The first member of our Top 50 Free Agents list has signed, and as you might expect given that this is baseball and not basketball, it was a minor signing. Robbie Ray is remaining in Toronto after the Blue Jays extended him a one-year, $8 million contract. Depending on what you think of Ray, it’s either a sign of a slow market or a fairly priced reclamation project — for what it’s worth, Craig Edwards projected exactly a one-year, $8 million deal.

For me, there are two interesting parts of the Ray signing. First, Robbie Ray felt this close to breaking into the top tier of starters for years. In his first five seasons with the Diamondbacks, he was frequently exciting and sometimes excellent. He put up a 2.89 ERA in 2017, and it wasn’t some hollow number with concerning peripherals; he induced swinging strikes on 14.2% of his pitches, a career high, and struck out 32.8% of opposing batters.

He also walked 10.7% of opposing batters, and unfortunately, that wasn’t a fluke. He walked 13.3% the next year and a grisly 17.9% in 2020, a sure way to go from inconsistent to ineffective. Missing bats is the most valuable pitching skill, but all the bat missing in the world won’t help you when that many batters are getting a free trip down to first. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I did a deeply meaningless thing. I ignored our site’s excellent projections — both ZiPS and Steamer do a great job of projecting future performance — and made my own terrible ones using some old methodology. Why? Partially because I’m not smart enough to build my own ZiPS, but mainly so that I could walk through the very basic way projection systems work — not by wishcasting or hoping or by finding some sneaky data point no one else has, but by carefully using and weighing the data we all have.

Of course, that’s a buttoned-down and boring way to think about things. Let’s talk about something fun instead! The top of the 2021 projections I made yesterday is dotted with a bunch of people you’d expect, and since I didn’t even bother park-adjusting it, a few too many Rockies. The impressive Fernando Tatis Jr. comes in at 11th in wOBA, which is cool given he still has a season of zeroes in there. Freddie Freeman is continuing his ascent. But here’s a shocker: there are four Mets in the top 40.

That sounds, well, wrong. The Mets aren’t supposed to be a good offensive team. They’re supposed to be a pitching team, what with Jacob deGrom and Noah Syndergaard atop the rotation (upon Syndergaard’s recovery) and Edwin Díaz locking down the bullpen. There’s just one problem with that narrative: it’s completely wrong. The Mets were, in fact, tied with the Dodgers for the best wRC+ in baseball last year. They finished fifth in position player WAR — the defense wasn’t a strength — but generally hit an absolute ton.
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It’s November, which means it’s time for an offseason tradition: asking whether some player who had a great season is now better than Mike Trout. Is it a reasonable tradition? Not particularly! But whether it’s Bryce Harper or Mookie Betts, Fernando Tatis Jr. or (in the mind of some wildly optimistic scout) Luis Robert, the tenor of the story is the same: this one guy is a good hitter now, and so maybe he’s a better hitter than Trout, the old best hitter.

One way you could handle this pointless speculation is to ignore it. You’d be totally justified in doing so. Trout is great! He had his worst year this year, and he was still great. Thanks for raising this silly question, enjoy the offseason, see you in February.

As you might have guessed based on the fact that this is an article, however, I’m going to do a little more than that. I’m not going to get into the hot-take-ness of it all, but there are ways to examine this question with a little bit of intellectual rigor. Also, while I’ve got you here, I might as well steal whole cloth from an old Tom Tango idea and make some simplistic projections, all the better to understand our site’s more complicated projections with.

The Marcel projection system is named after a monkey, and it also doesn’t exist anymore. But the concept still makes a ton of sense. Take a player’s actual performance in the last three years, do a little weighting, do a little mean reverting, and call it a projection. That probably sounds too simple, but that’s really how Marcel works. It’s not supposed to be the best projection system in the world, merely the minimum sufficient projection system.
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It’s been a while since we updated the OOTP Brewers, my experiment with crowd-managing a team in an online Out Of The Park Baseball league. We did just okay; our 83-79 record was good for second in the NL Central, but didn’t come close to yielding a Wild Card slot — too bad we didn’t have this year’s expanded playoffs system.

What lessons can we learn from the season? First, our pitching depth was severely tested, in a way that suggests we should focus more heavily on cultivating Triple-A talent in the future. Corbin Burnes, Brett Anderson, Jeff Samardzija (a mid-season acquisition), Alex Claudio, Tim Hill, and Devin Williams all ended the season on the 60-day disabled list, and Josh Lindblom missed three months early on. We withstood the storm somewhat by acquiring Kevin Gausman, but he’s headed into free agency this offseason — more pitching depth feels like an absolute necessity.

Additionally, this season showcased one of the Brewers roster’s biggest weaknesses: a lack of secondary difference-makers behind Christian Yelich. Keston Hiura and Brock Holt hit decently well, but Hiura also missed time, and Lorenzo Cain was alternately injured and ineffective before finally missing the last two months of the season. When Yelich went down for eight weeks, the offense simply had no driving force.

Unlike the starting pitching, that’s not an easy contingency to plan for. When a team with Milwaukee’s payroll signs a star to a long-term deal, they don’t have a lot of recourse in case of injury or ineffectiveness. We did sign Hiura to an extension this year, but that can only go so far. As Yelich goes, so will go the Brewers, and that isn’t likely to change anytime soon.

With that in mind, I have two priorities for the offseason: acquire a major-league starting pitcher and hunt the waiver wire and Rule 5 draft for pitchers who can start the season as relievers but double as back-of-rotation depth in the event of injury. The Brewers roster simply didn’t have enough pitching to withstand this year’s injury bug, and I’d like to avoid that going forward.

Of course, the entire season wasn’t about the Brewers. Ten teams made the playoffs in this league, and it was a pretty wild field. The NL had its fair share of chalk — you’ll hardly be surprised to know that the Dodgers won their division — but it also featured one notable upstart. The Pirates finished second in the NL and won the Central, paced by a devastating pitching staff (first in the NL in starting pitching ERA, fourth in overall pitching WAR) and an offense bolstered by a midseason addition of Marcus Semien. Read the rest of this entry »

Let me give you an interesting blind resume. Well, not blind really, because you’ve presumably read the title of this article already, but humor me. Our “anonymous” starter has been one of the best pitchers in baseball of late. Over the last four years, he’s compiled a 3.34 ERA, 3.27 FIP, and 3.46 xFIP. He’s done it with strikeouts — 28.4% and 10.6 per nine innings — and with grounders — his 1.61 GB/FB ratio helps him suppress home runs to the tune of 0.73 per nine innings.

Looking at seasonal production is confusing with 2020, so we’ll use a slightly different benchmark: WAR produced per 30 starts. On that list, our “mystery” pitcher places 20th in baseball over the last four years. Depending on how you define an ace, he might be one; at the very least, he’s been one of the best pitchers in the game.

This isn’t a true blind resume, of course. It’s Charlie Morton. The former Pirates prospect turned his career around in Houston, and he’s done more of the same in Tampa Bay. He’s also developed a reputation as a playoff monster, and while I’m not here to debate whether playoff aces exist, he was excellent this postseason; 20 innings of 2.7 ERA, 2.59 FIP excellence.

Why is this resume relevant? On Friday, the Rays declined Morton’s 2021 club option. Morton was due to earn $15 million in 2021, the result of a complicated contract that could deflate based on Morton’s health. The Rays are, to put it charitably, frugal — Morton was their highest-paid player by far last year, and they’ve had one of the five lowest payrolls in baseball in each of the last 10 years.

That said, let’s delve into Morton to figure out what the team declining his option means. Is it a referendum on Tampa Bay’s voluntary extreme penury? Is it a sign of a cold free agent market to come? Or are the Rays simply unconvinced that Morton will deliver the top-end starter performance he’s shown over the last four years? Read the rest of this entry »

Maybe you’ve heard — Blake Snell pitched a nifty five-plus innings two nights ago. The decision to pull him or leave him in has been hashed, rehashed, diced, A-Rod’ed, and generally poked and prodded like a murder victim in an episode of CSI. If you want my opinion on it, I would have kept Snell in, though I don’t think that was in any way the determining factor in the game.

That’s not why I’m writing today, though. Any honest analysis of that decision is going to come down to a minuscule edge. Use one good pitcher, or use another good pitcher? It doesn’t matter much — the players on the field determine the game, not the manager, even if you think the decision was clearly one way or the other. Instead, let’s appreciate not what Blake Snell could have done if he stayed in, but what he did do when he was in the game.

Snell threw 73 pitches on Tuesday night. He generated a whopping 16 swinging strikes, a 21.9% swinging strike rate. That was his second-highest mark of the year, behind a September 29 start against the Blue Jays. That might not sound impressive, but the Dodgers are, well, the Dodgers. No other starter this year topped a 20% swinging strike rate against them; they simply aren’t the kind of team that swings and misses. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s a left-handed first baseman putting on an absolute clinic at the plate in the World Series. Throw him a ball? He’s not interested. He’ll take and take until you challenge him in the strike zone. Even then, he might take — it’s three strikes to a strikeout, after all, and you might walk him all the same. He’s hitting well enough to keep people honest, but really, the walks are the main event. No, it’s not Max Muncy (or fine, it’s not just Max Muncy). It’s Ji-Man Choi.

Let’s start with the basics. Here are the playoff batters who swing least often at pitches outside the strike zone, minimum 40 opportunities to chase:

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Saturday night, the Rays and Dodgers played one of the wildest World Series games ever. Leads changed hands, runners slipped, pitchers crumbled, and the Rays walked it off in spectacular fashion. At the time, I criticized several managerial decisions, and I wasn’t alone. With the benefit of a few days of thinking, however, I wanted to look back at a few key decisions each manager made and decide whether they were blunders or merely tough decisions that looked worse in hindsight.

For the Dodgers, the key managerial decision was the relief pitcher hierarchy. After a spectacular pitching performance from Walker Buehler the previous night, Dave Roberts had the entire bullpen available. His first decision came with two outs in the fifth inning, when Julio Urías began his third trip through the Rays’ lineup. Urías had been up and down on the night; he had nine strikeouts, but he’d also allowed some loud contact and two home runs. The Rays stacked their lineup to challenge him; the first four hitters were all right-handed.

Roberts went to Blake Treinen, and I think that’s a reasonable choice. The Rays had a bench full of lefties, which means any stretch of righties in their lineup can turn into lefties at the drop of a scorecard. Despite that fact, however, Randy Arozarena probably wasn’t leaving the game, and guaranteeing a Treinen/Arozarena matchup, plus forcing Tampa Bay to use some left-handed pinch hitters, is as close to a positive platoon matchup as the Dodgers were going to get.

That leads us to a pivotal pitching change in the sixth: two runners on, one out, and Brandon Lowe stepping to the plate. Behind Lowe, the Rays had Willy Adames and Hunter Renfroe due up. In theory, that’s two righties and a lefty. In practice, Lowe is the only Tampa Bay hitter who the team couldn’t substitute. That left Dave Roberts with three decisions, in my mind — all of which he would have had to make several batters earlier to allow the pitchers time to warm up. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2004 movie Primer is widely considered the most complicated movie plot of all time. Two engineers travel back in time again — and again — and maybe before?? — and again in an attempt to mold events to their own benefit. It’s a truly ridiculous, convoluted mess — and it pales in comparison to what the Dodgers and Rays did last night in Game 4 of the World Series.

Let’s begin at the beginning. Ryan Yarbrough took the mound for the Rays, on three days’ rest after a relief appearance in the first game of the series, and he wasn’t sharp. He surrendered solo home runs to Justin Turner and Corey Seager, and scattered three other hits and a walk while striking out only one batter. He was out of the game in the top of the fourth.

Julio Urías, his counterpart, flirted with brilliance. He struck out nine Rays out of the 18 he faced, bullying the opposing lineup to the tune of 20 swinging strikes. Tampa Bay whiffed 17 times on his fastball alone, and his curveball accounted for another 10 called strikes. Naturally, the Rays tagged him for two home runs — a Randy Arozarena first-pitch ambush and a full-count moonshot from Hunter Renfroe. The Dodgers had added a run in the top of the fifth, so Urías left with a 3-2 lead.

LA added another run in the sixth inning,, and the game felt like it might start getting away from Tampa Bay in a hurry. The Dodgers bullpen isn’t airtight, but the Rays’ own bullpen hadn’t been able to slow down opposing hitters all series, and they were running out of good options to fill innings. What was the offense going to do, score six runs in four innings or something? Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday night, Nick Anderson hung a curveball. Will Smith greeted it rudely:

Two batters later, Anderson faced Edwin Ríos with a chance to get out of the inning. As Eric Longenhagen noted on our Twitch stream at the time, Anderson hung another one:

Luckily for the Rays, Ríos didn’t quite time that one up. Anderson followed it up with another curve, which bounced, and he escaped the inning. Things could have gone much worse, however, and Eric and I mused that Anderson might want to take a look at what was causing his pitches to float in like that.

It seems pretty obvious that Anderson’s breaking ball, a biting snapdragon that seems to pack two inches of horizontal break into the last 10 feet of its homeward path, is at its best when it drops most. There’s only one problem with that theory: the data. Take a look at Anderson’s curve in 2019, broken up into quartiles based on vertical break:

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