For more than a decade, Kenley Jansen has been a part of the fabric of baseball. He’s spent most of that time with the Dodgers, logging a dozen seasons as the reliever whose late-inning fortune sent Los Angeles fans into agony or ecstasy. Last year, he decamped for Atlanta, and this year his travels will continue: as Jeff Passan first reported, he’s shipping up to Boston on a two-year, $32 million deal.

At 35, Jansen is headed into the tail end of his career, though he’s still got plenty in the tank. Over the past five years, he’s declined from one of the best few relievers in the game – he posted a 2.01 ERA from 2013-17 – to merely an effective bullpen arm, with an aggregate 3.08 ERA and the peripherals to match. That’s a relatively graceful downward path, though it hasn’t always felt that way. Dodgers fans alternated between bringing out pitchforks and convincing themselves that Jansen was returning to his earlier dominance over four of those years, and he was unsteady at times in Atlanta, though he put together a solid season on the whole.

His pitch mix has likewise changed with age. Early in his career, “mix” might even have been a misnomer, because it implies a minimum of two things. From 2010-18, 87% of his pitches were cutters. That’s more of a pitch monoculture, or a pitch manufactured subdivision; every house identical, every plant eerily perfect. Read the rest of this entry »

For most of Winter Meetings, the San Diego Padres vigorously pursued a few of the best free agents available only to come up short on Trea Turner and Aaron Judge. Well, they finally made their big splash after most of the reporters and analysts had returned to their climatologically inferior home cities, signing shortstop Xander Bogaerts, formerly of the Boston Red Sox, to a monster 11-year contract. Bogaerts now stands an impressive $280 million richer and a lot of the Padres’ positional dominoes have fallen into place for the 2023 season.

If you’re ever prone to thinking that a player opt-out is mere frippery, like Roy Oswalt’s tractor or the mustache wax benefit that Rollie Fingers received, Bogaerts’ prior contract extension ought to firmly disabuse you of the notion. Bogaerts would have originally hit free agency after the 2020 season, but he came to terms with the Red Sox on a six-year, $120 million deal to keep him in Boston for what was likely to be the rest of his prime. Here’s what the projection looked like if we go back to that blessed time when we might have mistaken “Covid” for the first name of a Swedish scientist:

Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley break down the rest of the action from the Winter Meetings, including Arson Judge not signing with the Giants, Aaron Judge re-signing with the Yankees, the Padres missing out on Judge and Trea Turner, the Dodgers’ lack of interest in Carlos Correa, the Giants signing Mitch Haniger, the Cardinals signing Willson Contreras, the Cubs signing Jameson Taillon and Cody Bellinger, the going rate for mid-rotation starters, the Phillies signing Taijuan Walker and Matt Strahm, the secret to Dave Dombrowski’s owner cajoling, the Mets signing José Quintana, whether Steve Cohen has a spending limit, the Rangers signing Andrew Heaney, the Guardians signing Josh Bell, the Red Sox signing Kenley Jansen, Chris Martin, and Masataka Yoshida, the first draft lottery, the podcast’s thirstiness, and more, plus a Past Blast from 1939.

Audio intro: Eleventh Dream Day, “The Arsonist”
Audio outro: Queen, “’39”

Link to Manfred comments
Link to more Manfred comments
Link to Rob on competitive balance
Link to Arson Judge saga
Link to “the grink” tweet
Link to Heyman “grink” tweet
Link to Jay on Judge
Link to Dan on Judge
Link to Padres/Judge rumors
Link to Rosenthal on Correa
Link to Time feature on Judge
Link to Ben Clemens on Haniger
Link to Baumann on Contreras
Link to Justin Choi on Taillon
Link to qualifying offer decisions
Link to Chris Gilligan on Bellinger
Link to EW on Bellinger’s bat
Link to Laurila on Walker
Link to Walker tweet
Link to FG post on Martin
Link to SIS on Yoshida
Link to Baumann on Bell
Link to projected payrolls
Link to draft lottery results
Link to ChatGPT explainer
Link to Rule 5 scouting reports
Link to thirstiness tweet
Link to Ohtani pillow
Link to Insider baseballs report
Link to 1939 story source
Link to The Baseball Reliquary
Link to Baseball Reliquary article
Link to Jacob Pomrenke’s website
Link to Jacob Pomrenke on Twitter

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After being cancelled last offseason due to the lockout, on Wednesday, the 2022 Rule 5 Draft was completed in San Diego, with 15 players selected during the Major League phase. Below are our thoughts on those players; the numbers you see in parentheses are the 40-man roster counts that were recited by each team during the draft roll call. Remember that you can venture over to The Board for more information about several of these guys.

But first, our annual refresher on the Rule 5 Draft’s complex rules. Players who signed their first pro contract at age 18 or younger are eligible for selection after five years of minor league service if their parent club has not yet added them to the team’s 40-man roster; for players who signed at age 19 or older, the timeline is four years. Teams with the worst win/loss record from the previous season pick first, and those that select a player must not only (a) pay said player’s former club $100,000, but also (b) keep the player on their 25-man active roster throughout the entirety of the following season, with a couple of exceptions, mostly involving the injured list. If a selected player doesn’t make his new team’s active roster, he is offered back to his former team for half of the initial fee. After the player’s first year on the roster, he can be optioned back to the minor leagues. Read the rest of this entry »

Maybe catching isn’t as demanding and difficult a profession as lumberjacking or deep sea fishing, but it’s hard, man. There aren’t many people out there who can live up to the position’s enormous physical and intellectual demands, fewer still can do all that and hit at a level that registers as more than “automatic out” to opposing pitchers.

Even in the latter reaches of this year’s postseason, guys like Austin Hedges, Yadier Molina, and Martín Maldonado kept getting starts because they were a safe pair of hands behind the plate, even as the outs piled up at a rate that would’ve been unacceptable at any other position. Surefire two-way stars like J.T. Realmuto, Will Smith, and Adley Rutschman are rarer than at any other position, and the ranks of first-division starters swell and wane as a Jose Trevino suddenly learns how to hit, or an Austin Nola’s throwing becomes problematic.

So when a catcher comes along who can hit — like, really hit — that’s a rare thing. Even if the defense isn’t ideal, a catcher with a dangerous bat is worth, well, let’s ask the St. Louis Cardinals. Turns out they think it’s worth the five years and $87.5 million they just gave Willson Contreras. Read the rest of this entry »

SAN DIEGO — The early hours of Wednesday morning at the Winter Meetings brought a giant-sized deal for baseball’s latest home run giant… but not from the Giants. After a day in which it appeared as though Aaron Judge had decided he was not in fact prepared to be “a Yankee for life,” as he had previously professed, and would instead leave the Bronx to sign with the the team for which he grew up rooting in Linden, California, about two hours from the Bay Area, the 2022 AL MVP has returned to the Bronx via a record-setting nine-year, $360 million deal.

The move happened only after Judge arrived in San Diego on Tuesday night and heard overtures from a third team, the Padres, who had reportedly offered Trea Turner a $342 million deal before the shortstop signed with the Phillies on Monday. Via USA Today‘s Bob Nightengale, San Diego offered Judge $40 million per year over 10 years; whether either deal included deferred money isn’t known. According to the New York Post’s Jon Heyman, the Yankees had offered Judge eight years and $320 million — about $90 million more than the offer that he spurned just before Opening Day. “Once Judge told Hal Steinbrenner he wanted to be a Yankee (but had more $ on table elsewhere — SF and SD) Hal sealed the deal by bumping it another $40M and one year,” Heyman wrote. Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday evening, a thrill swept through the winter meetings. The rumors were true – the San Francisco Giants were in agreement with an American League right fielder on a multi-year deal. Yes, San Francisco, it’s time to welcome a new slugging right-handed hitter to town: Mitch Haniger signed a three-year, $43.5 million deal to become a Giant, with an opt out after year two.

Oh, you were expecting Aaron Judge? That didn’t quite pan out, though the Giants are reportedly still in pursuit of another hitter in free agency. But Haniger is a first course, and he fits the Giants quite well whether they look for another outfielder or pivot to the infield for help.

At season’s end, the San Francisco outfield was predominantly a lefty affair. Joc Pederson appeared in the outfield in 120 games. Mike Yastrzemski played the outfield in 147 of his own. LaMonte Wade Jr. missed a lot of time with injury, but rotated between seemingly every position in the field when he was healthy, including both left and right. The Giants theoretically love to mix and match based on the opposition, but they did a lot of running out a squad of lefties last year.
Read the rest of this entry »

Free agents are getting paid handsomely this offseason, and that includes Taijuan Walker. On Tuesday night, it was reported that the 30-year-old right-hander had agreed to a four-year, $72 million contract with the Phillies — not exactly Aaron Judge or Trea Turner money, yet further evidence that this is anything but a bear market for players, particularly starting pitchers.

The Dave Dombrowski-led team has good reason to be bullish on its latest acquisition. Back to full health after shoulder and elbow woes cost him all but 14 innings in 2018 and ’19 (he threw 53.1 frames in the truncated 2020 campaign), Walker has tossed 316.1 innings over the past two seasons. Moreover, he’s coming off of a year where he logged a 3.49 ERA, a 3.65 FIP, and a 21.5% strikeout rate with the Mets.

The Phillies are coming off of a World Series appearance, and while that presumably appealed to Walker — who wouldn’t want to play for a team aggressively chasing rings? — so too would the progressive pitching environment he’ll be joining. When Walker was interviewed here at FanGraphs in January 2021, roughly one month before signing as a free agent with the Mets, he spoke of how he’d previously worked out at Driveline, and how, as a pitcher, “you’d clearly prefer that your next team is one that places a high value on technology and data.”

Jeremy Hefner, the Mets’ pitching coach for each of the past three seasons, is analytically-inclined. Philadelphia’s pitching coach is Driveline-educated Caleb Cotham. 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. It was initially written for The Cooperstown Casebook, published in 2017 by Thomas Dunne Books, and subsequently adapted for SI.com and then FanGraphs. 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 happened so quickly. Freshly anointed the game’s top prospect by Baseball America in the spring of 1996, the soon-to-be-19-year-old Andruw Jones was sent to play for the Durham Bulls, the Braves’ High-A affiliate. By mid-August, he blazed through the Carolina League, the Double-A Southern League, and the Triple-A International League, then debuted for the defending world champions. By October 20, with just 31 regular-season games under his belt, he was a household name, having become the youngest player ever to homer in a World Series game, breaking Mickey Mantle’s record — and doing so twice at Yankee Stadium to boot.

Jones was no flash in the pan. The Braves didn’t win the 1996 World Series, and he didn’t win the ’97 NL Rookie of the Year award, but along with Chipper Jones (no relation) and the big three of Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and John Smoltz, he became a pillar of a franchise that won a remarkable 14 NL East titles from 1991 to 2005 (all but the 1994 strike season). From 1998 to 2007, Jones won 10 straight Gold Gloves, more than any center fielder except Willie Mays.

By the end of 2006, Jones had tallied 342 homers and 1,556 hits. He looked bound for a berth in Cooperstown, but after a subpar final season in Atlanta and a departure for Los Angeles in free agency, he fell apart so completely that the Dodgers bought out his contract, a rarity in baseball. He spent the next four years with three different teams before heading to Japan at age 35, and while he hoped for a return to the majors, he couldn’t find a deal to his liking after either the 2014 or ’15 seasons. He retired before his 39th birthday, and thanks to his rapid descent, he barely survived his first two years on the Hall of Fame ballot, with shares of 7.3% and 7.5%. Over the past three cycles, he’s more than quintupled that support, jumping to 19.4%, 33.9%, and 41.4%, a point where eventual election, either by the writers or a small committee, becomes a legitimate possibility. With five years of eligibility remaining, he still has a chance to get to 75% from the writers. Read the rest of this entry »

On a busy Tuesday at the Winter Meetings, the Cubs filled a hole in their outfield, signing centerfielder Cody Bellinger to a one-year deal with a mutual option for a second year, totaling $17.5 million in guaranteed money. The agreement gives the former MVP a change of scenery in his campaign to revive some version of the five-tool player who posted 7.7 WAR in his third full season at the age of 24 back in 2019 but has battled injuries and struggled mightily at the plate since then. For the Cubs, it’s a bet on a 27-year-old who they can reasonably expect, if healthy, to be no less than a solid defender in center field with a possibility to contribute a lot more value at the plate. It also means a chance to introduce some clarity into their 2023 outfield picture; barring further changes, Bellinger will join a pair of 28-year-olds in Ian Happ in left and Seiya Suzuki in right to form a capable starting unit for a team that was forced to employ a bit of a revolving door strategy in center in 2022.

The $17.5 million guarantee comes split over the next two years, as Bellinger will earn $12 million in 2023 with a $5.5 million buyout on the mutual option for the second year of the contract. This structure has become somewhat of a signature for the Cubs, who have signed a number of one-year deals with mutual options in the last couple of offseasons, including with Mychal Givens, Drew Smyly, and Jonathan Villar in 2022 and Jake Arrieta, Jake Marisnick, Joc Pederson, and Andrew Chafin in ’21. Mutual options are exceedingly unlikely to be picked up; in all likelihood, either the player did well enough in year one of the contract to want to test free agency or poorly enough that the club is unwilling to pay its end of the option. But the structure allows the team to offer a higher guarantee on a short-term contract while limiting its annual commitments under the salary tax and effectively deferring some portion of the money. For Chicago, Bellinger represents the beginning of what team president Jed Hoyer has indicated will be a busy offseason; just a few hours later, the Cubs signed right-hander Jameson Taillon to a four-year, $68 million deal. Attracting talent like Bellinger while managing to keep a good chunk of guaranteed money off the 2023 books is a great way to keep other doors open across the market. Read the rest of this entry »