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 »

In baseball, there are two sounds that can’t quite be matched: the pop of the catcher’s glove after a sizzling fastball, and the sound of the ball being crushed by the meaty part of the barrel. No one is more familiar with the latter than Giancarlo Stanton. In the Statcast era, no hitter has consistently hit the ball as hard as he has; his otherworldly bat speed leads to some of the most impressive batted balls you’ll ever see.

Stanton’s outlier ability to hit the ball like it came out of a rocket will always raise his floor as a hitter compared to the average player. If you hit the ball like he does, even pounding it on the ground isn’t a huge concern. That doesn’t mean Stanton is impervious, however. You can’t post an exit velocity if you swing through the ball, and if he were to start making less contact, it would be a problem. In 2022, Stanton’s hit tool looked closer to that of Joey Gallo than Aaron Judge, which led to his worst full season in pinstripes by wRC+, and perhaps since his rookie year all the way back in 2010. His .211 batting average and .293 on-base percentage were both more than 50 points off his career marks. And while that decline could be partially attributed to Stanton entering his mid-30s, that’s not the only factor at play here.

Stanton’s season was marred by injury. He constantly dealt with lower leg injuries; ankle tendinitis, a calf strain, and a bruised foot all messed with the way he interacted with the ground, and it showed at the plate. As a rotational athlete, your ability to exude force into the ground is directly tied to the stability of your lower half. When a hitter’s stride foot lands, it sends energy into the ground that shoots back up for the lower half to absorb. If you stomp on the ground, there is a wave of energy that recoils through your legs and hips that you must control if you want to transfer that energy into your swing. Any hitter’s ability to do this would be disrupted by a single lower leg injury. That only worsens when you deal with injuries on both sides of your body like Stanton did, which can lead to multiple energy leakages that completely throw off your swing. For Stanton, those can be seen in the atypical movement of his feet before and during his rotation.

I’m going to show you exactly what that looked like, but first, let’s detail some of the ways Stanton struggled relative to previous seasons from a statistical perspective:

Stanton’s drop in performance can be seen in his increased whiff rate in the zone and general performance against fastballs. A general rule of thumb is that great hitters crush fastballs. If a pitcher makes a mistake with a heater in the middle of the plate, they will pay the price. That becomes more difficult as velocity rises, but that’s where the great hitters set themselves apart from good hitters. Stanton has never been one to be overwhelmed by high velocity; in fact, he’s always been well above league average. But his injuries compromised his connection to the ground, and as a result, he struggled. The table below details his performance against high-velocity fastballs as a Yankee:

Stanton has dealt with soft tissue injuries for his entire tenure in New York, but he has still hit when he’s been on the field, including against high-velocity fastballs. But his .294 wOBA against this group of pitches was .017 points below league average and a big drop from his .359 mark in 2021, which was .049 points higher than the league average. This regression can be zoomed out on a more macro level, too. Stanton’s performance in the heart of the zone against fastballs also changed from 2021 to ’22:

There are a few takeaways from this. First, the drop in xwOBA in 2022 tells us Stanton’s expected stats were significantly worse than previous years on fastballs in the heart. He managed to keep his wOBA relatively high, but it seems like there was at least a little bit of luck involved. Next, when we focus in on in-zone fastballs when Stanton was behind in the count, you can see a precipitous drop from previous seasons. Like any great hitter, he would make pitchers pay for mistakes in the heart of the plate even when he was behind in the count, but that wasn’t the case last year. And while he is naturally a guess hitter, he seemed to rely too heavily on those guesses, and it resulted in many poor at-bats. A hitter of this caliber missing fastballs in the heart of the zone this much when behind in the count is a tell-tale sign that something is wrong. Those are the types of things you do when your body feels different and you can’t get to pitches you’ve always crushed.

To understand what I’m talking about, let’s run through a sequence where Stanton just looked off. This at-bat is from mid-July, after he suffered a right calf strain in late May and right around the time when he began missing time due to his left ankle. He started 2–0 on two fastballs out of the zone, then got three straight in the heart of the plate:

Pitch 3 (2–0 count)

Pitch 4 (2–1 count)

Pitch 5 (2–2 count)

This is a perfect in-game example of him letting fastball mistakes go by. One of the reasons Stanton has been such an incredible hitter for so long is that he creates his bat speed with minimal movement; his swing is shockingly quiet for somebody so large. On his two swings in advantage counts, his feet are dancing, especially in the first. He has a natural scissor kick from a closed stride, but it looks like he is losing grip on the ground before his swing gets going. Every hitter guesses or cheats at some point in an at-bat, but if they’re wrong, they can usually fight off a center-cut pitch with two strikes. Despite another fastball in the heart of the plate, Stanton couldn’t get a swing off. When your lower half isn’t properly connected to the ground, it can be difficult to rotate! As he took the pitch down the plate, you can see him enter extreme ankle eversion (ankle collapses inwards). Stand up and try to take a swing like that. Not so comfortable, right?

To illustrate that point further, here are a few swings from earlier in the season when Stanton’s feet are near neutral through the entire swing.

May 12

May 16

May 21

Each of these swings resulted in batted balls with exit velocities over 114 mph, a typical range for Stanton. But more importantly, his movements were quiet from his knees down. Relative to the swings against Cincinnati, there is no exaggeration of movement in any one part of his lower legs. In his home run swing against Dylan Cease, he uses his typical toe tap on his front foot and subtle scissor kick in the back foot to stay closed. There is no back foot slide like in July. These are fully healthy swings where Stanton maintains his connection to the ground from the beginning of rotation through contact.

Unfortunately for him, the compensations he showed in July only got worse through the end of the year.

August 29

September 24

October 1

From August on, Stanton was healthy enough to be on the field as other Yankees hitters faced injuries of their own, but he was clearly not close to 100%. These three swings can either be tied to his injured left ankle being unable to stay connected to the ground, or to his back foot not being strong enough to compensate for the energy leakage in his lead foot/ankle. In the first swing, his back leg slides way out because it’s attempting to do all the work for his body. The second swing is weeks later; he made an adjustment but still leaked into the same early ankle eversion in his back leg that we saw in July. It’s not impossible to hit like this, but when you’re struggling with stabilization, it’s not ideal.

His swing in early August is the most extreme example of how early ankle eversion can impact your lower half. It caused him to lose his back leg entirely, along with his posture. Those movements cut off his swing path, leading to his barrel being unable to cover the outer half. If you go back to Stanton’s swings from earlier in the year, you can see the best ones all come with athletic, straight posture. He’s a big dude, and to have success, he needs a stable base to control his body. This is obvious for any athlete, but as players age and lose a little bit of baseball skill, health and body control become more and more important. I’m not necessarily saying Stanton is losing skill; his first two months show that he seems to be okay. But he might be entering a stage of his career where he has less room for error and injuries like this compromise his skills and expose the biggest hole in his profile: swing and miss. I’m sure Stanton will be conscious of this heading into 2023.

Injuries have plagued Stanton for a while now, but as he heads into his mid-30s, health is more important than it’s ever been. His swing needs to stay quiet to make the most of his outlier strength. None of these injuries were major long-term concerns, but they were enough to compromise his swing and performance. Assuming he enters 2023 fully recovered from these issues, there is no question in my mind he still has the skills to deliver a 130–140 wRC+ season each year. But he will need to be conscious of how any injury impacts his swing as he enters the latter half of his career.

I’ll level with you: We’re squarely in baseball’s dead period. That’s fine. There are plenty of other sports going on, there’s more to life than sports, the great outdoors beckons, and so on. But this is a baseball website, not a winter activities website or even a football one. I’m actually in Canada on a ski trip as I put the finishing touches on this article, having watched the NFL playoffs this weekend. But I’m not here to talk about that! I’m here to make up a contract extension for one of my favorite players, and you’ll just have to humor me. (Though if you want to banter about skiing, might I suggest my weekly chats?)

That’s right: let’s talk about Harrison Bader, the once exuberantly-coiffed Yankees outfielder. The Bronx Bombers swapped Jordan Montgomery for Bader at the trade deadline last year in a move that neither team’s fanbase was in love with. Both players then turned around and contributed exactly what their team was hoping for – quality innings for Montgomery and lol-how-did-he-catch-that defense for Bader. Now, I think the Yankees should stop thinking of Bader as a two-year commitment and put a ring on it – or at least, a multi-year contract. Read the rest of this entry »

Clayton Beeter was a promising pitching prospect in the Los Angeles Dodgers organization when he was first featured here at FanGraphs midway through the 2021 season. He’s now a promising prospect in the Yankees’ system, having been acquired by New York early last August in exchange for Joey Gallo. A 24-year-old right-hander whom the Dodgers drafted 66th overall in 2020 out of Texas Tech University, Beeter is coming off of a season where he logged a not-so-impressive 4.56 ERA at a pair of Double-A stops, but also 129 strikeouts in 77 innings. Possessing a power arsenal, he’s a hurler with a high ceiling.

Command has been Beeter’s bugaboo. The Fort Worth native walked 5.4 batters per nine innings last year, and his career mark as a professional is 4.7. Much for that reason, our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen feels that Beeter profiles best out of the bullpen, where he would feature a fastball that “has big carry thanks to its backspinning axis.” Eric has likened the action of Beeter’s best pitch to the one thrown by Tampa Bay Rays reliever Nick Anderson.

Beeter believes that he can remain a starter, and the Yankees appear to want to give him that opportunity. They loosened the reins on his pitch count after trading for him, and not only was that welcome news for the young right-hander, but it also had a positive effect on his walk rate. After issuing 35 free passes in 51.2 innings with Double-A Tulsa, Beeter issued just 11 walks in 25.1 innings with Double-A Somerset.

Beeter discussed the deal that brought him to Yankees, and what it could mean for his future, at the end of the 2022 season.

———

David Laurila: Let’s start with the trade. How surprised were you?

Clayton Beeter: “Everyone knows it’s a possibility to get traded, but no one really sees that actually happening. That’s kind of the way it was for me. My pitching coach with the Dodgers had asked me the week before if the deadline was weighing on me, and I was like, ‘Not really, I don’t think I’m getting traded at all.’ Then, sure enough, I’m riding in the car to a road trip, and Twitter starts blowing up with my name on it. It happened.”

Laurila: Surprise aside, what was your reaction?

Beeter: “I was sad to leave, because I had some really good friends over there, but I’d also been feeling a little… I guess ‘stuck.’ I kind of needed a fresh start, and that’s exactly what happened. I was actually really excited to move teams.” Read the rest of this entry »

For the 18th 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 New York Yankees.

Batters

It’s really hard to be a lousy offense with Aaron Judge, and it’s really hard to be a great one without him. The Yankees were not otherwise stacked — or destitute — enough to buck that reality. With the return of their franchise slugger, if the Yankee offense doesn’t lead the American League in runs scored, it shouldn’t miss by a lot. The Yankees led the AL in runs scored last year and outside of Judge, they really didn’t get any standout, star-level offensive performances (other than Matt Carpenter, but that was only 154 plate appearances). Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2023 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Jacoby Ellsbury spent just 11 seasons — and not even a full 11 — in the majors and somehow managed to earn the enmity of the fan bases of both the Red Sox and Yankees, the only two teams for which he played. At his best, he was a speedy center fielder with some pop — a first-round pick and an All-Star, not to mention the first known Native American of Navajo descent to play in the majors. He led the AL in stolen bases three times, played a key role on two World Series winners, and netted a staggering seven-year, $153 million contract when he hit free agency.

Yet Ellsbury had a difficult time staying healthy and in the lineup. He missed nearly all of 2010 and half of ’12, the two campaigns on either side of his lone All-Star season, then averaged 130 games over the first four years of his Yankees deal before falling off the map. He rarely spoke to the media, which fed into a perception that he was detached or even apathetic, particularly when he made slow progress rehabilitating his injuries away from his teams, both of which happened to play in media-saturated cities. “Ellsbury is the inscrutable star,” wrote the Boston Globe’s Christopher L. Gasper in 2015. “We will never know the real Jacoby Ellsbury. He will never let us in. It’s not personal. It’s just his personality.”

“Though the quiet, amicable Ellsbury wasn’t loathed in the Yankees’ clubhouse, nor was he beloved, he never gave off the vibe that he burned to win,” wrote the New York Post’s Ken Davidoff in 2019. That comment came after Ellsbury spent all of 2018 and ’19 on the injured list, then was released by the Yankees with a year remaining on his contract — and just before the Yankees filed a grievance in an attempt to recoup some of his remaining salary, claiming that he had used an outside facility without their permission to rehab the injuries that kept him off the field. He and the team ultimately reached a confidential settlement, but he never played again; his final major league game was just 19 days after his 34th birthday. Read the rest of this entry »

A day after landing Seth Lugo, the Padres added another versatile player to the fold in Matt Carpenter. The 37-year-old lefty swinger, who rescued his career from oblivion with the Yankees, will serve as something of a utilityman according to MLB.com’s A.J. Cassavell, potentially picking up playing time at designated hitter, first base, and both outfield corners, with the possibility of backing up second base and third base as well.

In a season bookended by a stint with the Rangers’ Triple-A Round Rock affiliate and a fractured left foot, Carpenter hit an astounding .305/.412/.727 with 15 homers in just 154 plate appearances. His 217 wRC+ was the highest of any player who received at least 20 PA in 2022, 10 points higher than teammate Aaron Judge. It was also the highest wRC+ of any player with at least 150 PA since 2005, a cutoff I chose in order to avoid peak Barry Bonds, who topped the mark three times from 2001 to ’04:

That’s mixing a few small-sample seasons in with some MVP-winning ones (Betts, Cabrera, and Harper in addition to Judge), with Freeman in both camps, but that’s kind of the point. What Carpenter did in his small slice of playing time was otherworldly and unsustainable. That it even happened was almost unimaginable given that at this time last year, it wasn’t clear whether he’d ever occupy a major league roster again.

Carpenter was cut free by the Cardinals after hitting a combined .176/.313/.291 (76 wRC+) with 0.2 WAR in 180 games and 418 PA in 2020–21. The team declined his $18.5 million option for 2022, instead paying him a $2 million buyout and ending his 13-year run in the organization that drafted him out of Texas Christian University in the 13th round in 2009. During his 11 seasons in St. Louis, he made three All-Star teams, received MVP votes in three seasons, and outproduced every Cardinals position player this side of Yadier Molina, helping the team to four NL Central titles, six playoff appearances, and the 2013 NL pennant. But he hadn’t hit at even a league-average clip since 2018, making his two-year, $39 million deal a minor disaster, and so it made no sense to push to salvage the deal via its third year.

After his option was declined, Carpenter reached out to longtime NL Central rival Joey Votto for advice on how to reverse his mid-30s decline, as the Cincinnati first baseman had done. In a conversation that Carpenter recalled lasting 3 1/2 hours, Votto gave him a combination pep talk and roadmap to fixing his swing, one that centered around a data-driven approach. While working with hitting gurus Tim Laker and Craig Wallenbrock as well as former teammate Matt Holliday over the winter, Carpenter switched to a new bat and underwent a full mechanical overhaul to improve his swing path and refine his body movement.

As Holliday told the New York Post’s Dan Martin in June:

“Just watching on TV, his front hip was leaving early, which was pulling him out and around even inside pitches… He was missing under pitches that were middle-away and then balls that were in, he was hooking a little too much. As a friend and someone who likes hitting, I told him, ‘This is what I see’ and we talked about hitting and why his average on balls out over the plate had gone down and why he was getting under balls and striking out more than he ever had.

“After a few days, there was a different sound off the bat and the ball was traveling much better… He was getting carry on the ball with different spin and it was more true.”

Once the lockout ended, Carpenter signed a minor league deal with the Rangers, one that guaranteed him a salary of $2 million in the majors. After missing the cut for Opening Day, he accepted an assignment to Round Rock, where he hit .275/.379/.613 with six homers in 95 PA, but the team didn’t see fit to call him up. By mutual decision, he was released by the Rangers on May 19, then signed with the Yankees a week later, after they placed Giancarlo Stanton on the injured list with a right calf strain. Carpenter debuted that day, homered off the Rays’ Jeffrey Springs the next day, and just kept slugging; his first three hits, and eight of his first 12, were homers. Despite playing only sporadically during the periods when Stanton was healthy, he continued to wield an incredibly potent bat, making 16 starts at DH, 11 in right field, three apiece in left field and at first base, and two at third base; he also pinch-hit 12 times.

The storybook comeback came crashing to a halt when Carpenter fouled a Logan Gilbert pitch off the top of his left foot on August 8. He completed the plate appearance but didn’t play again before the end of the regular season. While the Yankees included him on their postseason roster, his 1-for-12 showing with nine strikeouts amply illustrated that he needed more time to get his rhythm back.

I’ll get back to the performance, but first, the contract. Carpenter is guaranteed $12 million in 2023–24, with incentives that can take the deal to $21 million. Via The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal, he’ll receive a $3 million signing bonus, a $3.5 million salary for 2023, and a $5.5 million player option for ’24. For both seasons, he gets an additional $500,000 for reaching plate appearance thresholds of 300, 350, 400, 450, 500, and 550; what’s more, each of those thresholds that he reaches in 2023 also increases his 2024 base salary by another $500,000.

Thus, if Carpenter makes 400 PA in 2023, he’ll earn $8 million and then have a $7 million player option for ’24. If he has a 550-PA season, he’ll make $9.5 millon in 2023, and if he picks up his $8.5 million option and then reaches 550 PA again, he’ll earn a total of $11.5 million in ’24, reaching the $21 million maximum for the package. Even if he doesn’t max out, that’s a pretty impressive payday under the circumstances.

Carpenter’s arrival adds yet another moving part to a San Diego roster that was upended by the Xander Bogaerts signing earlier this month. That pushed Ha-Seong Kim from shortstop to second base and Jake Cronenworth from second to first, and more or less ensured that Fernando Tatis Jr. primarily plays the outfield. While Carpenter appears likely to see the bulk of his time as the team’s DH, he could spot at first against some righthanders, which would return the lefty-swinging Cronenworth to the keystone and put the righty-swinging Kim on the bench. Carpenter doesn’t seem like much of a threat to take significant playing time away from Tatis (whose PED suspension still has 20 games to go) or Soto in the outfield corners, but he could fill in while one of them DHs or gets a day off.

As to how productive he can be in San Diego, it’s worth considering how Carpenter did what he did in New York. He hit the ball pretty hard in general (13.7% barrel rate, 42.1% hard-hit rate, 89.8 mph average exit velocity), but the key was putting it in the air with great frequency while playing half of his games in a ballpark that specifically rewards lefthanders for doing so. Among hitters with at least 150 PA, his 60% pull rate led the majors, and his 53.3% fly ball rate was third. All 15 homers — nine in Yankee Stadium, six on the road — came via pulled fly balls:

Carpenter hit just 25 pulled fly balls, but his 761 wRC+ on them ranked third in the majors, behind only Judge’s 902 (including 31 homers on 48 such balls) and Nathaniel Lowe’s 883 (17 homers on 26 such balls). Both of those guys had over 400 batted ball events in 2022, so their pulled flies represented a much smaller fraction (11.9% for Judge, 5.8% for Lowe) than for Carpenter (26.3%).

That strategy might not work as well in San Diego. Where Yankee Stadium is 314 feet down the right field line and 385 to right-center, Petco Park is 322 feet down the right field line and 391 to right-center. And that’s before considering the park’s notorious marine layer, which brings in cool, moist air and suppresses home runs — something not accounted for in Statcast’s expected home runs stat, which shows Carpenter matching his season total of 15, 14 of which would have gone out in San Diego based on distance and angle. By our park factors, which use five years of data, Yankee Stadium had a home run factor of 109 for lefties, and Petco
95; by those of Statcast, which are based upon three years of data, the gap is even wider, 118 to 96.

ZiPS isn’t tremendously optimistic about Carpenter’s production, which shouldn’t be a surprise given the sample sizes feeding it; after all, he preceded those 154 PA of videogame numbers with 910 that produced just an 87 wRC+:

Via Dan Szymborski, ZiPS values that production at $8.2 million on a two-year deal, though the low playing time is obviously a factor; if Carpenter reaches the higher percentiles of his 2023 projection, he’ll play more frequently. At a baseline of 400 PA, ZiPS projects a contract worth $12.8 million over two years, which is more in the ballpark of his deal, though if he’s good enough in 2023, he could opt to pursue something even more lucrative.

The Padres are banking that the things Carpenter did to overhaul his swing will make it more likely he can remain a productive hitter, if not a guy who homers at a Bonds-like rate. His addition pushes the team’s payroll to $266.7 million for Competitive Balance Tax purposes, about $6.3 million short of the third tier of penalties. Padres ownership has shown that it’s not too concerned about such matters at the moment, particularly if such moves give the team a better chance to win at a time when the Dodgers have suddenly gotten cost-conscious, to say nothing of how the Giants must be reeling from the shock of the Carlos Correa switcheroo. There’s no guarantee Carpenter can remain a big bat, but at the very least, the NL West’s deepest roster has gotten deeper.

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2023 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2022 election, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

More so than Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds, or Roger Clemens, Alex Rodriguez is the poster child for the era of performance-enhancing drugs within baseball. Considered “an almost perfect prospect” given his combination of power, speed, defense, and work ethic, the 6-foot-3 shortstop was chosen by the Mariners with the first pick of the 1993 draft, and reached the majors before his 19th birthday. In short order, he went on to produce unprecedented power for the position via six straight seasons of at least 40 homers, two with at least 50, and three league leads. Along the way, he signed a 10-year, $252 million deal with the Texas Rangers in January 2001, at that point the largest guaranteed contract in professional sports history.

In a major league career that spanned from 1994 to 2016, Rodriguez made 14 All-Star teams, won three MVP awards and two Gold Gloves, and became just the fifth player to reach the twin plateaus of 3,000 hits and 500 home runs, after Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, Eddie Murray, and Rafael Palmeiro. Along the way, he helped his teams to 12 postseason appearances, but only one championship. Though he sparkled at times in the postseason, he also went into some notorious slumps that only furthered the drama that surrounded him.

Always with the drama! Rodriguez’s combination of youthful charisma, success, and money magnified his every move, and his insecurities and inability to read the room guaranteed further tumult the more intense things got. Because of his proximity to Derek Jeter, first as a friendly rival within a trinity of great young shortstops that also included Nomar Garciaparra, and then as a teammate once the Yankees became the only club that could afford his contract, Rodriguez became an easy target for tabloid-style sensationalism long before he dated Madonna and Jennifer Lopez. His inability to get out of his own way only intensified once he got to New York, even before his PED-related misdeeds put him in the crosshairs. Read the rest of this entry »

Nine down, one to go. The 2022 free-agent signing period has been fast and furious. When Carlos Correa signed with the Giants earlier this week, he was the eighth of my top 10 free agents to sign. That breakneck pace hasn’t slowed. On Thursday night, Carlos Rodón and the Yankees agreed to a six-year, $162 million contract, as Jon Heyman first reported.

I pre-wrote some words on Rodón as a player, so let’s get to those before discussing the broader context of his signing. He’s a fascinating story, and yet simultaneously a very straightforward pitcher. He throws an overpowering fastball. He throws an overpowering slider. He throws them both very hard, and with solid accuracy. It sounds almost too simple, but both pitches are spectacular, and they pair well together. He’s going to throw them; the question is whether batters can hit them.

For the past two years, the answer has been a resounding no. In 2021, you could convince yourself it was just a hot streak. Rodón missed most of 2019 and ’20 due to injury, and he’d been roughly league average before that. The peripherals were excellent, and the pedigree was there — he was the third overall pick in the 2014 draft after a standout college career at North Carolina State — but he was a two-pitch pitcher with health concerns and one excellent season. To make matters worse, he looked fatigued at the end of the season — reasonably so given his workload increase — and lost fastball velocity until regaining it in the playoffs. The White Sox declined to issue him a qualifying offer, and he signed what was essentially a high-class prove-it deal with the Giants: two years and $44 million, with an opt out after the first year. Read the rest of this entry »

Will Warren has quietly, and quickly, emerged as one of the top pitching prospects in the New York Yankees organization. An eighth-round pick in the 2020 draft out of Southwestern Louisiana University, the 22-year-old right-hander made his professional debut this year, and by June he was pitching with Double-A Somerset. On the season, he had a 3.91 ERA and a 3.74 FIP with 125 strikeouts and 119 hits allowed in 129 innings.

His best two pitches have been added to his arsenal since college. Warren’s sweeper, which spins as high as 3,000 rpm, replaced the pedestrian slider he’d thrown as an amateur; his low-to-mid 90s sinker, which helped produce a 53% ground ball rate, was developed just this past season. His physique has transformed, as well. The 6-foot-2 hurler now packs close to 200 pounds on his once-lean frame, giving him a more-projectable starter’s build.

Warren discussed his developmental strides late in the 2022 season.

———

David Laurila: Let’s start with your M.O. on the mound. How do you get guys out?

Will Warren: “Basically attacking the zone, knowing that the guys behind me are going to make plays. As a sinkerball guy, I’m probably going to get a lot more ground balls than strikeouts, so I rely a lot on my defense to get people out.”

Laurila: I understand that you also have a pretty good slider.

Warren: “Yes. Analytics makes it easier to look at a pitch and say, ‘Oh, I can do this, I can manipulate it this way.’ When I got drafted by the Yankees, we [developed] the slider. We tinkered with some grips, and it ended up being what it is now.”

Laurila: Is it the Yankees whirly?

Warren: “It’s the sweeper, yes. Off the top of my head, I’m going say I get like 16–18 inches of sweep. I can get it bigger, but I think that’s what it is on average. The velocity is 84–87 [mph].” Read the rest of this entry »