Last week, Jay Jaffe wrote about the rumors that the Nationals were considering a contract extension for wünderkind Juan Soto, the team’s first step toward keeping him in town for the majority of his career. Though just 22 years old and four years away from free agency, Soto receiving an extension in the $400 million range would hardly be premature. Projection systems — which by their nature are supposed to be dispassionate and shoot for the middle — see him as having a no-doubt Hall of Fame career.

Yet if you’re a Nationals fan, you have cause to be suspicious that an extension gets done. You’ve seen your super-talented homegrown players leave unceremoniously in free agency as soon as they could, and while Soto has a more favorable outlook than Bryce Harper or Anthony Rendon did, you don’t want to see these negotiations drag out any longer than they have to.

It would be enough if Washington had just one young player’s future to stew upon this spring, but in fact, there are two. As Soto has been fielding questions about a possible extension in spring training, so too has shortstop Trea Turner, who at 27 is much closer to free agency; he’s set to hit the market after the 2022 season. That makes any extension decision that much more urgent. Turner knows it, and he’s been open about wanting to get an agreement done. From the Washington Post’s Barry Svrluga:

“I would love to play here my entire career,” Turner said Tuesday. “I’ve said it in the past. I’ve always liked it here, and don’t think the grass is greener on the other side. … I love it here. I love the atmosphere and the ballclub that [General Manager Mike] Rizzo and the coaching staff has put together every single year. We’ll see. I think those talks have happened in the past, and hopefully they’ll happen in the future.”

The Nationals’ position is a tricky one. Turner’s free agency would come two years before Soto’s, but the latter’s contract may still be the most important one, as it will be the larger of the two and must fit within Washington’s payroll. But retaining Turner in 2023 and beyond won’t come cheap. One of the top prospects in baseball when he debuted in 2015, he has slowly but surely started living up to that billing, turning into one of the league’s best shortstops over the last three seasons.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, RJ McDaniel and Jason Martinez examined the league’s second and third basemen. Today, we wrap up the infield positions, starting with catcher.

It’s all in the framing. The baseball industry’s ability to quantify catchers’ skill at converting borderline pitches into strikes has had a noticeable effect on the player pool, weeding out good-hit, bad-defense backstops — where have you gone, Ryan Doumit? — while lowering the bar for what constitutes acceptable offense. The short season, with its small samples, was particularly weird in this regard, as Jeff Mathis, the majors’ worst hitter over the past decade or so, outhit eight catchers who had at least 60 PA.

Short-season anomalies aside, the change in offensive expectations has been particularly noticeable during the Statcast era. While catchers as a group combined for about a 91 wRC+ from 2008 (the start of the PITCHf/x era) through 2014, that average dropped a full four points from 2015-19 as teams became more focused upon this area, though last year’s 92 WRC+ probably owed to short-season weirdness. As that offensive bar has been lowered, the gap between the majors’ best framer and the worst has shrunk; where it was nearly 98 runs in 2008, and an average of 57 runs from 2009-14, the gap was about 34 runs from 2017-19, and just 9.2 runs last year. Prorating that last figure to 24.8 runs over a full season, here’s the picture:

Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the latest spring exploits of Shohei Ohtani, the Royals extending Salvador Perez, rooting against injuries in spring training, and a mysterious former major leaguer known only as “Lewis,” then preview the 2021 Mets (37:09) with Deesha Thosar of the New York Daily News and the 2021 Marlins (1:14:26) with Jordan McPherson of the Miami Herald.

Audio intro: Mark Knopfler, "Nobody Does That"
Audio interstitial 1: Radiohead, "Lewis (Mistreated)"
Audio interstitial 2: Queen, "Put Out the Fire"
Audio outro: Feist, "Get it Wrong, Get it Right"

Link to video of Ohtani’s two-way game
Link to Ben Clemens on the Perez extension
Link to Jared Diamond on the Royals’ humane behavior
Link to Rustin Dodd on the Royals’ anti-porn campaign
Link to “Lewis” Wikipedia page
Link to “Lewis” B-Ref page
Link to “Lewis” on the Stathead ERA leaderboard
Link to story about deGrom’s spring speeds
Link to Matt Kelly on deGrom’s velo in 2020
Link to Travis Sawchik on deGrom’s velo in 2020
Link to Deesha on Jared Porter
Link to article on the Mets’ defense
Link to Jordan on Kim Ng
Link to Stephanie Apstein on Kim Ng
Link to Jordan on the Marlins’ pandemic year
Link to story about Marlins security guard
Link to Realmuto cracking the fish tank

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This morning, RJ McDaniel previewed baseball’s second basemen. Now, Jason Martinez turns his attention to the hot corner.

There’s not a lot of certainty in this year’s crop of third basemen. The majority are bounce-back candidates, due to injury, poor performance, or both. Those in their prime and also coming off of a productive and healthy 2020 season can be counted on one hand. And there wasn’t a lot of turn over at the position this offseason, either. One player changed teams via trade, and only a few others are in line for significant playing time after signing with a new team this past winter. There are breakout candidates, prospects on the rise, and veterans who might be reaching the end of the line. All in all, it’s a good mix of current, former, and potential superstars. Read the rest of this entry »

I asked Baltimore Orioles hitting coach Don Long a question on Monday morning, and he responded with a lengthy answer. I wanted to know, relative to years past, how much more frequently players are approaching him with ideas of changing their swing, and what he tends to tell them when that happens.

“Honestly, I’m not a believer in changing swings,” the veteran hitting instructor responded. “I operate under the thought that [for] every hitter, their best swing, they already possess. The thing that gets in the way of them being able to access their best swing, consistently, usually has to do with their thinking, their timing, their position, or their ability to be really good with their eyes.

“You’ve probably heard the old Michelangelo story, right? Supposedly, he carved this statue of David out of this block of granite, and they said, ‘How did you carve such a beautiful statue out of a block of stone?’ He said, ‘I simply chipped away at the stone until the statue revealed itself.’ That’s how I look at a hitter’s swing. You already possess your best swing — it’s already there — so let’s not spend time chasing a good swing, or chasing something that you already know how to do. Let’s chip away at the thing that’s getting in the way of that. And for most guys, the thing that interrupts the physical part of their game is the mental part of the game.

“I can give you an example. I had a guy come to me a couple days ago in the cage with an exasperated, ‘Man, what’s going on? I don’t know what to do.’ I said, ‘Let me ask you a question.’ I picked a ball up out of the basket and said, ‘What’s this pitch going to be?’ He looked at me and said, ‘I don’t know.’ I said, ‘Yeah, you do.’ Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, Meg Rowley introduced this year’s rankings, and Dan Szymborski examined the state of the league’s first basemen. Today, we turn our attention to second and third basemen, starting with the denizens of the keystone.

Second base is always a great time here at Positional Power Rankings Inc., an opportunity for us to answer the age-old question: If contact hitters were different, how different would they be? The answer is, of course, quite different, which is why we must rank them. Some, like the players at the top of this list, are contact hitters whose skills expand beyond that limited scope, taking them to critical plate appearances in the postseason, to pennants and championships. Some, with their abilities dwindling over time, are forced to adopt a different style of hitting. Some have never been successful big-leaguers; some are decade-long veterans. Some are young and on the rise; others are old, and sort of on the rise anyway. But they all occupy second base, and these are their rankings. Read the rest of this entry »

With Opening Day roughly a week away, teams are running out of time to sign players to contract extensions without dragging negotiations out into the season. This week will likely have a bevy of them, and the Royals got the party started early yesterday when they signed Salvador Perez to a four-year, $82 million extension, as The Athletic’s Alec Lewis reported.

The deal, which also contains a team option for a relatively affordable fifth year at $11.5 million after accounting for a buyout, doesn’t start until 2022. When it does kick in, Perez will become the second-highest-paid catcher in baseball, behind only J.T. Realmuto (Buster Posey has a team option for 2022, but it will likely not be exercised), with Yasmani Grandal as the only other catcher within hailing distance of his new deal.

In the current context of player spending, this qualifies as a surprise. Perez will turn 31 in May. He missed all of 2019 to have Tommy John surgery and a chunk of the previous season with an MCL sprain. When not injured, he rarely missed a game, exposing his body to the rigors of catching at a rate only matched by fellow Missourian Yadier Molina.

Catchers age in dog years. Perez is fighting gravity by continuing to be a valuable player every time he puts on the tools of ignorance. Most of the teams in baseball wouldn’t have signed this deal. What’s going on?
Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier today, Meg Rowley introduced this year’s positional power rankings. As a quick refresher, all 30 teams are ranked based on the projected WAR from our Depth Charts. Our staff then endeavors to provide you with some illuminating commentary to put those rankings in context. We begin this year’s series with first base.

In last year’s positional rankings, Jay Jaffe wrote that first base just “ain’t what it used to be.” The diminished status of what was once one of baseball’s premier positions went unchanged in 2020. Even worse, one of the few young players near the top of those rankings, Pete Alonso, took a step back. First base has almost become baseball’s oldies station, chock-full of memories of the early hits of Albert Pujols or Joey Votto or Miguel Cabrera, but never airing their newest singles.

So what’s caused the collapse in the Q Score of the game’s first basemen? Offense is still sexy, but the truth of the matter is that home runs are cheap and plentiful. In baseball’s last full season, 135 players qualified for a batting title, and only five of them failed to finish with double-digits home runs. In 2009, there were 31 such players. There were 27 single-digit sluggers in 1999; in 1989, before the early-90s offensive explosion, there were 47. There aren’t just more home runs in baseball, they’re spread more widely among its players. Teams finding more guys who could play shortstop and hit home runs didn’t magically result in the game’s first basemen also thumping more round-trippers.

What’s more, it sometimes seems like there aren’t any actual first base prospects anymore, just prospects at other positions that teams eventually settle for playing first. The Jays haven’t totally given up on Vladimir Guerrero Jr. at the hot corner, and one of the few genuine phenom first basemen to come up in recent years, Cody Bellinger, has turned out to be a dynamite center fielder instead. The Tigers have made no secret of the fact that they would prefer that last year’s number one overall pick, Spencer Torkelson, play at third, a position he didn’t even play in college. It makes one wonder whether Jim Thome and Pujols, both third basemen in the minors, would have been moved to first so quickly if they had been born later.

It’s hard to pinpoint the exact moment that baseball fell out of love with the position, but I’d highlight November 28, 2016 as a key date in the story. That was when reports came out that the Milwaukee Brewers weren’t going to tender Chris Carter, the National League’s home run leader, a contract for the 2017 season. And no one seemed especially shocked! The AL’s home run leader, Mark Trumbo, was also a free agent that offseason and neither he nor Carter attracted significant interest in free agency. Trumbo eventually settled for going back to the Orioles in late January; Carter signed a one-year deal with the Yankees and was done as a major leaguer by midseason.

Will first basemen ever return to prominence? Not everything is cyclical after all, and I think you’d need a change in how the numbers work in baseball to make first basemen desirable again. Perhaps a deadened ball will hurt the less-impressive power hitters at some point, resulting in first basemen reemerging as the game’s princes of power. Or maybe ball or rule changes will result in more balls in play for first basemen to field, giving a top player at the position the potential to post truly significant value on defense. But for 2021 at least, look for more of the same, with lots of familiar names and only a few players who excel enough at every aspect of the game, like Freddie Freeman, to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with baseball’s elites. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to the 2021 positional power rankings! As is tradition, over the next week and a half, we’ll be ranking every team by position as we inch closer to Opening Day. This is always something of a funny exercise. You read FanGraphs regularly, after all — a fact for which we are supremely grateful — and are well-versed in the goings on of the offseason. You know that Nolan Arenado now plays for the Cardinals (though the Rockies are still paying him for some reason) and that George Springer is a Blue Jay and that J.T. Realmuto found his way back to Philly. You might not remember that Mitch Moreland signed with Oakland, or that Collin McHugh is a Ray, but then, I sometimes forget those facts, which is surely more embarrassing for me than it is for you. All of which is to say, after an offseason spent reading transaction analysis and peeking at projections, you generally know what’s going on. And yet after a difficult, draining year (one you likely spent busy with many things in addition to baseball), you’re still keen to know more about the game and what it might look like between now and October. The positional power rankings are our answer to that impulse.

This post serves as an explainer for our approach to the rankings. If you’re new to the exercise, I hope it helps to clarify how they are compiled and what you might expect from them. If you’re a FanGraphs stalwart, I hope it is a useful reminder of what we’re up to. If you have a bit of time, here is the introduction to last year’s series. You can use the handy nav widget at the top of that post to get a sense of where things stood before Opening Day 2020, oddity and all.

Unlike a lot of sites’ season previews, we don’t arrange ours by team or division. That is a perfectly good way to organize a season preview, but we see a few advantages to the way we do it. First, ranking teams by position allows us to cover a team’s roster from top to bottom. Stars, everyday staples, and role players alike receive some amount of examination, and those players (and the teams they play for) are placed in their proper league-wide context. By doing it this way, you can easily see how teams stack up against each other, get a sense of the overall strength of a position across baseball, and spot places where a well-deployed platoon may end up having a bigger impact than an everyday regular who is merely good. We think all of that context helps to create a richer understanding of the state of things and a clearer picture of the season ahead.

We will have a post for each position, with starting pitchers and relievers divided into two posts each to allow us all the many words we need to do the league’s rotations and bullpens justice without taxing your patience. Each post will start with a brief summary of the position, then rank each team’s group of players from the best down to the worst based on projected WAR. Those WAR numbers are arrived at using a 50/50 blend of ZiPS and Steamer projections and our manually maintained team depth charts (courtesy of Jason Martinez), which include playing time estimates for every player. Read the rest of this entry »