On December 28, Sunday Notes led with a look at how seven of the nine position players projected to start for the Minnesota Twins this coming season were drafted by the club in either the first or second round. (The column also cited homegrown numbers for several other organizations.) Twins president of baseball operations Derek Falvey was quoted extensively within the piece, offering perspective on how the current roster came together.
Today we’ll hear from Twins GM Jeremy Zoll, as well as from Falvey, on a quartet of first- and second-round picks who have yet to reach Minnesota. One is a middle infielder, three are pitchers, and all rank among the team’s top prospects. I asked about each of them when the executives met with members of the media during the Winter Meetings.
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“It was Kaelen’s first full season, and he had an awesome year,” Zoll said of 23-year-old shortstop Kaelen Culpepper, whom the Twins drafted 21st overall in 2024 out of Kansas State University. “He was between High-A and Double-A, and we couldn’t have asked for it go much better. We’re really pleased. He had the opportunity to go to the Futures Game.
“He’s primarily playing shortstop, but he’s also getting some early work at second base and third base, as well as a little bit of game exposure at both spots. We’ll continue to let that play out as we get through spring training and into the season. We’ll figure it out exactly in terms of placement and proximity. We always kind of let the player dictate that with his performance, but he’s put just about as much pressure on us [as anyone] in terms of us wanting to keep moving him, and keeping him challenged.” Read the rest of this entry »
I have a confession to make. I started this article with a conclusion in mind, only to find that that conclusion was spectacularly untrue. But then I pivoted, and found something else I think is quite interesting. Is it obvious, in retrospect? I kind of think so. But I had fun doing it and learned something in the process, so I decided to write about it anyway.
I had a theory that the average catcher age, along with the average age for all the hardest defensive positions, had plummeted over the past decade, with the average DH age increasing as a counterbalance. My theory was that the universal DH allowed teams to massively alter their behavior. National League teams that had been playing older sluggers in the field could shift them down the defensive spectrum, either directly to DH or by displacing other old players to DH via a chain reaction of moving to easier defensive spots.
It’s beautiful logic, with just one problem: It’s untrue. Here’s the average seasonal age (as of July 1 each year) of catchers, shortstops, and DHs since 2002, the first year we have positional splits that allowed me to run this analysis:
The data is pretty noisy, which makes sense to me. It’s not like teams are targeting a given age; they’re just making baseball decisions about cost, team control, and production. Average age is a downstream result of a lot of decisions that are made for other reasons. But in the aggregate, the pattern I hoped to see just wasn’t there:
Average Age By Era, Position
Period
C
SS
DH
2002-2010
29.7
28.0
31.4
2011-2020
28.9
27.1
31.0
2021-2025
28.7
26.7
29.7
2002-10 vs. 2021-25
-1.1
-1.3
-1.6
In fact, DH has experienced the greatest decline in average age across all positions. That’s very much not what I expected. I do think that some of that is overstated. First base has had the smallest decline among positions, and I’d expect many of the displaced older hitters I mentioned in my hypothesis to end up there too. But if you average the age changes of first base and DH, they’re almost exactly the league average for position players. Clearly, the data do not support my claim. Read the rest of this entry »
Back in the fall, Daniel R. Epstein of Baseball Prospectus wrote a couple of articles about where hitters stand in the batter’s box. Statcast released batting stance information last year as part of the ongoing rollout of bat tracking information that started in 2024. Understandably, the location of a hitter’s center of mass got a bit overshadowed by the wealth of information about how their bat moves through space and finds its way to the ball (or not), but Dan did his part to drag it into the light. He found a relationship between contact rate and where the batter stands. Specifically, standing deeper in the box and standing closer to home plate are both associated with higher contact rates.
Both of those findings are intuitive enough. Standing deeper in the box gives you a longer reaction time. It’s no surprise that batters who take advantage of that extra information make more contact. It’s also easy to spot a potential selection bias: The players in the back of the box are likely back there because they’re the kind of contact-oriented players who want the extra reaction time.
I saw less of a physical reason for players who stand farther from home plate to make more contact, unless they stand so far from the plate that they have trouble reaching the outside corner, but (almost) nobody actually does that. It might take your bat head slightly longer to reach the outside part of the plate, but the ideal contact point for an outside pitch is deeper anyway, so I assumed the two would balance out and chalked the difference up to selection bias. Bigger players with longer arms naturally feel more comfortable farther away from home plate, and those bigger players tend to have more powerful swings, which tend to result in more whiffs. Causation isn’t correlation, and I wasn’t ready to go so far as to assume that standing farther away from home plate actually causes a batter to make less contact. Then I watched A League of Their Own again. Read the rest of this entry »
As you’re probably aware, the collective bargaining agreement between MLB and the MLBPA expires this year. Time flies, doesn’t it? The last time this happened, MLB locked out its players — the sport’s first work stoppage since the infamous strike that canceled the 1994 World Series.
The smart money is on there being another lockout next offseason; last time around, both sides did a lot of saber-rattling, but relatively little changed. We got the pre-arb bonus pool and some tinkering around the edges, but there was no salary cap, no abolition of the arbitration system, nothing that I’d describe as revolutionary. The duration of the lockout reflects that assessment; the stalemate lasted long enough to delay the season by a week, but not to cancel any games outright.
Having walked up to the verge of the abyss, peeked over the edge, and retreated, neither capital nor labor reaped a painful object lesson in the reality of all-out labor war. Last time that happened, it scared both sides into détente for 25 years. It seems reasonable to assume that either the players or owners might at least think about tickling the dragon’s tail next winter. Read the rest of this entry »
On Saturday, the eve of his posting window’s closure, 29-year-old Japanese third baseman Kazuma Okamoto agreed to a four-year, $60 million contract with the reigning American League champion Toronto Blue Jays. Okamoto, who made his NPB debut as a teenager, is a career .277/.361/.521 hitter with Tokyo’s Yomiuri Giants. He had a power-hitting breakout in 2018, his age-22 campaign, beginning a six-year streak in which he hit 30 or more annual home runs, including a 2023 season in which he cracked 41 of them. He ranks second in all of NPB with 214 homers since 2019, our first year of NPB data tracking here at FanGraphs. During his 2025 platform year, Okamoto posted an incredible .327/.416/.598 line and career-best 11% strikeout rate, albeit in only 77 games because he sprained his left elbow in an on-field collision that caused him to miss roughly half the season.
Dangerous from top to bottom, lineup depth was the bedrock of a Toronto team that came within inches of winning a World Series, and Okamoto’s balanced contact/power hitting style fits in with the Blue Jays’ baton-passing attack. Pre-existing defensive versatility on their roster — namely, incumbent second baseman Andrés Giménez’s ability to play shortstop — gave them the flexibility to pursue players of virtually any position as a means of replacing free agent shortstop Bo Bichette. Read the rest of this entry »
New Year’s Eve is a great time to agree to an eight-figure contract; you’ve already got champagne handy to celebrate. Congratulations, then, to Tyler Mahle and the San Francisco Giants on killing two birds with one stone.
Mahle is one of baseball’s great “I can fix him guys,” a status reflected in his contract structure: $10 million guaranteed over a single year, with an additional $3 million available in performance incentives. In 2020, the right-hander struck out 29.9% of the batters he faced over the pandemic-shortened season. The following year, he made 33 starts, threw 180 innings, and posted 3.9 WAR. Read the rest of this entry »
Cole Henry could close out games for the Nationals next season. Paul Toboni was noncommittal when I brought up that possibility during the Winter Meetings, yet there are no currently clear favorites to fill the role — not since Washington’s new president of baseball operations swapped southpaw Jose Ferrer to the Seattle Mariners in exchange for Harry Ford and Isaac Lyon in early December. And while the 26-year-old right-hander admittedly lacks ninth-inning experience — just two professional saves — he has attributes suggestive of late-inning effectiveness.
Henry’s 2025 numbers serve as an argument both for and against his assuming the closer responsibilities that Ferrer had inherited when Kyle Finnegan was dealt to Detroit at July’s trade deadline. Over 57 relief outings comprising 52-and-two-thirds innings, he held opposing batters to a .213 xBA while logging a better-than-league-average 25.6% whiff rate. Less encouraging were the 5.34 FIP that accompanied his 4.27 ERA, and the 13.3% walk rate that accompanied his 21.6% strikeout rate. Also notable was his .259 BABIP, but is that a red flag, or is it actually a sign that the Nationals might have stumbled upon their next Tyler Clippard?
Pitching for Washington from 2008-2014, Clippard crafted a 2.68 ERA, a notably higher 3.46 FIP, an 15.8% infield-fly rate, and a .233 BABIP (he also had 34 saves and 150 holds during that seven-year span). Henry’s infield-fly rate this past season was 21.4%, the third-highest mark in MLB among pitchers to throw at least 50 innings. Only Jordan Leasure (26.0%) and Alex Vesia (22.1%) induced a higher percentage of pop-ups.
Henry’s arm slot differs from Clippard’s, but his delivery nonetheless plays a role in his ability to miss barrels. Moreover, his slot has dropped since he was drafted 55th overall in 2020 out of LSU. Eric Longenhagen pointed that out earlier this summer: Read the rest of this entry »
Yesterday, the New York Post’s Jon Heyman reported that Japanese pitcher Tatsuya Imai has agreed to a three-year, $54 million pact with the Houston Astros (ESPN’s Jesse Rogers had the length). The deal includes opt outs after each of the first two years, essentially a “prove it” contract that gives Imai the opportunity to re-enter free agency should he quickly demonstrate that he’s better than the open market seemed to think he was during this posting period. Speaking of the posting system, note that the Astros will also pay Imai’s Japanese club, the Seibu Lions, just shy of $10 million under the current MLB/NPB posting agreement’s formula (20% of the contract’s first $25 million, 17.5% of the next $25 million, and 15% of anything over $50 million). The deal also features $9 million in escalator clauses that kick in as Imai approaches and crosses the 100-inning threshold during his first two seasons, bringing Houston’s total potential expenditure to roughly $73 million.
This deal is shorter and less lucrative than was generally expected by pundits (including yours truly) when it became known that Imai would be posted; Ben Clemens forecast a five-year, $100 million deal, while our median crowdsource estimate was for four years and $64 million before the posting fee. Imai is 27-years-old, he’s coming off of his best pro season after multiple consecutive years of improved strike-throwing, and he checks several of the visual scouting and data analytics boxes you want from a mid-rotation starter. What could be the reason(s) for the discrepancy between our collective expectations and Imai’s actual payday, and where does he fit into Houston’s rotation?
Let’s revisit the background on Imai. He was the Seibu Lions’ 2016 first round pick out of a high school in Utsunomiya City, a metro roughly the size of Tucson that’s about 80 miles north of Tokyo. He spent a year in the minors and then hopped right into the Lions rotation as a 20-year-old in 2018. Throughout his early and mid-20s, Imai was a walk-prone (but effective) starter. He dealt with multiple ailments in 2022 (including a right adductor injury), then took a step forward as a strike-thrower and an innings-eater in each of the next three seasons, becoming one of NPB’s best arms. Across the 2022-25 seasons, Imai halved his walk rate (from the 14% area to 7%), expanded his repertoire, and improved his fastball velocity even as his innings count grew to north of 160 frames. He’s had four consecutive seasons with an ERA under 2.50 (even while he was wild), and in 2025, he posted a 1.92 ERA and 2.01 FIP. Read the rest of this entry »
The Baltimore Orioles continued filling out their rotation last weekend, signing right-hander Zach Eflin to a one-year contract worth $10 million with a mutual option for the 2027 season. Traded to the Orioles from the Rays in 2024, Eflin struggled with injuries last year, throwing only 71 1/3 over 14 starts while putting up a 5.93 ERA and -0.3 WAR.
A first-round pick by the Padres out of a Florida high school in 2012, Eflin finally established himself as a solid mid-rotation starter with the Phillies at the end of the decade after being a part of trades for Matt Kemp and Jimmy Rollins. COVID and recurring patella issues in his right knee plagued him in 2021, resulting in season-ending surgery, and he missed another three months in 2022 with more problems with the same knee. Despite the setbacks, the Rays saw enough to sign him to a three-year, $40 million deal entering the 2023 season. Eflin experienced a minor back injury and tendinitis in his other knee, but that only cost him a handful of innings, and the result was his best and most durable campaign. He set career highs in starts (31), innings (177 2/3 innings), ERA (3.50), FIP (3.01), and WAR (4.9). While his numbers sagged a bit in 2024, Eflin was still a quality pitcher whose name bandied in trade rumors before the deadline. Read the rest of this entry »
