Kristian Campbell shot up the rankings last year, and elevating was a big reason why. Known primarily for his athleticism and bat-to-ball skills when he was drafted 132nd overall by the Red Sox in 2023, the Georgia Tech product transformed his right-handed stroke to the tune of 20 home runs and a 180 wRC+ over 517 plate appearances across three levels. Flying under most radar as recently as a year ago, Campbell is now one of the game’s top prospects. Moreover, he has a legitimate chance to break camp as Boston’s starting second baseman.
I asked the 22-year-old infielder about his swing change when the Red Sox held their annual rookie development camp at Fenway Park earlier this week.
“It’s been all about bat path,” explained Campbell, who had a 90% contact rate but just four home runs in his lone collegiate season (he’d been a freshman redshirt in 2022) . “Instead of being flat, or straight down, I’m trying to hit the ball at a good angle. That’s what I lacked coming into pro baseball, hitting the ball in the air. I never really hit for power before last year.”
The proof is in the numbers, and not just ones that can be found on the back of a baseball card. In 2023, Campbell went deep once in 84 professional plate appearances while logging a 48% ground ball rate with a minus-2 attack angle. This past season, the aforementioned 20 home runs — eight each in High-A and Double-A, and four in Triple-A — were accompanied by a 39% ground ball rate and a plus-9 attack angle. His xwOBAcon jumped from .327 to .422.
According to Campbell, his conversion didn’t require a complete revamping of his mechanics. Read the rest of this entry »
Major League Baseball had its “Kevin Durant is a Warrior” moment on Friday, when 23-year-old Japanese phenom Roki Sasaki agreed to sign with the defending World Series champion Los Angeles Dodgers for $6.5 million. Sasaki himself announced his decision via his Instagram, while his bonus was reported on X by The Athletic’s Fabian Ardaya and Alden González of ESPN.
If he can stay healthy, Sasaki is a likely front-of-the-rotation arm who has the talent to win Cy Young Awards. When he’s been fully operational, his fastball has averaged nearly 99 mph, he has an elite splitter, and his slider became a useable weapon in 2022. He joins a loaded Dodgers roster that has five or six other players who either have won a Cy Young or MVP (Freddie Freeman, Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts, Blake Snell), or could conceivably do so in their best season (Tyler Glasnow and maybe Yoshinobu Yamamoto). One and a half of those players weren’t even on last year’s Dodgers title team. As I’m writing this, the Dodgers have not yet announced the signing. Though Sasaki’s contract is technically a minor league deal, and he isn’t yet on the 40-man roster, he is overwhelmingly likely to break camp with the Dodgers’ big league club and be part of their squad that opens the season against the Cubs in Japan on March 18-19. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley react to the news that Roki Sasaki is signing with the Dodgers (shocker!), breaking down how the posting process played out, the Dodgers’ ridiculous rotation, whether L.A.’s talent-acquisition advantage is good or bad for baseball, the runners-up for Roki, and more. Then they explore how softball and baseball are joining the women’s sports boom via the expansion/launch of professional leagues this year and next by talking to Emma Baccellieri of Sports Illustrated about the Athletes Unlimited Softball League and AU’s innovative scoring model (49:15), and Kiri Oler of FanGraphs about the Women’s Professional Baseball League and her work as a data scientist on MLB: The Show (1:25:28).
For the most part, I am the voice of reason whenever my friends complain about slow offseasons, reassuring them with statements like, “Be patient,” “Stuff will happen,” “The dam will break.” Over the last week, though, I’ve become completely Jokerfied. After a slow seven days, I am now fully in the camp of believing that nothing happens, nothing ever will happen again, and spring training will open in a month with plenty of unsigned free agents. Anyway, now that that’s all out of my system and I can be a little more rational — a month is still a long time, the dam can break at any moment, etc. — it’s time to get into the updates with the Matrix. Read the rest of this entry »
When the Mets signed Juan Soto in December, he was, technically speaking, filling the hole that Jesse Winker left behind. Of course, that’s a bit like buying the Batmobile to replace an expired bus pass. Winker’s greatest strength is drawing walks, and Soto’s career walk rate makes Winker’s career walk rate look like Jeff McNeil’s career walk rate. Still, the point stands. The Mets lost one lefty-batting corner outfielder to free agency and replaced him with another. Yet, on Thursday afternoon, they re-signed Winker anyway. His one-year, $7.5 million contract is fairly straightforward, but the ramifications for New York’s roster could be much more complex.
Poor baserunning, miserable defense, and frequent injuries have limited Winker throughout his career. All the same, his bat was a major asset for the Reds from 2017-21. In just over 1,500 plate appearances with Cincinnati, he slashed .288/.385/.504 with a 132 wRC+. While he thrived at Great American Ball Park, he made his mark outside of that hitter’s haven, too, producing an .845 OPS and 126 wRC+ on the road. He made the All-Star team in his final season with the Reds, batting .305 with 24 home runs in 110 games, good for a career-best 3.2 WAR.
The next two seasons, however, marked a period of steep decline for Winker. Playing for the Mariners and Brewers, he managed just 0.7 WAR in 2022 and -0.8 in 2023. His agent might point out that back, neck, and knee injuries hampered his performance in that time, as did some bad luck on balls in play; his xwOBA was nearly 30 points better than his wOBA, while his BABIP was more than 50 ticks below his average from the previous five years. Even so, it would have been more than fair to worry about his future as a major leaguer after his dismal 2023 campaign. Entering 2024, his ZiPS projection was a mere 0.4 WAR in 415 plate appearances, and he was forced to sign a minor league contract with the Nationals less than two weeks before spring training began.
Back to full health, Winker rebounded in Washington. While he wasn’t a power threat like he’d been in his Reds heyday, he knocked 18 doubles and 11 home runs, giving him a middle-of-the-pack .162 ISO. His BABIP was back up above .300, and his 14.0% walk rate ranked fifth among qualified batters (as of his final day with the Nats). All in all, he put up a 125 wRC+ and 1.2 WAR in 101 games.
This was enough to pique the Mets’ interest ahead of the trade deadline. However, after Washington sent him to New York, Winker wasn’t the productive hitter that the Mets thought they were getting when they acquired him. Well, at least not during the regular season, when Winker was little more than replacement level with his new team. All the more disappointing, he was set up to thrive with the Mets: He had the platoon advantage almost every time he came to the plate. While Washington used him as an everyday player, New York shielded him from southpaws; he faced just four left-handed pitchers over the final two months of the season. Nonetheless, his 97 wRC+ with the Mets was much closer to his career mark against lefties (88) than righties (129).
The problem was rooted in Winker’s approach at the plate. With the Nationals, he ran that aforementioned 14.0% walk rate and struck out just 22.2% of the time. After the trade, he lowered his strikeout rate to 17.1%, which might’ve been a good thing, except that his walk rate also dropped way down, to 7.8%. With the Mets, Winker swung more often and made more contact, especially on pitches in the strike zone. His Z-Swing% (per Statcast) jumped from 60.5% to 70.4%, while his Z-Contact% jumped from 85.5% to 91.2%. This wouldn’t have been a problem if he crushed many of those extra balls he put in play, but, naturally, he did not.
So, why did Winker suddenly change his approach at a time when things were going well? I’d posit the Mets noticed that he was holding back on too many hittable pitches over the first four months of the season and let him know that was the case after the trade. According to Robert Orr’s calculations from his Damage leaderboard, Winker was better than the average hitter at identifying hittable pitches every year from 2020-23. Yet, with the Nationals this past season, his Hittable Pitch Take rate put him in the bottom third of the league. After he started swinging at more strikes with the Mets, he rose back up to the 66th percentile. The problem, however, was that he sacrificed another critical skill in the process. Winker’s selectivity rate — Orr’s metric that shows how often a player avoids swinging at bad pitches — fell from the 73rd percentile as a National to the 35th percentile as a Met. All that is to say, Winker swung at more good pitches, but he also swung at more bad ones, and he didn’t do enough damage against good pitches to compensate for his lack of production against the bad ones. Ultimately, his hard-hit and barrel rates were lower with the Mets than they were with the Nationals, as were his wOBA and xwOBA on contact.
This raises another question: Why would the Mets want Winker back if their efforts to improve his approach went so poorly? Perhaps they think he just needs a little more time to reap the rewards. After all, 129 plate appearances is nothing. Aaron Judge was still hitting below the Mendoza Line with an OPS in the mid-.700s by his 129th plate appearances last season. Thankfully for our purposes, we have an easy way to increase the sample size of Winker’s 2024 season with the Mets: Include the playoffs, as Winker took an additional 32 plate appearances in October. He continued to swing at strikes at a similar rate, but he used those swings to record several big hits, including two triples and a home run. He also drew seven walks, compared to just four strikeouts. If you combine those numbers with Winker’s regular season stats as a Met, you get a 10.6% walk rate, a 16.1% strikeout rate, and a .341 wOBA. Even more promising is his .353 xwOBA, notably higher than his .335 xwOBA with the Nationals. All of a sudden, it makes a lot more sense why the Mets decided to keep this guy around.
It’s far too soon to say if Winker’s new approach will work in a larger sample size. Still, it’s not hard to see why the Mets think he’s worth a longer look. In a best-case scenario, he could be an even more productive hitter than he was overall in 2024. And if this new approach doesn’t befit him going forward, he doesn’t have to be anything more than the hitter he was in Washington to be valuable on a one-year, $7.5 million deal. After all, the Mets will continue to shield him from left-handed pitching, and his track record against righties is strong:
Jesse Winker vs. RHP
Season
PA
wRC+
2017
111
169
2018
263
136
2019
334
124
2020
142
144
2021
367
178
2022
407
100
2023
184
66
2024
404
124
Career
2,212
129
So, that’s Winker. But this signing is an iceberg – and ironically, it’s the rare kind of iceberg that isn’t so good for a polar bear. At first glance, this is just a 1.0- to 1.5-WAR player signing a short-term deal commensurate with his talents. Yet, there’s a lot more to it than what you see on the surface. When SNY’s Andy Martino first reported the Winker signing, he added that the Mets are now preparing for life after Pete Alonso. Indeed, while no one could argue that Winker is a direct replacement for the All-Star first baseman, there is a connection between this signing and the Mets’ possibly giving up on Alonso if you follow the trail of dominoes far enough.
With Soto, Brandon Nimmo, Jose Siri, and Tyrone Taylor to man the outfield, the Mets are likely to use Winker as their primary DH against right-handed pitching. However, he can still play the corner outfield if he needs to; he spent 95 games on the grass last season, including 27 with New York. So, in the event of an injury to one of the team’s other outfielders, Winker can fill in. That means the Mets are less likely to ask McNeil to play the outfield in 2025. Instead, he can ideally play second base almost every day. As long as McNeil is covering the keystone, the Mets won’t need any of their young infielders at second base, therefore allowing Brett Baty, Luisangel Acuña, and Ronny Mauricio to focus their efforts on third. If just one of them, or some combination of the three, can competently cover the hot corner, Mark Vientos will be able to play first base full-time. Long story short, Winker improves the outfield depth, which indirectly improves the infield depth, which should allow Vientos to formally replace Alonso at first.
Another aspect to the iceberg is how this all affects Starling Marte, whose Gold Glove years are long behind him. In 170 games in the outfield over the past two years, he has accumulated -13 DRS, -14 OAA, and a -12 FRV. Meanwhile, neither ZiPS nor Steamer sees him as much more than a league-average bat. As a righty hitter, he could theoretically platoon with Winker at DH. After all, he posted an impressive 141 wRC+ against left-handed pitching last year. Yet, even with the platoon advantage, Marte might not be a strong enough hitter to warrant the reps. While he has had positive platoon splits the last three years, he had reverse platoon splits every year from 2014-21. In other words, he’s hardly a guaranteed lefty masher. On the contrary, ZiPS projects him for a .698 OPS against lefties and a .713 OPS against righties in 2025. Even if the Mets were willing to give a roster spot to the short side of a DH platoon, Marte probably wouldn’t be that guy.
The final component of the iceberg is what the Mets do next. Steve Cohen’s pockets are already deep, but if the Mets aren’t going to give Alonso a multi-year contract, and if they can get someone to take on any of Marte’s remaining salary, they’ll only have more to spend. With a projected payroll still $49 million below last year’s final tally and a luxury tax payroll still $17 million below the top penalty threshold, the Mets remain major players to watch as the offseason rolls on.
The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2025 Hall of Fame ballot. 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, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball Reference version unless otherwise indicated.
2025 BBWAA Candidate: Fernando Rodney
Pitcher
WAR
WPA
WPA/LI
R-JAWS
IP
SV
ERA
ERA+
Fernando Rodney
7.4
4.4
2.6
4.8
933
327
3.80
110
SOURCE: Baseball-Reference
Fernando Rodney is a man of many hats, most of them slightly askew. Over the course of a 17-year major league career, the Dominican-born reliever showed off his signature style while pitching for 11 different teams, and that’s not even counting his minor league, independent, winter league, or international stops. During his time, he notched 327 saves (19th all-time), made three All-Star teams, and pitched in two World Series, earning a ring with the 2019 Washington Nationals. In the process, he gave the hearts of his managers plenty of workouts as his command came and went, forcing him to work his way out of jams. But when it all came together for Rodney — as it did in 2012, when he posted a microscopic 0.60 ERA while saving 48 games for the Rays — he was a sight to behold.
Rodney’s crooked hat was just one of his famous quirks. He also shot an imaginary arrow into the sky after closing games, most famously upon recording the final out for the Dominican Republic in the 2013 World Baseball Classic championship game.
Eric A Longenhagen: Good morning from Tempe, where the Dream Series kicked off his morning. My attendance there plus what looks like it might be a looming Roki decision (he’s my responsibility to write up) means our chat will be shorter today.
12:02
Eric A Longenhagen: You know where to find the stuff I wrote for his week, I trust. So let’s get to it..
12:02
Phil: So all the sign are there. Roki will be a Blue Jay.
12:03
Eric A Longenhagen: A GM just told me that when they sourced uncommitted bonus pool amounts that Toronto had $1 million left. Acquiring a reported $2 mil puts them at an available $3 mil without breaking a deal.
12:03
Eric A Longenhagen: So we shall see
12:03
CY: Any insight on the Rangers pitching development this past year? Seems like they got a lot of breakouts with Alejandro rosario, kumar rocker, emiliano teodo, winston santos, kohl drake, and even some relief-only prospects in bryan magdaleno and skylar hales
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 Tampa Bay Rays.
Batters
Coming off a 99-win season, the Rays shed 19 games last year to finish at 80-82, their first losing record since 2017. While certainly some of that loss can be chalked up to Wander Franco’s troubling legal issues, which have likely brought an end to his baseball career, a blend of injuries and few pleasant surprises also played a big part in the Rays’ dropping out of solid contention. Two-thirds of last year’s projected starters, both in the lineup and the rotation, are gone, making this season a bit of a transition for Tampa Bay.
For a team that doesn’t spend money practically ever, and coming off a bloodbath of trades of youngish veterans, one could call the lineup projections surprisingly good. There are only a few positions that project to be below average, and even those spots aren’t disasters; in fact, every position on the team projects for more than 1 WAR. That’s a testament to the team’s player development system, which has to continually restock the shelves year after year because the organization doesn’t have enough money in the budget to bring in established talent through free agency.
Even so, the best parts of this lineup are rather uninspiring. ZiPS projects the Rays to get at least 3 WAR from only one position, second base, but I’m more skeptical than the Depth Charts are about Brandon Lowe’s ability to stay healthy. In the outfield, ZiPS doesn’t think Jonny DeLuca’s defense will be enough to make up for his bat, and it believes that Christopher Morel is best suited as a DH, where he may have the best chance to live up to his power potential.
But it’s not all bad. ZiPS does like some Rays players, just not the ones on the top of the depth chart – yet. Four of the top-eight WAR projections on offense are players who have not yet seized the primary jobs at their positions. Carson Williams is hardly unexpected, of course, given that he’s a top-five prospect. ZiPS thinks his bat is already acceptable for a starter in the middle infield, and the coordinate-based defensive system I use for the minor leagues thought he was one of the best fielding shortstops in the minors. He’s not the only minor leaguer to get defensive plaudits from ZiPS; third baseman Brayden Taylor also appears to be elite with the leather. He’s not as big a name as Williams, but my colleague Eric Longenhagen gave him a 45/70 evaluation for defense last year, and the Rays have liked his glove enough to give him some run at shortstop, something you don’t do with your third baseman if you think he’s a butcher. Going well down the prospect lists, catcher Dominic Keegan and center fielder Chandler Simpson also get very promising projections.
Sum it all up and the Rays have a solid offense with a lot of depth and a real future, but I’m not sure the upside will be realized this season.
Pitchers
When you compare the innings pitched in the ZiPS projections and the ones listed on our Depth Charts, one conclusion I think you should draw is that the Rays are very reliant on getting healthy innings from Shane McClanahan and Drew Rasmussen. The projections gauge the two as the most talented pitchers on the team right now, so it’s understandable that the Rays would struggle if they’re without McClanahan for the entire season and Rasmussen for most of it due to their respective major elbow surgeries.
That’s not to say ZiPS hates the rest of the rotation, just that McClanahan and Rasmussen would change the whole complexion of the staff. Ryan Pepiot was the odd man out in Los Angeles, but he thrived as a solid no. 2 or 3 starter with the Rays, who just stuck him in the rotation and left him there. Taj Bradley showed great progress from his rookie season, getting hit a lot less hard last year, and Zack Littell showed that Tampa hasn’t lost its touch for taking other teams’ castoffs and transmogrifying them into above-average starters, almost instantly.
A surprising number of other pitchers project to be about league average as starters: Shane Baz, Joe Rock, Mason Montgomery, and Mike Vasil. A few of these guys will likely see some significant bullpen innings, especially Montgomery.
The Rays don’t have the high-end bullpen arms that the Twins or Guardians do, at least not according to ZiPS, but they do still have is an impressive amount of relief pitching depth. The majority of the bullpen projects to be better than average, but only Kevin Kelly and Pete Fairbanks do by a large margin, with the computer not being all that high on Edwin Uceta. If the projections prove accurate, this is a solid bullpen, but it’s probably not going to make or break their chances of reaching the postseason.
The Rays are a good team, but they likely aren’t a great one. ZiPS projects them to finish with 84-88 wins, enough to put them back into contention, but perhaps not enough to actually make the playoffs.
Ballpark graphic is Dan’s mockup of George M. Steinbrenner Field. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here. Size of player names is very roughly proportional to Depth Charts playing time. The final team projections may differ considerably from our Depth Charts playing time.
Players are listed with their most recent teams wherever possible. This includes players who are unsigned or have retired, players who will miss 2025 due to injury, and players who were released in 2024. So yes, if you see Joe Schmoe, who quit baseball back in August to form a Norwegian Ukulele Dixieland Jazz band that only covers songs by The Smiths, he’s still listed here intentionally. ZiPS is assuming a league with an ERA of 4.11.
Hitters are ranked by zWAR, which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those that appear in the full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR. It is important to remember that ZiPS is agnostic about playing time, and has no information about, for example, how quickly a team will call up a prospect or what veteran has fallen into disfavor.
The 2023 Miami Marlins were pretty good. They couldn’t hit much, but they had a huge surplus of pitching. Enough not only to survive an injury to 2022 Cy Young winner Sandy Alcantara, but to trade from that surplus and acquire batting champion Luis Arraez. They won 84 games and made the playoffs. Once there, they got completely smoked in the Wild Card round, but things seemed to be going in the right direction.
They weren’t. More injuries piled up in 2024. Other pitchers regressed. Many, if not most, of the key players from 2023 — Jazz Chisholm Jr., Jake Burger, Josh Bell, Jesús Luzardo, Jorge Soler, Tanner Scott, A.J. Puk, even Arraez himself — either were traded or left as free agents. So too did manager Skip Schumaker, who earned plaudits for his handling of a flawed but decent roster in 2023, but lost 100 games a year later with the shattered remnants of that playoff team. He’s probably better off.
If you want reasons for optimism, you’re going to have to look hard. But if you want to find the successor to Arraez, you can stop at the top of Miami’s lineup. Read the rest of this entry »
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