FanGraphs Weekly Mailbag: June 6, 2026
Last Sunday, the White Sox defeated the Tigers, 2-1, to complete a weekend sweep on the South Side of Chicago. With the win, they pulled their playoff odds up to 20.3%. It was the first time those odds had been above 20% since April 12, 2023. The Sox dropped back below the 20% threshold on Monday with a loss to the Twins, and they enter their weekend series against the Phillies in Philadelphia with a 17.4% chance to reach the postseason, so it’s still way too early to declare them true contenders.
But unlike some of the other American League clubs off to unexpected hot starts, such as the Rays and Guardians, Chicago’s underlying performance supports its strong showing thus far. The White Sox have outperformed both their Pythagorean and BaseRuns records by just one win. The Rays are six and seven wins ahead of their Pythagorean and BaseRuns records, respectively, while the Guardians have exceeded their Pythagorean record by three wins and their BaseRuns mark by five. The A’s, the other AL team that surprised over the first two months of the season, endured a brutal 2-7 stretch to close out May and bring their record closer to their peripherals. Even so, all three of those teams enter the weekend with better playoff odds than the White Sox: the Rays at 83.1%, the Guards at 77.7%, and the A’s at 37.4%. That makes sense. Remember, a team’s Pythagorean and BaseRuns records only account for what’s already happened. Our Playoff Odds project future performance and factor in far more than just the first 10 weeks of play. Understanding that shouldn’t undermine the excitement that Sox fans are feeling right now; if anything, it should provide them with greater incentive to enjoy their team’s success while they can, for however long it lasts.
That’s the last you’ll read about the 2026 White Sox in this week’s mailbag. Instead, we’ll be answering your questions on the best system for bringing amateur talent into baseball, whether the Mets are paying more per win than any team ever, the new Hall of Fame pitching golden ticket, 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 think this is kind of where Jay is going, but I don’t really understand the desire to replace a “golden ticket” to Cooperstown with a new one. The old one was so bad! Do you really want Aaron Nolan in the Hall of Fame?
My personal take is that you need two of three things to be a Hall of Famer: Career total value, a high peak, or a legendary season or two. That would preclude any sort of “golden ticket” because you really need two have two of them. I think this doesn’t quite apply to DeGrom because he has the “legendary” side covered but I wouldn’t call this a “golden ticket.”
There is also a lot of discussion about what the “new” level for a pitcher should be despite the fact that there is at least one pitcher currently who looks like a future Hall of Famer without stretching the criteria (Chris Sale), and Gerrit Cole has a decent chance of being in that category too. Even Zack Wheeler has an outside chance of being a stronger candidate than DeGrom. We are going to have to have this discussion later anyway since there isn’t a single pitcher younger than Cole and older than Skenes who you can imagine as a Hall of Famer someday. We are going to need to know how things are in the next 5-8 years in between now and DeGrom’s first year on the ballot.
Is there really any chance of it, on his current trajectory? And if he somehow got right and had a late-career renaissance that got him anywhere near 200 wins, 3,000 Ks, 60 WAR, etc. (he’d need to average like 14 wins, 170 Ks, and 3.6 WAR per year through age 39 to hit those three benchmarks), wouldn’t he deserve consideration?
Depends on your imagination, I’d say. I can totally imagine Skubal putting together a HOF-worthy career. Crochet may have a shot, too. But yes, it’s early.
Also, Ohtani will be a HOFer one day, though not only on his merits as a pitcher.
While this doesn’t exactly describe how medical students match into residency programs, it is kind of a good first approximation. So there is at least one other industry where most people find out at the same time where they will be spending the next few years, on salaries that have been set in advance and are not negotiable, with little chance that will change.
I don’t really read Baumann much anymore because I often have a reaction like this, I probably should have skipped over the answer when I saw he was responding.
But that whole argument made no sense. Aside from the misunderstanding of how some licensed / regulated occupations work, here are some parts I object to:
1) The free market is the solution, and Baseball Stalin is necessary to get there and ultimately a force for good (we could have stopped there)
2) If we abolish the bonus pools we’ll just go back to how things were before 2012 (is this supposed to be an argument for it?)
3) Competitive balance in baseball is just not a big deal because soccer in Europe is popular (um)
4) Small market teams should just be smarter and better than everyone else, and then it will work, forever
The first one is the one that I think is the most insane. The concept of Baseball Stalin is a total nightmare, and that level of top-down economic management runs completely counter to the notion of free agency. There are also obvious risks if someone else becomes Baseball Stalin, or if the current Baseball Stalin is changed by the role. The second one probably does not support the argument, and is not even relevant if you’re also abolishing the draft system in place from 1965-2011. The last two are illogical. I’m not asking for a perfect argument with no holes but I am asking for something better than that.
I think you’re taking the Baseball Stalin point completely in the wrong way. It’s not that he’s arguing that a Baseball Stalin should impose his system; it’s that he wants to talk about what he thinks the ideal system would be, while fully recognizing that there is absolutely no way this would get instituted. Short of a Baseball Stalin, which doesn’t exist and certainly wouldn’t be him.
(I think the podcasters are also wrong about Climate Stalin, but never mind that.)
The critical point I think is number 3. There’s no draft in global soccer and global soccer is famously noncompetitive. One club has won six of the last nine Premier League championships. Two clubs have combined to win eighteen of the last twenty La Liga championships. A single club has won thirteen of the last fourteen Bundesliga championships. One club has won eleven of the last thirteen Ligue 1 championships. At least in Italy three different teams have won the last six, after Juventus won nine straight (and then faced severe punishment for financial fraud it seems?)
There’s a reasonable argument that it would be more just to have an uncompetitive league with more player choice, especially for international youth. But let’s be clear that the proposal is either to turn half the league into the Washington Generals or to also institute the kind of revenue sharing that really would require Baseball Stalin.
I also think the podcasters are incorrect about Climate Stalin. But I think it goes to a broader point about what people as fans think is the best interest of players versus what the players themselves think it would be.
I am sure that players would prefer to choose where they played, and the resistance to an international draft shows this. But it is not something that immediately ends the bargaining. It’s not like a cap, which is a total non-starter.
There’s a big disconnect between what we see as wrong versus what the players actually want. At some point you just have to take their word for it? I think that this is where the term Baseball Stalin becomes a real problem, because this is very much how things play out when you have a self-proclaimed revolutionary vanguard who thinks that eventually the masses will see what is in their best interest.
What the players want is money. That’s their priority. Can you imagine what the MLBPA’s reaction would be where the league offered—in addition to their current proposal—to also adopt all of these changes that are proposed here? They would say no so fast there wouldn’t even be time to make a guess. They would never, ever, ever trade a cap for freedom to pick your team.
I think you’re misunderstanding the incentives. The current union members who ratify the CBA can’t be affected by the amateur draft or the proposed international draft, because they are already MLB players. They don’t put it on a level with a salary cap because they are negotiating someone else’s rights. If there was a proposal to reinstitute the reserve clause, that would absolutely be a bigger red line for the union than a salary cap.
I started to type this out, but mine was both wordier and generally worse. Thanks!
What exactly is this (apparently so obvious as to need no explanation) argument against a Climate Stalin? In other words, how has anything in the last 2+ decades given you any hope that a decentralized framework for combating the problem will have any effect whatsoever except making things worse?
It’s not that I think it needs no explanation but that I didn’t want to gp into it on a baseball site! If you’re on bluesky, @ me there and I will be happy to explain my reasoning (I post under my real name, my last name can be found in the comments under the glizzy article. Or just search the site for “hi and lois”).
The problem with any Stalin is basically that dictators don’t work. Even the idea of a benevolent dictator – which it seems like a ton of people would really prefer based on a lot of the planet subscribing to some form of singular God, whether that’s a person or an entity – which seems like it should work and is the basis for all these Stalins, is actually just worse than collectivism.
The wisdom of crowds is a real effect and it demonstrates that we are better when we make decisions as a society instead of being told what to do by any one individual or group. Even if you assumed that the dictator is moral, compassionate, incorruptible, and a genius (by the way, you can’t) you run into the problem of perspective and expertise. There is just only so much one person or a small group can understand, which means that when decisions are made they’re often missing key components which render the outcome ineffective. Baumann demonstrates this because his perfect system is based on what he thinks is important and his own individual experience, which isn’t necessarily applicable to even the majority of the group he’s actively trying to help. Basically science and peer review exist for this reason – they recognized that a self-proclaimed shaman can just make stuff up but that gets harder to do when your conclusions have to be testable and repeatable.
Yes, group decision-making is messy and it feels like there has to be a better way; democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others. And nothing is absolute, there are definitely cases where a Stalin would be a better solution. The problem is finding the perfect Stalin, and then being right about which solutions, which is functionally impossible.
Yeah this is part of what I was getting at above. The arguments against “Domain Expert Stalin” are:
1) Dictatorial planning doesn’t usually work for the reasons you describe and especially not over the long term when the dictator changes
2) Dictatorial planning inevitably leads to people’s rights being trampled, sometimes unintentionally because you can’t take into account everyone’s needs from the top down, sometimes intentionally as paranoia sets in
3) Dictatorial planning is fundamentally at cross purposes with freedom of movement and setting terms, because freedom of movement conflicts with the need to control. And any attempt to claim that only capital will be constrained and not workers need to think seriously about how well that maps on to the claims and actual experience of the Soviet Union.
I think formerly matt w is saying that he thinks we should disregard the long “Baseball Stalin” part and just treat it as “imagine that there was no resistance to this plan,” so dictatorship itself becomes irrelevant. But then that opens up a whole new raft of questions. If there is no resistance to this plan why hasn’t it been proposed? What are the differences between this hypothesis world and the world we live in? Might these differences be big enough that the proposal itself doesn’t make sense for the real world?
Overall I don’t think anyone gets to wave away questions about “the owners / players will never accept this” with a magical qualifier about it actually getting implemented somehow. You would be better off using the hypothetical of the players going on strike until management caves, but even then I don’t know that the end result would look like this and there would be a huge number of second and third order effects that would make the players’ financial situation worse.
At the risk of getting political, I’m probably closer to libertarian than left or right (certainly with the way the extremes have taken over both parties lately), but even I realize that the wisdom of crowds may not make a difference with the climate. The biggest polluter in the world (China) has no incentive to change, particularly when emissions and economic growth are so closely intertwined. Probably the biggest factor here is there is no overarching global “power” than can hold countries’ feet to the fire if they promise X on emissions and deliver X+1.
OPEC would be a good real-world model as to how this will all play out; everyone has an incentive to cheat. Hell, now that I type this out, look at MLB or other professional sports: the cost of cheating is clearly much less than the cost of getting caught, so cheating happens.
Perhaps the greatest irony is that the answer isn’t Baseball Stalin, it’s Baseball Communism.
Pool all the revenue. Obviously there are going to need to be checks to ensure that teams aren’t cheating, but each team has 29 “competitors” that are incentivized to make sure they aren’t breaking the rules, because that’s dollars out of my pocket.
Now there aren’t large market or small market teams. If you want to spend on amateurs instead of pros for a higher risk and higher return, fine. LA and NY and Miami are going to have their unique attractions, but plenty of baseball players would rather be able to go back to their ranch in Wisconsin or eat barbeque in Kansas City than hit the clubs…as long as the contracts are the same.
The NFL seems like the best model for overall parity (and the outsized impact of a great QB is why the league doesn’t have the same on-field effect). MLB is probably the most player-friendly to its superstars. But the NBA is at the moment the best balance. Stars get paid, bench guys are making lifetime money, the highest payroll in the league is in Cleveland, the reigning champ is OKC, Boston and New York and LA are always drawing attention and therefore dollars. European soccer feels like the absolute worst way to run a pro sports league I have ever heard and absolutely no one should be modeling anything after what they do (except perhaps the club teams idea, it’d be a lot of fun if the Yankees also fielded a lacrosse and ultimate frisbee team).
Baseball communism is the actual answer to the “competitive balance” dilemma. If the league actually wants competitive balance, they shouldn’t be trying to restrict the high spenders, they should be pooling all the revenues so the Dodgers, Yankees, Pirates, and Marlins have the same amount of money coming in. They don’t even need to involve the players or the CBA to do that.
Baseball is an entertainment business. If all revenue is pooled, what incentive do owners have to invest in the clubs?
I’ve always been interested in removing territorial rights & revenue sharing. Let teams move wherever they want and see what effect that has on clawing back big market power. Obviously existing franchises are still iconic dominant franchises but maybe they converge towards something that makes more sense than we’ve seen with top down maneuvering, especially bc smaller market teams don’t see to be too successful at spreading the sport. Let existing teams move wherever they want.
As an aside I’ve always felt that teams like the Marlins and Rays are unpopular mostly of ownership decisions, not market fundamentals. I think most of the effects attributed to Florida are highly overstated and that those teams are unpopular mostly due to longterm fan disillusionment due to those teams not spending on good cores and developing dynasties around franchise players (ie Rays cutting salary after their 2010 playoff run tanked attendance; I think if they had invested in their team they would’ve blown up w/in a few years, as they were at similar attendance lvl as Nationals). Big problem is that running penny pincher operations and mooching off revenue sharing is a safer strategy than going big and some owners are obviously more comfortable w/ that stance and don’t put appropriate trust in their franchises.
Also, are MLB teams really in competition off the field? No. It essentially a single entity. It’s not like McDonald’s and Wendy’s competing for fast-food burger costumers. It’s a nationwide sports league competing for entertainment dollars. I’ve worked for national companies and was told where to go if I wanted to advance or even to keep working for them. I’m not too fussed about a player being told you need to work for this team if you want to get to/stay in the majors.
They are literally called “franchises” for this reason
I thought of medical students as well. As an academic who has not had a ton of control over where I live (though that’s a question of lack of jobs rather than a centralized system), it’s not great.
I used to work in a field where there was for the most part just one city in the country for which I could find employment in said field. But you go into something like that fully aware that is the case. That’s a lot different than not knowing whether you’ll be “stationed” in Georgia, Michigan, or Arizona next week.
Baseball players who declare for the draft also go into it knowing that they will not be able to control where they’ll be drafted? The other thing seems like it pertains to the trade market more, and we’re not talking about that.
I mean, I’m talking about that. I think the whole picture is necessary to properly compare. And the fact that they declare for the draft means they will move (or be located) in one of 30 different places and that location could change with I believe 72 hours notice at any point in time.
My knowledge of residencies is based largely on The Pitt, but my understanding is you basically apply for various positions, but when you are placed, it’s well in advance and you know how long you’ll be there. I also don’t think the lack of choice/stability lasts for basically you’re entire career for all but a very select few, as is the case for professional baseball.
I think it’s pretty widely different. There’s no trades or demotions, right? You have some choice related to specialty, right? The military seems like a closer comparison.
I do wish there was more of an age-based system. Everyone drafted out of high school or signed as a teenager internationally becomes a free agent after their age 27 season and every college draftee becomes a free agent after age 28 season. Obviously this would never happen. I’d also make pre-arbitration end after age 24 or after a player was on a major league roster for a single day (including post season) in three separate seasons.
And I’d formalize 3rd year+ arbitration as fair market value, so stud players should be getting $40m or more from year 3 onward. Again, this would never happen.
It’s wild how Jeff McNeil’s entire career is basically just Wade Boggs’ decline phase.
McNeil: 982 games, 3837 PAs, 115 WRC+, 20.8 WAR
Boggs age 34-41: 958 games, 4015 PAs, 108 WRC+, 19.1 WAR
Thanks Dan! 1-2 seems like a good number to me.
Cavalli and Grffin have been above average by ERA thus far this season. I believe both will finish similarly to where they are now. Littell was really truly awful in April with an era of like 14, but shockingly turned it around since with an era below 3. Add Herz when he is back. We should have a pretty solid top 4 by the seasons end.
Historically bad pitching staff in April turning around by the end of the season is a good story I’m looking forward to watching this summer.
@michael I couldn’t have dreamed for a more complete and excellent answer to my question. Kudos, and thanks for the thoughtful reply! I – 100% – do not agree will all of your conclusions, but appreciate the ideas.
i cant believe that the only mention of the Angels in the “worst spending per win share” section was to say they beat the most pricey team ever
“The Dodgers might have spent $25 million on a bonus for Paul Skenes, but the Rays or Royals or Rockies could invest their money in better training facilities or better coaches”
That’s not a valid point. If the Dodgers can outspend you on payroll then can outspend you on development too.
You don’t need to do your own inflation indexing. There are inflation calculators that let you put in a specific date and dollar value and it converts it to 2026 dollars which solves your inflation isn’t linear problem.
You’re system is clunky and historically inaccurate.
I ran a test. The 2005 Yankees paid about 3.8 million per win in 2026 dollars. The 2023 Mets paid about 4. 6 million per win. Your methodology fails.
Your methodology reminds me of an economist who, when asked if a raise in the minimum wage leads to higher unemployment, does a bunch of modeling instead of looking at the empirical data. You made an invalid assumption about whether inflation at a particular date was knowable or not. For the purposes of this exercise I used October as the benchmark month for a given year.
Seems like he’s using empirical data (compare to baseball payroll and salary data) and you’re using the theory (apply CPI inflation).
No, he created a model that he thinks would predict which team paid the least per win. I did the actual work for two of those teams and showed that his model doesn’t work.
He claimed it would be too hard to inflation adjust for each team. Maybe that’s so. I’m no computer programmer, just a historian. But it seems to me it ought to be possible to create some sort of code that pulls in say, the last however many years of payroll data we have rates and apply an inflation calculator by year and then divide those per win to anwer that actual question.
Fangraphs is great, in part, because they are so rigorous with the data (here meaning that they usually test the models to see if they work). So it stands out when the don’t. The author changed the terms of the question and answered a different question than was asked but was essentially “do teams that spend a lot of money get what they pay for?” to which the answer, which we already knew was, rarely if ever.
Using an inflation calculator, you get a boring answer biased towards the last few years because MLB payrolls have increased above CPI rates.
BLS actually calculates indexes for many different commodities and labor markets.
“Your methodology reminds me of an economist who, when asked if a raise in the minimum wage leads to higher unemployment, does a bunch of modeling instead of looking at the empirical data.”
It generally doesn’t, but it does usually result in increased prices.
I think the issue wasn’t that inflation is unknowable or non-linear but that inflation in baseball salaries does not directly track inflation in the broader economy. The answer’s method was trying to adjust for how big a payroll was for its era, just plugging it into an inflation calculator might instead tell you when league-wide salaries diverged from the broader economy.
Why does that matter? The question was “which team paid the most per win?” Why are we making this unnecessarily complicated by assuming that baseball dollars are somehow different from the rest of the dollars in the economy? Prices on individual commodities fluctuate against inflation all the time, but when we ask, how much did a tank of gas cast in 1973-4 during the oil schock caused by the Yom Kippur war and subsequent OPEC cut off, we don’t try to finagle it by adjusting for how much gasoline consumption was a percentage of gross domestic spending. Treating baseball labor as if were different from the rest of the overall context is silly (and part of the reason why teams use deferrels or spread contracts out now, they are acting based on their models for predicting inflation, and they’ve come out ahead as inflation has reached levels not seen since the late seventies over the last five years).
The point of using statistics and modeling is to make something visible that isn’t intuitively visible and have it actually be meaningful. But this is a case where we don’t need to model because we have the data. I don’t understand why we need to make assumptions that aren’t warranted to answer the question that was asked.