The players at the top of the market usually determine the shape of free agency. A team in need of offensive help in the outfield isn’t going to drop $100 million on Anthony Santander until it knows Juan Soto is no longer available. And Santander probably wouldn’t sign anyway. His agent would want to try to squeeze an extra few million out of a team that, having missed on Soto, needed desperately to go home with something.

A year ago, Shohei Ohtani held up the free agency deluge, and everyone reacted like he’d gotten to the front of a long line at Starbucks and had no idea what he wanted to order. (I mocked the public opprobrium then, but having stumbled into that simile I get it now. Everyone hates the Starbucks lollygagger.) Then Scott Boras, who usually waits out the market anyway, took even longer than usual to find homes for his top three clients. So free agency didn’t get going in earnest until mid-December, and stretched into March.

Of course, that’s only the top of the market. Every year, there’s a flurry of activity that starts only days after the end of the World Series, including some fairly big names changing teams. Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday, I wrote about one of my favorite topics: The impact of sabermetrics on the practice and analysis of baseball. Specifically, in this case: How MVP voters behave in the post-Fire Joe Morgan era. And for those of you who got to the end of that 2,000-word post and did not feel sated, there’s good news! This was not the question I actually set out to answer when I started kicking the topic around.

Welcome to Part 2.

The very name of the MVP award invites voters to consider the value of a certain player’s contributions. For nearly 100 years, that was a tricky proposition. How do you weigh differences in position, in playing style, park factors, hitting versus pitching versus fielding versus baserunning? It’s enough to boggle the mind. Read the rest of this entry »

Next Thursday night, we’re going to find out who won the biggest individual honors in baseball: the Most Valuable Player awards for both the American and National Leagues, as determined by the august and esteemed voters of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. (Cue trumpet fanfare.)

MVP awards memorialize great individual performances and bestow immense historical significance upon the players who earn them. This is the kind of thing Hall of Fame cases are built on. So you’d think the entire baseball-watching public would be glued to MLB Network or refreshing the BBWAA website on Thursday evening. But… maybe not. Aaron Judge and Shohei Ohtani are almost certain to win, and I guess it’s worth checking social media after dinner just to make sure.

There’s surprisingly little drama over awards these days; postseason betting odds on the MVP races were a little hard to come by, as most bookies have taken the issue off the board. But consider this as a measure of public sentiment: In early October, BetMGM had Judge as a 1-to-50 favorite in the AL, and Ohtani as a 1-to-100 favorite in the NL. Despite a spirited contrarian push by the pro-Fancisco Lindor camp late in the season, it’s all over but the shouting. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, the Angels aren’t waiting around, are they? In the week immediately following the World Series, the Halos have completed the only trade so far this offseason involving players going in each direction. They’ve also acquired Scott Kingery from the Phillies for cash considerations and executed a waiver claim on Oakland’s Ryan Noda, both low-risk acquisitions with the potential to fill a niche at the big league level.

The Triple-A first base depth chart for the Angels right now lists Noda alongside Niko Kavadas and Sonny DiChiara, which is a bumper crop of cube-shaped college sluggers if ever there were one. Someone find out what Tim Elko is up to and give him a call so the Angels can have the full set. But I digress.

Amidst all that other activity, Perry Minasian and Co. have made this offseason’s most notable free agent signing to date: right-handed pitcher Kyle Hendricks, late of the Chicago Cubs. Hendricks was the second major league free agent to sign so far this offseason, after Dylan Covey’s one-year deal with the Mets, and he’s a bigger name by far. A two-time Cy Young vote-getter and a cornerstone of the successful Cubs teams of the late 2010s, Hendricks joins the Angels on a one-year, $2.5 million deal. Read the rest of this entry »

It was the perfect exemplar of a Friday news dump, a quiet transaction between frequent trading partners. The Phillies and Angels swap players so often it’s sometimes hard to remember whether Brandon Marsh got traded for Logan O’Hoppe or George Klassen or Ron Gant. And while the Angels also made a splashy swap with the Braves the day before to acquire Jorge Soler, Philadelphia slipped another move in while nobody was looking: minor league infielder Scott Kingery to Los Angeles for cash considerations.

With all the fanfare of your buddy paying you back for buying Taco Bell on the way home the other night, an era is over.

Kingery could be a useful player for the Angels. He hit .268/.316/.488 in Triple-A last season, with 25 home runs and 25 stolen bases, playing mostly at shortstop with appearances at second, third, and in center field. The Phillies are pretty well set on the infield, but Kingery hasn’t appeared in the majors since June 8, 2022, when he went out to second base for a single defensive inning in a 10-0 blowout in Milwaukee. He hasn’t taken a major league at-bat since May 16, 2021, which is the last time he had anything like a regular roster role. Read the rest of this entry »

Did you enjoy that thrilling World Series clincher Wednesday night? Still glowing from Walker Buehler stomping in from the bullpen like Ricky Vaughn? Still got your protractor and T-square on your desk as you try to figure out if Gerrit Cole could’ve beaten Mookie Betts to first base with two outs in the fifth? I know I need a moment to decompress from all the excitement.

You know who doesn’t? Alex Anthopoulos and Perry Minasian, who couldn’t wait 24 hours to execute the first trade of the offseason. And this wasn’t some bit of bookkeeping minutiae, a my-garbage-for-your-trash trade to clear a 40-man roster spot before the Rule 5 draft protection deadline. This was a trade of big leaguers, and fairly noteworthy ones at that: The Braves are sending outfielder Jorge Soler to the Angels in exchange for right-hander Griffin Canning. Read the rest of this entry »

Scheduling a bullpen game in the World Series is, to some extent, outside Dave Roberts’ control. More than half of his useful starting pitchers are on the IL, so he has to do something. Game 4 isn’t the perfect spot for Johnny Wholestaff — the way MLB’s playoff format works, it’s the only game of the series that isn’t adjacent to an off day — but it’s also the only spot in a four-man rotation that’s guaranteed to only come up once.

The Dodgers’ manager was fortunate, however, in that by the time Game 4 rolled around, his team was already up 3-0 in the series. No team has ever overturned such a deficit in World Series play, and only once in baseball history has a team come back from 3-0 in any best-of-seven series. This we all knew going in. I was mildly surprised to learn that history is even less kind to clubs that spot their opponents the first three games of a Fall Classic: Before this season, teams with the opportunity to sweep a World Series had won Game 4 21 times in 24 attempts.

So Roberts entrusted Game 4 not just to his bullpen, but to his low-leverage guys: Ben Casparius, Daniel Hudson, Landon Knack, and Brent Honeywell. Sure enough, his team lost. Read the rest of this entry »

The Yankees came home from a resoundingly unproductive trip to California bloodied, but not beaten. A 2-0 deficit in the World Series is nothing to the Bronx Bombers, who have won four World Series after spotting their opponents two games. (Two of those — 1956 and 1978 — came against the Dodgers, in fact.) That’s more championships than 20 of the 29 other teams have won total.

But a comeback from 3-0? That’s only happened once in major league history — you don’t need to remind the Yankees when — and never in the World Series. So Game 3 was idiomatically, if not literally, a must-win.

From the pregame festivities, in which Fat Joe delivered an unsatisfying sequel to Ice Cube’s performance at Dodger Stadium two days ago, to the first inning, in which two of the first three Dodgers hitters scored, the Yankees were a step behind. The Dodgers, 4-2 winners, are one win from repeating a feat they haven’t achieved since 1963: sweeping the World Series. The Yankee comeback, in the unlikely event it happens at all, will have to start tomorrow. Read the rest of this entry »

Beneath this cynical, empirically motivated exterior, I’m actually a big softie. As such, I love it when an old guy turns back the clock and rediscovers the magic one last time. Almost a decade ago, Giancarlo Stanton was the proto-Aaron Judge: A player who was bigger and stronger than any outfielder we’d ever seen, and capable of hitting the ball much harder than anyone else in the league.

Stanton came of age just as Statcast made exit velocity public knowledge, though his 2017 season — the peak of his stardom — was impressive enough by the metrics Henry Chadwick scrawled on a cave wall 15,000 years ago. Those numbers: 59 home runs, 123 runs scored, 132 RBI, a .631 slugging percentage. Small wonder Stanton was named the MVP of the National League that year. Read the rest of this entry »

Pitching! Everyone’s concerned with pitching this postseason, and for good reason. Pitchers are always getting hurt. They don’t throw as many innings as they used to. Even good teams, rich teams like the Mets and Dodgers, are throwing de facto bullpen games deep in the playoffs. And leaving a starting pitcher in past his 18th hitter risks invoking the wrath of the dreaded third-time-through-the-order penalty.

Remember Tanner Bibee? He’s a really good starting pitcher; he had a 3.47 ERA in 31 starts for the Guardians this year. In Game 5 of the ALCS, two trips through the Yankees order got Bibee five scoreless innings. But when manager Stephen Vogt brought Bibee out for a sixth, it was like he’d ordered a punt on fourth-and-short from inside the opponent’s 40-yard line. And sure enough, Bibee allowed three hits to his last four opponents, the last of them a game-tying home run. Read the rest of this entry »