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.

Even before the sale is official, the Orioles have solved their no. 1 glaring weakness by acquiring Corbin Burnes for a draft pick and two players they didn’t really need. It’s as if the mere mention of Rubenstein changed the omens around the ballclub. Read the rest of this entry »

Late last night, the Milwaukee Brewers sent Corbin Burnes to the Baltimore Orioles for two 25-year-old players – left-handed pitcher DL Hall and infielder Joey Ortiz – as well as a Competitive Balance Round A pick in the 2024 draft (pick no. 34 overall). Milwaukee’s active roster is worse today without Burnes, who has been one of the best pitchers in baseball since moving into the rotation full-time in 2021. But the player portion of return for one year of Burnes, who is slated to hit free agency after the season, succeeds in threading the small market needle by providing both short- and long-term reinforcement to the big league club, as both players are major league ready and also under club control for the next six seasons. Burnes was unlikely to re-sign with Milwaukee, and the Brewers get a comp pick similar to the one they would have received had they extended him a qualifying offer after the 2024 season, plus two good, young players.

Let’s talk about those players, starting with Ortiz. A fourth rounder in 2019, Ortiz has a career .286/.357/.449 line in the minors and reached the big leagues in 2023. With so many other infielders, chiefly Gunnar Henderson and Jackson Holliday, also in the upper-level mix for playing time, the Orioles had a surplus of players like this in their system. Ortiz was a top 100 prospect last offseason and ended the 2023 season as my 57th overall prospect. His profile was initially rooted in his plus combination of defense and feel for contact, but in 2023, he traded some of that contact for meaningfully more power. Ortiz’s underlying contact quality took a leap across the board, most notably his hard-hit rate, which rose from 31% in 2022 to 46% in 2023. This was coupled with a noticeable shift in his physicality, as Ortiz looked bigger and stronger. Ortiz’s contact rates, both overall and in-zone, dropped a tad compared to 2022 and he’s a bit chase-prone, but his well-rounded offensive output should clear the relatively low bar for middle infielders. Read the rest of this entry »

As I write this, I’m in a fair amount of discomfort. I went to the dentist’s office for a routine filling and next thing you know, bam, root canal. I’m a little out of it, is the point, and in my dental chair daze, I did what everyone probably does when they’re upside down with blood rushing to their head for a long time: I started musing about Isaac Paredes.

Oh, I hear you. This isn’t what normal people do when they’re discombobulated, not even a little bit. To that I say, you’re not wrong. Also, though, I’m not a normal person. This is my job, and daydreaming about work is inevitable, not weird. In any case, I came up with an incredible idea, a way to work out the next Paredes before teams did. I was a genius. Here’s the bad news, though: I don’t really remember it now that I’m lucid again.

That’s a bummer, but it’s OK, because in trying to reconstruct my thoughts, I think I came up with a pretty cool way of contextualizing how much it pays to sell out for pulled contact. As an added bonus, I got to pore over a ton of data and play with it to my heart’s content. That’s the dream, coming up with some silly junk stat in a haze and then spending hours manipulating data to show that it’s worthwhile.
Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an evaluation of the prospects in the New York Mets farm system who readers should consider “imminent big leaguers,” players who might reasonably be expected to play in the majors at some point this year. This includes all prospects on the 40-man roster as well as those who have already established themselves in the upper levels of the minors but aren’t yet rostered. I tend to be more inclusive with pitchers and players at premium defensive positions since their timelines are usually the ones accelerated by injuries and scarcity. Any Top 100 prospects, regardless of their ETA, are also included on this list. Reports, tool grades, and scouting information for all of the prospects below can also be found on The Board.

You may be able to infer that is not a top-to-bottom evaluation of the Mets farm system. I like to include what’s happening in minor league and extended spring training in my reports as much as possible, since scouting high concentrations of players in Arizona and Florida allows me to incorporate real-time, first-person information into the org lists. In the Mets case, I’ll be heading to Florida in April for extended spring training to complete the entire list. Skimming the imminent big leaguers off the top of a farm system in the meantime allows time-sensitive information to make its way onto the site more quickly, better preparing readers for the upcoming season, helping fantasy players as they draft, and building site literature on relevant prospects to facilitate transaction analysis in the event that trades or injuries foist these players into major league roles. There will still be a full Mets prospect list that includes Ryan Clifford, Marco Vargas and all of the other prospects in the system who aren’t Top 100 guys and also appear to be at least another whole season away. As such, today’s list includes no ordinal rankings. Readers are instead encouraged to focus on the players’ Future Value (FV) grades. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh, Meg Rowley, and Baseball Prospectus editor-in-chief Craig Goldstein and managing editor Patrick Dubuque banter about editing, discuss the Orioles’ impending change in ownership (10:25), examine the newly released Baseball Prospectus 2024 (22:01), and then play a guessing/Remembering Some Guys game in which they each read aloud book comments about six unidentified players apiece, pulled from the full 29-year run of BP Annuals (39:20).

Audio intro: Benny and a Million Shetland Ponies, “Effectively Wild Theme (Horny)”
Audio outro: Andy Ellison, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Baseball Prospectus 2024
Link to FG SP depth charts
Link to FG post on Burnes
Link to MLBTR on Rubenstein
Link to The Carlyle Group wiki
Link to Rob Mains on the sale
Link to The Athletic on the sale
Link to Tsao’s Wikipedia page
Link to Ben on bidets

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It just didn’t make sense. There was no way that the Orioles were really planning on heading into the 2024 season with so little top-end pitching. I’m not saying Kyle Bradish, Grayson Rodriguez, and company are bad, but they were on the lighter side of potential playoff rotations, and that made very little sense to me given the composition of the rest of the team. It’s not every day that I take a team to task for something they didn’t do, but this one was just too illogical.

It turns out that the Orioles agreed with me on that one. Thursday night, they acquired Corbin Burnes from the Brewers in exchange for DL Hall, Joey Ortiz, and a Competitive Balance Round A pick, as Ken Rosenthal, Jeff Passan, and Mark Feinsand first reported. You know it’s a big trade when all the news-breakers are sharing it. Read the rest of this entry »

About a year ago, I wrote about how umpires have improved at calling balls and strikes throughout the pitch tracking era. They have gotten a whole lot better, especially at identifying strikes. While everyone appreciates a more consistent and accurate zone, that has made things a bit harder for hitters overall. More importantly, their progress didn’t seem like it was showing any signs of slowing down. With the 2023 season in the books, it’s time to check in on whether that’s still the case. The methodology here is simple: check to see if Statcast agrees with the umpire’s decision for each called ball and strike. This isn’t a perfect method, as a pitch right over the heart of the plate is a much easier call than one right on the edge, but the enormous sample sizes (there were 376,635 takes in 2023) mean that things even out over time.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

The San Diego Padres are falling apart a little, having divested themselves this winter of Juan Soto, Trent Grisham, Josh Hader, and (most likely) Blake Snell. But reinforcements are on the way, in the shape of Wandy Peralta, who on Wednesday agreed to a four-year, $16.5 million contract. Peralta might be the second-best active pitcher named Peralta, and the second-best left-handed pitcher in baseball history named Wandy, but he’s still a good reliever.

Peralta made 165 appearances over two and a half seasons with the Yankees, with a cumulative ERA of 2.82 despite pedestrian strikeout numbers. But in the age of heavy metal fastballs and sliders, Peralta is a little more refined and subtle. His most common pitch is a changeup, which is useful against lefties as well as righties, and it’s hard to square up. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s your chance to vote for the 2024 SABR Analytics Conference Research Awards winners.

The SABR Analytics Conference Research Awards will recognize baseball researchers who have completed the best work of original analysis or commentary during the preceding calendar year. Nominations were solicited by representatives from SABR, Baseball Prospectus, FanGraphs, the Internet Baseball Writers Association of America, and Sports Info Solutions.

To read any of the finalists, click on the link below. Scroll down to cast your vote.

Contemporary Baseball Analysis

• R.J. Anderson, “Why Baseball’s Next Unionization Effort Could Come From MLB Front Offices,” CBS Sports, May 1, 2023
• David J. Gordon, “Balancing Starter and Bullpen Workloads in a Seven-Game Postseason Series,” SABR Baseball Research Journal, Fall 2023
• Hannah Keyser and Zach Crizer, “How the Not-So-Subtle Art of Chucking it Right Down the Middle is Helping MLB Pitchers Get Ahead,” Yahoo! Sports, April 4, 2023
• Eric Longenhagen, “Let’s Get Small: Hundreds of Minor Leaguers Have Shrunk,” FanGraphs, September 29, 2023
• Robert Orr, “Quantifying the Corey Seager Approach,” Baseball Prospectus, November 8, 2023

Contemporary Baseball Commentary

• Michael Baumann, “I Was Supposed to Write About Elly De La Cruz Today,” FanGraphs, June 16, 2023
• Michael Clair, “In the Mountains of the World’s Most Remote Country, Baseball Takes Hold,” MLB.com, August 3, 2023
• Evan Drellich, “MLB’s Billionaire Owners Leaning on Public for Wave of New Ballparks,” The Athletic, September 12, 2023
• Esteban Rivera, “Shohei Ohtani’s Deal With New Balance Has Immense Potential,” FanGraphs, March 13, 2023
• Ginny Searle, “The Wrong Lessons Learned,” Baseball Prospectus, June 16, 2023

Historical Baseball Analysis/Commentary

• Russell A. Carleton, “Is WAR Still Stuck in the 20th Century?” Baseball Prospectus, February 8, 2023
• Stephen Dame, “Softball and Swastikas: The Riot at Toronto’s Christie Pits,” SABR Baseball Research Journal, Fall 2023
• Patrick Dubuque, “The Other Aging Curve,” Baseball Prospectus, January 31, 2023
• Sam Miller, “Based On A True Story: The Game’s Most Preposterous Fun Fact,” Pebble Hunting, June 6, 2023
• Dayn Perry, “Old Yankee Stadium’s Rise And Fall: Complete Story of ‘The House That Ruth Built’ 100 Years After Its Opening,” CBS Sports, April 18, 2023

John Dewan Defensive Analytics Award

• Robert Arthur, “The End of the Shift Helped Left-Handed Line Drive Hitters the Most,” Baseball Prospectus, November 7, 2023
• Alex Eisert, “Breaking Down the Kansas Kids’ Gold Glove Snub,” FanGraphs, October 31, 2023
• Jonathan Judge, “Introducing RDA,” Baseball Prospectus, February 8, 2023
• Rob Mains, “Fielding, It Turns Out, Does Slump,” Baseball Prospectus, August 29, 2023
• Mark Simon, “What Has 20 Years of Defensive Runs Saved Data Meant to Baseball?” Sports Info Solutions, February 7, 2023

Voting will be open through 11:59 p.m. MST on Friday, February 9, 2024.

Mobile or Safari users, click here to access the survey

Results will be announced and presented at the SABR Analytics Conference, March 8-10, 2024, in Phoenix, Arizona. Learn more or register for the conference at SABR.org/analytics.