If you’re not familiar with Jerry Weinstein, you should be. He is a catching coach legend. After decades with the Rockies, he recently jumped to the Cubs, and lucky for us, he’s quite active online talking about catching philosophies and training. One thing he has discussed recently is “slam dunk” framing.
Some cues in baseball are universal, and slam dunk framing is one of them. It looks just like how it sounds: Catchers take their glove and quickly snap it down as if they were dunking a basketball. What’s the intention? By moving their glove down in a quick, fluid motion on pitches at the top of the zone, they’re attempting to give the impression that these pitches are lower than where they actually crossed the plate.
While this could easily just be another solo Patrick Bailey framing post, there is one other guy in particular, Cal Raleigh, who deserves to squat in the spotlight. To set the stage, here are the leaders in Strike% in Zone 12 (the upper third in the shadow zone) last season: Read the rest of this entry »
It’s not every day that a piece of baseball news makes just about everyone go, “Oh, yay, that’s nice!” but the Mariners pulled it off less than 72 hours before the start of their season. Cal Raleigh is sticking around for the long run.
In which ways would a fully-implemented Automated Ball-Strike System [ABS] impact pitching? According to a coordinator I spoke to, one effect could be a further increase in the number of power arms who can get away with attacking the middle area of the zone. Conversely, crafty finesse types will become even less common, as getting calls just off the corners will no longer be possible.
Count Chris Bassitt among those not enamored with the idea.
‘“If you go to a full ABS system, you’re going to develop more throwers and the injury rates are going to spike,” opined the 36-year-old Toronto Blue Jays right-hander. “Then you’ll have to go back to pitching. The only way to stay healthy is to pitch. That’s never going to change in our sport. No matter how many people want to do something different, you have to pitch. There are obviously a number of facets for why people get hurt at the rate they’re getting hurt, but the answer for the injury history of the sport for the last five, ten years is more throwers. I don’t agree with it.”
If the winter is a time for dreams, the spring is a time for solutions. Your team may have been going after Juan Soto or Aaron Judge or Shohei Ohtani, depending on the offseason, but short of something going weird in free agency (like the unsigned Boras clients last year), if you don’t have them under contract at this point, they’ll be improving someone else’s club. However, that doesn’t mean that spring training is only about ramping up for the daily grind. Teams have real needs to address, and while they’re no doubt workshopping their own solutions – or possibly convincing themselves that the problem doesn’t exist, like when I wonder why my acid reflux is awful after some spicy food – that doesn’t mean that we can’t cook up some ideas in the FanGraphs test kitchen.
This is the final piece in a three-part series in which I’ll propose one way for each team to fill a roster hole or improve for future seasons. Some of my solutions are more likely to happen than others, but I tried to say away from the completely implausible ones. We’ll leave the hypothetical trades for Bobby Witt Jr. and Paul Skenes to WFAN callers. Also, I will not recommend the same fix for different teams; in real life, for example, David Robertson can help only one club’s bullpen. I wrote about the teams in the two East divisions last Wednesday, and then covered the Central divisions on Friday. Today, we’ll tackle the 10 teams in the West divisions, beginning with the five in the AL West before moving on to their counterparts in the NL West. Each division is sorted by the current Depth Charts projected win totals.
Texas Rangers: Reunite with Kyle Gibson
Look at the Rangers in our Depth Charts projection and glance down at the pitchers. Do you see a problem? We project the Rangers to have a decent rotation, right at the back of the top 10, but that also relies on a lot of innings from pitchers who have not been able to throw many in recent years. Jacob deGrom and Tyler Mahle are both projected to throw more innings apiece than the two of them have thrown combined over the last two years. I’d love to see 270 innings from deGrom and Mahle, but to count on that is just begging for a sad story. I probably believe in Kumar Rocker and Jack Leiter more than most, but neither of them should be counted on to solidify an injury-depleted rotation in 2025.
The Rangers need a reliable innings-eater, and old friend Kyle Gibson is still out there. He has made at least 30 starts in five of the last six full seasons, with the one time he didn’t reach that threshold coming in 2019, when he made 29 starts, appeared in 34 games, and put up 2.6 WAR across 160 innings — the fewest innings he’s thrown in that span, excluding 2020. He’s probably never again going to be as good as he was in 2021, when he was an All-Star with Texas before getting traded to the Phillies and finished with a 3.71 ERA, a 3.87 FIP, and 3.1 WAR, but Gibson comes with a fairly high floor. His performance last year with the Cardinals (4.24 ERA, 4.42 FIP, 1.5 WAR, 169 2/3 innings) was his least-productive campaign during that 2018-2024 stretch, but even that would benefit the Rangers right now.
Seattle Mariners: Add some Tork to the lineup
The Mariners have gotten more out of Luke Raley than they’ve had any right to, but he remains a platoon first baseman, with a .575 OPS in the majors against lefties. Even if he can do better than that — ZiPS thinks he’ll put up about a hundred more points of OPS in 2025 — he’s not David Ortiz against righties, so it’s hard to just give him a full-time job at first. The likely candidates to pair with Raley are thoroughly uninteresting, so why not look at Spencer Torkelson, a player who is just begging for a change of scenery? The Tigers have clearly soured on him; otherwise, they likely would not have signed second baseman Gleyber Torres and moved Colt Keith to first base to start there over Torkelson. He’s still young enough to have some upside and get things back on track, but even if he doesn’t ever reach his full potential, he ought to at least beat up on lefties. The Mariners could use more power, and I doubt the price tag will be high.
Houston Astros: Add a very boring arm
The Astros dug themselves a hole early on in 2024, in large part because of a spate of pitching injuries that tested their depth to the breaking point. Houston’s rotation ought to be good, but there still are a number of pitchers with injury concerns, once again leaving the team vulnerable to some bad health luck. The Astros could use some veteran depth to preemptively reinforce the rotation just in case someone goes down, and I think for them, Lance Lynn is the most interesting free agent still available.
The Astros are skilled at refining pitch arsenals, for both prospects and veterans, and Lynn has the weirdest repertoire of the remaining free-agent starters. Rather than the standard fastball-breaking-offspeed mix, Lynn basically throws a bunch of slightly-to-moderately different fastballs, making him the type of pitcher who could benefit from Houston’s wizardry. A sweeper could cause some additional tension for batters compared to his cutter, and he’s never really had a refined offspeed offering to use as a putaway pitch against lefties. The specifics would be for the Astros to figure out. Lynn also has expressed a willingness to pitch out of the bullpen after teams started inquiring about using him as a reliever, so even if Houston’s rotation remains in tact for the whole season, Lynn could still have a role.
Athletics: Get Sandy before heading to the desert
The good: The A’s actually spent some money this winter. The bad: We still project the A’s to have a losing record. The really bad: Our Depth Charts project the A’s to have a worse starting rotation than the White Sox. The Marlins are clearly in the shopping mood, having already sent away Jesús Luzardo, and with teams likely waiting to see how Sandy Alcantara fares after returning from Tommy John surgery, the A’s have an opportunity to jump the 2022 NL Cy Young’s trade market and steal a march on the better wild card contenders. A potential wrinkle here: The Yankees may be in the market for Alcantara now that Gerrit Cole is going to miss the 2025 season while recovering from Tommy John surgery. Still, the A’s shouldn’t let that deter them from targeting an ace at a time when he could be relatively affordable.
Los Angeles Angels: Hire a team of archaeologists to design a very complex treasure hunt that convinces Arte Moreno to sell the team so that he’s free to go on an Indiana Jones adventure
I admit it, I’m at a loss for words with the Angels. In some ways, they’re actually worse off than the White Sox, in that Chicago at least has a reasonable long-term plan while the Angels keep teetering between strategies that are either unclear, unrealistic, or both. Their moves reflect their extreme short-term thinking, leaving the organization without a coherent path to winning now or winning later. Leadership has to come from the top, and Moreno continues to show he is incapable of fixing things. Case in point: The Halos spent this offseason adding veteran depth pieces. These would’ve been smart moves if the Angels were already a good team and looking to patch up their few remaining areas of weakness. That, of course, is not the case. The Angels need to accept that they’re lost before they can move forward and begin to assemble a winning team while Mike Trout is still around. But as long as they keep following an ineffective leader, they’re going to keep walking in circles.
Los Angeles Dodgers: Find a weird reclamation project
This one was a struggle because the Dodgers, while not having the highest median win projection of any team in ZiPS history (that’s still the 2021 Dodgers), they have the highest floor, with no obvious weaknesses anywhere. I guess the one thing the Dodgers are missing is that random broken-down reliever that you forget still plays baseball until they inevitably fix him. I’d love to see if Daniel Bard has another improbable comeback left in him, or maybe Adam Cimber, because a star in the sky disappears whenever a sidearmer loses his job.
Arizona Diamondbacks: See if the Yankees are interested in Jordan Montgomery
As I mentioned in the A’s section, Cole’s Tommy John surgery is a massive blow to the Yankees as they look to defend their American League pennant in 2025. Will Warren has a good shot at being a pretty solid rotation fill-in, but with Luis Gil also out for a while and Nestor Cortes now on the Brewers, the team now has just about zero starting pitching depth left. Jordan Montgomery and the Yankees have a good history, and there’s an obvious need now. Montgomery really struggled in 2024, to the point that Arizona owner Ken Kendrick said publicly that adding the lefty was a “horrible signing.” The Diamondbacks also have plenty of rotation options, so many, in fact, that RosterResource currently projects Montgomery to pitch out of their bullpen. They surely won’t get much in return for him, and they should be prepared to eat a good chunk of his remaining salary, but if they want to move on from him and maybe even get a prospect or two in return, this is the way to do it.
San Diego Padres: Sign David Robertson
The Padres’ bullpen is hardly a dumpster fire, but it is kind of top-heavy, and we project everybody after the fifth option (Yuki Matsui) to be at or below replacement level. There’s not a lot of financial flexibility right now in San Diego for various reasons we won’t go into here, but if the Padres are looking for marginal gains on a budget, David Robertson is by far the best move they could make. They shouldn’t have to spend much to get him, considering he’s 40 years old and remains unsigned in the second week of March, but he is coming off a very good season and is comfortable pitching in a variety of bullpen roles.
San Francisco Giants: Inquire about Jesús Sánchez
The Giants are likely a tier below the Diamondbacks and Padres in the NL Wild Card race, but they’re still close enough that short-term improvements matter. San Francisco’s designated hitter spot is bleak, and the player we have getting the most plate appearances there, Jerar Encarnacion, was in an indie league for much of last season and put up a .277 on-base percentage in the majors. The Giants should see what it would take to get Jesús Sánchez from the Marlins. He’s never developed into a big home run hitter despite solid hard-hit numbers, in large part because he’s never generated much loft. He’s also a spray hitter, and last season, 13 of his 25 doubles were line drives hit the opposite way. It’s the type of game that could be better suited for the spacious Oracle Park. Sánchez would provide a left-handed complement to Encarnacion, and he’s good enough to play all three outfield positions if needed.
Colorado Rockies: Find the next Nolan Jones and Brenton Doyle
Since the departure of former GM Jeff Bridich, the Rockies have made quite a bit of progress in no longer treating prospects as annoyances, and they now give internal, lesser prospects chances to surprise them. The last bit is important, as the Rockies of five or six years ago would never have given someone like Nolan Jones or Brenton Doyle enough playing time to break out in the majors. Doyle hit 23 homers and stole 30 bases in 2024 while winning his second Gold Glove in as many seasons, and although Jones struggled last year, he was hurt on and off and should be expected to at least split the difference between that performance and his 2023 production.
Considering this, the Rockies should go full-carrion bird as the season approaches. Colorado ought to be in on any and all mildly interesting players who are shut out of major league opportunities in 2025. Among the guys the Rockies should target are Mickey Gasper, Edouard Julien, Addison Barger, Shay Whitcomb, Curtis Mead, and Leo Jiménez. They may never develop into stars, but the Rockies need to be willing to throw everything at the wall and hope to find at least a few productive players.
Tim Heitman, Mitch Stringer, and Vincent Carchietta-Imagn Images
If you’ve ever lived in a cold climate and had a car that you’re trying to nurse through one more winter because you can’t quite afford to replace it, you know the startup noise. Sort of a squeal on a rumble on a cough. You’re waking your old Ford Explorer from hibernation, and it would rather go back to bed.
Throwing arms are like that to some extent. As much as pitchers stay loose and work out all offseason — we no longer live in an age when a pitcher could spend all winter inside a bottle of whiskey, dry out on the train ride to Sarasota, and throw 250 innings without breathing hard — sometimes the body just does not ramp up to game fitness the way you’d expect.
As routine as injury announcements are this time of year, the end of last week was a bloodbath. Three pitchers who were going to end up on a lot of AL Cy Young shortlists — Gerrit Cole, George Kirby, and Grayson Rodriguez — all came down with some flavor of arm ickiness. Any kind of layoff at this point in the calendar can disrupt a pitcher’s ramp-up to the point that it imperils an Opening Day start, and three contenders are now praying that worse news isn’t coming. Read the rest of this entry »
Many years ago, there was a bar in Columbus, Ohio. It’s since been closed and razed after its owner, a serially corrupt lobbyist who later served time for his role in “a food service bribery scheme,”went to jail for owing some $300,000 in back taxes. When I was a young man, my friends and I would descend on this bar once a week in order to wreck house at pub trivia under our collective nom de guerre: Gorilla Bizkit.
One of the recurring theme rounds for this trivia game was called “Paxton or Pullman?” The host would give the title of a movie, and each team would have to say whether the film featured Bill Paxton, Bill Pullman, both, or neither. I remember Paxton-Pullman confusion being a minor internet meme back in humanity’s digital golden age, when we — green and callow as a budding flower — saw fit to spend our days determining whether a hot dog was a sandwich. (Among other questions of great teleological import.) Read the rest of this entry »
Drake Baldwin is one of baseball’s most-promising prospects. A third-round pick in 2022 out of Missouri State University, the 23-year-old catcher in the Atlanta Braves organization is No. 11 on our Top 100. His left-handed stroke is a big reason why. Flashing plus power, Baldwin bashed 16 home runs last season while logging a 119 wRC+ between Double-A Mississippi and Triple-A Gwinnett.
He could have pursued a career in another sport. All-State in hockey as a Wisconsin prep, the sturdily-built Madison West High School product potted 43 goals as a junior, then found the back of the net 46 times as a senior.
Why did he choose the diamond, and not the ice?
“Hockey recruiting is a little later, so I didn’t actually talk to many colleges,” Baldwin said of his decision. “I think I had a chance, and the [junior hockey] route was interesting too, but being able to go right from high school to college and start working on a degree was a more straightforward path to where I wanted to be. I mean, I love both sports. I wish I could play both of them. Baseball just came first.” Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the start of spring training games, the charms of Tigers reliever John Brebbia, whether MLB’s uniform pants were always semi-transparent, and Shohei Ohtani’s parallel parking skills. Then they preview the 2025 Seattle Mariners (27:37) with Ryan Divish of The Seattle Times, and the 2025 Cincinnati Reds (1:12:53) with The Athletic’s C. Trent Rosecrans.
The Seattle Mariners currently have one of baseball’s best farm systems, and its strength differs markedly from that of the big league roster. Pitching-rich at the major league level, it’s Mariners position player prospects who populate the top tier of our rankings. That’s welcome news — at least on paper — for a Seattle team that has recently excelled at keeping runs off the board, but has too often struggled to score.
Justin Toole is front and center in the organization’s quest to graduate productive bats into the parent club’s lineup. Brought on as director of player development following the 2022 season, the 38-year-old Council Bluffs, Iowa native has both the background and the acumen to help make that happen. Prior to coming to Seattle, Toole played seven professional seasons, then served four years as a minor league hitting coach, followed by three as a major league hitting analyst. All of his pre-Mariners experience came with Cleveland.
Toole discussed several of the system’s most promising prospects prior to heading to Arizona for the start of spring training.
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David Laurila: What is the current strength of the system?
Justin Toole: “From a player development standpoint, I think the strength is the individuality with how we handle our players. When we get people into our system, we figure out their strengths, we figure out their weaknesses, we help them understand their identity. We work with our players to get a feel for where they think they are, and where they want to go.
“Our group has done an unbelievable job of creating good player plans that are clear, that are are easy to follow. They’re simple. I think that’s kind of been the strength of our player development group. Of course, any good player development group is going to be good because of the scouting group. They bring in good players, players that fit what we want to do, and who we want to be.” Read the rest of this entry »
Let’s get this out of the way at the start: The Mariners are pretty good. Their starting pitching is incredible, and some projections systems even think they have a top-10 offense. This is not a Pirates situation, where a core led by Paul Skenes on a league-minimum contract is somehow projected to finish well under .500. In Seattle, the pieces are almost all there. Sadly for fans, “almost all there” might well define this era of Mariners baseball.
The latest expression of Seattle’s complacency came last week, when the team brought back Jorge Polanco on a one year, $7.75 million contract. (The deal is pending a physical.) According to a report from Adam Jude at the Seattle Times, Polanco’s signing means the “Mariners’ roster is effectively set.” For those counting at home, $3.5 million for 37-year-old Donovan Solano, a trade for Austin Shenton, and the Polanco deal represent the entirety of Seattle’s offseason roster upgrades. The Mariners missed the playoffs by one game in 2023 and 2024; they missed it by two games in 2021. They are always good but never great. And the team — or at least ownership — appears totally fine with that. Read the rest of this entry »
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