With a 115 wRC+, the 2024 Orioles were the best offensive team in franchise history, outperforming even the most dominant Baltimore lineups from the 1960s, 70s, and 80s. Their 115 wRC+ was also good for second in the AL last season, trailing only their pennant-winning division rivals in New York. A couple thousand miles away, the Diamondbacks also finished with a best-in-franchise-history 115 wRC+. That wRC+ was good for second in the National League, trailing only Arizona’s World Series-winning division rivals in Los Angeles. How’s that for symmetry?

On Tuesday, the Birds and the Snakes continued to parallel one another, at least as far as their lineups are concerned. In the afternoon, the Orioles announced they had signed righty-batting outfielder Ramón Laureano, reportedly to a one-year, $4 million deal. Not long after, the D-backs confirmed they had re-signed righty-batting outfielder Randal Grichuk, reportedly for one year and $5 million guaranteed. Both deals also come with options for 2026. Laureano’s is a $6.5 million team option, while Grichuk’s is a $5 million mutual option with a $3 million buyout. His salary for 2025 is technically only $2 million, with that buyout making up the rest of his $5 million guarantee. There was a time when both Laureano and Grichuk were promising, multi-talented, everyday players. These days, however, they’ve each become role players with two primary jobs: handle a part-time gig in the outfield and hit well against left-handed pitching. That should be exactly what the Orioles and Diamondbacks ask them to do in 2025. Read the rest of this entry »

Hello, and welcome to another installment of Transaction Analysis: Reliever Roundup Edition. Would you like to start with a joke? What’s that? You’re foaming at the mouth because the thought of starting with a joke is so exciting that you’ve lost all control of your bodily functions? I’m so glad we’re on the same page. Here we go:

Knock, knock.

Ok, now this is where you say: Who’s there? Great job.

The left-handed middle reliever with a fastball that averages just under 91 mph, who put up 0.5 WAR last season and on Tuesday signed a one-year, $3 million deal to return to his old team in his age-35 season.

Alright, now say it with me: Which one?

Thank you for your help. I think we nailed it. On Tuesday, Jon Heyman of the New York Post reported that Danny Coulombe, who spent the 2020-2022 seasons with the Twins, had agreed to return to Minnesota. Bobby Nightengale of the Minnesota Star-Tribune reported that the deal is for one year and a $3 million. Shortly thereafter, ESPN’s Jeff Passan announced that Tim Hill, who joined the Yankees in June 2024, would be returning to the Bronx on a $2.5 million deal, plus a $3 million club option for 2026 with a $350,000 buyout clause. Wait, I probably shouldn’t have explained the joke.

Tim Hill

Starting with New York, the Yankees really needed Hill back. He’s the only left-handed pitcher in their bullpen. During the team’s 2024 World Series run, he ran a 1.08 ERA over 10 appearances and 8 1/3 innings. The team’s only other left-handed relievers were Tim Mayza, who threw 2 1/3 innings and is now a Pirate, and Nestor Cortes, who is famously a starter, certainly didn’t look comfortable in his two postseason relief appearances, and is now a Brewer.

Hill is also coming off the best stretch of his career. He started the 2024 season with the White Sox, running a 5.87 ERA over 27 appearances before being released in June. The Yankees signed him two days later, and he finished the season with a 2.05 ERA over 44 innings and 34 appearances. What was different in New York? For starters, a decent bit of luck. Hill allowed a .436 BABIP in Chicago and a .238 BABIP in New York. However, the Yankees also made some drastic changes to Hill’s pitch mix. After arriving in New York, he drastically reduced his four-seamer usage and ditched his slider almost entirely.

Hill doesn’t miss bats and he doesn’t miss the plate, which means tons of balls in play. He’s a true side-armer with an arm angle of -20 degrees, and in September and October, he leaned (even further) into that identity, throwing his sinker 80% of the time, his four-seamer 18% of the time, and his slider just 2% of the time. Although batters made louder contact than they had during his time in Chicago, Hill’s already huge groundball rate rose to 70% with the Yankees. He allowed 117 groundballs and just 18 fly balls; in seven of his 35 regular season appearances, every single ball in play that he surrendered was a grounder. You have to imagine the Yankees are hoping to run that strategy right back, encouraging Hill to lean on the sinker and let opponents beat the ball into the ground for as long as it works.

Danny Coulombe

Coulombe returns to the Twins after two seasons with the Orioles, and the need he fills is every bit as dire. The only other lefties the Twins have are Brent Headrick, who has three big league innings to his name, and Kody Funderburk, who ran a 6.49 ERA in 2024. RosterResource doesn’t have Headrick or Funderburk in their projected bullpen. As you might recall, the Minnesota bullpen’s 4.89 ERA in the second half was the third worst in baseball and a major reason that the team crashed out of playoff contention (though it’s worth noting that the bullpen’s 3.72 xFIP was actually seventh best). The need is more general, however, as Coulombe is the only player the Twins have signed to a major league deal this offseason. If that sounds somewhat familiar, you could be thinking of the trade deadline, during which time Minnesota was battling for its life and made just one move, trading for reliever Trevor Richards. To put it bluntly, this is an infuriating time to be a Twins fan.

It’s hard to know exactly what to expect from Coulombe. He has a long track record of excellence, with a 2.69 ERA over the last five seasons, 2.92 during his three seasons in Minnesota and 2.56 during his two in Baltimore. However, he’s only thrown 130 1/3 major league innings over that period, an average of just 26 per season. In 2024, Coulombe was running a 2.42 ERA and 2.86 FIP when his season was stopped in its tracks in June for surgery to remove bone chips from his elbow. He returned to make four scoreless appearances in September, but his fastball velocity dropped to just below 89 mph. The Orioles let him walk rather than pick up a $4 million option. It’s hard to imagine the Twins signing him without feeling secure in the knowledge that his velocity would bounce back up to the 91-92 range, but it’s certainly something to watch for as the season starts. Coloumbe also spent most of the 2022 season on the injured list due to a hip impingement and missed time with biceps tendonitis in 2023. Health will be a major factor in determining whether the one major league signing the Twins have made this offseason actually has an impact.

There’s also some question about just what kind of pitcher Coulombe will be with the Twins. Upon joining the Orioles in 2023, Coulombe traded his slider for a sweeper with an extra eight inches of horizontal break, ditched his changeup entirely, and introduced a cutter that replaced his four-seamer as his most-used pitch. In 2024, Coulombe threw either the cutter or the sweeper nearly 60% of the time. If there’s one thing the Twins love, it’s a four-seamer – they’ve finished in the top four in four-seamer percentage in each of the last three seasons – so it will be interesting to see whether they encourage Coulombe to stick with what worked for him in Baltimore, or get him to return to what, you know, worked for him in Minnesota.

That’s the tricky thing about Coulombe; his performance has been consistent while his availability has been anything but. Every pitcher presents some level of injury risk, and Coulombe’s stuff and profile make him not just a great fit for Minnesota, but a desperately needed addition. All the same, if the team is really only going to make one addition, might it have been wiser to choose a safer option?

A key piece of the 2024 Detroit Tigers reunited with the team on Sunday, as starting pitcher Jack Flaherty signed a two-year deal worth $35 million. Flaherty excelled for the Tigers last year, putting up a 2.95 ERA and a 3.12 FIP in 106 2/3 innings over 18 starts, good for 2.1 WAR. With the Tigers seemingly out of the playoff race in July, he was shipped to the Dodgers, with whom he won the World Series. He was respectable over 10 regular-season starts with Los Angeles, but his performance was decidedly mixed in the postseason.

Like many short-term contracts for solid players, this deal comes with its own ifs, ands, and buts. Flaherty’s guaranteed money is front-loaded, structured as a one-year, $25 million deal with a player option for $10 million in 2026 that increases to $20 million if he starts 15 games in 2025. Whether one sees the deal as a two-year contract with an opt-out or a one-year contract with a player option is a “potato, po-tah-to” issue that really doesn’t matter here; in this case, they’re the same functional thing.

What does matter is that Flaherty’s market appears to not have developed as much as that of some of the other top pitchers available. While it shouldn’t raise an eyebrow that Blake Snell and Corbin Burnes got much bigger contracts, Flaherty also received a lighter deal than Sean Manaea, Nathan Eovaldi, and Luis Severino. While Flaherty didn’t miss any significant time due to injury last year — he skipped only a single start with lower back pain in July — questions about his back were enough for the Yankees to have second thoughts about trading for him at the deadline. The Dodgers were happy enough to acquire him, and though his strikeout rate dropped off (32% to 26%), he was certainly a net plus for an injury-thinned starting staff down the stretch. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s get this out of the way at the start: The Mariners are pretty good. Their starting pitching is incredible, and some projections systems even think they have a top-10 offense. This is not a Pirates situation, where a core led by Paul Skenes on a league-minimum contract is somehow projected to finish well under .500. In Seattle, the pieces are almost all there. Sadly for fans, “almost all there” might well define this era of Mariners baseball.

The latest expression of Seattle’s complacency came last week, when the team brought back Jorge Polanco on a one year, $7.75 million contract. (The deal is pending a physical.) According to a report from Adam Jude at the Seattle Times, Polanco’s signing means the “Mariners’ roster is effectively set.” For those counting at home, $3.5 million for 37-year-old Donovan Solano, a trade for Austin Shenton, and the Polanco deal represent the entirety of Seattle’s offseason roster upgrades. The Mariners missed the playoffs by one game in 2023 and 2024; they missed it by two games in 2021. They are always good but never great. And the team — or at least ownership — appears totally fine with that. Read the rest of this entry »

Max Scherzer is heading north of the border. On the heels of an injury-marred season, the three-time Cy Young winner agreed to a one-year, $15.5 million contract with the Blue Jays on Thursday. The deal is still pending a physical, no trivial matter for a 40-year-old pitcher who was limited to nine starts in 2024.

Scherzer spent the last season and change with the Rangers after being acquired from the Mets ahead of the 2023 trade deadline, and the past three seasons on a three-year, $130 million contract that set a record for the highest average annual value for a pitcher. This time around it’s former Tigers and Mets teammate Justin Verlander, whose subsequent two-year, $86.67 million deal with New York matched Scherzer’s AAV, more or less setting the market for over-40 future Hall of Famers coming off injury plagued seasons for AL West teams. He signed a one-year, $15 million deal with the Giants earlier this month.

The Rangers didn’t get much out of Scherzer, whose time in Texas added up to just 17 regular season and three postseason starts interrupted by five separate trips to the injured list. That count doesn’t even include his being replaced on the World Series roster after leaving Game 3 with back spasms. Fortunately for the Rangers, they wrapped up their win over the Diamondbacks in five games, nipping in the bud any what-might-have-beens regarding Scherzer missing a potential Game 7 start. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a quiet winter in the AL Central. After Michael Wacha signed an extension at the beginning of the offseason, the division’s five teams combined to add only one deal worth more than $20 million in guaranteed money; that was Shane Bieber’s surgery-affected pillow contract with the Guardians. Now, finally, we can add another to the ledger, courtesy of the Royals. On Wednesday, they signed Carlos Estévez to a two-year, $22.2 million deal with a club option tacked on the end, as ESPN’s Jeff Passan first reported.

The Royals came into the winter looking for relief help. It’s not the only place their roster needed a glow-up – even after trading for Jonathan India, they could still use another bat or two, especially in the corner outfield – but the bullpen was also a particular area of need. Last year’s Royals made the playoffs on the back of pitching, but their starters were the ones doing the heavy lifting, not their relievers. Deadline acquisition Lucas Erceg was the best of the group by a large margin, and John Schreiber was the only other reliever with impressive full-season numbers.

It’s not so much that a team can’t make the playoffs with such a thin bullpen – obviously, the Royals did. But they did it by the skin of their teeth at 86-76, and that despite spectacular seasons from Cole Ragans, Seth Lugo, and Wacha. Counting on those three to combine for 94 starts, 12.9 WAR, and ERAs in the low 3.00s across the board again would be wishful thinking. Additionally, they no longer have last year’s fourth starter Brady Singer, who was Cincinnati’s return in the India trade.

The 2024 bullpen finished last in baseball in shutdowns – appearances that increased win probability by six percentage points or more – and fifth worst in win probability added. Those are outcome statistics, not process ones, but the process statistics weren’t exactly pretty either. Kansas City was middle of the pack in WAR (3.6), 20th in ERA (4.13), 26th in K-BB% (12.0%). It’s not just that this team didn’t have a “true closer” – its bullpen was light on contributors from top to bottom. Read the rest of this entry »

Y’know that point in the last few rounds of every fantasy football draft when kickers and defenses start flying off the board? We’ve reached the MLB offseason version of that, when teams start making sure their bullpens are composed of relievers more akin to Brandon Aubrey than the Panthers’ defense. With the rush on relief pitching officially on, the Tigers and Mets both agreed to one-year deals with right-handed, back of the ‘pen types on Wednesday. Detroit signed Tommy Kahnle at a salary of $7.75 million for 2025, while New York guaranteed Ryne Stanek $4.5 million for his services this year, with another $500,000 available in incentives.

In 2024, Detroit’s starters threw 753 innings, while the team’s relievers nearly matched that number with 694 innings — a league-best mark for innings thrown among major league bullpens. Maintaining success while covering such a large quantity of innings is tricky business. “One of our great strengths last year was our ability to throw different looks at hitters and try to limit the number of times a hitter saw the same type of look or shape or slot in a given series.” Tigers GM Scott Harris told reporters after the Kahnle signing, “Tommy gives us a look we didn’t have.”

Alongside Kahnle, the main characters in the Tigers bullpen are likely to be right-handers Jason Foley, Beau Brieske, and Will Vest, with Tyler Holton, Sean Guenther, and Brant Hurter making up the left-handed contingent. Foley and Holton handled most of the late-inning, high-leverage work last year, with Vest and Brieske next in line to get crucial outs. Now Kahnle offers an additional option in close-game scenarios. And as one would expect from such a bullpen-reliant team, a full cast of contributors sits waiting in the wings, be they starters asked to handle a long relief role, such as Matt Manning, Ty Madden, and Kenta Maeda, or minor leaguers with options and big league experience, such as Brenan Hanifee and Alex Lange (who is working his way back from a season-ending lat injury). Read the rest of this entry »

Well, I did not see that one coming. After four years with the Padres, shortstop Ha-Seong Kim is headed to the Rays.

On Wednesday afternoon, ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported that Kim and Tampa Bay have agreed to a two-year, $29 million deal with an opt out after the first year (because opting out after the second year would just be silly). Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times followed with more details: Kim will make $13 million in 2025 (with an additional $2 million in incentives), then $16 million in 2026 if he doesn’t opt out. And because it’s paramount that we spread the scoops around as generously as possible, The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal quickly chimed in with his own news that Kim is expected to return in May from the shoulder injury that cut his 2024 season short. Let’s start with my own personal ignominy, and then we can dive into the details.

So last week I wrote something like 2,000 words about where Kim might end up. I didn’t even give Tampa Bay a full sentence. In one breath, in passing, I dismissed the Rays, Pirates, and White Sox as unlikely to spend that kind of money. That’s my bad, but also it begs a question. Why is Kim set to spend at least one season at exotic George Steinbrenner Field? For starters, the money isn’t quite what we expected. This is a pillow contract, and a discounted one at that. If Kim plays well, he’ll opt out again and go hunting for the dollars he deserves. If things go wrong, 2026 will be his platform year. For those twin security blankets, he accepted an average annual value that’s significantly below not just our $18.5 million crowdsourced estimate, but the $20 million that Ben Clemens predicted for him. (To be fair, Ben did nail the possibility of a two-year contract with an opt-out.) Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re a team looking for a bounce-back corner outfielder with a league-average bat, your search just got a little bit harder. On Monday, Jon Heyman reported that the Orioles had signed Dylan Carlson to a one-year, $975,000 deal, and on Tuesday, Ken Rosenthal reported that the Reds had signed former Oriole Austin Hays to his own one-year, $5 million deal. Both players were selected in the 2016 draft, both players got traded at the deadline only to be non-tendered after the season, and both players are projected to put up a wRC+ somewhere between 93 and 102 in 2025. In a reflection of the uncertainty surrounding Carlson, a $25,000 incentive will raise his salary to a cool million if he reaches 200 plate appearances in Baltimore. Hays’ deal has its own $1 million in incentives, but the terms have not yet been reported. These are two small-risk, small-reward moves, but context is key. The way we look at them depends a whole lot on the needs of the respective teams. Hays has more upside, but he’s joining a Cincinnati team that needs way more than a small reward in order to be a contender. Carlson has a much trickier path to playing time, but he makes sense as a depth piece in Baltimore.

Let’s start with Hays, who has a history of big league success under his belt and a much bigger role to play in 2025. Despite a strained calf, he managed to put up a 104 wRC+ with the Orioles in 2024. After a deadline trade to the Phillies, however, a hamstring strain and a debilitating kidney infection that went undiagnosed for weeks kept him to 85 wRC+ down the stretch, with zero walks in 80 plate appearances. Rather than keep Hays for an estimated $6.4 million in his last year of arbitration, the Phillies non-tendered him. Until the infection, Hays had been very consistent (and consistently average).

From 2021-23, Hays played at least 131 games each year while posting a wRC+ between 106 and 112. A hot start to the 2023 season even earned him his first All-Star nod. Going forward, however, his defensive limitations are going to keep him in left field and, in all likelihood, just below the 2.0-WAR mark, even if his bat bounces all the way back. There’s no doubt that his pull-side power and lack of range make him better suited for Cincinnati’s form-fitting left field than the blousy Baltimore outfield he’s used to. Still, Hays is entering his age-29 season, and while he could easily explode for 30 home runs in his cozy new environs, it’s hard to imagine him surpassing his career-high 2.5 WAR from 2023.

What does Hays do for Cincinnati’s depth chart? Assuming he gets plugged in as the left fielder, he moves Spencer Steer back to the infield. With Jonathan India in Kanas City, the Reds were in serious danger of merely having too many infielders rather than their usual way, way too many. However, now that Steer can rejoin Elly De La Cruz, Matt McLain, Jeimer Candelario, Christian Encarnacion-Strand, and newcomer Gavin Lux on the dirt, this infield is even more crowded than it was before the India trade. If Hays goes back to hitting like he’s capable of hitting, he could represent an upgrade in left field — not nearly enough to make the Reds look like more than a .500 ball club, but still an upgrade. If he does anything less, he will blend right into the bottom half of a Reds lineup that Dan Szymborski recently christened, “a giant bucket of ‘meh.’”

Turning our attention to Baltimore, it’s probably too late to keep dreaming on Dylan Carlson. Nonetheless, this move makes a lot of sense both for him and the Orioles. Carlson was a first-round draft pick by the Cardinals in 2016, and he eventually rose to 16th on our top 100 prospects list. He struggled in his 2020 debut — though he got hot enough down the stretch that the Cardinals batted him cleanup in their three-game Wild Card Series loss to the Padres — but put up a promising full-season campaign in 2021. That season, he batted .266/.343/.437 with 18 home runs and a 111 wRC+ across 149 games, good for 2.4 WAR and a third-place finish in the Rookie of the Year voting. And then he plunged into a spiral of injury and underperformance. He made two trips to the injured list in both 2022 and 2023 for four separate injuries; he missed a combined 29 days in 2022 with a hamstring strain and a thumb strain, and then in 2023, an ankle sprain and an oblique strain cost him a total of 76 days. While he was out with the oblique strain, he underwent season-ending arthroscopic surgery on the same ankle he’d sprained earlier that year. During spring training in 2024, he sprained the AC joint in his left shoulder in an outfield collision with human mountain Jordan Walker. That injury kept him out for the first 38 days of the season.

Carlson put up an xwOBA between .301 and .322 in every season between 2020 and 2023, and a DRC+ between 97 and 104 in every season between 2021 and 2023. When he returned from that shoulder injury, he wasn’t himself. If you don’t count his 35-game rookie season in 2020, Carlson’s 2024 season featured career worsts in walk rate, strikeout rate, contact rate, all three slash line stats, all the wOBAs, hard-hit rate, and, just for good measure, all the advanced defensive stats. He ended the season with a 67 wRC+, .209 batting average, -7 fielding runs, and -1.0 WAR. The Cardinals traded him to the Rays at the deadline, and the Rays non-tendered him after the season rather than pay him a couple million dollars in arbitration. Now, the Orioles have decided that they like him better than the $975,000 they used to have.

The projections see Carlson bouncing back to the league-average bat he was over the first four years of his career, and that’s presumably what the Orioles are expecting. However, let’s take just a moment to dream. We don’t know how much speed and power Carlson would have if he were to finally have the chance at a full, healthy season. His zone swing rate and contact rate plummeted in 2024, and you have to imagine that had something to do with his physical limitations at the plate. Over the course of his career, he’s got a solid .330 wOBA against fastballs, but Statcast puts his run value against them at -17, which speaks to an approach issue. He takes too many fastballs and whiffs at way too many fastballs, but when he hits them, he has a great deal of success. So why isn’t he looking for them more often?

Between Cedric Mullins, Tyler O’Neill, and Colton Cowser, the Orioles have a starting outfield. Between Heston Kjerstad, Daz Cameron, Jorge Mateo, and now Carlson, they have plenty of backups too, and because they’re loaded with infielders, they probably don’t have enough roster spots to keep all of them in Baltimore. The switch-hitting Carlson still has three options left, and it would make plenty of sense to see how he looks during spring training, keep him far away from any particularly mountainous teammates, and let him try to figure things out in Norfolk to start the season.

Carlson is now far removed from his days as a top prospect, but he’s still only 26 and has only once reached 500 plate appearances in a season. He’s always run solid chase and walk rates, and he showed a renewed ability to pull the ball in the air last season. The Orioles are on a pretty great run when it comes to developing young hitters. This seems like a low-risk move for them and a good landing spot for Carlson. Even if all he does is bounce back to being a league-average hitter and an average left fielder, that’s makes him a useful depth piece for a contending team.

Here’s a sentence that you probably didn’t expect to see a few years ago: The Pittsburgh Pirates were one of the most exciting teams of 2024. They had the Rookie of the Year and an instant contender for best pitcher in baseball in Paul Skenes. Jared Jones was electric. They’re chock full of young hitting prospects. And let’s reiterate: Paul Skenes!

As you might expect, the Pirates hit this offseason with some momentum. It’s hard to find superstars, but Skenes is one of the best five pitchers on the planet, and honestly, I think he might be the best, period. This is the type of winter that lends itself to going for it. The hype will likely never be greater. Add a star or two around Skenes, fill out the bottom of the lineup, and this team could win a weak NL Central. Come playoff time, no one in the world would want to face the Pirates. So it’s with some remorse that I announce their latest signings. On Monday, lefty reliever Tim Mayza agreed to a one-year, $1.15 million contract; on Tuesday, utilityman Adam Frazier followed suit with a one-year, $1.525 million pact.

Frazier was a fun story the last time he was on the Pirates. In the depths of their despair, he was a rare burst of energy, Luis Arraez before Arraez hit the big time. He rarely struck out, rarely hit homers, and caused chaos by putting the ball in play even without blazing speed. Heck, he even drew a nice trade return when the Pirates sent him to the Padres ahead of the 2021 deadline, headlined by Jack Suwinski and Tucupita Marcano, both of whom have made contributions to the big league club. Read the rest of this entry »