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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.

A bat-first shortstop with some pop and a first name that some writers interpreted as a typographical error, Jhonny Peralta spent 15 seasons in the majors (2003-17) while helping all three franchises he played for — Cleveland, Detroit and St. Louis — make the playoffs at least once. Though he struggled in his first exposure to the majors, he soon supplanted longtime fan favorite Omar Vizquel, impressing teammates and executives with his poise and establishing himself as part of a contending club’s youthful core.

Peralta made three All-Star teams, all in his late 20s and early 30s, though his career was tarnished due to a 50-game suspension for receiving performance-enhancing drugs from Biogenesis, the Miami-based anti-aging clinic whose most famous baseball client, Alex Rodriguez, received a full-season suspension. That Peralta was able to return to the Tigers in time to participate in their 2013 playoff run, and that he signed the biggest contract of his career shortly afterwards, caused controversy within the game and played a part in increasing PED penalties — which might be the most lasting part of his legacy. Read the rest of this entry »

Free agency has come and gone this offseason. Earlier than we’re used to in recent years, we can look back on this year’s class and make some conclusions. To some extent, that’s a lot of our offseason coverage; what are ZiPS projections and positional power rankings, after all, if not catalogs of how teams have changed their fortunes in the offseason? Today and tomorrow, I thought I’d do something slightly more navel-gazey, and perhaps slightly more useful in the long run, by looking back at my contract predictions to see what went right and what went wrong.

First things first: let’s take an accounting of both the crowd’s and my predictions. I took the contracts signed by each of the top 50 players in free agency. A few clarifying remarks: I removed players who accepted a qualifying offer, as both the crowd and I made our predictions before qualifying offers were extended. I considered only guaranteed years, ignoring options of any type, be they vesting, team, or player. I also ignored incentives and trade kickers. Finally. I’m using Carlos Correa’s rumored deal with the Mets — 12 years, $315 million — even while it’s not yet official and may be amended.

With that out of the way, I grouped the players into positional groups and compared our predictions to real life. How’d it go? Pretty well, actually, for both sides. Positive numbers here mean we under-estimated, and negative numbers represent an over-estimate:

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The Philadelphia Phillies were busy last week. They added high-profile veteran flamethrower Craig Kimbrel to the bullpen while DFA’ing former high-dollar international signee Francisco Morales to make room for him, then capped things off with a five-player trade with the Detroit Tigers headlined by two-time All Star reliever Gregory Soto. The deal involves several moving parts, both in the trade itself and in terms of what it means for the Tigers’ and Phillies’ roster and lineup construction in the upcoming season. The entire trade is:

Philadelphia receives:
RP Gregory Soto and 2B Kody Clemens

Detroit receives:
OF/1B Matt Vierling, MIF Nick Maton, C Donny Sands

The Phillies now have the majors’ two hardest-throwing left-handed pitchers in Soto and José Alvarado, and three of the top 40 regardless of handedness when you include Seranthony Domínguez. Alvarado and Domínguez handled high-leverage duty for the Phillies during the 2022 playoffs, with experienced veteran David Robertson playing the “closer” role in the event that both had already thrown, or if either was unavailable. Now Kimbrel and Soto, both with closer experience, appear poised to fall into high-octane versions of that role, and that extends to Soto’s assumed role as the second lefty in Philly’s bullpen, a part occupied last year by Brad Hand. Read the rest of this entry »

Last January, inspired by Cedric Mullins’s 2021 decision to stop switch-hitting, I tried to identify other switch-hitters who might benefit from swinging from one side or the other. Going beyond simply calculating the largest platoon splits, I relied on handedness splits for some of the players’ key underlying batted ball and plate discipline metrics. The idea was that there could be a path to improvement if these switch-hitters eliminated their severe underperformance from one side of the plate. Of course, the other option is simply to work on their weaker swing and become a better overall switch-hitter.

One of the batters I identified as a candidate to hit left-handed full-time was Ian Happ. Through 2021, Happ had posted a 55 point platoon split, the second-highest among the 25 switch-hitters in the sample. Happ crushes right-handed pitching from the left side, but all of his batted ball peripherals are significantly weaker when swinging from the right. Instead of taking my advice (thank goodness), Happ posted the best season of his career against left-handed pitching in 2022:

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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 New York Mets.

Batters

Closing a deal with Carlos Correa would obviously improve the team’s outlook, but the situation at third base — Correa’s likely position — is hardly dire. Eduardo Escobar is a league-average if quite unexciting player, and if his thumb is better, Brett Baty ought to provide additional depth as the season goes on. Even if I’m not quite as optimistic about Brandon Nimmo’s attendance record as the depth charts are, he has a long history of providing a lot of value even while missing a lot of games. Pete Alonso and Francisco Lindor are elite players at their respective positions, and Jeff McNeil isn’t that far off that status. Mark Canha and Starling Marte make up a solid supporting cast. Read the rest of this entry »

Along with Johnny Evers and Joe Tinker — they of Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance fame — Alan Trammell and Lou Whitaker are the most-storied double-play combination in baseball history. As well they should be. The Detroit Tigers duo played more games together (1,918) than any middle-infield duo in history. Moreover, they combined for 11 All-Star appearances, seven Gold Gloves, seven Silver Sluggers, and they won a World Series together. Both are icons for a franchise that has played in the American League since 1901.

Tinker and Evans, who played together with the Chicago Cubs from 1902-1912, are both in the Hall of Fame. So is Trammell. Meanwhile — this for reasons best explained as inexplicable — Whitaker is not. His exclusion stands as one of Cooperstown’s most glaring omissions.

Whitaker has more WAR and a higher JAWS score than a number of Hall of Fame second basemen, but that can be a debate for another day. For now, let’s focus on how he compares to Evers.

Whitaker: 2,369 hits, 244 home runs, 118 wRC+, 68.1 WAR.
Evers: 1,659 hits, 12 home runs, 109 wRC+, 49.0 WAR.

While Evers’s numbers are anything but great, it should be noted that he won an MVP award and played for three World Series-winning teams (the Cubs twice and the Boston Braves once). That said, it’s highly unlikely that he would be in the Hall of Fame were he not part of a legendary double-play combination (he and Tinker were Old-Timers-Committee selections in the same year). How they became legendary is, of course, a big part of the story. The poem penned in 1910 by sportswriter Franklin Pierce Adams reads: Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh, Meg Rowley, and longtime listener and Patreon supporter Jacob Barak banter about Jacob’s baseball-fan background, EW origin story, and much-discussed post about a Shohei Ohtani conundrum in the podcast’s Facebook group, then (10:35) answer listener emails about why we use dashes instead of slashes in displaying hitter’s hits and at-bats, unorthodox infield designs, where the money from competitive balance tax penalties goes, an Aaron Boone quote about “a championship and then some,” playing baseball with balls from other sports, teams tailoring the baseball to their pitchers’ strengths, the fewest games in a -1.0 WAR season and demanding a trade in the minors, the best teams from other leagues beating the worst teams from MLB, whether baseball is bad or good for the world, and the prospect of an MLB player coming out as trans or non-binary, plus Carlos Correa banter, a Stat Blast (1:21:41) about the late Nate Colbert and Padres home run hitters, a Past Blast (1:42:53) from 1952, and a few postscript updates.

Audio intro: Wire, “Dot Dash”
Audio outro: Jethro Tull, “Jacob’s Tales”

Link to Jacob’s Facebook post
Link to latest on Correa
Link to Ben C. on FA movement
Link to history of fraction slashes
Link to Stark on second base
Link to Stark on infield dirt
Link to EW Pesäpallo episode
Link to Evan’s first tweet
Link to Evan’s second tweet
Link to Boone video
Link to Yankees captains
Link to fewest G, -1 WAR hitters
Link to fewest G, -1 WAR pitchers
Link to Clay’s league strengths
Link to Rays Pride Night story
Link to Canha interview
Link to EW Brennaman episode
Link to EW emails database
Link to previous Colbert banter
Link to Padres HR leaderboard
Link to Stat Blast data
Link to Ryan Nelson on Twitter
Link to players w/164+ HR since ’75
Link to Padres ’69-’74 WAR leaders
Link to ’69-’74 team wins
Link to Colbert’s SABR bio
Link to Colbert’s RBI record
Link to more on the record
Link to ’69-’73 HR leaders
Link to Ben on Padres stars
Link to first Padres cycle
Link to first Padres no-hitter
Link to 1952 story source
Link to SABR on the ’52 Meetings
Link to Jacob Pomrenke’s website
Link to Jacob Pomrenke on Twitter
Link to MLBTR on Bauer
Link to Twins “DFA” tweet
Link to Hill hype video
Link to SABR on 3-team DHs
Link to Turner’s Vassegh tweet

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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.

It would be an overstatement to call the Dodgers’ acquisition of Andre Ethier a turning point in the franchise’s history, but when the team snagged him from the A’s in December 2005 in exchange for infielder Antonio Perez and outfielder Milton Bradley, it had made just three postseason appearances and won a grand total of one playoff game in the first 11 years of the Wild Card era — one playoff game since winning the World Series in 1988, even. During the course of Ethier’s 12-year career, the Dodgers reached the playoffs eight times, and while injuries limited his role at the end, he signed off with a pinch-hit RBI single in Game 7 of the 2017 World Series, and retired as the franchise leader in postseason games played (51).

As a Dodgers regular from 2006-15 — usually in right field, but with years spent mainly in left or center as well — Ethier combined good on-base skills and middle-of-the-lineup pop, meshing with a handful of homegrown players while helping the team win five NL West titles and add a Wild Card appearance in that span. During that time, Ethier made two All-Star teams, won Gold Glove and Silver Slugger awards, became a fan favorite, and earned a five-year, $85 million extension that unfortunately didn’t go as hoped. Indeed, the Dodgers sometimes seemed blind to his limitations, overexposing him to left-handed pitching (note his career 73 wRC+ against southpaws, 139 against righties) and overestimating his defensive abilities. Still, he spent his entire major league career in one place, making him one of two single-team candidates on this year’s ballot (Matt Cain is the other). Read the rest of this entry »