Spring training is a reliably terrible time for injury news. After a whole winter of not playing (though still training, of course), ramping back up to game speed inevitably creates new injuries or aggravates old ones. This process is always worse for pitchers, because their job is inherently more injury prone. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know in this introduction.

Here’s something you might not have known, and certainly didn’t know before this week: The Boston Red Sox look to be hit hardest by this yearly attrition. As Jeff Passan reported, Lucas Giolito is probably going to miss the entire season with an elbow injury. He has both a partially torn UCL and a flexor strain, a double whammy that almost always leads to surgery. That’s a tough injury for a team that absolutely couldn’t afford it.

Oh, sure, other teams have suffered unfortunate injuries to top starting pitchers. Justin Verlander will begin the season on the IL with shoulder soreness. Sonny Gray tweaked his hamstring and might miss Opening Day as a result. Kevin Gausman is dealing with shoulder fatigue and his timeline for returning is murky. The list goes on and on. But Giolito’s injury looks more severe and will likely require a much longer recovery time that the other ones will, and that puts Boston in a particular bind. Read the rest of this entry »

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I’ve had depth on my mind a lot recently. That’s because a lot of us here at FanGraphs have, and it’s turned into some pretty cool work that I previewed last week. That’s probably the last you’ll hear about that little project for a bit while we keep refining it and trying to figure out how to use the general concept in different ways. But there was one takeaway in the comments section that I found pretty amazing and I’m going to riff on it today because hey, it’s still early March and baseball news is in short supply.

Remove the top 10 players from 28 teams in baseball – all but the Rockies and Nationals – and look at every team’s winning percentage against neutral opposition. The Rockies are projected 29th out of 30 teams, ahead of only the White-Sox-Minus-10s. The Nationals, meanwhile, are 27th, ahead of just the Angels-Minus-10s and then those Rockies and the Pale-Hose-Minus-10s.

That just sounds wrong. Remove the Mets’ best 10 players, to pick a so-so divisional rival for one of our benighted franchises, and their best remaining player would be either Brett Baty or Luis Severino, both projected for 1.6 WAR. Again, that’s their best player in this hypothetical world. And we have them down as a .425 team. We think the Nats are at .408 at full strength! It’s truly hard to wrap your head around how that could be possible. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I laid out a new method of quantifying depth that we’re looking into here at FanGraphs. It’s based on the idea that while our depth charts are a point estimate of how much each player will play, the real-life way things work is different. To mimic reality more closely, we’re experimenting with removing players from the depth charts algorithmically and rebuilding teams on the fly to see how they look without their best players. Yesterday’s article covers our methodology in great detail.

There’s one thing that I wanted to add to that article but couldn’t find the space for: more tables. There was one big giant table in there that showed each team’s winning percentage as we removed more and more players from their squad. But that’s just not a great way to look at anything – 300 numbers in a giant table is more information than our brains can easily process. I don’t have a lot of new information today, but I thought I’d slice that data up into more bite-sized chunks so you can look at it without your eyes glazing over. One quick note: All the tables in this article are sortable, so you can order them by whichever category you so desire. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the great perks of working at FanGraphs is that I get to discuss baseball with my equally obsessed coworkers. Obviously, this is the kind of job you don’t get into unless you love the sport. A lot of the time, that means we just end up nerding out over how much we enjoy some minor but cool thing, or perhaps discussing our favorite of the game’s idiosyncrasies. Sometimes, though, we come up with new ideas together, or one person’s passing fancy turns into another person’s brainstorm, and before you know it, something nifty and novel is happening.

That’s why I’m writing this article today. At the December Winter Meetings, a subset of us sat down for our annual let’s-talk-about-fun-baseball-problems technical meeting. David Appelman and Sean Dolinar ran things. Folks like Jeff Zimmermann and Dan Szymborski popped in at various points. Jason Martinez and Keaton Arneson had big plans for how to improve the site’s functionality. Those guys are great at building models, running websites — advancing the state of how FanGraphs (and ZiPS) works, basically. I like to make jokes and write articles about bunts, so as far as I can tell, I got invited because I’m good at coming up with bad but interesting ideas.

That said, this year one thing was on a lot of our minds: depth. I’ve written a lot about how well our playoff odds reflect reality. They’re pretty good! But there’s always been an obvious problem with them. They use static rosters, which means they don’t account for the fact that some teams are more vulnerable to injury or underperformance than others. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Dodgers traded for Tyler Glasnow this offseason, he wasn’t the only player the Rays sent west. Manuel Margot also joined Los Angeles, where he would to fill Jonny DeLuca’s old role as a righty-hitting outfielder capable of playing any of the three spots. Yet, Margot wasn’t exactly a snug fit for the Dodgers; his inclusion in the trade felt more like a way for Tampa Bay to shed salary. It seemed likely that Los Angeles would flip him to another team before the start of the season.

That’s exactly what happened on Monday, when the Dodgers sent Margot and minor league infielder Rayne Doncon to the Twins in exchange for minor league shortstop Noah Miller. Los Angeles also agreed to cover $6 million of Margot’s $10 million salary for 2024, along with the $2 million he’d be owed if Minnesota doesn’t exercise its team option for 2025, as Aaron Gleeman reported. So, in trading Margot, the Dodgers are saving $4 million; naturally, they promptly turned around and signed Enrique Hernández to a one-year, $4 million deal.

You can almost analyze the Dodgers’ side of this trade in a box, because the things being exchanged are so similar. In fact, to make my analysis make sense, you have to know how close the prospects are in value, so let’s start there. Doncon is a 20-year old middle infielder who spent 2023 at Single-A Rancho Cucamonga struggling against older pitchers. Want a prospect novel? Eric Longenhagen has one for you:

Doncon was a 2021 and 2022 backfield prodigy who looked like he could become a slugging middle infielder. His bat speed, body projection, as well as his struggles on defense and with chase, prompted Alfonso Soriano pipe dreams and more level-headed Esteury Ruiz comparisons at the time. Doncon had a mediocre 2023 with the bat – .215/.283/.368, albeit with a career-high 14 homers – but looked much better on defense. He currently has the actions and arm strength for shortstop, but he’s still young and has a lot of room on his frame, which means he may yet outgrow that position and move to either second or third. Doncon’s pitch recognition is not great, and he’s a bit more chase and whiff prone than is ideal, but he has good power for a hitter his age and is probably going to grow into more. The longer he can stay at short, the better chance he gives himself at being a useful big leaguer despite his flaws. The Twins have two seasons to develop Doncon before they have to decide whether to expose him to the Rule 5 draft, and realistically, they have another year or two beyond that to let him barbecue on the 40-man if they really want to. He adds an element of upside to their system as well as an element of risk. He is not likely to have a meteoric rise. Instead, he is a slow-burning, high-variance prospect.

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I write about the Rays a lot. I just wrote about them signing Amed Rosario, for example. Earlier this month, I wrote an article titled “The Rays Can’t Keep Getting Away With This, Can They?”, and in another, I wrote that I had recently daydreamed about one of my favorite Rays players during a root canal. I’m endlessly impressed by how this team does it. But this year? I cannot put into words how wild I find this version of its team construction. In other words, I’m writing about the Rays because they deserve it – or at least I think so.

Last year, they won 99 games. They had both one of the best offenses and one of the best pitching staffs in the American League. They did a little bit of everything, and nearly overtook the Orioles for first place in the AL as a result. But that was last year. Three of Tampa Bay’s top six players aren’t returning.

There’s Wander Franco, of course. He may never play another game of major league baseball. Tyler Glasnow, who looked downright indomitable in his first year back from Tommy John surgery, got traded to the Dodgers. Shane McClanahan is having Tommy John himself. Heck, Jeffrey Springs came into the season as one of the team’s best pitchers, and his own surgery will keep him out until after the All Star break this year.
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It’s been a quiet winter in Pittsburgh. The Pirates lost almost no one from last year’s 76-86 team, but they didn’t add many players either. Their biggest acquisition is probably Aroldis Chapman. After that, it’s Marco Gonzales, Rowdy Tellez, Yasmani Grandal, or Martín Pérez. They’re competent major leaguers all, but hardly exciting additions. But as it turns out, the Pirates had another move to make, and it’s a welcome one:

BREAKING: Right-hander Mitch Keller and the Pittsburgh Pirates are in agreement on a five-year contract extension, sources tell me and @kileymcd. After a breakout season in which he struck out 210, the 27-year-old Keller will anchor the rotation for the team that drafted him.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) February 22, 2024

This is both exciting and necessary, at least in my opinion. The Pirates haven’t developed many effective starting pitchers in the last, well, ever. Only one Pirates starter in the past decade has eclipsed 10 WAR with the team: Gerrit Cole with 13. After that, their success stories are Jameson Taillon, Joe Musgrove, and, well… Iván Nova is sixth on the list, and that came in 2.5 years after the Yankees traded him to Pittsburgh. As Stephen Nesbitt and Ken Rosenthal recently chronicled in The Athletic, it’s been an ugly decade for baseball in the Steel City.

Mitch Keller has already accrued the third-most starting pitching WAR in the past decade with 7.5. He’s entering his sixth big league season this year, though ups and downs early in his career mean that it’s only his fifth year of service time. The road to success has been bumpy — from 2019 through 2021, he compiled a 6.02 ERA and only racked up 170 innings of major league work. Things have gotten better since then, though. He threw 159 solid innings in 2022 and then made 32 starts in 2023, both times looking like a consistently effective starter rather than the roller coaster ride of earlier years. Read the rest of this entry »

This winter has been one of the weakest markets for middle infielders in recent memory. You remember the shortstop glut of recent years? Carlos Correa, Corey Seager, Francisco Lindor, Trevor Story, Xander Bogaerts… the list of players who either reached free agency or signed extensions to take them off the market went on and on. But this year, the pickings were slim. Depending on personal preference, the best second baseman or shortstop available was… Whit Merrifield? Isiah Kiner-Falefa? I would have said Amed Rosario, only the market clearly disagrees:

Infielder Amed Rosario and the Tampa Bay Rays are in agreement on a one-year, $1.5 million contract, sources tell ESPN. Rosario, 28, will bring a strong bat against left-handed pitching and should get at-bats at shortstop, second base and potentially corner-outfield spots.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) February 20, 2024

That’s a shockingly light deal for Rosario, at least in my head. I had him at the tail end of my Top 50 free agent rankings, and the crowd and I both penciled him in for a two-year deal worth $8 million per year. Instead, he’s getting less than a fifth of that AAV, and for only a year at that. This merits some investigation, both into why his market didn’t develop and why the Rays came calling in the end. Read the rest of this entry »

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