Let’s dive right into a few incremental changes to the Top 100 prospects list, as well as a couple of non-Top 100 additions.

Cardinals lefty Matthew Liberatore has had a velo spike — he’s frequently reaching back for 96 and 97 when he wants, and his fastball is averaging 94.5 mph. That’s up about a tick and a half from his average in 2022, when he ran an ERA well north of 5.00 across about 150 combined innings split mostly between Triple-A and seven big league starts. Libby has had frequent enough velocity fluctuations during his time as a prospect to anticipate it will be a thing he deals with throughout his career, but his repertoire depth and the long-haul projection for his command will enable him to compete even when he doesn’t have his peak stuff. That’s largely why he was kept on the Top 100 this past offseason even though he had a poor 2022.

His FV isn’t changing in light of the spike (again, it’s fair to bet Liberatore’s peak velo will continue to yo-yo), but his report has been updated and he’s sliding up about 20 spots, from the very back of the list (where he sat with other bounce-back candidates) into the part of it that includes the other major league ready fourth starters. He’s probably better than Jake Woodford is right now, but St. Louis would be burning Woodford’s last option to swap them one-for-one. Woodford was effective in relief last year and could shift into that role again while a current ‘pen occupant is sent down instead, but the Cardinals don’t have an obvious candidate for that, as their big league relievers are largely either pitching well or are out of options. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a lot to love about how the Padres built their roster, and I’m not talking about the obvious stuff like trading for Juan Soto or building a lineup entirely of shortstops or sneaking Xander Bogaerts out of Boston under the fuel tank of an Isetta bubble car. I’m talking about how they built their pitching depth. It’s a smorgasbord of guy-remembering, a combination of starters from the 2010s who are just hanging on and top prospects from the 2010s who are still trying to break through.

Look at the pitching staff of the 2023 El Paso Chihuahuas: Cole Hamels, Jay Groome, Julio Teheran, Anderson Espinoza, Aaron Brooks, and (pounds table) Wilmer (pounds table) Jetpacking (pounds table) Font! In a ranking of expensive San Diego-based nostalgia trips, I did not think anyone would beat Top Gun: Maverick so soon, but here we are.

One of those 2010s late bloomer prospects broke camp with the big league club. Brent Honeywell Jr., who not so long ago was one of the most interesting pitchers in the high minors, has now made two appearances in the majors for the Padres. Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday, the Padres announced a seven-year extension with two-time All-Star Jake Cronenworth, a deal that will begin next season and is valued at $80 million over what would have been his final two years of arbitration and first five of free agency. For Cronenworth, a relative late-bloomer (at least among the crowd that goes on to sign $80 million contracts) who didn’t debut in the majors until he was 26 years old, it’s a day he admits he couldn’t have seen coming two or three years ago before distinguishing himself with a solid COVID-shortened rookie season, consecutive 4-WAR campaigns in 2021 and ’22, and a postseason resume that includes the hit that sent the Dodgers home last October.

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It’s also likely the only way that Cronenworth was going to find himself with a deal of this size and length in his career. While a younger player might be hesitant to sign an extension and surrender an opportunity at free agency, Cronenworth is already 29, and this contract buys out five free-agent years he would have been selling at the age of 32. During the last four offseasons, the only players to sign five-plus-year deals at the age of 32 or older have been DJ LeMahieu in 2021 (coming off consecutive top-five MVP finishes) and Freddie Freeman in 2022 (coming off four straight top-ten MVP finishes) — which is to say, it isn’t easy.

For the Padres, it’s the latest in a series of long-term commitments to core members of their current club: Fernando Tatis Jr., Manny Machado, Yu Darvish, Joe Musgrove, Robert Suarez, and now Cronenworth. Despite handing out all those extensions, San Diego has left enough on the books (or maybe just set those books on fire) to bring in Xander Bogaerts, Michael Wacha, Seth Lugo, Matt Carpenter, and familiar face Nick Martinez. It’s a combination of the Braves’ readiness to commit to players within the organization who have proved to be a good fit and the Mets’ willingness to go longer and deeper into their pockets than their market competitors.

How has that worked? In the short term, it’s enough to give the Padres our second-highest odds of winning the World Series and make them the title favorite of our staff. The long term is a question mark, but find me a fan who wouldn’t want to spend a half-decade with the above group, not to mention MVP favorite Juan Soto, whose name you have to assume is at the top of the to-do list on A.J. Preller’s office white board. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the advisability of suspending the pitch clock in certain high-stakes situations, some last-minute spring-training tweaks to the clock’s operation, and MLB’s marketing campaign about the new rules, then continue their 2023 season preview series by discussing the San Diego Padres (30:15) with AJ Cassavell of MLB.com, and the Cincinnati Reds (1:15:40) with C. Trent Rosecrans of The Athletic, plus a Past Blast from 1985 (1:54:31), trivia answers (1:59:57), and a few followups (2:01:33).

Audio intro: Alex Glossman and Ali Breneman, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial 1: Anthony Parker, “Cloud 9”
Audio interstitial 2: Steve Wynn, “Sustain”
Audio outro: Manther, “1985”

Link to Nitkowski thread
Link to Trout’s HRD call to Ohtani
Link to Schoenfield article
Link to Drellich article
Link to ESPN on the clock tweaks
Link to MLBTR on the clock tweaks
Link to Darren Baker video
Link to Darren Baker rule
Link to Cranston ad
Link to Cranston on Hot Ones
Link to FanGraphs playoff odds
Link to FG payroll breakdown
Link to Padres offseason tracker
Link to Padres depth chart
Link to story on Cruz’s eye
Link to AJ on position battles
Link to Seidler on sustainability
Link to article on Forbes valuations
Link to Forbes valuations
Link to Reds offseason tracker
Link to Reds depth chart
Link to Trent’s author archive
Link to Trent on Castellini
Link to Trent on India
Link to Trent on Greene
Link to farm system improvement
Link to Sidd Finch story
Link to story about Finch story
Link to Sidd Finch wiki
Link to April 15 followup
Link to David Lewis’s Twitter
Link to David Lewis’s Substack
Link to Padres-Reds trivia answers
Link to Ryan Nelson’s Twitter
Link to “The Comeback” Seinfeld clips
Link to “The Burning” Seinfeld clips
Link to 20-80 scale explainer

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David Ross was 38 years old and still strapping on the tools of ignorance when he was featured here at FanGraphs in February 2016. The title of the piece was David Ross: Future Big League Manager, and as many in the industry had suggested it would, that supposition soon came to fruition. The longtime catcher is currently embarking on what will be his fourth season at the helm of the Chicago Cubs. I recently asked Ross how he approaches the job philosophically now that he’s firmly in the trenches.

“My style — the way I approach being a manager — is leadership and direction, but I’m also still a player at heart,” Ross told me. “I understand what these guys are going through, competing for jobs and different roles. Communicating through that as a former player, someone who experienced it, I can relate to them. I try to keep a player’s mindset as part of my decision-making.”

Jed Hoyer was the club’s General Manager when the Cubs hired Ross following the 2019 season. I asked the now President of Baseball Operations about the process that informed that decision. Read the rest of this entry »

Injuries to pitchers are nothing new, given that pitchers are baseball’s version of a priceless vase balanced precariously on the edge of a table with a cat sitting next to it. But two bits of Tuesday news hit two contending teams hard, as the Rays and Padres both lost their arguable aces, Tyler Glasnow and Joe Musgrove, respectively, to injuries that could affect the regular season.

Glasnow’s injury is the more significant of the two: an oblique injury suffered while throwing a bullpen session on Monday. An MRI on Tuesday revealed a Grade 2 strain that will result in him missing an estimated six to eight weeks of the season. That practically guarantees that Glasnow will be sidelined for at least a month of the 2023 season, another setback for a pitcher who has known more than his fair share. Since being acquired by the Rays with Austin Meadows in return for Chris Archer, he has a 3.08 ERA and a 3.18 FIP for the Rays but only 268 innings over four-and-a-half years; he’s never thrown 100 innings in a single season in Tampa Bay. Glasnow is also still relatively fresh off his most recent injury, an August 2021 Tommy John surgery that cost him the end of that campaign and most of last year; as a result, the Rays have rightfully been extremely careful with him. I don’t expect them to rush him back given his history — the last thing you want is Glasnow changing his delivery due to lingering abdominal pain and risk a new arm injury — so I think that it’s unlikely we see much of him until June. Read the rest of this entry »

The speculation about Padres third baseman Manny Machado exercising his opt-out clause after the 2023 season came to a stunning conclusion over the weekend, as club and superstar agreed to an 11-year, $350 million contract. The new deal rips up the final six years of the contract that Machado signed before the 2019 season.

If nothing else, tally one team that is apparently not concerned with the short-term hiccups in baseball’s revenues due to the Bally/Diamond bankruptcy; the Padres are one of the teams with a regional sports network (RSN) that is affected. If revenues are up in the air, they have made sure that third base certainly is not, following an extension that will also keep Yu Darvish in town for all or most of the rest of his career. The Padres aren’t trying to be the Rays, the scrappy underdogs that hunt very large game with a sharpened stick; they’re trying to go toe-to-toe with the Dodgers at their own game. This is less David versus Goliath and more M. Bison versus palette-swapped M. Bison in “Street Fighter II.”

My colleague Jay Jaffe covered a lot of the particulars about the Manny situation in San Diego last week, so I’m going to skip the exposition. I think Jay and I both underestimated just how motivated the Padres were to ensure Machado stayed in mustard-and-brown for a long time. We had a ZiPS projection in that piece, but now that we know where he will play and for how long, I ran a new projection.

Let’s just say that ZiPS isn’t overly enthusiastic about the contract, valuing Machado’s future services at $181 million over 11 years. He is a superstar, but there’s a big difference between signing a player before their age-26 season and their age-30 season. Just to illustrate, here’s the projection a second time, but with Machado the age he was when he signed his initial deal with the Friars.

That’s a valuation over $400 million, a notable difference! The sad truth is that even for superstars, the 30s are more often than not a tale of significant decline. Just to illustrate, here are all non-active position players worth between 41–51 WAR through age 29 (Machado is at 46.6) and how they fared in their 30s.

ZiPS actually has Machado aging slightly better than the average player in this group, with an additional three WAR over about 1,000 more plate appearances. The three active players at the end of their careers that I chopped off wouldn’t make this any sunnier a list; none of Miguel Cabrera, Evan Longoria, or Andrew McCutchen have aged particularly well.

Some of the decreased projection is due to the fact that Machado is no longer a defensive star at third base as he was earlier in his career. Defense doesn’t decline as rapidly as people think at the non-speed positions, and the fact that Nolan Arenado’s glove has stayed quite steady gives him kind of a fallback position if his bat declines. Machado no longer has that luxury.

Despite my grumpiness as an analyst who inevitably has to play devil’s advocate, let me emphasize that I’m certainly not shedding any tears for the pocketbooks of team ownership. While speculating what the Padres’ analytics gang has for Machado over the next 11 years would be a wild-ass guess, I know enough to know that ZiPS does not generally give projections that are grossly different from ones that teams run internally. The team’s ownership group, led by Peter Seidler, was no doubt given all the information the team had internally of this type and is also aware of the revenue situation, his personal net worth, and the fact that the big jump in baseball’s luxury tax threshold from 2021 to ’22 is much, much smaller in subsequent seasons of the CBA. They take this risk with the eyes wide open.

Even as a risk, it’s hard to dislike this signing as a fan of baseball. It’s refreshing to see owners who want to keep their teams together, who prioritize putting the best team on the field right now, and who directly challenge another of baseball’s elite franchises. Baseball’s system of playoffs and revenue sharing incentivizes just sneaking into the postseason every year, and if I worked for a team, I’d recommend the same cynical view that is prevalent among franchises. So it’s nice to see a team with a little more ambition, one willing to be happy with the increases in team value rather than also requiring a healthy profit every season to boot.

There remains a big unanswered question in the form of Juan Soto. Keeping him may cost $40 million a year, and I now have to wonder just how far San Diego’s willingness to spend will stretch. Are the Padres really willing to already be at $200 million for 2025–27 with two starting pitchers under contract? The farm system has nowhere near the depth that it had a few years ago, after all; ZiPS had no Padres prospects in its Top 100. While our prospect team placed two, the farm system ranked 26th at the end of last year, and though the new rankings aren’t out yet, I can’t imagine they’ve moved up a ton. But we’ll worry about Soto later.

By signing Machado, the Padres have signaled that they’re here to win now, and that the current aggressive spending isn’t just the apogee between the fire sales that have peppered San Diego’s franchise history. They’re going after the Dodgers on their own turf, and that’s pretty cool. Now the win now team just has to do the hard part and actually win now.

Yu Darvish’s six-year, $108 million extension with the Padres looks innocuous enough. Darvish is absolutely essential to the Padres’ success, and he’s now one of those rare MLB players who’s signed multiple $100 million deals, despite not having reached free agency the first time until his age-31 season.

If anyone can pitch until he’s 42, it’s Darvish, the man who’s got more pitches than can fit in Mary Poppins’ carpetbag. This extension actually has me looking forward to watching Darvish once he gets into his latter-day Zack Greinke era. No, the interesting thing about this contract is not who’s getting paid, who’s doing the paying, or how much money is set to change hands. It’s when. Read the rest of this entry »

On the heels of what was arguably the best season of his career — one in which he set career highs in wRC+ (152) and WAR (7.4), helped the Padres to the NLCS for the first time in 24 years, and finished second in the NL MVP voting — Manny Machado has informed the Padres that he intends to exercise the opt-out in his $300 million contract after this season and test free agency again.

Last Friday, at the Padres’ spring training site in Peoria, Arizona, the All-Star third baseman confirmed that in December prior to the Winter Meetings, agent Dan Lozano gave the Padres a February 16 deadline to reach agreement on extending the 10-year, $300 million contract Machado signed in February 2019. According to a report by the San Diego Union-Tribune’s Kevin Acee, the Padres made just one offer after hearing from Lozano; two days before the deadline, they offered to add five years and $21 million per year ($105 million total) to the five years and $150 million that will remain on his deal after this year. The proposed package of 10 years and $255 million wasn’t enough to satisfy Machado, and so with the deadline having passed, he told reporters that now that he’s in camp he wants to focus on the upcoming season rather than on contract negotiations. Read the rest of this entry »

On October 27, 2008, I lay sprawled on the carpet in front of the television, watching as Cole Hamels twirled yet another postseason masterpiece. My new puppy sat calmly by my side, having finally learned the rally towel was my toy, not his. Hamels pitched six innings that night; he could have gone deeper were it not for a 48-hour rain delay, but his efforts proved to be enough. Two days later, I was jumping with joy into my father’s arms as Hamels clutched the World Series trophy in his.

Fifteen years later, the living room carpet is long gone. The TV remains, although it’s wildly out of date. That new puppy is now officially geriatric, with greying fur and two bad hips. My father would prefer I no longer jump into his arms; he gets enough of a workout carrying our 50-pound dog up and down the stairs.

Forty different players took the field for the Phillies in 2008. Thirty-nine have since retired. Hamels, however, isn’t quite ready to submit to the passage of time. On Thursday afternoon, the veteran left-hander signed a minor league deal with the Padres and will head to Peoria as a non-roster invitee, hoping to make his way back to the big leagues at 39 years old. Read the rest of this entry »