Just in time to push back the withdrawal symptoms from the lack of baseball, it’s awards week! We started, as usual, with the Rookie of the Year awards, and in the National League, Drake Baldwin earned the hardware, finishing with 21 first-place votes to Cade Horton’s total of nine. Baldwin was the only candidate to appear on all 30 ballots. Horton finished second, followed by Caleb Durbin, Isaac Collins, and Daylen Lile.
Did the BBWAA members entrusted with this task make good picks? That’s for you to decide. I’m here for my usual task of explaining/justifying/defending how I voted in my award this year, the NL Rookie of the Year award. I like to think I do a pretty good job, but I personally feel my responsibility for addressing my vote ought to go beyond the confidence I may have in my own competence. This is ostensibly an expert panel, not a federal election, so a vote here isn’t a question of my right to have one but my duty to exercise it thoroughly. People in the baseball community, from the most casual fans to the players themselves, ought to know why I voted for someone and not others. This is especially true when many disagree with me, such as my past first-place votes for Jackson Merrill last year and Trevor Rogers in 2021. Read the rest of this entry »
Hello, my name is Brendan Gawlowski. I could do the Troy McClure thing and list all of my previous bylines, but I’d prefer to just say that it’s a pleasure returning to FanGraphs after nearly four years away. Back in early 2022, I took a job as a pro scout for the Pittsburgh Pirates and I’ve been scouting minor leaguers ever since. In a few cases, I had a role in bringing players to Pittsburgh. It was a blast and I am grateful for the experience.
But for as much fun as I had, the job wore on those around me. I spent more than 80 nights on the road last year, a grueling schedule that’s rough on families in any situation and was increasingly unreasonable in mine. When I joined the Pirates, I was 30, childless, and ready to stretch my legs after two years of lying low and masking up. In the intervening years, a series of significant events made it hard to balance my passion for scouting with my responsibilities at home. My wife and I had a baby. A year later, we found ourselves facing a cancer diagnosis and long-term treatment. Our parents started battling their own medical problems. Through it all, I tried to be around as much as I could, but the realities of my schedule led to stressful compromises. The logistics of doing the job while being more than a replacement-level family member were hard to manage. This past July, I pulled an all nighter and drove from Corpus Christi to Houston to catch a 6 AM flight back home to Seattle, stepped inside for a quick shower, and then bolted two hours north to Bellingham for a birthday party. During that last stretch, my wife made her annual gentle suggestion that another path was possible.
And what a path this is. FanGraphs’s reputation as a leader in baseball analysis is well earned, particularly in the prospect space. For as long as he’s been at it, Eric has done an incredible job of covering the landscape. From my perspective, the breadth, depth, and nuance of his analysis is worth the price of a Membership all by itself. I learned plenty from him before, during, and after our time working together in my first stint here. The listing for this position came at the perfect time and I applied with gusto: I loved working as a scout, but the opportunity to join Eric in a full-time capacity, to continue evaluating baseball players while also getting another couple of months at home, was too enticing to pass up. Read the rest of this entry »
Guardians pitchers Emmanuel Clase and Luis Ortizhave been on non-disciplinary paid leave since July, as Major League Baseball investigated the two men’s involvement in a prop betting scandal. The allegation was that Ortiz had intentionally thrown at least two pitches outside the strike zone after tipping off bettors that he would do so. Armed with this advance knowledge, Ortiz’s confederates had profited in extremely specific prop bet markets.
Clase soon joined Ortiz on the sidelines, though the specifics of his supposed wrongdoing were not made public at the time. Both pitchers spent Cleveland’s terrific stretch run, and its playoff series against Detroit, in limbo.
Well, the other shoe dropped on Sunday, and what a shoe it is. The United States Attorney for the Eastern District of New York indicted the two pitchers on four counts: wire fraud conspiracy, honest services wire fraud conspiracy, conspiracy to influence sporting contests by bribery, and money laundering conspiracy. The first three counts come with a maximum penalty of 20 years imprisonment, each. Money laundering conspiracy has a five-year maximum. Ortiz was arrested in Boston on Sunday morning, and his attorney maintained his client’s innocence in advance of a scheduled Monday court appearance. Clase is not in custody as of this writing, but his attorney says he “is innocent of all charges and looks forward to clearing his name in court.” Read the rest of this entry »
Daylen Lile was one of the top rookie performers in the senior circuit this season. The 22-year-old outfielder debuted with Washington Nationals in late May and went on to slash .299/.347/.498 with a 132 wRC+ over 351 plate appearances. Displaying a combination of speed and power, Lile legged out 11 triples and left the yard eight times. A ninth home run on his ledger was an inside-the-parker.
When I talked to him in September, I learned that Lile and Nationals teammate James Wood were doing a lot of drill work together in the batting cage. Left on the cutting room floor from our conversation— the ensuing feature can be found here — was what he told me about the work itself. Like most good hitters, Lile is diligent about his routine.
“Your preparation matters, because what happens there translates to the game,” he said. “Mechanically, I still have the same swing I had [when entering pro ball in 2021], although I have changed a few things. I started getting my foot down early to see pitches longer, and now I’m doing a toe-tap for more rhythm, getting synced with the pitcher.”
And then there is the routine itself. Lile has been doing his “movement-prep stuff,” since coming back from UCL surgery, which cost him the 2022 season. Getting his body loose and keeping it that way throughout a long season is an integral part of his process. As you might expect, the work he does in the batting cage is every bit as important. Read the rest of this entry »
I love a complicated contract. I love any excuse to use the word byzantine really, so once we’re into stair-step incentive clauses, cascading conditional extensions, and the finer points of Major League Baseball’s collective bargaining agreement, I’m having the most convoluted kind of fun imaginable. Today, I’m going to take you step by step through the complex world of Shota Imanaga’s current contract situation. As you likely know, the Cubs offered him a qualifying offer on Thursday. All we’re going to do here is break down as simply as we can how he got to that point and what it means. We’re not going to leave anything out. To be clear, Imanaga’s contract situation isn’t anywhere near the most complex one, but even so, it’s dizzying. We’re going to lose ourselves in the minutia. For fun.
I also love the logistics. I love following a chain of what happens when and why so precisely that you can’t help but be overwhelmed by the absurdity of the situation. And even before you dive in, free agent contracts are inherently absurd. They’re iron-clad agreements negotiated within the framework of an already-negotiated-to-within-an-inch-of-its-life CBA. They’re insured, and in recent years their conditionality has exploded to the point where they contain as many branches as a choose-your-own-adventure novel. But in the end, they just boil down to figuring out how much somebody’s going to get paid at their job. They just happen to be agreements about how much the most obscenely wealthy people in the entire world are going to pay people who are about to become generationally wealthy. Almost no one involved will ever have to worry about money for the rest of their lives. The people who really need the elaborate safeguards in the CBA and uniform player contracts are the ones who don’t make millions of dollars. But this is still a job; a high-pressure, high-stakes job negotiated between bitter rivals, and one side has a history of financial malfeasance that dates back to the 19th century. Of course, lawyers have to be involved. Everything needs to be spelled out, and my goodness is it spelled out.
The details in the CBA are there for very good reasons, but they’re mind-bogglingly specific. The title on the PDF calls it the basic agreement, and like any basic document, it’s 426 pages long. I just scrolled to a random page in the middle, and the topic at hand was who exactly gets photocopies of team financial documents so that the players can determine whether the owners are actually following the rules of the basic agreement. We’re 209 pages in, and we’re still talking about the logistics of the document itself.
One section stipulates what happens if a player gets called up for the National Guard. Another explains that all visiting clubhouses must contain a hydroculator. The last page is a full-page table that establishes an agreed-upon figure for how long it takes to fly from every city in the league to every other city in the league. Did you have a blast watching the swing-off that decided this year’s All-Star Game? Well, its format was codified in the CBA, which brings to the mind’s eye two teams of lawyers, red-eyed, ties loosed and collars mangled, monologuing 12 Angry Men-style in a conference room strewn with stale donuts and half-empty coffee cups about whether each player really needs unlimited pitches for their three swings when 10 pitches should really be enough to cover it.
Here’s a good-faith offer: I will personally bake a batch of cookies and mail them to the first FanGraphs reader who reaches out to me with some sort of honest-to-goodness proof that they’ve read the entire CBA. (Cookie variety of your choosing, but please be aware that my macaron game is rusty.)
Most major league baseball organizations think more or less the same way. They vary on tactics and strategy, in competency, in resources, and in culture, but for the most part everyone agrees on how to win a baseball game. This leads to some groupthink and a lot of same-y executive hires.
The Giants have bucked the trend, turning back the clock to hand the reins to an ex-player who’s long on cultural cachet and short on expertise. He, in turn, made a delightfully unorthodox choice for field manager. I look forward to seeing if these iconoclasts can hold their own.
Not to be outdone, the Colorado Rockies have gone even further off the board for their new head of baseball operations, as they are reportedly nearing a deal to hire Paul DePodesta for the position. I’ll be as blunt as I can be: It’s one of the weirdest executive hires in decades, from an organization that’s at least a full step behind its rivals to start. With all the best will in the world, unless DePodesta’s appointment heralds a complete change in organizational structure and philosophy, it is almost certainly doomed to fail. Read the rest of this entry »
If you’ve been assiduously following the managerial report card series, you’ve no doubt been waiting for this one. I apologize for keeping you in suspense. I’ve been dragooned into service here because Ben Clemens, the normal custodian of this series, is also an inveterate overachiever and saddled himself with the Top 50 Free Agent list at the same time. Even he is only one man.
Why the five-day delay on this final installment in the series? Well, this being my first time writing a managerial report card, I wanted to do right by Ben and his creation. But also, the guy I was tasked with grading — Dodgers manager Dave Roberts — managed a lot, man. There’s just so much to unpack. Read the rest of this entry »
GREG WOHLFORD/ERIE TIMES-NEWS-USA TODAY NETWORK via Imagn Images
Max Anderson is making a name for himself in the desert. The Arizona Fall League’s hottest hitter is slashing a stand-up-and-take-notice .488/.650/.902 over 60 plate appearances with the Scottsdale Scorpions. Hitter-friendly circuit? Absolutely, but Anderson’s numbers are nonetheless impressive. The Detroit Tigers prospect has been scorching baseballs.
His regular-season numbers suggest that his AFL output isn’t wholly surprising. Playing against a higher level of competition, the 23-year-old infielder left the yard 19 times while putting up a 135 wRC+ between Double-A Erie and Triple-A Toledo. A .350/.400/.604 hitter at the University of Nebraska, the erstwhile Cornhusker has gone on to log a 120 wRC+ since being drafted 45th overall by Detroit in 2023.
Less impressive has been the youngster’s 6.7% walk rate as a professional. As Eric Longenhagen and James Fegan wrote back in March, “‘I like to swing, it’s not a secret,’ is both a favorite old José Abreu quote and the operating ethos of Anderson.” In terms of aggressiveness, that hasn’t really changed.
Our lead prospect analyst has seen a lot of him in the AFL, and he provided an updated report on the 40+ FV prospect earlier this week. Read the rest of this entry »
Just think how wrong it would’ve felt. Two years from now, watching Salvador Perez, who signed with the Royals as a 16-year-old in 2006, squatting behind the plate in Miami blue. Salvador Perez, who put the “everyday” in “Kansas City Royals everyday catcher” starting in 2012, launching dingers through the thin mountain air in Rockies purple. It’s enough to make you cry, but luckily, this dystopian future has been avoided. According to Anne Rogers of MLB.com, the 35-year-old backstop has signed an two-year extension that will keep in him in Royals Blue through the 2027 season. It’s better this way. The deal is for $25 million, with some deferrals and a $7 million signing bonus.
To be clear, Perez wasn’t at risk of leaving anytime soon. His previous four-year, $82 million deal that started in 2022 had a $13.5 million option for 2026, and general manager J.J. Picollo told reporters in September that the catcher would be returning one way or another. Anthony Franco of MLB Trade Rumors explained the reasons for the deal: “While the specific salary structure and deferrals have yet to be reported, it stands to reason [the Royals will] negotiate a lower ’26 salary than the option value while giving Perez the security of the second guaranteed year.” So it’s the classic extension trade-off. The Royals get a discount and Perez gets an extra year of job security. It also allows him to avoid free agency amid whatever shenanigans occur when the collective bargaining agreement expires after the 2026 season.
That extra year is a big one in terms of increasing the likelihood that Perez retires as a lifelong Royal. One day in the not-too-distant future, we’ll endure a knock-down-drag-out battle about Perez’s worthiness for enshrinement in the Hall of Fame, and we’ll be lucky to live through it. In the meantime, he’s improved his shot at wading into the fray wielding single-team bona fides. As for why the Royals would feel the need to get out in front of things and lock down the age-37 season of a catcher who has exceeded 0.8 WAR just once in the past four years, well, it makes more sense than you think. Read the rest of this entry »
