Look, I get it. You’re up in arms about the Roki Sasaki deal. The rich got richer and we’re all tired of the Dodgers signing every free agent (even you, Dodgers fans) — can they at least make it seem like it’s a level playing field? If that’s how you’ve been feeling this week, though, I’ve got some bad news for you, because I think the two moves the Dodgers have made since signing Sasaki might be bigger deals for 2025. Over the weekend, they signed the top reliever on the market, Tanner Scott. Now, they’re reportedly working on an agreement with Kirby Yates. As Yates’ signing is still pending a physical and has yet to be finalized, let’s cover Scott first, then ruminate on Yates at the end.

Scott’s deal, for four years and $72 million, befits an elite reliever, and that’s exactly what he is. He’s compiled a 2.04 ERA (2.53 FIP) across 150 innings over the last two years, using a lights-out slider and excellent fastball in roughly equal measure. We’re not talking about smoke and mirrors here; both of our pitch models think his fastball is one of the best handful in the game. His gaudy swinging strike rates provide supporting evidence. He sits 96-98 mph and touches 100. Sure, he walks his fair share of batters, but he’s a reliever – that’s just part of the bargain you accept sometimes.

If you’ll recall, the Dodgers leaned heavily on their bullpen in the 2024 postseason. Some of that was because of injuries to the starting rotation, but plenty of it was by choice. The Dodgers assembled a unit with four late-game options, and they used those options aggressively and opportunistically. Best opposing hitter up in the sixth inning? Send in a closer. Starter in a jam and the game on the line earlier than you expected? Send in a closer. Save situation? Fine, sure, we have a few left over anyway, send in a closer. Read the rest of this entry »

Like most of you, I’ve spent all winter with one eye on the Hall of Fame ballot tracker run by Ryan Thibodaux, Anthony Calamis, and Adam Dore.

As an aside: I love the tracker, partly because it’s in the best traditions of citizen journalism/archivism, and has been made essential within its niche by the enthusiasm and thoroughness of the people who run it. It reminds me of The Himalayan Database, which is considered the definitive list of all the climbers who have summited the highest mountains in the world. The Database was founded and run not by a sponsor or NGO, but by a single journalist, Elizabeth Hawley, who tracked, verified, and published ascents from the 1960s until her death in 2018. In this age of corporatization, conglomeration, and misinformation, it’s invigorating to see a single trusted list of Things That Happened published online somewhere by people who care about the historical record.

Anyway, last week, I noticed a fresh shipment of ballots from voters representing the Philadelphia BBWAA chapter, which included a swell of support for Jimmy Rollins’ candidacy. By Sunday, as I was looking over Inquirer columnist Marcus Hayes’ ballot, I found myself experiencing an unexpected combination of emotions. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, Michael Rosen wrote about Jack Flaherty’s delayed free agency market. Michael advanced a number of theories about why Flaherty hadn’t yet signed a deal, and what that might mean about his fastball, teams’ perceptions of his fastball, and the trajectory of his career broadly speaking. I found that piece really interesting – and I also started thinking about what Flaherty not having signed yet means in a larger sense.

You don’t have to look any further than last year to get an idea of what could happen to Flaherty. Blake Snell and Jordan Montgomery both waited a long time before settling for short-term deals. The year before that, Carlos Correa’s multiple failed physicals kept him on the market until the very end. In 2022, Correa, Kenley Jansen, and Trevor Story all found themselves looking for employment well into March.

All of those players came into the offseason expecting a major contract, and all of them ended up getting less than anticipated, bringing to mind some classic FanGraphs articles from Travis Sawchik, back in the halcyon days of 2018. Those articles drew on a study by Max Rieper that separated free agents into pre- and post-New Year’s signings and found a large discount for the latter group. Read the rest of this entry »

As soon as we get on the phone, Susan D’Andelet tells me that she was at Camden Yards for Jackson Holliday’s first career home run, a monster grand slam that landed out on Eutaw Street a few days earlier. “I went for work, actually,” she clarifies. “We took some of our clients.” It’s August, and as the Orioles challenge the Yankees for the best record in the American League, all of Maryland is buzzing with excitement. “Oh yeah,” she says. “I know they’re calling up another guy from, what is it, Double-A or whatever?” She lets out a big laugh. “You would think I would know more.”

Sports have surrounded D’Andelet (pronounced dee-ON-duh-LAY) her whole life. When her son was a child, he played alongside Bobby Boyd, a speedy outfielder who batted .331 at West Virginia University and spent four years in the Astros system. Boyd is now a CPA, D’Andelet tells me. Her husband is a sports fanatic who often coached their son’s teams. After they met, the couple discovered that their fathers had played together on the same football team, the Langdon Lions.

“I’m a sixth-generation native Washingtonian,” she says. “My dad grew up in D.C. and played all sorts of sports.” She remembers being dragged to Senators games and watching him play softball well into his 30s, before giving it up in favor of golf and fishing. His most enduring contribution to sports was an idea: He was William H. Williams, inventor of the cleat cleaner.

I wrote about the cleat cleaner last year, looking up the patent history to identify Williams as its inventor. A few months after my piece was published, D’Andelet was at a dinner party. “This baseball game happened to be on,” she recalls, “and I said to my friend, who I’ve known since high school, ‘Do you see that mat on the back of the pitcher’s mound?’ And I told her, ‘My dad invented that.’” The revelation earned her a skeptical look.

D’Andelet continues, “We’ve known each other probably 50 years. She said, ‘You’ve never told me that before.’ And I said, ‘Well, I didn’t think it was important.’ You know what I mean? It’s just not something that would necessarily come up. So anyway, I said, ‘Yeah, my dad invented that.’ She kind of looked at me – which people do – like, ‘Yeah… I don’t know about that.’” D’Andelet Googled it to prove her point, and happened upon my article, replete with images from her father’s patent request. She still has the originals.

The cleat cleaner is easy to overlook. Our attention is naturally drawn to incongruity, whereas the cleat cleaner is exquisitely logical and its presence on the back of the mound makes so much sense that you take it for granted. You can stare at it night after night without ever really seeing it. It might never come up in conversation, even if you spent your childhood helping your parents build a business around it. “Everybody knows it’s there, but they don’t think much about it,” D’Andelet says. “So I just thought it was interesting that you were interested.” She reached out a few days later, and when I asked whether she’d be interested in sharing her memories, she was enthusiastic about telling her father’s story.

Williams, known since childhood as Bunky, died from COVID pneumonia in February 2022, just shy of his 95th birthday. He came up with the idea for the cleat cleaner when D’Andelet and her two brothers were small children. “We lived in an apartment in D.C. when my parents had us,” D’Andelet says. “So my mother had three children under three years old. And we were in a one-bedroom apartment in Washington D.C., right off New Hampshire Avenue. I remember that. And then we moved out to the house where it was invented, in Silver Spring, Maryland, 701 Hobbs Drive.”

Williams was a vice president at American President Lines, an international shipping company. “He worked for them his whole business career, 30-some years, and the cleat cleaner was something that he did in the basement,” D’Andelet says. He lobbied on behalf of the company, often on Capitol Hill, though D’Andelet is quick to point out that he wasn’t registered as a lobbyist and never would have assented to being called one. And despite his invention, Williams wasn’t trained in engineering. “No, not at all, but he was very capable of doing a lot of things,” she says. “He was clever, and he was a smart man.” The house on Hobbs Drive had an unfinished basement, so Williams finished it himself, eventually creating a workroom with “a big old wooden workbench.” Aptly, his middle name was Handy.

Williams toiled in the workroom during the evenings, but the cleat cleaner was a family endeavor from the very beginning. “We had a little cottage industry in our home before it was fashionable,” D’Andelet says. Williams made the first prototype out of toys and a spare plank of wood. She remembers being a child and seeing him “drilling out the holes in that piece of wood, and taking my brothers’ plastic toy rockets and cutting them off and putting them in the holes.” The rockets came from sets of those little green army men that many of us had as children. “That’s what he got his patent on,” she says. Did her brothers protest about sacrificing their rockets to the cause? “No, I don’t think so. He might have even broken down and bought extras,” she says with a laugh. “We didn’t have a whole lot at that stage in our lives. He was probably in his 30s and we were all little kids.

Williams tested his prototype the same way anyone would. “I can remember him getting the dirt muddy, squirting it down with the hose in the backyard, getting a big patch of mud,” D’Andelet recalls. “He would have the baseball cleats on himself, and he would get a big old wad of mud on the cleats and then use the cleat cleaner. And so I imagine that he went through a number of these to get it right.” Once he’d perfected the design, Williams applied for and received a patent in 1963. “He found a place in Baltimore that would manufacture them,” she says. “He had a mold created, and had the company in Baltimore make these products. I remember my mother would load us all into the car and drive us to Baltimore, and we’d load them all in the trunk. What I remember in particular was that the rubber that they were made out of stunk. And the whole basement stunk.”

D’Andelet’s mother, Nettie Williams, now lives with her in Delaware. “She’s a delightful person, always was and still is. Very much a team player.” As the business got going, D’Andelet says, “my mother was really the one who was running it. She was a stay-at-home mom and she had the three of us. And when he started with this, she was right there at his side doing whatever needed to be done.” They initially marketed the cleat cleaner as a football product, sending mailers to NFL teams. “She did all the banking and bookkeeping, and the invoices would come in and she’d fill the orders.” Nettie made regular visits to the bank in Montgomery Country, often being served by the same young teller. “He was trying to figure out at the time why she had all these checks with the logos of the professional football teams on them,” D’Andelet says. One day, the bewildered teller finally asked whether Nettie was a cheerleader. “I guess that was the only thing he could come up with.”

Nettie went to secretarial school, so she was Bunky’s at-home secretary. D’Andelet remembers how he would return home after work, walk through the door, and say, “Nettie, take a letter!” Thinking about the scene now, D’Andelet laughs. “So she’d get her stenographer’s pad out and do shorthand, and be in there typing up letters to all the professional teams — the professional football teams and then eventually the baseball teams. And so she was the jack-of-all-trades. So whatever needed to be done, it was her and us. We were the cheap labor… Whether it was stuffing envelopes with flyers, or putting stamps on the envelopes. We would package up the cleat cleaners, initially it was in boxes, and we would address them and tape them up and take them to the post office. Everything that was done, we did.”

Although they started with football, cleat cleaners became more associated with baseball because they sat on the back of the mound, in clear view of millions of home viewers. Yet, despite the product’s popularity, Williams “didn’t make a killing from selling the cleat cleaner,” D’Andelet says, “It wasn’t what we lived off of. It was just a little aside for him. He saw that there was a need for this.”

It remained a cottage industry. When she was in her early 20s, D’Andelet’s friend, Chris Williams (no relation), posed for flyers. “He was the shoe model – or the foot model, or whatever you want to call it,” she says. “He played baseball a lot. He was very active. And my dad would have him put the cleats on and get them all muddied up, and try to get the mud out with the cleat cleaner and take pictures.”

Williams also invented a kicking tee. “That never really took off,” D’Andelet says, “and I don’t know why. It was called the Sky Tee and it sat on his rolltop desk.” At some point, the manufacturer in Baltimore was bought by another company. The new owner mistakenly believed that they also owned the mold, and Williams needed a lawyer to help him get it back. He kept the business going into his mid-80s, and you can still find the original cleatcleaner.com website, from 2001, on the Wayback Machine.

After making cleat cleaners for 50 years, Williams sold the business, along with the original mold, about 10 years ago. Before he did so, he asked whether anyone in the family wanted to take over. D’Andelet has spent her entire career in the mortgage, title, and real estate industry, and she just couldn’t see herself continuing the business. “It would have been nice,” she says. “It was kind of hard to say no.” She still has some cleat cleaners, but they’ve been in storage since a move a few years back.

D’Andelet still sees reminders of her father. On the highway, she sometimes finds herself alongside 18-wheelers hauling American President Lines shipping containers. “And you’ll see the ships. I see them sometimes when I’m going over the Chesapeake Bay Bridge. I’ll see the ships going along with the APL.”

The cleat cleaner is more widespread than ever. The patent expired back in 1980, and these days, there’s no shortage of companies manufacturing them. They come in an ever-expanding variety of styles, shapes, and colors, but Williams’ original design, the one that started as a plank of wood and sawed-off toy rockets, is still in production. And despite her best efforts, D’Andelet isn’t going to escape sports anytime soon. “I ended up marrying a man who was as interested in sports,” she says, building up to the punchline. “I said, ‘Look you can play all the sports you want to. Don’t expect me to come sit there and watch it.’”

Kristian Campbell shot up the rankings last year, and elevating was a big reason why. Known primarily for his athleticism and bat-to-ball skills when he was drafted 132nd overall by the Red Sox in 2023, the Georgia Tech product transformed his right-handed stroke to the tune of 20 home runs and a 180 wRC+ over 517 plate appearances across three levels. Flying under most radar as recently as a year ago, Campbell is now one of the game’s top prospects. Moreover, he has a legitimate chance to break camp as Boston’s starting second baseman.

I asked the 22-year-old infielder about his swing change when the Red Sox held their annual rookie development camp at Fenway Park earlier this week.

“It’s been all about bat path,” explained Campbell, who had a 90% contact rate but just four home runs in his lone collegiate season (he’d been a freshman redshirt in 2022) . “Instead of being flat, or straight down, I’m trying to hit the ball at a good angle. That’s what I lacked coming into pro baseball, hitting the ball in the air. I never really hit for power before last year.”

The proof is in the numbers, and not just ones that can be found on the back of a baseball card. In 2023, Campbell went deep once in 84 professional plate appearances while logging a 48% ground ball rate with a minus-2 attack angle. This past season, the aforementioned 20 home runs — eight each in High-A and Double-A, and four in Triple-A — were accompanied by a 39% ground ball rate and a plus-9 attack angle. His xwOBAcon jumped from .327 to .422.

According to Campbell, his conversion didn’t require a complete revamping of his mechanics. Read the rest of this entry »

For the most part, I am the voice of reason whenever my friends complain about slow offseasons, reassuring them with statements like, “Be patient,” “Stuff will happen,” “The dam will break.” Over the last week, though, I’ve become completely Jokerfied. After a slow seven days, I am now fully in the camp of believing that nothing happens, nothing ever will happen again, and spring training will open in a month with plenty of unsigned free agents. Anyway, now that that’s all out of my system and I can be a little more rational — a month is still a long time, the dam can break at any moment, etc. — it’s time to get into the updates with the Matrix. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Mets signed Juan Soto in December, he was, technically speaking, filling the hole that Jesse Winker left behind. Of course, that’s a bit like buying the Batmobile to replace an expired bus pass. Winker’s greatest strength is drawing walks, and Soto’s career walk rate makes Winker’s career walk rate look like Jeff McNeil’s career walk rate. Still, the point stands. The Mets lost one lefty-batting corner outfielder to free agency and replaced him with another. Yet, on Thursday afternoon, they re-signed Winker anyway. His one-year, $7.5 million contract is fairly straightforward, but the ramifications for New York’s roster could be much more complex.

Poor baserunning, miserable defense, and frequent injuries have limited Winker throughout his career. All the same, his bat was a major asset for the Reds from 2017-21. In just over 1,500 plate appearances with Cincinnati, he slashed .288/.385/.504 with a 132 wRC+. While he thrived at Great American Ball Park, he made his mark outside of that hitter’s haven, too, producing an .845 OPS and 126 wRC+ on the road. He made the All-Star team in his final season with the Reds, batting .305 with 24 home runs in 110 games, good for a career-best 3.2 WAR.

The next two seasons, however, marked a period of steep decline for Winker. Playing for the Mariners and Brewers, he managed just 0.7 WAR in 2022 and -0.8 in 2023. His agent might point out that back, neck, and knee injuries hampered his performance in that time, as did some bad luck on balls in play; his xwOBA was nearly 30 points better than his wOBA, while his BABIP was more than 50 ticks below his average from the previous five years. Even so, it would have been more than fair to worry about his future as a major leaguer after his dismal 2023 campaign. Entering 2024, his ZiPS projection was a mere 0.4 WAR in 415 plate appearances, and he was forced to sign a minor league contract with the Nationals less than two weeks before spring training began.

Back to full health, Winker rebounded in Washington. While he wasn’t a power threat like he’d been in his Reds heyday, he knocked 18 doubles and 11 home runs, giving him a middle-of-the-pack .162 ISO. His BABIP was back up above .300, and his 14.0% walk rate ranked fifth among qualified batters (as of his final day with the Nats). All in all, he put up a 125 wRC+ and 1.2 WAR in 101 games.

This was enough to pique the Mets’ interest ahead of the trade deadline. However, after Washington sent him to New York, Winker wasn’t the productive hitter that the Mets thought they were getting when they acquired him. Well, at least not during the regular season, when Winker was little more than replacement level with his new team. All the more disappointing, he was set up to thrive with the Mets: He had the platoon advantage almost every time he came to the plate. While Washington used him as an everyday player, New York shielded him from southpaws; he faced just four left-handed pitchers over the final two months of the season. Nonetheless, his 97 wRC+ with the Mets was much closer to his career mark against lefties (88) than righties (129).

The problem was rooted in Winker’s approach at the plate. With the Nationals, he ran that aforementioned 14.0% walk rate and struck out just 22.2% of the time. After the trade, he lowered his strikeout rate to 17.1%, which might’ve been a good thing, except that his walk rate also dropped way down, to 7.8%. With the Mets, Winker swung more often and made more contact, especially on pitches in the strike zone. His Z-Swing% (per Statcast) jumped from 60.5% to 70.4%, while his Z-Contact% jumped from 85.5% to 91.2%. This wouldn’t have been a problem if he crushed many of those extra balls he put in play, but, naturally, he did not.

So, why did Winker suddenly change his approach at a time when things were going well? I’d posit the Mets noticed that he was holding back on too many hittable pitches over the first four months of the season and let him know that was the case after the trade. According to Robert Orr’s calculations from his Damage leaderboard, Winker was better than the average hitter at identifying hittable pitches every year from 2020-23. Yet, with the Nationals this past season, his Hittable Pitch Take rate put him in the bottom third of the league. After he started swinging at more strikes with the Mets, he rose back up to the 66th percentile. The problem, however, was that he sacrificed another critical skill in the process. Winker’s selectivity rate — Orr’s metric that shows how often a player avoids swinging at bad pitches — fell from the 73rd percentile as a National to the 35th percentile as a Met. All that is to say, Winker swung at more good pitches, but he also swung at more bad ones, and he didn’t do enough damage against good pitches to compensate for his lack of production against the bad ones. Ultimately, his hard-hit and barrel rates were lower with the Mets than they were with the Nationals, as were his wOBA and xwOBA on contact.

This raises another question: Why would the Mets want Winker back if their efforts to improve his approach went so poorly? Perhaps they think he just needs a little more time to reap the rewards. After all, 129 plate appearances is nothing. Aaron Judge was still hitting below the Mendoza Line with an OPS in the mid-.700s by his 129th plate appearances last season. Thankfully for our purposes, we have an easy way to increase the sample size of Winker’s 2024 season with the Mets: Include the playoffs, as Winker took an additional 32 plate appearances in October. He continued to swing at strikes at a similar rate, but he used those swings to record several big hits, including two triples and a home run. He also drew seven walks, compared to just four strikeouts. If you combine those numbers with Winker’s regular season stats as a Met, you get a 10.6% walk rate, a 16.1% strikeout rate, and a .341 wOBA. Even more promising is his .353 xwOBA, notably higher than his .335 xwOBA with the Nationals. All of a sudden, it makes a lot more sense why the Mets decided to keep this guy around.

It’s far too soon to say if Winker’s new approach will work in a larger sample size. Still, it’s not hard to see why the Mets think he’s worth a longer look. In a best-case scenario, he could be an even more productive hitter than he was overall in 2024. And if this new approach doesn’t befit him going forward, he doesn’t have to be anything more than the hitter he was in Washington to be valuable on a one-year, $7.5 million deal. After all, the Mets will continue to shield him from left-handed pitching, and his track record against righties is strong:

So, that’s Winker. But this signing is an iceberg – and ironically, it’s the rare kind of iceberg that isn’t so good for a polar bear. At first glance, this is just a 1.0- to 1.5-WAR player signing a short-term deal commensurate with his talents. Yet, there’s a lot more to it than what you see on the surface. When SNY’s Andy Martino first reported the Winker signing, he added that the Mets are now preparing for life after Pete Alonso. Indeed, while no one could argue that Winker is a direct replacement for the All-Star first baseman, there is a connection between this signing and the Mets’ possibly giving up on Alonso if you follow the trail of dominoes far enough.

With Soto, Brandon Nimmo, Jose Siri, and Tyrone Taylor to man the outfield, the Mets are likely to use Winker as their primary DH against right-handed pitching. However, he can still play the corner outfield if he needs to; he spent 95 games on the grass last season, including 27 with New York. So, in the event of an injury to one of the team’s other outfielders, Winker can fill in. That means the Mets are less likely to ask McNeil to play the outfield in 2025. Instead, he can ideally play second base almost every day. As long as McNeil is covering the keystone, the Mets won’t need any of their young infielders at second base, therefore allowing Brett Baty, Luisangel Acuña, and Ronny Mauricio to focus their efforts on third. If just one of them, or some combination of the three, can competently cover the hot corner, Mark Vientos will be able to play first base full-time. Long story short, Winker improves the outfield depth, which indirectly improves the infield depth, which should allow Vientos to formally replace Alonso at first.

Another aspect to the iceberg is how this all affects Starling Marte, whose Gold Glove years are long behind him. In 170 games in the outfield over the past two years, he has accumulated -13 DRS, -14 OAA, and a -12 FRV. Meanwhile, neither ZiPS nor Steamer sees him as much more than a league-average bat. As a righty hitter, he could theoretically platoon with Winker at DH. After all, he posted an impressive 141 wRC+ against left-handed pitching last year. Yet, even with the platoon advantage, Marte might not be a strong enough hitter to warrant the reps. While he has had positive platoon splits the last three years, he had reverse platoon splits every year from 2014-21. In other words, he’s hardly a guaranteed lefty masher. On the contrary, ZiPS projects him for a .698 OPS against lefties and a .713 OPS against righties in 2025. Even if the Mets were willing to give a roster spot to the short side of a DH platoon, Marte probably wouldn’t be that guy.

The final component of the iceberg is what the Mets do next. Steve Cohen’s pockets are already deep, but if the Mets aren’t going to give Alonso a multi-year contract, and if they can get someone to take on any of Marte’s remaining salary, they’ll only have more to spend. With a projected payroll still $49 million below last year’s final tally and a luxury tax payroll still $17 million below the top penalty threshold, the Mets remain major players to watch as the offseason rolls on.

Read the rest of this entry »

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.