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”

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The Oakland A’s and Miami Marlins pulled off a minor trade over the weekend, with the A’s sending former first-round pick A.J. Puk down to Florida while another former first-rounder, outfielder JJ Bleday, headed to the CurrentCorporateName Coliseum. Puk had arguably his best — and healthiest — season as a pro in 2022, appearing in 66 1/3 innings over 62 games, all in relief, while putting up a 3.12 ERA and 3.69 FIP for the A’s. Bleday’s season was notably less successful, especially after a July call-up that led to a .167/.277/.309 line with the parent club while basically being a full-time starter.

For the Marlins, the draw of bringing Puk in is obvious. As I’ve noted in the past, I’m generally leery of the Marlins trading offense for pitching, considering how little they have of the former. But in this case, it’s hard to really describe Bleday as “offense,” while Puk is coming off an very successful season. While Puk succeeding as a late-inning reliever isn’t the sexiest outcome given his status as a prospect, it’s an important building block considering the time he’s missed as a pro due to Tommy John surgery, a shoulder surgery, and an annoying biceps issue. Just the fact that he came out the other side of those maladies with his upper-90s fastball and command both intact is a pretty big deal in my book and ought to have made Puk interesting to most teams.

Puk’s actual role for Miami is far from set in stone. It would be tempting to just call him a late-inning reliever — he’s arguably the top lefty in the bullpen and is less heartburn-inducing than Tanner Scott and more explosive than Steven Okert. But it’s hard to definitively close the book on him as a starter given his pedigree, build, and desire to start in the majors. The A’s had hinted that they were willing to explore using him as a starter in the spring, though that’s no guarantee that the Marlins will have the same willingness. That said, it should also be noted that the Marlins have been very reluctant to move some of their explosive young pitchers with injury issues to the bullpen full-time. Puk the Reliever is a solid contributor, but not a star, while Puk the Starter could still achieve stardom if he managed to stay healthy. Read the rest of this entry »

Late last week, the Reds and Guardians swapped young outfielders, with Cincinnati acquiring 24-year-old Will Benson from Cleveland in exchange for 21-year-old Justin Boyd, a 2022 second-round pick. The trade gives the Reds’ outfield mix a source of left-handed power, which they sorely lacked, as the Guardians pick up a long-term prospect in exchange for a player who was going to have a hard time emerging from a crowded field of similarly skilled young players on their own roster.

The 14th overall pick in the 2016 draft, Benson made his big league debut in 2022 and was in the majors long enough to exhaust rookie eligibility. Deployed almost entirely against right-handed pitchers — he took 55 of his 61 plate appearances against righties — he only managed to hit .182 in a small big league sample. Benson has had contact-related question marks since he was drafted; “will he hit enough?” was the big question about his prospectdom. Plus-plus raw power and arm strength gave him an everyday right fielder’s ceiling if he can.

Benson traversed the minors striking out at a 30% clip and never hit better than .238 at any level. But even as he struck out at an alarming rate, he has typically walked enough and gotten to enough power to perform above league average at each stop. In 2022, his age-24 season, his strikeout rate was suddenly a manageable 22.7%. There has not been a change to his swing that I can identify, though it’s worth noting that his raw swing rate is a measly 37%, which would be one of the lowest in all of MLB; in 2021, per Synergy Sports, it was 46%. It’s possible he has become discerning within the strike zone in a way that has helped his bat-to-ball skills play at a 40- or 45-grade, but visual assessment of his swing still generates a lot of concern around in-zone swing and miss, especially against fairly common letter-high fastballs. The 35+ FV grade with which Benson graduated (a grade befitting a narrow, situational big leaguer with one premium tool) would not change given this new information about his approach. Read the rest of this entry »

The free agent market skidded to a halt in February, with more than a week passing without a major league signing. Perhaps teams were waiting to settle arbitration cases, holding out for the 60-day IL, or simply playing free agency chicken with spring training right around the corner. Or maybe they’ve all been busy trying to wrap their heads around Chad Green’s contract so as to decide how it affected the market. Whatever the case may be, things finally started to pick up steam this past weekend.

Andrew Chafin came to terms with the Diamondbacks on Saturday afternoon, while Alex Reyes signed with the Dodgers shortly thereafter. Both contracts are one-year deals with incentives, and each comes with a team option for 2024. Chafin will make $5.5 million in 2023 with the potential to earn an additional $1 million in playing time bonuses. After that, the D-backs can pick up his $7.25 million option or pay him a $750,000 buyout. Reyes, meanwhile, will make a base salary of $1.1 million in 2023, while his team option is worth $3 million. Both years of the contract come with performance incentives that can push the total value up to $10 million.

Chafin is returning to the franchise where he spent the first decade of his professional career. In parts of seven big league seasons with Arizona, he tossed 271.2 innings with a 3.20 FIP, good for 4.0 WAR. No Diamondbacks reliever was more productive in that time. The D-backs flipped him to the Cubs at the 2020 trade deadline, and the Cubs subsequently flipped him to the Athletics the following year. Chafin signed with the Tigers after the lockout, and miraculously, he survived the 2022 trade deadline, leaving the team on his own terms this winter. Unfortunately, he may have come to regret that decision. Chafin declined a $6.5 million player option for 2023; his new deal guarantees him slightly less. Read the rest of this entry »

For the past few weeks, I’ve been delving into exit velocity readings in an attempt to find out what really matters and what’s just noise. I found that 95th-percentile exit velocity and contact rate are the two stickiest metrics from one year to the next, with exit velocity slightly more likely to remain the same from one year to the next.

Of course, that doesn’t mean it can’t change. In fact, players change their top-end power readings by a good amount every year. Sure, any individual player might be unlikely to do it, but there are tons of players in baseball. I found that only 4% of hitters change their 95th-percentile exit velocity (EV95) by one standard deviation from one year to the next, but 408 batters put at least 100 batted balls into play in 2022. Four percent of 408 is a lot more than zero.

With that in mind, I thought I’d take an inventory of those exit velocity changers and see what their improvement meant going forward. To do so, I created two groups: hitters whose EV95 improved by at least half a standard deviation from one year to the next, and the opposite, hitters whose EV95 declined by at least half a standard deviation. I picked half an SD instead of an entire one to bulk up the sample size. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, pitching prospect Grayson Rodriguez was asked a great question on The Baseball Barb-B-Cast. Rodgriguez is ranked third in an excellent Baltimore system, and as a player who was drafted in 2018, his tenure with the club spans both the Dan Duquette and Mike Elias eras. The question was: How has the organization changed over time?

Rodriguez started his answer with, “Everything about the organization changed but the name.” He touched on technology, pitch development, and the turnover in the coaching staff, but the part I want to focus on came right at the beginning, when he was describing the Duquette era: “Our pitching philosophy was, it was like, ‘Hey, you know, as a starter we’re going to go out in the first three innings and we’re just going to throw nothing but fastballs, and we’re going to see if that works.’ And, like, terrible. Terrible idea.”

Yup. That does indeed sound like a terrible idea. It also made me wonder whether teams are as focused on establishing the fastball as they once were. A reduction in first inning fastball rate would make sense for a couple reasons. First, fastball usage has dropped overall as teams have learned that pitchers should throw their best pitch more often, and fastballs themselves have become less effective:

Read the rest of this entry »

Colt Keith started to tap into his power last year. After going deep just twice in 2021 — his first professional season — the 21-year-old third baseman homered nine times in 48 games with High-A West Michigan before landing on the injured list with a dislocated shoulder in early June. Returning to action in October, Keith proceeded to hit three bombs in 19 Arizona Fall League games.

The increased power production by one of the top position-player prospects in the Detroit Tigers organization was by design.

“I changed my approach a little bit,” Keith told me during his stint in the AFL. “I started trying to hit balls out in front, and backspin them to all fields, looking for a little bit more power. A lot of people had told me I just needed to keep doing what I was doing, but looking at guys in the big leagues that I want to play like, they’re hitting 25-30 homers a year. I felt like I needed to move in that direction. At the same time, I want to keep my hit tool. Batting .300 with some home runs is what I’d like to do.”

That is what he did this past season. The 6-foot-3, 238-pound infielder — Keith has added meaningful size and strength since entering pro ball — augmented his regular-season round-trippers with a .301/.370/.544 slash line. In 2021, he’d slashed .320/.437/.422 with Low-A Lakeland before scuffling over the final month as a 19-year-old in the Midwest League. Read the rest of this entry »

As the Blue Jays attempt to build upon last year’s 92-win season — their best since 2015 in terms of won-loss record — they’ve locked up one of their young, homegrown stars. Earlier this week, Sportsnet’s Ben Nicholson Smith reported that the team had agreed to a multiyear extension with Bo Bichette, thereby avoiding what could have been a contentious arbitration hearing. The terms of the deal were unclear at the time, but on Thursday, The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal reported that Bichette will receive a three-year, $33.6 million guarantee, with escalators and incentives that can increase the total value of the deal to as much as $40.65 million.

Via the Associated Press, Bichette is guaranteed $6.1 million this year ($3.25 million as a signing bonus and $2.85 million in salary) and then $11 million in 2024 and $16.5 million in ’25. Winning an MVP award would increase his next salary by $2.25 million, while finishing second or third would add $1.25 million, and finishing fourth or fifth would add $250,000. The extension buys out all three of his arbitration years — his age-25 through 27 seasons — without delaying his free agency, as he enters 2023 with three years and 63 days of service time. Without the deal, he and the Blue Jays would have headed into arbitration with the two sides as far apart as any in the majors this year. According to MLB Trade Rumors, the $2.5 million gap between the filings of Bichette ($7.5 million) and the Blue Jays ($5 million) matched that of the Astros and Kyle Tucker; Houston won that hearing on Thursday.

Bichette is coming off a very good season, albeit something of an inconsistent one. He set a full-season high with a 129 wRC+ via a .290/.333/.469 line with 24 homers and 13 steals. His 4.5 WAR tied with Corey Seager for 14th in the American League and second among AL shortstops behind Xander Bogaerts, 0.1 WAR ahead of Carlos Correa. That said, his season was an uneven one that exposed concerns in several areas of his game. He hit just .213/.237/.298 (50 wRC+) in April and .257/.302/.418 (105 wRC+) through the first half — missing the AL All-Star team where he made it in 2021 — before batting .337/.378/.543 (163 wRC+) in the second half, capped by a .406/.444/.662 (217 wRC+) September. Fourteen of his 24 homers came before the break, but so did 100 of his 165 strikeouts; he trimmed his K% from 24.3% before the break to 19.2% after. Read the rest of this entry »