Milwaukee has arguably been the biggest beneficiary of the league’s austerity on the free agent market in recent seasons. A damp market gave the Brewers an opportunity to sign Lorenzo Cain to a team-friendly five-year deal in January of 2018, and their new center fielder’s 5.7 WAR campaign proved instrumental in a season Milwaukee won the NL Central by a single game. General manager David Stearns turned an even tidier trick last winter, inking Yasmani Grandal and Mike Moustakas to one-year pillow contracts in January and February respectively. Both made the All-Star team and they combined for 8 WAR as the Brewers again narrowly clinched a playoff berth.

Critically, the Brewers haven’t succeeded by aggressively courting free agents, but rather by waiting out the competition and swooping in with palatable offers to desperate players at the dawn of spring training. Cain surely entered his recruitment period thinking a nine-figure offer was a strong possibility, and neither Grandal nor Moustakas hit the market hoping for anything less than a multi-year deal. As prices fell, Milwaukee pounced. In capitalizing on a cool market, the Brewers were able to meaningfully augment their ballclub without incurring significant costs, and the result was a rare breakthrough to the playoffs.

Milwaukee won’t be able to run it back with the same strategy in 2020. As we’ve covered elsewhere, the free agent market has rebounded significantly this offseason. Unlike in recent years, many of the marquee players are already off the board, and for pretty big money, too. The league has already committed approximately $1.5 billion to players: That’s nearly a billion more than this time last year, a free agency period that ended with around $1.8 billion in total commitments. With plenty of mid-tier free agents still on the board, the pattern has been established: Good players are getting more money and more years than they have over the two previous seasons. Read the rest of this entry »

The Red Sox signed a pair of former top prospects to modest deals at the end of last week: José Peraza, 25, to a one-year deal worth $3 million; and Martín Pérez, 28, to a one year, $6 million deal with a club option for a second year and $6.25 million. Those moves appear targeted to replace the already-departed Brock Holt and the perhaps-soon-be-departed David Price, respectively, on the roster at a significant savings in cost. (Price is signed for $96 million over the next three seasons, and the Red Sox are apparently bound and determined to stay under the $208 million luxury tax threshold next year.)

The Peraza signing is the easiest to evaluate fully now, without the benefit of a full offseason’s worth of moves to put it in context. Holt, who has yet to sign with a team this offseason but now seems unlikely to return to Boston, played seven positions for the Red Sox last year and put up a perfectly respectable 103 wRC+ while doing so. Peraza only played six positions in 2019 — and one of them involved two stunt appearances on the mound — but he’s six years younger, quite likely cheaper, and there’s still hope that he’ll look more like the hitter who posted a .331 wOBA with the Reds back in 2016 than the guy who posted a .272 last season.

If Peraza can bounce back at the plate, the Red Sox can retain his services through arbitration (and at relatively low cost) all the way through the 2022 season. If he can’t, the Sox can non-tender him next season (or sooner) and all it’ll cost them is $3 million. I have my doubts that’ll happen, though. Peraza’s seen ever-fewer pitches inside the zone each year since 2017, as pitchers learn they don’t need to challenge him to get him out, and he was absolutely awful against the slider last year in a way that doesn’t leave me confident he’s due for a bounce back. Still, stranger things have happened, and Holt wasn’t going to be a Boston lifer. Read the rest of this entry »

Madison Bumgarner is staying in the National League West, but it won’t be with the Giants, the only professional organization he’s ever known. And he’s not joining the Dodgers, the championship-starved, longtime rivals who pursued him after losing out on Gerrit Cole, either. Instead, the 30-year-old lefty will join the rebuilding Arizona Diamondbacks via a five-year, $85 million contract, one that includes $15 million in deferred payments as well as a five-team no-trade clause.

The deal is the fourth-largest for a pitcher this winter after those of Cole (nine years, $324 million with the Yankees), Stephen Strasburg (seven years, $245 million with the Nationals), and Zack Wheeler (five years, $118 million with the Phillies), but it’s well short of the $100 million-plus contract he was reportedly seeking. Indeed, the gap between the third- and fourth-largest deals is strikingly large, particularly given that the two pitchers are similar in age (Bumgarner is 10 months older than Wheeler) and that for our Top 50 Free Agents list, both Kiley McDaniel and the crowd had the two pitchers very close together in terms of their paydays. The teeming masses estimated that both would receive four-year deals at $72 million, with McDaniel estimating $68 million for Wheeler and $64 million for Bumgarner.

It’s not hard to understand the discrepancy. Wheeler was worth a hefty 9.8 WAR over the past two seasons, including offense, with 5.3 (4.7 from pitching) in 2019. Bumgarner was worth 5.2 WAR over that same span, with 3.7 (3.2 from pitching) in 2019. Given his recent performance and the mere 749.1 major league innings under his belt, Wheeler, despite the injuries in his past, is seen as a pitcher who’s still on an upward trajectory, while Bumgarner, with 1,846 innings to his name, may have his best days in the rearview mirror. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Cherington stepped into a conflicted situation when he took over the GM reins in Pittsburgh last month. On the heels of a 93-loss season, an understandably-frustrated Pirates fan base wants to see a competitive team on the field in 2020. At the same time, a complete rebuild is arguably the more prudent course of action. Given the current roster and farm system, paired with ownership’s notoriously-tight purse strings… let’s just say that while Cherington is smart, he doesn’t possess magical powers. Patchwork moves alone aren’t going to turn this team around.

Nevertheless, that might be the plan. The former Red Sox and Blue Jays executive wasn’t willing to embrace the rebuild idea when I suggested it earlier this week during the Winter Meetings.

“There can be reasonable opinions from reasonable people, smart people, about the right direction, the right way to build,” said Cherington. “I can tell you that within our room, within baseball operations, we’re not thinking about it that way. We’re thinking about it more as ‘needing to get to a winning team.’ There’s no one path toward that.”

Cherington opined that there is untapped potential on the roster, and added that he’ll explore ways to add more talent. But what exactly does that mean? While he intimated that moves will be made, these are Bob Nutting’s Pittsburgh Pirates he’s working for now. I’d venture to guess that Scott Boras doesn’t have PNC Park phone numbers on speed dial. Read the rest of this entry »

Relievers are weird. For proof, just ask Blake Treinen. One year, Treinen is the best reliever in baseball. The next, he’s below replacement-level and gets non-tendered, though he still landed a relatively lucrative payday after signing with the Dodgers.

The reason teams remained interested in Treinen at all, let alone at a price above his arbitration projection, was because of his stuff. As Ben Clemens chronicled, Treinen’s stuff experienced a hiccup in 2019, but it was so good in 2018 that a $10 million gamble made plenty of sense. In baseball, stuff sells, and if Treinen can prove to still have the 2018 version of his one-seam fastball somewhere in his back pocket, Los Angeles will be quite pleased with the signing.

That brings me to Yimi García. He’s not a household name — you probably know him if you’re a Dodgers fan, or if you happened to sort the leaderboard of 2019 relief pitchers by HR/9 in descending order. (Yikes, Edwin Díaz.) The Dodgers non-tendered García, who had been projected to earn $1.1 million in arbitration. The Marlins picked him up on Thursday, signing him to a one-year, major league deal; his salary is not yet known. Read the rest of this entry »

The return of a vibrant free agent market has been the story of the offseason thus far. In recent days, we’ve seen three $200-plus million deals, including two record-setting contracts for pitchers and a $245 million contract for Anthony Rendon. Alongside, we’ve observed the continuation of a pattern established early this winter, where most players on our Top 50 Free Agent List have beaten their projected salaries. That hasn’t been true in every case: Josh Lindbloom just signed for more years and a lower AAV than we expected. But he’s one of the few exceptions. From Gerrit Cole to Tanner Roark, most players have signed for more money than we anticipated. Even Blake Treinen, who the Athletics didn’t even tender a contract to, inked an eight-figure deal on the open market.

That doesn’t mean everything has been patched up between ownership and the players. Teams seem every bit as leery of exceeding the luxury tax as they did last year, a stance best evinced by the Angels’ decision to package first-round pick Will Wilson with Zack Cozart in what amounted to a salary dump. More troublingly for the journeymen of the game, teams non-tendered more arb-eligible players than usual, including productive veterans like Treinen, Kevin Pillar, and Jonathan Villar. Consequently, the market for second-division starters and part-time players is unusually tight and crowded. Even with a resurgent free agent market, it’s a precarious time to be a low-level player in search of a home.

This brings us to Adam Jones, an All-Star turned platoon outfielder in the November of his career. In an era in which rookies are debuting near the peak of their powers, Jones’s career arc looks like the parabola we used to expect as the norm. After peaking as a 4-5 WAR player in his late 20s, he’s steadily declined in recent years:

Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2020 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2014 election at SI.com, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Jeff Kent took a long time to find a home. Drafted by the Blue Jays in 1989, he passed through the hands of three teams who didn’t quite realize the value of what they had. Not until a trade to the Giants in November 1996 — prior to his age-29 season — did he really settle in. Once he did, he established himself as a standout complement to Barry Bonds, helping the Giants become perennial contenders and spending more than a decade as a middle-of-the-lineup force.

Despite his late-arriving stardom and a prickly personality that sometimes rubbed teammates and media the wrong way, Kent earned All-Star honors five times, won an MVP award, and helped four different franchises reach the playoffs a total of seven times. His resumé gives him a claim as the best-hitting second baseman of the post-1960 expansion era — not an iron-clad one, but not one that’s easily dismissed. For starters, he holds the all-time record for most home runs by a second baseman with 351. That’s 74 more than Ryne Sandberg, 85 more than Joe Morgan, and 86 more than Rogers Hornsby — all Hall of Famers, and in Hornsby’s case, one from before the expansion era (note that I’m not counting homers hit while playing other positions). Among players with at least 7,000 plate appearances in their career who spent at least half their time at second base, only Hornsby (.577) has a higher slugging percentage than Kent’s .500. From that latter set, only Hornsby (1.010) and another pre-expansion Hall of Famer, Charlie Gehringer (.884), have a higher OPS than Kent (.855). Read the rest of this entry »

If you guessed that the expansion of the rosters to 26 players would result in more teams rolling the dice in the Rule 5 draft, you guessed wrong. Don’t feel too badly; I guessed wrong, too. Of last year’s 14 draftees taken in the major league phase, only three players — Richie Martin, Brandon Brennan, and Elvis Luciano — weren’t returned to their original teams. So how many of this year’s draftees taken in the major league phase of the draft have a chance of finishing the season with their new clubs?

Most players taken in the Rule 5 draft are quickly returned and forgotten, but there’s a long history of real contributors thriving in their new organizations. Johan Santana was the best player to swap teams in the Rule 5, but the list of eventual All-Stars taken is surprisingly long, including Shane Victorino, Odúbel Herrera, Ender Inciarte, Ryan Pressly, Josh Hamilton, and Joakim Soria. Last year’s draft was a bit of an outlier in that, at least for now, it looks like none of the players will make a long-term impact. For those drafted, there’s a real benefit, as their new team has a financial incentive to give them every opportunity to win a roster spot in the spring, something few fringe prospects can boast. For the players who do make the roster, the result can be lucrative even if they’re returned to their original teams: 43 days of service time gets you into MLB’s pension system, and a single day of service time get you medical benefits. Read the rest of this entry »

At this point in his career, seeing Brett Gardner in anything but Yankees pinstripes would have come as a surprise. That’s why it is no shock that Gardner and the Yankees have agreed to a one-year, $12.5 million contract, a deal that includes a club option for 2021 valued at $10 million, as first reported by George King of the New York Post.

Gardner, now 36, has spent his entire 12-year big-league career in New York, and with the retirement of CC Sabathia, remains the last holdover from the Yankees’ 2009 World Series squad. This new deal represents his third time negotiating with the Yankees to extend his stay; the first time Gardner was headed for free agency, the two sides agreed to four-year, $52 million extension beginning in 2015 with a club option for 2019. The Yankees declined that option but brought him back anyway on a one-year, $7.5 million contract, his first signed as a free agent.

Gardner had one of his most productive seasons to date on his one-year deal, earning every penny and more. In 550 trips to the plate, Gardner slashed .251/.325/.503, setting full-season career-highs in home runs (28) and wRC+ (115) to boot. Always a great all-around player, he still graded out positively in both center and left field while adding nearly five runs on the bases. In total, he was worth 3.6 WAR. Read the rest of this entry »

SAN DIEGO — In the wake of a record-setting season for total home runs — 6,776, or 1.39 per team per game, an increase of 21.4% relative to last year, and 11.0% relative to the previous record, set in 2017 — on Wednesday morning, Major League Baseball released its long-awaited report from a committee of scientists and Rawlings representatives in their attempt to account for what has happened during the 2017-19 seasons. Shortly afterwards, an eight-member panel consisting of representatives from the committee, Rawlings, and MLB then fielded questions from the media. It was a lot to absorb, even given familiarity with the topic, but the general impression from all that’s been put forth is that MLB and Rawlings don’t have the firmest of grips on their product and its performance.

The full 27-page “Preliminary Report of the Committee Studying Home Run Rates in MLB” (PDF) is highly technical, and worthy of further scrutiny, scientific study, and perhaps skepticism, but a few things came through in the press conference and a cursory trip through the report. First, Rawlings and MLB denied that there’s anything underhanded when it comes to changing the ball. Said President/CEO of Rawlings Michael Zlaket, “We have never been asked to ‘juice’ or ‘de-juice’ a baseball. And we’ve never done anything of the sort. Never would.”

Second, beyond a reiteration of the committee’s 2018 finding (PDF) that the ball-to-ball variability in aerodynamic drag is greater than the year-to-year change in average drag — a consequence, the league and Rawlings maintain, of using a product made of natural materials and constructed in part by hand — is that even the scientists involved in MLB’s committee are still grappling with the complex interplay of factors that affect drag. Seam height plays the biggest role, but hardly the only one. It will take further study to untangle the other factors — work that both Rawlings and MLB say that they’re committed to doing, via the committee. Read the rest of this entry »