Nothing says more about the state of Major League Baseball in 2019 than the fact that one of the biggest stories during the MLB Draft is the possible signings of two of last winter’s biggest name-brand free agents. Unencumbered by the signing team’s loss of draft picks with the conclusion of the MLB Draft, Dallas Keuchel and Craig Kimbrel have suddenly become a lot more exciting to clubs.

While it’s become commonplace to point to these non-signings as proof of MLB’s broken system of player compensation, I’m not actually buying it. Not that I’m disputing that there’s a serious issue, but I’d argue that the signings that are most problematic are when players like Ozzie Albies feel the need to take pennies on the dollar in their early twenties just so they can guarantee getting some of the win-related revenue they generate.

For free agents that aren’t elite contributors, I don’t think there’s any financial system that puts the genie in the bottle. Teams may not generally use straight WAR measures as unerring scripture, but they are more widely aware — even the teams run relatively poorly — of the limited impact of any one player. Mike Trout, as amazing as he is, isn’t the LeBron James of baseball, because the very design of the game itself prevents any one player from having as much of an impact on a team as LeBron or Steph Curry or James Harden or Tom Brady or Patrick Mahomes.

The demands of the players matter as well. It was widely reported over the winter that Craig Kimbrel was looking for a contract worth over $100 million for six years. While you’ll never get these rumors backed up with ironclad verification, nobody I’ve talked to inside baseball about Kimbrel’s demands has done anything but accept that as his camp’s demands.

At his best, Kimbrel was possibly the most dominating reliever of this generation, arguably even better than Mariano Rivera at his best (remember, what made Mo special wasn’t just how good he was, but how good he was for two decades). Baseball’s system no doubt underpaid Kimbrel — and the system for cost-controlled player needs serious addressing — but the Yankees or Red Sox or Cardinals or whichever team signs him has no interest in “making up” missing dollars to him that the Braves didn’t have to pay. Read the rest of this entry »

Jerry Dipoto broke a nearly two-week trade drought over the weekend, sending outfielder Jay Bruce and everyone’s favorite player, cash considerations, to the Philadelphia Phillies. In return, the Mariners received 1B/3B/OF prospect Jake Scheiner.

As with most Mariners, Bruce started the season with impressive power numbers, hitting seven home runs in the team’s first 13 games. There was a period earlier this season when home runs represented seven of Bruce’s nine hits, an unusual balance even for a one-dimensional power hitter in these home run-filled times. As a fan of unusual baseballings, I will cheerfully admit that I was kind of hoping for that to continue. At one point in April, Bruce held a .204/.298/.673 line. To put that into perspective, only four seasons in history among qualified batters have featured a SLG-OBP difference greater than 300 points.

Bruce’s flirtation with a 400-point difference early was way more fun to me than the usual “Joe So-and-So is on pace for 324 homers!” stuff. A race to topple Mark Reynolds for Mendoza Line-superiority in home runs (32) and slugging percentage (.433) could have been my song of the summer. Unfortunately, Bruce’s homer-pace slackened and he started hitting the occasional single. That has been enough to turn his 2019 into a more typical “middling power hitter” tune.

While I don’t think that anyone believed the Mariners were even close to being the best team in baseball — save for a couple of excited Mariners fans in my Twitter timeline — a 13-2 start gave Seattle some hope for a more interesting summer than expected. After all, this is a team that was forecasted to be on the dull side, but more blandly mediocre than unfathomably terrible. The best recent comparison would be the 2014 Milwaukee Brewers, another team that just wasn’t very good, but after a blazing 20-7 start and a 6 1/2 game lead, had enough of a cushion to be relevant into late summer.

Instead, Seattle unwound their hot start with impressive speed. Since the 13-2 start, the team’s gone 12-35, essentially ending any potential for a shocking run at the AL West title. To find a worse 47-game run for the Mariners, you have to look back to 1980, during the Dark Times of Seattle history. Bruce Bochte led the team in homers that year, crushing…uh…13 dingers, and the starting shortstop was the actual Mario Mendoza.

Once the 2019 version of the team was out of contention, the question became when Seattle would start selling rather than if. Bruce was always one of the best bets to go quickly if another team needed his services, not having been acquired by Seattle because of any burning desire to have him on the roster but as a balancing act to make the money in the Edwin Diaz–Robinson Canó trade satisfy both sides of the transaction. The Mariners may not have planned to give Daniel Vogelbach a serious look, but the Kyle Seager injury had a domino effect on the roster, sending Ryon Healy to third and Bruce and Edwin Encarnacion to first, opening up a spot for Vogelbach. The early demotion of Mallex Smith resulted in Mitch Haniger playing center field with more regularity, and that defensive combination allowed the team to fit Vogelbach, Bruce, Encarnacion, and Healy into the lineup simultaneously.

That gave the Mariners a lot of homers, but it turned out to be a not-so-good development for the team’s fielding. Through Monday morning, the Mariners are last in the majors in DRS (-50 runs) and UZR (-35 runs). Amusingly, Ichiro still leads M’s outfielders in UZR, at 0.2 in 10 innings.

Once everyone started shuffling back to their proper positions, Bruce was demoted to a semi-platoon role. He now follows another veteran acquired as salary makeweight from the Mets trade, Anthony Swarzak, out of town.

Bruce is a better fit with what the Phillies need. While the team’s left-handed hitters have combined for a wRC+ of 98 in 2019, it’s largely because of the existence of Bryce Harper. Odúbel Herrera’s arrest for domestic violence and uncertain return left the team in search for some left-handed hitting outside of Harper, and an extra outfielder. Ideally, Nick Williams would have been the best option to get increased playing time, but he has had an abysmal 2019, hitting .159/.205/.232 with a single homer as a part-timer. One can argue, probably correctly, that Williams likely has higher upside than Bruce, but things have changed in Philadelphia in the last couple of years. A team in contention and a rebuilding team ought to look at risk in different ways.

Bruce will likely continue in the semi-platoon role, as a fourth-outfielder who spells the regulars and plays a corner against a tougher righty when Scott Kingery isn’t in the lineup. Citizens Bank is a place where Bruce’s power, his only real remaining strength at this point, will shine. He is no longer the young semi-star he was in his early days with the Reds, but at this point of Bruce’s career, nobody’s really expecting that anymore. As a role player for the Phillies, Bruce will do his part to help the team hang onto first place.

12:01

Dan Szymborski: It is noon. It is a time for chats.

12:01

Dan Szymborski: ALCIDES KNOWS MORE ABOUT RINGS THAN JOSTENS

12:02

Dan Szymborski: I think he can be. The Nats really were too optimistic about counting on both Anibal and Heckickson.

Read the rest of this entry »

While many of the division races in baseball look quite similar to those in 2018, the AL Central has gone topsy-turvy. The Indians, despite a lackluster offseason, looked to be the clear favorite, with the Twins the only realistic threat to their recent dominance. That has turned out not to be the case, with Cleveland hanging around .500 as we enter the third month of the season and Minnesota holding a 9 1/2 game advantage, the largest divisional lead in baseball. I’d like to say I saw this coming, but I did not, and if I claimed otherwise, readers would no doubt out me as a filthy, filthy liar.

What was my complaint about the Twins? While they were considerably busier in the offseason than their rivals on the Cuyahoga, I was disappointed that they didn’t do more. Nelson Cruz was a solid short-term addition, and players like Marwin Gonzalez, C.J. Cron, and Jonathan Schoop all improved the depth of the team’s talent base, but I thought they should have been even more aggressive in their winter investments. Joe Mauer’s contract came off the books, and in a division with only one real 2019 rival, my belief was that it would be a mistake to start the season with a lower payroll than in 2018. Just one year before, the Twins aggressively pursued Yu Darvish and while that would clearly not have been a boon for the team that season, it represented them really pushing chips with the high-rollers when the opportunity presented itself.

But it has turned out that the need for a Bryce Harper or a Manny Machado or a Patrick Corbin wasn’t so pressing after all. Jake Odorizzi‘s continued development and Martin Perez’s unexpected velocity have a lot to do with it as well, but the Twins wouldn’t be where they are if a change in their offensive philosophy hadn’t paid off in spades. Read the rest of this entry »

“You don’t know the end result, and that part’s hard. So that’s why a little reflection right now, I need to reevaluate, go home, chill out and see how everything responds.”

– Dustin Pedroia, 5/27/19 press conference

The fat lady hasn’t sung for Dustin Pedroia, but she’s at least warming up for her aria. Pedroia, Red Sox manager Alex Cora, and president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski took a break from any Memorial Day barbecues to hold a press conference updating Pedroia’s injury status.

As you probably know by now, the news was not of the optimistic variety, with Pedroia announcing that he was taking a break from any rehab that specifically targeted a return to baseball in 2019. Pedroia’s knee has been a problem for years and he originally underwent surgery to repair a torn meniscus after the 2016 season.

Not all of Pedroia’s missed 2017 time was due to the knee injury, with the infielder also suffering issues with his ribs, his wrist, and even a nasal contusion after getting hit in the nose by a foul ball he hit off home plate. Complicating the situation was the hard slide from Manny Machado in an April 2017 game — there was a controversy at the time whether it was a dirty play — that led to Pedroia limping off the field. Pedroia’s stated in the past that he doesn’t hold a grudge against Machado, but that he does think about that injury.

After offseason surgery during the 2017-2018 winter that attempted to restore cartilage to his knee, Pedroia has suffered numerous setbacks, only getting into a few games in 2018 and 2019. When asked if he would return, Pedroia responded that he was not sure he’d ever play again. Read the rest of this entry »

What does ZiPS have for Yordan Alvarez’s translation?

Is Alvarez for real?

Do the Astros need to call up Alvarez right now?

Scattered within my weekly chat questions about cat and chili, there were quite a few questions revolving on Yordan Alvarez, who has spent the first two months of the 2019 season traumatizing minor league pitchers. So naturally, instead of answering the questions, I greedily saved the Alvarez talk for an article on the subject.

Prior to this season, Alvarez was ranked seventh in Houston’s farm system by Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel on the strength of his raw power potential. Ranking seventh on the Astros says more about the team’s organizational strength than any negative about Alvarez; he’s not someone who would appear in a Fringe Five column. While with a lot of minor league outfielders, you try to see if they can stick in center as long as possible, this was never a realistic option for Alvarez, who is cut from the massive slugger template.

But if you thought he was a one-dimensional type of hitter, a Pedro Cerrano type, you’d be wrong. While it’s not believed that he’ll maintain high batting averages in the majors, I think he might hang onto better averages than many think. For one, he has an efficient, easy swing and is willing to use the entire field, making him less likely to be subject to shift abuse than some other sluggers in the majors. Just to illustrate, here’s Alvarez’s spray chart in the minors in 2019 compared to Max Kepler, a more pull-heavy left-handed hitter.

Alvarez has kept his swinging strike rate under 10% in the high minors, and in the early going, he has cut off about a quarter of his 2018 strikeout rate. His walk rate has also edged higher; Alvarez is a hitter who eats what he hunts. ZiPS uses play-by-play data to estimate a version of xBABIP that I refer to as zBABIP (you don’t win the Kewpie doll for guessing what the z stands for). Alvarez won’t keep the .424 BABIP that’s currently driving his .400 batting average in the minors, of course, but the hit data suggests he may keep quite a lot of it. Read the rest of this entry »

12:04

Dan Szymborski: Unleash the Chatken!

12:05

Dan Szymborski: That’s a tricky thing in that’s it hard to really separate out a hitting coach’s contribution. It’s more of a leadership role for the manager to figure out than anything that is data driven.

12:05

Dan Szymborski: Unless someone smarter than me has found a way to isolate hitting coaches.

12:05

Dan Szymborski: Carp more.

Read the rest of this entry »

When we look back on this era of baseball in future times, exhorting children to get off our lawns, nobody shed tears of pity for the San Francisco Giants. After all, the Giants of this generation made the World Series four times and won three of them, a difficult, probability-crushing feat in a world where six division winners and four wild card teams make the playoffs. It was a team that featured most of the grandest years of one of the best players anyone will ever see — no, Dusty Baker, not Pedro Feliz — before that mantle was handed off.

After such a highlight-filled epic, the problem is what comes next? In literature, you have the ability to just end the story. King Arthur’s body sails to Avalon; Beowulf lives another 50 years; Frodo sails away. Or maybe the author doesn’t finish the books, and a TV adaptation shoves three years’ worth of material into 13 episodes. But baseball always has another sequel, another tale with new protagonists and antagonists and unfortunate Joe West cameos, and these San Francisco Giants have bungled the end of their current tale.

The Outfield Conundrum

We’ve talked a lot about Cleveland’s failures this offseason to address their outfield situation, but San Francisco’s problems are long-standing and arguably even less excusable. While one can rightly complain about the amount of chutzpah (and possibly arrogance) needed for a contending team to just let a major weakness slide going into the season because their competition is extremely weak, the Giants were under no such illusion. The NL West provided five playoff teams combined in 2017 and 2018 and the Dodgers were the NL champs in both seasons, so the “Hey, we play the Tigers and Royals a lot” excuse doesn’t hold. Not to mention that the Dodgers, while losing their partial season from Manny Machado, reasonably expected to get a full season from a returning Corey Seager, which is as good as a major free agent signing. Read the rest of this entry »

At 2018’s trade deadline, the Pittsburgh Pirates made a surprising move, picking up underperforming Chris Archer from the Tampa Bay Rays in return for Tyler Glasnow, Austin Meadows, and the ever-popular Player To Be Named. Once that latter nom de guerre was revealed to be Shane Baz, it meant that all three players heading to Florida were names of serious prospectage. In Eric Longenhagen’s top prospect list for the Pirates going into 2018, Meadows and Baz ranked No. 2 and No. 3, respectively. Glasnow, who didn’t qualify for the list due to service time, ranked second the year before.

How did I feel about this trade last year? At the time, I thought it was eminently reasonable for both sides. My argument was that the Rays would have been hard-pressed, even in sorta-contention, to turn down this kind of return given that the team’s long-term win condition is an assembly line of impact prospects.

For the Pirates, I argued that if this was part of a change in approach to more of a short-term, win-now approach in the offseason, this move could be justified, even with the team having a similar path to winning as the Rays do. This kind of bold, win-now or win-soon attempt (along with picking up Keone Kela from the Rangers) was something that was missing from the Pirates in recent years when the strength of their roster was at its peak.

The Pirates did not end up pushing their chips this offseason, though their signing of Jordan Lyles looks way better so far than I ever expected. But the winter moves were largely the kind of low-impact, solid-value moves the team has excelled at. They’ve even done well in several of these so far, with Francisco Liriano currently sitting at a 2.73 FIP and Melky Cabrera at .339/.375/.471 (though admittedly BABIP-aided).

These are the types of moves that win at chess, trading your movement-hampered bishop for your opponent’s strongly placed knight or giving up having both bishops to weaken their pawn structure. The problem is, that’s frequently not enough in baseball. Looking up at the league with fewer financial advantages and a division in which every single other team was in win-now mode, the Pirates didn’t need value trades, they needed to put an opponent’s rook in their pocket when the latter went to the bathroom. Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday, the White Sox announced that Carlos Rodón will undergo Tommy John surgery, prematurely ending his 2019 season. With a 12-to-16 month rehabilitation period generally the norm for pitchers undergoing TJ, even a sunny scenario for Rodón would put a serious dent in his 2020 season; a cloudier one makes it unlikely he returns to Chicago until his 2021 season.

For Rodón, it’s obviously a disaster, another setback in a career that had already been largely derailed by injuries in 2017 and 2018. Rodón was drafted third in the 2014 draft out of NC State. At the time, one of the things about Rodón that interested the White Sox was that he was quite polished, even for a top college pitcher, and as a result, was likely to get to the majors very quickly.

The White Sox were correct in this analysis. Rodón’s major league debut, a relief appearance against the Cleveland Indians early in 2015, was only his 12th game as a professional. Three relief appearances later — including two rather lengthy ones at 60 and 63 pitches — Rodón entered the rotation. He acquitted himself quite well as a rookie, with a 3.87 FIP in 139.1 innings, good enough for 1.8 WAR, even as he was a little lucky in his homers allowed. He showed continued progression in 2016, dropping over a walk a game, and ended up with a 4.04 ERA, a 4.01 FIP, and 2.8 WAR.

Since mid-2016, Rodón has racked up an unfortunate injury history. First, he missed a month in 2016 slipping on the dugout steps, spraining his wrist. Sadly, this is a story I know all too well, having been forced to wear a wrist brace about a decade ago after a similar fall on my stairs; there was feline involvement. Read the rest of this entry »