Victor Scott II has received a lot of attention lately, and for good reason. The 22-year-old outfielder swiped 94 bases this past season between High- and Double-A, then added 18 more representing the St. Louis Cardinals in the Arizona Fall League. Moreover, his left-handed stroke produced a .303/.369/.425 slash line over 618 plate appearances against Midwest League and Texas League pitching. Flying below the radar when he was taken in the fifth round of the 2022 draft out of West Virginia University, the speedster is now widely viewed as one of the most promising players in the Cardinals’ pipeline.

The focus the Atlanta native has received lately has understandably centered on his plus-plus wheels and his improved hit tool. Neither of those subjects was broached when I spoke to Scott over the phone in early December — this a few weeks before he graduated from WVU with a degree in Interdisciplinary Studies. Instead, we discussed his burgeoning music career. Scott is not only on the fast track to the big leagues, he is also an accomplished rapper.

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David Laurila: You’ve recorded a number of rap songs. Tell me about that.

Victor Scott II: “It’s something I can’t really do in-season, and I couldn’t really do at school, because I didn’t have a studio. Here at home, I can get in there with Quinn Carter — one of my best friends from back in the day — to kind of hang out and make music. It’s therapeutic. It allows me to get whatever off my mind, and also to be imaginative. It’s a cool little outlet, man. It’s great.” Read the rest of this entry »

For the last two offseasons, the Mets have operated with shock and awe, signing every free agent that wasn’t nailed down en route to building a team that could trade blows with the Braves atop the NL East. As you may have heard, that didn’t exactly pan out. So this offseason, they’re taking a new tack with a string of interesting signings that play below the top of the market. That trend continued over the weekend, when the Mets signed Sean Manaea to a two-year, $28 million deal, as Jon Heyman first reported.

As Kyle Kishimoto noted in our free agent preview, Manaea spent 2023 swinging wildly between roles for a Giants team that needed pitching help all over the place. He was a starter, long reliever, setup guy, whatever the situation demanded. He performed adequately in that tough job, but when he opted out of his contract after the season, it seemed likely that he’d look for a full-time starting spot. That’s where he’ll slot in on the Mets, who have spent the offseason remaking a rotation that had a lot of holes to fill after 2023’s trade spree. Read the rest of this entry »

The Mariners and Rays had a busy Friday last week, combining to make three trades involving seven players. Seattle got things started with a three-player swap with the San Francisco Giants, shipping Robbie Ray to the Bay Area in exchange for Mitch Haniger, Anthony DeSclafani, and cash considerations. Then the M’s and the Rays exchanged José Caballero and Luke Raley, before Tampa Bay finished off the day by sending Andrew Kittredge to St. Louis for Richie Palacios. Both the Mariners and Rays dealt from areas of strength to address areas of need, giving both teams greater roster clarity as the offseason moves towards spring training.

Just two years ago, the three players involved in the first trade of the day would have garnered much bigger headlines. In 2021, Ray, Haniger, and DeSclafani combined to accumulate 9.4 WAR, with Ray winning the American League Cy Young award. In the two seasons since then, however, the trio has combined for just 3.3 WAR, largely thanks to a litany of injuries. Ray was completely healthy in 2022, but he wasn’t able to replicate his award-winning performance in his first season in Seattle and then made just a single start in 2023 before needing Tommy John surgery. Haniger has never been a model of health — he’s played just two full seasons in his seven-year career — and missed time with ankle, back, oblique, and forearm injuries the past two seasons. DeSclafani managed just five starts in 2022 thanks to a recurring ankle injury, then wore down towards the end of last year with shoulder fatigue and forearm inflammation. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the first weekend of 2024, the Colorado Rockies made their first foray into the major league free agent market. And heavens to Betsy, they are loaded for bear.

Catcher Jacob Stallings signed a one-year deal for $1.5 million, which will count as $2 million for CBT purposes thanks to a potential $500,000 buyout of his 2025 mutual option. (Not that anyone cares; the Rockies are close to $75 million short of hitting the lowest tax threshold.) Dakota Hudson will also make $1.5 million in base salary, with the potential to double his money with innings-based incentives. The former Mississippi State right-hander is due one more season in arbitration after this.

Both players had been non-tendered by their previous clubs in November. Read the rest of this entry »

Kala’i Rosario won the Arizona Fall League’s Home Run Derby this past November, and he did so in impressive fashion. Not only did the 21-year-old Minnesota Twins outfield prospect pummel a total of 25 baseballs over the fence at Mesa’s Sloan Park, the longest of them traveled a power hitter-ish 465 feet. By and large, that is what Rosario’s game is all about. As Eric Longenhagen pointed out last summer, the 6-foot, 212-pound Papaikou, Hawaii native had previously won the 2019 Area Code Games Home Run Derby and he “swings with incredible force and has big raw power for his age.”

Rosario’s setup in the box stood out to me as much as his ability to bludgeon baseballs when I watched him capture the AFL’s derby crown. The right-handed hitter not only had his feet spread wide, he had next to no stride. I asked him about that following his finals victory over Toronto Blue Jays infield prospect Damiano Palmegiani.

“Tonight my setup was a little different, but in games I usually do a small stride, so it wasn’t a big difference,” Rosario told me. “I have power already, so I don’t lock into my coil too much. When I get into the box I kind of preset everything, and from there it’s just letting my hands do the work.”

Improving his contact skills is both a goal and a necessity for the slugger. Rosario had a 29.6% strikeout rate to go with his .252/.364/.467 slash line and 21 home runs in 530 plate appearances with High-A Cedar Rapids. As Longenhagen also opined in his midseason writeup, Rosario’s “high-effort swing has zero precision.” Widening out and shortening up have been part of his effort to alleviate that issue. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »