For over a century, baseball and the Summer Olympics have made for an uneasy mix at best. Dating back to the days when the Olympics was purely for amateur athletes, the sport has only sporadically been part of the slate, usually as an exhibition or demonstration. Major League Baseball’s refusal to release its players to participate — thereby disrupting its own schedule — led the International Olympic Committee to drop it in 2005, a slight that gave rise to the World Baseball Classic as an alternative. Now a group has begun a push to convince MLB owners to allow big leaguers to participate in the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, but to these eyes, it feels rather underwhelming in the shadow of the WBC’s success.

Via The Athletic’s Evan Drellich, at this week’s owners meetings in Orlando, Florida, Casey Wasserman presented a proposal for how such participation could work. Wasserman has feet in both worlds, serving as the CEO of the Wasserman Agency, which represents many of the game’s highest-paid stars, and also as the president of the Los Angeles Olympic Organizing Committee, which was successful in landing the 2028 Games for L.A. According to Drellich, he offered a blueprint for a six-to-eight team tournament that could be played on a condensed schedule of less than a week, one that wouldn’t be much more disruptive than the annual All-Star break.

In fact the timing of the 2028 games — from July 14–30 — is close enough to the usual All-Star break that it could supplant that year’s Midsummer Classic, according to Drellich. By comparison, the last five Summer Olympics have all either crossed into or taken place entirely in August. While that wasn’t the reason MLB didn’t let its players participate, it would have required a second break in the season, one happening just as the races for playoff spots heated up, and sometimes past the trade deadline, making it harder to replace a player lost to injury in the tournament. Read the rest of this entry »

With the additions of Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto on deals lasting 10 and 12 years, respectively, the Dodgers are entering a new era when it comes to their headlining superstars — not to take anything away from Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman, both of whom remain at or near the top of their respective games. On Monday, we learned that the next stage of Dodger baseball will also include another familiar superstar: The New York Post’s Joel Sherman and Jon Heyman reported that free agent Clayton Kershaw will return to the only team for which he’s ever pitched.

The exact terms of the deal — which is pending a physical on Thursday — have yet to emerge at this writing, but USA Today‘s Bob Nightengale reported that the deal is a “one-year, incentive-laden contract,” while The Athletic’s Andy McCullough added that the contract includes a player option for 2025. If exercised, that would allow Kershaw to join Ohtani — who won’t pitch in 2024 after undergoing reconstructive surgery on his UCL this past September — in the Dodgers’ rotation.

Player options tend to carry advantages when it comes to Competitive Balance Tax accounting, a significant concern for the Dodgers, who rank second in payroll (both actual and CBT-based) only to the Mets and are nearly $12 million over the fourth-tier tax threshold of $297 million even before adding Kershaw’s salary. For example, Justin Turner’s two-year, $21.7 million deal with the Red Sox last year called for a base salary of $8.3 million for 2023, then a $13.4 million option and $6.7 million buyout. By opting out, Turner made $15 million on a deal whose average annual value was just $10.85 million. Read the rest of this entry »

The 36-year-old Brasier, who made $2 million last year, his final one before free agency, is guaranteed $9 million for 2024–25, with a maximum of $4 million in incentives possible as well. At this writing, the specifics of the annual breakdowns and the benchmarks for those bonuses aren’t known, but suffice to say, this represents a big upgrade in his standard of living. The Angels, Cardinals, Red Sox, and Yankees all showed interest in him this winter as well, according to The Athletic’s Fabian Ardaya.

Such an outcome would have been almost unthinkable back in May, when Brasier lost his job with the Red Sox, for whom he’d pitched since 2018 with varying degrees of success. Though he made 68 appearances for Boston in 2022, he posted a 3.61 FIP but a 5.78 ERA in 62.1 innings, with a .335 BABIP — owing to too many hard-hit balls — playing a significant role in the discrepancy between those two run prevention figures. Through the first six weeks of his 2023 season with the Red Sox, it was more of the same: a 7.29 ERA, a 4.35 FIP, and a .344 BABIP in 21 innings.

On May 15, a day after Brasier had allowed three runs in a season-high 2.1 innings of garbage-time duty against the Cardinals, the Red Sox designated him for assignment; six days later, they released him. The Dodgers signed him to a minor league deal in early June, with Rob Hill, the team’s director of minor league pitching, and Brent Minta, their pitching analytics coordinator, suggesting he add a cut fastball to a repertoire that also includes a four-seamer that averages almost 96 mph and mid-80s slider.

Brasier spent about two weeks working on the new pitch at Camelback Ranch, then made two appearances for Triple-A Oklahoma City, during which he struck out five of nine hitters without allowing a baserunner. The Dodgers called him up, and he was outstanding, pitching to a 0.70 ERA and 2.48 FIP in 38.2 innings the rest of the way. Throwing the new pitch to lefties 46.8% of the time (though just 6.2% to righties), he held batters to a .152 average and .273 slugging percentage with a 16.4% whiff rate. Meanwhile, he cut his four-seam fastball usage in half, got better results on contact and higher whiff rates on all of his pitches:

Brasier had been scorched at a .389/.463/.611 clip by the 41 lefties he faced with the Red Sox, striking out just three of them while walking five. Once he joined the Dodgers, lefties hit just .123/.167/.211 in 60 plate appearances, with three walks (one intentional) and 18 strikeouts.

Overall, Brasier’s strikeout-walk differential doubled, and his results on contact improved dramatically:

All of which is to say that we can add Brasier to the ever-growing list of pitchers — Tyler Anderson, Andrew Heaney, Evan Phillips, Alex Wood — whom the Dodgers were able to get far more out of than other teams thanks to various tweaks in mechanics and repertoire. Noah Syndergaard and Lance Lynn are proof that they’re not always successful at doing so, but they’ve helped enough hurlers to justify their effort. As Phillips, the owner of a 7.26 ERA and 5.37 FIP in 57 innings at three previous stops before arriving in mid-2021, told the Los Angeles Times’ Mike DiGiovanna earlier this month, “When the Los Angeles Dodgers come calling and say, ‘Hey, we think you can be great,’ you tend to listen. They really forced the envelope and said, ‘You’re gonna need to do these things to pitch well,’ and I was in no position to argue with them.”

Phillips is now the closest thing the Dodgers have to a regular closer; he led the team — which had the majors’ third-best bullpen ERA (3.42), second-best FIP (3.73) and best WAR (7.6) last season — with 24 saves. Brasier is now in the mix for a late-inning role, along with fellow righties Brusdar Graterol and Joe Kelly. The latter, whom the Dodgers reacquired in the Lynn trade with the White Sox on July 28, then re-signed to a one-year, $8 million deal in December, has a notoriously spotty health history, as does Blake Treinen, who’s hoping to return to action after throwing just five innings in 2022 and none last year due to labrum and rotator cuff tears that required surgery. A healthy Brasier offers some insurance within that group.

The Dodgers haven’t cleared a roster spot yet for Brasier; they’ll likely just wait until Thursday, the first day that the team can move Tommy John surgery recipients Tony Gonsolin and Dustin May — not to mention newly re-signed Clayton Kershaw — to the 60-day injured list, where they won’t count against the 40-man roster limit. The team did already make a bit of room for Brasier within the bullpen and on the payroll by trading Ferguson to the Yankees. The 27-year-old lefty, who had been in the Dodgers organization since being drafted out of high school in 2014, set career highs in appearances (68), innings (60.1), and WAR (1.3) in 2023 while posting a 3.43 ERA and 3.34 FIP. As Davy Andrews pointed out in August, he restored a cutter to his arsenal in 2023. In his case, he ditched a reasonably effective curveball to do so, though it didn’t work too well against lefties:

In fact, Ferguson has yielded a higher wOBA to same-side hitters than he has to those of the opposite hand in each of the last two seasons and three out of five in a career that’s been interrupted by the pandemic and a late-2020 Tommy John surgery, his second. (His first was in 2014, just a week before he was drafted.)

For the Yankees, who last week lost stalwart lefty Wandy Peralta to the Padres, that’s something of step backwards. Peralta had been very effective against lefties (.217 wOBA in 174 PA in 2022–23) while also being pretty effective against righties (.300 wOBA in 276 PA over those two seasons), though that composite masks a 70-point year-to-year jump (from .266 in 2022 to .336 in ’23) against the latter. Ferguson, who will make $2.4 million in 2024, his last year before free agency, is less expensive, so there’s that for the Yankees.

Interestingly enough, Ferguson will join another former Dodgers lefty, 28-year-old Victor González, in New York’s bullpen; he was traded to the Yankees on Dec. 11 along with infield prospect Jorbit Vivas in exchange for another infield prospect, Trey Sweeney. Ferguson figures to be the higher of the two in the pecking order, in the setup mix along with righties Jonathan Loáisiga and Tommy Kahnle, ahead of closer Clay Holmes. It’s worth noting that Loáisiga and Kahnle combined for just 58.1 innings last year amid injuries, so manager Aaron Boone could call Ferguson’s number with some frequency.

As for the more experienced of the two pitchers the Dodgers received in exchange for Ferguson, the 30-year-old Gage is now in his eighth organization since being drafted by the Giants in the 10th round in 2014. He’s passed through the hands of the Mets, Rockies, Diamondbacks, Blue Jays, Astros, and Yankees while totaling just 16 games in the majors, 11 with Toronto in 2022 and five with Houston last year; he was optioned four times for his trouble. He’s pitched pretty well in his limited major league opportunities using a fastball-cutter combo with an occasional slider in the mix, posting a 1.83 ERA and 3.97 FIP in 19.2 innings while striking out 26% of hitters. He got knocked around at Triple-A Sugar Land last year, however, posting a 4.58 ERA and 5.29 FIP with a 23.4% strikeout rate; though he held lefties to a .203/278/.328 line in 73 PA, righties hit .333/.425/.559 in 121 PA against him. If you’re getting the sense that he’s a guy on the fringe of the 40-man roster who’s likely to change addresses multiple times in 2024, you’re probably right. He might be one free agent signing or a couple of bad — or even long — outings away from being sent down or out at any moment. It’s not entirely out of the question that he could be DFA’d to make room for a more experienced lefty reliever, as Alex Vesia and Ryan Yarbrough, the pair currently penciled in for the active roster, don’t exactly strike fear into anyone.

As for Zazueta, he’s the 19-year-old son of Christian Zazueta Sr., a still-active 15-season veteran of the Mexican League who spent last year with El Aguila de Veracruz. The younger Zazueta, also a native of Mexico, is listed at 6-foot-3 and 163 pounds. He’s spent the past two seasons in the Dominican Summer League, where last year he posted a 3.29 ERA and 4.59 FIP while striking out 23.6% of all hitters in a team-high 52 innings. He earned an honorable mention spot on the Yankees’ Top 36 Prospects List in December, where Eric Longenhagen lumped him among the swingmen while noting, “He has the pitch movement foundation to break out if he can throw harder as he matures. He currently has a rise-and-run upper-80s fastball, a shapely mid-70s curveball, and a precocious changeup, all of which have bat-missing promise.”

Bringing Brasier back is a nice move for the Dodgers, but by trading Ferguson, they still have a significant number of higher-leverage innings to fill, and may need another addition to the bullpen. Likewise, Ferguson probably shouldn’t be the last move the Yankees make in what’s been a rather underwhelming winter when it comes to patching their pitching staff.

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2024 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Last week, we learned that for the first time since 2020, BBWAA voters elected multiple players to the Hall of Fame. In fact the trio of Adrián Beltré, Todd Helton, and Joe Mauer outnumbers the total number of players elected to the Hall over the last three cycles. For as underwhelming as those recent top-line results may have been, they concealed the steady gains made by a handful of down-ballot candidates, including last year’s lone honoree, Scott Rolen, as well as Helton, each of whom was elected in his sixth year of eligibility after debuting with a share of the vote that in past eras suggested they had no hope of election via the writers. With three returning candidates for 2025 having received over 50% of the vote, and with some impressive newcomers poised to join them, it’s time to look ahead to what the next five ballots have in store.

This is the 11th time I’ve broken out my crystal ball in such a manner, dating back to the wrap-up of my 2014 election coverage at SI.com. With this edition, I’ve now done this more times at FanGraphs than SI. That first edition was so long ago that candidates still had 15 years of eligibility instead of 10, and so I could afford to project Tim Raines for election in 2018, his 11th year of eligibility. The Hall’s unilateral decision to truncate candidacies to 10 years would come just months later, though thankfully voters accelerated their acceptance of Raines, who was elected in 2017. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2024 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

The 2024 Hall of Fame election is in the books, with three newcomers — first-year candidates Adrián Beltré and Joe Mauer, and holdover Todd Helton — crossing the 75% threshold. It was a bit of a nailbiter, as Mauer cleared the bar by just four votes while Billy Wagner missed by five, but after just two candidates were elected by the writers over the past three cycles, it’s a welcome crowd of honorees, and it should make for a raucous weekend in Cooperstown when they and their families, friends and fans join those of Contemporary Baseball Era Committee honoree Jim Leyland for induction into the Hall on July 21. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2024 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Add a few more chairs to the dais. For the first time since 2020, BBWAA voters have elected multiple players to the Hall of Fame — three, in fact. Not only was Adrián Beltré elected as expected, with a hefty 95.1% of the vote, but fellow first-year candidate Joe Mauer and holdover Todd Helton cleared the 75% bar as well, making this the largest class since 2019 and the sixth of this millennium with more than two candidates elected. Though it appeared possible that Billy Wagner could join them, producing the fourth quartet of the past decade and the seventh class of more than three since the institution’s inception in 1936, he missed by just five votes.

While Beltré’s election was a foregone conclusion given that he received 216 out of 218 votes from among those published in Ryan Thibodaux’s indispensable Ballot Tracker prior to the announcement, the outcomes for Mauer (83.5% in the Tracker), Helton (82.6%) and Wagner (78.4%) all carried varying degrees of suspense up to the point when Hall president Josh Rawitch announced the results on Tuesday evening. Mauer’s high share of votes from among the “small Hall” ballots appeared to make his election a strong likelihood, but neither Helton nor Wagner had generated the volume of flipped votes — from no to yes — from among those public ballots that would have reduced their amount of uncertainty. In a pre-election forecast delivered Tuesday afternoon on MLB Now, Jason Sardell — whose probabilistic model has been the industry’s most accurate for the past several cycles — projected Mauer with a 99.9% chance of election, Helton with “about a 90% chance” (up from 71% Monday night), and Wagner with “about a one-in-four chance” (up from 18% Monday night). Read the rest of this entry »

2:00	Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon and happy Hall of Fame election results day!

2:02

Jay Jaffe: I’ve got a lot on my plate today but since my chats have been so scarce lately i figured I’d spend a bit of time answering questions here as a way to burn off some nervous energy. Hall of Fame and hot stove q’s take precedence. Speaking of hot stoves, our new range arrived today, replacing the 20+ year piece of junk that this house came with. it had better heat more evenly!

2:03	Jay Jaffe: Here’s my look at our Hall of Fame crowdsource ballot results and a preview of election day https://blogs.fangraphs.com/the-envelope-please-our-2024-hall-of-fame-…. I’ll obviously have more this evening

2:03	Jay Jaffe: And here’s a Twitter thread linking to the most likely honorees and a few other key pieces in this year’s series https://twitter.com/jay_jaffe/status/1749868791738097982 OK, on with the show

2:05	Jay Jaffe: I wouldn’t exactly say that. While the two candidates elected in this year’s crowdsource poll was fewer than in any of the previous five years, voters averaged just shy of 8 names per ballot; it’s just that those were spread more widely than we’ve seen

Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2024 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

If the BBWAA voters are only as generous as the FanGraphs readers who participated in this year’s Hall of Fame crowdsource ballot, just two candidates will get the nod when the Hall announces the election results on Tuesday, January 23 at 6 PM Eastern — both of them newcomers. In this year’s edition of our annual polling, which drew the highest turnout of the six years in which we’ve conducted this exercise, Adrián Beltré and Joe Mauer both topped 75%, while five other candidates received at least 64% but fell short. That group includes Todd Helton and Billy Wagner, both of whom have reasonable shots at getting their tickets to Cooperstown punched this week. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2024 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Content warning: This piece contains details about alleged domestic violence. The content may be difficult to read and emotionally upsetting.

During the Mets’ run of relevance in the mid-2000s, José Reyes looked like a superstar in the making. Through 2008, his age-25 season, the electrifying and charismatic shortstop had already led the National League in triples and steals three times apiece while collecting at least 190 hits for four straight seasons. Before that run, however, he had also demonstrated a propensity for leg injuries that cost him significant time. Those injuries eventually soured the increasingly cost-conscious Mets ownership on him despite his All-Star level play, and to be fair, Reyes was never really the same after departing New York via free agency following the 2011 season. By the time he returned five years later, he was not only a considerably diminished player but something of a pariah, having been suspended for violating the league’s new domestic violence policy and then released by the Rockies. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2024 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Victor Martinez could rake. A professional hitter in the best sense of the term, he could hit for average, topping .300 eight times in the 11 seasons in which he qualified for a batting title, no small task given his lack of speed. He could also hit for power, bopping 246 home runs with a single-season high of 32. He had great contact skills, striking out in just 10.9% of his plate appearances, and he was dangerous from both sides of the plate. Had he been able to catch as well as he hit, he’d probably be bound for Cooperstown. As it was, Martinez swung a potent stick for 16 major league seasons, making five All-Star teams and helping five teams reach the postseason, where he hit a robust .315/.374/.503 in 163 plate appearances.

Victor Jesús Martinez was born on December 23, 1978 in Ciudad Bolivar, Venezuela, the third of four children of Guillermo and Margot Coromoto Martinez. His younger brother, David Martinez (b. 1980) spent eight years between 1999 and 2007 pitching in the Yankees and Cleveland organizations as well as in independent leagues. Unfortunately, Guillermo died of a heart attack when he was 66 and Victor was seven, leaving Margot to work nursing jobs at two hospitals, one in the morning and the other in the afternoon. Read the rest of this entry »