At some point in the next 10 days, The Cincinnati Reds are going to trade Johnny Cueto, and some contender is going to get perhaps the best pitcher available for the stretch run. Nearly every team that’s in need of a starting pitcher has been linked to Cueto at some point, and the Reds won’t have any shortage of suitors vying for his services. But where does he fit best, and who should bid the most to secure him as their ace for the rest of the season?

First off, let’s just acknowledge that basically every contender in baseball could use Johnny Cueto; no one has four starters at his level, so he’d slide right into the front of every team’s playoff rotation, and would start the first game of a playoff series for most of them. But for some teams, he’d represent a larger upgrade than some others, and there are some teams that could use pitching that may very well be better off going in another direction than paying the price for Cueto.

At the top of that list, I’d probably put the Los Angeles Dodgers. They clearly need a starting pitcher or three, especially with Brett Anderson leaving his start early on Tuesday night, and really, his history of health problems made it unlikely that the team should count on him giving them significant innings in October even before that. Given their resources and their position at the top of the NL West, it seems very likely that the Dodgers will make a move to upgrade their rotation, but I don’t know that Cueto is the best option for them.

Part of the appeal of landing a guy at Cueto’s level is that you’re adding a guy who can match up with other team’s aces; you pay a premium to get Cueto because he’s going to have a larger impact in the postseason than he will in the regular season. Except the Dodgers already have the best pitcher in baseball and the guy pitching like the best pitcher in baseball right now; on the Dodgers, Cueto might actually be the #3 starter behind Clayton Kershaw and Zack Greinke.

There’s nothing wrong with having a great #3 starter, but that means in the first round, Cueto would only make one start. Paying the price to obtain an ace with the potential to only use him for one game in the first round probably isn’t worth it, and the Dodgers may very well be better off getting two lesser starters to fill the last two spots in their playoff rotation rather than going for one more elite starter to team with the two they already have.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

Between the All-Star break and the trade deadline, most starting pitchers make only a couple starts. For starting pitchers who could be on the move, the small timeframe places those starts under a microscope for those anticipating a trade. Teams wanting to trade for the starter want to ensure that they are getting a pitcher at the peak of his abilities to help with the last few months of the regular season and potentially the playoffs. For the best two starting pitchers on the market, Johnny Cueto and Cole Hamels, recent performance has begun to raise questions about their trade value. Whether recent performances have hurt their trade value is debatable, but we can look over the past few seasons and determine whether other pitchers have gone through a dip in performance prior to a trade and compare that performance after the trade.

Some have asserted that Hamels’ last two starts hurt his trade value. While he has given up 14 runs in less than seven combined innings in his last two starts, his underlying stuff (which is great) has not been affected, there was an extended layoff between the two starts due to the All-Star break, and in the outing prior to those starts, Hamels threw seven shutout innings with six strikeouts against no walks. Hamels does have a 3.91 ERA this season, but his 3.37 FIP is still in line with his stellar career numbers.

Read the rest of this entry »

The trading deadline is nearly upon us, and if history is a guide, there could be a dizzying amount of player movement in the coming days. This season appears to be unique in a couple of ways. There seems to be a somewhat historic mismatching of pure buyers and sellers, in large part due to the insanity of the American League wild-card race, with no team further than eight games under .500 or out of the wild-card lead. Purely by definition, is there a sure seller in the bunch?

This week, we’ll preview the deadline in a somewhat unique manner. Instead of focusing solely on club’s holes and potential targets, we’ll hone in on them from their respective talent arsenals to be drawn upon to make deadline deals. Which clubs are best — and worst — positioned to land the most attractive prizes on the market?

Read the rest of this entry »

“I’ll be honest. I think pulling the ball is the best way to get hits,” Charlie Blackmon said before a game against the Athletics, as we went over the various changes in his hitting profile from year to year. Maybe that’s baseball 101, but going the opposite way has its prominent supporters.

In the age of the shift, though, is Blackmon’s assertion itself still so obvious? Pull the ball a ton and you’ll end up seeing more defenders where you want the ball to go. Unless you have a certain skill that has fallen out of favor in baseball.

Read the rest of this entry »

The All-Star Game is behind us, which means everyone now is paying attention to the coming trade deadline. The appeal, I think, is about two things: One, we’re just engineered to crave roster change. Two, we’re led to believe this is when winners are made. Or at least, this is when winners do something that puts them over the hump; and this is when losers can try to collect prospects. For the next week and a half, the trade deadline will be the most important thing. Regardless of whether it deserves that status, this is the annual routine. Right now, it’s all about possible moves.

Related to that, Bob Nightengale caused a stir with his report that the Detroit Tigers might sell — and might therefore sell David Price. It’s significant not just because the Tigers don’t usually sell, but also because Price is an ace, and available aces are diamonds every July. Consensus is that there’s no sexier addition than a No. 1 starter, which is why there’s also so much attention on Johnny Cueto and Cole Hamels. And Jeff Samardzija and James Shields, and so on. The idea is that a front-line starter becomes even more valuable in the playoffs. And people are inclined to believe that, in the playoffs, pitching is what matters most. So this time of year, the supposedly most desirable pieces are the best and most durable arms.

This calls for a simple analysis. Actually, this calls for a very deep and thorough analysis, but I’m not very good at those. A simple analysis is the fallback. Front-line starters have been traded midseason before. What’s happened with the teams that got them?

Read the rest of this entry »

A lot of player interviews are a waste of time. This one isn’t. This is Lance Lynn, being interviewed in early June, after shutting down the Brewers:

Lynn talks a lot about the fastball, which is appropriate, because Lynn threw 119 pitches in the game, and if his words are to be believed, exactly one of those wasn’t a heater. According to the numbers we have, it was more like three non-heaters, but there’s no point in getting too hung up on this; either way, Lynn threw a crap-ton of heaters. He used it almost exclusively to keep the Brewers quiet, and that was mostly in keeping with Lynn’s evolved pitcher profile. Earlier in the year, when Bartolo Colon was on his run, much attention was paid to his unusual and seemingly simple pitching style. Lynn has become the best Colon comparison we have. Only he’s younger, and stronger, and better. On the surface, Lynn has one of the most simple game plans imaginable. Which means he’s figured out a complicated way to make it work.

Read the rest of this entry »

The New York Mets’ young trio of Matt Harvey, Jacob deGrom, and Noah Syndergaard have garnered quite a bit of attention of late. Our own Dave Cameron put all three pitchers in the first 30 names in his Trade Value series. The Mets were the only team with three pitchers on the list, and all three are 27 years old or younger. The Mets staff has carried a woeful offense and kept them in contention for a playoff spot. John Smoltz recently called the Mets’ young collection of talent “way better” than the 90s Braves teams that included Hall of Famers Smoltz, Greg Maddux, and Tom Glavine. While the young group is no doubt talented, how do they compare with other young groups around the league?

Read the rest of this entry »

Last season, the Orioles unexpectedly won the AL East. I say “unexpectedly” for two reasons. One, because almost nobody called for it during the preseason. And two, because Baltimore experienced injuries to and underperformance by some of their best players to such a degree that, had any of us known about it beforehand, it would have caused us all to project them falling backwards into last season, let alone last place. At the end of the year, their top-five players by WAR were Adam Jones, Steve Pearce, Nelson Cruz, J.J. Hardy, and Nick Markakis — a list within which Chris Davis, Matt Wieters, and Manny Machado (i.e. much of the team’s hypothetical core) are conspicuous by their absence.

This season things are different. This season, the list basically goes like this: Manny Machado, Manny Machado where you mispronounce his name for some reason, Manny Macahdo where I mistype his name for some reason, and then two more Manny Machados where you and I summon the humanity to get the man’s name right. Essentially this season, the second-place Orioles are Manny Machado and a bunch of .500-ish players or worse. That’s how good Manny Machado has been in 2015.

You may have read Dave Cameron’s recent trade-value series. If not read it. READ IT. On it, Machado ranked eighth, which is a very high ranking. However, if you look at the projected WAR by ZIPS over the next five seasons listed for each player in the articles and then re-ranked the players on that basis, you’ll get a top two of Mike Trout (double duh) and then Manny Machado himself. Machado, whose name my computer badly and inexplicably wants to change to “man mated,” has the second-highest projected WAR over the next five seasons. He’s that good now. He projects to be better soon. He hasn’t always been that good, though.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last Monday, at Just A Bit Outside, I looked into this year’s positional rookie class, and the fact that they were the best first-half class in the past ten years when measured by Wins Above Replacement. They have more overall total WAR, more individuals with over 1.0 WAR, and represent the first rookie class in at least a decade to have two rookies with over 3.0 WAR in the first half (Kris Bryant and Joc Pederson).

In short, this is a sort of renaissance year for positional rookies, and the article led me to wonder just how great 2015’s rookies are when compared to a larger sample of years, and a larger number of criteria. So here we are!

We’re going to be focusing mainly on positional players in today’s piece, as they’re really the standout group this season; rookie pitchers are having an about average year (by WAR) compared to years in this past decade, so that’s a topic for another day. As a primer, I’ll provide two charts from last week’s piece to get the ball rolling, and to get us up to speed with what was already covered.

First, I took the top-20 rookies by first-half WAR for each season in the past decade and looked at combined WAR:

Read the rest of this entry »

The adage that power is the last tool to develop floats around every year when trying to explain why a certain prospect has or has not realized his raw power in game situations. When I first heard the idea, it made sense. A hitter’s power develops as he gets stronger getting into his early-to-mid-20s, and… that was enough for me. The problem with this concept is that many of these hitters whose power we expect to develop sometime in the future already have the ability, just not the means to use it regularly. It’s not, in other words, merely a matter of getting it done in the weight room. And oftentimes, the smooth-stroking high-average doubles hitter never gets any attention for his power, then becomes a home-run monster as he matures. As an evaluator you need to understand how that happens and when it applies to individual hitters.

For this noninclusive inquiry, I wanted to look at two hitters lumped into the first group, those believed to have the raw power to be legitimate home-run hitters and how that power has or hasn’t manifested itself in the professional game. In looking at how hitters are able or unable to tap into their raw power skills, we can have a better idea of how to evaluate whether other players will be able to develop those skills into tangible results. Xander Bogaerts and Carlos Correa provide two excellent examples of this paradigm. Bogaerts has shown he can hit for moderate power in the minors against age-advanced competition, but has not yet brought it to Boston in his young career. Correa has started to showcase his power in the early going this year, though prior to this season it was more projection than demonstration. He was touted as a five-tool prospect going into the draft, and our own Kiley McDaniel graded him out in October as having a present 60 raw power tool (65 potential) with a 55 potential game power ability, or approximately 19-22 homers per season.

Read the rest of this entry »