Major League Baseball will look significantly different in 2023 due to several new rules, but there’s another change that won’t attract as much attention as a pitch clock or all that steamy base-on-base action. Ten veteran umpires have retired and 10 new ones will be taking their place. I’d like to explore the effect these new umpires might have, but first, let’s look at the state of umpiring right now.

The short version is pretty simple: Since the beginning of the pitch tracking era in 2008, umpires have improved their accuracy in calling balls and strikes every single year. Accuracy has gone from 81.3% to 92.4%. If an improvement of 11.1% in 15 years doesn’t sound particularly big, consider it this way: incorrect calls have been cut by nearly 60%.

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As the 2023 NCAA baseball season gets underway, so too does this year’s Prospect Week, which begins with a fresh coat of paint on my 2023 draft prospect rankings. I asked around the industry for thoughts about how many prospects it makes sense to ordinally rank at this time of year, and scouts’ and executives’ answers ranged from as low as 30 to as many as 75, with most answers falling close to 50. Typically, there are enough 40+ FV or better prospects by draft day to fill the first two rounds of the draft. For this update, I worked back through the players who already populated the 2023 rankings on The Board to revise their grades and reports, revisited my 2022 summer and fall in-person scouting notes, and integrated data from last season to identify and then help evaluate college prospects who weren’t already on there. I did that until I stopped finding players who comfortably hovered around the 40+ FV line or above.

Ideally, my draft list will eventually include all of the eligible players who are talented enough to make a pro team’s prospect list. Usually about 150 players end up migrating to the pro side of The Board right after the draft, a good many of whom haven’t even popped up yet. For a handful of them, the draft itself is my means of identification, with post hoc analysis generating their grade and ranking. Players who I already have notes and opinions about but who exist beneath the 40+ FV scope that I have hard ranked right now still make sense to have on The Board, just not yet with an ordinal ranking. The number of players in the 40 FV tier (future fifth starters and middle relievers, low-ceiling bench hitters, and volatile high school pitchers) and below is so substantial that it’s almost impossible to maintain a precise ranking into the fifth, sixth and seventh rounds of the draft (we’re talking about 200 rapidly changing youngsters at that point) since chunks of that would be rendered obsolete as early as this weekend. I have a few of these kinds of players bucketed by demographic below the ordinally ranked guys, as I have on past draft lists. Players will be added to those buckets, and the depth of the ordinal rankings will increase as the spring marches along and these players can be assessed with greater precision. Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Wacha is a boring free agent. Don’t take it personally, Padres fans or Cardinals fans from his electrifying 2013 run; he’s still a very competent pitcher who delivered a classic playoff performance as a rookie. At this point in his career, though, he’s a competent rotation filler, a fourth or fifth starter who offers bulk innings at a reasonable rate. As Michael Baumann already detailed, that suits San Diego just fine.

Naturally, since this is the Padres, that bread-and-butter signing comes with a wildly complicated contract structure. It’s a one-year, $7.5 million deal, or a three-year, $39.5 million deal, or a four-year, $26 million deal with innings pitched bonuses — or even some fraction thereof. No word on whether it’s also Optimus Prime, but it’s certainly a transformer:

Wacha deal with Padres:
Four years, $26M

Signing bonus $3.5M

2023 $4M

Club options, must be picked up simultaneously
2024 $16M
2025 $16M
 
If club options declined
2024 player option $6.5M
2025 player option $6M
2026 player option $6M
All exercised one at a time.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) February 16, 2023

One thing is for sure: the Padres aren’t afraid of a little complexity. They signed Nick Martinez to a similar deal earlier in the offseason. These nested and mutually exclusive options are hard to parse, but I think they’re an interesting idea, so let’s talk through the different ways this deal could go and what it means for both Wacha and the Padres. Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 1012

On this edition of the pod, we talk to a player/analyst in the Cardinals system before hearing the story of how our RosterResource guru got here.

• At the top of the show, David Laurila welcomes Ryan Loutus, a 24-year-old right-hander who went undrafted out of a D-III school and now finds himself in the Cardinals’ big league camp. Loutos has impressed on the mound, but he has also been a big contributor off the field, working as an analyst for the club to develop a player-facing app and help convey data to his teammates. David asks Ryan about balancing his focus between his two responsibilities, weighing pitching science vs. pitching feel, his analysis of his own arsenal, and what he might do after his pitching days are over. [3:57]
• After that, Ben Clemens asks Jason Martinez to share his own FanGraphs Backstory. We hear about wanting to run through a wall thanks to a Bob Gibson biography, working at the YMCA, starting a band, and eventually having the idea to create RosterResource. Jason also tells us how he and RosterResource ended up here at FanGraphs, spending a long time searching for the thing he was destined to do, and seeing Ruppert Jones go deep at his first Padres game. [26:55]

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Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @dhhiggins on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximate 1 hour 19 minute play time.)

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Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the release of FanGraphs’ playoff odds and the biggest differences between the FanGraphs and Baseball Prospectus playoff and World Series odds, then continue their 2023 season preview series by discussing the Seattle Mariners (18:28) with Ryan Divish of the Seattle Times and the Chicago White Sox (1:03:48) with The Athletic’s James Fegan, plus a Past Blast (1:49:08) from 1970 and a postscript.

Audio intro: Spiritualized, “Do it All Over Again”
Audio interstitial: Superchunk, “Low F”
Audio outro: The Stooges, “1970”

Link to Ohtani’s FA comments
Link to FG playoff odds announcement
Link to FG playoff odds
Link to Ben C. on the playoff odds
Link to PECOTA-based odds
Link to odds differences spreadsheet
Link to MASN statement
Link to Mariners offseason tracker
Link to Mariners depth chart
Link to Ryan’s spring training preview
Link to Ryan’s author archive
Link to 2023 draft order
Link to Vogt hiring news
Link to White Sox offseason tracker
Link to White Sox depth chart
Link to The Athletic’s offseason grades
Link to James’s spring training preview
Link to James’s author archive
Link to FG’s 2B projections
Link to 1970 article source
Link to 1970 Winter Meetings info
Link to SABR’s source
Link to David Lewis’s Twitter
Link to David Lewis’s Substack
Link to McCarver’s NYT obit
Link to Angell’s McCarver profile
Link to Angell on McCarver again
Link to FG’s Negro Leagues stats
Link to info on racetrack
Link to info on photography
Link to more info on photography
Link to third photography article
Link to fourth photography article
Link to fifth photography article

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Earlier this week, as is tradition, FanGraphs founder David Appelman went into his garage, turned off all the lights except for some candles, and performed a dark and arcane ritual. The words were carefully chosen and spoken precisely, with any variation promising disaster. Then he went back inside, pushed a few buttons on his computer, and now we have playoff odds for 2023!

Okay, fine, that isn’t exactly how it goes down, but it’s close. Our playoff odds bring together pieces of a lot of features you’ve already seen on the website. We start with a blended projection that incorporates ZiPS and Steamer’s rate statistic projections. We add in playing time projections from RosterResource, which incorporate health, skill, and team situation to create a unified guess for how each team will distribute their plate appearances and innings pitched.

With playing time and production in hand, we use BaseRuns to estimate how many runs each team will score and allow per game. That gives us a schedule-neutral win percentage for each team, because you can turn runs scored and runs allowed into a projection via the Pythagorean approximation. From there, we simulate the entire season 20,000 times, with an odds ratio and a random number generator determining the outcome of each game on the schedule, and voila! Our playoff odds. Read the rest of this entry »

12:02

Dan Szymborski: SzymChat is *back* now that I’m firmly in the domain of the living.

12:02

Dan Szymborski: Players tend to be stubborn about dropping pinch-hitting.

12:03

Dan Szymborski: And with Albies, he isn’t *so* bad left-handed that the issue is likely to be forced.

12:04

Dan Szymborski: I mean, he’s still at around a .750 OPS left-handed

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The FanGraphs 2023 Playoff Odds are now available on the site. As a reminder, here’s what each column represents in the current 12-team playoff structure:

• Win Div: The probability the team wins their division.
• Clinch Bye: The probability that the team wins their division and is one of the top two seeds in their league, thus earning a Wild Card Series bye.
• Clinch Wild Card: The probability the team qualifies for the playoffs through a Wild Card berth.
• Make Playoffs: The sum of Win Div + Clinch Wild Card, indicating the probability that the team qualifies for the playoff in any capacity.
• Make LDS (Postseason section): The probability the team wins the Wild Card Series or earns a bye.

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They say you should never go to the grocery store hungry. If you do, you could end up like the Padres: A cart full of shortstops, eye-catching extensions for key players like Yu Darvish and Robert Suarez, and even a couple fun veteran DH types from the end caps to snack on during the drive home. Then you get home, unload the car, and realize you forgot something essential like bread, or coffee, or the entire back half of a starting rotation.

So you have to go back to the store and pick up a Michael Wacha before spring training:

Wacha agreement with Padres has complex structure that could earn him more than $24M over four years, sources tell @TheAthletic. Deal includes player and team options that protect both Wacha’s upside and downside while lowering his AAV for luxury-tax purposes. Pending physical.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) February 15, 2023

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Gary Sanchez finally has a team… sort of. Last week, he was one of two catchers named to Team Dominican Republic’s roster for the 2023 World Baseball Classic, which gets underway next month. Meanwhile, although pitchers and catchers have reported to major league camps this week, Sanchez still doesn’t have a destination, as he remains a free agent.

By our count, Sanchez is one of just four position players who put up at least 1.0 WAR last year but remain on the market, along with shortstop Elvis Andrus (3.5), outfielder Jurickson Profar (2.5) and infielder José Iglesias (1.0). Admittedly, he’s not coming off a great season with the Twins, but Sanchez’s 1.3 WAR was respectable, his 89 wRC+ matched the major league average for catchers, and he had his best defensive season since 2018, reversing a multiyear decline.

Aside from rumors of interest from the Giants in January and the Angels earlier this month, the Sanchez burner of the hot stove has barely flickered this winter, but things heated up a bit in the wee hours of Wednesday after Sanchez and strength and conditioning coach Theo Aasen shared a short Instagram video of the 30-year-old backstop doing some exercises and baseball activities while wearing a shirt with the Yankees’ insignia. Read the rest of this entry »