2025 MLB Thread

[chasfh]

2 hours ago, gehringer_2 said:

I think it may be more likely that McGonigle will end up playing SS for some period than that we want him playing SS over that period. How many wins will that cost? None if you couldn't get anyone else! But it may not help their chance of winning a WS either.

Right, McGonigle would be only a short term fix at short, which is why they’re working him at short this winter. And he may even demonstrate in camp that he’s not up to it.

[4hzglory]

3 hours ago, Tiger337 said:

King is very talented, but had a rough year due to an injury which is why is probably why his statcast card looks bad.  The uncertainty is the reason the Tigers might have a chance at him.  The other issue is that they would have to give up a draft pick.  Edman said it would probably be a third rounder.  I wouldn't care about that, but others might disagree.    

I think it’s actually our 3rd pick we would lose which would I believe would be our comp pick which I think our comp pick is after the 2nd round.

[casimir]

Kim, King, and Fairbanks.  Maybe another multiple inning LHRP.  Then they’ll be fine for Opening Day provided good health.

[RatkoVarda]

Phillies giving OF Adolis Garcia $10M on a 1 year deal. The supply of RH OF is insanely low.

[Tenacious D]

36 minutes ago, RatkoVarda said:

Phillies giving OF Adolis Garcia $10M on a 1 year deal. The supply of RH OF is insanely low.

I’m not sure how much of an upgrade, if any, he is to Vierling.

[RatkoVarda]

not a Harris player for sure; .278 OPB! over his last 1200 plate appearances

[Tigermojo]

Braves sign Kim for one year $20 million.

[casimir]

30 minutes ago, Tigermojo said:

Braves sign Kim for one year $20 million.

That stinks.

[papalawrence]

Bummer about Kim. The past few days some guys have mentioned Detroit has interest in Okamoto. 

[chasfh]

I happened to notice that the Yankees had the longest average game time last year: 2:51. That's still almost three hours, and is two minutes more than their 2:49 from last year, and eight minutes more than their 2:43 average time in 2023.

Another thing I noticed is that, when I looked at all the teams ranked by highest average time of game, the teams at the top tended to be those with good records. In 2025, the six teams with the longest times of game were Yankees, Mets, Diamondbacks, Dodgers, Mariners, Blue Jays.

So I did a quick and dirty correlation between teams' average game times and their winning records since 2023, when the pitch timer was implemented, and the result is +.294, which is not statistically significant, but then, not nothing, either.

What I found more interesting, though, was when I broke the correlation down by season:

2023	0.159
2024	0.378
2025	0.413

The correlation between winning percentage and game time in minutes has been rising each year.

I think there is a possibility that certain teams may have noticed that by stretching out the game to fit the maximum amount of time they are allowed between pitches, plays, innings, etc., that they gain some edge in terms of performance, perhaps from maximizing their rest time in even minute, marginal ways.

I wonder whether anyone on the inside has noticed anything like this, and how they regard it, if at all?

[Tigermojo]

37 minutes ago, chasfh said:

I happened to notice that the Yankees had the longest average game time last year: 2:51. That's still almost three hours, and is two minutes more than their 2:49 from last year, and eight minutes more than their 2:43 average time in 2023.

Another thing I noticed is that, when I looked at all the teams ranked by highest average time of game, the teams at the top tended to be those with good records. In 2025, the six teams with the longest times of game were Yankees, Mets, Diamondbacks, Dodgers, Mariners, Blue Jays.

So I did a quick and dirty correlation between teams' average game times and their winning records since 2023, when the pitch timer was implemented, and the result is +.294, which is not statistically significant, but then, not nothing, either.

What I found more interesting, though, was when I broke the correlation down by season:

2023	0.159
2024	0.378
2025	0.413

The correlation between winning percentage and game time in minutes has been rising each year.

I think there is a possibility that certain teams may have noticed that by stretching out the game to fit the maximum amount of time they are allowed between pitches, plays, innings, etc., that they gain some edge in terms of performance, perhaps from maximizing their rest time in even minute, marginal ways.

I wonder whether anyone on the inside has noticed anything like this, and how they regard it, if at all?

They're scoring/allowing more runs?

[Tiger337]

Jason Foley signs with the Giants.  

[RatkoVarda]

21 minutes ago, Tiger337 said:

Jason Foley signs with the Giants.  

saw he was out until mid-2026; always rooted for him; massive developmental win for the Tigers and Foley that he went from undrafted out of Sacred Heart University (where he roomed with Zack Short) to a 4 year MLB career

[gehringer_2]

1 hour ago, Tigermojo said:

They're scoring/allowing more runs?

yankees games did total 51 more totals runs in '25 than '24

[Motor City Sonics]

On 12/15/2025 at 1:16 PM, RatkoVarda said:

Phillies giving OF Adolis Garcia $10M on a 1 year deal. The supply of RH OF is insanely low.

We have Justice Bigbie.  Who cares about the rest? 

[RatkoVarda]

Miguel Andujar is still available

[chasfh]

13 hours ago, Tigermojo said:

They're scoring/allowing more runs?

Would tat also be true of the Rockies? They have among the fastest games.

[casimir]

14 hours ago, chasfh said:

I happened to notice that the Yankees had the longest average game time last year: 2:51. That's still almost three hours, and is two minutes more than their 2:49 from last year, and eight minutes more than their 2:43 average time in 2023.

Another thing I noticed is that, when I looked at all the teams ranked by highest average time of game, the teams at the top tended to be those with good records. In 2025, the six teams with the longest times of game were Yankees, Mets, Diamondbacks, Dodgers, Mariners, Blue Jays.

So I did a quick and dirty correlation between teams' average game times and their winning records since 2023, when the pitch timer was implemented, and the result is +.294, which is not statistically significant, but then, not nothing, either.

What I found more interesting, though, was when I broke the correlation down by season:

2023	0.159
2024	0.378
2025	0.413

The correlation between winning percentage and game time in minutes has been rising each year.

I think there is a possibility that certain teams may have noticed that by stretching out the game to fit the maximum amount of time they are allowed between pitches, plays, innings, etc., that they gain some edge in terms of performance, perhaps from maximizing their rest time in even minute, marginal ways.

I wonder whether anyone on the inside has noticed anything like this, and how they regard it, if at all?

We need something more granular.  I would like to see time in between pitches and pitches per game.

[Motor City Sonics]

I'd like to break up the monotony of all this non-stop non-news to bring you a musical break courtesy of Dennis Dale McLain.      The second song, I'm not sure if Bob Gibson's guitar is even plugged in. 

 

Edited 17 hours ago by Motor City Sonics

[chasfh]

47 minutes ago, casimir said:

We need something more granular.  I would like to see time in between pitches and pitches per game.

Time between pitches could probably be extracted from freely-available Statcast data. There’s a guy who makes them available on his GitHub. 

[chasfh]

1 hour ago, casimir said:

We need something more granular.  I would like to see time in between pitches and pitches per game.

I think I figured out a hack to get at time in between pitches.

Fangraphs has pitches per game at the team level for both batting and pitching, in their Leaders area. Reference has time of game by team under Seasons/Other.

My simple hack is, take the total number of pitches faced by batters and thrown by pitchers for each team, and divide that by the average time of game multiplied by 162 for each team.

For example: the Tigers threw 24,044 pitches and faced 23,339 pitches as hitters, for a total of 47,383 total pitches thrown in their games. Their games averaged 158 minutes in length—multiply by 162, and we conclude that they played baseball for a total of 25,596 minutes during the regular season. (Apropos of nothing, that works out to almost 18 full days spent playing regular season baseball during the year.) Forty-seven thousand three hundred and eighty-three total pitches divided by 25,596 total minutes equals 1.85 pitches per minute on average in Tiger games during the regular season.

Maybe it's not perfect, but it's probably good enough.

Here's the resulting table for 2025.

Team	Pit/Min
NYY	1.75
TOR	1.77
NYM	1.78
SDP	1.78
TEX	1.78
HOU	1.78
MIA	1.79
BAL	1.80
ARI	1.80
TBR	1.81
SEA	1.81
BOS	1.81
PHI	1.81
LAA	1.81
CHC	1.82
STL	1.82
LAD	1.82
CHW	1.83
MIN	1.83
WSN	1.84
KCR	1.84
COL	1.84
PIT	1.84
ATH	1.85
MIL	1.85
DET	1.85
CIN	1.85
CLE	1.85
SFG	1.87
ATL	1.87
MLB	1.82

The team's in red are the playoffs teams from last season.

My takeaways:

• Yeah, the Yankees are decidedly the slowest team in between pitches.
• The best teams are not necessarily the slowest teams.
• Those Yankees/Blue Jays regular season games must have been murder to sit through.

 

Edited 16 hours ago by chasfh

[Tigermojo]

Murakami has to sign by Monday. 

[gehringer_2]

22 minutes ago, chasfh said:

I think I figured out a hack to get at time in between pitches.

Fangraphs has pitches per game at the team level for both batting and pitching, in their Leaders area. Reference has time of game by team under Seasons/Other.

My simple hack is, take the total number of pitches faced by batters and thrown by pitchers for each team, and divide that by the average time of game multiplied by 162 for each team.

For example: the Tigers threw 24,044 pitches and faced 23,339 pitches as hitters, for a total of 47,383 total pitches thrown in their games. Their games averaged 158 minutes in length—multiply by 162, and we conclude that they played baseball for a total of 25,596 minutes during the regular season. (Apropos of nothing, that works out to almost 18 full days spent playing regular season baseball during the year.) Forty-seven thousand three hundred and eighty-three total pitches divided by 25,596 total minutes equals 1.85 pitches per minute on average in Tiger games during the regular season.

Maybe it's not perfect, but it's probably good enough.

Here's the resulting table for 2025.

Team	Pit/Min
NYY	1.75
TOR	1.77
NYM	1.78
SDP	1.78
TEX	1.78
HOU	1.78
MIA	1.79
BAL	1.80
ARI	1.80
TBR	1.81
SEA	1.81
BOS	1.81
PHI	1.81
LAA	1.81
CHC	1.82
STL	1.82
LAD	1.82
CHW	1.83
MIN	1.83
WSN	1.84
KCR	1.84
COL	1.84
PIT	1.84
ATH	1.85
MIL	1.85
DET	1.85
CIN	1.85
CLE	1.85
SFG	1.87
ATL	1.87
MLB	1.82

The team's in red are the playoffs teams from last season.

My takeaways:

• Yeah, the Yankees are decidedly the slowest team in between pitches.
• The best teams are not necessarily the slowest teams.
• Those Yankees/Blue Jays regular season games must have been murder to sit through.

 

Nice. Pulling things out of datasets that were only in there implicitly was something I did a lot of when I worked as a process engineer.

You could amplify the time calc a little bit by subtracting the minimum 2min per half inning inning break from every game (minimum of 34 min for a home team win) plus a couple of extra minutes twice in each game for brooming the field.(maybe 5 min) which is guaranteed dead time - the order wouldn't change but the %difference and the net time per pitch would be closer - but still not that close given all the umpire time-outs, to the real number.

The other thing that *might* play into this is the amount of foul territory in the ball park. If park has a small foul area, there probably is less time spent after a ball goes out of play, than if the foul ball stays on the field and either a play is made or it has to be retrieved by a ball boy or player. But this factor would follow the park, not the team.

Edited 15 hours ago by gehringer_2

[chasfh]

19 minutes ago, Tigermojo said:

Murakami has to sign by Monday. 

 

[RatkoVarda]

Keller, Weaver, Houser all sign for 2/22M