The National League Rookie of the Year award was announced on Monday evening, with Michael Harris II of the Braves taking home the honor. Harris earned the hardware by collecting 22 of 30 first-place votes from the BBWAA writers, convincingly beating out teammate Spencer Strider, who only collected eight (and was left off one ballot completely), including mine.

Getting inappropriately annoyed with year-end awards — more specifically in 1995, the year Mo Vaughn beat Albert Belle in the AL and Dante Bichette confusingly finished second in the NL — was one of the things that got me reading Usenet. A high schooler at the time, I had little idea that it was the start of an astonishing career path. And even back then, I was frustrated that the writers who voted for these awards didn’t always make convincing arguments about their picks and, occasionally, offered no justifications at all. I still believe that this kind of transparency is crucial for the legitimacy of any type of award. This is ostensibly an expert panel — if it’s not, there’s no purpose for the award to exist — and as such, a secret ballot is not appropriate the way I believe it is for, say, a presidential or parliamentary election.

In my previous Rookie of the Year ballots, I gave my first-place votes to Corey Seager, Pete Alonso, and Trevor Rogers. The last one basically ruined my social media for a week. I had expected more writers to pick Jonathan India, but I felt (and still do) that Rogers had a slightly stronger case for the award. While it wouldn’t have changed my vote, I freely admit that I would have preferred to be one of three or five Rogers voters rather than end up being alone!

As usual, I will now endeavor to explain why I voted for the players I voted for. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not sure if you know this about me, but there are two things that I’ve always loved to do. First, I like to make things about me, even if the connection is tenuous. Second, I like to go over my own past decisions and see if there’s anything I can learn from them, hopefully without being too self-serving. I have great news – well, for me at least. Two free agent signings last week – Robert Suarez to the Padres and Rafael Montero to the Astros – have given me an opportunity to do both.

Of course, I don’t want to give either player short shrift. Both are excellent in their own right, late-inning relievers coming off of effective 2022 seasons and high-leverage postseason work. Egotistical as I am, I can’t completely ignore them and only talk about myself. As a compromise, I’ll start by profiling each player and their new contract. From there, we’ll move on to discussing why neither was on my Top 50 Free Agents ranking, and what I think I did wrong in making the list. Read the rest of this entry »

Even though Dansby Swanson checks in at number eight on our recently published top 50 free agent rankings, it feels like no one knows just how much to believe in him. Obviously, that’s not completely true. I’m sure Swanson strongly believes in himself. There’s a Re-sign Dansby Swanson petition on Change.org; I bet the 12 people who signed it believe in him quite a bit too. The rest of us, however, fall somewhere in the middle.

Swanson had a career year in 2022. His 6.4 WAR was 12th best in all of baseball, and 3.0 above his 2021 total. While the big jump is encouraging, it also makes him a regression candidate. Of the 83 position players with 500 plate appearances in both 2021 and ’22, only four improved their WAR total more. Aaron Judge improved by 5.9 WAR in 2022, and it’d be extremely unreasonable to expect him to put up anything like a repeat performance. The next three players, Eugenio Suárez, Nolen Arenado, and Manny Machado, were all bouncing back from a down year in 2021. Like Swanson, all three saw their BABIP improve by at least 40 points. Swanson was the only player of the group whose WAR in 2022 was three wins higher than in their best previous season. Read the rest of this entry »

In a slightly unexpected but not at all shocking move, the Tampa Bay Rays sent first baseman Ji-Man Choi to the Pittsburgh Pirates last Thursday in exchange for low-minors pitching prospect Jack Hartman. The move was a little surprising, at least to those not familiar with Tampa Bay’s 40-man picture. Choi is a talented, inexpensive player who played a clear role for the Rays. He established himself as a fan favorite at Tropicana Field over the past five years, and there was a brief time this offseason (for about four or five hours) when he was the longest-tenured position player in Tampa. He has no clear successor in the Rays organization. Even Choi himself seemed to be caught off guard by the move. The swap was rather unexpected from a Pirates perspective, too. I can’t say I thought we’d see a rebuilding team send away a prospect for a veteran in one of the first noteworthy trades of the offseason.

Upon closer inspection, however, it’s easy to see why both teams swung this deal. The Rays have a surplus of young players in the majors who need playing time and a surplus of young players in the minors who will be eligible for the Rule 5 Draft this December if they aren’t added to the 40-man roster. Choi is a known quantity on the wrong side of 30 who doesn’t offer much in the way of positional flexibility – aside from the occasional full split at first base, that is. This is more than a simple salary dump on Tampa’s part; they have better ways to use Choi’s roster spot, an unfortunate reality for fans who grew to love his joyful attitude and impassioned bat flips. As for Pittsburgh, they finished the 2022 season without a regular first baseman and needed to find someone to fill that hole. They may not be contenders, but they still have to play 162 games, and adding another good bat to the middle of the lineup will make those games far more watchable. As an added bonus, if everything goes right, the Pirates could find themselves sneaking into contention in a weak NL Central division. Adding Choi would look like a brilliant move in retrospect. More likely, the Pirates will fall out of contention by the trade deadline and flip Choi for a lottery ticket or two. Read the rest of this entry »

The Astros inexplicably jettisoned General Manager James Click six days after winning the World Series. Jim Crane, whose reputation isn’t exactly stellar, offered Click just a one-year deal to remain in Houston — a veritable slap in the face given what the team had just accomplished. For all intents and purposes, the owner’s offer was an invitation to vamoose. Crane wanted Click gone.

With rumors of his dismissal rampant, Click fielded a barrage of questions regarding his future when he met with the media during this week’s GM meetings in Las Vegas. Not wanting to beat what was essentially a dead horse, I asked the highly-successful executive about something entirely different: Which position will be most affected by the forthcoming limitations on defensive shifts?

“My gut reaction would be second base,” replied Click. “You could make a credible case for any of the four infield positions, but I also don’t know how much it’s going to really change the game. We’ll still see teams shift as much as they can within the rules. We’ll see shortstops almost directly behind second base, or second basemen directly behind the bag. So the question becomes: ‘How much do those few feet really change the batter’s approach, and the result?’ That said, I do think we’re going to need more athleticism at all positions. Any time you’re not able to position a guy exactly where the ball is most likely to go, you’re going to have to be able to move a little more to get to those balls.” Read the rest of this entry »

It wasn’t hard to see this coming. Despite taking over their jobs in the wake of the team’s sign-stealing scandal and leading the Astros to the AL’s best record since then, with a 2020 trip to the ALCS, a ’21 pennant and ’22 World Series win to boot, general manager James Click and manager Dusty Baker were both working without contracts beyond this season. Normally, such successful leaders are offered extensions well before their deals expire, but Astros owner Jim Crane refused the courtesy, sending both into the postseason as lame ducks. Both Click’s three-year deal and Baker’s one-year deal officially expired on October 31, before the final out of the team’s World Series triumph. Amid the celebration, Crane said he’d address the matter the following week, and while Baker agreed to return via a one-year deal, Click rejected a one-year offer, ending his tenure atop Houston’s front office.

Frankly, under such circumstances, a single-year offer is an insult, particularly for an organization’s highest-ranking baseball official, the person who is supposed to be the architect of the team. At this point in his storied career, the 73-year-old Baker may be fine with going year to year, but Crane had to know that the 44-year-old Click, who spent 14 years in the Rays’ front office but had never served as a GM before being hired in February 2020, would decline such an offer. With no current GM openings, the parting of the ways may mean that Click spends part or all of 2023 as some team’s special advisor or vice president, not unlike what Alex Anthopoulos did with the Dodgers between his runs as general manager with the Blue Jays and Braves. It does seem likely that by this time next year, Click will get to execute his vision via the security of a long-term deal.

Click inherited a roster that had been put together by predecessor Jeff Luhnow, who was suspended for a year by Rob Manfred as well as fired by Crane when the commissioner issued his report detailing the Astros’ illegal sign-stealing activities in January 2020. Maintaining and augmenting that roster over the past three seasons was no small task given the departures of stars Gerrit Cole, George Springer, and Carlos Correa via free agency. While Click was able to do so largely with players who entered the organization on Luhnow’s watch, it still takes the right judgment to decide that rookie Jeremy Peña, with zero major league experience, was ready to fill Correa’s shoes as of Opening Day, or that Framber Valdez. Cristian Javier, and Luis Garcia could replace the likes of Zack Greinke and Wade Miley. That Click did so with Crane — a demanding boss whose background is with his air-freight logistics business, not in a baseball front office — nosing his way into the operations side post-Luhnow shouldn’t be held against him. Read the rest of this entry »

Another solid pitcher has come off the free agent list on Thursday evening, as Clayton Kershaw is apparently close to a return to the Dodgers on a one-year contract. No financial terms have yet been revealed, but I would expect that the bottom-line figure is similar to the $17 million he made last year, or just a few million dollars more. The team didn’t extend him a qualifying offer, but that may reflect less on what the dollar figure is and more on the fact that he is Los Angeles’ longest-tenured player and a crucial part of the franchise’s history. Bouncing back from an elbow injury that ended his 2021 before the playoffs, Kershaw returned to his usual late-career form, with a 2.28 ERA and 2.57 FIP over 22 starts, good enough for 3.8 WAR and to make him the starting pitcher for the National League in the All-Star Game.

Kershaw has attained the service time and respect with the organization that he’s now one of those players who, as long as he wants to keep returning, can likely receive endless contracts, a status similar to that earned by players such as Adam Wainwright and David Ortiz in recent years. While he avoided a recurrence of the dreaded flexor tendon soreness from 2021, his ongoing back problems limited him to 126 1/3 innings, an expectation that seems likely to repeat going forward. Since leading the league with 232 2/3 innings in 2015, he has only been healthy enough to qualify for the ERA title twice in the last seven seasons. The bigger question wasn’t whether Kershaw would be back in Dodger blue but whether he would be back at all; the general consensus has been that he would either return to the Dodgers, go to his hometown Rangers, or retire.

ZiPS suggests a one-year, $17.6 million contract or a two-year, $31.8 million deal, so the projection is likely in the same zip code, if not the same neighborhood. Read the rest of this entry »

As announced on Monday, the MVP finalists for the 2022 season are Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani, and Yordan Alvarez in the American League, and Manny Machado, Nolan Arenado, and Paul Goldschmidt in the National League. If you check the FanGraphs leaderboards as regularly as I do, that list might sound familiar; not only are those the top three vote-getters for MVP in each league, but they also happen to be the top three players by WAR as well.

That’s not entirely surprising. Since 2008, every position player to have won the MVP finished among the top three in his league in WAR (Legacy WAR, to be specific). There’s nothing wrong with this per se, since the entire purpose of WAR is to measure player value. Still, it’s a little on the nose to see the finalists line up so perfectly with our leaderboards this year, especially in the NL, where the top eight position players all finished within a single win of one another. Read the rest of this entry »

The Rangers spent more than half a billion dollars in new free-agent contracts last year — by far the largest outlay in baseball — and wound up losing 94 games anyway. But while it was not a successful year by any stretch of the imagination, many of those long-term deals set the foundation for the roster as Texas attempts to exit a long rebuilding cycle. And with a solid, if expensive, core to build the lineup around, it isn’t hard to see where the major holes on the roster are: the pitching staff. Last year, the Rangers allowed 4.59 runs per game, 23rd in the majors, and their starters put up ERA- and FIP- marks of 119 and 111, respectively. With Jon Gray essentially the only established option written in pen for the rotation, they have a lot of work to do this offseason.

To that end, the Rangers acquired Jake Odorizzi from the Braves in exchange for Kolby Allard on Wednesday. Atlanta will be covering $10 million of Odorizzi’s $12.5 million salary in 2023 after he exercised his player option prior to being dealt. The unique two-year deal that he signed with Houston in 2021 included a number of performance bonuses and escalating clauses that pushed his player option from a base of $6.5 million to the current $12.5 million salary the Rangers will pay. Those escalators also increased the size of the buyout on his option from $3.25 million to $6.25 million. By meeting all of the thresholds and maxing out his potential salary, his decision to exercise his option became an easy decision. To make things even sweeter, his player option for ‘23 also includes a number of performance bonuses that could increase his total salary to a maximum of $15.5 million.

Odorizzi will be joining his sixth organization in his 12th season as a big leaguer. Over the last two years, he’s posted a league- and park-adjusted ERA (104) and FIP (107) just a hair over league average across 45 starts and 211 innings. These past couple of seasons have been a bit of a disappointment after what seemed like a breakout season back in 2019, when he put up career-bests in FIP, strikeout rate, and WAR. Unfortunately, a host of minor injuries cost him most of the shortened 2020 season and have prevented him from pitching a full season since then. Last season, with a healthy starting rotation full of better options, the Astros traded him straight up for Will Smith (the reliever) at the trade deadline. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday, MLB unveiled the three highest vote-getters for its four major end-of-season awards, including the three top-voted rookies in each league. Steven Kwan, Julio Rodríguez, and Adley Rutschman made the cut from a strong American League pool including playoff double-MVP Jeremy Peña, 2022 preseason No. 2 prospect Bobby Witt Jr., and rotation standouts from across the circuit (George Kirby, Reid Detmers, and Joe Ryan). In the National League, teammates Spencer Strider and Michael Harris II underscored Atlanta’s bright future with quick breakouts. Inaugural Gold Glove utilityman Brendan Donovan complemented his defensive versatility with a 129 wRC+ to earn an underdog spot among the finalists over Jake McCarthy, Seiya Suzuki, and others.

The winners won’t be revealed until this coming Monday, but this week’s announcement was a sort of celebration of a rookie class that lived up to expectations and then some. Award season is about recognition of individual achievement over the past regular season, but in the case of the Rookie of the Year, it also feels like a prospective look at the careers that might be awaiting us. With the talent exhibited by this year’s class, particularly the position players, it seems we have a lot to look forward to. Read the rest of this entry »