If you had to associate a single current major leaguer with throwing sinkers, Framber Valdez would be toward the top of the list. His standout career is all about throwing sinkers and keeping the ball on the ground. So imagine my surprise when I was perusing a leaderboard of starters who used their secondaries most frequently with two strikes in 2024. The top of that list is dotted with pitchers who confounded my classification system: We’ve got Corbin Burnes, Graham Ashcraft, and Clarke Schmidt there representing the cutter brigade. Most of the other pitchers in the top 10 mix in cutters liberally with two strikes. Then we’ve got Valdez, in 10th and looking sorely out of place.

Train your eyes on Valdez, and you’ll start to ask yourself: What’s going on here? In some ways, his statistics are consistent to the point of monotony. Take a look at his strikeout and walk rates over the years, plus some league-adjusted run prevention numbers:

After some early-career wildness, Valdez has produced a string of near-identical seasons. But while doing that, he’s cut back on using his sinker to finish off hitters. I know what you’re thinking: Sure, to throw his wipeout curveball. But nope! It’s a changeup story:

Read the rest of this entry »

A key piece of the 2024 Detroit Tigers reunited with the team on Sunday, as starting pitcher Jack Flaherty signed a two-year deal worth $35 million. Flaherty excelled for the Tigers last year, putting up a 2.95 ERA and a 3.12 FIP in 106 2/3 innings over 18 starts, good for 2.1 WAR. With the Tigers seemingly out of the playoff race in July, he was shipped to the Dodgers, with whom he won the World Series. He was respectable over 10 regular-season starts with Los Angeles, but his performance was decidedly mixed in the postseason.

Like many short-term contracts for solid players, this deal comes with its own ifs, ands, and buts. Flaherty’s guaranteed money is front-loaded, structured as a one-year, $25 million deal with a player option for $10 million in 2026 that increases to $20 million if he starts 15 games in 2025. Whether one sees the deal as a two-year contract with an opt-out or a one-year contract with a player option is a “potato, po-tah-to” issue that really doesn’t matter here; in this case, they’re the same functional thing.

What does matter is that Flaherty’s market appears to not have developed as much as that of some of the other top pitchers available. While it shouldn’t raise an eyebrow that Blake Snell and Corbin Burnes got much bigger contracts, Flaherty also received a lighter deal than Sean Manaea, Nathan Eovaldi, and Luis Severino. While Flaherty didn’t miss any significant time due to injury last year — he skipped only a single start with lower back pain in July — questions about his back were enough for the Yankees to have second thoughts about trading for him at the deadline. The Dodgers were happy enough to acquire him, and though his strikeout rate dropped off (32% to 26%), he was certainly a net plus for an injury-thinned starting staff down the stretch. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s get this out of the way at the start: The Mariners are pretty good. Their starting pitching is incredible, and some projections systems even think they have a top-10 offense. This is not a Pirates situation, where a core led by Paul Skenes on a league-minimum contract is somehow projected to finish well under .500. In Seattle, the pieces are almost all there. Sadly for fans, “almost all there” might well define this era of Mariners baseball.

The latest expression of Seattle’s complacency came last week, when the team brought back Jorge Polanco on a one year, $7.75 million contract. (The deal is pending a physical.) According to a report from Adam Jude at the Seattle Times, Polanco’s signing means the “Mariners’ roster is effectively set.” For those counting at home, $3.5 million for 37-year-old Donovan Solano, a trade for Austin Shenton, and the Polanco deal represent the entirety of Seattle’s offseason roster upgrades. The Mariners missed the playoffs by one game in 2023 and 2024; they missed it by two games in 2021. They are always good but never great. And the team — or at least ownership — appears totally fine with that. Read the rest of this entry »

Jared Koenig’s path to big-league success was anything but smooth. The southpaw didn’t throw his first pitch in affiliated baseball until he was 27 years old, that coming in the Oakland Athletics organization after three seasons on the indie-ball circuit. And while he made his MLB debut the following year, he appeared in just 10 games, logging a 5.72 ERA and losing three of four decision. That was in 2022. Subsequently signed by San Diego, he put up nothing-special numbers in Triple-A and was cut loose by the Padres midway through the 2023 campaign.

The Brewers gave him another opportunity. Milwaukee inked the 6-foot-5 left-hander to a contract prior to last season, and they’re certainly glad they did. Working primarily out of the bullpen — he served as an opener on six occasions — Koenig made 55 appearances for the NL Central champs, putting up a 2.47 ERA and a 3.28 FIP over 62 frames. Moreover, he was credited with nine wins and one save. Seemingly out of the blue, he’d come into his own as a 30-year-old rookie.

How he go from relative obscurity to providing quality innings for a playoff team? Read the rest of this entry »

Max Scherzer is heading north of the border. On the heels of an injury-marred season, the three-time Cy Young winner agreed to a one-year, $15.5 million contract with the Blue Jays on Thursday. The deal is still pending a physical, no trivial matter for a 40-year-old pitcher who was limited to nine starts in 2024.

Scherzer spent the last season and change with the Rangers after being acquired from the Mets ahead of the 2023 trade deadline, and the past three seasons on a three-year, $130 million contract that set a record for the highest average annual value for a pitcher. This time around it’s former Tigers and Mets teammate Justin Verlander, whose subsequent two-year, $86.67 million deal with New York matched Scherzer’s AAV, more or less setting the market for over-40 future Hall of Famers coming off injury plagued seasons for AL West teams. He signed a one-year, $15 million deal with the Giants earlier this month.

The Rangers didn’t get much out of Scherzer, whose time in Texas added up to just 17 regular season and three postseason starts interrupted by five separate trips to the injured list. That count doesn’t even include his being replaced on the World Series roster after leaving Game 3 with back spasms. Fortunately for the Rangers, they wrapped up their win over the Diamondbacks in five games, nipping in the bud any what-might-have-beens regarding Scherzer missing a potential Game 7 start. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m a big fan of Tommy Kahnle for reasons that don’t have that much to do with why the Tigers just signed him to a $7.75 million contract this week. Kahnle flatters the stereotype that most of a baseball team’s personality resides in its bullpen. I can offer two succinct anecdotes in support of the idea that Kahnle is someone your grandmother might euphemistically have referred to as “a character.”

The first: His torrid but fickle relationship with the Philadelphia Eagles. (Go Birds.) Kahnle has been on and off the Eagles bandwagon and back on again over the course of his career. Kahnle put the Birds in timeout in 2020 over their firing of Doug Pederson, which — far from being a sign of disloyalty — is actually precisely the kind of ferocious idiosyncrasy that makes Eagles fans the kind of people you don’t let yourself get trapped in a 1-on-1 conversation with. (Take it from me, I’ll talk your ear off about how I thought Macho Harris was the next Brian Dawkins.)

The other endearingly weird thing about Kahnle is how much he loves to throw his changeup. Read the rest of this entry »

Zach Dezenzo could play an important role for the Astros this year. The 24-year-old projects to be a “viable third baseman,” as Eric Longenhagen and Travis Ice wrote in Dezenzo’s prospect report in June, but depending on how Houston’s roster comes together — an Alex Bregman return remains a possibility — Dezenzo could also be used in left field. Indeed, at Astros FanFest on Saturday, manager Joe Espada said Dezenzo will get a lot of reps in left field during spring training.

Regardless of where he is stationed defensively, extra-base oomph will be the righty-hitting Dezenzo’s calling card. A 12th-round pick in 2022 out of Ohio State University, Dezenzo has 70-grade raw power that he is still learning to tap into in games (55 FV game power), according to our prospect team. Last season, he posted a 131 wRC+ between Double-A Corpus Christi and Triple-A Sugar Land. He made his big league debut in early August and was optioned a month later before getting called up again just before the end of the regular season. During his 19 major league games, he went deep twice while slashing .242/.277/.371 (84 wRC+) over 65 plate appearances.

Dezenzo discussed his development as a hitter when the Astros visited Fenway Park in August.

———

David Laurila: You didn’t get drafted your junior year, despite solid numbers [including a .933 OPS]. Why was that?

Zach Dezenzo: “Good question. I put together a pretty strong freshman season at Ohio State [in 2019] — freshman All-American honors — then the COVID season obviously got cut short. My junior year, I hit .302 with nine home runs, although we only played 42 games. I knew I was good, but I’m not sure that I did enough to raise many scouts’ attention. That’s probably kind of where I was at, needing one more year to show what I was truly capable of. But that’s OK. It all worked out perfectly fine.”

Laurila: You must have drawn some attention as a junior…

Dezenzo: “I did have some. The Astros were actually interested — they were probably the number one team in contact with me — so yes, there was definitely interest. It just didn’t pan out the way I wanted it to.”

Laurila: Jumping to your hitting profile, how does it now compare to when you signed? Are you mostly the same guy in the box? Read the rest of this entry »

Ketel Marte was one of the best 10 hitters in baseball in 2024. That’s just an objective fact – or at least as objective as facts can get in baseball. Our calculation of WAR? He was 10th among hitters. Baseball Reference has him 10th as well. Baseball Prospectus put him in seventh place. That’s not surprising; he set career highs in home runs, league-adjusted OBP and slugging, and wRC+. He played solid defense and even added a little value on the basepaths.

He was one of the best 10 hitters in baseball in 2019, too. In fact, he’s the only player to crack the top 10 in both 2019 and 2024. That’s wild. Aaron Judge, Mookie Betts, Shohei Ohtani, Corey Seager, Juan Soto, Bryce Harper, José Ramírez – they all played in both years. None of them – none! – managed the double that Marte did. This isn’t some weird defensive value issue, either: He’s the only hitter with a top-10 wRC+ in both years.

Those in between years? Don’t look too closely. Marte totaled 9.1 WAR across the 2020-2023 campaigns. He posted 6.3 WAR in each of 2019 and 2024. In that 2020-2023 span, he was 64th among hitters in total WAR. He had two seasons of roughly average offensive production in that span, and produced at a 3 WAR/600 pace instead of the 6.3 WAR/600 pace from 2019 and 2024. So it’s safe to say he’s streaky – one hitter some years, and a different guy other years. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the New York Yankees. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the fifth 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 »

It’s been a quiet winter in the AL Central. After Michael Wacha signed an extension at the beginning of the offseason, the division’s five teams combined to add only one deal worth more than $20 million in guaranteed money; that was Shane Bieber’s surgery-affected pillow contract with the Guardians. Now, finally, we can add another to the ledger, courtesy of the Royals. On Wednesday, they signed Carlos Estévez to a two-year, $22.2 million deal with a club option tacked on the end, as ESPN’s Jeff Passan first reported.

The Royals came into the winter looking for relief help. It’s not the only place their roster needed a glow-up – even after trading for Jonathan India, they could still use another bat or two, especially in the corner outfield – but the bullpen was also a particular area of need. Last year’s Royals made the playoffs on the back of pitching, but their starters were the ones doing the heavy lifting, not their relievers. Deadline acquisition Lucas Erceg was the best of the group by a large margin, and John Schreiber was the only other reliever with impressive full-season numbers.

It’s not so much that a team can’t make the playoffs with such a thin bullpen – obviously, the Royals did. But they did it by the skin of their teeth at 86-76, and that despite spectacular seasons from Cole Ragans, Seth Lugo, and Wacha. Counting on those three to combine for 94 starts, 12.9 WAR, and ERAs in the low 3.00s across the board again would be wishful thinking. Additionally, they no longer have last year’s fourth starter Brady Singer, who was Cincinnati’s return in the India trade.

The 2024 bullpen finished last in baseball in shutdowns – appearances that increased win probability by six percentage points or more – and fifth worst in win probability added. Those are outcome statistics, not process ones, but the process statistics weren’t exactly pretty either. Kansas City was middle of the pack in WAR (3.6), 20th in ERA (4.13), 26th in K-BB% (12.0%). It’s not just that this team didn’t have a “true closer” – its bullpen was light on contributors from top to bottom. Read the rest of this entry »