Come on, you knew Wade Miley was going to sign with the Brewers, right? He’s not exactly a lifer there. In fact, he’s spent most of his major league career elsewhere — Arizona, Boston, Seattle, Baltimore, Houston, Cincinnati, and Chicago, to be exact. He’s not from Milwaukee. But he just makes sense as a Brewer, and he knows it. He reportedly let his son make the final decision on whether he’d come back this year, and the verdict is in: one year and $8.5 million, with a mutual option for the 2025 season.

That’s not the only move Milwaukee made on Monday; the headline-grabber was making Jackson Chourio’s record-setting contract official. But even that wasn’t all. They also signed Joe Ross to a major league deal, as Robert Murray reported. Ross hasn’t pitched in the major leagues since 2021, but after missing most of 2022 rehabbing from Tommy John surgery, he averaged 96 mph on his fastball in 14 innings across three minor league levels for the Giants in 2023. Now, he’s back in the majors, though it’s unclear whether he’ll end up in the rotation or the bullpen.

Deals like these — moderately priced contracts for solid veterans with upside — have long been a Brewers specialty. They’ve benefited from a cornucopia of top pitching talent for the past half-decade, but they’ve supplemented it wisely as well. Miley’s 2023 season was a great example of that. He signed for $4.5 million last winter and threw 120 league-average innings, give or take some anomalous batted ball luck (his .234 BABIP was the lowest he’s allowed in his career). That was a huge coup for Milwaukee, which dealt with its fair share of pitcher injuries. Even on a tight budget, he was brought back for more of the same at roughly double the rate. Read the rest of this entry »

No one likes to talk about baseball as a business. Heck, I don’t like to talk about it, and I’m what passes for an expert in the subject around here. It’s tedious, the creeping financialization of everything in life. Baseball should be the crack of the bat and the glint of sunglasses as an outfielder charges across the grass towards a smashed line drive, not an accounting ledger filled with contracts and receipts. But inevitably Major League Baseball, which often gets shortened to “baseball” as though it embodies the entire sport, is about profit, which means it’s about money.

There’s a storm brewing on that front. As Travis Sawchik deftly reported over at The Score, the old way of doing business is standing on wobbly legs. Local TV deals make up a sizable portion of the league’s overall revenue. That makes perfect sense – baseball is a regional game, and its biggest draw, from an entertainment standpoint, is the sheer size of its inventory. Teams play 162 games a year, all through the hardest times to fill programming – the dog days of summer, Saturday evenings, national holidays, you name it. Sportico estimated that teams were paid roughly $2.25 billion for local broadcast rights in 2023. Read the rest of this entry »

Up in Seattle, the Mariners had a problem. Eugenio Suárez, who the team initially acquired as salary ballast in the trade that brought them Jesse Winker, was due to make $11 million next year – $13 million if you count a buyout on a team option for 2025. This wasn’t a huge problem – Suárez had been solid since joining the team, racking up 7.3 WAR in two seasons – but for a club whose payroll has bounced around between $110 million and $140 million in recent years, it’s a sizable chunk of the puzzle.

What’s more, Jerry Dipoto telegraphed the team’s intention to favor long-term budget sustainability over short-term upgrades in his now-infamous 54% remark. Dipoto apologized for the tone of those comments – “doing the fans a favor” is just not a good way to phrase things – but the broad point was hard to miss. The Mariners are committed to building their team for the long run on their own terms, which seems to mean prioritizing payroll savings and cost-controlled players wherever possible. Read the rest of this entry »

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Good relief is hard to find. Well, that’s not strictly true. Pretty much every team in baseball has multiple good relievers, random guys who throw 100 mph and snap off ludicrous sliders. But enough good relief pitching is hard to find, because it takes a village’s worth of relievers to get through a season, and the playoffs are even more challenging. As teams go to their bullpen earlier and earlier, they put more pressure on every arm in it, and the penalties to overworking your best few arms are harsh.

The Braves seem to understand that, because they’ve been aggressive about adding to their options this offseason. They already had Raisel Iglesias and A.J. Minter as reliable options. They gave Joe Jimenez and Pierce Johnson contract extensions that valued them like solid mid-to-late-inning options. They traded a sampler platter of former prospects for Aaron Bummer. Now they’ve added yet again by signing Reynaldo López to a three-year deal. Read the rest of this entry »

Admit it: you had a feeling it might go this way. Aaron Nola is headed back to Philadelphia. After a short trip to free agency, he re-signed with the Phillies for seven years and $172 million, as USA TODAY’s Bob Nightengale first reported. He’s the first domino to fall this offseason, but this was hardly a shocking outcome. The move makes a lot of sense for both team and player, which helps explain why it came to pass so swiftly.

Let’s start with the team side of things. The Phillies are bona fide World Series contenders, and they’re built to win right this minute. Bryce Harper, Trea Turner, and J.T. Realmuto are all at or near the peak of their careers. Kyle Schwarber and Nick Castellanos are in the same boat. The Philly offense is so good right now that it would be borderline criminal not to contend, and that’s clearly been the team’s plan. They made the World Series in 2022, then went out and added Turner in the offseason to bolster their squad.

If they didn’t act this offseason, they’d be moving in the wrong direction. The Phillies’ recent regular seasons may have been built around an excellent offense, but their playoff plan has been all about pitching. Nola and Zack Wheeler have each been October workhorses; taking advantage of off days, they’ve started 19 of the team’s 30 playoff games in the last two years. Giving the ball to elite starters that frequently takes pressure off both the rest of the rotation and the bullpen, the team’s two great weaknesses. Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve already heard it from me. You’ve already heard it from a lot of people. You’re going to keep hearing it all offseason. This is a tough year for teams that want to add offensive firepower in free agency. Unless you’re really into Cody Bellinger or Matt Chapman, it’s Shohei Ohtani or bust, and according to my math, there are 30 teams and only one Ohtani.

That’s a bleak reality, but it paints with too broad of a brush. That description makes it sound like every team who needs a hitter to play anywhere is in equally dire straits. That’s not true, though. If you’re looking for a third baseman or a righty power bat with questionable defensive value, you have options. If you want to sign an intriguing young corner outfielder who might pay dividends a few years down the road, Jung-hoo Lee is a solid choice. But if you’re looking for a catcher – sorry, pal, nothing to see here.

Every year is a bad year for free agent catchers. In the last five years, three catchers have hit the open market after a 3-plus WAR season or its 2020 equivalent: J.T. Realmuto, James McCann, and Willson Contreras. Realmuto was a perennial All-Star when he re-upped with the Phillies, and Contreras has been a valuable offensive contributor for quite some time, but McCann only barely qualifies; he put together a nice season over 111 plate appearances in 2020. If you’re looking for a star catcher, free agency is the wrong place to set your sights. Read the rest of this entry »

In the offseason, there’s no live major league baseball to watch. I’m a lazy consumer, so I don’t watch much LIDOM action; I catch bits and pieces here and there, but for the most part, the winter is when I recharge my baseball batteries and do a little film study.

I can hear what you’re saying: film study? I don’t play, and I don’t coach. I can’t develop some secret sauce that will help me win next year by grinding in the film room in December. For me, though, it’s just fun. Other than the fact that I’m nothing like Roger Federer, I completely identify with what he said about studying tape: “I used to do a lot of video analysis early on, but more for pleasure and looking at my own technique.”

Fine, I’m not watching my own technique, but I do like rewatching games from this year for my own enjoyment. I’m not so much trying to fix something for 2024 as trying to look back at 2023 and smile. Oh, you’d like an example? I’m glad you asked. Here’s the video I’ve been watching most recently: three delightfully ridiculous umpiring calls. Read the rest of this entry »

Maybe you’ve heard, but the Diamondbacks bunted a lot this postseason. I’m underselling it, of course — you definitely heard it. Maybe you saw Michael Baumann’s blow-by-blow recap of all the bunts. Maybe you read about Evan Longoria’s freelancing. Maybe you read Patrick Dubuque’s breakdown of teams trying to copy Arizona. Just yesterday, Russell Carleton actually went through all the math of which bunts are getting more popular league-wide in a typically excellent article. Maybe you read any of the countless other takes on it. But I have a different view. I think the Diamondbacks are being misrepresented. I think that it was more a case of a few opportunistic bunters than a team policy, and that their bunts didn’t alter the course of their offensive destiny much at all.

You’ve surely heard, in all that recounting, that the Diamondbacks led the majors in sacrifice bunts this year. It’s true! They also bunted a lot – either 68 or 69 times, depending on which bunt classification database you want to use. Corbin Carroll and Geraldo Perdomo combined to bunt 36 times this regular season. Perdomo was second in the majors in bunt attempts; Carroll was in the top 15. Read the rest of this entry »

As I’ve done for the past few years, I’m grading each eliminated postseason manager on their decision-making. We spend the year mostly ignoring managers’ on-field contributions, because to be honest, they’re pretty small. Using the wrong reliever in the eighth inning just doesn’t feel that bad on June 22; there are so many more games still coming, and the regular season is more about managing the grind than getting every possible edge every day. The playoffs aren’t like that; with so few games to separate wheat from chaff, every last ounce of win probability matters, and managers make personnel decisions accordingly. What better time to grade them?

My goal is to evaluate each manager in terms of process, not results. If you bring in your best pitcher to face their best hitter in a huge spot, that’s a good decision regardless of outcome. Try a triple steal with the bases loaded only to have the other team make four throwing errors to score three runs? I’m probably going to call that a blunder even though it worked out. Managers do plenty of other things — getting team buy-in for new strategies and unconventional bullpen usage behind closed doors is a skill I find particularly valuable — but as I have no insight into how that’s accomplished or how each manager differs, I can’t exactly assign grades for it.

I’m also purposefully avoiding vague qualitative concerns like “trusting your veterans because they’ve been there before.” Playoff coverage lovingly focuses on clutch plays by proven performers, but Adolis García and Josh Jung were important, too. Forget trusting your veterans; the playoffs are about trusting your best players. Nathan Eovaldi is valuable because he’s great, not because of the number of playoff series he’s appeared in. There’s nothing inherently good about having been around a long time; when I’m evaluating decisions, “but he’s a veteran” just doesn’t enter my thought process.

One note: In the pitching section, I took a more specific look at reliever matchups. This 2022 Cameron Grove study measures a repeat-matchup reliever penalty. A recent article examines the issue without focusing on specific matchups, but rather looking at relievers pitching on back-to-back days or on short rest after heavy workloads. Both of these things are, unsurprisingly, bad for reliever performance. Managing the balance between starter and reliever over-work is really hard. I probably haven’t given enough credit to the necessity of balancing bullpen workloads against particular opposing batters in the past, but I’ll make a note of it going forward. Read the rest of this entry »