Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the retirement of Meg favorite Mike Zunino, some teams’ mismatched gray jerseys and pants, whether Blake Snell is still unsigned in part because his pitching isn’t fun to watch (and whether he walks batters by accident or on purpose), and Joey Votto’s minor league deal with the Blue Jays, then preview the 2024 Tampa Bay Rays (36:14) with MLB.com’s Adam Berry, and the 2024 Pittsburgh Pirates (1:09:21) with MLB.com’s Alex Stumpf.
A funny thing happened in Detroit towards the end of the 2023 season: In September, the Tigers were tied with the Minnesota Twins for the best record in the American League. Tarik Skubal’s breakout and Spencer Torkelson’s second-half rampage helped them finish second in the AL Central, albeit nine games behind Minnesota. You may remember the excitement surrounding the team after their hot finish to the 2021 season and subsequent spending spree in free agency. With that false start in mind, it’s wise not to read too much into the final month of the 2023 season, but it does seem like the organization has actually progressed towards breaking out of their rebuilding phase. Read the rest of this entry »
While it’s a major blow that Lucas Giolito is likely to be out for at least the entire 2024 season due to a double whammy of elbow injuries, the Red Sox are making efforts to stabilize their already-thin rotation for the longer term. On Thursday, righty Brayan Bello agreed to a six-year, $55 million extension with a $21 million club option for his seventh season. In a well-timed touch, the formal announcement of the deal is expected on Saturday before the Red Sox play the first of two exhibition games against the Rays in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, where Bello will be surrounded by family and friends.
The guaranteed portion of Bello’s contract covers the 2024–29 seasons, the last of which would have been his first year of free agent eligibility. The total value of the deal is the second-largest ever for a pre-arbitration pitcher, just surpassing Hunter Greene’s six-year, $53 million extension, which he signed last April with comparable service time and which also includes a club option. Spencer Strider’s similarly structured deal, which came in at $75 million for six years plus a club option, is the record. (Hat tips to ESPN’s McDaniel and the Boston Globe’s Alex Speier for those comps).
The 24-year-old Bello, whom the Red Sox signed out of the Dominican Republic on July 2, 2017 for a bonus of just $28,000, solidified his spot in the majors last year after debuting in mid-2022. Last spring training he was pencilled in as the team’s sixth starter behind Corey Kluber, Nick Pivetta, Chris Sale, James Paxton, and Garrett Whitlock, and he began the season on the injured list recovering from a bout of elbow inflammation. But as injuries and/or ineffectiveness took hold of each member of the planned starting five, he moved up in the pecking order; after making his first start of the year on April 17, he remained in the rotation for the rest of the season, though he was briefly optioned following his second start before an injury to Whitlock brought him back for good. Bello’s 28 starts and 157 innings — the most by a homegrown Red Sox starter since Clay Buchholz in 2014 — both led the staff, while none of the aforementioned five made more than 23 starts or totaled more than 107.2 innings in the rotation.
In terms of run prevention, Bello was unremarkable, with final numbers straddling league average: a 4.24 ERA (93 ERA-) and 4.54 FIP (105 FIP-). However, those numbers are inflated by a pair of bad starts at each end of the season, in which he allowed 20 runs, 10 walks, and six homers across 16.1 innings. Even with his bad season-opening starts against the Angels and Brewers, he was much stronger in the first half than the second, when his home run rate more than doubled and his strikeout and walk rates inched in the wrong directions:
Brayan Bello’s 2023 Splits by Half
Split
IP
K%
BB%
K-BB%
HR/9
BABIP
ERA
FIP
1st Half
80
20.8%
6.5%
14.3%
0.90
.279
3.04
3.74
2nd Half
77
18.7%
6.9%
11.7%
1.87
.333
5.49
5.36
Perhaps not surprisingly given that he set a career high in innings (163, including a rehab start at Triple-A Worcester, up from 154.2 between the majors and minors in 2022), Bello wore down late in the year. Via the Boston Globe’s Julian McWilliams:
Fatigue and heavy legs began to set in. His slider didn’t quite have the sharp break to deter hitters from his two dominant pitches. His four-seam fastball played more as a show-me pitch, but Bello had difficulty locating it above the zone where opponents couldn’t do damage.
While Bello’s sinker/changeup combo turned heads, he’s far from a finished product, as the numbers attest. His sinker, which averaged 95 mph, kept righties at bay (.245 AVG, .381 SLG, 19.3% whiff), but not lefties (.341 AVG, .537 SLG, 8.2% whiff), which helped to account for one of the largest platoon splits for any righty pitcher:
Min. 200 right-handed and 200 left-handed batters faced.
As you can see, this was a particular problem for Red Sox starters, with Houck — who ranked third on the team with 21 starts, helping to fill the void left by so many injuries — having an even larger split than Bello, and Pivetta cracking the top 20, too.
Meanwhile, Bello’s signature changeup befuddled hitters, who managed just a .196 average and .291 slugging percentage against the pitch while whiffing on 38.7% of their swings. Less effective were his slider and four-seamer, with batters posting a .304 AVG and .457 SLG against the former and a .310 AVG and .646 SLG against the latter, which averaged 95.5 mph but just 2,083 rpm, placing him in the fifth percentile for spin rate.
Bello and the Red Sox are quite aware that his arsenal needs refinement, with chief baseball officer Craig Breslowtelling reporters on Wednesday, “We still think that his best years are ahead of him. We recognize some opportunities to further optimize the repertoire and we’re super excited about having him.” The pitcher spent the offseason working on elevating his four-seamer above the zone to change the eye level of hitters and get more chases outside the strike zone. He also threw a few sessions under the watchful eye of Hall of Famer and Red Sox special assistant Pedro Martinez, who offered Bello pointers on sharpening his slider with a different grip. To improve his stamina, he worked to strengthen his legs, not that we haven’t heard that one before.
Via Dan Szymborski, here’s a look at Bello’s ZiPS projection percentiles for 2024:
2024 ZiPS Projection Percentiles – Brayan Bello
Percentile
ERA+
ERA
WAR
95%
134
3.32
4.0
90%
126
3.53
3.6
80%
116
3.81
3.1
70%
111
3.98
2.8
60%
107
4.15
2.5
50%
104
4.28
2.2
40%
99
4.48
1.9
30%
95
4.66
1.6
20%
89
5.00
1.1
10%
83
5.34
0.6
5%
76
5.84
-0.1
As for the extension, it’s literally pretty much right on the money according to Dan’s model:
ZiPS Projection – Brayan Bello
Year
W
L
ERA
G
GS
IP
H
ER
HR
BB
SO
ERA+
WAR
2024
11
11
4.28
28
27
147.3
154
70
16
54
134
104
2.2
2025
11
10
4.26
27
26
143.7
148
68
16
50
130
104
2.2
2026
11
9
4.25
26
25
144.0
147
68
16
48
130
104
2.3
2027
11
9
4.23
26
24
140.3
142
66
15
47
126
105
2.2
2028
10
10
4.35
26
24
140.7
144
68
16
46
125
102
2.1
2029
10
10
4.39
24
23
135.3
140
66
16
45
117
101
1.9
2030
9
9
4.45
23
22
127.3
132
63
15
43
109
100
1.8
The ZiPS contract recommendation for the first six years of that deal is $50 million, so while the Red Sox see him as a potential no. 1 starter, Bello doesn’t have to be much better than average to match that valuation. He could wind up delivering a whole lot more value if he approaches his ceiling, but as a hard-throwing young hurler who’s years away from what he hopes will be his biggest payday, he’s got protection if things go south.
For the Red Sox, this is a positive move following a dreary and disappointing winter. Despite chairman Tom Werner’s assertion that the team would go “full throttle” in its efforts to improve after dismissing chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom, Boston has signed just two free agents to major league deals, Giolito (two years, $38.5 million) and Liam Hendriks (two years, $10 million). The former may be headed for Tommy John surgery, while the latter is expected to miss most or all of the season recovering from his own August 2023 Tommy John procedure. The team did make some trades, most notably dealing away Alex Verdugo, acquiring Tyler O’Neill, and swapping Sale for Vaughn Grissom, but that’s hardly a radical makeover for a team that has missed the playoffs in four of the past five seasons and projects to finish last in the AL East for the third straight year.
What particularly stands out about this Bello move is that the Red Sox have just one other pre-arb or arb-eligible player signed to an extension (Whitlock), which is a rather scathing indictment of their player development pipeline — though they did lock up Rafael Devers last year as he entered his final year of arb eligibility. This is at least a step in the right direction, and hardly an exorbitant amount of money. It won’t hamper them the way that, say, getting 11 starts from Sale from 2020–22 at a cost of about $71 million did. Which isn’t to say that Bello’s going to be as good as Sale, but let’s also remember that the White Sox (and later the Red Sox) got the best years of the wiry lefty’s career under a five-year, $32.5 million extension (2013–17) that had two club options tacked on.
Indeed, the Red Sox’s failure to develop quality homegrown pitching has been a particularly sore spot that has doomed multiple regimes. Again, it had been nine years since a pitcher they produced — as a draft pick or as an international free agent — threw as many innings in a season as Bello did in 2023. If Red Sox are to compete in the AL East while trying to live with midsized payrolls, they need to grow pitchers from within and hope some of them flourish to the point of being worth building around. They believe Bello can be one of them, and well, it’s a start.
One of the first posts I wrote for FanGraphs, some 18 months ago, concerned Adames’ future with the Brewers. Or, more likely given his potential to ring the bell for a nine-figure contract in free agency, his future elsewhere. Let’s check in on that potential, and see what we should expect from Adames in 2024 and beyond. Read the rest of this entry »
Over the next month, we at FanGraphs will be highlighting a number of site features and showing you how we use them. The goal is to make your visit to the website more enjoyable, and to help you get the most out of the features we’ve added over the years. Today, I’m going to walk through the various ways we deploy projections to make predictions about the future. Let’s explore our projected standings and playoff odds pages.
Before I ever worked at FanGraphs, I spent countless hours messing around with the playoff odds page. I like learning about the future, or at least learning about many possible futures, and I always found the slow-changing nature of projections early in the season to be soothing as a Cardinals fan. Stressed about last night’s crushing loss? On May 15? I could always look to the odds page, see that the team’s chances had barely budged, and calm myself down.
Five years into working here, I still use many of the same pages I did then, but they’ve been upgraded a good deal in the meantime. Let’s start with the nerve center of our predictions, the page that shows everything that feeds into our much-discussed playoff odds: the Projected Standings. You can find them using the navigation bar at the top of the site:
Most professional baseball players were fans of the sport before it became their job. Much like the rest of us, they grew up following their favorite teams and players, watching them on TV and, to varying degrees, reading about them in print or online. Then things changed. With few exceptions, primarily due to new routines and responsibilities, the way they follow the game is now different — in many cases, drastically so. No longer fans, these players have found themselves consuming baseball in a whole new way.
So how does then compare to now? I put that question to 10 players. Here is what they had to say.
———
Grayson Rodriguez, Baltimore Orioles pitcher: “As a kid growing up, I would just watch my favorite teams. I watched a lot of Astros and Rangers; I wouldn’t really watch a lot of other teams unless it was the playoffs or the World Series. Being in the game now, I try to watch everybody. I try to watch different pitchers. I watch their starts. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the A’s Las Vegas ballpark renderings, Brayan Bello’s extension with the Red Sox, and MLB’s Spring Breakout games, provide an update on EW listeners’ MLB ballpark meetup events, then preview the 2024 Baltimore Orioles (28:59) with The Baltimore Banner’s Danielle Allentuck, and the 2024 San Francisco Giants (1:04:38) with The Athletic’s Grant Brisbee.
After a long, cold winter, it’s a welcome sight to have teams back on the field this spring. The game’s biggest stars are getting back into their rhythms, some heated position battles are underway, and — most importantly, of course — new data is pouring into sites like FanGraphs. Caution is always advised when evaluating players based on their spring training statistics, but we can still learn a lot from what happens in these exhibition games.
One of the safest places to start is with a metric that players (pitchers, in this case) have the most control over: velocity. Most statistics are contingent on circumstance, making them less reliable, particularly this time of year. Just about everything a hitter does is a reaction to the pitch coming his way, and most pitching statistics are impacted by the fielders, the umpire, and even chance. How hard a pitcher can throw, on the other hand, is how hard he can throw. It may change as a result of health, age, conditioning, or mechanical adjustments, among other factors, but for the most part, it isn’t dependent on the hitter at the plate or the players in the field. It’s as raw a metric as we have.
That said, I’d be hesitant to read much into which pitchers are throwing softer in the first two weeks in spring training. To some extent, that’s what these games are here for, to build strength and get back in shape, and peak league-wide fastball velocity doesn’t usually come until the warmth of late spring. But the guys who are throwing significantly harder than last year? The ones who are throwing harder than they ever have? That seems worth noting. Read the rest of this entry »
Writing a book is a Herculean task to begin with, and in my inimitable way, I made it even harder when writing my 2017 book on the Hall of Fame, The Cooperstown Casebook, by challenging myself to compose concise 200–250 word summaries of the 220 major league players who were enshrined at that point as well as a few dozen past, present, and future candidates. My goal in doing so was to give the reader a thumbnail guide to these players’ careers while shining some fresh light on even the most familiar ones using advanced statistics. I had no shortage of options, but even so, I wish I had all the tools then that I do now. Here I’d like to highlight one of them as part of our series on useful site features you’ll find at FanGraphs.
Consider the case of Dazzy Vance, a colorful and dominant right-hander who made his name with the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1920s and ’30s. Vance was 24 years old when he debuted with the Pirates in 1915, but a variety of arm troubles limited him to just 33 major innings through his age-30 season. Finally pain free after elbow surgery (probably to remove bone chips), he resurfaced with Brooklyn in 1922, and on the strength of his combination of a blazing fastball and a sharp overhand curve “with a sweep that would shame a windmill,” as one writer described it, he led the NL with 134 strikeouts that season, and proceeded to repeat the feat in each of the next six seasons as well. His 262 strikeouts in 1924 was the highest total by any NL pitcher besides Christy Mathewson in the 1901–1960 span, and the highest by any pitcher in either league between the start of the Live Ball era (1920) and the United States’ entry into World War II (1941).
While I had enough confidence in my research to lead Vance’s Casebook capsule with, “Relative to his league, Vance struck out batters at a higher rate than [Nolan] Ryan, [Roger] Clemens, [Pedro] Martinez — any of them…” I worried that by explicitly quantifying his skill in this area that I’d either open myself to error or make even more work for myself, since the temptation was to go into further detail on the subject and perhaps calculate such data for every enshrined pitcher. Little did I know that within a year of the book’s publication that I would not only join the staff of FanGraphs but propose the creation of a leaderboard to tackle such questions with a few easy clicks. Read the rest of this entry »
the person who asks the lunch question: what’s for lunch?
12:01
Dan Szymborski: Nothing as last Thursday was an eating day
12:01
Dan Szymborski: Well, I had a pickle, but that doesn’t count because pickles are like 5 calories
12:02
GoBirds: In his prospects chat Eric referred to you as Danny. Are you a Danny? Should we call you Danny? Do we need to establish greater social connection first? Bring you chili or a cat? Danny Z sounds like you could be cool, maybe a DJ or something.
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Dan Szymborski