In Game 1 of the World Series, Phillies manager Rob Thomson made a rather unorthodox pitching change, bringing in Ranger Suárez, his probable Game 3 starter, for the seventh inning. He did so because he wanted a lefty to face the heart of Houston’s lineup, and he had already used his best southpaw reliever a few innings prior. Philadelphia did have a second left-hander waiting in the bullpen – Brad Hand – but in that moment, it was clear Thomson didn’t trust him with the game on the line. Fast forward a couple of months: Hand is a free agent, and the Phillies have a new lefty in his place. On Tuesday at the Winter Meetings, the team signed Matt Strahm for a two-year, $15 million contract, per Jeff Passan of ESPN. By giving him the sixth-largest guarantee for a free-agent reliever this offseason, the Phillies are betting that he’ll pitch well enough that they don’t have to put Suárez back in the bullpen anytime soon.

Strahm received a similar deal as Chris Martin (two years, $17.5 million), but he’s far less proven of a player. A 31-year-old left-hander, he spent last season with the Red Sox, throwing 44.2 innings with 52 strikeouts and a 3.72 FIP. It was a solid bounce-back season after he missed most of 2021 recovering from patellar tendon surgery on his right knee. Indeed, the southpaw has had a career full of setbacks and breakthroughs. He was a 21st-round draft pick who pitched just 30 innings of rookie ball before Tommy John surgery shut him down. Yet when he finally began his professional career in earnest, he was utterly dominant, quickly rising through the ranks of the Royals’ farm system. In 2017, five years after being drafted 643rd overall, he was named a top-100 prospect by this very website.

72. Matt Strahm

Scouting Summary: I’m on Strahm as a starter not just because I think his changeup will progress to average as he continues to make up for lost development time due to injury, but also because he has excellent command of a vicious curveball that he regularly works inside to right-handed hitters. He’ll also run his fastball up to 96.

-Eric Longenhagen

Strahm’s prospect pedigree hinged on his mid-rotation potential, a ceiling he never reached. He was terrific pitching out of the pen in 2018, his first full season, yet the Padres (who had acquired him in a deadline deal in ’17) tried moving him into the starting rotation the following season, and he failed miserably. He wound up back in the bullpen by the All-Star break. He was great again in the second half, and it seemed like he had finally found his calling as a dependable reliever. Unfortunately, that stability didn’t last long, as he had a wildly inconsistent 2020 season and ultimately needed knee surgery in October. He was non-tendered after the 2021 season, and the Red Sox picked him up for cheap.

That’s Strahm in a nutshell: from unheralded draft pick to top prospect to failed starter to solid reliever to injured list to eight-figure free-agent deal. As a result of all those ups and downs, he is still figuring things out at 31 years old. Evidently, the Phillies think they can aid in his self-discovery and turn Strahm into a consistent relief option over the next two years. Read the rest of this entry »

On December 2, the Arizona Diamondbacks came to terms with 27-year-old free agent reliever Miguel Castro on a one-year, $3.5 million contract. I wouldn’t blame you if you failed to catch the news amidst the flurry of moves and rumors from the Winter Meetings; the Turners and deGroms of the world have stolen much of the focus. Nevertheless, while his signing was relatively small, I was drawn to write about Castro for several reasons. For one thing, he’s just a lot of fun to watch. I mean, tell me you disagree:

Standing 6-foot-7, Castro is one of the taller pitchers in baseball, but his listed weight is only 205 pounds. To put that in perspective, he’s the same height as Aaron Judge but with about 75% of the body mass. Yet despite his slim frame, Castro throws high heat in an effortless fashion, whipping his long limbs around to sling a sinker at 98 mph. The length of his extremities also allows him good extension on top of his velocity. To finish it off, he tends to complete his delivery with a bit of extra flair on his back leg kick. Simply put, it’s a unique and satisfying pitching motion — the slime ASMR of windups, if you will. Read the rest of this entry »

If the BABIP gods change their minds, the Red Sox are the first in line. Last week, they inked left-handed reliever Joely Rodríguez, formerly of the Mets, to an incentive-laden, one-year contract with a team option for 2024. If he pitches like his peripheral numbers indicate he can, the signing should prove fruitful for Boston.

Rodríguez will make a base salary of $1.5 million in 2023, with a chance to earn an additional $2.25 million in incentives. He’ll receive a $50,000 bonus if he pitches in 30 games and an extra $50,000 each for reaching the 40-, 50-, 60-, and 70-game plateaus. On top of that, he’ll earn a bigger bonus the longer he remains on the active roster — an extra $500,000 each for logging 30, 60, 90, and 120 days.

Barring a significant injury or complete meltdown, Rodríguez should easily reach 120 days of service time in 2023. In other words, that $2 million bonus is practically money in his pocket. On the other hand, the games-pitched incentive is less of a guarantee. Rodríguez pitched 50-plus games in both of the past two seasons but has yet to cross the 60-game threshold in his MLB career. He has gotten close, however, and 2023 could be the year it finally happens. With the Red Sox, not only will he find himself a little higher up on the bullpen depth chart, but there will also be more relief opportunities to go around, as Boston’s starting rotation is unlikely to pitch quite as deep into games as New York’s. All that to say, he can reasonably expect to earn the $50,000 bonus for pitching 30, 40, and 50 games, and he might pocket another $50,000 for reaching the 60-game plateau; 70 games still seems a little out of reach.

After the deal’s first year, the Red Sox have a team option for $4.25 million (with another $250,000 in games-pitched incentives). If they choose not to exercise the option, Rodríguez receives a $500,000 buyout. In short, the deal is for a minimum of one year and $2 million, with a maximum potential of two years and $8.25 million. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the most common arguments against the designated hitter coming to the National League was that it would cause a decline in pinch-hitting, therefore removing an element of strategy from the game. It was inevitable, after all, that pinch-hitting opportunities would dry up without pitchers to sub out. Lo and behold, offensive substitutions in the NL decreased by more than 60% from 2021 to ’22, with teams sending just 1,647 pinch-hitters to the plate this past season, compared to 4,438 the year before.

Thankfully, for those of us who missed the glorious art of pinch-hitting, there was still a way to get our fix: the San Francisco Giants. They used 258 pinch-hitters in 2022 — 95 more than the team with the next-highest total, the Athletics. It’s also a whopping 222 more than the team with the fewest pinch-hit plate appearances, the Rockies. It’s so many pinch-hitters, in fact, that the Giants wouldn’t have looked out of place in the pitcher-hitting era. They used more bats off the bench in 2022 than one NL team, the Cardinals, used in 2021. In the first full year of the universal DH, the Giants were still pinch-hitting at a pre-DH rate. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I wrote about the overcrowded NL MVP ballot. Eight different position players finished within 1.0 WAR of the top spot on our leaderboard, more than in any other year since WAR was introduced. The MVP nearly always goes to one of the top position players by FanGraphs WAR. Thus, this past year presented us with one of the most hotly-contested MVP races in recent memory, regardless of how voters ultimately cast their ballots.

To have so many worthy choices for the award is exciting, even if we already know that Paul Goldschmidt emerged as the winner, with Manny Machado and Nolan Arenado placing second and third, respectively. As I wrote last Friday, “such a close race between so many contenders compels us to look beyond the go-to methods we might normally rely on to pick a winner. It allows us to think about how we measure value. It’s a chance to get creative.” I don’t know about you, but that sounds like a fun challenge to me. Now, from the headline and the image at the top of this piece, you can already guess who I would’ve picked. But indulge me for just a moment longer so I can explain how I came to that decision. On a ballot full of deserving choices, how was I to single out one name as the most deserving of all? Read the rest of this entry »

In a slightly unexpected but not at all shocking move, the Tampa Bay Rays sent first baseman Ji-Man Choi to the Pittsburgh Pirates last Thursday in exchange for low-minors pitching prospect Jack Hartman. The move was a little surprising, at least to those not familiar with Tampa Bay’s 40-man picture. Choi is a talented, inexpensive player who played a clear role for the Rays. He established himself as a fan favorite at Tropicana Field over the past five years, and there was a brief time this offseason (for about four or five hours) when he was the longest-tenured position player in Tampa. He has no clear successor in the Rays organization. Even Choi himself seemed to be caught off guard by the move. The swap was rather unexpected from a Pirates perspective, too. I can’t say I thought we’d see a rebuilding team send away a prospect for a veteran in one of the first noteworthy trades of the offseason.

Upon closer inspection, however, it’s easy to see why both teams swung this deal. The Rays have a surplus of young players in the majors who need playing time and a surplus of young players in the minors who will be eligible for the Rule 5 Draft this December if they aren’t added to the 40-man roster. Choi is a known quantity on the wrong side of 30 who doesn’t offer much in the way of positional flexibility – aside from the occasional full split at first base, that is. This is more than a simple salary dump on Tampa’s part; they have better ways to use Choi’s roster spot, an unfortunate reality for fans who grew to love his joyful attitude and impassioned bat flips. As for Pittsburgh, they finished the 2022 season without a regular first baseman and needed to find someone to fill that hole. They may not be contenders, but they still have to play 162 games, and adding another good bat to the middle of the lineup will make those games far more watchable. As an added bonus, if everything goes right, the Pirates could find themselves sneaking into contention in a weak NL Central division. Adding Choi would look like a brilliant move in retrospect. More likely, the Pirates will fall out of contention by the trade deadline and flip Choi for a lottery ticket or two. Read the rest of this entry »

As announced on Monday, the MVP finalists for the 2022 season are Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani, and Yordan Alvarez in the American League, and Manny Machado, Nolan Arenado, and Paul Goldschmidt in the National League. If you check the FanGraphs leaderboards as regularly as I do, that list might sound familiar; not only are those the top three vote-getters for MVP in each league, but they also happen to be the top three players by WAR as well.

That’s not entirely surprising. Since 2008, every position player to have won the MVP finished among the top three in his league in WAR (Legacy WAR, to be specific). There’s nothing wrong with this per se, since the entire purpose of WAR is to measure player value. Still, it’s a little on the nose to see the finalists line up so perfectly with our leaderboards this year, especially in the NL, where the top eight position players all finished within a single win of one another. Read the rest of this entry »

Defensive replacements might be the most overlooked of managerial decisions. We can (and do) spend hours debating the merits of lineup construction, pitching changes, and pinch-hitters, but rarely are defensive replacements a part of those conversations. Every Phillies fan has an opinion as to whether or not Rob Thomson should have pulled Zack Wheeler in the World Series. Padres faithful were left scratching their heads when Bob Melvin didn’t bring Josh Hader in to face Bryce Harper in the deciding game of the NLCS. The phrase “Taylor Walls, Pinch-Hitter” still echoes in many a Rays fan’s head.

But how many of the 24 defensive replacements do you remember from this year’s postseason?

I’m not trying to be obtuse here. I’m well aware of why defensive replacements don’t get much attention; they’re far less likely to make a difference than almost any other managerial decision. Defensive replacements only come in for an inning or two when their team is already in the lead. There’s no guarantee they get to a make a single out, let alone a difficult play that could have significant ramifications for the outcome of the game. Yet that being so, when and how to deploy defensive replacements is still an interesting bit of strategy, and eventually, over a substantial number of games, some defensive replacements are going to make a meaningful difference. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Silver Slugger finalists were announced last week, I took a minute to compare the stats between the candidates at each position. Judging by the comprehensive hitting metrics, like OPS, wOBA, and wRC+, it seemed, at first, like there were numerous close races — many too close to call. But when I turned my attention to Offensive Runs Above Average, several of the close races suddenly disappeared, with one player becoming the clear frontrunner. That can be the result of playing time considerations, but in these cases, it was largely because of baserunning. For example, José Ramirez, Rafael Devers, and Alex Bregman are neck-and-neck-and-neck when it comes to most measures of hitting, but by total offensive value, Ramírez has a commanding lead. There’s a similar thing going on between Xander Bogaerts, Bo Bichette, and Carlos Correa; they have nearly identical hitting stats, but Bogaerts is a markedly superior baserunner.

Once I looked at the baserunning stats, these once-close races hardly seemed close at all. Understandably, this got me thinking about what role baserunning plays in determining the Silver Sluggers. Is it one of the criteria voters are supposed to consider? That sounds like a simple enough question, and one that should have a simple enough answer. And yet that doesn’t seem to be the case. Read the rest of this entry »

Jose Altuve takes off, running as fast as he can down the line. The throw is coming in faster, sailing toward the bag. You can tell it’s going to be a close call, and indeed it is. The umpire extends his arms, signaling safe, and the crowd erupts into either emphatic cheers or cacophonous boos, depending on whether this hypothetical call takes place in Houston or Philadelphia. The whole play lasts only a few short seconds, but it’s one of the most thrilling moments of the entire game.

What I am describing is an infield hit — one of the most overlooked plays in baseball. It’s not surprising that home runs, extra-base hits and the like get a little more attention, especially since infield hits are just as often the result of poor defense or a lucky bounce as they are the result of true offensive skill. Yet as individual plays, infield singles are exactly what make baseball so exciting. There are few batted ball events as highly suspenseful as those in which an infield hit is possible. Those four to five seconds between the contact and the call can get your heart racing nearly as fast as the runner himself. Infield hits represent a true battle between batter, fielder, and even the field itself. On top of that, the ever-present possibility of an infield single is exactly what makes every routine ground ball worth watching.

This year, we have the privilege of watching two of the very best infield hitters in the game face off in the World Series. Altuve and Jean Segura are the active leaders in infield hits, the former with 247 and the latter right behind him with 244. They both passed Elvis Andrus on the active leaderboard this season, who himself reached the top of the leaderboard when Hunter Pence retired in 2020. FanGraphs began tracking infield hits in 2002, and in that time Segura and Altuve each rank among the top ten. Both just 32 years old, they have plenty of time to climb the ranks, too. Within a few years, they should find themselves second and third behind only infield hit god Ichiro Suzuki. Now if you don’t mind, I’d like to a moment to appreciate how they both got here. Read the rest of this entry »