Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about a generous podcast listener, Bruce Meyer’s elevation to interim executive director of the MLBPA, his framing of the sport’s competitive challenges, media messaging vis-à-vis the owners’ and players’ potential responsibility for missed games in 2027, and the creep of pitch-calling from the dugout, then preview the 2026 Detroit Tigers (53:35) with The Athletic’s Cody Stavenhagen, and the 2026 Athletics (1:31:28) with A’s on SI’s Jason Burke.
It’s common for readers to ask which of the players who aren’t on this year’s Top 100 might grace next year’s edition. Who has a chance to really break out? This is the piece for those readers, our “Picks to Click,” the gut-feel guys we think can make the 2027 Top 100.
This is the ninth year Eric has conducted this exercise at FanGraphs, and there are some rules. First, none of the players you see below will have ever been graded as a 50 FV or better in any of our write-ups or rankings. Second, we can’t pick players who we’ve picked in prior years, though we can take players who other writers have previously selected. For instance, Eric picked Demetrio Crisantes last year, but he got hurt and didn’t make this year’s Top 100. He can’t select him again (though he would if he could), but James or Brendan could if they wanted to (though they didn’t). Cam Caminiti, on the other hand… Read the rest of this entry »
This winter, I’ve really gotten into the Olympic spirit. It turns out that cheering for wholesome, fresh-faced athletes who represent the idea of the United States is a decent balm for the psychic wounds inflicted by watching the actual United States speed-run a collapse into kleptocratic authoritarianism. Also, I’m already a Peacock subscriber because I love Parks & Recreation. So I’m watching the curling. I’m watching the hockey. I’m watching the long-track speed skating and the short-track speed skating, even though short-track speed skating is basically just a cross between demolition derby and cockfighting. And if you told me two weeks ago how much cross-country skiing I would be watching this week, I would have asked you whether I was about to suffer some sort of brain injury.
The one sport I haven’t watched much of is figure skating. I wish I could watch it more often, but unfortunately, I suffer from a debilitating sequin allergy. I can make it through a short routine with nothing more than some acute rhinitis, but after even a few seconds of exposure to Tara Lapinski and Johnny Weir, I have to sit on a whole case of EpiPens. Still, one night last week, I pregamed with a dangerous amount of Benadryl and Allegra (or as the kids call it, Ballegradyl) and watched the ice dancing with my charming wife. Like so many people across the globe, we came away with a newfound appreciation for Twizzles. The Twizzle is the most difficult maneuver in ice dancing. It involves collecting a great deal of speed and then spinning across the ice on one skate, close to your partner, in perfect synchronization. Here’s the greatest Twizzle sequence ever performed, according to a YouTube user who is an owl.
In this article, we will capitalize the word Twizzle, partly out of respect for the extremely capricious linguistic conventions of the International Skating Union rulebook, but mostly because it’s fun. A Level 4 Twizzle, the highest degree of Twizzle, involves two sets of at least four rotations. In the second set, you have to rotate in the opposite direction and on a different edge of your skate.
During your Twizzles, you also have to include at least 4 Additional Features from 3 different Groups (I told you the capitalization was wild). Those additional features are movements that make Twizzling more difficult, such as continuous arm movement (Group A, upper body), holding the blade of your skate (Group B, skating leg and free leg), or starting your Twizzle with a Dance Jump (Group C, pattern, entry, exit). Was that enough to set your head to Twizzling? Maybe it would help to watch a quick instructional video with a voiceover that sounds like it was recorded in a particularly narrow crawlspace:
So that’s Twizzling. What’s it got to do with baseball? Sadly, not as much as one might hope. The competitors do boast bulging quadriceps, and they do move gracefully across a pristine surface while wearing shoes that have knives attached to the bottoms, and they do put all of their effort into generating maximum rotational energy, but as it’s rare to see baseball players spin more than once, and it’s even rarer to see them start those spins with a Dance Jump. The closest baseball equivalent to a Twizzle is when the center fielder chases down a ball in the gap and then has to fire the ball back in to the infield. Because all their momentum is pushing them toward their glove side and away from the infield, the only way they can get anything on the throw is to use that momentum to execute a neat little spin. It’s sort of the baseball equivalent of the gravity assist.
I’ve always been fascinated by this particular move. I still remember the first time I ever saw it. I was a junior in high school, and during batting practice before a game, this enormous guy from Strasburg just did it as nonchalantly as you’d scoop up a routine grounder at first. I was flabbergasted. His name was Joe Bauserman. Later that night, I would throw him a fastball that just missed the corner low and outside, and he would reach out and swat it over the right field fence, which is not generally a thing that happens when you’re a junior in high school. A couple years after that, he’d get drafted by the Pirates and spend a few months playing alongside Andrew McCutchen. I like to think they still keep in touch.
I usually play in the infield, so I’ve only had one occasion to try the Baseball Twizzle. I was playing in an adult league in Queens, and somebody smoked a line drive into the right field gap with a runner on third. I lit after it and made one of my better running catches, then swung around to fire the ball home. But I didn’t Twizzle. I wasn’t an outfielder, and, unlike Andrew McCutchen, I’d forgotten all about Joe Bauserman. Instead of turning away from the infield and executing a full spin, I fought against momentum and turned toward the infield. It was a mistake. I was no match for the momentum, which slammed me backwards into the ground. Luckily, our pitcher was a doctor, and he declared me concussion-free (though I do recall that for the next few days, I experienced an unusual urge to watch cross-country skiing).
In the interest of international cooperation, we’re going to award medals to the best Twizzlers in the major leagues. I spent much of Wednesday watching clips of center fielders making plays in the gaps and taking note of all the Twizzles I could find. We’re now going to count down the top three Twizzlers. To maintain the spirit of the ice dancing at the actual Olympics, the judging will meander from opaque to capricious to arbitrary to downright corrupt. (As such, should any big league center fielder want to move into medal contention, hit me up on Venmo and we’ll work something out.) I will say, however, that I did not intend to recognize players from three different countries, or that all three are participating in the World Baseball Classic. That honestly was a pure case of Olympic serendipity. Here we go. Get yourself a big old dose of Ballegardyl and let’s hand out some Twizzling medals. (Editor’s Note: Do not under any circumstances take Ballegradyl. We’re still writing settlement checks for the Percoviagranax debacle.)
The first medal goes to South Korea’s Jung Hoo Lee, an excellent showing for a player in his first full season here in the states. Lee is about to represent South Korea in the World Baseball Classic, so keep an eye out for Twizzles in Pool C. Still, Lee reached the podium more due to quantity than quality, which is why he’s down here with a bronze. He just barely beat out Rockies fly-chaser Brenton Doyle, whose Twizzles were smoother, but less frequent. Lee’s Twizzles were often lackadaisical, and he rarely included Additional Features – would it kill the guy to lift his cleat over his head every once in a while? – but the judges appreciated that he sometimes seemed to go out of his way to execute a twirl. He just needs to string together a couple in a row and he’ll be in business.
Pete Crow-Armstrong is a fitting recipient for a silver medal here. Like Lee, he’s about to represent his home country in the World Baseball Classic, when he mans center field for Team USA in Pool B. More importantly, he’s is one of the best defenders in baseball. As with so much of his game, PCA’s Twizzles erupt in a frothy blend of ebullientpuppy-dog energy and athletic grace. It’s worth noting that he overcame a slight hurdle to get here. Lefties get fewer chances to Twizzle than righties, because when they’re moving toward their glove side, they’re moving toward third base, so a spin isn’t always required for that particular throw. That didn’t stop Crow-Armstrong, who executed multiple Twizzles to third, and even Twizzled out of a dive once, an Additional Feature that won over even the cynical (and definitely corrupt) French judge.
Our gold medal Twizzler is representing the Dominican Republic in the WBC. Julio Rodríguez’s Twizzles aren’t always as flashy as Crow-Armstrong’s, but no player Twizzled more than J-Rod. His Twizzles weren’t just an affectation, either. Rodríguez always Twizzled with purpose. He broke down his steps. He pivoted hard. He came up firing. He sent the ball toward the base on a hop to make sure that he never overthrew anybody. All of this results in Twizzles so fundamentally sound that they brought a tear to the eye of even the curmudgeonly Ukrainian judge, and let me tell you, that guy has seen some stuff.
Rodríguez’s Twizzles kept runners from advancing multiple times. He often looked like a twirling ballet dancer, whipping his head around to locate his target as quickly as possible in order to ensure an accurate throw. On one play, he was just backing up the right fielder. It didn’t look like there was much chance the ball would even get to him, but not only was he ready, he was ready to execute a textbook Twizzle, and it might have even been scored a Level 2 Twizzle if he’d just Dance Jumped into it.
Congratulations to all of our medalists, and please join us tomorrow as we break down which ballplayers would be best at doubles luge.
I started this project nine and a half years ago. I’ve gone through multiple outside developers, cleared countless hurdles over an unknowable number of hours, taught myself a ton about coding and modeling, and studied thousands of variables. But finally, six years after the introduction of THE BAT X for hitters, THE BAT X for pitchers is finally here!
Similar to THE BAT X for hitters, the pitcher version starts with the classic version of THE BAT (which was built long before Statcast and all the advanced metrics we have now, and mostly just makes use of surface stats) and blends in my brand new pitcher “stuff” model, which I’m calling THE BATcast. (Get it, because it’s THE BAT using Statcast data?) Read the rest of this entry »
Today, we are proud to announce a new site feature: The FanGraphs Lab. The Lab is a collaboration between the editorial team and the engineering team here at the site, a joint effort to create more ways to sort through and visualize the huge crush of data that pervades baseball these days.
The FanGraphs Lab is a space for experimental data visualization and exploration tools that we believe might one day have a permanent place on the site. The key word there is experimental: One of the reasons we’re so excited about the Lab is that it’s never been easier to go from an idea for a new tool or visual to a functioning version of it. It’s not quite “if you can dream it, you can do it,” but it’s closer than you might think, which means that there’s a lot of room for innovation. The Lab will have a permanent home at www.fangraphs.com/lab. It will also be accessible from the main page of the site on the right navigation bar:
This project grew out of a discussion between the two of us. Actually, “discussion” might be the wrong way to put it: Ben just kept sending Sean links to new apps he had built in rickety programming languages, fun graphing tools without any immediate use case. Instead of politely telling Ben to shove off, Sean came up with a process for turning those concepts into functioning FanGraphs tools. First, with development assistance from Claude Code, Ben rebuilt his initial ideas in the FanGraphs code base. Next, Sean integrated these new pages into the site’s data and infrastructure. From there, we bounced ideas off of each other and iterated until we were happy with the output. After taking a few months to jump-start the process, the first prototypes are coming off the assembly line now. Read the rest of this entry »
This article unveils OOPSY’s first WAR-based Top 100 prospects list.
Broadly put, OOPSY mirrors the other projections systems at FanGraphs, but it uses its own ingredients, including its own aging curves, regression amounts, recency weights, major league equivalencies, and park factors. In terms of accuracy, it has held its own with the other projection systems, including when projecting rookies.
Since 2024, I have published OOPSY’s top prospect lists over at RotoGraphs with more of a fantasy focus, ranking pitchers by peak ERA and hitters by peak wRC+. In 2025, I began incorporating average fastball velocity into my prospect pitching projections, using data from The Board, as well as Stuff+, provided by Eno Sarris, where possible. Midway through 2025, I started accounting for EV90 in my prospect hitting projections, using data from Prospect Savant; I also include bat speed where data permits. And now that OOPSY accounts for defense as well as baserunning, I can rank prospects by projected WAR, to theoretically align more closely with the valuations used by major league organizations. Read the rest of this entry »
“I will start with the easy answer:” wrote Jeff Zimmerman back in 2014. The next part was bolded: “No, first and second half stats are not as important as the entire season for pitchers and hitters.” Jeff was talking about fantasy baseball, and whether you should consider a particularly strong or weak second half more relevant to a player’s future performance, but the lesson was clear. Overall stats tell you a lot more about a player than half a season of stats.
The same lesson is true over the course of a career. Since 1933, the year of the first All-Star Game, Stathead says that 2,146 players have made at least 900 career plate appearances in both the first half and the second half. Just under 93% of those players have a second half OPS that’s within 10% of their first half OPS. (We’re using percentages here rather than raw points in order to create a level playing field for players of varying skill levels. I calculated them by subtracting each player’s first half OPS from their second half OPS, then dividing the difference by their first half OPS.) Only 15 players – again, that’s 15 players out of a sample of 2,146 – saw their second half OPS differ from their first half OPS by more than 20%.
All of this makes sense. There’s no reason that a batter should be consistently better at the beginning or end of the season. As Eno Sarris once reminded us, seasons themselves are arbitrary endpoints. Most of the 15 outliers I mentioned in the previous paragraph are the results of short, noisy samples, either because they had short careers or they’re still in the early stages of their career right now. The longer your career, the more likely that your true talent level will shine through, regardless of the date on the calendar. Read the rest of this entry »
We know the steps to the annual spring dance by now: Pitcher appears for spring training, pitcher suffers minor injury or discomfort during practice, America holds its collective breath and hopes that barking elbow will just resolve itself.
Unfortunately, that hope is all too rarely vindicated, as imaging quickly confirms said pitcher has torn an essential bit of connective tissue.
The Twins speed-ran this dance this week with their no. 1 starter, Pablo López. The veteran right-hander cut short a bullpen session on Monday after feeling soreness in his elbow. Minnesota GM Jeremy Zoll announced Tuesday that López had torn an elbow ligament and that season-ending surgery was “very much on the table.” Read the rest of this entry »
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