The Red Sox are primed to make some moves this off-season, but not much is known about what those moves will be. They might sign a big money pitcher, they might not. They might trade a bunch of prospects, but they might not. They’re very likely to do something, probably, but what that something is, nobody has any idea. That’s all true, with one exception, an exception you’re likely aware of if you read the title of this post. Hanley Ramirez, lost puppy, needs a new home, and the Red Sox would very much likely to give him one.

It was only last season that Hanley showed up in Boston, skinny, hungry, wet from constant proverbial rain. The Red Sox took him in, scratched him behind the ears, and gave him shelter, food, and $88 million on a four-year deal with a $22 million vesting option. Then he spent the better part of the season pooping on the carpet.

Ramirez’s 2015 season was so bad he cost the Red Sox two wins. For $22 million and the promise of $66 million more, Boston got -1.8 WAR. The Red Sox would literally have been better off had Ben Cherington given one of those “we just signed a new player” press conferences and then, like Clint Eastwood, spent the time talking to an empty chair. Or maybe he could have talked about the team’s prospects for the coming season while casually lighting 20s on fire and tossing them over his shoulder while subordinates ran around frantically with fire extinguishers. Had he done that, it might have been the end of Cherington’s job, but if so it only would have sped up the process by about six months.

Now Boston is run by Dave Dombrowski and Dombrowski has moved Hanley from left field, which he can’t play, to first base, which he probably can’t play but we can’t be sure yet. Instead of putting him there for the final month of the season to see if he could, you know, do it, Boston sent him home. This is known as the writing being on the wall. Instead of getting ready for next season when getting ready for next season was all that was left, Boston said, “Nah, you know what, Hanley? Just get out of here. No, no, it’s fine, we’re good. Sure, sure we are. Have a great holiday!” So Hanley needs a new place to play. The Red Sox don’t want to go into next season with a total unknown at an important defensive position, let alone one they perceive to be a player who wasn’t interested in putting out maximum effort to learn a new position. No, they’re going to try to dump him on someone else.

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The American League edition of this post was published yesterday and can be found right here.

The goal here is to find the positions, before free agency really kicks off, that most need an improvement. I fear that I wasn’t quite clear enough in yesterday’s post — these are based on the 2016 Steamer projections and our in-house depth charts. They’re ranked by standard deviations above or below the mean for WAR, specific to each position. That’s why the order isn’t simply total WAR in descending order, because the average is different for each position.

It’s possible this one might be a bit of a letdown. See, the goal was to attempt to find areas that need addressed through free agency or perhaps a big offseason trade. In the American League, it worked, because basically every team in the AL is a contender, or a move or two away from being a contender, so things like the Angels’ left field spot, the Royals second baseman and the Tigers’ bullpen fit the bill of what we were looking for.

In the National League, though, there are just some bad teams. Bad teams that were bad last year, are going to be bad this year, and are bad enough all-around to where it just doesn’t make sense, yet, to fill their holes with big moves. A lot of this list ended up being bad positions on bad teams that may or may not be addressed, but I did the post yesterday so I’ve kinda gotta do the follow-up today.

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(Dis)honorable mentions: Padres third base, Braves third base, Reds left field, Phillies right field, Brewers second base, Rockies second base, Brewers shortstop, Diamondbacks bullpen, Braves second base, Braves rotation.

#10 Rockies – 1B

After declining a $9 million club option on Justin Morneau, who appeared in just 49 games last year due to recurring concussion issues, the Rockies are left with essentially the same collection of players that produced the second-lowest wRC+ of any team’s first basemen in the league last year. Outside of catcher, the rest of Colorado’s lineup is pretty well-set, so it’s potential this need is addressed, but pitching is clearly the team’s top priority, and so an Opening Day Paulsen-Rosario platoon isn’t out of the question.

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Jerry Dipoto has a plan. Importantly, he also has the autonomy to implement it. Free from the shackles of Anaheim, he’s now able to do his own thing, with his own people, in Seattle. That’s good news for Mariners’ fans.

Dipoto is doing more than simply replacing Jack Zduriencik as Seattle’s general manager. He’s enacting philosophical change. The erstwhile Angels GM is a former player with a scouting background, but he’s also one of the most analytically inclined front office executives in the game. The Mariners will be many things under Dipoto’s leadership; backwards isn’t one of them.

Dipoto shared his vision for the team during this week’s GM meetings in Boca Raton.

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DiPoto on the organization’s change of philosophy: “The philosophy I’m bringing over here is pretty different. I respect Jack Zduriencik – he’s had a wonderful baseball career and I’m sure he’ll continue to have one – but we’ll do things differently than he did. We see things through a different lens. I’m not going to tell you exactly how, because then it’s no longer an advantage, but it is significantly different. Regarding [the Angels], it would be fair to say that this is a different environment for me.”

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You’re forgiven if you don’t much care about Wednesday’s swap of Aaron Hicks for JR Murphy. Maybe you’re not a fan of the Twins or the Yankees. Maybe you’re not a fan of baseball at all, and you somehow wound up here by accident. Or maybe you are a fan of the Twins or the Yankees, but you recognize this as a trade featuring two players with less than 2 combined WAR over more than 1,200 plate appearances. Hicks has been probably the more hyped of the two, but Murphy is the younger of the two, and he seems like a backup. This isn’t on the level of Brad Miller and Nate Karns, and even that wasn’t on the level of something truly big.

These are the moves we have available to discuss, though, and if you want to speak generally, every professional baseball player has a compelling story. They’re all tremendously talented, and they’ve all dreamed of big-league success. If you want to speak specifically, Hicks is interesting, and I’d rate his level of interest above-average. He’s a former top prospect who’s trying to recover from initial struggles, and the most recent year saw him take a step forward. As far as this trade is concerned, it’s important to understand 2015 Aaron Hicks, and what follows are three keys to fully grasping the Hicks campaign. What he was in 2014, he wasn’t this summer.

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In meeting with the press recently, Rob Manfred mentioned a “fun fact” that the small-market Kansas City Royals boasted a bigger payroll than the big-market New York Mets. That fact might not be quite as fun for Mets fans who want their club to spend “commensurate with the economic resources available to them,” to use the commissioner’s words. With increased revenue from higher attendance, a playoff run, and rising projected attendance in 2016, the Mets could be poised to increase attendance, but if they choose to keep the status quo with salaries, they might not have a lot of maneuverability in free agency this winter.

Earlier this week, I took a look at all the American League teams and their current payroll situations as we head into free agency. This post repeats the same exercise for those teams in the National League. When determining a team’s payroll, first we need to look at every team’s guarantees heading into the 2016 season. To nobody’s surprise, the Dodgers have a commanding lead, per Cot’s Contracts.

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This is the second piece in a two-part series previewing the upcoming 2016 collective bargaining negotiations between Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association. Part I of the series examined the new leadership dynamic at MLB and the MLBPA, various economic issues (including the players’ declining share of league revenues, the qualifying offer system, and service time manipulation), and possible changes to the league’s Joint Drug Agreement.

In this post, I will be looking at bargaining issues related to the draft (international and domestic), along with various pace-of-play and scheduling issues, before offering a preliminary assessment of the likelihood that a work stoppage will impact the 2017 season.

International Draft

Since taking office, Rob Manfred has repeatedly suggested that one of his top priorities as commissioner is to implement a worldwide MLB draft, in one form or another (whether it be holding a single draft for all domestic and international prospects, or alternatively creating a separate draft for international players). As a result, one can safely assume that reaching an agreement on a “single method of entry into the game” – as Manfred likes to say – will undoubtedly be a top priority for MLB in the coming negotiations.

It is unclear whether the MLBPA will be willing to agree to subject international players to a draft, however. Read the rest of this entry »

The most prevalent questions in our weekly chats this time of year are “What areas should [insert favorite team here] be looking to address this offseason?” and “Who should they target to fix them?” People really like to predict the offseason, which is an impossible thing to predict.

We can’t anticipate trades or say with any confidence where free agents will land, but we can figure out who needs a boost the most. Using our team depth charts, powered by the 2016 Steamer projections, we can pretty quickly calculate current league WAR averages and z-scores for each team by position to get a sense of which positions need the most help. So, before free agency really gets underway, let’s do just that. The American League version is what you’re reading now, and the National League edition will follow this one, tomorrow.

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Honorable mentions: Orioles LF, Royals RF, Orioles RF, Angels rotation, Orioles 1B, Red Sox bullpen, White Sox SS, White Sox 2B, Tigers rotation, Mariners catcher.

#10 Angels – LF

And to think, it was just a couple months ago when the Angels had enough left fielders for the entire American League West. Matt Joyce, Shane Victorino, David Murphy and David DeJesus are all free agents now, though, and the Angels are left with a gaping hole that will clearly be filled before the offseason is over.

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With free agency now officially underway, we’ve reached the point in the off-season where baseball scribes roll out our annual warning to Major League teams: DON’T DO IT! The history of the $100 million contract is served up as a reminder that these mega-contracts have often turned out poorly, with names like Mike Hampton and Carl Crawford trotted out as reminders that big pricey off-season additions don’t come with any kind of guarantee of success. Because most free agents reach the open market around (or after) their 30th birthday, teams are often signing players whose best days are behind them, and end up paying big money to players who are in decline before they even put their new uniforms on.

The newest entry in the annual reminder of big contract risk comes from Will Leitch over at Sports on Earth. In his piece on Tuesday, Leitch notes that players who have been paid an annual average value of $20 million or more during their long-term deals have fared particularly poorly of late.

That is the dirty secret of every free-agent season: Almost every long-term deal that will be signed will be bad. In FanGraphs’ rankings over the summer of the worst five contracts, all five were massive free agency “victories” for the team that signed them, all within the past three years. These deals are terrible business. I know this is exciting. I know we can’t wait to talk about them all. I know some long-term deals even work out (though the only one immediately coming to mind is Matt Holliday). There are 34 players — not counting the free agents signing new deals — who will be making $20 million or more in 2016. The majority of them will absolutely not be worth it.

Leitch goes on to note that just eight of the 34 players scheduled to make $20+ million next year are “boons” to their franchise, while another eight are “up in the air”, leaving 16 as “drains”, including several players who might not even have jobs next year if it weren’t for their guaranteed contracts. It’s unquestionably true that a lot of these major signings in recent years have gone poorly, and undoubtedly, many of the teams who will be celebrating their new acquisitions over the next few months will end up wishing they’d been outbid instead.

But while I agree with Leitch’s overarching point about free agency being an inefficient way to build a roster, I think there are a couple of reasonable counters to his claims. Let’s attempt them.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

Last Wednesday, we looked at the most extreme home runs of the 2015 postseason. There was Daniel Murphy‘s off-the-shoetops homer, one of many ridiculous Kyle Schwarber blasts, and Jose Bautista’s now-infamous bat flip that caused such an uproar. And, while it was great to relive all of those home runs from the playoffs, a simple constraint to that piece was this: there were only 91 home runs hit during the postseason. We’re searching for extreme home runs, and that wasn’t the largest sample size from which to draw. Fun, absolutely, but there is more fun when more homers are involved.

And so we find ourselves here, staring at a sample of every home run hit during the regular season: all 4,907 of them. There are a lot of strange occurrences in that many separate events, and so I’ve pulled out some of the finest moments involving home runs during the entire 2015 regular season. As always, data has been mined from Baseball Savant and HitTrackerOnline. Let’s get to it!

Hardest-Hit Home Run: Josh Donaldson, 4/23/15

Josh Donaldson might win the American League MVP award this year. However, regardless of whether he wins or not, he beat out his biggest competitor in that award (Mike Trout) by almost a full mph in this category, producing an exit velocity of 120.5 mph on a belt-high changeup from Chris Tillman. Whether that fact will give Donaldson any solace if he loses the MVP award cannot be known, as we do not have an accurate knowledge of whether he reads these digital pages, or puts any stock into made-up awards related to home run compilation articles.

Also of note: the sound that emits from this particular contact of ball on bat. I’ve been trying to think of a way to describe it, and the best I can come up with is that something shattered. That something could’ve been the bat, or the ball, or might simply be the sound of a small fusion reaction. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t know if Clayton Kershaw is going to win the Cy Young Award, but I know he deserves to as much as anybody else. Three years ago, he won the Cy Young by allowing a .521 OPS. Two years ago, he won the Cy Young by allowing a .521 OPS. This year, he might win the Cy Young after allowing a .521 OPS. Maybe he wouldn’t mind a loss so much; he’s already won three of these things, plus a league MVP. He’s not hurting for hardware. But then, it’s not like Clayton Kershaw likes to lose.

He is the total package, as a pitcher, as a player, as a person. On the field, he’s proven his durability. He’s turned himself into a good hitter for his position. He’s also a good defender, who’s difficult to run against. Few pitchers have Kershaw’s know-how, and few pitchers have his command. Kershaw throws what rates as one of the best fastballs in baseball. He throws what rates as one of the best sliders in baseball. He throws what rates as one of the best curveballs in baseball. He does everything, and he’s 27. There’s no such thing as an actually perfect pitcher, but Kershaw is as close as it gets. There are no meaningful weaknesses. He’s even now proven himself in the playoffs.

There’s just this one thing. This one nearly irrelevant thing, that bothers Kershaw even if it doesn’t bother anybody else. Ask anyone else, and they’d tell you that Kershaw is as good as they come. Ask Kershaw, and he’d tell you he wishes he could throw a decent changeup.

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