Extension fever is gripping major league baseball. In the wake of deals that short-circuited the highly anticipated free agencies of veterans Nolan Arenado and Mike Trout, and delayed the onset of those of Alex Bregman, Aaron Hicks, Eloy Jimenez, Miles Mikolas, Luis Severino, Blake Snell, and others, the latest player to take himself off the market is Paul Goldschmidt. The 31-year-old Cardinals first baseman has reportedly agreed to a five-year, $130 million extension for the 2020-24 seasons, a generous-looking deal in light of the past two winters’ frosty free agent proceedings.

Three and a half months after he was traded by the Diamondbacks in exchange for Carson Kelly, Luke Weaver, Andy Young, and a Competitive Balance B pick, it still feels weird to type “Cardinals first baseman” in connection to Goldschmidt, who over the course of his eight-year major league career had become the face of the Diamondbacks’ franchise. An eighth-round pick out of Texas State University who barely grazed prospect lists — Baseball Prospectus ranked him 10th in 2011 (a “Two-Star Prospect”), while Baseball America ranked him 11th, good enough to make their annual Prospect Handbook but not even the team top 10 published over the winter — he nonetheless made six All-Star teams, won three Gold Gloves, finished in the top three of the MVP voting three times, and helped the team to two playoff berths during his run in Arizona. However, the Diamondbacks couldn’t get past the Division Series either in 2011 or ’17 despite Goldschmidt homering four times and slugging .688 in eight postseason games.

Even given Arizona’s lack of postseason success, that’s the type of player most teams would try to lock up long-term. The Diamondbacks did ink Goldschmidt to a five-year, $32 million extension circa March 2013, and in February 2017, team CEO Derrick Hall spoke of hoping that “he’s here for the long haul,” but by January 2018, it appeared that they were gearing up for life without their star slugger. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Arizona Diamondbacks acquired Luke Weaver in the deal that sent Paul Goldschmidt to the St. Louis Cardinals, they brought on board a 25-year-old right-hander with a crisp fastball and a plus changeup. What Weaver has lacked is a quality third option to augment his go-to offerings. While he went to his hook 12.7% of the time last year, the pitch was more of a show-me than a weapon. Improving it was a primary focus over the offseason, and it has remained one this spring.

It’s not the only pitch the former first-round pick has been working on. Weaver is also hoping to reintroduce a cutter-slider to his arsenal. The extent to which that qualifies as one or two pitches — i.e. cutter and/or slider — isn’t an easy question to answer. At least, that wasn’t the case when I sat down with Weaver a few weeks ago in D-Backs camp.

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David Laurila: It’s been a few years since we talked about your repertoire. What’s changed since that time?

Luke Weaver: “Fastball and changeup are still my primaries, but I’ve been developing a slider, and a better curveball. Both are turning into what they want to be. I’m not trying to force them into being any specific thing — I’m just seeing what the break is doing, trusting it, and going for it. With a cutter and a curveball to go with my main two, I have four legit pitches.”

Laurila: You first said ‘slider,’ but then called it a cutter. Which is it? Read the rest of this entry »

The Tampa Bay Rays announced this afternoon that they’ve come to terms on a long-term contract extension with the team’s ace, Blake Snell. At five years and $50 million, Snell’s new deal buys out all of his arbitration years and nets the Rays, or the team he’s eventually traded to, an extra year until he hits free agency. There are no team-friendly option years tacked into the end, a common feature in pre-arbitration long-term deals such as this. The deal will take Snell through his age-30 season.

Yes, it’s less than Snell would make if he were a free agent today, but in the big picture, it’s the MLBPA’s job to negotiate a fair system of compensation with major league teams. Snell has to do what’s best for himself under the system that’s currently in place. And as these contracts go, it’s hardly a poor one for the 2018 American League Cy Young winner. The contract goes into effect immediately, crushing the $15,500 raise that Snell was assigned by the team, a situation that was primed to leave lingering bad feelings between player and team. (See Gerrit Cole and the Pirates for a situation in which fighting over a few thousand dollars led to long-term bad feelings.) Per Jeff Passan, it’s the largest deal ever given to a player with just two years of service time, surpassing those signed by Gio Gonzalez as a Super 2 (five years, $42 million) and Corey Kluber (five years, $38.5 million); both of those deals contained option years.

The ZiPS projections don’t usually get too excited about single seasons, but Snell’s emergence was stunning one. No, he’s not really the pitcher that the 1.89 ERA suggests, but then, nobody really is so it’s not part of anybody’s realistic expectations. With the downside risks in both performance and injury factored in ZiPS, the projections still see him averaging just under four WAR a year over the terms of the contract. That’s enough to rank him comfortably in the top projected starting pitchers over the next five seasons. Read the rest of this entry »

Sure, he’s won seven straight batting titles in Japan, but it’s telling that, in English, “Ichiro Suzuki” roughly translates to “Can’t hit Pedro.”

– The Utah Chronicle, March 30th, 2001

It is late afternoon in Seattle, and it is the beginning of April, and it is quite cold. The Mariners are going to play the Oakland A’s. Today, the baseball starts counting. Across the infield dirt, just behind second base, a few faint letters mark the time: 2001.

More than 45,000 people are here, the most that have ever crowded into this still-new stadium. There’s less team spirit on display than you might expect. Most of the attendees aren’t flaunting jerseys; they’re bundled up, hands tucked into coats. The fading sunlight falls over the stadium from behind the pale, high clouds, and as a few Mariners take the field, running sprints across the outfield grass, a hearty cheer rises up to greet them. The men in white stretch, pulling arms and bouncing in lunges, before trotting back to the dugout. Not much longer, now. Not much longer.

High up on a view level fence, in front of a kid and their dad, you can see a white posterboard, letters painted in amateurish block text: “WELCOME ICHIRO.”

Many of them know only what the numbers can tell them, the list of achievements that made him worth tens of millions. Seven straight batting titles and a lifetime .353 average. Some may have gone down to spring training, gathering in the Arizona heat, and seen it for themselves: 26 hits, catching batting practice fly balls behind his back, throwing runners out at third with seemingly effortless throws from deep right. The speed — the Mariners said they’d clocked his home-to-first time at 3.7 seconds. (The fastest average home-to-first time among major leaguers in 2018 was 3.86.) Read the rest of this entry »

Even if you didn’t wake up at an ungodly early hour to watch Thursday’s Mariners-A’s game at the Tokyo Dome, by now you may have seen the stirring footage of Ichiro Suzuki exiting the game in the eighth inning en route to his official retirement. If not, beware the coming dust storm:

That the 45-year-old Suzuki — who was nudged off the Mariners’ roster and into an unofficial retirement and special assistant role last May 3, at a point when he was hitting .205/.255/.205 through 47 plate appearances — went 0-for-5 with a walk and a strikeout in his two-game cameo matters not a whit as far as his legacy is concerned. His awe-inspiring total of 4,367 career hits (1,278 in Nippon Professional Baseball, 3,089 in Major League Baseball) still stands as the signature accomplishment for a player who has spent more than a quarter-century serving as a wonderful ambassador for the sport on two continents. His stateside resumé, which includes not only his membership in the 3,000 Hit Club (despite not debuting in the majors until he was about half past his 27th birthday) but also his 10 All-Star appearances, 10 Gold Gloves, AL MVP and Rookie of the Year awards, and so on, is ample enough to guarantee him first-ballot election to the Hall of Fame. In the wake of Mariano Rivera’s groundbreaking unanimous election to the Hall in January, it’s even possible that Ichiro could replicate the feat.

The question is when. Hall of Fame election rules require a player to be retired for five seasons before appearing on the BBWAA ballot, which means that had he been content to hang up his spikes last May, he would have been eligible for the 2024 ballot (the date refers to the year of induction, not the year of the ballot’s release, which is typically in late November or early December of the previous year). Barring what would be an unprecedented ruling by the Hall, his two-game cameo resets his eligibility clock, pushing him to the 2025 ballot, a small price to pay for his being able to check off the bucket-list item of retiring on his own terms, in his native country. Not only will he become the first Japanese player to be elected to the Hall, but according to the Baseball-Reference Play Index, he will be the owner of the shortest final season of any elected position player. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, White Sox right fielder Eloy Jimenez, our eighth overall prospect on this year’s Top 100, joined this week’s extension palooza (now featuring prospects!), signing a precedent-smashing extension before he’s even spent a day in the major leagues.

An important point here is that the White Sox appear to have leveraged service time manipulation to their advantage, as noted by Ken Rosenthal, though they’re far from the first club to have done so. Since Chicago could have gained a seventh year of control by leaving Jimenez in the minors for 15 days, the six-and-two structure means that he only gave up one year of potential free agency from what was otherwise his best (and only) alternative to taking this deal. There’s no way to know exactly how much money or how many years this saved the White Sox, but it basically took one season from the free agent column and moved it into the arbitration column, so the figure is likely in the millions. Since this exact set of circumstances could be changed in the next round of CBA negotiations, it was opportunistic of the White Sox to use this negotiating chip while they still had it.

But that doesn’t take away from the fact that this deal is predicated, at least in part, on some disingenuous public posturing from a club in the middle of a rebuild that isn’t going that well. They’re essentially holding their best prospect, and their fans, hostage, all to squeeze a little more value out of a potential franchise player in a far-off year. General manager Rick Hahn gave a non-answer last August when, during a sixth straight season in which the club was more than 15 games out of first place, Jimenez clearly warranted a call-up but was left in Triple-A. Manager Rick Renteria casually compared Jimenez to Ken Griffey Jr. last week when he was sent to minor league camp. Astros pitcher Collin McHugh shined a light on the motivations behind the situation after Jimenez was optioned. If Jimenez is on the Opening Day roster, I’m sure we’ll get some chuckles and shrugs when Hahn or Renteria are asked how he magically became major league-ready less than a week after they’d announced that he wasn’t.

Jimenez originally signed for $2.8 million in 2013, so that money plus the roughly $1.6 million he would get making the league minimum in 2019-2021 obviously wasn’t going to create a set-for-life situation, especially after agent/buscon fees and taxes. The sort of player he has turned into (a big corner hitter who has gotten bigger and more corner-y in recent years) isn’t in demand in free agency or elsewhere, unless that player is making close to the league minimum or is hitting like J.D. Martinez. In our most recent Top 100 prospect list, we made a graph of Jimenez’s likely WAR outcomes over his cost-controlled years, using the empirical baseline of past 60 FV hitters:

Moving left to right, the percentages are 12%, 15%, 30%, 28% and 15%. The weighted average of Jimenez’s team control-years WAR is 15.5, putting him in the middle to lower end of the 60/65 group, which jives with our 60 FV grade. We basically think he’s a perennial three-win player with a chance for a season or two of production higher than that, and about a 25% chance of turning into a role player or one who fizzles out quickly (the bottom two tiers).

Craig Edwards’ research pegs a 60 FV hitter as being worth $55 million, but Jimenez is near the top of that range and research from Dan Aucoin pegs that value at about $60 million. That would cover the first seven seasons with no deal, so $43 million guaranteed with a chance at $77 million over eight years suggests that both sides did well, with Jimenez taking somewhere between a $10 million and $20 million discount (roughly a third) to get the money guaranteed, but losing little of the upside. If Jimenez captures the full value of the deal (eight years, $77 million), that figure is very close to his present asset value over eight years, or the median value of what he’s worth over that term.

The White Sox assume some risk that Jimenez ages very quickly and turns into a DH in his arbitration years, but they’re in a rebuild and things will have gone pretty poorly in other ways if that happens. Jimenez could be leaving some money on the table if he does indeed turn into J.D. Martinez, but I’m generally of the mind that right-handed hitters with heavy builds at age 22 to take the median payout, especially if they haven’t had a huge payday yet. I just wish these sorts of shenanigans weren’t what got them there.

Late Tuesday night, Ken Rosenthal reported that the Tampa Bay Rays had agreed to a six-year, $24 million contract extension with 24-year-old second baseman and outfielder Brandon Lowe. Lowe is our 46th overall prospect, the top one in the 50 FV tier, and the No. 5 prospect in a loaded Rays system.

According to the Tampa Bay Times’ Marc Topkin, the deal also includes two club option years, which, along with incentives, could bring the total value to $49 million; if those options are exercised, Lowe will be 32 when the deal ends. Lowe will now obviously be making much more during his pre-arb seasons than he would have with standard contract renewals, but the possibility of overarching changes to baseball’s compensation structure in the next CBA currently make it impossible to evaluate the latter parts of the deal on Lowe’s end.

If he becomes the type of player I expect him to be — Lowe has power, walks at an above-average clip, and plays several positions including a passable second base, all of which makes me think he’s a two to three win player — a $4 million average annual value would make Lowe a bargain for the Rays. Based on Craig Edwards’ work at our site (and Driveline Baseball’s recent attempt to refine that research), 50 FV position player prospects like Lowe should be valued at $28 million, quite close to the value of his deal, excluding of the team option years. The AAV of the two option years, which would encompass Lowe’s age-31 and 32 seasons, is $12.5 million, almost exactly what D.J. LeMahieu received this offseason (age 30, two years, $24 million), and LeMahieu has been what we’d call a 50 in prospect parlance, as he was on average about a two win player during his tenure with Colorado. Read the rest of this entry »

Coming on the heels of Mike Trout’s humongous contract extension, news broke that Alex Bregman and the Astros had agreed to an extension of their own worth $100 million, with Mark Berman first to report the deal. While the Trout contract is the biggest of all time, the Bregman deal is not without intrigue. Bregman, who was still a full year away from arbitration, is the first star-level player to sign a pre-arb contract extension in nearly five years. The last player at or above Bregman’s level of production to sign a contract like this was Trout, who signed his six-year, $144.5 million contract back in 2014.

Since 2014, the number of contract extensions buying out free agent years has decreased. When Luis Severino signed his deal earlier this offseason, Jeff Sullivan ran the numbers on the quantity of extensions by offseason, providing this graph.

In the five years leading up to the 2014 season, there were about 25 or so extensions per season, and in the five years since, the numbers have dropped in half. Since Severino signed, we have had Jose Leclerc, and now Alex Bregman, but those extension figures aren’t going up a ton this year. It isn’t just that the number of extensions have gone down; the quality of players signing those extensions has declined as well. We saw Trout’s big deal ahead of the 2014 season; the year before, Buster Posey, who was Super-2 arbitration eligible, signed an even bigger contract covering more seasons. It was Andrew McCutchen the year before Posey. Matt Carpenter and Jason Kipnis, who were several years older than Bregman but also coming off very good years, signed six-year deals with options guaranteeing themselves around $50 million each. Read the rest of this entry »

It wasn’t the biggest extension announced yesterday — it wasn’t even the biggest Astros extension announced yesterday — but Ryan Pressly’s two-year, $17.5 million deal with Houston, which was first reported by Chandler Rome, was a big deal for Pressly, a big deal for Houston, and a big deal for relievers. The deal will pay Pressly $2.9 million in 2019, his final arbitration year, then $8.75 million in each of 2020 and 2021. There’s a vesting club option for 2021, as well. It’s believed to be the biggest extension ever signed by a reliever not expected to close games for his team (that’s still Roberto Osuna’s job, at least for the time being) and is a tremendous accomplishment for a player who had a 4.70 ERA (with a 4.36 FIP) as recently as 2017.

But of course that 2017 performance isn’t what the Astros are paying for. They’re paying for what he did in Houston last August and September (which is strike out 32 men and walk just three in 23.1 innings pitched) and what they think he can do for them going forward (which is presumably more of the same). Héctor Rondón, Joe Smith, Collin McHugh, and Will Harris are all expected to become free agents at the conclusion of the 2019 season, and locking Pressly up now means the Astros will have one less thing to worry about next winter. For Pressly, this deal gives him the job security that has absolutely never been a guarantee in the years since he signed with the Red Sox as an 11th-round pick back in 2007.

The conventional wisdom is that relievers are inherently volatile — with a few, Mariano Rivera-shaped exceptions — and so giving them multi-year contracts is the kind of thing you only do when you’re competing for their services on the open market. You certainly wouldn’t expect to see a forward-thinking team like the Astros locking up a reliever with such a short track record of success — during his time in Minnesota at the beginning of 2018, Pressly had a 3.40 ERA and a 2.95 FIP — for two additional years when they’re competing against nobody but themselves. Read the rest of this entry »

One of my favorite sporting events of the year is just around the corner. And no, I’m not referring to Opening Day, though it indeed fits both conditions. I am, of course, talking about March Madness.

For a stat nut like me, March Madness is the perfect time of year. It combines sports with both probability and unpredictability. It’s also quite fun to see fans from all over the country supporting their local universities and alma maters in the biggest basketball tournament (and workplace distraction) in the United States.

The only thing missing from March Madness is a baseball spin. But for those like me who enjoy both the Madness and Opening Day, I have a solution: the perfect baseball-themed March Madness bracket. When I say “perfect,” I don’t mean literally perfect. Unfortunately, there is just a 1 in 9.2 quintillion chance that this bracket (or any other bracket) will achieve perfection.

It is perfect, though, in another sense. The second qualifier, “baseball-themed,” is important. This bracket can indeed call itself the perfect baseball-themed bracket. Let me show you how.

The process behind this is rather simple. I compiled all 68 teams in the tournament, and using Baseball-Reference’s Draft Index, was able to easily search every major league player to come from one of these schools. I then ranked each school by total WAR produced by those players.

I should note that this is only in the MLB Draft era (1965-present), and that this list only includes players who were drafted from said school. For example, if Devan Fink played baseball at Michigan but then transferred to the University of Florida and was subsequently drafted out of Florida, the Gators would get all of the credit for having harbored Devan Fink.

Without further ado, the rankings: Read the rest of this entry »