In 2008, the first year of PitchF/X pitch tracking, 13.9% of all pitches across the major leagues were sliders. Ah, those were the days – flat, crushable fastballs as far as the eye could see. More or less every year since then, sliders have proliferated. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the graph:

Are you surprised? Of course not. You’ve seen Blake Snell pitch – and Lance McCullers Jr., Sean Manaea, five of your team’s best relievers, and pretty much anyone in the past half decade. Pitchers are flocking to sliders whenever they can get away with throwing one. It used to be a two-strike offering, then an ahead-in-the-count offering, and now many pitchers would rather throw sliders than fastballs when they desperately need to find the zone. Look at that inexorable march higher.

Only, maybe it’s not so inexorable anymore. Between 2015 and 2023, the average increase in slider rate was 0.9 percentage points year-over-year. The lowest increase was half a percentage point; each of the last three years saw increases of a percentage point or more. But from 2023 to 2024, slider rate stagnated. In 2023, 22.2% of all pitches were sliders. In 2024, that number only climbed to 22.3%, the lowest increase since the upward trend started a decade ago.

That’s hardly evidence of the demise of the slider. For one thing, the number is still going up. For another thing, it’s one year. Finally, 2024 marked the highest rate of sliders thrown in major league history. If I showed you the above graph and told you “look, sliders aren’t cool anymore,” you’d be understandably unmoved.

Not to worry, though. It might be January 9, but I won’t try to pass that off as genuine baseball analysis even in the depths of winter. I’ve got a tiny bit more than that. Raw slider rate is a misleading way of considering how pitcher behavior is changing. There are two ways to increase the league-wide slider rate. First, pitchers could adjust their arsenals to use more sliders and fewer other pitches. Second, the population could change – new, slider-dominant pitchers could replace other hurlers who throw the pitch less frequently.

For example, Adam Wainwright retired after the 2023 season. He threw 1,785 pitches that year, and only five were sliders. Plenty of the innings Wainwright filled for the Cardinals went to Andre Pallante, who graduated from the bullpen to the rotation and made 20 starts in 2024. Pallante actually threw fewer sliders proportionally in 2024 than he did in 2023 – but his pitch count ballooned from 1,139 to 1,978. Similarly, Michael McGreevy made his big league debut in 2024 and threw 311 pitches, 19% of which were sliders.

The numbers can lie to you. Pallante, the only one of our three pitchers to appear in both years, lowered his slider rate. But in 2023, Pallante and Wainwright combined for a 7% slider rate. In 2024, Pallante and McGreevy combined for a 17.1% slider rate. That sounds like a huge change in behavior – but it’s actually just a change in population composition.

The story we all think about isn’t Wainwright retiring and handing his innings to McGreevy and Pallante. It’s Brayan Bello going from 17.5% sliders to 28% sliders while pitching a similar innings load – something that also happened in 2024, just so we’re clear.

To measure how existing pitchers are changing their slider usage, we shouldn’t look at the overall rate. We should instead look at the change in each pitcher’s rate. That’s a truer reflection of the question I’m asking, or at least I think it is. And that answer differs from the chart I showed you up at the top of this article.

There were 315 pitchers who threw at least 50 innings in 2023 and 2024, and threw at least one slider in each of those two years. Of those 315 pitchers, 142 increased their slider usage, 24 kept their usage the same, and 149 decreased the rate at which they threw sliders. The story was similar from 2022 to 2023. There were 216 pitchers who fit the criteria in those years; 90 increased their slider usage, 19 kept theirs the same, and 107 decreased the rate at which they used the pitch. From 2021 to 2022, the effect went the other way; 122 pitchers threw sliders more frequently in 2022 than they did in 2021, 22 kept their usage the same, and 74 decreased their usage.

Put that way, the change is quite striking. The slider craze kicked off in earnest in 2017. From 2016-2017, 114 pitchers increased their slider usage and 89 decreased theirs. That rough split persisted in 2017-2018 and 2018-2019. Everything around the 2020 season is a little weird thanks to the abbreviated schedule, but the basic gist – more pitchers increasing slider usage than decreasing slider usage – was true in every pair of years from 2014-2015 through 2021-2022.

That sounds more like a trend than the overall rate of sliders thrown. Graphically, it looks like this:

Let’s put that in plain English. From 2015, the start of the spike in slider usage, through 2022, there were far more pitchers increasing their slider frequency than decreasing it. On average across those years, 1.3 pitchers threw more sliders for every one pitcher who threw fewer. In the past two years, that trend has reversed; more pitchers are reducing their reliance on sliders than increasing it. The population is going to continue to change – they don’t make a lot of Adam Wainwrights these days – but on a per-pitcher basis, the relentless increase in slider usage has halted.

I tried a few other ways of looking at this phenomenon. I held pitcher workloads constant from year one and applied year two slider rates to each pitcher (pitchers who only threw in year one obviously keep their rate unchanged). The same trend held – the last two years have seen a sharp divergence from the boom times of 2015-2022. I looked at the percentage of starters who started using a slider more than some other pitch in their arsenal and compared it to the ones who de-emphasized it; same deal. I also should note that I’ve grouped sweepers and slurves among the sliders for this article, so this reversal is not about pitchers ditching traditional sliders to get in on the sweeper craze.

No matter how you slice it, we’ve seemingly entered a new phase of pitch design. For a while, most pitchers took a hard look at what they were throwing and decided they needed more sliders. Now, though, it appears that we’ve reached an equilibrium point. Some pitchers still want more. Some think they’re throwing enough, or even a hair too many. Now splitters are on the rise, and hybrid cutters are starting to eat into sliders’ market share.

It’s far too early to say that sliders are on the decline. Factually speaking, they’re not. But to me, at least, it’s clear that the last two years are different than the years before them when it comes to the most ubiquitous out pitch in baseball. Sure, everyone has a slider now – but in the same way that four-seam fastballs were inevitable right until sinkers made a comeback, the slider is no longer expanding its dominance among secondary pitches. An exciting conclusion? I’m not sure. But it’s certainly backed by the evidence.

What does it cost to sign a living legend? About $15 million, it turns out. Three-time Cy Young winner Justin Verlander is taking his talents to the West Coast for the first time, having inked a one-year deal with the San Francisco Giants for that aforementioned sum.

It’s another bold signing for newly appointed supreme prefect of baseball operations Gerald D. “Buster” Posey, who officially took charge a little over three months ago. And yet — if we give Posey the credit he’s reportedly due for the Matt Chapman extension — more than a quarter of San Francisco’s payroll (according to CBT math) is now devoted to players Posey is responsible for signing.

But Verlander could very well have cost more. He made nearly three times as much last season, and had he hit the 140-inning threshold in 2024, he would’ve been able to activate a player option worth $35 million, not $15 million. So why take such a big haircut? This is Justin Verlander, for God’s sake. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday the Dodgers traded Gavin Lux to the Reds for outfield prospect Mike Sirota, and Cincinnati’s 2025 Competitive Balance Round A selection, which is the upcoming draft’s 37th overall pick. Lux, who turned 27 in November, is a career .252/.326/.383 hitter in just shy of 1,500 career plate appearances. He is entering his first arbitration year; the Reds will have him under contract for three seasons.

The Lux Era in Los Angeles was rocky even though the team had championship success around him. He became one of baseball’s best prospects during an incredible 2019 season in which he slashed .347/.421/.607 with 59 extra-base hits in 113 minor league games. He spent the back half of that season, still age 21, at Triple-A Oklahoma City, briefly made his big league debut, and was my no. 2 prospect in baseball entering 2020. Expectations for him were sky high, not only in terms of his impact but also the immediacy of that impact.

Instead, problems with Lux’s throwing accuracy arose during the pandemic season and have been an intermittent problem ever since. His bout with the yips led to 2021 experimentation at third base and in left field, neither of which stuck. The Dodgers seemed determined to move Lux back to shortstop in 2023, but misfortune found Lux again when he blew his ACL in a Cactus League game and missed the whole year. Back at the keystone in 2024, Lux turned in an average offensive season – he slashed .251/.320/.383 over 487 plate appearances with a career high 10 home runs and 100 wRC+ – with below average second base defense, culminating in 1.5 WAR.

Lux is a good fit on a Reds roster teeming with versatile infielders, most of whom hit right-handed. While he’s anemic against lefties, especially their sliders, Lux is a career .264/.337/.408 hitter against righties and slashed .262/.332/.407 against them in 2024. The Reds look as though they’ll have the capacity to play in-game matchups at a variety of different positions if they want to, but from another point of view, they lack stability at every position but shortstop. Center fielder TJ Friedl has been on the IL five times within the last two years, second baseman Matt McLain got Arizona Fall League reps in center field when he returned from a serious shoulder injury of his own. Spencer Steer (1B/LF), Jeimer Candelario (1B/3B), Santiago Espinal (2B/3B/SS), and Rule 5 pick Cooper Bowman (2B/OF) all play a number of different positions, several overlapping with where Lux plays or has played. All are also right-handed. The Reds don’t have a obvious first baseman (Christian Encarnacion-Strand is the projected starter there, but he was bad last season) and it’s possible one of either Steer or Candelario will occupy that spot every day, necessitating a platoon at their other position. It’s conceivable that Lux will revisit left field or third base so that he, too, can bring some amount of versatility to the table and be part of said platoon, but no matter which players claim Opening Day roster spots in Cincinnati, they seem poised to move all over the place to help ensure favorable matchups for the offense.

The main return in this deal for Los Angeles is the draft pick, the 37th overall selection in what I believe to be a deep draft. Lux has performed like a 45-grade player so far, and prospects of about that talent level tend to be available in the Comp round of a deep class. This becomes the Dodgers’ first selection in the 2025 draft, as their ordinary first round pick was chuted 10 spots down to 40th overall because their big league payroll exceeded the second luxury tax threshold. They now have three of this year’s first 70 picks.

The transition from an infield with Lux to one with recent Korean signee, Hye-seong Kim (analysis here), represents a sizeable upgrade for the Dodgers on defense. Kim has played only second base for the last several KBO seasons, but he’s a great athlete with great range, and it’s reasonable to project that he’ll be able to play an MLB-quality shortstop, as well as several other positions, if given the opportunity. The Dodgers’ middle infield contingent in 2024 was a yip-prone Lux, several guys in their mid-30s, and a rusty-from-injury Tommy Edman, whom they acquired at the trade deadline. Their 2025 mix will depend on what kind of shortstop defender Kim ends up being — right now, they are still planning to have Mookie Betts open the year at short — and is pending whatever else the Dodgers do between now and Opening Day.

The sidecar to the trade is Sirota, a 21-year-old outfielder who was Cincinnati’s 2024 third round selection out of Northeastern, where he hit .324/.458/.577 during his career. (Unfamiliar readers should be aware that college stats are bloated.) He has yet to play an actual pro game, but he participated in Cincinnati’s instructional league activity during the fall. Here was my pre-draft report:

Speedy, power-over-hit center field prospect with plus plate discipline. Tightly wound athlete with narrow build, wiry and strong. Hands are especially lively with low-ball power. Likely going to swing underneath a ton of in-zone fastballs and be a below-average contact hitter. Speed fits in center; reads and routes need polish but the footspeed is there. Projected issues with the hit tool and Sirota’s flavor of build/athleticism look more like a part-timer. His on-base ability buoys his profile and gives Sirota a shot to be a Tyrone Taylor type of complimentary outfielder.

The Dodgers often target players with speed-driven profiles and attempt to make them stronger (Jake Vogel, Kendall George, Zyhir Hope), and Sirota is of that ilk. This is also the second year in a row the Dodgers have pounced on a recently drafted prospect who had yet to get his footing in pro ball (also Hope, from the Cubs).

So the Dodgers turn essentially a part-time player into a draft asset of comparable value (albeit a slow-to-mature one) and a likely lesser, but decent young prospect in Sirota. In a vacuum it’s a pretty even trade, but knowing they arguably replaced Lux with a better roster fit in a separate deal, and then cashed him in for multiple pieces feels like vintage Rays-era Andrew Friedman snowballing assets. For the Reds, Lux’s fit on their roster and their desire to compete for the NL Central crown helps justify things on their end, though it’s tougher to swallow a smaller market team coughing up such a high draft pick.

As of the time I’m writing this article, roughly half of our Top 50 free agents have signed new contracts this offseason. That sounds like a great time to take a look at how the market has developed, both for individual players and overall positional archetypes. For example, starting pitchers have been all the rage so far, or so it seems. But does that match up with the data?

I sliced the data up into three groups to get a handle on this: starters, relievers, and position players. I then calculated how far off both I and the crowdsourced predictions were when it came to average annual value and total dollars handed out. You can see here that I came out very slightly ahead of the pack of readers by these metrics, at least so far:

To be fair, none of us have done particularly well. The last two years I’ve run this experiment, I missed by around $1 million in average annual value, and the crowd missed by between $1 and $2 million. Likewise, I’ve missed by roughly $10 million in average annual value per contract, with the crowd around $18 million. This year, the contracts have been longer than I expected, and richer than you readers expected, though you did a much better job on a relative basis when it came to predicting total dollar outlay. We were all low on every category, though, across the board.
Read the rest of this entry »

Are there any Oakland Athletics fans reading this? If so, don’t worry, your team is doing its usual nonsense, there’s nothing to see here. You’re lucky they left, don’t feel so bad, those last few years can’t take away all the good times. You can go ahead and skip this one, great article, hooray. Now that that group is gone, and we’re left with Sacramentonians, new A’s fans, more general fans of the sport, and perhaps Vegas residents, let me say this: The A’s signing Brent Rooker to a five-year, $60 million extension is awesome, and I love it.

Rooker was a rare bright spot on a dismal 2023 A’s squad. Then he was downright excellent on the green-shoots-of-hope 2024 team, compiling 5.1 WAR, even with the punishing positional adjustment that comes from DHing, thanks to a scorching .293/.365/.562 batting line. That line is even better than you might think, coming as it did in the cavernous Coliseum, and it didn’t look fluky.

Rooker hits the stuffing out of the ball. He finished eighth in barrels per batted ball in 2024, just ahead of certifiably enormous guys Oneil Cruz, Kyle Schwarber, and Marcell Ozuna. He also elevates the ball more frequently than any of that crew. The two are intertwined, obviously, but any time you’re hitting rockets like the 2024 versions of Schwarber and Ozuna, you’re doing something right. You could hardly do better from scratch if you were trying to come up with an ideal power hitter; a vicious swing (78th-percentile bat speed) that frequently puts the ball in play at profitable launch angles (86th-percentile sweet spot rate) means plenty of barrels (97th percentile) and 39 homers even in a park that suppresses righty power mightily. Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Lorenzen is finally staying put. After signing one-year deals ahead of the last three seasons, and after getting traded at the deadline in each of the last two, the right-hander has played for six teams in four years. All that stops now. On Monday, a day when the temperature in Kansas City peaked at a balmy five degrees Fahrenheit, Lorenzen decided that the City of Fountains was a fine place to spend at least another half of a baseball season, agreeing to sign with the Royals on yet another one-year deal. For the first time since 2021, he’ll get to start a season in the same city where he ended the previous one. The deal is for $5.5 million plus performance escalators, and because of a $12 million mutual option for 2026 with a $1.5 million buyout clause, the guaranteed value comes to $7 million.

Despite a hamstring strain that cost him a month, Lorenzen excelled after being traded to the Royals at the 2024 deadline. In six starts and one relief appearance, he ran a 1.57 ERA over 28 2/3 innings. However, his peripherals were roughly the same before and after the move, and he mostly benefitted from the classic culprits of an unsustainable bounce: a .213 BABIP, an 89% strand rate, and a 6% HR/FB rate. The only notable change he made in Kansas City was ditching his regular slider entirely in favor of his sweeper. Over that short sample size, the move worked: The slider ran a 24% whiff rate in Texas, while the sweeper was at 41% in Kansas City.

I’m afraid I’m not done raining on Lorenzen’s parade just yet, because I have to tell you that this move terrifies me a bit. Between Texas and Kansas City, Lorenzen ran a 3.31 ERA, his best mark since 2019, when he put up a 2.92 mark as a reliever with the Reds. However, the underlying metrics were downright scary. Lorenzen’s 4.58 xERA, 4.89 FIP, and 4.95 xFIP were all his worst marks since his rookie season in 2015. The stuff models didn’t love him either: We have stuff numbers going back to 2020, and Lorenzen’s 5.10 predicted ERA from Pitching Bot and his 95 Stuff+ score were both the worst they’ve been over those five seasons. His 23.9% chase rate was the lowest of his career. His strikeout rate ticked up a tiny bit from 2023, but both it and his walk rate were among the worst of his career. Lorenzen’s four-seamer performed well, but it lost half a tick and a bit of movement. After his sinker spent the 2023 season flirting with the dead zone, in 2024 it decided to move in. Name a stat – other than BABIP, HR/FB, or strand rate – and Lorenzen was worse than his career average.

I’m sorry. That was a lot of negativity. I don’t necessarily think that Lorenzen is a lost cause, and a reunion with the Royals makes a lot of sense. They needed someone to replace the innings they lost by trading Brady Singer to Cincinnati. Also, even when he was at his best, Lorenzen routinely outperformed his peripherals. He was much more of a contact manager than a strikeout pitcher, and there’s no place better for such an approach than Kauffman Stadium. Entering his age-33 season, he no longer has above-average fastball velocity, but he throws the kitchen sink – four-seamer, sinker, changeup, cutter, slider, sweeper, curveball – and he’s still figuring out how to optimize the mix. In 2024, he brought back the cutter and curve, which he’d previously abandoned; the curve worked well and the slider didn’t. That’s useful information. He could keep throwing the sweeper more. He could stand to throw his changeup, which ran a 37% whiff rate, more as well. He also brings versatility, as he’s spent his career hopping between the rotation and the bullpen.

Speaking of versatility, there’s also the odd circumstance of Lorenzen’s two-way ambitions. He came up both a pitcher and a hitter after posting an .869 OPS with 41 home runs at Cal State Fullerton, and he has 147 major league plate appearances under his belt. A few weeks ago, Ken Rosenthal detailed a plan hatched by Lorenzen and his agent. Lorenzen would take a kitchen sink approach to free agency as well, pitching himself as a candidate to qualify as a two-way player, thereby giving his team (or, more likely, the team that trades for him at the deadline) an extra roster spot for a pitcher.

While it’s fun, the gambit was always a bit farfetched, and now that Lorenzen is returning to the Royals, it seems extremely unlikely to happen. In order to qualify, Lorenzen would need to get at least three PAs as a DH or a position player in at least 20 games. Lorenzen ran a .640 OPS in the minors, he has a career wRC+ of 84 in the majors, and he’s taken just two plate appearances over the past five seasons. Even when he was hitting, he never made it to 60 PAs in a season. The Royals just made it to the ALDS last season, and they are, in their own way, showing every indication that they intend to return to the playoffs in 2025. It’s hard to see them giving 60 PAs to a guy whose last hit came in 2019.

This is not a particularly risky move either for Lorenzen or the Royals. He’s back on a one-year contract, back in a pitcher-friendly park, and back playing for a team with which he had some success last season. The worst-case scenario is that the Royals don’t return to playoff contention and Lorenzen doesn’t pitch well enough (or hit enough, period) to get traded to his seventh team in five years. The best-case scenario involves Lorenzen throwing a couple more no-hitters and launching a couple more bombs. Of course, that worst-case scenario is far more likely than the best one, but either way, the possible benefits of this reunion far outweigh the potential pitfalls.

Those of you who followed Premier League soccer in the 2010s surely remember the “Like a New Signing” meme that dogged Arsenal back then. At that time, London’s coolest and bougiest soccer team was managed by an erudite Frenchman named Arsene Wenger, who’d led the club to enormous success in the first decade of his tenure by the strength of his own wits and Thierry Henry’s legs.

But in Wenger’s latter days, Arsenal was overtaken by richer rivals. Manchester United, Chelsea, and later, Manchester City. Arsenal had rich owners, but not Russian oligarch or Emirati sovereign wealth fund rich. That left Wenger to compete with a more modest budget, and his limitless belief that his own intellectual superiority would compensate for any deficit in resources. Read the rest of this entry »

Another year, another star from one of Asia’s major leagues comes over to play in Los Angeles. KBO infielder Hye-seong Kim is trading his burgundy Kiwoom Heroes uniform for Dodger blue. Kim, who turns 26 at the end of this month, has won four straight KBO Golden Glove Awards — one at shortstop, three at second base. He comes to the United States after a year in which he posted a 118 wRC+ and stole 30 bases, with career bests in home runs, RBI, strikeout rate, and slugging percentage.

What’s the price for this golden Adonis of an infielder? Just $12.5 million guaranteed over three years, plus a $2.5 million release fee due to Kim’s old club. And if the Dodgers like what they see, they can keep Kim for an another two seasons — 2028 and 2029 — for an additional $9.5 million.

How do they keep getting away with this? Read the rest of this entry »

The Orioles finally got tired of being poked with a stick to choruses of “Do something!” and signed Charlie Morton to a one-year deal worth $15 million. Will this move silence those voices? Probably not! But as Baltimore’s GM, Mike Elias seems impervious to external feedback, so those still crowing may as well be talking to a wall. Then again, maybe a wall would have a better understanding of the importance of balance when it comes to construction, making it better equipped to construct a big league roster. But more on that in a minute.

In a vacuum, signing Morton to an affordable, short-term deal is a positive addition. Though 2025 will be his age-41 season, Morton has logged at least 160 innings in each of the last four years and put up league average (or better) numbers. Given the scarcity of healthy, quality pitching over the last few years, pitchers who post are extremely valuable. And if one didn’t know Morton had already crested 40, scanning his production wouldn’t yield any obvious giveaways. He has become more of a finesse pitcher, relying on command and weak contact over strikeouts, but the shift has been subtle. Over the last four seasons, he’s thrown his curveball more than his four-seamer and his groundball rate has gradually grown, while his strikeout rate has slowly dwindled. Morton’s curve is easily his best pitch by Stuff+ at 122, and that’s what he uses to induce whiffs and groundballs. His other offerings have Stuff+ scores ranging from 72 to 86, but he locates them well and they mirror the spin of his curveball to keep hitters off balance.

As a pitcher relying on his ability to keep the ball on the ground, it would make Morton’s life easier to take the mound in front of a strong infield defense. In 2024, the Orioles infielders logged -20 OAA and -14.3 defensive runs, but there is reason to think they’ll do better moving forward. Last season’s numbers include a lot of Jordan Westburg playing second base instead of third, where he’s a much stronger defender, and Ramón Urías looking at times overcooked while covering the hot corner after Westburg went down with a fractured hand. Meanwhile, this is a young team that still has room for growth. Ryan Mountcastle’s defense at first has seen small year-over-year improvements since 2022, when he made the move from the outfield permanent. Ideally, Jackson Holliday will get settled in at second, and though Gunnar Henderson’s play at shortstop is the least of anyone’s concern, given that he’s still only 23, there’s no reason to think he’s done leveling up his game. Read the rest of this entry »

For the 21st consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Milwaukee Brewers.

Batters

The initial feedback from social media seems to be that folks are unimpressed with the ZiPS projections for Milwaukee’s lineup, but this is one of those occasions where multiple people can look at the same data and reach different conclusions. No, the Brewers’ lineup isn’t projected for a bunch of eye-popping WAR numbers like, say, the Dodgers’ is, but for the most part, they’re solidly above-average everywhere. Put a team like that in the NL Central and it’s very competitive. ZiPS prefers the Cubs’ offense overall, but you’ll see where the Brewers make up some ground when we get to the pitching. Read the rest of this entry »