sliderguy35

that's probably schneider's role, i think it's finally time for him to take his place as gen-z dan uggla. his batted ball profile is pretty platoon neutral, his swing decisions give him an offensive floor & he made real improvements to get over the contact rate cliff to be at least a tenable big leaguer. the tough part is getting him to fake it long enough as a defender but if the game's close they'll just bring ernie in anyways.

he was the 6th worst hitter in the entire league by wRC+ with at least 400 PAs against righties last year, his groundball rate was 8% higher than righties vs lefties & his air-pull rate dropped 7% when facing a righty vs a lefty. obviously last year, that was buoyed by him mashing lefties, but he also posted a .336 BABIP against them despite having a 46% flyball rate. generally higher flyball rates lead to lower BABIPs so there's some regression to be expected there, especially when only 9% of his flyballs are leaving the yard. still a valuable player to have on the roster but right now he should be someone that you're primarily looking to platoon. it would take major changes for him to be an overall above average offensive contributor.

i was more looking at the batted ball distribution rather than the results themselves (which is much stickier across smaller sample sizes) since becoming (essentially) a full time player in 2024, ernie's groundball rate spikes by close to 8% when facing righties vs lefties which is ultimately the reason why he's less effective against them (barring crazy BABIP luck like he had in the postseason). over his entire career, schneider's the same player vs both righties and lefties: pulls the ball a ton in the air & doesn't chase with barely passable contact rates. i have more faith in a guy like that being a platoon neutral contributor as long as he can fake it enough at 2B

i wonder if the plan is to generally have schneider operate as the strong / weak side of 2 different platoons considering how neutral his splits have been over his career. playing more 2B against righties to prevent ernie from having to play against every righty & let him come in as a defensive replacement playing more OF against lefties to spell barger against some of the tougher left handers also wouldn't discount the possibility of a return if bo has a great season & opts out after 2026, lotta money coming off the books and not a lot of young middle infield talent in the system outside of nimmala & jojo (neither of which are 2nd basemen)

i f***ing hate that the yankees are a smart org. why can't they just be like the angels and spend a lot of money in a dumb way.

he probably will just because of positional scarcity, it's really difficult to find a legitimate ++ center field defender who can at least be average with the stick in free agency. there's a lot of teams who might be trying to compete who just have a black hole offensively there currently. id guess that the jays / tigers / astros / mets / royals / phillies / nats / angels / dbacks would all at least be interested which naturally drives up the price

that's interesting, i didn't know about this special provision. i wonder how heavily they'd weight that vs the standard arb process. vladdy was a super 2 guy who got an extra year of arb tacked on, so his arb-2 year was closer to a standard arb-3 raise. He almost won an MVP in one of his pre-arb seasons, so his baseline salary was much higher ($7.9M in what would have been his final pre-arb year if not for super 2). skubal's arb-1 salary was $2.6M (the year before he won his first Cy Young) because he hadn't really done anything prior to his arb-1 season. whereas vladdy's salary at the same service time was $14.5M because of what i mentioned above. when vlad won his hearing, he got a $5M raise, but the the tigers' offer to skubal would have been a $10M raise. you can quibble that it's slightly low but it's not an insulting offer when you put it into context

it's not free agency though, from what I understand about the system, your pay in arb-3 is more so based on a combination of what your previous salary was alongside what other arb 3 pitches have made. its supposed to be slightly depressed from free agency. he's not going to be justifying why he'd be worth $30M on the open market, he's justifying why his salary should increase by $20M from the previous year and over $10M from the next highest arb-3 pitcher (degrom). the tigers offered the highest amount ever by a team for an arb-3 pitcher, you could argue they low-balled a bit because of inflation but it's really not egregious. the offer just looks low b/c boras corp decided to make their offer extreme. skubal is definitely WORTH the $32.5M that boras filed for (you could argue more as well), but it's just not how the system works.

the funny part is: his rate of pitches in the zone from the first 3 months to the last 3 months didn't even change (48.3% in both halves), he just start swinging more (swing rate increased by 7%) and making less contact (contact rate down by 6%). he chased over 50% of pitches out of the zone (preposterous) from july 1st on and had a walk rate of 0.5% (yes, that decimal is in the right place) in his final 183 PA. not ideal!

the edmonds thing is so unfortunate, he's a casualty of how stacked the ballot was in 2016. 12 people on that ballot are now in the HOF and that's not even including bonds, clemens, schilling. this year's ballot was a joke in comparison

i'd be pretty skeptical of okamoto hitting anything above .250 unless he somehow hits 35+ bombs. big league outfields are just too good defensively nowadays, it'd be pretty lucky to get anywhere close to the same BABIP he had in japan with how many flyballs he hits. pulling the ball in the air consistently is an incredibly valuable offensive skill, especially when you make a ton of contact, but it's really tough to have an informed opinion without having access to more of the granular swing data / hard hit / chase rates. you can dream on right-tail offensive outcomes like pre-washed nolan arenado / michael busch / pre-washed marcus semien but there's also a real chance he's a spencer steer / miguel vargas type player (who are ok big leaguers but not anyone you'd pay $15M per year). ultimately it's worth the gamble when you consider how much offensive depth the jays have & the fact that they're using monopoly money this offseason, but i'm going to reserve any opinions on the player until we get more information.

i think the concerns with imai are about the viability of a 2nd or 3rd pitch. The fastball is going to be a plus pitch because of the velo and angles at which he throws but teams are (understandably) skeptical of the slider or change/split performing. imai is a low slot guy with a lower spin capacity who spins the ball very efficiently. typically these kinds of pitchers are limited in how they expand their pitch mix so they end up being elite fastball guys without much else. (also known as: the kyle harrison problem) this kind of profile can still be elite (see: skenes, paul & duran, jhoan) but theyre really gonna have to push the velo. id be curious to see if the astros try to see if he can splink it like the 2 guys i mentioned above as well

god this is such a weird fit, he and spenny are basically the same player but i guess one of them gets to become the regular DH i guess there isn't really a clean fit around the league though, all the teams that are desperate at 1B are super left handed heavy already (nationals / marlins) or have an in-house guy who's 80% as good for a fraction of the price (d-backs / brewers)

george looked like he was on a downward trend when it came to hitting the ball on the ground (an 18% increase from 2021 to 2024) up until this year when he reduced his groundball rate by almost 14%. i was curious to see if something similar had been done before and if the GB rate stayed lower. I looked at the recent history of older players (age 30+) who've had a significant 1 season reduction in their groundball rate. Players in the last 5 years, aged 30+ with over a 10% reduction in GB rate vs their next season (min 250 PAs): Masataka Yoshida: 2024 - 116 wRC+, 42.7% GB rate (12% reduction) | 2025 - 88 wRC+, 54.9% GB rate Kyle Higashioka: 2024 - 104 wRC+, 28.1% GB rate (11% reduction) | 2025 - 93 wRC+, 35.3% GB rate Connor Joe: 2023 - 106 wRC+, 36.1% GB rate (10% reduction) | 2024 - 93 wRC+, 42.9% GB rate Randal Grichuk : 2023 - 101 wRC+, 40.9% GB rate (10% reduction) | 2024 - 139 wRC+, 36.7% GB rate David Peralta: 2022 - 104 wRC+, 36.3% GB rate (18% reduction) | 2024 - 80 wRC+, 48.3% GB rate good for handsome randal (although he was essentially a short-side platoon guy in 2024), but otherwise it looks like there's usually a pretty significant bounceback in terms of their groundball rate and subsequent reduction in their wRC+. that being said, none of these guys had posted anything close to a 166 wRC+ season, so there really isn't a good precedent, & nobody's improved their wRC+ season-to-season by over 70 points since 2018 mookie betts (springer improved by 72). my gut tells me this is going to end up in a 2022 paul goldschmidt situation, where he ends up in the 110-120 wRC+ area. a nice player to have but not one that'll carry the offense like he did last year

just goes to show how much overall contact rate matters... if you're below that 66-67% cliff there's really no precedent of being a consistent big leaguer over multiple seasons (aside from maybe peak gallo but even then his run was only a few seasons and only broke 3 WAR once) this also makes the reports that the yankees would only trade spencer jones for paul skenes seem hilarious. CLEARLY this kind of huge power, low contact profile isn't being valued by teams at all

the crazy thing about montgomery is that his command isn't even that bad, he had a 65% strike rate and a 67%(!) first pitch strike rate last year, both above average. when he was walking guys in the minors, he was well below average in both of these metrics. there's a real possibility he changes nothing, regresses to walking 6-7% of hitters instead, and becomes one of the best relievers in baseball. my idiot monkey brain won't let me escape the thought that shane baz looks like a temu version of gerrit cole. my rational brain knows that's idiotic and he doesn't have the command or the durability but he's got the elite fastball... and the banger curveball... if he just threw the slider more.................

i like mike burrows but i am lost as to why houston would do this melton is the best asset in the deal (his data is absolutely nuts) as a strong-side platoon guy who can play a passable center field. houston doesn't have anyone who can play center (why they didnt get mangum in this deal idk) and they're also throwing in a 40FV guy in brito for a guy who projects at the back end of a rotation?? good for tampa and pittsburgh (mason montgomery had one of the unluckiest reliever seasons i've ever seen last year, he's dynamite & mangum is a nice outfield rotational guy) for getting real assets and not giving up a ton.

teams aren't going to give up a 45+ FV guy for an expiring reliever with declining peripherals, that's like a mid-late first round pick. ferrer & zerpa both got larger returns because they're controllable for 4 & 3 years respectively and still potentially have upside because of their age & stuff. maybe the phillies could have gotten an additional 35+ FV guy tacked on but that seems like haggling, especially if they already liked bowlan. fwiw i like this deal a lot for the royals as well. they desperately needed someone who could get lefties out after they traded zerpa and have a lot of bowlan-esque depth in guys like luinder avila / james mcarthur / steven cruz. it absolutely makes them better next year i kinda like everything they've done this offseason. if you factor in that they basically lost a ragans season last year & believe the hype on cags & carter jensen (i do), i think they're going to take that division pretty handily.

idk, i see what the phillies are going for. strahm lost a tick and a half of velo last year & posted his worst Stuff, Swinging Strike rate & K-BB% as a phillie. he also posted the highest flyball rate among qualified relief pitchers in the league last year while also having one of the lowest HR/FB rates in baseball. bowlan's got a plus fastball & slider, he doesn't walk the yard & he's got a comparable swinging strike rate to guys like raisel iglesias, andrew kittredge and emilio pagan who just made $10M+ per year in free agency. plus they get him for cheap controllable years the entire time that he's going to be good. seems like a classic case of getting out a year early rather than a year late on strahm and they get a nice medium leverage piece for their bullpen moving forward. tidy work

the cano comparison is the one i keep coming back to for bo, they're shockingly similar when you dig into the numbers: incredible contact ability - consistently above the league average in chase rate, but still strike out below league average with lots of line drive contact above average hard hit rate despite the extra contact (we only have statcast for the back-half of cano's career but the pre-PED seasons look strikingly similar to bo in terms off HH and barrel rate) a mixed bag defensively (theres some rough early defensive seasons for cano) consistently in the 130-140 wRC+ range i also like the fact that bo gets to an above average hard hit rate by controlling the barrel instead of having elite bat speed. I haven't read any / done any research would back up the assumption that hard hit rates for players with elite barrel control age better than the guys who swing incredibly hard, but intuitively it makes sense that it'd be the case. (maybe a project for this offseason)

something to note: keller struck out 27% of hitters despite having a below average swinging strike rate (11%). you'd expect that K rate to regress somewhere in the low 20%s if he keeps up a similar swinging strike rate which is probably why he's only getting the 2/22 deal. in a vacuum i like keller more because his fastball has that cutting action that limits barrels alongside the velo and i think there's an avenue for him to throw more breaking balls to get more whiffs (the phillies did that with hoffman and it worked out really well for them).

i do like shapiro, i think everything this management group has done off the field (the dunedin facilities, the park renovations, improvements to care of players' families) is representative of a world-class organization. regarding my skepticism on the pitching side: they don't really do any of the sexy things that we can see on the public side (dramatic usage changes & pitch mix expansion, extreme velocity development) that would get the pitching nerds to geek out over them. that being said, there are enough things they do well on the major league side (primarily, understanding biomechanics to keep guys healthy & prioritizing count leverage) that I think they can be considered middle-of-the-road on the whole. it's tough to tell how they're doing from a minor league dev side without access to all the data, but i think it's a good sign that in the last couple of drafts, they've had a good number of pop-up guys that weren't 1st round picks that have increased in value fairly quickly (johnny king / gage stanifer / khal stephen / kendry rojas / tiedemann / etc). it's a good extension based on the combination of shapiro being good at what he does, as well as the uncertainty that would come from having to move on. we could be doing a whole lot worse

MARK SHAPIRO is going to be back in 2030? WTF!?!? lmao unreal!

sorry, bob steve is robert stephenson lol its probably objectively an overpay if you think of it as controllable outfielder for reliever, but the jays have like 4 guys (lukes / schreck / pinango / clase) that can serve that LH bench bat role so i don't really mind paying extra if its coming from an area where you have a surplus. plus i don't think people realize how good robert stephenson has been since he changed his pitch mix with the rays. here's a list of pitching seasons with the highest swinging strike rate (that's % of total pitches that are swung on and missed) in the last 10 years (min 50 IP): robert stephenson (2023) - 24.8% edwin diaz (2022) - 24.7% josh hader (2019) - 22.9% jacob degrom (2020) - 21.6% jacob degrom (2021) - 21.6% (he did this while walking 3% of hitters as a STARTING PITCHER lmao) andres munoz (2022) - 21.6% josh hader (2025) - 21.1% mason miller (2025) - 21.1% jacob degrom (2022) - 21.1% josh hader (2021) - 21.1% that's a pretty GD good list to be a part of. stephenson also had a 21.1% Swinging Strike rate in the 10 innings he pitched last year and he's never had a walk rate above 10% since he became a reliever in 2019. you take the injury risk for that kind of upside imo

the title of this thread is just A+, no notes. we need titles like this for all big re-signings, just change the period to an exclamation point if it's a good one BO BICHETTE is going to be back in 2026? WTF!?!? Lmao unreal!