With nearly every trade, you can expect fans of one side or the other to come away wondering where their GM went wrong. You can probably hear the complaints in your head, because you’ve almost certainly made them at one point or another yourself. We gave up those guys? For this one? Was there something else in it for us? What was he thinking?!?

It’s much rarer for both sides to have that reaction, because usually conventional wisdom tilts one way or the other. But the Braves and Red Sox might have accomplished it this past week:

BREAKING: The Atlanta Braves are acquiring seven-time All-Star Chris Sale in a trade with the Boston Red Sox, sources tell ESPN. Well-regarded infield prospect Vaughn Grissom is the return to Boston, which will send money with Sale, who waived his no-trade clause to join Atlanta

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) December 30, 2023

So in honor of sports talk radio and breathless questions about what could possibly be going through people’s heads, let’s examine both sides through the same lens. Read the rest of this entry »

For the past decade, the joke around Mets pitchers has been that they spend more time injured than active. There’s no shortage of examples; Jacob deGrom and Noah Syndergaard spring to my mind first, but Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander dealt with injuries in their time in Queens, too. Edwin Díaz just missed the 2023 season. Zack Wheeler never quite lived up to his potential when he was there, and injuries were a key reason why. Matt Harvey, Seth Lugo, Steven Matz — heck, here’s a story from 2017 about the Mets’ injury woes, which were already a trope before their recent woes.

In that sense, Coleman Crow is the platonic ideal of a Mets pitcher. He joined the organization in June, part of the package the Angels sent to New York in exchange for Eduardo Escobar. At the time, he hadn’t pitched since late April thanks to an elbow injury. His first notable decision as a Met was to get Tommy John surgery for that elbow; he’s now tracking for a return at the very end of next year, or potentially in 2025. He’s been a Met for roughly six months and thrown exactly zero pitches for them in that time.

Or maybe I should have said: he was a Met for roughly six months. On Wednesday, the Mets traded him to the Brewers in exchange for Adrian Houser and Tyrone Taylor, ending his tenure with the team. You think Harvey was often injured? Crow dialed it up to an entirely different level, albeit in the minors. It’s the kind of performance we might not see again for a while. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello, and welcome to another edition of Semi-Rebuilding Team Signs Solid Players. Last time, we saw the Kansas City Royals sign Michael Wacha and Hunter Renfroe. This time, we’re headed 800 miles east, to Pittsburgh, because the Pirates are our next feature. In the past week, they’ve added Martín Pérez and team legend Andrew McCutchen on one-year deals.

The McCutchen signing is the more interesting of the two to me – and also one that felt inevitable since the conclusion of last season. McCutchen enjoyed a resurgent 2023 in Pittsburgh, his first year back after a five-year, four-team odyssey that he embarked on after leaving before the 2018 season. He walked more, struck out less, stole more bases, made solid contact more frequently; if you can dream it, he did it better last year than he had in his previous peregrinations.

The result of that improvement was a 115 wRC+ and a .256/.378/.397 slash line, heavy on on-base and light on homers (12, the lowest he’s posted in a healthy season). Early in the season, it looked like that performance might be a key part of a Pirates playoff berth. But the team faded in the second half, and McCutchen’s season ended on September 4 when he partially tore his Achilles tendon legging out a double. Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, the Padres had a clear approach to the offseason. They came in badly needing innings, but with a decorated and devastating lineup – particularly after they signed Xander Bogaerts to add to their shortstop treasure trove. They did have a few holes, though, so they shopped in volume for complementary bats and mid-rotation arms. Their two preferred pitching targets: Seth Lugo and Michael Wacha. Clearly, the Royals were taking notes.

That’s right: After signing Lugo earlier this month, the Royals turned around and inked Wacha to a two-year, $32 million pact last week. They also addressed some of their outfield deficiency by signing Hunter Renfroe to a two-year, $13 million deal of his own. Both contracts feature player opt-outs for the second year. By sheer number of major league deals signed this offseason, the Royals are now lapping the field. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve become increasingly fascinated by major league teams’ depth recently. The reasons for my fascination are all over the map. I’m always interested in looking for blind spots in our playoff odds, and a conversation with the big boss (hi David!) at the Winter Meetings got me thinking about how teams allocate playing time between starters and backups. I was already independently digging into how team strength changes throughout the year as their roster changes. The plight of various injured pitching staffs – and the triumph of the always-adding Rangers – was yet another angle on the problem.

To that end, I started looking at how much of each team’s playing time and WAR comes from their Opening Day rosters every year. I was looking for interesting trends, though I wasn’t exactly sure where to find them, so my plan was to keep an open mind and see what jumped out at me. But, uh, I didn’t expect this.

See, my first check was what percentage of each team’s total WAR in a given season came from their initial roster. In a given year, you might have a very healthy roster like the Blue Jays’ (88.6% of their total plate appearances plus total batters faced came from players who were in uniform for the first game), and thus end up with 91.5% of your WAR coming from that group. You might make a series of call-ups throughout the seasons like the Reds (58.9% of playing time on the Opening Day roster) and end up with only 63.9% of your WAR coming from that group. I thought that by taking averages of these, I might be able to learn something. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the weekend, the Dodgers hit the motherlode, signing Shohei Ohtani to a landmark 10-year contract. Turns out, though, MLB didn’t award them the 2024 World Series just for doing that. There’s still baseball to be played, and while the Dodgers certainly aren’t short on tremendous hitters, they do need some serious help on the pitching side. Enter the Rays:

BREAKING: The Los Angeles Dodgers and Tampa Bay Rays are in agreement on a trade to send RHP Tyler Glasnow and OF Manuel Margot to the Dodgers for RHP Ryan Pepiot and OF Jonny Deluca — contingent on Glasnow signing an extension with L.A., which is expected, sources tell ESPN.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) December 15, 2023

I’m not sure that I’m making a strong enough statement. The Dodgers need help on the pitching side, and they need it badly. Before this trade, their depth chart looked like this:

That’s dire. It’s a mixture of injury risk, light workloads, unproven arms, and pitchers who check multiple of those boxes at once. Ohtani obviously won’t pitch next year. Walker Buehler hasn’t pitched since June 2022, looked bad in that 2022 season, and is their nominal ace. Bobby Miller is the only other guy the team seems to trust, and they’ll need plenty of volume from him, but he made 26 starts last year to get to his 138.2 innings, so it’s not like there’s a ton more in the tank. If the Dodgers’ lineup is Boardwalk and Park Place, their rotation looks more like Mediterranean and Baltic Avenues. Read the rest of this entry »

So, so, so much digital ink has already been spilled writing about Shohei Ohtani’s groundbreaking, $700 million contract. It’s a sign of baseball’s new era. Maybe it’s an accounting gimmick. Did he sell himself short? Did he set a new high bar? Is he giving the Dodgers a loan, or an unfair competitive advantage? Is the competitive balance tax broken?

I don’t really think it’s any of those things, as you can probably tell from the fact that I included them in my opening paragraph, and in rapid succession at that. In fact, I don’t have much of an opinion about what this contract “means.” I don’t think it’s a good idea to try to figure out how baseball works based on a unicorn, basically. You’d do just as well trying to figure out how countries work by looking at Singapore, or how weather works by looking at a tornado.

That said, boy do I love numbers, and I especially love goofing around with them. I really enjoyed Jon Becker’s CBT explainer, as well as Rob Mains’s look at deferrals and tax regimes. One thing that I feel very strongly about is that treating this as either Ohtani getting fleeced by the Dodgers or him and the team pulling a fast one on the entire league is misunderstanding the situation. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball trades are at their most interesting when they involve players with notable skill sets and teams with widely varying needs. Here, take my Luis Arraez, and I’ll take your Pablo López in return. Your Zac Gallen for my Jazz Chisholm. I suppose the Marlins are, in this way at least, my platonic ideal of a baseball team. But not all trades are like that. Some trades barely care about the skillsets of the players involved and instead depend to an annoying amount on their contracts. Take this one, a trade from last week’s Winter Meetings:

Mariners Get:

• Jackson Kowar
• Cole Phillips

Braves Get:

• Jarred Kelenic
• Evan White
• Marco Gonzales

Read the rest of this entry »

The first few days of the Winter Meetings didn’t deliver much action; at breakfast on Wednesday, Erick Fedde versus Wade Miley as the biggest signing of the meetings was a popular debate. But things picked up as the gathering ground to a close. First, the Yankees traded for Juan Soto. Next, Eduardo Rodriguez agreed to terms with Arizona. Finally, Jeimer Candelario capped the meetings off when he signed with the Reds for three years and $45 million and a team option for another year, as MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand first reported.

Part of the allure of free agency, as a fan experience, is that you never know where any given player might land, or who your team might pick up. Sure, we all have opinions on where the top guys will sign, but until they put pen to paper, or at least until Jeff Passan gets a text about their chosen destination, nothing is set in stone. But if you’d asked me to predict signings that wouldn’t happen this winter, I would have made a lazy prediction: the Reds would stay away from hitters in general and infielders in particular.

That doesn’t have anything to do with Candelario, to be clear. I think he’ll be one of the bargain signings of the offseason, a plus bat with playable defense at third base on an affordable contract. A three-year deal nets the back half of his prime without too much messiness at the end of the contract, and he’s played at a 3–4 WAR clip in three out of the past four years. He’s been the 68th-best hitter in baseball by our count over those four years, just ahead of Luis Arraez and Ketel Marte in a similar number of plate appearances, if you’re trying to calibrate that in your head. Read the rest of this entry »

The appetizers have been cleared. The waiters have brought out new plates and utensils. There was a long wait between courses, something in the kitchen perhaps; Tom Colichio wouldn’t be pleased. But it’s time for the entree: the Yankees have acquired Juan Soto from the Padres in exchange for Michael King, Drew Thorpe, Jhony Brito, Randy Vásquez, and Kyle Higashioka. New York is also getting Trent Grisham in the deal. Soto and the Bombers have been linked all offseason, but it seemed like San Diego might hold off on a move until Shohei Ohtani signed with an eye toward marketing Soto to the teams who missed out. Instead, the Yankees jumped the queue and acquired perhaps the best hitter who was available this winter, whether by trade or free agency.

You already know the deal with Soto. He’s a modern-day avatar of plate discipline who won the Home Run Derby a few years ago. He’s walked more frequently than he’s struck out in each of the last four seasons while launching 104 homers. His 159 wRC+ is the fourth-best in the majors since the start of the 2020 season, behind new teammate Aaron Judge, Yordan Alvarez, and Mike Trout. His .431 on-base percentage laps the field; Freddie Freeman is second at .410. He’s durable, to boot: he started 160 games this year and pinch-hit in the other two. Read the rest of this entry »