Every few years, the same old question sets the internet aflame: Why do Americans care so much about the British royal family Does batting average matter? If you haven’t seen my favorite formulation of the problem, here’s Tom Tango’s version of it:

Which is the more productive batter (all other things equal)

A.
.315 batting average
.365 OBP
.510 SLG

B.
.260 batting average
.365 OBP
.510 SLG

— Tangotiger ? (@tangotiger) January 9, 2023

I’ve taken a crack at this exact question before. The answer simply isn’t very surprising. If two hitters have the same on-base percentage and the same slugging percentage, they’re similarly valuable to their team’s offense. That’s why OPS is a popular offensive statistic despite its relative lack of precision; it does a lot of the same work as wOBA and wRC+ because its two component stats are mostly found in similar ratios and correlate well to offensive production. Linear weights are still better, because they do a better job of accounting for how important each plate appearance outcome is when it comes to run scoring, but you can get most of the way there with OBP and SLG.

There’s not much reason to go through the exact math of how wOBA works again, because the people who would be swayed by that math have already been swayed. But sabermetric forefather Voros McCracken mentioned a novel way of looking at the problem, and I thought I’d take a crack at it now that there are no more Carlos Correa free agency articles left to write. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley recap the conclusion of the Carlos Correa free agency saga, breaking down his new, actually finalized contract with the Twins, reviewing his offseason odyssey, and trying to anticipate his future. Then (28:20) they banter about Trevor Story’s elbow surgery, the Blue Jays’ and Marlins’ signings of Brandon Belt and Johnny Cueto, respectively (and Belt’s thoughts on chicken tenders), the Tigers moving in and lowering the fences at Comerica Park, and ballplayers’ belts and their handedness (dis)advantages as characteristics that set baseball apart. After that (54:47), they talk to two professors from the University of Illinois, Daniel Eck and Adrian Burgos, Jr., about their research into fans’ inflated appraisals of players from the distant past, the changing caliber of play in the majors over time, and adjusting traditional and advanced stats for the expansion of the player pool, followed (1:35:19) by a few updates and a Past Blast from 1954.

Audio intro: The Decemberists, “Red Right Ankle”
Audio interstitial: Uncle Tupelo, “Factory Belt”
Audio outro: Frank Sinatra, “I Don’t Believe in Rumors”

Link to Ben Clemens on Correa again
Link to Heyman on Correa
Link to Rosenthal on Correa
Link to Correa’s comments
Link to Mets’ Correa statement
Link to over/under draft results
Link to story on Story
Link to internal brace info
Link to Story’s arm strength
Link to Justin Choi on Belt
Link to Belt on chicken tenders
Link to Leo Morgenstern on Cueto
Link to Comerica alterations
Link to Miggy reaction
Link to HR park factors
Link to info on Miggy at Comerica
Link to long outs at Comerica
Link to more long outs at Comerica
Link to ballpark homogenization study
Link to lefty advantage research
Link to more on lefty advantages
Link to NYT on lefties and sports
Link to FG on the lefty pitcher edge
Link to Eck’s professor page
Link to Burgos’s professor page
Link to previous Burgos appearance
Link to adjusted WAR leaderboard
Link to technical model details
Link to Eck on era adjustments
Link to results part I
Link to results part II
Link to results part III
Link to MLB-eligible population
Link to Ben on quality of play
Link to 1954 story source
Link to article on baseball-fan age
Link to Jacob Pomrenke’s website
Link to Jacob Pomrenke on Twitter
Link to Nightengale on the Braves
Link to 2012 Anthopoulous article
Link to MLBTR on Vogt
Link to typesetting characters info

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It’s been a busy offseason for the Angels, who have added to their superstar duo in Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani by trading for Gio Urshela and Hunter Renfroe, and signing Brandon Drury, Tyler Anderson, Carlos Estévez, and now Brett Phillips. Phillips has bounced around the league since his debut in 2017, maxing out at just 292 plate appearances in a season. In 2022, he spent time with the Rays and Orioles but was DFA’d by both and became a free agent. The 28-year old will earn $1.2 million in Anaheim this season.

Phillips is a baserunning and defensive specialist with some sneaky pop. To put it another way, he has struggled at the plate throughout his career and has never made it as a starting position player. While he was quite solid in 2021, slashing .206/.300/.427 with a 103 wRC+ (and a 138 wRC+ when he held the platoon advantage) and 2.3 WAR, that production was nowhere to be seen in ’22. In 900 career plate appearances, he holds a 71 wRC+, and his Steamer projection of 74 wRC+ suggests that’s what you should expect going forward.

Phillips’ biggest weakness at the plate is his struggle to put bat on ball. Over the past two seasons, he’s come up empty on over a third of his swings, ranking in just the third percentile of hitters during that timespan. His uppercut swing has a large hole up in the zone, where his whiff rates in that area approach 50%. While he doesn’t chase many pitches out of the zone, his approach at the plate is more passive than disciplined, as he also watches many pitches over the plate. The end result is that pitchers earn far more strikes against him compared to the average hitter; his 32.9% CSW ranks second-worst among all batters. Throughout his career, he has walked at an above-average 9.7% clip, but his enormous 37.8% strikeout rate makes Giancarlo Stanton look like Luis Arraez in comparison. And while many of his compatriots on the whiff rate leaderboard like Joey Gallo and Miguel Sanó have outlier raw power, Phillips has never hit a ball harder than 108 mph. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2022 AL Comeback Player of the Year Award went to Justin Verlander, but were it not for Verlander’s historic return from Tommy John surgery, the hardware could have gone to Johnny Cueto instead. In 2022, Cueto signed a minor league contract with the White Sox on Opening Day. There was little doubt he would eventually make the major league roster, but it was still telling that the former All-Star and Cy Young finalist was forced to sign a non-guaranteed deal. He hadn’t thrown a full season since 2016, and as he entered the back half of his 30s, the once great pitcher’s career seemed to be winding down.

The veteran right-hander went on to pitch 25 games for Chicago, tossing 158.1 innings with a 3.35 ERA and 2.4 WAR. Only two AL hurlers, Framber Valdez and Shane Bieber, averaged more innings per start (min. 100 IP). Best of all, Cueto kept off the injured list, and from his debut on May 16 through the end of the season, he never missed a start. As a reward for his bounce-back performance, he earned himself a big league contract with the Marlins worth $8.5 million. The deal comes with a $10.5 million team option for 2024 (or a $2.5 million buyout). Read the rest of this entry »

Just under a year ago, Jake Mailhot identified Texas first baseman Nathaniel Lowe as a player with breakout potential. In fact, he wrote a whole article called, “Nathaniel Lowe Has Breakout Potential.” Then the 2022 season happened, and — you guessed it — Nathaniel Lowe officially broke out. He hit 27 home runs and raised his wRC+ from 114 to 143. Good for Nathaniel Lowe! He’s a slugger. Good for Jake Mailhot! He’s a clairvoyant.

The thing is, Lowe didn’t exactly follow the script laid out for him. Jake noted that for the last month and a half of the 2021 season, Lowe added some “responsible aggression,” lowering his strikeout rate despite swinging more often. He did that by making a ton of contact in the zone. Jake broke Lowe’s 2021 plate discipline stats down in a table, using August 16 as the dividing line. I’ve gone ahead and added 2022 to that table:

Read the rest of this entry »

It looked like Spenser Watkins’s career might be over when he was released by the Detroit Tigers in July 2020. Six years had passed since he was drafted in the 30th round out of Western Oregon University, and at no point over that span was he viewed as more than a fringe prospect. Possessing neither plus velocity nor a difference-making secondary, the right-hander was coming off a minor league season where he’d logged a 6.07 ERA. That the only offers Watkins was receiving were for non-playing roles wasn’t exactly a surprise.

Then the Orioles came calling. That opportunity, fueled by an education in pitching that he never received with the Tigers, ultimately catapulted him to the big leagues. On July 2, 2021 — nearly a year to the day after Detroit gave up on him — Watkins walked onto a mound in a Baltimore Orioles uniform. A year and half later, the Scottsdale native has 39 major league appearances comprising 160 innings under his belt. Moreover, unlike in his Tigers days, he knows how his arsenal plays.

Watkins discussed his education-driven evolution as a pitcher late in the 2022 season.

———

David Laurila: Two years ago, you were a career minor leaguer who’d been let go by the Tigers. How did you go from there to where you are now?

Spenser Watkins: “I was released during the COVID season, so I wasn’t playing; I didn’t go to the alt site, or anything like that. Basically, it was ‘OK, let’s see what the free agent market has to bring.’ Come December, that became, ‘OK, I’ve got to figure out what the next step is; I’ve got to figure out a way to provide for my family.’ Read the rest of this entry »

Hey, did you hear about the free agent who signed on Tuesday morning? Yeah, his name is Core… y Dickerson. So, yeah, not that free agent. Our deal is Corey Dickerson, to Washington, for one year and $2.25 million guaranteed, plus another $750,000 in performance incentives.

This is Dickerson’s third trip through the NL East since 2019, which is pretty enticing as a blind item, but then you realize that he was with the Phillies in 2019 but not ’22 and the Nats in 2023 but not ’19, and he missed the Mets and Braves altogether. That’s something of a theme for Dickerson’s career. He came up with the Rockies and was traded to the Rays in 2016, missing the two seasons in the past decade in which Colorado was good and having to sit through two of the last seasons in which Tampa Bay wasn’t.

But for as much as Dickerson has dodged playing for good teams for most of his career, he does have playoff experience, with the Marlins in 2020 and the Cardinals last year. He’s spent the past decade as an exemplar of a particular kind of player: a second-division starter who can be a meaningful platoon or bench player on a contender. That kind of player gets punted around a lot. Indeed, this will be Dickerson’s 11th big league season and his eighth team. He’s been traded in midseason twice and four times in total. (One of those trades was the deal that sent Germán Márquez and Jake McGee to Colorado in 2016.) Read the rest of this entry »

For the 18th 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 New York Yankees.

Batters

It’s really hard to be a lousy offense with Aaron Judge, and it’s really hard to be a great one without him. The Yankees were not otherwise stacked — or destitute — enough to buck that reality. With the return of their franchise slugger, if the Yankee offense doesn’t lead the American League in runs scored, it shouldn’t miss by a lot. The Yankees led the AL in runs scored last year and outside of Judge, they really didn’t get any standout, star-level offensive performances (other than Matt Carpenter, but that was only 154 plate appearances). Read the rest of this entry »

Ah, yes, another turn in the Carlos Correa saga. After agreeing to a deal with the Giants that fell apart and then agreeing to a deal with the Mets that hung in contract limbo for weeks, Correa is on the move again, back to where he started 2022. As Jeff Passan first reported, Correa and the Twins have agreed to a six-year, $200 million deal with vesting options that could boost the total payout to $270 million over 10 years.

By now you know Carlos Correa the player. He’s been one of the top free agents on the market for two years running, and he’s been one of the most prominent players in the game for half a decade. We’ve written about his free agency plenty of times already. But if you’d like a refresher, here it goes.

Correa has a well-rounded offensive game, the type of hitter you can plug into the middle of your order and not think twice about. He takes his walks and rarely strikes out. He does that not because he has an otherworldly batting eye, but rather because he has a solid sense of the zone and a good feel for contact. It also helps that opposing pitchers prefer to avoid the zone against him, owing to his comfortably plus power. He also plays solid shortstop defense, somewhere between plus and excellent depending on which scout or defensive metric you listen to. Put it all together, and he’s an All-Star level player every year when healthy. Read the rest of this entry »