When Matt Waldron made his major league debut for the Padres last June 24, it was a noteworthy event. While a few position players had thrown the occasional knuckleball ast a goof after taking the mound for mop-up duty, no true pitcher had thrown one in a regular season game in two years. The last one who had done so, the Orioles’ Mickey Jannis, made just one major league appearance. Mixing his knuckler in with four other offerings, Waldron bounced between the minors and majors for a couple months before sticking around in September. Now he’s a regular part of the Padres’ rotation, and he’s having success… some of the time.

Through six starts totaling 31 innings this season, Waldron owns a 4.35 ERA (111 ERA-) and 4.06 FIP (103 FIP-), which won’t put him in contention for the Cy Young award but is respectable enough to keep him occupying a back-of-the-rotation spot. For what it’s worth, within the Padres’ rotation he’s handily outpitched both Michael King (5.00 ERA, 6.30 FIP), whom the Padres acquired from the Yankees as one of the key pieces in the Juan Soto trade, and Joe Musgrove (6.94 ERA, 6.59 FIP), who last year signed a $100 million extension.

Waldron is striking out a modest 19.7% of hitters but walking just 7.3%; his 12.4% strikeout-walk differential is second best among Padres starters behind only Dylan Cease’s 18.7%, and Waldron’s 1.16 homers per nine sits in the middle of the pack among their starting five (which also includes Yu Darvish) — and a vast improvement on his 1.67 allowed per nine at Triple-A El Paso in 2022–23. He’s done a very good job of limiting hard contact, with his 87 mph average exit velocity placing in the 78th percentile and his 33.3% hard-hit rate in the 75th percentile. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.

Things couldn’t be going worse for the Angels. The Halos have stumbled to an 11-19 record in Ron Washington’s first year managing them, and he’ll now try to tread water without his best player. Future Hall of Famer Mike Trout is set to undergo knee surgery for a torn meniscus in his left knee, and while it isn’t expected to end his season, it will keep him out for awhile.

Trout started the year in fine form, with a wRC+ of 142 and 10 home runs tying him for the league lead. His production was elite despite a hilariously low .194 BABIP, which portended things likely would’ve gotten even better for him as the sample-size shenanigans worked themselves out. On top of that, he was much more aggressive on the bases, with his six steals equaling his total from the prior four years combined. That put him on pace for his first 30/30 season since his otherworldly 2012 rookie campaign. Indeed, this was shaping up to be another MVP-caliber campaign for Trout.

Of course, all of our optimism came with the cautious caveat: as long as he stays healthy. Which, as we know all too well, hasn’t been the case in recent years. Trout hasn’t played more than 120 games in a season since 2019, the year he won his third MVP award.

Beyond the silver lining that we might see Trout play baseball again in 2024, it’s too soon to know when he’ll be back in the lineup. Even so, we have some data to help us guess. A 2023 study by the Mayo Clinic’s Department of Orthopedic Surgery compiled data from 314 meniscus injuries from MLB and MiLB players over a seven-year period, with the median return to play time coming out to 70 days. But that includes all meniscus injuries, including those that didn’t require surgery. Knowing that Trout needs surgery paints a bleaker picture, with the median return to play for those players jumping up to 104 days. Put another way: A typical return from surgery wouldn’t have Trout returning to the Angels until the middle of August.

As difficult as it may be, the Angels still have to play baseball games without Trout. Taylor Ward (127 wRC+) and Jo Adell (174 wRC+) have done their part and will need to anchor the lineup and outfield without Trout. Mickey Moniak is expected to replace Trout in center field, at least against righties, and will likely platoon with new addition Kevin Pillar, whom the Angels signed to a major league deal shortly after Trout went down. Cole Tucker and Luis Rengifo are also capable of playing the outfield.

Bryce Miller’s Evolution

By now you’ve probably heard of Mariners righty Bryce Miller, though it’s certainly possible you hadn’t until he shined against the Braves on Monday. He took a perfect game into the sixth and a no-hitter into the seventh, striking out 10 and allowing just one run. The excellent showing lowered his ERA to 2.04 over his first six starts, with just 19 hits allowed in 35.1 innings. His strikeout rate has jumped from 22% last year to 29% so far this season, though he’s also walking a higher percentage of batters (9%, up from 5%). Of course, his .179 BABIP allowed is unsustainably low; then again, his 3.81 FIP is still respectable. Even if he’s due for some negative regression, it’s still worth discussing what has made him so effective thus far this year.

Miller relied heavily on his fastball as a rookie, and you would too if yours had 99th-percentile spin rate and nearly 10 inches of vertical ride — that’s more than all but seven pitchers who threw at least 100 innings in 2023. But when you throw your fastball nearly 60% of the time, major league hitters are going to know it’s coming and make the necessary adjustments to crush it. And boy, oh boy, they did, feasting for a .450 slugging percentage against Miller’s heater last year.

And so Miller’s response has been, unsurprisingly, to throw fewer four-seamers. He still relies on the pitch heavily, but it now represents 45% of his offerings, making him less predictable. He’s increased his sinker usage from 8% to 18%, and ditched his curveball and changeup for a splitter, which has quickly become his most-used secondary pitch (19%). With that splitter, he’s now actually running reverse splits in the early going, with lefties batting just .121/.205/.288 against it, and righties at .196/.262/.339. That said, he is striking out more and walking fewer righties than he is lefties, so I’d expect that trend to shift at least a bit. He’s kept lefties in check with his fastball this season, as his xwOBA allowed to them on that pitch has decreased from .406 to .333, but the splitter appears to be most effective tool to neutralize the platoon advantage. Lefties are 3-for-21 against that pitch with eight strikeouts and a 31.3% whiff rate. His continued emergence could give the Mariners a fourth great starter to go with Luis Castillo, George Kirby, and Logan Gilbert.

Jack Flaherty Shoves Against His Former Team

It wasn’t hard to imagine that Jack Flaherty would have a strong season. He’s still just 28, his velocity hasn’t dipped, and he has the pedigree of a fourth-place Cy Young finish in 2019. But back in December, when he signed a one-year, $14 million pillow contract with the Tigers, I certainly didn’t expect him to look as good as he did on Tuesday afternoon.

Facing the Cardinals — the team that drafted and developed him — for the first time since they traded him to the Orioles last summer, Flaherty allowed just two hits and one walk with a career-high 14 strikeouts on 93 pitches over 6.2 scoreless innings. All five of his pitches, even the few sinkers and changeups he threw, had whiff rates of at least 44%. Maybe he was amped facing his former club, or maybe he started to find his groove in his sixth start of the season; either way, all of his pitches had at least an extra tick of velocity from his rest-of-season averages. Despite his efforts, though, the Tigers allowed two runs in the top of the ninth inning and the Cardinals took the first game of Tuesday’s doubleheader, 2-1. (The Tigers won the night cap, 11-6.)

Flaherty’s excellent start could be quite the jumping-off point for a big contract when he reaches free agency again entering his age-29 season. Aside from this one outing, there are plenty of indications that Jack is, indeed, so back. His 2.85 FIP belies his 4.00 ERA, and he’s striking out 10 batters per every walk, a league-leading ratio. Most encouragingly, he’s made every start and thrown at least five innings and 87 pitches in each of them, no small feat for a guy who hasn’t qualified for the ERA title since that breakout 2019 campaign. If the Tigers are to stick around in the race, they’ll need more than just ace Tarik Skubal pitching big innings. Flaherty looks like a more than capable no. 2.

After a podcast preface by Ben Lindbergh about Mike Trout’s knee injury (sigh), Ben and Meg Rowley banter (4:19) about a weekend White Sox sweep, the overdue news that Nike is supposedly fixing the much-maligned MLB uniforms, follow-ups about rule rollbacks, ballplayer dirt ingestion, the “group Maddux,” and promotion/relegation, and the Twins’ summer sausage. Then (50:37) they talk to FanGraphs’ Ben Clemens about when it’s safe to evaluate changes in player performance and which hitters and pitchers have changed his mind the most (either positively or negatively) so far this season, plus a postscript (1:45:05).

Audio intro: Tom Rhoads, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial: Ted Berg, “Small Sample Size Song”
Audio outro: Dave Armstrong and Mike Murray, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to MLBTR on Trout’s knee
Link to BP Recovery Dashboard
Link to Trout baby announcement
Link to Trout hypotheticals
Link to Trout video
Link to uniform memo report
Link to The Athletic on unis
Link to Greene pants tear
Link to Drellich on MLBPA/Fanatics
Link to Ben on pitcher limits
Link to group Maddux response
Link to summer sausage wiki
Link to AP on the sausage
Link to Athletic on the sausage
Link to EW guest leaderboard
Link to signature significance info
Link to batted-ball predictiveness info
Link to Russell on hitter stats
Link to Russell on pitcher stats
Link to Carty on hitter stats
Link to Carty on pitcher stats
Link to Dolinar on sample size
Link to Russell on stability 1
Link to Russell on stability 2
Link to Ben C.’s riser picks
Link to Ben C.’s faller picks
Link to Orr on Abrams
Link to Ringer preseason predictions
Link to FG preseason top 100
Link to Clemens on Littell
Link to Clemens on Musgrove
Link to FG on Realmuto
Link to Tango on Realmuto
Link to Flaherty strikeouts story
Link to outfielder box article
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2:00	Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks, and welcome to another edition of my Tuesday chat!

2:02	Jay Jaffe: I’m a bit late in setting this up today as I was scrambling to file a piece on Padres knuckleballer Matt Waldron that will actually run tomorrow.

2:02	Jay Jaffe: We’ll give this a few minutes for the queue to fill up and for me to finish this structurally unsound turkey sandwich.

2:06	Jay Jaffe: Yesterday I took a look at Paul Goldschmidt and a handful of other former All-Stars who have been playing at or below replacement level through the season’s first month. https://blogs.fangraphs.com/paul-goldschmidt-and-the-crowd-below-repla…

2:09	Jay Jaffe: My usual go-to when I make a sandwich at home: Boar’s Head cracked pepper smoked turkey on Arnold Country White bread with mayo, mustard (eye-watering stuff from Philippe The Original, home of the French dip), sliced cucumber, and Potbelly Giardiniera (ikyky).

Read the rest of this entry »

They don’t have a division lead to show for it, but the Phillies have been one of the top teams in baseball to start the year. Alec Bohm and Trea Turner have carried an above-average offense despite some slow starts from the other usual suspects, and the pitching staff has lived up to its projected excellence, sitting a full win ahead of the field entering play Tuesday. Philadelphia’s substantial investments — from the newly extended Zack Wheeler and the re-signed Aaron Nola to the army of high-leverage bullpen arms — are paying off with interest, with Wheeler leading all NL pitchers in WAR. But sitting just a hair behind him is a teammate who may be having an even finer season: Ranger Suárez.

Suárez first rose to prominence in 2021, a season in which his role transitioned from mop-up reliever to co-closer to the rotation over the course of just a few months. After he recorded a diminutive 1.36 ERA across 106 innings in his breakout year, he earned a permanent spot in the rotation entering 2022. Over his first two seasons as a full-time starter, he’s put up a 92 ERA-, making him a solid mid-rotation arm but a clear step below Wheeler and Nola.

That’s changed this year, as the emergence of Suárez has given the Phillies a third ace to follow up their dominant duo. Case in point: Suárez’s eight-inning, one-run gem on Saturday constituted his worst start in weeks, snapping a 32-inning scoreless streak that included a complete game against the Rockies on April 16. And a quick glance at the numbers shows his superb month was no fluke.

The previous version of Suárez possessed neither plus stuff nor control, instead thriving with a high groundball rate that limited extra-base damage on balls in play. As someone who doesn’t throw hard or spin a hammer breaking ball, improvements to his stuff would need to come from more subtle means than his raw pitch characteristics. If anything, PitchingBot and Stuff+ view his season thus far as a slight step back in that department. But while Suárez hasn’t added a tick to his fastball or learned a new pitch, stronger command and synergy of the pitches he already had have led to big results across the board.

Suárez has a kitchen-sink arsenal, throwing five pitch types with regularity and none more than a third of the time. He most commonly starts hitters off with his sinker, a tumbling seam-shifted wake offering with just 4.5 inches of induced vertical break, which is less than half the league average. It’s doesn’t miss bats, but it has enough run to miss barrels; it’s his best groundball pitch and has a negative average launch angle. It’s also a called-strike machine when Suárez lands it in the zone, which he does about two-thirds of the time.

After getting ahead in the count, Suárez likes to pivot to his curveball and changeup, the latter of which has elevated his performance the most this season. The synergy between any groundballer’s sinker and change is crucial to their success – hitters unsure of what’s coming are more likely to both swing over changeups that dip beneath the zone and watch meaty sinkers go by, both good outcomes for the pitcher. Previously, Suárez struggled to locate his changeup, amassing a -5 run value over his first two years in the rotation. But with a +4 value in just six starts in 2024, it’s clear he’s turned a corner with it.

You might not recognize one of the stats in the above table. JOtZ% doesn’t roll off the tongue like BABIP or xwOBAcon, but it stands for “Just Outside the Zone” percentage – a region I defined as outside the rulebook strike zone but in Statcast’s shadow region. The changeups that are thrown just a few inches off or below the plate are the ones most likely ones to draw chases, making JOtZ% a decent indicator of command. In 2022 and ’23, Suárez often missed too low when throwing changeups – directionally correct in hitting his spots, but so low that no hitters were fooled into thinking they were sinkers. By more consistently finding the few inches directly beneath the strike zone, his JOtZ% shot up, and the results followed.

Most hurlers of his archetype struggle to find an out pitch, but Suárez may have two lethal offerings in the bank. In addition to his better-commanded changeup, his already-good curveball creates an enviable package of secondary stuff. He most commonly uses his curve in 0-2 and 1-2 counts as he fishes for strikeouts, often throwing it in the dirt with success. While his changeup’s success relies on pinpoint accuracy, Suárez’ curveball indiscriminately takes down opponents regardless of location thanks to its excellent two-planed break, with over a full foot of drop and sweep compared to a pitch thrown without spin.

Across the league, Suárez is one of just four starters (along with Tanner Bibee, Jack Flaherty, and Jared Jones) with a 19% swinging strike rate or higher on two separate pitches, which makes it no wonder he’s on pace for a career-high strikeout rate. But Suárez gets his whiffs much differently than his competitors do. One of the best indicators of pure stuff is in-zone whiff rate, the number of hittable pitches that batters come up empty on. High-octane aces like Wheeler, Gerrit Cole, and Spencer Strider top the leaderboards over the past few seasons, as do Bibee, Flaherty, and Jones this year. But while his 27.8% strikeout rate is in the top quartile of pitchers, Suárez’s zone-whiff rate sits in just the 8th percentile.

You could look at Suárez’s struggles to earn whiffs on strikes as a sign that his numbers are unsustainable, but I disagree – because what he lacks in in-zone dominance he more than makes up for by controlling the area outside of it. Because most out-of-zone pitches are taken for balls, the median pitcher loses about two runs of value per 100 they throw. No wonder we consider pitches thrown outside the zone to be mistakes. Except, that’s not the case for Suárez.

Suárez is one of just two starting pitchers in the league to create positive value by throwing outside the strike zone. He uses his non-strikes purposefully, each one carefully placed in an attempt to generate a swing from the batter. Data-driven models are a fan of his approach, with his 108 Location+ ranking sixth in the league. So far, it’s worked wonders for his ability to induce weak contact, shattering his previous bests in wOBA, groundball rate, and barrel rate while leading qualified starters in xERA.

More importantly, Suárez’s out-of-zone pitches don’t just keep the ball on the ground; they also miss bats entirely. He throws his curveball and changeup — his two best pitches at getting swings and misses — in the zone just a third of the time; most offerings that earn so many swinging strikes land in the zone far more often than that. Out-of-zone whiff rate is often thought of as a consequence of good stuff rather than great command – the leaderboard over the past few seasons closely resembles the one for strikeouts – but better command can also boost it. Suárez has improved his out-of-zone whiff rate by five percentage points this season, a year-over-year improvement that ranks in the 91st percentile.

All these whiffs on pitches outside the zone are also allowing Suárez to pitch deeper into games. Over his first two years as a starter, he wasn’t exactly known for volume; he would often get into deep counts, which led to a high walk rate and an average of fewer than 5.5 innings per start. Six starts into the new season, he’s bumped that average to 6.8 innings per start without a significant change in pitch count in part because he’s getting more swings on pitches outside the zone. He’s increased his strike rate from 62% to 66% while slashing his walk rate by more than half. More length from him will be a welcome development on a roster that is, for now, rostering just seven (all single-inning) relievers to accommodate a six-man rotation.

We often think of the pitchers with the best command as the ones who dominate within the strike zone – those with the highest zone rate, those who can hit their spots within it, and those who can limit walks — but Suárez shows us that command is different than control (which is something Jon Becker pointed out in his Top of the Order column Monday). Command is about throwing pitches in the spots that induce weak contact, generate whiffs, and befuddle hitters into making poor swing decisions. Suárez’s improved command has taken him to the next level, and he’s done it with a new approach outside the zone.

It’s easy to take a totally nihilistic view of pitching prospects in general. You’ll get your hopes up over a 13-strikeout start at the College World Series, twiddle your thumbs as innings limits and service time shenanigans delay the path to the majors by two years, and be left scratching your head when the pitcher’s UCL gives out anyway, just two months after his big league debut. Next thing you know, you’re watching a 29-year-old, whose coming was once as breathlessly anticipated as the Messiah’s, toodle around for 140 lackluster innings a year.

Such a viewpoint would be facile, the type of cynicism that, to quote the author Joe Klein, “passes for insight among the mediocre.” But baseball fans come by their pessimism honestly; as anyone who’s read a Nick Hornby novel knows, nothing fosters obnoxious nihilism like repeated heartbreak.

MacKenzie Gore was the high schooler with the big leg kick and unreal velocity for a lefty. Then he was arguably the top pitching prospect in baseball. Then he was trade fodder — but still a key component of the deal that brought Juan Soto from Washington to San Diego. And in 2023, Gore was fine. He made 27 starts, threw 136 1/3 innings, and posted a 4.42 ERA. Did he look like a future Cy Young winner? No. Was this worth giving up on Soto and risking sending the franchise into a tailspin? No. But he was competent in a big league rotation, and not all pitching prospects even achieve that. Read the rest of this entry »

Roughly a month’s worth of the 2024 season is now in the books. The American League East looks great. The Brewers and Guardians are standing up for the Central divisions. The White Sox can only beat the Rays, and the Astros somehow can’t beat anyone. Enough time has passed that I feel confident saying all of those things. On the other hand, it still feels too early to be certain about which players are over- or under-performing. But that doesn’t mean our opinions can’t change a bit. There’s enough data to make some educated guesses, so let’s put on our speculation caps. Here are four players — two hitters and two pitchers — who have risen in my estimation over the last few weeks. Tomorrow, I’ll follow up with four players who have gone the other way.

Elly De La Cruz, SS, Cincinnati Reds
I already thought De La Cruz had the potential to be one of the best players in baseball before the season started. Quite reasonably, though, I was worried about the downsides. A guy who struck out 33.7% of the time last year is always risky, and that’s particularly true given how he did it. He swung more often than league average at balls and less often than average at strikes; he also made less contact than average. You can have one of those three things be true, or maybe even two of three if you make up for it elsewhere, but three of three? Yikes. Read the rest of this entry »

Spending money can be a lot of fun, but spending someone else’s money is even better. And that’s exactly what we’re doing today!

About a month into the season is typically when I look at some of the players who are prime extension candidates and the possible deals they might work out with their teams. As usual, the contracts here are not necessarily what I would offer the players or what they will get, but what the mean, cold-hearted projections think would amount to a fair agreement. For each player, I’ve included their ZiPS projections with the latest model updates.

Elly De La Cruz, Cincinnati Reds (Nine years, $192 million)

It’s going to be a long time until Elly De La Cruz is eligible for free agency, but if the Reds wish to signal to the fans that the best players they develop will be in Cincinnati for longer than their middle arbitration years, ownership is going to have to make a real commitment to one of them at some point. And who is a better option than De La Cruz? I would have said Matt McLain a few months ago, but his major shoulder surgery makes it a risky time for both team and player to come to a meeting of the minds on a future dollar figure. De La Cruz still has issues making contact, but his plate discipline has continued to improve since his debut. He’s drawing a lot more walks this year and he’s actually been better than the average major leaguer at not chasing pitches. And with better plate discipline should come more power because a greater percentage of his swings will come against pitches that he can actually drive.

As you can see below, he wouldn’t need to exceed his 50th percentile projections for home runs by much to secure a 40/40 season. In fact, after hitting his eighth home run of the year Monday night, De La Cruz is currently on pace for 45 homers and an absurd 101 steals this season — and he still has a lot of polishing left to do. He’s also showing he’s far from a defensive liability at shortstop, even though a healthy McLain is still probably preferable there. This contract buys out some of De La Cruz’s early free agency years and gives him a big wad of guaranteed dough.

Corbin Burnes, Baltimore Orioles (Eight years, $210 million)

If you’ve been following my work for a while now, you surely know I’m an Orioles fan. And like many other Baltimore fans, I remember the moment when I became unhappy with the ownership of the late Peter Angelos. My feelings toward him soured because of how he and the Orioles handled their free agent negotiations with Mike Mussina. After Moose had previously taken a hometown discount, the O’s assumed he would continue to pitch for them at a below-market rate, and as a result, they lowballed him the next time he was eligible for free agency. He declined, leading to the second-best pitcher in team history finishing his career wearing Yankee pinstripes and ensuring that his Hall of Fame plaque wouldn’t have an ornithologically correct bird on the cap.

While I still think the team should lock up Grayson Rodriguez long term, it’s far more urgent< for the O’s to extend Corbin Burnes, given that he hits free agency after the season. No better pitcher will be available this winter, and nobody in the minors anywhere, for any team, is a safe bet to be better than Burnes over the next five or six years. New owner David Rubinstein has said all the right things, and he made a nice gesture when he bought everyone at Pickles a round of drinks, but the best way to show that he’s serious about building a perennial contender is to not let his team’s ace sign elsewhere. Given the O’s have just about nothing in the way of financial obligations, there’s no reason not to extend him. If that means paying more than that figure above, so be it.

Bo Bichette, Toronto Blue Jays (Seven years, $151 million)

Let’s be clear, despite his uncharacteristic struggles so far this season, I think Bo Bichette will command more than $151 million, and while the Blue Jays may balk any amount greater than that figure, they should still be willing to pay him whatever it takes to keep him around for the bulk of his career. Because of his position and his consistency (again, his first month of this season notwithstanding), Bichette has emerged as the best scion of a baseball family in Toronto, and time’s running out to extend bounty hunter Boba Chette before he hits free agency after the 2025 campaign. I actually think he’ll age better than ZiPS does, at least offensively. Either way, shortstops get super expensive if you wait until they hit the open market. That means that now’s the time for the Blue Jays to extend him if they’re going to keep him, even if that means going over this projected offer to ensure he doesn’t reach free agency.

Alex Bregman, Houston Astros (Four years, $101 million)

The Astros have been able to let some of their offensive contributors walk in free agency — Springer and Carlos Correa among them — mainly because they’ve had pretty solid replacements coming up at the same time, such as Yordan Alvarez, Kyle Tucker, and Jeremy Peña. There’s no similar player on the horizon who can take the place of Alex Bregman. And with Houston already reeling with its pitchers, it would be a lot to ask the front office to fill a gaping hole at third base as well.

Max Fried, Atlanta Braves (Six years, $150 million)

Atlanta has a knack for being able to survive epidemics of pitcher injuries in ways that are fascinating if you’re a fan of the team and maddening if you root for another one. But with Spencer Strider already out for the rest of this season after undergoing internal brace surgery for his damaged elbow, can Atlanta really afford to let Max Fried and Charlie Morton depart this offseason? I like what Reynaldo López has done this season, but you don’t really want to go into 2025 counting on his continued success, Chris Sale’s health, and a full recovery from Strider following his second UCL procedure? The Braves reportedly offered six years, $162 million to Aaron Nola; how could they not make a similar offer to Fried, a similarly valued pitcher who has been a large part of their recent success? Now, all reports I’ve heard suggest Fried’s not keen on discussing an extension during the season, but that doesn’t mean he wouldn’t change his mind if Atlanta gives him a good reason to do so.

Josh Naylor, Cleveland Guardians (Four years, $80 million)

Since the start of the 2002 season, the Guardians have received 10,109 plate appearances from first basemen not named Jim Thome, Carlos Santana, or Josh Naylor. Those 57 hitters have combined to hit .253/.324/.426 for 7.7 WAR, or about 0.5 WAR per 600 plate appearances. This is a franchise that has struggled to find solid fill-in first basemen, so it’s hard to imagine the Guardians would be able to find an an adequate replacement if Naylor walks after 2026. And this is hardly a blockbuster deal; it’s similar to what Kyle Schwarber got from the Phillies coming off the best season of his career (2.7 WAR in 2021). Naylor’s not a superstar, but he’s in his prime years. That should be enough incentive for the Guards to pay for him to stick around, and so long as the deal is fair, the fact that Josh’s younger brother Bo also plays for Cleveland might make him more inclined to stay.

Jackson Merrill, San Diego Padres (Seven years, $95 million)

Jackson Merrill has one of the odder long-term projections according to ZiPS, which expects him to have a long, stable plateau rather than a period of significant growth followed by a steady decline (at least in the years covered below). But ZiPS is increasingly coming around to his reputation as a good bad-ball hitter, and his batting average projections have improved considerably since the winter. Merrill looks to be a solid player, and he’s one the Padres may need toward the end of their long-term deals with infielders Xander Bogaerts, Manny Machado, and Jake Cronenworth.

Pete Alonso, New York Mets (No offer)

Pete Alonso is rightfully a very popular player in New York, and I’ve always had a soft spot for the Polar Bear, both because homers are fun and because ZiPS was in on him very early when he was a prospect (everyone likes looking smart). And with his free agency imminent, this would be a suitable time to extend him on a long-term contract. The problem is, the more I look at the situation, the harder it is for me to think of a scenario in which he and the Mets could come to terms on a deal unless one party was willing to come out of the negotiation feeling very unhappy. ZiPS suggests a four-year, $70 million contract, and I can’t imagine Alonso feeling anything but insulted by an offer like that. I think given Alonso’s place in the organization and the hiccups in the development of Brett Baty and Mark Vientos, the Mets would be willing to pay Alonso more than a projection suggests, but I can’t see them offering him Freddie Freeman or Matt Olson money, either. Because the basic fact is that Freeman and Olson are more well-rounded players than Alonso, who has one amazing dimension. Just to illustrate, below Alonso I’ve included the projections for Freeman and Olson over the next six years.

Alonso projects to be slightly worse than them in the short term and then to be similar in the later years, though that’s likely because he is younger than them. Plus, by the end of 2024, the other players’ contracts already will have covered two additional prime seasons from Olson and three from Freeman. I don’t think any pending free agent has a bigger gulf than Alonso does between the perceived value of his past and the expected value of his future, and as such, this has contract boondoggle written all over it, as big as it was with Kris Bryant a couple years ago. I don’t envy the Mets for the decision they have to make with Alonso, because letting him go, trading him, and keeping him all feel like poor options.

One day earlier this season, a seasoned big league reliever took stock of his career.

He has spent five years in the majors, handling his share of high-leverage innings and generally performing well. This coming fall, he is set to reach a magic number: six years of major league service, earning him the right of free agency for the first time in his career. He will hit the open market still in his prime, hoping to land a trifecta that he’s so far been denied – the ability to choose his employer, garner a long-term commitment and earn a salary determined by open competition for his services.

He’s not looking forward to it.

“You talk to some of your buddies that are in it and it’s a miserable experience,” the reliever told me recently, “because you don’t know where you’re going to go, no team wants to give you the value you think you’re worth, and you’re like, ‘Am I going to have a job? Where am I going to go? What am I going to do?’”

He is hardly alone. This spring, I’ve spoken to a number of players who are set to reach six years of service by the end of the 2024 season. They range from some of the best players at their positions to journeymen just hanging on, and all were granted anonymity so they could speak freely about approaching such a consequential milestone. For many, it will have taken a decade or more – of minor league seasons, of call-ups and send-downs and other detours – to finally have the ability to exert some control over their careers.

And they have mixed feelings about it.

They watched this past winter as standout players like Cody Bellinger, Blake Snell and others were forced to settle for pillow contracts rather than long-term guarantees. Juan Soto will make his bag this offseason, but after seeing the open market shun a two-time Cy Young winner and a former MVP, players on the verge of free agency can’t help but wonder how rudely it might treat them. Some are well over 30 years old, meaning they’ll reach free agency at ages for which teams are typically loath to pay. They’re hoping for the best, but several say free agency seems something less than it’s cracked up to be.

“Free agency this year was really strange,” said one hitter. “Super strange.”

“For the first time in a while,” said another, “it’s just not as clear what free agency can present to a player.”

“You feel like you’ve reached this part of your career where it’s a thing to celebrate,” said a pitcher, “and then you start to wonder, ‘Well, what am I going to be celebrating? What is this going to look like?’”

To reach this point requires mettle. Players have weathered meager minor league salaries, sudden employer changes and punishing arbitration hearings. Most players never get this far, but the ones who do are told they’ll be rewarded for completing the journey. The closer you get, though, the more a question begins to nag.

What if the promised land sucks?

…

When you’re a rookie, none of this seems real. The glow of the big leagues is intoxicating, and it’s easy to get drunk on the promise of a long and storied major league career. A rookie’s mind is either too overwhelmed to consider a possible business decision six years down the road, or too naïve to treat it as anything other than a fait accompli. You assume you’ll get there because nothing has yet told you it might not happen.

Or, more accurately, that it probably won’t.

“To bank on anything for six years,” said a pitcher, “is crazy.”

By the time players reach five years, they’ve inevitably learned this lesson. Almost all have struggled and been sent down. Some have been taken on and off the 40-man roster. Several have been waived or traded and had to start over, proving themselves to a new team. All the while, they’ve watched as a brutal process of attrition filtered out many of their teammates.

“It’s a long time to get to that free market,” said one player. “A high percentage of guys don’t make it past a year, and most guys don’t make it past three years.”

No one knows this better than a major league reliever. The ones I spoke to for this story all underscored just how fungible their position is. “If you’re down for a couple months, it’s just, ‘All right, see ya.’ We’re expendable,” said a middle reliever. Sometimes, said another, that means pitching “on a night you might be a little banged up” because the other choice may be pitching for nobody. “There’s really no room for error,” said a third. “You have to bring it every day.”

Though starting pitchers and everyday players enjoy a greater measure of certainty, laboring without a guarantee of future employment is kind of the gig. Reaching arbitration after three years provides a welcome bump in pay – “You always hear the saying, ‘Take it to ‘traish,’” said one reliever – but the process can be brutal. An arbitration hearing can amount to an hours-long critique of a player’s value, often in disagreement over just a few hundred thousand dollars. And even though it represents a player’s first real chance to advocate for his own value, much remains out of his control.

Performance in a player’s last pre-arb year carries outsized evaluative weight, locking them into a rough pay scale no matter how much they improve in future years. “I would have liked to have a better platform year,” said one hitter. At least you can control your platform year; there’s little influence to exert over others at your position in your service class. “If you get a guy who takes a bad deal from a team because he doesn’t have a good agent, or he doesn’t have any leverage and he just feels like he needs to take whatever deal gets offered,” said a pitcher, “the whole market gets reset.”

Still, that bad deal is at least guaranteed under the Collective Bargaining Agreement. Going to a hearing can be a matter of principle for players, but as many learned this spring, it exposes them to more risk. Some were alarmed that the Giants could cut an established player like J.D. Davis and pay him just a fraction of the salary he’d just won in a hearing; while negotiated one-year contracts for arbitration eligible players are fully guaranteed under the most recent CBA, that provision does not guarantee contracts reached through a hearing. There are no guarantees, it shows, until they’re written into your contract.

“At any time, the team can be done and decide to non-tender you,” a hitter said. “It still feels like you’re playing every year for your job the following year. It’s an incredible amount of stress. Nobody’s sitting here asking people to feel bad for us. But it makes it hard to let the best version of yourself show up every day when you’re constantly feeling like you’re playing for job security.”

No wonder the game has seen a run of young players agreeing to early-career extensions that are both lucrative and team-friendly. They land life-changing money and no longer have to trek the long and narrowing path to free agency. Though the players union stresses the importance of setting a player’s value on the open market, few who have had to grind just to reach five years begrudge anyone who took an early payday.

“Before approaching this personally, guys turning down big numbers, I flinched at it,” said one hitter. “I always understood the narrative that as a union, as an association, we have to move the needle for the wave of players after us. I get that. But it was hard for me to see early in my career because I felt like so much needed to happen between now and then.”

These players are much closer now, but a lot still could happen to derail them. If they struggle, they could be designated for assignment and released or outrighted to the minors before crossing the six-year threshold. If their team falls out of the playoff picture, a trade becomes more likely, uprooting players and their families in the middle of the year. An injury – an ever-present risk, especially for pitchers – would guarantee them service time but tank their value at the worst possible moment.

Then, even if they survive that final gauntlet to reach the open market, they may get their asses kicked. Players feel strongly that it shouldn’t be that way – “It’s hard to get there, and if you do, you should get paid for it,” one pitcher said – but they’re also pragmatists who know better than to stand on stubborn principle. If the open market isn’t going to treat you well, because you’re too old or because your position is too expendable or because teams just don’t want to spend money that particular winter, then maybe a team-friendly extension in the hand is worth more than a lucrative deal in the free-agent bush.

“It would be silly and a little bit irresponsible,” said one hitter, “to not take that into account.”

…

This isn’t to say free agency has lost all its luster, of course. “Agency” is the key part of the term. Not all free agents will get paid, at least not as much as they’d hope, but all of them will get to choose.

For so long, players don’t have that luxury. In what other profession can someone go a decade or more without having any choice about where to work? The current system has been codified in the CBA for decades – and was even more restrictive before the players organized – so it may be easy to take its effects for granted. But not when you’re on the precipice of finally being able to make decisions about your own career.

“It’s crazy. I’ve had zero say where I’ve been for 14 years,” said one pitcher. “To have the opportunity is probably what players look forward to the most.”

They’d like to get paid, too, either in free agency or earlier in their careers. To that end, the players offer varying solutions, some more attainable than others.

Everyone would like a shorter runway to free agency – “Maybe two years of league minimum and two years of arb,” said one hitter – although the players as a whole might not like the concessions the owners would demand to secure such an overhaul. Those who have been closer to the bargaining process know that. “Everybody would love to get to free agency sooner,” said a hitter who says he keeps up with the union’s efforts. “Is it realistic? I don’t know.”

The latest CBA did do more to funnel money to pre-arbitration players, raising the minimum salary and establishing a bonus pool to be distributed among top performers. One pitcher noted most of the players receiving that money are the uber-talents who are already likely to be offered lucrative extensions or land large free-agent deals, but others pushed back on such criticism. “More can always be done,” a hitter said. “But I do think the system is pretty good.” Another wouldn’t change a thing, despite having been released at one point in his arbitration years. Reaching six years is supposed to be hard. “The system in place, it’s been there for a while and a lot of guys have gone through it,” he said. “Like everything in the game, you’ve got to earn it.”

One solution that generated discussion amidst the sluggish spring was the idea of a signing deadline. The union has never advocated for such a measure publicly, and Scott Boras, the game’s most powerful player agent, has lambasted it as a giveaway to ownership; it’s perhaps telling that commissioner Rob Manfred was the one to float the idea. Still, with players having watched their colleagues hang on the open market deep into March, their curiosity about the benefits of a deadline hasn’t evaporated.

“That’s the thing I’ve been hearing mostly,” a pitcher said, “and it seems like there’s maybe some traction there.”

Even if a deadline wouldn’t be sound policy – teams can choose to not spend rather than embroil themselves in a bidding war, but free agents can’t realistically take their talents to another professional league – its lingering popularity demonstrates how much the specter of this past winter clouds the minds of players approaching free agency for the first time. They want the right of free agency, but they want it to be worth it. They don’t want to sit at home for months wondering where they’ll play, only to settle for a short-term deal that lands them in the exact same predicament a year later. No one wants to join the Boras Four.

Still, as poorly as those free agent forays went, those players still got to choose their employer. That’s what players covet as much as anything. “You used to hear this all the time as a player, that the goal was free agency,” said one pitcher. He offers an amendment to that, though: “Six years is the goal, but six years while still having more than one team interested in you is the goal.”

That pitcher is a reliever, one who knows that even at his best, he’s likely to live the rest of his career off one-year deals. But if a player is good and lucky and happens to time the market just right, it’s possible to fully grasp that brass ring. Not every free agent cashes in, but some do.

“I imagine if you’re coming off finishing six and having a good year,” said one hitter, “it’d be pretty fuckin’ cool.”

With five hits in a three-game span against the Diamondbacks and Mets, Paul Goldschmidt finally got off the interstate — to use former All-Star-turned-broadcaster Ken Singleton’s memorable term for hitters with a batting average below .200 — but as the end of April approaches, the 36-year-old first baseman has nonetheless produced at a sub-replacement level thus far. It’s early, but he’s got some company in that department among former All-Stars, as well as some high-profile free agents both past and future.

Goldschmidt won the National League MVP award in 2022, hitting a robust .317/.404/.578 with 35 homers; he led the league in both slugging percentage and wRC+ (176) while totaling 6.9 WAR. His value slipped to about half of that last season (3.4 WAR) as he batted .268/.363/.447 (122 wRC+) with 25 homers — respectable by most standards, but the lowest slugging percentage of his 13-year career to that point. Right now, both he and the Cardinals would gladly settle for that batting line, as he’s hitting just .208/.304/.287 with two homers, a 74 wRC+, and -0.3 WAR.

Goldschmidt is hardly the Cardinals’ only hitter who is struggling. Last week, the team optioned Jordan Walker, who was carrying a .155/.239/.259 (44 wRC+) line, back to Triple-A Memphis, but that hasn’t exactly cleared up the problem. Nolan Gorman (77 wRC+) and Lars Nootbaar (81 wRC+) have been terrible as well, and their center fielders, Michael Siani and the since-demoted Victor Scott II, have combined to “hit” .095/.170/.131 (-7 wRC+) en route to a net -1.0 WAR. Small wonder the team is second-to-last in the NL in scoring at 3.57 runs per game. But this dive isn’t so much about the Cardinals as it is about Goldschmidt, whose offensive profile looks as though it has aged 10 years in the past two. After going 3-for-4 with a home run off the Dodgers’ Tyler Glasnow on Opening Day, he went 92 plate appearances (of which just 12 were hits) before collecting his second extra-base hit. He’s up to four now, having doubled both on Wednesday and Saturday. Read the rest of this entry »