Last Tuesday’s 40-man roster deadline led to the usual squall of transaction activity, with teams turning over portions of their rosters in an effort to make room for the incoming crop of young rookies. Often, teams with an overflow of viable big leaguers will try to get back what they can for some of those players via trade, but because we’re talking about guys straddling the line between major league viability and Triple-A, those trades tend not to be big enough to warrant an entire post.

Over the next few days, we’ll endeavor to cover and analyze the moves made by each team, division by division. Readers can view this as the start of list season, as the players covered in this miniseries tend to be prospects who will get big league time in the next year. We’ll spend more time discussing players who we think need scouting updates or who we haven’t written about in the past. If you want additional detail on some of the more famous names you find below, pop over to The Board for a more thorough report.

The Future Value grades littered throughout these posts may be different than those on the 2022 in-season prospect lists on The Board to reflect our updated opinions and may be subject to change during the offseason. New to our thinking on this subject and wondering what the FVs mean? Here’s a quick rundown. Note that because we’re talking about close-to-the-majors prospects across this entire exercise, the time and risk component is less present here and these FVs are what we think the players are right now. Read the rest of this entry »

Another Pirates reliever has been picked up by the Yankees, and his name is Junior Fernández, owner of 54 career innings pitched in the majors with St. Louis and Pittsburgh. This past season, he finished with a 5.79 FIP in 18.2 innings; his career FIP sits at 5.57, so he hasn’t had much success in the league so far. So what exactly do the Yankees see in him?

Like many relievers in the Yankees’ bullpen, Fernández throws high-velocity sinkers and boasts an above-average ground ball rate: 58.9%, a very similar clip as Jonathan Loáisiga. That all sounds very similar to another Yankees pickup from the Pirates: Clay Holmes. But Holmes’ sinker is of the turbo ilk that forces its way down with bowling ball action; this past season, the vertical movement on that pitch was 21% above league average. Fernández’s is much more vertical neutral. In fact, the comparison to Loáisiga is much more appropriate. The table below shows how Fernández’s sinker specs compare to Loáisiga’s:

The two pitchers have similar extension, release points, and movement profiles. The entry into the zone in terms of horizontal and vertical approach angles isn’t all that far off either. Overall, we’re looking at very similar pitches, and Fernández throws his even harder by about a tick. This alone is a good starting point to explain why the Yankees were interested enough to scoop him up off waivers. Read the rest of this entry »

Blake Sabol has versatility, Pittsburgh ties, and a bat that could be providing thump to the Pirates’ lineup in the not-too-distant future. A left-handed-hitting catcher who also plays the outfield and first base, Sabol, 24, is coming off a season where he slashed .284/.363/.497 with 19 home runs between Double-A Altoona and Triple-A Indianapolis. The seventh-round selection in the 2019 draft has other notable qualities, as well. Along with being a stat nerd, the former University of Southern California Trojan has an engaging personality that promises to make him a fan favorite if he reaches the majors.

Sabol, who is Rule 5 eligible, talked about his multi-faceted game and his connections to the city he hopes to soon play in during his recent stint with the Arizona Fall League’s Surprise Saguaros.

———

David Laurila: I understand that you play multiple positions and have put up some good offensive numbers. How do you see yourself?

Blake Sabol: “Defensively, I kind of consider myself a Swiss Army Knife. I’m primarily a catcher, but I can be in the outfield and have also been taking some ground balls at first base. I’m hoping to be like a three-level player.

“With the bat, I’ve had a couple of good seasons under my belt — I’ve been able to hit for power and have a good OPS — so I feel I can impact the game that way. I think I can help a big league team. Instead of having a guy who is only a catcher, maybe just a backup catcher, I can be playing multiple spots, or even be in the lineup as a DH.”

Laurila: Your goal isn’t to be a starting catcher in the big leagues?

Sabol: “My goal is ultimately to be in the big leagues, anyway, anyhow. I mean, I would love to be a catcher. There’s a lot of value there, and I think I could do it. But ideally, and I’ve talked with Henry Davis about this, even if we’re splitting games behind the plate, I can go in the outfield or be a first baseman. I just want to be in the lineup as much as possible.” Read the rest of this entry »

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 2018 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. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

“A hard-charging third baseman” who “could have played shortstop with more range than Cal Ripken.” “A no-nonsense star.” “The perfect baseball player.” Scott Rolen did not lack for praise, particularly in the pages of Sports Illustrated at the height of his career. A masterful, athletic defender with the physical dimensions of a tight end (listed at 6-foot-4, 245 pounds), Rolen played with an all-out intensity, sacrificing his body in the name of stopping balls from getting through the left side of the infield. Many viewed him as the position’s best for his time, and he more than held his own with the bat as well, routinely accompanying his 25–30 homers a year with strong on-base percentages.

There was much to love about Rolen’s game, but particularly in Philadelphia, the city where he began his major league career and the one with a reputation for fraternal fondness, he found no shortage of critics — even in the Phillies organization. Despite winning 1997 NL Rookie of the Year honors and emerging as a foundation-type player, Rolen was blasted publicly by manager Larry Bowa and special assistant to the general manager Dallas Green. While ownership pinched pennies and waited for a new ballpark, fans booed and vilified him. Eventually, Rolen couldn’t wait to skip town, even when offered a deal that could have been worth as much as $140 million. Traded in mid-2002 to the Cardinals, he referred to St. Louis as “baseball heaven,” which only further enraged the Philly faithful.

In St. Louis, Rolen provided the missing piece of the puzzle, helping a team that hadn’t been to the World Series since 1987 make two trips in three years (2004 and ’06), with a championship in the latter. A private, introverted person who shunned endorsement deals, he didn’t have to shoulder the burden of being a franchise savior, but as the toll of his max-effort play caught up to him in the form of chronic shoulder and back woes, he clashed with manager Tony La Russa and again found himself looking for the exit. After a brief detour to Toronto, he landed in Cincinnati, where again he provided the missing piece, helping the Reds return to the postseason for the first time in 15 years. Read the rest of this entry »

Once you get past Aaron Judge, this offseason’s free agent outfield class gets real thin real fast. Brandon Nimmo is a very good player, but not a power threat, and after him and maybe Mitch Haniger, you get into the Michael Conforto–Cody Bellinger zone with alarming speed. “I can fix him” is as risky a conceit in baseball as it is in romance.

Andrew Benintendi sits in a bit of a no-man’s land between Nimmo and the true reclamation projects. There will be a team that misses out on Judge and Nimmo and finds itself with a hole in an outfield corner and about $15 million a year to spend to fill it; Benintendi will likely be the beneficiary of that vacancy when it emerges.

The sales pitch for Benintendi is pretty simple: At 28, he’s hitting the market fairly young and could command a deal as long as four years without including much of his decline, if any. He’s a capable defender in a corner who posted a career-high .373 OBP last year, which for what it’s worth was a hair higher than Nimmo’s, and has had a few monster seasons in the past, including a 20-20 campaign in 2017 and a nearly-5 WAR year the following season.

But there are drawbacks. When he was drafted seventh overall out of Arkansas in 2015, the question about Benintendi was, “How does such a teeny, tiny man hit so many home runs?” Twenty home runs, to be precise, in just 65 games, along with a .717 slugging percentage. That power has never showed up in the majors for Benintedi, whose career high in homers is exactly 20 in 151 games, and what moderate power he once had is going away. Read the rest of this entry »

Before we get to the 2023 ZiPS projections, there’s still some unfinished work from 2022 to do. Looking at which projections went the most wayward is definitely an exercise that makes me soul cringe a bit, but in any model, being wrong is an important component of eventually being right. Calibration is a long-term project, and while chasing greater accuracy in mean projections isn’t likely to result in any huge bounty — there’s a reason projection systems are so tightly clustered — there’s still improvement to be had in things like calibrating uncertainty and long-term data.

Let’s start with how teams performed versus their projections:

Teams have gotten a bit more polarized in how they’re run in-season. Looking at the in-season ZiPS projections, roster strength has varied much more in recent years than when I started doing this. It wouldn’t be surprising to see the mean absolute error — for an exercise like this, I want to use the simplest tool that gets the point across — creep up over time. That is the case here, as the MAE of 8.3 wins is above the ZiPS historical average of 7.5 (not including 2020). ZiPS underperformed its usual matchup vs. Vegas, only going 17-13 in over/unders as of the date of release (April 6); historically, ZiPS has averaged 19-11. Read the rest of this entry »

With the future of Twitter uncertain, Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley welcome Craig Goldstein of Baseball Prospectus and Jordan Shusterman and Jake Mintz of Fox Sports and Céspedes Family BBQ to draft the best tweets and traditions from more than a decade of content on Baseball Twitter (plus a Past Blast from 1932). (Warning/preview: Prepare for somewhat saltier language than usual.)

Audio intro: The Rentals, “Elon Musk is Making Me Sad”
Audio outro: Sparks, “Here Comes Bob”

Link to list of some tweets
Link to Martino/collusion story
Link to unread Rosenthal column
Link to Rosenthal column tweet
Link to Trout emoji EW episode
Link to Chubs EW episode
Link to Chubs tweets
Link to Chubs explainer
Link to Ben on teen newsbreakers
Link to Defector on Nightengale photos
Link to “Ralph” explainer
Link to “wall of porn” post
Link to Ben on the Castellanos meme
Link to Gmail redesign
Link to 1932 story source
Link to SABR on Cardinals ownership
Link to story about Landis and Rickey
Link to story on Rickey’s farm
Link to Jacob Pomrenke’s website
Link to Jacob Pomrenke on Twitter

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Last Tuesday’s 40-man roster deadline led to the usual squall of transaction activity, with teams turning over portions of their rosters in an effort to make room for the incoming crop of young rookies. Often, teams with an overflow of viable big leaguers will try to get back what they can for some of those players via trade, but because we’re talking about guys straddling the line between major league viability and Triple-A, those trades tend not to be big enough to warrant an entire post. Over the next few days, we’ll endeavor to cover and analyze the moves made by each team, division by division. Readers can view this as the start of list season, as the players covered in this miniseries tend to be prospects who will get big league time in the next year. We’ll spend more time discussing players who we think need scouting updates or who we haven’t written about in the past. If you want additional detail on some of the more famous names you find below, pop over to The Board for a more thorough report.

The Future Value grades littered throughout these posts may be different than those on the 2022 in-season prospect lists on The Board to reflect our updated opinions, and may be subject to change during the offseason. New to our thinking on this subject and wondering what the FVs mean? Here’s a quick rundown. Note that because we’re talking about close-to-the-majors prospects across this entire exercise, the time and risk component is less present here and these FVs are what we think the players are right now. Read the rest of this entry »

If you were waiting for a time when the discussion around the BBWAA’s annual Hall of Fame voting didn’t center around Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Curt Schilling, then I have good news: After 10 years of increasingly polarized debate, they all fell short of the 75% needed for election and have run out of eligibility on the ballot. They’re now candidates on the Contemporary Baseball Era Committee ballot — a problem for another day — but they’re not part of the 28-man slate unveiled by the Hall on Monday. That’s not to say that this ballot is devoid of controversial figures, or that debates about character are a thing of the past, but we can finally move beyond the cast that hit the 2013 ballot and spent 10 years monopolizing discussions and draining some of the fun out of the whole process.

The 2023 ballot doesn’t come without controversy, particularly in relation to the top newcomer, Carlos Beltrán. A nine-time All-Star and three-time Gold Glove winner who racked up 2,745 hits, 435 homers, and 312 steals, he’s got numbers to appease traditionalists, and likewise, he checks the advanced stat boxes by ranking eighth in WAR and ninth in JAWS among center fielders, thanks in no small part to the extra value he provided on the bases and in the field. For all of that, Beltrán is the player most closely identified with the Astros’ illegal sign stealing scandal, less because his own performance benefited (his 2017 season was below replacement level) than because The Athletic’s reporting and commissioner Rob Manfred’s subsequent report placed him at the center of the efforts to decode opposing catchers’ signs using the team’s video replay system.

Whether that is an offense grave enough to cost Beltrán a chance at Cooperstown is a matter for debate; his involvement in the matter already cost him his job as the Mets manager before he oversaw a single game. He returned to baseball this past year as a broadcaster for the YES Network, though no team has considered him for an in-uniform job since he left the Mets. Read the rest of this entry »