Daulton Varsho is good in a few very obvious ways. He’s lightning quick, gets great jumps in the outfield, and plays catcher when he’s not in center or right. He swatted 27 homers last year, and his underlying power metrics suggest that he’ll be able to hit 20-30 a season with some regularity. A plus center fielder who also plays catcher and hits for power? That’s a loud-tool kind of player, the sort who hits you over the head with how good they are.

That’s all true, but I’m intrigued by another one of Varsho’s skills. He might be a power hitter, but he’s also a volume bunter. He ended a plate appearance with a bunt 14 times in 2022, 14th-most in baseball. The guys ahead of him on this list are mostly singles hitters; Victor Robles and Geraldo Perdomo led the pack, for example. No one ahead of him on the list hit 20 homers; for someone with his level of pop, he’s a huge bunting enthusiast.

Strangely, he was particularly fond of bunting with the bases empty last year. That runs counter to conventional baseball wisdom, but also to all baseball wisdom. One of the best reasons to bunt is that even a failure can help score runs. If you try to bunt for a single with a man on first, plenty of your failures will still put a runner in scoring position. If you try a bunt and fail with no one on, it’s an out like any other. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll level with you: We’re squarely in baseball’s dead period. That’s fine. There are plenty of other sports going on, there’s more to life than sports, the great outdoors beckons, and so on. But this is a baseball website, not a winter activities website or even a football one. I’m actually in Canada on a ski trip as I put the finishing touches on this article, having watched the NFL playoffs this weekend. But I’m not here to talk about that! I’m here to make up a contract extension for one of my favorite players, and you’ll just have to humor me. (Though if you want to banter about skiing, might I suggest my weekly chats?)

That’s right: let’s talk about Harrison Bader, the once exuberantly-coiffed Yankees outfielder. The Bronx Bombers swapped Jordan Montgomery for Bader at the trade deadline last year in a move that neither team’s fanbase was in love with. Both players then turned around and contributed exactly what their team was hoping for – quality innings for Montgomery and lol-how-did-he-catch-that defense for Bader. Now, I think the Yankees should stop thinking of Bader as a two-year commitment and put a ring on it – or at least, a multi-year contract. Read the rest of this entry »

Every few years, the same old question sets the internet aflame: Why do Americans care so much about the British royal family Does batting average matter? If you haven’t seen my favorite formulation of the problem, here’s Tom Tango’s version of it:

Which is the more productive batter (all other things equal)

A.
.315 batting average
.365 OBP
.510 SLG

B.
.260 batting average
.365 OBP
.510 SLG

— Tangotiger ? (@tangotiger) January 9, 2023

I’ve taken a crack at this exact question before. The answer simply isn’t very surprising. If two hitters have the same on-base percentage and the same slugging percentage, they’re similarly valuable to their team’s offense. That’s why OPS is a popular offensive statistic despite its relative lack of precision; it does a lot of the same work as wOBA and wRC+ because its two component stats are mostly found in similar ratios and correlate well to offensive production. Linear weights are still better, because they do a better job of accounting for how important each plate appearance outcome is when it comes to run scoring, but you can get most of the way there with OBP and SLG.

There’s not much reason to go through the exact math of how wOBA works again, because the people who would be swayed by that math have already been swayed. But sabermetric forefather Voros McCracken mentioned a novel way of looking at the problem, and I thought I’d take a crack at it now that there are no more Carlos Correa free agency articles left to write. Read the rest of this entry »

Ah, yes, another turn in the Carlos Correa saga. After agreeing to a deal with the Giants that fell apart and then agreeing to a deal with the Mets that hung in contract limbo for weeks, Correa is on the move again, back to where he started 2022. As Jeff Passan first reported, Correa and the Twins have agreed to a six-year, $200 million deal with vesting options that could boost the total payout to $270 million over 10 years.

By now you know Carlos Correa the player. He’s been one of the top free agents on the market for two years running, and he’s been one of the most prominent players in the game for half a decade. We’ve written about his free agency plenty of times already. But if you’d like a refresher, here it goes.

Correa has a well-rounded offensive game, the type of hitter you can plug into the middle of your order and not think twice about. He takes his walks and rarely strikes out. He does that not because he has an otherworldly batting eye, but rather because he has a solid sense of the zone and a good feel for contact. It also helps that opposing pitchers prefer to avoid the zone against him, owing to his comfortably plus power. He also plays solid shortstop defense, somewhere between plus and excellent depending on which scout or defensive metric you listen to. Put it all together, and he’s an All-Star level player every year when healthy. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I looked into how the predictions at FanGraphs, both crowdsourced and those produced by me, matched the contracts awarded to free agents this offseason. Today, I’d like to dive into a few cases where I made mistakes in individual player predictions, as well as a few I think I did well on. In each case, I’ll try to come up with some takeaways for predicting contracts in the future.

Jacob deGrom
My prediction: 3 years, $141 million
Crowd prediction: 3 years, $120 million
Actual contract: 5 years, $185 million

My lesson here: Don’t predict an unprecedented contract if you’re aiming for accuracy. It made sense to me that Jacob deGrom would sign a deal that outstripped any before him when it comes to average annual value. He’s the best pitcher in the game when healthy, and that was enough for me. Why wouldn’t he have the biggest contract?

That’s a silly way of thinking about it in retrospect. He merited a huge contract, and he got one, but why in the world would someone with his injury history want a short-term deal? In all honesty, it doesn’t need to be more complicated than that. Predicting something outside of the ordinary is fine, but extraordinary predictions should require extraordinary confidence, not merely “I think this would be neat.” Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Free agency has come and gone this offseason. Earlier than we’re used to in recent years, we can look back on this year’s class and make some conclusions. To some extent, that’s a lot of our offseason coverage; what are ZiPS projections and positional power rankings, after all, if not catalogs of how teams have changed their fortunes in the offseason? Today and tomorrow, I thought I’d do something slightly more navel-gazey, and perhaps slightly more useful in the long run, by looking back at my contract predictions to see what went right and what went wrong.

First things first: let’s take an accounting of both the crowd’s and my predictions. I took the contracts signed by each of the top 50 players in free agency. A few clarifying remarks: I removed players who accepted a qualifying offer, as both the crowd and I made our predictions before qualifying offers were extended. I considered only guaranteed years, ignoring options of any type, be they vesting, team, or player. I also ignored incentives and trade kickers. Finally. I’m using Carlos Correa’s rumored deal with the Mets — 12 years, $315 million — even while it’s not yet official and may be amended.

With that out of the way, I grouped the players into positional groups and compared our predictions to real life. How’d it go? Pretty well, actually, for both sides. Positive numbers here mean we under-estimated, and negative numbers represent an over-estimate:

Read the rest of this entry »

For years, the baseball offseason had a predictable rhythm. When the World Series ended, we’d hit a lull. Around the Winter Meetings, a few Scott Boras clients would sign while he spouted strange, vaguely nautical similes. A few more marquee names would get caught up in Boras’ wake (see what I did there?) and sign as well. Then we’d have a lull around year end, and contract activity would pick up again in the new year.

That pattern hasn’t held even a little bit this winter. As of this writing, 45 of our top 50 free agents have signed, including the entire top 30; many guys who just missed the cut have signed as well. Four years ago, plenty of teams were still looking for free agent help in the first week of January. This year, your options are Johnny Cueto, Jurickson Profar, and then tumbleweeds.

This feels different than previous years of free agency, but I wanted to put some quantitative rigor behind that. I set out to compare this offseason to each previous one. I’ll spend plenty of time going through my methodology below, but first, let’s give the people what they want. This year really is different. Here’s the percentage of all free agents, weighted by previous year WAR, that had signed new deals by December 31 of each offseason since the conclusion of the 2000 season, excluding last year’s lockout weirdness:

The 2022-23 offseason (which I’ll be calling 2023 for simplicity’s sake for the remainder of the article) is tied for the most front-loaded offseason of this millennium. Given that offseasons had been getting progressively slower, that’s a meaningful change. Now, let’s talk about how I got to this conclusion, and come up with a few takeaways about the new landscape of free agency. Read the rest of this entry »

Maybe we shouldn’t doubt the Dodgers. They’ve won nine out of the last 10 NL West titles, and in the year they didn’t win the division, they won 106 games. They’re juggernauts by design, a team built to withstand the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. They draft well, develop well, spend a ton of money, and spend that money intelligently. They’re the closest thing baseball has to a dynasty these days, and given the inherent randomness of the playoffs, that’s not likely to change anytime soon.

That’s all true – and despite it all, I’m leaning towards doubting their chances in 2023. For the first time in years, I don’t have to jump through hoops to come up with reasons to do so. The Dodgers look like one of the best teams in baseball, but they no longer look, at least to me, like the absolute class of the league. It’s weird to think of it that way, but let’s talk through it together.

First things first: the Dodgers lost a ton of good free agents this year, just like they do every year. That’s simply the cost of doing business when you’re good as consistently as they are; your team will naturally be filled with great players approaching free agency. This year’s iteration of the team lost a whopping 21.3 WAR worth of 2022 production, the highest mark in the majors. The list of the top five teams when it comes to lost 2022 production is a who’s who of clubs trying to contend right now:

Read the rest of this entry »

Hey, they had the money. After the sensational done-not-done saga that ended with Carlos Correa signing with the New York Mets, the Giants spent the rest of the week signing two of the top remaining free agents on the market. They added Michael Conforto on a two-year, $36 million deal that includes an opt out after the first year, then signed Taylor Rogers to a three-year, $33 million deal after that.

I ranked Rogers 19th among this winter’s crop of free agents, so let’s start with him. To me, he’s one of the best handful of relievers in the game. I think this was a great pickup for the Giants — and would have been a great pickup for any team in baseball given the contract he got. Rogers spent the first six years of his major league career with the Twins and was reliably excellent, accruing a cumulative 3.15 ERA and 3.01 FIP. That earned him a spot on AJ Preller’s must-trade-for list; the Padres acquired him last offseason to head a closer-by-committee situation in San Diego.

He split time between the Padres and Twins last year – he was traded in the Josh Hader deal at the deadline – and had his worst season as a pro. He posted a 4.76 ERA, easily his worst mark and in a year where league-wide offense declined markedly. It looks to me mostly like bad luck, though; he still posted a 3.31 FIP, but largely got BABIP’ed (.327) and sequenced (63.5 LOB%, compared to a league average mark of 72.6%) to death. He struck out more than 30% of opposing batters while walking just under 7%, and gave up home runs at roughly the same clip he always had. The biggest cause for concern, in my eyes, is that he gave up a raft of hard contact in Milwaukee, but given that he only threw 23 innings there, I’d put it in the too-small-of-a-sample-to-matter bucket. Read the rest of this entry »