It’s been a hot start to the 2024 season for the Boston Red Sox. They started the season with a 10-game road trip to the West Coast and arrived home Monday at 7-3 after a four-game split in Seattle, a three-game sweep in what will likely be their final trip to play the A’s in Oakland, and a 2-1 series win over the Angels. While Boston hasn’t exactly met the highest of competition yet — this week’s home-opening series with Baltimore should be a serious test — the Sox entered Tuesday with the second-best run differential in the majors, at +26. Aside from the Trevor Story’s injury, which as Jon Becker explained yesterday is going to test Boston’s uninspiring middle infield depth, it’s been an encouraging first two weeks for Alex Cora’s club.

Somewhat unexpectedly, pitching has been the story of Boston’s early success, after the Red Sox redesigned their pitching infrastructure over the offseason. In this regard, two of the most important additions to the club are not current players but former big league pitchers: Craig Breslow, who replaced Chaim Bloom as the team’s chief baseball officer, and Andrew Bailey, the new pitching coach. After pitching as a reliever for 12 years in the majors, including parts of five seasons with the Red Sox, Breslow spent five years in the Cubs’ front office working to overhaul their pitching program. One of Breslow’s first moves was to hire Bailey, his former Red Sox teammate. Bailey, a two-time All-Star and the 2009 American League Rookie of the Year, came over from the Giants, where he held the same role and helped to develop the likes of Logan Webb, Kevin Gausman, and Carlos Rodón into some of baseball’s top pitchers recent years. Boston also hired Justin Willard to a role it titled “director of pitching.”

Entering Tuesday, Red Sox pitchers lead the majors with a 1.49 ERA, a 2.92 FIP, a 3.08 xFIP, 10.49 strikeouts per nine, and 2.4 WAR. Two times through the rotation, Tanner Houck hasn’t allowed a run, and Nick Pivetta, Kutter Crawford, and Garrett Whitlock have allowed one earned run each. The bullpen has supported this rotation capably, too — in 37.1 innings, Boston relievers rank second in baseball with 0.8 WAR, third with a 1.45 ERA and 3.40 xFIP, and fourth with a 3.18 FIP. All of this from a staff that features mostly the same members from a group that struggled last season. It’s too early to know for sure if 2024 will be any different, but this is an auspicious start. Read the rest of this entry »

After a long, cold winter, it’s a welcome sight to have teams back on the field this spring. The game’s biggest stars are getting back into their rhythms, some heated position battles are underway, and — most importantly, of course — new data is pouring into sites like FanGraphs. Caution is always advised when evaluating players based on their spring training statistics, but we can still learn a lot from what happens in these exhibition games.

One of the safest places to start is with a metric that players (pitchers, in this case) have the most control over: velocity. Most statistics are contingent on circumstance, making them less reliable, particularly this time of year. Just about everything a hitter does is a reaction to the pitch coming his way, and most pitching statistics are impacted by the fielders, the umpire, and even chance. How hard a pitcher can throw, on the other hand, is how hard he can throw. It may change as a result of health, age, conditioning, or mechanical adjustments, among other factors, but for the most part, it isn’t dependent on the hitter at the plate or the players in the field. It’s as raw a metric as we have.

That said, I’d be hesitant to read much into which pitchers are throwing softer in the first two weeks in spring training. To some extent, that’s what these games are here for, to build strength and get back in shape, and peak league-wide fastball velocity doesn’t usually come until the warmth of late spring. But the guys who are throwing significantly harder than last year? The ones who are throwing harder than they ever have? That seems worth noting. Read the rest of this entry »

The introduction (and then reintroduction) of the designated hitter to the National League wasn’t the smoothest of rollouts. It was first brought about as a safety measure in the chaos of the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, designed to relieve unnecessary stress on pitchers who were already dealing with a disrupted preseason. Despite the best efforts of the Players Association, the DH was removed from the NL for 2021, as the league declined to implement it without getting something in return (in this case, a delayed and potentially shortened season). A year later, and more than two months into the lockout, as the league and the union battled through negotiations over the new collective bargaining agreement, it was announced that the universal DH would return for the upcoming season, this time indefinitely.

It was a difficult task for NL teams to prepare one way for one season and another for the next. Of course, any hitter can slot into the DH spot on any given night, but not every team comes with a player who can provide real value with his bat alone, and it takes time either to acquire or develop a player like that, or to build enough depth to overcome not having one. With the universal DH, NL clubs would need to get another 700 or so productive plate appearances from their rosters — that’s no small feat. Understanding this, let’s consider the state of the DH in the National League.
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The Oakland-for-now Athletics had themselves a roster shuffle on Friday, bolstering their pitching staff by adding right-hander Ross Stripling and officially announcing the addition of lefty Alex Wood. Wood joined the A’s on a one-year contract worth $8.5 million (with another million’s worth of incentives) after three years with the Giants. Now Stripling, too, is headed east across the bay, in a deal sending minor league outfielder Jonah Cox west to San Francisco (To make room for the pair, Oakland outrighted lefty Francisco Pérez and designated infielder Jonah Bride for assignment).

Wood and Stripling, who might have said something like “It’s not goodbye; it’s see you later” while packing up their lockers after the 2023 season, will be teammates for the fourth separate stint on three different California teams. They spent from 2016 to 2018 together on the Dodgers before Wood was dealt to the Reds, were reunited back in Los Angeles for the start of the pandemic-shortened 2020 season until Stripling was traded to Toronto, and then signed nearly identical two-year, $25 million free agent contracts with San Francisco a year apart from one another. Now, they’ll pair up again in Oakland and figure to factor into a starting rotation that was worth a league-worst combined 1.8 WAR in last season.

Both pitchers were available at a modest cost to the A’s after floundering in their only year together with the Giants. As Kyle Kishimoto wrote last week, Wood struggled to get hitters to swing at bad pitches and to miss whenever they did swing, falling to the 13th percentile in chase percentage and the 17th in whiff percentage. As a result, he struck out a lot fewer hitters and walked a whole bunch more. He also failed to stay healthy, with strains in his left hamstring and lower back sidelining him for the bulk of two months, and by late July, he was relegated to bullpen work as a sort of piggybacker and long relief option. He pitched better in this role, but it was far from what he and the Giants had hoped for when he signed his deal before the 2022 season. Still, Wood brings 10 years of big league service and a not-too-shabby 18.1 career WAR to Oakland, where he’ll try to right the ship. Read the rest of this entry »

By most any measure, Rockies outfielder Nolan Jones had an excellent rookie season in 2023. He finished fourth in National League Rookie of the Year voting behind unanimous winner Corbin Carroll, Kodai Senga, and James Outman. He posted a .297/.389/.542 batting line in 106 games, becoming the first Rockie rookie to go 20-20 in franchise history. His .395 wOBA ranked 10th among the 212 players with at least 400 plate appearances. He was an above-average fielder, spending most of his time in the outfield corners, with his fairly poor range more than made up for by his elite arm (OAA, DRS, and UZR all agree that he was a plus defender). He led Colorado with 3.0 BsR, and finished as one of 12 players in the majors with as many as 3.0 runs above average in each of batting, base running, and fielding value:

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The 2023 season seemed to be studded with stars. Two-way phenom Shohei Ohtani turned in by far his best offensive season (not to mention a very good pitching season before succumbing to injury) en route to a unanimous MVP selection. Ronald Acuña Jr. made counting stat history with the first ever 40–70 season, posting a .428 wOBA that was somehow 35 points shy of his .463 xwOBA and earning his own unanimous recognition from MVP voters. This despite playing in the same league as Mookie Betts, who had what would have been a career-best season for almost anyone else, slashing .307/.408/.579 with a career-high 39 home runs. Freddie Freeman had the best season of one of the best active careers in baseball, somehow improving on a 2022 campaign that featured a .325/.407/.511 slash line and 7.1 WAR. And I could go on — Matt Olson hit 54 home runs, Marcus Semien and Corey Seager anchored a championship lineup, Francisco Lindor quietly put up another 6.0-WAR season, and Corbin Carroll wasted no time in establishing himself as a bona fide superstar. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s an attempt at selecting some adjectives to describe the last year or so in Queens. After a bonkers 2022–23 offseason, a 2023 regular season that was nothing short of catastrophic, and a frantic trade deadline effort to mitigate some of the damage, this offseason, new Mets president of baseball operations David Stearns and company have so far taken an approach that could be described as measured. Last offseason, the Mets signed seven multi-year deals, including four valued at over $75 million. On Thursday, the club agreed to terms on just its second eight-figure contract of the winter, signing center fielder Harrison Bader to a one-year, $10.5 million deal.

The addition of Bader is the latest in an offseason of conservative one-year deals for Stearns’ group. They took a $13 million flier on Luis Severino, who will move over from the Bronx and slot in somewhere in the starting pitching mix after Kodai Senga and Jose Quintana (and perhaps future rotation additions). They made budget-friendly additions to a depleted bullpen, swinging a trade with Milwaukee for Adrian Houser, claiming a handful of arms off of waivers, and offering one-year deals to Michael Tonkin, Jorge López, and Austin Adams. They added to their position player depth with infielders Joey Wendle and José Iglesias (on a minor-league deal) and alliterative outfielders Tyrone Taylor and Trayce Thompson (also on a minors deal), who now have Bader looking down from above on the depth chart. Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday, the Royals continued to bolster a pitching staff that desperately needs bolstering, signing Seth Lugo to a three-year, $45 million deal, and Chris Stratton to a one-year, $4 million pact. After signing left-hander Will Smith over the weekend and infielder Garrett Hampson in late November, the Royals have been among this offseason’s most active teams on the free-agent market. With Lugo, the club has made its fourth-largest financial commitment to a free agent in franchise history, and the largest since signing Alex Gordon and Ian Kennedy to the two biggest contracts in franchise history after winning the World Series in 2015.

That Lugo will be made one of the richest Royals ever says more about the market size and the finances of the club than it does about his value, but he makes for a nice add for a team who came out of 2023 with a lot more questions (Jordan Lyles? Brady Singer? Daniel Lynch IV?) than answers (Cole Ragans!) in the starting rotation. Kansas City identified a target in a crowded starting pitching market and went after him with an aggressive offer, and they’ve landed our 22nd-ranked free agent of the winter. Stratton, meanwhile, gives them another veteran in the bullpen at a modest cost. Read the rest of this entry »

The Los Angeles Dodgers and right-hander Joe Kelly did a whole bunch of paperwork just to end up back in business together. In November, the Dodgers declined a one-year, $9.5 million option on Kelly, buying the right-hander out for $1 million and sending him into free agency. This week, the two parties agreed to terms on another contract, reportedly for one year and $8 million. Nobody likes to take a pay cut, but for Kelly, who was born in Anaheim, that’s $9 million in his pocket to stay put instead of $9.5 million – ultimately a pretty friendly outcome after the option decision didn’t go his way.

If you’ve tuned in to the postseason in the last decade, you’re probably familiar with the work of Kelly, who started a World Series game for the Cardinals in 2013, earned his first ring with the Red Sox with a dominant October in 2018, and pitched for the Dodgers in four of the last five postseasons, winning his second World Series in 2020. He helped set up a pair of future Hall of Fame closers in their only World Series seasons (so far) two years apart in Craig Kimbrel and Kenley Jansen. Since the start of his career, the only pitchers with more postseason appearances than Kelly’s 41 are Jansen, Ryan Pressly, and Aroldis Chapman:

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In the few weeks following the conclusion of the World Series, with no meaningful major league games on the calendar until March, our collective attention shifts quickly to hot stove season. But as eager as we are to start slotting free agents into new rotations, bullpens, and lineups, there’s a bit of paperwork to take care of before the full extent of the winter’s class is even known. Teams have exclusive five-day windows with their departing clients, players and teams decide to opt in or out of optional contract years, and qualifying offers are issued and routinely rejected.

This past Friday was one of the final deadlines of MLB’s early offseason, by which teams had to choose whether or not to tender contracts to players on their 40-man roster with fewer than six years of service time. Those tendered contracts will remain under team control in 2024, but those whom teams declined to offer contracts were added to the free-agent pool and will look for work elsewhere. By the end of the day, a majority of teams had at least one extra empty 40-man spot, and dozens of players — headlined by two-time All-Star Brandon Woodruff — were newly available.

Woodruff, who is recovering from a shoulder surgery and will miss most of the upcoming season, is certainly the standout arm in this year’s cohort of non-tenders, but he’s not exactly the prototypical non-tender. In this year’s crop, there are a number of interesting low-profile arms who are looking to re-establish themselves as bullpen contributors with another big league opportunity after injuries or stretches of underperformance. Let’s take a look at a handful of guys who will be hoping to find good fits as low-risk potential contributors over the next few months. Read the rest of this entry »