Some 49 hours before their first regular season game, the Arizona Diamondbacks brought up the house lights to end the 2023-24 Hot Stove League. Jordan Montgomery is headed west on a one-year contract with a vesting option.

The 31-year-old Montgomery had been a well-regarded high-volume starter, but the 2023 postseason brought him to the verge of stardom. The Texas Rangers traded for Montgomery at the deadline, and with Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer battling injuries, it was the big South Carolinian who emerged as the team’s ace. He won three games in the postseason, including Game 7 of the ALCS in a multi-inning relief appearance on two days’ rest, and was one of the World Series champion’s breakout stars.

That championship, of course, came at the expense of Arizona, his new team. The Diamondbacks, having come so close to winning it all, had already brought in reinforcements by trading for third baseman Eugenio Suárez and signing outfielder Joc Pederson and lefty starter Eduardo Rodriguez. Last October, this was a team with an improvised rotation; with Montgomery, Rodriguez (once he returns from his season-opening IL stint), Zac Gallen, Merrill Kelly, a full year of a maturing Brandon Pfaadt, and a healthy Tommy Henry, it’s among the best in the sport. Read the rest of this entry »

The regular season starts in about a week, which means there isn’t much time left to sign free agents and integrate them into the team before games start to count. In some cases, in fact, there’s no time; Blake Snell won’t be ready for Opening Day, so any pitchers who haven’t signed yet surely won’t be either. But there’s one player who could probably fall out of bed and into a starting lineup next Thursday, and the Mets just signed him:

Breaking: JD Martinez to Mets. $12M

— Jon Heyman (@JonHeyman) March 22, 2024

J.D. Martinez is offense in a can. He plays DH, so he doesn’t need to learn who he’s throwing to or catching from. He’s well traveled, so this isn’t his first rodeo. And the Mets could use some offense, which means this signing lines up on many axes. At one year and $12 million, the contract is right. There’s just one question: How good will he be?

If you listen to our projections, Martinez is squarely on the downside of his career. ZiPS and Steamer project him for a 106 and 105 wRC+, respectively, with a ton of strikeouts offsetting strong power numbers. All DHs across baseball racked up a collective 106 wRC+ last year. It’s not exactly replacement level, but it doesn’t seem particularly hard to find someone capable of putting up that level of offense.

A counterpoint, though: Martinez just finished a season where he hit .271/.321/.572, good for a 135 wRC+. The year before that, he was at 119, and 126 the year before that. Sure, he’s not the fearsome, MVP-caliber hitter he was in 2017 and 2018, but there’s plenty of room to be worse than that and still great. His statline didn’t look particularly fluky; he posted a .301 ISO, meaningfully higher than his career mark, but he earned that production with a ton of hard contact. He posted the second-highest barrel rate of his career, the highest hard-hit rate, and put the ball in the air frequently to take advantage of all that thunder.

There are a lot of components to analyze, but at the end of the day, it all boils down to one question: Should we trust 2023, or the projections of 2024? If the Mets get some semblance of what the Dodgers got, this is a whale of a deal. If they get something closer to league average, the whole package is a lot less exciting. Let’s see if we can pick up on any patterns that suggest one or the other.

The big worry with Martinez’s game is that he strikes out a lot. His 31.1% mark in 2023 represented a new career high, but he’s always been a high-risk, high-reward hitter. Nearly every contact frequency and swing decision metric declined from the prior year:

That didn’t really harm Martinez last year. It seems like his plan was pretty straightforward. Swing hard, because you might hit it, more or less. You can live with a lot more misses if you downright wallop the ball when you connect, and that’s just what Martinez did. Those strikeouts have never sunk his offense; he has a career 132 wRC+ with a career 24.7% strikeout rate. Projection systems think he’ll strike out quite a bit next year — because of course they do — but that’s never stopped him from crushing.

Are Martinez’s lack of walks last year behind his lackluster projections? They’ve never been a huge part of his game in the first place, but 2023 marked one of the lowest walk rates of his decade-long offensive renaissance. No sweat from either Steamer or ZiPS there, though; they think he’ll rebound toward career norms.

No, the place they think Martinez will fall short is what happens after he hits the ball. I’m talking 10 fewer homers in 70 extra plate appearances, an epic power outage. I think the reason is pretty simple; 2023 was an outlier for him when it came specifically to power. He’s always run a high BABIP. He’s always hit a lot of doubles, particularly in Boston. But he hit homers on 6.9% of his plate appearances last year, the second-highest rate of his career, behind only his torrid 2017 season (.303/.376/.690, 167 wRC+). You probably can’t bet on that continuing.

In other words, the projections are based on a grain of truth, as they always are. If you’re trying to figure out how this signing will fail, it’s the general passage of time combined with regression. Martinez will keep striking out a lot, because those tend to be sticky. He’ll hit fewer bombs, because those are more variable. He’ll hit for a bit less BABIP, too, and of course he’s getting older, so sprinkle in a bit of decline everywhere, and presto change-o, you’ve turned Martinez into merely a decent hitter instead of a great one.

I don’t really buy that interpretation of the data, though. Projection systems obviously do a great job in the aggregate, but I think they’re missing the arrow of causality here. I don’t think Martinez struck out more, sustainably, and happened to hit the ball hard, unsustainably. I think that the two are linked, and that he took an attack-heavy approach understanding the inherent tradeoffs. I think it’s reasonable to project more power this year, though probably not last year’s Baseball Savant-incinerating red flames:

Split the difference between our projections and last season, and you get roughly what I’m expecting. Bunches of homers, bunches of strikeouts, and plenty of hard contact for singles and doubles mixed in. The Mets could use that kind of offense to anchor their lineup, which we think will end up in the middle of the pack in run scoring despite some excellent hitters at the top of the lineup.

The plate appearances that Martinez will soak up wouldn’t have been great, to say the least. There would’ve been a lot of Mark Vientos in there, and perhaps a heaping helping of Tyrone Taylor. Francisco Alvarez was always going to get his fair share of DH at-bats when he’s not catching, and maybe Martinez cuts down on those, but there are limits to how often you should play your catcher at DH from a rest perspective. Brandon Nimmo was the other likely beneficiary of DH time. He’s a great hitter, but who would cover for him in the outfield? This is a meaningful offensive upgrade, is my point.

Does this signing make the Mets playoff favorites? Not to me. I think they’re still a little bit short, largely because their pitching staff is somehow risky in terms of both talent and availability. But I like this signing a lot anyway. It’s the kind of move that David Stearns frequently made in Milwaukee, and it usually paid off there. If you build your team in such a way that it can add players who fetch less than expected in free agency, then go out and add those guys opportunistically, you end up with a good roster, though not always in the way you expected.

I never would have linked Martinez to the Mets at the start of this offseason. They seemed more likely to dip their toes into the pitching market, which is exactly what they did, signing Sean Manaea and Luis Severino. They traded for Adrian Houser and Taylor when the Brewers wanted to shed 40-man spots. In doing all of that, the Mets saved some money, which meant that when Martinez was available for less than initially forecast, they had the room to add, and the team composition to make it work.

I don’t think this deal will change the course of the 2024 season. I don’t think that his posting a 105 or 115 wRC+ will move mountains. I do think, however, that this move makes a ton of sense. It’s not a standalone attempt to fix the team. It’s not a blockbuster contract. It’s just a part of a larger philosophy of team construction: Getting good players on reasonable deals tends to pay off. And one added benefit to throw in at the end of this list, since I’ve already made my case that it’s a good signing: Everyone seems to love working with Martinez. He’s a student of hitting who would make Ted Williams proud. If you can justify the deal before adding that, that’s quite the throw-in.

I want to stress how outrageous it is that Michael Lorenzen was not the first former Cal State Fullerton two-way player to sign a free agent contract this winter. The guy who beat him to the punch, J.D. Davis, played 144 games for the Giants last year, starting 116 of them at third base. He’d gone through arbitration. More to the point, on March 1 he was the presumptive starter for a team with playoff aspirations, and he was under contract on March 10.

Then Davis got cut in order to save a few bucks in the wake of the Matt Chapman signing, and he ended up signing for less than half of his original salary with the Oakland A’s. There, he’ll be managed by Mark Kotsay, a former Cal State Fullerton two-way player.

While all of that was happening, Lorenzen was sitting by the phone. Or more likely, given his physique, he was lifting the phone just to get a good pump in, even though the only sound on the other end was a dial tone. Finally, overnight just six days before his team’s first regular season game, Lorenzen has a deal with the Texas Rangers: One year, $4.5 million, with an additional $2.5 million possible in incentives. Read the rest of this entry »

It was closer than a lot of us thought it’d be, but Blake Snell has found a job before the Second Coming. The reigning Cy Young winner, left unemployed past St. Patrick’s Day by the merciless vicissitudes of the market, has come to terms with the San Francisco Giants on a two-year, $62 million contract with an opt-out after the 2024 season. Snell’s compensation includes a $17 million signing bonus, payable in January 2026, and a $15 million base salary in 2024.

The contract itself is something of an anticlimax for a player who supposedly turned down a similar AAV over six years because he wanted the same annual compensation over nine. And it’s not the one-year megabucks prove-it contract I speculated about six weeks ago. It’s probably not even worth the eyes emoji he posted to Instagram last Sunday.

Snell’s agent, Scott Boras, ran out the usual playbook — leave it late, hold the line, appeal directly to ownership. Boras has gotten more players nine-figure contracts than most agents have in their email contacts, and this is how he does it. And at the risk of being a huge bummer about Snell getting a top-10 AAV ever for a pitcher, the plan seems to have backfired. Read the rest of this entry »

Two of the outfielders I would have been most interested in signing this winter (as high-quality backups) both agreed to deals last week. Normally, that wouldn’t be a big deal; that’s what offseasons are for, after all. But both of them signed roughly two weeks away from Opening Day, and for meaningfully less than I would have predicted. That means that you can’t disconnect their deals from the context in which they were signed. That also means they get wrapped up into one article, so here we go. This will be a three-parter: Michael A. Taylor’s signing with the Pirates, Adam Duvall’s signing with the Braves, and the market forces behind both moves.

Taylor to the Pirates
This one was so obvious in retrospect. The Pirates have a lot of interesting young players, but one thing they didn’t have was a complete outfield. They have Bryan Reynolds and Jack Suwinski, both potential pieces of the future and interesting players right now in their own right. But that’s only two outfielders, and Suwinski is more of an emergency center fielder than an everyday one. The options after that – Edward Olivares, Connor Joe – felt more like platoon pieces than everyday starters.

Taylor, who signed a one-year deal worth $4 million, makes the whole picture look a lot better. He’s an elite center field defender, regardless of which system you’re grading him on. That lets Suwinski and Reynolds handle the corners, more natural positions for both. It also means the Pirates won’t have to make a tough decision against lefty pitching: either to play the lefty-hitting Suwinski — who before the Taylor deal was their best defensive center field, even though isn’t really suited to play that position full time — despite the platoon disadvantage, or sacrifice defense. Now they can mix and match far more easily.

Taylor’s offensive game has always been his weak link, and that absolutely limited his market. He’s a career .239/.294/.389 hitter, good for an 82 wRC+, which spells out his upside pretty clearly. He’s an average overall player, give or take a rounding error, so long as he’s an elite defender. In each of the last three years, that’s been almost exactly what happened; his defense has carried him even when his offense hasn’t. When he smacked a career-high 21 homers last year, his production boomed, and he racked up 1.7 WAR in only 388 plate appearances.

We’re projecting a return to career norms for Taylor’s offense, and it’s not hard to see why. He posted easily the best power production of his career, and in a way that doesn’t feel sticky. Before last year, he’d hit 113 doubles and 74 home runs over his first nine seasons. He had 14 doubles and 21 homers in 2023, a meaningful deviation from his normal output. That all comes down to an impressive barrel rate and more aerial contact than ever, but I think it’s reasonable to project a return to career norms there, and Pittsburgh is a terrible park for righty power, which should push that even a bit lower.

If the Pirates are looking for a repeat of last year’s offense in a full-time role, they’ll likely be disappointed. But they absolutely don’t need that. He brings the floor of their outfield up significantly, to a roughly average unit. We think the Pirates will get nearly as many WAR from their outfielders (6.6) as the Mike Trout-led Angels (7.0) — partly because Angels right fielders are projected for 0.4 WAR, the worst total in the majors — with less injury risk. And all of that for $4 million! I love this signing for a team on the fringes of the playoff race thanks to the paper-soft NL Central.

Duvall to the Braves
Now for a signing that will matter far less in the regular season. The Braves signed Adam Duvall, who last year with the Red Sox put together his best season on a rate basis but dealt with plenty of injuries. He’s making $3 million on a one-year deal.

Duvall is the archetypical boom/bust hitter. He strikes out roughly 30% of the time, even in good years. He doesn’t walk a lot. What he does do is put the ball in the air at an absurd rate, and with authority. His career barrel rate, 11.8%, is in the top 10% of all hitters in the Statcast era. If pitchers hang ’em, he can definitely bang ’em.

I’d say that Duvall’s .284 ISO in 2023 was an unsustainable caricature of his offensive game, but his career mark is an also-outrageous .240. He’s never going to get on base much, but his power is as real as it gets, even as he enters his age-35 season. He truly doesn’t do anything else – his career OBP is below .300, a woeful number for a theoretically offense-first outfielder – but I can’t emphasize enough how real his power is.

The Red Sox put Duvall in center field in 2023, which caused some excitement about his ability to move up the defensive spectrum. I didn’t completely buy it, though, and it seems like teams didn’t either. At best, he’s a backup to the durable Michael Harris II. The real reason Duvall is headed to the Braves is insurance for their high-risk plan in left field. Atlanta moved a lot of pieces around to bring in Jarred Kelenic over the winter. The ceiling is high for the former top prospect, but let’s be realistic: the floor is unfathomably low.

Kelenic has a lot of prospect shine, but he’s a career 85 wRC+ hitter in 1,000 plate appearances of big league playing time. He’s been one of the worst hitters in baseball this spring, for whatever that’s worth. He has huge platoon splits; he’s been unplayably bad against lefties in a limited sample. I think that the Braves will give him a chance to hit against everyone and establish himself as an everyday player, but there’s no guarantee that he will.

Signing Duvall means that there’s an off ramp if things don’t work out with Kelenic. Until they added him, the alternatives were so bad that Kelenic might have retained his job even if he were to play quite poorly. Now, there’s a limit to how bad that position can get, because Duvall feels like a bankable option. He doesn’t have huge platoon splits, though he’ll surely be taking some of Kelenic’s playing time against tough lefties. But he can also just take playing time, period, if Atlanta decides its gamble isn’t paying off.

That’s really smart team-building, as far as I’m concerned. The Kelenic experiment isn’t a high-leverage one for the Braves, who figure to run roughshod over the NL East regardless of what their left fielders do. But when it comes to building a World Series winner, patching potential holes for cheap in March is a lot better than doing so for a premium at the trade deadline.

Why So Little Money?
Both Taylor and Duvall landed in my top 50 free agents list this offseason. The crowd and I both missed pretty badly on our estimates for both. I had Taylor down for one year and $9 million; the crowd called for two years at $7 million per. I did worse with Duvall; I had him pegged at one year and $10 million, while the crowd went for one year and $8 million. Neither player even got half the guarantees we estimated for them.

It’s all part of the same story that’s been going on in free agency for years. The middle class is getting squeezed. Teams prefer to look internally for roughly average options, confident in their ability to develop cheap alternatives who aren’t much worse than those available in free agency. That doesn’t work for stars – it’s a lot easier to find a minor leaguer who’s 90% of Taylor than one who’s 90% of Mookie Betts, obviously – so great players still sign big deals, but solid regulars feel the pinch.

I’ve tried to account for that in my contract projections by changing the scale that I use to convert WAR into salary. I’ve made the first 1.5 wins progressively less valuable over time to reflect the way teams are behaving. For what it’s worth, I think that behavior is completely logical; in a game of limited resources (an assumption completely worth challenging, but outside the scope of this article), pouring your money into chasing stars and then trying to replicate role players is a good strategy.

These two deals squeeze that distribution down even further. It’s hard to imagine Taylor or Duvall finishing less than a win above replacement, even in a part-time role. Fitting a curve to account for these salaries as well as some of the bigger deals signed in free agency would require making the first win almost completely worthless, even lower than I’ve forced it in recent years.

The question, then, is whether to use these contracts or most of the other contracts signed this offseason as benchmarks of what to expect going forward. You could throw Amed Rosario’s deal into the mix; $1.5 million for a rotation infielder is even a bit cheaper than these two. But then you’ve to contend with Joc Pederson’s getting $12.5 million, Kevin Kiermaier’s getting $10.5 million, and Isiah Kiner-Falefa’ getting two years and $15 million.

I’m going to handle these contracts in my future free agency prediction endeavors by hedging. I’ll use the data points, of course, but I think it’s reasonable to look at both of these as casualties of circumstances rather than perfect harbingers of the new normal. It’s hard to predict which free agents will get squeezed ex ante; every year, someone ends up sitting on the vine longer than expected because there aren’t quite enough teams looking for veterans.

I’m going to resist taking too broad of a lesson here, though. Taylor and Duvall are both outfielders with only one carrying tool, but players like that signed earlier this winter on more reasonable deals. The middle class is still getting squeezed, without a doubt. I just wouldn’t take these two deals as evidence of an acceleration of the trend. More likely, they’re victims of timing who will be huge bargains for the clubs that signed them.

Every team heads into spring training with The Plan for their roster. February is a time to dream about what could be, as new offseason acquisitions mix with the holdovers in camp. Then the reality of March settles in, spring injuries start to mount and The Plan is suddenly compromised or needs to be thrown completely out the window. For the Mariners, The Plan for their bullpen included some combination of Andrés Muñoz, Matt Brash, and Gregory Santos locking down the final few innings of any game they were leading. Unfortunately, the latter two of those three relievers are now dealing with injury issues that will keep them from being ready come Opening Day.

Brash had been dealing with elbow inflammation this spring after making more appearances (78) than any other reliever in baseball last year. Thankfully, surgery isn’t on the table yet, but the M’s are taking an understandably cautious approach to a key member of their ‘pen. Santos ended last season on the injured list due to an elbow issue and showed up in Arizona this spring with a sore shoulder. He had just started to ramp up his throwing program when he strained his lat on Tuesday. It doesn’t appear to be a serious issue, but it’s another setback for a pitcher who appeared to be a key offseason acquisition. In addition to losing Brash and Santos to start the season, Seattle’s bullpen depth took a hit when Jackson Kowar was diagnosed with a UCL tear last week; he will undergo Tommy John surgery, sidelining him until 2025.

To provide some insurance for their sudden lack of high-leverage options, Seattle signed Ryne Stanek to a one-year, $4 million deal on Friday. A setup man for the Astros over the last three years, Stanek compiled a solid 2.90 ERA during that time, though his 3.91 FIP wasn’t as pretty thanks to a very high walk rate. Still, his 27% strikeout rate and elite stuff allow him to be effective despite all the traffic on the basepaths. Read the rest of this entry »

Less than a week after Cody Bellinger signed a three-year deal that allows him to opt out after each of the first two seasons, Matt Chapman has done the same. The 30-year-old third baseman, who spent the past two seasons with the Blue Jays, has agreed to a three-year, $54 million deal with the Giants, with a mutual option for a fourth year — a deal that looks significantly less favorable than that of Bellinger.

Chapman placed seventh on our Top 50 Free Agents list in November, and like Bellinger (who was third on the list) sought and seemed likely to land a larger contract, particularly given the track record of their mutual agent, Scott Boras. That said, Chapman hit free agency after an uneven season, with his overall numbers (.240/.330/.424 for a 110 wRC+ with 3.5 WAR) representing a slight falloff from his 2022 performance (.229/.330/.433, 118 wRC+, 4.2 WAR). A closer look shows that last year Chapman had just two productive months and four bad ones, as well as difficulties hitting with runners in scoring position.

I’ll explore those details below, but the overarching impression I get from this deal — far more so than from Bellinger’s contract, in fact — is that Chapman and Boras overestimated how robust the market for his services would be and had to settle for much less. According to TSN Sports’ Scott Mitchell, the third baseman declined a six-year, $120 million extension offer from the Blue Jays at some point within the past year. His new contract falls short of that average annual value, even though it is half the length.

As initially reported, Chapman is guaranteed $20 million for 2024, $18 million for ’25, and $16 million for ’26, but the breakdown is more complicated. He’ll receive a $2 million signing bonus and a $16 million salary for 2024, with a $17 million player option and $2 million buyout for ’25, an $18 million player option and $3 million buyout for ’26, and then a $20 million mutual option and $1 million buyout for ’27. So if this winds up being a one-year deal, he’ll make $20 million ($2 million signing bonus, plus $16 million salary, plus $2 million buyout); for the two-year deal, it’s $38 million (the initial bonus, salaries of $16 million and $17 million, and a $3 million buyout); and for the three-year deal, it’s $54 million (bonus, salaries of $16 million, $17 million, and $18 million, $1 million buyout). If the mutual option is picked up — which is certainly no guarantee, considering he’ll be entering his age-34 season — the total value of the four-year deal will be $73 million (that $54 million, minus the $1 million buyout, plus $20 million). Got all that?

Chapman’s $18 million AAV is 25% below Ben Clemens’ estimate from our Top 50 list. Ben figured that Chapman would get $24 million per year (five years, $120 million), while our median crowdsource estimate came in at a $20 million AAV (four years, $80 million). By comparison, Bellinger’s $26.7 million AAV actually topped the estimates of $25 million per year by Clemens and $24 million per year by our crowd. What’s more, where Bellinger’s deal appeared to be a slight overpay relative to Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS-projected contract of three years and $70 million, Chapman’s deal falls short of the three-year, $79 million contract projected by the ZiPS model:

For both deals, Dan also provided contract valuations with the opt-outs priced in: three years and $58 million for Bellinger, and three years and $66 million for Chapman. The former exceeded the model’s estimate by about 38%, but the latter fell short by about 18%. That’s quite a haircut, particularly when one considers the questions of sustainability of Bellinger’s performance given his dreadful 2021–22 stretch and last year’s batted ball stats, which reflected a more contact-based two-strike approach. By comparison, for Chapman — who is more than two years older, which is already reflected in ZiPS — the concerns are more garden variety ones about season-to-season variance and aging.

Traditional numbers amplified the perception that Chapman’s decline from 2022 to ’23 was steeper than the advanced stats suggest; his 17 home runs and 54 RBIs last season were a considerable dip from his 27 home runs and 76 RBIs the year before. His career-low full-season RBIs total was in large part the product of a .215/.320/.299 (77 wRC+) performance with runners in scoring position. It was an anomalous showing — he produced a 122 wC+ in 170 PA with runners in scoring position in 2022, and owned a 128 wRC+ in that capacity for the first six years of his career — but it was poorly timed.

Situational hitting aside, Chapman’s monthly splits further shed light on why his season may have been viewed as worse than it actually was:

Chapman’s strong start was impossible to sustain — he had a 32.9% barrel rate over the first month of the season — but his production didn’t regress so much as it cratered. He posted a .205/.298/.361 (84 wRC+) line after April. The split on the bottom two lines illustrates Chapman’s numbers before and after spraining his right middle finger in a weight room mishap; he initially missed three games after suffering the injury, then went just 5-for-32 with a 40% strikeout rate in nine games before landing on the injured list. He missed 15 games and continued to be unproductive in the 15 games he played between his return and the end of the regular season, though he barreled the ball at a 16.2% clip, with a 51.4% hard-hit rate in that final stretch.

Chapman’s strikeout rate crept up one point from 2022, to 28.4%, but when he made contact, he absolutely pasted the ball. He produced average exit velocities of 92.5 mph or higher and hard-hit rates of at least 51.4% or higher in every month except August (90.0 mph and 42.6%, respectively), while his barrel rates were 10.5% or higher in every month except May (9.2%). His full-season 93.4 mph average exit velocity and 17.1% barrel rate both placed in the 98th percentile, while his 56.4% hard-hit rate trailed only that of Aaron Judge among all hitters. He was unlucky in the power department, in that he fell 3.7 home runs short of his expected total based upon the batted ball specs of his biggest flies, a gap that ranked eighth in the majors. He fell 33 points short of his .457 expected slugging percentage.

Chapman did play very good defense, with 12 DRS, 4.5 UZR, and 3 RAA. Those numbers all represented improvements on his 2022 metrics, even in about 130 fewer innings. That performance didn’t escape recognition, as he took home his fourth Gold Glove.

In all, it was a good-not-great season, one with an arc that didn’t particularly help Chapman’s cause. It was reported back in May that he and the team were both interested in an extension, though it’s not clear when the Blue Jays offered him the $120 million deal. Chapman turned down Toronto’s $20.325 million qualifying offer as well, but in mid-November, the team was still reportedly “making a big push” to keep him.

Yet the Blue Jays, who at one point thought they had landed Shohei Ohtani, and who were viewed as being the favorites to sign Bellinger, instead chose to make a series of smaller moves: They re-signed Kevin Kiermaier to a one-year deal in late December, signed Isiah Kiner-Falefa to a two-year deal soon afterward, and added Justin Turner on a one-year deal in late January. With Kiner-Falefa, Turner, Santiago Espinal, and Cavan Biggio all in the fold, the Blue Jays figured they had third base covered, even if that quartet doesn’t make up for the production that Chapman would have provided. Our Depth Charts projects the Blue Jays to finish with 2.1 WAR at third base; Chapman is projected for 3.3 WAR by Depth Charts. In addition to the roster crunch, Chapman’s salary, even at a discount, was more than what the team was comfortable paying after pivoting to those other players. The Blue Jays’ luxury tax payroll is estimated to be just under $12 million above the first Competitive Balance Tax threshold ($237 million), and they will be paying the tax for a second straight season.

With half a dozen teams — the Angels, Braves, Cardinals, Guardians, Padres, Red Sox — already committing at least $20 million to their third basemen on deals that extend through at least 2026, plus the Dodgers and Yankees prioritizing spending elsewhere and the Mets looking to cut expenses, Chapman only had a limited number of options for landing spots. The Mariners, Cubs, and Giants were the only teams other than the Blue Jays that were publicly connected to him.

This is the latest move for the Giants in a winter that also included a six-year, $113 million deal for center fielder Jung Hoo Lee , four years and $44 million for righty Jordan Hicks, three years and $42 million for DH/outfielder Jorge Soler, and two years and $8.25 million for catcher Tom Murphy. The signing of Chapman bumps J.D. Davis — his college teammate at Cal State Fullerton, incidentally — out of the lineup and provides San Francisco a solid upgrade, particularly in the field, where he’ll be playing behind a staff with three projected starters (Logan Webb, Alex Cobb, and Hicks) who last year had groundball rates above 57%.

Davis hit .248/.325/.413 (104 wRC+) while playing 116 games at third base (105 of them starts), 15 at first base, and 14 at DH. Long saddled with a reputation as a below-average defender, he put in considerable work to improve, and in a career-high 915.2 innings at the hot corner produced a mixed bag of metrics (-11 DRS , 0.8 UZR, 4 RAA). With lefty-hitting LaMonte Wade and righty Wilmer Flores the most likely combination at first base and Soler taking the bulk of the playing time at DH, Davis doesn’t have a clear path to playing time and could be a trade candidate. President of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi acknowledged the team’s surplus of infielders, telling reporters, “We’ll explore different things. It’s certainly possible that a move or two happens before the end of camp.’’

Perhaps more notably, Zaidi refused to rule out another free agent addition and indicated that the team could go over the $237 million CBT threshold. (RosterResource places their payroll at $230.5 million for tax purposes.) With the team already waiting for Cobb and Robbie Ray to return from surgeries at some point during the season, and having just lost Tristan Beck to aneurysm surgery, sources told the San Francisco Chronicle that the Giants remain in the mix for Blake Snell, another Boras client.

As for Chapman, here’s his ZiPS percentile breakdown:

It’s not hard to envision Chapman putting in a strong enough season to opt out, but it is worth remembering that Oracle Park particularly tends to suppress right-handed power, which is Chapman’s calling card on offense. All of which is to say that next winter, he could suffer from a similar perception problem if his counting stats don’t rebound, and so to these eyes, he’s carrying a greater share of the risk than he otherwise might have. However much this gets spun as a win-win deal like that of Bellinger, this looks like a case where Boras and his client came up short.

On Wednesday, the Baltimore Orioles signed two veterans — pitcher Julio Teheran and second baseman Kolten Wong — to minor league contracts with non-roster spring training invites. The Teheran signing has a pretty obvious logic: The veteran right-hander hasn’t been anything like a frontline starter in the majors since about 2016, or even a reliable rotation option since 2019.

But despite having come up with the Braves around the same time as Lew Burdette, Teheran is still only 33. He threw 71 2/3 competent innings for the Brewers last year, with only a 17.4% strikeout rate but a 4.40 ERA, which will play for a guy on a tryout. After the Corbin Burnes trade, the Orioles — who wanted badly for starting pitching in 2023 — had assembled a formidable front four of Burnes, Kyle Bradish, Grayson Rodriguez, and John Means. But Bradish and Means both suffered health setbacks that’ll at the very least delay their ramp-up for the season.

In short: The Orioles just had two rotation spots open up suddenly and Teheran was available, presumably cheap, and capable of sucking up major league innings. It’s a bit harder to see the need for Wong, who last year had a wRC+ of just 48 and was nearly a win below replacement in just 250 plate appearances.

More to the point, the Orioles need another infielder like they need a poke in the eye. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Cardinals signed Brandon Crawford to a one-year, $2 million deal earlier this week, the first thing that popped into my mind was a two-word hashtag. I figured it wouldn’t be long before the Giants’ social media accounts would send out the same thing they always post in response to the departure of a franchise icon: #ForeverGiant.

Of course, #ForeverGiant is a public relations gimmick, a way for the organization to soften the blow for fans who are sad to see one of their favorite players retire or, worse, wearing another team’s uniform. Yet in the case of Crawford, who grew up a Giants fan in the Bay Area and who became the franchise’s all-time leader in games played at shortstop, those two words actually rang true. They weren’t a ploy; they were a promise.

That’s why Crawford’s leaving San Francisco is sad for many Giants fans and weird for the rest of us. But moving on from something and getting over it are not the same thing. It was time for the Giants to move on from Crawford, to let him go somewhere else, even if it wasn’t an easy decision. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Dodgers traded for Tyler Glasnow this offseason, he wasn’t the only player the Rays sent west. Manuel Margot also joined Los Angeles, where he would to fill Jonny DeLuca’s old role as a righty-hitting outfielder capable of playing any of the three spots. Yet, Margot wasn’t exactly a snug fit for the Dodgers; his inclusion in the trade felt more like a way for Tampa Bay to shed salary. It seemed likely that Los Angeles would flip him to another team before the start of the season.

That’s exactly what happened on Monday, when the Dodgers sent Margot and minor league infielder Rayne Doncon to the Twins in exchange for minor league shortstop Noah Miller. Los Angeles also agreed to cover $6 million of Margot’s $10 million salary for 2024, along with the $2 million he’d be owed if Minnesota doesn’t exercise its team option for 2025, as Aaron Gleeman reported. So, in trading Margot, the Dodgers are saving $4 million; naturally, they promptly turned around and signed Enrique Hernández to a one-year, $4 million deal.

You can almost analyze the Dodgers’ side of this trade in a box, because the things being exchanged are so similar. In fact, to make my analysis make sense, you have to know how close the prospects are in value, so let’s start there. Doncon is a 20-year old middle infielder who spent 2023 at Single-A Rancho Cucamonga struggling against older pitchers. Want a prospect novel? Eric Longenhagen has one for you:

Doncon was a 2021 and 2022 backfield prodigy who looked like he could become a slugging middle infielder. His bat speed, body projection, as well as his struggles on defense and with chase, prompted Alfonso Soriano pipe dreams and more level-headed Esteury Ruiz comparisons at the time. Doncon had a mediocre 2023 with the bat – .215/.283/.368, albeit with a career-high 14 homers – but looked much better on defense. He currently has the actions and arm strength for shortstop, but he’s still young and has a lot of room on his frame, which means he may yet outgrow that position and move to either second or third. Doncon’s pitch recognition is not great, and he’s a bit more chase and whiff prone than is ideal, but he has good power for a hitter his age and is probably going to grow into more. The longer he can stay at short, the better chance he gives himself at being a useful big leaguer despite his flaws. The Twins have two seasons to develop Doncon before they have to decide whether to expose him to the Rule 5 draft, and realistically, they have another year or two beyond that to let him barbecue on the 40-man if they really want to. He adds an element of upside to their system as well as an element of risk. He is not likely to have a meteoric rise. Instead, he is a slow-burning, high-variance prospect.

Read the rest of this entry »