Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon and Happy Pi Day, folks! I’m in the middle of a snowstorm with a sick kiddo underfoot and a contractor overstaying his welcome, but we’re gonna try to get this one in.
2:03
Jay Jaffe: ‘Tis the season when I plug away at the Positional Power Rankings, so I haven’t published anything since Friday’s look at how the injuries of some high-profile starting pitchers will be handled within their various rotations https://blogs.fangraphs.com/painter-rodon-gonsolin-and-quintana-are-th…
Chip: Most knowledgeable people make the point that you shouldn’t read too much into spring training results, mostly referring to misplaced optimism or pessimism. What if a guy is continuing an already bad trend? I’m thinking specifically of Spencer Torkelson who was bad last year, changed his bat, and now is bad in spring training. Is he, just, maybe not a major league player?
2:08
Jay Jaffe: Count me as one who thinks you shouldn’t read too much into spring results, or dismiss a 23-year-old with 70-grade raw power after just 404 major league plate appearances. Should he be in the majors yet? Maybe not, given his modest results at Triple-A. Should you build your fantasy roster around him? Hell no. But 29 spring ABs in the first half of March against variable competition tells you nothing about where his career is going
“You can never have too much pitching” is an adage that predates the bombing of Pearl Harbor and a notion that’s at least as old as Old Hoss Radbourn’s sore right arm. Every team goes into the season expecting that its rotation will need far more than five starters, and one pitcher’s absence is another’s opportunity to step up, but that doesn’t make the inevitable rash of spring injuries any more bearable. This week, we’ve got a handful of prominent ones worth noting, with All-Stars Carlos Rodón and Tony Gonsolin likely to miss a few regular season turns, top prospect Andrew Painter targeting a May return, and José Quintana potentially out for longer than that.
The latest-breaking injury involves Painter, the freshest face among this group. The fast-rising 19-year-old Phillies phenom placed fifth on our Top 100 list. Moreover, the 6-foot-7 righty, who sports four potentially plus pitches, had already turned heads this camp, reaching 99 mph with his fastball in his spring debut on March 1 (Davy Andrews broke down his encounter with Carlos Correahere). While he topped out at Double-A Reading last year after two A-level stops, he was considered to be in competition with Bailey Falter for the fifth starter’s job, and had a legitimate shot at debuting as a teenager, though his 20th birthday on April 10 didn’t leave much leeway.
Alas — there’s always an alas in these stories — two days after Painter’s outing, manager Rob Thomson told reporters that he was experiencing tenderness in his right elbow, and several subsequent days without updates suggested there was more to the story. Indeed, an MRI taken on March 3 revealed a sprained ulnar collateral ligament, with the finding subsequently confirmed via a second opinion from Dr. Neal ElAttrache, hence the delay. The Phillies termed the injury “a mild sprain” that isn’t severe enough to require surgery. The team plans to rest Painter for four weeks from the date of injury (so, March 29) and then begin a light throwing program that under a best-case scenario would have him back in games in May. Read the rest of this entry »
In a winter that didn’t lack for shocking free agent moves — and even more shockingplottwists — the Rangers’ signing of Jacob deGrom was as eye-opening as any of them. After opting out despite two injury-shortened seasons, the 34-year-old righty left the Mets to sign a five-year, $185 million deal with the Rangers. The move was surprising not only because deGrom bolted from the team with which he’d spent his entire professional career, but also because he chose a club that won 68 games in 2022 over one that won 101.
The Rangers didn’t stop at adding deGrom when it came to addressing a rotation that was among the majors’ worst last year, ranking among the bottom seven in ERA, FIP, and WAR. In addition to retaining All-Star Martín Pérez and trading for Jake Odorizzi, they added both Nathan Eovaldi and Andrew Heaney via two-year free agent deals of $30 million and $20 million, respectively. Thanks to those additions plus holdovers Pérez and Jon Gray, Texas’ rotation ranks second in projected WAR via our Depth Charts, behind only the Yankees (who got some bad news on Thursday, as Carlos Rodón has suffered a mild forearm strain, cutting into the depth already compromised by Montas’ injury). The Rangers lead the majors when I compare the actual production of last year’s rotations to the projected production of this year’s units — though not without some caveats. Read the rest of this entry »
Monday offered a rare sighting, as Chris Sale took the mound in a game for the first time since last July 17 — even if it was only a Grapefruit League game against the Tigers. Limited to just 11 starts over the past three seasons due to injuries, the soon-to-be-34-year-old lefty took his first step towards both reestablishing his spot among the game’s top pitchers and helping to support a promising but rickety rotation that may be the Red Sox’s best hope for respectability this year.
Once upon a time, Sale ranked among the game’s most durable pitchers. From 2012-17, only Max Scherzer, R.A. Dickey and Jeff Samardzija threw more innings than his 1,230. Sale was limited to 27 starts in 2018 due to left shoulder inflammation, though he wobbled through the postseason while helping the Red Sox win the World Series. It’s been downhill ever since, as he pitched to a 4.40 ERA and missed the last seven weeks of the 2019 season due to left shoulder inflammation, then tore his ulnar collateral ligament the following spring and had Tommy John surgery. The Red Sox took a slow, deliberate approach to his rehab. He didn’t return to the majors until August 14, 2021, nearly 17 months after his surgery and two years and a day since his last regular season outing.
Sale made nine starts with mostly good results in 2021, posting a 3.16 ERA and 3.69 FIP while striking out 28.4% of hitters, but hopes that that performance would carry over into 2022 didn’t last long. About a week after the lockout ended, the Red Sox revealed that Sale had suffered a stress fracture in his right rib cage while throwing batting practice at Florida Gulf Coast University in mid-February; he wasn’t allowed to tell the team until the lockout ended. He finally made his first of four rehab starts on June 20, and returned to the Sox after a frustrating five-walk outing that was capped by him destroying a television and other equipment in what he later called “a 7-year-old temper tantrum.” On July 12 he finally took the mound for Boston, throwing five shutout innings against the Rays, but five days later, he didn’t make it out of the first inning against the Yankees, as a 106.7-mph Aaron Hicks line drive hit his left hand, fracturing his pinky. Around three weeks later, while the pinky was still healing, he broke his right wrist in a bicycle accident and needed season-ending surgery. Woof. Read the rest of this entry »
Jay Jaffe: For tomorrow I’m working on something about Chris Sale’s return
2:02
Jay Jaffe: Today: just chat, so pitter-patter let’s get at ‘er
2:04
Farhandrew Zaidman: True or false: the best Team Japan WBC pitcher not named Shohei Ohtani is Yoshi Yamamoto.
2:05
Jay Jaffe: I honestly don’t know much about Yamamoto but I know there’s a large contingent who would point to Roki Sasaki, who struck out 35.3% of all hitters last year and walked just 4.7%. I’ve seen clips but looking forward to watching him pitch
Pitchers, hitters, and the rest of us have spent the first couple weeks of this exhibition season adapting to the new pitch clock, but few players have set out to test the boundaries of the rule the way that Max Scherzer has. The future Hall of Famer’s search for an advantage has called to mind the philosophy offered by a hurler he’ll eventually join in Cooperstown, Warren Spahn: “Hitting is timing. Pitching is upsetting timing.” And the 38-year-old righty’s first two starts of the spring have demonstrated some ways in which a pitcher might weaponize the clock — and how such efforts might backfire.
Scherzer made his Grapefruit League debut on February 26 at the Mets’ Port St. Lucie Clover Park against the Nationals, throwing two innings and striking out five while allowing three hits and one run. At the outset of the SNY broadcast, Mets play-by-play announcer Gary Cohen foreshadowed the three-time Cy Young winner’s clock-testing efforts by telling viewers, “I think he’d going to love this pitch clock more than anybody else in baseball because he is fully capable of going old school on you, gettin’ it and throwing it.”
While fully capable of pulling the occasional fast one, Scherzer doesn’t particularly stand out in that regard according to Statcast’s new-ish Pitch Tempo metrics, which measure the median time between pitches that follow a take (called strike or ball). Last season, Scherzer averaged 16.6 seconds between such pitches with nobody on base, 1.5 seconds faster than the major league average but a full four seconds slower than major league leader Brent Suter’s 12.6 seconds, and 2.5 seconds slower than Cole Irvin, the fastest pitcher in this context among those who made at least 20 starts last year. Within that latter group, Scherzer ranked 54th-fastest out of 135. Read the rest of this entry »
Remember the 107-win Giants, the only team to take an NL West flag away from the Dodgers over the past decade? Last year’s crash to an 81-81 record marked a rude awakening, as the post-Buster Posey era got off to a rocky start following the future Hall of Famer’s abrupt retirement after the 2021 season. Now the Giants enter the post-Brandon Belt era as well, as the regular first baseman from their last two championship teams joined the Blue Jays in January.
I mention the Giants because in this National League counterpart to my examination of the weakest spots on American League contending teams, their catching and first base options occupy the first two spots, as they did little to address either position over the winter — a point that’s been overshadowed by the Padres’ spending spree and the Dodgers’ free agent exodus (a phrase I’ve now used for three straight articles and expect to deploy at this year’s Passover seder). The Giants are projected to finish third in the NL West with 84 wins, and while they do have a 41.8% chance of making the playoffs, improvements in both spots could have bumped them up by a good 20 percentage points.
As with the AL installment, here I’m considering teams with Playoff Odds of at least 10% as contenders; that threshold describes 10 NL clubs (all but the Cubs, Pirates, Reds, Rockies, and Nationals). It’s worth noting that because of the general tendency to overproject playing time and keep even the weakest teams with positive WAR at each position (in reality over 10% of them will finish in the red), our Depth Chart values at the team level are inflated by about 20%. That is to say, instead of having a total of 1,000 WAR projected across the 30 teams, we have about 1,200. Thus, I am discounting the team values that you see on the Depth Chart pages by 20%, and focusing on the lowest-ranked contenders among those whose adjusted values fall below 2.0 WAR, the general equivalent of average play across a full season. The individual WARs cited will remain as they are on the Depth Chart pages, however, and it’s worth noting that many of the players here — particularly youngsters with shorter track records — don’t project particularly well but aren’t without upside; hope springs eternal. Read the rest of this entry »
As Gavin Lux’s season-ending knee injury reminded us, the Dodgers had quite the free agent exodus during the offseason. Nearly two months ago, they led the pack when Ben Clemens examined which teams were at the extremes in terms of production lost and gained via free agency. With all but a few free agents of note now signed, I thought it would be worth circling back to those rankings before moving on to highlight some notable holes on contending teams, something of an offseason version of my Replacement Level Killers series.
When Ben checked in just after the New Year, the Dodgers were runaway leaders in terms of net WAR lost to free agency, having already parted ways with Tyler Anderson, Cody Bellinger, Justin Turner, Trea Turner and a dozen other players in an effort to trim payroll and lessen (if not eliminate) their Competitive Balance Tax burden. Towards that end, only two of their incoming free agents (J.D. Martinez and Noah Syndergaard) will make more than $10 million annually. To put it another way, the team won 111 games last year with a payroll just south of $270 million for CBT purposes, but after falling short of the National League Championship Series, they’re hoping to get as far or further by winning 80-something games and spending maybe $25 million less. Such are the vagaries of postseason baseball that it just might work. Read the rest of this entry »
Broken Bat: Looks to me the Dodgers must procure a shortstop to support the aging Rojas who all of a sudden the light is shining on. I don’t think they one ready in MILB. So… what team do they toss one of their pitching prospects to get one from? Would they dare pay Baez? I think Tigers would be content to get out of that contract for a decent tier 3 SP. What about trading with Reds? The ex Pirate Frazier? Might be available cheap. Thoughts on what they do?
2:08
Jay Jaffe: I don’t think the Dodgers see anything as “must” at least in the near term. They have reason to hope that after undergoing wrist surgery, Miguel Rojas can provide something closer to a league-average bat with plus defense filling in for Lux, and that they have enough depth to allow Chris Taylor to play there as well. There’s no way on God’s green earth they’re taking on Javier Baez’s contract or giving up a starting pitcher prospect for him, and I doubt they see Isiah Kiner-Falefa as an option, either. Not sue who you see on the Reds as an option, but ex-Pirate Adam Frazier (now an Oriole) isn’t a shortstop, totaling just 26 innings at the position in the majors.
One guy worth keeping an eye on is the Cardinals’ Paul DeJong, who after being displaced by Tommy Edman worked to rebuild his swing after being sent down last year, though the dividends certainly weren’t apparent at the major league level. If he’s recovered his form, he could be of interest.
2:08
Oaktown Blues: Is a Cristian Pache DFA in the cards this spring or will the A’s give him one more shot?
2:10
Jay Jaffe: he’s out of options but as the A’s are playing for crickets, I imagine they’ll give him every chance to hold onto a roster spot unless they have a crunch that they need to alleviate.
Still not sure I can name six A’s even after looking at their depth chart.
2:11
TheVoiceInYourHead: Why are people so stubborn about Rojas taking over for Lux?
In the wake of a free agent exodus that included shortstop Trea Turner and third baseman Justin Turner, the Dodgers entered the spring with a new-look infield that offered considerable uncertainty relative to the previously star-studded unit. Now the team will have to adjust its plans, because on Monday, Gavin Lux, who was slated to be the starting shortstop, tore the anterior cruciate ligament of his right knee, which will require surgery that is expected to sideline him for the entire season.
During the sixth inning of an exhibition game against the Padres in Peoria, Arizona, the 25-year-old Lux began running from second to third base on an infield grounder to third baseman Jantzen Witte. In ducking to avoid Witte’s throw to second base, Lux lost his balance, first stumbling and then tumbling into third as his right leg bent awkwardly. Upon crash-landing at the base, he clutched his right knee, clearly in pain, and could not leave the field under his own power, so the Dodgers called for the trainers’ cart. The video is here, but it’s not for the faint of heart. Read the rest of this entry »
Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon and Happy Pi Day, folks! I’m in the middle of a snowstorm with a sick kiddo underfoot and a contractor overstaying his welcome, but we’re gonna try to get this one in.
