The 2027 Free Agent Tracker is now live! There are currently 244 players on the list, with more sure to be added after the postseason concludes and teams begin to clear space on their 40-man rosters. The Tracker will be updated regularly throughout the offseason as qualifying offers are made (and then accepted or rejected) and free agents find their new homes.
Unlike in previous years, we’ve included players with pending contract options or opt-outs on our initial list of free agents. To avoid any confusion, there is an Option Type label displayed next to each player’s name, as well as a separate “FA Likelihood” column (my assessment), making it easy to filter out unlikely free agents like Ronald Acuña Jr. (the Braves have a club option, putting him in the “Not Happening” group) and include players like Nick Martinez (with a mutual option, he’s in the “Probably FA” bucket).
“Not Happening,” “Probably FA,” “Probably Not FA,” and “Tossup” are the “FA Likelihood” column categories. Any questions regarding these determinations can be sent to me on Twitter or Bluesky, or via email. I’ll be happy to discuss my assessment.
You can filter the Tracker by status (signed/unsigned), previous team, and signing team, and export the data for your own analysis. You can also sort by a player’s handedness, age, and 2026 WAR. Shortly after the postseason ends, projected 2027 WAR will be added to the Tracker, as will the results of our annual contract crowdsourcing project, which include median contract total, years, and average annual value estimates:
Baseball’s labor fight might get ugly in two months, but for now, we have the joy and chaos that is the postseason. And since the whole purpose of a baseball projection system is to project baseball, the ZiPS game-by-game postseason probabilities are now live. These projections are almost certainly going to see some shifts as team rosters, lineups, and starting pitchers firm up as we get closer to the start of play. And when it comes to starting pitchers, the changes could be significant! Hat tip to the last few playoff stragglers for getting their matchups sorted out relatively early on Sunday so I had time to run the tool.
Just to remind everyone, the ZiPS playoff model is rather different than the normal projections you see on the site during the regular season. From April through September, ZiPS needs to see the forest for the trees, but in a short sprint, we can focus more on the individual trees themselves. We can make educated guesses as to who is starting each game, what the lineups will look like, who is healthy and who isn’t, and so on. The ZiPS game matchup tool has a built-in lineup estimator that projects the line of every pitcher and hitter against every opposing hitter and pitcher, so there is no need to look at a team’s generalized offensive strength. The postseason also comes with the benefit of being able to run the full, more robust model of ZiPS rather than the simpler model used during the regular season, a compromise necessitated by the fact that projecting the entire league takes more than a day.
Is the model perfect? Of course not. All models are wrong, but some are useful. The approach I take has benefits in some very specific situations where a team’s seasonal record isn’t a good predictor of performance. For instance, in 2019, ZiPS saw the Nationals as being a far more dangerous opponent for the Dodgers than the conventional wisdom did by virtue of Washington’s ability to concentrate a very large percentage of the team’s innings in a few excellent pitchers. And yes, I will keep using this example until an even better one comes along! Read the rest of this entry »
Clayton Freeman/Florida Times-Union / USA TODAY NETWORK
October is one of our busier months editorially. We cover all of the postseason action, from previewing the relevant team strengths and weaknesses that might define each series to writing game stories for every game, with our writers often at the ballpark to bring you insight from the clubhouse. In fact, this year, we’re committed to having staff at every World Series game, allowing for additional reported work and greater access to players and team personnel, with in-person coverage throughout the earlier rounds as well. Needless to say, it’s a lot of work and travel, and it also sits outside the cadence of our usual baseball coverage, as it’s one of the few times a year when our staff consistently works on something resembling a beat writer’s schedule.
That’s why it’s frustrating that the amount of advertising revenue our playoff coverage generates is often so meager. The baseball season is predictably cyclical, and while many of our readers frequent the site regardless of which teams are playing in the World Series, from a traffic standpoint, October pales in comparison to March or July. As the field dwindles and more fanbases are disappointed, folks check out, often reengaging with us when free agents start to sign. We think comprehensive postseason coverage is vital to the fan and reader experience, but given the current state of both the internet and advertising, the scale needed to pay for that editorial content is well beyond what October FanGraphs generates in clicks. Read the rest of this entry »
Whenever I write a State of FanGraphs post, I see some version of this comment: “I’m already a FanGraphs Member, but I’d like to give FanGraphs more money. How can I do that?”
We deeply appreciate that some of you want to offer us more support than our standard annual Membership, and now there’s a way, with the FanGraphs MVP Membership. The price is $500 a year and you get the following:
All the usual FanGraphs Membership benefits
A gift exclusive to FanGraphs MVP Members
An annual call for MVPs with me and other FanGraphs leadership on the state and direction of the site
An optional tag on your comments indicating that you’re an MVP Member
Assuming that you’re already a site Member, this Membership will replace your current Membership, with your prorated remaining time credited to the initial $500 price. This way, if your $80 Membership just renewed, you don’t have to pay $580 to become an MVP Member.
Philosophically, we’re positioning FanGraphs MVP Membership as a way to further support our work, and receive some special recognition in the process. FanGraphs will become better with your additional support, but your individual FanGraphs experience won’t be better than any other Member’s. We feel this is an important distinction to make, and also an important distinction to be up-front about.
This year’s exclusive gift is a 14-ounce FanGraphs-branded Yeti mug with a ceramic interior:
When I showed the prototype to folks at a recent FanGraphs staff gathering, it was deemed “quite nice.” It will be laser etched with the FanGraphs logo, the year you became an MVP Member, and your MVP Member number, which is assigned in the order you sign up for an MVP Membership. In future years, we may have different gifts. We’ll think more about that this offseason, solicit feedback from MVP Members, and make an announcement as to what’s next before the first anniversary of FanGraphs MVP Membership.
Regardless, we won’t sell these FanGraphs Yeti mugs outside of MVP Membership. They are exclusive to FanGraphs MVP Members.
That said, we know that many existing Members who want to further support the site would prefer to buy more FanGraphs-branded merchandise to do so. We’re actively working on some new merch that isn’t tied to FanGraphs MVP Membership, as well as restocking some of our existing items, and should have more information soon!
If you have the means and love FanGraphs, an MVP Membership is a great way to support the site you’ve come to rely on while getting a nice mug you can brag about. And whether it’s as an annual or monthly Member or an MVP, we’re extremely grateful for all of our Members. You are the reason we’re able to continue to grow and improve the unique combination of data and editorial content that is FanGraphs.
If you’ve visited our splits leaderboards or the player page splits or splits tool in the last few days, you’ve probably noticed a change. And you’d be right to have noticed! Our development team just deployed our upgraded splits, and I’ve been tasked with running through the changes. Here’s a top-level summary before I dive deeper:
Splits Page on the Player Pages
We’ve added nine new stat groups to the splits page, including Statcast, Bat Tracking, plate discipline, and pitch-level metrics.
We’ve changed the UI to include a stat group selector at the top of the splits page to accommodate the addition of more stats. If you want to see stats that appear in Advanced, Batted Ball, or our new stat groups, you’ll simply click on those options instead of scrolling down.
Splits Leaderboards and Player Page Splits Tool
We’ve added the same new stat groups we added to the player page splits, including Statcast, Bat Tracking, plate discipline, and pitch-level metrics.
We’ve refreshed the UI using our modern interface, making it responsive to user interaction.
We’ve integrated the page with our updated Custom Teams feature. Please note, this integration is only available on the splits leaderboards.
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.
