The 2022 Blue Jays won 92 games and finished second in the American League in runs scored, and Alejandro Kirk had a lot to do with that. Hitting .285/.372/.415 and playing better defense behind the plate than most expected when he was a prospect, he formed a dynamite catching chimera with Danny Jansen and Gabriel Moreno, who was sent to Arizona this offseason. The resultant pairing of Kirk and Jansen projected to give the Blue Jays the best catching situation in baseball in 2023. But while the rest of the top catchers in the majors have worked out about as expected, Toronto’s have not, combining to hit a respectable but disappointing .232/.311/.384. As the younger and much less experienced of the two, with more time to grow as an offensive player, Kirk’s struggles concern me more.

It’s easy to forget how quickly Kirk rocketed through the minors in recent years. After playing mostly in High-A Dunedin in 2019, the Blue Jays were interested enough in his talent to put him on the taxi squad at the start of September 2020, even getting him into nine games, seven as a catcher. The following season, he only played a couple of weeks at Triple-A Buffalo before becoming a permanent major leaguer. While a promotion that aggressive does happen once in a while, there’s no situation that I can remember in which a team promoted a catcher who wasn’t an extremely polished defender that quickly. He hit .242/.328/.436 — a solid triple-slash for any catcher, but exciting for a player with such little high-level experience. Perhaps as importantly, while Kirk didn’t fool anyone into thinking he was the next Yadier Molina with the glove, he played far better defensively than the DH-pretending-to-be-a-catcher archetype that players like Zack Collins fall into. But Kirk’s .234/.353/.324 line so far is not what people expected in the follow-up season, and while the resulting wRC+ of 96 is far better than trainwreck status, it’s also far from the stardom he displayed last year.

When you see a dropoff like that, especially in a fairly short stretch of games, you frequently see a BABIP blip along with it. But while Kirk has dropped about 40 points of BABIP since last year, his hit profile supports a fairly low BABIP. In fact, ZiPS thinks that he’s “earned” a .249 BABIP based on how he’s hit this year, lower than his actual BABIP of .261. The plate discipline stats also show no red flags; he still makes good contact and isn’t suddenly offering more often at worse pitches.

The icky part of Kirk’s seasonal line involves the loss of power, and unfortunately, the drop in both his exit velocity and loft is real; four miles per hour and seven degrees of launch angle are not small deviations. For the Statcast era, I took every player who put 75 pitches into play in consecutive years, ranked their dips in exit velocity and launch angle (out of 2,389 players), and found those with the biggest dropoffs, using the average of their ranks (we’re trying to get a general idea, so a very simple method is fine). Here are the results:

Kirk ranks highly in terms of dropoff in these stats, so it’s not surprising to see his power evaporate. It’s also not something that bodes well. ZiPS and other projection systems deal with these issues in a more scientifically sound fashion than this, but there are a lot of fading players on this list. The ones that did improve overall in seasons after the two-year window, such as Díaz and Acuña Jr., managed to reverse this process. I went down the top 50 players on this list and found that this held true as well. And Kirk actually showed some dropoff from 2021 to ’22 despite his excellent performance, suggesting that the seeds of a future issue had already been sown.

One culprit here is that he is simply topping hard pitches down in the zone, whereas last year he was getting just enough loft to squeeze a bunch of hits out of them; he hit .452 on low fastballs and lifted the majority of them with a positive launch angle. This season, only three of 13 low fastballs haven’t been driven into the ground, and Kirk has lost about eight degrees of launch angle on average compared to last year. It’s not just luck either: he’s hitting them with less velocity, resulting in an xBA of .231 compared to .336 last year.

The exit velocity issue is important for Kirk because he’s not a fast player and hits a lot of grounders; he’s not going to be legging out many soft infield hits, so he needs to hit the ball hard. Groundball BABIP is very sensitive to exit velocity, as unlike fly balls, there’s no sweet spot where a soft hit becomes an impossible-to-field bloop.

And if you check the Statcast leaderboard in terms of year-to-year change, Kirk is near the top of the list in terms of most increased topped contact rate.

The good news is that the full model of ZiPS is aware of these hit tendencies and still thinks Kirk is going to be alright over the long haul, though his problems right now have increased the downside risk, pushing his projections down from the 3.5–4.0 WAR range they were in before the season:

These types of changes aren’t good, but they’re also not death sentences for careers and can be reversed. Kirk, even while struggling, still retains a lot of the characteristics that made him such a good hitter last year. The key to improving his baseball game right now may be working on his golf game and re-embracing the modern trend of turning low pitches into long drives rather than worm-burners.

From entertainment to finance to sports, every category of human endeavor has its own benchmark for incompetence. There are a lot of candidates to this title in MLB, but one of the most common invocations for ineptitude is the 1962 Mets. Sure, you can find better examples of hilarious failure in the 19th century, such as the Wilmington Quicksteps, who folded while warming up for a game in 1884 when attendance was zero, with the players having to find their own way home from Delaware. You can find teams that won fewer games, like the Cleveland Spiders. But 19th-century baseball was essentially one step above a traveling medicine show, and by the time the 1962 Mets came into existence, MLB was a thoroughly professional league which would be recognizable by today’s fans.

An expansion team that year, the Mets started off losing their first nine games. Things only got slightly better from there: they finished with 120 losses, the most in modern MLB history. Over 60 years later, the A’s, after a 10–38 start, seem poised to become the new true north of failure. Through the first 48 games (as of Sunday’s games), this year’s Oakland squad is actually two games behind (or ahead of, depending on your point of view) the ’62 Mets, who won 12 of their first 48 games.

In some ways, the A’s are already a sadder case than the Mets are. The Mets were an expansion team, hampered by very miserly rules for the expansion draft which left them (and the Houston Colt .45s) with long roads to putting talented players on the field. By all accounts, the team was trying to win, and fan interest was high relative to the performance, with a million fans putting New York in the middle of the pack, attendance-wise. The A’s, on the other hand, are desperately trying to move to Las Vegas or whatever other city without baseball is willing to throw a billion dollars their way and are averaging under 9,000 paying fans — not attending fans — per game. The Mets may have had one of the worst first basemen in the league in “Marvelous” Marv Throneberry, but at least media didn’t have to evacuate an area because of possum urine. Combine the possums with a few dozen cats and whatever else is lurking, and the WhateverItsCalledThisYear Coliseum may be best described as an open-air wildlife refuge that sometimes has baseball games.

But what are the odds that the A’s lose 120 games or even more by the end of the 2023 season? To get an idea, I fired up the ZiPS projection system to get the latest tales of woe from the AL West. Read the rest of this entry »

12:02

Dan Szymborski: ITS A CHAT!

12:04

Dan Szymborski: It’s a bit tricky – I don’t generally like skipping catchers too aggressively, but they can’t play both him and Endy Rodriguez.

12:05

Dan Szymborski: And it’s a little awkward to stick him in a non-catcher position in the majors

12:05

Dan Szymborski: Unless the Pirates have the guts to bench Santana

Read the rest of this entry »

Players the caliber of Juan Soto are rarely available via trade, so when the Padres acquired him via trade last summer from the drowning Nationals, it made a huge splash on the level of dropping a Sherman tank into your neighborhood swimming hole. But rather than continue his previous level of superstardom, he struggled to meet expectations in San Diego. His .236/.388/.390 line was still enough for a solid wRC+ of 130, but relative to his normal level of excellence, it’s hard to call that line anything but a disappointment.

Soto’s start in 2023, though, pales even next to his post-trade performance last year. April 17 may be the nadir of his career in San Diego: the Padres were shut out for the second game in a row, and he put up his fifth consecutive hitless game, leaving him with a triple-slash of .164/.346/.361. For the calendar year ending on that day, he was hitting .230/.391/.435 and had compiled 3.5 WAR — good enough for mere mortals, but not entities made of sterner stuff.

Around this time, Harold Reynolds talked a bit on MLB Network about Soto’s swing and the changes he was making. While I’ve criticized Reynolds plenty for his general analysis when it crosses into the jurisdiction of analytics, I bookmarked this video at the time, as the analysis rang true to me. He believed that Soto’s tinkering would pay dividends, and whether it’s a coincidence or not, he’s looked a lot more like the Soto we love over the last month. In 23 games since then and through Sunday’s action, he hit .321/.447/.571 and amassed 1.2 WAR, the kind of MVP-level production we’ve expected to see from him in mustard and brown and largely have not. Read the rest of this entry »

In the sea of prospects, Casey Schmitt barely caused a ripple. The only Top 100 list the infielder made before this season was Baseball Prospectus’ Top 101; he just squeezed in near the end at no. 94. The computer projections were no kinder, with ZiPS only projecting him as the fourth-best prospect in a rather weak San Francisco Giants system, just barely in its Top 200. Yet these limited expectations didn’t stop Schmitt from engulfing opposing pitchers in his first three big league games, as he went 8-for-12 with two home runs and two doubles.

Obviously, having three big games isn’t a guarantee of stardom — or even viability — in the majors. For example, Vaughn Eshelman started his major league career by throwing 13 shutout innings over his first two starts. He only had eight quality starts left in him (out of 28) and was out of the majors two years later. He might be best known for going on what was then the DL as a result of burning himself with a candle. Read the rest of this entry »

Bad injury news for a member of your rotation is always unwelcome, so the Braves had a very unhappy Wednesday, with two starting pitchers hitting the IL to go along with a loss in their series closer with the Red Sox.

In Atlanta’s current era of success since its last rebuild, there’s no pitcher that has been more crucial to the team’s fortunes than Max Fried. Since his debut in 2017, he has amassed 14.4 WAR, more than double that of any other pitcher on the roster (next up is Charlie Morton at 6.5). He’s already missed time this season due to an injury, a hamstring strain that cost him two weeks in April. The current injury, however, is far more serious, one that will measure in months rather than days or weeks.

Expectation has been Fried and Wright will both be sidelined for at least two months. With this being his second shoulder ailment of the year, Wright thinks he could be out longer than Fried.

— Mark Bowman (@mlbbowman) May 10, 2023

A forearm strain is usually enough to cause serious and forlorn eyebrow-raising, but the silver lining here is that the MRI on Fried’s elbow didn’t reveal an injury severe enough to require surgery. This is especially important given that he already had Tommy John surgery back when he was a prospect with the Padres. That previous procedure cost him part of 2014 and all of ’15, and the basic truth is that though medicine has made progress and that Tommy John surgeries aren’t career-enders to the degree they used to be, repeat procedures have considerably less success. In this 2016 study of so-called revision Tommy John surgery, less than half of the pitchers looked at even pitched in 10 major league games afterward, and they saw their average career length drop in half compared to first-time patients. Read the rest of this entry »

12:00

Dan Szymborski: And I have returned from a lengthy vacation and a Thursday in which I was way behind on an article I had to finish up!

12:01

Dan Szymborski: I’m still a Webb slinger, but I’m quite bullish on Joe Ryan. And hey, ZiPS never disliked him and that splitter’s been kickass

12:01

Dan Szymborski: Yeah, there are specific situations it’s useful

12:01

Dan Szymborski: for example, you don’t need a high probability of a sacrifice bunt becoming a hit to make it worthwhile

Read the rest of this entry »

If you look at teams with long-term stability, you’ll tend to find teams who have managed to get a lot of their best talent inked to contract extensions. When it comes to team construction, that certainty makes resolving other questions about the team a simpler matter and reduces the risk of a nasty surprise when your rival decides to spend the GDP of a small country on one of your best players in baseball. Making sure your core is locked up has been trickier since the mid-1970s, as it shockingly turned out that when you allow players to choose their employer, they may choose to find new employment! Teams as widely varying as John Hart’s 1990s Cleveland teams to today’s Braves employed these strategies as foundation of their continued success.

This year has already seen a number of key players signing long-term contracts that guarantee them healthy amounts of guaranteed cash: Corbin Carroll, Andrés Giménez, Keibert Ruiz, Miles Mikolas, Jake Cronenworth, Logan Webb, Ian Happ, Pablo López, Bryan Reynolds, and Hunter Greene have all signed deals within the last two months. Signing players now is usually better than waiting to later, so here are my eight players who teams should most urgently attempt to sign to long-term deals. For each player, I’ve included the current ZiPS-projected contract.

First off, let me address two players who you might expect to see here but who are not: Shohei Ohtani and Juan Soto. Ohtani looks like such a mega-blockbuster free agent that I’m not sure the Angels can realistically keep him from hitting the open market, and in any case, the projection would just be “all the currency that exists or ever will exist.” As for Soto, as much as it suprises me that I’m saying this, there’s enough of a question around where his ability level is right now that I think a meeting of the minds may be very difficult. The fact is that he’s a .234/.398/.437 hitter over the last calendar year, and with extremely limited defensive value, I’d actually be a little squeamish about offering him the 14-year, $440 million extension he turned down from the Nats. Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Chapman has long been a sabermetric darling, but it was largely on the basis of combining elite defense at the hot corner with merely above-average offense. While he’s always hit the ball hard, his rather low BABIPs and middling contact skills have been a ceiling on his production at the plate. With his glove in decline and entering his age-30 season, it was an open question as to how lucrative he would find free agency at the end of the season. But Chapman’s 2023 season has been an offensive tour de force, with a seasonal line of .364/.449/.636, a 202 wRC+ and 2.0 WAR as of Thursday morning. The Blue Jays have gotten better than a .700 OPS at only three positions this season (first base, third base, shortstop), and Chapman’s sterling performance is one of the main reasons the offense has still been able to rank sixth in the American League in runs scored.

Just to get it out of the way: Chapman’s not going to hit .364 for the 2023 season. Looking at the zBABIP that ZiPS calculates for him, it thinks his BABIP should be more like .300 based on how he’s hit, not the current .461 figure. But what does look like it’s here to stay is the level of power he’s displayed; if he were a computer program, David Lightman would have skipped Global Thermonuclear War and played Matt Chapman instead. An average exit velocity of 95.6 mph and a hard-hit rate of 66.7% are in ultra-elite territory, and small sample sizes for data like these are relatively meaningful. Chapman’s barrel percentage so far has approached a ludicrous 30%, a number nobody’s been able to touch in a full season (Aaron Judge at 26.2% in 2022 is the only player so far to beat 25%). Read the rest of this entry »

Any time something crazy happens early in the season, such as the week that Adam Duvall was leading the league in WAR, I tend to dismiss it with a single word reply of “April.” But the calendar has now flipped, and the shower-month has become the flower-month, so it’s getting a bit harder to ignore the Pirates, standing at the top of the NL Central with a 20–9 record, a whopping 10 games above last season’s victor, the currently last-place Cardinals. Nearly 20% of the season is now done, and it’s probably time to talk about whether Pittsburgh is for real.

First off, going 20–9 is always an impressive run. Teams that do that aren’t always great teams, but they’re usually at least middling and only rarely actually bad. There have been exactly 1.21 craploads of 20–9 or better runs over the last 20 years, and only two with a run that solid, the 2021 Cubs and 2005 Orioles, finished with 75 wins or fewer. And while the Pirates had more than their share of basement-dwelling opponents (the average opponent has a .430 winning percentage), great performances in baseball tend to be in environments that are most conducive to those performances. The Yankees had the best 29-game run last year, at 24–5, with 21 of those 29 games coming against non-playoff teams.

Suffice it to say that the projection systems were generally not optimistic on the idea of the Pirates being contenders in 2023. Our preseason depth charts gave them a 3% chance to win the division and a 6.5% chance of making the playoffs. ZiPS, which liked the Cardinals better than the combined projections (a prognostication that’s not looking great right now), was even more down on Pittsburgh, with only a 0.7% shot at the NL Central and 1.8% for a postseason. These weren’t hopeless numbers, but they certainly left the Pirates as a longshot. But as of the morning of May 2, our projections now have the Pirates at 18.5% to win the division and 32.3% to make the playoffs. And the updated ZiPS projections for 2023 suggest a chaotic division if everyone’s somewhere around their median projection. When you take into account Pittsburgh’s hot start, the Cubs playing very well, St. Louis’ bleak April, and Milwaukee’s pitching injuries, ZiPS sees the NL Central as wide open:

The good news for Pirates fans is that the assumptions needed to get here are not particularly aggressive. Neither ZiPS nor our Depth Charts combined projections have decided that Pittsburgh is a great team, or even a good one. In fact, both methodologies still see them finishing below .500 — Depth Charts as a .467 team, ZiPS as a .490 team. Read the rest of this entry »