Michael Wacha is a boring free agent. Don’t take it personally, Padres fans or Cardinals fans from his electrifying 2013 run; he’s still a very competent pitcher who delivered a classic playoff performance as a rookie. At this point in his career, though, he’s a competent rotation filler, a fourth or fifth starter who offers bulk innings at a reasonable rate. As Michael Baumann already detailed, that suits San Diego just fine.

Naturally, since this is the Padres, that bread-and-butter signing comes with a wildly complicated contract structure. It’s a one-year, $7.5 million deal, or a three-year, $39.5 million deal, or a four-year, $26 million deal with innings pitched bonuses — or even some fraction thereof. No word on whether it’s also Optimus Prime, but it’s certainly a transformer:

Wacha deal with Padres:
Four years, $26M

Signing bonus $3.5M

2023 $4M

Club options, must be picked up simultaneously
2024 $16M
2025 $16M
 
If club options declined
2024 player option $6.5M
2025 player option $6M
2026 player option $6M
All exercised one at a time.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) February 16, 2023

One thing is for sure: the Padres aren’t afraid of a little complexity. They signed Nick Martinez to a similar deal earlier in the offseason. These nested and mutually exclusive options are hard to parse, but I think they’re an interesting idea, so let’s talk through the different ways this deal could go and what it means for both Wacha and the Padres. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, as is tradition, FanGraphs founder David Appelman went into his garage, turned off all the lights except for some candles, and performed a dark and arcane ritual. The words were carefully chosen and spoken precisely, with any variation promising disaster. Then he went back inside, pushed a few buttons on his computer, and now we have playoff odds for 2023!

Okay, fine, that isn’t exactly how it goes down, but it’s close. Our playoff odds bring together pieces of a lot of features you’ve already seen on the website. We start with a blended projection that incorporates ZiPS and Steamer’s rate statistic projections. We add in playing time projections from RosterResource, which incorporate health, skill, and team situation to create a unified guess for how each team will distribute their plate appearances and innings pitched.

With playing time and production in hand, we use BaseRuns to estimate how many runs each team will score and allow per game. That gives us a schedule-neutral win percentage for each team, because you can turn runs scored and runs allowed into a projection via the Pythagorean approximation. From there, we simulate the entire season 20,000 times, with an odds ratio and a random number generator determining the outcome of each game on the schedule, and voila! Our playoff odds. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t like this title any more than you do. It just sounds so wrong. The guy with the largest contract signed by a pitcher in the history of the game is underrated? The New York Yankees ace isn’t being given his due? Preposterous! I might as well say no one watched the Super Bowl, or that we aren’t paying enough attention to weather balloons these days.

But uh… it’s true. I don’t have to like it and you don’t have to like it, but Cole is still one of the best pitchers in baseball, despite falling somewhat out of that conversation of late. He wasn’t even the most talked-about Yankee starter last year – that’d rightfully be Nestor Cortes. So consider this a Cole puff piece.

To begin, let’s consider our Depth Charts projections. These projections blend ZiPS and Steamer to produce rate statistic forecasts for every player. From there, Jason Martinez projects playing time, and those playing time projections cross with the rate statistics to produce overall projections. Cole sits in a tie for third place in projected WAR for 2023:

This shouldn’t be particularly surprising. He’s produced the ninth-most WAR among pitchers in the past two years, the ninth-most in the past three years, the third-most in the past four years, the third-most in the past five years… the point is, he’s consistently been one of the best in the game. While 2022 represented a down year, his overall body of work remains excellent.

What’s more, his 2022 swoon seems exaggerated to me. It represented his worst ERA since his Pittsburgh days, but luckily we have multiple statistics to describe pitching performance. I like to take a mosaic approach, looking at as many as I can and taking a rough average, and if you think of it that way, Cole’s 2022 looks pretty dang good. Read the rest of this entry »

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For the past few weeks, I’ve been delving into exit velocity readings in an attempt to find out what really matters and what’s just noise. I found that 95th-percentile exit velocity and contact rate are the two stickiest metrics from one year to the next, with exit velocity slightly more likely to remain the same from one year to the next.

Of course, that doesn’t mean it can’t change. In fact, players change their top-end power readings by a good amount every year. Sure, any individual player might be unlikely to do it, but there are tons of players in baseball. I found that only 4% of hitters change their 95th-percentile exit velocity (EV95) by one standard deviation from one year to the next, but 408 batters put at least 100 batted balls into play in 2022. Four percent of 408 is a lot more than zero.

With that in mind, I thought I’d take an inventory of those exit velocity changers and see what their improvement meant going forward. To do so, I created two groups: hitters whose EV95 improved by at least half a standard deviation from one year to the next, and the opposite, hitters whose EV95 declined by at least half a standard deviation. I picked half an SD instead of an entire one to bulk up the sample size. Read the rest of this entry »

Be honest: you didn’t think A.J. Preller was done with headline-making this offseason, did you? The Padres have built a team through outrageous swings — trades that no one else in baseball would attempt and free-agent signings that make opposing teams whine with envy. After signing Xander Bogaerts earlier this offseason, though, it seemed like even Preller might be out of moves. There was no one left to sign, no one left to trade for.

The joke’s on us, though, because the Padres found a new way to make news: they signed Yu Darvish to a six-year extension worth $108 million, as MLB.com’s AJ Cassavell reported. The deal replaces the final year of his existing contract, which would have ended after this year. Instead of hitting free agency, Darvish will remain a Padre, presumably for life at this point.

Darvish has long been one of my favorite pitchers thanks in large part to his dizzying array of pitches. He threw six different ones at least 5% of the time last year and even dabbled with two more. Six pitches, six years: I know an article setup when I see one. If you’ll indulge me in some gratuitous gif-posting, I’ll walk you through six ways to think about this contract. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a simple maxim in the entertainment business, which we here at FanGraphs subscribe to: give the people what they want. You called for it (implicitly), and now you’re getting it: more discussion of the Cole Irvin trade! And hey, if that’s not what you want, you should have somehow broadcast your thoughts to me more clearly.

Here’s the overarching concept of today’s article: the total-’em-up-and-compare method of analyzing trades doesn’t really work, and in fact it hasn’t really worked for a while. I’ve got some criticisms of WAR-to-money conversions in here, too, and a general questioning of the way people apply the nebulous concept of surplus value to baseball players. Let’s get right into it.

In the comments to the Irvin piece, someone mentioned an angle that I purposefully ignored in my analysis: adding up Irvin’s projected team-controllable WAR and comparing it to the monetary prospect values Craig Edwards produced a few years ago. Subject to a few assumptions, that accounting of the trade favors the Orioles by a huge margin. Prospects in the 40+ FV tier, like Darell Hernaiz, don’t usually work out. Irvin will almost certainly be better than replacement level. If you’re intent on slapping a universal dollar figure on all players based on that, the Orioles almost can’t lose in this trade.

That’s not really how it works in real life, though. Teams don’t have a department that inputs projections, turns everything into some calculation of value measured by dollars, and then pursues trades and acquisitions based on the cold hard reality of that math and nothing else. The Irvin trade reflects this in a few ways, so let’s talk about them. Read the rest of this entry »

The worst thing you can do in baseball as a hitter is swing through a fastball right down the pipe. That’s the pitch you were waiting for all along, and you turned it into a strike as surely as if you’d swung at a slider in the dirt. Conversely, that’s the best thing you can do as a pitcher. If your mistakes turn into strikes, it’s like playing on easy mode. Every pitcher is great when they’re dotting the corner, but turning middle-middle happy accidents into free strikes is the domain of an elite few.

If you look at the starters who did this most frequently in 2022, you’ll find a ton of good names and Eric Lauer:

Maybe that was harsh to Lauer, even. He’s clearly doing something right, given his two straight solid seasons despite lackluster raw stuff. It’s enlightening seeing him alongside a list of pitchers with dominant fastballs, and even if the other ten aren’t exclusively aces, they’re all solid starters with the chance to be more than that. Shane McClanahan, Spencer Strider, and Max Scherzer just missed the top 10. Zack Wheeler is way up there. This is clearly a desirable pitcher skill. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2021, John Means rode a command-first approach to the best pitching season on the Orioles. In 2022, Means missed most of the season – and Jordan Lyles and Dean Kremer both rode command-first approaches to the best starting pitching performances on the team. Now Lyles is gone and Means isn’t yet back from Tommy John, so the Orioles did what they had to do: traded for Cole Irvin, who will now inevitably ride a command-first approach to post the best numbers of any Orioles starter in 2023.

That’s my main takeaway from last week’s trade with the Oakland Athletics. The full trade: Irvin and prospect Kyle Virbitsky are headed to Baltimore in exchange for prospect Darell Hernaiz. In broad strokes, the deal makes sense: the A’s are continuing to get rid of every major leaguer they possibly can, while the Orioles look to make marginal improvements to their major league roster to back up last year’s breakthrough. But Irvin is hardly a slam dunk rotation topper, so I think it’s worth investigating what the O’s might see in him.

The first-level reason to acquire Irvin is probably the best one. He’s a left-handed fly-ball pitcher, and the new configuration of Camden Yards favors that skill set. The team pushed the left field wall back in 2022, and righties simply stopped hitting homers. In 2021, Baltimore was the easiest place for righties to hit home runs. In 2022, it was the sixth-toughest, a massive swing. Oakland has always been a pitcher-friendly park, and Irvin took good advantage of that; he should find similar success in the newly-spacious Camden. Read the rest of this entry »

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