The speculation about Padres third baseman Manny Machado exercising his opt-out clause after the 2023 season came to a stunning conclusion over the weekend, as club and superstar agreed to an 11-year, $350 million contract. The new deal rips up the final six years of the contract that Machado signed before the 2019 season.

If nothing else, tally one team that is apparently not concerned with the short-term hiccups in baseball’s revenues due to the Bally/Diamond bankruptcy; the Padres are one of the teams with a regional sports network (RSN) that is affected. If revenues are up in the air, they have made sure that third base certainly is not, following an extension that will also keep Yu Darvish in town for all or most of the rest of his career. The Padres aren’t trying to be the Rays, the scrappy underdogs that hunt very large game with a sharpened stick; they’re trying to go toe-to-toe with the Dodgers at their own game. This is less David versus Goliath and more M. Bison versus palette-swapped M. Bison in “Street Fighter II.”

My colleague Jay Jaffe covered a lot of the particulars about the Manny situation in San Diego last week, so I’m going to skip the exposition. I think Jay and I both underestimated just how motivated the Padres were to ensure Machado stayed in mustard-and-brown for a long time. We had a ZiPS projection in that piece, but now that we know where he will play and for how long, I ran a new projection.

Let’s just say that ZiPS isn’t overly enthusiastic about the contract, valuing Machado’s future services at $181 million over 11 years. He is a superstar, but there’s a big difference between signing a player before their age-26 season and their age-30 season. Just to illustrate, here’s the projection a second time, but with Machado the age he was when he signed his initial deal with the Friars.

That’s a valuation over $400 million, a notable difference! The sad truth is that even for superstars, the 30s are more often than not a tale of significant decline. Just to illustrate, here are all non-active position players worth between 41–51 WAR through age 29 (Machado is at 46.6) and how they fared in their 30s.

ZiPS actually has Machado aging slightly better than the average player in this group, with an additional three WAR over about 1,000 more plate appearances. The three active players at the end of their careers that I chopped off wouldn’t make this any sunnier a list; none of Miguel Cabrera, Evan Longoria, or Andrew McCutchen have aged particularly well.

Some of the decreased projection is due to the fact that Machado is no longer a defensive star at third base as he was earlier in his career. Defense doesn’t decline as rapidly as people think at the non-speed positions, and the fact that Nolan Arenado’s glove has stayed quite steady gives him kind of a fallback position if his bat declines. Machado no longer has that luxury.

Despite my grumpiness as an analyst who inevitably has to play devil’s advocate, let me emphasize that I’m certainly not shedding any tears for the pocketbooks of team ownership. While speculating what the Padres’ analytics gang has for Machado over the next 11 years would be a wild-ass guess, I know enough to know that ZiPS does not generally give projections that are grossly different from ones that teams run internally. The team’s ownership group, led by Peter Seidler, was no doubt given all the information the team had internally of this type and is also aware of the revenue situation, his personal net worth, and the fact that the big jump in baseball’s luxury tax threshold from 2021 to ’22 is much, much smaller in subsequent seasons of the CBA. They take this risk with the eyes wide open.

Even as a risk, it’s hard to dislike this signing as a fan of baseball. It’s refreshing to see owners who want to keep their teams together, who prioritize putting the best team on the field right now, and who directly challenge another of baseball’s elite franchises. Baseball’s system of playoffs and revenue sharing incentivizes just sneaking into the postseason every year, and if I worked for a team, I’d recommend the same cynical view that is prevalent among franchises. So it’s nice to see a team with a little more ambition, one willing to be happy with the increases in team value rather than also requiring a healthy profit every season to boot.

There remains a big unanswered question in the form of Juan Soto. Keeping him may cost $40 million a year, and I now have to wonder just how far San Diego’s willingness to spend will stretch. Are the Padres really willing to already be at $200 million for 2025–27 with two starting pitchers under contract? The farm system has nowhere near the depth that it had a few years ago, after all; ZiPS had no Padres prospects in its Top 100. While our prospect team placed two, the farm system ranked 26th at the end of last year, and though the new rankings aren’t out yet, I can’t imagine they’ve moved up a ton. But we’ll worry about Soto later.

By signing Machado, the Padres have signaled that they’re here to win now, and that the current aggressive spending isn’t just the apogee between the fire sales that have peppered San Diego’s franchise history. They’re going after the Dodgers on their own turf, and that’s pretty cool. Now the win now team just has to do the hard part and actually win now.

Joey Votto has yet to play a spring training game, and he probably won’t for at least a little while longer as he recuperates from the surgery on his left shoulder that ended his 2022 season. That hasn’t stopped the 39-year-old future Hall of Famer from filling reporters’ notebooks now that camp has opened, particularly as he heads into the final year of his 10-year contract and perhaps his final year in the majors.

Votto hit just .205/.319/.370 with 11 homers in 376 plate appearances last year; all of those slash stats were career lows, as were his 92 wRC+ and -0.9 WAR. His performance was particularly dismaying given his 2021 resurgence. Reversing a 2019-20 skid during which he had managed just a 101 wRC+, 26 homers, and 1.1 WAR, he hit .266/.375/.563 (139 wRC+) with 36 homers in 533 PA; all told, it was his best season since 2017.

That made the sudden arrival of Votto’s worst season all the more jarring, even though we’ve all become accustomed to seeing even great players in their late 30s fall apart. Last week, Votto offered an eye-catching, blunt assessment of his season:

Joey Votto said he felt like he was getting better last year after he ditched his "bullshit bat" and "greedy" approach. "But again, maybe I played like shit because I’m not good anymore, we’ll see. I doubt that, but we’ll see. I’m excited about the challenge."

— C. Trent Rosecrans (@ctrent) February 19, 2023

Read the rest of this entry »

Gavin Cross loves to hit, and he does so, figuratively speaking, with his feet planted firmly on the ground. The son of a former minor leaguer who went on to become a scout and a coach, the sweet-swinging 22-year-old outfielder was drafted ninth overall last year out of Virginia Tech and is now one of the top prospects in the Kansas City Royals organization. His smooth left-handed stroke is a big reason why. Cross logged a 1.071 OPS in his final collegiate season, and he essentially matched that number in his first taste of pro ball. Playing all but three of his games with Low-A Columbia, he put up a 1.070 OPS over 135 plate appearances.

Cross talked about his development as a hitter, and his ability to stay in the moment, last week.

———

David Laurila: How would you define yourself as a hitter, and how have you evolved?

Gavin Cross: “My dad played, and from a young age I was taught to be a hitter first. I was really conventional with my setup all the way until college, and was always trying to hit line drives to left-center. My freshman year — that was the COVID year — I had 24 hits, and 23 were singles. But I was second on our team in exit velo, so I was hitting the ball hard. I just wasn’t really hitting it in the air [and] splitting the gaps. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this month, I wrote about the improvements that umpires have made in calling balls and strikes according to the rulebook strike zone. Today, I’d like to focus on the other side of that equation: pitch framing. The consensus around baseball is that pitch framing’s story has followed a very familiar arc. Call it the Competitive Advantage Life Cycle:

• Teams realize the immense value of a skill.
• An arms race ensues as they scramble to cultivate it.
• The skill becomes widespread across the league.
• Since the skill is more evenly distributed, it loses much of its value.

Once everybody got good at pitch framing, nobody was great at it. As Rob Arthur has put it, “Catcher framing felt like it was disappearing almost as soon as it was discovered.” I even have fun graphs to drive the point home. There are definitely more useful ways of presenting the data, but I like how these ones let you watch the entropy dissipate over time in open defiance of the second law of thermodynamics:

Read the rest of this entry »

Harry Ford is one of the top prospects in the Seattle Mariners organization, and he is also unique among his peers. Born Harrison Michael Ford, in Atlanta, 20 years ago this week, the right-handed-hitting catcher is the son of English immigrants. His mother spent her childhood in London, while his father — “a real Brit; he still has an accent”— came to the U.S. a little over two decades ago from Oxford. Moreover, his multi-national upbringing included his family’s having hosted exchange students from Argentina, Brazil, and Germany.

If the above list of countries has you wondering if football — soccer to us here in the States — has been a part of his life, the answer is yes. Ford’s father is a huge Arsenal fan who used to play in a competitive men’s league, while the youngster impressed on the pitch in his schoolboy days before turning his full attention to baseball. Given that Ford is a muscular 5-foot-10, 200-pounds and has been called a unicorn due to the speed that augments his frame, how good might he have been had he pursued his father’s favorite sport rather than America’s national pastime?

“I think I’d go crazy in soccer!” was Ford’s fun-loving (and quite possibly accurate) response to that question, meaning that he would excel. Instead he is excelling on the diamond, and he’s doing so at a position that belies his athleticism. How he found himself wearing the tools of ignorance was a matter of happenstance.

“I was always a third baseman, but when I was eight or 10 we needed someone to play catcher,” explained Ford, whom the Mariners took 12th overall in the 2021 draft. “I remember that there was this royal blue, really ugly gear, and I was like, ‘I’ll try it. Why not? ‘I got back there and liked it, and haven’t left it since.”

As uncommon as it is for elite athletes to end up behind the plate, it has been an even less common destination for African Americans. Black catchers have been few and far between in MLB history. To Ford’s mind, “It will be cool to change that stigma.” Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley announce that they’re hiring a new podcast editor and solicit applications for the position, then (9:40) banter about another zombie-runner-related update to dictionary.com, MLB’s latest crackdown on sticky stuff, displaying the pitch clock on broadcast score bugs, Albert Pujols’s 10-year personal services contract with the Angels, and Rays pitcher Ryan Thompson’s comments about the arbitration process. After that, they continue their 2023 season preview series by discussing the Philadelphia Phillies (50:09) with Matt Gelb of The Athletic, and the Baltimore Orioles (1:26:47) with Nathan Ruiz of the Baltimore Sun, plus a double Past Blast from 1973 (2:05:42).

Audio intro: Girlpool, “Hire”
Audio interstitial 1: The House of Love, “Philly Phile”
Audio interstitial 2: The Felice Brothers, “Baltimore”
Audio outro: Emitt Rhodes, “Really Wanted You”

Link to updated “automatic runner” entry
Link to current “ghost runner” entry
Link to original “ghost runner” entry
Link to 1985 “automatic runner” reference
Link to other ’85 reference
Link to Hang Up and Listen episode
Link to Stark on sticky stuff
Link to Eno on sticky stuff
Link to Eno on sticky stuff again
Link to info on crows
Link to info on score bugs
Link to Blum on Pujols
Link to Thompson’s Twitter thread
Link to Thompson’s agency site
Link to Rosenthal on arbitration
Link to BP’s Arbitration Showdown
Link to FG post on arbitrators
Link to Rays Pride Night story
Link to FG playoff odds
Link to FG payroll rankings
Link to Phillies offseason tracker
Link to Phillies depth chart
Link to Middleton comments
Link to Matt’s spring training preview
Link to Matt on Painter
Link to ESPN on Song
Link to Matt on Song
Link to Matt on Thomson
Link to Matt’s author archive
Link to Orioles offseason tracker
Link to Orioles depth chart
Link to Plexiglass Principle info
Link to MLB.com regression article
Link to Sun sign removal tweet
Link to Nathan on the Sun sign
Link to Nathan on Angelos
Link to Nathan on Orioles team models
Link to story on throwing over plate
Link to more on throwing over plate
Link to BA on throwing over plate
Link to Angelos MLK Day story
Link to Angelos open books story
Link to story on throwing over plate
Link to Nathan’s author archive
Link to 1973 article source
Link to MLB 3-team doubleheaders
Link to David Lewis’s Twitter
Link to David Lewis’s Substack
Link to 1973 potential tie source
Link to 1973 potential tiebreaker source
Link to 1973 “NL Least” source
Link to story on 1973 race
Link to Ben on a 5-way tie
Link to Russell on a 5-way tie
Link to EW episode on a 5-way tie
Link to Jay Jaffe’s team entropy requiem

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The Brewers are vying for a playoff spot in 2023, and rightfully so. Despite coming up short last season, their roster is quite talented. Their playoff odds sit at 57% and their division odds at 37.6%, trailing only the Cardinals in the latter among NL Central squads. They’re led by a strong starting rotation, but the offense has at a least a few question marks. After trading for a potential bounceback candidate earlier this winter in Jesse Winker, they are hoping for the same in Luke Voit, who is joining Milwaukee this spring as a non-roster invite. After the worst offensive season in his professional career, Voit couldn’t land a guaranteed roster spot anywhere and will instead attempt to make a Brewers team in need of some offensive pop.

Voit is a good hitter. His recent track record might paint him as average, but injuries have limited his performance in consecutive years. Even though last season wasn’t nearly as productive as any of his years in New York, he still finished it with a 102 wRC+ in 568 plate appearances. And while it’s no longer realistic to assume good health from Voit, if he can sustain even semi-consistent health, he can be an offensive boost for the Brew Crew.

As it stands, the Brewers have a few options who will rotate between first base and designated hitter on a non-permanent basis, and none have the potential juice that Voit has. Let’s look at those options and how their ZiPS projection compares with Voit’s:

Assuming health, Tellez and Winker are the only hitters guaranteed to be in the lineup almost every game. Tellez performed well last year and has the advantageous platoon split; Milwaukee’s offense is highly dependent on him repeating his 2022 season. Winker is expected to be the most productive of the other options. He will likely move between the outfield and designated hitter (and probably spend more time doing the latter than playing the former), but if he hits anything like he did in Cincinnati and as ZiPS expects him to, the at-bats for Voit will be limited. Despite this, Winker and Tellez are both left-handed, leaving some room for Voit to get decent playing time. Read the rest of this entry »

It has been a pretty quiet offseason in Seattle. The Mariners got things moving fairly quickly, trading for Teoscar Hernández and Kolten Wong to cover the holes left by a couple of departing free agents, but things slowed down after that. They’ve brought in a couple of veterans to provide a bit of depth, but are otherwise largely banking on a repeat of their success last year and some continued growth from their young core. They made one more last minute addition yesterday, signing Kole Calhoun to a minor league contract with an invitation to spring training.

Bringing in an 11-year veteran like Calhoun is the type of move that plenty of teams make during the spring, but they rarely work out for the player involved. Most ball clubs are content to roll out whatever internal depth they already have instead of clearing a 40-man roster spot to add a player on a minor league deal. But every once in a while, a veteran will show that he has just enough left in the tank during spring training to break camp on the Opening Day roster.

If you squint, you can see how Calhoun could be primed for a bounce back season in 2023. A long-time Angel, he really started to struggle during his final seasons in Anaheim. From 2017–19, he put up a 94 wRC+ and accumulated 3.5 WAR, with a career-high 33 home runs in his final season for Los Angeles. He joined the Diamondbacks in free agency the following year and produced a career-high 125 wRC+ and 1.5 WAR during the shortened season. The last two years haven’t been kind to him, however. A recurring hamstring injury cut short most of his 2021 season and his production cratered last year after signing a one-year deal with the Rangers, with his wRC+ falling to a career-low 67. Read the rest of this entry »

As an East Coast dweller with a habit of watching West Coast broadcasts (and particularly Dodgers games) after the work is done and the kiddo tucked in, I’m well aware of Kenley Jansen’s evolution toward what we might politely call a more deliberate approach to pitching. Indeed, over the course of his 13-year major league career, he has evolved into one of the majors’ slowest workers on the mound. With this year’s introduction of a pitch clock, he spent the offseason working to adjust his delivery and is facing as much pressure as any pitcher to adapt to the new rules, though he’s hardly alone.

On Thursday, The Athletic’s Andy McCullough and Jen McCaffrey had some choice quotes from Jansen, who joined the Red Sox this year via a two-year, $32 million deal, on the subject of his tempo. Last year, while a member of the Braves, he saw his name atop an MLB Network graphic of the slowest-working pitchers. “I was so embarrassed,” he told The Athletic. “Like, dude, you’ve got to clean it up.”

“It drives me crazy,” he added. “Because I’m like, when did I get this slow?”

The topic is particularly relevant because Major League Baseball is adding a pitch clock this year, one that gives pitchers 15 seconds to begin their deliveries with the bases empty and 20 to do so with men on. MLB is also planning strict enforcement of the balk rule, because the aforementioned times require clarity on when a pitcher’s delivery starts, thus presenting an additional problem for Jansen.

The 35-year-old righty believes that the addition of a double swivel of his left (front) hip to start his delivery may have slowed his delivery down even as its addition catalyzed his resurgence. Stung by his reduced role in the 2020 postseason as the Dodgers finally won that elusive championship and hoping to regain velocity and command, he added the move in April ’21. By repeating a hip swivel that he’d previously introduced at the start of his delivery, he improved his balance, avoided drifting toward third base, and lengthened his delivery toward home plate. His results certainly improved: his average cutter velocity increased from 90.9 mph to 92.5, and his ERA fell from 3.33 to 2.22 (though his FIP and xERA barely budged). Last year, Jansen’s cutter averaged 92.2 mph, still faster than his 2018–20 velocities.

As you can see from the video above, the hip swivel is pretty subtle when viewed from the center field angle via which we typically watch pitchers, but the batter and umpire have a better view. That little movement matters because under the new rule, the clock stops at the start of the delivery, but what Jansen’s doing is a false start that can disrupt a hitter’s timing. Now in addition to speeding up his internal clock, he has to work on simplifying his delivery so as not to commit a balk.

While his hip swivel helps at least somewhat in explaining Jansen’s rebound in performance — mixing in his sinker and slider have helped as well — the data tell us he’s been throwing the brakes on his pace of work more or less since he assumed closer duties for the Dodgers in 2012, just three years after switching from catching to pitching and two years after reaching the majors. Last year, Statcast began publishing Pitch Tempo data, which measures the median time between pitch releases; not every pitch is accounted for, only those that were called strikes or balls. The Statcast measure differs from our lost-and-found Pace metric, which divides the time difference between the PITCHf/x timestamps of the first and last pitches of a plate appearance by the number of pitches in the PA minus one. Statcast also splits the data into into times with the bases empty and with men on base. Here’s what the data looks like for Jansen; by happy coincidence, the start of Statcast’s data coverage is the same year as his major league debut.

Jansen’s delivery times have generally been on the rise since he began pitching, with 2012, ’16, and last year standing out as points where he went from slow to slower to slowest. Pitchers as a group have been taking even longer between pitches over the same timespan, with the average with nobody on base increasing from 15.8 seconds in 2010 to 18.1 seconds in ’22, and from 22.2 seconds with nobody on in ’10 to 23.3 in ’22. Taking a page from contributor Chris Gilligan’s big-picture look at the attempts to improve the pace of play, here’s how the leaguewide tempo data looks alongside pace and time of game over the span of Jansen’s career:

Note that last year reversed a years-long trend; the average time between pitches decreased relative to 2021, as did the length of the average nine-inning game. Those improvements have largely been attributed to the PitchCom signaling system, though two-year declines in strikeout and walk rates have helped as well.

While I could give you a pair of graphs comparing Jansen’s splits to the league averages, I chose attempt to index his splits (pitcher tempo divided by league tempo times 100) into what I’ll call Tempo+, which I think similarly gets the point across:

From 2012 to ’21, Jansen was around 30% above average with the bases empty and about 17% above average with men on, but last year he set highs in both categories, climbing to 42% above average with the bases empty and 35% above average with men on. Good thing he moved out of the Pacific time zone, or I’d have been even more sleep-deprived.

Anyway, among pitchers with at least qualifying 100 pitches with the bases empty in 2022, Jansen actually had only the third-longest time between pitches:

Jansen did edge Loáisiga for the highest percentage of slow pitches, with 22.3% of his offerings with the bases empty taking at least 30 seconds, compared to 21.2% for Loáisiga. Meanwhile, with men on base, Jansen took over the major league lead in average time…

… but took a backseat to Gallegos in percentage of slow pitches, 58.2% to 57.4%; Williams (54.6%) and Colomé (51.7%) were the only other pitchers who topped 50% under those conditions. Gallegos might be the heavyweight champion of dawdlers, as his 33.8 seconds with men on in 2021 is the highest mark of the past seven seasons, and his 26.5 seconds with the bases empty that same year ranks third behind only Rafael Dolis (27.2 seconds in 2020) and Chapman (26.9 seconds in 2021). Jansen’s former teammate, the infamously slow Pedro Báez, has the second-longest split with men on, 32.9 seconds in 2015, and shaved just one second off that the following year.

if I had six months to live, I'd spend it watching Pedro Baez throw an inning because it would feel like eternity

— Jay Jaffe (@jay_jaffe) October 10, 2016

It’s important to point out that Pitch Tempo doesn’t directly line up with the new pitch timer, which starts when the pitcher receives the return throw from the catcher and ends once he begins his delivery. Statcast publishes a Timer Equivalent that just subtracts six seconds from the tempo measure. Jansen’s Timer Equivalent measures of 19.6 seconds with the bases empty and 25.6 seconds with men on base would both constitute what former teammate Clayton Kershaw cheekily called “a shot clock violation” given the new regulations.

In terms of cleaning it up, Jansen is hardly alone. Using 100-pitch cutoffs for each split, last year 81 out of 523 qualifiers (15.4%) had timer equivalent averages over 15 seconds with the bases empty, and 56 out of 467 (12.3%) had averages over 20 seconds with men on. In both categories, the vast majority of the pitchers above those thresholds were relievers. In fact, only five pitchers who made at least half a dozen starts last year had timer equivalents greater than 15 seconds with the bases empty: Shohei Ohtani (15.7), Tylor Megill (15.3), JP Sears, Corbin Burnes, and Michael Kopech (15.1 apiece). Meanwhile, 16 starters had timer equivalents of at least 20 seconds with men on base, led by Montas, the only pitcher who cracked the tables above:

In an odd coincidence, not only is Montas here but also Sears, one of the pitchers he was traded for last August, and just missing the cut with an average right at 20 seconds is another, Ken Waldichuk. To be fair, Montas was bothered by shoulder problems that sent him to the injured list late last year and resulted in surgery earlier this week; his 28.0-second tempo average with men on base was 1.5 seconds higher than in ’21, suggesting he might have been trying to give himself a little extra time to recharge between pitches.

Indeed, that’s the general theory for the increased time between pitches, particularly for relievers; they’re throwing short stints at maximum effort and so need a bit of extra time to get that velocity to where it can have the greatest effect. FiveThrityEight’s Rob Arthur previously found that every second of delay adds .02 mph to average fastball velocity, which is to say that waiting 10 seconds can add 0.2 mph. Earlier this week at Baseball Prospectus, Darius Austin took a deeper look at the tempo-velocity link in light of the rule change, particularly searching for pitchers able to avoid losing velocity while improving their tempo from beyond the new clock limits to more acceptable times:

[P]itchers in the slower tempo group were 32 percent more likely to have increased their velocity with runners on. It’s the bases empty comparison that shows the notable difference here, though: only 24.3% (17 of 70) pitcher seasons saw an increase in average fastball velocity accompanying a reduction in time between pitches. By contrast, 41.4% of the pitchers who took more time on the mound added something to their fastball, making it over 70% more likely that fastball velocity increased relative to those who sped up between deliveries.

Particularly as he’s now 35 years old, Jansen is at least well aware of the continuous work it takes to adjust, but maintaining his effectiveness while adhering to the new rules is as big a challenge as he’s faced on the field. Here’s hoping he can get time on his side.

When I filed my story about LSU’s two-way star Paul Skenes on Monday evening, I thought, “Well, I probably won’t have to think or write about another pitching prospect whose career was complicated by military obligations for at least another 72 hours!”

How wrong I was. On Wednesday afternoon, momentous news filtered up from Florida, and not the kind of news that normally filters up from Florida: Noah Song, late of the Red Sox and the U.S. Navy, is bound for Phillies camp. Read the rest of this entry »