12:01

Dan Szymborski: And thus it begins.

12:01

Dan Szymborski: Yup!

12:03

Dan Szymborski: There’s perhaps something in the story I have missed as I only know the basics. IIRC, the Yankees ran into cap issues from previous international signing.

12:03

Dan Szymborski: I doubt it will affect anything long-term.

Read the rest of this entry »

“When you decide to hit rock bottom, humiliation is part of the deal.” – Guillaume Musso

The Baltimore Orioles may have kicked off this year’s set of team elegies, but the Detroit Tigers are now the favorite to finish the 2019 season with baseball’s worst record. That possibility is hardly earth-shattering –practically everyone knew that when Detroit’s window finally shut, part of the deal was that pieces of glass would fly everywhere.

Did the 2010s Detroit Tigers do enough to be considered a dynasty? Dynastic ambition is largely in the eyes of the beholder. As amusing as I find the idea personally, the BBWAA doesn’t hold a decennial vote on a team’s dynasty status and then confer jewels and a royal scepter on teams that receive 75% of the vote. I would suggest that the Tigers were at least a mini-dynasty by virtue of them being one of the league favorites to start the season several years in a row and winning four consecutive division titles, all while relying on essentially the same core of players. (The World Series requirement has always seemed a little unrealistic in modern baseball given that the postseason is largely a crapshoot as a result of its structure.)

Whether a dynasty, a mini-dynasty, or simply a good team that crushed a weak division for a while, it’s over. The Tigers are now the crushees rather than the crusher. Read the rest of this entry »

“Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.” – Mark Twain

While you may have thought that the Orioles were officially eliminated sometime back in February, they actually lasted five months dangling in the aether between the realities of implausibility and impossibility. The Orioles don’t have as strong a claim to being the worst team in baseball as the Tigers do, given that the O’s had an easier path to their tragic number thanks to a division with two of the best teams in baseball and last year’s World Series winner. Camden Yards hosted a terrible team in 2019, but that’s alright and perhaps even a bit awesome.

The Setup

For the Orioles, there were no delusions about what 2019 would bring. While many teams should be faulted for not spending last winter, keeping their wallet shut as if they were method-acting in a local production of A Christmas Carol, the Orioles don’t bear that blame. In this case, there really was no reason to spend money. This wasn’t a team with any 2019 upside; the best thing that could have happened in Baltimore would have been Chris Davis retiring to be a professional juggler, medicine-show salesman, or Fortnite streamer. But short of that or another winter miracle, the O’s were going to fly the L flag frequently.

If someone in the organization had appointed me benevolent dictator of the team, I probably would have traded Mychal Givens in the offseason, given the rather short shelf life of non-Mariano relief pitchers. The Orioles either chose to go a different way or simply felt that the offers they received weren’t tempting enough. The team’s approach wasn’t necessarily wrong; Givens wasn’t predestined to struggle in the early months of 2019, and given that he’s not a free agent until after the 2021 season, the O’s will have other opportunities to trade him, perhaps during or after a stronger 2020.

In the end, there weren’t really that many big picture moves to make over the winter, as the team had already traded off most of their veterans with any kind of significant value. Trey Mancini and Andrew Cashner didn’t have much trade value going into last offseason; Mancini had a rather lousy 2018 season and Cashner was apparently only really fit for a team looking for guys who could pass as extras in a Civil War film.

Without much to trade or much reason to spend, Baltimore had a busy waiver and minor-league signing year, picking up some players in the Rule 5 draft, some catchers so that every pitch didn’t go right to the backstop, and frightening me with the signing of Alcides Escobar to a minor-league contract. None of the prospects the O’s acquired were obviously pushing for major league jobs in 2019 and it was too soon in the rebuilding process for them to have developed a stable of interesting fringe prospects to play with, so the team went with whatever mildly fascinating player they could dig up for free, and gave them every chance to stick in the lineup.

The Projection

Like every other projection system, analyst, beat writer, fan, or person foggily aware of the existence of baseball who hadn’t just gotten back from a sojourn in Brigadoon, ZiPS did not think the 2019 Orioles were going to be a particularly good baseball team. The amusing thing is that the bleak projection, a 59-103 record and playoff odds in the one-in-thousands, was actually significantly better than 2018’s final record. ZiPS projected a 12-game improvement in 2019, one of the largest bumps in the majors. Rather than hope, this was really just Bill James’s Plexiglass Principle in action, as the O’s weren’t just a lousy team in 2018 but a rather unfortunate one as well.

The Orioles had two jobs in 2019: find out useful baseball things about the various players who fell into the organization over the winter, and keep fan morale high enough to at least outdraw the Miami Marlins.

The Results

The Orioles allow home runs. I’d say all the home runs, but Dan Straily couldn’t pitch 1400 innings this season. The team made their bid for statistical infamy by setting the record for most home runs ever allowed by a pitching staff, accomplishing the feat with six weeks remaining in the season, but is that really so bad? Baseball is a nostalgic game, and the grossly inept seem to be remembered in the same treacly sepia tones as the greats. The 1962 Mets were a dreadful team that lost a ton of games, with a roster mainly consisting of The Wrong Frank Thomas, old Richie Ashburn, and the first two dozen fans to show up when they opened the gates in the season debut. What they weren’t is forgotten, and losers in baseball tend to be lovable when the memories of them don’t fade. How much did the Cubs wring out of not being able to win the World Series for over a century? If you’re going to be lousy, be amazing at it. Don’t be like the 90s Royals, who were actually trying and failing.

More importantly, the O’s did use the season to find out things about their players. They resisted doing anything that would obviously stand in the way of that exercise; Alcides Escobar didn’t make the team, and the organization resisted the bad idea of bringing back Adam Jones after he failed to sign a contract. Baltimore played pretty much all of their halfway-interesting role players to assess what they could do to help the team in the next four to eight years. And while they didn’t find any actual stars, they did find players who have some utility to a future team. Hanser Alberto, who had a near-.800 OPS for Triple-A Round Rock in 2018, showed tremendous versatility and a hit tool good enough to perhaps be Homer Bush for a while. John Means ought to be at least an innings-eater for the next six years, and a total of 16 pitchers have gotten starts for Baltimore this season. Mancini has shown he is more the 2017 version of himself than the 2018 one, and Chris Davis is conclusively not having a bounce back. The catching situation is likely tolerable already, unlike most of the rest of the team, and will get better thanks to a certain draft pick.

The farm system’s improvement continued; the organization’s ranking has jumped to 12th THE BOARD. That’s not Padres, Rays, or Dodgers territory, but the team entered the season ranked 26th, and while McDongenhagen didn’t explicitly rank the farm systems in the preceding years, the team’s system was…worse. They now have 11 players with a 45 FV or better and while we haven’t seen big power from No. 1 pick Adley Rutschman yet, he’s about as highly polished a hitter as you’ll find in the low minors.

The Baltimore Orioles are in a much better position than they were a year ago and a phenomenally improved one from 18 months ago. They know more about the players in the system, they’re developing talent, and while attendance is hardly promising, at least there aren’t dumpsters full of Boog’s pit beef hanging around on Russell St.

What Comes Next?

This was never going to be an easy rebuild, with the team opting not to retool before the situation became dire, something that helped the Brewers make a quick turnaround a couple of years ago. This was a total, full-on, tear-down-the-entire-termite-infested-house project, completely new construction on a barren plot of land. I’m still hopeful they trade Jonathan Villar this winter, as the team’s roster is filling out enough that they don’t need Villar quite as much to complete a roster card. It’s also time to release Chris Davis. The money is gone, and it’s much better to pay Davis not to play baseball for your team than to pay him an identical sum to be on the roster.

While I’m hopeful the Mike Elias/Sig Mejdal braintrust would avoid such a signing anyway, I’m crossing my fingers that the Orioles losing in the latest MASN drama will keep them from getting any bright ideas about an Eric Hosmer-esque signing to “jumpstart” the competitive cycle. The team still isn’t close and they once again need to look for lottery tickets; the odds are long but it’s infinitely better to have tickets for tomorrow’s lottery than losing tickets from yesterday’s.

There was a bit of a bloodbath in the scouting department this past week, but I think people overreacted to the news. The team isn’t banning scouting — even the most saber-friendly teams spend a ton on scouting — but the front office almost certainly wants scouts who speak the same language they do. From scouting to player development to (hopefully) eventual promotion to the majors, there’s a lot of non-statistical information that needs to be conveyed and it helps if everyone’s speaking the same language. There has been a lot written in the local press about the years of expertise lost, but when it comes down to it, that expertise didn’t prevent the Orioles from having one of basebll’s worst farm systems for years. Think of it as the scouting equivalent of the Moneyball movie quote: If he’s a good hitter, why doesn’t he hit good?

The Absitively, Posilutely, Way-Too-Early ZiPS Projection – Trey Mancini

The team could theoretically trade Trey Mancini, who has largely rehabilitated his value from 2018, but I’m not sure they need to, considering that there are three additional seasons until he hits free agency, and that 1B/corner OF/DH types are simply not valued as highly in baseball as they once were, perhaps to the point that they’re currently undervalued (see the Edwin Encarnación trade).

ZiPS still isn’t buying into Mancini completely (he was really awful in 2018), but his projection is now back in the league-average player territory. League-average players have value, else we’d use WAA instead of WAR for everything! I’m slightly more optimistic than ZiPS is as Mancini’s plate discipline has been slowly but steadily improving on a yearly basis, and one of the elements of his big 2017 — a BABIP that wasn’t supported by his peripheral numbers — isn’t present in the system. Of course, ZiPS takes that stuff into consideration as well, but I think given my history, nobody would accuse me of wearing black-and-orange colored glasses! Mancini’s a regular ol’ good player and there’s nothing wrong with that, apart from his outfield play, where he’s likely a win worse every year. It’s yet another reason to release Davis; any time you’re playing Davis at first, you’re likely sticking Mancini in the outfield, where his lousiness has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

12:02

Dan Szymborski: G’Afternoon!

12:03

Dan Szymborski: If only I had such powers.

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Pretty highly. He’s getting a power boost even for power boosts

Read the rest of this entry »

For a losing team, the Cincinnati Reds have been busy. It’s not just trading players either, as Cincinnati made one of the biggest deadline moves while many contenders slumbered in near-stasis, picking up Trevor Bauer with an eye towards retooling for the 2020 season. Only three of the eight players in Wednesday’s lineup were also in the lineup on Opening Day: Tucker Barnhart, Eugenio Suárez, and José Iglesias. Chief among the new additions is the recently called-up Aristides Aquino, a big slugger lurking far back from the head of the team prospect lists coming into the season. After a fairly unimpressive minor league career, Aquino has feasted on the major league bouncy ball in 2019, slugging 28 homers in 294 AB in the formerly pitcher-friendly International League and then a shocking 11 homers in just 20 major league games.

Aquino was not some elite prospect finally being called up. The Reds have only received the benefit of getting a look at Aquino because they decided to use their ABs in a now-lost season in a productive way. If the team hadn’t dropped Matt Kemp or traded Yasiel Puig, choosing to go with the known quantity in a mistaken attempt to goose attendance (there’s no evidence this actually works), there wouldn’t have been as many opportunities to assess Aquino or Josh VanMeter or Phil Ervin in the majors. They now have more information on these players — how they’ve played at the big league level — and that information can have a positive effect on the decisions they make on how to win the NL Central or a wild card spot in 2020. Even picking up veteran Freddy Galvis, a 2.0 WAR player, for free has a value to a team like the Reds given his one-year, $5-million option for 2020. Scooter Gennett was always likely to be gone, but Galvis may not be, and now the Reds have another player who they can choose to start in 2020 or trade over the winter.

The Reds have been fortunate in these decisions, but I would have been in favor of this calculus even if Aquino/VanMeter/Ervin had been terrible. My fundamental belief is that among hitters and pitchers, teams have roughly a combined 12,000 plate appearances/batters faced to work with every year, and as many of them should be devoted to trying to win games as possible. Maybe they’re not 2019 wins — maybe they’re wins in 2020 or 2023 or 2026. But even players not working out gives you information; if Aquino came to the majors and hit like Lewis Brinson, it would still give the Reds data they didn’t have before. You don’t acquire that kind of knowledge when you’re a 90-loss team still penciling Billy Hamilton or Chris Davis into the lineup on a daily basis. Read the rest of this entry »

Ronald Acuña Jr., with 34 home runs, 28 stolen bases, and six weeks left in the season, has a chance to become the fifth player to join Major League Baseball’s 40-40 Club. If Acuña’s membership application is approved by feats of baseballing, he’ll join an exclusive fraternity of Jose Canseco, Alex Rodriguez, Barry Bonds, and Alfonso Soriano. Okay, mostly elite.

As someone who apparently became a “veteran” baseball analyst at some point, I’m not always sure if the game has changed or if I have. When I was a kid, there’d be talk of 20-20 clubs, 30 HR/100 RBI guys, and scores of home run milestones. But you don’t hear about these baseball clubs as often as you used to. Has fandom changed this much or have I become jaded about these kinds of statistically interesting accomplishments? Or is that some of the older markers for performance, such as the 400 Homer Club, have become less exclusive institutions to join than a sandwich shop that give you a 10th sub free after buying nine?

The 40-40 Club, on the other hand, still excites me. Part of it could be that Jose Canseco’s charge on his way to becoming the founding member of this fraternity in 1988 was still very early in my Serious Baseball Fandom phase. I’ve loved watching baseball from the age of three, but it wasn’t until a few years later I really became a serious fan of the game, aided by my grandfather getting me a subscription to Sports Illustrated in 1986, a bit before my eighth birthday. While I watched the 1983-1985 World Series games, the 1986 World Series was the first one where I really followed every pitch, watching to the end even on school nights. I can still remember Tim Teufel‘s error as much as Bill Buckner‘s more famous one, and am able to exactly replicate Marty Barrett‘s closed stance and Sid Fernandez’s three-quarters delivery.

Read the rest of this entry »

While the Twins going home run-crazy in a world of home run-wackiness may have been the most significant early storyline for Minnesota, one of the team’s other early bright spots was the emergence of Martín Pérez. I was extremely skeptical of the decision to bring him in given his history with the Rangers, and thought the Twins ought to have been more aggressive in signing top free agents after clearing Joe Mauer’s salary.

In the early months of the season, my worries about Pérez seemed almost quaint. On May 23, at what I would call his high-water mark, the Twins outslugged the Angels, winning 16-7 and leaving Pérez with a 7-1 record and a 2.95 ERA. He was showing increased velocity. Pérez was never a big fastball pitcher, but his increased velocity from late 2018 — when he had an average velocity of at least 95 mph in four of his September relief appearances — continued in 2019 as a starter. But perhaps the most important factor in his early-season success was the development of his cut-fastball, a pitch he picked up on advice from his agent and with help from teammate Jake Odorizzi.

The proof of the pudding is in the eating and with his fancy new cutter, Pérez feasted on opposing batters in the late spring. Through the literal end of the season (June 20), Pérez threw 435 cutters, making it his most-used pitch, and held batters to a .164 BA and a .250 SLG. Against all other pitches, including his fastball, the league was hitting .301. 42% of his 74 strikeouts were thanks to his cutter. To put how well the cutter was performing in perspective, from 2007 on Mariano Rivera, who knows a bit about this pitch, had batters swing-and-miss on 10% of his cutters. Through mid-June, Pérez was at 15%. Read the rest of this entry »

11:58

Dan Szymborski: Instead of getting into a random Twitter fight right at 11:58 AM and starting the chat late, I’m going to go against character and do the responsible thing and just start my chat at 11:58 AM!

11:58

Dan Szymborski: Absotively, posilutely.

11:59

Dan Szymborski: I wouldn’t mind everyone getting to choose their own. It’s not football and it’s not really hard to tell who is on what team from context.

Read the rest of this entry »

Unlike the other five divisions in the majors, the National League Central has spent 2019 in a constant state of upheaval. Four of the five teams have spent multiple days in first place, with none of the quartet being able to hang on to and solidify their lead. The division’s doormat, the rapidly collapsing Pittsburgh Pirates, spent nearly 15% of the season in first or second place. The Cincinnati Reds, the only team that hasn’t led the Central (I’m not counting the tie the morning after Opening Day), have the division’s second-best Pythagorean record.

In this environment, one might have expected to see significant wheeling-and-dealing at the trade deadline. While most of the National League could rightly claim to be in the Wild Card race, the Central teams jockeying for October baseball had the benefit of also being in a tight race for the division. Being able to draw the straight or the flush, the NL Central teams with 2019 postseason aspirations were incentivized to make an aggressive play for a Zack Greinke or a Trevor Bauer.

And the teams’ closeness wasn’t just a creation of the projections, either. On the morning of July 31, the Cubs and Cardinals were tied for first-place; the Brewers were a game back. ZiPS largely agreed that the Cubs had the strongest roster, enough to make the North Siders the favorite, but hardly a prohibitive one:

What ought to have made making significant upgrades more important for the Cardinals and Brewers is that hidden in the projections were signs that the Cubs were more dangerous at the end of July than they had been earlier in the season. Dial back to May 15 and the ZiPS projections only saw the Cubs roster as that of a .531 team, with the Brewers at .525 and the Cardinals at .519. That’s just under a two-game spread from top to bottom over the course of a 162-game season. Read the rest of this entry »

To say that Kevin Gausman has been a frustrating pitcher to his fans and employers alike would be an undersell. Debuting in the majors in 2013 for the Baltimore Orioles, he’s passed the two-WAR mark in four seasons and only failed to hit the one-WAR threshold when he threw just 47.2 innings in his rookie campaign. But while Gausman has been a contributor, given his top-prospect status, his ability to hit the high-90s, and his possession of a knee-buckling splitter, his career still feels curiously underwhelming. His unusually robust first-half/second-half splits certainly don’t help the common perception of Gausman, with his second halves (ERA of 3.63) needing to deflate the ERAs from his first halves (4.96).

Now Gausman joins his third organization of the last year. And at the nadir of his value too; while the Braves didn’t give up any elite prospects to pry Gausman from the Orioles in 2018, they at least gave up actual prospects. The Cincinnati Reds only needed a waiver claim to bring Gausman to town, essentially committing to nothing more than paying the rest of his 2019 salary.

Gausman’s history of at least moderate respectability works in his favor, but that 6.19 ERA is hard to completely forget about. With a FIP of 4.21, there’s a massive discrepancy between his actual run prevention and the run prevention suggested from his peripheral stats. The tricky part then becomes figuring out which stat to believe more, so we need to do further digging. Read the rest of this entry »