As of the time I’m writing this article, roughly half of our Top 50 free agents have signed new contracts this offseason. That sounds like a great time to take a look at how the market has developed, both for individual players and overall positional archetypes. For example, starting pitchers have been all the rage so far, or so it seems. But does that match up with the data?

I sliced the data up into three groups to get a handle on this: starters, relievers, and position players. I then calculated how far off both I and the crowdsourced predictions were when it came to average annual value and total dollars handed out. You can see here that I came out very slightly ahead of the pack of readers by these metrics, at least so far:

To be fair, none of us have done particularly well. The last two years I’ve run this experiment, I missed by around $1 million in average annual value, and the crowd missed by between $1 and $2 million. Likewise, I’ve missed by roughly $10 million in average annual value per contract, with the crowd around $18 million. This year, the contracts have been longer than I expected, and richer than you readers expected, though you did a much better job on a relative basis when it came to predicting total dollar outlay. We were all low on every category, though, across the board.
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Are there any Oakland Athletics fans reading this? If so, don’t worry, your team is doing its usual nonsense, there’s nothing to see here. You’re lucky they left, don’t feel so bad, those last few years can’t take away all the good times. You can go ahead and skip this one, great article, hooray. Now that that group is gone, and we’re left with Sacramentonians, new A’s fans, more general fans of the sport, and perhaps Vegas residents, let me say this: The A’s signing Brent Rooker to a five-year, $60 million extension is awesome, and I love it.

Rooker was a rare bright spot on a dismal 2023 A’s squad. Then he was downright excellent on the green-shoots-of-hope 2024 team, compiling 5.1 WAR, even with the punishing positional adjustment that comes from DHing, thanks to a scorching .293/.365/.562 batting line. That line is even better than you might think, coming as it did in the cavernous Coliseum, and it didn’t look fluky.

Rooker hits the stuffing out of the ball. He finished eighth in barrels per batted ball in 2024, just ahead of certifiably enormous guys Oneil Cruz, Kyle Schwarber, and Marcell Ozuna. He also elevates the ball more frequently than any of that crew. The two are intertwined, obviously, but any time you’re hitting rockets like the 2024 versions of Schwarber and Ozuna, you’re doing something right. You could hardly do better from scratch if you were trying to come up with an ideal power hitter; a vicious swing (78th-percentile bat speed) that frequently puts the ball in play at profitable launch angles (86th-percentile sweet spot rate) means plenty of barrels (97th percentile) and 39 homers even in a park that suppresses righty power mightily. Read the rest of this entry »

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I’m sure that Yankees fans are well and truly tired of hearing about Juan Soto. We get it, he likes the other New York team more. So don’t worry, friends. I won’t mention Juan Soto, unparalleled hitting genius, after this paragraph. Sure, the ghost of Juan Soto, signer of the biggest contract in professional sports history, might inform the rest of the moves the Yankees are making. Sure, not signing superstar Juan Soto after his incandescent 2024 season makes all the rest of the team’s moves feel minor. But again, you won’t see the words “Juan Soto” after this instance, so let’s get to the moves the Yankees are making to bolster their team in the aftermath of losing one of the brightest stars in the game.

Signing Paul Goldschmidt
The Yankees are going to need some offense if they want to replace Jua – whoa, almost broke my own rule right out of the gate. Uh… the Yankees are going to need some offense, period. They were a top-heavy team last year between Aaron Judge and his running mate, name tastefully withheld. Giancarlo Stanton’s playoff surge notwithstanding, the existing roster just didn’t have that much juice beyond Judge. Sure, adding Cody Bellinger was nice, but they needed to do more. Paul Goldschmidt, signed for one year and $12.5 million, is definitely more, it’s just a question of how much after his bummer of a 2024 season. Read the rest of this entry »

Every story written about the Mets this offseason starts with Juan Soto, but pretty much all of them immediately introduce a caveat: “They’ll also need to sign more pitching.” And it’s true! The Mets, as constituted after signing Soto, had a fearsome top of the lineup and a mystery box of a pitching staff. But they also had money, which can be exchanged for goods and services, and now they’ve given that money to Sean Manaea, who signed a three-year, $75 million deal to return to Queens last week.

Manaea was comfortably the team’s best starter in 2024. He signed a one-year prove-it deal that valued him somewhere between a swingman and a fourth starter, and he delivered the goods, to the tune of a 3.47 ERA over 181 innings of work. He got even better in the second half, adopting a new cross-fire delivery and changing the shape of his fastball for the better. A down postseason hardly put a damper on his year; the 2024 version of Manaea fulfilled the promise he’d shown since breaking into the majors in 2016.

The question, then, is whether he can do it again. There’s plenty of reason to believe he can. Manaea’s fastball plays much better from a low slot, and he misses enough bats to run an above-average strikeout rate even without a true wipeout pitch. He also got his walk rate under control in the second half of the year, which has long been a sticking point in his game. It’s not so much that Manaea’s wild, but at his best, he was running walk rates around 5%, and that number had ballooned into the 8-9% region in recent years. After changing his delivery in late July, he walked only 6.2% of opposing batters. He’s never going to strike out a gaudy number of guys, but if he isn’t issuing free passes, his stuff keeps hitters off balance and results in a lot of easy innings even without strikeouts. Read the rest of this entry »

Last offseason, the Diamondbacks were in search of a marquee starter to pair with Zac Gallen atop their rotation. The market was thin at the top – Yoshinobu Yamamoto and Shohei Ohtani were probably never available to them, so their best options were Sonny Gray, Blake Snell, Eduardo Rodriguez, Shota Imanaga, and Jordan Montgomery. They signed two of those guys, and neither delivered the rotation-stabilizing performance they had expected. But instead of waving their hands in the air and raving at the injustice of variance, the Diamondbacks got right back on the horse:

BREAKING: Corbin Burnes to Diamondbacks, $210M, 6 years. opt out after 2 years

— Jon Heyman (@jonheyman.bsky.social) 2024-12-28T06:32:12.313Z

Corbin Burnes was the best free agent pitcher available. In each of the last five seasons, he’s been one of the top pitchers in the game, racking up a 2.88 ERA, 3.01 FIP, and 816 innings pitched. He’s second in WAR (21.7) over that time frame, second in RA9-WAR (23.2), second in strikeouts (946), and third in innings pitched. In other words, he’s been a capital-A Ace, a set-it-and-forget-it choice at the top of the starting rotation. He’ll receive $35 million a year for six seasons, with an opt-out after the second year of the deal, which also includes a $10 million signing bonus.

With Gallen also on their dance card, the Diamondbacks have one of the best one-two combinations in the majors. That doesn’t even include Merrill Kelly, a borderline All-Star when healthy, or Brandon Pfaadt, who looked like he was finally breaking out before a rough final two months of the season. Add in Montgomery and Rodriguez, and Arizona goes six deep with plausible playoff starters. That’s how you injury-proof a rotation – sheer depth.
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Hi, I’m Ben Clemens. You might know me from such articles as “C’mon, Orioles, Do Something”, “Why Are the Orioles’ Playoff Odds So Low?”, and “Wait, FanGraphs Is Too Low on the Orioles Again?!”. In my spare time, I also write about the rest of the league, but today I’m focusing on Baltimore yet again given their latest signing: The O’s and right-hander Tomoyuki Sugano have agreed to a one-year, $13 million contract.

Sugano has been one of the best pitchers in NPB for more than a decade. The 35-year-old won the Central League MVP in 2014, and he’s added two more MVP awards since then. He also won two Sawamura Awards – think the Cy Young, only for the entire league and with minimum criteria – neither in any of his three MVP seasons. In other words, he’s been racking up hardware like no one else for his entire career.

Reading a scouting report on Sugano is like chicken soup for my command-obsessed soul. If pitching was entirely about hitting a tiny target, Sugano might be the best pitcher in the world. Saying that he has the ball on a string would be offensive to Sugano; I can’t control a yo-yo as well as he can spot his five-pitch arsenal. He walked 16 of the 608 batters he faced last year, a 2.6% rate that would make George Kirby jealous.

It’s not just walk avoidance that sets Sugano apart from the crowd, though. He works the corners and tunnels his pitches off of each other to great effect. He can add or subtract from everything he throws, so his five-pitch mix can feel even deeper when a hitter is trying to figure out what’s coming next. He might not inspire the physical discomfort batters experience when facing triple-digit heat that could come right at their ribcage if the pitcher misses his location, but facing Sugano is like solving a Saturday crossword puzzle, if crossword puzzles threw splitters. Read the rest of this entry »

The Winter Meetings always feature trades, but two stood above the fray last week. First, the Guardians traded Andrés Giménez to the Blue Jays in a two-part transaction that briefly left Cleveland with three lefty-hitting first basemen. Then the White Sox traded Garrett Crochet to the Red Sox for four prospects. The best of that group, Kyle Teel, happens to play catcher, the same position as Chicago’s top prospect Edgar Quero. They even have the same future value grade of 50, which is the cutoff for top 100 prospects.

The Guardians made an extra trade to avoid doubling up on similar archetypes, sending Spencer Horwitz to the Pirates for three young pitchers, but the White Sox just kept both catchers. I heard a lot of murmured questioning of that decision as I walked around the Dallas hotel that briefly hosted the center of the baseball universe. But I think both teams were acting rationally, and that worrying about Teel and Quero overlapping is silly. I can’t prove it for you – but I did come up with some data that will hopefully sway your opinion.

Cleveland’s case was straightforward. Steamer projects Horwitz as a 2.5 WAR/600 PA player. It projects Kyle Manzardo as a 1.8 WAR/600 PA player. Josh Naylor? Steamer has him down for 2.4 WAR/600 PA. Three players for two positions — first and DH. (Yes, Horwitz has played second base, too, but he really shouldn’t be a second baseman, and I don’t think the Guardians would’ve used him there.) One of them would ride the bench despite being an above-average contributor, a poor decision for a team that’s trying to maximize its resources. Something had to give.

On the other hand, there are the White Sox. They, too, traded a young star, and the best player they got back plays a position where they already had a similar option. Teel was our 42th-ranked prospect on our updated Top 100 list in 2024, a polished all-around catcher who we expect to reach the majors at some point in the next two years. Quero was our 40th-ranked prospect, and you’re never going to believe this, but he’s a polished all-around catcher who we expect to reach the majors at some point in the next two years.
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It’s a ritual as old as time. The Brewers develop an intriguing young player into an All-Star, and a fun one at that. Next, that player approaches free agency – that’s how time works. The Brewers then trade that player to a contending team, getting back a few players with multiple years of team control. Finally, the Brewers develop those players into stars, spin the wheel again, and the band plays on. Today’s edition: Milwaukee traded Devin Williams to the Yankees in exchange for Nestor Cortes and infield prospect Caleb Durbin, as Jeff Passan first reported.

Williams is the rare pitcher who isn’t even as famous as his best pitch. His screwball/changeup hybrid is nicknamed The Airbender, and it’s been making major leaguers look like overmatched kids for years. On the back of that pitch and a plus fastball, he’s compiled a career ERA of 1.83 over five-plus seasons of dominance. His 39.4% career strikeout rate reads like a typo. He rose to prominence during the 2020 season, and he’s been the second-best reliever in baseball since then, trailing only Emmanuel Clase.

It doesn’t matter what you call the pitch; Williams’ results speak for themselves. “Changeup-first dominant closer” only sounds fluky until you look at the raw data. He misses more bats than Josh Hader. He might even be better than his run-prevention numbers would suggest, because the runs he gives up come in bunches. In 2023, for example, he gave up 10 earned runs all year, and four were in a single game. The upshot: He’s first among relievers in win probability added by a ton, because a truly outrageous number of his games end in scoreless innings. He’s not Mariano Rivera, but he might be the closest thing in today’s game: an automatic ninth inning.
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