FanGraphs Weekly Mailbag: December 6, 2025
The Winter Meetings begin on Sunday in Orlando, and as always, the FanGraphs crew will be there covering all the baseball buzz. For that reason, I’ll keep this introduction brief; we’ll have more than enough words for you to read in the week ahead, when the offseason action is bound to pick up considerably.
Three weeks ago, I put out a call for fresh mailbag submissions, and you all delivered the goods. I knew I could count on you! We’ve received so many great questions since then, including the four that we’ll get to in a moment, and so I just wanted to thank everyone for holding up your end of the bargain. Now it’s time for us to do our part and answer them!
Before we do, though, I’d like to remind you that 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.
The Mets as the Kendall Roy/Fredo Corleone Least Favorite Child of Privilege is the truest and funniest thing i read this week.
I don’t really think you can put those two together. The Mets are more Kendall Roy than Fredo Corleone. Kendall Roy is an idiot surrounded by other idiots, who draws attention but is really no more incompetent than everyone else (in this example, the other MLB teams). Fredo Corleone is an idiot who happens to have Michael as his brother. If there is a Michael among MLB teams it’s in Los Angeles.
Who is Sonny Corleone in this comparison?
AJ Preller?
Track and field has guns
Maybe a little gun could replace “play ball!”
I feel like mlb umpires with guns, no matter how small, can only end in disaster.
Cowboy Joe West coming out of retirement
I read this comment before I read the article which made it equal parts hilarious, confusing, and intriguing
So did baseball! If not for the heroics of Enrico Pallazzo, who knows what could have happened.
David Wright had a higher war in his 20’s than Beltre did but then Wright’s body completely fell apart in his 30’s and Beltre took off in his 30’s and ended up in the hof. Wright was a brilliant player and such a joy to watch the Wilpons wasted his peak, and also took away his biggest strength going to right field with power with the old Citi field dimensions. Wright unlike Mattingly hit til the end even when he had a neck injury in 2016 and said he couldn’t look at the pitcher yet put up a 116 wRC+ being a three true outcomes guy that season. Not that I think Wright should go into the hof but he was a much better player than Mattingly, who I think will be voted into the hof on Sunday. I really miss watching Wright play and third base for the Mets has mostly been a black hole the last ten years.
Wright, and the answer to the question above, are a great explanation of why Mattingly doesn’t belong in the Hall. He had 4 really good seasons, 4 or 5 decent ones, and that’s it. There are dozens of guys with similar careers cut short by injury or health. While the Hall bias is probably against the Yankees, if anything, if Mattingly didn’t play for NY he wouldn’t even be on the era committee ballot.
i think the other comparable thing to wright has more to do with the committees than NY. its that they are both suck likeable guys you cant help but want them to win. (or get in the hall in this case.)
When Davy Andrews wrote the statement about the difference between football and baseball, I am sure George Carlin, in looking down from heaven, was smiling.*
The all-time list of “what if” guys includes some guys who were actually inducted by the veterans committee like Dave Parker and Dick Allen. But without a doubt the greatest “what if” situations are pitchers.
My list of non hall of famers ranked by “what if” questions I have:
Honorable Mentions: Don Mattingly, Jim Fregosi, Vida Blue, Sam McDowell, Matt Harvey, Frank Tanana
10) Grady Sizemore
9) Ben Sheets
8) David Wright
7) Mark Prior
6) Giancarlo Stanton
5) Johan Santana
4) Nomar Garciaparra
3) Doc Gooden (although his was mostly self-inflicted)
2) Fernando Valenzuela
1) JR Richard
Gooden, Prior and Santana immediately came to my mind.
Santana had a HOF-worthy career, and I am confident we will eventually be inducted. Gooden’s fate, as you mention, was largely self-inflicted.
Then there’s Mark Prior, who took a 117-mph line drive off his pitching elbow which Aramis Ramirez caught in foul territory for an out. Two nearly perfect years in the majors, then “good when available”, then gone. Only pitched five seasons – I did a double take when I saw that a couple years ago.
Feels like Bryant should be on the list too, but hard to what-if someone who won ROY, MVP and got a ring – and seems to be a pretty decent guy.
Am I remembering Mark Prior’s career-altering injuries wrong? I always thought it was the shoulder injury from a baserunning collision with Marcus Giles that was the primary cause, but my memory is unreliable on the best days
You are correct – the violent-aggressive baserunning of Prior got him hurt first. The line drive off the elbow was the most memorable, and summed up his misfortune just as well.
Similarly I tell myself the story that Bryant took a fastball to the face against Colorado from which he never really recovered. Under scrutiny his power all but disappeared the month before he got hit, and there had been reports of a nagging shoulder injury before and after it. But “fastball to the face” is a more dramatic beginning of the end than “nagging shoulder injury”.
So many Cubs wound up with strange endings to their career. Rizzo was having a decent decline phase with the Yanks until his unfortunate run-in with Fernando Tatis’ hip.
If you win ROY and MVP within your first two seasons, you’re ~75% to get in the Hall of Fame. Bryant won’t even be Hall of Good.
I’m not really sure what happened with him. It seems like a series of fluke injuries that collectively don’t seem like a fluke over 7 years.
I’m pretty sure Bryant actually wanted to live in Colorado (don’t blame him) which was why he went there. He had a good career, iirc he has the same sort of spinal stenosis as Wright. There are other MLB players who have had it and still continued producing, but clearly wasn’t the case with him. It isn’t Rendon territory, but sometimes I wonder about him as well. I mean Rendon 100% is taking advantage. Bryant just doesn’t seem like he can generate any power. He’s quite thin, but always was post college. Just weird all the way around.
And Luke Easter!! Hall of Fame bat and Hall of Fame personality, but integration was too slow, and not having a DH retired him to the minors too early. I see little difference between him and David Ortiz other than when they played.
If we’re going with what-ifs having to do with integration I’ve got a whole bunch about the legends: Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, Bullet Rogan, Oscar Charleston, Buck Leonard…
Yeah, agreed, the question was for modern players. Easter’s professional career was entirely post-integration (or rather “during” integration), and was so impressive given his age (33 when he made it to Cleveland), he’s a special kind of what-if.
Good call on Jim Fregosi. He was easily the best shortstop of the 1960s, and maybe the best shortstop of the whole 1947-1980 period even though his career was sabotaged by injury by age 29.
He never reached the same heights as Nomar offensively but he was like him in that he did everything well. He wasn’t as good a defender as Luis Aparicio or Rico Petrocelli, he didn’t hit as many homers as Dick McAuliffe, he didn’t hit for average or steal bases like Maury Wills. But he was like Top 5 among shortstops in every single one of those categories except for stolen bases, where he was sixth.
He has fourth most fWAR among shortstops from 1951 to the present through age 28. The top one was likely juicing (A-Rod), the second one is likely the greatest shortstop of all time (Ripken). The ones directly above Fregosi (Yount) and the three directly below him (Banks, Trammell, and Lindor) are all in the Hall of Fame or going to get there.
I’m sure there are a ton of pitchers, but there are some more pretty fascinating position player what-ifs, too: Eric Davis, Byron Buxton, Dickie Thon (career largely-derailed by pitch to face in his 26-year-old 150 wrc+ season).
Injuries suck.
Oh jeez, Eric Davis. I totally forgot about him. Bump everyone below #2 down a spot, I’m putting Eric Davis one spot above Doc Gooden.
The most PAs he ever had in a season was 562. That was 1987, and he put up as much fWAR as Dale Murphy did in Murphy’s bonkers 44 homer season…in 130 fewer PAs.
He was one of the most gifted players I’ve ever seen, but the guy was a one-man medical case study. His crash into the wall didn’t formally end his magical 1987 season but he wasn’t the same afterwards. Then he started having hamstring injuries, recurring knee injuries, a herniated disc, and one of the scariest things I’ve ever seen on a baseball field when he lacerated his kidney in the world series. Oh, and then he had cancer, and he returned to slash .327 / .388 / .582 the following year at the age of 36.
He was the textbook definition of a “power-speed” player the moment he stepped into the league. He only had six seasons where he topped 500 PAs and only had eight where he topped 400…and he had seven 20/20 seasons. The only season where he had more than 400 PAs and didn’t have a 20/20 season was 1998, the year after the cancer surgery. He was faster than Barry Bonds and had more power than Rickey Henderson. It was like if Elly de la Cruz had a 55 grade hit tool.
Pedroia makes my top 5. His career was derailed by the dodgy machado “slide”.
He put up 5.4 Bwar in 2016, then the “slide” happened April 2017 and that was that. He’d put up 50 BWAR through 2016. His chances of throwing up a few 3 BWAR seasons were good. Machado ruined all that.
Small note: It’s common for people to call out the different nature of Gooden’s downfall versus other players’. We see little bit of this behavior in regards to King Felix as well (“conditioning”) and the online vitriol for Rendon is pretty fierce. But nobody can mention Gooden without highlighting it.
Is there a good reason for this? I can see the downside, where we feel the need to assign blame to some and leave others blameless; that’s a societal trait I don’t like. But maybe there’s some value that I’m not seeing?
One can argue about what Drug addiction, depression, even general lack of motivation _are_, but they aren’t really choices, and nobody would ever inflict that on themselves if they could stop it. And those many of us who are blessed to not have these traits are just better poised to succeed in sports, not that different than if we had resilient ligaments.
Moreover, if we are imagining “what if”, I feel like imagining what would have happened to Doc is actually more interesting than all these other guys with their serial injury history – more common stories.
And to be blunt – wasn’t Gooden just better than all these other guys? Like, didn’t he have a chance to be one of the handful of greatest ever? Not sure the others on the list can make that claim.
I’m open to being wrong on any front, but I was struggling trying to find a reason why we keep mentioning this stuff.
Yeah we definitely separate players into “deserving” and “undeserving” based on whether it was injuries or not that wrecked them. We think of injuries as random and drug use as something that makes them less “deserving” of sympathy. There’s something weird about that, because a ton of players were doing cocaine at that time and nobody got addicted anything like he did except Steve Howe.
Yes and that binary breakdown doesn’t capture the nuance of the real world.
Guys have been over drinking forever, and gobbling pills – did they deserve their relative failures or success? Some players grew up so poor they probably didn’t reach their full genetic height – do we just ignore such factors?. Guys are playing through all manners of unknown ailments (eg mullins’ Crohns) – how do we account for situations that don’t make the headlines? Allegedly Matt Manning was derailed by covid – should he have worn a mask? And all these injured guys – should they have stretched more? or learned from Billy Martin that splitters are rough on the arm? What about all the gay players – to the extent to which that holds them back, where does that fit? Could Eckersley have protected his wife from Rick Manning somehow become a superstar faster?
The whole injuries vs “the field” seems like a really blunt instrument. A little preachy maybe, but mostly just beneath our collective level of analysis on this site.
Tony canigliaro is #1 on my list
Pete Reiser says hey.
The ones that get me more than anything aren’t necessarily the super-talented injured guys or players unjustly held back by the color line. It’s guys like Dustin Fowler — no, he likely wouldn’t have been a HOFer, but to suffer such a terrible injury in your debut is just awful.
Not even going to mention Jose Fernandez? And sure Stanton is a “what if” but he will still hit 500hrs and might end up in the hof cuz that is where 500 hr guys w postseason heroics go
Next weeks mailbag might ask – of the 8 players who have had 10+ year layoffs between all-star appearances, how statistically unlikely is it that 3 are named Rick?
Rick Porcello and Rick Ankiel, the only major league Ricks this century, never made the All-Star game. EDIT: I missed Rick Helling, Rick White, and Rick Bauer. Also no All Stars.
BBRef indicates there are currently zero Ricks in the minors, although there are several Rickys, a Rickey, and a Rickardo.
Keep an eye on Rickey, especially if he refers to himself as such
FWIW, a properly trained umpire will not shout “fair ball.” They gesture “fair” but do not vocalize, so as to distinguish it from a foul. An ump only really has six uttetances: ball, strike, safe, out, “time”/timeout, and foul.
!!Roy Kent, Roy Kent, he’s here, he’s there, he’s every-f@cking-where, Roy Kent, Roy Kent!!
Gooden threw 10 CG | 6 SHO and struck out 300 batters (with 112 BB) over 191 innings…as an 18 year old in the Carolina League.
That’s hysterical.
He jumped straight to the majors the next year. It was a bit less dominant, he “only” had 7 complete games, three shutouts, and 276 strikeouts in his rookies year over 218 innings.
That was a killer year for rookie pitching. Mark Langston and Orel Hersheiser also had strong rookie years, and Roger Clemens had a decent run that year until he tore his labrum. I have a hard time imagining a group of rookie starters doing as well as those four, and there were four other starters with an fWAR over 2 that year (one of whom was a reliever, Ken Howell).
That has to be the best crop of rookie starters ever. 1966 and 1972 were also pretty good, but not like that.
(Bret Saberhagen and Mark Gubicza also debuted that year, but they didn’t really hit their stride until later.)
I laughed when I read that the umps have tiny little brooms.
Maybe baseball can whistle in the first pitch!
this was a great article, and the readers combined to put up one of the greatest collection of posts I’ve ever seen on this site. Kudos all around!