The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2024 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.
Last week, we learned that for the first time since 2020, BBWAA voters elected multiple players to the Hall of Fame. In fact the trio of Adrián Beltré, Todd Helton, and Joe Mauer outnumbers the total number of players elected to the Hall over the last three cycles. For as underwhelming as those recent top-line results may have been, they concealed the steady gains made by a handful of down-ballot candidates, including last year’s lone honoree, Scott Rolen, as well as Helton, each of whom was elected in his sixth year of eligibility after debuting with a share of the vote that in past eras suggested they had no hope of election via the writers. With three returning candidates for 2025 having received over 50% of the vote, and with some impressive newcomers poised to join them, it’s time to look ahead to what the next five ballots have in store.
This is the 11th time I’ve broken out my crystal ball in such a manner, dating back to the wrap-up of my 2014 election coverage at SI.com. With this edition, I’ve now done this more times at FanGraphs than SI. That first edition was so long ago that candidates still had 15 years of eligibility instead of 10, and so I could afford to project Tim Raines for election in 2018, his 11th year of eligibility. The Hall’s unilateral decision to truncate candidacies to 10 years would come just months later, though thankfully voters accelerated their acceptance of Raines, who was elected in 2017. Read the rest of this entry »
Carson Williams is a high-profile prospect in a fertile Tampa Bay Rays farm system. Drafted 28th overall in 2021 out of San Diego’s Torrey Pines High School, the 20-year-old shortstop is No. 20 in MLB Pipeline’s recently-released Top 100, and he will also rank prominently when our own list comes out next month. His 2023 production provided ample evidence of his plus tools. Playing primarily at High-A Bowling Green, and with cups of coffee at the Double-A and Triple-A levels, Williams walloped 23 home runs while putting up a 130 wRC+.
Erik Neander was effusive in his praise when giving a synopsis of the young infielder during November’s GM Meetings.
“Incredible physical potential in all aspects of the game, both sides of the ball,” Tampa Bay’s President of Baseball Operations told me. “And someone who is made to do this, mentally and emotionally. He handles it well. It’s pretty close to a total package in terms of his potential and the ingredients you like to see at such a young age.”
Fittingly, Williams came off as both humble and self-aware when I spoke to him late in the Arizona Fall League season. Asked where he is in his development, he replied that he was “right in the middle of it,” adding that “the minor leagues are a tough road” and he is “going through all of the normal things that a kid out of high school has to.” One of them, as he readily admits, is the challenge of competing against professional pitchers who possess bat-missing repertoires. If a red flag exists within his prospect profile, it would be the 31.4% strikeout rate on last year’s ledger. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley unleash another rant about the Orioles’ inaction (prompted by Mike Elias quotes about their aggressiveness) and banter about the David Robertson and Joc Pederson signings and baseball in Masters of the Air, then (33:51) answer listener emails about whether the Diamondbacks still qualify as a young franchise, injury stoppage time in baseball, director’s cuts of baseball broadcasts, how baseball would be different if teams had to leave a player with the other team at the end of each series, and fixing the Rockies (plus a few follow-ups).
By most any measure, Rockies outfielder Nolan Jones had an excellent rookie season in 2023. He finished fourth in National League Rookie of the Year voting behind unanimous winner Corbin Carroll, Kodai Senga, and James Outman. He posted a .297/.389/.542 batting line in 106 games, becoming the first Rockie rookie to go 20-20 in franchise history. His .395 wOBA ranked 10th among the 212 players with at least 400 plate appearances. He was an above-average fielder, spending most of his time in the outfield corners, with his fairly poor range more than made up for by his elite arm (OAA, DRS, and UZR all agree that he was a plus defender). He led Colorado with 3.0 BsR, and finished as one of 12 players in the majors with as many as 3.0 runs above average in each of batting, base running, and fielding value:
Players With 3.0+ Runs of Batting, Base Running, and Fielding
Kevin Sousa-USA TODAY SportsMatt Chapman is the second-highest-ranked position player left on the free agent market, and few players have a more evocative reputation: Four Gold Gloves in five full major league seasons, plus various newfangled defensive awards like a Platinum Glove and the Wilson Overall Defensive Player of the Year. Chapman is like a movie that won the Oscar and the Palme d’Or, and you look at the DVD cover and see it also won Best Picture at the Inland Empire Film Critics Association Awards. Lots of people think he’s good.
Even if Chapman weren’t a great defender, he’d be a valuable free agent. He’s reliable: Since his first full year in the majors, 2018, he’s never missed more than 23 games in a season. He has a career wRC+ of 118, and he’s averaged 29 home runs per 162 games. Jeimer Candelario, who is seven months younger than Chapman and has had only one season as good as Chapman’s worst full campaign in the majors, just got $45 million over three years. Ben Clemens predicted that Chapman’s free agent contract would be $24 million a year over five years; the median crowdsource estimate was 4 years at $20 million per. I tend to trust Ben’s judgment more than that of the crowd, wise as the crowd may be.
But Chapman is, nevertheless, an interesting case: a high-strikeout hitter who doesn’t put up huge power numbers, and a glove-first player at a bat-first position. That’s a precarious profile when considering a player for a long-term contract into his mid-30s. Read the rest of this entry »
Two-time Cy Young Award winner Blake Snell is still a free agent toward the end of the third week of January, and there reportedly remains a large gap between his asking price and what his potential suitors are willing to pay him. Snell’s upside is undeniable, but there are some concerns about his long-term value. He has not been a model of durability or consistency throughout his eight-year career, and perhaps most concerning is that even at his best, he allows a lot walks.
Last year, despite his overall excellence, Snell led the majors with 99 walks, 16 more than the next two guys, Charlie Morton and Johan Oviedo. In terms of BB%, his 13.3% rate beats out Morton’s by 1.7 percentage points. Spending north of $200 million on a pitcher who gives up so many free passes, even one of Snell’s caliber, is a tough sell. However, Snell isn’t your typical wild thing who doesn’t know where the ball is going after he releases it. Rather, there appears to an intentionality to where he misses. His misses are frequently in locations where the worst outcome is a wasted pitch out of the zone, rather than over the middle of the plate where batters can do more damage. Such an approach can be incredibly unpleasing to watch, but it has proven to be effective for him, nonetheless.
That he has a propensity for giving up walks and preventing runs forces us to consider that walks alone might not be the best encapsulation of his command. His ability to live around the edges and leave his misses in low risk locations is a skill. To defend that notion, I’ll present some data outlining where Snell throws his pitches, and how that compares to his peers. Let’s start with fastball command. Below is a table of last year’s top 20 pitchers in fastball shadow zone percentage, out of the 119 pitchers who threw at least 1,000 heaters:
Snell’s positioning between command artists like George Kirby and Aaron Nola above him, and Pablo López and Sonny Gray below him is unexpected. (Hunter Greene and Reid Detmers are less regarded for their command, but even their walk rates were, respectively, 3.7 and 4 percentage points lower than Snell’s 13.3%.) When looking a little further, Snell had the third lowest frequency of heart percentage on his heater last year. It’s one of the reasons why he was able to avoid the long ball so well. His 0.75 HR/9 ranked fourth among qualified pitchers. This is not a new trend for him, either. His fastball Shadow Zone% was even better in 2022. His 26.6% Heart% was 2.6 percentage points higher than it was last year, but it still ranked 17th among the 117 pitchers who threw at least 1,000 fastballs, and consequently, he allowed just 0.77 HR/9.
There is more to Snell than just his fastball, though. After all, he threw heaters less than half the time last year. To get a true sense of his command, we also need to evaluate his three other pitches: curveball, slider, changeup. Snell ranked second among all pitchers in breaking ball run value last year, so presumably he has a good handle on his curve and slider. For this table, I’ll use chase zone percentage:
The data presented here combines all the breaking balls a pitcher throws. In my best effort to keep the denominators similar (this one has 106 pitchers), the minimum number of breaking balls is set at 600. Once again, Snell has good positioning. Most of this top 20 list features pitchers who throw a high volume of curveballs and place them well, like Corbin Burnes, Framber Valdez, and Zac Gallen. With his nasty slider, Spencer Strider is a bit of an outlier in this group, but other guys with high velocity sliders begin to pop up in the 20s. Point being, Snell is one of the best pitchers in baseball when it comes to landing breaking balls in competitive spots to get whiffs, even if they are out of the zone. This part was expected, given his elite whiff rates on both his slider and curveball.
This doesn’t tell the entire story about how Snell uses his breaking balls, though. Yes, we know he gets plenty of chases and whiffs, but he does it differently than any other pitcher in baseball. He doesn’t give hitters many opportunities to hit mistakes because, more often than not, he refuses to throw his breaking pitches anywhere in or around the strike zone. Of the 149 pitchers in baseball who threw at least 500 breaking balls in 2023, Snell had the lowest combined rate of pitches in the heart and shadow zones by nine percentage points. Nine! He is the only pitcher on that list who throws his breaking balls in these two zones less than half the time.
It becomes even more clear that his avoiding the zone is by design rather than an indication that he has poor command when looking at what happens when he doesn’t locate his breaking balls as well as he would like. Last year, he threw 29.5% of his breaking pitches in the waste zone, the highest rate in the majors. That’s 9.4 percentage points higher than the next guy, Shane Bieber.
His unwillingness to give in leads to a lot of noncompetitive pitches, but that’s the point. Batters can’t crush pitches if they don’t swing, and even when they do, the pitches are breaking far enough outside the zone that hitters can’t do much with them, anyway. Considering that last year he also mostly ditched his slider against right-handed hitters in favor of his changeup, there is good reason to believe he has a much better understanding of how to execute and optimize his arsenal.
Speaking of the changeup, the plus command trend holds up there as well. Last year, he landed the pitch in the shadow zone 50% of the time, the fifth highest rate among the 107 pitchers who threw at least 300 offspeed pitches.
Specifically looking at the shadow zone is important for this pitch, because it’s not the kind of changeup or forkball that has wicked drop and falls out of the zone. Instead, it’s a pitch that tunnels with his heater and is roughly 9 mph slower without big time movement. Its success hinges on landing it in the shadow zone with consistency. Snell had never done that until last year. After fading the pitch for most of his San Diego tenure, he bumped the usage back up over 20%.
Usually this is the point in an analysis where I’d lay out some video highlighting how this data looks in practice, but that doesn’t feel necessary here. For one, I’ve already told you how visually unpleasing watching Snell walk the house can be. If you’ve watched him navigate a game, you know the feeling. If you haven’t, then herearesome games where he walks guys for nitpicking around the edges.
Conventional wisdom would suggest that because of all the walks, Snell has poor command, and therefore is a risky investment for teams looking to sign him. Yes, it is true that he allows an uncomfortable amount of walks, and for a lesser pitcher, this would not be ideal. Except, Snell is not a lesser pitcher, and his approach is not conventional. Despite the walks, maybe even because of them, Snell is adept at run prevention. He has a good feel for keeping his pitches in places where he won’t get burned too badly. After all, bases on balls are better than long balls, right?
Kim Klement-USA TODAY SportsMike Redmond has been up close and personal with a lot of high-profile players, some of whom arrived on the scene at a young age. As a big league backstop from 1998-2010, Redmond caught the likes of Josh Beckett, Johan Santana, and Dontrelle Willis, and he played alongside Miguel Cabrera. As the manager of the Miami Marlins from 2013-2015, he helped oversee the blossoming careers of José Fernández, Giancarlo Stanton, and Christian Yelich. With the exception of Santana, who was by then a comparative graybeard at age 26, the septet of stalwarts were barely into their 20s when they began playing with, and for, Redmond.
Now the bench coach of the Colorado Rockies, Redmond looked back at his experiences with the aforementioned All-Stars when the Rockies visited Fenway Park last summer.
——-
David Laurila: Let’s start with José Fernández, who was just 20 years old when he debuted. Just how good was he?
Mike Redmond: “I mean, yeah, he was a phenom. The plan was for him to be in the minor leagues for one more year, but because we were so thin pitching wise we had to bring him to the big leagues. We didn’t have anybody else that year.
“I’d seen José, because I’d managed in the Florida State League when he was there the year before. Christian Yelich and J.T. Realmuto were on that team, as well. I was with Toronto, managing Dunedin, so I got to see all of those guys in the minor leagues. With José, you could just tell. The stuff, the confidence, the mound presence… it was just different. It was different than the other guys in that league, man.
“I got the manager’s job with the Marlins, and I remember being in spring training that first year. [President of Baseball Operations] Larry Beinfest and I were talking about José, and he goes, ‘Hey, don’t get too excited. You’re not going to get him just yet.’ I was like, ‘OK, whatever.’ Sure enough, José ended up breaking camp with us because of injuries. We had him on a pitch count, and he’d always give me a hard time about it, because he wanted to throw more. I would be like, ‘Hey, listen, you have 100 pitches. How you use those 100 pitches is up to you.’ I would say that he used them pretty effectively. He was nasty. Great slider. And again, he was very confident in his abilities. He was a competitor. I mean, he reminded me of some of the great pitchers I’d caught in the big leagues, like Josh Beckett and Johan Santana. Guys who just dominated.” Read the rest of this entry »
Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Chicago White Sox. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our own observations. This is the fourth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.
A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.
All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley follow up on the contract over/unders draft and the “death ball,” banter about the signings of Rhys Hoskins and Matt Moore, weigh their current confidence levels in the A’s actually moving to Las Vegas, and consider a suggestion for a “pulling the goalie”-style tweak to baseball. Then (35:44) they talk to leading Hall of Fame election forecaster Jason Sardell about how and why he developed his probabilistic Cooperstown projection model, how it works, this year’s results and surprises, the public-private ballot split, the toughest players to project, his Hall of Fame philosophy, the shrinking of the Hall of Fame backlog, upcoming candidates and ballots, his non-baseball scientific pursuits, and much more.
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