While many of my colleagues here at FanGraphs have spent the last two weeks discussing prospects, I’ve been thinking about veteran starting pitchers. I usually do. Perhaps it’s because I’m just young enough that there are still a couple of starters left from the earliest days of my fandom. Technically, the last starting pitcher to debut before I was born retired this past September… although the last one before him retired a full decade earlier. Still, I can’t really remember the days before Zack Greinke was a big league hurler, and Justin Verlander was already one of the best in the game by the time I started following baseball closely. This is the first year that I’m older than every prospect on our Top 100 list, but as long as Greinke and Verlander are still in the league, I can convince myself that I’m still a kid.

There’s no easy way to decide the age at which a “pitcher” becomes an “older pitcher.” There is evidence that certain skills start dropping off as early as age 26, while the average MLB player retires before his 30th birthday. On the other hand, in almost any other industry, some of baseball’s elder statesmen would still be considered young. Clayton Kershaw is barely old enough to run for president, while Jacob deGrom could probably still get cast as a teenager on The CW. Personally, I think of 36 as the age when a player enters “older” territory. There isn’t anything scientific about it (and believe me, I tried to find a more scientific answer – there’s just no magic number), but 36 is the entry point into the late 30s. It’s an age at which no one is too surprised to see a player retire, nor is anyone overly shocked to see a talented player sign a lucrative, multi-year deal.

In 2022, pitchers age 36 and older were amazing. Relievers in that age range did well (especially Daniel Bard, Chris Martin, and Adam Ottavino), but it was the starters who did most of the heavy lifting. They combined for a 3.53 ERA, 3.66 FIP, and 23.8 WAR (1.77 WAR per 100 IP). The last time starters age 36 and older produced more than 23 WAR was 2007, when John Smoltz, then 40, Tom Glavine, then 41, and Greg Maddux, then 41, helped older starters throw nearly twice as many innings as they did in 2022. The last time older starters were so valuable on a per-inning basis was all the way back in 2001, when Randy Johnson, then 37, and Roger Clemens, then 38, took home their fourth and sixth Cy Young awards, respectively.

For comparison, the average starter under 36 had a 4.07 ERA, 4.06 FIP, and was worth just 1.24 WAR per 100 IP in 2022. The older cohort will always benefit from survivorship bias, but even so, it’s rare to see older starters perform so much better (if better at all) than their younger counterparts. The last time older starters were this much better than the younger ones, in terms of FIP and WAR/IP, was 2003; if you go by ERA, 2002 was the last time.

To be sure, the top two arms in the cohort, Verlander and Max Scherzer, deserve the lion’s share of the credit. Verlander won the AL Cy Young with one of the best age-39 seasons in recent memory, while Scherzer, then 37, could have seriously challenged Sandy Alcantara for the NL award were it not for a couple of stints on the injured list. However, six more veteran starters threw over 120 innings with at least 1.5 WAR: Greinke, Corey Kluber, Adam Wainwright, Johnny Cueto, Rich Hill, and Charlie Morton.

While the strong performance of older starters in 2022 was unexpected, that’s not to say it came out of nowhere. Every year since the start of the 2019 season, pitchers age 36 and older have thrown a higher percentage of all starter innings than they did the year before. Their collective ERA and WAR/IP were better than those of their younger counterparts in every season from 2019–22. Older starters were getting more opportunities and making the most of them.

Then the 2023 season happened. Heading into the year, there were plenty of reasons to believe older starters would continue to thrive. All eight of the aforementioned veterans were set to return. At least some decline was expected from the Elder Eight — especially from Verlander and his 1.75 ERA — but reinforcements were on the way, with five younger talents aging into the group. Joining the fold were three recent All-Stars and Cy Young vote-getters, Lance Lynn, Yu Darvish, and Hyun Jin Ryu, as well as two lesser but typically dependable pitchers, Wade Miley and Carlos Carrasco. Those were some top prospects! Unfortunately, even as the workloads for older pitchers continued to rise, their collective performance did not.

Morton was the only member of the Elder Eight who improved in 2023. After finishing 2022 with a 3.10 ERA and 4.1 WAR, Darvish posted a 4.56 ERA last year, though that was still enough for a respectable 2.4 WAR, and missed the final 37 days of the season with an elbow injury. Carrasco was below replacement level last season, as his ERA ballooned to 6.80, and had two IL stints that cost him a combined 60 days. And then there was Lynn, whose decline was perhaps the most astonishing of the older pitchers. Last year, he gave up 44 home runs, the most by any pitcher in a season since Bronson Arroyo (46 homers) in 2011; after averaging 0.9 HR/9 over his first 11 big league seasons, Lynn allowed 2.16 HR/9 last year, the second-worst rate ever for a qualified starter in a single season, behind only Jose Lima and his 2.2 rate in 2000.

Meanwhile, Miley had a sweet-as-pie 3.14 ERA, but his 4.69 FIP wasn’t so nice, and although Ryu pitched well (3.46 ERA), he made only 11 starts because he missed the first four months of the season as he rehabbed from Tommy John surgery.

Ultimately, the biggest problem was how poorly the worst members of the age group performed, but it also hurt that the guys at the top (Verlander and Scherzer) took a step back, and no new aces emerged in their place. It’s worth mentioning that the table below includes only what these pitchers did as starters last season, though four of them (Kluber, Hill, Cueto, and Greinke) pitched in relief, as well.

Overall, starters age 36 and older saw their WAR nearly slashed in half. Their ERA- rose from 89 to 111, while their FIP- climbed from 93 to 111. Only twice in the last 50 years have older starters had a worse FIP compared to league average; similarly, only four times have they produced less WAR/IP. On the bright side, older starters made an additional 49 starts and threw nearly 200 more innings than they did the year before. Thus, they continued the trend of older starters taking on heavier workloads for the fifth consecutive season. We haven’t quite reached the levels of the early 2000s, when older starters were throwing 9-10% of all starter innings, but we have returned from the dark days of the mid-2010s when it looked like older starting pitchers were becoming an endangered species. However, if this trend is to continue, older starters will need to provide better results.

So, what are the prospects for older starters in 2024? Once again, there is reason for optimism. A couple of last season’s worst performers, Wainwright and Kluber, have retired. A few more, such as Cueto and Carrasco, are unlikely to make many starts unless they earn the opportunity. Moreover, while it would be fair to assume that some of the top performers from last year will take a step back, some bounceback candidates can make up the difference. Darvish had much better peripherals last year (3.74 xERA, 4.03 FIP) than his 4.56 ERA would suggest, while Lynn projects to have a large positive regression after his uncharacteristically bad season; his 2.2 projected Depth Charts WAR would be a tremendous improvement upon his 0.5 WAR in 2023.

Even better, several (relatively) young guns are entering their age-36 season. Joining the club are Kershaw, deGrom, Alex Cobb, Kenta Maeda, and Kyle Gibson (and, uh, Dallas Keuchel). Gibson is quite reliable, though his ceiling is not as high as the others in this group, and the same is true for Maeda if he can stay healthy. Both should help raise the cohort’s floor. Meanwhile, Keuchel probably won’t pitch enough to have a strong effect either way. Kershaw, deGrom, and Cobb will all start the season on the injured list, but perhaps between the three of them, they could provide a full season’s worth of starts. If they do, the three-headed monster of deCobbshaw might be the best pitcher in the whole age group. Our Depth Charts projections have deCobbshaw making 34 starts with a 3.60 ERA and 3.8 WAR. Could Verlander or Darvish match that level of production? It’s possible, but I wouldn’t call it likely, and the projections seem to agree. Here is what our Depth Charts have to say:

That 22.1 WAR figure is awfully close to the 23.8 WAR older starters produced in 2022, and the 1,766 IP projection would make 2024 the sixth straight season in which older starters took on a heavier workload. I’d take the playing time estimates with a grain of salt for the pitchers who haven’t signed yet, but still, the projections are enough to get me excited about an old guy revival. They may not quite reach the heights of the 2022 season, but this group features future Hall of Famers padding their résumés, pitchers who could be All-Stars this year, and beloved journeymen still chugging along. After several disappointing seasons for older starters in the 2010s, we’re lucky to be watching so many talented pitchers prolong their careers in 2024. And I’m happy to feel like a kid for at least one more year.

It’s been a quiet winter in Pittsburgh. The Pirates lost almost no one from last year’s 76-86 team, but they didn’t add many players either. Their biggest acquisition is probably Aroldis Chapman. After that, it’s Marco Gonzales, Rowdy Tellez, Yasmani Grandal, or Martín Pérez. They’re competent major leaguers all, but hardly exciting additions. But as it turns out, the Pirates had another move to make, and it’s a welcome one:

BREAKING: Right-hander Mitch Keller and the Pittsburgh Pirates are in agreement on a five-year contract extension, sources tell me and @kileymcd. After a breakout season in which he struck out 210, the 27-year-old Keller will anchor the rotation for the team that drafted him.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) February 22, 2024

This is both exciting and necessary, at least in my opinion. The Pirates haven’t developed many effective starting pitchers in the last, well, ever. Only one Pirates starter in the past decade has eclipsed 10 WAR with the team: Gerrit Cole with 13. After that, their success stories are Jameson Taillon, Joe Musgrove, and, well… Iván Nova is sixth on the list, and that came in 2.5 years after the Yankees traded him to Pittsburgh. As Stephen Nesbitt and Ken Rosenthal recently chronicled in The Athletic, it’s been an ugly decade for baseball in the Steel City.

Mitch Keller has already accrued the third-most starting pitching WAR in the past decade with 7.5. He’s entering his sixth big league season this year, though ups and downs early in his career mean that it’s only his fifth year of service time. The road to success has been bumpy — from 2019 through 2021, he compiled a 6.02 ERA and only racked up 170 innings of major league work. Things have gotten better since then, though. He threw 159 solid innings in 2022 and then made 32 starts in 2023, both times looking like a consistently effective starter rather than the roller coaster ride of earlier years. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about MLB’s semi-transparent-pants problem and the Nike/Fanatics uniform mess that’s swallowed spring training, a “down the dick” etymology follow-up, Kodai Senga’s injury, Mitch Keller’s extension, the Marlins signing Tim Anderson, and a minor league free agent draft update. Then they preview the 2024 Arizona Diamondbacks (38:13) with The Arizona Republic’s Nick Piecoro and the 2024 Milwaukee Brewers (1:10:18) with The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel’s Curt Hogg.

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Following a career-worst season and some stinging public criticism from Yankees general manager Brian Cashman, Giancarlo Stanton is making some changes. Earlier this week, the oft-injured 34-year-old slugger reported to spring training looking significantly leaner than in the past, and on Wednesday provided the public with the first glimpse of his reworked swing. Sure, this all fits into the realm of spring training clichés, and batting practice cuts won’t tell us whether the changes can reverse his decline or improve his chances of staying healthy, but a rebound would certainly be welcome as the Yankees attempt to recover from their worst record in 31 years.

Amid a season in which so many key Yankees wound up sidelined by injuries for significant spells, Stanton played in just 101 games, his lowest full-season total since 2019, when he was limited to 19 games by left biceps and right knee injuries. This time around, he missed 46 days due to a left hamstring strain, the latest in a litany of lower body injuries he’s incurred since the start of 2019:

That’s 301 days on the injured list, not including his missing three games in the 2019 ALCS against the Astros. Meanwhile, Stanton has played 391 regular season games, which prorates to an average of 89 over a 162-game season.

It was with that frustrating series of absences in mind that Cashman vented during a media session at the GM meetings in Arizona last November, “I’m not going to tell you he’s gonna play every game next year because he’s not. He’s gonna wind up getting hurt again, more likely than not, because it seems to be part of his game.” To be fair, Cashman immediately added, “But I know that when he’s right and healthy – other than this past year – the guy’s a great hitter and has been for a long time.”

Stanton refrained from public comment at the time, letting agent Joel Wolfe trade volleys with the GM, who went into damage control mode. “I value Giancarlo Stanton as a player,” he told reporters. “Without a doubt, he’s one of the big drivers when we do win. He’s one of the few players you bring to New York that hasn’t backed down, that has handled himself in a professional manner through thick and thin.” The GM additionally spoke with both player and agent to clear the air, and since then, both Cashman and Stanton have kept the substance of their discussion private. “He knows my reaction to that,” said the latter at the Yankees’ spring training complex on Monday.

Until 2023, Stanton’s absences were mitigated at least somewhat by his productivity. He hit .248/.338/.493 for a 130 wRC+ from 2019–22, including .273/.354/.516 (138 wRC+) in his 139-game ’21 campaign, his healthiest one of that stretch. He made the AL All-Star team in 2022, but his ugly final line (.211/.297/.462, 116 wRC+) concealed a drastic split: He hit .285/.339/.523 (142 wRC+) through May 24, his last day before landing on the IL due to right ankle inflammation, but just .166/.272/.425 thereafter, and to get to an even 100 wRC+ for that stretch required hitting home runs in his final three games. That sorry batting line looks a lot like last year’s one (.191/.275/.420), though with rising scoring levels, the latter was good for just an 89 wRC+ and -0.8 WAR. Since that ankle-related IL stint, he owns a 93 wRC+ and -0.6 WAR in 699 PA. It ain’t great.

As ever, Stanton struck out a lot, but that wasn’t his primary problem. In terms of overall strikeout rate, his 29.9% was down 0.4 points from 2022, and dead even with ’18. His 34.1% whiff rate was right at his Statcast-era average, down 2.4 points from 2022, and down 0.3 points from ’18. His 13.7% swinging strike rate and his 29.4% chase rate were both similarly below 2018, ’22, and his career marks.

Likewise, Stanton continued to put a charge in the ball when he connected, if not quite as hard as in recent years (I’ve omitted 2019 and ’20 due to their small samples):

Not all contact is created equal, of course. Stanton pulled the ball 41.1% of the time in 2023, up from 36.5% in ’22 and his highest full-season rate since ’17, when he was still a Marlin. In general, pulled fly balls tend to be the most productive, while opposite field groundballs tend to be more productive than pulled ones even after the banning of infield shifts. What we see with Stanton is that his results on pulled groundballs — which used to be quite good, because he hit them so hard — have deteriorated drastically, as have his results on pulled fly balls:

Because xBA, xSLG, and xwOBA don’t account for spray angle, I’ve instead used the annual league-wide averages for right-handed hitters where I’d usually put those figures. You can see that Stanton was way below those averages last year despite exit velos about 5 mph above the league-wide averages. His launch angles were particularly extreme, given that righties averaged -12.0 degrees on pulled grounders and 34.7 degrees on pulled fly balls. His 37.2-degree average on the latter was so high as to be unproductive; he was over 500 points short of the league average slugging percentage on fly balls. I couldn’t fit it into the table, but the estimated average distance on his pulled fly balls in 2023 was 344 feet, a full 20 feet shorter than his average from the year before; he averaged 356 feet in 2018 and 348 in ’21.

Some of the missing production probably owes to Stanton’s speed, or lack of it. His sprint speed fell from the 69th percentile in 2018 to the 13th percentile by ’21, and was down to the fourth percentile last year. It’s likely that some of this is intentional — his not running hard at times is a way to prevent injuries or to avoid turning minor aches into major problems — but it’s no doubt costing him hits here and there, contributing to his shortfalls in batting average relative to xBA. In fact, a quick look at his player page shows that his rate of infield hits per groundball (IFH% on his player page) has fallen from 12.8% in 2018 to 4.4% in ’21, 4.1% in ’22 and 2.8% last year.

Meanwhile, Stanton got under a lot more balls than usual, regardless of direction, leading to a higher percentage of harmless popups and flies. His 26.6% Under rate was his highest of the Statcast era, well above his 19.7% in 2022; he hadn’t been above 22% since ’16. He went 6-for-66 on those balls in 2023, which was actually better than his 2-for-52 in ’22 or his 4-for-70 in ’21; the problem was that those balls occupied a larger share of his contact.

Though he still slugged .533 against four-seamers and .516 against sinkers, Stanton was much less productive against fastballs of both types than in the past. He struggled with sliders, as he usually does, and was utterly helpless against curveballs, which was comparatively new. In 2018, he hit .233 and slugged .517 against curves, and even in ’22, he was at .222 AVG/.389 SLG; last year, he plummeted to .115 AVG/.269 SLG. His heat maps show that he has serious holes in his swing. Here’s a comparison between his heat maps for barreled balls against fastballs (the top pair) and breaking balls (the bottom pair); 2018 is on the left and ’23 on the right. Note how much smaller the coverage of the latter is — he didn’t barrel a single ball against pitches outside those areas — and how there is much less red.

Here’s a look at the progression of Stanton’s overall xwOBAs by Gameday zone:

Check out the sequence in the lower right corner of the strike zone. Within this timespan, Stanton’s xwOBAs in that cell have dropped from .287 to .252 to .207 to .129 (see here to zoom in on the numbers). Meanwhile, all of the red has disappeared from the upper and outer thirds of the zone. As Alex Chamberlain wrote last week, that upper third is particularly important when it comes to producing pulled fly balls, so it doesn’t help that Stanton’s whiff rate in that part of the zone has climbed from 23.1% in 2018 to a decimal or two on either side of 30% in the last two seasons — more than double the league-wide rate.

Particularly in light of the data, I’m hardly the first to wonder if Stanton’s series of lower body injuries has compromised his flexibility, contributing to those open holes in his swing. Indeed, in September at Pinstripe Alley, Malachi Hayes built on FanGraphs contributor Esteban Rivera’s visual breakdown of some mechanical issues Stanton was having, pointing out the slugger’s increased difficulty with low breaking balls and the way pitchers were going even lower against him:

Sliders and changeups, making up about a third of the pitches he sees, are crossing the plate a little less than two inches lower and a little bit farther away than they have over the last few years. It sounds like a small change, but the difference shows up in heat maps — especially against right-handed pitchers — and it seems increasingly clear that he just can’t go down and get those pitches like he used to.

Stanton, whose work ethic and conditioning have never been in doubt within the organization, told reporters he spent the offseason focusing on mobility and on changing his swing. Improved mobility should help him find time in an outfield mix that will include Alex Verdugo in left, Aaron Judge in center, and Juan Soto in right. Light-hitting Trent Grisham can help in center, and while that could mean Judge spending time in left field, as manager Aaron Boone suggested last month, it’s probably going to mean a lot of DH duty for No. 99 as well, given his own injury history. The situation will only become more crowded once Jasson Domínguez returns from the Tommy John surgery he had in September. Unless Stanton can play the outfield — more likely right field, with Soto slotting in left — he stands to lose playing time. He played just 33 games in the outfield last year, and 38 the year before, and the results were quite poor (a combined -7 DRS, -4 RAA, and -0.8 UZR in 567 innings for the two seasons). More mobility certainly couldn’t hurt.

As for the promised changes, here’s a glimpse of the 6-foot-4 Stanton (listed at 245 pounds but looking lighter) appearing kind of skinny next to the 6-foot-7, 282-pound Judge, via Newsday’s Erik Boland:

Judge and Stanton after playing catch pic.twitter.com/kxZUjVx2sE

— Erik Boland (@eboland11) February 19, 2024

Here’s a side-by-side comparison of Stanton’s stance, from last season to this year, courtesy of The Athletic’s Chris Kirschner:

Side by side look of Giancarlo Stanton’s stance from videos I shot. Left is today. Right is last year.

We will see what it looks like with the game angle camera.

Stanton said he was making some changes to his swing https://t.co/i2MsLICKPA pic.twitter.com/cs3Tmmp9m8

— Chris Kirschner (@ChrisKirschner) February 21, 2024

And here he is taking a BP cut:

Here’s Giancarlo Stanton pic.twitter.com/e9QOSWCgGy

— Chris Kirschner (@ChrisKirschner) February 20, 2024

Stanton is more upright, with his back leg closer to the plate than before, but at this level of intensity and the limited number of angles, it’s tough to say more than that. Given that it’s February, his changes — and those of everybody else who reported to camp talking about swing tweaks, new pitches, and improved training regimens — should be considered a work in progress. With the addition of Soto, there’s a bit less pressure on Stanton to be one of the lineup’s primary producers, but the Yankees can’t justify playing him if he remans below replacement level. We’ll see soon enough whether he can return to being close to the dangerous hitter he used to be.

Below we’ve compiled scouting snippets for 100 interesting prospects to monitor in 2024. Readers should think of this piece as dessert for the Top 100 Prospects list. Similar to the structure of the Other Prospects of Note section of the team lists, we have grouped players into buckets by prospect type. We tried to touch on players who we thought readers might be curious about for one reason or another, often guys who could have a meaningful 2024 impact, or whose development this season could be key for their careers. We tried to focus on players from orgs whose lists haven’t run yet this cycle. For those whose lists have been published, there is a link to their full scouting report next to their name in lieu of us taking up more space in this post. In some cases, we end up going into the reasons why a player was excluded from the Top 100, which is an attempt to anticipate your questions, not us trying to knock the player. After all, everyone here is considered a prospect. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the 10th season of Jose Cuas’ professional career, but he’s only been tagged in a FanGraphs article once before today. Back in August, he figured in Eric Longenhagen’s writeup of minor trade deadline moves when he (Cuas, not Eric) was traded from the Royals to the Cubs for outfielder Nelson Velázquez. And Eric unfortunately stepped on my two big Jose Cuas facts: First, that he used to be a position player. Second, he shared an infield at the University of Maryland with Brandon Lowe and LaMonte Wade Jr. I’ll go one step further: It was Cuas who led the team in home runs.

In their draft year, those guys combined to finish second in the Big Ten tournament; along the way they handed conference champion Illinois its first loss in months, in a game that ended at like 2 a.m. local time. You have no idea how far back “Late Night LaMonte” goes. Then, the Terps upset no. 1 overall seed UCLA in regional play and nearly made the College World Series.

Pro ball has been an absolute laugh riot for Wade and Lowe, but Cuas had a little rougher start. Read the rest of this entry »

When Adam Jones compared his former Orix Buffaloes teammate Masataka Yoshida to Juan Soto, he quickly established the lofty expectations that Yoshida would face as he made the transition to the major leagues. The comparison painted a clear picture of the type of batter Yoshida was in Japan. For all of Soto’s success on contact, his truly elite skill is his plate discipline, and the same was true for Yoshida. In five of his seven seasons in Japan, he ran a walk rate higher than his strikeout rate while posting a 176 wRC+ during his career in his home country. In his final year in NPB, he had the second-lowest strikeout rate and second-highest walk rate among qualified batters.

The transition from Asian leagues to the majors has usually been more difficult for batters than for pitchers. High velocity is the greatest concern, but the quality of breaking and offspeed offerings is much higher as well. For Yoshida, his pitch recognition skills seemed like they’d help him overcome these common problems, even if his overall plate discipline suffered a bit. While he wasn’t able to reach the heights of his career in Japan, he did manage to record a 109 wRC+ in his first big league season, though his 0.6 WAR was certainly lower than the Red Sox were expecting when they signed him to a huge five-year deal. His overall value was hurt by some ugly defense in left field; then again, his glove was never his strength. More concerning was that his approach at the plate worsened as the season went on, leading to a dreadful final two months that greatly diminished what otherwise would have been a successful rookie year.

Through the first three months of the season, everything looked like it was working out; he was posting a 129 wRC+ with 8.7% walk rate and an 11.3% strikeout rate. The plate discipline looked like it had made the transition without any fuss, and he was hitting for some power to top it all off. Unfortunately, over the next three months, things took a turn for the worse, dragging his overall line down to where it ended the season. It’s pretty easy to see what the issue was when you look at his rolling strikeout and walk rates during the season.

From July 1 through the end of the season, he took just seven walks total and his strikeout rate jumped to 17.0%. He continued to produce in July, even as he began to lose his plate discipline, but everything crumbled over the final two months, when he slashed .257/.276/.371 and had a 68 wRC+ across 181 plate appearances.

So what happened to his legendary plate discipline skills that drew comparisons to those of Soto during the second half of the season? Looking under the hood, it seems like he started pressing once he started struggling. When you compare his underlying plate discipline metrics from his time in Japan to his rookie season, you can pretty clearly see where things went wrong.

In Japan, Yoshida’s low swing rates were the backbone of his approach. The qualified batter with the lowest swing rate in the majors last year was Yoshida’s World Baseball Classic teammate Lars Nootbaar (35.3%), followed by Soto (35.7%). At his peak in Japan, Yoshida approached that level of selectivity. This, combined with a low chase rate and high contact percentages on pitches in and out of the zone, was Yoshida’s recipe for success.

During the first half of last season when his plate discipline was still intact, his swing and chase rates looked similar to what he had been running in Japan. Everything trended the wrong way during the second half of the season; he became much more aggressive and started chasing pitches out of the zone at a far higher rate than he had in years.

It’s worth noting that fatigue certainly contributed to Yoshida’s struggles. The schedule in the majors is far more grueling than it is in NPB, where all the games are played in the same time zone and the longest flight takes about 3 1/2 hours. Yoshida was gassed by the end of June, right around the time he lost his approach.

When we’re analyzing a hitter’s plate discipline, looking at swing, chase, and contact rates are usually the most commonly cited metrics because they’re publicly available, but they’re a pretty blunt tool when trying to discern a hitter’s swing decisions. Thankfully, Robert Orr of Baseball Prospectus has done some fantastic work to illuminate this problem. Back in November, he introduced his SEAGER metric, which looks at expected swing or take run values and grades a player’s swing decisions based on what they actually did. It has two components: the rate of hittable pitches taken, which measures aggression; and the rate of bad pitches taken, which measures selectivity.

As you’d expect from the name of the metric, Corey Seager’s swing decisions grade out incredibly well. Juan Soto also does well via this methodology, sitting ninth in baseball in SEAGER and first in selectivity. Based on his reputation and his swing, chase, and contact rates in Japan, you’d expect Yoshida to have a high-selectivity, low-aggression SEAGER profile. That’s not exactly what the data bears out.

Yoshida’s SEAGER was quite poor because he wasn’t aggressive enough on hittable pitches to compensate for his lower-than-expected selectivity, which was roughly league average. For comparison’s sake, I included Soto’s SEAGER metrics above just to marvel at how incredible his ability to lay off bad pitches is.

When we look at the rolling graphs of Yoshida’s SEAGER components, we get a much clearer picture of what happened during his season. First his selection tendency:

We can see that Yoshida was extremely selective early in the season, up near the Soto range, but that cratered as the season went on and only barely recovered by the end of the year. His discerning eye at the plate was supposed to be the elite skill that would help him make the transition to the major leagues. That was the case for the first few months before he lost his way.

His rolling rate of hittable pitches taken doesn’t look much better:

As expected, Yoshida was pretty passive to start out the season, but he became more aggressive as he started to slump and never really recovered. Swinging at hittable pitches more often would be a good thing in a vacuum, but when taken into context with all the other things that were trending the wrong way during Yoshida’s second half, I’m not so sure it helped. Plate discipline is a fine balance between identifying bad pitches to take and being aggressive on good pitches to hit. Yoshida’s strengths seem like they’re more focused on the former, and when he became more aggressive, he threw that balance out of whack.

There were plenty of knock-on effects as Yoshida’s plate discipline deteriorated. Early on in the season, he was producing above average contact quality, helping him post a .174 ISO through the end of June. That metric dropped to .138 during the second half of the season as his contact quality collapsed along with his approach.

Despite seeing some decent results on balls in play in July, his contact quality took a steep dive in that month. Only a high BABIP and a couple of lucky home runs were able to buoy his production. His contact quality improved slightly in August, but he was hitting his batted balls at less than ideal angles, which led to far too many outs. Things got really interesting in September. His batted ball quality rebounded significantly with his highest expected wOBA on contact of the season coming during that month. Unfortunately, his actual results on those batted balls lagged well behind his expected stats. On top of that, he made far less contact that month, when he struck out 23.5% of the time. Still, it’s encouraging to see that his contact quality improved during the final month of the season, even if his discipline hadn’t recovered.

With this additional context, we can paint a pretty clear picture of Yoshida’s season. He started the season with his established approach and things were going well for him. In July, that approach started to unravel as he started swinging much more aggressively. His results on balls in play boosted his batting line that month, but everything collapsed once those hits stopped falling in. When he started slumping, he abandoned his extremely selective approach and his plate discipline never recovered. By the end of the year, his approach was completely unrecognizable from what it was in Japan.

With a full year of experience in the majors now under his belt, Yoshida has a better understanding of what to expect moving forward. His offseason training program was designed to better prepare him for the grind of a major league season, and being less fatigued should make it easier for him to return to form the next time he struggles. As he heads into his second year in the majors, he will need to lean on his excellent pitch recognition skills to sustain his success and pull him out of a slump when he goes cold. And when he inevitably scuffles again, he’ll need to remember why those skills are so critical to his success, so he doesn’t lose himself again.

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Diamondbacks owner Ken Kendrick wants many things. Mostly, hundreds of millions of dollars in taxpayer money with which to renovate his team’s aging and leaky home ballpark, but also, incidentally, a World Series. The D-backs came close last year, and even though they fell at the final hurdle, the outlook of the ballclub is optimistic. Their entire core is back, and young stars like Corbin Carroll and Gabriel Moreno should only improve with time. This offseason, Arizona has traded for third baseman Eugenio Suárez and signed lefty starter Eduardo Rodriguez to improve its rotation. Brandon Pfaadt should have a stronger sophomore season, and global top-10 prospect Jordan Lawlar should break into the lineup at some point this season.

Finally, the Diamondbacks have upgraded their designated hitter spot, which was a bit of a wild card last October. The most recent addition came this weekend, when they signed Randal Grichuk to a one-year deal worth $2 million in guaranteed money. Read the rest of this entry »

This winter has been one of the weakest markets for middle infielders in recent memory. You remember the shortstop glut of recent years? Carlos Correa, Corey Seager, Francisco Lindor, Trevor Story, Xander Bogaerts… the list of players who either reached free agency or signed extensions to take them off the market went on and on. But this year, the pickings were slim. Depending on personal preference, the best second baseman or shortstop available was… Whit Merrifield? Isiah Kiner-Falefa? I would have said Amed Rosario, only the market clearly disagrees:

Infielder Amed Rosario and the Tampa Bay Rays are in agreement on a one-year, $1.5 million contract, sources tell ESPN. Rosario, 28, will bring a strong bat against left-handed pitching and should get at-bats at shortstop, second base and potentially corner-outfield spots.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) February 20, 2024

That’s a shockingly light deal for Rosario, at least in my head. I had him at the tail end of my Top 50 free agent rankings, and the crowd and I both penciled him in for a two-year deal worth $8 million per year. Instead, he’s getting less than a fifth of that AAV, and for only a year at that. This merits some investigation, both into why his market didn’t develop and why the Rays came calling in the end. Read the rest of this entry »