FanGraphs Weekly Mailbag: August 16, 2025
I love a large lad who steals bases. That’s why I was thrilled when my friend Kevin submitted a mailbag question about Juan Soto’s base-stealing binge this season. I thought Davy Andrews would be the perfect person to answer Kevin’s query because he’d already written about the Mets’ stolen-base efficiency back in June. And I was correct; Davy was the perfect person. So perfect, in fact, that he wrote a whole article about it instead.
When I let Kevin know about Davy’s piece, he followed up with a question about Josh Naylor, who rather shockingly has stolen 22 bases as of Friday morning. Of course, Naylor is now teammates with Cal Raleigh, another slow runner with double-digit steals. The topic was too rich for me to resist, so that’s where we’ll begin today.
Before we do, though, I’d like to give a quick happy 20th birthday shoutout to FanGraphs! I’m sure David Appelman will be pleased to know that I was nine years old when he created and launched this wonderful website. Oh, and as always, I’ll remind you all that while anyone can submit a question, this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com.
Matt is the associate editor of FanGraphs. Previously, he was the baseball editor at Sports Illustrated. His work has appeared in The New York Times, Men’s Health, Baseball Prospectus, and Lindy’s Sports Magazine. Follow him on Twitter @ByMattMartell and Blue Sky @mattmartell.bsky.social.
I cannot think of a baseball name that is both so grotesque and clever as “Thickey Henderson.”
Something that inspires equal parts admiration and revulsion.
I both wish I had come up with it and would be disgusted to meet the person who did.
Kinda feels like Dan misread the question there, I think Matt was asking for the probability of both teams being at .500 at the same time at any point the rest of the season. I could definitely see where something that granular would be difficult to simulate, though.
Haha no complaints from me, though! It’s an honor just to get my question answered.
If anyone knows where I could find a visualizer of franchises’ all-time records, that would be great! I’m curious about teams crossing .500. Aside from the Pirates and Jays, I don’t see any team crossing soon. Next closest teams are Astros at 57 above and White Sox at 53 below, and they’re moving opposite directions. Rays are 91 below but I don’t know if they’re primed to take any dramatic leaps up.
Man that MVP = WAR leader idea is awful! Might as well just turn the games over to the computers.
Historically it would have been better than what actually happened. Willie Mays probably should have won half a dozen more MVPs than he actually did. Juan Gonzalez won over Griffey Jr and over A-Rod another year (although in retrospect I’m not super broken up over the latter situation, they could have given it to Nomar!). Rickey Henderson got robbed at least twice, including at least once by a reliever.
I would like to think that voters are more savvy now, but then again it’s not so hard to make the right call when Aaron Judge is putting up double digit WAR seasons.
The sad thing is that I couldn’t remember which of the reliever MVPs had robbed Rickey. The 80’s were wild.
Rollie Fingers in 1981. He also got robbed by Don Mattingly, his own teammate, in 1985. And by Robin Yount in 1989, although in those latter two years they could have given it to Wade Boggs and would it have been fine.
I think the part that is so annoying isn’t that Rickey got robbed (although that’s a crime in itself, Rickey’s the best), it’s that there were like 3-5 different players who would have been better picks than the guy who actually won it. In 1984, they gave it to another reliever (Willie Hernandez) over both Cal Ripken Jr (who turned in a virtually identical year to his MVP-winning season in 1983) and two different players on Hernandez’s own team (Alan Trammell and Chet Lemon).
The situation with Yount winning in 1989 was definitely more defensible because nobody had access to decent defensive metrics, but in retrospect it’s obvious that something was off. He had something like 80 less putouts than the previous year and his fielding percentage was 14th out of 18 qualified center fielders. That was definitely a year they just counted up RBIs and runs, I like Robin Yount a lot but by that point injuries had left him a shell of his former self in terms of athleticism even if his hitting skills remained very strong. Much like Jeter many years later, he made a lot of really exciting plays that would have looked very boring if Devon White was out there instead.
Pretty much yes to all of this, except to acknowledge that Willie Hernandez led the AL in WPA in 1984, posting the 43rd best season of all-time for seasons Baseball-Reference has available (~1912-present) and the 16th best pitching WPA season of all-time.
Check out 1995. Barry Larkin was an OK choice but Dante Bichette finished second while Bonds was twelfth. The voters really hadn’t figured out what Coors Field meant.
The reason I am not concerned about the “…it would have been better than what actually happened…” aspect is that you are applying a metric which didn’t exist at the time to review the actual choices. Now that the metric is readily available to be used as an input, it will be considered and factored in voter decision making. So the existence of the metric itself should be enough without robotically relying on it to make decisions.
I personally don’t want WAR (which version, btw) awarding an MVP to someone generating 7.6 WAR on a last place team instead of the writers giving it to someone who generated 7.4 WAR and contributed to making the playoffs. Just a personal preference.
I think the main case against just awarding it to the top WAR leader is twofold:
On technical grounds, the problem is that there are some weird quirks of any WAR system you use. This is even more so for pitching, but bWAR’s defensive metrics are awful and fWAR’s positional adjustments are outdated (I also think that some of the OAA / FRV values are a bit extreme, as are the framing metrics, but they’re both such a huge improvement on DRS…)
On process grounds, the conversations that people and writers have around the MVP can be valuable. Baseball is an exceptionally social fan experience with all of the downtime in the game, and this carries over into debates over who wins what.
But I think there should be a noticeable and substantive argument why WAR is “wrong” in a specific case to award it to someone who has less WAR. Or if the player does something truly unprecedented and is otherwise close, like Ohtani’s two-way exploits (although I think he led in WAR in both of is LAA wins anyway). I don’t think that “we gave it to Mike Trout last year, we should give it to Josh Donaldson instead because his team won the division” is a good reason.
Though It is so much harder to generate 7.6 WAR for a losing team than 7.4 for a winning team.
I don’t think that is true at all, since WAR is a measure of individual performance/outcomes. See ‘trout, mike’
Paul Goldschmidt used to rack up steals even without speed. 2016 was his best season on the bad paths stealing 32 bags and was caught twice, he ranked #251 in sprint speed that season with 27.3 ft/sec. Soto is next level slow this season clocking in at a speedy 25.9 ft/sec. Goldy this season clocks in at 26.4 ft/sec. Soto has lost just shy of a foot in one year down from 26.8ft/sec to 25.9ft/sec yikes!
An mvp change that should but will NEVER happen is, since there’s as much inter league as there is in other sports now, there should be only league wide awards not nl/al separations.
as someone who does a projection model for my job, i also do not go back and look at old results, and one of the reason is that the model itself has changed so much. and although it sounds smart, im not sure how much one would actually get out of the analysis. if youre wrong then, what does it really say?? anyway just my two cents and/or deluding myself for not looking into it too
I think the counterargument is if our collective knowledge has been built off series of analyses over time, it’s worth revisiting important (or just interesting) past works to see if the conclusions still hold up in the face of new data and/or new methodologies.
If i had guessed, I would have thought the Blue Jays had a better lifetime record than the Pirates. I am clearly going through some recency bias on the pirates, While recalling the World Series champion Blue jays back with Cito Gaston. .
Pirates racked up a bunch of wins before World War I with Honus Wagner, so it’s hard to blame you for the recency bias!
That anecdote about Antoan Richardson rolling a TV out to the field is hilarious. It just feels really goofy. But it’s actually pretty brilliant.
I wonder about Antoan Richardson. His minor stats weren’t amazing, but they were solid. His walk rate and k rate both were solid. He obviously had no power but I’d venture was a good defender. A good eye who can play D and can pinch run? Played till 32 and only got 21 career plate appearances. Can’t tell me he wasn’t good enough to be a 5th outfield pinch runner type. He is probably making more now than he did his entire career, which is crazy. Probably a 120-130wrc guy in the minors also, didn’t bother filtering just eyeballin it.