Saberseminar is a leading baseball and sports analytics conference — and it’s all for a good cause. The conference will take place August 29-30 at Illinois Tech in Chicago. Saberseminar brings together academics, data scientists, and MLB front office employees for a two-day showcase of the latest developments in baseball analytics, and it’s a great chance for researchers to show off their work in front of an audience of teams and vendors that are looking to hire. 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. FanGraphs has been a supporter of Saberseminar for over 10 years, and several members of our staff will be in attendance. Proceeds from the conference support the Alliance to Cure Cavernous Malformation and the Young Center for Immigrant Children’s Rights.
We hope you’ll consider attending. Tickets are on sale now, with a large discount for students. For more information, please visit the conference website. We hope to see you there!
Conference Details
August 29-30
Hermann Hall Conference Center at Illinois Tech
3241 S Federal St, Chicago, IL 60616 Full Schedule
Saberseminar Meetup (21+)
August 29 at 6 PM
Maria’s Community Bar Back Patio
960 W 31st St, Chicago, IL 60608
Every July, we release our annual Trade Value Series highlighting the top 50 players in baseball, taking contract status and performance into account. For the past five years, I’ve been in charge of that exercise, with liberal amounts of help from the rest of the FanGraphs staff and some contacts on the team side. Last year, we added a new evaluator: You.
Today, we’re excited to announce the return of our crowdsourced trade value tool, which can be found here. Let’s review how it works, just in case you didn’t spend last year’s All-Star break furiously clicking through it when you should have been working. The tool, created by Keaton Arneson, and developed by Keaton and Sean Dolinar, aggregates simple “Which of these two players do you prefer?” questions to create a composite ranking. Using the tool is simple. When you pull it up, you’ll be presented with two players and asked to choose which one you think has a higher value in trade:
Ah, but what does “higher value” mean? Sometimes the simplest questions are the toughest. Having a higher value in trade isn’t the same as being better, or being younger, or having a more team-friendly contract. It might be some combination of those things, of course, and of other factors as well. In the real world, players have differing levels of value to teams based on a host of considerations, from how well they plug a hole left by a recently injured star to where the team finds itself in the playoff race. A promising prospect might mean more to a rebuilding club, just as a proven difference maker might move the needle for a team with October ambitions. We can’t tell you how to weigh these factors, which is part of the fun of constructing a trade value list in the first place. What we can do is provide some data that we consider useful in making such determinations and let you decide how to apply it. Read the rest of this entry »
FanGraphs Members may have noticed an incredible new feature over the last couple weeks, and today, we’re thrilled to officially announce it. Members now have access to Heat Maps on our leaderboards and player pages. Sean Dolinar has been hard at work for the past month or so putting this together, and now I get to walk you through this Members-exclusive feature. Read the rest of this entry »
Site customization has become an increasingly important part of our development strategy here at FanGraphs; it’s also one of the core benefits of becoming a Member. Today, we’re introducing our revamped Custom Teams feature, a tool popular with fantasy baseball managers as they track the statistics and projections of the players on their roster.
This tool shouldn’t be confused with the Custom Reports you can create in our leaderboards. Custom Teams are collections of players that can be accessed across different FanGraphs tools; Custom Reports are a collection of specific stat fields and players that can only be accessed in the leaderboards.
What’s new?
We’ve rebuilt the Custom Teams interface from the ground up to utilize our current player search functionality, while also introducing additional improvements to make the tool more useful:
We now have three different types of teams: Manual, Ottoneu, and Legacy.
Manual teams are the default team type, where you enter player names to create your team. We’ve updated the player search so that it performs the same as the main search bar on the site:
We’ve also added a “Paste names” section to the interface. You can now copy and paste player names to import many players at once, including a column of player names from Excel or Google Sheets. The name and spelling has to be an exact match to what’s in our database (though it doesn’t require the use of diacritical marks), and you must have one player per line with a return separating them:
Ottoneu integration means you can now import your teams directly from Ottoneu. This automatically connects if you are logged in with your FanGraphs/Ottoneu account. You can then preview your roster and select a sync mode:
The Ottoneu sync mode has three options:
Auto Sync – This mode will reload your teams every time it is used (in the Custom Teams interface, loading a leaderboard, etc.), so it will pick up any changes you’ve made to your team.
User-Controlled Sync – This mode gives you more control over when your team updates.
One-Time Import – This mode effectively makes your team a manual team, but it keeps the reference to your team intact, just in case you want to change the update mode.
Please note, if you are using Auto/User-Controlled Sync, you cannot edit your team in this interface; you can only do that in one-time import mode. Any updates will need to made on the Ottoneu side.
Legacy teams are the temporary bridge between the current tool and the new one. All the teams that you’ve created on the legacy myteams.aspx page are accessible here, but you still need to use the old page to modify them:
The Legacy myteams.aspx Page
What will happen to the legacy myteams.aspx page?
We are phasing it out. We do not want to disrupt people’s use of the tool during the season, so the legacy page will remain available through the end of the 2026 season. It will be removed after the conclusion of the World Series.
What will happen to my old teams?
Before we remove the legacy page, you will only be able to modify your team through the old interface. You can view or use your team through the new interface, but the team information only flows in one direction.
Once we remove the legacy page, whatever legacy custom teams you have will be migrated to manual custom teams in the new tool.
Who can access the new Custom Teams tool?
We developed this tool for FanGraphs Members, so you’ll need to be a Member to access all of its features. Non-Members can try it out, however. They will be able to create teams with a maximum of 10 players, and are limited to manually created teams only. The legacy tool doesn’t have any Membership restrictions, but as noted above, it is being phased out.
After we phase out the legacy tool, you will still be able to access your old teams regardless of team size. However, non-Members won’t be able to add or change players if their team already has 10 players.
Hello! This year marks 21 seasons of FanGraphs, and as we look ahead to the August 5 anniversary of our launch, I wanted to thank you for reading and visiting the site. And, as has become an annualtradition, I also wanted to provide you with an update on the state of FanGraphs.
I started last year’s version of this piece by listing all of our new features and site improvements. As this year’s list is even longer, instead of detailing everything up front, I’ve included a Feature Appendix at the bottom of this post. Take a look – it’s quite a scroll. What I was struck by as I was compiling that list is just how much we’ve been able to accomplish with our Members’ support, support that has translated into new features, voices, data, and other random fun stuff you didn’t even know you wanted. From the written work of our dedicated team of baseball experts to all the stats and leaderboards, the data and fantasy tools to the prospect analysis, the projections, RosterResource, the mobile app, the podcasts, the chats — the depth and breadth of the site is very special. Plus, we do it all without private equity funding or sports betting partnerships, allowing us to produce the independent analysis and high-quality tools you’ve come to rely on.
And while I think the future of FanGraphs is bright, I also think it’s worth talking about the realities of running a sports media site in 2026, the challenges we see looming, and why your support matters more now than it ever has before.
First, if you are a FanGraphs Member, thank you so much for your continued support. Membership is set to account for about 80% of our revenue this year. Six years ago, that number was about 25%. Still, our Members only make up about 2% of what we believe to be the real-life human visitors to the site. We want our work and data to be accessible, but we’re up against a number of challenges.
Data Is More Expensive
FanGraphs isn’t free to operate. We don’t scrape data, opting instead to maintain agreements with all our data providers. This has been our model from day one, both because I wanted FanGraphs to be sustainable and for our data to be reliable, and because people deserve to be paid for their work. This strategy seems to have worked out, but it comes at a cost. Our data costs have nearly doubled over the past five years. At the same time…
Advertising Revenue Is Down, While Bots and Scraping Cost Us More
Our advertising revenue has decreased 50% since 2024. There are multiple factors at work here, some of which are good. We’ve decreased the number of ads on some pages, and our Members enjoy a fully ad-free experience as one of their Member benefits. But as I mentioned, even with the growth we’ve seen, Members only account for about 2% of our total users, and there is a massive discrepancy between the ads served to non-Members and the number of pageviews we’ve served. This May, multiple site analytics tools we use claim we served about 12 million pageviews to non-Members; ads were served on just 2.1 million of those pageviews. That’s only about 18% of pageviews, compared to 51% two years ago. That’s a staggering amount of missing ad revenue.
Non-Member Pageviews/Pageviews With Ads
Time Frame
Total Pages
Pages with Ads
% With Ads
May 2024
6.9M
3.5M
51%
May 2025
7.5M
2.5M
33%
May 2026
12M
2.1M
18%
Two things are likely happening here. First, we’re seeing a lot more bot traffic, which often doesn’t register as the sort of browser session that advertisers care about. We estimate that at least 60% of all traffic coming to FanGraphs is from non-human sources, including web crawlers, AI bots, and scrapers. In addition to the decline in ad revenue, this has led to increased server costs and us spending valuable time figuring out where the offending traffic is coming from in order to keep the site operational.
Second, folks are much more apt to use ad blockers these days, so while our overall site traffic hasn’t declined, our non-Member users are seeing ads at much lower rates. This creates the untenable situation where we’re serving up more content, but also serving up fewer ads because those ads are either being blocked, or the thing using our resources isn’t even a person.
Those are some of the challenges we face right now, but the landscape we operate in also has some big potential shocks on the horizon, one likely to affect digital publishing more generally, the other specific to baseball.
The Impact of AI
First, I’ll take this opportunity to share our editorial policy around the use of AI. All of the editorial content at FanGraphs is written entirely by the members of our staff, without any assistance from generative AI models, and that will remain our policy going forward. You don’t come to FanGraphs to read ChatGPT’s analysis, and there’s no way it could come up with the headlines Michael Baumann does.
And while the development team has found AI to be a useful coding tool, we don’t use it to create stats or metrics, or ask it to source the data displayed on the site. I have no interest in Claude hallucinating Jacob Misiorowski’s strikeout rate or average fastball velocity (though you’d be forgiven for wondering if either is real).
Of course, AI’s impact goes beyond the need for code checks or an editorial policy. Put simply, AI is taking our content and repurposing it in a way that could make it so that there’s no need to actually visit the site. Indeed, changes to many popular search engines mean many people unfamiliar with FanGraphs might not even discover the site in the first place. Just think about the AI results you see on Google. How many people are going to click through to our Brewers Top Prospect list, a piece that took days to write and edit, when Gemini will serve up much of Jesús Made’s scouting report, tool grades and all? If there’s ever been an existential crisis for online publishers, it’s this. Whether it’s Membership or advertising revenue, our business model depends on visiting the site, and AI seems poised to keep people away, eroding the link between writers and readers.
Baseball’s Looming Lockout
The precise impact of this winter’s seemingly inevitable lockout is tough to gauge, as it will greatly depend on how long it takes MLB and the Players Association to reach an agreement. But if the pandemic and the last lockout taught us anything, it’s that not having major league baseball isn’t great for a baseball media site. We saw our traffic dip 50% during the 2021-22 lockout. The support of our Members helped us weather it, but it was a challenge, and if we were to lose an entire season, I’m not sure what it would mean for FanGraphs without significant Membership growth.
So what should you take from all of this? Well first, become a FanGraphs Member! Membership allows us to continue to grow and improve the site, providing a source of revenue that’s immune from macro forces like AI or baseball’s labor dispute, and that’s more stable than advertising. We’re in a moment where it’s incumbent upon all of us to support the writers, artists and publications we love, or risk losing them. Obviously I hope FanGraphs is on that list for you, but this isn’t just a FanGraphs thing. Unfortunately, the era of good free content is over. Ultimately, the advertising model syphoned a shocking amount of money away from publishers to middlemen and tech giants, and AI is threatening to destroy one of the most reliable ways for us to surface our work to new readers. But your direct support puts you in the driver’s seat. It’s not what SEO wants, or AI wants, or what the advertisers want. It’s what you want.
Our pledge to you is that if you support us, we’ll keep producing all the great baseball analysis you’ve come to rely on, and continue to grow the site in new and interesting ways, just like we have for the past 21 years.
Late last season, we completely rebuilt the Scores section of FanGraphs from the ground up. During the offseason, we continued that effort by redesigning the pages that support it, including new Box Scores, Game Graphs, Game Stats, and Play Logs. Those updates were aimed at making it easier to explore and understand everything that happens during a game, from the first pitch to the final out.
Today, we’re excited to introduce the newest addition to that suite of tools: Pitcher Game Cards, which can be found in Game Graphs.
The Pitcher Game Cards are designed to provide a detailed, game-level snapshot of every pitcher who appears in a game. While a traditional box score can tell you what happened, the Pitcher Game Cards help explain how it happened by combining game results, pitch usage, movement profiles, and pitch quality metrics into a single view. Read the rest of this entry »
Father’s Day is right around the corner, and the last day to order FanGraphs merchandise and have it arrive in time for the holiday is June 12. We ship everything USPS Priority mail, so it typically takes 2-3 days to arrive, with some remote locations potentially taking longer.
Welcome to the latest installment of FanGraphs Changelog, where we update you on some of the recent improvements we’ve made to the site as we work to build a better FanGraphs.
First, a few things you might know about already:
We updated the Baseball Simulator to include a bunch more features, including historical players and park and weather factors.
In adding prospects to the app, we’ve outgrown the bottom tab bar, so you can now select between a few preset tab bar configurations; Members can fully customize the tab bar. To customize the tabs, go to the More Menu and select “Customize Tabs.” As a reminder, all features in the app can be found within the More Menu.
We’ve also implemented a new Member feature that allows users to set their default player page view options, while also allowing for temporary changes:
One of the challenges of fitting a data-intensive website into a mobile app is figuring out how to allow users to view the ever-growing number of tables they want to see. For example, I might have default tables that I typically look at for a given player (in the image above, it’s the Standard table), but today I need to see that player’s wRC+, WAR and Win Probably Added to settle a debate with a friend. Using the Temporary view option, I can temporarily enable the tables to see those stats. The next time I use the app, however, it will reset to the default view that I’m used to.
We’ve also implemented push notifications for both Android and iOS. After enabling notifications at the OS level, you can find the main controls for the notifications in the More Menu under “Notifications.” There you can choose to follow updates based on a scoring change in a selected team’s game, see when that team’s game goes final, or both:
If you are using iOS, you can enable Live Activities within the Scores tab to follow a live updating Win Expectancy Graph on your lock screen. Note that iOS limits Live Activities to five at a time:
You can also get a notification when we publish a new article, or follow a writer by tapping the subscribe (bell) button on their byline. Note that co- and tri-bylines are considered distinct from individual authors:
You can also now submit feedback directly in the app to report a bug or request new features:
RosterResource Contracts on Player Pages
Last month, Jon Becker added player contract details to the RosterResource Payroll pages. We’ve now integrated that feature into the player pages. If you go to a player page, find the RosterResource section on the side bar, and click Contract History, you can find the contract history for the player contracts we have tracked since 2020, when we integrated RosterResource into FanGraphs:
We’ve also upgraded the Closer Depth Charts to include more information about a given appearance, including how many innings the pitcher pitched, which innings they pitched, the number of batters they faced, and the leverage when they entered the game:
These offer different views than the Lineup Tracker, showing the batting and defensive lineups vertically. The “row banding” allows you to see usage streaks more easily.
Flair
We’ve continued expanding our customization options for Members. We wanted to do a black header to go with our Dark Mode, which might have been inspired by some of the recent City Connect uniforms. But unlike the City Connects, the header and theme is totally up to you, the FanGraphs Member!
If you have any questions, please leave them in the comments below, and if you have any suggestions for site features, please be sure to let us know. And lastly, a thank you to our Members! Membership is the best way to support our staff, and ensure that we can continue to grow and improve the site. We couldn’t do any of this without you!
Historical Players, Marcel Projections, and Season Stats
You can now select any player from all of baseball history for your simulations. Want Babe Ruth’s 1923 season outcomes in your sim? Not a problem! Want a 1999 version of Pedro Martínez on the mound? You can do that too! Read the rest of this entry »
We partnered with the clothing brand Ellsworth & Ivy to make these retro-themed FanGraphs sweatshirts. They have fully stitched chenille lettering and a stitched logo near the bottom hem:
As a quick reminder, when we put these up for sale in January, they sold out in 24 hours. So get yours before they’re gone!
