If you think back through the mists of time to last October, the Braves had one calling card on their march to the World Series: a bullpen that answered the bell day after day and either kept them in games or closed the door, depending on the situation. The core four members of that bullpen – Will Smith, Tyler Matzek, Luke Jackson, and A.J. Minter – will return, but some peripheral members of the team’s pitching staff left in free agency, and you can always use more pitching. To that end, Atlanta signed Collin McHugh today:

#Braves Sign RHP Collin McHugh: pic.twitter.com/MjLGaejG0h

— Atlanta Braves (@Braves) March 15, 2022

As far as I’m concerned, the terms of the deal – two years and $10 million, with an additional team option for $5 million net of buyout – are an incredible deal for the defending champions. McHugh was one of the best relievers in baseball last year on a rate basis, and he’s getting less this year than Brad Hand, who bounced through three teams on his way to a below-replacement-level season.

I could just tell you that McHugh looks like a good bet to provide strong relief work, but I’ll do slightly better than that. As Jon Tayler noted in our free agent preview, McHugh made one key change to his pitch mix in 2021: he rediscovered an old friend. He threw his cutter 33% of his time, a rate he hadn’t approached since he was a full-time starter in 2016. In addition to that, he maxed out on slider usage; he threw it 52.9% of the time, by far a career high. He was essentially a cutter/slider pitcher, with the occasional four-seamer mixed in for the element of surprise.
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It would be fun, if you were running a team, to go out and sign the best available player at every position where you had even a specter of a question. Need a shortstop? Call Carlos Correa. First baseman? Freddie Freeman awaits. Second baseman? Science now allows us to regrow and clone Rogers Hornsby. If you’re spending at the completely fake top end of the market that I just made up, you might as well spring for the very best available.

Sadly, the real world doesn’t quite work that way. For one, teams don’t have infinite money; more importantly, cloning and reanimating technology doesn’t exist yet unless you’re interested in making Scottish sheep. Even good teams have to sign players who aren’t perennial MVP contenders, or even perennial All Stars. The Dodgers signed Jake Lamb and Hanser Alberto this week, and the White Sox signed Josh Harrison. None will be the best player on their team. None will be an MVP frontrunner. All three are interesting fits that will help their teams, though.
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While titans of industry like Matt Olson, Nelson Cruz, and Josh Donaldson were changing teams, a few other things happened in the baseball world. For example: Sean Doolittle, Brad Hand, Ian Kennedy, and Chad Kuhl all found new teams. Sure, they weren’t the headliners of the last few days, but they’re all interesting in their own way. Let’s run down these signings alphabetically and maybe tell a joke or two while doing so.

Nationals Sign Sean Doolittle

When the Nationals traded for Sean Doolittle in 2017, he brought much-needed bullpen stability to an already-competitive team. Things aren’t quite the same for either side in their reunion. Doolittle had a down 2020, then signed a one-year, $1.5 million deal with the Reds. With Cincinnati out of the running and Doolittle losing high-leverage opportunities, they put him on waivers, and he finished his season as a middle reliever in Seattle. Read the rest of this entry »

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I like to think of myself as a pretty reasonable baseball thinker. When I see a trade, I can put myself in both teams’ shoes and understand where they’re coming from. I might not agree with their evaluation of each individual player; heck, I might not agree with the direction they’re going overall. Usually, though, I can trace back their steps until I find the key thing driving the trade on both sides. Usually isn’t always, though. Meet the strangest trade I’ve seen in recent memory:

Catcher Ben Rortvedt is headed to the Yankees along with Josh Donaldson and Isiah Kiner-Falefa, sources tell ESPN. Catcher Gary Sanchez and Gio Urshela are going to Minnesota.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) March 14, 2022

This trade is a Rohrshach test, only more inscrutable. Sometimes I feel like the Yankees won. Sometimes I feel like the Yankees lost. Sometimes I feel like the Twins lost and the Yankees broke even. Sometimes I feel like they both lost, as strange as that may sound. Sometimes I feel like it was actually just Isiah Kiner-Falefa for cash. Sometimes I feel like Josh Donaldson will set the league on fire to get back at the Twins. Let’s look at this trade from as many angles as possible and see if we can figure out what’s going on.
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The itinerant gunslinger is a time-worn trope in Westerns, but baseball experienced a resurgence of its own version of it over the weekend. Andrelton Simmons and José Iglesias, two older free agents with sterling defensive reputations, are each headed to a new team. Simmons signed with the Cubs, a one-year, $4 million deal with incentives that could push his total payout higher. Meanwhile, Iglesias signed a one-year, $5 million deal with the Rockies. Rather than cover them both separately, let’s go through the deals together so that I can force some metaphors on you and compare two delightfully shrewd defensive wizards.

The glove-only shortstop isn’t what it used to be, particularly if you hit like Simmons did in 2021. He stumbled to a .223/.283/.274 batting line, and while his defense was predictably excellent, that’s simply not enough to lock down an everyday starting role. The Twins weren’t good last year, and even then, Simmons started to lose playing time as the season wore on. The Cubs will be his third team in the past three years, and he’s solidly into the short-term-stints-on-okay-teams phase of his career.

For his part, Iglesias must think Simmons is downright sedentary. The Rockies will be his sixth team in five seasons; he’s bounced around on one-year deals since 2019, and even got traded in-season last year. He wasn’t an offensive black hole to the extent that Simmons was in 2021, but he’s hardly Carlos Correa with the bat in his hands; he’s compiled a 93 wRC+ in his last four seasons. His defense doesn’t grade out as well as Simmons’ does, though; depending on who you listen to, he was somewhere between acceptable and quite bad defensively last year after being solid throughout his career. Read the rest of this entry »

The baseball season is back! Rejoice! No time for bad feelings – it’s a celebration, and we’re all invited. I don’t really think the rest of this article is something you have to read right now, but I’ll level with you: I had already done the research for it, and it’s worth writing about, so before we descend into a non-stop festival of free agent signings and trades, you’re getting an article about a decision that the MLBPA won’t have to reckon with for a few months yet.

Before we got a merciful end to the CBA back-and-forth, a deal was proposed by MLB that would institute an international draft in exchange for eliminating the qualifying offer system. One detail of the reporting on this issue bugged me: at least one “industry source” gave an estimate for the value of the QO system that I found hard to believe:

1. It is difficult to know what dollar values the sides attach to the international draft or eliminating qualifying offer. Industry sources estimate QO to be worth $50m-$100m annually. Just because one side links two issues does not mean they are identically valued.

— Evan Drellich (@EvanDrellich) March 9, 2022

I don’t doubt Drellich’s reporting, but that number sounded wildly high to me. A single-digit group of players receive the qualifying offer each year; they’d have to be losing $10 million per player to make the math make sense. The draft picks that teams surrender to sign those players aren’t worth that much. The highest possible estimate for the cost of those picks comes in around $8 million per player, and that’s for teams with a luxury tax bill (or CBT, if you’re into acronyms).

To settle this question, I decided to look at all of the free agents who have received qualifying offers since the first year of the current QO system, the 2017-18 offseason. I’ve previously estimated what teams pay per WARin free agency, which gave me a useful database to start the investigation. Read the rest of this entry »

After another 24 hours of intense negotiations, MLB’s lockout of the players remains in effect. Just like the last time negotiations ticked past a league-imposed deadline, MLB announced that they had canceled a week (two series) of games, postponing Opening Day until April 14. That brings the total number of weeks canceled to two and series to four, with the possibility of more to come should the two sides not reach a compromise in their negotiation of a new collective bargaining agreement.

It’s unclear whether these games will remain canceled, or whether some newly structured season will change the schedule. After all, the league canceled a week of games last week, then spent most of this week saying they would un-cancel them and play a full 162 if the two sides reached a deal by their new deadline. Plus, the length of the season, and the salaries and service time that go with it, is itself a matter of bargaining. But let’s take the league at their word and assume that we’re now looking at a 150-game season. Read the rest of this entry »

You’ll have to bear with me at the start of this one, because I’m feeling expansive today. This article is about baseball trivia, but I’m getting there in an oblique way. It starts in Magnus Effect Baseball, but don’t worry, MLB fans, we won’t be staying there long on this winding journey to some fun facts.

I have a prospect crush on one of my virtual Phillies: a 17-year-old third baseman named Izzy de Santiago. He’s absolutely crushing the Dominican Summer League in 102 plate appearances, to the tune of a .375/.412/.583 line. His skillset is expansive; he hits for power and average and rarely swings and misses. He also has a huge infield arm and blazing straight-line speed. He looks like a potential future star, in fact. There’s just one problem:

My guy can’t take a walk to save his life, and he’s not projected to learn how to. Despite that huge hole in his game, he still has an OBP higher than his batting average, and it’s for one key reason: he’s quite good at getting hit by pitches. He’s racked up six so far in his abbreviated season, a frankly stunning pace. Six more HBPs than walks sounded extreme to me — and then I started spiraling back into the real world.
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