Superstar trades are the most fun type of deadline trade, but the majority of deals before July 31 will involve more ordinary talent. Typically, these players don’t really move the needle on playoff chances in the aggregate; the largest benefit they deliver is to sand off a nick in the team’s roster construction. We haven’t seen many of these trades just yet, but the working hypothesis — with which I agree — is that one trade deadline ought to make teams more interested in these types of moves since they no longer have the luxury of an additional month to see if they’re needed at all.

Baseball being baseball, some of these minor acquisitions may end up being instant superstars for their new teams.

For instance, Randy Winn was hardly a mediocre player and, using modern constructions of Wins Above Replacement, you can make a very good case that he was a borderline star in 2002-2004 leading up to his trade. That wasn’t really his reputation at the time, and having a fairly run-of-the-mill season with the Mariners, he only fetched the endlessly injured Jesse Foppert and the endlessly Yorvit Torrealba, Yorvit Torrealba. Winn responded to the trade by literally putting up Mike Trout-levels of WARitude, a .359/.391/.680, 3.6 WAR hitting double-digit WAR totals on a seasonal basis.

Nyjer Morgan was swapped to the Nationals along with Sean Burnett for Joel Hanrahan and post-hype Lastings Milledge. In 49 games, Morgan hit .351/.396/.415 and stole 24 bases (2.9 WAR)

And Doyle Alexander, a solid pitcher mid-career for the Blue Jays, is chiefly remembered in lore for two things. The first is being the player who used a rarely exercised part of the CBA to demand a trade after being dealt during a multi-year contract with more than five years of service time. Alexander did not realize that it lost him his free agent rights for a time. The second, and more famous thing, he’s remembered for is being traded for John Smoltz. Alexander’s 9-0, 1.53 ERA effort in 11 starts was crucial to getting Detroit in the playoffs, but the Tigers weren’t secret geniuses. Read the rest of this entry »

Going into the trade deadline last year, I put on my Dictator of MLB hat and made some trade deadline moves of my own. Upon further review, it turned out that my declarations while wearing a magical, virtual hat were not binding on any team; I was unable to force those trades to actually happen. While I have not obtained the desired legal authority over the last calendar year, it was a fun exercise, so I am reviving it ahead of next week’s deadline.

The basic rules are simple. I can’t guarantee that every trade will be thought of as fair by every reader — indeed, I can guarantee the opposite — but I did make a real effort to at least construct trades that were plausible. That is, except for the very last section, where I am explicitly trying to make wild trades, spitballing how a team could pull off a trade that ought to be impossible.

The Milwaukee Brewers acquire P Marcus Stroman from the Toronto Blue Jays for SS Mauricio Dubon, OF Trent Grisham, P Aaron Ashby, and 2B Travis Shaw

Brandon Woodruff’s injury throws a monkey wrench into the works for the Brewers, and with one of the weaker rotations among first-tier playoff contenders, something’s gotta give. While Stroman has expressed a desire to go to the Yankees, the Brewers ought to have more motivation, unless James Paxton is secretly injured. Brice Turang is the shortstop horse to bet on in the Brewers system, and Dubon is sufficiently close to the majors to tempt the Blue Jays, who have seemed to prefer near-major league ready prospects for reasons that elude me. Grisham would give Toronto a near-future bat who is increasingly intriguing, and Ashby would fulfill the team’s need to have every player in the minor league system related to a former major leaguer. Shaw isn’t here to actually add much, but instead to give Toronto an opportunity to rehab his value, and clear the way for Keston Hiura for good. Read the rest of this entry »

12:05

Dan Szymborski: And the chat has begun.

12:07

Dan Szymborski: I wasn’t going to address this, but there are a *lot* of questions and comments on the topic, so I’m going to make a quick comment and then no more on the subject.

12:09

Dan Szymborski: Jonah Keri is someone who I’ve known for a long time and the allegations are as completely and utterly shocking to me as to anyone else.

12:09

Dan Szymborski: His alleged conduct is frighteningly awful and I hope the justice system works as it is supposed to.

12:10

Dan Szymborski: ZiPS has backed off that somewhat – remember these are preseason runs.

Read the rest of this entry »

In a year not otherwise flowing with surprises on the team level, the Texas Rangers have been a big one. A 50-46 record isn’t one that’s dominating the American League or the AL West but it’s good enough that if the season ended today, the Rangers would finish 16 games ahead of their preseason ZiPS projections on a seasonal basis. One of the players most responsible for Texas’s surprise prediction-rebellion is Mike Minor. At 8-4 with a 2.73 ERA — even his 3.82 FIP is just fine in 2019’s Sillyball environment — Minor made his first All-Star Game. From missing two seasons with shoulder problems to becoming a successful Royals reclamation projection to growing into a solid No. 2 starter to being named an All-Star, Minor’s emergence has been one of the best stories in baseball in 2019. And sports being cruel sometimes, the Rangers may very well be best-served by allowing Minor to wear another uniform in the denouement.

Coming into 2019, the computer’s reasons for Rangers skepticism were straightforward: Texas had some interesting, top-tier talent but also a stunning lack of depth around the diamond. Not a single Ranger had a three-WAR season in 2018 and the team’s WAR leader, Jurickson Profar, was an Oakland Athletic. Even the team’s most interesting talent had questions, whether it was Joey Gallo‘s batting average, Jose Leclerc‘s sustainability, Rougned Odor alternating between being Jeff Kent and Clark Kent, or Nomar Mazara’s puzzling lack of development. On some level, ZiPS wasn’t wrong, as the Rangers still lack depth, but it missed out on the magnitude of their good performances. Mike Minor and Lance Lynn look like pitchers you’d actually like pitching in a playoff game, Joey Gallo has spent much of the season challenging the Alomar Line instead of the Mendoza, and Hunter Pence is having one of the wildest, out-of-nowhere offensive comebacks that I can remember.

So, given all these happy surprises, which have led to real playoff contention, why should they explore a Minor trade? Read the rest of this entry »

The Chicago Cubs and Kansas City Royals completed a trade Monday evening, with the Royals sending starting catcher Martin Maldonado to Chicago in return for swingman Mike Montgomery.

While Montgomery was never part of the team’s stable of frontline talent, he’s been a useful role player for the Cubs since being picked up from Seattle in the Dan Vogelbach trade. Since that 2016 swap, Montgomery has put up a 3.68 ERA across 38 starts and 81 relief appearances for the Cubs. The idea of having a pitcher in a long-term role as a swingman/spot-starter is something largely dead in 2019 baseball, so Montgomery was a bit of throwback in this sense. He filled in admirably with a 3.69 ERA as a starter in 2018 with Yu Darvish injured and Tyler Chatwood issuing more walks than a corrupt local judge.

2019 has been a struggle for Montgomery, with shoulder and finger injuries limiting his availability and moderate control issues hampering his effectiveness. Montgomery is still likely a useful player over the long haul and isn’t a free agent until after the 2021 season, but the Cubs are quite rightly taking “now” as a priority over “later.” That Montgomery is the player heading to Kansas City is also fueled by the fact that Montgomery requested a trade this season. From a career standpoint, it makes sense for Montgomery to get an opportunity to start full-time; a starting pitcher is going to do better in free agency no matter how the CBA changes between now and the end of 2021.

If for nothing else, Montgomery will always possess a unique place in Cubs history as the pitcher who threw the final pitch of the 2016 World Series.

And in the “now,” the Cubs had other priorities. Catching has been a strength for the team, but Willson Contreras heading to the injured list with a foot issue creating some unwanted uncertainty at the position. Without Contreras, the Cubs only had a single healthy catcher on the 40-man roster in Victor Caratini. This close to the trade deadline, with no guarantee that Contreras would be back after the minimum IL stay, so the Cubs were put into a position where they couldn’t wait and see how his recovery goes. Remember, July 31 is now the trade deadline in Major League Baseball starting this year, which means that the Cubs can’t count on picking up a cheap catcher in mid-August if something unexpected happens in Contreras’s recovery. Read the rest of this entry »

The Boston Red Sox and the Baltimore Orioles completed a trade over the weekend, with Baltimore sending pitcher Andrew Cashner to Boston in return for center fielder Elio Prado and third baseman Noelberth Romero.

At 28-65, the Orioles appear likely to be eliminated from the playoff race sometime in August. Andrew Cashner is a free agent at the end of the season, and even if Baltimore had a less implausible shot at the playoffs, it makes a lot of sense to get something in return for the right-hander while the getting is good. In this case, the getting is two very deep dives into the Red Sox organization. Prado and Romero are both 17 year-olds out of Venezuela. Neither player is anywhere near the top of the prospect radar at this point. To grab a couple of lottery picks, the Orioles agreed to pay half of Cashner’s salary to the Red Sox, a figure just a bit under $2 million. If either prospect works out, it won’t be a new experience for Cashner, who has been swapped for Anthony Rizzo and Luis Castillo in previous trades.

Cashner has had a decent season on paper, but the Orioles’ return suggests that there is a good deal of skepticism surrounding his 3.83 ERA and 4.25 FIP. The bump in Cashner’s peripherals in 2019 is at least enough for ZiPS to think of him as a one-win player. That’s par for the course for a fifth starter, and it just so happens that’s exactly what the Red Sox were in the market for. It isn’t something that will show up well in playoff projections, but remember that teams can no longer pick up major league-caliber fourth and fifth starter types in August, which means that teams ought to take more care to prepare for emergencies now. And pitchers famously have lots of emergencies. Brian Johnson is currently out due to an intestinal issue, and given that he’s been out for weeks, it seems to be something a good bit more serious than overindulging in spicy chili. He has thrown a couple of bullpens, but his trip to the IL creates some uncertainty, which isn’t a good state of being for a contending team. And Cashner is likely a safer below-average pitcher than Hector Velazquez. Read the rest of this entry »

12:02

Dan Szymborski: Release the Chaten!

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Intrigued by it, but haven’t dipped my toes in yet. HS has been fun!

12:03

Dan Szymborski: You should see a WAR update in the trade value series. I may do something more substantial before the offseason.

Read the rest of this entry »

Marcus Semien is having a moment. Semien finished the 2018 season with 3.7 WAR, nearly doubling the next-best total of his career. There was a catch, however, in that Semien’s WAR was largely fueled by a sudden jump in his defensive numbers. While the numbers for Baseball Info Solutions and Ultimate Zone Rating never completely agreed on Semien, they both thought he was a below-average defender at short. Coming into 2018, per 1350 innings, BIS had Semien at -2.7 runs, while UZR had him at -7.6 runs. In 2018, those numbers were +8.5 runs and +7.9 runs respectively, numbers that, if believed, meant that Semien had added 10-to-15 runs of value from somewhere very unexpected.

While a White Sox prospect, it was thought that Semien would likely struggle playing shortstop in the majors. In the minors, he made 60 errors in 2203 innings (37 errors per 1350 innings), which led the White Sox to find as much time for him at second and third base as possible. And while error rates usually come down in the majors, Semien committed 35 errors in his first season as the A’s shortstop. You could argue that errors can be overused as a method of defensive evaluation — and you’d be correct — but there are limits. UZR actually had Semien as slightly above-average in range, with the -11.7 total run estimate coming from a brutal -12.6 runs from errors. That’s not a run-of-the-mill error-prone season, either:

Read the rest of this entry »

If the other projectionators are anything like me, the projections going awry, afoul, or askew is always something in the back of their minds. Ideally, one should make projections, let the rubber hit the road, and then worry about what actually happened in the fall post-mortems. As much as I’d like to do that, when ZiPS makes an aggressive projection in one direction or the other, especially one that departs from the consensus of the other projection systems, I can’t help but look over my shoulder. Yesterday, I looked at pitchers for whom ZiPS missed the mark. Today, I consider the other side.

Among hitters, no projection has haunted my dreams as much as Juan Soto’s. Yes, Juan Soto was a superstar in 2018. Yes, he was just 19 when he destroyed the National League. Yes, everybody loves him as a player, not just the projection systems. However, in this case, ZiPS went out on a bit of a limb with Soto. Rather than the typical curmudgeonly regressing-toward-the-mean, ZiPS saw Soto playing even better, projecting a ninth-place finish in WAR among position players. Soto hasn’t been a disappointment, and ZiPS hasn’t been totally wrong, but the modest 23-point differential between ZiPS and reality grows larger once you consider that ZiPS missed low on the level of offense around the league.

It’s interesting to see where ZiPS differed the most from the other three projection systems used here. Do note that the “Consensus OPS” will vary slightly from what you see in the following tables, as ZiPS is not included in these consensus stats. ZiPS in 2019 tended to like a lot of the mid-20s “interesting” power prospects while simultaneously liking middling young catchers less than the other systems. That’s something that hadn’t come up in previous seasons, so I’m curious to see whether it continues and what it means. The data used by ZiPS versus that used by the other systems means it isn’t always going to be an apples-to-grenades comparison.

As with the pitchers, ZiPS is very close in accuracy to the consensus projections, but slightly behind (again, as I expect it to be). For the bias-adjusted projections, the consensus has an RMSE (root-mean-square error) of 0.1072 in OPS compared to ZiPS’ .1076. If these were the end-of-year results, we’d all be very depressed, but half-year stats are quite volatile!

Everyone liked Fernando Tatis Jr. over the long haul prior to his debut, but it was an open question whether or not everything would click in 2019. Everything has clicked in 2019. It’s easy to forget that Tatis only played a little more than half of a season in Double-A in 2018, and missed significant time due to a broken thumb. That he has succeeded does not mean it was a certainty coming into the season, so I’ll live with being wrong here. In a way, Tatis’ explosion reminds me of Hanley Ramirez’s back in the day. Not that Tatis and Hanley are or were comparable players, but the magnitude of their respective rookie explosions is similar.

What will haunt me is the Gurriel projection. The consensus was wrong on Gurriel, but if you scroll up to the first chart, ZiPS was really, really wrong on Gurriel. What makes it even more maddening is that I’m still not sure why. Gurriel’s launch angle is up and he’s hitting more barrels, but he’s also exhibiting this weird combination of swinging at fewer pitches and making even less contact than in 2018. ZiPS is coming around on Gurriel, and his rest-of-season projection now stands a stunning 73 points of OPS above his preseason projection. If we used the full-on ZiPS rather than the simpler in-season model that increase would be 94 points! The computer understands the improvement better than I do apparently.

ZiPS liked Joey Gallo more than the consensus, but still undershot Gallo’s OPS (so far) by more than 100 points. I can at least get my head around Gallo’s improvement. While a .391 BABIP is unlikely to be sustainable, there’s been a real change in his approach at the plate. In 2018, Gallo swung at 32.2% of pitches outside the strike zone; that ranked him 152nd in baseball if we use 300 plate appearances as our cutoff. In a single year, he’s cut off nearly a third of that, with his 22.5% ranking 21st-best among players with 150 plate appearances. While he’s also swinging at fewer pitches in the strike zone, the dropoff isn’t to the same degree. Even if his BABIP drops precipitously from .391, it may not drop down to previous levels. Gallo had a .250 BABIP in 2017 and a .249 BABIP in 2018, but the ZiPS model for BABIP that uses hit ball data thinks he “ought to” have put up a .301 BABIP over that period. That’s the largest deviation among hitters, suggesting that there was some hidden upside in there. ZiPS only projected a .273 BABIP — the longer a player underperforms, the more likely ZiPS is to believe reality rather than the estimate — but now thinks he’s somewhere around .300 again.

Baseball’s having a low-ball moment. Using Statcast’s strike zone, the rate at which home runs are being hit on low pitches is up 62% from 2018. 409 balls below the strike zone were hit for homers last year; this year we’re already at 347! Does this have an effect on the projections? Looking at the projections as a whole, there’s a real relationship between a hitter’s low-ball hitting ability and him beating the 2019 projections. This is something to come back to in the season’s post-mortem. The number of golf ball homers being hit would make a 1970s hitting coach cringe!

Oh, J-Ram, did you anger a sorcerer? Unless I missed something, if Ramirez’s season ends up with this OPS, it will be the least accurate projection for a batter coming off a five-WAR season in ZiPS history. Now, ZiPS only goes back to the early years of the millennium, but still, that’s not a feather in ZiPS’ cap.

Naturally, coming off a drug suspension, there are eyebrows being raised at Robinson Canó’s disappointing season in New York. It’s tempting to take the bait and worm out of a bad projection, but with nearly 15 years of drug testing, ZiPS still can’t find a pattern of group over-performance or underperformance based on the timing of a drug suspension. I think the more boring story — that a 36-year-old middle infielder is declining rapidly — is the more accurate one.

Danny Jansen fits in the category of “wrong, but in a very weird way.” ZiPS was relatively negative on Jansen coming into the season, projecting a .243/.332/.385 line, a full 61 points of OPS below what the fans estimated. Coming off a .247/.342/.432 debut and a strong performance in Triple-A, people expected more. Readers north of the border let me have it (though politely, because Canada). ZiPS turned out to be wrong, but in the opposite direction: Jansen now at .196/.278/.314 for the Jays.

If the other projectionators are anything like me, the projections going awry, afoul, or askew is always something in the back of their minds. Ideally, one should make projections, let the rubber hit the road, and then worry about what actually happened in the fall post-mortems. As much as I’d like to do that, when ZiPS makes an aggressive projection in one direction or the other, especially one that departs from the consensus of the other projection systems, I can’t help but look over my shoulder.

Two of the projections keeping me up at night the most from the preseason are those of Shane Bieber and Giovanny Gallegos.

Coming into 2019, ZiPS projected Bieber to go 13-8, with a 3.71 ERA, a 3.49 FIP, and 3.8 WAR. Those numbers were a bit sweat-inducing given that 3.8 WAR was enough to rank Bieber 13th in the majors entering the season. Bieber had a 3.23 FIP in his rookie season, but posted a 4.55 ERA and appeared to lack an out pitch against left-handed batters. Players with fewer projected wins included reigning AL Cy Young winner Blake Snell, Stephen Strasburg, German Marquez, and Patrick Corbin. Thankfully, this was one projection where ZiPS had company, with the rest of the projection systems housed at FanGraphs (Steamer, THE BAT, ATC) joining in. Whether your preferred quote about friendship is “I would rather walk with a friend in the dark, than alone in the light,” or the considerably darker “Misery loves company,” we all went down the Bieber road together.

But ZiPS went out on the Giovanny Gallegos branch nearly alone. Gallegos was in the top 10 of pitchers ZiPS was the most optimistic about. Indeed, with a 0.57 ERA difference between ZiPS and the consensus, ZiPS was only more optimistic about three other pitchers: Brad Brach, Mychal Givens, and Juan Nicasio. ZiPS is losing those battles so far, but Gallegos has been terrific for the Cardinals, striking out 13 batters a game; he was recently moved into higher-leverage spots. Read the rest of this entry »