Three days ago, Jesús Luzardo was a fun bounceback candidate. As a minor leaguer, he was one of the best prospects in the game, with an explosive fastball, a spectacular array of secondaries, and plus command. In his first two seasons of big league experience, that continued; he missed bats, walked only 6.8% of his opponents, and posted an ERA in the upper threes. But in 2021, his command collapsed, and with it his untouchable status in Oakland. In the midst of a 6.61 ERA season with an 11% walk rate, the A’s shipped him off to Miami in exchange for Starling Marte.

It’s not three days ago anymore. Now, after a dominant start, I’m considering a different question: is Luzardo Miami’s best pitcher? Is he one of the best pitchers in baseball, full stop? That’s probably hyperbole, but again: Luzardo was one of the best pitching prospects in baseball only a handful of years ago. Let’s give his remarkable turnaround the consideration it deserves, and see if we can figure out what changes he’s made to unlock this new level of performance while we’re at it.

First things first: has Luzardo made any changes to his delivery? To figure this out with my remedial understanding of pitching mechanics, I watched one fastball from his 2021 season and one fastball from his 2022 debut over and over (and over and over and over) again. Here are the clips in question. First, a called strike last April:

Next, a foul tip from Tuesday:

I’m hardly an expert here, but I noticed several differences. First, he’s more to the third-base side of the rubber. Second, at the peak of his lead leg’s lift, his glove position is meaningfully higher. Take a look at the two side-by-side and it’s somewhat obvious, even if the different aspect angles from the two broadcasts keep you from making a straight comparison:

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Drew Rasmussen was a Rays success story last year. A key part of the trade that sent Willy Adames to Milwaukee, Rasmussen profiled as a plus reliever. But after initially serving as a multi-inning bullpen arm, Tampa Bay slotted him into the rotation for the last two months of the season, and he delivered 37 innings of 1.46 ERA, 2.76 FIP excellence. Sure, it was over 4.5 innings per start, and the peripherals weren’t pretty, but quality over quantity has always been a deal the Rays will take, and you certainly can’t argue with his run prevention.

Rasmussen did it despite what could charitably be described as a predictable arsenal. He threw his fastball 65% of the time and his slider another 30% of the time. If we’re being honest, it was more like 1.5 pitches — his fastball did a lot of the heavy lifting, and the slider picked up the pieces. It’s one of those spin-and-speed four-seamers that are all the rage these days. Rasmussen didn’t always locate it well, but simply put, it’s a hard pitch to hit.

He paired that fastball with a slider that featured two-plane action. It wasn’t a big movement pitch; it had drop and arm-side run in roughly equal proportion, but its main standout quality was that it was an offspeed pitch when hitters were setting up for 98 mph at the letters. If you’re trying to cover a high fastball, particularly one that struck you out last at-bat like this:

Then it’s hard to adjust to a slow and low pitch like this:

When you look at it that way, it’s a pretty good pitch. And hey, by some metrics, it was: hitters had a lot of trouble squaring it up, mustering a woeful .226 wOBA on contact (and a 41% hard-hit rate). On the other hand, it hardly missed any bats; Rasmussen was in the bottom 10% of baseball for swinging strike rate and bottom 15% for CSW rate. Eno Sarris wrote about the pitch in the playoffs and came away similarly unsure of its efficacy. Read the rest of this entry »

There are so many good young shortstops in baseball these days that it’s easy to lose track. The oldest starter in the top 10 of our positional power rankings is Xander Bogaerts, and he hasn’t turned 30 yet. Eighteen of the top 20 shortstops are under 30. It can feel like every team has one of these guys. But that doesn’t mean they’re not valuable, and the Mariners clearly agree: they recently agreed to a contract extension with J.P. Crawford that will keep him in the Pacific Northwest through the 2026 season.

Crawford is, for lack of a better way to put it, an in-between Mariner. The team’s old guard – Félix Hernández and Kyle Seager, for example – is gone. The new guard – Jarred Kelenic, Julio Rodríguez, Logan Gilbert, et al. – are breaking in now. But Crawford debuted for Seattle in 2019, and saw his first major league action in 2017. He would have reached free agency after the 2024 season, awkwardly in the middle of what the Mariners hope will be their new core’s best years.

The solution seemed obvious, and the deal the two sides worked out fits the mold almost perfectly. The five-year, $51 million pact is straightforward; no options on either side, no escalators, and no buyouts. It will pay him $10 million in each of the first four seasons and $11 million in the last year. Read the rest of this entry »

José Ramírez is subtly bending the fabric of space and time. It’s the only way I can explain it. How else can you square the particular details of his hitting prowess? He’s impossibly quick to the ball, creating consistent loud contact. That should require a wild swing, but it doesn’t. He’s one of the best contact hitters in baseball. He has one of the best approaches in the game; sometimes it seems like he knows what’s coming before the pitcher throws it. He’s one of the best defenders in the game. It all feels vaguely magical.

Until today, he was also the most underpaid star in baseball. A five-year, $26 million extension he signed before the 2017 season (with two team options for another $26 million) immediately preceded his ascent to one of the best players in the game. That’s no longer true; today, he more than tripled his career guaranteed earnings by agreeing to a five-year, $124 million extension with the Guardians.

BREAKING: Star third baseman José Ramirez and the Cleveland Guardians are in agreement on a five-year, $124M contract extension, sources familiar with the deal tell ESPN. Deal includes full no-trade clause. With this year and pickup of a 2023 option, Ramirez is guaranteed $150M.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) April 6, 2022

This deal, which starts after the 2023 season, should keep Ramírez in Cleveland for the rest of his peak, and quite possibly the rest of his career. For fans of a franchise that had seen its home-grown stars leave quite a bit of late, it’s a welcome turn of events. For Ramírez, it’s financial and — thanks to a no-trade clause — workplace stability.

I know this article is about a contract, but I can’t help it: I just want to talk about how great Ramírez is. I wasn’t exaggerating up above; I really do struggle to wrap my head around his talent. Most hitters have identifiable holes, places where they sacrifice one thing to gain greatly in another area. Level, four-seam-punishing swing? You likely struggle with sinkers low in the zone. Patient approach that hunts fastballs and waits out secondary pitches? Breaking balls in the zone will be your Kryptonite. Whip-quick pull hitter? You might struggle with pitches away. Read the rest of this entry »

In a normal baseball offseason, all the trades would have already happened. Front offices have all season to call each other up with a million permutations of deals, and the deals they make spawn other deals, and player injuries spawn other deals, and free-agent signings lead to surpluses or needs, and… well, you get the idea. Trading flurries happen in December, and during spring training, and teams work out their rosters that way.

With a compressed offseason thanks to the lockout, the timeline has gotten all mixed up. Now, trades are happening three days before opening day. It’s madness! And speaking of:

Tigers Get

• Austin Meadows

Rays Get

• Isaac Paredes
• Competitive Balance Round B Pick

This trade was announced last night, and I’m writing about it this morning, and so rather than write a block of text about one side’s return and then a block of text about the other, I’m going to try a slightly different framing tool: I’ll walk you through a few levels of how I’ve thought about this deal. It’s an interesting one, no doubt, as trades involving the Rays so often are. Let’s get started!
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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.

Finally, you’ve reached the last positional power rankings entry of the year. It’s also the most powerful power ranking of the bunch — all the others have had to settle for five or so absolute superstars, but through the magic of counting entire rotations together, we’re looking at an embarrassment of riches here. Twenty-four pitchers in this writeup are projected for three or more WAR this season — good luck matching that at shortstop. And that doesn’t even count the bottom half of rotations (sorry, Shane Bieber, you’re still cool, though). Considering a group of eight-ish starters instead of one-ish starter and his backups for each team means that there are going to be more good players by default.

If you’ll allow me to indulge in a bit of inside baseball, starting pitching rankings are different in one other major way: the attrition on this list has been strikingly high. If you could go back in time a month and look at the second base power rankings, they’d look basically the same as they do now. Marcus Semien? Good then, good now. Maybe the occasional signing or trade shook things up, but for the most part, nothing has changed. When it comes to pitchers, nothing is constant. Seemingly every day, someone goes down with injury. Take a snapshot a week ago, and White Sox would have graced the top five. The Padres added Sean Manaea, then saw Mike Clevinger’s projected innings total take a hit. There’s no more volatile position in the game. That’s modern baseball in a nutshell — starters are hugely important, and they’re also quite breakable. Your team’s fortunes depend in large part on these units, and they in turn depend in large part on extremely breakable ligaments and tendons. Read the rest of this entry »

If I told you that two contending teams swapped major leaguers, you’d probably have an idea of what that looks like. Maybe a reliever and a fourth outfielder changed hands, or something like that. The Blue Jays and the White Sox didn’t do that, though; they swapped catchers, as Jeff Passan first reported:

The Chicago White Sox and Toronto Blue Jays are in agreement on a trade that will send catcher Zack Collins to the Blue Jays in exchange for catcher Reese McGuire, sources familiar with the deal tell ESPN.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) April 3, 2022

But even though both Reese McGuire and Zack Collins play catcher, they do so in very different ways. Amusingly, as we at FanGraphs work through our Positional Power Rankings, Collins is essentially positionless power. His home run totals in the minors and batted ball metrics in the majors tell a consistent story; if he can figure out a way to limit his strikeouts, he’ll be a fearsome hitter.

In a previous era, that might have secured him a starting catching role. But our newfound understanding of the value of receiving has exposed Collins as one of the worst defenders at the position — one who was worth a ghastly 14 runs below average in only 506 innings of catching last year. It’s not an easy skill to show with a GIF or two, and that sounds like a ton of runs to surrender in such a short time. But that matches up with the eye test, and the Blue Jays will likely use Collins mainly as a first baseman and DH.
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Author’s note: Jacob deGrom was scratched from his scheduled start today after feeling tightness in his throwing shoulder. He will undergo an MRI. While that potential injury makes his availability for the start of the season murky, this article is about his spring start on March 27.

When you watch Jacob deGrom, he’ll make you question what you know about the fine art of pitching. Develop a mix of killer pitches to keep batters off balance? He has five excellent pitches, but he basically only uses two of them. Change speeds? He throws his fastball in a consistent band, his slider in a consistent band, and when he does deign to drop in a changeup, it matches his slider.

None of that is the most obviously extreme thing about deGrom, though. If you’ve paid attention through a few of his starts, you know what I’m talking about: he barely uses any of the plate. Home plate is 17 inches wide, and baseballs have a radius of roughly 1.5 inches. That means that pitchers have 18.5 inches of horizontal space to play with, from catching the edge on one side of the plate to catching it on the other. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, the Twins got their dessert: they signed the top free agent in the market and installed him in the middle of the lineup. This week, they’re eating their vegetables, in the form of a one-year deal with Chris Archer:

Right-hander Chris Archer and the Minnesota Twins are in agreement on a one-year, $3.5 million contract, sources familiar with the deal tell ESPN. Archer, 33, will join the Twins' rotation and can earn up to $9.5 million this season with performance bonuses.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) March 28, 2022

Those incentives are a modern-day version of a games started bonus. Archer will receive them based on the number of games he either starts or pitches three innings of relief in – basically starting or being the headliner after an opener.

I like the idea of this contract quite a bit, for both Archer and the Twins. From Archer’s perspective, it’s a bet on himself with a financial cushion if things don’t work out. When he signed in Tampa Bay last year, he hadn’t pitched since 2019, and he didn’t even accrue 20 innings. He hurt his forearm in his second start of the year, missed four months, then hurt his hip not long after returning. A starting role in the majors seemed far from a certainty. Read the rest of this entry »