The Tampa Bay Rays announced this afternoon that they’ve come to terms on a long-term contract extension with the team’s ace, Blake Snell. At five years and $50 million, Snell’s new deal buys out all of his arbitration years and nets the Rays, or the team he’s eventually traded to, an extra year until he hits free agency. There are no team-friendly option years tacked into the end, a common feature in pre-arbitration long-term deals such as this. The deal will take Snell through his age-30 season.

Yes, it’s less than Snell would make if he were a free agent today, but in the big picture, it’s the MLBPA’s job to negotiate a fair system of compensation with major league teams. Snell has to do what’s best for himself under the system that’s currently in place. And as these contracts go, it’s hardly a poor one for the 2018 American League Cy Young winner. The contract goes into effect immediately, crushing the $15,500 raise that Snell was assigned by the team, a situation that was primed to leave lingering bad feelings between player and team. (See Gerrit Cole and the Pirates for a situation in which fighting over a few thousand dollars led to long-term bad feelings.) Per Jeff Passan, it’s the largest deal ever given to a player with just two years of service time, surpassing those signed by Gio Gonzalez as a Super 2 (five years, $42 million) and Corey Kluber (five years, $38.5 million); both of those deals contained option years.

The ZiPS projections don’t usually get too excited about single seasons, but Snell’s emergence was stunning one. No, he’s not really the pitcher that the 1.89 ERA suggests, but then, nobody really is so it’s not part of anybody’s realistic expectations. With the downside risks in both performance and injury factored in ZiPS, the projections still see him averaging just under four WAR a year over the terms of the contract. That’s enough to rank him comfortably in the top projected starting pitchers over the next five seasons. Read the rest of this entry »

Sure, he’s won seven straight batting titles in Japan, but it’s telling that, in English, “Ichiro Suzuki” roughly translates to “Can’t hit Pedro.”

– The Utah Chronicle, March 30th, 2001

It is late afternoon in Seattle, and it is the beginning of April, and it is quite cold. The Mariners are going to play the Oakland A’s. Today, the baseball starts counting. Across the infield dirt, just behind second base, a few faint letters mark the time: 2001.

More than 45,000 people are here, the most that have ever crowded into this still-new stadium. There’s less team spirit on display than you might expect. Most of the attendees aren’t flaunting jerseys; they’re bundled up, hands tucked into coats. The fading sunlight falls over the stadium from behind the pale, high clouds, and as a few Mariners take the field, running sprints across the outfield grass, a hearty cheer rises up to greet them. The men in white stretch, pulling arms and bouncing in lunges, before trotting back to the dugout. Not much longer, now. Not much longer.

High up on a view level fence, in front of a kid and their dad, you can see a white posterboard, letters painted in amateurish block text: “WELCOME ICHIRO.”

Many of them know only what the numbers can tell them, the list of achievements that made him worth tens of millions. Seven straight batting titles and a lifetime .353 average. Some may have gone down to spring training, gathering in the Arizona heat, and seen it for themselves: 26 hits, catching batting practice fly balls behind his back, throwing runners out at third with seemingly effortless throws from deep right. The speed — the Mariners said they’d clocked his home-to-first time at 3.7 seconds. (The fastest average home-to-first time among major leaguers in 2018 was 3.86.) Read the rest of this entry »

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Perhaps no position has been more impacted by the phenomenon of tanking than designated hitter. Teams that fancy themselves contenders splurge on elite bats like J.D. Martinez and Giancarlo Stanton, while teams out of contention rotate light-hitting utility infielders through without regard for the offensive demands of the position. The result is yet another year with a clear divide between the haves and the have-nots – a line that doesn’t really correlate well with how much is spent. Yes, the Red Sox, Yankees, and Twins brought in their primary DHs on lucrative contracts, but guys like Khris Davis and Shohei Ohtani cost far less. The Astros embraced the idea of using a homegrown positionless bat, employing Tyler White at a relative pittance. At the other end of the spectrum are teams like the Blue Jays and Orioles, who spent big a few years ago on positionless sluggers and now find themselves with sunk costs.

We can recognize four distinct tiers of DH in 2019. There’s the elite tier, which consists of one player alone – albeit one player who is arguably the best pure hitter in the majors. Then we have four teams with near-elite bats. What’s most interesting about those top two tiers is that none of those hitters came up as, or have experience at, first base; all but one are, at least nominally, outfielders. Those teams that do utilize erstwhile first basemen form a secondary tier of four well-above average hitters. The rest of the league employs hitters who either aren’t something yet, or used to be something, but aren’t now. If there’s a lesson to be learned from these rankings, it’s that spending on elite bats works. Spending on designated hitters doesn’t. Read the rest of this entry »

Even if you didn’t wake up at an ungodly early hour to watch Thursday’s Mariners-A’s game at the Tokyo Dome, by now you may have seen the stirring footage of Ichiro Suzuki exiting the game in the eighth inning en route to his official retirement. If not, beware the coming dust storm:

That the 45-year-old Suzuki — who was nudged off the Mariners’ roster and into an unofficial retirement and special assistant role last May 3, at a point when he was hitting .205/.255/.205 through 47 plate appearances — went 0-for-5 with a walk and a strikeout in his two-game cameo matters not a whit as far as his legacy is concerned. His awe-inspiring total of 4,367 career hits (1,278 in Nippon Professional Baseball, 3,089 in Major League Baseball) still stands as the signature accomplishment for a player who has spent more than a quarter-century serving as a wonderful ambassador for the sport on two continents. His stateside resumé, which includes not only his membership in the 3,000 Hit Club (despite not debuting in the majors until he was about half past his 27th birthday) but also his 10 All-Star appearances, 10 Gold Gloves, AL MVP and Rookie of the Year awards, and so on, is ample enough to guarantee him first-ballot election to the Hall of Fame. In the wake of Mariano Rivera’s groundbreaking unanimous election to the Hall in January, it’s even possible that Ichiro could replicate the feat.

The question is when. Hall of Fame election rules require a player to be retired for five seasons before appearing on the BBWAA ballot, which means that had he been content to hang up his spikes last May, he would have been eligible for the 2024 ballot (the date refers to the year of induction, not the year of the ballot’s release, which is typically in late November or early December of the previous year). Barring what would be an unprecedented ruling by the Hall, his two-game cameo resets his eligibility clock, pushing him to the 2025 ballot, a small price to pay for his being able to check off the bucket-list item of retiring on his own terms, in his native country. Not only will he become the first Japanese player to be elected to the Hall, but according to the Baseball-Reference Play Index, he will be the owner of the shortest final season of any elected position player. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, White Sox right fielder Eloy Jimenez, our eighth overall prospect on this year’s Top 100, joined this week’s extension palooza (now featuring prospects!), signing a precedent-smashing extension before he’s even spent a day in the major leagues.

An important point here is that the White Sox appear to have leveraged service time manipulation to their advantage, as noted by Ken Rosenthal, though they’re far from the first club to have done so. Since Chicago could have gained a seventh year of control by leaving Jimenez in the minors for 15 days, the six-and-two structure means that he only gave up one year of potential free agency from what was otherwise his best (and only) alternative to taking this deal. There’s no way to know exactly how much money or how many years this saved the White Sox, but it basically took one season from the free agent column and moved it into the arbitration column, so the figure is likely in the millions. Since this exact set of circumstances could be changed in the next round of CBA negotiations, it was opportunistic of the White Sox to use this negotiating chip while they still had it.

But that doesn’t take away from the fact that this deal is predicated, at least in part, on some disingenuous public posturing from a club in the middle of a rebuild that isn’t going that well. They’re essentially holding their best prospect, and their fans, hostage, all to squeeze a little more value out of a potential franchise player in a far-off year. General manager Rick Hahn gave a non-answer last August when, during a sixth straight season in which the club was more than 15 games out of first place, Jimenez clearly warranted a call-up but was left in Triple-A. Manager Rick Renteria casually compared Jimenez to Ken Griffey Jr. last week when he was sent to minor league camp. Astros pitcher Collin McHugh shined a light on the motivations behind the situation after Jimenez was optioned. If Jimenez is on the Opening Day roster, I’m sure we’ll get some chuckles and shrugs when Hahn or Renteria are asked how he magically became major league-ready less than a week after they’d announced that he wasn’t.

Jimenez originally signed for $2.8 million in 2013, so that money plus the roughly $1.6 million he would get making the league minimum in 2019-2021 obviously wasn’t going to create a set-for-life situation, especially after agent/buscon fees and taxes. The sort of player he has turned into (a big corner hitter who has gotten bigger and more corner-y in recent years) isn’t in demand in free agency or elsewhere, unless that player is making close to the league minimum or is hitting like J.D. Martinez. In our most recent Top 100 prospect list, we made a graph of Jimenez’s likely WAR outcomes over his cost-controlled years, using the empirical baseline of past 60 FV hitters:

Moving left to right, the percentages are 12%, 15%, 30%, 28% and 15%. The weighted average of Jimenez’s team control-years WAR is 15.5, putting him in the middle to lower end of the 60/65 group, which jives with our 60 FV grade. We basically think he’s a perennial three-win player with a chance for a season or two of production higher than that, and about a 25% chance of turning into a role player or one who fizzles out quickly (the bottom two tiers).

Craig Edwards’ research pegs a 60 FV hitter as being worth $55 million, but Jimenez is near the top of that range and research from Dan Aucoin pegs that value at about $60 million. That would cover the first seven seasons with no deal, so $43 million guaranteed with a chance at $77 million over eight years suggests that both sides did well, with Jimenez taking somewhere between a $10 million and $20 million discount (roughly a third) to get the money guaranteed, but losing little of the upside. If Jimenez captures the full value of the deal (eight years, $77 million), that figure is very close to his present asset value over eight years, or the median value of what he’s worth over that term.

The White Sox assume some risk that Jimenez ages very quickly and turns into a DH in his arbitration years, but they’re in a rebuild and things will have gone pretty poorly in other ways if that happens. Jimenez could be leaving some money on the table if he does indeed turn into J.D. Martinez, but I’m generally of the mind that right-handed hitters with heavy builds at age 22 to take the median payout, especially if they haven’t had a huge payday yet. I just wish these sorts of shenanigans weren’t what got them there.

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It’s not a news flash that Juan Soto was great in 2018. The simplest of statistics could tell that story. His OBP started with a 4. His slugging percentage started with a 5. He had 22 homers in a mere 116 games. However, the real hype starts when you dig into the numbers a little more. Juan Soto was 19, and he walked 16% of the time in the big leagues while putting up a 146 wRC+. People are making historical comparisons because that’s the only way to appreciate such a tremendous feat. No one in history has put up a better batting line before their 20th birthday, and the only people to come close are Mel Ott, Tony Conigliaro, and Ty Cobb. When you put it that way, maybe we’re underselling how great Soto’s 2018 was.

I’m not writing today to remind you of how good Soto’s 2018 was (like, really good though! Really good!). Instead, let’s talk about the approach he used to generate those numbers. Here’s a leaderboard of the 10 best hitters in baseball by wOBA last year, minimum of 450 PA. I’m using wOBA instead of wRC+ for compatibility with data further along in the article:

Well, that’s about what you’d expect. Ten great hitters, or potentially nine great hitters and Max Muncy, depending on how you feel about him. Paul Goldschmidt was eleventh if you want to leave Muncy out of this. That alone is already amazing. What makes it really impressive, however, is that Soto did it all against fastballs. I’m going to throw another leaderboard at you. Read the rest of this entry »

Our yearly project of ranking each team at each position continues with center fielders, the position of Mays and Mantle, the position at the crossroads of the offensive and defense parts of baseball’s positional spectrum. Let’s get straight down to the business of ranking the players who come after Mike Trout.

Nowadays, center field is largely seen as a position made up of Mike Trout and Everybody Else. And with a major identity crisis, that conclusion isn’t so far off. There’s no clash of center field greats, with Trout largely lapping the field. Looking at many of the leaders in WAR at the position over the last five years, a great many won’t play center field in 2019 or have already moved off the position: Andrew McCutchen, Charlie Blackmon, Adam Jones, Marcell Ozuna, Christian Yelich, and so on. After Trout and Lorenzo Cain, who jumps out as an all-around star at the position, the way a Carlos Beltran or Jim Edmonds did?

Nor, with baseball’s traditional roles changing, can center field claim to be the most popular home for leadoff hitters. In 2018, leadoff hitters played centerfield only 24% of the time, the lowest figure in the Split Leaderboards (which go back to 2002) and well off the 41% mark for 2013, just six years ago. Center fielders hit .253/.319/.407 in 2018, the position’s second-worst OPS since 2002, and amassed -3.4 wRAA, also their second-worst. Read the rest of this entry »

Late Tuesday night, Ken Rosenthal reported that the Tampa Bay Rays had agreed to a six-year, $24 million contract extension with 24-year-old second baseman and outfielder Brandon Lowe. Lowe is our 46th overall prospect, the top one in the 50 FV tier, and the No. 5 prospect in a loaded Rays system.

According to the Tampa Bay Times’ Marc Topkin, the deal also includes two club option years, which, along with incentives, could bring the total value to $49 million; if those options are exercised, Lowe will be 32 when the deal ends. Lowe will now obviously be making much more during his pre-arb seasons than he would have with standard contract renewals, but the possibility of overarching changes to baseball’s compensation structure in the next CBA currently make it impossible to evaluate the latter parts of the deal on Lowe’s end.

If he becomes the type of player I expect him to be — Lowe has power, walks at an above-average clip, and plays several positions including a passable second base, all of which makes me think he’s a two to three win player — a $4 million average annual value would make Lowe a bargain for the Rays. Based on Craig Edwards’ work at our site (and Driveline Baseball’s recent attempt to refine that research), 50 FV position player prospects like Lowe should be valued at $28 million, quite close to the value of his deal, excluding of the team option years. The AAV of the two option years, which would encompass Lowe’s age-31 and 32 seasons, is $12.5 million, almost exactly what D.J. LeMahieu received this offseason (age 30, two years, $24 million), and LeMahieu has been what we’d call a 50 in prospect parlance, as he was on average about a two win player during his tenure with Colorado. Read the rest of this entry »