On August 18 in Colorado, Ha-Seong Kim led off first base, then dived back to beat a pickoff attempt. He tore the labrum in his right shoulder, and that was the last time we saw him play in 2024. After a failed rehab attempt, Kim underwent surgery in October, and he won’t be ready to play again until sometime between April and June. Just as uncertain: Where exactly Kim will be suiting up when he returns. There’s no doubt about his skill. Over the past four years, Kim has spent time at second, short, and third, and neither DRS nor FRV has ever rated him as below average at any of those spots. He needed a year to adjust on offense after arriving from the KBO in 2021, but over the past three seasons, he’s run a 106 wRC+. That ranks 13th among shortstops, and over the same period, his 10.5 WAR ranks 11th.

Kim entered free agency after both he and the Padres declined their ends of a mutual option, and he came in at ninth on our Top 50 Free Agents. According to the projections, he’ll command a four- or five-year deal with an AAV in the neighborhood of $19 million. However, the shoulder injury could cost him as much as half of the 2025 season, and it makes for a tough needle to thread. He’s got to sign with a team that needs a solid infielder, but not badly enough to need one right away. Moreover, a shoulder injury is especially scary for Kim, whose arm strength is an important part of his overall value and who already possesses below-average power at the plate. For that reason, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Kim get a pillow contract: Ben Clemens proposed two years with an opt-out. Back in November, Mark Feinsand reported that Kim had generated “lots of interest,” and wrote about the possibility that he’d be among the first free agents off the board. However, it’s now late January, and if you cruise through our Depth Charts, you’ll notice that there just don’t seem to be many good landing spots for Kim. Let us begin our litanies. Read the rest of this entry »

As soon as we get on the phone, Susan D’Andelet tells me that she was at Camden Yards for Jackson Holliday’s first career home run, a monster grand slam that landed out on Eutaw Street a few days earlier. “I went for work, actually,” she clarifies. “We took some of our clients.” It’s August, and as the Orioles challenge the Yankees for the best record in the American League, all of Maryland is buzzing with excitement. “Oh yeah,” she says. “I know they’re calling up another guy from, what is it, Double-A or whatever?” She lets out a big laugh. “You would think I would know more.”

Sports have surrounded D’Andelet (pronounced dee-ON-duh-LAY) her whole life. When her son was a child, he played alongside Bobby Boyd, a speedy outfielder who batted .331 at West Virginia University and spent four years in the Astros system. Boyd is now a CPA, D’Andelet tells me. Her husband is a sports fanatic who often coached their son’s teams. After they met, the couple discovered that their fathers had played together on the same football team, the Langdon Lions.

“I’m a sixth-generation native Washingtonian,” she says. “My dad grew up in D.C. and played all sorts of sports.” She remembers being dragged to Senators games and watching him play softball well into his 30s, before giving it up in favor of golf and fishing. His most enduring contribution to sports was an idea: He was William H. Williams, inventor of the cleat cleaner.

I wrote about the cleat cleaner last year, looking up the patent history to identify Williams as its inventor. A few months after my piece was published, D’Andelet was at a dinner party. “This baseball game happened to be on,” she recalls, “and I said to my friend, who I’ve known since high school, ‘Do you see that mat on the back of the pitcher’s mound?’ And I told her, ‘My dad invented that.’” The revelation earned her a skeptical look.

D’Andelet continues, “We’ve known each other probably 50 years. She said, ‘You’ve never told me that before.’ And I said, ‘Well, I didn’t think it was important.’ You know what I mean? It’s just not something that would necessarily come up. So anyway, I said, ‘Yeah, my dad invented that.’ She kind of looked at me – which people do – like, ‘Yeah… I don’t know about that.’” D’Andelet Googled it to prove her point, and happened upon my article, replete with images from her father’s patent request. She still has the originals.

The cleat cleaner is easy to overlook. Our attention is naturally drawn to incongruity, whereas the cleat cleaner is exquisitely logical and its presence on the back of the mound makes so much sense that you take it for granted. You can stare at it night after night without ever really seeing it. It might never come up in conversation, even if you spent your childhood helping your parents build a business around it. “Everybody knows it’s there, but they don’t think much about it,” D’Andelet says. “So I just thought it was interesting that you were interested.” She reached out a few days later, and when I asked whether she’d be interested in sharing her memories, she was enthusiastic about telling her father’s story.

Williams, known since childhood as Bunky, died from COVID pneumonia in February 2022, just shy of his 95th birthday. He came up with the idea for the cleat cleaner when D’Andelet and her two brothers were small children. “We lived in an apartment in D.C. when my parents had us,” D’Andelet says. “So my mother had three children under three years old. And we were in a one-bedroom apartment in Washington D.C., right off New Hampshire Avenue. I remember that. And then we moved out to the house where it was invented, in Silver Spring, Maryland, 701 Hobbs Drive.”

Williams was a vice president at American President Lines, an international shipping company. “He worked for them his whole business career, 30-some years, and the cleat cleaner was something that he did in the basement,” D’Andelet says. He lobbied on behalf of the company, often on Capitol Hill, though D’Andelet is quick to point out that he wasn’t registered as a lobbyist and never would have assented to being called one. And despite his invention, Williams wasn’t trained in engineering. “No, not at all, but he was very capable of doing a lot of things,” she says. “He was clever, and he was a smart man.” The house on Hobbs Drive had an unfinished basement, so Williams finished it himself, eventually creating a workroom with “a big old wooden workbench.” Aptly, his middle name was Handy.

Williams toiled in the workroom during the evenings, but the cleat cleaner was a family endeavor from the very beginning. “We had a little cottage industry in our home before it was fashionable,” D’Andelet says. Williams made the first prototype out of toys and a spare plank of wood. She remembers being a child and seeing him “drilling out the holes in that piece of wood, and taking my brothers’ plastic toy rockets and cutting them off and putting them in the holes.” The rockets came from sets of those little green army men that many of us had as children. “That’s what he got his patent on,” she says. Did her brothers protest about sacrificing their rockets to the cause? “No, I don’t think so. He might have even broken down and bought extras,” she says with a laugh. “We didn’t have a whole lot at that stage in our lives. He was probably in his 30s and we were all little kids.

Williams tested his prototype the same way anyone would. “I can remember him getting the dirt muddy, squirting it down with the hose in the backyard, getting a big patch of mud,” D’Andelet recalls. “He would have the baseball cleats on himself, and he would get a big old wad of mud on the cleats and then use the cleat cleaner. And so I imagine that he went through a number of these to get it right.” Once he’d perfected the design, Williams applied for and received a patent in 1963. “He found a place in Baltimore that would manufacture them,” she says. “He had a mold created, and had the company in Baltimore make these products. I remember my mother would load us all into the car and drive us to Baltimore, and we’d load them all in the trunk. What I remember in particular was that the rubber that they were made out of stunk. And the whole basement stunk.”

D’Andelet’s mother, Nettie Williams, now lives with her in Delaware. “She’s a delightful person, always was and still is. Very much a team player.” As the business got going, D’Andelet says, “my mother was really the one who was running it. She was a stay-at-home mom and she had the three of us. And when he started with this, she was right there at his side doing whatever needed to be done.” They initially marketed the cleat cleaner as a football product, sending mailers to NFL teams. “She did all the banking and bookkeeping, and the invoices would come in and she’d fill the orders.” Nettie made regular visits to the bank in Montgomery Country, often being served by the same young teller. “He was trying to figure out at the time why she had all these checks with the logos of the professional football teams on them,” D’Andelet says. One day, the bewildered teller finally asked whether Nettie was a cheerleader. “I guess that was the only thing he could come up with.”

Nettie went to secretarial school, so she was Bunky’s at-home secretary. D’Andelet remembers how he would return home after work, walk through the door, and say, “Nettie, take a letter!” Thinking about the scene now, D’Andelet laughs. “So she’d get her stenographer’s pad out and do shorthand, and be in there typing up letters to all the professional teams — the professional football teams and then eventually the baseball teams. And so she was the jack-of-all-trades. So whatever needed to be done, it was her and us. We were the cheap labor… Whether it was stuffing envelopes with flyers, or putting stamps on the envelopes. We would package up the cleat cleaners, initially it was in boxes, and we would address them and tape them up and take them to the post office. Everything that was done, we did.”

Although they started with football, cleat cleaners became more associated with baseball because they sat on the back of the mound, in clear view of millions of home viewers. Yet, despite the product’s popularity, Williams “didn’t make a killing from selling the cleat cleaner,” D’Andelet says, “It wasn’t what we lived off of. It was just a little aside for him. He saw that there was a need for this.”

It remained a cottage industry. When she was in her early 20s, D’Andelet’s friend, Chris Williams (no relation), posed for flyers. “He was the shoe model – or the foot model, or whatever you want to call it,” she says. “He played baseball a lot. He was very active. And my dad would have him put the cleats on and get them all muddied up, and try to get the mud out with the cleat cleaner and take pictures.”

Williams also invented a kicking tee. “That never really took off,” D’Andelet says, “and I don’t know why. It was called the Sky Tee and it sat on his rolltop desk.” At some point, the manufacturer in Baltimore was bought by another company. The new owner mistakenly believed that they also owned the mold, and Williams needed a lawyer to help him get it back. He kept the business going into his mid-80s, and you can still find the original cleatcleaner.com website, from 2001, on the Wayback Machine.

After making cleat cleaners for 50 years, Williams sold the business, along with the original mold, about 10 years ago. Before he did so, he asked whether anyone in the family wanted to take over. D’Andelet has spent her entire career in the mortgage, title, and real estate industry, and she just couldn’t see herself continuing the business. “It would have been nice,” she says. “It was kind of hard to say no.” She still has some cleat cleaners, but they’ve been in storage since a move a few years back.

D’Andelet still sees reminders of her father. On the highway, she sometimes finds herself alongside 18-wheelers hauling American President Lines shipping containers. “And you’ll see the ships. I see them sometimes when I’m going over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. I’ll see the ships going along with the APL.”

The cleat cleaner is more widespread than ever. The patent expired back in 1980, and these days, there’s no shortage of companies manufacturing them. They come in an ever-expanding variety of styles, shapes, and colors, but Williams’ original design, the one that started as a plank of wood and sawed-off toy rockets, is still in production. And despite her best efforts, D’Andelet isn’t going to escape sports anytime soon. “I ended up marrying a man who was as interested in sports,” she says, building up to the punchline. “I said, ‘Look you can play all the sports you want to. Don’t expect me to come sit there and watch it.’”

Do me favor. Don’t imagine trading Mookie Betts. Who would do that, anyway? Instead, imagine Mookie Betts trading Mookie Betts. That is to say, imagine Mookie Betts deciding to trade the current version of himself for a younger version of himself. Most of us would make that trade in a second – my younger self had so much hair and was already reading at a fifth-grade level! – but why would Mookie Betts make that trade? Coming into 2024, he had just put up a seven-win season while running a 166 wRC+, the second-best batting line of what should end up as a Hall of Fame career. That’s the ideal self, right there. No trades necessary.

From afar, Betts’s 2024 season was of a piece with the ones that preceded it. He put up his eighth-career 4-WAR season and ran a 141 wRC+, almost exactly in line with his career mark. But look at this:

Go ahead and ignore the short 2020 season, when Betts posted a low pull rate. All the numbers go up toward the second half of the graph before dipping back down in 2024. In a couple of major ways, Betts looked a lot less like what we’ve seen in this decade, and a lot more like what we saw back in the first few seasons of his career. He went back to striking out less, pulling the ball less, and hitting the ball significantly softer. In case that graph isn’t clear to you, let me show you the same numbers, this time split up into three chunks: 2014 through 2017, 2018 through 2023, and then just the 2024 season.

See the chunks? If those three metrics — Betts’ strikeout rate, hard-hit rate, and pull rate — are ringing some bells, it’s probably because I wrote about them back in May. At the time, I noticed that pitchers were doing their absolute best to pitch Betts away, away, away. Well, that trend continued throughout the season, and it certainly seems possible that it explains a lot of these numbers. Continuing with our theme, let’s take this in chunks. We’ll talk about the strikeout rate first because it’s the least dramatic.

Betts has never been anything but excellent at avoiding strikeouts. However, he had an 11% strikeout rate in 2024, and even by his own ridiculous standards, that was something. It was tied for the best mark of his career, it represented a nearly 30% drop-off from his 2023 rate, and it put him in the 98th percentile of all major league hitters. The thing is, his plate discipline didn’t change all that dramatically. He saw fewer pitches in the zone, which is a good way to avoid strikeouts, but he also had one of the higher chase rates of his career. The big difference was that he swung more often on the first pitch and he recorded one of the highest contact rates of his career. That’s a little odd, because chasing more normally leads to whiffing more. However, seeing more outside pitches could lead to more contact, as the ideal contact point for an outside pitch is further behind home plate, which gives the batter more time to react. As I mentioned, all of these numbers were within Betts’ career norms, but between the aggression, especially on the first pitch, and the higher chase rate, it seems safe to say that Betts was looking to put the ball in play a bit more often.

At the same time, Betts’ contact quality took an enormous dip. His hard-hit rate fell from 48.5% in 2023 all the way to 39.5%. That still left him fairly close to the league average, but it was one of the biggest drops in baseball, and the underlying numbers are even uglier. Betts’ 90th percentile exit velocity and his best speed (which throws out the weakest 50% of batted balls and then takes the average of the remaining 50%) represented career lows. The 90th percentile mark put him in the 27th percentile. This is not the direction in which you want to be trending.

As I noted back in May, Betts adjusted to the outside pitches by setting up closer to the plate. That can make it difficult to hit the inside pitch with authority, because you have less time to turn on it, but Betts’ contact quality was down across the board. Here’s his hard-hit rate on pitches in the zone:

The inner third definitely saw the biggest drop-off, but his hard-hit rate was down on pitches out over the plate too. That brings us to our third and final chunk. Betts ran a 34.3% pull rate, the lowest of his career and at least 10 percentage points lower than his rate in each of the three previous seasons. Here are spray heat maps for 2023 and 2024. Everything’s shifting away from left field and toward right field. It’s also shifting away from deep fly balls.

Betts has never been the strongest player in the league, but he’s always hit the ball hard, and he transformed himself into one of the game’s true masters at turning on the inside pitch and ripping it down the line or over the fence. In 2024, however, he traded that super power for the ability to spray line drives to all fields. It certainly seems like this was a response to the way he was being pitched. After all, it’s pretty hard to yank a pitch on the outside corner down the left field line. And if you’re not seeing pitches that you can yank to the pull side, then it no longer makes sense to build your whole approach around that goal.

I don’t want to overreact to a single season, let alone one in which Betts produced his typical fantastic offensive numbers — especially considering that Betts missed nearly two months with a fractured hand. This is one of those times when I really wish we had bat tracking data stretching back over the last several years. Betts had an average bat speed of 69.1 mph in 2024, which put him in just the 14th percentile, and I wish there were a way to know whether that was a big drop-off from previous seasons. He turned 32 last year, and just Tuesday, Tom Tango published an aging curve that makes it look like there’s a dramatic bat speed drop-off starting at 32. If you look at Betts’ spray charts and his contact rates, you get the sense that he just reworked his approach in order to make the most of the pitches he was seeing. However, the exit velocity numbers are such an extreme departure from his previous seasons. To some degree, they’re probably a symptom of that larger adjustment, but Betts’ bat may just be slower than it used to be.

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 »