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.)

Read the rest of this entry »

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.

After 17 seasons as a professional baseball player – very nearly half his life – Kyle Higashioka has signed his first major league free agent contract. And the timing couldn’t have been better. Higashioka entered a thin catching market coming off the most productive offensive season of his career, and he cashed in to the tune of a slightly back-loaded two-year, $12.5 million deal with the Rangers. The deal also has a $7 million mutual option for 2027 with a $1 million buyout, which means Higashioka is guaranteed to make $13.5 million.

One very disappointing year removed from a World Series championship, the Rangers are hoping that the 34-year-old’s consistency can help them bounce back into contention. Higashioka has now strung together three consecutive seasons in which he’s played at least 83 games and put up at least 1.3 WAR. Texas would love to see him make it four. Read the rest of this entry »

A couple weeks ago, I introduced the We Tried Tracker, which we are using to document each time a team claims that it was also in on a free agent who signed elsewhere. I was truly moved by your response. Many of you sent excellent leads on social media. The tip line I set up, WeTriedTracker@gmail.com, received 30 emails and only 26 of them were spam, which seems like a pretty good ratio to me. As things have gotten cooking, we’ve added color coding to the tracker, and (at the suggestion of Twitter user @YayaSucks) links to the original reporting for each We Tried. I will do my best to keep tricking out the tracker until it’s so bright and confusing that looking at it hurts both your eyes and your brain. Thank you to everyone who reached out with a tip, and please keep up the good work! So many teams are out there trying right now, and it is both our responsibility and our great privilege to award them partial credit for those efforts.

According to the Free Agent Matrices (which now contain the We Tried Tracker), 13 free agents have signed so far. In theory, that means there have been 377 opportunities for a We Tried, but that might not be the most reasonable way to look at things. We have so far documented five We Trieds, and I’d say that going 5-for-13 strikes me as a solid batting average, especially this early in the process, when only two names from the Top 50 are off the board. With that, let’s dive into the week in We Tried.

The second official We Tried of the offseason came in controversial fashion. On November 21, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts and A’s manager Mark Kotsay spoke at the USC Sports Business Summit in a segment titled Inside the Dugout: A Fireside Chat. Maybe it’s because I went to a tiny liberal arts college, but I’m really blown away by the USC Sports Business Association’s Adobe Creative Suite budget. Somebody’s not messing around with Canva.

Below is a still from the event that I grabbed from the SBA’s Instagram reel. This isn’t necessarily the point, but I think we should all take a moment to note the conspicuous absence of a fire.

That’s not a fireside chat, my friends. That is just a chat.

While chatting, Kotsay mentioned that the A’s had talked to free agent Walker Buehler, but that Buehler had told them he didn’t want to play in Sacramento. Right out of the gate, Kotsay was testing the limits of the We Tried. They usually come from reporters, and when they do come from a team source, that source is almost never the manager. Moreover, Kotsay was speaking to a group of college students. He probably didn’t expect his words to get out to the general public at all. It just so happened that one of those college students, Kasey Kazliner, is also a sports reporter who wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity to break a story. Kazliner posted the comment 15 minutes into the chat. Less than 70 minutes after it ended, the hardworking R.J. Anderson had already published a full article about it for CBS Sports.

The second factor is that Buehler hasn’t signed anywhere yet. A week ago, I would have told you that by definition, We Trieds have to come after the free agent has actually signed, but after conferring with Jon Becker, I see now that I was wrong. A We Tried simply has to come when the team in question has decided that it’s out on a player, and if there’s one thing the A’s love, it’s getting the hell out of dodge. It may have been accidental, it may have come in a fraudulent fireside chat, and it may end up coming months before the player in question actually signs a contract, but the A’s have officially backed into the second We Tried of the season.

I have to be honest with you, I absolutely love that literally one day after creating the tracker we were already splitting hairs and getting pedantic about what counted and what didn’t count. What better way to spend the offseason than engaging in some light pedantry? And what’s the point of creating a leaderboard if you don’t get to argue about the score? That’s what makes it sports.

Two days before Thanksgiving, Christmas came early. Scoopslinger Jon Heyman set a season high by breaking three We Trieds in two posts. At 11:15 p.m. Eastern, he posted, “Red Sox were in on both Snell and [Yusei] Kikuchi before losing out. They seek rotation upgrades and have preferred a lefty.” This is a true classic of the form. There’s no quote, no attribution, and no supporting evidence. The Red Sox were simply “in on” Snell and Kikuchi, which could mean absolutely anything at all. Maybe they offered more money than the teams that actually signed them. Maybe they’d been meaning to look up their ERAs on the back of a Topps card. Either one would make Heyman’s words technically true. It’s the doubling up that makes it art, though. The Red Sox couldn’t have bothered to reach out to two different reporters, just for the sake of not making it look like they simply texted Heyman a picture of their shopping list? You have to ask yourself how many names could appear one announcement before you’d start to doubt its veracity. I think the answer is three. Say Max Fried signs somewhere on Tuesday, and Heyman posts that the Blue Jays were in on all of Fried, Snell, and Kikuchi. At that point, you’re in list mode. Once the reporter is using a serial comma, we’ve officially entered the realm of farce.

Shortly after Heyman’s post, Mark Feinsand cited a source who also included the Orioles to the mix of the teams that were in on Snell. But the night belonged to Heyman. Less than an hour later, he posted his third We Tried of the evening: “Yankees had a zoom call with Blake Snell just today. But their near total focus is on Juan Soto. Their plan Bs need to wait a bit.” This is really mixing it up. We’ve got one juicy detail to go on, and if there’s one thing I know, it’s that when you really mean business, you hop on Zoom. Sure, the Yankees have a private jet, but nothing says “I really, truly want to give you hundreds of millions of dollars” like a glitchy video call. There is no better way to entice a potential employee to join your organization than by forcing them to watch via webcam as the pallid November sunlight plays off the blotchy skin beneath your eyes and your reverb-drenched voice intones the magic words: “We think you’d look great in pinstripes.” Why didn’t the Yankees just announce that they’d sent Snell a carrier pigeon?

On Friday, Andy Kostka reported that the Orioles were in on Kikuchi as well, bringing them into a tie for first place with the Red Sox. More importantly, it gave “We were in on him” a commanding lead in terms of the language used. Of the seven We Trieds, four took the form of a team being “in on” the player, while three other phrasings were tied with just one instance. With that, our update is complete, and I’ll leave you with our first leaderboards of the offseason. We will keep tracking as the offseason continues, and as always, please let us know if you see a We Tried out in the wild.

BONUS CONTENT: Last week, Johnny Damon went on the “Shut Up Marc” podcast, hosted by Marc Lewis. He talked about signing with the Yankees following the 2005 season and described how the Red Sox made him the subject of a particularly cynical We Tried:

I had four great years there and then I accepted with the Yankees, the contract… A couple days later I get a package, a DHL package from the Red Sox: four-year, $40 million contract. And it’s like, ok… So that’s kind of showing faith that they offered me a deal so that can tell to the media that, “We offered them a contract, he just didn’t take it.” So yeah, that’s how things work.

Early last year, I wrote two articles exploring the handful of pitchers who decided that, depending on the handedness of the batter they were facing, they should change not just their pitch mix but something more fundamental about themselves as pitchers. Some drastically lowered their arm angle against same-handed batters, while some scooched from one side of the rubber to the other. I mostly wrote about these pitchers because they were fun to watch, but I also dived into the reasoning behind their decisions. It wasn’t hard to understand what they were thinking: All things being equal, throwing from a lower arm angle works better against same-handed batters, while a higher arm angle works better against opposite-handed hitters. I even had numbers to back it up. I ran correlation coefficients between the pitcher’s wOBA allowed and their release point, and I used average velocity as a sort of control variable.

The correlation coefficients in this table are quite small, but they indicate that when the pitcher has the platoon advantage, vertical release point matters a whole lot. In fact, in that sample, it has the same correlation to success as velocity, which is definitely a surprise. When the batter has the platoon advantage, vertical release point doesn’t have any bearing on their success, but horizontal release point does. That’s why some pitchers scooch all the way over to the opposite side of the rubber.

Now that you’re all caught up, it’s time to address the big flaw in those numbers. The problem with my data was that I wasn’t actually using the pitcher’s arm angle. I was using their release point – literally the spot in the air above the mound where the ball leaves their hand – as a stand-in. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, the Mets really did it. On Tuesday, they finally went out and landed the electric Dominican outfielder with the big tools and the ebullient personality, the one they’d been dreaming of for so very long. Well, they landed one of the electric Dominican outfielders they’d been dreaming of, anyway.

In a one-for-one swap, the Mets received center fielder Jose Siri from the Rays in exchange for right-handed pitching prospect Eric Orze. Siri is a thrilling player with four jaw-dropping tools: power, defense, speed, and throwing. The complete absence of a hit tool leaves him kind of like a boat with the world’s greatest bilge pump and a gaping hole in the hull. He’s forever battling to mash enough moonshots and make enough improbable catches to stay afloat despite running a strikeout rate that falls somewhere between catastrophic and cataclysmic. In a move that will surprise no one who is even passingly familiar with the Rays, the team turned Siri into a pitching prospect the moment he could conceivably begin to cost them actual money. The Mets now control Siri for his three arbitration years, and MLB Trade Rumors projects him for a $2.3 million salary in 2025 (plus a luxury tax penalty). Given that the trade went down Tuesday, the Rays have probably already turned Orze into a bona fide ace.

The move could indicate something of a pattern for the Mets, who signed the glove-first Harrison Bader to a one-year contract before the 2024 season. Here’s how similar the two players are: At the time of his signing, Bader was 29 years old and had posted a career wRC+ of 90 while averaging 20 OAA per 150 games. Right now, Siri is 29 years old and has posted a career wRC+ of 89 while averaging 19.1 OAA per 150 games.

That move didn’t exactly pan out. Bader managed to avoid the injured list for the first time since 2020 and his 85 wRC+ wasn’t far below his career mark, but it wasn’t exactly the bounce-back season the Mets had hoped for. He started nearly every game against right-handed pitching, but against lefties, he went from ceding the occasional start to Tyrone Taylor at the beginning of the season to sitting more often than not by the end of it. This wasn’t ideal considering Bader has a career 109 wRC+ vs. lefties and an 84 wRC+ vs. righties. By the time the playoffs rolled around, he was the odd man out. He got into nearly all of the team’s postseason games, but started just twice and made just six plate appearances.

In all, the Mets got just 1.6 WAR in center field in 2024. That ranked 22nd in all of baseball, and it was the lowest ranking of any position on the field for the team. The only other spots on the diamond where the Mets were even in the bottom half of the league were starting pitcher, catcher, and right field. With Bader and Jesse Winker entering free agency and Taylor undergoing surgery to repair a hernia and remove a loose body from his throwing elbow, Siri is unlikely to be the last outfielder the Mets acquire this offseason.

The Athletic’s Will Sammon cited sources who reported that this wasn’t the first time the Mets had sought to get their hands Siri, and it’s not hard to see why. Siri is as tempting a project as any player in the game. He’s an incredibly gifted defensive center fielder with light tower power and absolutely no semblance of plate discipline or contact ability. The team that could get him to chase just a little bit less, to whiff just a little bit less, would have a monster on its hands. However, Siri is entering his age-29 season, and it’s hard to imagine that even the team that wanted him badly enough to risk the humiliation of trading a pitching prospect to the Rays really expects to finally unlock him. Unlike lower-back pain, plate discipline isn’t something you just happen to pick up once you hit your 30s. In 2024, Siri ran a 37.9% strikeout rate. Among players with 400 plate appearances in a season, that’s the third-highest mark in major league history. His 35.8% career strikeout rate ranks 14th on our career leaderboard, and five of the 13 players ahead of him were pitchers.

Just like Bader in Flushing, Siri started losing playing time as the 2024 season went on. Jonny DeLuca, who in 2024 featured – and stop me if you’ve heard this before – excellent speed and defense to go with some trouble getting on base, absorbed that playing time and will presumably be starting in center for the Rays next season. This time, the Mets got their solid, if flawed, center fielder on the trade market because there really aren’t any to be had in free agency. Understandably, they’re not keen to ride the Bader train again. Michael A. Taylor and Manuel Margot, the only other true center fielders on the free agent market, are both on the wrong side of 30 and coming off their own extremely down 2024 seasons. Siri’s production may look a lot like Bader’s, but he’s got a better track record when it comes to health, and because he cost a prospect rather than a free agent contract, he’ll come with a smaller luxury cap hit.

In Orze, the Rays landed a 27-year-old multi-inning reliever with a killer splitter and a modest track record of minor league success. The Mets selected him in the fifth round of the 2020 draft out of the University of New Orleans. If you’re familiar with him already, you’re either aware that he has survived two types of cancer or you’ve heard about his unfortunate major league debut. On July 8, Orze entered in the sixth inning against the Pirates and allowed a walk and two singles without recording an out. All three runners would score and he’d be tagged with the loss to go with his infinite ERA. Orze would make just one more appearance with the Mets.

Despite an unspectacular 29.7% chase rate in the minors in 2024, Orze has had excellent strikeout rates throughout his minor league career. However, those strikeouts have come hand-in-hand with dangerously high walk rates. In 2022, Eric Longenhagen ranked Orze seventh in Mets system, writing that he was a “near-ready multi-inning reliever… a super valuable piece for a contending team, and a huge draft and dev feather in the cap of the org.” Unfortunately, Orze stalled out, posting a 5.13 ERA at Triple-A Syracuse in 2022 and a 5.31 ERA there in 2023. After the ranked portion of the team’s 2024 prospect list, Eric wrote simply that Orze “has a plus-plus changeup and struggles to throw strikes.” He wasn’t wrong. Among minor leaguers with at least 75 plate appearances tracked by Statcast in 2024, Orze’s 44% zone rate put him in the just 13th percentile.

To be fair, Orze’s peripherals outpaced his ERA, especially in 2022. In 2024, he had a 2.92 ERA with a 3.65 xFIP. He looks like a classic pronator, able to make the ball run to his arm side at will. Both scouts and stuff models are in love with his splitter, and his slider should be serviceable. His four-seamer is the problem. The pitch averages a hair under 94 mph, and as you can see from Max Bay’s Dynamic Dead Zone app, its movement profile is unlikely to fool too many hitters.

See how the pink oval of the pitch’s actual shape matches up almost perfectly with the light blue ovals that indicate the shape that a batter would expect? That’s no good. If the Rays are going to turn Orze into their next star, they’ll need to help him with his command, and they’ll need to help him unlock a better fastball. Still, we’ve been doing this long enough to know that when the Rays post something like this on Bluesky, everyone should be afraid.