When José Abreu signed with the Astros earlier this offseason, there was a lot to like. He fits their overall team construction, he’s a great hitter, and the contract looks more reasonable every day in the context of the rest of the free agent market. In several corners of the baseball internet, though, there was one worrisome note: Abreu’s performance against fastballs, particularly of the high-velocity variety, declined markedly in 2022.

I’m not crediting one person in particular with this observation, only because I’ve seen it in so many different places. It’s incontrovertibly true. Here are Abreu’s numbers against both all four-seamers and all fastballs thrown 95 mph or harder, per Baseball Savant:

Oh no! The trends seem quite clear; Abreu didn’t hit fastballs very well in 2022, and he’d already started to decline against them somewhat the season before. Is he just cooked? Is this fastball performance the proverbial canary in the coal mine, alerting us that bad times are coming? Read the rest of this entry »

This offseason has seen an avalanche of activity early on, with 22 of our top 25 free agents signing before Christmas. But last night, we somehow doubled up. After an undisclosed medical issue held up the official announcement of Carlos Correa’s contract with the Giants, the entire deal fell through, and the Mets stepped into the fray, signing Correa to a 12-year, $315 million deal this morning, as Jon Heyman first reported.

I’ll let that breathe for a second so that you can think about it. The Giants went from laying out $350 million and adding a cornerstone player to their roster for more than a decade to nothing at all. The Mets went from a big free agency haul to an unprecedented one. Correa is going from shortstop to third base, and maybe losing one gaudy vacation home in the process when all is said and done.

The Mets had already spent heavily this offseason to shore up their pitching. With Jacob deGrom, Chris Bassitt, and Taijuan Walker all leaving in free agency, the team had a lot of high-quality innings to replace, and they did so in volume, adding Justin Verlander, Kodai Senga, and José Quintana. Those were in effect like-for-like moves, as was signing Edwin Díaz, Adam Ottavino and Brandon Nimmo after they reached free agency. The 2023 Mets stood to look a lot like the 2022 Mets in broad shape – most of their additions were either swaps (deGrom for Verlander) or small (Omar Narváez will be a platoon catcher, David Robertson will shore up the bullpen). Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I wrote about what I consider to be a key driver in the recent uptick in long-dated contracts: rising interest rates. It was a math-y and abstract article, and I wouldn’t blame you for getting a few paragraphs in, noting the sheer volume of numbers and calculations, and moving on with your life. But if you didn’t do that, hold onto your butts, because it’s time to take the financial angle up a notch.

The main takeaway of that previous article was that when interest rates are high, money in the future is worth less in present value, so teams that look at their books in terms of net present value will perceive long-term contracts as a smaller liability. The easy way of thinking about this is by imagining a team funding a contract upfront by buying bonds and holding them to pay out each future year of a player’s contract. You have to spend much less money today to fund future obligations than you would’ve had to spend if interest rates were much lower, as they were for the entire previous decade.

That’s not realistic, though, because teams don’t pre-fund contracts with treasury bonds. They have better stuff to do with any money sitting around, like buying real estate developments or lobbying senators. Most teams have debt outstanding, too; if they had a huge chunk of change sitting around, they’d look for new investments first, then think about retiring debt, then think about buying out minority owners, and probably prioritize buying treasury bonds only slightly higher than lighting the money on fire. Read the rest of this entry »

Why would you want to add a top-tier shortstop in free agency? I can think of plenty of reasons. Maybe you lost just such a player to free agency this offseason; after all, for every star reaching free agency, there’s a team that employed them in 2022 and now has a hole at the position. Maybe you want to improve a team that’s solid elsewhere but has room to improve at shortstop; the Phillies fit that description exactly and snagged Trea Turner earlier this month. Maybe your plan to promote a top prospect is starting to feel risky; if Aaron Judge had left New York, the Yankees might have replaced some of his production in the form of a slugging shortstop.

Or maybe your team just wants to get better and spend more money to do so. For example:

BREAKING: Cubs and Dansby Swanson have an agreement on a seven-year deal for $177 million, per source. https://t.co/9cmtK9mLzL

— Kiley McDaniel (@kileymcd) December 17, 2022

The Cubs weren’t close to contention in 2022, going 74–88 with underlying numbers that largely agreed with that assessment of their talent. They have interesting players on the major league roster and promising prospects nearing major league debuts, but even if several of those situations worked out, there’s a meaningful gap between 74 wins and the 93 the Cardinals posted to win the division. Heck, there’s a meaningful gap between 74 and 86, the mark the Brewers hit in a down year for them. If Chicago wanted to compete in 2023, it couldn’t sit pat. Read the rest of this entry »

Nine down, one to go. The 2022 free-agent signing period has been fast and furious. When Carlos Correa signed with the Giants earlier this week, he was the eighth of my top 10 free agents to sign. That breakneck pace hasn’t slowed. On Thursday night, Carlos Rodón and the Yankees agreed to a six-year, $162 million contract, as Jon Heyman first reported.

I pre-wrote some words on Rodón as a player, so let’s get to those before discussing the broader context of his signing. He’s a fascinating story, and yet simultaneously a very straightforward pitcher. He throws an overpowering fastball. He throws an overpowering slider. He throws them both very hard, and with solid accuracy. It sounds almost too simple, but both pitches are spectacular, and they pair well together. He’s going to throw them; the question is whether batters can hit them.

For the past two years, the answer has been a resounding no. In 2021, you could convince yourself it was just a hot streak. Rodón missed most of 2019 and ’20 due to injury, and he’d been roughly league average before that. The peripherals were excellent, and the pedigree was there — he was the third overall pick in the 2014 draft after a standout college career at North Carolina State — but he was a two-pitch pitcher with health concerns and one excellent season. To make matters worse, he looked fatigued at the end of the season — reasonably so given his workload increase — and lost fastball velocity until regaining it in the playoffs. The White Sox declined to issue him a qualifying offer, and he signed what was essentially a high-class prove-it deal with the Giants: two years and $44 million, with an opt out after the first year. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m going to start today by telling you something very obvious: the new hot trend in contracts this offseason is extremely long deals. You know it. I know it. Ken Rosenthal says it, so it must be true. Living legend Jayson Stark laid it out as only he can: we’ve seen three free-agent deals of 11 or more years in the last two weeks, as compared to one in the entire previous history of baseball.

What factors are behind this hot new contract structure? Did a financial consultant walk through the Winter Meetings whispering “long contracts are in, pass it on” to team employees? I truly wish that were the case. It could be my big break in starting up Ben Clemens Investigates, and I’ve always wanted to wear a Sherlock Holmes hat. Bad news, though: to the best of my knowledge, that didn’t happen. It didn’t have to happen. The incentives to offer long-term deals are mathematically based, and I’m frankly pretty annoyed that I didn’t see this coming in predicting contracts this offseason. Read the rest of this entry »

Catching is the most taxing position in baseball. Day in and day out, it grinds on the players who attempt it. Catchers almost never play a full season, because it’s just plain harder to catch two days in a row than play the field on those days. Mathematically, that means fewer stars, because catchers have fewer plate appearances to excel in. That warps the market for free-agent catchers; in a given year, there might be only one or two full-time starters available at the position.

If you’re a team looking for a catcher, that puts you in a bind. This year’s market is a great example; I can name plenty of teams that “needed a catcher” coming into this offseason, but there were only two at the top of the market, and that’s if you count Sean Murphy, whom the A’s traded to Atlanta on Monday. Short of that, Willson Contreras was at the top by himself, and the Cardinals signed him earlier this month. That means the other teams who “needed a catcher” had to look a tier down. Speaking of which: the Twins signed Christian Vázquez to a three-year deal worth $30 million. Not long after, the Guardians signed Mike Zunino to a one-year deal for $6 million. Read the rest of this entry »

When I read today’s ZiPS projections for the Blue Jays, I was struck by one clear weakness: starting pitching depth. The team boasts an impressive lineup across the board, with Lourdes Gurriel Jr. the closest thing to a weak spot. Toronto also has two borderline aces in Alek Manoah and Kevin Gausman.

That sounds great, but the fourth and fifth starters are projected for a combined 1.7 WAR, which is wildly uninspiring. That hardly seems like a smart plan for a presumptive playoff team, but the Jays are no dummies. Those projections are now outdated — sorry Dan! — because Chris Bassitt is headed north on a three-year, $63 million deal, as Jeff Passan first reported.

Bassitt isn’t the best pitcher to reach free agency this season, but he’s squarely in the top tier. I ranked him 14th among the top 50 free agents this offseason, with only four pitchers ahead of him. Rational observers could certainly differ on that; he’s at the head of a large pack of starters who I think will deliver roughly equivalent value over the next few years. But the general point holds: he’s the kind of pitcher that you probably don’t want starting your first game of the playoffs but that you’d be ecstatic to have as a third starter. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

The Braves have taken a heterodox approach to building a bullpen in recent years. Sometimes they apply the overall team strategy of strongly preferring players with ties to Georgia, like Collin McHugh and former Brave Will Smith. Sometimes they take fliers on players looking to reinvigorate their careers, like Kirby Yates and Nick Anderson. Sometimes they fleece the Angels for Raisel Iglesias, or sign a good closer to a short-term deal like Kenley Jansen, or draft and develop an A.J. Minter. Heck, sometimes they just call Jesse Chavez, and he magically appears in the bullpen.

This week, they’re trying a new tack, making a trade to shore up their already-solid relief corps. It wasn’t the biggest transaction of the week or anywhere near it, but every transaction deserves a little analysis. Let’s talk Braves and Tigers. Let’s talk Joe Jiménez, Justyn-Henry Malloy, and Jake Higginbotham:

#Braves acquire RHP Joe Jiménez: pic.twitter.com/VkFZGXIdhw

— Atlanta Braves (@Braves) December 8, 2022

Jiménez is a walking advertisement for reliever volatility. Depending on the year, he’s been either excellent or near-unplayable. His true talent level likely lies somewhere in between his superlative 2022, when he struck out a third of opposing batters to go with pinpoint control, and his ’21, when he ran a 16.7% walk rate and an ERA approaching 6.00. Sure, relievers are volatile, but Jiménez has been really volatile. Read the rest of this entry »