To paraphrase ILoveMakonnen, the Rays are winning, winning, winning again, so they’re spending, spending, spending. Tampa Bay threw its hat into the free agent ring Thursday night by inking right-hander Zach Eflin to a three-year, $40 million contract. That one of baseball’s most tightfisted teams would devote eight figures a year to a free agent comes as at least a mild surprise, and every time the Rays get their checkbook out some amusing historical facts bubble up to the surface.

Sure enough, the estimable Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times reached into his bag and extracted a real doozy: Eflin’s $40 million deal is the largest free agent signing in franchise history by total value. Turns out the previous record-holder was, and you might want to sit down, Wilson Alvarez, who signed for $35 million over five years in the first year of the franchise’s existence.

A $40 million contract isn’t that much by the standards of modern baseball; for that matter, it’s second-pairing defenseman money for the Tampa Bay Lightning. But the signing might surprise onlookers who last saw Eflin as the third-best reliever in a Phillies bullpen that wasn’t as bad as its reputation but still wasn’t exactly the 1990 Reds. So let’s see what $40 million worth of Zach Eflin gets you these days. Read the rest of this entry »

The youths are everywhere you turn — loitering at the mall, hanging around in parking lots, playing catcher for the Mets. I’m serious: On September 30, Francisco Álvarez became the first person born after 9/11 to appear in an MLB game. The iPod is older than Álvarez. And it gets worse; there’s a pretty good chance that Andrew Painter, who was born in April 2003, will pitch significant innings for the Phillies next year.

This trend of increasingly younger people being allowed to play professional baseball is troubling to say the least. But it is only a trend, and not a universal dictate. There are a select few graybeards left in the game trying to hold back the tide. If a GM wants to hand a few million dollars to a player who’s too old to spend it all on vape pens and ring lights, there is an option on the free-agent market. A man who’s not only old enough to buy cigarettes, but who was also old enough to buy cigarettes back when they cost $3 a pack. A man so old the Grim Reaper followed him around for a while until he told the Grim Reaper to get off his lawn. An active player who, years after the retirement of Eric Young, Jr., played in the majors alongside Eric Young, Sr.

That’s right: Nelson Cruz. A man who straddles the line between Gen-X and Millennial like the Colossus of Rhodes. At 42 years old, he is the oldest position player on the market. And despite nods at retirement — next spring, he’ll be the GM of the Dominican Republic national team at the World Baseball Classic rather than its DH — Cruz wants to play in the big leagues in 2023. Read the rest of this entry »

It wasn’t too long ago that it was a delightful novelty when position players pitched. When Casper Wells came in from the outfield to chuck batting practice fastballs at the plate, it signified that the game had gone into a zone of silliness. Either the game was such a blowout there was nothing to be gained by taking it seriously, or it had gone on so long that both teams had run out of pitchers. In the latter case, that usually happened well after midnight, with all the slap-happy antics exhausted people tend to get up to.

But seeing a position player on the mound is no longer cause for giddiness and mirth. It’s almost commonplace; so much so that MLB had to institute a rule prohibiting position players from pitching in games where the score is closer than seven runs. Like a Foster the People song, the position player pitching got overexposed and lost its luster. What was once a reason to turn a game on is now a signal that you might as well turn it off.

Why are so many position players pitching nowadays? Well, there’s the serious answer, which has to do with bullpen construction and the proliferation of the max-effort relief pitcher. And then there’s the truth, which is that in baseball, unlike curling, it’s considered indecorous to concede a game you’re going to lose. That’s what the position player pitching usually means now: The game is out of reach, so let’s just get it over with, ideally with as little expenditure of time and effort as is practicable. Read the rest of this entry »

No National League team benefited more from the universal DH this year than the Philadelphia Phillies. The torn UCL Bryce Harper suffered in April would’ve been a season-ending injury for any Phillies outfielder from 1883 to 2019, but Harper was able to get a platelet-rich plasma injection, grit his teeth, and DH the rest of the way. You’re probably familiar with what ensued: Philadelphia’s first playoff berth in 11 years, numerous loud home runs and memorable GIFs, “swing of his life,” and so on and so forth.

Unfortunately for Harper, eventually someone had to open up his throwing arm and see precisely what had gone wrong in there. Last week, Dr. Neal ElAttrache — there’s a name you never want to see in a news story about your team’s best player — broke out his scalpel and went spelunking.

For months, Harper and the Phillies settled into a position of anxious uncertainty; perhaps the damage to his elbow wouldn’t be so bad. An Opening Day start in right field was probably too much to ask for, but maybe he could rehab in the offseason and get back to throwing by mid-spring. This is a situation that ought to be familiar to anyone who’s sat in their mechanic’s waiting room and hoped that the phrase “blown head gasket” would not be part of the day’s conversation.

Unfortunately, Dr. ElAttrache was forced to perform another dreaded proper noun: Tommy John surgery. In short, you can take that depth chart with Harper in right field and throw it right in the trash. Now, the party line is that Harper will return to the lineup as a DH around the All-Star break, and maybe start playing the outfield again by the end of the 2023 regular season. Read the rest of this entry »

Once you get past Aaron Judge, this offseason’s free agent outfield class gets real thin real fast. Brandon Nimmo is a very good player, but not a power threat, and after him and maybe Mitch Haniger, you get into the Michael Conforto–Cody Bellinger zone with alarming speed. “I can fix him” is as risky a conceit in baseball as it is in romance.

Andrew Benintendi sits in a bit of a no-man’s land between Nimmo and the true reclamation projects. There will be a team that misses out on Judge and Nimmo and finds itself with a hole in an outfield corner and about $15 million a year to spend to fill it; Benintendi will likely be the beneficiary of that vacancy when it emerges.

The sales pitch for Benintendi is pretty simple: At 28, he’s hitting the market fairly young and could command a deal as long as four years without including much of his decline, if any. He’s a capable defender in a corner who posted a career-high .373 OBP last year, which for what it’s worth was a hair higher than Nimmo’s, and has had a few monster seasons in the past, including a 20-20 campaign in 2017 and a nearly-5 WAR year the following season.

But there are drawbacks. When he was drafted seventh overall out of Arkansas in 2015, the question about Benintendi was, “How does such a teeny, tiny man hit so many home runs?” Twenty home runs, to be precise, in just 65 games, along with a .717 slugging percentage. That power has never showed up in the majors for Benintedi, whose career high in homers is exactly 20 in 151 games, and what moderate power he once had is going away. Read the rest of this entry »

While the top of the celebrated free agent shortstop market has yet to roll into motion, the end of last week saw a flurry of action a little lower on the positional power rankings. The Yankees agreed to a one-year, $6 million deal with Isiah Kiner-Falefa, locking up his final season of team control. And as Friday afternoon progressed, four other teams linked up for an exchange of shortstops. A shortswap, if you will.

Gio Urshela went from the Twins to the Angels for 19-year-old pitching prospect Alejandro Hidalgo, Kyle Farmer went from the Reds to the Twins for minor league pitcher Casey Legumina, and Kevin Newman went from the Pirates to the Reds for reliever Dauri Moreta.
Read the rest of this entry »

It can be difficult to find the thing you didn’t realize you needed until you didn’t have it when it counted, or to offload it when you realized you had more of it than you could use. That thing, in this case: production from the catcher position.

Catchers are unlike infielders or outfielders, in that you can only one can play at a time. Or rather, two catchers can play at once, if one slides over to first base or DH, in which case the thing that makes them so special — the ability to slap on some plastic padding and soak up foul tips and 58-foot curveballs five nights a week — essentially goes to waste.

Consider Oakland’s situation; after developing Sean Murphy into one of the top catchers in the game, the A’s landed former top-10 pick Shea Langeliers in the Matt Olson trade. Langeliers reached the majors this year and hit fairly well, but not so well that he’s an ideal DH, which is where he made most of his starts on account of being blocked by Murphy.

Or how about the Blue Jays, who have not one but three starter-quality catchers? Alejandro Kirk emerged as a star in 2022, and Danny Jansen put up 2.6 WAR and a 140 wRC+ in just 72 games. That left Gabriel Moreno, one of the top prospects in baseball, even more blocked than Langeliers when he emerged as big league-ready late this season.

It makes sense, therefore, that trade rumors swirl around both Oakland and Toronto, as both teams could stand to cash in their surfeit of backstops for help elsewhere. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve been aware of either the Baltimore Orioles or FanGraphs Dot Com in the past nine months, you already know the two entities have not always played nice with one another. On the eve of the 2022 season, our playoff odds gave Baltimore just 0.1% chance of making the playoffs, meaning that out of 20,000 simulated universes, the Orioles would only reach the Wild Card round 20 times. (I’ve been to one of those universes. Chick-fil-A is open on Sundays, Ryan Reynolds owns Twitter, and the airlines never got deregulated. It’s heaven.)

As late as September, when the Orioles had clearly surpassed any reasonable expectations and were still in the hunt, our playoff odds were still quite pessimistic relative to other projections systems. Sure enough, Baltimore finished 83-79, three games behind Tampa Bay. But for a team that hadn’t finished at or above .500 since 2016 and hadn’t even won 55 games in a full season since 2017, that’s a good year. Something to build on, particularly considering the wellspring of young talent bubbling up from the minors like the Clampett family’s oil well.

And yet the Orioles aren’t exactly keeping the band together. After moving Jorge López and Trey Mancini at the trade deadline, the first week of the offseason proper has seen several more departures, including Robinson Chirinos, Rougned Odor, and Jordan Lyles. That’s three starting position players (at least for part of the season), as well as Baltimore’s leaders in saves and innings pitched. Read the rest of this entry »

Wednesday marked the return of one of baseball’s blessed traditions: Scott Boras Comedy Hour. At most major industry conferences, the sport’s most powerful agent has developed a habit of leaning against a wall in some hotel hallway with dozens of the BBWAA’s leading lights before him like children at the foot of Christ in the illustrations from a Sunday School tract. This year’s GM meetings are no exception.

Over the years, the erudite Boras has modulated the form of his address; what was once a straightforward press scrum became a vehicle for one-liners. Now, Boras uses his time to rip off a series of bodged-together puns and rhyming couplets in praise of his top clients.

It’s an odd spectacle with little precedent in American sports apart from — and I make this comparison advisedly — Muhammad Ali. But it is nevertheless an important one. Minutes after Boras got through his set, President Biden addressed the nation after Tuesday night’s pivotal midterm elections, and I was so wrapped up in Boras Chat I forgot there was another thing happening. Read the rest of this entry »

“Mike from Shamong you’re on 94.1 WIP.”

“Hey, Joe, first time long time, thanks for having me on.”

“I hear you want to talk some Phillies. What’s on your mind, brother?”

“Joe, the Phils gotta get rid of Rhys Hoskins. I know he’s been around a while and people say he’s a nice guy but I just can’t stand to watch him anymore. He struck out 10 times in the World Series, he drops every third ball that comes to him, he’s the reason we lost!”

“Well Mike, most of the Phillies lineup went missing at the end of the Wo—”

“I HATE HIS STINKING GUTS JOE! I CAN’T STAND TO LOOK AT HIM!”

“So you want to trade him, then?”

“I do, Joe. Hoskins only has one year left before free agency, and we can’t lose him for nothing. Look, Nola was pretty bad in the World Series too. Maybe we can trade Hoskins for a no. 2 starter? How about that kid from San Diego, Musgraves? Yeah, Hoskins to the Padres for Musgraves and a first-round pick. What do you think about that? I’ll take my answer off the air.”

Read the rest of this entry »