I have a hot baseball take. The most dominant performer I’ve seen in real life isn’t Shohei Ohtani, or Aaron Judge, or Barry Bonds. It’s Jacob deGrom, and specifically the form that deGrom showed starting in 2019. He mostly threw fastballs and sliders. He only attacked one side of the plate. It sounds like a bad approach, one that a thoughtful hitter could easily exploit. Yet it was absolutely, completely unhittable.

Why? First, deGrom’s fastball is a unicorn. His combination of release point, shape, velocity, and command means that batters are trying to hit flat and even seemingly rising pitches on the edges of the plate. By releasing so low and yet generating so much backspin, he’s defying expectations. By throwing it so hard, he’s giving batters less time to react. By spotting it on the edge of the plate, he’s giving them no good options even if they swing; it’s hard to do damage on pitches that avoid the center of the plate.

From 2020 to 2022, the velocity part of this equation kicked into overdrive. In each of those years, deGrom averaged 98.7 mph or faster with his fastball. But it turns out it still looks pretty good at 97:

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On the first day of the season, Aaron Judge and the Yankees offense didn’t make much noise. They scraped together four runs against the Brewers, led by homers from Austin Wells and Anthony Volpe. But for the next two games, they feasted on Milwaukee pitching. Saturday brought a nine-homer barrage in a 20-9 victory. They cranked four more homers on their way to double-digit runs again the next day. The Yankees are hot – and Judge is at the center of it.

Well, he’s one of the things at the center of it. Torpedo bats are getting their 15 minutes of fame as you read this. Several Yankees are using these bats, which reach their greatest width around the sweet spot and taper thereafter, to great effect so far this year. The bats have been around for a few years, and the Yankees aren’t the only ones using them, but now they’re a topic of conversation across big league clubhouses. Honestly? I don’t have a lot to tell you about torpedo bats that hasn’t already been written. But I do have this to say: Judge isn’t using one, and he’s the beating heart of New York’s offensive explosion to start the season.

It’s been only three games, of course, so you can’t read much into batting lines. But Judge is slugging 1.818 through those games, with a .545/.643/1.818 slash line that’s good for a 547 wRC+. He’s only struck out twice. He had exactly one three-game stretch this good last year – and he won MVP unanimously.
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The last few years, I’ve had a pre-Opening Day tradition of making five bold predictions about the upcoming season. It’s a good way to talk through some of the players and teams where my opinions are different from the crowd. But bold predictions are a boom industry – the entire FanGraphs staff will be making some tomorrow, and I already drafted 10 of my own on Effectively Wild. So Meg and I came up with a great substitute: five big questions about the season. These aren’t the only big questions I have. They aren’t even necessarily the biggest questions in baseball. But they’re five storylines that I think are unresolved, and their answers will have a lot to say about how the 2025 season goes.

1. Are the Rays still the Rays?
The Rays have been doing the same player-swapping roster construction trick for more than a decade now. They operate on a shoestring budget, they consistently find ways to trade their surplus for great value, and their pitching development is some of the best in the game. They’re constantly churning out top prospects, and even after graduating Junior Caminero, they boast one of the best farm systems in baseball.

That prospect pipeline keeps on delivering, but in 2024, the wins didn’t follow. The team finished below .500 for the first time since 2017, and got outscored by 59 runs in the process. The Rays didn’t do much this winter – trading Jeffrey Springs, and signing Danny Jansen and Ha-Seong Kim were their big moves. We’re projecting them to finish last in the AL East – albeit still above .500. What happened to the 90-win perpetual juggernaut? Read the rest of this entry »

At first glance, this might seem like a list of the best pitchers in baseball rather than a list of the best rotations. That’s the thing I noticed most when writing this article; nine of the top 10 pitchers in the game according to our projections can be found on these 15 teams. It’s not that good pitchers inherently make for good pitching staffs, though that’s certainly part of it. It’s more that the concentration of top pitchers on top teams reflects a strategic optimization of limited resources.

A good pitcher on a bad team is just bad business in today’s game. Pitchers are highly sought after in trade, which makes them worth their weight in prospects, so to speak. They’re also fragile – one sore elbow, and bam, 18 months go down the drain. That gives teams with good pitchers but bad playoff chances a clear incentive: maximize the value of your top pitcher by trading them before they get injured. And rebuilding teams almost never sign top pitchers in free agency; it’s safer to anchor yourself around a hitter. Can you draft and keep one of these top-tier arms? Absolutely, and you’ll see some of those on this list, but the prevailing trend is that of established aces migrating towards contending teams. Read the rest of this entry »

The week leading up to Opening Day is extension season. Players want to put aside money discussions when the games start to matter, teams crave cost certainty, and everyone’s packing up from spring training with hope in their hearts; it’s a perfect setting for agreeing to deals. Amid a flurry of other activity, the Cleveland Guardians got in on the act by signing Tanner Bibee to a five-year, $48.5 million extension, with a club option for another year after that.

Let’s get straight to what you came here for, the ZiPS projections:

Those are pretty much what I expected. Through two years in the big leagues, Bibee has been a steady contributor whose best skill is good command. ZiPS projects more of the same for the next five years. That slight decline in innings you see over the course of the projection isn’t really a Bibee thing, it’s a pitcher thing. You just never know when one awkward elbow twinge will cost someone a year, and that’s reflected in declining innings totals over time.

Let’s talk about Bibee the pitcher for a moment before getting into the Guardians. He’s a product of the organization in the Shane Bieber mold, a crafty college arm who added velocity in the Cleveland system and went from fifth-round draft pick to runner-up for the 2023 AL Rookie of the Year award. That velocity doesn’t give him an unhittable fastball or anything like that. But where his fastball was a key sticking point in his pre-professional profile, now it’s just another average pitch. It sits 94-95 mph, touches the upper 90s in big spots, and has decent shape — more rise than run, but not a ton of movement overall.

That might not sound intriguing to you; after all, plenty of major leaguers have fastballs like that. But that’s the revelation here. With a boring fastball, Bibee’s other pitches all play up. He has impeccable command of spinning stuff, to the point where his pitches sometimes bleed together in our classification systems. There’s the hard one, either a cutter or sharp slider depending on who you ask, mid-80s and biting hard glove side. That’s his workhorse pitch, the one he favors in key spots and uses to set up strikeouts. There’s the sweepier version, a few miles an hour slower but with much more horizontal movement. He throws that one as a putaway pitch. Then there’s the curveball, slower still and with big north-south movement. He uses that as a change of pace, only when ahead in the count and largely fishing for strikeouts. The three combine to leave batters off balance and lunging.

That blended breaking ball complex looks a lot like Bieber, who followed a similar trajectory to the majors but then rode it even higher, to the 2020 Cy Young. Like Bieber, Bibee has a changeup to complement the bendy stuff. Bibee’s is loopy, 12 mph slower than his fastball, and most useful against lefties. His arm action disguises it enough that he can throw it to righties, too, and he’s willing to use it late in counts after batters have seen mostly fastballs and sliders.

As was the case with Bibee’s fastball, lots of major league pitchers have pitches that vaguely sound like the secondary stuff that I just described. What sets Bibee apart is his placement of those pitches. His fastball lives up in the zone. He attacks the glove-side edge with his hard slider and mixes locations haphazardly with the loopier breaking balls, alternating between placing them for called strikes and trying to pick out a corner or bounce a curveball. His changeup consistently hits the arm-side edge of the plate. He barely walked anyone in the minors, and that has carried over even against major league hitters.

You’ve seen the ZiPS median forecasts. The upside outcomes? Those will come if Bibee takes the next step with his slider by using it proactively and creatively. I keep comparing him to Bieber because we’ve seen that this exact skill set can produce ace-level seasons if everything breaks right. Maybe Bibee will top out as a three-win true-talent pitcher, but the future is unknowable, and he has the tools to break out to an even higher level than he’s already displayed.

For the Guardians, that present talent level is already mighty valuable. They just made the playoffs with Bibee as their no. 1 starter. They’re one of four contenders in the AL Central this year, again with him as their best option in the rotation. It’s a poor starting rotation, if we’re being honest, but that only makes him more important. It’s not Bibee and a bunch of similar options; it’s Bibee and then a bunch of question marks. Despite only two years in the majors, he’s a rock of stability in a sea of uncertainty.

This contract extension buys out either one or two years of free agency, depending on the club option. The value is almost exactly in line with what he’d expect to make in arbitration, plus a reasonable rate for the free agency year(s). This isn’t some outrageous bargain; it’s just two sides agreeing to tamp down volatility.

You can imagine some ways that this deal could end up making Bibee a lot more money than he otherwise would’ve received. Mainly, that’d be because of a future injury: As a fifth-round pick, Bibee never received a huge signing bonus, and he wasn’t due to hit arbitration (and bigger salaries) until 2026. That means he would’ve earned a raise pending health, but “pending health” is a scary phrase for pitchers. By signing this deal, he removed that risk. Now, there are no possible outcomes where Bibee doesn’t end up rich for life.

The Guardians, on the other hand, are getting future cost certainty. Not so much in the arbitration years – the terms of his extension roughly match what ZiPS would expect for those payouts. But let’s put it this way: The Guardians don’t sign big deals in free agency. They haven’t signed a marquee free agent on the open market in 20 years, since they added peak Kevin Millwood before the 2005 season. Those two years of free agency represent something the Guardians have no other way of obtaining – extra team control of very good players.

The Cleveland model has been remarkably successful for a long time now. It’s about constantly remaking the team even while the current version excels, finding new key players to replace the old key players while José Ramírez keeps the tempo. The Guardians deal in two currencies: talent and years. They’re adept at finding talent. Their budget and approach limit them on the years side of things.

In other words, Cleveland is always balancing competing now with competing in the future, and the limiting factor is usually how many years of good players the team has in hand. This extension addresses that directly by adding to the number of years that Bibee will be around, and adding in a way that the franchise can stomach financially. This deal won’t make the Guardians better in 2025, and it won’t even save them money in the immediate future. But now they have one more good player for at least one more year, at a price that makes sense for both sides. They’re in the business of sustainability, and this deal is perfect for their purposes.

CJ Abrams does not wait patiently. That’s never been his thing. He rampaged his way to the major leagues in 2022 at age 21, on a playoff contender no less. Now, should he have been in the majors that year? It’s easy, in retrospect, to question San Diego’s decision to call him up. He was below replacement level as a rookie with the Padres before they sent him to the Nationals in the Juan Soto trade, and then he was also below replacement level with Washington that year. But doing things even before they make sense has always been Abrams’ game.

To wit: You wouldn’t teach a major leaguer to swing like Abrams does. He’s one of the most aggressive hackers in the sport. His 53.1% swing rate – and 34.2% chase rate – are both among the highest marks in the league. And this isn’t some case of premeditated, Corey Seager-style aggression, either. Everyone who swings more frequently than Abrams swings at more strikes than he does. Seager chases seven percentage points less frequently and swings at strikes seven percentage points more frequently. Abrams isn’t playing six dimensional chess when he swings. He’s trying to do this:

That’s absurd (complimentary). As fate would have it, I was watching that game on TV when it happened as part of an article I hoped to write on the opposing pitcher, Hayden Birdsong. I made a strange sound when Abrams hit that ball, somewhere between a laugh and a gasp. Look at his contact point again:

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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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