FanGraphs Weekly Mailbag: September 27, 2025
There is still a lot to play for as we enter the final weekend of the regular season. How exciting! As I sit down to write this mailbag on Friday afternoon, two division races and three Wild Cards are still in play between the two leagues. In the American League, four teams are fighting for three spots, while three National League clubs are competing for the final spot in the senior circuit.
Of course, we’ll be watching more than just the standings over the next few days. Will Cal Raleigh get to 62 or 63 home runs this season? If he does, will it be enough for him to win the AL MVP award over Aaron Judge? Personally, I will be watching to see if Corbin Carroll hits three more triples. He enters Friday’s game with 17 on the season, and he already has more than 30 doubles, 30 home runs, and 30 stolen bases. My preseason bold prediction was that Carroll would become the fifth 20/20/20/20 player ever, and the first since Jimmy Rollins and Curtis Granderson both did it in 2007. Carroll probably won’t get there, but he’s close enough that I’ll be paying attention.
Before we get to this week’s mailbag, I have one quick programming note to mention. We’ll still be doing our weekly mailbag during the postseason, but we might move around the specific day it runs depending on the playoff schedule. Our plan is to do one before every postseason round, beginning with the Division Series. And as always, I’d like to remind all of 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.
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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.
If the players did a “wildcat strike”, would MLB void only some contracts, I.E., those of contracts that are underwater, like Kris Bryant or Masataka Yoshida?
This is exactly what I was thinking. The Mets aren’t going to let Soto go, but the White Sox would happily tell Benintendi that he was in violation of labor law to get out of their commitment for 2027.
I would definitely be interesting in hearing a lawyer’s take on this, because there are two possibilities:
1) They can void any contracts (this is what you are thinking)
2) They can void all contracts but not pick and choose
This is all in the realm of theory since there is basically no way the players will wildcat strike. But in case #2 I would be curious to see which owners would vote for termination of all guaranteed contracts and which ones wouldn’t.
The Orioles would because it would just be Tyler O’Neill, the Royals and Brewers would not because they don’t want to lose Bobby Witt and Jackson Chourio.
The Padres would have a tough choice, since they have Jackson Merrill and Fernando Tatis Jr but are also broke (and Merrill would be under team control still) and would probably love to not have to pay Bogaerts or Machado.
In theory the D-Backs would vote against because of Carroll and Marte but the owner philosophically believes in sticking it to the union, so who knows.
I assume the Dodgers and Phillies would vote against because they’re happy with how their team is constructed and it would take a lot of work to reassemble the stars. I would probably put the Yankees and Mets in that category too, but I’m not sure.
The Angels would vote in favor for a large number of reasons, but mostly because Moreno is reactionary and because he viscerally dislikes Rendon.
I have no idea what the Rays would do.
A longer term strategy for the players would be to divide the owners, as there are clearly those interested in profit by competing (LAD, NYM, et al) and those interested in profit by depraved noncompetitiveness (PIT, COL), and that tension can be exploited.
I don’t really know that there is anyone in that first category aside from LAD and NYM. There are other teams that have the resources and pressure to invest in the team and they do to some extent, but they clearly don’t care as much about it as LAD and NYM. And they typically align with the rest of the league on policy and labor issues. I don’t think there’s any way to divide and conquer with NYY / PHI / TOR / TEX / ATL / HOU / BOS / CHC / SFG all sticking with the rest of the league on policy.
> but mostly because Moreno is reactionary and because he viscerally dislikes Rendon.
Not even sure if this was meant to be funny but I literally LOLed.
If they could do that, and maybe they could, I don’t think it would likely work well if the goal is to end the wildcat strike. I’m guessing the players wouldn’t come back without an agreement honoring previous contracts. I guess it is possible but not likely, that if the players are massively overplaying their hands, something like this could happen but I could also see all the teams that don’t have significant underwater contracts not being for this either, from a competitive standpoint.
Yes, I don’t see the players returning without a resumption of previously executed contracts paid in full beyond the period of games lost due to the strike. I can’t see players allowing a subset of players to lose their guaranteed contracts allowing owners to pick or choose which contract(s) to honor in a new CBA.
Also, I really appreciate the thorough explanation Michael Baumann to my question. Seems like fans are generally apt to support the owners based on poll results of fans (at MLB trade rumors) indicating they support the entire 2027 season be cancelled for the owners to win on their demand to implement a hard salary cap vs. the de-facto luxury tax soft cap in place now, which few teams including top revenue teams like Boston (12th in 2025 payroll) and the Cubs (11th, both per Cots Contracts) choose to cross on a regular basis.
Add to it the judicial and political climate which seems to favor ownership, vs. 1995 when Judge Sonia Sotomayor ruled against most owners attempts to field scab players to start the 1995 season. Seems as a once avid fan every stance by the owners since 1994 has worked against the long term interests and growth of the game (revenue sharing incentivizing tanking and a growing permanent class of non competitive teams, cheapening of the regular season through expanded playoffs, reduced to eliminated access of regular season OTA broadcasts, or even paid for broadcasts with exclusive deals for Amazon Prime, Apple, contraction of minor league / non complex league levels, caps to international player spending, qualifying FA offers and subsequent lost draft picks, “luxury” tax, etc..
The owners one role is acting as financial and managerial stewards of the game, and yet this 2027 Armageddon is primarily due to the fact the owners cannot effectively manage the long term interests of baseball. They, not the players, cannot agree how to best manage revenue allocation between the majority of small to mid market teams ($250M-$350/$400M annual revenue) vs. the half dozen teams with substantially more local revenue at the top. Their solution is to further reduce player’s share of MLB revenue, and further exclusion of “non game day” revenue such as real estate, gambling, separate ownership of Local TV and streaming platforms, as part of the “revenue sharing” they consider part of CBA negotiations.
I’m pretty sure that BsR only counted stolen bases before 2002. Taking an extra base is counted from 2002-present, but from 1901-2001 it would have just been stolen bases only.
Although I think the thought that this is the best baserunning year ever could be correct, because teams used to steal like crazy and the caught stealing rates would have dragged down the BsR. And clearly the BsR calculations are penalizing runners who get thrown out trying to take an extra base or other things, because the worst baserunning year is 2017 at -8.4.
Unless I’m misreading this, it looks like the entire league-wide BsR is between 1.1 and -0.8 from 1901 to 2001. Which also makes me wonder if there was some sort of norming going on in the earlier numbers, or if it is just really hard to put up that much value or negative value from stolen bases alone.
I do have to hand it to 1977 though, they somehow managed to steal 3,016 bases as a league and get caught 1,780 times. They were getting thrown out well over a third of the time. Lou Brock completely lost his edge that year, going to from 56 stolen bases and 19 CS to 35 SB and 24 CS. Garry Templeton hadn’t learned how to run yet, stealing 28 bags and getting caught 24 times. The Pirates had two players who had double-digit stolen bases (Dave Parker and Al Oliver) but who got caught more than they successfully stole. Makes me wonder who was coaching baserunning that year.
Update: It looks like FG includes Statcast data in BaseRunning from 2016 to the present, which accounts for the more extreme values in recent years. So BsR is not strictly comparable between 2001 and 2002, and then against between 2015 and 2016. UBR shows up until 2024, and looks like it is comparable between 2002 and 2023.
More fun with stolen bases and baserunning:
From 2002 to 2024, the worst baserunning team in MLB has been the White Sox and it’s not even close with -175.3. The Giants are second from the bottom with -108.0. The top teams are the Rays (164), Phillies (162), and Rangers (119.1). However, the Phillies are the team that derived the most of that from stolen bases, their wSB was 108.2 while the Rays were at 40.8 and the Rangers at 25.6.
From 1962 to 2001 the best stolen base team was the 1993 Expos. The Expos had a ridiculously fun set of base thieves in the late 1980s and early 1990s. In the late 1980s they had Otis Nixon and Tim Raines, and in the early 1990s they had Marquis Grissom and Delino DeShields.
The worst team was the 1987 San Francisco Giants, who managed as a team to steal 126 bases and get caught 97 times. Will Clark got thrown out 17 times compared to only 5 steals. Candy Maldonado stole 8 bases and got thrown out 8 times. Bob Melvin when 0 for 4. He ended his career with 4 steals and 13 times getting caught.
The best wSB scores from 1962 to 2001 is pretty obvious (Rickey, Raines, Willie Wilson, Joe Morgan, Vince Coleman). The worst are more entertaining: Buddy Bell, Greg Gagne, Chet Lemon, Tim Wallach, Duane Kuper, and Bobby Bonilla. Bell was ridiculously bad at this, with 55 stolen bases to 79 CS. Duane Kuper only had one year where the stole more bases than he was caught stealing. Dave Parker and Pete Rose show up too near the bottom. Parker was a little iffy on the basepaths throughout his career but things got real bad for him in the 1980s. I was trying to figure out if Pete Rose’s bad baserunning coincided with his player-manager years but he actually did pretty good in 1985 and 1986 (11 to 1).
The Bell/Kuiper stats were caused because they were on Cleveland & they did the “hit & run” all the time & they got hung out to dry all the time.
Chet Lemon was a terrible baserunner, he just had no instincts at all..which was a shame because he was fast & a really good CF & a good hitter with a good eye..he just didn’t have the ability to read pitchers or get good jumps.
I remember Gagne, Wallach & Bonilla & the only common thread I can think of is they were all slow.
Purely technical correction, here: work to rule is a type of strike and (usually) can only be performed when a union is in a strike position. What we usually call a ‘strike’ is just one type of strike and more specifically a walkout or a withholding of labor.
Whether that is true depends on the jurisdiction and the class of worker. I can assure you that many, many unions have done work-to-rule outside of a strike position and gotten away with it. It’s far more common to do it that way than work-to-rule from a strike position.
But a work-to-rule outside of a strike position not effective if you don’t have ironclad job security, because in that case outside of a protected strike the employer can simply just fire you.
The real issue with work-to-rule in this case is that you can’t work-to-rule if you’re locked out. This would have to be some sort of thing that happened after the lockout unless you think you could get a deal before the end of the 2026 season, and if the owners are committed to locking the players out for leverage I don’t think that’s going to change their minds.
I’m more or less at a loss what “work to rule” would entail, in practice, for MLB players.
The typical example, in other industries, is something like refusing discretionary overtime/extra shifts.
I can’t think of a good analog for MLB players.
Charlie Morton is such an incredible interview. I wish I knew how insightful he is before he signed with the Orioles. He never seems to give one sentence answers, it’s always a response that he thinks about and he tells you the full truth. Always worth reading his words.
Is the new market inefficiency IBB’ing the batter BEFORE a team’s best hitter, so the best hitter performs slightly worse than they’d otherwise by expected to? “This one weird trick lowers Shohei Ohtani’s OPS by 100 points!”
I admire the attitude that Charlie Morton talked about, because I tend to take criticism to heart, and dismiss praise. I wish I’d learned to fix that when I was younger, before too much damage was done. Now it’s like being 40 games under with 20 to play.