Last week, we tried a few Member-only game threads on the site. They were pretty well received, so we’re going to host them each day of the postseason going forward. Our Member community is made up of thousands of incredibly knowledgable baseball fans, and we think this is a great way to follow a game with like-minded baseball enthusiasts.
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 »
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:
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:
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.
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:
What will happen to the legacy myteams.aspx page?
What will happen to my old teams?
