Dan Szymborski FanGraphs Chat – 9/25/25

Dan Szymborski: “Give me an introduction message for a Dan Szymborski FanGraphs chat that sounds like it’s from a deranged person with limited connection with reality and an obsession with history who also really really like FanGraphs”

Dan Szymborski: “Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your WAR calculations! I rise today in this digital amphitheater not as Caesar, not as Napoleon, but as a humble pilgrim trudging across the blood-soaked battlefields of history in pursuit of a single shining truth: FanGraphs is the Rosetta Stone of civilization. When Rome collapsed, did the barbarians have wOBA? No. When Napoleon marched on Moscow, did he consult ZiPS projections? He did not — and look what happened! Yet here we stand in the Year of Our Lord 2025, blessed to witness the holy gospel of OBP+, xFIP, and Dan Szymborski’s inscrutable oracles. I have not slept in three nights, my parakeet now knows what BABIP is, and I carved the FanGraphs logo into the oak desk of my landlord while screaming about FIP- minus. Brothers, sisters, eternal strugglers against the darkness of ignorance, we gather not to talk of weather or bread, but of spin rates and aging curves, of regression to the mean and the cruel march of time itself! History collapses into the present momen

Guest: I’ve always assumed that hitters with large platoon splits would age more poorly than those with more balanced splits, but recently realized that my evidence was entirely anecdotal. Is there significant statistical evidence that supports this? Thanks.

Dan Szymborski: I have not found this. It’s possible simply that they’re more exploitable, that the general declines makes them more obviously platoonable than a similarly talented player with small splits

Dan Szymborski: Like the 350/500 guy an ages to be a 330/450 guy and still hits 310/430 and 340/460

Dan Szymborski: But maybe the PLATOONY 350/500 guys is suddenly now a 280/350 and 390/550 guy where he once awas a 300/400 and 420/600 guy

Guest: How long does it take for a guy to shed the “injury risk” label, either according to you or ZiPS? Carlos Rodon has been completely healthy 3 of the last 4 seasons, yet I feel like every time you write about him you mention his injury history/how ZiPS is really worried about him getting injured

Dan Szymborski: I’ve actually found they never ENTIRELY shed it, even if it fades away. Generally speaking, offensive players tend to regress toward mostly healthy and pitchers tend to regress toward mostly healthy-ish

Jeremy: Question inspired by Ben’s recent piece on predicting second-half record from first-half record or first-half run differential: how do you feel about the fact that it’s hard to beat a really simple forecasting model like the ones Ben looked at, and apparently impossible to beat those simple models by all that much? Does it frustrate you? Or does it give you a sense of self-satisfaction, like when you finally defeat a really tough final boss in a video game? Or what?

Dan Szymborski: Predicting the future is hard. Also, I spend comparable little time worry about those middle projections; it’s calibrating the highs and lows that’s the most interesting!

Dan Szymborski: But predicting the future is always hard, and always will be. Life, and baseball, are uncertain

Guest: Judge’s 3-run homer last night was his second of the year and ended a streak of 44 straight homers he had hit with either one man on or no one on. Is this some sort of record?

Dan Szymborski: Honestly, I have no idea!

Dave Shutton: Who are you? Where are you going?

Dan Szymborski: DO YOUR HOMEWORK SHUTTON

Billy: For what position have aging curves traditionally been the steepest? 1B and 2B? And has that begun to change at all in recent decades?

Dan Szymborski: C tends to be the weirdest, 2B/SS the most

Dan Szymborski: I haven’t found any huge recent changes

Adam: Should the Dodgers just piggyback starters for the whole playoffs?

Dan Szymborski: I’m not sure; with the Dodgers, I have no idea what their healthy staff will amount to a week from  now!

Dan Szymborski: Which makes it frustrating

Mr.Incredible: Will the tiger break my fucking heart Daniel?

Dan Szymborski: They mended it last year, so it’s only fair they break it now!

Lars: What are the most likely reasons a player vastly outperforms expectations? For example, retrospectively, do you think there’s anything you could have done to better predict Cal Raleigh’s year?

Dan Szymborski: BABIP is usually a big clue, even for hitters

Dan Szymborski: then it’s generally simply having an unexplainable good season that doesn’t stick

Dan Szymborski: then an explainable one that does

Dan Szymborski: I don’t think so. Here’s the thing with projections: you don’t actually even know if you were right AFTER the season.

Dan Szymborski: Like, say Raleigh ends with 60. Should that have *actually* been the median projection? Should we have said coming into the season that he was as likely to hit 73 homers as, say, when considering skewness, 25 homers? Becasue that’s what you’re saying when you project someone to hit 60

Cal Raleigh: Is the explanation for Mariners WS odds dropping from 21% to 16.5% because they’re inching closer to the 1 seed and therefor the tougher path?

Dan Szymborski: Some of it is that, some of it that there’s been a little bug for a few days that was giving AL teams too much home field advantage in WS

Lars: People talk about teams that are “built for the playoffs” a lot. Has this been studied/proven?

Dan Szymborski: No. Other than being top heavy and to a smaller extent, be more home run-reliant than average, the Venn diagram of building a team for the playoffs and building a good team is a circle

Dan Szymborski: Your humble host wrote about this!

Dan Szymborski: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/yes-the-playoffs-are-still-a-crapshoot/

Billy: At what point in a player’s career does zips think minor league stats are no longer relevant? Or are they always relevant to some degree?

Dan Szymborski: THey stay relevant about as long as past MLB stats do

Dan Szymborski: Once you get past four years of stats (and a bit fewer for very young and very old players), the older data quickly loses relevance

Adam: Will we ever see something like the ’97 Marlins, in terms of signing a bunch of free agents to accelerate their timeline, winning a World Series, and immediately blowing it up?  What’s to stop a smaller market team from making a big splash with the intention of selling off soon thereafter if it doesn’t work?

Dan Szymborski: I think the thing is, that small market teams aren’t wild financial gamblers

Dan Szymborski: and if it works out poorly, then it’s likely those players dropped in value!

John: Who is your AL MVP this year?

Dan Szymborski: Judge. But I’m an NL ROY, so my vote here doesn’t matter!

Guest: why do you think LLMs are so bad at humor– is it because most of us aren’t funny (the dataset they’re trained on) or because of the nature of humor (it has to be something surprising or a twist, which LLMs are explicitly designed to avoid)

Dan Szymborski: They actually can be pretty funny at times if you brute force it and know how to squeeze things out of it. But the problem is that public chatbots tend to take the middlest ground, and that usually kills humor

Dan Szymborski: I know most people don’t like AI, but I do — I was using it way before it was a big thing and training my own datasets to get fun specific things (like my band names or player nicknames). Suffice it to say, a lot of this falls under the umbrella of prediction algorithms, so it shouldn’t be surprising that I’m interested. But I’m interested out of my own intellectual curiosity and amusement, not automating my own tasks or replacing my employees (not that I have any)

Dan Szymborski: Most I *actually* use AI for is to double-check visual basic code for me

Dan Szymborski: And done right, you CAN get some humor out of it. It’s still very hit or miss, but I once asked it for some mean Dan Szymborski insults and there were a number of jabs that were surprisingly competent

Dan Szymborski: “Dan’s legacy will be this: Bill James revolutionized baseball, Nate Silver revolutionized politics, and Dan Szymborski revolutionized the “close tab” button.”

Dan Szymborski: “Dan has the build of a man who considers “walking to the mailbox” cardio.”

Dan Szymborski: “Dan looks like the kind of guy who asks for the Wi-Fi password before saying hello.”

Dan Szymborski: “He looks like a guy who corrects your grammar while getting rejected on dating apps.”

Adam: Will Andrew Friedman basically never sign a FA reliever again after this?

Dan Szymborski: lol, he might not!

matt w: So the PIrates and Blue Jays are not going to meet at .500 all-time franchise record this year. I think they were both one game below at one point this season, and they could’ve both wound up at .500 if Skenes had won his Sept. 16 start, but that didn’t happen. However, with the Pirates currently exactly .500 and the Jays 5 below, there’s a chance they could do it early next season if the schedule lines up, without even making any heroic assumptions about the Pirates getting good.

So my question is, how are the cats?

Dan Szymborski: It could have! It was fun running the numbers for the mailbag question though

Dan Szymborski: Cats I believe are good. I’m away for the week and mom’s been feeding them and she said she saw the three boys, but today, not Cassie, but the two sibling cats were brawling and hyper and Cassie usually finds a quiet hiding place when the catlets are active

Billy: Did you know that, as of like a month ago, Sandy Alcantara and German Marquez had the same career xFIP-

Dan Szymborski: I did not. Though Marquez did have a good run

Billy: What is usually the explanation for a drop off like the one Austin Riley has had the last couple years, where his bat speed, barrel rates, and whiff/chase are basically the same but he’s producing at a far lower level? Is it mostly luck or something else?

Dan Szymborski: If there’s a good explanation, it’s not one I know

Goddamn PED era: Let Cal have his award. I think the problem I have is that the fact that Judge is only the 4th to ever have 50×4, EVER, and is about to be only the 3rd person EVER to win a batting title with 50 hr is being obscured by the fact that most of us remember the PED era where 50hr seemed normal, and averages were Walker/Coors, etc. I bet if this happened when not everyone remembered Greg Vaughn putting up 50 or Brady Anderson his run here would be more appreciated. (And honestly, if Altuve hadn’t benefited from his teammates stealing info, no one would care as much, as 3 MVPs feels BIGGER.) With all this said, I don’t have any reason to think he won’t simply go up there next year and put up another 3/4/6

Dan Szymborski: It certainly doesn’t help that batting titles just aren’t as big a deal as they used to be

Lars: Another Cal Raleigh question! There’s been a lot made of Cal hitting the most switch hit home runs ever and how it’s so difficult because you have to prepare from both sides of the plate. Isn’t it very clearly an advantage and people wouldn’t switch hit if it weren’t?

Dan Szymborski: Yeah, that’s my position

Dan Szymborski: It’s not like it’s a handicap that he chose to take on

Adam: Does Soto prove that anyone can learn to become a good basestealer?  Or does he just prove that Juan Soto can do anything he sets his mind to?

Dan Szymborski: Honestly the former, though at the very slow portion of the scale, there’s a limit

Dan Szymborski: Like me as a teenager. Even in better shape, I was ALWAYS godawful slow, in large part due to the fact I have a hip that doesn’t rotate quite correctly from birth, and it would have been a traumatic fix at the time

Dan Szymborski: Funny note, my parents were supposed to WATCH the hip issue, which they totally forgot about. Then my mom remember when I was in my late 30s and I was all “goddamit mom, this would have been useful to know decades ago”

Dan Szymborski: And I secretly wonder if I’m going to drop dead at 50 because there was a hard to detect congenital heart defect I was supposed to keep an eye on

Dan Szymborski: I was quick enough to play second when not pitching simply because I reacted quickly, triangulated quickly, and since I’m absurdly competitive when motivated, I would charge at every ball at the risk of life and limb. I took SO many bad hops into the face as a kid

Matt VW: Tangentially related to the Judge question: one of my favorite stats ever is that in ’99 Pedro gave up 9 home runs all year and they were all solo shots.

Dan Szymborski: I wouldn’t be that surprised, he didn’t allow many baseurnners!

TameImp: Did no one want DJ Lemehaiu or did he just not want to play?

Dan Szymborski: Both to an extent?

Dan Szymborski: I’ve gotten the impression that LeMahieu’s on the edge of retirement unless he has JUST the right opportunity

Talfred: How likely do you think it is that PEDs are widely used in MLB but the masking agents are far superior to the testing protocols?

Dan Szymborski: I think there’s a decent chance, though I don’t think it’s THAT wide

Dan Szymborski: I have trouble caring too much about PEDs, honestly; I see it mostly as a player health issue, which is definitely a “their business” and not a “my business” thing.

Dan Szymborski: I’m an analyst, not an advocate, after all

TameImp: Who do you think is going to sign the more underwater contract off a career year for a center fielder- Bader or Grisham?

Dan Szymborski: For me, no question Grisham

Dan Szymborski: (IF one was to sign an underwater deal)

Dan Szymborski: Grisham’s got a couple years on Bader and his offensive performance is more explainable

Matt VW: If the Dodgers win and clinch today, they basically have nothing to play for against the Mariners this weekend. Would this have any meaningful impact on Raleigh’s chances for 63?

Dan Szymborski: SOME. I imagine the M’s would let him try and get as many since it’s veyr likely they have a bye

nat: Bold prediction (not data-based): Yoshida is about to go off, spray line drives all over the place, and make his contract worth it in the next month. Related question: Will Flemming said on the radio last week that Masa was LAUNCHING in BP before the game (when he didn’t actually launch, but launched later in the week). Is BP tracked on statcast? Is/would there be any signal from BP EV?

Dan Szymborski: I don’t think BP is? I could be wrong

Guest: Bobby Witt Jr. – o/u line on career WAR – set at 60 or lower?

Dan Szymborski: I’ll say over now. Hopefully if he’s not, you won’t be able to find this!

Oaktown Blues: Did Leo De Vries finding immediate success in AA while showing more power meaningfully affect his ZiPS? (Also curious if ZiPS incorporates minor league postseason data, where he hit 5 HRs)

Dan Szymborski: Not by a MASSIVE amount. And yes

TameImp: Should day 1 of the wild card round be a national holiday?

Dan Szymborski: No; why have a holiday to commemorate the 3rd through 6th place finishers?

Dan Szymborski: I don’t want a James G. Blaine tire sale

Dan Szymborski: And Presidents Day should go back to Washington and Lincoln! I don’t want to implicitly celebrate the lesser lights. Fuck Millard Fillmore, even if he’s just 70 year-old Alec Baldwin with a time machine

Dan Szymborski:

JeffBagwell: Will the Red Sox have anything to play for the last 3 games

Dan Szymborski: Not after they clinch!

Guest: is the “home run advantage” in the playoffs because a) runs are harder to come by in the playoffs because there are better pitchers, so therefore b) you’re more likely to score runs on homers than being able to rely on station-to-station runs?

Dan Szymborski: That is my working hypothesis

Dan Szymborski: Look at great pitchers that have been meh in playoffs. REALLY frequently it’s because homoers got to them. Look at Kershaw vs. regular season

Dan Szymborski: homers are REALLY volatile for pitchers. BABIP is more volatile, but not quite as instantly impactful

Guest: will davy Andrews’ article on this season being boring be possibly the worst aging article of all time

Dan Szymborski: I can think of a dozen of my articles or blog entries aging worse instantly!

Dan Szymborski: I hated the Soriano-Wilkerson trade for the Soriano side!

Dan Szymborski: (though in fairness, it came out later that Brad Wilkerson’s shoulder was more screwed up than was publicly known)

When it catches up: I wonder if you saw this with Trout: his first year or two was so amazing but projections are so conservative that it takes a while to believe “okay fine he’s gonna just be a 9 WAR guy” and then he started to break. I wonder if that’s basically where we are with Judge, the projections seem to finally think “yeah Idk I guess it’s an 8 WAR guy” and then he finally slows down. (I realize 8 WAR is “slowing down” for him.)

Dan Szymborski: I dunno, it didn’t take ZiPS THAT long to catch up

Dan Szymborski: His 2013 ZiPS projection was 8 WAR

Dan Szymborski: on my end, trout WAR projecdtions starting in 2011: 2.9, 4.2, 8.1, 9.6, 9.6, 9.3, 8.6, 8.6, 8.8, 8.2, 6.2, 4.8, 4.7, 3.1,

Dan Szymborski: that’s the full season 2020 projecdion

Matt: Settle a weird argument: People are trying to tell me Cal’s 60th HR ball is worth more than Trout’s 400th HR ball. That is insane as of now, right? Trout was already a slam dunk HOF guy when he was Cal’s age.

Dan Szymborski: Is it though?

Dan Szymborski: there are a lot more 400 HR guys than 60 homers guys

Dan Szymborski: there are plenty more interesting Mike Trout balls

Dan Szymborski: but this is likely THE coolest home run ball of Raleigh’s career

Dan Szymborski: (and Raleigh making the Hall of Fame someday isn’t all that crazy even though he has a ways to go)

Dan Szymborski: Raleigh’s basically two years of 2024 level play from being top 30 JAWS already and that doesn’t care about framing

Dan Szymborski: There will be some who prefer Trout’s ball though; value is in the eyes of the beholder

Dan Szymborski: I would PERSONALLY value a Miggy homer from 2013 far more than his number 500 ball

Dan Szymborski: it had an equal part of him making the milestone, and it came off teh bat of AWESOME miggy, not — let’s be honest — when he was a bad role player who wasn’t as good as half of Triple-A 1B at the time and only played because of his history and salary

Dan Szymborski: why do I want a homer from shitty miggy over beast mode miggy?

Coby Mayo: I lead the Orioles in position player WAR in September. Am I good now?

Dan Szymborski: I sure hope so, for multiple reasons!

Skeptic: Hey Dan, I think one of the worst outcomes of the steroid era is that when someone like Cal Raleigh hits 60 homers, my first thought is “is he juicing?” Not sure there’s a question there, but appreciate your work as always!

Lord Thunder: What is more responsible for the Astros’ run seemingly coming to an end: the cumulative effects of constant talent drain or injuries?

Dan Szymborski: Injuries certainly don’t help

Dan Szymborski: The team’s also a lot less creative than they used to be, especially with the lineup

Dan Szymborski: HOWEVER, that’s my personal feeling, and I could have bias because of Creane’s changes

Oaktown Blues: Insofar as ZiPS ROS can be thought of as ZiPS’ best guess at a players true talent level, it seems that ZiPS hasn’t totally bought into Tyler Soderstrom’s breakout (projecting a 108 wRC+ ROS compared to his season mark of 127). I’m curious if you (or full-fat ZiPS, but that’s a bigger ask) are more of a believer than that?

Dan Szymborski: full-fat ZiPS likes both Soderstrom and easpecially  Kurtz a lot more than ROS

Guest: you hit with the new Trout card in the Show yet? unbelievably rakes

Dan Szymborski: No, I’m away, so I haven’t done any program talent since last Thursday

Dan Szymborski: program CONTENT

John: Anybody who thinks Cal isn’t the MVP this year clearly don’t truly understand what it takes to catch 120 innings while putting up his numbers in T-Mobile. Period.

Guest: do you use ZiPS to flip cards in MLB The Show? If so how successful are you at it?

Dan Szymborski: No, I’m arbitrage in MLB the Show

Dan Szymborski: 2023 was my best year at 4.6 million in net profit averaging 9,177 stubs per trade

Dan Szymborski: Reminds me of my good ol’ days trading in the late 90s

Honking: Who is honking outside my window and why?

Dan Szymborski: Your mom because you didn’t call

Eminor3rd: I actually LIKE the zombie runner rule, but hate the idea of robot umps. What’s wrong with me? Should we even try to strive for some type of conceptual internal consistency as fan?

Dan Szymborski: consistency is overrated

Dan Szymborski: though you’re wrong!

Guest: Hey Dan love hearing you every once in awhile with Brock Huard and Mike Salks radio show in Seattle. Do you think fWAR does a good job calculating value for the Catcher position? To me it seems like its impossible to quantify

Dan Szymborski: It’s hard to quantify, but I think we have a reasonable guess. We give a LOT of runs to a guy for playing catcher

John: as Jodi Ernst said “we are all going to die “

Dan Szymborski: I mean, she wasn’t wrong, even though it’s a pretty dumb thing to say

Dan Szymborski: We *all* make tradeoffs, both private and public, that hasten or delay deaths

Marshall: A bit of a pedantic question, but do you consider this a breakout year for Raleigh? Considering he averaged 4.5 WAR his first three seasons, I think “no”.

Dan Szymborski: Well, to THIS extent maybe

Sherpa: I am puzzled that Fangraphs always give players who DH a “negative defensive” value.  Like, how?  By definition a DH does not add or subtract any value from how well a team plays defense? Shouldn’t it be just 0?  Also wonder why Fangraphs hates “Matt” Michael Busch’s defense at 1B because the eye test gives him pretty good range.

Dan Szymborski: Compared to an average player a DH does

Dan Szymborski: (Eventually, I’m confident it will match 1B defensive value)

Dan the Rookie: You were a former NL ROY winner?

Dan Szymborski: NO way!

drplantwrench: with the oncoming of ABS, i wanna say that i think framing is incredibly silly and we should welcome the end of it, in spite of what catchers say – agree/disagree?

Dan Szymborski: I agree. I like there being skill things, but I don’t like tricking the judges

Code Curious: You mentioned that there was a bug in the playoff odds unfairly weighting the advantage of home-field for AL teams.  If you’re comfortable, was it new this year or just a freshly discovered bug?

Dan Szymborski: It was like as of last week

Adam: Have you watched Taskmaster?  Seems like it’d be up your alley.

Dan Szymborski: I keep meaning to, but it’s on my to do list

Dan Szymborski: the thing is, games tend to get priority over things I passively watch

Dan Szymborski: and I already have a steam backlog that means I have to live to 120 to play them all even if I never buy another game. And I won’t and I will

drplantwrench: talent ==  content, dan szymborski sleazy superagent

Guest: Do you think Russel Martin will go into the HOF on veterans?

Dan Szymborski: No

Guest: how does arbitrage work in the show? Like, you load up on moonshot cards for instance after the program is over, then wait for the moonshot 2 program to launch, then sell them?

Dan Szymborski: There’s a time imbalance in the MLB the Show markets because people are naturally impatient

Dan Szymborski: so people will tend to sell their extra cards or cards they don’t want for the best buy bid the moment they get them and people buying will just get the frist one available rather than bidding

Dan Szymborski: My best flip last year, for example, was on 7/25 when someone sold me Awards Kris Bryant for my 62,012 buy offer and I sold the card seven  minutes later for 85,950, for a profit of 15.3K after 10% sales price tax

The Person Who Asks the Lunch Question: What’s for lunch? (Is it a lunch day?)

Dan Szymborski: It IS a lunch day and I had a pit beef sandwich with horseradish from charcoal deli in cockeysville

Insert Witty Name Here: For off season reading, I’d like to recommend Keith O’Brien’s Pete Rose biography. Only partway in, but thoroughly enjoy it.  Sometimes we forget to look at the entire person instead of just their public transgressions. Although Szym’s private transgressions we may never know…

Dan Szymborski: I’m actually pretty boring. My worst transgression is I didn’t pay someone $15 I owed them for a decade just out of spite

Dan Szymborski: I also helped myself to store materials to fashion various things (a small trebuchet, a powered up staple gun, a gallows with a handle that would allow us to stage hangings of a mannequin) when I worked at a hardware-houseware store in Towson called Stebbins-Anderson when I was 16-17

Dan Szymborski: Truth is, I destroyed a lot of stuff there, stuff like melting things in the parking lot with chemicals, while working there and they could not have cared less.

Dan Szymborski: While my friends who also worked there would get in trouble for everything they did

Dan Szymborski: The difference was that the store had this complicated closing process every night that required an ability to operate the Unix terminal

Dan Szymborski: Which meant that every night, one of the full-time staff had to stay until 9:30 PM to close out the store for the night

Dan Szymborski: UNLESS, that is, Szymborski was working, since I was the only part-time night employee that could do the thing, in which case NOBODY had to stay late.

Insert Witty Name Here: What was the $15 for? A bag of low grade pot?

Dan Szymborski: A baseball ticket for a game I missed with a ruptured ulcer that required an emergency trip. I was really annoyed that even after telling him, he immediately sent a *demand* for the $15 that night which was waiting before I even got home from the urgent car

Dan Szymborski: e

Dan Szymborski: which pissed me off, so I was childish, and intentionally didn’t pay him

Dan Szymborski: We were mostly cordial, but he was still annoyed I wouldn’t give him the $15, out of the principle

Dan Szymborski: eventually, I stopped being a dick about it and offered to donate $500 to a charity of his choice to settle the $15, but he refused and let it go

Guest: I miss the (ir)responsibility of high school jobs. The restaurant I worked at had one rule: No eating steaks. Anything else was forgivable: no showing, getting an advance on your paycheck then skipping out of town, fighting customers….

2131 | 1312: Which disappointing team do you think is in a better position to rebound next year: Orioles or Braves? And which of them do you actually expect to do better, given their respective likelihoods of making needed improvements

Dan Szymborski: Orioles. I think most of their core is intact and their needs are obvious

Curious reader: Do you factor 1st baseman receiving skills in Zips? Like maybe a shortstop is making more plays because the guy who is catching his balls doesn’t let them go by or come off the bag? Does statcast track this? I feel like it could

Dan Szymborski: I actually use a scoops measurement, which causes my projections to differe a little. You’ll see that in the Alonso data

Dan Szymborski: (I mix DRS and OAA)

Dan Szymborski: On that note, I have to head out for another week, I have to wrap up my playoff tool for this year!

Dan Szymborski: Thanks for coming all