Early last year, I wrote two articles exploring the handful of pitchers who decided that, depending on the handedness of the batter they were facing, they should change not just their pitch mix but something more fundamental about themselves as pitchers. Some drastically lowered their arm angle against same-handed batters, while some scooched from one side of the rubber to the other. I mostly wrote about these pitchers because they were fun to watch, but I also dived into the reasoning behind their decisions. It wasn’t hard to understand what they were thinking: All things being equal, throwing from a lower arm angle works better against same-handed batters, while a higher arm angle works better against opposite-handed hitters. I even had numbers to back it up. I ran correlation coefficients between the pitcher’s wOBA allowed and their release point, and I used average velocity as a sort of control variable.

The correlation coefficients in this table are quite small, but they indicate that when the pitcher has the platoon advantage, vertical release point matters a whole lot. In fact, in that sample, it has the same correlation to success as velocity, which is definitely a surprise. When the batter has the platoon advantage, vertical release point doesn’t have any bearing on their success, but horizontal release point does. That’s why some pitchers scooch all the way over to the opposite side of the rubber.

Now that you’re all caught up, it’s time to address the big flaw in those numbers. The problem with my data was that I wasn’t actually using the pitcher’s arm angle. I was using their release point – literally the spot in the air above the mound where the ball leaves their hand – as a stand-in. Read the rest of this entry »

The Cleveland Guardians are a pretty tightfisted organization. They spend infrequently, frugally, and deliberately. So I was amused when, some three weeks ago, they jumped to re-sign backup catcher Austin Hedges to a one-year, $4 million contract. That’s roughly 4% of what the Guardians spent on player payroll in total this past season — and on a backup catcher?

Now, Hedges is one of the league’s best defenders, at the position where defense is of the utmost performance. And by all accounts he’s the best clubhouse guy since Spanky from The Little Rascals. But he’s the worst hitter in the league. That’s not an exaggeration; Hedges hasn’t posted a wRC+ over 50 since 2018, and in his past two seasons he hasn’t broken 25.

Since 2019, Hedges is hitting .171/.234/.273. Of the 364 players who have taken 1,000 or more plate appearances over that time, Hedges is dead last in wRC+ by a huge margin. Jackie Bradley Jr. is in second-to-last place with a wRC+ of 67; Hedges is at 39. (Which speaks to how far you can get in baseball if you’re an elite defender and everyone likes you.) Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re a team in the market for a top starting pitcher this winter, cross one of the best off your holiday list. The Dodgers, a team desperately in need for dependable starting pitchers whose arms are fully connected at the shoulders and elbows, signed Blake Snell to a five-year contract worth $182 million. The deal also includes a $52 million signing bonus. Snell, one of last year’s big name free agents who signed a shorter-term deal after not getting the offer they wanted, started 20 games for the Giants in 2024, putting up a 3.12 ERA, a 2.43 FIP, and 3.1 WAR in a season that was marred by an adductor strain. Compared to last winter, when Snell’s fate went unanswered until he signed in late March, you might as well start calling him Blake Schnell. Wait, don’t do that, that’s a terrible joke even by my standards.

Left-hander Blake Snell and the Los Angeles Dodgers are in agreement on a five-year, $182 million contract, pending physical, sources tell me and @jorgecastillo. The World Series champions get the two-time Cy Young winner in the first nine-figure deal of the winter.

— Jeff Passan (@jeffpasan.bsky.social) 2024-11-27T04:00:23.933Z

One of the biggest risks a team winning the World Series faces is complacency. It’s a perfectly natural thing to feel pleased with the moves that led to your team winning a championship, but a team that believes it can mostly stand pat and run it back is planting the seeds of its own demise. Even with all the talent on their team, the Dodgers still have significant roster holes to fill this offseason, and it’s a good sign for those hoping for a repeat that less than a month after hoisting the trophy, they’ve already addressed one of those weaknesses. Whatever one thinks of Dave Roberts as a manager, it’s difficult to deny that he did a convincing job this past postseason managing a pitching staff that basically had two healthy and reliable starting pitchers. The Dodgers won the World Series despite their injury-thinned rotation, not because of it.

Now, Snell isn’t the type to give you seven or eight innings per start. Who is in 2024, really? What Snell brings to the table – outside of being a really good pitcher – is that he has a pretty solid record when it comes to injury. That’s not to say that he doesn’t get hurt. On the contrary, only twice has he made at least 30 starts in a season. However, what he has avoided are the serious injuries that cause pitchers to miss months or entire seasons. His IL stints are generally for short-term nagging ailments, frequently adductor strains. His worst elbow injury was a procedure to remove loose bodies in his elbow about five years ago, not major reconstructive surgery. The Dodgers will be happy to get their five or six innings from him 25 or so times a year.

Given what the Dodgers have faced injury-wise these last few years, that may be especially valuable to them. Bad luck has to figure into some of these injuries, but their problems in October was the downside of the approach they’ve taken toward the pitching staff in recent seasons. The Dodgers haven’t really prioritized certainty among their pitchers. Instead, they’ve depended on high-upside, high-risk guys such as Tyler Glasnow, late-era Clayton Kershaw, and any of the young flamethrowers who dominate upon arrival before blowing out their arms. For the most part, the Dodgers have made this work because they’ve kept enough of these pitchers around to put together a capable rotation of four or five pitchers at any given moment. Generally, this has proven an effective strategy for the Dodgers, but this time, they rolled snake eyes a few times in a row, and ended up in a difficult situation at the most crucial time of the year. They made it work, but they are smart enough to recognize they might not be able to thread the needle through such a narrow margin for error again.

So, what about Snell himself? Let’s run the projections for him with the Dodgers.

The Dodgers are projected as one of the absolute best teams for Snell to end up with, and ZiPS projects performance that it would value at five years, $144.2 million. That’s a bit below the actual $182 million deal he received, but then again, so is the actual contract itself! As with Shohei Ohtani, the top dollar figure becomes a bit less sexy when you consider how the deal is structured. Some of the money is deferred, to the extent that it drops the present value enough so that the deal is worth more in the neighborhood of $160 million instead.

In some respects, Snell’s 2024 season was more impressive than the 2023 campaign that earned him the second Cy Young award of his career. Snell allowed a lot of walks in 2023, but he survived it because he was excellent with runners on base. That’s the kind of thing that’s hard to sustain, but he didn’t have to in 2024, as he shaved off the extra walk per game he’d added the year before. Snell’s strikeout rate was the best of his career, and it was powered by a career best in contact percentage. Snell has been a successful starter in the majors for years, but he has more varied tools now than he did before. Most notably, his changeup has become more of a weapon against righties, especially with two strikes.

With Snell under contract, the Dodgers rotation looks something like this: Snell, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Glasnow, and Shohei Ohtani, along with whichever one or two other starters are healthy at any given time. At least in the way-too-early ZiPS positional projections for 2025, Snell’s arrival leapfrogs the Dodgers over the Phillies, Mariners, and Braves for the top rotation in the majors, though things can change a bit depending on how your distribute the innings. And the Dodgers might not be done adding to their rotation, either. They are expected to be serious contenders to sign Roki Sasaki, and they could still bring back Kershaw on another one-year deal.

Does adding Snell fundamentally change the outlook for the Dodgers? Not really; they were always going to be a contender in 2025. However, what signing Snell does is give the Dodgers a better chance to get through the season with fewer surprises and go deep into the playoffs again. Not since the 1999-2000 Yankees a quarter century ago has a team won consecutive championships. Snell puts the Dodgers in a strong position to alter that factoid.

It’s a shame that “bunts are bad” has become one of the truisms at the core of the ceaseless, silly battle between old school and new school, stats and scouts, quantitative and qualitative assessment methods. It’s understandable, because “stop bunting so much” was one of the first inroads that sabermetric analysts made in baseball strategy. But that was 25 years ago, and while everyone kept repeating that same mantra, the facts on the ground changed.

Sacrifice bunts by non-pitchers have plummeted over the years, as they should have. In recent years, the bunts that are left, the ones that teams haven’t streamlined out of their game planning, are mostly the good ones. “Bunts are bad” never meant that in totality; it just meant that too many of the times that teams sacrificed outs for bases were poor choices. That’s become much more clear now that pitchers don’t bat anymore. The 2022 season, the first full year of the universal DH, set a record for most runs added by bunting. After a down 2023, this season was right back near those banner highs. So let’s recap the ways teams beat the old conventional wisdom and assembled a year of bunting that the number-crunchingest analyst on the planet could appreciate.

The Death of the Worst Sac Bunts
When is a good time to bunt? It’s complicated! It depends on where the defense is playing, the score of the game, who’s on base, the player at the plate, the subsequent hitters due up, and myriad other minor factors. But there’s one overwhelming factor: There are base/out states where bunts are almost always a bad idea, and the more you avoid those, the better.

Sacrifice bunting with only a runner on first almost never makes sense. You’re getting just a single advancement, and it’s the least valuable advancement there is. Getting a runner to third with only one out is an admirable goal. Moving two runners up is even better. Squeeze plays have huge potential rewards. Moving a guy from first to second just doesn’t measure up.

Likewise, bunting gets worse when there’s already one out in the inning. Plate appearances with runners on base are worth their weight in gold in the modern, homer-happy game. Crooked numbers are tough to come by, and the easiest way to get them is by stacking up opportunities to hit multi-run homers. When you already have a runner on base, bunts are always suspect. Bunts that cut out half of your remaining outs in the inning are even worse.

There are occasional circumstances where these types of bunts make sense. If the batter thinks they’ll beat out a hit fairly often, bunting gets better. The weaker the hitter and the better the subsequent lineup, the more attractive bunts get. Close games and speedy runners can tip the balance. It’s not a universally bad decision to bunt with only a runner on first, or to bunt with one or more outs, but the higher the proportion of bunts that move a runner to third with less than two outs, the better.

To get an idea of how much this has changed while removing pitchers from the equation, I looked at the 2015-2019 seasons and excluded all plate appearances from the ninth spot in the batting order. That’s not a perfect way of removing pitchers, but it gets pretty close. I used this to get an idea for what percentage of bunts came in favorable situations – with at least a runner on second and no one out.

In those years, 23.2% of bunts occurred in the best situations for a sacrifice. After removing bases-empty bunts, which are clearly a different animal, we’re left with bunts in situations where a sacrifice isn’t particularly valuable. Those ill-conceived bunts cost teams roughly 0.1 runs per bunt, a shockingly high number. All other bunts – attempts for a hit or attempts to move a runner to third with only one out – carried positive run expectancy. It’s just that there were so many bunts in bad spots.

In 2024, 31.7% of bunts came in “good sacrifice” situations, with a runner on second and no one out. Increasingly, the “bad sacrifice” situations are now about going for a single with some ancillary benefits of runner advancement. On-base percentage on bunts with runners on base is up. In 2024, 25% of the bunts with runners on base ended with the batter reaching base safely, via hit, failed fielder’s choice, or error. That’s up from 22% (non-pitcher) in the 2015-2019 era, and from 17.7% from 2008 to 2012. If anything, that understates it too: Plenty of the worst hitters in baseball used to bat in front of pitchers, which limited their bunting opportunities.

Impressive Individual Efforts
Jose Altuve bunted 14 times this year. Nine of those turned into singles. That was the best performance by anyone with double-digit bunts, but it was hardly the only exceptional effort. Jake McCarthy bunted 21 times and racked up 10 singles. Luke Raley went 7-for-12. This one from Altuve was just perfect:

That’s not to say there have never been good bunters before. Dee Strange-Gordon consistently turned bunts into singles at a high clip. Altuve has been in the majors for a while. But the high-volume bunters in today’s game are more effective than they were 10 years ago in the aggregate. There are also fewer truly objectionable bunters. Francisco Lindor bunted 20 times in 2015 and reached base safely only three times. Fellow 2024 Met Jose Iglesias bunted 12 times and reached base once. There were still some bad bunters – Kevin Kiermaier and Kyle Isbel had awful results, for example – but it’s become far less common.

Bunting for a single is hardly the only positive outcome, of course. That’s why you bunt in the first place – because bunts lead to more productive outs, on average, than swinging away. Advancement is more likely and double plays are less likely. Individual efforts of the top few bunters have always been net positive. These days, those top bunters are accounting for a bigger share of overall bunts, and the results have improved proportionally.

Bunters Were Already Good
Here’s a secret: The wars were already over. In 2002, bunters batting in the 1-8 spots in the lineup cost their teams 36 runs relative to a naive expectation based on the base/out state when they batted. In 2004, that number swelled to -63 runs. It was negative in 11 of the 12 seasons from 2000-2011, with roughly 2,000 bunts a year from this cohort, which largely excludes pitchers.

The number of non-pitcher bunt attempts declined as the 21st century progressed into its second decade. By 2015, we were down to 1,500 a year or so and steadily declining. The bunts excised from the game were all the lowest-value bunts, the ones most likely to hurt the batting team. From 2012 onward, non-pitchers have produced positive value on their bunt attempts every single year. Meanwhile, bunt attempts have declined and then stabilized, around 1,100-1,200 per year. Teams aren’t dummies – they’ve cut out 800 bunts a year, or more than 25 per team, and those bunts are pretty much all the no-hope-for-a-single sacrifice attempts that drew statistically minded folks’ ire in the first place.

In that sense, you’re not really seeing anything completely new in 2024. The very best bunters in the game are a little bit better than they used to be, but not overwhelmingly so. They’re choosing better spots, but not overwhelmingly so. They’re succeeding more frequently when they aim for a hit, but good bunters have always been good at that. The real change is in the bunts that aren’t happening.

The Mariners
I’ll be honest: I didn’t expect the Mariners to top the list of best bunting teams. They seem too station-to-station, too offensively challenged, too reliant on the home run. What can I say? Appearances can be deceiving. Led by Raley, an unlikely but enthusiastic bunter, the Mariners had a league-best performance. This one was just perfect:

It was a great situation for a bunt. The Astros were shifted over toward Raley’s pull side, which left third baseman Alex Bregman on an island covering third and prevented him from crashing early. Raley disguised the bunt long enough to get everything moving, and then used his sneaky-blazing footspeed to beat it out. It’s a masterpiece of bunting.

Victor Robles is less about masterpieces and more about maximum effort. He bunts too often for his own good. That leads to a lot of iffy bunts, but also some gems:

That’s another one where reading the defense made all the difference. The Rays shifted their middle infielders away from first, which meant a bunt past the pitcher would leave Yandy Díaz helpless. This one also benefited from a bit of defensive confusion, as many good bunts do. Who was covering second when Díaz fielded the ball? More or less no one:

Hey, every little bit helps when you’re bunting. And while plenty of other Mariners contributed to their success as well – Leo Rivas and Jorge Polanco know how to handle a bat – I had to close this out with another gem from Raley. Sure, it’s against the White Sox, but those runs count too. Raley is just vicious when it comes to attacking good spots to bunt:

It’s not every day that you see a squeeze bunt go for a no-throw single. But again, Raley read the defense and placed the ball perfectly. Not much you can do about this:

Altuve might have the advantage in raw numbers, but no one made me sit up in my seat hoping for a bunt like Raley did this year. Hat tip to Davy Andrews for highlighting his hijinks early in the year, and Raley just never stopped going for it.

The Angels
By all rights, this article should be over. The Mariners were the best bunters this year, Raley was their ringleader, and they exemplified the way bunts are making offenses better in today’s game. But the Angels are altogether more confusing and more giffable, so I’m giving them a shout too.

You’d think that Ron Washington’s team would be at the very top of the bunt rate leaderboards, but the Halos attempted only 25 bunts this year, half the Mariners’ tally and seventh-lowest in baseball. The reason why is obvious: They weren’t that good at it. They weren’t the worst team in terms of runs added – that’d be the Nats, who were both prolific and bad at bunting this year – but they were impressively inefficient. No one with so few bunt attempts was nearly so bad in the aggregate.

They bunted in bad spots. They rarely reached base even when the defense was poorly positioned. This might be the worst bunt attempt you’ve seen this year:

Unless it’s this:

The lesson: Stop with all these squeeze bunts. Unless it’s against the White Sox, that is:

See, our story has a happy ending for the bunters after all. I love bunts, and I’m not afraid to use this platform to show it.

Enlightenment era poet Alexander Pope famously wrote, “Fools rush in where angels fear to tread.” His words imply that angels are the opposite of fools. If that’s true, I wonder if it wouldn’t be such a bad thing for angels to give rushing in a try every once in a while. Could that be precisely what Perry Minasian is thinking?

Including the piece you’re reading right now, the FanGraphs staff has written about four trades and three free agent signings this November. Five of those seven transactions have involved the Angels. It started with the first major trade of the offseason: Before the Dodgers even held their parade, the Angels flipped Griffin Canning to the Braves for Jorge Soler. Then they signed free agents Kyle Hendricks, Travis d’Arnaud, and Kevin Newman. Along the way, the Halos also picked up Scott Kingery and Ryan Noda, and dropped Patrick Sandoval (among others) ahead of the non-tender deadline.

On Monday morning, the Angels continued getting an early start on the offseason – this time in more ways than one. At 5:38 AM PST, news broke that they had agreed on a three-year, $63 million deal with left-hander Yusei Kikuchi. I’m imagining the news came out so early in the morning because Kikuchi is in Japan right now, and given Kikuchi’s well-known sleep schedule (and the 17-hour time difference), Minasian only had a brief window in which both he and his top target were awake. Like MacGyver racing to deactivate a time bomb, Minasian cut the right wire just in time and successfully negotiated the biggest free agent deal of his Angels tenure. Read the rest of this entry »

Joshua Kuroda-Grauer began his professional career this past summer on the heels of a stellar junior season at Rutgers University. The 21-year-old shortstop from New Brunswick, New Jersey, was named Big Ten Player of the Year after slashing a robust .428/.492/.590 with five home runs. Moreover, he swiped 24 bases, had more walks (23) than strikeouts (18), and played well defensively. The first player selected on the second day of the amateur draft — he went 75th overall — Kuroda-Grauer is No. 12 on our recently released 2025 Athletics Top Prospects list.

His pro debut was indicative of his skillset. Over 126 plate appearances across Low-A Stockton, High-A Lansing, and briefly Triple-A Las Vegas, the right-handed-hitting middle infielder slashed .324/.421/.343 with a 123 wRC+, and just as he’d done as a Scarlet Knight, he had more free passes (12) than strikeouts (9). As our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen described in his writeup, “Kuroda-Grauer’s offensive profile is built around his advanced bat-to-ball chops…. [he] is short to the ball with average bat speed.”

Toward the end of the minor league season, Kuroda-Grauer discussed his draft experience, how he’s developed as a hitter, and the role model mindset that was ingrained in him by his two mothers.

———

David Laurila: You were drafted in the third round. What were your expectations?

Kuroda-Grauer: “I was told to expect anything from the second to the fourth, so I fell kind of where I thought I’d fall. I’m just really happy and fortunate to be with the A’s organization, especially with the group of guys that came in.”

Laurila: Were the A’s a surprise, or were they a team you knew was on you?

Kuroda-Grauer: “I definitely knew they were interested. When I went out to the combine in Phoenix, I had a great meeting with them. So I wasn’t too surprised, but a crazy thing about the draft is that you can meet with however many teams, but then you get picked up by one that never really talked to you.”

Laurila: You hadn’t been drafted out of high school, correct? Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I wrote about Paul Goldschmidt’s prospects in free agency, but didn’t speculate on a landing spot for the 2022 NL MVP. Not to worry — when the FanGraphs Bluesky account recirculated the piece on Monday, the public weighed in. One respondent thought the Yankees made sense, and while I don’t think the fit is ideal for either player or club, the underlying logic is reasonable enough. And here I’ll add my own spin on a potential Goldschmidt-Yankees partnership: It sure feels like the Yankees love old first basemen.

In 2024, 34-year-old Anthony Rizzo and 35-year-old DJ LeMahieu combined for 548 plate appearances and 1017 2/3 defensive innings at first base for the Yankees. (All ages in this piece are relative to the standard June 30 cutoff date unless otherwise specified.) That’s 81.5% of the Yankees’ playing time by plate appearances and 70.0% by defensive innings. Over the past five years, Yankees first basemen have the highest average age in the league. Since Don Mattingly turned 30 in 1991, the Yankees’ most-used first baseman has been in his age-30 season or older in 28 of 34 seasons. In 12 of those seasons, the Yankees’ most-used first baseman has been 33 or older, including in 2023 and 2024.

This got me thinking about the idea of the old first baseman. Read the rest of this entry »

Last offseason, the Reds assembled a frankly confusing amount of infield depth. With the emergence of Elly De La Cruz, Matt McLain, and Noelvi Marte, there weren’t many spaces available to start with. They signed Jeimer Candelario, and already had Christian Encarnacion-Strand as an option at first. Spencer Steer moonlights in the infield too. That left Jonathan India as an odd man out, and he seemed like a clear trade candidate merely waiting for a good home.

In 2024, that good home turned out to be Cincinnati. McLain missed the entire year after shoulder surgery. Encarnacion-Strand got hurt in May and didn’t return. Marte got suspended for PED use. When all was said and done, the Reds ended up trading for infield depth in Santiago Espinal. India played in 151 games and supplied his usual OBP-heavy offense.

Holding onto India worked out for the Reds last year, but there’s no way they could’ve tried the same plan again. That would’ve been just too many resources committed to one subset of the team, and Cincinnati has needs across the roster. So after many months, the trade we’ve all been expecting for roughly a year has come to pass. The Reds traded India and outfielder Joey Wiemer to the Royals in exchange for righty starter Brady Singer.

At first blush, this trade feels strange from the Reds’ standpoint. India might be a luxury good for their team, but he’s a legitimately good hitter with two years of reasonably priced team control remaining. He was their third-best hitter by WAR, and the Reds need people on base to take advantage of their homer-friendly stadium. Singer was Kansas City’s fourth starter, and 700 innings into his career, he’s not exactly a mystery box: He’ll give you a 4-ish ERA if you can put a good defense behind him. Not only that, but the Reds had to throw in Wiemer just to get things done. What gives?
Read the rest of this entry »

By the peripheral metrics, Max Fried is nothing special. Over the course of his career, his strikeout and walk rates sit somewhere around the league average. By results, however, he looks like a Hall of Famer; his 2.81 ERA since the start of 2020 ranks third among all starters. When teams contemplate whether to offer the left-hander a five- or six-year deal this winter, one question will be top of mind: Who is the real Max Fried?

Last week, Thomas Harrigan at MLB.com argued that Fried’s contact prevention resume might be the strongest of any contemporary pitcher. Harrigan noted that, after setting a cutoff, nobody has allowed a lower barrel rate this decade. That is reflected in Fried’s home run rate and therefore his FIP — other than Logan Webb, no starter allowed fewer home runs on a rate basis. Thanks to that super low home run rate, Fried posted a 3.11 FIP and 15.4 WAR over the decade — strong numbers, but reflective of a very good pitcher rather than one of the game’s elite.

One thing FIP ignores is the number of doubles a pitcher allows. Fried allowed just 16 doubles in 2024, tied for the lowest mark among all qualified pitchers. That low doubles rate is consistent with his performance over the years — during the 2020s, only 3.5% of the hitters Fried faced reached on doubles, ranking sixth-lowest among 173 pitchers in the sample:

Read the rest of this entry »

Tyler Holton got a 10th-place vote in American League MVP balloting, and as you might expect, social media reacted like social media is wont to do. Responses to the news leaned negative, with a number of people saying that they had have never even heard of him. Some were disrespectfully profane, offering variations of “Who the [expletive] is Tyler Holton?”

Needless to say, not everyone who posts on social media platforms is an especially-knowledgeable baseball fan. Which is perfectly fine. There are many different levels of fandom, so if you mostly just know the big names — the Judges, the Sotos, the Witts — all well and good. Follow the game as you see fit.

Those things said, it is high time that more people become familiar with Holton. Much for that reason, Toronto Star columnist Mike Wilner doesn’t deserve the brickbats he’s received for his down-ballot nod to the 28-year-old Detroit Tigers southpaw. What he deserves is applause. And not just because he was willing to go outside the box. Holton has quietly been one of MLB’s most effective pitchers.

The numbers tell part of the story. Read the rest of this entry »