Full disclosure, right up top: I’m rooting for Brett Baty to win the Mets’ starting third base job out of spring training. There are many reasons: First, all things being equal I’d prefer to see a young player get playing time rather than a veteran. Playing the kids shows an open-mindedness on the team’s part, as well as a level of faith in young players that allows them to go out on the field with a sense of freedom rather than a fear of failure. It’s forward-looking, which is an important consideration even for a club as well-resourced as the Mets.

But second, I’m a baseball writer who communicates mostly in puns, and to people like me, Baty is a divine blessing. As a general rule, baseball doesn’t do unit-based nicknames as much as hockey or even football, which is a pity. While other sports are rolling out the Legion of Doom or That 70s Line or Gang Green, baseball — a sport with an unparalleled literary and folkloric tradition, I might add — is resting on the laurels of the $100,000 Infield. It’s been more than 30 years since the Nasty Boys, for God’s sake.

So if the Mets end up having an infield of three multi-time All-Stars between the ages of 28 and 30, plus a rookie third baseman, we’re calling it the Three Men and a Baty infield. Agreed? Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about catcher Grayson Greiner’s height, Shohei Ohtani’s titanic homers, tight t-shirt, and pepper-grinding in WBC exhibitions, and a few preview-related trivia questions, then continue their 2023 season preview series by discussing the Toronto Blue Jays (15:02) with Kaitlyn McGrath of The Athletic, and the Kansas City Royals (55:25) with Anne Rogers of MLB.com, plus a Past Blast from 1977 (1:23:45) and trivia answers (1:32:46).

Audio intro: Yo La Tengo, “Shades of Blue”
Audio interstitial: The Joy Formidable, “Into the Blue”
Audio outro: Don Gibson, “Blue, Blue Day”

Link to tall-catchers EW episode
Link to Sam’s Substack
Link to first Ohtani dinger
Link to longer dinger video
Link to second Ohtani dinger
Link to side view of first swing
Link to side-by-side swings
Link to Japan News on homers
Link to MLB.com on the homer
Link to 2022 pepper-grinder story
Link to Nootbaar WBC story
Link to other Nootbaar story
Link to Ohtani’s tight t-shirt
Link to “Shoebae” account
Link to FanGraphs playoff odds
Link to FG payroll breakdown
Link to Blue Jays offseason tracker
Link to Blue Jays depth chart
Link to Kaitlyn’s spring preview
Link to Kaitlyn on the OF dimensions
Link to Travis on the OF dimensions
Link to Statcast park factors
Link to Kaitlyn’s author archive
Link to Royals offseason tracker
Link to Royals depth chart
Link to 2022 rookie PA by team
Link to profile of Quatraro
Link to story on throwing strikes
Link to Anne on “Raid the Zone”
Link to Anne on Royals pitchers
Link to story on KC ballpark sites
Link to 1977 article source
Link to Five Seasons on Goodreads
Link to David Lewis’s Twitter
Link to David Lewis’s Substack
Link to Ryan Nelson’s Twitter
Link to Ward on pitch-calling
Link to Richard Hershberger’s book

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Pitchers, hitters, and the rest of us have spent the first couple weeks of this exhibition season adapting to the new pitch clock, but few players have set out to test the boundaries of the rule the way that Max Scherzer has. The future Hall of Famer’s search for an advantage has called to mind the philosophy offered by a hurler he’ll eventually join in Cooperstown, Warren Spahn: “Hitting is timing. Pitching is upsetting timing.” And the 38-year-old righty’s first two starts of the spring have demonstrated some ways in which a pitcher might weaponize the clock — and how such efforts might backfire.

Scherzer made his Grapefruit League debut on February 26 at the Mets’ Port St. Lucie Clover Park against the Nationals, throwing two innings and striking out five while allowing three hits and one run. At the outset of the SNY broadcast, Mets play-by-play announcer Gary Cohen foreshadowed the three-time Cy Young winner’s clock-testing efforts by telling viewers, “I think he’d going to love this pitch clock more than anybody else in baseball because he is fully capable of going old school on you, gettin’ it and throwing it.”

While fully capable of pulling the occasional fast one, Scherzer doesn’t particularly stand out in that regard according to Statcast’s new-ish Pitch Tempo metrics, which measure the median time between pitches that follow a take (called strike or ball). Last season, Scherzer averaged 16.6 seconds between such pitches with nobody on base, 1.5 seconds faster than the major league average but a full four seconds slower than major league leader Brent Suter’s 12.6 seconds, and 2.5 seconds slower than Cole Irvin, the fastest pitcher in this context among those who made at least 20 starts last year. Within that latter group, Scherzer ranked 54th-fastest out of 135. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re a reader of this site, you probably know that spring training results don’t carry much weight. If you’re really invested in spring outcomes, try exploring them on a rate basis, as those metrics seem to provide the most signal. But what I’m most interested in during the spring are the underlying characteristics that drive outcomes, and often, those characteristics are much stickier than pure results.

Notching high exit velocities in-game, for example, can be thought of as a player tapping into their top-end strength. It can be tough to discern fact from fiction among the countless “best shape of his life” reports, but I figured there might be something to Brendan Donovan’s offseason adjustments when I saw him obliterate a home run to right field in his first spring plate appearance, 105.5 mph off the bat:

Now, 105.5 mph isn’t light-tower power, but it’s notable coming from the slap-hitting utilityman. After posting an ISO over .139 just once across the four minor league stops where he had at least 100 plate appearances, that mark dropped to a paltry .097 in Donovan’s big league debut. And he hit all of three balls harder than 105.5 mph in the majors last year, none of them going for homers, en route to posting an eighth-percentile barrel rate. Ouch. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the weekend, veteran left-hander Brad Hand agreed to a one-year, $2 million contract with the Colorado Rockies, according to Ken Rosenthal. That poor man. This being the offseason of creative contract structures, Hand will receive an additional $1 million if he starts the regular season on the major league roster or IL, and $500,000 of that $2 million guarantee comes in the form of a buyout of a $7 million club option for 2024. In other words, the Rockies are spending $2 million to find out if Hand is completely cooked, but if he’s not they can keep him in the fold for two seasons at a pretty reasonable rate.

Hand was last seen pitching in the colors of Colorado’s sometime postseason nemesis, the Philadelphia Phillies. There, Hand filled what one might call the 2019 Fernando Rodney role. In that scenario, a manager only has a couple relievers he trusts in the postseason, but more innings than he can fill using those arms alone. Enter a veteran — Rodney for the 2019 Nats, Hand for last year’s Phillies — whose stuff isn’t what it used to be but whose experience and guile might allow him to steal a medium-leverage inning or two. In the NLDS against the Braves, that worked quite well. The following series against the Padres, not so much.

That’s because Hand is no longer the elite high-volume reliever he was in San Diego and Cleveland in the late 2010s. If he were, he wouldn’t be signing for $2 million in March. So the question is — as is ever the case with this team — what do the Rockies see in Hand? Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the New York Yankees. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the third year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but I use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

Alejandro Kirk slashed a solid .285/.372/.415 with 14 home runs and a 129 wRC+ last year in his first full big-league season. Moreover, the 24-year-old Toronto Blue Jays catcher drew 63 free passes while going down by way of the K just 58 times. His 10.7% strikeout rate was third best in the junior circuit, behind only Steven Kwan’s 9.4% and Luis Arraez’s 7.1%.

How similar of a hitter is Kirk to Arraez? I asked that question to Blue Jays manager John Schneider prior to Thursday’s game in Dunedin.

“When you talk about contact, not a lot of swing-and-miss, yeah, they’re similar,” replied Schneider. “There’s a little more damage potential with Kirky. But more walks than strikeouts is tough to do at any level, [especially] the big leagues. So, I think when it’s just strike zone command, on-base, and contact-ability, they are pretty similar.”

Arraez, now a member of the Miami Marlins, won the American League batting title with the Minnesota Twins while slashing .316/.375/.420 with eight home runs and a 131 wRC+. Following up on my initial question, I asked Schneider if Kirk has the potential to capture a title of his own. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Kenta Maeda pitching well despite PitchCom giving away his signs, spring training injuries (5:26), the upsides and downsides of pitchers beginning to call their own pitches with PitchCom (9:03), and the reasons why hitters collectively seem to swing more often than they should (20:18). Then they continue (and pass the halfway point of) their 2023 season preview series by discussing the Los Angeles Dodgers (40:01) with Fabian Ardaya of The Athletic, and the Chicago Cubs (1:19:32) with Sahadev Sharma of The Athletic, plus a Past Blast from 1976 (2:07:56).

Audio intro: Faye, “Swing State”
Audio interstitial 1: Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, “Requiem K. 626 – Lux Aeterna”
Audio interstitial 2: Andy Fairweather Low, “Halfway to Everything”
Audio outro: Lucy Dacus, “Triple Dog Dare”

Link to ESPN on Maeda
Link to Turner-Hernández video
Link to EW shart discussion
Link to Rob Arthur on sign-stealing
Link to article on training w/o games
Link to Greinke calling own pitches
Link to Maddux calling own pitches
Link to old EW on calling own pitches
Link to Scherzer on PitchCom legality
Link to ESPN on pitchers calling pitches
Link to article on Padres pitch calls
Link to article on Burnes pitch calls
Link to article on Giants pitch calls
Link to tweet about Ohtani pitch calls
Link to article on Cole pitch calls
Link to article on Severino pitch calls
Link to video of Scherzer pitch calls
Link to hitter run values on swings
Link to Tom Tango thread on swings
Link to Devan Fink on swings
Link to Eno Sarris on swings
Link to Swing decision Run Value
Link to Vargas not swinging
Link to Tango on approaches by count
Link to Tango on sliders
Link to Tom Verducci on sliders
Link to Rob on playing deeper
Link to Rob on BABIP/defense
Link to Russell on OBP > BA
Link to FanGraphs playoff odds
Link to FG payroll breakdown
Link to Dodgers offseason tracker
Link to Dodgers depth chart
Link to Ben Clemens on the Dodgers
Link to Fabian on Syndergaard
Link to article on Heyward’s swing
Link to Fabian’s spring preview
Link to Dodgers first-round picks
Link to Fabian’s author archive
Link to Cubs offseason tracker
Link to Cubs depth chart
Link to EW preview series wiki
Link to 2019 Pitch Lab piece
Link to 2022 Pitch Lab piece
Link to Sahadev on Hendricks
Link to Sahadev on Ricketts
Link to Sahadev on Bellinger
Link to Sahadev on Madrigal
Link to Sahadev on Taillon
Link to Sahadev on sweepers
Link to EW Bellinger roundtable
Link to Woodward on back-picks
Link to Sahadev’s spring preview
Link to Sahadev’s author archive
Link to 1976 article source
Link to HoF site on the shorts
Link to Paul Lukas on the shorts
Link to Chris Creamer on the shorts
Link to Costanza uniforms video
Link to David Lewis’s Twitter
Link to David Lewis’s Substack
Link to MLBTR on Painter
Link to NPB triple-digit uniform
Link to CPBL no. 999
Link to triple-digit ump uniforms
Link to Spaceman uni source
Link to Lee wearing 337

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Remember the 107-win Giants, the only team to take an NL West flag away from the Dodgers over the past decade? Last year’s crash to an 81-81 record marked a rude awakening, as the post-Buster Posey era got off to a rocky start following the future Hall of Famer’s abrupt retirement after the 2021 season. Now the Giants enter the post-Brandon Belt era as well, as the regular first baseman from their last two championship teams joined the Blue Jays in January.

I mention the Giants because in this National League counterpart to my examination of the weakest spots on American League contending teams, their catching and first base options occupy the first two spots, as they did little to address either position over the winter — a point that’s been overshadowed by the Padres’ spending spree and the Dodgers’ free agent exodus (a phrase I’ve now used for three straight articles and expect to deploy at this year’s Passover seder). The Giants are projected to finish third in the NL West with 84 wins, and while they do have a 41.8% chance of making the playoffs, improvements in both spots could have bumped them up by a good 20 percentage points.

As with the AL installment, here I’m considering teams with Playoff Odds of at least 10% as contenders; that threshold describes 10 NL clubs (all but the Cubs, Pirates, Reds, Rockies, and Nationals). It’s worth noting that because of the general tendency to overproject playing time and keep even the weakest teams with positive WAR at each position (in reality over 10% of them will finish in the red), our Depth Chart values at the team level are inflated by about 20%. That is to say, instead of having a total of 1,000 WAR projected across the 30 teams, we have about 1,200. Thus, I am discounting the team values that you see on the Depth Chart pages by 20%, and focusing on the lowest-ranked contenders among those whose adjusted values fall below 2.0 WAR, the general equivalent of average play across a full season. The individual WARs cited will remain as they are on the Depth Chart pages, however, and it’s worth noting that many of the players here — particularly youngsters with shorter track records — don’t project particularly well but aren’t without upside; hope springs eternal. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s talk about free agent outfielders. Nearly every team could use one, either to serve in a starting role or to provide an upgrade over the players who are currently fourth or fifth on the depth chart. Unsurprisingly, reigning AL MVP Aaron Judge took home the largest contract of any outfielder this winter, but 11 inked average annual values of at least $10 million. Along with a variety of part-time and platoon players signed for smaller sums, nearly every big league-caliber outfielder has found a home for the season. Most of the remaining free agents, like Alex Dickerson and Jackie Bradley Jr., project to be around replacement level for 2023. But there’s an outlier, someone who just posted a career-best 2.5 WAR and was projected by our readers for a three-year, $30 million contract – Jurickson Profar. No other unsigned player is projected to earn even a third of that, but as teams start to finalize their rosters during spring training, Profar still doesn’t know what uniform he’ll be playing in come Opening Day.

Entering the offseason, we had Profar pegged as the 36th-best free agent in the class after his $10 million mutual option with the Padres was declined. Neighboring hitters on that list include Michael Brantley, Brandon Drury, and Josh Bell; all three have signed and will earn a combined $37 million in 2023. So what makes teams hesitant to add Profar to their roster?

Let’s compare him to the aforementioned trio of Brantley, Drury, and Bell. In fact, Profar is quite comparable to Brantley and Bell, who both play a position down the defensive spectrum. Both are also considerably better hitters than Profar. Brantley’s wRC+ hasn’t sat below 120 in five years, while Bell’s mark sits at 121 since the beginning of 2021. On the other hand, Profar’s 110 wRC+ last year was his highest in a full season, and his career mark of 94 is substantially worse than that of Brantley or Bell. Other outfielders like J.D. Martinez and Michael Conforto also signed in that price range. In other words, if a team was looking for an everyday left fielder who wouldn’t break the bank, Profar probably wouldn’t have been their first call. Read the rest of this entry »