Niko Kavadas had recently been named Boston’s Minor League Player of the Year when he was first featured here at FanGraphs in November 2022. Two years later, he’s now playing for the Los Angeles Angels, after the Red Sox traded him at this summer’s deadline as part of a five-player swap. Power and patience are his calling cards. Kavadas was slashing .281/.424/.551 with 17 home runs in Triple-A at the time he was dealt, and while he subsequently struggled after receiving his first call-up — a 77 wRC+ and 38.7% strikeout rate over 106 plate appearances — he did go deep four times.
The 26-year-old first baseman very much remains a work in progress, as evidenced by his having spent the last month-plus playing in the Arizona Fall League. And while assessing progress in an extreme hitter-friendly environment can be tricky, he nonetheless crushed the ball during his time in the desert. Kavadas was named the AFL’s Offensive Player of the Year after slashing .329/.462/.700 with 13 extra-base hits, including six home runs, over 91 plate appearances. We’ll get to why he was there in a moment.
When I caught up to Kavadas prior to a Fall League game in October, the first thing I wanted to know was how the present-day iteration compares to the hitter I’d spoken to 25 months earlier. Read the rest of this entry »
The team that signs Nick Pivetta this offseason will be getting a veteran starter who, as my colleague Ben Clemens stated in our 2025 Top 50 Free Agents rundown, has “long been a favorite of pitching models.” The team will also be getting someone who believes in pitching to his strengths. The 31-year-old right-hander is studious about his craft, but with a notable exception. Poring over scouting reports isn’t his cup of tea.
“I think about it not as a specific hitter, but more of, ‘Is he a lefty or a righty?,’” explained Pivetta, whose past four-plus seasons have been with the Boston Red Sox. “I have certain sequences that I do against lefties or righties. I do the same sequences against either side, no matter the hitter.”
That’s not to say he totally ignores weaknesses. As Pivetta told me in our last-weekend-of-the-season conversation, there are certain hitters who struggle with a particular pitch and/or location, so he might vary his “same game plan around a certain spot.” But for the most part, he is “doing the exact same thing over and over again, just trying to execute.”
The extent to which that is optimal is open for debate. As his 50 Free Agents blurb spells out, Pivetta’s numbers suggest that he has never reached — and perhaps not even approached — his full potential. The stuff is unquestionably plus, but the consistency has clearly been lacking.
The Victoria, British Columbia native has pitched more than 1,000 innings over eight big-league seasons, so opposing teams have a pretty good idea of what to expect when he takes the mound. Moreover, certain lineups will present, at least on paper, a greater challenge for his pitch mix and standard attack plan. Might adherence to advance reports be a meaningful advantage add? Read the rest of this entry »
Hitting coaches and swing coaches aren’t the same thing.
I heard those exact words, or variations thereof, a number of times this season while talking to coaches. More often that not, the words were accompanied by an opinion that too many hitters — especially young hitters — are overly focused on honing a perfect swing, whereas what they should primarily be focusing on is… well, actually hitting the baseball. That’s not to discount the importance of good swings — every hitting coach understands their value — but much more goes into squaring up pitches within a game environment. As San Diego Padres special assistant Mark Loretta put it in yesterday’s Talks Hitting interview, “Obviously, you have to swing to hit the ball, but swinging isn’t hitting.”
Here is what three MLB general managers had to say on the subject, primarily as it relates to player development.
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Ross Fenstermaker, Texas Rangers GM
The Texas Rangers named a new general manager on November 4, promoting Ross Fenstermaker from assistant GM/player development and international scouting, a role he’d held since October 2021. A University of California Davis graduate, Fenstermaker has been with the organization since 2010, initially coming on board as a baseball operations intern.
Given his PD experience — and with swings in mind — I asked Fenstermaker about the advancements the Rangers made in that area over recent seasons. Read the rest of this entry »
Mark Loretta was a solid hitter over 15 big league seasons, and he was especially good in 2003 and 2004. Over that two-year span, the right-handed-hitting second baseman slashed .325/.382/.469 with 75 doubles, 29 home runs, and a 129 wRC+ with the San Diego Padres. Contact was one of his strong suits. The Northwestern University product had a 7.9% strikeout rate to go with an 8.2% walk rate in 2003-04, numbers largely in line with his 9.2% and 8.5% career marks.
His overall production was comparably modest. Loretta consistently put up high batting averages – they ranged between .280 and .335 during his 11 full seasons — but he went deep just 76 times and finished with a 100 wRC+. Those numbers came over seven-plus seasons with the Milwaukee Brewers, three with the Padres, two-plus with the Houston Astros, and one each with the Boston Red Sox and Los Angeles Dodgers. Your prototypical “professional hitter,” Loretta debuted in 1995 and played his last game in 2009.
Now a special assistant with San Diego, Loretta sat down to talk hitting when the Padres played at Fenway Park in late June.
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David Laurila: Looking back, what style of hitter were you, and did that change over the course of your career?
Mark Loretta: “That’s a good question. I would say that I was developed and came up as [someone who hit] inside the ball, hit the ball up the middle, hit it the other way, hit it where it’s pitched. I was very contact-oriented. I didn’t really sit on pitches or sell out for fastballs, I mainly liked to see the ball get deep.
“About halfway through my career I made a concerted effort to learn to pull the ball better, and more often. I think that’s when my career sort of took off. I was able to get to keep that contact-hitter, hit-it-where-it’s-pitched approach, but also handle the ball inside much better.
“My power — more doubles, more home runs — came when I pulled the ball. For a lot of my career, pitchers would pound me in, pound me in, because I hit the ball well the other way. I made a couple of adjustments with my swing and started looking a little bit more in when I was in hitter’s counts. I would lay off the ball middle-away when it was 2-0 or 3-1.”
When I talked to him at last year’s GM meetings, J.J. Picollo told me that an offseason priority was to add “guys with experience” to a Kansas City Royals roster that was long on promising young talent but short on veteran presence. Picollo did just that — Seth Lugo, Hunter Renfroe, Will Smith, and Michael Wacha were among those brought on board — and while the additions only told part of the story, the end result was a best seller. One year after winning just 56 games, the 2024 Royals went 86-76 and played October baseball for the first time in a decade.
What does the AL Central club’s Executive Vice President/General Manager see as the top priority going into next season?
“We need to be a little more dynamic offensively, and by that I mean we need to get on base at a higher rate than we did this year,” Picollo told me earlier this week in San Antonio. “We’re trying to target players we can lengthen out our lineup with, whether it’s someone at the top, in the middle, or toward the back end. Our identity is more pitching and defense, base running, and situational hitting, so how can we add some guys that can complement what we already have that will allow us to score more runs?”
The Royals crossed the plate 735 times in 2024, the sixth-highest total in the American League. Their .306 on-base percentage was ninth-highest, while their .403 slugging percentage and their 170 home runs ranked sixth and tenth respectively. As power obviously helps provide more runs, I asked Picollo if OBP is indeed the priority. Read the rest of this entry »
The Seattle Mariners had the most starter innings in the majors this year and fell short of the playoffs. Conversely, Detroit Tigers had the fewest starter innings and reached the postseason. For their part, the Kansas City Royals, who had the second-most starter innings, did play October baseball, while the San Francisco Giants, who had the second-lowest total, did not. And then there were the Milwaukee Brewers. Much like the Tigers, the Brewers made the postseason despite getting a low number of innings from their starters — they ranked fifth from the bottom — in part because several of their relievers had outstanding seasons.
What does that all mean? Moreover, what might it mean going forward?
In search of answers, I spoke with the general mangers and/or presidents of baseball operations of the five aforementioned teams at this week’s GM Meetings in San Antonio, Texas. For the execs whose clubs had a low number of starter innings, I was interested in how few innings they felt they could get next year and return (or advance) to the postseason. For those whose clubs topped the starter innings rankings, my inquiries were more about their philosophy and preferences in the seasons to come.
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Justin Hollander, Seattle Mariners
“I don’t think there is such a thing as too many [starter innings],” said Hollander, whose club had 942 2/3 starter innings this season. “We are very cognizant of pitcher health and of making sure we’re putting them in positions to succeed. I think we did about as well as you can with that. In a perfect world, you would never have a stressful inning as a pitcher; that’s not realistic. But surrounding our starters with an impact bullpen, which we’ve done over the years, gives the manager and the pitching coaches the freedom and confidence to let the starter go to the point where they feel like they’ve done everything they can to win the game.
“Our starters take a ton of pride in going deep into the game. We don’t want to artificially limit them, or script out what that’s going to look like. Watching and evaluating the game as it goes on — when is the right time? — is something that our staff has done a great job of.”
The days of a Mickey Lolich going 300-plus innings, like he did multiple times in the 1970s with the Tigers, are long gone and unlikely to be repeated. Even so, are today’s top-end innings standards — Logan Gilbert’s 208 2/3 was this year’s highest total — at all detrimental to a pitcher’s long-term health and effectiveness?
“In the 2024 baseball universe, our starters are pretty optimized,” opined Hollander. “And I think there is a distinction between optimized and maxed out. We’re not looking to max out and get every possible pitch out of our starters, we’re looking to optimize the performance of our team. We don’t ask them to do more than that, because then you might be risking maximizing to the detriment of the team.
Despite “an impact bullpen,” giving more innings to relievers hasn’t been a consideration for the Mariners.
“We’ve never talked about that,” Hollander told me. “Obviously, there is a rest component, and there may be a time when someone hasn’t pitched in a few days so it’s kind of a must-pitch day for them if there is a spot to get them in the game. I think we had a great balance this year between pitcher usage and pitcher rest. But I don’t think we ever factored in the idea of wanting to take a starter out to put someone in from the bullpen if it wasn’t time to take the starter out. Our starters are among the highest-impact starters in baseball. We want to do everything we can to put them in position to succeed for as many innings as they have to give us.”
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Scott Harris, Detroit Tigers
Citing both his team’s 753 starter innings, a number that owes something to a spate of injuries, as well as the volatility of reliever performances year to year, I asked Harris, “What is the fewest you can get next year and return to the postseason?”
“I think the line between starter and reliever is blurring,” Harris replied. “If you watched the Tigers in the second half, we didn’t have traditional starters that started our games; we had a pitcher come in and replicate a starter’s workload. The philosophy behind that is, we felt like we could get better matchups without putting an extra strain on our bullpen. And we didn’t actually put an extra strain on our bullpen. So, I don’t think it will be hard to replicate what we did last year if we choose to pursue that nontraditional pitching strategy of a reliever starting a game, then a starter-type pitching the bulk innings, and then relievers coming in at the end of a game. Read the rest of this entry »
Megan Mendoza/The Republic/USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
Gino Groover is one of the most promising prospects in the Arizona Diamondbacks system. He is also one of the most intriguing. When profiling him for our D-backs list back in May, Eric Longenhagen wrote that the 22-year-old third baseman “was among the 2023 draft’s more volatile and exciting prospects.” Bullish on his potential, our lead prospect analyst added that “2024 might be a breakout season” for the right-handed-hitting North Carolina State University product.
Fate intervened. As Eric explained, Groover ended up having surgery to repair a displaced radius fracture suffered in a collision with a baserunner at first base, this after just four games with High-A Hillsboro. He missed three months, did a rehab stint in the Arizona Complex League, then rejoined the Hops on July 19.
He hit well upon his return. The former second rounder logged a 129 wRC+ over 175 plate appearances with the Northwest League club, and he followed that up with a 178 wRC+ over 55 plate appearances with Double-A Amarillo. Counting his eight games in the ACL, Groover finished the season with a .281/.367/.484 slash line, 10 home runs, and a 133 wRC+. And two other numbers merit mention: His strikeout rate was 13.6%, while his walk rate was 11.4%.
Grover is currently making up for missed development time in the Arizona Fall League, where he is slashing .370/.444/.389 over 63 plate appearances for the Salt River Rafters. He talked hitting prior to a game in mid-October.
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David Laurila: How would you define yourself as a hitter? Also, do you feel that you’ve established an identity at this early stage of your career?
Gino Groover: “I mean, I think everybody is different, but finding yourself as a hitter — what your strengths are, and playing to your strengths — is something you don’t really want to deviate away from. I’ve always had a hit-first profile, letting my power come later as I’ve gotten bigger, stronger, and a little older.
“I have my approach, and, especially at this level, you can’t be afraid to be wrong sometimes. You obviously can’t go up there and expect to hit everything, so you don’t want to deviate from your approach. If you do, you’ll get caught in between and won’t hit either heaters or offspeed. So, whatever my approach is, I stick to it. Sometimes I’m right, sometimes I’m wrong, and we go from there, playing it by ear with whatever I’m seeing.” Read the rest of this entry »
Bryce Eldridge is the top prospect in the San Francisco Giants system thanks largely to the lethality of his power-packed left-handed stroke, an enviable asset that he augments with a patient approach. Drafted 16th overall in 2023 out of Vienna, Virginia’s James Madison High School, the 6-foot-7 first baseman projects, in the words of Eric Longenhagen, as “a middle-of-the-order force.”
What he accomplished in his first full professional season suggests that our lead prospect analyst’s assessment was spot-on. Beginning the year in Low-A and ending it in Triple-A, Eldridge slashed .289/.372/.513 with 23 home runs and a 137 wRC+ over 519 plate appearances. Moreover, he put up those numbers as a teenager. Eldridge didn’t turn 20 until mid-October.
That he was drafted as a two-way player is part of his story. While he hasn’t toed the rubber in a game since receiving his just-shy-of $4M signing bonus, the possibility of his playing both ways was certainly there. (Longenhagen was bearish on the idea, opining in his post-draft recap that the “two-way experiment should eventually lead him to full-time hitting.”)
His potential as a pitcher was the first subject I broached when speaking to Edington at the Arizona Fall League, where he is suiting up for the Scottsdale Scorpions. Why is he now a hitter only? Read the rest of this entry »
Ryan Pepiot was a highly regarded prospect in the Los Angeles Dodgers organization when he was first featured here at FanGraphs in June 2021. Then 23 years old and pitching in Double-A, the right-hander out of Butler University discussed his signature pitch, a changeup that our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen had likened to Devin Williams’ high-spin Airbender.
Pepiot is now with the Tampa Bay Rays, having been acquired from Los Angeles along with Jonny DeLuca in exchange for Tyler Glasnow and Manuel Margot last December. He has also emerged as an established big league starter. Getting his first extended opportunity after making 17 appearances over the two previous seasons, he made 26 starts, posting a 3.60 ERA and 3.95 FIP over 130 innings.
Three-plus years after our initial conversation, I sat down with Pepiot on the final weekend of the 2024 regular season, this time to touch on each of his five pitches.
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David Laurila: What is your full repertoire right now?
Ryan Pepiot: “Four-seam fastball, changeup, slider, cutter, and a curveball that I’ll throw occasionally.” Read the rest of this entry »
Ethan Salas is one of baseball’s top prospects. Currently playing for the Arizona Fall League’s Peoria Javelinas, the left-handed-hitting catcher is not only No. 7 on The Board, he won’t turn 19 until next summer. Signed as an international free agent out of Venezuela by the San Diego Padres in January 2023, Salas is both precociously talented and mature beyond his years.
He is also still figuring things out. The 6-foot-2, 205-pound backstop was refreshingly candid on that front when I spoke to him on my recent visit to the AFL. More advanced defensively than he is with the bat — a scouting assessment he agrees with — Salas readily admits that there areas in which he needs to improve.
“I would say more consistency on game management stuff would be the biggest one right now,” said Salas, who has caught only 870 professional innings. “Calling pitches, situations in the game, seeing things before they happen, how to prevent big innings. I need to be more efficient in those areas.”
Salas’s physical attributes are undeniably plus, which brings us to an interesting aspect of how he operates behind the dish. It came to the fore when I asked if he is one-knee-down or more traditional in his setup. Read the rest of this entry »
