Good swing decisions are vital to a hitter’s success. Having a finely tuned stroke is important — swing mechanics are diligently honed for a reason — but the ability to consistently attack the right pitches is every bit as valuable. Avoiding chasing while keying in on offerings you can drive greatly enhances your chances of squaring up a baseball.

Dillon Lawson, the new assistant hitting coach of the Boston Red Sox, is a huge proponent of a disciplined approach. The Louisville, Kentucky native views the optimization of swing decisions as an integral part of his job — one that now includes working alongside co-assistant hitting coach Ben Rosenthal and lead hitting coach Peter Fatse.

Prior to joining the Red Sox organization last year as its minor league hitting coordinator, the 39-year-old Lawson spent parts of five seasons with the New York Yankees, first as their minor league hitting coordinator from 2019-2021 and then as their major league hitting coach from 2022 until July 2023. He also tutored minor leaguer hitters for two seasons in the Houston Astros organization, in 2016 and 2018.

Lawson sat down to talk hitting at Fenway Park last weekend.

———

David Laurila: There are swing coaches and there are more traditional hitting coaches. Where do you fit into that dynamic?

Dillon Lawson: “Whether it’s what I feel is right, or it’s just a sense of pride, I think we’re all trying to be the best hitting coaches we could possibly be. That means you’re able to help players in whatever way they need to be helped. Sometimes that’s with an approach. Sometimes it’s with confidence. Sometimes it’s a swing change, whether that’s with the load or the path. Some people need more power. Other people need more contact.

“In the minor leagues, with the whole department… let’s say you’ve got 10 hitting coaches all pushing the same direction, trying to help a large group of hitters. Then, here with Boston — same with the Yankees — a group of three [at the big league level] is nice, because the better the player is, the more difficult it is to get them just a half a percent better. Sometimes you have to get creative. Sometimes you have to dig deep into your toolkit. When you have the group all working together, working well together, you can help players more quickly.”

Laurila: Is the swing overemphasized in today’s game? Read the rest of this entry »

After a fairly brisk start, the pace of free agency has bogged down in the new year. The clog in the pipeline is Pete Alonso, the burly first baseman late of the New York Mets. Alonso’s free agent case fascinates me, as he represents a possibly rare intersection of fame and scarcity of skill, making him especially difficult to put a value on.

Given Alonso’s popularity in New York, the shortness of the Mets’ lineup even after signing Juan Soto, and the fact that owner Steve Cohen is so rich the Sumerians might not have invented currency if they’d known he was going to come along, a reunion makes a certain amount of sense. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2025 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, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Like Sara Lee, nobody doesn’t like Curtis Granderson. A power-hitting center fielder who reached the 20-homer plateau 10 times, with a high of 43, he was a threat to steal a base during the first decade of his major league career as well. He made three All-Star teams and had a knack for turning up on winners, starting (and starring) for six teams that made the playoffs, including two that reached the World Series, while reaching the postseason twice as a reserve acquired for the stretch run. His penchant for strikeouts made him a somewhat streaky performer, but he earned a reputation within the game for being even-keeled, thoughtful, hard working, and generous — a clubhouse leader and a favorite of teammates, fans, and media. At a time when African-American participation in baseball was (and still is) on the wane, he wore his socks high every day as a tribute to Negro Leagues players, and channeled his charitable efforts towards increasing Black participation in the sport, an effort that has carried over into his retirement. Read the rest of this entry »

On September 3, 2024, Tommy Edman swung through an 0-2 fastball to end the top of the ninth inning of a game against the Angels. Witness, please.

Back when I was a kid, all anyone talked about was fastball velocity. Mark Wohlers could hit 100, and that was a big deal. Never mind that while velocity is important, it’s arguably the third-most significant tool in a pitcher’s tackle box, after location and movement. But even in the days of fuzzy over-the-air TV and print media, you could quantify velocity and share it simply. It was possible to describe the exquisite movement on Greg Maddux’s low-90s two-seamer, but it was hard and took up a lot of time. I think that’s got something to do with George Will being the way he is. But I digress. Read the rest of this entry »

For the 21st consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Cleveland Guardians.

Batters

It’s weird doing the Twins and Guardians back to back, as ZiPS sees a lot of similarities between the two teams. It sees both clubs as having one mid-career future Hall of Famer, a really good outfielder, a bunch of slightly below-average players elsewhere in the lineup, a sneaky good rotation with one starter the system likes quite a bit more than the others, and an ultra-elite bullpen that should compete to be the best in baseball in 2025.

Overall, ZiPS sees the Guardians similarly to how Steamer does, though the shape of the projection is a bit different; ZiPS likes the hitting a good deal less than Steamer does, but is more optimistic than its cyber-rival when it comes to the pitching. Read the rest of this entry »

It wasn’t supposed to go down like this. After a sensational contract year — striking out 30% of hitters, posting the lowest walk rate of his career, bedazzling his jewelry cabinet with a World Series ring — Jack Flaherty looked like he was set to make a boatload of money. Days after his 29th birthday, we here at FanGraphs ranked Flaherty eighth among our Top 50 Free Agents, one spot behind his former high school teammate, Max Fried.

Early in December, Fried blew away expectations, inking an eight year, $218 million deal with Yankees. And he wasn’t the only one. Starters from Blake Snell to Luis Severino landed surprisingly lucrative contracts; when Ben Clemens checked in last week on his free agency projections, he noted that he’d under-projected the deals for starting pitchers by about $17 million on average. His takeaway: “Pitchers are getting paid this winter.”

Not all of them, it turns out. As the calendar creeps uncomfortably close to the start of spring training, the youngest available starting pitcher in free agency finds himself without an employer. Every couple weeks, a sparsely sourced rumor about Flaherty bubbles up on MLB Trade Rumors — there’s “mutual interest” with the Orioles, the Tigers have “some interest” in a reunion — but for a large part of the offseason, it’s been silence on the Flaherty beat.

The most substantial of these rumors flowed from the estimable pen of Ken Rosenthal over the weekend. Rosenthal and Will Sammon reported in The Athletic that Flaherty was “open to considering” a “short-term deal” with a “high average annual value.” The hot market for starters and the comparatively cool market for Flaherty suggest that, unlike the rest of the nominal “front-end” starting pitchers at the top of the market, something about him scares teams. All of this leads me to ask: What’s the matter with Jack Flaherty?

One obvious answer is the track record. On some level, teams are going to be somewhat hesitant to commit serious resources to anyone whose last healthy and effective season before 2024 came prior to the pandemic. Rosenthal and Sammon wrote in their report that “teams perhaps want to see Flaherty put together two consecutive seasons of elite performance.” And there are the shoulder issues in 2021 and 2022 that limited him to just 114 1/3 innings over that two-year span.

But I don’t think the track record tells the full story. I think the weak Flaherty market comes down to concerns about his 2024 season itself. Specifically, I think teams are worried about his fastball.

They get there in different ways, but the three pitchers who received $200 million (or thereabouts) contracts this winter all have plus fastballs. Snell throws the prototypical ace four-seamer, averaging 96 mph with 19 inches of induced vertical break. Corbin Burnes’ cutter is one of the signature pitches in baseball, capable of missing bats and neutralizing contact quality against hitters on both sides of the plate. Fried is a bit of a different case — his fastball averaged just 93.9 mph last season — but the shape is totally bizarre relative to his arm angle, resembling Burnes’ cutter from the left side. Fried also throws five other pitches, minimizing the importance of his four-seamer.

Flaherty’s fastball was the slowest of these four primary offerings, averaging 93.3 mph. In September, that dropped all the way to 92.6 mph. At below-average velocities, even a half-tick of heat loss can be brutal. And while the shape of the fastball is unusual — Flaherty throws from a low slot and gets just four inches of horizontal movement, meaning the pitch unexpectedly cuts in a funky fashion — it doesn’t have the sink that allows Fried’s and Burnes’ fastballs to burrow beneath barrels. Also unlike Fried, Flaherty in effect throws just three pitches: his four-seam fastball and the two breaking balls. (He also flashes a changeup and sinker, but last season he used each of those pitches less than 3% of the time.)

Given the mediocrity of his fastball, Flaherty must aim for fine locations. His success can vary. (I want to caveat the following with the fact that the Dodgers have a strong organizational preference for where their pitchers locate their fastballs, which may or may not be the way Flaherty will pitch with a new team.)

I’ll start with his matchups against left-handed hitters, because these were the majority of hitters that Flaherty faced in 2024. After his trade to the Dodgers in late July, the target for his fastball was almost exclusively set up in one location: Low and away.

A handful of times per start, Flaherty tried to climb the ladder, aiming for swinging strikes at the top of the zone. But in the three starts I watched in full, he almost always targeted his fastballs low and away when facing lefties.

Now, as the plot below of his fastball location to lefties shows, his execution wasn’t perfect. Aiming a baseball is really hard. But I’d venture to say that it was pretty good — he hardly yanked any of his fastballs to the glove side, and most of his misses drifted harmlessly off the plate. In any case, the plot tells a clear story: Flaherty was looking to paint with his fastball rather than challenge hitters over the plate.

This sort of nibbling quality with the fastball is perhaps not what teams want to see from their high-paid free agent starter. Snell, Burnes, and even Fried to some extent can throw fastballs with a large margin for error. Flaherty’s margins are thinner.

This is especially true against right-handed hitters, where his glove-side command is not as good. Against righties, Flaherty also frequently targeted low and away. But as the plot below of fastballs to righties shows, Flaherty doesn’t have the same level of command to the outer edge of this side of the plate. Note the lack of dots in that low-away corner compared to the yanked misses off the plate:

To lefties, Flaherty has the luxury of his misses generally drifting off the plate for balls. When he misses his target to righties, however, the miss tends to drift middle-middle. And when you’re missing middle-middle with 93-mph four-seamers, it’s generally not going to turn out well for you. (This might explain part of Flaherty’s reverse splits last season.)

When executed well, the low-and-away target serves an important function — it sets up his two nasty breaking balls, a harder gyro slider at 85 mph and a loopier knuckle-curve at 78 mph. As this pitch plot shows, these two pitches blend together in a deceptive manner, forcing hitters to guess which one is coming:

Flaherty is at his best when he’s mixing in the low fastballs with the two breakers right below the zone. Check out this two-pitch sequence to Ryan O’Hearn. He nails his 0-0 target to get ahead:

On 0-1 — the perfectly executed fastball fresh in O’Hearn’s head — Flaherty buries a curveball right below the previous location, getting O’Hearn to swing way over the pitch:

After a couple of breaking balls in the dirt, Flaherty punches O’Hearn out on a high fastball. With hitters laser-focused on the bottom of the strike zone, that occasional late-count high heater leads to a ton of whiffs. It’s a pretty combo when it works.

But if Flaherty falls behind, there just isn’t a great option to induce weak contact. When the early-count fastball execution is less than perfect, he tends to back himself into a corner. And when he’s forced to come over to the plate with the heater, he can be vulnerable to the long ball. Just ask O’Hearn:

If Flaherty’s fastball velocity remains in that 92-93 range, it will likely be a tradeoff between giving up a few too many walks due to nibbling (as he did early in his career) or risking extra-base damage by coming over the plate.

So, yes, there are reasons to be concerned about Flaherty. But overly fixating on his fastball risks ignoring his upside.

That two-breaking-ball attack works against both righties and lefties; when he gets ahead in the count, there’s almost nobody better. That strikeout rate is no illusion. So the question becomes: How can Flaherty reliably get ahead of hitters?

One option is pitching backwards. Flaherty’s fastball usage in 0-0 counts is roughly 50%. (On the plot below, red represents the four-seamer, gold represents the slider, and blue represents the curveball.) Given the frequency of his slider usage in 3-1 and 3-2 counts (50% and 44.8%, respectively) it follows that he has the confidence to throw it for a strike when he needs it. Mixing in more breaking balls in early counts could take some pressure off the four-seamer.

Flaherty could also use his sinker more often. If his problem at present is mostly with right-handed hitters, the sinker could give him a weak-contact option and a pitch that he feels comfortable throwing on the inner-half of the plate. Notably, the sinker grades out fine by stuff models — PitchingBot, for example, gives it a 56 on the 20-80 scale.

It’s also not impossible that some of his velocity could return. Maybe he no longer can regularly dial up 95-96 mph as he did in his early 20s, but it’s also possible that his late-season swoon can be chalked up to his posting his highest innings total in five years. In the range of velocity that he sat in the later months of the season, every half-tick is crucial, but if he can consistently live at 93-94 mph with the ability to touch 96, that softens many of the concerns.

Concluding this article definitively is challenging. On the one hand, the skittishness of the clubs is perfectly understandable. But plenty of contending teams need starting pitching, and an industry-wide fear of Flaherty’s weaknesses could cost clubs their chance to add someone who just performed like one of the best hurlers in the game.

Not every out is created equal. Take this fly out from Corbin Carroll, for example:

A lot of things can happen when you make an out with the bases loaded. You could strike out, leaving every runner in place. You could hit into a double play, an inning-ending one in this case. You could ground out some other way, or hit an infield fly. But Carroll’s here was the most valuable imaginable; with one out, he advanced every single runner, including the runner who scored from third.

Mathematically speaking, you can think of it this way. The average out that took place with the bases loaded and one out lowered the team’s run expectancy by a massive 0.61 runs in 2024. That’s because tons of these outs were either strikeouts (bad, runner on third doesn’t score) or double plays (bad, inning ends). But Carroll’s fly out was far better than that. It actually increased the run expectancy by a hair; driving the lead runner home and moving the trail runners up a base is exquisitely valuable.

That’s not the only way this could have gone. Consider a similar situation, a groundout from Aaron Judge:

Like Carroll, Judge batted with a runner on third and fewer than two outs. In this situation, the average out is bad, lowering run expectancy by 0.514 runs. But Judge’s was obviously worse. It cost the Yankees all the expected runs they had left in the inning, naturally, which added up to just a bit more than 1.15. Read the rest of this entry »

For the 21st consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Minnesota Twins.

Batters

The Twins entered last September as a second-place team with a 92% chance to make the playoffs, according to ZiPS. But then, after going 9-18 that month, they finished fourth in the AL Central and fell short of the postseason. When you look at it that way, their 2024 campaign was certainly a disappointment. However, for as bad things ended, the Twins still posted a winning record (82-80) for the second consecutive year, and none of their problems down the stretch last year suggest there’s anything fundamentally broken with the organization. I mean, sure, Twins fans surely would want them to spend more aggressively, but that’s a gripe they share with the fans of the other AL Central teams.

As it turned out, Carlos Correa shockingly didn’t suddenly forget how to play baseball in 2023; he had terrific 2024 season that hopefully wiped some memories clean. One potential concern is his plantar fascitis – which he’s had in both heels at times over the last 18 months – but with a normal offseason of rest, he should begin this season on fairly strong footing, and ZiPS projects him to have a fairly typical Correa campaign.

Byron Buxton had a similarly solid comeback season. He posted a 142 wRC+, and after the Twins used him exclusively at DH in 2023 in an unsuccessful attempt to keep him healthy, he returned to center field and played above-average defense. I’d be shocked if Buxton made the 567 plate appearances that Depth Charts is projecting for him right now – he’s never done that in the majors – but when he’s playing, he remains a tantalizing talent. Given his history, I would assume the Twins are expecting to have him for about 90-100 games.

The rest of the offense is a great deal less exciting. Royce Lewis still has some upside, but he has a long injury history of his own, and his offense was fairly ordinary last year after his stunning 2023 output. Although he’s probably nearing his ceiling, right fielder Matt Wallner projects to be solidly above average over the next few years, and the catching tandem of Ryan Jeffers and Christian Vázquez is a good one. Elsewhere, though, this lineup feels more patchwork; it’s not really a giant mess, but you kind of wish it had a bit more thump.

There are some lesser projections of interest here. ZiPS isn’t high on Brooks Lee, but it does think that Edouard Julien deserves a chance to avenge his weak 2024, and there’s a real case for promoting Luke Keaschall quickly if he continues to hit in the high minors. It would be nice to see the team get one more bat in free agency, either as an upgrade over Trevor Larnach or to beef up its projected production at DH.

ZiPS expects that it’ll take a few years for Walker Jenkins to really develop his power, but it likes the aforementioned Keaschall and center field prospect Emmanuel Rodriguez.

Pitchers

Pitching-wise, the Twins had an odd season. They had a massive difference between their ERA (4.26) and FIP (3.84), finishing 21st in the former but a much more respectable seventh in the latter stat. And they did that with a rather average defense, so you can’t blame the glove work for that. The good thing is that by and large, the current pitchers on the roster don’t have a lengthy history of falling short of their FIP, which suggests that some of the weaker-than-expected performances were more blips than true concerns.

One thing that hurt the rotation wasn’t so much the primary members but some really terrible performances from the Plan B gang. Chris Paddack and David Festa drastically underperformed their peripheral numbers, and fill-ins like Louie Varland and Zebby Matthews were downright dreadful. ZiPS expects a lot more from all four pitchers, especially Matthews, and overall, it projects the rotation to be somewhere between sixth and 10th in baseball in WAR. The 2.63 HR/9 that Matthews allowed last year may look especially bad, but as I warn people, don’t go nuts over crazy short-term home run stats. A shocking number of people yelled at me in 2019 about a positive Corbin Burnes projection because of the 17 homers he allowed over 49 innings in 2019. ZiPS has little to complain about at the top of the rotation, with Pablo López, Joe Ryan, and Bailey Ober, though López is the only one of the trio that ZiPS projects to have a high long-term ceiling. If ZiPS is right, the Twins are about set here, with a strong starting five and good depth behind them.

The Twins had the second-best bullpen in the American League last year by WAR (5.9), and the good news for Minnesota fans is that the bullpen should remain terrific in 2025. In fact, though it’s certainly not an official projection yet, ZiPS believes at this moment that the Twins have the best bullpen in baseball. Jhoan Duran ought to have a better season in 2025, and now that the Twins have announced that Griffin Jax won’t be moved back to the rotation in 2025, the two of them will form a deadly one-two late-inning punch. Brock Stewart is also projected to have a better season – though his sore shoulder will need to cooperate – and aside from Jorge Alcala and Michael Tonkin, ZiPS projects every significant Minnesota reliever to have an ERA under 4.00. The Twins don’t really need to make any additions here, either. If they are going to make more moves, they should target offensive upgrades.

This is a solidly built team that is deep enough to have a pretty high floor. That said, the Twins have enough weaknesses that ZiPS puts them in the 85-88 win range right now. The AL Central projects to be one of the closer divisions in baseball, and the Twins likely will still be playing meaningful games in September.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here. Size of player names is very roughly proportional to Depth Chart playing time. The final team projections may differ considerably from our Depth Chart playing time.

Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned or have retired, players who will miss 2025 due to injury, and players who were released in 2024. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a Norwegian Ukulele Dixieland Jazz band that only covers songs by The Smiths, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.11.

Hitters are ranked by zWAR, which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those that appear in the full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR. It is important to remember that ZiPS is agnostic about playing time, and has no information about, for example, how quickly a team will call up a prospect or what veteran has fallen into disfavor.

As always, incorrect projections are either caused by misinformation, a non-pragmatic reality, or by the skillful sabotage of our friend and former editor. You can, however, still get mad at me on Twitter or on BlueSky.

If you’re a Milwaukee Brewers fan, you probably know the volume and quality of Colin Rea’s work the past two seasons. Last season, only 58 pitchers qualified for the ERA title, and Rea was among them. Over the past two seasons, Rea is second among Brewers pitchers in starts, innings, wins, and strikeouts, trailing only Freddy Peralta in those categories.

If you’re not a Brewers fan, you might have seen the news that Rea signed with the Cubs and thought, “Oh, is this guy the Padres tried to trade with a torn UCL? Is he back from Japan?”

In an offseason defined by the scarcity of starting pitching, it’s a bit jarring to see a starter sign for one year and $5 million. Especially one who just threw 167 2/3 innings in 2024. There aren’t enough of those guys in the entire league for every team to have two. Roughly 15 times as many people summited Mt. Everest in 2024 as qualified for the major league ERA title. And Rea got just $5 million? What gives? Read the rest of this entry »

The Blue Jays came into this offseason with one glaring need: relievers. Now, that’s not to say that they don’t need help elsewhere. The bottom of their lineup is thin. They’re probably a starter short of an optimal rotation, particularly given how uncertain Alek Manoah’s future looks. But they’re a playoff hopeful, and they had the worst bullpen in baseball in 2024 – 3.1 wins worse than the White Sox, if you can believe it. So the bullpen had to be priority number one, and voila:

OFFICIAL: We’ve signed All-Star RHP Jeff Hoffman to a 3-year deal ??

Welcome Back, @Hoff_23! pic.twitter.com/A1tN8zOGjV

— Toronto Blue Jays (@BlueJays) January 11, 2025

Jeff Hoffman might not be a household name, but he’s been one of the best relievers in baseball since joining the Phillies in 2023. He’s racked up 3.6 WAR in that time, but reliever WAR can get weird with the leverage adjustments, so let’s put it this way instead: He’s sixth in ERA and third in FIP over the last two years. His strikeout rate hovers around 33.3%, and he walks a thoroughly normal number of hitters. In other words, this doesn’t look like a fluke, and he’s not getting paid like a fluke, either. His deal is worth $33 million over those three years, with $6 million in available incentives. Read the rest of this entry »