Two of the outfielders I would have been most interested in signing this winter (as high-quality backups) both agreed to deals last week. Normally, that wouldn’t be a big deal; that’s what offseasons are for, after all. But both of them signed roughly two weeks away from Opening Day, and for meaningfully less than I would have predicted. That means that you can’t disconnect their deals from the context in which they were signed. That also means they get wrapped up into one article, so here we go. This will be a three-parter: Michael A. Taylor’s signing with the Pirates, Adam Duvall’s signing with the Braves, and the market forces behind both moves.

Taylor to the Pirates
This one was so obvious in retrospect. The Pirates have a lot of interesting young players, but one thing they didn’t have was a complete outfield. They have Bryan Reynolds and Jack Suwinski, both potential pieces of the future and interesting players right now in their own right. But that’s only two outfielders, and Suwinski is more of an emergency center fielder than an everyday one. The options after that – Edward Olivares, Connor Joe – felt more like platoon pieces than everyday starters.

Taylor, who signed a one-year deal worth $4 million, makes the whole picture look a lot better. He’s an elite center field defender, regardless of which system you’re grading him on. That lets Suwinski and Reynolds handle the corners, more natural positions for both. It also means the Pirates won’t have to make a tough decision against lefty pitching: either to play the lefty-hitting Suwinski — who before the Taylor deal was their best defensive center field, even though isn’t really suited to play that position full time — despite the platoon disadvantage, or sacrifice defense. Now they can mix and match far more easily.

Taylor’s offensive game has always been his weak link, and that absolutely limited his market. He’s a career .239/.294/.389 hitter, good for an 82 wRC+, which spells out his upside pretty clearly. He’s an average overall player, give or take a rounding error, so long as he’s an elite defender. In each of the last three years, that’s been almost exactly what happened; his defense has carried him even when his offense hasn’t. When he smacked a career-high 21 homers last year, his production boomed, and he racked up 1.7 WAR in only 388 plate appearances.

We’re projecting a return to career norms for Taylor’s offense, and it’s not hard to see why. He posted easily the best power production of his career, and in a way that doesn’t feel sticky. Before last year, he’d hit 113 doubles and 74 home runs over his first nine seasons. He had 14 doubles and 21 homers in 2023, a meaningful deviation from his normal output. That all comes down to an impressive barrel rate and more aerial contact than ever, but I think it’s reasonable to project a return to career norms there, and Pittsburgh is a terrible park for righty power, which should push that even a bit lower.

If the Pirates are looking for a repeat of last year’s offense in a full-time role, they’ll likely be disappointed. But they absolutely don’t need that. He brings the floor of their outfield up significantly, to a roughly average unit. We think the Pirates will get nearly as many WAR from their outfielders (6.6) as the Mike Trout-led Angels (7.0) — partly because Angels right fielders are projected for 0.4 WAR, the worst total in the majors — with less injury risk. And all of that for $4 million! I love this signing for a team on the fringes of the playoff race thanks to the paper-soft NL Central.

Duvall to the Braves
Now for a signing that will matter far less in the regular season. The Braves signed Adam Duvall, who last year with the Red Sox put together his best season on a rate basis but dealt with plenty of injuries. He’s making $3 million on a one-year deal.

Duvall is the archetypical boom/bust hitter. He strikes out roughly 30% of the time, even in good years. He doesn’t walk a lot. What he does do is put the ball in the air at an absurd rate, and with authority. His career barrel rate, 11.8%, is in the top 10% of all hitters in the Statcast era. If pitchers hang ’em, he can definitely bang ’em.

I’d say that Duvall’s .284 ISO in 2023 was an unsustainable caricature of his offensive game, but his career mark is an also-outrageous .240. He’s never going to get on base much, but his power is as real as it gets, even as he enters his age-35 season. He truly doesn’t do anything else – his career OBP is below .300, a woeful number for a theoretically offense-first outfielder – but I can’t emphasize enough how real his power is.

The Red Sox put Duvall in center field in 2023, which caused some excitement about his ability to move up the defensive spectrum. I didn’t completely buy it, though, and it seems like teams didn’t either. At best, he’s a backup to the durable Michael Harris II. The real reason Duvall is headed to the Braves is insurance for their high-risk plan in left field. Atlanta moved a lot of pieces around to bring in Jarred Kelenic over the winter. The ceiling is high for the former top prospect, but let’s be realistic: the floor is unfathomably low.

Kelenic has a lot of prospect shine, but he’s a career 85 wRC+ hitter in 1,000 plate appearances of big league playing time. He’s been one of the worst hitters in baseball this spring, for whatever that’s worth. He has huge platoon splits; he’s been unplayably bad against lefties in a limited sample. I think that the Braves will give him a chance to hit against everyone and establish himself as an everyday player, but there’s no guarantee that he will.

Signing Duvall means that there’s an off ramp if things don’t work out with Kelenic. Until they added him, the alternatives were so bad that Kelenic might have retained his job even if he were to play quite poorly. Now, there’s a limit to how bad that position can get, because Duvall feels like a bankable option. He doesn’t have huge platoon splits, though he’ll surely be taking some of Kelenic’s playing time against tough lefties. But he can also just take playing time, period, if Atlanta decides its gamble isn’t paying off.

That’s really smart team-building, as far as I’m concerned. The Kelenic experiment isn’t a high-leverage one for the Braves, who figure to run roughshod over the NL East regardless of what their left fielders do. But when it comes to building a World Series winner, patching potential holes for cheap in March is a lot better than doing so for a premium at the trade deadline.

Why So Little Money?
Both Taylor and Duvall landed in my top 50 free agents list this offseason. The crowd and I both missed pretty badly on our estimates for both. I had Taylor down for one year and $9 million; the crowd called for two years at $7 million per. I did worse with Duvall; I had him pegged at one year and $10 million, while the crowd went for one year and $8 million. Neither player even got half the guarantees we estimated for them.

It’s all part of the same story that’s been going on in free agency for years. The middle class is getting squeezed. Teams prefer to look internally for roughly average options, confident in their ability to develop cheap alternatives who aren’t much worse than those available in free agency. That doesn’t work for stars – it’s a lot easier to find a minor leaguer who’s 90% of Taylor than one who’s 90% of Mookie Betts, obviously – so great players still sign big deals, but solid regulars feel the pinch.

I’ve tried to account for that in my contract projections by changing the scale that I use to convert WAR into salary. I’ve made the first 1.5 wins progressively less valuable over time to reflect the way teams are behaving. For what it’s worth, I think that behavior is completely logical; in a game of limited resources (an assumption completely worth challenging, but outside the scope of this article), pouring your money into chasing stars and then trying to replicate role players is a good strategy.

These two deals squeeze that distribution down even further. It’s hard to imagine Taylor or Duvall finishing less than a win above replacement, even in a part-time role. Fitting a curve to account for these salaries as well as some of the bigger deals signed in free agency would require making the first win almost completely worthless, even lower than I’ve forced it in recent years.

The question, then, is whether to use these contracts or most of the other contracts signed this offseason as benchmarks of what to expect going forward. You could throw Amed Rosario’s deal into the mix; $1.5 million for a rotation infielder is even a bit cheaper than these two. But then you’ve to contend with Joc Pederson’s getting $12.5 million, Kevin Kiermaier’s getting $10.5 million, and Isiah Kiner-Falefa’ getting two years and $15 million.

I’m going to handle these contracts in my future free agency prediction endeavors by hedging. I’ll use the data points, of course, but I think it’s reasonable to look at both of these as casualties of circumstances rather than perfect harbingers of the new normal. It’s hard to predict which free agents will get squeezed ex ante; every year, someone ends up sitting on the vine longer than expected because there aren’t quite enough teams looking for veterans.

I’m going to resist taking too broad of a lesson here, though. Taylor and Duvall are both outfielders with only one carrying tool, but players like that signed earlier this winter on more reasonable deals. The middle class is still getting squeezed, without a doubt. I just wouldn’t take these two deals as evidence of an acceleration of the trend. More likely, they’re victims of timing who will be huge bargains for the clubs that signed them.

Earlier today, Meg Rowley introduced this year’s positional power rankings. As a quick refresher, all 30 teams are ranked based on the projected WAR from our Depth Charts. Our staff then endeavors to provide you with some illuminating commentary to put those rankings in context. We begin this year’s series at catcher.

2023 was a big year for our understanding of catcher defense, as Baseball Savant launched new Statcast-based metrics to quantify the value of catcher throwing and blocking, adding to their existing framing data. While evaluators already had a general feel for which catchers could keep the ball in front of them and which ones had cannon arms (and while prior work had been done on the subject at Baseball Prospectus, among other places), Statcast’s new numbers furthered our ability to compare each dimension of catcher defense in terms of its relative importance. We learned that Sean Murphy prevented 16 runners from advancing via a wild pitch or passed ball, and saw how Shea Langeliers‘ elite arm accuracy might make future base stealers think twice before running on him. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

With the start of the season just two weeks away, it’s time for one of my most beloved/hated/dreaded annual traditions: making my picks for breakouts and busts. For those of you who haven’t read one of these pieces in the past, these are my picks for the players who are the most likely to change the general consensus about them over the course of the 2024 season. And since we’re talking about generally low-probability outcomes — this isn’t a list of players with better or worse projections than last year — there’s no exercise with more potential to make me look super smart… or dumb. For every J.P. Crawford or Steven Kwan triumph, there’s an instance of Andrew Vaughn-induced shame.

As usual, let’s start with a quick table of the triumphs and humiliations of last year’s picks:

It was about an average year. Vaughn and Christian Walker were the biggest misses, and Jordan Walker’s lousy defense kept him from being a win. Now on to this year’s picks.

The Breakouts

Spencer Torkelson, Detroit Tigers
Spencer Torkelson’s .233/.313/.446 line certainly didn’t knock any socks off, but he was a (relative) beast over the last two months of the season, hitting .244/.329/.526 with 16 homers. Now, I always warn folks to not read too much into monthly splits because there’s a tendency to think that splits coinciding with a good explanation are enough to overcome the small sample size issues, and because the endpoints are selective. The two-month split, however, isn’t why Torkelson’s here. Rather, there was a lot of evidence to suggest that he was underperforming his peripherals for most of the season up until that point. From the beginning of the season through August 8, Torkelson was the biggest zStats underachiever with significant playing time. Using only Statcast data with no information as to actual results, ZiPS thought that in that span Tork should have been an .868 OPS hitter; his actual OPS was .688. His OPS after that day? .921! Remember, Torkelson was a top-five prospect in baseball entering his rookie season in 2022, so even though his first year was a disaster, he’s not some 31-year-old beer leaguer coming out of nowhere.

Patrick Bailey’s Bat, San Francisco Giants
I can’t really call it a full breakout since Patrick Bailey already had an overall breakout season, thanks to defense that crushed even the loftiest of expectations. What puts him here is that people may be sleeping on his bat. No, I don’t think there’s any chance he starts hitting like Buster Posey, but Bailey’s otherworldly defense and lackluster bat (wRC+ of 78) appears to have pigeonholed him as a typical no-hit, all-glove backstop. I think that would be a mistake. Catchers have really weird developmental curves and I can’t stress enough how difficult it is for a catcher to nearly skip the high minors; he only played 28 games above A-ball before debuting in San Francisco. He hit .251/.351/.424 in the minors – again, not star quality but far from a total zero – and even without full developmental time offensively, he wasn’t completely destroyed by MLB pitching. In fact, he showed surprisingly solid plate discipline and power for a prospect with so little experience with the bat. Both ZiPS and our Depth Charts project Bailey to have an 82 wRC+, but I would not be shocked if he finished the season with a mark between 95 and 100, which, if his defense holds up, would make him an elite catcher overall.

Wyatt Langford, Texas Rangers
I don’t have a formal rule about it, but when ZiPS projects a player with little or no MLB experience to lead in a significant stat, I should take it very seriously since ZiPS doesn’t often go nuts about minor leaguers. The last player I can think of is Luis Arraez, who had a 21% chance of hitting .300 for his rookie season, according to ZiPS, which also projected him to have the highest batting average in baseball by 2020. ZiPS thinks Wyatt Langford is going to lead the majors in doubles and be one of the best offensive rookies in recent years. He was one of the few college hitters that ZiPS saw as nearly ready for the majors in 2023, and it liked him more than similarly advanced hitters Nolan Schanuel and Dylan Crews. Since ZiPS is my sidekick – or maybe it’s the other way around – I gotta have its back!

Anthony Volpe, New York Yankees
Anthony Volpe had a solid rookie season, but given his elite prospect status, it was a mild disappointment that he was only league average. Because of this, I think people are now underselling his offensive upside. He hit for a lot of power for a 22-year-old shortstop (21 home runs, .174 ISO). He also stole 24 bases on 29 tries, including successfully swiping each of his first 15 attempts, and was worth 3.5 base running runs. Two of his biggest problems were that he didn’t get on base enough (.283 OBP, 8.7 BB%) and struck out too much (27.8 K%), but these weren’t issues for him in the minors, and some of his fundamentals here are promising — he actually gets off to fewer 0-1 counts than most players with his strikeout rate. All of this suggests that he should figure things out with more major league experience. ZiPS also thinks he should have had a .312 BABIP given his Statcast data, instead of his actual mark of .259, which indicates that some of his woes were likely do to bad luck.

Keibert Ruiz, Washington Nationals
As with Volpe, I think Keibert Ruiz’s low BABIP, especially his .223 BABIP in the first half, made his season look a lot weaker than it was. ZiPS saw a .270 BABIP as a more reasonable number for him as a hitter in the first half, and that number continued to rise in the second half; he had a .285 zBABIP by the end of the season. Giving Ruiz back some of the batting average makes his actual .226/.279/.360 first-half line look a lot less abysmal and his .300/.342/.467 one in the second half look less like a fluke. In fact, except for a bit more power, most of the difference between his first half and second half was BABIP, so the halves weren’t quite as different as they appeared. Overall, his zStats line of .274/.330/.445 reflects a much more advanced hitter than we saw overall in 2023.

As I reminded people with Bailey, catchers tend to have a weird developmental pattern, and Ruiz has been no exception. Ruiz was a top prospect for a long time before hitting the Double-A wall, and his standing fell quite a bit in the eyes of prospect watchers. But he re-established himself as a top prospect to a degree that he was a huge part of Washington’s return when it traded Max Scherzer and Trea Turner to the Dodgers in 2021. I think people forget how young he still is at 25, and being older is not as big of a deal for a catching prospect than for someone at any other position.

Elly De La Cruz, Cincinnati Reds
Elly De La Cruz is a common breakout pick for obvious reasons, but I’m including him here specifically because his plate discipline wasn’t as bad as it looks from the raw stats. ZiPS actually thought, from his plate discipline data, that his strikeout rate should have been more like 27% instead of nearly 34%, enough to knock off 27 strikeouts. And given that he should be a high BABIP player, because he was the fastest man in baseball last year, putting more balls in play would benefit him more than it would most players. Overall, his zStats line last year was .273/.323/.449, compared to his actual line of .235/.300/.410, meaning the holes in his game aren’t quite as deep as his reputation would suggest.

And if you don’t buy that, he did show better plate discipline as the season progressed. I’ll again warn of the dangers of storylines that coincide with splits, but things like offensive swing percentage stabilize very quickly, mitigating some of the sample size issues. I don’t think it’s a stretch to look at the graph below and conclude that De La Cruz got caught up in the hype of his initial success and became too aggressive. As a result, he started struggling before coming to realize that he had gotten away from the approach that made him such a dynamic player in the first place.

Dominic Canzone, Seattle Mariners
One should be suspicious of Pacific Coast League stats, but Dominic Canzone’s .354/.431/.634 line last year was good even by PCL standards, enough for a 151 wRC+ in the league. However, that success didn’t follow him to the majors. He probably doesn’t have a lot of upside, but the rate of his improvement over the last couple of years suggests that there’s a chance he could have a nice little Geronimo Berroa-esque run.

Tucupita Marcano, San Diego Padres
This one is kind of a stretch because I don’t see an obvious path for Tucupita Marcano to get much playing time. He hasn’t hit at all in the majors yet, but he’s also had a weird minor league career; he’s still just coming off his age-23 season and has made some progress at translating his minor league plate discipline to the majors. ZiPS isn’t in on him, but Steamer is, and if he can managed his 94 wRC+ Steamer projection, along with a decent glove (though more at second base than short) and his speed, he’ll at least be interesting. Gotta have one out there pick, no?

The Busts

Cody Bellinger, Chicago Cubs
I don’t think Cody Bellinger will fall anywhere near the depths of his brutal 2021 season, but there are reasons to be suspicious of last year’s resurgence. He changed some of his mechanics and altered his approach, especially in two-strike counts, to make more contact, and those adjustments should be sustainable. It’s the power numbers that are a bit preposterous, to the degree I can’t think of any comparable player who managed to maintain this amount of power with mediocre-at-best exit velocity numbers. Statcast’s expected slugging percentage knocks 88 points off his actual one, and the ZiPS version (zSLG) is 20 points meaner than that.

J.T. Realmuto, Philadelphia Phillies
This one hurts, especially for a player ZiPS was so excited about in 2015-2016 before his breakout. But the decline in J.T. Realmuto’s offensive numbers in 2023 is supported by the drop in his peripheral numbers; he was just a bit worse at everything last year. He’s also a catcher entering his mid 30s. This is a gut thing more than a projection thing, but I suspect any kind of a leg injury would be a bigger deal for a surprisingly quick player like Realmuto, whose offensive stats already reflect his speed, than for your typical catcher.

Isaac Paredes, Tampa Bay Rays
Isaac Paredes is a good hitter, but is he really a 140 wRC+ guy? In both Statcast and ZiPS, Paredes had an even larger disparity between his actual power numbers and his peripherals than Bellinger. That said, there’s some good news, because unlike Bellinger, Paredes has done this before. There were 20 hitters in 2022 that hit at least five more homers than zHR expected, and 18 of them went on to hit fewer home runs in 2023. Paredes was one of the two who hit more (the other was Pete Alonso). Because Paredes has such a low hard-hit percentage, I’m not completely on board yet.

Lane Thomas, Washington Nationals
One thing about Cinderella stories is that people tend to overrate them after the ball. Most of these stories don’t involve permanent stardom; Joey Meneses and Frank Schwindel are two example of people getting too excited about an older breakout guy. Unlike Schwindel, Lane Thomas is probably still a league-average player, on the level of his 2021 and 2022 seasons, but I’d be shocked to see him hit 30 homers again. He’s probably a stopgap center fielder/fourth outfielder type, and I’m seeing him surprisingly high in some fantasy rankings.

Dominic Fletcher, Chicago White Sox
I was pretty shocked to see the White Sox trade Cristian Mena for Dominic Fletcher, even with the assumption that ZiPS is being too exuberant about Mena in ranking him at the back of the top 50 prospects. If you evaluate him the way our prospect team does, a fourth outfielder for a 45 FV prospect is quite a rich gain. And it’s looking like the Sox will give Fletcher a pretty good chance at getting the majority of the playing time in right field. It’s not as bad as the team’s irrational excitement about Oscar Colás last year, but there’s just not a lot of support for Fletcher’s maintaining his .301/.350/.441 line from his brief stint in the majors. That’s ridiculously higher than his zStats slash line of .249/.290/.376, which works out to a difference of 125 OPS points.

Welcome to the 2024 positional power rankings! As is tradition, over the next week and a half, we’ll be ranking every team by position as we inch closer to Opening Day next Thursday. This is always something of a funny exercise. You read FanGraphs regularly, after all — a fact for which we are very grateful — and are well-versed in the various signings and trades that occurred over the offseason. You know that Shohei Ohtani is now a Dodger, just as you’re aware that Juan Soto is a Yankee and Dylan Cease a very recent Padre. And yet, you’re still keen to know more about the game and what it might look like between now and October. The positional power rankings are our answer to that impulse.

This post serves as an explainer for our approach to the rankings. If you’re new to the exercise, I hope it helps to clarify how they are compiled and what you might expect from them. If you’re a FanGraphs stalwart, I hope it is a useful reminder of what we’re up to. If you have a bit of time, you’ll find the introduction to last year’s series here. You can use the navigation widget at the top of that post to get a sense of where things stood before Opening Day 2023, a spring that saw a host of rule changes take the league by storm.

Unlike a lot of sites’ season previews, we don’t arrange ours by team or division. That is a perfectly good way to organize a season preview, but we see a few advantages to the way we do it. First, ranking teams by position allows us to cover a team’s roster from top to bottom. Stars, everyday contributors, and role players alike receive some amount of examination, and those players (and the teams they play for) are placed in their proper league-wide context. By doing it this way, you can more easily see how teams stack up against each other, get a sense of the overall strength of a position across baseball, and spot places where a well-constructed platoon may end up having a bigger impact than an everyday regular who is good rather than great. We think all of that context helps to create a richer understanding of the state of the game and a clearer picture of the season ahead. Read the rest of this entry »

Orion Kerkering enjoyed a meteoric rise to the big leagues last year. The 2022 fifth-round draft pick began the campaign in Low-A Clearwater, and when
October rolled around he was taking the mound for the Philadelphia Phillies in the postseason. His numbers along the way were eye-catching. Pitching out of the bullpen at four minor-league levels, the University of South Florida product logged a 1.51 ERA and a 38.9% strikeout rate over 53-and-two-thirds innings. Called up in late September, he proceeded to fan six batters and allow one run in three appearances comprising the same number of innings.

That Kerkering was then entrusted to take the ball in the playoffs was a testament to his talent — a big part of which is a bat-missing offering even more impressive than his 98.6-mph fastball.

“That’s hard for me to do,” Kerkering replied when asked to describe his signature pitch. “I call it a slider and everyone says it’s one of the best ones out there. To that, I’m kind of, ‘OK, whatever. That’s fine.’ I just trust it as much as I can.”

The 22-year-old right-hander started throwing a slider as a Venice, Florida prep. Velocity-wise, it was 78-81 mph early on, and from there it got “faster and faster” to where it is now a crisp 86-87. The shape is basically the same — “with maybe a little more movement” — as is the grip.

“It’s kind of like how you teach a 12-year-old a curveball,” he said of the grip. “But instead of spinning on top of it, I spin on the 1:20-2:00 o’clock axis. If you think of [Clayton] Kershaw’s curveball, it will spin and then drop. Mine is the same way. It has the gyro spin, then it takes off.” Read the rest of this entry »

How about this: How about you and I forget for a couple minutes that we’re at FanGraphs, deep in the stat-swamped soul of the sabermetrics community? Let’s just pretend you’re reading an article on a website with a name like SuperCoolBaseballStuff.com. This is not the time to get lost in the weeds. Spring is in the air, and we’re rhapsodizing about the smell of the freshly cut grass. The birds have returned, and they’re waking us up at dawn with their incessant noises. Now is the time to be excited about baseball (and annoyed about the birds), and quite simply, nobody does more exciting stuff on a baseball field than Oneil Cruz and Elly De La Cruz. So let’s keep it simple. Let’s talk about all the superlatives that make the pair so exciting as we race toward the 2024 season.

For the first time, both Cruz and De La Cruz will be in the show at the same time. Cruz was called up for good in June 2022, and he finished the season on a high note, running a 133 wRC+ over the final month. He came into 2023 with the stated goal of a 30-30 season, but in just his ninth game, he fractured his left fibula during a collision at the plate. De La Cruz was called up in June 2023 and promptly went supernova. He ran a 179 wRC+ with eight stolen bases and 10 extra-base hits over his first 16 games, but struggled over the last few months. This year, they’ll be the Opening Day shortstops for their respective teams, and Cruz is on record saying that his ankle feels not just 100%, but 200%, which may very well be a record.

Somehow, the two players are extremely similar while also being completely unprecedented. The similarities start with their surnames, and then there’s the fact that they’re both young, ridiculously tall shortstops who hail from the Dominican Republic and play in the NL Central. The height thing is likely a bigger deal than you realize. Cruz is 6’7” and De La Cruz is 6’5”. According to Stathead, that makes them just the seventh and eighth players ever to be 6’5” or taller and play a single inning of shortstop in, ahem, the bigs. They’re the only ones ever to be regular starters at the position; those other six combined for a total of 113 games at short. You’re not going to believe this, but until Cruz dethroned him, the leader was Michael Morse, with 57 games. The 6’5” Morse, who finished his career with -73.2 total defensive runs, totaled 450 innings at short for the Mariners in 2005, racking up -13 DRS and a UZR/150 of -20.9.

Cruz and De La Cruz have both played in exactly 98 big league games, and their skillsets are nearly identical, as well. They’ve both walked 35 times, struck out 33.7% of the time, and posted batting averages and on-base percentages within two points of one another. Here’s what that similarity looks like courtesy of some cherry-picked Baseball Savant sliders:

Not that it matters much, but 2022 Cruz is on the left and 2023 De La Cruz is on the right. There’s so much red and so much blue. These are insanely fun profiles. Cruz and De La Cruz do everything at 100 miles per hour, except for hitting the baseball, which they do at 120. They run like cheetahs who were genetically modified for maximum speed and then shot out of a cannon. They crush baseballs like PETA-members who just found out that the baseballs were responsible for performing the illegal experiments on those cheetahs. They throw the ball over to first as if they heard you get an extra out if you manage to blast it right through the first baseman’s solar plexus. They whiff like they think they can generate enough wind power to solve the climate crisis all by themselves. They’re boom and bust personified. They’re the middle schoolers who figured out that you could game the typing test by absolutely going for broke, because 150 words per minute minus a 50% error rate still leaves you at 75 words per minute. They’re like basketball played on roller skates. It’s poetry when it works, carnage when it doesn’t, and impossible to turn away from.

As for whether the whole package will work, well that’s trickier. Here are the final grades the two players received from our prospect team upon graduation:

Again, the numbers are very similar, but Cruz, all of two inches taller, has a tougher path defensively. He’s always been capable of making a great play, but he’s never looked like a sure thing at short, in terms of either range or hands, and he didn’t look at home in left field when the Pirates tried him out there in the minors. In 2022, he graded out as a hair above average according to DRS, but the other defensive metrics didn’t love him. As he continues to fill out, he’s less likely to maintain his speed and range. On the other hand, he owns a career 106 wRC+. He managed to cut his chase and whiff rates toward the end of 2022. In the short samples of 12 LiDOM games and nine MLB games, he boasted vastly improved walk and strikeout rates in 2023. Those trends have now held through nine spring training games as well, long enough for Cruz to tie for the MLB lead with five homers.

As Robert Orr demonstrated over at Baseball Prospectus, the switch-hitting De La Cruz made his own plate discipline gains during the 2023 season, going from a 38.8% chase rate in July to 25.7% in September and October. In fact, according to Pitcher List, by the end of the season, his swing decisions were well above average.

Although he ended the season on a low note in terms of performance, De La Cruz actually posted a .334 xwOBA in September and October, his best figure of the season by a wide margin. De La Cruz put up a 24.5% HR/FB in 2023, 10th-highest among qualified players, but that masked the fact that his 53.9% groundball rate was the 11th-highest. It’s possible that chasing less soft stuff below the zone will help him to put more balls in the air going forward. Even if that doesn’t happen, it’s possible that he’ll just keep hitting the ball hard enough that he doesn’t need to lift it very often to do damage. Moreover, De La Cruz is better positioned to stick at shortstop. He graded out well according to OAA and UZR, though DRS and DRP were less impressed. Importantly, he’s also just 22, and he has time to improve. Although he put up just an 84 wRC+ last year, his defense and his propensity to take any and every base helped him put up 1.7 WAR in his 98 games.

For both players, the future has some truly massive error bars. They’re just 22 and 25 years old, and they’ve yet to play a full season’s worth of games. With apologies to Michael Morse, there just aren’t many comparable players we can look to for insights on their development. Their tools are so preposterous that their ceiling is somewhere out by the asteroid belt. But their long levers and their unproven eyes could keep them from ever making enough contact to take advantage of all that power. All the same, even if they just manage to stick it out as league-average shortstops, they’ll achieve it by way of some of the most electric, entertaining baseball the world has ever seen. They’ll also be doing it in an era where each 100 mph throw from deep in the hole and each 122 mph rocket off the bat can be tracked and marveled at in all its gaudy splendor. It’s time to get excited.

If you’ve been reading me with any frequency for the past 20-some years — the last six of them here at FanGraphs — you may have noticed that I’m prone to dropping the occasional number into my prose. In fact, Statcast says I do so in 57.6% of my sentences, which ranks in the 93rd percentile even among my FanGraphs colleagues. Admittedly, I just made that part up, but the point is that I’m someone who tends to present a fair bit of data to the reader in support of my analysis.

At this site, we feature a lot of data, and as a consequence, not all of it is easy to find, but we do our best to organize it logically so that users can do so. Once again, I’d like to highlight a particular area as part of our series on the useful site features you’ll find at FanGraphs.

Back in 2007, for the Baseball Prospectus book It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over, I compiled a historical All-Star squad of ignominy, identifying players at each position whose performances had dragged their teams down in tight races: the Replacement-Level Killers. I’ve revisited the concept numerous times at multiple outlets and have adapted an expanded form of it into a midsummer series that serves as a trade deadline preview, highlighting the particular trouble spots on each contender. Read the rest of this entry »

The Milwaukee Brewers were already coming out of this offseason with more unanswered questions than a contending team would typically like. They’ve lost their top two starting pitchers to trade or injury, they’ve changed managers, and their big offseason free agent signing hasn’t played a meaningful game since the 2022 postseason.

And the questions continue to pile up. Devin Williams, one of the best closers in baseball and arguably Milwaukee’s best player, is going to be out for the next three months. The good news is it’s not an arm or shoulder injury that would lead to long-term problems or a multi-year absence. But it’s a pretty gnarly-sounding injury nonetheless: Not one but two stress fractures in his back.

Williams pitched through back soreness since at least last September — and with two fractures in a vertebra at the bottom of his ribcage, “soreness” is probably an understatement. Williams won’t need surgery, but he’ll be totally shut down for the next six weeks. The long ramp-up to game fitness will take at least another six weeks, which puts the target date for his return sometime in late June. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, in the second installment of this ongoing series, I started picking apart the language used to describe baseball swings. But given how many elements make up a player’s swing, and therefore how much terminology exists to describe the subtle (and not so subtle) differences between them, I could only fit so much into that post before I had to cut myself off.

I’m skipping the preamble this time, so if you’re not quite sure what you’ve stumbled into with this primer, you can catch up with the first and second editions of this series, and meet me back here when you’re ready. I will, however, reiterate that the point of this is not to identify “good” or “bad” elements of baseball mechanics, but rather to define these terms as descriptive tools, as opposed to value-based judgements. And just like in my last post, I’m focusing on big leaguers for this one, thanks to the availability of side views of their swings, which are featured in MLB broadcasts, but missing from most MiLB game feeds.

Now, as promised, I’ll pick up exactly where I left off.

Short Swing vs. Long Swing
In Hitting, Part One, I dug into players’ loads, i.e. where a player’s hands come set before he starts his forward motion toward an incoming pitch. When a swing is described as being either “long” or “short” to the ball, that is referring to how quickly and directly a player can get the barrel of his bat to the ball. There’s some debate as to whether the length we’re describing is a measure of time, or of distance, but in either case, a “short” swing is one where a player’s bat moves directly to the ball, while a “long” swing is one where the bat’s path is less direct.

Typically, being short to the ball is favored, in the same way that a pitcher’s repeatable delivery is often more favorable than a violent one (see Pitching, Part One, for more on that). Of course, there are many exceptions to that rule, but generally, being short to the ball is considered a good thing. This is largely due to the fact that the simplicity of a short swing is often seen as more reliable and sustainable, particularly as a player is still developing in the minor leagues. A short swing allows a player to wait longer before deciding whether to swing at a given offering, which can be valuable by way of pitch selection, and for a minor leaguer who hasn’t yet faced advanced pitching, that bodes well for how he’ll fair as opposing pitchers’ velocities increase and their command becomes more precise.

Short swings come in many flavors. Here are some examples:

Short to the Ball, With Power: Yordan Alvarez

Yordan Alvarez’s simple load and short bat path allow him to attack pitches and get the sweet spot of his bat to the ball quickly. He guides the knob of his bat directly to where the pitch is coming at him, and the barrel of his bat quickly follows the same route.

Short to the Ball, Without Power: Steven Kwan

Kwan is short to the ball, but his swing differs from Alvarez’s cut. Whereas the appeal of Alvarez’s being short to the ball allows him to apply his upper body strength to pitches throughout the strike zone, Kwan’s swing is more about simply getting his bat on the ball, even if he’s not trying to send it out of the park. As such, a side-by-side look at their respective swings shows similarly short bat paths, but by the time they’re making contact, their postures are very different, illustrating the difference between a power swing and a contact swing (more on that later).

Sometimes, adding length to a swing is valuable. For example, Fernando Tatis Jr.’s deep load, and Junior Caminero’s bat wrap (both featured in my previous entry), create a longer distance for their bats to travel, but are also contributors to those players’ bat speed and power production.

Long to the Ball: Davis Schneider

In Schneider’s case, his long swing isn’t due to a particularly deep load or a bat wrap. His bat simply takes a longer route to the strike zone from his load to his point of contact.

A side-by-side comparison with Alvarez’s direct bat path makes this easier to see. Switching back to a front view of their respective swings (the camera movement in Schneider’s side view makes for a nauseating side by side), keep an eye on the heads of their respective bats. You’ll first see the swing all the way through, then with a few freeze frames thrown in to illustrate the moments when their bat paths differ the most, with Schneider’s dipping down behind him, rather than making a straight line to the ball.

Thus far, Schneider has used his long swing to optimize his launch angle, despite his middling average exit velocity. Because he raked during his first taste of the majors last year, albeit in just 35 games (141 plate appearances), it is acceptable for him to maintain his current mechanics (weirdos welcome!), but if he encounters timing issues in the future, he may have to adjust to shorten his swing.

Shortening Up: Alec Bohm

Adjusting swing length can make a huge impact on a player’s ability to consistently get to his power in a game. After a headline-making 2020 season, Bohm’s power dipped significantly the following year. This may have been due to his swing becoming too long.

Here’s a look at his swing in 2020:

And here’s what it looked like in 2021:

And to make it even clearer, here’s a side by side, first all the way through, and then with some handy freeze frames:

These camera angles are slightly different, so I can’t overlay these videos to make my point, but you can see that his 2021 swing starts earlier, and begins with his back elbow dipping, and his bat head looping back toward the catcher, whereas in 2020, his hands and bat moved directly to the ball. As of 2023, his power was back, as was his short swing.

Power vs. Contact Swing
As I hinted above, in the Alvarez-Kwan comparison, players will often develop swings that are geared specifically toward either power or contact. The reasons why players do this are relatively self explanatory, and based on body type, speed, positional profile, or countless other attributes that may make a player more valuable if he focuses on either power or contact, rather than both.

Power Swing: Kyle Schwarber

Schwarber generates power with a stable, balanced lower half, with his weight evenly distributed, if not slightly shifted toward his back foot. He uses his strong hands and arms to generate bat speed without sacrificing that stable base. Schwarber’s swing has always been geared for power, though he has simplified it in significant ways since he came up with the Cubs.

Schwarber’s old swing included a much noisier load, an obvious hitch (or trigger), and a more pronounced leg kick. The leg kick, in particular, caused Schwarber to shift his weight during his swing, whereas his current mechanics finish with his weight distributed in more or less the same way as before he starts his swing, allowing for an even stronger and more stable base. In other words, while it’s always been a power swing, the simplifications he’s made over the years have enhanced the power-driven aspects of it.

Contact Swing: Luis Arraez

Arraez is MLB’s current king of contact. Dating back to his debut in 2019, he’s never finished a season with a contact rate below 90%. He’s short to the ball, and adjusts the barrel of his bat to pitches throughout the strike zone. In contrast to Schwarber, Arraez’s lower half is less stable, with his back foot rarely staying planted, and he lets his arms extend as he makes contact with the ball, essentially allowing the weight of the bat, combined with basic physics, to do more of the heavy lifting, when it comes to power generation (or lack thereof).

He doesn’t hike his back elbow up like Schwarber does, and he’s not clubbing the ball with his upper body, so when he makes contact, he doesn’t focus on activating the muscles in his arms to drive the ball a great distance, opting instead to throw his hands toward the ball, and simply spray line drives to whatever part of the field makes the most sense, based on the pitch’s location. (He led the majors in line drive percentage in 2023.) In slow motion, you can see that the impact of the ball on the bat causes his arms to wobble in a noodly kind of way, which you’ll rarely see from a pure power hitter like Schwarber, whose arms stay bent and flexing as he makes contact.

That’ll do it for this installment, but I’ll be back soon with yet another batch of hitting terminology, and after that we’ll get back to the pitching side of things. Stay tuned!