It’s been a quiet winter in Pittsburgh. The Pirates lost almost no one from last year’s 76-86 team, but they didn’t add many players either. Their biggest acquisition is probably Aroldis Chapman. After that, it’s Marco Gonzales, Rowdy Tellez, Yasmani Grandal, or Martín Pérez. They’re competent major leaguers all, but hardly exciting additions. But as it turns out, the Pirates had another move to make, and it’s a welcome one:

BREAKING: Right-hander Mitch Keller and the Pittsburgh Pirates are in agreement on a five-year contract extension, sources tell me and @kileymcd. After a breakout season in which he struck out 210, the 27-year-old Keller will anchor the rotation for the team that drafted him.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) February 22, 2024

This is both exciting and necessary, at least in my opinion. The Pirates haven’t developed many effective starting pitchers in the last, well, ever. Only one Pirates starter in the past decade has eclipsed 10 WAR with the team: Gerrit Cole with 13. After that, their success stories are Jameson Taillon, Joe Musgrove, and, well… Iván Nova is sixth on the list, and that came in 2.5 years after the Yankees traded him to Pittsburgh. As Stephen Nesbitt and Ken Rosenthal recently chronicled in The Athletic, it’s been an ugly decade for baseball in the Steel City.

Mitch Keller has already accrued the third-most starting pitching WAR in the past decade with 7.5. He’s entering his sixth big league season this year, though ups and downs early in his career mean that it’s only his fifth year of service time. The road to success has been bumpy — from 2019 through 2021, he compiled a 6.02 ERA and only racked up 170 innings of major league work. Things have gotten better since then, though. He threw 159 solid innings in 2022 and then made 32 starts in 2023, both times looking like a consistently effective starter rather than the roller coaster ride of earlier years. Read the rest of this entry »

“Jose Altuve will be an Astro for life,” read the club’s announcement on Tuesday afternoon. Under different circumstances, that could be construed as a threat. But Altuve will be well-remunerated for the remainder of his time in Houston: His new contract extension will run for five years, starting in 2025, and pay him a guaranteed $125 million.

This is the third long-term contract Altuve has signed with the Astros, the club that signed him as a 16-year-old out of Venezuela all the way back in 2007. By the time it’s over, he will have spent some 23 seasons in the organization, 19 of them in the major leagues. The phrasing of the announcement is a little more concrete than any prediction about 2029 ought to be. It’s possible that Altuve will continue playing once his deal expires. But when it does, he’ll be seven months short of his 40th birthday. That seems like as good a time as any to plan on wrapping things up. Read the rest of this entry »

The Kansas City Royals committed to the largest contract in franchise history on Monday, signing shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. to an 11-year extension worth $288.8 million. In addition to the guarantee, which runs through the 2034 season, there’s a three-year club option worth $89 million that would bring the total value of the deal to $377 million if exercised. Witt gets some options of his own, with four opt-out opportunities from 2030 to 2033 (the seventh, eighth, ninth, and 10th seasons of the deal). The 23-year-old Witt had a breakout 2023 season, hitting .276/.319/.495 with 30 homers and 49 stolen bases, good for 5.7 WAR, a mark that ranked third among shortstops behind only Corey Seager and Francisco Lindor.

Suffice it to say, I was floored when news of this deal hit Monday afternoon. Money may not go as far as it used to, but a nearly $300 million commitment is still a pretty large one, with fewer than 20 contracts in league history exceeding $250 million in guaranteed cash. A contract this big would still be a massive story in New York or Los Angeles; in the context of Kansas City baseball, the discovery of extraterrestrial life would probably get booted from the front page in favor of this deal. To say the Royals don’t typically enter into pacts like this would be an epic understatement. We’re talking about a franchise that had never given out even a $100 million contract, with the largest previous deal being Salvador Perez’s 2021 extension that guaranteed him $82 million over four years. Triple the size of Perez’s bag of cash and you still have enough left over to make a stack of hundred dollar bills about 140 feet high.

The Royals picked the right player to play Rich Uncle Pennybags with. Witt is the team’s best young player since Carlos Beltrán about 20 years ago. Back then, the Royals valued him so highly that after agreeing in principle to a three-year, $25 million contract, ownership decided to blow up the deal by trying to pull back a million dollars. A year later, Beltrán was traded in a three-way swap that netted the organization Mark Teahen, Mike Wood, and John Buck, who combined for about seven total WAR as Royals. Two decades later, Beltrán has a good shot at making the Hall of Fame — the biggest obstacle is his involvement in Houston’s trashcananigans — and if he gets a plaque, it may be with NY on the cap, not KC.

Witt isn’t some stathead favorite who snuck in a great season on the back of a spike in walks and crazy one-year defensive numbers (though we’ll get to his defense in a minute) — he was one of the top amateurs in the country, and as a pro prospect, he was one of those rare players who the scouts, the numbers crowd, and the computers all relished. He so electrified the atmosphere in spring training in 2021 that the Royals might have given serious thought to having him basically skip the whole upper minors.

While the Royals were probably right to develop Witt traditionally, assigning him to Double-A in 2021, they cleared the decks to get him a full-time spot in the lineup for 2022. Adalberto Mondesi’s presence resulted in Witt starting off at third base, but Mondesi’s ACL tear opened up the shortstop job, which Witt has mostly held since. A .254/.294/.428 line in his rookie campaign wasn’t phenom material, but as a 22-year-old shortstop, it was still enough to place him around average at the position, with a whole lot of unexplored ceiling remaining. Let’s crank up the time machine and jump back to his long-term ZiPS projections before last season:

Assuming the reduced salary figures for his pre-free agency years, ZiPS would have offered 11 years and $282 million to cover Witt through the 2034 season, though without the opt-out years, which do add significant value for most players. And remember, that projection isn’t what the computer suggests knowing how last season went — this is before 2023.

While this projection did a decent job of pegging Witt’s 2023 offense (with a projected OPS+ of 114 vs. an actual OPS+ of 120 and a wRC+ of 115), the computer didn’t see his defensive improvements coming. Originally, it was up for debate whether Witt’s future in the majors would be at shortstop or third base; the Royals originally starting Mondesi at short over Witt wasn’t necessarily some bit of undue veteran deference. Per Statcast’s RAA, Witt improved by 17 runs at shortstop from 2022 to 2023, ranking as the top defensive shortstop in the American League last season. Even Sports Info Solutions’ Defensive Runs Saved, a relative skeptic on Witt, saw a 12-run improvement.

Defense is notoriously hard to measure, but Witt’s numbers improved both in terms of range and avoiding errors. The latter is a relatively small part of defense, but it’s also one that’s much easier to measure, and Witt netted six runs of his improvement just from avoiding errors, going from six non-throwing errors to only two in 2023 despite 50% more innings. Last August, Jake Mintz went into detail on Witt’s defensive instruction at shortstop:

For a crash course in rewiring his defensive approach, Witt’s personal hitting coach Jeremy Isenhower invited well-known private infield coach Nate Trosky out to his hitting facility in Tomball, Texas, for two days of intensive training with the young shortstop. In the nippy mid-December chill, Trosky, an eccentric, fast talking, sun-hat wearing, country-song singing, infield mental skills expert, ran Witt through nearly six straight hours of instruction.
[…]
A close review of Witt’s 2022 errors confirms this hypothesis. Most of his fielding mistakes appeared to stem from a hesitant first step that led to issues with Witt’s timing and rhythm toward the ball. But if Trosky made things incredibly complicated on purpose, Royals first-year infield coach José Alguacil has taken an opposite yet complementary approach.

Let’s spin up the computer one more time and get Witt’s current projection, through the team option years:

How good is this projection? ZiPS would happily throw another $100 million Witt’s way, meaning the Royals still have a lot of room for this deal to be absolutely fabulous from their point of view. Note that ZiPS isn’t even assuming Witt is a +10 defensive shortstop; 2023 was only enough for it to believe that he’s league average. If I tell ZiPS to assume he’s a -10 shortstop with the glove right now, it still thinks $240 million would be a fair deal. In other words, liking this contract from Kansas City’s perspective does not require you to abandon all skepticism about his defense.

Outside of the bottom line figure, it’s encouraging to see the Royals invest in a young star to this degree. It’s hard to remember now, but at one point, the Royals were one of baseball’s model franchises. Founded with the late Ewing Kauffman as the owner, the Royals managed to pass the .500 mark in just their third year of existence, and following their breakout 1975, they were one of the top teams in baseball for 15 years, a whole generation of baseball:

Kauffman mostly kept Kansas City’s stars together and put the team’s cash back into the roster. From 1985 to 1994, the Royals were only out of the top 10 in payroll once, in 1992, and even led the league in 1990. But Kauffman passed away in 1993 and so did the team’s Golden Era. Outside of the Royals’ brief period of relevance in the mid-2010s, they spent so much time in the basement that someone should have checked them for a Vitamin D deficiency. The team’s success in 2014-2015 energized the locals for the first time in decades, but the organization showed little inclination to actually try and keep those fans, and as the team’s core aged and/or moved on, so did the KC faithful. Paid attendance in the championship 2015 season was over 33,000 per game. The Royals haven’t even done half that since 2019.

Does signing Bobby Witt Jr. bring back the Royals as a dynasty? Of course not — the team has still more holes than Clyde Barrow’s 1934 Ford DeLuxe Fordor. But Witt’s signing is a callback to a happier time, when Royal blue held more than just temporary apparel for superstars. Whether or not the Royals solve their other problems, for the next decade, shortstop probably won’t be one of them.

The Detroit Tigers locked up one of their top young prospects to a long-term extension over the weekend, signing infielder Colt Keith to a six-year contract worth $28.6 million guaranteed, including a buyout after year six. With three team options totaling an additional $38 million, Keith might not hit free agency until after the 2032 season. Those options can be enriched further, by up to $18 million, depending on Keith’s success at earning MVP votes, Silver Slugger awards, and All-Star appearances. The deal has a maximum value of $82 million over nine years.

One of Detroit’s recent struggles has been its inability to find and develop offensive talent. This wasn’t the case during the team’s run of success in the early 2010s, with future Hall of Famer Miguel Cabrera as its anchor. But as Cabrera and Victor Martinez aged, and other key contributors, such as Prince Fielder, J.D. Martinez and Austin Jackson, left for other teams, the Tigers’ offensive output dropped to the bottom of the league. Aside from Nick Castellanos, who was traded in 2019, none of the young hitters coming up through the system have panned out.

That said, the Tigers have seen some signs of hope over the last few years. When healthy, Riley Greene has been very good, and while Spencer Torkelson had a rough start to his big league career, he improved significantly in the second half of 2023. Detroit still needs more, though, and that may come in the form of Keith, a fifth-round pick from the COVID-abbreviated 2020 draft. Keith showed promise in 2022, hitting .301/.370/.544 for West Michigan of the High-A Midwest League, but he injured his shoulder badly on a pickoff attempt in June, costing him the rest of the season. He recovered enough to play in the Arizona Fall League, where he hit .344/.463/.541 in 80 plate appearances over 19 games.

Despite the short season, he ranked atop Detroit’s prospect list found in our humble home. Splitting 2023 between Double- and Triple-A, Keith stayed healthy and hit a combined .306/.380/.552 with 27 homers and 38 doubles. ZiPS translates that performance into a .268/.328/.454, 20 homer line, well below the level of phenom, but more than respectable for a second base/third base prospect in his first go at the high minors.

With a contract that can stretch for nine years, let’s crank out the long-term ZiPS projection for Keith.

While those are not star-level projections, they are the ones of a player you’d like to keep around through his prime. There are lots of familiar names among Keith’s ZiPS comps, such as Eric Chavez, Hank Blalock, Jedd Gyorko, Castellanos himself, Rafael Devers, Ryan Zimmerman, Travis Fryman, and Joe Crede. No, none of them were Hall of Famers – though it’s plausible that Devers could hit enough homers to prove the exception – but each were solid big leaguers.

One of the largest remaining questions around Keith is what position he’ll play in the majors. He’s played both second and third base, and appears to be below average at both. The probabilistic coordinate method that ZiPS uses graded Keith at about eight runs below average at second base, per 1300 innings, in 2023 and six runs below average at third. My colleague Eric Longenhagen feels that Keith is more likely to stick at second, rather than third.

During his stay in Toledo, Keith began to see more time at second base rather than his native third. He’s a bad defender at both spots but has a much greater chance at becoming passable (read: hidden) at second, where some of Keith’s issues with throwing are masked.

[…]

Keith has bulked up considerably since signing, and the effects of his increased size are evident on defense. Once a fair bet to stay on the middle infield, he is now fighting just to stay at third. He is stiff and bulky, his actions are well below average, and while he shows you a big arm when he gets to wind up and really let it eat, he struggles to throw from odd platforms. It’s feasible a team could live with him playing third base situationally, but it’s not ideal, and Colt is a 30-grade defender right now.

In a perfect world, Keith would stick at one of the two positions, with Jace Jung manning the other. One of the nice things about a rebuild is that teams get the chance to experiment, and the Tigers take advantage of that with Keith. Playing him in left field would be a great deal less exciting, but not a disastrous outcome, with mean projected OPS+ numbers in the high 110s during his prime. Left field Keith profiles similarly to Lourdes Gurriel Jr., who as one of the best outfielders available in free agency this offseason managed to snag a three-year deal with the Diamondbacks.

There are risks that come with signing a player with so little professional experience, but those are reflected in the price. Yes, $28.6 million is a lot of cash, but not so much in the context of baseball, and the ZiPS projection for Keith suggests a $38 million offer, taking into consideration the reduced salaries of the cost-controlled years. Similar extensions to Jon Singleton and Scott Kingery didn’t work out particularly well for the teams that made them, namely the Astros and Phillies, but those deals weren’t detrimental, either. The upside for Detroit here is considerable.

Are the Tigers playoff contenders in 2024? Probably not. But they’re not so far away that it would be a black swan event if they made some noise in the AL Central race or threatened to grab the last wild card spot. If they succeed, it will likely be in large part due to players like Keith taking a step forward.

Over the past few days, industry news-breakers (beginning with Ken Rosenthal) began to report that the Milwaukee Brewers and top prospect Jackson Chourio are nearing a contract extension. Chourio, who turns 20 in March, has been among the very best prospects in baseball for the better part of the past 18 months. He turned 19 just before the start of the 2023 season and slashed .280/.336/.467 in 122 games at Double-A Biloxi before the Brewers gave him a six-game shot of espresso at Triple-A Nashville in late-September. His power, speed and, more recently, his improvements on defense give him rare upside as a 30/30 threat and plus center field defender.

The complete details of the contract aren’t known, but Curt Hogg of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel first suggested that it would be something like an eight-year, $80 million deal. Adam McCalvy of MLB.com reported that Chourio and the Brewers agreed to a structure and length of eight years, with two club options that would bring the total length to 10 years if exercised. Earlier today, Jon Heyman of the New York Post tweeted that the guaranteed amount will total $82 million, accounting for a $2 million buyout of the Brewers’ club options, while McCalvy reported that the club options plus incentives could push the total value into the $140 million range. If we assume that Chourio will make the Opening Day roster, this deal will cover what would have otherwise been his six years of pre-free agency service, two of his free agent years, and potentially two more. Even if the Brewers pick up the two team options, Chourio will hit free agency again before he turns 30. It’s also worth noting that the big money, team-option portion of Chourio’s contract doesn’t kick in until after Christian Yelich’s monster contract has expired. Read the rest of this entry »

The Dodgers and Max Muncy clearly believe they have a pretty good thing going. Since retooling his swing after being cast off by the A’s, the late-blooming slugger has been a key middle-of-the-lineup component on six straight playoff teams, and part of three pennant winners including their 2020 championship squad. Within the past four years, the Dodgers have inked Muncy to three contract extensions, the latest of which — announced on Thursday — is a two-year, $24 million deal with a club option for a third season, potentially keeping Muncy in the fold through 2026.

Muncy, who turned 33 on August 25, is coming off a season in which he hit .212/.333/.475 and matched his career high with 36 homers, three of them grand slams. The batting average wasn’t pretty (though it was at least above the Mendoza Line) and his 26.4% strikeout rate was his highest since 2018, but his 14.7% walk rate and considerable power helped to make up for it. Amid some ups and downs, his 118 wRC+ was 18 points short of his career mark but still ranked eighth among regular third basemen.

Read the rest of this entry »

The good times are rolling in Pittsburgh. Though their seven-game winning streak ended on Tuesday night as they failed to hold a 7-2 lead against the Dodgers, the Pirates are off to a 16-8 start, their best since 1992, and they lead the NL Central by a game. What’s more, they’ve finally sealed a long-term deal with their star left fielder, as Bryan Reynolds has reportedly agreed to an eight-year, $106.75 million extension that covers his 2023-30 seasons.

It’s the largest contract in Pirates history, outdoing Ke’Bryan Hayes‘ eight-year, $70 million extension as the team ventures into nine-digit territory for the first time. The deal includes a six-team no-trade list, the first time in 17 years that the Pirates have included some form of no-trade protection in a contract. Notably, it does not include an opt-out clause, an item that had previously been a stumbling block when the two sides neared a deal with the same dollars-and-years framework just before Opening Day. Reynolds wanted an opt-out after 2026, meaning that the Pirates would gain only one more year of control if he were to exercise that option.

As with that proposal, the contract incorporates the 28-year-old Reynolds’ $6.75 million salary for this season, his second of arbitration eligibility (as a Super Two, he has two more remaining). He also receives a $2 million signing bonus, with salaries of $10 million and $12 million for 2024 and ’25, his final two arb years, and then $14 million for ’26 and $15 million annually for ’27-30. The Pirates hold a $20 million club option and $2 million buyout for his services in 2031, his age-36 season.

If those annual salaries seems a little light to you, you’re not alone, but the particulars of his situation make it worth a closer look. We’ll start with Dan Szymborksi’s ZiPS projection from February, which suggested a six-year, $95 million valuation for Reynolds’ 2024-29 years:

Under the actual contract, Reynolds will be paid just $81 million for those six years. On the other hand, he’ll make $15 million for what eyeballs to be about a one-win projection for 2030, so much of that shortfall comes out in the wash.

The problem for Reynolds — the reason the dollar figures aren’t bigger — is something of a perfect storm of service time and aging curves. He was stellar in 2021, making the NL All-Star team while hitting .302/.390/.522 (141 wRC+) with 6.2 WAR, but he slipped to .262/.345/.461 (125 wRC+) and 2.8 WAR last year. Even with ZiPS forecasting him at 4.0 WAR this year, going forward he projects to lose about one win for every two years as he ages. On top of that, his salary is being drastically suppressed by the arbitration system during what project to be his strongest seasons; as a free agent, he’d be worth over $30 million a year for 2023-25, but he’ll only make about 30% of that.

As Dan summarized via Twitter, “[I]t’s hard to value those seventh and eighth years very highly at all for a 3-4 win player that far away in his mid-30s. Obviously, Reynolds would have done better if he were a free agent this year. But he’s not and this price is the product of his age and MLB’s service-time rules; Reynolds just didn’t have a great deal of leverage because the Pirates already had nearly all the years they wanted.”

That’s a bit of a harsh reality, but it’s offset by Reynolds getting the stability and security he valued. Though he requested a trade in December after the team reportedly offered a six-year, $80 million extension — over $50 million short of the eight-year, $134 million deal he was seeking — he cared enough to return to the table and found a way to stay, even forgoing the opt-out.

It’s nice to see Pirates fans get nice things for a change, and the structure of Reynolds’ deal is such that even by the craptastic standards of the way the team has been run under owner Bob Nutting, none of the annual salaries should be backbreaking. Unless his option is picked up, Reynolds won’t even set the franchise’s single-season record for salary, and not until 2027 would he surpass Andrew McCutchen for the highest salary solely paid by the team, which turns out to be an important distinction given their dismal history:

Is Reynolds as good as prime Cutch? No, but McCutchen signed his six-year, $51.5 million extension 11 years ago, and industry inflation has obviously pushed salaries upwards since then. Someone was bound to break McCutchen’s franchise record before the next ice age arrived, and it makes sense that it was Reynolds, whose 6.2 WAR in 2021 was the highest for a Pirate since McCutchen’s 7.4 WAR in ’14.

As for his current performance, when I checked in on him just a couple of weeks ago, Reynolds was off to a sizzling start, hitting .356/.367/.778, leading the NL in slugging percentage and homers (five), and ranking fifth in both WAR (0.7) and wRC+ (184); amid that tear, he was named NL Player of the Week. Now he’s down to .294/.319/.553, and his 127 wRC+ is just two points ahead of last year and two behind his preseason ZiPS projection. Regression doesn’t mess around, kids.

That said, even given the ups and downs, Reynolds is hitting the ball harder this season than he has in the past, and the sample sizes are either approaching or past the point where they start to stabilize, so his performance is worth an update:

Via Baseball Prospectus’ Russell Carleton, exit velocity begins to stabilize around 40 batted ball events and barrel rate at 50 BBE, so you can start to take what he’s done thus far seriously; he’s in the 84th percentile for the former and 92nd percentile for the latter. Ground ball, fly ball, and hard-hit rates begin to stabilize at 80 BBE, a total he should reach soon after he returns from the bereavement list. (Reynolds left the team for a personal matter on Sunday, which allowed the Pirates to recall 33-year-old career minor leaguer Drew Maggi, who has yet to get into a game — what’s Derek Shelton waiting for?)

With more balls in the air, a higher average exit velocity, and more frequent barrels, Reynolds has an expected batting average of .314 (95th percentile) and an expected slugging percentage of .604 (93rd percentile); he’s fallen off from the major league-leading .896 he put up during the season’s first two weeks, but that was always going to happen.

The good news for the Pirates is that even as Reynolds has cooled off, other players have stepped up, to the point that Connor Joe (.328/.423/.590, 174 wRC+), Jack Suwinski (.269/.385/.635, 166 wRC+) and McCutchen (.270/.371/.527, 141 wRC+) are outhitting him within a lineup that ranks sixth in the NL in wRC+ (108) and fourth in scoring (4.92 runs per game). Meanwhile, on the other side of the ball the Pirates are allowing only 3.92 runs per game, the NL’s fourth-lowest rate, and they’re tied with the Brewers for third in the league in run differential (+24) behind only the Cubs (+45) and Braves (+38). It’s still early enough not to get too wound up about their start, but for the first time in awhile, the Pirates are offering significant measures of hope, and wrapping up Reynolds for the future is something worth celebrating.

Hunter Greene left his most recent start after taking a comebacker off his right shin, but the 23-year-old righty appears set to stick around Cincinnati for awhile. Per ESPN’s Jeff Passan, the fireballer agreed to a six-year, $53 million extension (2023-28) with a seventh-year club option. Remarkably, amid the Reds’ teardown, this deal makes him the roster’s first player with a guaranteed salary for next season.

Via MLB Trade Rumors, this is the second-largest extension for a pitcher with between one and two years of service time, after Spencer Strider’s six-year, $75 million deal with the Braves. Strider sold high, so to speak, signing that contract coming off a 202-strikeout, 1.83-FIP season in which he was runner-up to teammate Michael Harris II in the NL Rookie of the Year voting. Greene, who’s less of a finished product, didn’t have quite that kind of platform.

Chosen with the second pick of the 2017 draft out of Notre Dame High School in Sherman Oaks, California — at a point when he was still a two-way player — Greene quickly shifted his focus to pitching and found early success in the minors. He earned a spot in the 2018 Futures Game, but not long afterwards sprained his UCL and lost a season and a half to Tommy John surgery. When he debuted in the majors on April 10, 2022, he had just 186 minor league innings under his belt, which is to say that he was still rather raw. Particularly considering he was on a team that lost 100 games, and that he was hit hard early in the year, he acquitted himself well, posting a 4.44 ERA and 4.37 FIP in 125.2 innings. Read the rest of this entry »

On Friday, the Giants announced a five-year, $90 million contract extension with star right-hander Logan Webb. The 26-year-old Webb came to national attention during the 2021 NLCS, in which he allowed a single run across two starts against the Dodgers, striking out 17 and walking one over 14 2/3 innings. Across 2021 and 2022, Webb was 12th in baseball in pitcher WAR, one spot behind Gerrit Cole, and 20th in ERA among pitchers with at least 200 innings pitched, one spot ahead of Shane Bieber.

Webb was due to reach free agency after the 2025 season. This contract will buy out his two remaining arbitration years for a total of $20 million, then pay him $23 million, $23 million, and $24 million from 2026 to 2028. It’s a deal indicative of Webb’s special status in the Giants’ organization, and it could nonetheless be an enormous bargain for the team. Read the rest of this entry »

If there’s one thing I remember the Cubs of recent vintage for, it’s winning the curse-breaking World Series in 2016. What, you were expecting something else? But if there are *two* things I remember the Cubs of recent vintage for, the second one is failing to sign their marquee players to contract extensions. Kris Bryant, Javier Báez, Willson Contreras, Anthony Rizzo: all four felt like candidates for a contract extension that made them a lifetime Cub, with a jersey retirement ceremony and fawning coverage from national media for their sparkling career.

Each of those four plays for another team now. The Cubs never turned that dynamic core into a second championship, or even a second World Series appearance. For a team that had dynastic aspirations, it’s a strange look. To the Cubs’ credit, it’s also a look they seem intent on changing. After signing Nico Hoerner to a three-year extension, they took care of another core player, agreeing to a three-year extension with Ian Happ worth $61 million, as Bleacher Nation’s Michael Cerami first reported.

Happ represents a bridge between the 2016 squad that has now mostly departed and the modern-day Cubs team. He debuted in 2017, and while he spent most of ’19 in the minors, he’s otherwise been a fixture in the Chicago lineup ever since. He’s also been a fixture in the field, though not always in the same place. In 2022, however, he settled into an everyday left field role and put up his best season as a professional.

A quick look at Happ’s statline might leave you wanting. He doesn’t hit a ton of home runs or get on base at an unbelievable clip. He doesn’t have a shockingly low strikeout rate for modern baseball. He simply does everything well, with no real holes in his game other than a slightly elevated strikeout rate, and that adds up to solid overall performance even without anything that will blow you away. Here, take a look at it in percentile form, as compared to all qualified hitters:

The funny thing about those numbers is that Happ’s game doesn’t feel middle-of-the-road at all. He’s capable of enormous top-end power but until 2022 had paired that intermittent thump with plenty of empty swings. His career swinging-strike rate is roughly 14%; he shaved that to 11.8%, and the hits flowed like wine. That’s how you can post your lowest career ISO and beat your career batting line anyway. Read the rest of this entry »