Just three days ago, there was gnashing of teeth and rending of garments in the blue-and-orange tinted sectors of the New York metropolitan area. Jacob deGrom, light of the world, oppressor of batters, had taken the money and run to Texas. This was a black eye for the conspicuously moneyed regime of hedge fund billionaire Steve Cohen, who’d promised to do for the Mets what Gulf state sovereign wealth funds are doing for European soccer teams. Instead, he’d been outbid for the best pitcher in baseball, a homegrown superstar the likes of which the Mets hadn’t produced since… is it sacrilegious to say Tom Seaver?

Fear not, because the Mets have secured a hell of a fallback option. On Sunday night, former Met Carlos Baerga announced on Instagram — because sure, why not? “Carlos Baerga’s Instagram” is my favorite Bo Burnham song — that Justin Verlander was signing with the Mets for two years and $86.8 million, with a mutual option for a third year. On Monday morning, ESPN’s leading scoop man, Jeff Passan, reported substantially similar news: Verlander to New York for two years and $86 million, with a vesting option for 2025.

Depending on how you feel about Carlos Rodón, there are either two or three legitimate difference-making no. 1 starters in this year’s free-agent class. (And even a Rodón superfan such as myself will acknowledge that deGrom and Verlander are a step above.) The Mets lost one but gained another. Read the rest of this entry »

Move over, Jacob deGrom; this was the best free-agent deal of last week:

Right-handed reliever Chris Martin and the Boston Red Sox are in agreement on a two-year, $17.5 million contract, pending physical, sources familiar with the deal tell ESPN. Martin, 36, was magnificent for the Dodgers after a deadline trade and parlayed it into a multiyear deal.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) December 2, 2022

I kid, but only sort of! Obviously, deGrom is a phenomenal pitcher. The Rangers did well to court him. And this isn’t me advocating for the importance of “surplus value” or whatever vague finance jargon gets thrown around these days. I just really like Chris Martin, and I also think the Red Sox got a ton of bang for their buck for signing him.

There are also things not to like about Martin, at least on the surface. If people objected to a 35-year-old first baseman getting three years, imagine their discomfort at the sight of a 36-year-old reliever getting two years. His fastball velocity is pedestrian by modern standards, his pitch movement data isn’t eye-popping, and he doesn’t throw from an unorthodox angle to compensate. In 2021, Martin’s strikeout rate plummeted to 18%, and it’s worrisome to think he could return to such a dramatic low. When the risks are lined up like this, a two-year pact comes off as unappealing. 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 today’s team is the San Diego Padres.

Batters

When you look at the Padres’ depth charts, there’s a kind of clarity when trying to decide what the team needs to do this winter. The strengths of the offense are obvious: Juan Soto, Manny Machado, and a healthy Fernando Tatis Jr. enter any season as top-notch MVP contenders. And unlike a certain seraphim-themed organization I won’t name with a few mega-stars at the top, there isn’t a huge drop-off to the next tier, whether it’s Jake Cronenworth, Ha-Seong Kim, or Trent Grisham after you’ve threatened him with torture if he tries to bunt for a hit at an awkward moment.

The team’s needs here are also quite obvious; I can’t imagine the Padres actually enter the season with Taylor Kohlwey and José Azocar splitting playing time in left field. The problem is, I also couldn’t imagine Nomar Mazara actually getting 41 starts in 2022, but that’s just what he did.

San Diego would also benefit from some figuring out what to do about Tatis’ position long-term. Right now, we have him splitting time in several places, but I think that the Padres are best served by figuring out whether Cronenworth or Kim are the answer at second, determine where they can put Tatis, and then find a full-time upgrade over Eguy Rosario or Brandon Dixon, whom I see more as complementary talent.

Another thing that is obvious here is that the Padres do need to spend some time this winter fattening up their organizational depth. The high minors are fairly empty at the moment — a combination of graduating talent, traded talent, and a bunch of minor league veterans now in free agency or in other organizations. Most of the players here who look like “break in case of fire” emergency options like C.J. Hinojosa or Domingo Leyba are no longer in the organization. This isn’t necessarily an expensive thing to do, either, and adding a left fielder and a couple of pitchers wouldn’t hinder this. Read the rest of this entry »

During the playoffs, Nick Castellanos made a few noteworthy catches, darting and diving to his left. I wondered whether the Phillies’ right fielder, with his mitt on his left hand, was alone in relishing plays to his gloveside. After all, Castellanos didn’t have to reach across his body to make the catch when moving in this direction. I also wondered what, if any, implications this would have on outfield positioning and alignment.

In terms of directional Outs Above Average (OAA), my findings demonstrated that right-handed outfielders actually performed marginally better moving to their armside than their gloveside. But they were considerably stronger to their left than left-handers, who in turn performed much better to their own gloveside. If that word salad confused you, not to worry. These numbers might be easier to digest:

Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t bring this up very often, but before I wrote here, I had a job trading interest rates. I won’t bore you with the technical details, but I’ve been drawing on that experience a lot recently in thinking about how teams operate when signing free agents, so I thought I’d lay out my recent thoughts here. None of this is quite fully formed yet, but I think I’m on the way there, and I’d love to hear some feedback and see if I can better formulate my point as a result.

Speaking broadly, there are two main ways to get a return on your investment in finance. First, you could lean into the efficiency of the market. You’ve probably never heard of most of the companies that do this: Virtu, DRW, Jump, Hudson River, Susquehanna, Two Sigma. They’re all major players with virtually no broader name recognition. They’re broadly considered “high-frequency traders,” which means they buy and sell an absolutely massive number of stocks and bonds every day, trying to make a tiny profit on each one.

This is the “efficient market” you learned about if you took an economics class in college. If you’re trying to buy one share of a stock and I’m trying to sell one, a high-frequency trader will hope to sell to you at $100.00, buy from me at $99.99, and pocket the penny of difference. Do that a billion times, and pretty soon you’re talking about real money. It’s more complex than that — obviously, given the amount of brain and computing power all of these companies exert — but you can broadly think of them as profiting because there’s a well-accepted price for any given security at any given time, which means they can make money off of tiny deviations from that fair price. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball’s Winter Meetings are in full swing! Now is time to make some trades. Now is the time to sign some free agents. You and I are going to put together a team. What should our team look like? Don’t worry. I’ve already decided for us.

In 2022, Mets batters got hit by 112 pitches, setting a new single-season major league record. Ever since they broke the record, I’ve been wondering how many HBP a team could rack up if they made it their sole mission. That’s our challenge.

We’ll be building our roster using Steamer projections for the 2023 season, and we’ll assemble a lineup with the goal of obliterating the Mets’ record. We’re going to get hit often and we’re going to get hit with style. To get us in the spirit of the enterprise, I’ve named our new team the Cooperstown Contusions. Before you ask, yes, our mascot will be an anthropomorphic bruise:

Read the rest of this entry »

Friday afternoon is traditionally the time when organizations dump unpleasant news. The week before the Winter Meetings, it’s also the time when organizations finally get rid of players they’ve been trying to trade. To that end, the Seattle Mariners have acquired second baseman Kolten Wong, along with $1.75 million in cash, from the Milwaukee Brewers in exchange for infielder Abraham Toro and outfielder Jesse Winker.

Huh. Interesting. Read the rest of this entry »

SAN DIEGO — The Crime Dog is going to Cooperstown. On Sunday, the Contemporary Baseball Era Committee unanimously elected Fred McGriff to the Hall of Fame, bypassing far more statistically impressive candidates — namely Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Rafael Palmeiro — due to their connections to performance-enhancing drugs. On a panel that included two former teammates (Greg Maddux and Kenny Williams, with Chipper Jones appointed but replaced at the last moment due to illness) as well as former Blue Jays executive Paul Beeston, McGriff was the only candidate from among the eight to reach the necessary 75% of the vote.

Curt Schilling — who like Bonds and Clemens fell off of the BBWAA ballot after 10 years this past January having bled voter support after a seemingly endless string of noxious public comments that culminated with supporting the January 6, 2021 insurrection and comparing Dr. Anthony Fauci to a Nazi — also fell short, though he fared better than the Gruesome Twosome. Indeed it’s not hard to see the results as a rebuke of PED-linked candidates, whether or not they actually tested positive and were penalized by Major League Baseball, by a committee seemingly engineered to keep them out. Read the rest of this entry »

The Colorado Rockies have received their fair share of criticism since winning 91 games and earning a Wild Card berth in 2018. Four losing seasons have played a part in that, but so too have some questionable decisions, financial and otherwise. Four months ago — and he’s no lone wolf in having offered such a critique — my colleague Dan Szymborski called Colorado “The worst-run organization in baseball.”

My own coverage of the club, which has focused primarily on players, prospects, and coaches, has included neither criticism nor compliment. Which isn’t to say I’m not intrigued by brickbats thrown. I am, which led me to approach Colorado GM Bill Schmidt to get his perspective on some of what has been said about the team he’s been with for two-plus decades.

The first thing I asked Schmidt about was the October decision to fire hitting coach Dave Magadan and replace him with Hensley “Bam Bam” Meulens, who’d previously worked with the San Francisco Giants and, this past season, the New York Yankees.

“They’re different people with different experiences.” said Schmidt, a longtime scout who replaced Jeff Bridich (initially on an interim basis) as Colorado’s GM in May 2021. “Hensley had a lot of success with the Giants. There are certain things… I’ll let him talk about the certain things he believes in, but he and Bags were different types of players who have different ideas of what they consider important.”

Bringing “Bam Bam” on board is notable in part because he’s an outsider; the Rockies have often been called an insular organization. Schmidt bristled when asked about that claim. as well as about accusations that the team he leads lacks direction. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s get the specifics out of the way first, so we can all gasp and react together. Jacob deGrom is now a Texas Ranger, after he signed a five-year, $185 million deal with a conditional option for a sixth year, as Jeff Passan first reported:

BREAKING: Right-hander Jacob deGrom has signed a five-year, $185 million contract with the Texas Rangers, sources tell ESPN. Physical is passed. Deal is done. Includes conditional sixth-year option that would take total deal to $222 million. Full no-trade clause. A massive haul.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) December 3, 2022

Alright, now that we’ve got that written down: gasp! I have to say, I didn’t see this coming. Earlier this week, I described deGrom as the one pitcher I’d want on the mound if humanity was going to play a single baseball game against an alien society to determine the fate of the world. Simply put, he’s the best doing it right now when he’s available.

His opponents next year won’t be aliens. In fact, they’ll be the ones who feel like they’re facing an extra-terrestrial, because the way deGrom pitches doesn’t resemble any other starter. He pumps 100 mph fastballs and hits the edges of the strike zone with frankly inhuman precision. The velocity understates how good his fastball is. Even the location understates how good his fastball is. He also induces tremendous vertical break on the ball, and his delivery means that his fastball crosses the plate at a comically shallow angle. I wouldn’t trust any characteristic-based pitching model that didn’t grade deGrom’s fastball as an 80 – it’s as good as it gets. Read the rest of this entry »