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Technically, there wasn’t much at stake. Even though Mason Miller was looking to protect a one-run lead with two outs in the 10th inning of an early September clash, the A’s and Rangers were playing out the string, battling for wins in a lost season. For Wyatt Langford, however, it meant something more.

On the first pitch, Miller fired 101 mph down the middle. Langford was aggressive, fouling it straight back for strike one. He watched 102 mph sail high, then flicked his bat to foul off an up-and-in 101-mph heater to fall into a 1-2 hole. A slider sailed outside before he fouled off pitches at 102 mph and 103 mph to stay alive, and then he laid off two wicked sliders to secure the base on balls. Langford faced down some of the best stuff in baseball, and emerged the victor.

It was just a walk, but it sparked a resurgence. After a dismal five months, Langford exploded in September, posting a 180 wRC+ and leading the American League in WAR. In the series following his successful encounter with Miller, he blasted titanic tanks off Luke Weaver and Clay Holmes, catching up to heaters at the top of the zone and depositing hanging sweepers deep into the left field bleachers.

It led to a question: Was September reflective of Langford’s new level? The answer, in part, was conditional on prior expectations.

And the expectations were certainly high heading into the season. After landing in Texas with the fourth overall pick in the 2023 draft, Langford incinerated the high minors, posting a .360/.480/.677 line across four levels and 200 plate appearances. ZiPS pegged Langford’s 50th percentile outcome above three wins, reasonably confident that Langford would go from the SEC to an above-average regular in the span of a year. As Cactus League play began, the hype train picked up steam; Langford hit .365 with six homers, leaving no doubt as to whether he’d start the year on the big league roster.

It turns out hitting in the majors is hard. No longer was Langford tasked with fending off the pitching staff of Mississippi State or the El Paso Chihuahuas; instead, he had to deal with Chris Sale sliders, Hunter Greene fastballs, and Tarik Skubal changeups.

Fittingly, he looked like a rookie. The plate discipline was there early on; his walk and strikeout rates hovered around league average, suggesting that Langford was not completely overmatched like his rookie counterpart Jackson Chourio, who struck out over 32% of the time in March and April. But Langford’s batted ball quality was lacking. He slugged just .314 in April, lifting heaps of lazy fly balls into outfield gloves.

Whereas Chourio found his footing in the summer months, logging a 144 wRC+ in June and never looking back, Langford’s line remained stubbornly subpar — until the final month of the season. Finally, as the Rangers slogged through their September schedule, Langford went bananas. His .300/.386/.610 line and excellent baserunning led to 1.6 WAR in that month alone, trailing only the infernal Shohei Ohtani.

There are a few potential stories to tell about the Langford rookie campaign. One is that he ran into a few poorly located pitches across a small sample. Another is that Langford made his adjustments, just as Chourio clearly did, accumulating enough experience against major league stuff to leverage his immense tools.

ZiPS, as always, splits the difference. The projection system sees Langford as a 3.8 WAR, 128 OPS+ guy next year, baking in Langford’s transcendent minor league results with a slight skill bump as he heads into his age-23 season.

But splitting the difference is no fun. This approach, applied to players across the league, will lead to more accurate projections. There is no good empirical reason to weigh September results more heavily in the next season’s forecast. But there is a temptation, at least on my end, to believe that Langford is going to be the player we saw in September moving forward.

In this version of the narrative, the expectation for Langford’s sophomore campaign isn’t just an All-Star 4-WAR season, as ZiPS forecasts; it’s something more like 5 WAR as the 50th percentile expectation, mirroring the age-23 projections for recent breakouts Corbin Carroll and Julio Rodríguez.

To make that argument persuasively, it would require evidence that Langford identified and then fixed the flaws that held him back across his first 400 or so plate appearances. And there is at least some reason to believe he did.

There is no one culprit for a hitter’s poor performance. The reasons are layered and complex; it could be an issue with certain pitch types or certain locations, for example. In Langford’s case, it seemed like at least one of the issues was structural, tied to his hitting mechanics. Both he and Rangers offensive coordinator Donnie Ecker believed his swing was too vertical.

Even two weeks into the season, it was clear that Langford needed to adjust. There was one clear potential area of improvement: His distribution of weight on his swing. In a story written by Steve Kornacki (no, not that Steve Kornacki) at MLB.com, Ecker was quoted as saying that Langford’s mechanical tendencies needed a reboot.

“[Langford] came from college and regularly has not faced breaking balls that are breaking 18 to 20 inches,” Ecker told Kornacki. “So, some of the body position he was in in college is now starting to evolve. If you look where the pressure is at, maybe in college it was on his back side. All of the best hitters in the big leagues, their pressure, when they land [on swings], is in the middle of their body. So, he’s slowly evolving from a guy that’s back, to having to get over the center that’s in the middle of our body.”

Esteban Rivera, FanGraphs’ resident hitting mechanics expert, explained to me that loading up weight on the backside makes it easier for hitters to whip their barrel under the ball and therefore generate power. This approach works well in college, where hitters aren’t generally exposed to high velocity and see a lot of mistake pitches. It works less well when Brandon Pfaadt is spinning sweepers that teleport across the width of the plate. Esteban also pointed out that fastballs on the inner half or sliders off the plate could trouble a hitter with a swing oriented toward crushing middle-middle mistakes.

Langford, for his part, appeared well aware of the problem.

“We’re working on getting back to that center mass, and not staying back too much,” Langford said in April. “It’s caused me to swing a little more up than I wanted, and I’m leveling out my swing. That’s helping me see the ball better.”

The early results were not favorable. Langford’s average launch angle climbed each month, from 16 degrees in April all the way to 23 degrees in August. Perhaps as a result, he was flummoxed by sweepers and sliders thrown by same-handed pitchers; through August, his wOBA was .234 on these pitches. He was even worse on hard inside fastballs; his .205 wOBA on high-velocity sinkers and four-seamers thrown on the inner half ranked among the worst in the league.

But in September, the swing leveled out. Langford’s average launch angle in September — 11 degrees — was the lowest of any month in the 2024 season. And the results — perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not — followed.

On inside heat, Langford never really adjusted. But he started crushing fastballs left out over the plate as well as hanging breaking balls, staying back long enough to identify spin and punishing mistakes. A good portion of his damage came on swings like this double against Marcus Stroman, lasering sliders at the knees into the right-center field gap:

These improvements coincided with a change to his setup. In April, he was hunched at the moment of the pitcher’s foot strike, looking to my amateur eye more like a slap hitter:

But during his month of destruction, Langford stood much more upright, ready to attack balls at any depth or width.

Langford’s apparent mechanical adjustments, prospect pedigree, and chronologically convenient damage distribution leads to questions about the nature of projections. Prospect evaluators, including our own Eric Longenhangen, were unbothered by his slow start. In his Top 100 Prospects Update in May, as Langford sat sidelined with a hamstring injury, Eric wrote that he expected Langford would “be an offensive star upon his return, and probably pretty quickly,” noting that the “huge tools and plate coverage” remained intact. It was just a matter of adjusting.

In his final month of the season, Langford looked like the offensive star Eric expected. In most cases, a huge month should not be cause for altering a projection. Langford, though, could be an exception.

The Milwaukee Brewers have graduated a number of quality hitting prospects in recent seasons, with the likes of Sal Frelick, Garrett Mitchell, and Brice Turang emerging as bona fide big leaguers. Most notable among the arrivals is, of course, Jackson Chourio, who debuted this past spring just weeks after celebrating his 20th birthday. The sweet-swinging wunderkind wasted little time in establishing himself as one of the game’s brightest young stars.

More talent is on the way. Milwaukee’s pipeline is rife with promising young bats, one of whom possesses the raw talent to potentially follow in Chourio’s footsteps. Jesus Made not only put up a 169 wRC+ in the Dominican Summer League, the 17-year-old switch-hitting shortstop logged impressive contact rates, chase rates, and exit velocities. With barely over 200 professional at-bats under his belt, he is already a Top 100 prospect (his exact placement on our list is yet to be determined).

Brenton Del Chiaro has been front and center in the development of Chourio, Made, and others within the Brewers system. Recently promoted to assistant director of player development, the 45-year-old former catcher has been Milwaukee’s minor league hitting coordinator since December 2021. Prior to that, he served as an assistant hitting coordinator, and as a hitting coach in the Arizona Complex League.

In the latest installment of our Talks Hitting series, Del Chiaro discusses several of the system’s top prospects, as well as the philosophies that the hitting department adheres to.

———

David Laurila: How will your role change with the new title?

Brenton Del Chiaro: “Actually, not very much. It’s just a little bit of additional responsibility. I will continue overseeing hitting while also interacting with our full-season managers. I’m also going to have some lower-level roster responsibilities. So, still day to day with the hitting, but now interacting and overseeing our managers at the full-season affiliates and having some input on lower-level roster construction and playing time grids.” Read the rest of this entry »

A couple weeks ago, I introduced the We Tried Tracker, which we are using to document each time a team claims that it was also in on a free agent who signed elsewhere. I was truly moved by your response. Many of you sent excellent leads on social media. The tip line I set up, WeTriedTracker@gmail.com, received 30 emails and only 26 of them were spam, which seems like a pretty good ratio to me. As things have gotten cooking, we’ve added color coding to the tracker, and (at the suggestion of Twitter user @YayaSucks) links to the original reporting for each We Tried. I will do my best to keep tricking out the tracker until it’s so bright and confusing that looking at it hurts both your eyes and your brain. Thank you to everyone who reached out with a tip, and please keep up the good work! So many teams are out there trying right now, and it is both our responsibility and our great privilege to award them partial credit for those efforts.

According to the Free Agent Matrices (which now contain the We Tried Tracker), 13 free agents have signed so far. In theory, that means there have been 377 opportunities for a We Tried, but that might not be the most reasonable way to look at things. We have so far documented five We Trieds, and I’d say that going 5-for-13 strikes me as a solid batting average, especially this early in the process, when only two names from the Top 50 are off the board. With that, let’s dive into the week in We Tried.

The second official We Tried of the offseason came in controversial fashion. On November 21, Dodgers manager Dave Roberts and A’s manager Mark Kotsay spoke at the USC Sports Business Summit in a segment titled Inside the Dugout: A Fireside Chat. Maybe it’s because I went to a tiny liberal arts college, but I’m really blown away by the USC Sports Business Association’s Adobe Creative Suite budget. Somebody’s not messing around with Canva.

Below is a still from the event that I grabbed from the SBA’s Instagram reel. This isn’t necessarily the point, but I think we should all take a moment to note the conspicuous absence of a fire.

That’s not a fireside chat, my friends. That is just a chat.

While chatting, Kotsay mentioned that the A’s had talked to free agent Walker Buehler, but that Buehler had told them he didn’t want to play in Sacramento. Right out of the gate, Kotsay was testing the limits of the We Tried. They usually come from reporters, and when they do come from a team source, that source is almost never the manager. Moreover, Kotsay was speaking to a group of college students. He probably didn’t expect his words to get out to the general public at all. It just so happened that one of those college students, Kasey Kazliner, is also a sports reporter who wasn’t about to pass up the opportunity to break a story. Kazliner posted the comment 15 minutes into the chat. Less than 70 minutes after it ended, the hardworking R.J. Anderson had already published a full article about it for CBS Sports.

The second factor is that Buehler hasn’t signed anywhere yet. A week ago, I would have told you that by definition, We Trieds have to come after the free agent has actually signed, but after conferring with Jon Becker, I see now that I was wrong. A We Tried simply has to come when the team in question has decided that it’s out on a player, and if there’s one thing the A’s love, it’s getting the hell out of dodge. It may have been accidental, it may have come in a fraudulent fireside chat, and it may end up coming months before the player in question actually signs a contract, but the A’s have officially backed into the second We Tried of the season.

I have to be honest with you, I absolutely love that literally one day after creating the tracker we were already splitting hairs and getting pedantic about what counted and what didn’t count. What better way to spend the offseason than engaging in some light pedantry? And what’s the point of creating a leaderboard if you don’t get to argue about the score? That’s what makes it sports.

Two days before Thanksgiving, Christmas came early. Scoopslinger Jon Heyman set a season high by breaking three We Trieds in two posts. At 11:15 p.m. Eastern, he posted, “Red Sox were in on both Snell and [Yusei] Kikuchi before losing out. They seek rotation upgrades and have preferred a lefty.” This is a true classic of the form. There’s no quote, no attribution, and no supporting evidence. The Red Sox were simply “in on” Snell and Kikuchi, which could mean absolutely anything at all. Maybe they offered more money than the teams that actually signed them. Maybe they’d been meaning to look up their ERAs on the back of a Topps card. Either one would make Heyman’s words technically true. It’s the doubling up that makes it art, though. The Red Sox couldn’t have bothered to reach out to two different reporters, just for the sake of not making it look like they simply texted Heyman a picture of their shopping list? You have to ask yourself how many names could appear one announcement before you’d start to doubt its veracity. I think the answer is three. Say Max Fried signs somewhere on Tuesday, and Heyman posts that the Blue Jays were in on all of Fried, Snell, and Kikuchi. At that point, you’re in list mode. Once the reporter is using a serial comma, we’ve officially entered the realm of farce.

Shortly after Heyman’s post, Mark Feinsand cited a source who also included the Orioles to the mix of the teams that were in on Snell. But the night belonged to Heyman. Less than an hour later, he posted his third We Tried of the evening: “Yankees had a zoom call with Blake Snell just today. But their near total focus is on Juan Soto. Their plan Bs need to wait a bit.” This is really mixing it up. We’ve got one juicy detail to go on, and if there’s one thing I know, it’s that when you really mean business, you hop on Zoom. Sure, the Yankees have a private jet, but nothing says “I really, truly want to give you hundreds of millions of dollars” like a glitchy video call. There is no better way to entice a potential employee to join your organization than by forcing them to watch via webcam as the pallid November sunlight plays off the blotchy skin beneath your eyes and your reverb-drenched voice intones the magic words: “We think you’d look great in pinstripes.” Why didn’t the Yankees just announce that they’d sent Snell a carrier pigeon?

On Friday, Andy Kostka reported that the Orioles were in on Kikuchi as well, bringing them into a tie for first place with the Red Sox. More importantly, it gave “We were in on him” a commanding lead in terms of the language used. Of the seven We Trieds, four took the form of a team being “in on” the player, while three other phrasings were tied with just one instance. With that, our update is complete, and I’ll leave you with our first leaderboards of the offseason. We will keep tracking as the offseason continues, and as always, please let us know if you see a We Tried out in the wild.

BONUS CONTENT: Last week, Johnny Damon went on the “Shut Up Marc” podcast, hosted by Marc Lewis. He talked about signing with the Yankees following the 2005 season and described how the Red Sox made him the subject of a particularly cynical We Tried:

I had four great years there and then I accepted with the Yankees, the contract… A couple days later I get a package, a DHL package from the Red Sox: four-year, $40 million contract. And it’s like, ok… So that’s kind of showing faith that they offered me a deal so that can tell to the media that, “We offered them a contract, he just didn’t take it.” So yeah, that’s how things work.

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 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.

When the Phillies returned to contention following a slide into irrelevance in the wake of their 1993 National League pennant, shortstop Jimmy Rollins, first baseman Ryan Howard, and lefty Cole Hamels gained most of the attention. Howard all but ran Jim Thome out of town after the latter was injured in 2005, then mashed a major league-high 58 homers in ’06 en route to NL MVP honors. Rollins, the emotional center of the team, carried himself with a swagger and declared the Phillies “the team to beat” at the outset of 2007, then won the MVP award when the team followed through with a division title. Hamels debuted in 2006 and became their ace while making his first All-Star team the next season. In the middle of all that, as part of the nucleus that would help the Phillies win five straight NL East titles from 2007–11, with a championship in ’08 and another pennant in ’09, Chase Utley was as good or better than any of them, though the second baseman hardly called attention to himself.

Indeed, Utley seemed to shun the spotlight, playing the game with a quiet intensity that bordered on asceticism. He sped around the bases after hitting home runs, then reluctantly accepted high-fives in the dugout. “I am having fun,” he told the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Andy Martino in 2009. “When I’m on the baseball field, that’s where I love to be. I’m not joking around and smiling. That competition, that heat-of-the-battle intensity, that’s how I have fun.” Read the rest of this entry »

It’s always nice when something works out perfectly, right away. At the trade deadline, the Dodgers insinuated themselves into a three-way deal with the White Sox and Cardinals, acquiring Michael Kopech and Tommy Edman in exchange for infielder Miguel Vargas and a smattering of minor leaguers. Edman, who hadn’t played an inning all year to that point because of a wrist injury, was of little use to the Cardinals and zero use to the White Sox, so Los Angeles was able to acquire him on the cheap.

The wrist healed; the former Stanford standout debuted in late August, posted a 98 wRC+ in 37 regular-season games, then played every inning of the Dodgers’ successful World Series run. He started games at both center field and shortstop, hit .328/.354/.508 with five stolen bases in 16 appearances, and went home with NLCS MVP honors.

So you’d understand why both sides would want to run it back. On Friday night, the Dodgers announced that they and the 29-year-old Edman had agreed to a contract extension. This five-year, $72 million deal supersedes the final year of Edman’s previous two-year contract, worth $9.5 million. Should this partnership continue to bear fruit through the end of the decade, the Dodgers have a $13 million club option for 2030 as well. Read the rest of this entry »

The Miami Marlins are coming off of a 100-loss season, and a lack of bats had a lot to do with that. The NL East club scored the fewest runs in the senior circuit. The arms weren’t all that much better — only the Colorado Rockies allowed more runs — but there is light at the end of the tunnel. Sandy Alcantara and Eury Pérez are on track to return from Tommy John surgery, while Jesús Luzardo and Max Meyer should be healthy following comparably minor injuries. Moreover, the organization’s top pitching prospects have high ceilings. Pitching — especially young pitching — is the organization’s greatest strength.

Miami’s President of Baseball Operations largely agreed with that opinion when I presented it to him at last month’s GM Meetings in San Antonio.

“I think so,” Peter Bendix told me. “I hope so. We have a lot of guys I’m really excited about. I think that next year a lot of these guys have things to prove, whether that’s health, bouncing back from a disappointing season, just establishing themselves, or building on what they did last year.”

A pair of pitchers who are likely a few years away from reaching the big leagues stand out. One of them is is a now-20-year-old southpaw whom the Marlins drafted 35th overall in 2023 out of Andover, Massachusetts’s Phillips Academy.

“Thomas White is maybe the best left-handed pitching prospect in baseball,” said Bendix, whose opinion is by no means singular (Noah Schultz and one or two others are also in the conversation). “If you look at left-handed pitchers who were 19 years old, missed as many bats as he did, didn’t walk guys, limited hard contact, throw 95-plus, have a plus breaking ball, and have command, it’s a short list. Now it’s his job to go out there build on that, see what he can he can do with another full year underneath him.” Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about a Nolan Arenado rumor, then (5:15) answer listener emails about fandoms that are overrepresented in baseball media, Formula 1-style “pay players” in MLB, whether players should be paid overtime for the postseason, whether MLB will ever classify foreign leagues as “major,” a Disney Channel baseball scene, fan-elected baseball executives, and (1:14:13) a player (Earl Pruess) with a mysterious nickname, followed by a bonus Stat Blast (1:24:02) about the typical tenures of sports leagues commissioners and Supreme Court justices.

Audio intro: Andy Ellison, “Effectively Wild Theme”
Audio outro: Moon Hound, “Effectively Wild Theme”

Link to MLBTR on Arenado
Link to Arenado Athletic report
Link to Dave’s USSM letter
Link to MLBTR on the letter
Link to “pay drivers” article
Link to NBA prize money
Link to Dodgers postseason pool
Link to Ben on league reclassification 1
Link to Ben on league reclassification 2
Link to Suite Life scene
Link to Suite Life episode
Link to spectator interference rule
Link to Veeck’s fanagers
Link to “Gibby” nicknames
Link to Pruess post
Link to Pruess TSN card
Link to Pruess signing article
Link to Pruess gambling article
Link to Pruess documents
Link to Pruess autograph 1
Link to Pruess autograph 2
Link to Pruess autograph 3
Link to Pruess obit
Link to younger Pruess obit
Link to listener emails database
Link to EW commissioners discussion
Link to Stat Blast spreadsheet
Link to latest HUAL episode
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