Matthew Trueblood

This was clarified last year, can't remember because of whom, but: the player has to qualify for a full year of service time. That's a slight but meaningful distinction from having to be on the roster all year. For instance, if PCA is up by the last week in April, he'd qualify.

The Cubs' offseason is far from complete, but they've made enough moves in the last two weeks to merit a refresh of the roster projection we did for them last month. Let's tackle the task. Image courtesy of © Kamil Krzaczynski-USA TODAY Sports One month ago, I wrote up the most likely 26-man roster for Opening Day 2024, which then looked an awful lot like the team we last saw at the end of 2023, less the much-discussed Cody Bellinger. It was purely an exercise in framing, because we all knew the roster would look much different than that come late March. Now, things are a little more in focus. The lineup, the rotation, and the bullpen have each gotten an infusion of talent, and the depth chart at each position is starting to make more sense. Still, it feels certain that more will change. We just heard from Josh Illes this weekend about Jed Hoyer's enigmatic "fourth or fifth inning" comments, and the implication that there might be a lot more action ahead. For today, then, let's lay out the various units of the roster as it stands, while understanding that this is more work-in-progress than either rough draft or final copy. Lineup Mike Tauchman, CF Nico Hoerner, 2B Ian Happ, LF Seiya Suzuki, RF Michael Busch, 1B Dansby Swanson, SS Christopher Morel, DH Yan Gomes, C Nick Madrigal, 3B The addition of Busch really makes the lineup feel less shaky. Sliding his left-handed bat into the middle of the batting order, even with the understanding that he's somewhere south of stardom, pushes Swanson and Morel down into spots where they fit more naturally, and Busch seems better able to balance and lengthen the heart of the order than the guy he's replacing in this mix, Matt Mervis. As we creep closer to spring, I wonder increasingly whether Gomes will be the starting catcher again. Bringing him back on an affordable team option was a no-brainer, because he's respected and beloved by teammates and had a fine year at the plate. He's in hid mid-30s, though, and massive offensive regression would be no big surprise. We might see more of Miguel Amaya than has been generally believed, and sooner. Bench Amaya, C Patrick Wisdom, 3B/1B Miles Mastrobuoni, IF Alexander Canario, OF Again, I'm leaving Pete Crow-Armstrong off the roster and back in Iowa, for the moment. If the team can assemble a more reliable, dangerous position-player group, and if Crow-Armstraong has a great Cactus League, I won't object to seeing him break camp with the team. Right now, though, he looks like an almost glove-only contributor in the short term, and that's a tough fit on this roster. By contrast, Wisdom becomes a better fit for the team by the day. With Busch taking the majority of the playing time at first base, Wisdom pairs beautifully as a platoon partner for him, and can continue to be deployed on a matchups basis opposite Madrigal at third. Of course, a Bellinger signing would change some things, but it looks like there's a wide-open lane to 300 plate appearances for Wisdom again, in a way that could help the team. Starting Rotation Justin Steele - LHP Shota Imanaga - LHP Jameson Taillon - RHP Kyle Hendricks - RHP Jordan Wicks - LHP Javier Assad - RHP Even more than the Busch acquisition, Imanaga changes the landscape. While we continue to feel out how they'll actually do things, I'm listing six starters, because I expect the rotation to feel as much like a six-man group as a five-man one, even if they rarely use six in an on-schedule cycle. At any rate, this pushes Taillon and Hendricks down to the area where they fit much better, and the depth (in addition to prospects on the come, like Cade Horton) is such that they can give themselves a chance to win just about every day. Bullpen Adbert Alzolay - RHP Julian Merryweather - RHP Yency Almonte - RHP Mark Leiter Jr. - RHP Drew Smyly - LHP José Cuas - RHP Hayden Wesneski - RHP This unit feels the most out of joint right now--not worst, just least smooth or complete. They need more certainty at the back end of the game, but they also face the constraint of several players being out of options and unable to be sent to the minors. Few teams in MLB worry less about having those out-of-options guys piled up in the pen; Jed Hoyer is willing to lose the relief projects who don't work out. Still, they have some rebalancing to do, here and elsewhere. We'll probably end up doing this another time or two before Opening Day actually comes. The roster is far from final, and activity should come as soon as this week. For now, though, what do you think of the above production? Whom would you remove, and in favor of whom? Discuss it here. View full article

Jed Hoyer always speaks so guardedly and then half the time he doesn't do what he really only hints he's gonna do, but people always seem to take what he says at face value, anyway. I'm not directly faulting you, but I don't hear what other people seem to hear when Hoyer talks, and I think history supports my interpretation, which amounts to: not one word he says in public means anything.

All offseason, the Cubs have been locked in a slow, dangerous tango with Scott Boras, and nearly all of the rumors and musings have centered on Cody Bellinger, Jordan Montgomery, and/or Matt Chapman. There's one more big name on Boras's client list, though, and it's time to tackle him. Image courtesy of © Orlando Ramirez-USA TODAY Sports I understand why Blake Snell is not some fans' cup of tea. If truth be told, he isn't mine, either. I like my aces to fill up the strike zone, and Snell (who walked a career-high 13.3 percent of opposing batters last year) stubbornly refuses to do so. He's an inveterate nibbler. He's also a two-time Cy Young Award winner. He has four truly filthy pitches, and he's actually pretty good at locating each of them. He just spends to much time trying to hit the corners and induce chases with his breaking stuff that he lets every count become a deep one. In the last 50 seasons (going back to 1974), 10 pitchers have had at least seven no-hit bids that lasted at least six innings. Nolan Ryan, Randy Johnson, and Justin Verlander each have double-digit games of that type. Then there are Max Scherzer and David Cone, who got through six hitless frames eight times each. That leaves five guys who have gotten that far seven times each: Aníbal Sánchez, Tim Wakefield, Roger Clemens, Dave Stieb, and Snell. A perennial 30-percent strikeout guy as a starter, Snell only really gets held back by injuries. When he took the ball, he averaged 5,6 innings per start in 2023, which just isn't that bad. Let's go pitch by pitch through his arsenal, to discuss why he's so good. Four-Seam Fastball Snell doesn't have a freakish fastball, from a spin or a vertical approach angle (VAA) perspective. He's the anti-Shota Imanaga--all the special in his heater comes from the high height of his release point and the speed on it. Sitting 95 and with the ability to add and subtract a few ticks in each direction from there, Snell gets good ride when he attacks the top of the zone with the fastball. He almost has to work up there for the pitch to really take off and get the whiffs he wants. Many pitchers, especially these days, excel at throwing their heater to one side of the plate or the other. They favor that side, and it sets up the rest of their arsenal, and they command the ball much better there than to the other side of the plate. That isn't in evidence at all with Snell. He's slightly better at commanding it to the glove side (away from a lefty) when a lefty is at the plate, mostly, he tries to move the pitch around to all quadrants and chase whiffs at the letters and above, without trying to cut the zone into thirds or quarters. Thinking that way about the fastball is what leads to starters with 13-percent walk rates, but it also makes it hard to square a guy up and leads to high strikeout rates. Curveball Coming from his high release point and spindly frame, Snell's curve catches you by surprise a little. You expect a hurler like this to have one of those elite spin rates--for the ball to sing with that high metallic sound as it comes of their fingers, like blade or a wine glass has been struck just right. Instead, he has a Drew Smyly-ish hook, with as much tumble as crazy top spin. Still, he does have that top spin, and he uses it to induce elite whiff rates on the curve--especially from righties. Overhand curves are often part of reverse-split packages, and indeed, lefties make contact better and more often against Snell's hook than do righties. It's a pitch that works gorgeously off the fastball, though, regardless of the handedness of the opponent. Changeup The offering for which Snell doesn't get enough credit is the changeup, a pitch of which he does have pretty tight command. It's not a bat-missing monster, but it does induce whiffs. More importantly, it's a weak contact machine for him. Opponents had an average exit velocity south of 80 miles per hour and an average launch angle of just over 2 degrees on Snell's changeup in 2023. He didn't throw the pitch a single time to a lefty; he threw nearly 600 of them to righties. He just pounds away at one target with it, and because righties have to be ready for three other pitches, they're helpless on it. Slider This is the pitch that occasionally gets hit hard for him. Snell's slider is a 'gyro' type offering, with a small deviation in actual spin axis from the fastball but a wide variance in the exact spin he applies to it from one offering to the next. It still gets a ton of whiffs, but a pitch like that is not going to be easily or prettily commanded. It's far from a sweeper, with a mostly vertical movement differential from the fastball, and it'll sometimes hang on the glove-side third of the plate, above the knee. When that happens, he does pay for it. It doesn't happen so often that he really gets hurt in the big picture, though, as evidenced by the two Cy Young Awards and the career ERA of 3.20. Snell is a much more complete pitcher than he gets credit for. Entering the offseason, I ranked him fourth on my list of the top 50 fits for the Cubs in free agency, one ahead of Imanaga. I still think that's true. It's very hard to swallow the worry and pony up over $200 million for a pitcher like Snell, because he issues so many walks and has had hip trouble, groin trouble, and loose bodies in his elbow within the last five years. Once you step back from focusing on your preferred picayune problems, though, you can see the big picture, and it's worth that kind of investment. Snell is the last player available who really represents an infusion of superstar talent and transformation for the Cubs. With him joining Justin Steele, Imanaga, Jameson Taillon, and Kyle Hendricks in the starting rotation, the team would take a leap to a new level of expected competitiveness. Obviously, it's wildly unlikely to come to fruition. If the Cubs do spend that kind of money at this point, it's more likely to be on Cody Bellinger. Still, I think Snell might be a wiser investment than has become the consensus. He does a lot of things very, very well--more than enough to make up for the things he does that are aggravating. Would you still want Snell on a long-term, high-dollar deal? Or does Imanaga slake your thirst for rotation reinforcement this winter? Let's discuss it. View full article

The Cubs' newest starting pitcher doesn't throw especially hard, and because of that fact, some outlets have tabbed him as a back-end arm. That kind of lazy, radar gun-only scouting should be left in 2014. Ten years later, we know better. It's true: Shota Imanaga doesn't throw all that hard. While he's touched 96 miles per hour a few times relatively recently, he more frequently sits between 91 and 93 miles per hour. In an MLB where the average four-seamer hums in at 94, that marks him as below-average in one regard. When you combine that apparent weakness with the fact that he's left-handed and his relatively small frame, you can talk yourselt into viewing him as a guy who will be lucky to hold up the back end of an MLB rotation. Multiple evaluators have done just that, led by the venerable Baseball America. While the non-velocity concerns raised by some are valid (and will be briefly treated here, in due time), the dismissiveness with which Imanaga's potential to be an above-average starter has been downplayed is half-baked. Take every pitcher who threw at least 200 four-seam fastballs last year, and their per-pitch run value on that offering has a correlation factor of 0.27 with velocity. In one (much too simplistic) reading of the data, then, velocity can explain about 27 percent of a pitcher's fastball effectiveness. I don't know whether that number surprises you. It feels right to me, but in the modern game, we hear so much about velocity that the relationship might sound unexpectedly weak. It's true, though, and we've advanced enough in our collection of data about pitching to say with some certainty that other attributes affect the effectiveness of fastballs, too. Imanaga doesn't have even average velocity, but he does do a couple of other things well. We know that his spin rate and his vertical approach angle (VAA) are both substantially better than average. As it turns out, if you have to choose, you want the guy with those two attributes, rather than the guy with the more commonly cited one. Spin rate (0.25) and VAA (0.25) have almost as strong a correlation with run value per pitch as does velocity. Now, the three attributes overlap, and don't add up to explain three-quarters of fastball effectiveness. But it's not as though every pitcher with a good spin rate has a good VAA, and that citing the two is thus redundant. Velocity carries a correlation coefficient of 0.23 with spin rate and of 0.25 with VAA. Spin and VAA share a coefficient of 0.22, meaning they're no more likely to coincide than velocity and either of them are. These are interrelated characteristics, then, but each has independent value, and a guy with Imanaga's combination of the two newer, less heralded markers is as valuable (or more so) than one who throws hard but lacks anything special in terms of spin or VAA. The best comp for Imanaga's fastball characteristics might be Andrew Heaney, another high-spin, flat-VAA, relatively low-velocity lefty. Heaney certainly has profiled as a back-end starter for much of his career, but that's much more because his slider usually doesn't miss bats and because his changeup is inconsistent than because of that fastball. When he's had those elements working, as was the case during his 2022 stop with the Dodgers, he's been dominant. If Imanaga is able to sustain his higher-end velocities better than expected, he starts to profile more like Freddy Peralta, anyway, but Heaney would hardly be a disappointing comp. That brings us to Imanaga's other offerings. He has a sweeper and a splitter right now, each of them effective in their own ways. In fact, he throws two different flavors of changeup--one a split-change from an unusual, four-seam grip, and one more of a straight change. The splitter is the pitch that will devastate big-league hitters, assuming he can find a feel for it with the different ball they use here in the States. I believe completely in the value of Imanaga's fastball. The splitter is always a tough pitch to project, but he seems to have the feel and the experience with it to adapt. The differentiator for him will be the breaking ball. I called it a sweeper a moment ago, and that's what it is, but the team and Imanaga might come together to decide that that pitch is better shoved into a tertiary, complementary role, with a more vertical, 'gyro' slider taking over as the primary breaker. That kind of pitch would work better against right-handers and give Imanage three different looks against them. A sweeper, as we discussed over the weekend, is an unavoidably platoon-vulnerable offering. For a lefty, it often has limited utility. Imanaga might overcome that, but reshaping the breaking ball might be the key to making him the partner the Cubs want for Justin Steele at the front of the rotation. His fastball, despite the malign with which it has been treated in some corners, needs no such adjustment. Does Imanaga's lack of raw heat concern you? Will Imanaga miss enough bats to dominate in MLB? Here's the place to discuss it. View full article

Though he quickly became a secondary consideration once the full scope of the trade was known, the Cubs added an interesting relief pitcher in Thursday's trade with the Dodgers. Let's talk more about him, and about how modern pitching analysis works. Image courtesy of © Eric Hartline-USA TODAY Sports For parts of the last two seasons, Yency Almonte has been downright dominant. At other times, he's looked almost helpless. That's partially because he's dealt with (and sometimes tried to pitch through) injuries, but it also has something to do with his skill set--and the inherent weaknesses in his game. Almonte, who will turn 30 in June, has two years of team control remaining. He can't be optioned to the minors, which somewhat limits his roster utility, but if he pitches the way he did throughout 2022, that won't matter. That year, he allowed fewer than four baserunners for every five innings pitched and had an ERA of 1.02. None of that is quite sustainable, but if used carefully, he can be something on the comfortable side of the wide spectrum between those numbers and the 5.06 mark he put up in an uneven 2023. Although his season ended early due to a leg injury, Almonte had a great summer last year. His ugly overall numbers were mostly the result of a hideous April and early May, during which his ERA crested at 9.00. From May 20 through the injury in August, though, he allowed just a .577 OPS and had a 2.70 ERA. It was all thanks to finding a previously missing feel for his sweeper, which will be the star of much of the rest of this discussion. When Almonte's sweeper was beyond his command, and especially when it was a bit short on downward movement, he got into a lot of trouble. Once he cleaned that up, he regained his effectiveness, but he still issued a lot of walks and doesn't strike batters out the way you expect a flamethrowing modern reliever to. What gives? In short, Almonte's problem is a platoon issue. He has the capacity to dominate right-handed batters, but limited answers for lefties. That hasn't shown up in his raw results based on handedness over the last two years, but it's true. Yency Almonte, 2022-23, Platoon Splits Split AVG OBP SLG K% BB% HR% BABIP vs. LHH 0.202 0.314 0.288 16.5 12.4 1.7 0.232 vs. RHH 0.204 0.293 0.332 27.9 8.6 2.7 0.264 Right-handed batters got more hits and a few more home runs against Almonte since the start of 2022, but it's lefties who run up his pitch count, draw walks at a high rate, and against whom he doesn't miss bats. Opponents' contact quality doesn't support the idea that he's simply throwing more hittable meatballs against righties, either. They just got luckier than lefties did over a short sample. Almonte is a righty-killer because he primarily uses a sweeper. That's the pitch at the heart of his arsenal. Against righties, in fact, it's one he throws a healthy majority of the time. Yency Almonte, 2022-23, Pitch Types by Opposing Batter Handedness Split FA% SI% SW% CH% vs. LHH 38.2 7.9 34.5 17.9 vs. RHH 1 41.3 56.8 0.1 As you can see, though, even against lefties, he leans heavily on the sweeper. That's his pitch; it's how he went from a fringe big-leaguer to a (however inconsistently) nasty relief weapon. If you had this pitch, you'd throw it a lot, too, and forget about who was up. elpBQTVfVjBZQUhRPT1fQmdVRFVGQlFYMWNBWEZ0UkF3QUFBVkJSQUFBTkFBY0FCbGRXVXdaVUNBSlVDQXBV.mp4 Here's the thing, though: as you would guess, that result isn't quite typical. Against lefties, this is a much more representative sweeper from Almonte. eFprWWpfWGw0TUFRPT1fVWxOWkJ3RldBd2NBQUZjR1Z3QUFCMVZUQUZrQldsY0FBbFpXQndVSEIxSlhWZ1FF.mp4 There's good, tight break even on that pitch. It's just that, given the angle a left-handed batter gets on the ball out of Almonte's hand and the shape of the movement, it's much easier for them to lay off than it is for righties to do the same. That's compounded by the fact that (understandably) Almonte tries to dot the outside edge with a backdoor version of that sweeper to lefties, only to see it really get away from him. It's just not a pitch that lends itself to being thrown with good command on the arm side of the plate. Yency Almonte, Pitch-By-Pitch Outcomes, Sweepers, 2022-23 Split Ball% Called Strike% Chase% Whiff/Swing% vs. LHH 43.7 25.8 22.3 44.6 vs. RHH 36.8 34 35.6 49.8 You can't throw a pitch that results in a ball over 43 percent of the time once every three pitches, but that's exactly what Almonte has done against lefties over the last two years. He can't land the sweeper in the zone consistently, which is fine when hitters expand the zone to fish for the pitch at a 35-percent clip, but when they can identify it early and only chase outside the zone 22 percent of the time, it spells trouble. Even though lefties didn't rack up gaudy numbers against him, they extended at-bats and innings by working him for walks and staying alive until they could try to square up one of his other offerings. This is normal, and it's a good entry point for a short conversation that feels long overdue. This week on 670 The Score's Bernstein and Holmes show, host Laurence Holmes pleaded with the baseball world to "get together on what's a slider, and what's a sweeper, and are they really different?" It's been bandied about a bit since the sweeper took the league by storm a couple years ago, but that question hasn't been adequately or satisfactorily answered until now--at least, not in terms that lay people can grasp. For an instructive contrast, consider Almonte and new teammate Adbert Alzolay. Last year, Alzolay broke out as the Cubs' relief ace, and it was largely thanks to his ability to pair each of his fastballs with his slider--a pitch with some tilt but a pretty vertical shape. He could attack lefties with that offering, because it worked naturally off of his heat even as it moved toward the opposite-handed batter. Almonte's breaking ball isn't a slider, like Alzolay's. It's a sweeper. It's probably time to stop thinking of sweepers as a version of the slider. For a long time, we put what should really be called two different pitches into one bin, because there were few good ways to reliably differentiate them. Now, we can do so pretty well, and we ought to. Here's Almonte's heaters, paired with his sweeper. Feel free to study those two charts for a bit, but the differences should really jump right out. Alzolay's slider is a pitch with greater gyro spin--what's sometimes called a 'bullet' slider, because it has that football-like rotation that contributes only inefficiently to movement, by slowing the ball down so that gravity can act on it and pull it downward. Almonte's is a sweeper, with far more tilt, and the movement he gets comes from the spin he applies. As you can intuit (or see by the spread of the pitches shown in the plots above), the slider Alzolay throws is an easier pitch to command, which is crucial when trying to get out opposite-handed batters with a breaking ball. It also has a more vertical movement differential from his fastballs, whereas the relationship between Almonte's heaters and his sweeper is pretty horizontal. By and large, you get out same-handed hitters with horizontal movement, and you get out opposite-handed ones with vertical movement. Thus, a sweeper (which will, all else equal, always be a more horizontal pitch than a gyro slider) can be highly effective against same-handed guys, but is rarely so against opposite-handed ones. True, old-fashioned sliders are more versatile. They're not as nasty. Alzolay will never miss as many bats, on a per-swing bases, as Almonte does. Alzolay can throw his more effectively to lefties, though. Why did Almonte use the pitch so often, so stubbornly against lefties, then? That answer is simple: He doesn't have a useful changeup at this point. He's comfortable with both the sinker and the sweeper against righties, but against lefties, he really needs something to complement his four-seamer. Since he doesn't get the movement separation he needs on the changeup, he tries to find his outs by pairing the four-seamer with the sweeper, instead. He only induced whiffs on 8.8 percent of swings against his change from 2022-23. Hitters don't hammer the pitch, but they can easily fight it off when he does land it in the zone, and he doesn't do so nearly often enough. Only 10.4 percent of the changeups at which opposing lefties did not swing were called strikes. When you're never in the zone with a pitch, hitters don't have to respect it. So, to get lefties out, what should Almonte do? It starts with changing the areas of the zone he targets most often. Here's where he threw his four-seamers and sweepers against them over the last two seasons, using TruMedia tools. You can see the way he favors the glove side of the plate with the four-seamer, a result of the angle he creates for himself by lining up on the extreme first-base side of the pitching rubber, and obviously, too, the way he tries to break the sweeper off of that pitch. That's where his pitches go against left-handed batters. Now, consider where he finds his whiffs against them: Changing location patterns isn't as easy as identifying the need to do so, but Almonte clearly needs to let his four-seamer run more up and away from lefties. Maybe, once he sets their sights up there, the sweeper down and in will look a bit more enticing. Even then, though, don't expect an extraordinary forward leap from Almonte. It looks like control will remain a bugaboo for him, and while he had a handsome strikeout rate against righties over the last two years, he's never had a gaudy one, by modern standards. That's thanks to the sinker he uses against them, rather than the four-seamer that has a little more deception and life at the top of the zone. The sinker doesn't miss bats, though it does help Almonte minimize hard contact in the air. He has great velocity and good spin on the fastballs, which helps him induce harmless contact. The breaking stuff is tasked with getting the whiffs. Instead, think of Almonte as a right-handed reliever who should be highly effective against fellow righties, but shielded from lefties. To shore up that weakness a bit, the Cubs and their new pitcher might work together to add a splitter in place of his ineffectual changeup, or to realign him a bit on the rubber, as the team did with Jose Cuas after acquiring him last summer. The former would let him deemphasize the breaking ball against lefties and balance out his profile. The latter would help him change the sights a bit on his four-seamer and sweeper, but the sweeper is too good to tweak much, and that means accepting the vulnerability to lefties that it brings with it. Craig Counsell might just need to manage around Almonte's shortcomings and get the most out of him, and given the new skipper's track record, that's not an unreasonable thing for which to hope. Where do you envision Almonte fitting into the 2024 bullpen hierarchy? Do you trust him more or less than Cuas, or Daniel Palencia? How about Julian Merryweather? Chime in below. View full article

I think it's the latter, and I think it's Busch... but I also don't think even they know. I think they carefully carved out a move that leaves them able to go several directions from here, because they're not sure about any of these guys or eager to meet the asking price on Chapman.

The Cubs suddenly can't stop adding players to their 40-man roster. This time, it's a sweeper monster of a relief pitcher, with two remaining years of team control. That's not unexpected, given the value Busch and Almonte can deliver, but it sure does underscore the stakes of this move. Ferris is a tremendous prospect, but far from the big leagues, and the Cubs will get considerable value from Busch in both the short and the long term. This comes far short of being a finishing move for the Cubs' offseason, but it pushes it forward in a big and important way. Busch's left-handed bat balances and deepens the batting order, and Almonte's upside as a strikeout guy in middle relief does the same for the bullpen. To get both without giving up a player who would help any time even in the next two seasons is a coup, even if the upside of Hope and Ferris is huge. Let's crank up the conversation. How do you feel about this move? What would your Opening Day lineup look like from here, and which move do you expect next? View full article

The Cubs have made a major addition to their 2024 roster, but there are serious questions about the health of the player they're bringing in—enough of them to compel the two sides to cobble together a complicated contract. In short, the deal reflects the real concerns teams had about Imanaga as they got more information about his shoulder (which was operated on in late 2020) and the prognosis for long-term durability there. There's an important distinction to be drawn, there, between those concerns about long-term commitments and the idea that Imanaga is damaged goods. Just last winter, we saw this play out on a much larger and more familiar scale. Multiple teams flinched at the finish line of deals with Carlos Correa because of a plate in his lower leg that they believed could hobble him in his 30s. Correa ended up with a deal that included multiple team options and guaranteed him only $200 million, as opposed to the $350 million and $315 million the Giants and Mets, respectively, had first put on the table. The concern there wasn't present inability to perform, though. If it had been, Correa would have ended up signing for far, far less money. Rather, the sticking point with both scuttled deals was disagreement about how much a team should discount a player from the value they would otherwise have because of a projected health issue. Longer ago but, perhaps, more directly comparably, the Dodgers signed Kenta Maeda to an eight-year deal when he came over from Japan prior to 2016. Because of concerns about his elbow, Maeda only got $3 million in guaranteed salary for each season of that deal, but he could earn more than $10 million more each year if he stayed fully healthy and in the starting rotation. The contract only guaranteed him $25 million, but he made roughly $52.7 million over its span, even with the pandemic season forcing everyone to take prorated shares of their official salaries and despite Tommy John surgery robbing him of his entire 2022 campaign. Maeda pitched just over 866 innings over the life of the deal, but when he was on the mound, he was very, very good. Imanaga's situation falls somewhere between those two cases on the spectrum. His asking price wasn't knocked down as much as Maeda's was, although one team never in the center of the reported mix for him felt so emboldened by the collective unease within the last week that they waded in with a one-year offer attached only to a vesting option, and they were not immediately rebuffed. However, while Correa's issue only shortened his deal from 13 years to six, the 30-year-old Imanaga will end up with just two years of guaranteed money. After that, this deal will include options for both parties, and it could incorporate some incentives, too. If his shoulder were in pristine condition, Imanaga would have successfully commanded a nine-figure deal, given the current market for starting pitchers with upside. There are legitimate concerns about how his approach will translate to MLB, but the team can work with him to make his repertoire work just fine Stateside. Far more intractable are worries about his arm holding up, but again, that doesn't mean that it's currently in tatters. This is where the gap between our knowledge of MLB and NPB pitchers becomes important. Were Imanaga already in MLB when he underwent his surgery three years ago, we would all have a clearer understanding of the exact nature of that injury, and it would surprise no one that the fact of that injury affected his market. On the other hand, Carlos Rodon had shoulder surgery in 2019, and he signed for $162 million last winter. We can confidently say, then, that Imanaga's health record diminished his market, and that that has left the Cubs with a somewhat complex contract and an uncertain asset in the person of their new No. 2 starter. Nonetheless, he's an exciting addition, and this deal appears to limit risk for the team while allowing the player to preserve some upside in his own right. Do you expect the Cubs to pursue another starter after signing Imanaga? Let's discuss that, and other questions that leap to mind in the wake of the team's first substantial move of the winter. View full article

Jed Hoyer's long winter's nap is over. He's up, and the team now has another left-handed starter to pair with their incumbent ace atop the rotation. Image courtesy of © Sam Navarro-USA TODAY Sports Shortly before the end of his posting window, Shota Imanaga has agreed to a deal to join the Cubs and help lead their rotation. Imanaga, 30, is not big or hard-throwing by modern standards, but he has good strikeout stuff and has been one of the best pitchers in Nippon Professional Baseball for the last half-decade. USA Today's Bob Nightengale reported it first. This is a great way for the team to escape their winter doldrums. Imanaga is not a perfect pitcher. He'll run into some trouble with home runs, and he'll need to tweak his approach to adapt to MLB hitters and their superior power. There are also some lingering whispers about his shoulder, which kept his price tag south of the nine-figure megadeal he and his representation envisioned when the posting period began. Still, he's a terrific second starter in the short term, alongside Justin Steele and (the Cubs will hope) half a step ahead of Jameson Taillon and Kyle Hendricks, among others. We've broken it down a bit in the past, but let's pause to use some TruMedia tools to examine his arsenal in greater depth. Imanaga has a high-spin, high-riding fastball and a splitter on which he kills spin gorgeously, and which doesn't involve much of a change in spin axis. It can be devastating. As most Japanese starters do, Imanaga also maintains a deep arsenal beyond the fastball-splitter pairing. He merely tinkers with a sinker and cutter, but he has both a sweepy slider and a curveball, which let him change speeds, eye levels, and looks to continue racking up whiffs when hitters try to sit on the heat and the splitter. Without question, he'll be a fly-ball pitcher, and that could lead to some inflated home-run totals as he comes Stateside. Health is the other major question mark. He's come in just shy of 160 innings in each of the last two seasons, and now there's a tangible reason to believe that his arm might need ongoing maintenance. Still, he's a material upgrade for a rotation that badly needed one, and gives the Cubs more options (just as he removes some of Cubs fans' agita) for the balance of the offseason. For now, maintain a soupçon of caution. The deal won't be official until a physical scheduled for tomorrow, and there are some concerns in that realm that could still nullify the arrangement. The Cubs have already done some due diligence on that front, though, and it's unlikely that the final examination will result in a derailment. UPDATE: Jon Morosi says the deal will have an AAV in the $15-million range. That tracks, especially given the late changes in his market, but underscores the potential upside of this deal. If Imanaga is even a steady fourth starter in the vein of (pre-2023) Taillon, he's well worth $15 million per year, and this deal will not stretch to five guaranteed years. If his stuff plays the way the Cubs hope, he's a bargain, and crucially, the deal only costs them cash. The posting fee doesn't count against their competitive-balance tax payroll calculation, and they don't lose a draft pick. These are ancillary but important reasons why the fit here is so good. How does this move work for you, as a first strike of the offseason? Are you excited about Imanaga, or worried about how his game will translate to MLB? View full article

The Cubs need at least one bat to bolster their lineup for 2024, and ideally, it would be someone who hits for power. Because of that, though, there's real risk of overlooking the upside of their current lineup, including a locked-in leadoff hitter extraordinaire. Image courtesy of © Charles LeClaire-USA TODAY Sports There was nothing quiet, exactly, about Nico Hoerner's breakout campaign in 2023. He stole 43 bases and played sparkling defense at second base, racking up highlights along the way. Because of the shape of his batting profile, though, it can be easy to gloss over the value he delivers with that part of his game. After his second-half surge and in light of the granular data we can now glean about his performance, Hoerner belongs at the top of the lineup for 2024--and he'll be a difference-maker in that slot. Even speed and aggressiveness as great as Hoerner's don't count for much if a player can't get on base or hit for real power, and through the middle of last season, Hoerner just wasn't doing enough of either. In fact, through the All-Star break last year, he was hitting just .271/.321/.376 for his career, and .275/.330/.382 for his career. That's adequate. That keeps you in the lineup, if you're fast and play great defense at a fairly important position, but it just doesn't make a lineup better. It doesn't actively put runs on the board, even paired with that speed and aggressiveness. After the All-Star break, though, Hoerner was sensational. He batted .297/.377/.391 in the second half. A .377 OBP guy, in a league that averages a .325 mark, has ample value. Part of the improvement was thanks to a better batting average on balls in play, and as you can see, there was no sudden power jump. The BABIP was more of a modest increase than a spike, though, and it wasn't the result of mere luck. He had his approach better organized down the stretch. Here's a TruMedia heat map of Hoerner's exit velocity on batted balls, by pitch location, split between the two halves. Hoerner generated more hard contact in the first half, by going and getting the ball up and away from him. He was very good at shooting that pitch to right field. It had a low ceiling of isolated value, because Hoerner doesn't hit for the kind of power that leads to extra-base hits when stroking the ball the other way, even in his hot zones. In the second half, he focused more on crushing pitches in the middle of the zone, but that came at the price of some of those unique hits to the right side. Here's the telling thing, though. Keep that heat map for exit velo in mind, and consult this map of his swing rate by location for the two halves. Most hitters generate a lot of value by swinging at the ball down and in. That's a power hot spot for most guys. It's a place where you can do major damage, if you have a typical swing. Hoerner doesn't have one, though. As the first set of charts will attest, he's good at hitting the high pitch. He's not going to hit it hard enough to make it worth trying to lift it very much, but that's ok on pitches up in (or even above) the zone. His swing is geared for contact, not dingers. With his swing plane, he doesn't cover the pitch down and in all that well, but that's ok. He wised up in the second half and swung at that pitch less often. Instead, he raised his sights and hit more line drives. His Hard Hit rate and average launch angle were up in the second half, fueling his BABIP uptick. On top of a more complete and nuanced approach, Hoerner has one trait that makes me believe he can sustain what we saw late in 2023: no one hits the league's toughest fastballs better, or at least more often. Some 366 hitters saw at least 100 fastballs with a vertical approach angle (VAA) of -4.5 degrees or higher in 2023. A flat VAA is one of the top things on every pitching coach's wish list lately. It signals deceptiveness, and that hop that makes it so hard to square up a really good heater. On average, hitters whiffed 33.2 percent of the time against those flat-VAA fastballs. Hoerner, by contrast, whiffed on just 5.2 percent of his swings against them. That was not only the lowest miss rate in baseball, but a full 1.8 percentage points better than Travis Jankowski, second-best. Luis Arraez was third, at 7.8 percent. Overall, Hoerner takes what is a very blue heat map for most hitters and splashes it with red. Hoerner is a viciously tough out. He neutralizes the best, trendiest fastballs in baseball. He might never find more than 10-homer power, and he doesn't even have elite doubles power, but he's going to hit for average for at least the rest of his prime. Now that he's tightened his approach, he's also started walking more, and that, too, should continue. Pencil Hoerner into the leadoff spot for the next two or three years, and start your mental work on the Cubs lineup with No. 2. Are you buying Hoerner as a dangerous leadoff man? Does that temper your desperation for another addition to the Cubs lineup? Let's discuss. View full article

I love the splitter in general, so I'd lean this way, too. But I'm not sure it's a good fit for Wesneski's mode of movement--or at least, that the arsenal he'd be leaning into by choosing that tweak over a change of slider shape is the one that best suits him. It'll be interesting to see which way they go.

As the Cubs ponder ways to make external upgrades to the pitching staff, let's look at one important young pitcher already on the team who might have another level of performance within reach. Image courtesy of © Lon Horwedel-USA TODAY Sports Last week at Baseball Prospectus, the excellent Mario Delgado Genzor wrote an insightful piece about the art and science of pitching. Specifically, he broke down something he calls the Pronator's Triangle, and discussed how pitchers' wired-in physical movement preferences might inform the construction and effectiveness of their arsenals. It's a really good article. If you're a BP subscriber, make sure to check it out. As I read Mario's work, I thought instantly about Hayden Wesneski. Even in a season that saw Keegan Thompson's career go completely off the rails, no pitcher on the Cubs roster was more disappointing than Wesneski in 2023. He had looked like a potential mid-rotation starter in his brief audition in 2022, but that didn't translate to success in a full-fledged opportunity to join the rotation when the team broke camp last spring. Instead, he quickly had to be demoted back to Triple-A Iowa. He spent the rest of the season yo-yoing between the minors and the majors, often working as a long reliever or swingman, and only found even a semblance of a groove after moving into short relief in September. Going into the season, we knew there would be challenges ahead. As I wrote last spring, Wesneski had a significant hurdle to clear when he joined the organization. He had a deep pitch mix, but he also had a bifurcated release point. In other words, he released some of his pitches from one arm slot, and others from another. That kind of split makes it easier for hitters to eliminate certain offerings as possibilities right out of the hand, and it can have implications for both durability and command, to boot. Wesneski tried to reconcile his arm slots, but it didn't stick. He still throws his four-seamer and cutter from one angle, and his sinker, sweeping slider, and changeup from another. That's a problem--one that helps explain why lefties hit .298/.369/.617 against him in 2023. It essentially disqualifies him as a starter in the big leagues, and limits his utility even out of the bullpen. With a problem that can be so large-scale and multi-systemic, though, that leaves a huge, scary question: What's the solution? You almost have to choose between rebuilding his entire delivery and rebuilding his entire pitch mix, and if you do the former, you might end up having to do the latter, anyway. Enter Delgado Genzor, with his delightfully clear communication of a nuanced pitching subject. The Pronator's Triangle describes the relationship between the plot points when you chart a pitcher's horizontal and vertical movement against one another, if they belong to the class of pitchers who tend to pronate through release of the ball. ('Pronation,' for the uninitiated, is what your high-school pitching coach probably called, 'turning it over.' It's not always a true turn of the arm or hand to tilt the palm toward a same-handed batter's box, but it is, at least, staying through the inside of the ball at release.) When we talk about pronation, we're most often talking about sinkers and changeups, but some guys do have perfectly useful four-seamers despite a tendency toward pronation. As Delgado Genzor also wrote, guys with a preference for pronation (as opposed to supination, which is the motion around the outside of the ball we usually associate with cutters, sliders, and curveballs) can still have very effective breaking balls. These are almost always 'gyro' sliders, in the modern parlance. They don't have a lot of sweep; they turn like a cement truck and drop mostly due to gravity. Here's an example of a Pronator's Triangle, cribbed straight from the article. It's the movement profiles by pitch category for Luis Castillo, who was at the center of the piece overall. Notice that, technically speaking, Castillo's breaking stuff doesn't have much spin-induced movement. It only 'moves' due to gravity, as the gyro spin slows down its progress toward the plate and doesn't produce the same resistance to that force as backspin of any form would. Compare that chart to Wesneski's movement plot (by pitch type, not category, because I think we'll gain more clarity this way in his case.) It's pretty simple. Wesneski's sweeper stretches the Pronator's Triangle beyond its breaking point. That sweeper works best off his four-seamer, in terms of movement, but his four-seamer comes from a different slot, so the deception is gone. His changeup also works better off the four-seamer than off the sinker, because he doesn't generate enough run on the change to differentiate it from that sinker. Again, though, that would only be true if movement were the only relevant variable. Instead, we have to account for the fact that the four-seamer comes from a different release point than the change, too. That leaves us with a couple of divergent paths ahead for Wesneski. One option is to focus on the four-seamer and the cutter, and try to learn a splitter to go with it. That would be a three-pitch mix good enough to work against both righties and lefties, if he could command it sufficiently and stay healthy along the way. The alternative would be sticking with the sinker and the changeup, leaning more into pronation from that slot to engender better movement on the change, and trading in the sweeper for a gyro slider. Wesneski had such a pitch early in 2023. He utilized one earlier in his pro career, too, but the Yankees prefer to give pitchers like him a sweeper as they near the majors. When he was throwing the gyro slider in the spring, though, Wesneski released it from that four-seamer and cutter slot, not the slot from which he throws his pronator stuff. If either of these avenues promised surefire success, the Cubs and Wesneski already would have plunged down it at full speed. Instead, all the data tells us there are boulders in either path for the righthander. He might not be able to find three pitches he can command (and which have the right kind of movement profile to neutralize hitters) from either slot. He might never find the thing that unlocks what seems like significant upside. After watching a lot of Wesneski for the last year, though, I would feel much more confident trying the second path. That means scrapping the sweeper, and re-training Wesneski to throw the gyro slider from a lower slot. It means changing the way he attacks the strike zone, and probably where he sets up on the mound. It means making the four-seamer a tertiary weapon and some hard work in finding feel for a circle change. That's a lot of possible pitfalls, and it's not to mention the biggest lift involved: getting Wesneski to buy in on leaving behind the pitch that made him low-grade famous, and which has netted him the best grades since before he even debuted in MLB--that sweeper. For those reasons, the team might go the other way. Learning a splitter and raising the slot on the sweeper is probably easier than doing what I just listed. Either road is worth exploring. Motor preference theory (pronation vs. supination) is not a perfect or complete one. Still, laying it out this way helps us see that continuing to try everything Wesneski tried throughout 2023 is a non-starter. One way or another, he needs to make big, big changes. This is just a paradigm to help us see which ones are possible. View full article

Not all efficiency is desirable. Sometimes, if you want a sport to feel substantial and valuable, there needs to be human error—and lots of it. Image courtesy of © Ron Chenoy-USA TODAY Sports Have you ever looked at the leaderboard for career double plays turned by outfielders? I have. I do it probably once a month, not because it changes that much, but because it hasn't changed since I first stumbled upon it, and it probably never will again. I circle back to it because there's something to learn about baseball, I think, from looking at it over and over. Above the actual lists on such pages, Baseball Reference puts photos of the 24 players atop the board. Here's that array for career double plays by outfielders (mostly, of course, plays on which the fielder caught the ball and threw out a runner either trying to advance or scrambling back to the base on which they started, but this also includes the fistful of unassisted double plays turned by, say, Tris Speaker). Yes, that's Speaker right at the top of the list, with 38 more than the guy in second place—who, yes, is Ty Cobb. The point, though, is all of that black-and-white. This leaderboard is one of my favorite ways to meditate on the greatness of Willie Mays, because you could add another half-dozen pictures to this list and he'd still be the only one whose photo stands out. The next picture that wouldn't look like 23 of these look would be that of Jesse Barfield, who's tied for 34th place on the list. After him, the next would be Richie Ashburn and Ken Griffey, Jr., tied for 53rd. Mays turned 60 double plays in his career. Barfield turned 49. Ashburn and Griffey turned 43. I return to it, too, though, because whenever I read about baseball games (and about the growth of the sport in general) in the first half of the 20th century, what jumps out to me is how much of what was celebrated then would be denigrated—what has, in fact, been run out of the game altogether—now. At the dawn of the 20th century, when people talked about what was great about baseball, they emphasized daring, physicality, and tenacity. Looking back, it's easy to dismiss that as puffery or propaganda, but when you come across a leaderboard like this, you realize that it wasn't. The game was really once played in a way that demanded and rewarded the widely articulated American virtues of the time. In an American era defined by Teddy Roosevelt and his worldview, baseball emerged as the national pastime by trying hard to engender the same attitudes and actions Roosevelt himself would—although, ironically, Roosevelt himself disliked the game. It wasn't just about unapologetic violence, either, like Cobb's sharpened spikes and beanballs that actually knocked out batters who looked too comfortable in the box. There was a culture of aggressiveness on the bases. In a game relatively light on home runs, teams tried to create runs by relentlessly pushing their luck, and running into outs on the bases was part of the bargain. Everyone was fine with that. I don't long for most of that. Even at the time, Cobb's misanthropy was a point of criticism. Nowadays, we cringe whenever a pitch plunks a batter above the belt, even though they wear helmets made of materials that were nonexistent when Frank Chance was out there letting his merely hatted head take the brunt of pitches in order to gain 90 feet of progress. Takeout slides and other forms of brinksmanship didn't build character; they just showed a disregard for other people. However, I do think something was lost when people stopped foolishly pushing the envelope on the bases. Underneath some of the mythmaking and morality that dominated conversations about the game 120 years ago laid something real. Baseball can be instructive, and it can be edifying. I don't think it manages that, though, when we treat it like a video game. This isn't a critique of modern analytics. As that photo array above reminds us, the change has come slowly over many decades, not all at once since the dawn of the internet age. In fact, here are the average number of outs made on the bases per team in select seasons, going as far back as reliable everyday data on this can take us. Season Outs on Bases per Team 1953 79 1963 74 1973 72 1983 69 1993 67 2003 57 2013 53 2023 45 No, what I'm talking about is a change that happened because home runs became more frequent, and because teams started to realize there might be more value in stringing together hits and avoiding outs than in pushing the limits. Remember when you would get the latest version of a video game and set about trying to beat it? You'd be systematic about it. You'd learn from each mistake. If turning left got you killed, the next time you tried the level, you'd turn right. Through trial and error, you felt your way to the ruthless efficiency that finally resulted in solving the whole game. Eventually, you'd just come down the court in Double Dribble and hoist that corner 3, because you'd found a glitch and now you had the game by the short hairs. Long before sabermetrics, baseball teams started learning from their mistakes and stopped running wild. It's a sound strategical choice. I'm just not convinced it's good for the game, as we want the game to be. Sport, which is either a sibling or a cousin of the arts, is most valuable when it imitates life. Video games don't imitate life at all. Life isn't a closed system, and it doesn't repeat itself. You can't just learn from one experience and apply the lesson (unthinkingly, without modification) to the next similar experience. There will be important, even crucial differences between the new experience and the one from which you're trying to learn. To imitate life and not a video game, then, baseball needs what no video game can ever have: unpredictable irrationality. Sometimes, we need players to make what have to be called bad decisions, out of an overweaning eagerness to press an advantage or out of desperation to make up for a mistake. We need guys who give in to a certain arrogant instinct and guys who simply lose focus. Those aren't good things to have happen, but because they happen all the time in real life, they should happen in baseball, too, so we can better feel connected to (and better learn from) the game. These things happen in baseball, even now, because the game is played by people, not computers. As teams try harder to program and educate their players with each passing year, though, we just aren't seeing enough of those instances. Baseball isn't without random error and the unpredictability and excitement that come with it, but it's gotten too close to being without it. We need more screw-ups. Obviously, though, it always feels miserable when it's your team making the mistakes. The Cubs ran into a bunch of bad outs on the bases in September, often out of those same couple of motives I named above. That made their collapse especially maddening. It wasn't good for Cubs fans. Still, maybe it was good for baseball, insofar as baseball is meant to be good for us. No one will voluntarily start making outs on the bases just to make the game more reflective of human nature. That's why rules and physical changes (especially the pitch timer and the bigger bases) we've seen implemented lately are extra valuable. More random errors happen in football and basketball than in baseball, because there's a ticking clock (two of them, really) in each sport to force action and limit preparation for that action. The pitch timer brings that to baseball. It limits the ability of everyone involved, including baserunners and fielders, to think all the way through each pitch before it happens and receive instructions from the dugout. There might still be more ways to encourage irrationality on the field, but for now, it's worth waiting to see how these rules continue to reintroduce some chaos into the contest. The changes didn't increase outs on the bases in 2023, but they did engender more aggressiveness, in addition to a faster pace. Hopefully, those trends continue in 2024. View full article