Ben Lindbergh, Meg Rowley, and FanGraphs authors Michael Baumann and Ben Clemens play “Character Who Appears in Shōgun the Novel (but Not the TV Series) or International Amateur Baseball Player” (3:13), banter about an MLBPA power struggle (8:37) and the life of late Orioles owner Peter Angelos (16:51), and then explain the second annual preseason predictions game (22:38) and make 10 bold predictions apiece (29:00) about baseball in 2024, to be voted on by listeners.
Up until now, the Rockies had made very little noise this offseason. After agreeing to extensions with Germán Márquez and Charlie Blackmon just before the 2023 season wrapped up, Colorado spent a mere $3.5 million on major league free agent deals in the six months since, the fewest of any team in the majors. Yet, at the tail end of a long, quiet winter, the Rockies finally made headlines, when on Sunday they signed 22-year-old Ezequiel Tovar to a long-term contract extension. The deal, which begins right away, will pay Tovar $63.5 million over the next seven years. After that, the Rockies have a $20.5 million team option for 2031, the shortstop’s age-29 season.
Across three offseasons at the helm for Colorado, general manager Bill Schmidt has largely avoided multi-year free agent deals, with one notable exception: Kris Bryant and the seven-year, $182 million pact he signed before the 2022 season. Over the past two winters, the Rockies are one of only three teams not to have signed a single multi-year free agent deal; the other two clubs, the Pirates and Orioles, have outspent Colorado by totals of $37.71 million and $10.13 million, respectively. However, free agency isn’t the only way for teams to keep players around for longer periods of time. Under Schmidt, the Rockies have signed eight players to multi-year extensions; only the Braves have extended more players on multi-year deals in that span. Atlanta has gotten far more extension attention, but this is how Colorado operates, too.
Even so, the Tovar deal represents a different approach for the Rockies because it is the first time that Schmidt has extended a player with fewer than four years of service. It’s also the longest extension the Rockies have awarded since February 2019, when they signed Nolan Arenado to an eight-year, $260 million deal that began in 2020. Moreover, while we have started to see more and more pre-arb players signing long-term extensions around the majors, many of those players either are stars or have star potential. Perhaps the only good comp for Tovar’s extension is the eight-year, $50 million deal Keibert Ruiz signed with the Nationals after putting up a 91 wRC+ and 1.8 WAR in 2022, his first full season. Then again, even Ruiz arguably had a higher ceiling at the time. Tovar might be in a class of his own when it comes to low-ceiling, high-floor youngsters signing lucrative long-term deals.
Entering the 2023 season, Eric Longenhagen and Tess Taruskin ranked Tovar no. 41 on our Top 100 Prospects list, describing him as “a fantastic defensive shortstop” with “poor plate discipline” that “somewhat undermines his excellent bat-to-ball skill.” One year later, Tovar is no longer a prospect, but that remains the prevailing report. He finished his debut season with the lowest walk rate and the second-highest O-Swing% among qualified NL batters. He also finished with 16 OAA and 13 DRS; the only shortstop to outpace him in both metrics was Dansby Swanson. Despite his 70 wRC+, worst among qualified NL hitters, Tovar finished his rookie season with 1.6 WAR. That’s hardly star-level performance, but a 1.6-WAR player is still a big league regular.
Let’s get the bad stuff out of the way first: Tovar’s offensive numbers last season were pitiful. One of the only areas in which he was above average was batting average, and Coors Field likely inflated that number. His plate discipline was dreadful, as expected, but so were his contact skills, which came as something of a surprise. Tovar ranked 66th out of 72 qualified NL hitters in contact rate, and he wasn’t just whiffing on pitches outside the zone. While his O-Contact% was poor, his Z-Contact% also came in below league average.
On the bright side, when he did manage to put the ball in play, Tovar showed flashes of his promising hit tool. His .378 xwOBAcon was a few ticks above league average, thanks to his line drive tendencies. He ranked in the 71st percentile in Baseball Savant’s Sweet-Spot% and finished seventh among qualified NL players in line drive rate. If he can make more contact, especially on pitches in the strike zone, his offensive numbers will improve even if he never adds a lick of discipline to his game. If he can improve his plate discipline, then all the better. For what it’s worth, he significantly improved his walk rate during his final season in the minor leagues, prompting his Double-A manager, Chris Denorfia, to rave about Tovar’s growth. “He’s made this developmental jump,” Denorfia told David Laurila in 2022. “Something clicked to where he’s recognizing situations where pitchers are going to try to get him to chase.” Plate discipline is a different animal in the majors than in the minors, but still, it’s worth acknowledging that this is a skill he has successfully improved in the past.
Tovar also showed off 69th-percentile sprint speed in 2023. He won’t ever be a weapon on the basepaths, but with speed like that, he should be a better base runner than his numbers last year would suggest; he went 11-for-16 on stolen base attempts and was worth -0.6 BsR. Long story short, this is a player with much more offensive potential than we saw last season, and he has a strong enough glove to allow him to nurse his growing pains at the highest level while still contributing positive value to his club.
Courtesy of Dan Szymborski, here is what the ZiPS projections envision for Tovar over the next eight years:
ZiPS Projection – Ezequiel Tovar
Year
BA
OBP
SLG
AB
R
H
2B
3B
HR
RBI
BB
SO
SB
OPS+
WAR
2024
.259
.300
.424
552
75
143
32
4
17
76
28
142
11
87
2.2
2025
.263
.306
.438
562
79
148
33
4
19
81
30
138
11
91
2.6
2026
.266
.310
.442
568
82
151
34
3
20
84
32
133
11
94
2.9
2027
.267
.313
.448
572
85
153
34
3
21
86
34
129
10
96
3.1
2028
.267
.313
.446
574
85
153
34
3
21
87
35
125
10
96
3.1
2029
.266
.314
.445
571
86
152
33
3
21
86
36
122
9
96
3.2
2030
.268
.317
.449
563
85
151
33
3
21
86
36
121
8
97
3.2
2031
.270
.318
.453
552
84
149
32
3
21
84
35
119
8
99
3.2
With projections like that, ZiPS would give Tovar $92 million over seven years. That’s more than he’ll make even if the Rockies pick up his team option for an eighth year.
With all that in mind, it’s easy to see why the Rockies offered Tovar a long-term extension. We’ve already seen his floor, and it’s rather sturdy — he can be a valuable player even if he’s the worst hitter in the league. The Rockies could do a heck of a lot worse than pay $9 million per year for seven seasons of a 1.5-win shortstop. What’s more, it won’t take much for this deal to pay dividends in Colorado. If Tovar’s hit tool progresses against big league pitching, he would blossom into an above-average shortstop throughout his twenties.
As for Tovar, his youth has gifted him the rare opportunity to cash in now without giving up the chance to sign another long-term deal. His $63.5 million guarantee is more than the vast majority of players will earn in their careers, yet he can still reach free agency before his 30th birthday. If Colorado picks up its club option, Tovar will have to wait another year to test the open market. Yet, if the Rockies are comfortable paying $20.5 million for his services (even the Rockies, and even in 2031 dollars), that suggests Tovar will be playing well enough to cash in on the free agent market at 30 years old. The two or three free agent years he is losing aren’t nothing, especially for a glove-first player. Still, Tovar had to sacrifice something for lifelong financial security, and it’s not difficult to understand why he made that choice.
Ultimately, this is a rock solid move for both sides. The Rockies are betting they secured three additional years with an excellent shortstop at price tag well below market value. If that doesn’t work out, they’re only slightly overpaying one of the better defensive players in baseball. Meanwhile, Tovar gets to work out his kinks at the MLB level without ever having to worry about money, and if everything goes according to plan, he can still sign a lucrative free agent deal in the 2030s. Now, both sides can get to work on what they need to do next: Tovar will try to improve his plate discipline, while the Rockies will look to acquire, develop, and yes, extend the stars who can help them escape the NL West basement.
Earlier today, Dan Szymborski kicked off our reliever rankings. Now we’ll take a look at the bullpens projected to be baseball’s best.
There are some positions for which a cleaner, wider WAR gap exists between the top teams and the bottom, where we can more definitively say that some teams are better than others. For instance, the combination of talent and depth that the Yankees and Braves have in right field separates them from the rest of baseball in a substantial way: There’s a projected 4-5 WAR gap between those clubs and the teams projected/ranked as high as sixth in right field. The projected WAR gap between the Phillies’ bullpen and that of the White Sox, ranked all the way down at 30, is only about that much, at 4.5 WAR. Relief pitching is not one of those positions with clear, WAR-driven demarcation from team to team, and bullpens on clubs with better rotations (and starters who eat up innings) are going to be punished for throwing fewer innings than those on teams that frequently deploy long relievers since WAR is a counting stat influenced by playing time. Read the rest of this entry »
After wrapping up our position player rankings with the league’s designated hitters, we turn our attention to the pitchers, starting with the bullpens in the bottom half of the reliever rankings.
One of my favorite jokes, which I’ve probably beaten into the ground at this point, is that there are three teams a year whose fans think they have a great bullpen, while those who root for the 27 other clubs are convinced that their team’s bullpen is the worst in baseball history and the primary reason they aren’t going to win the World Series. Read the rest of this entry »
Blaze Alexander is on the bubble to break camp with the Arizona Diamondbacks. His spring showing suggests he deserves the opportunity to do so. In 52 Cactus League plate appearances, the 24-year-old infield prospect has slashed .420/.442/.640 with seven extra-base hits and five stolen bases in as many attempts. Moreover, he’s continued to show promise since being taken in the 11th round of the 2018 draft out of IMG Academy. That he’s mostly flown under the radar while doing so is starting to change.
“I hope that’s the case,” Alexander told me in mid-March. “I mean, I’ve been putting on a pretty good performance this spring, so I definitely think I’m opening some eyes. That said, I obviously need to transfer it over to the regular season.”
The likelihood of his doing so in the big leagues was improved on Friday when the D-Backs released Elvis Andrus, a notable roster move given that the 15-year veteran had been inked to a free agent contract as a potential backup for Geraldo Perdomo. As it now stands, there is a good chance that Alexander — “a viable defensive shortstop with a huge arm… [who] hits for enough power” in the words of Eric Longenhagen — will be filling that role.
Hitting for power isn’t one of Alexander’s aims, nor is it part of his process. While he does possess pop — his ledger includes 30 home runs in 734 plate appearances over the past two minor-league seasons — his M.O. is bullets, not blasts. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the J.D. Martinez and Michael Lorenzen signings, Eury Pérez‘s elbow, Jackson Holliday not making the O’s Opening Day roster, and MLB’s crowded, mediocre middle, then preview the 2024 New York Yankees (16:49) with The Athletic’s Chris Kirschner, and the 2024 Washington Nationals (1:14:13) with The Washington Post’s Andrew Golden.
In an in-depth discussion that became a bonus episode, Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley explore the state of the sports-betting scandal surrounding Shohei Ohtani and his former interpreter Ippei Mizuhara, breaking down the stakes, the most pressing sources of uncertainty, and the many possible outcomes and consequences.
We conclude our rankings of the game’s position players with a deep dive on designated hitters.
Back when the DH rule was introduced in 1973 (has it really been five decades?), the role was often filled by aging and/or physically compromised sluggers who were in the lineup on a regular basis. Boston’s Orlando Cepeda played in 142 games, while Minnesota’s Tony Oliva played in 146 and the California Angels’ Frank Robinson saw action in 147. All were in their mid-to-late 30s, and save for Robinson’s 17 games in left field, all were exclusively designated hitters. The Tigers differed in that they platooned at the position, but it was with an otherwise similar script. Gates Brown and Frank Howard, both at the tail end of their careers, combined to play in just three games with a glove in hand. Read the rest of this entry »
The regular season starts in about a week, which means there isn’t much time left to sign free agents and integrate them into the team before games start to count. In some cases, in fact, there’s no time; Blake Snell won’t be ready for Opening Day, so any pitchers who haven’t signed yet surely won’t be either. But there’s one player who could probably fall out of bed and into a starting lineup next Thursday, and the Mets just signed him:
J.D. Martinez is offense in a can. He plays DH, so he doesn’t need to learn who he’s throwing to or catching from. He’s well traveled, so this isn’t his first rodeo. And the Mets could use some offense, which means this signing lines up on many axes. At one year and $12 million, the contract is right. There’s just one question: How good will he be?
If you listen to our projections, Martinez is squarely on the downside of his career. ZiPS and Steamer project him for a 106 and 105 wRC+, respectively, with a ton of strikeouts offsetting strong power numbers. All DHs across baseball racked up a collective 106 wRC+ last year. It’s not exactly replacement level, but it doesn’t seem particularly hard to find someone capable of putting up that level of offense.
A counterpoint, though: Martinez just finished a season where he hit .271/.321/.572, good for a 135 wRC+. The year before that, he was at 119, and 126 the year before that. Sure, he’s not the fearsome, MVP-caliber hitter he was in 2017 and 2018, but there’s plenty of room to be worse than that and still great. His statline didn’t look particularly fluky; he posted a .301 ISO, meaningfully higher than his career mark, but he earned that production with a ton of hard contact. He posted the second-highest barrel rate of his career, the highest hard-hit rate, and put the ball in the air frequently to take advantage of all that thunder.
There are a lot of components to analyze, but at the end of the day, it all boils down to one question: Should we trust 2023, or the projections of 2024? If the Mets get some semblance of what the Dodgers got, this is a whale of a deal. If they get something closer to league average, the whole package is a lot less exciting. Let’s see if we can pick up on any patterns that suggest one or the other.
The big worry with Martinez’s game is that he strikes out a lot. His 31.1% mark in 2023 represented a new career high, but he’s always been a high-risk, high-reward hitter. Nearly every contact frequency and swing decision metric declined from the prior year:
Swing Decision Blues
Year
O-Swing%
Z-Swing%
O-Contact%
Z-Contact%
SwStr%
2022
34.9%
78.1%
58.0%
81.2%
14.6%
2023
36.9%
76.7%
47.0%
82.2%
17.2%
That didn’t really harm Martinez last year. It seems like his plan was pretty straightforward. Swing hard, because you might hit it, more or less. You can live with a lot more misses if you downright wallop the ball when you connect, and that’s just what Martinez did. Those strikeouts have never sunk his offense; he has a career 132 wRC+ with a career 24.7% strikeout rate. Projection systems think he’ll strike out quite a bit next year — because of course they do — but that’s never stopped him from crushing.
Are Martinez’s lack of walks last year behind his lackluster projections? They’ve never been a huge part of his game in the first place, but 2023 marked one of the lowest walk rates of his decade-long offensive renaissance. No sweat from either Steamer or ZiPS there, though; they think he’ll rebound toward career norms.
No, the place they think Martinez will fall short is what happens after he hits the ball. I’m talking 10 fewer homers in 70 extra plate appearances, an epic power outage. I think the reason is pretty simple; 2023 was an outlier for him when it came specifically to power. He’s always run a high BABIP. He’s always hit a lot of doubles, particularly in Boston. But he hit homers on 6.9% of his plate appearances last year, the second-highest rate of his career, behind only his torrid 2017 season (.303/.376/.690, 167 wRC+). You probably can’t bet on that continuing.
In other words, the projections are based on a grain of truth, as they always are. If you’re trying to figure out how this signing will fail, it’s the general passage of time combined with regression. Martinez will keep striking out a lot, because those tend to be sticky. He’ll hit fewer bombs, because those are more variable. He’ll hit for a bit less BABIP, too, and of course he’s getting older, so sprinkle in a bit of decline everywhere, and presto change-o, you’ve turned Martinez into merely a decent hitter instead of a great one.
I don’t really buy that interpretation of the data, though. Projection systems obviously do a great job in the aggregate, but I think they’re missing the arrow of causality here. I don’t think Martinez struck out more, sustainably, and happened to hit the ball hard, unsustainably. I think that the two are linked, and that he took an attack-heavy approach understanding the inherent tradeoffs. I think it’s reasonable to project more power this year, though probably not last year’s Baseball Savant-incinerating red flames:
Split the difference between our projections and last season, and you get roughly what I’m expecting. Bunches of homers, bunches of strikeouts, and plenty of hard contact for singles and doubles mixed in. The Mets could use that kind of offense to anchor their lineup, which we think will end up in the middle of the pack in run scoring despite some excellent hitters at the top of the lineup.
The plate appearances that Martinez will soak up wouldn’t have been great, to say the least. There would’ve been a lot of Mark Vientos in there, and perhaps a heaping helping of Tyrone Taylor. Francisco Alvarez was always going to get his fair share of DH at-bats when he’s not catching, and maybe Martinez cuts down on those, but there are limits to how often you should play your catcher at DH from a rest perspective. Brandon Nimmo was the other likely beneficiary of DH time. He’s a great hitter, but who would cover for him in the outfield? This is a meaningful offensive upgrade, is my point.
Does this signing make the Mets playoff favorites? Not to me. I think they’re still a little bit short, largely because their pitching staff is somehow risky in terms of both talent and availability. But I like this signing a lot anyway. It’s the kind of move that David Stearns frequently made in Milwaukee, and it usually paid off there. If you build your team in such a way that it can add players who fetch less than expected in free agency, then go out and add those guys opportunistically, you end up with a good roster, though not always in the way you expected.
I never would have linked Martinez to the Mets at the start of this offseason. They seemed more likely to dip their toes into the pitching market, which is exactly what they did, signing Sean Manaea and Luis Severino. They traded for Adrian Houser and Taylor when the Brewers wanted to shed 40-man spots. In doing all of that, the Mets saved some money, which meant that when Martinez was available for less than initially forecast, they had the room to add, and the team composition to make it work.
I don’t think this deal will change the course of the 2024 season. I don’t think that his posting a 105 or 115 wRC+ will move mountains. I do think, however, that this move makes a ton of sense. It’s not a standalone attempt to fix the team. It’s not a blockbuster contract. It’s just a part of a larger philosophy of team construction: Getting good players on reasonable deals tends to pay off. And one added benefit to throw in at the end of this list, since I’ve already made my case that it’s a good signing: Everyone seems to love working with Martinez. He’s a student of hitting who would make Ted Williams proud. If you can justify the deal before adding that, that’s quite the throw-in.
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