Today, at FanGraphs dot com, we’re turning over a new leaf. The last two times Aroldis Chapman changed teams — when he signed with the Pirates last January and when he was traded from Kansas City to Texas seven months prior — Jay Jaffe and I both referenced the Tattoo Infection Incident of 2022. It’s memorable and useful as a shorthand for the ignoble end to Chapman’s tenure with the Yankees — though both of his stints in New York were to a greater or lesser extent ignoble throughout.
More than that, Lindsey Adler’s story on the situation introduced a novel clause to the sportswriting canon, a literary construction so vivid it clearly fascinated both Jay and myself for months after the fact. But no more. I’m going to write an Aroldis Chapman story without quoting the phrase, “veritable moat of pus.”
Oh crap, I said the phrase that pays. What a pity; with that said, I’ll surely have another opportunity to write a clean transaction story about the veteran left-hander when he changes teams again. Because if Chapman is still able to command a one-year, $10.75 million contract from the Red Sox, it seems major league teams are determined to keep giving chances to a player who ought to have exhausted the sport’s patience by now.
The personal reasons for teams to avoid Chapman are numerous and memorable, from his workplace absenteeism in 2022 to the appalling details of his domestic violence case that merited a 30-game suspension in 2016. Last winter, I admitted to being confused by the Pirates’ eagerness to court such a player, given the goodwill they’d started to build up after years of fielding noncompetitive rosters.
The Red Sox aren’t quite in the same boat; they were in the ALCS as recently as 2021 and won the World Series in 2018, with a team that I’d rank as the best of that decade. But since 2018, the Sox have just the one playoff appearance, and they have more last-place finishes than winning seasons. Not exactly a team with social capital to throw around wantonly.
Actual capital, however, the Red Sox have in abundance. The Boston teams of the past five years have largely been failures, but good news: They’ve been expensive failures. Even in recent years, with payroll downsizing and indifferent ownership, the Red Sox have run payrolls north of $180 million, stretching into the $200 million range on occasion.
In 2024, the Red Sox paid a combined $26.9 million to three late-30s relief pitchers: Kenley Jansen, Chris Martin, and Luis Garcia. All three are currently free agents, and Boston’s payroll commitments for 2025 currently stand at just $148 million. What’s $10.75 million for Chapman, in that context, but a drop in the bucket?
Red Sox chief baseball officer Craig Breslow continues to build bullpens out of pieces that were competitive back when he himself was pitching. Chapman joins Liam Hendriks at the sharp end of Boston’s bullpen. Both pitchers have February birthdays; Hendricks will turn 36 just before spring training, and 18 days later Chapman will turn 37.
Many happy returns.
A few years ago, these two were among the best relievers in baseball. Hendriks has thrown just five innings over the past two seasons; he missed the first two months of 2023 while undergoing treatment for non-Hodgkin lymphoma, then tore his UCL about two weeks after his return to game action.
What of Chapman? His personal history doesn’t seem to bother GMs that much, so what do they still find attractive about him as a pitcher?
Well, it’s not that he’s the hardest-throwing pitcher in the world anymore. Chapman’s four-seamer, which topped out at an average velocity of 101.1 mph in 2016, now comes in at 97.8 mph, making it the 22nd-fastest four-seam fastball in the majors last season (minimum 100 pitches). The King of Velo Mountain is now Angels reliever Ben Joyce, while Chapman’s down with… wow, would you look at that! Thyago Vieira’s back in the Show!
Forgive me, I’m being glib. That doesn’t tell the whole story. For one, Chapman still has the second-best four-seamer velocity among left-handed pitchers. More relevant, he’s had a sinker, which comes in harder than his four-seamer, for several years now. That pitch was the sixth fastest in baseball in 2024, counting all fastball types.
Chapman’s has been throwing his sinker more and more as the years have gone on; he used it 27% of the time in 2024, which for all practical purposes gave it parity with his four-seamer. Chapman averaged 16.6 pitches per outing this past year, which comes to about four and a half sinkers and a little over five and a half four-seamers.
The hardest sinker Chapman threw in 2024 clocked 105.1 mph. It missed the strike zone.
Which is what I like to call a microcosm. Because when Chapman’s on the mound, a smart hitter might not even bother using his bat.
Since 2021, there have been 627 individual qualified reliever seasons. Chapman owns three of those, and all three are in the top 17 reliever seasons for walk rate. Chapman fell short of qualifying in 2022 (again, “veritable moat of pus”), when his walk rate was 17.5%.
The walkiest relievers in baseball history include some cautionary tales; Daniel Bard’s yips season is in no. 1 on the list, for instance. But the list of top 25 walk rate seasons since 2021 is full of pitchers who turned into unhittable monsters right afterward: José Alvarado, Cristian Javier, Kirby Yates, Lucas Erceg, Tanner Scott twice…
I’m skeptical that Chapman can do the same. He’s never had great control, even in his most dominant years with the Reds, and that walk rate has teetered on the edge of unlivable for four full seasons now.
Since 2023, he’s shown surprising… I don’t want to call it finesse, because he’s still walking the yard. But it’s something in that neighborhood. Chapman came up as the purest fastball-slider flamethrower you could imagine; now he’s an actual four-pitch pitcher.
It’s still fastball-slider to lefties, but he’s mixing four pitches — four-seamer, sinker, slider, splitter — to right-handed hitters. And the new pitches have been his most effective; last season, they were his two best in terms of opponent batting average, wOBA, xwOBA, and whiff rate. For the past two seasons, Chapman has actually handled righties quite a lot better than lefties.
Chapman’s Reverse Splits, 2023-24
| Opponent | FF% | SI% | SL% | SF% | Whiff% | wOBA | K% | BB% |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| vs. LHH | 44.9 | 9.1 | 42.7 | 3.3 | 35.8 | .313 | 30.9 | 19.5 |
| vs. RHH | 39.3 | 25.9 | 23.2 | 11.6 | 37.3 | .263 | 41.7 | 13.0 |
SOURCE: Baseball Savant
Even with the ludicrous walk rate, Chapman was fine in 2024; he had an ERA of 3.79, but his FIP and xERA averaged out to an even 3.00, indicating he was a little unlucky.
But it’s not clear to me that this is a $10 million a year reliever. Again. This is apparently a minority opinion; both Ben Clemens and his fan crowdsourcing Cerebro pegged Chapman for one year and $10 million. Getting that contract right within $1 million feels like a win to me.
But they also estimated contracts for Yates, Scott, Jansen, Clay Holmes, Carlos Estévez, Blake Treinen, and Jeff Hoffman, all of which came in between $8 million and $12 million per annum. I might take every single one of those pitchers over Chapman if the money were the same. If a free agent reliever named Chapis Aroldman blinked into existence this morning with Chapman’s exact physical and statistical attributes, but none of the aura conferred by his 335 career saves or the emeritus title of fastest pitcher alive, Aroldman would not be as handsomely compensated.
Chapman has been an idiosyncratic, but generally above-average reliever for the past two seasons. I imagine that if he’s healthy, he’s capable of doing the same in 2025. Perhaps Breslow and his merry men have a plan to extract even more from the aging flamethrower.
I don’t think Chapman is a bad pitcher, but I question the logic of a rebuilding team paying $10.75 million for a 36-year-old one-inning reliever. Particularly this one. Maybe the market will explode over the next two months and we’ll look back on this signing as a coup for Boston. Until then, it’s money that could’ve been spent more productively elsewhere.
