While it’s not quite the cakewalk that the NL Central projects to be in 2021, the AL West is up for grabs this year. The Astros project as comfortable favorites, but that’s just one team. The Rangers and Mariners aren’t likely to be competitive. That leaves room for the A’s and Angels to take a crack at the division. On Thursday, Oakland took a stab at it, signing Trevor Rosenthal to a one-year, $11 million deal, as Jon Heyman first reported.

If you glanced at our list of the top 50 free agents, you won’t find this deal particularly odd. Projector emeritus Craig Edwards saw a two-year, $16 million deal for Rosenthal, while crowdsourcing came in at two years and $13 million. One year and $11 million is a better deal than those, but not by a huge amount, and Jeff Passan reported that he turned down multi-year deals in that range. Rosenthal’s contract includes deferrals — he’s due $3 million in 2021, $3 million in 2022, and $5 million in 2023. That’s essentially $11 million, though; at a 2% interest rate, it’s the same as $10.75 million in 2021. Don’t focus too much on that — it’s mere window dressing, and the interesting part of the contract is Rosenthal himself.

Rosenthal is hardly a standard free agent, and the fact that he’s signing a perfectly ordinary contract is in itself remarkable. This time last year, he had reported to camp with the Kansas City Royals on a minor league contract. The deal wasn’t for the league minimum — it guaranteed him $2 million if he made the major league roster, with another $2.25 million in incentives. Earnable money is different from a guaranteed contract, however, and if he’d had a bad spring training or tweaked something before camp ended, he’d never see the money.

With the benefit of hindsight, that deal was great for both Rosenthal and the Royals. He appeared in 14 games and struck out 21 opponents, good for a 37.5% strikeout rate that echoed his best years with the Cardinals. Did he walk 12.5% of opposing batters? Sure, but you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet, and he had been plenty effective in St. Louis even with slightly elevated walk rates. The Royals dealt him to San Diego in exchange for Edward Olivares and Dylan Coleman, two mid-level prospects, and everyone walked away happy.

Wait, hold up. Rosenthal has a career 2.75 FIP (and a 3.46 ERA and 3.32 xFIP, it’s hardly smoke and mirrors). He had a career 2.79 FIP before his solid 2020. He got flipped for two real prospects after 13 innings of relief work, after 233 pitches. Teams seemed to agree that he had value. Why did he have to take a minor league deal to prove himself? Read the rest of this entry »

In 2021, Fernando Tatis Jr. is one of the Padres’ brightest stars. In 2031, he’ll presumably also be one of the Padres’ brightest stars, because he just signed a 14-year, $340 million extension to remain in San Diego, as Dennis Lin and Ken Rosenthal first reported.

That’s a lot of years, and a lot of money, and don’t you worry, we’ll have some ZiPS projections and some calculations of dollars per WAR and an explanation of how the arbitration system impacts this deal. First, though, here’s Tatis having fun:

With that important message out of the way, let’s get down to business. Tatis is one of the best players in baseball right this minute, and he turned 22 a month ago. When he broke into the majors in 2019, he truly broke in. His .317/.379/.590 line was scintillating, and also too short; a stress reaction in his back limited him to only 84 games. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2016, Matt Shoemaker had a career year. He made 27 starts, threw 160 innings, and compiled 3.5 WAR on the back of a 3.88 ERA, 3.52 FIP, and truly pinpoint control (4.5% walk rate). In the four years since, he’s thrown 166 innings — total. That’s been worth 1.3 WAR, with his 4.12 ERA, 4.73 FIP, and 8.2% walk rate all representing steps back from his peak form.

Of course, as a pitcher, his services are still in demand: There are never enough arms to cover the innings that teams need, and you can always dream on someone returning to their peak form. This year, that need and dream belong to the Twins, who signed Shoemaker on Sunday to a one-year deal worth $2 million as he attempts to reprise his former success.

From late 2016 to ’20, everything that could go wrong for Shoemaker did. On September 4, 2016, he was hit in the head with a line drive that fractured his skull. He rehabbed from that injury in time for the 2017 season, only to have his year cut short by forearm tightness; he eventually had a compressed nerve surgically corrected. When he returned to the field, his arm still hurt, and he missed most of 2018 after surgery on an elbow tendon.

That was enough for the Angels, who non-tendered Shoemaker, but his woes were only beginning. After signing with the Blue Jays, he tore his ACL during a rundown (as a fielder, but still!) after only five starts. After yet another rehab, he returned for an abbreviated 2020. Even then, he couldn’t stay on the field, missing the better part of a month with shoulder inflammation.

That’s a truly grim five-year stretch, the kind of injury past that some pitchers can’t recover from. But while some pitchers’ arms are never the same after that kind of luck, Shoemaker has been effective when he’s taken the field. It hasn’t been great — as I mentioned above, his ERA, FIP, and walk rate have all been worse — but he’s still been playable, and it’s easy to convince yourself that a healthy Shoemaker might add back some velocity and pick up where he left off.
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I’ve always struggled to understand the “ceiling” projections that accompany prospects. It’s not that I don’t get the concept — 95th- or 99th-percentile outcomes aren’t the same for everyone, and that’s interesting. And it’s not that I don’t think some prospects have higher ceilings than others. It’s merely that I have a hard time discerning which types of prospects have the greatest chance of being superstars. For every Bryce Harper where the talent smacks you in the face, there’s a Mookie Betts. Fine, it’s not a one-to-one ratio, but plenty of prospects exceed their supposed ceilings, and I’m no good at figuring out which ones are the most likely to do so.

Because of this deficiency, I’ve always looked at prospects slightly differently. I tend to look for players who have a good chance at becoming average regulars, assuming that the best way to find prospects who’ll go completely ham and turn into MVP candidates is to find as many minor leaguers who have the skills to make the big leagues as possible.

This process has led to some successes — like Eric Longenhagen, I was optimistic about Randy Arozarena when the Rays acquired him in 2019. It has also led to some failures — like former FanGraphs editor Carson Cistulli, I’m still waiting for Max Schrock to ascend to batting-title contention. This year, I’ve been working on putting a little more intellectual rigor behind my process, and Eric and Meg Rowley were kind enough to let me share the Prospects Week stage to yammer on about it.

As befits any Ben Clemens project, I used a combination of statistical modeling, careful observation, and semi-rigorous gibberish to synthesize a group of hitters I’m interested in. If you want to ignore the methodology and just get to the sweet, sweet list, I totally understand, but for everyone else, let’s talk about that “statistical modeling” part.

The natural impulse when looking at minor league statistics is to apply some kind of translation. Strike out 15% of the time in Double A? You’ll strike out 23% of the time in the majors. Nine percent walks and a .330 BABIP? That’ll be 6% and .295, thank you very much. Then you add a little age-related improvement dust, and bam, major league prediction. One problem with that method: it’s terrible and doesn’t work. Read the rest of this entry »

While the Dodgers spent plenty of the offseason upgrading their roster, they conspicuously avoided one spot. Third base, which has been Justin Turner’s domain since Los Angeles signed him before the 2014 season, lay fallow. With Turner on the market, it always felt like a foregone conclusion that the two sides would reunite. On Saturday, they made it official; the 36-year-old is returning on a two-year deal worth $34 million with a club option for a third year, as… well, as Justin Turner first reported.

When Turner last left the field as a Dodger, the moment was bittersweet. His team had just won the World Series after years of failure, but he was removed during the clinching Game 6 after testing positive for COVID-19. Despite that, he returned to the field, maskless, to celebrate with his teammates. Rumors of discipline swirled, though MLB eventually declined to enforce any punishment. Days later, he became a free agent.

Despite that strange backdrop, Turner always looked like a good bet to return to the Dodgers. As a native of Southern California, he has ties to the city; heck, they have a Justin Turner day there. In addition, the team’s only roster hole was at third base, where it had left Edwin Ríos atop the depth chart despite only 139 plate appearances in the majors — a weak link in an otherwise monstrous lineup.

No longer. Turner has been almost metronomically consistent since joining the Dodgers in 2014. His lowest WAR total (excluding the shortened 2020 season) was 3.4, and his highest 5.4. His worst batting line was still excellent: .275/.339/.493 in 2016. His best batting line fell just short of true superstar territory — .312/.406/.518 in 2018, or maybe .340/.404/.493 in a half-season in ’14. He’s simply been a great hitter, year in and year out, by walking, limiting strikeouts, and making solid contact.
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This story starts, as all good stories do, with me recounting the time one of my coworkers and I discussed something. Okay, fine, very few good stories start that way — almost none, in fact — but bear with me. This (non-baseball) coworker, someone who I consider very bright and very interested in baseball, told me he didn’t really believe in wRC+, even after I’d shown him some articles describing it.

Why, I wondered, didn’t he believe in it? It’s so elegant! The math is right there! How can you not like something that wraps up performance at the plate in a single number? No need to compare apples to oranges — you can juice everything to a pulp and simply count calories. His answer was simple: it doesn’t consider batting order.

“You’re telling me,” he said, “that you’d rather have Mitch Moreland as a leadoff hitter than Xander Bogaerts?” It was 2017, and we were working in the Northeast, which explains why both players were Red Sox and why this question was even close. “His wRC+ is higher, but he’d be worse at leadoff. He doesn’t get on base enough.”

To be honest, it’s a compelling argument. I didn’t really have the intellectual tools or the time to counter it. I went with the old tried and true method: I vaguely mentioned something about context-neutrality in the long run, said I had some bonds to arbitrage or whatnot, and went back to work, ending the conversation without conceding defeat.

Fast forward to today, and I still don’t have a wonderful answer to my former co-worker’s point. I do have a computer program that simulates games, though, so I decided to come up with a quick and dirty check. What if we plugged real hitters with similar one-number batting statistics but who get there in wildly different ways into the lineup? Would we learn anything? Would I be able to write 1,500 words about it and entertain the masses? I guess we’ll find out! Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this offseason, Dan Szymborski wrote about the Giants’ remade rotation and the strategy behind it. In short: Alex Wood and Anthony DeSclafani were interesting free agents, and without much chance of reaching the playoffs, the team opted to buy low and hope to catch lightning in a bottle. In the weeks since, San Francisco has repeated the same project, only this time for the bullpen, highlighted by Jake McGee’s two-year, $7 million dollar deal announced on Tuesday.

McGee joins a sampler platter of relievers who might be good on cheap deals. In early December, the Giants signed Matt Wisler to a one-year deal. Later that month, they signed John Brebbia, who will spend at least the first half of the year rehabbing from Tommy John surgery but could be a late-season bullpen piece. They’ve also extended minor league deals to Dominic Leone, James Sherfy, Silvino Bracho, and Zack Littell. Spaghetti, meet wall.

McGee is the most interesting member of this group, which explains why he got two years and real money while everyone else got only a single year. He combines three things that teams look out for in relievers: he strikes out more batters than average; he walks fewer batters than average; and he’s left-handed. Those three traits alone are enough to get a job, and indeed, the Dodgers signed McGee to a one-year deal before 2020 when he was coming off back-to-back -0.3 WAR seasons.
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Earlier this week, as is tradition, FanGraphs founder David Appelman went into his garage, turned off all the lights except for some candles, and performed a dark and arcane ritual. Then he went back inside, pushed a few buttons on his computer, and now we have playoff odds for 2021!

Okay, fine, that isn’t exactly how it went down, but it’s close. Our playoff odds incorporate little pieces of a lot of features you’ve already seen on the website. We start with a blended projection that incorporates ZiPS and Steamer’s rate statistic projections. We add in playing time projections from RosterResource, which incorporate health, skill, and team situation to create a unified guess for how each team will distribute their plate appearances and innings pitched.

With playing time in hand, we use BaseRuns to estimate how many runs each team will score and allow per game based on our earlier blended rate statistic projections. That gives us a schedule-neutral win percentage for each team, because you can turn runs scored and runs allowed into a projection via the Pythagorean approximation. From there, we simulate the season 10,000 times, with an odds ratio and a random number generator determining the outcome of each matchup. Voila! Our playoff odds.

Why am I telling you all of this? First, so you can look at them. They’re accessible from the main page, but you can also click here to dive in. Second, because I’m going to walk through some projections I found interesting, as well as a few places where the gap between common perception and our odds merit an explanation. Let’s get started! Read the rest of this entry »

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It feels like a long time ago that the Oakland A’s won the AL West. Partially, that’s because everything feels like it lasted forever in 2020 — the last year has been the longest decade of our lives. Partially too, though, it’s because the team has spent the vast majority of the offseason doing nothing.

Marcus Semien, Liam Hendriks, Joakim Soria, Yusmeiro Petit, Mike Minor, and Tommy La Stella all left in free agency. On Saturday, the A’s made their first major transaction of the offseason, trading Khris Davis and Jonah Heim for Elvis Andrus. Later that day, they issued their first (!) major league contract of the offseason, signing Mike Fiers to a one-year, $3.5 million deal, as Ken Rosenthal and Alex Coffey first reported.

Fiers was an important but unsung part of a run-prevention monster in 2020. He made 11 starts for the A’s, who reached the playoffs on the back of a simple strategy: prevent some runs with starting pitching, hold some leads with a phenomenal bullpen, and sprinkle excellent defense around it to make it all play up. Fiers wasn’t an ace, and he didn’t need to be.

That appears to be Oakland’s plan again this year. Their projected rotation is close to unchanged (Minor started a handful of games, but the other five top starters are all back):

Fiers will be the worst everyday starter, like he was last year, but he’ll take the ball every five days, and the A’s would have struggled on that front otherwise. Daulton Jefferies, A.J. Puk, and Grant Holmes are the next three starters up, and all have had serious injury issues in the past few years; the team will likely want to limit all of their innings this year. Read the rest of this entry »