Please note, the deadline application has been extended to Monday, September 22.

FanGraphs is now accepting applications to join our staff as a full-time prospect writer.

The prospect writer will work with lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen and other members of the FanGraphs staff to produce organizational top prospect lists, amateur draft coverage, and other minor league and prospect-related content. A successful candidate will be able to evaluate prospects using in-person looks, video scouting, and data. Familiarity and comfort with advanced statistics is a requirement, as is prior scouting or prospect evaluation experience and a firm understanding of the minor league landscape. Just as importantly, we’re looking for a writer who can generate their own ideas, produce lively and engaging prose, and detail what makes a prospect good (or bad) in a way that is educational, accurate, and fun to read. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s do something completely different and have some fun! Over the course of the past year, I created an arcade game that can be played on a Nintendo Entertainment System (NES) from 1985! The game might looks familiar, but it’s been adapted for baseball.

This is an actual NES game; it is a .nes ROM file that you can play on original hardware. I found a JavaScript emulator, so you can more easily play it online. You can download the ROM here and use it in your emulator, flash cart, or your retro gaming setup of choice.

Below you can click on the photo, which will take you to the online emulator. It works best on desktops running Chrome, Firefox, or the new Edge. Safari is playable but it gives a soft picture without sound. Gameplay suffers on mobile, especially smaller devices. It’s best to use your keyboard to control everything, but there is a virtual controller available, too.

(Click to open FanGraphs Arcade)

Game Play

I don’t want to give too much away about the game, because half of the fun of an arcade game is trying things out, failing, then trying again until you succeed, though I will answer questions in the comments or on Twitter if anyone has any. Read the rest of this entry »

FanGraphs turns 20 years old today!

As you’ve no doubt noticed, we’ve added some balloons to the site to mark the occasion. If you click on one, you’ll be presented with an article that’s been deemed a worthy piece of FanGraphs history by our current staff, FanGraphs alumni, and industry friends. (I hope you’ll add your favorites in the comments here.)

Beyond the balloons, 20 years seemed like an appropriate moment to reflect on how the site started, and how it has gotten to where it is today.

I started FanGraphs when I was 23 years old. I was working at AOL, and my job involved putting together powerpoint decks of dialup metric graphs for executives. I thought the dialup business’ days were numbered — somewhat ironic, since dialup seems to have lived on for almost exactly 20 more years. Read the rest of this entry »

Are you a FanGraphs Member? Are you going to be in the Chicagoland area August 23-24? Would you like to attend Sabermetrics, Scouting, and the Science of Baseball, also known as Saberseminar? Well great news! FanGraphs is doing a Saberseminar ticket giveaway for our Members.

Hosted by Illinois Tech at their Chicago campus, Saberseminar is a charity conference that brings together baseball fans, sabermetricians, data scientists, and front office personnel for a two-day showcase of the latest developments in baseball analytics. Researchers, students, and industry folks spend the weekend presenting their latest work. Last year’s conference featured talks from Reds senior director of analytics Nick Wan and Chicago White Sox senior advisor to pitching Brian Bannister, among many others, and this year’s lineup is similarly impressive. It’s also a place to network and build community across the industry, whether it’s with fans, reporters covering the game, scientists studying it, or front office personnel. Several FanGraphs writers past and present will be in attendance, including me! And all of the conference’s proceeds go to charity causes like the Alliance to Cure Cavernous Malformation.

FanGraphs has been a supporter of Saberseminar for over 10 years. This year, we’re giving away six tickets to the conference to our Members. To enter, simply fill out this Google form with your name and the email address associated with your Membership. This is important, as it is how we will verify your Membership status. You’re limited to one entry per email address. We’ll do a random drawing next Thursday, August 14, to determine who gets the tickets.

Conference Details
August 23-24
Hermann Hall Conference Center at Illinois Tech
3241 S Federal St, Chicago, IL 60616
Full Schedule

Saberseminar Meetup (21-plus)
August 23 at 5:30 PM
Maria’s Community Bar Back Patio
960 W 31st St, Chicago, IL 60608

Reminder: Starting August 4, the price of a FanGraphs Membership is going up. You can find more information on the reason for the increase, as well as how to lock in our existing pricing, in the post below. As I noted when we announced the pricing change on June 10, Membership makes our work at the site possible, allowing us to add new site features and grow our staff, and it comes with a ton of great benefits. Since that announcement, we’ve launched a pitch-type splits leaderboard and a crowdsourced trade value tool, and we’ve added a full-time staff member. We know there is intense competition for your subscription dollars, but we think the breadth and depth of our coverage makes a Membership well worth it and still represents a considerable value in the sports media subscription landscape. I hope you’ll become a Member, and help us continue to build a better FanGraphs. Thank you for your support. – David Appelman

Over the last five years, as we’ve navigated a changing advertising landscape — not to mention the pandemic and a lockout — I’ve endeavored to be transparent about the state of the site, our business model, and our plans for the future. I’ve taken that approach because FanGraphs is a community, and I think our readers deserve to understand what we are doing and why. It’s been four years since we last increased the price of a FanGraphs Membership, and we’ve delayed this increase for as long as possible. We’ve not only seen considerable increases in our stat licensing fees and infrastructure costs, but this year we’ve also seen a steep decline in our advertising rates as well as our organic search traffic, as Google continues to push relevant websites further and further down the page in favor of new AI search results.

Beginning August 4, a yearly FanGraphs Membership will cost $80; a Monthly Membership will cost $15 a month, while a Three-Year Membership will cost $200. Since we won’t be introducing this change until August 4, you still have the opportunity to purchase a $60 Membership for the year, or upgrade your existing Membership to a $150 Three-Year Membership, allowing you to grandfather yourself into our existing pricing for the next three years. Read the rest of this entry »

Every July, FanGraphs releases our annual Trade Value Series highlighting the top 50 players in baseball, taking contract status and performance into account. For the past four years, I’ve been in charge of this exercise, with liberal amounts of help from the rest of the FanGraphs staff and some contacts on the team side. This year, I’ve got company. For the first time, FanGraphs readers will be creating their own trade value list. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello, all of you FanGraphs readers! Are you a FanGraphs Member? Are you looking for something fresh to read on Saturday mornings? Do you have any burning baseball questions for us, but don’t quite know where to ask them? Well, then we’ve got great news for you.

FanGraphs is launching a weekly mailbag, curated by me, that will run on the website every Saturday morning. Anyone can submit a question, but the piece answering them will only be available to FanGraphs Members.

So how is this going to work? Send any and all of your questions — about baseball, baseball writing, or whatever else you might be interested in having us answer — to me via email at mailbag@fangraphs.com, and each week, I’ll pick a few that we’ll answer in that Saturday’s mailbag. That’s right, I said we, because my FanGraphs colleagues will be helping me out. If you have a Hall of Fame question, I’ll probably relay it to Jay Jaffe. We’ve got Eric Longenhagen for prospect inquiries, and Dan Szymborski if we need to consult the ol’ ZiPS machine — the list goes on! We’ll do our best to answer as many questions as possible each week, but we won’t be able to get to them all. The ideal mailbag question is something that requires a deeper dive than we can tackle in our various chats, but is not so expansive that it warrants an entire article. Read the rest of this entry »

We now have NPB data available on FanGraphs! It can found on the player pages and the leaderboards.

A few notes on NPB data:

• All NPB data is provided by Sports Info Solutions and is available going back to 2018.
• We update NPB (and KBO) data around 11:30 ET each night with the previous days games.
• wRC+, ERA-, and FIP-, are park adjusted using five-year park factors.

Speaking of park adjustments, MiLB and KBO wRC+, ERA-, and FIP- are now also park adjusted using five-year park factors. You can read more about how our park factors are calculated here. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the 20th season of FanGraphs Baseball! In what’s becoming an annual tradition, allow me to run through all of the cool new features we’ve added to the site in the past year:

• Customizable player page dashboards and player cards, like heat maps, rolling averages, and more (Member exclusive)
• The fantasy Player Rater
• Division I college data
• NPB data
• Spring training data
• New heat maps
• Pitch modeling game logs
• WAR-based Playoff Odds
• Steamer platoon, context neutral, and percentile projections (Member exclusive)
• Historical Steamer, ZiPS, and ATC projections (Member exclusive)
• OOPSY projections
• FanGraphs Walk-Off (Member exclusive)

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m happy to announce that we’ve added Division I college data to the site. You can access the data via the player pages and leaderboards.

Some things to be aware of:

• Division I data is updated daily and is available going back to 2021.
• wRC+, ERA-, and FIP- are conference adjusted, but not park adjusted.
• College data on the player pages is hidden by default for players who have more than one year of minor league data. It can be viewed by clicking on the “College” toggle right above any data table.
  
• All college data is provided by College Splits.

We’re able to bring new features to the site because of Member support. If you enjoy our new college data, or any of our content, please consider becoming a FanGraphs Member. Membership benefits currently include:

• Unlimited FanGraphs & RotoGraphs articles
• Ad-free browsing
• One-click data exports
• Custom Player Page dashboards and more player cards, like heat maps, rolling averages, and more
• Dark and Classic Site Modes
• FanGraphs Walk-off, your personalized year-end review
• Enhanced Steamer projections
• Historical ZiPS and Steamer projections

Thank you for your support. Please let us now if you run into any issues with the new college data, either in the comments below or through our support page.