Welcome to FanGraphs’ top-50 free-agent rankings. Dave Cameron had previously been responsible for this annual post; I took the reins last year. I’m back leading the charge again, with some assistance from my colleagues.

In what follows, I’ve provided contract estimates and rankings of the winter’s top free agents, along with market-focused breakdowns for the top-25 players. As for why I’ve provided commentary on only the top 25, you can decide for yourself whether it’s because my take on No. 49 Eric Sogard was too hot for the internet, or because all of the players just kind of seemed the same to me by that point. Meanwhile, a combination of Ben Clemens, Craig Edwards, Brendan Gawlowski, Jay Jaffe, Eric Longenhagen, Rachael McDaniel, and Dan Szymborski have supplied the more player-focused breakdowns, which are designed to provide some context for each player at this moment in his career.

Note that players are ranked in the order in which I prefer them, in terms of the overall guaranteed money I’d spend on them. Usually, this is very similar to the order of the overall contract values as both the crowd and I have projected. But in some instances, that’s not the case. I explain my rationale where relevant.

The main theme that I hit upon multiple times in my comments below is the continued evolution of free agency: how hard teams compete with one another in the market, how quickly players sign, the types of player helped or hurt by the changing landscape, and the methods agents use to position their clients, and the deals they eventually sign. If you’re interested in more notes and rumors, I’ll have a corresponding post up to that end shortly, but I didn’t want to make you scroll any further.

Now let’s get to the list.

– Kiley McDaniel Read the rest of this entry »

Josh Osich doesn’t bury his head in the sand when a change is in order. Compared to most hurlers, the 31-year-old southpaw has been chameleon-like in terms of his pitch usage. He’s switched teams, as well. Originally in the Giants organization, Osich spent 2019 with the White Sox, and just this past week he was claimed off waivers by the Red Sox.

Intrigued by what I saw in his pitch-type column, I asked the former Oregon State Beaver for the reasons behind all the ebbs and flows of his offerings.

“If the scouting report is the same every year, they know what you’re going to be throwing,” Osich said this summer. “It’s always nice to change things up, so that they don’t know what’s coming. In 2016, I was sinker-heavy. The year before that, I was fastball-changeup-cutter; it was more of a mix. In 2018, there were probably a few more changeups. This year I’ve been cutter-heavy.”

Very cutter-heavy. Roughly two out of every three pitches Osich threw in 2019 were classified as cutters. Might that not be contradictory to his “they don’t know what’s coming” comment? Read the rest of this entry »

Do you think the end of the baseball season results in a nice vacation for front offices? Poppycock! Horsefeathers! Archaic 19th Century Declaration of Shock! Hundreds of players will be able to offer their services on the open market after the post-postseason quiet period ends in a few days. With those free agency entrants comes a significant decision for teams: whether to extend qualifying offers to their departing free agents. And unlike paying your water, electric, or taco bill, it’s an actual choice that has to be made.

For those who don’t have the qualifying offer rules committed to memory, a refresher is in order. If a free agent spent the entire season on one team’s roster and has never before received a qualifying offer, his team can choose to extend to him a qualifying offer in order to receive draft pick compensation should he elect to sign with another team.

If a team makes a free agent a qualifying offer and received revenue sharing, they get a pick after the first round of the draft if the player is guaranteed at least $50 million by his new team. If they did not receive revenue sharing, their comp picks comes after the second round. If the team did not receive revenue sharing and did not exceed the luxury tax, they get a post-round two pick no matter the free agent’s new contract. The increasingly rare number of teams that exceed the soft salary cap luxury tax threshold pick after round four.

The qualifying offer is a one-year deal equivalent to the average of the salary of the top 125 highest-paid players in baseball. For the first time ever, the qualifying offer went down this year as owners realize that not paying for stuff is a lot more fun than paying for stuff, even if it doesn’t always result in winning baseball games.

The decision to make a free agent a qualifying offer has real consequences for players and teams, sometimes disastrous ones. The Cleveland Indians let Michael Brantley walk scot-free after the 2018 season, unwilling to risk “having to” sign a player coming off a 3.5 WAR season to a reasonably priced one-year contract. Brantley was worth 4.2 WAR in 2019; the Indians were patching holes in their outfield the entire season. Cleveland finished three games behind the Wild Card road team, the Tampa Bay Rays, so you can do the math there. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I wrote about the decisions A.J. Hinch and the Astros made in Game 7 of the World Series. Zack Greinke started the inning, gave up a one-out homer to Anthony Rendon that cut the Astros’ lead to 2-1, and then walked Juan Soto. At that point, Hinch opted to take Greinke out and bring in Will Harris; Howie Kendrick proceeded to hit a two-run homer to give the Nationals a lead they would never relinquish. In my piece, I argued that Hinch should have left Greinke in to finish the seventh, but before I got there, I discussed whether Greinke should have started the inning to begin with, and the team’s bizarre handling of Gerrit Cole as a potential reliever:

That leaves Gerrit Cole. It’s not clear why Cole was only going to be available for the ninth inning if Houston got the lead. He was warming earlier in the game. He was pitching on two days rest, so it’s possible he was only going to be available for an inning, and it seems reasonable to want to put him in at the start of an inning so he can be better prepared for it, but having him only available in the ninth to close out a World Series win is an odd choice and makes one wonder if the decision wasn’t entirely baseball-related. In any event, if Cole could have only gone one inning and needed to start it, then sticking with Greinke to start the seventh was completely reasonable.

We now have some answers, though they cause more questions.

Read the rest of this entry »

The list of baseball’s winningest teams is one that any franchise would want to be on, but if we take that list and remove the World Series champions, it becomes something of a bummer. Everyone remembers the 2001 Mariners more for what they didn’t do than what they did. It’s not clear how history will remember the 2019 Astros. It seems likely this club will simply get tossed in with the 2017 team that did win it all, taking some of the sting away from not being able to claim a second championship this season. Though perhaps difficult for Houston and its fans right now, we should remember just how great this team was. There’s a reason the Astros’ World Series odds were so high for so long, and it’s because they put together a roster that, over the course of the regular season and much of the postseason, was a lot better than everyone else.

The table below feels almost obligatory, but here’s a list of the teams to win least 105 games, with how their seasons finished:

Read the rest of this entry »

Gerardo Parra reached base only one time in the World Series, a walk against Josh James in Game 4. It wasn’t a key moment in the series — the Nationals were down 4-0, and while Parra scored, the Nats lost 8-1. When he reached first base, he was downright businesslike:

But businesslike isn’t normally a good description of Parra’s time on the Nationals. He’s widely regarded as a great clubhouse guy, ambushing Stephen Strasburg with hugs and keeping things light over the long grind of a season. He also, you may have heard, uses “Baby Shark” as his walkup music, a song that Nationals fans and players alike have rallied around.

If you’re curious, here’s a handy guide of the hand signals the Nationals make after hits:

Read the rest of this entry »

In an interview that ran here last week, Red Sox Senior Vice President/Assistant General Manager Zack Scott suggested that Dave Dombrowski’s successor will be heavily invested in analytics. That turned out to be an understatement. On Monday, Chaim Bloom — an integral cog in Tampa Bay’s cutting-edge front office since 2005 — was formally introduced as Boston’s Chief Baseball Officer.

If you paid heed to the press conference, you’re aware that “collaborative” was the buzzword of the day. Bloom, principal owner John Henry, chairman Tom Werner, and president/CEO Sam Kennedy used the term (and variants thereof) as frequently and purposefully as “Trick or Treat” is heard on Halloween.

Dombrowski didn’t depart Fenway Park in a gorilla costume, as Theo Epstein famously did in 2005, but the reason he’s being replaced isn’t cloaked in mystery. However much the ownership group cares to dance around it, Dombrowski didn’t fully embrace the collaborative process that was deemed necessary to move the team forward, certainly not to the extent they expect Bloom to do so.

Couching his comments with, “I wouldn’t contrast the two,” Henry said from the dais that ownership was “extremely desirous of bringing in someone who would augment and add, as opposed to bringing in someone who might have been an autocrat.” Read the rest of this entry »

It is not an indictment of a pitcher to allow a home run to Anthony Rendon. He hit 34 of those this season, and 104 over the past four seasons combined. It is also no grand failure to walk Juan Soto. The precocious 21-year-old was issued 108 free passes this season, the third-most in the National League. He also hits for quite a bit of power, so sometimes, a pitcher is content watching Soto trot down to first if it doesn’t mean he just yanked a pitch into the seats. When Rendon homered and Soto walked in back-to-back plate appearances in the seventh inning of Game 7 of the World Series on Wednesday, it wasn’t, as Craig Edwards wrote earlier today, a sure sign that Houston starter Zack Greinke had run out of gas. But it was spooky enough to make Astros manager A.J. Hinch reach for his bullpen, bringing in Will Harris to face Howie Kendrick with a 2-1 lead.

By now, you know what happened next. Kendrick poked his bat head through the bottom of the zone and got enough of a Harris fastball to drill the foul pole in right field for a two-run homer. The shot gave the Nationals their first lead of the game, and they never looked back, adding three more runs the rest of the way while their bullpen stymied Houston’s destructive lineup en route to a 6-2 final and their first World Series championship in franchise history. Harris is a very good pitcher, and he made a good pitch — a cutter that was on track to perfectly dot the low and outside corner of the strike zone. But Kendrick came up with the only possible swing that could have done damage against it, and in doing so, delivered a fatal blow to the Astros’ historically great season. It also nullified a performance by Greinke that could have served as the defining moment of his career.

Greinke allowed two runs in six and two-thirds innings on Wednesday, despite allowing just four baserunners. For comparison’s sake, his counterpart, Max Scherzer, allowed the same number of runs in five innings while allowing 11 to take base. Before the two-out homer and walk in the sixth, Greinke had been spectacular. He faced the minimum 12 batters over the first four innings of the game, allowing just one hit — a single by Soto — that was wiped out on a double play. He issued his first walk with one out in the fifth inning against Kendrick, but bounced back from that with two quick outs to end the threat, before throwing another 1-2-3 frame in the next inning. After six scoreless, Greinke had thrown just 66 pitches. While Scherzer labored on the other side, having to gut through each inning after falling behind hitters repeatedly and setting up potentially disastrous situations with men on base, Greinke seemed to be on cruise control. Read the rest of this entry »

Just as we all predicted in the run-up to the World Series, relief pitching had a hand in determining the outcome. Though starting pitchers contributed admirably to relief efforts (two-thirds of a scoreless inning for the Astros, six scoreless for the Nationals), real relievers had to take the stage occasionally. And after you strip out those innings by starters, a trend emerges.

The Nationals bullpen was bad. That’s no shock — they were bad all year, and they were facing one of the best hitting teams of all time. Strip out Patrick Corbin’s four innings of lights-out relief, and Joe Ross’ two scoreless innings earlier in the series, and the balance of the bullpen recorded a 5.51 ERA, with as many walks as strikeouts. They allowed four home runs in only 16 and a third innings. Fernando Rodney’s line looks like a work of comedy — two innings, no strikeouts, six walks. It was more or less what every Nationals fan feared going into the series.

But if the Nationals bullpen was bad, the Astros bullpen was a full-fledged disaster. When the Astros needed relief innings, one of the best bullpens of the regular season simply wasn’t up to the task. Over 21 and a third innings, they recorded a 5.91 ERA and a 5.37 FIP. They kept their heads above water on the non-contact front, with 24 strikeouts and only 13 walks, but also gave up four home runs. Eight Houston relievers appeared in the series, and seven of them allowed runs.

But even that grim statistical record undersells things. Houston’s bullpen also allowed three unearned runs, while Washington’s pen allowed none. That leaves the Astros with a 7.17 RA/9 out of the bullpen, a number that almost doesn’t look like a baseball statistic. The Astros bullpen put together a 3.75 ERA in the regular season, and a 4.24 FIP. As recently as the ALCS, they’d looked like a cohesive unit, with a 4.12 ERA and 4.80 FIP — not great, but enough to get by against the fearsome Yankee offense. In the World Series, it all crumbled. Read the rest of this entry »

When the seventh inning began, the Astros’ chances of winning the World Series looked good. With a rolling Zack Greinke, Gerrit Cole available out of the bullpen, and closer Roberto Osuna fresh, the Astros had a clear path to getting the final nine outs and celebrating a title for the second time in three seasons. It didn’t work out that way. The Nationals rallied, the Astros were defeated, and A.J. Hinch’s decision making merits some scrutiny. Bad outcomes can cause us to believe the decisions that led to those outcomes were poor, when that isn’t always the case. Let’s take a look.

We’ll start with Greinke entering the seventh, take a quick detour, and then get back to him. After six innings, Greinke had made a total of 67 pitches; he got through the sixth on just eight pitches, including a strikeout of Trea Turner to end that frame. While Greinke’s velocity is not a big part of his game, his fastball velocity was still fine and he topped 90 mph on one of the pitches to Turner. Heading into the seventh, Astros manager A.J. Hinch had a few different options. He could continue on with Greinke, go to Cole, go to Osuna, or go to someone else, like Will Harris or Jose Urquidy.

There are two causes for concern with respect to Greinke, one sort of real, the other self-imposed by the Astros. The Greinke-related issue is that he was about to face the Nationals the third time through the order. He had retired Turner, but Adam Eaton, Anthony Rendon, and Juan Soto loomed. But at this point in the game, facing the order a third time should have been of minimal concern. The “penalty” pitchers often experience is due to two factors. One is the rising pitch count of the pitcher. With Greinke only at 67 pitches, that really wasn’t an issue. The other factor is that the third time through, pitchers often pitch against a portion of the lineup that is disproportionately comprised of the better hitters at the top of the order. While that was an issue for Greinke with Eaton, Rendon, and Soto, it would have been a problem for the Astros no matter who was on the mound. So then the question is, who is the better pitcher, a rolling Zack Greinke or one of the bullpen arms?

Will Harris as reliever and Zack Greinke as starter put up roughly equivalent numbers, with FIPs around three. Add to that that Harris had pitched the night before and Greinke seems like he was a sound choice. Urquidy pitched well in the fourth game of the series and also performed well in two relief outings earlier in the postseason. There’s an argument to be made that as a reliever, Urquidy might be a little better than Greinke as a starter, but it isn’t an especially compelling one. Roberto Osuna also put up similar numbers to Greinke’s in the regular season. The idea behind pulling starters is to replace them with relievers who are better. Greinke at 67 pitches is one of the 10 best starters in baseball, and as good or better than most of Houston’s relief options. It doesn’t make a ton of sense to pull him while he’s still on his game.

That leaves Gerrit Cole. It’s not clear why Cole was only going to be available for the ninth inning if Houston got the lead. He was warming earlier in the game. He was pitching on two days rest, so it’s possible he was only going to be available for an inning, and it seems reasonable to want to put him in at the start of an inning so he can be better prepared for it, but having him only available in the ninth to close out a World Series win is an odd choice and makes one wonder if the decision wasn’t entirely baseball-related. In any event, if Cole could have only gone one inning and needed to start it, then sticking with Greinke to start the seventh was completely reasonable.

Here’s where Greinke’s pitches went to the first three batters in that frame, from Baseball Savant.

Against Eaton, he pounded the outside corner away and induced a groundout. Against Rendon, Greinke threw the hardest pitch of his night at 91.8 mph for a ball, and then missed with a changeup that Rendon crushed. The walk to Soto put the winning run on base, but Greinke caught a bit of a bad break during the at-bat. After a 1-0 whiff on an outside curve, Soto took a change outside. Then, he took a change that should have made the count 2-2, but instead made it 3-1. With the count tilted in Soto’s favor, Greinke threw the same curve that got the whiff earlier, but Soto took the pitch and went to first.

With Howie Kendrick coming up, we are faced with a set of questions similar to those from the beginning of the inning. Greinke was now at 80 pitches and with a walk and a homer, the results said he was getting worse. His velocity against Rendon and the tough break against Soto — one of the best hitters in the game regardless of age, with his 155 wRC+ against righties behind only Christian Yelich, Mike Trout, Cody Bellinger, and George Springer (min. 350 PA v RH) this season — it’s not clear that Greinke didn’t do the right thing by not giving in. Cole seemingly needed a clean start to the inning to enter the game, and that logic might have also been true for Urquidy, who had only come in during the middle of an inning with the Astros once. (That relief outing came in the second inning of a September game against the Angels, and while barely worth mentioning, he gave up a single to the first batter.)

In his piece on the same subject, Michael Baumann discussed the reasons why relieving Greinke and bringing in Harris was defensible, though he did acknowledge Harris’ potential wear as a point against it. That Osuna came in later that inning is another point against it (Osuna is better than Harris), but it’s still not clear that pulling Greinke was the right move. With the lineup through Rendon and Soto, unless Greinke was tired, any issues related to the third time through the order were mostly moot. Howie Kendrick has been a good hitter, but he’s not on the level of Rendon or Soto. With Kendrick and then Asdrúbal Cabrera coming up, leaving Greinke in might have been the best play if Hinch was going to bring in a pitcher other than Gerrit Cole or the best reliever. And if Greinke was tiring, he wasn’t really showing it based on velocity and just pitching Soto carefully.

At that point, the decision should have been Osuna or Greinke; if Hinch thought Osuna wasn’t the best available reliever because he had a few slip-ups in the postseason, then the choice should have been sticking with Greinke. Playing by the numbers doesn’t always require pulling the starter. Relievers aren’t necessarily better than the guy currently on the mound, and even good relievers aren’t usually better than a fresh starter if he’s one of the 10 best in the game. Greinke might have had some so-so outings in the playoffs before last night, and his three strikeouts might not have suggested dominance, but 19 called strikes out of the 80 pitches he threw is an indicator that he was keeping Washington off balance. Was relieving Greinke defensible? Sure. Was it the right call? I’m less certain. It’s usually better to take a pitcher out too early than too late, but in the most important plate appearance of the season, Houston’s fifth-best pitcher threw the pitch that lost the Astros the lead and eventually the championship.