The State of FanGraphs 2025
With the new season underway, an update on where the site stands.
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Welcome to the 20th season of FanGraphs Baseball! In what’s becoming an annual tradition, allow me to run through all of the cool new features we’ve added to the site in the past year:
- Customizable player page dashboards and player cards, like heat maps, rolling averages, and more (Member exclusive)
- The fantasy Player Rater
- Division I college data
- NPB data
- Spring training data
- New heat maps
- Pitch modeling game logs
- WAR-based Playoff Odds
- Steamer platoon, context neutral, and percentile projections (Member exclusive)
- Historical Steamer, ZiPS, and ATC projections (Member exclusive)
- OOPSY projections
- FanGraphs Walk-Off (Member exclusive)
We’ve also enhanced and improved a ton of our existing features, including:
- Revamping our player pages
- Upgrading our spray charts
- Improving player search
- Improving our live data feed
- Relaunching the community research blog
Over the past five years, we’ve moved from relying primarily on advertising revenue to support the site to a subscription Membership model. We initially did this out of necessity during the pandemic, but we’ve also learned that we’re able to better serve our readers through this approach. The last few years have seen digital advertising rates fluctuate dramatically; as I detailed in last year’s update, the space can be opaque and difficult to navigate. All of that revenue uncertainty makes it hard to plan new initiatives and hire new staff. We are a baseball site of baseball experts for baseball enthusiasts of all stripes. We aren’t SEO experts or marketing geniuses. Membership allows us to focus on bringing you the very best baseball content and tools we can.
With Membership, you’ve gotten headlines like “Davis Schneider, I Mustache You How You’re Doing This.” You’ve gotten 5,000 words on foul tips to the throat. You’ve gotten dozens of player interviews. There have been over 350,000 words written on prospects in the past year alone, and more than 40 many-thousand-word deep dives into the most recent Hall of Fame slate. Want 25,000 words on the players with the highest trade value in baseball, or 100,000 words of positional power rankings previewing the season, or nearly 50,000 words of tiered fantasy rankings? We’ve got you covered.
Membership comes with ad-free browsing, one-click data exports, and unlimited FanGraphs and RotoGraphs articles. It has also allowed us to bring you greater site customization; indeed, customization has become a key tenet of Membership. We don’t want to force you to see baseball or FanGraphs the way we do. We want to let you choose what you want to see and how you want to see it, from flipping the site into Dark or Classic mode, to removing photos from the home page, to setting up your own player page dashboards and custom reports and leaderboards.
It has taken 20 years of work to bring you the site that you’re visiting today. There are so many features that are being actively maintained and improved upon that it’s frankly hard even for me to keep track of them all. Between the writing, the Depth Charts, the projections, all of the RosterResource and fantasy tools, the various models and stats, the podcasts, and the Membership benefits, I really think there’s no baseball site that pulls data from more places and ties it all together for you quite like FanGraphs does.
And we’re independent. We have no corporate overlords or outside investors, and we don’t partner with sportsbooks. Our 15 full-time staff members and 17 contributing writers are supported by advertising revenue and your Membership dollars.
I know that we’re all facing economic uncertainty right now, but if you’re in a position to do so, I hope you’ll consider a Membership. It’s the best way to both experience the site and help us make FanGraphs even better.
