The polarizing debate over how Hall of Fame voters should handle candidates with connections to performance-enhancing drugs began in the wake of Rafael Palmeiro’s 2005 positive test, was amplified when Mark McGwire became eligible on the BBWAA ballot two years later, and reached a fever pitch when Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Sammy Sosa joined the fray on the 2013 ballot. None of those candidates has been elected thus far despite numbers that once upon a time would have guaranteed them entry, and the cacophony and controversy has yet to abate. With Monday’s release of this year’s BBWAA ballot, the debate now enters a new phase, as both David Ortiz and Alex Rodriguez are eligible for the first time in the same year that Bonds and Clemens have their last chance in front of the writers.

Here’s the full slate of 30 candidates, including those of 17 holdovers from last year’s slate, the first in which nobody was elected since that 2013 ballot, when Bonds and company debuted alongside the since-elected Craig Biggio and Mike Piazza and the long-lost Kenny Lofton. The newcomers are in italics:

Bobby Abreu, Barry Bonds, Mark Buehrle, Roger Clemens, Carl Crawford, Prince Fielder, Todd Helton, Ryan Howard, Tim Hudson, Torii Hunter, Andruw Jones, Jeff Kent, Tim Lincecum, Justin Morneau, Joe Nathan, David Ortiz, Jonathan Papelbon, Jake Peavy, Andy Pettitte, A.J. Pierzynski, Manny Ramirez, Alex Rodriguez, Scott Rolen, Jimmy Rollins, Curt Schilling, Gary Sheffield, Sammy Sosa, Mark Teixeira, Omar Vizquel, and Billy Wagner.

Rodriguez hit 696 home runs, collected 3,115 hits, made 14 All-Star teams and won three MVP awards, yet in 2009, Sports Illustrated reported that he was roughly one of 100 players who failed the supposedly anonymous survey test from ’03. Since that test carried no penalty, he wasn’t disciplined at the time, but he missed the entire 2014 season due to a suspension for PEDs obtained via the Biogenesis clinic. Ortiz hit 541 home runs, made 10 All-Star teams, and helped the Red Sox to three World Series wins, producing some indelible postseason highlights along the way. But likewise with him, in 2009, The New York Times reported that both he and teammate Manny Ramirez had also failed the survey test. Both players will get some amount of support from voters, but like Bonds and Clemens, who respectively received 61.8% and 61.6% last year but have only gained about eight points over the last four cycles, they may have enough opposition to prevent their election. Read the rest of this entry »

Friday’s 40-man roster/Rule 5 Draft protection deadline featured the usual flurry of transactional activity. While christening a new wave of big leaguers, the day’s moves also illuminated a secondary effect of recent farm-building trends, and indicated some shifts in the way teams are thinking about the players they do or don’t decide to protect. As I fly through each team’s additions and subtractions from Friday, I’ll flesh out these concepts where they best apply. I’ve tried to give readers a little scouting note on every player, getting into greater detail for players who aren’t yet on The Board (which is where you’ll want to go for in-depth scouting reports) or whose reports I think have meaningfully changed since they were last updated on The Board. Readers should know that when it comes to examining the reasons teams chose not to protect players on Friday, I’m using informed speculation.

Here’s a quick rundown/refresher for folks who might be new to caring about this particular aspect of roster construction. Deeper teams tend to have more good players than they can roster, and tend to lose the ones toward the bottom of their depth chart to talent-hungry clubs that consider them upgrades to the players currently on their not-so-good roster. Sometimes a team with a good big league roster will also have a large wave of quality prospects approaching the majors, and the combination of the two creates motivation to trade some of those prospects away, or else loose them for nothing via waivers or the Rule 5 Draft. The way the 60-day injured list works also impacts a lot of fringe roster movement.

There are a couple ways teams try to deal with this if they think they have more desirable players than they do roster spots. They either package several of them as part of a trade for one significant big leaguer, or deal them for very young players who are several years from needing to be added to the 40-man. Teams keep 40-man dynamics in mind with every move they make, but the period just before the 40-man/Rule 5 deadline at the end of November is almost entirely driven by them. Teams weigh adding their own prospects to the 40-man against the chances that an unprotected player might be popped in the Rule 5 Draft (and stick on their new team’s roster), as well as who they might otherwise be able to use that roster spot for. It’s a part of the baseball calendar that forces teams to make moves that help us learn about their collective behavior and individual preferences. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Though this year’s market for catchers is pretty barren, so much so that Pedro Severino was a solid pickup for the Brewers, the 2023 free agent class is much more fertile. Several notable catchers will be available for teams to vie for, including Max Stassi, Willson Contreras, and Mike Zunino. Rather than wait the extra year, however, the Colorado Rockies seem content with their in-house options, last week handing veteran backstop Elias Díaz a three-year extension worth $14.5 million. The contract covers his remaining year of arbitration and two seasons of free agency.

In so doing, the Rockies have effectively announced their intent to stick with Díaz rather than search for a new everyday catcher; Dom Nuñez will likely occupy a backup role, while Drew Romo, the team’s No. 3 prospect according to our 2021 rankings, is still a couple of years away from his big-league arrival. All things considered, Díaz had himself a solid season. His 1.6 WAR ranked 15th among 30 catchers with at least 300 plate appearances, making him just about a smack-dab average backstop. Assuming Díaz can keep up this level of production, an AAV slightly under $5 million is a green light, more so because of the relative scarcity of reliable alternatives.

But of course, it’s more complicated than that. In 2019, his previous full season, Díaz was one of the worst catchers in the league, with a 61 wRC+ and a negative value in just about every defensive metric; he was non-tendered by the Pirates that offseason. His track record before that isn’t impressive, either – though Díaz accrued 1.8 WAR in 82 games in 2018, his ’17 campaign was disastrous, good (?) for -1.2 WAR. The Rockies are betting that this back-and-forth parkour will stop, and that the Díaz of the present will be who Díaz remains in the future. It’s a bit risky, though. Which version of Díaz is more likely to appear next season, and can we make an educated guess using the numbers? Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Chicago White Sox.

Batters

The White Sox offense projects similarly to how it did prior to the 2021 season, which is good news for the team considering how easily they made the playoffs. But that also means the fundamental problems in the offense remain, with an additional issue compared to last year. ZiPS may be underestimating Eloy Jiménez — it’s always hard to evaluate players coming back from injury — but we can’t pretend that there isn’t some risk involved there. The remaining outfield position and DH are thornier concerns, and ZiPS is more pessimistic here than Steamer is. This is not a popular opinion, but if the White Sox plan to use Andrew Vaughn like our depth charts indicate they will, I really hope they just let him crush Triple-A pitching for a few months rather than juggling him with Gavin Sheets and Adam Engel. The basic problem is that though Vaughn was deservedly a terrific prospect, and 2020’s lost season of course did him no favors, he still doesn’t have a professional season in line with what you would expect from a top first base prospect. Read the rest of this entry »

Carlos Cortes might be the most-unique player available in the upcoming Rule 5 draft. A 24-year-old multi-positional player whom the New York Mets took in the third round of the 2018 draft out of the University of South Carolina, Cortes is ambidextrous. When stationed at second base, he throws right-handed. When patrolling the outfield, he throws from his natural left side.

The both-ways ability dates back to his formative years in the Orlando area.

“When I was around eight years old, my dad told me that my chances of playing a position would increase if I was able to throw right-handed,” explained Cortes, who currently stands 5-foot-7. “I didn’t really like it at first — he kind of forced me to do it — but by the time I got to high school, I was pretty natural with it. I caught my first couple years, then played second my junior and senior years, as well as in the outfield. I kind of played everywhere.”

Everywhere included the mound. Throwing left-handed, Cortes sat comfortably in the high-80s and became Lake Howell High School’s closer in his final prep season. Then came his collegiate experience. Eschewing the opportunity to sign with the Mets as a 20th-round pick in 2016, Cortes proceeded to play primarily in the outfield with the Gamecocks, putting up a .906 OPS along the way. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley recap the results of awards week, focusing on the controversy over Corbin Burnes’s victory over Zack Wheeler in NL Cy Young voting, the inconsistency between the AL and NL Cy Young results, how voting patterns are evolving, whether anyone actually discounts the value of innings, FIP vs. ERA and a misconception about the suitability of FIP for retrospective evaluation, and the MVP victories of Shohei Ohtani and Bryce Harper. Then (43:24) they start their series of discussions of Korean baseball drama Stove League by breaking down the first four episodes of the show. (Note: No spoilers beyond Episode 4.)

Audio intro: The High Water Marks, "Award Show"
Audio outro: The Lemonheads, "Stove"

Link to NL Cy Young voting results
Link to AL Cy Young voting results
Link to AL MVP voting results
Link to Ben on Ohtani’s stats
Link to NL MVP voting results
Link to Alex Speier on Cy Young voting
Link to Jayson Stark on awards stats
Link to Jeff Passan’s tweet about innings
Link to Tom Tango on deGrom vs. Urías
Link to Tango on predicting Cy Young results
Link to Dan Szymborski on his NL RotY ballot
Link to Ben Clemens on Burnes
Link to Neil Paine on MVPs and team performance
Link to history of BBWAA Cy Young voting
Link to history of BBWAA MVP voting
Link to Russell Carleton on reliever workloads
Link to Incheon SSG Landers Field
Link to Moneyball bat scene
Link to Twitter thread on Jung Hwa Kim
Link to explainer about Korean beef
Link to Stove League teaser video
Link to Stove League review
Link to stream Stove League via Kocowa
Link to stream Stove League via Viki

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It’s a day late but certainly not a dollar short as Chin Music returns with guest co-host Hannah Keyser of Yahoo Sports, who joins me to talk about baseball and other stuff. We begin by discussing awards week, or more accurately, the reaction to awards voting and the weird emotional energy some devote to it. Then we move on to actual baseball news with some big deals for pitchers, the Mets finally getting a GM, and the success and failure of some of the experimental rules being tested in the Arizona Fall League. After that, we’re joined by special guest Evan Drellich of The Athletic, who updates us on baseball’s labor negotiations, with all three of us setting odds on where things go from here. Then it’s your emails on private workouts, trade targets and some changes in the game, which allows Hannah to talk about her ridiculous concept of Total Bases Ball. Finally, we finish with some Sumo and Project Runway talk before leaving you for the week.

As always, we hope you enjoy, and thank you for listening.

Music by Model Home.

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Warning One: While ostensibly a podcast about baseball, these conversations often veer into other subjects.

Warning Two: There is explicit language.

Run Time: 2:27:51

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The following article is part of a series concerning the 2022 Golden Days Era Committee ballot, covering managers and long-retired players whose candidacies will be voted upon on December 5. For an introduction to this year’s ballot, see here, and for an introduction to JAWS, see here. Several profiles in this series are adapted from work previously published at SI.com, Baseball Prospectus, and Futility Infielder. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Billy Pierce

An undersized southpaw listed at just 5-foot-11 and 160 pounds but armed with a blazing fastball, Billy Pierce earned All-Star honors seven times during his 18-year career (1945, ’48-64) and helped both the 1959 White Sox and ’62 Giants to pennants. He ranked among the game’s best pitchers during the 1950s, posting a higher WAR (43.9) than any other AL hurler and running second in both ERA+ (128, behind Whitey Ford‘s 140) and wins (155, behind Early Wynn’s 188) during that span. Had each league issued its own Cy Young award — which didn’t happen until 1967, 11 years after the first one — Pierce likely would have taken home some hardware.

Pierce was born in Detroit on April 2, 1927, and grew up in suburban Highland Park, Michigan. As he once said, he began playing baseball at age 10; after he refused to have his tonsils removed, his parents coerced him by offering a major league baseball and a good glove. “I took the bribe,” he said. “It really was a thrill to throw around that league ball, and I’ve been throwing ever since.” Read the rest of this entry »