As Members of our site, you probably know by now that FanGraphs goes dark on most national holidays, as we were the past two days. We believe our staff deserves to enjoy holidays without having to worry about working, and our readers tend to have plans that don’t involve reading about baseball or staring at statistics on a screen. The exception is when news breaks that would prompt our readers to stop what they’re doing and rush to the site for analysis, such as a major transaction involving a star player. So for a few hours on Wednesday afternoon, as chatter picked up that Dylan Cease was nearing a deal with the Blue Jays, Meg and I both prepared for the possibility that we might need to work a bit on Thanksgiving, especially because the team in question plays in a country that doesn’t observe the holiday on the same day Americans do. Fortunately — ahem, thankfully — Cease agreed to a seven-year, $210 million contract with Toronto in time for Michael Baumann to write up the news and for us to edit and publish it Wednesday night.

The Cease signing was the latest move in what has already been a fairly active offseason. The Cardinals traded starting pitcher Sonny Gray to the Red Sox on Tuesday, two days after the Mets and Rangers made a one-for-one swap of former All-Stars. I learned of the Brandon Nimmo-for-Marcus Semien exchange around 2 AM Central European Standard Time on Monday, after I made the chaotic decision to wake up and watch the Rams-Buccaneers game before what turned out to be a roughly 24-hour travel day from Italy to New York. Following my initial surprise, I couldn’t help but wonder if Nimmo’s former teammate Matt Harvey would once again pitch for Team Italy in the upcoming World Baseball Classic.

We won’t be covering any of these moves in this week’s mailbag. Instead, we’ll be answering your questions about the best unmade baseball movie, JJ Wetherholt, the marginal value of team runs scored and individual offensive production, and more. 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 »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley bring on top-tier Patreon supporter Becca Balton to banter about Becca’s baseball background, her origins as a listener, and the Nationals’ new direction, then (17:51) answer emails about a team WAR cap, an extra-innings variant in which the team to score fastest wins, manager close-ups on postseason broadcasts, citing the stats of a particular pitch, a pitch-based skills competition, and the “corners” of the strike zone, followed (1:09:33) by Stat Blasts about postseason series MVPs with negative (c)WPAs, pitchers who earned their first save in their final appearance, the oldest/most-experienced pitchers to push their career records over .500 for the first time, and teams that swept the major awards in the shortest spans, plus a postscript on the Dylan Cease signing and more.

Audio intro: Jonathan Crymes, “Effectively Wild Theme”
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Link to Yesavage splitter stats
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The stove was already hot the week before Thanksgiving. But on Wednesday evening, the Toronto Blue Jays threw some logs on the fire and aimed a leaf blower at the damn thing, and now the proverbial stove is hot enough to melt soda cans into aluminum ingots.

Dylan Cease has signed with the reigning AL champions, and for what they offered him — $210 million over seven years — you’d be packing your bags for Canada, too. Looks like someone can shell out for the fancy cranberry sauce this Thanksgiving. Read the rest of this entry »

During an introductory press conference for outfielder Brandon Nimmo this week, Rangers president of baseball operations Chris Young somehow expressed both confidence and uncertainty about his newest acquisition. Nimmo, he said, would handle right field for the Rangers in 2026, though he didn’t sound too sure about it.

“We’re not 100 percent committed to [Nimmo in right],” Young told reporters on Monday. “I think it’s likely where he’ll play, but [those are] conversations that we’ll have with Brandon, with [manager] Skip [Schumaker] and with Wyatt [Langford], and really making sure that we understand all aspects of this and where they’re most comfortable. I do think we have three very good, talented, very talented outfielders. At the outset, I think it’s likely Brandon plays right, but I think that’s a further conversation.”

There are a number of considerations here. Nimmo, at this phase of his career, is almost certainly best in left field. His knees are jacked up; his arm is noodle-adjacent. Evan Carter nominally profiles as a center fielder, but injuries have kept him off the field for much of the last two seasons; it’s possible a corner could be the best way to ensure his availability. Langford’s known right field experience is limited to a single game for the 2022 Peninsula Pilots of the collegiate summer Coastal Plain League.

In my view, there’s only one way to sort this mess out: Commit to playing Langford in center. Read the rest of this entry »

Connelly Early emerged as one of the top pitching prospects in the Boston Red Sox organization this season. The 23-year-old left-hander logged a 2.60 ERA and a 2.74 FIP over 101 1/3 minor league innings, then allowed just five runs over 19 1/3 innings following a September call-up. His first two major league outings — he made four regular season starts in all — were especially impressive. Facing the Athletics on each occasion, Early worked a combined 10 1/3 frames, surrendering a lone run, issuing one free pass and fanning 18 batters.

Jacob Wilson had some noteworthy at-bats against the young southpaw. The A’s shortstop went 2-for-5 against him, singling twice (one of them an infield hit), and also striking out twice. The strikeouts stand out when you consider Wilson’s profile. The second-place finisher in this year’s American League Rookie of the Year race recorded a 7.5% strikeout rate, the lowest among qualified hitters not named Luis Arraez.

The number of pitches he saw from Early (28) and how they were sequenced is what prompted me to put together the article you are currently reading. Between the two games, Early threw Wilson seven curveballs, seven changeups, five sinkers, four sliders, and four four-seamers. And with the exception of back-to-back curveballs in their first matchup, Early didn’t double up on a pitch. That especially caught my eye the fourth time they faced each other when Wilson went down swinging to end a nine-pitch at-bat.

The day after the Early and Wilson battled for a second time, I approached both to ask what they’d seen from each other. As they wouldn’t be matching up again in 2025, asking them for their scouting reports on one another seemed fair game for discussion.

I began with the shortstop. 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.

When the Phillies returned to contention following a slide into irrelevance in the wake of their 1993 National League pennant, shortstop Jimmy Rollins, first baseman Ryan Howard, and lefty Cole Hamels gained most of the attention. Howard all but ran Jim Thome out of town after the latter was injured in 2005, then mashed a major league-high 58 homers in ’06 en route to NL MVP honors. Rollins, the emotional center of the team, carried himself with a swagger, declared the Phillies “the team to beat” at the outset of 2007, then won the MVP award when the team followed through with a division title. Hamels debuted in 2006 and became their ace while making his first All-Star team the next season. In the middle of all that, as part of the nucleus that would help the Phillies win five straight NL East titles from 2007–11, with a championship in ’08 and another pennant in ’09, Chase Utley was as good or better than any of them, though the second baseman hardly called attention to himself.

Indeed, Utley seemed to shun the spotlight, playing the game with a quiet intensity that bordered on asceticism. He sped around the bases after hitting home runs, then reluctantly accepted high-fives in the dugout. “I am having fun,” he told the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Andy Martino in 2009. “When I’m on the baseball field, that’s where I love to be. I’m not joking around and smiling. That competition, that heat-of-the-battle intensity, that’s how I have fun.” Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the Red Sox-Cardinals trade involving Sonny Gray and take Hal Steinbrenner to task for his comments about the Yankees not being profitable, then (37:00) talk to Jay Jaffe about the big issues surrounding this year’s (and upcoming years’) BBWAA and Era Committee Hall of Fame ballots.

Audio intro: Philip Tapley and Michael Stokes, “Effectively Wild Theme”
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Link to MLBTR on Gray
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The Boston Red Sox have acquired veteran right-hander Sonny Gray and cash from the St. Louis Cardinals, in exchange for pitchers Richard Fitts and Brandon Clarke, and either cash or a player to be named later. Seems straightforward enough.

After 13 seasons in the majors, you all know Gray by now: short guy out of Vanderbilt. Big, slow curveball, but not a ton of velo. Changes teams every two or three years. In those 13 seasons, Gray’s two best WAR seasons are 5.4 and 4.5, but he’s posted four additional seasons of between 3.5 and 3.9 WAR, and three others of between 2.4 and 2.7 WAR. This is the Toyota Sienna of pitchers: You don’t stay up nights dreaming about him, and he can be a little pricey, but he’ll get you and your family where they need to go with an absolute minimum of fuss.

The Red Sox made the playoffs in 2025. I don’t think I’m going out on a limb by assuming they’d like to make the playoffs again in 2026. If I were in the playoff-making business, I’d welcome the opportunity to add Sonny Gray to my team. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve long been interested in measuring the value of making an out. Different outs count differently, and yet pretty much every baseball statistic you can imagine ignores that fact. I’m not just talking about advanced ones like wRC+ or wOBA, though those do indeed treat all outs as equal. I’m talking about basic things like batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage. No one says, “Well, he batted .320, but some of those outs were in bad situations, so it was more like batting .313.” That’s not how we think about offensive statistics.

But just because we don’t count outs differently doesn’t mean that they all have the same value. This is obviously true. Striking out with a runner on third and fewer than two outs is a tragedy. Hitting a run-scoring groundout in the same situation gets the batter a long series of fist bumps back in the dugout. But when it comes to wRC+ or batting average, that distinction doesn’t show up.

There are good reasons for existing statistics to work the way that they do. Batters don’t control who’s on base and how many outs there are when they come to the plate. They don’t control whether there are fast runners on base, or whether the outfield has arms so weak that anyone could score from third base on a fly ball. In the same way that a home run is a home run is a home run, statistics that try to measure batter skill treat all outs the same. But still… I wanted to know more. Read the rest of this entry »

You just had to take in a ballgame. The sky was blue. The birds were chirping. On a day like today, even you couldn’t resist the siren song of the ballpark. You headed into the city and bought yourself a ticket, but now you’re in trouble. The zombie apocalypse began sometime after the third inning. The epicenter was right nearby, and the undead were drawn to the stadium in droves by the irresistible aroma of thousands of delicious humans. Maybe the churros too. It’s entirely possible that even the undead love the smell of churros. Whatever the reason, they (the zombies, not the churros) are flooding through the concourse and out into the stands. They’re climbing over the façade from every direction. You’re trapped.

You spent years telling anyone who would listen that the world was coming to an end. You told your family to prepare themselves the way you had been preparing yourself. You gave that speech every Thanksgiving, right up until you stopped getting invited to Thanksgiving. You built your bunker. You stocked it with food and batteries and flashlights and Twinkies. For reasons that you can’t quite recall, you’ve even got several cases of diapers down there. Most importantly, you stocked it with weaponry. You procured all kinds of weapons: big ones, small ones, stabby ones, shooty ones, explodey ones, poisony ones. You built a shrine to all the different ways a human being can inflict damage on any and all kinds of matter, and then you left it all behind, just hours before the apocalypse.

Here you are in your seat, and the zombies have got you surrounded. They want your sweet, sweet brains. The good news is that even without your arsenal, you’re ready to fight. You’ve been preparing for this moment your whole life. You reach back under your seat for the novelty helmet you discarded back in the third inning, scrape out as much nacho cheese as you can, and settle it onto your head. It may not be much good against a major league fastball, but as long as you can find some way to keep it in place, it should be strong enough to resist the teeth of the undead. Read the rest of this entry »