FanGraphs Weekly Mailbag: February 28, 2026
Happy last day of February, everyone. By this time next week, the World Baseball Classic will have begun, allowing us to experience the best of what our global game has to offer. Earlier this month, Kiri Oler previewed the WBC with four team-by-team breakdown pieces, one for each pool, and we’ll have more coverage next week leading into the tournament. Also, I’ll be in Miami covering Pool D, which features Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, the Netherlands, Israel, and Nicaragua, so if you have any questions related to the first-round action at loanDepot park, you know how to reach me.
Of course, the World Baseball Classic isn’t the only baseball we have to look forward to in March. We are less than four weeks away from Opening Day! This year marks the earliest traditional Opening Day in MLB history, with 14 games scheduled for Thursday, March 26. The night before, the Giants will host the Yankees for the first game of the season. That standalone primetime matchup will air on Netflix of all places, because we all needed another streaming service subscription.
Anyway, in this week’s mailbag, we’ll be answering your questions about the NL Central, the value of a foul ball, a hypothetical Hall of Fame election in which every player regained eligibility for one year, and the most and least valuable baseball last names. 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.
Re: Last Names – Alas, poor Josh Outman, for what might have been.
Outman would have been a great name for a pitcher. For a hitter…nope.
Scott Blewett is a terrible name for a reliever.
Definitely.
Who names their kid Scott?!?
So many ways to go here. The old Pirates pitcher Bob Walk comes to mind. But all I can say is Richard Lovelady. What WERE his parents thinking when they gave him that first name.
Current St. Louis pitcher Richard Fitts fall into the same category. as Lovelady.
Every time I see his name, the 16 year old portion of my brain let’s out a little chuckle.
Don’t forget the pitcher Grant Balfour! And then head on over to Jon Bois’s Baseball Name Hall of Fame.
Arlie Latham’s entry…oh wow…
They were hoping for a porn star
In an era where pitcher injuries are more common than pinch runners, I always thought DL Hall was really risking the wrath of the Gods of nominative determinism.
Man, that guy Tommy John is just ASKING for trouble 🙂
Lou Gehrig’s family, too.
“Babe Ruth used to tell him, Lou, there’s a disease with your name all over it pal….I mean, Lou Gehrig’s Disease…how do you not see that comin’?!”
–Denis Leary
Edited
I love the most WAR per player per surname chart. It reminds me of the best sibling charts that someone (Bill James?) used to do, that would inevitably include Babe and Geezer Ruth or some other made up fake brother because Babe by himself beat all the families. It’s a weird combination of rare–but not unique–surnames that happen to have 1 Hall of Famer. Would using median rather than average reveal some names with a bit broader success.
Hank Aaron and Tommie Aaron hold the record for the most home runs by a pair of siblings.
Tommie Aaron has 13 homers.
I am pretty sure that even if you took the average instead of the sum that the Aaron brothers would still score highly on a lot of cumulative stats.
The major league record of Butts, Honus Wagner’s real life older brother. https://www.fangraphs.com/players/butts-wagner/1013478/stats/batting
Driving from (near) Nashville to the Florida Gulf Coast every year on family vacation, I would always get a chuckle when passing Butts TV in tiny Brewton, Alabama.
Alas, Butts TV is no more: https://www.brewtonstandard.com/news/no-ifs-ands-or-butts-building-had-rich-history-138849
The other side of that is the list that doesn’t do it per player. It’s basically those maps of “how common XXX is in the US” that don’t measure per capita and are basically just maps of population density.
Jon
Those lists were entertaining. In my younger days I quite enjoyed trying to make the best 9 man lineups per last name when taking a deep dive in Total Baseball. Let’s see some all time rosters for the top few
The Larkin one is basically just Barry Larkin (67 fWAR) and an 1800s guy named Henry Larkin who put up good numbers against guys who were making 50+ starts a year and pitching for 400+ innings in a season*. And then a bunch of replacement level guys. Barry Larkin and a cast of anonymous Larkins who are just there to fill out the roster.
*in 1887 a guy by the name of Matt Kilroy struck out 3.31 batter per nine innings, walked 2.40 per nine innings, and put up 7.8 fWAR because he pitched five hundred and eighty nine innings. His team must have felt good about him because he had 513 strikeouts the previous season, the most ever in a season.
My first thought when I saw the list per person was “it’s gotta be the Bergens at the bottom, right?” but there are only three Bergens that I can find. All have negative fWAR.
So I had to look up Matt Kilroy. Those 513 Ks in 583 IP in 1886 are nuts, considering that the league K/9 rate was 4.4. Even more nuts, his ERA+ was only 101. His K-rate was more than halved the next year, but he put up an ERA+ of 133.
Power of pitching to contact!
Kilroy was here
Davidson immediately rang true for worst last name (Tucker sends a chill down my spine as an angels fan). i’m a bit surprised that Simmons is the best – I wonder if the results change if you filtered this to start in say 1980 or so instead
Another sighting for Doug Flynn, the worst baseball player of all time. Here are the Flynns I could find and their fWARs:
Jocko: 3.6
Clipper: 0.6
Joe: 0.3
John: 0.3
Brian: 0.3
Mike: 0.0
George: -0.1
Ed: -0.3
Carney: -0.2
Doug: -8.3
That’s right everyone, Doug Flynn is such a bad player he dragged his namesakes kicking and screaming into negative territory.
For those of you who are enjoying this name based thing, Baseball Reference has a page titled “largest baseball families” which I think aims to catalog every baseball family with 5 or more members (some scouts / GMs / managers are included in this).
Of the ones I (and probably you) are familiar with, the biggest family is the Alou / Rojas family that includes Felipe / Matty / Jesus / Moises Alou as well as Mel Rojas. Other names you probably recognize are:
-Alomar (Sandy Sr, Sandy Jr, Roberto)
-Guerrero (Vlad Sr, Vlad Jr)
-Leiter (Al, Mark Sr, Mark Jr, Jack)
-Ripken (Cal Sr, Cal Jr, Billy)
-Holliday (Matt, Jackson, Ethan)
-Boyer (Ken, Clete, also another brother named Cloyd. Clete, Cloyd, and…Ken?)
-Boone (Bob, Bret, Aaron, and which also includes Nick Allen, he’s son-in-law to Bret)
Here are some things I learned:
One Taiwanese family that has twenty seven members who I think all played in the NPB or otherwise was affiliated with NPB teams. There is also a Chinese family that I think were entirely in the CPBL with the same number.
Greg and Mo Vaughn are cousins to each other and to Jerry Royster.
Not only is Zach Plesac the nephew of Dan Plesac, but so is Blaze Alexander.
Rangers prospect David Davalillo is part of a larger baseball family, with his grand-uncle getting over 4000 PAs in an eighteen year career. His grandfather and father also played in the minors (grandfather made it briefly to the majors).
Wander Franco not only has two other brothers named Wander Franco who played in the minors, and is also the nephew of Erick and Willy Aybar.
Steve Sax’s brother played in MLB, and are uncles / older cousins to the Sogards.
Brothers Pascual Perez and Melido Perez both pitched no-hitters that were removed from the record books because the games were shortened by rain.
How many Rougned Odors are included on the list?
The Boones would also include Bob’s father Ray. I am probably remembering this wrong, but I believe they and the Bells (Gus, Buddy, David) are the only 3-generation baseball families.
You left out Wilton Guerrero, Vlad Sr.’s big brother.
That was intentional
There is another (Wilton) Guerrero (prospect) on the way.
I’m so sorry that such a disgusting nephew has polluted the the Zone.
I’ve wondered if David Davalillo is related to old Dodger pinch hitter Vic Davalillo.
Now I know.
Name-based trivia is my jam so–oh wait. I can bring this to around to another question. As a Pirates fan, I’m ok, because I have learned to feel things about things other than my team winning, such as Jose Quintana’s meteoric rise to become the franchise’s all-time fWAR leader among players whose name starts with Q, and the suspense over whether Jose Urquidy can replace Duane Underwood. If they can win games that’s a bonus.
Right, the name stuff. It doesn’t look like I coudl easily check anything about this without some actual data-scraping, especially because clicking on the “name” column of the leaderboards alphabetizes by first name. But that made me realize that the most auspicious name for a ball player whose first and last names were the same has got to be Aaron Aaron.
[Sometime I was doing an I-related search and ran across the Iorgs, which made me wonder if Nathan Eovaldi was the best player ever whose last name started with two vowels. Shortly thereafter I realized I was dumb.]
Don’t look at the other half of the name and call yourself Henry Henry, neither of the players named Henry Henry made it out of the minors.
Great to know you’ll be in Miami for Pool D. I’m going March 6-11. Dominican Republic is the likely favorite, it it should be interesting to see who grabs the second spot!
Fangraphs odds apparently don’t take defense into consideration. Pittsburg is going to be really bad defensively. They haven’t improved their offense enough to make up for potentially the worst defense in the majors.
I have noticed that projection systems tend to regress defensive performance pretty heavily back towards league average (see: CJ Abrams, Heliot Ramos, Teoscar Hernandez).
I think that probably works better for individual-level projections than when a team has decided they’re going to play Bryan Reynolds in left field, Oneil Cruz in CF and Ryan O’Hearn in right. This is an example of “correlated errors” where the errors are correlated because the projection systems don’t know the Pirates are going to put guys in bad situation.
1) Cruz is the least problematic of the group. He actually was +4 FRV in 2025. The problem is that the positive value is mostly due to his arm–he led center fielders in errors last year, and both his reaction and burst in the outfield are below average. He’s not going to be much help for covering for the other two outfielders the way someone like Daulton Varsho is.
2) O’Hearn put up +6 FRV at 1B in 2025, a position that he will play roughly zero games at if Spencer Horwitz is healthy, and instead is slated for about 800 innings in RF where he is -4 FRV in 634 innings. Hard to tell exactly how his range is due to small samples, but in 2023 and 2024 his burst would have placed him as the second worst among outfielders.
3) Bryan Reynolds…oh dear…he’s goine from +3 FRV in 2020, +1 in 2021, 0 in 2022, -4 in 2023, and -10 in 2024. They moved him to right field in 2025, where he was only -4. But what I think the projection systems don’t know is that RF is a much easier position in PIT’s home stadium than LF. His reaction has always been bad, and his routes have always been good, but his burst has gone from roughly neutral to being clearly below average.
None of those guys are deal breakers individually and they’re not going to be anywhere near as bad as the Angels’ outfield but they seem determined to try.
(They’re also banking pretty hard on Brandon Lowe’s second base defensive projection being quite a bit closer to 2023 and 2024 (+1 FRV) than 2025 (-9).)
The funny thing about Ozuna is that it wouldn’t be a huge surprise if he’s cooked, and it also wouldn’t be surprising if he’s easily the most productive hitter in the Pirates. You could easily see either of these happening.
Schrodingers DH!
Last year he could’ve been both cooked and the most productive hitter on the Pirates at once.
The Ozuna signing is partly that someone has to hit against LHP I think, they already had Cruz and Horwitz with huge platoon splits and Reynolds historically (though not last year) better from the right side than the left, and then they added Lowe and O’Hearn (though O’Hearn has some history of hitting LHP). And Ozuna maybe isn’t the kind of pull-only RHB who would get eaten alive by PNC, At least, Ben Clemens said he does damage to all fields.
[Fun fact I just discovered on Statcast’s park-adjusted homers: Isaac Paredes has 92 career homers and Statcast estimates that in Camden Yards he’d have 36. 36!]
As a Pirates fan, I am cautiously optimistic about 2026. On the one hand, the offense is greatly improved but as mentioned by a commenter the defense has gotten worse. I will say that they should be more fun to watch this year. This is the first time in about 10 years that I have purchased tickets before the season started.
I think the negative side of the name question could be evaluated differently. I think it would be interesting to find the delta between a prospect’s FV and their eventual WAR total. Not many players get the chance to prove their bad-ness over a long period.
Great mailbag this week!
Ted Davidson was a talented reliever whose career essentially ended after he was shot by his wife in a domestic dispute.