The baseball season is only one day old, so it’s probably too early to draw any conclusions. The Reds will probably be bad. The Astros will probably be good. The Angels will probably snatch defeat from the jaws of victory and end up around .500 despite employing two of the best players on the planet. Other than those broad strokes, though, it’ll take us a little while to know much for certain.

With that stipulated, let’s make far too much of something that a player did, not even yesterday, but in spring training. That sounds like a fun way to start our year. Ryan McMahon is embarking on his seventh major league season (counting a cup of coffee in 2017). He’s a defensive standout, heir to Nolan Arenado as an elite Rockies third baseman. He sports a career 89 wRC+. He also hit a ball tremendously hard in spring training, so now it’s time to dream on him as a power threat, or at least an above-average offensive player.

The list of the hardest-hit balls in spring training is filled with hitters you’d expect to see. Giancarlo Stanton places both first and third. Oneil Cruz makes an appearance in the top 10. Jordan Walker, who ascended to the major leagues on the back of his raw power, is in the top five. Franmil Reyes and Franchy Cordero, both of whom have power to spare, place highly. Then there’s McMahon, who smashed a grounder at a shocking 117.8 mph, the second-hardest-hit batted ball that Statcast recorded all spring. Read the rest of this entry »

The Cardinals have put themselves in a bit of a bind. They take sustainability seriously, building to compete both now and tomorrow. They never rebuild, never go all in, and always balance the present and future responsibly. If your goal is to win forever, you have to think about more than just the next year when you make a decision. For all that focus on long-term planning, though, they have a lackluster rotation, and it’s slated to get a lot worse after this year.

Of St. Louis’ top five starting options, only one, Steven Matz, came into the spring under contract for 2024. That might not be a problem if there were a heaping helping of starting pitching prospects knocking on the door to the major league clubhouse, but there aren’t. Gordon Graceffo isn’t far off, and if you’re willing to do a lot of projecting, Tink Hence might be major league ready before too long, but the up-and-down fifth starters and swingmen with live arms that other teams use to bulk up their starting rotation in times of need don’t really exist here.

Now, the Cardinals have two starters under contract for 2024 after signing Miles Mikolas to a contract extension that will pay him $40 million for the 2024 and ’25 seasons, as Derrick Goold first reported. That doesn’t exactly create a complete 2024 starting rotation, but it’s twice as many pitchers as St. Louis had before last Friday. Bam, problem solved! Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier today, we looked at the teams in the bottom half of the league’s rotations. Now to close out the positional power rankings, we look at the game’s best.

Welcome to the last installment of our positional power rankings (well, other than tomorrow’s summary post). We’ve saved the best for last, whether you’re looking for total projected WAR or stars named. The best pitchers in baseball are increasingly pitching together, leading to two- and even three-star team-ups that dot the top of our rankings. It’s still an overall squad ranking, though, which means the teams that emerge on top combine stars with depth that can chip in either to the back of the rotation or higher up if injuries demand it.

Oh, yeah: injuries play a big part in this year’s list. Whether it’s the Yankees and their strange mix of depth and uncertainty, the Rangers signing a trio of talented but oft-injured starters, or the Brewers hoping to get enough innings from the top end of their rotation to buy time to figure out the bottom, how the depth chart shakes out and how many innings the top starters pitch will determine who ends up getting the most out of their starters this year. It’s not even just injuries to stars; health matters for depth options too, as teams invariably find out when they’re calling James Shields in August to see if he’s available. Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve probably seen the jokes. Oh, the Nationals might have traded Juan Soto, but it’s no big deal, because they have Juan Soto’s replacement waiting in the wings. Ooh, intriguing! But of course, it’s mostly a setup to make a crack about how Joey Meneses is on an unsustainable heater — fifteen minutes of fame before an inevitable crash back to just-okayness.

Heck, look at our projections for him this year. Depth Charts pegs him for 602 plate appearances, a 111 wRC+, and 1.5 WAR. That’s not awful or anything, but astute readers will note that Meneses managed 1.5 WAR last season in just 240 plate appearances. From his debut on August 2 through the end of the season, he was 11th in baseball in wRC+. This year, we’re projecting him to be 136th.

That sucks! It really sucks. It’s partially unavoidable, though. We’ve all gotten so used to projections, so used to the fact that how a player does in any given year is only a small part of what we should use to forecast their future, that actual performances largely get lost in the mix. The forecasts are darn good at their jobs in aggregate. It’s easy to listen to what they have to say and tune out that pesky reality that disagrees. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier today, Davy Andrews gave an accounting of the league’s third basemen. Now we turn our attention to the shortstops.

So, so deep. That’s true of the Mariana Trench, which extends some 36,000 feet below sea level, and also of the shortstop position in the major leagues. If you think of an average player as one who accrues roughly 2 WAR per 600 plate appearances, 29 teams are above average at shortstop. That’s because everyone puts their best athletes there for as long as they can, which results in an embarrassment of positional riches. You have to delve down to 25th on this list to get to a team whose aggregate projection is less than 3.0 WAR. No other position’s list of three-WARriors extends past 20th. Read the rest of this entry »

I found myself speechless on Friday afternoon. I was partaking in one of my favorite yearly rituals, watching the first round of the NCAA tournament at a sports bar. Something about the atmosphere calls to me — masses of strangers on the edges of their barstools, captivated by the energy of do-or-die games between wildly mismatched teams. As it happened, the bar I picked was a Purdue bar, and the mood slowly soured as the Boilermakers struggled with and ultimately fell to tiny Fairleigh Dickinson, one of the greatest upsets in the history of the tournament.

That game got me thinking about why I love the World Baseball Classic so much. It’s a newfound love of mine. The last time the WBC was held, in 2017, I paid exactly as much attention to it as my work required; given that my job was to try to make money trading interest rates, that worked out to exactly zero. I vaguely knew that the United States won, but even as a baseball fan, it didn’t really grab me. I liked the Cardinals, not Team USA, and it felt like a weird time of year for competitive baseball.

Having watched most of this year’s games, I’m sad I wasn’t watching before. The WBC is like nothing else in professional baseball, a chaotic and exciting mashup of national identity and high tension, often between teams that have no business being on the same field as each other.

Major league baseball is, by design, a slog. No individual game matters all that much because there are so many of them. If you’re a player, you can’t get too high or too low, even if you really want to. The Pirates and the Dodgers are a big mismatch, but even if the Pirates beat the odds and win a game, that game almost doesn’t matter. They’ll play again the next day, and then the next day, and then grind through a whole year’s worth of games. Read the rest of this entry »

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Every time a young star signs a contract extension, we all breathlessly mention the total guarantee. Did you hear Corbin Carroll is getting one hundred and ten million dollars? You could buy a pretty nice house with that, or several nice houses, or live comfortably for the rest of your life and set your kids up to succeed in the bargain. It’s natural to focus on something like that. It is, after all, the main part of the deal.

In almost every one of these extensions, there’s an additional feature: one or more years of team options tacked on to the end of the contract. Our collective analytical view of those tends to be more or less a shrug. “Oh, yeah, and two team options, so that’s nice,” we say, or “well, that makes sense.” I wouldn’t call our evaluations of these options particularly nuanced.

I don’t think that’s going to change on the whole, but the Carroll extension spurred me to at least delve a little deeper into the dollars and cents side of those team options. I’ve already done some work on opt outs from the player perspective, and conveniently enough, I can lift a lot of the mathematical methods from that treatment and use them to evaluate things from the team side. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the weekend, I participated in a panel at the SABR Analytics Conference in Phoenix. It was a ton of fun, and I enjoyed getting a chance to nerd out about baseball with a bunch of like-minded people. The awards show wasn’t bad, either. I look forward to Michael Baumann and I making subtle references to it the rest of the year (or maybe just me; Baumann is less arrogant than I am).

The topic of my panel, where I was joined by Yahoo Sports’ Hannah Keyser and moderator Vince Gennaro, was players we love for the 2023 season. I love Shohei Ohtani and Mike Trout most for the 2023 season, but more specifically, it was about players we love who aren’t widely regarded as superstars. I came prepared; I picked two hitters and two pitchers who fit the bill.

A panel isn’t the same as a presentation, and our discussion ranged widely around these and other players (Hannah loves Wander Franco and Hunter Greene, Vince loves Dylan Cease), but I thought I’d lay out my research here as well. If you’re a frequent reader, you probably already know how much I like these guys, but it never hurts to reiterate a point. Read the rest of this entry »

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