While it’s a major blow that Lucas Giolito is likely to be out for at least the entire 2024 season due to a double whammy of elbow injuries, the Red Sox are making efforts to stabilize their already-thin rotation for the longer term. On Thursday, righty Brayan Bello agreed to a six-year, $55 million extension with a $21 million club option for his seventh season. In a well-timed touch, the formal announcement of the deal is expected on Saturday before the Red Sox play the first of two exhibition games against the Rays in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, where Bello will be surrounded by family and friends.

The guaranteed portion of Bello’s contract covers the 2024–29 seasons, the last of which would have been his first year of free agent eligibility. The total value of the deal is the second-largest ever for a pre-arbitration pitcher, just surpassing Hunter Greene’s six-year, $53 million extension, which he signed last April with comparable service time and which also includes a club option. Spencer Strider’s similarly structured deal, which came in at $75 million for six years plus a club option, is the record. (Hat tips to ESPN’s McDaniel and the Boston Globe’s Alex Speier for those comps).

The 24-year-old Bello, whom the Red Sox signed out of the Dominican Republic on July 2, 2017 for a bonus of just $28,000, solidified his spot in the majors last year after debuting in mid-2022. Last spring training he was pencilled in as the team’s sixth starter behind Corey Kluber, Nick Pivetta, Chris Sale, James Paxton, and Garrett Whitlock, and he began the season on the injured list recovering from a bout of elbow inflammation. But as injuries and/or ineffectiveness took hold of each member of the planned starting five, he moved up in the pecking order; after making his first start of the year on April 17, he remained in the rotation for the rest of the season, though he was briefly optioned following his second start before an injury to Whitlock brought him back for good. Bello’s 28 starts and 157 innings — the most by a homegrown Red Sox starter since Clay Buchholz in 2014 — both led the staff, while none of the aforementioned five made more than 23 starts or totaled more than 107.2 innings in the rotation.

In terms of run prevention, Bello was unremarkable, with final numbers straddling league average: a 4.24 ERA (93 ERA-) and 4.54 FIP (105 FIP-). However, those numbers are inflated by a pair of bad starts at each end of the season, in which he allowed 20 runs, 10 walks, and six homers across 16.1 innings. Even with his bad season-opening starts against the Angels and Brewers, he was much stronger in the first half than the second, when his home run rate more than doubled and his strikeout and walk rates inched in the wrong directions:

Perhaps not surprisingly given that he set a career high in innings (163, including a rehab start at Triple-A Worcester, up from 154.2 between the majors and minors in 2022), Bello wore down late in the year. Via the Boston Globe’s Julian McWilliams:

Fatigue and heavy legs began to set in. His slider didn’t quite have the sharp break to deter hitters from his two dominant pitches. His four-seam fastball played more as a show-me pitch, but Bello had difficulty locating it above the zone where opponents couldn’t do damage.

While Bello’s sinker/changeup combo turned heads, he’s far from a finished product, as the numbers attest. His sinker, which averaged 95 mph, kept righties at bay (.245 AVG, .381 SLG, 19.3% whiff), but not lefties (.341 AVG, .537 SLG, 8.2% whiff), which helped to account for one of the largest platoon splits for any righty pitcher:

As you can see, this was a particular problem for Red Sox starters, with Houck — who ranked third on the team with 21 starts, helping to fill the void left by so many injuries — having an even larger split than Bello, and Pivetta cracking the top 20, too.

Meanwhile, Bello’s signature changeup befuddled hitters, who managed just a .196 average and .291 slugging percentage against the pitch while whiffing on 38.7% of their swings. Less effective were his slider and four-seamer, with batters posting a .304 AVG and .457 SLG against the former and a .310 AVG and .646 SLG against the latter, which averaged 95.5 mph but just 2,083 rpm, placing him in the fifth percentile for spin rate.

Bello and the Red Sox are quite aware that his arsenal needs refinement, with chief baseball officer Craig Breslow telling reporters on Wednesday, “We still think that his best years are ahead of him. We recognize some opportunities to further optimize the repertoire and we’re super excited about having him.” The pitcher spent the offseason working on elevating his four-seamer above the zone to change the eye level of hitters and get more chases outside the strike zone. He also threw a few sessions under the watchful eye of Hall of Famer and Red Sox special assistant Pedro Martinez, who offered Bello pointers on sharpening his slider with a different grip. To improve his stamina, he worked to strengthen his legs, not that we haven’t heard that one before.

Via Dan Szymborski, here’s a look at Bello’s ZiPS projection percentiles for 2024:

As for the extension, it’s literally pretty much right on the money according to Dan’s model:

The ZiPS contract recommendation for the first six years of that deal is $50 million, so while the Red Sox see him as a potential no. 1 starter, Bello doesn’t have to be much better than average to match that valuation. He could wind up delivering a whole lot more value if he approaches his ceiling, but as a hard-throwing young hurler who’s years away from what he hopes will be his biggest payday, he’s got protection if things go south.

For the Red Sox, this is a positive move following a dreary and disappointing winter. Despite chairman Tom Werner’s assertion that the team would go “full throttle” in its efforts to improve after dismissing chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom, Boston has signed just two free agents to major league deals, Giolito (two years, $38.5 million) and Liam Hendriks (two years, $10 million). The former may be headed for Tommy John surgery, while the latter is expected to miss most or all of the season recovering from his own August 2023 Tommy John procedure. The team did make some trades, most notably dealing away Alex Verdugo, acquiring Tyler O’Neill, and swapping Sale for Vaughn Grissom, but that’s hardly a radical makeover for a team that has missed the playoffs in four of the past five seasons and projects to finish last in the AL East for the third straight year.

What particularly stands out about this Bello move is that the Red Sox have just one other pre-arb or arb-eligible player signed to an extension (Whitlock), which is a rather scathing indictment of their player development pipeline — though they did lock up Rafael Devers last year as he entered his final year of arb eligibility. This is at least a step in the right direction, and hardly an exorbitant amount of money. It won’t hamper them the way that, say, getting 11 starts from Sale from 2020–22 at a cost of about $71 million did. Which isn’t to say that Bello’s going to be as good as Sale, but let’s also remember that the White Sox (and later the Red Sox) got the best years of the wiry lefty’s career under a five-year, $32.5 million extension (2013–17) that had two club options tacked on.

Indeed, the Red Sox’s failure to develop quality homegrown pitching has been a particularly sore spot that has doomed multiple regimes. Again, it had been nine years since a pitcher they produced — as a draft pick or as an international free agent — threw as many innings in a season as Bello did in 2023. If Red Sox are to compete in the AL East while trying to live with midsized payrolls, they need to grow pitchers from within and hope some of them flourish to the point of being worth building around. They believe Bello can be one of them, and well, it’s a start.

Spring training is a reliably terrible time for injury news. After a whole winter of not playing (though still training, of course), ramping back up to game speed inevitably creates new injuries or aggravates old ones. This process is always worse for pitchers, because their job is inherently more injury prone. I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know in this introduction.

Here’s something you might not have known, and certainly didn’t know before this week: The Boston Red Sox look to be hit hardest by this yearly attrition. As Jeff Passan reported, Lucas Giolito is probably going to miss the entire season with an elbow injury. He has both a partially torn UCL and a flexor strain, a double whammy that almost always leads to surgery. That’s a tough injury for a team that absolutely couldn’t afford it.

Oh, sure, other teams have suffered unfortunate injuries to top starting pitchers. Justin Verlander will begin the season on the IL with shoulder soreness. Sonny Gray tweaked his hamstring and might miss Opening Day as a result. Kevin Gausman is dealing with shoulder fatigue and his timeline for returning is murky. The list goes on and on. But Giolito’s injury looks more severe and will likely require a much longer recovery time that the other ones will, and that puts Boston in a particular bind. Read the rest of this entry »

Even with an extra day in February this year, Matt Chapman remains unsigned, his free agency having lingered past the start of exhibition season. Admittedly, the soon-to-be-31-year-old third baseman is coming off of an uneven season marked by a late slump related to a finger injury, but he’s been reliably productive throughout his seven-year career, with good-to-great defense bolstering his value at the plate. Meanwhile, his former (?) team, the Blue Jays — who reportedly offered him a nine-figure extension before he hit free agency — have cobbled together an uninspiring solution at third base.

Chapman isn’t the only remaining free agent who could provide a significant upgrade, but he’s by far the best position player remaining on the shelves, and the combination of his absence and the Blue Jays’ needs stands out as I turn to the American League edition of my roundup of the most glaring holes on contending teams (the National League edition is here). For this exercise, I’ve highlighted the spots that per our projections — which combine ZiPS and Steamer as well as playing time estimates from RosterResource — fall below a combined 2.0 WAR on teams whose Playoff Odds sit at or above 25%.

Why 2.0 WAR? That’s the rough equivalent of average play across a full season, but because of the general tendency to overproject playing time and keep even the weakest teams with positive WARs at each position (in reality over 10% of them will finish in the red), our position player Depth Chart values at the team level are inflated by about 20%. That is, instead of having a total of 1,000 WAR projected across the 30 teams, and 57% of that (570 WAR) allocated to position players, our Depth Chart values currently add up to about 682 WAR. Thus, I am discounting the team values that you see on the Depth Chart pages by 20%, and focusing on the lowest-ranked contenders among those whose adjusted values fall below that 2.0 WAR threshold. The individual WAR values cited will remain as they are on the Depth Chart pages, however, and it’s worth noting that many of the players here — particularly youngsters with shorter track records, including some from our Top 100 Prospects list — don’t project particularly well but still have considerable upside. Read the rest of this entry »

Direct Links (Please see full job postings below):

Developer, Baseball Systems
Analyst, Baseball Analytics

Developer, Baseball Systems

Location: Boston, MA, United States
Status: Full-Time / On-Site

DEPARTMENT OVERVIEW:
Members of the Baseball Systems Team at the Boston Red Sox are focused on designing, building, and refining the software and data pipelines used within Baseball Operations. These tools and applications are an integral part of the decision-making process, are directly integrated in the workflows of all departments within Baseball Operations, and provide an efficient, consistent, and accessible experience when interacting with our internal data sources and applications.

POSITION OVERVIEW:
The Developer, Baseball Systems position will be a member of the baseball operations software development team, and is responsible for the design, development, and support, of all baseball systems. This individual will work closely with members of baseball operations to understand business requirements that drive the analysis, design, and development of quality baseball systems and solutions. This position is focused heavily on front-end development, and will collaborate closely with colleagues on the software development team and baseball operations personnel from all departments.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Create leading-edge baseball solutions together with the software development team and others on new and existing baseball systems
• Contribute to the design and implementation of the software architecture and embrace a software engineering mindset
• Participate in key phases of the software development process of critical baseball applications, including requirements gathering, analysis, effort estimation, technical investigation, software design and implementation, testing, bug fixing, and quality assurance
• Responsible for the design and development of complex web-based user interfaces, web services, back-end logic, and other aspects of web applications
• Actively participate with other software developers in design reviews, code reviews, and other best practices
• Work closely at times with baseball analysts to design and implement solutions to their data needs
• Respond to and resolve technical problems and issues in a timely manner
• Identify and implement creative solutions for technical challenges

CHARACTERISTICS/QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science, Software Engineering, Computer Engineering, or a related field
• 0-2 years of front-end development experience building web applications with frameworks such as Angular or React, and experience developing with Typescript, CSS, HTML, C#, ServiceStack, T-SQL, or similar technologies, is required.
• Experience with relational database design and development in SQL Server, Snowflake, MySQL, PostgreSQL, or similar technologies, is required.
• Experience building front-end visualizations using D3, chart.js, or similar, is a plus
• Experience developing with cloud technologies from Azure, GCP, or AWS are a plus
• Experience integrating systems and data using third-party APIs and services are a plus
• Ability to work autonomously and as a team in a fast paced environment
• High level of attention to detail with the ability to multi-task effectively
• Comfortable working remotely when required and using Zoom, Teams, Slack, Trello, and other tools to communicate with all team members
• High degree of professionalism and ability to maintain confidential information
• Excellent organizational and time management skills
• An understanding of baseball, common terms, and analytic measures, is a plus

At the Boston Red Sox and Fenway Sports Management, we go beyond embracing diversity. We’re committed to living by our values, strengthening our community, and creating a workplace where people genuinely feel like they belong.

Too often, job seekers don’t apply to positions because they don’t meet every qualification. If you love this role and are great at what you do, we encourage you to apply. Your unique skills and experiences might just be what we’ve been looking for.

Prospective employees will receive consideration without discrimination based on race, religious creed, color, sex, age, national origin, handicap, disability, military/veteran status, ancestry, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression or protected genetic information.

To Apply:
To apply, please follow this link.

Analyst, Baseball Analytics

Location: Boston, MA, United States
Status: Full-Time / On-Site

DEPARTEMENT OVERVIEW:
Baseball Analytics supports the decision-making processes throughout Baseball Operations, including Player Valuation, Player Development, Major League Strategic Information, and Sports Science. Core responsibilities include predictive modeling, long-term research, report creation, and delivering the output of one’s work in a clear and digestible manner.

POSITION OVERVIEW:
The Boston Red Sox are seeking an Analyst for the team’s Baseball Analytics department. The role will support all areas of Baseball Operations while working closely with Director of Baseball Analytics, and our team of analysts.

This is an opportunity to work in a fast-paced, intellectually curious environment and to impact player personnel and strategic decision making.

RESPONSIBILITIES

• Statistical modeling and quantitative analysis of a variety of data sources, for the purpose of player evaluation, strategic decision-making, decision analysis, etc.
• Effectively present analyses through the use of written reports and data visualization to disseminate insights to members of the Baseball Operations leadership.
• Maintain working expertise of leading-edge analytics, including publicly available research and novel statistical approaches, in order to recommend new or emerging techniques, technologies, models, and algorithms.
• Other projects and related duties as directed by the Director, Baseball Analytics, and other members of Baseball Operations leadership.

CHARACTERISTICS/QUALIFICATIONS

• Bachelor’s degree in an analytical field such as statistics, predictive analytics, data science, engineering, applied math, physics, quantitative social sciences, computer science, computer vision, or operations research.
• Masters, PhD, or equivalent experience in one of the aforementioned fields preferred.
• Advanced understanding of statistical methods or machine learning techniques.
• Proficiency with modern database technologies including SQL.
• Demonstrated experience with programming languages (e.g., R or Python).
• Demonstrated ability to communicate technical ideas to non-technical audiences using data visualization.

At the Boston Red Sox and Fenway Sports Management, we go beyond embracing diversity. We’re committed to living by our values, strengthening our community, and creating a workplace where people genuinely feel like they belong.

Too often, job seekers don’t apply to positions because they don’t meet every qualification. If you love this role and are great at what you do, we encourage you to apply. Your unique skills and experiences might just be what we’ve been looking for.

Prospective employees will receive consideration without discrimination based on race, religious creed, color, sex, age, national origin, handicap, disability, military/veteran status, ancestry, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression or protected genetic information.

To Apply:
To apply, please follow this link.

The content in this posting was created and provided solely by the Boston Red Sox.

Minor League Assistant, Baseball Systems

Location: Fort Myers, FL, United States
Status: Full-Time

DEPARTMENT OVERVIEW:
Members of the Baseball Systems team at the Boston Red Sox are focused on designing, building, and refining the software and data pipelines used within Baseball Operations. These tools and applications are an integral part of the decision-making process, are directly integrated in the workflows of all departments within Baseball Operations, and provide an efficient, consistent, and accessible experience when interacting with our internal data sources and applications.

POSITION OVERVIEW:
As the Minor League Assistant, Baseball Systems you will represent the Baseball Systems Front Office in Ft. Myers, responsible for minor league video, including collection, organization, distribution, and management. You will improve and advance the video process, including potential involvement of new software and hardware. In addition, you’ll be a key resource for Player Development staff in day-to-day needs related to the effective use of technology and video assets. This individual is expected to become proficient in the operation of all baseball technology across the minor league system. This includes Blast, Trackman, Portable Trackman, Camera Systems, KinaTrax, Hawk-Eye, and streaming video assets. Work with your supervisor to oversee the training of affiliate associates. Lastly, the Assistant will contribute in a supporting role to data engineering efforts that work toward complete and accurate data collection, developing new skills in support of these efforts.

RESPONSIBILITIES:

• Coordinate and oversee all Minor League video collection and distribution. Monitor video collection and ensure that it is up-to-date.
• Manage minor league BATS system, keeping the central database up to date.
• Manage affiliate video and computer equipment.
• Ensure video is easily accessible locally at the affiliates for coaches and over the internet for remote staff.
• Oversee creation of player video comparisons for priority players at least once per season (and as needed) with affiliate interns and Player Development coordinators.
• Proactively provide specialty video (both solicited and unsolicited) to coordinating staff, and ensure proactive video production by affiliate interns.
• Manage custom video sharing using BATS with other organizations to build-out our library of available video.
• Be a resource to Player Development staff to a reasonable extent as needed with technologies.
• Assist in the managing of the Affiliate Technology Associates. Assist in the training of associates in the use of all technologies.
• Travel to each affiliate and the academy in the DR at the beginning of the season to ensure all technology and video assets are operating smoothly.
• Provide support for technical issues.
• Work collaboratively with sports science personnel with new and existing technology.
• Become proficient in the operation and maintenance of baseball technology devices and manage the devices across the minor league system.
• Assist in implementing the technology used throughout the minor leagues, including Blast sensors, Trackman, Portable Trackman, Edgertronic High Speed Cameras, KinaTrax motion capture, Hawk-Eye, HitTrax, Trajekt Arc pitching machines, and other technologies.
• Manage the operation of KinaTrax motion-capture systems in the JBP cage and JBP stadium, as well as train interns on the operation of KinaTrax in JBP and at applicable affiliates.
• Manage the operation of the Hawk-Eye ball tracking and motion-capture system across all affiliates.
• Working with our Technology Specialist, respond to and resolve technical problems and issues in a timely manner across all minor league affiliates and in the DR.
• Maintain the streaming assets at all minor league affiliates and in the DR and insure games and supporting data are available to other baseball systems.
• Manage and contribute to the discovery of existing and emerging baseball technologies.
• Gain familiarity with data engineering processes and tools and contribute in a supporting role on a daily basis by performing the following:
• Using development tools to review the quality of Trackman and Hawk-Eye pitch data
• Becoming experienced with SQL to update database tables and make data corrections
• Learning Python to develop new processes in support of data engineering efforts

CHARACTERISTICS/QUALIFICATIONS:

• Excellent computer and device troubleshooting skills and ability to use Remote Desktop and other remote access technologies.
• Experience setting up and configuring equipment such as servers, computers, cameras, and other devices, is a plus.
• Experience with SQL, Python, R, or other languages is a plus.
• Up to 2 years of experience in baseball or another sport.
• Ability to work autonomously and as a team in a fast paced environment
• Strong interpersonal and communication skills, and an ability to establish and maintain effective working relations with those encountered in the course of work
• High level of attention to detail with the ability to multi-task effectively
• High degree of professionalism and ability to maintain confidential information
• Excellent organizational and time management skills required 

At the Boston Red Sox and Fenway Sports Management, we go beyond embracing diversity. We’re committed to living by our values, strengthening our community, and creating a workplace where people genuinely feel like they belong.

Too often, job seekers don’t apply to positions because they don’t meet every qualification. If you love this role and are great at what you do, we encourage you to apply. Your unique skills and experiences might just be what we’ve been looking for.

Prospective employees will receive consideration without discrimination based on race, religious creed, color, sex, age, national origin, handicap, disability, military/veteran status, ancestry, sexual orientation, gender identity/expression or protected genetic information.

To Apply:
To apply, please follow this link.

The content in this posting was created and provided solely by the Boston Red Sox.

In terms of rankings and projection, Mick Abel is much the same pitcher he was 24 months ago. When the now-22-year-old right-hander was featured in February 2022 during our annual Prospect Week, he was No. 1 in the Philadelphia Phillies system and No. 20 on our Top 100. Fast forward to the present, and he is No. 2 in the Philadelphia Phillies system and No. 22 on our Top 100. As Eric Longenhagen explained in his recent writeup, “Abel didn’t have an especially good 2023… [but] still has most all of the ingredients needed to be an impact starter, he just isn’t totally baked yet.”

How has the 2019 first-rounder out of Beaverton, Oregon’s Jesuit High School matured the most since our conversation two years ago? I asked him that question at Philadelphia’s spring training facility in Clearwater, Florida on Friday.

“I’d say it’s the separation of over-the-rubber and over-the-plate mentality, knowing how to distinguish between the two,” replied Abel, who had a 27.5% strikeout rate but also a 13.5% walk rate in 108-and-two-third innings with Double-A Reading last year. “Whether it’s in the bullpen or on the game-mound, knowing when and how to make adjustments without getting too deep in my head about it.

“Staying more direct and knowing that if I get too long with my arm action in back I’m going to be a little later to the plate,“ Abel said when asked to elaborate on the actual mechanics. “I want to make sure that everything is on time going down the hill.” Read the rest of this entry »

When Adam Jones compared his former Orix Buffaloes teammate Masataka Yoshida to Juan Soto, he quickly established the lofty expectations that Yoshida would face as he made the transition to the major leagues. The comparison painted a clear picture of the type of batter Yoshida was in Japan. For all of Soto’s success on contact, his truly elite skill is his plate discipline, and the same was true for Yoshida. In five of his seven seasons in Japan, he ran a walk rate higher than his strikeout rate while posting a 176 wRC+ during his career in his home country. In his final year in NPB, he had the second-lowest strikeout rate and second-highest walk rate among qualified batters.

The transition from Asian leagues to the majors has usually been more difficult for batters than for pitchers. High velocity is the greatest concern, but the quality of breaking and offspeed offerings is much higher as well. For Yoshida, his pitch recognition skills seemed like they’d help him overcome these common problems, even if his overall plate discipline suffered a bit. While he wasn’t able to reach the heights of his career in Japan, he did manage to record a 109 wRC+ in his first big league season, though his 0.6 WAR was certainly lower than the Red Sox were expecting when they signed him to a huge five-year deal. His overall value was hurt by some ugly defense in left field; then again, his glove was never his strength. More concerning was that his approach at the plate worsened as the season went on, leading to a dreadful final two months that greatly diminished what otherwise would have been a successful rookie year.

Through the first three months of the season, everything looked like it was working out; he was posting a 129 wRC+ with 8.7% walk rate and an 11.3% strikeout rate. The plate discipline looked like it had made the transition without any fuss, and he was hitting for some power to top it all off. Unfortunately, over the next three months, things took a turn for the worse, dragging his overall line down to where it ended the season. It’s pretty easy to see what the issue was when you look at his rolling strikeout and walk rates during the season.

From July 1 through the end of the season, he took just seven walks total and his strikeout rate jumped to 17.0%. He continued to produce in July, even as he began to lose his plate discipline, but everything crumbled over the final two months, when he slashed .257/.276/.371 and had a 68 wRC+ across 181 plate appearances.

So what happened to his legendary plate discipline skills that drew comparisons to those of Soto during the second half of the season? Looking under the hood, it seems like he started pressing once he started struggling. When you compare his underlying plate discipline metrics from his time in Japan to his rookie season, you can pretty clearly see where things went wrong.

In Japan, Yoshida’s low swing rates were the backbone of his approach. The qualified batter with the lowest swing rate in the majors last year was Yoshida’s World Baseball Classic teammate Lars Nootbaar (35.3%), followed by Soto (35.7%). At his peak in Japan, Yoshida approached that level of selectivity. This, combined with a low chase rate and high contact percentages on pitches in and out of the zone, was Yoshida’s recipe for success.

During the first half of last season when his plate discipline was still intact, his swing and chase rates looked similar to what he had been running in Japan. Everything trended the wrong way during the second half of the season; he became much more aggressive and started chasing pitches out of the zone at a far higher rate than he had in years.

It’s worth noting that fatigue certainly contributed to Yoshida’s struggles. The schedule in the majors is far more grueling than it is in NPB, where all the games are played in the same time zone and the longest flight takes about 3 1/2 hours. Yoshida was gassed by the end of June, right around the time he lost his approach.

When we’re analyzing a hitter’s plate discipline, looking at swing, chase, and contact rates are usually the most commonly cited metrics because they’re publicly available, but they’re a pretty blunt tool when trying to discern a hitter’s swing decisions. Thankfully, Robert Orr of Baseball Prospectus has done some fantastic work to illuminate this problem. Back in November, he introduced his SEAGER metric, which looks at expected swing or take run values and grades a player’s swing decisions based on what they actually did. It has two components: the rate of hittable pitches taken, which measures aggression; and the rate of bad pitches taken, which measures selectivity.

As you’d expect from the name of the metric, Corey Seager’s swing decisions grade out incredibly well. Juan Soto also does well via this methodology, sitting ninth in baseball in SEAGER and first in selectivity. Based on his reputation and his swing, chase, and contact rates in Japan, you’d expect Yoshida to have a high-selectivity, low-aggression SEAGER profile. That’s not exactly what the data bears out.

Yoshida’s SEAGER was quite poor because he wasn’t aggressive enough on hittable pitches to compensate for his lower-than-expected selectivity, which was roughly league average. For comparison’s sake, I included Soto’s SEAGER metrics above just to marvel at how incredible his ability to lay off bad pitches is.

When we look at the rolling graphs of Yoshida’s SEAGER components, we get a much clearer picture of what happened during his season. First his selection tendency:

We can see that Yoshida was extremely selective early in the season, up near the Soto range, but that cratered as the season went on and only barely recovered by the end of the year. His discerning eye at the plate was supposed to be the elite skill that would help him make the transition to the major leagues. That was the case for the first few months before he lost his way.

His rolling rate of hittable pitches taken doesn’t look much better:

As expected, Yoshida was pretty passive to start out the season, but he became more aggressive as he started to slump and never really recovered. Swinging at hittable pitches more often would be a good thing in a vacuum, but when taken into context with all the other things that were trending the wrong way during Yoshida’s second half, I’m not so sure it helped. Plate discipline is a fine balance between identifying bad pitches to take and being aggressive on good pitches to hit. Yoshida’s strengths seem like they’re more focused on the former, and when he became more aggressive, he threw that balance out of whack.

There were plenty of knock-on effects as Yoshida’s plate discipline deteriorated. Early on in the season, he was producing above average contact quality, helping him post a .174 ISO through the end of June. That metric dropped to .138 during the second half of the season as his contact quality collapsed along with his approach.

Despite seeing some decent results on balls in play in July, his contact quality took a steep dive in that month. Only a high BABIP and a couple of lucky home runs were able to buoy his production. His contact quality improved slightly in August, but he was hitting his batted balls at less than ideal angles, which led to far too many outs. Things got really interesting in September. His batted ball quality rebounded significantly with his highest expected wOBA on contact of the season coming during that month. Unfortunately, his actual results on those batted balls lagged well behind his expected stats. On top of that, he made far less contact that month, when he struck out 23.5% of the time. Still, it’s encouraging to see that his contact quality improved during the final month of the season, even if his discipline hadn’t recovered.

With this additional context, we can paint a pretty clear picture of Yoshida’s season. He started the season with his established approach and things were going well for him. In July, that approach started to unravel as he started swinging much more aggressively. His results on balls in play boosted his batting line that month, but everything collapsed once those hits stopped falling in. When he started slumping, he abandoned his extremely selective approach and his plate discipline never recovered. By the end of the year, his approach was completely unrecognizable from what it was in Japan.

With a full year of experience in the majors now under his belt, Yoshida has a better understanding of what to expect moving forward. His offseason training program was designed to better prepare him for the grind of a major league season, and being less fatigued should make it easier for him to return to form the next time he struggles. As he heads into his second year in the majors, he will need to lean on his excellent pitch recognition skills to sustain his success and pull him out of a slump when he goes cold. And when he inevitably scuffles again, he’ll need to remember why those skills are so critical to his success, so he doesn’t lose himself again.

Worried that civilization is going to come to an end this year? Fear not. The Red Sox and Brewers have both made big bets that life will go on in 2025. Boston has signed reliever Liam Hendriks to a two-year, $10 million contract with a mutual option for 2026. In Milwaukee, Brewers ace Brandon Woodruff, who was non-tendered in November, will remain a Brewers ace for the time being; Jon Heyman reported Monday morning that Woodruff and the team were in agreement on their own two-year contract, the terms of which are as yet undisclosed.

Based on their performance over the past several seasons, both Hendriks and Woodruff would probably be in line to make way more money on much longer-term deals if either one were expected to pitch in 2024. Woodruff made only 11 starts in 2023 and underwent shoulder surgery in October. Hendriks underwent treatment for non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma last offseason; cancer defeated, he returned to the field in May. His comeback was as short-lived as it was widely celebrated, though; less than two weeks after his first outing of 2023, Hendriks’ elbow started barking. The dreaded forearm strain turned into the even-more-dreaded torn UCL, and the avuncular Australian had Tommy John surgery in early August. Read the rest of this entry »

Kyle Teel is well positioned as Boston’s catcher of the future. Drafted 14th overall by the Red Sox out of the University of Virginia last summer, the backstop, who turned 22 last week, enters his first full professional season as the fifth-ranked prospect in Boston’s farm system and no. 80 on our Top 100. According to our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen, Teel “presents a well-rounded overall profile” that includes “a fabulous offensive résumé.”

His 2023 numbers were certainly exemplary. Teel slashed .407/.475/.655 with 13 home runs in his junior year at UVA, helping earn him first-team All-American accolades and rocketing him up draft boards. Upon reaching pro ball, his left-handed stroke produced a .363/.483/.495 slash line and a 173 wRC+ in 114 plate appearances across three minor league levels, his last stop being Double-A Portland.

Defense is, of course, a major responsibility for catchers. Last month, when Teel was at Fenway Park for Boston’s rookie development program, I spoke with him about his preparation and setup behind the plate, his throwing, and his offensive profile.

———

David Laurila: Catching is a science as well as an art. With that in mind, what role does data play in what you do defensively?

Kyle Teel: “I really like data when it comes to how pitchers’ stuff moves, and heat maps on what to throw to certain guys at certain times. That’s obviously beneficial, but there is also nothing like the feel of the game. You need to be using your eyes and seeing what you can take in, in the moment. But the data is definitely important. Before every game, I look at what pitchers like to throw, their tendencies in certain counts, and things like that. That’s both as a catcher and when I’m hitting.”

Laurila: Do you think like a catcher when you’re in the batter’s box?

Teel: “I kind of do. There are benefits to doing that, just knowing how pitchers work and what guys tend to throw in certain counts. Overall, I would say that having a good feel at the plate and calling pitches is very similar.”

Laurila: How do you balance data and instincts? Read the rest of this entry »

Roman Anthony arguably has the highest upside in the Boston Red Sox system. Three months shy of his 20th birthday, the left-handed-hitting outfielder is No. 14 on our recently-released Top 100, and in the words of Eric Longenhagen, he “has the offensive foundation (plate discipline and contact) to be a top five prospect if he can more readily get to his power in games.”

Getting to more of his in-game power was an organizationally-driven goal throughout a first full professional season that saw the 2022 second-rounder begin in Low-A Salem and finish in Double-A Portland. Progress was made. Of the 14 home runs Anthony swatted over 491 plate appearances, all but one came from mid-June onward. Learning to lift was the key and, according to the youngster that came not from an overhaul of his mechanics, but rather from subtle adjustments.

“At the beginning of the year, I was pulling it on the ground a little more than I would like to,” acknowledged Anthony, who was 200-plus plate appearances into the season when he went yard for a second time. “But I worked with my hitting coaches and eventually it clicked. It was really just minor tweaks. It’s not as though I was redoing my swing, or anything like that. I still have pretty much the same swing I’ve always had.”

According to Red Sox farm director Brian Abraham, Anthony’s adjustments were crafted primarily in a batting cage with simple, yet creative, drill work. Read the rest of this entry »