Financially savvy or cheap? Like beauty, the fundamental essence of thriftiness lies in the eye of the beholder. In truth, either adjective adequately describes the Blue Jays under the stewardship of club president Mark Shapiro and general manager Ross Atkins. In their teardown, the Jays have done much to rebuild the farm system and add a youthful vigor to the big league team. Recent trades to unload veteran talent, most notably the Kevin Pillar and Marcus Stroman deals, were difficult but justifiable moves for a team unable to compete in the short term.

But the Jays have also come under criticism for leaning a bit too far into the rebuild. They were all set to play the service-time manipulation game with Vladimir Guerrero Jr. (a hamstring injury allowed them to delay his call-up without resorting to that tactic) and have been so aggressive in culling their veterans that Anthony Alford, with all of 59 career plate appearances to his name, is now the club’s longest tenured player. The makeover led an obviously delighted Shapiro to gush: “The combination of young talent along with the lack of future commitments, it will never be this again. It’s just for this moment.”

Surprisingly soon after achieving that spiritual high, the Jays started adding major league players. The big signing was Hyun-Jin Ryu, but they’ve made other moves to fill out their hollow roster. The additions of Chase Anderson and Tanner Roark give them a respectable rotation, and by signing of Travis Shaw, Toronto may well lengthen the middle of the lineup. Taken together, these moves make the Jays quite a bit better in the here and now. I don’t know if I’d call them playoff contenders quite yet, but it’s been a far more expeditious winter north of the border than many anticipated.

Shaw signed a one-year contract for $4 million, with incentives that could carry the deal to nearly $5 million if he plays well. Of course, he was only available for that price because he was non-tendered by Milwaukee after his horrible, no good, very bad 2019 season. After producing 3.5 wins in 2017 and 2018, his production fell off a cliff:

For a player who was only 29, the regression was as surprising as it was dramatic. Few players pumpkin overnight and the ones who do usually aren’t in their 20s, nor holding their own at a demanding defensive position.

Knowing nothing else, signing Shaw makes sense for a rebuilder like Toronto, particularly given the terms. It’s a classic pillow contract, a one-year, low-dollar commitment that won’t disrupt the club’s burgeoning young core. A third basemen by trade, Shaw will likely slide across the diamond to first to fill the vacancy left by Justin Smoak’s departure. The new man will get a chance to start and rebuild his value after a nightmare season, a mutually beneficial proposition; if last season proves an aberration, the Jays can flip Shaw for a prospect near the deadline. For his part, Shaw would then hit free agency without his 2019 numbers looming over his recruitment.

The challenge here is that Shaw didn’t merely have an off year, or put up lousy numbers after battling an injury. Rather, he was simply one of the worst players in the league last season. Among players with at least 250 plate appearances, only Mike Zunino offered less at the plate:

Everywhere you look, there’s a damning statistic. He struck out in 33% of his plate appearances, which is troubling on its own and also nearly double how often he fanned in 2018. His .157 batting average was the lowest in the league, which is bad, though not nearly as bad as the fact that his .270 slugging percentage also brought up the rear.

But a glance at Shaw’s batted ball profile suggests that all may not be lost just yet. His average exit velocity has barely budged throughout his major league career, and he actually set a career best in 2019, at 88.7 mph. His hard hit rate was only a tiny bit lower in 2019 than in previous seasons. For what it’s worth, he hit just fine in Triple-A after a midseason demotion.

Shaw had two problems last year, and they may well be related. The first is that he swung and missed far too often, and way more than he normally does. He made contact 70% of the time he swung last year, which is bad relative to the league and terrible compared to his career norms. There isn’t a key split here, mostly because none of them are good: He didn’t swing any more often (on either pitches in or out of the zone) but he missed a whole lot more, and his whiff rate rose on fastballs, offspeed pitches, and breaking balls. The uptick in missed fastballs was particularly substantial, from 18% of the time in 2018 to nearly 30% last year. Interestingly, a lot of those increased whiffs were concentrated in the upper part of the strike zone and above. His whiff rate was worse just about everywhere, but the difference is especially glaring above the belt:

That feeds into the second problem, which is what happened when he did connect. Always a guy who put the ball in the air a lot, Shaw’s average launch angle shifted from 16.6 degrees to 24.5 degrees (the league average was 11.2) in 2019. That was the second highest launch angle in baseball, and as you’d expect, it produced a corresponding increase in fly balls and popups from previous campaigns.

Critically, this change was clearly counterproductive for Shaw. On this site, we’ve often covered how hitters try to change their launch angle in an effort to hit more balls in the air, and how this tends to lead to a better offensive output. But there’s a limit to how high you want to go. It’s not necessarily that Shaw climbed into dangerous territory — Rhys Hoskins had the third highest launch angle last year, and Edwin Encarnación and Mike Trout occupied similar real estate — but it may well be dangerous territory for him. After all, Shaw was a pretty darn good hitter pre-2019, and with a higher launch angle than most bears. Raising that launch angle produced more harmless flies and far more swings and misses, particularly up in the zone, as we’d expect from a player using a steeper swing plane. All of this suggests that he wasn’t getting his bat in the hitting zone for nearly long enough.

It’s a trend that started early in 2019. At FanGraphs, we’ll often talk about how spring training numbers are meaningless, and usually they are. At the very outer fringes of the extremes though, we can sometimes detect something meaningful, for either good or ill. Such was the case with Shaw last year, who struck out 25 times without a walk in 52 trips to the plate. He hit the ball pretty well when he did connect last spring, which somewhat masked the issue at the time, but in hindsight it’s clear that this was a season-long problem for him.

Despite the depths of his struggles, this seems like a reversible trend. It’s far easier to fix glaring and identifiable problems than to grasp for solutions in the dark. Toronto’s challenge is to either help Shaw make more and better contact with the swing plane he employed in 2019 or to help him return to what worked in previous seasons. Simply knowing what to do doesn’t ensure that Shaw can do it, of course, but at least it’s a theoretically fixable issue. We’ve seen plenty of players successfully adjust their launch angles and there’s no reason to think Shaw can’t do the same.

Ultimately, for one-year and $4 million, this is the kind of move rebuilding clubs should be lining up to make. If Shaw doesn’t hit, the team can swallow the money and find someone else to man first base. But even modest improvement makes this a bargain of a contract, and given Shaw’s underlying batted ball indicators and recent history of success, there are plenty of reasons to think he can bounce back. A return to form won’t necessarily propel Toronto to the top of a very competitive AL East, but combined with a number of promising young players, it would go some way toward making the Blue Jays a fun club to watch in 2020. Between that and his potential re-sale value, what’s not to like?

The Minnesota Twins have re-signed soon-to-be 37-year-old reliever Sergio Romo to a one-year deal worth $5 million, as first reported by Jesse Sanchez of MLB.com. His contract includes an option for 2021, and allows him to earn up to $10 million total. You may feel like you’ve read this a hundred times this winter, but Romo is the latest free agent to sign for more money than our crowdsourcing forecast projected ($3 million in this case).

The right-hander pitched well for the Twins last year after a midseason trade brought him to Minneapolis. In 27 games, he threw 22.2 innings, posting a 3.18 ERA (146 ERA+) and a 3.35 FIP, along with tidy strikeout and walk totals. He took over as the eighth-inning guy pretty much as soon as he reached town, and earned a couple of saves as well.

A 12-year veteran, Romo is one of the greybeards now. Among active relievers, his 709 games played are the fifth most in baseball (Francisco Rodriguez, who played in 948, is listed as active on Baseball Reference, though he hasn’t appeared in the majors since 2017) and only Tyler Clippard and Fernando Rodney were called upon more often in the 2010s. As you’d expect, he’s been consistently durable throughout his 12-year career, pitching in 60-plus games in eight of the last 10 years. He hasn’t had a serious injury since 2009. Read the rest of this entry »

Milwaukee has arguably been the biggest beneficiary of the league’s austerity on the free agent market in recent seasons. A damp market gave the Brewers an opportunity to sign Lorenzo Cain to a team-friendly five-year deal in January of 2018, and their new center fielder’s 5.7 WAR campaign proved instrumental in a season Milwaukee won the NL Central by a single game. General manager David Stearns turned an even tidier trick last winter, inking Yasmani Grandal and Mike Moustakas to one-year pillow contracts in January and February respectively. Both made the All-Star team and they combined for 8 WAR as the Brewers again narrowly clinched a playoff berth.

Critically, the Brewers haven’t succeeded by aggressively courting free agents, but rather by waiting out the competition and swooping in with palatable offers to desperate players at the dawn of spring training. Cain surely entered his recruitment period thinking a nine-figure offer was a strong possibility, and neither Grandal nor Moustakas hit the market hoping for anything less than a multi-year deal. As prices fell, Milwaukee pounced. In capitalizing on a cool market, the Brewers were able to meaningfully augment their ballclub without incurring significant costs, and the result was a rare breakthrough to the playoffs.

Milwaukee won’t be able to run it back with the same strategy in 2020. As we’ve covered elsewhere, the free agent market has rebounded significantly this offseason. Unlike in recent years, many of the marquee players are already off the board, and for pretty big money, too. The league has already committed approximately $1.5 billion to players: That’s nearly a billion more than this time last year, a free agency period that ended with around $1.8 billion in total commitments. With plenty of mid-tier free agents still on the board, the pattern has been established: Good players are getting more money and more years than they have over the two previous seasons. Read the rest of this entry »

The return of a vibrant free agent market has been the story of the offseason thus far. In recent days, we’ve seen three $200-plus million deals, including two record-setting contracts for pitchers and a $245 million contract for Anthony Rendon. Alongside, we’ve observed the continuation of a pattern established early this winter, where most players on our Top 50 Free Agent List have beaten their projected salaries. That hasn’t been true in every case: Josh Lindbloom just signed for more years and a lower AAV than we expected. But he’s one of the few exceptions. From Gerrit Cole to Tanner Roark, most players have signed for more money than we anticipated. Even Blake Treinen, who the Athletics didn’t even tender a contract to, inked an eight-figure deal on the open market.

That doesn’t mean everything has been patched up between ownership and the players. Teams seem every bit as leery of exceeding the luxury tax as they did last year, a stance best evinced by the Angels’ decision to package first-round pick Will Wilson with Zack Cozart in what amounted to a salary dump. More troublingly for the journeymen of the game, teams non-tendered more arb-eligible players than usual, including productive veterans like Treinen, Kevin Pillar, and Jonathan Villar. Consequently, the market for second-division starters and part-time players is unusually tight and crowded. Even with a resurgent free agent market, it’s a precarious time to be a low-level player in search of a home.

This brings us to Adam Jones, an All-Star turned platoon outfielder in the November of his career. In an era in which rookies are debuting near the peak of their powers, Jones’s career arc looks like the parabola we used to expect as the norm. After peaking as a 4-5 WAR player in his late 20s, he’s steadily declined in recent years:

Read the rest of this entry »

On the eve of the winter meetings, a full month and one major holiday into the offseason, it’s a good time to review what we’ve observed on the free agent market thus far and gauge how that activity portends for the rest of the year. It’s always an interesting question, but one that feels particularly relevant now after consecutive cold stoves and increasingly heated rhetoric from both the league and the MLB Players Association about the game’s economic landscape.

Inevitably, most of the action this winter will be viewed through the prism of whether this offseason feels as strange as the last two, which, if you’ve forgotten, were very unusual. Top free agents got their customary nine-figure offers, and we even saw a couple of record-breaking contracts, as Manny Machado and Bryce Harper inked the sport’s first $300 million free agent deals.

But seemingly everyone else had to scramble for work. In an abrupt departure from convention, teams both spent considerably less money than in winters past and waited significantly longer to solidify their roster. Meanwhile, players signed for dimes on the dollars they could have expected in previous years. Nick Markakis made his first All-Star team and took a pay cut to remain in Atlanta, and Mike Moustakas and Yasmani Grandal settled for one-year deals. Useful players like Denard Span faded away entirely. Revenues around the league were up, but teams had less and less to offer free agents. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Wednesday, the New York Yankees released Jacoby Ellsbury, cutting ties with the oft-injured outfielder even though he still had a year and more than $26 million left on his long-term deal. The Yankees are trying to worm their way out of that commitment, on the somewhat dubious premise that he received treatment from an unapproved physician, so the drama isn’t quite over yet. Either way though, he’s played his last game in New York. Along with Greg Bird and Nester Cortes Jr., Ellsbury was released in order to clear roster space for younger prospects.

By any measure, Ellsbury’s time in the Bronx was a disappointment. He played 120 games only twice, topped the three-win mark just once, and started four playoff games during his tenure. His first season was promising: He took advantage of Yankee Stadium’s short porch in right and parked 16 homers, the second-highest total of his career, en route to a 3.6 WAR season. But injuries and age soon caught up with him. While he retained most his speed and wits on the bases, starting in 2015, his production at the plate dipped noticeably. After falling out of the lineup in 2017, Ellsbury missed the entire 2018 season recovering from an oblique strain and a torn labrum in his hip, and then all of last year while batting plantar fasciitis. He was not expected to contribute significantly to the 2020 Yankees had he remained part of the roster.

In the wake of his release, there have been a few pieces speculating about where Ellsbury ranks on New York’s list of biggest free agent busts. That’s as unfair as it is uncharitable for a player who was pretty good in pinstripes before injuries kept him away from the field.

More to the point, there’s far more about Ellsbury’s career to celebrate than to lament. At his best, he was a breathtaking center fielder and one of the most exciting baserunners in recent memory. His 343 career steals are the seventh-most of any player this century, an impressive total even without considering that he stole successfully more than 82% of the time. He was a big part of two World Series winners and his out-of-nowhere power spike in 2011 fueled one of the best individual seasons of the decade. He stole home not once but twice, and set a major league record by reaching base 30 times on catcher’s interference. He was good, he was fun, and if this is the end for Ellsbury, we’re lucky to have seen him play. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, we posted a roundup of the top 50 free agents on the market this winter. We’ve already seen a couple of the guys near the top of that list either rework their contract or choose not to opt out, but the rest of the list remains unsigned.

Today we’re taking a look at the plausible landing spots for the top free agents left. A top-six list is a little awkward and perhaps less SEO friendly than a top five, but our fifth- and sixth-place players were projected for the same salary, so we’ve included both here. This post isn’t necessarily a prediction of where certain guys will sign, but rather, it’s a look at which teams should be in the market for these top talents given what we know about their ambitions and financial priorities. Spoiler: You won’t see the Red Sox listed below.

1. Gerrit Cole
Kiley’s estimate: 7 Years, $242 million
Should be interested: Los Angeles Dodgers, Atlanta Braves, Chicago Cubs, Texas Rangers, St. Louis Cardinals, honestly the whole league
Perfect fit: Los Angeles Angels

Cole may not capture the Cy Young this year, but after a dominating October in which his very presence loomed as the most significant storyline in each series Houston played, the consensus is that he’s the best pitcher in baseball. We haven’t seen that kind of arm hit the free agent market since CC Sabathia after the 2008 season. There isn’t a club in baseball that wouldn’t benefit from Cole’s services, even at the imposing price he’ll command. At the very least, every nominal contender in baseball should be evaluating what they can do to bring the big right-hander to their city.

His list of serious suitors figures to be quite smaller than that, and most of them are out west. The Dodgers make plenty of sense. Despite seven straight NL West titles, the club hasn’t won a championship with this core, and subpar starting pitching in the playoffs has been a big reason why they’ve fallen short. Is there a player better positioned to fill that gap than Cole? Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a great postseason. But…

Baseball fans have been treated to an excellent month of ballgames. The NL Wildcard was an instant classic, and three matchups in the divisional round went the distance. Washington pitched historically well in the NCLS, and on the other side of the bracket, two of the best teams in baseball battled in an entertaining war of attrition, a back and forth set that climaxed with José Altuve’s walk-off homer in Game 6. Thus far, we’ve been spoiled.

But you’d be forgiven for thinking it hasn’t felt that way. As baseball reaches its annual crescendo, the sport’s collective focus has often drifted away from the games on the field. The partial un-juicing of the ball emerged as a dominant storyline early in the postseason, right alongside the usual complaints about extended commercial breaks and out-of-touch announcers blathering on far-flung networks. Then, as the league championships kicked off, ESPN’s T.J. Quinn released a disturbing piece detailing how Angels team employees not only failed to intervene on Tyler Skaggs‘ drug use but actually abetted it in his final days. Reading the news, you may well conclude that the league itself has lost the ability to sway the narrative in a way that reflects positively on the enterprise.

Unfortunately, the pattern continued; Game 1 of the World Series began under a cloud of a different sort. In the aftermath of Houston’s dramatic, exuberant ALCS win over the Yankees, assistant general manager Brandon Taubman used the occasion to rub salt in a wound. With three women reporters standing nearby, Taubman, cigar in hand, loudly and repeatedly directed a message their way: “Thank God we got Osuna! I’m so [expletive] glad we got Osuna!”

On the surface, it’s a curious message: Altuve only had to save the day because closer Roberto Osuna had coughed up a ninth-inning lead. The context, however, is damning. Osuna is only an Astro because the club was able to acquire him on the cheap while he served a suspension for domestic violence. One of the women in question has previously come under fire from Taubman for the timing of her Osuna-related tweets. That she was wearing a purple anti-domestic violence bracelet at the time adds a jolt of nastiness to already reprehensible behavior.

By now you know the details of what followed. How Sports Illustrated’s Stephanie Apstein reported the news; that Houston vehemently denied the incident took place, and questioned Apstein’s credibility, when multiple other journalists from other outlets corroborated Apstein’s account; and the Astros’ late and inadequate walk-back of their initial statement. On a day when we should have been celebrating the best of baseball, hyping up Gerrit Cole and Max Scherzer, we were instead left to grapple with the worst symptoms of its culture. As the Washington Post’s Barry Svulga succinctly summed it up: “It’s infuriating it’s 2019, and it’s the World Series, and we even need to be having this conversation. But clearly we do.”

In the end, baseball itself rescued the day. It wasn’t so much that a great game made us forget all that transpired in the previous 48 hours — as if anyone with a Twitter feed possibly could have anyway. No, a game cannot simply toss us an escape rope, and we shouldn’t want to move on so soon: Three women were wronged in an incident symptomatic of a broader problem; basic decency demands that we ask baseball to better itself.

What a game can do is remind us why we care in the first place, why we’re bothering with reading and listening and talking about these problems within baseball’s ecosystem instead of anywhere else. For all that was wrong in the last few days, baseball reminded us of its virtues, of why we choose to spend our leisure time in this imperfect space. Read the rest of this entry »

The connection between past and present is more durable in baseball than in other sports, and the link is particularly apparent during the World Series. We’ve had nearly 120 of these now, and the classics are a constant presence in contemporary broadcasts. Seemingly every inning, we hear about great games from earlier eras or learn how X is the first player to do Y in the World Series since 1950-something.

If there’s any problem in this connection with the past, it’s that so much of the discourse focuses on the games from the so-called Golden Era at the expense of more recent history. To an extent, that’s a function of time; however great the 2016 World Series may have been, it’s difficult to place those games into historical perspective. Sometimes, memories must marinate.

But that shouldn’t stop us from trying. Below, I recounted each of the World Series’ from the 21st century, and attempted to rank them from least to most compelling. It’s a subjective list — could it be anything else? — but however you order it, it’s clear that we’ve had our share of great matchups lately. More than anything though, at the dawn of the 2019 World Series, it’s worthwhile to take a look back at the previous 19 matchups. After all, we had a lot of fun back then. It’d be a shame if we forgot the details.

19. 2007: Red Sox over Rockies in Four

Entering the series, Colorado was the best story in sports. With a record of 77-72, the Rockies were 6 1/2 games out of first with barely two weeks to play in the regular season. From there, they took 12 of 13 down the stretch, won a one-game playoff, and swept consecutive series to reach their first championship.

Reality struck immediately. Dustin Pedroia led off the bottom half of Game 1 with a homer over the Green Monster and the Sawx boat-raced their guests 13-1. Games 2 and 4 were one-run contests, but this was ultimately a matchup between the best team in the American League and a .500ish squad no longer riding a historical hot streak, and it felt like it.

Series Minutiae: Bobby Kielty only hit one homer during the regular season and had just one at-bat in the series, but it was a big one: His solo shot in Game 4 proved to be both the winning run in the game and the last at-bat in his big league career. Read the rest of this entry »

Atlanta’s Game 5 loss to St. Louis last week marked not only the end of a season, but also the end of an era, as Braves catcher Brian McCann announced his retirement after the contest. It came without much warning: McCann hadn’t tipped his hand publicly and he certainly could have found work in 2020 had he wanted to play. For a man who mostly kept quiet away from the diamond, his understated goodbye was a fitting conclusion to a great and perhaps under-appreciated career. While at times overshadowed by others at the position, McCann was one of the game’s premier catchers for more than a decade. His steady production at the plate and prowess with the glove made him a star — and an intriguing test case for Cooperstown.

McCann was Atlanta’s second-round pick out of Duluth High School in Georgia in 2002, a prequel of sorts to the club’s strategy of locking down home-state talent in the draft later that decade. High school backstops are a notoriously risky player pool, but McCann bucked the odds and blossomed into one of Atlanta’s top prospects almost immediately. He was one of the best players in the Sally League as a 19-year-old, and he slugged nearly .500 in the pitcher-friendly Florida State League a year later. He then proved equal to the Double-A test in 2005. Fifty games into the season, he’d walked nearly as often as he’d struck out and with good power to boot. Stuck in third place and receiving little production from their catchers, Atlanta summoned him to the big leagues that June. (The minor league skipper who delivered the good news? None other than Brian Snitker.)

McCann made his debut at 21 years old and homered in his second game. True to form, he circled the bases quickly and unemotively, not even cracking a smile until he’d reached the dugout. By mid-August, he’d claimed the starter’s job. He finished his first campaign with a respectable .279/.345/.400 line (93 wRC+) and clubbed two more home runs in the NLDS that fall. His quick success prompted the Braves to anoint him their catcher of the future and dispatch Johnny Estrada, an All-Star the previous year, to Arizona for bullpen help.

McCann immediately rewarded Atlanta’s show of faith. In 130 games, he hit .333/.338/.572 (142 wRC+) and led all National League catchers with 4.3 WAR. That kicked off a 12-year run in which he was one of the league’s best-hitting backstops. Over that span, he made seven All-Star teams and won six Silver Slugger Awards. We didn’t realize it at the time, but McCann was legitimately one of the best and most consistent players in baseball at his peak:

Read the rest of this entry »