On Tuesday, we published an update to our 2022 Draft rankings. Today, I pushed 2023 and 2024 to The Board, with the small 2024 group consisting almost entirely of our highly-ranked, unsigned 2021 high schoolers.

The most significant takeaway from the 2023 class is its projected strength at the top. There’s currently only one 50 FV prospect in the 2022 class, but already three atop the 2023 group: Ole Miss shortstop Jacob Gonzalez, Wake Forest third baseman Brock Wilken, and LSU outfielder Dylan Crews. That’s more than has been typical for a class that’s still a year and a half away from draft day. Gonzalez has special bat-to-ball skills and can play a premium position, Wilken already has 70-grade raw power and rare athleticism for a corner defender, and Crews performed in the SEC and reinforced confidence in the huge tools that made him famous as a high schooler.

This group may eventually be joined by more prospects. Most of the college players who will be eligible in 2023 are still teenagers right now, and some of them have not even had the opportunity to play consistently as they are coming off freshman seasons at big, talent-rich programs. With a couple of obviously excellent prospects already in place at the top of the class, and so much of the rest of it still in a magmatic stage of development, the 2023 draft has a shot to be pretty special up top. Read the rest of this entry »

The Los Angeles Dodgers’ brand is synonymous with superstars. It’s Clayton Kershaw, Mookie Betts, and deadline trades for Max Scherzer. Have a problem that needs a hammer? The Dodgers will bring two hammers, and they’ll have Walker Buehler on standby just in case. Those are the perks of having both one of the shrewdest front offices in baseball and one of the highest payrolls in the sport every year.

It’s funny, then, that Chris Taylor is one of the team’s greatest success stories. Taylor came to the Dodgers as an afterthought, in exchange for Zach Lee, a minor league pitcher who made all of 14 starts in the Seattle system before the team waived him. Six years later, Taylor is again headed to Los Angeles — but this time he’s doing it as a very rich man rather than a career minor leaguer. He and the Dodgers agreed to a four-year contract worth $60 million, as Ken Rosenthal reported. The deal also contains a team option for a fifth year.

All of that stuff I said at the top about the Dodgers and stars? It’s true, but the Los Angeles roster relies on positional versatility to make everything work. Taylor is the poster boy for this style: he played at least 50 innings at second, third, short, left, center, and right last year. Corey Seager injury? Taylor can fill in. Strange lineup with Max Muncy at second and Cody Bellinger at first? Taylor can flip to center — or to third base if Justin Turner needs a breather. Seager is gone, but with Trea Turner as a one-for-one replacement, Taylor will likely continue to get near-everyday playing time without a true home in the field. Read the rest of this entry »

The Rays and Marlins love making trades. They’ve now combined for four trades this year, though this one is the most consequential. The terms are simple: Miami gets Joey Wendle and Tampa Bay gets Kameron Misner. That’s it!

Normally at FanGraphs, we try to tell you why the trade might make sense for both sides, and which way we would lean if we had to choose a winner. If we’re feeling feisty, we might throw in a joke or two, perhaps a Dick Monfort burn if Dan Szymborski is in the driver’s seat. Today, though, the two of us had wildly different views of who won this trade. So without further ado, here are Brendan’s (Marlins) and Ben’s (Rays) thoughts on which side got the best of the other in this very Floridian trade.

Brendan’s Take

Ben probably isn’t the first analyst to pan a deal where Miami sought to improve the big league club, but I can’t find much recent precedent. That the Fighting Jeters beefed up at all seems sufficient cause for celebration. MLB is at its best when teams put their top product on the field, and the Marlins often fail to clear that low threshold. But between the Avisaíl García signing, the Sandy Alcantara extension, the Jacob Stallings trade, and now the Wendle deal, the Marlins have the swagger of… well, not a contender exactly, but at least an upright major league team. Read the rest of this entry »

With Major League Baseball’s current collective bargaining agreement (CBA) set to expire at 11:59 p.m. Eastern tonight, the owners and the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) are currently meeting in Dallas to exchange various proposals in an attempt to reach a deal. Unfortunately, media reports suggest that no new agreement is imminent, meaning that the sport is facing the very real possibility that it will experience its first work stoppage since the infamous players’ strike of 1994-95.

While it is certainly possible that tonight’s deadline could pass without triggering a labor stoppage — indeed, the two sides can elect to continue to negotiate with the existing CBA governing the sport in the interim — MLB commissioner Rob Manfred seemed to suggest prior to Thanksgiving that the owners will lock out the players if no agreement is reached this evening.

Consequently, this post explores the various options available to the MLBPA should the owners implement a lockout at midnight tonight as anticipated. Along the way, I will borrow from a similar post I wrote back in 2016 during the last CBA negotiations. While that labor-stoppage primer ultimately proved to be unnecessary, barring a miraculous turn of events in the coming hours, it would appear that fans are unlikely to be so lucky this time around. (Meanwhile, for anyone looking to understand the basis for the current dispute between the owners and players, this preview from a couple weeks ago may prove helpful.)

First, some basic legal background. A lockout is a legally sanctioned tool in which management (in this case, team owners) announces that it will refuse to allow its unionized employees (presently, the players) to work until an ongoing labor dispute is resolved. This means that the players will not be paid, or allowed to report to work, until a new CBA has been agreed to. In the interim, there will be no major-league free-agent signings, trades, or games played. A lockout is thus the ownership equivalent of a strike by the players. Read the rest of this entry »

Few people probably anticipated the kind of spending frenzy we’ve seen this offseason leading up to a likely lockout. Nobody assumed the Rangers would be leading the way. They’ve now committed over $500 million in salary in the last 48 hours, with the biggest chunk of that coming on Monday afternoon in the form of a 10-year, $325 million deal for shortstop Corey Seager, who finished second in our top 50 free agent rankings. The deal includes a $5 million bonus and no opt-outs.

(A quick note before we move on: When you get into these numbers, state taxes make a difference. Playing in Texas and the AL West, Seager will play nearly two-thirds of his games in tax-free states. The Dodgers, who play nearly two-thirds of their games in the state with the highest tax rate in the country, could have offered $350 million and still not matched the Rangers in overall money.)

In Seager, the Rangers get a face-of-the-franchise–level talent — when he’s healthy, which has been depressingly rare of late. He missed more than a third of the 2021 season due to an errant pitch breaking a bone in his hand, lost nearly three weeks of the ’19 season to a hamstring strain, and was absent for the majority of of the ’18 season due to Tommy John and hip surgeries.

That said, the healthy version of Seager (and to be far, the broken hand was an accident) has shown that he’s capable of seasons worthy of MVP votes and is the best offensive shortstop on the market, and yes, that includes Carlos Correa, No. 1 in our top 50. Seager’s power is a seemingly underrated aspect of his game that every bit matches Correa’s in terms of exit velocities, and the former’s pure hit tool exceeds the latter’s, who is ultimately the better overall player thanks to his incredible defensive prowess. Read the rest of this entry »

For all of the sound and fury coming from Steve Cohen last week upon being spurned by Noah Syndergaard and Steven Matz, the Mets’ owner has put his money where his mouth is since then. After signing a trio of midmarket position players — outfielders Starling Marte and Mark Canha, plus infielder Eduardo Escobar — over the Thanksgiving holiday weekend, New York landed a marquee hurler on Monday, agreeing to terms with Max Scherzer on a three-year, $130 million deal.

The contract will pay Scherzer $43.33 million annually for his age 37–39 seasons, marking this as quite a high-risk move. The deal, which includes an opt-out after 2023 as well as a full no-trade clause, is a record-setter, with an average annual value 20% higher than the $36 million per year won by the Yankees’ Gerrit Cole, the previous standard-bearer. And — in a bit that’s sure to be schadenfreude-licious for a certain segment of the Mets’ fan base — while Scherzer is pulling down that massive salary, he’ll also be receiving the first three of seven $15 million deferred payments from the Nationals during the span of his contract with the Mets.

The move comes as something of a surprise given that Scherzer refused to consider waiving his 10-and-5 rights for a potential deal to the Mets in July. On top of that, the Dodgers, to whom he was ultimately dealt, were presumed to have the inside track on retaining the 37-year-old righty given their status as contenders, their seemingly limitless resources, and a sense of unfinished business after coming up short in their quest to defend their 2020 title. But whether it was because Los Angeles wouldn’t go beyond two years or because Scherzer, who purchased a mansion in Jupiter, Florida in 2020, preferred a return to the East Coast, New York was able to close a deal ahead of the December 1 expiration of the current Collective Bargaining Agreement and the lockout that’s likely to follow.

In the final year of his seven-year, $210 million contract with the Nationals — perhaps the most fully realized free-agent mega-deal to date, featuring two Cy Young awards, two no-hitters, a championship, 39.7 WAR, and probably a curly W on the cap of his Hall of Fame plaque — Scherzer pitched like a man in search of more hardware. In his first nine starts after being dealt to the Dodgers, he posted astounding numbers (0.78 ERA, 1.36 FIP, 36.6% strikeout rate), and on September 12, during that run, he became the 19th pitcher in history to collect 3,000 career strikeouts, doing so while taking a perfect game into the eighth inning. Even after a couple of bumpy starts at the end of the regular season, he finished second in the NL in ERA (2.46), strikeouts (236), strikeout rate (34.1%) and K-BB% (28.8%), third in WAR (5.4), and fourth in FIP (2.96) in 179.1 innings. In the year’s Cy Young voting, he placed third behind Corbin Burnes and Zack Wheeler, receiving six first-place votes.

Even so, those bumpy starts turned out to be an ominous portent of things to come. Scherzer failed to complete five innings in two of his three postseason starts, including the NL Wild Card Game. After closing out the Giants in the ninth inning of Game 5 of the Division Series, he admitted that he was battling arm fatigue, and was able to make only one NLCS start; he could only watch as a similarly gassed Walker Buehler struggled on three days of rest in Game 6 against the Braves. Still, Scherzer’s problem was believed to be nothing more than arm fatigue — understandable given his 128.2-inning workload increase relative to 2020.
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Marcus Semien finally landed his long-term contract over the weekend, coming to an agreement on a seven-year, $175 million deal with the Rangers. The tritagonist of the AL MVP race in both 2021 and ’19 hit .265/.334/.538 with 6.6 WAR for the Blue Jays in 2021, playing in all 162 games for just the second time in his career.

Marcus Semien's deal with the Texas Rangers is for seven years and $175 million, a source familiar with the agreement tells ESPN.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) November 28, 2021

The exact distribution of the money is not yet public, so we don’t know about opt-outs, options, buyouts, incentives, and the like. But whatever the fine print says, this is a big contract, and one that it looked like Semien would never be able to land. A late bloomer, he was not widely considered a top prospect around baseball, though he ranked 31st in the inaugural ZiPS Top 100 Prospects before the 2014 season after terrific all-around performances in ’13 for Triple-A Charlotte and Double-A Birmingham. But it was the outlier here, and the White Sox of the time were not a particularly imaginative organization. They didn’t see him, then error-prone, as a shortstop, and in any case, Alexei Ramirez had an ironclad hold on the position. This was the era in which the Sox seemed determined to play Gordon Beckham at second indefinitely, despite any performance-based reason for that strategy, and little attempt was made to find a role for Semien on the roster. He, along with Chris Bassitt and a couple others, was shipped off to Oakland after the 2014 season for Jeff Samardzija.

Oakland has never shied away from being the Island of Misfit Toys and found a better use for Semien, and like Marco Scutaro, a stathead darling from a decade prior, he turned out to be a low-cost, league-average infielder. With the help of Ron Washington, he improved immensely with the glove and nearly put up his first 4-WAR season in 2018. When his power broke out, as it did the following season, he was a legitimate contender for the AL MVP award.

The next time you hear bemoaning about how players always have career years right before they hit free agency, remember to keep the example of Semien in your mind. He finally made it the market after 2020, his age-29 season, but was coming off a relatively unimpressive follow-up to his MVP-caliber ’19, hitting .223/.305/.374. It was hardly a lousy year by any stretch — his 1.2 WAR represented a 3.1 WAR pace over a full campaign — but it was one to get the word “fluke” out there.

With the hope of a bounceback season in a year not drastically shortened by a raging pandemic, he signed a one-year deal with Toronto worth $18 million, positioning him to get one more chance to land a big deal. That bet paid off, and while the shape of his contribution changed between ’19 and ’21 — less batting average, an easier defensive position, more power — a second big season answered a lot of questions about just how good a player he was.
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J.T. Hintzen is a reliever with a five-pitch arsenal. Atypical as that is — most bullpen arms don’t feature such a wide array of offerings — it’s one particular pitch that sets the 25-year-old right-hander apart from his peers. Hintzen’s varied mix includes the increasingly-rare knuckleball.

More on that in a moment.

Hintzen is as unheralded as he is unique. A 10th-round pick in 2018 out of Florida Southern College, the Greenwich, Connecticut native remains under the radar despite a 3.38 ERA and 204 strikeouts in 162-and-a-third professional innings. Back in action this summer following last year’s COVID-cancelled minor-league season, he logged a 3.88 ERA and a 12.3 K/9 over 58 innings with the Double-A Biloxi Shuckers.

Hintzens arsenal comprises two sliders — “one that sweeps across the zone, and one that’s more downward” — a changeup, a four-seam fastball with good ride, and the knuckleball. Effectively tunneling his heater and the sharper of his breakers is a big key to his success.

“[The slider] comes out of the same arm slot as my fastball, and pairing the two usually gets hitters out, because they can’t read it well,” explained Hintzen, who augmented his 36 regular-season appearances with 11 more for the Arizona Fall League’s Salt River Rafters. “It comes out hard. If I throw my fastball 90 mph, my slider is probably coming out around 85. The sweeping one is more like 80 mph. I’ve gotten up to 20-plus inches of horizontal break with that one — straight across the zone like a frisbee — whereas the [harder one] is more like five to 10, but more downward. I’m throwing them on two different planes.”

Hintzen delivers his pitches from a lower arm slot — his release point will creep below five feet — and the spin he gets on his fastball ranges between 2,400 and 2,500 RPMs. And then there’s the pitch that rotates hardly at all. Read the rest of this entry »

How good was phenom Wander Franco’s rookie season in 2021? So good that it actually compelled the Tampa Bay Rays to spend money. Just before Turkey Day, the team and Franco came to an agreement on a massive deal that could reach 12 years and $223 million.

Shortstop Wander Franco and the Tampa Bay Rays are in agreement on a 12-year contract that guarantees him around $185 million, sources tell ESPN. The deal is worth a maximum of $223 million. It is done, pending small details. The 20-year-old is going to be a Ray for a long time.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) November 23, 2021

Since this is baseball, this isn’t one of those NFL deals in which someone lands a comma-laden top number but, when you read the finer details, it turns out that a huge chunk of that money is a roster bonus due in four years that will never be paid off. Eleven years and $182 million of Franco’s deal is guaranteed, with the bulk of the rest coming from a $25 million club option for 2033 and a little more in incentives that kick in for finishing the top five in the AL MVP voting starting in 2028.

This deal is the new all-time record for a player with less than a full year of service time; the previous no. 1 was Ronald Acuña Jr.‘s extension worth up to $100 million, an agreement that this one essentially laps. Fernando Tatis Jr.’s contract is a larger one at 14 years and $340 million, but he was also a player who had cleared two years of service time when he signed on the dotted line, giving him more financial leverage over the Padres.

Franco finished “only” third in AL Rookie of the Year voting, but this was largely due to the fact that voters give a heavy penalty to a great player with less playing time, something I have direct experience with. The winner, his teammate Randy Arozarena, bested him in WAR, 3.3 to 2.5, but he needed twice as many games to get that far above replacement level. There was little question Franco was ready, as he hit .313/.372/.583 in 40 games for Triple-A Durham. These weren’t flash Albuquerque or Las Vegas numbers either; ZiPS translated that performance as a .281/.328/.473 line, not all that different from the actual .288/.347/.463 line he put up for Tampa Bay.

In case it already wasn’t clear after years of him being the consensus best prospect in baseball, the ZiPS projection for Franco is also that of a young star.

Obviously, the potential exists for him to hit higher numbers in his peak seasons; bottom-line projections are 50th-percentile projections and will naturally be much less volatile than what actually happens. But when I ran the 2022 projections for all the likely subjects, thanks to Acuña’s ACL injury, the only player that ZiPS projects to accumulate more WAR than Franco over the rest of their respective careers is Juan Soto.

The big question out there: is the contract fair to both parties? After all, one can make the argument that Franco may have earned much more by simply playing his way through baseball’s salary process and hitting free agency after the 2027 season.

To that question, I’m in the “yes” camp. The Rays have a great deal of financial leverage with Franco two seasons away from his first arbitration year, assuming that he would achieve Super Two status after the 2023 season at two years, 104 days of service time. But by the same token, I don’t expect the Rays to pay him as if he were a free agent, either. What I personally like to see is a contract that reflects the risks that both parties take in a long-term deal without being grossly weighted in one direction or the other. Call it actuarial fetishism, but a contract like Ozzie Albies‘ seven-year, $35 million contract offends me as an analyst in a way that this deal does not.

I’m not sure why I haven’t built this into the standard ZiPS model (I probably will after this ZiPS season is over), but I constructed a small simulation for how much Franco could make going year-to-year and then signing a mega-deal relative to what he will actually get. In the 50th-percentile projection, with near-minimum salaries in 2022 and ’23, arbitration projections, and free-agent contract projections, ZiPS estimates $297 million over the next 12 years. This is well above the $223 million he can max out at, but that’s not the whole story, either. The upside isn’t tremendously high, with the 90th-percentile projection going up to $360 million. Franco could figure out how to pitch like Jacob deGrom this offseason, and he’ll still get relatively paltry sums of money for the next few years; arbitration awards don’t scale up linearly for superstars. And the downside is significant. His 10th-percentile result ends up with him making less than $20 million over his career, and in 35% of the simulations, he falls short of $182 million. By comparison, at the time of their signings, Acuña falls short of his guaranteed deal only 17% of the time, and Albies does worse only 9% of the time. Another natural comparison is when the Rays signed Evan Longoria a week into his major league career to a contract worth a guaranteed $17.5 million over six years; ZiPS only had him doing worse than that contract in 11% of the simulations.

The future is a very uncertain thing, as demonstrated by the very weak 2021 seasons from Cody Bellinger and Gleyber Torres. Those young stars would probably be better off right now if they had signed $150 million contracts after their rookie campaigns. Since every Mets fan is born with a genetic catalog of tales of sadness and loss, ask someone in Queens their feelings about Gregg Jefferies, who put up an OPS over 1.000 as a 19-year-old for Double-A Tidewater and a .961 OPS in his first cup of coffee before settling into a respectable, but disappointing, 20-WAR career.

No matter what happens with Franco, he’s basically a fifth of the way to becoming a billionaire before the taxman gets involved. The Rays leveraged their position — as you expect people to do in salary negotiations — but not in a grotesque way. If I were an agent and Franco were my client, I’d raise no fuss about him taking this deal. He’s one of baseball’s bright young stars, one MLB would be wise to market around, and now he can afford an entourage worthy of his abilities. Thumbs up all around from me.

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Batters

Like most teams that lose 110 games, the 2021 Diamondbacks were lousy. But they’re not completely hopeless. Indeed, when perusing the projections from top to bottom, the overall feeling you get isn’t one of a lineup full of disasters and voids but rather an overpowering rush of underwhelmedness, which I’m not sure is an actual word. There are some 20 organizational players listed here (some are now minor league free agents) with projected WARs between 0.5 and 1.5 wins. These are players who have value and can contribute to a winning team, but who aren’t going to win divisions on their own. Ketel Marte projects to stand clearly above the rest of the lineup in 2022, giving Arizona’s offense the look of a bowl of Lucky Charms that has had all the marshmallows picked out. Read the rest of this entry »