FanGraphs Weekly Mailbag: August 9, 2025
My favorite baseball questions are the ones that require both quantitative data and subjective analysis to answer. Who is the greatest baseball player of all time? Well, I could pull up the career WAR leaderboards, say Babe Ruth, and call it a day, but that wouldn’t a satisfying way to reach a conclusion. All of us know that the essence of Ruth — his vast accomplishments and legend — cannot be encapsulated by how many Wins Above Replacement he was worth.
What about Barry Bonds? He ranks second with 164.4 WAR, less than three wins behind Ruth (167.0), while playing against better competition; after all, Bonds wouldn’t have been allowed to play during Ruth’s career. Good point, but there’s the whole steroids thing clouding his legacy. For a while, Mike Trout looked like a worthy answer because of how much better he was than everybody else at a time when sabermetrics were becoming more mainstream. We would use the data to quantify his excellence and then, whenever the numbers alone weren’t convincing, we would say something about the superior talent level in the game today. Now, of course, the overwhelming majority of us would probably answer Shohei Ohtani because of his two-way exploits. We could cite his statistics, but we’d have to include so many qualifications, most of which would relate to the fact that he’s pitching and hitting.
I am not going to reveal my answer in this week’s mailbag because none of you asked for it. Instead, I bring this up because it relates to a different question that a reader named Derek submitted, which we’ll get to in a moment. But before we do, I’d like to remind all of you 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.
Thanks for answering my question about strikeouts. That helped a lot and I would absolutely read a full article about it if you decided to write one.
I wrote one that’s kinda similar a few years ago:
https://blogs.fangraphs.com/a-tale-of-two-fastballs/
I know this is outside the parameters of the first question, but I find it fascinating that Ruben Sierra put up over -5.0 WAR from 1993-2006. Or basically the last 1,000 games of his career.
Wasn’t he an mvp once?
Second in 1989. Easily his best season and he was a good player the first half dozen seasons. Then he got thicccc and lost his athleticism.
fWAR has Rickey Henderson as the best AL player in 1989, but he was traded midseason and I bet people got weirded out because of that. Then he won in 1990, and looking back on it, it’s kind of amazing anyone else got a first place vote. He slashed .325 / .437 / .577 with 28 homers and 65 steals but Cecil Fielder came back and smashed a whole lot of homers. If you asked any kid in America who was a better baseball player, anyone living outside of Michigan would have said Rickey.
That was Rickey’s only MVP award. We’ve already covered 1989, and he had the misfortune of overlapping with George Brett’s, Robin Yount’s, and Cal Ripken Jr’s best seasons (although the writers didn’t give it to Ripken in 1984). He also overlapped with the writers going all-in for relievers as MVPs, with Willie Hernandez and Rollie Fingers winning it, which I’m sure seemed reasonable at the time but look bad in retrospect.
And then they gave it to Don Mattingly instead of Rickey in 1985, and seriously, while Mattingly’s surface stats were slightly better Rickey also stole 80 bases. Again, every kid in American knew who the better player was, with the possible exception of kids in NYC.
Rickey finished second in 1981 and third in 1985, not getting a single first place vote in the latter (presumably because everyone who voted for a Yankee voted for Mattingly instead). Clearly, they should have let the kids vote instead.
Loved Donnie baseball growing up but…any idea who he was driving in most of the time in his mvp season? Anytime Rickey got on base it was an instant double. That dude was so good and for so long.
What level of contract would it take to lock up Skenes beyond the team control years?
Six years, $215M?
Sixteen years, $500N?
Is there any level of money that could get him to sign up for more time in Pittsburgh? Or would Mark Cuban or some other fabulously wealthy person with Pittsburgh ties have to buy the team first and promise to turn everything around?
I don’t see any hope for turning this around in the next 3 or 4 years, they need more time to make this work. (it’s also kind of irrelevant because Nutting would need a personality transplant to spend enough anyway)
Mike Trout, a weather fan from New Jersey, took a long look around the Anaheim Angels and said, “Yeah, gimme MORE!”
So, what does any of us really know?
Nutting said before this season that he believed he’d given Cherington enough resources.
LOL I believe he did….kind of like Dick Montford claiming the Rockies can compete every year.
As long as Nutting owns the Pirates, Skenes should make sure to not re-sign with them. They will not be competitive and honestly as a fan I don’t think Nutting deserves to have the most exciting young pitcher in his team. Skenes is a draw for fans to watch games (only Pirates games I watch are Skenes starts) and I’m sure Nutting loves the slight increase in revenue from Skenes. It would be nice if the Pirates sold and Skenes stayed in a Central division for some more parity, but I bet he reaches FA and signs with an East or West Coast team.
This is kind of what I was getting to with my comment. Coming up with plans to fix the Pirates seem doomed as long as Nutting owns the team. Any plan assumes a baseline level of spending and competence that he has not shown over his tenure of owning the team and is unlikely to start having.
Ben’s answer and this answer is basically a call to stop being a Pirate fan. Or Nutting’s ownership is a call to stop being a Pirate fan. I read it as saying that there is essentially nothing they can do to build a winning team in the Skenes window. Which sucks, because I am both a Pirates fan and a baseball fan and now I don’t know what to do for the next four summers.
Maybe be a Tigers fan?
Or if that feels too much like hopping on a bandwagon, maybe an Orioles or Royals fan.
They call him Bob “Nothing” for a reason. I’m a Yankee fan but I would love for the Pirates to find an owner who would spend. Of course Bobby Bozo would have to agree to sell. What a beautiful park PNC is.
This is way too risky for a drone like Cherington (not to mention he’d botch it anyway), but one way to get serious pieces to contend in the Skenes window is to trade Griffin and Chandler.
Cherington, right or wrong, does not like trading his best prospects for veterans. This was a big to-do within the Red Sox fandom when he wouldn’t trade for win-now veterans, but in the end they were right to not trade Bogaerts and Jackie Bradley Jr.
Although they could have traded Matt Barnes and Allen Webster.
Who represents Skenes? If it’s Scott Boras, forget it, Skenes will be on the market and the Pirates will not be able to compete, if they even attempt it, with the big boys.
If you sign a Boras client, you’re not keeping him past free agency unless you outbid everyone else for him and the player wants to stay there.
People criticize teams over and over again for not retaining Boras represented players, but his track record is crystal clear – no pre-free agency extensions.
It’s ISE Baseball who represents Skenes.
I too would love to read a full length article about the way hitter and pitcher strategic mixes interact, along strikeout rate and many other metrics. I would even be game for a series of such articles.
But I think the original question has a much simpler answer: the zero-sum conflict at the heart of baseball is not between pitching and hitting; it’s between offense and defense. From that point of view, it’s perfectly symmetric. Strikeouts are a bit better for the defense than field outs on average, but nothing crazy. But while the hitter controls basically 100% of the offense, the pitcher does not control anywhere near 100% of the defense. So estimates of true-talent ERA (or RA) would be justified to regress the successes and failures of balls in play far more than strikeouts and walks and (to a lesser extent) home runs. FIP is simply an extreme version of that to prioritize explainability.
This dynamic doesn’t rest on any decisions or goals by either player. It’s simply an artifact of trying to separate out the pitcher’s contribution to the total defense.
Maybe another way of thinking of this is to think of what happens if the pitcher’s only effect on the at bat is strikeout chance, while the hitter’s effect is not just strikeout chance but chance on what happens after contact.
Envision it kinda like the a game like Time Travel Baseball or Strat-O-Matic where you have different cards for pitchers and hitters–except the way it works is, you roll on the pitcher’s card first, and the pitcher’s card tells you whether or not to roll on the hitter’s card. And, this is the important part, the pitcher’s card only has the outcomes “strikeout” or “roll on the batter’s card.” The batter’s card has outcomes “strikeout” and “home run” and various balls in play. Then you obviously want your pitcher’s card to have more strikeouts. But a batter card with more strikeouts can be better than one with fewer, if the other outcomes are good enough.
Obviously that’s way oversimplified–at the very least, pitchers control walks too–but it’s one way that strikeout can be a good measure of pitchers but not of hitters. It’s not that hitters like striking out, but it’s easier for them to gain something to make up for more strikeouts than it is for pitchers to gain something that makes up for fewer strikeouts.
Also I would totally read the book about whether the pitcher and hitter are moving sequentially.
Poor Turk Lown was so anonymous that his FanGraphs player page doesn’t know that he died in 2016 🙁
Turk Lown was so unknown….
It’s not just guys like Lown; no relatively modern players have dates of death listed, and their ages continue to be calculated. Very odd. I posted about it in another thread recently, but I don’t think it got an answer.
Matt – I’m another Pirates fan that loves seeing common sense with regards to a Skenes extension. Thanks. Our local media doesn’t understand Arbitration and using comps… let alone Super Two. You’d get a lot of retweets and forwards if Fangraphs would approximate a Skenes extension with a couple different lengths. (I like through his 29 y/o season)
I would have suggested a stake in Primanti’s…
If the question is asking about a Skenes extension now, it is even more unreasonable as Skenes doesn’t have three years of team control but rather four.
I wonder if the pirates could get enough back from a Skenes trade to make the playoffs in 2027? I would think he could get you a few fv50s and maybe a fv60 from someone. They have solid pitching besides Skenes.
They have a bunch of interesting teenagers. I think with above average prospect luck they could build a playoff team in 2027 if they traded Skenes and got a few fv50s and 60s in return. But I’m open to other opinions.
I’d trade the Braves whole farm system (admittedly few interesting hitting prospects) for him
I proposed that the Red Sox trade all of the following players for Skenes:
Roman Anthony
Kristian Campbell
Jhostynxon Garcia
Payton Tolle
Brandon Clarke
Connelly Early
And both Red Sox fans and Pirates fans said they wouldn’t do it.
And now Anthony is definitely off-limits, so I think the whole thing is moot because it relied pretty heavily on the Red Sox trading the #1 prospect in baseball. It would be very, very hard for any team to offer enough value for Skenes. The Tigers could do it, but I don’t think they should.
The Dodgers probably could too. Although you’re probably mixing in just graduated players like Pages or Rushing if you’re looking to make that deal.
Per Pipeline, the A’s just got a FV60 (and a few other pieces) for a f’n reliever.
And Paul Skenes is mos def not a f’n reliever.
I don’t like that this is so frequently used against Ruth, as he had no control over that and it isn’t even accurate. Integration improved the player pool less than expansion diluted it.
Population growth and adding more foreign players massively improved talent far more than expansion diluted it.
That isn’t true. There were only 16 teams in the major leagues back then, which means that Ruth faced the top pitchers like Walter Johnson substantially more often than modern hitters face the top modern pitchers. The percentage increase from expansion is massively larger than the percentage of the population that was excluded from competition.
Population growth. The population of the US in 1920 was 106 million and in 1990 it was 249 million, so there were more Americans to draw on for every major league roster spot, even before you account for integration and overseas players. There were more than twice as many one-in-a-million talents in the US when Bonds was playing than when Ruth was.
To get specific, taking the top 25 pitchers in all-time WAR, Ruth had 314 career PA against them (Walter Johnson and Lefty Grove) and Bonds had 466. Admittedly I extended that from 20 to 25 to catch Schiling and Smoltz.
That doesn’t account for the age distribution of the population or for other sports drawing off talent more. Probably the most we can say about it is there’s no real way to know for sure.
Slightly more than half of that population growth came from women, who obviously wouldn’t be Major League Baseball players. The NBA also didn’t exist back then, while the NFL was nowhere near as popular. The best athletes in the U.S. back then who weren’t barred by segregation played baseball.
The increase from 16 to 30 teams more than offsets the increased player pool. Keep in mind that many Hispanic players did play during segregation, and that the percentage of MLB made up of black players has never exceeded 18.7%.
What a strange point – as if women were invented in 1950.
The US census going back to the 19th century never shows more than 105 or fewer than 95 women per 100 men, which means any effect on these ratios is minimal.
At least your point about having to compete for talent could be true, though I highly doubt it’s enough to overcome the trends downstream of the fact that the average MLB player in 1925 was only paid 100-400 dollars a month, about double what an average factory worker was paid at the time.
Pre-integration, there were two hitters and one pitcher born in the Dominican who got any significant playing time in MLB; 7 total.
This season, there are more than 4 players (of any playing time) per team (~135).
1 Venezuelan with significant playing time (3 total) pre-integration; a little more than one per team currently (~45).
~20 Puerto Ricans total pre-integration, about that many in the league currently.
3 total Mexicans, ~15 in the league currently.
It’s obviously harder to estimate proportions of Hispanic-Americans, but the international pool was clearly a pool of players that was massively underdeveloped into the 1960s (the numbers didn’t spike immediately after integration).
Just looking at the basic numbers, US population was 2.5X in 1990 vs.1920. If ~100 million supported 16 teams, the same proportion in 1990 would be 40 teams (and at that point, the league was still 26 teams).
Now there’s an argument that given that MLB-level talent is an incredibly long tail outcome on the spectrum of athletic talent in a population, the raw ratio isn’t necessarily going to correlate 1:1 to an increase to top-of-the-line talent. But I also think it’d be enough to cover more teams.
He also faced cannon fodder like the rest of the Senators’ rotation substantially more often. And substantially fewer different pitchers per series.
Given what we know about familiarity effects, and what I’d think was a larger delta between the best and worst pitchers at the time, it seems to me that the fact Ruth faced the same pitchers over and over again, irrespective of how good they were, would have very likely helped rather than hurt him.
I just want to know what Turk Lown’s nickname in the clubhouse was. And whether it was Turd Clown…
Barry Bonds was so good, for so long, against good competition, and played home games in ballpark that suppressed home runs. I’m glad I was able to watch him play. His legendary at bat against Eric Gagne is an example of his greatness and what he brought to MLB
WAR to nine decimal places seems unnecessarily specific. Anything beyond one decimal place is guesswork.