When we talk about the Philadelphia Phillies around here these days, it’s rarely in a positive light. It’s usually about wondering what they’re doing with Cole Hamels, or how Ryan Howard is completely unmovable, or just generally wondering how many years it might take to return the team to relevance. They’ve brought this on themselves with their direction — or lack of it — over the past few years. When you look at the fact that they have six different positions ranking in the bottom three in our 2015 projections, you really start to understand just how bad this team is going to be.

But it’s not all bad. It can’t be. Even the Phillies are going to have a bright spot. Since I’m in a charitable mood, and since there’s very little happening in baseball right now, and since we haven’t really talked about him yet, let’s focus today on Ken Giles, who very well might be the team’s closer this year should Jonathan Papelbon get moved.

Let’s start with some small sample sizes to output a ranking that is technically accurate, yet obviously flawed: Read the rest of this entry »

As I write this on the afternoon of February 1, the Diamondbacks catching depth chart looks like this:

#31 Diamondbacks

That’s a position for a major league baseball team! A not particularly good or even interesting team, but a major league team nonetheless. Look at it. Bask in it. If the concept of “replacement level” needed a human face, well, here’s a bunch of them. With barely more than two weeks before pitchers report to begin throwing to those catchers, that’s what the Diamondbacks look like they’re going to have. It’s been nearly two months since Miguel Montero was dealt to the Cubs, and everyone assumed that another move would be coming, some way to ensure that the team would have at least a single dependable catcher to make it through the season.

Despite some rumors, nothing’s happened. Dioner Navarro is still a Blue Jay, despite Russell Martin. Welington Castillo, seemingly made redundant by Montero and David Ross joining the Cubs, is still in Chicago, and if a deal was going to be there, it seems like it would have been there within the Montero deal. Carlos Corporan is a Ranger. Geovany Soto went to the White Sox. A ton of other catchers — Ryan Hanigan, Rene Rivera, Yasmani Grandal, Derek Norris, Hank Conger, etc. — found themselves on the move. The top remaining free agent catcher is probably 35-year-old Gerald Laird, which is to say, there’s no longer any remaining free agent catchers.Update: Of course they did.

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It’s been a frustrating offseason for Baltimore fans, he says to people who already know just how little the Orioles have done. Nelson Cruz, Nick Markakis, Andrew Miller, and Nick Hundley have all left town. The entirety of the work the team has done to replace them was to bring back Delmon Young and import reliever Wesley Wright. While you can’t draw a straight line between the team’s inactivity and the ongoing “is Dan Duquette leaving for Toronto” saga, it’s easy to see how some may look to see a relationship there.

Trading for Travis Snider, as the O’s did on Tuesday night, won’t change that. But that we’re talking about him says a little bit about what the Baltimore offseason has come to, a lot about the state of baseball news on January 28th, and something about a player that the Orioles clearly hope can become their next scrapheap pickup to yield results on a team that’s making something of a habit out of confounding the expectations.

There’s no way to sugarcoat this, really: Snider’s major league career has been a bust, at least so far as the expectations go for being the 14th overall pick in the 2006 draft. It’s fair to wonder what might have been had the Blue Jays let him get more than 18 Triple-A games before promoting him to the big leagues as a 20-year-old in 2008, despite the fact that he’d struck out 27.4% of the time in 423 Double-A plate appearances prior to that. Still, he was rated as a top-6 overall prospect by both BA and BP headed into 2009… and never quite stuck. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not sure that we talk about how great Chris Sale is often enough. That’s relatively easily explained, I suppose; after all, with offense down across baseball, there’s more great-looking starting pitchers than ever, and even just within Sale’s division last year we found Corey Kluber, James Shields, Yordano Ventura, Max Scherzer, David Price, Anibal Sanchez, Justin Verlander, and Phil Hughes. You don’t have to go too far to find an interesting starter to talk about these days.

Sale finished third in the AL Cy Young balloting, but a distant third, not picking up a single first-place vote. That was primarily due to an early-season trip to the disabled list that left him unable to match Kluber and Felix Hernandez in innings pitched; otherwise, on a rate basis, he was every bit the equal of the AL’s two best starters. But we know that Sale is incredible, and we know that in 2014 he began to be a different kind of incredible, as Jeff Sullivan noted in June. Sale began to diminish usage of his fearsome slider, the one that he’d collected more than half of his strikeouts in 2012-13 with, in hopes that fewer sliders would help maintain the health of his arm.

That was in June. Now it’s January. We have a full season of data to look back upon, and three things should be pretty immediately clear. One, Sale really did use the slider less over the course of the year as compared to 2013: Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s what we know about what’s left on the free agent market: If you wanted a bat, you should have acted months ago. Hanley Ramirez, Pablo Sandoval, Michael Cuddyer, Russell Martin and others came off the board pretty quickly. With Nori Aoki in San Francisco and Colby Rasmus in Houston, the best remaining bat might be… who? Geovany Soto? Rickie Weeks? It’s similar for starting pitchers, because while James Shields is still out there, after him, it’s something like Kyle Kendrick and the remains of Chad Billingsley.

But relievers… well, relievers are another story. The big fish like Andrew Miller and David Robertson are long gone, and guys like Zach Duke and Luke Gregerson got paid too, but you could still put together an entire big league bullpen, at reasonable cost and decent productivity, with what’s still left out there.

In fact, let’s play a quick game. “Free agents” are listed as though they’re baseball’s 31st team on our Depth Charts, mostly so that players without a home have a place to be listed so that we can see their projections. With the caveat that WAR isn’t exactly the best way to rate a reliever and that this is for entertainment purposes only, look at where the Free Agent team ranks on the per-positional projection pages:

Read the rest of this entry »

Mets fans aren’t happy. I live in New York City, so perhaps I’m just overexposed to this, or maybe it’s because I was surrounded in close proximity by disappointed Mets fans at last week’s Pitch Talks event, or that I keep reading about fans trying to crowdsource a “sell the team” billboard, but the anger is clear. After six straight losing seasons, with multiple young pitching prospects ready now, with Matt Harvey on his way back and the Braves and Phillies on the way down, the sum of the off-season’s shopping has been a confusing contract for 36-year-old qualifying offer recipient Michael Cuddyer and the addition of John Mayberry for the bench.

That means no trade of an excess starter (though Dillon Gee is expected to go soon), no help for the bullpen, and, seemingly most egregious of all, no shortstop. Right now, the team is insisting they’ll be fine with 23-year-old Wilmer Flores, who may or may not be able to handle the position defensively, backed up by 25-year-old Ruben Tejada, who is generally despised by fans.

On Friday, one local beat writer vocalized the prevailing opinion:

The Wilpons obviously are too broke to find and pay a real shortstop, too cash-poor to have built on the signing of Michael Cuddyer.

No one is defending the mistakes of owner Fred Wilpon — other than MLB itself, since Wilpon was recently inexplicably named as the chairman of baseball’s finance committee (!) — because a New York team with less than $100 million on the books, even after arbitration is factored in, is obscene. But how true is that in regards to shortstop? Was there really something the Mets could have or should have done there? And is the current shortstop situation as dire as it seems? Let’s dig into that. Read the rest of this entry »

You might have noticed that a lot of catchers have been on the move this winter, and you wouldn’t be mistaken if you thought that every single one went through San Diego at some point. (The Padres traded Yasmani Grandal to the Dodgers and Rene Rivera to the Rays, briefly had Ryan Hanigan before sending him to Boston, and ended up with the duo of Derek Norris and Tim Federowicz.) You probably also noticed the Blue Jays gave Russell Martin a huge contract, that the Cubs are thrilled to be going from Welington Castillo to Miguel Montero and David Ross, and, well, yes, this is going to be about pitch framing.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hyun-Jin Ryu isn’t the best Dodger starter, because Clayton Kershaw exists. He’s not the second-best Dodger starter, because Zack Greinke exists. If you can’t even make a case for being one of the two best starters on your own team, it’s going to be very difficult to make the case that you’re one of the better starters in the game. “No. 3 starter” just doesn’t have that much appeal to it, as recent third bananas like Doug Fister or Anibal Sanchez can attest to.

Being fortunate — or unfortunate, depending on how you look at it — enough to be paired with the truly elite starters in the game shouldn’t affect how you’re viewed, of course. Any player should be judged on his own merits and compared to the full population of pitchers, not just those who happen to share a clubhouse. In the same way that it’s foolish to think that Maikel Franco and Addison Russell are equal players just because they are ranked as the No. 2 prospect for their respective franchises, you can’t assume that Ryu and, say, Ricky Nolasco are of equal value because they’re the third-best starter on their team.

All of which is a long way of getting to the point, which is this: Ryu has proven himself to be one of baseball’s outstanding pitchers in his two seasons in America, and none of us — us here at FanGraphs included, unfortunately — seem to talk about him that way.

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Times have changed, finally, in Philadelphia. Approximately two years after most of the rest of us thought it was time to blow things up, and six months after GM Ruben Amaro reportedly told closer Jonathan Papelbon that the team was still attempting to win now, the Philles have eventually seen the light and committed to the future. Jimmy Rollins is gone. Marlon Byrd is gone. Antonio Bastardo is gone. Cole Hamels may yet be gone. Cliff Lee, presuming he can show he’s healthy early in 2015, will almost certainly be gone by July. Papelbon probably follows. It’s possible Chase Utley sticks it out to maintain one last link to the past, but it’s clear the Phillies we knew are gone, and the next year or two (or more) are going to be a difficult transition.

I didn’t mention Ryan Howard because when you read a quote like this, as Amaro told a local radio station just before the holidays…

“We’ve talked to Ryan,” Amaro said in an interview with 97.5 The Fanatic’s Mike Missanelli on Friday afternoon. “And I told him that in our situation it would probably bode better for the organization not with him but without him. With that said if he’s with us, then we’ll work around him. We’ll hope he puts up the kind of numbers that we hope he can and we’ll see where it goes from there.”

…then it deserves its own section.

When your general manager says the team is better off without you and that if you’re still in town, then they will “work around [you],” well, it’s clear you’re definitely gone. Or, at least, will be at some point, since he’s not been moved yet. You can live with an aging Utley, because he’s still a solid player with no obvious successor. You can’t keep Howard around because he’s a negative for a National League club and each plate appearance that goes to him takes one away from Maikel Franco or Cody Asche or Darin Ruf. None are going to be the next great Phillies first baseman, but there’s value in simply removing an aging, ineffective Howard from the equation, if only emotionally.

I hardly need to remind you of how difficult it’s going to be for the Phillies to actually make a Howard move, because you know all the reasons why. Instead, let’s play a game. Let’s find Howard a new home. Would any team bother with the roster spot? Is there actually a place where he could be of value? Maybe this will be fun. Unless you’re a Phillies fan, of course. Then it won’t be much fun at all.

* * * Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s talk about the Twins for a moment. No, you probably don’t want to talk about the Twins, I understand, but it’s Christmas Eve, and the eight or so of you who are unfortunate enough to be in an office right now will probably be happy to talk about something, I think. And the Twins, certainly, are something.

Yesterday, Jeff Sullivan took a look at projected 2015 team defenses, and within that piece was a list of teams that you wouldn’t really want to be included on:

Now, the three worst defensive teams, projected:

• Astros
• White Sox
• Twins

It’s difficult to dispute that from a Minnesota perspective, because while Jeff noted the obvious caveats of attempting to project defense, the 2014 Twins finished 29th in DRS, 24th in UZR/150, and 27th in Defense. One of the teams regularly behind them, Cleveland, will no longer have a left side of the infield that occasionally lined up as Asdrubal Cabrera and Carlos Santana. They’ll still be below-average, but they might not be a train wreck. The Twins? The Twins’ main non-pitching move this winter has been to import baseball’s worst regular defender from a year ago, Torii Hunter, and park him in right field.

Read the rest of this entry »