On Tuesday evening, a thrill swept through the winter meetings. The rumors were true – the San Francisco Giants were in agreement with an American League right fielder on a multi-year deal. Yes, San Francisco, it’s time to welcome a new slugging right-handed hitter to town: Mitch Haniger signed a three-year, $43.5 million deal to become a Giant, with an opt out after year two.

Oh, you were expecting Aaron Judge? That didn’t quite pan out, though the Giants are reportedly still in pursuit of another hitter in free agency. But Haniger is a first course, and he fits the Giants quite well whether they look for another outfielder or pivot to the infield for help.

At season’s end, the San Francisco outfield was predominantly a lefty affair. Joc Pederson appeared in the outfield in 120 games. Mike Yastrzemski played the outfield in 147 of his own. LaMonte Wade Jr. missed a lot of time with injury, but rotated between seemingly every position in the field when he was healthy, including both left and right. The Giants theoretically love to mix and match based on the opposition, but they did a lot of running out a squad of lefties last year.
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MLB’s annual winter meetings usually prompt free-agent signings. The last time they were held before COVID-19 interrupted the league’s yearly schedule, Gerrit Cole, Stephen Strasburg, and Anthony Rendon all signed. This year feels like more of the same; Jacob deGrom signed in the leadup to the meetings, Trea Turner and Justin Verlander signed during them, and several other top free agents are rumored to be next.

But not every signing can be thunderous. The Pirates aren’t going to make the World Series next year. They probably won’t win 80 games; they went 62–100 in 2022 and haven’t approached .500 since they went 82–79 in 2018. But they made two signings on Tuesday in San Diego, adding Vince Velasquez and Jarlín García on one-year deals worth $3.15 million and $2.5 million, respectively. García’s deal also contains a club option for 2024 worth $3.25 million.

Neither of these deals will alter the balance of power in the NL Central, but I think both make plenty of sense for Pittsburgh. Let’s start with the starter — or at least, the pitcher who more resembles a starter. Velasquez flashed tantalizing potential over five-plus seasons with the Phillies, but inconsistent command and secondaries held him back. He spent 2022 on the White Sox as a swingman, jumping to the rotation when injuries hit the projected starters. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t bring this up very often, but before I wrote here, I had a job trading interest rates. I won’t bore you with the technical details, but I’ve been drawing on that experience a lot recently in thinking about how teams operate when signing free agents, so I thought I’d lay out my recent thoughts here. None of this is quite fully formed yet, but I think I’m on the way there, and I’d love to hear some feedback and see if I can better formulate my point as a result.

Speaking broadly, there are two main ways to get a return on your investment in finance. First, you could lean into the efficiency of the market. You’ve probably never heard of most of the companies that do this: Virtu, DRW, Jump, Hudson River, Susquehanna, Two Sigma. They’re all major players with virtually no broader name recognition. They’re broadly considered “high-frequency traders,” which means they buy and sell an absolutely massive number of stocks and bonds every day, trying to make a tiny profit on each one.

This is the “efficient market” you learned about if you took an economics class in college. If you’re trying to buy one share of a stock and I’m trying to sell one, a high-frequency trader will hope to sell to you at $100.00, buy from me at $99.99, and pocket the penny of difference. Do that a billion times, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money. It’s more complex than that — obviously, given the amount of brain and computing power all of these companies exert — but you can broadly think of them as profiting because there’s a well-accepted price for any given security at any given time, which means they can make money off of tiny deviations from that fair price. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s get the specifics out of the way first, so we can all gasp and react together. Jacob deGrom is now a Texas Ranger, after he signed a five-year, $185 million deal with a conditional option for a sixth year, as Jeff Passan first reported:

BREAKING: Right-hander Jacob deGrom has signed a five-year, $185 million contract with the Texas Rangers, sources tell ESPN. Physical is passed. Deal is done. Includes conditional sixth-year option that would take total deal to $222 million. Full no-trade clause. A massive haul.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) December 3, 2022

Alright, now that we’ve got that written down: gasp! I have to say, I didn’t see this coming. Earlier this week, I described deGrom as the one pitcher I’d want on the mound if humanity was going to play a single baseball game against an alien society to determine the fate of the world. Simply put, he’s the best doing it right now when he’s available.

His opponents next year won’t be aliens. In fact, they’ll be the ones who feel like they’re facing an extra-terrestrial, because the way deGrom pitches doesn’t resemble any other starter. He pumps 100 mph fastballs and hits the edges of the strike zone with frankly inhuman precision. The velocity understates how good his fastball is. Even the location understates how good his fastball is. He also induces tremendous vertical break on the ball, and his delivery means that his fastball crosses the plate at a comically shallow angle. I wouldn’t trust any characteristic-based pitching model that didn’t grade deGrom’s fastball as an 80 – it’s as good as it gets. Read the rest of this entry »

“He made a mistake, and Trout made him pay.” No doubt you’ve heard some version of that sentence countless times. Maybe the announcers called it a hanging slider, or a meatball, or any number of other ways of describing a poor pitch. But what exactly does it mean, and how can you know one when you see one?

I’ve discussed that question with my colleagues frequently, but we’ve never come up with a satisfactory answer because the pitches that get classified as mistakes aren’t always intuitive. Sometimes a pitcher hits the inside edge of the zone, only for a hitter sitting on just such a pitch to unload on it. Sometimes a backup slider ties up the opposing hitter. There’s bias to these observations, too: You’re far more likely to remember a pitch that gets clobbered for a home run than one that merely results in a take or a loud foul.

I still don’t have a definitive answer. I did, however, make an attempt at answering one very specific form of the question. One pitch that really does feel like a mistake, regardless of intent and irrespective of circumstance, is a backup slider over the heart of the plate. Spin a slider wrong, and it morphs into a cement mixer, turning over sideways without movement. Leave one of those middle middle, and the result is a slow and centrally located bat magnet. Read the rest of this entry »

The Nationals aren’t going to make the playoffs in 2023. They probably won’t even sniff .500; unsurprisingly, the team that traded Juan Soto along with everything that wasn’t nailed down this past season isn’t quite ready to compete for division titles. That doesn’t mean they shouldn’t try to get better, though – when the next generation of Nationals stars reaches the majors, the team would prefer to have some major league pieces already in place, mirroring the vaunted Cubs and Astros rebuilds of the 2010s. To that end, the Nationals made a signing I absolutely love yesterday, snagging Jeimer Candelario on a one-year deal worth $5 million, with $1 million in incentives.

Before the 2022 season, no one would have believed you if you told them Candelario would be a free agent this winter. In 2020 and ’21, he hit a combined .278/.356/.458, good for a 125 wRC+. He backed that up with decent defense at third base; all told, he looked like a comfortably above-average player carried by his bat. Then came 2022, an abject disaster; over 124 injury-interrupted games, he hit .217/.272/.361 and saw pretty much every statistical indicator tick downwards. The Tigers chose to release him rather than go through arbitration, which MLB Trade Rumors estimated at roughly $7 million.

For the 2020 and ’21 versions of Candelario, that would be a bargain. Quite frankly, I still think it would make sense after his poor 2022 season. The Tigers didn’t share my assessment, valuing the combination of money and roster space as more important than retaining his services. I’m not quite sure I understand it – they currently have two open spots on their 40-man roster and no in-house third baseman – but their loss was Washington’s gain. Read the rest of this entry »

The Astros capped off a dominant postseason run with a World Series title that showed off a well-rounded and star-studded organization. They won with great starting pitching, great relief pitching, powerful hitting, and excellent defense. This wasn’t a case of a few guys getting hot and carrying a moribund offense, or a heroic member of the rotation piling up innings that no one counted on. The team stacked with good players up and down the roster simply deployed them as expected, and got a parade for its trouble.

It’s funny, in that context, to note that one of the best offenses in baseball had a clear hole at first base. Yuli Gurriel, the longtime incumbent at the position, had an abysmal year, compiling a .242/.288/.360 batting line that represented his second-worst performance in the majors (and his second poor showing in three years). The Astros scored runs at a gaudy clip despite his decline, but they didn’t bury their heads in the sand about Gurriel; they traded for Trey Mancini at the deadline to shore up their first-base options.

Bad news: Mancini wasn’t very good either. He and Gurriel combined to rack up -1.4 WAR with Houston. Yeesh. By the time the playoffs rolled around, the Astros were using unheralded rookie David Hensley as a right-handed DH in lieu of Mancini. It worked well enough to win, but it was a strange look for a team already punting on offense at catcher. Read the rest of this entry »

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Last week, I contemplated baseball as a carnival game. It gave me great joy because I think there should be more silly games in the world. It also gave me great joy because I got to spend hours watching beautifully located pitches, on a loop, for work. I wouldn’t necessarily recommend trying this yourself – bosses are wild these days – but trust me, it’s really fun.

Another thing I really enjoyed in writing that article was watching batters react to those perfectly placed pitches. One, in particular, stuck with me, so I snuck a piece of it into the piece. Here’s the full clip. In it, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. has either just realized he had a huge cryptocurrency position on FTX or been called out on strikes:

I love it. I love it so much. It makes me even happier that he wasn’t right. That was a strike! Everyone loves to think they’ve been wronged. Everyone has their own perspective. Vlad’s perception of the strike zone is surely that it smaller than the actual zone. In this case, the difference between perception and reality led to a delightful expression of disbelief. Read the rest of this entry »

One of my favorite things about baseball is the sheer number of mind games going on before every pitch. Will the batter sit on a fastball? Will the pitcher give in to the count and throw that fastball the batter is sitting on? The batter is weak against changeups, but the pitcher’s best secondary is a slider – what does that mean for each of their mindsets? First base is open, but the next batter up is strong – what does that mean? The permutations and counters are endless.

It doesn’t stop with the batter-pitcher confrontation. What if there’s a pickoff called? The defense is back and shifted – would a bunt make sense here? Does the count matter for the defense? What about the score? You can spin endlessly around these decisions, and it’s wonderful. I spend plenty of time watching the game and daydreaming about which tactics each team might employ.

That’s all awesome, and a great part of baseball. This article is very much not about those mind games. There’s another part of baseball that I also enjoy – watching phenomenal athletes at the top of their craft. Forget the game theory and levels of counter-play – the physical skill on display in a random baseball game is immense. Read the rest of this entry »