Three seasons ago, Matt Harvey was one of the best pitchers in all of major-league baseball. Over 26 starts, his 2.00 FIP was the best among all starters. His 2.27 ERA placed behind only Clayton Kershaw and Jose Fernandez’s marks by that measure. Despite a relative deficit of innings, Harvey’s 6.5 WAR was third among pitchers behind only Clayton Kershaw and Adam Wainwright.

The reason for that low-ish innings total? A partially torn UCL that ended Harvey’s season in August and ultimately required Tommy John surgery. Rehab kept Harvey off the mound for the entire 2014 campaign, as well, but he came back strong in 2015, posting a 2.71 ERA (82 ERA-) and 3.05 FIP (80 FIP-), and proved instrumental in getting the New York Mets into the World Series.

The 2016 campaign has been an up-and-down one for Harvey — and will feature much more down than up going forward, as reports indicate that the right-hander will undergo surgery for thoracic outlet syndrome. For the Mets, the loss of Harvey is a threat to their postseason odds. For Harvey himself, it’s a threat to his career.

On May 20, Eno Sarris wondered, What’s Wrong with Matt Harvey? His conclusion: that maybe the slider wasn’t quite as good as it had been, by movement or location, and that a little bit of work on that pitch might right the ship. For a time after that, Harvey appeared to have gotten things in order. In five starts beginning May 30, Harvey went at least six innings in every start, striking out 25 against five walks with a 2.25 ERA and 2.08 FIP. His strikeouts were down a bit from last year in that stretch (25% to 21%), but his walks also decreased (7% to 4%).

Read the rest of this entry »

At last year’s the trade deadline, the Texas Rangers made a deal for Cole Hamels despite a 50-52 record that placed them three games back in the wild card race, with four teams in front of them — and seven games back in the division, with two teams ahead of them. The club ultimately finished the season 38-22, winning the division in the process. The addition of Hamels was certainly integral to their success.

That said, the trade wasn’t necessarily made with just 2015 in mind; in the process, the Rangers were able to move Matt Harrison’s contract and retain Cole Hamels through either 2018 or 2019 (for which latter year the club holds an option). Hamels hasn’t been at his best this year — his 2.93 ERA obscures uncharacteristically weak fielding-independent numbers — but the Rangers have continued winning this season, having produced a 53-32 record and a 7.5-game lead on the Houston Astros.

The Rangers leveraged some payroll flexibility into the acquisition of a player likely to help them in the present and future. A look at the current state of future payroll commitments could help determine which teams are best positioned to take on money at this year’s deadline.

While the traditional would-be free agents are always popular trade targets, there are quite a few players who could be moved in the next month who are owed money beyond this season. Ryan Braun has $76 million remaining on his contract after this year. Andrew Miller will earn $18 million through the 2018 season. Carlos Gonzalez has $20 million coming to him next year while Jay Bruce has a reasonable option and Jonathan Lucroy has a ridiculously team-friendly option. While teams have more money to spend than ever before, they still operate on budgets, and looking at future commitments is a start in determining how much money a team has to spend.

The graph below shows every team’s commitments for the 2017 season, per Cot’s Contracts. Only guaranteed money is included, which means options and potential arbitration salaries are left out for the time being.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, after months of rumored negotiations, news broke that Disney had agreed to acquire a 33% stake in MLB’s streaming-video division, often referred to as BAM Tech. According the report, Disney — which has ABC and ESPN under its umbrella — agreed to acquire one-third of BAM Tech for $1.16 billion, which puts the overall valuation for the entire streaming division at $3.5 billion. As part of the deal, Disney also has the right to purchase another 33% of the company in the future, which would allow them to become majority owners of whatever they choose to call BAM Tech long-term.

The deal is certain to have far-reaching implications for the future of streaming video, and it also could have implications in the upcoming labor negotiations as owners attempt to separate non-baseball revenue from baseball revenue despite its origins within the game.

With this deal, it is clear that BAM Tech is set to be distinct from MLBAM, focusing on streaming efforts outside of baseball. This development was first announced last August, coinciding with a deal to acquire NHL’s streaming rights. MLBAM  has become a force in the industry, branching out from providing only MLB-related services several years ago to providing back-end help to ESPN, rolling out the WWE Network and HBO NOW, along with streaming the NCAA Tournament and PGA tour events.

MLB considered several options with their streaming-services business, from going public to staying put, but ultimately chose a strategic partnership with Disney. By retaining a large equity stake in BAM Tech, at least until the option to sell another third is due, MLB has bet on the continuing upside of the company. By partnering with Disney, the odds are good that more deals like what the league did with the NHL and HBO will come down the pike, and if MLB and Disney can grow the company together, the remaining equity the league holds will likely increase in value, perhaps significantly.

Read the rest of this entry »

The New York Yankees aren’t completely out of the 2016 postseason race, but they’re also not trending up. The team has done little this season to make anyone think they’re playoff-bound or anything more than a .500 team. Masahiro Tanaka has been good and CC Sabathia is having a nice bounce-back season, but Michael Pineda, Nathan Eovaldi, Luis Severino and Ivan Nova haven’t been able to keep the ball in the park, giving up 52 homers in 274.1 innings. On offense, the only above-average hitter is a 39-year-old Carlos Beltran, and he’s having trouble staying on the field. The strength of the team is an historically great bullpen, and if the team is willing to give up on this season, they could get quite a return over the next month by dealing Aroldis Chapman, Andrew Miller and maybe even Dellin Betances.

The Yankees are currently 37-39 with a negative-34 run differential*. They’re nine games back in the division and six games out of the last wild-card spot, needing to pass six teams to get there. Our projections have them going 44-42 the rest of the way, thereby ending the year at exactly .500. BaseRuns says the Yankees have played like a team that should be 33-43. While the team’s peripheral pitching stats suggest the team has outperformed their results a little bit (4.43 ERA and 4.00 FIP), we’re still talking about a team that might be .500 if things had worked out better, not a team that looks like a contender. The team’s best playoff odds are likely behind them and the team has a roughly 6% chance at the postseason right now.

*Numbers before play on Wednesday.

So in all likelihood, the team should be sellers. That said, a team of veterans with long-term contracts doesn’t generally make for the most appealing trade partner. If he’s still healthy, Carlos Beltran should be in demand, and it’s possible that Nathan Eovaldi might bring something back, but the strength of the Yankees has been the bullpen, and if they’re going to sell, that’s where they’ll get the greatest return.

Read the rest of this entry »

Jay Bruce’s tenure with the Reds has reached the kids in the back seat asking “Are we there, yet?” stage. It feels like he should have been traded a while ago, yet here is, again a trade target and again a player Cincinnati can move to help its rebuilding process. The team has a $13 million option on Bruce for next year, so they theoretically still control him for another year and a half. That said, now is really the time the Reds need to trade him.

Figuring out when the Reds could have traded Bruce isn’t difficult. Determining if they should have is more so. Jay Bruce signed his current contract back before the 2011 season. The deal guaranteed him $51 million, buying out his arbitration years and potentially three years of free agency. The Reds were coming off a division-winning season, and while the 2011 season was disappointing, the team made the playoffs in 2012 and 2013. Heading into the 2014 season, the Reds had reasonable expectations of contending.

That edition of the Reds featured one of the best players in baseball, Joey Votto; a still decent Brandon Phillips; a nice, young player in Todd Frazier; and promising guys like Devin Mesoraco and Billy Hamilton, who were potentially ready to step forward. With a rotation of Johnny Cueto, Mat Latos, Homer Bailey, Mike Leake, and Alfredo Simon — and Tony Cingrani with Aroldis Chapman in the ninth — the team looked like it might have a decent shot at postseason contention. At the very least, there wasn’t the obvious need to blow things up and rebuild. The 2014 season proceeded to become a bit of a disaster, however. Votto got hurt, Phillips got worse, Bailey and Latos couldn’t pitch full seasons, and Jay Bruce had the worst year of his career, putting up a wRC+ of 78, a 40-point drop from his previous four seasons.

Read the rest of this entry »

In 1990, Rickey Henderson came to the plate in the leadoff spot 588 times (out of 594 total plate appearances). He hit 28 homers out of that slot, walking 95 times and striking out just 60, en route to a .326/.439/.579 line as Oakland’s No. 1 hitter. He also stole 65 bases and was caught on just 10 attempts. All told, he produced a 10.2-WAR season that has since been eclipsed by only three position players: Barry Bonds, Cal Ripken, and Mike Trout.

Henderson’s 190 wRC+ mark in 1990 has been topped by a small handful of batters in the meantime, too: Bonds a bunch of times, Jeff Bagwell Mark McGwire. Bryce Harper did it last year, and Frank Thomas did, too, in the strike-shortened 1994 season. None of them provided such production out of the leadoff spot, however. By most criteria, it’s the greatest hitting season by a leadoff batter in history.

It will likely remain the greatest season by a leadoff batter after the 2016 campaign, as well. That said, Cardinals infielder Matt Carpenter is making a strong case for second-best.

In terms of pure value at the plate, Matt Carpenter is off to a great start. Carpenter’s .300/.419/.585 line has led to a .419 wOBA and a 167 wRC+ that leads the National League and is behind only David Ortiz in all of major-league baseball*. Over the last 365 days, Carpenter’s 154 wRC+ mark sits behind only Ortiz, Trout, Josh Donaldson, Harper, and Joey Votto, and his .277 ISO is the seventh best in baseball. Continued production at that level would give him one of the greatest-hitting leadoff seasons of all time.

*Numbers current as of Monday afternoon.

Read the rest of this entry »

Of late, the Pittsburgh Pirates have been remarkable in a rather disappointing way. On May 27, the club was 28-19 and had a 43.7% chance of making the playoffs. Two weeks later, after a sweep at the hands of the St. Louis Cardinals, Dave Cameron cast considerable doubt on the Pirates’ ability to compete this season. Now, after four weeks and a 6-20 stretch, the team’s playoff odds are down to 2.7% in what figures to be a very competitive wild-card race.

Despite the disappointments of June, the Pirates continue to possess a very good, very young core in the form of Gerrit Cole, Starling Marte, and Gregory Polanco. That group provides an opportunity to stay competitive in a way most small-market franchises have found incredibly difficult. The emergence of Jameson Taillon can only help those fortunes going forward.

Still just 24 years old, it would be reasonable to assume that Taillon has been taking a fairly standard path to the big leagues, continuing to move up the ranks as he gets older and has more success. That has not been the case, however. Taillon was actually fairly close to the majors three years ago, at 21 years of age, reaching Triple-A in 2013, with a reasonable expectation of finding his way to Pittsburgh the following season. He was consistently ranked among the top 20 or so prospects since having been drafted with the second-overall pick in 2010.

That 2014 season didn’t go as planned, however, and Taillon underwent Tommy John surgery in April of 2014. A solid rehab and recovery would have put him back on the mound sometime in the middle of last season. While trying to ramp up for the rest of the season, Taillon then had surgery for a hernia, recovery from which kept him out the rest of the season. When he headed back to Triple-A this year, he had not made a competitive pitch in over two full seasons. He didn’t look rusty, though, recording 61 strikeouts and just six walks in 61.2 innings of work for Indianapolis. That earned him a promotion to the majors — and, in light of Pittsburgh’s difficulty in finding reliable and healthy starters, his stay in the big leagues should last a while.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tampa Bay’s Blake Snell entered the season as one of Major League Baseball’s top prospects. Among the top-20 names on a number of the industry’s preseason lists and a dark-horse Rookie of the Year Candidate, there were rumors that the young left-hander might agree to a contract extension with the Rays that likely would have placed him on the club’s Opening Day roster. That didn’t happen, however. Finally, after sufficient time had passed to secure an extra year of service time for the Rays, Snell was called up to make a start and pitched well. Following that, however, a series of off days allowed Tampa Bay to deploy a four-man rotation. That, combined with a series of solid starts from Matt Andriese, meant Snell stayed down in the minors. Now he’s back and the results so far are mixed — but also easily corrected.

When a pitcher has compiled just three starts in the majors, and the first one of those is separated by more than a month from the other two, evaluating his statistics is a glass-half-full-half-empty situation. If you want to believe Blake Snell is doing well, look at his ERA and FIP — they’re 2.40 and 2.92, respectively — and how he has yet to concede a home run. For those who’d like to view the glass as half empty, consider instead that Snell has allowed five unearned runs for which his ERA (by definition) doesn’t account — and that, in his last two starts, he’s recorded as many walks as strikeouts. While giving up no home runs is good, it likely can’t continue like that and could lead to higher run totals in the future.

Read the rest of this entry »

Conventional wisdom dictates that, when signing a free agent to a multi-year deal, the signing team will receive most of the value from that player at the beginning of his contract. Ideally, the team receives a surplus in the early stages of the agreement. But even then, as the player ages and declines, the club is likely to pay more than a the player is worth for the final years.

Given the effects of age-related decline, it was troubling when, after signing a three-year deal as a 37-year-old, Carlos Beltran proceeded to record a poor 2014 campaign. After Beltran began the 2015 season with a terrible April, at least one writer reasonably (foolishly?) wondered if Beltran was finished. He’s done nothing but hit since then.

In Carlos Beltran’s first 14 seasons, from 1998 to 2011, he played in nearly 1,800 games and hit .283/.361/.496, conspiring to produce a career 120 wRC+ as he entered his age-35 season. Then, just when he should have been exhibiting real signs of decline, he recorded a .282/.343/.493 and 127 wRC+ between 2012 and -13 with the Cardinals. His walk rate did decline a bit, but with the general suppression of offense in baseball, his performance relative to the league improved. While his defense no longer represented an asset, he had sufficiently staved off a decline on offense. So it’s not surprising that, when the Yankees gave him three years and $45 million before 2014, they had reason to believe that possessed at least one more good year in him.

It would be a bit melodramatic to call 2014 a disaster for Beltran, but the season didn’t go well. No stranger to a variety of maladies over his career, Beltran ended up on the disabled list for bone spurs in his right elbow in May, and then went on the seven-day DL in July due to a concussion he sustained when a batted ball hit him in practice. He hit .233/.301/.402 on the season, leading only to a 96 wRC+. While not so poor in itself, the battin line was coupled with poor base-running numbers and below-average defense in right field, leaving him with a negative WAR on the season. He had elbow surgery after the during the 2014-15 offseason to relieve the discomfort he was feeling, but the first month of 2015 could not have gone any worse.

Read the rest of this entry »

Like any baseball stat, Wins Above Replacement provides the answer to a question. The question, in this case? Something like this: accounting for all the main ways (hitting, running, defense, etc.) in which a player can produce value for his team, how many wins has this particular player been worth?

There are, of course, criticisms of WAR. Some valid, others less so. One prominent criticism is how defensive value is handled in WAR. Some don’t understand how it’s calculated. Others understand but also question how well it represents a player’s defensive contributions. These criticisms shouldn’t be dismissed. As with all baseball statistics, though, it’s necessary to consider WAR in the context in which it’s presented — that is, to remember the question a metric is intended to answer and the method by which it attempts to answer that question.

On Monday, I completed one such reminder in a discussion of players whose WAR totals this year are probably low based on what we know about their defense. Today, I’ll make another attempt — this time, by examining players whose WAR totals are probably inflated by defensive numbers unlikely to be sustained over the course of a season.

In the comments of Monday’s post, one reader, Ernie Camacho, noted:

[T]here is a weird tension in this article between quantifying and estimating what has already happened, on the one hand, and evaluating player talent, on the other. I’m not sure we should be blending the two.

This is a good point. That tension most definitely exists, and it’s possible that some of that tension is what causes people to discount defensive metrics — and WAR as a whole. I agree that, in terms of calculating WAR, we should not be blending what has already happened with what we think will probably happen. Over time, in an ideal world, WAR captures both. In smaller samples, however, this is more difficult to do. In fact, there’s actually something that does capture the blending when we have smaller samples: projections. If we want to capture a player’s talent level at any given moment, projections do that very well.

Read the rest of this entry »