Since the last time Josh Bell suited up for the Nationals on August 1, 2022, he has played for four different teams. The Nationals dealt him to the Padres alongside Juan Soto at the 2022 trade deadline. Then he became a free agent and signed a two-year, $33 million deal with the Guardians, only for Cleveland to flip him to the Marlins the following summer. He swam with the Fish for just under a year before it was Miami’s turn to cast him off at the deadline in 2024. Finally, after finishing out this past season with the Diamondbacks, Bell is returning to Washington on a one-year, $6 million contract. That closes the circle on a two-and-a-half-year expedition that took him from the East Coast to the West Coast to the Midwest to the wetlands to the desert and back to the nation’s capital. According to Google Maps, it would take you just over 166 days to walk that journey. Bell, not exactly known for his footspeed, did it in 881.
With the Gold Glover Nathaniel Lowe likely to see most of the playing time at first base, Bell should slot in as Washington’s everyday designated hitter. Bell has primarily played first throughout his career, but his defense has always been lacking, even by the standards of the position. He has never finished a season with a positive DRS, and only once has he finished with a positive OAA or FRV. In 2024, Bell ranked last among all first basemen in DRS and second to last in OAA and FRV, despite playing just 98 games at the position. As long as Lowe stays healthy, which he’s largely managed to do throughout his career, the Nationals won’t need to worry about Bell’s glove at first. Meanwhile, Bell won’t need to worry about the harsh positional adjustment for designated hitters dragging down his overall numbers. A full-time DH who plays all 162 games would finish with -17.5 Def; Bell finished with -17.8 Def in 2024. As long as he sticks at DH, things can’t get any worse.
Of course, that also means Bell’s defensive value won’t get any better. If he’s going to improve upon a replacement-level (-0.1 WAR) 2024 season, he’ll need to do it with his offense. More specifically, he’ll need to do it with his bat. Over the past four years, Bell has been the least productive baserunner in the sport, with -17.6 BsR. His best baserunning season in that span was 2021, when he finished with -3.9 BsR, eighth-worst in the majors. To put that in context, -3.9 BsR is so low that Steamer doesn’t project anyone to finish with -3.9 BsR in 2025. Heck, Steamer doesn’t have anyone else finishing below -2.9, while Bell is projected for -2.3. Bell’s baseline is such an aberration that Steamer refuses to accept it as his (or anyone’s) 50th-percentile outcome. Read the rest of this entry »
Rickey Henderson had something to offer everyone. He was a Bay Area icon who spent more than half his career wearing the green and gold of the Oakland Athletics, yet he was traded away twice, and spent time with eight other teams scattered from Boston to San Diego, all of them viewing him as the missing piece in their quest for a playoff spot. For fans of a throwback version of baseball that emphasized speed and stolen bases, “The Man of Steal” put up numbers that eclipsed the single-season and career records of Lou Brock and Ty Cobb. To those who viewed baseball through the new-fangled lens of sabermetrics, he was the platonic ideal of a leadoff hitter, an on-base machine who developed considerable power. To critics — including some opponents — he was a showboat as well as a malcontent who complained about being underpaid and wouldn’t take the field due to minor injuries. To admirers, he was baseball’s most electrifying player, a fierce competitor, flamboyant entertainer, and inner-circle Hall of Famer. After a 25-year major league career full of broken records (not to mention the fourth-highest total of games played, ahem), Henderson spent his age-45 and -46 seasons wowing fans in independent leagues, hoping for one last shot at the majors.
It never came, but Henderson’s résumé could have hardly been more complete. A 10-time All-Star, two-time world champion, an MVP and Gold Glove winner, he collected 3,055 hits and set the career records for stolen bases (1,406), runs scored (2,295), and walks (2,190); the last was eclipsed by Barry Bonds three years later, though Henderson still has more unintentional walks (2,129). He also holds the single-season record for stolen bases (130), as well as the single-season and career records for caught stealing (42 and 335, respectively).
“If you could split him in two, you’d have two Hall of Famers. The greatest base stealer of all time, the greatest power/speed combination of all time (except maybe Barry Bonds), the greatest leadoff man of all time,” wrote Bill James for The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract in 2001. “Without exaggerating one inch, you could find fifty Hall of Famers who, all taken together, don’t own as many records, and as many important records, as Rickey Henderson.” Read the rest of this entry »
With their trade for Garrett Crochet back in early December, the Red Sox indicated their intention to aggressively compete for the AL East crown in 2025. The Yankees missing out on Juan Soto, along with the relative inaction of the Orioles and Blue Jays this offseason, has opened that window for Boston. And the Sox have continued to add talent to their pitching staff, signing Walker Buehler to a one-year deal two days before Christmas. The contract will guarantee Buehler $21.05 million, which also happens to be the exact value of the qualifying offer the Red Sox extended to Nick Pivetta and that the Dodgers declined to offer to Buehler. There’s also a $25 million mutual option for 2026 and as much as $2.5 million in performance bonuses for hitting games started thresholds.
After undergoing his second Tommy John surgery in 2022, Buehler finally returned to a major league mound last May, but he really struggled to find his footing after being sidelined for nearly two full years. A June hip injury limited him to just 16 starts and 75.1 innings, and his 5.38 ERA and 5.54 FIP were easily the worst marks of his career. Despite his summer scuffles, Buehler managed to turn things around during the playoffs. He pitched to a 3.60 ERA across 15 postseason innings, including a gutsy scoreless start in Game 3 of the World Series and the first save of his career in the decisive Game 5.
Of course, Buehler was one of the most successful young starters in baseball from 2018–21. Among all qualified pitchers during that stretch, he ranked seventh in WAR, sixth in ERA-, and eighth in FIP-. But postseason heroics aside, 2024 was a pretty miserable year for Buehler. He couldn’t find consistency with his mechanics, and that hip injury seemed to disrupt any progress he was making on that front. He was marginally better after returning from the IL in August and he was able to make a few key adjustments to his mechanics down the stretch — no doubt helping him find some limited success in October — but he entered this offseason as an enigmatic free agent. His early career success was undeniable, but his injury history and disappointing return raised a lot of questions about his ability to contribute quality innings moving forward. Read the rest of this entry »
Sports Info Solutions has been tracking every pitch thrown in Major League Baseball since 2002, and since the beginning, those pitches have been hitting the strike zone less and less frequently. You can check the tumbling year-over-year numbers over on our pitch-level data leaderboard, but if you want to spare yourself a click, I pulled them into the graph below. It paints a damning picture of the command of today’s stuff-over-stamina, throw-it-hard-before-your-elbow-explodes pitchers. Don’t go near this graph if you’re on roller skates:
If you ever feel the need to shake your fist at young pitchers and mutter about loud music and fastball command, this is the graph for you. SIS has documented the percentage of pitches that hit the strike zone dropping from the low 50s to the low 40s over the last 20 years. Combine that with the game’s ever-increasing focus on velocity and stuff, and you’ve got a nice, tidy narrative: today’s pitchers are too focused on throwing hard to know where the hell they’re throwing the ball. However, the truth is a bit more complicated. It’s important to keep in mind that the SIS numbers come from real life human beings who analyze video to track pitches, while the friendly robot that powers Statcast has its definition of the strike zone set in digital stone. Read the rest of this entry »
As the halfway point of the offseason approaches, Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the relative merits of the first half of the offseason vs. the second half of the offseason, assess the weakest projected positions on contending teams and the best remaining free agents, and list MLB stories they’re looking forward to following.
I think a lot of us overestimate the significance of geography when predicting where free agents will sign. In Max Kepler’s case, however, we all might have underestimated the role geography would play in his decision. Perhaps it was inevitable that the greatest German-born player in MLB history would head to the state with the greatest German population in the country. Lo and behold, on December 19, the all-time leader in runs, home runs, RBI, and WAR among Deutschland natives agreed to a one-year, $10 million contract with the Philadelphia Phillies.
Yet, aside from helping the Phillies pander to their fans in Germantown, it’s a little difficult to see how Kepler fits this team. Entering the offseason, many expected Philadelphia would pursue a right-handed batter to play left field who could split playing time with Brandon Marsh. Instead, they signed Kepler, who bats lefty and hasn’t played left field since his days at Double-A in 2015. What’s more, president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski has made it clear the Phillies plan to use Kepler as an everyday player, despite the fact that injuries have kept him from playing more than 130 games in a full season since 2019.
Kepler’s limited experience in left field is the least concerning aspect of all this. Whether you look at OAA, FRV, DRS, or Baseball Prospectus’s DRP, Kepler has never been a below-average outfield defender in any season of his career. His strong track record as a right fielder, and his past experience in center, should help him adjust to left. Furthermore, Kepler might benefit from playing a position where throwing isn’t quite as important. Although his arm strength consistently ranks above the league average, he has been worth -3 throwing runs in his career, according to Baseball Savant.
Even if it won’t be a major adjustment, it’s not nothing for the Phillies to ask Kepler to re-learn a position after almost 10 years away. It makes me think of the movie line I quote more often than any other. In Moneyball, when Billy Beane tries to convince catcher Scott Hatteberg that he can play first base, Beane asks Ron Washington to tell Hatteberg that’s it not that hard. “It’s incredibly hard,” Washington replies. 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 Cincinnati Reds.
Batters
In return for their mini-free agent spree after nearly making the playoffs in 2023, the Cincinnati Reds dropped five wins, finishing 2024 with a 77-85 record. It wasn’t as bad as it looked — the team improved its Pythagorean record by five wins compared to the year before — but it felt lousy that only Nick Martinez really shined among their signings. Elly De La Cruz did break out in a massive way — he was a legitimate MVP contender for much of the season — but Matt McLain’s torn labrum and rib injury kept him away from the action.
A look at the depth chart graphic makes it pretty clear where the Reds are strong: Even with some regression toward the mean, De La Cruz is the team’s most important player, and if healthy, McLain will upgrade second base. Continuing the up-the-middle strength is Jose Trevino, recently acquired from the Yankees; he and Tyler Stephenson give the Reds an excellent tandem behind the plate. TJ Friedl in center gets a less exciting projection, but he’s still perfectly serviceable as a starter, and he’s the worst projected player of the up-the-middle quartet. Read the rest of this entry »
Swaddled comfortably beneath the tree of Phillies fans this year was Jesús Luzardo, whom the club acquired from the Miami Marlins on December 22 along with upper-level minor league catcher Paul McIntosh. In exchange, the Marlins received Top 100 prospect and teenage leather-wizard Starlyn Caba, plus A-ball outfield prospect Emaarion Boyd.
The 27-year-old Luzardo, who is under contract for the next two years, has amassed a 4.29 career ERA in 512 innings across parts of six big league seasons. He has been subject to quite a bit of career turbulence since he was a high school senior. He had Tommy John surgery in March 2016; a few months later, the Nationals drafted him in the third round. Then, after just three starts in the Nationals organization, he was traded to the Athletics, along with Blake Treinen, for Ryan Madson and Sean Doolittle. With Oakland, Luzardo grew into one of baseball’s top handful of prospects and ranked sixth overall at the start of the 2020 season; the shortened COVID campaign became his rookie graduation year. When Luzardo got off to a rocky start in 2021, the A’s put him in the bullpen, then traded him to Miami at the deadline for Starling Marte.
For parts of the last three and a half years, Luzardo has been one of the better lefty starters in baseball when healthy, and he’s fourth among qualified southpaws in strikeout-to-walk ratio since 2022. But consistent health has evaded him. Luzardo has exceeded 20 starts in a season only once in his entire career. His injuries haven’t always been arm-related, but they still represented a concern for any team that was looking to acquire him. In 2024, he posted a career-low strikeout rate (21.2%), albeit in just 66 2/3 innings. He was shut down with elbow soreness early in the season, and then, back in June, he was shelved for the remainder of the year with a lumbar stress reaction in his back. The second injury likely impacted Luzardo’s trade market at the deadline, which is perhaps part of why Miami waited until after the season to deal him. Five days before the trade, MLB.com’s Christina De Nicola reported that Luzardo is a “full go” for spring training.
While Luzardo will immediately compete with Nick Castellanos for the mantle of “most fun Phillies player name to say with a Delaware County accent,” where he slots into Philadelphia’s rotation is another matter. The depth and quality of the Phillies’ staff means Luzardo is arguably the club’s fifth starter, even though he has front-end stuff. All of Zack Wheeler, Aaron Nola, Ranger Suárez, and Cristopher Sánchez have accumulated more WAR than Luzardo across the last two seasons. Healthy Luzardo has a fastball that sits 94-97 mph, and both his slider and changeup have generated plus swinging-strike rates throughout his big league career, each hovering around 20% (the major league average is about 15% for both). He’s had only one spat of wildness in his entire career (that 2021 season during which the A’s put him in the bullpen) — dating all the way back to his high school underclass days. He has the talent of a no. 2 or 3 starter on a good team, but he hasn’t demonstrated the durability of one.
The Phillies’ rotation is stacked beyond those aforementioned hurlers. Taijuan Walker is still around, the newly signed Joe Ross has lots of starting experience, top prospect Andrew Painter is returning from Tommy John (his innings will be backloaded in 2025), and Moisés Chace is a Top 100 Prospect who might kick the door down. Injuries will likely erode whatever starting pitching surplus the Phillies (or any team) currently have on paper, and at least one starter will fall off the roster each year for the next several seasons. Suárez is in his contract year, Luzardo and Walker have two years left, Wheeler three. They have the young arms to make in-house replacements during that span without losing any quality. Dave Dombrowski, Preston Mattingly, and company have assembled a rotation with the high-end talent to contend now and the depth to sustain it for several years to come.
The Phillies had also fortified their upper-level catching depth with the acquisition of McIntosh. The 27-year-old has plus raw power but isn’t a very good defender. He has allowed stolen bases at an 83% success rate in his minor league career. Incumbent backup catcher and clubhouse mascot Garrett Stubbs is a career .215/.294/.311 hitter who is entering his age-32 season. Fellow mask-wearing munchkin Rafael Marchán, who is currently the third catcher on the Phillies’ 40-man roster, is a good contact hitter and fair defender, but he has dealt with several injuries during the last three years and lacks any modicum of power. The 5-foot-9 switch-hitter will turn 26 in February and is out of minor league options. McIntosh and recently signed Payton Henry, a 27-year-old bat-first minor leaguer who is now on his fourth org in four years, both bring an offensive element that the Phillies have been lacking from the backup catcher’s spot for several years. Their additions perhaps signal that the Phils are at least considering a bit of a sea change behind J.T. Realmuto and might allow these four to compete for a roster spot during camp and throughout 2025.
In exchange the Marlins received 19-year-old shortstop Starlyn Caba and 21-year-old outfielder Emaarion Boyd. Caba has a chance to be the best shortstop defender in all of baseball at maturity. He is an unbelievable athlete with ridiculous body control, range, and a big arm for a 5-foot-9 guy. He’ll make the occasional overzealous throw that misses first base entirely, but he is otherwise a complete and sensational shortstop. Despite his age, he is basically a lock to be a special defensive player at arguably the most important position on the field.
Caba has also shown great plate discipline and above-average contact ability in the lower minors. He’s a career .252/.398/.304 hitter across two minor league seasons and spent the last six weeks of 2024 at Low-A Clearwater while he was still just 18 years old. Caba has accumulated many more walks than strikeouts during that span and his granular contact data (5% swinging strike rate, 93% in-zone contact, 87% overall) is exceptional, especially for such a young switch-hitter. He does not, however, have a huge offensive ceiling. Caba is four inches shorter than Zach Neto and his bat speed is only fair. There isn’t going to be big power here; in fact, it’s likely Caba’s lack of power will somewhat dilute the performance of his OBP and contact skills — he tends to keep infielders busy. A career similar to that of Jose Iglesias is fair to hope for Caba, while Andrelton Simmons (who had a more meaningful power peak) feels like the absolute ceiling. That’s a good prospect. Caba has existed toward the back of the Top 100 list for the last year and will continue to rank there this offseason.
Boyd is less a surefire prospect and more of a flier. He signed out of a Mississippi high school for just shy of $650,000 back in 2022 and had an average 2023 before stumbling in 2024 as High-A pitchers took advantage of his tendency to chase. Boyd is fast, lanky, and projectable, and he’s a fantastic rotational athlete with above-average bat speed. He had exciting early-career contact performance, but that has dipped closer to average as he’s climbed into the mid-minors. A plus runner, Boyd lacks the feel and technical skill to play a competent center field right now. He has mostly played left field despite wheels that allowed him to steal an inefficient 56 bases in 2023 — he was caught 18 times. He’s raw on both sides of the ball but toolsy enough to be considered a potential late-blooming prospect.
Much of Miami’s value in this return is tied up in Caba, which runs counter to its otherwise volume-driven trade tendency so far under GM Peter Bendix. In most of the several seller-style trades the Fish have made since he was hired, they’ve gotten back several pieces. However, Boyd is a such low-probability proposition that one might consider this effectively a one-for-one swap: two years of Luzardo for a potential everyday shortstop who is likely still roughly a half decade away from establishing himself in the big leagues. While I like Caba as a prospect, this is perhaps an underwhelming return for someone of Luzardo’s talent, but a reasonable one for someone of Luzardo’s actual production.
Every story written about the Mets this offseason starts with Juan Soto, but pretty much all of them immediately introduce a caveat: “They’ll also need to sign more pitching.” And it’s true! The Mets, as constituted after signing Soto, had a fearsome top of the lineup and a mystery box of a pitching staff. But they also had money, which can be exchanged for goods and services, and now they’ve given that money to Sean Manaea, who signed a three-year, $75 million deal to return to Queens last week.
Manaea was comfortably the team’s best starter in 2024. He signed a one-year prove-it deal that valued him somewhere between a swingman and a fourth starter, and he delivered the goods, to the tune of a 3.47 ERA over 181 innings of work. He got even better in the second half, adopting a new cross-fire delivery and changing the shape of his fastball for the better. A down postseason hardly put a damper on his year; the 2024 version of Manaea fulfilled the promise he’d shown since breaking into the majors in 2016.
The question, then, is whether he can do it again. There’s plenty of reason to believe he can. Manaea’s fastball plays much better from a low slot, and he misses enough bats to run an above-average strikeout rate even without a true wipeout pitch. He also got his walk rate under control in the second half of the year, which has long been a sticking point in his game. It’s not so much that Manaea’s wild, but at his best, he was running walk rates around 5%, and that number had ballooned into the 8-9% region in recent years. After changing his delivery in late July, he walked only 6.2% of opposing batters. He’s never going to strike out a gaudy number of guys, but if he isn’t issuing free passes, his stuff keeps hitters off balance and results in a lot of easy innings even without strikeouts. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the latest on Roki Sasaki’s posting process, the NL-AL imbalance, and why the active homer leader doesn’t have more homers, then (50:44) review the team goals from the 2024 season preview series.
Sponsor Us on Patreon
EW Subreddit
Effectively Wild Wiki
iTunes Feed
Spotify Feed
Facebook Group
Bluesky Account
Twitter Account
Get Our Merch!
