The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2025 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Calling Ben Zobrist a utility player — or even a superutility player, given that he could play the outfield as well as the infield — is like calling Citizen Kane a movie about a sled. Unrecruited out of high school, and later unheralded as a prospect due to his age, he seemingly came out of nowhere to emerge as a star for the upstart Tampa Bay Rays, and in doing so removed the stigma of moving between positions on a regular basis. On the offensive side, “Zorilla” was a switch-hitter with elite plate discipline, mid-range power, and a minimal platoon split. As a defender, he provided average-or-better defense at second base and the outfield corners, and could play passably at a few other positions as well. Thanks to that combination, he helped change the way teams thought about roster construction, giving the more creative ones the flexibility to cobble together multiposition platoons.

Zobrist made only three All-Star teams in his 14-year career, but he helped his clubs reach the postseason eight times in an 11-year span (2008–18). From 2009–14, he ranked among the game’s most valuable players by WAR, and in the years adjacent to that stretch, he helped the Rays (2008), Royals (2015), and Cubs (2016) reach the World Series. He was the World Series MVP in the last of those seasons, when the Cubs won their first title in 108 years, and even got a breakfast cereal named after him, Zorilla Crunch! If not for his late start — he didn’t get more than 250 plate appearances in a season until age 28 — he might have had a real shot at making noise on this Hall of Fame ballot instead of going one-and-done. Read the rest of this entry »

On Friday the Athletics and Rays completed a four-for-two trade centered around 32-year-old lefty starter Jeffrey Springs, who heads to Northern California. The A’s also got lefty swingman Jacob Lopez, while the Rays received wild, hard-throwing righty Joe Boyle, two minor leaguers (first baseman Will Simpson and right-handed pitcher Jacob Watters), and the 36th overall pick in the 2025 draft.

Springs, who is under contract through at least 2026, had a breakout 2022 season when the Rays moved him from the bullpen to their rotation, and he amassed 3.1 WAR across 135 1/3 innings. He got hurt a few starts into 2023 and needed Tommy John surgery, which cost him the rest of 2023 and most of 2024. After he returned from a prolonged, 12-start minor league rehab period, Springs had good surface-level stats in the big leagues – 7 GS, 33 IP, 37 K, 1.36 WHIP, 3.27 ERA – but showed reduced stuff compared to his pre-TJ form. Ken Rosenthal reported that Springs was shut down in September on the advice of his surgeon.

Springs joins an Athletics team flush with exciting young hitters but badly in need of pitching, which they’ve addressed with not only this trade but the recent signing of hard-throwing veteran Luis Severino (analysis here). The trade also adds payroll to the Athletics’ ledger, which they likely must continue to expand in order to avoid a grievance from the MLB Players Association. Read the rest of this entry »

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).
Read the rest of this entry »

The Miami Marlins are coming off of a 100-loss season, and a lack of bats had a lot to do with that. The NL East club scored the fewest runs in the senior circuit. The arms weren’t all that much better — only the Colorado Rockies allowed more runs — but there is light at the end of the tunnel. Sandy Alcantara and Eury Pérez are on track to return from Tommy John surgery, while Jesús Luzardo and Max Meyer should be healthy following comparably minor injuries. Moreover, the organization’s top pitching prospects have high ceilings. Pitching — especially young pitching — is the organization’s greatest strength.

Miami’s President of Baseball Operations largely agreed with that opinion when I presented it to him at last month’s GM Meetings in San Antonio.

“I think so,” Peter Bendix told me. “I hope so. We have a lot of guys I’m really excited about. I think that next year a lot of these guys have things to prove, whether that’s health, bouncing back from a disappointing season, just establishing themselves, or building on what they did last year.”

A pair of pitchers who are likely a few years away from reaching the big leagues stand out. One of them is is a now-20-year-old southpaw whom the Marlins drafted 35th overall in 2023 out of Andover, Massachusetts’s Phillips Academy.

“Thomas White is maybe the best left-handed pitching prospect in baseball,” said Bendix, whose opinion is by no means singular (Noah Schultz and one or two others are also in the conversation). “If you look at left-handed pitchers who were 19 years old, missed as many bats as he did, didn’t walk guys, limited hard contact, throw 95-plus, have a plus breaking ball, and have command, it’s a short list. Now it’s his job to go out there build on that, see what he can he can do with another full year underneath him.” Read the rest of this entry »

Well, the Mets really did it. On Tuesday, they finally went out and landed the electric Dominican outfielder with the big tools and the ebullient personality, the one they’d been dreaming of for so very long. Well, they landed one of the electric Dominican outfielders they’d been dreaming of, anyway.

In a one-for-one swap, the Mets received center fielder Jose Siri from the Rays in exchange for right-handed pitching prospect Eric Orze. Siri is a thrilling player with four jaw-dropping tools: power, defense, speed, and throwing. The complete absence of a hit tool leaves him kind of like a boat with the world’s greatest bilge pump and a gaping hole in the hull. He’s forever battling to mash enough moonshots and make enough improbable catches to stay afloat despite running a strikeout rate that falls somewhere between catastrophic and cataclysmic. In a move that will surprise no one who is even passingly familiar with the Rays, the team turned Siri into a pitching prospect the moment he could conceivably begin to cost them actual money. The Mets now control Siri for his three arbitration years, and MLB Trade Rumors projects him for a $2.3 million salary in 2025 (plus a luxury tax penalty). Given that the trade went down Tuesday, the Rays have probably already turned Orze into a bona fide ace.

The move could indicate something of a pattern for the Mets, who signed the glove-first Harrison Bader to a one-year contract before the 2024 season. Here’s how similar the two players are: At the time of his signing, Bader was 29 years old and had posted a career wRC+ of 90 while averaging 20 OAA per 150 games. Right now, Siri is 29 years old and has posted a career wRC+ of 89 while averaging 19.1 OAA per 150 games.

That move didn’t exactly pan out. Bader managed to avoid the injured list for the first time since 2020 and his 85 wRC+ wasn’t far below his career mark, but it wasn’t exactly the bounce-back season the Mets had hoped for. He started nearly every game against right-handed pitching, but against lefties, he went from ceding the occasional start to Tyrone Taylor at the beginning of the season to sitting more often than not by the end of it. This wasn’t ideal considering Bader has a career 109 wRC+ vs. lefties and an 84 wRC+ vs. righties. By the time the playoffs rolled around, he was the odd man out. He got into nearly all of the team’s postseason games, but started just twice and made just six plate appearances.

In all, the Mets got just 1.6 WAR in center field in 2024. That ranked 22nd in all of baseball, and it was the lowest ranking of any position on the field for the team. The only other spots on the diamond where the Mets were even in the bottom half of the league were starting pitcher, catcher, and right field. With Bader and Jesse Winker entering free agency and Taylor undergoing surgery to repair a hernia and remove a loose body from his throwing elbow, Siri is unlikely to be the last outfielder the Mets acquire this offseason.

The Athletic’s Will Sammon cited sources who reported that this wasn’t the first time the Mets had sought to get their hands Siri, and it’s not hard to see why. Siri is as tempting a project as any player in the game. He’s an incredibly gifted defensive center fielder with light tower power and absolutely no semblance of plate discipline or contact ability. The team that could get him to chase just a little bit less, to whiff just a little bit less, would have a monster on its hands. However, Siri is entering his age-29 season, and it’s hard to imagine that even the team that wanted him badly enough to risk the humiliation of trading a pitching prospect to the Rays really expects to finally unlock him. Unlike lower-back pain, plate discipline isn’t something you just happen to pick up once you hit your 30s. In 2024, Siri ran a 37.9% strikeout rate. Among players with 400 plate appearances in a season, that’s the third-highest mark in major league history. His 35.8% career strikeout rate ranks 14th on our career leaderboard, and five of the 13 players ahead of him were pitchers.

Just like Bader in Flushing, Siri started losing playing time as the 2024 season went on. Jonny DeLuca, who in 2024 featured – and stop me if you’ve heard this before – excellent speed and defense to go with some trouble getting on base, absorbed that playing time and will presumably be starting in center for the Rays next season. This time, the Mets got their solid, if flawed, center fielder on the trade market because there really aren’t any to be had in free agency. Understandably, they’re not keen to ride the Bader train again. Michael A. Taylor and Manuel Margot, the only other true center fielders on the free agent market, are both on the wrong side of 30 and coming off their own extremely down 2024 seasons. Siri’s production may look a lot like Bader’s, but he’s got a better track record when it comes to health, and because he cost a prospect rather than a free agent contract, he’ll come with a smaller luxury cap hit.

In Orze, the Rays landed a 27-year-old multi-inning reliever with a killer splitter and a modest track record of minor league success. The Mets selected him in the fifth round of the 2020 draft out of the University of New Orleans. If you’re familiar with him already, you’re either aware that he has survived two types of cancer or you’ve heard about his unfortunate major league debut. On July 8, Orze entered in the sixth inning against the Pirates and allowed a walk and two singles without recording an out. All three runners would score and he’d be tagged with the loss to go with his infinite ERA. Orze would make just one more appearance with the Mets.

Despite an unspectacular 29.7% chase rate in the minors in 2024, Orze has had excellent strikeout rates throughout his minor league career. However, those strikeouts have come hand-in-hand with dangerously high walk rates. In 2022, Eric Longenhagen ranked Orze seventh in Mets system, writing that he was a “near-ready multi-inning reliever… a super valuable piece for a contending team, and a huge draft and dev feather in the cap of the org.” Unfortunately, Orze stalled out, posting a 5.13 ERA at Triple-A Syracuse in 2022 and a 5.31 ERA there in 2023. After the ranked portion of the team’s 2024 prospect list, Eric wrote simply that Orze “has a plus-plus changeup and struggles to throw strikes.” He wasn’t wrong. Among minor leaguers with at least 75 plate appearances tracked by Statcast in 2024, Orze’s 44% zone rate put him in the just 13th percentile.

To be fair, Orze’s peripherals outpaced his ERA, especially in 2022. In 2024, he had a 2.92 ERA with a 3.65 xFIP. He looks like a classic pronator, able to make the ball run to his arm side at will. Both scouts and stuff models are in love with his splitter, and his slider should be serviceable. His four-seamer is the problem. The pitch averages a hair under 94 mph, and as you can see from Max Bay’s Dynamic Dead Zone app, its movement profile is unlikely to fool too many hitters.

See how the pink oval of the pitch’s actual shape matches up almost perfectly with the light blue ovals that indicate the shape that a batter would expect? That’s no good. If the Rays are going to turn Orze into their next star, they’ll need to help him with his command, and they’ll need to help him unlock a better fastball. Still, we’ve been doing this long enough to know that when the Rays post something like this on Bluesky, everyone should be afraid.

We’ve reached the point in the Arizona Fall League calendar when the weather has officially shifted toward autumn, which makes being at the ballpark during the day about as close to heaven as one can get. The return of great weather also means the return of the Valley’s snowbirds, the (usually retired) folks who only live here during the pleasant time of year. The highways are suddenly very full again, and I’ve become a crabby baby about driving all the way to the West Valley for day games that then force me to drive home in rush hour traffic made more harrowing by the uptick in people. Opportunities to double up at East Valley stadiums are now golden, and I’ll be at Salt River and then Mesa each of the next couple of days.

We’re now deep enough into the AFL schedule that I’m starting to shift my in-person scouting focus toward hitters, especially when pitchers I’ve already seen a couple of times are in the game. It means spending more time down the baselines rather than behind home plate and (probably) more hitter-focused pieces like this for the next couple of weeks. But for now… Read the rest of this entry »

Ryan Pepiot was a highly regarded prospect in the Los Angeles Dodgers organization when he was first featured here at FanGraphs in June 2021. Then 23 years old and pitching in Double-A, the right-hander out of Butler University discussed his signature pitch, a changeup that our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen had likened to Devin Williams’ high-spin Airbender.

Pepiot is now with the Tampa Bay Rays, having been acquired from Los Angeles along with Jonny DeLuca in exchange for Tyler Glasnow and Manuel Margot last December. He has also emerged as an established big league starter. Getting his first extended opportunity after making 17 appearances over the two previous seasons, he made 26 starts, posting a 3.60 ERA and 3.95 FIP over 130 innings.

Three-plus years after our initial conversation, I sat down with Pepiot on the final weekend of the 2024 regular season, this time to touch on each of his five pitches.

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David Laurila: What is your full repertoire right now?

Ryan Pepiot: “Four-seam fastball, changeup, slider, cutter, and a curveball that I’ll throw occasionally.” Read the rest of this entry »

Tre’ Morgan is one of the most promising prospects in the Tampa Bay Rays organization. Drafted 88th overall last year out of LSU, the 22-year-old left-handed-hitting first baseman slashed .324/.408/.483 with 10 home runs and a 158 wRC+ in 437 plate appearances between three levels this season. Moreover, he’s only upped his profile by continuing to rake in the Arizona Fall League. As our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen wrote on Tuesday, Morgan “is making a case to be elevated into the back of this offseason’s Top 100 list.”

Morgan — a New Orleans native with a well-deserved reputation for being both personable and thoughtful about his craft — talked hitting prior to taking the field for the AFL’s Mesa Solar Sox earlier this month.

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David Laurila: Who are you as a hitter? In other words, how would you describe your style and approach?

Tre’ Morgan: “As a a hitter, I’m definitely contact over power. Swinging and missing is something that just shouldn’t happen too often. That’s how I was taught to hit, by my dad really. If I run into one, it sometimes goes pretty far, but I kind of stick to gap-to-gap, trying to play with the barrel.”

Laurila: What is your father’s background?

Morgan: “He played football, mostly — he played college football and had a couple of tryouts for the NFL — but he taught me everything I know about baseball. He said that he was better than me [at baseball] when I was growing up.”

Laurila: You said that the ball sometimes goes far when you run into one. What have you had in terms of exit velocities and distances? Read the rest of this entry »

Travis Ice and I have begun early work on the Los Angeles Angels and Sacramento Athletics prospect lists, and because both franchises’ prospects are on the Mesa Solar Sox roster, I spent most of last week seeing whatever game they were playing.

At this point in the Fall League, the leaders in games played have laced up their spikes only eight or nine times. Anything you’ve read about this year’s AFL so far has encompassed just two weeks of part-time play for any given player. Remember this is a hitter-friendly league for a number of both developmental and environmental reasons, and that triple slash lines in this league are not a reliable proxy for talent.

Tre’ Morgan, 1B, Tampa Bay Rays

Offensive standards at first base are quite high, and even though the collective performance of this year’s group was down relative to recent norms (by kind of a lot), it’s still a position from which we expect good players and prospects to provide impact power. Morgan has been a relevant prospect since high school, but a relative lack of power has tended to cap his projection into more of a part-time first base/outfield role.

During the 2024 regular season it looked like Morgan was more often taking max-effort swings and selling out for power. He reached Double-A and slugged .483 across three levels, but his middling raw strength and opposite-field tendency as a hitter (plus elevated chase rates relative to his career norms) suggested this was maybe not the best approach for him. In the Fall League, Morgan has been more balanced, really taking enormous hacks only in favorable counts. He’s still stinging the ball in a way that indicates he’ll be a doubles machine, and he seems less vulnerable to fastballs up and away than he did during the summer. We don’t have a way of truly knowing how Morgan will handle elevated big league fastballs until he faces them, but a more balanced, contact-oriented style of hitting is going to give him a much better chance of covering the top of the zone and being a more complete hitter. (An aside: Watch A’s prospect Denzel Clarke go first-to-third at the video’s 1:55 mark.)

I think the absolute ceiling for his production looks something like Brandon Belt’s or Daniel Murphy’s pre-Juiced Ball era statline. More likely Morgan’s output will look something like Ji Man Choi’s or LaMonte Wade Jr.’s. Morgan is not a guy who is going to hit 20 homers per year, but a heady, well-rounded offensive skillset coupled with his excellent, profile-seasoning first base defense make him better than the 40 FV grade player I evaluated him as during the year. He is making a case to be elevated into the back of this offseason’s Top 100 list.

Caleb Durbin, UTIL, New York Yankees

I gave Durbin short shrift last year even after his .353/.456/.588 line in the 2023 Fall League. He had a good 2024 at Triple-A Scranton, including a strong second half after he returned from a fractured wrist. Durbin is short — really short, he’s 5-foot-6 — but he’s not small; he’s built like a little tank. His compact, stocky build helps keep his swing short and consistently on time to pull the baseball. His quality of contact in 2024 was commensurate with a guy who slugs under .400 at the big league level, but he was dealing with an injury that typically impacts contact quality for a while after recovery.

Perhaps most importantly, Durbin looks fine at both second and third base and has also been playing all over the outfield. Defensive versatility might be his key to being rostered consistently. Durbin ran a jailbreak 4.10 for me last week, but his home-to-first times have been close to 4.4 seconds on normal swings. That’s not blazing and slower than what’s typical of a decent center fielder, but any kind of outfield viability would help the former Division-III standout become an improbable big leaguer. Durbin has played sparingly in center field during his career, and it’s going to be very difficult to evaluate him there this Fall League unless he starts getting reps there every day, which I think is unlikely. It’s more of a thing to watch develop into next spring.

Kemp Alderman, OF, Miami Marlins

Alderman, a 2023 second round pick out of Ole Miss who had some of the best exit velocities in that draft class, is currently leading the AFL with six home runs. He hit one on Friday at a whopping 119.5 mph. It went out on a line, ricocheting off the side of the batter’s eye, which you can see in this frame:

Friday, Marlins outfielder Kemp Alderman hit a homer that left Salt River Fields in a real hurry, at 119.5 mph. pic.twitter.com/HBvj2F0oud

— FanGraphs Prospects (@FG_Prospects) October 22, 2024

Like Durbin, Alderman missed time in 2024 with a broken hand. It’s good to see Alderman hitting with elite peak power coming off of this particular injury, but I’d advise everyone to pump the breaks on his overall prospectdom at this time. He loads his hands so deep, high, and late that I worry he’ll struggle against better velocity as he climbs the minors. Though Alderman’s regular-season strikeout rates don’t raise alarm, I don’t think 30-ish games at each A-ball level is a meaningful sample, especially for a draft pick out of an SEC school. It’s fine to be hopeful that I’m wrong or that Alderman will make necessary adjustments once better stuff starts beating him, and he clearly has the power to clear the offensive bar at a corner outfield spot. But even though he’s raking out here, he does not have an opinion-altering look. I know Marlins fans have gone through this a lot lately, where they have a minor leaguer with elite power but an insufficient hit tool to profile (Peyton Burdick, Griffin Conine, Jerar Encarnacion), and I worry Alderman is another of this ilk.

Devin Kirby, RHP, Minnesota Twins

Alert Ben Lindbergh, we have a knuckler. The 25-year-old Kirby was an undrafted free agent out of UConn in 2023 and spent most of 2024 in Fort Myers either on the Complex or FSL roster. His knuckleball needs to be more consistent for him to be considered a prospect at all, but for now it’s a lot of fun to watch a guy whose primary pitch is his knuckler.

The Arizona Fall League has a knuckleballer this year, Twins righty Devin Kirby. pic.twitter.com/Z6c7ik6vH4

— FanGraphs Prospects (@FG_Prospects) October 18, 2024

Board Additions

Ryan Birchard, RHP, Milwaukee Brewers
Henry Bolte, OF, Oakland Athletics

These players have had their scouting reports added to the Fall League tab on The Board. Head over there to check out their tool grades and scouting reports.

Boyhood allegiances typically go away after a player is drafted and signs with a team other than the one he (or she) grew up following. Drew Gilbert isn’t necessarily an exception to that rule, but the 24-year-old St. Paul native does retain a soft spot for the Minnesota Twins.

“I think that happens a little more so as you get older, not necessarily exactly when you sign,” said Gilbert, whom the Houston Astros drafted 24th overall in 2022 out of the University of Tennessee. “You move around a lot. I went from Minnesota to Tennessee, and then once you get drafted you go around the country with different affiliates. I don’t want to say you lose the fandom, but it naturally goes away a little bit. That being said, when [the Twins] were in the playoffs last year it was still super fun to watch. Of course, any time you get playoff baseball, no matter who you’re rooting for, it’s a cool thing to watch.”

The 2023 Twins aren’t the only team he’s had reason to root for in the postseason. The Astros won the World Series in his 2022 draft year, and his new organization’s parent club has a chance to do so this year. The New York Mets acquired Gilbert as part of last summer’s Justin Verlander trade deadline deal. Read the rest of this entry »