FanGraphs Baseball

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On Saturday night, in the first inning of Game 2 of the World Series in Milwaukee, Rays left fielder Chandler Simpson slapped an RBI single through the left side of the infield. Once the hometown fans had finished groaning and the visitor’s dugout had exhausted its supply of high fives, Simpson’s presence on first base temporarily warped the gravitational pull of the World Series.

A chyron featuring Simpson’s stolen base totals for the regular season provided an impromptu long division lesson: 46 steals, 60 attempts, 76.7% success rate. The camera zoomed in on him as he conferred with first base coach Corey Dickerson (who, it’s worth noting, didn’t come close to stealing 46 bases in his entire 11-year career), and Brewers first baseman Jake Bauers did his best to look like he wasn’t eavesdropping. When starter Logan Henderson came set, the broadcast switched to a side-by-side-by-side shot that showed Simpson bracketed by Henderson and catcher William Contreras. Contreras stayed in a high, one-knee crouch and sneaked peeks down to first base before and after each pitch to Junior Caminero. Henderson tried to freeze Simpson by standing as still as a statue while the pitch clock ticked down toward zero on one pitch, then firing the next as soon as he came set. Everybody knew it was only a matter of time.

It happened on the fourth pitch. Despite Henderson’s best efforts, Simpson timed him up perfectly. At the exact moment Henderson raised his left heel, Simpson took off like a shot. The pitch was a fastball and Contreras was already on his feet by the time it arrived. He made a quick transition and fired a laser down to second base, a foot or two higher and more toward the first base side of the bag than he’d intended, but by no means a terrible throw. It didn’t matter. Simpson already had second base stolen. His hand touched the bag as second baseman Brice Turang’s glove closed around the ball. In a bit of visually pleasing accidental choreography, when Turang turned to attempt a swipe tag, Simpson was executing his own, equally sharp turn. He was also, temporarily, weightless.

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Liam Hicks had an adventurous night during Game 2 of the World Series in Milwaukee. In the first inning, after the Rays had already plated two runs against Brewers starter Logan Henderson, Hicks clubbed a two-run homer — the first homer of this year’s World Series, in fact — to extend the lead to 4-0. In the sixth inning, after that lead had been trimmed to a single run, he was thrown out at the plate while trying to score, a play that loomed particularly large in what became a 5-4 defeat that put the Rays in a two-games-to-none series hole. While Hicks has scuffled at the plate for much of the postseason, he’s come up big a few times, and has had a substantial impact since being acquired from the Marlins in a deadline-day trade.

By the time Hicks batted for the first time on Saturday night, the 24-year-old Henderson had already thrown 23 pitches. Yandy Díaz led off, and after battling for seven pitches, he reached second base when shortstop Cooper Pratt threw away a fairly routine groundball. He scored on a Chandler Simpson single, and after Simpson stole second, Junior Caminero worked the count full and then fouled off a couple of pitches before singling home Simpson. Up came Hicks, and after he fouled off a high four-seamer, Henderson left an 87.8-mph cutter in the middle of the plate. Hicks connected, launching the ball 411 feet to right center for a two-run homer.

With that, Hicks — who was born and raised in Toronto, rooting for Blue Jays teams that featured Russell Martin — became just the fourth Canadian-born player to homer in a World Series, after the Yankees’ George Selkirk (Games 1 and 5 in 1936), the Cardinals’ Larry Walker (Games 1 and 3 in 2004), and the Blue Jays’ Vladimir Guerrero Jr. (Games 4 and 5 in 2025). No pressure to hit another, eh? Read the rest of this entry »

Free agency begins five days after the end of the World Series. As in other recent seasons, FanGraphs is once again facilitating a contract crowdsourcing project, with the idea being to harness the wisdom of the crowd to better understand and project the 2026-27 free agent market.

In recent years, we’ve added a few features to these ballots based on reader feedback. You now have the option to indicate that a player will only receive a minor league contract, or won’t receive a contract at all. If there is a player option, team option, or opt out in a player’s contract, you’ll be able to indicate whether you think he will remain with his current team or become a free agent. Statistics are prorated to full season values where noted. Unless otherwise indicated, the projected WAR figures are from the first cut of the 2027 Steamer600 projections.

Below are ballots for seven of this year’s free agents — in this case, a group of catchers. Read the rest of this entry »

Free agency begins five days after the end of the World Series. As in other recent seasons, FanGraphs is once again facilitating a contract crowdsourcing project, with the idea being to harness the wisdom of the crowd to better understand and project the 2026-27 free agent market.

In recent years, we’ve added a few features to these ballots based on reader feedback. You now have the option to indicate that a player will only receive a minor league contract, or won’t receive a contract at all. If there is a player option, team option, or opt out in a player’s contract, you’ll be able to indicate whether you think he will remain with his current team or become a free agent. Statistics are prorated to full season values where noted. Unless otherwise indicated, the projected WAR figures are from the first cut of the 2027 Steamer600 projections.

Below are ballots for seven of this year’s free agents — in this case, a group of outfielders. Read the rest of this entry »

Free agency begins five days after the end of the World Series. As in other recent seasons, FanGraphs is once again facilitating a contract crowdsourcing project, with the idea being to harness the wisdom of the crowd to better understand and project the 2026-27 free agent market.

In recent years, we’ve added a few features to these ballots based on reader feedback. You now have the option to indicate that a player will only receive a minor league contract, or won’t receive a contract at all. If there is a player option, team option, or opt out in a player’s contract, you’ll be able to indicate whether you think he will remain with his current team or become a free agent. Statistics are prorated to full season values where noted. Unless otherwise indicated, the projected WAR figures are from the first cut of the 2027 Steamer600 projections.

Below are ballots for eight of this year’s free agents — in this case, a group of starting pitchers. Read the rest of this entry »

MILWAUKEE — You all know the theoretical concept of a replacement-level player. I suspect I’m not the only one who associates that concept with a specific person: The guy who’s continuously mediocre despite repeated exposure to big league competition. The longer he sticks around, the more chances he gets, the more I catch myself thinking, “Why? Can’t they at least try to find someone better?”

Until this year, that guy, for me, was Jake Bauers. In his 20s, Bauers played for seven different organizations, spending six seasons in the majors. In 615 games, he hit .211/.307/.365, which is a wRC+ of 88, with 58 home runs, a 29.0% strikeout rate, and -0.4 career WAR. He was a first baseman, and not an exceptional defender, who hit for neither average nor power, and struck out a lot. He isn’t a great athlete, and as a seventh-round pick out of a high school in Huntington Beach, California, he had neither the prospect pedigree nor the winning collegiate track record that would warrant so many chances.

I didn’t get it, especially because Bauers had toured so many organizations — the Padres, the Rays, the Guardians, the Yankees, and most latterly the Brewers — who have earned a reputation for knowing what they’re doing. Why did this most replaceable of players keep getting chances? Read the rest of this entry »

Playing professional baseball is so hard, and requires so much preternatural ability, that it borders on impossible for the civilian mind to comprehend. Hitting a 90 mile an hour pitch — let alone the 100 mph ones warping the fabric of the sport — requires a combination of hand-eye coordination, anticipation, and kinetic movement that most people straight up cannot attain. Whereas with other professions, the concept of achieving greatness is graspable — I have not, and never will, write the next great American novel, but I can at least formulate the thought of how to do so — watching a major league baseball game and trying to imagine oneself in that position is total fantasy.

That being said, if you were to take the three foundational elements of the game — hitting, pitching, and fielding — and force a rando from the local bar to perform one of them, I’d argue that fielding would be by far the easiest. No one who isn’t regularly playing baseball, or is at least recently removed from doing so, is rolling out of bed and getting bat to ball in a World Series game. And while getting an out from the mound might be doable simply because the fielders could help, the pitches coming from commoner arms would be deeply comical in comparison to the real thing. But catching a popup or fielding a grounder could be done, even if some of the participants in Game 2 of the World Series produced evidence to the contrary.

The miscues started early in Saturday night’s feverish game between the Rays and Brewers. Yandy Díaz, the very first hitter of the night, pushed a weak groundball to Milwaukee shortstop Cooper Pratt to get things going. Pratt ushered the ball into his glove and readied for a throw that some (though not all) slightly athletic normies could make. But, perhaps because this was a big, important baseball game that was on television and not just a hypothetical exercise for some guy’s blog, Pratt did not complete the throw and instead bounced it right into the camera well. One batter, one error. Read the rest of this entry »

Adam Ottavino matched up against Paul Goldschmidt more often than he did any other hitter. The now-retired right-hander faced the still-active slugger 32 times, surrendering six hits — including three home runs — and issuing half a dozen walks. He set him down on strikes 13 times.

What does Ottavino most remember about his battles with Goldschmidt, who over 16 seasons has logged 905 extra-base hits, a 135 wRC+, and 58.8 WAR in what is arguably a Hall of Fame-worthy career?

“He was usually the best player on his team, and because of my righty-matchup ability I faced him a lot,” said Ottavino, who has smoothly segued from data-savvy reliever to insightful broadcast analyst. “At the beginning it was as many sliders as I could throw, but then he kind of figured out that the best approach against me was to not try to pull the ball. If you look at his three home runs, they were all to the opposite field. I realized that I had to switch up from only staying on the outside corner and start coming inside a little bit.

“When I developed the cutter, I used it a lot in mid-counts, because I knew he wasn’t hunting that pitch,” Ottavino went on to say.” It became a lot more cat-and-mouse over time. I mean, it was never a comfortable matchup. He had a really good approach, and I felt like he was very calculated coming to each at-bat. Sometimes I was able to stay a step ahead, and sometimes not.”

As for the baker’s dozen strikeouts, the Northeastern University product recalls the majority of them coming on takes, mostly in their later matchups. When he sensed that Goldschmidt was looking slider on a two-strike count, and thus “open for a freeze,” he would throw a backdoor sinker.

A memorable punch out came on a swing-and-miss. Read the rest of this entry »

MILWAUKEE — In the bottom of the sixth inning of Game 2 of the World Series, Brewers right fielder Sal Frelick dug in against Rays reliever Ian Seymour with his team trailing by a run.

Seymour’s first pitch, a sinker, landed right in the middle of the zone for a called strike one.

The Brewers had trailed 4-0 in this game before they’d even come to the plate, but they’d been in this position before. Read the rest of this entry »