You’ve seen this movie a million times. The Rays make some innocuous transaction, adding a reliever you’ve heard of but perhaps forgotten about in trade or free agency. You remember that guy – but now? Him? Surely they can’t be serious. But of course, they are serious, and it ends up working out better than anyone expected, and next thing you know that guy is getting key outs against great hitters.
You might think the team’s most recent reliever transaction fits both parts of this trope: an obscure(ish) pitcher who will no doubt become good. But you’d only be half right about Phil Maton, who has reportedly agreed to a one-year deal for $6.5 million, with a $7.5 million team option for 2025, per Mark Feinsand and Robert Murray. A physical is still pending, and the contract isn’t expected to become official until next week, per Marc Topkin. Will Maton lock down key innings for Tampa Bay this year? I’d bet on it. But where you’d go wrong is in thinking that Maton came to the Rays to get better. While you weren’t looking, he’s already become a great reliever, and the Rays are in fact engaging in another of their favorite offseason pastimes: seeing a great performance before the rest of the league and capitalizing.
I can hear your skepticism, and that’s perfectly okay. Phil Maton is a great reliever? How come our Depth Charts project him for a 4.10 ERA next year? How come his best season produced a 3.00 ERA and peripherals on either side of four? How come he signed this deal in February? Am I thinking, perhaps, of a different Phil Maton? Read the rest of this entry »
With the news that Byron Buxton is eyeing up a return to center field, the Minnesota Twins have quite a bit of flexibility at the heavy end of the defensive spectrum. When they need some thump and don’t care much about the defensive consequences, the Twins can choose from a variety of designated hitters, left fielders, and first basemen: Matt Wallner, Alex Kirilloff, Trevor Larnach, and most recently Carlos Santana.
Santana, who will turn 38 just after Opening Day, has been around so long he’s the only reason anyone remembers Casey Blake. By now, you know what he’ll provide: Lots of walks, a little power, and decent defense at first base. Santana’s last season of 2.0 WAR or more was 2019, and after spending 10 of his first 11 seasons in Cleveland, he’s bounced around quite a bit; this is his fifth team since the start of the 2022 season. Read the rest of this entry »
The White Sox rebuild marched on over the weekend, as the team signed a veteran non-roster invitee and made two trades that brought three prospects and a draft pick into the system. Most significantly, 24-year-old reliever Gregory Santos was traded to the Mariners for 23-year-old righty Prelander Berroa, 25-year-old outfielder Zach DeLoach and a “Comp B” draft pick, the 69th choice in the 2024 draft. The White Sox also traded 21-year-old righty Cristian Mena to Arizona for 26-year-old outfielder Dominic Fletcher. Read the rest of this entry »
Ed Szczepanski-USA TODAY Sports
The Oakland-for-now Athletics had themselves a roster shuffle on Friday, bolstering their pitching staff by adding right-hander Ross Stripling and officially announcing the addition of lefty Alex Wood. Wood joined the A’s on a one-year contract worth $8.5 million (with another million’s worth of incentives) after three years with the Giants. Now Stripling, too, is headed east across the bay, in a deal sending minor league outfielder Jonah Cox west to San Francisco (To make room for the pair, Oakland outrighted lefty Francisco Pérez and designated infielder Jonah Bride for assignment).
Wood and Stripling, who might have said something like “It’s not goodbye; it’s see you later” while packing up their lockers after the 2023 season, will be teammates for the fourth separate stint on three different California teams. They spent from 2016 to 2018 together on the Dodgers before Wood was dealt to the Reds, were reunited back in Los Angeles for the start of the pandemic-shortened 2020 season until Stripling was traded to Toronto, and then signed nearly identical two-year, $25 million free agent contracts with San Francisco a year apart from one another. Now, they’ll pair up again in Oakland and figure to factor into a starting rotation that was worth a league-worst combined 1.8 WAR in last season.
Both pitchers were available at a modest cost to the A’s after floundering in their only year together with the Giants. As Kyle Kishimoto wrote last week, Wood struggled to get hitters to swing at bad pitches and to miss whenever they did swing, falling to the 13th percentile in chase percentage and the 17th in whiff percentage. As a result, he struck out a lot fewer hitters and walked a whole bunch more. He also failed to stay healthy, with strains in his left hamstring and lower back sidelining him for the bulk of two months, and by late July, he was relegated to bullpen work as a sort of piggybacker and long relief option. He pitched better in this role, but it was far from what he and the Giants had hoped for when he signed his deal before the 2022 season. Still, Wood brings 10 years of big league service and a not-too-shabby 18.1 career WAR to Oakland, where he’ll try to right the ship. Read the rest of this entry »
Last week, I looked at players the projection systems agree on and homes for remaining top free agents using ZiPS. To complete this troika of pieces reviewing some of the ZiPS projections, I’ve asked ZiPS for the players whose medium-term outlook has changed the most from last year’s projections to this year’s. There are a lot of ways to do it, but I went with the simple method of looking at 2024-2027 projections at this time last year and the 2024-2027 projections right now.
I’m actually a little surprised that someone beat Ronald Acuña Jr. here. I liked Colorado’s pickup of Nolan Jones a lot – and nobody would claim I wear purple-and-black colored glasses – but he turned out even better than I or the projection system expected. Jones was a high-power, high-BABIP talent in the minors, both characteristics that served him well in Coors. Nobody’s confusing him with Kevin Kiermaier, but he turned out to be more competent defensively in the outfield than most expected, a not insignificant thing in a park with a very large outfield. Note that ZiPS doesn’t exclusively use Statcast’s OAA/RAA in its defensive estimations; it uses a mix that is mostly so, but still contains a bit of DRS and a dash of UZR. A .400 BABIP would be difficult to “keep” under any circumstances, so regression is expected, but Jones’ career is still on a lot more solid ground than a year ago.
The reason for the suspicions on Acuña are unsurprising and not a secret: He was recovering from a serious ACL injury and had a fairly run-of-the-mill return in 2022. I don’t necessarily think ZiPS was wrong to make this projection given the risk, though I’ll note that it “hated” him to the tune of having the seventh-best four-year WAR projection for a position player. Well, 2023 happened, and I doubt I have to explain the qualities of that campaign for him. He’s back on the previous track on dueling with Juan Soto and Julio Rodríguez for best X-year projections.
None of the projection systems think Evan Carter will hit for as much average as he did during his first taste of the big leagues, but they all think he’s an above-average starter in the majors right now. There was promise in his profile entering 2023, but a lot more uncertainty because for as young as he was, he was still a relatively low-power prospect with a lot of walk value – not always a huge plus for a prospect becuase of the risk of Jeremy Hermida Syndrome – and hadn’t yet played above High-A ball. The majors turned out not to be so far away.
I said last year at this time that ZiPS needed another year to be sure about Masyn Winn, and that’s precisely what happened. Colt Keith, with a full healthy season after a shoulder injury, put himself into the top tier of prospects and earned an extension from the Tigers before he played a game. Chas McCormick is one of the oldest players on the list, and even if it took a long time until Dusty Baker noticed his improvement, the Astros were aware of it. Patrick Bailey turned out to be a truly dynamite defensive player in the majors.
The Henry Davis bump feels a little odd, but ZiPS was really down on him until his minor league performance in 2023, which featured a spicy 178 wRC+ at Double-A and Triple-A. Jake Burger did enough to upgrade him from a useful role player into a short-term league-average starter. Jordan Lawlar’s very short debut in the majors wasn’t impressive, but a 20-year-old shortstop with a 127 wRC+ in the high minors is someone on the verge of being in phenom territory, especially because he can actually play the position; he’s not a Danny Tartabull slugger shoehorned into a position he can’t play.
Robert Hassell III missed most of the Arizona Fall League in 2022 with a broken hamate bone, and things got even worse when the calendar flipped; he hit .221/.324/.321 across two levels in 2023. Just to contextualize how troubling a line that is, ZiPS gets a translation of .201/.275/.274 for the year. It doesn’t end him as a prospect, but it isn’t encouraging to see such a lack of production from one of the two outfield prospects the Nationals received in the Soto trade. On the bright side for Washington, the other outfielder it picked up for Soto, James Wood, was the No. 2 prospect in all of baseball in our updated 2023 rankings and had a four WAR improvement in this exercise.
This wasn’t a great season for Royals hitting prospects. The trio of MJ Melendez, Nick Pratto, and Vinnie Pasquantino were expected to provide some reinforcements to a punchless outlet, but two of the three (Melendez and Pratto) made this list. Even Pasquantino ranked 56th, but that’s more due to his missing more than three months with a shoulder injury that required season-ending surgery; he’s performed considerably better than the other two in the majors. Melendez now finds himself with a limited path to a long career. His bat regressed massively, a major issue now that the Royals are using him as a DH and in the outfield instead of as a catcher because they didn’t trust his glove behind the plate. He now needs to either convince the Royals he can handle catching (and actually be able to do so) or make a huge step forward with the bat, both easier said than done. Pratto was promoted in late April and had a big May, but he basically stopped hitting after that, eventually getting demoted the minors. He didn’t hit there, either.
ZiPS wasn’t a fan of Aaron Zavala, a second-round pick by the Rangers in 2021, but after this walk-heavy prospect hit the wall in Double-A (.194/.343/.285), it’s even less so. However, I wouldn’t completely write him off yet, because it’s hard for a projection system to deal with his injury setbacks; a spinal tumor and UCL surgery in consecutive years have presented major obstacles for him. He may be too patient as a hitter, but he also has had such little experience as a pro that he could still develop a more aggressive approach at the plate. Plate discipline is a means to an end, not an end to itself; if he doesn’t learn to punish pitchers when he get his pitch, he won’t make it as he moves up the minor league ladder.
Jake Cronenworth is a good bounceback candidate with the bat, but playing him at first always was going to take away a chunk of his value, especially as he turned out to be a rather unimpressive defensive player there. Addison Barger was a ZiPS favorite entering 2023, but an elbow injury cost him two months of the season and possibly contributed to his giant step backwards in the power department.
Brett Baty still has one of the best projections on this list, but a half-year of some really awful play in the majors ought to sap some of the exuberance about his output.
At the back of the list, Carlos Correa may have pleased the Twins in October, but it was one of his worst seasons as a pro. Because of his strong track record, ZiPS expects him to be much better moving forward than he was in 2023, but it can’t completely ignore such a down year. ZiPS also remains high on Anthony Volpe overall, but he didn’t show as much progress with the bat as ZiPS had hoped, and some of that superstar high-end has been whittled down a bit.
Some may believe that ZiPS isn’t as positive about Kyle Bradish’s 2023 as it should be, but he is the biggest positive mover among pitchers, going from a fringe fifth starter (in the opinion of ZiPS) to at least a legitimate number-two guy behind Corbin Burnes (!!!). I talked a bit about Brock Stewart in Projection Fight Club; he’s had a long injury history, but the anemic plate discipline numbers batters managed against him last season made ZiPS a believer, even with a relatively small sample size.
Eury Pérez amply demonstrated he was ready for the majors, and just in time to add some cover to a rotation that will be without Sandy Alcantara for 2024. Gregory Santos quickly figured out the whole command thing to go along with a fastball that can touch the century mark. I like to imagine I was correct about the Zach Eflin breakout, even if I was a few years early, but I don’t expect anyone to give me credit for that. He was fourth in the AL in WAR among pitchers, after all. Health seems to be the biggest boost here, because Eflin has been good for a while; he has now had four consecutive seasons with a FIP below four.
The Phillies no longer have Eflin, but they do have Cristopher Sánchez, who quickly worked his way into the rotation to give them a boost down the stretch. ZiPS thinks he’s for real. Same goes for Tanner Bibee, who showed he could finish off batters quite competently with both his slider and his changeup. Michael King consolidated his 2022 gains, and it’s completely unsurprising the Padres want to look at him as a starter if they can.
Alek Manoah’s 2023 represented such a turn of fate that William Hogarth could have painted it. After finishing third in the 2022 AL Cy Young race, he was demoted from the majors to the lowest level of the minors last June, returned after a month, and then was optioned again during the second week of August, this time to Triple-A, where he never pitched because of various ailments. No matter how much promise he has flashed in the past, ZiPS can’t ignore such a brutal decline. Carlos Rodón and Luis Severino were both injured and ineffective last year, two of the reasons the Yankees missed the playoffs. Noah Syndergaard demonstrated that it’s unlikely he can transition effectively from the power pitcher he once was into a finesse guy, and ZiPS jumped off the Shintaro Fujinami train, though I still have some hope for him as a full-time reliever. Kyle Wright and Brandon Woodruff both had significant injuries.
Note that the Ohtani decline here is as a pitcher only, and as mad as it makes me, it’s fair given he just had his second Tommy John surgery.
All told, the decliners for pitchers are much less interesting than the gainers or the hitter numbers, simply because elbows and shoulders change the expectations for pitchers more quickly. I think next year, I’ll filter out injured pitchers.
Coming up later this week: the first official ZiPS projected standings of 2024!
David Bednar was an unproven San Diego Padres pitcher when he was first featured here at FanGraphs in March 2020. The burly right-hander had made just 13 big-league appearances, all in the previous season when he’d allowed eight runs in 11 innings of undistinguished work. A 35th-round draft pick four years prior, he’d been lightly regarded as a prospect.
Fast forwarding to today, Bednar is one of the most dominant closers in the game. Now pitching for his hometown Pittsburgh Pirates, the hard-throwing hurler is coming off of an All-Star season where he logged 39 saves, a 2.00 ERA, and a 2.53 FIP. Since being acquired in a three-deal in January 2021, he boasts a 2.25 ERA and a 2.56 FIP, as well as a hefty 31.2% strikeout rate.
How has the 6-foot-1, 250-pound reliever evolved since we first spoke? I asked him that question when the Bucs visited Wrigley Field in late September.
“I’m able to command all three of my pitches in the zone better,” said Bednar. “I also have a better idea of where my misses are. Another big thing is having the confidence to trust my stuff in the zone. I know it sounds redundant, but I’m just competing in the zone. When I attack guys and keep all of my lanes the same, good things happen.”
Bednar feels that his raw stuff is much the same as what it was before his breakthrough. Along with the aforementioned strides, how he sequences has gone a long way toward his success. A former teammate played a big role. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley break down the Corbin Burnes trade between the Orioles and Brewers, then (23:19) talk to 81-year-old Don Kessinger, former six-time All-Star shortstop for the Cubs, about being an amateur multi-sport star, learning to switch-hit after making the majors, playing in Sandy Koufax’s perfect game, hitting in the low-offense 1960s, facing Nolan Ryan and Bob Gibson, doing Derek Jeter’s jump throw before Jeter did, being the American League’s last player-manager, the 1969 Cubs, his memories of Leo Durocher and Bill Veeck, Disco Demolition Night, being the father and grandfather, respectively, of big leaguers Keith Kessinger and Grae Kessinger, how pitching today compares to pitching during his era, and much more, plus (1:11:59) a few follow-ups.
Brad Rempel-USA TODAY Sports
In a more just world — in a world without injury — Byron Buxton would need a lot more shelf space in his home. A five-tool player with a name that sounds like it should belong to a superhero, Buxton was drafted second overall in 2012, spent some time as our number one prospect, debuted at age 21, and went on to average nearly 4.6 WAR per 162 games. By all rights, he should have spent his 20s challenging Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani to a game of hot potato with the American League MVP trophy. He should be on magazine covers. He should be a worldwide megastar nicknamed Lord Byron.
Instead, Buxton is a one-time All-Star who owns a Gold Glove, a Platinum Glove, and a Wilson Overall Defensive Player of the Year, all three awarded in 2017. He’s never finished better than 16th in the MVP race. You know the reason for this as well as I do. Buxton has never put up 4.6 WAR in a season because he’s never come close to playing in 162 games in one. He’s surpassed 92 games just once and he’s qualified for the batting title just once: in 2017, the year of the glove-shaped trophies. Over the nine seasons of his career, Buxton has played in roughly 4.5 seasons worth of games. The injury section of his Baseball Prospectusplayer page borders on some sort of macabre literary pretension, listing a blazon of injuries to his head, face, shoulder, back, ribs, wrist, hand, thumb, finger, hip, groin, hamstring, knee, shin, foot, and toe. There are fractures, hairline fractures, concussions, contusions, lacerations, dislocations, strains, sprains, soreness, inflammation, and tendinitis.
This morose lede is just a preamble though, because Buxton is back. Earlier this week at TwinsFest, he told everyone just that: “Oh yeah. I’m back.” After undergoing offseason surgery to excise a plica from his right knee, he is ready to play center field for the first time since 2022. “What makes me so sure? My body tells me that,” Buxton said. This is wonderful news. Anyone who loves baseball is rooting for him to get a shot at a full, fully healthy season. Anyone who loves baseball is excited to watch him roam center field once again, a human being so perfectly suited to that environment and the task before him that you can’t help but feel for just a moment like maybe the whole world makes sense after all.
Anyone who loves baseball is also tempering their expectations. Buxton is 30 and coming off a second straight season that ended with knee surgery. His offseason routine right now is equal parts physical therapy and baseball activities. The Twins have been honest about the fact that “back” might not mean exactly what we might want it to mean. They’re hoping that Buxton will be able to play 80 games in center field. For his part, Buxton chose not to put a number on it. “My body will tell me that,” he said.
Bodies are the worst. What the hell are you supposed to do with your hands? The same body that gives you the coordination and grace to play the game in such a way that it transcends the realm of sport and becomes art can then decide to break down frequently — so frequently that the fleeting chance to perform on that plane of existence serves as nothing more than a wistful reminder of what could have been.
How much health is a person entitled to? Everyone on earth has had their life limited to some degree by their health, and everyone knows people who have had it much worse. Injuries are a part of sports and a part of life. No one deserves to be injured, or to feel sick. In a more merciful world, we would all live healthy lives, achieving our potential (or not achieving it for all the other reasons that we don’t achieve our potential), and then one day the grim reaper would give us a friendly tap on the pristine shoulder and ask us to follow him, please.
It gets weirder when you’re a talent like Buxton. It’s his life, and he must be acutely aware of how differently things could have gone, of how much more he had to offer over the last nine years. But the rest of the baseball world feels robbed too, both on his behalf and on our own. We want to see his greatness for ourselves and for baseball as a whole.
How much health is a ballplayer entitled to? With the exception of Cal Ripken Jr., every baseball player alive could argue that they would have had a lot more to offer the game if only their body would have cooperated.
Buxton, though, is a different, more extreme case. Keep in mind that his 19.0 WAR during his nine major league seasons rank 60th among all position players. Keep in mind that every single one of the 59 players ahead of him has played in more games than his 670 in that span. (Ronald Acuña Jr. has the next fewest games played in the group, at 673, but he debuted three years after Buxton and has recorded 545 more plate appearances.) Keep in mind that 39 of those 59 players have made at least 1,000 more plate appearances than Buxton’s 2,487. Keep in mind that even when he has been on the field, Buxton hasn’t been at 100% all that often. Keep in mind that despite that fact, on a per-game basis, Buxton has been more valuable than 31 of those 59 players.
In 2023, battling through a rib injury, patella tendinitis, and a hamstring strain that combined to limit him to 85 games, Buxton ran a 98 wRC+. It was his worst offensive performance since 2018, when he played in just 28 games. Buxton was more aggressive on pitches in the zone and he made more contact, but that didn’t stop his strikeout rate from rising by a percentage point. His average exit velocity fell last year, and his EV50 (the average of the top 50% of his hardest hit balls, which Baseball Savant formerly referred to as best speed) has dropped in each of the past three seasons, from 104.7 mph to 103.8 to 102.5.
Even so, there were positive signs last season, too. His sprint speed was still a nearly elite 29.3 mph. He was still worth 4.8 runs on the bases, tied for 29th best in baseball among players with at least 300 plate appearances and his highest total since 2017. Although his power was down overall, Buxton was still capable of top-end exit velocity. He ripped three of the four hardest-hit balls of his career in 2023. That includes a career-high 116.9 mph double on Aug. 1, his last regular season game of the season.
Buxton has also made it clear that he’ll be more comfortable when he’s playing on both sides of the ball again. “I’m 29, I’m DHing, and I know I’m not supposed to be DHing,” Buxton said at TwinsFest. “You’re not buying into DH.” There’s bias in these numbers, because Buxton was usually relegated to DH when he wasn’t healthy enough to play the field, but since 2019, he has a 111 wRC+ as a DH and a 136 wRC+ as a center fielder. “What excites me? I’m going back to center,” he said. “As simple as that. Nothing makes me happier than playing the outfield.” He’s not alone. The Twins have been encouraged by videos of Buxton’s progress, seeing him move better than he has in years, watching him get into his legs at the plate and make the thunderous contact that he’s capable of making.
One of the joys of sports is that we get to witness greatness. Somewhere out there, at every human pursuit, someone is the best. If you’re one of the greatest accountants in the world, that gift will probably allow you to carve out a nice life for yourself, maybe even a luxurious one. But your gift will likely go unrecognized to some degree. How exactly do you judge that someone is the best in the world at accountancy? In sports, greatness shows up in the numbers, but it’s often obvious. It knocks you over the head. It’s miraculous to behold. Sometimes you see Shohei Ohtani at the plate, looking completely fooled by a pitch yet still able to reach flick it over fence, and you can’t help but laugh, because no other reaction seems appropriate. Buxton, too, is that type of player when he is on the field.
It would be truly magical to see Buxton at his best, and best health, for a whole season. He certainly deserves the chance. The rest of us will be hoping he gets that chance, too. But at the same time, we should not confuse hope with expectation. The sanguine quotes may have gotten the headlines, but Buxton gave another that summed up the situation a little more completely. “It’s different, I can feel it. It feels good,” he said. “Things feel back to … as close to normal as it’s going to get. You take the positive and run with it.”
Under John Angelos, son of Peter Angelos, who took the team to the verge of the World Series in the 1990s, the Baltimore Orioles have been hamstrung by a lack of investment, uncertainty over potential relocation, and a lawsuit over control of the family fortune that contains allegations straight out of the Book of Genesis. A 100-win team with a once-in-a-generation core of up-the-middle talent has had its wings clipped by an owner whose picture should be on the Wikipedia page for Hanlon’s Razor.
Well, the O’s are finally getting out of purgatory. Angelos has agreed to sell the team to a group fronted by billionaire David Rubenstein. The new owners will reportedly purchase 40% of the team now, with Rubenstein replacing John Angelos as the Orioles’ control person once the sale goes through. His group will then have the option to buy full control at a later date.
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