The free agent market skidded to a halt in February, with more than a week passing without a major league signing. Perhaps teams were waiting to settle arbitration cases, holding out for the 60-day IL, or simply playing free agency chicken with spring training right around the corner. Or maybe they’ve all been busy trying to wrap their heads around Chad Green’s contract so as to decide how it affected the market. Whatever the case may be, things finally started to pick up steam this past weekend.

Andrew Chafin came to terms with the Diamondbacks on Saturday afternoon, while Alex Reyes signed with the Dodgers shortly thereafter. Both contracts are one-year deals with incentives, and each comes with a team option for 2024. Chafin will make $5.5 million in 2023 with the potential to earn an additional $1 million in playing time bonuses. After that, the D-backs can pick up his $7.25 million option or pay him a $750,000 buyout. Reyes, meanwhile, will make a base salary of $1.1 million in 2023, while his team option is worth $3 million. Both years of the contract come with performance incentives that can push the total value up to $10 million.

Chafin is returning to the franchise where he spent the first decade of his professional career. In parts of seven big league seasons with Arizona, he tossed 271.2 innings with a 3.20 FIP, good for 4.0 WAR. No Diamondbacks reliever was more productive in that time. The D-backs flipped him to the Cubs at the 2020 trade deadline, and the Cubs subsequently flipped him to the Athletics the following year. Chafin signed with the Tigers after the lockout, and miraculously, he survived the 2022 trade deadline, leaving the team on his own terms this winter. Unfortunately, he may have come to regret that decision. Chafin declined a $6.5 million player option for 2023; his new deal guarantees him slightly less. Read the rest of this entry »

For the past few weeks, I’ve been delving into exit velocity readings in an attempt to find out what really matters and what’s just noise. I found that 95th-percentile exit velocity and contact rate are the two stickiest metrics from one year to the next, with exit velocity slightly more likely to remain the same from one year to the next.

Of course, that doesn’t mean it can’t change. In fact, players change their top-end power readings by a good amount every year. Sure, any individual player might be unlikely to do it, but there are tons of players in baseball. I found that only 4% of hitters change their 95th-percentile exit velocity (EV95) by one standard deviation from one year to the next, but 408 batters put at least 100 batted balls into play in 2022. Four percent of 408 is a lot more than zero.

With that in mind, I thought I’d take an inventory of those exit velocity changers and see what their improvement meant going forward. To do so, I created two groups: hitters whose EV95 improved by at least half a standard deviation from one year to the next, and the opposite, hitters whose EV95 declined by at least half a standard deviation. I picked half an SD instead of an entire one to bulk up the sample size. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, pitching prospect Grayson Rodriguez was asked a great question on The Baseball Barb-B-Cast. Rodgriguez is ranked third in an excellent Baltimore system, and as a player who was drafted in 2018, his tenure with the club spans both the Dan Duquette and Mike Elias eras. The question was: How has the organization changed over time?

Rodriguez started his answer with, “Everything about the organization changed but the name.” He touched on technology, pitch development, and the turnover in the coaching staff, but the part I want to focus on came right at the beginning, when he was describing the Duquette era: “Our pitching philosophy was, it was like, ‘Hey, you know, as a starter we’re going to go out in the first three innings and we’re just going to throw nothing but fastballs, and we’re going to see if that works.’ And, like, terrible. Terrible idea.”

Yup. That does indeed sound like a terrible idea. It also made me wonder whether teams are as focused on establishing the fastball as they once were. A reduction in first inning fastball rate would make sense for a couple reasons. First, fastball usage has dropped overall as teams have learned that pitchers should throw their best pitch more often, and fastballs themselves have become less effective:

Read the rest of this entry »

Colt Keith started to tap into his power last year. After going deep just twice in 2021 — his first professional season — the 21-year-old third baseman homered nine times in 48 games with High-A West Michigan before landing on the injured list with a dislocated shoulder in early June. Returning to action in October, Keith proceeded to hit three bombs in 19 Arizona Fall League games.

The increased power production by one of the top position-player prospects in the Detroit Tigers organization was by design.

“I changed my approach a little bit,” Keith told me during his stint in the AFL. “I started trying to hit balls out in front, and backspin them to all fields, looking for a little bit more power. A lot of people had told me I just needed to keep doing what I was doing, but looking at guys in the big leagues that I want to play like, they’re hitting 25-30 homers a year. I felt like I needed to move in that direction. At the same time, I want to keep my hit tool. Batting .300 with some home runs is what I’d like to do.”

That is what he did this past season. The 6-foot-3, 238-pound infielder — Keith has added meaningful size and strength since entering pro ball — augmented his regular-season round-trippers with a .301/.370/.544 slash line. In 2021, he’d slashed .320/.437/.422 with Low-A Lakeland before scuffling over the final month as a 19-year-old in the Midwest League. Read the rest of this entry »

As the Blue Jays attempt to build upon last year’s 92-win season — their best since 2015 in terms of won-loss record — they’ve locked up one of their young, homegrown stars. Earlier this week, Sportsnet’s Ben Nicholson Smith reported that the team had agreed to a multiyear extension with Bo Bichette, thereby avoiding what could have been a contentious arbitration hearing. The terms of the deal were unclear at the time, but on Thursday, The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal reported that Bichette will receive a three-year, $33.6 million guarantee, with escalators and incentives that can increase the total value of the deal to as much as $40.65 million.

Via the Associated Press, Bichette is guaranteed $6.1 million this year ($3.25 million as a signing bonus and $2.85 million in salary) and then $11 million in 2024 and $16.5 million in ’25. Winning an MVP award would increase his next salary by $2.25 million, while finishing second or third would add $1.25 million, and finishing fourth or fifth would add $250,000. The extension buys out all three of his arbitration years — his age-25 through 27 seasons — without delaying his free agency, as he enters 2023 with three years and 63 days of service time. Without the deal, he and the Blue Jays would have headed into arbitration with the two sides as far apart as any in the majors this year. According to MLB Trade Rumors, the $2.5 million gap between the filings of Bichette ($7.5 million) and the Blue Jays ($5 million) matched that of the Astros and Kyle Tucker; Houston won that hearing on Thursday.

Bichette is coming off a very good season, albeit something of an inconsistent one. He set a full-season high with a 129 wRC+ via a .290/.333/.469 line with 24 homers and 13 steals. His 4.5 WAR tied with Corey Seager for 14th in the American League and second among AL shortstops behind Xander Bogaerts, 0.1 WAR ahead of Carlos Correa. That said, his season was an uneven one that exposed concerns in several areas of his game. He hit just .213/.237/.298 (50 wRC+) in April and .257/.302/.418 (105 wRC+) through the first half — missing the AL All-Star team where he made it in 2021 — before batting .337/.378/.543 (163 wRC+) in the second half, capped by a .406/.444/.662 (217 wRC+) September. Fourteen of his 24 homers came before the break, but so did 100 of his 165 strikeouts; he trimmed his K% from 24.3% before the break to 19.2% after. Read the rest of this entry »

Heston Kjerstad’s path to the big leagues began with a serious speed bump. Shortly after being taken second overall by the Orioles in the 2020 draft out of the University of Arkansas, the left-handed-hitting outfielder was diagnosed with myocarditis. He has since fully recovered, but because of a high-grade hamstring injury incurred last spring, he wasn’t able to make his professional debut until June. He didn’t forget how to hit during the long layoff. In 284 plate appearances between Low-A Delmarva and High-A Aberdeen, Kjerstad slashed .309/.394/.457 with a 135 wRC+. Moreover, he proceeded to earn MVP honors in the Arizona Fall League by pummeling pitchers to the tune of a 1.007 OPS.

No. 7 in a loaded Baltimore Orioles system, Kjerstad will celebrate his 24th birthday on Sunday. He talked hitting during his stint in the AFL.

———

David Laurila: Tell me about your progression as a hitter. You were obviously out of action with the health issue for some time.

Heston Kjerstad: “You know, it’s part of the game. Everybody misses time here and there, but you’ve done it for so long and practiced it so much that while there is a little rust to be knocked off, it’s going to come back to you. And honestly, there are some things you learn from being away from the game, and you apply them once you are back.” Read the rest of this entry »

I’m gonna start this one with a hot take: superstars can be boring. Before the pitchforks come out, let me explain myself. I love it just as much as everyone else when Aaron Judge obliterates second-deck homers, Jacob deGrom throws triple digits with ease, or Shohei Ohtani, well, does both. But the way star players contribute to their teams is quite predictable. Provided he’s healthy, Mike Trout’s name will be somewhere on the top third of the lineup card with a little number eight on the position column 155 times a year. Manager Phil Nevin doesn’t have to make any difficult decisions about when or where to start him.

But for most fans, the base unit of their baseball viewing experience is a team, rather than an individual player. The average Hennepin County resident would probably say they’re a Twins fan rather than characterize themselves as a Carlos Correa or Byron Buxton supporter. Often times, the same principle is true of baseball analysis. Sure, we write a lot about single players, but individuals don’t play in a vacuum. My favorite part of every free-agent signing to write is about how a new player fits into the roster they’ve just joined, and WAR, possibly the most referenced metric on this site, is literally an estimation of how much a team victories a given player adds. Heck, we had 58 people comment on a piece about projected team standings even before the majority of free agents had signed.

So, back to my original thesis. The game’s best players are incredibly awe-inspiring in what they can do on the field, but we don’t get to think about the role in which they’re best used, because that role is just “all the time”. Earlier this week, I wrote about Dylan Moore, who signed a three-year extension with Seattle. He’s not the most exciting player to write about as an individual; he doesn’t have monster exit velocities or dominate the contact leaderboards. What he does do, though, is patch about ten holes the Mariners have or may have in the future due to platoon issues, defensive limitations, or injuries. Seattle’s front office realized that a single non-starting player could be the solution to many team-specific problems and gave Moore a small pile of money to remain in the Pacific Northwest for the foreseeable future. Moore was fun to write and think about because of the specific ways in which he complements the team around him, and I like this type of analysis because it’s much more unique to each individual player and their team.

It’s time we get to the subject of this piece. In my Moore article, I found that nearly half of his plate appearances came against left-handed pitching, which placed fourth among righty hitters. The man who ranked first? Austin Slater of the Giants. An up/down bench outfielder for his first three years in the league, he earned a full-time roster spot in 2020 and has made the most of it despite his non-starting role, amassing 4.6 WAR in 735 plate appearances (3.8 WAR/600 PA). While he’s appeared in at least 125 games in each of the last two seasons, he’s only made 116 starts. But starting the game on the bench hasn’t seemed to affect his performance, with a 118 wRC+ during that time. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2023 ZiPS projections have all been incorporated into the site, and while there will be some additions (platoon splits), changes (there’s a weird RBI bug affecting a handful of very poor minor league hitters) and updates to come, the player pages now contain the projections for the upcoming season. Our Depth Charts also reflect ZiPS along with Steamer, enabling David Appelman to crank up all the dials and flick all the switches, and you to blame me as well as Steamer when a team’s projection doesn’t look right to you!

Spring doesn’t actually start in the Northern Hemisphere until March 20 this year, but the real spring, baseball’s spring training, kicks off in a week when pitchers and catchers report. While it’s unlikely that these are the precise rosters that will eventually start playing exhibition games, the vast majority of the significant shifts in player talent have already happened.

So where do we stand?

Naturally, I used the ZiPS projection system to get the latest run of team win totals. Borrowing from my piece on the American League, the methodology I’m using here isn’t identical to the one we use in our Projected Standings, meaning there will naturally be some important differences in the results. So how does ZiPS calculate the season? Stored within ZiPS are the first through 99th-percentile projections for each player. I start by making a generalized depth chart, using our Depth Charts as a jumping off point. Since these are my curated projections, I make changes based on my personal feelings about who will receive playing time as filtered through arbitrary whimsy my logic and reasoning. ZiPS then generates a million versions of each team in Monte Carlo fashion — the computational algorithms, that is (no one is dressing up in a tuxedo and playing baccarat like James Bond). Read the rest of this entry »

Be honest: you didn’t think A.J. Preller was done with headline-making this offseason, did you? The Padres have built a team through outrageous swings — trades that no one else in baseball would attempt and free-agent signings that make opposing teams whine with envy. After signing Xander Bogaerts earlier this offseason, though, it seemed like even Preller might be out of moves. There was no one left to sign, no one left to trade for.

The joke’s on us, though, because the Padres found a new way to make news: they signed Yu Darvish to a six-year extension worth $108 million, as MLB.com’s AJ Cassavell reported. The deal replaces the final year of his existing contract, which would have ended after this year. Instead of hitting free agency, Darvish will remain a Padre, presumably for life at this point.

Darvish has long been one of my favorite pitchers thanks in large part to his dizzying array of pitches. He threw six different ones at least 5% of the time last year and even dabbled with two more. Six pitches, six years: I know an article setup when I see one. If you’ll indulge me in some gratuitous gif-posting, I’ll walk you through six ways to think about this contract. Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 1011

This week, we sit down with one of the bright baseball minds in Baltimore before getting our lead prospect analyst’s backstory.

• At the top of the show, David Laurila welcomes Sig Mejdal, vice president and assistant general manager of the Baltimore Orioles. Mejdal tells us about breaking into baseball with the Cardinals, and what his day-to-day with Mike Elias and former podcast guest Eve Rosenbaum is like. Mejdal also shares his thoughts on analytics and data, and what his team of analysts are working on in Baltimore. Finally, David asks about spending a season in the minors, seeing Albert Pujols in his prime, and how difficult it was to trade Trey Mancini. [3:32]
• After that, Ben Clemens is joined by Eric Longenhagen for the latest edition of FanGraphs Backstories. Eric tells us about interning with his hometown IronPigs, taking up writing because he got mono, working at Baseball Info Solutions, and eventually ending up at FanGraphs. Ben also asks Eric about his favorite baseball memories, which include dressing up as Mark McGwire for Halloween and going to Veterans Stadium for his first major league game. The duo also discuss the Super Bowl being in Arizona and how going to Eagles training camp had an impact on Eric’s path. [24:20]

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