Long, successful baseball careers usually have a predictable shape to them. A young, highly-regarded prospect gets his first cup of coffee, then becomes a full-time starter over the next few years, possibly ascending to star level. Then he slowly ages and declines, riding off into the sunset in his late 30s. Some choose not to follow that trend. Jamie Moyer pitched twice as many innings in his 40s as he did in his 20s, finally retiring at the absurd age of 49. In 1965, a 59-year-old Satchel Paige returned to the majors for one more game, and despite his signing being a largely ceremonial move, he still tossed three scoreless innings.

Then there’s Rich Hill. First drafted out of high school in a different millennium, Hill debuted with the Cubs in 2005 at age 25. Over the next decade, he bounced around the league, often struggling with elbow injuries and poor command. At the end of 2014, Hill was a 34-year-old who had played for six different teams, only completing 100 frames in a season once. After opting out of a minor league deal with the Nationals in the middle of the 2015 season, Hill ran out of offers with affiliated clubs. He signed with the independent Long Island Ducks and laid waste to his Atlantic League competition… for two starts. Hill was then tendered a big league contract with his hometown team, the Red Sox, had four excellent starts to close out the season, and has held down a big league roster spot ever since. Hill will begin the upcoming spring training by celebrating his 43rd birthday, making him the oldest major league player since the then 45-year-old Ichiro Suzuki last suited up in 2019. The Pirates will be his 12th team, making him one of just six players to appear for a dozen or more clubs.

When a slightly younger Hill signed with the Red Sox (for the seventh time in his career), Ben Clemens used the prophetic projection system RiPS (Rich is Pitching Superlatively) to forecast a 4.15 ERA and 1.7 WAR for his 2022 season. Hill’s actual numbers? A 4.27 ERA (but a 4.13 SIERA), and 1.8 WAR. Not bad, RiPS. But it gets even better. Ben wrote, “If he pitches to this line, he’ll earn $8 million next year and be well worth it for Boston.” In 2023, the Pirates will be paying Hill (checks notes) $8 million on the dot. Can we get some RiPS projected standings for the season? They might even turn out to be more accurate than the baseball Reddit’s marble race simulations. Read the rest of this entry »

In the days before Christmas, the Chicago Cubs filled out their starting rotation by bringing back a familiar face: Drew Smyly. This past season was one to forget for the Cubs, but Smyly was one of the bright spots. After confusing hitters with a breaking ball-heavy attack, Smyly earned an equally confusing contract structure: $8 million in 2023, $8.5 million in ’24, with an opt-out after this year and a $10 million mutual option for 2025, which comes with a $2.5 million buyout. That brings the total guarantee to two years, $19 million.

Once one of the top pitching prospects in baseball, Smyly spent most of his late 20s and early 30s bouncing aimlessly from team to team. But in 2022, he found stability in Chicago, and rewarded the Cubs with his best full season since 2014: 22 starts, 106 1/3 innings, and a 3.47 ERA. While his ERA would seem to flatter his underlying numbers, Smyly still posted a respectable FIP (4.23) and xERA (4.17). Compared to comparable free agents (Mike Clevinger, Noah Syndergaard, Matthew Boyd), Smyly’s getting an extra guaranteed year, but at a slightly lower AAV. If you want a starting pitcher who’s likely to throw 100 innings or more, with a reasonable chance of better-than-replacement-level rate stats, two years and $19 million is about what you should expect to pay.

That’s not too bad for a back-end starter, which is all Chicago will need him to be. The Cubs have already added Jameson Taillon to a rotation that includes Marcus Stroman and Justin Steele, who was quietly impressive in his first full season as a big league starter. Kyle Hendricks is also on course to return from a shoulder injury, which means Smyly is basically just there to make up the numbers. Let’s put it this way: If Smyly ends up having to be anything more than Chicago’s fourth-best starter, this is going to be a lost season anyway, and for reasons that have nothing to do with the 33-year-old lefty. Read the rest of this entry »

When I was assigned to write about Nathan Eovaldi’s eventual free agent signing — this prior to the Winter Meetings — my best guess was that he’d be returning to his baseball home for each of the last four-plus seasons. Boston had been a good fit for the 32-year-old right-hander, and the Chaim Bloom-run club needed him more than he needed them. Given the uncertainty of their rotation — not to mention increasing pressure to spend like a contender, not a small-market pretender — the Red Sox bringing back Eovaldi would have made all the sense in the world.

That didn’t happen. Last week, the Texas Rangers, a team that actually has been spending like a contender, inked the no. 15 player on our Top 50 free agent rankings to a two-year, $34 million contract. It was their third ambitious signing of the winter. Earlier in the offseason, Chris Young and Co. jumpstarted the starting rotation by signing Jacob deGrom to a five-year, $185 million deal and Andrew Heaney to a two-year, $25 million pact. The cumulative $244 million expenditure was based on need. Lacking front-of-the-rotation quality, Texas finished fourth from the bottom among American League clubs in starting pitcher WAR last year.

The trio of newcomers join a rotation that includes Jon Gray and Martín Pérez (back with the club after accepting Texas’ qualifying offer), with Dane Dunning, Jake Odorizzi (acquired in trade from the Braves in November), and Glenn Otto serving as solid backup options. Thanks to the additions, this is one of the deepest — and potentially among the most productive — starting staffs in either league. Read the rest of this entry »

The Arizona Diamondbacks front office isn’t afraid to make marquee “challenge trades,” deals that are consummated in a place of competitive neutrality rather than between one “buyer” and one “seller,” swaps that have more to do with player fit, or the opportunity to move a player at the peak of their trade value in exchange for one you ordinarily wouldn’t be able to acquire. They did it when they sent Jazz Chisholm Jr. to Miami for Zac Gallen and pulled off a version of it when they acquired Starling Marte from Pittsburgh. Christmas Eve Eve brought the latest example, with Arizona sending outfielder Daulton Varsho to the Toronto Blue Jays in exchange for left fielder Lourdes Gurriel Jr. and catcher Gabriel Moreno. Varsho and Moreno probably aren’t names casual baseball fans know. In fact, I’d wager the culture is more familiar with Gurriel’s wavy, meringue-like locks than the two cornerstones of this trade, as Varsho has come of age in relative obscurity near the basement of a loaded NL West, and Moreno (though no longer rookie eligible due to days on the active roster) spent most of 2022 gestating in Buffalo. Instead, this is a blockbuster for the nerds and hardcore seamheads, a deal that fortifies a contending team’s lineup while giving the other club a rare opportunity to acquire a recently graduated top prospect and field a young, high-ceiling’d roster that might be able to slay the blue and brown dragons in its division if most of the youngsters pan out as hoped.

As of now, Varsho is the most accomplished and successful player in the trade. A former top 100 prospect himself, 2022 was Varsho’s third big league season, but the first in which he played the entire slate at the big league level. He had a career year, slashing .235/.302/.443 with 27 homers, 53 total extra-base hits, and 16 steals in 22 attempts, all while playing several positions, including some center field and catcher. Even with the low batting average and on-base percentage, Varsho’s season was good for a whopping 4.6 WAR, placing him 26th among all position players in baseball. A huge chunk of that WAR total comes from Varsho’s defensive metrics, as Statcast has him evaluated as having been worth 18 Outs Above Average in the outfield, sixth in all of baseball in 2022 and first among everyday outfielders.

It’s wise to take defensive metrics with a grain of salt. Even for a relatively fleet-footed player, such a superlative performance was surprising given Varsho’s catching background and prospect evaluation, which projected him to an outfield corner in the event that he couldn’t stick behind the plate. If he were truly an elite right fielder and plus center fielder (his OAA were split pretty evenly between the two positions), why wasn’t he just being deployed as an outfielder throughout his career? Part of the reason Varsho’s statistical performance is in its own stratosphere is the sheer number of opportunities rated “three star” and above he had throughout the 2022 season. He ranked no lower than 15th in all of baseball in opportunities to make three-, four-, and five-star plays on defense. But he did make those plays, all at a rate near the top of the big league leaderboards, including every single three-star play he was tasked with, a great distance from the rest of his peers when you combine raw opportunity and rate of success. Read the rest of this entry »

For the 18th consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Los Angeles Angels.

Batters

I remember the first time I visited Anaheim. A jewel along the Mississippi River, with its vast cornfields, state fairs with fried butter, and an easy drive from cities like Detroit, Chicago, Cincinnati, or St. Louis. Hold on a jiffy, that doesn’t sound quite right. Anaheim is actually in southern California, not the midwest. My confusion, you see, stems from my opinion that the Angels, despite having two of the best players of this generation, are a Central division team. At least, they’re run like one.

The Angels aren’t afraid of a few big contracts, but when it’s time to fill out the roster, it’s all cost-cutting, “just good enough” thinking, and depth resembling a small puddle on a blazing hot day. Just good enough hasn’t, it’s turned out, actually been good enough, not by any stretch of the imagination. The Angels haven’t had a winning record since 2015. The Pirates have a win-loss record more recently in the black. Read the rest of this entry »

Tyler Black could follow in his father’s footsteps, but that’s not the path he’s pursuing. What the 22-year-old Toronto native wants to do is to play in the big leagues — a goal that is very much within his reach. Drafted 33rd overall in 2019 out of Wright State University, Black is an on-base machine who ranks No. 12 on our recently-released Milwaukee Brewers Top Prospects list.

The road not being taken is related to the youngster’s dream. His father is former TSN and CTV broadcaster Rod Black, whose three-plus decades behind the microphone had him calling games in a variety of sports, including baseball (one of his on-air partners was World Series hero Joe Carter). I asked the infielder/outfielder if he ever envisions himself describing the action on a diamond, court, or even a sheet of ice.

“Maybe when I’m done playing,” Black told me during his stint in the Arizona Fall League. “I’ve never really thought about it seriously, but I can say that it was definitely great growing up around sports. My dad used to announce Blue Jays games, Toronto Raptors games — pretty much everything — so I was always around ballparks, and around athletes. That kind of put me into the game.”

Legendary Blue Jays broadcaster Jerry Howarth, who was alongside Tom Cheek when the latter emoted “Touch ’Em All Joe!” — a moment that will forever live in Canadian baseball lore — is among those who reached out after Rod Black’s son was drafted by the Brewers. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2022, I once again had an opportunity to interview numerous people within the game. Many of their words were shared in my Sunday Notes column, while others came via an assortment of Q&As, feature stories, and the Talks Hitting series. Here is a selection of the best quotes from this year’s conversations, with the bolded lines linking to the pieces they were excerpted from.

——

“I’d say Mike Trout is underrated. For one, he’s coming off an injury. Two, he’s playing with a two-way player who everybody goo-goo and ga-gas about. I’ll say this about Clayton Kershaw as well: When you do it for so long, people kind of get bored. It just becomes ho-hum.” — Dallas Keuchel, Chicago White Sox pitcher

“It was like, ‘Oh, this guy isn’t going to turn into a pumpkin. He’s real. There’s substance to this, he’s not just this novelty act with the shimmy and the shake, and the drop down.’ There are objective measures that say this guy is a high-level starter. Now it’s, ‘OK, how do we continue to build on that?’” — Matt Blake, New York Yankees pitching coach

“It’s part of what led us to George Kirby. He had very good stuff on draft day that turned into elite stuff once he got into our system… We feel like we can take good stuff and turn it into great stuff. We feel like we can take average stuff and turn it into plus stuff. It’s hard to look at a pitcher who only has stuff and say we’re going to make him into ‘a guy.’” — Jerry Dipoto, Seattle Mariners President of Baseball Operations Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley close the book on 2022 by bantering about the year in Effectively Wild, the Marlins signing Jean Segura, the heretofore-unsuspected existence of Charles Leblanc, and the pitch-calling accuracy of 10 retiring umpires, plus followups on how the zombie runner affects plate appearance totals, Lars Nootbaar’s pepper grinder, the year-to-year consistency of team replay-review success rates, and overlooked Rockies stories. Then (38:51) they discuss at least one listener-nominated topic about each American League team that they had previously overlooked on the podcast in 2022 (including mini Stat Blasts about the most unique team lineups used per season and Anthony Santander and team winning percentages when a player hits at least two homers), plus a Past Blast (1:46:52) from 1949.

Audio intro: Other Lives, “End of the Year”
Audio outro: Blue Rain Boots, “2023”

Link to nVenue episode
Link to MLBTR on Segura
Link to projected team WAR
Link to retiring umps story
Link to Umpire Scorecards
Link to Hallion punchouts video
Link to story on ump improvements
Link to story on ump age
Link to EW episode on NL teams
Link to pepper grinder story
Link to tweets about Nootbaar
Link to replay success rates
Link to success-rate spreadsheet
Link to stat correlations
Link to SP stat correlations
Link to more stat correlations
Link to pitching stat correlations
Link to xstats correlations
Link to Freeland clip
Link to Pint story
Link to Rockies scoreboard
Second link to Rockies scoreboard
Link to 2022 SP WAR
Link to Baker deli story
Link to Craig Wright on Vogt
Link to UPI Vogt story
Link to Vogt homer video
Link to Vogt ref impression 1
Link to Vogt ref impression 2
Link to Ringer best sports moments
Link to highest BABIPs
Link to OAA behind pitcher
Link to FG on the righty shift
Link to Jays Journal on Gausman
Link to The Athletic on Gausman
Link to Jay Jaffe on Gausman
Link to FG on Jays shifting
Link to Kwan pinball story
Link to swing rate leaderboard
Link to CtC on Gonzalez
Link to story on Gonzalez’s swings
Link to story on Harry Ford
Link to story on Great Britain/WBC
Link to 2+ home run spreadsheet
Link to immaculate innings story
Link to best second-half hitters
Link to Harold Ramírez story
Link to Boston.com on Eck
Link to The Ecktionary on Twitter
Link to Ecktionary glossary
Link to The Athletic on Eckersley
Link to Eck on “pair of shoes”
Link to CBS Sports on Cuas
Link to The Athletic on Cuas
Link to Cuas MLBN video
Link to Cuas on his debut
Link to article on Meadows
Link to Rodriguez report
Link to Rodriguez return story
Link to lineups spreadsheet
Link to Ryan Nelson’s Twitter
Link to previous lineups Stat Blast
Link to RP WPA leaders
Link to fastest four-seamers
Link to story on Cruz and Arraez
Link to ultimate grand slams
Link to Cabrera robbery
Link to article on Cabrera
Link to Pinstripe Alley on Cabrera
Link to 1949 story source
Link to Dodgertown site
Link to story on Rickey innovations
Link to Jacob Pomrenke’s website
Link to Jacob Pomrenke on Twitter

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Ben Lindbergh, Meg Rowley, and FanGraphs writer Ben Clemens continue a cherished podcast tradition by conducting the 10th annual Effectively Wild Minor League Free Agent Draft, in which they select 10 minor league free agents each and compete to see whose roster will accumulate the most combined MLB playing time in 2023. First they explain the history and ground rules of the draft, and then they start making their selections (18:11), followed by a Past Blast (1:20:02) from 1948.

Audio intro: Greg Brown, “Laughing River”
Audio outro: Buzzcocks, “Playing for Time”

Link to eligible free agents
Link to WAR of past selections
Link to the draft at the EW wiki
Link to competitions spreadsheet
Link to this year’s picks
Link to BA picks
Link to Down on the Farm (hitters)
Link to Down on the Farm (pitchers)
Link to Down on the Farm (signings)
Link to VEB on draftees
Link to 1948 story source
Link to SABR on Braves Field
Link to SABR on neon foul poles
Link to Jacob Pomrenke’s website
Link to Jacob Pomrenke on Twitter

 Sponsor Us on Patreon
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The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2023 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Even without Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Curt Schilling, and Sammy Sosa — and with just a trickle of compelling new candidates — this year’s BBWAA Hall of Fame ballot doesn’t lack for controversy or tough decisions. The issue of performance-enhancing drugs continues to stand in the way of the candidates with the gaudiest statistics, and voters must also confront the matter of how much weight, if any, to accord the ballot’s notorious character clause. But with a deadline of December 31, a voter can deliberate for only so long, and so five weeks after my envelope arrived in the mail, it’s time to turn this thing around.

This is my third year with an actual ballot, but filling one out hardly feels like old hat, even with 21 years of analyzing Hall of Fame elections, and 19 years of doing so while armed with the system that became JAWS (next year, I’ll do something to celebrate). While so many mentors, peers, and colleagues have come and gone in this racket, I’m grateful to have stuck around long enough to have earned the right to vote, and it’s a privilege I embrace, even with the heightened scrutiny that comes with having a ballot.

In the weeks since the Hall unveiled this year’s 28-candidate slate, I’ve analyzed the top 17 candidates at length. That leaves 11 one-and-done stragglers to cover in early January, none of whom are in serious consideration for space on my ballot; indeed, none of those 11 has secured a single vote from among the 70 published in the Ballot Tracker as of 12:01 AM ET Thursday, but their careers deserve a proper valedictory. While I’ve mostly known whom I planned to include, I went through my full process before finalizing its contents, just as I did with my virtual ballots; particularly given my recent attempts to update the pitching side of JAWS, it never hurts to take another look. Read the rest of this entry »