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The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2025 Hall of Fame ballot. 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, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

He won’t end up in Cooperstown like Larry Walker and Todd Helton, and he was never the face of the franchise the way Troy Tulowitzki was, but Carlos González is the only player to appear in three separate postseasons for the Rockies, a bridge between high points of the Helton/Tulowitzki era to those of the Nolan Arenado one. González solidified his spot in the majors with the 2009 Rockies, who overcame a slow start to claim a Wild Card berth, and was still playing regularly (albeit much less effectively) on their ’17 and ’18 Wild Card qualifiers. In between those October appearances, the sweet-swinging CarGo made three All-Star teams, took home three Gold Gloves, and won a very Coors Field-flavored batting title that propelled him to third place in the 2010 NL MVP race. Alas, as with so many other Rockies stars, he also battled numerous injuries, topping 140 games just three times in his 12 seasons.

Carlos Eduardo González was born on October 17, 1985 in Maracaibo, Venezuela, to parents Euro (an auto mechanic), and Lucila (an employee in the insurance industry). Euro had only a passing interest in baseball, but his oldest son, Euro Jr., dominated street games in their Maracaibo neighborhood. Euro Jr. didn’t start playing organized baseball until he was 12, so he never had the opportunity to capitalize on his raw talent, but he took great interest in the affinity that Carlos, his younger brother by seven years, had for the game. When Carlos was five, Euro Jr. helped find him a Little League team, his entry into Venezuela’s vast state-run youth baseball structure. Euro Jr. worked to help his younger brother buy a glove and baseball shoes.

As a child, Carlos often snuck into the kitchens and closets of relatives and hijacked their broom handles. “I would find the broom and unscrew it so I had a bat to hit stuff with,” he told the Denver Post’s Troy Renck in 2013. His toys became projectiles. “I never liked playing with them. I would toss them up in the air and hit them all the time,” as he told Renck. Read the rest of this entry »

For the 21st consecutive season, the ZiPS projection system is unleashing a full set of prognostications. For more information on the ZiPS projections, please consult this year’s introduction and MLB’s glossary entry. The team order is selected by lot, and the next team up is the Toronto Blue Jays.

Batters

The AL East team that entered 2024 with the highest projected floor turned out to have… the lowest actual floor in 2024. Curse you, probability! The rotation disappointed last year, and a wide swathe of the starting lineup either underperformed or got injured, and in some cases, both. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh, Meg Rowley, and Ben Clemens banter about the Giants signing Justin Verlander, a plateau in leaguewide slider usage, and why spending on free agents has exceeded expectations so far. Then (20:55) they continue a cherished podcast tradition by conducting the 12th annual Effectively Wild Minor League Free Agent Draft, in which they select 10 minor league free agents each and compete to see whose roster will accumulate the most combined MLB playing time in 2025.

Audio intro: Austin Klewan, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Daniel Leckie, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to Baumann on Verlander
Link to Dubuque on Verlander
Link to Verlander pitch values
Link to Verlander max speeds
Link to Verlander stuff ratings
Link to Ben L. on Kershaw
Link to Ben C. on sliders
Link to Ben C. on spending
Link to FG SP projections
Link to last year’s draft
Link to FA draft wiki
Link to competitions sheet
Link to historical picks sheet
Link to BA list
Link to Neosho alumni
Link to Neosho wiki
Link to EW gift subscriptions

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On Thursday the Dodgers and Twins agreed to a small trade involving former Top 100 Prospect, Diego Cartaya, a 23-year-old Venezuelan catcher who has struggled to develop as he’s been exposed to upper-level pitching. The Dodgers designated him for assignment earlier this week. In exchange, the Dodgers received hulking 20-year-old DSL righty, Jose Vasquez, a hard-throwing prospect who has spent the last two seasons in the DSL.

Cartaya was a big bonus amateur player ($2.5 million) whose career had a very promising first four seasons. He slashed .254/.389/.503 in 2022, at mostly High-A, when he was still just 20 years old. He was striking out at an elevated rate (26.7%) at the time, but he was also getting to impressive power and playing a premium position. His big frame and plus raw arm strength were the foundation of a likely defensive fit at catcher, and at the time it felt fine that Cartaya (who had missed all of 2020 because of the COVID shutdown, and most of 2021 due to injury) was a little behind as a receiver and ball-blocker.

In the two seasons since then, though, Cartaya has either plateaued or regressed in basically every facet of the game. His hands remain below average, and this shows in the way he tries to frame borderline pitches and in how he tries to pick balls in the dirt. Cartaya is capable of hurling darts right to second base with plus pop times, but he often either takes too long to get rid of the baseball, or airmails throws into center field. He has a good arm, yet he’s allowed stolen bases at an 80% success rate in his minor league career and 84% in 2024.

At a mix of Double- and Triple-A, Cartaya hit .189/.278/.379 in 2023 — his first year on the Dodgers 40-man roster — and .221/.323/.363 in 2024. His measurable power has dipped, with his hard hit rate dropping from 41% in 2022 to 33% last year. It’s prudent to give young catchers a long runway to develop as hitters because their bodies take a beating playing defense, and they might be physically compromised for large chunks of a season, such that it impacts their overall offensive output. But Cartaya has now had two years with the look of a fringe prospect, and so at this point it’s fair to consider him exactly that. He’s still a big-framed young guy with that big arm, and the Twins have had success at developing catchers who were once considered long shots to remain behind the plate, so Cartaya still carries some prospect value as a potential late-bloomer.

While Cartaya’s development stagnated and his options nearly ran dry, Dalton Rushing emerged as a potential everyday catcher in the Dodgers system. Hunter Feduccia (whom I have a backup catcher grade on) is a solid third option on the 40-man right now, behind starter Will Smith and backup Austin Barnes, while Rushing further develops in the minors. There was probably still time for the Dodgers to attempt to develop Cartaya if they really wanted to, but as a contending team they’ll likely have other, more pressing needs for that 40-man roster spot, and they got an actual prospect in return.

Cartaya is now on Minnesota’s 40-man in what will be his final option year. He is very unlikely to make the Opening Day roster, barring injuries to the catchers in front of him, and he’s likely to be the Twins’ fourth catcher on the depth chart when camp breaks, behind Ryan Jeffers, Christian Vázquez, and another former Dodgers minor leaguer, Jair Camargo. Industry inventory at catcher is always low, and depth at that position is coveted on the margins of every roster. If the Twins develop Cartaya enough that he can be their backup next year when Vázquez’s contract ends, then they can feel okay about having given up an actual prospect for him.

That actual prospect is Jose Vasquez, who signed with Minnesota at the tail end of the 2022 signing period (December 13) for $120,000, and he spent both 2023 and 2024 in the DSL. After walking more than a batter per inning in his debut season, Vasquez had a much better second campaign, working 2-to-4 innings at a time, as both a starter and reliever, and amassing 30 2/3 innings, 45 strikeouts, and a much more tenable 15 walks.

Despite his strike-throwing improvement, Vasquez is still most likely going to be a reliever. He’s a physical, 220ish-pound 20-year-old who has had trouble harnessing his 94-97 mph fastball, which sometimes has very heavy late sink. His 84-88 mph slider is curt and cuttery at times, but it flashes bat-missing two-plane shape and above-average length. Vasquez’s realistic ceiling is better than a generic middle reliever, but he’s maybe a half decade away from the bigs. He’ll probably begin his Dodgers career in Extended Spring Training.

Pitchers and catchers might not start reporting to camp for another five weeks, but as we count down the days until the start of spring training, we can at least look forward to the winter’s remaining free agents finding new homes, as well as the announcement of each team’s list of non-roster invitees (NRIs) to big league camp. And if we’re lucky, a few more big trades might go down.

Whatever happens, our Opening Day Tracker will continue to be updated with every player who will report to a major league camp, as well as their projected roster status.

Here’s a quick primer on who will be in major league camp, what happens as rosters are pared down to 26 players, and how our tracker can help you keep up between now and Opening Day. Read the rest of this entry »

12:00

Dan Szymborski: Let’s start the madness. I mean chat.

12:01

Dan Szymborski: Blue Jays tomorrow. I was travelling back through snow and then had to dig out my driveway and my mom’s driveway. Measured nine inches on my back lawn.

12:02

Dan Szymborski: I think it’d be close

12:02

Dan Szymborski: But on the no side

Read the rest of this entry »

On December 12, the day of Juan Soto’s introductory press conference with the Mets – imagine for a moment being one of the three people in New York City who still requires an introduction to the concept of Juan Soto – the temperature at nearby La Guardia Airport peaked at 43 degrees. Soto wore a turtleneck and chain under his blazer, presumably to ward off the cold, but possibly because he was inspired by the look his new teammate Mark Vientos rocked during the National League Championship Series.

During the press conference, Soto swapped out the blazer for a crisp, new Mets jersey, but he left the turtleneck in place. The temperature was down to 37 by the time he ventured out to the elevated seats behind home plate for a photo op. “We got about fifteen minutes with Soto and his family,” said photographer Brad Penner in an email, “and it was COLD.” The photo op wasn’t just quick. It was weird, and the images it left us with are bizarre and beautiful. “I’ve done many press conferences,” wrote Penner, “but few that were like this one.”

As he so often does, Soto seemed to jump right out of the photos. “I chose a seat as close to where Soto would be,” Penner said, “so I could line him up with the scoreboard, rather than the field and seats.” That was smart, as the Mets displayed a “Welcome to the//New York Mets//Juan Soto” graphic on both scoreboards, each featuring three images of him. That left many of the photos with seven Sotos in them, quite possibly a world record. With the focus of the lens necessarily all the way in the foreground, the scoreboard isn’t crisp. You can just make out the tiny “Welcome to the” portion of the graphic, but only if you zoom in and enhance like a CIA agent tracking Jason Bourne through a train station. (Also, there’s no comma between “Mets” and “Juan Soto,” so it reads like the entire team has been renamed the New York Mets Juan Soto. Take that, Cleveland Napoleons!)

Soto was standing in an area that was much darker than the field and the scoreboard in the background, and in the twilight, the black fabric of the turtleneck discolored his paper-thin jersey in an odd way. The white jersey shone brightly where it hung free, but where it lay flat against the turtleneck, it failed to contain the darkness within. The numbers on Soto’s jersey lit up like reflectors while the underside of his cap swallowed light like a black hole. In one picture, Soto smiles and spreads his arms wide, but his arms and his entire head are fully engulfed in impenetrable shadow.

In case you can’t tell, I adore these pictures. They’re not the action-packed hero shots that we’re used to seeing splashed across the sports section or the homepage of our favorite baseball analytics website. We’re accustomed to crisp, perfectly lit pictures of batters flattening fastballs into pancakes and pitchers grimacing mid-delivery with their UCLs stretched past the point of no return. But for the past month, with no new art to take their place, these photos of Soto looking, of all things, human, are everywhere. There he is on the television, in the newspaper, on the internet: in the dark, wearing a baseball jersey over a chain and a turtleneck that probably cost more money than I have ever seen in my life, alternating between posing confidently and standing awkwardly.

That’s part of the deal for professional baseball players. From the moment they arrive at spring training until the moment their season ends, they’re fair game for photographers. The Imagn photo service has 4,455 pictures of Soto, 1,113 of them from the 2024 season alone. But when the season ends, the players disappear. In the winter, they get to live their quasi-private lives away from the cameras, and baseball editors get to scroll through Imagn’s 56 pages of 2024 Juan Soto pictures in an attempt to avoid reusing that one shot they used back in December.

But now we’ve got art of Soto in a Mets uniform. Sure, the art isn’t what we’re used to, but it beats using an old photo of him in a Yankees uniform. Here’s what you see what you search Imagn for Juan Soto (which you can do here).

For any editor whose news organization didn’t send a photographer to Soto’s presser, this is what you have to choose from. It’s one closeup after another: Juan Soto with his arms outstretched like Moses parting the Red Sea, Juan Soto nervously smiling and adjusting the cuff of his turtleneck, Juan Soto with his hands raised like he’s conducting an orchestra, Juan Soto with the same goofy, sideways smile that Steve Carell wore in the poster for The 40-Year-Old Virgin.

I was a teenager when digital cameras began to fully replace film cameras, and I remember that era just well enough to appreciate what the transition cost us. Today, you can take and instantly delete an infinite number of pictures until you get one that shows exactly what you want it to show. Before that option was available, you couldn’t see your photos until you remembered to take the roll to the developer months later. When you finally got them back, you’d discover that you had your finger over the lens for a couple of them, that you had your eyes closed for a couple more, that the lighting was off for a couple more, and that one was, for no discernible reason, completely gray. If you were a total amateur like me, you’d consider yourself lucky to end up with two or three photographs that actually came out well. In other words, photography used to accurately represent real life. Real life is 90% crazy eyes and pre-sneeze faces, and you don’t get to dial up the saturation. I don’t mean to sound like a crank. I love having a decent camera in my pocket at all times; I’m just saying that it has distorted our world a bit.

For that reason, I love the fact that these pictures are everywhere you look. Penner took all of them, and he’s a fantastic photographer. He took the widely circulated picture of Francisco Lindor celebrating on the field after the Mets dispatched the Phillies in the NLDS, and he even had a comp in mind for the madness of Soto’s press conference: Kemba Walker’s 2021 introductory presser for the Knicks, which took place at the top of the Empire State Building. But still, these are not the perfect pictures we’re used to seeing. They show the rare photo opportunity that ends up looking every bit as contrived as it actually is.

For the next month, do your best to enjoy these pictures. The moment Soto arrives in Port St. Lucie, you’ll stop seeing them. They’ll be replaced by low-angle shots of a godlike Soto in a crisp uniform, an immaculate Florida sky behind him. He’ll be launching batting practice home runs and laughing with his teammates. It will be perfect. There will be no turtleneck.

In 2008, the first year of PitchF/X pitch tracking, 13.9% of all pitches across the major leagues were sliders. Ah, those were the days – flat, crushable fastballs as far as the eye could see. More or less every year since then, sliders have proliferated. Don’t believe me? Take a look at the graph:

Are you surprised? Of course not. You’ve seen Blake Snell pitch – and Lance McCullers Jr., Sean Manaea, five of your team’s best relievers, and pretty much anyone in the past half decade. Pitchers are flocking to sliders whenever they can get away with throwing one. It used to be a two-strike offering, then an ahead-in-the-count offering, and now many pitchers would rather throw sliders than fastballs when they desperately need to find the zone. Look at that inexorable march higher.

Only, maybe it’s not so inexorable anymore. Between 2015 and 2023, the average increase in slider rate was 0.9 percentage points year-over-year. The lowest increase was half a percentage point; each of the last three years saw increases of a percentage point or more. But from 2023 to 2024, slider rate stagnated. In 2023, 22.2% of all pitches were sliders. In 2024, that number only climbed to 22.3%, the lowest increase since the upward trend started a decade ago.

That’s hardly evidence of the demise of the slider. For one thing, the number is still going up. For another thing, it’s one year. Finally, 2024 marked the highest rate of sliders thrown in major league history. If I showed you the above graph and told you “look, sliders aren’t cool anymore,” you’d be understandably unmoved.

Not to worry, though. It might be January 9, but I won’t try to pass that off as genuine baseball analysis even in the depths of winter. I’ve got a tiny bit more than that. Raw slider rate is a misleading way of considering how pitcher behavior is changing. There are two ways to increase the league-wide slider rate. First, pitchers could adjust their arsenals to use more sliders and fewer other pitches. Second, the population could change – new, slider-dominant pitchers could replace other hurlers who throw the pitch less frequently.

For example, Adam Wainwright retired after the 2023 season. He threw 1,785 pitches that year, and only five were sliders. Plenty of the innings Wainwright filled for the Cardinals went to Andre Pallante, who graduated from the bullpen to the rotation and made 20 starts in 2024. Pallante actually threw fewer sliders proportionally in 2024 than he did in 2023 – but his pitch count ballooned from 1,139 to 1,978. Similarly, Michael McGreevy made his big league debut in 2024 and threw 311 pitches, 19% of which were sliders.

The numbers can lie to you. Pallante, the only one of our three pitchers to appear in both years, lowered his slider rate. But in 2023, Pallante and Wainwright combined for a 7% slider rate. In 2024, Pallante and McGreevy combined for a 17.1% slider rate. That sounds like a huge change in behavior – but it’s actually just a change in population composition.

The story we all think about isn’t Wainwright retiring and handing his innings to McGreevy and Pallante. It’s Brayan Bello going from 17.5% sliders to 28% sliders while pitching a similar innings load – something that also happened in 2024, just so we’re clear.

To measure how existing pitchers are changing their slider usage, we shouldn’t look at the overall rate. We should instead look at the change in each pitcher’s rate. That’s a truer reflection of the question I’m asking, or at least I think it is. And that answer differs from the chart I showed you up at the top of this article.

There were 315 pitchers who threw at least 50 innings in 2023 and 2024, and threw at least one slider in each of those two years. Of those 315 pitchers, 142 increased their slider usage, 24 kept their usage the same, and 149 decreased the rate at which they threw sliders. The story was similar from 2022 to 2023. There were 216 pitchers who fit the criteria in those years; 90 increased their slider usage, 19 kept theirs the same, and 107 decreased the rate at which they used the pitch. From 2021 to 2022, the effect went the other way; 122 pitchers threw sliders more frequently in 2022 than they did in 2021, 22 kept their usage the same, and 74 decreased their usage.

Put that way, the change is quite striking. The slider craze kicked off in earnest in 2017. From 2016-2017, 114 pitchers increased their slider usage and 89 decreased theirs. That rough split persisted in 2017-2018 and 2018-2019. Everything around the 2020 season is a little weird thanks to the abbreviated schedule, but the basic gist – more pitchers increasing slider usage than decreasing slider usage – was true in every pair of years from 2014-2015 through 2021-2022.

That sounds more like a trend than the overall rate of sliders thrown. Graphically, it looks like this:

Let’s put that in plain English. From 2015, the start of the spike in slider usage, through 2022, there were far more pitchers increasing their slider frequency than decreasing it. On average across those years, 1.3 pitchers threw more sliders for every one pitcher who threw fewer. In the past two years, that trend has reversed; more pitchers are reducing their reliance on sliders than increasing it. The population is going to continue to change – they don’t make a lot of Adam Wainwrights these days – but on a per-pitcher basis, the relentless increase in slider usage has halted.

I tried a few other ways of looking at this phenomenon. I held pitcher workloads constant from year one and applied year two slider rates to each pitcher (pitchers who only threw in year one obviously keep their rate unchanged). The same trend held – the last two years have seen a sharp divergence from the boom times of 2015-2022. I looked at the percentage of starters who started using a slider more than some other pitch in their arsenal and compared it to the ones who de-emphasized it; same deal. I also should note that I’ve grouped sweepers and slurves among the sliders for this article, so this reversal is not about pitchers ditching traditional sliders to get in on the sweeper craze.

No matter how you slice it, we’ve seemingly entered a new phase of pitch design. For a while, most pitchers took a hard look at what they were throwing and decided they needed more sliders. Now, though, it appears that we’ve reached an equilibrium point. Some pitchers still want more. Some think they’re throwing enough, or even a hair too many. Now splitters are on the rise, and hybrid cutters are starting to eat into sliders’ market share.

It’s far too early to say that sliders are on the decline. Factually speaking, they’re not. But to me, at least, it’s clear that the last two years are different than the years before them when it comes to the most ubiquitous out pitch in baseball. Sure, everyone has a slider now – but in the same way that four-seam fastballs were inevitable right until sinkers made a comeback, the slider is no longer expanding its dominance among secondary pitches. An exciting conclusion? I’m not sure. But it’s certainly backed by the evidence.