Tampa Bay’s pre-deadline activity — trading bat-first prospect Nick Solak for electric reliever Peter Fairbanks, then moving recently-DFA’d reliever Ian Gibaut for a Player to be Named, and sending reliever Hunter Wood and injured post-prospect infielder Christian Arroyo to Cleveland for international bonus space and outfielder Ruben Cardenas, a recent late-round pick who was overachieving at Low-A — got us thinking about how teams’ anticipation of the fall 40-man deadline might impact their activity and the way they value individual prospects, especially for contending teams.

In November, teams will need to decide which minor league players to expose to other teams through the Rule 5 Draft, or protect from the Draft by adding them to their 40-man roster. Deciding who to expose means evaluating players, sure, but it also means considering factors like player redundancy (like Tampa seemed to when they moved Solak) and whether a prospect is too raw to be a realistic Rule 5 target, as well as other little variables such as the number of option years a player has left, whether he’s making the league minimum or in arbitration, and if there are other, freely available alternatives to a team’s current talent (which happens a lot to slugging first base types).

Teams with an especially high number of rostered players under contract for 2020 and with many prospects who would need to be added to the 40-man in the offseason have what is often called a “40-man crunch,” “spillover,” or “churn,” meaning that that team has incentive to clear the overflow of players away via trade for something they can keep — pool space, comp picks, or typically younger players whose 40-man clocks are further from midnight — rather than do nothing, and later lose players on waivers or in the Rule 5 draft.

As we sat twiddling our thumbs, waiting for it to rain trades or not, we compiled quick breakdowns of contending teams’ 40-man situations, using the Roster Resource pages to see who has the biggest crunch coming and might behave differently in the trade market because of it. The Rays, in adding Fairbanks and rental second baseman Eric Sogard while trading Solak, Arroyo, etc., filled a short-term need at second with a really good player and upgraded a relief spot while thinning out their 40-man in preparation for injured pitchers Anthony Banda and Tyler Glasnow to come off the 60-day IL and rejoin the roster. These sorts of considerations probably impacted how the Cubs valued Thomas Hatch in today’s acquisition of David Phelps from Toronto, as Hatch will need to be Rule 5 protected this fall.

For this exercise, we used contenders with 40% or higher playoff odds, which gives us the Astros, Yankees, Twins, Indians, Red Sox, and Rays in the AL and the Dodgers, Braves, Nationals, Cubs, and Cardinals in the NL, with the Brewers, Phillies, and A’s as the teams just missing the cut. Read the rest of this entry »

After a surprise first-place finish in the National League East last year, the Atlanta Braves entered this offseason searching for an offensive threat to bolster their lineup. After being shutout twice in their Division Series matchup against the Dodgers, they probably had good reason to be on the lookout for a new bat to add to their roster. They quickly struck a one-year deal with Josh Donaldson worth $23 million in the hopes that he would rekindle some of the magic that made him the second-most valuable player in baseball from 2013-2017.

Through the first two months of the season, it seemed like a worst-case scenario was playing out for the Braves’ biggest offseason acquisition. Through May 31, Donaldson had posted a 118 wRC+ and 1.2 WAR in 217 plate appearances. Above average, yes, but a far cry from his 148 wRC+ he averaged annually in the five years prior to 2018. With a lengthy injury history since at least 2016, you had to wonder if all that wear and tear had caught up with his 33-year-old body.

A shoulder injury sapped him of his power last year, so it was a little worrisome that his ISO was just .186 through the first two months of the season. That would have been his lowest power output since 2012, the year before he broke out with the Athletics. But more concerning was the 28.1% strikeout rate, higher than any other season in his career except for the brief cup of coffee he received way back in 2010. In his prime, he had always been able to combine reasonable strikeout rates with his massive power.

Since June 1, however, Donaldson has put together a vintage performance. He’s matched his previous offensive output exactly, posting a 148 wRC+ and 1.8 WAR across 198 plate appearances. He’s tied for the National League lead in home runs during this period with 16. That puts him on pace to launch more than 30 home runs for the fourth time in five years. So what happened to his power early this season and why has it come on so strong recently? Read the rest of this entry »

Ronald Acuña had Steve Cishek right where he wanted him. He had worked the count to 3-0, and with a man on first base, Cishek was in a tough situation. The Cubs led by only two, and that put Cishek in quite the bind. Walk Acuña, and the tying run would be aboard with no one out. Give him a pitch to hit, and the game could be tied in a single swing. Acuña waited, Cishek dealt, and the result:

Cishek, no doubt, made the exact pitch he was hoping for. Still, it was a tremendously aggressive swing from Acuña, at a pitch that he couldn’t do much with. No real harm done — Acuña walked on the very next pitch. Cishek, as it turns out, was wild that day — he’d walked Freddie Freeman before Acuña, and he walked Nick Markakis after him to load the bases. All three scored, and the Braves won. Still, what was Acuña doing swinging there? Cishek had thrown seven straight balls to start the inning. The Braves weren’t punished for Acuña’s aggression, but the swing seemed a bit out of place. Read the rest of this entry »

Luke Jackson has blown six saves this season, tied for the major league lead. His struggles as the Braves closer have given rise to a play on the chorus from OutKast’s “Ms. Jackson”: Back in mid-May, after blowing two save opportunities in a row, fans on the Atlanta airwaves and Twitter started singing “I’m sorry Luke Jackson (oooh).” His problems — and the singing — only got worse in early June after he allowed runs in five of his first seven appearances in the month. But if you look at Jackson’s peripherals outside of their game context, the next line in OutKast’s song becomes a lot more appropriate: “I am for real.”

A first-round draft pick by the Texas Rangers in 2010, Jackson never really lived up to his pedigree with his original organization. By 2015, he had transitioned to the bullpen full-time, though he did make his major league debut that year. He was traded to the Braves in an unheralded, change-of-scenery move in December 2016 for Brady Feigl (no, the other one) and Tyrell Jenkins. He was just as unremarkable in Atlanta, getting designated for assignment three separate times, each time going unclaimed on waivers. He made the Opening Day roster this year as a fall back option after injuries decimated the team’s bullpen during spring training.

In his first appearance of the season, he gave up a grand slam to Rhys Hoskins. Luckily it was a low-leverage situation since the Braves were already three runs behind. With Arodys Vizcaino injured and A.J. Minter and Dan Winkler ineffective, Jackson found himself thrust into high-leverage situations by mid-April. But despite the aforementioned struggles, he’s been the best reliever in the Braves bullpen this year. If you compare what he’s doing this year to what he was doing before, he looks like a completely different pitcher:

Read the rest of this entry »

Our Playoff Odds page has a nice little feature that lets you display, for any two dates, the difference between a team’s playoff odds on Date A and its odds on Date B. Around the end of each calendar month, I like to use that feature to check in on which teams most improved their odds over the month that was and which lost ground. It’s a long season, and it’s easy to miss things. Here are the largest changes in playoff odds from June 1 to June 30:

There’s a story there. Let me start it by saying that 17 of 30 big-league teams saw no change at all to their playoff odds in June, or saw a change of less than 2%. Another five saw a change greater than 2%, but less than 10%. Of the eight teams whose playoff odds swung by more than 10% in June, fully half — the four teams at the top of the table — came from the same division: the National League East. To some extent, that kind of clustering is to be expected — when one team rises, another in its division must fall — but the relative quiet of every other division gives us an opportunity to reflect for a moment on what happened in the NL East in June, and what lies ahead in July. Read the rest of this entry »

After years of inconsistent production, Mike Foltynewicz finally harnessed his elite fastball and emerged as an All-Star in 2018. Across 183 innings, Foltynewicz struck out 202 hitters while notching a 2.85 ERA and a 3.37 FIP. All of those marks were easily career bests and, perhaps most impressively, he managed to miss tons of bats while also increasing his ground-ball rate. One year doesn’t make an ace, but Foltynewicz’s stock surged as much as anybody’s in baseball last season.

But Foltynewicz hasn’t built off his breakout campaign in 2019. The right-hander started the season on the disabled list, didn’t look quite right when he rejoined the rotation, and has yet to resemble his 2018 form in anything more than short bursts.

Across 10 starts this year, he’s posted a 5.53 ERA and a FIP north of 6.00. After striking out nearly 10 hitters per nine innings last season, he’s now whiffing fewer than eight. Even worse, Foltynewicz’s home run rate has tripled in 2019, and his 2.44 HR/9 ratio is the fifth-worst in the league among pitchers who have thrown at least 50 innings.

There are a few factors that explain Foltynewicz’s plummeting numbers. As always, velocity is the first thing to check when a pitcher suddenly starts getting hit around, and sure enough, Foltynewicz is down a bit relative to last season. Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Brett Anderson, Anthony Swarzak, and Jimmy Yacabonis — on how they learned and developed their sliders.

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Brett Anderson, Oakland A’s

“My go-to has always been my slider. I’ve evolved into more of a sinker guy now, but at the same time, my slider has kind of been my bread and butter for however long I can imagine. It’s what I get my swings-and-misses with.

“I knew I had a chance to pitch on the varsity team as a freshman [in high school]. I wasn’t going to go in there with a fastball and a changeup only, so I started throwing a curveball. It was a spiked curveball, because I have huge palms and short fingers. I’ve never really been able to throw a conventional breaking ball because of that; everything just kind of slipped out.

“I started off with that get-me-over curveball, just to have something that spun against varsity kids. It was like a 12-6. Then I started throwing one that was straighter and it cut a little bit. I kind of morphed that one into a slider. It’s the same grip essentially, but two different pitches. I get on top for a curveball, usually just to get ahead, or to get back in the count; it’s to steal strikes. The slider is more of my put-away. I spike both pitches, the slider and the curveball. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball has changed a lot in the last five years, so much so that watching a game from 2014 already feels like a blast from the past. Offense was low, sinking fastballs were everywhere, and groundballs and defense were the order of the day. 2019 hardly feels like the same game — unless you’re watching Mike Soroka, that is. Though Soroka is only 21 years old, he pitches like he’s from a previous era. In a time of four-seam fastballs, Soroka pitches off of his sinker — he’s throwing only 16% four-seamers this year and 46.3% two-seam fastballs. In a world of exciting high-velocity young aces, Soroka sits around 93 mph. In a world of home runs, he has allowed only one all year. In short, Mike Soroka doesn’t fit in 2019. How does he do it?

As is almost always the case with pitching, Soroka isn’t doing one specific thing that makes him dominant. If it were that straightforward, that easy to reverse engineer, everyone would be doing it. Still, dominant is an apt description of Soroka’s 2019 season. He’s posted a 1.38 ERA over ten starts. His FIP is nearly as jaw-dropping — fifth in baseball at 2.70. Has he been a little lucky that only 2.9% of fly balls hit against him have become home runs this year? Certainly. Still, though, his 3.5 xFIP is no slouch, 20th-best among qualified starters.

Great pitching is always interesting, but the way Soroka is doing it is what makes him unique. His 21.9% strikeout rate is below league average, not the kind of thing you can say about most excellent pitchers. His 6.5% walk rate is better than average, but not absurdly so — it’s merely 38th-lowest among qualified starters. In short, Soroka is an evolutionary Mike Leake, or 2019’s Miles Mikolas. He’s effective in a way that resists categorization, that belies the easy tropes of analysis. Why is Mike Soroka good? He’s good because he gets every little edge he can.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Atlanta Braves and Dallas Keuchel agreed to terms on a contract Thursday night, thus ending baseball’s short free agency burst following the conclusion of the MLB Draft. Keuchel’s one-year, $13 million deal will enable him to enter the free agent market after the 2019 season with a clean slate, without any qualifying offer compensation pick baggage to reduce his value to a new team (or offer an excuse not to sign him).

We’ve seen this short-term playbook before from the Braves before, so it’s unsurprising to see them commit to a one-year (in reality, four-month) contract for Keuchel. The offseason in Atlanta was quieter than expected, with the team — or more accurately Liberty Media, the ownership group — choosing not to try to splash cash in the direction of Manny Machado or Bryce Harper like some of the other Johnny-come-soonlys in baseball. The only significant signing the team made was a one-year deal with Josh Donaldson for $23 million.

The $13 million is $13 million straight-up, something that shouldn’t necessarily be taken for granted as these types of midseason contracts tend to be a bit strange. For example, when Roger Clemens signed a one-year contract worth $28,000,022 (the beer money at the end to match his uniform number), that figure represented what it would’ve been over an entire season; Clemens only made a little under $20 million, with the money starting to flow when he made his season debut for the Yankees in June.

The reasons the Braves signed Keuchel to a short-term contract are similar to those behind their Donaldson deal: the team has a very deep stable of prospects and doesn’t necessarily want to commit to Keuchel long-term any more than they wanted to with Donaldson.The long-term solution at third base was always Austin Riley, but with the team coming off an NL East crown and still very likely to be just as competitive in 2019, they wanted a safer short-term option. Enter Donaldson The exact pitcher for whom Keuchel is keeping a seat warm is unclear, but the Braves have enough interesting candidates that the assumption is the question will work itself out over time.

The issue for Atlanta was that that question was not working itself out as quickly as the team hoped. The Braves starters have combined for a 4.38 ERA (19th in MLB) and 3.6 WAR (also 19th) and while those numbers aren’t the worst among 2019’s contenders, the rotation clearly has not been enough of a positive asset. And obviously, this matters quite a bit, with the Braves looking up at the Phillies in the NL East by a two-game margin. Atlanta’s rotation as of this moment has more question marks than they did at the start of the season.

Kyle Wright, Sean Newcomb, Bryse Wilson, and Touki Toussaint have all had brief stints in the rotation, with all four losing those jobs quickly (the latter two after their first starts). You can make a pretty good argument that the Braves have perhaps been a bit impatient with some of these pitchers, but it’s hard to blame the team for their urgency.

Perhaps more rope would have been given if Mike Foltynewicz and Kevin Gasuman were meeting expectations.

Folty’s spring was marred by elbow problems and while his health doesn’t appear to be a question, his velocity and his slider have been. His velocity has recovered, with his fastball in recent starts in the 95-96 mph range, much closer to the 96-97 mph he showed throughout 2018 than the 93-95 he initially came back with in late April. But the slider is still missing bite and that’s a crucial pitch in his repertoire. The former Astro’s breakout 2018 was mostly due to his slider, which ranked fourth in our pitch values, behind only those of Patrick Corbin, Jhoulys Chacin, and Miles Mikolas. Batters only hit .106 against his sliders last year and only mustered a .183 slugging percentage. In just over a month of pitching, he’s allowed almost as many extra-base hits on sliders (9) as he did in all of 2018 (11). And looking at his Statcast data, he’s lost three inches of vertical movement and two inches of horizontal movement from last season.

Kevin Gausman’s ERA remains above six, a disturbingly high number considering that we’re now in June. Given that his FIP is a much better 4.03, Gausman’s poor bottom-line run prevention has some mitigating factors, including a .331 BABIP and a bullpen that hasn’t had his back (58% LOB compared to 72% league-average). But as with the Braves’ lack of patience with the young pitchers hitting roadblocks, Atlanta just doesn’t have the time to hang around and hope that Gausman turns his theoretical run-prevention back into actual run-prevention. Gausman’s done himself no favors by narrowing of his repertoire; he’s essentially been a fastball/splitter-only pitcher in 2019, with his slurve largely abandoned. He’ll likely end up in the bullpen for now, which may be a better fit for a two-pitch hurler still missing his former high-end heat.

Under the set of circumstances Atlanta is facing, not only is Keuchel a good signing, but the terms make it one of the best potential buys this year. It’s still strange to call $13 million nothing, but in terms of major league free agency, these are nanoscopic potatoes. You can’t spend as much as you want on amateur free agents or draft picks. You don’t have an unlimited supply of prospects to trade for short-term gains. But you can spend all you want on free agents, with the only limitation being the luxury tax threshold, which is still a softer roadblock than the severe penalties for overspending on other avenues of talent acquisition. That’s not a problem for the Braves, who could sign James Shields to a one-year, $50 million deal and still be short of the Danger Zone. (Warning: You should probably not sign James Shields for one year and $50 million.)

Having the opportunity to sign a legitimate free agent in midseason is pretty rare, but Keuchel’s unusual market afforded the Braves the chance to add a player who might not have seemed necessary for the team in January, but who addresses an obvious need now. One remaining question, perhaps one left unanswered and lost in time: did the Braves need to wait this long to sign Keuchel? After all, given how quickly they cycled through the pitching prospects, the team certainly understood how urgent the rotation issue was. It may not have been obvious in March, but the weakness was apparent certainly by mid-April. In terms of free-agent compensation, Craig Edwards estimated that signing Keuchel would have an additional cost of $4.7 million for Atlanta, hardly a crippling loss. What part of this late signing was the draft pick value (or a more general reluctance to spend on free agents) and what part was Keuchel and his agent preferring to have more teams in the bidding such as the Yankees ($10.6 million loss), Cardinals ($7.4 million), or the Cubs ($6.8 million)? If only houseflies on walls had tape recorders, or whatever the kids are calling those today.

ZiPS has been more of a fan of Keuchel, at least in 2019, than the other projection systems, so it’s unsurprising it gave a digital thumbs-up to this signing to go along with my analog one. The penalty used for his missing time is relatively tame as there’s no injury involved, and most players out voluntarily don’t return in as brutally an inept fashion as Kendrys Morales did after ending his 2014 hiatus. That history doesn’t suggest a huge penalty is hardly surprising, as most players don’t use that time sitting around eating cookies, playing video games, and watching reruns of Press Your Luck. Even I don’t eat that many cookies working at home in a decidedly non-athletic capacity.

ZiPS projects a 116 ERA+ and 1.6 WAR for Keuchel with the assumption that he needs a few weeks to be ready to pitch in a major league game. Atlanta will take that and honestly, probably be happy with less. Because if you’re not using money to sign Keuchel, your other options for signing pitchers using just money are Shields or Yovani Gallardo or Miguel Gonzalez, and so on. Keuchel adds just a hair over a win compared to the likely other options and in the NL East, that win might actually matter.

Is adding a Keuchel a giant, season-changing move? Of course not, but those are more or less unicorns; situations like the Giants picking up Randy Winn midseason and getting 3.6 WAR in 58 games are highly unusual. From the projections, the Braves have turned about 20% of the scenarios in which they don’t win the NL East into NL East titles, and erased about 30% of their non-playoff finishes from the timeline. Without trading prospects or developing time travel technology, the Braves made as good an acquisition as you realistically can make in June. Of course, we could have said the same thing in May.

Stephen Nogosek got one step closer to the big leagues when he was promoted from Double-A Binghamton to Triple-A Syracuse On May 24. The next rung on the ladder is New York, and the 24-year-old right-hander will be bringing more than a four-pitch mix with him when he arrives at Citi Field. He’ll bring a mule-deer mindset, as well.

Nogosek was a Duck before becoming a Met. In between, he was Red Sox property, having been selected by the AL East club in the sixth round of the 2016 draft out of the University of Oregon. Thirteen months later, he was included in the trade-deadline deal that brought Addison Reed to Boston. The address change didn’t shake him up so much as wake him up.

“I was asleep on this bus,” explained Nogosek, who was with high-A Salem at the time. “We were our way to Winston-Salem, and Adam Lau nudged me and said, ‘Hey, you just got traded.’ I was like, ‘Whatever,’ and fell back asleep. When I kind of woke up a little, I was like, “OK, did I really get traded?’

Shenanigans were certainly possible — teammates can’t always be trusted on such matters — but this was no tomfoolery. Once the cobwebs cleared, Nogosek learned that he would indeed be receiving his paychecks (meager as they are in the minors) from another organization. Read the rest of this entry »