The year was 2023, the MLB season was ending, and Elehuris Montero was on a tear Read the rest of this entry »
This article ranks the top 25 hitting prospects by peak projected MLB wRC+ heading into 2025, continuing an annual tradition (skip to the bottom for the ranking!). It is a counterpart to the top 25 pitching prospects piece I published last month.
I am lucky enough to once again rank players at third base this season. The prep work begins now. First question; who is new to the list? Who will I rank this year that I didn’t rank last year? To answer that question, I loaded up the auction calculator, prioritized the “3B” position, and edited the “Starts to Qualify at Position” way down to five. That means all players who played five or more games at 3B in 2024, get placed in the same pool, on the same scale, and valued based on their Steamer projection. Who did I find that wasn’t around last season? To explain it, a poem:
New to 3B
On these keys I will pound,
on this list Jazz Chisholm Jr. can be found.
And if you please, Joey Ortiz.
While Junior Caminero may drive a Camero,
Vladimir, Jr. Guerrero is instantly a top numero.
Connor Norby likely won’t hit forty,
but with twenty he may be sporty.
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Continuing an annual tradition, this article ranks the top 25 starting pitching prospects by peak projected MLB ERA heading into 2025 (skip to the bottom for the ranking!)
Like the other projection systems at FanGraphs, my projections capture the usual ingredients: past performance weighted by recenecy, regression to the mean that accounts for a player’s probability of making the major leagues, major league equivalencies to adjust for minor league difficulty, aging, park effects, and league scoring environment. The peak projections make use of aging curves to translate a player’s forecast to a late-20s peak forecast. Regardless of where the “true” peak age is, there is broad consensus that most growth happens in the teen years and early-20s, however.
You can feel it in the pit of your stomach. Symptoms of watching a slider hang in the zone from your favorite pitcher include but are not limited to jaw-clenching, toe-curling, fist balling, hot-flashes, “we’ll never make the playoffs” thoughts, and of course, a bubbling sensation in the lower abdomen region. Dylan Cease fans beware, the following GIF may conjure up some of the previously listed symptoms. Read the rest of this entry »
Going back in time can be rough. You hop in your DeLorean full of excitement and hop out shocked to see how you looked just a few months ago. What am I wearing? Did I really think that looked ok? Or, in a more relevant use of time travel judgment, did I really think Brett Baty would win the third-base job over Mark Vientos?! In this hypothetical return to the past, there I sit, pushing the buttons of my laptop late at night, typing out the following portion of my preseason third base ranks: Read the rest of this entry »
For baseball fans visiting FanGraphs who do not play fantasy baseball, leaderboards will do. Scroll to the bottom right corner of the main page and all baseball fans can see that, of course, Aaron Judge and Juan Soto are the current leaders in wOBA and wRC+. They can see that Chris Sale and Tarik Skubal have the lowest ERAs in the game and that Emmanuel Clase and Kirby Yates have the lowest reliever ERA in the game. But we fantasy baseball players need something more. We need to see who has been valuable from a specific set of league parameters. Bring in year-to-date auction values with the FanGraphs auction calculator! Read the rest of this entry »
I have once again been called up from Triple-A for the spot start with Jeff away, as I have minor league options remaining. This article approximately follows his methodology, focusing on players widely available at the start of this week (I use a <75% owned in the Main Event threshold). The players are ordered for redraft leagues roughly by my rest-of-season preference–only two weeks to go (!)–grouped by starters, relievers, and hitters. I tend to put a lot of weight on recent playing time trends and popular weekly (e.g., Razzball) and rest-of-season projections, including the various systems published at FanGraphs, and my own system. I play in a lot of NFBC 15-teamers, so that’s the context I have in mind when writing this. Happy bidding!
It’s an odd thing, trying to rank baseball players before the season begins. There’s so much that can happen in between your last click of the “Post” button and the start of the regular season. Pre-season rankings are like a message in a bottle that gets gently pushed out to sea, or in my case, thrown overboard in choppy seas after the contents of the said bottle have been drained, stuffed with the best note I could muster and chucked out into the ether. It’s not easy, that’s what I’m trying to convey. In this post, I’m going to focus on what went well.
Should you still trust pitching projections in the final month of the season? Or is it enough to just look at how a player has performed this year? This article explores some strategies for how to better project September pitching performances. Read the rest of this entry »