The book on Yandy Díaz has already been written. An excellent eye at the plate paired with great bat-to-ball skills has allowed him to post fantastic strikeout and walk rates throughout his career; he was one of six qualified batters who walked more than they struck out last year. When he puts the ball in play, he hits it harder than nearly anyone else in baseball, though his extremely high groundball rate has been a problem. In 2022, all those skills coalesced into a career-high 146 wRC+ and 3.8 WAR.
The book on Díaz has yet to be written. His elite plate discipline is still present, but he’s already matched his home run total from last year in just 32 games; he’s on pace to launch more than 40 this year, which would blow away his previous career high of 14 in 2019. On April 18, he hit the longest home run of his career, a 440-foot blast. His outstanding hard-hit rate has increased up to 56.4%, and his barrel rate has increased by nine points, fueling a .281 ISO and a 192 wRC+, all career-bests. Read the rest of this entry »
Nolan Arenado could have won the National League Most Valuable Player award last year, though he lost out to teammate Paul Goldschmidt, who gave chase to the Triple Crown and finished with the more eye-catching traditional stats (but slightly lower fWAR and bWAR). But while Goldschmidt has been similarly productive this year amid the Cardinals’ dreadful start — indeed, his three homers on Sunday helped end the team’s eight-game losing streak — the same can’t be said for Arenado, who’s off to an uncharacteristically bad start.
Between compiling their worst record through 35 games in half a century and making the puzzling decision to move marquee free agent Willson Contreras off of catcher, the Cardinals are such a mess that I mentioned Arenado only in passing on Monday. He’s nowhere near the team’s biggest problem, yet at the same time, the 32-year-old third baseman is hitting just .232/.282/.326 for a 69 wRC+ thus far. His 82-point drop from last year’s 151 wRC+ is the majors’ second-largest among players with at least 400 plate appearances last year and 100 this year:
Minimum 400 plate appearances in 2022 and 100 plate appearances in ’23.
Arenado, whose 207-point drop in slugging is also the majors’ largest at these cutoffs, isn’t the only MVP-caliber player struggling. Judge, the reigning AL MVP, hasn’t come close to replicating last year’s astronomical numbers, though he’s still an above-average hitter. Machado, who finished between Goldschmidt and Arenado in the NL MVP voting (and edged both in WAR), is scuffling nearly as badly as his fellow third baseman. Several recent All-Stars besides those players (Benintendi, Giménez, Marte, Rodríguez, and Springer) are represented above as well. That’s baseball, Suzyn. Read the rest of this entry »
RIP Vida Blue. No-hitter at 21, MVP/CY at 22, 3x World Series winner 22-24, 6x All-Star
7 May 2023
2:07
Yeah Well Hiura Towel: What are the chances Manfred & the other owners will get sick of the Athletics stadium search clown show and force Fisher to sell?
If you look at teams with long-term stability, you’ll tend to find teams who have managed to get a lot of their best talent inked to contract extensions. When it comes to team construction, that certainty makes resolving other questions about the team a simpler matter and reduces the risk of a nasty surprise when your rival decides to spend the GDP of a small country on one of your best players in baseball. Making sure your core is locked up has been trickier since the mid-1970s, as it shockingly turned out that when you allow players to choose their employer, they may choose to find new employment! Teams as widely varying as John Hart’s 1990s Cleveland teams to today’s Braves employed these strategies as foundation of their continued success.
This year has already seen a number of key players signing long-term contracts that guarantee them healthy amounts of guaranteed cash: Corbin Carroll, Andrés Giménez, Keibert Ruiz, Miles Mikolas, Jake Cronenworth, Logan Webb, Ian Happ, Pablo López, Bryan Reynolds, and Hunter Greene have all signed deals within the last two months. Signing players now is usually better than waiting to later, so here are my eight players who teams should most urgently attempt to sign to long-term deals. For each player, I’ve included the current ZiPS-projected contract.
First off, let me address two players who you might expect to see here but who are not: Shohei Ohtani and Juan Soto. Ohtani looks like such a mega-blockbuster free agent that I’m not sure the Angels can realistically keep him from hitting the open market, and in any case, the projection would just be “all the currency that exists or ever will exist.” As for Soto, as much as it suprises me that I’m saying this, there’s enough of a question around where his ability level is right now that I think a meeting of the minds may be very difficult. The fact is that he’s a .234/.398/.437 hitter over the last calendar year, and with extremely limited defensive value, I’d actually be a little squeamish about offering him the 14-year, $440 million extension he turned down from the Nats. Read the rest of this entry »
An increase in stolen bases wasn’t the primary aim of MLB’s offseason rule changes, but it was expected to be a happy side effect of new timing rules and bigger bases. Baseball fans will argue about just about anything, but stolen bases enjoy near-universal popularity. They’re exciting to watch, and they reward athleticism and initiative. The only drawback: They’re risky. And the new rules would mitigate that risk.
Over the first weekend of the season, the Orioles brought forth a new golden age of basestealing in the span of two days. In 10 attempts, they stole 10 bases off the Red Sox, and they did so without coming particularly close to getting thrown out.
“We just knew we needed to do a better job with the run game after that series,” Red Sox catcher Connor Wong says. “You can’t let guys run all over you and get into scoring position all the time.” Read the rest of this entry »
Last year, as you might have heard, the Guardians cracked the code. I say “you might have heard,” but let’s be honest: you heard. You couldn’t walk five feet without someone telling you that contact was in, that this team of genius mavericks had turned baseball on its ear by finding players who don’t fit the modern-day ideal. What dummies, those other teams! All you have to do is not strike out, and then baseball is easy. Why didn’t anyone else try this plan before?
Good news! The Guardians have continued their no-strikeout ways this year; they’re fourth in baseball in strikeout rate (lower is better), striking out only 20.3% of the time. But bad news! They stink. Their offense is hitting an aggregate .224/.301/.330, good for a 75 wRC+, the worst mark in baseball. The Athletics are in the middle of recreating the plot of Major League, and the Guardians are comfortably worse than them offensively. The Nationals traded everyone who wasn’t nailed down, then traded the nails they had left over, and the Guardians are comfortably worse than them offensively. They’re comfortably worse than everyone offensively; the Tigers are in 29th place, and they’re six points of wRC+ better. Only the Tigers and Marlins, who combine awful offense with awful baserunning, have scored fewer runs.
What gives? To some extent, this is about overhype. The Guardians had the lowest strikeout rate in baseball last year, but it’s not like they lit the world on fire offensively. They produced a 99 wRC+, which is below average (that’s how it works), and scored 698 runs, 15th in baseball. That’s despite playing a lot of games against the Royals, White Sox, and Tigers, who were all bad pitching teams. They did that with Andrés Giménez putting up a 140 wRC+ and Oscar Gonzalez coming out of nowhere to hit .296/.327/.461 over nearly 400 plate appearances. To put it mildly, those two haven’t backed up their performances this year. Read the rest of this entry »
Below is an evaluation of the prospects in the Chicago Cubs farm system who readers should consider “imminent big leaguers,” players who might reasonably be expected to play in the majors at some point this year. This includes all prospects on the 40-man roster as well as those who have already established themselves in the upper levels of the minors but aren’t yet rostered. We tend to be more inclusive with pitchers and players at premium positions since their timelines are usually the ones accelerated by injuries and scarcity. Any Top 100 prospects, regardless of their ETA, are also included on this list. Reports, tool grades, and scouting information for all of the prospects below can also be found on The Board.
This is not a top-to-bottom evaluation of the Cubs farm system. We like to include what’s happening in minor league and extended spring training in our reports as much as possible, since scouting high concentrations of players in Arizona and Florida allows us to incorporate real-time, first-person information into the org lists. However, this approach has led to some situations where outdated analysis (or no analysis at all) was all that existed for players who had already debuted in the majors. Skimming the imminent big leaguers off the top of a farm system will allow this time-sensitive information to make its way onto the site more quickly, better preparing readers for the upcoming season, helping fantasy players as they draft, and building site literature on relevant prospects to facilitate transaction analysis in the event that trades or injuries foist these players into major league roles. There will still be a Cubs prospect list that includes Alexis Hernandez, Cade Horton, and all of the other prospects in the system who appear to be at least another season away. As such, today’s list includes no ordinal rankings. Readers are instead encouraged to focus on the players’ Future Value (FV) grades. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh talks to Will Leitch about the Cardinals’ horrendous start, their baffling decision to bar big free-agent addition Willson Contreras from catching, how Yadier Molina’s legacy looms over the franchise, how Oli Marmol and John Mozeliak have handled the team’s struggles, how the rest of the season might go, and more, along with the Effectively Wild connection in Will’s new novel, The Time Has Come. Then (54:51) Ben talks to David Hrusovsky about wearing a SpongeBob costume to Guardians games and David’s ongoing effort to map every high school baseball field in the country and document the weirdest ones. After that (1:19:58), Ben brings on frequent Stat Blast consultant Ryan Nelson to deliver several Stat Blasts, followed by (1:51:35) a Past Blast from 2004 and a few follow-ups.
Jonathan India started his career with a bang. In 2021, the Cincinnati second baseman put up a 120 wRC+ and 3.0 WAR over 150 games, good enough to snag National League Rookie of the Year honors. Last year, a hamstring injury limited him to just 103 games, and he struggled to a 95 wRC+ at the plate. He looked like a natural bounce back candidate coming into the 2023 season, and here he is bouncing back. After a big day on Sunday, India’s .306/.397/.460 slash line consists of three career-best figures. His underlying metrics are also better than ever in a host of categories.
Jonathan India – Year-Over-Year Stats
Season
Chase%
Whiff%
BB%
K%
GB/FB
Exit Velocity
HardHit%
wRC+
2021
25
22.8
11.3%
22.3%
1.32
87.6
38.1%
120
2022
27.9
21
7.2%
21.8%
1.14
85.1
28.8%
95
2023
22.1
14.3
11.6%
14.4%
1.19
90.2
43.8%
130
Let’s start with plate discipline. India is chasing less than ever, whiffing less than ever, walking more, and striking out way less. Those developments are all — and please excuse the inside baseball jargon here — very good. His chase rate has either improved or held steady against every pitch type except for sinkers, which have been something of an Achilles’ heel this year. He’s hitting them harder, but 71% of the sinkers he’s put in play have been groundballs, up from 54% in previous years.
India is reaching base more and hitting the ball much harder. After the previous paragraph, you might assume that his increased exit velocity has come from hitting more pitches in the zone, but the difference is smaller than you might think: 87% of his balls in play came on pitches in the zone, as opposed to 84% in 2021. Further, a close look at his batting line reveals something interesting: Although he’s hitting the ball harder and his BABIP is at a career high, his production on balls in play is still a ways off from where it was in 2021.
Jonathan India – Balls in Play
Season
BABIP
wOBA
xwOBA
2021
.326
.413
.395
2022
.305
.357
.339
2023
.343
.390
.366
Again, this is not necessarily a bad thing; walking more and striking out less has so far made this a worthwhile tradeoff. But it’s worth exploring why India’s newfound exit velocity hasn’t translated into as much power as we might expect. He’s currently running a .153 ISO, closer to the mark he put up last year than the .190 he posted in 2021. His barrel rate is likewise between his 2021 and ’22 figures, and his HR/FB is at a career low. Read the rest of this entry »
Jay Jaffe
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