max silver

By the Statcast baserunning metric Gimenez was only a slightly above average baserunner at +1 runs. Horwitz rated very poorly at -4 runs in about 3/4 of a season's worth of playing time, so swapping these two players would lead to about a 5-6 run swing for the team's total. The Blue Jays were the second worst team by this metric at -14 runs, and swapping these two players would take them to about -8 runs or approximately 6th worst. Gimenez has posted +4 and +3 runs in prior seasons so perhaps he can bounce back a bit on the bases as his sprint speeds are only down a tick or two.

I'm not convinced that the team wouldn't receive better combined production from a platoon of dudes like Wagner and Jiminez vs Torres. Torres has a rather generous 3 win steamer projection that somewhat relies on posting the best defensive season of his career and best baserunning numbers of the last 4 seasons on top of that.

You have this backwards. The majority of Vlad's negative run value was based on holding instead of attempting to take an extra base when the opportunity presented itself. He was essentially even when he attempted to take an extra base (+2 advances/-2 thrown out) but he was -4 due to holding when there was an extra base available to him. Kirk's extreme passivity on the bases was the primary reason why he rated so poorly. He accumulated -3 runs on holds alone, where he had an opportunity to advance an extra base based on various factors and decided to not attempt to take the extra base. It's definitely a double edged sword with someone that slow though as the inherent risk of being thrown out on all but the easiest opportunities to advance would essentially negate most of these opportunities.

Kirk is 18th worst among all MLB players vs Vlad who is first. Kirk is arguably a worse baserunner than Vlad as he only had about 1/3 of the baserunning opportunities as Vlad and still accounted for -3 runs vs Vlad's -6 runs. Horwitz was another Blue Jays "standout" at -4 runs.

If the report is true that's surprisingly reasonable.

If he comes anywhere close to replicating the 180 wRC+ he produced in half a season of play in 2024 he'll likely earn a similar amount to Vlad as he's a solid outfield defender on top of the bat. He doesn't have the bad body concerns hanging over him either.

I had the same thoughts. He's using his objectively worst pitch (least whiffs/highest exit velos) too often. Perhaps it's a bit of a conscious choice to pitch longer into games by inducing contact but it's coming at the expense of strikeouts.

Wow I'm impressed with this browser so far, it makes a tremendous difference in page load speeds on this forum on mobile devices.

But then Baseball trade values rates sending out Horwitz alone as a massive overpay.

How on earth does it make a lick of sense for a team that's about to sell to take on the full contract for a glove first second baseman that's in the midst of a 7 year $100+ million contract? A team that's selling would have just kept Horwitz or traded him for younger players/minor league assets.

Yeah I think that Atkins and Co. may have underestimated the kind of guarantee Romano was going to gain in free agency. It's certainly an interesting occurrence that they non tendered Romano after a season lost due to elbow issues and paid the same amount of money to a guy who also missed a bunch of time due to various elbow issues.

Yeah this just trading offense away from an offensively starved team to add defence to a squad that already won a team gold glove. Maybe this means a big bat 1B/DH type is being acquired in free agency that would make Horwitz largely redundant (Joc Pederson for example).

This dude has a very strong arm for a second baseman and elite speed on the bases. I would be really surpised if he's not at least an above average defender at short stop and a longer term Bo replacement.

Nah it's the weird bagged milk in Ontario that scared Soto away.

I low key think the smart play for the Mets would be to allow Soto to opt out and have someone else dramatically overpay for his decline years. If they could benefit from 5 years of a HOF caliber player’s peak while avoiding the ugly back half of his contract I think they would likely come out way ahead.

I think it would be a toss up between Bregman and Adames in terms of overall impact.

You weren't paying attention to the general commentary surrounding Berrios on this board during the season if this is what you believe. I'm not about to spend an hour going back to find receipts to prove this point but this was exactly the type of general tenure of the comments towards Berrios when he was struggling mid season. I wonder what the chances are of Berrios ultimately opting out? I'm not blind to the fact that the reduction in the quality of the peripherals strongly suggests this will ultimately catch up to him, but having said that he did look much better to end the season once he rediscovered his slurve so all is not lost towards him remaining an effective mid rotation arm or better. Given the escalation in salaries that increases the odds of him opting out, but then he would still need to at least have an effective platform season before opting out. If the team is competitive the next few seasons (also far from a given given the holes on the roster) perhaps this makes him a little more likely to want to stay vs opting out as well.

I'm perfectly fine with using both advanced and traditional statistics to evaluate player performance. The main point that I'm trying to make is that Berrios produced excellent results in 2024 and as such was essentially worth the money he was paid as a result. I'm not a fan of cherrypicking FIP and the associated FWAR on their own as it completely ignores what actually happened on the field in favor of a theoretical result that would occur if there a baseball league that existed without any fielders on the field of play. I like to look at more than just FIP/FWAR and have a peak at xERA, Baseball Reference WAR values, RAR etc. For instance by RWAR, Berrios was worth 2.4 wins in 2023 and 2.2 wins in 2024. By RA9 WAR Berrios was worth 3.8 wins in 2023 and 3.7 wins in 2024. Yet despite essentially producing identical results by these two measures Berrios was only worth 1.0 wins in 2024 vs 2.8 wins in 2024. I just tend to think that it's sort of ridiculous to completely ignore what happened on the field of play in terms of actual results. I tend to think the same thing with position player performance. I've raised this example in the past but I think it would be exactly the same thing to only look at xWOBA for a player when evaluating their season, and completely ignoring the on the field results. That's what it's doing with pitchers in essence, and it's just incredibly inconsistent that they utilize completely different methodologies between pitchers and position players as neither of them has any control over what happens to batted balls on the field, and as such each of them are prone to wild swings in batted ball results as a result. This would be like if Fangraphs used xWOBA instead of wRC+ for offensive contributions. Vlad produced a .378 xWOBA in 2023, so if you ignore the disappointing 118 wRC+ and used the expected statistic Vlad would likely rate as closer to a 3-3.5 win player that season instead of the 1.3 value he was credited with.

I think everyone is losing sight of the fact that Berrios provided the team with a fantastic result on the field reminiscent of a number 2 pitcher in 2024, and the on field result was essentially the same as the prior year. Tell me which one was the bad season of the two that has people talking about how his contract is some sort of albatross hanging around the organization's neck: Season A: 16-11 192 IP 3.60 ERA Season B: 11-12 189 IP 3.65 ERA If you look at FIP/FWAR in isolation you would think that 2024 (1.0 FWAR) was equally as bad as the poor 2022 season where Berrios posted a 5.23 ERA over only 172 IP (0.9 FWAR). Berrios outperformed his FIP to a large degree in 2024, however the xERA levels for both seasons are within a stone's throw for both seasons (4.51/4.74). The lack of strikeouts was certainly concerning, but I think that Berrios largely rediscovered his form mid season after struggling to effectively utilize his slurve early on. It's obviously far from a guarantee that Berrios can outperform his advanced ERA indicators again, but he's done it the last two seasons as far as xERA is concerned.

Yeah that's a fair point but Jansen was awesome for the first 4 or so weeks after returning (201 wRC+ up to May 20) and legitimately awful for the remainder of the season (63 wRC+ the rest of the way). It's certainly not outside the realm of possibility that the barrage of pitches he tends to eat in the hands and wrists while up at the plate could be a contributing factor behind the poor season on both sides of the ball. The dramatic dropoff in his defense was the most alarming thing to me as all he was good at was blocking while he was terrible at everything else.

Yeah that seems about right.

I think at best he might hit 20 home runs, but that will require a massive bounceback season compared to last season where he averaged all of 86.6 MPH off of the bat. His best ever season of 17 home runs in 2023 would have only seen a small improvement to 19 home runs if his home park were Great American ballpark in Cincinatti, so it seems super unlikely he'll somehow manage to find an extra 13 home runs out of nowhere simply due to playing in a bit smaller park. I attempted to look up the park factors for George Steinbrenner Field and while the available dataset was 10+ years old it reflected a park that's very neutral offensively overall, and for the represented timeframe was a difficult park to hit home runs.

Grandal had himself a nice bounceback season so that wouldn't be the end of the world if the price is reasonable. But with Jansen earning an $8.5 million contract despite having the worst season of his career it seems as though Grandal will be earning a similar deal.

I believe that Kim would likely man second base until his shoulder was strong enough to handle short stop. https://www.nytimes.com/athletic/5973372/2024/12/05/matt-chapman-giants-shortstop-ha-seong-kim/?utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=mlbtw&source=mlbtw

I think the Red Sox could have afforded Mookie Betts easily based on the size of that market, but ownership was not willing to offer him a fair market value contract for a player of his talent level. I'm fine with the team handing out 3/4 year contracts as if these don't ultimately work out and Vlad/Bo leave etc. the team is going to be forced to rebuild anyway whether these players are signed or not. If these deals work out in the early years the team will have a good shot to at least compete for wild card spots in the meantime, and if they don't work the team will suck and will rebuild anyway. Having these deals on the ledger aren't going to be the thing holding the team back from being competitive at that point, it will just mean more ownership money is being spent on a s***** team vs ownership pocketing more profits. Ownership has shown that they are willing to greenlight higher payrolls so the team can simply ride out these deals while rebuilding in the meantime. Pitching looks to be obscenely expensive up to this point but it remains to be seen if the position player market prices are similar in nature.