Ketel Marte was one of the best 10 hitters in baseball in 2024. That’s just an objective fact – or at least as objective as facts can get in baseball. Our calculation of WAR? He was 10th among hitters. Baseball Reference has him 10th as well. Baseball Prospectus put him in seventh place. That’s not surprising; he set career highs in home runs, league-adjusted OBP and slugging, and wRC+. He played solid defense and even added a little value on the basepaths.

He was one of the best 10 hitters in baseball in 2019, too. In fact, he’s the only player to crack the top 10 in both 2019 and 2024. That’s wild. Aaron Judge, Mookie Betts, Shohei Ohtani, Corey Seager, Juan Soto, Bryce Harper, José Ramírez – they all played in both years. None of them – none! – managed the double that Marte did. This isn’t some weird defensive value issue, either: He’s the only hitter with a top-10 wRC+ in both years.

Those in between years? Don’t look too closely. Marte totaled 9.1 WAR across the 2020-2023 campaigns. He posted 6.3 WAR in each of 2019 and 2024. In that 2020-2023 span, he was 64th among hitters in total WAR. He had two seasons of roughly average offensive production in that span, and produced at a 3 WAR/600 pace instead of the 6.3 WAR/600 pace from 2019 and 2024. So it’s safe to say he’s streaky – one hitter some years, and a different guy other years. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the New York Yankees. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the fifth 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.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked 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. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the overwhelming listener response to their previous conversation about cover models for baseball video games, and Ben issues some “Bo Nos” in support of his previous Royals reporting. Then (18:19) they talk about the Rays signing Ha-Seong Kim, Roki Sasaki “prospect” rankings, a recent leaguewide run on relievers, trade-based brother breakups, Hal Steinbrenner’s unconvincing attempt at anti-Dodgers-spending solidarity, and minor league name matches for major leaguers, plus (51:42) an in-depth discussion about the teams that have had the most demoralizing (and/or inactive) offseasons (so far).

Audio intro: Philip Tapley and Michael Stokes, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Benny and a Million Shetland Ponies, “Effectively Wild Theme (Horny)”

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It’s been a quiet winter in the AL Central. After Michael Wacha signed an extension at the beginning of the offseason, the division’s five teams combined to add only one deal worth more than $20 million in guaranteed money; that was Shane Bieber’s surgery-affected pillow contract with the Guardians. Now, finally, we can add another to the ledger, courtesy of the Royals. On Wednesday, they signed Carlos Estévez to a two-year, $22.2 million deal with a club option tacked on the end, as ESPN’s Jeff Passan first reported.

The Royals came into the winter looking for relief help. It’s not the only place their roster needed a glow-up – even after trading for Jonathan India, they could still use another bat or two, especially in the corner outfield – but the bullpen was also a particular area of need. Last year’s Royals made the playoffs on the back of pitching, but their starters were the ones doing the heavy lifting, not their relievers. Deadline acquisition Lucas Erceg was the best of the group by a large margin, and John Schreiber was the only other reliever with impressive full-season numbers.

It’s not so much that a team can’t make the playoffs with such a thin bullpen – obviously, the Royals did. But they did it by the skin of their teeth at 86-76, and that despite spectacular seasons from Cole Ragans, Seth Lugo, and Wacha. Counting on those three to combine for 94 starts, 12.9 WAR, and ERAs in the low 3.00s across the board again would be wishful thinking. Additionally, they no longer have last year’s fourth starter Brady Singer, who was Cincinnati’s return in the India trade.

The 2024 bullpen finished last in baseball in shutdowns – appearances that increased win probability by six percentage points or more – and fifth worst in win probability added. Those are outcome statistics, not process ones, but the process statistics weren’t exactly pretty either. Kansas City was middle of the pack in WAR (3.6), 20th in ERA (4.13), 26th in K-BB% (12.0%). It’s not just that this team didn’t have a “true closer” – its bullpen was light on contributors from top to bottom. Read the rest of this entry »

Break up the twins! The Giants did just that on Wednesday, sending lefty Taylor Rogers and cash to the Reds in exchange for minor league righty Braxton Roxby. The move ends the two-year run that paired Rogers with his twin brother Tyler in San Francisco, and fortifies the back end of Cincinnati’s bullpen.

If you don’t have your scorecard handy, this Rogers brother is the lefty who throws from a three-quarters arm slot, with an average release angle of 29 degrees according to Statcast. The one still on the Giants is the righty submariner with an average arm angle of -64 degrees. Trevor Rogers is no relation, and the timing of this morning’s piece by Michael Baumann is just an eerie coincidence.

Taylor Rogers, who turned 34 on December 17 — Tyler did too, to be clear — is coming off a season in which he posted a career-low 2.40 ERA in 60 innings spread across 64 appearances. It was his third year in a row and the sixth time in his nine-year career that he’s reached the 60-game plateau. For as impressive as his ERA was, it was somewhat out of step with his 3.75 FIP and 3.29 xERA. While he lowered his walk rate from an unsightly 11.6% in 2023 to 8.8%, his strikeout rate fell from 29.6% to 25.7%, making his 16.9% K-BB% his worst mark since 2017. This was the third year in a row that Rogers’ strikeout rate has declined, from a high of 35.5% while he was with the Twins (but not with his twin) in 2021. The velocity of his sinker has been on the wane as well, dropping annually from a high of 95.7 mph in 2021 to 93.0 last year.

Rogers’ declining strikeout rate was offset by his dramatic improvement in suppressing hard contact. Where he was significantly below average in both 2022 and ’23, he was among the best in ’24:

So what changed? The big thing is that Rogers threw his sinker more often than his sweeper for the first time since 2020; his share of sinkers rose from 41.3% to 52.8%, and his share of those in the strike zone rose from 40.7% to 54.2%. That increase in sinker usage was sort of a hopping-on-the-bandwagon thing for Rogers, as the Giants threw more sinkers than any other club for the second straight year; their 26.4% rate led the majors, though it was actually down from their 28.1% rate in 2023, the highest of any team since the pandemic-shortened season. Rogers’ sinker was much more effective against righties than it had been in recent years, and while it would be a misnomer to suggest they tattooed his sweeper, both righties and lefties got much better results against it on contact than expected:

Overall, righties hit just .202/.268/.380 (.282 wOBA) against Rogers, while lefties slashed .284/.364/.421 (.343 wOBA). This was the first time Rogers showed a reverse platoon split since 2019, a handy outcome considering 57% of the batters he faced were righties, but it’s not necessarily a split that we should expect to continue. Over the past three years, Rogers has held lefties to a .253 wOBA, compared to .339 for righties.

Rogers joins lefties Sam Moll and Brent Suter in the Cincinnati bullpen. While Rogers has experience closing — he saved 79 games from 2019–22 with the Twins, Padres, and Brewers — he figures to share setup duties with righty Emilio Pagán in front of closer Alexis Díaz. Though he did trim his walk rate late in the season, Díaz was rather erratic last year, pitching to a 3.99 ERA and 4.57 FIP even while converting 28 of 32 save chances, so it’s definitely not a bad thing that Rogers gives new manager Terry Francona a ninth-inning alternative in case Díaz struggles.

The Giants will pay $6 million of the $12 million Rogers will make in the third year of his three-year, $33 million deal, so this is something of a bargain for the Reds. That $6 million bought the Giants the righty Roxby, who turns 26 in March. After going undrafted out of the University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown, Roxby connected with the Reds during a Zoom meeting with the Kyle Boddy, then the team’s director of pitching, and assistant pitching coach Eric Jagers. “[T]hey had video breaking down my mechanics, as well as the analytics of my pitches and how I can use them better,” Roxby told David Laurila in 2021. “That made it hard not to choose them.”

The 6-foot-3, 215-pound Roxby posted a 5.21 ERA but a 28.8% strikeout rate in 48 1/3 innings at Double-A Chattanooga in 2024, his first full season in the upper minors. Eric Longenhagen graded his slider as a plus with his fastball and cutter both above average, though his command is just 30-grade. From Roxby’s prospect report:

Roxby’s fastball was up two ticks in 2024 and now lives in the mid-90s with uphill angle and tail. Roxby’s funky lower slot creates these characteristics. He tends to pitch backwards off of his sweeping mid-80s slider, which he commands better than his fastball. He has the stuff of a pretty standard middle reliever, though Roxby’s command puts him in more of an up/down bucket.

On the subject of the trade, Tyler Rogers shared this very sweet note:

In all, it’s hard to characterize this trade as an impact move for either team, but it is one of several additions the Reds have made this month — most notably the additions of Gavin Lux and Austin Hays — while trying to upgrade from last year’s 77-85 record. Who knows, maybe they’ll trade for Tyler (or Trevor) next?

Y’know that point in the last few rounds of every fantasy football draft when kickers and defenses start flying off the board? We’ve reached the MLB offseason version of that, when teams start making sure their bullpens are composed of relievers more akin to Brandon Aubrey than the Panthers’ defense. With the rush on relief pitching officially on, the Tigers and Mets both agreed to one-year deals with right-handed, back of the ‘pen types on Wednesday. Detroit signed Tommy Kahnle at a salary of $7.75 million for 2025, while New York guaranteed Ryne Stanek $4.5 million for his services this year, with another $500,000 available in incentives.

In 2024, Detroit’s starters threw 753 innings, while the team’s relievers nearly matched that number with 694 innings — a league-best mark for innings thrown among major league bullpens. Maintaining success while covering such a large quantity of innings is tricky business. “One of our great strengths last year was our ability to throw different looks at hitters and try to limit the number of times a hitter saw the same type of look or shape or slot in a given series.” Tigers GM Scott Harris told reporters after the Kahnle signing, “Tommy gives us a look we didn’t have.”

Alongside Kahnle, the main characters in the Tigers bullpen are likely to be right-handers Jason Foley, Beau Brieske, and Will Vest, with Tyler Holton, Sean Guenther, and Brant Hurter making up the left-handed contingent. Foley and Holton handled most of the late-inning, high-leverage work last year, with Vest and Brieske next in line to get crucial outs. Now Kahnle offers an additional option in close-game scenarios. And as one would expect from such a bullpen-reliant team, a full cast of contributors sits waiting in the wings, be they starters asked to handle a long relief role, such as Matt Manning, Ty Madden, and Kenta Maeda, or minor leaguers with options and big league experience, such as Brenan Hanifee and Alex Lange (who is working his way back from a season-ending lat injury). Read the rest of this entry »

Some people run away from their bad opinions. Not me. When I’m wrong I build a monument to my own foolishness and dance around it like a child around a maypole. So I think what I’m going to do from now on is just write about Trevor Rogers every few months from now until the end of his career.

I was all-in on Rogers when he came up with the Marlins. The combination of easy lefty velocity and starter volume is the forbidden fruit of scouting, and nobody is immune to its temptations. Think about how James Paxton kept getting eight-figure contract offers five years after he stopped being an effective major league starter. Or how it took about eight starts last year for Garrett Crochet to go from “maybe a reliever” to “definitely prime Chris Sale, no questions asked.” Rogers was no different. Read the rest of this entry »

Hunter Dobbins has emerged as one of the top pitching prospects in the Red Sox system. Selected in the eighth round of the 2021 draft out of Texas Tech University, the 25-year-old right-hander is coming off of a 2024 season in which he logged a 3.08 ERA and a 3.04 FIP over 125 2/3 innings between Double-A Portland and Triple-A Worcester. Assigned a 40+ FV grade by Eric Longenhagen after being added to Boston’s 40-man roster in November, Dobbins was called “a near-ready fifth starter prospect” by our lead prospect analyst back in July.

Dobbins discussed his repertoire and approach when the Red Sox held their annual Rookie Development Camp at Fenway Park earlier this month.

———

David Laurila: What have you most learned about pitching since getting to pro ball?

Hunter Dobbins: “I would say how to attack hitters. Every single year I’m learning how to follow our plan and execute that plan. I think I’ve taken a big step forward in that aspect. The pitch shapes are also getting a lot more consistent. Last year, a couple of my pitches would have almost two different movements. This year, I’m looking at having consistent movement so that I can go right at hitters. But overall, it’s more of the strategy side of things where I’ve learned the most.”

Laurila: How do you balance attacking weaknesses versus throwing your pitches where they tend to play best?

Dobbins: “I side more on sticking to my strengths. That said, I have five pitches. I have pitches that move in all different directions, so I’m going to take into account if a guy struggles on this half of the plate with pitches that move in this direction; I’m going to have a strength in that realm. But I’m also not going to shy away from something I know I can land, even if that is considered one of his strengths. I’m going to take my best ball versus his best swing and see what happens.”

Laurila: How many pitches did you have when you signed? Read the rest of this entry »

Well, I did not see that one coming. After four years with the Padres, shortstop Ha-Seong Kim is headed to the Rays.

On Wednesday afternoon, ESPN’s Jeff Passan reported that Kim and Tampa Bay have agreed to a two-year, $29 million deal with an opt out after the first year (because opting out after the second year would just be silly). Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times followed with more details: Kim will make $13 million in 2025 (with an additional $2 million in incentives), then $16 million in 2026 if he doesn’t opt out. And because it’s paramount that we spread the scoops around as generously as possible, The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal quickly chimed in with his own news that Kim is expected to return in May from the shoulder injury that cut his 2024 season short. Let’s start with my own personal ignominy, and then we can dive into the details.

So last week I wrote something like 2,000 words about where Kim might end up. I didn’t even give Tampa Bay a full sentence. In one breath, in passing, I dismissed the Rays, Pirates, and White Sox as unlikely to spend that kind of money. That’s my bad, but also it begs a question. Why is Kim set to spend at least one season at exotic George Steinbrenner Field? For starters, the money isn’t quite what we expected. This is a pillow contract, and a discounted one at that. If Kim plays well, he’ll opt out again and go hunting for the dollars he deserves. If things go wrong, 2026 will be his platform year. For those twin security blankets, he accepted an average annual value that’s significantly below not just our $18.5 million crowdsourced estimate, but the $20 million that Ben Clemens predicted for him. (To be fair, Ben did nail the possibility of a two-year contract with an opt-out.) Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re a team looking for a bounce-back corner outfielder with a league-average bat, your search just got a little bit harder. On Monday, Jon Heyman reported that the Orioles had signed Dylan Carlson to a one-year, $975,000 deal, and on Tuesday, Ken Rosenthal reported that the Reds had signed former Oriole Austin Hays to his own one-year, $5 million deal. Both players were selected in the 2016 draft, both players got traded at the deadline only to be non-tendered after the season, and both players are projected to put up a wRC+ somewhere between 93 and 102 in 2025. In a reflection of the uncertainty surrounding Carlson, a $25,000 incentive will raise his salary to a cool million if he reaches 200 plate appearances in Baltimore. Hays’ deal has its own $1 million in incentives, but the terms have not yet been reported. These are two small-risk, small-reward moves, but context is key. The way we look at them depends a whole lot on the needs of the respective teams. Hays has more upside, but he’s joining a Cincinnati team that needs way more than a small reward in order to be a contender. Carlson has a much trickier path to playing time, but he makes sense as a depth piece in Baltimore.

Let’s start with Hays, who has a history of big league success under his belt and a much bigger role to play in 2025. Despite a strained calf, he managed to put up a 104 wRC+ with the Orioles in 2024. After a deadline trade to the Phillies, however, a hamstring strain and a debilitating kidney infection that went undiagnosed for weeks kept him to 85 wRC+ down the stretch, with zero walks in 80 plate appearances. Rather than keep Hays for an estimated $6.4 million in his last year of arbitration, the Phillies non-tendered him. Until the infection, Hays had been very consistent (and consistently average).

From 2021-23, Hays played at least 131 games each year while posting a wRC+ between 106 and 112. A hot start to the 2023 season even earned him his first All-Star nod. Going forward, however, his defensive limitations are going to keep him in left field and, in all likelihood, just below the 2.0-WAR mark, even if his bat bounces all the way back. There’s no doubt that his pull-side power and lack of range make him better suited for Cincinnati’s form-fitting left field than the blousy Baltimore outfield he’s used to. Still, Hays is entering his age-29 season, and while he could easily explode for 30 home runs in his cozy new environs, it’s hard to imagine him surpassing his career-high 2.5 WAR from 2023.

What does Hays do for Cincinnati’s depth chart? Assuming he gets plugged in as the left fielder, he moves Spencer Steer back to the infield. With Jonathan India in Kanas City, the Reds were in serious danger of merely having too many infielders rather than their usual way, way too many. However, now that Steer can rejoin Elly De La Cruz, Matt McLain, Jeimer Candelario, Christian Encarnacion-Strand, and newcomer Gavin Lux on the dirt, this infield is even more crowded than it was before the India trade. If Hays goes back to hitting like he’s capable of hitting, he could represent an upgrade in left field — not nearly enough to make the Reds look like more than a .500 ball club, but still an upgrade. If he does anything less, he will blend right into the bottom half of a Reds lineup that Dan Szymborski recently christened, “a giant bucket of ‘meh.’”

Turning our attention to Baltimore, it’s probably too late to keep dreaming on Dylan Carlson. Nonetheless, this move makes a lot of sense both for him and the Orioles. Carlson was a first-round draft pick by the Cardinals in 2016, and he eventually rose to 16th on our top 100 prospects list. He struggled in his 2020 debut — though he got hot enough down the stretch that the Cardinals batted him cleanup in their three-game Wild Card Series loss to the Padres — but put up a promising full-season campaign in 2021. That season, he batted .266/.343/.437 with 18 home runs and a 111 wRC+ across 149 games, good for 2.4 WAR and a third-place finish in the Rookie of the Year voting. And then he plunged into a spiral of injury and underperformance. He made two trips to the injured list in both 2022 and 2023 for four separate injuries; he missed a combined 29 days in 2022 with a hamstring strain and a thumb strain, and then in 2023, an ankle sprain and an oblique strain cost him a total of 76 days. While he was out with the oblique strain, he underwent season-ending arthroscopic surgery on the same ankle he’d sprained earlier that year. During spring training in 2024, he sprained the AC joint in his left shoulder in an outfield collision with human mountain Jordan Walker. That injury kept him out for the first 38 days of the season.

Carlson put up an xwOBA between .301 and .322 in every season between 2020 and 2023, and a DRC+ between 97 and 104 in every season between 2021 and 2023. When he returned from that shoulder injury, he wasn’t himself. If you don’t count his 35-game rookie season in 2020, Carlson’s 2024 season featured career worsts in walk rate, strikeout rate, contact rate, all three slash line stats, all the wOBAs, hard-hit rate, and, just for good measure, all the advanced defensive stats. He ended the season with a 67 wRC+, .209 batting average, -7 fielding runs, and -1.0 WAR. The Cardinals traded him to the Rays at the deadline, and the Rays non-tendered him after the season rather than pay him a couple million dollars in arbitration. Now, the Orioles have decided that they like him better than the $975,000 they used to have.

The projections see Carlson bouncing back to the league-average bat he was over the first four years of his career, and that’s presumably what the Orioles are expecting. However, let’s take just a moment to dream. We don’t know how much speed and power Carlson would have if he were to finally have the chance at a full, healthy season. His zone swing rate and contact rate plummeted in 2024, and you have to imagine that had something to do with his physical limitations at the plate. Over the course of his career, he’s got a solid .330 wOBA against fastballs, but Statcast puts his run value against them at -17, which speaks to an approach issue. He takes too many fastballs and whiffs at way too many fastballs, but when he hits them, he has a great deal of success. So why isn’t he looking for them more often?

Between Cedric Mullins, Tyler O’Neill, and Colton Cowser, the Orioles have a starting outfield. Between Heston Kjerstad, Daz Cameron, Jorge Mateo, and now Carlson, they have plenty of backups too, and because they’re loaded with infielders, they probably don’t have enough roster spots to keep all of them in Baltimore. The switch-hitting Carlson still has three options left, and it would make plenty of sense to see how he looks during spring training, keep him far away from any particularly mountainous teammates, and let him try to figure things out in Norfolk to start the season.

Carlson is now far removed from his days as a top prospect, but he’s still only 26 and has only once reached 500 plate appearances in a season. He’s always run solid chase and walk rates, and he showed a renewed ability to pull the ball in the air last season. The Orioles are on a pretty great run when it comes to developing young hitters. This seems like a low-risk move for them and a good landing spot for Carlson. Even if all he does is bounce back to being a league-average hitter and an average left fielder, that’s makes him a useful depth piece for a contending team.