It was bound to happen once the odds shifted in favor of baseball starting on time, but the offseason has ramped up quickly over the last week. Some of the top free agents have come off the board, and a five-player trade, some smaller signings and all sorts of 40-man roster shuffling took place. Buried among it all was a quick move by the Cardinals on Thursday, as they sent outfielder Dexter Fowler to the Angels per Jon Heyman, with St. Louis picking up all but $1.75 million of his 2021 salary.

It’s not a transaction that really moves the needle for either team in terms of the standings. And it’s not a transaction that creates any kind of real financial flexibility for future moves. Instead, this is a deal that illustrates how one player may fall on different points on the insurance vs. opportunity spectrum depending on which uniform he’s suiting up in.

I’m not here to argue that Dexter Fowler is that good now. He wasn’t a star necessarily, but he spent a nice-sized chunk of the last decade firmly in the “very good” category. He got on base and had some sneaky pop, and from 2011-17 averaged a .370 OBP with an .800-plus OPS and a 116 wRC+. And while he was certainly athletic enough to be a good center fielder, but he’s never been a good defender. His jumps and routes have always been substandard, and his habit of catching the ball at his chest has driven fundamentals-focused coaches insane for 13 years now, though he at least does tend to catch it. I remember Fowler’s 2014 campaign with the Astros and how I’d wince every time the ball was hit his way. I’d hoped to find a video to illustrate this tendency, and it didn’t take long. I thought I might need to go through a few videos from MLB’s vault to uncover a good example, but it was right there in the first video provided, his last putout of the 2020 season.

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Hey everyone, and welcome to the convergence of two recurring segments. It’s the highly awaited crossover between “Can You Believe the Cardinals Got Nolan Arenado for That?” and “Let’s Value Gimmicky Contracts,” two columns I almost assuredly enjoy writing more than you enjoy reading.

Let’s get the deferred money part out of the way first, because while it’s obviously very important to the Rockies and Cardinals, it has nothing to do with Arenado’s decision-making. He’s getting his cash, and whether the check says Monfort or DeWitt, the cash still spends the same. It won’t affect his decision on whether to rip the whole contract up.

As Jeff Jones reported, Arenado agreed to modify his contract as part of the trade. In 2021, he was due $35 million. Now, he’ll receive $15 million this year, paid directly by the Rockies. He’ll also receive $20 million in deferred compensation, regardless of whether or not he opts out. If he’s still under this contract, that money will be sent to the Cardinals, who will then pay it to Arenado. If he opts out, the Rockies will pay him the $20 million directly.

Finally, if Arenado doesn’t opt out, the Rockies will be on the hook for the $16 million he’s due in 2027. That’s the new year that the Cardinals agreed to as part of the trade, and while it’s unclear exactly why the Rockies chose to pay that part rather than some pro-rated portion of earlier salaries, here we are.

For the Cardinals, this is a great fit. They’d been acting as though cash was a key constraint this year, and getting a year of Arenado at no cost (literally, no monetary cost!) does a good job of making the short-term books work. In the long run, they’re paying him nothing for one year (if he opts out after 2021), $35 million over two years (if he opts out after 2022), or $164 million over seven years.

With that covered, let’s talk about Arenado’s options. The structure is as straightforward as it gets for these kinds of things. After 2021, Arenado will have the option to walk away from the entire deal and become a free agent. If he opts to remain in St. Louis, he’ll get another chance to wash his hands of the deal after 2022. If he still wants to stay, then he’ll be under contract until after the 2027 season.

When Arenado signed his extension two years ago, I covered a probabilistic way of thinking about the value. In the interim, a few things have happened. First, Arenado had a down 2020. Second, Dan “Dr. ZiPS” Szymborski gave me a long-term forecast for Arenado that beats my generic aging expectations. Finally, I’ve added a few bells and whistles to the option model in the interim. For the most part, though, we’re just running it back.

To calculate the value of an opt out, we need a few things. First, a central projection for how good a player will be in the future. ZiPS is all over that. Here’s the next five years of Arenado’s projections:

I’ll assume a standard aging curve after that, which gets us a central tendency for how his career will go.

Next, we need to apply variance. I’ve found in previous studies that projections for players who fit Arenado’s mold — mid-career and projections above 2 WAR — vary with a standard deviation of roughly 1.4 WAR from year to year. We’ll start with projections as a baseline, but to figure out the value of an option — the right but not obligation to do something — we’ll have to simulate 10 million or so different futures, then work out what happens on average.

Finally, we need to figure out how to translate Arenado’s projections into a potential new contract. Converting WAR to dollars misses some team-building effects, and as Craig Edwards showed last year, it’s not as simple as applying a linear conversion. Still, it’s my model, and it’s just for Arenado, not for the dang league as a whole. Let’s start with $8 million per win.

While we’re varying projections, we also need to vary the cost of a win. I assumed that the cost of 1 WAR will increase by an average of $250,000 per year, but with a standard deviation of $800,000. In plenty of years, the cost of a win will go down, even if the overall cost increases over time. There might be, say, a global pandemic, or a shortened season with no fans… wild nonsense like that.

Finally, we get down to brass tacks. When the player reaches his opt out, there’s a simple calculation. Take his new median projection, age it down as appropriate, and come up with a WAR projection for the remaining years of the contract. Multiply that number by the cost per win that we simultaneously calculated, and you have the contract that Arenado would sign, in a perfectly efficient market, if he opted out. I added one quick sanity check: if it’s within $10 million dollars of breaking even, Arenado won’t leave. That represents the uncertainty of finding a new contract, as well as the benefits of familiarity.

If there were only one opt out, our calculation would be simple. After one year, we simply apply an aging penalty and a random change in projection. Then, we use that to price out a new contract. With only one year before an opt out, things are simple like that.

In Arenado’s case, the odds are stacked in favor of him declining the opt out. The average situation (no change in projection) sees him with a $101.5 million contract after this year. He’d need to raise his 2022 projection by roughly 1.5 WAR to merit a contract that would be worth opting out for. How often does that happen? Roughly 14% of the time.

Let’s look at it more thoroughly. Here’s how much he projects to make in each scenario, including the $35 million he’s making in 2021 regardless:

In that sense, the opt out already in Arenado’s contract is “worth” $6 million. It could be worth more, though. Replace our forecasts with the ZiPS forecasts that ignore 2020 (they used 2019’s rate stats again), and instead things get a little spicy:

Hey, look! If Arenado were projected to be a bit better — and again, injury has at least something to do with why he’s not — then his option would be worth more. Neat stuff!

That’s not why you’re here, though. Or, maybe it is, but that’s not what Arenado’s contract looks like anymore. In agreeing to head to St. Louis, Arenado gained an extra opt out after the 2022 season.

It’s slightly tricky to model nested opt outs like this, where the second one can only be exercised if the first isn’t. In practice, the decision won’t be overly complex. After 2021, Arenado and his agents will model something that looks a lot like the calculations I did above, valuing his existing contract based on his current projections and including a 2022 opt out. That number will come out to something higher than $180 million, because some amount of the time, he’ll opt out after 2022 and get a raise.

With that number in hand, they’ll approximate what he could get on the open market and compare the two. If he thinks he can get more now, on the open market, than the value of his existing contract inclusive of the opt out, he should leave. Otherwise, he should stay and wait the extra year to see what happens.

Unfortunately, that doesn’t work well in my framework. In each of my 10 million simulations, computer Arenado would need to run 10 million simulations to work out the value of his option using this Monte Carlo method. That comes out to one hundred trillion simulations, and it doesn’t even add much precision for our trouble. Instead, I’m just setting the cutoff higher; Arenado will need $15 million in prospective gains to pull the trigger on opting out after year one.

How does this change things? Less than you’d think. I previously calculated that Arenado would opt out 14% of the time; he now opts out 12.4% of the time in year one. With more time to vary, and thus a higher percent chance of improving enough to opt out, he also has an 8.2% chance of opting out after 2022. All together, that looks like this:

In the scenarios where Arenado opts out after 2022, he is, on average, quite good. This makes sense, because he’s only opting out in the best 8% of scenarios. If he muddles along, he’s staying. If he has a late-career renaissance, it only stands to reason that he’ll be more valuable. All told, the two opt outs add a projected $13 million to the value of the deal — not bad!

Once more, let’s plug in a more optimistic view of Arenado and see what shakes out. This is Dan’s pre-2020 version, where he’s projected for 5 WAR in 2021:

Again, the better Arenado is now, the higher the chance he opts out, and the more the second opt out is worth to him. In the base case ZiPS projections, a second opt out added roughly $6 million to Arenado’s expected earnings. In this pre-injury case, a second opt out would add more than $17 million.

That’s the gory math of the way this complex contract works. In practice, however, Arenado seems likely to take the Clayton Kershaw route. Kershaw, too, had the choice of opting out of his contract early and becoming a free agent. He used that leverage to get the Dodgers to offer him a new contract, avoiding free agency but monetizing his ability to leave. Even if Arenado improves this year and next, that seems like the most likely eventuality.

What’s an opt out worth? In Arenado’s case, it’s real money in expectation. Add that to the extra contract year that he snagged as part of the deal, and it’s easy to see why the player’s union was okay with him taking deferrals in 2021. Remember, though: even in the scenario where he’s at his best, he still leaves less than half the time. It’s valuable despite being unlikely, and that’s the magic of options.

It was never going to be enough for one of the more electrifying players in the world, but allow me to sing one part of the harmony panning the Rockies’ return for Nolan Arenado. As I was on the phone working on prospects lists in the days before the trade’s prospect details were finalized, casual conversation with scouts and front office folks indicated that both Arenado’s public request for a trade as well as Rockies ownership’s supposedly mediocre financial situation made it so that teams pursuing the third baseman were really leveraging Colorado into taking an underwhelming prospect package, knowing that the front office (which is different than ownership) would have no choice but to trade him, and soon. While I can’t know what other offers the Rockies received or how those prospect packages compared to the one they got, which we’d really need to know to truly evaluate this or any trade, it certainly isn’t an exciting group. They’re 40 FV prospects who I think can be big league role players, but none are potential stars, and there may not even be a regular among them. I think you could argue this group does better to mitigate risk through quantity than, say, the prospects in the Joe Musgrove trade, but the best piece in the Musgrove trade (Hudson Head, a 45 FV) is two full FV grades better than anyone in this deal. And St. Louis got Nolan Arenado.

But let’s talk about these players — Austin Gomber, Elehuris Montero, Mateo Gil, Tony Locey, Jake Sommers — and then the future of this bizarre Rockies organization. The player in this deal with the most obvious physical talent is 22-year-old 3B/1B Elehuris Montero, who spent the year at the Cardinals’ alternate site. He peaked as a 40+ FV prospect after his 2018 performance (.322/.381/.529 at Low-A) but I backed off of him after spending an extended period watching him in the 2019 Arizona Fall League. His approach is a problem. During some of his Fall League starts, Montero saw five pitches over the course of an entire game. During the regular season, he averaged just shy of 2.5 pitches per plate appearance. For comparison’s sake, among big league hitters with at least 200 PAs in 2019, Willians Astudillo ranked last in pitches per PA with 2.9; no other big leaguer was under three. From a hitting talent perspective — the bat speed, primarily — Montero has everyday upside, but corner bats with approach issues are terrifying prospects. Read the rest of this entry »

For years, rumors have connected Nolan Arenado and the St. Louis Cardinals. Some of it was wishcasting — Cardinals fans have spent the last 25 years expecting (and often seeing) trades for unhappy superstars, and Arenado sure seemed unhappy. Some of it was actual interest — the Cardinals have been in the superstar trade market and the Rockies have been in the move-Arenado market at various points. Today, it’s happening: per The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal, Arenado has been traded to the Cardinals for five players: Austin Gomber, Mateo Gil, Tony Locey, Elehuris Montero, and Jake Sommers.

The sticking point in any Arenado trade was always going to be capitalism. That’s painting with a broad brush, so let’s rephrase: there’s no doubt that Arenado is one of the best players in the game, but the vagaries of his contract and the math of surplus value combined to limit a potential return. Remember when Giancarlo Stanton got traded to the Yankees for essentially nothing? This would be like that, only potentially even worse.

Arenado is due $199 million over the next six years. That’s a large contract, as befits a player of his stature. If you value one win above replacement at around $8 million (my best estimate at present, though the error bars are huge given the pandemic), Arenado would need to produce roughly 25 WAR over the next six years to break even. We’ve got ZiPS forecasts for the next five of those years:

The numbers fall a little short, which is why finding a trading partner for Arenado has proved so elusive even as rumors of his availability persisted. That doesn’t even take into account a player option that would allow him to become a free agent after the 2021 season; it’s hard to trade a lot for a player who might not be on your team in a year’s time.

Those are the reasons that Arenado was a strange piece to fit in a trade. The counter? Arenado is an awesome player! He’s Nolan Arenado, for crying out loud. Over the last five years, he’s been the seventh-best position player in the game. At 29, he’s not a spring chicken anymore, but he’s still one of the best third basemen out there. Every single team in baseball would be improved by adding him, even if they had to shift a few pieces around to fit him in.

This weird dichotomy — excellent player, middling trade chip — explains the strangeness of this deal. Though the terms of the deal aren’t final, the Rockies are reportedly sending roughly $50 million to the Cardinals as part of the trade, and Arenado has agreed to defer some of his compensation to further sweeten the financial pot for St. Louis. The Cardinals gave Arenado an extra opt-out and an extra year reported at $15 million in exchange. There are all kinds of wild financial things going on in this deal, but let’s skip all that for now and focus on what St. Louis is getting on the field.

The highlight of this trade is pretty clear: the Cardinals just got a new best player on their team. The NL Central is up for grabs this year, and the four teams with a realistic shot at it have spent the offseason doing a whole lot of nothing. Adam Wainwright, who signed earlier this week, was the first player the Cardinals inked to a major league contract all offseason. Read the rest of this entry »

A familiar face is staying in St. Louis, as veteran starter Adam Wainwright, a Cardinal for 18 years now, came to an agreement Thursday on returning to the team for the 2021 season. The deal is believed to be worth $8 million — a bump in guaranteed money from his $5 million going into 2020 and $2 million in ’19.

This one-year deal isn’t, however, one of those last-gasp contracts agreed to with a franchise stalwart brought back in a wave of nostalgia. With Jack Flaherty slumping in 2020, Wainwright was the team’s most valuable pitcher and one of the primary reasons the Cardinals were able to sneak into the playoffs toward the back of the inflated 16-team field. In 10 starts, his 3.15 ERA was his best figure in a full season since 2014. Not only did he pitch well, but he also pitched deep into games, with his 6.6 innings per game being practically Old Hoss Radbourn-esque by modern standards. That was enough for third among qualifying pitchers behind only Kyle Hendricks and Trevor Bauer.

In a sense, 2020 was the completion of a comeback from Wainwright’s most recent season ruined by injury — a 2018 campaign in which he was shut down for most of the year due to a sore elbow. It was the fourth season he lost to injury as a pro, following 2015 (a ruptured Achilles tendon), ’11 (Tommy John surgery), and most of ’04 (a partial UCL tear).

You could make the argument, however, that Wainwright was never struggling as much as his ERA suggested. We use a stat like FIP because it’s less volatile than ERA and tends to have more predictive value. Since 2016, Wainwright’s FIPs have been in a fairly tight band, with less than a half-run per game separating the worst year (4.36) from the best (3.93). He didn’t actually lose any velocity at this time, either — Waino was never a traditional power pitcher — and people were a bit too quick to give the eulogy for his career.

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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 St. Louis Cardinals.

Batters

Can we just say 87 wins and call it a day? It feels like that’s what I’ve been projecting for the Cardinals for the last 15 years or so. That’s an exaggeration, but not an extreme one: ZiPS hasn’t projected them outside the 85–90 win range in a full season since 2011. Going back to the first official ZiPS team standings in 2005 — I only did players in the initial couple of years — St. Louis’ projections have been below .500 once (2008) and above 90 wins once (2010). The lineup rarely has superstars at the top of the lineup, but the Cards have a knack for keeping their floor incredibly high.

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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.

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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 2018 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.

“A hard-charging third baseman” who “could have played shortstop with more range than Cal Ripken.” “A no-nonsense star.” “The perfect baseball player.” Scott Rolen did not lack for praise, particularly in the pages of Sports Illustrated at the height of his career. A masterful, athletic defender with the physical dimensions of a tight end (listed at 6-foot-4, 245 pounds), Rolen played with an all-out intensity, sacrificing his body in the name of stopping balls from getting through the left side of the infield. Many viewed him as the position’s best for his time, and he more than held his own with the bat as well, routinely accompanying his 25 to 30 homers a year with strong on-base percentages.

There was much to love about Rolen’s game, but particularly in Philadelphia, the city where he began his major league career and the one with a reputation for fraternal fondness, he found no shortage of critics — even in the Phillies organization. Despite winning 1997 NL Rookie of the Year honors and emerging as a foundation-type player, Rolen was blasted publicly by manager Larry Bowa and special assistant to the general manager Dallas Green. While ownership pinched pennies and waited for a new ballpark, fans booed and vilified him. Eventually, Rolen couldn’t wait to skip town, even when offered a deal that could have been worth as much as $140 million. Traded in mid-2002 to the Cardinals, he referred to St. Louis as “baseball heaven,” which only further enraged the Philly faithful.

In St. Louis, Rolen provided the missing piece of the puzzle, helping a team that hadn’t been to the World Series since 1987 make two trips in three years (2004 and ’06), with a championship in the latter year. A private, introverted person who shunned endorsement deals, he didn’t have to shoulder the burden of being a franchise savior, but as the toll of his max-effort play caught up to him in the form of chronic shoulder and back woes, he clashed with manager Tony La Russa and again found himself looking for the exit. After a brief detour to Toronto, he landed in Cincinnati, where again he provided the missing piece, helping the Reds return to the postseason for the first time in 15 years. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

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 »