The Winter Meetings begin on Sunday in Orlando, and as always, the FanGraphs crew will be there covering all the baseball buzz. For that reason, I’ll keep this introduction brief; we’ll have more than enough words for you to read in the week ahead, when the offseason action is bound to pick up considerably.

Three weeks ago, I put out a call for fresh mailbag submissions, and you all delivered the goods. I knew I could count on you! We’ve received so many great questions since then, including the four that we’ll get to in a moment, and so I just wanted to thank everyone for holding up your end of the bargain. Now it’s time for us to do our part and answer them!

Before we do, though, I’d like to remind you that this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for an upcoming mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »

The Red Sox and Pirates made a roster-balancing deal Thursday night as a prologue to Winter Meetings, with a five-player swap headlined by outfield prospect Jhostynxon Garcia (who heads to Pittsburgh) and pitchers Johan Oviedo and Tyler Samaniego (who head to Boston). Here’s the complete trade:

Pittsburgh receives:
OF Jhostynxon Garcia
RHP Jesus Travieso

Boston receives:
RHP Johan Oviedo
LHP Tyler Samaniego
C Adonys Guzman Read the rest of this entry »

A lot has happened since we launched the 2026 version of the We Tried tracker a few weeks ago. With the Winter Meetings about to kick off, we’ve seen 14 We Trieds from 10 different teams concerning eight different free agents. (As always, you can keep track of them all at this link.) That may sound like a lot this early in free agency, but it’s worth noting that 10 of our Top 50 free agents are already off the board (though three of those players accepted the qualifying offer, which means nobody had the chance to try). I suspect we’re a bit behind last year’s pace. Hopefully more news about teams’ pursuits will leak out in the coming months. The big number we’re shooting for here is 100: Last year, the offseason closed with 99 We Trieds. Let’s make it to triple digits!

More will certainly come. Raisel Iglesias is currently leading the pack with four We Trieds, but don’t be surprised if Ryan Helsley overtakes him. Multiple reports said that fully half the teams in the league were interested in Helsley, but we only have two actual We Trieds so far, and one came from Helsley himself. Helsley told reporters that the Tigers were particularly interested in signing him as a starting pitcher, which isn’t a surprise, but his phrasing was particularly fun. He said the Tigers were “in on me heavy.” Honestly, I don’t have any jokes here. It’s just a slightly odd grammatical construction that I will probably think about twice a day for the next few years of my life. Before this week, you could be in on something. You could maybe even be heavily in on it. But now you can be in on it…heavy. Sometimes language evolves just like lifeforms, one mutation at a time. Read the rest of this entry »

Happy Friday, and welcome to this offseason’s first installment of the Matrix Reloaded column. There has already been plenty of activity ahead of the 2025 Winter Meetings, which kick off this Sunday in sunny (well maybe, I haven’t actually checked the weather yet, and also it doesn’t matter because I won’t be going outside) Orlando, Florida. Since this is my first roundup of the winter, let’s start with a refresher on how the Matrix works.

My precious, color-coded spreadsheet has plenty of tabs for your perusal, but my bread and butter is the main FA Matrix tab, which includes a self-explanatory summary of signings at the top and a somewhat less self-explanatory color-coded summary of rumors concerning unsigned players further down. The FA Legend tab right next door will be helpful in decoding it, but here I’ll note that what I classify as a rumor is fairly subjective, as the lines between things like “interested in,” “kicking the tires,” “have looked into,” and “believed to be interested in” are pretty blurry. All rumors are linked to each colored cell, and I encourage reading them for further context beyond how I’ve bucketed them into groups.

With all that out of the way, let’s get into the deals that actually have been completed in the last week or so. For larger moves, I’ll be hitting on three key points: how the deal affects the signing team; how it affects other teams; and how it affects similar players. For smaller deals, I’ll be more rapid-fire and talk only about the signing team; other teams aren’t going to react too strongly to a $2 million bench player inking a new deal. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2026 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

In an age when baseball is so obsessed with velocity, it’s remarkable to remember how recently it was that a pitcher could thrive, year in and year out, despite averaging in the 85–87 mph range with his fastball. Yet that’s exactly what Mark Buehrle did over the course of his 16-year career. Listed at 6-foot-2 and 240 pounds, the burly Buehrle was the epitome of the crafty lefty, an ultra-durable workhorse who didn’t dominate but who worked quickly, used a variety of pitches — four-seamer, sinker, cutter, curve, changeup — moving a variety of directions to pound the strike zone, and relied on his fielders to make the plays behind him. From 2001 to ’14, he annually reached the 30-start and 200-inning plateaus, and he barely missed on the latter front in his final season.

August Fagerstrom summed up Buehrle so well in his 2016 appreciation that I can’t resist sharing a good chunk of it:

The way Buehrle succeeded was unique, of course. He got his ground balls, but he wasn’t the best at getting ground balls. He limited walks, but he wasn’t the best a limiting walks. He generated soft contact, but he wasn’t the best at generating soft contact. Buehrle simply avoided damage with his sub-90 mph fastball by throwing strikes while simultaneously avoiding the middle of the plate:

That’s Buehrle’s entire career during the PITCHf/x era, and it’s something of a remarkable graphic. You see Buehrle living on the first-base edge of the zone, making sure to keep his pitches low, while also being able to spot the same pitch on the opposite side of the zone, for the most part avoiding the heart of the plate. Buehrle’s retained the ability to pitch this way until the end; just last year [2015], he led all of baseball in the percentage of pitches located on the horizontal edges of the plate.

Drafted and developed by the White Sox — practically plucked from obscurity, at that — Buehrle spent 12 of his 16 seasons on the South Side, making four All-Star teams and helping Chicago to three postseason appearances, including its 2005 World Series win, which broke the franchise’s 88-year championship drought. While with the White Sox, he became just the second pitcher in franchise history to throw multiple no-hitters, first doing so in 2007 against the Rangers and then adding a perfect game in ’09 against the Rays. After his time in Chicago, he spent a sour season with the newly rebranded Miami Marlins, and when that predictably melted down, spent three years with the Blue Jays, earning one more All-Star nod and helping them make the playoffs for the first time in 22 years.

Though Buehrle reached the 200-win plateau in his final season, he was just 36 years old when he hung up his spikes, preventing him from more fully padding his counting stats or framing his case for Cooperstown in the best light. A closer look beyond the superficial numbers suggests that, while he’s the equal or better of several enshrined pitchers according to WAR and JAWS, he’s far off the standards. Like fellow lefty and ballot-mate Andy Pettitte, he gets a boost from S-JAWS, a workload-adjusted version of starting pitcher JAWS that I introduced in 2022. Thus far, I’ve only included Pettitte on one of my five ballots (one of seven including virtual ballots), though I’m mulling his inclusion this year — a thought process that’s taking place as the electorate grapples with shifting standards for starting pitchers following last year’s election of CC Sabathia and the candidacies of Félix Hernández (who debuted last year) and Cole Hamels (this ballot’s top newcomer). I’ve pledged to reconsider Buehrle as well; I’m 0-for-5 in voting for him thus far, and I’m hardly alone, as he debuted with 11% in 2021, scraped by with 5.8% the next year, and has barely regained that lost ground, receiving 11.4% in 2025. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh, Sam Miller, and podcast scorekeeper Chris Hanel review the results of an under-25-pitchers draft Ben and Sam conducted a decade ago. Then (13:38) Ben and Sam banter about Ben’s physique, answer listener emails about doing a The Only Rule-style experiment 10 years later, discuss Sam’s revamped, unique approach to writing about baseball this year, and consider some possibilities for what we’ll remember about baseball in 2025. After that (1:05:57), Ben continues the sporadic “Baseball Jobs” series by interviewing 71-year-old John Yandle, the Giants’ left-handed batting-practice pitcher since 1985, about his transition from pitcher to BP pitcher, the keys to good BP, balancing his day job and his baseball side gig, anticipating starting-pitcher matchups, fending off advanced pitching machines, his incredible longevity, arm care in his 70s, the hitters who’ve complained the most, throwing BP to Barry Bonds, and more, followed by (2:01:20) a postscript.

Audio intro: Gabriel-Ernest, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial: Sam Miller, “Effectively Wild Theme (Ken Maeda’s Nice ‘n’ Easy Remix)”
Audio outro: Jimmy Kramer, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to EW Episode 669
Link to competitions/drafts sheet
Link to EWStats site
Link to The Only Rule
Link to Ben’s Vince Gilligan video
Link to Pebble Hunting
Link to Sam on tripping
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Link to Sam on the CI challenge
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Link to How To with John Wilson
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Link to John’s B-Ref page
Link to John’s Newmark bio
Link to 2024 article on John
Link to 2012 article on John
Link to 2007 article on John
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Link to Bonds TTO splits
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The Tampa Bay Rays have signed outfielder Cedric Mullins, late of the Mets and Orioles, to a one-year contract worth $7 million. This deal makes a lot of sense if you look at Mullins’ overall numbers from 2025: 17 home runs, a 10.0% walk rate, and a 94 wRC+ from a guy who can run well enough to play center.

That sounds like a pretty good player, and for just $7 million. Inflation’s so bad these days that $7 million is reliever money on the free agent market — not even good reliever money — and for that the Rays got themselves a fringe-average center fielder. Read the rest of this entry »