Niko Kavadas had recently been named Boston’s Minor League Player of the Year when he was first featured here at FanGraphs in November 2022. Two years later, he’s now playing for the Los Angeles Angels, after the Red Sox traded him at this summer’s deadline as part of a five-player swap. Power and patience are his calling cards. Kavadas was slashing .281/.424/.551 with 17 home runs in Triple-A at the time he was dealt, and while he subsequently struggled after receiving his first call-up — a 77 wRC+ and 38.7% strikeout rate over 106 plate appearances — he did go deep four times.

The 26-year-old first baseman very much remains a work in progress, as evidenced by his having spent the last month-plus playing in the Arizona Fall League. And while assessing progress in an extreme hitter-friendly environment can be tricky, he nonetheless crushed the ball during his time in the desert. Kavadas was named the AFL’s Offensive Player of the Year after slashing .329/.462/.700 with 13 extra-base hits, including six home runs, over 91 plate appearances. We’ll get to why he was there in a moment.

When I caught up to Kavadas prior to a Fall League game in October, the first thing I wanted to know was how the present-day iteration compares to the hitter I’d spoken to 25 months earlier. Read the rest of this entry »

The players at the top of the market usually determine the shape of free agency. A team in need of offensive help in the outfield isn’t going to drop $100 million on Anthony Santander until it knows Juan Soto is no longer available. And Santander probably wouldn’t sign anyway. His agent would want to try to squeeze an extra few million out of a team that, having missed on Soto, needed desperately to go home with something.

A year ago, Shohei Ohtani held up the free agency deluge, and everyone reacted like he’d gotten to the front of a long line at Starbucks and had no idea what he wanted to order. (I mocked the public opprobrium then, but having stumbled into that simile I get it now. Everyone hates the Starbucks lollygagger.) Then Scott Boras, who usually waits out the market anyway, took even longer than usual to find homes for his top three clients. So free agency didn’t get going in earnest until mid-December, and stretched into March.

Of course, that’s only the top of the market. Every year, there’s a flurry of activity that starts only days after the end of the World Series, including some fairly big names changing teams. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Los Angeles Angels. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the fifth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of a series concerning the 2025 Classic Baseball Era Committee ballot, covering long-retired players, managers, executives, and umpires whose candidacies will be voted upon on December 8. For an introduction to the ballot, see here, and for an introduction to JAWS, see here. Several profiles in this series are adapted from work previously published at SI.com, Baseball Prospectus, and Futility Infielder. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Tommy John spent 26 seasons pitching in the majors from 1963–74 and then 1976–89, more than any player besides Nolan Ryan, but his level of fame stems as much from the year that cleaves that span as it does from his work on the mound. As the recipient of the most famous sports medicine procedure of all time, the elbow ligament replacement surgery performed by Dr. Frank Jobe in late 1974 that now bears his name, John endured an arduous year-long rehab process before returning to pitch as well as ever, a recovery that gave hope to generations of injured pitchers whose careers might otherwise have ended. Tommy John surgery has somewhat obscured the pitcher’s on-field accomplishments, however.

A sinkerballer who relied upon his command and control to limit hard contact, John didn’t overpower hitters; after his surgery, when the usage of radar guns became more widespread, his sinker — which he threw 85-90% of the time — was generally clocked in the 85-87 mph range. He paired the sinker with a curveball, or rather several curves, as he could adjust the break based upon the speed at which he threw the pitch. He was the epitome of the “crafty lefty,” so good at his vocation that he arrived on the major league scene at age 20 and made his final appearance three days after his 46th birthday. He made four All-Star teams and was a key starter on five clubs that reached the postseason and three that won pennants, though he wound up on the losing end of the World Series each time.

Thomas Edward John Jr. was born on May 22, 1943 in Terre Haute, Indiana. He cut his teeth playing sandlot ball and more organized games at Spencer F. Ball Park, a three-block square with about 10 baseball diamonds used for everything from pickup games to those of two rival high schools, Garfield and Gerstmeyer, the latter of which he attended.

At Gerstmeyer, John excelled in basketball as well as baseball, so much so that the rangy, 6-foot-3 teenager was recruited by legendary Kentucky coach Adolph Rupp, and had over 50 basketball scholarship offers but just one for baseball (few colleges gave those out in those days). When Rupp paid a visit to their household, the senior John told the coach that his son was probably going to bypass college to pursue professional baseball. As the pitcher recalled in 2015:

Rupp said, “Well, we have a pretty good baseball team down in Kentucky, and your son might even be able to make our team.” My dad never liked Rupp, but that really made him mad. He told Coach Rupp, “Don’t let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.” Rupp was furious. His assistant came in and tried to smooth things over, but it didn’t matter.

On the mound, John lacked a top-notch fastball but had a major league-caliber curveball that he learned from former Phillies minor leaguer Arley Andrews, a friend of his father. He pitched to a 28-2 record in high school, and while the Cleveland Indians scout who signed him, John Schulte, expressed concern about his inability to overpower hitters, he signed him nonetheless two weeks after John graduated from Gerstmeyer in 1961 — four years before the introduction of the amateur draft. Read the rest of this entry »

Most of the time, you can count on early November to take a break from following baseball news. The World Series has just ended, but free agency hasn’t started in earnest. International free agents generally get posted closer to the mid-December deadline. Big trades are more of a December/January thing. But the Angels don’t operate that way. First they traded for Jorge Soler. Then they signed Kyle Hendricks. Now they’ve signed the first multi-year free agency deal of the offseason, linking up with Travis d’Arnaud on a two-year, $12 million contract.

At first blush, this feels like so much shuffling of deck chairs. The Angels have a lot of needs, to put it bluntly. Catcher was one of their best positions last year. They need more starters, more relievers, more outfield depth, more infield depth, and more top-of-the-order bats. Incumbent Logan O’Hoppe was one of only three hitters on the team to eclipse the 2-WAR mark. Why not sign a second baseman, or another starting pitcher, or pretty much anyone else?

I think there’s more here than meets the eye, though. We’re not talking about a blockbuster signing, and quite frankly, we’re not talking about a playoff team. A good season for the Angels in 2025 would mean flirting with .500 and developing a few new everyday players. Maybe Jo Adell will take a step forward and Mike Trout will play a full season at his normal standard of excellence. Maybe Zach Neto will continue on his current trajectory towards borderline All-Star production (once he’s back from shoulder surgery, of course) and Reid Detmers will rediscover his wipeout slider. Read the rest of this entry »

Well, the Angels aren’t waiting around, are they? In the week immediately following the World Series, the Halos have completed the only trade so far this offseason involving players going in each direction. They’ve also acquired Scott Kingery from the Phillies for cash considerations and executed a waiver claim on Oakland’s Ryan Noda, both low-risk acquisitions with the potential to fill a niche at the big league level.

The Triple-A first base depth chart for the Angels right now lists Noda alongside Niko Kavadas and Sonny DiChiara, which is a bumper crop of cube-shaped college sluggers if ever there were one. Someone find out what Tim Elko is up to and give him a call so the Angels can have the full set. But I digress.

Amidst all that other activity, Perry Minasian and Co. have made this offseason’s most notable free agent signing to date: right-handed pitcher Kyle Hendricks, late of the Chicago Cubs. Hendricks was the second major league free agent to sign so far this offseason, after Dylan Covey’s one-year deal with the Mets, and he’s a bigger name by far. A two-time Cy Young vote-getter and a cornerstone of the successful Cubs teams of the late 2010s, Hendricks joins the Angels on a one-year, $2.5 million deal. Read the rest of this entry »

It was the perfect exemplar of a Friday news dump, a quiet transaction between frequent trading partners. The Phillies and Angels swap players so often it’s sometimes hard to remember whether Brandon Marsh got traded for Logan O’Hoppe or George Klassen or Ron Gant. And while the Angels also made a splashy swap with the Braves the day before to acquire Jorge Soler, Philadelphia slipped another move in while nobody was looking: minor league infielder Scott Kingery to Los Angeles for cash considerations.

With all the fanfare of your buddy paying you back for buying Taco Bell on the way home the other night, an era is over.

Kingery could be a useful player for the Angels. He hit .268/.316/.488 in Triple-A last season, with 25 home runs and 25 stolen bases, playing mostly at shortstop with appearances at second, third, and in center field. The Phillies are pretty well set on the infield, but Kingery hasn’t appeared in the majors since June 8, 2022, when he went out to second base for a single defensive inning in a 10-0 blowout in Milwaukee. He hasn’t taken a major league at-bat since May 16, 2021, which is the last time he had anything like a regular roster role. Read the rest of this entry »

Did you enjoy that thrilling World Series clincher Wednesday night? Still glowing from Walker Buehler stomping in from the bullpen like Ricky Vaughn? Still got your protractor and T-square on your desk as you try to figure out if Gerrit Cole could’ve beaten Mookie Betts to first base with two outs in the fifth? I know I need a moment to decompress from all the excitement.

You know who doesn’t? Alex Anthopoulos and Perry Minasian, who couldn’t wait 24 hours to execute the first trade of the offseason. And this wasn’t some bit of bookkeeping minutiae, a my-garbage-for-your-trash trade to clear a 40-man roster spot before the Rule 5 draft protection deadline. This was a trade of big leaguers, and fairly noteworthy ones at that: The Braves are sending outfielder Jorge Soler to the Angels in exchange for right-hander Griffin Canning. Read the rest of this entry »

One of my favorite pieces I wrote last year was about players whose baserunning value was at odds with their footspeed: specifically, those who were squandering the God-given advantage of their legs. A year later, I have a new crop of baserunners to write about. We also have an updated version of our metric for calculating baserunning value (BsR) in 2024. So, I decided the topic was worth a fresh look.

I took a pretty subjective approach when I wrote about this last season. I went through the sprint speed leaderboard on Baseball Savant, compared it to our BsR leaderboard, and scanned for players who stood out. This time around, I decided I could be a little more scientific. I made a spreadsheet featuring every player who has taken at least 300 plate appearances and recorded at least 100 competitive runs this season – nice, round, arbitrary cut-off points to limit small sample size randomness. Then, I determined the percentile value for each player’s BsR, as well as the percentile value for two different measurements of speed: sprint speed and the time it takes to run from home plate to first base (HP to 1B).

As I compared the results, three names immediately caught my eye: Jo Adell, Jeff McNeil, and Mickey Moniak. Adell has, by far, the widest gap between his sprint speed percentile (86th) and BsR percentile (9th). That’s approximately a 77% difference; no other runner has a gap bigger than 60%. Meanwhile, McNeil boasts the widest gap between his HP to 1B percentile (86th) and BsR percentile (19th). Finally, Moniak ranks among the top 20% in both sprint speed and HP to 1B, yet he ranks among the bottom third in BsR. He has the third-largest gap between his sprint speed (84th) and BsR (32nd) and the fifth-largest gap between his HP to 1B (83rd) and BsR. He is the only player with one of the five largest gaps in both areas: Read the rest of this entry »

At the trade deadline, all fans are equal. No matter their age, location, partisan commitments, gender, religion, emotional disposition, or level of statistical curiosity, they have one thought: “Man, our bullpen stinks. Our GM really needs to do something about it.”

By and large, the GMs agree. That’s why a quick survey reveals that roughly a bajillion pitchers got traded this deadline season. OK, it’s not that many. Between July 1 and July 30 this year, I counted 44 major league pitchers who were traded to a playoff contender. For transparency’s sake, I judged “major league pitcher” subjectively. Some of these trades amount to one team sending the other a Low-A no-hoper or a bag of cash in order to jump the waiver line for a guy they like. And then the team in question waives the guy they traded for three weeks later.

In short, I love you, Tyler Jay, and we’ll always have that killer Big Ten regular season in 2015, but you don’t count as a major league pitcher for the purposes of this experiment. Read the rest of this entry »