The Juan Soto era of Yankees baseball is off to a resounding start. The 25-year-old superstar put on a tour de force as his new team swept a four-game series against the Astros in Houston to open the season, most notably by throwing out the potential tying runner at the plate in the ninth inning on Opening Day and then driving in the decisive runs in each of the next three games. The sweep would not have been possible, however, without a couple of unheralded reserves rising to the occasion, namely Oswaldo Cabrera and Jon Berti, both filling in for the injured DJ LeMahieu at third base.

First, let’s note Soto, who absolutely wore out Astros pitchers by going 9-for-17 with a trio of walks and a quartet of RBI, one in each game. He began with a fifth-inning single off Framber Valdez that brought home the Yankees’ first run of the season and started a comeback from a 4-0 deficit. Then with one out in the ninth and the Yankees up 5-4, he scooped up Kyle Tucker’s single and nabbed Mauricio Dubón at the plate. In the seventh inning on Friday, he worked a bases-loaded walk against Rafael Montero to break a 1-1 tie, and in the bottom half of the frame followed with a sliding catch off an Alex Bregman bloop that could have brought in the tying run. In the seventh inning on Saturday, he broke a 3-3 tie by poking an opposite-field solo homer into the Crawford Boxes at the expense of Bryan Abreu. And in the ninth inning on Sunday he again broke a 3-3 tie, capping a three-hit day by slapping a two-out, full-count RBI single off Josh Hader. Oh, is that all?

The Yankees couldn’t have asked for more from their latest marquee addition, who helped them to their first 4-0 start since 2003 (also on the road) and their first four-game series sweep ever in Houston. Including their three-game sweep at Minute Maid Park last September, they’ve won seven in a row against the team that has tormented them for most of the past decade by eliminating them from the postseason in 2015, ’17, ’19, and ’22. For a Yankees team that missed the postseason last year, that has to be a boost.

They did it all while scrambling to fill the shoes of the 35-year-old LeMahieu, who was slated to be their leadoff hitter and regular third baseman to start the season. On March 16, LeMahieu fouled a ball off the top of his right foot in an exhibition game, and was initially diagnosed with a bone bruise after X-rays, a CT scan, and an MRI all came back negative. His slow recovery made apparent his need to start the season on the sidelines; on Opening Day, the Yankees made it official by placing him on the IL retroactive to March 25. A follow-up MRI on Saturday revealed that he had actually suffered a fracture.

This is the second year out of three that LeMahieu has contended with an injury to his right foot. In 2022, he broke a sesamoid bone in his right big toe that led to ligament damage in his second toe; he needed a cortisone shot at the All-Star break and played through the injury for most of the second half, hitting just .228/.308/.327 over that span, spiraling into a 1-for-31 slump before missing three weeks in September, and getting left off the postseason roster. He never underwent offseason surgery to alleviate the issue, which may have contributed to his first-half struggles in 2023 (.220/.285/.357, 77 wRC+), but thanks to former hitting coach Sean Casey, who helped LeMahieu improve his lower body positioning, he hit for a 129 wRC+ in the second half, though he still finished with a thin .243/.327/.390 (101 wRC+) line.

While the Yankees did not announce a full timeline for his return, manager Aaron Boone said the infielder would work out at the team’s spring training facility in Tampa as his pain allows, and that he would be re-imaged in two weeks; a best-case scenario might put his return at the end of April, though the team isn’t going to rush him back. LeMahieu’s slow recovery from his previous foot injury is an “added concern, which is why we’re not pushing it,” Boone said, “It’s not something that he’s going to play through. He’s going to be 100 percent.”

The Yankees hadn’t confirmed the fracture until after the season started, but they knew LeMahieu would be out and also that Oswald Peraza would begin the year on the IL with a right shoulder strain. Both injuries prompted New York to pulled off a three-team trade just 24 hours before Opening Day, acquiring Berti from the Marlins, trading 18-year-old outfielder John Cruz — a “prospect of note” on the Yankees’ Top Prospects list — to the Marlins and 26-year-old out-of-options backup catcher Ben Rortvedt to the Rays, with 23-year-old outfield prospect Shane Sasaki going from Miami to Tampa Bay, as well. In 2023, the 34-year-old Berti, who spent the past five seasons with the Marlins, batted .294/.344/.405 (103 wC+) with seven homers in a career-high 424 plate appearances en route to 2.1 WAR; his batting average was a career high, and he just missed setting full-season highs in the other slash categories. One oddity about his numbers is that he went from stealing a major league-high 41 bases in 46 attempts in 2022 to just 16 in 22 attempts in ’23 despite the new rules that had so many players running wild; even so, his sprint speed still placed in the 95th percentile, according to Statcast.

The righty-swinging Berti can play second base, shortstop, and third base, and also has experience at all three outfield positions, though 29 of his 30 starts in the outfield over the past three seasons were in left field. He didn’t see his first action for the Yankees until Sunday, when he went 1-for-4 with a fourth-inning single off Astros starter J.P. France; the hit brought home Anthony Rizzo to put the Yankees ahead 2-1, but they couldn’t hold that lead. It was in the ninth inning where Berti came up bigger. With the Yankees having taken the lead thanks to Soto’s RBI single, the Astros began the inning with back-to-back singles by Jeremy Peña and Victor Caratini against closer Clay Holmes. Jose Altuve then ripped a hot grounder down the third base line, but Berti prevented what could have been an RBI double with a diving, backhanded stop, then recovered to beat Peña to third for the force out.

Berti didn’t get to play until Sunday because the 25-year-old Cabrera had done such a strong job holding down the hot corner. A 45-FV switch-hitting prospect who was more or less crowded out of the middle infield by the rises of Peraza and Anthony Volpe, both younger and with higher ceilings, Cabrera reached the majors first, on August 17, 2022. He hit .247/.312/.429 (111 wRC+) with 1.5 WAR in 171 PA in a utility role over the final third of the season, learning the outfield corners on the fly but starting key games at shortstop as well, including two against Houston in the ALCS. He made the team out of spring training last year and spent most of the season in the majors but struggled mightily, hitting just .211/.275/.299. His 60 wRC+ tied for the sixth-lowest mark among players with at least 300 PA, and he finished with -0.6 WAR. He struggled from both sides of the plate, with a 61 wRC+ against lefties and a 60 against righties.

While he started spring training in a 1-for-23 slump, Cabrera overhauled his swing and approach. He ditched a high leg kick in favor of a toe-tap that he had previously used mainly in two-strike situations in order to reduce his movement and simplify his path to the ball. He also focused more on contact and on hitting line drives after observing Soto in batting practice. Cabrera told The Athletic’s Chris Kirshner:

“The one big thing that I see from that guy is he doesn’t try to hit fly balls… He’s not trying to hit the ball in the air every time. His hands just get quick to the ball. That’s what got my attention. He’s always trying to hit line drives. When I saw Soto hitting in the cage for the first time, it was low line drives all of the time, so what am I doing trying to hit homers all of the time? I talked with the hitting coaches about it — obviously, Soto and I are not the same. But I’ve been trying to take some of the things he does into my game.”

On Opening Day, Cabrera batted ninth and collected a fifth-inning infield single off Valdez and then a game-tying solo homer off Montero in the sixth. On Friday, he went 4-for-5, with a single and a double off Cristian Javier, then an RBI single off Tayler Scott, and a two-run single off Parker Mushinski. While he batted right-handed against Valdez, he went lefty-on-lefty against Mushinski, something the team is having him do against certain southpaws. He had less success with that approach against Josh Hader, striking out against him on both Saturday and Sunday, but in the first of those games he had already hit a game-tying two-run homer in the seventh off Abreu, a righty. He started at shortstop on Sunday, filling in for Volpe, who sat due to a stomach bug.

Cabrera’s .438/.471/.875 across 17 PA is a clear signal that we’re in small-sample territory, but it’s worth at least a passing note regarding how much harder he’s hit the ball. Last season, he averaged just 87.8 mph in exit velocity, with a 3.5% barrel rate and a 32.5% hard-hit rate. Through his first 10 batted balls, he’s averaged 91.6 mph with one barrel and five hard-hit balls.

Obviously, the samples will have to get much larger before we have any real idea whether Cabrera truly has improved. Nonetheless, his rising to the occasion in timely fashion offers hope that the Yankees are a deeper team than last year, one that will be able to weather the absence of LeMahieu.

Enrique Bradfield Jr. has good wheels, and he can also hit a bit. Drafted 17th overall last year by the Baltimore Orioles out of Vanderbilt University, the 22-year-old outfielder not only slashed .311/.426/.447 over three collegiate seasons, his table-setter batting style translated smoothly to pro ball. In 110 plate appearances versus A-ball pitching, Bradfield batted .291 with a Bonds-esque .473 OBP.

The chances of Bradfield’s ever being comped to Barry Bonds are basically nonexistent. At 6-foot-1 and 170 pounds, the erstwhile Commodore is, in the words of our prospect co-analysts Eric Longenhagen and Tess Taruskin, “a contact-oriented speedster who will also play plus defense.” Power isn’t a meaningful part of his game. Bradfield went deep just 15 times at Vandy, and not at all after inking a contract with the O’s.

He doesn’t expect that to change. When I asked him during spring training if he’s ever tried to tap into more power, Bradfield said that has never been a focus, adding that he’d “be going in the wrong direction if it was.” That seems a shrewd self-assessment. A line-drive hitter who swings from the left side, Bradfield will ultimately reach Baltimore by continuing to propel balls from foul pole to foul pole. Read the rest of this entry »

Mookie Betts, Shohei Ohtani, and Yoshinobu Yamamoto walk into the Dodgers clubhouse in 2032, where… they’re greeted by Will Smith. There’s no punchline to this setup because it’s not joke, as the All-Star receiver has joined those other three Dodgers in inking a deal that’s at least a decade long. On Wednesday, the day before his 29th birthday, Smith agreed to a 10-year, $140 million extension.

Smith has already helped the Dodgers win a World Series and established himself as one of the game’s preeminent catchers. He’s second in WAR among catchers since 2019, the year he debuted, with his 15.8 WAR trailing only the 19.8 WAR of J.T. Realmuto, who took nearly 500 more plate appearances over that same stretch. He’s tops among all catchers for the 2021–23 stretch with 12.9 WAR, a span over which he and Realmuto (who had 12.6 WAR) had nearly identical PA totals. Though he still had one more year after this one before becoming eligible for free agency, he and the Dodgers had wanted to hammer out a long-term deal for a while, so much so that according to MLB.com’s Juan Toribo, the two sides had engaged in extension discussions “each of the last few seasons.”

Smith is coming off an admittedly uneven season. Though his 119 wRC+ was the lowest mark of his five-year career, he posted his second-highest WAR (4.4). He hit .261/.359/.438 with 19 homers in 554 plate appearances, but tailed off after a hot start:

Smith made his first All-Star team (!) on the strength of that first half, but even then, all wasn’t quite well. On April 12, he suffered a concussion when a foul ball hit his mask and missed two weeks of action. Three days after returning, on April 30, he was hit by a Jake Woodford sinker. He suffered a broken rib and an oblique strain but played through them, and doing so created some bad habits with regards to his mechanics. From a September 22 piece by Jack Harris in the Los Angeles Times:

Instead of his typically smooth, compact inside-out swing, Smith said his bat path has been too “out to in” lately, leading to more whiffs and mis-hits on pitches he used to crush.

He said his front side is opening up too much, causing him to cut across the ball instead of driving it with his easy pop.

… Added [manager Dave] Roberts: “There was probably a little bit of guarding [the injury] initially after. And then when you’re talking about the rib, the oblique, that sort of dovetails into some changed mechanics.”

Particularly with the Dodgers’ awareness of his slump, the team probably should have dialed Smith’s workload back a bit more than it did; he matched his 2022 total of 106 starts behind the plate but DHed only 14 times, compared to 25 the year before. He had enough success in ironing out his mechanics that he went 5-for-12 with a double and a triple in the Dodgers’ three-and-out Division Series loss to the Diamondbacks, and he’s off to a 6-for-14 start this year, so there’s no reason to think he’s permanently broken.

As for the contract, it’s the longest ever for a catcher, surpassing the eight-year extensions of Joe Mauer, Buster Posey, and Keibert Ruiz, who came up in the Dodgers’ system, generally a level behind Smith, before being traded to the Nationals in the Max Scherzer blockbuster in 2021. Smith’s deal isn’t nearly as lucrative as either the Mauer or Posey ones for $184 million and $167 million — and that’s without adjusting for inflation, as both of those were signed more than a decade ago. In terms of unadjusted average annual value, Smith’s $14 million a year ranks just 12th among catchers historically and fourth currently, according to Cot’s Contracts. On an annual basis, that $14 million average comes to only about 60% of the $23.1 million that Realmuto, the game’s highest-paid catcher, is making.

That AAV requires adjustment, however, because as with the Ohtani and Betts deals — and those of Freddie Freeman and Teoscar Hernández, so long as we’re on the subject of the Dodgers — a significant amount of the money is deferred. In his case, it’s $50 million, with the team paying out $5 million a year from 2034–43. That reduces the AAV of Smith’s deal to $12.24 million for Competitive Balance Tax purposes, about 53% of what Realmuto (who himself deferred half of his $20 million 2021 salary) is making.

Structure-wise, according to MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand, Smith will receive a $30 million signing bonus — half payable on November 15, the other half on January 15 — and be paid $13.55 million this year (replacing the one-year, $8.55 million contract he signed in January), then $13 million a year for 2025–27, $9.5 million for ’28-32, and $9.95 million for ’33. That’s a cool breeze running through Guggenheim Baseball Management’s bank account; in 2028, Betts will be taking home more than three times as much ($30 million), and Yamamoto nearly that ($26 million). While he doesn’t have explicit no-trade protection, he’ll reach 10-and-5 status in mid-2028, and his contract has one other provision that protects him: If he’s traded, the deferred money becomes payable in season, meaning that the acquiring team will take a larger CBT hit unless the two sides agree to a similar arrangement.

Even given the length of the deal, ZiPS is surprisingly optimistic about Smith. Via Dan Szymborski:

That’s 23.9 WAR over the life of the contract, with 17.1 WAR in the first half of the deal, a very strong return. In fact, the ZiPS suggested contract for this projection is $164 million over 10 years, but once the deferred money is accounted for, the Dodgers are paying him the equivalent of about 75% of that in present value. This is a very good deal for them, and if it seems like Smith is getting the short end here, it’s just that the two sides have figured out a mutually advantageous way of structuring the payments. To these eyes, the way it makes the most sense is to think of that signing bonus and the higher salaries of the first four years as one deal that without deferrals averages out to $20.6 million a year over the next four years (which would be the second-highest AAV for a catcher, surpassing Salvador Perez’s $20.5 million), and then about $9.6 million per year for the last six, a little less than the $10.15 million James McCann is making as a well-compensated backup.

Particularly in the wake of the Ohtani contract, I’ve seen complaints that the Dodgers’ penchant for using deferred money is somehow a subversion of the Competitive Balance Tax system — as if that were sacrosanct — and therefore bad for baseball. I don’t find this notion particularly convincing. The league and the owners knew exactly what they were doing when they designed this system; as former MLBPA executive subcommittee member Collin McHugh told The Athletic recently, “They’re better at finding loopholes in the system because that is their job, to maximize profit” for the 30 owners. Does anyone out there actually think that even the most miserly of the multimillionaires and billionaires who own teams got filthy rich without understanding the time value of money and the advantages, tax-related and otherwise, of spreading out large payments? The concept permeates our society; not all of us are fortunate enough to have socked away money for retirement, but at some point, most of us have been encouraged to participate in a pension plan, 401k, or IRA that provides tax advantages and spreads out our income to compensate for lesser earnings down the road.

As for the players and owners, in December the Wall Street Journal’s Linsdey Adler and Richard Rubin reported that the owners have proposed limits on the amount of salary that can be deferred, with one 2021 proposal including a full ban, but the MLB Players Association rejected the idea. Understandably, they have no incentive to give up that right without receiving major concessions in return. Maybe they’d agree to forgo deferrals if the owners were to allow players to reach eligibility for arbitration and/or free agency more quickly, but we all know that’s not happening anytime soon.

Anyway, it’s not like the Dodgers, who now have $915.5 million worth of deferrals on their books for the salaries of Betts, Freeman, Hernández, Ohtani, and Smith, are doing this while avoiding paying the CBT. They’re well past the fourth-tier threshold of $297 million, and figure to be paying taxes annually for the foreseeable future, with increasingly steeper penalties and the risk of an inflexible roster; it’s hardly inconceivable that some of these contracts could go south and cause the Dodgers headaches down the road. As for Smith, he’s now got a handsome deal that rewards him for his place as part of the team’s foundation, with protection from the cumulative impact of so many innings behind the plate. Good for him, and good for the Dodgers.

A popup is an automatic out. In 2023, popups had a batting average of just .014, so if we round up, we can say honestly that 99% of them were completely worthless. If you see the ball leave the bat headed straight up in the air, the outcome is essentially predetermined. No other batted ball carries less intrigue. Groundballs may be pariahs in the era of the launch angle revolution, but their .261 batting average meant they were 18 times more likely than popups to end up as hits. Knowing all that, you could be excused for thinking that the popup is the most boring possible way for the ball to be put in play. But I’m going to let you in on something: The popup is secretly the most exciting play in baseball.

You see, what popups lack in suspense, they make up for in drama. That’s because the popup is the play most likely to end up with any and all of the players on the field screaming. Now, in most contexts, screaming isn’t necessarily something you look forward to. Personally, my day-to-day life contains exactly zero screaming, and I prefer to keep it that way. In any given situation, I tend to think of somebody yelling at me as the absolute worst-case scenario. However, the screaming that happens during a popup is fun. No one is screaming to hurt anyone else. Players may scream out of anger, but they also scream in order to be helpful and to keep their teammates safe. When the ball has been popped up, screaming is cooperation. Screaming is friendship. Screaming is love.

As we embark on the 2024 season, it’s best to think of popups like tragic operas. Everyone walks into the theater knowing that things will end badly for the protagonist. They’re not there to find out what will happen, they’re there to be moved by how it happens. Although the end is sad, there is great beauty to be found in the death and shrieking. With that, let’s review the different reasons that players might end up screaming their heads off when the ball gets lifted into the air. I watched every single televised popup that happened during spring training, and then I made supercuts so that we could break them down together. I also included a few choice screams from recent seasons.

Whenever the ball is popped up, it is the solemn duty of every ballplayer to shout “Up!” as loud as humanly possible. This is the law, and it was hammered into me so hard when I was in high school that it became an involuntary response. I’m now 40 years old. I play recreational softball. And still, I cannot help screaming every time someone pops the ball up. No one else does this. It is embarrassing and I am unable to stop. It is less embarrassing when big leaguers do it.

In theory, the goal of this particular scream is to help the catcher. The catcher is busy trying not just to catch the pitch, but to frame it while also managing all of the other responsibilities that come with the position. Unlike everyone else on the field, a ball popped straight up immediately leaves the catcher’s line of sight. Screaming, “Up!” lets them know the location of the ball and warns them that they might have to make a play on it. Occasionally, you can see that catchers really do need the help. They’re capable of looking very confused indeed.

For that reason, and also because they are themselves forbidden from catching popups, pitchers have also been trained to point to the ball when it’s popped up. It is not helpful, but it is, once again, the law. It must be extraordinarily infantilizing for the pitcher, normally the source of all the action, to be reduced to a helpless citizen of Metropolis, shouting, “Look, up in the sky!” I imagine it also feels quite futile, since, throughout the entire history of baseball, exactly zero popups have ever been caught because the pitcher’s index finger helped a fielder locate the ball.

Once it has been established that the ball is, in fact, up, it’s time to decide who will have the honor of catching it. This is determined by way of the democratic process of — you guessed it — even more screaming, just as the founding fathers intended. In theory, there are certain places where one fielder has the right of way, but in practice, the rules are simple: Whoever screams the loudest and the latest gets the ball. The generally accepted parlance is, “I got it.” As Junior Caminero makes clear in the first clip below, “Mía, mía, mía” works just as well for Spanish speakers.

It really is important for the fielders to declare whether or not they’ve got it. To you, it may just sound like grown men shouting at each other, but in baseball, that’s known as communication. If your team fails to communicate, then something like this could happen.

But that’s still not the worst-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is an outfield collision, and it happens all too frequently. Usually, there’s nothing funny about ballfield collisions, but they can have their moments. For example, the legendary band Yo La Tengo got their name from center fielder Richie Ashburn’s futile attempt to avoid outfield collisions with shortstop Elio Chacon when the two played together for the Mets in the early ’60s. Seamus Kerney tells the story in Ashburn’s SABR bio:

The story revolved around the antics of the Spanish-speaking shortstop for the Mets, Elio Chacon, and his penchant for frequent near-collisions with outfielders. This was especially true with Ashburn on short fly balls to center field. Ashburn realized that Chacon did not understand the English warning: “I have it,” so he went to a bilingual Mets player and was told that Chacon would understand the warning in Spanish, yo la tengo; that it meant the fly ball was the center fielder’s to catch. Soon enough a short fly ball was hit and a back-pedaling Chacon veered off, following Ashburn’s admonition in Spanish. What was unexpected was that onrushing, English-only left fielder Frank Thomas completely flattened Ashburn. After pulling his center fielder from the ground, Thomas asked him “What’s a Yellow Tango?”

Sometimes the issue is not who will get the ball, but whether the fielder can get to it safely. If the ball is being buffeted by the wind and your head is craned skyward to track it into foul territory, it can be hard to mind your surroundings. That’s where your teammates can come in, telling you whether or not you have the space to safely make the catch without running into the wall. The preferred verbiage is “Got room! Got room!” Strangely, nobody yells much of anything when you don’t have room. It doesn’t make a ton of sense, as that’s the situation when you’d really need help to keep from crashing into the wall. In theory, nobody should need to be told that they’ve got room. They should just keep going after the ball until they hear a teammate say, “Stop running or you’ll die!”

There’s one more player who can get in on the screaming action, and that’s the batter. In this case, there is no altruistic reason for screaming. It’s just pure catharsis, a way to vent the rage from your body before you explode. Let it out, Jason Heyward. Let it out.

Of course, the players aren’t the only ones who can scream. I have a friend who is physically incapable of going to concert without shouting something at the band between songs. Maybe it’s a joke, or maybe it’s just a big, loud Woooo! There is something inside of him that simply cannot survive those few seconds of silence. For baseball fans with the same condition, the odd interstice when everyone in the stadium is waiting for the ball to finally remember that it’s earthbound is the perfect moment to grab some attention. Usually, they’ll shout that it is in fact they who have got it, but it’s also a time to shine for people blessed with great whistles or anyone who simply loves screaming. In my favorite of the clips that follow, someone who is presumably not familiar with the terminology of the game very clearly tells the fielder, “You’re gonna fumble it.”

In addition to the joy of screaming, popups give you a chance to enjoy the choreography of a baseball game. Because it’s never immediately clear where the ball will land and who will end up with it, the broadcast cuts to the widest shot they have, way up behind home plate. In this rare glimpse of the entire field, you can see all of the infielders, and sometimes all nine fielders, as they move together. There’s beauty in it, and it truly lets you see the way in which defense requires all nine players.

One of my favorite moments comes in the instant before they cut to that camera. It’s vanishingly brief, and it can only take place if a right-handed batter fouls a pitch from a right-handed pitcher down the first base line. When that happens, the pitcher, catcher, and hitter will all move together, following the ball toward first base. First their heads snap up, and then their bodies follow in sort of a synchronized drift. It’s like they’re zombies who suddenly catch the scent of brains wafting over from the south.

That’s the last supercut I’ve got, but before I leave you, I’d like to share with you my dream of the perfect popup. It’s the popup where everyone in the stadium screams: players, fans, umpires, announcers, ushers, even the possums (assuming the game is being played in Oakland). I crunched a lot of tape looking for the perfect popup. I never found it, but I know that it’s out there somewhere.

The perfect popup starts with a pitcher unleashing both the baseball and a max effort grunt. With a mighty cut, the batter sends the ball straight up into the stratosphere, and the catcher, pitcher, and infielders instantly scream the word, “Up!” in perfect unison. The batter barks the F-word in fury, smashing the bat over a beefy thigh. The umpires shout, “Infield fly, batter’s out!” Thunderclouds boom. A swirling thermal pushes the ball hither and yon in the sky, and as it passes over each fielder in turn, each one shouts, “I’ve got it! I’ve got it!” At first the fans shout gaily that they’ve got it too, but as the ball travels ever skyward in open defiance of gravity, their playful shouts turn into panicked screams. They rend their garments. The batter, no longer jogging half-heartedly toward first, furiously churns around the bases. The ball keeps rising. “Cold beer here,” screams a vendor, completely oblivious to the apocalypse unfolding around him. “Yes, oh God yes,” howls the play-by-play announcer. And then, just like that, the ball decides to start falling. The thunderclouds dissipate. The fans meekly put back on the clothes they’d ripped from their bodies in terror. The third baseman drifts toward the dugout, and after reassurances that he’s got room, he settles under the ball, says once more that he’s got it, and secures it safely in his glove. The batter dives headfirst into home. God weeps.

Happy Friday, and welcome to Top of the Order, FanGraphs’ new triweekly column! Every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.

To those who aren’t familiar with my work, a little background: I’ve been at FanGraphs since the beginning of the 2021 season. My work here has been largely behind the scenes, with my main responsibility being updating the RosterResource payroll pages (which are pretty great, if I do say so myself). I’ve worked with Jason Martinez and RosterResource as far back as 2012, when it was MLB Depth Charts, before it was in FanGraphs’ awesome interface and even before it was stored in Google Sheets (it was just text on a page!).

That transaction and payroll lens has dominated how I think about baseball over the last decade or so; it’s informed how I watch baseball, and it will certainly influence the topics I choose to discuss in these columns. I’m not watching for the long view of players’ Hall of Fame careers like Jay Jaffe does; I don’t have an incredible projection system like Dan Szymborski; I don’t have an innate feel for the game’s aesthetics and trends like Ben Clemens. I’m watching and following for information. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s probably no surprise to you that I’ve always loved baseball. It hasn’t always been in the way I love it now. These days, I read about the sport all day and watch more games than I can count every week. It’s a self-enforcing cycle; the more I like it, the more baseball I get exposed to, which makes me like it more, on and on like that.

That’s not what made me like the sport in the first place, though. I’ve loved baseball for as long as I can remember. Every March, as I anxiously await the start of the season, I find myself reminiscing about how I ended up here. This year, those memories have come on even more strongly, because my dad’s birthday lines up with the start of the season and he’s turning 75 this year. I’m feeling so strongly, in fact, that Meg was kind enough to let me write about what got me hooked on the sport when I was a kid.

I didn’t grow up in a “baseball market.” We didn’t get Cardinals games on TV; for most of my childhood, we didn’t even have cable. But most of my fondest memories of being a kid revolve around the sport anyway. My parents got to work early on me, and they kept it up until I was a lifelong fan.

No baseball on TV? It was no problem, because my uncle taped a St. Louis promotional spot titled “Ozzie, That’s a Winner” and mailed it to us. It was a gas station advertisement, if I’m remembering correctly, with clips of great defensive plays interspersed around The Wizard talking about where he filled up his tank. I didn’t care about that part even a little bit. I watched that video until the tape wore out and tried to mirror Ozzie’s moves in our family room. Credit my mom and dad for sitting there without laughing while a small left-handed child tried to make himself look like the best defensive shortstop of all time, because they never once told me how doomed my dream of being the next Ozzie was.
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After an offseason marked by big trades and a slow free agent market, the 2024 season is almost upon us; we made it. And on this, the morning of Opening Day, we engage in our annual tradition of asking our staff to open themselves up to public ridicule by trying to predict the year in baseball. Some of these predictions will prove to be prescient; others will make their forecaster feel a little silly. Such is the prognostication business.

We asked the staff to predict the playoff field, as well as the pennant and World Series winners, and the individual award recipients. Folks from FanGraphs and RotoGraphs weighed in. Here are the results. Read the rest of this entry »

Logan Webb was my pick for NL Cy Young last season, and while the prediction didn’t come to fruition, the San Francisco Giants right-hander did come close to capturing the honor — this despite an 11-13 record. (We’ve come a long way, haven’t we?) He finished second in the voting to Blake Snell, who is now his rotation mate, and while Webb’s major league-leading 216 innings certainly captured the attention of the electorate, many of his other numbers stood out as well. He ranked fourth among qualified National League pitchers in both ERA (3.25) and FIP (3.16), and his 1.29 walks per nine innings was second to none. Moreover, his 62.1% groundball rate was the highest in either league.

He hardly came out of nowhere. Webb was already good, as his stats over the past three seasons attest. Since the beginning of the 2021 campaign, he has a 3.07 ERA and a 3.00 FIP, and his signature sinker-changeup combination has been responsible for a 59.9% groundball rate. A comparably humble 23.1% strikeout rate over that span (21.4% last year) notwithstanding, the 27-year-old worm-killing workhorse is one of the best pitchers in the game.

Webb sat down to talk pitching at San Francisco’s spring training facility earlier this month. He’ll be on the mound later today when the Giants open the regular season in San Diego.

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David Laurila: How have you evolved as a pitcher since coming to pro ball?

Logan Webb: “I’ve changed probably four different times. I was a sinker guy when I first started. Then I had Tommy John, and when I came back, so did the velo — it was back to the reason why I was drafted.”

Laurila: You were drafted [by the Giants in 2014] because you threw hard? Read the rest of this entry »

If you were searching for evidence of the changing of the guard in the major leagues — or of the occupational hazards faced by starting pitchers — look no further than this year’s slate of Opening Day hurlers. As the 2024 season launches with what was supposed to be a full schedule on Thursday — the Brewers-Mets and Braves-Phillies games have both been postponed until Friday — the absences of so many of the game’s most renowned pitchers due to injuries and other issues loom large. If there’s good news, it’s that we still have plenty of top arms on tap.

Consider, for example, the fact that neither of last year’s two Cy Young Award winners, Gerrit Cole and Blake Snell, will be taking the hill on Thursday. After being diagnosed with nerve inflammation and edema earlier this month, Cole — one of just two pitchers to throw at least 200 innings in both 2022 and ’23 — will start the year on the injured list and won’t even begin throwing again until early or mid-April. A best-case scenario has him returning around the start of June; in his place, the Yankees will start Nestor Cortes. Snell, who reached free agency after winning his second Cy Young last year with the Padres, didn’t even sign with the Giants until March 19 and isn’t built up enough to be on the Opening Day roster, let alone take his turn. Instead, Logan Webb will get the call for San Francisco for the third straight season, though that might have been the case even if Snell had signed in a timely fashion.

This is more or less a once-every-couple-of-decades occurrence. According to ESPN’s Tim Kurkjian, the last time neither Cy Young winner started the following Opening Day was in 2005. That year, despite their hardware, both the Astros’ Roger Clemens and the Twins’ Johan Santana yielded to teammates with longer tenures with their respective clubs, namely Roy Oswalt and Brad Radke. Before that, you have to go back to 1982, when neither the Dodgers’ Fernando Valenzuela nor the Brewers’ Rollie Fingers (a reliever) started. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past week and a half, we’ve published our annual season preview, ranking the league’s players by position and team based on a blend of our projections (a 50/50 split between ZiPS and Steamer) and our manually maintained RosterResource playing time estimates courtesy of Jason Martinez. If you happen to have missed any of those installments, you can use the navigation widget above to catch up.

Today, I’m going to summarize the results. We’ll look at some tables and pick out a few interesting tidbits in a moment, but first, it’s important to remember that this exercise captures a snapshot of how we project teams to perform now. Teams aren’t static. Since we began publishing our rankings, Wyatt Langford, our no. 2 overall prospect, officially made the Rangers’ Opening Day roster, while Jackson Holliday, our no. 1 overall prospect, learned he’d be starting his season at Triple-A Norfolk. Cardinals outfielder Dylan Carlson suffered a sprained AC joint in his left shoulder during a collision with teammate Jordan Walker. He’ll start the season on the IL, paving the way for speedster (and no. 83 overall prospect) Victor Scott II to debut. And mere hours after our starting pitching rankings went live, Jordan Montgomery signed with the Arizona Diamondbacks, pushing them from 13th all the way up to fourth. Heck, while I was writing this summary, news broke that Reds infielder Matt McLain underwent shoulder surgery, putting his season in jeopardy. Read the rest of this entry »