It just didn’t make sense. There was no way that the Orioles were really planning on heading into the 2024 season with so little top-end pitching. I’m not saying Kyle Bradish, Grayson Rodriguez, and company are bad, but they were on the lighter side of potential playoff rotations, and that made very little sense to me given the composition of the rest of the team. It’s not every day that I take a team to task for something they didn’t do, but this one was just too illogical.

It turns out that the Orioles agreed with me on that one. Thursday night, they acquired Corbin Burnes from the Brewers in exchange for DL Hall, Joey Ortiz, and a Competitive Balance Round A pick, as Ken Rosenthal, Jeff Passan, and Mark Feinsand first reported. You know it’s a big trade when all the news-breakers are sharing it. Read the rest of this entry »

The first rule of Projection Fight Club is that you don’t talk about Projection Fight Club. Fortunately, the second rule of Projection Fight Club is that you are allowed to write about Projection Fight Club — otherwise, I might get in hot water with our editors for pitching an article I can’t actually produce.

If you’ve been paying attention to the projections housed here at FanGraphs (this is an odd article to read if you’re haven’t been), you’ve probably seen that our player pages now include ZiPS, Steamer, and THE BAT projections for the 2024 season (ATC projections are also available). You may have compared them a little. Perhaps you’ve even shaken your fist at the heavens for the temerity of allowing these systems to besmirch the good name of your favorite player or team. For me, the most interesting projections are the ones where the various systems disagree the most. After all, we watch heavyweight fights, not heavyweight agreements. Nobody would shell out cash to watch the Universal Amiable Concordance Championship.

Since we now have the different projections available, I thought I’d highlight some of the players who inspire the greatest discord amongst the various systems. I’m not going to guess which system will end up being right — it would be inappropriate for me to write a piece like that with one of the pugilists in the ring — but where possible, I’ll talk a bit about the complications involved with projecting those players, and in the instances where ZiPS stands alone as the biggest outlier, I’ll try to lend some additional insight as to why my system is being so nice or mean. Read the rest of this entry »

A lot of my thoughts on hitting are rooted in my own experiences playing, for better or for worse. When I was in school playing ball, I was constantly working through a particular mechanical issue. Traditionally, it is called “getting stuck on the back side,” but I always said I got stuck on a pedestal. When I got to the highest point of my leg kick (which was moderately high), I sometimes transferred too much of my weight over my back foot – it was a swing path killer. Because of my extensive experience with it, I’ve always been keen on identifying hitters who have a similar issue.

Rotational movements like hitting and pitching have linear components, but hitters need to do more than just move on the coronal plane (from left to right or right to left) in order to have a deep entry into the hitting zone. A hitter has to rotate with his hips and/or spine while moving along that linear plane to create rotational power and an ideal bat path. In the case of pedestal hitters, they reach their peak leg lift while sometimes neglecting those other aspects of movement.

Take Will Smith, for example. He uses a high leg kick to create space in his swing and fell into the pedestal hitting habit during the second half of last season:

October 9th

September 22nd

September 7th

A few hittable pitches in the heart of the zone with no barrels to show for it. On the middle-middle heaters, his path was cut off and he only skimmed the bottom of the ball, rather than hitting it flush. That led to can-of-corn fly balls to right field instead of barreled line drives. This was a persistent issue for Smith throughout 2023 – the worst offensive season of his five-year career and the first with an ISO below .200.

When you transfer too much weight over your back foot, you either get stuck and create a path which leads to lazy fly balls to the opposite field or you fall too heavy on your front side and hit grounders like Smith did against Manaea. You lose depth in your bat path and can’t cover as much of the zone with your barrel. For Smith, that negatively impacted his wOBA on outer third pitches. For the bulk of his career, he has been able to cover those pitches, so this should be something he can fix. To do that, he’ll have to get back to his early 2023 swings where he was balanced and creating space for his bat to work through the zone.

April 30th

Smith is a good enough hitter that he still posted a 119 wRC+ last year despite his mechanical flaw. Not everyone has that much room for error, though. Enrique Hernández has had a wRC+ below 75 in consecutive seasons after running a 109 mark in 2021. Like Smith, he typically relies on a big leg kick to create space, rhythm, and timing in his swing. And while the size of his leg kick fluctuates more than Smith’s, it’s still a key driver in his process. Here are a few swings from 2023 before he was traded to the Dodgers:

April 11th

June 25th

July 2nd

Even if you want to cut Hernández some slack on the high quality changeup from Shane McClanahan, that swing is still a good example of how his lack of balance causes him to land heavily on his lead leg. The heavy landing is even more obvious in his swing against Jesse Scholtens in the second clip. With that swing in particular, his leg kick works straight up and down, which causes him to force a lead hip external rotation.

What do I mean by that? If you’re trying to explode your lead leg open, you would create the counter movement (internal hip rotation) first. That way, you’re creating a reciprocal pattern that leads to smooth external rotation. Staying neutral at the beginning of the swing creates an imbalance, causing the hitter to stand on the pedestal instead of rotating into and then out of it as he swings. Hernández has hyper mobile external rotation, which is seen by his tendency to stride open. To control it, he needs to create sufficient counter rotation with his hips. Unsurprisingly, when he went to Los Angeles, he made a clear change in his leg lift that allowed him to stack his center of mass over his midpoint instead of his back leg. Pay attention to the direction he works his leg kick:

August 19th

September 9th

His leg lift started working on an angle towards his back leg, which allowed him to have a controlled explosion and balanced swing. With the Dodgers, he had a 96 wRC+ – much more in line with his career 94 mark. Yes, it was over a sample of 185 plate appearances, but the movement quality improvement is undeniable.

The last example I’ll use to portray pedestal hitters is Guardians outfielder Steven Kwan. His case is a bit more complicated. In his rookie season, he splashed onto the scene with a 126 wRC+. However, his peripherals suggested there would likely be a regression – his .341 wOBA was considerably higher than his .312 xwOBA. In 2023, those numbers almost completely converged. He had a .313 wOBA and .318 xwOBA. From a mechanical point of view, this wasn’t completely surprising.

His big leg kick is a crucial component of his swing. It keeps him stable, which plays a key role in his great plate discipline. However, the movement also makes him heavily reliant on his hands to do most of the work to get on plane. Given his elite bat-to-ball skills, he can successfully do that more than other players, but he doesn’t have much room for error. If he gets stuck on his back side, his hands can only do so much. If he identifies a pitch too late, even just slightly, then he puts himself in a tough position to make flush contact. Here are a few swings showing that:

July 9th

August 30th

September 22nd

Each of these fastballs were thrown between 96 and 97 mph, but were right down the middle. Kwan couldn’t get his hands on plane despite the hittable locations. This was a trend for him all year. In 2023, he saw 190 four-seamers with a velocity of at least 96 mph and had a .155 wOBA against them. This is another example of why rotational hitters like Kwan, Hernández and Smith need to be on top of their mechanics at all times. Pedestal hitting gives batters even less margin for error than other hitters against high velocity.

Every hitter has his weakness, and for this trio of players, theirs is directly related to how they load with their leg kick. As I watch each of them in 2024, I’ll be looking for any potential adjustments they might have made over the offseason, or might make as the season progresses.

A couple of weeks ago, Alex Coffey of the Philadelphia Inquirer wrote a profile of Ani Kilambi, the assistant GM who heads up the Phillies’ R&D department. Reading it, one detail immediately jumped out at me: Coffey published the name of Philadelphia’s proprietary database. It’s called Rocky. That’s a fun name, and it follows the league-wide trend of clubs giving their databases names that are both adorable and specific to either their team or city. It was the first time I’d come across the name, even though the article indicated that it had been around for years.

Like many people, I first learned about team databases when it was reported that Chris Correa, then the Cardinals’ scouting director, had illegally accessed Houston’s database in 2015; Correa later pled guilty to five criminal charges related to his unauthorized access. Even before that, though, teams were understandably secretive about the information they used. Milwaukee’s sports science wing is known as The Lab, and the Brewers have made it very clear that they don’t want anyone coming near it. The photos below are from an MLB.com article about The Lab in 2020.

That secrecy often extends to the name of the database. I imagine the thinking is that it’s harder to break into something if you don’t know what it’s called. Still, there was an inconsistency that bothered me. The names of these databases are a closely held secret, yet I already knew a handful of them. I wondered why that was, so I set off on a research marathon to find as many of the names as I possibly could. It took many, many hours, and my list is still not complete. Read the rest of this entry »

Justin Turner, the longtime Dodgers stalwart and kind of guy who makes you wonder when “professional hitter” stopped being a baseball idiom in common usage, has a new gig. After one season in Boston — moderately successful for him, less so for his team — Turner is moving west to Toronto, where he’ll make $13 million this season, with the chance to earn an additional $1.5 million in bonuses and incentives.

Now, if you’re anything like me, you probably saw the news that Turner would be sharing an infield (and/or a DH spot) with Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and thought, “Wait, didn’t Turner come up with the Orioles around the same time Guerrero père was winding down his career there?” And sure enough, he did. But Turner isn’t just so old he played with his new teammate’s dad. He’s so old he played four years of college, got drafted, spent three seasons in the minors, played parts of two seasons in the majors with the Orioles, and got traded away before his new teammate’s dad even got there.

Turner just turned 39, which is still 39 years old in Canada after you account for the exchange rate. I checked. That’s relatively young for someone who spent their young adulthood working on a humanities PhD while all their friends were starting families and getting established professionally. (You’ve still got your whole life ahead of you! I believe in you!) But it’s old for a ballplayer. Particularly a ballplayer on a contract that indicates he’s meant to be a key contributor on a playoff team. Read the rest of this entry »

Are you, or have you ever been, in a position to make decisions about major league team personnel? Do you like trading? Have you ever held a dime and wished it were two nickels, or vice versa? If so, stay where you are, remain calm, and Jerry Dipoto will be calling you soon to make some deals. Like this one:

MLB righties Anthony DeSclafani and Justin Topa along with prospects OF Gabriel Gonzalez and RHP Darren Bowen is the four player return for Polanco, per sources. Believe cash is also involved. https://t.co/GQDKtwaogh

— Kiley McDaniel (@kileymcd) January 30, 2024

Prospects! Relievers! Reclamation projects! Everyday regulars! This one has a little bit of everything. But it’s more complicated than that, because it’s not your standard offseason trade, where one team is downgrading to look for the future while the other builds for today. Both of these teams have playoff hopes this year, and they’re each using this trade to improve their chances. It’s a weird one.
Read the rest of this entry »

We’re all looking for an end to the winter doldrums, but whatever meteorological fortunes Punxsutawney Phil might indicate in a few days, the real start of spring doesn’t come until pitchers and catchers report. The vernal equinox ain’t the boss of me! But before camp opens, some unfinished offseason business remains, with scads of free agents still unsigned. And while many of the biggest names — Shohei Ohtani, Yoshinobu Yamamoto, Aaron Nola — have long been off the board, there are still players out there who could have a real effect on their next team’s fate.

Of course, we could just wait and see what happens, but I’m impatient. Since I just finished the ZiPS team-by-team rundowns, let’s use them… for evil. Rather than sit around checking our watches, I asked ZiPS to estimate which team will get the biggest championship boost from each free agent. Now, these suggestions don’t have the force of law or extortion — I’d need to be about 700% smarter and at least 7% more villainous to properly construct a doomsday machine — but let’s just imagine. Just to be clear, these aren’t predictions about what will happen, but rather an indication of which team the projections say has the greatest 2024 incentive to sign each player. And if teams aren’t considering these signings, well, maybe they should? We’ll use our 2024 free agent rankings and forcibly sign some of the players remaining. For each player, I’ll include their percentile projections with their new, possibly unwilling employers. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2024 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Last week, we learned that for the first time since 2020, BBWAA voters elected multiple players to the Hall of Fame. In fact the trio of Adrián Beltré, Todd Helton, and Joe Mauer outnumbers the total number of players elected to the Hall over the last three cycles. For as underwhelming as those recent top-line results may have been, they concealed the steady gains made by a handful of down-ballot candidates, including last year’s lone honoree, Scott Rolen, as well as Helton, each of whom was elected in his sixth year of eligibility after debuting with a share of the vote that in past eras suggested they had no hope of election via the writers. With three returning candidates for 2025 having received over 50% of the vote, and with some impressive newcomers poised to join them, it’s time to look ahead to what the next five ballots have in store.

This is the 11th time I’ve broken out my crystal ball in such a manner, dating back to the wrap-up of my 2014 election coverage at SI.com. With this edition, I’ve now done this more times at FanGraphs than SI. That first edition was so long ago that candidates still had 15 years of eligibility instead of 10, and so I could afford to project Tim Raines for election in 2018, his 11th year of eligibility. The Hall’s unilateral decision to truncate candidacies to 10 years would come just months later, though thankfully voters accelerated their acceptance of Raines, who was elected in 2017. Read the rest of this entry »

Carson Williams is a high-profile prospect in a fertile Tampa Bay Rays farm system. Drafted 28th overall in 2021 out of San Diego’s Torrey Pines High School, the 20-year-old shortstop is No. 20 in MLB Pipeline’s recently-released Top 100, and he will also rank prominently when our own list comes out next month. His 2023 production provided ample evidence of his plus tools. Playing primarily at High-A Bowling Green, and with cups of coffee at the Double-A and Triple-A levels, Williams walloped 23 home runs while putting up a 130 wRC+.

Erik Neander was effusive in his praise when giving a synopsis of the young infielder during November’s GM Meetings.

“Incredible physical potential in all aspects of the game, both sides of the ball,” Tampa Bay’s President of Baseball Operations told me. “And someone who is made to do this, mentally and emotionally. He handles it well. It’s pretty close to a total package in terms of his potential and the ingredients you like to see at such a young age.”

Fittingly, Williams came off as both humble and self-aware when I spoke to him late in the Arizona Fall League season. Asked where he is in his development, he replied that he was “right in the middle of it,” adding that “the minor leagues are a tough road” and he is “going through all of the normal things that a kid out of high school has to.” One of them, as he readily admits, is the challenge of competing against professional pitchers who possess bat-missing repertoires. If a red flag exists within his prospect profile, it would be the 31.4% strikeout rate on last year’s ledger. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Chicago White Sox. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the fourth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »