The 2023 Miami Marlins were pretty good. They couldn’t hit much, but they had a huge surplus of pitching. Enough not only to survive an injury to 2022 Cy Young winner Sandy Alcantara, but to trade from that surplus and acquire batting champion Luis Arraez. They won 84 games and made the playoffs. Once there, they got completely smoked in the Wild Card round, but things seemed to be going in the right direction.

They weren’t. More injuries piled up in 2024. Other pitchers regressed. Many, if not most, of the key players from 2023 — Jazz Chisholm Jr., Jake Burger, Josh Bell, Jesús Luzardo, Jorge Soler, Tanner Scott, A.J. Puk, even Arraez himself — either were traded or left as free agents. So too did manager Skip Schumaker, who earned plaudits for his handling of a flawed but decent roster in 2023, but lost 100 games a year later with the shattered remnants of that playoff team. He’s probably better off.

If you want reasons for optimism, you’re going to have to look hard. But if you want to find the successor to Arraez, you can stop at the top of Miami’s lineup. Read the rest of this entry »

Do me favor. Don’t imagine trading Mookie Betts. Who would do that, anyway? Instead, imagine Mookie Betts trading Mookie Betts. That is to say, imagine Mookie Betts deciding to trade the current version of himself for a younger version of himself. Most of us would make that trade in a second – my younger self had so much hair and was already reading at a fifth-grade level! – but why would Mookie Betts make that trade? Coming into 2024, he had just put up a seven-win season while running a 166 wRC+, the second-best batting line of what should end up as a Hall of Fame career. That’s the ideal self, right there. No trades necessary.

From afar, Betts’s 2024 season was of a piece with the ones that preceded it. He put up his eighth-career 4-WAR season and ran a 141 wRC+, almost exactly in line with his career mark. But look at this:

Go ahead and ignore the short 2020 season, when Betts posted a low pull rate. All the numbers go up toward the second half of the graph before dipping back down in 2024. In a couple of major ways, Betts looked a lot less like what we’ve seen in this decade, and a lot more like what we saw back in the first few seasons of his career. He went back to striking out less, pulling the ball less, and hitting the ball significantly softer. In case that graph isn’t clear to you, let me show you the same numbers, this time split up into three chunks: 2014 through 2017, 2018 through 2023, and then just the 2024 season.

See the chunks? If those three metrics — Betts’ strikeout rate, hard-hit rate, and pull rate — are ringing some bells, it’s probably because I wrote about them back in May. At the time, I noticed that pitchers were doing their absolute best to pitch Betts away, away, away. Well, that trend continued throughout the season, and it certainly seems possible that it explains a lot of these numbers. Continuing with our theme, let’s take this in chunks. We’ll talk about the strikeout rate first because it’s the least dramatic.

Betts has never been anything but excellent at avoiding strikeouts. However, he had an 11% strikeout rate in 2024, and even by his own ridiculous standards, that was something. It was tied for the best mark of his career, it represented a nearly 30% drop-off from his 2023 rate, and it put him in the 98th percentile of all major league hitters. The thing is, his plate discipline didn’t change all that dramatically. He saw fewer pitches in the zone, which is a good way to avoid strikeouts, but he also had one of the higher chase rates of his career. The big difference was that he swung more often on the first pitch and he recorded one of the highest contact rates of his career. That’s a little odd, because chasing more normally leads to whiffing more. However, seeing more outside pitches could lead to more contact, as the ideal contact point for an outside pitch is further behind home plate, which gives the batter more time to react. As I mentioned, all of these numbers were within Betts’ career norms, but between the aggression, especially on the first pitch, and the higher chase rate, it seems safe to say that Betts was looking to put the ball in play a bit more often.

At the same time, Betts’ contact quality took an enormous dip. His hard-hit rate fell from 48.5% in 2023 all the way to 39.5%. That still left him fairly close to the league average, but it was one of the biggest drops in baseball, and the underlying numbers are even uglier. Betts’ 90th percentile exit velocity and his best speed (which throws out the weakest 50% of batted balls and then takes the average of the remaining 50%) represented career lows. The 90th percentile mark put him in the 27th percentile. This is not the direction in which you want to be trending.

As I noted back in May, Betts adjusted to the outside pitches by setting up closer to the plate. That can make it difficult to hit the inside pitch with authority, because you have less time to turn on it, but Betts’ contact quality was down across the board. Here’s his hard-hit rate on pitches in the zone:

The inner third definitely saw the biggest drop-off, but his hard-hit rate was down on pitches out over the plate too. That brings us to our third and final chunk. Betts ran a 34.3% pull rate, the lowest of his career and at least 10 percentage points lower than his rate in each of the three previous seasons. Here are spray heat maps for 2023 and 2024. Everything’s shifting away from left field and toward right field. It’s also shifting away from deep fly balls.

Betts has never been the strongest player in the league, but he’s always hit the ball hard, and he transformed himself into one of the game’s true masters at turning on the inside pitch and ripping it down the line or over the fence. In 2024, however, he traded that super power for the ability to spray line drives to all fields. It certainly seems like this was a response to the way he was being pitched. After all, it’s pretty hard to yank a pitch on the outside corner down the left field line. And if you’re not seeing pitches that you can yank to the pull side, then it no longer makes sense to build your whole approach around that goal.

I don’t want to overreact to a single season, let alone one in which Betts produced his typical fantastic offensive numbers — especially considering that Betts missed nearly two months with a fractured hand. This is one of those times when I really wish we had bat tracking data stretching back over the last several years. Betts had an average bat speed of 69.1 mph in 2024, which put him in just the 14th percentile, and I wish there were a way to know whether that was a big drop-off from previous seasons. He turned 32 last year, and just Tuesday, Tom Tango published an aging curve that makes it look like there’s a dramatic bat speed drop-off starting at 32. If you look at Betts’ spray charts and his contact rates, you get the sense that he just reworked his approach in order to make the most of the pitches he was seeing. However, the exit velocity numbers are such an extreme departure from his previous seasons. To some degree, they’re probably a symptom of that larger adjustment, but Betts’ bat may just be slower than it used to be.

Earlier this week, I threw some numbers together on the value of productive outs. I focused on Corbin Carroll, and rightly so: His electric skill set is a perfect entry point for explaining how hitters can add (or subtract) value relative to average even when making an out. Putting the ball in play? We love it. Avoiding double plays? We love that too. The Diamondbacks are a team full of speedsters, and Carroll’s productive outs gave their baserunners a chance to show off their wheels.

A quick refresher: I calculated the difference in run scoring expectation between the average out and a specific type of out (strikeout, air out, non-GIDP groundout, double play) for each base/out state. Then I had a computer program tag each out made in 2024 with that difference. For example, the average out made with a runner on second and no outs cost teams 0.35 runs of scoring expectation in 2024. Groundouts in that situation only cost 0.25 runs, a difference of 0.1 runs.

Thus, on every groundout that occurred with a runner on second and no out, I had the computer note ‘plus 0.1’ for the “productive out” value. A strikeout in that situation, on the other hand, lowered scoring expectancy by 0.43 runs, a difference from average of -.09 runs. So the computer noted ‘minus 0.09’ for every strikeout with a runner on second and no out. Do this for every combination of base/out state and out type, add it all up, and you can work out the total value of a player’s productive outs. Read the rest of this entry »

Good swing decisions are vital to a hitter’s success. Having a finely tuned stroke is important — swing mechanics are diligently honed for a reason — but the ability to consistently attack the right pitches is every bit as valuable. Avoiding chasing while keying in on offerings you can drive greatly enhances your chances of squaring up a baseball.

Dillon Lawson, the new assistant hitting coach of the Boston Red Sox, is a huge proponent of a disciplined approach. The Louisville, Kentucky native views the optimization of swing decisions as an integral part of his job — one that now includes working alongside co-assistant hitting coach Ben Rosenthal and lead hitting coach Peter Fatse.

Prior to joining the Red Sox organization last year as its minor league hitting coordinator, the 39-year-old Lawson spent parts of five seasons with the New York Yankees, first as their minor league hitting coordinator from 2019-2021 and then as their major league hitting coach from 2022 until July 2023. He also tutored minor leaguer hitters for two seasons in the Houston Astros organization, in 2016 and 2018.

Lawson sat down to talk hitting at Fenway Park last weekend.

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David Laurila: There are swing coaches and there are more traditional hitting coaches. Where do you fit into that dynamic?

Dillon Lawson: “Whether it’s what I feel is right, or it’s just a sense of pride, I think we’re all trying to be the best hitting coaches we could possibly be. That means you’re able to help players in whatever way they need to be helped. Sometimes that’s with an approach. Sometimes it’s with confidence. Sometimes it’s a swing change, whether that’s with the load or the path. Some people need more power. Other people need more contact.

“In the minor leagues, with the whole department… let’s say you’ve got 10 hitting coaches all pushing the same direction, trying to help a large group of hitters. Then, here with Boston — same with the Yankees — a group of three [at the big league level] is nice, because the better the player is, the more difficult it is to get them just a half a percent better. Sometimes you have to get creative. Sometimes you have to dig deep into your toolkit. When you have the group all working together, working well together, you can help players more quickly.”

Laurila: Is the swing overemphasized in today’s game? Read the rest of this entry »

After a fairly brisk start, the pace of free agency has bogged down in the new year. The clog in the pipeline is Pete Alonso, the burly first baseman late of the New York Mets. Alonso’s free agent case fascinates me, as he represents a possibly rare intersection of fame and scarcity of skill, making him especially difficult to put a value on.

Given Alonso’s popularity in New York, the shortness of the Mets’ lineup even after signing Juan Soto, and the fact that owner Steve Cohen is so rich the Sumerians might not have invented currency if they’d known he was going to come along, a reunion makes a certain amount of sense. Read the rest of this entry »

On September 3, 2024, Tommy Edman swung through an 0-2 fastball to end the top of the ninth inning of a game against the Angels. Witness, please.

Back when I was a kid, all anyone talked about was fastball velocity. Mark Wohlers could hit 100, and that was a big deal. Never mind that while velocity is important, it’s arguably the third-most significant tool in a pitcher’s tackle box, after location and movement. But even in the days of fuzzy over-the-air TV and print media, you could quantify velocity and share it simply. It was possible to describe the exquisite movement on Greg Maddux’s low-90s two-seamer, but it was hard and took up a lot of time. I think that’s got something to do with George Will being the way he is. But I digress. 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 Cleveland Guardians.

Batters

It’s weird doing the Twins and Guardians back to back, as ZiPS sees a lot of similarities between the two teams. It sees both clubs as having one mid-career future Hall of Famer, a really good outfielder, a bunch of slightly below-average players elsewhere in the lineup, a sneaky good rotation with one starter the system likes quite a bit more than the others, and an ultra-elite bullpen that should compete to be the best in baseball in 2025.

Overall, ZiPS sees the Guardians similarly to how Steamer does, though the shape of the projection is a bit different; ZiPS likes the hitting a good deal less than Steamer does, but is more optimistic than its cyber-rival when it comes to the pitching. Read the rest of this entry »

It wasn’t supposed to go down like this. After a sensational contract year — striking out 30% of hitters, posting the lowest walk rate of his career, bedazzling his jewelry cabinet with a World Series ring — Jack Flaherty looked like he was set to make a boatload of money. Days after his 29th birthday, we here at FanGraphs ranked Flaherty eighth among our Top 50 Free Agents, one spot behind his former high school teammate, Max Fried.

Early in December, Fried blew away expectations, inking an eight year, $218 million deal with Yankees. And he wasn’t the only one. Starters from Blake Snell to Luis Severino landed surprisingly lucrative contracts; when Ben Clemens checked in last week on his free agency projections, he noted that he’d under-projected the deals for starting pitchers by about $17 million on average. His takeaway: “Pitchers are getting paid this winter.”

Not all of them, it turns out. As the calendar creeps uncomfortably close to the start of spring training, the youngest available starting pitcher in free agency finds himself without an employer. Every couple weeks, a sparsely sourced rumor about Flaherty bubbles up on MLB Trade Rumors — there’s “mutual interest” with the Orioles, the Tigers have “some interest” in a reunion — but for a large part of the offseason, it’s been silence on the Flaherty beat.

The most substantial of these rumors flowed from the estimable pen of Ken Rosenthal over the weekend. Rosenthal and Will Sammon reported in The Athletic that Flaherty was “open to considering” a “short-term deal” with a “high average annual value.” The hot market for starters and the comparatively cool market for Flaherty suggest that, unlike the rest of the nominal “front-end” starting pitchers at the top of the market, something about him scares teams. All of this leads me to ask: What’s the matter with Jack Flaherty?

One obvious answer is the track record. On some level, teams are going to be somewhat hesitant to commit serious resources to anyone whose last healthy and effective season before 2024 came prior to the pandemic. Rosenthal and Sammon wrote in their report that “teams perhaps want to see Flaherty put together two consecutive seasons of elite performance.” And there are the shoulder issues in 2021 and 2022 that limited him to just 114 1/3 innings over that two-year span.

But I don’t think the track record tells the full story. I think the weak Flaherty market comes down to concerns about his 2024 season itself. Specifically, I think teams are worried about his fastball.

They get there in different ways, but the three pitchers who received $200 million (or thereabouts) contracts this winter all have plus fastballs. Snell throws the prototypical ace four-seamer, averaging 96 mph with 19 inches of induced vertical break. Corbin Burnes’ cutter is one of the signature pitches in baseball, capable of missing bats and neutralizing contact quality against hitters on both sides of the plate. Fried is a bit of a different case — his fastball averaged just 93.9 mph last season — but the shape is totally bizarre relative to his arm angle, resembling Burnes’ cutter from the left side. Fried also throws five other pitches, minimizing the importance of his four-seamer.

Flaherty’s fastball was the slowest of these four primary offerings, averaging 93.3 mph. In September, that dropped all the way to 92.6 mph. At below-average velocities, even a half-tick of heat loss can be brutal. And while the shape of the fastball is unusual — Flaherty throws from a low slot and gets just four inches of horizontal movement, meaning the pitch unexpectedly cuts in a funky fashion — it doesn’t have the sink that allows Fried’s and Burnes’ fastballs to burrow beneath barrels. Also unlike Fried, Flaherty in effect throws just three pitches: his four-seam fastball and the two breaking balls. (He also flashes a changeup and sinker, but last season he used each of those pitches less than 3% of the time.)

Given the mediocrity of his fastball, Flaherty must aim for fine locations. His success can vary. (I want to caveat the following with the fact that the Dodgers have a strong organizational preference for where their pitchers locate their fastballs, which may or may not be the way Flaherty will pitch with a new team.)

I’ll start with his matchups against left-handed hitters, because these were the majority of hitters that Flaherty faced in 2024. After his trade to the Dodgers in late July, the target for his fastball was almost exclusively set up in one location: Low and away.

A handful of times per start, Flaherty tried to climb the ladder, aiming for swinging strikes at the top of the zone. But in the three starts I watched in full, he almost always targeted his fastballs low and away when facing lefties.

Now, as the plot below of his fastball location to lefties shows, his execution wasn’t perfect. Aiming a baseball is really hard. But I’d venture to say that it was pretty good — he hardly yanked any of his fastballs to the glove side, and most of his misses drifted harmlessly off the plate. In any case, the plot tells a clear story: Flaherty was looking to paint with his fastball rather than challenge hitters over the plate.

This sort of nibbling quality with the fastball is perhaps not what teams want to see from their high-paid free agent starter. Snell, Burnes, and even Fried to some extent can throw fastballs with a large margin for error. Flaherty’s margins are thinner.

This is especially true against right-handed hitters, where his glove-side command is not as good. Against righties, Flaherty also frequently targeted low and away. But as the plot below of fastballs to righties shows, Flaherty doesn’t have the same level of command to the outer edge of this side of the plate. Note the lack of dots in that low-away corner compared to the yanked misses off the plate:

To lefties, Flaherty has the luxury of his misses generally drifting off the plate for balls. When he misses his target to righties, however, the miss tends to drift middle-middle. And when you’re missing middle-middle with 93-mph four-seamers, it’s generally not going to turn out well for you. (This might explain part of Flaherty’s reverse splits last season.)

When executed well, the low-and-away target serves an important function — it sets up his two nasty breaking balls, a harder gyro slider at 85 mph and a loopier knuckle-curve at 78 mph. As this pitch plot shows, these two pitches blend together in a deceptive manner, forcing hitters to guess which one is coming:

Flaherty is at his best when he’s mixing in the low fastballs with the two breakers right below the zone. Check out this two-pitch sequence to Ryan O’Hearn. He nails his 0-0 target to get ahead:

On 0-1 — the perfectly executed fastball fresh in O’Hearn’s head — Flaherty buries a curveball right below the previous location, getting O’Hearn to swing way over the pitch:

After a couple of breaking balls in the dirt, Flaherty punches O’Hearn out on a high fastball. With hitters laser-focused on the bottom of the strike zone, that occasional late-count high heater leads to a ton of whiffs. It’s a pretty combo when it works.

But if Flaherty falls behind, there just isn’t a great option to induce weak contact. When the early-count fastball execution is less than perfect, he tends to back himself into a corner. And when he’s forced to come over to the plate with the heater, he can be vulnerable to the long ball. Just ask O’Hearn:

If Flaherty’s fastball velocity remains in that 92-93 range, it will likely be a tradeoff between giving up a few too many walks due to nibbling (as he did early in his career) or risking extra-base damage by coming over the plate.

So, yes, there are reasons to be concerned about Flaherty. But overly fixating on his fastball risks ignoring his upside.

That two-breaking-ball attack works against both righties and lefties; when he gets ahead in the count, there’s almost nobody better. That strikeout rate is no illusion. So the question becomes: How can Flaherty reliably get ahead of hitters?

One option is pitching backwards. Flaherty’s fastball usage in 0-0 counts is roughly 50%. (On the plot below, red represents the four-seamer, gold represents the slider, and blue represents the curveball.) Given the frequency of his slider usage in 3-1 and 3-2 counts (50% and 44.8%, respectively) it follows that he has the confidence to throw it for a strike when he needs it. Mixing in more breaking balls in early counts could take some pressure off the four-seamer.

Flaherty could also use his sinker more often. If his problem at present is mostly with right-handed hitters, the sinker could give him a weak-contact option and a pitch that he feels comfortable throwing on the inner-half of the plate. Notably, the sinker grades out fine by stuff models — PitchingBot, for example, gives it a 56 on the 20-80 scale.

It’s also not impossible that some of his velocity could return. Maybe he no longer can regularly dial up 95-96 mph as he did in his early 20s, but it’s also possible that his late-season swoon can be chalked up to his posting his highest innings total in five years. In the range of velocity that he sat in the later months of the season, every half-tick is crucial, but if he can consistently live at 93-94 mph with the ability to touch 96, that softens many of the concerns.

Concluding this article definitively is challenging. On the one hand, the skittishness of the clubs is perfectly understandable. But plenty of contending teams need starting pitching, and an industry-wide fear of Flaherty’s weaknesses could cost clubs their chance to add someone who just performed like one of the best hurlers in the game.

Not every out is created equal. Take this fly out from Corbin Carroll, for example:

A lot of things can happen when you make an out with the bases loaded. You could strike out, leaving every runner in place. You could hit into a double play, an inning-ending one in this case. You could ground out some other way, or hit an infield fly. But Carroll’s here was the most valuable imaginable; with one out, he advanced every single runner, including the runner who scored from third.

Mathematically speaking, you can think of it this way. The average out that took place with the bases loaded and one out lowered the team’s run expectancy by a massive 0.61 runs in 2024. That’s because tons of these outs were either strikeouts (bad, runner on third doesn’t score) or double plays (bad, inning ends). But Carroll’s fly out was far better than that. It actually increased the run expectancy by a hair; driving the lead runner home and moving the trail runners up a base is exquisitely valuable.

That’s not the only way this could have gone. Consider a similar situation, a groundout from Aaron Judge:

Like Carroll, Judge batted with a runner on third and fewer than two outs. In this situation, the average out is bad, lowering run expectancy by 0.514 runs. But Judge’s was obviously worse. It cost the Yankees all the expected runs they had left in the inning, naturally, which added up to just a bit more than 1.15. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re a Milwaukee Brewers fan, you probably know the volume and quality of Colin Rea’s work the past two seasons. Last season, only 58 pitchers qualified for the ERA title, and Rea was among them. Over the past two seasons, Rea is second among Brewers pitchers in starts, innings, wins, and strikeouts, trailing only Freddy Peralta in those categories.

If you’re not a Brewers fan, you might have seen the news that Rea signed with the Cubs and thought, “Oh, is this guy the Padres tried to trade with a torn UCL? Is he back from Japan?”

In an offseason defined by the scarcity of starting pitching, it’s a bit jarring to see a starter sign for one year and $5 million. Especially one who just threw 167 2/3 innings in 2024. There aren’t enough of those guys in the entire league for every team to have two. Roughly 15 times as many people summited Mt. Everest in 2024 as qualified for the major league ERA title. And Rea got just $5 million? What gives? Read the rest of this entry »