Archive for Daily Graphings

When Can Cincinnati Paint the NL Central Red?

Elly De La Cruz
Sam Greene–The Enquirer

To put it charitably, it’s been a rough 18 months for fans of the Reds. Finding themselves surprisingly in the wild card race in July 2021, the team’s front office bravely ran away at the trade deadline, choosing only to improve the bullpen depth slightly. The downhill slope has only grown steeper since then, as the organization chose to go into full fire sale mode, trading practically every player with a significant contract who drew interest from another team. The exodus of talent had immediate results in Cincy: the team lost 100 games for the first time since 1982, when Reds GM Dick Wagner conducted his own fire sale on the dried-up husk of the Big Red Machine.

For anyone who may have thought that Cincinnati’s suddenly hard-line approach to spending was a temporary rebuilding strategy, ownership has done its best to disabuse fans off the notion. Bob Castellini was reportedly one of the owners who didn’t want to raise the luxury tax threshold at all, and he’s spoken repeatedly about the team’s finances. Club president Phil Castellini, during a lunch with a Reds booster group, gave a confusing presentation about how awful it was to own a baseball team, complete with a bizarre presentation that either made myriad mistakes or simply made up playoff projections from this very site. Most prognostications have the Reds challenging the Pirates for fourth place in the NL Central in 2023.

Against this backdrop, not all is doom and gloom. Despite the disappearance of talent at the major league level, there are a lot of interesting players in the minors. The farm system improved to eighth in the league in our late 2022 rankings, and five prospects made our recently released Top 100 Prospects list. The 2023 ZiPS projections for the Reds are bleak, but it’s more optimistic about the state of the farm system, ranking seven Cincinnati prospects in its Top 100. Overall, 11 players made the Top 200 in the ZiPS prospect list, including a ludicrous numbers of shortstops (five).

ZiPS Top Prospects – Cincinnati Reds
Player Position ZiPS Rank FanGraphs Rank
Elly De La Cruz SS 14 6
Noelvi Marte SS 15 94
Matt McLain SS 30 Unranked
Spencer Steer 3B 51 47
Edwin Arroyo SS 58 52
Allan Cerda CF 73 Unranked
Christian Encarnacion-Strand 3B 96 Unranked
Connor Phillips P 160 Unranked
Andrew Abbott P 170 Unranked
Jose Torres SS 190 Unranked
Chase Petty P 196 Unranked
Alejo Lopez 2B 211 Unranked
Michael Siani CF 223 Unranked
Rece Hinds RF 254 Unranked
Tyler Callihan 2B 308 Unranked
Ivan Johnson 2B 322 Unranked
Jay Allen II CF 335 Unranked
Matheu Nelson C 362 Unranked

There’s not a whole lot of pitching on this list, but the good news is that the Reds already have some promising arms on their roster. ZiPS thinks that the three front-end starters — Hunter Greene, Graham Ashcraft, and Nick Lodolo — will all make positive contributions in 2023, and odds are they’ll be even better come ’25 or ’26. Before and after a shoulder strain that cost most of his August, Greene was dominant in his 35 1/3 second-half innings, with a 1.02 ERA, 1.70 FIP, 13 strikeouts per game, and a walk rate cut in half from before the All-Star break. The last may be the most important; it doesn’t take a whole lot of innings to establish an improved (or worsened) walk rate. Lodolo, meanwhile, barely needed a half-season to put up 2 WAR, and Ashcraft and his high-90s fastball ought to have some strikeout upside.

If we construct a roster based on who is under contract or team control, you can cobble together most of a pretty interesting 2025 roster. Now, not all of these players will actually be on the roster in two years; the idea is to get the baseline for a team with the players the Reds currently have.

C Tyler Stephenson
1B Christian Encarnacion-Strand
2B Jonathan India
3B Noelvi Marte
SS Elly de la Cruz
LF Spencer Steer
CF Matt McLain
RF Allan Cerda
DH Jake Fraley

C Mat Nelson
IF Edwin Arroyo
OF Michael Siani
OF Stuart Fairchild

SP Hunter Greene
SP Nick Lodolo
SP Graham Ashcraft
SP Andrew Abbott
SP Connor Phillips

RP Alexis Díaz
RP Tejay Antone
RP Justin Dunn
RP Reiver Sanmartin
RP Ian Gibaut
RP Connor Overton
RP Joel Kuhnel
RP Ricky Karcher

You can no doubt quibble with any of these choices, because this is highly speculative. Maybe the shortstops sort themselves out in a different way, assuming that some aren’t directly traded for outfield help. Perhaps the Reds stick with Nick Senzel through his free-agent season, but I personally feel that he’s a prime suspect to be non-tendered after 2023. There are myriad choices that can be made differently, but generally speaking, if you can only make the 2025 Reds using in-organization players, the basic framework is likely to be something in this ballpark.

I did this with the Pirates last week (and the rest of the league), and I only got the Bucs to 76 wins in 2025. But the Reds have a sunnier baseline; with all teams under the same constraints, they “start” 2025 with a baseline projection of 85 wins. That’s not to say that will be the projection, only where the team stands in talent in 2025 compared to the rest of the league. And an 84-win team in the NL Central is a contender, unless someone decides to go all-in, Padres-style, in the next couple years.

This is where Cincinnati hits an important decision point. If a team like this looks to be a contender in 2025, would there actually be investment in the roster in free agency to get it over the top? The lack of this was the crucial element that doomed the good 2010s Pirates teams. Will the Castellinis, if they’re still the owners, stick to their financial guns when there’s a real chance at playoff contention? It doesn’t really make sense to spend a lot on the Reds as they’re currently constructed, but what happens when there’s a compelling reason to? I don’t know the answer to that question, though I’m cautiously pessimistic.

There’s a lot to not like about the Reds right now. But there’s a lot to like about their future, if ownership is willing to allow that future to fully bear fruit.


San Diego Strikes Again With 11-Year Extension for Manny Machado

Manny Machado
Brad Penner-USA TODAY Sports

The speculation about Padres third baseman Manny Machado exercising his opt-out clause after the 2023 season came to a stunning conclusion over the weekend, as club and superstar agreed to an 11-year, $350 million contract. The new deal rips up the final six years of the contract that Machado signed before the 2019 season.

If nothing else, tally one team that is apparently not concerned with the short-term hiccups in baseball’s revenues due to the Bally/Diamond bankruptcy; the Padres are one of the teams with a regional sports network (RSN) that is affected. If revenues are up in the air, they have made sure that third base certainly is not, following an extension that will also keep Yu Darvish in town for all or most of the rest of his career. The Padres aren’t trying to be the Rays, the scrappy underdogs that hunt very large game with a sharpened stick; they’re trying to go toe-to-toe with the Dodgers at their own game. This is less David versus Goliath and more M. Bison versus palette-swapped M. Bison in “Street Fighter II.”

My colleague Jay Jaffe covered a lot of the particulars about the Manny situation in San Diego last week, so I’m going to skip the exposition. I think Jay and I both underestimated just how motivated the Padres were to ensure Machado stayed in mustard-and-brown for a long time. We had a ZiPS projection in that piece, but now that we know where he will play and for how long, I ran a new projection.

ZiPS Projection – Manny Machado
Year BA OBP SLG AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI BB SO SB OPS+ DR WAR
2023 .266 .338 .469 561 87 149 28 1 28 95 62 119 8 125 2 4.8
2024 .262 .336 .460 541 82 142 27 1 26 89 61 115 7 123 1 4.3
2025 .254 .328 .438 520 76 132 25 1 23 81 58 112 6 115 1 3.5
2026 .249 .323 .422 490 69 122 23 1 20 73 54 106 5 109 0 2.8
2027 .245 .320 .408 453 61 111 21 1 17 63 50 100 4 105 -1 2.2
2028 .237 .311 .388 410 53 97 18 1 14 54 44 93 3 97 -2 1.4
2029 .234 .308 .376 359 44 84 16 1 11 46 38 83 2 93 -2 0.9
2030 .230 .303 .362 304 37 70 13 0 9 37 32 71 2 88 -3 0.5
2031 .226 .297 .347 265 30 60 11 0 7 31 27 62 1 82 -3 0.2
2032 .225 .296 .348 178 20 40 7 0 5 20 18 43 1 82 -3 0.1
2033 .220 .289 .339 109 12 24 4 0 3 12 11 26 0 78 -2 -0.1

Let’s just say that ZiPS isn’t overly enthusiastic about the contract, valuing Machado’s future services at $181 million over 11 years. He is a superstar, but there’s a big difference between signing a player before their age-26 season and their age-30 season. Just to illustrate, here’s the projection a second time, but with Machado the age he was when he signed his initial deal with the Friars.

ZiPS Projection – Manny Machado (Four Years Younger)
Year BA OBP SLG AB R H 2B 3B HR RBI BB SO SB OPS+ DR WAR
2023 .269 .343 .481 572 91 154 29 1 30 102 65 118 9 130 2 5.2
2024 .270 .344 .487 571 92 154 29 1 31 101 66 116 8 132 2 5.4
2025 .265 .343 .476 569 91 151 28 1 30 99 68 114 7 129 3 5.2
2026 .260 .338 .466 569 89 148 28 1 29 97 68 114 7 125 2 4.8
2027 .259 .337 .461 557 86 144 27 1 28 93 67 112 6 123 1 4.5
2028 .251 .331 .441 537 80 135 25 1 25 86 65 109 5 116 0 3.7
2029 .252 .332 .443 515 77 130 24 1 24 81 62 105 4 117 0 3.5
2030 .249 .328 .434 486 71 121 22 1 22 75 58 100 4 114 -1 3.0
2031 .248 .327 .427 487 69 121 22 1 21 73 57 101 3 112 -2 2.7
2032 .247 .326 .422 453 63 112 20 1 19 67 53 95 3 110 -3 2.3
2033 .243 .321 .407 420 56 102 19 1 16 60 48 89 2 105 -4 1.8

That’s a valuation over $400 million, a notable difference! The sad truth is that even for superstars, the 30s are more often than not a tale of significant decline. Just to illustrate, here are all non-active position players worth between 41–51 WAR through age 29 (Machado is at 46.6) and how they fared in their 30s.

20s WAR vs. 30s WAR for Selected Stars
Name 20s PA 20s HR 20s BA 20s OBP 20s SLG 20s WAR 30s PA 30s HR 30s BA 30s OBP 30s SLG 30s WAR
Honus Wagner 3888 37 .341 .396 .489 41.2 7851 64 .320 .388 .455 96.9
Mike Schmidt 4506 235 .255 .374 .511 50.0 5556 313 .277 .385 .540 56.5
Joe Morgan 5298 103 .270 .384 .414 43.5 6031 165 .272 .399 .439 55.3
Nap Lajoie 4290 66 .363 .396 .545 48.3 6170 17 .320 .369 .410 53.9
Wade Boggs 3910 56 .354 .439 .484 43.0 6830 62 .313 .401 .419 45.3
Jeff Bagwell 4410 187 .304 .409 .536 42.3 5021 262 .290 .406 .544 37.9
George Davis 6095 60 .314 .378 .444 48.1 4056 13 .265 .336 .345 36.5
Paul Waner 4735 60 .351 .422 .521 41.2 6027 53 .319 .391 .436 35.8
George Brett 5338 125 .316 .369 .497 50.7 6287 192 .295 .370 .479 33.9
Sam Crawford 6133 58 .307 .354 .447 43.5 4461 39 .313 .372 .459 27.6
Joe Cronin 5218 62 .301 .381 .449 41.2 3620 108 .303 .402 .496 27.5
Reggie Jackson 5056 254 .265 .359 .503 45.8 6360 309 .259 .353 .480 27.0
Eddie Murray 5837 258 .298 .373 .509 45.0 6980 246 .278 .348 .449 27.0
Billy Hamilton 4378 26 .348 .455 .447 43.5 3206 14 .338 .456 .412 26.8
Johnny Mize 4189 184 .331 .413 .588 44.5 3182 175 .287 .376 .528 26.2
Al Simmons 4752 173 .363 .405 .596 47.4 4763 134 .305 .355 .475 23.6
Frank Thomas 4790 257 .330 .452 .600 48.7 5285 264 .276 .389 .515 23.4
Gary Carter 5025 188 .269 .342 .457 46.2 3994 136 .254 .326 .416 23.2
Ivan Rodriguez 5622 196 .304 .341 .485 46.2 4648 115 .288 .325 .438 22.8
Scott Rolen 5122 226 .286 .378 .520 47.8 3396 90 .274 .344 .447 22.0
Robin Yount 7148 144 .285 .331 .428 44.9 5101 107 .286 .357 .432 21.6
Goose Goslin 5600 145 .328 .393 .522 44.3 4222 103 .300 .380 .471 21.1
Alan Trammell 5949 118 .288 .355 .420 43.1 3427 67 .281 .346 .407 20.6
Manny Machado (Projected) 6273 283 .282 .341 .493 46.6 4645 163 .246 .319 .412 20.6
Tim Raines 5621 87 .303 .391 .442 46.4 4738 83 .283 .378 .405 20.0
Joe Torre 5481 181 .297 .362 .465 44.2 3321 71 .298 .369 .431 18.1
Lou Boudreau 5175 40 .292 .374 .410 49.9 1848 28 .304 .397 .427 17.6
Larry Doby 4182 164 .296 .403 .517 44.0 2731 109 .277 .368 .473 17.6
Dick Allen 4872 234 .297 .381 .543 43.9 2442 117 .282 .371 .514 17.4
Ernie Banks 4632 269 .292 .354 .557 46.7 5763 243 .260 .310 .454 16.6
Richie Ashburn 6109 19 .313 .393 .393 42.0 3627 10 .298 .402 .362 15.9
Jimmy Sheckard 6154 43 .284 .370 .394 41.6 2964 13 .251 .385 .344 15.1
Hank Greenberg 4587 247 .326 .418 .625 48.0 1509 84 .275 .393 .544 14.7
Bobby Bonds 5236 218 .273 .358 .482 42.5 2854 114 .258 .345 .450 14.6
Willie Keeler 5176 23 .376 .419 .470 41.4 4418 10 .300 .350 .347 14.3
Buster Posey 3692 116 .307 .373 .476 43.7 1915 42 .293 .369 .429 13.8
Elmer Flick 4701 43 .320 .397 .460 42.4 1713 5 .295 .367 .404 13.6
Duke Snider 5494 276 .306 .385 .557 51.0 2743 131 .275 .369 .504 12.8
Brian McCann 4354 176 .277 .350 .473 42.5 2496 106 .236 .315 .413 12.0
Willie Wells 3129 121 .336 .417 .571 46.8 1306 19 .314 .385 .451 10.3
Ted Simmons 5888 151 .297 .365 .454 44.0 3797 97 .266 .322 .411 10.2
Joe Medwick 5901 180 .332 .370 .542 47.8 2241 25 .302 .343 .406 9.3
Joe Kelley 5552 56 .335 .422 .485 46.0 2568 9 .279 .357 .378 9.0
David Wright 5453 204 .301 .381 .506 43.1 1419 38 .279 .357 .436 8.2
Vern Stephens 5694 207 .289 .360 .472 43.9 1546 40 .276 .337 .418 7.1
Ralph Kiner 4557 294 .281 .405 .571 42.4 1699 75 .274 .378 .489 6.4
George Sisler 4574 60 .361 .404 .510 46.4 4439 42 .320 .354 .426 6.2
Travis Jackson 5053 103 .298 .346 .446 41.2 1626 32 .268 .307 .394 5.8
Charlie Keller 3839 162 .292 .414 .530 42.7 765 27 .260 .390 .455 5.0
Vada Pinson 6850 186 .297 .341 .469 42.8 3553 70 .265 .301 .390 4.5
Cesar Cedeno 6051 158 .290 .353 .458 46.0 2082 41 .271 .327 .401 3.9
Jim Fregosi 5944 115 .268 .340 .403 42.6 1458 36 .249 .329 .381 1.6
John McGraw 4893 13 .334 .466 .411 48.8 33 0 .280 .455 .280 0.2

ZiPS actually has Machado aging slightly better than the average player in this group, with an additional three WAR over about 1,000 more plate appearances. The three active players at the end of their careers that I chopped off wouldn’t make this any sunnier a list; none of Miguel Cabrera, Evan Longoria, or Andrew McCutchen have aged particularly well.

Some of the decreased projection is due to the fact that Machado is no longer a defensive star at third base as he was earlier in his career. Defense doesn’t decline as rapidly as people think at the non-speed positions, and the fact that Nolan Arenado’s glove has stayed quite steady gives him kind of a fallback position if his bat declines. Machado no longer has that luxury.

Despite my grumpiness as an analyst who inevitably has to play devil’s advocate, let me emphasize that I’m certainly not shedding any tears for the pocketbooks of team ownership. While speculating what the Padres’ analytics gang has for Machado over the next 11 years would be a wild-ass guess, I know enough to know that ZiPS does not generally give projections that are grossly different from ones that teams run internally. The team’s ownership group, led by Peter Seidler, was no doubt given all the information the team had internally of this type and is also aware of the revenue situation, his personal net worth, and the fact that the big jump in baseball’s luxury tax threshold from 2021 to ’22 is much, much smaller in subsequent seasons of the CBA. They take this risk with the eyes wide open.

Even as a risk, it’s hard to dislike this signing as a fan of baseball. It’s refreshing to see owners who want to keep their teams together, who prioritize putting the best team on the field right now, and who directly challenge another of baseball’s elite franchises. Baseball’s system of playoffs and revenue sharing incentivizes just sneaking into the postseason every year, and if I worked for a team, I’d recommend the same cynical view that is prevalent among franchises. So it’s nice to see a team with a little more ambition, one willing to be happy with the increases in team value rather than also requiring a healthy profit every season to boot.

There remains a big unanswered question in the form of Juan Soto. Keeping him may cost $40 million a year, and I now have to wonder just how far San Diego’s willingness to spend will stretch. Are the Padres really willing to already be at $200 million for 2025–27 with two starting pitchers under contract? The farm system has nowhere near the depth that it had a few years ago, after all; ZiPS had no Padres prospects in its Top 100. While our prospect team placed two, the farm system ranked 26th at the end of last year, and though the new rankings aren’t out yet, I can’t imagine they’ve moved up a ton. But we’ll worry about Soto later.

By signing Machado, the Padres have signaled that they’re here to win now, and that the current aggressive spending isn’t just the apogee between the fire sales that have peppered San Diego’s franchise history. They’re going after the Dodgers on their own turf, and that’s pretty cool. Now the win now team just has to do the hard part and actually win now.


Joey Votto Tries to Bounce Back

Sam Greene/The Enquirer / USA TODAY NETWORK

Joey Votto has yet to play a spring training game, and he probably won’t for at least a little while longer as he recuperates from the surgery on his left shoulder that ended his 2022 season. That hasn’t stopped the 39-year-old future Hall of Famer from filling reporters’ notebooks now that camp has opened, particularly as he heads into the final year of his 10-year contract and perhaps his final year in the majors.

Votto hit just .205/.319/.370 with 11 homers in 376 plate appearances last year; all of those slash stats were career lows, as were his 92 wRC+ and -0.9 WAR. His performance was particularly dismaying given his 2021 resurgence. Reversing a 2019-20 skid during which he had managed just a 101 wRC+, 26 homers, and 1.1 WAR, he hit .266/.375/.563 (139 wRC+) with 36 homers in 533 PA; all told, it was his best season since 2017.

That made the sudden arrival of Votto’s worst season all the more jarring, even though we’ve all become accustomed to seeing even great players in their late 30s fall apart. Last week, Votto offered an eye-catching, blunt assessment of his season:

Read the rest of this entry »


Royals Prospect Gavin Cross Talks Hitting

Jayne Kamin-Oncea-USA TODAY Sports

Gavin Cross loves to hit, and he does so, figuratively speaking, with his feet planted firmly on the ground. The son of a former minor leaguer who went on to become a scout and a coach, the sweet-swinging 22-year-old outfielder was drafted ninth overall last year out of Virginia Tech and is now one of the top prospects in the Kansas City Royals organization. His smooth left-handed stroke is a big reason why. Cross logged a 1.071 OPS in his final collegiate season, and he essentially matched that number in his first taste of pro ball. Playing all but three of his games with Low-A Columbia, he put up a 1.070 OPS over 135 plate appearances.

Cross talked about his development as a hitter, and his ability to stay in the moment, last week.

———

David Laurila: How would you define yourself as a hitter, and how have you evolved?

Gavin Cross: “My dad played, and from a young age I was taught to be a hitter first. I was really conventional with my setup all the way until college, and was always trying to hit line drives to left-center. My freshman year — that was the COVID year — I had 24 hits, and 23 were singles. But I was second on our team in exit velo, so I was hitting the ball hard. I just wasn’t really hitting it in the air [and] splitting the gaps. Read the rest of this entry »


Pitch Framing Is Evolving Along With the Strike Zone

Vincent Carchietta-USA TODAY Sports

Earlier this month, I wrote about the improvements that umpires have made in calling balls and strikes according to the rulebook strike zone. Today, I’d like to focus on the other side of that equation: pitch framing. The consensus around baseball is that pitch framing’s story has followed a very familiar arc. Call it the Competitive Advantage Life Cycle:

  • Teams realize the immense value of a skill.
  • An arms race ensues as they scramble to cultivate it.
  • The skill becomes widespread across the league.
  • Since the skill is more evenly distributed, it loses much of its value.

Once everybody got good at pitch framing, nobody was great at it. As Rob Arthur has put it, “Catcher framing felt like it was disappearing almost as soon as it was discovered.” I even have fun graphs to drive the point home. There are definitely more useful ways of presenting the data, but I like how these ones let you watch the entropy dissipate over time in open defiance of the second law of thermodynamics:

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Sunday Notes: Born To Brits, Harry Ford Could Be MLB’s Next Great Black Catcher

Harry Ford is one of the top prospects in the Seattle Mariners organization, and he is also unique among his peers. Born Harrison Michael Ford, in Atlanta, 20 years ago this week, the right-handed-hitting catcher is the son of English immigrants. His mother spent her childhood in London, while his father — “a real Brit; he still has an accent”— came to the U.S. a little over two decades ago from Oxford. Moreover, his multi-national upbringing included his family’s having hosted exchange students from Argentina, Brazil, and Germany.

If the above list of countries has you wondering if football — soccer to us here in the States — has been a part of his life, the answer is yes. Ford’s father is a huge Arsenal fan who used to play in a competitive men’s league, while the youngster impressed on the pitch in his schoolboy days before turning his full attention to baseball. Given that Ford is a muscular 5-foot-10, 200-pounds and has been called a unicorn due to the speed that augments his frame, how good might he have been had he pursued his father’s favorite sport rather than America’s national pastime?

“I think I’d go crazy in soccer!” was Ford’s fun-loving (and quite possibly accurate) response to that question, meaning that he would excel. Instead he is excelling on the diamond, and he’s doing so at a position that belies his athleticism. How he found himself wearing the tools of ignorance was a matter of happenstance.

“I was always a third baseman, but when I was eight or 10 we needed someone to play catcher,” explained Ford, whom the Mariners took 12th overall in the 2021 draft. “I remember that there was this royal blue, really ugly gear, and I was like, ‘I’ll try it. Why not? ‘I got back there and liked it, and haven’t left it since.”

As uncommon as it is for elite athletes to end up behind the plate, it has been an even less common destination for African Americans. Black catchers have been few and far between in MLB history. To Ford’s mind, “It will be cool to change that stigma.” Read the rest of this entry »


Luke Voit Looks To Prove Himself With the Brewers

Luke Voit
Brad Mills-USA TODAY Sports

The Brewers are vying for a playoff spot in 2023, and rightfully so. Despite coming up short last season, their roster is quite talented. Their playoff odds sit at 57% and their division odds at 37.6%, trailing only the Cardinals in the latter among NL Central squads. They’re led by a strong starting rotation, but the offense has at a least a few question marks. After trading for a potential bounceback candidate earlier this winter in Jesse Winker, they are hoping for the same in Luke Voit, who is joining Milwaukee this spring as a non-roster invite. After the worst offensive season in his professional career, Voit couldn’t land a guaranteed roster spot anywhere and will instead attempt to make a Brewers team in need of some offensive pop.

Voit is a good hitter. His recent track record might paint him as average, but injuries have limited his performance in consecutive years. Even though last season wasn’t nearly as productive as any of his years in New York, he still finished it with a 102 wRC+ in 568 plate appearances. And while it’s no longer realistic to assume good health from Voit, if he can sustain even semi-consistent health, he can be an offensive boost for the Brew Crew.

As it stands, the Brewers have a few options who will rotate between first base and designated hitter on a non-permanent basis, and none have the potential juice that Voit has. Let’s look at those options and how their ZiPS projection compares with Voit’s:

Brewers 1B/DH Options
Name HR BB% K% wRC+
Rowdy Tellez 32 10.3 20.2 123
Keston Hiura 21 8.5 35.5 115
Mike Brosseau 12 8.9 26.7 105
Jesse Winker 14 14.0 18.8 124
Luke Voit 20 10.3 31.4 111

Assuming health, Tellez and Winker are the only hitters guaranteed to be in the lineup almost every game. Tellez performed well last year and has the advantageous platoon split; Milwaukee’s offense is highly dependent on him repeating his 2022 season. Winker is expected to be the most productive of the other options. He will likely move between the outfield and designated hitter (and probably spend more time doing the latter than playing the former), but if he hits anything like he did in Cincinnati and as ZiPS expects him to, the at-bats for Voit will be limited. Despite this, Winker and Tellez are both left-handed, leaving some room for Voit to get decent playing time. Read the rest of this entry »


The Mariners Add Insurance Plan For Their Outfield

Jerome Miron-USA TODAY Sports

It has been a pretty quiet offseason in Seattle. The Mariners got things moving fairly quickly, trading for Teoscar Hernández and Kolten Wong to cover the holes left by a couple of departing free agents, but things slowed down after that. They’ve brought in a couple of veterans to provide a bit of depth, but are otherwise largely banking on a repeat of their success last year and some continued growth from their young core. They made one more last minute addition yesterday, signing Kole Calhoun to a minor league contract with an invitation to spring training.

Bringing in an 11-year veteran like Calhoun is the type of move that plenty of teams make during the spring, but they rarely work out for the player involved. Most ball clubs are content to roll out whatever internal depth they already have instead of clearing a 40-man roster spot to add a player on a minor league deal. But every once in a while, a veteran will show that he has just enough left in the tank during spring training to break camp on the Opening Day roster.

If you squint, you can see how Calhoun could be primed for a bounce back season in 2023. A long-time Angel, he really started to struggle during his final seasons in Anaheim. From 2017–19, he put up a 94 wRC+ and accumulated 3.5 WAR, with a career-high 33 home runs in his final season for Los Angeles. He joined the Diamondbacks in free agency the following year and produced a career-high 125 wRC+ and 1.5 WAR during the shortened season. The last two years haven’t been kind to him, however. A recurring hamstring injury cut short most of his 2021 season and his production cratered last year after signing a one-year deal with the Rangers, with his wRC+ falling to a career-low 67. Read the rest of this entry »


Kenley Jansen Is Fighting the Clock, but He’s Hardly Alone

Kenley Jansen
Nathan Ray Seebeck-USA TODAY Sports

As an East Coast dweller with a habit of watching West Coast broadcasts (and particularly Dodgers games) after the work is done and the kiddo tucked in, I’m well aware of Kenley Jansen’s evolution toward what we might politely call a more deliberate approach to pitching. Indeed, over the course of his 13-year major league career, he has evolved into one of the majors’ slowest workers on the mound. With this year’s introduction of a pitch clock, he spent the offseason working to adjust his delivery and is facing as much pressure as any pitcher to adapt to the new rules, though he’s hardly alone.

On Thursday, The Athletic’s Andy McCullough and Jen McCaffrey had some choice quotes from Jansen, who joined the Red Sox this year via a two-year, $32 million deal, on the subject of his tempo. Last year, while a member of the Braves, he saw his name atop an MLB Network graphic of the slowest-working pitchers. “I was so embarrassed,” he told The Athletic. “Like, dude, you’ve got to clean it up.”

“It drives me crazy,” he added. “Because I’m like, when did I get this slow?”

The topic is particularly relevant because Major League Baseball is adding a pitch clock this year, one that gives pitchers 15 seconds to begin their deliveries with the bases empty and 20 to do so with men on. MLB is also planning strict enforcement of the balk rule, because the aforementioned times require clarity on when a pitcher’s delivery starts, thus presenting an additional problem for Jansen.

The 35-year-old righty believes that the addition of a double swivel of his left (front) hip to start his delivery may have slowed his delivery down even as its addition catalyzed his resurgence. Stung by his reduced role in the 2020 postseason as the Dodgers finally won that elusive championship and hoping to regain velocity and command, he added the move in April ’21. By repeating a hip swivel that he’d previously introduced at the start of his delivery, he improved his balance, avoided drifting toward third base, and lengthened his delivery toward home plate. His results certainly improved: his average cutter velocity increased from 90.9 mph to 92.5, and his ERA fell from 3.33 to 2.22 (though his FIP and xERA barely budged). Last year, Jansen’s cutter averaged 92.2 mph, still faster than his 2018–20 velocities.

As you can see from the video above, the hip swivel is pretty subtle when viewed from the center field angle via which we typically watch pitchers, but the batter and umpire have a better view. That little movement matters because under the new rule, the clock stops at the start of the delivery, but what Jansen’s doing is a false start that can disrupt a hitter’s timing. Now in addition to speeding up his internal clock, he has to work on simplifying his delivery so as not to commit a balk.

While his hip swivel helps at least somewhat in explaining Jansen’s rebound in performance — mixing in his sinker and slider have helped as well — the data tell us he’s been throwing the brakes on his pace of work more or less since he assumed closer duties for the Dodgers in 2012, just three years after switching from catching to pitching and two years after reaching the majors. Last year, Statcast began publishing Pitch Tempo data, which measures the median time between pitch releases; not every pitch is accounted for, only those that were called strikes or balls. The Statcast measure differs from our lost-and-found Pace metric, which divides the time difference between the PITCHf/x timestamps of the first and last pitches of a plate appearance by the number of pitches in the PA minus one. Statcast also splits the data into into times with the bases empty and with men on base. Here’s what the data looks like for Jansen; by happy coincidence, the start of Statcast’s data coverage is the same year as his major league debut.

Jansen’s delivery times have generally been on the rise since he began pitching, with 2012, ’16, and last year standing out as points where he went from slow to slower to slowest. Pitchers as a group have been taking even longer between pitches over the same timespan, with the average with nobody on base increasing from 15.8 seconds in 2010 to 18.1 seconds in ’22, and from 22.2 seconds with nobody on in ’10 to 23.3 in ’22. Taking a page from contributor Chris Gilligan’s big-picture look at the attempts to improve the pace of play, here’s how the leaguewide tempo data looks alongside pace and time of game over the span of Jansen’s career:

Pace of Play Metrics
Season Avg Empty Avg Men On Pace Time of Game
2010 15.8 22.2 21.0 2:50
2011 15.8 22.2 20.9 2:51
2012 16.3 22.7 21.4 2:55
2013 16.7 23.1 21.9 2:58
2014 17.2 23.5 22.2 3:02
2015 17.6 24.2 23.2 2:56
2016 17.8 24.4 23.3 3:00
2017 17.3 23.5 22.7 3:05
2018 17.2 23.3 22.5 3:00
2019 17.7 23.9 22.9 3:05
2020 18.0 23.9 23.2 3:07
2021 18.3 24.3 23.7 3:10
2022 18.1 23.3 23.1 3:03

Note that last year reversed a years-long trend; the average time between pitches decreased relative to 2021, as did the length of the average nine-inning game. Those improvements have largely been attributed to the PitchCom signaling system, though two-year declines in strikeout and walk rates have helped as well.

While I could give you a pair of graphs comparing Jansen’s splits to the league averages, I chose attempt to index his splits (pitcher tempo divided by league tempo times 100) into what I’ll call Tempo+, which I think similarly gets the point across:

From 2012 to ’21, Jansen was around 30% above average with the bases empty and about 17% above average with men on, but last year he set highs in both categories, climbing to 42% above average with the bases empty and 35% above average with men on. Good thing he moved out of the Pacific time zone, or I’d have been even more sleep-deprived.

Anyway, among pitchers with at least qualifying 100 pitches with the bases empty in 2022, Jansen actually had only the third-longest time between pitches:

Pitch Tempo Trailers, Bases Empty
Pitcher Team Pitches Empty Tempo Empty
Jonathan Loáisiga NYY 179 25.8
Giovanny Gallegos STL 248 25.8
Kenley Jansen ATL 296 25.6
Kyle Finnegan WAS 297 25.5
Dominic Leone SFG 186 24.8
Devin Williams MIL 296 24.7
Andrew Bellatti PHI 217 24.6
Aroldis Chapman NYY 197 24.6
Alex Vesia LAD 241 24.5
Hunter Strickland CN 263 24.3
SOURCE: Baseball Savant
Minimum 100 qualifying pitches.

Jansen did edge Loáisiga for the highest percentage of slow pitches, with 22.3% of his offerings with the bases empty taking at least 30 seconds, compared to 21.2% for Loáisiga. Meanwhile, with men on base, Jansen took over the major league lead in average time…

Pitch Tempo Trailers, Men on Base
Pitcher Team Pitches On Base Tempo On Base
Kenley Jansen ATL 148 31.4
Giovanny Gallegos STL 153 30.8
Devin Williams MIL 183 30.5
Alex Colomé COL 143 30.3
Mark Melancon ARI 180 28.6
Hirokazu Sawamura BOS 193 28.4
Aroldis Chapman NYY 129 28.3
Kyle Finnegan WAS 178 28.2
Tony Santillan CIN 123 28.2
A.J. Minter ATL 186 28.0
Frankie Montas OAK/NYY 337 28.0
SOURCE: Baseball Savant
Minimum 100 qualifying pitches.

… but took a backseat to Gallegos in percentage of slow pitches, 58.2% to 57.4%; Williams (54.6%) and Colomé (51.7%) were the only other pitchers who topped 50% under those conditions. Gallegos might be the heavyweight champion of dawdlers, as his 33.8 seconds with men on in 2021 is the highest mark of the past seven seasons, and his 26.5 seconds with the bases empty that same year ranks third behind only Rafael Dolis (27.2 seconds in 2020) and Chapman (26.9 seconds in 2021). Jansen’s former teammate, the infamously slow Pedro Báez, has the second-longest split with men on, 32.9 seconds in 2015, and shaved just one second off that the following year.

It’s important to point out that Pitch Tempo doesn’t directly line up with the new pitch timer, which starts when the pitcher receives the return throw from the catcher and ends once he begins his delivery. Statcast publishes a Timer Equivalent that just subtracts six seconds from the tempo measure. Jansen’s Timer Equivalent measures of 19.6 seconds with the bases empty and 25.6 seconds with men on base would both constitute what former teammate Clayton Kershaw cheekily called “a shot clock violation” given the new regulations.

In terms of cleaning it up, Jansen is hardly alone. Using 100-pitch cutoffs for each split, last year 81 out of 523 qualifiers (15.4%) had timer equivalent averages over 15 seconds with the bases empty, and 56 out of 467 (12.3%) had averages over 20 seconds with men on. In both categories, the vast majority of the pitchers above those thresholds were relievers. In fact, only five pitchers who made at least half a dozen starts last year had timer equivalents greater than 15 seconds with the bases empty: Shohei Ohtani (15.7), Tylor Megill (15.3), JP Sears, Corbin Burnes, and Michael Kopech (15.1 apiece). Meanwhile, 16 starters had timer equivalents of at least 20 seconds with men on base, led by Montas, the only pitcher who cracked the tables above:

Pitch Timer Equivalent Trailers, Men on Base
Pitcher Team Pitches On Timer Eq On
Frankie Montas OAK/NYY 337 22.0
Josiah Gray WSN 415 21.3
Shohei Ohtani LAA 401 20.9
JP Sears NYY/OAK 198 20.9
Zac Gallen ARI 339 20.8
Cory Abbott WSN 124 20.8
Mike Clevinger SDP 272 20.7
Aaron Nola PHI 389 20.6
Blake Snell SDP 350 20.6
Brayan Bello BOS 244 20.4
Paul Blackburn OAK 278 20.2
Vince Velasquez CHW 219 20.2
Jeffrey Springs TBR 325 20.2
Andre Pallante STL 332 20.2
Beau Brieske DET 173 20.2
Max Fried ATL 419 20.2
SOURCE: Baseball Savant
Minimum 100 qualifying pitches.

In an odd coincidence, not only is Montas here but also Sears, one of the pitchers he was traded for last August, and just missing the cut with an average right at 20 seconds is another, Ken Waldichuk. To be fair, Montas was bothered by shoulder problems that sent him to the injured list late last year and resulted in surgery earlier this week; his 28.0-second tempo average with men on base was 1.5 seconds higher than in ’21, suggesting he might have been trying to give himself a little extra time to recharge between pitches.

Indeed, that’s the general theory for the increased time between pitches, particularly for relievers; they’re throwing short stints at maximum effort and so need a bit of extra time to get that velocity to where it can have the greatest effect. FiveThrityEight’s Rob Arthur previously found that every second of delay adds .02 mph to average fastball velocity, which is to say that waiting 10 seconds can add 0.2 mph. Earlier this week at Baseball Prospectus, Darius Austin took a deeper look at the tempo-velocity link in light of the rule change, particularly searching for pitchers able to avoid losing velocity while improving their tempo from beyond the new clock limits to more acceptable times:

[P]itchers in the slower tempo group were 32 percent more likely to have increased their velocity with runners on. It’s the bases empty comparison that shows the notable difference here, though: only 24.3% (17 of 70) pitcher seasons saw an increase in average fastball velocity accompanying a reduction in time between pitches. By contrast, 41.4% of the pitchers who took more time on the mound added something to their fastball, making it over 70% more likely that fastball velocity increased relative to those who sped up between deliveries.

Particularly as he’s now 35 years old, Jansen is at least well aware of the continuous work it takes to adjust, but maintaining his effectiveness while adhering to the new rules is as big a challenge as he’s faced on the field. Here’s hoping he can get time on his side.


The State of League Parity

Mookie Betts
Rick Scuteri-USA TODAY Sports

With players and team personnel reporting to their spring camps, the 2023 season is almost upon us, with 30 teams set to play over 2,000 games in an effort to qualify just for a chance to reach the ultimate goal of a World Series. It’s a marathon of unparalleled scale in American professional sports, and when all is said and done, some of those teams may be separated by as little as one or two wins — or, though it hasn’t happened since the tragic assassination of Game 163 last winter, any of a series of tiebreakers buried somewhere in the season standings.

That such a long race can come down to the final days is part of what makes our sport brilliant, like some amplified version of Monday’s UAE Tour cycling photo finish my colleague Michael Baumann shared on Twitter. It is part of what makes us all tune in so faithfully for this marathon; over a long summer, the margins between the playoff-bound and the homebound can be paper thin. Just ask last year’s 87-win Phillies and 86-win Brewers, who finished their seasons with extremely different tastes in their mouths.

All this to say: competitive balance is, well, a delicate balance, and with the debut of our 2023 playoff odds last week, there’s no time like the present to evaluate the state of the league from a parity perspective. Competitive parity in MLB has been a hot topic for the better part of a decade as we’ve started to see megateams like the Dodgers and Astros routinely eclipsing 100 wins, and others getting more comfortable with finishing somewhere around 60. In the five full seasons since 2017, 17 teams have reached 100 victories; just five did so in the previous 11 years. On the other side of the standings, prior to 2019, there had been just one season in which as many as four teams lost 100 games; then four clubs did so in each of the 2019, ’21, and ’22 seasons. With that in mind, here’s a look at the disparity in team winning percentage at the end of each season since 1960:

A few things are clear: measures of parity are pretty susceptible to swings in either direction, and as for right now, we are playing through a particularly disparate era. After a seven-year low in 2014, disparity spiked over the next five years to a peak standard deviation of .098 in 2019 before effectively leveling out around .090 in the last three. Left unchecked, this could pose a risk to the delicate balance of maintaining an exciting and marketable 162-game regular season. A wider spread means fewer tight playoff races and more teams with known playoff fates in the latter months of the regular season. Read the rest of this entry »