FanGraphs Weekly Mailbag: November 29, 2025
As Members of our site, you probably know by now that FanGraphs goes dark on most national holidays, as we were the past two days. We believe our staff deserves to enjoy holidays without having to worry about working, and our readers tend to have plans that don’t involve reading about baseball or staring at statistics on a screen. The exception is when news breaks that would prompt our readers to stop what they’re doing and rush to the site for analysis, such as a major transaction involving a star player. So for a few hours on Wednesday afternoon, as chatter picked up that Dylan Cease was nearing a deal with the Blue Jays, Meg and I both prepared for the possibility that we might need to work a bit on Thanksgiving, especially because the team in question plays in a country that doesn’t observe the holiday on the same day Americans do. Fortunately — ahem, thankfully — Cease agreed to a seven-year, $210 million contract with Toronto in time for Michael Baumann to write up the news and for us to edit and publish it Wednesday night.
The Cease signing was the latest move in what has already been a fairly active offseason. The Cardinals traded starting pitcher Sonny Gray to the Red Sox on Tuesday, two days after the Mets and Rangers made a one-for-one swap of former All-Stars. I learned of the Brandon Nimmo-for-Marcus Semien exchange around 2 AM Central European Standard Time on Monday, after I made the chaotic decision to wake up and watch the Rams-Buccaneers game before what turned out to be a roughly 24-hour travel day from Italy to New York. Following my initial surprise, I couldn’t help but wonder if Nimmo’s former teammate Matt Harvey would once again pitch for Team Italy in the upcoming World Baseball Classic.
We won’t be covering any of these moves in this week’s mailbag. Instead, we’ll be answering your questions about the best unmade baseball movie, JJ Wetherholt, the marginal value of team runs scored and individual offensive production, and more. 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.
Good mailbag everyone!
What a wonderful answer on the DiMaggio biofilm!
I have read Creamer’s book on DiMaggio, and a few others. I am old enough to have lived DiMaggio and Marilyn. I lucked into a casual meeting with Joe in Senior years. A gentleman. Gawd, NOT deeply flawed. A man who appreciated his skill, humbled that the public too, appreciated. Joe never wanted the lime light, and put his privacy on high value. Joe was respectful to all respectful to him. Same goes for Ted Williams. American heroes of an Age that movie stars, sport stars, and GI Joe contributed mightily to America. Not flawed.
I know little of DiMaggio, so I’m not speaking directly about him, but generally I think we can appreciate who a person is while acknowledging that they are a complex, multi-faceted, and yes flawed individual. Nobody is perfect, everybody has their insecurities and demons, even if they’re not on public display. Assuming their flaws are not monstrous, I think we can certainly hold complicated ideas about people. For me, acknowledging the full complexity of someone while still appreciating them is a greater act of respect than pretending the flaws don’t exist. YMMV.
i reacted to the writer’s use of the adjective “deeply.” The adjective was an unnecessary slam at a good man.
Happy Post-Thanksgiving everyone!
My nominee for a baseball movie that I wish had been made would be a version of Million-Dollar Arm focused on Rinku Singh and Dinesh Patel, who came across in their diaries as pretty interesting guys who deserved more than to be reduced to comic relief in a sanded-down Jerry Maguire. (Going by the reviews.)
our readers tend to have plans that don’t involve reading about baseball or staring at statistics on a screen
Um. But I’m glad you take the holidays off! There are already plenty of statistics for me to look at when I need my fix.
I think almost all of my plans outside of basic life support stuff (eating, drinking, sleeping) over the next year involve either baseball or statistics.
I don’t think my commute involves statistics. That’s a plan, right?
Bone up on LA
Eric’s answer is excellent and super well-written and I learned a lot from doing it, but I can’t help but feel that he’s missing the most obvious answer to Spenser’s question: It is really hard to hit well without power!
I don’t know how teams actually view it but they way they should view it is not whether a third baseman gives them enough power but whether it gives them enough offense for the position with the scarcity of players who can play it.
If Luis Arraez could play a scratch third base then teams should absolutely put him there (especially when he was a top hitter in 2022-2023). It shouldn’t matter one bit whether he has power or not. It’s just that virtually nobody can be a productive hitter with that little power, especially from year to year.
This means that the problem shouldn’t be “does Wetherholt have the power to play the position” and should be “does Wetherholt have the power to run an average to above average batting line?” And I think it’s possible. Those EV90, Hard hit, and max EV numbers put him in the same range as the 2025 versions of Gavin Sheets, Spencer Torkelson, Willy Adames, Andrew McCutchen, Mike Yastrzemski, Anthony Volpe, Ryan O’Hearn, Brendan Donovan, Jackson Holliday, and Alec Bohm. McCutchen, Holliday, and Volpe were below 100 wRC+, but the others range in wRC+ from 105 to 127, mostly clustering between 105-110. That should play at third base (or second), but his chase rate and contact rate more closely resembles Torkelson (118 wRC+) and Donovan (119 wRC+) than the others, so there is some upside there too.
The bigger issue is the one that Eric specifically ruled out of bounds for the question, which is whether he would be a better defender at second or third base. Which is clearly way more important than how he gets to his offensive production. And Eric says he has below average range for an MLB shortstop and only a 50 arm. I’d put him at second base and if for some reason I didn’t trade Donovan I’d move him to third base instead. Donovan has a decent track record at third base in the past and if he’s on the way out anyway you might as well show off his versatility.
I am here, patiently waiting for the Dock Ellis movie.
No No: A Dockumentary does a really good job encapsulating everything in his life plus the larger importance of those late sixties, early seventies Pirates teams.
My dream trilogy of Biopics would be Roberto Clemente, Josh Gibson, and Satchel Paige. Honorable mention to a pair of Rubes, Foster and Waddell.
Clemente and Paige are my picks. How in the world have those biopics not already been made?
I would like to see an adaptation of Game of Shadows and Love Me, Hate Me except you cast literally the most charismatic actor who looks vaguely like Barry Bonds as the lead.
I want them to portray Barry Bonds as the total jerk that he is, but have him be so magnetic you wind up empathizing with him anyway. You can take some liberties with it and make it a real Greek tragedy, where he loses everything except his record and money (in real life, I think he still has a relationship with his kids and is mostly healthy even if he lost both his spouses and the Hall of Fame). Think the end of The Godfather Part III, you can win but also lose.
Unfortunately Will Smith and Idris Elba are too old now, and Forest Whitaker and Denzel Washington are way too old. And I don’t think Michael B Jordan or Lakeith Stanfield look anything like Bonds, although maybe without the facial hair they would? Probably not.
Would definitely look forward to the casting of Ken Griffey Jr and Gary Sheffield. And his Sun Devils teammates almost unanimously voting him off the team.
Now that I think of it, a Gary Sheffield biopic might be even better than a Bonds one. Some real sequel / spinoff potential, so you got to get an incredible actor for Sheffield.
Barry Bonds is interesting in that he is both easy to hate and easy to love. Moreover, the reasons for both of them resonate with regular people like us. If your dad got treated the way Bobby was treated by reporters and everyone else in baseball, you would have a chip on your shoulder too. If you truly believed you were the best (and the evidence proved it) and yet somehow lesser players got all the cred, you might do anything it takes to stick it to them. And no, you would never apologize for it because it was all ‘right’ in your mind. It was justice.
Barry Bonds makes sense.
The good thing about this is you could cast a relative unknown and make it their breakout role. Obviously 10 years ago Elba would have been amazing, but there is a man out there who is made for this role, and the public deserves to see it.
Michael B Jordan would *kill* it as Bonds!
Daniel Kaluuya would be a great choice to play Barry Bonds.
He’s got the acting chops & has been in enough movies (Get Out, Black Panther, Nope, Judas and the Black Messiah) that most people are familiar with him, but, he’s not a huge star that would overshadow the role.
I don’t think he really looks anything like Bonds which is why I said Lakeith Stanfield (one of his recurring costars and also an outstanding actor). But Kaluuya is probably the greatest male actor under 40, so I support casting him in any project I am already excited about. Give me Daniel Kaluuya in your movie adaptations of The Great Gatsby, Candide, Othello, Invisible Man, Catch-22, The Count of Monte Cristo, Antigone, Ulysses…okay, maybe we shouldn’t make any adaptations of Ulysses.
Oh! The baseball movie I really want is the life, and investigation into the life of, the great Negro League pitcher Dave Brown. His SABR bio is absolutely gripping. (If you don’t want to read it, the tl;dr: After becoming a suspect (likely innocent) in a murder, he pitched for several years under an assumed name, made his way to California, and lived a long life under a different assumed name.)
Movie I want? The story of cocaine in the late ’70s & early ’80s, told in a style reminiscent of Reservoir Dogs or Goodfellas.
But collectively I think a biopic of Buck O’Neal would be more timely & more likely to be able to be made into a timeless classic (& make a billion dollars, too.)
The plot of Cocaine Bear, except instead of the woods it’s a baseball stadium / clubhouse, and instead of the bear it’s Keith Hernandez.
I’m sorry, “Heath Kernandez,” all resemblances to actual major league baseball players are accidental.
This has nothing to do with baseball, but I must include this quote from the “Cocaine Bear (bear)” wikipedia article:
(There is dispute about whether the taxidermied bear in Kentucky is the actual Cocaine Bear.)
In the case where an unqualified person officiates a wedding, the social construct of marriage is sanctioned by the state only if the happy couple believes the person marrying is legitimate? I can’t decide whether this is completely understandable or completely illogical. Or if it is humane or because Kentucky doesn’t want to go to the trouble of invalidating everyone’s marriage licenses.
(I also think there is some question whether a taxidermied bear counts as a “person”, sounds like a bit of definition creep to me)
The Kentucky laws do say
402.070 Marriage not invalid for want of authority to solemnize.
I’m on the side of “understandable” here. Don’t want people suddenly finding out they never were married.
On the other hand, one of the owners of the Cocaine Bear mall says “”As long as you feel that the person marrying you — like Cocaine Bear — has the authority, then that marriage can be binding here in Kentucky,” and it’s like, that’s fine for the couple, but it seems like it should be a problem for him that he’s holding out the bear as licensed to perform marriages when it isn’t? Leaving aside the whole “person” question?
What kind of degenerate has holiday plans that don’t include reading about baseball??????
I don’t really plan on it. It just happens like an inevitability.
Movie idea: House of David. Coen Brothers. Glen Powell as exiled mlb player in disguise. Buscemi and Turturro as coaches. Patton Oswalt as a cop. Credit scriptbto Barton Fink.
Holly Hunter team owner
John Goodman ghost of Babe Ruth
I actually appreciate that Fangraphs gives its employees holidays. I can wait a day or a week for in-depth analysis.
Secondly, I have a follow up to Dan. Thank you very much for your thoughtful response. I was asking it from the perspective of judging the best hitters. I believe it has become generally accepted that a 6 war player is more valuable than a couple 3 war players. Stars have more value. Does this apply to hitting for which MLB teams pay a premium in comparison with fielding and baserunning value.
What prompted this question was looking back at Harper’s 2021 and David Ortiz and Albert Belle peak seasons.
It seems like they were unquestionably superstar hitters but their war totals seem relatively low (Harper’s league leading 179ops+ in 2021 produced the same bwar as Kyle Tucker’s well rounded season, Ortiz’s 2006 compared to Placido Polanco) . I’m wondering if crossing the 160 (or 180 or 145) wrc/ops+ threshold could be relevant.
This has me wondering in a whole different direction: what are the best low WAR seasons?
Realizing some might view it as a contradiction in terms, I’ll try to justify; if we can have great seasons with low batting averages or great seasons with few HRs or whatever, could we have a, say season that was nonetheless historic, but the player put up only 3 WAR (say, Luis Arraez hitting .400)? Which are those seasons?
Lou Brock stealing 118 bases and putting up 3.0 WAR in 1974 has to be up there.
Ryan Howard averaged 47 home runs and 2.8 war from 2007-2009
He also had a 137 ops+ in that time period
My Great-Uncle David was an account executive at Diner’s Club back in the 50’s—basically, he was paid to glad-hand restaurant owners into accepting what became known as credit cards. He was a huge Yankees fan and had *dozens* of scrapbooks and photo albums filled with pics of players hanging out at Toots Shor’s and other NYC watering holes. Uncle Dave passed away back in the 90’s and, as far as I know, never spilled the dirt on what actually went on in those dark rooms…maybe that DiMaggio book will fill in some blanks.
I’d love to see a solid adaptation of Michael Chabon’s “Summerland”. It might work best as an animated streaming series (one season).
Actually it would probably be terrible viewing. But the storytelling is pretty awesome and worth your time if you enjoy a fantasy parallel-world story with baseball at its center.
I’d like to see Prophet of the Sandlots in movie form. Dustin Hoffman or Joe Pesci as Tony Lucadello.
Just wanted to say that as someone who was in the daily newspaper grind (and subsequently ground down), I commend FanGraphs for granting their staffers a well earned break.