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After trading away Blake Snell and declining Charlie Morton’s club option last offseason, the Rays made a flurry of smaller moves to bolster their rotation depth, bringing in Michael Wacha, Rich Hill, and Chris Archer on one-year deals. But Archer ended up spending the majority of the season on the Injured List, Hill was traded away in July, and while Wacha pitched better than his 5.05 ERA might lead you to believe, it was still a 5.05 ERA. Those three combined for 48 appearances for Tampa Bay and just 1.9 WAR, and all three won’t be returning in 2022.

With Tyler Glasnow projected to be sidelined for the entire season after Tommy John surgery, the Rays’ rotation once again looked rather pyramid-shaped heading into this offseason: lots of depth and plenty of options in the middle, but thin at the top. Shane McClanahan, Drew Rasmussen, Ryan Yarbrough, Luis Patiño, and Shane Baz are lined up to take on the bulk of the starter innings in 2022, but while that group was solid last season, putting up a cumulative 5.9 WAR in 112 combined games, no one present has all that much major league experience.

To that young group, the Rays have added a veteran who can also address their need for a frontline starter, signing Corey Kluber to a one-year, $8 million contract on Sunday. The deal includes incentives based on games started that could push the total up to $13 million — a safeguard given his recent and long injury history. He missed the majority of the 2019 season in Cleveland after a line drive fractured his throwing arm and made just one start in Texas the year after, leaving his only appearance with a shoulder injury after a single inning. He signed a one-year deal with the Yankees in January and started the season looking good, making nine starts through April and May, but left his tenth with another shoulder injury that kept him off the mound for two months; he returned at the end of August and made six more starts down the stretch.
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In an accord between familiar and frenetic trading partners, the San Diego Padres sent Adam Frazier to the Seattle Mariners on Saturday in exchange for prospects Ray Kerr and Corey Rosier. It’s a bit of an odd move. The Padres, nominally in win-now mode, just shipped off a 3.5-win player for prospects. Meanwhile, the Mariners beefed up their thin infield, but at the risk of incurring a considerable opportunity cost in a free agent market that seemed tailor made for their needs.

Let’s touch on San Diego’s side first, since it’s the more perplexing one at a glance. Frazier is the big name in the deal. The National League’s starting second baseman in last summer’s All-Star Game, the 29-year-old hit .305/.368/.411 last season while accruing the aforementioned 3.5 WAR, though his production dipped following the trade. Always a good contact hitter, Frazier joined the game’s elite in 2021 with a 10.8% strikeout rate — only Michael Brantley, David Fletcher, and Kevin Newman whiffed less often. While 2021 may well have been his peak, Frazier’s been a pretty good player for a long time: Since debuting in 2016, he’s notched a 103 wRC+ and has averaged 2.4 WAR per 162 games. Contending teams looking to gain ground don’t usually trade away this kind of production, particularly from a player they just acquired last July.

Despite that, you can understand why the Padres considered him surplus to requirements. With no path to a starting job in the infield, and Ha-Seong Kim around to fill a multi-positional utility role, Frazier was a bit of a square peg on a roster of round holes. Yes, the Friars could have used him in the outfield — as they sometimes did last summer — but it’s not the best use of his skills. In theory, exchanging him for players who could offer the Pads more stick in the outfield or depth in the bullpen makes sense. Read the rest of this entry »

The Red Sox have made their first free-agent signing of the offseason, bringing in Michael Wacha on a one-year, $7 million deal, as the Boston Globe’s Alex Speier reported. The 2022 season will see Wacha donning his fourth uniform in the last four years after he spent ’21 with the Rays, ’20 with the Mets, and everything up to that point with the Cardinals. That recent bouncing around comes as his performance has fallen on hard times, with three straight seasons with an ERA over 4.50. But while the 30-year-old righty may not be a splashy signing, teams have found ace-level performance in this price range in previous years, like the Giants signing Kevin Gausman to a $9 million deal in 2019, or the Blue Jays signing Robbie Ray for $8 million last offseason. And in Wacha’s case, there were some interesting things happening with him late in the year that make this deal worth diving into.

When Wacha is off, as has often been the case since 2019, he has a hard time keeping the ball in the yard. His HR/FB rate has nearly doubled from his prime years with the Cardinals and is the fourth worst in the majors since 2019. And that’s despite his velocity — 93.8 mph on his four-seamer on average last year — being nearly the same as it was when he was in St. Louis. Read the rest of this entry »

There are two narratives to consider with Steven Matz, who signed with the Cardinals last Wednesday. There’s the straight-up baseball story of a solid pitcher joining the rotation of a good team. Then there’s the seemingly never-ending soap opera that is the Mets, whom he spurned in the final moments of his free agency for St. Louis.

Let’s start with the baseball side of things. Matz immediately fills a rotation spot for a Cardinals team that will likely be in the thick of things in the NL Central in 2022. At four years and $11 million per, with the chance to earn an additional $4 million over the life of the contract via performance bonuses, he topped the length and total value, though not AAV, predicted by Ben Clemens in our top 50 free agents list, on which he ranked no. 31, and beat the crowd-sourced numbers in each category.

The lefty will slot somewhere in the middle of the St. Louis starter group, certainly following Adam Wainwright and Jack Flaherty, and if there’s anyone on the market who fits the definition of middle-rotation starter, it’s Matz. As 2020 gets further away in our collective rear-view mirrors, we’ve learned how much data from that season is an outlier, and an extreme one at times, as was the case with him; he was northing short of miserable in his nine appearances that season. And while he had his share of health issues in his earlier years, if you take his three most recent full seasons, he’s been the roughly the same player in terms of both consistent performance and availability.

He doesn’t have the kind of high-spin, bat-missing stuff that teams tend to look for in the modern game, but Matz keeps the ball on the ground at roughly a 50% rate and should benefit greatly from a Cardinals defense that represents a significant upgrade from what was behind him in Toronto. He leans primarily on his 93–96-mph sinker and throws a pair of breaking balls roughly a quarter of the time, preferring his curve over his slider, and for good reason, considering the quality of the pitch. Changeups are rare but shouldn’t be, as he’s added a few inches of drop on the pitch over the past few years, leading to an offering that performs quite well.

During those previously mentioned three full seasons, Matz averaged 30 starts and 155 innings per, so he’s been taking the bump every five days, but going deep into games is not something he brings to the table, as he got more than 18 outs just three times in 2021. He can throw a strike when he has to but needs to play around the edges in order to succeed with his arsenal, leading to deeper counts, more than 100 pitches per six innings, and the need for multiple relievers to finish the job.
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J.T. Hintzen is a reliever with a five-pitch arsenal. Atypical as that is — most bullpen arms don’t feature such a wide array of offerings — it’s one particular pitch that sets the 25-year-old right-hander apart from his peers. Hintzen’s varied mix includes the increasingly-rare knuckleball.

More on that in a moment.

Hintzen is as unheralded as he is unique. A 10th-round pick in 2018 out of Florida Southern College, the Greenwich, Connecticut native remains under the radar despite a 3.38 ERA and 204 strikeouts in 162-and-a-third professional innings. Back in action this summer following last year’s COVID-cancelled minor-league season, he logged a 3.88 ERA and a 12.3 K/9 over 58 innings with the Double-A Biloxi Shuckers.

Hintzens arsenal comprises two sliders — “one that sweeps across the zone, and one that’s more downward” — a changeup, a four-seam fastball with good ride, and the knuckleball. Effectively tunneling his heater and the sharper of his breakers is a big key to his success.

“[The slider] comes out of the same arm slot as my fastball, and pairing the two usually gets hitters out, because they can’t read it well,” explained Hintzen, who augmented his 36 regular-season appearances with 11 more for the Arizona Fall League’s Salt River Rafters. “It comes out hard. If I throw my fastball 90 mph, my slider is probably coming out around 85. The sweeping one is more like 80 mph. I’ve gotten up to 20-plus inches of horizontal break with that one — straight across the zone like a frisbee — whereas the [harder one] is more like five to 10, but more downward. I’m throwing them on two different planes.”

Hintzen delivers his pitches from a lower arm slot — his release point will creep below five feet — and the spin he gets on his fastball ranges between 2,400 and 2,500 RPMs. And then there’s the pitch that rotates hardly at all. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a good time to be a pitcher: The market for hurlers has been ablaze with rumors and signings, and we haven’t even reached Thanksgiving. The latest move comes from the White Sox, who have signed reliever Kendall Graveman to a three-year, $24 million deal, per MLB Network’s Jon Heyman. He is already the fifth pitcher to sign a multi-year deal so far this offseason, and the sixth pitcher to come off our Top 50 free agent list, where he was ranked at No. 45.

Graveman spent his mid-20s as a starter for the A’s, posting elite ground-ball rates and minimal strikeouts — a recipe that never quite worked out, as by the time he had Tommy John surgery in 2018, he had a career ERA of 4.38, a FIP of 4.54, and a strikeout rate of only 15%. He returned to the big leagues in 2020 with the Mariners, which is where we first got a glimpse of his new form, with a 3.60 ERA and 3.09 FIP in a month of bullpen work to close out the season.

His successful transition to the ‘pen after struggling as a starter is hardly a new story, yet Graveman and his aversion to whiffs isn’t exactly the prototype you look for when trying to create a great reliever. One of the keys for him, as is often the case, came from tapping into unseen velocity when pitching shorter relief outings; what once was a 93-mph sinker now sat 96 and touched 99.

The velocity carried over into 2021, and with it, newfound run suppression, as he became a dominant closer for the surprising Mariners. By the time the trade deadline rolled around, Graveman had a 0.82 ERA, and while his peripherals (a 2.90 FIP and 3.13 xFIP) may have suggested he was closer to a good reliever than an elite one, it was still clear that the move to the bullpen had turned his career around. The Astros acquired him at the deadline to bolster their bullpen for the playoffs, and while still good, he regressed closer to what his peripherals had said all along, putting up a 3.13 ERA the rest of the way. Read the rest of this entry »

How good was phenom Wander Franco’s rookie season in 2021? So good that it actually compelled the Tampa Bay Rays to spend money. Just before Turkey Day, the team and Franco came to an agreement on a massive deal that could reach 12 years and $223 million.

Shortstop Wander Franco and the Tampa Bay Rays are in agreement on a 12-year contract that guarantees him around $185 million, sources tell ESPN. The deal is worth a maximum of $223 million. It is done, pending small details. The 20-year-old is going to be a Ray for a long time.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) November 23, 2021

Since this is baseball, this isn’t one of those NFL deals in which someone lands a comma-laden top number but, when you read the finer details, it turns out that a huge chunk of that money is a roster bonus due in four years that will never be paid off. Eleven years and $182 million of Franco’s deal is guaranteed, with the bulk of the rest coming from a $25 million club option for 2033 and a little more in incentives that kick in for finishing the top five in the AL MVP voting starting in 2028.

This deal is the new all-time record for a player with less than a full year of service time; the previous no. 1 was Ronald Acuña Jr.‘s extension worth up to $100 million, an agreement that this one essentially laps. Fernando Tatis Jr.’s contract is a larger one at 14 years and $340 million, but he was also a player who had cleared two years of service time when he signed on the dotted line, giving him more financial leverage over the Padres.

Franco finished “only” third in AL Rookie of the Year voting, but this was largely due to the fact that voters give a heavy penalty to a great player with less playing time, something I have direct experience with. The winner, his teammate Randy Arozarena, bested him in WAR, 3.3 to 2.5, but he needed twice as many games to get that far above replacement level. There was little question Franco was ready, as he hit .313/.372/.583 in 40 games for Triple-A Durham. These weren’t flash Albuquerque or Las Vegas numbers either; ZiPS translated that performance as a .281/.328/.473 line, not all that different from the actual .288/.347/.463 line he put up for Tampa Bay.

In case it already wasn’t clear after years of him being the consensus best prospect in baseball, the ZiPS projection for Franco is also that of a young star.

Obviously, the potential exists for him to hit higher numbers in his peak seasons; bottom-line projections are 50th-percentile projections and will naturally be much less volatile than what actually happens. But when I ran the 2022 projections for all the likely subjects, thanks to Acuña’s ACL injury, the only player that ZiPS projects to accumulate more WAR than Franco over the rest of their respective careers is Juan Soto.

The big question out there: is the contract fair to both parties? After all, one can make the argument that Franco may have earned much more by simply playing his way through baseball’s salary process and hitting free agency after the 2027 season.

To that question, I’m in the “yes” camp. The Rays have a great deal of financial leverage with Franco two seasons away from his first arbitration year, assuming that he would achieve Super Two status after the 2023 season at two years, 104 days of service time. But by the same token, I don’t expect the Rays to pay him as if he were a free agent, either. What I personally like to see is a contract that reflects the risks that both parties take in a long-term deal without being grossly weighted in one direction or the other. Call it actuarial fetishism, but a contract like Ozzie Albies‘ seven-year, $35 million contract offends me as an analyst in a way that this deal does not.

I’m not sure why I haven’t built this into the standard ZiPS model (I probably will after this ZiPS season is over), but I constructed a small simulation for how much Franco could make going year-to-year and then signing a mega-deal relative to what he will actually get. In the 50th-percentile projection, with near-minimum salaries in 2022 and ’23, arbitration projections, and free-agent contract projections, ZiPS estimates $297 million over the next 12 years. This is well above the $223 million he can max out at, but that’s not the whole story, either. The upside isn’t tremendously high, with the 90th-percentile projection going up to $360 million. Franco could figure out how to pitch like Jacob deGrom this offseason, and he’ll still get relatively paltry sums of money for the next few years; arbitration awards don’t scale up linearly for superstars. And the downside is significant. His 10th-percentile result ends up with him making less than $20 million over his career, and in 35% of the simulations, he falls short of $182 million. By comparison, at the time of their signings, Acuña falls short of his guaranteed deal only 17% of the time, and Albies does worse only 9% of the time. Another natural comparison is when the Rays signed Evan Longoria a week into his major league career to a contract worth a guaranteed $17.5 million over six years; ZiPS only had him doing worse than that contract in 11% of the simulations.

The future is a very uncertain thing, as demonstrated by the very weak 2021 seasons from Cody Bellinger and Gleyber Torres. Those young stars would probably be better off right now if they had signed $150 million contracts after their rookie campaigns. Since every Mets fan is born with a genetic catalog of tales of sadness and loss, ask someone in Queens their feelings about Gregg Jefferies, who put up an OPS over 1.000 as a 19-year-old for Double-A Tidewater and a .961 OPS in his first cup of coffee before settling into a respectable, but disappointing, 20-WAR career.

No matter what happens with Franco, he’s basically a fifth of the way to becoming a billionaire before the taxman gets involved. The Rays leveraged their position — as you expect people to do in salary negotiations — but not in a grotesque way. If I were an agent and Franco were my client, I’d raise no fuss about him taking this deal. He’s one of baseball’s bright young stars, one MLB would be wise to market around, and now he can afford an entourage worthy of his abilities. Thumbs up all around from me.

Even coming off of a 107-win season and the NL West title, the Giants found themselves in a rather difficult position entering this offseason. A starting rotation worth a combined 16.5 WAR last season — good for fifth highest in the majors — found itself at risk of losing four mainstays who combined for 610.2 of the 831.1 innings that it logged last season: Kevin Gausman (192 IP), Anthony DeSclafani (167.2), Alex Wood (138.2), and Johnny Cueto (114.2). On Monday, the team brought two of those hurlers back into the fold, striking a three-year, $36 million agreement with DeScalafani and a two-year contract worth more than $10 million annually with Wood. Within one hour, the Giants brought back 40% of their 2021 starting rotation and solidified a potential weak point.

As with most of their teammates, DeSclafani and Wood had near-career years in black and orange last season, and they cashed in with nice new contracts before the calendar hit December. The former came in at No. 36 on our top 50 free agents list, with Ben Clemens projecting a two-year, $20 million contract and the median FanGraphs reader estimating two years and $19.5 million. Clearly, the Giants had to go an extra year to get that done. Wood, meanwhile, was unranked on our list, though Ben noted that he had considered slotting him at No. 50, and that the crowdsourced projection had him earning a three-year, $33 million deal. Read the rest of this entry »

Joe Gray Jr. possesses some of the best raw talent in the Milwaukee Brewers system. A second-round pick in the 2018 draft out of Hattiesburg (Mississippi) High School, the 21-year-old outfielder is coming off a season where he slashed .252/.355/.499 between Low-A Carolina and High-A Wisconsin. Augmenting those numbers were 23 stolen bases, 22 doubles, nine triples, and 20 home runs in 479 plate appearances. Called “a high-risk/reward prospect” by Eric Longenhagen earlier this summer, Gray Jr. capped off his 2021 campaign by competing in the Arizona Fall League with the Salt River Rafters.

Currently Milwaukee’s No. 12 prospect, per The Board, he discussed his development during the penultimate week of AFL action.

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David Laurila: To start, who are you as a hitter?

Joe Gray Jr.: “I’d say I’m still figuring it out. I’m still young and learning to let my body work how it works and not be restricted. That’s what I’m trying to do right now. But I know what I can do. I’m a guy who can drive the ball when I get a pitch out over the plate. I’ve just got to play to my strengths. As I get older and more experienced, through repetitions and at bats, I know it will come.

“Again, I can’t necessarily put too much into ‘who I am.’ I’m not going to put pressure on myself, trying to make sure I’m down with it tomorrow or even next week. This is my first full season, so I’m still trying to figure myself out.”

Laurila: Can you say a little bit more about learning your body, and not restricting yourself? Your level of athleticism is obviously high. Read the rest of this entry »