Some 49 hours before their first regular season game, the Arizona Diamondbacks brought up the house lights to end the 2023-24 Hot Stove League. Jordan Montgomery is headed west on a one-year contract with a vesting option.

The 31-year-old Montgomery had been a well-regarded high-volume starter, but the 2023 postseason brought him to the verge of stardom. The Texas Rangers traded for Montgomery at the deadline, and with Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer battling injuries, it was the big South Carolinian who emerged as the team’s ace. He won three games in the postseason, including Game 7 of the ALCS in a multi-inning relief appearance on two days’ rest, and was one of the World Series champion’s breakout stars.

That championship, of course, came at the expense of Arizona, his new team. The Diamondbacks, having come so close to winning it all, had already brought in reinforcements by trading for third baseman Eugenio Suárez and signing outfielder Joc Pederson and lefty starter Eduardo Rodriguez. Last October, this was a team with an improvised rotation; with Montgomery, Rodriguez (once he returns from his season-opening IL stint), Zac Gallen, Merrill Kelly, a full year of a maturing Brandon Pfaadt, and a healthy Tommy Henry, it’s among the best in the sport. Read the rest of this entry »

It remains a heartbreaking but immutable fact of baseball life that you cannot steal first base.

So over the weekend, Cleveland Guardians outfielder Myles Straw passed through waivers. He’s no longer on the 40-man roster and will start the season in Triple-A, despite having a guaranteed three years and $20.45 million remaining on his contract.

On this, the day (at least idiomatically) of Ezequiel Tovar’s contract extension, Straw serves as a solemn reminder of the dangers of getting too attached to a fast guy with questions about his bat. Read the rest of this entry »

I want to stress how outrageous it is that Michael Lorenzen was not the first former Cal State Fullerton two-way player to sign a free agent contract this winter. The guy who beat him to the punch, J.D. Davis, played 144 games for the Giants last year, starting 116 of them at third base. He’d gone through arbitration. More to the point, on March 1 he was the presumptive starter for a team with playoff aspirations, and he was under contract on March 10.

Then Davis got cut in order to save a few bucks in the wake of the Matt Chapman signing, and he ended up signing for less than half of his original salary with the Oakland A’s. There, he’ll be managed by Mark Kotsay, a former Cal State Fullerton two-way player.

While all of that was happening, Lorenzen was sitting by the phone. Or more likely, given his physique, he was lifting the phone just to get a good pump in, even though the only sound on the other end was a dial tone. Finally, overnight just six days before his team’s first regular season game, Lorenzen has a deal with the Texas Rangers: One year, $4.5 million, with an additional $2.5 million possible in incentives. Read the rest of this entry »

I went to high school in a state with an extremely late calendar, and I took a lot of AP classes. Which meant that from about the second week of May until the end of the school year in late June, most of my class schedule was pretty pointless. It’s hard to get a bunch of overworked, checked-out teens to focus in class with nothing on the line, especially when said teens have just seen the sun for the first time in six months. Full credit to the teachers who were able to thread that needle, but in general we watched a lot of movies and played a lot of rummy while the clock ran out.

And that’s sort of where we are in spring training. With most rosters all but set and the Dodgers and Padres already playing meaningful games in Korea, the only thing left to do is find a live rooster — was it a live rooster? — to take the curse off Jake Cronenworth’s glove. And that’s not gonna take all week.

So let’s make a prediction. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, Jay Jaffe and Ben Clemens examined the state of first and second base. Today, we wrap up the infield positions, starting with a look at the league’s shortstops.

Shortstop is an incredibly important position. A team that can find someone to field it competently and put up significant offensive numbers can profit substantially. You’d think it’d be difficult to find a player who can do both. And yet, out of the 30 shortstop situations around the league, there are only a handful of real stinkers. Everyone else has a recent blockbuster free agent, or an emerging top prospect, or at the very least a solid starter. Teams know the value of a good two-way shortstop, so when they find one, they treasure him: Of the top nine teams in this ranking, seven have a starting shortstop who’s currently on a contract worth more than $150 million. Read the rest of this entry »

Two weeks ago, I wrote about Marlins righthander Max Meyer, an electrifying arm whose debut campaign two years ago was cut short by Tommy John surgery. I had been a big fan of Meyer’s game dating back to his days at the University of Minnesota, but in the pros he’d stumbled into a situation that’s fascinated me for years: the Marlins’ starting rotation.

The Marlins are a weird organization, battling from the bottom up against a tightfisted owner. They’ve seen off numerous well-regarded figures in both front office and field management — Michael Hill, Don Mattingly, and most recently Kim Ng — and from a cultural perspective they’ve vacillated between Florida’s two great cultural signifiers: the blue blazer and the pink flamingo.

But by God, they’ve tried stuff. And sometimes, they’ve been successful. Over the past five seasons, they have more playoff appearances and more postseason series wins than the Mets, Giants, Cubs, or Mariners. Most of all, they’ve been good at developing pitching. Read the rest of this entry »

It was closer than a lot of us thought it’d be, but Blake Snell has found a job before the Second Coming. The reigning Cy Young winner, left unemployed past St. Patrick’s Day by the merciless vicissitudes of the market, has come to terms with the San Francisco Giants on a two-year, $62 million contract with an opt-out after the 2024 season. Snell’s compensation includes a $17 million signing bonus, payable in January 2026, and a $15 million base salary in 2024.

The contract itself is something of an anticlimax for a player who supposedly turned down a similar AAV over six years because he wanted the same annual compensation over nine. And it’s not the one-year megabucks prove-it contract I speculated about six weeks ago. It’s probably not even worth the eyes emoji he posted to Instagram last Sunday.

Snell’s agent, Scott Boras, ran out the usual playbook — leave it late, hold the line, appeal directly to ownership. Boras has gotten more players nine-figure contracts than most agents have in their email contacts, and this is how he does it. And at the risk of being a huge bummer about Snell getting a top-10 AAV ever for a pitcher, the plan seems to have backfired. Read the rest of this entry »

The Milwaukee Brewers were already coming out of this offseason with more unanswered questions than a contending team would typically like. They’ve lost their top two starting pitchers to trade or injury, they’ve changed managers, and their big offseason free agent signing hasn’t played a meaningful game since the 2022 postseason.

And the questions continue to pile up. Devin Williams, one of the best closers in baseball and arguably Milwaukee’s best player, is going to be out for the next three months. The good news is it’s not an arm or shoulder injury that would lead to long-term problems or a multi-year absence. But it’s a pretty gnarly-sounding injury nonetheless: Not one but two stress fractures in his back.

Williams pitched through back soreness since at least last September — and with two fractures in a vertebra at the bottom of his ribcage, “soreness” is probably an understatement. Williams won’t need surgery, but he’ll be totally shut down for the next six weeks. The long ramp-up to game fitness will take at least another six weeks, which puts the target date for his return sometime in late June. Read the rest of this entry »

The FanGraphs split tool is so powerful that its functions have to be… (rubs hands together)… (waits for applause)… split into multiple spotlight posts. I’ll admit right away that the feature I’m about to highlight is a little bit out there. I don’t use it every day, or even every week. But it allowed me to research what ended up being my favorite data-driven article that I’ve written in my time at this company.

The post in question, from last January, is titled “Yandy Díaz, Artificial Turf, and Earl [Expletive] Weaver.” As you can guess from the headline, it was born from a desire to talk about my favorite manager in baseball history, and his rhetorical gift for dense and florid obscenity. In order to get there, I had to dig around looking for hitters like Díaz: big, strong guys who hit the ball hard enough to put it over the fence, but who suffered from high groundball rates.

After some clicking and sorting, I was tickled to discover that there were a lot of Rays and Blue Jays at the top of the leaderboard. The Rays and Blue Jays — in addition to playing in the same division and having rhyming names — both play on artificial turf. Only five teams in the league do. Could they be targeting groundball hitters on purpose, on the pretense that fake grass is friendlier to such hitters than the real stuff? (I didn’t know it at the time, but the Marlins and Diamondbacks would make surprise runs to the playoffs in 2023 after finishing first and fourth in groundball rate. Both teams play on turf.)

Actually investigating that premise — that groundball hitters fare better on turf — required refining the whole set of offensive data down by batted ball type. Then again by stadium. There’s no split tool for grass vs. turf, nor for the two different brands of artificial turf. So that involved filtering for the stats at the five ballparks in question and consolidating them. Surely no tool can slice the apple that thin.

Poppycock. The splits tool did it with ease. By changing the filter from MLB to team-by-team, I then could split these groundball stats out into each individual team’s home ballpark. You could even change the date parameters to expand the sample to two seasons instead of one, or look at away teams’ stats in those environments.

And from there, the possibilities are… maybe not literally endless, but close enough you’d never be able to tell. These stats are available on a player-by-player basis, either as a leaguewide leaderboard or narrowed to one or a few specific hitters of interest via the Custom Players function.

Now, all of the parks with artificial turf are indoors, which makes splits by weather irrelevant. But that’s available too. Not too long before I wrote the groundballs-on-turf article, I was in the auxiliary press box in Philadelphia, watching Seranthony Domínguez trying and failing to grip his changeup in driving rain and freezing cold conditions in Game 5 of the NLCS. Surely it must be difficult to pitch in the cold and the wet.

Good news: We can tell exactly how difficult by filtering for temperature and precipitation.

Temperature is just the tip of the proverbial iceberg: The splits tool also supports searches by custom range for elevation, wind speed, barometric pressure, and air density. I didn’t even know “air density” was something you could measure. Either way, there’s no need to use the time of year as a proxy for atmospheric conditions. The dog days of summer aren’t the same in Atlanta as they are in Boston, after all, so the splits tool allows you to be more precise.

These splits are useful both for rigorous empirical study — determining the effects of ballpark construction or weather on offensive environment — and for trivia — “leading the league in RBI when the temperature is over 80 degrees and the wind is blowing at least 10 mph,” or something equally esoteric and frivolous. That’s both sides of the coin for the numerically literate sports fan.

On the very first day of my freshman year of college, my Journalism 101 professor quoted a line from All the President’s Men: “Follow the money.” Over four years as an undergrad, I’d hear that maxim more times than I could count. Enough that after more than 10 years in the business, it’s been incorporated into my subconscious so thoroughly that I can hear my old professors and mentors (and sometimes Hal Holbrook) repeating it without needing them to be physically present.

Obviously, we at FanGraphs would like nothing better than for some of your money to be spent on a Membership. Your support funds valuable tools like the RosterResource payroll pages, my favorite way to follow that famous principle of journalism. Read the rest of this entry »