It was closer than a lot of us thought it’d be, but Blake Snell has found a job before the Second Coming. The reigning Cy Young winner, left unemployed past St. Patrick’s Day by the merciless vicissitudes of the market, has come to terms with the San Francisco Giants on a two-year, $62 million contract with an opt-out after the 2024 season. Snell’s compensation includes a $17 million signing bonus, payable in January 2026, and a $15 million base salary in 2024.
Snell’s agent, Scott Boras, ran out the usual playbook — leave it late, hold the line, appeal directly to ownership. Boras has gotten more players nine-figure contracts than most agents have in their email contacts, and this is how he does it. And at the risk of being a huge bummer about Snell getting a top-10 AAV ever for a pitcher, the plan seems to have backfired. Read the rest of this entry »
Two of the outfielders I would have been most interested in signing this winter (as high-quality backups) both agreed to deals last week. Normally, that wouldn’t be a big deal; that’s what offseasons are for, after all. But both of them signed roughly two weeks away from Opening Day, and for meaningfully less than I would have predicted. That means that you can’t disconnect their deals from the context in which they were signed. That also means they get wrapped up into one article, so here we go. This will be a three-parter: Michael A. Taylor’s signing with the Pirates, Adam Duvall’s signing with the Braves, and the market forces behind both moves.
Taylor to the Pirates
This one was so obvious in retrospect. The Pirates have a lot of interesting young players, but one thing they didn’t have was a complete outfield. They have Bryan Reynolds and Jack Suwinski, both potential pieces of the future and interesting players right now in their own right. But that’s only two outfielders, and Suwinski is more of an emergency center fielder than an everyday one. The options after that – Edward Olivares, Connor Joe – felt more like platoon pieces than everyday starters.
Taylor, who signed a one-year deal worth $4 million, makes the whole picture look a lot better. He’s an elite center field defender, regardless of which system you’re grading him on. That lets Suwinski and Reynolds handle the corners, more natural positions for both. It also means the Pirates won’t have to make a tough decision against lefty pitching: either to play the lefty-hitting Suwinski — who before the Taylor deal was their best defensive center field, even though isn’t really suited to play that position full time — despite the platoon disadvantage, or sacrifice defense. Now they can mix and match far more easily.
Taylor’s offensive game has always been his weak link, and that absolutely limited his market. He’s a career .239/.294/.389 hitter, good for an 82 wRC+, which spells out his upside pretty clearly. He’s an average overall player, give or take a rounding error, so long as he’s an elite defender. In each of the last three years, that’s been almost exactly what happened; his defense has carried him even when his offense hasn’t. When he smacked a career-high 21 homers last year, his production boomed, and he racked up 1.7 WAR in only 388 plate appearances.
We’re projecting a return to career norms for Taylor’s offense, and it’s not hard to see why. He posted easily the best power production of his career, and in a way that doesn’t feel sticky. Before last year, he’d hit 113 doubles and 74 home runs over his first nine seasons. He had 14 doubles and 21 homers in 2023, a meaningful deviation from his normal output. That all comes down to an impressive barrel rate and more aerial contact than ever, but I think it’s reasonable to project a return to career norms there, and Pittsburgh is a terrible park for righty power, which should push that even a bit lower.
If the Pirates are looking for a repeat of last year’s offense in a full-time role, they’ll likely be disappointed. But they absolutely don’t need that. He brings the floor of their outfield up significantly, to a roughly average unit. We think the Pirates will get nearly as many WAR from their outfielders (6.6) as the Mike Trout-led Angels (7.0) — partly because Angels right fielders are projected for 0.4 WAR, the worst total in the majors — with less injury risk. And all of that for $4 million! I love this signing for a team on the fringes of the playoff race thanks to the paper-soft NL Central.
Duvall to the Braves
Now for a signing that will matter far less in the regular season. The Braves signed Adam Duvall, who last year with the Red Sox put together his best season on a rate basis but dealt with plenty of injuries. He’s making $3 million on a one-year deal.
Duvall is the archetypical boom/bust hitter. He strikes out roughly 30% of the time, even in good years. He doesn’t walk a lot. What he does do is put the ball in the air at an absurd rate, and with authority. His career barrel rate, 11.8%, is in the top 10% of all hitters in the Statcast era. If pitchers hang ’em, he can definitely bang ’em.
I’d say that Duvall’s .284 ISO in 2023 was an unsustainable caricature of his offensive game, but his career mark is an also-outrageous .240. He’s never going to get on base much, but his power is as real as it gets, even as he enters his age-35 season. He truly doesn’t do anything else – his career OBP is below .300, a woeful number for a theoretically offense-first outfielder – but I can’t emphasize enough how real his power is.
The Red Sox put Duvall in center field in 2023, which caused some excitement about his ability to move up the defensive spectrum. I didn’t completely buy it, though, and it seems like teams didn’t either. At best, he’s a backup to the durable Michael Harris II. The real reason Duvall is headed to the Braves is insurance for their high-risk plan in left field. Atlanta moved a lot of pieces around to bring in Jarred Kelenic over the winter. The ceiling is high for the former top prospect, but let’s be realistic: the floor is unfathomably low.
Kelenic has a lot of prospect shine, but he’s a career 85 wRC+ hitter in 1,000 plate appearances of big league playing time. He’s been one of the worst hitters in baseball this spring, for whatever that’s worth. He has huge platoon splits; he’s been unplayably bad against lefties in a limited sample. I think that the Braves will give him a chance to hit against everyone and establish himself as an everyday player, but there’s no guarantee that he will.
Signing Duvall means that there’s an off ramp if things don’t work out with Kelenic. Until they added him, the alternatives were so bad that Kelenic might have retained his job even if he were to play quite poorly. Now, there’s a limit to how bad that position can get, because Duvall feels like a bankable option. He doesn’t have huge platoon splits, though he’ll surely be taking some of Kelenic’s playing time against tough lefties. But he can also just take playing time, period, if Atlanta decides its gamble isn’t paying off.
That’s really smart team-building, as far as I’m concerned. The Kelenic experiment isn’t a high-leverage one for the Braves, who figure to run roughshod over the NL East regardless of what their left fielders do. But when it comes to building a World Series winner, patching potential holes for cheap in March is a lot better than doing so for a premium at the trade deadline.
Why So Little Money?
Both Taylor and Duvall landed in my top 50 free agents list this offseason. The crowd and I both missed pretty badly on our estimates for both. I had Taylor down for one year and $9 million; the crowd called for two years at $7 million per. I did worse with Duvall; I had him pegged at one year and $10 million, while the crowd went for one year and $8 million. Neither player even got half the guarantees we estimated for them.
It’s all part of the same story that’s been going on in free agency for years. The middle class is getting squeezed. Teams prefer to look internally for roughly average options, confident in their ability to develop cheap alternatives who aren’t much worse than those available in free agency. That doesn’t work for stars – it’s a lot easier to find a minor leaguer who’s 90% of Taylor than one who’s 90% of Mookie Betts, obviously – so great players still sign big deals, but solid regulars feel the pinch.
I’ve tried to account for that in my contract projections by changing the scale that I use to convert WAR into salary. I’ve made the first 1.5 wins progressively less valuable over time to reflect the way teams are behaving. For what it’s worth, I think that behavior is completely logical; in a game of limited resources (an assumption completely worth challenging, but outside the scope of this article), pouring your money into chasing stars and then trying to replicate role players is a good strategy.
These two deals squeeze that distribution down even further. It’s hard to imagine Taylor or Duvall finishing less than a win above replacement, even in a part-time role. Fitting a curve to account for these salaries as well as some of the bigger deals signed in free agency would require making the first win almost completely worthless, even lower than I’ve forced it in recent years.
I’m going to handle these contracts in my future free agency prediction endeavors by hedging. I’ll use the data points, of course, but I think it’s reasonable to look at both of these as casualties of circumstances rather than perfect harbingers of the new normal. It’s hard to predict which free agents will get squeezed ex ante; every year, someone ends up sitting on the vine longer than expected because there aren’t quite enough teams looking for veterans.
I’m going to resist taking too broad of a lesson here, though. Taylor and Duvall are both outfielders with only one carrying tool, but players like that signed earlier this winter on more reasonable deals. The middle class is still getting squeezed, without a doubt. I just wouldn’t take these two deals as evidence of an acceleration of the trend. More likely, they’re victims of timing who will be huge bargains for the clubs that signed them.
With the start of the season just two weeks away, it’s time for one of my most beloved/hated/dreaded annual traditions: making my picks for breakouts and busts. For those of you who haven’t read one of these pieces in the past, these are my picks for the players who are the most likely to change the general consensus about them over the course of the 2024 season. And since we’re talking about generally low-probability outcomes — this isn’t a list of players with better or worse projections than last year — there’s no exercise with more potential to make me look super smart… or dumb. For every J.P. Crawford or Steven Kwan triumph, there’s an instance of Andrew Vaughn-induced shame.
As usual, let’s start with a quick table of the triumphs and humiliations of last year’s picks:
It was about an average year. Vaughn and Christian Walker were the biggest misses, and Jordan Walker’s lousy defense kept him from being a win. Now on to this year’s picks.
The Breakouts
Spencer Torkelson, Detroit Tigers Spencer Torkelson’s .233/.313/.446 line certainly didn’t knock any socks off, but he was a (relative) beast over the last two months of the season, hitting .244/.329/.526 with 16 homers. Now, I always warn folks to not read too much into monthly splits because there’s a tendency to think that splits coinciding with a good explanation are enough to overcome the small sample size issues, and because the endpoints are selective. The two-month split, however, isn’t why Torkelson’s here. Rather, there was a lot of evidence to suggest that he was underperforming his peripherals for most of the season up until that point. From the beginning of the season through August 8, Torkelson was the biggest zStats underachiever with significant playing time. Using only Statcast data with no information as to actual results, ZiPS thought that in that span Tork should have been an .868 OPS hitter; his actual OPS was .688. His OPS after that day? .921! Remember, Torkelson was a top-five prospect in baseball entering his rookie season in 2022, so even though his first year was a disaster, he’s not some 31-year-old beer leaguer coming out of nowhere.
Patrick Bailey’s Bat, San Francisco Giants
I can’t really call it a full breakout since Patrick Bailey already had an overall breakout season, thanks to defense that crushed even the loftiest of expectations. What puts him here is that people may be sleeping on his bat. No, I don’t think there’s any chance he starts hitting like Buster Posey, but Bailey’s otherworldly defense and lackluster bat (wRC+ of 78) appears to have pigeonholed him as a typical no-hit, all-glove backstop. I think that would be a mistake. Catchers have really weird developmental curves and I can’t stress enough how difficult it is for a catcher to nearly skip the high minors; he only played 28 games above A-ball before debuting in San Francisco. He hit .251/.351/.424 in the minors – again, not star quality but far from a total zero – and even without full developmental time offensively, he wasn’t completely destroyed by MLB pitching. In fact, he showed surprisingly solid plate discipline and power for a prospect with so little experience with the bat. Both ZiPS and our Depth Charts project Bailey to have an 82 wRC+, but I would not be shocked if he finished the season with a mark between 95 and 100, which, if his defense holds up, would make him an elite catcher overall.
Wyatt Langford, Texas Rangers
I don’t have a formal rule about it, but when ZiPS projects a player with little or no MLB experience to lead in a significant stat, I should take it very seriously since ZiPS doesn’t often go nuts about minor leaguers. The last player I can think of is Luis Arraez, who had a 21% chance of hitting .300 for his rookie season, according to ZiPS, which also projected him to have the highest batting average in baseball by 2020. ZiPS thinks Wyatt Langford is going to lead the majors in doubles and be one of the best offensive rookies in recent years. He was one of the few college hitters that ZiPS saw as nearly ready for the majors in 2023, and it liked him more than similarly advanced hitters Nolan Schanuel and Dylan Crews. Since ZiPS is my sidekick – or maybe it’s the other way around – I gotta have its back!
Anthony Volpe, New York Yankees Anthony Volpe had a solid rookie season, but given his elite prospect status, it was a mild disappointment that he was only league average. Because of this, I think people are now underselling his offensive upside. He hit for a lot of power for a 22-year-old shortstop (21 home runs, .174 ISO). He also stole 24 bases on 29 tries, including successfully swiping each of his first 15 attempts, and was worth 3.5 base running runs. Two of his biggest problems were that he didn’t get on base enough (.283 OBP, 8.7 BB%) and struck out too much (27.8 K%), but these weren’t issues for him in the minors, and some of his fundamentals here are promising — he actually gets off to fewer 0-1 counts than most players with his strikeout rate. All of this suggests that he should figure things out with more major league experience. ZiPS also thinks he should have had a .312 BABIP given his Statcast data, instead of his actual mark of .259, which indicates that some of his woes were likely do to bad luck.
Keibert Ruiz, Washington Nationals
As with Volpe, I think Keibert Ruiz’s low BABIP, especially his .223 BABIP in the first half, made his season look a lot weaker than it was. ZiPS saw a .270 BABIP as a more reasonable number for him as a hitter in the first half, and that number continued to rise in the second half; he had a .285 zBABIP by the end of the season. Giving Ruiz back some of the batting average makes his actual .226/.279/.360 first-half line look a lot less abysmal and his .300/.342/.467 one in the second half look less like a fluke. In fact, except for a bit more power, most of the difference between his first half and second half was BABIP, so the halves weren’t quite as different as they appeared. Overall, his zStats line of .274/.330/.445 reflects a much more advanced hitter than we saw overall in 2023.
As I reminded people with Bailey, catchers tend to have a weird developmental pattern, and Ruiz has been no exception. Ruiz was a top prospect for a long time before hitting the Double-A wall, and his standing fell quite a bit in the eyes of prospect watchers. But he re-established himself as a top prospect to a degree that he was a huge part of Washington’s return when it traded Max Scherzer and Trea Turner to the Dodgers in 2021. I think people forget how young he still is at 25, and being older is not as big of a deal for a catching prospect than for someone at any other position.
Elly De La Cruz, Cincinnati Reds Elly De La Cruz is a common breakout pick for obvious reasons, but I’m including him here specifically because his plate discipline wasn’t as bad as it looks from the raw stats. ZiPS actually thought, from his plate discipline data, that his strikeout rate should have been more like 27% instead of nearly 34%, enough to knock off 27 strikeouts. And given that he should be a high BABIP player, because he was the fastest man in baseball last year, putting more balls in play would benefit him more than it would most players. Overall, his zStats line last year was .273/.323/.449, compared to his actual line of .235/.300/.410, meaning the holes in his game aren’t quite as deep as his reputation would suggest.
And if you don’t buy that, he did show better plate discipline as the season progressed. I’ll again warn of the dangers of storylines that coincide with splits, but things like offensive swing percentage stabilize very quickly, mitigating some of the sample size issues. I don’t think it’s a stretch to look at the graph below and conclude that De La Cruz got caught up in the hype of his initial success and became too aggressive. As a result, he started struggling before coming to realize that he had gotten away from the approach that made him such a dynamic player in the first place.
Dominic Canzone, Seattle Mariners
One should be suspicious of Pacific Coast League stats, but Dominic Canzone’s .354/.431/.634 line last year was good even by PCL standards, enough for a 151 wRC+ in the league. However, that success didn’t follow him to the majors. He probably doesn’t have a lot of upside, but the rate of his improvement over the last couple of years suggests that there’s a chance he could have a nice little Geronimo Berroa-esque run.
Tucupita Marcano, San Diego Padres
This one is kind of a stretch because I don’t see an obvious path for Tucupita Marcano to get much playing time. He hasn’t hit at all in the majors yet, but he’s also had a weird minor league career; he’s still just coming off his age-23 season and has made some progress at translating his minor league plate discipline to the majors. ZiPS isn’t in on him, but Steamer is, and if he can managed his 94 wRC+ Steamer projection, along with a decent glove (though more at second base than short) and his speed, he’ll at least be interesting. Gotta have one out there pick, no?
The Busts
Cody Bellinger, Chicago Cubs
I don’t think Cody Bellinger will fall anywhere near the depths of his brutal 2021 season, but there are reasons to be suspicious of last year’s resurgence. He changed some of his mechanics and altered his approach, especially in two-strike counts, to make more contact, and those adjustments should be sustainable. It’s the power numbers that are a bit preposterous, to the degree I can’t think of any comparable player who managed to maintain this amount of power with mediocre-at-best exit velocity numbers. Statcast’s expected slugging percentage knocks 88 points off his actual one, and the ZiPS version (zSLG) is 20 points meaner than that.
J.T. Realmuto, Philadelphia Phillies
This one hurts, especially for a player ZiPS was so excited about in 2015-2016 before his breakout. But the decline in J.T. Realmuto’s offensive numbers in 2023 is supported by the drop in his peripheral numbers; he was just a bit worse at everything last year. He’s also a catcher entering his mid 30s. This is a gut thing more than a projection thing, but I suspect any kind of a leg injury would be a bigger deal for a surprisingly quick player like Realmuto, whose offensive stats already reflect his speed, than for your typical catcher.
Isaac Paredes, Tampa Bay Rays Isaac Paredes is a good hitter, but is he really a 140 wRC+ guy? In both Statcast and ZiPS, Paredes had an even larger disparity between his actual power numbers and his peripherals than Bellinger. That said, there’s some good news, because unlike Bellinger, Paredes has done this before. There were 20 hitters in 2022 that hit at least five more homers than zHR expected, and 18 of them went on to hit fewer home runs in 2023. Paredes was one of the two who hit more (the other was Pete Alonso). Because Paredes has such a low hard-hit percentage, I’m not completely on board yet.
Lane Thomas, Washington Nationals
One thing about Cinderella stories is that people tend to overrate them after the ball. Most of these stories don’t involve permanent stardom; Joey Meneses and Frank Schwindel are two example of people getting too excited about an older breakout guy. Unlike Schwindel, Lane Thomas is probably still a league-average player, on the level of his 2021 and 2022 seasons, but I’d be shocked to see him hit 30 homers again. He’s probably a stopgap center fielder/fourth outfielder type, and I’m seeing him surprisingly high in some fantasy rankings.
Dominic Fletcher, Chicago White Sox
I was pretty shocked to see the White Sox trade Cristian Mena for Dominic Fletcher, even with the assumption that ZiPS is being too exuberant about Mena in ranking him at the back of the top 50 prospects. If you evaluate him the way our prospect team does, a fourth outfielder for a 45 FV prospect is quite a rich gain. And it’s looking like the Sox will give Fletcher a pretty good chance at getting the majority of the playing time in right field. It’s not as bad as the team’s irrational excitement about Oscar Colás last year, but there’s just not a lot of support for Fletcher’s maintaining his .301/.350/.441 line from his brief stint in the majors. That’s ridiculously higher than his zStats slash line of .249/.290/.376, which works out to a difference of 125 OPS points.
Orion Kerkering enjoyed a meteoric rise to the big leagues last year. The 2022 fifth-round draft pick began the campaign in Low-A Clearwater, and when
October rolled around he was taking the mound for the Philadelphia Phillies in the postseason. His numbers along the way were eye-catching. Pitching out of the bullpen at four minor-league levels, the University of South Florida product logged a 1.51 ERA and a 38.9% strikeout rate over 53-and-two-thirds innings. Called up in late September, he proceeded to fan six batters and allow one run in three appearances comprising the same number of innings.
That Kerkering was then entrusted to take the ball in the playoffs was a testament to his talent — a big part of which is a bat-missing offering even more impressive than his 98.6-mph fastball.
“That’s hard for me to do,” Kerkering replied when asked to describe his signature pitch. “I call it a slider and everyone says it’s one of the best ones out there. To that, I’m kind of, ‘OK, whatever. That’s fine.’ I just trust it as much as I can.”
The 22-year-old right-hander started throwing a slider as a Venice, Florida prep. Velocity-wise, it was 78-81 mph early on, and from there it got “faster and faster” to where it is now a crisp 86-87. The shape is basically the same — “with maybe a little more movement” — as is the grip.
“It’s kind of like how you teach a 12-year-old a curveball,” he said of the grip. “But instead of spinning on top of it, I spin on the 1:20-2:00 o’clock axis. If you think of [Clayton] Kershaw’s curveball, it will spin and then drop. Mine is the same way. It has the gyro spin, then it takes off.” Read the rest of this entry »
How about this: How about you and I forget for a couple minutes that we’re at FanGraphs, deep in the stat-swamped soul of the sabermetrics community? Let’s just pretend you’re reading an article on a website with a name like SuperCoolBaseballStuff.com. This is not the time to get lost in the weeds. Spring is in the air, and we’re rhapsodizing about the smell of the freshly cut grass. The birds have returned, and they’re waking us up at dawn with their incessant noises. Now is the time to be excited about baseball (and annoyed about the birds), and quite simply, nobody does more exciting stuff on a baseball field than Oneil Cruz and Elly De La Cruz. So let’s keep it simple. Let’s talk about all the superlatives that make the pair so exciting as we race toward the 2024 season.
For the first time, both Cruz and De La Cruz will be in the show at the same time. Cruz was called up for good in June 2022, and he finished the season on a high note, running a 133 wRC+ over the final month. He came into 2023 with the stated goal of a 30-30 season, but in just his ninth game, he fractured his left fibula during a collision at the plate. De La Cruz was called up in June 2023 and promptly went supernova. He ran a 179 wRC+ with eight stolen bases and 10 extra-base hits over his first 16 games, but struggled over the last few months. This year, they’ll be the Opening Day shortstops for their respective teams, and Cruz is on record saying that his ankle feels not just 100%, but 200%, which may very well be a record.
Somehow, the two players are extremely similar while also being completely unprecedented. The similarities start with their surnames, and then there’s the fact that they’re both young, ridiculously tall shortstops who hail from the Dominican Republic and play in the NL Central. The height thing is likely a bigger deal than you realize. Cruz is 6’7” and De La Cruz is 6’5”. According to Stathead, that makes them just the seventh and eighth players ever to be 6’5” or taller and play a single inning of shortstop in, ahem, the bigs. They’re the only ones ever to be regular starters at the position; those other six combined for a total of 113 games at short. You’re not going to believe this, but until Cruz dethroned him, the leader was Michael Morse, with 57 games. The 6’5” Morse, who finished his career with -73.2 total defensive runs, totaled 450 innings at short for the Mariners in 2005, racking up -13 DRS and a UZR/150 of -20.9.
Cruz and De La Cruz have both played in exactly 98 big league games, and their skillsets are nearly identical, as well. They’ve both walked 35 times, struck out 33.7% of the time, and posted batting averages and on-base percentages within two points of one another. Here’s what that similarity looks like courtesy of some cherry-picked Baseball Savant sliders:
Not that it matters much, but 2022 Cruz is on the left and 2023 De La Cruz is on the right. There’s so much red and so much blue. These are insanely fun profiles. Cruz and De La Cruz do everything at 100 miles per hour, except for hitting the baseball, which they do at 120. They run like cheetahs who were genetically modified for maximum speed and then shot out of a cannon. They crush baseballs like PETA-members who just found out that the baseballs were responsible for performing the illegal experiments on those cheetahs. They throw the ball over to first as if they heard you get an extra out if you manage to blast it right through the first baseman’s solar plexus. They whiff like they think they can generate enough wind power to solve the climate crisis all by themselves. They’re boom and bust personified. They’re the middle schoolers who figured out that you could game the typing test by absolutely going for broke, because 150 words per minute minus a 50% error rate still leaves you at 75 words per minute. They’re like basketball played on roller skates. It’s poetry when it works, carnage when it doesn’t, and impossible to turn away from.
As for whether the whole package will work, well that’s trickier. Here are the final grades the two players received from our prospect team upon graduation:
Prospect Grades
Tool
Oneil Cruz
Elly De La Cruz
Hit
30 / 40
30 / 40
Game Power
40 / 70
45 / 70
Raw Power
80 / 80
60 / 70
Speed
60 / 45
80 / 70
Field
40 / 45
45 / 55
FV
60
60
Again, the numbers are very similar, but Cruz, all of two inches taller, has a tougher path defensively. He’s always been capable of making a great play, but he’s never looked like a sure thing at short, in terms of either range or hands, and he didn’t look at home in left field when the Pirates tried him out there in the minors. In 2022, he graded out as a hair above average according to DRS, but the other defensive metrics didn’t love him. As he continues to fill out, he’s less likely to maintain his speed and range. On the other hand, he owns a career 106 wRC+. He managed to cut his chase and whiff rates toward the end of 2022. In the short samples of 12 LiDOM games and nine MLB games, he boasted vastly improved walk and strikeout rates in 2023. Those trends have now held through nine spring training games as well, long enough for Cruz to tie for the MLB lead with five homers.
As Robert Orr demonstrated over at Baseball Prospectus, the switch-hitting De La Cruz made his own plate discipline gains during the 2023 season, going from a 38.8% chase rate in July to 25.7% in September and October. In fact, according to Pitcher List, by the end of the season, his swing decisions were well above average.
Although he ended the season on a low note in terms of performance, De La Cruz actually posted a .334 xwOBA in September and October, his best figure of the season by a wide margin. De La Cruz put up a 24.5% HR/FB in 2023, 10th-highest among qualified players, but that masked the fact that his 53.9% groundball rate was the 11th-highest. It’s possible that chasing less soft stuff below the zone will help him to put more balls in the air going forward. Even if that doesn’t happen, it’s possible that he’ll just keep hitting the ball hard enough that he doesn’t need to lift it very often to do damage. Moreover, De La Cruz is better positioned to stick at shortstop. He graded out well according to OAA and UZR, though DRS and DRP were less impressed. Importantly, he’s also just 22, and he has time to improve. Although he put up just an 84 wRC+ last year, his defense and his propensity to take any and every base helped him put up 1.7 WAR in his 98 games.
For both players, the future has some truly massive error bars. They’re just 22 and 25 years old, and they’ve yet to play a full season’s worth of games. With apologies to Michael Morse, there just aren’t many comparable players we can look to for insights on their development. Their tools are so preposterous that their ceiling is somewhere out by the asteroid belt. But their long levers and their unproven eyes could keep them from ever making enough contact to take advantage of all that power. All the same, even if they just manage to stick it out as league-average shortstops, they’ll achieve it by way of some of the most electric, entertaining baseball the world has ever seen. They’ll also be doing it in an era where each 100 mph throw from deep in the hole and each 122 mph rocket off the bat can be tracked and marveled at in all its gaudy splendor. It’s time to get excited.
The Milwaukee Brewers were already coming out of this offseason with more unanswered questions than a contending team would typically like. They’ve lost their top two starting pitchers to trade or injury, they’ve changed managers, and their big offseason free agent signing hasn’t played a meaningful game since the 2022 postseason.
And the questions continue to pile up. Devin Williams, one of the best closers in baseball and arguably Milwaukee’s best player, is going to be out for the next three months. The good news is it’s not an arm or shoulder injury that would lead to long-term problems or a multi-year absence. But it’s a pretty gnarly-sounding injury nonetheless: Not one but two stress fractures in his back.
Williams pitched through back soreness since at least last September — and with two fractures in a vertebra at the bottom of his ribcage, “soreness” is probably an understatement. Williams won’t need surgery, but he’ll be totally shut down for the next six weeks. The long ramp-up to game fitness will take at least another six weeks, which puts the target date for his return sometime in late June. Read the rest of this entry »
I saw Dylan Cease’s start on Monday night and wanted to pass along some notes and video of him following his trade to the Padres. I also wanted to share fresh spring notes on the new White Sox prospects acquired yesterday. Let’s start with Cease. Here is my video from his unbroadcast start:
Almost all professional baseball players played at least one other sport growing up. Moreover, many of them were athletically gifted at a young age and thus excelled against their school-age contemporaries in their formative years, often all the way through high school. Fast forward to today, and many continue to play other sports in a recreational capacity — golf is prominent — especially in the offseason.
Watching other sports is also popular activity for ballplayers. Much as they tuned in to see their favorites on the family TV, they now do so as adults. Like the rest of us, they enjoy sitting on their couches, or hanging out with friends at sports bars, rooting for successful shots, goals, and touchdowns. Temporarily apart from the game they get paid to play, they get to be fans.
With those things in mind, I asked a dozen players about their “other” sport. Besides baseball, what did they most enjoy playing, and what do they now most enjoy watching?
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Dansby Swanson, Chicago Cubs shortstop: “Basketball. I was pretty good. I could really shoot. My basketball game was somewhat similar to my baseball game. I kind of did the right things. I knew what to do. I knew where to go. I averaged around 15 points in high school. It was [a big school]. We had over 2,000 kids. There are a lot of big schools in Georgia.
“I grew up in very much a sports family. I love watching all sports, honestly. I love watching football. I love watching basketball. Obviously, I watch a lot of soccer; I watch my wife [Mallory Swanson, who plays for the Chicago Red Stars and the U.S. Women’s National Team]. Golf is on the TV. An underrated sport to watch is tennis. I have sports on TV all the time.”
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Mike Trout, Los Angeles Angels center fielder: “I played basketball and football throughout high school. I’d probably say that basketball was my best other sport. I was a small forward and an OK player. Read the rest of this entry »
There are so many great defenders in the majors right now. In the infield, there are elite shortstops, like Francisco Lindor and Dansby Swanson. In the outfield, there are the dudes who don’t let anything drop, such as Brenton Doyle and Harrison Bader. But none of these players are projected to lead baseball in Def, according to ZiPS. That title belongs to San Francisco Giants catcher Patrick Bailey.
Last year, Bailey led all players in Def with 26.8 runs. On the Statcast side of things, he was second in Fielding Run Value with +18, behind Doyle. He is unquestionably one of the most valuable defenders in the game, and much of that is due to his elite framing. He accumulated +16 framing runs and recorded a 52.9% strike rate – both the highest marks in baseball.
If you look at the Statcast framing leaderboard, you’ll notice one color for Bailey: red. He is above average in all nine parts of the shadow zone. That is simply unheard of. Typically, for catchers to be elite in one area, they tend to sacrifice another part of the zone. Take Adley Rutschman, for example. He is elite at the top of the zone but slightly below average at the bottom. Sean Murphy has the opposite tendency. He steals at the bottom while losing some at the top. Bailey is a departure from the norm. He can steal strikes in any part of the zone without sacrificing elsewhere.
That’s an impressive skill that made Bailey stand out last season. It’s also the exact kind of statistical quirk that warrants a video deep dive to uncover how he does it. Before jumping in, let’s discuss the two things we’ll be paying attention to here: Bailey’s pre-pitch stances and glove turns. To be this efficient around the strike zone, catchers not only have to have multiple stances, but they also have to know when to use them. By understanding their pitching staff and their movement profiles, they know when to deploy what stance and how to best use their hands.
The following clips will display how Bailey switches up his approach depending on the pitcher and/or location. Let’s start with Logan Webb – the sinkerballer and command artist:
Sinker
Where Bailey sets up behind the plate dictates his stance. He favors his inside knee down most of the time, but there is some variance depending on the pitcher and pitch. More so than when he is catching other pitchers, he has no problem setting up closer to the edges of the plate for Webb.
The key difference between the two sinkers is how he uses his glove turn in preparation for the pitch. On the arm side sinker, he uses more of a straight down quarter turn. Whereas with the glove side sinker, you’ll notice a more deliberate rounded turn. As a catcher, matching the plane of the pitch leads to the smoothest reception. If you don’t alter the rotation of your glove as you catch the ball, it appears as natural as possible to the umpire, resulting in a better chance at a strike call. Bailey has a perfect understanding of this, which can also be seen when he receives sliders:
Slider
On the arm side, it’s pretty standard. The glove side is where the quarter turn sticks out. Pushing a breaking ball back toward the middle of the plate can often look forced. But if a catcher is already tracing that movement before he receives the ball, it appears natural and can lead to stolen strike calls. Additionally, Bailey’s ability to switch which leg is down lets him be as loose as possible with his movements after the pitch is released. This allows him to smoothly shift his positioning to ensure that he catches the pitch closer to the center of his body, which makes it look more like a strike to the umpire.
While the one-knee catching stance has swept through the league, it’s still not common for catchers to switch from knee to knee as often as Bailey does. It puts him in a better position to handle pitches coming in from different angles. When a catcher has his inside knee up, that leg can sometimes make it difficult for him to reach across his body. Since Bailey almost always has his inside knee down for horizontal moving pitches, that’s not a concern. But there are some situations in which Bailey will alter this approach, such as when Webb throws his changeup:
Changeup
He switched from his typical stance, with his outside knee up, when catching the changeup with the lefty-hitting Jonah Heim at the plate. Bailey is most likely more comfortable putting his right knee up when Webb throws his changeup because that pitch doesn’t get much horizontal movement, and his glove turn probably feels more natural when he has space on his glove side. However, he is forced to switch his stance when there is a runner on first and second base is vacant because he can’t make throws with his left knee down. But that isn’t an issue for him, because he is comfortable flipping his stance.
Now, let’s see how Bailey handles Camilo Doval, whose arsenal — 100 mph rising cutters, 98 mph sinkers, 90 mph sliders — is completely different than Webb’s repertoire. Bailey knows that, so he takes a slightly different approach:
There are a few things to note here. First, Bailey gets in a lower stance with the slider coming and a runner on third, which puts him in a better position to block anything in the dirt. His low glove turn also prepares him to either flip his mitt over to get into a blocking stance or quickly shift it for a backhand pick. With high velocity sliders, a pick can often be more effective than a traditional chest block because there isn’t much time for a catcher to drop to his knees and get in front of the pitch. Meanwhile, Bailey hardly moves his glove in preparation for the cutter. Doval probably needs the high target for a visual marker, and an exaggerated glove turn isn’t needed for high pitches anyways.
Watching Bailey handle all types of high pitches is one of his best skills as a framer. No matter if it’s a heater or breaker, he knows when to attack pitches and when to be more patient. Doval’s cutter is one example of that, but the way he receives high sinkers and high sweepers perfectly displays that dichotomy:
Sinkers
Sweepers
Since Bailey sets up on the edges, it’s important his glove gets to the spot where the sinkers are going before they arrive, so long as that location is within the width of his shoulders. Anything outside of his frame will clearly look like a ball to an umpire, and the whole point of framing is to be inconspicuous. So when he’s expecting a backdoor sinker from Taylor Rogers (top left), he receives the pitch in the middle of his body while slightly pointing his shoulders toward the batter, Corbin Carroll. The pitch was out of the zone but appeared right on the edge because of how Bailey presented it. On the pitch from Alex Wood (top right), Bailey knows to keep his posture high and eyes over the squared bunt. That lets him beat the pitch from going too far out of the zone while giving the umpire a clear look at it. It was a great mid-pitch adjustment that led to another strike on a borderline pitch.
His approach to sweepers is much more patient. This is a pitch that will keep moving as long as the catcher lets it. If it starts out of the zone, letting it travel as much as possible gives it a better chance to scratch the edge of the plate. Even if the pitch passes the plate out of the zone – like against Randal Grichuk (bottom left) – the catcher can let it get deep enough so that it still looks like a strike when he catches it behind the plate. This is a good time to refocus on Bailey’s stances. It’s more difficult for a catcher to let these pitches travel with his leg or knee in the way. Keeping the inside knee down lets him adjust his upper body as needed while giving his arm the space it needs to move freely. The more space for smooth movement, the better prepared he is to let the pitch get deeper into the zone.
It’s hard to consistently do what Bailey does when it comes to switching stances. Not all players have the mobility on both sides of their body. On top of that, Bailey demonstrates an advanced understanding of pitch movement and matching planes with glove turns no matter who is one the mound. It’s the full pitch framing package. With a full season of work, I’m excited to see how much defensive value Bailey can bring. We could be in store for one of the best defensive seasons in recent memory.
After a pair of runner-up finishes in 2019 and ’21, Gerrit Cole finally won a Cy Young Award last year, but it doesn’t look like he’ll become the first American League pitcher to repeat since Pedro Martinez in 1999–2000. On Wednesday, the New York Post’s Jon Heyman reported that the 33-year-old righty will miss at least one to two months of the regular season due to an elbow issue, and is heading to Los Angeles for an in-person consultation with Dr. Neal ElAttrache, one of the industry’s top orthopedic surgeons — a move that has fueled speculation his injury could be even worse. At the very least, the loss of Cole exposes the Yankees’ lack of rotation depth and jeopardizes their chances of returning to the playoffs after missing out in 2023.
In one of the most nerve-wracking days in recent Yankees history, the team sent both Cole and Aaron Judge — two players making a combined $76 million in 2024 — for an MRI on Monday. The slugger had been experiencing discomfort in his abdominal area, which he believes stems from work he did over the offseason to correct his mechanics in the wake of his right big toe injury. He got a clean bill of health and expects to return to the lineup this weekend. As for the ace, his difficulties in recovering from his starts sent him to the MRI tube. Said manager Aaron Boone, “He described it as his recovery before getting to his next start has been more akin to what he feels during the season when he’s making 100 pitches… When he’s throwing 45 and 55, he usually doesn’t have the recovery issues he’s having.”
The exact nature of Cole’s diagnosis has yet to be reported, only that he’s experienced inflammation and “a twinge in his elbow.” It’s not uncommon for a team to get input from multiple doctors and have a player undergo additional tests, such as a dye contrast MRI to get a better look before determining a course of action; at the very least, Cole reportedly had x-rays and a CT scan on Tuesday. As this has played out, the high stakes and the Yankees’ opacity in handling the extended absences of Judge, Anthony Rizzo, Carlos Rodón, Luis Severino and other players in recent years has fed into a cottage industry that presumes cover-ups and worst-case scenarios. That Boone and general manager Brian Cashman have sometimes downplayed initial concerns ahead of prolonged outages in such cases has further fanned those flames. Read the rest of this entry »
