Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the retirement of Meg favorite Mike Zunino, some teams’ mismatched gray jerseys and pants, whether Blake Snell is still unsigned in part because his pitching isn’t fun to watch (and whether he walks batters by accident or on purpose), and Joey Votto’s minor league deal with the Blue Jays, then preview the 2024 Tampa Bay Rays (36:14) with MLB.com’s Adam Berry, and the 2024 Pittsburgh Pirates (1:09:21) with MLB.com’s Alex Stumpf.

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A funny thing happened in Detroit towards the end of the 2023 season: In September, the Tigers were tied with the Minnesota Twins for the best record in the American League. Tarik Skubal’s breakout and Spencer Torkelson’s second-half rampage helped them finish second in the AL Central, albeit nine games behind Minnesota. You may remember the excitement surrounding the team after their hot finish to the 2021 season and subsequent spending spree in free agency. With that false start in mind, it’s wise not to read too much into the final month of the 2023 season, but it does seem like the organization has actually progressed towards breaking out of their rebuilding phase. Read the rest of this entry »

While it’s a major blow that Lucas Giolito is likely to be out for at least the entire 2024 season due to a double whammy of elbow injuries, the Red Sox are making efforts to stabilize their already-thin rotation for the longer term. On Thursday, righty Brayan Bello agreed to a six-year, $55 million extension with a $21 million club option for his seventh season. In a well-timed touch, the formal announcement of the deal is expected on Saturday before the Red Sox play the first of two exhibition games against the Rays in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, where Bello will be surrounded by family and friends.

The guaranteed portion of Bello’s contract covers the 2024–29 seasons, the last of which would have been his first year of free agent eligibility. The total value of the deal is the second-largest ever for a pre-arbitration pitcher, just surpassing Hunter Greene’s six-year, $53 million extension, which he signed last April with comparable service time and which also includes a club option. Spencer Strider’s similarly structured deal, which came in at $75 million for six years plus a club option, is the record. (Hat tips to ESPN’s McDaniel and the Boston Globe’s Alex Speier for those comps).

The 24-year-old Bello, whom the Red Sox signed out of the Dominican Republic on July 2, 2017 for a bonus of just $28,000, solidified his spot in the majors last year after debuting in mid-2022. Last spring training he was pencilled in as the team’s sixth starter behind Corey Kluber, Nick Pivetta, Chris Sale, James Paxton, and Garrett Whitlock, and he began the season on the injured list recovering from a bout of elbow inflammation. But as injuries and/or ineffectiveness took hold of each member of the planned starting five, he moved up in the pecking order; after making his first start of the year on April 17, he remained in the rotation for the rest of the season, though he was briefly optioned following his second start before an injury to Whitlock brought him back for good. Bello’s 28 starts and 157 innings — the most by a homegrown Red Sox starter since Clay Buchholz in 2014 — both led the staff, while none of the aforementioned five made more than 23 starts or totaled more than 107.2 innings in the rotation.

In terms of run prevention, Bello was unremarkable, with final numbers straddling league average: a 4.24 ERA (93 ERA-) and 4.54 FIP (105 FIP-). However, those numbers are inflated by a pair of bad starts at each end of the season, in which he allowed 20 runs, 10 walks, and six homers across 16.1 innings. Even with his bad season-opening starts against the Angels and Brewers, he was much stronger in the first half than the second, when his home run rate more than doubled and his strikeout and walk rates inched in the wrong directions:

Perhaps not surprisingly given that he set a career high in innings (163, including a rehab start at Triple-A Worcester, up from 154.2 between the majors and minors in 2022), Bello wore down late in the year. Via the Boston Globe’s Julian McWilliams:

Fatigue and heavy legs began to set in. His slider didn’t quite have the sharp break to deter hitters from his two dominant pitches. His four-seam fastball played more as a show-me pitch, but Bello had difficulty locating it above the zone where opponents couldn’t do damage.

While Bello’s sinker/changeup combo turned heads, he’s far from a finished product, as the numbers attest. His sinker, which averaged 95 mph, kept righties at bay (.245 AVG, .381 SLG, 19.3% whiff), but not lefties (.341 AVG, .537 SLG, 8.2% whiff), which helped to account for one of the largest platoon splits for any righty pitcher:

As you can see, this was a particular problem for Red Sox starters, with Houck — who ranked third on the team with 21 starts, helping to fill the void left by so many injuries — having an even larger split than Bello, and Pivetta cracking the top 20, too.

Meanwhile, Bello’s signature changeup befuddled hitters, who managed just a .196 average and .291 slugging percentage against the pitch while whiffing on 38.7% of their swings. Less effective were his slider and four-seamer, with batters posting a .304 AVG and .457 SLG against the former and a .310 AVG and .646 SLG against the latter, which averaged 95.5 mph but just 2,083 rpm, placing him in the fifth percentile for spin rate.

Bello and the Red Sox are quite aware that his arsenal needs refinement, with chief baseball officer Craig Breslow telling reporters on Wednesday, “We still think that his best years are ahead of him. We recognize some opportunities to further optimize the repertoire and we’re super excited about having him.” The pitcher spent the offseason working on elevating his four-seamer above the zone to change the eye level of hitters and get more chases outside the strike zone. He also threw a few sessions under the watchful eye of Hall of Famer and Red Sox special assistant Pedro Martinez, who offered Bello pointers on sharpening his slider with a different grip. To improve his stamina, he worked to strengthen his legs, not that we haven’t heard that one before.

Via Dan Szymborski, here’s a look at Bello’s ZiPS projection percentiles for 2024:

As for the extension, it’s literally pretty much right on the money according to Dan’s model:

The ZiPS contract recommendation for the first six years of that deal is $50 million, so while the Red Sox see him as a potential no. 1 starter, Bello doesn’t have to be much better than average to match that valuation. He could wind up delivering a whole lot more value if he approaches his ceiling, but as a hard-throwing young hurler who’s years away from what he hopes will be his biggest payday, he’s got protection if things go south.

For the Red Sox, this is a positive move following a dreary and disappointing winter. Despite chairman Tom Werner’s assertion that the team would go “full throttle” in its efforts to improve after dismissing chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom, Boston has signed just two free agents to major league deals, Giolito (two years, $38.5 million) and Liam Hendriks (two years, $10 million). The former may be headed for Tommy John surgery, while the latter is expected to miss most or all of the season recovering from his own August 2023 Tommy John procedure. The team did make some trades, most notably dealing away Alex Verdugo, acquiring Tyler O’Neill, and swapping Sale for Vaughn Grissom, but that’s hardly a radical makeover for a team that has missed the playoffs in four of the past five seasons and projects to finish last in the AL East for the third straight year.

What particularly stands out about this Bello move is that the Red Sox have just one other pre-arb or arb-eligible player signed to an extension (Whitlock), which is a rather scathing indictment of their player development pipeline — though they did lock up Rafael Devers last year as he entered his final year of arb eligibility. This is at least a step in the right direction, and hardly an exorbitant amount of money. It won’t hamper them the way that, say, getting 11 starts from Sale from 2020–22 at a cost of about $71 million did. Which isn’t to say that Bello’s going to be as good as Sale, but let’s also remember that the White Sox (and later the Red Sox) got the best years of the wiry lefty’s career under a five-year, $32.5 million extension (2013–17) that had two club options tacked on.

Indeed, the Red Sox’s failure to develop quality homegrown pitching has been a particularly sore spot that has doomed multiple regimes. Again, it had been nine years since a pitcher they produced — as a draft pick or as an international free agent — threw as many innings in a season as Bello did in 2023. If Red Sox are to compete in the AL East while trying to live with midsized payrolls, they need to grow pitchers from within and hope some of them flourish to the point of being worth building around. They believe Bello can be one of them, and well, it’s a start.

The Brewers are in a fascinating situation, not so much treading water as trying to swim in two different directions at the same time. They’ve lost their celebrated manager and traded their Cy Young-winning ace, but they’ve brought in Rhys Hoskins on a lucrative (for them) free agent contract while deciding not to trade their other major free-agent-to-be, Willy Adames.

One of the first posts I wrote for FanGraphs, some 18 months ago, concerned Adames’ future with the Brewers. Or, more likely given his potential to ring the bell for a nine-figure contract in free agency, his future elsewhere. Let’s check in on that potential, and see what we should expect from Adames in 2024 and beyond. Read the rest of this entry »

Most professional baseball players were fans of the sport before it became their job. Much like the rest of us, they grew up following their favorite teams and players, watching them on TV and, to varying degrees, reading about them in print or online. Then things changed. With few exceptions, primarily due to new routines and responsibilities, the way they follow the game is now different — in many cases, drastically so. No longer fans, these players have found themselves consuming baseball in a whole new way.

So how does then compare to now? I put that question to 10 players. Here is what they had to say.

———

Grayson Rodriguez, Baltimore Orioles pitcher: “As a kid growing up, I would just watch my favorite teams. I watched a lot of Astros and Rangers; I wouldn’t really watch a lot of other teams unless it was the playoffs or the World Series. Being in the game now, I try to watch everybody. I try to watch different pitchers. I watch their starts. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the A’s Las Vegas ballpark renderings, Brayan Bello’s extension with the Red Sox, and MLB’s Spring Breakout games, provide an update on EW listeners’ MLB ballpark meetup events, then preview the 2024 Baltimore Orioles (28:59) with The Baltimore Banner’s Danielle Allentuck, and the 2024 San Francisco Giants (1:04:38) with The Athletic’s Grant Brisbee.

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I’m not the first member of the Cole Ragans fan club – that’d be Nick Pollack. I’m not an early member – hi Eno and Esteban. The cat is out of the bag: A scout called Ragans “left-handed deGrom” in a recent Jeff Passan roundup. The Royals’ left-hander looks like an absolute terror on the mound.

So I’m not going to try to convince you that Ragans is good. Those other articles have surely done a good enough job of doing that. I’m also not going to try to convince you that he’s a left-handed version of the best inning-for-inning pitcher of the 21st century. But I do want to take a quick look at how he’s continuing to change his arsenal, and how some of his old skills could help him keep his tremendous run of form going in 2024.

The reason Ragans has drawn such flashy comparisons likely starts with his fastball. As Passan noted, he averaged 99.2 mph in his first start of spring. Statcast didn’t track it, but I was able to capture some of it by watching the broadcast. There was no radar gun, but the announcers frequently mentioned his velocity and never said a number lower than 98. It certainly looked pretty sharp when he blew it past Mike Trout:

Read the rest of this entry »

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

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

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

When free agent Matt Chapman signed with the Giants this past weekend, most of my analysis focused upon the ups and downs of his 2023 season and the nature of his contract, which looks comparatively team friendly. One thing I underplayed in the analysis was the extent to which San Francisco’s winter stands out relative to the competition. Even before the addition of Chapman, the Giants had spent more money on free agents than any other team besides the Dodgers, and likewise project to receive more WAR from those additions than any team besides their longtime rivals.

Based on the data in our Free Agent Tracker, the Giants have now committed $261.25 million in guaranteed salaries: $113 million to center fielder Jung Hoo Lee, $44 million to righty Jordan Hicks, $42 million to DH/outfielder Jorge Soler, and $8.25 million to catcher Tom Murphy; this accounting does not include the major league salaries that shortstop Nick Ahmed or lefty reliever Amir Garrett will get if they make the big league roster; last month, they each signed minor league deals as non-roster invitees. San Francisco’s additions may not be as eye-catching as signing either Carlos Correa or Aaron Judge would have been last offseason, and the team still projects for a middle-of-the-pack 82 wins after going 79-83 last year, but the Giants may not be done spending some of the money that was burning a hole in their pockets. They remain interested in Blake Snell, especially in the wake of injuries within their rotation.

Of course, the Dodgers blow the field away when it comes to spending, even if we stick to the adjusted salaries once deferred money is factored in, with a total of $853.2 million: $437.83 million to Shohei Ohtani (down from a sticker price of $700 million), $325 million to Yoshinobu Yamamoto, $20.434 million to outfielder Teoscar Hernández (down from $25 million), $10 million to Clayton Kershaw (with incentives that can increase the value significantly for both 2024 and ’25), $9 million apiece to Ryan Brasier and Jason Heyward, $8 million to Joe Kelly, $7 million to James Paxton, and $4 million to Enrique Hernández.

Here’s a look at the 30 teams’ free agent spending. Note that, as above, these figures factor in the applicable deferrals but not incentives, escalator clauses, or split-contract salaries from minor league deals:

As you can see, five teams committed less than $10 million each this winter, and of the bottom seven teams, four (the Orioles, Rays, Twins, and Marlins) made the playoffs last year. Free agency isn’t the only route to improve a team, but particularly with regards to the Orioles, one can empathize with fans who are disappointed that last year’s success hasn’t translated into a shopping spree to improve their odds of getting back to the postseason.

The 30 teams have committed a total of $2.74 billion to free agents so far, and even though that figure will increase once Snell and Jordan Montgomery sign, overall spending will still be lower this offseason than in recent ones. Based on the data at RosterResource, teams spent $4 billion last offseason ($2.22 billion on the top 12 free agents alone) and $3.22 billion in the lockout-interrupted offseason of 2021–22. For this winter, spending works out to an average of $91.38 million per team, but that figure is skewed by the top teams to such an extent that the median is just $49.25 million; only nine teams exceeded the mean.

Beyond the dollars, I thought it would be worth revisiting some free agent accounting we’ve done in the past, regarding WAR added and lost in free agency. This isn’t quite as straightforward as it sounds, as we’ll soon see.

This is the most basic accounting, lumping together players signed to major league deals and those who had to settle for minor league ones; the latter inflates the counts of some of these teams well into double digits. It’s worth noting that where players spent time with multiple teams in 2023, I’ve only counted their WAR with their last team on the outgoing side, but their full-season WAR on the incoming side. Consider the case of Jeimer Candelario, who produced 3.1 WAR for the Nationals and then 0.2 WAR for the Cubs. To these eyes, crediting the Reds as adding a 3.3-WAR player properly conveys the impact of a substantial addition. The question is whether to count the Cubs as losing 3.3 WAR (via a player they acquired without intending to retain) or 0.2 WAR (reflecting the transient nature of a late-season addition). I went with the latter option.

The total number of outgoing free agents shown above (277) doesn’t include 11 additional players from the KBO and NPB, eight of whom have signed (all but Trevor Bauer, Adam Plutko, and Yasiel Puig), meaning that from among that total, 73 — about 25% — are unsigned. Most of the unsigned are fairly low impact players, in that just 13 produced at least 1.0 WAR last year, with Montgomery (4.3), Snell (4.1), Brandon Belt (2.3), Mike Clevinger (2.2) and J.D. Martinez (2.2) the only ones above 2.0. Meanwhile, 35 of them produced zero or negative WAR, though to be fair, that was often in limited opportunity.

While the eight foreign players who have signed are counted in the total number of signed free agents above, they didn’t produce any WAR within MLB. Thus, the fact that three teams outrank the Dodgers in terms of net free agent WAR comes with the caveat that the Los Angeles total doesn’t include Yamamoto.

I’ll come back to that issue, but first let’s note the teams at the extremes. Ahead of the Dodgers are three teams who had a bunch of players hit the open market, but who were at best minimally productive in 2023, and who all went out and made at least a few solid moves. Of the dozen Reds to test free agency, including the still-unsigned Joey Votto, only Harrison Bader produced even 1.0 WAR in 2023, and he nonetheless was 0.2 wins below replacement after being acquired from the Yankees. On the other side, in addition to Candelario, the team shored up its pitching by adding starters Nick Martinez and Frankie Montas, relievers Brent Suter and Emilio Pagán, and more — not big moves, but enough to put them at the top. The Cardinals shed five players, most notably Dakota Hudson, and overhauled their rotation by adding Sonny Gray, whose 5.3 WAR as a Twin tied Kevin Gausman for the AL lead, as well as Kyle Gibson and Lance Lynn; they also added Keynan Middleton to the bullpen and staffed their bench with Brandon Crawford and Matt Carpenter. Of the eight Royals who became free agents, only Zack Greinke produced 1.0 WAR, but they beefed up their pitching, with starters Seth Lugo and Michael Wacha; their lineup, with Hunter Renfroe; and their bench, with Adam Frazier and Garrett Hampson to their bench. These moves won’t win them the division, but they’re at least proof of life.

The Dodgers’ figures on both sides of the ledger are inflated by their keeping Brasier, Enrique Hernández, Heyward, Kelly, and Kershaw, but they did shed the still-unsigned J.D. Martinez and Julio Urías, replacing them with the market’s two most expensive players. The Diamondbacks re-signed Lourdes Gurriel Jr. and didn’t lose anybody who produced at least 1.0 WAR for the team, while the only departing Giant to meet that threshold was Sean Manaea.

At the other end of the spectrum, it’s striking that the bottom five teams include three AL postseason participants plus one NL team that barely missed it. Whether they won it all or fell short, their offseasons have resulted in some downsizing of payrolls and perhaps expectations.

In the wake of last year’s $255 million flop, the uncertainty regarding their local broadcast deal, and the death of chairman Peter Seidler, the Padres gutted their pitching staff, with Snell, Lugo, Martinez, Wacha, and closer Josh Hader among those departing, along with catcher Gary Sánchez, whom they plucked off the scrapheap and who had his best season since 2019. Most of the money they’ve spent this offseason was on their bullpen, with Wandy Peralta, Japanese lefty Yuki Matsui and Korean righty Woo-Suk Go joining the fold. The Twins shed Gray, Kenta Maeda, and Tyler Mahle from their rotation, and both Donovan Solano and Michael A. Taylor remain unsigned but unlikely to return; meanwhile their most impactful addition is first baseman Carlos Santana. The Blue Jays let Chapman depart, along with Belt, Hicks and Whit Merrifield; they cobbled together a lower-cost third base solution, which includes the incoming Justin Turner and Isiah Kiner-Falefa, retained center fielderKevin Kiermaier, and took a flier on Cuban righty Yariel Rodriguez, who spent three seasons in NPB. The Rangers may still re-sign Montgomery, but for now he counts only on the outbound side, and they also shed relievers Aroldis Chapman, Chris Stratton, and Will Smith, plus catcher/DH Mitch Garver. Their rotation is full of question marks as they bank on Jacob deGrom, Max Scherzer, and Mahle having strong returns from surgery. Veteran righty David Robertson should bolster the bullpen, and Garver’s departure is mitigated by the eventual arrival of top prospect Wyatt Langford.

Since the impact of the foreign free agents isn’t reflected in the table above, I took one more look at the landscape using projected WAR on the incoming side. Instead of taking it straight from our Free Agent Tracker — that uses Steamer, which is available in time for the opening bell of the offseason, but not ZiPS, which takes longer to prepare — I took the more labor-intensive route by swapping in our Depth Charts projections, which takes an average the two systems:

Despite accounting for Yamamoto, the Dodgers actually fall in the rankings due to known injuries (Ohtani won’t pitch in 2024, while Kershaw could be out until August) and regression (Brasier and Heyward, particularly), while the Giants surpass them with the addition of Lee. Also notable on the upper end are the Mets, mainly due to anticipated rebounds from Manaea, Bader, and Luis Severino. On the other side, the Orioles stand out more than in the previous table, mainly because the only free agent they signed to a major league deal, Craig Kimbrel, is projected to regress. Given that both Kyle Bradish and John Means have been sidelined with elbow injuries to start the season, it seems possible the O’s could add a low-cost starter who might boost their standing here a bit.

Thanks to our tools at FanGraphs, free agency is easy to track, even if I’ve made it more labor-intensive for this exercise. It’s hardly the only route by which teams improve, however. For example, the Orioles traded for Corbin Burnes, who may outproduce any of the starters who were signed. But in the big picture, the patterns I’ve illustrated offer us plenty of hints about what to expect from the upcoming season.

The Miami Marlins made a surprising run to the postseason in 2023, but it’ll be hard to repeat. First of all, the Marlins punched above their weight last year, which is saying something, because an adult marlin can weigh the better part of a ton. Also, they don’t have arms, or hands, or fists, which makes punching anything above anything quite a challenge.

More to the point, Miami went 84-78, which is tied for the fourth-fewest wins ever for a playoff team in a 162-game season. The Marlins also had a Pythagorean record of just 75-87; they finished 20th in the league in wRC+ and 16th in ERA-. Getting back to the playoffs in 2024 is a realistic goal, but in order to achieve it the Marlins will probably have to be better this year than they were last.

Where will that improvement come from? Not external acquisitions, which have amounted mostly to trading for Jonah Bride and Nick Gordon, hoping to extract whatever juice is left in Trey Mancini’s bat, and signing Tim Anderson — a move that looks suspiciously like a repeat of the Jean Segura experiment from a year ago. Read the rest of this entry »