Matt 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 here are some 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?

Mike 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.

Audio intro: Jimmy Kramer, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Xavier LeBlanc, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to over/under draft results
Link to MLBTR FA top 50
Link to death ball BP article
Link to Leo on average fastballs
Link to post on unique pitches
Link to Dead Man’s Curve wiki
Link to Davy Andrews on Hoskins
Link to Brewers offseason additions
Link to MLBTR on Moore
Link to BP’s 2012 Top 101
Link to Ben on pitching prospects
Link to 2023 team RP ranks
Link to A’s update
Link to A’s payments
Link to Vegas event video
Link to MLBTR on the A’s ballpark
Link to “consequences” tweet
Link to Meg on the penalty box
Link to Beltré video
Link to Mauer video
Link to Helton video
Link to Jason’s final projections
Link to 2024 projections roundup
Link to 2023 projections roundup
Link to voting results
Link to Jay’s ballot breakdown
Link to Lewie Pollis on the voting
Link to Wagner interview
Link to Stark on Wright
Link to Posnanski suggestion
Link to SIS on Sabathia
Link to ballot tracker
Link to Thibodaux on EW
Link to Jason on MLB Network
Link to Ben on Mauer in 2018
Link to Ben on Beltré in 2017
Link to Ben on Hall of Framers

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Sometime during the second inning, I climb past a dozen rows of empty yellow seats toward the usher at the top of the section. “¿Cuando vienen todos?” I ask when she looks up. When are they all coming? This is my first Dominican Winter League game, and I was prepared for pandemonium: the energy, the blaring music, the crush of the crowd. Instead, the stadium is desolate.

The usher looks confused by my question, and I worry that my iffy Spanish is to blame. “¿Quién?” she asks. Who?

We look around the empty stadium, and though we say the exact same thing at the exact same time, our inflections couldn’t be more different. Mine is declarative: “La gente.” The people. Hers is interrogative: “¿La gente?” I realize that she wasn’t confused by my grammar; she was confused by the fact that I expected anyone to be here in the first place. My ears are too slow to process the entirety of her explanation, but I catch enough. This game doesn’t matter. The semi-final round of the playoffs begins in a few days and both teams have already clinched their spots. Nadie viene. Nobody’s coming. Read the rest of this entry »

Every free agent left-handed pitcher entering his age-35 season is headed to Southern California. Canadian bird magnet James Paxton has agreed to a one-year deal with the Dodgers, with base compensation of $11 million and another $2 million (half of it fascinatingly attainable) available in bonus. Another top pitching prospect from the 2010s, Matt Moore, is returning to the Angels for $9 million.

These were two of the premier left-handed pitching prospects in baseball in the early 2010s, and their current fates really illustrate how far in the past that was. Nevertheless, Paxton’s ability continues to tempt teams into thinking, “No, this time will be different, he’ll stay healthy, I know it.” Meanwhile, Moore has reinvented himself into one of the best in baseball at a different job than the one he trained for. Read the rest of this entry »

The other day, my friend asked me a simple baseball question with no easy answer: What does a four-seam fastball look like? Not what is a four-seam fastball, or what does a four-seam fastball accomplish, or any number of fastball-related questions with more straightforward answers. He wanted me to conjure up an image of the most common pitch in baseball. I didn’t quite know what to tell him; strangely enough, the more ordinary something is, the harder it can be to describe.

My friend is merely a rhetorical device, but I’ve already grown attached to him, so let’s call him Tony. Tony is a casual observer of baseball. He hears terms like “fastball” and “curveball” and “the Dodgers are ruining the game” every now and then, but he doesn’t have the requisite context to understand what any of it really means. How do I show Tony what a four-seam fastball looks like in 2023? After all, every pitcher works differently. The velocity gap between Jhoan Duran’s and Rich Hill’s four-seam fastballs is the difference between a speeding ticket and losing your license. Explaining to Tony that those two offerings are technically the same pitch would be like trying to convince an alien that a Bergamasco Shepherd and a Xoloitzcuintli are the same species. It’s factually correct, yet without hyper-specific evidence – and the background knowledge necessary to interpret that evidence – it’s all but impossible to believe.

I could show Tony some video of Félix Bautista to illustrate the ideal four-seam fastball. Alternatively, I could show him Andrew Heaney as an example of a perfectly average four-seamer instead:

Yet Tony didn’t ask about results, be they average or exceptional. He wants a visual point of reference, and simply put, neither of those two throws a visually conventional heater. Reaching triple-digits on the radar gun remains a rarity, and Bautista does it more often than most. Meanwhile, Heaney throws his fastball with over 15 inches of arm-side run; that’s 70% more horizontal movement than the average four-seamer of a similar speed and release point. On the graph below, Heaney sits way over on the right, and only two dots (min. 500 pitches) can be found farther in that direction:

What Tony really wants to see is the prototypical four-seam fastball, the pitch that most closely resembles the norm in as many material ways as possible. Identifying the man who throws such a pitch won’t serve a practical purpose; it won’t help teams win ballgames, fans win their roto league, or Harold Ramírez lay off all those four-seamers outside the zone. Still, it’s nice to have a baseline for the most important pitch in baseball – or any pitch for that matter. Thus, I set out to find the pitchers who throw the pitches that best exemplify what each pitch looks like in the game today.

A project like this requires a good deal of subjective decision making. No one throws a pitch perfectly identical to league average in every measurable way. Heck, even if someone did, who’s to say that average is the same as normal. The league average four-seam fastball last year clocked in at 94.2 mph, but the average reliever threw nearly a full mile per hour faster than the average starter. With that in mind, would it be incorrect to say that a starter who boasts a 94.2 mph heater is throwing with typical velocity? On top of that, pitchers who throw harder fastballs tend to throw better fastballs, which means they get to throw more fastballs. Therefore, they influence the league average to a greater extent than their less prolific peers. The average velocity of the 43 starters who threw at least 1,000 four-seam fastballs last season was 1.2 mph faster than the average velocity of the 216 starters who threw between 50 and 999 of the same pitch. Should those fewer, faster pitchers have such an outsized influence on the overall numbers? With all that said, I’m sticking with league average as my baseline (for lack of a perfect alternative, if nothing else), and I hope you’ll stick with me as I explain the rest of my decisions.

Next, I had to figure out how to narrow down the list of possible candidates. Seven-hundred and thirty-one players threw a four-seam fastball in the major leagues last year, and I wasn’t going to get anywhere if I gave each of them a close look. (Sorry Tony, even I have my limits.) Thus, I set 100 four-seam fastballs as my arbitrary minimum requirement, and I chose to prioritize one attribute above all else: velocity. It’s called a fastball, after all.

Seven pitchers (min. 100 pitches) averaged exactly 94.2 mph on their four-seam fastball. Another 18 sat at 94.1 or 94.3 mph, and I included those arms in my search to allow for candidates who might be a rounding error away from league average. That gave me 25 pitchers to work with, 19 right-handers and 6 southpaws. I hemmed and hawed over whether to include lefties at all, and ultimately I put off making a decision in hopes I wouldn’t have to. Thankfully, that proved to be the case, as none of the top candidates were left-handed.

Armed with 25 contenders and a Google spreadsheet, I hopped on Baseball Savant, looking for as many physical pitch characteristics as I could find and manipulate. I settled on nine: vertical release point, horizontal release point, extension, perceived velocity, vertical movement, horizontal movement, spin rate, total movement, and active spin. After calculating the standard deviation of each metric, I returned to my 25 candidates. Did anyone fall within one standard deviation of league average in every category?

Well Tony, today is your lucky day. One pitcher, and only one pitcher, fit the bill. One pitcher was within a single standard deviation of league average in all nine of the aforementioned metrics. That same pitcher came within half a standard deviation in seven categories, within a quarter of a standard deviation in five categories, and within an eighth of a standard deviation in four. No one else came closer at any step along the way. The owner of the most ordinary four-seam fastball in baseball is José Berríos.

Wow… Let’s take a minute to marvel at the regularity. Here’s how Berríos threw his four-seamer in 2023:

And here is how he stacks up to Alec Marsh, the next closest competitor and, as I discovered, a player for the Royals, not the title of a Phillies day care fan fiction. I’ve also included league average numbers in the table for additional context:

I considered making a case for Marsh on the basis of speed alone. At the beginning of my search, I said I would prioritize velocity, and his 94.2 mph average was right on the money. However, Berríos’s 94.3 mph average velocity was actually rounded up from 94.25 mph. In other words, if he had thrown just one additional fastball at 92.3 mph or slower (he threw 27 such pitches last year), his season average would have fallen to 94.2. It’s simply too close to take the title away from him.

Interestingly, Berríos’s four-seam fastball wasn’t quite so ordinary until this past season. For most of his career, he threw the pitch with less rise and more run than the typical four-seamer. However, in 2023, his four-seamer had more vertical movement and less horizontal movement than it had since his breakout campaign in 2018:

My quest for the platonic ideal of a four-seam fastball was so fruitful that I decided to perform a similar search for sinkers and cutters. I still prioritized velocity, but for this investigation, I also took movement into account to narrow down the contenders. Call me a literalist, but I say the typical sinker needs to sink, and the typical cutter needs to cut.

Starting with sinkers, I picked out the 12 pitchers who came within one-quarter of a standard deviation of league average in velocity and within half a standard deviation in both vertical and horizontal movement. Next, I compared them all to league average in each of the additional categories I previously identified. Unfortunately, there wasn’t quite as clear of a winner this time around.

Only one pitcher, Colin Rea, finished within one standard deviation of league average in every metric (including mph). However, eight others finished within one standard deviation in nine out of 10. When I narrowed the criteria to half a standard deviation, Rea remained in the lead, meeting the criteria in nine of the 10 metrics, but he was tied with three other pitchers: Mitch Keller, Miles Mikolas, and Bryse Wilson. Meanwhile, at a quarter of a standard deviation, Rea reclaimed sole position of first place (eight out of 10), but three more arms were right on his tail with seven: Mikolas, Pedro Avila, and Brandon Pfaadt. What’s more, one of the metrics in which Rea wasn’t particularly close to league average was vertical movement, and that seems pretty important for a sinker. Among the quartet of Rea, Mikolas, Avila, and Pfaadt, only Avila came within a quarter of a standard deviation of league average in vertical movement. Finally, when I went down to an eighth of a standard deviation away from league average, Rea lost his crown to Avila, who came that close to league average in six different metrics. Rea and Noah Davis finished right behind him with five each.

The names that came up most often in the previous paragraph were Rea, Avila, and Mikolas. However, only one of those three threw his sinker with precisely league-average velocity. Indeed, only one of those three came within half a mile per hour of average. What’s more, that same pitcher was the only candidate out of 12 who came within an eighth of a standard deviation of league average in both vertical and horizontal movement, and one of only two who came within a quarter: Pedro Avila.

Likewise with the cutter, there were no exact matches. I picked out the 14 contenders who came within half a standard deviation of league average in velocity and both planes of movement, but none of those 14 came within one standard deviation of league average in every other metric. Nonetheless, there was still a clear winner. Only one pitcher came within half a standard deviation of average in nine categories, within a quarter in six categories, and within an eighth in five. He was one of only four pitchers within half a standard deviation of league average in both vertical and horizontal movement and within a rounding error of league average in velocity. And out of those four, he was easily the closest to league average in release point and extension. It’s Javier Assad.

Here at FanGraphs, we pay a ton of attention to average performance. The concept of “league average” informs some of our most foundational stats. We even have a tab on the leaderboards page (+ Stats) dedicated to precisely that. It’s not hard to see why; a good sense of average performance, whether for a team, a player, or an individual skill, has all sorts of practical applications. Sometimes, however, it’s just as interesting to take a step back from results and focus on the process instead. We talk a whole lot about four-seamers, sinkers, and cutters, and it’s helpful to visualize those concepts as best we can. In 2023, it was Berríos, Avila, and Assad who made that possible.

So, there you have it, Tony. It’s been fun! Let’s grab a coffee sometime soon.

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.

The 2024 Hall of Fame election is in the books, with three newcomers — first-year candidates Adrián Beltré and Joe Mauer, and holdover Todd Helton — crossing the 75% threshold. It was a bit of a nailbiter, as Mauer cleared the bar by just four votes while Billy Wagner missed by five, but after just two candidates were elected by the writers over the past three cycles, it’s a welcome crowd of honorees, and it should make for a raucous weekend in Cooperstown when they and their families, friends and fans join those of Contemporary Baseball Era Committee honoree Jim Leyland for induction into the Hall on July 21. Read the rest of this entry »

The free agent market is finally starting to move. Rhys Hoskins is headed to Milwaukee, finalizing a two-year, $34 million contract with an opt-out after the first year, per Scoop Czar Jeff Passan. You don’t have to squint to see the fit here. Milwaukee needs hitting, Hoskins needs a place to hit, and it’s always nice to feel wanted. The option effectively makes this a pillow contract for Hoskins, who ruptured his ACL in spring training and missed the entire 2023 season. (This seems like a good place to note that the deal is almost certainly still pending a physical.) If he proves that he can still hit like Rhys Hoskins, he can opt out and go after a bigger deal while he’s still a fresh-faced 31-year-old with the world at his feet, rather than a doddering, unemployable 32-year-old. If he needs another year to knock the rust off, well, I’ve heard great things about Milwaukee.

Hoskins ranked 20th on our Top 50 Free Agents. Ben Clemens estimated that he would receive a three-year contract for a total of $45 million, meaning that Hoskins fell short of the estimate in terms of years, but exceeded it in terms of average annual value. Michael Baumann did a lot of the legwork a couple weeks ago, so I’ll leave it to him to remind you of just how good a hitter Hoskins is:

The value that Hoskins brings is obvious. His power can be streaky on a game-to-game basis — a danger of being a three true outcome-heavy hitter — but in the aggregate, he’s one of the most consistent players in baseball. Hoskins is a career .242/.353/492 hitter, with a 13.5% walk rate and a 23.9% strikeout rate. That’s a career wRC+ of 126.

In four full seasons in the majors (discounting Hoskins’ 50-game rookie season and the 41 games he played in 2020), he’s never been worth more than 2.4 WAR, nor less than 2.0. His full-season career low in wRC+ is 112, while his full-season career high is 128. You can like or dislike the total package, but you know what you’re going to get.

Read the rest of this entry »