Jeremy Peña is off to an excellent start. He’s also been one of the least productive hitters in baseball. How’s that for a lede?

If I told you that without any additional context, perhaps you’d think Peña was struggling at the plate but making up for it in the field. Yet, the former Gold Glove winner currently has -2 OAA and -5 DRS on the season. So much for that theory. Much to the contrary, Peña is on fire at the plate. Over the first six weeks of the 2024 campaign, he is batting .313 with a 129 wRC+. And while his .351 BABIP is likely unsustainable, his .327 xBA ranks second among qualified American League batters. His .363 xwOBA ranks in the 80th percentile, a big step up from his .305 xwOBA (22nd percentile) in 2023. Most impressive, he has cut his strikeout rate down to just 14.0%, ninth lowest in the AL. His strikeout rate has improved from the 30th percentile in his 2022 rookie campaign to the 61st percentile last season, and now it sits in the 92nd percentile in year three.

However, if you glance up from those percentiles on Peña’s Baseball Savant page, you might be surprised by the most important number of them all: His batting run value is zero. The line on the value spectrum is the faintest shade of blue, sitting about a quarter of an inch closer to “poor” than “great.” That doesn’t seem right. Indeed, out of 485 batters to see a pitch this year, Peña is the only one with a wOBA and xwOBA above .350 and a negative batting run value, according to Savant. It’s not hard to understand why he’s an outlier. Typically, when a player is hitting anywhere close to as well as Peña, he provides at least some positive value to his club.

Metrics like wOBA and xwOBA are context neutral, while Baseball Savant calculates run value by considering the runners on base, the number of outs, and the ball and strike count for each discrete event. If you take that general methodology a step further and also consider the inning and the score, you get a statistic like Win Probability Added (WPA) – although Peña might ask that we please, please stop taking the methodology a step further. According to WPA, Peña has cost the Astros far more than he has given back in 2024. Houston ranks second to last in the AL with -3.82 offensive WPA this season. Peña (-1.03) is responsible for more than a quarter of that negative WPA. Only two players have contributed to the team’s misfortunes more than Peña: the now-optioned José Abreu and a deeply slumping Alex Bregman. Read the rest of this entry »

In the modern game, pinch-hitting is seen as something of a lost art. This likely started with teams prioritizing roster spots for extra bullpen arms over spare position players. With that came a heavier emphasis on positional flexibility off the bench, rather than plus contact skills (think Ross Gload) or a big bopping bat (à la Matt Stairs). As an angry Facebook commenter might tell you, it’s one more way that sabermetrics has ruined America’s pastime. Yet, the numbers bear it out; the best arm is often a fresh arm, while conversely, fresh bats off the bench tend to perform significantly worse than their counterparts in the starting lineup. Ahead of the 2020 season, Ben Clemens found that the pinch-hitting penalty, first theorized in 2006, still held 14 years later. Contemplating Ben’s findings, Patrick Dubuque of Baseball Prospectus penned a line that stuck deep in my brain: “Pinch-hitters are just difficult to justify, except when they’re mandatory.”

Pinch-hitters were mandatory far less often in 2020 after the universal DH came into play. However, the age of the universal DH is also the age of expanded rosters and pitcher limits, and those new roster rules may just have saved the pinch-hitter from a slow demise. Pinch-hitters are rarely mandatory anymore, but they haven’t disappeared as much as you might think. Read the rest of this entry »

Mike Trout decided he was going to be more aggressive on the bases this year. Last season, Trout lamented that he missed the days when he was a true stolen base threat. It couldn’t have been easy for the former steals leader to watch the effects of the new rules play out around him. Like Mr. Incredible stuck in a dead-end office job, Trout longed for the glory days. I’d imagine that feeling was made all the more painful because he knew deep down that he still had the skills to achieve greatness.

Things are different this season. Last year, the Angels ranked last in the American League in stolen bases. This year, they rank third. They have a new manager and several new coaches. Trout is never one to spark controversy, and he hasn’t blamed any of his past managers for holding him back. Still, former Angels manager Phil Nevin made it clear he wasn’t all that interested in his players stealing last year, while new skipper Ron Washington and first base coach Bo Porter have already spoken about their team taking a more aggressive approach on the bases. Both mentioned Trout in particular, and Trout himself has confirmed that aggressive baserunning is a bigger part of the “game plan” for 2024. Read the rest of this entry »

Dating back to August 31, 2023, the Padres have the best record in baseball. They have the second-highest run differential in that time, trailing only the Brewers, against whom they just took two out of three on the road. To be clear, these are fun facts for the jumbotron rather than meaningful or predictive metrics. After all, the Padres of late 2023 look quite a bit different from the Padres of early 2024, and their performance from last September is doing most of the heavy lifting. Even so, it’s enough to make you stop and think, “Hey, these Padres are still pretty good!”

That’s not to say the Padres ever looked like a bad team. However, it would have been easy to write them off, at least subconsciously, after last year’s disappointing performance and the offseason that followed. The Padres ranked second in the NL in pitching WAR and third in position player WAR last season, yet they finished just 82-80. And although they were able to secure a winning record on the final day of the regular season, they certainly lost more than they gained over the winter. As their three biggest competitors in the NL West added six of our top nine free agents (and 10 of our top 21), the Padres lost their best hitter (Juan Soto), their closer (Josh Hader), their ace (Blake Snell), and three more capable arms from the rotation (Seth Lugo, Michael Wacha, and Nick Martinez), all while slashing payroll by nearly $90 million. Read the rest of this entry »

Up until now, the Rockies had made very little noise this offseason. After agreeing to extensions with Germán Márquez and Charlie Blackmon just before the 2023 season wrapped up, Colorado spent a mere $3.5 million on major league free agent deals in the six months since, the fewest of any team in the majors. Yet, at the tail end of a long, quiet winter, the Rockies finally made headlines, when on Sunday they signed 22-year-old Ezequiel Tovar to a long-term contract extension. The deal, which begins right away, will pay Tovar $63.5 million over the next seven years. After that, the Rockies have a $20.5 million team option for 2031, the shortstop’s age-29 season.

Across three offseasons at the helm for Colorado, general manager Bill Schmidt has largely avoided multi-year free agent deals, with one notable exception: Kris Bryant and the seven-year, $182 million pact he signed before the 2022 season. Over the past two winters, the Rockies are one of only three teams not to have signed a single multi-year free agent deal; the other two clubs, the Pirates and Orioles, have outspent Colorado by totals of $37.71 million and $10.13 million, respectively. However, free agency isn’t the only way for teams to keep players around for longer periods of time. Under Schmidt, the Rockies have signed eight players to multi-year extensions; only the Braves have extended more players on multi-year deals in that span. Atlanta has gotten far more extension attention, but this is how Colorado operates, too.

Even so, the Tovar deal represents a different approach for the Rockies because it is the first time that Schmidt has extended a player with fewer than four years of service. It’s also the longest extension the Rockies have awarded since February 2019, when they signed Nolan Arenado to an eight-year, $260 million deal that began in 2020. Moreover, while we have started to see more and more pre-arb players signing long-term extensions around the majors, many of those players either are stars or have star potential. Perhaps the only good comp for Tovar’s extension is the eight-year, $50 million deal Keibert Ruiz signed with the Nationals after putting up a 91 wRC+ and 1.8 WAR in 2022, his first full season. Then again, even Ruiz arguably had a higher ceiling at the time. Tovar might be in a class of his own when it comes to low-ceiling, high-floor youngsters signing lucrative long-term deals.

Entering the 2023 season, Eric Longenhagen and Tess Taruskin ranked Tovar no. 41 on our Top 100 Prospects list, describing him as “a fantastic defensive shortstop” with “poor plate discipline” that “somewhat undermines his excellent bat-to-ball skill.” One year later, Tovar is no longer a prospect, but that remains the prevailing report. He finished his debut season with the lowest walk rate and the second-highest O-Swing% among qualified NL batters. He also finished with 16 OAA and 13 DRS; the only shortstop to outpace him in both metrics was Dansby Swanson. Despite his 70 wRC+, worst among qualified NL hitters, Tovar finished his rookie season with 1.6 WAR. That’s hardly star-level performance, but a 1.6-WAR player is still a big league regular.

Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way first: Tovar’s offensive numbers last season were pitiful. One of the only areas in which he was above average was batting average, and Coors Field likely inflated that number. His plate discipline was dreadful, as expected, but so were his contact skills, which came as something of a surprise. Tovar ranked 66th out of 72 qualified NL hitters in contact rate, and he wasn’t just whiffing on pitches outside the zone. While his O-Contact% was poor, his Z-Contact% also came in below league average.

On the bright side, when he did manage to put the ball in play, Tovar showed flashes of his promising hit tool. His .378 xwOBAcon was a few ticks above league average, thanks to his line drive tendencies. He ranked in the 71st percentile in Baseball Savant’s Sweet-Spot% and finished seventh among qualified NL players in line drive rate. If he can make more contact, especially on pitches in the strike zone, his offensive numbers will improve even if he never adds a lick of discipline to his game. If he can improve his plate discipline, then all the better. For what it’s worth, he significantly improved his walk rate during his final season in the minor leagues, prompting his Double-A manager, Chris Denorfia, to rave about Tovar’s growth. “He’s made this developmental jump,” Denorfia told David Laurila in 2022. “Something clicked to where he’s recognizing situations where pitchers are going to try to get him to chase.” Plate discipline is a different animal in the majors than in the minors, but still, it’s worth acknowledging that this is a skill he has successfully improved in the past.

Tovar also showed off 69th-percentile sprint speed in 2023. He won’t ever be a weapon on the basepaths, but with speed like that, he should be a better base runner than his numbers last year would suggest; he went 11-for-16 on stolen base attempts and was worth -0.6 BsR. Long story short, this is a player with much more offensive potential than we saw last season, and he has a strong enough glove to allow him to nurse his growing pains at the highest level while still contributing positive value to his club.

Courtesy of Dan Szymborski, here is what the ZiPS projections envision for Tovar over the next eight years:

With projections like that, ZiPS would give Tovar $92 million over seven years. That’s more than he’ll make even if the Rockies pick up his team option for an eighth year.

With all that in mind, it’s easy to see why the Rockies offered Tovar a long-term extension. We’ve already seen his floor, and it’s rather sturdy — he can be a valuable player even if he’s the worst hitter in the league. The Rockies could do a heck of a lot worse than pay $9 million per year for seven seasons of a 1.5-win shortstop. What’s more, it won’t take much for this deal to pay dividends in Colorado. If Tovar’s hit tool progresses against big league pitching, he would blossom into an above-average shortstop throughout his twenties.

As for Tovar, his youth has gifted him the rare opportunity to cash in now without giving up the chance to sign another long-term deal. His $63.5 million guarantee is more than the vast majority of players will earn in their careers, yet he can still reach free agency before his 30th birthday. If Colorado picks up its club option, Tovar will have to wait another year to test the open market. Yet, if the Rockies are comfortable paying $20.5 million for his services (even the Rockies, and even in 2031 dollars), that suggests Tovar will be playing well enough to cash in on the free agent market at 30 years old. The two or three free agent years he is losing aren’t nothing, especially for a glove-first player. Still, Tovar had to sacrifice something for lifelong financial security, and it’s not difficult to understand why he made that choice.

Ultimately, this is a rock solid move for both sides. The Rockies are betting they secured three additional years with an excellent shortstop at price tag well below market value. If that doesn’t work out, they’re only slightly overpaying one of the better defensive players in baseball. Meanwhile, Tovar gets to work out his kinks at the MLB level without ever having to worry about money, and if everything goes according to plan, he can still sign a lucrative free agent deal in the 2030s. Now, both sides can get to work on what they need to do next: Tovar will try to improve his plate discipline, while the Rockies will look to acquire, develop, and yes, extend the stars who can help them escape the NL West basement.

Yesterday, we wrapped up our analysis of the league’s infielders with third base and shortstop. Today, we shift our attention to the outfield, starting in left field.

Left field has been one of the weaker positions in the game for several years, but the outlook for 2024 is especially bleak. For the first time since 2017 (excluding 2020), we don’t have a single team projected to surpass four wins. The Astros’ 3.7 WAR projection is the lowest total for the top team at any non-pitching position on the power rankings this year. In fact, it’s the lowest total for the top team at any non-pitching position since 2019, when we projected Red Sox designated hitters for a mere 3.4 WAR. Read the rest of this entry »

In his recent piece about umpire accuracy, Davy Andrews noted that plate umpires correctly called 99.26% of heart zone pitches in 2023. When I first read that number, I didn’t think missed calls in the heart zone warranted any closer investigation. For most of us, ninety-nine point anything is as good as 100; you don’t spend much time worrying about the 0.01% of germs Purell can’t kill. Then again, if you were to consider the sheer amount of bacteria on your hands at any given moment, you might opt for a second squirt of sanitizer. A tiny percentage of a tremendous number is still going to be a pretty big number. The same is true for missed calls in the heart zone. There aren’t quite as many pitches in an MLB season as there are germs on your phone screen, but there are enough that a few tenths of percent of heart zone offerings still represents a pretty hefty figure. In 2023, plate umpires watched 381 pitches sail over the heart of the plate without signaling a strike. When you frame it that way (pun absolutely intended), it actually sounds pretty bad.

I wasn’t nearly as surprised to learn that plate umpires missed 428 calls in the chase zone last season. Offerings in the chase zone are designed to look hittable out of the pitcher’s hand. An especially talented catcher can make them look hittable as they reach his glove, too. Meanwhile, a batter might like to earn a few extra balls inside the zone, but he doesn’t have the same influence over calls as do his opponents. Besides, if a hitter recognizes that a pitch is coming for the heart zone, he’s not going to wriggle and contort his body in hopes of inducing a missed call – he’s going to swing. To that end, batters are much more likely to swing in the heart zone than the chase zone, which means that on a rate basis, umpires miss significantly more calls over the heart of the plate because there are fewer total pitches there that need to be called. While 381 and 428 are similar figures, batters took 2.4 times as many pitches in the chase zone as in the heart zone. Apparently, it’s harder than I thought to call strikes what they are. Read the rest of this entry »

While many of my colleagues here at FanGraphs have spent the last two weeks discussing prospects, I’ve been thinking about veteran starting pitchers. I usually do. Perhaps it’s because I’m just young enough that there are still a couple of starters left from the earliest days of my fandom. Technically, the last starting pitcher to debut before I was born retired this past September… although the last one before him retired a full decade earlier. Still, I can’t really remember the days before Zack Greinke was a big league hurler, and Justin Verlander was already one of the best in the game by the time I started following baseball closely. This is the first year that I’m older than every prospect on our Top 100 list, but as long as Greinke and Verlander are still in the league, I can convince myself that I’m still a kid.

There’s no easy way to decide the age at which a “pitcher” becomes an “older pitcher.” There is evidence that certain skills start dropping off as early as age 26, while the average MLB player retires before his 30th birthday. On the other hand, in almost any other industry, some of baseball’s elder statesmen would still be considered young. Clayton Kershaw is barely old enough to run for president, while Jacob deGrom could probably still get cast as a teenager on The CW. Personally, I think of 36 as the age when a player enters “older” territory. There isn’t anything scientific about it (and believe me, I tried to find a more scientific answer – there’s just no magic number), but 36 is the entry point into the late 30s. It’s an age at which no one is too surprised to see a player retire, nor is anyone overly shocked to see a talented player sign a lucrative, multi-year deal.

In 2022, pitchers age 36 and older were amazing. Relievers in that age range did well (especially Daniel Bard, Chris Martin, and Adam Ottavino), but it was the starters who did most of the heavy lifting. They combined for a 3.53 ERA, 3.66 FIP, and 23.8 WAR (1.77 WAR per 100 IP). The last time starters age 36 and older produced more than 23 WAR was 2007, when John Smoltz, then 40, Tom Glavine, then 41, and Greg Maddux, then 41, helped older starters throw nearly twice as many innings as they did in 2022. The last time older starters were so valuable on a per-inning basis was all the way back in 2001, when Randy Johnson, then 37, and Roger Clemens, then 38, took home their fourth and sixth Cy Young awards, respectively.

For comparison, the average starter under 36 had a 4.07 ERA, 4.06 FIP, and was worth just 1.24 WAR per 100 IP in 2022. The older cohort will always benefit from survivorship bias, but even so, it’s rare to see older starters perform so much better (if better at all) than their younger counterparts. The last time older starters were this much better than the younger ones, in terms of FIP and WAR/IP, was 2003; if you go by ERA, 2002 was the last time.

To be sure, the top two arms in the cohort, Verlander and Max Scherzer, deserve the lion’s share of the credit. Verlander won the AL Cy Young with one of the best age-39 seasons in recent memory, while Scherzer, then 37, could have seriously challenged Sandy Alcantara for the NL award were it not for a couple of stints on the injured list. However, six more veteran starters threw over 120 innings with at least 1.5 WAR: Greinke, Corey Kluber, Adam Wainwright, Johnny Cueto, Rich Hill, and Charlie Morton.

While the strong performance of older starters in 2022 was unexpected, that’s not to say it came out of nowhere. Every year since the start of the 2019 season, pitchers age 36 and older have thrown a higher percentage of all starter innings than they did the year before. Their collective ERA and WAR/IP were better than those of their younger counterparts in every season from 2019–22. Older starters were getting more opportunities and making the most of them.

Then the 2023 season happened. Heading into the year, there were plenty of reasons to believe older starters would continue to thrive. All eight of the aforementioned veterans were set to return. At least some decline was expected from the Elder Eight — especially from Verlander and his 1.75 ERA — but reinforcements were on the way, with five younger talents aging into the group. Joining the fold were three recent All-Stars and Cy Young vote-getters, Lance Lynn, Yu Darvish, and Hyun Jin Ryu, as well as two lesser but typically dependable pitchers, Wade Miley and Carlos Carrasco. Those were some top prospects! Unfortunately, even as the workloads for older pitchers continued to rise, their collective performance did not.

Morton was the only member of the Elder Eight who improved in 2023. After finishing 2022 with a 3.10 ERA and 4.1 WAR, Darvish posted a 4.56 ERA last year, though that was still enough for a respectable 2.4 WAR, and missed the final 37 days of the season with an elbow injury. Carrasco was below replacement level last season, as his ERA ballooned to 6.80, and had two IL stints that cost him a combined 60 days. And then there was Lynn, whose decline was perhaps the most astonishing of the older pitchers. Last year, he gave up 44 home runs, the most by any pitcher in a season since Bronson Arroyo (46 homers) in 2011; after averaging 0.9 HR/9 over his first 11 big league seasons, Lynn allowed 2.16 HR/9 last year, the second-worst rate ever for a qualified starter in a single season, behind only Jose Lima and his 2.2 rate in 2000.

Meanwhile, Miley had a sweet-as-pie 3.14 ERA, but his 4.69 FIP wasn’t so nice, and although Ryu pitched well (3.46 ERA), he made only 11 starts because he missed the first four months of the season as he rehabbed from Tommy John surgery.

Ultimately, the biggest problem was how poorly the worst members of the age group performed, but it also hurt that the guys at the top (Verlander and Scherzer) took a step back, and no new aces emerged in their place. It’s worth mentioning that the table below includes only what these pitchers did as starters last season, though four of them (Kluber, Hill, Cueto, and Greinke) pitched in relief, as well.

Overall, starters age 36 and older saw their WAR nearly slashed in half. Their ERA- rose from 89 to 111, while their FIP- climbed from 93 to 111. Only twice in the last 50 years have older starters had a worse FIP compared to league average; similarly, only four times have they produced less WAR/IP. On the bright side, older starters made an additional 49 starts and threw nearly 200 more innings than they did the year before. Thus, they continued the trend of older starters taking on heavier workloads for the fifth consecutive season. We haven’t quite reached the levels of the early 2000s, when older starters were throwing 9-10% of all starter innings, but we have returned from the dark days of the mid-2010s when it looked like older starting pitchers were becoming an endangered species. However, if this trend is to continue, older starters will need to provide better results.

So, what are the prospects for older starters in 2024? Once again, there is reason for optimism. A couple of last season’s worst performers, Wainwright and Kluber, have retired. A few more, such as Cueto and Carrasco, are unlikely to make many starts unless they earn the opportunity. Moreover, while it would be fair to assume that some of the top performers from last year will take a step back, some bounceback candidates can make up the difference. Darvish had much better peripherals last year (3.74 xERA, 4.03 FIP) than his 4.56 ERA would suggest, while Lynn projects to have a large positive regression after his uncharacteristically bad season; his 2.2 projected Depth Charts WAR would be a tremendous improvement upon his 0.5 WAR in 2023.

Even better, several (relatively) young guns are entering their age-36 season. Joining the club are Kershaw, deGrom, Alex Cobb, Kenta Maeda, and Kyle Gibson (and, uh, Dallas Keuchel). Gibson is quite reliable, though his ceiling is not as high as the others in this group, and the same is true for Maeda if he can stay healthy. Both should help raise the cohort’s floor. Meanwhile, Keuchel probably won’t pitch enough to have a strong effect either way. Kershaw, deGrom, and Cobb will all start the season on the injured list, but perhaps between the three of them, they could provide a full season’s worth of starts. If they do, the three-headed monster of deCobbshaw might be the best pitcher in the whole age group. Our Depth Charts projections have deCobbshaw making 34 starts with a 3.60 ERA and 3.8 WAR. Could Verlander or Darvish match that level of production? It’s possible, but I wouldn’t call it likely, and the projections seem to agree. Here is what our Depth Charts have to say:

That 22.1 WAR figure is awfully close to the 23.8 WAR older starters produced in 2022, and the 1,766 IP projection would make 2024 the sixth straight season in which older starters took on a heavier workload. I’d take the playing time estimates with a grain of salt for the pitchers who haven’t signed yet, but still, the projections are enough to get me excited about an old guy revival. They may not quite reach the heights of the 2022 season, but this group features future Hall of Famers padding their résumés, pitchers who could be All-Stars this year, and beloved journeymen still chugging along. After several disappointing seasons for older starters in the 2010s, we’re lucky to be watching so many talented pitchers prolong their careers in 2024. And I’m happy to feel like a kid for at least one more year.

A month after Rowdy Tellez was non-tendered by the Brewers, the first baseman signed with the Pirates to little fanfare. It’s not hard to see why that particular transaction flew under the radar. Back in the good old days of December, the offseason was at its peak. There were more pressing concerns than a player with exactly 0.0 career WAR joining a rebuilding club. Yet two months later, amidst the dullest stretch of the winter (and perhaps a bout of offseason-induced delirium), I have realized we made a dreadful mistake. FanGraphs has cursed Rowdy Tellez, and now it falls on my shoulders to reverse the spell. Let me explain. Read the rest of this entry »

In the second half of the 2023 season, three players shared designated hitting duties for the Arizona Diamondbacks: Lourdes Gurriel Jr., Tommy Pham, and Evan Longoria. Three more started multiple games at DH: Dominic Canzone, Kyle Lewis, and Buddy Kennedy. By mid-November, none of those players remained with the organization. The D-backs quickly replaced Longoria, trading for veteran third baseman Eugenio Suárez in November. A few weeks later, they re-signed Gurriel. However, neither move fully addressed the hole at DH; Suárez will slot in at the hot corner, while Gurriel should start most days in left field. The Diamondbacks still needed a regular designated hitter, and late last week, they finally found their guy in Joc Pederson.

Pederson will earn $9.5 million in 2024, with a $14 million mutual option ($3 million buyout) for 2025. If both sides pick up their end of the option, the deal will max out at $23.5 million over two years, quite similar to our crowdsourced estimate of two years and $24 million. In the more likely scenario where one side or the other declines the option, Pederson will earn $12.5 million for a single year of work, almost perfectly in line with Ben Clemens’ prediction of one year and $12 million. That is to say, nothing about this contract comes as much of a shock. Read the rest of this entry »