Friends, Red Sox fans, FanGraphs readers, lend me your ears,
I come to analyze the contract extension, not to bemoan it.
The free agency status that teams despise lives after them,
The good is oft interred with their luxury tax penalties.

Here, under leave of Meg and the rest,
For they are honorable editors,
Come ZiPS to speak at Anthony’s signing,
It is my computer, faithful and just to me.

While the Red Sox have quite the mixed record of letting players leave in free agency or trading them before they can sign elsewhere, the organization has been fairly aggressive at signing players with limited service time in order to buy out free agent years in advance. Brayan Bello is signed through 2030, at least if a club option is picked up, and both Kristian Campbell and Ceddanne Rafaela, well short of arbitration status, are under club control into the 2030s. When the Red Sox acquired Garrett Crochet, they didn’t muck around either, making sure he’d be kept in town on a six-year, $170 million contract extension that he signed a few months after the trade.

Now it’s Roman Anthony’s turn. The guaranteed portion of the contract calls for $130 million over eight years, beginning next season, with $125 million total in salary through the 2023 campaign and a $5 million buyout on a $30 million club option for 2034. If the Red Sox pick up the option, the total value of the deal would be nine years and $155 million. There is also a Halloween bucket full of various incentives that could net Anthony a maximum $230 million over the next nine years. However, that high-end figure will be quite hard to meet. As MassLive’s Chris Cotillo points out, for Anthony to earn that $230 million maximum, he would have to finish top two in the Rookie of the Year voting this season, make the All-Star team in all eight seasons of the extension and also in the option year, and win the next nine MVP awards — one for every year of the extension, plus the option season. Nobody has ever won nine MVPs; Barry Bonds has the most, with seven. So, in order to hit every incentive in his new contract, Anthony would have to become, without exaggeration, the best baseball player ever. If, in the pretty-much-impossible event that this happens, the Red Sox would be getting literally the greatest of all time for less money than the Angels are paying Anthony Rendon. Read the rest of this entry »

Jose Altuve has been doing the same thing for a long time now. The 35-year-old Astro is closing in on 250 career home runs despite the fact that he’s never possessed the look, or even the swing, of a traditional slugger. Altuve has never hit the ball hard and has always chased a bit more than you’d like, but he’s excellent at making contact, which helps him avoid strikeouts, and he’s excellent at pulling the ball in the air, which helps him make the most of that contact. Altuve has ridden those pulled fly balls to a career 114 SLG+ and 101 ISO+. If we start in 2015, the beginning of the Statcast era and the year he really started to focus on lifting and pulling, those numbers are 119 and 113. This year, however, for the first time, I’m genuinely starting to wonder how Altuve is still doing it.

Altuve is running an average exit velocity of just 85 mph. Here’s what that looks like in the context of his career. It’s the lowest mark he’s ever put up by nearly a full mile per hour, and it’s 1.5 mph off the average he put up just last year:

Those numbers look even more stark when we put them in the context of the rest of the league. Altuve is running the second-lowest average exit velocity among all qualified batters. Think of any slap-happy contact hitter – Luis Arraez, Jacob Wilson, Sal Frelick, Geraldo Perdomo – Altuve has a lower average exit velocity than all of them. But like clockwork, Altuve is still running a 120 wRC+ and batting .280. With 19 home runs, he’s on pace for 27, the highest mark he’s put up since 2022. Altuve is still lifting and pulling, lifting and pulling, making contact, avoiding strikeouts, rinse and repeat, even though his contact quality has dropped to about as low as you can possibly imagine. Read the rest of this entry »

Prior to batting practice, pitchers stroll onto the outfield grass to play catch with each other. Keeping their arms loose is a primary objective of what’s known as “catch play,” but there is more to it than just that. As a rule, the pitchers are throwing with purpose, both in terms of velocity and making sure that their mechanics are in order. At times they are also tinkering with grips, trying to find — or rediscover — desired movement on a specific pitch. And then there is long toss. While not all pitchers employ the practice, it is common to see crow-hop throws from foul line to deep center field. One thing you’ll rarely see is the casual tossing of a baseball back and forth.

How do pitchers get paired up for catch play? Does it differ for starters and relievers? What knowledge can be gleaned from these partnerships? Are there teammates you would rather not have as a throwing partner, because they’re especially challenging to catch?

With those questions in mind, I talked to three starters (Garrett Crochet, Seth Lugo, and Michael Wacha), two relievers (Liam Hendriks and Kirby Yates) a position player turned reliever (Lucas Erceg), a pitcher turned pitching coach (Mark Prior), a pair of pitchers turned broadcasters (Jeff Montgomery and Steve Sparks, and a longtime bullpen catcher (Javier Bracamonte).

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Garrett Crochet, Boston Red Sox left-hander:

“Greg Weissert is my catch partner right now. Honestly, it kind of happened out of necessity. It was Justin Slaten for awhile, but Slaten went down [with an injury]. I was playing catch with our bullpen catcher for awhile, but I prefer to throw with another pitcher. Typically, starters either play catch with each other or with a bullpen catcher. In Chicago [with the White Sox], it was mostly a bullpen catcher for me.

“When I was coming out of the bullpen in 2021, I was throwing with Michael Kopech and everything was just real hard and real scary. Sometimes with Weisert it gets that way, too, especially with the curveball he throws. It’s different for Greg and myself, too, because he has to be ready to pitch every day, whereas I don’t. I’m probably the one that he hates to catch. But no, he loves it. He’ll get down on one knee, use a catcher’s mitt, catch flat-grounds. It’s cool. I try to get after it as much as my body allows me to. Read the rest of this entry »

Bo Bichette went 2-for-6 with a three-run homer in Toronto’s 20-1 win over the Rockies on Wednesday afternoon. Business as usual.

Over the past month, Bichette has been one of the hottest hitters in baseball. Over his past 27 games, he is 46-for-115, bringing his batting average for the season to .301. This hot streak coincides broadly with a move down the lineup for the 27-year-old shortstop, from getting on base in front of Vladimir Guerrero Jr. to being tasked with driving him in. And because Guerrero is on base quite a bit, Bichette is also among the leaders in RBI in that span, with 27 in that 27-game run.

It’s gone under the radar a little, what with the Red Sox setting the world on fire, but Bichette’s Blue Jays have had a good month and change. Toronto is 24-10 since June 28, which is the second-best record in the American League behind Boston’s. In that time, the Jays have been the highest-scoring team in baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re a fan of a large-market team that has recently been struggling to score runs, you may be eligible for compensation. Wait, no – that’s not right. You may be eligible to complain about your team in my weekly chat? Not quite it, either. Let’s try it one more time… If you’re a fan of a large-market team that has recently been struggling to score runs, you are eligible to read this article and see to what extent your team has let you down and to what extent it’s just a narrative.

The Yankees and Mets have been having a tough time of late, which always brings out doubters, both fans and rivals. I don’t quite know what to tell those grumpy souls. You’re upset with the Yankees offense? Well yes, sure, absolutely, carry on, but they do have the highest team wRC+ in baseball. The Mets let you down? Without a doubt, they’re the Mets, so on and so forth – but they’re top 10 in baseball in wRC+, too. Orioles offense bumming you out? Yeah, I mean, they’ve been a bummer, but they’ve also been impacted by injuries, which seems hard to blame them for.

I came up with a quantitative test for how much teams have disappointed relative to preseason expectations. I took the actual playing time that each team has allocated so far. Then, I used preseason projections to come up with the offensive numbers we’d expect from each team given who has played and how good we projected them to be. I compared that to how good the team has actually been. The difference between those two numbers is the aggregate overachievement or underperformance that can’t be attributed to injury.
Read the rest of this entry »

While he went 0-for-3 in New York’s shutout loss, the Yankees breathed a sigh of relief last night as Aaron Judge returned from the IL after a mercifully short stint. Since debuting in the majors, Judge has been an offensive powerhouse, but one who got off to a relatively late start and endured plenty of injury misfortune. Go back five years, and the big question was whether he could stay healthy enough for the Yankees to plan around him, not what the numbers on his Cooperstown plaque would be should he manage a long big league career. Now, the idea of him not making the Hall of Fame seems like a charmingly naïve anachronism, a bit like wondering if Netflix would be able to survive the shift to streaming.

In the last four-plus seasons, Judge has hit 233 home runs, almost tripling his career total, and has seemingly destroyed what appeared to be the modern ceiling for obtainable WAR from a hitter who doesn’t also pitch in his spare time. It now looks like Judge may be up to 400 career homers well before the end of next season. So just where is his ceiling now? And can anyone challenge him as the Chief Justice of the Longball for this generation?

Let’s go back to 2020 for a minute. I fired up the ZiPS projection system and asked the computer to provide me with Judge’s career projections after that season. While he had always been a feared hitter, winning AL Rookie of the Year honors in 2017, he was just finishing his age-28 season and had only played one actual full season in the majors. And despite having a 52-home run campaign in his rear view, his career total of 119 homers was relatively pedestrian, behind players like Maikel Franco, Rob Deer, and Randal Grichuk through the same age. Judge didn’t do any better by the fancy-pantséd numbers, ranking 488th all-time in WAR through age 28, and that’s just the position players. The ZiPS projection for him at the time told the tale of an extremely talented slugger who couldn’t stay on the field, one who, if he proved especially unfortunate in the years to come, might not get the 5% of the vote necessary to stay on the Hall of Fame ballot. Read the rest of this entry »

I used to have a bit that one of the joys of the postseason was watching the wider baseball-watching public discover a previously unknown Rays pitcher when he mowed down the Astros in the first nationally televised game of his career.

It’s a little harder to pull that off as a position player: Go from complete unknown to key regular on a playoff team. In fact, a lot of the most important position players in this pennant race — Shohei Ohtani, Kyle Schwarber, Manny Machado — were names before they even joined their current teams.

On the other hand, you’d be forgiven for not knowing Isaac Collins. Read the rest of this entry »

How likely do you think the Reds are to make the playoffs? I’m not asking you to guess what our Playoff Odds say about them. I’ll tell you that in the next paragraph. I’m asking you to put your own number on it, based on what you know and think about both the Reds and the playoff picture. They are 59-54 with 49 games to play. They’re three games back of the Padres for the final Wild Card spot and four behind the Mets for the second spot. Got a number in your head? Then we’re ready for another paragraph.

Thank you for playing. As of this writing, our Playoff Odds give the Reds a 12.4% chance of reaching the postseason. I imagine that feels a little light to at least some people. Baseball Reference gives the Reds a 36.3% chance of making the playoffs. They’re within four games of both the Mets and the Padres. They’re also within five games of the Phillies, the first-place team in the NL East. If the Reds keep playing like they’re playing and any one of those teams has a late-season swoon, they’re in. According to Pythagorean Win-Loss expectancy, they should have the same record as the Mets right now and a better record than the Padres. They just added at the deadline. Hunter Greene looks like he’ll be back soon, and Elly De La Cruz sure looks like the kind of player who can put a team on his back for a couple weeks and carry it over the finish line.

Then again, I’m sure that number feels high to some people. You can understand why the numbers don’t like the Reds. Baseball Reference gives them such a high chance because it ignores roster composition, and, well, the Reds have a weaker roster than the teams ahead of them. They rank 22nd in position player WAR, and they didn’t add as much at the deadline as the Phillies, Mets, or Padres. In fact, according to ZiPS, they actually became 3.2% less likely to make the playoffs when the deadline dust settled, because of doubts about Ke’Bryan Hayes and presumably because the other teams added so much more. They’ve had the fifth-easiest schedule in baseball to this point in the season, and they’ve got the toughest schedule in baseball from here on out. They’ve overperformed their xwOBA by six points, the second-highest such gap in baseball. Not only do our projections have the Reds missing the playoffs, they have them finishing at 82-80, one game above .500 for the season and seven games behind the Padres in the standings. Read the rest of this entry »

Four years ago, Garrett Whitlock’s emergence as an elite major league reliever was one of my favorite stories in baseball. How could it not be? He was a Red Sox Rule 5 pick who had been on the Yankees. It doesn’t get much better than that. He was a dominant multi-inning reliever right from the jump, with a 1.96 ERA over 73 1/3 innings pitched and excellent peripheral statistics across the board.

The years since then haven’t been so halcyon. He followed up his breakout with another good year of relieving, but a foray into starting went only OK. Whitlock started 2023 season in the rotation but pitched poorly, hit the IL three times, and ended the year as a mid-leverage bullpen arm. Then he tried the rotation again in 2024, but hurt his elbow after four starts and had internal brace surgery. All told, those three seasons came with a 4.01 ERA, a 3.71 FIP, and not a ton of volume.

That internal brace surgery brings us to this year. Internal brace procedures come with faster turnaround times than full Tommy John surgery, and Whitlock was ready for Opening Day. He started the season as a middle reliever and mopup man, entering in the fifth, fourth, and eighth (down four runs) for two innings apiece in his first three appearances. He didn’t look immediately restored, but who would? After he acclimated to the majors again, though, his command snapped back to its prior superb level, his secondaries improved, and he’s been nothing short of outstanding. Welcome to Garrett Whitlock’s second act. Read the rest of this entry »

Kyle Karros has quietly emerged as one of the most promising prospects in the Colorado Rockies system. Since being drafted in the fifth round two years ago out of UCLA, the 23-year-old third baseman has slashed .303/.393/.455 with a 134 wRC+ over 1,000 plate appearances. His numbers this season are in that same ballpark. Over 305 plate appearances, the bulk of them with the Double-A Hartford Yard Goats — he was promoted to the Triple-A Albuquerque Isotopes on July 18 — Karros is slashing .297/.398/.463 with a 142 wRC+.

As our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen wrote back in January, the son of former Los Angeles Dodgers slugger Eric Karros “needs to develop power.” The progeny’s right-handed stroke produced 15 home runs a year ago, and this season he has left the yard six times. Given his 6-foot-5, 220-pound frame, there is a pretty good chance that he will tap into his power with more experience. Longenhagen recently updated Karros to a 40 FV prospect while ranking him 14th in the Rockies system.

On the eve of his becoming an Isotope, Karros discussed his approach to hitting, as well as his baseball relationship with his father.

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David Laurila: How would you define yourself as a hitter?

Kyle Karros: “I’ve really bought into being a complete hitter first, and allowing power to just come naturally. I’ve kind of always put an emphasis on not chasing homers. Doubles are my game. I also feel like you grow into home runs. You learn what counts you can take advantage of. You get more efficient with your swing. But right now — this year, especially — I’ve bought into really controlling the zone. I think what allows me to do that is having a right-center type of approach. That allows me to let the ball travel a little deeper. If I’m on a fastball to right-center, that puts me on offspeed where I’m able to pull and elevate.”

Laurila: Is letting the ball travel more new to this year? Read the rest of this entry »