The Brewers are in a fascinating situation, not so much treading water as trying to swim in two different directions at the same time. They’ve lost their celebrated manager and traded their Cy Young-winning ace, but they’ve brought in Rhys Hoskins on a lucrative (for them) free agent contract while deciding not to trade their other major free-agent-to-be, Willy Adames.

One of the first posts I wrote for FanGraphs, some 18 months ago, concerned Adames’ future with the Brewers. Or, more likely given his potential to ring the bell for a nine-figure contract in free agency, his future elsewhere. Let’s check in on that potential, and see what we should expect from Adames in 2024 and beyond. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the next month, we at FanGraphs will be highlighting a number of site features and showing you how we use them. The goal is to make your visit to the website more enjoyable, and to help you get the most out of the features we’ve added over the years. Today, I’m going to walk through the various ways we deploy projections to make predictions about the future. Let’s explore our projected standings and playoff odds pages.

Before I ever worked at FanGraphs, I spent countless hours messing around with the playoff odds page. I like learning about the future, or at least learning about many possible futures, and I always found the slow-changing nature of projections early in the season to be soothing as a Cardinals fan. Stressed about last night’s crushing loss? On May 15? I could always look to the odds page, see that the team’s chances had barely budged, and calm myself down.

Five years into working here, I still use many of the same pages I did then, but they’ve been upgraded a good deal in the meantime. Let’s start with the nerve center of our predictions, the page that shows everything that feeds into our much-discussed playoff odds: the Projected Standings. You can find them using the navigation bar at the top of the site:

Read the rest of this entry »

Most professional baseball players were fans of the sport before it became their job. Much like the rest of us, they grew up following their favorite teams and players, watching them on TV and, to varying degrees, reading about them in print or online. Then things changed. With few exceptions, primarily due to new routines and responsibilities, the way they follow the game is now different — in many cases, drastically so. No longer fans, these players have found themselves consuming baseball in a whole new way.

So how does then compare to now? I put that question to 10 players. Here is what they had to say.

———

Grayson Rodriguez, Baltimore Orioles pitcher: “As a kid growing up, I would just watch my favorite teams. I watched a lot of Astros and Rangers; I wouldn’t really watch a lot of other teams unless it was the playoffs or the World Series. Being in the game now, I try to watch everybody. I try to watch different pitchers. I watch their starts. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the A’s Las Vegas ballpark renderings, Brayan Bello’s extension with the Red Sox, and MLB’s Spring Breakout games, provide an update on EW listeners’ MLB ballpark meetup events, then preview the 2024 Baltimore Orioles (28:59) with The Baltimore Banner’s Danielle Allentuck, and the 2024 San Francisco Giants (1:04:38) with The Athletic’s Grant Brisbee.

Audio intro: Harold Walker, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial 1: Liz Panella, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial 2: Ian H., “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Alex Glossman and Ali Breneman, “Effectively Wild Theme”

A’s ballpark link 1
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After a long, cold winter, it’s a welcome sight to have teams back on the field this spring. The game’s biggest stars are getting back into their rhythms, some heated position battles are underway, and — most importantly, of course — new data is pouring into sites like FanGraphs. Caution is always advised when evaluating players based on their spring training statistics, but we can still learn a lot from what happens in these exhibition games.

One of the safest places to start is with a metric that players (pitchers, in this case) have the most control over: velocity. Most statistics are contingent on circumstance, making them less reliable, particularly this time of year. Just about everything a hitter does is a reaction to the pitch coming his way, and most pitching statistics are impacted by the fielders, the umpire, and even chance. How hard a pitcher can throw, on the other hand, is how hard he can throw. It may change as a result of health, age, conditioning, or mechanical adjustments, among other factors, but for the most part, it isn’t dependent on the hitter at the plate or the players in the field. It’s as raw a metric as we have.

That said, I’d be hesitant to read much into which pitchers are throwing softer in the first two weeks in spring training. To some extent, that’s what these games are here for, to build strength and get back in shape, and peak league-wide fastball velocity doesn’t usually come until the warmth of late spring. But the guys who are throwing significantly harder than last year? The ones who are throwing harder than they ever have? That seems worth noting. Read the rest of this entry »

Writing a book is a Herculean task to begin with, and in my inimitable way, I made it even harder when writing my 2017 book on the Hall of Fame, The Cooperstown Casebook, by challenging myself to compose concise 200–250 word summaries of the 220 major league players who were enshrined at that point as well as a few dozen past, present, and future candidates. My goal in doing so was to give the reader a thumbnail guide to these players’ careers while shining some fresh light on even the most familiar ones using advanced statistics. I had no shortage of options, but even so, I wish I had all the tools then that I do now. Here I’d like to highlight one of them as part of our series on useful site features you’ll find at FanGraphs.

Consider the case of Dazzy Vance, a colorful and dominant right-hander who made his name with the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1920s and ’30s. Vance was 24 years old when he debuted with the Pirates in 1915, but a variety of arm troubles limited him to just 33 major innings through his age-30 season. Finally pain free after elbow surgery (probably to remove bone chips), he resurfaced with Brooklyn in 1922, and on the strength of his combination of a blazing fastball and a sharp overhand curve “with a sweep that would shame a windmill,” as one writer described it, he led the NL with 134 strikeouts that season, and proceeded to repeat the feat in each of the next six seasons as well. His 262 strikeouts in 1924 was the highest total by any NL pitcher besides Christy Mathewson in the 1901–1960 span, and the highest by any pitcher in either league between the start of the Live Ball era (1920) and the United States’ entry into World War II (1941).

While I had enough confidence in my research to lead Vance’s Casebook capsule with, “Relative to his league, Vance struck out batters at a higher rate than [Nolan] Ryan, [Roger] Clemens, [Pedro] Martinez — any of them…” I worried that by explicitly quantifying his skill in this area that I’d either open myself to error or make even more work for myself, since the temptation was to go into further detail on the subject and perhaps calculate such data for every enshrined pitcher. Little did I know that within a year of the book’s publication that I would not only join the staff of FanGraphs but propose the creation of a leaderboard to tackle such questions with a few easy clicks. Read the rest of this entry »

12:00

Dan Szymborski: Ojn time!

12:00

Dan Szymborski: On time!

12:01

Dan Szymborski: Nothing as last Thursday was an eating day

12:01

Dan Szymborski: Well, I had a pickle, but that doesn’t count because pickles are like 5 calories

Read the rest of this entry »

It feels like March comes earlier every year. Certainly Jordan Montgomery and Blake Snell must feel that way, seeing as how they’re sitting around unemployed while college basketball tournaments are already underway. All of a sudden, starting rotation spots are harder to come by than tenure-track professorships in the humanities. And they’re not the only ones. Michael Lorenzen is also sitting around getting way too good at playing along with The Price is Right. He might not have been at the head of the free agent class, but by God he was an All-Star and threw a no-hitter just last year!

All of these guys will find work somewhere, somehow, and at some vast salary figure. Probably not nine years and $270 million, but it’ll be a lot of money.

This free agent saga has gone on for so long that there really isn’t much more to say about players who had been picked apart and analyzed exhaustively by the Winter Meetings last December, and have remained on the vine for another three months since. Except this: Are they at risk of becoming overripe? Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not the first member of the Cole Ragans fan club – that’d be Nick Pollack. I’m not an early member – hi Eno and Esteban. The cat is out of the bag: A scout called Ragans “left-handed deGrom” in a recent Jeff Passan roundup. The Royals’ left-hander looks like an absolute terror on the mound.

So I’m not going to try to convince you that Ragans is good. Those other articles have surely done a good enough job of doing that. I’m also not going to try to convince you that he’s a left-handed version of the best inning-for-inning pitcher of the 21st century. But I do want to take a quick look at how he’s continuing to change his arsenal, and how some of his old skills could help him keep his tremendous run of form going in 2024.

The reason Ragans has drawn such flashy comparisons likely starts with his fastball. As Passan noted, he averaged 99.2 mph in his first start of spring. Statcast didn’t track it, but I was able to capture some of it by watching the broadcast. There was no radar gun, but the announcers frequently mentioned his velocity and never said a number lower than 98. It certainly looked pretty sharp when he blew it past Mike Trout:

Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Milwaukee Brewers. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the fourth 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 »