Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Meg’s memories of Ichiro and his sensational MLB debut, Ippei Mizuhara’s letter about his work with Shohei Ohtani, Roki Sasaki’s dog, the misleading name of “Sluggball,” Jurickson Profar and the prospect of a Braves rebound, which players will get “shorter” thanks to the challenge system, two new rules changes, how the Dodgers will make innings meet, how to make 3B coaches more aggressive, “Tragedeigh,” and more.

Audio intro: Alex Glossman and Ali Breneman, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Ian H., “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Ichiro’s first MLB hit
Link to Ben on Ichiro’s homers
Link to Ippei’s letter
Link to Ippei recording
Link to Roki’s dog
Link to dog tweet
Link to Dekopin meeting
Link to Slugball website
Link to Slugball article 1
Link to Slugball article 2
Link to Slugball article 3
Link to Sluggball video
Link to Petriello on Profar
Link to team WAR projections
Link to Rosenthal on Boras/Braves
Link to ABS measuring info
Link to Eric on heights
Link to George’s Timberlands
Link to Drellich on rule changes
Link to MLBTR on rule changes
Link to EW Episode 1863
Link to article on baserunning play
Link to EW Episode 2169
Link to Dodgers depth chart
Link to Sheehan on the Dodgers
Link to listener emails database
Link to running strategy study
Link to Russell on 3B coaches
Link to Ben on goalie goals
Link to tragedeigh wiktionary
Link to tragedeigh subreddit
Link to EW gift subscriptions

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I began last week’s Matrix Reloaded with a note about the slow pace of the offseason in January, and that was still the case when the column was published at 3:35 p.m. ET. So, of course, less than three hours after that went live, Roki Sasaki announced on Instagram that he’d signed with the Dodgers. His signing kicked the market into gear, making these past seven days far more eventful than what we’d experienced in recent weeks.

For my neurotic Offseason Matrices work, that means a lot fewer blank cells and a lot more maroon cells, indicating a lack of fit due to a positional logjam. The game of musical chairs continues and free agents remain available to sign, but many of the teams that might’ve been interested earlier in the offseason have since filled their openings. That doesn’t necessarily mean that all of these players will sign for less than what they were expected to when the offseason began — though, as Ben Clemens demonstrated earlier this week, many of them will — but it does mean their options are limited. Without further ado, let’s get to the transactions that happened and what we can glean about the ones that may still be to come. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

For the 21st consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this years introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Kansas City Royals.

Batters

The Tigers got a bit more attention simply because they seemed so dead in the water in July, but Kansas City’s 30-win improvement from the year before – and the even more impressive 35-win improvement in Pythagorean wins – was damn impressive. Victory may have a thousand fathers, but Bobby Witt Jr. was the big daddy of this feat, missing out on an MVP award only because he plays in the same league as peak Aaron Judge. ZiPS isn’t keen to project 7- or 8-WAR seasons as the baseline expectation based on a single season, but Witt’s projection still is that of a serious MVP candidate, and among players over the next five years, his WAR projection is less than those of only Juan Soto and Shohei Ohtani. His nearly $290 million deal with the Royals is, in the early days, looking like one of the best team investments of all time.

ZiPS is naturally excited about Witt, but that excitement doesn’t carry over to the rest of the team. This probably isn’t a surprise considering that other than Witt, only Salvador Perez finished with 2 WAR among Royals hitters in 2024. If you rank Kansas City’s hitters from last season, and add up the five best after Witt, they still add up to a full win short of the franchise shortstop.

That being said, it’s not exactly a Darryl Strawberry-playing-with-Springfield-Nuclear-Plant-employees situation. ZiPS expects the Royals to get around 2 WAR at most positions, with projections for Perez, Jonathan India, and Maikel Garcia crossing the two-win line in 2025. And if Michael Massey and Vinnie Pasquantino end up playing in more games than the 120-something that ZiPS projects for them, they each would also be worth more than 2 WAR. Witt may stand alone as a superstar in this lineup, but the Royals do have some solid talent here.

What is disappointing, given how competitive the projections are for the Royals as a whole and how close they are to the Guardians and Twins, is that Kansas City didn’t make a more vigorous attempt to upgrade its corner outfield spots. MJ Melendez hasn’t done anything that ought to entitle him to be the default option in left field, even if you look at his sunnier Steamer and OOPSY projections. If you subscribe to the ZiPS projection for Melendez, the Royals, as of now, look to enter the season as a reigning playoff team with a replacement-level corner outfield. Kansas City is projected to get positive value from its left fielders overall, but only because our Depth Charts is factoring in some time for India out there, and ZiPS doesn’t like right fielder Hunter Renfroe much more than it does Melendez. Right now, it looks like the value of four of Witt’s wins will do nothing more than offset the roughly replacement-level production of those two outfielders. Then again, that’s kind of what happened last year; while Witt posted a 10-win season, Royals corner outfielders combined for about -1.0 WAR. At the moment, ZiPS is projecting their corner outfielders to be worth about 1.3 WAR. That’s an improvement, yes, but as I mentioned up top, ZiPS projects Witt to be worth about four wins less than he was last season. That’s still a six-win season, but as things stand, the Royals are projected to get about two fewer wins of total value from the three positions — shortstop, left field, and right field — this year (7.3) than they did last year (9.4).

Pitchers

ZiPS may think that the Royals have the offense of a 68-win team plus Witt, but it thinks they have a rotation that’s in the top third of the league, a more bullish outlook than the other projections. It’s not shocking that ZiPS projects Cole Ragans to have a 4-WAR season, based on Depth Charts’ projected innings for him. (Below, you’ll see ZiPS has him at 2.9 WAR, but that’s only because it projects him to throw fewer innings.) But what might be surprising is how little Seth Lugo is projected to drop off from his superb 2024 season, when he finished second in the Cy Young voting. If Witt makes up for some of the sins for the offense, the Ragans-Lugo one-two punch covers up some more of them. Michael Wacha projects as a solid no. 3 starter, and though ZiPS doesn’t love Alec Marsh, it does like Kris Bubic quite a bit. It also thinks that pitchers like Michael Lorenzen and Kyle Wright are more than capable of filling out a decent rotation.

From a projection standpoint, Noah Cameron might be the most interesting Royals starter. He’s a soft-tosser, with a fastball in the low 90s, but he has excellent command and, most importantly, he avoided getting his brains beaten in by Triple-A hitters, which is a frequent fate of pitchers of this type. Instead, opposing batters had a very low average exit velocity against him (under 83 mph). And thanks to his changeup and curveball, which are both plus pitches, he also struck out 29% of the Triple-A batters he faced. A control pitcher who can avoid hard contact and knows how to get some strikeouts is someone worth watching.

ZiPS projects the bullpen to be right around league average, thanks in large part to Lucas Erceg and Hunter Harvey, both picked up last July for the pennant race (and beyond). Considered just as a reliever, Angel Zerpa would have a projected 3.65 ERA, an slight improvement over his solid 2024 season. John Schreiber gets a fairly good projection as well, but after that, ZiPS is less impressed with Kansas City’s relief options. If the Royals are not going to fix their outfield in free agency – and they may not be able to do that anymore because most of the quality guys have already signed — they might want to get another arm or two to improve their bullpen.

From a preliminary standpoint, ZiPS projects Kansas City to finish with 82-85 wins in 2025. That’s tantalizingly close to competing on equal terms with the Twins and Guardians, close enough that the Royals should keep adding this offseason to pull ahead of their division rivals and make a run at another postseason appearance.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here. Size of player names is very roughly proportional to Depth Chart playing time. The final team projections may differ considerably from our Depth Chart playing time.

Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned or have retired, players who will miss 2025 due to injury, and players who were released in 2024. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a Norwegian Ukulele Dixieland Jazz band that only covers songs by The Smiths, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.11.

Hitters are ranked by zWAR, which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those that appear in the full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR. It is important to remember that ZiPS is agnostic about playing time, and has no information about, for example, how quickly a team will call up a prospect or what veteran has fallen into disfavor.

As always, incorrect projections are either caused by misinformation, a non-pragmatic reality, or by the skillful sabotage of our friend and former editor. You can, however, still get mad at me on Twitter or on BlueSky.

The Dodgers won 100 games in 2023. Then they signed the top two free agents in that year’s class: Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, a pair of unicorns the likes of which aren’t available every offseason. In 2024, the Dodgers had the best record in baseball. Then they won the World Series, and along the way made the last two rounds of the playoffs look pretty easy. Ohtani won the NL MVP award.

And then they signed a bunch of new players and brought back a few more! Blake Snell! Roki Sasaki! Tanner Scott! Hyeseong Kim! Michael Conforto! Kirby Yates, probably! Teoscar Hernández! Blake Treinen! Kotaro Matsushima! (OK, Matsushima is a rugby player — I included him to see if you’re paying attention.)

MLB needs a salary cap, say two thirds of the 36,000 respondents to a much-circulated poll on MLB Trade Rumors. More jarring are the results to question no. 2: Almost exactly half of some 27,000 respondents would be willing to lose the entire 2027 season if it meant MLB instituted a salary cap. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Back in early October, Termarr Johnson self-assuredly told MLB Pipeline’s Jim Callis that he is continuing to work on being “the best hitter in the world.” The 20-year-old Pittsburgh Pirates prospect didn’t put it quite that way when I spoke to him days later, but he did exude determination and confidence when addressing his craft. That’s understandable. Drafted fourth overall in 2022 out of Atlanta’s Mays High School, Johnson remains a high-ceiling hitter, albeit one whose developmental path hasn’t been as smooth as many had anticipated.

His 2024 season included both stumbles and strides. The 5-foot-7, 190-pound middle infielder logged a solid 121 wRC+ between High-A Greensboro (487 plate appearances) and Double-A Altoona (57), but as our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen wrote last summer, Johnson’s “underlying contact data is pretty concerning.” Moreover, while his 15 home runs were indicative of plus power potential, the accompanying .386 slugging percentage was a bit underwhelming. Johnson’s left-handed stroke is unquestionably capable of causing damage, but further fine-tuning is needed before that can happen at the big league level.

Johnson discussed his approach to hitting shortly after the start of the Arizona Fall League season.

———

David Laurila: You’re still just 20 years old. Do you feel that you’ve settled into your identity as a hitter?

Termarr Johnson: “For sure. I feel like I have a pretty good swing, and I hit the ball hard pretty often, so I’m just trying to keep a good approach and bring the pitcher to me. I feel like that puts me in the best position possible. And to be honest with you, I’m a different hitter every at-bat. I’m a different hitter based on… like, every pitcher is different. Every pitch is different. Every situation is different. I’ll be a different hitter if there’s a runner on base and I’m trying to get him in, late in the game, or I’ll be a different hitter when I’m leading off the game.”

Laurila: That’s basically approach. What about mechanically? Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, I published my findings about the relationship between when free agents sign and the size of their contracts. As a quick refresher, in recent years, the last 20% or so of free agents to sign have been settling for contracts meaningfully lower than pre-offseason expectations. But that finding raises more questions, some of which I hope to answer today.

First, there’s an obvious question: Did the free agents who got those late, discounted deals perform worse than expected during the following season? In other words, did their low-dollar-value deals foreshadow lower-than-projected production? To examine this, I took the upcoming season’s projections for the players ranked on my Top 50 Free Agents list in each of the past three years, 150 players in all, to come up with a projected WAR for each segment of players. I then compared it to how they actually did in the ensuing year. There is indeed a drop-off for those who signed late:

First things first: Every group underperformed its projections. That comes down to playing time. Our projections use Depth Charts playing time, which approximates the most likely distribution of playing time across a given roster without accounting for the likelihood of injuries. Just as an example, non-catcher batters were projected for an average of more than 600 plate appearances in this dataset, and they came in closer to the mid-500s in practice. So don’t pay too much attention to the absolute numbers; the relative differences are what to look at here.

The last 10 free agents to sign saw huge shortfalls in production relative to expectations. One reason: They played less. The average hitter in this group of 150 free agents batted 70 times less than projected. Hitters signed among the last 10 free agents in their class batted 100 times less than projected. Likewise, the average pitcher in the group came up 25 innings shy of projections, but pitchers among the last 10 players signed came up 40 innings short.
Read the rest of this entry »