It looked like Spenser Watkins’s career might be over when he was released by the Detroit Tigers in July 2020. Six years had passed since he was drafted in the 30th round out of Western Oregon University, and at no point over that span was he viewed as more than a fringe prospect. Possessing neither plus velocity nor a difference-making secondary, the right-hander was coming off a minor league season where he’d logged a 6.07 ERA. That the only offers Watkins was receiving were for non-playing roles wasn’t exactly a surprise.

Then the Orioles came calling. That opportunity, fueled by an education in pitching that he never received with the Tigers, ultimately catapulted him to the big leagues. On July 2, 2021 — nearly a year to the day after Detroit gave up on him — Watkins walked onto a mound in a Baltimore Orioles uniform. A year and half later, the Scottsdale native has 39 major league appearances comprising 160 innings under his belt. Moreover, unlike in his Tigers days, he knows how his arsenal plays.

Watkins discussed his education-driven evolution as a pitcher late in the 2022 season.

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David Laurila: Two years ago, you were a career minor leaguer who’d been let go by the Tigers. How did you go from there to where you are now?

Spenser Watkins: “I was released during the COVID season, so I wasn’t playing; I didn’t go to the alt site, or anything like that. Basically, it was ‘OK, let’s see what the free agent market has to bring.’ Come December, that became, ‘OK, I’ve got to figure out what the next step is; I’ve got to figure out a way to provide for my family.’ Read the rest of this entry »

Ah, yes, another turn in the Carlos Correa saga. After agreeing to a deal with the Giants that fell apart and then agreeing to a deal with the Mets that hung in contract limbo for weeks, Correa is on the move again, back to where he started 2022. As Jeff Passan first reported, Correa and the Twins have agreed to a six-year, $200 million deal with vesting options that could boost the total payout to $270 million over 10 years.

By now you know Carlos Correa the player. He’s been one of the top free agents on the market for two years running, and he’s been one of the most prominent players in the game for half a decade. We’ve written about his free agency plenty of times already. But if you’d like a refresher, here it goes.

Correa has a well-rounded offensive game, the type of hitter you can plug into the middle of your order and not think twice about. He takes his walks and rarely strikes out. He does that not because he has an otherworldly batting eye, but rather because he has a solid sense of the zone and a good feel for contact. It also helps that opposing pitchers prefer to avoid the zone against him, owing to his comfortably plus power. He also plays solid shortstop defense, somewhere between plus and excellent depending on which scout or defensive metric you listen to. Put it all together, and he’s an All-Star level player every year when healthy. Read the rest of this entry »

While the Carlos Correa negotiations remain in a deadlock, the Blue Jays made (some) headlines yesterday by inking Brandon Belt to a one-year deal worth $9.6 million, per multiple sources. Belt, a longtime fixture of the Giants’ offense, is expected to play first base and serve as Toronto’s designated hitter. That means he’ll be sharing time with Vladimir Guerrero Jr. as well as Danny Jansen and Alejandro Kirk, who’ll likely take turns DH’ing to minimize their grueling workload as catchers.

At first, that arrangement doesn’t make immediate sense. What Guerrero, Jansen, and Kirk share in common besides their hatred of incoming baseballs is right-handedness, and righty batters are usually worse against righty pitchers. You might have reasoned that the Jays recruited the lefty-hitting Belt to shore up this particular weakness. But so far in their careers, the aforementioned trio hasn’t shown much of a vulnerability against same-handed pitching. Check out these splits:

So why did the Jays go out of their way to sign Belt? Some potential answers: It’s good to have diversity in a lineup; the Jays needed hitting depth; and Belt, regardless of handedness, is an intriguing rebound candidate. But I have another theory! The main reason why same-handed pitcher-batter matchups tend to end in embarrassment for the batter is because breaking balls are good — almost too good, as the league-wide imbalance between pitchers and batters demonstrates. Or just ask Max Scherzer, who throws his slider exclusively against right-handed hitters and eats them alive. It’s getting more and more important that teams are able to weather such breaking ball barrages. Read the rest of this entry »

For some reason, a clip of Alex Rodriguez yielding shortstop to Cal Ripken Jr. in the latter’s final All-Star game just won’t stop popping up on my Twitter timeline. Maybe it’s because I seem to stop scrolling every time I see it, but regardless, it keeps making me think about the great shortstops who have gone from playing up the middle to patrolling the hot corner during the prime of their careers. Funny enough, Ripken wasn’t one of them. His switch came later in his career, but the guy who yielded to him transitioned after an MVP season. A-Rod moved over upon his trade to the New York Yankees, and the rest is history.

While Carlos Correa technically still doesn’t know where he’ll be playing baseball in 2023, assuming that he and the New York Mets work out a deal, it will involve him ceding his natural position to fellow island mate Francisco Lindor. Correa and Lindor don’t present a perfect parallel to A-Rod and Derek Jeter because the skill differential makes a little more sense this time around. But Correa has long been compared to Rodriguez when it comes to his physical stature, tenacity, and fervor for the game. Now Correa finds himself considering a switch similar to A-Rod’s despite very recently being considered one of the best defensive shortstops in the game. Luckily, in terms of his skill set, Correa is a near-perfect fit to immediately be an elite defender at the hot corner, much like A-Rod’s seamless transition. Before laying out the case defending that transition, let’s take a look at Correa’s fielding metrics over the years:

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I looked into how the predictions at FanGraphs, both crowdsourced and those produced by me, matched the contracts awarded to free agents this offseason. Today, I’d like to dive into a few cases where I made mistakes in individual player predictions, as well as a few I think I did well on. In each case, I’ll try to come up with some takeaways for predicting contracts in the future.

Jacob deGrom
My prediction: 3 years, $141 million
Crowd prediction: 3 years, $120 million
Actual contract: 5 years, $185 million

My lesson here: Don’t predict an unprecedented contract if you’re aiming for accuracy. It made sense to me that Jacob deGrom would sign a deal that outstripped any before him when it comes to average annual value. He’s the best pitcher in the game when healthy, and that was enough for me. Why wouldn’t he have the biggest contract?

That’s a silly way of thinking about it in retrospect. He merited a huge contract, and he got one, but why in the world would someone with his injury history want a short-term deal? In all honesty, it doesn’t need to be more complicated than that. Predicting something outside of the ordinary is fine, but extraordinary predictions should require extraordinary confidence, not merely “I think this would be neat.” Read the rest of this entry »

Free agency has come and gone this offseason. Earlier than we’re used to in recent years, we can look back on this year’s class and make some conclusions. To some extent, that’s a lot of our offseason coverage; what are ZiPS projections and positional power rankings, after all, if not catalogs of how teams have changed their fortunes in the offseason? Today and tomorrow, I thought I’d do something slightly more navel-gazey, and perhaps slightly more useful in the long run, by looking back at my contract predictions to see what went right and what went wrong.

First things first: let’s take an accounting of both the crowd’s and my predictions. I took the contracts signed by each of the top 50 players in free agency. A few clarifying remarks: I removed players who accepted a qualifying offer, as both the crowd and I made our predictions before qualifying offers were extended. I considered only guaranteed years, ignoring options of any type, be they vesting, team, or player. I also ignored incentives and trade kickers. Finally. I’m using Carlos Correa’s rumored deal with the Mets — 12 years, $315 million — even while it’s not yet official and may be amended.

With that out of the way, I grouped the players into positional groups and compared our predictions to real life. How’d it go? Pretty well, actually, for both sides. Positive numbers here mean we under-estimated, and negative numbers represent an over-estimate:

Read the rest of this entry »

Last January, inspired by Cedric Mullins’s 2021 decision to stop switch-hitting, I tried to identify other switch-hitters who might benefit from swinging from one side or the other. Going beyond simply calculating the largest platoon splits, I relied on handedness splits for some of the players’ key underlying batted ball and plate discipline metrics. The idea was that there could be a path to improvement if these switch-hitters eliminated their severe underperformance from one side of the plate. Of course, the other option is simply to work on their weaker swing and become a better overall switch-hitter.

One of the batters I identified as a candidate to hit left-handed full-time was Ian Happ. Through 2021, Happ had posted a 55 point platoon split, the second-highest among the 25 switch-hitters in the sample. Happ crushes right-handed pitching from the left side, but all of his batted ball peripherals are significantly weaker when swinging from the right. Instead of taking my advice (thank goodness), Happ posted the best season of his career against left-handed pitching in 2022:

Read the rest of this entry »

Along with Johnny Evers and Joe Tinker — they of Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance fame — Alan Trammell and Lou Whitaker are the most-storied double-play combination in baseball history. As well they should be. The Detroit Tigers duo played more games together (1,918) than any middle-infield duo in history. Moreover, they combined for 11 All-Star appearances, seven Gold Gloves, seven Silver Sluggers, and they won a World Series together. Both are icons for a franchise that has played in the American League since 1901.

Tinker and Evans, who played together with the Chicago Cubs from 1902-1912, are both in the Hall of Fame. So is Trammell. Meanwhile — this for reasons best explained as inexplicable — Whitaker is not. His exclusion stands as one of Cooperstown’s most glaring omissions.

Whitaker has more WAR and a higher JAWS score than a number of Hall of Fame second basemen, but that can be a debate for another day. For now, let’s focus on how he compares to Evers.

Whitaker: 2,369 hits, 244 home runs, 118 wRC+, 68.1 WAR.
Evers: 1,659 hits, 12 home runs, 109 wRC+, 49.0 WAR.

While Evers’s numbers are anything but great, it should be noted that he won an MVP award and played for three World Series-winning teams (the Cubs twice and the Boston Braves once). That said, it’s highly unlikely that he would be in the Hall of Fame were he not part of a legendary double-play combination (he and Tinker were Old-Timers-Committee selections in the same year). How they became legendary is, of course, a big part of the story. The poem penned in 1910 by sportswriter Franklin Pierce Adams reads: Read the rest of this entry »

When the ball dropped at midnight and 2022 turned into 2023, 29 of the 30 major league teams had signed at least one free agent, from the Mariners spending $1.2 million on Trevor Gott to the Mets agreeing to terms with seemingly every star player on the market. Even the penny-pinching Marlins brought in Jean Segura, and the A’s committed a respectable $34 million to four solid role players. Now, a few days into the new year, team no. 30 has joined the fray: the Brewers are bringing back left-handed pitcher Wade Miley on a one-year contract that will pay him $3.5 million with a $10 million mutual option for ’24 (with a $1 million buyout) and another $1.5 million in playing time incentives. In total, that guarantees him $4.5 million this season.

Formerly an innings eater who completed at least 190 frames every year from 2012 to ’15 with a 98 ERA-, Miley has battled injuries in each of 2018, ’20, and ’22. Last season, he was limited to just nine appearances with the Cubs as he dealt with elbow and shoulder issues. With that in mind, I’ll be looking at his performance in a limited 2022 campaign in conjunction with his full ’21 season, where he barely qualified for the leaderboards with 163 innings pitched. His stats were very similar in those two samples; he ran an ERA in the low-threes with far less inspiring peripherals and near equal numbers in the walk and strikeout departments. Read the rest of this entry »

For years, the baseball offseason had a predictable rhythm. When the World Series ended, we’d hit a lull. Around the Winter Meetings, a few Scott Boras clients would sign while he spouted strange, vaguely nautical similes. A few more marquee names would get caught up in Boras’ wake (see what I did there?) and sign as well. Then we’d have a lull around year end, and contract activity would pick up again in the new year.

That pattern hasn’t held even a little bit this winter. As of this writing, 45 of our top 50 free agents have signed, including the entire top 30; many guys who just missed the cut have signed as well. Four years ago, plenty of teams were still looking for free agent help in the first week of January. This year, your options are Johnny Cueto, Jurickson Profar, and then tumbleweeds.

This feels different than previous years of free agency, but I wanted to put some quantitative rigor behind that. I set out to compare this offseason to each previous one. I’ll spend plenty of time going through my methodology below, but first, let’s give the people what they want. This year really is different. Here’s the percentage of all free agents, weighted by previous year WAR, that had signed new deals by December 31 of each offseason since the conclusion of the 2000 season, excluding last year’s lockout weirdness:

The 2022-23 offseason (which I’ll be calling 2023 for simplicity’s sake for the remainder of the article) is tied for the most front-loaded offseason of this millennium. Given that offseasons had been getting progressively slower, that’s a meaningful change. Now, let’s talk about how I got to this conclusion, and come up with a few takeaways about the new landscape of free agency. Read the rest of this entry »