Chaim Bloom’s plan to replace Trevor Story began to take shape Wednesday morning, as the Boston Red Sox signed outfielder Adam Duvall to a one-year, $7 million deal. Duvall can earn an additional $3 million in playing time incentives; he missed the second half of the 2022 season with an injured wrist, and the Red Sox are hedging their bets against another IL stint.

A couple of weeks ago, this signing wouldn’t have made much sense. Boston’s outfield looked all set with Masataka Yoshida in left field, Enrique Hernández in center, and Alex Verdugo in right, plus Rob Refsnyder on the bench and Jarren Duran at Triple-A. But then their second baseman/potential shortstop underwent major surgery on his throwing arm, and the Red Sox were thrown for a loop. The versatile Hernández, who’s played every position save for catcher, became the shortstop by default, and Boston needed a new center fielder. Enter Duvall.

Duvall took up center field late in life, making his first appearance there a few weeks before his 32nd birthday. He started his first game there the following April and didn’t become a primary center fielder until last year, his age-33 season. In 2023, he’ll attempt to play his first full season as a center fielder at an age when most players are already moving down the defensive spectrum. Read the rest of this entry »

Tommy Pham has only played in nine major league seasons, accruing a little more than seven and a half seasons’ worth of service time. It feels like it should be more. This man has drifted to so many ports, made headlines for conduct meritorious, ignoble, and points in between. He has lived and died a hundred times in a baseball uniform, and every one of those lives has been fascinating. Pham is as close as you’ll get among millennials to one of those old-timey ballplayers with an unbelievable backstory, like Dazzy Vance or Turkey Mike Donlin. Now he’s a New York Met, signed to a one-year, $6 million deal with another $2 million possible in incentives.

I’ll leave the fantasy football jokes to the comment section, but I will mention what Andy Martino of SNY noted as the news broke:

Yes, Tommy Pham slapped a man because of fantasy football, but the background work Mets did on him turned up intel that he's a very well-liked teammate and good clubhouse presence. The man he slapped was on a different ballclub, after all

— Andy Martino (@martinonyc) January 18, 2023

Read the rest of this entry »

Ordinarily, a minor league free agent with a non-roster invite wouldn’t warrant a standalone article. But Jorge Alfaro, who signed with the Red Sox on Monday, is not your ordinary player.

First of all, the path to regular playing time is relatively straightforward for Alfaro. He’ll be competing for minutes with Connor Wong and Reese McGuire. Wong has hit well in the minors but struggled in a brief major league audition last year, and he has an option year left. McGuire has been solid defensively the past two seasons, but his bat is not of such quality that the Sox would move heaven and earth to keep him in the lineup. If Alfaro plays well in spring training, there’s every reason to believe he’ll head north with the Red Sox and play regularly.

Alfaro’s contract indicates as much. If he makes the team, he’ll be paid $2 million, which is more than either McGuire or Wong will earn this season. He’ll also have two chances to opt out — June 1 and July 1 — if he hasn’t been called up by then. Minor league free agent or not, Alfaro aims to play in the bigs this year.

The second reason Alfaro is worthy of discussion: Well, he’s Jorge Alfaro. Read the rest of this entry »

Amid the frantic negotiations of this year’s arbitration deadline on Friday, the Twins and right-hander Chris Paddack agreed to avoid arbitration and then on the only multi-year deal of the day, a three-year, $12.5 million contract through the 2025 season. The deal, which came just hours after Paddack and the Twins settled at $2.4 million for 2023, buys out his final year of arbitration and his first year of free agency for $10.1 million and includes up to $2.5 million in bonuses.

It’s a reasonable arrangement for both sides. Paddack, who turned 27 just a few days prior, underwent his second Tommy John surgery in May and is aiming for an August 2023 return. Tacking on another year of team control in Minnesota gives him security in his effort to get healthy and still lets him reach free agency a couple of months before his 30th birthday. For the Twins, given Paddack’s injury and his struggles in recent seasons, they are buying low on a player with elite control and significant upside. It’s also a modest investment to help shore up a rotation that will feature three starters — Sonny Gray, Tyler Mahle, and Kenta Maeda — on contract years in 2023.

Before his surgery, when Paddack was dealt from San Diego to Minnesota on Opening Day 2022, it wasn’t entirely clear what type of pitcher the Twins were adding. He had excelled as a 23-year-old rookie in 2019, posting a 3.33 ERA, 3.95 FIP, and 4.05 xFIP over 26 starts, striking out 9.79 and walking just 1.98 per nine innings. Relying on a mid-90s fastball with a changeup and curveball as secondary offerings, he ranked in the 73rd percentile in average exit velocity, 81st in hard-hit percentage, and 88th in both walk rate and chase rate as a rookie. He benefited from the second-lowest BABIP among pitchers with 100 innings or more, but he was successfully limiting hard contact. Read the rest of this entry »

After five seasons and four different teams, Andrew McCutchen is returning to the ballclub where it all began. On Friday morning, the 36-year-old outfielder came to terms with the Pirates on a one-year, $5 million contract. The deal is pending a physical, but the official hype video is already up on Twitter.

McCutchen was remarkable in his first stint with Pittsburgh, putting up 46 WAR from 2009 to ’17. Only five players were more valuable during those nine years: Mike Trout, Buster Posey, Joey Votto, Miguel Cabrera, and Robinson Canó. McCutchen hit 203 home runs, stole 171 bases, and led the Pirates to three straight postseason appearances, including their first in more than 20 years. He’s the best player in the history of PNC Park and the greatest Pirate since Barry Bonds. Read the rest of this entry »

On New Year’s Day, the Cubs’ first base-and-DH situation was a smoking crater. But now the fires have been extinguished and the hole is being filled with aggregate; the Eric Hosmer signing got the process started, and over the weekend, Chicago inked Trey Mancini — of the Italian national team, apparently — to a two-year contract.

Mancini’s coming off a bit of an odd year. He hit .268/.347/.404 in 92 games for Baltimore, then got traded to the Astros at the deadline and apparently forgot to bring his bats south. A disappointing .176/.258/.364 showing in August and September turned into an appalling playoff campaign in which he started 0-for-18.

So, in his most recent and most widely viewed major league experience, Mancini had onlookers saying things like, “But I thought pitchers didn’t hit anymore.” On the other hand, he’d been a consistent 20-homer guy across the first four years of his career, and even as recently as July had a wRC+ of 116. Perhaps his power wasn’t ideal for a middle-of-the-order bat, but he got on base and hit for a decent average. Read the rest of this entry »

He’s not the Japanese starting pitcher that fans were likely hoping for, but the Athletics signed Shintaro Fujinami to a one-year deal worth $3.25 million, just a couple days before the January 14 deadline to sign posted players. With most starting-caliber players already traded away for prospects, Fujinami becomes just the sixth Oakland player not on a league minimum or arbitration contract, joining a collection of names including fellow international signee Drew Rucinski.

Eleven years ago, when an 18-year old Fujinami was selected in the first round of the 2012 NPB draft by the Hanshin Tigers, many evaluators considered him better than Shohei Ohtani, also taken in that round. Fujinami was well-known as a prospect coming out of high school, where he led his team to victory in the summer Koshien tournament by throwing complete-game shutouts on consecutive days, then tossing another shutout to clinch a junior world championship less than two weeks later. He had an excellent rookie season with the Tigers, posting a 2.75 ERA over 24 starts, and continued this excellence from 2014 to ’16 with a 3.02 ERA and 16.2 WAR, placing in the top seven pitchers by WAR each year.

Then things started to come off the rails. Where Fujinami had succeeded in spite of his below-average command in his first four years, his strike-throwing issues became debilitating after that. In 2017, he walked a sixth of his batters faced; in ’18, his ERA climbed to 5.32 as the walk issues remained. He made just one start in 2019 and has played part of each season since in the minor leagues.

Since 2020, Fujinami has made 27 major league starts and 34 relief appearances, along with 21 farm team appearances (19 of them starts). While he still had a double-digit walk rate in 2020 and ’21, his 7.6% clip in ’22 was the best of his NPB career, as he basically matched the league-average rate of 7.7%. His performance in the strikeout and walk department notably improved after a stretch in the bullpen and in the minors, with excellent peripheral numbers in the last two months of the season. He finished the year with a 3.38 ERA in 66.2 innings, but due to the lowered NPB offensive environment, that resulted in just a 102 ERA- (92 FIP-). While he wasn’t throwing more pitches in the strike zone than before, he significantly cut down on the number of waste pitches thrown, as evidenced by a career-high chase rate. Read the rest of this entry »

Nelson Cruz wants his ring. Since watching a World Series slip right over the webbing of his glove in 2011, he has played 11 more seasons, well past his 40th birthday, in pursuit of that ultimate goal. On Wednesday, the 42-year-old agreed to sign on for his 19th major league season with his eighth team, heading to San Diego to join a fun Padres team looking to find its way even deeper into the playoffs after reaching its first NLCS of the 21st century last year. The deal, worth $1 million over one year, pending a physical, reunites Cruz with former Rangers assistant general manager A.J. Preller as well as former teammates and Dominican countrymen Manny Machado and Juan Soto, who he’ll suit up with first as general manager-player for the Dominican World Baseball Classic team in March.

Cruz could easily have called it a career by this point. After establishing himself as a big league bat in Texas, he has enjoyed a prosperous second act as somewhat of a slugging journeyman, representing four different teams in the All-Star Game since his age-32 season. Of his 459 career home runs, 382 have come since his 30th birthday, trailing only Barry Bonds, Babe Ruth, Rafael Palmeiro, and Hank Aaron. Prior to last year, hadn’t posted a wOBA under .340 or wRC+ under 123 in nearly a decade.

And then came 2022, the type of year that would chase most veterans into retirement. In 124 games as the primary DH for the 55-win Nationals, Cruz’s prodigious power disappeared; his slugging percentage went from .497 to .337, his ISO dipped from .232 to .103, and his wRC+ fell from 123 to 85. Aside from a 22-game stretch in late May and early June during which he looked like prime (or 38-year-old) Cruz, hitting .418/.483/.633 in 90 plate appearances, he wasn’t able to offer much value at the plate. He battled inflammation in his left eye that was obscuring his vision, which he said had been a worsening problem for about a year and a half. He was ultimately shut down in mid-September, but instead of calling it quits, he had his eye surgically repaired and got back to work, most recently alongside 2022 AL batting champ Luis Arraez. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a busy offseason for the Angels, who have added to their superstar duo in Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani by trading for Gio Urshela and Hunter Renfroe, and signing Brandon Drury, Tyler Anderson, Carlos Estévez, and now Brett Phillips. Phillips has bounced around the league since his debut in 2017, maxing out at just 292 plate appearances in a season. In 2022, he spent time with the Rays and Orioles but was DFA’d by both and became a free agent. The 28-year old will earn $1.2 million in Anaheim this season.

Phillips is a baserunning and defensive specialist with some sneaky pop. To put it another way, he has struggled at the plate throughout his career and has never made it as a starting position player. While he was quite solid in 2021, slashing .206/.300/.427 with a 103 wRC+ (and a 138 wRC+ when he held the platoon advantage) and 2.3 WAR, that production was nowhere to be seen in ’22. In 900 career plate appearances, he holds a 71 wRC+, and his Steamer projection of 74 wRC+ suggests that’s what you should expect going forward.

Phillips’ biggest weakness at the plate is his struggle to put bat on ball. Over the past two seasons, he’s come up empty on over a third of his swings, ranking in just the third percentile of hitters during that timespan. His uppercut swing has a large hole up in the zone, where his whiff rates in that area approach 50%. While he doesn’t chase many pitches out of the zone, his approach at the plate is more passive than disciplined, as he also watches many pitches over the plate. The end result is that pitchers earn far more strikes against him compared to the average hitter; his 32.9% CSW ranks second-worst among all batters. Throughout his career, he has walked at an above-average 9.7% clip, but his enormous 37.8% strikeout rate makes Giancarlo Stanton look like Luis Arraez in comparison. And while many of his compatriots on the whiff rate leaderboard like Joey Gallo and Miguel Sanó have outlier raw power, Phillips has never hit a ball harder than 108 mph. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2022 AL Comeback Player of the Year Award went to Justin Verlander, but were it not for Verlander’s historic return from Tommy John surgery, the hardware could have gone to Johnny Cueto instead. In 2022, Cueto signed a minor league contract with the White Sox on Opening Day. There was little doubt he would eventually make the major league roster, but it was still telling that the former All-Star and Cy Young finalist was forced to sign a non-guaranteed deal. He hadn’t thrown a full season since 2016, and as he entered the back half of his 30s, the once great pitcher’s career seemed to be winding down.

The veteran right-hander went on to pitch 25 games for Chicago, tossing 158.1 innings with a 3.35 ERA and 2.4 WAR. Only two AL hurlers, Framber Valdez and Shane Bieber, averaged more innings per start (min. 100 IP). Best of all, Cueto kept off the injured list, and from his debut on May 16 through the end of the season, he never missed a start. As a reward for his bounce-back performance, he earned himself a big league contract with the Marlins worth $8.5 million. The deal comes with a $10.5 million team option for 2024 (or a $2.5 million buyout). Read the rest of this entry »