Christian Walker had to wait for an opportunity. Drafted as a first baseman by the Orioles out of the University of South Carolina in 2012, he came up through Baltimore’s system at the same time that Chris Davis was bashing home runs on a regular basis. Then he found himself with a team where the player ensconced at his position was even better: In 2017 and ’18, Walker was buried behind Paul Goldschmidt on the Diamondbacks’ depth chart. When he celebrated his 28th birthday in March 2019, he had all of 61 big league games under his belt.

Opportunity finally came that season — Goldschmidt was traded to the Cardinals over the winter — and Walker didn’t waste it. Displaying the plus power that has remained his calling card, he went deep 29 times and logged a .348 OBP and a .476 slugging percentage. He’s an even better hitter now, heading into the current campaign on the heels of a 2022 season that saw him go deep 36 times with a 122 wRC+.

More than opportunity was behind the slugger’s breakthrough. Six years ago, he began an evolution that has turned him what he is today: a bona fide hitting nerd. Walker discussed that transformation prior to a recent spring training game.

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David Laurila: You had a breakthrough season in 2019. Was that mostly a matter of opportunity, or was it more about adjustments you’d made?

Christian Walker: “A little bit of both. Some of it was diving into the hitting side of things, the mechanics. I’m a tinkerer at heart, so it’s fun for me to think about new things and try to unlock something. But to be honest, it’s really about being surrounded by a great staff. They know where my head goes when I want to work on something and start asking questions. It’s good to have guys like [hitting coach] Damion Easley around to keep me competitive and less mechanical.

“That said, the whole conversion started in 2015 when I got introduced to a hitting guy back in Pennsylvania. Jon Walton is at Diamond Dreams Baseball Academy, and he’s shown me this whole other world of hitting. We grew up in similar baseball circles — I’m from just outside of Philly — and he really understands the data side of hitting. It’s helpful for me to have somebody to filter the helpful stuff from the getting-lost-in-the-weeds conversations.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Cardinals have put themselves in a bit of a bind. They take sustainability seriously, building to compete both now and tomorrow. They never rebuild, never go all in, and always balance the present and future responsibly. If your goal is to win forever, you have to think about more than just the next year when you make a decision. For all that focus on long-term planning, though, they have a lackluster rotation, and it’s slated to get a lot worse after this year.

Of St. Louis’ top five starting options, only one, Steven Matz, came into the spring under contract for 2024. That might not be a problem if there were a heaping helping of starting pitching prospects knocking on the door to the major league clubhouse, but there aren’t. Gordon Graceffo isn’t far off, and if you’re willing to do a lot of projecting, Tink Hence might be major league ready before too long, but the up-and-down fifth starters and swingmen with live arms that other teams use to bulk up their starting rotation in times of need don’t really exist here.

Now, the Cardinals have two starters under contract for 2024 after signing Miles Mikolas to a contract extension that will pay him $40 million for the 2024 and ’25 seasons, as Derrick Goold first reported. That doesn’t exactly create a complete 2024 starting rotation, but it’s twice as many pitchers as St. Louis had before last Friday. Bam, problem solved! Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve reached the point in the offseason when it’s time for one of my favorite/most hated preseason traditions: my attempt to predict breakouts and busts. Since any breakouts or busts beyond what a projection system suggests are naturally going to be low-probability outcomes, there’s a high probability of me looking pretty silly — something writers try to avoid. Let’s start by looking back at how smart I was last year… or how foolish:

First, from the comments in the hitter articles, there’s still some lingering confusion on what I mean by a breakout or bust. When I pick a player to break out or bust, I’m basing this relative to the general expectations as I perceive them, not relative to the previous season’s performance. For example, Joey Gallo is a bust not because I think he’ll be worse than last season, but because I think he’ll be worse than those baked-in expectations; there has been a lot of speculation that the shift will save him, and I don’t think that’s true. You see this on the financial markets quite a bit, when the market reacts negatively to good news that’s not as good as what was already priced into the valuations, and vice-versa. Also remember, that this isn’t necessarily me versus ZiPS; sometimes ZiPS agrees with me, and sometimes it angrily disagrees, or at least it would if I didn’t have the power to delete it from existence.

Back to business. Kikuchi was one of my worst breakout picks ever, and while I was correct that his BABIP and strikeout rates would bounce back from the second half of 2021, I missed his overall command being significantly worse, the slider being an ultra-disaster, and the resulting awful season. Howard ended up in the minors after a horrific opening week, and while he pitched well in the minors, I’m certainly not going to claim any victory based on translations! I’m still not sure what to make about Rodriguez’s season, which featured a ribcage strain and a mysterious stint on the restricted list thanks to persona/family reasons. Graterol pitched well, but he’s still not hitting the strikeout rates I think his stuff could be giving him.

On the plus side, McKenzie was solid, Suarez became one of the better relievers in the league after that first rough patch, and Luzardo did, in fact, have his walks under control. I thought Cease would be a serious Cy Young contender and he was; I’m still fuming that he didn’t make the All-Star Game.

Without further ado, let’s get to the picks, and may the baseball fates have mercy on my soul. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier today, we looked at the teams in the bottom half of the league’s rotations. Now to close out the positional power rankings, we look at the game’s best.

Welcome to the last installment of our positional power rankings (well, other than tomorrow’s summary post). We’ve saved the best for last, whether you’re looking for total projected WAR or stars named. The best pitchers in baseball are increasingly pitching together, leading to two- and even three-star team-ups that dot the top of our rankings. It’s still an overall squad ranking, though, which means the teams that emerge on top combine stars with depth that can chip in either to the back of the rotation or higher up if injuries demand it.

Oh, yeah: injuries play a big part in this year’s list. Whether it’s the Yankees and their strange mix of depth and uncertainty, the Rangers signing a trio of talented but oft-injured starters, or the Brewers hoping to get enough innings from the top end of their rotation to buy time to figure out the bottom, how the depth chart shakes out and how many innings the top starters pitch will determine who ends up getting the most out of their starters this year. It’s not even just injuries to stars; health matters for depth options too, as teams invariably find out when they’re calling James Shields in August to see if he’s available. Read the rest of this entry »

Do you want to see baseball’s brightest young talents get a chance on the biggest stage? Do you want teams to care more about winning now than saving a few bucks six years down the road? If so, you probably had a good weekend. Anthony Volpe, 21 years old and the no. 11 prospect on the FanGraphs Top 100, has made the Yankees out of camp. Jordan Walker, 20 years old and the no. 12 prospect in baseball, has likewise made the Cardinals and will figure into an intriguing outfield rotation. Let us rejoice and be glad.

Jeff Passan summed up the news from the weekend thusly: “Service-time manipulation still exists. But new CBA rules that incentivize teams to start the year with top prospects are working.”

Those rules, which came into force a year ago, reward teams that promote high-performing prospects early. The specific mechanism, which ties top-100 prospect lists and BBWAA award voting to cash bonuses for players and draft pick bonuses for teams, has its issues, but the intent is good. Service time manipulation is black-letter illegal under the CBA, but in practical terms it’s been practically impossible to prove — so much so that executives can talk openly about doing it without fear of repercussion. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, we ranked baseball’s bullpens. Today, we turn our attention to the starters, beginning with the rotations that project in the bottom half of the league.

The starting pitching pool is tightening once again. This year’s bottom half features four teams with a 40% or better chance at making the playoffs, including a pair of projected division winners. That isn’t because those teams are overrated and have bad staffs, either, but rather that there is a tight middle class of rotations in the league right now. The teams ranked ninth through 20th are separated by just 3 WAR, with the American League having eight of those clubs. The National League has an intriguing group of teams at 21st-24th that are all a breakout or two away from joining that middle class. Even the very bottom got a boost this year, as last year’s 30th-ranked club (Arizona) checked in with just 5.8 projected WAR while this year’s 30th-ranked Nationals are more than a win clear of that mark at 7.1 WAR. Both leagues have their bottom feeders, with the National League getting the 29th and 30th ranked squads and the American League checking in with the next four. Read the rest of this entry »

With baseball’s time of game issue resolved (I say with just a hint of hyperbole), MLB’s battle with sticky substances is back to being a top priority for the league offices, or so we can gather from the latest league-wide memo on the subject. After the first crackdown mid-season in 2021, we saw a pronounced dip in spin rates and spin-to-velocity ratio across baseball, an apparent sign that pitchers were responding to the league’s concerns. When the league renewed its commitment to inspecting pitchers at the start of the 2022 season, this impact appeared to persist through the early spring. But as the season went on, it was well-reported that league-wide rates began to creep back up, nearing pre-crackdown levels by August of last season.

While in 2021, two pitchers were issued the 10-game suspension MLB had promised in the event of a transgression, there were no such violations in 2022, only this weird moment between Madison Bumgarner and umpire Dan Bellino and this high-profile ear massage for Joe Musgrove courtesy of Buck Showalter in the deciding game of the NL Wild Card Series. But the league has taken note of the elevated rates and now means business: umpires are being empowered to check pitchers randomly and at will, urged to increase their scrutiny in “frequency and scope.” The memo seems to say: “no, seriously, please stop doing that.” Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier today, Kyle Kishimoto kicked off our reliever rankings. Now we’ll take a look at the bullpens projected to be baseball’s best.

There are some positions for which a cleaner, wider gap exists between the top teams and the bottom, where we can more definitively say that some teams are better than others. For instance, the combination of talent and depth that the Blue Jays have at the catching position separates them from the rest of baseball. Relief pitching is not one of these positions. Sure, we have the bullpens ranked, and you can see their statistical projections above and below, but be sure to notice how thin the margins tend to be here, and know that relief inning sample sizes are small enough that this is where WAR is the least good at properly calibrating impact and value. Things like managerial usage, depth, and roster flexibility tend to play a huge role in the way bullpens perform throughout a season, and those are factors we can’t totally control for here. Read the rest of this entry »

After wrapping up our position player rankings with the league’s designated hitters, we turn our attention to the pitchers, starting with the bullpens in the bottom half of the reliever rankings.

Relievers are really, really tough to project. From the tiny sample sizes of previous seasons’ work to uncertainty over a pitcher’s role and the wide variety of offseason mechanical and pitch mix adjustments they make in search of a big breakout, it’s uniquely difficult to accurately forecast the future effectiveness of individual relievers. Still, some relievers are clearly a cut above the rest, and a commonality among the teams in the bottom half of there rankings is that they don’t have many of them. Less than two wins separate teams no. 16 and 30, and in order to exceed their projections, they’ll be looking for their up/down or replacement-level arms to hit their high-percentile upside and factor as high-leverage options on their respective squads. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s always dangerous to put too much stock in spring training performances. Take last year for example. If you just went by spring training stats, you would have predicted Paul Goldschmidt for MVP (hey, pretty good!) and Patrick Corbin for Cy Young (I award you no points, and may God have mercy on your soul). All the same, with Opening Day on Thursday, it’s time to learn what we can from spring training performances. Luckily we have more Statcast data than ever, some of which stabilizes much faster than traditional performance stats. As of Sunday night, 1,650 batters have seen at last one pitch during spring training this year. 11 of the ballparks that have hosted spring training games are set up for Statcast, and we have exit velocity data on at least 15 balls in play for 199 players. That might not sound like much to go on, but there’s definitely some signal among the noise.

Here are the numbers: 188 players have had at least 200 PAs in one season, then the next season had at least 15 spring training BIP measured by Statcast and then took 200 regular-season PAs. On the left are the regular-season average exit velocities from season one to season two; on the right are the average exit velocities from season two’s spring training and regular season.

If you’re trying to predict regular-season exit velocity, you’d obviously rather have 200-plus PAs worth of information from last year (r=.71) than 15-plus BIP from this year’s spring training (r=.50). However, the correlation between spring training and regular-season exit velocity is still plain to see, and if you regress it with the previous season’s exit velocity, the correlation gets stronger still (r=.76). Spring training performance contains enough signal to identify some real standouts for further analysis.

In this article we’re focusing on three players who are surprising or otherwise notable, so apologies to established players like Pete Alonso, Francisco Lindor, Bo Bichette, Bryan Reynolds, and Ryan McMahon. Your baseball bashing has become humdrum and unexciting. Congratulations on your continued excellence, but please move along, because we need to talk about Jake Cave.

Jake Cave
In December, the Phillies claimed Cave off waivers from the Orioles, who had claimed him off waivers from the Twins in October. Over parts of five seasons in Minnesota, he posted a 92 wRC+ in 1,015 PAs. Since arriving in Clearwater, he’s posted a 61.5% hard-hit rate and 92.3 mph average exit velocity.

Cave doesn’t walk enough to be the platonic ideal of a three true outcomes player; he needs to slug enough to overcome a walk-to-strikeout ratio that is best viewed with an electron microscope. He managed that feat in 2018 and ’19, but the Cave of recent vintage has been a shadow of himself. We’ll let him explain, but before you read the quote below, go ahead and take a big sip of water, because the reveal is really something.

“I know when I’m healthy, I can bring some things to the table. I’m just trying to show that. I’m 30 but I feel just as strong, just as fast as I’ve ever felt in my life. I’m in a pretty good spot. It was an injury thing. I broke my back in 2021. I think that was a big deal because I’d been feeling that for a while. I don’t know how it happened but it happened. In 2021, I was hurting to start the year but played through it. Then I eventually got an MRI and broke an L5.”

Just to recap: Jake Cave feels great. Jake Cave was playing through a broken back but didn’t realize it. Jake Cave thinks the broken back might have been a big deal.

News reports at the time referred to Cave’s injury as a stress reaction, but either way, he deserves a little bit of grace here. In the short 2020 season, plenty of players — Nolan Arenado, for example — had what could just have been a bad start in any other season, but instead became a down year. Cave dealt with a pretty serious injury in 2021. We can’t just ignore the fact that it’s been three years since he had success at the big league level, but in 2022 he posted a career-lowest strikeout rate, and his hard-hit rate and average exit velocity were above league-average for the first time since 2019. His groundball rate plummeted, but unfortunately so did his line drive rate and his pull rate. Essentially, Cave hit a lot more fly balls to the big part of the ballpark, and he didn’t have the strength to send them over the fence.

Cave hit a ball 110.5 mph a few weeks ago, a height he hadn’t reached since 2019, and he’s also another year removed from the broken back business, which, again, might have been a big deal. He could be working with some strength that he didn’t have last year. If he can go back to pulling the ball a bit more or even just maintain last year’s batted ball profile and with a little bit more power (and in a smaller ballpark), he would go back to being a solid hitter.

Spencer Torkelson
Spencer Torkelson had solid exit velocity numbers last year, but that didn’t translate into solid performance. As Jay Jaffe said in the first base positional power rankings, “Torkelson has nowhere to go but up.” ZiPS agrees, pegging him for a 115 wRC+, a whopping 39-point jump from his rookie season. He is running a 66.7% hard-hit rate and a 96.2 mph exit velocity during spring training, and maybe just as importantly, he has one of the biggest sample sizes on the list, with 33 balls in play measured by Statcast. He’s hit 12 of them at least 105 mph.

Last year, Torkelson posted a 41.4% hard-hit rate and a 90.5 mph average exit velocity. He had three different stretches of at least 30 balls in play with a hard-hit rate over 50% (one of them peaked at 63%). During those three stretches, his average exit velocity peaked at 92.2, 93.6, and 96.3 mph, respectively. That is to say, he isn’t doing something completely new, but he’s showing that even when he was going right last year, he still had more in the tank.

But if you’ve been following the Tigers in spring training, you know that even though Torkelson is crushing the ball, he can’t buy a base hit, and that’s a familiar story. In 2022, his xwOBA outpaced his wOBA by 33 points, the 11th-highest difference among all qualified batters. Maybe some of that was bad luck, but the longer it goes on, the more likely it looks the issue is with his batted ball profile. Torkelson hits entirely too many balls on the ground, especially too many of his hard-hit balls, which renders all his loud contact less meaningful. Last year, his average exit velocity was in the 78th percentile, but his xISO, which he underperformed by 35 points, was in the 51st. Take a look at the 15-day rolling averages of Torkelson’s wRC+ and his groundball rate:

The two are pretty much mirror images. Torkelson was terrible when he put the ball on the ground and great when he didn’t. He ran a 40.3% groundball rate in 2022 and is currently at 35.9% in spring training.

This spring, Torkelson has also been getting better pitches to hit by being more aggressive earlier in the count. As a result, he’s walked at less than half his 2022 clip, and his strikeout rate has stayed the same. It’s great that he’s crushing the ball in spring training, and his .278/.328/.389 slash line is still much better than last year’s. All the same, it looks like hitting the ball harder will not, on its own, take him to the next level.

Mark Vientos
Speaking of leveling up, Jon Heyman reported on Friday that Mark Vientos had a better shot to make the Mets’ opening day roster than Brett Baty. Then on Saturday, both Vientos and Baty were reassigned to minor league camp. After both players torched the minors last year and spring training this year, GM Billy Eppler performed the Thank You Mario! But Our Princess Is in Another Castle routine, explaining that the pair still have “some development objectives to reach.” When asked what those objectives were, Eppler served reporters a delectable word salad: “Just continuing to get tested in different game situations. Learning the speed, when to give ground, when to take ground. Just being put in different types of circumstances, different types of situations.”

Of all players with at least 15 balls in play recorded by Statcast, Vientos ran the second-highest average exit velocity of the spring at 97.5 mph. He had a 60% hard-hit rate over 20 recorded BIP. On his non-recorded balls in play, he went 8-for-14 with three doubles, so it’s not as if he just happened to hit the ball hard when the cameras were on. Baty has been performing quite well himself, although his exit velocities are more in the Really Quite Good range rather than the Destroyer of Worlds range.

Both players are 23, and it’s pretty clear that Baty has all the seasoning he needs to get a real shot. It would be surprising if he didn’t get called up to take over at third base after a few weeks of working on his defense continuing to get tested in different game situations.

Vientos is a different story for a couple reasons. First, he’s well and truly blocked, so much so that Eric Longenhagen, who ranked him as the organization’s sixth-ranked prospect last July, mentioned him as a trade candidate. Vientos is a third baseman in theory, but he doesn’t field well. He’s blocked by Eduardo Escobar and Baty at third and by Alonso at first. Our depth charts have Darin Ruf 러프 and Tommy Pham getting the lion’s share of PAs against lefties, with Daniel Vogelbach mashing righties as usual.

Next is Vientos’ profile. He has absolutely slugged his way up the Mets’ system, with a .210 ISO over five minor league seasons, running decent walk rates and extremely high strikeout rates. ZiPS projects him for a 107 wRC+ this year, but with a 32.6% strikeout rate. Last year only one qualified batter had a higher strikeout rate. Vientos will need every last bit of that power if he’s going to be an effective big league hitter.

If that profile sounds familiar, it’s because everything you just read about Vientos applies equally to Ruf. ZiPS sees him bouncing back from a rocky 2022 to post a 111 wRC+ with a .178 ISO and a 28.8% strikeout rate. It’s understandable that the team would give the 36-year-old Ruf a chance to prove that he can regain his old form before casting him aside for a rookie with essentially the exact same profile.

Still, it must be frustrating for Vientos, who has done everything to the baseball save light it on fire in trying to make the team this spring. He didn’t see great results during his brief big league debut last year, but he posted a 45.8% hard-hit rate and a 93.3 mph exit velocity across 24 batted balls and 41 PAs. He would seem to be as good an option as Ruf right now, and if the 23-year-old should ever close up any of the holes in his game — chasing less, elevating the ball more — all that loud contact should yield big results.