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Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
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If there were a rule that prevented World Series champions from making moves during the offseason following a championship, the Chicago Cubs would likely be one of the teams best able to withstand such a handicap. In their rotation, they return their four best starters and plan to move bullpen acquisition Mike Montgomery to the rotation. On the position-player side the team loses center fielder Dexter Fowler but remains pretty well insulated to withstand his loss by fielding good players at every other spot.
The bullpen, however, would be another matter under the terms of this hypothetical scenario. The Cubs entered the offseason with a number of questions in the bullpen, and they have answered those questions with high-risk, high-reward relievers who could give the Cubs one of the best bullpens in baseball.
Entering the 2016 season, the Cubs’ two best relievers were expected to be Hector Rondon and Pedro Strop. Along with depth in the form of Trevor Cahill, Justin Grimm, Adam Warren, and Travis Wood, the Cubs began the season with a bullpen that ranked eighth in our 2016 Positional Power Rankings. It was a solid, but not spectacular, group.
Sensing an opportunity to win their first World Series title in a considerable time, the club decided to shore up that bullpen at midseason by bringing in Aroldis Chapman and Montgomery. While Chapman didn’t perform as well in the playoffs as he did in the regular season, the innings total of Cubs relievers in the playoffs reveals the importance of the team’s midseason additions.
| Player | IP |
|---|---|
| Aroldis Chapman | 15.2 |
| Mike Montgomery | 14.1 |
| Travis Wood | 6.1 |
| Carl Edwards | 6.1 |
| Hector Rondon | 6.0 |
| Pedro Strop | 5.2 |
| Justin Grimm | 4.1 |
| Jon Lester | 3.0 |
The Cubs’ two midseason acquisitions pitched roughly 50% of the team’s postseason bullpen innings, while the stalwarts from the beginning of the season recorded less than 20% of those crucial outs. Both Rondon and Strop suffered injuries in the second half and Cubs manager Joe Maddon was reluctant to rely on them in pressure situations. While Montgomery is still on the team, his role has likely changed. Meanwhile, is Chapman headed back to New York with the Yankees, and lefty Travis Wood is also a free agent.
If you’re an avid FanGraphs reader, you might remember a piece I wrote January in which I wondered whether Vladimir Guerrero had the credentials of a Hall of Famer. The verdict? He does. As an inductee, he wouldn’t have the most impressive resume in the Hall, but he’d belong — and, according to the first 44 ballots collected by Ryan Thibodaux by way of his BBHOF Tracker, it appears as though the voters agree:
| Player | Vote% |
|---|---|
| Jeff Bagwell | 89% |
| Tim Raines | 87% |
| Ivan Rodriguez | 81% |
| Vladimir Guerrero | 74% |
| Trevor Hoffman | 74% |
| Barry Bonds | 70% |
| Roger Clemens | 70% |
| Edgar Martinez | 66% |
| Mike Mussina | 62% |
| Curt Schilling | 51% |
| Manny Ramirez | 43% |
| Lee Smith | 36% |
| Larry Walker | 19% |
| Jeff Kent | 17% |
| Fred McGriff | 15% |
| Jorge Posada | 11% |
| Sammy Sosa | 11% |
| Billy Wagner | 9% |
| Gary Sheffield | 6% |
At 74%, Guerrero is right on the threshold for induction (which requires a candidate is named on 75% of ballots). That means that even if he isn’t selected this year Guerrero will almost certainly gain entry to the Hall next year. Which is great. Guerrero was a fantastic player. He’s deserving.
Larry Walker was also a great player, though. In most important ways, he was a superior one. And he’s received enough votes on previous Hall of Fame ballots to return for a seventh year. Like the previous six years, however, Walker is unlikely to be enshrined in Cooperstown this year — if the early polling holds steady, that is. In light of Guerrero’s seeming popularity, that’s strange. By most reasonable accounts, Walker has a better case. If you vote for Guerrero, you have to vote for Walker.
Two days ago, I examined what exactly is going on in the San Diego rotation. The notion of a Padres pitcher is almost a philosophical one. Technically there are starting pitchers on the roster, yes, but any resemblance to any quality pitchers, alive or dead, is entirely coincidental.
This is somewhat the case with the group of outfielders currently employed by the Cleveland Indians. I would hesitate to insinuate that these outfielders, who play for a team that reached Game Seven of the World Series, are of a similar quality to the starting pitchers of the Padres. Tyler Naquin, after all, just finished third in the American League Rookie of the Year voting. Brandon Guyer could be sitting on his couch at home and stand a good chance of being hit by an errant pitch and being awarded first place. Lonnie Chisenhall is a solid if unspectacular player. And we must remember that for all his injury tribulations this past year and change, Michael Brantley is still one of the more talented players in all of baseball.
Yet when taken altogether, this does not look like the outfield of a team that just won a pennant, nor one that’s expected to contend for a division title. Cleveland’s strength will always be its pitching. The team is built around Francisco Lindor, yes, but it’s also built around Corey Kluber, Carlos Carrasco, and Danny Salazar. These are the men who decide if the team soars or crashes. If the pitching is good, the team will have a chance. They still need good position players, though, and the outfield gives them three opportunities to do that.
Relievers are the hot new thing, you might have heard. Aroldis Chapman and Kenley Jansen got north of $80 million, plus opt-outs. Mark Melancon got $62 million, plus an opt-out. Mike Dunn got $19 million. Mike Dunn! Perhaps nothing says reliever inflation more than Mike Dunn getting $19 million. Or maybe that just says he signed with the Rockies, and the Rockies are weird. But Colorado bizarreness aside, good relievers aren’t cheap anymore.
Well, unless they’re good in a really weird way, anyway.
| 9:11 |
: Welp okay
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| 9:11 |
: Hello friends and welcome to delayed Friday baseball chat
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| 9:11 |
: Hello, friend!
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| 9:11 |
: Hello friend
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| 9:12 |
: Where’s my burrito? Where’s my burrito? Where’s my burrito?
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| 9:12 |
: at the store
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After having typically appeared in the very famous pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past few years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Tampa Bay Rays. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.
Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Chicago NL / Cleveland / Detroit / Houston / San Diego / Toronto / Washington.
Batters
Due to their limited resources, the Rays have been compelled to search for value in places where it isn’t readily apparent. These financial constraints, for example, led pretty directly to the phenomenon known as Ben Zobrist, Improbable Superstar. The ascent of Kevin Kiermaier (502 PA, 4.2 zWAR) is almost equally improbable as Zobrist’s, though. Selected in the 31st round of the 2010 draft out of Parkland College, Kiermaier has now averaged more than four wins per season over his first three major-league campaigns. Much of that value, of course, is a product of Kiermaier’s defensive acumen. ZiPS calls for more of the same in that regard, projecting Kiermaier to save 17 more runs than the average center fielder.
With the exception of Evan Longoria (658, 3.9), unfortunately, the club doesn’t currently employ any field players who profile as anything much better than average — and the short-term prognosis for newly acquired Wilson Ramos (465, 2.5), one of only four batters who receives a forecast for more than two wins, is uncertain in light of the season-ending injury he suffered at the end of 2016.
No offense to Welington Castillo, but the hottest topic in Orioles land right now is whether the team should trade Zach Britton. Clubs, unsurprisingly, have shown interest in a possible deal. Scour the web and you’ll find polemics both for and against one. I’m here to argue the latter case.
The case for trading Britton isn’t hard to make. He’ll make $11.4 million next year, as projected by MLB Trade Rumors. That’s a lot of scratch for an ostensibly mid-market club to pay someone to pitch 70 innings.
We can all agree that WAR does a pretty good job of sorting, right? Like, even if you can quibble with the numbers, it paints a pretty good general picture. Good players tend to have better WARs than worse players. Great, okay. Over the past couple seasons, 130 different players have batted at least 1,000 times. Recognize right away there’s selection bias here — it’s mostly just decent players, and better players, who would play that much. The sample is already skewed somewhat toward quality, toward talent. Within that pool, by WAR, Odubel Herrera ranks 38th. He’s statistical neighbors with Daniel Murphy, Dexter Fowler, Dustin Pedroia, and Kole Calhoun. Herrera turns 25 in a couple of weeks, and as a Rule 5 grab, he’s been fantastic.
It makes all the sense in the world that the Phillies would want to get Herrera locked up. And from Herrera’s side, of course he’d want guaranteed money. Two winters ago his old team left him unprotected. There’s vulnerability there, vulnerability no one wants to feel again and again. Herrera now has an extension, which isn’t strange. But it’s another extension that leaves a young player looking like he sold himself short.
