Fifteen months ago, the Cubs non-tendered Kyle Schwarber following a subpar season, because they didn’t think he would be worth paying something in the neighborhood of $10 million. He landed on his feet with the Nationals, went on an epic home run binge in June, made his first All-Star team, and, after being traded to the Red Sox at the deadline, helped Boston make a run to the ALCS. On Wednesday, the 29-year-old slugger parlayed that big season into an agreement on a four-year, $79 million deal with the Phillies.

Schwarber set career bests across the board with a .266/.374/.554 (145 wRC+) line for the Nationals and Red Sox in 2021, thumping 32 homers en route to 3.1 WAR. He packed that production into just 471 plate appearances; among players with at least 400 PA in both leagues, he ranked 10th in slugging percentage and 11th in wRC+. He fell short of qualifying for the batting title because he lost six weeks to a right hamstring strain and was still on the injured list when he was sent to the Red Sox for pitching prospect Aldo Ramirez on July 29.

Schwarber’s season was actually a bit more uneven than those robust numbers suggest. Coming off a subpar .188/.308/.393 (89 wRC+) campaign with the Cubs in the pandemic-shortened 2020, he signed a one-year, $10 million deal with the Nationals but hit for just a 103 wRC+ with nine homers in April and May. He didn’t add his 10th homer until June 12, but from that point to the end of the month, he pounded 16 in just 83 plate appearances, a run that included four two-homer games and a three-homer game (his six multi-homer games overall tied Joey Gallo, Aaron Judge, and Salvador Perez for the major league lead). On June 19 and 20 against the Mets, he tied the major league record with five homers in two games, homering twice and driving in four runs in the seven-inning nightcap of a doubleheader, and then hitting three homers and driving in four runs the next day. From June 19 to 29, he mashed 12 taters in 10 games, tying Albert Belle for the major league record.

Unfortunately, just three days later, Schwarber strained his right hamstring and landed on the injured list, which put a damper on his first All-Star selection, announced just two days later. The Nationals, who went 19–9 in June to nose above .500 (40–38), sank to 8–18 in July and cleaned house at the end of the month, trading eight players off the major league roster, including franchise cornerstones Max Scherzer and Trea Turner. Flipping Schwarber as part of that housecleaning was a no-brainer. Read the rest of this entry »

The Reds and Mariners both finished just outside their respective leagues’ playoff pictures last season, but they’re heading in different directions for 2022. Less than 24 hours after trading Sonny Gray to Minnesota, Cincinnati dealt left fielder Jesse Winker and third baseman Eugenio Suárez to Seattle in exchange for a four-player package headlined by 23-year-old lefty Brandon Williamson, who recently landed at no. 61 on our Top 100 Prospects list.

Also heading from the Emerald City to the Queen City are right-hander Justin Dunn, outfielder Jake Fraley, and a player to be named later. Via The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal:

The SEA-CIN deal also includes a player to be named going back to the Reds, source tells @TheAthletic. Reds high on that player, believe it will enhance package

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) March 14, 2022

This is an aggressive move for the Mariners, who haven’t made the playoffs since 2001 and who last year won 90 games, two fewer than the Red Sox and Yankees, the AL’s Wild Card teams. The gave up a substantial amount of young pitching in an effort to shore up an offense that scored just 4.30 runs per game, the AL’s fifth-lowest total, and managed just a 93 wRC+, tied for the fourth-lowest mark. The Reds… well, they saved some money and got some impressive, controllable pitching, but they also gave up their most impactful hitter over the past two seasons — and a prominent voice in the clubhouse — in order to dump the $35 million owed to Suárez. Read the rest of this entry »

Even given the lockout, the Mets have already had a banner offseason, adding three former All-Stars — Max Scherzer, Starling Marte, and Eduardo Escobar — to the roster via free agency. On Saturday, they traded for a fourth, sending pitching prospects J.T. Ginn and Adam Oller to the Athletics for 33-year-old right-hander Chris Bassitt, who made his first All-Star team in 2021, the best season of his seven-year major league career.

Originally drafted by the White Sox in 2011 and then acquired by the A’s in the December ’14 deal involving Marcus Semien and Jeff Samardzija, Bassitt is something of a late bloomer. He threw just 143.2 major league innings before undergoing Tommy John surgery in May 2016, and didn’t make it back to a major league mound until July ’18, his age-29 season. He’s been very good in parts of four seasons since then, pitching to a 3.23 ERA (76 ERA-) and 3.82 FIP (89 FIP-) in 412 innings. In the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, his 2.29 ERA ranked third in the American League, his 3.59 FIP 10th, and his 1.3 WAR 14th (his 2.3 bWAR was third).

Though Bassitt pitched to a 3.15 ERA and 3.34 FIP in 157.1 innings last year, his season took a terrifying turn on August 17, when a 100 mph line drive off the bat of the White Sox’s Brian Goodwin hit him on the right side of the face. He suffered facial lacerations and a displaced tripod fracture of his right cheek, the latter of which required surgery, but thankfully, he avoided a concussion or any damage to his vision. He was able to return to the A’s after missing five weeks, making two abbreviated but reassuring starts in late September.

Before the injury, Bassitt led the AL in both innings and starts, but he wound up falling 4.2 frames short of qualifying for the ERA title. Among pitchers with at least 140 innings, his 0.86 homers per nine ranked third, his ERA fourth (Robbie Ray, the only one of those top four to qualify, finished at 2.84), his FIP fifth, and his 18.8% strikeout-to-walk differential 11th. His 3.3 WAR was tied for 11th among all AL pitchers regardless of innings. Read the rest of this entry »

2:00	Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks, and HAPPY BASEBALL SEASON!

2:01

Jay Jaffe: Brooklyn resident here, and I’m trying to get my blood pressure under control after this: Jeff Coltin @JCColtin I’m walking into City Hall from one direction while Mayor Adams comes from the other. Before I can get a word in, he says “This is New York, we don’t wear Boston hats.” It’s a Brooklyn Dodgers hat! 11 Mar 2022

2:02	Jay Jaffe: But nonetheless, i’m delighted that the lockout is over and that we’re going to get a full baseball season in. My coverage of the new CBA deal is here https://blogs.fangraphs.com/we-have-a-cba-deal-and-a-162-game-season/

2:02	Jay Jaffe: I’ve also got a fun podcast spot with SB Nation’s Jon Bois here https://blogs.fangraphs.com/fangraphs-audio-jon-bois-on-dave-stieb-lou…

2:03

Jay Jaffe: My recent piece about Dave Stieb’s Hall of Fame case (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/cooperstown-notebook-born-in-the-fifties/) and the first installment of Jon’s four-part documentary series on the great Blue Jay () coincided so it seemed only natural for the two of us to nerd out together.

2:04	Jay Jaffe: Anyway, let’s get to it! A word of warning: between my Hall of Fame coverage and the negotiations, I haven’t thought about transactions very much since early December. Things could be a bit rusty.

Read the rest of this entry »

And on the 99th day of the owners’ lockout, shortly after the umpteenth deadline set by commissioner Rob Manfred, Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association finally reached a deal on a new Collective Bargaining agreement, just in time to preserve a 162-game schedule. Players will report to camps by March 13 (except for those with visa issues); arbitration figures will be exchanged on March 22, with hearings taking place during the season; Opening Day is set for April 7; the regular season will be extended by three days to absorb one of the two previously canceled series, with nine-inning doubleheaders and off days used as a means of absorbing the other; and players will receive full pay and service time. We’re a long, long ways from all being right with the world, or even within the baseball industry, but yes, there will be a 2022 major league season.

BREAKING: Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association have reached a tentative agreement on a new labor deal, sources tell ESPN. While it still needs to be ratified by both parties, that is expected to be a formality, and when it is:

Baseball is back.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) March 10, 2022

Two days of close-but-no-cigar negotiations had the two sides drawing closer on core economic issues, but MLB’s insistence upon pairing the creation of an international draft with the ending of the qualifying offer system (aka direct draft pick compensation) set things back on Wednesday. Manfred responded by postponing (but notably not officially cancelling) another week of games, and the league stopped short of delivering a full counterproposal in the late afternoon, instead presenting the union with three options. Via ESPN’s Jesse Rogers:

[1] “Sign the CBA, including eliminating draft pick compensation [the qualifying offer system], and take some time to examine the international draft. If the union won’t implement within a couple years (by ’24?), the league can re-open the CBA.

[2] “Do the entire package without the draft which means without draft pick compensation.”

[3] “Take the original deal. League gets the international draft and draft pick compensation is eliminated.”

The union rejected the premise but made a counterproposal to remove the qualifying offer this year, contingent upon the two sides studying the parameters of the international draft further and setting a deadline to reach agreement or return to the status quo of qualifying offer and no draft. The union proposed November 15 for the date, but mere minutes after my morning update went live, The Athletic’s Evan Drellich reported that the two sides had agreed to a July 25 deadline instead. After a bit more back and forth on the numbers, the proposal was put to a vote, but while the union’s executive subcommittee unanimously voted against the proposal (8–0), the 30 team representatives who round out its executive board voted 26–4 in favor of it, with the Mets, Yankees, Astros and Cardinals dissenting. The owners ratified the agreement shortly after 6 pm ET by a unanimous 30–0 vote, and the lockout officially lifted just after 7 pm ET.

As for the details, not all of them are immediately clear, nor have all of them been fully reported. Here’s what we know so far. Read the rest of this entry »

At least from the outside, on Wednesday it appeared possible that after another marathon session of negotiations the owners’ self-imposed lockout might end in time to meet commissioner Rob Manfred’s umpteenth deadline and squeeze in a full 162-game season. The dollar figures from proposals by the league and the union pertaining to the new collective bargaining agreement’s core economic issues had converged into “split the difference” territory. Yet since Tuesday night, it had become apparent that the path to a deal suddenly hinged upon the union agreeing to the implementation of an international draft, in exchange for which the qualifying offer system (a.k.a draft pick compensation) would be eliminated. Long sought by the league, and long reviled by the players, the international draft was suddenly of vital importance for one side and simply too complex for the other to agree to under the pressure of deadlines and ultimatums. And so, around 6:30 pm ET on Wednesday, Manfred snatched defeat from the jaws of victory by announcing the postponement of Opening Day to at least April 14.

Manfred didn’t actually use the phrase “officially canceled,” as he did on March 1, nor did he hold a press conference. This time, he said via a statement, “Because of the logistical realities of the calendar, another two series are being removed from the schedule, meaning that Opening Day is postponed until April 14th.” Given what transpired in the days leading up to this week’s artificially-imposed and then delayed deadline, it’s clear not only that the schedule still has a bit of wiggle room via potential doubleheaders (likely with seven-inning games) and juggled off-days, but that the league understands that it can’t unilaterally dictate the length of the season. The ramifications for shortening the slate with regards to salaries, incentives, and service time will require another layer of negotiations, guaranteeing more headaches — particularly with the union having indicated that anything less than pay and service time based on 162 games could mean withholding approval an expanded playoff format for 2022.

As noted in my coverage on Wednesday, the now-familiar pattern — MLB leaking details of its proposal to the media in the dead of night, in time for the next day’s news cycle but before the players, wary of being pressured into accepting an agreement in the wee hours, could consult their executive board and respond — had the potential to create unfounded optimism about a deal. The international draft, which on Wednesday morning USA Today’s Bob Nightengale called “the last big remaining obstacle to reach a labor deal today” proved to be no small hurdle, either. Read the rest of this entry »

Remember back on March 1, when Rob Manfred canceled Major League Baseball’s March 31 Opening Day and the first week of games? And the week before that, when a league spokesperson threatened that canceled games would not be rescheduled, saying, “A deadline is a deadline. Missed games are missed games. Salary will not be paid for those games”? Apparently that wasn’t the real deadline to fit a full 162-game season into the calendar. No — and we’ll pause here so as to be heard over the sound of goalposts being dragged — that deadline was apparently Tuesday, and it’s been extended yet again. After lawyers for the league and the union huddled on Monday, MLB offered its latest formal proposal, and the two sides went back and forth for over 17 hours on Tuesday before pausing around 2:30 AM ET on Wednesday morning so that the union could speak to its board and respond with a counterproposal.

The two sides have converged on monetary issues, but significant gaps remain both there and on other matters, most notably the international draft. It’s possible that a deal could come Wednesday… or that the whole thing could fall apart, with more finger-pointing, and Manfred announcing the cancellation of more games.

Before digging into the details, it’s worth noting again that the length of the season and the ramifications that carries for salaries, incentives, and service time isn’t something that Major League Baseball can decide unilaterally. It’s subject to negotiation, which was why the passage of the March 1 deadline felt so significant, as any attempt to shorten the season would add another layer of complexity to the already contentious proceedings. Complicating matters — or calling the league’s bluff, depending upon how one looks at it — the union has indicated that anything less than pay and service time based on 162 games could mean that they won’t approve an expanded playoff format for 2022. Read the rest of this entry »

The Competitive Balance Tax threshold has been central to the contentious collective bargaining agreement negotiations and the ending of the owners’ self-imposed lockout. The league and the players union have been further apart on that issue than on any of the other major ones, which helps to explain why last week’s optimism regarding a last-minute deal proved to be unfounded. Even with the owners’ offers to raise the minimum salary and improve the lot of pre-arbitration players — albeit not to the levels that the union was seeking — the minimal growth of the CBT threshold meant the owners’ final pre-deadline proposal was dead on arrival. Yet according to The Athletic’s Evan Drellich, four of the 30 team owners objected even to those threshold levels.

As noted several times in my coverage of the negotiations, the CBT threshold has not kept pace with revenues over the past decade and has increasingly been treated as a salary cap by owners. Recall this oft-circulated graph from The Athletic”

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s small potatoes in the context of what’s going on (or not) in the baseball industry and the rest of the world, but so far as the Hall of Fame goes, the problem in a nutshell is this: Half of the starting pitchers who are in the Hall and were born in the 1950s are named Jack Morris. While there’s no need to relitigate the polarizing battle that forestalled his eventual election — been there, done that — the real issue, to these eyes, is that the gruff ex-Tigers workhorse is the only starter in the Hall born after 1951 and before ’63. When stacked up against other enshrined starters, his credentials are modest at best, and so his presence in the plaque room feels like an indictment of the quality of his peers.

The reality is that Morris won battles of attrition, first against the forces that reshaped the role of the starting pitcher following the introduction of the designated hitter in 1973, and then against the voting bodies that were slow to recognize the strength of those forces. He was a throwback, and in the arguments over his merits he became a symbol for a bygone era. Backed by strong offenses, he piled up innings while having less success preventing runs than his the best of his peers, but more success avoiding injuries or replacement by pinch-hitters and relievers. Plus, he won a few big games in October.

For all of that, I did not have Morris or any specific pitcher in mind when I began exploring ways to modernize JAWS to better account for the changes in starting pitcher workloads that have occurred over the past century and a half. After nearly two decades of using my Hall of Fame fitness metric, I know the contours of the position-by-position rankings reasonably well, and so I had a pretty good idea in advance which ones would be helped by whatever adjustments I settled on — that while knowing that those changes wouldn’t be so radical as to upset the entire system. That said, I suspected that shining a brighter light on some of those players would particularly resonate with fans of a certain age, particularly as I worked my way through history and reached the frame of reference of players I’m old enough to have watched. I don’t cross paths with a lot of fans of Jim McCormick or Wes Ferrell these days, but Luis Tiant is another matter. Read the rest of this entry »

So much for commissioner Rob Manfred’s stated desire to avoid a “disastrous outcome,” and so much for the urgency of the owners’ “defensive” lockout, which was supposed to jumpstart negotiations towards a new collective bargaining agreement — albeit in a most curious manner, with 43 days of radio silence and just one formal proposal to the players over a 71-day span. On Tuesday evening, the commissioner canceled the first two series of the regular season — a total of 91 games, constituting five to seven for each team — after the players union and the owners failed to meet his artificially-imposed deadline for a new CBA in time to preserve the season’s scheduled opening on March 31.

“I had hoped against hope I wouldn’t have to have this press conference where I am going to cancel some regular season games,” said Manfred on Tuesday. Citing the two sides meeting in Jupiter, Florida for nine straight days, he added, “I want to assure our fans that our failure to reach an agreement was not due to a lack of effort by either party.”

If indeed those games are lost, they would be the first regular season games missed due to a work stoppage since the 1994-95 players’ strike, and the first due to a lockout by the owners. When the owners locked the players out of spring training for 32 days in 1990, the resulting settlement included an Opening Day pushed back by a week, a season end date extended by three days, and all but two of the 26 teams playing 162 games. The 91 games would instantly leapfrog the 86 missed at the start of the 1972 season due to a players’ strike. As in that year, Manfred has said that games won’t be made up, even if that means competitors playing uneven numbers of games — a situation that helped to decide the AL East that year, with the Tigers (86-70) finishing half a game ahead of the Red Sox (85-70). Read the rest of this entry »