When the Braves signed Ronald Acuña Jr. and Ozzie Albies to phenomenally team-friendly contracts before the 2019 season, two distinct possibilities loomed. First, the team could bank the money they saved and put out a good team at a discounted price. Second, they could reinvest those savings and attempt to put together a great team. Which they chose would say a lot about how the team planned on operating long-term.

The question is no longer open. The Braves have overcome a season-ending injury to Acuña to surge to the top of the NL East, and while the Phillies and Mets continue to nip at their heals, they’re well on their way to a fourth straight division title. They’ve done so thanks to some new young contributors — Austin Riley and Ian Anderson have come into their own this year. They’ve made some savvy signings and trades — Charlie Morton has been their best pitcher this year, and Jorge Soler has been excellent since joining the team.

Now, the Braves are making moves to prolong their stay atop the division. In late August, they signed Travis d’Arnaud to a two-year extension. They followed that up by signing Morton to a one-year deal (both contracts have team options tacked on). Let’s take a look at both of those deals, as well as how they affect the team’s outlook for next year and beyond.

Signing d’Arnaud to an extension — two years and $16 million with a team option for a third year — was hardly an obvious move for the team. He missed the majority of the season after tearing a ligament in his thumb in May. He’s hit well since his return, but even so, his seasonal line works out to an 84 wRC+. Combine that with solid receiving, and the total package works out to a roughly average catcher.

What made the Braves so eager to lock d’Arnaud up? His replacements fell well short of that average catcher bar. On the year, Atlanta’s catcher position has produced -1.4 WAR, the worst mark in the majors. It’s not an individual problem; a huge array of catchers have combined to weigh the position down:

Relative to that mess, d’Arnaud is a huge improvement. That’s not to say that Contreras won’t figure it out, or that Vogt isn’t a capable backup. But for a team with an embarrassment of riches at most positions, giving away so much value at catcher doesn’t make sense. It gets worse: the list of free agent catchers this offseason is nasty, brutish, and short. Yan Gomes and Martín Maldonado are the headliners, and it gets worse from there. Miss signing your target, and you might be in for a long offseason. Read the rest of this entry »

The Giants have been one of the year’s biggest surprises, leading the National League West for a large portion of the season and holding the best record in baseball since the beginning of June. Their success is due in large part to some unexpectedly resurgent seasons from their veteran core. On Friday, San Francisco rewarded one of those veterans, signing Brandon Crawford to a two-year, $32 million contract extension.

The Tigers haven’t been nearly as good as the Giants in 2021, but they’ve played some really competitive baseball after an ugly 8-19 April. A big reason for their change in fortunes has been some excellent production from Jonathan Schoop. After signing back-to-back one-year deals with Detroit the last two seasons, the team inked him to a two-year, $15 million contract extension on August 7.

Crawford, a Bay Area native, has spent his entire career with the Giants. He was selected in the fourth round of the 2008 draft and has been a fixture at shortstop since his major league debut in 2011. He’s the franchise leader in games played at at the position and was a key contributor to two World Series championships in 2012 and ’14. After the 2015 season, he signed a six-year, $75 million contract extension that would have expired at the end of this season. This new extension guarantees that Crawford remains a single-franchise player at least through his age-36 season, a feat that’s become increasingly rare in today’s game. Read the rest of this entry »

The Angels locked up their second baseman on Opening Day, inking David Fletcher to a five-year contract that will keep him in Anaheim through at least the 2025 season. In addition to the baseline guaranteed money ($24.5 million), there are two club option years at $8 million and $8.5 million. Both option years have buyouts for $1.5 million, the first one bringing the contract to the headline figure of $26 million.

Fletcher has been a find for the Angels, and I daresay that he’s outperformed the original expectations for him. Drafted as a shortstop out of Loyola Marymount, he avoided the wacky error totals that many middle infield prospects put up in the low minors. Still, his offensive profile wasn’t seen as having enough upside to propel him to the top of the team’s prospect lists. The consensus going into 2018 was generally that he would be a utility infielder, though a dependable one.

Notably, even the lukewarm evaluations had nuggets of Fletcher’s later success. John Sickels gave Fletcher a C+, but praised his reliability and noted him as a player who could surprise.

David Fletcher, SS, Grade C+: Age 23, a sixth-round pick in 2015 from Loyola Marymount, hit .266/.316/.339 with 20 doubles, three homers, 20 steals, 27 walks, 55 strikeouts in 448 at-bats between Double-A and Triple-A; easy to under-estimate, old-time scouts would have called him an “intangibles” player; runs well, but throwing arm is nothing special and hitting power is below average; all that said, he is a very reliable defensive shortstop how outplays his mediocre defensive tools with positioning, instincts, and impressive reliability: has a .982 career fielding percentage at short; most likely a utilityman but might surprise eventually; ETA 2018.

Here at FanGraphs, Eric Longenhagen gave Fletcher a 40-grade in 2017 but had praise for his contact skills.

A draft-eligible sophomore at Loyola Marymount, Fletcher projects to carve out a big-league job as a utility man capable of competently playing both middle-infield positions, a terrific outcome for a sixth-round pick.

Fletcher is an above-average straight-line runner but not an especially twitchy athlete, and he’s able to play short despite fringey range and an average arm because of polished but unspectacular actions, hands, and good instincts. His bat is quick, his stroke short but effortful. Fletcher projects as a fringe hitter with 40 raw power and less than that in games.

As for ZiPS, it saw Fletcher as merely a .237/.276/.304 hitter with above-average defense at second in the majors in 2018, so I cannot claim that my work nailed his rise either! ZiPS didn’t really start getting interested until after 2018 when it translated his full season at .274/.314/.394 but at 13 runs better than average at second.

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When the Mets traded for Francisco Lindor earlier this offseason, an extension felt likely, even certain. As the season rolled inexorably closer with no deal in place, however, that likelihood (certitude?) ebbed: The Mets seemed tied to their offer, Lindor had a March 31 negotiation deadline, and no one was budging. Last night, the impasse ended: The two parties agreed to a 10-year, $341 million extension that will make him the highest-paid shortstop in history, as Jon Heyman first reported.

Lindor’s brilliance hardly needs recapitulation, but for giddy Mets fans drinking in every piece of marginalia about this deal, I’ll offer a quick one. If Andrelton Simmons didn’t exist, Lindor would be the best defensive shortstop of the 21st century. He boasts a rare combination of mobility, sure hands, a strong arm, and defensive instincts. If those sound like everything you could ask for in a shortstop, you’re not wrong. There’s really no way of overstating it, because this isn’t a place where eye tests and various wonky metrics disagree. Every advanced defensive metric places him among the top handful of defenders since he entered the league, with only Simmons and Nick Ahmed as peers. The eye test will tell you that his mere presence stabilizes an infield and calms the pitchers in front of him. The talent and panache on display nightly is simply irrefutable.
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The week before the regular season begins is usually extension season, as teams and players scramble to complete deals before the day-to-day rigors of playing baseball for six straight months get in the way of discussions. While this year hasn’t seen many extensions so far, it hasn’t seen none; on Wednesday, the Astros signed Lance McCullers Jr. to a five-year, $85 million extension, as FOX 26’s Mark Berman first reported.

McCullers would have reached free agency after this year; all five years of his extension would have been free-agent years, which makes comparisons easier. This deal is essentially a pre-agreement to a free-agent contract, with none of that squirrely nonsense of buying out arbitration years or extra team options on the end. Five years and $85 million, simple as that.

How does that rate look next to comparable free agents? For once, I’m stumped. The pandemic-shortened season, and teams’ subsequent financial retrenching, makes using past years as a guidepost a poor idea. Madison Bumgarner, for example, signed a five-year, $85 million deal — the exact terms! — but did so before the world changed. This offseason, no comparable pitchers hit the market; the only pitcher who signed a multi-year deal with an average annual value above $10 million was Trevor Bauer, and that’s not a useful comp here either.

You could, if you were so inclined, use Dan Szymborski’s research from last week that estimated the cost of one WAR in future years. The estimate has wide error bands, because it’s based only on multi-year contracts signed this offseason, but it looks like so:

With that in hand, we next need to estimate how good McCullers will be in the relevant 2022–26 timeframe. Luckily, ZiPS has us covered there as well:

With the projection in tow and a cost per WAR (I added $250,000 per year after the years in the table), we can just do the math. That’s a 9.3 WAR projection overall, and after applying the relevant yearly multipliers, the projections would suggest a $75 million contract. That implies the Astros overpaid, but take a gander at those innings projections. McCullers’ past injury history leads ZiPS to a pessimistic playing time assumption. An extra 15 innings per year would move the deal up to fair value. So would four seasons of 150-inning production and a single missed season. In other words, it comes in pretty close to what we’d expect after accounting for his skill and risk factors.

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With Opening Day roughly a week away, teams are running out of time to sign players to contract extensions without dragging negotiations out into the season. This week will likely have a bevy of them, and the Royals got the party started early yesterday when they signed Salvador Perez to a four-year, $82 million extension, as The Athletic’s Alec Lewis reported.

The deal, which also contains a team option for a relatively affordable fifth year at $11.5 million after accounting for a buyout, doesn’t start until 2022. When it does kick in, Perez will become the second-highest-paid catcher in baseball, behind only J.T. Realmuto (Buster Posey has a team option for 2022, but it will likely not be exercised), with Yasmani Grandal as the only other catcher within hailing distance of his new deal.

In the current context of player spending, this qualifies as a surprise. Perez will turn 31 in May. He missed all of 2019 to have Tommy John surgery and a chunk of the previous season with an MCL sprain. When not injured, he rarely missed a game, exposing his body to the rigors of catching at a rate only matched by fellow Missourian Yadier Molina.

Catchers age in dog years. Perez is fighting gravity by continuing to be a valuable player every time he puts on the tools of ignorance. Most of the teams in baseball wouldn’t have signed this deal. What’s going on?
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In 2021, Fernando Tatis Jr. is one of the Padres’ brightest stars. In 2031, he’ll presumably also be one of the Padres’ brightest stars, because he just signed a 14-year, $340 million extension to remain in San Diego, as Dennis Lin and Ken Rosenthal first reported.

That’s a lot of years, and a lot of money, and don’t you worry, we’ll have some ZiPS projections and some calculations of dollars per WAR and an explanation of how the arbitration system impacts this deal. First, though, here’s Tatis having fun:

With that important message out of the way, let’s get down to business. Tatis is one of the best players in baseball right this minute, and he turned 22 a month ago. When he broke into the majors in 2019, he truly broke in. His .317/.379/.590 line was scintillating, and also too short; a stress reaction in his back limited him to only 84 games. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the great unknowns in this season of great unknowns is what 2020 means for salaries. Not 2020 salaries, mind you: we’ve already figured that one out, give or take some J.A. Happ corner cases and Jacoby Ellsbury grievances. This offseason, however, is an entirely different ball of yarn. Will teams commit as much money to free agency and arbitration this year as they did last year, knowing all the while that fans in stands might be an iffy proposition in 2021? Heck, even with fans back in 2021, would teams avoid free agency to recoup the losses, real or imagined, that they suffered in 2020?

Today, the first new data point is in: per reporting by Jeff Passan, the Dodgers have signed Mookie Betts to a massive extension, totaling $392 million over 13 years. His 2020 arbitration salary ($27 million, of which he’ll receive a prorated $10 million) is in that mix; the new part of the deal is 12 years and $365 million. Per Ken Rosenthal, the deal will include salary deferrals totaling $115 million. Also per Rosenthal, there’s some financial tomfoolery on the front end; a $65 million signing bonus that confers some tax benefits and a salary structure that pays him only $17.5 million per year in 2021 and 2022, shielding the Betts from any loss due to prorating of salaries over the next two years should something unforeseen happen. Depending on how you feel about the specifics of Mike Trout’s extension and deferred money in general, it’s either the biggest or second-biggest contract in MLB history, and it takes the biggest name out of the upcoming offseason’s free agency market.

To be clear, this doesn’t mean that money will flow like wine this offseason. The contract Betts signs doesn’t have all that much bearing on what a mid-tier veteran will get, or whether teams will be more aggressive about non-tendering arb-eligible players to save money. Top tier free agents have hardly been the ones getting pinched in free agency in the past five years.

The biggest point of interest from an economic side, in my opinion, is the length of the deal. Everyone knows that Mookie Betts is wildly valuable. Still, I wondered if he might be forced to accept a short but lucrative contract while teams sorted through the long-term fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic. Will stadiums fill to quite the same capacity ever again? Likely, but it’s no longer a certainty. Owners off-lay risk onto players wherever possible; short-term deals leave the risk of a fall in baseball revenue squarely on the guy taking the field every day. They also, of course, give the player upside should baseball’s economic fortunes improve, but that’s not at the forefront of anyone’s mind at the moment. Read the rest of this entry »

With their eyes shifting from rebuilding to contending, the White Sox have been on a spending spree lately, not only signing a fistful of free agents this winter but also locking up some of their most talented young players via long-term extensions. They struck again on the latter front on Thursday; via The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal, they’ve agreed to a five-year extension with Yoán Moncada, their most valuable position player in 2019.

Moncada, who signed with the Red Sox out of Cuba for a record $31.5 million back in February 2015, topped the FanGraphs Top 100 Prospects list in 2017, shortly after being traded from Boston to Chicago in the Chris Sale blockbuster. He put together uneven performances at the big league level in 2017 and ’18 but began living up to that top prospect billing by breaking out in a big way in ’19, his age-24 season. While he missed three weeks in August due to a right hamstring strain, he hit a sizzling .315/.367/.548 with 25 homers and 10 steals. He tied for sixth in the AL in wRC+ (141) and placing ninth in WAR (5.7).

There was much to like about Moncada’s breakout on both sides of the ball. Despite a more aggressive approach at the plate that saw his O-Swing% jumped from 23.3% to 32.7%, and his overall swing rate from 41.1% to 47.3%, he cut his strikeout rate from 33.4% (yielding a league-high 217 strikeouts) to 27.5%. Not only did he make more frequent contact, he hit the ball much harder; his average exit velocity jumped from 90.6 mph to 92.8, seventh among all qualifiers, and his xwOBA shot from .302 to .362. On the defensive side, he seamlessly handled the move from second base, where he was subpar in 2018 (-3.7 UZR, -11 DRS), to third base, where he was more or less average (4.3 UZR, -4 DRS). Read the rest of this entry »

Christian Yelich has emerged as one of the game’s elite players while playing under a very club-friendly contract. Now it appears as though the Brewers’ right fielder will be paid like the superstar he’s become, even while staying put in the game’s smallest market. According to The Athletic‘s Ken Rosenthal (with a substantial assist from the New York Post’s Joel Sherman), the Brewers and Yelich are nearing agreement on an extension that will cover nine years and be worth around $215 million, with a mutual option for a 10th year.

Yelich won NL MVP honors in 2018 while leading the Brewers to a division title and helping them come within one win of a trip to the World Series. He hit .326/.402/.598 with 36 homers and league bests in batting average, slugging percentage, wRC+ (166) and WAR (7.6), then followed that up with another MVP-caliber campaign that featured even better numbers, including a slash-stat Triple Crown (.329/.429/.671), 44 homers, and again league bests in both wRC+ (174) and WAR (7.8). Alas, on September 10, he fracture his right kneecap by fouling a pitch off of it (OUCH), ending his season and, as it turned out, his MVP hopes; he finished second to Cody Bellinger, over whom he had a slight statistical advantage at the time of the injury.

Including his 2016 and ’17 seasons, which were worth a combined 10.0 WAR, Yelich has been the majors’ third-most valuable player over the past four years. You can probably guess who’s first and second:

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