During free agency, baseball fans have a tendency to throw out terms like “upside,” talk about players’ “ceilings” and “floors,” and do their best to evaluate the “risk and reward” of any given move. When teams make offseason additions, it’s impossible not to imagine not only what level of production can be expected, but also what might happen if everything clicks and, as the case may be, what might happen if things don’t. This becomes the basis of endless debate: what kind of heights can the prospect just traded for reach? Should that last spot in the rotation go to the reliable veteran or the young flamethrower who has yet to put it all together?

Teams have to make these evaluations themselves when considering roster construction. Say, for instance, that Player A was expected to contribute 2.0 WAR, but a team’s projection models indicate that he could be as valuable as 4.0 WAR or as unproductive as replacement level. Player B, on the other hand, is also projected for 2.0 WAR, but the models expect him to end up somewhere between 1.3 and 2.7 WAR. It’s not necessarily inherently better to choose one player over the other; it’s ultimately a matter of the club’s priorities at the time. This could depend on all sorts of factors: the size of the investment in the first place, where this player is expected to fit on the roster, how much the team anticipates competing for a title, maybe even player development insights that the front office or coaching staff thinks might help push the player toward the top of his projected spectrum.

As this winter’s free agency was unfolding, I was curious if there were insights to draw from how the disparity of players’ varied outcomes were playing out on the market. A handful of players with relatively uncertain futures (let me stress “relatively”) like Robert Suarez, Zach Eflin, and Masataka Yoshida were commanding larger — and longer — contracts than projected. Meanwhile, some relative knowns — veterans like Jean Segura and Noah Syndergaard — were coming in under their projections, and players like Elvis Andrus and Brad Hand are still out there looking. There are counterexamples, to be sure, but it made me want to explore whether there was particular interest in (and resources being allocated to) players that offered a high ceiling, even if that meant taking on the risk of a lower floor. Read the rest of this entry »

Will Bednar had a disappointing 2022 season. Drafted 14th overall in 2021 by the San Francisco Giants after a breakout campaign at Mississippi State University, the 22-year-old right-hander battled back issues and saw both his velocity and command take a step in the wrong direction. Pitching at Low-A San Jose, he logged a 4.19 ERA and issued 22 free passes in 43 innings. But there were positives, too. Even with the health-related downtick in his power arsenal’s effectiveness, the younger brother of Pittsburgh Pirates closer David Bednar fanned 51 batters and allowed just 25 hits.

One year ago this month, our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen wrote that “Bednar’s best pitch is a plus low-80s slider with plenty of bite.” The offering remains the righty’s go-to, and I talked to him about it during his stint in the Arizona Fall League.

———

David Laurila: Let’s start with the nuts and bolts. What is your repertoire?

Will Bednar: “Fastball, slider, changeup. I’ve been kind of playing around with a little bit of a two-seam, too.”

Laurila: The slider is your best pitch?

Bednar: “Yeah. The slider is definitely my best pitch. Without a doubt.”

Laurila: What is the story behind it? Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t like this title any more than you do. It just sounds so wrong. The guy with the largest contract signed by a pitcher in the history of the game is underrated? The New York Yankees ace isn’t being given his due? Preposterous! I might as well say no one watched the Super Bowl, or that we aren’t paying enough attention to weather balloons these days.

But uh… it’s true. I don’t have to like it and you don’t have to like it, but Cole is still one of the best pitchers in baseball, despite falling somewhat out of that conversation of late. He wasn’t even the most talked-about Yankee starter last year – that’d rightfully be Nestor Cortes. So consider this a Cole puff piece.

To begin, let’s consider our Depth Charts projections. These projections blend ZiPS and Steamer to produce rate statistic forecasts for every player. From there, Jason Martinez projects playing time, and those playing time projections cross with the rate statistics to produce overall projections. Cole sits in a tie for third place in projected WAR for 2023:

This shouldn’t be particularly surprising. He’s produced the ninth-most WAR among pitchers in the past two years, the ninth-most in the past three years, the third-most in the past four years, the third-most in the past five years… the point is, he’s consistently been one of the best in the game. While 2022 represented a down year, his overall body of work remains excellent.

What’s more, his 2022 swoon seems exaggerated to me. It represented his worst ERA since his Pittsburgh days, but luckily we have multiple statistics to describe pitching performance. I like to take a mosaic approach, looking at as many as I can and taking a rough average, and if you think of it that way, Cole’s 2022 looks pretty dang good. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday, Major League Baseball’s Joint Competition Committee dealt a double blow to anybody who enjoys baseball’s weirder late-inning turns, with the 11-man body making the runner-on-second extra innings rule permanent for all regular-season games and placing further restrictions on the use of position players to pitch. Both votes were unanimous, according to ESPN’s Jesse Rogers, and both rules will go into effect for this season alongside the previously adopted ones adding a pitch clock and regulating pickoff throws, prohibiting defensive shifts, and enlarging the bases.

First put into place as part of the COVID-19 health and safety protocols introduced for the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, the extra-innings rule mandates that each inning after the ninth begin with a runner on second base; some call it the ghost runner, but the zombie runner (named by our own digital dandy, Dan Szymborski) or Manfred Man (christened by Reds statistician Joel Luckhaupt) are more apt. The increased ease of scoring runs is designed to bring tied games to a quicker conclusion, thereby saving wear and tear on pitchers’ arms and reducing the amount of roster churn that occurs after lengthy extra-innings contests; often the reward for a less experienced reliever stepping up to throw multiple innings in extras is a ticket to Triple-A in favor of a fresher arm.

The new restrictions on position players pitching allow teams to turn to non-pitchers only when down by eight or more runs, up by 10 or more runs, or in extra innings. In the spring of 2019, a year before the pandemic began, MLB announced a version of this rule with a permissible margin of at least eight runs in either direction, but that was revised to “more than six runs” (i.e., at lest seven runs) the following spring before all hell broke loose. The rule was suspended under the 2020 and ’21 health and safety protocols but restored last year; in a June 4 game last season, Dodger manager Dave Roberts was prevented by umpires from using utilityman Zach McKinstry to pitch while trailing 9–4, a five-run margin. On the other side of the coin, Roberts used utilityman Hanser Alberto to pitch 10 times last season, including eight where the Dodgers held a lead, two of which occurred with margins of less than 10 runs.

The 11-member Joint Competition Committee was created as part of last year’s Collective Bargaining Agreement. Whereas MLB could previously implement rules unilaterally with one year’s notice to the players’ union, the new committee gives the players a voice in the form of four player representatives, but they’re outnumbered by the six owners on the committee; one umpire is also on the committee as well. Thus the players’ power only goes so far. Last September, the bloc of players voted unanimously against the banning of shifts and the introduction of the pitch clock, but they were outvoted on both matters, and both rules will go into effect this season despite their protestations. With both of these matters, however, the players were onboard, with Rogers reporting, “Players had concerns, as statistics were beginning to be dramatically affected by so many position players pitching.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Dodgers have had a fairly quiet offseason by their recent standards. Because they are set to exceed the competitive balance tax threshold for the third consecutive season, any spending over the $233 million limit will carry a 50% tax. As a result, Los Angeles has settled for smaller moves, bringing in Miguel Rojas via a trade with the Marlins and signing a couple of veterans to one-year deals. They added another free agent to that group on Friday, inking David Peralta to a one-year, $6.5 million contract with incentives that could bring the total to $8 million.

A long-time member of the Diamondbacks, Peralta peaked in 2018 with a 130 wRC+ and a career-high 30 home runs. In the three years after that breakout, he fell back to being a league average hitter with good plate discipline and decent power. A late-ish bloomer who converted away from the mound after he had already made his professional debut, the 35-year-old was never going to fit into Arizona’s rebuilding plan despite becoming a fan favorite in the desert. Read the rest of this entry »

The offseason is beginning to wrap up, but there are still plenty of names still available to help boost the fringes of teams’ rosters, especially in depth relievers. Last week, Michael Fulmer became the latest of these signings, inking a one-year deal with the Cubs.

The bulk of Fulmer’s big league career has been spent in Detroit, where he won the AL Rookie of the Year award in 2016. With a 3.06 ERA and 3.76 FIP in 159 innings, he looked to be the future ace of a Tigers rotation that had lost Rick Porcello and Max Scherzer a couple years earlier and would lose Justin Verlander the next season. But after two more seasons where he performed around league average and a 2019 campaign completely lost to Tommy John surgery, Fulmer went through a catastrophic 2020, with an ERA near nine and less than three innings per start. It seemed like his time as a productive big leaguer was over, and it was — as a starter. But he’s performed quite well over the past two years in the bullpen, posting career bests in ERA and strikeouts.

While Fulmer had above-average seasons as a starter, he had neither big-time swing-and-miss stuff nor pinpoint command, succeeding despite pedestrian numbers in the strikeout and walk departments. Instead, his best years were characterized by a solid ability to suppress hard contact and home runs, possibly aided by his cavernous home ballpark. He throws two fastball variants but has shown a slight preference for the sinker, which has allowed him to run a groundball rate that’s consistently a few points above the league average. Read the rest of this entry »

We’re excited to announce that Negro Leagues data is now available on the FanGraphs player pages and leaderboards! In addition, Negro Leagues players now have FanGraphs player pages. All data is provided by The Seamheads Negro Leagues Database powered by Agate Type Research. Special thanks are due to Gary Ashwill and Kevin Johnson for their assistance as we incorporated the data into the site.

The seven Black baseball leagues included in our data mirror those at Baseball Reference and are consistent with the recommendations of SABR’s Negro Leagues Task Force and Major League Baseball’s announcement recognizing these leagues as being major leagues.

Read the rest of this entry »

Depending on what your expectations were for the 2022 postseason, you likely saw Cristian Javier as the third or fourth starter for the Astros entering October. Dusty Baker agreed, as Javier didn’t get a start until the ALCS against the Yankees. But Javier clearly had different plans. When given the chance, he was dominant: in 12.2 innings, he pitched to a 0.71 era; in his two starts, he gave up a single hit across 11.1 innings facing the imposing lineups of the Yankees and Phillies. That performance plus his 3.4 fWAR in 148.2 regular-season innings put him on the map as one of the league’s best young pitchers. And last week, the Astros rewarded him as such by handing him a five year, $64 million extension.

After Houston announced the hiring of long-time Braves scouting executive Dana Brown as the team’s new general manager, I wondered if he would bring along his former organization’s tendency to extend players into their would-be free-agent years. It didn’t take long for that idea to come to reality. Javier was set to enter his three arbitration years in his age 26–28 seasons; those years have been bought out with salaries escalating from $3 million in 2023 to $7 million in ’24 and $10 million in ’25. His age-29 and 30 seasons will come at the price of $21 million per year, with an opportunity to escalate it from $500,000 to $2 million per year if he finishes at or near the top of the Cy Young ballot.

Even with free-agent departure after free-agent departure, Houston’s rotation remained strong due to the development of Framber Valdez and now Javier. But with the departure of Justin Verlander, the rotation looked like it was finally hitting a point of potential vulnerability. Extending Javier, then, provides the Astros some semblance of certainty beyond 2025. And with their entire starting lineup other than Martín Maldonado locked up through at least ’25, they needed to invest in their rotation. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley lament the newly codified permanence of the zombie runner, rededicate themselves to “ghost runner” reeducation, and banter about a new position-player-pitching limitation, Andrew Chafin’s surprisingly modest contract, Derek Jeter joining Fox Sports, baseball’s leading newsbreakers vs. the leading newsbreakers in other sports, baseball officiating vs. football officiating, the schedule for Triple-A robo umps, and a 1937 proposal for baseball photo finishes. Then they continue their 2023 season preview series by discussing the Cleveland Guardians (35:09) with MLB.com’s Mandy Bell and the Texas Rangers (1:12:18) with The Athletic’s Levi Weaver, plus Past Blasts (1:55:08) from 1873 and 1968 and a few follow-ups.

Audio intro: Dawes, “Everything is Permanent”
Audio interstitial 1: 10cc, “I’m Mandy Fly Me”
Audio interstitial 2: Levi Weaver, “Dark Clay”
Audio outro: Dr. Dog, “Ebenezer Scrooge”

Link to rules announcements
Link to extra-innings pace study
Link to Ben on TLOU
Link to Eric Stephen thread
Link to Eno on pos. player pitchers
Link to WaPo on PPP
Link to Royals Review on PPP
Link to MLBTR on Chafin’s option
Link to MLBTR on Chafin’s signing
Link to Stathead on leading LHRP
Link to Leo Morgenstern on Chafin
Link to Jake Mailhot on LHRP
Link to Sheehan on NFL/MLB calls
Link to Super Bowl holding play
Link to MLB.com on Jeter
Link to Katie Baker on Fox pregames
Link to robo ump schedule
Link to Max Bishop SABR bio
Link to Craig Wright on Bishop
Link to 1937 photo finish source
Link to article on photo-finish camera
Link to film development source
Link to other film development source
Link to FG team projections
Link to payroll rankings
Link to Guardians offseason tracker
Link to Guardians depth chart
Link to Rangers offseason tracker
Link to Rangers depth chart
Link to Levi’s wins prediction
Link to Levi’s author archive
Link to FG’s SP projections
Link to FG’s LF projections
Link to 2022 LF WAR by team
Link to Bochy’s W-L record
Link to 1873 article source
Link to Rob Arthur on OF shifts
Link to Rob on OF depth
Link to 1968 article source
Link to second ’68 article source
Link to third ’68 article source
Link to David Lewis’s Twitter
Link to David Lewis’s Substack
Link to CBA AAV rule
Link to NHL contract rules
Link to old CPBL logo
Link to Brännboll wiki
Link to Brännboll video
Link to 1796 proto-baseball text
Link to baseball exceptionalism wiki
Link to A Christmas Carol ending

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