I have a confession to make. I started this article with a conclusion in mind, only to find that that conclusion was spectacularly untrue. But then I pivoted, and found something else I think is quite interesting. Is it obvious, in retrospect? I kind of think so. But I had fun doing it and learned something in the process, so I decided to write about it anyway.

I had a theory that the average catcher age, along with the average age for all the hardest defensive positions, had plummeted over the past decade, with the average DH age increasing as a counterbalance. My theory was that the universal DH allowed teams to massively alter their behavior. National League teams that had been playing older sluggers in the field could shift them down the defensive spectrum, either directly to DH or by displacing other old players to DH via a chain reaction of moving to easier defensive spots.

It’s beautiful logic, with just one problem: It’s untrue. Here’s the average seasonal age (as of July 1 each year) of catchers, shortstops, and DHs since 2002, the first year we have positional splits that allowed me to run this analysis:

The data is pretty noisy, which makes sense to me. It’s not like teams are targeting a given age; they’re just making baseball decisions about cost, team control, and production. Average age is a downstream result of a lot of decisions that are made for other reasons. But in the aggregate, the pattern I hoped to see just wasn’t there:

In fact, DH has experienced the greatest decline in average age across all positions. That’s very much not what I expected. I do think that some of that is overstated. First base has had the smallest decline among positions, and I’d expect many of the displaced older hitters I mentioned in my hypothesis to end up there too. But if you average the age changes of first base and DH, they’re almost exactly the league average for position players. Clearly, the data do not support my claim. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Daniel Vogelbach becoming a Brewers hitting coach and coach-hiring trends, analyze and phact-check Tommy Pham’s pitch for “PhamGraphs,” react to the Kazuma Okamoto signing and the Blue Jays embracing their big-market potential (in contrast to the Giants), and take the temperature of the pretty tepid stove (phollowed by a phollow-up on Pham).

Audio intro: The Spaghettis, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Ian Phillips, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Vogelbach news
Link to Brewers coaching staff
Link to last year’s Vogelbach hiring
Link to Vogelbach promo
Link to article on PhamGraphs
Link to negativity bias wiki
Link to team batting LI
Link to batter opp_DRA-
Link to team batter opp_DRA-
Link to lineup construction study
Link to DRA- explainer
Link to DRC+ explainer
Link to Canha’s BP player card
Link to Pham’s BP player card
Link to August Pham incident
Link to EW Episode 2363
Link to PH PA leaders
Link to Eric on Okamoto
Link to NPB HR since 2019
Link to MLBTR on Okamoto
Link to MLBTR on Takahashi
Link to FG payroll page
Link to FG post on Mahle
Link to team SP projections
Link to FG top 50 FA
Link to Ben on pennant complacency
Link to Harbaugh firing
Link to latest Hang Up and Listen
Link to Albies TikTok

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12:02

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks, and welcome to my first chat of 2026! I’ll get this going momentarily (having a chat with a reporter about Hall of Fame stuff)

12:04

Jay Jaffe: OK, I’m back! Happy New Year to you all.

12:04

Jay Jaffe: Hope you had good holiday breaks. If you missed it, I published my Hall of Fame ballot explainer https://blogs.fangraphs.com/jay-jaffes-2026-hall-of-fame-ballot

12:05

Jay Jaffe: and yesterday began the One-and-Done portion of the ballot with a profile of Hunter Pence https://blogs.fangraphs.com/jaws-and-the-2026-hall-of-fame-ballot-hunt…

12:06

Jay Jaffe: I did include a couple of one-and-dones in the pre-holiday coverage, namely Alex Gordon and Edwin Encarnación, but I gave their careers longer treatments. Likewise for the next profile, Shin-Soo Choo.

12:06

Jay Jaffe: anyway, on with the questions!

Read the rest of this entry »

Back in the fall, Daniel R. Epstein of Baseball Prospectus wrote a couple of articles about where hitters stand in the batter’s box. Statcast released batting stance information last year as part of the ongoing rollout of bat tracking information that started in 2024. Understandably, the location of a hitter’s center of mass got a bit overshadowed by the wealth of information about how their bat moves through space and finds its way to the ball (or not), but Dan did his part to drag it into the light. He found a relationship between contact rate and where the batter stands. Specifically, standing deeper in the box and standing closer to home plate are both associated with higher contact rates.

Both of those findings are intuitive enough. Standing deeper in the box gives you a longer reaction time. It’s no surprise that batters who take advantage of that extra information make more contact. It’s also easy to spot a potential selection bias: The players in the back of the box are likely back there because they’re the kind of contact-oriented players who want the extra reaction time.

I saw less of a physical reason for players who stand farther from home plate to make more contact, unless they stand so far from the plate that they have trouble reaching the outside corner, but (almost) nobody actually does that. It might take your bat head slightly longer to reach the outside part of the plate, but the ideal contact point for an outside pitch is deeper anyway, so I assumed the two would balance out and chalked the difference up to selection bias. Bigger players with longer arms naturally feel more comfortable farther away from home plate, and those bigger players tend to have more powerful swings, which tend to result in more whiffs. Causation isn’t correlation, and I wasn’t ready to go so far as to assume that standing farther away from home plate actually causes a batter to make less contact. Then I watched A League of Their Own again. Read the rest of this entry »

For the 22nd consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction, as well as MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Tampa Bay Rays.

Batters

The Orioles hogged most of the AL East Disappointment space in 2025, but the Rays were similarly uninspiring. Rather than bouncing back from a down 2024, their first losing season in a pretty long stretch, they dropped down a few more wins in 2025, and never felt like they were relevant, either as dominating contender or incompetent doormat. While the Rays are historically great when it comes to squeezing as much out of every penny, it can be difficult for them to turn things around quickly because they won’t bridge gaps with big spending. So now they enter 2026 with their usual m.o. of trying to accumulate enough incremental advantages to sneakily win 90 games.

Tampa Bay doesn’t have a particularly deep offense, so if the team is successful, it’ll likely require big years from Yandy Díaz and Junior Caminero. ZiPS is still happy with Díaz as one of the better DHs in baseball, though the fact that he’ll turn 35 in August can’t completely be ignored. Nor is ZiPS projecting 45 home runs from Caminero, but he still should be easily this lineup’s largest source of pure power. The computer does expect some offensive regression from Jonathan Aranda, since being able to run a .409 BABIP — like he did last year — isn’t a skill that major leaguers just happen to possess. That said, he’s still projected to produce enough to play first base, rather than getting stuck in tweener hell — that awful place reserved for players who both aren’t good enough offensively to be first basemen and who aren’t strong enough defensively to play a more important infield spot.

ZiPS is not electronically enamored with either recent signee Cedric Mullins or Josh Lowe in the outfield, and it sees the Nick Fortes-led catching tandem as less forte and more pianissimo, but the Rays look at least passable at those positions. Carson Williams gets a solid projection from ZiPS, better than either Steamer or THEBAT, but it is a lot less excited about him, both offensively and defensively, after his rough 2025 season. Left field projects to be a real problem spot, and though Brandon Lowe is probably overrated at this point, ZiPS doesn’t really like any of his possible replacements at second base on our depth chart. ZiPS does like Jadher Areinamo’s defense a lot more than the consensus, so he’s at least interesting. Prospect Xavier Isaac doesn’t spike a big projection, but his offensive upside is real, and there’s hope that his elbow is fine, and that there are no lasting repercussions from the “life-saving” brain surgery he had over the summer.

Pitchers

Even after trading right-hander Shane Baz to the Orioles, the Rays rotation looks to be in at least decent shape. If Shane McClanahan, who hasn’t pitched in the majors since 2023, is fully healthy, he rounds out a pretty nice top trio with Drew Rasmussen and Ryan Pepiot. Meanwhile, offseason acquisition Steven Matz could be either a decent fourth starter or strong in a relief role, and Tropicana Field is a fairly safe home to limit his occasional homericiousness. Both Joe Boyle and Ian Seymour project as league average or just a skosh worse, so there are at least six plausible rotation candidates here, and Yoendrys Gómez isn’t that far back. What ZiPS doesn’t see is a lot of emergency depth here; it usually thinks the Rays have a number of fringy pitching prospects who could fill in admirably, but that’s not the case this time around.

The bullpen is a similar story. ZiPS isn’t super excited about Edwin Uceta, but it remains a huge fan of Griffin Jax, picked up last summer when the league pillaged the Twins. Jax was a short-term play, but ZiPS doesn’t see Taj Bradley, whom Tampa Bay sent to Minnesota in return, as being much more interesting than either Boyle or Seymour. Garrett Cleavinger gets a solid projection, and ZiPS is happy with Bryan Baker, Mason Englert, and Kevin Kelly. ZiPS is less tickled by the Rays’ options to cover lower-leverage innings, guys like Steven Wilson or Hunter Bigge, but I’m sure the team will find some random unknown reliever to put up a 3.30 ERA.

The Rays aren’t bad, but this is a tough division, and there are enough holes and questions that ZiPS is putting them in water-treading territory again, somewhere between a few games below .500 and a few games above it. That’s still a team that can sneak into a wild card, but it’ll need some good fortune to do so.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here. Size of player names is very roughly proportional to Depth Chart playing time. The final team projections may differ considerably from our Depth Chart playing time.

Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned or have retired, players who will miss 2026 due to injury, and players who were released in 2025. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a Ambient Math-Rock Trip-Hop Yacht Metal band that only performs in abandoned malls, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.16.

Hitters are ranked by zWAR, which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those that appear in the full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR. It is important to remember that ZiPS is agnostic about playing time, and has no information about, for example, how quickly a team will call up a prospect or what veteran has fallen into disfavor.

As always, incorrect projections are either caused by misinformation, a non-pragmatic reality, or by the skillful sabotage of our friend and former editor. You can, however, still get mad at me on Twitter or on Bluesky. This last is, however, not an actual requirement.

As you’re probably aware, the collective bargaining agreement between MLB and the MLBPA expires this year. Time flies, doesn’t it? The last time this happened, MLB locked out its players — the sport’s first work stoppage since the infamous strike that canceled the 1994 World Series.

The smart money is on there being another lockout next offseason; last time around, both sides did a lot of saber-rattling, but relatively little changed. We got the pre-arb bonus pool and some tinkering around the edges, but there was no salary cap, no abolition of the arbitration system, nothing that I’d describe as revolutionary. The duration of the lockout reflects that assessment; the stalemate lasted long enough to delay the season by a week, but not to cancel any games outright.

Having walked up to the verge of the abyss, peeked over the edge, and retreated, neither capital nor labor reaped a painful object lesson in the reality of all-out labor war. Last time that happened, it scared both sides into détente for 25 years. It seems reasonable to assume that either the players or owners might at least think about tickling the dragon’s tail next winter. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to 2026. Time marches on, and so too does the Offseason Matrices document. It has been pretty quiet since I updated you with a Matrix Reloaded last Monday, so much so that we pushed back our return to our usual Friday schedule, knowing that Tatsuya Imai and Kazuma Okamoto would at least sign over the weekend. Assuming the first full week of the New Year is busier, we’ll be back at it on Fridays for the remainder of the offseason. Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday, the eve of his posting window’s closure, 29-year-old Japanese third baseman Kazuma Okamoto agreed to a four-year, $60 million contract with the reigning American League champion Toronto Blue Jays. Okamoto, who made his NPB debut as a teenager, is a career .277/.361/.521 hitter with Tokyo’s Yomiuri Giants. He had a power-hitting breakout in 2018, his age-22 campaign, beginning a six-year streak in which he hit 30 or more annual home runs, including a 2023 season in which he cracked 41 of them. He ranks second in all of NPB with 214 homers since 2019, our first year of NPB data tracking here at FanGraphs. During his 2025 platform year, Okamoto posted an incredible .327/.416/.598 line and career-best 11% strikeout rate, albeit in only 77 games because he sprained his left elbow in an on-field collision that caused him to miss roughly half the season.

Dangerous from top to bottom, lineup depth was the bedrock of a Toronto team that came within inches of winning a World Series, and Okamoto’s balanced contact/power hitting style fits in with the Blue Jays’ baton-passing attack. Pre-existing defensive versatility on their roster — namely, incumbent second baseman Andrés Giménez’s ability to play shortstop — gave them the flexibility to pursue players of virtually any position as a means of replacing free agent shortstop Bo Bichette. Read the rest of this entry »