Back in the days before Junior Caminero — even in the days before Wander Franco — there was Brandon Lowe, a 5-foot-10 second baseman who anchored the Tampa Bay Rays’ lineup during its most fecund period. As the Rays made the playoffs five years in a row from 2019 to 2023, and won the pennant in 2020, Lowe was at the center of it. He posted a 151 wRC+ in 2020, and a year later he hit 39 home runs.
That’s tied for the second-most homers in a season in Rays history, up among a bunch of guys (Carlos Pena, Logan Morrison, Jose Canseco) who are so big they could fit Lowe in their jacket pocket.
Now, as Caminero is bashing his way into the everyday lineup, Lowe is at an inflection point in his career. He’s struggled to stay healthy the past three years, and he turns 31 in July. And because everything the Rays touch has to be viewed through this lens: Lowe is in the final guaranteed season of his seven-year contract. His 2026 club option is quite affordable, even for Tampa Bay ($11.5 million), but there’s only one option year. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about whether certain injuries can improve players, old-but-good guys not getting gigs, the offensive disparity between the Grapefruit and Cactus Leagues, and Bryce Harper’s Phanatic tattoo. Then they preview the 2025 Boston Red Sox (31:16) with The Boston Globe’s Alex Speier, and the 2025 Sacramento Athletics (1:25:13) with Jason Burke of Inside the A’s.
You have to hand it to the Mets. There really does seem to be something ineffable that brings drama to Queens. No, I don’t mean the LOLMets meme, the belief that things will find a way to break every year, because I don’t really think it’s true. The Mets aren’t cursed. But they do have a way of making things interesting. It’s never all smooth sailing, but they’re never completely down and out either. There’s always a little more to explore at Citi Field, and this offseason is no exception. The Mets are on top of the world, because they signed Juan Soto, one of the biggest free agent prizes of all time. And they have their backs to the wall, because two pitchers they signed to assemble a playoff rotation are already injured.
Frankie Montas was the first casualty. He felt discomfort after his very first bullpen session of spring training, and a lat sprain means that he won’t be able to throw for another 5-7 weeks. Given that the regular season is five weeks away, and that Montas had done essentially no buildup before his injury, we’re talking about multiple months of absence.
The good news is the Mets built their rotation this offseason to withstand injuries. After all, Montas wasn’t the most prominent starting pitcher they signed this winter. Sean Manaea holds that distinction; he was the best pitcher on last year’s team, and though he hit free agency, he signed a three-year deal worth $75 million to come back. That’s not quite ace money in today’s game, which is perfect: Manaea’s not quite an ace, just a solid playoff starter with upside. Except, he’s also hurt now. After feeling some discomfort of his own, an MRI revealed a right oblique strain. Read the rest of this entry »
In a generally bleak 2024 season for the Toronto Blue Jays, one of the few bright spots in that Kafkaesque wasteland was the return of Vladimir Guerrero Jr. as a force to be reckoned with in the lineup. Guerrero followed up his MVP-caliber performance in 2021 with a solid-but-underwhelming 2022 season and a below-average 2023, and there were real questions about his value as a player as he neared his expected free agency after the 2025 campaign. His .323/.396/.544, 165 wRC+, 5.5 WAR line last year was a dramatic demonstration that his 2021 season was a lot more than a stone-cold fluke. Free agency beckons, and the Blue Jays are down to the last year of his services before he reaches the open market. Guerrero set the deadline to work out an extension with Toronto for February 17, and that date has come and gone without an agreement.
The great Irish writer Seamus Heaney often spoke of the good that poetry could do, both for individuals and the world at large. To that point, he once lamented in jest that “poetry can’t be administered like an injection.” Admittedly, I stumbled upon that quotation by accident, deep within an internet rabbit hole I tumbled down while researching the American baseball pitcher Andrew Heaney. (Sometimes I forget to search for more than just a last name.) Nevertheless, I was so taken with Seamus Heaney’s message that I felt inspired to inject his words into my writing and analysis today.
Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests.
I’ll dig with it.
-From “Digging” (1966)
On Thursday, the Pirates and Heaney – Andrew, to be clear – agreed to a one-year, $5.25 million contract for 2025. After two years with the Rangers, the veteran left-hander will slot into Pittsburgh’s rotation for his age-34 season.
A first-round pick by the Marlins in 2012, Heaney spent three seasons in their organization. He climbed to the summit of Miami’s top prospect list in 2013 and made his big league debut the subsequent summer. Following the 2014 season, he was the headlining prospect in a fascinating trade with the Dodgers that brought Dan Haren, Dee Strange-Gordon, and Miguel Rojas to the Marlins in exchange for Heaney, as well as future Dodgers stalwarts Enrique Hernández and Austin Barnes, and catcher-to-pitcher convert Chris Hatcher. Hours later, the Dodgers flipped Heaney to the Angels for Howie Kendrick. At the time, Kendrick was coming off a 4.6-WAR season for the reigning AL West champions, just to offer some sense of how highly the Angels must have valued Heaney. Read the rest of this entry »
Xavier Isaac’s game is built around damage. No. 98 on our recently-released Top 100, the 21-year-old, left-handed-hitting Tampa Bay Rays prospect has, according to our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen, “some of the most exciting power in pro baseball.” Getting to it consistently will be his biggest challenge going forward. As Longenhagen also wrote in his report, “By the end of the season, [Isaac] had a sub-60% contact rate, which is not viable at the big league level… [but] if “he can get back to being a nearly 70% contact hitter, he’s going to be a monster.”
While Isaac’s 143 wRC+ between High-A Bowling Green and Double-A Montgomery was impressive, his 33.3% strikeout rate was another story. The built-to-bash first baseman knows that cutting down on his Ks will go a long way toward his living up to his lofty potential. At the same time, he’s wary of straying too far from his strengths.
“I’ve tuned up my power, and now I need to get my contact up a little bit more,” Isaac told me during the Arizona Fall League season. “It’s like a tradeoff, kind of. I’m going to strike out, but I’m also going to hit the ball a little harder. I have a lot of power, so some of it is about going up there and taking a risk. I obviously don’t want to strike out — I‘m trying to put it in play — but I also don’t want to be making soft contact.”
That’s seldom a problem when he squares up a baseball. Not only does his bat produce high exit velocities, he knows what it feels like to propel a pitch 450-plus feet. He doesn’t shy way from the power-hitter label. Asked if that’s what he is, his response was, “For sure.”
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the end of the Yankees’ beard ban, the potential end of MLB’s business relationship with ESPN, and whether the World Baseball Classic should imitate the NHL’s 4 Nations Face-Off. Then they preview the 2025 Texas Rangers (50:07) with MLB.com’s Kennedi Landry, and the 2025 Pittsburgh Pirates (1:27:23) with Pittsburgh Baseball Now’s John Perrotto, plus a postscript (2:03:57) about Ben’s growing affection for Tigers righty John Brebbia.
The need to define a scope, to create a boundary of coverage, creates a hole in prospect writing. Most public-facing prospect publications, FanGraphs included, analyze and rank players who are still rookie-eligible because, contrary to what you’ve probably learned about my capacity to be long-winded over the years, you just have to stop somewhere. Because of this, every year there are players who fall through the cracks between the boundaries of prospect coverage and big league analysis. These are often players who came up, played enough to exhaust their rookie eligibility, and then got hurt and had a long-term rehab in the minors. Or who graduated and then have been mothballed at Triple-A due to clogged major league rosters ahead of them. The goal of this piece is to highlight some of the players who no longer fit the parameters of my prospect lists and provide an updated long-term scouting prognosis for each of them.
Peraza was evaluated as an average everyday shortstop when he was last a prospect. Backburnered due to the emergence of Anthony Volpe, Peraza is still an above-average shortstop defender despite average arm strength. He’s always had a slight power-over-hit offensive skillset, and that dynamic has continued; Peraza still has above-average bat speed but only had a 71% contact rate in 2024. He dealt with a shoulder strain which kept him out for most of the first two months of the season and might have impacted his hitting ability. If the shoulder injury continues to affect his bat and he ends up with closer to a 30-grade hit tool instead of his projected 45, he would end up as a utility man rather than a regular.
Rodriguez came to Pittsburgh via the three-team Joe Musgrove deal in 2021, and graduated in 2023 as a 55-FV prospect thanks to projected plus contact ability and catching defense. He needed Tommy John surgery after the 2023 season and missed almost all of 2024, except for 10 games in September at Altoona and Indianapolis. Rodriguez looks bigger and stronger now, and the receiving aspect of his catching defense was fine when he returned, though he had only a few opportunities to throw (he popped 1.97, and 1.90 on a throw cut in front of the bag) and wasn’t really forced to block any pitches in the dirt in his few games back there. Offensively, he looked rusty. He wasn’t rotating as well as before the injury, but he still flashed low-ball bat control from both sides of the dish. I’m wondering if the Pirates had conversations about Rodriguez playing winter ball as a way to get him live reps and, if so, why they decided not to send him. He didn’t play enough to have cogent, updated thoughts on anything but his defense, which I thought looked fine.
I started to move off of Luciano prior to the start of the 2023 season, when he fell to the very back of my Top 100, then was completely off it in 2024. Not only had he made zero progress as a shortstop defender but cracks began to show in his offense. Across the last couple of seasons, as opposing pitchers’ fastball velocity climbed while Luciano traversed the minors, his ability to pull fastballs completely evaporated. He can crush a hanging breaking ball, but his bat path is such that he can really only inside-out heaters to right field. Through my own learned experience, this has become a warning sign when it’s true of low-level prospects. If Luciano can’t pull fastballs when they’re 92 mph, what happens when they’re 95? Well, we’re finding out that it means he has a 70% contact rate, and that in effort to be more on time against fastballs he’s lunging at sliders and missing 40% of those. For a player who is only now just starting to learn the outfield, and therefore not really bringing anything polished to the table at the moment, that’s a problem. The late transition on defense was a stubborn misstep, probably by some combination of Luciano and the org. The Giants were perhaps trying to preserve Luciano’s prospect value for as long as possible (which I suppose worked to an extent, just not here at FG) by leaving him at shortstop and hoping nobody would notice he couldn’t actually play there.
The good news is that Luciano still hits the ball really hard, as do the couple of good big league outfielders who power through their sub-70% contact rates, which appears to be what Luciano will have to do. Think of guys like Teoscar Hernández and Brent Rooker, who broke out in their late 20s. Outcomes like that are perhaps an eventuality for Luciano, but the Giants aren’t exactly in a long-term rebuild such that they’ll be happy to wait around for it to happen. Luciano is also entering his final option year, which means if they want to retain him, those growing pains will have to occur under the big league spotlight. His tenure with San Francisco has been painted into a bit of a corner. He’s still a 40+ FV player for me, and I think Luciano will have a meaningful power-hitting peak in his physical prime, but I think that’s more likely to occur in a different uniform.
I’m still keen on Matos who, despite some relevant flaws, is a special contact hitter with unique pull power characteristics. Matos graduated as a 55-FV prospect in 2023, in part because I believed he could play a viable center field (he cannot). He spent most of 2024 at Triple-A and has struggled to find big league footing, slashing a career .235/.288/.344 in 400 total plate appearances across a couple of seasons. Despite a frustrating tendency to chase, Matos has still maintained high-end contact rates (92% in-zone, 85% overall), and he has a special ability to cover high fastballs with power. A body blow to Matos’ fit on a big league roster is that he’s a below-average corner defender. That’s fine for guys like Juan Soto, Yordan Alvarez, Riley Greene, and Anthony Santander, but less so for one-note offensive performers, which is what Matos might be. Matos’ chase, and the way it saps his game power because he’s putting sub-optimal pitches into play, makes it more likely that his FV hovers in that 30-to-40 range when you stack him against the other corner outfielders across the next several seasons.
Walker was sent down to Memphis in April, didn’t come back up until mid-August, and struggled on both sides of the ball upon his return. The Cardinals have a new hitting coach and so this might change, but Walker’s swing (and more specifically his spray despite his style of swinging) is bizarre. He hits with an enormous open stride, bailing way out toward third base, the swing of someone trying like hell to pull the ball. But he still mostly doesn’t, certainly not as much as you’d expect from someone swinging like this. Walker has also never had especially good secondary pitch recognition, and changeups and sliders both performed like plus-plus pitches against him last year. His current swing certainly doesn’t help him cover those outer edge sliders.
On defense, Walker made a full-time transition from third base to the outfield in 2023, but he’s never looked comfortable catching the baseball out there, and that remained true at the end of 2024. Walker is still only 22 years old and has impact tools in his power, speed, and arm strength. His top-end speed for a 6-foot-6, 250-pound guy is amazing, his outfield arm is one of the better ones in baseball, and his bat speed is near elite. Aside from his lack of plate discipline, Walker shares a lot of similarities with Pat Burrell. Burrell was also a heavy-footed outfielder who relied on his arm on defense, and his issues with secondary pitches continued throughout his career, but ultimately his power made him a very productive player for a long time. Walker was in the big leagues before he turned 21, and Burrell didn’t debut until well after his 23rd birthday. I think Walker deserves more runway, and I’m still optimistic that he can be a middle-of-the-order hitter during his window of team control, but there probably has to be a swing change here.
For the last couple of years, Pratto’s strikeout rates have continued to hover around 30%, even in the minors, and while his swing still has superlative lift, his raw power has plateaued and is insufficient for a first baseman striking out this much. He’s out of options and is on the Royals’ roster bubble.
Trammell only played 10 big league games last year. He looks pretty much the same as he did in 2021 when he was struggling to get his footing in Seattle. He still has above-average power and speed, but he’s a 65% contact hitter who hasn’t been able to cover high fastballs. Despite his speed, Trammell is still not an especially skilled defender; he is a clunky fit in center, and his arm makes left field his best spot. He doesn’t make enough contact to be a regular, but he fits great on a roster as the fifth outfielder. He brings big energy and motor to the party, and he can run into the occasional extra-base hit coming off the bench.
Grissom, who was traded straight up for Chris Sale, looked pretty bad in 2024 amid multiple hamstring injuries. He is not a good defensive second baseman (the only position he played last year), and has a 50-hit, 40-power combination on offense. That’s a fringe big leaguer.
Hunter Bigge’s baseball career was in limbo when he graduated from Harvard University in 2021 with a degree in physics. Drafted in the 12th round by the Chicago Cubs two years earlier, the 26-year-old right-hander had scuffled in High-A and was unsure if he should continue to pursue his boyhood dream or move on to a career outside of baseball. Returning to the Ivy League institution to complete his studies following that difficult season gave him options, but he still loved the game.
Fast forward to 2024, and Bigge was thriving in the big leagues.
Bigge debuted with the Cubs on July 9, then a few weeks later was dealt to the Tampa Bay Rays along with Ty Johnson and Christopher Morel in exchange for Isaac Paredes. He excelled in both uniforms. With 15 of his 19 appearances coming after the trade, Bigge worked 17 1/2 total frames, fanning 24 batters while allowing 17 hits and just five free passes. Moreover, he posted a 2.60 ERA, a 2.76 FIP, and a 32.9% strikeout rate. His heater played a huge role in his success. At 97.5 mph, it ranked in the 94th percentile among his contemporaries.
Bigge discussed his path to the big leagues, and his approach on the mound, during the final weekend of the 2024 season.
———
David Laurila: Let’s start with one of my favorite icebeaker questions: Do you approach pitching as more of an art, or as more of a science?
Hunter Bigge: “I approach it more as an art. I’m pretty analytical, but I don’t think the analytical part of my brain is the one that allows me to play the best. I try to come at it with a little more flexibility. I let the science inform the high-level decisions, but when I’m out there, I’m thinking of it more like a dance with the hitter.” Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the start of spring training games, the charms of Tigers reliever John Brebbia, whether MLB’s uniform pants were always semi-transparent, and Shohei Ohtani’s parallel parking skills. Then they preview the 2025 Seattle Mariners (27:37) with Ryan Divish of The Seattle Times, and the 2025 Cincinnati Reds (1:12:53) with The Athletic’s C. Trent Rosecrans.
Sponsor Us on Patreon
EW Subreddit
Effectively Wild Wiki
iTunes Feed
Spotify Feed
Facebook Group
Bluesky Account
Twitter Account
Get Our Merch!
