Author Archive: Ben Clemens

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.
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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 »

The Detroit Tigers were a bad baseball team last year. No one’s arguing that. But you could make an argument that production in the infield is what sunk their offense from bad to catastrophic. Tigers outfielders weren’t the absolute pits — they slashed .255/.311/.410, good for an 87 wRC+ after accounting for Comerica’s spacious dimensions, which was 25th in baseball.

In comparison, the infield — even including DHs — hit .233/.285/.377, a 71 wRC+ that was worst in baseball. They struck out much more than league average, walked much less than league average, and didn’t hit for power. That’s not quite an infield full of Billy Hamiltons, but it’s awful. The league as a whole batted .256/.326/.441, which means that the Tigers infield wasn’t within driving distance of decent.

With two signings this week, however, the Tigers put a dent in their former ineptitude. The team inked Jonathan Schoop and C.J. Cron to two identical deals — $6.1 million over a single year — to provide a solid dose of “not that bad” to a team sorely lacking in that particular medicine. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a narrative you’ve probably heard this offseason: free agency is back because non-playoff teams are trying to make a splash. On its face, it makes a lot of sense; the Angels, White Sox, Rangers, Reds, and Diamondbacks have all made meaningful additions to their rosters this year. Star players are headed to non-playoff teams, hoping to tip the scales of 2020 in their favor.

And yet, that narrative leaves out some inconvenient truths. Of the top three free agents this offseason in our Top 50, two signed with playoff teams. Sixteen free agents who were worth 2 or more WAR last year have signed so far; of those 16, 10 are headed to teams who played in October this year.

Only last year, all three of the top free agents (Manny Machado, Bryce Harper, and Patrick Corbin) signed with teams who hadn’t made the playoffs the previous year. Is the 2019-2020 offseason truly the year of non-playoff teams getting fancy, or are we merely falling victim to narrative? Read the rest of this entry »

The last time Eric Sogard was on the Brewers, he was bad. Not just run of the mill bad, but really bad! He hit .134/.241/.165 in 113 plate appearances for them in 2018, good for a 14 wRC+. That was all the team needed to see to send him to Triple-A Colorado Springs — where he hit .225/.297/.270 at altitude. So it was hardly surprising when they parted ways, with Milwaukee opening up playing time for their packed infield and Sogard seeking an easier path to the majors in Toronto.

What a difference a year makes. Sogard was excellent in 2019 over 442 plate appearances with the Blue Jays and the Rays. He hit 13 home runs, more than he’d previously hit in his 1800 career plate appearances. He slashed his strikeout rate, put a few more balls in the air, and was handsomely rewarded; not only were the homers a career high, but he hit 23 doubles and two triples as well, leading to easily his best single-season production. A .316 BABIP didn’t hurt, either — in all, he produced a 115 wRC+ on the year.

There were reasons to be skeptical, of course. Those home runs were largely of the “hey, that got out?” variety. The average home run in baseball last year was hit at 103.5 mph. Sogard’s baker’s dozen dingers averaged 96.7 mph. If you’re more of an xwOBA person, combining angle and speed, his home runs had an expected wOBA of .701. The league average was a robust 1.359, and among players with five or more home runs, only Sandy León had worse expected results on homers.

In fact, if you want to be skeptical, you could say that Sogard didn’t even have a particularly impressive 2019 despite the surface numbers. His overall wOBA of .346 was excellent, but it vastly outstripped his xwOBA of .307, driven largely by his home run luck. None of this is surprising or hard to tease out from watching him play; he simply doesn’t hit the ball that hard, and even though lots of players ran into some extra home runs in 2019, Sogard really ran into some extra home runs. Read the rest of this entry »

The concept of one-out pitchers suggests a kind of dystopian future for baseball. Generic Matchup Righty Number One (let’s call him Adam Cimber for the sake of this sentence) comes in to get the first out of an inning. He’s replaced by Adam Kolarek to get a lefty, then Adam Ottavino to get another righty, and then, look, I’m out of Adams, but maybe Adam Wainwright was the starter?

In any case, it’s hard to imagine a more boring inning, a more surefire way to get Johnny and Jane Millennial to change the channel to Fortnite or American Gladiators or whatever it is the kids like these days. That, more or less, is the theory behind MLB’s newest rule change, a three batter minimum for relief pitchers that will go into effect for the 2020 season. The rule requires a pitcher to face three batters, or pitch to the end of the half-inning, with some exceptions for injuries.

There’s only one problem with that narrative: that all-Adam inning doesn’t exist much in the majors, even without a three batter minimum. In fact, the one-out relief specialist just isn’t much of a role in baseball anymore. I investigated the numbers to find out which teams would be most affected. To my surprise, essentially none of them were. Read the rest of this entry »

The Milwaukee Brewers acquired two thirds of a world class outfield before the 2018 season, trading for Christian Yelich and signing Lorenzo Cain in free agency. Yelich has been one of the best players in baseball since joining Milwaukee, and Cain was excellent in 2018 before injuries and age slowed him somewhat in 2019. Few teams in baseball would take their center and right field pairing over Milwaukee’s.

But as I learned in third grade math, two thirds is less than one. Left field has been a hodgepodge over the last two years. In 2018, the team relied on a combination of Ryan Braun, Eric Thames, Domingo Santana, and even Hernán Pérez to fill innings. That was mostly okay, though the team wasn’t satisfied; they sent Santana to Seattle in the offseason in exchange for Ben Gamel in an attempt to patch up the outfield.

In 2019, it was more of the same. Braun and Gamel got the majority of the playing time and were fine. Trent Grisham had a late-season cameo replacing Yelich and looked to be the left fielder of the future, but the team sent him to San Diego to shore up other holes in the roster earlier this offseason. The team also cut ties with Thames (and traded Jesús Aguilar during the season), so Braun will be covering first base in 2020. Put it all together, and the team was sorely in need of outfield help. Read the rest of this entry »