The Tampa Bay Rays have a reputation of getting the best out of previously undervalued pitchers, and Garrett Cleavinger is a prime example. Acquired from the Los Angeles Dodgers in August 2022 in exchange for German Tapia, the 30-year-old southpaw was subsequently limited to 12 games in 2023 due to a knee injury, but a breakout was right around the corner. Cleavinger made a career-high 68 appearances last year, logging a 3.75 ERA and a 26.7 strikeout rate over 60 relief innings. His ledger included seven wins and six saves.

A high-octane heater was one of his best weapons; at 96.3 mph, Cleavinger’s four-seamer ranked in the 84th percentile for velocity. With that in mind, I asked the Lawrence, Kansas native if he identifies as a power pitcher.

“It’s a part of my game,” Cleavinger told me at the close of the 2024 campaign. “I’m definitely not a pinpoint command guy like some pitchers are — I wish I was a little bit better in that aspect — but power stuff coming out of the pen does kind of fit the description for me.”

Possessor of a varied arsenal is another accurate description. The erstwhile University of Oregon closer now features five-pitches, only one of which he threw less than 10 percent of the time. Per Baseball Savant, the breakdown was: cutter 26.3%, four-seamer 24.8%, slider 22.0%, sweeper 17.4%, and two-seamer 9.5%. Two of those were recent additions. Read the rest of this entry »

I began last week’s Matrix Reloaded with a note about the slow pace of the offseason in January, and that was still the case when the column was published at 3:35 p.m. ET. So, of course, less than three hours after that went live, Roki Sasaki announced on Instagram that he’d signed with the Dodgers. His signing kicked the market into gear, making these past seven days far more eventful than what we’d experienced in recent weeks.

For my neurotic Offseason Matrices work, that means a lot fewer blank cells and a lot more maroon cells, indicating a lack of fit due to a positional logjam. The game of musical chairs continues and free agents remain available to sign, but many of the teams that might’ve been interested earlier in the offseason have since filled their openings. That doesn’t necessarily mean that all of these players will sign for less than what they were expected to when the offseason began — though, as Ben Clemens demonstrated earlier this week, many of them will — but it does mean their options are limited. Without further ado, let’s get to the transactions that happened and what we can glean about the ones that may still be to come. Read the rest of this entry »

The Dodgers won 100 games in 2023. Then they signed the top two free agents in that year’s class: Shohei Ohtani and Yoshinobu Yamamoto, a pair of unicorns the likes of which aren’t available every offseason. In 2024, the Dodgers had the best record in baseball. Then they won the World Series, and along the way made the last two rounds of the playoffs look pretty easy. Ohtani won the NL MVP award.

And then they signed a bunch of new players and brought back a few more! Blake Snell! Roki Sasaki! Tanner Scott! Hyeseong Kim! Michael Conforto! Kirby Yates, probably! Teoscar Hernández! Blake Treinen! Kotaro Matsushima! (OK, Matsushima is a rugby player — I included him to see if you’re paying attention.)

MLB needs a salary cap, say two thirds of the 36,000 respondents to a much-circulated poll on MLB Trade Rumors. More jarring are the results to question no. 2: Almost exactly half of some 27,000 respondents would be willing to lose the entire 2027 season if it meant MLB instituted a salary cap. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Back in early October, Termarr Johnson self-assuredly told MLB Pipeline’s Jim Callis that he is continuing to work on being “the best hitter in the world.” The 20-year-old Pittsburgh Pirates prospect didn’t put it quite that way when I spoke to him days later, but he did exude determination and confidence when addressing his craft. That’s understandable. Drafted fourth overall in 2022 out of Atlanta’s Mays High School, Johnson remains a high-ceiling hitter, albeit one whose developmental path hasn’t been as smooth as many had anticipated.

His 2024 season included both stumbles and strides. The 5-foot-7, 190-pound middle infielder logged a solid 121 wRC+ between High-A Greensboro (487 plate appearances) and Double-A Altoona (57), but as our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen wrote last summer, Johnson’s “underlying contact data is pretty concerning.” Moreover, while his 15 home runs were indicative of plus power potential, the accompanying .386 slugging percentage was a bit underwhelming. Johnson’s left-handed stroke is unquestionably capable of causing damage, but further fine-tuning is needed before that can happen at the big league level.

Johnson discussed his approach to hitting shortly after the start of the Arizona Fall League season.

———

David Laurila: You’re still just 20 years old. Do you feel that you’ve settled into your identity as a hitter?

Termarr Johnson: “For sure. I feel like I have a pretty good swing, and I hit the ball hard pretty often, so I’m just trying to keep a good approach and bring the pitcher to me. I feel like that puts me in the best position possible. And to be honest with you, I’m a different hitter every at-bat. I’m a different hitter based on… like, every pitcher is different. Every pitch is different. Every situation is different. I’ll be a different hitter if there’s a runner on base and I’m trying to get him in, late in the game, or I’ll be a different hitter when I’m leading off the game.”

Laurila: That’s basically approach. What about mechanically? Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, I published my findings about the relationship between when free agents sign and the size of their contracts. As a quick refresher, in recent years, the last 20% or so of free agents to sign have been settling for contracts meaningfully lower than pre-offseason expectations. But that finding raises more questions, some of which I hope to answer today.

First, there’s an obvious question: Did the free agents who got those late, discounted deals perform worse than expected during the following season? In other words, did their low-dollar-value deals foreshadow lower-than-projected production? To examine this, I took the upcoming season’s projections for the players ranked on my Top 50 Free Agents list in each of the past three years, 150 players in all, to come up with a projected WAR for each segment of players. I then compared it to how they actually did in the ensuing year. There is indeed a drop-off for those who signed late:

First things first: Every group underperformed its projections. That comes down to playing time. Our projections use Depth Charts playing time, which approximates the most likely distribution of playing time across a given roster without accounting for the likelihood of injuries. Just as an example, non-catcher batters were projected for an average of more than 600 plate appearances in this dataset, and they came in closer to the mid-500s in practice. So don’t pay too much attention to the absolute numbers; the relative differences are what to look at here.

The last 10 free agents to sign saw huge shortfalls in production relative to expectations. One reason: They played less. The average hitter in this group of 150 free agents batted 70 times less than projected. Hitters signed among the last 10 free agents in their class batted 100 times less than projected. Likewise, the average pitcher in the group came up 25 innings shy of projections, but pitchers among the last 10 players signed came up 40 innings short.
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 Houston Astros.

Batters

The 2024 season started terribly for the Astros, with a 12-24 record in the early going and most of their projected rotation on the IL. The hole the team dug was deep enough that even with them playing solid ball after early May, the Astros didn’t get above .500 for good until the end of June. Still, nobody in the AL West managed to take advantage of Houston’s weak start. The Astros built a comfortable lead throughout August, and though the Mariners never fell hopelessly behind in the race, they never made Houston really sweat either. Read the rest of this entry »

The other day, I was poking around on the Minnesota Twins’ RosterResource page. Mostly because the Twins have been quiet this offseason, I wanted to make sure they were still there and that I hadn’t missed another round of contraction rumors.

It’s fine, guys, I checked and the Twins are not going out of business anytime soon.

The other thing I noticed is that Minnesota had only two hitters who qualified for the batting title last season, which is not a lot. The Rangers and Brewers (which I would not have guessed) had seven each. And with Carlos Santana bound for his fifth go-around with Cleveland (it’s only his third but I know you were about to look), Willi Castro stands alone in Minnesota. The Marlins and Rays are the only other teams that are set to return only a single qualified hitter from 2024. Read the rest of this entry »

On August 18 in Colorado, Ha-Seong Kim led off first base, then dived back to beat a pickoff attempt. He tore the labrum in his right shoulder, and that was the last time we saw him play in 2024. After a failed rehab attempt, Kim underwent surgery in October, and he won’t be ready to play again until sometime between April and June. Just as uncertain: Where exactly Kim will be suiting up when he returns. There’s no doubt about his skill. Over the past four years, Kim has spent time at second, short, and third, and neither DRS nor FRV has ever rated him as below average at any of those spots. He needed a year to adjust on offense after arriving from the KBO in 2021, but over the past three seasons, he’s run a 106 wRC+. That ranks 13th among shortstops, and over the same period, his 10.5 WAR ranks 11th.

Kim entered free agency after both he and the Padres declined their ends of a mutual option, and he came in at ninth on our Top 50 Free Agents. According to the projections, he’ll command a four- or five-year deal with an AAV in the neighborhood of $19 million. However, the shoulder injury could cost him as much as half of the 2025 season, and it makes for a tough needle to thread. He’s got to sign with a team that needs a solid infielder, but not badly enough to need one right away. Moreover, a shoulder injury is especially scary for Kim, whose arm strength is an important part of his overall value and who already possesses below-average power at the plate. For that reason, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Kim get a pillow contract: Ben Clemens proposed two years with an opt-out. Back in November, Mark Feinsand reported that Kim had generated “lots of interest,” and wrote about the possibility that he’d be among the first free agents off the board. However, it’s now late January, and if you cruise through our Depth Charts, you’ll notice that there just don’t seem to be many good landing spots for Kim. Let us begin our litanies. Read the rest of this entry »

“It’s better not to know so much about what things mean.”
– David Lynch in Rolling Stone, September 1990

A few friends and I have a recurring movie night where we take turns choosing the featured film for the evening. Because one friend has decided to make his picks in the “campy horror” genre, last week we wound up watching Peter Jackson’s Dead Alive (yes, THAT Peter Jackson). Rotten Tomatoes describes it as a “delightfully gonzo tale of a lovestruck teen and his zombified mother,” while Wikipedia goes with “zombie comedy splatter film.” It deals in absurdity and surrealism and its favorite tool of the trade is fake blood. The production reportedly went through about 80 gallons of the stuff.

Absurdist storytelling launders its messaging through exaggerated extremes and by defying or subverting logic in ways frequently so morbid or dark that they surpass tragedy and come all the way back around to comedy. Extremes that defy logic exist in baseball too. A particularly rich source being players’ home/road splits. I went searching the 2024 season for the most extreme differences in player performance (minimum 200 plate appearances) between their home parks and road venues across a variety of offensive metrics. In my own act of defying reason, I don’t really have an explanation for choosing hitters over pitchers. Maybe I’ll do pitchers in the future. Maybe I won’t. Who needs symmetry or balance in the universe? Anyway, I found the largest disparities, and ignored the boring, expected ones like Rockies hitters clubbing a bunch more homers at Coors Field, and instead, locked in on the truly bizarre.

Certain occurrences earn their bizarre status not because of their unexpected nature, but rather because they take an expected outcome to such an extreme as to feel over the top, or a bit “on the nose,” as an editor might put it. Dead Alive depicts Lionel, a young adult man, still living at home with his mother, an overbearing type who domineers his life. Lionel and his mother portray the standard “momma’s boy” archetype, but exaggerated to nth degree — the film culminates with the supercharged zombie version of Lionel’s mother inserting her son back into her womb, where she can finally regain complete control over his life.

Like an overbearing mother, certain ballparks have a strong influence on the type of hitter who thrives under their care. Some encourage power, or prefer a certain handedness, while others look down on hitting and choose instead to emphasize pitching and defense. Petco Park in San Diego does not favor offense in general, but it is among the least friendly ballparks for lefties who hit a bunch of singles. Enter Luis Arraez, the singles hitter of all singles hitters.

The infielder/DH was traded to the Padres from the Marlins last May 4. Like Lionel, who in the early scenes of Dead Alive meets a nice young woman named Paquita and takes her on a date to the zoo, Arraez continued to do his thing for the month of May, hitting 38 singles, compared to the 30 he hit during the first month of the season. But then Lionel’s mother interrupts the date, gets bit by a Sumatran Rat Monkey, and chaos ensues, just as the influence of Petco Park eventually exerts its will on Arraez. He ended the season with a .268 average at home and a .359 average on the road, due in part to his hitting about 20% fewer singles (71 vs. 90) and almost 50% fewer doubles (11 vs. 21) at home compared to on the road. This placed him at the extreme end of Petco Park’s offense dampening effects, so extreme as to feel like the stadium stuffed Arraez inside her womb until he learned his lesson about hitting all those singles.

Batting average is one thing, but there are other stats that you wouldn’t necessarily expect to have extreme home/road splits; similarly, you wouldn’t necessarily expect a scene at the beginning of a movie that depicts the main character mowing the lawn at the behest of his mother to foreshadow a momentum shift in the big fight scene at the end. Nevertheless, Brice Turang’s stolen base success rate was 15 points higher at home than on the road, which was the largest differential among base stealers with at least 30 attempts (omitting Jazz Chisholm Jr. who was around 20 percentage points better on the road, but also switched home stadiums in late July). The Brewers second baseman stole 28 bases at American Family Field and was caught just one time there, while in away parks he stole 22 bases and was caught five times. The discrepancy becomes all the more notable when considering Turang reached base less frequently at home, posting a .290 OBP in Milwaukee compared to a .341 OBP everywhere else.

There aren’t too many data points to suggest why Turang was better at swiping bags at home, but as a player with just over 1,000 big league plate appearances, it makes sense that some of his visual timing and positioning cues might be more locked in at AmFam than they are elsewhere in the league. Things like the first base cutout in the infield grass and the sightlines behind the pitcher as he’s taking his lead from first are likely more dialed in at the place where Turang has taken the majority of his reps in the majors. Using one of his strongest tools (94th percentile sprint speed) and the comforts of a familiar environment, Turang almost completely compensated for his otherwise negative contributions on offense, just as Lionel, in defending his home from a horde of zombie partygoers, turned to a trusted tool — his lawnmower and its sharp, speedy blade — to mow through the walking dead.

The largest split I could find with respect to wRC+, which is already adjusted for park factors, belongs to Luis García Jr., who after several up and down seasons with the Nationals, spent 2024 as Washington’s primary second baseman. The lefty logged a 156 wRC+ at home and a 63 wRC+ on the road, a 93-point spread. This is where it’s helpful to know exactly how the park adjustment is applied to wRC+ and why that might make a fairly neutral hitting environment like Nationals Park seem like an oasis for one hitter in particular. Or, in other words, why a young lady like Paquita might continue to see someone even after his zombie mother ate her dog.

(Here is where I must note that there is a character in Dead Alive named Scroat. Unfortunately, I couldn’t make a baseball analogy to Scroat because I do not remember which character was Scroat, and an IMDb search through the movie’s cast list does not have a headshot next to the actor who played Scroat. Really, I just wanted a chance to write Scroat in a FanGraphs post, so here we are. Scroat!)

Anyway, the park factor applied to wRC+ is a single value that captures the run environment in the stadium overall, as opposed to the more granular component level park factors that consider the stadium’s influence on the individual components of offense, such as singles, doubles, triples, home runs, etc. Component park factors that take into consideration the batter’s handedness are also available. Digging into the components of García’s home/road splits reveals that when in D.C., he struck out less and hit more singles and homers. Component park factors explain part of why García might benefit more from hitting in Washington than an average hitter: Nats Park does suppress strikeouts relative to its peers, and left-handed hitters get a boost with respect to singles. Fewer strikeouts means more balls in play at a ballpark where a ball in play off the bat of a lefty is more likely to lead to a hit. However, Washington remains neutral on home runs for those hitting from the left side. Looking at García’s splits with respect to batted ball characteristics reveal his home run-to-fly ball rate drops from 19.2% at home to 6.7% on the road. But it’s not just that the ball is carrying better because, additionally, his hard hit rate increases from 24.1% on the road to 38.4% at home. That García’s strikeout rate drops 10 percentage points in his home ballpark relative to everywhere else, in conjunction with his improved contact quality on fly balls, seems to suggest he sees the ball better at Nats Park than anywhere else. And for what it’s worth, a special aptitude for vision is what kept Lionel’s girlfriend from abandoning him, as she believed the tarot reading done by her seer/grandmother that foretold a fated, long-term romantic entanglement with Lionel.

Many don’t believe in fate and instead subscribe to the nihilistic view that the universe is composed of randomness, which at times manifests as utter, uninterpretable chaos. T-Mobile Park in Seattle is one of the worst ballparks for hitters, both overall and across all individual components, unless, by chance, you happen to be Luke Raley. The Mariners outfielder/first baseman defied the natural order of the universe (to the extent that there is one) and posted a .393 wOBA, 166 wRC+, and hit 15 home runs across 229 plate appearances at home, with a .295 wOBA, 91 wRC+, and seven homers over 226 PA on the road. Looking at component factors does absolutely nothing to explain Raley’s performance at T-Mobile Park, since as a lefty, all of Seattle’s horrible hitting juju applies even more so than it does for righties. His BABIP hovered around .300 both at home on the road, suggesting that if there’s luck in his performance, it was distributed evenly at home and on the road. In terms of his batted ball profile, Raley did have a higher hard hit rate at home, and he also pulled the ball more and put it in the air more, which collectively signals an overall higher quality of contact. Perhaps like the tarot-reading grandmother, Raley possesses some special sight that allows him to see the ball in a way that no one else has mustered at T-Mobile Park, or perhaps, as is the messaging of much absurdist art, we must simply submit to the random, chaotic winds of the universe, blowing some fly balls over the fence and leaving others to die on the warning track.

Whatever force is tasked with inflicting chaos upon the masses, it seems to enjoy unleashing Yordan Alvarez as often as possible. It’s true that Houston’s lefty DH/left fielder was not involved with the Astros’ banging scheme scandal, but he nevertheless is a frequent recipient of boos at away ballparks due to his uncanny ability to launch game-winning, soul-crushing moonshots in front of opposing fans. Though the booing is more of a vibes-based response, the data show that Alvarez does tap into his power more frequently on the road, hitting both doubles and home runs at a much higher rate, leading to a road wRC+ that is 62 points higher than his mark at home (a road advantage topped only by J.P. Crawford of the Mariners).

Again, wRC+ already accounts for the overall run environment, but not the components by which a particular player might be more heavily impacted. Houston’s ballpark, which is now called Daikin Park, grades out as neutral to hitters overall and with respect to left-handed home runs, but for doubles, a lefty hitter should have an easier go of it (though it’s worth noting Alvarez pulls the ball at a below average rate for lefties). But despite the neutral or better home park environment, in 2024, Alvarez hit 12 doubles and 13 homers across 315 plate appearances at home, while hitting 22 doubles and 22 homers across 320 plate appearances on the road. Alvarez also walked slightly more on the road, while holding his strikeout rate constant, suggesting a more patient approach that led to higher quality contact; this is reinforced by his higher home run-to-fly ball rate (20.4% vs. 11.7%) and hard hit rate (46.1% vs. 36.1%) away from Houston.

As with some of the other extreme splits, the increased patience and improved contact might mean that Alvarez doesn’t see the ball as well at Daikin Park as he does elsewhere. Or this instance of absurd home/road splits might be trying to send a different message. Absurdist art and its close relative, surrealism, frequently serve to defy logic, or at least quantifiable logic. At the end of Dead Alive, Lionel cuts his way out of his mother’s womb using a talisman that Paquita’s grandmother gave him for good luck. She probably thought its magical properties would prevent anything bad from happening to him, rather than its physical properties allowing him to puncture zombie flesh. Even magic follows no logical order.

Meanwhile, when asked to describe the experience of playing in a big league stadium in front of a packed crowd during the highest leverage moments of the game, players frequently use the word surreal. And in the surreal world, there wouldn’t necessarily be a logical explanation for why Alvarez becomes more powerful on the road, why he happens to be holding a talisman that can puncture the hearts of opposing fans. Maybe he feels less pressure away from the home fans. Maybe he takes a twisted pleasure in making a stadium full of fans fall silent. Maybe, like the zombies in the movie, he takes a poison intended for animals that has the unintended effect of supercharging his abilities. I’m mixing my talisman and poison metaphors now, but as previously established, there are no rules and nothing matters, so just roll with it and instead linger on the thought that if Alvarez ever leaves the Astros, he may morph into a supercharged monster permanently.

While we’re defying logic, I did stumble upon one member of the Colorado Rockies with a home/road split worth mentioning. In 228 plate appearances at Coors Field, Michael Toglia hit eight home runs; in 230 plate appearances away from Coors Field, he hit 17 home runs. So, in nearly the same number of opportunities, Toglia smacked more than twice as many home runs on the road as he did at Coors Field, a park notorious for juicing fly balls. My best guess is that the stadium’s reputation is doing psychic damage to a 26-year-old first baseman with just one full season under his belt. His hard hit rate is still higher at home, suggesting maybe he thinks that all he needs to do is swing out of his shoes and the thin air will do the rest. Meanwhile, his Med% is higher on the road and he hits the ball to the opposite field more often, suggesting a more controlled, purposeful swing away from the influence of Colorado. Maybe he’s overthinking the atmospheric conditions, or maybe he made a deal with an evil imp that granted him 60-grade raw power everywhere except the Mile High City.

Sometimes chaotic occurrences exist purely for comedic relief, offering no larger societal lesson or commentary on humanity. At one point in Dead Alive, Lionel visits his mother’s grave because he knows she’s a zombie and, therefore, not actually dead, so his master plan is to administer sedatives to her indefinitely in order to keep her safely in the ground. When he gets jumped at the cemetery by a band of local hooligans, he’s saved by a priest (literally, not spiritually), who seems to have exactly one skill, which is, as the priest puts it, to “kick ass for the Lord.” He does single-handedly wipe out the hooligans with what appears to be self-taught kung fu, but then promptly gets conscripted to the zombie ranks. The kung fu priest of baseball is Mike Yastrzemski, right fielder for the Giants, whose extreme singular skill is striking out way less at home than on the road. All of his other splits are as expected, but when batting at Oracle Park, he strikes out 19.7% of the time, compared to 32.6% everywhere else. It’s the most extreme strikeout difference in the bigs by a couple of percentage points.

In the movie’s next scene, Lionel has rounded up the current group of zombies, including the priest and a nurse, who was originally dispatched to look into his mother’s ailments before her transition to undead was complete. The priest and the nurse take a liking to one another and wind up birthing a baby zombie. This leads to a scene that was not in the original script and serves no purpose to the larger narrative; really, it’s just there for the jokes. Jackson decided to add it after they’d finished filming everything else, because they were still under budget, and since then, he has called it his favorite scene in the movie. For no comprehensible reason, Lionel takes the baby to the park, pushing it along in a stroller and mimicking the actions of the mothers he observes interacting with their babies. Perhaps Lionel thought that a change of scenery and treating the baby like a regular human baby would coax it into acting like a regular human baby, but it did not. Instead the viewer is treated to a series of hijinks, where the baby drags Lionel all over the park, and Lionel has to act like tackling a baby is perfectly normal behavior.

New Orioles outfielder Tyler O’Neill is the zombie baby hoping that a change of scenery does prompt a transformation. O’Neill experienced an even stranger flavor of Yastrzemski’s strikeout split. It’s not particularly unusual for hitters to strike out less in San Francisco (though not to the extreme reached by Yastrzemski), and the same holds true for Boston, where O’Neill played his home games last year. But O’Neill flipped the script; instead of striking out less at Fenway Park, he struck out significantly more frequently, posting a rate of 39.7% as opposed to 27.9% on the road. O’Neill hasn’t always struck out more at home than on the road. For example, during his final two years with the Cardinals, he was better in St. Louis than he was away from it, which is interesting considering that Fenway is a much more hitter-friendly park than Busch Stadium. It’s pretty funny to think that Fenway of all places could act as one hitter’s kryptonite, but the Orioles are hoping that was the case here. Perhaps getting O’Neill into a different park will do for him what Lionel couldn’t do for the zombie baby. If O’Neill’s overall line winds up resembling something closer to last year’s road performance, he’s much more likely to be a productive contributor in Baltimore. The spike in strikeouts caused his on-base percentage to crater to .301 in Boston, compared to .369 everywhere else.

For as much as we’d like for everything in baseball and life to follow some logical, rational, and quantifiable natural order, it doesn’t always work that way. There are too many lurking variables, agents of chaos, and forces we don’t yet understand. Sometimes it’s incredibly funny when something happens that we can’t explain. Sometimes it teaches us something completely separate from what we set out to divine. Sometimes we just have to accept that we don’t know what a weird thing is really about.