In 2023, Jurickson Profar was quite possibly the worst full-time player in Major League Baseball. In 2024, he was one of the best. Slashing .280/.380/.459 while playing half his games at the pitcher-friendly Petco Park, Profar finished with a 139 wRC+, sixth best among qualified NL batters. Despite his mediocre baserunning (-0.8 BsR) and poor defense (-8 DRS, -6 FRV), his bat carried him to a 4.3-WAR season. Still, he entered free agency in a tricky position. He’d be looking for a suitor who’d put much more stock in his recent phenomenal performance than the long, uneven period that came before it. On Thursday, the Braves emerged as one such team. Deciding that Profar’s pros far outweighed his cons, Atlanta inked the veteran outfielder to a three-year, $42 million contract.
In hindsight, this contract and pairing feel so predictable that I could have pre-written this article weeks ago. When it comes to projecting Profar’s future performance, the error bars are wide. We’re talking about a player who was released by, of all teams, the Colorado Rockies in 2023 and found himself starting for the NL All-Stars less than a year later. Yet, projecting his contract turned out to be surprisingly easy. Ben Clemens predicted Profar would sign for three years and $45 million. MLB Trade Rumors predicted Profar would sign for three years and $45 million. Kiley McDaniel of ESPN predicted Profar would sign for three years and $45 million. The median projection from our contract crowdsourcing exercise? Yep, three years and $45 million. As divided as this country might be, we could all agree on one thing: Profar would sign a three-year deal with an AAV close to $15 million. Lo and behold, the Braves will pay him $14 million per annum through 2027.
Three years and $42 million is the same contract both Lourdes Gurriel Jr. and Jorge Soler signed last offseason, and very close to the three-year, $43.5 million deal Mitch Haniger signed the winter before. In other words, it’s the going rate for a corner outfielder in his early 30s with something like a two-win projection but All-Star upside. Profar might have a wider range of outcomes, but his median projection is right in that window. If he reverts to the version of himself that we saw in 2023, the Braves will soon regret his contract. If he keeps up his 2024 performance, his salary will look like a bargain. Ultimately, however, Profar only has to be the player he was in 2018 (107 wRC+, 2.2 WAR), 2020 (113 wRC+, 0.9 WAR), or 2022 (110 wRC+, 2.4 WAR) for this deal to pay dividends. That’s exactly the kind of player Steamer thinks he’ll be in 2025: Read the rest of this entry »
Look, I get it. You’re up in arms about the Roki Sasaki deal. The rich got richer and we’re all tired of the Dodgers signing every free agent (even you, Dodgers fans) — can they at least make it seem like it’s a level playing field? If that’s how you’ve been feeling this week, though, I’ve got some bad news for you, because I think the two moves the Dodgers have made since signing Sasaki might be bigger deals for 2025. Over the weekend, they signed the top reliever on the market, Tanner Scott. Now, they’re reportedlyworking on an agreement with Kirby Yates. As Yates’ signing is still pending a physical and has yet to be finalized, let’s cover Scott first, then ruminate on Yates at the end.
Scott’s deal, for four years and $72 million, befits an elite reliever, and that’s exactly what he is. He’s compiled a 2.04 ERA (2.53 FIP) across 150 innings over the last two years, using a lights-out slider and excellent fastball in roughly equal measure. We’re not talking about smoke and mirrors here; both of our pitch models think his fastball is one of the best handful in the game. His gaudy swinging strike rates provide supporting evidence. He sits 96-98 mph and touches 100. Sure, he walks his fair share of batters, but he’s a reliever – that’s just part of the bargain you accept sometimes.
If you’ll recall, the Dodgers leaned heavily on their bullpen in the 2024 postseason. Some of that was because of injuries to the starting rotation, but plenty of it was by choice. The Dodgers assembled a unit with four late-game options, and they used those options aggressively and opportunistically. Best opposing hitter up in the sixth inning? Send in a closer. Starter in a jam and the game on the line earlier than you expected? Send in a closer. Save situation? Fine, sure, we have a few left over anyway, send in a closer. Read the rest of this entry »
It must have been fifth grade or so when I encountered the “compare and contrast” essay prompt for the first time. I remember thinking: What the hell? These two passages were written by different people. Why is it on me to tell you what is similar about them?
Over the years, I got better at these prompts. But it appears I’ve regressed. Two relievers signed eight-figure contracts last week. What’s similar? They both closed out games for World Series-winning teams in the 2020s, will likely handle the eighth inning for their new employers, and were born in the glorious and blessed year of 1993. What’s different? One throws right-handed, one throws left-handed. One signed with a contender; one perhaps got paid a premium so his team can try to avoid an MLBPA grievance.
But there are limits to the illuminating qualities of comparison. These days, individualized analysis is required to assess the effectiveness of a pitcher, so that’s how this post will proceed today. A.J. Minter and José Leclerc will earn life-changing quantities of money to chuck leather a few dozen times. Let’s find out why. Read the rest of this entry »
The Toronto Blue Jays have finally signed a free agent slugger, agreeing to a five-year, $92.5 million deal with outfielder Anthony Santander on Monday afternoon. A former Rule 5 pick out of Cleveland, Santander has spent his whole major league career with the Baltimore Orioles. He’s amassed 9.6 WAR, 155 home runs, and a 113 wRC+ in 2,830 plate appearances since his 2017 debut, but these numbers are also dragged down a bit by the fact it took him a few years to really get going as a hitter. Since the start of 2022, his age-27 season, he’s been worth 8.3 WAR and posted a much sunnier 124 wRC+. This past year was the best full season of his career thus far; he slashed .235/.308/.506 and set career highs with 44 homers, a 129 wRC+, and 3.3 WAR en route to earning his first All-Star selection and Silver Slugger award.
Anthony Santander and Blue Jays are in agreement pending physical, sources say. @MLBNetwork
Santander’s deal includes a club option for 2030 and an opt-out after the 2027 season, according to multiple reports. The club option is a conditional one; if Santander chooses to opt out, Toronto can void his decision so long as it tacks on the sixth year, which would bring the total value of the contract to $110 million. The options here don’t change the calculus of the deal all that much. Considering Santander is already 30 and doesn’t offer much more than his power, he probably won’t risk the security of his contract unless his production with the Jays exceeds what he did with the Orioles — and even then, he might rather stay put. Similarly, the Jays probably won’t exercise their option for the sixth year unless he continues to be a viable middle-of-the-order slugger into this mid-30s. Read the rest of this entry »
Major League Baseball had its “Kevin Durant is a Warrior” moment on Friday, when 23-year-old Japanese phenom Roki Sasaki agreed to sign with the defending World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers for $6.5 million. Sasaki himself announced his decision via his Instagram, while his bonus was reported on X by The Athletic’s Fabian Ardaya and Alden González of ESPN.
If he can stay healthy, Sasaki is a likely front-of-the-rotation arm who has the talent to win Cy Young Awards. When he’s been fully operational, his fastball has averaged nearly 99 mph, he has an elite splitter, and his slider became a useable weapon in 2022. He joins a loaded Dodgers roster that has five or six other players who either have won a Cy Young or MVP (Freddie Freeman, Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Blake Snell), or could conceivably do so in their best season (Tyler Glasnow and maybe Yoshinobu Yamamoto). One and a half of those players weren’t even on last year’s Dodgers title team. As I’m writing this, the Dodgers have not yet announced the signing. Though Sasaki’s contract is technically a minor league deal, and he isn’t yet on the 40-man roster, he is overwhelmingly likely to break camp with the Dodgers’ big league club and be part of their squad that opens the season against the Cubs in Japan on March 18-19. Read the rest of this entry »
When the Mets signed Juan Soto in December, he was, technically speaking, filling the hole that Jesse Winker left behind. Of course, that’s a bit like buying the Batmobile to replace an expired bus pass. Winker’s greatest strength is drawing walks, and Soto’s career walk rate makes Winker’s career walk rate look like Jeff McNeil’s career walk rate. Still, the point stands. The Mets lost one lefty-batting corner outfielder to free agency and replaced him with another. Yet, on Thursday afternoon, they re-signed Winker anyway. His one-year, $7.5 million contract is fairly straightforward, but the ramifications for New York’s roster could be much more complex.
Poor baserunning, miserable defense, and frequent injuries have limited Winker throughout his career. All the same, his bat was a major asset for the Reds from 2017-21. In just over 1,500 plate appearances with Cincinnati, he slashed .288/.385/.504 with a 132 wRC+. While he thrived at Great American Ball Park, he made his mark outside of that hitter’s haven, too, producing an .845 OPS and 126 wRC+ on the road. He made the All-Star team in his final season with the Reds, batting .305 with 24 home runs in 110 games, good for a career-best 3.2 WAR.
The next two seasons, however, marked a period of steep decline for Winker. Playing for the Mariners and Brewers, he managed just 0.7 WAR in 2022 and -0.8 in 2023. His agent might point out that back, neck, and knee injuries hampered his performance in that time, as did some bad luck on balls in play; his xwOBA was nearly 30 points better than his wOBA, while his BABIP was more than 50 ticks below his average from the previous five years. Even so, it would have been more than fair to worry about his future as a major leaguer after his dismal 2023 campaign. Entering 2024, his ZiPS projection was a mere 0.4 WAR in 415 plate appearances, and he was forced to sign a minor league contract with the Nationals less than two weeks before spring training began.
Back to full health, Winker rebounded in Washington. While he wasn’t a power threat like he’d been in his Reds heyday, he knocked 18 doubles and 11 home runs, giving him a middle-of-the-pack .162 ISO. His BABIP was back up above .300, and his 14.0% walk rate ranked fifth among qualified batters (as of his final day with the Nats). All in all, he put up a 125 wRC+ and 1.2 WAR in 101 games.
This was enough to pique the Mets’ interest ahead of the trade deadline. However, after Washington sent him to New York, Winker wasn’t the productive hitter that the Mets thought they were getting when they acquired him. Well, at least not during the regular season, when Winker was little more than replacement level with his new team. All the more disappointing, he was set up to thrive with the Mets: He had the platoon advantage almost every time he came to the plate. While Washington used him as an everyday player, New York shielded him from southpaws; he faced just four left-handed pitchers over the final two months of the season. Nonetheless, his 97 wRC+ with the Mets was much closer to his career mark against lefties (88) than righties (129).
The problem was rooted in Winker’s approach at the plate. With the Nationals, he ran that aforementioned 14.0% walk rate and struck out just 22.2% of the time. After the trade, he lowered his strikeout rate to 17.1%, which might’ve been a good thing, except that his walk rate also dropped way down, to 7.8%. With the Mets, Winker swung more often and made more contact, especially on pitches in the strike zone. His Z-Swing% (per Statcast) jumped from 60.5% to 70.4%, while his Z-Contact% jumped from 85.5% to 91.2%. This wouldn’t have been a problem if he crushed many of those extra balls he put in play, but, naturally, he did not.
So, why did Winker suddenly change his approach at a time when things were going well? I’d posit the Mets noticed that he was holding back on too many hittable pitches over the first four months of the season and let him know that was the case after the trade. According to Robert Orr’s calculations from his Damage leaderboard, Winker was better than the average hitter at identifying hittable pitches every year from 2020-23. Yet, with the Nationals this past season, his Hittable Pitch Take rate put him in the bottom third of the league. After he started swinging at more strikes with the Mets, he rose back up to the 66th percentile. The problem, however, was that he sacrificed another critical skill in the process. Winker’s selectivity rate — Orr’s metric that shows how often a player avoids swinging at bad pitches — fell from the 73rd percentile as a National to the 35th percentile as a Met. All that is to say, Winker swung at more good pitches, but he also swung at more bad ones, and he didn’t do enough damage against good pitches to compensate for his lack of production against the bad ones. Ultimately, his hard-hit and barrel rates were lower with the Mets than they were with the Nationals, as were his wOBA and xwOBA on contact.
This raises another question: Why would the Mets want Winker back if their efforts to improve his approach went so poorly? Perhaps they think he just needs a little more time to reap the rewards. After all, 129 plate appearances is nothing. Aaron Judge was still hitting below the Mendoza Line with an OPS in the mid-.700s by his 129th plate appearances last season. Thankfully for our purposes, we have an easy way to increase the sample size of Winker’s 2024 season with the Mets: Include the playoffs, as Winker took an additional 32 plate appearances in October. He continued to swing at strikes at a similar rate, but he used those swings to record several big hits, including two triples and a home run. He also drew seven walks, compared to just four strikeouts. If you combine those numbers with Winker’s regular season stats as a Met, you get a 10.6% walk rate, a 16.1% strikeout rate, and a .341 wOBA. Even more promising is his .353 xwOBA, notably higher than his .335 xwOBA with the Nationals. All of a sudden, it makes a lot more sense why the Mets decided to keep this guy around.
It’s far too soon to say if Winker’s new approach will work in a larger sample size. Still, it’s not hard to see why the Mets think he’s worth a longer look. In a best-case scenario, he could be an even more productive hitter than he was overall in 2024. And if this new approach doesn’t befit him going forward, he doesn’t have to be anything more than the hitter he was in Washington to be valuable on a one-year, $7.5 million deal. After all, the Mets will continue to shield him from left-handed pitching, and his track record against righties is strong:
Jesse Winker vs. RHP
Season
PA
wRC+
2017
111
169
2018
263
136
2019
334
124
2020
142
144
2021
367
178
2022
407
100
2023
184
66
2024
404
124
Career
2,212
129
So, that’s Winker. But this signing is an iceberg – and ironically, it’s the rare kind of iceberg that isn’t so good for a polar bear. At first glance, this is just a 1.0- to 1.5-WAR player signing a short-term deal commensurate with his talents. Yet, there’s a lot more to it than what you see on the surface. When SNY’s Andy Martino first reported the Winker signing, he added that the Mets are now preparing for life after Pete Alonso. Indeed, while no one could argue that Winker is a direct replacement for the All-Star first baseman, there is a connection between this signing and the Mets’ possibly giving up on Alonso if you follow the trail of dominoes far enough.
With Soto, Brandon Nimmo, Jose Siri, and Tyrone Taylor to man the outfield, the Mets are likely to use Winker as their primary DH against right-handed pitching. However, he can still play the corner outfield if he needs to; he spent 95 games on the grass last season, including 27 with New York. So, in the event of an injury to one of the team’s other outfielders, Winker can fill in. That means the Mets are less likely to ask McNeil to play the outfield in 2025. Instead, he can ideally play second base almost every day. As long as McNeil is covering the keystone, the Mets won’t need any of their young infielders at second base, therefore allowing Brett Baty, Luisangel Acuña, and Ronny Mauricio to focus their efforts on third. If just one of them, or some combination of the three, can competently cover the hot corner, Mark Vientos will be able to play first base full-time. Long story short, Winker improves the outfield depth, which indirectly improves the infield depth, which should allow Vientos to formally replace Alonso at first.
Another aspect to the iceberg is how this all affects Starling Marte, whose Gold Glove years are long behind him. In 170 games in the outfield over the past two years, he has accumulated -13 DRS, -14 OAA, and a -12 FRV. Meanwhile, neither ZiPS nor Steamer sees him as much more than a league-average bat. As a righty hitter, he could theoretically platoon with Winker at DH. After all, he posted an impressive 141 wRC+ against left-handed pitching last year. Yet, even with the platoon advantage, Marte might not be a strong enough hitter to warrant the reps. While he has had positive platoon splits the last three years, he had reverse platoon splits every year from 2014-21. In other words, he’s hardly a guaranteed lefty masher. On the contrary, ZiPS projects him for a .698 OPS against lefties and a .713 OPS against righties in 2025. Even if the Mets were willing to give a roster spot to the short side of a DH platoon, Marte probably wouldn’t be that guy.
The final component of the iceberg is what the Mets do next. Steve Cohen’s pockets are already deep, but if the Mets aren’t going to give Alonso a multi-year contract, and if they can get someone to take on any of Marte’s remaining salary, they’ll only have more to spend. With a projected payroll still $49 million below last year’s final tally and a luxury tax payroll still $17 million below the top penalty threshold, the Mets remain major players to watch as the offseason rolls on.
If you’re a Milwaukee Brewers fan, you probably know the volume and quality of Colin Rea’s work the past two seasons. Last season, only 58 pitchers qualified for the ERA title, and Rea was among them. Over the past two seasons, Rea is second among Brewers pitchers in starts, innings, wins, and strikeouts, trailing only Freddy Peralta in those categories.
In an offseason defined by the scarcity of starting pitching, it’s a bit jarring to see a starter sign for one year and $5 million. Especially one who just threw 167 2/3 innings in 2024. There aren’t enough of those guys in the entire league for every team to have two. Roughly 15 times as many people summited Mt. Everest in 2024 as qualified for the major league ERA title. And Rea got just $5 million? What gives? Read the rest of this entry »
The Blue Jays came into this offseason with one glaring need: relievers. Now, that’s not to say that they don’t need help elsewhere. The bottom of their lineup is thin. They’re probably a starter short of an optimal rotation, particularly given how uncertain Alek Manoah’s future looks. But they’re a playoff hopeful, and they had the worst bullpen in baseball in 2024 – 3.1 wins worse than the White Sox, if you can believe it. So the bullpen had to be priority number one, and voila:
OFFICIAL: We’ve signed All-Star RHP Jeff Hoffman to a 3-year deal ??
Jeff Hoffman might not be a household name, but he’s been one of the best relievers in baseball since joining the Phillies in 2023. He’s racked up 3.6 WAR in that time, but reliever WAR can get weird with the leverage adjustments, so let’s put it this way instead: He’s sixth in ERA and third in FIP over the last two years. His strikeout rate hovers around 33.3%, and he walks a thoroughly normal number of hitters. In other words, this doesn’t look like a fluke, and he’s not getting paid like a fluke, either. His deal is worth $33 million over those three years, with $6 million in available incentives. Read the rest of this entry »
What does it cost to sign a living legend? About $15 million, it turns out. Three-time Cy Young winner Justin Verlander is taking his talents to the West Coast for the first time, having inked a one-year deal with the San Francisco Giants for that aforementioned sum.
It’s another bold signing for newly appointed supreme prefect of baseball operations Gerald D. “Buster” Posey, who officially took charge a little over three months ago. And yet — if we give Posey the credit he’s reportedly due for the Matt Chapman extension — more than a quarter of San Francisco’s payroll (according to CBT math) is now devoted to players Posey is responsible for signing.
But Verlander could very well have cost more. He made nearly three times as much last season, and had he hit the 140-inning threshold in 2024, he would’ve been able to activate a player option worth $35 million, not $15 million. So why take such a big haircut? This is Justin Verlander, for God’s sake. Read the rest of this entry »
The Rangers’ busy offseason continues with their biggest (if only literally) signing yet: right-handed pitcher Chris Martin. It’s a nice landing spot for the 38-year-old reliever, who was born and raised in Arlington and previously spent a season and a half with his hometown team at the end of the 2010s. Those links are more than just trivia; Martin reportedly was so eager to return to the site of his birth (kind of like a salmon) that he signed for the fabled hometown discount: $5.5 million over one year. That’s a 42% pay cut from his salary with the Red Sox last season.
At 6-foot-8, he’s also one of the very few active players who can look GM Chris Young in the eye. Here’s a fun fact from the Department of I Looked This Up So You’re Going to Hear About It: There are 52 right-handed pitchers in major league history who have been listed at 6-foot-8 or taller. Four of them are named Chris, and the Rangers are halfway to collecting the full set. If Texas trades for Cardinals righty Chris Roycroft next, surely Chris Volstad will be waiting by the phone expecting a call about a scouting job. Read the rest of this entry »
