Niko Kavadas had recently been named Boston’s Minor League Player of the Year when he was first featured here at FanGraphs in November 2022. Two years later, he’s now playing for the Los Angeles Angels, after the Red Sox traded him at this summer’s deadline as part of a five-player swap. Power and patience are his calling cards. Kavadas was slashing .281/.424/.551 with 17 home runs in Triple-A at the time he was dealt, and while he subsequently struggled after receiving his first call-up — a 77 wRC+ and 38.7% strikeout rate over 106 plate appearances — he did go deep four times.

The 26-year-old first baseman very much remains a work in progress, as evidenced by his having spent the last month-plus playing in the Arizona Fall League. And while assessing progress in an extreme hitter-friendly environment can be tricky, he nonetheless crushed the ball during his time in the desert. Kavadas was named the AFL’s Offensive Player of the Year after slashing .329/.462/.700 with 13 extra-base hits, including six home runs, over 91 plate appearances. We’ll get to why he was there in a moment.

When I caught up to Kavadas prior to a Fall League game in October, the first thing I wanted to know was how the present-day iteration compares to the hitter I’d spoken to 25 months earlier. Read the rest of this entry »

Picture peak Kyle Hendricks. He didn’t blow hitters away, but he sure recorded a lot of outs, deceiving hitters with a flurry of cutters, sinkers, and changeups. All of those pitches traveled in a similar tunnel; hitters couldn’t help but hit the ball with the thin part of their bat. Even late-period Hendricks manages to sit atop the hard-hit rate leaderboards in spite of a 87-mph fastball. His ability to do so is a function of his arsenal, which is designed to keep hitters off balance and off barrel.

They’re the same age, but Nick Martinez just spun up a peak Hendricks season, reliably generating yucky contact on balls in play. Those results earned him a qualifying offer of $21.05 million from the Reds, which he reportedly accepted on Sunday.

When the Reds initially proffered Martinez a QO, I saw a hefty helping of both consternation and skepticism around that decision, but I think it holds up well. Sure, Martinez doesn’t strike out a ton of batters. But who needs strikeouts when you’ve got routine fly balls?

To think Martinez is unlikely to deliver $21 million of value for his club in the 2025 season, you have to believe that the ability to generate weak contact is fluky, subject to the vicissitudes of randomness. But that belief might be misplaced. Read the rest of this entry »

The best-case scenario for a sports team owner is rare, but clear: A local businessman runs the team as a community institution. Rather than an absentee landlord, the owner should be a community leader. That’s the vision new Orioles owner David Rubenstein is selling. During the playoffs, rather than sequestering himself in a luxury box, Rubenstein sat in the stands, among the people. OK, he was right by the home dugout, so he was among the richest subset of the people, but it’s good optics.

And less than a year into his tenure, Rubenstein is showing himself to be a builder of bridges. Or a tearer-down of walls. Or a mover of walls, at any rate. One of baseball’s most foolishly conceived and widely derided architectural features is on its way out. Mike Elias, the Orioles’ executive vice president and general manager, announced Friday that the left field wall at Oriole Park at Camden Yards is getting a haircut and moving toward the plate.

Glory, glory, hallelujah. Read the rest of this entry »

The team that signs Nick Pivetta this offseason will be getting a veteran starter who, as my colleague Ben Clemens stated in our 2025 Top 50 Free Agents rundown, has “long been a favorite of pitching models.” The team will also be getting someone who believes in pitching to his strengths. The 31-year-old right-hander is studious about his craft, but with a notable exception. Poring over scouting reports isn’t his cup of tea.

“I think about it not as a specific hitter, but more of, ‘Is he a lefty or a righty?,’” explained Pivetta, whose past four-plus seasons have been with the Boston Red Sox. “I have certain sequences that I do against lefties or righties. I do the same sequences against either side, no matter the hitter.”

That’s not to say he totally ignores weaknesses. As Pivetta told me in our last-weekend-of-the-season conversation, there are certain hitters who struggle with a particular pitch and/or location, so he might vary his “same game plan around a certain spot.” But for the most part, he is “doing the exact same thing over and over again, just trying to execute.”

The extent to which that is optimal is open for debate. As his 50 Free Agents blurb spells out, Pivetta’s numbers suggest that he has never reached — and perhaps not even approached — his full potential. The stuff is unquestionably plus, but the consistency has clearly been lacking.

The Victoria, British Columbia native has pitched more than 1,000 innings over eight big-league seasons, so opposing teams have a pretty good idea of what to expect when he takes the mound. Moreover, certain lineups will present, at least on paper, a greater challenge for his pitch mix and standard attack plan. Might adherence to advance reports be a meaningful advantage add? Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of a series concerning the 2025 Classic Baseball Era Committee ballot, covering long-retired players, managers, executives, and umpires whose candidacies will be voted upon on December 8. For an introduction to the ballot, see here, and for an introduction to JAWS, see here. Several profiles in this series are adapted from work previously published at SI.com, Baseball Prospectus, and Futility Infielder. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Even in an era brimming with colorful characters and exceptional hurlers, Luis Tiant stood out. The barrel-chested, mustachioed Cuban righty combined an assortment of exaggerated deliveries with a variety of arm angles and speeds that baffled hitters — and tantalized writers — over the course of a 19-year major league career (1964–82) and an affiliation with the game in one capacity or another that extended through the remainder of his life. “The Cuban Dervish,” as Sports Illustrated’s Ron Fimrite christened him in 1975, died on October 8 at the age of 83. No cause of death was announced.

The son of a legendary Negro Leagues and Latin American baseball star colloquially known as Luis Tiant Sr. — a skinny lefty, in contrast with the burly physique of his right-handed son — the younger Tiant was exiled from his home country in the wake of Cuban prime minister Fidel Castro’s travel restrictions, and separated from his family for 14 years. Against that backdrop of isolation, “El Tiante” went on to become the winningest Cuban-born pitcher in major league history, and to emerge as a larger-than-life character, so inseparable from his trademark cigars that he chomped them even in postgame showers. On the mound, he was a master craftsman whose repertoire of four basic pitches (fastball, curve, slider, and changeup) combined with three angles (over-the-top, three-quarters, and sidearm) and six different speeds for the curve and change yielded 20 distinct offerings according to catcher Carlton Fisk.

I covered Tiant’s life at length — and I mean length — here at FanGraphs shortly after he passed. Now that he’s a candidate on the Classic Baseball Era Committee ballot, I invite you to (re)read that profile for the biographical details of the man’s fascinating life and career, which began with Cleveland (1964–69), and included stops with the Twins (1970), Red Sox (1971–78), Yankees (1979–80), Pirates (1981), and Angels (1982). I’m devoting this space to a more thorough review of his case and quest for Cooperstown in the context of this ballot, particularly as he’s competing for votes with one of his former teammates and contemporaries, Tommy John.

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Tiant finished his career with a collection of accolades that at first glance looks a little light for a Hall of Famer. He won two ERA titles, posting a 1.60 mark in 1968, the Year of the Pitcher, and a 1.91 mark in ’72, when after a three-season odyssey of injuries, different uniforms, and diminished effectiveness he worked his way from the bullpen to the rotation and became a Boston folk hero. While he additionally led his league in shutouts three times, he doesn’t have much additional black ink when it comes to traditional stats. He made just three All-Star teams and never won a Cy Young award, topping out with a fourth-place finish in 1974, as well as fifth- and sixth-place finishes. That’s a little misleading, however. In 1968, he accompanied that 1.60 ERA with a 21-9 record in 258 1/3 innings, but that year Denny McLain became the first pitcher in 34 years to top 30 wins, going 31-6 with a 1.96 ERA in 336 innings. It was only the year before that the Cy Young had been split into separate awards for each league, and voters could submit only one name; not until 1970 would they be allowed to submit a top three. McLain won unanimously, but it’s quite possible that Tiant would have finished second if voters had been allowed larger ballots; in the MVP voting, he tied for fifth with the Orioles’ Dave McNally (22-10, 1.95 ERA in 273 innings), with McLain (who won both MVP and Cy Young) the only pitcher above them.

As it is, Tiant scores a modest 97 on Bill James’ Hall of Fame Monitor, which measures how likely (but not how deserving) a player is to be elected by awarding points for various honors, league leads, postseason performance and so on — the things that tend to catch voters’ eyes. A score of 100 is “a good possibility,” while 130 suggests “a virtual cinch.”

Speaking of the postseason, Tiant was very good within a limited footprint, going 3-0 with a 2.86 ERA in 34 2/3 innings. The fractional two-thirds of an inning came in mopup duty with the Twins in 1970, the rest in ’75 with the Red Sox. He threw a complete-game three-hitter with just an unearned run allowed in the ALCS opener against the A’s; a Game 1 shutout against the Reds in the World Series; a four-run, 155-pitch complete game on three days of rest in Game 4 — a start that’s the stuff of legends; and then a valiant seven-inning, six-run effort in Game 6, when he faltered late but was saved by Carlton Fisk’s famous 12th-inning homer. Had the Red Sox won Game 7, this “hero of unmatched emotional majesty” (as Peter Gammons called him) might well have been the World Series MVP.

Whether or not Tiant’s basic numbers scan as Hall-worthy depends somewhat upon the era to which you’re comparing them. Pitcher wins are an imperfect stat to begin with for reasons statheads have spent the past 40-plus years explaining, but historically they’ve remained foremost in the minds of Hall voters, and so I think the following is at least somewhat instructive. Of the 53 pitchers who have collected somewhere between 210 and 249 career wins, just 15 are in the Hall, nine of whom began their major league careers before 1920. None debuted during the 1921–49 stretch; of the other six, four arrived in the 1950–65 range, namely Whitey Ford (236 wins, debuted 1950), Jim Bunning (224 wins, debuted 1955), Juan Marichal (243 wins, debuted 1960), and Catfish Hunter (224 wins, debuted 1965). The other two reached the majors over two decades later, namely John Smoltz (213 wins, debuted 1988) and Pedro Martinez (219 wins, debuted 1992).

Meanwhile, of the 38 pitchers in that 210–249 win range who aren’t enshrined, 11 debuted prior to 1920, six more in the 1921–49 period unrepresented within the first group, three in the 1950–65 range (Mickey Lolich, Jim Perry, and Tiant), 11 in the 1966–87 span, and then eight from ’88 onward, including three still active or not yet eligible (Zack Greinke, Clayton Kershaw, and Max Scherzer). If we set aside the pre-1950 group and the ones not yet eligible, that’s six out of 24 pitchers in this range who are in the Hall versus 18 outside. While none of the outsiders won a Cy Young, neither did Bunning or Marichal. Run prevention-wise, Hunter is the only Hall of Famer from this group with a lower ERA+ (104) than Tiant (114). Even so, Mark Buehrle, Tim Hudson, Kevin Brown, and Curt Schilling are all outside with an ERA+ in the 117-127 range.

Viewed from this vantage, it shouldn’t be surprising that Tiant didn’t get elected. But when he first became eligible, on the 1988 BBWAA ballot, he had reason for optimism given that Hunter — statistically the most like Tiant as expressed by his Similarity Score (another James creation) — had been elected just the previous year with a comparable win-loss record and ERA (224-166, 3.26 ERA) to Tiant’s marks of 229-172 and 3.30. The second-most similar pitcher to Tiant by that method, Bunning (224-184, 3.27 ERA), had received 70% on that same ballot. While slugger Willie Stargell was the only candidate elected via the 1988 ballot, Tiant received 30.9%, far short election but a debut hardly without promise; meanwhile, Bunning inched up to 74.2%.

Alas, both pitchers got lost in the shuffle on the 1989 ballot. Not only did Johnny Bench and Carl Yastrzemski both debut and gain easy entry with vote shares in the mid-90s, but Gaylord Perry and Fergie Jenkins also debuted, both with more robust résumés than either Tiant or Bunning in terms of statistics and honors. Both were former Cy Young winners with more than 3,000 strikeouts, with Perry owning a second Cy Young and membership in the 300-win club as well. Bunning fell back to 63.3%, while Tiant slipped to 10.5%.

First-year candidate Jim Palmer, a three-time Cy Young winner, jumped the line to gain entry in 1990, as Bunning slid to 57.9% and Tiant to 9.5%. When Jenkins and Perry were elected in 1991, Bunning aged off the ballot (he would be elected by the Veterans Committee in ’96), while Tiant sank even further, to 7.2%. He had missed his window; after Jenkins’ election, it would take until 2011 for another starter with fewer than 300 wins (Bert Blyleven) to gain entry via the writers. As “That Seventies Group” reshaped expectations for Hall starters’ credentials, Tiant never even climbed back to 20%, topping out at 18% in 2002, his final year on the ballot.

Tiant’s candidacy has fared similarly amid ever-changing ballot formats since then. In three appearances on the Veterans Committee ballots (2005, ’07, ’09), he maxed out at 25%. He’s now on his fourth appearance on an Era Committee ballot. He was considered alongside the likes of future Hall of Famers Kaat, Ron Santo, Gil Hodges, Minnie Miñoso, and Tony Oliva, plus this ballot’s Ken Boyer as part of the 2012 Golden Era Committee ballot, for candidates who made their greatest impact on the game during the 1947–72 period, as well as a similar cast that also included this ballot’s Dick Allen three years later. In both cases, he fell short of the level of support needed to have his actual vote total announced; customarily, the Hall lumps together all of the candidates below a certain (varying) threshold as “receiving fewer than x” votes to avoid embarrassing them (or their descendants) with the news of a shutout. When the Hall reconfigured the Era Committee system in 2016, Tiant wound up classified within the Modern Baseball Era (1970–87); after finishing below the threshold for vote totals on the 2018 ballot, he was bypassed for the ’20 one, a ballot that finally gave Dwight Evans and Lou Whitaker their first shots.

As you can see from the table above, Tiant’s Hall of Fame Monitor score (HOFM) is the lowest of the group, but he fares better via advanced metrics. He ranked in his league’s top 10 in WAR eight times, leading in 1968 (8.5) and finishing fourth in both ’72 and ’74. While he cracked the top 10 in ERA just four times, he did so in ERA+ seven times (including the two league leads), a reminder that toiling in hitter-friendly Fenway Park may have cost him some recognition. While he’s on the lower side of That Seventies Group in terms of S-JAWS, the adjusted version of my Hall fitness metric that tones down the impact of high-volume innings totals from earlier eras, his ranking is still impressive. The newer version jumps him from 59th overall to tied for 42nd with Palmer and Smoltz, two pitchers generally considered no-doubt Hall of Famers; meanwhile, he’s 45th in both career WAR and in adjusted peak. Voters won’t see another candidate above those rankings until Kershaw and friends (a quartet that also includes Justin Verlander) become eligible.

In introducing S-JAWS, I noted that Tiant is below the standard — the mean of all enshrined starters — but basically at the median (53.6). While he doesn’t particularly stand out next to a cohort of 300-game winners, he’s got much stronger advanced stats than Hunter (who nonetheless had a Cy Young and five championships going for him) and Kaat (a Cy Young winner but a compiler whose lengthy broadcast career helped his 2022 Era Committee election). His S-JAWS equals or surpasses some other enshrinees whose careers overlapped, such as Don Drysdale (53.7), Marichal (53.2), Bunning (51.4), Ford (45.5), Sandy Koufax (44.2), and Jack Morris (37.4), but those pitchers all have higher Monitor scores, with Bunning (98) the only other one below 100. The enshrined starters he outranks in S-JAWS mostly had shorter careers in earlier eras, where innings totals were higher and runs even more scarce.

I’ve wavered on Tiant, mainly in light of older versions of JAWS and in direct comparison to his Era Committee competition, because even beyond the numbers his case hasn’t always jumped out. On my virtual 2018 Modern Baseball ballot, I tabbed Marvin Miller, Alan Trammell, and Ted Simmons, but left my fourth slot empty because I didn’t see any of the other seven candidates (Tiant, John, Morris, Steve Garvey, Don Mattingly, Dale Murphy, and Dave Parker) as strong enough. Morris was elected, but Tiant is by far the strongest of that group by JAWS if not more traditional reckonings. If I had a do-over, factoring in his cultural importance as one of the most high-profile Cuban player success stories, from battling racism in the minors after being cut off from his family to his mid-career comeback and emergence as a folk hero, I’d consider him more strongly — but including him on that ballot would have hinged upon how much extra weight to give John for his own comeback after the pioneering elbow surgery that bears his name.

I’m still wrestling with Tiant versus John on this ballot. Tiant — who pitched in the same rotation with John in Cleveland, New York, and Anaheim — is squarely ahead on a performance basis, and in a vacuum I think he’s Hall-worthy; I’m pretty solidly in favor of any post-integration pitcher with an S-JAWS of 50 or higher. What I’m less sure of is whether Tiant will emerge as one of my top three on my virtual ballot, or whether Hall voters’ unfortunate history of waiting until after a candidate’s death to recognize them — see Santo, Miñoso, and Allen for just the latest in the litany — suggests that I should put aside my soft resistance to the 81-year-old John and prioritize voting for him while he’s still around to appreciate the honor. With three more candidates to evaluate, I have a bit longer to think about it.

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 Colorado Rockies.

Batters

Are the Rockies a good team? No, they are not. Are the Rockies even a middling team? Again, no. But things may slowly be getting better. Colorado will still have a lousy offense in 2025, but you can at least see the light at the end of a (very) long tunnel, most obviously when looking at the lineup. No one would confuse the Rockies with the Rays in terms of the cleverness with which they construct their roster, but the utter disaster that is the Kris Bryant signing does appear to have to had some kind of effect on their organizational decision-making. Since the start of 2023, they’ve done some very un-Rockies things. Jumping on the opportunity to snatch up an upside play like Nolan Jones isn’t something this team would have done in the late 2010s. The old Rockies would have found a way to play a mediocre veteran over Ezequiel Tovar, and there’s no way Brenton Doyle would have been given anywhere near enough rope to stick around for a possible breakout. Can you imagine past Rockies teams being patient with fringy prospects like Michael Toglia, giving an opportunity to a veteran journeyman like Jake Cave, or releasing Elias Díaz, a veteran catcher who made the All-Star Game the year prior, to find playing time for a prospect? Now, it hasn’t all worked out, but it at least represents some movement away from the strategies that slammed the competitive window of the last good Rockies team closed. You can’t get out of a hole until you stop digging. Read the rest of this entry »

Aaron Judge is the best hitter on the planet. Over the last three seasons combined, he has a 202 wRC+. We’re witnessing one of the best stretches by any hitter in baseball history, full stop. The fact that a player as great as Judge can struggle as much as he did this postseason (113 wRC+ in 64 plate appearances) is telling of how slumps can happen to anybody at any time, regardless of talent. You could chalk it up to randomness, and you’d probably be right, but randomness doesn’t mean there isn’t a reason for it.

For example, hitters can find their mechanics out of whack, sometimes with no explanation. When that happens, they look to address the inefficiency and get themselves back on track. Sometimes it’s bad luck, but oftentimes it’s mechanics. Those blips can explain why hitters go through ups and downs. And depending on who you are and what your hitting style is, the fluctuations can be wide.

During the World Series, when Aaron Boone was asked if he thought Judge was pressing at the plate, he made a comment that stuck with me. Boone said, “… it can always be a little bit of a mechanical thing.” It’s not exactly clear if he meant that for Judge specifically or for all hitters, but regardless, I think it illuminates the mindset of players when they work through slumps. Depending on the shape or severity, it usually pushes hitters to get in the cage to figure out what tweak will unlock the best version of themselves. With Judge in particular, any mechanical issues can completely disrupt his bat path. Let me clarify that a bit further. Read the rest of this entry »

The players at the top of the market usually determine the shape of free agency. A team in need of offensive help in the outfield isn’t going to drop $100 million on Anthony Santander until it knows Juan Soto is no longer available. And Santander probably wouldn’t sign anyway. His agent would want to try to squeeze an extra few million out of a team that, having missed on Soto, needed desperately to go home with something.

A year ago, Shohei Ohtani held up the free agency deluge, and everyone reacted like he’d gotten to the front of a long line at Starbucks and had no idea what he wanted to order. (I mocked the public opprobrium then, but having stumbled into that simile I get it now. Everyone hates the Starbucks lollygagger.) Then Scott Boras, who usually waits out the market anyway, took even longer than usual to find homes for his top three clients. So free agency didn’t get going in earnest until mid-December, and stretched into March.

Of course, that’s only the top of the market. Every year, there’s a flurry of activity that starts only days after the end of the World Series, including some fairly big names changing teams. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Los Angeles Angels. 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 »

Hitting coaches and swing coaches aren’t the same thing.

I heard those exact words, or variations thereof, a number of times this season while talking to coaches. More often that not, the words were accompanied by an opinion that too many hitters — especially young hitters — are overly focused on honing a perfect swing, whereas what they should primarily be focusing on is… well, actually hitting the baseball. That’s not to discount the importance of good swings — every hitting coach understands their value — but much more goes into squaring up pitches within a game environment. As San Diego Padres special assistant Mark Loretta put it in yesterday’s Talks Hitting interview, “Obviously, you have to swing to hit the ball, but swinging isn’t hitting.”

Here is what three MLB general managers had to say on the subject, primarily as it relates to player development.

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Ross Fenstermaker, Texas Rangers GM

The Texas Rangers named a new general manager on November 4, promoting Ross Fenstermaker from assistant GM/player development and international scouting, a role he’d held since October 2021. A University of California Davis graduate, Fenstermaker has been with the organization since 2010, initially coming on board as a baseball operations intern.

Given his PD experience — and with swings in mind — I asked Fenstermaker about the advancements the Rangers made in that area over recent seasons. Read the rest of this entry »