In the second half of the 2023 season, three players shared designated hitting duties for the Arizona Diamondbacks: Lourdes Gurriel Jr., Tommy Pham, and Evan Longoria. Three more started multiple games at DH: Dominic Canzone, Kyle Lewis, and Buddy Kennedy. By mid-November, none of those players remained with the organization. The D-backs quickly replaced Longoria, trading for veteran third baseman Eugenio Suárez in November. A few weeks later, they re-signed Gurriel. However, neither move fully addressed the hole at DH; Suárez will slot in at the hot corner, while Gurriel should start most days in left field. The Diamondbacks still needed a regular designated hitter, and late last week, they finally found their guy in Joc Pederson.

Pederson will earn $9.5 million in 2024, with a $14 million mutual option ($3 million buyout) for 2025. If both sides pick up their end of the option, the deal will max out at $23.5 million over two years, quite similar to our crowdsourced estimate of two years and $24 million. In the more likely scenario where one side or the other declines the option, Pederson will earn $12.5 million for a single year of work, almost perfectly in line with Ben Clemens’ prediction of one year and $12 million. That is to say, nothing about this contract comes as much of a shock. Read the rest of this entry »

Edouard Julien had a remarkable rookie season. Called up for good in late May, he knocked 16 home runs and ran a 136 wRC+ over 109 games, finishing seventh in the AL Rookie of the Year voting. Among second basemen with at least 400 plate appearances, that 136 wRC+ ranked third in baseball, behind Mookie Betts and Jose Altuve and ahead of Luis Arraez. That’s pretty good company. Using the same plate appearances threshold, his 17.2% chase rate was the lowest in baseball, which enabled him to run a 15.7% walk rate, good for fifth highest. John Foley recently wrote an excellent breakdown of Julien’s patience over at Twinkie Town.

There are also plenty of non-baseball reasons to enjoy Julien. He’s the bearer of the fanciest name in MLB, and so far as I can tell he’s just the second player in big-league history whose name includes the vowels O, U, and A all in a row. The first was also an Edouard: Joseph Albert Rolland Édouard, better known as Roland Gladu. A French-Canadian like Julien, Gladu played all over the world, homering in the professional leagues of five different countries: Canada, the United States, Mexico, Cuba, and Great Britain. Julien’s name also flows off the tongue in a pleasing way. Because of the scansion of Edouard Julien, whenever I think about him for an extended period of time, this song gets stuck in my head:

I even wrote a Julien-inspired version of the song — mostly because I couldn’t not write one — which you can listen to at the bottom of this piece.

Back to baseball, there was a bit of helium in Julien’s 2023 numbers. His wOBA outpaced his xwOBA by 18 points, and his .371 BABIP ranked fifth in all of baseball. Understandably, the projection systems see him stepping back to a wRC+ around 115 next year. There are still some holes in Julien’s game. He doesn’t make enough contact, especially on pitches in the zone. Combined with his preternatural patience, that leads to a big, scary strikeout rate of 31.4%. While that did help him fit in with the rest of Minnesota’s roster, it’s not exactly ideal.

Today we’re going to worry about a different part of Julien’s profile: hitting left-handed pitching. To say that it wasn’t a highlight of his rookie campaign would be an understatement. Julien’s splits against righties and lefties were downright historic. In fact, he took home the first annual Scooter Gennett Award for Offensive Asymmetry, which goes to the player with the largest difference between their wRC+ against righties and lefties (minimum 400 PAs). Since 2002, which is as far back as our main leaderboard tracks handedness splits, 4,418 player seasons have met that PA minimum. Gennett became the face of the award thanks to a 2014 season when he put up an excellent 118 wRC+ against righties and a downright depressing -40 against lefties. In 2023, Julien put up a wRC+ of 151 against righties and 22 against lefties, for a difference of 129. Since 2002, only 10 players have had a wider range.

Keep in mind, a lot of this is small sample size theater. There aren’t that many left-handed pitchers, and if your team doesn’t trust you to hit against them, you’re not going to get what few chances are available. This can also create a chicken-and-the-egg situation. You can get fewer PAs against lefties because you can’t hit them, or you can fail to hit lefties because you don’t see them often enough to get comfortable. Julien had just 48 PAs against lefties in 2023. Of the 4,418 seasons in our sample, only 42 of those players faced lefties less often than Julien’s 11.8%. Julien would probably improve against lefties if he ever got regular plate appearances against them, but even if he doesn’t, it would be foolish to assume that a wRC+ of 22 represents his true talent level.

However, this isn’t a new phenomenon. Back in December, Nick Nelson noted Julien’s splits with Double-A Wichita during the 2022 season. Julien slashed .332/.465/.566 against righties and .210/.373/.276 against lefties. If you’re keeping score at home, that works out to OPS splits of 1.031 and 649.

There’s one more important caveat before we dive into the numbers: The splits don’t matter that much. Most pitchers are righties. That means Julien will get to face righties most of the time, and it also means that finding a righty to platoon with him won’t be terribly hard. If his platoon splits were to stay exactly the same, Julien would still be a league-average hitter as long as he didn’t face lefties more than 40% of the time, and that’s not going to happen. Of our 4,418-season sample, only 27 players ever saw lefties that often.

However, none of that made me less curious about what was going on when Julien faced lefties, so I broke down the splits.

His strikeout rate is higher against lefties, but the walk rate is what really jumps out. It’s 13 percentage points higher against righties than against lefties. That’s an enormous difference! All of our small sample size caveats apply, but in terms of walk rate, depending on the handedness of the pitcher, Julien goes from very nearly Juan Soto to literally worse than Javier Báez. Let’s take a look at what’s going on under the hood:

Well that’s simple enough. Julien swings a lot more against lefties, especially outside the zone. He’s still patient by any reasonable standard; a 21.5% chase rate is still in something like the 92nd percentile. However, Julien also whiffs more, and not just outside the zone. His zone contact rate is already the most worrisome part of his profile, and against lefties it’s even worse.

Unfortunately, the problems don’t stop there. When he does put the ball in play against lefties, Julien not only hits the ball a lot softer, but he hits it straight into the ground.

There’s a big difference if you go by Statcast’s hard-hit rate, but take a look at the soft, medium, and hard percentages, which come from Sports Info Solutions. By their reckoning, Julien’s hard-hit rate is more than 30 percentage points lower against lefties. And then there’s the launch angle. Julien hits the ball on the ground more than would be ideal against righties, but against lefties? That’s not a typo; just one of Julien’s 30 batted balls was a fly ball. That’s how you get a 24:1 ratio of groundballs to fly balls. What does that look like in a heat map? It looks like never hitting the ball out of the infield.

This doesn’t seem to be a pitch location issue. When facing Julien, lefties have targeted the bottom of the zone more often than righties have, but only slightly. The same is true of his swing decisions. Julien swung at lower pitches from lefties, but just barely. It doesn’t seem to be a pitch type issue either. Against lefties, 56.7% of his balls in play against came on sinkers, breaking balls, or offspeed pitches, compared to 48.4% against righties. That’s not an insignificant difference, but it’s nowhere near enough to explain an 18.2-degree shift in launch angle. It just seems to be the way he hit the ball against lefties.

This is, I swear, the last time I remind you that everything I’ve just said is based on small samples, but seriously, the samples are very small. I’m hoping that we’ll get some bigger samples in 2024, but so far that doesn’t seem likely. He started just seven of the 38 games the Twins faced a left-handed starter with him on the roster, ceding the keystone to Kyle Farmer and Jorge Polanco. Polanco’s current contract ends after 2024, with a club option for 2025. Even if the trade rumors around Polanco turn out to be true, Farmer and the Twins just agreed on a one-year deal, avoiding arbitration, with a mutual option for 2025. It’s a bit disappointing. I would love to see what Julien could do over a bigger sample. If he does turn out to be passable against lefties, it would be extremely fun to watch and it could propel him to another level. And if it turns out that a 22 wRC+ really does represent his true talent level, that would be pretty interesting, too. More importantly, it would lock up the Scooter Gennett Award for Offensive Asymmetry for years to come.

It’s been a rough week for workers in certain sectors of the American economy, but for veteran right-handed relief pitchers, business is a-boomin’. David Robertson has signed a one-year contract with the Texas Rangers worth $11.5 million, with a mutual option for 2025. Hector Neris has landed with the Cubs on a one-year deal worth $9 million, with a team option for a second year at the same amount. If you pitched in relief for the 2019 Phillies, stay by your phone — a team is going to call any moment. That means you, Adam Morgan! Read the rest of this entry »

Carson Williams is a high-profile prospect in a fertile Tampa Bay Rays farm system. Drafted 28th overall in 2021 out of San Diego’s Torrey Pines High School, the 20-year-old shortstop is No. 20 in MLB Pipeline’s recently-released Top 100, and he will also rank prominently when our own list comes out next month. His 2023 production provided ample evidence of his plus tools. Playing primarily at High-A Bowling Green, and with cups of coffee at the Double-A and Triple-A levels, Williams walloped 23 home runs while putting up a 130 wRC+.

Erik Neander was effusive in his praise when giving a synopsis of the young infielder during November’s GM Meetings.

“Incredible physical potential in all aspects of the game, both sides of the ball,” Tampa Bay’s President of Baseball Operations told me. “And someone who is made to do this, mentally and emotionally. He handles it well. It’s pretty close to a total package in terms of his potential and the ingredients you like to see at such a young age.”

Fittingly, Williams came off as both humble and self-aware when I spoke to him late in the Arizona Fall League season. Asked where he is in his development, he replied that he was “right in the middle of it,” adding that “the minor leagues are a tough road” and he is “going through all of the normal things that a kid out of high school has to.” One of them, as he readily admits, is the challenge of competing against professional pitchers who possess bat-missing repertoires. If a red flag exists within his prospect profile, it would be the 31.4% strikeout rate on last year’s ledger. Read the rest of this entry »

By most any measure, Rockies outfielder Nolan Jones had an excellent rookie season in 2023. He finished fourth in National League Rookie of the Year voting behind unanimous winner Corbin Carroll, Kodai Senga, and James Outman. He posted a .297/.389/.542 batting line in 106 games, becoming the first Rockie rookie to go 20-20 in franchise history. His .395 wOBA ranked 10th among the 212 players with at least 400 plate appearances. He was an above-average fielder, spending most of his time in the outfield corners, with his fairly poor range more than made up for by his elite arm (OAA, DRS, and UZR all agree that he was a plus defender). He led Colorado with 3.0 BsR, and finished as one of 12 players in the majors with as many as 3.0 runs above average in each of batting, base running, and fielding value:

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Matt Chapman is the second-highest-ranked position player left on the free agent market, and few players have a more evocative reputation: Four Gold Gloves in five full major league seasons, plus various newfangled defensive awards like a Platinum Glove and the Wilson Overall Defensive Player of the Year. Chapman is like a movie that won the Oscar and the Palme d’Or, and you look at the DVD cover and see it also won Best Picture at the Inland Empire Film Critics Association Awards. Lots of people think he’s good.

Even if Chapman weren’t a great defender, he’d be a valuable free agent. He’s reliable: Since his first full year in the majors, 2018, he’s never missed more than 23 games in a season. He has a career wRC+ of 118, and he’s averaged 29 home runs per 162 games. Jeimer Candelario, who is seven months younger than Chapman and has had only one season as good as Chapman’s worst full campaign in the majors, just got $45 million over three years. Ben Clemens predicted that Chapman’s free agent contract would be $24 million a year over five years; the median crowdsource estimate was 4 years at $20 million per. I tend to trust Ben’s judgment more than that of the crowd, wise as the crowd may be.

But Chapman is, nevertheless, an interesting case: a high-strikeout hitter who doesn’t put up huge power numbers, and a glove-first player at a bat-first position. That’s a precarious profile when considering a player for a long-term contract into his mid-30s. Read the rest of this entry »

Mike Redmond has been up close and personal with a lot of high-profile players, some of whom arrived on the scene at a young age. As a big league backstop from 1998-2010, Redmond caught the likes of Josh Beckett, Johan Santana, and Dontrelle Willis, and he played alongside Miguel Cabrera. As the manager of the Miami Marlins from 2013-2015, he helped oversee the blossoming careers of José Fernández, Giancarlo Stanton, and Christian Yelich. With the exception of Santana, who was by then a comparative graybeard at age 26, the septet of stalwarts were barely into their 20s when they began playing with, and for, Redmond.

Now the bench coach of the Colorado Rockies, Redmond looked back at his experiences with the aforementioned All-Stars when the Rockies visited Fenway Park last summer.

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David Laurila: Let’s start with José Fernández, who was just 20 years old when he debuted. Just how good was he?

Mike Redmond: “I mean, yeah, he was a phenom. The plan was for him to be in the minor leagues for one more year, but because we were so thin pitching wise we had to bring him to the big leagues. We didn’t have anybody else that year.

“I’d seen José, because I’d managed in the Florida State League when he was there the year before. Christian Yelich and J.T. Realmuto were on that team, as well. I was with Toronto, managing Dunedin, so I got to see all of those guys in the minor leagues. With José, you could just tell. The stuff, the confidence, the mound presence… it was just different. It was different than the other guys in that league, man.

“I got the manager’s job with the Marlins, and I remember being in spring training that first year. [President of Baseball Operations] Larry Beinfest and I were talking about José, and he goes, ‘Hey, don’t get too excited. You’re not going to get him just yet.’ I was like, ‘OK, whatever.’ Sure enough, José ended up breaking camp with us because of injuries. We had him on a pitch count, and he’d always give me a hard time about it, because he wanted to throw more. I would be like, ‘Hey, listen, you have 100 pitches. How you use those 100 pitches is up to you.’ I would say that he used them pretty effectively. He was nasty. Great slider. And again, he was very confident in his abilities. He was a competitor. I mean, he reminded me of some of the great pitchers I’d caught in the big leagues, like Josh Beckett and Johan Santana. Guys who just dominated.” Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Chicago White Sox. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our 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 »

Every free agent left-handed pitcher entering his age-35 season is headed to Southern California. Canadian bird magnet James Paxton has agreed to a one-year deal with the Dodgers, with base compensation of $11 million and another $2 million (half of it fascinatingly attainable) available in bonus. Another top pitching prospect from the 2010s, Matt Moore, is returning to the Angels for $9 million.

These were two of the premier left-handed pitching prospects in baseball in the early 2010s, and their current fates really illustrate how far in the past that was. Nevertheless, Paxton’s ability continues to tempt teams into thinking, “No, this time will be different, he’ll stay healthy, I know it.” Meanwhile, Moore has reinvented himself into one of the best in baseball at a different job than the one he trained for. Read the rest of this entry »

The free agent market is finally starting to move. Rhys Hoskins is headed to Milwaukee, finalizing a two-year, $34 million contract with an opt-out after the first year, per Scoop Czar Jeff Passan. You don’t have to squint to see the fit here. Milwaukee needs hitting, Hoskins needs a place to hit, and it’s always nice to feel wanted. The option effectively makes this a pillow contract for Hoskins, who ruptured his ACL in spring training and missed the entire 2023 season. (This seems like a good place to note that the deal is almost certainly still pending a physical.) If he proves that he can still hit like Rhys Hoskins, he can opt out and go after a bigger deal while he’s still a fresh-faced 31-year-old with the world at his feet, rather than a doddering, unemployable 32-year-old. If he needs another year to knock the rust off, well, I’ve heard great things about Milwaukee.

Hoskins ranked 20th on our Top 50 Free Agents. Ben Clemens estimated that he would receive a three-year contract for a total of $45 million, meaning that Hoskins fell short of the estimate in terms of years, but exceeded it in terms of average annual value. Michael Baumann did a lot of the legwork a couple weeks ago, so I’ll leave it to him to remind you of just how good a hitter Hoskins is:

The value that Hoskins brings is obvious. His power can be streaky on a game-to-game basis — a danger of being a three true outcome-heavy hitter — but in the aggregate, he’s one of the most consistent players in baseball. Hoskins is a career .242/.353/492 hitter, with a 13.5% walk rate and a 23.9% strikeout rate. That’s a career wRC+ of 126.

In four full seasons in the majors (discounting Hoskins’ 50-game rookie season and the 41 games he played in 2020), he’s never been worth more than 2.4 WAR, nor less than 2.0. His full-season career low in wRC+ is 112, while his full-season career high is 128. You can like or dislike the total package, but you know what you’re going to get.

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