It just didn’t make sense. There was no way that the Orioles were really planning on heading into the 2024 season with so little top-end pitching. I’m not saying Kyle Bradish, Grayson Rodriguez, and company are bad, but they were on the lighter side of potential playoff rotations, and that made very little sense to me given the composition of the rest of the team. It’s not every day that I take a team to task for something they didn’t do, but this one was just too illogical.
Bill Streicher-USA TODAY SportsThe free agent market is finally starting to move. Rhys Hoskins is headed to Milwaukee, finalizing a two-year, $34 million contract with an opt-out after the first year, per Scoop Czar Jeff Passan. You don’t have to squint to see the fit here. Milwaukee needs hitting, Hoskins needs a place to hit, and it’s always nice to feel wanted. The option effectively makes this a pillow contract for Hoskins, who ruptured his ACL in spring training and missed the entire 2023 season. (This seems like a good place to note that the deal is almost certainly still pending a physical.) If he proves that he can still hit like Rhys Hoskins, he can opt out and go after a bigger deal while he’s still a fresh-faced 31-year-old with the world at his feet, rather than a doddering, unemployable 32-year-old. If he needs another year to knock the rust off, well, I’ve heard great things about Milwaukee.
Hoskins ranked 20th on our Top 50 Free Agents. Ben Clemens estimated that he would receive a three-year contract for a total of $45 million, meaning that Hoskins fell short of the estimate in terms of years, but exceeded it in terms of average annual value. Michael Baumann did a lot of the legwork a couple weeks ago, so I’ll leave it to him to remind you of just how good a hitter Hoskins is:
The value that Hoskins brings is obvious. His power can be streaky on a game-to-game basis — a danger of being a three true outcome-heavy hitter — but in the aggregate, he’s one of the most consistent players in baseball. Hoskins is a career .242/.353/492 hitter, with a 13.5% walk rate and a 23.9% strikeout rate. That’s a career wRC+ of 126.
In four full seasons in the majors (discounting Hoskins’ 50-game rookie season and the 41 games he played in 2020), he’s never been worth more than 2.4 WAR, nor less than 2.0. His full-season career low in wRC+ is 112, while his full-season career high is 128. You can like or dislike the total package, but you know what you’re going to get.
Rhys Hoskins is a free agent, and it’s kind of weird. The 30-year-old first baseman spent 10 seasons in the Phillies organization, six of them (plus one full year spent on the injured list) with the major league club. For a time, he was one of the only bright spots on a completely moribund team, but eventually the big fella settled into a role as a supporting player and de facto table-setter for a lineup built around Bryce Harper. His achievements in that role include the Bat Spike home run, a three-run dinger off Spencer Strider in the 2022 NLDS — the Phillies’ first home playoff game in 11 years.
While it was surpassed in the imagination by Harper’s pennant-winning homer in the rain later that October, the image of Hoskins’ celebration lives on in memory as a highly localized version of the José Bautista bat flip for people who are deeply upset by the decline in the quality of Wawa’s sandwich bread since the chain went national. You want to watch the home run again? I do. Let’s watch it again.
For the 20th consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Milwaukee Brewers.
Batters
The Brewers won 92 games in 2023, enough to coast to a division title with nine games to spare, though it didn’t really have much to do with their offense. After a respectable 2022 season, the team’s wRC+ dropped to 92, ahead of just six teams (four of which won fewer than 62 games). In a season that saw an upswing in baseball’s offensive environment, the Brewers only slugged .385, their worst showing in 30 years.
That’s not to say there weren’t bright spots, but of the four players who put up a wRC+ of at least 100 in a minimum of 100 plate appearances, two (Carlos Santana and Mark Canha) are no longer on the team. Of the two who still call Milwaukee home, William Contreras is the best bet to maintain his 2023 production, though one-year framing numbers did a lot of heavy lifting. Meanwhile, Christian Yelich had a nice little bounce back, but he’s still a 32-year-old coming off two-and-a-half far less impressive seasons. ZiPS is grumpier than Steamer with respect to Yelich, but even Steamer has him falling short of 3 WAR, and that’s in a scenario where he has nearly perfect health. Read the rest of this entry »
For the past decade, the joke around Mets pitchers has been that they spend more time injured than active. There’s no shortage of examples; Jacob deGrom and Noah Syndergaard spring to my mind first, but Max Scherzer and Justin Verlander dealt with injuries in their time in Queens, too. Edwin Díaz just missed the 2023 season. Zack Wheeler never quite lived up to his potential when he was there, and injuries were a key reason why. Matt Harvey, Seth Lugo, Steven Matz — heck, here’s a story from 2017 about the Mets’ injury woes, which were already a trope before their recent woes.
In that sense, Coleman Crow is the platonic ideal of a Mets pitcher. He joined the organization in June, part of the package the Angels sent to New York in exchange for Eduardo Escobar. At the time, he hadn’t pitched since late April thanks to an elbow injury. His first notable decision as a Met was to get Tommy John surgery for that elbow; he’s now tracking for a return at the very end of next year, or potentially in 2025. He’s been a Met for roughly six months and thrown exactly zero pitches for them in that time.
Or maybe I should have said: he was a Met for roughly six months. On Wednesday, the Mets traded him to the Brewers in exchange for Adrian Houser and Tyrone Taylor, ending his tenure with the team. You think Harvey was often injured? Crow dialed it up to an entirely different level, albeit in the minors. It’s the kind of performance we might not see again for a while. Read the rest of this entry »
The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2024 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 and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.
The fourth and final multi-candidate pairing of this series is by far the heaviest, covering two candidates who have both been connected to multiple incidents of domestic violence. Read the rest of this entry »
Bob Melvin feels that the San Francisco Giants could use more star power. Hearing the team’s new manager say as much when he met with the media in Nashville earlier this week prompted a question from yours truly. Prefacing it by pointing out that the San Diego Padres team he led last year had no shortage of it, I asked the veteran skipper if it is possible to have too much “star power.”
“Not necessarily,” replied Melvin, whose 2023 Padres underachieved to the tune of an 82-80 record. “It just depends on the makeup. Look, the year before we went to the NLCS in my first year there. Last year was a disappointing season, but I don’t think there’s anything to make of it being a poor year because there was too much star power. They have some really good players there, it just didn’t work out as well.
“I am big on incorporating,” Melvin added. “I think everybody needs a role and everybody needs to feel they’re a part of it. That makes for a much better clubhouse. Everybody feels they’re important. There’s an enthusiasm to that. I think there’s a place for both.”
Scott Harris largely agrees with Melvin. When the subject of impact free agents such as Shohei Ohtani came up, I asked Detroit’s President of Baseball Operations the same question that I’d asked his San Francisco contemporary. Read the rest of this entry »
Over the past few days, industry news-breakers (beginning with Ken Rosenthal) began to report that the Milwaukee Brewers and top prospect Jackson Chourio are nearing a contract extension. Chourio, who turns 20 in March, has been among the very best prospects in baseball for the better part of the past 18 months. He turned 19 just before the start of the 2023 season and slashed .280/.336/.467 in 122 games at Double-A Biloxi before the Brewers gave him a six-game shot of espresso at Triple-A Nashville in late-September. His power, speed and, more recently, his improvements on defense give him rare upside as a 30/30 threat and plus center field defender.
The complete details of the contract aren’t known, but Curt Hogg of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinelfirst suggested that it would be something like an eight-year, $80 million deal. Adam McCalvy of MLB.com reported that Chourio and the Brewers agreed to a structure and length of eight years, with two club options that would bring the total length to 10 years if exercised. Earlier today, Jon Heyman of the New York Posttweeted that the guaranteed amount will total $82 million, accounting for a $2 million buyout of the Brewers’ club options, while McCalvy reported that the club options plus incentives could push the total value into the $140 million range. If we assume that Chourio will make the Opening Day roster, this deal will cover what would have otherwise been his six years of pre-free agency service, two of his free agent years, and potentially two more. Even if the Brewers pick up the two team options, Chourio will hit free agency again before he turns 30. It’s also worth noting that the big money, team-option portion of Chourio’s contract doesn’t kick in until after Christian Yelich’s monster contract has expired. Read the rest of this entry »
Position Summary: As part of the Baseball Systems department, this role will work closely with the Data Engineering and Software Engineering groups within Baseball Systems to enhance existing tools and processes and build new ones.
Essential Duties and Responsibilities:
Investigate user identified data quality concerns relating to areas such as game statistics, scouting reports, and transactions. Diagnose and fix the issue(s).
Load new datasets from vendors into internal databases and make the data available to users.
Design tools to surface data in web applications and clearly communicate the tool’s functionality.
Qualifications:
Experience with programming languages such as Python, Java, C#.
Experience with SQL, including writing and maintaining queries.
Experience working with relational databases such as SQL Server and PostgreSQL.
Experience with advanced statistical baseball concepts, including advanced statistics and player evaluation metrics.
Our Team:
Baseball Systems is the software backbone of Baseball Operations. We provide data and decision-making tools for analysts, coaches, and front office personnel to help win a World Series.
Our department consists of a team of data engineers and a team of software engineers who work across all different aspects of Baseball Operations providing support and tools relevant to each group.
We work directly with stakeholders in every department of Baseball Operations to ensure every project we work on drives value to the organization and helps us win more games on the field.
We help drive technical innovation to find new ways to solve baseball problems.
Our Pitch You come here to make a difference. We are a purpose-led organization, focused on building an inclusive and engaging culture that fosters excellence, collaboration, and ingenuity. We strive to be a model employer and cultivator of talent, empowering our teams to drive innovation through the inclusion of diverse thoughts, ideas, and perspectives. We operate at the highest standard of excellence, investing in the development of our staff across all levels and embracing differences through a culture of respect and understanding.
We are proud to offer a highly competitive perks and benefits package including:
League wide insurance plan
Collaborative recognition program and incentives
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Paid time off for volunteering
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Brewers Home Game tickets, promotional giveaways and other discounts!
For more information about our Crew, other benefits and insight into our Club culture please visit our Careers Page.
The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2024 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2015 election at SI.com, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. 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. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.
Wherever Gary Sheffield went, he made noise, both with his bat and his voice. For the better part of two decades, he ranked among the game’s most dangerous hitters, a slugger with a keen batting eye and a penchant for contact that belied his quick, violent swing. For even longer than that, he was one of the game’s most outspoken players, unafraid to speak up when he felt he was being wronged and unwilling to endure a situation that wasn’t to his liking. He was a polarizing player, and hardly one for the faint of heart.
At the plate, Sheffield was viscerally impressive like few others. With his bat twitching back and forth like the tail of a tiger waiting to pounce, he was pure menace in the batter’s box. He won a batting title, launched over 500 home runs — he had 14 seasons with at least 20 and eight with at least 30 — and put many a third base coach in peril with some of the most terrifying foul balls anyone has ever seen. For as violent as his swing may have been, it was hardly wild; not until his late 30s did he strike out more than 80 times in a season, and in his prime, he walked far more often than he struck out.
Bill James once referred to Sheffield as “an urban legend in his own mind.” Off the field, he found controversy before he ever reached the majors through his connection to his uncle, Dwight Gooden. He was drafted and developed by the Brewers, who had no idea how to handle such a volatile player and wound up doing far more harm than good. Small wonder then that from the time he was sent down midway through his rookie season after being accused of faking an injury, he was mistrustful of team management and wanted out. And when he wanted out — of Milwaukee, Los Angeles, or New York — he let everyone know it, and if a bridge had to burn, so be it; it was Festivus every day for Sheffield, who was always willing to air his grievances.
Later in his career, Sheffield became entangled in the BALCO performance enhancing drug scandal through his relationship with Barry Bonds — a relationship that by all accounts crumbled before he found himself in even deeper water. For all of the drama that surrounded Sheffield, and for all of his rage and outrageousness, he never burned out the way his uncle did, nor did he have trouble finding work.
Even in the context of the high-scoring era in which he played, Sheffield’s offensive numbers look to be Hall of Fame caliber, but voters have found plenty of reasons to overlook him, whether it’s his tangential connection to PEDs, his gift for finding controversy, his poor defensive metrics, or the crowd on the ballot. In his 2015 debut, he received just 11.7% of the vote, and over the next four years, he gained barely any ground. But from 2019 to ’21, he jumped from 13.6% to 30.5% to 40.6%, with the fifth-largest and third-largest gains on the ’20 and ’21 ballots. After repeating with the same percentage in 2022, he jumped to 55% in ’23, with the cycle’s fourth-largest gain. His share of the vote is now larger than any player who’s been linked to PEDs via BALCO, the Mitchell Report, or a suspension except for Bonds or Roger Clemens. Still, as he enters his final year of eligibility on the writers’ ballot, he’ll need a Larry Walker-like jump to get to 75%. Read the rest of this entry »
