Last week, Ben Clemens wrote a fantastic piece comparing how well he, the FanGraphs crowd, and a set of other baseball websites and analysts did at predicting the fates of 2025 MLB free agents. His conclusion is that we, the crowd, did an overall great job. I concur. Yay, us!

Unaware that Ben had a piece in the works, I also spent time over the past few weeks testing the wisdom of the FanGraphs crowd against what free agents actually received this offseason, and hoped to publish my work in the newly revived Community Blog. After Ben’s article was published, the editorial staff at FanGraphs noted that I took slightly different slices of the data and conducted different analyses. They encouraged me to refine and update some of my analysis so they could then run it as a companion piece.

“Wisdom of the crowd” is the idea that the collective opinion of a diverse, independent group of individuals will come to a better decision than that of even the most well-informed individual expert. While it doesn’t always bear out, where would we be without the wisdom of crowdsources like Reddit, Quora, Wikipedia… or FanGraphs?

Beyond just being a fun way to engage with readers, the FanGraphs free agent crowdsource predictions exercise represents a good test of the “wisdom of the crowd” theory. Let’s see how wise this crowd turned out to be.

To test our wisdom, on February 17 and then again on March 8, I downloaded the excel file of the 2025 Free Agent Tracker. I then selected for every free agent who signed for a total contract value of at least $2 million, resulting in 105 cases. (Jon Berti and Amed Rosario just made the cut with one-year, $2 million deals; Mike Tauchman and Michael A. Taylor just missed it at one year and $1.95 million.) I then sorted out the players who didn’t receive a crowdsource estimate, reducing the pool to 67 players.

These 67 players were predicted by us to receive a collective 153 years of contracts (an average of 2.28 years per player) for a collective total of $2,886,520,000 and an average contract of $43,082,388.

However, this was an overall good year for free agents — just ask Juan Soto (15 years, $765 million) or Max Fried (8 years, $218 million) — and they ended up collectively out-earning our expectations by 10.4%. These 67 free agents signed a collective 150 years of contracts (we were 98.7% accurate in cumulative contract length!) for a collective $3,186,325,000, with an average contract of $47,557,090 (an AAV of just over $19 million).

Our collective wisdom was pretty good, but we underestimated the market by 10.4%. Let’s take a more detailed look at what happened.

Analyzing the Widest Prediction Gaps
In my research, I looked at the differences between what the FanGraphs crowd predicted and the actual signings. Again, I compared total contract value to the median crowdsourced prediction. (I know this is an oversimplification. I couldn’t think of an elegant way to include things like the “value” of opt-outs, etc.)

The FanGraphs crowd was within $2 million of the actual contract value for 22 of the free agents and got two exactly right, the one-year deals that Justin Verlander ($15 million) and Caleb Ferguson ($3 million) signed.

Some free agents signed for considerably more than we expected. In terms of total amounts, Soto, Fried, Blake Snell (5 years, $182 million), Tanner Scott (4 years, $72 million), Willy Adames (7 years, $182 million), and Corbin Burnes (6 years, $210 million) all exceeded their contract predictions by at least $30 million, with Soto, Fried, and Snell earning over $60 million more than we predicted. No other player signed a deal worth more than $20 million above what we predicted for him. Five relief pitchers — A.J. Minter (2 years, $22 million), Andrew Kittredge (1 year, $10 million), Yimi García (2 years, $15 million), Blake Treinen (2 years, $22 million), and Scott — netted contracts worth more than double what we expected they’d get. Minter especially scored a bonanza, getting a total value that was more than four times higher than what we predicted. It was a very good year to be a high-upside relief arm.

On the flip side, there were other free agents who signed contracts below our predictions, with many of these players settling for short-term deals that curbed their total values. Pete Alonso (2 years, $54 million), Jack Flaherty (2 years, $35 million), Ha-Seong Kim (2 years, $29 million), Alex Bregman (3 years, $120 million), and Gleyber Torres (1 year, $15 million) all received contracts that were worth at least $30 million less than we expected, with only one other player, Andrew Heaney (1 year, $5.25 million), underperforming his predicted deal by more than $14 million. In terms of percentage, Alonso, Flaherty, Kim, Torres, Heaney, and Max Kepler (1 year, $10 million) received less than 50% of what the crowd predicted. It’s worth pointing out that Alonso and Bregman received higher average annual values than expected, owing to their shorter contract lengths. Bregman is set to make $4.7 million more per year than the $27 million AAV the crowd predicted for him, while Alonso’s $27 million AAV is $2 million per year more than expected.

Eyeballing the data, a pattern seemed to emerge in which the top of the market did as well or better than expected, while the middle-to-bottom of the market fared worse. (This would be consistent with many author and reader hypotheses of how the market would shake out.) So I ran a quick correlation between the rank of the size of the signed contract and the difference between prediction and actual total contract value. The correlation coefficient was -.52, indicating that indeed those who signed the smaller contracts signed for less than predicted more so than those who signed larger total contracts.

The Implications of Signing Late
Once again, Ben pre-empted some of my analyses with his own deeper dives. Specifically, back in January, he examined whether those who signed late in the offseason (a) signed for less, and (b) performed worse than those who signed earlier. In short, yes and yes.

When one of my favorite players, Alonso, signed late and for far less than we expected, I also hypothesized that those who sign late in free agency get less than expected relative to those who sign early. After all, late signees usually do so after their options have dwindled. However, the 2025 free agent tracker does not include date of signing, so I could not directly test this proposition. (I suppose if I’d really wanted to spend time researching this, I could have gone back and logged every signing date, but, you know, this is the Community Blog and not my full-time job.) That said, I did find the list of players who’ve signed since the start of February as opposed to earlier in the offseason and ran some quick comparisons.

Of the players in the main sample, nine signed between February 1 and March 8. Nick Pivetta, Enrique Hernández, and Tommy Pham all signed for more than expected, although Hernández and Pham signed one-year deals worth $1.5 million and $1 million above their modest one-year expectations. Pivetta signed for an additional year and $10 million over his predicted deal (5 years and $55 million, compared to the crowd’s prediction of 4 years and $45 million). Kanley Jansen (1 year, $12 million) and Justin Turner (1 year $6 million) signed one-year contracts worth $2 million less than we expected — not very far off expectations.

The remaining four deals since the start of February demonstrate the downside of signing near the end of the offseason. In fact, those four players (Bregman, Alonso, Flaherty, and Heaney) represent four of the six deals listed in the overestimated contracts sample included in the previous section.

Comparison to Six Years Ago
Back in 2019, I performed a similar analysis that was published here in the community notes. That year’s free agent class, led by Bryce Harper and Manny Machado, came in under our expectations. Recall 2019 was a very cold “hot stove,” with major signings not occurring until late in the offseason. (Harper wasn’t signed until February 28!)

We predicted that year’s sample of 47 free agents would receive a collective 123 years of contracts (an average of 2.61 years per player) for a collective total of $1,801,000,000 and an average contract of $38,320,000. However, they ultimately received 91.4% of what was expected – a collective 109 years of contracts (an average of 2.32 years per player) for a collective total of $1,619,500,000 and an average contract of $34,460,000.

Our collective wisdom back then was also pretty solid, except we overestimated the market for free agents by just about the same margin as we underestimated it this year.

Conclusions?
I don’t think we can take any major lessons from this analysis — perhaps just two small ones: 1) relief pitchers with upside did well, and 2) prominent free agents shouldn’t wait too long to sign. That said, running the numbers was fun, and I hope you enjoyed the article. I’ll be back next year at this time with another update. Until then, let the wisdom of crowds protect you from the madness of crowds.

(…or “Fun With FanGraphs’ Free Agent Tracker and Excel”)

The 2019 offseason was an interesting and surprising one. It continued the recent trends of free agents signing later and of several prominent free agents getting less than expected. There was debate here at FanGraphs and elsewhere on whether free agency is broken, no longer working as intended, and if it could lead to a labor shutdown. Others see the big money earned by Harper and Machado as evidence that all is fine. I wanted to take a closer look, informed by data and some quick-and-dirty analysis.

On March 3, 2019, I went to FanGraphs’ free-agent tracker and selected the first 60 free agents listed in descending order of total value of newly signed FA contract. I removed the 13 players who were not featured in reader contract crowdsourcing, leaving 47 players, ranging from Bryce Harper ($330M) to Lonnie Chisenhall ($2.8M). I then compared the total years and total dollar values from crowdsourcing to the actual signed contracts. Here’s what I found. Read the rest of this entry »