Davy Andrews recently wrote about Steven Kwan’s defense, which, as my colleague chronicled, has been demonstrably stellar. Not only has the 28-year-old Cleveland Guardians left fielder been awarded a Gold Glove in each of his four MLB seasons, the metrics back up the accolades. There hasn’t been a better defender at his position, and that goes for the senior circuit as well as the American League.
And then there is Kwan’s bat. The 2018 fifth-round pick out of Oregon State University isn’t a basher, but he is a solid contributor to the Guardians offense. Since debuting in 2022, the erstwhile Beaver has slashed .281/.351/.390 with a 112 wRC+. Moreover — this is no secret for most FanGraphs readers — he seldom goes down by way of the K. Kwan’s 9.5% strikeout rate over the past four campaigns is the lowest among qualified hitters not named Luis Arraez.
Grant Fink knows his left-handed stroke as well as anyone. Cleveland’s hitting coach tutored Kwan in the minors before moving into his current role, and they work together in the offseason. I asked Fink about two-time All-Star when the Guardians visited Fenway Park last September.
“If you look at his profile as a hitter in the major leagues, it is based on accuracy and ball flight,” Fink told me. “His key is making sure that his body is moving in a way where he can get his barrel to the ball in multiple places in the zone, and that he is making contact in the right windows to produce that consistent ball flight. Read the rest of this entry »
Department: Baseball Systems Reports To: Director, Baseball Systems Job Status: Full-Time, Non-Exempt
Overview:
Building upon our storied legacy, the New York Yankees look to attract the best possible talent not just on the field, but in the front office as well. It is our shared responsibility to maintain the first-class reputation associated with the franchise in all aspects of our business.
The New York Yankees organization is accepting applications for an experienced Full-Stack Software Engineer in their Baseball Operations department. Candidate should have 5+ years of full-stack development experience building front-end data-driven web applications using REST services and JavaScript MV frameworks like React, Angular, or Vue.js. Candidates should possess not only the technical skill, but the design sensibilities needed to create a compelling and efficient user experience.
Primary Responsibilities:
Assist in the design and implementation of web-based tools and applications utilizing data, video, and visualizations for baseball operational personnel, including front office staff, scouts, coaches and ultimately players.
Write clean, concise, testable code in a variety of languages (primarily JavaScript/TypeScript, HTML, C#, SQL) utilizing best practices in software engineering.
Perform code reviews and collaborate with other developers (both junior and senior) as well as Data Engineers to deliver best-in-class software solutions.
Utilize AI and code-assistance tooling where advantageous but recognize where these tools are detrimental and that all code submitted is your work product.
Interface with all departments within Baseball Operations (scouting, player development, coaching, analytics) to build tools and reporting capabilities to meet their needs.
Work with major and minor league pitching, hitting and player tracking datasets, college and other amateur data, international baseball data, and many other baseball data sources.
Qualifications and Experience:
Bachelor’s degree (B.S.) in Computer Science or related field.
MUST have 5+ years of experience with data-driven web application development using all the following:
JavaScript MV frameworks (React/Angular/Vue.js/etc.), with React preferred.
Consuming and writing REST API services in platforms like Node.JS, .NET, Flask, etc.
ORM data access frameworks, like Hibernate, Entity Framework, SQLAlchemy, etc.
Relational databases, particularly Microsoft SQL Server
Demonstrated ability to develop clean and concise UI/UX web applications with attention to detail and a compelling data visualization experience.
Proficient in SQL data structures, query writing, CRUD operations, and various database design principles.
Familiarity with various IDEs (Visual Studio, VS Code, Cursor, etc) and how to leverage them to develop code efficiently.
Thorough understanding of Git operations, as well as general CI/CD best practices and DevOps tooling.
Knowledge of Cloud Platform services (in particular AWS and Azure), with a general understanding of how to leverage these services.
Knowledge of the software development lifecycle (requirements definition, design, development, testing, implementation, verification), Agile, and industry best practices.
Excellent communication and problem-solving skills – must be able to break down a complex task and put together an execution strategy with minimal guidance.
Familiarity with typical baseball data, basic and advanced metrics, tracking system (Trackman, Hawkeye, Statcast, etc.) data structures a plus.
The salary range for the position is $125,000-$145,000. This includes a comprehensive benefits package.
This description is intended to describe the type of work being performed by a person assigned to this position. It is not an exhaustive list of all duties and responsibilities required of the employee. The New York Yankees are an Equal Opportunity Employer. The Company is committed to the principles of equal employment opportunity for all employees and applicants for employment.
Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Los Angeles Angels. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the sixth 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 Eric Longenhagen put together our 2018 Philadelphia Phillies top prospects list, he described southpaw Ranger Suárez as “small but athletic and mechanically efficient, unfurling a sinker/slider combination that has a chance to play at the back of a rotation.” Having yet to pitch above High-A, the 22-year-old Suárez was assigned a 40 FV and a 2020 ETA.
He has gone on to exceed expectations. Not only did Suárez reach the majors earlier than anticipated — July of that same season — he has evolved into a frontline starter. After first establishing himself as a reliever, the Pie de Cuesta, Venezuela native moved into the Phillies rotation in August 2021, and since then, he boasts a 3.39 ERA and a 3.45 FIP over 654 frames. Moreover, he has gone 4-1 with a 1.48 ERA in the postseason, a contributing factor to his desirability in the free agent market. As chronicled by my colleague Davy Andrews, the Red Sox inked Suárez to a five-year, $130-million deal earlier this month.
When Sonny Gray met with the Boston media after being acquired via trade from the St. Louis Cardinals in late November, I asked the veteran right-hander if he feels settled in to who he’ll be going forward, or if he foresees making any changes to his repertoire or pitch usage. I haven’t had an opportunity to ask that question to Suárez, but I did present a version of it to Red Sox chief baseball officer Craig Breslow. Does the organization’s pitching brain trust anticipate suggesting any tweaks, or do they view the 30-year-old lefty as someone who already optimizes his talents? Read the rest of this entry »
Let’s start with a thought experiment, then we’ll get to the guy in the picture up there. Say you’ve got an unhittable fastball. Every time an opposing batter swings at it, they miss. With such a pitch, you’d want to hit the strike zone every time. Only good things can happen in the strike zone. Either the batter takes and you earn a called strike, or they swing and you earn a swinging strike. Outside the zone, you’d run the risk of throwing a ball because the batter lays off it.
Now, say you’ve got an extremely hittable fastball. Not only does it never generate a whiff, but every time the batter swings at it, they also hit a home run. You’d never want to throw that pitch in the zone. You wouldn’t want to throw it much at all. Maybe you’d use it as a waste pitch to change the batter’s eye level, just every once in a while, and so far outside the zone that they wouldn’t even think about swinging at it. But that’s it.
Those are extreme examples, but my point is to introduce the concept of an ideal zone rate. Every pitcher (and every pitch) in baseball lives somewhere between those two extremes. Some pitchers should live in the zone and some should avoid it. All sorts of factors inform that ideal zone rate: how likely the pitch is to earn a whiff, how likely it is to earn a chase, how hard it tends to gets hit, whether it tends to gets hit in the air or on the ground, how it interacts with the rest of your repertoire, how it performs in different locations, how well you’re able to locate it, how confident you feel in it, the count, batter, situation, and so on, and so on.
Lately, the calculus has shifted somewhat. The zone rate has been rising because pitchers have been instructed to aim down the middle and trust in their stuff. In 2024, 49.6% of all pitches were in the strike zone and 26.5% were specifically in the heart zone (the area at least one baseball’s width from the edge of the zone). Both of those numbers were the highest rates we’d seen since the start of the pitch tracking era in 2008, and both of those numbers were surpassed in 2025, when for the first time ever, more pitches hit the strike zone than missed it. Across baseball, the ideal zone rate has increased.
Aidan Miller Photo: Kim Klement Neitzel-Imagn Images
Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Philadelphia Phillies. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the sixth 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 »
The San Francisco Giants, with their unique front office leadership and unconventional manager, have gone the traditional route. “Acquire Harrison Bader” is a tried-and-true team-building strategy for a would-be contender; the former Florida Gator is on his way to his seventh organization in the past four-and-a-half years.
The Giants, unlike Bader’s previous employers, seem interested in keeping him around long enough to unpack all his furniture: Bader’s new contract is for two years and $20.5 million.
Regardless of any analysis to follow, this move makes the Giants stronger in 2026. Bader is a legitimate center fielder who’ll relieve the defensive pressure on the freshly emancipatedJung Hoo Lee (who’s stretched in center) and Heliot Ramos (who’s stretched at any position that requires him to wield a glove). Guys who can play center field comfortably and have a clue at the plate are harder to find than you’d think — especially in free agency — and the Giants got one. Read the rest of this entry »
One day, José Ramírez will get old. One day, he’ll dodder out to the grass in front of the pitcher’s mound on the arm of an adorable grandchild and lollipop the ball into the dirt in front of home plate to the warm cheers of the Cleveland faithful. That’s sure to happen at some indeterminate point in the future. This weekend, however, the Guardians expressed their belief that Ramírez’s inevitable decline is a long way off, inking the 33-year-old future Hall of Famer to a seven-year contract extension that will keep him in the fold through the 2032 season. When the extension expires, Ramírez will be 40.
We’ll break down all the numbers and the dollars, but the biggest story here is the most obvious one. This is great news for anybody who loves Ramírez, the Guardians, or baseball. Ramírez has full no-trade rights, and there’s every reason to expect him to stay for the rest of his career. It’s time to talk about statues and plaques and how nice it is that we’ll never have to know just how wrong it would feel to see him in a jersey that doesn’t say Cleveland on it. This is the third extension Ramírez has signed. The first came in 2016, and it bought out his arbitration years plus two option years. The second came in 2022, and, like this one, it bought out the final three years of the previous extension. Ramírez wanted to stay in Cleveland, and with those first two extensions, he forfeited tens of millions of dollars on the open market to do so.
This extension is slightly more complicated, and the details matter quite a bit. Ramírez was already signed though the 2028 season as part of the previous seven-year extension, so it’s not as if there was a pressing need to get this done. He was owed $69 million over the next three years. This deal reworks his compensation over that period and adds four more years. Over the next seven seasons, Ramírez will earn $25 million per year, with $10 million per year deferred. (Each of those deferrals lasts 10 years, and then pays out $1 million per year for 10 years. So he’ll get $1 million in 2036, $2 million in 2037, and so on until he gets his final $1 million payment in 2051.) The deal also came with perks like increased bonuses for awards and high finishes in the MVP voting, an extra hotel room on road trips, and use of a private jet to and from the All-Star Game plus one extra time per year. Read the rest of this entry »
Joe Boyle is emerging as a late-bloomer success story. Now 26 years old, the Tampa Bay Rays right-hander is coming off a campaign during which he not only continued to display a power arsenal, but began to rein in his command as well. Over 86 innings with Triple-A Durham, Boyle paired a 32.9% strikeout rate with an 11.8% walk rate; across 52 innings with the big league club, those numbers were 25.7% and 12.4%. While admittedly far from George Kirby-esque, those free-pass percentages were nonetheless a meaningful step in the right direction.
Boyle’s relationship with the strike zone has long been tenuous. In May 2024, Eric Longenhagen wrote that while “Boyle has had huge stuff for his entire life as a prospect, [he has] also been very wild.” Fast forward to December of that same year, and our lead prospect analyst again cited the nastiness of the 6-foot-8, 250-pound hurler’s offerings, adding a caveat that he has “zero feel for location.”
Something else that Longenhagen wrote 13 months ago bears noting:
“It’s possible that the Rays will attempt to do with Boyle what they successfully accomplished with Tyler Glasnow: Simplify his delivery to make it more consistent and hope it’s enough for him to be a five-inning starter.”
Currently projected as the Rays’ fifth starter by RosterResource, Boyle is now with his third organization. Selected in the fifth round of the 2020 draft by the Cincinnati Reds out of the University of Notre Dame, he was subsequently swapped to the Oakland Athletics in 2023, and then to Tampa Bay the following winter. It is understandable that the pitching-savvy Rays were, and remain, enamored with his potential. While Boyle’s success at the major league level has been spotty — his ERA last season was 4.67 — his comps stick out like a sore thumb. Baseball Savant’s list of the pitchers most similar to Boyle based on velocity and movement comprises Chase Burns, Jacob deGrom, Dylan Cease, Hunter Greene, and Bubba Chandler. Read the rest of this entry »
John E. Sokolowski, Nick Turchiaro, Wendell Cruz-Imagn Images
You already know how it works: January is for signings, trades, and articles that grade those signings and trades. Everything gets a letter, every transaction has a winner and loser, and positive thinkers like me hand out thumbs up left and right. I’ve rarely seen a signing I didn’t like. I think that most trades help out both sides. What about the aggregate effect of all the signings and trades, though? Which teams play the offseason game the best or the worst? Looking at the Mets this winter got me thinking.
How should we evaluate a front office, particularly in the offseason when we don’t have games to look at? I’ve never been able to arrive at a single framework. That’s only logical. If there were one simple tool we could use to evaluate the sport, baseball wouldn’t be as interesting to us as it is. The metrics we use to evaluate teams, and even players, are mere abstractions. The goal of baseball – winning games, or winning the World Series in a broad sense – can be achieved in a ton of different ways. We measure a select few of those in most of our attempts at estimating value, or at figuring out who “won” or “lost” a given transaction. So today, I thought I’d try something a little bit different.
Instead of a single number, I’m going to evaluate the decisions that David Stearns and the Mets made this winter on three axes. The first is what I’m calling Coherence of Strategy. If you make a win-now trade but then head into the season with a gaping hole in your roster, that’s not coherent. If you trade a star for teenage prospects and then extend a 33-year-old, that’s not coherent. Real-world examples are never that simple, but you get the idea. Some spread in decisions is inevitable, but good teams don’t work against themselves more than they have to.
Next, Liquidity and Optionality. One thing we know for sure about baseball is that the future rarely looks the way we expect it to in the present. Preserving an ability to change directions based on new information is important. Why do teams treat players with no options remaining so callously? It’s because that lack of optionality really stings. Why do teams prefer high-dollar, short-term contracts over lengthy pacts in general? It’s because you don’t know how good that guy is going to be in year six, and you certainly don’t know how good your team will be or whether you’ll have another player for the same position. All else equal, decisions that reduce future optionality are bad because they limit a team’s ability to make the right move in the future.
Finally, maximizing the Championship Probability Distribution. We like to talk about teams as chasing wins, but that’s not exactly what’s going on. Teams are chasing the likelihood of winning a World Series, or some close proxy of that. That’s often correlated to wins, but it’s not exactly the same. Building a team that outperforms opponents on the strength of its 15th-26th best players being far superior to their counterparts might help in the dog days of August, when everyone’s playing their depth pieces and cobbling together a rotation, but that won’t fly in October. Likewise, high-variance players with decent backup options don’t show up as overly valuable in a point estimate of WAR, but they absolutely matter. Teams are both trying to get to the playoffs as often as possible and perform as well as they can after arriving there. That’s not an easy thing to quantify, but we can at least give it a shot.
Let’s begin with a look at the transactions that reshaped the lineup. The biggest of these has to be the infield turnover, with Pete Alonso out and Bo Bichette, Jorge Polanco, and Marcus Semien in. Since we’re including Semien, we’ll have to include the departure of outfielder Brandon Nimmo as well. These decisions are clearly coherent; Alonso’s leaving meant space in the infield and an offensive deficit, and the Mets signed multiple free agents to account for that. I’ll analyze the Coherence of Strategy axis at the end of this write-up, but for each individual deal, I’ll focus on the other two axes of analysis. Read the rest of this entry »
