Last year, I took a long look at the predictive power of rookie exit velocity. One of the things I learned was that for rookies with at least 200 balls in play, wRC+ was less predictive of their future performance than max exit velocity. That blew my mind. Knowing just one measurement, the velocity of a player’s hardest-hit ball, was more useful than knowing about their overall performance through their entire rookie season. Exit velocity matters a lot, as does how you interpret the data.

Since the rollout of Statcast in 2015, we’ve been introduced to three general ways of thinking about exit velocity, along with half a dozen individual variations. Depending on the context, we might read about a player’s average exit velocity, their maximum exit velocity, their hard-hit rate, or any number of exit velocity percentiles. For a while now, I’ve been wondering which one of these methods is most useful. Could there be one exit velocity metric to rule them all?

I have to imagine that at some point in the last several years, the R&D department of each major league team has asked itself that exact same question. In each big league city, someone much smarter than I am did the math and wrote up the results in a report that now rests comfortably in a proprietary database with a catchy name. The rest of us just have to make do with rumors and innuendo suggesting that teams most often value something akin to 90th-percentile exit velocity. To my knowledge, no one in the public sphere has made a comprehensive survey, and I wanted to look into the matter for myself. Read the rest of this entry »

The internet has democratized so much of our society, but nothing more than hating baseball teams. A generation ago, everyone was sick to death of the Yankees, but now it seems like half the league is one obnoxious fan tweet or one ill-timed bat flip or clueless GM comment from becoming the pariah of the week. It can get a little hard to track sometimes.

So in some respects, this week’s Juan Soto trade is a welcome throwback to old times. A no-doubt top-tier superstar has drifted across the great material continuum and found himself, almost by accident, resplendent in pinstripes and razor burn. A trade to make Yankees fans rejoice, and the vast majority of our great, God-fearing nation go, “Ugh, these freakin’ guys.”

Nevertheless, Soto’s arrival in New York offers an opportunity to witness something unusual. Assuming Aaron Boone figures out that Soto should go in front of Aaron Judge in the batting order, we’re about to see the best on-base guy of his generation batting ahead of the best power hitter of his generation. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about a lackluster punning performance by Scott Boras at the Winter Meetings, then (12:03) dissect the momentous trade of a big Boras client, Juan Soto, from both the Yankees’ and Padres’ perspectives. After that (1:04:00), they discuss Eduardo Rodríguez bolstering the Diamondbacks’ rotation, Jeimer Candelario joining the Reds’ overcrowded infield (1:10:00), how worried Cardinals manager Oli Marmol should be about Yadier Molina‘s new job (1:20:18), and Bryce Harper’s extremely farsighted extension request (1:25:45).

Audio intro: Ian Phillips, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Beatwriter, “What Did Jerry Dipoto Do?”

Link to AP Snell/Belli quotes
Link to birdfeeder quote
Link to Boras scrum photo 1
Link to Boras scrum photo 2
Link to Martino tweet
Link to Morosi tweet
Link to Clemens on Soto
Link to Kram on Soto
Link to Petriello on Soto in NY
Link to Petriello on Soto comps
Link to Ben on the Betts trade
Link to Ben on the Soto Shuffle
Link to Craig on the Soto trade
Link to Kiley on Yankees pitchers
Link to FG SP depth charts
Link to Sheehan on the trade
Link to Dan S. on ERod
Link to Clemens on Candelario
Link to Cards’ Molina tweet
Link to article on Molina
Link to story on Harper extension
Link to Mahomes restructuring
Link to Salvy renegotiation
Link to MLBTR on O’s suitor
Link to Secret Santa sign-up sheet

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While looking back at the free agent signings I covered last winter, I noticed a bit of a pattern. On the same day Aaron Judge came to terms on a nine-year, $360 million deal with the Yankees, I wrote about Miguel Castro. On the same day Brandon Nimmo agreed to a $162 million deal with the Mets, I wrote about Matt Strahm. On the same day Yu Darvish and Bo Bichette signed contract extensions, I wrote about Pierce Johnson and Scott McGough. While the rest of the baseball world was focused on All-Stars and mega-million-dollar contracts, I found myself drawn to mid-tier relievers on small-scale deals.

We’re not farming for clicks here at FanGraphs, and I’m grateful to write for a website where I never have to come up with hot takes or misleading headlines. Thankfully, I’ve never been asked to write about one weird trick for evading the luxury tax or why dermatologists hate Gabe Kapler. Still, it’s nice when others read your work, and as much as I love them, I know middle relievers don’t rack up pageviews like middle-of-the-order bats. While I have a weakness for run-of-the-mill bullpen arms — the more ordinary the better — I know I need to resist the pull.

“Leo,” I said to myself when the offseason began. “You can’t write about so many relievers this winter. You wrote about Joely Rodríguez last year. Maybe this time you cover Eduardo Rodriguez instead?”

Flash forward to the final day of the Winter Meetings, and I’m here to write about Luis García, Adam Cimber, and Michael Tonkin. Like the 2020 Phillies, you could say I have a bullpen problem. Read the rest of this entry »

In the midst of a Winter Meetings that was fairly quiet as far as free agent signings go, the Arizona Diamondbacks and Eduardo Rodriguez came to an agreement on a four-year contract worth a guaranteed $80 million. Bouncing back from a problem-filled 2022 Detroit debut, Rodriguez was one of the reasons the Tigers maintained a position at the very edge of relevance in 2023. Through the end of May, E-Rod was a top 10 starting pitcher in the American League, posting a 2.13 ERA and 3.14 FIP over 11 starts; his 1.8 WAR ranked eighth in WAR. But his chances of sneaking into the Cy Young conversation were derailed by a finger injury that cost him a month of the season. While he got back into the rotation fairly quickly, he wasn’t quite the same in the second half, issuing more free passes and seeing his strikeout rate drop by about 20%.

Read the rest of this entry »

The first few days of the Winter Meetings didn’t deliver much action; at breakfast on Wednesday, Erick Fedde versus Wade Miley as the biggest signing of the meetings was a popular debate. But things picked up as the gathering ground to a close. First, the Yankees traded for Juan Soto. Next, Eduardo Rodriguez agreed to terms with Arizona. Finally, Jeimer Candelario capped the meetings off when he signed with the Reds for three years and $45 million and a team option for another year, as MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand first reported.

Part of the allure of free agency, as a fan experience, is that you never know where any given player might land, or who your team might pick up. Sure, we all have opinions on where the top guys will sign, but until they put pen to paper, or at least until Jeff Passan gets a text about their chosen destination, nothing is set in stone. But if you’d asked me to predict signings that wouldn’t happen this winter, I would have made a lazy prediction: the Reds would stay away from hitters in general and infielders in particular.

That doesn’t have anything to do with Candelario, to be clear. I think he’ll be one of the bargain signings of the offseason, a plus bat with playable defense at third base on an affordable contract. A three-year deal nets the back half of his prime without too much messiness at the end of the contract, and he’s played at a 3–4 WAR clip in three out of the past four years. He’s been the 68th-best hitter in baseball by our count over those four years, just ahead of Luis Arraez and Ketel Marte in a similar number of plate appearances, if you’re trying to calibrate that in your head. 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 and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

It’s no secret that we’re in the midst of a lean period for starting pitchers getting elected to the Hall of Fame via the BBWAA. Since the elections of 300-game winners Tom Glavine, Greg Maddux, and Randy Johnson in 2014 and ’15, just four starters have gained entry via the writers, two of them alongside the Big Unit in the latter year (Pedro Martinez and John Smoltz) and two more in ’19 (Roy Halladay and Mike Mussina). From a demographic standpoint, Halladay is the only starter born after 1971.

It’s quite possible we won’t get another starter born in that shag-carpeted decade unless voters come around on Andy Pettitte (b. 1972) or Mark Buehrle (b. 1979), a pair of southpaws who cleared the 200-win mark during their exceptional careers, producing some big moments and playing significant roles on championship-winning teams. Yet neither of them ever won Cy Young awards, created much black ink, or dominated in the ways that we expect Hall-caliber hurlers to do. Neither makes much of a dent when it comes to JAWS, where they respectively rank 92nd and 90th via the traditional version, about 14 points below the standard, or tied for 80th and 78th in the workload-adjusted version (S-JAWS). Neither has gotten far in their time on the ballot; Pettitte maxed out at 17% last year, his fifth, and Buerhle returned to double digits with 10.8% in his third year of eligibility — still a couple eyelashes short of his debut share.

After updating both pitchers’ profiles last year, I’ll stick to excerpting them this time before getting back to my latest thinking on the subject. Read the rest of this entry »

The Pirates have had a rough go of it. After notching three straight Wild Card berths from 2013 to ’15, they saw their production tail off and haven’t made the postseason since. In that time, they also had the second-best pitching staff by ERA and the fourth-best by FIP thanks to a league-leading 51.3% groundball rate. Their rate of burning worms was 2.8 points higher than the second-place Dodgers, the same distance between Los Angeles and the 10th-place Mets.

The Pirates accomplished this by throwing sinkers at a 23.2% clip, separating them from the second-ranked Guardians by 5.5 points, about the same distance between Cleveland and the 10th-place Angels. Coupled with pitch-framing improvements and a move toward more strategic infield positioning, the Pirates experienced a pitching leap that theScore.com’s Travis Sawchik chronicled in Big Data Baseball. This did wonders for a number of hurlers, namely Francisco Liriano, A.J. Burnett, and Edinson Volquez. But others, such as Charlie Morton and Gerrit Cole, only blossomed upon leaving the Steel City.

Pittsburgh’s pitching apparatus isn’t viewed as revolutionary any longer, but they’ve had a solid record with crafty lefties in recent years — think Rich Hill, Tyler Anderson, and Jose Quintana. Marco Gonzales, acquired from the Mariners (via the Braves) along with cash in exchange for a player to be named later, will hope to join that group. Perhaps the soft-tossing southpaw — who, like the Pirates of the 2010s, relies primarily on inducing weak contact — will be the one to reignite something in the Steel City forges. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley (at the Winter Meetings in Nashville) banter about how the secrecy surrounding Shohei Ohtani’s free agency is breaking baseball media members’ brains, what makes free agency fun for fans, the advisability of a winter transaction deadline and whether it’s OK for baseball to just be boring sometimes, and the latest ridiculous dot-connecting about Ohtani’s destination, plus (41:50) discussion of the Winter Meetings milieu, the Jarred Kelenic swap (43:55) and what it means for the Mariners, the Yankees’ Alex Verdugo deal (1:00:30), the Orioles’ Craig Kimbrel signing (1:06:05), Erick Fedde joining the White Sox (1:15:24), and a smattering of minor news and transactions, followed (1:18:08) by a conclusive solution to a recent Stat Blast mystery and an outro rendition (1:24:43) of the classic Michael Baumann baseball ditty “What Did Jerry Dipoto Do?”

Audio intro: Justin Peters, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Michael Baumann, “What Did Jerry Dipoto Do?”

Link to Olney column
Link to Rosenthal column
Link to Mintz column
Link to O’Brien tweet
Link to Janes tweet
Link to Janes column
Link to article on Ohtani’s agent
Link to article on Jays meeting
Link to article on Giants meeting
Link to flight-tracking tweet
Link to Washington quotes
Link to quote about Boone’s face
Link to Nightengale on Roberts
Link to article on Roberts/Gomes
Link to tweet about Friedman
Link to EW branzino wiki
Link to Opryland photos
Link to Hollander’s quote
Link to Dipoto quotes
Link to Baumann on Kelenic
Link to Dubuque on Kelenic
Link to Clemens on Brewers SPs
Link to Gilligan on Kelly
Link to Roberts on Betts
Link to Roberts on Kershaw
Link to Blum on Trout
Link to Baumann on Yates
Link to Clemens on Verdugo
Link to Baumann on Kimbrel
Link to Longenhagen on Fedde
Link to tweet about Fedde
Link to Verdugo benching info
Link to Verdugo Dodgers incident
Link to EW episode 2093
Link to 1998 Baseball Weekly article
Link to 1998 Ocker article
Link to 1998 AP article
Link to 1998 game’s play log
Link to 2000 game’s play log
Link to latest-first-whiff data
Link to longest whiff-less stretches
Link to Ryan Nelson on Twitter
Link to Nightengale “two sides” tweet
Link to 1998 clip 1
Link to 1998 clip 2
Link to 1998 clip 3
Link to Secret Santa sign-up sheet

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The major league phase of the 2023 Rule 5 Draft was this afternoon at the Opryland Hotel in Nashville and concluded with 10 players being selected to join new organizations. Below are our thoughts on those players; the minor league phase of the draft was interesting enough that it might get its own post in the very near future. The numbers you see in parentheses represent each team’s 40-man roster count entering the draft.

Before we get to the reports, our annual refresher on the Rule 5 Draft’s complex rules. Players who signed their first pro contract at age 18 or younger are eligible for selection after five years of minor league service if their parent club has not yet added them to the team’s 40-man roster; for players who signed at age 19 or older, the timeline is four years. Teams with the worst win/loss record from the previous season pick first, and those that select a player must not only (a) pay said player’s former club $100,000, but also (b) keep the player on their 25-man active roster throughout the entirety of the following season, with a couple of exceptions that mostly involve the injured list. If a selected player doesn’t make his new team’s active roster, he is offered back to his former team for half of the initial fee. After the player’s first year on the roster, he can be optioned back to the minor leagues. Read the rest of this entry »