As with many of my articles, Wednesday’s piece on Jarren Duran had its genesis in one of my weekly chats, back in early January. With the Red Sox dealing with a crowded outfield, a reader proposed a trade return for Duran, and in the context of sidestepping the specifics of the deal, I offered a rather curt dismissal of Duran as having had “a pretty meh age-28 season” in 2025. When I received pushback for that bit of reflexive hyperbole — which stood in contrast to the more measured answers I generally give at a notoriously slower pace — I offered a table of his monthly batting splits, and rather than let a debate hijack the chat, I squirreled away the idea of writing more in depth about Duran at a later date.

That date arrived earlier this week, as I caught up with some of the outfielder’s recent comments and other news out of Red Sox camp while diving into his 2025 season. In terms of value, Duran’s fall-off from a 6.8-WAR 2024 season to a 3.9-WAR ’25 campaign produced the second-largest drop in WAR among players with at least 600 plate appearances in both seasons. Duran was still quite valuable — tied for 16th among AL position players in WAR — but not exceptional. “Pretty meh” was obviously an overstatement, but as I noted in the chat, Duran’s above-average offensive production (a 111 wRC+) was driven by one exceptional month that papered over three subpar ones and two others more or less in line with his seasonal numbers:

Duran’s July sticks out like a sore thumb; he didn’t have a slugging percentage within 250 points of it, or a wRC+ within 80 points of it, in any of the other five months. Take his midsummer surge — which included 35 total bases in 35 at-bats against the Twins, Rockies, and Nationals — out of the equation and Duran hit just .247/.320/.405 (98 wRC+) in the other five months. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Detroit Tigers. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the sixth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Konnor Griffin’s openness to an extension with the Pirates and a weird Wilyer Abreu check-swing broken bat, then preview the 2026 Boston Red Sox (20:00) with The Boston Globe’s Alex Speier, and the 2026 Cincinnati Reds (1:08:36) with The Athletic’s C. Trent Rosecrans.

Audio intro: Kite Person, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial 1: Philip Tapley and Michael Stokes, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial 2: Austin Klewan, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: El Warren, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to FG post on Scherzer
Link to FG post on Sale
Link to Misiorowski video
Link to article about video
Link to FG post about video
Link to Griffin report
Link to MLBTR on Griffin
Link to Griffin’s wedding
Link to Griffin’s homers
Link to MLBTR on his bonus
Link to Skenes WBC quote
Link to Skubal start news
Link to Abreu video
Link to Abreu article
Link to definition of swing
Link to team payrolls page
Link to Red Sox offseason tracker
Link to Red Sox depth chart
Link to team SP projections
Link to Pete Abe post
Link to Red Sox HR projections
Link to Red Sox 2B projections
Link to Cora on the projections
Link to FG post on Duran
Link to Alex on Gonzales
Link to Alex’s author archive
Link to Reds offseason tracker
Link to Reds depth chart
Link to 2025 team SP WAR
Link to C. Trent on Marte’s catch
Link to Statcast park factors
Link to Votto post 1
Link to Votto post 2
Link to The Simpsons quote
Link to C. Trent’s author archive

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You can never have enough starting pitching. Certainly the Toronto Blue Jays can’t. They’ve signed right-handed pitcher Max Scherzer to an incentive-heavy one-year contract with a $3 million base salary.

This is technically his third go-around in Canada; he made 20 starts for the Jays last year (17 in the regular season and three more in the playoffs) before hitting free agency. Scherzer, who is 291 years old, also served as a hussar in the army of the Marquis de Montcalm during the Seven Years’ War. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, I wrote about the cost of a win in free agency. I loved seeing the discussion of that article online and in the comments section, so I thought I’d set aside some time to consider a few of the questions readers had. Here are my answers to those questions.

What if We Used More Tiers?
If three tiers is good, would four be better? Five? Six? In my initial analysis, I ran all these variations in the background and decided that three was optimal for presentation and clarity. I also determined that the sample sizes would get vanishingly small as we expanded to more and more tiers. But as several readers asked for more granular looks, why not? Here is a four-tier version:

And a five-tier version:

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Juan Soto wants a Most Valuable Player award. Plenty of players give voice to outsized ambitions during spring training, but at this point in Soto’s career, the goal seems downright reasonable. The future Hall of Famer already has a World Series ring, a batting title, a stolen base crown, a Home Run Derby trophy, and bunch of All-Star nods and Silver Sluggers. Seeing as he’s unlikely to get a Gold Glove (barring some sort of trophy swap situation with Francisco Lindor), an MVP certainly seems like the next box to check. But as great as Soto has been since the moment he debuted for the Nationals in 2018, he doesn’t have a well-rounded game, and I’ve always had a sneaking suspicion that his weaknesses might keep him from ever winning an MVP. Now that it’s his stated goal, let’s take a closer look at his chances.

Soto is one of the best and most consistent players in the game. According to JAWS, he’s already the 36th-best right fielder of all time, and he’s still three years too young to be the president (in the Dominican Republic; he’s eight years too young in the USA). Since his first full season in 2019, he’s missed an average of just seven games per season and he’s never put up a wRC+ below 143. In any given season, if you had to pick the player most likely to rack up at least 5.0 WAR, Soto would be your guy. But his game is also incomplete. He’s the second coming of Ted Williams, in ways both good and bad. He’s got the other-worldly plate discipline and the power, but he’s also got the putrid outfield defense.

Soto is well aware of his deficiencies. “I feel like everybody tries to do better than what they did before,” he told Anthony DiComo of MLB.com. “I would definitely love to be better around the bases and better around the outfield. Even hitting, I try to keep my hitting increased. Thank God I’ve been doing well the past couple seasons. I’ve been putting numbers up there, career highs and stuff like that. So I just want to keep doing the same thing. I try to be better year after year.” Read the rest of this entry »

When the Colorado Rockies buy low on a former first-round prospect coming off an abysmal season, the null hypothesis is that the player in question is cooked. The Rockies’ front office might not be the laughingstock it was before the hiring of Paul DePodesta… but it could still be, and even if things are going to change for the better there, it’s going to take a minute to find out for sure.

If the Diamondbacks let Jake McCarthy loose in a my-garbage-for-your-trash trade, the smart money is on Colorado not rediscovering the magic that made McCarthy an enticing prospect a few years ago.

But what if the smart money is wrong? Read the rest of this entry »

I’m a big believer in the value of WAR as a statistic. Like any summary stat, WAR is notably imperfect, with its nods to pragmatism, compromises made on philosophical grounds, and the necessary inclusion of many components that are just damn difficult to quantify even if we have a basis to think they’re important. Still, like all good models, even if WAR isn’t right, it can be useful. It gives us a broad estimate of a player’s overall contribution to winning baseball games, and almost certainly provides a far better conception of which individual actions lead to wins than generally existed, say, 50 years ago. But when we’re talking about whether a player is a Hall of Famer, a more malleable concept than what wins the most games, is WAR the right measure to look at? When I think about this question, four people instantly come to mind: Jacob deGrom, Miguel Cabrera, Jack Morris, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

Since FanGraphs is a website dedicated to baseball, we’ll start by talking about Mozart. Even people who don’t really listen to classical music, and thus couldn’t tell Gustav Mahler from Rick Mahler, would almost certainly count Mozart among the greatest composers of all time. Why? Well, the first part is obvious: because of his body of work as a whole. But what aspects of that work make him great? I’d submit that it’s the quality of his best compositions, rather than the massive volume of work he produced, that pushes him ahead of his peers.

Mozart is a legend because of his greatest works, such as his last three symphonies, his late 1780s/early 1790s run of operas, and the latter half of his piano concertos — and I could go on! But he also wrote a lot of stuff that just isn’t that good. He was a musical prodigy, but almost all of his early work is interesting because he was very young when he wrote it, not because of its own merits. Composers have always had to pay the bills, and Mozart wrote a huge amount of what was more or less intended to be pleasant background music, no more compelling than the peppy ukulele and xylophone music that seemed to be in every Kickstarter video in 2017. If the hundreds of examples of such work were to simply blink out of existence because someone got a hold of the Infinity Gauntlet, it would change nothing about Mozart’s greatness. Those compositions had value to Mozart in that they enabled him to write the good stuff that is worth remembering, but he’s great because of his peak. Read the rest of this entry »