Opting Out May Not Be Manny Machado’s Best Move

Bill Streicher-USA TODAY Sports

On the heels of what was arguably the best season of his career — one in which he set career highs in wRC+ (152) and WAR (7.4), helped the Padres to the NLCS for the first time in 24 years, and finished second in the NL MVP voting — Manny Machado has informed the Padres that he intends to exercise the opt-out in his $300 million contract after this season and test free agency again.

Last Friday, at the Padres’ spring training site in Peoria, Arizona, the All-Star third baseman confirmed that in December prior to the Winter Meetings, agent Dan Lozano gave the Padres a February 16 deadline to reach agreement on extending the 10-year, $300 million contract Machado signed in February 2019. According to a report by the San Diego Union-Tribune’s Kevin Acee, the Padres made just one offer after hearing from Lozano; two days before the deadline, they offered to add five years and $21 million per year ($105 million total) to the five years and $150 million that will remain on his deal after this year. The proposed package of 10 years and $255 million wasn’t enough to satisfy Machado, and so with the deadline having passed, he told reporters that now that he’s in camp he wants to focus on the upcoming season rather than on contract negotiations. Read the rest of this entry »


2023 Top 100 Prospects Chat


Brewers Prospect Sal Frelick on Being a Pure Hitter

Sal Frelick
USA TODAY NETWORK

Sal Frelick is a pure hitter from a cold weather climate. He is also one of the top prospects in the Brewers’ system and ranks 68th overall on our recently released Top 100. A Massachusetts native who was drafted 15th overall in 2021 out of Boston College, the 22-year-old outfielder is coming off of a first full professional season in which he slashed .331/.403/.480 with 11 home runs between three levels. Moreover, he fanned just 63 times in 562 plate appearances and spent the final two months with Triple-A Nashville. Assigned a 50 FV by our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen, the 5-foot-9-and-a-half, 184-pound left-handed hitter doesn’t project to hit for much power, but his elite contact skills make him one of the more intriguing position player prospects in the National League.

Frelick discussed his line-drive approach and his ascent to pro ball prior to the start of spring training.

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David Laurila: You’re obviously a very good hitter. Where did you learn to hit?

Sal Frelick: “I don’t know if I ever learned from anybody, For as long as I can remember, the only thing I’ve tried to do is not strike out. I’ve wanted to put the ball in play, and over time, with that being the number one priority for me, it’s kind of how the swing I have now developed.”

Laurila: Is it basically the same swing you had as a kid?

Frelick: “Just about. It’s obviously gotten a little cleaner mechanically, but for the most part it’s been just short and compact. It’s not the prettiest thing you’ll ever see, but it gets the job done.”

Laurila: What’s not pretty about it?

Frelick: “If you look at your average lefty, sweet-swinging [Robinson] Canó-type of player, they have these nice long swings. Because I’ve always been trying to stay as short as possible, trying not to swing and miss, it’s just kind of compact.” Read the rest of this entry »


2023 Top 100 Prospects

Below is our list of the top 100 prospects in baseball. The scouting summaries were compiled with information provided by available data and industry sources, as well as from our 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 we use that as a rule of thumb.

All of the 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.

And now, a few important things to keep in mind as you’re perusing the Top 100. You’ll note that prospects are ranked by number but also lie within tiers demarcated by their Future Value grades. The FV grade is more important than the ordinal ranking. For example, the gap between Padres shortstop Jackson Merrill (No. 10) and Yankees shortstop Oswald Peraza (No. 40) is 30 spots, and there’s a substantial difference in talent between them. The gap between Peraza and Guardians pitcher Tanner Bibee (No. 70), meanwhile, is also 30 numerical places, but the difference in talent is relatively small. You may have also noticed that there are more than 100 prospects in the table below, and more than 100 scouting summaries. That’s because we have also included the 50 FV prospects whose ranking fell outside the 100, an acknowledgement both that the choice to rank exactly 100 prospects (as opposed to 110 or 210 or some other number entirely) is an arbitrary one and that there isn’t a ton of daylight between the prospects who appear in that part of the list.

You’ll also notice that there is a Future Value outcome distribution graph for each prospect on the list. This is an attempt to graphically represent how likely each FV outcome is for each prospect. Before his departure for ESPN, Kiley McDaniel used the great work of our former colleague Craig Edwards to find the base rates for each FV tier of prospect (separately for hitters and pitchers), and the likelihood of each FV outcome. For example, based on Craig’s research, the average 60 FV hitter on a list becomes a perennial 5-plus WAR player over his six controlled years 26% of the time, and has a 27% chance of accumulating, at most, a couple of WAR during his six controlled years. We started with those base rates for every player on this year’s list and then manually tweaked them depending on our more specific opinions about the player. For instance, Dodgers 2B/LF Miguel Vargas and Marlins shortstop Yiddi Cappe are both 50 FV prospects, but other than them both being Cuban, they are nothing alike. Vargas is a bankable, big league-ready hitter with moderate upside, while Cappe is a risky low-level prospect with huge upside. Our hope is that the distribution graphs reflect these kinds of differences.

This year’s crop of prospects has a relatively shallow high-impact group at the very top of the list. There is no 70 FV prospect in this year’s class and only two 65 FV prospects. In a typical year, we’d have a couple more than that, and sometimes as many as five or six, but this year there are only two. And it doesn’t take long before you start talking about players with warts that reduce confidence in the overall profile. This year’s 60 FV tier has some players who still show some hit tool red flags (Chourio, De La Cruz, Jones) that kept them from ever really being considered for the tier above.

Only 37 of the 112 ranked players here are pitchers. Pitchers tend to be volatile and subject to heightened injury risk, plus their usage is being spread out among more pitchers in the majors, reducing the impact of individuals. The 55 FV pitchers and above tend to have some combination of monster stuff and good command, whereas the 50 FV pitchers often have one or the other. We gravitate toward up-the-middle defenders littered all throughout the minor leagues, and really only tend to push corner bats onto the list when they’re close to the big leagues, or if we have an abnormal degree of confidence that they will continue to hit all the way through the minors. High-risk hitters with huge tools are also welcome since FV is a subjective way to factor both ceiling and risk into the same grade.

For a further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, please read this and this. If you would like to read a book-length treatment on the subject, one is available here. Read the rest of this entry »


The Bryan Reynolds Conundrum

Bryan Reynolds
Charles LeClaire-USA TODAY Sports

Despite three seasons until he hits free agency, the Pirates find themselves at a crossroads with Bryan Reynolds. Pittsburgh shipping out veterans as they approach lucrative paydays is a 30-year-old story, and as the team’s young(ish) star with the most service time, it’s no surprise that Reynolds would be the subject of constant, swirling rumors. He and the Pirates talked about an extension, but nothing came of it; seeking a little more clarity, the 2021 All-Star requested a trade. Luckily, unlike the Gerrit Cole situation, there hasn’t been a decisive break between player and organization, and Reynolds is still open to discussing an extension. But what kind of extension is realistic for Reynolds, and will the Pirates be able to field a contender while they have him?

Per The Athletic, the Pirates and Reynolds were about $50 million apart in their extension talks. Given that this $50 million isn’t, say, the difference between $300 and $350 million, it’s a notable separation. Pittsburgh’s offer was six years and $75 million, covering a few years of free agency; that would be the largest contract in team history, but that mostly reflects the ultra-thrifty approach of the Bucs, not some surfeit of munificence on their part. Compared to the eight-year, $70 million contract that Ke’Bryan Hayes signed, it seems downright miserly, given how far away Hayes was even from arbitration at the time.

Reynolds had a notable dropoff in play from 2021 to ’22, going from .302/.390/.522, 6.1 WAR to .262/.345/.461, 2.9 WAR, but a large chunk of that dropoff was to be expected given the pattern of what happens to players after career-best seasons. And in any case, there was never a chance the Pirates were actually going to offer him a contract consistent with the notion that he was a six-win player, because then you’re getting into Juan Soto territory. But as a three- or four-win player with a few years of arbitration remaining, it’s close enough for a deal to be plausible.

So let’s run the numbers. The current contract, a two-year deal to avoid arbitration, already covers the 2023 season, so we’ll focus the projection as an extension past this season. Read the rest of this entry »


Jay Jaffe FanGraphs Chat – 2/21/23

2:03
Avatar Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! Welcome to my first chat of February and my first in my new (and maybe very old, I’d have to check) time slot. I’m back in circulation after a bout of COVID (boo) among other things. Yesterday I did a piece on the contentious arbitration hearing of Corbin Burnes and what some fair contract offers for him might look like based on ZiPS (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/milwaukee-burnes-a-bridge/). Next up is a piece on Manny Machado’s plans to opt out. Anyway, on with the show…

2:04
Wireless Joe Jackson: How is it that Helton is going to walk into the HoF but Olerud got one-and-done’d with 4 votes?  I am OUTRAGED!  Or at least as outraged as possible regarding a HoF thing.

2:10
Avatar Jay Jaffe: It’s a bummer that Olerud went one-and-done on the 2011 ballot, but it’s not that hard to understand why. He came along as a candidate at a time when the electorate was rather stingy and largely paying no mind to advanced statistics. His raw totals of both hits (2,239) and home runs (255) did not read as Hall of Fame-caliber totals. A look at JAWS shows that he’s 24th at the position, just above contemporaries Jason Giambi and Will Clark (both one-and-done as well) but below Keith Hernandez. He’s 3.6 WAR behind Helton in career WAR and 7.6 WAR behind him in peak WAR — more than a win per year at his very best — and the 5.6-point gap between Helton (54.2, 0.8 above the Hall standard) and Olerud (48.6, 4.8 points below) is a big one where dreams of Cooperstown vanish into thin air.

2:10
Fan: Hello Jay, what are the chances Kenny Lofton gets voted in by the Veteran’s committee any time soon?

2:11
Avatar Jay Jaffe: very very low. It’s harder to get on to a ballot with the committee change and so long as this is hanging over his head it’s tough to see another candidate being bumped off the ballot to make room for him and thus drawing negative publicity to the process. https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-08-22/kenny-lofton-accus…

2:11
Guest: Merrifield starting at 2B in Toronto? Roster Resource has him starting over Espinal.

Read the rest of this entry »


Ben Clemens FanGraphs Chat – 2/21/23

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An Exceptional Season in the Annals of Stealing Home

Randy Arozarena
Mike Watters-USA TODAY Sports

In the first game of the 2021 ALDS between the Rays and Red Sox, Randy Arozarena stole home. With two outs, two strikes, and a dangerous left-handed hitter at the plate, the defense wasn’t worried about the runner at third. Arozarena took advantage, sprinting for home as southpaw Josh Taylor began his methodical windup. The speedy rookie timed it perfectly, taking off as soon as Taylor turned around and launching into his slide by the time the ball left the pitcher’s hand.

It was the first straight steal of home in the playoffs since Jackie Robinson accomplished the feat in 1955. Arozarena also made history by becoming the first player to ever homer and steal home in the same postseason game. But his stolen base wasn’t just historic in and of itself, and his jump wasn’t the only thing he timed perfectly. By stealing home that October, he tied a beautiful bow atop one of the most impressive league-wide seasons in the history of stealing home plate. Read the rest of this entry »


Elvis Andrus Stays in Chicago, Shifts Over to Second

Elvis Andrus
Brian Sevald-USA TODAY Sports

It’s always nice to feel welcome. After excelling for the White Sox as a stopgap shortstop in 2022, Elvis Andrus will return to Chicago in 2023, this time as the team’s starting second baseman. Toward the end of the 2022 season, he made clear to reporters that he would welcome a return engagement and was open to shifting positions if need be. Apparently Rick Hahn was listening. The deal, pending a physical, is for a reported one year and $3 million. ESPN‘s Jeff Passan and USA Today’s Bob Nightengale first reported the deal and terms, respectively. Amazingly, after 14 years in the big leagues, this was the first time Andrus had ever been a free agent.

Although Andrus didn’t make our Top 50 Free Agents list, he accrued more WAR in 2022 than 37 players who did, and he has, in my opinion, the greatest surname in all of baseball. Our crowdsourced predictions pegged him for two years and $20 million, so if one year and $3 million sounds like a lot less to you, then your math is spot on. According to MLB Trade Rumors, the only other teams reported to have interest in Andrus were the Red Sox and Angels. Read the rest of this entry »


Diamondbacks Farm Director Josh Barfield Talks Development and Comps

Michael Chow-Arizona Republic

The Arizona Diamondbacks currently have one of baseball’s best farm systems and an improved player development system is playing a big role in its success. Led by Josh Barfield since 2019, the department has seen the likes of Corbin Carroll and Alek Thomas make their big league debuts in just the past year, and other high-ceiling prospects — Jordan Lawlar is among the notables — are coming fast. Moreover, the pipeline includes not just position players, but also promising pitchers. Playing in a powerhouse division that includes the Dodgers, Giants, and Padres, the D-backs will be counting on their young core as they strive to reach the postseason for the first time since 2017.

Barfield discussed a few of the team’s top prospects, and a pair of under-the-radar players to keep an eye on, in a recent phone call.

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David Laurila: You had a relatively short playing career. Looking through the lens of your current job, how might you have been better developed?

Josh Barfield: “That’s a good question. I think having a better understanding of what I did well, the areas that I struggled in, and spending more time on [the latter]. A lot of times, guys will… it’s always fun to work on the things you’re good at, but I think the best players — the most talented ones I’ve been around — have done a really good job of recognizing their weaknesses and attacking those areas on a daily basis. Offensively, defensively, whether it’s a movement efficiency… training today is just so much more individualized compared to 20 years ago when I was coming up.” Read the rest of this entry »