January 21st, 2025: Hall of Fame, Sasaki, Dodgers, Bullpen, Alonso, Bat Speed, Jones

On this date in 2020, Derek Jeter was announced as the newest Hall of Famer. He appeared on 396 of 397 ballots. The voter who omitted Jeter hasn’t been revealed and Derek took it in stride – “I could care less,” he said about not being unanimous (it’s couldn’t! couldn’t care less!) – but I can’t lie, the thought of being the one voter who didn’t vote for Ichiro crossed my mind as I filled out my ballot. Ichiro is getting in easily, so I thought about strategically omitting him and using that vote on a player who needs more help to get in. I ultimately decided against it and voted for who I consider the best players rather than get cute, but yeah, being The Guy Who Didn’t Vote For Ichiro definitely crossed my mind. Maybe I’ll do a strategic omission in the future. Not yet though. Not with my first ballot and not with Ichiro. Here now is today’s post. (This is a call for mailbag questions. This is the slow time of year and I've cleaned out the inbox pretty well the last few weeks, so I'm running short. Send 'em to RABmailbag at gmail. Thanks.)

1. The 2025 Hall of Fame class will be announced later today (6pm ET on MLB Network). According to the public ballot tracker, Ichiro is still at 100% with roughly 45% of ballots known, and CC Sabathia is currently well over the 75% threshold needed for induction. Carlos Beltrán and Billy Wagner are also over 75%, though with less breathing room than Sabathia. Looks like we’re getting at least a three-player class, with a chance at four. Sabathia has already said he wants a Yankees hat on his Hall of Fame plaque. My question is, after Sabathia, who will be the next Yankee to get into the Hall of Fame? (I asked this same question back in 2019.) Robinson Canó and Alex Rodriguez have Hall of Fame resumes, but won’t get in due to their PED use. Andy Pettitte hasn’t come close to 75% in his seven years on the ballot, so it won’t be him unless the Veterans Committee puts him in down the line. We all love Dellin Betances and Brett Gardner, but it won’t be them (they will join the ballot soon though). I see three candidates for the next Yankees’ Hall of Famer: Gerrit Cole, Aaron Judge, and Giancarlo Stanton. Stanton is 71 homers away from 500 and every member of the 500-homer club is in the Hall of Fame except the PED guys (A-Rod, Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, etc.) and Miguel Cabrera and Albert Pujols, who aren’t eligible yet. Giancarlo has three years remaining on his contract. 71 homers in three years is doable (he hit 82 homers from 2022-24), though not a lock given his age and injury history, and the possibility of a work stoppage in 2027. Cole’s had a Hall of Fame peak and needs to do a little more compiling to strengthen his case. I didn’t realize he’s still under 2,000 career innings at age 34 (1,954). Sabathia was at 2,821.1 innings going into his age 34 season, for reference. Talking to some writer pals, my sense is Judge is already a Hall of Famer given his historically great peak, and he still has plenty of time to add to his career totals. Age and contract status indicate Stanton will join the Hall of Fame ballot first, then Cole, then Judge. So the “who will be the next Yankee to get into the Hall of Fame?” question is really a "will Stanton or Cole get in before Judge?" question. I’m gonna say Cole is the next Yankees’ Hall of Famer. He’ll get in on the first or second ballot, and Stanton will be more of a seventh or eighth ballot guy, if he gets in at all. We’ll find out in, uh, a decade or so.

2. The sun rose in the east, Tuesday came after Monday, and Roki Sasaki signed with the Dodgers. You can occasionally predict baseball, Suzyn. The Dodgers were favored to sign Sasaki for well over a year, and after weeks of rumors about this team and that team having a chance, he signed with the Dodgers. The Blue Jays and Red Sox were after Juan Soto, maybe the Dodgers and Nationals too, but, when it was all said and done, it was Yankees vs. Mets, with the most money winning out, just as we all expected. These things do have a way of playing out the way to expect them to play out sometimes. Soon after landing Sasaki, the Dodgers signed Tanner Scott. It’s a four-year deal worth $72M ($18M per year), which I reckon caught the attention of Devin Williams and his agent. The complaints about the Dodgers – they’re ruining baseball! we can’t compete! – are the same complaints we heard about the Yankees when they signed Mike Mussina right after winning their third straight World Series, and Jason Giambi after winning their fourth straight pennant. This is nothing we haven’t heard before. Fans of the other 29 teams aren’t mad the Dodgers are ruining baseball. They’re mad their team isn’t the one ruining it. The Dodgers can do this because they’ve earned it. They earned it by winning on the field and by having the best front office in baseball, and an owner with deep pockets and a willingness to spend (that last part isn’t always a given). Why wouldn’t a player want to play for the Dodgers? They win, they’ll make you better, and they’ll make you rich. They’re best in class and it wasn’t always this way. It wasn’t that long ago that the Dodgers were so dysfunctional that they had Russian psychics on the payroll. The Athletics, Marlins, Pirates, and White Sox are harming baseball more than the Dodgers. I think it’s good for baseball when there’s a superteam and a villain (as much as there can be a superteam in this sport). This is the entertainment business and hating the villain/celebrating their failure is entertaining. The Yankees were that villain for a very long time, and always will be the villain to some extent, but the Dodgers are the baddies now. Speaking from experience, their fans would do well to embrace it and not fight it. I look forward to Giancarlo Stanton hitting a nuke and staring down Sasaki in Game 4.

3. Unless they signed a less heralded prospect who lost his deal with the Dodgers we don’t know about, the Yankees didn’t gain anything from Roki Sasaki’s decision. The Dodgers had a $5,146,200 bonus pool and gave Sasaki a $6.5M bonus. They traded fringe top 30 prospects OF Dylan Campbell (Phillies) and OF Arnaldo Lantigua (Reds) to get the bonus pool money they needed after Sasaki’s decision. (I figured the OF Josue De Paula rumors were bogus.) The Athletic (subs. req’d) had an interesting deep dive into Sasaki’s free agency and in it they report the Padres told him they had trades lined up to max out their bonus pool, and would give him every last penny. San Diego can max out their bonus pool at just over $10M. Maybe the Yankees were involved there somehow? They put their international signings on hold until Sasaki made his decision (other teams did the same), so something was up. Maybe they had a bonus pool trade lined up with the Padres, maybe they were targeting a player the Dodgers wouldn’t be able to sign, I dunno. The Yankees do not announce their international amateur signings like some other teams, though Baseball America’s tracker lists several signings, including Dominican SS Manny Cedeno and Dominican OF Ruben Castillo. The Yankees have started making all the signings they put on hold last week. Alas and alack, they didn’t benefit from Sasaki’s decision, at least not unless they landed an under-the-radar international player we don’t know about who had his agreement with the Dodgers broken when Sasaki took their money.

4. The Dodgers signing Tanner Scott could – could – make Anthony Banda or Alex Vesia available. They lack options in their bullpen, as in they can not option players to the minors to call up a fresh arm. Vesia is the only reliever in the bullpen with a minor league option. Everyone else is out of options or has enough service time (5+ years) to refuse a demotion, so their bullpen roster flexibility is minimal. The Yankees need a lefty reliever and Banda and Vesia are lefties, and ostensibly expendable because Scott is also a lefty. Then again, the Dodgers will have to go through some combination of Corbin Carroll, Bryce Harper, Jackson Merrill, Matt Olson, Kyle Schwarber, Juan Soto, and Kyle Tucker to win the NL pennant. Having multiple lefties available in the bullpen isn’t just a good idea, it’s necessary. Banda, briefly a Yankee in 2022, had a breakout year last season thanks to a reworked slider. Vesia is kinda like a lefty Chad Green in that he leans heavily on his elite fastball. He has two years of control remaining and that’s usually when the Dodgers trade role players for prospects (Banda has three years of control). The Yankees went 0-for-2 in lefty reliever trades with the Dodgers last year (Caleb Ferguson and Victor González), so maybe that spooks them out of a trade. Also, how much do you want to trade for Banda or Vesia when you could just sign Andrew Chafin or Tim Hill? To sum this all up, yes, I could see the Dodgers moving Banda or Vesia now, and no, I don’t think the Yankees should be at the front of the line to get either. Trading legitimate prospects for non-elite relievers is not something the Yankees, who pull good relievers out of thin air every year, should be in the habit of doing.

5. Two days before the Dodgers signed Tanner Scott, the Mets gave lefty A.J. Minter two years and $22M with an opt out, and that one surprised me. Minter, 31, is coming off hip surgery and was down two ticks of velocity last year. I guess these days a prove yourself contract for a second tier reliever is $11M, multiple years, and an opt out. Sheesh. Makes Jonathan Loáisiga’s $5M contract with a $5M club option look better. Does the Minter deal and the one-year, $10M contracts signed by Andrew Kittredge (Orioles) and José Leclerc (Athletic) push Andrew Chafin out of the price range the Yankees are comfortable with? Were they ever comfortable with Chafin’s price range? I would guess the Minter signing takes the Mets out on Tim Hill – Danny Young, their second lefty, had very promising underlying numbers in 2024 – so there’s a little less competition there. I trust the Yankees to fill their lefty reliever void. They’ve earned the benefit of the doubt with relievers. But, if they are going to re-sign Hill, maybe do it sooner rather than later? Names are coming off the board and prices seem to be going up. 

6. It is objectively hilarious the Blue Jays took on $11M owed to Myles Straw to add $2M in international bonus pool space Friday, then didn’t get Roki Sasaki. Straw stinks, he is a sixth outfielder/pinch-runner, and Toronto gave the Guardians a get out of jail free card on that contract. Yikes! I get it though. It’s $11M across two years, which won’t be prohibitive for a team with a $260M+ payroll (Toronto’s problem is getting players to take their money, not an inability/unwillingness to spend), and the Blue Jays had to do everything they could to stand out. That includes showing Sasaki they had the money in hand and would offer him as much as possible. It didn’t work, Sasaki’s a Dodger, but the Blue Jays are desperate. They keep finishing second or third for top free agents. They were among Sasaki’s three finalists, so there was a small opening, and they went for it. As a fan of an AL East rival, it’s very funny they lost that bet and are stuck with Straw, but I understand why the Blue Jays took on his contract to get the bonus pool space. After missing out on Sasaki, Toronto pivoted to Anthony Santander, and gave him a five-year contract worth more than $90M. That's a “if this doesn’t work, it’ll be the next GM’s problem” contract if I've ever seen one. I could see the Blue Jays signing Jack Flaherty too (Ben Nicholson-Smith says they're after Max Scherzer). Things are about to come to a head for the Blue Jays. Bo Bichette and Vlad Guerrero Jr. are a year away from free agency, the big league roster isn’t great, the farm system is thin, and they haven’t won a postseason game since 2016. Without an excellent 2025, a tear down and rebuild (and a new front office) could be right around the corner. Didn’t the Blue Jays just come out of a rebuild not too long ago? Rebuilds are such a scam.

7. Timing is everything in this game, and if the Yankees and everyone else had known the Mets would lowball Pete Alonso as much as they did, I reckon the offseason would have played out much differently. Joel Sherman reports the Mets offered Alonso a three-year contract in the $68M to $70M range, which is an offer that was made to be rejected. Just enough for the Mets to tell their fans “we tried” but also not enough that Alonso and Scott Boras would take it, and now the Mets have apparently moved on. They've since signed A.J. Minter and Jesse Winker. I want no part of Alonso on a long-term contract. But one year with a player option or two? I would’ve loved that. Alas, the Yankees already signed Paul Goldschmidt, and they’re locked into Giancarlo Stanton at DH. Weird offseason for the Mets, no? They gave Juan Soto all that money, then surrounded him with Sean Manaea, Frankie Montas, Jose Siri, Jesse Winker, A.J. Minter coming off hip surgery, and Clay Holmes as a starter. I made a meme:

The Dodgers are having the offseason Steve Cohen’s Mets should have had. Cot’s estimates the Mets' 2025 luxury tax payroll at $295.8M, down from $347.7M last season. I just don’t get their star (singular) and scrubs approach to the offseason. Well, whatever. The Yankees signed Goldschmidt when they did because several teams were after him, and it was either sign him then or miss out. Too bad it took Alonso’s free agency as long as it did to play out. Him on a one-year contract (with a few player option as the cost of doing business) would have been nice.

8. I was playing around with Statcast’s bat speed leaderboard the other day when I stumbled on something that might be worth a longer write-up at some point. When you think of bat speed, you think hitters, but the data can also tell us something about pitchers. Which pitcher had the highest average bat speed against in 2024? Taijuan Walker, who is very bad. Which pitcher had the lowest average bat speed against in 2024? Chris Sale, who won the NL Cy Young. Hitters were much more comfortable cutting it loose against Walker than Sale, understandably. Fast swing rate is the percentage of swings over 75 mph. The league average fast swing rate is 23%. Here is the 2024 pitcher fast swing rate leaderboard:

1. Will Vest: 15.5%
2. Dennis Santana: 16.2% (2024 Yankee)
3. Tim Hill: 16.2% (2024 Yankee)
4. Trent Thornton: 16.2%
5. Keegan Akin: 16.7%
6. Robert Suarez: 16.8%
7. Bryan Abreu: 16.9%
8. Chris Sale: 17.1%
9. Enyel De Los Santos: 17.1% (2024 Yankee)
10. Bryan Woo: 17.1%
11. Michael Tonkin: 17.7% (2024 Yankee)

Four of the top 11 in fast swing rate pitched for the Yankees last year. Three of them were acquired during the season, meaning the Yankees sought them out. New Yankee Max Fried was also in the top 25 at 19.2%. Devin Williams missed time with injury and doesn’t have enough opposing swings to qualify, but he was at 17.5% last year. Seems to me the Yankees’ new thing is pitchers with low fast swing rates, which implies hitters are uncomfortable taking their A swing against them. This tracks, right? The Yankees have had a thing for pitchers who keep the ball on the ground and suppress exit velocity in the Matt Blake era. Pitchers who limit fast swings are a natural extension of that. The public only has one year of bat speed data, but Statcast has tracked it for years. Teams have been digging into this for a while now. I’m looking forward to getting a second year of bat speed data in 2025. That will make it easier to pick up on trends. For now, I guess I need to start scouring the fast swing rate leaderboard for pitchers the Yankees might target rather than the ground ball rate and exit velocity leaderboards.

9. I’ve been plugging away at my annual top 30 Prospects list the last week or so and I’m struggling with where to place Spencer Jones. On one hand, last year’s 36.8 K% and 33% in-zone whiff rate were ghastly and comfortably within fatal flaw range. Joey Gallo had a 32% in-zone whiff with the Yankees, for reference. That was in the big leagues. Jones was in Double-A. On the other hand, the kid did hit a respectable .259/.336/.452 (124 wRC+) last season, including .277/.349/.509 (140 wRC+) after June 1st. Almost no one in the minors does as much damage as Jones when he makes contact. Here are the 2024 slash lines when you remove plate appearances that end in a strikeout:

• Spencer Jones: .443/.532/.773

• Eastern League average: .327/.420/.510

Removing strikeouts is a quick and dirty way to measure on-contact damage, and pretty much no one in the minors can match Jones. (Aaron Judge hit .464/.604/1.010 in plate appearances that didn’t end in a strikeout last year compared to the .325/.402/.533 league average, which, lol.) On top of that on-contact damage, Jones is a legitimate stolen base threat and a good defensive center fielder. How do you value a player who produces that much when he puts the ball in play and also has positive value on the bases and in the field (at a premium up-the-middle position), but has extreme swing-and-miss issues? Forget about Jones whittling his strikeout rate down to league average. Can he get it down to 30 K%? Guys who strike out that much are hard to watch, I know, but that’s also a strikeout level where Jones could be a very productive player. Jones carries extreme risk and also tremendous upside. I’ll get the ranking figured out eventually, but I’ve been going back and forth on where to place him the last few weeks. The case can be made Jones is the second best prospect in the system, or something like the eighth best prospect in the system.

10. I have no idea why this crossed my mind, but the other day I found myself wondering about the Yankees’ longest trade partner drought. Meaning, which team have the Yankees gone the longest without making a trade? Any guesses? I’ll wait.

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It’s the Tigers. The Yankees and Tigers haven’t made a trade since the Justin Wilson for Luis Cessa and Chad Green deal on Dec. 9th, 2015. If we remove cash trades, the answer is the Nationals. The Yankees and Nationals haven’t made a player-for-player trade since David Carpenter for Tony Renda on June 11th, 2015. The Yankees have made a trade with every team since 2021 except the Nationals, Tigers, Mariners, and Rockies. The last Yankees-Mariners trade was Nestor Cortes for international bonus pool on Nov. 25th, 2019 (after the Yankees DFAed Nestor). The last player-for-player trade with the Mariners was Juan Then for Edwin Encarnación on June 15th, 2019. The last Yankees-Rockies trade was the low stakes Joe Harvey for Alfredo Garcia swap on July 31st, 2019. I have no idea why I’m mentioning this here. The trade partner drought crossed my mind the other day, so I looked it up to satisfy my curiosity, and figured I’d throw the answer here. I was most surprised to learn the Yankees have made a trade with 25 of the other 29 teams within the last four years. Feels like the Yankees haven’t made 25 trades total the last four years, nevermind traded with 25 different teams. Baseball, man.

(Send your requests for Friday's mailbag to RABmailbag at gmail dot com. The random Yankee series is on hiatus, but feel free to send in requests for when it returns.)