DALLAS — There’s only so much oxygen available for big-payroll Northeastern teams that are in crisis despite a largely successful 2024 campaign. And the Yankees, as ever, have been sucking up most of the attention. But don’t underestimate the furor that’s been floating around Philadelphia since the Fightins’ ignominious four-game NLDS exit. Dave Dombrowski has been rumored to have his finger in many pots in the first month of the offseason — an Alec Bohm change-of-scenery trade here, a Garrett Crochet blockbuster there — but as of the opening of MLB’s Winter Meetings, nothing had yet materialized.

Well, wait no longer. Longtime Blue Jays closer Jordan Romano is on the Rob Ducey Highway, bound for South Philly on a one-year, $8.5 million contract. Read the rest of this entry »

While the New York Mets were busy spending three-quarters of a billion bucks, the defending champion Dodgers were making a couple of lower-key moves, re-signing reliever Blake Treinen and signing outfielder Michael Conforto. Treinen, a Dodger since 2019, will make $22 million over the next two seasons. Conforto arrives in Los Angeles on a one-year, $17 million contract after two seasons with the organization’s biggest rival, the San Francisco Giants.

Treinen is a known commodity for the Dodgers, so this is basically a status quo signing. He had a solid first season with the organization in 2020 — 3.86 ERA, 3.15 FIP, 25 2/3 innings — and won a World Series, and then he was even better in 2021, posting a 1.99 ERA and 2.88 FIP across 72 1/3 innings. However, in 2022, Treinen’s shoulder started becoming a problem. After the season, he had surgery to repair his labrum and rotator cuff, forcing him to miss all of 2023. This March, his spring training was interrupted when he was hit by a line drive that bruised his lung, but that didn’t prevent him from having a successful campaign. His velocity was down a bit, though the dip had little effect on his results: 1.93 ERA, 3.00 FIP, 46 2/3 innings. And while his sinker wasn’t the weapon it was before the shoulder surgery, his sweeper was scarier than ever.

Bringing back Treinen doesn’t really change the outlook of the Dodgers bullpen, simply because it already looked pretty nasty, especially if you agree with ZiPS. (Steamer isn’t quite as bullish on their relief corps.) Treinen does have some associated downside risk to keep in mind beyond the normal pitcher injury stuff. He didn’t reach his final form until he was around 30, so he’s probably a bit older than most people think; he turns 37 at the end of June. While I always tell people that “hitters age, pitchers break,” Treinen is approaching ages where actual decline beyond normal injury/attrition is a thing that happens. The Dodgers have more than enough depth to deal with this, should it come to pass.

Adding Conforto isn’t quite as sexy a move as it would have been four years ago. With the Mets, Conforto had established himself as an All-Star talent, with a 133 wRC+ and 13.5 WAR in just under 2,000 plate appearances from 2017 through 2020. But a hamstring injury and a case of COVID marred his 2021 season, and a shoulder injury from a workout during the offseason lockout resulted in surgery that cost him the entire 2022 campaign. Signed with the Giants to a make-good contract before 2023, Conforto’s first season back from injury was rather underwhelming, with a bland .232/.344/.384 triple-slash line, a 99 wRC+, and 0.8 WAR, but he bounced back in 2024, though not quite to his previous levels. Across 488 plate appearances, he hit .237/.309/.450 with 20 home runs, a 112 wRC+, and 1.3 WAR.

Naturally, the Dodgers will not be counting on Conforto to be one of the grand movers of the offense. At this stage in his career, he’s basically taking over the role of late-period Jason Heyward, in that he’s a lefty-hitting corner outfielder who’ll complement the team’s righty-hitting role players, such as Andy Pages and Chris Taylor. ZiPS projects a .766 OPS from Conforto against right-handed pitchers in 2025 for the Dodgers.

Having Conforto on the roster clarifies a couple other unanswered questions when looking at the Dodgers. Dalton Rushing saw a good bit of time in the outfield for Triple-A Oklahoma City this past year, but I suspect that until the Dodgers are ready to use him in a full-time role, they’d rather see him get at-bats in the minors than fight for scraps in the majors. It also likely ensures that Mookie Betts will primarily be an infielder in 2025, unless injuries strike. Conforto’s signing probably doesn’t have much of an effect on whether Los Angeles brings back free agent Teoscar Hernández returns, though Pages may end up without a roster spot should Hernández return.

Do Treinen and Conforto make the Dodgers a significantly better team? Of course not. But they are a deeper, more resilient group with the two of them around.

… And this is why you move the left field wall back in. On Saturday, the Orioles jumped into the free agent market looking for upside, inking two veterans who, when they’re at their best, have the ability to rival the most fearsome sluggers in the game.

Outfielder Tyler O’Neill, who bashed 32 home runs over just 113 games with the Red Sox, signed a three-year, $49.5 million deal that will make him an Oriole through his age-32 season. Catcher Gary Sánchez, who turned 32 just last week, signed a one-year, $8.5 million deal. Both players are right-handed batters with multiple 30-homer seasons under their belts, which is to say that until the Orioles announced a few weeks ago that their left field wall would no longer be located way the hell out in Towson, both might have seriously considered passing on an offer to play in Baltimore and watch all their would-be home runs die in the left fielder’s glove. (Honestly, I’m mostly joking here. O’Neill and Sánchez have enough power that they’re among the small cohort of players who didn’t really have to worry about Walltimore.)

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For a month or so every year it seems, Danny Jansen looks like Babe Ruth. The only season out of the past four in which he hasn’t put up a 20-game stretch with a wRC+ over 200 was 2023, and he was pretty awesome in 2023 anyway; he posted a 115 wRC+ overall that year, while playing the most offensively-challenged position in the sport, no less. So in some ways, the Rays might have just signed the best offensive catcher in baseball:

@JeffPassan tweetedCatcher Danny Jansen and the Tampa Bay Rays are in agreement on a one-year, $8.5 million contract that includes a mutual option for a second season, sources tell ESPN. Jansen, who has played in Toronto and Boston, remains in the AL East. On it: @ByRobertMurray and @TBTimes_Rays.

— Passanthallich (@passanthalbot.bsky.social) 2024-12-06T18:18:18.487825+00:00

Of course, when it comes to overall production, they absolutely didn’t. Jansen was white hot to start the year in 2024 – and then ended the season with an 89 wRC+, going from target deadline acquisition to backup in the process. And while he has indeed hit well when healthy, he gets hurt a lot. Across those aforementioned four seasons, he’s accumulated only 1,078 plate appearances. He hit the IL twice in 2021, twice again in ’22, twice yet again in ’23, and then missed the start of the ’24 season rehabbing from the last ’23 injury.

So maybe Jansen is secretly an amazing hitter – or maybe it’s a miracle that he can even still play baseball. Either of those could be true, and of course the truth is likely somewhere in between. The Rays are famously good at discerning where in the “somewhere in the middle” players lie, and as such, they feel like a natural home for Jansen.

Finding catchers who can both hit and field is nearly impossible. The Rays haven’t particularly prioritized them in the draft, and they certainly haven’t gone out of their way to trade for or sign marquee catchers. That’s how they ended up with Ben Rortvedt (career wRC+: 70) as their primary catcher in 2024. In 2023, that role went to Christian Bethancourt (career wRC+: 71). In 2022, Bethancourt backed up Francisco Mejía (career wRC+: a scintillating 86, though with poor defense).
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A year ago, Juan Soto was the buzz of baseball’s Winter Meetings. It wasn’t because of anything he had agency over, though. The San Diego Padres were reportedly looking to trade him, and they eventually did. This year, Soto is the story again. But instead of waiting to see what his fate is, he’ll get to choose. Or maybe I should say that he did choose, because as Jon Heyman first reported, Soto signed a 15-year, $765 million dollar deal to join the New York Mets.

Presumably, you aren’t reading this article with no background knowledge of who Soto is. Still, I want to give you a refresher, because Soto is such a delightful player. He’s your favorite hitter’s favorite hitter. He has the best batting eye in baseball, and it’s not close. His sense of the strike zone is so good that it feels like he’s dictating the terms rather than the pitcher, one of very few hitters in baseball who gives that impression. He’s perennially one of the best in the game when it comes to avoiding swinging and missing, and he walks nearly a fifth of the time because pitchers are too afraid to challenge him.

Why are they too afraid? Because he’s also one of the best power hitters in baseball. He launched 41 homers and 31 doubles in 2024. He’s hit 201 home runs in his career, seventh-best in the majors over that span. His worst seasonal line was in 2022… when he hit .242/.401/.452 while getting traded mid-season. “Worst” is all relative, though; it was the ninth-best offensive line in the majors that year. Soto is so good offensively that despite being known for patience first and power second, he’s actually 11th in the league in batting average since debuting. He’s just good at every facet of hitting. Read the rest of this entry »

Last year’s Winter Meetings were a bit of a snooze until the end, but 2024’s kicked off in style with the biggest free agent this offseason, Juan Soto, signing a massive 15-year deal to join the New York Mets for what is likely to be the rest of his career. At $765 million, Soto’s new contract is the richest in the history of professional sports. The ifs, buts, and wherefors make the contract even richer, as Soto scores a signing bonus of $75 million immediately, has no money deferred, and even has an opt-out after the fifth season if he believes he can land something even more lucrative. The Mets do get the option to void Soto’s opt-out by adding $40 million to the value of the last decade of his contract.

The wildest thing is that it’s not really even much of an overpay. Some might compare it to contracts like the ones given to Albert Pujols or Miguel Cabrera, but those deals were given to significantly older players. Signing a player in his mid-20s rather than one in his late-20s or early-30s is a very big deal. First off, let’s run the numbers for Soto in Queens:

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Through the first week of December, the steady trickle of free agency had almost exclusively included pitchers and catchers. Other position players, understandably, seemed to be waiting out Juan Soto’s market, as the price tag for Zoomer Ted Williams reportedly continues to climb. But as the baseball glitterati descend on Dallas for the Winter Meetings, at least one top position player will already have a new home.

Shortstop Willy Adames is now a San Francisco Giant. Adames was the no. 2 overall free agent on Ben Clemens’ Top 50 list, and the first major acquisition for new Giants president of baseball operations Buster Posey. It’s quite a splashy move; Adames’ seven-year, $182 million contract is the largest, by total value, the Giants have ever given out, beating the eight-year, $167 million extension Posey himself signed in 2013.

Records are made to broken. Read the rest of this entry »

After their surprise run to the playoffs this year, the Mets have a lot of work to do this offseason to follow up on their unexpected success. From their rotation alone, they lost Sean Manaea, Luis Severino, and Jose Quintana to free agency — that trio combined to make 94 starts in 2024 — leaving Kodai Senga and David Peterson as the lone holdovers. Earlier this week, New York signed Frankie Montas to a two-year deal to begin restocking its pitching staff. On Friday, the next domino fell: Clay Holmes, erstwhile Yankees closer, agreed to a three-year contract worth $38 million with an opt out after the second year.

With an extensive résumé covering high-leverage innings a borough over, you might expect the Mets to plug Holmes into the bullpen behind Edwin Díaz and call it good. Instead, they’re planning on transitioning him to the starting rotation. Holmes has all of four major league starts under his belt and all of them came during his rookie campaign back in 2018. He worked extensively as a starter in the minor leagues but the year he made his major league debut was the last time he threw more than 100 innings in a season.

In their never-ending search for effective starting pitching, teams have turned their gaze to the bullpen over the past few years. Just this season, Garrett Crochet, Reynaldo López, and Jordan Hicks made the jump from the bullpen to the rotation. Last year, Seth Lugo, Michael King, and Zack Littell made a similar shift. It doesn’t always work; for every success story like Lugo’s or López’s, there’s a cautionary tale like that of Hicks or A.J. Puk. Even Crochet, for all his early success, seemed to wear down towards the end of the season, despite some extremely careful handling by the White Sox given the left-hander’s injury history. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s just put the headline up right away. Luis Severino is now an Athletic:

BREAKING: Right-hander Luis Severino and the A’s are in agreement on a three-year, $67 million contract, sources tell ESPN. It is the largest guarantee in the history of the A’s franchise. And even with the qualifying offer attached, Severino got well over market expectations.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) December 5, 2024

Now this is an interesting free agent signing. The A’s just signed the second-biggest deal of the offseason so far, and the largest in franchise history. They have one other player with a guaranteed contract on the team – and that’s lefty reliever T.J. McFarland, making $1.8 million in 2025. This is a sea change in terms of how the team operates, so let’s talk about why they did it and the ways it could succeed or fail.

First things first: The A’s could use some pitching. They were better than you’d think in 2024 – they won 19 more games than their dispiriting 2023 campaign. Three different A’s hitters – Brent Rooker, Lawrence Butler, and JJ Bleday – eclipsed three wins above replacement, the first time that had happened since the team shipped out Matt Olson and Matt Chapman. All three of those guys are young and under team control for a while. Shea Langeliers and Zack Gelof both look like good everyday players. Jacob Wilson is an intriguing top prospect. If it weren’t for the overall John Fisher stink of the franchise, this lineup would feel mighty tantalizing.
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Today, at FanGraphs dot com, we’re turning over a new leaf. The last two times Aroldis Chapman changed teams — when he signed with the Pirates last January and when he was traded from Kansas City to Texas seven months prior — Jay Jaffe and I both referenced the Tattoo Infection Incident of 2022. It’s memorable and useful as a shorthand for the ignoble end to Chapman’s tenure with the Yankees — though both of his stints in New York were to a greater or lesser extent ignoble throughout.

More than that, Lindsey Adler’s story on the situation introduced a novel clause to the sportswriting canon, a literary construction so vivid it clearly fascinated both Jay and myself for months after the fact. But no more. I’m going to write an Aroldis Chapman story without quoting the phrase, “veritable moat of pus.”

Oh crap, I said the phrase that pays. What a pity; with that said, I’ll surely have another opportunity to write a clean transaction story about the veteran left-hander when he changes teams again. Because if Chapman is still able to command a one-year, $10.75 million contract from the Red Sox, it seems major league teams are determined to keep giving chances to a player who ought to have exhausted the sport’s patience by now. Read the rest of this entry »