Bertz
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Everything posted by Bertz
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The old adage of "it's better to get rid of a guy a year too early rather than a year too late" feels pretty apt for the Suzuki situation
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I'm curious if the Dodgers retool in response to this. The team is old and obviously getting older. They're still good enough to win next year's World Series, but now's kind of the point to act if you want to gracefully transition to the next Dodger team instead of Dombrowski-ing it. Especially since the new CBA will probably have some mechanism in it to make running a $400M+ payroll more painful than it is now.
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FWIW ZiPS has mostly nailed the big guys from the past several years. Notably it differed from the market on Shota, Murakami, and Imai in the right direction. If anything I think the best path forward might be closer to only trusting performance data and ignoring the scouting data because macro things like the different ball make them not applicable.
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There's a really good chance no one on the market this year besides Skubal clears Alex Bregman money. We don't have to do this annual song and dance.
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Love seeing the extra velo but I'm not really convinced anything the Rays have done with Peralta has made him better. His K/BB/GB numbers aren't collectively better with the Rays. He's given up fewer dongs and had better sequencing. The fact that his barrels are up and his K's are down definitely makes both of those look like luck rather than skill.
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115 on the cutter is probably good enough that he could spam it 70% of the time and get by in relief That's fun
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The league is broadly optimizing towards pull in the air, and the Cubs are actually top dogs there. The Brewers and to a lesser extent the Rays are zagging. I suspect this is doing two things 1. To your point, the Brewers hit a lot of mediocre balls that in 2026 defenses are generally not well positioned to make a play. Especially since the Brewers are the fastest team in the league 2. Further upstream, Brewer swings are different. They have flatter swings and more oppo oriented attack angles. This is likely why they seem to come through so much in the clutch. Much in the same way that the Theo era Cubs ended up getting their legs taken out from under them by the relief pitcher meta shifting to high fastball/low curveball, I suspect the Brewers zagging is letting them feast on in vogue pitch types The question is how much runway can they get out of this. The A's were ahead of the curve on the flyball revolution and they got maybe 2 years before the league caught on and they started having to pay retail for talented players.
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I have little interest in going beyond 2, mayyybe 3 years on any available bats. But this is the one guy I'd at least leave the door cracked for. I suspect he ends up with a team willing to pay for him to stay on the dirt though.
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Freddy Peralta was kind of trash with the Rays too, he just had a prettier ERA. - His groundball rate went down to 36% - His K rate dropped to 19.7% - His HR/FB rate went way down, which explains a lot. That said to whatever extent that's a skill pitchers have (I think very little, but we'll set that aside) this was clearly just luck as his barrel rate against actually went up with the Rays - He got a little more chase and that led to a little more soft contact, but not enough to explain more than a run and a half of ERA He basically got some positive regression on homeruns and sequencing and stopped playing in front of a clownshow infield defense. I like Peralta and think he's a good target this winter. This kind of decline without losing anything off the fastball is generally fixable. But he is very much still a reclamation project. The Rays have yet to fix anything.
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Late bloomers happen, but him having one season of track record and no defensive value has me pretty out on him. Median outcome going forward feels pretty close to what we just got out of Michael Conforto. That's nice, I'm hoping we can get that again (whether from Conforto or someone else), but it's not something I'd pay a premium for.
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One of my biggest pet peeves is the thing where any time a ball is hit well people say it was right down the middle
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There are broadly 4 categories of outfielders available this winter: 1. Good players coming off of a career year - Suzuki, Arozarena 2. Good players coming off of a bit of a down year - Happ, Ward, Grisham 3. Big time buy lows options: previously good players who had either a disastrous '26 or a couple down years in a row - Luis Robert, Dalton Varsho, Cedric Mullins 4. Platoon Bats - Michael Conforto, Tyrone Taylor, Ramon Laureano, etc. etc. I personally don't expect a lot of daylight between those top 5 guys going forward, so grabbing one guy from Group 2 and one guy from 3 or 4, ideally both lefties, feels like the obviously right call?
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Saw this on Reddit: The four teams remaining are two teams that have never won a WS, the team with the longest title drought and....the back to back champs Also The four remaining teams have won 10 WS in the past 100 years. The Dodgers of course have 9 of those 10
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On a rate basis Amaya's actually been quite a bit better than Kelly the last few years. That said don't gloss over that "on a rate basis" qualifier: - Amaya has a lengthy injury history even for a catcher - Kelly has clearly been the #1 in the team's eyes the past two years, it's safe to say some of Amaya's production has been a result favorable matchups - Kelly has had way more playing time, abd the nature of catchers is that wear and tear behind the plate follows you to the batters box. Kelly's probably a better player. If we're using those school style grades I'd probably call Kelly a B+ and Amaya a B-. But Amaya is 5 years younger and we have Ayers knocking on the door too. So it's the right call to let Kelly go get a raise somewhere else and bring in a lesser veteran behind Amaya.
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I mean the difference between 65/35 and 70/30 over that period is like 30 PAs. If you fix that my back if the napkin math looks like it drops his wRC+ to 115? And 24 is not an infant but it's absolutely arrow up still. The flattening of aging curves is largely about quantifying defense better, i.e. offense peaks late 20's defense peaks mid 20's. For instance if you look at the pre-season ZiPs forecast for Shaw they saw him adding 15 points of OPS from 26 to 27. Last year's outfield production is not walking back through that door, even if you pay a premium to bring back last year's outfielders. Like it would be crazy to throw Pedro and Shaw in the corners and hang the mission accomplished banner but signing a gaggle of 33 year olds to completely block off the kids feels almost as bad in the opposite direction.
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Matt Shaw has a 118 wRC+ since the '25 ASB, and like there are aspects of that you can quibble with but also he's 24 and probably at least a +5 in the COF defensively
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I mean yeah a guy who is wearing out the opposite field gap is going to get attacked up and in?
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Shaw's bat speed went up as the season went on, and anecdotally it felt like he really figured out his ideal approach (for stuff hard and up shoot it into the RCF gap, for stuff soft and low golf it right down the line). He also looked really good in the OF after his rough April. Dude's a horsefeathers and a dope but I do think he's probably a good player and from a field of play perspective feel comfortable assuming he'll be the primary in one of the COF spots.
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Oh totally there's a reasonable conversation to be had about Happ but stuff like this feels over the top
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Ian Happ was the 30th best OFer in baseball this year we don't need to pretend he's suddenly unplayable
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Interesting that they offered 154. Most of the scuttlebutt the last few years has been around 156: - 26 week season with 1 scheduled off day every week - Two 3 game series every week (no more 2s or 4s unless it's a rainout/makeup) - Maths out cleanly for a relatively balanced schedule both in the current division setup and also the coming 32 team/4 team divisions setup
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Each of the last two years we have at this point on the calendar been pretty certain the team's biggest move would be a SP and then it has very much not ended up that way. But man I'd be surprised if the team did anything this winter on that side of the ball bigger than re-upping with Happ.
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I'm really curious if the team would sign Taira given his body type. The team has really leaned into height and extension and athleticism as the years have gone on. Taira looks like Gotenks when the boys horsefeathersed up the fusion dance. But hey we've signed Shota and Stroman in the past five years, and we know they LOVE weird approach angles. Sato will likely find someone willing to let him stay on the dirt and Itoh's basically another Sugano, so I doubt either is going to end up here.
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The team is $100M under last year's payroll right now. So even if they want to stay under the LT, and even if the LT doesn't move at all in the new CBA, there's like $70M to spend. The absolute floor for this offseason is something like bringing back Gausman, Peterson, Happ, and Rea.
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