Beneath this cynical, empirically motivated exterior, I’m actually a big softie. As such, I love it when an old guy turns back the clock and rediscovers the magic one last time. Almost a decade ago, Giancarlo Stanton was the proto-Aaron Judge: A player who was bigger and stronger than any outfielder we’d ever seen, and capable of hitting the ball much harder than anyone else in the league.

Stanton came of age just as Statcast made exit velocity public knowledge, though his 2017 season — the peak of his stardom — was impressive enough by the metrics Henry Chadwick scrawled on a cave wall 15,000 years ago. Those numbers: 59 home runs, 123 runs scored, 132 RBI, a .631 slugging percentage. Small wonder Stanton was named the MVP of the National League that year. Read the rest of this entry »

Rihanna said it best. Or maybe it was Russell Crowe. This is the main event. The top seed in the American League meets the top seed in the National League. The presumptive AL MVP is leading his team against the presumptive NL winner. Those guys, coincidentally, are the two biggest free agents in history – Shohei Ohtani broke the bank this past offseason, only a year after Aaron Judge signed a historic deal of his own. Juan Soto might eclipse them both this winter. And while those three are the biggest stars in the game right now, they have three previous MVP winners – Mookie Betts, Freddie Freeman, and Giancarlo Stanton – as sidekicks. Oh yeah, and the two highest-paid pitchers in history are the aces of their respective teams. Heck, I’ve allowed this paragraph to run to a ridiculous length, and I’m only now mentioning 2024 Home Run Derby winner Teoscar Hernández.

By any objective measure, this World Series matchup is absolutely loaded with star power. But the current players are only half the story. This is the 12th Yankees-Dodgers matchup in World Series history – the Dodgers have played in 22 of these things, and they’ve faced one team more than half the time. This isn’t quite Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Fall Classic anymore, where the two preeminent teams are a subway ride apart, but the next best thing is a rivalry between the two biggest cities in the country.

Want an example of how good the players in this series are? Here are the top five hitters in baseball by wRC+ this year:

Jay Jaffe dove into how rare it is to see the best player in each league in the World Series – turns out, it’s quite rare! Fifty-homer sluggers have also never faced each other in the Series before now, and that leaves out the fact that Ohtani stole 50 bags too. Soto is an absurdly over-qualified second banana. Betts isn’t on this list, and he was in the MVP running before missing time with injury. The star power on display is simply staggering, as Davy Andrews noted Wednesday. Read the rest of this entry »

Free agency begins five days after the end of the World Series. As in other recent seasons, FanGraphs is once again facilitating a contract crowdsourcing project, with the idea being to harness the wisdom of the crowd to better understand and project the 2024-25 free agent market.

In recent years, we’ve added a few features to these ballots based on reader feedback. You now have the option to indicate that a player will only receive a minor league contract, or won’t receive one at all. If there is a player option, team option, or opt out in a player’s contract, you’ll be able to indicate whether you think he will remain with his current team or become a free agent. Numbers are prorated to full season where noted. The projected WAR figures are from the first cut of the 2025 Steamer600 projections.

Below are ballots for 11 of this year’s free agents — in this case, a group of starting pitchers.

Free agency begins five days after the end of the World Series. As in other recent seasons, FanGraphs is once again facilitating a contract crowdsourcing project, with the idea being to harness the wisdom of the crowd to better understand and project the 2024-25 free agent market.

In recent years, we’ve added a few features to these ballots based on reader feedback. You now have the option to indicate that a player will only receive a minor league contract, or won’t receive one at all. If there is a player option, team option, or opt out in a player’s contract, you’ll be able to indicate whether you think he will remain with his current team or become a free agent. Numbers are prorated to full season where noted. The projected WAR figures are from the first cut of the 2025 Steamer600 projections.

Below are ballots for 10 of this year’s free agents — in this case, a group of position players, including the winter’s top free agent.

Tre’ Morgan is one of the most promising prospects in the Tampa Bay Rays organization. Drafted 88th overall last year out of LSU, the 22-year-old left-handed-hitting first baseman slashed .324/.408/.483 with 10 home runs and a 158 wRC+ in 437 plate appearances between three levels this season. Moreover, he’s only upped his profile by continuing to rake in the Arizona Fall League. As our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen wrote on Tuesday, Morgan “is making a case to be elevated into the back of this offseason’s Top 100 list.”

Morgan — a New Orleans native with a well-deserved reputation for being both personable and thoughtful about his craft — talked hitting prior to taking the field for the AFL’s Mesa Solar Sox earlier this month.

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David Laurila: Who are you as a hitter? In other words, how would you describe your style and approach?

Tre’ Morgan: “As a a hitter, I’m definitely contact over power. Swinging and missing is something that just shouldn’t happen too often. That’s how I was taught to hit, by my dad really. If I run into one, it sometimes goes pretty far, but I kind of stick to gap-to-gap, trying to play with the barrel.”

Laurila: What is your father’s background?

Morgan: “He played football, mostly — he played college football and had a couple of tryouts for the NFL — but he taught me everything I know about baseball. He said that he was better than me [at baseball] when I was growing up.”

Laurila: You said that the ball sometimes goes far when you run into one. What have you had in terms of exit velocities and distances? Read the rest of this entry »

Let me be very clear: This doesn’t matter. What I’m about to show you is small sample size theater. It’s not statistically significant. It has no bearing on what’s actually going to happen in the World Series. We are here for a fun fact rather than a learning opportunity. Are we all in agreement? Okay, then let me show you something wild. Here are Aaron Judge’s career numbers against the Los Angeles Dodgers.

So, uh, yeah. A .389 batting average is good. A slugging percentage in the thousands is good. A wRC+ over 300 is also good. Just in case you were wondering how good those numbers are, here’s a table that shows the best career numbers against the Dodgers, minimum 40 plate appearances, courtesy of our splits leaderboard. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I published the first half of my votes for this year’s Fielding Bible awards, which have now been released. This morning, I’m going to cover my ballots for the three outfield positions, pitchers, multi-positional defenders, and defensive player of the year. If you’re curious about the methodology I used, you can read all about it in yesterday’s article, but here’s a bite-sized refresher:

I used a weighted blend of DRS, FRV, DRP, and UZR (the four flagship public defensive metrics), with the weights based on how well each metric did at each position when it comes to reliability and consistency. I used different weightings based on recent effectiveness at a few position groupings: first base, non-first-base infield, catcher, and outfield. That gave me an initial rough order. From there, I used my own expertise, both in terms of deeper statistical dives on individual players and the copious amounts of baseball I watched this year, to assemble my final rankings. I deferred to advanced metrics when the gaps were huge – Patrick Bailey is the best defensive catcher by a mile, for example – but for close calls, I leaned heavily on my own judgment.

That’s the broad strokes of how I built a method for analysis, which is hopefully at least somewhat interesting. More interesting than that? The actual players who played the defense and got the awards. So let’s get right to my last six ballots. The award winners are noted with an asterisk after their name in the balloting section

Left Field
1. Colton Cowser
2. Riley Greene*
3. Lourdes Gurriel Jr.
4. Steven Kwan
5. Jackson Chourio
6. Alex Verdugo
7. Wyatt Langford
8. Ian Happ
9. Brandon Marsh
10. Taylor Ward

I thought that Cowser and Greene were the two easy choices for this award. They both played elite defense, with every metric above average and a few elite markers. (Greene was the best left fielder by DRS, Cowser by FRV.) They both exemplify what I’m looking for in a left fielder – namely, someone good enough that their team keeps playing them in center. In fact, if either were much better defensively, they might not qualify for this award; you have to play the plurality of your innings at a position to qualify, and they both played hundreds of innings in center.
Read the rest of this entry »

When it comes to throwing shade in the playoffs in recent years, nothing has caught as much – not even your least favorite broadcaster – than the concept of home field advantage. The reason for the negative feelings isn’t surprising. Other than a possible first-round bye, home field advantage is the main reward for playoff teams that win more regular-season games than other playoff teams.

It’s true that home teams have struggled in recent postseasons, but they actually haven’t been too bad this year. The 19-18 record of home teams isn’t the most scintillating of tallies, but their .513 winning percentage across 37 games is not exactly a stunning departure from the .522 winning percentage for home teams during the 2024 regular season. The most games a team can possibly play in a single postseason is 22, and nine points of winning percentage works out to only 0.2 wins per 22 games.

Naturally, the data are noisy given the relatively small number of postseason games, even under the current format, but the recent issues with home field advantage seem to mostly be a 2023 thing, when home teams went 15-26, comfortably their worst year. Smoothing out the data a bit doesn’t really do much, either.

You can always find an oddity if you shave data paper-thin like prosciutto, but with data as volatile as this, you’ll mostly end up with bleeps and bloops that don’t really mean anything. Like, sure, teams are 29-31 since 1995 at home in Game 7s and Game 5s, but that’s primarily the odd blip of NLDS home teams going 4-12 in their rubber matches.

Returning to 2023 one more time, I went back and looked at the projections, both from ZiPS and regular-season record or Pythagorean record. Using each team’s actual 2023 record, the average home team in the playoffs had a .562 regular-season winning percentage; it was .551 for the road teams. It’s a .564/.553 split using the Pythagorean records. But I still have all the projected matchups and rosters at the start of the playoffs saved, so I re-projected the results of every actual game that was played. ZiPS thought on a game-by-game basis, with home field advantage completely removed from the equation, the road teams were actually slightly stronger, projecting the average home team at .545 and the average road team at .556. Facing off against each other, ZiPS expected home teams to have a .489 record in the 31 actual playoff games, with an 8% chance of going 15-26 or worse.

Looking at the Wild Card era as a whole, home teams have gone .540 over 1,045 playoffs games. In the regular season over the same era, home teams have a .537 winning percentage. In other words, the playoffs just aren’t that different from the regular season. (ZiPS assumes a .535 playoff winning percentage for the home team in a game of exactly equal teams.) So why does it feel so bad? I suspect one reason can be found in the charts above. Home teams had a pretty good run in the mid-2010s, on the heels of the expansion from eight to 10 playoff teams, peaking at a .581 winning percentage from 2013 to 2017. In that context, it conveys the feeling that home field advantage is working as intended, and the five-year runs stayed slightly above the historical trend until the 2023 home field crash.

Since that crash feels especially bad, it’s natural that people search for deeper meaning in data that don’t really have a lot to give. One common cry was blaming the long layoffs from the bye round. This argument doesn’t hold up, as Ben Clemens pointed out last postseason.

It also doesn’t have much to do with modern baseball or modern players, either. Home field advantage has been relatively stable in the regular season throughout baseball history.

There’s been some long-term decline, but nothing earth-shattering.

The larger problem is simply that fundamentally, home field advantage just isn’t a big deal in baseball. It’s not as big a deal in other sports as some think, but unlike in the other major sports, the difference in baseball between a great team, a good team, a lousy team, and the Chicago White Sox is not that large. Other sports don’t need home field advantage to be as much of a differentiator, especially in the playoffs. A few years back, Michael Lopez, Greg Matthews, and Ben Baumer crunched some numbers and estimated that to match the better-team-advances rate of the NBA playoffs, MLB teams would need to play best-of-75 playoff series. I certainly love me some baseball, but I can’t imagine I’d still watch World Series Game 63 with the same intensity as I do every Fall Classic game now. Besides, the MLBPA wouldn’t be on board, and the calendar would make that a practical impossibility anyway.

Even giving the team with more wins home field advantage in every single game doesn’t drastically weight the dice. Assuming a .535 home winning percentage and evenly matched teams, the home team would require a best-of-13 series to become a 60/40 favorite; to increase its odds to 2-to-1, we’d have to make it a best-of-39 series. Just to experiment, I simulated series with the normal postseason distribution of home field advantage (one extra game) between two teams, the one in which the home team is .020 wins better than its opponent (just over three wins in a season). I then ran the numbers for how often the better team would be expected to win, based on series length.

So what does this all mean? In all likelihood, home field advantage in the playoffs hasn’t changed in any meaningful way. And isn’t really all that big of a deal in the first place. Without altering the very nature of the postseason significantly — aggressive changes such as requiring the lower-seeded team sweep in the Wild Card series to advance — baseball has a very limited ability to reward individual playoff teams based on their regular-season results. Home field advantage isn’t broken; it’s working in the extremely limited way that one should expect. If the Dodgers beat the Yankees in the World Series this year, it probably won’t be because they were rewarded one more possible home game.

You are allowed to be sad. You do not have to be psyched about watching two gigantic legacy franchises smash everything in their paths and then start smashing each other in the Godzilla vs. King Kong World Series. You can be bummed that both of the obvious favorites made the World Series even though you also would have been bummed if some undeserving Wild Card team had sneaked in. Anyone who expects you to be rational in your rooting interests is being completely unreasonable. This a matchup designed specifically for fans of hegemony. You do not have to be good. You are allowed to cheer for Team Asteroid.

That said, there’s still a lot to be excited about in this matchup. The World Series offers itself to your imagination. I doubt that there’s one person reading this who doesn’t enjoy watching Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Juan Soto, or Freddie Freeman play baseball, who doesn’t thrill at the thought of seeing them on the biggest stage the game has to offer. It’s just inconceivable that a baseball fan could be so hopelessly lost.

Judge hit 58 home runs this season. He led baseball with a 218 wRC+. That’s the seventh-best qualified offensive season since 1900. The only players who have topped it: Barry Bonds, Babe Ruth, and Ted Williams. Judge is blasting his way onto Mount Rushmore in front of our eyes. Ohtani’s 181 wRC+ ranked second. While rehabbing from Tommy John surgery, he put up the first 50-50 season in history. When you combine his offense and baserunning, Ohtani was worth 80.7 runs this season, the 35th-highest total ever. Over 11 postseason games, he has a .434 on-base percentage with 10 RBI and 12 runs scored, and somehow his offensive line is worse than it was during the regular season. Soto was right behind Ohtani at 180. In seven big-league seasons, he’s never once been as low as 40% better than average at the plate, and he is still getting better. Read the rest of this entry »