You’d be forgiven, in a week where the three biggest free agents on the market signed for the better part of a billion dollars, for suffering from a little contract fatigue. The Angels and Yankees are both fascinating to think about — the Yankees for the neo-Evil Empire vibe the Cole signing gives off, and the Angels because hey, Mike Trout and Anthony Rendon are fun together. The Nationals re-signing Strasburg was the least interesting of the three, and he was just the World Series MVP on the team he helped make nationally relevant!

So in that light, I’m not going to try to convince you that the Mets signing Rick Porcello is an earth-shattering, franchise altering move. It’s a neat coincidence that the terms of the contract, one year and $10 million, match Blake Treinen’s deal with the Dodgers — two pitchers trying to prove they still have it. But in terms of competitive impact, it’s a meat and potatoes kind of deal; it will make the team a little better for 2020, in the way that adding competent pitchers does, without significantly changing the general circus that is the Mets.

So instead of detailing the prospective Mets rotation, let’s look at a few mystery players. First, here are two pitchers who seem pretty okay:

Read the rest of this entry »

At the end of 2018, Blake Treinen was riding high. He finished sixth in AL Cy Young voting, a placement befitting his absolutely outrageous season. He threw 80 innings of 0.78 ERA, 1.82 FIP relief, the best relief season by RA9 WAR in the 21st century and the sixth best by fWAR. He earned a $6.4 million salary in arbitration, and entered 2019 as the anchor of a fearsome bullpen.

Ten days ago, the A’s chose not to tender Treinen a contract. The dominant days of 2018 looked far gone; Treinen was below replacement level this year, and it’s easy to see why: his walk rate spiked from 6.7% to 13.9%, while his strikeout rate concurrently fell from 31.8% to 22.2%. Where a year ago he was an elite strikeout pitcher with a below average walk rate, this year he was just bad. His nine home runs allowed were also a career worst, and the combined package just didn’t work at all.

So when the A’s non-tendered him, it was somewhat surprising but not unthinkable. They run a shoestring operation, and spending on relievers is a risky way to spend scarce resources, particularly when said reliever was so bad last season. He wasn’t due much of a raise in arbitration — MLB Trade Rumors projected a $7.8 million salary — but the A’s decided they’d be better off finding relievers elsewhere and saving the money.

Yesterday, everything went all funny. The Dodgers signed Treinen to a one-year, $10 million deal, and, well — you’re not supposed to get non-tendered and then make more as a free agent. The whole reason teams crave controllable players so much is that arbitration awards tend to come at a discount to free agent prices. Non-tenders happen when teams expect a corner case in arbitration (generally for closers and dingers, but also award wins and prior salary awards) to create a distorted market. Read the rest of this entry »

Anthony Rendon is stoic on the field. Watching a Nationals game during his tenure, there was always opportunity to play a fun sub-game: watch Rendon for a grimace, or a sigh, or any indication that he was upset. You could go whole games without seeing it; he was simply out there working, staying in the moment, comfortable in himself and focused on the next pitch, the next ball to field, the next rally.

While it’s probably unfair to generalize a player’s on-field demeanor to their life, it’s a natural impulse. And so I can’t help picturing Rendon and his wife celebrating his new deal with a head nod, or perhaps a knowing smile, and a glass of wine on the patio. Staying in the moment; focusing on the next task at hand.

The next task is now teaming up with Mike Trout to win the World Series. The Angels signed Rendon to a seven-year, $245 million contract tonight, making him the third highest paid player in baseball on an annual basis, behind only Trout and Gerrit Cole (and tied with former teammate Stephen Strasburg, though without the deferral chicanery). The contract, first reported by Jon Heyman, is straightforward: seven years, $35 million each year, with a full no-trade clause and no opt outs. Read the rest of this entry »

Last night, Gerrit Cole signed a record-breaking contract with the Yankees. Jay Jaffe broke down the signing, and mentioned one important part: the contract includes a player option after five years. In a contract as lengthy and lucrative as Cole’s, an opt out might seem like mere ornamentation. That’s not the case, though: as Stephen Strasburg’s earlier contract shows, sometimes the market in the future is simply better for a pitcher than we think. With that in mind, I took a stab at valuing the player option.

We use two player projection systems here at FanGraphs, and I ran both of them through the option pricing tool, as well as a hybrid. First, let’s take a look at the most optimistic: Steamer projects Cole for 6.3 WAR this year. From there, I applied a standard 0.5 WAR/year aging penalty and ran the numbers. You can read the methodology here, but as a quick refresher, I take an aging-inclusive projection, then bump each year by a random, normally distributed number to account for fluctuations in talent level.

The bumps persist year-to-year; if Cole improves to a 7 WAR projection for 2021, his mean projection for 2022 would be 6.5 WAR after the aging penalty, and I then apply another random talent bump to that projection. I do the same thing with the cost of a win in free agency; it generally trends upward, but jumps around, and the jumps persist year-to-year. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I had some fun putting Austin Hedges into generic NL and AL lineups. It wouldn’t have been fun for those lineups, of course: Austin Hedges is a terrible hitter! He cost lineups something like 30 runs over a full season, and that’s with him replacing the worst hitter on the team.

So while the mental gymnastics of seeing how much damage Hedges would do was fun, it was a macabre kind of amusement. Look how bad your team could be at offense without being worse at baseball overall! That doesn’t really get the people going.

With this lineup approximating tool assembled, though, there’s no reason to limit its use to Hedges. Instead, let’s put Mike Trout in some lineups — all over lineups — and see if we can create some fun statlines.

I’ll be honest, this exercise started with me wondering what the Astros would look like with Trout. So to start, I plugged Trout into the Astros’ regular lineup. Their team now looks like this:

First of all, hoo boy. That’s almost too hot to print. I wasn’t really sure where to put everybody; I briefly considered having Altuve bat seventh, and it didn’t even look all that wrong, which should tell you everything you need to know about how good the lineup is. (I left Chirinos in as the catcher because I’m using 2019 season stats for this exercise, but that hardly matters to the results.) Read the rest of this entry »

Picture a beautiful defensive play in your head. For me, it’s Andrelton Simmons charging, slightly to his right. He picks an awkward hop cleanly, transfers it smoothly, and fires a strike to first base to get a speedy runner:

Maybe you’re the outfield defense type — you see Victor Robles at a full-out sprint, a seamless transition to a slide, and a line-drive double transmogrified into an out. Either way, beautiful defensive plays are a combination of impossibly fast-twitch muscles and learned grace.

Next, picture a team that excels at run prevention. This one is more abstract, so I’ll guide you a little. The best four teams in terms of ERA- last year were all among the top six in strikeout rate. They were all among the top six teams in preventing walks. In fact, out of the top half of the league when it comes to ERA-, only four teams had a below-average strikeout rate, and two of those were almost exactly average. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a fast offseason for mid-tier pitchers, and that trajectory continued on Thursday with Michael Pineda signing a two-year contract to return to Minnesota. The actual value of the deal will come out to $17.6 million after pro-rating down the 2020 salary due to his suspension:

The first year of Michael Pineda's deal — which is pending a physical — is a prorated $10m. With a 39-game suspension to serve, that means #MNTwins will pay roughly $7.6m in the 1st year of the deal. In reality, it's more like a 2-year, $17.6-million deal for Pineda.

— DanHayesMLB (@DanHayesMLB) December 6, 2019

The weirdness of signing a suspended player and pro-rating salary aside, this looks like a contender for the most team-friendly contract so far this offseason. Cole Hamels, who Kiley listed exactly one slot ahead of Pineda, is going to make more in 2020 than Pineda will over the next two years, and he was arguably worse than Pineda in 2019.

It’s almost beside the point to explain why this signing makes sense for the Twins, but let’s go through the motions quickly. The team’s winning recipe in 2019 was a combination of home runs at the plate and steady starters on the mound. José Berríos and Jake Odorizzi both had standout years, but the rotation was solid 1 through 5: Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a day ending in “Y,” so the San Diego Padres have made another trade involving talented outfielders. This time, it’s a big one: Tommy Pham and Jake Cronenworth will be playing in San Diego next year, with Hunter Renfroe, Xavier Edwards, and reportedly another prospect going to the Rays in exchange.

There’s a lot to unpack in this trade, so let’s take it in sections. First: what are the Rays doing? One option, as always, is that they’re one step ahead of the competition. Trading with the Rays is hazardous for executives’ health. They’re liable to turn a pile of straw into a 3-WAR outfielder, and get you to chip in Shane Baz while you’re at it.

Pham himself was one of these trades a little over a year ago. The Rays traded a shiny marble, two bright red shoelaces, Genesis Cabrera, Justin Williams, and Roel Ramirez to the Cardinals for Pham at the 2018 trade deadline. Pham promptly caught fire, batting .343/.448/.622 through the rest of 2018 before adding a 121 wRC+ 2019. His 3.3 WAR might look low for that offensive line, but it’s largely due to 92 plate appearances at designated hitter, which lowered his defensive value (though Statcast didn’t like his outfield defense in 2019).

When the Rays trade a 31-year-old outfielder for a 27-year-old outfielder, it’s easy to read it as them simply trying to outmaneuver the Padres. But there’s one major complication: salary. Pham is in his second year of arbitration, and he won his case against the Rays last year, securing a $4.1 million salary for 2019. MLB Trade Rumors projects him for $8.6 million in arbitration this year, which would have made him the third-highest-paid Ray, behind only Charlie Morton and Kevin Kiermaier. Read the rest of this entry »

Austin Hedges had a disastrous season at the plate. He batted .176/.252/.311, good for a 47 wRC+ that placed him last among batters with at least 300 plate appearances. But Hedges had a remarkable season behind the plate. He was worth 27.3 defensive runs above average, second only to J.T. Realmuto and first on a rate basis among all players in baseball.

WAR gives us a handy way to convert this, and WAR was pretty happy with Hedges in 2019. He was worth 1.4 WAR in 347 plate appearances, which works out to 2.4 WAR per 600 plate appearances. An average player would be worth just under 2 WAR per 600, which means Hedges was above-average despite his sub-Mendoza batting stats.

But when someone’s batting line is as poor as Hedges’, there’s an impulse to say that WAR doesn’t capture everything. Hedges isn’t a bad hitter; he’s an exceptionally bad hitter. He had a 47 wRC+! Six pitchers had better batting lines last year. My former colleague Sheryl Ring pointed this out recently, and opined that NL teams simply couldn’t afford to carry a bat that poor in addition to the pitcher’s spot. This made me think several things at once. My first thought was “Of course not! WAR works.” My second thought was “Actually yeah, two pitcher-level batters in a row would be awful. I’m not sure that a linear stat could handle that.” My third thought was: time to do some analysis.

At a high level, it’s clear that wRC+ isn’t simply additive. Consider a team with four batters who always walk or hit a single, and five batters who always strike out. This is an extreme example, of course, but that team would have a roughly average wRC+. It would also be an incredibly potent offense if you stacked your four productive hitters together; it would average something like 7.5 runs a game depending on the timing of singles and walks.

Of course, if you sequenced your hitters poorly, it could also average zero runs per game. When we’re looking at extreme examples (and Hedges is extreme, though not nearly this extreme), the order really does matter. How should one deal with this? It’s a bit of a cliche, but: very carefully. Read the rest of this entry »

“Drew Pomeranz, star reliever” would have been an absurd claim five months ago, when the left-hander was laboring as a starter with the Giants. Since then, however, it’s become an eminently reasonable view. Beginning with a stint out of the bullpen in San Francisco and continuing with the Brewers, Pomeranz delivered a half-season of pure electricity.

Today that view goes mainstream. As first reported by Ken Rosenthal, the Padres have signed Pomeranz to a four-year, $34 million deal, further thinning out the free agent reliever market and besting the estimates of both Kiley McDaniel and the crowd on our Top 50 Free Agents list; Pomeranz ranked 24th on the list. Pomeranz will join Kirby Yates to further anchor what was already an above-average unit.

The terms of the deal were reported by Joel Sherman: Pomeranz will receive a $8 million signing bonus, and his annual salaries will be $4 million, $6 million, $8 million, and $8 million respectively. That works out to an average annual value of $8.5 million, with the money slightly front-loaded for the Padres.

I recently wrote about the changes Pomeranz made to his game as a reliever, but they’re worth reiterating, as they certainly figure heavily into San Diego’s move. Essentially, Pomeranz is the type of pitcher best suited to switch to relief. He has a great fastball that could use a bit of extra giddyup, a terrific secondary offering in his knee-buckling curve, and no business throwing any of his other pitches.

The returns on this new look were immediate. Pomeranz struck out nearly half the batters he faced over 30 innings of work, and he looked the part while doing it. The riding fastball went from a good pitch to one of the best fastballs in baseball. The curve wasn’t far behind; its 12-6 break looks best as an offset to the four-seamer, and batters loading up for the heat were blindsided by the curve. Read the rest of this entry »