1:00	Dan Szymborski: BASEBALL BASEBALL BASEBALL BASEBALL

1:00	Jay Jaffe: Hi everybody and a very pleasant good afternoon (or morning) to you wherever you may be. Happy 2023 baseball season and welcome to our Opening Day chat!

1:01	Jay Jaffe: Honestly, I don’t think it would take all that much — a couple of key rotation injuries to Houston and a few guys having bigger-than-expected seasons for Seattle while the Angels and Rangers don’t quite get there.

1:00	Dan Szymborski: The Mariners win a number of games in 2023 that is a larger number than the number of games that the Houston Astros and Los Angeles Angels win!

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On Monday, we wrote about three interesting players who had been putting up massive exit velocity numbers in spring training. Today we’ll highlight two more players in depth, and touch briefly on a two more. Ben Clemens will be writing about Ryan McMahon, who happens to be the spring training exit velocity champion, tomorrow.

Now that spring training is over, you can find the final exit velocity leaderboard at the bottom of this article. It’s got some notable names: Ke’Bryan Hayes is crushing the ball, but he’s still not elevating it; Kris Bryant is healthy and mashing; Nolan Gorman is demonstrating that Jordan Walker isn’t the only exciting prospect in St. Louis; Christian Walker is making last year’s breakout look more sustainable, rocket by rocket; and Zac Veen is giving Colorado fans something, anything to look forward to.

If you read Monday’s article, you likely noticed that the featured players shared a similar profile. A list of players who can demolish a baseball but aren’t established stars is going to be heavy on strikeouts and problematically high groundball rates. You should expect that trend to continue today. Read the rest of this entry »

Opening Day is finally upon us. The weather is getting warmer, the smell of spring is in the air, and regular season baseball is back. Enjoying games around the league on Opening Day is a ritual for many baseball fans including myself, and these games are particularly exciting because teams always bring the best they have to offer. The long slog of the season sometimes leads to rest days for star hitters, and a string of injuries can ruin a lineup come June or July. But Opening Day is the only day where everyone is on display, particularly on the mound, as each team hands the ball to its no. 1 starter to start the season, health permitting, to produce some of the best matchups we’ll see all year.

In total, 19 of the top 30 pitchers by our Depth Charts projections will take the hill today, from no. 1 Jacob deGrom to no. 29 Hunter Greene. A few top pitchers lost Opening Day nods to a superior teammate — for example, the pocket aces at the top of Philadelphia’s rotation will force Zack Wheeler to wait his turn to start until Saturday. In other cases, a team’s Opening Day starter isn’t its best by our projections; Brady Singer, the no. 30 pitcher by Depth Charts with a projected WAR of 2.9, was supplanted by Zack Greinke and his 1.1 WAR projection. But overall, the combined skill of today’s starters outclasses that of any other day in the season. With these great matchups in mind, let’s plan out a full day of baseball watching that will maximize the amount of elite starting pitching on the screen. Read the rest of this entry »

After an offseason marked by big free-agent contracts, big bases, and the introduction of the pitch clock, the 2023 season is almost upon us; we made it. And on this, the morning of Opening Day, we engage in our annual tradition of asking our staff to open themselves up to public ridicule and predict the year in baseball. Some of these predictions will prove to be prescient; others will make their forecaster feel a little silly. Last year’s Mariners? Our staff thought they’d finally bring an end to the franchise’s playoff drought, and wouldn’t you know it, they did just that. The division-winning Cleveland Guardians? We fared less well. Such is the prognostication business.

We asked the staff to predict the playoff field, pennant and World Series winners, and the individual award recipients. Folks from FanGraphs and RotoGraphs weighed in; here are the results. Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, Andrés Giménez enjoyed quite a breakout season, helping to lessen the sting of the Francisco Lindor trade by emerging as one of the top second basemen in the game. He made his first All-Star team, won his first Gold Glove, and helped the Guardians win the AL Central for the first time since 2018. Now, the team has guaranteed that he’ll stick around for a good long while. On Tuesday, ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported that Giménez has agreed to terms on a seven-year, $106.5 million extension that also includes an option for an eighth season.

The full details of the contract have not yet been reported, but the deal appears to cover the 2023-29 seasons, with a $4 million signing bonus and a $23 million club option for 2030 that comes with a $2.5 million buyout. Via as-yet-unspecified escalators, that option can increase to $24 million (note that Passan has reported the option year as 2031, meaning that the guaranteed portion of the deal wouldn’t begin until next season). At its maximum, the extension could pay Giménez $128 million over eight years, his ages 24-31 seasons.

The guaranteed portion of the contract is the second-largest in team history after José Ramírez’s five-year, $124 million extension signed last year. The extension is the latest manifestation of what has practically become a Cleveland tradition, one that traces back to the rebirth of the franchise. In the mid-1990s, general manager John Hart pioneered the practice of signing young stars such as Sandy Alomar Jr., Carlos Baerga, Manny Ramirez, Jim Thome, and Omar Vizquel to extensions that ran through at least some of their arbitration years and kept them in the fold when they would have hit free agency. It’s a strategy that enabled the team to save millions of dollars while maintaining a competitive nucleus, and one that has become popular with several other teams, most notably the Braves (for whom Hart served as president of baseball operations from late 2014 to late ’17). Long after Hart left Cleveland, successors Mark Shapiro and Chris Antonetti continued to sign players such as Ramírez, Michael Brantley, Travis Hafner, Jason Kipnis, Corey Kluber, Carlos Santana, and Grady Sizemore to deals along those lines.

That’s an incomplete list of players who went this route, but it never included Lindor, who went year-to-year during his arbitration years until the team decided it couldn’t afford him at a full market price. On January 7, 2021, Lindor and Carlos Carrasco were traded to the Mets in exchange for the then-22-year-old Giménez, shortstop Amed Rosario, outfielder Isaiah Greene and righty Josh Wolf.

Giménez had hit an impressive .263/.333/.398 (105 wRC+) in 49 games with the Mets during the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, but he struggled in his first year with Cleveland, batting .218/.282/.351 (74 RC+) in 68 games sandwiched around a detour to Triple-A Columbus that lasted nearly three months. He did hit much better after returning (.245/.320/.382, 94 wRC+) than before (.179/.226/.308, 43 wRC+) even if he didn’t actually make better contact. As I noted last fall, he held his own after returning despite lacking a consistent approach at the plate. “Last year [2021] he’d deviate after like a bad game,” manager Terry Francona told the Akron Beakon Journal’s Ryan Lewis in May. “You’d have different stance, you have a leg kick you didn’t have, you get a toe-tap.”

Guardians hitting coaches Chris Valaika and Victor Rodriguez helped Giménez ditch the leg kick, which they felt was hindering his pitch recognition and his timing. He fared better against every major pitch type in 2022 than ’21, and overall batted .297/.371/.466 with 17 homers and 20 steals. His 140 wRC+ finished in a virtual tie with Rafael Devers and Carlos Correa for eighth in the AL (one point ahead of Ramírez) and among second basemen of either league trailed only Jose Altuve and Jeff McNeil. On the other side of the ball, Giménez’s 16 DRS, 9 OAA and 6.5 UZR each ranked second among all second basemen, and overall, his 6.1 WAR tied Xander Bogaerts for fifth in the AL, and among second basemen trailed only Altuve. That’s some fine company.

Giménez’s performance included a few areas of concern, notably a 40.8% chase rate, 6.1% walk rate, and Statcast contact numbers (87.8 mph average exit velocity, 6.2% barrel rate, 37.6% hard-hit rate) that placed only in the 29th–36th percentiles. Thanks in part to his 94th-percentile speed, he was nonetheless one of the majors’ most productive hitters on groundballs, ranking among the top half-dozen in both batting average and wRC+:

As noted last fall, hitters combined for a .235 AVG and 35 wRC+ on grounders; based on that, Giménez netted an extra 17 hits, without which he’d have finished with a .263 AVG and .433 SLG, much closer to his expected numbers.

While I do wonder about the sustainability of that aspect of his game, in all, that’s a pretty impressive showing for a 23-year-old. In fact, it’s one of the best age-23 seasons of the past decade:

Again, fine company even given the presence of a few players who have flamed out; Bellinger and Bryant have both dealt with a series of injuries, while Puig’s decline has been an ugly mixture of on- and off-field issues. The book isn’t closed on any of the above players, but several are Cooperstown bound. It’s worth noting that the two other Cleveland players on the list have turned out quite well, and that Giménez’s 140 wRC+ is actually higher than all of the other non-first base infielders — even those who out-homered him by a significant margin.

Because Giménez spent so long in the minors in 2021, he’s accrued only two years and 106 days of major league service time, 66 short of reaching three full seasons (which would have made him eligible for free agency after the 2025 season) and 22 short of becoming an arbitration-eligible Super Two. Thus, his contract for 2023 was among the 28 the team recently renewed; most of those salaries haven’t even been published yet, but Giménez was only set to make $739,400. The $4 million signing bonus bumps him up to something closer to what a star-caliber player in his first year of arbitration eligibility might make. For example, Bichette, who’s heading into his age-25 season with 3.063 years of service time, is making $2.85 million in salary plus a $3.25 million signing bonus as part of his three-year, $33.6 million extension, while the Padres’ Jake Cronenworth, who has exactly three years of service time, is making $4.225 million coming off back-to-back 4.1-WAR seasons. Had he reached three years, Giménez might be somewhere in that ballpark.

Via Dan Szymborski, here’s Giménez’s projection through 2030, the year with the club option:

Even with some regression to 4.5 WAR per year at his peak, the ZiPS contract projection for Giménez if he were a free agent comes to a whopping $287.2 million, which is more than Bogaerts received from the Padres as a 30-year-old free agent (and spread out over 11 years, at that). Even with the expected discounts for his arbitration years, Giménez projects to be worth $139.5 million through 2029, and $170.8 million through ’30; through that lens, this looks like a rather club-friendly deal. It’s not an out-and-out steal the way Ramírez’s five-year, $26 million deal for 2017-21 — over which the third baseman produced 28 WAR, made three All-Star teams and finished in the top three in AL MVP voting three times — turned out to be, but it’s clear that Giménez traded some risk for financial security. If he’s still even close to being a three-win player in 2030, he’ll stand to make tens of millions more, though he’s unlikely to approach the windfall he might have reaped if he’d spent all of 2021 in the majors and hit free agency after 2025, his age-26 season.

All of which is to say that this is A Very Guardians Deal, and while we can again bemoan the salary structure that prevents players short of six years of service time from getting anything approaching their full market value, it takes two sides to tango. And we shouldn’t be surprised if at least a couple more extensions follow in short order. Via The Athletic’s Zack Meisel, the team is in “advanced negotiations” with multiple players including Rosario, Triston McKenzie, Steven Kwan, and Trevor Stephan, hoping to complete extensions by Opening Day (Stephan’s is reportedly nearing completion). Meanwhile, Emmanuel Clase (five years, $20 million) and Myles Straw (five years, $25 million) signed such deals last spring, albeit at a scale much smaller than that of Giménez. If some of those extensions come though, they’ll probably increase the team’s payroll — estimated at around $90.7 million even with several of those aforementioned extension candidates’ salaries unknown — by a few million dollars. They’re still likely to rank among the bottom third of the 30 teams, even while contending for another AL Central title or at least a playoff spot. This approach has worked for the Guardians before, and at least in terms of establishing generational wealth for Giménez, it will work for him as well.

Opening Day is tomorrow, but not everyone has their legs under them just yet. Take Miguel Vargas, whom I wrote about a couple of weeks ago — he wasn’t even allowed to swing for a quarter of his spring training plate appearances. While he’s swatted three doubles and a homer since taking the bat off his shoulder, he probably wouldn’t have minded at least a handful of extra reps.

And it seems like he isn’t alone. Teams have dealt with the usual rash of injuries this spring, and a sizable portion of Opening Day bats will take the field without the benefit of a full slate of spring training plate appearances. For his part, when Vargas broke his finger, the Dodgers were able to get him some semblance of in-game experience by having him track pitches without swinging. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past week and a half, we’ve published our annual season preview, ranking the league’s players by position and team based on a blend of our projections (a 50/50 split between ZiPS and Steamer) and our manually maintained playing time estimates courtesy of Jason Martinez. If you happen to have missed any of those installments, you can use the navigation widget above to catch up.

Today, I’m going to summarize the results. We’ll look at some tables and pick out a few interesting tidbits in a moment, but first, it’s important to remember that this exercise captures a snapshot of how we project teams to perform right now. Teams aren’t static. Since we began publishing our rankings, prospects Anthony Volpe, Jordan Walker, and Brice Turang all made their respective clubs’ Opening Day rosters, and Grayson Rodriguez and Brett Baty learned they will have to wait a little while longer. The Brewers designated Keston Hiura for assignment (he has since cleared waivers and been outrighted to the Brewers’ Triple-A team) and signed non-roster invitee Luke Voit to a one-year big league deal. Rhys Hoskins tore his ACL and will likely miss the season; Triston McKenzie injured his shoulder and could miss up to eight weeks.

This being baseball, players will tweak elbows and hamstrings, lose playing time to underperformance, and get traded. That’s why we maintain a Team WAR Totals page, which lists projected positional WAR by team and updates regularly throughout the season as we learn more about who is likely to take the field every day and what shape they’ll be in when they do. It’s important to note that the WAR numbers you see on that page may differ from those you’ve seen on the positional power rankings, mostly because those figures are aware of the injuries and transactions that have altered our playing time estimates since the rankings went live; the Z-Scores I’ll include later also use the WAR figures that power the Team WAR Totals page. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome back baseball! After an exciting and dramatic World Baseball Classic to whet our appetites, the main course is finally here. I introduced these power rankings a few years ago as a way to think about all 30 teams in baseball and stack them up against each other outside of the rigid structures of leagues or divisions. Nearly every major site has some form of power rankings, usually derived from whatever panel of experts each site employs. These rankings, though, are entirely data driven.

A reminder for how these rankings are calculated: first, we take the three most important components of a team — their offense (wRC+), their pitching (a 50/50 blend of FIP- and RA9-, weighted by starter and reliever IP share), and their defense (RAA) — and combine them to create an overall team quality metric. For these offseason power rankings, I’ve used each team’s projected stats based on their Depth Charts projections which are now powered by our blend of ZiPS and Steamer projections. I’ve also used the projected fielding component of WAR that appears on our Depth Charts projections as the defensive component for each team in lieu of RAA.

The Braves haven’t budged from the top of these rankings throughout this offseason. Sure, the Mets spent a ton of money this offseason, and the Phillies just went to the World Series, but Atlanta has owned this division for the last half decade. There are still some lingering questions, however. Orlando Arcia likely isn’t the long-term solution at shortstop, but both Vaughn Grissom and Braden Shewmake were optioned to Triple-A last week; the former has some defensive issues to work through, and the latter needs more exposure to high-level pitching before being handed a job in the big leagues. There are also some injury concerns in their pitching staff, with both Kyle Wright and Raisel Iglesias dealing with shoulder issues this spring and Michael Soroka not fully recovered from his many maladies. Still, this team is loaded with young talent and poised to win its sixth consecutive division title.

The big storyline for the Yankees this spring has been the competition for starting shortstop, with top prospect Anthony Volpe earning a spot on the Opening Day roster. That should provide youthful excitement to cover the very real concerns in the rotation and outfield. Harrison Bader likely won’t be out for long with his strained oblique, but his absence has revealed how shallow the position group is when Aaron Judge has to slide over to center field. And injuries of varying severity to Carlos Rodón, Luis Severino, and Frankie Montas aren’t exactly how you want to start off the season. Read the rest of this entry »

With Opening Day on the horizon, three teams are planning to enter the season with exclusively right-handed rotations: the Guardians, the Twins, and the White Sox. As I’m sure I don’t have to tell you, that’s not the only thing these clubs have in common; they’re also the three contenders for the AL Central crown. An all-righty rotation isn’t unheard of, but it is uncommon, and it’s particularly unusual to see three within the same division. Here’s how they each stack up:

Around this time last season, there were likewise three teams planning to deploy all-righty rotations: the Guardians, the Twins, and the Mets. The Mets, however, had lefty in David Peterson at Triple-A, and it was only a matter of time before they needed him. Indeed, he was called up two days into the season and made his first start a week later. As for the Guardians and Twins, they also had lefties waiting in the wings. Konnor Pilkington was the first man called up when Cleveland needed a sixth starter; Devin Smeltzer wasn’t the first call-up for Minnesota, but he was soon to follow.

This year, the White Sox have joined the all-righty ranks. In fact, they haven’t had a left-handed starter since releasing Dallas Keuchel last May. Meanwhile, the Guardians and Twins have more right-handed depth than last season. Pilkington is still around for Cleveland, but he had a poor showing this spring, and several right-handed prospects are moving their way up the depth chart. As for Minnesota, Smeltzer elected free agency in October, and every new starter the team acquired this offseason has been a righty. Read the rest of this entry »

Sean Hjelle has been turning heads this preseason and seems to have pitched his way into a major league job. Then again, Hjelle turns heads everywhere; the former Kentucky Wildcat is the tallest player in baseball, at 6-foot-11, leaving him tied with Jon Rauch as the tallest player in MLB history. Anytime a pitcher above 6-foot-6 or so gets extended major league run, there’s an assumption that with a big body comes big velocity. That might be entirely Randy Johnson’s fault; Rauch sat in the low 90s, and until the end of last season, Hjelle didn’t throw much harder.

But as as he told Alex Pavlovic of NBCSN Bay Area early in spring training, Hjelle had been able to tickle 96 or 97 for one adrenaline-fueled inning in his last appearance of the 2022 season. This winter, his goal was to hold that velocity deeper into games. How? Well, to quote legendary Giants fan Huey Lewis, by working out most every day and watching what he eats. And after almost two months of training camp, Hjelle can look back and see the fruits of his labor. Read the rest of this entry »