On Monday, Ben Clemens published an article containing a list of the hitters who are getting the most power from the fewest swings and misses. It’s a ratio of barrels to whiffs, which Ben — because of his inexhaustible capacity for alliteration — calls “whomps per whiff.”

One name that stood out to me was Jake Cronenworth, who came in seventh on the whomps per whiff leaderboard. I first encountered Cronenworth many years ago, when he was the Shohei Ohtani of the Big Ten, and have been mightily pleased to see him evolve from a seventh-round pick to a two-time All-Star, and a starting infielder on a Padres team that usually buys its infielders from the Rolls Royce dealership.

A year ago, Cronenworth singed a seven-year contract extension that will keep him in brown and gold into the 2030s, and then the wheels fell off. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.

It’s not easy to be in playoff position — no matter how early we are in the season — with an offense ranked 23rd in wRC+ entering Tuesday. But that’s exactly where the Tigers stood, above .500 despite an offense that’s better than only seven other teams. Spencer Torkelson doesn’t yet have a home run, Colt Keith has been anemic in his first few weeks in the majors, Javier Báez has continued his backslide, and Detroit is getting almost no offense from its catchers. Mark Canha, Riley Greene, and Kerry Carpenter have been great, but three well-performing hitters can’t carry the other six spots in the lineup. So, then, it’s not hard to see what’s keeping the Tigers afloat: the performance of their pitchers.

A FIP of about 4.00 has the Tigers right in the middle of the pack in pitching WAR, but in terms of ERA — however sustainable or unsustainable it may be — they are among baseball’s best teams at preventing runs.

Detroit’s main contributor has been, of course, ace Tarik Skubal. He’s already been worth 1.0 WAR over his five starts, striking out nearly a third of the batters he’s faced and walking less than 5% of them. He’s allowed just two home runs, a major improvement from a few years ago. He surrendered 35 homers over 149.1 innings in 2021, his first full season in the big leagues, when he was a fastball-heavy prospect who tried to shove his heater down batters’ throats, an approach that often led to uneven results. Now that he’s mixing his pitches, Skubal is overwhelming hitters and making it far harder to guess what he’s going to throw, leading to far more weak contact.

Other than Kenta Maeda, who’s struggled badly this year despite his five scoreless innings Tuesday night, the rest of the rotation is doing its job, too. Jack Flaherty has his best strikeout percentage since 2019, when he finished fourth in the NL Cy Young race, Casey Mize is fully healthy, and Reese Olson looks like a solid back-end starter.

Where the Tigers have especially shined is in relief. Their relievers have an incredible 1.83 ERA, which actually went up after Tuesday night’s 4-2 win over the Rays, though it’s worth noting that mark has been aided by an unsustainably low BABIP against. Jason Foley is the headliner in the bullpen, firing high-90s sinkers to keep his ERA spotless through 11 appearances, but he’s had plenty of help. Shelby Miller’s deceptive fastball is difficult to square up, lefties Andrew Chafin and Tyler Holton are getting out right-handed hitters as well as lefties, and Alex Lange has been effectively wild. Even multi-inning relievers Alex Faedo and Joey Wentz, who largely pitch in low leverage situations, are doing well.

Opposing hitters won’t continue to run such a ridiculously low BABIP, but Torkelson won’t go homerless either. Such are the ebbs and flows that come with a long season, and right now the pitching is flowing and the offense is ebbing, with the former doing juuuuuust enough to keep the Tigers in the conversation as true contenders.

Will Daulton Varsho’s Adjustments Stick?

By no means was Daulton Varsho bad in his first season with the Blue Jays, but he was definitely underwhelming. He was still worth over two wins on the strength of his outfield defense — he led the majors in defensive runs saved — after hanging up his catcher’s mitt for good. However, his bat lagged far behind, with his 107 wRC+ from 2022 dropping all the way down to 85 last year. His strikeout and walk rates were similar, and he actually hit more balls in the air, but fewer of his fly balls turned into home runs because he was popping up far more pitches and pulling the ball less.

In working with bench coach and offensive coordinator Don Mattingly to flatten his swing plane a little in an effort to create fewer automatic outs, Varsho is thriving so far in 2024. His hard-hit rate is the highest of his career, with his average exit velocity up a full mph from 2023. Ironically, his IFFB% is actually higher than it’s ever been, but it’s more than outweighed by better contact overall, which has led to six homers (already 30% of last year’s total) and a 158 wRC+.

Varsho still has some holes in his game: Along with the popups, he’s pulling even fewer of his balls in play, and while he’s walking more, he’s also striking out more than ever. His offensive profile right now looks more boom or bust than Varsho and Mattingly intended, and the bust could come as quickly as the boom did. But for now, he and the Blue Jays should keep riding the wave of his boom for as long as it lasts.

RIP to Robert Suarez’s Fastball Streak

All good things must come to an end, and so it has with Robert Suarez’s fastball streak. For 79 pitches, the Padres’ closer threw nothing but four-seam and two-seam fastballs, until, finally, he mixed in a changeup at Coors Field on Monday night.

Although his ERA has fluctuated in his three MLB seasons since coming over from Japan, Suarez has been mostly the same pitcher when looking at xERA, though FIP feels differently about his 2023. At any rate, Suarez is taking a new approach in 2024; his pitch mix was essentially unchanged from 2022 to 2023, but now he’s throwing his two fastballs nearly 90% of the time.

The rest of his pitches are changeups, meaning Suarez doesn’t have any breaking pitches in his arsenal, but hitters have been flummoxed nonetheless. That fastball-changeup combo is enough to give hitters fits. Entering play Tuesday, he’s allowed just one run in 10.2 innings and earned eight saves. That’ll play.

Dating back to August 31, 2023, the Padres have the best record in baseball. They have the second-highest run differential in that time, trailing only the Brewers, against whom they just took two out of three on the road. To be clear, these are fun facts for the jumbotron rather than meaningful or predictive metrics. After all, the Padres of late 2023 look quite a bit different from the Padres of early 2024, and their performance from last September is doing most of the heavy lifting. Even so, it’s enough to make you stop and think, “Hey, these Padres are still pretty good!”

That’s not to say the Padres ever looked like a bad team. However, it would have been easy to write them off, at least subconsciously, after last year’s disappointing performance and the offseason that followed. The Padres ranked second in the NL in pitching WAR and third in position player WAR last season, yet they finished just 82-80. And although they were able to secure a winning record on the final day of the regular season, they certainly lost more than they gained over the winter. As their three biggest competitors in the NL West added six of our top nine free agents (and 10 of our top 21), the Padres lost their best hitter (Juan Soto), their closer (Josh Hader), their ace (Blake Snell), and three more capable arms from the rotation (Seth Lugo, Michael Wacha, and Nick Martinez), all while slashing payroll by nearly $90 million. Read the rest of this entry »

I had a few notes on topical prospects without a big piece to put them in, so I’m including them here in an appetizer-sampler article.

How Is Jackson Merrill Taking to Center Field?

Well, let’s observe. Here’s every fly ball hit Merrill’s way in April, minus the mind-numbingly routine plays and liners he had no chance to catch:

Read the rest of this entry »

Adam Cimber is one of those pitchers that you notice, yet don’t spend too much time thinking about. The arm angle catches your attention, but at the same time, the side-slinging right-hander is neither overpowering nor a prolific ninth-inning arm. Working most often in the seventh and eight innings throughout his career, Cimber has a pedestrian mid-80s fastball and a meager 18.0% strikeout rate. Moreover, he’s been credited with just 23 wins and seven saves since debuting with the San Diego Padres in 2018.

Amid little fanfare, and with the exception of an injury-hampered 2023, he’s been one of the most reliable relievers in the game. Now 27 years old and with his fifth team — Cimber signed a free agent deal with the Los Angeles Angels over the winter — the University of Washington product has made 327 appearances, more than all but 13 hurlers during his big-league tenure. Killing a lot of worms along the way — his ground ball rate is north of 51% — he’s logged a 3.46 ERA and a 3.81 FIP over 304 innings.

Speaking to Cimber during spring training, I learned that he began throwing sidearm when he was 14 years old, this at the suggestion of his father, who felt he’d need to do something different if he hoped to make his high school team. Role models included Dan Quisenberry and Kent Tekulve — “my father grew up in that era of baseball, the 1970s and 1980s” — as well as a quartet of more-recent sidearmers and submariners.

“For the longest time it was Darren O’Day, Joe Smith, and Steve Cishek,” said Cimber, who has made four appearances this year and allowed one run in four-and-two-thirds innings. “But the pitcher I grew up watching that really helped me after I dropped down was Brad Ziegler. That was way back in the day. They’re all different in their own way — they went about it in a different way — but it’s always great to learn from guys that went before me.” Read the rest of this entry »

With a new baseball season comes a fresh set of box scores to pick apart daily, but the ink on the first one wasn’t even dry, so to speak, when it lodged itself in my brain at an ungodly early hour on March 20 and stuck there like a flashing neon sign: EIGHT SHORTSTOPS! On Opening Day in Seoul against the Dodgers, the Padres fielded a lineup that except for its battery of Yu Darvish and Luis Campusano was entirely made up of shortstops past and present; by contrast the Dodgers had resorted to placing six-time Gold Glove-winning right fielder Mookie Betts at short to accommodate their own uneven roster. To this baseball-addled mind, it felt like a collision of four decades worth of reading about scouting philosophies and sabermetrics, from Dollar Sign on the Muscle and Future Value through Bill James’ defensive spectrum and the basic construction of WAR, with its positional adjustments. It took a remarkable confluence of circumstances to arrive at this arrangement, which to be fair was never intended to be permanent, though manager Mike Shildt has used that same lineup more often than any other since then.

Shortstops tend to be some of the most gifted and athletic players on the diamond. As Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel put it in Future Value, the requirements for the position include “an above-average arm, plus speed/range, plus footwork, and average hands/action.” A very high percentage of right-handed players were shortstops at some point as amateurs; indeed, playing the position at that stage is “a strong indication of a player’s all-around athleticism,” as Baseball America’s J.J. Cooper wrote last month when noting the Padres’ increasing stockpile. Most of those amateur shortstops migrate across the defensive spectrum to less demanding positions as their bodies grow and they progress through the minors and into the majors, with the development of their offensive skills helping to determine where they might find homes. As James observed long ago, the more difficult the defensive position, the lower the bar for offensive production.

Here’s the lineup in question:

That’s a collection of parts that don’t yet look like they make up a whole. The lineup shows the contours of the boom-and-bust cycle weathered by general manager A.J. Preller, who has committed nearly $1 billion to Machado (11 years, $350 million after the six-time All-Star opted out of his original 10-year, $300 million deal), Tatis (14 years, $340 million), and Bogaerts (11 years, $280 million) alone. While the Padres reached the NLCS in 2022 after knocking off both the 101-win Mets and 111-win Dodgers, Preller’s vision hasn’t translated into full-blown success; after winning just 82 games with a club record $255 million payroll ($280 million for tax purposes) in 2023, he’s been forced to retool — most notably by dealing away late-’22 acquisition Juan Soto — and may be nearing the end of his rope.

Long story short, Preller invested a whole lot of money while packing the Padres’ roster not just with stars, but with stars of a certain type (most of them in line with the trend toward increasingly large but athletic men playing the position), then moving them around as they began to crowd each other. With the team now stretched thin, he’s filling in the gaps with light-hitting utilitymen and an interesting experiment. It’s worth a look at how the Padres got to this point.

The Fringe Guys

Likely the most transient member of this lineup is Wade. A former Yankees prospect, he grazed the Baseball Prospectus Top 101 Prospects list at no. 101 in 2017, following a .259/.352/.349 season at Double-A Trenton and then a stint in the Arizona Fall League learning to play the outfield. Vice president of player development Gary Denbo and others in the organization envisioned Wade as the Yankees’ answer to superutilitymen Ben Zobrist and Brock Holt, but his complete lack of power and failure to make consistent contact prevented him from realizing that lofty goal. Seven years and four DFAs later, the 29-year-old lefty swinger is the owner of a career .220/.297/.302 (68 wRC+) batting line with a 1.7% barrel rate and 24.7% strikeout rate in 726 plate appearances. Signed to a minor league deal in November after getting just 55 PA with the 112-loss A’s last year, Wade has started five of the Padres’ nine games at third base in place of Machado, who’s still recovering from October surgery to repair his right extensor tendon in his elbow. Of the four games Wade hasn’t started, two apiece have been started by 24-year-old righty rookie Eguy Rosario (who has pinch-hit for Wade three times and who himself has played 130 minor league games at shortstop) and 23-year-old lefty-swinging third base prospect Graham Pauley, who finished last season with 20 games at Double-A, but whose infield defense was described as “currently untenable.”

Also on the fringe is Profar, who goes further back with Preller than any other Padre, having been signed out of Curaçao by the Rangers on July 2, 2009, when Preller was the team’s director of professional and international scouting. By 2013, the 20-year-old Profar was the game’s top prospect, but with a trio of All-Stars — Ian Kinsler, Elvis Andrus, and Adrián Beltré — blocking his path to regular playing time in the Texas infield, he was limited to utility duty as a rookie. His trajectory shifted once he lost nearly two full years to right shoulder injuries, first a torn teres major that cost him all of 2014, then a torn labrum that required surgery and limited him to a rehab stint in late ’15. He’s tasted only intermittent success since, finishing with least a 100 wRC+ and 1.0 WAR just three times in the last seven years while more or less playing himself out of the infield; in 2022–23, he logged one inning at second base and 151.1 at first.

After hitting 15 homers with a 111 wRC+ and a career-high 2.5 WAR in 2022, Profar opted out of the final year of his three-year, $21 million deal with the Padres, then went unsigned into mid-March ’23 before catching on with the Rockies. His season was such a disaster that the team released him in late August, and while he enjoyed a bit of September success upon being picked up by San Diego, he finished with a 76 wRC+ and -2.0 WAR. Yet he’s back on a one-year, $1 million-plus-incentives deal, starting in left field because of the team’s lack of outfield depth.

The Cornerstone

As for the other six (former) shortstops, they’ve basically been shoehorned into the lineup by whatever means necessary in a process that dates back to 2019, when the team signed Machado to a 10-year, $300 million deal with the intention of returning him to third base after he had spent most of the previous season at shortstop for the only time in his major league career.

When the Orioles drafted Machado out of a Miami high school with the third pick in 2010, he had already played shortstop for the legendary 2009 under-18 U.S. national team that won a gold medal at the Pan American Junior Championships. Machado played almost exclusively at shortstop in his three minor league seasons (the first of which was only five games long). By the spring of 2012, the 19-year-old phenom was the no. 11 prospect in the game according to Baseball America, drawing comparisons to Alex Rodriguez but also concerns that he might physically outgrow the position. Meanwhile, the Orioles already had a shortstop they were quite satisfied with in 29-year-old J.J. Hardy, who was coming off a 30-homer, 4.5 WAR season and who had recently signed a three-year, $22.5 million extension. Machado began that season at Double-A Bowie, but when the Orioles, who had gone 69-93 in 2011 — their 14th consecutive losing season — found themselves in contention, they called up Machado in early August and stuck him at third base, where he had just two games of professional experience. He quickly proved to be a spectacular defender, a major upgrade over incumbent Wilson Betemit, who was soon lost to a wrist injury anyway. The Orioles won 93 games and claimed a Wild Card spot in 2012, and the Machado-Hardy left side remained in place through two more playoff appearances over the next four years before the latter’s body broke down.

During Hardy’s injury-related absences in 2015–16, Machado filled in at shortstop, playing a total of 52 games there. After Hardy retired following the 2017 season, Machado returned to his old position, first with the Orioles, who were amid a tear-down phase, and then with the Dodgers, who traded for him on July 18, 2018. Though he produced 7.0 WAR in his walk year, Machado’s metrics at shortstop weren’t great (-10 DRS, -6.5 UZR, 1 RAA), and by the time he signed with San Diego in February 2019, the 20-year-old Tatis was on the cusp of the majors, ready to make the jump from Double-A. Back at third, Machado has made two All-Star teams and had two top-three finishes in the MVP voting while emerging as a team leader — so much so that the Padres lavished a new extension on him after he opted out of his original deal at the end of the 2022 season. As for when he’ll return to the field — thereby trimming the shortstop total down to a reasonable (?) seven, with Machado replacing Wade at third and a better hitter than Wade starting at DH — the timeline is tentative at best, “possibly by the end of April.”

The Prodigy

While Machado didn’t have a great first year with the Padres in 2019, Tatis was a revelation on the offensive side, hitting .317/.379/.590 (151 wRC+) in 84 games before a stress reaction in his lower back ended his season in mid-August. His defensive metrics were another story, in the red across the board (-3 DRS, -5.8 UZR, -12 RAA); while Machado’s were somewhat better during a 37-game stint at shortstop when Tatis missed nearly six weeks due to a hamstring strain, the Padres opted to restore their previous configuration during the shortened 2020 season. Both players performed well; Tatis’ defensive numbers even improved across the small sample, and the team went 37-23, making the playoffs for the first time in 14 years, albeit via an expanded field.

With the infield getting increasingly crowded due to the arrivals of Cronenworth (in a December 2019 trade with the Rays along with Tommy Pham) and Kim (from the KBO in the winter of 2020–21), the Padres inked Tatis to a massive extension in the spring of 2021, then experimented with him in center and right field while he was in the midst of a monster 42-homer, 158 wRC+ season that again included mostly below average defensive metrics at shortstop (-7.5 UZR, -6 DRS, 2 RAA). The plan to go forward with him as an outfielder in 2022 was interrupted by Tatis’ misadventures, first a fracture in his left wrist that required surgery and may have occurred during one of the multiple motorcycle accidents he was involved in while in the Dominican Republic that offseason, and then an 80-game PED suspension that landed while he was on a rehab assignment. When he finally returned last year, it was as a right fielder, and while his offense wasn’t up to his usual level, his defense was elite. He led all right fielders with his 29 DRS, 13.8 UZR, and 10 RAA, taking home not only a Gold Glove but the NL Platinum Glove.

The Swiss Army Knife

Drafted as a second baseman out of the University of Michigan — where he pitched and played first, second, third, and left field but not shortstop — in 2015, Cronenworth spent most of the next four seasons playing short in the Rays’ organization, albeit with healthy servings of second base and third base. He even pitched in seven games at Durham in 2019, and might have continued to do so if not for MLB’s dumb rule changes, which included one that set a 20-inning bar for someone to be considered a two-way player; otherwise, he could only enter when his team was winning or losing by more than six runs.

As a rookie in 2020 he hit a robust .285/.354/.477 (126 wRC+) while playing mainly at second base, but he started at shortstop in the three games Tatis did not, and served as a late-inning replacement in eight others. During Tatis’ initial outfield foray, it was Cronenworth who took over at shortstop, starting 31 of 34 games and performing right around average according to the metrics.

He held the second base job in 2022, and was a Gold Glove finalist while hitting for a 110 wRC+ with 4.2 WAR, but the arrival of Bogaerts the following winter pushed him to first base, a position where the Padres had long struggled for offensive production due to their misguided belief in Eric Hosmer, who netted 0.4 WAR in four and a half seasons before being traded. Unfortunately, Cronenworth’s offense has declined since the move, putting the Padres at a deficit offensively; he slipped to a 92 wRC+ and 1.1 WAR last year.

The (Kiwoom) Hero

The infield got even more crowded in 2021 with the arrival of Kim, who had starred as a shortstop for the Nexen (later Kiwoom) Heroes in the KBO. When he first came stateside via a four-year, $28 million deal, he scuffled at the plate, hitting .202/.270/.352 (71 wRC+) while backing up at second, short, and third. He filled in for Tatis during a COVID-related IL stint in May, but was mainly consigned to pinch-hitting duty during Tatis’ outfield experiment.

Once the Padres committed to making Tatis an outfielder, it was Kim they chose to play shortstop for 2022. He rewarded their faith by doing standout work (10 DRS, 4.9 UZR, 4 RAA), becoming a Gold Glove finalist while improving to a 106 wRC+. He accommodated the team by moving to second base with the arrival of Bogaerts in 2023, winning a Gold Glove while hitting 17 homers with a 112 wRC+ and 4.4 WAR. In February, the Padres decided they would be better with the smaller, rangier Kim at shortstop and Bogaerts at second, a move that not only makes sense on paper but seems geared to keeping Kim around past his current deal (he has an $8 million mutual option for 2025).

The Interloper

Signed out of Aruba just shy of his 17th birthday in 2009, Bogaerts played exclusively at shortstop until he reached Triple-A four years later. Following a quick initiation at Pawtucket, the Red Sox squeezed the 20-year-old prospect into their lineup as a third baseman alongside shortstop Stephen Drew, and won the World Series with that combination. When Drew opted out, Bogaerts began the 2014 season at shortstop; he shifted back to third when Drew belatedly re-signed, but when the veteran didn’t hit a lick, the Red Sox foisted him on the Yankees in a July 31 trade and reinstalled the rookie at short. Over the next eight seasons he emerged as one of baseball’s best shortstops, hitting for a 125 wRC+ with 34.0 WAR (second at the position) from 2015–22 and signing a six-year, $120 million extension in ’19. Even so, he accumulated -50 DRS and -25 RAA in that span.

Bogaerts exercised an opt-out in his contract after 2022 and signed a massive deal with the Padres with the understanding that a position switch might happen down the road. He was solid defensively in his first season in San Diego (-4 DRS, 2 RAA, 0 UZR) while hitting for a 120 wRC+, but during spring training, the Padres convinced him to swap places with Kim. “I signed here as a shortstop,” Bogaerts said in late February. “But to me, I just live and die baseball… I’m just doing it in the best interests of the team, and in the end, I feel like I’m at peace with moving off.”

The Latest Experiment

Given the flimsiness of their outfield and the logjam in the infield, the Padres decided late last year to try Merrill, their 2021 first-round pick, in the outfield; as Longenhagen and Tess Taruskin wrote when they placed him 30th on this year’s Top 100 Prospects list, his below-average hands suggest that he’ll permanently move off shortstop eventually. Merrill played five games in left field at Double-A San Antonio, and the Padres prepared him for the likelihood of continuing down that path. They tried Merrill in both left and center field this spring, and the 20-year-old (whose birthday is April 19) impressed them enough to open the season at the latter spot. So far, he’s hit a respectable .240/.321/.440 while starting seven of nine games there and taken over after pinch-hitting for the light-hitting José Azocar in the other two. If Kim leaves after this season, Merrill could be back in the shortstop mix, but for now, this is how the Padres are rolling.

Will it all work? The early returns are mixed, as the Padres are just 4-5. Their offense has been robust, scoring 5.78 runs per game (sixth in the NL), but their shaky pitching has allowed an even six runs per game (10th). It’s far too early to get a read on defensive metrics, but for now we’ll note that the team’s .651 defensive efficiency is 11th, 24 points below the league average. Stay tuned.

With the start of the season just two weeks away, it’s time for one of my most beloved/hated/dreaded annual traditions: making my picks for breakouts and busts. For those of you who haven’t read one of these pieces in the past, these are my picks for the players who are the most likely to change the general consensus about them over the course of the 2024 season. And since we’re talking about generally low-probability outcomes — this isn’t a list of players with better or worse projections than last year — there’s no exercise with more potential to make me look super smart… or dumb. For every J.P. Crawford or Steven Kwan triumph, there’s an instance of Andrew Vaughn-induced shame.

As usual, let’s start with a quick table of the triumphs and humiliations of last year’s picks:

It was about an average year. Vaughn and Christian Walker were the biggest misses, and Jordan Walker’s lousy defense kept him from being a win. Now on to this year’s picks.

The Breakouts

Spencer Torkelson, Detroit Tigers
Spencer Torkelson’s .233/.313/.446 line certainly didn’t knock any socks off, but he was a (relative) beast over the last two months of the season, hitting .244/.329/.526 with 16 homers. Now, I always warn folks to not read too much into monthly splits because there’s a tendency to think that splits coinciding with a good explanation are enough to overcome the small sample size issues, and because the endpoints are selective. The two-month split, however, isn’t why Torkelson’s here. Rather, there was a lot of evidence to suggest that he was underperforming his peripherals for most of the season up until that point. From the beginning of the season through August 8, Torkelson was the biggest zStats underachiever with significant playing time. Using only Statcast data with no information as to actual results, ZiPS thought that in that span Tork should have been an .868 OPS hitter; his actual OPS was .688. His OPS after that day? .921! Remember, Torkelson was a top-five prospect in baseball entering his rookie season in 2022, so even though his first year was a disaster, he’s not some 31-year-old beer leaguer coming out of nowhere.

Patrick Bailey’s Bat, San Francisco Giants
I can’t really call it a full breakout since Patrick Bailey already had an overall breakout season, thanks to defense that crushed even the loftiest of expectations. What puts him here is that people may be sleeping on his bat. No, I don’t think there’s any chance he starts hitting like Buster Posey, but Bailey’s otherworldly defense and lackluster bat (wRC+ of 78) appears to have pigeonholed him as a typical no-hit, all-glove backstop. I think that would be a mistake. Catchers have really weird developmental curves and I can’t stress enough how difficult it is for a catcher to nearly skip the high minors; he only played 28 games above A-ball before debuting in San Francisco. He hit .251/.351/.424 in the minors – again, not star quality but far from a total zero – and even without full developmental time offensively, he wasn’t completely destroyed by MLB pitching. In fact, he showed surprisingly solid plate discipline and power for a prospect with so little experience with the bat. Both ZiPS and our Depth Charts project Bailey to have an 82 wRC+, but I would not be shocked if he finished the season with a mark between 95 and 100, which, if his defense holds up, would make him an elite catcher overall.

Wyatt Langford, Texas Rangers
I don’t have a formal rule about it, but when ZiPS projects a player with little or no MLB experience to lead in a significant stat, I should take it very seriously since ZiPS doesn’t often go nuts about minor leaguers. The last player I can think of is Luis Arraez, who had a 21% chance of hitting .300 for his rookie season, according to ZiPS, which also projected him to have the highest batting average in baseball by 2020. ZiPS thinks Wyatt Langford is going to lead the majors in doubles and be one of the best offensive rookies in recent years. He was one of the few college hitters that ZiPS saw as nearly ready for the majors in 2023, and it liked him more than similarly advanced hitters Nolan Schanuel and Dylan Crews. Since ZiPS is my sidekick – or maybe it’s the other way around – I gotta have its back!

Anthony Volpe, New York Yankees
Anthony Volpe had a solid rookie season, but given his elite prospect status, it was a mild disappointment that he was only league average. Because of this, I think people are now underselling his offensive upside. He hit for a lot of power for a 22-year-old shortstop (21 home runs, .174 ISO). He also stole 24 bases on 29 tries, including successfully swiping each of his first 15 attempts, and was worth 3.5 base running runs. Two of his biggest problems were that he didn’t get on base enough (.283 OBP, 8.7 BB%) and struck out too much (27.8 K%), but these weren’t issues for him in the minors, and some of his fundamentals here are promising — he actually gets off to fewer 0-1 counts than most players with his strikeout rate. All of this suggests that he should figure things out with more major league experience. ZiPS also thinks he should have had a .312 BABIP given his Statcast data, instead of his actual mark of .259, which indicates that some of his woes were likely do to bad luck.

Keibert Ruiz, Washington Nationals
As with Volpe, I think Keibert Ruiz’s low BABIP, especially his .223 BABIP in the first half, made his season look a lot weaker than it was. ZiPS saw a .270 BABIP as a more reasonable number for him as a hitter in the first half, and that number continued to rise in the second half; he had a .285 zBABIP by the end of the season. Giving Ruiz back some of the batting average makes his actual .226/.279/.360 first-half line look a lot less abysmal and his .300/.342/.467 one in the second half look less like a fluke. In fact, except for a bit more power, most of the difference between his first half and second half was BABIP, so the halves weren’t quite as different as they appeared. Overall, his zStats line of .274/.330/.445 reflects a much more advanced hitter than we saw overall in 2023.

As I reminded people with Bailey, catchers tend to have a weird developmental pattern, and Ruiz has been no exception. Ruiz was a top prospect for a long time before hitting the Double-A wall, and his standing fell quite a bit in the eyes of prospect watchers. But he re-established himself as a top prospect to a degree that he was a huge part of Washington’s return when it traded Max Scherzer and Trea Turner to the Dodgers in 2021. I think people forget how young he still is at 25, and being older is not as big of a deal for a catching prospect than for someone at any other position.

Elly De La Cruz, Cincinnati Reds
Elly De La Cruz is a common breakout pick for obvious reasons, but I’m including him here specifically because his plate discipline wasn’t as bad as it looks from the raw stats. ZiPS actually thought, from his plate discipline data, that his strikeout rate should have been more like 27% instead of nearly 34%, enough to knock off 27 strikeouts. And given that he should be a high BABIP player, because he was the fastest man in baseball last year, putting more balls in play would benefit him more than it would most players. Overall, his zStats line last year was .273/.323/.449, compared to his actual line of .235/.300/.410, meaning the holes in his game aren’t quite as deep as his reputation would suggest.

And if you don’t buy that, he did show better plate discipline as the season progressed. I’ll again warn of the dangers of storylines that coincide with splits, but things like offensive swing percentage stabilize very quickly, mitigating some of the sample size issues. I don’t think it’s a stretch to look at the graph below and conclude that De La Cruz got caught up in the hype of his initial success and became too aggressive. As a result, he started struggling before coming to realize that he had gotten away from the approach that made him such a dynamic player in the first place.

Dominic Canzone, Seattle Mariners
One should be suspicious of Pacific Coast League stats, but Dominic Canzone’s .354/.431/.634 line last year was good even by PCL standards, enough for a 151 wRC+ in the league. However, that success didn’t follow him to the majors. He probably doesn’t have a lot of upside, but the rate of his improvement over the last couple of years suggests that there’s a chance he could have a nice little Geronimo Berroa-esque run.

Tucupita Marcano, San Diego Padres
This one is kind of a stretch because I don’t see an obvious path for Tucupita Marcano to get much playing time. He hasn’t hit at all in the majors yet, but he’s also had a weird minor league career; he’s still just coming off his age-23 season and has made some progress at translating his minor league plate discipline to the majors. ZiPS isn’t in on him, but Steamer is, and if he can managed his 94 wRC+ Steamer projection, along with a decent glove (though more at second base than short) and his speed, he’ll at least be interesting. Gotta have one out there pick, no?

The Busts

Cody Bellinger, Chicago Cubs
I don’t think Cody Bellinger will fall anywhere near the depths of his brutal 2021 season, but there are reasons to be suspicious of last year’s resurgence. He changed some of his mechanics and altered his approach, especially in two-strike counts, to make more contact, and those adjustments should be sustainable. It’s the power numbers that are a bit preposterous, to the degree I can’t think of any comparable player who managed to maintain this amount of power with mediocre-at-best exit velocity numbers. Statcast’s expected slugging percentage knocks 88 points off his actual one, and the ZiPS version (zSLG) is 20 points meaner than that.

J.T. Realmuto, Philadelphia Phillies
This one hurts, especially for a player ZiPS was so excited about in 2015-2016 before his breakout. But the decline in J.T. Realmuto’s offensive numbers in 2023 is supported by the drop in his peripheral numbers; he was just a bit worse at everything last year. He’s also a catcher entering his mid 30s. This is a gut thing more than a projection thing, but I suspect any kind of a leg injury would be a bigger deal for a surprisingly quick player like Realmuto, whose offensive stats already reflect his speed, than for your typical catcher.

Isaac Paredes, Tampa Bay Rays
Isaac Paredes is a good hitter, but is he really a 140 wRC+ guy? In both Statcast and ZiPS, Paredes had an even larger disparity between his actual power numbers and his peripherals than Bellinger. That said, there’s some good news, because unlike Bellinger, Paredes has done this before. There were 20 hitters in 2022 that hit at least five more homers than zHR expected, and 18 of them went on to hit fewer home runs in 2023. Paredes was one of the two who hit more (the other was Pete Alonso). Because Paredes has such a low hard-hit percentage, I’m not completely on board yet.

Lane Thomas, Washington Nationals
One thing about Cinderella stories is that people tend to overrate them after the ball. Most of these stories don’t involve permanent stardom; Joey Meneses and Frank Schwindel are two example of people getting too excited about an older breakout guy. Unlike Schwindel, Lane Thomas is probably still a league-average player, on the level of his 2021 and 2022 seasons, but I’d be shocked to see him hit 30 homers again. He’s probably a stopgap center fielder/fourth outfielder type, and I’m seeing him surprisingly high in some fantasy rankings.

Dominic Fletcher, Chicago White Sox
I was pretty shocked to see the White Sox trade Cristian Mena for Dominic Fletcher, even with the assumption that ZiPS is being too exuberant about Mena in ranking him at the back of the top 50 prospects. If you evaluate him the way our prospect team does, a fourth outfielder for a 45 FV prospect is quite a rich gain. And it’s looking like the Sox will give Fletcher a pretty good chance at getting the majority of the playing time in right field. It’s not as bad as the team’s irrational excitement about Oscar Colás last year, but there’s just not a lot of support for Fletcher’s maintaining his .301/.350/.441 line from his brief stint in the majors. That’s ridiculously higher than his zStats slash line of .249/.290/.376, which works out to a difference of 125 OPS points.

Almost all professional baseball players played at least one other sport growing up. Moreover, many of them were athletically gifted at a young age and thus excelled against their school-age contemporaries in their formative years, often all the way through high school. Fast forward to today, and many continue to play other sports in a recreational capacity — golf is prominent — especially in the offseason.

Watching other sports is also popular activity for ballplayers. Much as they tuned in to see their favorites on the family TV, they now do so as adults. Like the rest of us, they enjoy sitting on their couches, or hanging out with friends at sports bars, rooting for successful shots, goals, and touchdowns. Temporarily apart from the game they get paid to play, they get to be fans.

With those things in mind, I asked a dozen players about their “other” sport. Besides baseball, what did they most enjoy playing, and what do they now most enjoy watching?

———

Dansby Swanson, Chicago Cubs shortstop: “Basketball. I was pretty good. I could really shoot. My basketball game was somewhat similar to my baseball game. I kind of did the right things. I knew what to do. I knew where to go. I averaged around 15 points in high school. It was [a big school]. We had over 2,000 kids. There are a lot of big schools in Georgia.

“I grew up in very much a sports family. I love watching all sports, honestly. I love watching football. I love watching basketball. Obviously, I watch a lot of soccer; I watch my wife [Mallory Swanson, who plays for the Chicago Red Stars and the U.S. Women’s National Team]. Golf is on the TV. An underrated sport to watch is tennis. I have sports on TV all the time.”

———

Mike Trout, Los Angeles Angels center fielder: “I played basketball and football throughout high school. I’d probably say that basketball was my best other sport. I was a small forward and an OK player. Read the rest of this entry »

You truly cannot make this stuff up. Back in December, the Padres were involved in the biggest trade of the offseason, sending Juan Soto to the Yankees in return for a heaping helping of pitching prospects. It’s the kind of trade you make when you’ve missed out on your goal, a classic attempt to turn a bad situation into an OK one. When you trade one of the best handful of players in baseball for some dudes most people outside of New York have never heard of, it’s fairly easy to guess your team’s trajectory.

But, uh, don’t tell A.J. Preller that. On Wednesday, the Padres made their second blockbuster of the winter, this one headed in the opposite direction: They acquired Dylan Cease from the Chicago White Sox in exchange for Drew Thorpe, Jairo Iriarte, Samuel Zavala, and Steven Wilson, as Mark Feinsand first reported.

This is wild stuff. It’s so hard to get a player like Soto on your team; if you have him, and you’re trying to make the playoffs, there’s almost never a good reason to move him. If you do move him, you’re probably rebuilding, though, not turning around and using one of those same prospects you got in the first deal to add a new star. The Padres, man.
Read the rest of this entry »

When free agent Matt Chapman signed with the Giants this past weekend, most of my analysis focused upon the ups and downs of his 2023 season and the nature of his contract, which looks comparatively team friendly. One thing I underplayed in the analysis was the extent to which San Francisco’s winter stands out relative to the competition. Even before the addition of Chapman, the Giants had spent more money on free agents than any other team besides the Dodgers, and likewise project to receive more WAR from those additions than any team besides their longtime rivals.

Based on the data in our Free Agent Tracker, the Giants have now committed $261.25 million in guaranteed salaries: $113 million to center fielder Jung Hoo Lee, $44 million to righty Jordan Hicks, $42 million to DH/outfielder Jorge Soler, and $8.25 million to catcher Tom Murphy; this accounting does not include the major league salaries that shortstop Nick Ahmed or lefty reliever Amir Garrett will get if they make the big league roster; last month, they each signed minor league deals as non-roster invitees. San Francisco’s additions may not be as eye-catching as signing either Carlos Correa or Aaron Judge would have been last offseason, and the team still projects for a middle-of-the-pack 82 wins after going 79-83 last year, but the Giants may not be done spending some of the money that was burning a hole in their pockets. They remain interested in Blake Snell, especially in the wake of injuries within their rotation.

Of course, the Dodgers blow the field away when it comes to spending, even if we stick to the adjusted salaries once deferred money is factored in, with a total of $853.2 million: $437.83 million to Shohei Ohtani (down from a sticker price of $700 million), $325 million to Yoshinobu Yamamoto, $20.434 million to outfielder Teoscar Hernández (down from $25 million), $10 million to Clayton Kershaw (with incentives that can increase the value significantly for both 2024 and ’25), $9 million apiece to Ryan Brasier and Jason Heyward, $8 million to Joe Kelly, $7 million to James Paxton, and $4 million to Enrique Hernández.

Here’s a look at the 30 teams’ free agent spending. Note that, as above, these figures factor in the applicable deferrals but not incentives, escalator clauses, or split-contract salaries from minor league deals:

As you can see, five teams committed less than $10 million each this winter, and of the bottom seven teams, four (the Orioles, Rays, Twins, and Marlins) made the playoffs last year. Free agency isn’t the only route to improve a team, but particularly with regards to the Orioles, one can empathize with fans who are disappointed that last year’s success hasn’t translated into a shopping spree to improve their odds of getting back to the postseason.

The 30 teams have committed a total of $2.74 billion to free agents so far, and even though that figure will increase once Snell and Jordan Montgomery sign, overall spending will still be lower this offseason than in recent ones. Based on the data at RosterResource, teams spent $4 billion last offseason ($2.22 billion on the top 12 free agents alone) and $3.22 billion in the lockout-interrupted offseason of 2021–22. For this winter, spending works out to an average of $91.38 million per team, but that figure is skewed by the top teams to such an extent that the median is just $49.25 million; only nine teams exceeded the mean.

Beyond the dollars, I thought it would be worth revisiting some free agent accounting we’ve done in the past, regarding WAR added and lost in free agency. This isn’t quite as straightforward as it sounds, as we’ll soon see.

This is the most basic accounting, lumping together players signed to major league deals and those who had to settle for minor league ones; the latter inflates the counts of some of these teams well into double digits. It’s worth noting that where players spent time with multiple teams in 2023, I’ve only counted their WAR with their last team on the outgoing side, but their full-season WAR on the incoming side. Consider the case of Jeimer Candelario, who produced 3.1 WAR for the Nationals and then 0.2 WAR for the Cubs. To these eyes, crediting the Reds as adding a 3.3-WAR player properly conveys the impact of a substantial addition. The question is whether to count the Cubs as losing 3.3 WAR (via a player they acquired without intending to retain) or 0.2 WAR (reflecting the transient nature of a late-season addition). I went with the latter option.

The total number of outgoing free agents shown above (277) doesn’t include 11 additional players from the KBO and NPB, eight of whom have signed (all but Trevor Bauer, Adam Plutko, and Yasiel Puig), meaning that from among that total, 73 — about 25% — are unsigned. Most of the unsigned are fairly low impact players, in that just 13 produced at least 1.0 WAR last year, with Montgomery (4.3), Snell (4.1), Brandon Belt (2.3), Mike Clevinger (2.2) and J.D. Martinez (2.2) the only ones above 2.0. Meanwhile, 35 of them produced zero or negative WAR, though to be fair, that was often in limited opportunity.

While the eight foreign players who have signed are counted in the total number of signed free agents above, they didn’t produce any WAR within MLB. Thus, the fact that three teams outrank the Dodgers in terms of net free agent WAR comes with the caveat that the Los Angeles total doesn’t include Yamamoto.

I’ll come back to that issue, but first let’s note the teams at the extremes. Ahead of the Dodgers are three teams who had a bunch of players hit the open market, but who were at best minimally productive in 2023, and who all went out and made at least a few solid moves. Of the dozen Reds to test free agency, including the still-unsigned Joey Votto, only Harrison Bader produced even 1.0 WAR in 2023, and he nonetheless was 0.2 wins below replacement after being acquired from the Yankees. On the other side, in addition to Candelario, the team shored up its pitching by adding starters Nick Martinez and Frankie Montas, relievers Brent Suter and Emilio Pagán, and more — not big moves, but enough to put them at the top. The Cardinals shed five players, most notably Dakota Hudson, and overhauled their rotation by adding Sonny Gray, whose 5.3 WAR as a Twin tied Kevin Gausman for the AL lead, as well as Kyle Gibson and Lance Lynn; they also added Keynan Middleton to the bullpen and staffed their bench with Brandon Crawford and Matt Carpenter. Of the eight Royals who became free agents, only Zack Greinke produced 1.0 WAR, but they beefed up their pitching, with starters Seth Lugo and Michael Wacha; their lineup, with Hunter Renfroe; and their bench, with Adam Frazier and Garrett Hampson to their bench. These moves won’t win them the division, but they’re at least proof of life.

The Dodgers’ figures on both sides of the ledger are inflated by their keeping Brasier, Enrique Hernández, Heyward, Kelly, and Kershaw, but they did shed the still-unsigned J.D. Martinez and Julio Urías, replacing them with the market’s two most expensive players. The Diamondbacks re-signed Lourdes Gurriel Jr. and didn’t lose anybody who produced at least 1.0 WAR for the team, while the only departing Giant to meet that threshold was Sean Manaea.

At the other end of the spectrum, it’s striking that the bottom five teams include three AL postseason participants plus one NL team that barely missed it. Whether they won it all or fell short, their offseasons have resulted in some downsizing of payrolls and perhaps expectations.

In the wake of last year’s $255 million flop, the uncertainty regarding their local broadcast deal, and the death of chairman Peter Seidler, the Padres gutted their pitching staff, with Snell, Lugo, Martinez, Wacha, and closer Josh Hader among those departing, along with catcher Gary Sánchez, whom they plucked off the scrapheap and who had his best season since 2019. Most of the money they’ve spent this offseason was on their bullpen, with Wandy Peralta, Japanese lefty Yuki Matsui and Korean righty Woo-Suk Go joining the fold. The Twins shed Gray, Kenta Maeda, and Tyler Mahle from their rotation, and both Donovan Solano and Michael A. Taylor remain unsigned but unlikely to return; meanwhile their most impactful addition is first baseman Carlos Santana. The Blue Jays let Chapman depart, along with Belt, Hicks and Whit Merrifield; they cobbled together a lower-cost third base solution, which includes the incoming Justin Turner and Isiah Kiner-Falefa, retained center fielderKevin Kiermaier, and took a flier on Cuban righty Yariel Rodriguez, who spent three seasons in NPB. The Rangers may still re-sign Montgomery, but for now he counts only on the outbound side, and they also shed relievers Aroldis Chapman, Chris Stratton, and Will Smith, plus catcher/DH Mitch Garver. Their rotation is full of question marks as they bank on Jacob deGrom, Max Scherzer, and Mahle having strong returns from surgery. Veteran righty David Robertson should bolster the bullpen, and Garver’s departure is mitigated by the eventual arrival of top prospect Wyatt Langford.

Since the impact of the foreign free agents isn’t reflected in the table above, I took one more look at the landscape using projected WAR on the incoming side. Instead of taking it straight from our Free Agent Tracker — that uses Steamer, which is available in time for the opening bell of the offseason, but not ZiPS, which takes longer to prepare — I took the more labor-intensive route by swapping in our Depth Charts projections, which takes an average the two systems:

Despite accounting for Yamamoto, the Dodgers actually fall in the rankings due to known injuries (Ohtani won’t pitch in 2024, while Kershaw could be out until August) and regression (Brasier and Heyward, particularly), while the Giants surpass them with the addition of Lee. Also notable on the upper end are the Mets, mainly due to anticipated rebounds from Manaea, Bader, and Luis Severino. On the other side, the Orioles stand out more than in the previous table, mainly because the only free agent they signed to a major league deal, Craig Kimbrel, is projected to regress. Given that both Kyle Bradish and John Means have been sidelined with elbow injuries to start the season, it seems possible the O’s could add a low-cost starter who might boost their standing here a bit.

Thanks to our tools at FanGraphs, free agency is easy to track, even if I’ve made it more labor-intensive for this exercise. It’s hardly the only route by which teams improve, however. For example, the Orioles traded for Corbin Burnes, who may outproduce any of the starters who were signed. But in the big picture, the patterns I’ve illustrated offer us plenty of hints about what to expect from the upcoming season.