First base talent isn’t distributed as evenly as many of the other positions you’ll read about in this exercise. There’s a clear top tier, just like everywhere on the diamond, but things drop off quickly after that. The top few teams have situations that any contender would be happy with, but the landscape turns shockingly flat just afterwards. A whopping 17 teams project for between 1.5 and 2.5 WAR at first base, an enormous tier that starts in the top 10 and stretches nearly to the bottom of the list.

What’s behind that talent distribution? I like to call it the first base dead zone, a concept I’ll be talking about quite a bit today. It works like this: The major leagues are full of hitters who can manage a line that’s around 5-15% better than league average. They tend to disproportionately be limited to first base, DH, and the outfield corners. In 2024, only three primary first basemen managed a wRC+ of 135 or better (minimum 200 PA). There were 25 players between a 100 and 120 wRC+, though. No other position has a distribution that even approaches that rare peak and broad middle. Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, Erick Fedde returned to the majors after a one-year sojourn to Korea. He signed a two-year, $15 million deal with the White Sox after a rousing KBO performance. Then he started the season in Chicago strong, at the same time the team around him fell apart. By the time he got traded to St. Louis at the deadline, his place in the national eye was fading. When the Cardinals missed the playoffs, Fedde did too, and he played a little worse down the stretch.

Why write about him, then? Two reasons. First, a spate of injuries means that plenty of playoff contenders are hunting around for pitching. With the Cardinals already having announced their intent to retool for the future, Fedde is surely being discussed in front offices across the sport. Second, I was very in on the right-hander last year, and his first-half performance only cemented my view. But his full-year numbers weren’t quite as good. Variance? Confirmation bias? I can’t be sure until I look. In other words, if you’re a fan of a team with playoff aspirations and pitching problems, you should be curious. And since I share that curiosity, let’s find out together.

If I had to describe Fedde in his first major league stint, I’d focus on how he succeeded without standout stuff. To be honest, though, “succeed” overstates it; over 450 innings with the Nationals, he compiled a 5.41 ERA. You can probably picture someone on your favorite team like Fedde even if you don’t remember his tenure in Washington: a kitchen-sink fifth starter getting by on guile rather than blowing hitters away, and even then not always succeeding.

As an NC Dino, Fedde was a much different pitcher. How different? He struck out nearly a third of the batters he faced and won MVP honors. He looked like Korea’s Jacob deGrom, in other words, and I was curious what kind of changes he’d made to his arsenal to achieve those results. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re a Cleveland Guardians fan, the ritual is surely getting old at this point. The team develops an All-Star middle infielder, and times are good. Then, inevitably, that player leaves and is replaced by a new and unproven middle infielder. Can the team make it work? Tune in next season to find out.

The latest intriguing replacement is Gabriel Arias, who, like seemingly every recent Guardians hitting prospect, is a shortstop by trade. He looked like the heir apparent to the job in 2023, backing up at short before Amed Rosario’s departure. But Arias scuffled, then broke his wrist at the tail end of the season. That injury might have lingered into last year, and whatever the reason, he struggled mightily, ceding the shortstop job to Brayan Rocchio. Luckily, in Cleveland, a contributing role is only one trade away, and now that second baseman Andrés Giménez is a Blue Jay, Arias heads into 2025 as a key part of the Guardians’ infield plans.

Plenty of the particulars of Arias’ 563 major league plate appearances are ripped right out of his last prospect report. Intermittent contact issues? Yeah, he strikes out a third of the time. Potential for power? He launched 10 homers in half a season in 2023. Defensive versatility? He’s logged time at every position other than pitcher and catcher. But the relative weights of each of those features of his game matter, and so far in his career, the contact issues have dominated.

It’s possible to succeed despite a high-strikeout game, and honestly, Arias is the right kind of player to do so. Teams will tolerate a player with a bad contact rate if he hits for power and contributes with his glove. The defensive component is already there, especially because of his versatility, but the power hasn’t arrived; his career .138 ISO is the domain of contact hitters, not boom-bust guys whose muscles have muscles.

Is that going to change this year? To be clear, I don’t know. Guys like Arias flame out all the time. It’s really hard to stick around and produce in the majors when you run even a 15% swinging strike rate – and he’s up near 20%. But if things work out, it’s fairly easy to see how they would. Really, one video is all I need to show you:

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Something might be brewing in Sacramento. The 2024 A’s beat expectations by a mile, though expectations were admittedly muted coming off of a disastrous 2023, and this offseason has seen the club be quite busy. The team’s best player, Brent Rooker, signed an extension that will keep him around through at least 2029, well past when the A’s are scheduled to move to Las Vegas. The pitching staff looks much improved, thanks to the surprise signing of Luis Severino and a trade for Jeffrey Springs. And now last year’s second-best player, Lawrence Butler, has signed a contract extension too:

BREAKING: Outfielder Lawrence Butler and the A’s are in agreement on a seven-year, $66.5 million contract extension with one club option, sources tell ESPN. Butler, 24, broke out as a rookie last year and is seen as a foundational player for the A’s moving forward.

— Jeff Passan (@jeffpasan.bsky.social) 2025-03-07T04:22:52.566Z

A year ago, this contract would have been mind-boggling. Butler debuted in the bigs in 2023 with an uneven two months of work. His minor league track record suggested intriguing upside – he flashed excellent power while climbing the ranks and was only in a position to struggle in the majors because he’d reached Triple-A at age 22 – but like so many A’s, he was a question mark, a talented youngster with some good signs and some red flags.

The A’s started 2024 hot, at least by their standards, but Butler didn’t. After breaking camp with the team, he ran into a huge power outage. Over 121 plate appearances, he managed just two homers en route to a .179/.281/.274 slash line, so the A’s sent him back down to Triple-A. What can you do? Sometimes your 23-year-old who never played above A-ball until a year ago needs a bit of extra seasoning. Read the rest of this entry »

As I write this, the winter free agency period has essentially drawn to a close. Out of the top 50 free agents I highlighted before the offseason began, 48 have found homes — sorry, David Robertson and Kyle Gibson. Per RosterResource, only five free agents – including the two holdovers from the top 50 – accrued 1 WAR or more in 2024 and haven’t yet signed new deals. In other words, all the signing that is going to happen basically has, so it’s time to look back and see how you and I did at predicting the deals players would sign.

I like to evaluate my own predictions in service of making better ones in the future, dividing them up into a few categories. First, I break signings down by position, because the market for relievers and second basemen is different. Second, I look at both average annual value and total guarantee. There’s no set ratio for how to relate those two, so looking at each independently seems best to me. Finally, I look at both the individual predictions (how close to the actual contract that a player signed my predictions came), as well as the overall trend (how my aggregate predictions for each position group did compared to the total amount they received).

This year, I made all of that back-checking more rigorous. I put all of my predictions, as well as every crowdsourced one, into a giant spreadsheet. I noted all the contracts that were signed, made adjustments for deferrals, and ignored non-guaranteed money. I compared each actual contract to our predictions. I also gathered some of the best non-FanGraphs predictions I could find, looking to outlets like ESPN, The Athletic, and MLB Trade Rumors. Below, you’ll find how both the crowd (you) and I did, as well as the best non-FanGraphs entrant in each category. Read the rest of this entry »

I got my start in baseball writing as a Cardinals blogger. That’s only natural – I’m a Cardinals fan. My dad grew up in St. Louis and passed it on to me. I’m still a fan, though certainly less than I was before I started writing about the sport as my full-time job. But whether you’re looking at it through the lens of a fan or just as an analyst, the trajectory of this always-competing, never-quite-dominant team has been fascinating to watch.

I had a strange feeling while watching the Redbirds last year. I kept wondering, “Why is this team full of old guys?” Ever since the 2011 World Series win, Albert Pujols’ first finale in St. Louis, the team always seemed full of young, devil-magicky contributors. An average Cards roster had a few recognizable stars plus a bunch of young guys you’d never heard of who were way better than you initially realized. Matt Carpenter and Michael Wacha were unexpected stars in 2013. Carlos Martínez and Kolten Wong came on strong. After a few years of missing the playoffs despite interesting young contributors (Tommy Pham, Randal Grichuk, Luke Weaver), the 2019 Cards coalesced around Jack Flaherty, Tommy Edman, and Paul DeJong.

You’ve heard of all of those players, of course, but at the time, they were young up-and-comers. The Cardinals never seemed to be old despite running out Yadier Molina and Adam Wainwright year after year. Those guys were a key veteran core, helping to spread the team gospel to the young horde backing them up. But even with those old hands running things, my view of the Cards as a youthful outfit was correct. From 2013 through 2018, St. Louis’ roster was younger than average every year. Then they were ever so slightly older than league average in 2019 and again in 2020. Read the rest of this entry »

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They’ve changed the rules to make it easier to steal bases. That’s not my conjecture. That’s just the truth. By limiting the number of pickoffs and setting a timer that baserunners can use to establish a rhythm, the game has changed completely. Obviously, it has. You knew this. There were 158 baserunners who tried to steal 10 or more times last season, up from 115 in the final year before the rule changes. Most of them were incredibly successful, too: Those 158 stole at an aggregate 80.4% clip.

That’s not all that interesting, to be honest. You knew it already. But what you might not know? Three baserunners apparently didn’t get the memo. Ryan McMahon, Nicky Lopez, and Vidal Bruján all attempted double digit steals and got thrown out more than half the time. I had to know more, so I tried to see what had gone wrong for these three would-be thieves. Read the rest of this entry »

Catcher is a thankless job. If you do it successfully, perfectly even, that means that you’re letting highly paid professionals whip projectiles at you as hard as they can hundreds of times a day. Sometimes, other highly paid professionals will divert these projectiles toward you at the last second, or inadvertently hit you with the giant wooden sticks they’re carrying. You have to dive around and flail your limbs, because the only thing worse than getting hit by one of these balls is not getting hit by them; letting them fly by hurts your team. People try to steal from you constantly, so while you’re trying to catch a rock-hard 100-mph pellet, you also have to scan your peripherals. And if all of that isn’t bad enough, here’s the worst part: Sometimes your manager chooses to start Martín Maldonado ahead of you.

I kid, of course, but I’m writing about Yainer Diaz today, and his gradual phase-in to the major leagues is a key part of his major league career so far. Diaz burst onto the big league scene in 2023 with the kind of approach that makes hitting instructors wince, then shrug their shoulders and nod. He swung early and often, took big hacks, and generally acted like he was allergic to taking walks or hitting singles. It worked. He clobbered 23 homers in only 377 plate appearances, spraying loud contact to all fields. He played better-than-expected defense, too, belying his early scouting reports.

Despite that excellent rookie season, Diaz couldn’t displace an aging Maldonado as the team’s primary catcher; he took some reps at DH, but lost those as well when the team got healthy. By the playoffs, he was an afterthought, a pure backup catcher. But when Maldonado (and manager Dusty Baker) departed in the offseason, Diaz ascended to a starting job. Then he struggled – through the All-Star break, he was hitting a so-so .284/.308/.409 with iffy defense. If you’re more of a WAR person, that’s 1.1 WAR, not great. Here’s one story you could tell about Yainer Diaz: a prospect who struggled to break through with regular playing time.
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You have to hand it to the Mets. There really does seem to be something ineffable that brings drama to Queens. No, I don’t mean the LOLMets meme, the belief that things will find a way to break every year, because I don’t really think it’s true. The Mets aren’t cursed. But they do have a way of making things interesting. It’s never all smooth sailing, but they’re never completely down and out either. There’s always a little more to explore at Citi Field, and this offseason is no exception. The Mets are on top of the world, because they signed Juan Soto, one of the biggest free agent prizes of all time. And they have their backs to the wall, because two pitchers they signed to assemble a playoff rotation are already injured.

Frankie Montas was the first casualty. He felt discomfort after his very first bullpen session of spring training, and a lat sprain means that he won’t be able to throw for another 5-7 weeks. Given that the regular season is five weeks away, and that Montas had done essentially no buildup before his injury, we’re talking about multiple months of absence.

The good news is the Mets built their rotation this offseason to withstand injuries. After all, Montas wasn’t the most prominent starting pitcher they signed this winter. Sean Manaea holds that distinction; he was the best pitcher on last year’s team, and though he hit free agency, he signed a three-year deal worth $75 million to come back. That’s not quite ace money in today’s game, which is perfect: Manaea’s not quite an ace, just a solid playoff starter with upside. Except, he’s also hurt now. After feeling some discomfort of his own, an MRI revealed a right oblique strain.
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