Baseball’s version of Lebron James’ The Decision appears to have come to pass, with all-universe talent Shohei Ohtani announcing on his Instagram that he has found a new home in Los Angeles, this time with the Dodgers. The deal is for 10 years and $700 million.
While the full details of the contract’s “unprecedented” deferrals aren’t yet known, 10 years and $700 million is the mega-contract of all mega-contracts, besting the previous record by hundreds of millions of dollars. And like the Alex Rodriguez signing more than two decades ago, this will likely be the record for a while, including a possible Juan Soto deal next winter. Read the rest of this entry »
Shouldered with the needle-threading task of simultaneously cutting payroll and rebuilding a pitching staff thinned out by the departure of several key free agents, the Padres traded superstar Juan Soto and Gold Glove-caliber center fielder Trent Grisham to the Yankees on Wednesday in exchange for three big league arms — righties Michael King, Randy Vásquez, and Jhony Brito — as well as a fourth who is nearly ready for primetime in prospect Drew Thorpe and backup catcher Kyle Higashioka. Ben Clemens did a full analysis on the impact that the 25-year-old Soto, one of baseball’s best hitters, will have on the Yankees. I’m going to dive deeper into the arms headed to the Gaslamp District and talk about how the Padres might go about finishing their offseason to-do list.
Most readers are probably aware that a mandate to shed payroll was a driving factor for this trade from San Diego’s perspective. The club’s sudden shift in financial direction occurred in the wake of the death of owner Peter Seidler. The trade also addresses a large portion of the Padres on-field baseball needs, though it also creates massive new holes in their lineup and defensive alignment where Soto and Grisham used to be. The Friars will need to fill or upgrade at least two or three spots of their currently-projected lineup if they want to compete with the defending NL champion Diamondbacks and reigning division-winning Dodgers in 2024, and they probably also need another starting pitcher or two to round out their rotation. Shedding Soto’s salary likely created some space to do so, but given the Padres’ financial constraints, perhaps not enough to solve all of these problems via free agency. There may be internal candidates, especially on the position player side, who can contribute at the league minimum salary in 2024; I’ll get to those prospects later.
Let’s start with who came back to San Diego and how they fit into an overhauled pitching staff. Prior to the trade, our Padres rotation projection looked rough. Joe Musgrove and Yu Darvish were fortified by 27-year-old knuckleballer Matt Waldron, and walk-prone MLB virgin Jay Groome. The free-agent departures of Nick Martinez, Seth Lugo, Michael Wacha, and reigning Cy Young winner Blake Snell, who pitched a combined 570 innings in 2023, left the Padres in dire need of impact and depth to have a functional and competitive pitching staff in 2024. Even if one believes (as I do) that prospect Jairo Iriarte is talented enough to make a meaningful near-term impact, the Padres still badly needed to add several pitchers to their big league staff. This trade gets them most of the way there, as all four of the pitchers acquired for Soto could reasonably be expected to pitch in the big leagues next season. Read the rest of this entry »
The internet has democratized so much of our society, but nothing more than hating baseball teams. A generation ago, everyone was sick to death of the Yankees, but now it seems like half the league is one obnoxious fan tweet or one ill-timed bat flip or clueless GM comment from becoming the pariah of the week. It can get a little hard to track sometimes.
So in some respects, this week’sJuan Soto trade is a welcome throwback to old times. A no-doubt top-tier superstar has drifted across the great material continuum and found himself, almost by accident, resplendent in pinstripes and razor burn. A trade to make Yankees fans rejoice, and the vast majority of our great, God-fearing nation go, “Ugh, these freakin’ guys.”
Nevertheless, Soto’s arrival in New York offers an opportunity to witness something unusual. Assuming Aaron Boone figures out that Soto should go in front of Aaron Judge in the batting order, we’re about to see the best on-base guy of his generation batting ahead of the best power hitter of his generation. Read the rest of this entry »
While looking back at the free agent signings I covered last winter, I noticed a bit of a pattern. On the same day Aaron Judge came to terms on a nine-year, $360 million deal with the Yankees, I wrote about Miguel Castro. On the same day Brandon Nimmo agreed to a $162 million deal with the Mets, I wrote about Matt Strahm. On the same day Yu DarvishandBo Bichette signed contract extensions, I wrote about Pierce Johnson and Scott McGough. While the rest of the baseball world was focused on All-Stars and mega-million-dollar contracts, I found myself drawn to mid-tier relievers on small-scale deals.
We’re not farming for clicks here at FanGraphs, and I’m grateful to write for a website where I never have to come up with hot takes or misleading headlines. Thankfully, I’ve never been asked to write about one weird trick for evading the luxury tax or why dermatologists hate Gabe Kapler. Still, it’s nice when others read your work, and as much as I love them, I know middle relievers don’t rack up pageviews like middle-of-the-order bats. While I have a weakness for run-of-the-mill bullpen arms — the more ordinary the better — I know I need to resist the pull.
“Leo,” I said to myself when the offseason began. “You can’t write about so many relievers this winter. You wrote about Joely Rodríguez last year. Maybe this time you cover Eduardo Rodriguez instead?”
In the midst of a Winter Meetings that was fairly quiet as far as free agent signings go, the Arizona Diamondbacks and Eduardo Rodriguez came to an agreement on a four-year contract worth a guaranteed $80 million. Bouncing back from a problem-filled 2022 Detroit debut, Rodriguez was one of the reasons the Tigers maintained a position at the very edge of relevance in 2023. Through the end of May, E-Rod was a top 10 starting pitcher in the American League, posting a 2.13 ERA and 3.14 FIP over 11 starts; his 1.8 WAR ranked eighth in WAR. But his chances of sneaking into the Cy Young conversation were derailed by a finger injury that cost him a month of the season. While he got back into the rotation fairly quickly, he wasn’t quite the same in the second half, issuing more free passes and seeing his strikeout rate drop by about 20%.
The first few days of the Winter Meetings didn’t deliver much action; at breakfast on Wednesday, Erick Fedde versus Wade Miley as the biggest signing of the meetings was a popular debate. But things picked up as the gathering ground to a close. First, the Yankees traded for Juan Soto. Next, Eduardo Rodriguez agreed to terms with Arizona. Finally, Jeimer Candelario capped the meetings off when he signed with the Reds for three years and $45 million and a team option for another year, as MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand first reported.
Part of the allure of free agency, as a fan experience, is that you never know where any given player might land, or who your team might pick up. Sure, we all have opinions on where the top guys will sign, but until they put pen to paper, or at least until Jeff Passan gets a text about their chosen destination, nothing is set in stone. But if you’d asked me to predict signings that wouldn’t happen this winter, I would have made a lazy prediction: the Reds would stay away from hitters in general and infielders in particular.
That doesn’t have anything to do with Candelario, to be clear. I think he’ll be one of the bargain signings of the offseason, a plus bat with playable defense at third base on an affordable contract. A three-year deal nets the back half of his prime without too much messiness at the end of the contract, and he’s played at a 3–4 WAR clip in three out of the past four years. He’s been the 68th-best hitter in baseball by our count over those four years, just ahead of Luis Arraez and Ketel Marte in a similar number of plate appearances, if you’re trying to calibrate that in your head. Read the rest of this entry »
The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2024 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.
It’s no secret that we’re in the midst of a lean period for starting pitchers getting elected to the Hall of Fame via the BBWAA. Since the elections of 300-game winners Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux, and Randy Johnson in 2014 and ’15, just four starters have gained entry via the writers, two of them alongside the Big Unit in the latter year (Pedro Martinez and John Smoltz) and two more in ’19 (Roy Halladay and Mike Mussina). From a demographic standpoint, Halladay is the only starter born after 1971.
It’s quite possible we won’t get another starter born in that shag-carpeted decade unless voters come around on Andy Pettitte (b. 1972) or Mark Buehrle (b. 1979), a pair of southpaws who cleared the 200-win mark during their exceptional careers, producing some big moments and playing significant roles on championship-winning teams. Yet neither of them ever won Cy Young awards, created much black ink, or dominated in the ways that we expect Hall-caliber hurlers to do. Neither makes much of a dent when it comes to JAWS, where they respectively rank 92nd and 90th via the traditional version, about 14 points below the standard, or tied for 80th and 78th in the workload-adjusted version (S-JAWS). Neither has gotten far in their time on the ballot; Pettitte maxed out at 17% last year, his fifth, and Buerhle returned to double digits with 10.8% in his third year of eligibility — still a couple eyelashes short of his debut share.
After updating both pitchers’ profiles last year, I’ll stick to excerpting them this time before getting back to my latest thinking on the subject. Read the rest of this entry »
The Pirates have had a rough go of it. After notching three straight Wild Card berths from 2013 to ’15, they saw their production tail off and haven’t made the postseason since. In that time, they also had the second-best pitching staff by ERA and the fourth-best by FIP thanks to a league-leading 51.3% groundball rate. Their rate of burning worms was 2.8 points higher than the second-place Dodgers, the same distance between Los Angeles and the 10th-place Mets.
The Pirates accomplished this by throwing sinkers at a 23.2% clip, separating them from the second-ranked Guardians by 5.5 points, about the same distance between Cleveland and the 10th-place Angels. Coupled with pitch-framing improvements and a move toward more strategic infield positioning, the Pirates experienced a pitching leap that theScore.com’s Travis Sawchik chronicled in Big Data Baseball. This did wonders for a number of hurlers, namely Francisco Liriano, A.J. Burnett, and Edinson Volquez. But others, such as Charlie Morton and Gerrit Cole, only blossomed upon leaving the Steel City.
Pittsburgh’s pitching apparatus isn’t viewed as revolutionary any longer, but they’ve had a solid record with crafty lefties in recent years — think Rich Hill, Tyler Anderson, and Jose Quintana. Marco Gonzales, acquired from the Mariners (via the Braves) along with cash in exchange for a player to be named later, will hope to join that group. Perhaps the soft-tossing southpaw — who, like the Pirates of the 2010s, relies primarily on inducing weak contact — will be the one to reignite something in the Steel City forges. Read the rest of this entry »
The appetizers have been cleared. The waiters have brought out new plates and utensils. There was a long wait between courses, something in the kitchen perhaps; Tom Colichio wouldn’t be pleased. But it’s time for the entree: the Yankees have acquiredJuan Soto from the Padres in exchange for Michael King, Drew Thorpe, Jhony Brito, Randy Vásquez, and Kyle Higashioka. New York is also getting Trent Grisham in the deal. Soto and the Bombers have been linked all offseason, but it seemed like San Diego might hold off on a move until Shohei Ohtani signed with an eye toward marketing Soto to the teams who missed out. Instead, the Yankees jumped the queue and acquired perhaps the best hitter who was available this winter, whether by trade or free agency.
You already know the deal with Soto. He’s a modern-day avatar of plate discipline who won the Home Run Derby a few years ago. He’s walked more frequently than he’s struck out in each of the last four seasons while launching 104 homers. His 159 wRC+ is the fourth-best in the majors since the start of the 2020 season, behind new teammate Aaron Judge, Yordan Alvarez, and Mike Trout. His .431 on-base percentage laps the field; Freddie Freeman is second at .410. He’s durable, to boot: he started 160 games this year and pinch-hit in the other two. Read the rest of this entry »
Yesterday evening, ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported that the Chicago White Sox are signing KBO kickback starting pitcher Erick Fedde to a two-year, $15 million contract. Fedde had an incredible 2023 season for the NC Dinos, posting a 2.00 ERA in 180.1 IP while striking out 209 and walking just 35. He was named the KBO’s MVP and won their equivalent to the Cy Young. Read the rest of this entry »
