Welcome to the more interesting league. Back in 2015, ZiPS saw two very different leagues — an American League in which most of the teams were competitive, and a bifurcated National League that featured a stronger line between the haves and the have-nots than 1780s France. By mid-September of that year, just one team in the the American League (the Oakland A’s) was positioned to finish with a sub-.500 record; only two were on track to reach the 90-win mark. As for the Senior Circuit, ZiPS thought that six of baseball’s best eight teams resided there, as well as five of the six worst.

In four years, these positions have done a Freaky Friday switcheroo. The AL is now home to six of the eight teams with the best projected rosters and six of the eight with the worst, with only three AL West teams (the A’s, Rangers, and Mariners, in that order) representing the middle class. The average NL trailer is 9 1/2 games back in the division and 3 1/2 back of a wild card berth compared to the AL’s 14 games and 8 1/2 games respectively.

So how do the ZiPS in-season projections work? For the Big, Official projections, I use the full ZiPS model rather than the comparatively simple in-season version in an effort to get the best estimates possible. Each player receives a percentile projection, with ZiPS randomly selecting from each player’s distribution to get a range of the expected roster strength for each individual team. Then each team is projected against every other team in their schedule a million times for the rest of the year. All this has the benefit of getting more accurate tails, as opposed to the binomial distribution you get when you’re working with an assumed roster strength; one of the most important things about ZiPS is that on all layers, it’s designed to be skeptical about its own accuracy.

According to projections, the eventual NL Central winner will be under 95.3 wins 90% of time, assuming a strange world in which we can play out the final three months of the season a million times. That barely gets you the home field-advantaged wild card spot in the American League half the time. If the National League doesn’t have an exciting trade deadline, maybe we should start to think that something’s up, given that mid-to-upper 80s in wins makes you a serious wild card contender. Only two teams in the league ought to actually be sure about throwing in the towel right now: the Marlins and the Giants.

Back in April, this race projected to be the second most exciting in baseball after the NL Central, with four teams projected between 87 and 93 wins and the fifth projected to, well, complete the 2019 season without folding (I’ll leave the identities of these teams for you to figure out). Instead, with a 16-5 record in June, the Atlanta Braves have put some real daylight between themselves and their rivals. Dallas Keuchel is not a superstar, but he also represents the biggest addition to an NL East team so far, one which addressed a significant team worry. With the deepest farm system in the division and a likely willingness to add salary for the right player, the “intangible” projections may be even better than what my computer spits out.

The Nationals have shown a pulse in June, enough to get them within a couple games of second place in the division. ZiPS still sees Washington as the team with the strongest overall 2019 roster in the East, with an 11-point edge in winning percentage over the Braves in a theoretical world in which the teams played identical schedules. But that margin is smaller than it was at the start of the season and it’s simply preferable to be the team with the 8 1/2 game advantage than the one that’s slightly better on paper. Start the grandmaster out without a couple of pawns, and a highly-skilled amateur chess player will probably win. If anything, it makes the decision to make trades in July a little trickier; it’s easier psychologically to shop Anthony Rendon or Max Scherzer if you’re not competitive. And with a weak farm system, the Nats don’t have a lot of ammo. Perhaps they’d be well-served to stop giving away interesting relievers.

As of this morning, the Mets were closer to the Marlins than the Braves in the division. The team made significant improvements in the offseason, but those moves also had the feeling of being half-measures, with team ownership still not wanting to spend money at the level you would expect from a team in a massive market (even if they do play second fiddle). The rotation’s 4.64 ERA left pitching coach Dave Eiland as the team’s designated scapegoat for its failings, but the real culprit here is the team defense. At -55 runs (if you believe the numbers from Baseball Info Solutions), a league-average defense would have the Mets at a 3.92 ERA, fourth in the National League. Even UZR’s less depressing estimates would place the Mets with a 4.27 ERA, better than the NL’s current 4.37 average. I’m sure threatening two or three more journalists will fix that right up.

I’m not going to fault the Phillies for Bryce Harper’s rather pedestrian offense. But I will fault them for their apparent disinterest in either Dallas Keuchel or Craig Kimbrel. While only one team could sign each player, none of the usual sources buzzing around the Phillies suggested that they ever had more serious interest than their public demeanor reflected. Losing Andrew McCutchen — even a post-star McCutchen — was a blow the team is ill-positioned to handle and one it can’t wait to address.

Caleb Smith is likely a real find, certainly more of one than I envisioned when the Marlins picked him up from the Yankees in 2017. Garrett Cooper is likely the only interesting player on the team’s offense (he’s 28, but a long way from free agency), which makes one ask the very real question of how Miami managed to get more for Mike King than for Chris Paddack, Josh Naylor, and Luis Castillo combined. Perhaps the Marlins tanking is somehow less depressing than the Marlins trying to contend?

The Central feels a lot like the division that nobody wants to win. Four of the five teams have held first place for multiple consecutive days, and not just at the start of the season when you have a bunch of 2-0 and 1-1 records floating around the league. While nobody has achieved any permanent daylight, I still think the Cubs have the best chance of doing so. Kimbrel may not be at his peak, but his signing and the theoretical return of Brandon Morrow would address what has been the team’s largest hole.

While the Brewers aren’t a depressing franchise, their use of Keston Hiura and Travis Shaw is a real head-scratcher. At the start of the season, I felt the team’s best use of Hiura would be to start him in the minors and have him bash his way into the majors, allowing them not to worry about having to make a difficult decision. The first part of that plan seemed to work out, but even with Shaw struggling and Hiura slugging .531, the Brewers haven’t been able to make the hard choice to turn Shaw into a reserve and make the team better right now. Yes, Hiura’s strikeout-to-walk ratio in the majors didn’t exactly scream Joey Votto, but he’s actually hitting the ball once in a while. ZiPS estimates that starting Shaw instead of Hiura over the rest of the season costs the Brewers about a tenth of a playoff appearance. That’s not negligible.

Who would’ve thought the bullpen would be the best part of the Cardinals? Yes, Paul Goldschmidt should be hitting better and Matt Carpenter should be hitting better and most of the rotation should be pitching better, but there’s no such thing as a Should NL Central winner. The Cards are a hard team to upgrade, simply because there aren’t many obvious places to give out pink slips. ZiPS is down to believing the Cards are a .510 team.

The Reds are a better team than their record, but the math remains daunting. How damaging was the team’s 1-8 start? They’ve gone 35-32 since, have a 43-33 Pythagorean record overall, and their 7.0% projected playoff chance is still behind their preseason projection of 11.5%. But at least they’re actually putting their best possible lineup on the field, with Jesse Winker, Nick Senzel, and Yasiel Puig as a fairly stable outfield. It would have been nice if they had just committed to this group from the start rather than trying to get Matt Kemp at-bats and seeing more in Scott Schebler than a fourth outfielder. Derek Dietrich’s offense has been encouraging, but it’s perhaps his defense that’s been the bigger surprise. He could always hit, but his defensive numbers at second are much more adequate than they were in his Marlins days. Small sample size, of course.

As for Pittsburgh, I don’t think they have the arms to peek back over the .500 mark for any extended period of time this year. With a healthy Jameson Taillon, and Chris Archer looking more like the Cy Young threat he once was, the division’s middle-heavy enough that the Pirates could be a contender. I don’t think they are, though.

It’s only really a 100.0% chance to win the NL West because of rounding, but it’s hard to envision a scenario in which the Dodgers blow a 13-game lead. Maybe, if there was another top team in the division that was simply underperforming, you could squint your way to seeing some type of apocalyptic scenario in which a second place team goes 55-25 in the second-half while Cody Bellinger and Hyun-Jin Ryu are captured by brigands in a forest. You can’t even “But ’69 Mets!” here — that team maxed out at a ten-game deficit. Okay, the Bucky Dent Yankees, but who in the division has a Goose Gossage or a Reggie Jackson?

Suffice it to say, Goose Gossage might actually upgrade the Colorado Rockies bullpen. I don’t mean 1978 Gossage — I mean Gossage now. In truth, Colorado’s bullpen hasn’t really been that mad, but they tend to fail in the most spectacular ways possible, as seen in their three straight walk-off losses against the Dodgers. In typical Colorado fashion, the team ranks 22nd in position player WAR and 22nd in wRC+ and I’m not sure anyone in the front office realizes this.

The Padres are obviously not as good a team as the Dodgers, but they’re the most fascinating team to watch, simply because of the young talent that will inevitably reach the majors in the next few years. I remain at a loss as to why they’ve been so conservative with Luis Urias, who is likely to be part of the best possible lineup right now (and I say this as someone who is a fan of Ian Kinsler as a player). It’s hard to blame any fiduciary shenanigans given that the team pointedly decided to not play those sorts of games with Paddack or Fernando Tatis Jr. The team is obviously pleased to be wild card-relevant, though I don’t think they’ll do anything to jeopardize the real show, which should start as soon as next year.

The Diamondbacks continues to accidentally contend, but I still think they’re more likely to trade off the reasons for that contention rather than make any additions. I still don’t believe Zack Greinke finishes his contract in Arizona, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see Robbie Ray go. I think either Greinke or Ray are potentially more impactful pickups than Madison Bumgarner would be and there’s an actual Bumgarner market. It’s hard to see the Diamondbacks as a good enough team to be able to turn down solid offers should they materialize.

Every year, there’s a team that’s rebuilding that doesn’t quite realize it. Right now, that’s the San Francisco Giants. Other teams have come back from deeper pits than 33-43, but most of those other teams were more talented. The Giants have already played 13 different players in the outfield and just claimed Joey Rickard on waivers. By comparison, the Yankees have had most of their desired starting lineup on the IL but have only used nine.

12:04

Dan Szymborski: Uh oh

12:12

Dan Szymborski: Just letting the queue fill up a bit more. The post wasn’t going live so I had to re-do it.

12:12

Dan Szymborski: We’re going to start off at about 12:30 PM

12:12

Dan Szymborski: Maybe earlier if you guys build up a mighty buffer.

12:23

Dan Szymborski: OK, let’s get this strangely scheduled party started.

Read the rest of this entry »

When looking at the differences between midseason and original projections, it’s always fun to see where reality shredded expectations the most. The American League in 2019, on the other hand, is fairly boring. We have one big surprise, bordering on the edge of truly affecting the playoff hunt, and a relatively mild switcheroo in the AL Central leader. Sure, the White Sox are a bit better than projected and the Angels a bit worse, but it’s generally a league in which most teams are at least in the same time zone as their preseason win prognostications.

So how do the ZiPS in-season projections work? For the Big Official ones, I use the full-on ZiPS model rather than the comparatively simple in-season one, to try to get the best estimates possible. Each player gets a percentile projection, with ZiPS randomly selecting from each player’s distribution to get a range of the expected roster strength for each individual team. Then each team is projected against every other team in their schedule a million times for the rest of the year. All this has the benefit of getting more accurate tails as opposed to the binomial distribution when you’re working with an assumed roster strength; one of the most important things in ZiPS is that on all layers, it’s designed to be skeptical about its own accuracy.

So let’s dive right into the American League. Read the rest of this entry »

One element missing from the Oakland A’s in recent years has been an ability to develop long-term, high-quality starting pitchers. The cupboard hasn’t been completely bare, with Sonny Gray notably appearing on the cusp of establishing himself as one of the best starting pitchers in the league before a series of injuries waylaid him starting in 2016. Whether ultimate responsibility comes down to failure in developing pitchers or not choosing the right ones in the draft, the A’s have a poor record at finding starters. Gray remains the most-recent drafted pitcher to amass even five WAR in his MLB career.

The legacy of the trio of Mark Mulder, Tim Hudson, and Barry Zito leaves a long shadow on the franchise. In the past 20 years, the A’s have a total of 39 top-50 starting pitcher seasons. That’s above-average (you’d expect an average team to have roughly 33 of these seasons), but it’s also skewed very heavily in favor of the pitchers the team had back when we were worried that the Y2K bug would destroy humanity something something.

Wait, Gil Heredia had a top-50 season? Read the rest of this entry »

12:02

Dan Szymborski: “Dan Szymborski is chatting now.”

12:02

Dan Szymborski: OH GOD HE ISN’T PANIC

12:02

Dan Szymborski: Now I am.

12:03

Dan Szymborski: It kinda sucks, but their poor fortune is baked into the cake.

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Yeah, they’re 8 games under their Pythag. But the thing is, you don’t get those games back. You expect them to match their Pythags going forward, not get an extra helping from the good luck carnitas.

Read the rest of this entry »

12:01

Dan Szymborski: The prophecy of the chat has been fulfilled.

12:01

Dan Szymborski: I actually had a dream about Brandon Lowe the other night that had no extra base hits and I decided to model ISO by BMI out of curiosity

12:02

Dan Szymborski: But for some reason, Lowe was 6-6 and huge in my dream, which he is not.

12:02

Dan Szymborski: The power is likely real, but I expect the BA to come down somewhat

Read the rest of this entry »

The Atlanta Braves and Dallas Keuchel agreed to terms on a contract Thursday night, thus ending baseball’s short free agency burst following the conclusion of the MLB Draft. Keuchel’s one-year, $13 million deal will enable him to enter the free agent market after the 2019 season with a clean slate, without any qualifying offer compensation pick baggage to reduce his value to a new team (or offer an excuse not to sign him).

We’ve seen this short-term playbook before from the Braves before, so it’s unsurprising to see them commit to a one-year (in reality, four-month) contract for Keuchel. The offseason in Atlanta was quieter than expected, with the team — or more accurately Liberty Media, the ownership group — choosing not to try to splash cash in the direction of Manny Machado or Bryce Harper like some of the other Johnny-come-soonlys in baseball. The only significant signing the team made was a one-year deal with Josh Donaldson for $23 million.

The $13 million is $13 million straight-up, something that shouldn’t necessarily be taken for granted as these types of midseason contracts tend to be a bit strange. For example, when Roger Clemens signed a one-year contract worth $28,000,022 (the beer money at the end to match his uniform number), that figure represented what it would’ve been over an entire season; Clemens only made a little under $20 million, with the money starting to flow when he made his season debut for the Yankees in June.

The reasons the Braves signed Keuchel to a short-term contract are similar to those behind their Donaldson deal: the team has a very deep stable of prospects and doesn’t necessarily want to commit to Keuchel long-term any more than they wanted to with Donaldson.The long-term solution at third base was always Austin Riley, but with the team coming off an NL East crown and still very likely to be just as competitive in 2019, they wanted a safer short-term option. Enter Donaldson The exact pitcher for whom Keuchel is keeping a seat warm is unclear, but the Braves have enough interesting candidates that the assumption is the question will work itself out over time.

The issue for Atlanta was that that question was not working itself out as quickly as the team hoped. The Braves starters have combined for a 4.38 ERA (19th in MLB) and 3.6 WAR (also 19th) and while those numbers aren’t the worst among 2019’s contenders, the rotation clearly has not been enough of a positive asset. And obviously, this matters quite a bit, with the Braves looking up at the Phillies in the NL East by a two-game margin. Atlanta’s rotation as of this moment has more question marks than they did at the start of the season.

Kyle Wright, Sean Newcomb, Bryse Wilson, and Touki Toussaint have all had brief stints in the rotation, with all four losing those jobs quickly (the latter two after their first starts). You can make a pretty good argument that the Braves have perhaps been a bit impatient with some of these pitchers, but it’s hard to blame the team for their urgency.

Perhaps more rope would have been given if Mike Foltynewicz and Kevin Gasuman were meeting expectations.

Folty’s spring was marred by elbow problems and while his health doesn’t appear to be a question, his velocity and his slider have been. His velocity has recovered, with his fastball in recent starts in the 95-96 mph range, much closer to the 96-97 mph he showed throughout 2018 than the 93-95 he initially came back with in late April. But the slider is still missing bite and that’s a crucial pitch in his repertoire. The former Astro’s breakout 2018 was mostly due to his slider, which ranked fourth in our pitch values, behind only those of Patrick Corbin, Jhoulys Chacin, and Miles Mikolas. Batters only hit .106 against his sliders last year and only mustered a .183 slugging percentage. In just over a month of pitching, he’s allowed almost as many extra-base hits on sliders (9) as he did in all of 2018 (11). And looking at his Statcast data, he’s lost three inches of vertical movement and two inches of horizontal movement from last season.

Kevin Gausman’s ERA remains above six, a disturbingly high number considering that we’re now in June. Given that his FIP is a much better 4.03, Gausman’s poor bottom-line run prevention has some mitigating factors, including a .331 BABIP and a bullpen that hasn’t had his back (58% LOB compared to 72% league-average). But as with the Braves’ lack of patience with the young pitchers hitting roadblocks, Atlanta just doesn’t have the time to hang around and hope that Gausman turns his theoretical run-prevention back into actual run-prevention. Gausman’s done himself no favors by narrowing of his repertoire; he’s essentially been a fastball/splitter-only pitcher in 2019, with his slurve largely abandoned. He’ll likely end up in the bullpen for now, which may be a better fit for a two-pitch hurler still missing his former high-end heat.

Under the set of circumstances Atlanta is facing, not only is Keuchel a good signing, but the terms make it one of the best potential buys this year. It’s still strange to call $13 million nothing, but in terms of major league free agency, these are nanoscopic potatoes. You can’t spend as much as you want on amateur free agents or draft picks. You don’t have an unlimited supply of prospects to trade for short-term gains. But you can spend all you want on free agents, with the only limitation being the luxury tax threshold, which is still a softer roadblock than the severe penalties for overspending on other avenues of talent acquisition. That’s not a problem for the Braves, who could sign James Shields to a one-year, $50 million deal and still be short of the Danger Zone. (Warning: You should probably not sign James Shields for one year and $50 million.)

Having the opportunity to sign a legitimate free agent in midseason is pretty rare, but Keuchel’s unusual market afforded the Braves the chance to add a player who might not have seemed necessary for the team in January, but who addresses an obvious need now. One remaining question, perhaps one left unanswered and lost in time: did the Braves need to wait this long to sign Keuchel? After all, given how quickly they cycled through the pitching prospects, the team certainly understood how urgent the rotation issue was. It may not have been obvious in March, but the weakness was apparent certainly by mid-April. In terms of free-agent compensation, Craig Edwards estimated that signing Keuchel would have an additional cost of $4.7 million for Atlanta, hardly a crippling loss. What part of this late signing was the draft pick value (or a more general reluctance to spend on free agents) and what part was Keuchel and his agent preferring to have more teams in the bidding such as the Yankees ($10.6 million loss), Cardinals ($7.4 million), or the Cubs ($6.8 million)? If only houseflies on walls had tape recorders, or whatever the kids are calling those today.

ZiPS has been more of a fan of Keuchel, at least in 2019, than the other projection systems, so it’s unsurprising it gave a digital thumbs-up to this signing to go along with my analog one. The penalty used for his missing time is relatively tame as there’s no injury involved, and most players out voluntarily don’t return in as brutally an inept fashion as Kendrys Morales did after ending his 2014 hiatus. That history doesn’t suggest a huge penalty is hardly surprising, as most players don’t use that time sitting around eating cookies, playing video games, and watching reruns of Press Your Luck. Even I don’t eat that many cookies working at home in a decidedly non-athletic capacity.

ZiPS projects a 116 ERA+ and 1.6 WAR for Keuchel with the assumption that he needs a few weeks to be ready to pitch in a major league game. Atlanta will take that and honestly, probably be happy with less. Because if you’re not using money to sign Keuchel, your other options for signing pitchers using just money are Shields or Yovani Gallardo or Miguel Gonzalez, and so on. Keuchel adds just a hair over a win compared to the likely other options and in the NL East, that win might actually matter.

Is adding a Keuchel a giant, season-changing move? Of course not, but those are more or less unicorns; situations like the Giants picking up Randy Winn midseason and getting 3.6 WAR in 58 games are highly unusual. From the projections, the Braves have turned about 20% of the scenarios in which they don’t win the NL East into NL East titles, and erased about 30% of their non-playoff finishes from the timeline. Without trading prospects or developing time travel technology, the Braves made as good an acquisition as you realistically can make in June. Of course, we could have said the same thing in May.

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 »