Yesterday, Jay Jaffe and Leo Morgenstern examined the state of first and second base. Today, we wrap up the infield positions, starting with a look at third base.

Third base has featured some truly top-tier stars in their prime for a while now. Nolan Arenado, Manny Machado, and José Ramírez are all either 30 or 31 (Arenado turns 32 next month), and all are coming off seasons so spectacular that no projection system worth its ones and zeros would predict a repeat performance. Alex Bregman turns 29 in just a couple of days, and the projections see him notching another five wins in 2023. All of this to say, enjoy peak third base while you can, because aging curves bend but they rarely break. Read the rest of this entry »

7:01	Jay Jaffe: Good evening, folks, and welcome to our WBC Finals chat!

7:03	Jay Jaffe: Ohtani started five days ago so guess they didn’t want to mess with his every sixth-day routine, but he could pitch an inning in relief. Darvish… not sure, as the complaint has been that he hasn’t been getting enough buildup here, but I’d expect he’s good for 2-3 innings tonight

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Earlier today, Jay Jaffe covered the league’s first basemen. Now, Leo Morgenstern examines the state of the keystone.

Second base is going to be a fascinating position to watch this season. Under the new rules limiting defensive shifts, teams must have “at least two infielders completely on either side of second base,” and those players “may not switch sides” within an inning. Consequently, second basemen will no longer have help from a shifted shortstop or third baseman, making defensive range all the more important at the keystone. On the other side of the ball, second basemen could have their best offensive season in years. While excellent bat-to-ball skills aren’t a requirement to play the position, the two often go hand in hand. Second basemen are consistently the best contact hitters (and some of the worst power hitters) in the sport. This means their performance is more dependent on BABIP, so with the distinct possibility that league-wide BABIP will rise this season, second basemen could stand to benefit quite a bit.

And it’s not just about the new rules! Second base is projected to have the most even distribution of talent, from the Rangers at the top to the Nationals at the bottom. It’s the only defensive position where no team is projected for more than 5 WAR, and yet 28 teams are projected for at least two wins. The bottom-ranked Nationals are still projected for 1.8 WAR – the highest among last-place teams at any position. Read the rest of this entry »

Nico Hoerner is a mix of old school and new school when it comes to hitting. He’s also a mix of contact and emerging gap-to-gap power. Drafted 24th overall by the Chicago Cubs out of Stanford University in 2018, the 25-year-old second baseman is coming off a season where he slashed .281/.327/.410 with 10 home runs and a 106 wRC+. Possessing potential that easily exceeds his to-date performance, he projects as a cornerstone in the Cubs’ lineup for years to come.

Hoerner discussed his continuing evolution as a hitter, including how he balances an appreciation of metrics and a keep-it-simple approach, following a recent spring training game in Mesa, Arizona.

———

David Laurila: How have you evolved as a hitter since coming to pro ball? Are you mostly the same guy?

Nico Hoerner: “For the most part, I don’t think guys really change that much. The guys that improve a lot are often doubling down on their strengths. They’re learning what they do best and are more consistent with that. I’ve definitely made improvements — there are things that have changed over the years — but I think my foundation is pretty similar.”

Laurila: I recall reading that you made a swing adjustment shortly after you signed, the goal being to hit more balls in the air. Is that accurate?

Hoerner: “I’ve never wanted to hit a ground ball in my life, to be honest with you. A lot of it comes from the pitches you swing at, how your body is moving, and learning your own strengths.”


Laurila: That said, was there an actual adjustment?

Hoerner: “Yeah. I think what you swing at is going to be the biggest factor in the balls that you put in play. I’m looking to hit the ball hard, hit high line drives as much as I can, and swing at pitches in the middle of the plate. Over time, with more at-bats, more experience, that really comes about.” Read the rest of this entry »

I found myself speechless on Friday afternoon. I was partaking in one of my favorite yearly rituals, watching the first round of the NCAA tournament at a sports bar. Something about the atmosphere calls to me — masses of strangers on the edges of their barstools, captivated by the energy of do-or-die games between wildly mismatched teams. As it happened, the bar I picked was a Purdue bar, and the mood slowly soured as the Boilermakers struggled with and ultimately fell to tiny Fairleigh Dickinson, one of the greatest upsets in the history of the tournament.

That game got me thinking about why I love the World Baseball Classic so much. It’s a newfound love of mine. The last time the WBC was held, in 2017, I paid exactly as much attention to it as my work required; given that my job was to try to make money trading interest rates, that worked out to exactly zero. I vaguely knew that the United States won, but even as a baseball fan, it didn’t really grab me. I liked the Cardinals, not Team USA, and it felt like a weird time of year for competitive baseball.

Having watched most of this year’s games, I’m sad I wasn’t watching before. The WBC is like nothing else in professional baseball, a chaotic and exciting mashup of national identity and high tension, often between teams that have no business being on the same field as each other.

Major league baseball is, by design, a slog. No individual game matters all that much because there are so many of them. If you’re a player, you can’t get too high or too low, even if you really want to. The Pirates and the Dodgers are a big mismatch, but even if the Pirates beat the odds and win a game, that game almost doesn’t matter. They’ll play again the next day, and then the next day, and then grind through a whole year’s worth of games. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, Meg Rowley introduced this year’s rankings, while Dan Szymborski examined the state of the league’s catchers. Today, we turn our attention to first and second basemen.

First base was “The Goldy and Freddie Show” in 2022. Paul Goldschmidt and Freddie Freeman both topped 7.0 WAR, becoming the only first basemen to reach that plateau since 2015, when Goldschmidt and Joey Votto both did so; since 2009, Chris Davis (2013) is the position’s only other player to reach such heights. Goldschimdt hit for a 177 wRC+, the highest mark by a first baseman since Votto in 2012, and became the first first baseman since Votto in ’10 to win an MVP award in a full-length season (Freeman and Abreu took home the honors in the pandemic-shortened 2020 campaign).

What goes up must come down, though, and so just as 2021 found the majors’ first basemen combining for their highest wRC+ (114) and WAR (70.2) since ’17, last year they collectively fell off. They still posted the highest wRC+ of any position (111), but their combined WAR dropped to 51.1, a decline of about 0.6 WAR per team. Christian Walker was the only first baseman within three wins of Goldy and Freddie’s 7.1 WAR, and just eight players who spent a plurality of their time at the position topped 3.0 WAR, down from 10 in ’21. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Team USA’s WBC quarterfinal and semifinal victories and Jose Altuve’s injury, then continue their 2023 season preview series by discussing the New York Yankees (28:17) with Brendan Kuty of The Athletic, and the Washington Nationals (1:06:41) with Jesse Dougherty of The Washington Post, plus a Past Blast from 1983 (1:47:29), trivia answers (1:52:16), and an initial reaction to a stone-cold classic Japan-Mexico WBC semifinal (1:53:33).

Audio intro: Harold Walker, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio interstitial 1: The Moaners, “Yankee on My Shoulder”
Audio interstitial 2: Krestovsky, “National Spark”
Audio outro: Keenan The First and RandiVision, “Big Game”

Link to Rosenthal on Turner’s homer
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Below is an evaluation of the prospects in the San Francisco Giants farm system who readers should consider “imminent big leaguers,” players who might reasonably be expected to play in the majors at some point this year. This includes all prospects on the 40-man roster as well as those who have already established themselves in the upper levels of the minors but aren’t yet rostered. We tend to be more inclusive with pitchers and players at premium positions since their timelines are usually the ones accelerated by injuries and scarcity. Any Top 100 prospects, regardless of their ETA, are also included on this list. Reports, tool grades, and scouting information for all of the prospects below can also be found on The Board.

This is not a top-to-bottom evaluation of the Giants farm system. We like to include what’s happening in minor league and extended spring training in our reports as much as possible, since scouting high concentrations of players in Arizona and Florida allows us to incorporate real-time, first-person information into the org lists. However, this approach has led to some situations where outdated analysis (or no analysis at all) was all that existed for players who had already debuted in the majors. Skimming the imminent big leaguers off the top of a farm system will allow this time-sensitive information to make its way onto the site more quickly, better preparing readers for the upcoming season, helping fantasy players as they draft, and building site literature on relevant prospects to facilitate transaction analysis in the event that trades or injuries foist these players into major league roles. There will still be a Giants prospect list that includes Grant McCray, Patrick Bailey, Aeverson Arteaga and all of the other prospects in the system who appear to be at least another season away. As such, today’s list includes no ordinal rankings. Readers are instead encouraged to focus on the players’ Future Value (FV) grades. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier today, Meg Rowley introduced this year’s positional power rankings. As a quick refresher, all 30 teams are ranked based on the projected WAR from our Depth Charts. Our staff then endeavors to provide you with some illuminating commentary to put those rankings in context. We begin this year’s series at catcher.

As usual, we begin our annual positional power rankings examining the position that’s the most clouded in mystery, the one where our best baseball praxis still leaves us with the most unanswered questions. Catchers remain unique in their significant and meaningful interaction with pitchers and the art of pitching. We’ve come a long way in evaluating much of the job of catching, with pitch framing statistics the most recent and one of the most valuable developments (at least until the inevitable day when balls and strikes have their locations called by a brigade of cameras and computers), but there are still things we can’t yet quantify. Still, that skills might be hard to capture with numbers doesn’t necessarily mean they’re nonexistent, just that they’re difficult to measure. Even if baseball didn’t collect a single statistic, teams would still need to consider how and why and whether player X helps them win games more than player Y, while fans would still argue over who is better than who. Our framework for evaluating catchers may be imperfect, but there’s still a lot we can say about those who don the tools of ignorance, and we get a little better at it every year. Read the rest of this entry »