The Astros undoubtedly view their 2023 season as a disappointment. They won 90 games, their lowest full-season total since 2016. They won the AL West, but only via tiebreaker, and then lost a tight ALCS to the division rival Rangers. Viewed through the lens of Houston’s recent domination of the American League, even a solid result isn’t enough.

Just one problem: There weren’t a lot of obvious places for the team to improve. Their lineup is full of the guys who have been mashing for them for years. José Abreu might theoretically be a weak link, but he looked better in the playoffs, and it’s not like there are a ton of exciting first basemen available in free agency anyway. Michael Brantley’s retirement lets Yordan Alvarez DH more frequently, and between Jake Meyers and Chas McCormick, the team has outfielders to fill any voids out there.

Still, the Astros wanted to get better, and hats off to them for that. Could they use some pitching? Sure, of course, but their top duo of Justin Verlander and Framber Valdez is already great, and I really like both Hunter Brown and J.P. France as options behind them. If there was a weakness, it was a thin bullpen, but that can be fixed. Like, say, for example:

BREAKING: Star closer Josh Hader and the Houston Astros are in agreement on a five-year, $95 million contract, a source tells ESPN.

The deal contains no deferrals. It is the largest present-day value contract for a relief pitcher in baseball history.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) January 19, 2024

Read the rest of this entry »

Jace Jung is following in his brother’s footsteps, albeit via a distinctly different path. Unlike his older sibling, Texas Rangers 2023 rookie standout Josh Jung, the 23-year-old Detroit Tigers infield prospect isn’t a self-professed hitting nerd. Which isn’t to suggest he lacks the skills needed to one day wield an impact bat at the big league level. A top prospect in a solid Detroit system, the younger Jung is coming off of a first full professional season where he slashed .265/.376/.502 with 28 home runs and a 143 wRC+ between High-A West Michigan and Double-A Erie.

His left-handed stroke has long been his calling card. A three-year stalwart at Texas Tech University — the same school Josh attended — Jace put up an 1.116 OPS as a collegian before being taken 12th overall by the Tigers in the 2022 draft. That he’s continued to bash in pro ball is anything but a surprise. Possessing a plus power profile, he is in many ways a mirror image of his right-handed-hitting brother, though again, not when it comes to having an analytic approach to the craft. As he explained to me late in the Arizona Fall League season, Jace is a proponent of keeping things as simple as possible.

———

David Laurila: Your brother told me that you’re not nearly as much of a hitting nerd as he is. How much do you study hitting?

Jace Jung: “I’ve actually gotten into it a lot more this year, trying to figure out what pitchers’ pitches do. At the same time, when I get up to the plate, I mostly just trust my swing. I know that what it comes down to for me is rhythm and timing. So really, I try to keep it as simple as possible when I get up there. I just try to hit the baseball.” Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Detroit Tigers. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my 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 »

Billy Wagner has a chance to be voted into the Hall of Fame this year. As I type these words on Saturday evening, the erstwhile left-handed reliever — this in his penultimate appearance on the BBWAA ballot — is polling at 80.0% with nearly half of the electorate having disclosed their choices. If he finishes at or above the 75% threshold required for induction he will become the ninth closer enshrined in Cooperstown.

Many will argue that closers — at least not those named Mariano Rivera — don’t belong in the Hall of Fame. The reasoning, by and large, is lack of innings thrown (Wagner has just 903), which factors into comparably low WAR totals (Rivera has 38.6, whereas workmanlike starters such as Kenny Rogers and John Lackey are north of 40). Add in a rule that allows for what might be deemed “cheap saves” and the argument against closers is understandable.

Personally, I don’t think there are enough closers in the Hall of Fame. It’s not as though the role isn’t important, and it certainly isn’t recent. The first 15-save season came exactly 100 years ago, with Firpo Marberry doing the honors with the Washington Senators (the right-hander added two more saves in that year’s World Series). Marberry subsequently logged the first 20-save season in 1926, and by career’s end he’d led the American League in saves and appearances six times each. Marberry isn’t in the Hall of Fame, but when you factor in his historical significance — ditto his higher JAWS score than all of Rollie Fingers, Lee Smith, and Bruce Sutter — he arguably should be.

If a “closer” with Marberry’s statistical résumé — he finished with 99 saves and 148 wins (56 of them as a reliever) — could be deemed Hall-worthy, what about a Wagner contemporary like John Franco? While not as overpowering as Wagner, Franco did amass 424 saves — two more than the on-the-doorstep Hall of Famer’s total, and the most ever for a southpaw. Moreover, it ranks fifth-most all-time, while his 1,119 appearances ranks third-most. With the caveat that JAWS isn’t bullish on his credentials, Franco presents an intriguing case. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the offseason doldrums and this winter’s free-agent activity compared to last year’s, the Josh Hader and Robert Stephenson signings (with a contract over/under draft update), a bleak week in sports (and non-sports) media, pitcher/catcher technique and the automated strike zone, and the invasion of players named Jackson, followed by Stat Blasts (1:14:48) about Hader’s strikeout splits by out count, “minimum journeymen,” the longest palindromic win-loss sequences, and the most consecutive games started at catcher.

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Ben Lindbergh, Meg Rowley, and Patreon supporter Nick Taber banter about Nick’s baseball background and MLB’s most hated teams, then (19:41) answer listener emails about baseball’s newsbreakers as secret newsmakers, a baseball mercenary who plays for multiple teams in the same city (or who has it out for one particular opponent), whether we would remember the year with the last perfect game, making early playoff rounds longer than late rounds, a player whose stats improve depending on how much money he’s paid, allowing teams to choose the number of defenders in the field, picking the preferred way for Shohei Ohtani to specialize (if he had to choose one), a super-philanthropic free agent, and more.

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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.

Content warning: This piece contains details about alleged domestic violence. The content may be difficult to read and emotionally upsetting.

During the Mets’ run of relevance in the mid-2000s, José Reyes looked like a superstar in the making. Through 2008, his age-25 season, the electrifying and charismatic shortstop had already led the National League in triples and steals three times apiece while collecting at least 190 hits for four straight seasons. Before that run, however, he had also demonstrated a propensity for leg injuries that cost him significant time. Those injuries eventually soured the increasingly cost-conscious Mets ownership on him despite his All-Star level play, and to be fair, Reyes was never really the same after departing New York via free agency following the 2011 season. By the time he returned five years later, he was not only a considerably diminished player but something of a pariah, having been suspended for violating the league’s new domestic violence policy and then released by the Rockies. Read the rest of this entry »

What did the Nationals do to deserve scrutiny at this juncture? Absolutely nothing. If someone had signed Blake Snell this week, I would not be working myself up to caring about what the Nats have or have not done this offseason. But when Ben Clemens wrote about the Orioles’ sleepy winter (would that we all had the good fortune to sleep through winter), I found myself casting my gaze southwest, to the next stop on the I-95 corridor.

Because the Orioles at least won 100 games last year. They played in the playoffs. Okay, having witnessed the front end of their ALDS loss in person, “played” is probably too strong a word. “Appeared in” is more like it. But still, there’s a thriving — if perilously under-resourced — ballclub in Baltimore. In Washington, there is but the promise of such, and little evidence thus far of life in the primordial slurry that’s taken up residence in Nationals Park. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, I wrote about Emmanuel Clase. Specifically, I wondered whether a lower release point, or whatever caused that lower release point, was the reason his performance took a step back in 2023. I don’t know the answer for sure. I don’t even think there is a way to know the answer for sure, but I’ve spent the last few days thinking about release points. Clase’s has fallen roughly two inches over the last two years. That feels like a lot to me, but I realize that I don’t have a basis for that feeling. What happens to a pitcher’s release point on a year-over-year basis? Does it stay the same? What constitutes a normal amount of variance? Does it only fall off once things are starting to go wrong? Does it slowly degrade over time just like the pitcher himself, who is after all merely an ephemeral vessel of bone and sinew, destined to return unto the dust?

Naturally, there’s only one place to find answers for metaphysical questions like these: Baseball Savant. I pulled the average vertical release point for every pitcher in the Statcast era, calculating the year-over-year change for their primary fastball. For pitchers who threw both a four-seamer and a sinker, I ignored whichever pitch they threw less often. I also threw out seasons in which players changed their release point by more than four inches, which to me indicates an intentional change to a pitcher’s delivery and overall approach to pitching. We’re interested in cases like Clase’s, where his release point changed unintentionally as he tried to pitch in the same way.

That left me with a goodly sample of 5,353 player seasons. In addition to calculating the change in vertical release point, I also noted the change in fastball velocity, along with the changes in the pitcher’s overall FIP-, whiff rate, and groundball rate (adjusted to league average). The first thing I did was create an aging curve, but before I show it to you, I’d like to tell you what I was expecting to see. Read the rest of this entry »

For the 20th consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the penultimate team is New York Yankees.

Batters

If I’ve learned anything from two decades of projection work (and people getting mad at that projection work), it’s that fans are way too optimistic about teams when everything goes great and way too pessimistic after things have gone awry.
The 2022 Yankees were a good example of this. After a first half in which they went 58-23, good for a .716 winning percentage and a Pythagorean win percentage that nearly matched, ZiPS only projected the team to go 45-36 the rest of the way. “Knave!” they shouted at me on Twitter. “Vagabond! Miscreant!” OK, maybe they didn’t use those words exactly, but there was bewilderment and more than a touch of anger that I would disrespect the Bronx Bombers so. In the end, the Yankees actually were four wins worse than that projection in the second half.

And just like things are never as amazing as they seem when everything goes your way, the reverse is true, with the Yankees again being a good example. They had their worst season since 1992 in 2023, and based on how they’ve been talked about over the last six months or so, you’d think they were a glorified Triple-A team. But the Yankees weren’t that bad — they went 82-80 in a division without a true doormat team to beat up on. That record was all of seven wins below their preseason projection, a miss that barely merits raising an eyebrow, and certainly doesn’t justify floating Brian Cashman out to sea (or bunting more). Read the rest of this entry »