Last week, the consequences of Houston’s sign-stealing scandal became clear after commissioner Rob Manfred announced the results of MLB’s investigation into the team’s “banging scheme” and use of replay review to electronically steal signs. By the end of the week, Houston’s field manager and general manager had been fired, and the collateral damage from that investigation led to two more managerial dismissals around the league. While the league-administered discipline for non-Houston personnel is still pending, everyone named in the report has been fired.

Now that Houston has been punished, Manfred will turn his attention to the Red Sox, who are under investigation for illegally using the replay room in their own sign-stealing system. Boston’s scheme wasn’t nearly as elaborate as the one used in Houston. Per a report from Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich in The Athletic:

Three people who were with the Red Sox during their 108-win 2018 season told The Athletic that during that regular season, at least some players visited the video replay room during games to learn the sign sequence opponents were using. The replay room is just steps from the home dugout at Fenway Park, through the same doors that lead to the batting cage. Every team’s replay staff travels to road games, making the system viable in other parks as well… The Red Sox’s system was possible only when a runner was on second base, or sometimes even on first base. Nonetheless, a team that is able to discern that information live, during a game, and relay it to base runners has a distinct advantage. A runner at second base can stare in at a flurry of catcher’s signs and know which one matters, then inform the hitter accordingly.

Rather than a using a trash can, the Red Sox decoded signs sequences in the video replay room and conveyed that information to the dugout. Once everyone knew the sign sequence, any runner on second base could communicate the signs to the batter via subtle movements or gestures.

The Red Sox will almost certainly face some sort of discipline, especially since they’re repeat offenders: In September 2017, both the Red Sox and Yankees received what now looks like a slap on the wrist for using electronic means to steal signs — on that occasion, using smart watches to communicate between members of the coaching staff and club personnel. Alex Cora obviously wasn’t part of the organization the first time the Red Sox were caught, but he was likely involved this time around. Cora and the Red Sox have already “mutually agreed to part ways,” but that won’t stop MLB from handing down some sort of suspension on top of the penalties it levies on the team.

From an on-field perspective, the limitations of the Red Sox system are immediately apparent. The system only works if there’s a runner on base to see the signs the catchers puts down. The threat of runners stealing signs from second base has always been a part of game — it’s the reason a different sign sequence is used once a runner reaches base — but decoding the sequence using video replay cuts out that gamesmanship.

As I was with the Astros, I was interested in seeing if we could decipher just how much the Red Sox benefited from their own sign-stealing system.

Back in November, I estimated the Astros cumulatively gained around five wins from their banging scheme. Would Boston’s less sophisticated system result in a similar cumulative benefit or would the constraints of requiring a runner to be on second base limit the net effect? The answer might seem obvious, but based on the reports, the Red Sox were able to use their system both at home and on the road, while the Astros were limited to using their cameras at home. That alone increases the sample size for the Red Sox to about half of the total pitches the Astros saw at home in 2017.

A simple look at the Red Sox’s wOBA with a runner on second reveals a big jump in performance in 2018:

At the surface-level, something seems amiss. The team’s improvement probably isn’t related to an upgraded roster, as it could have been with the Astros in 2017. Of the 11 batters who accumulated more than 200 plate appearances with the 2017 Red Sox, eight were back in 2018.

When we look at Boston’s plate discipline metrics with a runner on second, things look a bit murky:

As a team, with a man on second, the Red Sox chased pitches out of the zone far less often than in years prior but that didn’t necessarily translate to fewer swings and misses. And their contact rate on pitches in the zone actually fell from 2017 to 2018.

With that high-level look not very conclusive, let’s dive into the pitch-level data. As a refresher, I’m calculating run values for every pitch thrown using RE288 — the run expectancy based on the 24 base-out states and the 12 plate count states. When we filter and aggregate those run values, we can get a sense of how a team performed in particular situations, say, when a runner is on second base and they might be relaying the incoming pitch to the batter. To account for the different sample sizes, I scaled the run values to standardize the values per 100 pitches.

In 2018, the Red Sox saw a huge boost in performance when facing offspeed pitches with a runner on second base when compared to 2017, particularly when they swung at those pitches. They also saw a big improvement when swinging at fastballs. They saw smaller benefits when taking those two pitch types. It’s interesting that they didn’t see any improvement against breaking balls, though their improvement against the two other pitch types more than compensated.

What does the data show when we compare their 2018 performance with runners on second to their performance when there were runners on first or third but not on second?

Almost across the board, the Red Sox performed much better when there was a runner on second. And the biggest difference in performance was swinging at offspeed pitches like we saw above. In Rosenthal and Drellich’s initial report about the Red Sox sign-stealing scheme, there was some speculation that the signs could be stolen by a runner on first base. If that’s true, it doesn’t necessarily show up in the data. They clearly saw a benefit when there was specifically a runner on second.

Finally, let’s add their performance when the bases are empty to our analysis.

It’s clear that the Red Sox hit much better when there was a runner on second base. They simply crushed offspeed pitches and saw smaller benefits when facing breaking balls and fastballs. The obvious implication is that the team gained an advantage when a runner on second was able to relay the incoming pitch to the batter. When we compare their aggregate run values from 2017 to 2018, I estimate they gained a total cumulative value around five wins — the same estimated benefit the Astros saw with their sign-stealing scheme in 2017. And of course, that doesn’t completely account for the effects that are difficult to quantify, such as the cumulative benefit of requiring opposing pitchers to throw more pitches as hitters lay off of offspeed deliveries designed to entice a swing and a miss.

This isn’t the space to analyze how individual batters benefited from the system, particularly since no players were directly named in the report from Rosenthal and Drellich. I’d expect we’d see similar results to the Astros data though — marginal benefits for most individuals that add up to significant gains for the team. I was surprised to find that the total cumulative effect for Boston was on par with what I estimated for the Astros. It seemed like the limitations of Boston’s system would have resulted in a smaller effect. Perhaps the familiarity of receiving intel from a runner on second allowed Red Sox batters to effectively act on that information when presented; maybe it was hard for hitters to process information from a clanging trash can in the short time before they had to face an incoming pitch.

It appears that both sign-stealing ploys were similarly effective, which makes it’s clear that MLB needs to find a way to prevent teams from implementing these kind of schemes moving forward. Houston’s harsh punishment and the pending discipline for the Red Sox is one step, but the league needs to take more effective preventative measures. Further regulating who is allowed to use the replay room seems like a quick and simple fix that could be instituted as soon as this season. But as long as teams are looking for any and every small advantage and win-at-all-costs attitudes are promoted within organizational cultures, another controversy of this magnitude seems likely to happen again. Rather than react to that new disruption, MLB needs to be forward thinking, particularly as new technology affects how the game is viewed and played.

There was an unusual flurry of contract extensions handed out last offseason. In March alone, teams guaranteed over $1 billion in new contract extensions to 11 players — Mike Trout’s record-breaking 10-year, $360 million contract was the centerpiece. In all, 26 players signed a new contract extension between the end of the 2018 World Series and the beginning of the regular season with seven more getting ink on the page in early April. It was an unprecedented outbreak of extensions for players young and old (ish). We’ve already seen five contract extensions since the end of the World Series this offseason, including new contracts for Aroldis Chapman, José Abreu, and Luis Robert. Now we have two more to add to the list in David Peralta and Miguel Sanó.

The first was signed on Friday when Peralta agreed to a three-year, $22 million contract extension with the Diamondbacks. The deal buys out the 32-year-old’s final season of arbitration and his first two years of free agency. He won’t receive a raise on his salary from last season ($7 million) like he would have in arbitration, but the guaranteed salary over the next three years makes it a nice trade-off. After suffering an injury to his AC joint in his right shoulder and spending time on the injured list three times in 2019, this contract extension gives Peralta some security if his injury woes continue.

For the Diamondbacks, Peralta represents an important piece of continuity as they enter the second year of their soft reset that started when they traded away Paul Goldschmidt and Zack Greinke. Peralta’s age and injury history precludes him from being considered part of Arizona’s core group of players led by Ketel Marte, but he’s certainly an important part of their roster as they try and compete for the NL Wild Card again. If his shoulder is healthy, his four-win season in 2018 provides a tantalizing glimpse at his potential ceiling. For an average annual value of just over $7 million, this extension could provide some excellent value for the Diamondbacks. It also provides some cost control for the organization in 2021 and 2022 when they have a sizeable group of prospects that could be graduating and the payroll room to supplement their young core with significant free agent additions. Read the rest of this entry »

The Marlins have spent this offseason quietly adding a number of high-upside veterans on the cheap. They’ve traded for Jonathan Villar after Baltimore unceremoniously dumped him, claimed Jesús Aguilar on waivers, and added Francisco Cervelli on a one-year contract worth just $2 million. They continued to upgrade their roster just after Christmas, signing Corey Dickerson to a two-year deal worth $17.5 million.

The left-handed outfielder fills a big need on the Marlins roster. In 2019, Miami utilized the uninspiring trio of Harold Ramirez, Curtis Granderson, and Austin Dean for the lion’s share of the innings in left field. They collectively cost the Marlins 1.7 wins, with just Ramirez rating above replacement level. For a rebuilding club, this isn’t necessarily concerning or surprising. In Dean and Ramirez, the Marlins were simply looking to see if either minor league veteran could make it in the big leagues, and Granderson was a classic clubhouse veteran playing out the last days of a long career.

But with the Marlins looking to break free from their endless rebuilding phase, adding Dickerson is a savvy move. He immediately upgrades their outfield and provides the club with a much-needed left-handed bat in the lineup. Since his debut in 2013 for the Rockies, he’s posted a 117 wRC+ and 11.5 WAR. After a good start to his career in Colorado, a strikeout problem and getting traded away from the Rays forced him to make some changes to his approach in 2018. In Pittsburgh, he started choking up regularly in an effort to make much more contact. The adjustments worked and he cut his strikeout rate by almost 10 points. Read the rest of this entry »

Since 2016, only one other team has lost more players to the Injured List than the Los Angeles Angels. They’ve cumulatively lost over 5,600 days to various injuries during the last four seasons, the second highest total in the majors behind the Padres. And a significant number of those injuries have decimated their pitching staff.

The pitchers listed above account for over 2,200 days lost to injury over the last four years, nearly 40% of the team’s cumulative total. And that doesn’t even take into account the relievers and other less established starters who also lost time to injuries, or Tyler Skaggs’ tragic passing earlier this year (the days listed above include his 2019 IL stint, not the season days following his death). The Angels’ trouble keeping their pitching staff healthy has been one of the major reasons they haven’t come close to sniffing the postseason since 2014 despite employing the best player in baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

Just a few years ago, Wade Miley was a free agent without many teams interested in his services. He had struggled through two seasons in Seattle and Baltimore, compiling an ugly 5.48 ERA and a 4.85 FIP across more than 300 innings in 2016 and 2017. He eventually signed a minor-league contract with Milwaukee in February of 2018 and completely reinvented himself under the tutelage of Derek Johnson, the Brewers pitching coach at the time. Across 16 starts, he cut his ERA in half and dropped his FIP to 3.59. After a season in Houston, Miley will reunite with Johnson, now the pitching coach for the Reds. It’s a two-year, $15 million pact with a $10 million club option for 2022 and a few performance bonuses. Miley ranked 32nd on our Top 50 Free Agents list, with Kiley McDaniel expecting a one-year, $9 million deal; the crowd came much closer to his actual contract, projecting two years and $16 million.

The biggest change Miley made with the Brewers was scraping his slow, looping slider for a hard cutter. He actually made the change at the nadir of his season in Baltimore back in 2017, but Johnson helped him hone the pitch and encouraged him to make it a major part of his repertoire. In a 2018 interview with Todd Rosiak of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Miley described the moment he decided to make the change to his repertoire:

“Just made it up in the middle of the game [on July 25, 2017]. Swear to God. I was getting crushed a little bit. Welington Castillo was catching and I just said, ‘Hey, look, when (Evan) Longoria comes back up to bat, I’m throwing all cutters.’ He just kind of looked at me and laughed. So we did, struck him out and then he grounded out his next at-bat. So I kind of ran with it.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Amidst a flurry of activity surrounding Gerrit Cole and Anthony Rendon at the Winter Meetings, the Blue Jays bolstered their starting rotation with an under-the-radar free agent signing. On Wednesday afternoon, Toronto agreed to a two-year, $24 million deal with Tanner Roark.

The Blue Jays had 21 different pitchers start a game in 2019, the most in the majors. While a handful of these starters were relievers acting as openers, it’s still a shocking amount to work through in a single season. With Marcus Stroman and Aaron Sanchez traded mid-season, there were moments in September when the pitching probables for Toronto were filled with TBDs.

After trading for Chase Anderson earlier this offseason, the Blue Jays continued to shore up their thin rotation by adding Roark, and they paid a bit of a premium for his durability. He’s made more than 30 starts in five of the last six seasons, with a stint in the bullpen in 2015 as the lone outlier. And though his innings total dropped to 165 in 2019 after three straight seasons of 180 innings or more, he made 31 starts split between Cincinnati and Oakland. His new pact with the Blue Jays has an average annual value higher than Kiley McDaniel ($10m AAV) or the crowd ($9.6m AAV) projected. With such a shaky rotation, the consistency and reliability of Roark was likely a factor in that slightly elevated salary. Read the rest of this entry »

On Monday, no other team non-tendered more players than the Brewers. In addition to the 10 free agents lost from their roster, the five players let go earlier this week add to the mass exodus from Milwaukee. Those 15 players accounted for 14 WAR in 2019. More than a third of those wins were accumulated by Yasmani Grandal, their All-Star catcher. The Brewers failed to bring him back on a long-term deal after he signed a four-year pact with the White Sox worth $73 million.

With plenty of holes on their roster and division-rivals gearing up for next year, the Brewers entered this offseason with plenty of work to do. Trading for Luis Urías and Eric Lauer was the first step towards rebuilding their roster. Now they have their replacement for Grandal in hand. Early Thursday morning, Ken Rosenthal reported that the Mariners had struck an agreement to trade Omar Narváez to the Brewers. Greg Johns later reported the return from Milwaukee: RHP Adam Hill and the Brewers’ Competitive Balance draft pick (currently slotted in at 71 overall).

With the catching market rife with buyers and few quality catchers to be had, a number of teams moved quickly to secure a deal with a new backstop. Grandal, Travis d’Arnaud, Tyler Flowers, Yan Gomes, and Stephen Vogt all signed new deals or re-signed with their previous club in November, leaving the free agent market rather bare. With the Mariners basically telegraphing their intent to move Narváez this offseason, the only question was which contender would partner up. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been more than two weeks since the Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich’s bombshell report at The Athletic, which revealed a massive sign-stealing scandal implemented by the Houston Astros beginning in 2017. Since then, we’ve seen reports that the official investigation launched by Major League Baseball has confirmed the system as described by Mike Fiers in that original report; they are continuing to look into other ways the Astros may have cheated during the 2017 postseason and beyond. Whether the Astros were using a modified method on the road relying on “buzzers,” as some have speculated, has yet to be confirmed.

What we do know is that the Astros broke the rules by using technology to steal signs in real-time. Members of Houston’s front office and coaching staff could face significant penalties, and with Alex Cora and Carlos Beltrán implicated as sign-stealing ringleaders, there could be impacts felt in organizations beyond Houston. It remains to be seen just how severe the punishment will be — though our own Craig Edwards argued last week that they could be quite severe indeed — and if any players are caught up in the fallout.

Last week, I took an initial look at whether or not the on-field value of the Astros sign-stealing scheme could be parsed out in the data. Between the changing roster, the changing ball, and the at times non-linear effect of coaching and player development, there was a lot of noise in the data. At a broad level, it’s hard to make any conclusive statements about the specific effects of the Astros sign-stealing, though as I noted, the fact that the team persisted in the practice suggests they believed they derived an appreciable benefit from it. On Friday, two more attempts to answer that same question were made.

Over at The Ringer, Ben Lindbergh concluded:

“Knowing the next pitch just has to help, right? But no matter how we slice and dice the data, the statistical case is less compelling than it would be if sign-stealing made hitting as simple as it seems like it should. Great as the Astros were at the plate in 2017, the most fascinating aspect of their sign-stealing scandal is that it didn’t make them even better.”

Rob Arthur was a little more confident in his conclusions in a piece for Baseball Prospectus:

“We can tentatively conclude that their sign stealing probably had a major impact on the team’s plate discipline numbers. This was not innocent cheating that barely affected the game; according to the available data, it may have yielded an unprecedented improvement in the Astros’ ability to make contact and lay off outside pitches, helping to turn a talented lineup into one of the best-hitting teams of all time.”

In my previous piece, I landed somewhere in between these two positions: sign-stealing probably had an impact, but it was nearly impossible to determine the exact benefit at a team level due to all the noise. But what happens if we drill down to the per-pitch level, as I did with the run expectancy (RE288) data in my article last week, and this time focus on individual players? Read the rest of this entry »

With the offseason moving at it’s now customarily glacial pace, the story that’s dominated the baseball headlines for the past week has been the Astros sign-stealing scandal. Since the first story was published by Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich at The Athletic last Tuesday, we’ve seen bits of evidence confirming the Astros strategy: a crude system of live monitors and a trash can to relay the incoming pitch type to the batter. On Friday, Rob Arthur of Baseball Prospectus provided audio evidence from the TV broadcasts, on which the whacking of the trash can can be identified and analyzed. Rosenthal and Drellich followed up their post with another revelation that the Astros were exploring different ways to electronically steal signs. And then there’s the video evidence pulled from the 2017 Astros World Series documentary showing a computer — sometimes a monitor, sometimes a laptop — in the tunnel leading to the dugout with a trash can nearby.

MLB is still conducting its own investigation, but the evidence that’s been dug up publicly is pretty damning. Sign-stealing has always been part of the game, but the Astros crossed the line when they began using electronic means to relay information in real-time. And this isn’t the first time they’ve been accused of baseball skullduggery of some sort. There’s little doubt that some form of punishment will be handed down by the commissioner’s office once MLB wraps up its investigation. The only question is how harsh will the penalties be; will it be a slap on the wrist, or will the hammer come down hard to deter other teams who are likely exploring other ways to use technology to steal signs.

Gamesmanship and various forms of cheating are as much a part of the fabric of baseball as the unwritten rulebook, all in an effort to gain an upper hand against your opponent. But how much of a benefit does sign-stealing give to a batter? Knowing what type of pitch is incoming gives the batter a distinct advantage — more information is far better than just guessing — but they still need to translate that information into action, whether its a swing or a take. Since we have plenty of data to analyze, can we measure the effect of sign-stealing on the outcome of a pitch, play, or game? Read the rest of this entry »

The Rangers entered this offseason in a unique position. While many teams appear to be content to wait patiently for the free agent market to get moving and a handful are actively trying to clear salary, the Rangers seem like one of the few clubs approaching the market aggressively. That stance isn’t necessarily reflective of their standing in the AL West — they finished a distant third behind the A’s and the Astros — but it’s partially an artificial urgency created by the opening of their new stadium in 2020.

General Manager Jon Daniels has made it clear that the team will be looking to improve its roster any way they can, including dipping into the top-tier free agent market. They’re reportedly “aggressively” pursuing Josh Donaldson and have been linked to a number of other big names. With their outfield more or less set, with Willie Calhoun, Joey Gallo, and Nomar Mazara manning the three spots from left to right, the infield is the likely target for an upgrade on the position player side of the roster.

Third base seems like the best place to pursue a high-end free agent simply because there are more of them on the market than any of the other infield positions. Plus, the Rangers have Elvis Andrus and Rougned Odor’s unmovable contracts entrenched up-the-middle. The problem is the Rangers infielder with the best 2020 projection is currently penciled in as their everyday third baseman. Read the rest of this entry »