Nelson Cruz wants his ring. Since watching a World Series slip right over the webbing of his glove in 2011, he has played 11 more seasons, well past his 40th birthday, in pursuit of that ultimate goal. On Wednesday, the 42-year-old agreed to sign on for his 19th major league season with his eighth team, heading to San Diego to join a fun Padres team looking to find its way even deeper into the playoffs after reaching its first NLCS of the 21st century last year. The deal, worth $1 million over one year, pending a physical, reunites Cruz with former Rangers assistant general manager A.J. Preller as well as former teammates and Dominican countrymen Manny Machado and Juan Soto, who he’ll suit up with first as general manager-player for the Dominican World Baseball Classic team in March.

Cruz could easily have called it a career by this point. After establishing himself as a big league bat in Texas, he has enjoyed a prosperous second act as somewhat of a slugging journeyman, representing four different teams in the All-Star Game since his age-32 season. Of his 459 career home runs, 382 have come since his 30th birthday, trailing only Barry Bonds, Babe Ruth, Rafael Palmeiro, and Hank Aaron. Prior to last year, hadn’t posted a wOBA under .340 or wRC+ under 123 in nearly a decade.

And then came 2022, the type of year that would chase most veterans into retirement. In 124 games as the primary DH for the 55-win Nationals, Cruz’s prodigious power disappeared; his slugging percentage went from .497 to .337, his ISO dipped from .232 to .103, and his wRC+ fell from 123 to 85. Aside from a 22-game stretch in late May and early June during which he looked like prime (or 38-year-old) Cruz, hitting .418/.483/.633 in 90 plate appearances, he wasn’t able to offer much value at the plate. He battled inflammation in his left eye that was obscuring his vision, which he said had been a worsening problem for about a year and a half. He was ultimately shut down in mid-September, but instead of calling it quits, he had his eye surgically repaired and got back to work, most recently alongside 2022 AL batting champ Luis Arraez. Read the rest of this entry »

A day after landing Seth Lugo, the Padres added another versatile player to the fold in Matt Carpenter. The 37-year-old lefty swinger, who rescued his career from oblivion with the Yankees, will serve as something of a utilityman according to MLB.com’s A.J. Cassavell, potentially picking up playing time at designated hitter, first base, and both outfield corners, with the possibility of backing up second base and third base as well.

In a season bookended by a stint with the Rangers’ Triple-A Round Rock affiliate and a fractured left foot, Carpenter hit an astounding .305/.412/.727 with 15 homers in just 154 plate appearances. His 217 wRC+ was the highest of any player who received at least 20 PA in 2022, 10 points higher than teammate Aaron Judge. It was also the highest wRC+ of any player with at least 150 PA since 2005, a cutoff I chose in order to avoid peak Barry Bonds, who topped the mark three times from 2001 to ’04:

That’s mixing a few small-sample seasons in with some MVP-winning ones (Betts, Cabrera, and Harper in addition to Judge), with Freeman in both camps, but that’s kind of the point. What Carpenter did in his small slice of playing time was otherworldly and unsustainable. That it even happened was almost unimaginable given that at this time last year, it wasn’t clear whether he’d ever occupy a major league roster again.

Carpenter was cut free by the Cardinals after hitting a combined .176/.313/.291 (76 wRC+) with 0.2 WAR in 180 games and 418 PA in 2020–21. The team declined his $18.5 million option for 2022, instead paying him a $2 million buyout and ending his 13-year run in the organization that drafted him out of Texas Christian University in the 13th round in 2009. During his 11 seasons in St. Louis, he made three All-Star teams, received MVP votes in three seasons, and outproduced every Cardinals position player this side of Yadier Molina, helping the team to four NL Central titles, six playoff appearances, and the 2013 NL pennant. But he hadn’t hit at even a league-average clip since 2018, making his two-year, $39 million deal a minor disaster, and so it made no sense to push to salvage the deal via its third year.

After his option was declined, Carpenter reached out to longtime NL Central rival Joey Votto for advice on how to reverse his mid-30s decline, as the Cincinnati first baseman had done. In a conversation that Carpenter recalled lasting 3 1/2 hours, Votto gave him a combination pep talk and roadmap to fixing his swing, one that centered around a data-driven approach. While working with hitting gurus Tim Laker and Craig Wallenbrock as well as former teammate Matt Holliday over the winter, Carpenter switched to a new bat and underwent a full mechanical overhaul to improve his swing path and refine his body movement.

As Holliday told the New York Post’s Dan Martin in June:

“Just watching on TV, his front hip was leaving early, which was pulling him out and around even inside pitches… He was missing under pitches that were middle-away and then balls that were in, he was hooking a little too much. As a friend and someone who likes hitting, I told him, ‘This is what I see’ and we talked about hitting and why his average on balls out over the plate had gone down and why he was getting under balls and striking out more than he ever had.

“After a few days, there was a different sound off the bat and the ball was traveling much better… He was getting carry on the ball with different spin and it was more true.”

Once the lockout ended, Carpenter signed a minor league deal with the Rangers, one that guaranteed him a salary of $2 million in the majors. After missing the cut for Opening Day, he accepted an assignment to Round Rock, where he hit .275/.379/.613 with six homers in 95 PA, but the team didn’t see fit to call him up. By mutual decision, he was released by the Rangers on May 19, then signed with the Yankees a week later, after they placed Giancarlo Stanton on the injured list with a right calf strain. Carpenter debuted that day, homered off the Rays’ Jeffrey Springs the next day, and just kept slugging; his first three hits, and eight of his first 12, were homers. Despite playing only sporadically during the periods when Stanton was healthy, he continued to wield an incredibly potent bat, making 16 starts at DH, 11 in right field, three apiece in left field and at first base, and two at third base; he also pinch-hit 12 times.

The storybook comeback came crashing to a halt when Carpenter fouled a Logan Gilbert pitch off the top of his left foot on August 8. He completed the plate appearance but didn’t play again before the end of the regular season. While the Yankees included him on their postseason roster, his 1-for-12 showing with nine strikeouts amply illustrated that he needed more time to get his rhythm back.

I’ll get back to the performance, but first, the contract. Carpenter is guaranteed $12 million in 2023–24, with incentives that can take the deal to $21 million. Via The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal, he’ll receive a $3 million signing bonus, a $3.5 million salary for 2023, and a $5.5 million player option for ’24. For both seasons, he gets an additional $500,000 for reaching plate appearance thresholds of 300, 350, 400, 450, 500, and 550; what’s more, each of those thresholds that he reaches in 2023 also increases his 2024 base salary by another $500,000.

Thus, if Carpenter makes 400 PA in 2023, he’ll earn $8 million and then have a $7 million player option for ’24. If he has a 550-PA season, he’ll make $9.5 millon in 2023, and if he picks up his $8.5 million option and then reaches 550 PA again, he’ll earn a total of $11.5 million in ’24, reaching the $21 million maximum for the package. Even if he doesn’t max out, that’s a pretty impressive payday under the circumstances.

Carpenter’s arrival adds yet another moving part to a San Diego roster that was upended by the Xander Bogaerts signing earlier this month. That pushed Ha-Seong Kim from shortstop to second base and Jake Cronenworth from second to first, and more or less ensured that Fernando Tatis Jr. primarily plays the outfield. While Carpenter appears likely to see the bulk of his time as the team’s DH, he could spot at first against some righthanders, which would return the lefty-swinging Cronenworth to the keystone and put the righty-swinging Kim on the bench. Carpenter doesn’t seem like much of a threat to take significant playing time away from Tatis (whose PED suspension still has 20 games to go) or Soto in the outfield corners, but he could fill in while one of them DHs or gets a day off.

As to how productive he can be in San Diego, it’s worth considering how Carpenter did what he did in New York. He hit the ball pretty hard in general (13.7% barrel rate, 42.1% hard-hit rate, 89.8 mph average exit velocity), but the key was putting it in the air with great frequency while playing half of his games in a ballpark that specifically rewards lefthanders for doing so. Among hitters with at least 150 PA, his 60% pull rate led the majors, and his 53.3% fly ball rate was third. All 15 homers — nine in Yankee Stadium, six on the road — came via pulled fly balls:

Carpenter hit just 25 pulled fly balls, but his 761 wRC+ on them ranked third in the majors, behind only Judge’s 902 (including 31 homers on 48 such balls) and Nathaniel Lowe’s 883 (17 homers on 26 such balls). Both of those guys had over 400 batted ball events in 2022, so their pulled flies represented a much smaller fraction (11.9% for Judge, 5.8% for Lowe) than for Carpenter (26.3%).

That strategy might not work as well in San Diego. Where Yankee Stadium is 314 feet down the right field line and 385 to right-center, Petco Park is 322 feet down the right field line and 391 to right-center. And that’s before considering the park’s notorious marine layer, which brings in cool, moist air and suppresses home runs — something not accounted for in Statcast’s expected home runs stat, which shows Carpenter matching his season total of 15, 14 of which would have gone out in San Diego based on distance and angle. By our park factors, which use five years of data, Yankee Stadium had a home run factor of 109 for lefties, and Petco
95; by those of Statcast, which are based upon three years of data, the gap is even wider, 118 to 96.

ZiPS isn’t tremendously optimistic about Carpenter’s production, which shouldn’t be a surprise given the sample sizes feeding it; after all, he preceded those 154 PA of videogame numbers with 910 that produced just an 87 wRC+:

Via Dan Szymborski, ZiPS values that production at $8.2 million on a two-year deal, though the low playing time is obviously a factor; if Carpenter reaches the higher percentiles of his 2023 projection, he’ll play more frequently. At a baseline of 400 PA, ZiPS projects a contract worth $12.8 million over two years, which is more in the ballpark of his deal, though if he’s good enough in 2023, he could opt to pursue something even more lucrative.

The Padres are banking that the things Carpenter did to overhaul his swing will make it more likely he can remain a productive hitter, if not a guy who homers at a Bonds-like rate. His addition pushes the team’s payroll to $266.7 million for Competitive Balance Tax purposes, about $6.3 million short of the third tier of penalties. Padres ownership has shown that it’s not too concerned about such matters at the moment, particularly if such moves give the team a better chance to win at a time when the Dodgers have suddenly gotten cost-conscious, to say nothing of how the Giants must be reeling from the shock of the Carlos Correa switcheroo. There’s no guarantee Carpenter can remain a big bat, but at the very least, the NL West’s deepest roster has gotten deeper.

The Padres continued has been a productive offseason on Monday, closing a deal with veteran right-hander Seth Lugo for two years at just over $15 million, with a player option after the 2023 season, according to The Athletic’s Fabian Ardaya. After 12 years with the Mets, the 33-year-old leaves the only club he’s ever known for an opportunity to start in San Diego after spending the bulk of the last five seasons out of the bullpen. The Padres, meanwhile, add another versatile arm in a winter during which, in addition to signing Xander Bogaerts, they’ve already agreed to new contracts with a pair of 2022 postseason standouts in swingman Nick Martinez and setup man Robert Suarez, who earned himself a five-year, $46 million commitment after an excellent rookie campaign. Lugo, who comes at a similar AAV but a shorter commitment, has an opportunity to slot into the back end of a starting rotation that lost Sean Manaea and Mike Clevinger after underwhelming short stints with the club.

For the Padres, the addition of Lugo also represents a victory over the rival Dodgers, who were reported to have been in the mix for the right-hander right up until A.J. Preller sealed the deal. San Diego, well on its way to owing more in luxury tax payments in 2023, seems intent on making a run for the division title after ousting the 111-win Dodgers from the postseason last year. Per our depth charts, Lugo’s projected 1.2 WAR improved the Padres’ starting staff — one led by Yu Darvish, Joe Musgrove, and Blake Snell — from a projected ranking of 14th in the majors to 12th, leapfrogging the Dodgers and the Verlander-less Astros, and drawing them just about even with the Giants. Read the rest of this entry »

For most of Winter Meetings, the San Diego Padres vigorously pursued a few of the best free agents available only to come up short on Trea Turner and Aaron Judge. Well, they finally made their big splash after most of the reporters and analysts had returned to their climatologically inferior home cities, signing shortstop Xander Bogaerts, formerly of the Boston Red Sox, to a monster 11-year contract. Bogaerts now stands an impressive $280 million richer and a lot of the Padres’ positional dominoes have fallen into place for the 2023 season.

If you’re ever prone to thinking that a player opt-out is mere frippery, like Roy Oswalt’s tractor or the mustache wax benefit that Rollie Fingers received, Bogaerts’ prior contract extension ought to firmly disabuse you of the notion. Bogaerts would have originally hit free agency after the 2020 season, but he came to terms with the Red Sox on a six-year, $120 million deal to keep him in Boston for what was likely to be the rest of his prime. Here’s what the projection looked like if we go back to that blessed time when we might have mistaken “Covid” for the first name of a Swedish scientist:

Read the rest of this entry »

SAN DIEGO — The early hours of Wednesday morning at the Winter Meetings brought a giant-sized deal for baseball’s latest home run giant… but not from the Giants. After a day in which it appeared as though Aaron Judge had decided he was not in fact prepared to be “a Yankee for life,” as he had previously professed, and would instead leave the Bronx to sign with the the team for which he grew up rooting in Linden, California, about two hours from the Bay Area, the 2022 AL MVP has returned to the Bronx via a record-setting nine-year, $360 million deal.

The move happened only after Judge arrived in San Diego on Tuesday night and heard overtures from a third team, the Padres, who had reportedly offered Trea Turner a $342 million deal before the shortstop signed with the Phillies on Monday. Via USA Today‘s Bob Nightengale, San Diego offered Judge $40 million per year over 10 years; whether either deal included deferred money isn’t known. According to the New York Post’s Jon Heyman, the Yankees had offered Judge eight years and $320 million — about $90 million more than the offer that he spurned just before Opening Day. “Once Judge told Hal Steinbrenner he wanted to be a Yankee (but had more $ on table elsewhere — SF and SD) Hal sealed the deal by bumping it another $40M and one year,” Heyman wrote. Read the rest of this entry »

For the 18th 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 today’s team is the San Diego Padres.

Batters

When you look at the Padres’ depth charts, there’s a kind of clarity when trying to decide what the team needs to do this winter. The strengths of the offense are obvious: Juan Soto, Manny Machado, and a healthy Fernando Tatis Jr. enter any season as top-notch MVP contenders. And unlike a certain seraphim-themed organization I won’t name with a few mega-stars at the top, there isn’t a huge drop-off to the next tier, whether it’s Jake Cronenworth, Ha-Seong Kim, or Trent Grisham after you’ve threatened him with torture if he tries to bunt for a hit at an awkward moment.

The team’s needs here are also quite obvious; I can’t imagine the Padres actually enter the season with Taylor Kohlwey and José Azocar splitting playing time in left field. The problem is, I also couldn’t imagine Nomar Mazara actually getting 41 starts in 2022, but that’s just what he did.

San Diego would also benefit from some figuring out what to do about Tatis’ position long-term. Right now, we have him splitting time in several places, but I think that the Padres are best served by figuring out whether Cronenworth or Kim are the answer at second, determine where they can put Tatis, and then find a full-time upgrade over Eguy Rosario or Brandon Dixon, whom I see more as complementary talent.

Another thing that is obvious here is that the Padres do need to spend some time this winter fattening up their organizational depth. The high minors are fairly empty at the moment — a combination of graduating talent, traded talent, and a bunch of minor league veterans now in free agency or in other organizations. Most of the players here who look like “break in case of fire” emergency options like C.J. Hinojosa or Domingo Leyba are no longer in the organization. This isn’t necessarily an expensive thing to do, either, and adding a left fielder and a couple of pitchers wouldn’t hinder this. Read the rest of this entry »

The 40-man roster deadline led to the usual squall of transaction activity, with teams turning over portions of their rosters in an effort to make room for the incoming crop of young rookies. Often, teams with an overflow of viable big leaguers will try to get back what they can for some of those players via trade, but because we’re talking about guys straddling the line between major league viability and Triple-A, those trades tend not to be big enough to warrant an entire post.

Here I endeavor to cover and analyze the moves made by each team, division by division. Readers can view this as the start of list season, as the players covered in this miniseries tend to be prospects who will get big league time in the next year. We’ll spend more time discussing players who we think need scouting updates or who we haven’t written about in the past. If you want additional detail on some of the more famous names you find below, pop over to The Board for a more thorough report.

The Future Value grades littered throughout these posts may be different than those on the 2022 in-season prospect lists on The Board to reflect our updated opinions and may be subject to change during the offseason. New to our thinking on this subject and wondering what the FVs mean? Here’s a quick rundown. Note that because we’re talking about close-to-the-majors prospects across this entire exercise, the time and risk component is less present here and these FVs are what we think the players are right now. Read the rest of this entry »

Nolan Jones might be ready to break out in Colorado, and turning 4 o’clock into 7 o’clock is how he would go about doing it. His time in Cleveland over — the Rockies acquired the rangy 6-foot-4 outfielder from the Guardians earlier this week in exchange for Juan Brito — Jones heads west with a swing that is, by his own admission, compact in the cage and too long in the batter’s box. Striking an effective balance between the two is an ongoing goal and a key to his future success.

“I’ve got really long levers, so I’m trying to simplify my moves and make them more efficient,” Jones told me earlier this summer. “Like anybody else, my moves become bigger in the game, and when your limbs are long, a two-inch move in the cage can become a six-inch move. My swings in the cage are those toned-down moves. I’m trying to be shorter to where, when they get bigger in the game, they’re right where I want them to be.”

Reaching his potential has been a frustrating endeavor for the 24-year-old. Selected in the second round of the 2016 draft out of Philadelphia’s Holy Ghost Preparatory School, Jones has ranked as Cleveland’s top prospect multiple times, and he was No. 51 in our Top 100 as recently as the spring of 2021. What has largely held him back is a penchant to swing-and-miss, a trait that accompanied him to the big leagues this season. Along with a .244/.309/.372 slash line over 94 plate appearances, the rookie had a 33% strikeout rate and a worst-on-the-club 71.6% Z-contact rate. Given the Guardians’ preference for hitters who can consistently put the ball in play, Jones no longer fitting into their plans comes as no surprise. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not sure if you know this about me, but there are two things that I’ve always loved to do. First, I like to make things about me, even if the connection is tenuous. Second, I like to go over my own past decisions and see if there’s anything I can learn from them, hopefully without being too self-serving. I have great news – well, for me at least. Two free agent signings last week – Robert Suarez to the Padres and Rafael Montero to the Astros – have given me an opportunity to do both.

Of course, I don’t want to give either player short shrift. Both are excellent in their own right, late-inning relievers coming off of effective 2022 seasons and high-leverage postseason work. Egotistical as I am, I can’t completely ignore them and only talk about myself. As a compromise, I’ll start by profiling each player and their new contract. From there, we’ll move on to discussing why neither was on my Top 50 Free Agents ranking, and what I think I did wrong in making the list. Read the rest of this entry »

Before we begin, a quick apology from me: I haven’t gotten to these managerial report cards as quickly as I’d like. They take a lot of work, believe it or not. I comb through every game log multiple times to capture the particulars of each situation, keeping an eye on pitcher and batter availability while doing so. I like to watch key moments, too, just in case something pops up that way. I still miss things — it’s hard to get every last detail right, though I try to be thorough — but without poring over the details to get everything straight, I couldn’t write these.

Between the general rigors of writing and compiling the annual top-50 free agent list, I just haven’t had time to get these done. That’s not a great excuse, and I’m sure these are less interesting to read than they would have been if they had come out directly after the relevant eliminations. But hey, they’re here now! Well, this one is. More will follow in the coming week.

Bob Melvin, San Diego Padres

Batting/Lineups: B-
Melvin faced one central decision throughout the playoffs: who to play at first base. The lineup didn’t offer much in the way of flexibility anywhere else; every slot had a clear starter. That left Josh Bell, Wil Myers, and Brandon Drury to share DH and first base between the two of them. Drury theoretically has positional versatility, but there was nowhere else to put him. Melvin used two general rules: play Bell against righties and sit Bell against lefties. Read the rest of this entry »