FanGraphs Baseball

It’s been a relatively quiet offseason for the San Francisco Giants, who signed outfielder Mitch Haniger but have come up empty on bigger names including Trea Turner, Kodai Senga, and, most notably, Aaron Judge. On Sunday, though, they got back in action, inking a deal with left-handed pitcher Sean Manaea for two years and $25 million, with an opt-out after 2023.

At age 30, Manaea tested the open market as a free agent for the first time in his career. In 885 career innings, he has almost defined what it means to be a league-average pitcher, with a 4.07 ERA (99 ERA-) and 4.06 FIP (98 FIP-). While he’s made 30 starts in a season just once and missed almost the entire 2019 season with injury, he’s been consistently available throughout his career and has averaged over 5.5 innings per start, well above average in today’s game. While Manaea had a very good 2021 season, during which he set a career high in strikeouts while walking a minuscule 5.4% of batters and posting an 88 FIP-, his performance largely regressed after being traded to the Padres just before Opening Day this year. His strikeout rate fell, his walk rate went from elite to average, and his home run rate spiked, leading to a career-worst 4.96 ERA even in a lowered offensive environment.

So what caused this significant regression in performance? First, let’s examine Manaea’s pitch mix. The bread and butter of his arsenal is a low-90s sinker that he throws over 60% of the time, but its true shape lies somewhere between that of a sinker and a four-seam fastball. In 2022, the pitch had 2.4 fewer inches of drop than other sinkers thrown in the same velocity band, with about an inch less horizontal run. Read the rest of this entry »

Masyn Winn has a high ceiling as a position player. Rated the best athlete in the St. Louis system by Baseball America, the 20-year-old shortstop is No. 2 in our Cardinals prospects rankings and No. 55 in our Top 100. Drafted 54th overall in 2020 out of Kingwood (Tex.) High School, Winn is coming off of a season where he slashed .283/.364/.468 with 12 home runs and 43 stolen bases between High-A Peoria and Double-A Springfield. His summer included an appearance in the 2022 All-Star Futures Game.

He could very well be a pitcher… or a two-way player. As our lead prospect evaluator Eric Longenhagen explained back in July, Winn “was a two-way amateur with huge arm strength,” and while no one was projecting him as the next Shohei Ohtani — a unicorn, he’s not — there is no denying his unique skillset. Winn had a throw from shortstop clocked at 100.5 mph during the Futures Game.

Winn discussed his pitching background and the possibility of him one day returning to the mound during his October/November stint in the Arizona Fall League.

———

David Laurila: I’m especially interested in your positional background. Why are you an infielder now, and not a pitcher?

Masyn Winn: “I’m not a pitcher because the Cardinals and I decided that’s the easier route to go. Hitting… I mean, it’s a lot easier to pick the glove back up and go back on the mound than it is to pick a bat back up. In our thought process, if I make it as a hitter, that’s fantastic. If not, I’ll just fall back to pitching. I think that’s a good plan because of how hard hitting is. Taking a couple years off and then trying to go back to it would be a little tough.”

Laurila: When was the decision made?

Winn: “I ended up throwing one inning at the end of last year. We were going to do a throwing program the last six weeks or so, but I ended up tweaking my arm a little bit, so during the offseason we decided to shut it down and just focus on hitting.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Oakland Athletics are in search of a new ballpark, either within Oakland or elsewhere — most likely Las Vegas. If and when that comes to pass, the aging Coliseum will probably be torn down. And here’s where the A’s lose me: They seem to be under the impression that their active players must all be evacuated in the form of being traded to other organizations before the ballpark is destroyed.

The Atlanta Braves were in no hurry to disabuse Oakland of this notion, as they pried catcher Sean Murphy from Oakland’s clutches Monday afternoon as part of a three-team deal with the Milwaukee Brewers. Four weeks ago I wrote about the trade market for Murphy, made expendable in Oakland by the emergence of Shea Langeliers, who came over from the Braves in the Matt Olson trade. Therein, I specifically noted the Braves as a team that should not trade for Murphy, owing to Atlanta’s surfeit of catchers: Travis d’Arnaud and William Contreras.

Sure enough, with Murphy coming in, not one but two catchers are heading out. Contreras is headed north, while third-stringer — and longtime Brewers backup — Manny Piña will go to Oakland. Speedster Esteury Ruiz is also headed down the John Jaha Highway from Milwaukee to Oakland, and no fewer than five pitchers fill out this salad bar of a trade: Freddy Tarnok, Kyle Muller and Royber Salinas from Atlanta to Oakland, Joel Payamps from Oakland to Milwaukee, and Justin Yeager from Atlanta to Milwaukee.

Here’s the entire three-team, nine-player deal in table form, for clarity’s sake.

Nine players makes for a big trade, but nevertheless, let’s go through each name in at least some detail before drawing conclusions. Read the rest of this entry »

When I read today’s ZiPS projections for the Blue Jays, I was struck by one clear weakness: starting pitching depth. The team boasts an impressive lineup across the board, with Lourdes Gurriel Jr. the closest thing to a weak spot. Toronto also has two borderline aces in Alek Manoah and Kevin Gausman.

That sounds great, but the fourth and fifth starters are projected for a combined 1.7 WAR, which is wildly uninspiring. That hardly seems like a smart plan for a presumptive playoff team, but the Jays are no dummies. Those projections are now outdated — sorry Dan! — because Chris Bassitt is headed north on a three-year, $63 million deal, as Jeff Passan first reported.

Bassitt isn’t the best pitcher to reach free agency this season, but he’s squarely in the top tier. I ranked him 14th among the top 50 free agents this offseason, with only four pitchers ahead of him. Rational observers could certainly differ on that; he’s at the head of a large pack of starters who I think will deliver roughly equivalent value over the next few years. But the general point holds: he’s the kind of pitcher that you probably don’t want starting your first game of the playoffs but that you’d be ecstatic to have as a third starter. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

A week ago at the Winter Meetings, Nationals manager Dave Martinez told reporters that the team was looking to add a veteran starting pitcher. On Friday, MASN’s Mark Zuckerman reported that Washington did just that, making its biggest move of the offseason by signing free agent Trevor Williams. The two-year, $13 million commitment, per The Athletic’s Stephen J. Nesbitt, represents the team’s third-biggest contractual commitment, behind the long-term deals of Stephen Strasburg and Patrick Corbin.

Williams played a significant role with the Mets in 2022, starting nine games while Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer were on the IL earlier in the season and making 21 relief appearances. Given New York’s glut of solid right-handed relief arms, he didn’t make the roster for the Wild Card Series against the Padres. Had he been on the Nationals in 2022, his 0.6 WAR would have been third on the staff, and his 3.21 ERA and 3.88 FIP would have been fourth (among pitchers who threw at least 25 innings).

Williams will immediately become the most reliable arm in Washington’s starting rotation. At Federal Baseball, Patrick Reddington noted that he had a 1.80 ERA against the Nationals in 2022, so if nothing else, they’ve co-opted a former tormenter. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2023 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2015 election at SI.com, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. 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.

Wherever Gary Sheffield went, he made noise, both with his bat and his voice. For the better part of two decades, he ranked among the game’s most dangerous hitters, a slugger with a keen batting eye and a penchant for contact that belied his quick, violent swing. For even longer than that, he was one of the game’s most outspoken players, unafraid to speak up when he felt he was being wronged and unwilling to endure a situation that wasn’t to his liking. He was a polarizing player, and hardly one for the faint of heart.

At the plate, Sheffield was viscerally impressive like few others. With his bat twitching back and forth like the tail of a tiger waiting to pounce, he was pure menace in the batter’s box. He won a batting title, launched over 500 home runs — he had 14 seasons with at least 20 and eight with at least 30 — and put many a third base coach in peril with some of the most terrifying foul balls anyone has ever seen. For as violent as his swing may have been, it was hardly wild; not until his late 30s did he strike out more than 80 times in a season, and in his prime, he walked far more often than he struck out. Read the rest of this entry »

In the wake of a frenzied week at the Winter Meetings that saw teams ink five different players — Xander Bogaerts, Aaron Judge, Trea Turner, Justin Verlander, and Jacob deGrom — to contracts through their age-39 seasons, The Athletic’s Jayson Stark declared that it was “just like ‘old’ times.” All of these cornerstone stars will also receive at least $25 million annually through the duration of their deals. Meanwhile, last year, only the short-term pacts for Max Scherzer and Verlander fit both of these criteria; in the 2021 and ’20 offseasons, no contracts did. All of this while one big domino, Carlos Correa, has yet to fall.

This offseason’s free agent class is a special one, following multiple remarkable feats including Judge’s historic home run total and deGrom and Verlander’s dominant returns from serious arm injuries. But the sheer amount of money and years included in the contracts doled out thus far is also due, at least in part, to the open minds (and wallets) of team owners.

And just like the “old” times, the Steinbrennerian behavior of the Mets’ Steven Cohen and the Padres’ Peter Seidler, who both took over their respective teams heading into the 2021 offseason, has left other teams with smaller markets and/or more miserly owners in the dust. Only this time, the Oakland Athletics haven’t unearthed anything akin to their early-2000s Moneyball tactics, which by now have been adopted by all of the big market teams, in order to close the gap. Unless there’s something about Jace Peterson and Aledmys Díaz we don’t know, that is. Read the rest of this entry »

Mid-day Sunday in Japan (and typo-inducingly late Saturday night in the U.S.), the New York Mets added to their rotation, signing 29-year-old righty Kodai Senga to a five-year, $75 million deal. The contract reportedly includes a no-trade clause and an opt out after the third year of the contract.

The addition of Senga provides the Mets rotation with perhaps the final hard-throwing patch it needed due to the departure of several free agents. The Flushing starting pitcher carousel has seen Jacob deGrom, Taijuan Walker, and presumably Chris Bassitt depart, while that group has been replaced, seemingly man for man, by living legend Justin Verlander, José Quintana, and now Senga, an 11-year NPB veteran who led Japan’s top league in strikeouts in 2019 and ’20.

After starting his career as a reliever, Senga moved into the Fukuoka Hawks rotation in 2017 and has spent the last half decade as one of the better starters (and hardest-throwing pitchers) in all of Nippon Professional Baseball. As I noted when analyzing Senga for our Top 50 Free Agent ranking (Senga checked in at no. 18), while the soon-to-be 30-year-old righty struggled with walks early in his tenure as a starter (he walked 75 hitters in 180 innings in 2019 and 57 hitters in 121 innings in ’20), free passes have become less of an issue during the last two seasons. Senga’s walk rate has fallen from the 10-11% range to the 8-8.5% range during that stretch, and his WHIP was a measly 1.05. 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 Toronto Blue Jays.

Batters

When you look at Toronto’s lineup, there isn’t much to complain about. ZiPS disagrees with Steamer on some of the individual players, but the overs and unders are pretty even, meaning that ZiPS thinks this will be as potent a run-scoring squad as Steamer does. Among the most notable projections? Many of the worries ZiPS had about Matt Chapman were resolved in 2022, while my system is a bit concerned about Vladimir Guerrero Jr.’s output after his Statcast data dropped back down to its 2020 levels. It’s still the projection of an All-Star first baseman, but it’s distinctly behind last year’s and certainly well off 2021’s elite performance.

Still, there are a couple of things to gripe about. Slowly transitioning George Springer to right field is a good idea given his age, and with Kevin Kiermaier signed, they’re at least moving him for an excellent defensive center fielder. Kiermaier has his own injury concerns, but there’s nothing keeping Springer from getting plenty of time in center as the Plan B. I think Springer is moving because the Jays have an option and the team is considering his health, as he’s actually held up very well defensively out there. But left field still projects as a “meh” position. ZiPS has never been a Gurriel fan, and the system agrees with Statcast that his 2022 batting average was a bit inflated; the loss of power is also very concerning. I’d love to see the Jays take a stab at a better option here, though players have been coming off the board quickly. Read the rest of this entry »