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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“Hey, they won’t have to say ‘we tried’ this time.” I can’t attribute that quote to anyone in particular, but the Winter Meetings were abuzz with variations on a theme. After missing out on Juan Soto and Max Fried earlier in the week, the Boston Red Sox switched gears from free agency to the trade market and found their star. In a blockbuster deal, they’re acquiring Garrett Crochet from the Chicago White Sox in exchange for Kyle Teel, Braden Montgomery, Chase Meidroth, and Wikelman Gonzalez, as Julian McWilliams of the Boston Globe first reported.

This is the biggest trade of the offseason, and it’ll almost surely still occupy that position when next season rolls around. Pitchers like Crochet don’t hit the market very often. He blew the doors off the league in his first year of starting, pairing premium velocity with two excellent secondaries. He threw 146 innings, struck out more than 200 batters, and barely walked anyone while doing so. His strikeout stuff, exploding fastball, and lanky lefty frame call to mind Chris Sale, another Sox-to-Sox trade piece, and with the White Sox in the middle of a gut-renovation rebuild, he was always likely to get traded. The only questions were who for, and which team was most interested in adding him to their rotation.

We’ll cover the ins and outs of the prospects included in the deal in a separate post. Broadly speaking, though, the White Sox got a little bit of everything in their return. Teel is a Top 100 catching prospect approaching major league readiness with impressive speed. Montgomery is a high-risk, high-reward outfield prospect, the 12th pick of the 2024 draft. Gonzalez has mouth watering stuff that took a step back this year, and a sky-high walk rate to match. Meidroth is an on-base genius with questionable power and an uncertain defensive future. The White Sox have so many needs that they don’t have to be choosy about filling particular holes or looking for particular profiles. They just need talent. This return fits well with that best player available mentality. Read the rest of this entry »

The Blue Jays came into the offseason at a crossroads. With Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Bo Bichette headed for free agency after the 2025 season, the pressure is on: Make the playoffs or go the entirety of their team control years without a single playoff win. (They’re 0-6 in three Wild Card series.) It’s no surprise they were in on Juan Soto, and after coming up short there, they pivoted to the trade market, acquiring Andrés Giménez (and Nick Sandlin) from the Cleveland Guardians in exchange for Spencer Horwitz and Nick Mitchell. The Guardians then sent Horwitz on to the Pirates in exchange for Luis L. Ortiz, Michael Kennedy, and Josh Hartle, all of whom we’ll break down in a forthcoming post.

This trade improves the Blue Jays’ outlook for 2025, and it does so in a way that fits their recent team-building to a T. Two years ago, they added Daulton Varsho and Kevin Kiermaier, perhaps the two best defensive outfielders in baseball, and frequently played them together. They gave Santiago Espinal regular playing time when his defense graded out well, then phased him out in favor of new defensive wunderkind Ernie Clement when Espinal faltered defensively. They used Isiah Kiner-Falefa to patch defensive holes across the diamond until they traded him this past summer. Now they’re adding Giménez, one of the best infield defenders in all of baseball, to the mix.

Last season marked Giménez’s third straight Gold Glove and second straight Fielding Bible award. The voters (full disclosure: I am one of them) didn’t give it to him on reputation. He’s not just a shortstop playing second base; he’s a very good shortstop playing second base. He has the strongest throwing arm of any second baseman and uses it to his advantage, ranging up the middle to make outrageous plays. He has soft hands and quick reflexes. Statcast credits him with 37 runs above average over the past three years, tops in the majors. DRS thinks Statcast is being too modest – it credits him with 59 runs saved, 22 ahead of second place. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t know the name for this phenomenon, but I’m guessing everyone has experienced it at some point. You hear something enough times, and you start to repeat it without really thinking critically about it. My example: the breakeven stolen base rate. I’ve heard that term so many times over the years, often in connection with whether teams were stealing too much or not enough, that I incorporated it into my thought processes like it was my own.

But then someone asked me why the optimal stolen base success rate was around 70%, and I realized that I’d been wrong. It was a bolt-of-inspiration kind of moment – you only need to hear the counter-argument once to re-assess your old, uncritically assumed thought. Why should teams keep stealing so long as they’re successful more than 70% (ish) of the time? I couldn’t explain it to myself using math.

The other side of the coin, the notion that teams should be successful at far better than the breakeven rate in the aggregate, is incredibly easy to understand. There’s a difference between marginal return and total return. Consider a business where you’re making investments. Your first investment makes $10. Your next one makes $8, and then $6, and so on. You could keep investing until your business breaks even – until you make a negative $10 investment to offset that first one, more or less ($10+$8+$6+$4+$2+$0-$2-$4-$6-$8-$10). But that’s a clearly bad decision. You should stop when your marginal return stops being positive – when an investment returns you $0, you can just stop going and pocket the $30 ($10+$8+$6+$4+$2+$0). Read the rest of this entry »

For a month or so every year it seems, Danny Jansen looks like Babe Ruth. The only season out of the past four in which he hasn’t put up a 20-game stretch with a wRC+ over 200 was 2023, and he was pretty awesome in 2023 anyway; he posted a 115 wRC+ overall that year, while playing the most offensively-challenged position in the sport, no less. So in some ways, the Rays might have just signed the best offensive catcher in baseball:

@JeffPassan tweetedCatcher Danny Jansen and the Tampa Bay Rays are in agreement on a one-year, $8.5 million contract that includes a mutual option for a second season, sources tell ESPN. Jansen, who has played in Toronto and Boston, remains in the AL East. On it: @ByRobertMurray and @TBTimes_Rays.

— Passanthallich (@passanthalbot.bsky.social) 2024-12-06T18:18:18.487825+00:00

Of course, when it comes to overall production, they absolutely didn’t. Jansen was white hot to start the year in 2024 – and then ended the season with an 89 wRC+, going from target deadline acquisition to backup in the process. And while he has indeed hit well when healthy, he gets hurt a lot. Across those aforementioned four seasons, he’s accumulated only 1,078 plate appearances. He hit the IL twice in 2021, twice again in ’22, twice yet again in ’23, and then missed the start of the ’24 season rehabbing from the last ’23 injury.

So maybe Jansen is secretly an amazing hitter – or maybe it’s a miracle that he can even still play baseball. Either of those could be true, and of course the truth is likely somewhere in between. The Rays are famously good at discerning where in the “somewhere in the middle” players lie, and as such, they feel like a natural home for Jansen.

Finding catchers who can both hit and field is nearly impossible. The Rays haven’t particularly prioritized them in the draft, and they certainly haven’t gone out of their way to trade for or sign marquee catchers. That’s how they ended up with Ben Rortvedt (career wRC+: 70) as their primary catcher in 2024. In 2023, that role went to Christian Bethancourt (career wRC+: 71). In 2022, Bethancourt backed up Francisco Mejía (career wRC+: a scintillating 86, though with poor defense).
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A year ago, Juan Soto was the buzz of baseball’s Winter Meetings. It wasn’t because of anything he had agency over, though. The San Diego Padres were reportedly looking to trade him, and they eventually did. This year, Soto is the story again. But instead of waiting to see what his fate is, he’ll get to choose. Or maybe I should say that he did choose, because as Jon Heyman first reported, Soto signed a 15-year, $765 million dollar deal to join the New York Mets.

Presumably, you aren’t reading this article with no background knowledge of who Soto is. Still, I want to give you a refresher, because Soto is such a delightful player. He’s your favorite hitter’s favorite hitter. He has the best batting eye in baseball, and it’s not close. His sense of the strike zone is so good that it feels like he’s dictating the terms rather than the pitcher, one of very few hitters in baseball who gives that impression. He’s perennially one of the best in the game when it comes to avoiding swinging and missing, and he walks nearly a fifth of the time because pitchers are too afraid to challenge him.

Why are they too afraid? Because he’s also one of the best power hitters in baseball. He launched 41 homers and 31 doubles in 2024. He’s hit 201 home runs in his career, seventh-best in the majors over that span. His worst seasonal line was in 2022… when he hit .242/.401/.452 while getting traded mid-season. “Worst” is all relative, though; it was the ninth-best offensive line in the majors that year. Soto is so good offensively that despite being known for patience first and power second, he’s actually 11th in the league in batting average since debuting. He’s just good at every facet of hitting. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s just put the headline up right away. Luis Severino is now an Athletic:

BREAKING: Right-hander Luis Severino and the A’s are in agreement on a three-year, $67 million contract, sources tell ESPN. It is the largest guarantee in the history of the A’s franchise. And even with the qualifying offer attached, Severino got well over market expectations.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) December 5, 2024

Now this is an interesting free agent signing. The A’s just signed the second-biggest deal of the offseason so far, and the largest in franchise history. They have one other player with a guaranteed contract on the team – and that’s lefty reliever T.J. McFarland, making $1.8 million in 2025. This is a sea change in terms of how the team operates, so let’s talk about why they did it and the ways it could succeed or fail.

First things first: The A’s could use some pitching. They were better than you’d think in 2024 – they won 19 more games than their dispiriting 2023 campaign. Three different A’s hitters – Brent Rooker, Lawrence Butler, and JJ Bleday – eclipsed three wins above replacement, the first time that had happened since the team shipped out Matt Olson and Matt Chapman. All three of those guys are young and under team control for a while. Shea Langeliers and Zack Gelof both look like good everyday players. Jacob Wilson is an intriguing top prospect. If it weren’t for the overall John Fisher stink of the franchise, this lineup would feel mighty tantalizing.
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Let’s be honest: Headlines aside, trying to dub one pitch the “best” in baseball is a silly way of thinking about things. There are so many pitches a year that anointing exactly one the best doesn’t make much sense. Emmanuel Clase threw hundreds of unhittable cutters this year. Blake Snell’s curveball, when correctly weighted, might as well be made of smoke. Paul Skenes and Jhoan Duran both throw 100-mph offspeed pitches. How can you separate one of these from the rest?

One easy way? Ask one of our pitch models. PitchingBot gives every single pitch three grades. There’s a pure stuff grade, a pure command grade, and a holistic overall score. Those work basically how you’d expect. Stuff is just the raw characteristics of the pitch, ignoring location and count. Command accounts for count and location. The overall grade isn’t a straight combination of the two; it uses all the same inputs, but instead of separately considering pitch shape and location, it grades the combination.

If, for example, you wanted to see the nastiest pitch of the year, you’d look at each individual pitch’s stuff grade. You’d want something with a ton of movement, good velocity, and probably some kind of funky release point to make the other attributes play up. It almost certainly won’t be a fastball, because there’s no way you can match the pure bat-missing prowess of a breaking pitch that way. You’d be looking for something like this:

That Kevin Gausman splitter is just the ticket. It’s not his most consistent pitch – splitters are tough that way. The movement profile is all over the place depending on his exact grip, which leads to the occasional floating ball that hitters can obliterate. But that variance works in his favor sometimes, too, like on that pitch to Giancarlo Stanton. That splitter fell 37 inches, six more than his average one, because he killed the spin on it absolutely perfectly. Read the rest of this entry »

As I occasionally mention, I worked in finance before I started writing about baseball. One of my early bosses told me something that pretty much everyone in the industry has heard at one time or another. I had just presented a fancy trade that took advantage of about seven different financial instruments to eke out a small profit with minimal risk. He took a long look at my page of notes, scrunched up his nose, and gave me a tip that has stuck with me ever since: “Hedges are for gardens.”

That’s not something you’ll learn in a book. Financial theory is all about reducing variance and then doing the resulting low-risk trade you’ve built over and over. They call them hedge funds for a reason, after all: hedging against loss is a lot of the point. But the secret those books won’t tell you is that this behavior has a logical limit. If I showed you a risk-free way to make a dollar, theory would tell you to replicate that exact trade a billion times. If I showed you a riskier way to make five dollars, theory would tell you to reject it in favor of the first trade and make up the foregone four dollars in volume.

But in the real world, that’s not how things work. As it turns out, you can’t replicate things infinitely. Plenty of the decisions I’d made that reduced variance also reduced expected return per unit of the trade. You can think of it in simplified terms: I’d taken something that would make me four dollars, plus or minus five dollars, and turned it into something that made me two dollars for sure. Two is less than four. If I could select the guaranteed two dollar option twice, that would be clearly better than the risky four dollar option, but my boss pointed out that just doing twice as much isn’t always easy, or even feasible. The better trade, he told me, was the one that didn’t sacrifice quite so much expected value in the name of hedging.

What does this have to do with baseball? More than you’d think. Accepting lower returns in exchange for lower risk is a time-honored tradition across all sports. Whether it’s the running game in football, mid-range jumpers in basketball, or setting up deep and playing defensively in soccer, old school tactics were heavy on risk mitigation. Baseball has tons of these: shortening up to put the ball in play, pitching to contact, sacrifice bunting, letting your starter go seven regardless of how he’s pitching that day. Those strategies are all about minimizing variance around your central outcomes rather than trying for the highest effective value. Read the rest of this entry »

Last offseason, the Mets got in early on the starting pitching market. They signed Luis Severino in late November, later pairing him with Sean Manaea atop their rotation. Both deals were modest and short term, essentially chances for the players to rebuild their résumés while pitching for a playoff contender. And that’s exactly what happened. So now, with Severino and Manaea in line for larger paydays, the circle of life restarts: The Mets have signed Frankie Montas to a two-year, $34 million deal with an opt out after the first year.

At surface level, Montas doesn’t seem like a blockbuster signing. He just posted a 4.84 ERA (and 4.71 FIP, this wasn’t some weird BABIP issue) in his first year back after missing most of 2023 due to a shoulder injury. He’s about to turn 32. His last excellent season was in 2021. The list of drawbacks is lengthy.

Ah, but “knowing which drawbacks to overlook” might be David Stearns’ superpower. Manaea was coming off of two straight abysmal seasons when he signed in New York, and Severino hadn’t been great since 2018. But both had the capability to excel – they already had in their careers, and not in a fluky way. The right surroundings, the right defense, a pinch of luck here and there: It wasn’t hard to see how those two deals could work out. Likewise, Montas might have been down in 2024, but I have no trouble talking myself into an improved 2025.

Montas has never been a pure bat-missing strikeout machine. When he was at his best in Oakland, he did everything just well enough for the total package to work. He struck out more batters than average, walked fewer than average, kept the ball in the ballpark, and went six or so innings a start. No one would mistake him for Cy Young, but doing a bunch of things well added up to an ERA in the mid-3s. That’s a clear playoff starter, exactly what the Mets need.
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