A .441 winning percentage and fourth place in one’s division on the day of the trade deadline aren’t typical characteristics of a buying team, but 2020 is anything but a typical season. Even after a disappointing 15-19 start, the Cincinnati Reds are just 1 1/2 games out of a playoff spot. Considering the number of moves the team had already made in an effort to make this a contending season, that’s a gap the organization thought was worth trying to close with a pair of deals completed just ahead of Monday’s 4:00 pm deadline.

The Reds acquired outfielder Brian Goodwin from the Angels and closer Archie Bradley from the Diamondbacks within just a few minutes of each other on Monday, with the list of total exits and entrances appearing as follows:

• Reds get: RHP Archie Bradley and OF Brian Goodwin
• Diamondbacks get: INF Josh VanMeter and OF Stuart Fairchild
• Angels get: LHP Packy Naughton, and PTBNL or cash

We’ll start with Bradley, as he’s likely to have the biggest impact considering Cincinnati’s relief woes. The Reds’ bullpen has been a far cry from their stellar starting rotation this season, allowing the fourth-worst ERA and fifth-worst FIP in the majors. The unit hasn’t had any trouble striking out batters, leading the majors with 11.9 strikeouts per nine, but it has allowed opponents to rack up walks and homers with similar frequency — only four teams have a higher walk rate in their bullpens than Cincinnati’s, and only the Phillies have a higher home run rate. Read the rest of this entry »

Robbie Ray had often been mentioned in hot stove rumors. As the Diamondbacks have toed the line between buying and selling, adding and subtracting, Ray was someone whose name you’d hear in connection to possible trades to contending teams looking for rotation help. He always stayed put though, even as his service clock ticked away and his electric arm never quite broke out the way he or his team hoped.

With just hours to spare before Monday’s trade deadline, Ray was finally traded. The Toronto Blue Jays made him the second starting pitcher they’d acquired in as many days, sending Travis Bergen to Arizona to complete the deal. To put it mildly, the circumstances of Ray’s exit from the Diamondbacks are not what the team hoped for. Though it was always unlikely Arizona would challenge the Dodgers for the division, they had still hoped to contend for a wild card spot. Instead, they entered Monday holding a record of 14-21, last place in the NL West. Ray, meanwhile, no longer offers multiple years of team control, as he’s set to enter free agency after this season. Even if he were pitching like a top-of-the-rotation arm, the days of him netting an impact prospect are over.

Alas, Ray is not pitching like a top-of-the-rotation arm. Over seven starts this season, he has thrown 31 innings and allowed 27 runs (7.84 ERA), has struck out 43, and has walked an MLB-leading 31 batters. Ray has never been what you would call a control wizard. Out of 146 pitchers who have thrown at least 500 innings since he debuted in 2014, only two have walked a greater percentage of hitters than Ray (10.9%). He’d always been able to make that work, however, because he’s struck out the seventh-highest percentage of hitters (28.7%) in that span. That exorbitant strikeout rate has been steady, too — if his current rate holds, this would be his fourth-straight season striking out at least 12 batters per nine innings. Read the rest of this entry »

To look at the New York Yankees roster, as is typically the case, is to gaze upon a dizzying number of potential star hitters. But as the last couple of seasons have shown us, the roster of players in the Yankees organization doesn’t often match up with the guys they actually have available to take the field. In 2019, the team had a large chunk of its starting rotation and lineup on the IL by the second week of the regular season, and the problem never got much better. Giancarlo Stanton, Aaron Judge, Aaron Hicks, Didi Gregorius and others all missed substantial time during the season.

The injury bug has continued to bite them in 2020, with Stanton back on the IL alongside Gleyber Torres and DJ LeMahieu while Judge only recently returned from missing time himself. In spite of all of this, the team has remained extremely competitive thanks to the contributions of role players who have consistently stepped into the spotlight. Last year it was Gio Urshela and Mike Tauchman leading the charge in keeping the Yankees afloat. This year, the man stealing the spotlight is Luke Voit.

After appearing in 118 games for the Yankees last season, Voit has secured the job as the team’s starting first baseman in 2020. The longer he plays, the harder it is for the Yankees to justify handing his spot in the lineup over to someone else. Voit has seemed to get hotter each week he’s been on the field — over the Yankees’ first 14 games, he carried an OPS of .816. Over their next seven, he had an OPS of .945. Last week, he began to go berserk, going 8-for-20 over his last six games with six homers, three walks and three strikeouts.

He started his most recent tear by clubbing two homers in a game against the Red Sox last Monday: Read the rest of this entry »

Folks, it brings me no pleasure to report that Mike Trout is broken.

Okay, I’m kidding. He’s still great at baseball. He owns a 138 wRC+ with 10 homers and a .309 ISO that is right in line with where he’s sat the last few seasons. Trout’s power output, specifically since the birth of his first child on July 30, has been the subject of many comments about his new “Dad Strength.” But when you hear people describe what it’s like to become a parent, you usually don’t encounter them saying they can suddenly knock the snot out of a baseball. They describe gaining other virtues, such as patience. In baseball, one can display patience by drawing walks. If we truly wished to go to the silly trouble of speculating on what a milestone in one’s personal life could do for their on-field abilities, the idea of a hitter being more relaxed in the batter’s box after he has been made wise and humble by fatherhood seems like a natural step to take. Read the rest of this entry »

Nothing can deflate the excitement surrounding a hopeful contender like a leaky bullpen, but as is the case most years, several teams have encountered just that kind of luck in the opening weeks of the 2020 season. At various times, the relief corps of the Cubs, Reds, and Padres have all been a hurdle for those teams to overcome, rather than an asset assisting them in their playoff pursuits. As much as those units and others have struggled this season, however, no team’s group of relievers has made victories harder to achieve than that of the Phillies. Their bullpen ERA of 8.00 is the worst in baseball by more than two runs. Unsurprisingly, that has had a big impact on Philadelphia’s postseason hopes — at 10-14, the team is last in its division, and second-worst in the National League.

Instead of packing it in, however, the Phillies have dialed up some assistance from the last place team in the other league. Late Friday night, Philadelphia struck a deal to acquire right-handed relievers Brandon Workman and Heath Hembree from the Boston Red Sox in exchange for right-hander Nick Pivetta and minor league arm Connor Seabold. Boston also sent $815,000 in cash to complete the swap, assisting the Phillies in paying the $1.05 million owed to the two relievers for the rest of the season.

Of the pair heading to Philadelphia, Workman offers the most upside. A Tommy John survivor who was still spending significant time in the minors as recently as 2018, Workman broke out in 2019 with some truly elite numbers — a 1.88 ERA, 2.46 FIP, 2.1 WAR, and 13.06 K/9. When I examined him near the end of last season, I found he’d made a number of changes to his approach. He was suddenly throwing his curve nearly half of the time, and had found a way to to dramatically reduce the number of strikes he threw without suffering a noticeable drop in opponents’ swing rate. Read the rest of this entry »

It is uncommon for a player who has only pitched in relief to land within sniffing distance of a preseason top-100 prospect list. In his 2020 rankings, Eric Longenhagen identified a total of 43 pitchers, 42 of which have spent most if not all of their minor league careers as starters. Typically, just the threat that a pitcher could need to transition to the bullpen in the majors necessitates a substantial drop in his stock. Dodgers right-hander Brusdar Graterol, for example, dropped nearly 50 spots on Longenhagen’s list in the span of a year, partially due to the increased likelihood his big league career would be spent as a reliever.

All of which is to say that Cleveland’s James Karinchak is an anomaly. He was No. 115 on Longenhagen’s prospect list before the season started, two spots behind Graterol. Where he differs from Graterol — as well as others like Rays right-hander Shane Baz, who was ranked one spot behind Karinchak — is that there hasn’t been any real effort to have him start in some time. He appeared in 82 minor league games from 2017-19 and started just six, all of which came back in his first professional season. There is little precedent for someone inspiring such promise as a full-time reliever in the minors. Fittingly, there is also little precedent for the numbers Karinchak posted in his minor league career.

Karinchak made the Cleveland prospect list only in the “Other Prospects of Note” section before the 2019 season. At the time he was coming off a season in which he’d thrown 48.2 innings across three levels of the minors and allowed just nine runs while striking out 81 and walking 36. An injured hamstring delayed his first appearance last year, but when he finally got back on the mound, his numbers were something you couldn’t expect to replicate in a video game. Read the rest of this entry »

When Mookie Betts signed a 12-year, $365 million extension with the Los Angeles Dodgers at the beginning of the season, it meant that another player would be the top free agent available this winter. The battle for who takes that spot is a somewhat stiff one. Marcus Semien, Trevor Bauer, and George Springer could all be in the running for major long-term deals, with the possible exception of Bauer if he sticks to his plan to only sign one-year contracts. But the best of the entire bunch is likely J.T. Realmuto.

The 29-year-old Phillies catcher has seemed like a prime extension candidate after Philadelphia traded for him before the 2019 season in the midst of a free-agent spending spree. With only about seven weeks remaining in the 2020 regular season, however, Realmuto is still set to hit the open market this winter. And every day, he’s raising his price tag.

Realmuto has already amassed 1.0 WAR in 17 games this season, making him the most valuable catcher in baseball again. He was also the best catcher in baseball last year, as well as the year before that. It isn’t revelatory to say Realmuto is the best catcher in the sport — Jeff Sullivan made the case even before the Marlins sent him to Philadelphia. At this point it almost does Realmuto a disservice to talk about him solely in the context of his position.

You often hear people say things like “this guy hits well for a catcher,” or “this guy runs well for a catcher,” because catching requires a unique skill set that is rare to find in players who also excel at other things on a baseball field. Those qualifiers can often be useful in giving context to evaluating a catcher, because comparing a catcher’s offense to that of a right fielder, or his athleticism to that of a shortstop, doesn’t make any sense. Realmuto, however, transcends the expectations we have for those at his position. Here are the 20 most valuable players in baseball since the start of the 2017 season: Read the rest of this entry »

I’m going to show you all something. It’s grotesque and upsetting, but I need us to be up to speed on this before we move forward. I promise it will be worth it. My apologies if you’re recovering from a long night or are in the middle of eating.

Man.

This isn’t the full list of hitters who played for the 2019 Orioles. Jonathan Villar was the team’s second baseman, and he accumulated 4.0 WAR while holding a 107 wRC+, but Baltimore dumped him in a cost-cutting move. Then there was Trey Mancini, owner of a 132 wRC+ and 3.6 WAR last year, but he is missing this season while undergoing chemotherapy treatment for colon cancer (he’s reportedly progressing well). With those two in the fold, the 2019 Orioles were still the third-worst position player group in baseball. Without them, these were the players who remained. This is a very bad group of hitters.

Now, let me show you a very good group of hitters: Read the rest of this entry »

Dylan Bundy’s first four starts last season were emblematic of a few different things. They told the story of the 2019 Orioles, a team that would set records for pitching futility. They told the story of last year’s juiced ball, which helped facilitate the highest league-wide home run rate in history. And they told the story, once again, of how far Bundy’s star had fallen. Once considered a generational pitching prospect, a Tommy John surgery combined with other injuries wedged three whole years between Bundy’s first season of big league action and his second. As time passed, dreams of him becoming a bona fide ace faded, as he instead turned into something closer to an average back-end starter — from 2017-18, his first two years as a full-time starter, he had an ERA- of 110 and a FIP- of 106, below-average marks that could usually be blamed on problems with the long ball. Through four starts in 2019, those issues persisted; he threw just 17.1 innings and allowed 15 runs on 18 hits, with a whopping seven homers allowed to go with nine walks and 22 strikeouts.

It is that backdrop that has made Bundy’s first four starts of this season almost entirely unrecognizable. He’s thrown 28.2 innings and allowed just five runs on 15 hits, three walks, and two homers. He has struck out 35 hitters. Pick a pitching category right now, and Bundy, 27, is probably either leading it or trailing only a handful of guys.

Read the rest of this entry »

The process of coming up with article ideas often involves trying to find who’s the best at something in baseball right now. With clubs having played around 18 games at most, however, the tops of the leaderboards are still muddled with plenty of players who have gaudy (and most likely unsustainable) numbers. For example, seven technically qualified players currently have ISOs over .400. Seven also have an OBP of at least .440, while a whopping 21 pitchers have a FIP of 2.50 or below. There are potential stories to be written about all of those performances, but many of them run the risk of aging poorly with just one bad start or series.

But this article isn’t about someone who is running circles around the league right now. This article is about Freddy Galvis.

Just over a quarter of the way through the season, Galvis is having the kind of year you would probably expect him to have. He holds a .205/.314/.386 line through his first 51 plate appearances (all stats are through August 11), has hit a couple of homers, owns a 96 wRC+, and has been an above-average defender at shortstop. A below-average-but-not-terrible slash line, some pop, and a reliable glove? Yep, that’s Freddy Galvis alright. But that’s not the complete picture. The reason Galvis has been a consistently below-average hitter despite possessing a bit more power than many other shortstops is because his plate discipline numbers are typically very weak — his career walk rate is 5.5%, and his strikeout rate is 20.2%. With a BB/K ratio like that, a .260 average and 20 homers just aren’t enough to make you a league-average hitter.

Fortunately for Galvis, that ratio suddenly looks very different in 2020. Read the rest of this entry »