On December 12, the day of Juan Soto’s introductory press conference with the Mets – imagine for a moment being one of the three people in New York City who still requires an introduction to the concept of Juan Soto – the temperature at nearby La Guardia Airport peaked at 43 degrees. Soto wore a turtleneck and chain under his blazer, presumably to ward off the cold, but possibly because he was inspired by the look his new teammate Mark Vientos rocked during the National League Championship Series.

During the press conference, Soto swapped out the blazer for a crisp, new Mets jersey, but he left the turtleneck in place. The temperature was down to 37 by the time he ventured out to the elevated seats behind home plate for a photo op. “We got about fifteen minutes with Soto and his family,” said photographer Brad Penner in an email, “and it was COLD.” The photo op wasn’t just quick. It was weird, and the images it left us with are bizarre and beautiful. “I’ve done many press conferences,” wrote Penner, “but few that were like this one.”

As he so often does, Soto seemed to jump right out of the photos. “I chose a seat as close to where Soto would be,” Penner said, “so I could line him up with the scoreboard, rather than the field and seats.” That was smart, as the Mets displayed a “Welcome to the//New York Mets//Juan Soto” graphic on both scoreboards, each featuring three images of him. That left many of the photos with seven Sotos in them, quite possibly a world record. With the focus of the lens necessarily all the way in the foreground, the scoreboard isn’t crisp. You can just make out the tiny “Welcome to the” portion of the graphic, but only if you zoom in and enhance like a CIA agent tracking Jason Bourne through a train station. (Also, there’s no comma between “Mets” and “Juan Soto,” so it reads like the entire team has been renamed the New York Mets Juan Soto. Take that, Cleveland Napoleons!)

Soto was standing in an area that was much darker than the field and the scoreboard in the background, and in the twilight, the black fabric of the turtleneck discolored his paper-thin jersey in an odd way. The white jersey shone brightly where it hung free, but where it lay flat against the turtleneck, it failed to contain the darkness within. The numbers on Soto’s jersey lit up like reflectors while the underside of his cap swallowed light like a black hole. In one picture, Soto smiles and spreads his arms wide, but his arms and his entire head are fully engulfed in impenetrable shadow.

In case you can’t tell, I adore these pictures. They’re not the action-packed hero shots that we’re used to seeing splashed across the sports section or the homepage of our favorite baseball analytics website. We’re accustomed to crisp, perfectly lit pictures of batters flattening fastballs into pancakes and pitchers grimacing mid-delivery with their UCLs stretched past the point of no return. But for the past month, with no new art to take their place, these photos of Soto looking, of all things, human, are everywhere. There he is on the television, in the newspaper, on the internet: in the dark, wearing a baseball jersey over a chain and a turtleneck that probably cost more money than I have ever seen in my life, alternating between posing confidently and standing awkwardly.

That’s part of the deal for professional baseball players. From the moment they arrive at spring training until the moment their season ends, they’re fair game for photographers. The Imagn photo service has 4,455 pictures of Soto, 1,113 of them from the 2024 season alone. But when the season ends, the players disappear. In the winter, they get to live their quasi-private lives away from the cameras, and baseball editors get to scroll through Imagn’s 56 pages of 2024 Juan Soto pictures in an attempt to avoid reusing that one shot they used back in December.

But now we’ve got art of Soto in a Mets uniform. Sure, the art isn’t what we’re used to, but it beats using an old photo of him in a Yankees uniform. Here’s what you see what you search Imagn for Juan Soto (which you can do here).

For any editor whose news organization didn’t send a photographer to Soto’s presser, this is what you have to choose from. It’s one closeup after another: Juan Soto with his arms outstretched like Moses parting the Red Sea, Juan Soto nervously smiling and adjusting the cuff of his turtleneck, Juan Soto with his hands raised like he’s conducting an orchestra, Juan Soto with the same goofy, sideways smile that Steve Carell wore in the poster for The 40-Year-Old Virgin.

I was a teenager when digital cameras began to fully replace film cameras, and I remember that era just well enough to appreciate what the transition cost us. Today, you can take and instantly delete an infinite number of pictures until you get one that shows exactly what you want it to show. Before that option was available, you couldn’t see your photos until you remembered to take the roll to the developer months later. When you finally got them back, you’d discover that you had your finger over the lens for a couple of them, that you had your eyes closed for a couple more, that the lighting was off for a couple more, and that one was, for no discernible reason, completely gray. If you were a total amateur like me, you’d consider yourself lucky to end up with two or three photographs that actually came out well. In other words, photography used to accurately represent real life. Real life is 90% crazy eyes and pre-sneeze faces, and you don’t get to dial up the saturation. I don’t mean to sound like a crank. I love having a decent camera in my pocket at all times; I’m just saying that it has distorted our world a bit.

For that reason, I love the fact that these pictures are everywhere you look. Penner took all of them, and he’s a fantastic photographer. He took the widely circulated picture of Francisco Lindor celebrating on the field after the Mets dispatched the Phillies in the NLDS, and he even had a comp in mind for the madness of Soto’s press conference: Kemba Walker’s 2021 introductory presser for the Knicks, which took place at the top of the Empire State Building. But still, these are not the perfect pictures we’re used to seeing. They show the rare photo opportunity that ends up looking every bit as contrived as it actually is.

For the next month, do your best to enjoy these pictures. The moment Soto arrives in Port St. Lucie, you’ll stop seeing them. They’ll be replaced by low-angle shots of a godlike Soto in a crisp uniform, an immaculate Florida sky behind him. He’ll be launching batting practice home runs and laughing with his teammates. It will be perfect. There will be no turtleneck.

Michael Lorenzen is finally staying put. After signing one-year deals ahead of the last three seasons, and after getting traded at the deadline in each of the last two, the right-hander has played for six teams in four years. All that stops now. On Monday, a day when the temperature in Kansas City peaked at a balmy five degrees Fahrenheit, Lorenzen decided that the City of Fountains was a fine place to spend at least another half of a baseball season, agreeing to sign with the Royals on yet another one-year deal. For the first time since 2021, he’ll get to start a season in the same city where he ended the previous one. The deal is for $5.5 million plus performance escalators, and because of a $12 million mutual option for 2026 with a $1.5 million buyout clause, the guaranteed value comes to $7 million.

Despite a hamstring strain that cost him a month, Lorenzen excelled after being traded to the Royals at the 2024 deadline. In six starts and one relief appearance, he ran a 1.57 ERA over 28 2/3 innings. However, his peripherals were roughly the same before and after the move, and he mostly benefitted from the classic culprits of an unsustainable bounce: a .213 BABIP, an 89% strand rate, and a 6% HR/FB rate. The only notable change he made in Kansas City was ditching his regular slider entirely in favor of his sweeper. Over that short sample size, the move worked: The slider ran a 24% whiff rate in Texas, while the sweeper was at 41% in Kansas City.

I’m afraid I’m not done raining on Lorenzen’s parade just yet, because I have to tell you that this move terrifies me a bit. Between Texas and Kansas City, Lorenzen ran a 3.31 ERA, his best mark since 2019, when he put up a 2.92 mark as a reliever with the Reds. However, the underlying metrics were downright scary. Lorenzen’s 4.58 xERA, 4.89 FIP, and 4.95 xFIP were all his worst marks since his rookie season in 2015. The stuff models didn’t love him either: We have stuff numbers going back to 2020, and Lorenzen’s 5.10 predicted ERA from Pitching Bot and his 95 Stuff+ score were both the worst they’ve been over those five seasons. His 23.9% chase rate was the lowest of his career. His strikeout rate ticked up a tiny bit from 2023, but both it and his walk rate were among the worst of his career. Lorenzen’s four-seamer performed well, but it lost half a tick and a bit of movement. After his sinker spent the 2023 season flirting with the dead zone, in 2024 it decided to move in. Name a stat – other than BABIP, HR/FB, or strand rate – and Lorenzen was worse than his career average.

I’m sorry. That was a lot of negativity. I don’t necessarily think that Lorenzen is a lost cause, and a reunion with the Royals makes a lot of sense. They needed someone to replace the innings they lost by trading Brady Singer to Cincinnati. Also, even when he was at his best, Lorenzen routinely outperformed his peripherals. He was much more of a contact manager than a strikeout pitcher, and there’s no place better for such an approach than Kauffman Stadium. Entering his age-33 season, he no longer has above-average fastball velocity, but he throws the kitchen sink – four-seamer, sinker, changeup, cutter, slider, sweeper, curveball – and he’s still figuring out how to optimize the mix. In 2024, he brought back the cutter and curve, which he’d previously abandoned; the curve worked well and the slider didn’t. That’s useful information. He could keep throwing the sweeper more. He could stand to throw his changeup, which ran a 37% whiff rate, more as well. He also brings versatility, as he’s spent his career hopping between the rotation and the bullpen.

Speaking of versatility, there’s also the odd circumstance of Lorenzen’s two-way ambitions. He came up both a pitcher and a hitter after posting an .869 OPS with 41 home runs at Cal State Fullerton, and he has 147 major league plate appearances under his belt. A few weeks ago, Ken Rosenthal detailed a plan hatched by Lorenzen and his agent. Lorenzen would take a kitchen sink approach to free agency as well, pitching himself as a candidate to qualify as a two-way player, thereby giving his team (or, more likely, the team that trades for him at the deadline) an extra roster spot for a pitcher.

While it’s fun, the gambit was always a bit farfetched, and now that Lorenzen is returning to the Royals, it seems extremely unlikely to happen. In order to qualify, Lorenzen would need to get at least three PAs as a DH or a position player in at least 20 games. Lorenzen ran a .640 OPS in the minors, he has a career wRC+ of 84 in the majors, and he’s taken just two plate appearances over the past five seasons. Even when he was hitting, he never made it to 60 PAs in a season. The Royals just made it to the ALDS last season, and they are, in their own way, showing every indication that they intend to return to the playoffs in 2025. It’s hard to see them giving 60 PAs to a guy whose last hit came in 2019.

This is not a particularly risky move either for Lorenzen or the Royals. He’s back on a one-year contract, back in a pitcher-friendly park, and back playing for a team with which he had some success last season. The worst-case scenario is that the Royals don’t return to playoff contention and Lorenzen doesn’t pitch well enough (or hit enough, period) to get traded to his seventh team in five years. The best-case scenario involves Lorenzen throwing a couple more no-hitters and launching a couple more bombs. Of course, that worst-case scenario is far more likely than the best one, but either way, the possible benefits of this reunion far outweigh the potential pitfalls.

Sports Info Solutions has been tracking every pitch thrown in Major League Baseball since 2002, and since the beginning, those pitches have been hitting the strike zone less and less frequently. You can check the tumbling year-over-year numbers over on our pitch-level data leaderboard, but if you want to spare yourself a click, I pulled them into the graph below. It paints a damning picture of the command of today’s stuff-over-stamina, throw-it-hard-before-your-elbow-explodes pitchers. Don’t go near this graph if you’re on roller skates:

If you ever feel the need to shake your fist at young pitchers and mutter about loud music and fastball command, this is the graph for you. SIS has documented the percentage of pitches that hit the strike zone dropping from the low 50s to the low 40s over the last 20 years. Combine that with the game’s ever-increasing focus on velocity and stuff, and you’ve got a nice, tidy narrative: today’s pitchers are too focused on throwing hard to know where the hell they’re throwing the ball. However, the truth is a bit more complicated. It’s important to keep in mind that the SIS numbers come from real life human beings who analyze video to track pitches, while the friendly robot that powers Statcast has its definition of the strike zone set in digital stone. Read the rest of this entry »

I hope that you spared a thought over the holidays for the poor Naylor brothers. In a premise tailor-made for a lesser Hallmark movie, their time as teammates came to an end just four days before Christmas, when the Guardians traded Josh Naylor to the Diamondbacks in exchange for right-handed pitcher Slade Cecconi and a Competitive Balance Round B draft pick. Just 21 minutes after Jeff Passan broke the news that broke up the family, he also reported that veteran first baseman Carlos Santana had agreed to a one-year, $12-million deal to fill the hole Naylor left in the Cleveland infield. He failed to report on what, if anything, would fill the hole left in Bo Naylor’s heart.

After five years away, Santana is coming home to Cleveland for the third time — another solid premise for a Hallmark movie. In fact, he still has a home in Cleveland. Or he did, anyway. He put it on the market a few weeks ago and closed on a sale two days before signing with the Guardians. Another fun side note to Santana’s signing: He very nearly busted the We Tried Tracker. Ken Rosenthal listed seven other teams that were in on Santana: “The Seattle Mariners, Santana’s team in 2022, sought to reunite with him virtually the entire offseason, and were pushing for a resolution. Santana said both New York teams, Detroit and Arizona also were in the mix, while San Diego and Texas had asked him to wait.” If you’re keeping score at home, that’s four teams that were in the mix, two in the brand-new category of asking the player to wait, and then the extraordinarily thirsty Mariners. As you may have noticed, Rosenthal is citing Santana himself as the source for this information. If more players spoke to reporters about the interest they received, the tracker would look a lot more robust.

After running a combined wRC+ of 94 from 2020 to 2023, Santana suddenly rediscovered his form with the Twins in 2024. In his age-38 season, Santana ran a 114 wRC+ with 23 home runs, and his 11 fielding runs earned him his first Gold Glove. He racked up 3.0 WAR, more than he totaled in all but two of his 15 years in the big leagues, and good for the fifth-most WAR among first basemen last season. His average contact quality didn’t stray far from his career norms, and his vaunted batting eye remained about as strong as ever. The big difference is that 23.8% of his batted balls came in the form of line drives or fly balls to the pull side. That’s his highest rate since 2014. Focusing on pull-side power has been a major organizational focus for the Twins, so much so that before the season, Trevor Larnach decided he’d gone too far in that direction and needed to develop a more balanced approach. Whether or not the Twins were responsible for it, this approach change certainly worked for Santana, and the Guardians are hoping that he can keep both the bat and the glove going for one more year.

As for the Diamondbacks, they’re in for their first taste of life without a cornerstone at the cold corner since 2010. Naylor may not be peak Paul Goldschmidt or Christian Walker, but he’s been a top-10 first baseman over the past three years. As slugging first basemen who play bigger than the numbers suggest, Naylor and Santana have a lot in common. Both players are under six feet tall and both depend on the home run ball despite lacking jaw-dropping exit velocities. Naylor hits the ball on the ground more often and lacks Santana’s gift for staying within the strike zone, but he hits the ball harder. Despite comparable average exit velocities and hard-hit rates, Naylor’s 90th percentile exit velocity was 106 mph, significantly higher than Santana’s 103.7-mph mark. In 2024, despite running a bottom-quartile groundball rate, Naylor put up the first 30-homer season of his career, to go along with a 118 wRC+. He’s now reached that mark or higher in each of the last three seasons. His 2.3 WAR ranked 11th among first basemen in 2024, and his 7.0 WAR over the past three seasons ranked eighth.

Santana’s deal is for exactly the same amount as MLB Trade Rumors predicted that Naylor would get in his final year of arbitration, and that’s what makes this such a Cleveland move. The Guardians are taking on more risk due to Santana’s age and giving up Naylor’s higher upside, but essentially, they swapped out two similar players for identical prices and wound up with a draft pick and an interesting arm in Cecconi. Steamer projects Naylor to put up 2.0 WAR next season, compared to 1.2 for Santana. You can understand why, on the “Five and Dive” podcast, Jeffrey Paternostro called the move, “so Guardians (derogatory).” It took a whole lot of work for Cleveland to make its first base situation a bit dicier in exchange for a couple longshots.

Cecconi announced his arrival in Arizona with a bang in 2023, and I mean that very literally. He made four starts and three relief appearances, running a 4.33 ERA and 4.37 FIP. Cecconi entered the 2024 season as the D-backs’ no. 5 overall prospect and their system’s top-ranked pitcher, but he struggled mightily, running a 6.66 ERA and 5.02 FIP. He bounced between the minors and majors, and he was sent to the bullpen in late July, but his 4.49 xERA and 4.70 xFIP — while still nothing to write home about — were much less worrisome. Cecconi doesn’t rack up many whiffs or strikeouts, he doesn’t run a great groundball rate, and he doesn’t avoid hard contact. But what he does have is solid control, a fastball that can reach 98 mph, three other pitches that grade out as above average according to Pitching Bot, Stuff+, and StuffPro, and 0.155 years of service time.

The Rays were rumored to be interested in him at the trade deadline, and it’s entirely possible that the Guardians turn him into a serviceable pitcher. Although the fastball can reach 98, it averages closer to 94 and got rocked last season. Somehow, the Diamondbacks let Cecconi throw it 55% of the time anyway. Maybe the Guardians will get him in the pitching lab and help him figure out a fastball that works. Maybe they’ll make him a full-time reliever to bump his velocity back up to the top of its range. They’ll definitely have him throw his heater less often. Then again, maybe they just wanted that draft pick.

On Monday, Statcast took its the latest step toward the goal of consolidating all baseball data into one website so unimaginably massive that not even Joey Gallo’s batting average can escape its gravitational pull. Baseball Savant unveiled enhanced baserunning leaderboards, supplementing its leaderboard for extra bases taken with a separate leaderboard for basestealing, and also adding one that combines the two into an overall baserunning value leaderboard. (In a much quieter move that could end up being even more consequential for the super-duper data dorks in your life, Baseball Savant also introduced toggles for the first and second halves of the season into its search function.) I’ve spent the past couple days looking around at the numbers to see how this new information might change our understanding of the craft of baserunning, and I’d like to share my initial thoughts.

I think the big benefit of these data is they will teach us a lot about how particular players do what they do. MLB.com’s David Adler broke down some of the fun features of the new leaderboards, and if that’s your thing, there are indeed plenty of fun features to marvel at. If you surf around the leaderboard, you can see that on-base machine Juan Soto unsurprisingly led all players with 1,324 opportunities to steal a base this season. You can see that Mookie Betts gets excellent jumps when he’s stealing, traveling 6.1 feet between the moment of the pitcher’s first move and the moment of their release, the largest distance in the game. You can see just how anachronistic Lane Thomas’s 26-for-40 stolen base season really was. Read the rest of this entry »

DALLAS — The Winter Meetings have officially wrapped up, and our We Tried Tracker is starting to look mighty festive. At this point, it’s too full to tackle everything that happened in Dallas in one article, so we’ll just be breaking down the highlights. If you’re a completist, head over to the tracker, where each We Tried now contains a link its original report. Things have been moving fast this week, so I’m sure we’re missing some things. If you spot anything that’s not on the tracker, please reach out to me on social media or at WeTriedTracker@gmail.com. I so appreciate everyone who has participated. I have been reading and replying to every tip, and I will continue to do so.

I’d like to shout out one tipster in particular. Reader Chris Vena has been keeping me apprised of his softball team’s efforts to land several premier free agents, and they just cannot seem to seal the deal. First, they attempted to pry Shohei Ohtani away from the Dodgers, but were told that they lacked the prospect capital. Next, they tried to land Garrett Crochet, but the White Sox apparently wouldn’t agree to a deal unless Chris threw in his teammate Jimmy. “I know the writers at FanGraphs might accuse me of prospect hugging,” Chris wrote, “but I like this kid’s arm, his bat-to-ball skills, and I kind of have a crush on his older sister. I think our team can afford to pass on Crochet in this instance.”

One of the most interesting parts of this exercise is that when I originally proposed it, fans of several teams jumped in to opine that their particular ball club was sure to lead the league. That makes perfect sense, as the practice of claiming that you were in on a player is often specifically geared toward mollifying a jilted fanbase. If you ever heard Nationals Park explode with boos when Mark Teixeira – a Maryland native who chose to sign with the Yankees rather than the National League team closest to home – would come to the plate, you know that people take these things very much to heart. This offseason, Red Sox fans shouted the loudest that they would lead the league in We Trieds, and though the Blue Jays and Mets were very nearly as vociferous, Boston is not just pacing the field but lapping it. As I write, the Red Sox lead all comers with six We Trieds, twice as many as any other team. They’ve been in the mix for a pitcher, they’ve been in on pitchers, and they’ve even made aggressive runs at pitchers. Truly, no one is trying harder or failing louder than the Red Sox. Trading for Crochet seems like a decent consolation prize.

Now that we’re tracking everything, it’s been fun keeping tabs on all of the different ways that a team can describe its involvement. Classics “we were in on” and “we were in the mix” lead all other phraseologies with four instances each. After that, we’ve got a smorgasbord of one-offs: “We had interest in him,” “We were highly competitive,” “We made what we felt was a competitive offer,” “We had some back and forth.” A.J. Preller broke new ground by telling reporters that the Padres were “involved in, so far, almost all the catchers that have gone off the board to some degree.” How do you even unpack that? The Padres were involved in every single catcher who signed a deal? All six of them? What about Max Stassi, who signed a minor league deal with the Giants? “To some degree” is also the broadest blanket statement possible. Does that include zero degrees? If so, I was in on all those catchers too. I’m just like A.J. Preller.

As you surely know, Juan Soto had five primary suitors: the Mets, Yankees, Red Sox, Blue Jays, and Dodgers. At this point, two of those teams have made it onto the tracker in very specific fashion. MassLive.com’s Sean McAdam reported that Boston’s best offer to Soto was for 16 years and $700 million, while Bob Nightengale put a bit of poetry into his Yankees We Tried: “The New York Yankees offer for Juan Soto was $760 million for 16 years. He chose the Mets.” I’ve already heard Mets fans talking about printing up “He chose the Mets” t-shirts. While we can’t know for sure what made up Soto’s mind, that information makes it look awfully simple: No one wanted him as badly as the Mets did.

I haven’t seen any information about the Dodgers’ pursuit, but GM Ross Atkins addressed Toronto’s push while talking to reporters on Monday. “As things progressed,” he said, “we felt as though we were a great landing spot for Juan Soto and grateful to be in that process.” Now that’s a different approach. Rather than leaking a combination of years and dollars to a scoopster, Atkins invited a group of reporters into the team’s hotel suite and went on the record in order to say that the Jays were just happy to be there. I can’t decide whether it’s the epitome of the We Tried or the polar opposite, but either way, it’s delightfully Canadian.

We’re going to close this out with the A’s, because things are getting weird in Not Oakland. First of all, the A’s have to get out of their comfort zone and actually sign some players in order to avoid a grievance from the MLBPA. As you might recall, the A’s executed one of the first We Trieds of the offseason accidentally, when manager Mark Kotsay reportedly told a group of USC students that Walker Buehler told the A’s he didn’t want to play in Sacramento. During his media availability in Dallas, Kotsay disputed that report, making a point of telling reporters, “I want to say first, the article that came out with Walker, that wasn’t necessarily true. Walker never said he didn’t want to play in Sacramento.” There’s no way for us to know the facts here. Kotsay could be trying to clean up the classic gaffe of saying something that everyone already knows to be true – and I don’t think anyone would actually fault him for that – or there really could have been a misunderstanding or a rephrasing issue. Can you picture a scenario in which Buehler really is dying to play in Sacramento? Maybe if he’s a big fan of the legendary Sacramento band Cake, or if he’s always dreamed of playing in the California capital. Assuming that he’s not a huge “Sheep Go to Heaven” guy, I’m guessing he’d prefer to play in a big league stadium.

The last one gets even weirder. It started on Wednesday morning, when Bob Nightengale posted an entirely new kind of We Tried: “Believe or not, one of the most aggressive teams in the Max Fried sweepstakes were the Athletics before he signed his 8-year, $218 million deal with the Yankees.” Right out of the gate, things are getting hinky. “Believe it or not, we tried” is an instant classic of the genre. Any time a reporter has to preface breaking news with, “I know it sounds like I’m lying to you, but…” they’re off to a great start. And then after that, there is no specific information. Nightengale just says the A’s were “one of the most aggressive teams.”

Apparently, that was still too specific, though. Within three hours, MLB.com’s Martín Gallegos had a refutation from someone who would definitely know: “GM David Forst said the reports of A’s aggressively pursuing Max Fried were untrue.” Let’s start with the obvious: This is hilarious. Nightengale reports something so preposterous that he has to preface it with an avowal that he really is telling the truth, and the general manager immediately comes out and says it isn’t true. You have to believe him. What motivation could Forst have to refute this rumor aside from a desire to set the record straight? It’s the exceedingly rare We Didn’t Try, and it only makes sense for a team whose primary desire is to avoid getting anybody’s hopes up. “Please,” Forst seems to be begging, “don’t expect us to exchange money for baseball players. We’re still figuring out how Venmo works.”

Personally, I like to imagine that Forst wasn’t disputing the entire report; just the part where Nightengale said that the A’s were pursuing Fried aggressively. Maybe the A’s did try to land him, but their attempt mostly consisted of texting him pictures of the Sacramento skyline.

And that’s going to conclude our wrap-up. We will keep you updated as the offseason progresses. I’m sorry we couldn’t get to all of the week’s developments, but believe it or not, I really tried.

I don’t know if you were aware of this, but Anthony Santander hits a lot of foul balls. Let me rephrase that, Anthony Santander hits mostly foul balls. He hit 655 foul balls in 2024, a whopping 220 more than the balls he actually hit into fair territory. In all, 60% of the time that Santander made contact, the ball went foul. That honestly blows me away. It’s obvious once you stop and think about it, but I had simply never considered the possibility that some players would hit more foul balls than fair balls. As it turns out most players hit more foul balls than fair balls. In 2024, just 24% of players hit more balls fair than foul.

Still, Santander’s raw total of foul balls was second only to Matt Olson. In 2023 and 2022, the only other full seasons of his career, Santander finished fourth and eighth, respectively. Between the foul balls and the home runs, when Santander comes to the plate, you know exactly what you’re getting: a fantastic chance of bringing home a souvenir. This season, however, we’re not just interested in the fact that Santander’s foul ball per plate appearance rate was a whopping 98.9%. We’re interested in something a bit more specific.

Depending on how you look at them, foul balls aren’t necessarily a good thing or a bad thing. Obviously, all strikes are bad, but you’d prefer a foul to a whiff. On the other hand, if you hit the ball hard, you’d much rather see it stay fair than land just on the wrong side of the chalk. However, some foul balls are clearly worse than others, and that leads us to another thing Santander does distressingly often. In 2024, Santander led baseball with 65 popups. He also tied for the league lead in 2023 and he finished second in 2022. That’s why we’re focused on Santander in particular. When you discuss the unholy amalgam of foul balls and popups known as the foul out, Santander is unavoidable. These traits combine to create one particular result: Santander spends an extremely high percentage of his follow-throughs with his head tipped all the way back, looking like a little kid leaning out the window and trying to catch raindrops with his tongue. Read the rest of this entry »

It looks like Nathan Eovaldi made the right decision. So far this offseason, the pitching market has been much hotter than projected, and as the Winter Meetings kicked into high gear in Dallas on Tuesday, that trend continued. The 34-year-old right-hander will not regret for a moment declining his $20 million player option with the Rangers. After signing a two-year, $34 million contract (plus that option) before the 2023 season, Eovaldi will remain in Texas on a brand new three-year, $75 million deal. That $25 million average annual value far outstrips the projections of $16 million by Ben Clemens, $20 million from our readers, and $22 million from MLB Trade Rumors. As Nick Deeds noted for MLBTR, Eovaldi is only the third pitcher in the past 15 years to sign a deal for more than two years that starts in his age-35 season or later.

Speaking of pitchers who are old enough to remember the band the Wallflowers, the Texas rotation features an awful lot of them. Eovaldi rejoins Jon Gray, Tyler Mahle, and Cody Bradford, along with whatever presumably small, magnificent portion of a season Jacob deGrom can provide. If you’re keeping track at home, the average age of those pitchers is 32.28 years. Bradford is the baby, as he’ll be a tender 27 when the season starts. Dane Dunning, who took a step back last season (and turns 30 the week after next), will also be available. The rotation could also get an infusion of youth from Kumar Rocker, who absolutely annihilated the minors and pitched well in three big league starts during the 2024 season, and Jack Leiter, who struggled mightily in nine big league appearances.

That might just be enough starting pitching depth to make it through the season, but – with the exception of free agents Andrew Heaney and Max Scherzer – the Rangers are running back a rotation that finished the season ranked 22nd in WAR and 21st in ERA, FIP, and xFIP. Even in their championship 2023 season, the Rangers ranked just 18th in all four of those metrics. And it’s not as if they’re obviously due for a huge bounce-back year. If that group is going to meaningfully improve, it’ll mean deGrom staying healthy and either Rocker or Leiter making that last big jump, and neither of those propositions is what you’d consider a sure thing. Eovaldi is a proven big-game pitcher with a 3.05 career ERA and a 9-3 record in the postseason. (Of course, if the Rangers hope to avail themselves of that skill set, they’ll need to go out and find approximately one entire bullpen’s worth of relievers, but that’s a conversation for a different day). Read the rest of this entry »

… And this is why you move the left field wall back in. On Saturday, the Orioles jumped into the free agent market looking for upside, inking two veterans who, when they’re at their best, have the ability to rival the most fearsome sluggers in the game.

Outfielder Tyler O’Neill, who bashed 32 home runs over just 113 games with the Red Sox, signed a three-year, $49.5 million deal that will make him an Oriole through his age-32 season. Catcher Gary Sánchez, who turned 32 just last week, signed a one-year, $8.5 million deal. Both players are right-handed batters with multiple 30-homer seasons under their belts, which is to say that until the Orioles announced a few weeks ago that their left field wall would no longer be located way the hell out in Towson, both might have seriously considered passing on an offer to play in Baltimore and watch all their would-be home runs die in the left fielder’s glove. (Honestly, I’m mostly joking here. O’Neill and Sánchez have enough power that they’re among the small cohort of players who didn’t really have to worry about Walltimore.)

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Last week, Russell Carleton wrote a thought-provoking article for Baseball Prospectus about the automatic ball-strike system, which will be creeping into the major league level during spring training in just a few months. What I found really fascinating was the particular distinction Carleton drew between the current zone and the robot one. “I think that there is a human element that we need to consider when talking about the automated strike zone,” Carleton wrote. “It’s just not that human element. It’s the one no one wants to talk about.” The element he was referring to was probability.

Assuming it’s functioning properly, the robot zone is perfectly black and white. Every pitch either touches the strike zone or doesn’t and that’s that. On the other hand, humans are imperfect, so the zone they call features plenty of gray. Pick any spot in or near the strike zone, and you can look up the probability that it will be called a ball or a strike. In the moment, for any one batter and pitcher, that’s completely unfair; a robot would know with 100% certainty whether the pitch should have been called a strike or a ball, whereas roughly 7% of the time, the human umpire will make the wrong call, screwing somebody over in the process. But over the course of a long season, things tend to balance out, and you can construct some reasonable arguments in favor of the current, unintentionally probabilistic approach.

If you’re familiar with the work of Umpire Scorecards, you’re likely used to the idea of a probability-based strike zone already. Umpire Scorecards grades umpires not simply by how well they adhere to the rulebook zone, but by how much better or worse than average they are at adhering to it. In order to make that judgement, it’s necessary to consider sorts of factors that might affect the call of an average umpire: location, speed, break, handedness, count, and so on. “The reality is that there’s the ‘definitely a strike’ zone,” Carleton wrote last week. “There’s the ‘definitely not a strike’ zone. And there’s the fuzzy zone. There are different rules in the fuzzy zone. Taking away the fuzzy zone and forcing it into the yes/no zone is going to have some very unpredictable consequences.” Take the count as an example. As you surely know, umpires see their zones tighten up with two strikes and loosen up with three balls. If that tendency disappeared, walk and strikeout rates would likely go up. Do we want that?

Because an ever-increasing number of umpires rose through the ranks under a system that rewards them for adhering to the Statcast zone, accuracy has been rising and rising. Another way to phrase it is that humans have been successfully trained to perform more and more like robots. We’ve already seen some of the consequences Carleton mentioned. Accuracy has increased faster for pitches inside the zone than outside the zone, which has resulted in more called strikes and depressed offense. Another effect is that umpires have been calling more strikes at the bottom of the zone – or if you prefer, catchers have been stealing more strikes at the bottom of the zone. Today, we’re particularly interested in the top and bottom, because when I was reading Carleton’s article, one thing kept popping into my mind. Here’s a diagram of the strike zone pulled straight from the MLB rulebook. Whoever posed for this thing has some serious cheekbones. Seriously, this dude is absolutely smoldering:

The rulebook zone starts at the midpoint between the shoulders and the top of the pants, which is why each time a new batter comes to the plate, the umpire stops the game, pulls out their trusty tape measure, and calculates that exact spot. Wait, sorry, the umpire doesn’t do that. As a result, the top and bottom of the zone are blurrier than the sides. Players on the extremes of the height spectrum often bear the brunt of that. If you look at the players who led the league in called strikes above the zone in 2024, you’ll find that five of the top eight – Sal Frelick, Corbin Carroll, Seiya Suzuki, Josh Smith, and Jose Altuve – stand 5-foot-10 or shorter. Likewise, the umpire never squats down to make sure they register the exact height of the hollow beneath the kneecap, so if you look for players who got the the most called strikes below the zone, you’ll find that four of the top 11 – Michael Toglia, Oneil Cruz, Elly De La Cruz, and Aaron Judge – stand 6-foot-5 or taller. It’s not as dramatic a percentage as the short players at the bottom of the zone, but the trend is clear and it’s understandable. The torso midpoint and the knee hollow are just guidelines based on dubious anatomical landmarks – it might help to think of them the way a hitting coach thinks of instructional cues: You don’t actually want the batter to hit a low line drive to the opposite field every single time, but focusing on that goal can help them keep their swing right – and they’re every bit as fuzzy as the calls of the umpires tasked with abiding by them.

The ABS zone eschews body parts. It knows nothing of knees and shoulders, and if a batter were to sag their pants extremely low, it wouldn’t care that the midpoint between their top and the shoulders had just shifted down dramatically, reducing the size of the strike zone. (To be clear, a human umpire wouldn’t adjust the strike zone based on saggy pants either, but according to the letter of the law, they should.) ABS determines the top and bottom of the zone by using a percentage of the batter’s height, which is why hundreds of minor leaguers suddenly shrank last fall. The top of the zone is 53.5% of the batter’s height, while the bottom is 27%. If you’re keeping score at home, that means that the total height of the strike zone is 26.5% of the batter’s height. If that strikes you as a small percentage, you’re not wrong. I ran some quick measurements on our rulebook strike zone friend in the diagram above. His strike zone represents a whopping 41% of his crouched height. As it turns out, that’s because the proportions of the diagram are a bit off. If you measure everything based on the width of the strike zone in the diagram, 17 inches, you’ll discover that our friendly guy only stands 4-foot-5. Once again, this is the actual diagram that describes the strike zone in the official Major League Baseball rulebook! The height of the zone in the diagram works out to 22 inches. In order for it to be accurate according to the ABS zone – in which the height of the zone represents 26.5% of the batter’s total height – the batter would need to be 6-foot-9. When he stood up out of his crouch, our tiny batter would somehow need to find an extra an extra 27 inches of height!

I understand that umpires are being judged based on the Statcast zone, and that they’re also working off decades of experience. It’s not as if they’re pulling this diagram out of their pockets as a refresher between pitches. And maybe the foreshortening here is just a little bit dramatic. But also, uh, it may be time to update the officially sanctioned illustration of the zone that they see in their rulebooks.

All of this led me to one question: How much bigger is the strike zone for a tall player than a short player? Because ABS uses simple percentages based on the batter’s height, we can determine that exactly. Here’s the thing about the strike zone, though. The effective size of the strike zone is a lot bigger than its actual size. If one electron on the baseball’s outer edge passes through the zone, then the pitch counts as a strike. The zone that pitchers aim for and batters protect isn’t just 17 inches wide. It’s 17 inches wide plus the diameter of a baseball on either side. Regulation balls are between 2.865 to 2.944 inches in diameter, and we’re going to make our calculations using the bigger size, simply because, once again, we care about the effective zone that the batter actually has to protect. In all, that means the zone is just a hair under 22.889 inches wide for everyone.

The same goes for the height of the zone. Because this is the variable part, let’s just start with an average, 6-foot-2 major leaguer. The top of the zone will be 53.5% of their 74-inch height, which is to say 39.590 inches. Add the height of the ball and that brings us to 42.534 inches. For reference, a standard kitchen counter is 36 inches tall, so put a bobblehead on your counter and you’ve got the top of the zone for an average player. The bottom of the zone is 27% of their height, and once we factor in the diameter of the baseball, that works out to 17.036 inches off the ground. The average newborn baby is 19 to 20 inches tall, so for reference, head to the nursery of your local hospital, borrow the shortest baby you can find, and politely ask them to stand up. That’s the bottom of the average player’s zone.

To get the total area of the zone, we’re back in geometry class: Simply multiply the base times the height. Well, actually, that’s not quite true in this case. We need to remove some area around the corners because of the roundness of the baseball. Let me show you what I mean. Here’s the top-left corner of the zone:

There are three baseballs here. The one on the bottom and the one on the right are just barely touching the rulebook strike zone, so they’re definitely strikes. But what about the one on the top left? The edges of the ball, both on the bottom and on the right side, are within the parameters of the strike zone, but because it doesn’t have corners, the ball isn’t actually touching the zone. I don’t know how the Hawk-Eye system works, but I have to assume that it’s prepared for such a scenario. Right? Maybe? Even a perfect rulebook strike zone needs to have curved corners to account for this. I can’t tell you the exact area that we need to subtract from each corner of the zone because I have forgotten approximately 100% of the trigonometry I’ve ever learned. However, I used Photoshop to cheat and get an approximate measurement. I simply threw a whole bunch of baseballs on the same diagram, all of them touching the exact corner of the zone, and then measured the area in pink relative to the size of the ball.

[Update: Reader Joe Wilkey pointed out in the comments that the solution to this corner conundrum is actually very simple geometry. For each corner, you take the area of a square whose sides are the same diameter as the baseball (8.670 inches), then you subtract from it a quarter of the area of a circle whose radius is the diameter of a baseball (6.809 inches). The diagram below should help explain how that works. That means that we’ll subtract 1.860 inches per corner, or 7.442 inches in total. The following numbers have been updated to account for that figure.]

With that last puzzle piece in place, we can calculate the exact size of each player’s strike zone. The formula looks like this:

Area of Strike Zone = (((Width of Plate + (Width of Baseball x 2)) x (53.5% of Height – 27% of Height + (Width of Baseball x 2))) – (4 x ((Width of Baseball x Width of Baseball) – (pi x Width of Baseball x Width of Baseball ÷ 4)))

If all those parentheses make you want to die, we can hop into algebra and simplify the formula so it looks like this:

Area of Strike Zone = (22.9 x (26.5% of Height + 5.9)) – 7.4

Now that our formula is settled, let’s see how much of the strike zone different players actually have to cover.

Let’s go to everyone’s favorite odd couple. Aaron Judge’s strike zone is 3.45 inches taller than Jose Altuve’s, and its total area is a whopping 78.9 square inches larger. To put that in context, a marbled composition notebook, the kind you used to use in school, has a total area of 70.7 inches. That’s a pretty significant extra amount to cover, and don’t even get me started on the difference between Sean Hjelle’s zone and Shakira’s. If the 5-foot-4 Wee Willie Keeler were to come back and play as a zombie batter today, his strike zone would be almost perfectly square. For anyone shorter, the zone would be wider than it is tall.

Maybe even more interesting are the columns for the top and bottom. Judge’s zone starts seven inches above Altuve’s, but it ends just 3.5 inches below it. That’s just a result of using a percentage as the determining factor. It makes all the sense in the world to do so, but it’s likely the reason that list of players who get lots of unjust called strikes at the top of the zone is more densely packed with short players. The knees of short and tall players are much closer in height than their shoulders. When taking the height of the batter into account, umpires should be adjusting more at the top of the zone than the bottom, but clearly, that’s not so easy to do.

As for whether or not all of this is fair – bigger players having so much more zone to worry about than smaller players – my answer is a firm maybe. In absolute terms, Oneil Cruz has a much bigger strike zone to cover than Corbin Carroll, which is patently unfair. However, proportionally speaking, he doesn’t have to reach any higher or lower than Carroll does to get to the top or the bottom of the zone. The angles are exactly the same. Moreover, if we keep analyzing things proportionally, it’s clear that the strike zone is much narrower for him. Because Cruz’s larger height leaves him with longer arms and a longer torso to lean with, Carroll has to reach for an outside pitch in a way that Cruz doesn’t. The stills below are both taken from hard-hit balls on pitches that hit the outside corner.

Carroll’s whole swing is affected by the need to reach out for the ball, but look how much more upright Cruz is on the left. Even on the outside corner, the pitch is in his wheelhouse and he’s able to pull it approximately 9,000 feet. I’d guess that more than offsets the extra 54.6 inches of zone that Cruz has to cover. Even if we use an ABS system to implement a perfect strike zone, we still can’t make it perfectly fair.