To put it charitably, it’s been a rough 18 months for fans of the Reds. Finding themselves surprisingly in the wild card race in July 2021, the team’s front office bravely ran away at the trade deadline, choosing only to improve the bullpen depth slightly. The downhill slope has only grown steeper since then, as the organization chose to go into full fire sale mode, trading practically every player with a significant contract who drew interest from another team. The exodus of talent had immediate results in Cincy: the team lost 100 games for the first time since 1982, when Reds GM Dick Wagner conducted his own fire sale on the dried-up husk of the Big Red Machine.

For anyone who may have thought that Cincinnati’s suddenly hard-line approach to spending was a temporary rebuilding strategy, ownership has done its best to disabuse fans off the notion. Bob Castellini was reportedly one of the owners who didn’t want to raise the luxury tax threshold at all, and he’s spoken repeatedly about the team’s finances. Club president Phil Castellini, during a lunch with a Reds booster group, gave a confusing presentation about how awful it was to own a baseball team, complete with a bizarre presentation that either made myriad mistakes or simply made up playoff projections from this very site. Most prognostications have the Reds challenging the Pirates for fourth place in the NL Central in 2023.

Against this backdrop, not all is doom and gloom. Despite the disappearance of talent at the major league level, there are a lot of interesting players in the minors. The farm system improved to eighth in the league in our late 2022 rankings, and five prospects made our recently released Top 100 Prospects list. The 2023 ZiPS projections for the Reds are bleak, but it’s more optimistic about the state of the farm system, ranking seven Cincinnati prospects in its Top 100. Overall, 11 players made the Top 200 in the ZiPS prospect list, including a ludicrous numbers of shortstops (five).

There’s not a whole lot of pitching on this list, but the good news is that the Reds already have some promising arms on their roster. ZiPS thinks that the three front-end starters — Hunter Greene, Graham Ashcraft, and Nick Lodolo — will all make positive contributions in 2023, and odds are they’ll be even better come ’25 or ’26. Before and after a shoulder strain that cost most of his August, Greene was dominant in his 35 1/3 second-half innings, with a 1.02 ERA, 1.70 FIP, 13 strikeouts per game, and a walk rate cut in half from before the All-Star break. The last may be the most important; it doesn’t take a whole lot of innings to establish an improved (or worsened) walk rate. Lodolo, meanwhile, barely needed a half-season to put up 2 WAR, and Ashcraft and his high-90s fastball ought to have some strikeout upside.

If we construct a roster based on who is under contract or team control, you can cobble together most of a pretty interesting 2025 roster. Now, not all of these players will actually be on the roster in two years; the idea is to get the baseline for a team with the players the Reds currently have.

C Tyler Stephenson
1B Christian Encarnacion-Strand
2B Jonathan India
3B Noelvi Marte
SS Elly de la Cruz
LF Spencer Steer
CF Matt McLain
RF Allan Cerda
DH Jake Fraley

C Mat Nelson
IF Edwin Arroyo
OF Michael Siani
OF Stuart Fairchild

SP Hunter Greene
SP Nick Lodolo
SP Graham Ashcraft
SP Andrew Abbott
SP Connor Phillips

RP Alexis Díaz
RP Tejay Antone
RP Justin Dunn
RP Reiver Sanmartin
RP Ian Gibaut
RP Connor Overton
RP Joel Kuhnel
RP Ricky Karcher

You can no doubt quibble with any of these choices, because this is highly speculative. Maybe the shortstops sort themselves out in a different way, assuming that some aren’t directly traded for outfield help. Perhaps the Reds stick with Nick Senzel through his free-agent season, but I personally feel that he’s a prime suspect to be non-tendered after 2023. There are myriad choices that can be made differently, but generally speaking, if you can only make the 2025 Reds using in-organization players, the basic framework is likely to be something in this ballpark.

I did this with the Pirates last week (and the rest of the league), and I only got the Bucs to 76 wins in 2025. But the Reds have a sunnier baseline; with all teams under the same constraints, they “start” 2025 with a baseline projection of 85 wins. That’s not to say that will be the projection, only where the team stands in talent in 2025 compared to the rest of the league. And an 84-win team in the NL Central is a contender, unless someone decides to go all-in, Padres-style, in the next couple years.

This is where Cincinnati hits an important decision point. If a team like this looks to be a contender in 2025, would there actually be investment in the roster in free agency to get it over the top? The lack of this was the crucial element that doomed the good 2010s Pirates teams. Will the Castellinis, if they’re still the owners, stick to their financial guns when there’s a real chance at playoff contention? It doesn’t really make sense to spend a lot on the Reds as they’re currently constructed, but what happens when there’s a compelling reason to? I don’t know the answer to that question, though I’m cautiously pessimistic.

There’s a lot to not like about the Reds right now. But there’s a lot to like about their future, if ownership is willing to allow that future to fully bear fruit.

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Manny Machado’s extension, whether the Padres have spending constraints, and what the team’s future might look like, then (18:51) discuss their impressions of the pitch clock in spring training so far and offer a brief update on their podcast editor search (30:42). After that, they continue their 2023 season preview series by discussing the St. Louis Cardinals (33:55) with Katie Woo of The Athletic, and the Arizona Diamondbacks (1:09:31) with Nick Piecoro of the Arizona Republic, plus a Past Blast from 1974 (1:44:41).

Audio intro: Robyn Hitchcock, “1974”
Audio interstitial 1: Ween, “Stay Forever”
Audio interstitial 2: Rotten Mind, “Serpent Eyes”
Audio outro: David Crosby, “1974”

Link to Dan S. on Machado
Link to MLBTR on Machado
Link to WaPo on the Padres
Link to payroll breakdown
Link to next year’s FA class
Link to Colbert Stat Blast
Link to game-ending violation video
Link to game-ending violation story
Link to Sawchik’s game-time thread
Link to Ben on spring training
Link to Jeff on spring training pace
Link to FanGraphs playoff odds
Link to Cardinals offseason tracker
Link to Cardinals depth chart
Link to Katie’s spring preview
Link to Katie on players to watch
Link to Katie on bounceback players
Link to Katie’s author archive
Link to D-backs offseason tracker
Link to Diamondbacks depth chart
Link to BJOL regression article
Link to Nick’s spring preview
Link to Nick’s author archive
Link to 1974 article source
Link to 1959 article source
Link to Trueman’s CSUN page
Link to Trueman’s book
Link to Trueman’s other book
Link to David Lewis’s Twitter
Link to David Lewis’s Substack
Link to Britton on Mets pickoffs
Link to Woodward on Mets pickoffs

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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 »