#6: Short memories and long contracts
Were there actually a lot of extensions? Or were we mesmerized by the very idea of future wealth?
Happy Friday, Zach here this morning. Extension season has been … extended, apparently.
Since stateside Opening Day a week ago, the Padres have locked up NL Rookie of the Year runner-up Jackson Merrill for at least nine years. The Red Sox have secured offseason trade prize Garrett Crochet and top prospect Kristian Campbell long-term. And the Diamondbacks have re-upped star second baseman Ketel Marte.
The annual tradition of verbal negotiation deadlines, big dollar figure demands and contract year intrigue usually plays out as the caffeinated subplot to February and March’s lazy spring training days. So the barrage of deals coming across the wire after the typical, informal Opening Day deadline has felt strange enough to make sharp observers wonder if there is an underlying impetus for the agreements — such as alarm over the likely lockout following the 2026 season.
Having little hope of divining the thinking of a dozen or more interested parties, I wanted to answer a simpler question: Have there actually been more extensions than usual signed this spring?
The timing of this flurry is certainly notable. February and March are the prime months for extension talks, and most assume hopes are dashed if deals aren’t done before the first pitch. (I’d include myself in that, as I wrote about the Blue Jays’ stressful situation with free-agent-to-be Vladimir Guerrero Jr. just yesterday.)
Using FanGraphs’ Roster Resources transaction records, I zeroed in on extensions signed in February, March or April since 2021. Through one basic lens, looking at all extensions of five or more guaranteed years, 2025 stands as a busy but not unprecedented spring. So far, 10 such deals have been struck — Merrill, Crochet, Campbell, Marte, Lawrence Butler, Justin Martinez, Alejandro Kirk, Tanner Bibee, Cal Raleigh and Brandon Pfaadt.
That puts this year in a tie with 2023, a spring that included extensions for Corbin Carroll, Manny Machado and Andrés Giménez. Of note: Logan Webb, Hunter Greene and Bryan Reynolds inked long-term pacts included in that total after Opening Day.
It’s fair to say that several of this year’s moves — Merrill, Campbell and Crochet — feel like especially impactful benchmarks. The Major League Baseball Players Association reportedly tried to talk Merrill out of accepting his nine-year, $135 million deal with the Padres. Even though that number could grow more lucrative with annual incentives, his instant stardom at a premium position suggests his earning power would have grown into the multiple hundreds of millions. Campbell’s deal also looks like a bargain for the Red Sox — though few would quibble with his rationale for accepting $60 million less than a week into his big-league career.
I took another run through the transaction data looking for young players, those still in their team control years, who signed away at least one season of potential free agency. In that realm, spring 2025 doesn’t hold a candle to 2023 in terms of pure numbers.
2021: 4 (Fernando Tatis Jr., Lance McCullers Jr., Francisco Lindor, David Fletcher)
2022: 8 (Marte, Matt Olson, Ryan McMahon, Max Stassi, Ke'Bryan Hayes, J.P. Crawford, Myles Straw, Kyle Freeland)
2023: 12 (Carroll, Giménez, Webb, Reynolds, Cristian Javier, José Alvarado, Keibert Ruiz, Miles Mikolas, Orlando Arcia, Jake Cronenworth, Ian Happ, Pablo López)
2024: 5 (Bobby Witt Jr., Mitch Keller, Ezequiel Tovar, Will Smith, Ceddanne Rafaela)
2025: 6 (Butler, Kirk, Raleigh, Crochet, Campbell, Merrill)
Some of those 2023 deals are more marriages of convenience than long-term commitment, sure, but there were real top-of-the-line players there, too. Most extensions feel significant in the moment, as the players did something to warrant the transactional enthusiasm, but it’s easy to spot once-burgeoning stars who did well to capitalize on their moment. Though the years and the money give obvious indications of just how much promise each deal portends, our memories nonetheless underestimate the shock of information we’ve long ago absorbed. We like newfound excitement. We see patterns. We seek explanation.
Maybe, maybe, this spring will indeed dwarf recent years in terms of impact. If Guerrero or Kyle Tucker join the parade, it probably will. But as with so many other April storylines, only time will tell.
Torpedo bats are years from completing their mission
Or how the pitching machine revolution of 2022 is paying off now for Eugenio Suarez
by Zach Crizer
Speaking of short memories, I’m already beginning to track the tone of the conversation around torpedo bats.
The baseball brain trust has long sought ways to level the playing field for hitters against ever-advancing pitching technology. Plenty of good, helpful ideas seem like The Solution until they get lost in the alchemy of split-second decisions and reactive hand-eye coordination. The process of hitting is too fast, too subconscious and too individual to bend to our collective will. You might as well try to train an entire city not to sneeze.
Some ideas are The Solution for some players, though. A few years ago, Hannah and I wrote about a high-tech pitching machine called the Trajekt Arc that simulated the experience of facing actual pitchers. At the time, only a handful of teams had it, and they wanted to keep it that way. Spoiler: Everyone got wind of the fancy new toy. Many have been using the Arc in the bowels of their ballparks for three or more years now. Clearly, it hasn’t sparked a league-wide hitting revolution, but it has been a revelation for at least one hitter.
Eugenio Suarez, the veteran Diamondbacks third baseman, got off to a brutal start last year. He was batting .202/.277/.326 on June 15, 31% worse than the average MLB hitter by the park-adjusted metric wRC+. That’s about when he started using the Trajekt as part of his routine, at the suggestion of D-backs coaches. His season turned around, to the tune of a .299/.350/.574 line the rest of the way, 50% better than the average hitter.
The gains have carried into 2025. Hannah caught up with Suarez at Yankee Stadium on Thursday, a night after he bashed a go-ahead grand slam for his fifth long ball of the young season.
“I give it a lot of credit, that Trajekt,” he said. “I feel like I’ve already had two or three at-bats before I face the starting pitcher.”
Suarez explained that for each pitcher he wants to train against, he’ll take five to 10 swings against the fastball, then tell the coaches operating the machine to give him a mix of the hurler’s arsenal. Three or four at-bats’ worth.
“If you strike me out, you strike me out,” he said. “I start again. I have another at-bat. If I hit a double, homer, whatever, I take another at-bat. I make it real, because I want to feel that way. So when I come to the game, I'm already engaged with the pitcher. You know what I mean?”
It’s still just half a season of evidence, but Statcast numbers show Suarez’s Trajekt-ory (sorry) dovetails with the logical benefits of such a routine. Take a look at these before and after numbers, sampling 2022 to June 15, 2024 vs. the machine-aided time since.
Here’s his performance against non-fastballs, the pitches that tend to give him the most trouble.
Before: .189/.258/.354, 39.4% whiff rate, 37.6% hard-hit rate, 22 HR in 654 PA
After: .228/.259/.584, 37.1% whiff rate, 45.6% hard-hit rate, 15 HR in 158 PA
Same drill, but for starting pitchers — the arms he’s most able to plan for.
Before: .241/.331/.419, 31.1% whiff rate, 41.3% hard-hit rate, 33 HR in 928 PA
After: .317/.387/.634, 25.6% whiff rate, 48.9% hard-hit rate, 16 HR in 212 PA
Look, Suarez whacked 49 home runs for the Reds in 2019. He’s an established slugger capable of going on a hot streak, technology or not, but his tale illustrates how new things can make a real difference when hitters’ needs are met. As Davy Andrews explained for FanGraphs, the torpedo bats are likely going to zip past fad status and become a customizable tool in a hitter’s plan of attack.
In the coming year or two, we’ll be seeing more torpedo bats specifically, and more bats that are customized to an individual player generally. But they could also be tailored for a specific situation.
Whatever lasting effects this idea creates won’t stem from the simple “yes or no” of trying the bats, but from the years-long quest of how to use them best. Suarez told Hannah he tries to work with the Trajekt every day he has access (home games, typically), because it’s the biggest change he can identify that contributed to his turnaround.
Ultimately, the best thing a hitter can be is ready for whatever comes next.
“I put that in my routine, and I start having good results,” Suarez said, “and then I start feeling confident in myself.”
Now a section where, each week, one of us will share a little bit about something *other than baseball* we’re fans of lately. We’re calling it …
Rooting Around
Hot breakfast in the middle of the week
by Hannah Keyser
Yesterday morning, I made banana pancakes. (I kind of wish they had been anything else — blueberry pancakes, perhaps — because I cringe to remember that my first concert ever was Jack Johnson, with a high school boyfriend who had such a similar affect and actual appearance that now I just picture him and Jack Johnson as the same person.)
Babies are little time cyphers who suck up every available second and then some you didn’t even know you had. Parenthood means having less time in every possible way. And yet, it also alerts you to time you never noticed before. Like in the morning, before work. That time is not merely transitional. It can be substantive, precious, even. Did you know there is all this time before 9 a.m. (especially if you sleep until 7 a.m. on only the luckiest of days)? Not time to journal or exercise or read peacefully in bed or film TikToks about morning routines which I really hoped to avoid referencing altogether except I don’t want you to think I’m totally out of the loop of what’s happening on the internet. But time to make breakfast. If you have to.
If, for instance, you find yourself solely responsible for the survival and sustenance of a small person who can neither conceive of nor execute their own meals, suddenly you realize there is time for breakfast every single day. Sometimes that means yogurt. Or, actually, a lot of the time that means yogurt — which the baby can’t choke on and which he always is happy to have, and which does make a mushy, sticky mess but does not stain. But sometimes it means avocado toast on a Tuesday. Cheesy scrambled eggs on a Wednesday. Banana pancakes on a Thursday. Often it means a round of blueberries for breakfast dessert. Or (more) yogurt mixed with peach butter from the farmers market, which we picked up because the pumpkin butter from the same purveyors had been such a hit when we first started tentatively introducing real foods in the dead of winter when there was nothing fresh to offer instead.
In a full decade together before the baby, Jake and I never made pancakes. “Did you ever see me even eat a pancake in that time?” he says when I point this out. I don’t think I did. But I made enough for all of us and so we ate banana pancakes together, all three of us. Not a picturesque breakfast, by any means. I put my plate on top of my closed computer which lives on what you could call the kitchen table except that we primarily eat on the couch and work at that table after getting rid of the desk to make room for the crib.
They were fantastic, the banana pancakes that I made according to the first result on Google after searching “banana pancake recipe.” Jake was impressed. He extolled how fluffy they were, encouraging our baby to appreciate what mamma had made (He didn’t. He just wanted yogurt). We didn’t clean up the kitchen until lunchtime — which is, admittedly, a downside to the big weekday breakfast. But turns out you can find time for that, too, if you really have to. And you should: Find time you didn’t realize you had. Make a hot breakfast in the middle of the week.
What we’re chatting about
I’m sorry to gild the lily but Shohei Ohtani and the Dodgers already have some truly great celebrations going so far this season. The doggy Decoy one he’s doing with Miguel Rojas is cute, but even more impressive is this team-wide reference to Ohtani’s subtle voguing in this skincare (?) commercial. –HK
A recurring feature of Mets games over the past few years has involved one hitter — often Francisco Lindor — strolling back to the dugout and cupping his hand to whisper some sort of strategic insight or advice to the hitters due up. In the latest “oh, we can quantify that” moment, Baseball Prospectus analyst Stephen Sutton-Brown found evidence that some hitters are consistently better than others at adjusting to pitchers within a game. No. 1? Francisco Lindor. –ZC
I ran into Ron Blum at the ballpark and, true to exactly the version of him presented in the newsletter earlier this week, he pointed out something about the Ketel Marte extension that I had not (and truthfully would not have) noticed: Marte is set to get the least amount of money in 2027, which Ron suspects Marte’s camp would have wanted so as to minimize losses if the 2027 season is shortened or lost altogether to a lockout. –HK
The demand for torpedo bats and the demand for torpedo bat content came together in the perfect anecdotal lede about a 70-year-old in search of a little more pop for his senior hardball league at the Victus Sporting Good store. –HK
The commenter who asks “Why doesn’t his dumper bobble” is a brilliant marketing mind who should be hired immediately. –HK
And finally, a non link that we have very much been discussing: This week at the ballpark, I saw a player pull a toothbrush and toothpaste out of his bag and begin brushing his teeth dry while sitting at his locker — the bathroom surely not more than 50 feet away! I shudder to remember it. Are we horrified or is this acceptable dental health behavior? –HK