If you’re into FanGraphs’ linear pitch values, there was a many-way tie for the single most valuable pitch of the year. As the pitch values are context-neutral and count-adjusted, the best pitch you can throw is a 3-0 pitch that retires a batter. 3-0 is the worst count you can be in as a pitcher, and an out is the best possible outcome. Here’s one:

Wait a second. That doesn’t look like a very good pitch at all! Yasiel Puig got robbed there; that’s a 400-foot laser beam, at pretty much the optimum home run angle. He just happened to catch the deepest part of the park, and Starling Marte is fast.

Yes, linear weights aren’t perfect. We all know that. Many of their problems are nearly impossible to fix; if a pitcher’s fastball helps set up his slider, should it get credit for some of the slider’s effectiveness? If he’s staying away from Juan Soto with first base open and a man on third, should we dock those pitches for being outside the strike zone? Pitch values have their fair share of problems.

But if we can’t fix all of those problems, we can at least tackle one. When a ball is nailed like Puig did with that one, it’s usually a hit. Since 2015, we’ve had access to xwOBA, which (roughly speaking) considers the speed and angle of a given hit to assign it a value. Rather than look at the result on the field, it looks at the results of all similar batted balls. It has its shortcomings (largely related to spray angle), but it sure beats calling that Jordan Lyles pitch a good one. Read the rest of this entry »

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On July 5, in his last start before the All-Star game, Alex Wood was dealing. The Diamondbacks couldn’t touch him with a thirty-nine-and-a-half foot pole. Over seven dominant innings, he struck out 10 batters, walking only two in a scoreless outing. Wood didn’t start the All-Star game, but he could have; his 2.04 FIP, 30.9% strikeout rate, 1.67 ERA, and 10-0 record had something for every stripe of fan. As he walked off the mound, the crowd at Chavez Ravine roared.

Wait — Chavez Ravine? Oh. Yeah. I left something out. That was July 5, 2017. It’s been a minute since Alex Wood was at his world-devouring best. In the second half of that season, he was ordinary, potentially sub-ordinary. His strikeout rate fell 12 points, his FIP more than doubled, and the Dodgers started managing his workload. The culprit? It can often be hard to pin one down, but in this case, well:

Not what you like to see. The Dodgers skipped his spot in the rotation once, hoping he’d recover, but never put him on the IL. He averaged 90.4 mph on his fastball in the playoffs, and while he was mostly effective, the early-season magic never came back. Read the rest of this entry »

Imagine, if you will, running the Rays. As you ponder your next fleecing acquisition, a lackey rushes in. “Sir! I’ve found a new undervalued talent to acquire!” Before you can even ask, he continues. “He’s on the Cardinals, and his name is Randy Ar–.”

“The Cardinals?!?” You thought you’d trained your lackeys better. “They probably won’t even take our phone calls. They hate us! They never forgave us for that time we sent them Revelation Cabrera.”

“Génesis, sir. And I’ve got that angle covered. We’ve been working on our player operations department, as you know. And Kean, the new recruit we released to bring us back information from other clubs? He already has a mole.”

Of course, this isn’t how major league front offices work. They all have each other on speed dial. They go to the same conferences, hire people back and forth, and value players using roughly similar frameworks. One bad trade isn’t enough to jam up the works; teams understand that baseball players have unknowable and variable outcomes, that sometimes Tommy Pham is a key cog and sometimes he hurts his hip.

I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s talk details. Thursday night, the Rays sent Matthew Liberatore, Edgardo Rodriguez, and a Competitive Balance Round B pick to the Cardinals in exchange for Randy Arozarena, José Martínez, and a Competitive Balance Round A pick. That’s a lot of moving parts, so we’ll break them down one by one before talking about the overarching strategy behind it. Read the rest of this entry »

Last month, I set out to investigate whether the 2019-2020 offseason was a sea change in terms of teams outside the playoffs signing free agents. I can save you the click on that link — it wasn’t. At the time, things were leaning toward the less-egalitarian end of the spectrum; weighted by WAR, the average free agent was joining a team with a .545 record in 2019.

But that was a month ago, and many more signings have happened since then. All kinds of bad or in-the-middle teams have been getting into the act; the Blue Jays signed Hyun-Jin Ryu, the White Sox continued their bonanza, and the Diamondbacks signed Madison Bumgarner. There were smaller moves as well — Tanner Roark also joined the Blue Jays; Julio Teheran is an Angel now. Even the Tigers signed a few veterans.

Of course, playoff teams from 2019 added free agents as well. The Nationals fortified their bullpen with Will Harris and Daniel Hudson (plus bonus Starlin Castro action), and the Twins added Rich Hill and Homer Bailey. The point is, it’s not obvious whether the haves or have nots have done better since then.

Let’s look at a quick update first. First, there’s the rough cut; the total wins acquired in the offseason so far. Playoff teams are still acquiring more than half of the WAR available in free agency: Read the rest of this entry »

Héctor Rondón made a ton of appearances last year for a solid Houston bullpen. The Astros had a top 10 bullpen in both ERA and WAR, and Rondón made the third-most appearances on the team. If you only knew those two things, then, it would look like quite the deal when the Diamondbacks signed Rondón for a mere $3 million, with a club option for 2021 tacked onto the back end, as Nick Piecoro reported yesterday.

Of course, I cleverly avoided telling you anything about how good Rondón was last year aside from his appearances. And while he wasn’t abysmal, at least not completely — he had a 3.71 ERA, racked up positive WPA, and still sat 97 mph with his fastball — some of the underlying metrics looked rough. His FIP was a career-worst 4.96, his strikeout rate cratered to 18.7%, and he was below replacement level on the year in our FIP-based WAR accounting. By the playoffs, he was buried in the bullpen — seven relievers in the Houston ‘pen faced more batters, and his average entry leverage was a piddling 0.16.

So before we decide if this was a good signing for the Diamondbacks, we need to decide if Rondón is still good. At his peak on the Cubs, he was an impact reliever with pretty good stuff and great control. He’s still only 31 — this isn’t some kind of Fernando Rodney situation here, where there’s a picture in his attic with an increasingly tilted cap that keeps him in baseball shape. He’s still, age-wise at least, in his prime.

So what’s changed for Rondón? We can rule out the normal way relievers break. He’s been extremely durable, making at least 50 appearances for six straight years. He hasn’t lost velocity, either: he throws as hard now as he did when he was on the Cubs. And his postseason banishment wasn’t a matter of him losing steam at the end of a long slog of a year; his fastball averaged 96.8 mph in the playoffs, barely down from 96.9 during the regular season. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a big, boring truism you surely don’t want to read an article about: as a pitcher, it’s better to be ahead in the count than behind. Good, great, fine. Thanks for the information, Ben, but let’s move along. We all know that, there’s no need to further prove it.

But wait! Here’s another truism that complicates the first one. Better hitters get ahead in the count more often. Mike Trout gets to 1-0 a lot more frequently than Billy Hamilton does — in roughly 48% of his plate appearances, as compared to a mere 36.8% for Hamilton.

So here’s a fact presented without context: major league hitters, as a whole, had a .363 wOBA after 1-0 counts and a .270 wOBA after 0-1 counts. Get ahead, hit better. But here’s some context, which at least slightly confuses the issue. The average wOBA of a batter reaching a 1-0 count was .322. In contrast, the average wOBA of 0-1 batters was .317. Better batters, in other words, really do reach advantageous counts more often. If you don’t account for that, you’ll probably end up over-valuing getting ahead in the count. Read the rest of this entry »

In December, the free agent signings flowed like wine. You could hardly finish reading about one marquee free agent’s landing spot before another domino fell. Stephen Strasburg, Gerrit Cole, and Anthony Rendon signed on consecutive days, and Edwin Encarnación signed with the White Sox on literal Christmas. It was a hectic month, to say the least.

Of course, taking so many names off the board in December portends a slower January, and that was certainly the case this weekend. Take the Padres. In November, they signed Drew Pomeranz, the sabermetric darling of the offseason, whose relief work in 2019 makes him a potential bullpen ace. In December, they went wild with trades: they added Tommy Pham, Trent Grisham, Zach Davies, and Jurickson Profar to the team over three deals.

In January — well, January has barely started, but so far, they’ve moved down a rung on the urgency ladder. This Saturday, they signed Craig Stammen to a two year, $9 million dollar deal, with a club option for a third. Stammen has been a valuable part of the Padres bullpen over the past two seasons, and he’ll likely continue to appear in high leverage situations for the team, albeit now behind Pomeranz and Kirby Yates rather than just Yates. Read the rest of this entry »

The Washington Nationals didn’t set out to win the World Series in spite of their bullpen. Before the 2019 season, they made two high-upside moves by signing Trevor Rosenthal and trading for Kyle Barraclough. They also added lefty help in Tony Sipp. During the season, they took fliers on Fernando Rodney, Javy Guerra, Brad Boxberger, and Jonny Venters, while also inexplicably trading Austin Adams. And they added three relievers on deadline day, including postseason stalwart Daniel Hudson.

Those moves may not have worked out for the most part, but they showed the team’s intent to build a solid bullpen. And with Hudson leaving in free agency and the other lottery tickets long gone, they were back at square one. Enter Will Harris, who yesterday signed a three-year, $24 million contract with the team that spectacularly beat him in Game 7 of the World Series.

That’s a compelling narrative, so let’s at least give it a little space. Harris will be sharing a locker room with Howie Kendrick, whose foul-pole-scraping home run flipped a deficit to a lead the team would never relinquish. The first time he walks into the locker room in spring training after batters have reported, he’ll probably get a mock cheer from Kendrick and the rest of the Nats hitters. He’ll almost certainly get a big ovation the first time he appears in DC, and that will be weird for him for a second.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Minnesota Twins had a tremendous 2019 regular season. They set a franchise record for wins, set a major league record for home runs, and did it all with a core of exciting hitters who will be back in 2020. If every season could go like the 2019 regular season, the Twins would be sitting pretty.

Of course, it wasn’t all sunshine and lollipops. A midseason swoon briefly dropped them behind the Cleveland Indians, who remain their biggest intradivision competition heading into 2020. Their starting rotation, so solid top to bottom in 2019, wasn’t as locked up as the hitters — four of the five pitchers who made the most starts either reached free agency or had contract options declined. And of course, they got drummed out of the playoffs in three nasty, brutish, but most definitely not short games with the Yankees.

Earlier this week, the Twins made two moves that help address those three areas of concern from the 2019 season. They signed Rich Hill and Homer Bailey to one year contracts totaling $10 million ($3 million for Hill, $7 million for Bailey), though Hill’s contract has reachable playing time incentives that could see it reach $9.5 million. Let’s cover the way these moves helped through the lens of the three areas that felled them last year. Read the rest of this entry »