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 Texas Rangers.
Batters
If you were looking to assign blame for the Rangers going from being World Series champions to having a 78-84 season, you’d have a bounty of targets. From a Pythagorean standpoint, the collapse from one year to the next was even worse; the 2024 Rangers bled 12 wins compared to 2023, but in terms of run differential, they dropped an impressive 21 wins. Given the widespread nature of their disappointing season, the latter number is probably closer to the “true” decline.
The offense’s contribution dropped in half, from 34.1 WAR in 2023 to 16.9 WAR in 2024. And unlike the 2014 squad, the last Texas team to so dramatically underachieve, the 2024 Rangers can’t really put the lion’s share of the blame on injuries, at least on the run-scoring side of the equation. Evan Carter missed most of the season with a back injury, but he also only played in 23 regular season games in 2023. Corey Seager typically misses a couple dozen games a year, and while Josh Jung’s fractured wrist was a stroke of bad luck, Josh Smith was a very good replacement. A lot of the lost performance came from healthy, established players, and even worse, a good number of those players are veterans on the back end of their respective career trajectories. Read the rest of this entry »
By the peripheral metrics, Max Fried is nothing special. Over the course of his career, his strikeout and walk rates sit somewhere around the league average. By results, however, he looks like a Hall of Famer; his 2.81 ERA since the start of 2020 ranks third among all starters. When teams contemplate whether to offer the left-hander a five- or six-year deal this winter, one question will be top of mind: Who is the real Max Fried?
Last week, Thomas Harrigan at MLB.com argued that Fried’s contact prevention resume might be the strongest of any contemporary pitcher. Harrigan noted that, after setting a cutoff, nobody has allowed a lower barrel rate this decade. That is reflected in Fried’s home run rate and therefore his FIP — other than Logan Webb, no starter allowed fewer home runs on a rate basis. Thanks to that super low home run rate, Fried posted a 3.11 FIP and 15.4 WAR over the decade — strong numbers, but reflective of a very good pitcher rather than one of the game’s elite.
One thing FIP ignores is the number of doubles a pitcher allows. Fried allowed just 16 doubles in 2024, tied for the lowest mark among all qualified pitchers. That low doubles rate is consistent with his performance over the years — during the 2020s, only 3.5% of the hitters Fried faced reached on doubles, ranking sixth-lowest among 173 pitchers in the sample:
The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2025 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.
In a home run-saturated era, Ichiro Suzuki stood out. Before coming stateside, the slightly-built superstar earned the moniker the “Human Batting Machine” from Japanese media, and he hardly missed a beat upon arriving in Seattle in 2001, slapping singles and doubles to all fields in such prolific fashion that he began his major league career by reeling off a record 10 straight 200-hit seasons. Along the way, he set a single-season record with 262 hits in 2004, and despite not debuting until age 27, he surpassed the 3,000-hit milestone. Between Nippon Professional Baseball and Major League Baseball, he totaled 4,367 hits, making him the International Hit King — a comparison that rankled some, including the Hit King himself, Pete Rose.
Despite his small stature (listed at 5-foot-11, 175 pounds), Suzuki was larger than life, an athlete on a first-name basis with two continents full of fans. Wearing “Ichiro” on the back of his jersey — his manager’s idea of a promotional gimmick — he built his legend in Japan by winning seven straight batting titles (1994–2000) and three straight MVP awards for the Orix Blue Wave, whom he led to a Japan Series championship in 1996. When he joined the Mariners, he faced widespread skepticism about whether his style of play would translate, because while NPB star Hideo Nomo had enjoyed considerable success with the Dodgers upon arriving in 1995, no Japanese position player had made the transition to MLB before. The Mariners — who within the previous two years had shed superstars Randy Johnson, Ken Griffey Jr., and Alex Rodriguez from their squad — won Suzuki’s rights and signed him, but his struggles in his first spring training caused manager Lou Piniella concern. Yet it all worked out, and in spectacular fashion. Suzuki led the AL with a .350 batting average, won Rookie of the Year and MVP honors while helping the Mariners to a record 116 wins, and began 10-year streaks of All-Star selections and Gold Glove awards.
All of this played out during a time when sabermetricians downplayed the value of batting average relative to on-base and slugging percentages. Like Derek Jeter, Suzuki was more a fan favorite than a stathead one, though his additional contributions on the bases and in right field helped him rank third among all position players for that decade-long stretch with 54.8 WAR, trailing only Albert Pujols (81.4) and Rodriguez (71.5). But Suzuki wasn’t just about the numbers. Beneath his near-religious devotion to routine burned a competitive fire that was offset by a sly sense of humor, both of which featured copious quantities of f-bombs that were hardly lost in translation, to hear others tell the stories. Read the rest of this entry »
Tyler Holton got a 10th-place vote in American League MVP balloting, and as you might expect, social media reacted like social media is wont to do. Responses to the news leaned negative, with a number of people saying that they had have never even heard of him. Some were disrespectfully profane, offering variations of “Who the [expletive] is Tyler Holton?”
Needless to say, not everyone who posts on social media platforms is an especially-knowledgeable baseball fan. Which is perfectly fine. There are many different levels of fandom, so if you mostly just know the big names — the Judges, the Sotos, the Witts — all well and good. Follow the game as you see fit.
Those things said, it is high time that more people become familiar with Holton. Much for that reason, Toronto Star columnist Mike Wilner doesn’t deserve the brickbats he’s received for his down-ballot nod to the 28-year-old Detroit Tigers southpaw. What he deserves is applause. And not just because he was willing to go outside the box. Holton has quietly been one of MLB’s most effective pitchers.
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about how much Shohei Ohtani’s teammates helped him win his third MVP award, his incredible four-season stretch, whether Dekopin/Decoy is really his dog, the other MVP and Cy Young results, a Joey Meneses signing, Austin Slater and the virtues of being a team’s “top target,” the Rays’ confounding stadium strategy, the varying pronunciations of “envelope,” a listener question about RSN ownership, the seventh annual Effectively Wild Secret Santa, and more, plus a postscript Stat Blast (1:15:40) about players whose whole MLB careers were confined to “non-MLB” ballparks.
As a player’s body changes over time, the same movements he used to make may not work well for him anymore. Adjusting to these changes (or not) will make or break his career. These changes have been especially stark for Giancarlo Stanton. The 35-year-old slugger serves as an interesting case for observing how great hitters can alter their swings over time to adjust to their changing physical attributes.
Stanton had a 116 wRC+ in 459 plate appearances in 2024 – the 15th season of his career. That’s nearly identical to the 118 mark he set across 396 plate appearances as a rookie in 2010. The difference between Stanton then and now, though, is night and day. Let’s take a look at Stanton at age 20 to get an idea of what his swing was like during his first major league season:
Open stance, non-neutral shin angle, slight hand row. None of these things are currently present in Stanton’s swing. None. When he came up, he looked like an uber-athletic NFL tight end. He could run well, move fluidly, and was twitchy enough to have a bit of extra movement in his swing (compared to recent years) and still have success. Yeah, he struck out over 30% of the time in his rookie campaign, but he was still learning big league pitching. He boasted a 141 wRC+ the following season with a very similar swing. It wasn’t until his third season where there was an obvious change. This was when Stanton showed what he was really capable of at the plate (and when he started going by Giancarlo):
Now that’s what I’m talking about. These are truly Stantonian homers here. In 2012, Stanton raised his wRC+ to 158, delivering 5.1 WAR in just 123 games. He cemented himself as one of the scariest sluggers in the game, and much of that should be attributed to his mechanical adjustments. He changed his stance to a neutral position and raised his hands up a considerable amount. From this point on, his hands would stay in a higher slot. His hand row from the previous two seasons always brought him to a higher point than where he started in his setup. As a player with 80-grade power, he didn’t really need that extra movement to create force. Depending on your body type (arm length, upper body flexibility, etc.), swinging a flat bat from a high slot makes it easier to get your bat on plane. Since he wasn’t the type of hitter who varies his shoulder plane all that much, it was a logical change to simplify his approach.
Even with these changes, we’re still pretty far off from where Stanton has been over the last few seasons. He maintained these mechanics throughout 2012 and 2013. However, during this time, health became an issue. He missed time in both of these seasons for knee, abdominal , ankle, thigh and shoulder injuries. Without biomechanical data, we can’t definitively say these injuries forced his body to change and/or he had to adjust his swing to compensate for his compromised health, but my goodness, those are injuries almost from head to toe! It wasn’t until the 2014 season that Stanton played over 140 games in a single season. And unsurprisingly, he came into that year with another modified setup:
This is the first time in his career where we saw Stanton narrow his stance. I’m theorizing here, but taking away movement could have had two benefits for him: Similar to my point before, he is so strong that he never really needed to move all that much to create power, and less movement would give him a better shot at making contact. Second, by narrowing his stance and not crouching as much, he would put less stress on his body. He ended this season with a 161 wRC+, the highest mark of his career. He also remained healthy until the middle of September, when he was hit in the face by a pitch that prematurely ended his season.
The narrowed stance kept working for him in 2015. Across his 74 games to start the year, he scorched 27 home runs — a full-season pace of 58. But on June 26 — his 74th game — he broke his hamate bone swinging at some point during his final two at-bats, both strikeouts, and missed the rest of the season.
The one thing about Stanton’s swing that he has never really reconciled is that he doesn’t decelerate much. I think this is a big reason why we see such egregious whiffs from him. Once he gets started, there is no slowing down. It also comes with some added risk of injury. This is such a violent swing, and his body bears the brunt of that force because he doesn’t have the brakes in place to come to a controlled stop.
Although he was healthy to start the season in 2016, it was clear the injury had compromised him. By the end of the year, he’d completely gotten away from the setup that he’d had so much success with before the hamate injury. In fact, he returned to a similar stance that we saw from him early on in his career:
Forward lean, slightly open hips, and more knee bend. Sound familiar? That’s because this is essentially rookie year Stanton, not the great hitter he was in 2014-2015. His performance also reverted back to where it was in 2010; his 118 wRC+ in 2016 was identical to his mark as a rookie. It makes sense, then, that he ditched this setup in 2017. Closed stance Stanton has entered the chat:
Stanton didn’t close his stance off until about June, but he didn’t run it back the first few months with the stance he used during his down 2016 season. He came into 2017 with the same stance he had in 2014-2015, when he was raking. But from the summer on, he closed things up, finishing the season with 59 home runs and winning NL MVP. It was a special run that completely took off due to another mechanical change – probably the most important of his career.
Stanton was traded to the Yankees following the 2017 season and showed up with the same exact setup, and for good reason. After struggling big time out of the gate, he ended up with a 128 wRC+. Not great but still very good. He was healthy for pretty much the entire season too, playing in 158 games. Then in 2019, the injuries piled up. After a knee injury that kept him out for almost the entire year, he returned in the playoffs and sustained a quad injury. Then it was hamstring injury that limited him to 23 games during the shortened 2020 season. Over the two years, he played in a total of 61 regular season games.
Unlike other times in his career, Stanton’s injuries in those seasons didn’t lead to a mechanical overhaul. At this point in his career, he knew what the best version of himself looked like. If he could get his body back to feeling healthy, it made sense not to go through any big changes. And in 2021, that worked out well. He swatted 35 homers in 139 games and finished with a 138 wRC+. He suffered a minor quad strain early in the season, but other than that, he was healthy all year.
Though he missed 10 days with a minor calf strain in late May/early June, Stanton was also mostly healthy for the first half of 2022, and he hit well enough to make the All-Star team (133 wRC+ during the first half). But then the lower body injuries returned, and this time they were even lower than before. He made it three days into the second half before landing on the IL with Achilles tendonitis. He missed just over a month, and when he came back in late August, it took him about two weeks to get going. He also had a minor injury scare when he fouled a ball off his foot on September 5; he wasn’t in the lineup for the Yankees’ next four games, though he did pinch hit in two of them. He caught fire upon returning to the lineup on September 10, posting a 133 wRC+ with seven home runs over his final 79 plate appearances of the regular season.
Still, these particular injuries represented a new challenge for Stanton. As a closed-stance hitter, he is far more reliant on his connection to the ground, making these repeated injuries from the ankle downward especially concerning. Not only does he have to regain his strength, but he also has to figure out how to move in space and interact with the ground. This gets more difficult for players as they age and the injuries compound. The thing about Stanton, though, is he has always been willing to tweak his mechanics. However, he needed to hit rock bottom before deciding to go away from the setup that he’d had so much success with for so long.
Health was a problem for Stanton again in 2023. He strained his hamstring in April and missed almost two months. Upon his return, he was far off from his diminished 2022 form, when he finished the year with 113 wRC+, which to that point was the worst mark of his career. His 86 wRC+ to end the year was bleak. He stayed healthy after his return, but the awful performance brought up the question: Was this just too much for him to overcome? For Stanton, the answer was to do what he had done so well for his entire career. He made some more changes, this time to his mechanics and his body.
There was a lot of discussion around Stanton’s adjustments at the beginning of 2024, including this comprehensive look from Jay Jaffe. In short, the main point was that he slimmed down (a lot!) and shifted closer to the neutral setup he had from 2014 and 2015 rather than the extreme closed stance he had employed beginning in June of 2017.
This goes back to the talk about matching your swing to your physical attributes. Stanton has dealt with so many lower body issues over the last five years, and they have impacted what he can do physically. He couldn’t sustain the same movement pattern in the closed stance with his current body, so he went to a similar version of the swing that his body could handle. His regular season still wasn’t great, but it was a major step up from the year before. And when you consider the show he put on in October, it’s safe to say his changes worked pretty well overall. For a last look, let’s see where he stands as of October, from a mechanical perspective:
Whatever your opinion is of Stanton’s career, how he projects for the rest of it, or anything related to that, there is no denying that what he has done throughout the last 15 years has been remarkable. There aren’t many hitters who can change as much as he has and still have success. A big part of being a great baseball player is making adjustments. Stanton has done that incredibly well for a long, long time.
The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2025 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2016 election at SI.com, 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. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.
Billy Wagner was the ultimate underdog. Undersized and from both a broken home and an impoverished rural background, he channeled his frustrations into throwing incredibly hard — with his left hand, despite being a natural righty, for he broke his right arm twice as a child. Scouts overlooked him because he wasn’t anywhere close to six feet tall, but they couldn’t disregard his dominance over collegiate hitters using a mid-90s fastball. The Astros made him a first-round pick, and once he was converted to a relief role, his velocity went even higher.
Thanks to outstanding lower-body strength, coordination, and extraordinary range of motion, the 5-foot-10 Wagner was able to reach 100 mph with consistency — 159 times in 2003, according to The Bill James Handbook. Using a hard slider learned from teammate Brad Lidge, he kept blowing the ball by hitters into his late 30s to such an extent that he owns the record for the highest strikeout rate of any pitcher with at least 900 innings. He was still dominant when he walked away from the game following the 2010 season, fresh off posting a career-best ERA. Read the rest of this entry »
Eric A Longenhagen: Good morning from Tempe. I indeed have COVID and am probably going to do an abbreviated version of chat today. If anyone wants two Todd Barry tickets for tonight at Crescent Ballroom they should holler at me.
12:03
Andy: It’s early but any thoughts on next year’s draft class?
12:03
Eric A Longenhagen: I really like the HS class, I think the college pitching crop will be way better than last year, I’m not sure Ethan Holliday is actually good
12:04
Syndergaardengnomes: Too soon for a breakdown of the top rule 5 guys available?
12:05
Eric A Longenhagen: It’s just such an inefficient, open-ended exercise with an enormous player pool. I could spend a while just scrolling through Roster Resource picking names that stand out to me, but now is not the time for it.
12:06
Eric A Longenhagen: Evan Reifert was one, just browsing the site like normal this week, that stood out to me.
This year’s free agent class features a recent — as in the past two years — MVP. He’s playing the same position he has his entire career and has suffered no recent major injuries: 151 games played in his MVP campaign, 154 in each of the two that followed. And yet interest in this legend of the game is expected to be limited.
On the Top 50 free agents list, Ben Clemens ranked him 41st, which is third at his own position and lower than eight — EIGHT! — relief pitchers. I don’t know why I’m being coy about this player’s identity, actually, because presumably you can see the headline and header image and already know I’m talking about Paul Goldschmidt. Read the rest of this entry »
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