As you might have heard, the Yankees made a big splash early this offseason by trading for Juan Soto. It was one of the most impactful moves of the entire winter, and they struck quickly. Then, they went into hibernation. Their next major move didn’t come until yesterday, when they signed Marcus Stroman to a two-year deal worth $37 million, as Joel Sherman first reported.

As second acts go, it’s surely not what Yankees fans were hoping for. New York was linked to Yoshinobu Yamamoto, and several other interesting pitchers were at least briefly connected to the team as well. But while Stroman is hardly the most exciting signing of the offseason, I think he’ll be an important cog in the team’s 2024 quest to get back to the playoffs, and that makes for a great fit in my opinion.

Let’s get something out of the way first: ZiPS doesn’t agree with me on this one. It thinks that Stroman is going to be a decidedly unexciting rotation option for the next two years:

In a word, yikes. That’s a desultory projection, the kind of starter that you’d be unhappy turning to in a playoff game. As you can see, the model would only have offered him about $25 million for the next two years rather than $37 million. But I’m not quite buying it, so let’s talk about why. Read the rest of this entry »

Monday is the first day of the new international signing period, so I’ve expanded and updated my evaluations of players from the class. An overview of the rules that govern signing international amateurs can be found on MLB’s glossary here, while more thorough and detailed documentation can be found starting on page 316 of the CBA and page 38 of the Official Professional Baseball Rules Book. Players have until December 15 to sign before this signing period closes.

Scouting reports, tool grades, and projected signing teams and bonuses for just shy of 50 players from the 2024 class can now be viewed over on The Board. Because the International Players tab has an apples and oranges mix of older pros from Asian leagues and soon-to-be first-year players, there is no explicit ranking for this amateur class on The Board. However, I’ve stacked the class with a ranking in the table below, and as usual, that ranking will live on the International Players dropdown of The Board after most of these guys have finished signing in the coming weeks. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

Given that he made just one All-Star team in his 13-year major league career (2006–13), and only once finished higher than 11th in the Cy Young Award voting, it’s tough to argue that James Shields was a star. The 6-foot-3, 210-pound righty was a reliable, high-quality workhorse for most of his career, totaling 200 or more innings 10 times and making 33 or more starts nine times, five of which included an ERA+ of 110 or higher. He earned — or rather borrowed from NBA legend James Worthy — the nickname “Big Game James” for strong performances in high-profile spots, and while it wasn’t always apt, he was renowned for his work ethic and competitiveness, viewed as a player who could mentor younger pitchers and help to transform the culture of a team. Shields helped both the 2008 Rays and 2014 Royals come out of nowhere to reach the World Series, and wound up at the center of a couple of pivotal trades. Read the rest of this entry »

The San Francisco Giants drafted Reggie Crawford as a two-way player, and so far they’ve allowed the 30th-overall pick in the 2022 draft to continue to both pitch and swing the bat. How much longer that will be the case remains to be seen, with the forthcoming season likely going a long way toward determining an answer. To this point, Crawford has had scant opportunity to do either. Thanks largely to Tommy John surgery, the 6-foot-4, 235-pound University of Connecticut product has logged just 19 innings and 111 plate appearances (71 of them in the Arizona Fall League) since signing a professional contract.

Eric Longenhagen described the left-left hurler/first-baseman as “a prospect of extreme variance” and “still more a developmental project than anything else” when assigning him a 40+ FV midway through last summer. That both his hitting and pitching potential factor into our lead prospect analyst’s assessment makes Crawford arguably the most intriguing young player in the Giants’ pipeline. If he performs capably on both sides in 2024, he’ll be among the most intriguing young players in baseball.

Crawford discussed his two-way aspirations in the final week of the Arizona Fall League season.

———

David Laurila: To start, I’m interested in your thoughts on someone you’ve been playing against here in the Fall League. Carson Williams was highly regarded as a two-way player in high school, but has only played shortstop since Tampa Bay drafted him 28th overall in 2021. Could you see him succeeding at both in pro ball?

Reggie Crawford: “Oh, I’d imagine so. It just comes down to… I mean, for me the planning and the scheduling is probably the most difficult part. Someone who is that athletic and has those sets of tools, I don’t see why he wouldn’t be able to.” Read the rest of this entry »

Rhys Hoskins is a free agent, and it’s kind of weird. The 30-year-old first baseman spent 10 seasons in the Phillies organization, six of them (plus one full year spent on the injured list) with the major league club. For a time, he was one of the only bright spots on a completely moribund team, but eventually the big fella settled into a role as a supporting player and de facto table-setter for a lineup built around Bryce Harper. His achievements in that role include the Bat Spike home run, a three-run dinger off Spencer Strider in the 2022 NLDS — the Phillies’ first home playoff game in 11 years.

While it was surpassed in the imagination by Harper’s pennant-winning homer in the rain later that October, the image of Hoskins’ celebration lives on in memory as a highly localized version of the José Bautista bat flip for people who are deeply upset by the decline in the quality of Wawa’s sandwich bread since the chain went national. You want to watch the home run again? I do. Let’s watch it again.

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 next team up is the Chicago Cubs.

Batters

Are the Cubs back to their mid-2010s form? That’s a bit of a stretch, but these Cubs showed they have a live pulse, not falling out of playoff contention until the final week of the 2023 season. Cody Bellinger, one of the reasons the offense was so potent (third in the National League in runs scored), turned out to be one of the best pillow-contract signings of all time. Perhaps a little too good, as it was enough for Bellinger to decline his side of a $25 million mutual option for 2024. The Cubs could still sign Bellinger, but even if they do, it’s not a great bet they’ll get the same production as last year. ZiPS is a bit more optimistic than Steamer, but it still projects a returning Bellinger to “give back” some of his contact and a significant chunk of his power. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh, Meg Rowley, and listener Michael Mountain banter about Michael’s proposal for Effectively Wild listener ballpark meetups during the 2024 MLB season, followed by (7:24) Michael’s guest Stat Blasts about the best non-award-winning players, his all-time player tiers, and Hall of Famers (and HoF candidates) who excelled or flopped at leading their leagues at their respective positions. Then (36:17) Ben and Meg talk to Brian Moritz about his prediction/warning that a major sports-betting journalism scandal could be coming.

Audio intro: Guy Russo, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: The Gagnés, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to listener-meetup form
Link to Michael on Episode 1263
Link to undecorated players sheet
Link to EW Episode 964
Link to Bill James proposal
Link to reworked tiers
Link to league leaders sheet
Link to Hall of Stats shutdown
Link to Eight Men Out wiki
Link to Brian’s Nieman Lab piece
Link to Brian’s 2022 piece
Link to Brian at St. Bonaventure
Link to Sports Media Guy
Link to WSJ on journalist inside info
Link to story on BBWAA rules
Link to story on ESPN rules
Link to story on Chams
Link to newsroom betting policies
Link to tweet about Curb betting
Link to “fading” definition
Link to MLBTR on Stroman
Link to over/under draft results
Link to Ben on arbitration
Link to Stat Blast song cover
Link to all Stat Blast covers

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He may not have upper-echelon career totals, but boy was Michael Brantley an absolute baller. A five-time All-Star, Brantley also won a Silver Slugger and finished third in American League MVP voting in 2014, a year that saw him finish second in the AL in WAR behind only Mike Trout, the MVP winner. After a very successful 15-year career, the sweet swinging lefty outfielder has decided to hang up his cleats. It’s an unsurprising move for Brantley, who had battled shoulder injuries for much of the last three seasons and would have been entering his age-37 season.

Brantley was a unique player. Over the course of his career (2009-2023), the league-wide strikeout rate increased from 18.0% to 22.7%. But while the league was whiffing more and more, Brantley bucked the trend. During his 10-year tenure in Cleveland, he struck out 10.7% of the time; in the five years he spent in Houston, that mark was exactly the same. Indeed, his strikeout rate with the Astros was over 40% better than the league average rate (22.8%) during that period. Of the hitters with at least 1,000 plate appearances from 2019 to 2023, 21 had a strikeout rate below 14%. Only two had a higher wRC+ than Brantley: Alex Bregman (137) and José Ramírez (132).

His skill set was timeless, headlined by his elite contact ability. His wRC+ was actually higher in his 30s (124) than it was in his 20s (112). And his future looked bright – ZiPS projected him for a .290/.354/.416 line and a 114 OPS+ in the upcoming season had he played. As Timothy Jackson of Baseball Prospectus put it, Brantley was “unique among players with outlier skills.” And so, with his time in the majors coming to a close, I wanted to look back at Brantley’s career progression. More specifically, I wanted to examine how his consistently elite contact skills allowed him to maintain his performance despite myriad injuries. Read the rest of this entry »