The biggest Scott Boras client hasn't decided on a home yet, but his top pitchers continue flying off the free agent board well in advance of next week's winter meetings.
Frankie Montas restarted the hot stove after a Thanksgiving weekend pause, reportedly signing with the Mets for two years and $34 million, pending a physical. He joins Blake Snell and Yusei Kikuchi in not only signing before the winter meetings, but beating the contract projections, as FanGraphs' crowdsourced guess put Montas at two years and $26 million. This all seems to bode well for Garrett Crochet's value, at least until the musical chairs start dwindling in supply.
Montas is coming off a 2024 season that was average at best on the whole, albeit with a big performance bump after being traded to the Brewers. The Mets had success with pitchers at a similar juncture in their careers with Luis Severino and Sean Manaea, so back to the well they go.
It's worth noting that Montas' strikeout rate jumped nearly 10 percent after being dealt from the Reds. Perhaps new White Sox bench coach Walker McKinven had something to do with that. Speaking of which ...
Spare Parts
Daryl Van Schouwen has the jump on the White Sox's coaching staff announcement, although he doesn't quite have all the names. We've known about McKinven, Ethan Katz and Marcus Thames returning, but Van Schouwen has Grady Sizemore, Jason Bourgeois, Justin Jirschele, Jason Bourgeois, Matt Wise and Drew Butera all coming back as well. Setting aside the specific titles as a smaller matter, assistant hitting coach is the only real mystery here.
Aram Leighton reported another White Sox non-roster invitee in Cal Mitchell, a former second-round pick of the Pirates who hit .222/.285/.343 over 71 games with Pittsburgh in 2022 and 2023. He signed with the Padres after the season and hit .277/.359/.612 with 22 homers over 122 games at Triple-A El Paso in 2024.
After the Birmingham Barons won the Southern League title, I wondered what it might meant for the coaching prospects of Sergio Santos and John Ely. We know the answer to the latter from Scott Merkin, who says Ely is stepping away from the professional grind after his wife gave birth to their first child after the season.
Russell Carleton writes about the upcoming experimentation with automated ball-strike systems in spring training games, and what he writes reminds me of watching Colson Montgomery see multiple called balls overturned by challenges last year:
If you’re going to turn some pitches that were in a “60% of the time” strike zone into surefire strikes, that’s going to mess with the whole ecosystem. We saw above that batters respond to increasing probability of a strike by swinging more often, because their other option is accepting a higher likelihood of a strike. Would they be incentivized to chase worse pitches that the evidence shows that they have a harder time making contact on? The reality is that there’s the “definitely a strike” zone. There’s the “definitely not a strike” zone. And there’s the fuzzy zone. There are different rules in the fuzzy zone. Taking away the fuzzy zone and forcing it into the yes/no zone is going to have some very unpredictable consequences. Maybe they’d even be good consequences, but there would be consequences. [...]
If MLB can figure out where the strike zone is, it would just be an engineering problem to program a robot to call that zone. They could get their wish: a strike zone with no ambiguity and no fuzzy edges. Maybe they need to stop and ask whether that’s a good idea. The human element isn’t just a semi-charming quirk of how the game is played. The fuzzy zone is a distinct and real strategic feature of the game. Forcing everything into a binary system isn’t “cleaning up a problem” like most fans seem to think. It’s fundamentally altering a piece of the game, and when you approach it from that perspective, it suddenly takes on a very different meaning.
Pedro Grifol can feel better, because Matt Eberflus was fired by a franchise that's even more historically averse to dumping its leader in the middle of a season. I'd say that his tenure was reminiscent of Grifol's, except Grifol's White Sox were a combined 14-45 in his two Aprils, so he never got a chance to freeze up in an important games the way Eberflus did.
