The Cardinals’ 2023 season was disappointing, but it was anything but boring. The electric Jordan Walker cracked the Opening Day roster, tying a record for most games (12) with a hit to start a career for a player age 20 or younger. Then he went on to post what I can only assume (given the dearth of fielding statistics before 2000) is one of the worst defensive seasons by a rookie ever, costing St. Louis 16 runs per Defensive Runs Saved and 12 runs per Ultimate Zone Rating and Runs Above Average. Additionally, the Cardinals brought over veteran signal-caller Willson Contreras from the division-rival Cubs for $87.5 million, only to relegate him to DH and corner outfielder in May, then to just DH, before moving him back to catcher… all within the span of a week. And don’t even ask me, or Jack Flaherty for that matter, about the right-hander’s fastball velocity.

But Kyle Gibson is boring. Last year, the Cardinals were in the bottom 10 in baseball in ERA, FIP, xFIP, and SIERA, and at the General Managers Meetings a couple of weeks ago, Cardinals’ President of Baseball Operations John Mozeliak made clear the team’s desire to upgrade their pitching staff this offseason. But the Cards whiffed on Aaron Nola despite their early interest in the ace, and instead went with… Lance Lynn and Gibson? Read the rest of this entry »

Good relief is hard to find. Well, that’s not strictly true. Pretty much every team in baseball has multiple good relievers, random guys who throw 100 mph and snap off ludicrous sliders. But enough good relief pitching is hard to find, because it takes a village’s worth of relievers to get through a season, and the playoffs are even more challenging. As teams go to their bullpen earlier and earlier, they put more pressure on every arm in it, and the penalties to overworking your best few arms are harsh.

The Braves seem to understand that, because they’ve been aggressive about adding to their options this offseason. They already had Raisel Iglesias and A.J. Minter as reliable options. They gave Joe Jimenez and Pierce Johnson contract extensions that valued them like solid mid-to-late-inning options. They traded a sampler platter of former prospects for Aaron Bummer. Now they’ve added yet again by signing Reynaldo López to a three-year deal. Read the rest of this entry »

The theme of free agency so far is returning to one’s origins. A day after Aaron Nola re-upped with the Phillies, Lance Lynn signed a one-year contract with the St. Louis Cardinals, the team that drafted him in the first round in 2008. Lynn’s deal will pay him $10 million in 2024, with a 2025 club option for $11 million that comes with a $1 million buyout, and $3 million in incentives. That brings the total guarantee to $11 million and the total potential value of the contract to $24 million.

Lynn won a World Series with St. Louis as a rookie in 2011, made his first All-Star team in 2012, and in total pitched six years and nearly 1,000 innings with the club before leaving as a free agent after the 2017 season.

Much has happened since then. Read the rest of this entry »

Admit it: you had a feeling it might go this way. Aaron Nola is headed back to Philadelphia. After a short trip to free agency, he re-signed with the Phillies for seven years and $172 million, as USA TODAY’s Bob Nightengale first reported. He’s the first domino to fall this offseason, but this was hardly a shocking outcome. The move makes a lot of sense for both team and player, which helps explain why it came to pass so swiftly.

Let’s start with the team side of things. The Phillies are bona fide World Series contenders, and they’re built to win right this minute. Bryce Harper, Trea Turner, and J.T. Realmuto are all at or near the peak of their careers. Kyle Schwarber and Nick Castellanos are in the same boat. The Philly offense is so good right now that it would be borderline criminal not to contend, and that’s clearly been the team’s plan. They made the World Series in 2022, then went out and added Turner in the offseason to bolster their squad.

If they didn’t act this offseason, they’d be moving in the wrong direction. The Phillies’ recent regular seasons may have been built around an excellent offense, but their playoff plan has been all about pitching. Nola and Zack Wheeler have each been October workhorses; taking advantage of off days, they’ve started 19 of the team’s 30 playoff games in the last two years. Giving the ball to elite starters that frequently takes pressure off both the rest of the rotation and the bullpen, the team’s two great weaknesses. Read the rest of this entry »

Philly baseball fans didn’t even have to wait until the turkeys were in the oven for the first major Phillies news of the offseason, as Bob Nightengale and Jeff Passan reported Sunday that the team has brought back Aaron Nola on a seven year, $172 million contract that will keep their no. 2 starter in town until the end of the 2030 season. Read the rest of this entry »

The last domino in our top 50 free agent rankings finally fell Sunday morning, with Jon Heyman breaking the news of Jurickson Profar’s one-year, $7.75 million pact with the Rockies. The ex-Padres outfielder can earn an additional $1 million through incentives.

While I perpetually struggle to wrap my head around Rockies transactions, from Profar’s side, it’s clear why he took this deal. Given reports of a high asking price, he likely overestimated the strength of his market, and as the winter wore on, he probably realized that his best chance at besting the $7.5 million option he turned down to stay in San Diego was to wait things out until March and hope a spot opened up after the usual rash of spring training injuries. That plan has come to fruition, with a guarantee just north of the money he declined.

What’s more, the one-year deal gives Profar the chance to improve upon a career-high 2.5 WAR last season in the hopes of snagging his asking price in his next trip to free agency. Teams know how to adjust for park factor, but it’s still hard to think of a better place to go on a one-year contract than Coors Field. Read the rest of this entry »

I first learned about joint dislocation in 2003 after Derek Jeter slid into a nasty collision at third base. When I heard that Jeter had suffered a dislocated shoulder, my five-year-old brain naturally conjured up an image of a disembodied arm lying on the infield dirt. You can imagine my surprise when the Yankees shortstop returned six weeks later, both arms firmly secured in their sockets.

As horrifying as dislocation sounds, and as painful as I’m sure it is, a dislocated shoulder isn’t always a serious injury. Fernando Tatis Jr. dislocated his shoulder several times during the 2021 season and still managed to play 130 games and put up 7.3 WAR en route to a third-place finish for NL MVP. Brandon Inge once dislocated his shoulder mid-game and popped it back in place on the field; the very next inning, he smacked a go-ahead RBI single.

Thus, when Brendan Rodgers landed awkwardly on his shoulder last Tuesday, there was no cause for panic straight away. Manager Bud Black described the incident as “a pretty classic thing,” while Matthew Ritchie of MLB.com wrote that Rodgers might be “a tad delayed.” Unfortunately, the injury appears to be far more significant than your run-of-the-mill dislocation, with reports suggesting Rodgers might need surgery to repair the damage. If he goes under the knife, the Rockies second baseman could miss most, if not all, of the upcoming season. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the weekend, veteran left-hander Brad Hand agreed to a one-year, $2 million contract with the Colorado Rockies, according to Ken Rosenthal. That poor man. This being the offseason of creative contract structures, Hand will receive an additional $1 million if he starts the regular season on the major league roster or IL, and $500,000 of that $2 million guarantee comes in the form of a buyout of a $7 million club option for 2024. In other words, the Rockies are spending $2 million to find out if Hand is completely cooked, but if he’s not they can keep him in the fold for two seasons at a pretty reasonable rate.

Hand was last seen pitching in the colors of Colorado’s sometime postseason nemesis, the Philadelphia Phillies. There, Hand filled what one might call the 2019 Fernando Rodney role. In that scenario, a manager only has a couple relievers he trusts in the postseason, but more innings than he can fill using those arms alone. Enter a veteran — Rodney for the 2019 Nats, Hand for last year’s Phillies — whose stuff isn’t what it used to be but whose experience and guile might allow him to steal a medium-leverage inning or two. In the NLDS against the Braves, that worked quite well. The following series against the Padres, not so much.

That’s because Hand is no longer the elite high-volume reliever he was in San Diego and Cleveland in the late 2010s. If he were, he wouldn’t be signing for $2 million in March. So the question is — as is ever the case with this team — what do the Rockies see in Hand? Read the rest of this entry »

It has been a pretty quiet offseason in Seattle. The Mariners got things moving fairly quickly, trading for Teoscar Hernández and Kolten Wong to cover the holes left by a couple of departing free agents, but things slowed down after that. They’ve brought in a couple of veterans to provide a bit of depth, but are otherwise largely banking on a repeat of their success last year and some continued growth from their young core. They made one more last minute addition yesterday, signing Kole Calhoun to a minor league contract with an invitation to spring training.

Bringing in an 11-year veteran like Calhoun is the type of move that plenty of teams make during the spring, but they rarely work out for the player involved. Most ball clubs are content to roll out whatever internal depth they already have instead of clearing a 40-man roster spot to add a player on a minor league deal. But every once in a while, a veteran will show that he has just enough left in the tank during spring training to break camp on the Opening Day roster.

If you squint, you can see how Calhoun could be primed for a bounce back season in 2023. A long-time Angel, he really started to struggle during his final seasons in Anaheim. From 2017–19, he put up a 94 wRC+ and accumulated 3.5 WAR, with a career-high 33 home runs in his final season for Los Angeles. He joined the Diamondbacks in free agency the following year and produced a career-high 125 wRC+ and 1.5 WAR during the shortened season. The last two years haven’t been kind to him, however. A recurring hamstring injury cut short most of his 2021 season and his production cratered last year after signing a one-year deal with the Rangers, with his wRC+ falling to a career-low 67. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball season is almost upon us. Spring training competition has begun and the hot stove of free agency has cooled off a bit, though not entirely. Many players, especially on the relief market, have yet to be signed. But over the past week, two former starters with a recent track record of excellent relief performance have taken their talents to Southern California – one finding a new home in Anaheim while the other returns to the big city.

Angels sign Matt Moore to a one-year, $7.55 million deal

Moore’s path through professional baseball has been as interesting as any. A highly touted high school draftee, Moore was once ranked as the top prospect in the game by MLB.com and Baseball Prospectus, ahead of Bryce Harper and Mike Trout. He established himself in the majors at the age of 23, making the AL All-Star team in his second full season. He then missed almost all of 2014 and ’15 with a torn UCL. After returning, his performance quickly dipped from solid to disastrous. He bounced from team to team and posted a 5.99 ERA in 2017-18 while splitting time between the rotation and bullpen. He appeared in just two games in 2019 before a knee injury prematurely ended his season. With his track record of injuries and poor performance now six years long, Moore took a new path to rejuvenate his career, signing with the Fukuoka SoftBank Hawks of NPB for the 2020 season. There he ultimately excelled, with a 2.65 ERA and 3.21 FIP in 13 starts. Moore’s performance impressed the Phillies, who brought him on in a hybrid starter/reliever role where his struggles continued, allowing almost two homers per nine innings and a walk every other frame. However, one team still saw something in him – the Texas Rangers. They signed him to pitch out of the bullpen, and he was excellent: His 1.95 ERA and 2.98 FIP in 74 innings were career bests, as was his 10.1 K/9. Read the rest of this entry »