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 »

Hey, did you hear about the free agent who signed on Tuesday morning? Yeah, his name is Core… y Dickerson. So, yeah, not that free agent. Our deal is Corey Dickerson, to Washington, for one year and $2.25 million guaranteed, plus another $750,000 in performance incentives.

This is Dickerson’s third trip through the NL East since 2019, which is pretty enticing as a blind item, but then you realize that he was with the Phillies in 2019 but not ’22 and the Nats in 2023 but not ’19, and he missed the Mets and Braves altogether. That’s something of a theme for Dickerson’s career. He came up with the Rockies and was traded to the Rays in 2016, missing the two seasons in the past decade in which Colorado was good and having to sit through two of the last seasons in which Tampa Bay wasn’t.

But for as much as Dickerson has dodged playing for good teams for most of his career, he does have playoff experience, with the Marlins in 2020 and the Cardinals last year. He’s spent the past decade as an exemplar of a particular kind of player: a second-division starter who can be a meaningful platoon or bench player on a contender. That kind of player gets punted around a lot. Indeed, this will be Dickerson’s 11th big league season and his eighth team. He’s been traded in midseason twice and four times in total. (One of those trades was the deal that sent Germán Márquez and Jake McGee to Colorado in 2016.) Read the rest of this entry »

Ah, yes, another turn in the Carlos Correa saga. After agreeing to a deal with the Giants that fell apart and then agreeing to a deal with the Mets that hung in contract limbo for weeks, Correa is on the move again, back to where he started 2022. As Jeff Passan first reported, Correa and the Twins have agreed to a six-year, $200 million deal with vesting options that could boost the total payout to $270 million over 10 years.

By now you know Carlos Correa the player. He’s been one of the top free agents on the market for two years running, and he’s been one of the most prominent players in the game for half a decade. We’ve written about his free agency plenty of times already. But if you’d like a refresher, here it goes.

Correa has a well-rounded offensive game, the type of hitter you can plug into the middle of your order and not think twice about. He takes his walks and rarely strikes out. He does that not because he has an otherworldly batting eye, but rather because he has a solid sense of the zone and a good feel for contact. It also helps that opposing pitchers prefer to avoid the zone against him, owing to his comfortably plus power. He also plays solid shortstop defense, somewhere between plus and excellent depending on which scout or defensive metric you listen to. Put it all together, and he’s an All-Star level player every year when healthy. Read the rest of this entry »

While the Carlos Correa negotiations remain in a deadlock, the Blue Jays made (some) headlines yesterday by inking Brandon Belt to a one-year deal worth $9.6 million, per multiple sources. Belt, a longtime fixture of the Giants’ offense, is expected to play first base and serve as Toronto’s designated hitter. That means he’ll be sharing time with Vladimir Guerrero Jr. as well as Danny Jansen and Alejandro Kirk, who’ll likely take turns DH’ing to minimize their grueling workload as catchers.

At first, that arrangement doesn’t make immediate sense. What Guerrero, Jansen, and Kirk share in common besides their hatred of incoming baseballs is right-handedness, and righty batters are usually worse against righty pitchers. You might have reasoned that the Jays recruited the lefty-hitting Belt to shore up this particular weakness. But so far in their careers, the aforementioned trio hasn’t shown much of a vulnerability against same-handed pitching. Check out these splits:

So why did the Jays go out of their way to sign Belt? Some potential answers: It’s good to have diversity in a lineup; the Jays needed hitting depth; and Belt, regardless of handedness, is an intriguing rebound candidate. But I have another theory! The main reason why same-handed pitcher-batter matchups tend to end in embarrassment for the batter is because breaking balls are good — almost too good, as the league-wide imbalance between pitchers and batters demonstrates. Or just ask Max Scherzer, who throws his slider exclusively against right-handed hitters and eats them alive. It’s getting more and more important that teams are able to weather such breaking ball barrages. Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday, the Mariners were active. Most notably, they inked outfielder AJ Pollock to a one-year, $7 million contract, their largest guarantee of the offseason. Additionally, they swung their second trade with the Brewers this winter, acquiring reliever Justin Topa for fellow right-hander Joseph Hernandez.

While the M’s have been busy all offseason, highlighted by three significant trades prior to this one, no one move stands out as the “splash” fans may have been hoping for in order to build on the team’s drought-ending 2022 playoff run. Still, the club has added an estimated $23 million in payroll from a variety of sources, seeking to retool an already solid roster across multiple areas. Lately, left field and the bullpen have stood out as the largest holes, and Saturday’s two transactions move the Mariners closer to filling them.

Let’s start with left field and AJ Pollock. Last year, Mariners’ outfielders put up a 111 wRC+, which tied for fifth-best. But their overall performance was dragged down by a middling five Outs Above Average (OAA) mark, which placed them 11th in the majors. This winter, the M’s parted with Jesse Winker, their incumbent left fielder whose -10 OAA mark stood out as the sixth worst among all major league outfielders. Dealing him to the Brewers for Kolten Wong, Seattle also managed to shore up a second base need in the process — collectively, the M’s put up the majors’ third-worst WAR mark at the keystone last year — and the money just about evened out with the Brew Crew’s help. Read the rest of this entry »

The San Francisco Giants started their week off by announcing a new free agent signing: right-handed pitcher (and sometime Elliott Smith look-alike) Luke Jackson. And for a career middle reliever, it’s a pretty big commitment: $3 million in 2023, $6.5 million in ’24, and a club option for ’25 that will cost $7 million if exercised, $2 million if not. That’s a total guarantee of $11.5 million over two years.

Jackson, 31, was originally a Texas Rangers draft pick, but spent the past six seasons with the Braves. He was last seen among the vaunted bullpen that helped carry Atlanta to the 2021 World Series title. Jackson tied with Will Smith for the most appearances by an Atlanta reliever (71) and had the lowest ERA on the staff (1.98). He made 11 more appearances in the playoffs. Nine of those were scoreless; the other two (four earned runs in 1/3 of an inning in Game 3 of the NLCS; two batters faced, two doubles in Game 6 of the NLCS) were very much not.

You might have clued in to the fact that Jackson hasn’t pitched in a meaningful game since the 2021 World Series, which was more than a year ago. If so, congratulations on remembering that it’s 2023 now — lots of people are still struggling with that. But yes, Jackson had Tommy John surgery in April of last year. Based on normal rehabilitation times, it wouldn’t be shocking to see him pitch for the Giants at some point in 2023, but it would constitute a minor medical miracle if he were able to return for Opening Day. Read the rest of this entry »

When the ball dropped at midnight and 2022 turned into 2023, 29 of the 30 major league teams had signed at least one free agent, from the Mariners spending $1.2 million on Trevor Gott to the Mets agreeing to terms with seemingly every star player on the market. Even the penny-pinching Marlins brought in Jean Segura, and the A’s committed a respectable $34 million to four solid role players. Now, a few days into the new year, team no. 30 has joined the fray: the Brewers are bringing back left-handed pitcher Wade Miley on a one-year contract that will pay him $3.5 million with a $10 million mutual option for ’24 (with a $1 million buyout) and another $1.5 million in playing time incentives. In total, that guarantees him $4.5 million this season.

Formerly an innings eater who completed at least 190 frames every year from 2012 to ’15 with a 98 ERA-, Miley has battled injuries in each of 2018, ’20, and ’22. Last season, he was limited to just nine appearances with the Cubs as he dealt with elbow and shoulder issues. With that in mind, I’ll be looking at his performance in a limited 2022 campaign in conjunction with his full ’21 season, where he barely qualified for the leaderboards with 163 innings pitched. His stats were very similar in those two samples; he ran an ERA in the low-threes with far less inspiring peripherals and near equal numbers in the walk and strikeout departments. Read the rest of this entry »

When I wrote up the Cubs’ signing of Drew Smyly, I reflected on the… let’s call it uninspiring state of the rest of the roster. Plenty of solid players, little star power, little upside to speak of. For a putative big-market team with (as of the Smyly signing) a payroll almost $20 million under the luxury tax threshold, that’s an easy enough problem to solve early in the offseason. Less so now, when most of the quality free agents have already found employment for 2023. So at the end of the Smyly post, I made a joke: “Could they convince Cubs fans that Eric Hosmer is Anthony Rizzo with a beard and thicker eyebrows?”

Good news, everyone: There’s a new Rizzo in town, and his eyebrows are magnificent.

Jesse Rogers of ESPN reported Wednesday afternoon that the Cubs had, in fact, agreed to terms with Hosmer. Years ago, the 33-year-old first baseman was the first marquee signing of what became the current Padres’ run of contention, but on August 2 of last year, he was deemed surplus to requirements. As San Diego completed the Juan Soto–Josh Bell blockbuster, the Friars shipped Hosmer to Boston, and retained almost all of the $13 million a year left on his contract for the privilege of doing so. Hosmer, who will make that amount in each of the next three seasons, will only cost the Cubs the league minimum, Rogers reports. Read the rest of this entry »