When the ball dropped at midnight and 2022 turned into 2023, 29 of the 30 major league teams had signed at least one free agent, from the Mariners spending $1.2 million on Trevor Gott to the Mets agreeing to terms with seemingly every star player on the market. Even the penny-pinching Marlins brought in Jean Segura, and the A’s committed a respectable $34 million to four solid role players. Now, a few days into the new year, team no. 30 has joined the fray: the Brewers are bringing back left-handed pitcher Wade Miley on a one-year contract that will pay him $3.5 million with a $10 million mutual option for ’24 (with a $1 million buyout) and another $1.5 million in playing time incentives. In total, that guarantees him $4.5 million this season.

Formerly an innings eater who completed at least 190 frames every year from 2012 to ’15 with a 98 ERA-, Miley has battled injuries in each of 2018, ’20, and ’22. Last season, he was limited to just nine appearances with the Cubs as he dealt with elbow and shoulder issues. With that in mind, I’ll be looking at his performance in a limited 2022 campaign in conjunction with his full ’21 season, where he barely qualified for the leaderboards with 163 innings pitched. His stats were very similar in those two samples; he ran an ERA in the low-threes with far less inspiring peripherals and near equal numbers in the walk and strikeout departments. Read the rest of this entry »

For the 18th 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 Baltimore Orioles.

Batters

The building of Baltimore’s offense is coming along quite nicely; graduating two arguable no. 1 prospects to the majors in a single season has a curious way of doing that! The O’s should at least be locking up Adley Rutschman as soon as possible and ideally Gunnar Henderson as well. There’s no need to stay on both too long; everyone knows about Rutschman’s awesomeness, and I’ve written near-panegyrics about Henderson already. Similar to Mike Devereaux three (!) decades ago, Cedric Mullins is a borderline star.

The O’s aren’t amazing anywhere else in the lineup, but they are at least adequate, with a couple of exceptions. ZiPS does think the team could use an outfield upgrade, but one can at least understand why the Orioles are waiting to see which of their young outfield prospects takes a big step up, if any. I’m crossing my fingers, because Nomar Mazara was signed to a minor league contract and is lurking in the wings, like a replacement-level Sauron after the fall of Númenor.

Just in case you have only seen the graphic and not the tables below, ZiPS does project Ryan Mountcastle to be an above-average first baseman. What it isn’t crazy about is the backup situation with Mountcastle expected to spend some time at DH. Lewin Díaz is far from a ZiPS fave, but it sees him as quite a bit superior to Ryan O’Hearn, whose acquisition never made much sense to me given his poor track record.

I’m not going to grump about the O’s being quiet here, nor am I a particular fan of the Adam Frazier signing, since I’m going to complain elsewhere in a minute. Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 1006

In the first show of 2023, we welcome back a beat writer friend to talk Cardinals before introducing a new series on the podcast.

• At the top of the program, David Laurila is joined by Derrick Goold of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch (and The Best Podcast in Baseball), who last appeared on episode 903. The duo discuss whether Nolan Arenado deserves the title of the best all-around player in the National League, while contemplating if Paul Goldschmidt may have claim as the best hitter in the circuit. David and Derrick also talk about players on this year’s Hall of Fame ballot like Bobby Abreu and Gary Sheffield, and how Derrick has been listening to FanGraphs Audio in recent weeks for insight while preparing his own ballot. [4:34]
• In the second half, Ben Clemens debuts his new series FanGraphs Backstories. Ben will be interviewing FanGraphs staff to discuss how they came to the site and what their favorite baseball memories are, and senior writer Jay Jaffe is first up. Jay shares how he never would have imagined he’d end up at FanGraphs after his early days at Baseball Prospectus, what his time at Sports Illustrated was like, and how truly unforgettable Nolan Ryan was to a young fan. [43:32]

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Audio after the jump. (Approximate 1 hour 9 minute play time.)

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If you’re anything like me, you care what your friends think of you. I’m not talking about the middle school I’ll-do-whatever-they-do kind of caring; I like to think I’ve outgrown that. But I certainly still want to fit in. I think these feelings are fairly universal among adults, whether the in-group in question is composed of friends, co-workers, or just a collection of peers with whom you happen to share something.

My credence stems from a classical psychological study conducted by Solomon Asch, which spawned an entire category of literature under the “conformity” umbrella. The word has a negative connotation, but as long as it isn’t taken to extremes, conformity is a natural and adaptable human behavior. It’s likely even seen in baseball players (and not just in how they wear the same outfit to all of their games).

In Asch’s study, a subject was placed among a group of confederates, or research assistants posing as subjects themselves. The group was shown a series of “target” lines, each alongside another group of lines, and instructed to find the line in the group most similar to the target. There was always an obvious answer, and the confederates were instructed to never choose it. The majority of subjects agreed with the confederates at least once. Read the rest of this entry »

When I wrote up the Cubs’ signing of Drew Smyly, I reflected on the… let’s call it uninspiring state of the rest of the roster. Plenty of solid players, little star power, little upside to speak of. For a putative big-market team with (as of the Smyly signing) a payroll almost $20 million under the luxury tax threshold, that’s an easy enough problem to solve early in the offseason. Less so now, when most of the quality free agents have already found employment for 2023. So at the end of the Smyly post, I made a joke: “Could they convince Cubs fans that Eric Hosmer is Anthony Rizzo with a beard and thicker eyebrows?”

Good news, everyone: There’s a new Rizzo in town, and his eyebrows are magnificent.

Jesse Rogers of ESPN reported Wednesday afternoon that the Cubs had, in fact, agreed to terms with Hosmer. Years ago, the 33-year-old first baseman was the first marquee signing of what became the current Padres’ run of contention, but on August 2 of last year, he was deemed surplus to requirements. As San Diego completed the Juan Soto–Josh Bell blockbuster, the Friars shipped Hosmer to Boston, and retained almost all of the $13 million a year left on his contract for the privilege of doing so. Hosmer, who will make that amount in each of the next three seasons, will only cost the Cubs the league minimum, Rogers reports. Read the rest of this entry »

For years, the baseball offseason had a predictable rhythm. When the World Series ended, we’d hit a lull. Around the Winter Meetings, a few Scott Boras clients would sign while he spouted strange, vaguely nautical similes. A few more marquee names would get caught up in Boras’ wake (see what I did there?) and sign as well. Then we’d have a lull around year end, and contract activity would pick up again in the new year.

That pattern hasn’t held even a little bit this winter. As of this writing, 45 of our top 50 free agents have signed, including the entire top 30; many guys who just missed the cut have signed as well. Four years ago, plenty of teams were still looking for free agent help in the first week of January. This year, your options are Johnny Cueto, Jurickson Profar, and then tumbleweeds.

This feels different than previous years of free agency, but I wanted to put some quantitative rigor behind that. I set out to compare this offseason to each previous one. I’ll spend plenty of time going through my methodology below, but first, let’s give the people what they want. This year really is different. Here’s the percentage of all free agents, weighted by previous year WAR, that had signed new deals by December 31 of each offseason since the conclusion of the 2000 season, excluding last year’s lockout weirdness:

The 2022-23 offseason (which I’ll be calling 2023 for simplicity’s sake for the remainder of the article) is tied for the most front-loaded offseason of this millennium. Given that offseasons had been getting progressively slower, that’s a meaningful change. Now, let’s talk about how I got to this conclusion, and come up with a few takeaways about the new landscape of free agency. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley discuss the Red Sox signing Rafael Devers to a lengthy extension, the state of the Sox, the next two free-agent classes, and Carlos Baerga the newsbreaker, then banter about bad news for Charles Leblanc, a Congressional baseball analogy, the Sears/Willis Tower, a painful slide by a broadcaster, the Dodgers’ offseason, and redefining the pitcher win, plus a Past Blast from 1951.

Audio intro: Greg Camp, “The Armageddon Slide”
Audio outro: Bobby Thomson, “Because of You”

Link to Baumann on Devers
Link to Dubuque on Devers
Link to Gilligan on Boston’s SP
Link to story about booing Henry
Link to team WAR projections
Link to Baerga’s Devers report
Link to Baerga on Judge/Correa
Link to info on free-agent classes
Link to MLBTR on Leblanc
Link to Marlins WAR leaders
Link to no-hitter analogy
Link to Curtis on baseball analogies
Link to Willis Tower wiki
Link to Manning on SNL
Link to tweet about Vassegh
Link to Vassegh YouTube video
Link to story on Vassegh
Link to grape stomp meme
Link to Ben Clemens on the Dodgers
Link to Russell on wins
Link to EW on baseball uniqueness
Link to 1951 story source
Link to Jacob Pomrenke’s website
Link to Jacob Pomrenke on Twitter

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The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2023 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, 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.

Jacoby Ellsbury spent just 11 seasons — and not even a full 11 — in the majors and somehow managed to earn the enmity of the fan bases of both the Red Sox and Yankees, the only two teams for which he played. At his best, he was a speedy center fielder with some pop — a first-round pick and an All-Star, not to mention the first known Native American of Navajo descent to play in the majors. He led the AL in stolen bases three times, played a key role on two World Series winners, and netted a staggering seven-year, $153 million contract when he hit free agency.

Yet Ellsbury had a difficult time staying healthy and in the lineup. He missed nearly all of 2010 and half of ’12, the two campaigns on either side of his lone All-Star season, then averaged 130 games over the first four years of his Yankees deal before falling off the map. He rarely spoke to the media, which fed into a perception that he was detached or even apathetic, particularly when he made slow progress rehabilitating his injuries away from his teams, both of which happened to play in media-saturated cities. “Ellsbury is the inscrutable star,” wrote the Boston Globe’s Christopher L. Gasper in 2015. “We will never know the real Jacoby Ellsbury. He will never let us in. It’s not personal. It’s just his personality.”

“Though the quiet, amicable Ellsbury wasn’t loathed in the Yankees’ clubhouse, nor was he beloved, he never gave off the vibe that he burned to win,” wrote the New York Post’s Ken Davidoff in 2019. That comment came after Ellsbury spent all of 2018 and ’19 on the injured list, then was released by the Yankees with a year remaining on his contract — and just before the Yankees filed a grievance in an attempt to recoup some of his remaining salary, claiming that he had used an outside facility without their permission to rehab the injuries that kept him off the field. He and the team ultimately reached a confidential settlement, but he never played again; his final major league game was just 19 days after his 34th birthday. Read the rest of this entry »

Our story begins in June of 2019, when the Cubs took a chance on a still-unsigned Craig Kimbrel. What happened next can only be described as a disaster. Kimbrel gave up a preposterous number of home runs, almost single-handedly causing the Cubs to miss the playoffs. He didn’t show any signs of improvement the following season, and his once lustrous career looked just about over, seemingly bringing the Cubs’ three-year, $43 million investment down with him.

Then, a miracle: In the first half of 2021, Kimbrel returned to form. He trimmed the walks and home runs, and co-authored a no-hitter in the process. The Cubs traded him to the White Sox at the deadline, after which he became one of the worst relief pitchers in baseball. Kimbrel ended the year with a respectable 2.26 ERA, but consider how that’s split: a 0.49 ERA with the Cubs, a 5.09 ERA with the White Sox. That offseason, the Dodgers traded for Kimbrel, hunting for upside as they usually do. And despite the controversy surrounding his usage, Kimbrel finished the year with pedestrian numbers. He wasn’t a complete mess, but he wasn’t great, either.

All this brings us to the Phillies, who’ve signed the now 34-year-old closer to a one-year deal worth $10 million. I don’t know if there’s really such a thing as a “safe” reliever. What I do know is that Kimbrel is decidedly not one. His whole career post-Boston has been a series of ups and downs, the latter more frequent than the former. But given how shallow the market for relief pitching is this offseason, it seemed inevitable that someone would take a flier on him. Kimbrel, for better or worse, has become the Phillies’ problem to solve. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2021 ALCS feels like it happened far more than 15 months ago. After coming within two wins of their fifth World Series berth in the 21st century, the Red Sox dropped 14 wins off their 2021 total to finish in last place in ’22, albeit in the only division in baseball with four teams over .500. The offensive production was okay, the rotation and bullpen proved unreliable, the defense was at times humiliating, and injuries underscored a lack of sufficient depth in a number of areas. Come November, key contributors including Xander Bogaerts, Nathan Eovaldi, and J.D. Martinez hit free agency, leaving Boston with a handful of needs just to stay level in 2023. And though the organization insisted that a Bogaerts extension was its top priority of the offseason, Boston instead watched as the Padres swooped in and inked him to a jaw-dropping 11-year, $280 million deal, leaving the Red Sox with only a fourth-round compensation pick to show for their efforts.

The offseason hasn’t been a total loss. On Wednesday, Carlos Baerga (yes, really) broke the news that the club had signed Rafael Devers to the largest and longest contract in Red Sox history, extending the 26-year-old for $331 million over 11 years. The agreement is a big change of direction for a team that failed to retain either Mookie Betts or Bogaerts, and also a bit of a salvation for a winter that up until last night had seemed to bring more bad news than good.

In terms of bringing on new players to help lift the team back to the playoffs in the immediate future, Boston’s biggest addition this offseason so far is Japanese outfielder Masataka Yoshida on a surprisingly lucrative five-year deal worth $105 million. Beyond him, the Red Sox made some smaller additions on short, low-cost deals for veterans. They aimed to revamp the bullpen with the additions of Kenley Jansen, Chris Martin, and Joely Rodríguez, and brought in Justin Turner as a right-handed corner infield bat and DH. Most recently, they added much-needed depth to the starting rotation by signing 36-year-old Corey Kluber on a one-year, $10 million contract with an $11 million club option for 2024. Read the rest of this entry »