Imagine you’re stuck in a huge hole. A chasm, a pit, an oubliette.

You’re in this hole, and you have to get out. You’re not going to just jam your fingernails into the wall and start climbing straight up. Wouldn’t be much of a hole if getting out were so simple. You’d have to build stairs or carve handholds or piece together an improvised ladder. It takes time, with no guarantee of success, and progress is not necessarily linear.

The White Sox are in a metaphorical hole at the moment. (Wait, wasn’t the hole always a metaphor? Don’t worry about it.) They just finished 41-121, a record so poor it violates certain assumptions that underpin contemporary baseball analysis. For example: Replacement level — as in wins above — comes to a winning percentage of .294, which is a hair under 48 wins. That’s seven more than the White Sox managed last season. Read the rest of this entry »

Pete Alonso is going back to the Mets. It always felt like the most likely outcome, and to be honest, it would’ve been super weird to see him in any other uniform. Alonso has never been the best player on the Mets, but he does the coolest and most valuable thing you can do on a baseball diamond — hit home runs — with great frequency. That, and an affable attitude that’s endeared him to the fans, has made him an institution in Queens.

Unfortunately, there was something of a disagreement over what all those contributions were worth. Alonso returns to his team of origin on a front-loaded two-year, $54 million contract that features an opt-out. If Alonso does what he’s done his whole career, he can test free agency again next winter, having pocketed $30 million. That’s a handsome one-year salary for any player, but far, far short of Alonso’s expectations. Read the rest of this entry »

I went to the Pirates’ RosterResource page this morning and thought the following thought: “Man, is Isiah Kiner-Falefa really going to lead off for this team? God, that’s depressing.” Not that I have anything against IKF; it’s just symptomatic of a Pirates team that seems built to do little more than participate in the coming season.

The Pirates being an afterthought is nothing new; on the contrary, it’s been the default state of affairs for most of the past 45 years. But recent developments have made this a particularly frustrating time for Pirates fans.

At the risk of oversimplifying things, there are two kinds of good players: Players you can get and players you have to have drop out of the sky for you. Like Willy Adames is a really good player, and worth the monster contract the Giants just gave him. But if he’d signed elsewhere, the Giants could’ve found another player like him.

Not so Paul Skenes. Read the rest of this entry »

It was a bit of a weird assignment: “Hey, one of our most popular projections drops this week, would you mind telling everyone where you think it’s wrong?” Sure thing, bossman!

Joking aside, I get it. Playoff odds are probabilistic; if you asked me how many teams would miss their projected win total, I’d say half are going to come in high and the other half are going to come in low. They follow a set methodology that you can’t tweak if the results look off. That means the standings page is blind to factors human observers can see. It doesn’t know who’s getting divorced, who made a conditioning breakthrough over the winter, and who just really freaking hated the old pitching coach who got fired.

Nevertheless, these numbers are valuable because the projection system doesn’t mistake anecdotes for data and overrate the intangible. It’s a reminder to trust your gut, but only to an extent. Read the rest of this entry »

I worry that Jackson Merrill’s incredible rookie season has been appropriately recognized but underexamined. For any rookie to put up 5.3 WAR and finish in the top 10 in MVP voting is incredible; for a kid who was 20 years old on Opening Day and learning to play center field on the job, it’s extraordinary.

As impressive as that one-line summary is, Paul Skenes (and to a lesser extent Jackson Chourio) sucked up a lot of the shine that would have accompanied such a performance in most seasons. Shine can be hard to come by for a player on a West Coast non-Dodgers team that’s already got plenty of stars to promote.

So I found myself, in the dead of winter, contemplating what comes after the abstract for Merrill. Specifically, whether a certain nit is worth picking. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m a big fan of Tommy Kahnle for reasons that don’t have that much to do with why the Tigers just signed him to a $7.75 million contract this week. Kahnle flatters the stereotype that most of a baseball team’s personality resides in its bullpen. I can offer two succinct anecdotes in support of the idea that Kahnle is someone your grandmother might euphemistically have referred to as “a character.”

The first: His torrid but fickle relationship with the Philadelphia Eagles. (Go Birds.) Kahnle has been on and off the Eagles bandwagon and back on again over the course of his career. Kahnle put the Birds in timeout in 2020 over their firing of Doug Pederson, which — far from being a sign of disloyalty — is actually precisely the kind of ferocious idiosyncrasy that makes Eagles fans the kind of people you don’t let yourself get trapped in a 1-on-1 conversation with. (Take it from me, I’ll talk your ear off about how I thought Macho Harris was the next Brian Dawkins.)

The other endearingly weird thing about Kahnle is how much he loves to throw his changeup. Read the rest of this entry »

Some people run away from their bad opinions. Not me. When I’m wrong I build a monument to my own foolishness and dance around it like a child around a maypole. So I think what I’m going to do from now on is just write about Trevor Rogers every few months from now until the end of his career.

I was all-in on Rogers when he came up with the Marlins. The combination of easy lefty velocity and starter volume is the forbidden fruit of scouting, and nobody is immune to its temptations. Think about how James Paxton kept getting eight-figure contract offers five years after he stopped being an effective major league starter. Or how it took about eight starts last year for Garrett Crochet to go from “maybe a reliever” to “definitely prime Chris Sale, no questions asked.” Rogers was no different. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the hardest decisions a GM has to make is when to cut ties with a franchise icon. Free agency usually comes around right as a player’s aging curve starts to get hairy, and in many cases the club would be better off shaking hands with the player and parting friends, rather than sinking hundreds of millions of dollars in order to force the fans to watch their hero decline.

Unless, of course, the player in question goes off and signs with a rival and keeps producing. In which case, not only is the original team worse off, everyone involved in the decision looks like an idiot. And not just that, a callous idiot, which is the worst kind of idiot to be.

As the last days of January whistle by, two of the top remaining free agents — Alex Bregman and Pete Alonso — find themselves in precisely the situation I’ve just described. And for that reason, both players and their former employers have re-engaged in contract talks to see if they can work things out after all. Read the rest of this entry »

Last time we saw Tobias Myers, he was beating the bejeezus out of the New York Mets in Game 3 of the NL Wild Card Series: Five innings, 66 pitches, five strikeouts, no walks, two hits allowed, one hit batter. Being a rookie starting pitcher in a playoff game in the 2020s, he exited early, but having allowed zero runs, it was to a chorus of Hosannas mixed with “Who the heck is this guy?”

Myers’ chief weapon in his most famous start was his slider, which he threw 31.8% of the time, generating four whiffs, two foul balls, and three called strikes. The Mets made contact seven times, resulting in six outs.

But Myers’ most effective pitch during the regular season — at least on a per-pitch basis — was his changeup. Myers threw 245 of those across his 138 regular-season innings, resulting in a whiff rate of 44.4% and an opponent batting average of .083. Only four of the 27 changeups that were put in play turned into hits, and because all four of those were singles, Myers’ had an opponent SLG to match his opponent batting average: .083. Read the rest of this entry »

The Dodgers won 100 games in 2023. Then they signed the top two free agents in that year’s class: Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, a pair of unicorns the likes of which aren’t available every offseason. In 2024, the Dodgers had the best record in baseball. Then they won the World Series, and along the way made the last two rounds of the playoffs look pretty easy. Ohtani won the NL MVP award.

And then they signed a bunch of new players and brought back a few more! Blake Snell! Roki Sasaki! Tanner Scott! Hyeseong Kim! Michael Conforto! Kirby Yates, probably! Teoscar Hernández! Blake Treinen! Kotaro Matsushima! (OK, Matsushima is a rugby player — I included him to see if you’re paying attention.)

MLB needs a salary cap, say two thirds of the 36,000 respondents to a much-circulated poll on MLB Trade Rumors. More jarring are the results to question no. 2: Almost exactly half of some 27,000 respondents would be willing to lose the entire 2027 season if it meant MLB instituted a salary cap. Read the rest of this entry »