I don’t know the name for this phenomenon, but I’m guessing everyone has experienced it at some point. You hear something enough times, and you start to repeat it without really thinking critically about it. My example: the breakeven stolen base rate. I’ve heardthattermsomanytimes over the years, often in connection with whether teams were stealing too much or not enough, that I incorporated it into my thought processes like it was my own.
But then someone asked me why the optimal stolen base success rate was around 70%, and I realized that I’d been wrong. It was a bolt-of-inspiration kind of moment – you only need to hear the counter-argument once to re-assess your old, uncritically assumed thought. Why should teams keep stealing so long as they’re successful more than 70% (ish) of the time? I couldn’t explain it to myself using math.
The other side of the coin, the notion that teams should be successful at far better than the breakeven rate in the aggregate, is incredibly easy to understand. There’s a difference between marginal return and total return. Consider a business where you’re making investments. Your first investment makes $10. Your next one makes $8, and then $6, and so on. You could keep investing until your business breaks even – until you make a negative $10 investment to offset that first one, more or less ($10+$8+$6+$4+$2+$0-$2-$4-$6-$8-$10). But that’s a clearly bad decision. You should stop when your marginal return stops being positive – when an investment returns you $0, you can just stop going and pocket the $30 ($10+$8+$6+$4+$2+$0). Read the rest of this entry »
For a month or so every year it seems, Danny Jansen looks like Babe Ruth. The only season out of the past four in which he hasn’t put up a 20-game stretch with a wRC+ over 200 was 2023, and he was pretty awesome in 2023 anyway; he posted a 115 wRC+ overall that year, while playing the most offensively-challenged position in the sport, no less. So in some ways, the Rays might have just signed the best offensive catcher in baseball:
@JeffPassan tweetedCatcher Danny Jansen and the Tampa Bay Rays are in agreement on a one-year, $8.5 million contract that includes a mutual option for a second season, sources tell ESPN. Jansen, who has played in Toronto and Boston, remains in the AL East. On it: @ByRobertMurray and @TBTimes_Rays.
Of course, when it comes to overall production, they absolutely didn’t. Jansen was white hot to start the year in 2024 – and then ended the season with an 89 wRC+, going from target deadline acquisition to backup in the process. And while he has indeed hit well when healthy, he gets hurt a lot. Across those aforementioned four seasons, he’s accumulated only 1,078 plate appearances. He hit the IL twice in 2021, twice again in ’22, twice yet again in ’23, and then missed the start of the ’24 season rehabbing from the last ’23 injury.
So maybe Jansen is secretly an amazing hitter – or maybe it’s a miracle that he can even still play baseball. Either of those could be true, and of course the truth is likely somewhere in between. The Rays are famously good at discerning where in the “somewhere in the middle” players lie, and as such, they feel like a natural home for Jansen.
Finding catchers who can both hit and field is nearly impossible. The Rays haven’t particularly prioritized them in the draft, and they certainly haven’t gone out of their way to trade for or sign marquee catchers. That’s how they ended up with Ben Rortvedt (career wRC+: 70) as their primary catcher in 2024. In 2023, that role went to Christian Bethancourt (career wRC+: 71). In 2022, Bethancourt backed up Francisco Mejía (career wRC+: a scintillating 86, though with poor defense). Read the rest of this entry »
A year ago, Juan Soto was the buzz of baseball’s Winter Meetings. It wasn’t because of anything he had agency over, though. The San Diego Padres were reportedly looking to trade him, and they eventually did. This year, Soto is the story again. But instead of waiting to see what his fate is, he’ll get to choose. Or maybe I should say that he did choose, because as Jon Heyman first reported, Soto signed a 15-year, $765 million dollar deal to join the New York Mets.
Presumably, you aren’t reading this article with no background knowledge of who Soto is. Still, I want to give you a refresher, because Soto is such a delightful player. He’s your favorite hitter’s favorite hitter. He has the best batting eye in baseball, and it’s not close. His sense of the strike zone is so good that it feels like he’s dictating the terms rather than the pitcher, one of very few hitters in baseball who gives that impression. He’s perennially one of the best in the game when it comes to avoiding swinging and missing, and he walks nearly a fifth of the time because pitchers are too afraid to challenge him.
Why are they too afraid? Because he’s also one of the best power hitters in baseball. He launched 41 homers and 31 doubles in 2024. He’s hit 201 home runs in his career, seventh-best in the majors over that span. His worst seasonal line was in 2022… when he hit .242/.401/.452 while getting traded mid-season. “Worst” is all relative, though; it was the ninth-best offensive line in the majors that year. Soto is so good offensively that despite being known for patience first and power second, he’s actually 11th in the league in batting average since debuting. He’s just good at every facet of hitting. Read the rest of this entry »
Let’s just put the headline up right away. Luis Severino is now an Athletic:
BREAKING: Right-hander Luis Severino and the A’s are in agreement on a three-year, $67 million contract, sources tell ESPN. It is the largest guarantee in the history of the A’s franchise. And even with the qualifying offer attached, Severino got well over market expectations.
Now this is an interesting free agent signing. The A’s just signed the second-biggest deal of the offseason so far, and the largest in franchise history. They have one other player with a guaranteed contract on the team – and that’s lefty reliever T.J. McFarland, making $1.8 million in 2025. This is a sea change in terms of how the team operates, so let’s talk about why they did it and the ways it could succeed or fail.
First things first: The A’s could use some pitching. They were better than you’d think in 2024 – they won 19 more games than their dispiriting 2023 campaign. Three different A’s hitters – Brent Rooker, Lawrence Butler, and JJ Bleday – eclipsed three wins above replacement, the first time that had happened since the team shipped out Matt Olson and Matt Chapman. All three of those guys are young and under team control for a while. Shea Langeliers and Zack Gelof both look like good everyday players. Jacob Wilson is an intriguing top prospect. If it weren’t for the overall John Fisher stink of the franchise, this lineup would feel mighty tantalizing. Read the rest of this entry »
Let’s be honest: Headlines aside, trying to dub one pitch the “best” in baseball is a silly way of thinking about things. There are so many pitches a year that anointing exactly one the best doesn’t make much sense. Emmanuel Clase threw hundreds of unhittable cutters this year. Blake Snell’s curveball, when correctly weighted, might as well be made of smoke. Paul Skenes and Jhoan Duran both throw 100-mph offspeed pitches. How can you separate one of these from the rest?
One easy way? Ask one of our pitch models. PitchingBot gives every single pitch three grades. There’s a pure stuff grade, a pure command grade, and a holistic overall score. Those work basically how you’d expect. Stuff is just the raw characteristics of the pitch, ignoring location and count. Command accounts for count and location. The overall grade isn’t a straight combination of the two; it uses all the same inputs, but instead of separately considering pitch shape and location, it grades the combination.
If, for example, you wanted to see the nastiest pitch of the year, you’d look at each individual pitch’s stuff grade. You’d want something with a ton of movement, good velocity, and probably some kind of funky release point to make the other attributes play up. It almost certainly won’t be a fastball, because there’s no way you can match the pure bat-missing prowess of a breaking pitch that way. You’d be looking for something like this:
That Kevin Gausman splitter is just the ticket. It’s not his most consistent pitch – splitters are tough that way. The movement profile is all over the place depending on his exact grip, which leads to the occasional floating ball that hitters can obliterate. But that variance works in his favor sometimes, too, like on that pitch to Giancarlo Stanton. That splitter fell 37 inches, six more than his average one, because he killed the spin on it absolutely perfectly. Read the rest of this entry »
As I occasionally mention, I worked in finance before I started writing about baseball. One of my early bosses told me something that pretty much everyone in the industry has heard at one time or another. I had just presented a fancy trade that took advantage of about seven different financial instruments to eke out a small profit with minimal risk. He took a long look at my page of notes, scrunched up his nose, and gave me a tip that has stuck with me ever since: “Hedges are for gardens.”
That’s not something you’ll learn in a book. Financial theory is all about reducing variance and then doing the resulting low-risk trade you’ve built over and over. They call them hedge funds for a reason, after all: hedging against loss is a lot of the point. But the secret those books won’t tell you is that this behavior has a logical limit. If I showed you a risk-free way to make a dollar, theory would tell you to replicate that exact trade a billion times. If I showed you a riskier way to make five dollars, theory would tell you to reject it in favor of the first trade and make up the foregone four dollars in volume.
But in the real world, that’s not how things work. As it turns out, you can’t replicate things infinitely. Plenty of the decisions I’d made that reduced variance also reduced expected return per unit of the trade. You can think of it in simplified terms: I’d taken something that would make me four dollars, plus or minus five dollars, and turned it into something that made me two dollars for sure. Two is less than four. If I could select the guaranteed two dollar option twice, that would be clearly better than the risky four dollar option, but my boss pointed out that just doing twice as much isn’t always easy, or even feasible. The better trade, he told me, was the one that didn’t sacrifice quite so much expected value in the name of hedging.
What does this have to do with baseball? More than you’d think. Accepting lower returns in exchange for lower risk is a time-honored tradition across all sports. Whether it’s the running game in football, mid-range jumpers in basketball, or setting up deep and playing defensively in soccer, old school tactics were heavy on risk mitigation. Baseball has tons of these: shortening up to put the ball in play, pitching to contact, sacrifice bunting, letting your starter go seven regardless of how he’s pitching that day. Those strategies are all about minimizing variance around your central outcomes rather than trying for the highest effective value. Read the rest of this entry »
Last offseason, the Mets got in early on the starting pitching market. They signed Luis Severino in late November, later pairing him with Sean Manaea atop their rotation. Both deals were modest and short term, essentially chances for the players to rebuild their résumés while pitching for a playoff contender. And that’s exactly what happened. So now, with Severino and Manaea in line for larger paydays, the circle of life restarts: The Mets have signed Frankie Montas to a two-year, $34 million deal with an opt out after the first year.
At surface level, Montas doesn’t seem like a blockbuster signing. He just posted a 4.84 ERA (and 4.71 FIP, this wasn’t some weird BABIP issue) in his first year back after missing most of 2023 due to a shoulder injury. He’s about to turn 32. His last excellent season was in 2021. The list of drawbacks is lengthy.
Ah, but “knowing which drawbacks to overlook” might be David Stearns’ superpower. Manaea was coming off of two straight abysmal seasons when he signed in New York, and Severino hadn’t been great since 2018. But both had the capability to excel – they already had in their careers, and not in a fluky way. The right surroundings, the right defense, a pinch of luck here and there: It wasn’t hard to see how those two deals could work out. Likewise, Montas might have been down in 2024, but I have no trouble talking myself into an improved 2025.
Montas has never been a pure bat-missing strikeout machine. When he was at his best in Oakland, he did everything just well enough for the total package to work. He struck out more batters than average, walked fewer than average, kept the ball in the ballpark, and went six or so innings a start. No one would mistake him for Cy Young, but doing a bunch of things well added up to an ERA in the mid-3s. That’s a clear playoff starter, exactly what the Mets need. Read the rest of this entry »
It’s a shame that “bunts are bad” has become one of the truisms at the core of the ceaseless, silly battle between old school and new school, stats and scouts, quantitative and qualitative assessment methods. It’s understandable, because “stop bunting so much” was one of the first inroads that sabermetric analysts made in baseball strategy. But that was 25 years ago, and while everyone kept repeating that same mantra, the facts on the ground changed.
Sacrifice bunts by non-pitchers have plummeted over the years, as they should have. In recent years, the bunts that are left, the ones that teams haven’t streamlined out of their game planning, are mostly the good ones. “Bunts are bad” never meant that in totality; it just meant that too many of the times that teams sacrificed outs for bases were poor choices. That’s become much more clear now that pitchers don’t bat anymore. The 2022 season, the first full year of the universal DH, set a record for most runs added by bunting. After a down 2023, this season was right back near those banner highs. So let’s recap the ways teams beat the old conventional wisdom and assembled a year of bunting that the number-crunchingest analyst on the planet could appreciate.
The Death of the Worst Sac Bunts
When is a good time to bunt? It’s complicated! It depends on where the defense is playing, the score of the game, who’s on base, the player at the plate, the subsequent hitters due up, and myriad other minor factors. But there’s one overwhelming factor: There are base/out states where bunts are almost always a bad idea, and the more you avoid those, the better.
Sacrifice bunting with only a runner on first almost never makes sense. You’re getting just a single advancement, and it’s the least valuable advancement there is. Getting a runner to third with only one out is an admirable goal. Moving two runners up is even better. Squeeze plays have huge potential rewards. Moving a guy from first to second just doesn’t measure up.
Likewise, bunting gets worse when there’s already one out in the inning. Plate appearances with runners on base are worth their weight in gold in the modern, homer-happy game. Crooked numbers are tough to come by, and the easiest way to get them is by stacking up opportunities to hit multi-run homers. When you already have a runner on base, bunts are always suspect. Bunts that cut out half of your remaining outs in the inning are even worse.
There are occasional circumstances where these types of bunts make sense. If the batter thinks they’ll beat out a hit fairly often, bunting gets better. The weaker the hitter and the better the subsequent lineup, the more attractive bunts get. Close games and speedy runners can tip the balance. It’s not a universally bad decision to bunt with only a runner on first, or to bunt with one or more outs, but the higher the proportion of bunts that move a runner to third with less than two outs, the better.
To get an idea of how much this has changed while removing pitchers from the equation, I looked at the 2015-2019 seasons and excluded all plate appearances from the ninth spot in the batting order. That’s not a perfect way of removing pitchers, but it gets pretty close. I used this to get an idea for what percentage of bunts came in favorable situations – with at least a runner on second and no one out.
In those years, 23.2% of bunts occurred in the best situations for a sacrifice. After removing bases-empty bunts, which are clearly a different animal, we’re left with bunts in situations where a sacrifice isn’t particularly valuable. Those ill-conceived bunts cost teams roughly 0.1 runs per bunt, a shockingly high number. All other bunts – attempts for a hit or attempts to move a runner to third with only one out – carried positive run expectancy. It’s just that there were so many bunts in bad spots.
In 2024, 31.7% of bunts came in “good sacrifice” situations, with a runner on second and no one out. Increasingly, the “bad sacrifice” situations are now about going for a single with some ancillary benefits of runner advancement. On-base percentage on bunts with runners on base is up. In 2024, 25% of the bunts with runners on base ended with the batter reaching base safely, via hit, failed fielder’s choice, or error. That’s up from 22% (non-pitcher) in the 2015-2019 era, and from 17.7% from 2008 to 2012. If anything, that understates it too: Plenty of the worst hitters in baseball used to bat in front of pitchers, which limited their bunting opportunities.
Impressive Individual Efforts Jose Altuve bunted 14 times this year. Nine of those turned into singles. That was the best performance by anyone with double-digit bunts, but it was hardly the only exceptional effort. Jake McCarthy bunted 21 times and racked up 10 singles. Luke Raley went 7-for-12. This one from Altuve was just perfect:
That’s not to say there have never been good bunters before. Dee Strange-Gordon consistently turned bunts into singles at a high clip. Altuve has been in the majors for a while. But the high-volume bunters in today’s game are more effective than they were 10 years ago in the aggregate. There are also fewer truly objectionable bunters. Francisco Lindor bunted 20 times in 2015 and reached base safely only three times. Fellow 2024 Met Jose Iglesias bunted 12 times and reached base once. There were still some bad bunters – Kevin Kiermaier and Kyle Isbel had awful results, for example – but it’s become far less common.
Bunting for a single is hardly the only positive outcome, of course. That’s why you bunt in the first place – because bunts lead to more productive outs, on average, than swinging away. Advancement is more likely and double plays are less likely. Individual efforts of the top few bunters have always been net positive. These days, those top bunters are accounting for a bigger share of overall bunts, and the results have improved proportionally.
Bunters Were Already Good
Here’s a secret: The wars were already over. In 2002, bunters batting in the 1-8 spots in the lineup cost their teams 36 runs relative to a naive expectation based on the base/out state when they batted. In 2004, that number swelled to -63 runs. It was negative in 11 of the 12 seasons from 2000-2011, with roughly 2,000 bunts a year from this cohort, which largely excludes pitchers.
The number of non-pitcher bunt attempts declined as the 21st century progressed into its second decade. By 2015, we were down to 1,500 a year or so and steadily declining. The bunts excised from the game were all the lowest-value bunts, the ones most likely to hurt the batting team. From 2012 onward, non-pitchers have produced positive value on their bunt attempts every single year. Meanwhile, bunt attempts have declined and then stabilized, around 1,100-1,200 per year. Teams aren’t dummies – they’ve cut out 800 bunts a year, or more than 25 per team, and those bunts are pretty much all the no-hope-for-a-single sacrifice attempts that drew statistically minded folks’ ire in the first place.
In that sense, you’re not really seeing anything completely new in 2024. The very best bunters in the game are a little bit better than they used to be, but not overwhelmingly so. They’re choosing better spots, but not overwhelmingly so. They’re succeeding more frequently when they aim for a hit, but good bunters have always been good at that. The real change is in the bunts that aren’t happening.
The Mariners
I’ll be honest: I didn’t expect the Mariners to top the list of best bunting teams. They seem too station-to-station, too offensively challenged, too reliant on the home run. What can I say? Appearances can be deceiving. Led by Raley, an unlikely but enthusiastic bunter, the Mariners had a league-best performance. This one was just perfect:
It was a great situation for a bunt. The Astros were shifted over toward Raley’s pull side, which left third baseman Alex Bregman on an island covering third and prevented him from crashing early. Raley disguised the bunt long enough to get everything moving, and then used his sneaky-blazing footspeed to beat it out. It’s a masterpiece of bunting.
Victor Robles is less about masterpieces and more about maximum effort. He bunts too often for his own good. That leads to a lot of iffy bunts, but also some gems:
That’s another one where reading the defense made all the difference. The Rays shifted their middle infielders away from first, which meant a bunt past the pitcher would leave Yandy Díaz helpless. This one also benefited from a bit of defensive confusion, as many good bunts do. Who was covering second when Díaz fielded the ball? More or less no one:
Hey, every little bit helps when you’re bunting. And while plenty of other Mariners contributed to their success as well – Leo Rivas and Jorge Polanco know how to handle a bat – I had to close this out with another gem from Raley. Sure, it’s against the White Sox, but those runs count too. Raley is just vicious when it comes to attacking good spots to bunt:
It’s not every day that you see a squeeze bunt go for a no-throw single. But again, Raley read the defense and placed the ball perfectly. Not much you can do about this:
Altuve might have the advantage in raw numbers, but no one made me sit up in my seat hoping for a bunt like Raley did this year. Hat tip to Davy Andrews for highlighting his hijinks early in the year, and Raley just never stopped going for it.
The Angels
By all rights, this article should be over. The Mariners were the best bunters this year, Raley was their ringleader, and they exemplified the way bunts are making offenses better in today’s game. But the Angels are altogether more confusing and more giffable, so I’m giving them a shout too.
You’d think that Ron Washington’s team would be at the very top of the bunt rate leaderboards, but the Halos attempted only 25 bunts this year, half the Mariners’ tally and seventh-lowest in baseball. The reason why is obvious: They weren’t that good at it. They weren’t the worst team in terms of runs added – that’d be the Nats, who were both prolific and bad at bunting this year – but they were impressively inefficient. No one with so few bunt attempts was nearly so bad in the aggregate.
They bunted in bad spots. They rarely reached base even when the defense was poorly positioned. This might be the worst bunt attempt you’ve seen this year:
Unless it’s this:
The lesson: Stop with all these squeeze bunts. Unless it’s against the White Sox, that is:
See, our story has a happy ending for the bunters after all. I love bunts, and I’m not afraid to use this platform to show it.
Last offseason, the Reds assembled a frankly confusing amount of infield depth. With the emergence of Elly De La Cruz, Matt McLain, and Noelvi Marte, there weren’t many spaces available to start with. They signed Jeimer Candelario, and already had Christian Encarnacion-Strand as an option at first. Spencer Steer moonlights in the infield too. That left Jonathan India as an odd man out, and he seemed like a clear trade candidate merely waiting for a good home.
In 2024, that good home turned out to be Cincinnati. McLain missed the entire year after shoulder surgery. Encarnacion-Strand got hurt in May and didn’t return. Marte got suspended for PED use. When all was said and done, the Reds ended up trading for infield depth in Santiago Espinal. India played in 151 games and supplied his usual OBP-heavy offense.
Holding onto India worked out for the Reds last year, but there’s no way they could’ve tried the same plan again. That would’ve been just too many resources committed to one subset of the team, and Cincinnati has needs across the roster. So after many months, the trade we’ve all been expecting for roughly a year has come to pass. The Reds traded India and outfielder Joey Wiemer to the Royals in exchange for righty starter Brady Singer.
At first blush, this trade feels strange from the Reds’ standpoint. India might be a luxury good for their team, but he’s a legitimately good hitter with two years of reasonably priced team control remaining. He was their third-best hitter by WAR, and the Reds need people on base to take advantage of their homer-friendly stadium. Singer was Kansas City’s fourth starter, and 700 innings into his career, he’s not exactly a mystery box: He’ll give you a 4-ish ERA if you can put a good defense behind him. Not only that, but the Reds had to throw in Wiemer just to get things done. What gives? Read the rest of this entry »
