Here’s an undeniable truth: Your performance matters most in the biggest spots. It sounds silly to write that, in fact. It’s so obviously true. I’m not just talking about professional sports, or even just sports. No one cares if you nailed your violin solo in your basement when you were practicing it Tuesday evening; they care whether you fumbled the chord progression in Thursday’s big recital.

That self-evident truth has led to decades of squabbling over baseball performances. It’s incontrovertibly true – and yet it seems that players don’t have a lot of control over when they have their best performances. If you want to start an annoying discussion with your uncle (not my uncle, hi Roy, but your generic back-in-my-day uncle), just talk about RBIs or pitcher wins and say something about clutch. You won’t thank me, because just imagining that discussion is giving me anxiety, but you’ll certainly prove my point.

What if we could find a place where players can control their best performance, though? There’s one place in baseball that follows an orderly progression of leverage: the count. The first pitch of an at-bat just matters less, on average, than one thrown with two strikes. That’s true regardless of who’s at bat, regardless of who’s pitching, and regardless of the game situation.

What’s more, there’s an easy way that pitchers can change their performance, and it’s largely in their control. They don’t throw every single pitch the exact same; that would be flatly impossible. Some of the variation in pitch shape is inevitable, caused by minute differences and grip or infinitesimally different release points. But velocity? Pitchers can mostly control that.
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With the Reds’ roster overflowing with talented young infielders, it appeared that manager David Bell would have the pleasant challenge each day of figuring out how to fit as many of them into the lineup as possible. That task, though, just got a bit easier — at least for the first half of the season. On Friday, the team announced that Major League Baseball has suspended Noelvi Marte for the first 80 games of the regular season following a positive test for a performance-enhancing drug.

The 22-year-old Marte made his major league debut on August 19, just over a year after he was acquired from the Mariners in the Luis Castillo blockbuster. After playing exclusively at shortstop from 2019–22, last year he split his time between short and third base at Double-A Chattanooga, played third exclusively at Triple-A Louisville, and then made 29 of his 34 appearances for the Reds at the hot corner, including 26 starts. In all he hit .279/.358/.454 (110 wRC+) with 11 homers and 18 steals in 92 minor league games and then a sizzling .316/.366/.456 (120 wRC+) with three homers and six steals in 35 games for the Reds.

Because he finished with just 114 at-bats and 44 days on the active roster, Marte is still considered a rookie. He placed 41st on this year’s Top 100 Prospects list (up from 94th in 2023), good for no. 1 in the Reds’ system. He’s a well-rounded player who projects as an everyday third baseman, with a shot to be more impactful if he can tap into his 60-grade raw power with greater frequency.

Alas, it will be a few months before he gets a chance to do so. Marte tested positive for boldenone, an anabolic steroid that’s illegal under the game’s Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment program. While he can still participate in spring training, his 80-game suspension takes effect at the start of the regular season. During his suspension, he can work out at the Reds’ complex in Goodyear, Arizona for extended spring training, and will be eligible to return to the majors on June 21, before which he can go on a minor league rehab assignment. If the Reds reach the postseason, something they’ve done just once (2020) over the past 10 seasons, Marte would not be eligible to participate.

PED suspensions have become increasingly uncommon at the major league level in recent seasons, which isn’t to say that the drugs’ usage has been entirely eradicated. Last year, just one major leaguer tested positive and was suspended, Brewers reliever J.C. Mejía, and his suspension wasn’t handed down until September 20. He drew a 162-game suspension as a second offender, as he was also suspended in 2022. More notably, Padres shortstop-turned-outfielder Fernando Tatis Jr., who was suspended on August 12, 2022, finished serving out his suspension during the ’23 season. Here’s a look at the number of major league suspensions for PEDs for each season since 2012:

In November 2022, the New York Times’ James Wagner reported that players from the Dominican Republic account for half of the positive tests in the majors and minors every year, but the frequency is even greater at the major league level. Including Marte, 15 of the last 18 suspensions handed down to major leaguers since the start of 2020 have gone to Dominican players; the U.S-born Paul Campbell and Héctor Santiago (both 2021) and Venezuela-born José Rondón (2022) were the exceptions.

The high frequency likely owes to the fact that old-fashioned anabolic steroids such as boldenone and stanozolol are easily available without prescriptions in the DR, and are easily detected through MLB’s existing testing program. Seven of the aforementioned 18 suspensions were for boldenone, while five were for stanozolol; all but Rondón (boldenone) are Dominican. Designer steroids, which are harder to detect, are more expensive. One concern within the game right now regarding the dearth of recent suspensions is that the testing program hasn’t caught up to whatever’s in vogue.

As for the Reds, this likely isn’t the scenario that they envisioned when they amassed and then augmented this stable of talented young infielders, but because of their depth, they’re built to withstand the loss of any of them. Marte was one of four Reds infielders who debuted in the majors last year, along with Elly De La Cruz (the only one younger than Marte, and our no. 6 prospect entering the 2023 season), Christian Encarnacion-Strand, and Matt McLain. The glut also includes 2019 NL Rookie of the Year Jonathan India, late-’22 debutant Spencer Steer (no. 47 on the 2023 Top 100), and free agent addition Jeimer Candelario, who signed a three-year, $45 million deal during the Winter Meetings. All of them are capable of playing multiple positions, which set up quite a puzzle as spring began, as Michael Baumann explored last month. Candelario and De La Cruz are both switch-hitters, the rest of them righties.

While India, Steer, and Encarnacion-Strand all primarily played third base in the minors, on Saturday, Bell told reporters that Candelario would be the regular third baseman in Marte’s absence. Even so, the manager is keen to take advantage of the flexibility the group affords him, saying, “We’re gonna create as many options over there as we can for that… There’s just so many different ways that our lineup can come together that we’ll just create the options and kind of let that play out a little bit.”

Here’s how Baumann pieced together the situation as camp opened last month, based upon what Bell and president of baseball operations Nick Krall had said, including the expectation that McLain and De La Cruz would be the primary middle infield combo:

And here’s my best guess as to how it looks now in the wake of Bell’s statements:

Encarnacion-Strand, a 24-year-old righty, hit .270/.328/.477 (112 wRC+) with 13 homers in 241 plate appearances for the Reds last year after absolutely tearing up the International League (.331/.405/.637, 20 HR, 152 wRC+ in 316 PA). Thirty-two of his 36 non-DH starts at the major league level came at first base, and that figures to be his primary position to start the season. India, who hit .244/.338/.407(99 wRC+) with 17 homers and 14 steals last year, hasn’t played anywhere besides second in the majors, but he is now going to add first, third (his regular position at the University of Florida), and left field to his repertoire while also getting time at DH. Steer, who hit .271/.356/.464 (118 wRC+) with a team-high 23 homers and 15 steals in 2023, is probably the best hitter of the bunch but something of a defensive liability no matter where you put him; that said, his -14 RAA last year was well below his -5 DRS and -4 UZR, when he split time between five positions: first base (501 innings), second base (124), third base (350.1), left field (311), and right field (11). He DHed in only six games last year, and doing so more often this year probably depends upon how well India takes to the outfield.

On the subject of platooning, as Baumann pointed out, both Encarnacion-Strand and India had reverse platoon splits in the majors last year, with India’s persisting as far as his career goes (99 wRC+ against lefties, 110 against righties) but Encarnacion-Strand’s leveling out once you include the minors. The lack of lefty hitters in this group puts a couple of other players in the picture, as noted above. Likely to get substantial playing time against righties in both outfield corners and DH is the lefty-swinging Fraley, who hit .256/.339/.443 with 15 homers and 21 steals in just 380 PA last year. With former prospect Jose Barrero placed on waivers and claimed by the Rangers on Saturday, Kemp, who also bats left-handed, is the leading candidate to claim the roster spot vacated by Marte. A non-roster invitee, he hit just .209/.303/.304 (77 wRC+) with five homers and 15 steals for the lowly A’s last year; he can play second and left field, and while his bat is hardly his best asset, he owns a career 100 wRC+ against southpaws, compared to 93 against righties, which could be useful to Bell. Versatile righty Josh Harrison, who hit a limp .204/.263/.291 (51 wRC+) in 114 PA for the Phillies last year before being released and spending time with the Rangers’ Triple-A Round Rock affiliate, is another NRI competing for the open infield spot, but his handedness probably puts him at a disadvantage.

All told, the loss of Marte is a blow to the career of a bright prospect, particularly in a season where he was hoping to solidify his spot at the major league level. While it won’t help the Reds either, they were built to withstand such contingencies, and in Marte’s absence, they’ll get a chance to figure out the strengths and weaknesses of their other young players.

The proliferation of Stuff models has invariably pitted capital-S Stuff against command in terms of their respective importance to a pitcher’s success. If you had to choose one, is it better to locate well, or is it better to be filthy?

The answer to this question is why baseball is beautiful and delightful but also occasionally horribly frustrating. From Vicente Iglesias and Scott Powers:

Importance, in layman’s terms, means how relevant a variable is to explaining an observed outcome; reliability is how much we can expect a variable to repeat or be repeated. In baseball, we often talk about these ideas in terms of “descriptiveness” and “predictiveness.” This dichotomy illustrates the Catch-22 that forever propels baseball forward in all its uncertain glory: pitch location plays an outsized role in determining the outcomes we witness, yet we cannot expect to rely on it year over year. Meanwhile, Stuff is much more reliable next year — i.e., changes to a pitcher’s pitches in terms of velocity, movement, and release point tend to vary to a much smaller degree over time — but it plays a significantly undersized role in influencing actual outcomes this year. Brutal stuff. Why do we even bother? Read the rest of this entry »

Coby Mayo is No. 23 on our Top 100, and a power-packed stroke is a big reason why. Drafted by the Baltimore Orioles out of Parkland, Florida’s Stoneman Douglas High School in 2020, the 6-foot-5, 230-pound third baseman is coming off of a 2023 season where he bashed 29 home runs while logging a 156 wRC+ between Double-A Bowie and Triple-A Norfolk. Moreover, he did so as a 21-year-old.

His maturation as a hitter has been more nuanced than pronounced. When I talked to Mayo in March 2022, he told me that he doesn’t “like to think about hitting too much,” and has “always been a see-ball-hit-ball kind of guy.” For the most part, that hasn’t really changed.

“I try not to think too much when I get into the box,” Mayo said when reminded of those words. “That’s stayed the same. A lot of people will get into the box and start overthinking. They’ll try to manipulate their swings here and there. I just try to have a good approach, a game plan, and kind of let that take over.”

The promising slugger does feel like he has a better understanding of his swing than he did two years ago. When things are going well, he knows what he’s doing right. When things are going wrong, he understands why and can adjust accordingly. The swing itself has changed since we first spoke. Mayo explained that his load, hand placement, and bat path are all “a little bit different” — albeit in a subtle manner. As he put it, “You can’t really notice them with the naked eye.” Creating more loft and allowing him to better use the entire field have been the goals behind the tweaks.

One thing that hasn’t changed is what our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen has descried as a “sometimes ugly looking cut, which has a strange, choppy stride… an odd look, but it works for him.” Read the rest of this entry »

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.

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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:

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:

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 Breslow telling 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:

As for the extension, it’s literally pretty much right on the money according to Dan’s model:

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.

The Brewers are in a fascinating situation, not so much treading water as trying to swim in two different directions at the same time. They’ve lost their celebrated manager and traded their Cy Young-winning ace, but they’ve brought in Rhys Hoskins on a lucrative (for them) free agent contract while deciding not to trade their other major free-agent-to-be, Willy Adames.

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:

Read the rest of this entry »