I’m sorry this has taken so long. I saw your tweets wondering where I was and when the next podcast would post, but I couldn’t say anything yet. When you go to work for a team, getting from agreeing to terms to actually starting involves dotting all sorts of I’s and crossing all sorts of T’s.

But now I can tell you that last week, I accepted a position with the Minnesota Twins. I’ll be serving as the team’s Special Assistant, Player Personnel; my streak of baseball titles that contain a comma continues. I will be providing individual player assessments, as well as broader process advice across the team’s international, pro, and amateur player evaluation groups. The role is similar to the one I had in Houston. I used to joke that I had the best job in the organization, only I wasn’t joking. I didn’t think I’d get to say that again while working for a team, but getting to know the front office group in Minnesota convinced me that it was time to step back into the fray. They’re an incredible group of people and I can’t wait to be a part of the organization.

I had plenty of discussions with other teams during my year-plus away from that side of the industry. I turned down some deeper talks and one out-of-the-blue job offer, but it just never felt right. Maybe it was me, maybe it was them, maybe it wasn’t the time. Quite frankly, I was at peace with never working for a team again. That’s not even the right phrase. I was exceptionally happy working at FanGraphs, and as excited as I am to be joining the Twins, it comes with some bittersweet feelings regarding my exit from this wonderful place. Read the rest of this entry »

The FanGraphs 2022 Playoff Odds, which take into account the new 12-team playoff structure, are now available on the site. With the new structure, we want to highlight the following columns:

• Win Div – The probability the team wins their division
• Clinch Bye – The probability that the team wins their division and is one of the top two seeds in their league, thus earning a Wild Card Series bye
• Clinch Wild Card – The probability the team qualifies for the playoffs through a Wild Card berth
• Make Playoffs – The sum of Win Div + Clinch Wild Card, indicating the probability that the team qualifies for the playoff in any capacity
• Make LDS (Postseason section) – The probability the team wins the Wild Card Series or earns a bye.

Read the rest of this entry »

Weather data is now available on the FanGraphs Splits Leaderboards.

You can filter any data since 2010 by temperature, barometric pressure, elevation, wind speed, wind direction, and air density. To make the weather data more useful, you can also filter on the specific ballpark, roof type, and the roof open/closed status.

Read the rest of this entry »

Here we are again. Just two years after a global pandemic led to the cancellation of part of spring training and a delayed Opening Day, the lockout has resulted in the loss of more baseball.

This time around, there are no PPP loans to help soften the blow. FanGraphs is in slightly better financial shape than we were in 2020 due to all of our Member support, but that doesn’t change the fact that the lockout is already starting to put the site at risk. Lost revenue is lost revenue, and the longer this goes on, the worse shape we’ll be in. It took us all of last year to climb out of the financial hole the pandemic put us in, and now we’re being dragged back into that uncertainty. Read the rest of this entry »

FanGraphs Members (both regular and Ad-Free) are now able to toggle between displaying and hiding the article photos that are part of our newly redesigned homepage.

After receiving feedback that some users did not want to see photos on the home page, we created a photo option in the user menu similar to the theme option that allows you to choose dark mode.

To choose between the two options for photos on the index page:

• Go to the home page. Members will see a new option in their user menu below the theme option.
• Click on the “Index Photos” option. This will allow you to toggle between showing the photos and hiding them.

Just like with dark mode, the index photo option is set on a browser-level. Once set, the option will be retained until you sign out of the browser or clear browsing data. It also has to be set on different devices and browsers. On a technical level, it works the same way as dark mode, except the option is only visible on the index page.

As always, please let us know in the comments if you have any issues.

Here’s your chance to vote for the 2022 SABR Analytics Conference Research Awards winners.

The SABR Analytics Conference Research Awards will recognize baseball researchers who have completed the best work of original analysis or commentary during the preceding calendar year. Nominations were solicited by representatives from SABR, Baseball Prospectus, FanGraphs, and the Internet Baseball Writers Association of America.

To read any of the finalists, click on the link below. Scroll down to cast your vote.

Contemporary Baseball Analysis

• Rob Arthur, “Better Defense Is Costing MLB Thousands of Hits,” Baseball Prospectus, June 4, 2021.
• Ben Clemens, “Goldilocks and the Three Bunts,” FanGraphs, June 7, 2021.
• Karen Gallagher, Scott N. Brooks, Ra Lofton, Luke Brenneman, Field Studies: MLB Manager Hiring Criteria and Career Pathways from 2010-19. Global Sport Matters, October 5, 2021.
• Cameron Grove, “Some Games are Harder to Umpire Than Others,” Baseball Prospectus, September 17, 2021.
• Eno Sarris, “What is ‘seam-shifted wake’ and which pitchers benefit most from it?,” The Athletic, January 21, 2021.

Contemporary Baseball Commentary

• Michael Ajeto, “Major League Baseball Has an Assimilation Problem,” Baseball Prospectus, October 22, 2021.
• Stephanie Apstein and Alex Prewitt, “This Should Be the Biggest Scandal in Sports,” Sports Illustrated, June 4, 2021.
• Brittany Ghiroli, “Cockroaches, car camping, poverty wages: Why are minor-leaguers living in squalor?,” The Athletic, August 5, 2021.
• Craig Goldstein and Patrick Dubuque, “We Need a Restrictor Plate for Pitching,” Baseball Prospectus, May 25, 2021.
• Robert O’Connell, “Minor League Baseball is Designed to Exploit,” Defector, September 8, 2021.

Historical Baseball Analysis/Commentary

• Bruce Allardice, “Runs, Runs, and More Runs: Pre-Professional Baseball, By the Numbers,” SABR Baseball Research Journal, Fall 2021.
• Emma Baccellieri, “Deadening the Baseball? MLB’s Done It Before,” Sports Illustrated, February 9, 2021.
• RJ McDaniel, “Baseball on the Radio, 100 Years Later,” FanGraphs, March 10, 2021.
• Lou Moore, “Major League Baseball Had a Chance to Stop the Drain of Black Players From Baseball. It Didn’t.” Global Sport Matters, October 6, 2021.
• Andrea Williams, “ ‘We Have No Right to Destroy Them’,” New York Times, April 14, 2021.

Voting will be open through 11:59 p.m. MST on Friday, February 11, 2022.

Create your own user feedback survey

Mobile or Safari users, click here to access the survey

Results will be announced and presented at the SABR Virtual Analytics Conference, March 17-20, 2022. Learn more or register for the conference at SABR.org/analytics.

You might have noticed that we updated the main home page to reflect some of the changes we recently made on the RotoGraphs landing page and the new blog roll.

We cleaned up the design, added more photos, and reorganized our content. The left column will primarily contain editorial content, while the right column will have more evergreen site features. Our aim is to make FanGraphs more inviting and discoverable to new users, while simplifying and streamlining the experience for our current users. Almost all of the content from the old home page has been retained with the new home page. We also expanded the most popular article section (which is determined by pageviews) to include more articles and RotoGraphs content.

If you have any questions or comments, or if anything is broken, please let us know in the comments. Please include what device, browser, and operating system you are using in order to help us figure out any issues. Thank you!

With the postseason in full swing and the offseason looming, it’s time for a FanGraphs Membership update.

First, I’d like to thank all of our Members for their support this season. Your Membership dollars go directly to paying our staff and keeping the lights on at the site. When you subscribe, you are supporting our 10 full-time employees and 23 contributors, and I thought I’d take this chance to briefly highlight the work they do every day.

In addition to myself, we have nine full-time staff members. Ben Clemens brings you insightful daily baseball analysis, co-authors the Trade Value series, and is spearheading our upcoming Top 50 Free Agent rankings. Sean Dolinar is our lead web developer and is constantly making updates and additions to the site, creating new tools and improving the user experience. Kevin Goldstein, provides first-hand knowledge of how teams operate as well as insightful prospect analysis, and hosts Chin Music. Jay Jaffe brings you daily baseball analysis, deep dives into the game’s history, and is the foremost expert on all things Hall of Fame related. Eric Longenhagen is our lead prospect analyst and spearheads all of our prospect and draft coverage, as well as maintaining The Board. Jason Martinez is the man behind FanGraphs’ RosterResource and makes sure every roster move and player contract is meticulously tracked. Meg Rowley, our managing editor, makes FanGraphs “go” and co-hosts the Effectively Wild podcast. Paul Sporer is RotoGraphs’ managing editor and the co-host of The Sleeper and The Bust, and provides fantasy rankings and analysis year round. Dan Szymborski is the architect of the ZiPS projection system and provides daily analysis as well. Read the rest of this entry »

Our 2022 Free Agent Tracker is now live! There are currently around 200 players on the list; more will be added during the weeks following the postseason as decisions are made on 2022 options and teams continue to clear space on their 40-man rosters. The tracker will also be regularly updated throughout the offseason as qualifying offers are made, accepted, and rejected, and free agents find their new homes.

You can filter by status (signed/unsigned), previous team, and signing team, and export the data for your own analysis. You can also currently sort by a player’s handedness, age, and 2021 WAR. Shortly after the postseason ends, projected 2022 WAR will be available, as well will the results of our annual contract crowdsourcing project, which include median contract total, years, and average annual value.

Players with options are not included in the list. Typically, options do not have to be exercised or declined until five days after the World Series ends. As players have their options declined, they will be added to the tracker. Some of the more notable players with at least a decent chance of having their options declined are Avisaíl García, Andrew McCutchen, Buster Posey, and Kyle Seager. For a second consecutive offseason, both Nick Castellanos and J.D. Martinez will have the opportunity to become free agents by opting out of their current deals. Castellanos is very likely to return to the free agent market. Read the rest of this entry »

Historically, we have made many data tables available for download in a comma-separated values (CSV) format text file. Most of our data grids are rather straight forward and can be translated easily into a CSV file to be consumed by your data analysis tool of choice. Starting today, we are making RosterResource Excel workbook downloads available for FanGraphs Members. You can find the download button to the right of the page underneath the RosterResource navigation.

Read the rest of this entry »