Sorry, but this is going to be kind of a bummer. Our topic today is the crushing weight of statistical determinism. In researching this article, I learned something that increased my knowledge but also decreased my sense of the possible, and it made me a little bit sad. I would now like to share my sadness with you. We’re going to be studying the Victor Robles Problem.

You might not remember the days when Victor Robles was a star prospect. After short, impressive stints in 2017 and ’18, he had a breakout season in 2019, putting up a 92 wRC+ and 3.5 WAR, and finishing sixth in NL Rookie of the Year voting. ZiPS projected him for 3.3 WAR in 2020. If he could take the next step offensively, he’d be a star; if his offense remained just a bit below average, he’d still be a very productive center fielder. Instead, he turned in three straight seasons with a wRC+ under 70. Here are the Statcast gearboxes for his rookie season and 2022:

There’s a whole lot of blue in the top two rows. Plate discipline was the concern when Robles was first called up, and that was certainly an issue, but the lack of power stands out much more. Although his max exit velocity indicates that he has the capacity to hit the ball hard, Robles’ average exit velocity has been in the first percentile in each of his big league seasons, and his hard-hit rate has never been better than fifth percentile. The Victor Robles Problem is a question: Can a player who didn’t hit the ball hard as a rookie ever turn into a good hitter? Read the rest of this entry »

Masataka Yoshida is MLB’s latest NPB import, having been inked to a five-year, $90M contract by the Boston Red Sox earlier this week. A 29-year-old, left-handed-hitting outfielder, Yoshida is coming off of a season where he slashed .335/.447/.561 with 21 home runs for the Orix Buffaloes… and it wasn’t a breakout season. He’s been one of the best hitters in Japan’s top league in each of the last five years.

Who is the best pitcher in NPB? I asked Yoshida that question on Thursday following his introductory press conference at Fenway Park.

“Probably Kodai Senga,” replied Yoshida, citing the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks right-hander who recently signed a 5-year, $75M deal with the New York Mets. “I think he was the best pitcher in Japan.”

Intrigued by that answer, I followed up by asking, via interpreter Keiichiro Wakabayashi, if he feels that Senga is actually better than his former Orix teammate, 24-year-old Yoshinobu Yamamoto. Read the rest of this entry »

The Cubs added to their bullpen on Thursday, signing veteran journeyman Brad Boxberger to a one-year deal with a mutual option for a total guaranteed value of $2.8 million. The 34-year-old right-hander is coming off an effective stint just up I-94 in Milwaukee, where he served as a reliable middle-innings complement to Devin Williams and Josh Hader for the bulk of two seasons after signing as a minor league free agent in spring training of 2021. In those two campaigns, he made 141 appearances, posting a 3.15 ERA, a 3.61 FIP, 10.56 K/9, and 1.5 WAR. Despite his effectiveness with the Brewers, Milwaukee declined to bring him back on a $3 million team option last month, and instead he’ll join a young Chicago bullpen that could use some help after ranking 28th out of 30 bullpens in 2022 in WAR, 25th in situational wins, and second in blown saves.

Thanks to the circumstances of his contracts, Boxberger will end up with a higher guarantee moving forward than he would have if the Brewers had picked up his extra year. According to president of baseball operations Matt Arnold, Boxberger was exposed to waivers and went unclaimed prior to Milwaukee’s decision, which told him that “the market did not value him at the level of the option value.” After they declined, Boxberger was issued a $750,000 buyout and signed for a guarantee of just $200,000 less than the option value, giving him an effective guarantee of over $3.5 million. The structure of his new deal fits the Cubs’ somewhat recent signature of a one-year deal with an unlikely mutual option, giving him a base salary of $2 million in 2023 with an $800,000 buyout on a $5 million dollar mutual option for 2024. Read the rest of this entry »

Masataka Yoshida is an extremely cool ballplayer. The 29-year-old has hit .300/.400/.500 six seasons in a row, and despite 20-homer power and plenty of walks, he never strikes out. I’m serious: in 508 Pacific League plate appearances in 2022, Yoshida walked 80 times and struck out just 41 times. That’s a BB% and K% of 15.7% and 8.1%, respectively. He makes Alejandro Kirk look like Dave Kingman. Now, will a 5-foot-8 left fielder be able to keep hitting 20 homers a year on this side of the Pacific? I don’t know, but I’m excited to find out.

Yoshida is, so far, the crown jewel of the offseason for the Red Sox. Between his five-year contract and posting fee, he cost Boston $105.4 million, a significant outlay for any team. If you roll in the posting fee, that’s within rounding distance of the AAV Brandon Nimmo and Kyle Schwarber got in free agency; that indicates Boston views Yoshida as an impact player at his position.

On Thursday, the Red Sox officially announced Yoshida’s signing and added him to the 40-man roster. In order to make room, they designated Jeter Downs for assignment. And suddenly what should have been a joyous day was dampened by the weight of reflection. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

The final installment of this week’s set of international player updates revolves around the amateur prospects who will begin to sign a month from now when the new international signing period begins on January 15. An overview of the rules that govern signing international amateurs can be found on MLB’s glossary here, while more thorough and detailed documentation can be found starting on page 287 of the CBA (forgive the 2017-21 version – the full text of the latest agreement isn’t publicly available yet), and page 38 of the Official Professional Baseball Rules Book. I pulled out portions of these documents for reference in the pieces published earlier this week and have done so again here, but I suggest readers familiarize themselves further. The international amateur arena is a procedural and ethical mess that has undergone wholesale structural changes several times during my time as a writer, most recently because of what the pandemic did to shift the timeline of each signing period.

Projected signing teams, scouting reports and tool grades on just over 30 players from the 2023 class can now be viewed over on The Board. Because the International Players tab has an apples and oranges mix of older pros from Asian leagues and soon-to-be first-year players, there is no explicit ranking on The Board, but I’ve stacked the class of anticipated 2023 signees in a table below with a ranking for reference should you need it. As has been the case with past classes, after these players sign, they will be pulled off the International Players section of The Board and warehoused in a ranking of their signing class for record-keeping purposes.

As always, the FV grade is a more important measure for readers to focus on than the ordinal rankings here. Because these players are so close in age to the younger prospects who participate in any given domestic draft, I like to use theoretical draft position as a barometer by which to grade the international amateurs. Scouting and comparing international players’ tools and athleticism to those of recent and upcoming domestic amateurs helps me to triangulate approximately where they’d go in a given draft, and assign them a FV based on that approximation. Players with a 40+ FV grade or above tend to be prospects who I think would go in the first two rounds of a draft, while the teenage 40 FV prospects are the sort I’d ballpark in the $700,000 to $1 million bonus range as draft prospects, basically the slot amounts just after the second round. Read the rest of this entry »

What kind of hitter did the Milwaukee Brewers get when they acquired Owen Miller from the Cleveland Guardians on Wednesday in exchange for a player to be named later or cash? Statistically speaking, the answer is someone who put up uninspiring numbers in his first full big-league season. The infielder, who recently turned 26 years old, logged a .287 wOBA and an 85 wRC+ in 472 plate appearances. After starting strong — he had a 1.043 OPS on May 8, and had delivered a number of clutch hits — Miller provided only a modicum of value with the bat.

In terms of his overall development as a hitter, Miller has evolved — intent-wise more than production-wise to this point — from the player who Eric Longenhagen described prior to the 2021 season. Ranking him No. 14 on that year’s Cleveland Top Prospects list, our lead prospect analyst wrote that the former third-round pick out of Illinois State University had a “minimalistic swing [that] enables him to make high rates of contact, while the strength in Miller’s hands generates doubles power.”

Miller stroked 26 doubles this past season, but only six home runs, and he had 93 strikeouts to go with 32 walks. By and large, he remains a work-in-progress — albeit one who can provide value with his versatility while continuing to work on his offensive skills.

The newest Brewer talked hitting in an interview that took place a handful of months into the season, only to be placed on the back burner until now.

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David Laurila: How would you describe yourself as a hitter?

Owen Miller: “I’ve kind of changed, I would say. When I was younger — coming up in college, and in the minors — I was very contact-oriented, with a very line drive approach. I was handsy, trying to manipulate my barrel. Then, over the quarantine period when we had time to work on things… I understood that there are things that elite hitters do as far as using their bodies more, and I started to make some swing changes off of that. Not really swing changes, per se, but rather adjustments. Read the rest of this entry »

Jordan Walker is no. 8 on our Top 100 thanks largely to his bat. As our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen wrote in July, the 6-foot-5, 220-pound St. Louis Cardinals outfield prospect “is one of the most exciting young hitters in the minors, with elite power potential and superlative on-paper performance at Double-A while he’s still not old enough to have a beer.” At season’s end, the 20-year-old Stone Mountain, Georgia native boasted a .306/.388/.510 slash line, with 19 home runs and a 128 wRC+.

His tool set also includes a plus arm, which this writer witnessed firsthand during an Arizona Fall League game. Fielding a ball deep in the right field corner, Walker gunned a strike to second base that had me harkening back to the days of Dwight Evans and Dave Parker. A throw I wasn’t on hand to see was arguably even more impressive. As MLB.com’s Jesse Borek reported in mid-October, Walker “cut the ball loose at 99.5 mph, a throw harder than any by a St. Louis Cardinals outfielder since Statcast began to keep track in 2015.”

Shortly after talking to Walker’s close friend and AZL teammate Masyn Winn — featured here at FanGraphs on Tuesday — I approached the organization’s top-rated prospect to talk about his two most eye-catching assets: his bat and his arm. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m going to start today by telling you something very obvious: the new hot trend in contracts this offseason is extremely long deals. You know it. I know it. Ken Rosenthal says it, so it must be true. Living legend Jayson Stark laid it out as only he can: we’ve seen three free-agent deals of 11 or more years in the last two weeks, as compared to one in the entire previous history of baseball.

What factors are behind this hot new contract structure? Did a financial consultant walk through the Winter Meetings whispering “long contracts are in, pass it on” to team employees? I truly wish that were the case. It could be my big break in starting up Ben Clemens Investigates, and I’ve always wanted to wear a Sherlock Holmes hat. Bad news, though: to the best of my knowledge, that didn’t happen. It didn’t have to happen. The incentives to offer long-term deals are mathematically based, and I’m frankly pretty annoyed that I didn’t see this coming in predicting contracts this offseason. Read the rest of this entry »

Will Warren has quietly, and quickly, emerged as one of the top pitching prospects in the New York Yankees organization. An eighth-round pick in the 2020 draft out of Southwestern Louisiana University, the 22-year-old right-hander made his professional debut this year, and by June he was pitching with Double-A Somerset. On the season, he had a 3.91 ERA and a 3.74 FIP with 125 strikeouts and 119 hits allowed in 129 innings.

His best two pitches have been added to his arsenal since college. Warren’s sweeper, which spins as high as 3,000 rpm, replaced the pedestrian slider he’d thrown as an amateur; his low-to-mid 90s sinker, which helped produce a 53% ground ball rate, was developed just this past season. His physique has transformed, as well. The 6-foot-2 hurler now packs close to 200 pounds on his once-lean frame, giving him a more-projectable starter’s build.

Warren discussed his developmental strides late in the 2022 season.

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David Laurila: Let’s start with your M.O. on the mound. How do you get guys out?

Will Warren: “Basically attacking the zone, knowing that the guys behind me are going to make plays. As a sinkerball guy, I’m probably going to get a lot more ground balls than strikeouts, so I rely a lot on my defense to get people out.”

Laurila: I understand that you also have a pretty good slider.

Warren: “Yes. Analytics makes it easier to look at a pitch and say, ‘Oh, I can do this, I can manipulate it this way.’ When I got drafted by the Yankees, we [developed] the slider. We tinkered with some grips, and it ended up being what it is now.”

Laurila: Is it the Yankees whirly?

Warren: “It’s the sweeper, yes. Off the top of my head, I’m going say I get like 16–18 inches of sweep. I can get it bigger, but I think that’s what it is on average. The velocity is 84–87 [mph].” Read the rest of this entry »