Matt Chapman is the second-highest-ranked position player left on the free agent market, and few players have a more evocative reputation: Four Gold Gloves in five full major league seasons, plus various newfangled defensive awards like a Platinum Glove and the Wilson Overall Defensive Player of the Year. Chapman is like a movie that won the Oscar and the Palme d’Or, and you look at the DVD cover and see it also won Best Picture at the Inland Empire Film Critics Association Awards. Lots of people think he’s good.

Even if Chapman weren’t a great defender, he’d be a valuable free agent. He’s reliable: Since his first full year in the majors, 2018, he’s never missed more than 23 games in a season. He has a career wRC+ of 118, and he’s averaged 29 home runs per 162 games. Jeimer Candelario, who is seven months younger than Chapman and has had only one season as good as Chapman’s worst full campaign in the majors, just got $45 million over three years. Ben Clemens predicted that Chapman’s free agent contract would be $24 million a year over five years; the median crowdsource estimate was 4 years at $20 million per. I tend to trust Ben’s judgment more than that of the crowd, wise as the crowd may be.

But Chapman is, nevertheless, an interesting case: a high-strikeout hitter who doesn’t put up huge power numbers, and a glove-first player at a bat-first position. That’s a precarious profile when considering a player for a long-term contract into his mid-30s. Read the rest of this entry »

Every free agent left-handed pitcher entering his age-35 season is headed to Southern California. Canadian bird magnet James Paxton has agreed to a one-year deal with the Dodgers, with base compensation of $11 million and another $2 million (half of it fascinatingly attainable) available in bonus. Another top pitching prospect from the 2010s, Matt Moore, is returning to the Angels for $9 million.

These were two of the premier left-handed pitching prospects in baseball in the early 2010s, and their current fates really illustrate how far in the past that was. Nevertheless, Paxton’s ability continues to tempt teams into thinking, “No, this time will be different, he’ll stay healthy, I know it.” Meanwhile, Moore has reinvented himself into one of the best in baseball at a different job than the one he trained for. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Friday, I was surprised to remember that the Washington Nationals were still a going concern, so I wrote an article expressing my befuddlement at the organization’s inaction over the 18 months since the Juan Soto trade. The title of the story: “Let’s Poke the Washington Nationals with a Stick to See if They’re Still Alive.”

The Nats have found a stick and shown signs of life within just four days. And what a stick it is: Joey Gallo, one of the biggest, strongest, most powerful hitters out there. That’s a big stick. A stick fit to make Theodore Roosevelt use his inside voice. Gallo, late of the Minnesota Twins, will make $5 million on a one-year deal.

Signing Gallo won’t turn the Nationals around overnight, or even appreciably accelerate Washington’s rebuild. He’s just a man, after all. A big one, but merely a man. Nevertheless, this is exactly the kind of move the Nationals should be making. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a mean-spirited but persistent thread in American pop culture, in which the Midwest is depicted as a cultural backwater, populated by sleepy, gormless, unattractive rubes and devoid of meaningful art or culture. For example, this sidesplitting musical interlude from 30 Rock. As an East Coast snob who lived for many years among the Great Lakes, I find this line of comedy offensive. Midwesterners are friendly, vigorous, beautiful people, and they live in a land of marvels. (If you’re wondering why I’ve chosen to open with this confusing and risky metaphor: We just got a new assistant editor, Matt Martell, and I’m hazing him by handing him a grenade on his second day.)

But when it comes to pitching, the coastal elites might have a point: Standards have slipped a little in the heartland. For the Chicago White Sox and Pittsburgh Pirates, John Brebbia and Aroldis Chapman, respectively, are marquee signings. (Now I’ve thrown all that goodwill away by puncturing Pittsburghers’ delusion that they’re from the East Coast. How foolish of me.) Read the rest of this entry »

What did the Nationals do to deserve scrutiny at this juncture? Absolutely nothing. If someone had signed Blake Snell this week, I would not be working myself up to caring about what the Nats have or have not done this offseason. But when Ben Clemens wrote about the Orioles’ sleepy winter (would that we all had the good fortune to sleep through winter), I found myself casting my gaze southwest, to the next stop on the I-95 corridor.

Because the Orioles at least won 100 games last year. They played in the playoffs. Okay, having witnessed the front end of their ALDS loss in person, “played” is probably too strong a word. “Appeared in” is more like it. But still, there’s a thriving — if perilously under-resourced — ballclub in Baltimore. In Washington, there is but the promise of such, and little evidence thus far of life in the primordial slurry that’s taken up residence in Nationals Park. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2021, Vladimir Guerrero Jr. put on a remarkable show, hitting .311/.401/.601 with 48 home runs. He finished second in MVP voting to Shohei Ohtani — perhaps the only drawback to having Ohtani in the league is he’s going to end up dwarfing about a decade of other great performances on the historical record — with a season that looks even better in context.

In the past 100 years, only 10 AL or NL players have posted full seasons with a .300/.400/.600 slash line at age 22 or younger. And this is not one of those things hitters tend to achieve before flaming out. Of those 10 players, five — Ted Williams, Jimmie Foxx, Mel Ott, Joe DiMaggio, and Eddie Mathews — are not only Hall of Famers but inner-circle Hall of Famers. Albert Pujols will be once he’s eligible. Alex Rodriguez would be if he’d stayed away from Biogenesis and/or not been so weird the entire sport had it out for him. That leaves three active players: Bryce Harper, Juan Soto (in the COVID-shortened 2020 season), and Vladito.

So that’s five Hall of Famers, three future Hall of Famers, plus one guy who would be in the Hall of Fame if performance were the only consideration. But what of the young Guerrero? Read the rest of this entry »

The San Francisco Giants have reportedly agreed to a contract with right-handed pitcher Jordan Hicks worth $11 million a year. (Makes sense, Hicks was really good out of the bullpen for St. Louis and Toronto last year, and reliable relief arms are hard to come by in free agency.) The deal will run for four years. (Wow, that’s a long time.) It also contains $2 million a year in workload-based incentives that start at 100 innings per season, because the Giants (hold onto your butts) intend to use Hicks as a starter.

Fascinating! Read the rest of this entry »

Rhys Hoskins is a free agent, and it’s kind of weird. The 30-year-old first baseman spent 10 seasons in the Phillies organization, six of them (plus one full year spent on the injured list) with the major league club. For a time, he was one of the only bright spots on a completely moribund team, but eventually the big fella settled into a role as a supporting player and de facto table-setter for a lineup built around Bryce Harper. His achievements in that role include the Bat Spike home run, a three-run dinger off Spencer Strider in the 2022 NLDS — the Phillies’ first home playoff game in 11 years.

While it was surpassed in the imagination by Harper’s pennant-winning homer in the rain later that October, the image of Hoskins’ celebration lives on in memory as a highly localized version of the José Bautista bat flip for people who are deeply upset by the decline in the quality of Wawa’s sandwich bread since the chain went national. You want to watch the home run again? I do. Let’s watch it again.

Read the rest of this entry »

With one game to win and the world championship on the line, Japan manager Hideki Kuriyama called on left-hander Shōta Imanaga to start the decisive game of the World Baseball Classic. Availability and pitch count obviously limited Kuriyama’s options, but still, it’s quite an honor, considering Japan’s pitching staff also included Shohei Ohtani, Yu Darvish, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and wunderkind Roki Sasaki.

The Cubs must have been impressed, because on Monday night Bob Nightengale reported that Chicago had reached an agreement with the two-time NPB All-Star. Imanaga, who had previously been linked with the Giants, will make at least $30 million over two years, with options and incentives that could bring the total value of the deal to $80 million over a longer (but still as-yet-unspecified) term. Jon Heyman called the deal “complicated.”

However much Imanaga’s contract will end up confounding the bookkeepers, it won’t be official until he passes a physical. That must be completed before Imanaga’s posting window expires Thursday afternoon. Read the rest of this entry »

Like the wealthiest man in the grocery store, whose cart is so full of expensive foodstuffs that an extra block of aged cheese merely blends into the bill, the Dodgers have signed Teoscar Hernández. This deal allows them to fill the J.D. Martinez-shaped void in the lineup by replacing him with the other corner outfield/DH guy the mid-2010s Astros gave up on too early.

Hernández, 31, will make a sticker value of $23.5 million over his one-year contract, though — and you might want to make sure you’re sitting down for this one — the practical value of the deal will be lowered to roughly $20.4 million by deferrals. Hernández probably will not register as more than an afterthought in an offseason that brought in Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and Tyler Glasnow. (I’m old enough to remember the 2000-01 free agent class being billed as: Alex Rodriguez, Mike Mussina, Manny Ramirez, Mike Hampton… and also Darren Dreifort!) But Teoscar brings necessary right-handed pop to a lineup that could have used a little extra power, particularly from that side of the plate. Read the rest of this entry »