For the last two offseasons, the Mets have operated with shock and awe, signing every free agent that wasn’t nailed down en route to building a team that could trade blows with the Braves atop the NL East. As you may have heard, that didn’t exactly pan out. So this offseason, they’re taking a new tack with a string of interesting signings that play below the top of the market. That trend continued over the weekend, when the Mets signed Sean Manaea to a two-year, $28 million deal, as Jon Heyman first reported.

As Kyle Kishimoto noted in our free agent preview, Manaea spent 2023 swinging wildly between roles for a Giants team that needed pitching help all over the place. He was a starter, long reliever, setup guy, whatever the situation demanded. He performed adequately in that tough job, but when he opted out of his contract after the season, it seemed likely that he’d look for a full-time starting spot. That’s where he’ll slot in on the Mets, who have spent the offseason remaking a rotation that had a lot of holes to fill after 2023’s trade spree. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll level with you, readers: I’ve been taking it easy for the last few weeks, enjoying the end of the year and starting to get recharged for 2024. Not much baseball is going on, spring training is still quite a bit away, and we haven’t even had many exciting signings or trades to break the doldrums. It’s only natural, given that kind of backdrop, to let your mind wander.

One of the things I found myself wondering about was how Tyler O’Neill would like playing in Fenway Park. On the one hand, it seems like a match made in heaven; O’Neill is a righty hitter who puts the ball in the air, and Fenway is a perfect park for hitters who can pepper the monster out in left field. On the other hand, O’Neill’s power is absolutely gargantuan; if you hit the ball 400 feet, how far away the left field wall is doesn’t matter much. Heck, the wall might turn some smashed homers into doubles or even singles; it’s just so dang tall.

Statcast data bears that worry out. In 2023, O’Neill only hit nine homers. That’s bad enough, but here’s the kicker: per Baseball Savant, he would have only hit six homers if he played the entire season in Fenway. That’s actually tied for the stadium that would have allowed the fewest homers – Camden Yards and its new left-field cutout is the other laggard. Some of that is because O’Neill doesn’t hit dead pull shots all that often, and some of it is because no matter how crushed this baseball was, it didn’t get high enough off the ground. Read the rest of this entry »

The Rangers have a problem you don’t see every day. They have three pitchers, each likely out until halfway through this season, who all look like surefire starters when healthy. Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer need no introduction; deGrom is looking at an August or September return, while Scherzer will likely be back in July. Add Tyler Mahle to the list, too: the Rangers signed him to a two-year, $22 million deal this offseason, but he won’t be fully recovered from Tommy John surgery until around midyear.

Let’s get the easy caveat out of the way: it’s not clear how good any of these three will be in 2024. Scherzer and Mahle weren’t exactly setting the world on fire before they got injured, and deGrom is coming off a nerve wracking second TJ. But I think it’s reasonable to look at that trio and see at least two elite starters. A rotation with a healthy deGrom, Scherzer, and Mahle at the top would probably be one of the best in baseball. That doesn’t even account for Nathan Eovaldi and the rest of the team’s arms – Jon Gray looked pretty good in his own return from injury this past October.

That starting five sounds incredible to me. There’s room for one of those pitchers to get hurt – and with that collection of guys, one of them getting hurt seems likely – and still have a fearsome playoff rotation. That’s almost certainly the team’s plan – signing deGrom is one thing, but signing an already-hurt Mahle makes it pretty clear that they’re building in some injury tolerance and aiming for the postseason. I like the plan – look no further than the Braves and Dodgers to see how teams struggle to find top tier pitching to pair with excellent offenses. But it does raise a question: What do they do for the first three months of the season? Read the rest of this entry »

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 »