We conclude our rankings of the game’s position players with a deep dive on designated hitters.

Does anyone miss seeing pitchers hit? My guess is that the vast majority of you don’t, and for good reason. Pitchers have become increasingly dominant, which only increases the value of quality hitters, many of whom are utilized at the DH position. Some, like 42-year-old Nelson Cruz, fit the 1973 Orlando Cepeda mold, while others, like Shohei Ohtani… well, there are no others like Shohei Ohtani. If there has ever been a baseball unicorn, the Angels’ two-way superstar is just that.

Not all of players who see time at DH are defensive liabilities. Some clubs are blessed with positional depth and are looking for a way to fit a player into the lineup — Giancarlo Stanton and AJ Pollock are examples — while for others, it’s a matter of safeguarding health. Byron Buxton and Tyler Stephenson stand out in this regard. Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Duffy is in camp with the Kansas City Royals on a minor-league contract, and as is common for veteran players in his situation, he has multiple opt-out clauses. Whether he ends up exercising any of them remains to be seen. The 32-year-old infielder is on the bubble with days left before the start of the regular season, and even if he doesn’t make the Opening Day roster, there is a chance that he would accept a Triple-A assignment with a call-up in mind. All Duffy knows for certain is that he wants to keep playing.

“I’ve kind of made the decision that they are going to have the rip the jersey off of me,” said Duffy, who has battled injuries throughout his seven big-league seasons. “If I were to call it a career at some point in the next five years, I would find myself saying, ‘Man, I wish I’d have played one more year.’ Life post-baseball is going to be so much longer than anything the grind can throw at me. At the end of the day, I really enjoy what this game does for me in terms of pushing me to learn something new.”

Duffy is 12-for-36 on the spring, and he can provide more-than-adequate defense at multiple positions. Assuming he can stay healthy, he can help a big-league team — be it the Royals or someone else — for the foreseeable future. Even so, he knows that the clock is ticking. While many players who are asked about their post-baseball plans deflect the question, Duffy is forthcoming on the subject. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, Dan Szymborski and Michael Baumann previewed left and center field. Now we round out the outfield positions with a look at right field.

Blame Bryce Harper, Juan Soto, Ronald Acuña Jr., and even Aaron Judge. Right field may be home to some of the game’s best hitters and brightest stars, but last year the position fell into a collective offensive funk, in part because some of the aforementioned players either underperformed or spent more time at other positions — or both.

Perhaps that was just the flip side of a 2021 season in which right fielders collectively produced a 109 wRC+, higher than any other position besides first base and the highest of any batch of right fielders since ’17. In 2022, right fielders combined for just a 102 wRC+, the lowest mark within our positional splits, which go back to 2002. They were outhit not only by first basemen (111 wRC+) but by left fielders (106) and third basemen (105) as well; left fielders had last outproduced them in 2006, third basemen in ’16, and not once had both done so in the same season. Seventeen of the 30 teams failed to reach a 100 wRC+ at the position, while nine were below 90. Only 18 players accumulated at least 200 plate appearances at the position while maintaining a 100 wRC+, down from 21 in 2021 and 24 in ’19. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier today, Dan Szymborski examined the state of left field. Now we turn our attention to those who roam center.

So much of evaluating and utilizing center fielders comes down to what you want. It’s easy to forget sometimes that this is an up-the-middle, premium defensive position, like shortstop and catcher. Even if the defensive demands aren’t quite as extreme, there’s a limited number of ballplayers who can hold their own in center, and a huge premium on those who can play it well. And if you’re looking for players who can field the position competently and hit? Well, that’s an even smaller pool still.

Such scarcity makes the two clear best center fielders in baseball — Mike Trout and Julio Rodríguez — supremely valuable. As interesting as those two superstars are to discuss, most of the other 28 teams are engaged in an even more fascinating puzzle: How to maximize value at this position in the aggregate. For some, that involves building an up-and-coming potential star, like Michael Harris II or Luis Robert Jr., into the best version of himself that he can be. Other teams, like the Brewers and Tigers, are auditioning even less developed players in the hope that they’ll turn into something special. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, we wrapped up our analysis of the league’s infielders with third base and shortstop. Today, we shift our attention to the outfield, starting in left.

The sabermetric era has resulted in hard times for left field as a position. Teams are more willing than ever to give their best young talent every opportunity to stick at tougher defensive positions, which narrows the pipeline to corner outfield jobs. One-dimensional hitters have gone out of style and big home run totals alone don’t result in hefty contracts on the easy side of the defensive spectrum. Throughout the 1950s and ’60s, with barely half the number of teams, there were regularly six or seven active left fielders who were future Hall of Famers. Harmon Killebrew, Willie McCovey, Billy Williams, Frank Robinson, and Carl Yastrzemski all qualified for the batting title as left fielders in 1963. In contrast, there are basically two superstar left fielders today: Juan Soto and Yordan Alvarez, and the latter doesn’t even exclusively play the position. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier today, Davy Andrews gave an accounting of the league’s third basemen. Now we turn our attention to the shortstops.

So, so deep. That’s true of the Mariana Trench, which extends some 36,000 feet below sea level, and also of the shortstop position in the major leagues. If you think of an average player as one who accrues roughly 2 WAR per 600 plate appearances, 29 teams are above average at shortstop. That’s because everyone puts their best athletes there for as long as they can, which results in an embarrassment of positional riches. You have to delve down to 25th on this list to get to a team whose aggregate projection is less than 3.0 WAR. No other position’s list of three-WARriors extends past 20th. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, Jay Jaffe and Leo Morgenstern examined the state of first and second base. Today, we wrap up the infield positions, starting with a look at third base.

Third base has featured some truly top-tier stars in their prime for a while now. Nolan Arenado, Manny Machado, and José Ramírez are all either 30 or 31 (Arenado turns 32 next month), and all are coming off seasons so spectacular that no projection system worth its ones and zeros would predict a repeat performance. Alex Bregman turns 29 in just a couple of days, and the projections see him notching another five wins in 2023. All of this to say, enjoy peak third base while you can, because aging curves bend but they rarely break. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier today, Jay Jaffe covered the league’s first basemen. Now, Leo Morgenstern examines the state of the keystone.

Second base is going to be a fascinating position to watch this season. Under the new rules limiting defensive shifts, teams must have “at least two infielders completely on either side of second base,” and those players “may not switch sides” within an inning. Consequently, second basemen will no longer have help from a shifted shortstop or third baseman, making defensive range all the more important at the keystone. On the other side of the ball, second basemen could have their best offensive season in years. While excellent bat-to-ball skills aren’t a requirement to play the position, the two often go hand in hand. Second basemen are consistently the best contact hitters (and some of the worst power hitters) in the sport. This means their performance is more dependent on BABIP, so with the distinct possibility that league-wide BABIP will rise this season, second basemen could stand to benefit quite a bit.

And it’s not just about the new rules! Second base is projected to have the most even distribution of talent, from the Rangers at the top to the Nationals at the bottom. It’s the only defensive position where no team is projected for more than 5 WAR, and yet 28 teams are projected for at least two wins. The bottom-ranked Nationals are still projected for 1.8 WAR – the highest among last-place teams at any position. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, Meg Rowley introduced this year’s rankings, while Dan Szymborski examined the state of the league’s catchers. Today, we turn our attention to first and second basemen.

First base was “The Goldy and Freddie Show” in 2022. Paul Goldschmidt and Freddie Freeman both topped 7.0 WAR, becoming the only first basemen to reach that plateau since 2015, when Goldschmidt and Joey Votto both did so; since 2009, Chris Davis (2013) is the position’s only other player to reach such heights. Goldschimdt hit for a 177 wRC+, the highest mark by a first baseman since Votto in 2012, and became the first first baseman since Votto in ’10 to win an MVP award in a full-length season (Freeman and Abreu took home the honors in the pandemic-shortened 2020 campaign).

What goes up must come down, though, and so just as 2021 found the majors’ first basemen combining for their highest wRC+ (114) and WAR (70.2) since ’17, last year they collectively fell off. They still posted the highest wRC+ of any position (111), but their combined WAR dropped to 51.1, a decline of about 0.6 WAR per team. Christian Walker was the only first baseman within three wins of Goldy and Freddie’s 7.1 WAR, and just eight players who spent a plurality of their time at the position topped 3.0 WAR, down from 10 in ’21. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier today, Meg Rowley introduced this year’s positional power rankings. As a quick refresher, all 30 teams are ranked based on the projected WAR from our Depth Charts. Our staff then endeavors to provide you with some illuminating commentary to put those rankings in context. We begin this year’s series at catcher.

As usual, we begin our annual positional power rankings examining the position that’s the most clouded in mystery, the one where our best baseball praxis still leaves us with the most unanswered questions. Catchers remain unique in their significant and meaningful interaction with pitchers and the art of pitching. We’ve come a long way in evaluating much of the job of catching, with pitch framing statistics the most recent and one of the most valuable developments (at least until the inevitable day when balls and strikes have their locations called by a brigade of cameras and computers), but there are still things we can’t yet quantify. Still, that skills might be hard to capture with numbers doesn’t necessarily mean they’re nonexistent, just that they’re difficult to measure. Even if baseball didn’t collect a single statistic, teams would still need to consider how and why and whether player X helps them win games more than player Y, while fans would still argue over who is better than who. Our framework for evaluating catchers may be imperfect, but there’s still a lot we can say about those who don the tools of ignorance, and we get a little better at it every year. Read the rest of this entry »