MLB managers not named Tony La Russa did Zoom calls with members of the media this past week. Today’s column features highlights from several of those sessions.

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Two of the topics Dusty Baker addressed on Monday were job-related. One was the position he currently holds with the Houston Astros, the other was a role that’s never appealed to him. The latter is anathema to baseball’s Most Interesting Man in the World because it wouldn’t allow him to kick back and ruminate on life.

“One reason I never wanted to be a general manager is because you don’t really have an offseason,” Baker told a cohort of reporters. “He works all year, and doesn’t have much time off, but for the general manager, and front office people, this is the most busy time of the year.”

Baker is 71 years old with 23 managerial seasons under his belt. How much longer he’ll sit in that chair is a question he can’t answer, but he’s been around long enough to know that life can come at you from different directions. Much for that reason, he’s simply going with the flow.

“Depends on how I feel [and it] depends on how the team feels about me,” said Baker, who was hired by Houston prior to last season. “Changes are going to come about in life. I tend to think in terms of Walter Alston and Tom Lasorda. Those guys signed a series of 20 one-year contracts. I’m not lame anymore. You know what I mean? A lame duck can’t fly. But my wings aren’t clipped no more. I can always fly.” Read the rest of this entry »

The fact that Andy Haines has been coaching for close to two decades doesn’t make him unique among his contemporaries. But his background does differ. Two years into his tenure as the hitting coach of the Milwaukee Brewers, Haines is just 43 years old. He’s either been coaching or managing for basically his entire adult life.

Haines earned a master’s degree from Middle Tennessee State University, and since that time he’s tutored players in independent ball, at every level of the minors — including as a coordinator — and more recently in the majors. An assistant hitting coach with the Chicago Cubs in 2018, where he worked alongside Chili Davis, Haines was hired into his current role by the Brewers in November of that same year.

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David Laurila: What stands out to you about today’s hitting environment?

Andy Haines: “What’s prevalent right now is how things have evolved with technology. Hitting is still at the mercy of pitching — it’s still a reactionary event — and the trends in the game somewhat dictate what hitters need to do to have success. You’re seeing guys rip four-seamers at the top. With technology, guys in the minor leagues can practice not only spinning the ball, but how efficiently they can spin it, and where it gets the outs.

“Everybody talks about the trends — the Three True Outcomes — and how the game is being played. For me, those are the challenges on the hitting side. And defense is a part of run prevention, too. The defense in the big leagues is incredible. Front offices have more research tools and sophistication as far as defensive metrics. They play you where you hit the baseball. So there are a lot of things trending that make it challenging to score runs.”

Laurila: How similar are big-league hitting coaches right now? Do they all speak the same language — not just the terminology, but also the concepts being prioritized? Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2021 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2015 election at SI.com, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Wherever Gary Sheffield went, he made noise, both with his bat and his voice. For the better part of two decades, he ranked among the game’s most dangerous hitters, a slugger with a keen batting eye and a penchant for contact that belied his quick, violent swing. For even longer than that, he was one of the game’s most outspoken players, unafraid to speak up when he felt he was being wronged and unwilling to endure a situation that wasn’t to his liking. He was a polarizing player, and hardly one for the faint of heart.

At the plate, Sheffield was viscerally impressive like few others. With his bat twitching back and forth like the tail of a tiger waiting to pounce, he was pure menace in the batter’s box. He won a batting title, launched over 500 home runs — 14 seasons with at least 20 and eight with at least 30 — and put many a third base coach in peril with some of the most terrifying foul balls anyone has ever seen. For as violent as his swing may have been, it was hardly wild; not until his late thirties did he strike out more than 80 times in a season, and in his prime, he walked far more often than he struck out. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for nine years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Milwaukee Brewers.

Batters

Milwaukee’s approach to replacing Yasmani Grandal (.848 OPS in 2019), Mike Moustakas (.845), and Eric Thames (.851) took the form of, well, nothing. That’s possibly a little too cruel, but it wasn’t reasonable to expect Justin Smoak, Avisaíl García, and Eric Sogard to make up for that production. Losing Lorenzo Cain due to his opt-out — and let’s be clear that nobody should fault him at all for this — caught the team by surprise as well, necessitating Garcia as the center fielder. Overall, from 2019 to ’20, the Brewers saw improved offense at one position (shortstop), held serve at a second (center), and lost ground everywhere else. Sum up everything, and the lineup combined for an 89 wRC+, the 10th-worst in team history and a 10-point drop from 2019. To put this into context, this was only slightly better than the Brew Crew did in their one season as the Seattle Pilots.

Thanks to 16 teams qualifying for the playoffs, that still wasn’t enough to prevent Milwaukee from October baseball. Like the rest of the NL Central, the Brewers were quietly dispatched in the wild-card round. With a 16-team playoff structure unlikely for 2021, a repeat performance would likely doom any quest for a postseason appearance.

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Dave Magadan nearly won a National League batting title in 1990. A first baseman for the New York Mets at the time, “Mags” finished with a .328 average, seven percentage points behind Willie McGee. A big final game of the season could have pushed him over the top — the math showed as much — although the odds were against him. So too was a cagey southpaw making his 547th, and final, big-league start.

“I think I needed to go 4 for 4,” recalled Magadan, who is now the hitting coach for the Colorado Rockies. Willie McGee had been traded to the American League around the end of August — he went to Oakland — so his batting average was frozen. Because of that, those of us who were chasing him had a number to shoot for.”

Magadan went into the Wednesday afternoon finale hitting .329 — Eddie Murray, then with the Los Angeles Dodgers, was at .328 — and the targeted 4 for 4 would indeed have allowed Magadan to match McGee’s mark… albeit only through rounding. Magadan would have finished at .3348 to McGee’s .3353, leaving the latter with the official title by the narrowest of margins.

No decimal points were needed. Magadan went 0 for 1, and then hit the showers with his lone plate appearance having served as a reminder that you can’t always believe what you’re told told. This is especially true when the words are spoken by the opposing pitcher. Read the rest of this entry »

In the final 2019 standings, fourth-place teams in their respective divisions finished an average of 30 games behind the first-place team. In 2018, that number was about 22, and in 2017, it was about 25. The distance between your average fourth-place team and their division’s first-place team fluctuates a bit year-to-year depending upon how super that season’s super-teams are, but it’s never close. The worse team will sneak in a few victories against the superior team over the course of 18 or so matchups throughout the season, but the two really aren’t supposed to be on the same level. One of these teams has a good chance of hosting a playoff series, and the other is having trouble selling tickets in September.

Our preseason playoff projections tend to reflect that space. Before the season was postponed and the schedule still ran 162 games, our projected fourth-place finishers in four of the six divisions were given a 1% chance or less at finishing first. The Phillies, the presumed fourth-place finishers in the NL East, were given less than a 5% chance of winning their division. Then there was the NL Central, where the Cardinals were pegged for fourth but given a 17% chance to finish on top, with a projected record that was within four games of the first-place Cubs. That would have been the tightest grouping of the top four teams in any division since the AL East in 1988.

When the new 60-game season was done, just five games wound up separating the top four teams in the NL Central, and from the looks of our Depth Charts projections, the race figures to be incredibly tight again in 2021. While the Pirates lag far behind the pack, the top four teams in the division stand incredibly close in talent level.

Read the rest of this entry »

In 2017, Christian Yelich finished his last season as a Miami Marlin with a 117 wRC+. That figure, along with the help of his owner-friendly contract, was enough to make him a highly sought-after trade chip — valuable enough for Milwaukee to send the then-No. 13, No. 52, and No. 87 prospects in baseball to acquire his services. Yelich was widely recognized as an excellent baserunner and at least a passable defensive outfielder. But the Brewers were acquiring him for his bat, and they felt his offense from the previous season helped justify the price they were paying.

Fast forward three years, and there are a different set of expectations for Yelich. This winter, he’s coming off a season which he finished with a 112 wRC+, not far from that final season in Miami. But after back-to-back seasons in which he posted a 170 wRC+ and 15.4 WAR — both tops in the National League in that timeframe — and finished in the top two in the MVP voting, that number now looks like a disappointment. There were some positive aspects of his 2020: He walked more than 18% of the time, and while his .225 ISO was below the standard he’d set in his previous two seasons, it still leads all of his Marlins seasons by a substantial margin. But while that helped him maintain an above-average wOBA, they obfuscate a season full of bizarre and unexpected developments for the 28-year-old outfielder.

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I’ll admit it: I think about Corbin Burnes way more often than is healthy. Not in a Swimfan way, or anything; his blowup 2019 and standout ’20 are just my favorite example of a pitcher adjusting his pitch mix to match his natural talents, and Burnes has no shortage of talent. His fastball sits in the mid-90s with a naturally robust spin rate, and his slider turns batters into pretzels. He also posted a 6.09 FIP in 2019, driven by allowing 17 home runs in only 49 innings.

What was Burnes’ problem? While his fastball has a lot of spin, it’s not the same kind of spin as your average fastball. His fastball is heavy on gyroscopic spin — the football spin that gives sliders and cutters their signature “dot” — and light on transverse (or “active”) spin, which imparts movement. Of the 601 pitchers who threw at least 250 fastballs in 2019, Burnes’ active spin percentage ranked 585th.

That’s not a death knell for pitchers. The bottom of the list is dotted with sinker-ballers (the two types of fastballs are grouped together), and sinkers are unlike four-seamers in two ways. First, they have less transverse spin in general. Second, they don’t need as much transverse spin, because the effect they produce is a pitch that rises less than a batter expects. As they’re still thrown with backspin, less movement means less rise. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a chart I used for a story I wrote last week:

I came across this while writing about Houston Astros left-hander Brooks Raley, whose 2020 season is marked by the dot in yellow. But had you come across this chart in the wild, Raley’s dot wouldn’t be the one that gets your attention. That would be the dot in the upper left, isolated all by itself with baseball’s best whiff rate and one of its lowest exit velocities allowed. If you’re the dot in yellow, it means you had a sneakily good year. If you’re the one off by itself, you’re probably one of the best pitchers in baseball.

That lonesome dot in the corner belongs to Milwaukee Brewers right-hander Devin Williams, who won the National League Rookie of the Year Award on Monday. Among the finalists he defeated for the award were a former third overall pick who reached based 40% of the time in his debut and an out-of-nowhere breakout utility player who helped lead his team to its first playoff appearance in 14 years. From where I sit, the decision shouldn’t have been all that controversial. Read the rest of this entry »

Without a true minor league season on which to fixate, I’ve been spending most of my time watching and evaluating young big leaguers who, because of the truncated season, will still be eligible for prospect lists at the end of the year. From a workflow standpoint, it makes sense for me to prioritize and complete my evaluations of these prospects before my time is divided between theoretical fall instructional ball, which has just gotten underway, and college fall practices and scrimmages, which will have outsized importance this year due to the lack of both meaningful 2020 college stats and summer wood bat league looks because of COVID-19.

I started with the National League East, then completed my look at the American League West, AL East, and Central. Below is my assessment of the , covering players who have appeared in big league games. The results of the changes made to player rankings and evaluations can be found over on The Board, though I try to provide more specific links throughout this post in case readers only care about one team. Read the rest of this entry »