FanGraphs Weekly Mailbag: January 31, 2026
Hello everyone, and welcome to the final mailbag of January! We’re now less than two months from Opening Day. I, for one, can’t wait.
It was mostly a slow week on the transaction front, with the most notable move being Harrison Bader’s two-year, $20.5 million deal with the Giants. As soon as the news broke, I texted Connor Grossman, who writes the Giants Postcards newsletter, saying: “Is Harrison Bader the most Giants player who has never played for the Giants?” In response, Connor called Bader Kevin Pillar 2.0. Anyway, this week we also learned that two core players from small-market clubs have signed seven-year extensions. First, José Ramírez and the Guardians agreed to a $175 million contract that will keep him in Cleveland through his age-39 season; by the time the deal is done, he could very well be the best Cleveland player that any of us have ever seen — unless some FanGraphs reader was alive to watch Tris Speaker. Then, on Friday afternoon, ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported that Jacob Wilson signed a $70 million extension with the A’s. Davy Andrews wrote up the Ramírez deal, and he’ll do the same for Wilson in a piece that will run on Monday.
We won’t be covering Bader, J-Ram, or Wilson for the rest of this mailbag. Instead, we’ll be answering your questions on players hitting the same number of home runs in four different seasons, ties in baseball, park effects, and more. But first, 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.
I’m not sure how everyone else feels, but I’d much much rather have ties than the zombie runner.
I agree! I think it would amp up the tension as the game goes on and incentivize managers to take more risks in the 8th and 9th innings.
It might even reduce the need for 13 relievers, or at least those cases where a reliever gets sent down or DFA’d because the bullpen was drained by an 11-inning game so a fresh arm is needed.
I’m struggling to come up with anything a manager might do that is more risky than what they do now.
Just thinking out loud:
Pinch runners and hitters is what I was thinking of. By the time the 8th inning rolls around and it’s a tie game managers would just start subbing in guys.
Would absolutely have a positive impact on health too.
I love quirky home run stats. Another one I found recently was that Shohei Ohtani was the first player to ever hit 55 home runs. What can’t the guy do?!
Huh, it’s like Scorigami but Homerigami. Looks like now the lowest homer total nobody has ever hit is 67.
Chris Davis was the first guy to ever hit 53, and Luis Gonzalez and Alex Rodriguez are the only guys to hit 57.
Regarding the first question and stretching things a bit, if you were looking at BA instead of HRs, Khris Davis hitting .247 4 years in a row would be noteworthy. For some reason I thought that streak was one of the oddest in baseball.
Not only did Adam Dunn hit exactly 40 4x, but, he did it 4 straight years.
& Ken Boyer & Fred Lynn hit 24 23, respectively, 4x in a row.
So, here’s the question- What is the longest timeframe someone has hit the same # of HR’s in a year? & what is the #?
You’d have to put a minimum on it or you’d end up with some old-time guy like Rabbit Maranville or Nellie Fox who hit 0 or 1 HR a year every year for 10 years or some guy like Pepe Frias (9 years played, 1 HR in his career) that had 100 AB a year & never hit any HR’s.
Any mention of Pepe Frias is a post of the day!
Today’s mailbag: Yet *another* thing Hank Aaron did more than anyone else.
I’m confident you could write a longish book on that topic.
As for me, I’m still minorly angry that David Aardsma supplanted Aaron at the top of the alphabetical order list. How perfect was that Aaron was first for so long?
Hank Aaron was the MAN. Full stop
I’m mad at Alaa Abdelnaby for the same reason.
“ I would argue that these numbers indicate that the scoring is friendliest in the majors. It’s not a smoking gun or anything, but the jump in fielding percentage from Triple-A to the majors is three times bigger than the jump from Double-A to Triple-A?”
A fair point, but there appears to be more overlap of talent between double A and triple A than the other adjacent levels. AA has the hot young prospects who tend to spend minimal or no time in AAA before MLB promotion while AAA is more of a taxi squad of players optioned from MLB for underperforming or MLB replacement level players
That’s Ralph Waldo Emerson, though you might already know that. And it’s a *foolish* consistency.
Yes. People use it to excuse their own logical inconsistencies, but what Emerson was talking about was people who refused to change their opinions even in the face of new data.
Shouldn’t major league players just be better on defense on average by a big margin? The great hitters get promoted fast out of the minors, but don’t the great defenders as well? Nick Allen is not in the majors for his bat! Plus the Dh should give the majors an edge to some degree over minors that don’t use the DH.
I would guess that the great defenders don’t get promoted out of the minors as fast, because an all-glove no-hit guy will get left in the minors longer than an all-hit no-glove guy. Especially with the DH. For every Nick Allen there’s a dozen Stephen Alemaises, but your Vinny Ps and Edouard Js and CESes are going to get a look in the majors.
Also if defense peaks earlier than offense, the major league advantage on defense wouldn’t be as pronounced.
On the other hand, in the minors you’re probably more likely to have guys playing further up the defensive spectrum than their eventual home. So that might knock the level of defense in the minors back down a bunch.
Reggie hit 40 homers in the 1960s and 1980s, but not the 1970s. That’s kinda fun.
One potential problem with ties is how to adjudicate the standings. Just w-l % can lead to strange and possibly unacceptable outcomes. Imagine two teams in a division near 0.500 w-l%. One time had 40 ties with a final record of 61-61. Another team had three ties with a final record of 79-80. Who wins? International football has one answer.
Yeah, you really can’t go W-L%.
To the further extreme: is a 1-0-162 team better than a 162-1-0 team?
At a quick glance, I think a 3/0/1 scoring (W/L/T) only swaps BOS <> TOR in the updated standings.
You see some weird quirks related to ties in the EPL and/or overtime losses in the NHL. For instance, Vegas is 25-30 in hockey and in 4th place in the western conference; San Jose is 27-26 and in 10th place in the conference (and Nashville is 25-29 and in 11th). Vegas has 14 overtime losses (which award a point apiece) whereas San Jose has only four and Nashville six.
Over in the EPL, three teams have 33 points at present: Newcastle (9-6-9), Sunderland (8-9-6), and Bournemouth (8-9-7). In their case, they rank by goal differential, which I like as a tiebreak.
Ties are good. Managers and strategy will quickly adjust and latter innings would be managed differently. There’d be more urgency. Zombie runners is a concept from the depths of h*ll. Then again I’m still not happy about inter league games, so there is that….
Roger Angell seems likely to have seen Tris Speaker play at least once, and despite his apparent disinterest in advanced stats it’s entirely possible he read something on Fangraphs at least once. So there’s at least one potential link.
That Frank Thomas anecdote is a major wtf
I am one of those no ties ever guys, but also don’t like ghost runners. Play it out! I realize it’s ridiculous but it’s also entertainment, and it’s random. Only guys I feel bad for in the 17 inning games are the guys who stopped getting served in the 7th inning
My grandfather had season tickets to the Tigers for five decades, so he saw every American League player from about 1915 to 1965. I asked him who the best player was that he ever saw, expecting Cobb, Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio or Williams. Without hesitation, he said, “Tris Speaker.”
The Rizzo thing is fun. Reminds me of when Khris Davis had the exact same batting avg a few (4?) years in a row.
Yep! .247 every single season from 2015-18. .244 the previous season, .242 career.
It seems worth pointing out that NPB does have ties. After 12 innings, not 10. Of course, baseball culture is different here.
My Baystars had a 71-66-6 record last season. No one set the stadium on fire.
the actual saying is “Foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little [small] minds.” folks often forget the foolish part, which makes the saying a lot truer and wiser (it is, by the way, my favorite saying).