I’ve been working at FanGraphs long enough — more than two full years now — that I’ve started to build a track record. By that I mean that when I get something right, I can go back and gloat about it.

In February 2023, I wrote about Rangers outfielder Adolis García: A power-over-hit player who struggled to get on base and did not play a premium position. Some years ago, I was at a Starbucks a couple blocks from my house when I saw someone who looked like an ex-girlfriend of mine a few tables away. On further reflection, I don’t think it was really her, but I packed up my computer, downed my macchiato, went home, and never came back. You can never be too careful.

I would ordinarily avoid players like García with even greater alacrity. Nevertheless, I reasoned that the Rangers, having invested much more heavily in pitching than hitting, needed their right fielder to be at his best if they hoped to achieve anything in 2023. And García had made very good contact the previous season, but had not been rewarded accordingly. So despite my trepidation regarding his overall skill set, I predicted that García would take a step forward. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, the Mets really did it. On Tuesday, they finally went out and landed the electric Dominican outfielder with the big tools and the ebullient personality, the one they’d been dreaming of for so very long. Well, they landed one of the electric Dominican outfielders they’d been dreaming of, anyway.

In a one-for-one swap, the Mets received center fielder Jose Siri from the Rays in exchange for right-handed pitching prospect Eric Orze. Siri is a thrilling player with four jaw-dropping tools: power, defense, speed, and throwing. The complete absence of a hit tool leaves him kind of like a boat with the world’s greatest bilge pump and a gaping hole in the hull. He’s forever battling to mash enough moonshots and make enough improbable catches to stay afloat despite running a strikeout rate that falls somewhere between catastrophic and cataclysmic. In a move that will surprise no one who is even passingly familiar with the Rays, the team turned Siri into a pitching prospect the moment he could conceivably begin to cost them actual money. The Mets now control Siri for his three arbitration years, and MLB Trade Rumors projects him for a $2.3 million salary in 2025 (plus a luxury tax penalty). Given that the trade went down Tuesday, the Rays have probably already turned Orze into a bona fide ace.

The move could indicate something of a pattern for the Mets, who signed the glove-first Harrison Bader to a one-year contract before the 2024 season. Here’s how similar the two players are: At the time of his signing, Bader was 29 years old and had posted a career wRC+ of 90 while averaging 20 OAA per 150 games. Right now, Siri is 29 years old and has posted a career wRC+ of 89 while averaging 19.1 OAA per 150 games.

That move didn’t exactly pan out. Bader managed to avoid the injured list for the first time since 2020 and his 85 wRC+ wasn’t far below his career mark, but it wasn’t exactly the bounce-back season the Mets had hoped for. He started nearly every game against right-handed pitching, but against lefties, he went from ceding the occasional start to Tyrone Taylor at the beginning of the season to sitting more often than not by the end of it. This wasn’t ideal considering Bader has a career 109 wRC+ vs. lefties and an 84 wRC+ vs. righties. By the time the playoffs rolled around, he was the odd man out. He got into nearly all of the team’s postseason games, but started just twice and made just six plate appearances.

In all, the Mets got just 1.6 WAR in center field in 2024. That ranked 22nd in all of baseball, and it was the lowest ranking of any position on the field for the team. The only other spots on the diamond where the Mets were even in the bottom half of the league were starting pitcher, catcher, and right field. With Bader and Jesse Winker entering free agency and Taylor undergoing surgery to repair a hernia and remove a loose body from his throwing elbow, Siri is unlikely to be the last outfielder the Mets acquire this offseason.

The Athletic’s Will Sammon cited sources who reported that this wasn’t the first time the Mets had sought to get their hands Siri, and it’s not hard to see why. Siri is as tempting a project as any player in the game. He’s an incredibly gifted defensive center fielder with light tower power and absolutely no semblance of plate discipline or contact ability. The team that could get him to chase just a little bit less, to whiff just a little bit less, would have a monster on its hands. However, Siri is entering his age-29 season, and it’s hard to imagine that even the team that wanted him badly enough to risk the humiliation of trading a pitching prospect to the Rays really expects to finally unlock him. Unlike lower-back pain, plate discipline isn’t something you just happen to pick up once you hit your 30s. In 2024, Siri ran a 37.9% strikeout rate. Among players with 400 plate appearances in a season, that’s the third-highest mark in major league history. His 35.8% career strikeout rate ranks 14th on our career leaderboard, and five of the 13 players ahead of him were pitchers.

Just like Bader in Flushing, Siri started losing playing time as the 2024 season went on. Jonny DeLuca, who in 2024 featured – and stop me if you’ve heard this before – excellent speed and defense to go with some trouble getting on base, absorbed that playing time and will presumably be starting in center for the Rays next season. This time, the Mets got their solid, if flawed, center fielder on the trade market because there really aren’t any to be had in free agency. Understandably, they’re not keen to ride the Bader train again. Michael A. Taylor and Manuel Margot, the only other true center fielders on the free agent market, are both on the wrong side of 30 and coming off their own extremely down 2024 seasons. Siri’s production may look a lot like Bader’s, but he’s got a better track record when it comes to health, and because he cost a prospect rather than a free agent contract, he’ll come with a smaller luxury cap hit.

In Orze, the Rays landed a 27-year-old multi-inning reliever with a killer splitter and a modest track record of minor league success. The Mets selected him in the fifth round of the 2020 draft out of the University of New Orleans. If you’re familiar with him already, you’re either aware that he has survived two types of cancer or you’ve heard about his unfortunate major league debut. On July 8, Orze entered in the sixth inning against the Pirates and allowed a walk and two singles without recording an out. All three runners would score and he’d be tagged with the loss to go with his infinite ERA. Orze would make just one more appearance with the Mets.

Despite an unspectacular 29.7% chase rate in the minors in 2024, Orze has had excellent strikeout rates throughout his minor league career. However, those strikeouts have come hand-in-hand with dangerously high walk rates. In 2022, Eric Longenhagen ranked Orze seventh in Mets system, writing that he was a “near-ready multi-inning reliever… a super valuable piece for a contending team, and a huge draft and dev feather in the cap of the org.” Unfortunately, Orze stalled out, posting a 5.13 ERA at Triple-A Syracuse in 2022 and a 5.31 ERA there in 2023. After the ranked portion of the team’s 2024 prospect list, Eric wrote simply that Orze “has a plus-plus changeup and struggles to throw strikes.” He wasn’t wrong. Among minor leaguers with at least 75 plate appearances tracked by Statcast in 2024, Orze’s 44% zone rate put him in the just 13th percentile.

To be fair, Orze’s peripherals outpaced his ERA, especially in 2022. In 2024, he had a 2.92 ERA with a 3.65 xFIP. He looks like a classic pronator, able to make the ball run to his arm side at will. Both scouts and stuff models are in love with his splitter, and his slider should be serviceable. His four-seamer is the problem. The pitch averages a hair under 94 mph, and as you can see from Max Bay’s Dynamic Dead Zone app, its movement profile is unlikely to fool too many hitters.

See how the pink oval of the pitch’s actual shape matches up almost perfectly with the light blue ovals that indicate the shape that a batter would expect? That’s no good. If the Rays are going to turn Orze into their next star, they’ll need to help him with his command, and they’ll need to help him unlock a better fastball. Still, we’ve been doing this long enough to know that when the Rays post something like this on Bluesky, everyone should be afraid.

Let’s play a little guessing game. See if you can identify the pitchers who produced the two seasons below.

Got your guesses ready? Awesome. The answer is… after the break. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, the Angels announced that they had signed catcher Travis d’Arnaud to a two-year deal. I was on vacation at the time and I didn’t hear about the move until later. Truthfully, I didn’t think about it too much once I did hear about it. However, I heard immediately about what happened on Sunday, and when I did my ears perked right up. Deep within a Tampa Bay Times article about the Rays’ housing crisis, Marc Topkin buried a gem: “The Rays had interest in” d’Arnaud. Why is that minor detail so consequential? Because it means that We Tried season is officially underway. For the uninitiated, We Tried is what teams sometimes tell their beat reporters after a free agent they coveted signs with another team. The beat reporters dutifully report this retrospective interest to their readers. It’s a bizarre ritual, but it’s also a lot of fun (unless you were a fan of the Mets during the Wilpon Era, in which case I apologize for not including a trigger warning at the top of this article).

Only one team gets to sign each free agent, but every team is free to announce publicly that they wanted that free agent and to do so in whatever language they choose. The Phillies were reportedly in on Yoshinobu Yamamoto. The Red Sox had interest in Kodai Senga. Topkin’s report included the tidbit that d’Arnaud didn’t sign with the Rays because he “supposedly wanted to get back to his native southern California.” Frankly, there’s no reason to limit this to baseball teams. Anybody can do it. For example, I can officially report that I was interested in Michael Wacha. Unfortunately, he decided to return to the Royals for several million dollars before I had time to make my opening offer of $35, unlimited soda from the vending machine, and two of those really big pumpkins you see at the state fair.

“Plans are real things and not experience,” wrote John Steinbeck. “A rich life is rich in plans. If they don’t come off, they are still a little bit realized.” MLB front offices agree with him. Organizations normally go to absurd lengths in order to keep their best-laid plans secret, but once those plans gang agley, they’re more than happy to make sure that the public awards partial credit for them. The move carries no real risk. These reports almost never indicate the name of the executive who made the claim, and even if the claim is untrue, the free agent in question usually has little reason to refute it.

Teams often have legitimate reasons for announcing to the world that they were in on a free agent. First of all, it might simply be the truth, and telling the truth is generally a good thing. It could be a signal to your fans or your current players that you’re really going for it and that good times are coming. It could be a signal to other free agents that you’re open for business. Unfortunately, teams also have plenty of shadier reasons. A team might just say it to make themselves appear more relevant than they really are. Sometimes it’s just a matter of feeding a reporter harmless information in order to keep greasing the skids of a transactional relationship. Sometimes teams want to make a player look bad, or to not-so-subtly intimate that the team that signed them overpaid.

There’s no limit to the number of ways to announce that you tried. You can say that you had interest in a player, that you met with them, that you had talks, that you were in on them, that you were involved, that you were close to a deal, that you couldn’t agree to terms. As the Rays did with d’Aarnaud, you can even provide a reason behind the player’s decision that conveniently absolves you of responsibility. However you couch things, the message is the same: We tried. We failed. We alerted the press because we wanted the whole world to know about our failure. That’s one particularly weird facet of this practice. How often do you hear uber-competitive front office types announce to the public at large that they tried and failed at anything? They’ll only do so when it might also mean making them look good (or making someone else look bad).

Over at Jon Becker’s indispensable Free Agent Matrices, you can find a color-coded spreadsheet that breaks down every team’s interest level in every free agent using 11 different categories. And that’s just one tab. The Matrix is – and I say this with nothing but admiration – a monument to the absurdity of the game we love and a work of absolute madness. Remember the movie Dave, when Dave calls his friend Murray into the White House to eat bratwurst and find $650 million in the federal budget? After perusing the 16 different tabs of the Matrices, I genuinely believe that Becker could balance the budget and fix the deficit in one afternoon even without the bratwurst.

So here’s what I propose: We create a We Tried Tracker. We’re going to steal Becker’s idea, but our matrix is solely for teams that announce that they tried to sign a player after the fact. Just like Becker, I’ve created a spreadsheet to keep tabs on everything. It’s simple now, but we’ll trick it out once things get going. Maybe we’ll color-code things too. Mauve could mean “We were involved.” Chartreuse could mean “We were interested, but we weren’t about to pay as much as those jabronis did.” Fuchsia could mean “We liked the cut of his jib, but the seas are rough out there and our boat is so little.”

I can’t do this alone. I’m sure I’ll miss a We Tried here or there, so I am officially asking for your help. If you see a We Tried, let me know on social media. If you don’t have social media, send me an email at WeTriedTracker@gmail.com. Yes, that’s a real email address and I will be monitoring it. Please be a part of the ridiculous thing that we are building. If and when the We Tried market really heats up, I’ll provide updates. We’ll keep a leaderboard of the teams and players that execute and incite the most We Trieds. We’ll document the different ways that teams express the sentiment. Together, we can make this offseason 10% more fun and at least 20% more stupid.

Update: Jon Becker graciously offered to fold the We Tried Tracker into the Free Agent Matrices, so the link above has been updated to take you deep into the heart of that now 17-tabbed spreadsheet.

As of 1:00 PM Eastern, Becker has yet to balance the federal budget.

For the 21st consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Seattle Mariners.

Batters

For the third time in the last four years, the Mariners hung around the playoff race for most of the 2024 campaign, before falling just short by the season’s denouement. When it comes to winning 85 to 90 games a year like clockwork, Jerry Dipoto’s ship is airtight and his sailors always on the ball. But so far, St. Louis Cardinals: Pacific Northwest hasn’t been quite as effective as the original series — the Mariners aren’t going to have as easy a time stealing division titles as the Cardinals did, playing as they do in a harder division. While the Mariners aggressively add players and make trades, there’s a basic conservatism here that limits the team’s ultimate upside; despite seven winning seasons in the last 11 years, Seattle has maxed out at just 90 wins. This isn’t a new thing either — the franchise only has one 95-win-or-better season in its history (the 116-win 2001 season, of course). Read the rest of this entry »

The 2023 season gave us the most predictable pair of Rookie of the Year races in recent memory. Gunnar Henderson and Corbin Carroll were our top two prospects entering the year and the overwhelming preseason ROY favorites among our staff. At season’s end, they each earned all 30 votes on their respective ballots. It was only the second time in the 21st century that both the AL and NL ROY winners were unanimous decisions (Aaron Judge and Cody Bellinger won unanimously in 2017) and the first time that the clear preseason favorites were also the undisputed victors. By comparison, the 2024 Rookie of the Year races were about as predictable as a toddler’s favorite food.

You don’t want Wyatt Langford? But you loved Wyatt Langford yesterday!

So you either like Paul Skenes or Jackson Merrill, but you won’t tell me which one and if I pick wrong you’ll throw him on the floor and scream? Got it.

AL Rookie of the Year Luis Gil missed most of the 2022 and 2023 seasons recovering from Tommy John surgery. Even before he tore his UCL, a future move to the bullpen seemed possible, and if it weren’t for his strong spring training (15 2/3 IP, 2.87 ERA) and Gerrit Cole’s elbow injury, that’s likely where Gil would have begun the 2024 campaign. Runner-up Colton Cowser was a slightly more promising prospect; he graduated with a 45+ FV to Gil’s 40+. Still, like Gil, his starting role in the majors was not guaranteed until he earned it with a red-hot spring and an equally scorching start to the regular season.

Of the three finalists in the AL, only third-place finisher Austin Wells ranked among our top 100 prospects ahead of the season. And of the five players who earned votes for AL Rookie of the Year as part of our preseason staff predictions exercise (Langford, Evan Carter, Junior Caminero, Holliday, and Colt Keith), only Langford ended up earning so much as a single vote from the BBWAA. He finished seventh with one second-place vote and four third-place selections.

The NL contenders weren’t quite as surprising. All three finalists, Skenes, Merrill, and Jackson Chourio, were among our top 30 prospects entering the season. Meanwhile, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, the most popular NL Rookie of the Year choice in March, only fell out of the race due to a triceps injury that cost him almost half the season. Yet, although the NL field was not so surprising, at least not like the AL field turned out to be, the final results were just as hard to predict. The voting ultimately wasn’t all that close – Skenes earned 23 first-place votes to Merrill’s seven – but those numbers might undersell what a difficult decision all 30 voters had to make. Dan Szymborski did a great job breaking down why it was such a tough choice (and why he ultimately cast his ballot for Merrill).

Merrill showed off all five tools in 2024, the most impressive of which was his center field defense, considering he was a shortstop up until this year. OAA, UZR, and Baseball Prospectus’s DRP loved him in center. Only DRS disagreed (0 DRS), but even a perfectly neutral defensive performance is admirable coming from a 21-year-old playing the position for the first time. Combine that glove with good baserunning, great contact skills, and a surprising amount of power, and you get Merrill’s 5.3 WAR, more than a full run higher than any other rookie in either league. The last rookie to produce more WAR and still lose the ROY was Kenny Lofton (5.8 WAR) in 1992. Thus, the fact that Skenes came out on top is a testament to the dominant season he put together. Over 23 starts and 133 innings, he pitched to a 1.96 ERA and 4.3 WAR. No rookie starter has thrown more innings with a lower ERA in over 50 years. If Skenes had been on the Pirates’ roster on Opening Day, it’s very likely he’d have surpassed Merrill’s 5.3 WAR, and this conversation wouldn’t have been so complicated. But that’s the debate in a nutshell. On the one hand, you can’t blame Skenes for not pitching in the majors sooner. He was clearly ready to make the Pirates’ roster out of camp. On the other hand, you can’t give him credit for innings he didn’t pitch.

Only two more rookies earned votes in the NL, and either of them very well could have won the award outright if they’d played in the opposite league. Chourio wasn’t quite as strong of a hitter as Merrill, but he excelled on both sides of the ball, finishing with 21 homers, 22 steals, 6 OAA, and 3.9 WAR. Meanwhile, fourth-place finisher Shota Imanaga was terrific in the first year of what now looks like an incredibly team-friendly four-year, $53 million deal with the Cubs. His 2.91 ERA ranked third among all qualified NL pitchers. His 3.72 FIP was significantly higher, so his 3.0 WAR ranked just 19th among NL hurlers. Still, among rookie pitchers, it was second only to Skenes.

A trio of NL infielders also deserve some recognition for their strong rookie seasons; any of them might have earned some down-ballot votes in a weaker year. Masyn Winn (3.6 WAR) and Joey Ortiz (3.1 WAR) were strong defenders with roughly league-average bats, while Tyler Fitzgerald (3.0 WAR) put up a .217 ISO and 132 wRC+ over 96 games while looking just capable enough with the glove to be an everyday shortstop.

The AL rookie class didn’t have quite as much top-end talent or mid-tier depth. Gil was a solid, mid-rotation starter who moderately outperformed his peripherals. That’s no knock on the righty, who was a valuable member of the Yankees’ AL pennant-winning roster, but he didn’t have a star-making debut season like Skenes, Imanaga, or Yamamoto. According to WAR (and 14 out of 30 voters), Cowser actually had the more impressive season. Even so, it’s hard to ignore how similar Cowser’s numbers were to those of the NL’s distant third-place finisher Chourio. And considering neither Gil nor Cowser was a slam dunk to win, one might have thought Wells would earn some first-place votes himself. He blossomed into a terrific defensive catcher by anyone’s metrics (13 FRV, 11 DRS, 14.5 DRP), which is quite the accomplishment. Unfortunately, he disappeared at the plate in September (22 wRC+) and may have cost himself the hardware in the process.

Where the AL rookie class really stood out this year was in the bullpen. Two of the top three relievers by WAR were AL rookies: Cade Smith (2.7 WAR) and Mason Miller (2.3 WAR). Miller was the bigger story because of his triple-digit fastball velocity, gaudy strikeout totals, and strong start to the season, but Smith ended up with a lower ERA and FIP in 11 1/3 additional innings. Nonetheless, narrative often prevails in awards voting, and Miller finished ever so slightly ahead of Smith. It probably didn’t help Smith’s case that he was hidden behind Cy Young finalist Emmanuel Clase in the Guardians’ bullpen, whereas Miller racked up 28 saves as the A’s closer.

The other two AL rookies receiving votes were outfielders Wilyer Abreu (3.1 WAR) and Langford (2.9 WAR). The two had similarly valuable seasons; each was above average at the plate, while Abreu was the stronger fielder and Langford the better baserunner. However, Abreu came into the season as a relatively unheralded name, and Langford’s top-prospect reputation preceded him. Thus, compared to Abreu, who looked like a blossoming star, Langford almost seemed to be a disappointment — at least relative to expectations. That could explain why Abreu earned a couple more votes, including a pair of second-place selections from outside the Boston chapter of the BBWAA.

The emergence of star prospects like Skenes and Merrill, the breakouts of less-heralded rookies like Cowser and Gil, and the close ROY races in both leagues highlight what was another banner year for rookies. Overall, they combined for 138.3 WAR in 2024, surpassing the previous record of 134.8 set by last year’s rookie class:

What’s more, this past year’s rookies represented 13.8% of WAR league-wide. That figure isn’t quite record-breaking, but it is the highest percentage of WAR to come from rookies since 1947, fittingly the first season of the ROY award, created for and won by Jackie Robinson. These are the top seasons in history according to percentage of WAR produced by rookies, excluding 1871 (when everyone was a rookie):

Of course, all of this is partly because rookies have seen a steady increase in playing time since the start of the 21st century. When rookies play more, it stands to reason that they’re going to produce more value. Therefore, it’s also relevant to look at the ratio of rookie WAR to rookie playing time, which I’ve calculated by taking the percentage of league-wide WAR produced by rookies and dividing it by the percentage of league-wide plate appearances and batters faced by rookies. Rarely is that ratio going to be higher than 100% (that would mean rookies were outproducing non-rookies on a rate basis), but the closer the number is to 100%, the better rookies have performed compared to the rest of the league.

By this metric, the 2024 season isn’t quite as historic. Still, it was the strongest year for rookies since 2012 and one of the top three seasons of the last 30 years. The graph begins in 1916, when TBF data is first available:

Another metric to consider is the number of rookies who reached a certain WAR threshold. Decimal places of WAR are pretty insignificant, and any WAR threshold I pick is going to be somewhat arbitrary. Still, I think it’s interesting to identify the number of rookies who made a lasting impression in any given season. For instance, 28 players on our rookie leaderboards finished with at least 2.0 WAR this past season. The last time there were more two-win rookies was 1920, which was the first season that any of the Negro Leagues are considered major leagues, and therefore the rookie season of all-time great players like Oscar Charleston and Cristóbal Torriente. Meanwhile, the last time rookies made up such a high percentage of all two-win major leaguers was 1947:

Similarly, the last time there were more three-win rookies on our leaderboards was 1920, and the last time rookies made up a higher percentage of three-win players was 1947.

At this point, I feel compelled to note that due to MLB’s two-pronged rookie eligibility requirements, our leaderboards include a handful of players who have already exhausted rookie status. It’s easy to filter out players who have reached 130 at-bats or 50 innings pitched in the majors; it’s harder to filter out those who have accumulated 45 days on an active major league roster during the championship season (not counting days on the injured list) without reaching either of those other playing time thresholds. For the sake of consistency, the numbers I’ve cited up to this point come directly from our leaderboards. I could have manually extracted the few players who weren’t technically rookies in 2024, but it would be impossible to do that for every season on record. Moreover, I don’t think it’s a grave sin to include a player like Lawrence Butler when I’m looking at general rookie trends; if he had been called up just a week later in 2023, he’d still have been rookie eligible in 2024.

However, in case that makes you skeptical about the greatness of this year’s rookie class, let me ease your troubled mind. Even if I manually correct the 2024 data and remove players like Butler, rookies still made up a higher percentage of all two-win players in 2024 than in any season since 1920 and a higher percentage of all three-win players than in any season since 1984. And keep in mind, that’s without manually correcting the data in any other season.

Some of these rookies will become superstars in the years to come. At least one of them already is. Others may look back on 2024 as the best year of their careers. As their futures unfold in different ways, we may soon forget that all of these players crossed the major league threshold in the same season. Still, for this brief moment in time, all of these players are a unified graduating class. So, let me leave them with the distinctive, touching, and unforgettable words of my high school principal’s graduation speech: “Today is the first day of the rest of your lives.”

Niko Kavadas had recently been named Boston’s Minor League Player of the Year when he was first featured here at FanGraphs in November 2022. Two years later, he’s now playing for the Los Angeles Angels, after the Red Sox traded him at this summer’s deadline as part of a five-player swap. Power and patience are his calling cards. Kavadas was slashing .281/.424/.551 with 17 home runs in Triple-A at the time he was dealt, and while he subsequently struggled after receiving his first call-up — a 77 wRC+ and 38.7% strikeout rate over 106 plate appearances — he did go deep four times.

The 26-year-old first baseman very much remains a work in progress, as evidenced by his having spent the last month-plus playing in the Arizona Fall League. And while assessing progress in an extreme hitter-friendly environment can be tricky, he nonetheless crushed the ball during his time in the desert. Kavadas was named the AFL’s Offensive Player of the Year after slashing .329/.462/.700 with 13 extra-base hits, including six home runs, over 91 plate appearances. We’ll get to why he was there in a moment.

When I caught up to Kavadas prior to a Fall League game in October, the first thing I wanted to know was how the present-day iteration compares to the hitter I’d spoken to 25 months earlier. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball’s awards season is in full swing this week. Tonight, the National League Rookie of the Year award, officially known as the Jackie Robinson award since 1987, was awarded to Paul Skenes, who was impressive enough to also be a finalist in the NL Cy Young award voting. Skenes finished with 23 first-place votes to Jackson Merrill’s seven.

I’m not here to praise or criticize the results. Instead, I’m here to perform what I see as my journalistic duty. I was an NL Rookie of the Year voter this year (my sixth time voting for the award), and I have always felt that it’s important to give a detailed explanation of the reasoning behind my choice. As usual, I spent most of the final weekend of the season agonizing over my choices, because while being asked to vote for one of these awards is admittedly really cool, it’s also a weighty responsibility that demands care as well as candor. Offering a breakdown of my vote hasn’t always been fun — in 2021, my decision to vote for Trevor Rogers over Jonathan India resulted in my social media mentions being inundated with a combination of threats and insults — but I think I owe it to the fans and the players involved to explain myself. (OK, some of the brouhaha in 2021 was fun, like the suggestion that the Cincinnati Reds should fire me, a notion that still amuses me on many levels.) Read the rest of this entry »

Picture peak Kyle Hendricks. He didn’t blow hitters away, but he sure recorded a lot of outs, deceiving hitters with a flurry of cutters, sinkers, and changeups. All of those pitches traveled in a similar tunnel; hitters couldn’t help but hit the ball with the thin part of their bat. Even late-period Hendricks manages to sit atop the hard-hit rate leaderboards in spite of a 87-mph fastball. His ability to do so is a function of his arsenal, which is designed to keep hitters off balance and off barrel.

They’re the same age, but Nick Martinez just spun up a peak Hendricks season, reliably generating yucky contact on balls in play. Those results earned him a qualifying offer of $21.05 million from the Reds, which he reportedly accepted on Sunday.

When the Reds initially proffered Martinez a QO, I saw a hefty helping of both consternation and skepticism around that decision, but I think it holds up well. Sure, Martinez doesn’t strike out a ton of batters. But who needs strikeouts when you’ve got routine fly balls?

To think Martinez is unlikely to deliver $21 million of value for his club in the 2025 season, you have to believe that the ability to generate weak contact is fluky, subject to the vicissitudes of randomness. But that belief might be misplaced. Read the rest of this entry »

The team that signs Nick Pivetta this offseason will be getting a veteran starter who, as my colleague Ben Clemens stated in our 2025 Top 50 Free Agents rundown, has “long been a favorite of pitching models.” The team will also be getting someone who believes in pitching to his strengths. The 31-year-old right-hander is studious about his craft, but with a notable exception. Poring over scouting reports isn’t his cup of tea.

“I think about it not as a specific hitter, but more of, ‘Is he a lefty or a righty?,’” explained Pivetta, whose past four-plus seasons have been with the Boston Red Sox. “I have certain sequences that I do against lefties or righties. I do the same sequences against either side, no matter the hitter.”

That’s not to say he totally ignores weaknesses. As Pivetta told me in our last-weekend-of-the-season conversation, there are certain hitters who struggle with a particular pitch and/or location, so he might vary his “same game plan around a certain spot.” But for the most part, he is “doing the exact same thing over and over again, just trying to execute.”

The extent to which that is optimal is open for debate. As his 50 Free Agents blurb spells out, Pivetta’s numbers suggest that he has never reached — and perhaps not even approached — his full potential. The stuff is unquestionably plus, but the consistency has clearly been lacking.

The Victoria, British Columbia native has pitched more than 1,000 innings over eight big-league seasons, so opposing teams have a pretty good idea of what to expect when he takes the mound. Moreover, certain lineups will present, at least on paper, a greater challenge for his pitch mix and standard attack plan. Might adherence to advance reports be a meaningful advantage add? Read the rest of this entry »