If you’re a baseball fan — and presumably most people reading this are — Game 7 of the 2025 World Series was like the best buffet you’ve ever been to. There were no hotel pans full of lukewarm highlights sitting atop Sterno cans. This one had dramatic home runs, crazy defensive plays, a series of starting pitcher relief cameos, and even some questionable baserunning for flavor. Even Will Smith’s 11th-inning home run, which was the eventual difference, might have only been the fifth-most exciting moment in one of the best World Series games I’ve seen in my near half-century of existence.
We certainly started off with an entertaining matchup of starting pitchers. For the Dodgers, we got Shohei Ohtani, the player who has defined the 2020s. While Tyler Glasnow’s three-pitch save in Game 6 didn’t disqualify him — he appeared later in this game — Ohtani is tricky to use as a relief option since the Ohtani DH rule only works when he’s starting. On the other side, Max Scherzer got the start for the Blue Jays, and while the future Hall of Famer is nearing the end of his career and is no longer an ace, I wouldn’t dare get between Mad Max and a Game 7.
Ohtani started things off in the first with a liner to center, advancing to second on a Smith grounder after a terrific diving play by Vladimir Guerrero Jr. to prevent the Dodgers from getting two on with no one out. Ohtani then advanced to third on a Freddie Freeman fly out, but he was stranded after a Mookie Betts groundout to Andrés Giménez. Read the rest of this entry »
The Fall Classic has traveled near and far, but wherever they are, the Dodgers have relied heavily on Yoshinobu Yamamoto to lead the team to victory, and on Friday night he delivered once again. Following a three-game swing in Los Angeles, the World Series returned to Toronto for Game 6. And though back in their home and native land, the Blue Jays fell to the Dodgers 3-1, meaning Canada’s team will face L.A. in a decisive Game 7 on Saturday night.
The faster we’re fallin’, we’re stoppin’ and stallin’,
We’re runnin’ in circles again.
Just as things were lookin’ up, you said it wasn’t good enough,
But still, we’re tryin’ one more time.
Blue Jays starter Kevin Gausman had the first seven batters he faced looking like they might be in over their heads. His splitter was working exactly as intended — presenting as a center-cut fastball, then diving in too deep for the hitter to make contact — and leading to a ton of swing-and-miss. As he worked deeper in the game, Gausman mixed in his slider more, which earned him some quick outs on weak contact. For the most part, he cruised through his six innings and 93 pitches. For the most part. 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 2025-26 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 statistics and WAR figures are from the first cut of the 2026 ZiPS projections.
Below are ballots for eight of this year’s potential free agents — in this case, a group of players who began their pro careers in affiliated ball before transitioning to NPB or the KBO, and who could eye a return to MLB this winter. For more detailed scouting information, be sure to read their reports on The Board, as well as Eric Longenhagen and James Fegan’s recent piece on the players who could be coming over from Asian pro leagues this offseason. 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 2025-26 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 statistics and WAR figures are from the first cut of the 2026 ZiPS projections.
Below are ballots for eight of this year’s potential free agents — in this case, a group of foreign pros from NPB and the KBO who may be posted this winter. For more detailed scouting information, be sure to read their reports on The Board, as well as Eric Longenhagen and James Fegan’s recent piece on the players who could be coming over from Asian pro leagues this offseason. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s time for another cycle of prospect lists and, as has become customary, we’re starting with scouting reports on pro players in foreign leagues, with a focus on players available for MLB free agency this offseason. On The Board, you can access a fresh batch of scouting reports and evaluations for relevant players from Nippon Professional Baseball, the Korea Baseball Organization, and the Chinese Professional Baseball League in Taiwan, as well as reports on some young players we’ve identified as potentially impactful long-term prospects. For those who need a crash course on the age- and pro experience-driven lines of demarcation that dictate how MLB teams sign international players, we’d point you to a number of MLB.com glossary entries, including those on international free agency for those in Asian pro leagues, international amateur free agency and bonus pool restrictions, the Japanese posting system, and the Korean posting system.
It can be a bit overwhelming to sift through so many different types of players on that section of The Board — it’s a real apples and oranges situation when we’re talking about some guys who are in their 30s and others who are fairly young — so we’ve broken many of them into digestible subgroups below, with focus on the crop that is purported to be coming over this offseason. You’ll notice that some players appear across multiple categories. The Board has each player’s full scouting report and tool grades — think of this as more of a table of contents. Read the rest of this entry »
For the first time all season — indeed, the first time since Game 5 of last year’s Division Series against the Padres — the Dodgers are facing elimination. A win on Friday night in Toronto will continue their season, forcing Game 7 of the World Series, while a loss will end it, making the Blue Jays champions for the first time in 32 years. Since their 18-inning victory in Game 3 late Monday night local time (and Tuesday morning for much of the continental United States and Canada) on Freddie Freeman’s walk-off home run, the Dodgers have looked as though they’re sleepwalking. They were thoroughlyoutplayed by the Blue Jays in both Games 4 and 5, with rough performances by their starters, relievers, hitters, and fielders. For Game 6, Los Angeles will turn to Yoshinobu Yamamoto, hoping he can continue his tremendous October run and extend the season for one more night.
During the National League Championship Series, the Dodgers rotation absolutely dominated the Brewers, posting a 0.63 ERA and 1.88 FIP in 28 2/3 innings, but in the World Series it’s been a different story, as those starters have been touched for a 4.88 ERA and 4.55 FIP in 31 1/3 innings. To be fair, some of those runs are attributable to manager Dave Roberts’ trying to squeeze a few more outs from Blake Snell in Games 1 and 5 and Shohei Ohtani in Game 4 instead of handing clean innings over to an increasingly erratic bullpen. The damage from those attempts — both starters combined to record only two outs (both by Snell in Game 5) and bequeath seven baserunners, all of whom later scored, to three different relievers — blew those three games wide open. Yamamoto not only has produced the Dodgers’ only quality start of the series, but also the only relief from their relievers, as the 27-year-old righty spun a four-hit complete game on 105 pitches in Game 2, his second time going the distance in as many turns. If that wasn’t bad-ass enough, he warmed up in the top of the 18th inning of Game 3, ready to relieve Will Klein if needed.
As you’ve probably seen by now, Yamamoto’s three-hit complete game in Game 2 of the NLCS was the first by a postseason starter since the Astros’ Justin Verlander went the distance against the Yankees in Game 2 of the 2017 ALCS. Yamamoto is just the sixth starter with multiple complete games in a single postseason during the Wild Card era, and the first in 24 years to go back-to-back at least once. Read the rest of this entry »
Eric A Longenhagen: It’s Halloween, and you know what that means; running back to the store once you realize the amount of candy you’ve eaten necessitates another bag. Bah haaaa haaaa!
12:17
Eric A Longenhagen: James and my write-up on Asian pros will be live momentarily, though all the reports are already available on The Board.
12:18
Eric A Longenhagen: Okay, let’s hit your questions.
12:18
Insert Witty Name Here: Gotta ask the obvious: what’s the 70, 60, 50, 40, 30, and 20 grade halloween candy?
12:20
Eric A Longenhagen: I have a 70 on Reese’s and Almond Joy, a 60 on Kit Kat, Twix, Reese’s Pumpkins and Snickers, 50 on Hershey’s anything, 40 and below on all fruit-related candies
This is the third article I’ve written about cleat cleaners. So far as I can tell, that’s three more articles than anybody else. As a result, I have spent the past two seasons completely in the tank for cleat cleaners. I’m incapable of turning on a game without assessing the situation on the mound. What color is the cleat cleaner? Can I tell which brand it is from the shape? Most importantly, how dirty is it? It’s rare to get a shot of a pitcher using the cleat cleaner, but you can still tell whether it’s being used. The evidence is right there in front of your eyes. The cleat cleaner will be filthy. The weird rubber mat that cleans cleats with cleats of its own is now staked as firmly in my heart as it is to the backslope of the pitcher’s mound.
That brings us to Monday night (and Tuesday morning). Game 3 of the World Series was a thrilling, exasperating showcase for baseball. More importantly for our purposes, it also gave the cleat cleaner a chance to shine – or to do whatever the opposite of shining is because you’re completely covered in mud – on the game’s biggest stage.
The cleat cleaner does not normally get much time in the limelight. Pitchers most often avail themselves of it right before the start of the inning. They throw their warm-up pitches, circle around to the back of the mound, take a few calming breaths, clean their spikes, then climb up to the summit and set themselves. If the broadcast has come back from commercial in time, this routine is rarely considered worth documenting. At any given time, only one shot can make it onto your television, and at least as far as directors are concerned, there’s almost always something more interesting to show than a man cleaning his shoes. Even when we do get a shot of the pitcher cleaning his cleats, we rarely see the actual cleat cleaner. The camera usually shows the pitcher from the waist up. In fact, we got one of those shots in the very first inning on Monday night. Here’s Max Scherzer using the cleat cleaner before he faces Shohei Ohtani to start the game.
Hmm. That wasn’t very satisfying, was it? As usual, you can’t see Scherzer’s feet at all. Rather than force you to take my word for it that he was using the cleat cleaner, I’ve recreated his lower half utilizing an innovative new CGI technology known as iPhone Video of Me Wearing Jeans and Baseball Cleats in My Bedroom.
Now you get it. From that shot alone, Game 3 was already a victory for all of us cleat cleaner fanatics. We actually got to see someone using the cleat cleaner during the World Series. But the cleat cleaner was just getting started. This was an 18-inning game that featured a staggering 609 total pitches. That’s not just the highest total of the season; it’s 137 pitches more than the game with the next-most pitches (Game 5 of the ALDS between the Tigers and Mariners). And each individual pitch wreaks havoc on the mound. For an example, we need look no further than the very first pitch of the game. Here’s Tyler Glasnow getting ready before he warms up for the first inning. He absolutely tears in to the mound.
The mound is made out of clay, and before every game, the grounds crew shapes and tamps it into smooth perfection, then covers it with a layer of soil conditioner. Some pitchers like the pitching rubber to be flush with the dirt, but most want to be able to wedge their cleat into a hole next to the rubber. Glasnow belongs to the latter camp, and he’s not hesitant about dredging a trench in order to get things just how he likes them. The clay goes flying every which way, and then he spanks his foot onto the mound in order to dislodge it from his cleats. All this happened before Glasnow even started his warm-up tosses. By the time the game actually started, the picture-perfect manicured mound was nothing but a cherished memory. And with every single pitch, the cleats grab some more clay and send it flying. Here’s a closeup of the very first pitch of the game. I’ve added some arrows to help you notice individual clods of mud.
You can see a small clod go flying when Glasnow raises his front foot. More clods go flying when he pushes off with his back foot. Some fall off from above when he whips it around. Others go skittering across the mound when he lands. And this is just the tabletop. We can’t see whatever destruction he causes at the front of the mound when his front foot lands. This is just one pitch, specifically the first pitch of the game, when the mound and the cleats are at their most pristine and least likely to stick. But cleats are designed to grab hold of the earth. That’s their whole job, and like so many of us, they have trouble letting go. Once there’s clay on the cleats, the remaining clay on the mound wants to stick to it too. It builds up.
If you’ve even played a game in rainy conditions, you know that it’s really uncomfortable to have your cleats fully packed with mud. It’s not just that you can’t get as much traction. It’s also that mud and clay make your shoes really heavy. You feel stuck. If you’re a pitcher, your entire delivery depends on balance, and all of a sudden, you’re trying to perform your carefully rehearsed, repeatable delivery with your balance completely out of whack. That won’t do, so you head to the cleat cleaner and make a deposit.
The cleat cleaner is exactly like the bottom of a shoe. It’s just a flat surface full of spikes designed to grab hold of big chunks of earth with maximum efficiency. If you forgot your spikes one day, you could absolutely strap the cleat cleaner to the bottom of your sneakers. It would work just fine, and you’d certainly turn some heads. When you consider the similarity between them, you realize that the relationship between the cleat cleaner and the cleat is as one-sided as you can imagine. In that sense it’s truly a selfless tool. It’s like watching a chimpanzee grooming another chimpanzee, but instead of eating the bugs it finds, it just settles them into its own fur. One day, grounds crews will invent an even bigger cleat cleaner, but until then, we get to watch the dirt build up all game long. Here’s a GIF that shows the cleat cleaner during the first pitch of every half inning during Game 3.
It sort of looks like one of those time-lapse videos of a swarm of ants devouring a piece of fruit from a nature documentary. Scherzer did a number on the cleat cleaner in the third inning, and Mason Fluharty, who replaced Scherzer in the fifth, tracked in a bunch of mud after firing his warm-up pitches. By the 15th inning or so, you can barely even see the top. It’s just a pile of mud.
It’s not just that the cleat cleaner gets completely full. Look at the havoc inflicted over the entire area. The Dodgers logo fades into nothing. Clods of clay are absolutely everywhere. That happens all over the field. Here’s a still from the 18th inning. The low angle allows you to see that the entire home plate area and much of the grass in its vicinity is covered in crumbs of mud.
After the game, the grounds crew has to remove every one of those crumbs. The home plate area and basepaths need to be perfectly smooth, and an accretion of clay would kill all the grass. They rake, they scoop with shovels, they pick them up by hand, sometimes they vacuum. And then they have to refill all the divots, which requires a tremendous amount of tamping, also by hand. It’s hard work. The tamp is a heavy tool. You raise it, you slam all that heft down into the earth, and you do it again until the ground is flat.
Brett Davis-Imagn Images
But that’s after the game. For the most part, the grounds crew just has to watch as the damage to the field that they just spent all day perfecting accumulates during the game. And this was an especially long game. For comparison, here’s a split-screen between the first pitch of the game and the 609th. On the right, you can see the few crumbs that Glasnow scattered across the top of the mound while excavating and warming up, but that’s it. The field is a lush, perfect carpet.
By the last pitch of the game, it’s a war zone. The left side of the frame is pockmarked and scarred. It’s covered in shrapnel. Every one of those little dark spots you see is a clump of clay that someone’s cleats yanked straight out of the field and then deposited elsewhere. I turned the contrast way up just to illustrate just how many of these clumps get spread out across the field over the course of the game.
It’s a whole lot, especially around the mound, because pitching deliveries are violent. They have hard starts and stops that send the clay flying all over the place. But the real dark spot is around the cleat cleaner, and by the 12th inning, I had noticed that it was in shambles. It was almost completely full of mud. I was ecstatic (and not a little sleep-deprived). The cleat cleaner was doing what so many of us try and fail to do for our whole lives. It achieved its full potential. Every once in a while, the grounds crew will come out and replace the cleat cleaner when it gets completely full, especially on a rainy day.
Scott Taetsch-Imagn Images
That didn’t happen on Monday. The cleat cleaner just kept getting more and more full. By the 14th inning, you could barely see its spikes at all. The clay was just piled on top of it. It was literally being buried. Here it is in the 17th inning. If the clay weren’t so much darker in color than the soil conditioner, you might not even know it was there. It’s just a lump of earth.
This is what it looks like when a cleat cleaner dies a hero. It’s cleat cleaner Valhalla. It was all downhill from there. Pitchers kept trying to clean their cleats, but the device was so completely buried that they tended to pick up just as much dirt as they deposited. The problem was, the game was still going on, and as it was the 17th inning of the World Series, they kind of needed to be at their best. That brings us to Will Klein.
Klein was pitching the game of his life. He threw a total of 5 1/3 major league innings during the regular season and had made just one appearance during the postseason. He had never once thrown more than three innings in a single outing over his five years in professional baseball. And on Monday, he delivered four scoreless innings of one-hit ball. It was a fairytale, except that his glass slipper was completely swamped in mud. During the 18th inning, cameras caught Klein going to the overloaded cleat cleaner three times, and because he was still slipping during his pitches, each time was a bit more violent than the next.
With two outs, after falling behind Tyler Heineman, 2-1, Klein decided that going Mortal Kombat on the helpless cleat cleaner was bringing diminishing returns. He finally gave up and went back to the old methods. As organist Dieter Ruhle played the theme from The NeverEnding Story, Dodgers ball boy Branden Vandal raced out to the mount with the trusty baseball standby of a couple of taped-together tongue depressors. The right-handed Klein cleaned off his left cleat himself, then realized there was no way to clean off his right cleat with a glove on his left hand. He handed off the tool to Vandel and leaned on the ball boy’s shoulder while the latter scraped off the accumulated clay and dirt with vigor. Klein gave Vandel a tap on the shoulder to say, “That’s clean enough,” and Vandal hustled back to the dugout. The righty retook the mound and struck out Heineman to end the frame.
Anything goes in the playoffs. Klein is a perfect example, a young player being asked to perform far beyond any reasonable expectation under the most intense pressure of his entire career. As it turns out, if the game goes long enough, the same gets asked of the cleat cleaner.
Ben and Meg banter about Trey Yesavage’s performance in World Series Game 5, whether he’s already provided a career’s worth of value to Toronto, his current prospect ranking, and his future, plus Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s steady postseason production vs. Shohei Ohtani’s clustered postseason production, covering the regular season like we cover the postseason, why the Dodgers’ bats have gone cold, Teoscar Hernández’s outfielding, Mookie Betts’ future at shortstop, what the World Series says about “momentum,” how the last two games of the series will affect post-series discussions about MLB, and Davis Schneider’s batting mimicry.
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