Andrew Benintendi presents as a good table-setter option for the White Sox. Signed by Chicago’s American League entry on Friday, the no. 17 player on our 2023 Top 50 Free Agent rankings is a good fit for an underachieving team that could use better on-base percentages near the top of its lineup. While batting average-heavy Tim Anderson will presumably remain the leadoff hitter — this despite a career 3.6% walk rate and .316 OPB — someone who can consistently get on base in front of the thumpers can only help.

Benintendi had a better 2022 season than a lot of people realize. In 521 plate appearances split between the Kansas City Royals and the New York Yankees, the left-handed-hitting outfielder logged a 122 WRC+ — this despite a .399 SLG and only five home runs — which was a mere point lower than his career high. Matching that wRC+, as well as his .373 OBP, would be worth the reported five-year, $75 million deal.

Benintendi will turn 29 next July, so there is a real possibility that his best years are ahead of him. Cecil Cooper presents as a best-case comp. Through age 28, Cooper — a left-handed-hitting first baseman who established himself in Boston before playing two seasons in Milwaukee — had 73 home runs and a 116 wRC+ (Benintendi currently has 73 home runs and a 109 wRC+.) From age 29 through age 33, Cooper put up a 141 wRC+ with 123 home runs. Read the rest of this entry »

Like several other players from the 2018 World Series champion core of the Red Sox, J.D. Martinez has found himself wearing a different uniform in a new city. After finishing out his five-year contract with Boston, he has agreed to a one year, $10 million contract to be the Dodgers’ designated hitter and reunite with his former hitting coach Robert Van Scoyoc. That name might not ring a bell to you, but Martinez’s ascent as a hitter came after the work he did with Van Scoyoc before the 2014 season, when he officially broke out as a hitter with a 154 wRC+ with the Tigers. Martinez will also reunite with another teammate, Mookie Betts, whose work with Van Scoyoc led to a bit of a power breakout as well.

For Martinez, the reunion comes at a good time. After a big bounceback season in 2021 where he was hitting the ball consistently hard with a ton of success, his power took a significant step back. His hard-hit rate tailed off by about eight percentage points, his xwOBACON was his lowest in a full season with Boston, and he converted fewer of his fly balls into home runs. That amassed to a home run drop off from 28 to 16 despite only 38 fewer plate appearances. Martinez, being the extremely talented hitter he is, still put together a 119 wRC+, but that loss of thump at age 35 suggests that the downturn is coming. The hope for both him and the Dodgers is that some of that power and forceful impacting of the baseball can be recovered with Van Scoyoc.

The most glaring regression from 2021 to ’22 was in damage done in the heart of the plate. Looking at Martinez’s Statcast’s Swing Take profile, you can zero in on the run values in each area of the strike zone for any given hitter. Typically, hitters of his ilk will crush mistakes in the heart of the zone. In the simplest way possible, that is what it takes to a be a good big league hitter; pitchers will make mistakes, and you need to make them hurt.

What makes you special is if you can do anything in addition to that. Robert Orr of Baseball Prospectus has an informative piece about that exact topic. Basically, both good and great hitters do damage in the heart of the plate, but the difference between the two is that additional skill of crushing bad pitches. Martinez can’t expect to have sustained success if he is producing a -2 run value in the heart of the plate as he did in 2022. He needs to get closer to his +34 runs in 2021.

When breaking it down further between fastballs and breaking balls, we can get a little more insight into exactly what happened in the heart of the plate for Martinez. His swing rates stayed relatively the same on both pitch types, but the damage done on both varied; he was actually better on fastballs in the heart of the plate in 2022 (.442 wOBA) compared to 2021 (.390 wOBA) despite the overall downturn in production. Both those rates were well above the league average in each season.

The real issue here was only being pedestrian against breaking balls, with a .363 wOBA against them in the heart of the plate was only 15 points higher than the league average of .348. That was unlike Martinez; the path he creates with his swing is made to hit these pitches out of the park, or at least into the gaps. In four full seasons between 2017 and ’21, he hit 29 home runs on breakers in the heart of the plate and had a .502 wOBA; in 2022, though, he went deep just twice, with near-average production. No hitter needs to be excellent against breaking balls overall, but if a pitcher leaves a cookie over the middle of the plate and you can’t hit it, there is some cause for concern.

Will that be what Martinez works on? My guess: When he is in the cage, I think his focus will be on elongating his bat path further in front of the plate to pull breakers from left-center to the left field line, rather than strictly thinking about hitting breakers. There is a slight difference between the two.

Beyond that, it’s fascinating to think about the impact Martinez could have on his teammates. If you haven’t listened to him talk about hitting, then I strongly suggest you do. He is one of a handful of hitters in baseball who not only has an advanced level of understanding of swing mechanics, but can also communicate that understanding to others with words and visual assistance. That skill, while not seen in the box score, can make a huge difference when he has time to break down his video. But perhaps what is even more valuable about it is he can share his thoughts and knowledge with his teammates if they’re open to hearing it. Some that come to mind who might benefit from Martinez’s wisdom are Gavin Lux and Miguel Vargas. The former feels like he is close to a breakout, and the latter is a young, impressionable hitter looking for a shot to make him stick out among the rest of the Dodgers’ depth options.

Martinez’s approach to hitting is all about cleaning up bat path and swing mechanics rather than looking at a micro issue and trying to fix only that. By addressing the swing in general, those other problems should take of themselves. The good thing for him is that he is in the perfect place to do this now: with a team that gets hitting, and with the hitting coach who helped him dominate the AL East.

During the offseason, teams largely split into three groups. The first are the big spenders, teams that are aware of the holes on their roster and make aggressive efforts to patch them. Next are the more thrifty clubs, ones who dedicate themselves to marginal upgrades – signing a reliever here, a fourth outfielder there, often single-handedly dictating the market for the middle tier of free agents and below. Last are the window shoppers, who for some reason whiff on every single free agent despite having “tried their best.” That’s generally ownership-speak for “I don’t really wanna spend,” but I digress. The point is, teams are somewhat predictable, and the moves they make are indicative of their internal situation.

This offseason, the Red Sox have defied such categorization. As a big market team, it seemed they would focus on retaining their star shortstop (or at least replacing him with a similarly talented infielder) and bolstering their rotation. One month later, Xander Bogaerts is a San Diego Padre, and Boston has yet to add a starting pitcher; Nathan Eovaldi, who rejected a qualifying offer, remains in free agency limbo. These aren’t omissions typical of a team of their stature, which calls into question the Red Sox’s goals for next season and beyond.

Are they planning on tearing it down? That doesn’t seem likely, given that they signed Chris Martin and Kenley Jansen to two-year contracts. So are they a thrifty spender, intent on being neither a contender nor an intentionally terrible mess? Probably not, because they signed Masataka Yoshida to a deal that blew even the most optimistic projections out of the water. It’s confusing indeed. If I had to place the Red Sox into an offseason bucket, it’d be the throw-anything-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks group. Population: one. Read the rest of this entry »

They say murderers always return to the scene of the crime. Joseph Nicholas Gallo, murderer of baseballs, is the latest. Gallo’s one-year, $11 million deal with the Minnesota Twins brings the longtime Rangers slugger back to Target Field, site of the event that brought him to national baseball consciousness.

The weekend of the 2014 Futures Game, with the national scouting and media glitterati in attendance, Gallo put on a positively pyrotechnic batting practice display. For a good time, try Googling “Joey Gallo Truck Futures Game.” Gallo hit 15 home runs in BP that afternoon, the most of all the prospects on show. Six of those dingers went to the upper deck in right center field, and the gigantic 20-year-old put another through the windshield of a pickup truck Chevrolet had parked on the right field concourse as part of a marketing display.

Then he backed it up in the game, taking Astros prospect Michael Feliz deep — at least 419 feet — for the eventual game-winning home run. Gallo took home MVP honors for himself.

Read the rest of this entry »

Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: the Detroit Tigers signed a veteran starting pitcher with (a) experience as a reliever and (b) a troubling injury history to a single-year deal worth (up to) $10 million. Two weeks after signing 31-year-old Matthew Boyd to such a contract, the Tigers came to terms with soon-to-be 31-year-old Michael Lorenzen on a similar deal. Lorenzen will make $8.5 million guaranteed, with the chance to earn an additional $1.5 million in performance incentives.

One year and $8.5 to $10 million is just what you’d expect for Lorenzen, who was worth 1.0 WAR last season and projects to be worth another 1.0 WAR (per Steamer) in 2023. When he was on the mound, he was a league-average starter in 2022, with a 4.24 ERA and a 4.31 FIP. Unfortunately, a shoulder strain kept him out for two months in the middle of the year. He has yet to prove he can last a full season in a starting role.

Lorenzen was a closer in college, but the Cincinnati Reds saw his potential as a starter and stretched him out as such. Then he struggled in the role in his rookie season, and after an elbow injury kept him out for much of his sophomore campaign, he returned to the bullpen. Not one to be easily discouraged, Lorenzen advertised his services as a starting pitcher when he reached free agency last winter. The Angels took him up on his offer and invited him to join their six-man rotation for the 2022 season. It was a good landing spot for a pitcher who had barely worked as a starter since 2015:

The Angels did not, however, take Lorenzen up on his other offer: in addition to starting ballgames, he wanted regular plate appearances and reps in the outfield. He had not been a two-way player since 2019, when he played 89 innings in the outfield and hit .208/.283/.313. One might have thought the Angels were the perfect team to give him that opportunity, but in hindsight, it was a bit of a pipe dream. The Angels entered the season with a strong outfield alignment of Mike Trout, Taylor Ward, and Brandon Marsh, and they certainly didn’t have any at-bats to spare at DH. By the time Trout was injured and Marsh was traded, Lorenzen was wasting away on the injured list.

As it turns out, focusing on one aspect of his game was the smartest choice for Lorenzen, and the man himself seems to agree. “Now that I am a starter, I’m pretty happy about that,” he told the Orange County Register in April. “Of course, if they want me to hit, I’m willing to do it, but it’s not something that I’m fighting for.”

After years spent mainly in the bullpen, Lorenzen made 18 starts in 2022 and looked more than capable while doing so. By WAR, it was the second-best season of his career. Any time he might have spent training at the plate would only have taken away from time spent refining his pitch repertoire.

To that point, Lorenzen clearly put a great deal of work into his pitches this season. Back in April, Jake Mailhot wrote about Lorenzen’s return to the starting rotation and how he was adjusting his repertoire to find success. Yet Lorenzen wasn’t done making changes – not even close. His pitch mix morphed as the season continued, and many of the adjustments Jake wrote about completely disappeared. The sinker, Lorenzen’s most-thrown pitch in April, became less and less of a factor. By the end of the year, he was using it only 8% of the time. His slider, meanwhile, lost about four inches of horizontal movement from April to September. The first clip here is from April 18, while the second is from September 9:

Lorenzen’s primary pitches also changed throughout the year. From April to June, his go-to offering against left-handed batters was the four-seam fastball, but his changeup earned a bigger role as the year progressed. By September, he was throwing the change to lefties nearly half the time:

Similarly, his sinker was his primary pitch against righties early on, but his slider overtook it by season’s end:

Lorenzen also vastly reduced his cutter usage and adding in a curveball. Until September, he had thrown just five curveballs all year. Over his final five starts, he threw 30. As for his individual pitches, Lorenzen added spin to every one of his offerings throughout the season, and he also started throwing a noticeably slower changeup. All this to say, late-season Lorenzen was a vastly different pitcher than his early-season counterpart. He changed his approach, and he had better outings as a result:

Lorenzen did well to concentrate on his pitching in 2022. He saw especially positive results in September, and he’ll look to build upon that success in a healthy 2023 season. It’s probably best if he continues to resist the call of the bat – even if he has a much better chance of cracking the lineup with his new team. Lorenzen’s career OPS (small sample size warning) is higher than the Steamer projections for half of Detroit’s starting lineup:

It’s funny that I find myself advocating against Lorenzen, the two-way player. I promise I’m not anti-fun! In fact, I was inspired to write about him in the first place precisely because of his experience on both sides of the ball. A little part of me was hoping to find an argument that might compel him to pick up the bat once again. However, the more I learned about his 2022 season, the more invested I became in Lorenzen, the one-way player. He spent the year altering his approach and refining his individual pitches, and the season ended before we could tell if he found a pitch mix to stick with.

That being the case, I look forward to watching his development continue into 2023. With the Tigers, Lorenzen should have a low-stress environment to tinker, adjust, and grow as a starting pitcher. If he’s happy with the approach he took in September, I’m interested to see how it plays out over a full season. And if he isn’t done adjusting, I’m excited to keep up with whatever changes he makes next.

Why would you want to add a top-tier shortstop in free agency? I can think of plenty of reasons. Maybe you lost just such a player to free agency this offseason; after all, for every star reaching free agency, there’s a team that employed them in 2022 and now has a hole at the position. Maybe you want to improve a team that’s solid elsewhere but has room to improve at shortstop; the Phillies fit that description exactly and snagged Trea Turner earlier this month. Maybe your plan to promote a top prospect is starting to feel risky; if Aaron Judge had left New York, the Yankees might have replaced some of his production in the form of a slugging shortstop.

Or maybe your team just wants to get better and spend more money to do so. For example:

BREAKING: Cubs and Dansby Swanson have an agreement on a seven-year deal for $177 million, per source. https://t.co/9cmtK9mLzL

— Kiley McDaniel (@kileymcd) December 17, 2022

The Cubs weren’t close to contention in 2022, going 74–88 with underlying numbers that largely agreed with that assessment of their talent. They have interesting players on the major league roster and promising prospects nearing major league debuts, but even if several of those situations worked out, there’s a meaningful gap between 74 wins and the 93 the Cardinals posted to win the division. Heck, there’s a meaningful gap between 74 and 86, the mark the Brewers hit in a down year for them. If Chicago wanted to compete in 2023, it couldn’t sit pat. Read the rest of this entry »

The Orioles made a low-key signing Thursday evening, inking second baseman Adam Frazier to a one-year, $8 million contract. Frazier struggled in 2022 after being acquired by the Mariners last fall for two minor leaguers, Corey Rosier and Ray Kerr. After a .305/.368/.411, 3.6 WAR season in 2021 that looked as if he had established a new level of play, he spent much of this past season in a fight with the .600 OPS line, a battle from which he narrowly proved victorious.

Frazier will take over as Baltimore’s starting second baseman; the main draw for his service is that he was a bit less disappointing in 2022 than the incumbent second baseman, current free agent Rougned Odor. In that light, one could make an argument that this signing represents an incremental improvement at a reasonable cost. I’m not entirely convinced of this. The O’s don’t start 2023 with the same in-house options as they did last spring, as Gunnar Henderson’s meteoric rise gives them another infielder, and one with massive upside. So the question is whether Frazier is actually much of an upgrade, if at all, over the players who would have likely received playing time at second otherwise.

To get an idea if 2022 or 2021 are closer to some abstract concept of Frazier’s “true” ability, let’s start with the ZiPS projection for him in 2023.

The good news is that Frazier is projected to bounce back somewhat to league-average levels of play. Steamer is generally in the same neighborhood, though it likes his bat a bit more and his defense a bit less. Alas, his projected rebound season is closer to ’22 than ’21, no doubt in large part because some of the fuel powering the latter was a BABIP more than 30 points better than his career average, as well as the fact that he just celebrated his 31st birthday a couple of days ago. Read the rest of this entry »

The Cubs added to their bullpen on Thursday, signing veteran journeyman Brad Boxberger to a one-year deal with a mutual option for a total guaranteed value of $2.8 million. The 34-year-old right-hander is coming off an effective stint just up I-94 in Milwaukee, where he served as a reliable middle-innings complement to Devin Williams and Josh Hader for the bulk of two seasons after signing as a minor league free agent in spring training of 2021. In those two campaigns, he made 141 appearances, posting a 3.15 ERA, a 3.61 FIP, 10.56 K/9, and 1.5 WAR. Despite his effectiveness with the Brewers, Milwaukee declined to bring him back on a $3 million team option last month, and instead he’ll join a young Chicago bullpen that could use some help after ranking 28th out of 30 bullpens in 2022 in WAR, 25th in situational wins, and second in blown saves.

Thanks to the circumstances of his contracts, Boxberger will end up with a higher guarantee moving forward than he would have if the Brewers had picked up his extra year. According to president of baseball operations Matt Arnold, Boxberger was exposed to waivers and went unclaimed prior to Milwaukee’s decision, which told him that “the market did not value him at the level of the option value.” After they declined, Boxberger was issued a $750,000 buyout and signed for a guarantee of just $200,000 less than the option value, giving him an effective guarantee of over $3.5 million. The structure of his new deal fits the Cubs’ somewhat recent signature of a one-year deal with an unlikely mutual option, giving him a base salary of $2 million in 2023 with an $800,000 buyout on a $5 million dollar mutual option for 2024. Read the rest of this entry »

Nine down, one to go. The 2022 free-agent signing period has been fast and furious. When Carlos Correa signed with the Giants earlier this week, he was the eighth of my top 10 free agents to sign. That breakneck pace hasn’t slowed. On Thursday night, Carlos Rodón and the Yankees agreed to a six-year, $162 million contract, as Jon Heyman first reported.

I pre-wrote some words on Rodón as a player, so let’s get to those before discussing the broader context of his signing. He’s a fascinating story, and yet simultaneously a very straightforward pitcher. He throws an overpowering fastball. He throws an overpowering slider. He throws them both very hard, and with solid accuracy. It sounds almost too simple, but both pitches are spectacular, and they pair well together. He’s going to throw them; the question is whether batters can hit them.

For the past two years, the answer has been a resounding no. In 2021, you could convince yourself it was just a hot streak. Rodón missed most of 2019 and ’20 due to injury, and he’d been roughly league average before that. The peripherals were excellent, and the pedigree was there — he was the third overall pick in the 2014 draft after a standout college career at North Carolina State — but he was a two-pitch pitcher with health concerns and one excellent season. To make matters worse, he looked fatigued at the end of the season — reasonably so given his workload increase — and lost fastball velocity until regaining it in the playoffs. The White Sox declined to issue him a qualifying offer, and he signed what was essentially a high-class prove-it deal with the Giants: two years and $44 million, with an opt out after the first year. Read the rest of this entry »

Despite trailing only the Mets in payroll last season, the Dodgers inked just their second eight-figure contract of the offseason Wednesday night. Noah Syndergaard and his one-year, $13 million pact will join the returning Clayton Kershaw (on a one-year, $20 million deal) in shoring up a rotation that has said goodbye to breakouts Tyler Anderson and Andrew Heaney.

Enduring the losses of Anderson and Heaney means the Dodgers will have to rely more heavily on a number of pitchers with health concerns. Julio Urías, whose 2.16 ERA came out just above Tony Gonsolin’s 2.14 mark, is the only Dodgers starter to have thrown at least 175 innings in each of the past two years; Urías was himself a non-factor for two years after having anterior capsule surgery on his left shoulder in 2017. As for Gonsolin, owner of the rotation’s lowest 2022 ERA, he suffered a forearm strain in late August; he would go on to pitch just 3.1 innings the rest of the year, including the playoffs. Relegated to mid-rotation duty now, Kershaw hasn’t appeared in 30 games since 2015 and in the past two seasons hasn’t topped 22. Dustin May, Tommy John returnee, was only in the rotation for six turns this summer before landing on the shelf again, this time with a back issue. And now the player formerly known as Thor will round things out. Read the rest of this entry »