Judging by their 69-win projection and negligible odds of winning the World Series, the Pirates don’t have a great deal to look forward to from a competitive standpoint in 2022. But Opening Day is a time for celebration and optimism nonetheless, and early on Thursday afternoon, FanSided’s Robert Murray reported that the team had agreed to an eight-year, $70-million extension with third baseman Ke’Bryan Hayes, the largest contract in Pirates history.

The contract for the 25-year-old Hayes is also a record for a player with between one and two years of service time. It covers his final two pre-arbitration years, his three years of arbitration-eligibility, and the first three years of his free agent eligibility, through his age-32 season. The exact details have not been reported at this writing, including the value of his club option for the ninth year (2030).

The celebration was almost immediately dampened when Hayes left the Pirates’ opener against the Cardinals in the bottom of the first inning due to an apparent injury to his left wrist. He dove trying to catch a bloop into left field by Dylan Carlson, but the ball fell and turned into a double. After Tyler O’Neill singled Carlson home two batters later, Pirates head athletic trainer Rafael Freitas and manager Derek Shelton came out of the dugout to check on Hayes, unwrapping his left wrist and taking him out of the game.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Diamondbacks and Rangers made a minor deal on Opening Day, with Texas sending upper-level infielder Yonny Hernandez to Arizona for low-level center field speedster Jeferson Espinal. Arizona desperately needs big league infield help with Nick Ahmed (shoulder) and Josh Rojas (oblique) starting the year on the injured list. They traded cash to Chicago for upper-level infielder Sergio Alcántara a few days ago and now add the plucky Hernandez, who was squeezed out of Texas by the additions of Corey Seager and Marcus Semien from above, and by the bevy of prospects (among them Ezequiel Duran, Josh Smith, and Davis Wendzel) who are either on, or are soon-to-be-on, the 40-man from below. Read the rest of this entry »

Just before Opening Day, the Brewers played musical chairs with their catching corps in a pair of moves perhaps triggered by losing Pedro Severino to a PED suspension. They made two trades, adding two backstops and subtracting another, and shipping a couple of lower-ranked prospects out as part of the deals. They are:

From Miami: C Alex Jackson
To Miami: 2B Hayden Cantrelle and RHP Alexis Ramirez

From San Diego: C Victor Caratini
To San Diego: C Brett Sullivan and UTIL Korry Howell Read the rest of this entry »

2:10	Jay Jaffe: HAPPY OPENING DAY! And welcome to FanGraphs’ Opening Day chat

2:11	Jay Jaffe: Thrilled to be here, particularly in light of how bleak things looked regarding the start of the season just a few weeks ago. We’ve all made it through a very tough winter

2:12

Jay Jaffe: We’re gonna be clickety-clacking along this afternoon, starting with the Brewers-Cubs game. In the meantime, I’d like to pass along a quick message from Meg: Meg Rowley @megrowler earnest tweet alert: It pales in comparison to (gestures at everything) but the last two years have been a pretty stressful time to be in the baseball website biz, so as we celebrate another Opening Day, thanks for sticking with @fangraphs. It has made all the difference 🥰 7 Apr 2022

2:13	Jay Jaffe: Thank you for following along!

Read the rest of this entry »

Last Saturday, the White Sox rotation took a hit when Lance Lynn limped off the mound in pain after tearing a tendon in his right knee. In the wee hours of Tuesday, just before Lynn underwent surgery, The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal reported that Chicago signed free agent Johnny Cueto to a minor league deal. The move helps to replenish the team’s depth and offers the promise of another go-round for for a pitcher who has been beset by injuries in recent years but has long ranked among the game’s most entertaining hurlers.

Via ESPN’s Jeff Passan, the 36-year-old Cueto will make a prorated share of $4.2 million dollars if he’s in the majors. According to MLB Network’s Jon Heyman, he has a May 15 opt-out date if he’s still in the minors.

Cueto spent the past six seasons with the Giants via a $130 million deal, but the team cut bait last November by declining his $22 million option for this season, instead paying him a $5 million buyout — a move that was hardly a surprise given his ongoing injury problems. After making a full complement of 32 starts in 2016, he never made more than 25 in a season during the remainder of his deal. Blisters limited him to 25 turns in 2017, and an ankle sprain and Tommy John surgery to just 13 in ’18-19. He did make 12 starts during the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, but just 21 last year, scattered around separate trips to the injured list for a grade 1 lat strain, a flexor strain, COVID-19 protocol, and then an elbow strain that limited him to just one September appearance, the first relief appearance of his major league career.

Despite those maladies, Cueto’s 4.08 ERA (101 ERA-), 4.05 FIP (100 FIP-), and 1.5 WAR made for his best season since 2016, even though his 114.2 innings were 32.2 fewer than his total in ’17, when he produced 1.2 WAR. He struck out 20% of batters, right at his career average but placing him in just the 25th percentile according to Statcast; walked just 6.1% (good for the 75th percentile); and allowed 1.18 homers per nine, 0.15 lower than the major league average for starters. Though his exit velocity and barrel and hard-hit rates were better than average, with his 6.4% barrel rate coming in at the 71st percentile, his low strikeout rate inflated his xERA to a gaudy 4.99. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome back, baseball! After a prolonged offseason rife with drama and surprises, Opening Day is finally upon us. Last year, I introduced these power rankings as a way to think about all 30 teams in baseball and stack them up against each other outside the rigid structures of leagues or divisions. Nearly every major site has some form of power rankings, usually derived from whatever panel of experts each site employs. These rankings, though, are entirely data driven.

First, we take the three most important components of a team — their offense (wRC+), and their starting rotation and bullpen (a 50/50 blend of FIP- and RA9-) — and weight and combine them to create an overall team quality metric. For these Opening Day power rankings, I’ve used each team’s projected stats based on their Depth Charts projections. New for this year, I’ve opted to include defense as a component, though it’s weighted less heavily than offense and pitching. Some element of team defense is captured by RA9-, but now that FanGraphs has OAA/RAA from Statcast available on our leaderboards, I’ve chosen to include that as the defensive component for each team. For just this run of rankings, I’ve used the projected fielding component of WAR that appears on our Depth Charts projections. Read the rest of this entry »

Much of the New York-market media attention that’s followed the announcement that Ron Marinaccio will be on the Yankees’ Opening Day roster has centered on his roots. A boyhood fan of the team that he now plays for, the right-hander was born and raised in Toms River, New Jersey.

There’s much more to his story. A 2017 19th-round pick out of the University of Delaware, Marinaccio has gone from a marginal prospect to the doorstep of a major-league debut in a little more than a year. As Eric Longenhagen put it when he wrote up the 26-year-old reliever for our 2022 Yankees Top Prospects list, “Marinaccio was a 2021 revelation.” In 40 outings comprising 66.1 innings between Double-A Somerset and Triple-A Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, Marinaccio logged a 2.04 ERA and allowed just 35 hits. Moreover, he fanned 105 batters.

A pitch that he hadn’t previously featured has played a big role in his ascent. Described by Longenhagen as a “trapdoor-action changeup,” the offering grades out at 60 on the 20/80 scouting scale — and it’s not his only effective weapon. Marinaccio has increased the velocity of his fastball, and he’s also revamped his slider, in the process adding a horizontal-in-the-opposite-direction component to his arsenal.

Marinaccio — No. 20 on on the aforementioned Yankees list — discussed the analytics-driven evolution of his repertoire prior to a recent spring training game.

———

David Laurila: What is the story behind your changeup?

Ron Marinaccio: “I’ve always had it, and the analytics kind of helped bring it out. With the boost of my velo last year, they moved me up a level, and from there we started diving a little bit deeper into the analytics. I realized that I’d only been throwing the changeup around 5% of the time, whereas last year it was probably closer to 40%, maybe even 50%. The usage went way up.”

Laurila: You said the analytics helped bring it out. Had you not known that it was good?

Marinaccio: “Yes, but in the past things were generally more fastball/slider. That was the way people thought righties should pitch to righties. I would throw it mostly to lefties, but once I started throwing it more to righties, I started to get more confidence in it. That’s when I was like, ‘Wow, I was only throwing this 5% of the time?’ My first outing, I threw over 50% changeups.”

Laurila: When and where did you first learn your changeup? Read the rest of this entry »

After an offseason that saw labor acrimony bookended by two frenetic free agency periods, the 2022 season is almost upon us; we made it. And on this, the morning of Opening Day, we engage in our annual tradition of asking our staff to open themselves up to public ridicule and predict the year in baseball. Some of these predictions will prove to be prescient; others will make their forecaster feel a little silly. Last year’s Braves? Our staff thought they’d win the NL East. Last year’s Angels, Mets, Twins, and Padres? Whoops! Such is the prognostication business.

We asked the staff to predict the expanded playoff field, pennant and World Series winners, and the individual award recipients. Folks from FanGraphs and RotoGraphs weighed in; here are the results. Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 969

FanGraphs Audio is here a day early this week in celebration of Opening Day, and we have a pair of great interviews to ring in the season.

• At the top of the show, David Laurila welcomes Matt Bowman, a former Cardinals and Reds pitcher who is now in the Yankees system. The pair first talked years ago, and the right-hander shares how he has evolved both as a pitcher and as a student of pitching in the time since. Bowman also discusses his first Opening Day on a major league roster, talking to Amir Garrett about his slider, recovering from Tommy John surgery, and how impressed he is by Yankees pitching development. [2:59]
• In the second half, Jay Jaffe welcomes long-time baseball writer and friend Craig Calcaterra, who recently published his book Rethinking Fandom: How to Beat the Sports-Industrial Complex at Its Own Game. He and Jay talk about how the challenges of authoring a book compare to daily writing, as well as how the book came to be. The pair also discuss how our fandom changes as we grow as people, the inherent conflict of criticizing an industry you work in, and the occasional value of embracing being a fair-weather fan. [31:38]

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José Ramírez is subtly bending the fabric of space and time. It’s the only way I can explain it. How else can you square the particular details of his hitting prowess? He’s impossibly quick to the ball, creating consistent loud contact. That should require a wild swing, but it doesn’t. He’s one of the best contact hitters in baseball. He has one of the best approaches in the game; sometimes it seems like he knows what’s coming before the pitcher throws it. He’s one of the best defenders in the game. It all feels vaguely magical.

Until today, he was also the most underpaid star in baseball. A five-year, $26 million extension he signed before the 2017 season (with two team options for another $26 million) immediately preceded his ascent to one of the best players in the game. That’s no longer true; today, he more than tripled his career guaranteed earnings by agreeing to a five-year, $124 million extension with the Guardians.

BREAKING: Star third baseman José Ramirez and the Cleveland Guardians are in agreement on a five-year, $124M contract extension, sources familiar with the deal tell ESPN. Deal includes full no-trade clause. With this year and pickup of a 2023 option, Ramirez is guaranteed $150M.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) April 6, 2022

This deal, which starts after the 2023 season, should keep Ramírez in Cleveland for the rest of his peak, and quite possibly the rest of his career. For fans of a franchise that had seen its home-grown stars leave quite a bit of late, it’s a welcome turn of events. For Ramírez, it’s financial and — thanks to a no-trade clause — workplace stability.

I know this article is about a contract, but I can’t help it: I just want to talk about how great Ramírez is. I wasn’t exaggerating up above; I really do struggle to wrap my head around his talent. Most hitters have identifiable holes, places where they sacrifice one thing to gain greatly in another area. Level, four-seam-punishing swing? You likely struggle with sinkers low in the zone. Patient approach that hunts fastballs and waits out secondary pitches? Breaking balls in the zone will be your Kryptonite. Whip-quick pull hitter? You might struggle with pitches away. Read the rest of this entry »