Shohei Ohtani is a unicorn. No player in 20th- or 21st-century AL/NL history, not even Babe Ruth in his last two seasons with the Red Sox (1918–19), has been able to sustain regular duty in both a rotation and a lineup over a full season, let alone excel at both endeavors. At this writing, the 29-year-old superstar leads the majors in homers (34), slugging percentage (.665), and wRC+ (179), and he’s got the AL’s second-best strikeout rate (32.2%) and lowest batting average against (.191). He currently ranks among the AL’s top 10 in Baseball Reference’s position player WAR (4.0, fourth) and pitching WAR (2.5, ninth), and just over a full win ahead of Ronald Acuña Jr. for the major league lead in combined WAR. Over the past two and a half seasons, he’s been worth 25.0 WAR, 5.9 more than the top position player, Aaron Judge.

Some day, Hall of Fame voters will have to reckon with Ohtani. If he reaches the kind of career numbers that Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS system forecast for him over the winter — 1,809 hits, 404 homers, 124 OPS+, 158 wins, 2,329 strikeouts, 122 ERA+, and 72.1 WAR — the decision will be a no-brainer. I’m already of the mind that if he gets to his 10th season (2027) and is still doing double duty, he’ll have my vote when he lands on the ballot regardless of what the numbers say, because what he’s doing is so utterly remarkable. WAR and JAWS weren’t really built to handle a case like his, and not only because his ability to save his team a roster spot is probably worth some uncounted fraction of a win per year, too. Read the rest of this entry »

As is tradition at FanGraphs, we’re using the lead-up to the trade deadline to take stock of the top 50 players in baseball by trade value. For a more detailed introduction to this year’s exercise, as well as a look at the players who fell just short of the top 50, be sure to read the Introduction and Honorable Mentions piece, which can be found in the widget above.

For those of you who have been reading the Trade Value Series the last few seasons, the format should look familiar. For every player, you’ll see a table with the player’s projected five-year WAR from 2024-2028, courtesy of Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections. The table will also include the player’s guaranteed money, if any, the year through which their team has contractual control of them, last year’s rank (if applicable), and then projections, contract status, and age for each individual season through 2028 (if the player is under contract or team control for those seasons). Last year’s rank includes a link to the relevant 2022 post. Thanks are due to Sean Dolinar for his technical wizardry. At the bottom of the page, there is a grid showing all of the players who have been ranked up to this point.

One note on the rankings: Particularly at the bottom of the list, there isn’t a lot of room between the players. The ordinal rankings clearly matter, and we put them there for a reason, but there isn’t much of a gap between, say, the 39th-ranked player and the 60th. The magnitude of the differences in this part of the list is quite small. Several of the folks I talked to might prefer a player in the honorable mentions section to one on the back end of the list, or vice versa. I think the broad strokes are correct, and this is my opinion of the best order, but with so many players carrying roughly equivalent value, disagreements abounded.

With that out of the way, let’s get to the first batch of players. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m sorry in advance. That guy you like, your favorite young star on your favorite team? I ranked him too low. I missed something, I’m biased, I just don’t know enough about baseball. Have I even been to a game? Do I understand what it takes to win? That guy’s a stud and I’m treating him like a chump. And have you seen the terrible players I put above him? Shocking!

Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, welcome to the 2023 edition of our annual Trade Value Series. Starting today and continuing all week, we’ll release our list, taking player performance, age, and contract into account. Dave Cameron, Kiley McDaniel, Craig Edwards, and Kevin Goldstein have all run this show in years past; this is my second year at the helm.

Luckily for you (and those poor players I’ve disrespected), I didn’t have to do this on my own; I got an absolute ton of help. First, I gathered every possible input I could think of: age, contract status, measures of current production, estimates of future production, Statcast data, pitch-level modeling, Zodiac sign, and positional scarcity. From there, I got feedback from the rest of the FanGraphs staff (special thanks here to Dan Szymborski for his ZiPS assistance and Meg Rowley for being a frequent sounding board as I hemmed and hawed over the list in progress) to form a rough ranking. Then I got some feedback from external sources to further hone in on a final order. The input from all those sources was useful and much appreciated, but make no mistake, this is my list. Read the rest of this entry »

Trevor May is a Miguel Cabrera fan. Moreover, he has some favorite Miggy moments. I learned as much when I caught up to the always-engaging 33-year-old right-hander on the Sunday leading into the All-Star break.

“I got my first jersey from another player in our last series,” said May, who broke into the big leagues with the Minnesota Twins in 2014 and now plays for the Oakland Athletics. “We were in Detroit and I got a Miggy Cabrera jersey signed. I’m not a huge memorabilia guy, but he was my first, ‘Oh wow, I’m in The Show.’ It was like, ‘That’s Miguel Cabrera in the box!’ He’s one of the greatest of this generation.”

Nine years later, both players are nearing the end of the line. Cabrera, whose career has him Cooperstown-bound, is set to retire after this season. May, whose accomplishments have been far more humble, faces an uncertain near-term future. He has a 5.32 ERA in the current campaign, as well as a career-low 17.0% K rate.

May’s post-playing-days future is media-focused, and he’s already begun establishing himself in that realm. The Longview, Washington native has been an active podcaster and streamer — gaming is a noteworthy interest, Pat McAfee a notable influence — and just this past week he was part of MLBNetwork Radio’s All-Star Game coverage. His newly-signed jersey is ticketed for his home studio. As May explained, “the background has been kind of sparse, and I wanted to make sure that baseball has a spot there, along with all the nerdy stuff I’m into, whenever I’m in front of the camera.”

May has pitched in front of ballpark cameras many times, and while that includes more than two dozen appearances against the Detroit Tigers, a few of his Miggy moments likely weren’t captured. Even if they were, they went unnoticed by the vast majority of viewers. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the 2024 regular-season schedule, the baseball relevance of a study about humans’ hunger for useless information, and the storylines they’re most looking forward to following over the remainder of the season, then (35:58) answer emails about a total solar eclipse during a Guardians game, sliding into a base covered in dirt, why baseball broadcasts don’t do a better job of showing baserunners, same-named players playing the same position in the same game, defining a “comeback win,” the meaning of “retiring x in a row,” why pitchers are still listed as switch-hitters, a way to save time with pinch-hitter announcements, making it legal for multiple runners to occupy the same base, and going winless in extra-inning games, plus a Stat Blast (1:21:36) about managerial ejections, a Future Blast (1:51:20) from 2033, and a few follow-ups.

Audio intro: Benny and a Million Shetland Ponies, “Pedantic Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Benny and a Million Shetland Ponies, “Horny Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to 2024 schedule
Link to study about pain and info
Link to The Ringer’s MLB storylines
Link to Rosenthal on buyers/sellers
Link to MLBTR on Ohtani
Link to Minasian on Ohtani
Link to Hal Steinbrenner comments
Link to milk cartons wiki
Link to MLBTR on Mozeliak
Link to EW Episode 1354
Link to list of rival-team streaks
Link to Trent on “Billy runs”
Link to Trent on HUaL
Link to Rob Mains on the ALC
Link to Ben on the eclipse game
Link to EW volcano event
Link to EW eclipse episode
Link to Pickles sprinkler video
Link to Pickles lights-out video
Link to electron repulsion article
Link to Mets “ghost runner” clip
Link to The Bear transcript
Link to Jones vs. Jones game
Link to double-Gonzalez game
Link to first “comeback win” episode
Link to Robertson batting in 2022
Link to Stathead on winless extras teams
Link to winless extras starts
Link to EW emails database
Link to Hyde ejection story
Link to Ryan Nelson on Twitter
Link to ejections data
Link to 1998 Leyland article
Link to 2006 Guillen article
Link to other Guillen article
Link to third Guillen article
Link to 2008 La Russa article
Link to 1973 Mathews article
Link to 1974 Berra article
Link to article on longest games
Link to 1982 Lasorda article
Link to other Lasorda article
Link to ejection reasons 1
Link to ejection reasons 2
Link to Garver ejection article
Link to Rick Wilber’s website
Link to Dahlen/Klem article
Link to Jay on Dahlen
Link to Dahlen SABR bio
Link to MLBTR on Bieber
Link to Judge-sighting story

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We’re now three months past the last ZiPS projected standings, which ran before the season, and as one should expect, reality has caused a whole lot of changes to the prognostications. Most of the times when I run ZiPS standings, I use data from the in-season player projection model, which is simpler based on the fact that a full batch run of the 3,500 or so players projected, even if I split it up among my two most powerful computers, would take a total of about 30 hours to finish. But I always do the whole shebang in the middle of every month, and baseball’s pause for All-Star Week provides me an opportunity to run projected standings with the best possible model I can come up with, and not have it be a couple days out of date.

So that’s what we’re going to do. With one exception, the methodology remains identical to the one described in the final preseason projections.

I’ve spent the last week working on and testing an addition to the ZiPS standings model to factor in the problem that preseason projections have with temporality. Basically, you can project teams based on who they have in the organization at the time of the projection, but you can’t easily do it for players not in the organization who will eventually be. If I knew at the start of 2022 that the Padres would have Juan Soto for most of the summer, it would have had an effect on the preseason projections! Like any model that people continually work on, ZiPS doesn’t have substantial bias in almost all categories: there’s no systematic tendency to overrate or underrate any specific type of team (bias in exercises like this is easier to iron out than inaccuracy). But there’s an exception: ZiPS in the preseason slightly underrates teams that will eventually add value to the major league roster in the form of trade and overrates those do the opposite.

This is something I’ve long wanted to try to deal with in as effective a way as I could. So what I’ve done is gone back and re-projected every team at June 15, July 1, and July 15 since I started ZiPS, then, with the data of players each team added at the major league level, used the playoff projections at that date, the team’s payroll (it does have a factor), the weakness of the team’s worst positions, the time since last playoff appearance, and the team’s farm system ranking (where possible) to make a probabilistic model of increases and decreases in roster strength due to the trade deadline. Overfitting is a concern, so I’ve cross-validated to do my best to ensure that isn’t an issue, and while it’s less than a half-win in final accuracy, any shaving off of error is a helpful thing. So these standings represent some increased chances that teams like the Orioles and Rangers have a slightly stronger roster than what is currently available from August 1 on, and that teams like the A’s and Tigers have weaker ones. The changes in projections are small because this is a noisy, inaccurate thing, but I’ll be tracking in future years both standings with and without this model to see how they fare. Read the rest of this entry »

On Thursday, I took the first swing for my annual roundup of active players who may or may not be building their cases for the Hall of Fame. With one exception, all of the ones I examined were in their age-30 seasons or later, but for this installment of shortstops and outfielders, I’ll take a look at some who are still in their 20s and have further to go before they reach Cooperstown.

For this exercise, unless otherwise indicated, I will be referencing bWAR for season and career totals, my JAWS metric, and the ZiPS rest-of-season projections, since one of the goals here is to give an idea of where these players will stand at the end of the season, having banked a full complement of WAR instead of just 80-some games worth. These future candidates are already dealing with suppressed WAR totals from the 60-game 2020 season (which hardly makes them the first to experience such scheduling limitations and career interruptions due to wars and strikes). Unlike last year, I’ll cover pitching in one installment. Note that I am by no means predicting that every player here will make it to Cooperstown or even suggesting that all are worthy; in some cases I’m particularly pessimistic, but these are the names that get tossed around

If you’re just arriving, I’d encourage you to at least read the introduction in Part 1. The important take-home point was my finding that nearly three-quarters of the position players who have reached a 40.0-WAR peak score (best seven seasons, aka WAR7) have eventually been enshrined, and so inevitably a good bit of the focus throughout this exercise has been on the math required to improve those scores. There is and will be far more to those cases, and to appreciating these players’ skills and accomplishments, but for the purposes of space I’ve had to cut to the chase. Here again is the table related to those 40.0-WAR peaks:

At every position, I’ve counted the total number of players with a peak WAR of at least 40.0; the number of Hall of Famers meeting that criterion; and the number of such players who are not yet eligible, either because they’re active, too recently retired to appear on a Hall of Fame ballot, or on the permanently ineligible list, like Pete Rose (whom JAWS classifies as a left fielder) and Shoeless Joe Jackson (right field). For catchers, I used a 32.0-WAR threshold instead of 40.0, as their values are constrained by the limits of playing time and pre-framing measures. Read the rest of this entry »

Having reached the post–All-Star break world, you may find yourself perusing various stat leaderboards trying to get a grip of who has performed to, above or below expectations. I consider myself a relatively positive person, so when somebody isn’t performing to par, I like to explore their profile in search of a hint of their previous self, or in the case of a prospect, their best future self.

For this piece, I’m going to dive into a group of these players. The criteria aren’t too strict; I’m generally looking for players who are roughly 15 points or more of wRC+ below their preseason ZiPS projection. Other than that, there is some combination of batted ball data, mechanics, and a splash of subjectivity affecting my choices. With that said, let’s jump into it, starting with a former top five prospect. Read the rest of this entry »

Lance Lynn was phenomenal in his final start before the All-Star break, going seven innings, striking out 11 batters, and allowing just three baserunners. By game score, his outing against Toronto was among the top 20 starts of the year. But if you prefer to focus on factors solely within a pitcher’s control — strikeouts, walks, and home runs — it wasn’t even the best of Lynn’s season. By FIP, his most dominant performance was a 16-strikeout gem against the Mariners a few weeks prior. Over seven frames, he walked only two and kept everything in the ballpark. Even more impressive, all but one of his strikeouts came on a swing and miss, as Lynn collected 33 whiffs on the evening, the most by any pitcher in a single outing this season. His 16 strikeouts were also the most in a single game this year; no other pitcher has topped 13.

Lynn has two more double-digit strikeout games this year, one each against the Rays and the Twins. Only eight other pitchers have four or more double-digit strikeout games, and only four have multiple starts of seven-plus innings, double-digit strikeouts, two or fewer walks, and zero home runs: Kevin Gausman, Zac Gallen, Logan Webb, and Pablo López. (The White Sox, being the 2023 White Sox, went on to lose all four contests, but that’s hardly a reflection of Lynn’s efforts on the mound.) Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to an All-Star week edition of Five Things, my weekly column that looks at whatever caught my eye in the last week. As always, thanks to Zach Lowe of ESPN for the column idea. One piece of feedback I frequently get on this series is that I’m not paying enough attention to the big stars. It’s true; we’re not exactly short on Shohei Ohtani coverage here at FanGraphs, and I’m one of those hipster-y baseball watchers who loves a fourth outfielder more than your average fan. This week, though, I thought I’d do something a little different. In celebration of the All Star game, which is perennially one of my favorite events despite the low stakes, here are five things I like about huge stars. Read the rest of this entry »