The theme of free agency so far is returning to one’s origins. A day after Aaron Nola re-upped with the Phillies, Lance Lynn signed a one-year contract with the St. Louis Cardinals, the team that drafted him in the first round in 2008. Lynn’s deal will pay him $10 million in 2024, with a 2025 club option for $11 million that comes with a $1 million buyout, and $3 million in incentives. That brings the total guarantee to $11 million and the total potential value of the contract to $24 million.

Lynn won a World Series with St. Louis as a rookie in 2011, made his first All-Star team in 2012, and in total pitched six years and nearly 1,000 innings with the club before leaving as a free agent after the 2017 season.

Much has happened since then. Read the rest of this entry »

The non-tender deadline isn’t usually an event that screams star power. The players involved are pre-free agency, making them cheap and controllable — qualities that appeal mightily to big league GMs. So if there’s even a question about whether a player is worth retaining or trading, as opposed to cutting loose, that usually means the player is neither good nor particularly promising.

All that goes out the window, apparently, when it comes to a pitcher who just underwent shoulder surgery. The Atlanta Braves, who went all Marie Kondo on their 40-man roster as the weekend approached, sent Kyle Wright to the Royals in exchange for Jackson Kowar. The same day, the Milwaukee Brewers did them one better and flat-out non-tendered two-time All-Star Brandon Woodruff. Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday, the estimable and exquisitely coiffed Jeff Passan reported that MLB is considering a small change to the pitch clock for 2024. In its first year, the pitch clock counted down from 20 seconds with runners on base; MLB wants to bring that number down to 18 seconds. The proposal also includes a reduction in mound visits from five per team to four. MLB’s competition committee will deliberate over these proposals and then — considering more than half of the body is appointed by the league — most likely rubber-stamp them.

As for the headline change? It’s two seconds. It’s nothing. Two Mississippi. The Astros’ pitching staff alone has two Mississippi guys. (Okay, two Mississippi State guys.) MLB has already made the single biggest change it’s ever going to make to the timing of the game by instituting the pitch clock in the first place. How much can two seconds possibly matter? Read the rest of this entry »

When the Pittsburgh Pirates took Henry Davis first overall in 2021, they knew they were making a compromise. No matter what happened, even if he blew away everyone’s expectations, he was destined to only be the second-best hitter in big league history with the first name Henry and a last name that’s also a first name.

More than that, the Pirates took him knowing he probably wasn’t the best player in the draft. Davis received a signing bonus of just $6.5 million, only the fifth-highest number in the top six picks. Going way under slot allowed the Pirates to overpay for highly touted high schoolers with their next three picks, and I guess Bryan Bullington and Tony Sanchez no longer count as “in recent memory.”

Nevertheless, having the first pick is a rare gift, and you don’t want to blow it. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s tough to defend one of the most unpopular trades of the past 10 years, but when Mookie Betts got traded to the Dodgers in 2020, some people tried. One of the most commonly grasped straws involved the centerpiece of the deal, Alex Verdugo. Nobody worth listening to said Verdugo was as good as Betts, who was at that point an MVP, the best player on the best team of the 2010s, and on a bullet train to Cooperstown. But Verdugo was a good player, of a similar type to Betts. He’s also three and a half years younger than Betts, and at the time of the trade had five seasons of team control left to Betts’ one.

And if you squint hard enough, you can see it. Verdugo, at his best, has the same strengths as Betts: hitting for contact, defense in right field, doubles power. Where the comparison falls apart is that Verdugo is merely good at those things, and an average regular overall, while Betts is among the best in the game at defense and contact hitting. And while Verdugo is good for about a dozen home runs a year, Betts averages 32 home runs and 22 stolen bases per 162 games played. Snatch is a pretty good gangster movie, but anyone who tells you it’s as good as The Godfather is trying to get one over on you.

Now, Verdugo does have something more concrete in common with Betts: He’s one year from free agency, and the Red Sox are shopping him. Read the rest of this entry »

Phillies president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski addressed the media on Wednesday at MLB’s GM meetings, before a virus ripped through the league’s front offices and turned a normally convivial event into gastrointestinal Ragnarok.

Speaking as someone who makes frequent use of bathrooms at MLB facilities, and as someone who got knocked out by norovirus earlier this year: Fellas, you gotta wash your hands. I’m not going to break the omerta of the men’s room and name names, but there are too many people who work in baseball who think it’s acceptable to go potty, then leave the room to go around touching stuff without so much as a cursory splash of hand sanitizer. It’s 2023. Grow up. Wash your damn hands.

Where was I? Oh yeah, speaking of making a splash, Dombrowski shared some important news: Bryce Harper is going to be a first baseman from now on. Read the rest of this entry »

In case you were on sabbatical on Monday and missed the news, it’s manager hirin’ season. As much as player evaluation is an inexact science, identifying good potential managers is even more so. Even previous success as a manager is no guarantee. Dusty Baker and Bruce Bochy both won titles almost immediately after being hired to their last jobs, but consider how badly things went for Joe Girardi in Philadelphia or Joe Maddon in Anaheim.

So much of this job is either intangible or inscrutable to outsiders; more than that, there are several different ways to become qualified for it. Monday’s new hires — Craig Counsell of the Cubs, Stephen Vogt of the Guardians, and Carlos Mendoza of the Mets — represent three different paths to managerial candidacy. That got me thinking about managers less as individuals than as classes of individuals. Read the rest of this entry »

An entire offseason’s worth of managerial reshuffling took place early Monday afternoon, as the most coveted managerial role was filled and the most coveted managerial candidate found a home — just not how you’d think.

The Guardians first announced the hiring of Mariners bullpen coach and golden-voiced baritone Stephen Vogt. Shortly thereafter, news broke that the Cubs were hiring outgoing Brewers manager Craig Counsell, despite already having David Ross under contract for that position. Counsell had been expected to follow former Brewers baseball ops boss David Stearns to the Mets, but when he landed in Chicago, the Mets unveiled Yankees bench coach Carlos Mendoza as their new manager.

Counsell, regarded as one of the top skippers in the sport, has reset the market for manager salaries with a five-year, $40 million contract. A free agent after his Brewers contract expired, he interviewed with both New York and Cleveland and was regarded as both teams’ top choice. When he made his unexpected switch to Chicago, that made the other teams’ decisions easier, and thus followed the busy afternoon on the coaching carousel. Read the rest of this entry »

In the five days between the World Series and the start of free agency, there’s plenty of paperwork to do — exercising or declining options, sorting out 40-man roster spots, that sort of thing — before a team starts the offseason in earnest. Sometimes, that shuffling reveals a landing spot for a player who was going to be turned loose anyway, and we get a trade.

Mark Canha, your friendly neighborhood on-base machine, is headed from Milwaukee to Detroit, with 25-year-old Double-A reliever Blake Holub headed in the opposite direction. Read the rest of this entry »

You might have noticed a surfeit of bunting in this postseason, or at least it seemed that way because Geraldo Perdomo was in the World Series. I, the man who launched an impromptu Bunt Week two months ago, could not let the opportunity pass to sit in judgment of these bunts.

We often decry the sacrifice bunt as a needless waste of outs, but a bunt for a hit can be one of the most audacious, skilled plays in the sport, as beautiful in its own way as a light-tower home run. In fact, every bunt is distinctive and wonderful, and so each must be examined — all 26 of them — for procedural and results-based value, tactical and strategic context, as well as aesthetic value. These are just the 26 bunts that resulted in action, according to Baseball Savant, so be warned: failed bunt attempts are not featured. If you’re looking for that failed Trea Turner push bunt in Game 7 of the NLCS, you will not find it here. (Though for the record, I didn’t hate it.)

Let us judge the bunts. Read the rest of this entry »