Offseason News & Notes, Edition #1
I start an offseason news & notes series, looking in at three names to recently be added to the free agent pool: Tim Anderson, Eduardo Rodriguez, and Joey Votto
We are about to enter the free agency period, always an interesting and exciting time on the MLB calendar. There are plenty of big names that we’ve known about for awhile, but there’s been a handful more to pop up in the last few days as teams or players have declined their contract options to elect for free agents.
Three names are covered here, but we’ll get into a lot more of this stuff as news comes out over the next couple of months.
Tim Anderson
The 30-year-old is coming off his worst season by far, hitting just one home run and reaching a career-low 60 wRC+.
He’s never been a power bat, with a career barrel rate under 6%, but things bottomed out there as well in 2023 with a mark of 2.9%.
Among hitters with at least 400 PAs, only Brice Turang had a worse OPS than Anderson’s mark of .582, and his barrel rate put him in the bottom 20 as well.
Maybe it was somewhat by design, but Anderson was by far the worst hitter in the league in terms of getting balls in the air.
His 61% GB% shows that more clearly than the average launch angle, but here’s the histogram of launch angles that really shows the full picture:
So he was just slapping balls on the ground all year. His batting average was buoyed by a .323 BABIP, which was actually the lowest number of his career (lifetime .348 BABIP). We have come to expect a higher BABIP from the Tim Anderson type who puts a lot of pressure on fielders by putting balls on the ground and having good speed. A guy without a ton of swing speed will be better served hitting ground balls or line drives since most of their fly balls won’t have the distance to get over anybody’s head.
I’m not much of a defensive analytics guy, but from what I see he’s always pretty average in that regard and this year he ticked slightly below average.
There’s also the element of his game where he will sometimes punch people in the face. I doubt that matters a ton to most teams, but it’s definitely something to note when you’re talking about the guy specifically.
The reason to sign Tim Anderson (and to maybe draft him in deep fantasy leagues) would be that he clearly can’t repeat this 2023 season. He hit career-worsts or near career-worsts across the board (his 23.3% K% was his worst mark since 2018). Maybe that means that he just lost a bunch of skills, but I think it’s more likely that it was a combination of not being fully healthy, randomness, and maybe some mental stuff as well with the White Sox being in the cellar pretty much all year. He’s just 30 years old, as we noted, so you wouldn’t expect physical degradation at this point (although anything is possible).
He will certainly be cheap, and it’s not the easiest thing in the world to find a cheap, reliable shortstop these days (not that we can call him reliable at this point, I suppose).
I think he’s a logical signing for a mediocre team that maybe has some outside aspirations of competing next year - and obviously, he makes a lot more sense for a team that doesn’t have a true Major League shortstop. Anderson could probably move to second base as well, and maybe that would be the better choice for him at this stage.
For fantasy purposes, it’s probably going to be bad news. The White Sox have hit him exclusively at lead-off even through his struggles, and it’s extremely unlikely that any team in the league is going to lead off a guy who was a bottom-five hitter in the league last year. He will probably slide in at the bottom of some mediocre lineup, which isn’t a good situation at all for a guy who has depended on scoring runs and stealing bases to get his fantasy value even when times were good.
I will be happy to buy low on him in the super, super deep leagues as a bench middle infield depth option - but in standard league situations, there’s no reason to go here.
Eduardo Rodriguez
Not many players increased their stock more than E-Rod in 2023. After sitting out 2020, putting up a bad 4.74 ERA in 2021, and then throwing just 91 innings in 2022 - things were at bottom for E-Rod. There were legitimate questions about whether or not he even really wanted to play baseball, but he put a lot of those concerns to bed last season.
26 GS, 152.2 IP, 4.06 xFIP, 11.4% SwStr%, 23% K%, 7.7% BB%
That’s a pretty decent 15.3% K-BB%, and he limited hard contact with a .274 BABIP and .296 xwOBA allowed.
The pitch mix:
I don’t think he’s much more than a slightly above-average strikeout pitcher, and he really has never been (career-best K% was still under 27%), but he has a career 4.03 ERA and 1.06 WHIP - so he’s certainly someone deserving of a job in most rotations in baseball.
What is pretty interesting here is that he opted out of a three-year, $49 million contract - so obviously he would expect to be able to do better than that in free agency. And I suppose that’s a good bet at this point with starting pitching being a scarce resource and Major League Baseball seemingly being in its best financial place since 2019.
My prediction would be that E-Rod lands with a very competitive team, I wouldn’t think the mid-level teams are really going to be competitive here. There will be multiple bidders, and that will drive the price up to the point where teams like Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Cleveland, etc. all probably get priced out. The Mets and Dodgers will both certainly be looking to spend some money on rotation help, so I wouldn’t be surprised at all to see him land on one of those big teams - and that would easily make him a top 40 or so SP for fantasy purposes next year. Just note that he’s not a guy that has ace upside. Age isn’t a problem right now (he’ll turn 31 on April 7th), but he is well past the days where we could expect a true change/breakout. He’s more of an SP3-4 in fantasy, and if he ends up in a good situation he might end up being over-priced for fantasy purposes.
Joey Votto
The biggest narrative story of the week was the Reds declining the option on Votto. It’s pretty rare to see a team let go of someone who has done so much for them and has been around so long, but the Reds really didn’t have a choice here with all of these talented young guys on their roster. That team can certainly compete next year, and Votto would be nothing more than a bench bat for them - clearly not worth the money it would have cost.
Now, maybe they’ll re-negotiate in free agency and he’ll return, that would make some sense since he clearly really likes Cincinnati - but if he’s interested at all in the money right now, he will head for a new team. There are plenty of teams out there that would be happy to start him nearly every day at first base - so that’s the most likely situation, I think.
The first thing to note is that Votto is 40 years old. The second thing to note is that he managed to play in just 65 games last year. Some of that had to do with the Reds starting the young guys over him down the stretch as they were in the playoff race, but most of it was because he was not healthy.
At the end of the year, he had done this:
242 PA, .202/.314/.433, 14 HR, 25.6% K%, 11.2% BB%
In case you haven’t been paying attention since the COVID year, Joey Votto is not at all the same guy he was for most of his career. This is going to be true with anybody of this age, but it’s more than that with Votto. He very clearly transformed himself to optimize his performance after 2019/2020.
For his career prior to that, Votto was just a bat magician. He would rarely strike out, take a ton of walks, and never pop up. He was like a Luiz Arraez type with more power, but he was never a guy at the top of the home run leaderboard.
Heading into 2021, he clearly decided to sell out for power. His strikeouts ticked up, but so did his barrel, fly ball, and pull rates. It was a wise decision, and he put together a really impressive 2021 season at the age of 37.
A lot of that is gone now, you can see the EV has never returned from that super high 92.9 number, but the barrel rates have stayed in double-digits even in these last two seasons.
Great American Ballpark was a great situation for him to turn a lot of cheap pulled fly balls into homers, but clearly, there’s still a good amount of raw power here as shown by that 11% Brl% (league average is down at 8%. Last season, the home run rate for players between 10.5% and 11.5% Brl% was 24.5 PA/HR, good for around a 25-homer pace.
The logical landing spot for Votto would be a team with a need at first base and a need for some veteran leadership.
But expectations need to be tempered in a big way for a guy at age 40. I think 20-25 homers is reasonable for Votto, and he can probably still play just fine defense at first base. But the batting average is going to top out around .240 - and more likely he’ll be a .225 or so guy. Strictly based on his abilities with the bat, he’ll end up overpaid - but if you believe in clubhouse stuff and veteran leadership, then you’d have to factor that into the analysis as well.
I think he probably will end up with a weird team, he’s not someone that the best teams in the league are going to want. And it also won’t make any sense for a team with a solid first baseman to sign him either. I could take the time here to filter down the options, but I am not going to do that. All I know is that he’s a nice fit for my hometown Pittsburgh Pirates!
For fantasy purposes, he’s certainly not someone to draft in normal/standard leagues, but if he finds himself a starting job - he can be drafted in those super-deep redraft leagues.