Here’s an attempt at selecting some adjectives to describe the last year or so in Queens. After a bonkers 2022–23 offseason, a 2023 regular season that was nothing short of catastrophic, and a frantic trade deadline effort to mitigate some of the damage, this offseason, new Mets president of baseball operations David Stearns and company have so far taken an approach that could be described as measured. Last offseason, the Mets signed seven multi-year deals, including four valued at over $75 million. On Thursday, the club agreed to terms on just its second eight-figure contract of the winter, signing center fielder Harrison Bader to a one-year, $10.5 million deal.

The addition of Bader is the latest in an offseason of conservative one-year deals for Stearns’ group. They took a $13 million flier on Luis Severino, who will move over from the Bronx and slot in somewhere in the starting pitching mix after Kodai Senga and Jose Quintana (and perhaps future rotation additions). They made budget-friendly additions to a depleted bullpen, swinging a trade with Milwaukee for Adrian Houser, claiming a handful of arms off of waivers, and offering one-year deals to Michael Tonkin, Jorge López, and Austin Adams. They added to their position player depth with infielders Joey Wendle and José Iglesias (on a minor-league deal) and alliterative outfielders Tyrone Taylor and Trayce Thompson (also on a minors deal), who now have Bader looking down from above on the depth chart. Read the rest of this entry »

This was supposed to be a simple one. To ease my way into 2024, I dipped into the bag of fun ideas that I’d been saving for the offseason. Once we get past the All-Star break, there’s so much serious baseball being played that I try not to pitch too many frivolous stories. I don’t always succeed, but I try. As a result, when the season ends, the Notes app on my phone is full of hastily-typed fragments:

• The noise Andrew Vazquez [sic] makes when he pitches
• The Palmeiro Award – goes to the least deserving GG winner each year
• Players tearing their pants when they slide. Andrew Benintendi 8/15/23
• Where do pop-ups come from?
• Pitchers who make the most fun noises

The idea for this article was called Weakest hit balls of the year, and it seemed pretty straightforward. Take a look at the batted balls with the lowest exit velocity and have some fun writing about nubbers, squibbers, and dribblers. As it turns out, that’s actually a slightly tricky assignment.

First, there are plenty of plays to weed out. Statcast sometimes struggles to track balls hit directly into the ground. It must be hard to get a good reading on a ball that only travels a foot or two before hitting the ground and changing direction. A lot of those topped balls have no Statcast data whatsoever, but for some, Statcast records the speed and angle not of the ball off the bat, but of the ball bouncing off the dirt. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll level with you, readers: I’ve been taking it easy for the last few weeks, enjoying the end of the year and starting to get recharged for 2024. Not much baseball is going on, spring training is still quite a bit away, and we haven’t even had many exciting signings or trades to break the doldrums. It’s only natural, given that kind of backdrop, to let your mind wander.

One of the things I found myself wondering about was how Tyler O’Neill would like playing in Fenway Park. On the one hand, it seems like a match made in heaven; O’Neill is a righty hitter who puts the ball in the air, and Fenway is a perfect park for hitters who can pepper the monster out in left field. On the other hand, O’Neill’s power is absolutely gargantuan; if you hit the ball 400 feet, how far away the left field wall is doesn’t matter much. Heck, the wall might turn some smashed homers into doubles or even singles; it’s just so dang tall.

Statcast data bears that worry out. In 2023, O’Neill only hit nine homers. That’s bad enough, but here’s the kicker: per Baseball Savant, he would have only hit six homers if he played the entire season in Fenway. That’s actually tied for the stadium that would have allowed the fewest homers – Camden Yards and its new left-field cutout is the other laggard. Some of that is because O’Neill doesn’t hit dead pull shots all that often, and some of it is because no matter how crushed this baseball was, it didn’t get high enough off the ground. Read the rest of this entry »

The Rangers have a problem you don’t see every day. They have three pitchers, each likely out until halfway through this season, who all look like surefire starters when healthy. Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer need no introduction; deGrom is looking at an August or September return, while Scherzer will likely be back in July. Add Tyler Mahle to the list, too: the Rangers signed him to a two-year, $22 million deal this offseason, but he won’t be fully recovered from Tommy John surgery until around midyear.

Let’s get the easy caveat out of the way: it’s not clear how good any of these three will be in 2024. Scherzer and Mahle weren’t exactly setting the world on fire before they got injured, and deGrom is coming off a nerve wracking second TJ. But I think it’s reasonable to look at that trio and see at least two elite starters. A rotation with a healthy deGrom, Scherzer, and Mahle at the top would probably be one of the best in baseball. That doesn’t even account for Nathan Eovaldi and the rest of the team’s arms – Jon Gray looked pretty good in his own return from injury this past October.

That starting five sounds incredible to me. There’s room for one of those pitchers to get hurt – and with that collection of guys, one of them getting hurt seems likely – and still have a fearsome playoff rotation. That’s almost certainly the team’s plan – signing deGrom is one thing, but signing an already-hurt Mahle makes it pretty clear that they’re building in some injury tolerance and aiming for the postseason. I like the plan – look no further than the Braves and Dodgers to see how teams struggle to find top tier pitching to pair with excellent offenses. But it does raise a question: What do they do for the first three months of the season? Read the rest of this entry »

The other day I was just noodling around on the site, looking for ideas, when I noticed something interesting on the RosterResource payroll breakdown page. This coming season, the Houston Astros are at $222 million in payroll commitments, which brings them to $237 million and change against the competitive balance tax — just over by a couple hundred thousand.

Next season, Houston has just $65 million committed to the major league payroll. Now, actually clicking through to the team page, you realize that’s a little misleading: Depending on workload, both Justin Verlander and Ryan Pressly can activate lucrative options, and Framber Valdez and Kyle Tucker will both enter their third year of arbitration. I do not want to conceive of a scenario in which either Valdez or Tucker gets non-tendered; no doubt it would be horrifying. So clearly the Astros will be well into the hundreds of millions in 2025 no matter what they do.

But upon clicking through, I came to a horrifying realization: Jose Altuve and Alex Bregman will both be free agents after the season. Which just doesn’t seem possible. I remember Bregman’s freshman year in college, and Altuve playing on that terrible contract that the Astros ripped up in order to sign him through what seemed like the end of time. Well, guess what? The end of time is nigh. Read the rest of this entry »

Billy Cook is flying well below the radar in the Baltimore Orioles organization. That’s understandable. The 2023 American League East champions continue to boast one of the top farm systems in baseball, and Cook is a soon-to-turn-25-year-old outfielder/infielder out of Pepperdine University who lasted until the 10th round of the 2021 draft. Moreover, while he went deep a team-best 24 times this past season with Double-A Bowie, it’s easy to be overshadowed when your teammates include high-profile first-rounders such as Jackson Holliday and Heston Kjerstad, as well as highly regarded slugger Coby Mayo and, at year’s end, fast-rising backstop Samuel Basallo.

Those things said, Cook has a lot to prove. His numbers with Bowie were solid but unspectacular, posting a .251/.320/.456 line and a 110 wRC+. Moreover, while his 25% strikeout rate was an improvement from the previous year, he’ll likely need to further hone his contact skills if he hopes to beat the odds and wear a big league uniform. Given his age and utility profile, he remains more project than prospect — especially within a system with no shortage of blue chippers.

Cook discussed his game, and dark horse status, at the tail end of the Arizona Fall League season, which saw him log an .818 OPS with the Mesa Solar Sox.

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David Laurila: You hit 24 home runs this year, but outside of that, I don’t know a lot about you. How would you describe your game?

Billy Cook: “I’m working on my complete game. I think the power has always been there, and then there are the stolen bases [30 in 33 attempts in 2023]. I have speed. When I don’t get into my power, I can get away with a little soft contact here and there by beating out a groundball. But I do want to hit the ball in the air. This offseason I’ll be working on turning the hard groundballs into doubles, putting them into the gaps instead of hitting super low line drives. That’s pretty much it with the offense. Defensively, I’m trying to be that utility guy, someone who is able to play anywhere to keep the bat in the lineup.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Cubs made the first big splash of the offseason by purloining Craig Counsell, widely regarded as one of the top managers in baseball, from the division rival Brewers, under the nose of the voracious, all-consuming Mets. On January 2, the Cubs introduced Counsell’s major league coaching staff. Right-handed pitcher Colten Brewer will also be joining the team in 2024.

But Counsell’s signing was supposed to herald a big and flashy offseason, a statement of intent that the Cubs were set to return to the forward-thinking, all-conquering form that made them such a force in the National League in the middle of the last decade. But the Cubs’ most recent trade was November 6. Their most recent major league free agent signing was Edwin Ríos, on February 17 of last year. That assumes Brewer is on a minor league deal; he’s pitched in the majors in five of the past six seasons, but he broke his own signing on Instagram rather than going through the agent-to-newsbreaker pipeline.

Having a quiet offseason so far is not necessarily a bad thing. There’s plenty of winter left, and plenty of free agents still on the board. Besides, maybe Jed Hoyer is doing a bit based on the fact that the team’s mascot is a bear and bears hibernate. That’d be sick. If there are two things I love, it’s hibernating and overcommitting to a bit. Read the rest of this entry »

After running his highest FIP since his breakout season in 2019, Lucas Giolito has secured a modified prove-it deal. Over the holidays, the right-hander signed a two-year contract with the Boston Red Sox worth $38.5 million. He will make $18 million in the first season and $19 million in the second; he can opt out after 2024. If he elects not to opt out, a conditional option kicks in for the 2026 season that is dependent on whether he throws at least 140 innings in 2025. If he does, it becomes a mutual option worth $19 million; if he doesn’t, it becomes a $14 million club option.

Despite Giolito’s 4.88 ERA, 5.27 FIP, and 41 home runs allowed (second to only Lance Lynn) in 2023, he was still perceived as a mid-rotation option entering free agency. Much of that was due to his above-average performance from 2019-21, but he has also proven he can stay healthy and make his starts. Since 2021, he is 16th in the league in innings pitched. His 184.1 IP with the White Sox, Angels, and Guardians in 2023 only further cemented his reputation. With Boston ranking second-to-last in the American League in starter innings pitched behind only Oakland, this was a practical match that came at a reasonable cost.

Giolito’s $19.25 million AAV is fifth among starting pitchers who have signed free agent contracts this offseason (excluding Shohei Ohtani), placing him in between the top and middle tier. Given that he hasn’t reached his 30th birthday, it seems plausible that he can keep up his volume while potentially improving his results and returning to the starter he was for a three-year stretch in Chicago.

After his first start with the Guardians in September (he was famously scooped up off waivers from the Angels, who had acquired him from the White Sox just five weeks prior), Giolito spoke with David Laurila about his season and impending free agency. In that conversation, Giolito was candid about his lack of execution in 2023, and how he hadn’t been able to command the anchor of his arsenal, his fastball-changeup combination. Giolito expressed that he wants to consistently command his heater up in the zone; for the changeup, the goal is more competitive pitches in the zone. Like any fastball-changeup combo, helping one will inherently help the other. As a high-release, big-extension pitcher, this is a natural path for Giolito, especially considering that the blueprint has already worked. To better understand how his fastball has fluctuated in recent seasons, let’s look at some qualities of the pitch:

His fastball plays best when it’s at the top of the zone. Interestingly, his fastball was located higher on average in 2023 than in any other season since 2019 but was by far the worst in terms of value, though I’m not sure that was the primary reason for his struggles. Instead, I’d look to his horizontal location, and the trend of him throwing his heater closer to righties and further away from lefties. Since his breakout in 2019, Giolito had always neutralized left-handed batters, with his fastball-changeup combo the reason. Lefties had never posted a wOBA above .283 against him; that mark jumped to .334 in 2023. By moving the pitch further to the edge (likely due to his release point change), his two-pitch combo lost some of its in-zone consistency, especially the changeup. The trend started in 2022, and even with a slight bounce back this year, the changeup still struggled:

Similar to the heater, the pitch moved progressively further toward righties as its performance dipped. In the two seasons where Giolito threw the pitch at its highest height on average, it’s been the most effective. Given Giolito’s tendency to keep the fastball up, a higher tunnel with the changeup is logical. But going back to its in-zone utility, 2022 and 2023 saw him have in-zone rates below 50% (45.0% and 49.2%, respectively) after he ran the pitch in the zone between 51.3% and 59.1% from 2019 to 2023. The nature of the tunnel is most deceptive when he can keep the pitch in the strike zone. All of this to say, the story that Giolito told Laurila a few months ago tracks very well. The question now is what he and the Red Sox can do to flip things back to what they were during his very good three-year run in Chicago.

Without any making any mechanical changes, my first thought would be to shift Giolito to the first base side of the rubber to ensure his pitches are moving on the side of the plate where he had success. Seems foolproof, right? The thing is, he has been on this side of the rubber for years. He can’t go any further! Here is a screenshot from a late September start:

Next, we might look to something mechanical that has had a direct impact on where he is releasing the ball or the angle his arm is at when he releases it. That makes me think of what we know about Giolito in general and what he did to become the pitcher he was from 2019-21. The most obvious thing is his abbreviated arm action. A big piece of unlocking his performance was getting his arm swing timing in line with the rest of his body by shortening it. If he got out whack in the last two seasons, perhaps it’s related to this, even if it’s not as drastic as his early career form. To analyze that, let’s do a video comparison of Giolito in 2021 versus 2023. The first two clips are from 2021 and the next two are 2023:

His arm was late during his run in Cleveland. Visually, when his lead foot stabilized on the ground, his forearm was still below 45 degrees. Ben Brewster from Tread Athletics has stated that an “on time” arm is between 45 to 90 degrees at contact/stabilization, while slightly late is from 25-45, and late is less than 25. In both Cleveland clips, Gio’s arm is hardly getting to 25 degrees when his lead leg block contacts the ground. In Chicago, he is hovering somewhere around 60 degrees, give or take.

Basically, we know what Giolito’s arm looks like when it’s on time. When looking at where he was in Cleveland, it’s clear he was later than is ideal for him. In terms of release point and command, it makes sense that he has lost some feel. His arm is in a different position than when he was succeeding. Trying to execute the same game plan with this difference, even if it is slight, can be difficult. The good news is that this change hasn’t affected his health or ability to maintain volume. The bad news is that if his body isn’t as mobile in some areas as it was in his mid-20s, these positions might not be as attainable.

Even if Giolito doesn’t make a return to his peak form from a few years ago, he is still a positive addition for the Red Sox. As their rotation is currently constructed, it’s highly plausible that he will lead the team in innings, as no other pitcher on the roster has ever thrown more than 180 in their respective careers. Giolito is a good start to raising their floor, but they need a sure-thing, high-quality pitcher. And while Chris Sale isn’t that pitcher anymore, trading him to Atlanta only further increases their need. What they do from here on will depend on their willingness to open their pocket book or deal from their core of position player prospects.

The Mariners have made their first significant upgrade of the offseason, inking Mitch Garver to a two-year deal worth $24 million. Formerly a member of the Twins and Rangers, the soon-to-be 33-year-old Garver first made a name for himself in the peak of the juiced ball era, clubbing 31 homers in just 93 games while slugging .630 in his 2019 campaign. He hasn’t reached such heights since, but Garver has remained an offensive threat, even as he’s struggled to stay healthy and demonstrate his prowess over a full season.

Let’s take a look at the best-hitting catchers of 2023. In the modern era of lower catcher workloads and backstops moonlighting at first base, DH, and even in the outfield, you can define “best-hitting catcher” in many ways. But for now, I’ll just use primary catchers as defined by our leaderboards:

On the surface, Garver was the best offensive catcher in the league, along with former teammate Ryan Jeffers, who broke out in his first season as Minnesota’s “primary” backstop (his 82 starts behind the plate were barely a majority). Michael Baumann pointed out last month that Garver is masterful at waiting for his pitch and then pulling it out of the yard. Those pitches are usually fastballs, which he’s crushed with authority throughout his career to the tune of a +51 run value. Over time, pitchers have picked up on his tendencies, throwing him breaking balls at a 98th-percentile rate. And while 2023 marked an improvement in his results against bendy stuff, Garver’s success in spite of this has come thanks to his selective aggression, patiently waiting for heaters in his wheelhouse. Read the rest of this entry »

On December 26, the New York Yankees sent 26-year-old outfielder Estevan Florial to the Cleveland Guardians in exchange for 27-year-old reliever Cody Morris.

Florial has appeared in parts of four big league seasons but has never had more than 71 plate appearances in any one of them. He’s accumulated enough playing time to lose rookie eligibility but not enough to evaluate him based on his big league performance; he’s still more or less an older prospect. I considered Florial to be one of the Yankees’ best couple of prospects in the 2018-19 window, but his strikeouts became excessive at the upper levels (usually hovering around 30%) and, especially after the pandemic season, I began to move off of him. After a rough introduction to Triple-A in 2021, Florial has had two really solid seasons, with a wRC+ in the 124-130 range each of the last two years. He experienced a substantial uptick in his power output as a 25-year-old at Triple-A Scranton in 2023, as Florial clubbed 25 homers in just 101 games, matching his combined Triple-A total from 2022 and 2021 across 180 games. Read the rest of this entry »