The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2023 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2017 election at SI.com, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. 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.

A savant in the batter’s box, Manny Ramirez could be an idiot just about everywhere else — sometimes amusingly, sometimes much less so. The Dominican-born slugger, who grew up in the Washington Heights neighborhood of upper Manhattan, stands as one of the greatest hitters of all time, a power-hitting right-handed slugger who spent the better part of his 19 seasons (1993–2011) terrorizing pitchers. A 12-time All-Star, Ramirez bashed 555 home runs and helped Cleveland and Boston reach two World Series apiece, adding a record 29 postseason homers along the way. He was the World Series MVP for the Red Sox in 2004, when the club won its first championship in 86 years.

For all of his prowess with the bat, Ramirez’s lapses — Manny Being Manny — both on and off the field are legendary. There was the time in 1997 that he “stole” first base, returning to the bag after a successful steal of second because he thought Jim Thome had fouled off a pitch… the time in 2004 that he inexplicably cut off center fielder Johnny Damon’s relay throw from about 30 feet away, leading to an inside-the-park home run… the time in 2005 when he disappeared mid-inning to relieve himself inside Fenway Park’s Green Monster… the time in 2008 that he high-fived a fan mid-play between catching a fly ball and doubling a runner off first… and so much more. Read the rest of this entry »

On May 24, the Angels were 27-17 and just a game behind the Astros in the AL West. Their roster was relatively healthy, and a breakout from Taylor Ward alongside standout performances from Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani had helped them leap out to a strong start through the first month and a half of the season. Two weeks later, their win total was still stuck at 27, having fallen below .500 after an ugly 14-game losing streak. Of the nine players who accumulated more than 100 plate appearances for the Angels through mid-May, just three reached at least 300 plate appearances afterwards. Los Angeles cycled through 32 different position players from May 24 onwards, struggling to find any sort of competent depth to cover for their injured and ineffective players.

The Angels’ lack of depth isn’t isolated to this season either — it’s been a constant thorn in their side for the past decade. They haven’t posted a winning record since 2015 and have only reached the playoffs once over the last 13 seasons despite employing two of the best baseball players to ever play the game, one of whom has been an Angel for most of that stretch. With Ohtani’s free agency just a year away and the potential sale of the franchise by owner Arte Moreno looming, the 2023 season feels like a significant hinge point for the Angels.

So far this offseason, they’ve been aggressive in bringing in the type of talent that complements their superstars while avoiding any long-term commitments that could complicate the sale of the club. They signed Tyler Anderson and Carlos Estévez to bolster their pitching staff and traded for Hunter Renfroe and Gio Urshela to lengthen their lineup. And on Tuesday, they inked Brandon Drury to a two-year, $17 million contract. That deal brings the Angels’ total projected 2023 payroll to $206 million, the highest in franchise history. 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 Colorado Rockies.

Batters

There are a lot of problems with the Colorado Rockies as an organization, but I think the biggest one is different than what ails most other poorly run franchises. It’s not parsimony; while the Rockies aren’t exactly the Mets, with a projected 2023 payroll around $163 million, they’re not the Pirates or the Marlins either. Playing in Coors make things trickier, but the team’s already shown they can find viable starting pitching — the biggest challenge in an environment like Denver — and they play in a beautiful park and city, and get consistent fan support. It isn’t even necessarily an analytics problem. While the top levels of the org clearly aren’t on board with the ways modern front offices think about the game — they have a department with sky-high employee churn — this is more a symptom of the problem rather than the problem itself. The problem that plagues the Rockies is a lack of imagination.

What do I mean by imagination? With most bad teams, you can imagine the scenario in which they’re good. The Orioles looked like a pretty lousy club entering the 2022 season, but they also had the most high-upside minor league talent in baseball. The Reds have several young pitchers with impressive physical tools, while the Pirates have some interesting starters to go along with some good prospects and young big leaguers at key defensive positions. But if you look at the Rockies, especially the offense, there just isn’t ambition there. While it’s bad that this group projects as one of the worst lineups in the league, it’s even worse that they project as having the lowest variance of any team I’ve projected so far this offseason. It’s a bit like buying a lottery ticket; almost every time you play Powerball, you’re going to be a loser, but if you hit it big, you become fabulously wealthy. Nobody buys a Powerball ticket because the winning prize is a 1989 Mercury Sable. Read the rest of this entry »

When José Abreu signed with the Astros earlier this offseason, there was a lot to like. He fits their overall team construction, he’s a great hitter, and the contract looks more reasonable every day in the context of the rest of the free agent market. In several corners of the baseball internet, though, there was one worrisome note: Abreu’s performance against fastballs, particularly of the high-velocity variety, declined markedly in 2022.

I’m not crediting one person in particular with this observation, only because I’ve seen it in so many different places. It’s incontrovertibly true. Here are Abreu’s numbers against both all four-seamers and all fastballs thrown 95 mph or harder, per Baseball Savant:

Oh no! The trends seem quite clear; Abreu didn’t hit fastballs very well in 2022, and he’d already started to decline against them somewhat the season before. Is he just cooked? Is this fastball performance the proverbial canary in the coal mine, alerting us that bad times are coming? Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley break down every incredible angle of the biggest twist of the MLB offseason: free agent Carlos Correa’s overnight pivot from a 13-year agreement with the San Francisco Giants to a 12-year deal with the New York Mets. After their incredulous Correa reactions, they close with a few thoughts on the Pirates’ latest innovation in the realm of announcing signings (this one involving Austin Hedges), Aaron Judge and the Yankees’ captaincy, and their intention to talk about Brandon Drury and the Angels, plus a Past Blast from 1945.

Audio intro: Fruit Bats, “Stunned One”
Audio outro: The Weakerthans, “Hymn of the Medical Oddity”

Link to Ben L. on Correa
Link to Ben C. on Correa
Link to Boras comments
Link to Verducci on Correa
Link to Heyman’s report
Link to Heyman on Cohen
Link to The Athletic on Correa
Link to Emma’s tweet
Link to team payrolls
Link to team depth charts
Link to 2003 Onion story
Link to Astudillo report
Link to R.J.’s Pirates tweet
Link to Jeter video
Link to MLBTR on McCann
Link to 1945 story source
Link to SABR on Robinson’s signing
Link to SABR on Wright
Link to Jacob Pomrenke’s website
Link to Jacob Pomrenke on Twitter

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This offseason has seen an avalanche of activity early on, with 22 of our top 25 free agents signing before Christmas. But last night, we somehow doubled up. After an undisclosed medical issue held up the official announcement of Carlos Correa’s contract with the Giants, the entire deal fell through, and the Mets stepped into the fray, signing Correa to a 12-year, $315 million deal this morning, as Jon Heyman first reported.

I’ll let that breathe for a second so that you can think about it. The Giants went from laying out $350 million and adding a cornerstone player to their roster for more than a decade to nothing at all. The Mets went from a big free agency haul to an unprecedented one. Correa is going from shortstop to third base, and maybe losing one gaudy vacation home in the process when all is said and done.

The Mets had already spent heavily this offseason to shore up their pitching. With Jacob deGrom, Chris Bassitt, and Taijuan Walker all leaving in free agency, the team had a lot of high-quality innings to replace, and they did so in volume, adding Justin Verlander, Kodai Senga, and José Quintana. Those were in effect like-for-like moves, as was signing Edwin Díaz, Adam Ottavino and Brandon Nimmo after they reached free agency. The 2023 Mets stood to look a lot like the 2022 Mets in broad shape – most of their additions were either swaps (deGrom for Verlander) or small (Omar Narváez will be a platoon catcher, David Robertson will shore up the bullpen). Read the rest of this entry »

I’m a fan of Michael Brantley. A big, big fan, in fact. He’s the type of hitter that both old school and new school folks adore. He doesn’t strike out and he hardly ever whiffs, but he still swings fast and with a variable bat path. He doesn’t necessarily light it up with his exit velocity, instead thriving by hitting it where they ain’t. On Sunday, he re-signed with the Astros on a one-year, $12 million contract; he can earn an additional $4 million in performance incentives. Basically, if he stays healthy and hits like he has since arriving in Houston in 2019, the deal will end up having about the same average annual value as his previous two-year, $32 million contracts with the Astros. Retaining Brantley is a low risk move. He is the perfect option to complete an already extremely balanced and talented group of hitters. And while he might not be the athlete he once was — his sprint speed dropped all the way down to the 11th percentile in 2022 — all the team needs him to do is stay healthy and hit in the DH spot.

Brantley has been extremely consistent during his four years with Houston; he’s posted a wRC+ ranging from 121 to 132 and been good for a three to four win pace no matter how many games he played. In his first two seasons, he didn’t miss much time at all, playing in 148 games in 2019 and 46 in the shortened ’20. However, his number of games played began to trail off in 2021, dipping to 121, and he only managed 64 in ’22 before requiring season-ending surgery on his right shoulder. After the injury, the Astros missed Brantley, including in the postseason. I know they won the World Series, but there were times throughout the playoffs when their lineup stagnated and could have used some of the variation Brantley provides. Their offense was still deeper than any other team, but if they could have asked for anything, it would have been another lefty to put the ball in play after the heart of the lineup delivered a mass of baserunners.

Of course, Brantley’s ability to play that role in 2023 assumes health, which as we’ve noted, hasn’t been a given. And injuries remain a significant concern after his shoulder surgery in August, the second of his career. No surgery is ever good, but for a hitter, lead shoulder surgery is particularly impactful. When you think about swing mechanics, having relaxed shoulders is key to avoiding too much tension in your upper body. One thing my hitting coaches always used to tell me was to relax from the chest up. Sometimes when hitters try to muscle up and take swings, they tense their shoulders. This can negatively affect a smooth energy transfer, as well as barrel accuracy and deceleration. Your shoulders should be along for the ride, not impeding your swing with roadblocks. Brantley has already overcome shoulder surgery before, but as you age, rehab gets more difficult. It’s obviously a concern. Read the rest of this entry »

The Mets, in their shopping spree of an off-season, have brought back yet another player from last year’s squad. Joining the already re-signed Brandon Nimmo and Edwin Díaz, Adam Ottavino has also agreed to run it back with a team clearly willing to upgrade wherever necessary in pursuit of a championship. He will earn $14.5 million over the next two seasons, with the opportunity to opt out after 2023.

Ottavino is coming off of arguably the best full season of his career and a major rebound from his previous two years. From 2013 to ’19, he had a 2.90 ERA and 3.34 FIP as one of the only pitchers who could figure out the nightmare of Coors Field. He spent 2020 with the Yankees and ’21 with the Red Sox, where his performance declined a bit but his peripherals were still above average. His 2022, with a 2.05 ERA and 2.85 FIP, was certainly a return to form, but he did so with a newfound skill that he’s excelled in for the first time in his career: limiting walks.

For the first time since 2016, Ottavino had a single-digit walk rate, and in the span of just one offseason he went from dreadful (seventh percentile) to very good (77th percentile) at avoiding free passes. In addition to bringing his strikeout rate back to the level of his Rockies days, he posted the best full-season K-BB% of his career. Not only are these improvements impressive in the context of his own career, but the jump is also an outlier among all major league pitchers; between 2021 and ’22, only three other pitchers had their K-BB% improve more than Ottavino. Read the rest of this entry »

A day after landing Seth Lugo, the Padres added another versatile player to the fold in Matt Carpenter. The 37-year-old lefty swinger, who rescued his career from oblivion with the Yankees, will serve as something of a utilityman according to MLB.com’s A.J. Cassavell, potentially picking up playing time at designated hitter, first base, and both outfield corners, with the possibility of backing up second base and third base as well.

In a season bookended by a stint with the Rangers’ Triple-A Round Rock affiliate and a fractured left foot, Carpenter hit an astounding .305/.412/.727 with 15 homers in just 154 plate appearances. His 217 wRC+ was the highest of any player who received at least 20 PA in 2022, 10 points higher than teammate Aaron Judge. It was also the highest wRC+ of any player with at least 150 PA since 2005, a cutoff I chose in order to avoid peak Barry Bonds, who topped the mark three times from 2001 to ’04:

That’s mixing a few small-sample seasons in with some MVP-winning ones (Betts, Cabrera, and Harper in addition to Judge), with Freeman in both camps, but that’s kind of the point. What Carpenter did in his small slice of playing time was otherworldly and unsustainable. That it even happened was almost unimaginable given that at this time last year, it wasn’t clear whether he’d ever occupy a major league roster again.

Carpenter was cut free by the Cardinals after hitting a combined .176/.313/.291 (76 wRC+) with 0.2 WAR in 180 games and 418 PA in 2020–21. The team declined his $18.5 million option for 2022, instead paying him a $2 million buyout and ending his 13-year run in the organization that drafted him out of Texas Christian University in the 13th round in 2009. During his 11 seasons in St. Louis, he made three All-Star teams, received MVP votes in three seasons, and outproduced every Cardinals position player this side of Yadier Molina, helping the team to four NL Central titles, six playoff appearances, and the 2013 NL pennant. But he hadn’t hit at even a league-average clip since 2018, making his two-year, $39 million deal a minor disaster, and so it made no sense to push to salvage the deal via its third year.

After his option was declined, Carpenter reached out to longtime NL Central rival Joey Votto for advice on how to reverse his mid-30s decline, as the Cincinnati first baseman had done. In a conversation that Carpenter recalled lasting 3 1/2 hours, Votto gave him a combination pep talk and roadmap to fixing his swing, one that centered around a data-driven approach. While working with hitting gurus Tim Laker and Craig Wallenbrock as well as former teammate Matt Holliday over the winter, Carpenter switched to a new bat and underwent a full mechanical overhaul to improve his swing path and refine his body movement.

As Holliday told the New York Post’s Dan Martin in June:

“Just watching on TV, his front hip was leaving early, which was pulling him out and around even inside pitches… He was missing under pitches that were middle-away and then balls that were in, he was hooking a little too much. As a friend and someone who likes hitting, I told him, ‘This is what I see’ and we talked about hitting and why his average on balls out over the plate had gone down and why he was getting under balls and striking out more than he ever had.

“After a few days, there was a different sound off the bat and the ball was traveling much better… He was getting carry on the ball with different spin and it was more true.”

Once the lockout ended, Carpenter signed a minor league deal with the Rangers, one that guaranteed him a salary of $2 million in the majors. After missing the cut for Opening Day, he accepted an assignment to Round Rock, where he hit .275/.379/.613 with six homers in 95 PA, but the team didn’t see fit to call him up. By mutual decision, he was released by the Rangers on May 19, then signed with the Yankees a week later, after they placed Giancarlo Stanton on the injured list with a right calf strain. Carpenter debuted that day, homered off the Rays’ Jeffrey Springs the next day, and just kept slugging; his first three hits, and eight of his first 12, were homers. Despite playing only sporadically during the periods when Stanton was healthy, he continued to wield an incredibly potent bat, making 16 starts at DH, 11 in right field, three apiece in left field and at first base, and two at third base; he also pinch-hit 12 times.

The storybook comeback came crashing to a halt when Carpenter fouled a Logan Gilbert pitch off the top of his left foot on August 8. He completed the plate appearance but didn’t play again before the end of the regular season. While the Yankees included him on their postseason roster, his 1-for-12 showing with nine strikeouts amply illustrated that he needed more time to get his rhythm back.

I’ll get back to the performance, but first, the contract. Carpenter is guaranteed $12 million in 2023–24, with incentives that can take the deal to $21 million. Via The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal, he’ll receive a $3 million signing bonus, a $3.5 million salary for 2023, and a $5.5 million player option for ’24. For both seasons, he gets an additional $500,000 for reaching plate appearance thresholds of 300, 350, 400, 450, 500, and 550; what’s more, each of those thresholds that he reaches in 2023 also increases his 2024 base salary by another $500,000.

Thus, if Carpenter makes 400 PA in 2023, he’ll earn $8 million and then have a $7 million player option for ’24. If he has a 550-PA season, he’ll make $9.5 millon in 2023, and if he picks up his $8.5 million option and then reaches 550 PA again, he’ll earn a total of $11.5 million in ’24, reaching the $21 million maximum for the package. Even if he doesn’t max out, that’s a pretty impressive payday under the circumstances.

Carpenter’s arrival adds yet another moving part to a San Diego roster that was upended by the Xander Bogaerts signing earlier this month. That pushed Ha-Seong Kim from shortstop to second base and Jake Cronenworth from second to first, and more or less ensured that Fernando Tatis Jr. primarily plays the outfield. While Carpenter appears likely to see the bulk of his time as the team’s DH, he could spot at first against some righthanders, which would return the lefty-swinging Cronenworth to the keystone and put the righty-swinging Kim on the bench. Carpenter doesn’t seem like much of a threat to take significant playing time away from Tatis (whose PED suspension still has 20 games to go) or Soto in the outfield corners, but he could fill in while one of them DHs or gets a day off.

As to how productive he can be in San Diego, it’s worth considering how Carpenter did what he did in New York. He hit the ball pretty hard in general (13.7% barrel rate, 42.1% hard-hit rate, 89.8 mph average exit velocity), but the key was putting it in the air with great frequency while playing half of his games in a ballpark that specifically rewards lefthanders for doing so. Among hitters with at least 150 PA, his 60% pull rate led the majors, and his 53.3% fly ball rate was third. All 15 homers — nine in Yankee Stadium, six on the road — came via pulled fly balls:

Carpenter hit just 25 pulled fly balls, but his 761 wRC+ on them ranked third in the majors, behind only Judge’s 902 (including 31 homers on 48 such balls) and Nathaniel Lowe’s 883 (17 homers on 26 such balls). Both of those guys had over 400 batted ball events in 2022, so their pulled flies represented a much smaller fraction (11.9% for Judge, 5.8% for Lowe) than for Carpenter (26.3%).

That strategy might not work as well in San Diego. Where Yankee Stadium is 314 feet down the right field line and 385 to right-center, Petco Park is 322 feet down the right field line and 391 to right-center. And that’s before considering the park’s notorious marine layer, which brings in cool, moist air and suppresses home runs — something not accounted for in Statcast’s expected home runs stat, which shows Carpenter matching his season total of 15, 14 of which would have gone out in San Diego based on distance and angle. By our park factors, which use five years of data, Yankee Stadium had a home run factor of 109 for lefties, and Petco
95; by those of Statcast, which are based upon three years of data, the gap is even wider, 118 to 96.

ZiPS isn’t tremendously optimistic about Carpenter’s production, which shouldn’t be a surprise given the sample sizes feeding it; after all, he preceded those 154 PA of videogame numbers with 910 that produced just an 87 wRC+:

Via Dan Szymborski, ZiPS values that production at $8.2 million on a two-year deal, though the low playing time is obviously a factor; if Carpenter reaches the higher percentiles of his 2023 projection, he’ll play more frequently. At a baseline of 400 PA, ZiPS projects a contract worth $12.8 million over two years, which is more in the ballpark of his deal, though if he’s good enough in 2023, he could opt to pursue something even more lucrative.

The Padres are banking that the things Carpenter did to overhaul his swing will make it more likely he can remain a productive hitter, if not a guy who homers at a Bonds-like rate. His addition pushes the team’s payroll to $266.7 million for Competitive Balance Tax purposes, about $6.3 million short of the third tier of penalties. Padres ownership has shown that it’s not too concerned about such matters at the moment, particularly if such moves give the team a better chance to win at a time when the Dodgers have suddenly gotten cost-conscious, to say nothing of how the Giants must be reeling from the shock of the Carlos Correa switcheroo. There’s no guarantee Carpenter can remain a big bat, but at the very least, the NL West’s deepest roster has gotten deeper.

In order to understand Jordan Lyles’ two-year, $17 million contract with the Kansas City Royals, you need to understand this: Baseball, unlike other sports, is not governed by a clock.

A rosy, romantic articulation of this fact has been a cliché within the sport for generations. Other, newer, cruder sports are bound by the oppressive temporal strictures that make our lives into a brutal struggle, but not baseball. Baseball proceeds at whatever pace the game requires, aloof from the petty concerns of time. This distance allows grown men to revert to gleeful childhood. The crack of the bat, the smell of fresh-cut grass, and so on.

The truth is somewhat more sinister. Because baseball operates outside the bounds of time, there is no escape unless the game is completed. Mere desultory attendance will not suffice — progress must be made or the game will not allow you to leave. You cannot take a knee, or rag the puck, or kick the ball really high to kill the clock. There is no clock. Baseball is like Jumanji. Complete the objective or you will be trapped within the game until you die. Read the rest of this entry »