While the heavily-favored Yankees deal with the loss of Luis Severino, the Red Sox have a rotation problem of their own, albeit on a significantly smaller scale. On Thursday, interim manager Ron Roenicke told reporters that Chris Sale will begin the year on the injured list. While his delay is related to a bout of pneumonia rather than the elbow injury that curtailed his 2019 season, it’s yet another reminder of the concerns that surround the going-on-31-year-old lefty.

Last year, Sale made just 25 starts, the final one on August 13. He was then shut down due to what was termed elbow inflammation, and while he paid a visit to Dr. James Andrews for a second opinion, he avoided surgery, though he did receive a platelet-rich plasma injection. The headlines at the time were to the tune of “avoids Tommy John surgery,” but there’s never been any indication that Sale’s complaint or his PRP injection were related to his ulnar collateral ligament. His elbow is now said to be fine; he’s been throwing bullpen sessions and is scheduled to throw an extended batting practice session this weekend. However, he’s behind the schedule of his rotation-mates due to back-to-back cases of the flu and pneumonia that he contracted earlier this month. Here’s what Roenicke said, via ESPN:

“With the sickness, it cost him two weeks’ time, and that two weeks is what we’d like to give him to make sure that he’s right,” Roenicke said. “He’s worked hard on getting his arm right, and we didn’t think four starts in spring training was fair to him.

…”Nothing at all with the arm. He’s doing really good with that,” Roenicke said. “We’re really happy with that.”

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While it was understandably overshadowed by Gerrit Cole’s pinstriped premiere, Gary Sánchez made his Grapefruit League debut on Monday. In doing so, he showed off a new stance behind the plate, one that’s intended to shore up the defensive inconsistencies that have cut into his value while making him the brunt of so much criticism during his tenure with the Yankees.

The game wasn’t televised, and the only video I could find was rather rough, shot from the press box and thus showing the catcher’s back, but here you can see what’s going on:

Sánchez now sets up in his crouch with his right knee on the ground, a stance whose purpose the New York Post’s George King III explained succinctly earlier this month:

The lower setup is designed to improve Sánchez’s ability to frame borderline pitches in the bottom of the strike zone but not interfere with his improved blocking skills or take anything away from an above-average throwing arm. It also may reduce the stress on Sánchez’s legs, which have suffered muscle injuries the past two seasons that landed him on the injured list a combined four times.

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The 2019 Yankees won 103 regular season games despite receiving just three starts from Luis Severino. The 2020 Yankees will have to make do in an even more extreme fashion. On Tuesday, general manager Brian Cashman announced that doctors have recommended that the 26-year-old righty undergo Tommy John surgery; he will do so on Thursday. His injury further depletes a rotation that was already slated to start the season without either James Paxton or Domingo Germán, taking a bite out of the Yankees’ playoff hopes — though they’re still heavily favored to win the AL East.

More than anything, losing an electrifying two-time All-Star for a full season or perhaps even longer is just a bummer. Pitchers, man…

The latest turn in the ongoing Severino saga began last Thursday — coincidentally, the pitcher’s birthday — when the Yankees announced that he had been shut down due to forearm soreness, an issue that he’d first reported following his ALCS Game 3 start against the Astros last October but one the team believed to be transient. When Severino continued to experience soreness in the offseason before beginning his throwing program, the team had him travel to New York to undergo MRI and CT scans, neither of which revealed any significant problems. In the wake of last week’s shutdown — during which manager Aaron Boone revealed that Severino had a loose body in his elbow that had previously been asymptomatic — Severino underwent a dye contrast MRI, which revealed a partially torn ulnar collateral ligament as well as pain in the area. Thus, Severino will go under the knife of Dr. David Altchek at the Hospital for Special Surgery in New York. Read the rest of this entry »

Spring training results are basically meaningless, and yet as portents of things to come are concerned, Ketel Marte homering on Sunday, in his first plate appearance of the Cactus League season, was a positive. The 26-year-old Diamondback is coming off a breakout, MVP-caliber season, albeit one that ended with him on the sidelines. Marte didn’t play a single game after September 17 due to a stress reaction in his lower back, and while he didn’t need surgery, his recovery was something of an abstraction until that first knock; the same can be said for baseball in general.

Behold, let the new season begin:

Primer turno y primer jonrón para Ketel Marte. ? #MLBDominicana ?? pic.twitter.com/CJVoZGevEx

— MLB Dominicana (@MLBDominicana) February 23, 2020

The switch-hitting Marte enjoyed a dazzling 2019, setting career highs in virtually every key offensive category. He hit .329/.389/.592, numbers that respectively ranked second, seventh, and fourth in the NL; his 150 wRC+ ranked fourth as well, behind only Christian Yelich (174), Cody Bellinger (162), and Anthony Rendon (154). That performance wasn’t anything that could have been expected given his previous history, as he entered the season a career .263/.324/.389 hitter, one fresh off a modest .260/.332/.437 (106 wRC+) showing in 2018. Marte’s 32 homers more than doubled his previous total of 22, compiled in over 1,500 plate appearances from 2015-18. Read the rest of this entry »

12:03

Jay Jaffe: Hey hey, folks! Welcome to another edition of my Monday chat. I’m back from a week spent in sunny Siesta Key, Florida — no baseball, just family stuff like watching my daughter and her cousin splash in a swimming pool and build sandcastles on the beach. I just finished making a presentation about baseball to my daughter’s preschool class, which was wild. We gave out baseball cards, popcorn, and sunflower seeds, and sang “Take Me Out to the Ballgame.” Did not get into the various flavors of WAR. Jay Jaffe @jay_jaffe About to give a presentation about baseball to a bunch of 3-4 year olds in my daughter’s preschool class. Trying to decide first topic 24 Feb 2020

12:03

Jay Jaffe: Gah, the poll didn’t post there.

12:05

Jay Jaffe: Hmmm. I can’t see mustering much sympathy for the players who were involved if they’re getting razzed about it daily. I do think I’d reserve my sympathy for those who weren’t part of the 2017-18 teams and may catch some collateral damage.

12:07

Jay Jaffe: It varies from publication to publication and sometimes from writer to writer. At Baseball Prospectus, the rights for each piece reverted to me after a period (18 months I think). At Sports Illustrated, they retain the copyright but are pretty cooperative about granting permission to re-use, such as for my book or to update as part of my JAWS series. Here, I retain the rights to my work.

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On Wednesday, Major League Baseball made official a handful of rule changes that had been in the works for nearly a year. In case you missed it while following the latest twists and turns of the Astros’ sign-stealing saga or the excitement of pitchers and catchers reporting, here’s the full press release, which spares us from having to retype it:

Rule changes for the 2020 season were announced today by @MLB. pic.twitter.com/cXZrFzHv3F

— MLB Communications (@MLB_PR) February 12, 2020

The three-batter minimum rule — and the existential threat it poses to lefty specialists — has been the most discussed of these changes. Our own Ben Clemens illustrated that it won’t matter all that much, a conclusion supported by Sam Miller’s examination, while other analysis such as this article by Tom Verducci and this one by Cliff Corcoran suggest it could have a negative impact.

The changes to the injured list and the service time tradeoffs that come with the permanent 26th man and the limited September roster size can bear closer analysis, but the rules that have my attention today — and this should be no surprise if you’ve been reading my work here — are the ones concerning position players and two-way players. By themselves, they won’t amount to much, and while they do close the loopholes that come with the 13-pitcher limitations on the new 26-man rosters, those are some pretty narrow loopholes to begin with. What they really do is stamp out a bit of novelty, not that the sport needs further encroachment by the Fun Police. Read the rest of this entry »

While Yasiel Puig remains unsigned, a couple of other free agent outfielders came off the board on Wednesday via one-year deals at rock-bottom prices that belie their potential productivity even in part-time roles. Cameron Maybin returned to the Tigers, with whom he debuted in 2007, via a $1.5 million deal that includes an additional $1.3 million in incentives, while Jarrod Dyson agreed to a $2 million contract with the Pirates.

The well-traveled Maybin, who turns 33 on April 4, has played for eight different major league teams and has already passed through the hands of the Tigers twice. They made him the No. 10 pick out of an Asheville, North Carolina high school in 2005, and brought him to the majors in 2007, but dealt him to the Marlins that December in the Miguel Cabrera blockbuster. After three years with the Marlins, four with the Padres, and one with the Braves, he sparkled in a return to the Tigers for the 2016 season (.315/.383/.418) but was nonetheless dealt to the Angels that November and continued on his merry way. After splitting the 2018 campaign between the Marlins (again) and Mariners, he went to spring training last year with the Giants but was cut in late March after being arrested on a DUI charge. He landed with the Indians and opened the season with the team’s Triple-A Columbus affiliate before being sold to the Yankees for all of $25,000 on April 25, a time when Giancarlo Stanton, Aaron Judge, Aaron Hicks, and Clint Frazier were all sidelined by injuries. Read the rest of this entry »

“It feels like there’s still no closure and everything has been thrown into question — past outcomes are being second-guessed and even future games will be cast in doubt. There can be no redemption arc after an institutionalized scandal like this until there’s some accountability.” — Sean Doolittle, Nationals reliever

Sean Doolittle speaks for all of us. Four weeks after Commissioner Rob Manfred issued his report on the Astros’ illegal sign-stealing efforts and suspended both president of baseball operations Jeff Luhnow and manager AJ Hinch for the 2020 season, new revelations about the scheme continue to emerge, some of which challenge his findings or call his judgment into question. So long as such information keeps coming to light, Major League Baseball can’t make this scandal — or the justifiable outrage from players within the game and fans outside of it — go away. Not even a leaked report about a cockamamie 14-team playoff format will deflect attention from Houston’s various schemes.

Last Friday, the Wall Street Journal‘s Jared Diamond reported on an effort by the Astros’ baseball operations department to decode opponents’ signs and relay that information to hitters in real time, one that preceded the trash can banging scheme and that general manager Jeff Luhnow had awareness of, though it went unmentioned in the commissioner’s report. Later that day, MLB Network aired an exclusive interview with A.J. Hinch, one in which the Astros’ former manager expressed regret over his own role in failing to stop his players from participating in the sign-stealing scheme but gave a carefully parsed answer when it came to the possible use of wearable buzzers. On Monday, pitcher Mike Bolsinger, who retired just one of eight Astros hitters he faced in his final major league appearance on August 4, 2017, filed a civil lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court, “accusing the Astros of unfair business practices, negligence and intentional interference with contractual and economic relations,” according to USA Today’s Nancy Armour. Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers and catchers have begun reporting to camps, and all but a small handful of name-brand free agents have found home. From among our Top 50 Free Agents list, one in particular stands out for multiple reasons: Yasiel Puig. The enigmatic 29-year-old right fielder’s current plight and potential matches are worth a closer look.

Signed to a seven-year, $42 million contract after defecting from Cuba in 2012, Puig made an instant impact upon debuting with the Dodgers on June 3, 2013, and was just about the game’s most arresting — and polarizing — presence for his first two seasons in the majors. What’s an article about Puig without some video? Let’s remember some highlights.

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12:02

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon and welcome to today’s chat. As I spent the weekend in Cooperstown at the Friends of Doubleday Hot Stove Weekend event, i’m scrambling to catch up. The chat will begin in a few minutes; thank you for your patience…

12:08

Jay Jaffe: OK, I’m back.

12:11

Jay Jaffe: they paid more but they got more, I think. Giving up Downs and Wong was trading from considerable organizational depth — they already have lots of 2B options including Lux, a top-10 prospect ready to take over, and they still have both Will Smith and Keibert Ruiz as catchers, with Wong looking more like an Austin Barnes type. Graterol works as a win-now addition in the bullpen, something that IMO they still needed to add. And if they intend to trade Joc and Stripling, they can further reconfigure.

12:12

Jay Jaffe: Leaving the Angels non-deal aside, I’d say that the Dodgers paid more but in doing so also improved their 2020 roster by a larger increment than they had previously done

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