Gary Sanchez finally has a team… sort of. Last week, he was one of two catchers named to Team Dominican Republic’s roster for the 2023 World Baseball Classic, which gets underway next month. Meanwhile, although pitchers and catchers have reported to major league camps this week, Sanchez still doesn’t have a destination, as he remains a free agent.

By our count, Sanchez is one of just four position players who put up at least 1.0 WAR last year but remain on the market, along with shortstop Elvis Andrus (3.5), outfielder Jurickson Profar (2.5) and infielder José Iglesias (1.0). Admittedly, he’s not coming off a great season with the Twins, but Sanchez’s 1.3 WAR was respectable, his 89 wRC+ matched the major league average for catchers, and he had his best defensive season since 2018, reversing a multiyear decline.

Aside from rumors of interest from the Giants in January and the Angels earlier this month, the Sanchez burner of the hot stove has barely flickered this winter, but things heated up a bit in the wee hours of Wednesday after Sanchez and strength and conditioning coach Theo Aasen shared a short Instagram video of the 30-year-old backstop doing some exercises and baseball activities while wearing a shirt with the Yankees’ insignia. Read the rest of this entry »

Will Bednar had a disappointing 2022 season. Drafted 14th overall in 2021 by the San Francisco Giants after a breakout campaign at Mississippi State University, the 22-year-old right-hander battled back issues and saw both his velocity and command take a step in the wrong direction. Pitching at Low-A San Jose, he logged a 4.19 ERA and issued 22 free passes in 43 innings. But there were positives, too. Even with the health-related downtick in his power arsenal’s effectiveness, the younger brother of Pittsburgh Pirates closer David Bednar fanned 51 batters and allowed just 25 hits.

One year ago this month, our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen wrote that “Bednar’s best pitch is a plus low-80s slider with plenty of bite.” The offering remains the righty’s go-to, and I talked to him about it during his stint in the Arizona Fall League.

———

David Laurila: Let’s start with the nuts and bolts. What is your repertoire?

Will Bednar: “Fastball, slider, changeup. I’ve been kind of playing around with a little bit of a two-seam, too.”

Laurila: The slider is your best pitch?

Bednar: “Yeah. The slider is definitely my best pitch. Without a doubt.”

Laurila: What is the story behind it? Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t like this title any more than you do. It just sounds so wrong. The guy with the largest contract signed by a pitcher in the history of the game is underrated? The New York Yankees ace isn’t being given his due? Preposterous! I might as well say no one watched the Super Bowl, or that we aren’t paying enough attention to weather balloons these days.

But uh… it’s true. I don’t have to like it and you don’t have to like it, but Cole is still one of the best pitchers in baseball, despite falling somewhat out of that conversation of late. He wasn’t even the most talked-about Yankee starter last year – that’d rightfully be Nestor Cortes. So consider this a Cole puff piece.

To begin, let’s consider our Depth Charts projections. These projections blend ZiPS and Steamer to produce rate statistic forecasts for every player. From there, Jason Martinez projects playing time, and those playing time projections cross with the rate statistics to produce overall projections. Cole sits in a tie for third place in projected WAR for 2023:

This shouldn’t be particularly surprising. He’s produced the ninth-most WAR among pitchers in the past two years, the ninth-most in the past three years, the third-most in the past four years, the third-most in the past five years… the point is, he’s consistently been one of the best in the game. While 2022 represented a down year, his overall body of work remains excellent.

What’s more, his 2022 swoon seems exaggerated to me. It represented his worst ERA since his Pittsburgh days, but luckily we have multiple statistics to describe pitching performance. I like to take a mosaic approach, looking at as many as I can and taking a rough average, and if you think of it that way, Cole’s 2022 looks pretty dang good. Read the rest of this entry »

The Dodgers have had a fairly quiet offseason by their recent standards. Because they are set to exceed the competitive balance tax threshold for the third consecutive season, any spending over the $233 million limit will carry a 50% tax. As a result, Los Angeles has settled for smaller moves, bringing in Miguel Rojas via a trade with the Marlins and signing a couple of veterans to one-year deals. They added another free agent to that group on Friday, inking David Peralta to a one-year, $6.5 million contract with incentives that could bring the total to $8 million.

A long-time member of the Diamondbacks, Peralta peaked in 2018 with a 130 wRC+ and a career-high 30 home runs. In the three years after that breakout, he fell back to being a league average hitter with good plate discipline and decent power. A late-ish bloomer who converted away from the mound after he had already made his professional debut, the 35-year-old was never going to fit into Arizona’s rebuilding plan despite becoming a fan favorite in the desert. Read the rest of this entry »

The offseason is beginning to wrap up, but there are still plenty of names still available to help boost the fringes of teams’ rosters, especially in depth relievers. Last week, Michael Fulmer became the latest of these signings, inking a one-year deal with the Cubs.

The bulk of Fulmer’s big league career has been spent in Detroit, where he won the AL Rookie of the Year award in 2016. With a 3.06 ERA and 3.76 FIP in 159 innings, he looked to be the future ace of a Tigers rotation that had lost Rick Porcello and Max Scherzer a couple years earlier and would lose Justin Verlander the next season. But after two more seasons where he performed around league average and a 2019 campaign completely lost to Tommy John surgery, Fulmer went through a catastrophic 2020, with an ERA near nine and less than three innings per start. It seemed like his time as a productive big leaguer was over, and it was — as a starter. But he’s performed quite well over the past two years in the bullpen, posting career bests in ERA and strikeouts.

While Fulmer had above-average seasons as a starter, he had neither big-time swing-and-miss stuff nor pinpoint command, succeeding despite pedestrian numbers in the strikeout and walk departments. Instead, his best years were characterized by a solid ability to suppress hard contact and home runs, possibly aided by his cavernous home ballpark. He throws two fastball variants but has shown a slight preference for the sinker, which has allowed him to run a groundball rate that’s consistently a few points above the league average. Read the rest of this entry »

Depending on what your expectations were for the 2022 postseason, you likely saw Cristian Javier as the third or fourth starter for the Astros entering October. Dusty Baker agreed, as Javier didn’t get a start until the ALCS against the Yankees. But Javier clearly had different plans. When given the chance, he was dominant: in 12.2 innings, he pitched to a 0.71 era; in his two starts, he gave up a single hit across 11.1 innings facing the imposing lineups of the Yankees and Phillies. That performance plus his 3.4 fWAR in 148.2 regular-season innings put him on the map as one of the league’s best young pitchers. And last week, the Astros rewarded him as such by handing him a five year, $64 million extension.

After Houston announced the hiring of long-time Braves scouting executive Dana Brown as the team’s new general manager, I wondered if he would bring along his former organization’s tendency to extend players into their would-be free-agent years. It didn’t take long for that idea to come to reality. Javier was set to enter his three arbitration years in his age 26–28 seasons; those years have been bought out with salaries escalating from $3 million in 2023 to $7 million in ’24 and $10 million in ’25. His age-29 and 30 seasons will come at the price of $21 million per year, with an opportunity to escalate it from $500,000 to $2 million per year if he finishes at or near the top of the Cy Young ballot.

Even with free-agent departure after free-agent departure, Houston’s rotation remained strong due to the development of Framber Valdez and now Javier. But with the departure of Justin Verlander, the rotation looked like it was finally hitting a point of potential vulnerability. Extending Javier, then, provides the Astros some semblance of certainty beyond 2025. And with their entire starting lineup other than Martín Maldonado locked up through at least ’25, they needed to invest in their rotation. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley lament the newly codified permanence of the zombie runner, rededicate themselves to “ghost runner” reeducation, and banter about a new position-player-pitching limitation, Andrew Chafin’s surprisingly modest contract, Derek Jeter joining Fox Sports, baseball’s leading newsbreakers vs. the leading newsbreakers in other sports, baseball officiating vs. football officiating, the schedule for Triple-A robo umps, and a 1937 proposal for baseball photo finishes. Then they continue their 2023 season preview series by discussing the Cleveland Guardians (35:09) with MLB.com’s Mandy Bell and the Texas Rangers (1:12:18) with The Athletic’s Levi Weaver, plus Past Blasts (1:55:08) from 1873 and 1968 and a few follow-ups.

Audio intro: Dawes, “Everything is Permanent”
Audio interstitial 1: 10cc, “I’m Mandy Fly Me”
Audio interstitial 2: Levi Weaver, “Dark Clay”
Audio outro: Dr. Dog, “Ebenezer Scrooge”

Link to rules announcements
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Link to Bochy’s W-L record
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Link to David Lewis’s Twitter
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Link to CBA AAV rule
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The Oakland A’s and Miami Marlins pulled off a minor trade over the weekend, with the A’s sending former first-round pick A.J. Puk down to Florida while another former first-rounder, outfielder JJ Bleday, headed to the CurrentCorporateName Coliseum. Puk had arguably his best — and healthiest — season as a pro in 2022, appearing in 66 1/3 innings over 62 games, all in relief, while putting up a 3.12 ERA and 3.69 FIP for the A’s. Bleday’s season was notably less successful, especially after a July call-up that led to a .167/.277/.309 line with the parent club while basically being a full-time starter.

For the Marlins, the draw of bringing Puk in is obvious. As I’ve noted in the past, I’m generally leery of the Marlins trading offense for pitching, considering how little they have of the former. But in this case, it’s hard to really describe Bleday as “offense,” while Puk is coming off an very successful season. While Puk succeeding as a late-inning reliever isn’t the sexiest outcome given his status as a prospect, it’s an important building block considering the time he’s missed as a pro due to Tommy John surgery, a shoulder surgery, and an annoying biceps issue. Just the fact that he came out the other side of those maladies with his upper-90s fastball and command both intact is a pretty big deal in my book and ought to have made Puk interesting to most teams.

Puk’s actual role for Miami is far from set in stone. It would be tempting to just call him a late-inning reliever — he’s arguably the top lefty in the bullpen and is less heartburn-inducing than Tanner Scott and more explosive than Steven Okert. But it’s hard to definitively close the book on him as a starter given his pedigree, build, and desire to start in the majors. The A’s had hinted that they were willing to explore using him as a starter in the spring, though that’s no guarantee that the Marlins will have the same willingness. That said, it should also be noted that the Marlins have been very reluctant to move some of their explosive young pitchers with injury issues to the bullpen full-time. Puk the Reliever is a solid contributor, but not a star, while Puk the Starter could still achieve stardom if he managed to stay healthy. Read the rest of this entry »

Late last week, the Reds and Guardians swapped young outfielders, with Cincinnati acquiring 24-year-old Will Benson from Cleveland in exchange for 21-year-old Justin Boyd, a 2022 second-round pick. The trade gives the Reds’ outfield mix a source of left-handed power, which they sorely lacked, as the Guardians pick up a long-term prospect in exchange for a player who was going to have a hard time emerging from a crowded field of similarly skilled young players on their own roster.

The 14th overall pick in the 2016 draft, Benson made his big league debut in 2022 and was in the majors long enough to exhaust rookie eligibility. Deployed almost entirely against right-handed pitchers — he took 55 of his 61 plate appearances against righties — he only managed to hit .182 in a small big league sample. Benson has had contact-related question marks since he was drafted; “will he hit enough?” was the big question about his prospectdom. Plus-plus raw power and arm strength gave him an everyday right fielder’s ceiling if he can.

Benson traversed the minors striking out at a 30% clip and never hit better than .238 at any level. But even as he struck out at an alarming rate, he has typically walked enough and gotten to enough power to perform above league average at each stop. In 2022, his age-24 season, his strikeout rate was suddenly a manageable 22.7%. There has not been a change to his swing that I can identify, though it’s worth noting that his raw swing rate is a measly 37%, which would be one of the lowest in all of MLB; in 2021, per Synergy Sports, it was 46%. It’s possible he has become discerning within the strike zone in a way that has helped his bat-to-ball skills play at a 40- or 45-grade, but visual assessment of his swing still generates a lot of concern around in-zone swing and miss, especially against fairly common letter-high fastballs. The 35+ FV grade with which Benson graduated (a grade befitting a narrow, situational big leaguer with one premium tool) would not change given this new information about his approach. Read the rest of this entry »

The free agent market skidded to a halt in February, with more than a week passing without a major league signing. Perhaps teams were waiting to settle arbitration cases, holding out for the 60-day IL, or simply playing free agency chicken with spring training right around the corner. Or maybe they’ve all been busy trying to wrap their heads around Chad Green’s contract so as to decide how it affected the market. Whatever the case may be, things finally started to pick up steam this past weekend.

Andrew Chafin came to terms with the Diamondbacks on Saturday afternoon, while Alex Reyes signed with the Dodgers shortly thereafter. Both contracts are one-year deals with incentives, and each comes with a team option for 2024. Chafin will make $5.5 million in 2023 with the potential to earn an additional $1 million in playing time bonuses. After that, the D-backs can pick up his $7.25 million option or pay him a $750,000 buyout. Reyes, meanwhile, will make a base salary of $1.1 million in 2023, while his team option is worth $3 million. Both years of the contract come with performance incentives that can push the total value up to $10 million.

Chafin is returning to the franchise where he spent the first decade of his professional career. In parts of seven big league seasons with Arizona, he tossed 271.2 innings with a 3.20 FIP, good for 4.0 WAR. No Diamondbacks reliever was more productive in that time. The D-backs flipped him to the Cubs at the 2020 trade deadline, and the Cubs subsequently flipped him to the Athletics the following year. Chafin signed with the Tigers after the lockout, and miraculously, he survived the 2022 trade deadline, leaving the team on his own terms this winter. Unfortunately, he may have come to regret that decision. Chafin declined a $6.5 million player option for 2023; his new deal guarantees him slightly less. Read the rest of this entry »