There are a handful of things that I consider pillars of my personality and spirit. Baseball, of course, is one of them. That’s likely easy to infer, but there are a few others that you might not know about. Since I was a kid, what I’ve put on my feet has meant a lot to me. No matter where I was going, I wanted to rock fresh kicks. This also meant that players with signature cleats and/or sneakers meant a lot to me, too. I wore Ken Griffey Jr.’s Air Griffey Max 1s the second my feet were big enough to fit into a kid’s pair. Unfortunately, in the last decade or so, baseball players haven’t inspired as prominent a line of footwear as Griffey did. But I think there is a chance for that to change.

In January, baseball’s most iconic star, Shohei Ohtani, signed a multi-year footwear and apparel deal with New Balance. The numbers around the deal still aren’t clear, but it will be a long-term partnership with custom apparel, cleats, and sneakers. What I want to address is the potential impact of this deal and how it can serve as an entry point for growing the culture of baseball by stretching it beyond the diamond and onto people’s feet. Other prominent players, like Aaron Judge and Mike Trout, have footwear and apparel deals of their own, but none has stomped a footprint on sneaker and fashion culture like Griffey did when his first shoe dropped in 1996 at the peak of his stardom.

The drop of the Air Max Griffey 1 was strategic and savvy. In Complex’s account of Griffey’s impact on this era of sneaker and baseball history, they noted that Griffey and Nike’s goal for the shoe was to be multipurpose and fashionable. Specifically, Griffey himself demanded the shoes be wearable with jeans. Why was that? Well, of course that would mean they were more than just an athletic shoe — you can fit them up too. That plan worked out well for Griffey and Nike, who were able to carve out additional space in the sneaker market to go along with the Jordan line and other Nike sponsored basketball players. With the help of the company’s marketing push and its desire to make the most of Griffey’s stardom, an iconic sneaker was created that is still being worn over 20 years after its original release. This helped Griffey cement the leap from being a baseball and sports icon to a cultural one. New Balance and Ohtani could make the most of their partnership if they used this approach to their advantage and applied it to their own plans for Ohtani’s market appeal. Read the rest of this entry »

MIAMI – Welcome to the Pool of Death. Three of the World Baseball Classic’s best teams — the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Venezuela — came to Miami last weekend knowing that only two of them would still be there past Friday. (Apologies to Israel and Nicaragua, the minnows unceremoniously chucked into the shark tank.) And by dint of the schedule, it was Venezuela that seemed to draw the shortest straw, opening pool play against the powerhouse Dominican Republic on Saturday night, then facing Puerto Rico, the 2017 tournament runner-up, just 24 hours later. The options before Venezuela: sink or swim.

“When you speak about the pool of death, when you say that Venezuela had the most complicated journey, we Venezuelans are used to that, right?” said manager Omar Lopez before Sunday night’s game. “We are used to complications, tough moments, adversities. Somehow we overcome those obstacles, and this is the same way we are going to play here.”

And that’s exactly what Venezuela did. Buoyed by big bats and some stellar pitching, Lopez’s squad grabbed back-to-back wins over its fellow Latin American super-clubs, taking control of Pool D and virtually guaranteeing the team a spot in the quarterfinals and a date with the Pool C runner-up in Miami a week from now. On Saturday, Venezuela stymied a stacked Dominican lineup and touched up NL Cy Young winner Sandy Alcantara in his home park in a 5–1 shocker. On Sunday, they pounded out seven runs in the first two innings en route to a 9–6 win over Puerto Rico. The weekend was a raucous Caracas block party, soundtracked by thousands of fans in red, blue and yellow going wild with every homer and strikeout — outdone only by the Venezuelan players who came spilling out of the dugout to celebrate virtually every hit. Read the rest of this entry »

PHOENIX – Each first-round site of the World Baseball Classic had its glamor fixture. For Pool C in Phoenix, everyone had Sunday night’s game between the United States and Mexico circled on the calendar. Mexico certainly did, and then circled the bases several times for good measure.

Joey Meneses homered twice, while Randy Arozarena went 3-for-5 with two doubles and three runs scored to lead an impressive offensive outburst by Mexico. Patrick Sandoval and Javier Assad kept the U.S. off the board long enough for Mexico to win 11-5 and maintain control of its own destiny. Had Mexico merely beaten the U.S., it would’ve constituted an upset but not a shocking one. It was the nature of the win that was so remarkable.

At one point, Mexico led 11-2 and had a runner on second base who, had he scored, would have invoked the WBC’s mercy rule. And even that scenario understates the extent to which Mexico outhit, out-pitched, and out-fielded its northern neighbors. Team USA’s worst WBC loss since an 11-1 defeat to Puerto Rico in 2009 leaves the heavy Pool C favorites in serious danger of first-round elimination. Read the rest of this entry »

This is a Shohei Ohtani Update. The World Baseball Classic is officially underway, and after a weekend packed with games, it’s time to check in on one of the biggest stars in the world. With Samurai Japan fresh off a 4-0 rampage through Pool B, FanGraphs can now officially report that Shohei Ohtani is still good at baseball.

The issue was not necessarily in question, but it’s worth taking a look at Ohtani’s performance considering his sudden disappearance at the end of the 2022 season. The two-way star didn’t play in a single game for more than four months — essentially the entire winter. Although he posted 9.5 WAR in 2022, several straw men constructed for the purpose of this sentence wondered whether, after such a long layoff, Ohtani would even remember how to play baseball at all.

Fortunately, Ohtani arrived at spring training in mid-February. After spending a couple weeks re-familiarizing himself with the sport, Ohtani got into three spring training games. Ohtani the batter hit a triple on the first pitch he saw, and has gone 2-for-5 so far. Ohtani the pitcher made one appearance, throwing 2.1 scoreless innings with no hits, two walks, and two strikeouts. Cactus League sources indicate that both a 1.200 OPS as a hitter and a 0.00 ERA as a pitcher are considered good. Read the rest of this entry »

Spring is for extensions. As surely as swallows flock to Capistrano or salmon charge upstream, major league teams spend February and March offering their young stars sackfuls of money in exchange for years of team control. Sure enough, the Diamondbacks and Corbin Carroll followed the path of least resistance over the weekend in agreeing to an eight-year deal worth $111 million, with a ninth-year option for $28 million and $20 million in various contract incentives.

That sounds like a lot of money. Carroll, after all, has only played 32 games in the major leagues and has accrued only 772 professional plate appearances. But do the math, and you can see why Arizona offered this deal, and also why Carroll accepted it.

Carroll isn’t some random recent debut. He’s the number two prospect in baseball, a power-contact-speed-and-defense threat who has dismantled every level of competition he’s faced. That includes the major leagues; that 32-game debut saw Carroll hit .260/.330/.500 with superlative baserunning and defense. He looked like an All-Star right away, and truthfully, he’s always looked like an All-Star. That’s how you end up as the number two prospect in baseball as a 5-foot-10 outfielder so quickly despite missing nearly two consecutive seasons of playing time thanks to the pandemic and then injury. Read the rest of this entry »

Gerrit Cole faced Jordan Walker for the first time on Wednesday, and he came away impressed. The New York Yankees ace induced a ground-ball out from the top prospect in the St. Louis Cardinals system in the first inning, but then surrendered a line-drive single to him on a 95-mph heater a handful of frames later. When Cole met with members of the media mid-game — standard fare for starters during spring training — I asked him about his matchups with the fast-rising phenom.

“I thought he put a good swing on it,” Cole said of Walker’s knock. “It was a good adjustment from the first at-bat. It was a good pitch, a borderline ball, and one of the better swings of the day, for sure.”

Cole needed clarification as to whom he was opining on before offering the praise. Understandably focusing on preparing for the regular season, he admitted — this with the caveat that he wasn’t being disrespectful — he didn’t know where Walker was hitting in the St. Louis lineup.

Walker was understandably very aware of Cole. Asked about what the five-time All-Star had said — the question came from a St. Louis scribe whom I’d shared the quotes with — he was equal parts pleased and humble.

“It means a lot, man,” said Walker, who is No. 12 on our Top 100 and at age 20 has a legitimate chance to break camp with the Cardinals. “He’s a helluva pitcher. His stuff was really electric today. His stuff was really jumping. His slider was good. So it means a lot to hear that from him. A wonderful pitcher.”

As Cardinals fans are discovering, the 6-foot-5, 220-pound Stone Mountain, Georgia native is more than just a star in the making. He also exudes fun. I asked the effervescent outfielder how he is balancing that trait alongside being hyper-focused in his quest to earn a big-league job. Read the rest of this entry »

“You can never have too much pitching” is an adage that predates the bombing of Pearl Harbor and a notion that’s at least as old as Old Hoss Radbourn’s sore right arm. Every team goes into the season expecting that its rotation will need far more than five starters, and one pitcher’s absence is another’s opportunity to step up, but that doesn’t make the inevitable rash of spring injuries any more bearable. This week, we’ve got a handful of prominent ones worth noting, with All-Stars Carlos Rodón and Tony Gonsolin likely to miss a few regular season turns, top prospect Andrew Painter targeting a May return, and José Quintana potentially out for longer than that.

The latest-breaking injury involves Painter, the freshest face among this group. The fast-rising 19-year-old Phillies phenom placed fifth on our Top 100 list. Moreover, the 6-foot-7 righty, who sports four potentially plus pitches, had already turned heads this camp, reaching 99 mph with his fastball in his spring debut on March 1 (Davy Andrews broke down his encounter with Carlos Correa here). While he topped out at Double-A Reading last year after two A-level stops, he was considered to be in competition with Bailey Falter for the fifth starter’s job, and had a legitimate shot at debuting as a teenager, though his 20th birthday on April 10 didn’t leave much leeway.

Alas — there’s always an alas in these stories — two days after Painter’s outing, manager Rob Thomson told reporters that he was experiencing tenderness in his right elbow, and several subsequent days without updates suggested there was more to the story. Indeed, an MRI taken on March 3 revealed a sprained ulnar collateral ligament, with the finding subsequently confirmed via a second opinion from Dr. Neal ElAttrache, hence the delay. The Phillies termed the injury “a mild sprain” that isn’t severe enough to require surgery. The team plans to rest Painter for four weeks from the date of injury (so, March 29) and then begin a light throwing program that under a best-case scenario would have him back in games in May. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m happy to announce that we now have two pitch quality models, PitchingBot and Stuff+, available for your perusal on the FanGraphs Leaderboards.

PitchingBot is the brainchild of Cameron Grove. We worked with Cameron to be able to run and maintain his model in-house at FanGraphs; he has since joined an MLB front office. You can read all about PitchingBot in the FanGraphs Library here.

In short, PitchingBot takes inputs such as pitcher handedness, batter handedness, strike zone height, count, velocity, spin rate, movement, release point, extension, and location to determine the quality of a pitch, as well as its possible outcomes. Those outcomes are then aggregated and normalized on a 20-80 scouting scale, which is what is displayed on the leaderboards. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve reached the point in the offseason when it’s time for one of my favorite/most hated preseason traditions: my attempt to predict breakouts and busts. Since any breakouts or busts beyond what a projection system suggests are naturally going to be low-probability outcomes, there’s a high probability of me looking pretty silly — something writers try to avoid. Let’s start by looking back at how smart I was last year…or how foolish:

First, the bad news. Kelenic and Adell were both just awful, and I would definitely call 2022 a giant miss for both players as they enter their post-prospect period. I suspect there’s more hope to still be had for Kelenic than Adell, but I wouldn’t exactly call myself prescient about either. Kepler’s breakout didn’t happen at all, and his power all but disappeared. Anderson I’ll call an incomplete because of injury, and while Higashioka did match his entire previous career in WAR, that was largely due to defense, which I can hardly claim credit for predicting. Hiura did hit far better than he had recently, but he also didn’t exactly get a ton of playing time with the Brewers, who appeared to have lost interest in him. There were a few triumphs, however: Kwan and Lux both had excellent seasons, especially the former. Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 1015

This week’s episode is a bittersweet one, as your favorite podcast producer (that’s me!) tells his story before saying goodbye.

Dialing in from the snowy slopes of France, Ben Clemens interviews me, Dylan Higgins, for the latest edition of FanGraphs Backstories. Ben and I talk about the gateway drug that was Moneyball, how I hopped from internship to internship, and the summer I spent in an office with Branch Rickey III. I also tell Ben about my adventures working in the Australian Baseball League, finding myself in a sticky championship celebration, and eventually finding my people at FanGraphs.

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Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @dhhiggins on Twitter.

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Audio after the jump. (Approximate 51 minute play time.)

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