Sometimes I dream about a life as a scout, traveling around the world watching baseball players in person for the first time. That’s not reality for me, though. Instead, I’m limited to a dozen or so games a year in person and many more on my television. But every now and then, I get a remnant of that in-person feeling when watching on TV and can recall the performance pitch by pitch. Those are special in their own way. This year, one of those came in a mid-September game when Brayan Bello took on the Yankees in Fenway Park.
For the first time since his call-up in July and after a rough patch to kick off his big league career, Bello was on a nice run of success, with back-to-back starts of five or more innings. And over five innings, he was solid again against his team’s biggest rival, racking up 14 whiffs, striking out six and not yielding a single run. Through a combination of four-seamers, sinkers, changeups, and sliders, he stifled the Yankees’ lineup two times through the order. Read the rest of this entry »
If there’s a clear no. 1 biggest college baseball program in the country, I’m not going to offer my opinion on what it is. Not because I don’t have an opinion on the subject, but because sharing it — no matter what answer you give — tends to invite dozens of message board posters to find out where you live and hide spiders in your car.
Regardless of who’s no. 1, LSU — in terms of tradition, program success, resources, developmental track record, and fan support — has to be up there.
In 2022, former Arizona and Nevada head coach Jay Johnson took over for the recently retired Paul Manieri, who’d made five College World Series in his 15 seasons in Baton Rouge, and won the 2009 national championship. Results in Johnson’s first year were in the neighborhood of what Manieri accomplished in his final few seasons: The Tigers went 40-22 (17-13 in SEC play) before falling to Southern Mississippi in a regional final. Whether that’s viewed as a failure, a minor disappointment, or a step in the right direction, one thing is for absolute certain: It’s not where LSU wants to be. Read the rest of this entry »
The St. Louis Cardinals consistently boast a productive prospect pipeline, and Randy Flores is one of the reasons why. The 47-year-old former big leaguer has been the club’s Director of Scouting since August 2015 — Assistant General Manager was added to his title in 2018 — and the drafts he’s overseen have yielded both admirable results and enviable promise. Especially impressive is the fact that the Cardinals haven’t drafted higher than 18th overall under Flores’ watch; the team has uncovered several gems beyond the first round.
Flores discussed St. Louis’ draft and development processes, as well as some of the organization’s current top prospects, in a recent phone conversation.
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David Laurila: You were drafted out of USC by the Cardinals in 1996, and subsequently drafted and signed by the Yankees the following year. How do those experiences inform what you do as a scouting director?
Randy Flores: “When I think back to that — going through the internal pressures of the draft, which I felt — what stands out is that I was able to do it relatively anonymously. With today’s player, it’s completely different. With the growth of amateur coverage, third party, and all the social media platforms… these players already have followings in high school. They are ranked. They are graded against their peers at a level that I don’t know how I would have handled. So to answer your question, going through that experience gives me tremendous empathy for the modern young player who is embarking on this pressure-packed journey in a fish bowl that I couldn’t have imagined.” Read the rest of this entry »
Josh Barfield had a relatively short big league career. Now the farm director for the Arizona Diamondbacks, the 40-year-old son of 1980s outfielder Jesse Barfield played for the San Diego Padres in 2006, and for the Cleveland Indians from 2007-2009. I asked the erstwhile infielder whom he considers the most talented of his former teammates.
“I think I’d have to say Grady Sizemore,” replied Barfield. “He was ridiculously talented. He could do just about everything on the field. Probably the best player overall — the best career — was Mike Piazza, but for pure talent it would be Grady.”
Sizemore debuted with Cleveland and accumulated 27.3 WAR — — only Albert Pujols, Chase Utley, and Alex Rodriguez had more — from 2005-2008 in his age 22-25 seasons. He made three All-Star teams, won two Gold Gloves, and logged a 129 wRC+ with 107 home runs and 115 stolen bases over that four-year-stretch. A string of injuries followed, torpedoing what might have been a brilliant career. When all was said and done, Sizemore had just 29.7 WAR.
No sooner had pitchers and catchers begun reporting to Tampa, Florida than the Yankees rotation sustained a double blow. On Monday, Nestor Cortes revealed that he had suffered a hamstring strain that will keep him from participating in the World Baseball Classic and sideline him for at least part of spring training. On Wednesday, the team announced that Frankie Montas will undergo arthroscopic shoulder surgery next week and at best will be limited to a late-season return. While the team has the depth to cover for both losses — indeed, their rotation currently tops our preseason Depth Charts by a full win — the Yankees can’t afford for much more to go wrong with the unit.
The 28-year-old Cortes is coming off a breakout campaign during which he made the AL All-Star team and blew past his previous career high of 93 innings. His 158.1 innings fell just short of qualifying for the ERA title but among AL pitchers with at least 150 innings, his 2.44 ERA ranked ninth, his 3.13 FIP eighth, and his 3.6 WAR tied for 10th. He missed a couple of turns due to a late-season groin strain that recurred in the Yankees’ final game of the season, their ALCS Game 4 loss to the Astros.
Cortes had agreed to pitch for Team USA in next month’s World Baseball Classic, and so like other participants in the tournament, he reported to camp on Monday, three days ahead of the Yankees’ official report date for pitchers and catchers. Upon reporting, he revealed that he had suffered “a low Grade 2” strain of his right hamstring while running sprints on February 6 near his home in Miami. He has been able to continue his throwing program, and manager Aaron Boone and pitching coach Matt Blake bothtold reporters on Wednesday that they believe Cortes will be ready by Opening Day; he even threw a bullpen on Friday morning. Looking ahead, the Yankees open at home against the Giants on March 30, and thanks to an off day on the 31st, they won’t need a fifth starter until April 5 against the Phillies. Read the rest of this entry »
Major League Baseball will look significantly different in 2023 due to several new rules, but there’s another change that won’t attract as much attention as a pitch clock or all that steamy base-on-base action. Ten veteran umpires have retired and 10 new ones will be taking their place. I’d like to explore the effect these new umpires might have, but first, let’s look at the state of umpiring right now.
The short version is pretty simple: Since the beginning of the pitch tracking era in 2008, umpires have improved their accuracy in calling balls and strikes every single year. Accuracy has gone from 81.3% to 92.4%. If an improvement of 11.1% in 15 years doesn’t sound particularly big, consider it this way: incorrect calls have been cut by nearly 60%.
Michael Wacha is a boring free agent. Don’t take it personally, Padres fans or Cardinals fans from his electrifying 2013 run; he’s still a very competent pitcher who delivered a classic playoff performance as a rookie. At this point in his career, though, he’s a competent rotation filler, a fourth or fifth starter who offers bulk innings at a reasonable rate. As Michael Baumann already detailed, that suits San Diego just fine.
Naturally, since this is the Padres, that bread-and-butter signing comes with a wildly complicated contract structure. It’s a one-year, $7.5 million deal, or a three-year, $39.5 million deal, or a four-year, $26 million deal with innings pitched bonuses — or even some fraction thereof. No word on whether it’s also Optimus Prime, but it’s certainly a transformer:
Wacha deal with Padres: Four years, $26M
Signing bonus $3.5M
2023 $4M
Club options, must be picked up simultaneously 2024 $16M 2025 $16M
If club options declined 2024 player option $6.5M 2025 player option $6M 2026 player option $6M All exercised one at a time.
One thing is for sure: the Padres aren’t afraid of a little complexity. They signed Nick Martinez to a similar deal earlier in the offseason. These nested and mutually exclusive options are hard to parse, but I think they’re an interesting idea, so let’s talk through the different ways this deal could go and what it means for both Wacha and the Padres. Read the rest of this entry »
Earlier this week, as is tradition, FanGraphs founder David Appelman went into his garage, turned off all the lights except for some candles, and performed a dark and arcane ritual. The words were carefully chosen and spoken precisely, with any variation promising disaster. Then he went back inside, pushed a few buttons on his computer, and now we have playoff odds for 2023!
Okay, fine, that isn’t exactly how it goes down, but it’s close. Our playoff odds bring together pieces of a lot of features you’ve already seen on the website. We start with a blended projection that incorporates ZiPS and Steamer’s rate statistic projections. We add in playing time projections from RosterResource, which incorporate health, skill, and team situation to create a unified guess for how each team will distribute their plate appearances and innings pitched.
With playing time and production in hand, we use BaseRuns to estimate how many runs each team will score and allow per game. That gives us a schedule-neutral win percentage for each team, because you can turn runs scored and runs allowed into a projection via the Pythagorean approximation. From there, we simulate the entire season 20,000 times, with an odds ratio and a random number generator determining the outcome of each game on the schedule, and voila! Our playoff odds. Read the rest of this entry »
They say you should never go to the grocery store hungry. If you do, you could end up like the Padres: A cart full of shortstops, eye-catching extensions for key players like Yu Darvish and Robert Suarez, and even a couple fun veteran DH types from the end caps to snack on during the drive home. Then you get home, unload the car, and realize you forgot something essential like bread, or coffee, or the entire back half of a starting rotation.
So you have to go back to the store and pick up a Michael Wacha before spring training:
Wacha agreement with Padres has complex structure that could earn him more than $24M over four years, sources tell @TheAthletic. Deal includes player and team options that protect both Wacha’s upside and downside while lowering his AAV for luxury-tax purposes. Pending physical.
During free agency, baseball fans have a tendency to throw out terms like “upside,” talk about players’ “ceilings” and “floors,” and do their best to evaluate the “risk and reward” of any given move. When teams make offseason additions, it’s impossible not to imagine not only what level of production can be expected, but also what might happen if everything clicks and, as the case may be, what might happen if things don’t. This becomes the basis of endless debate: what kind of heights can the prospect just traded for reach? Should that last spot in the rotation go to the reliable veteran or the young flamethrower who has yet to put it all together?
Teams have to make these evaluations themselves when considering roster construction. Say, for instance, that Player A was expected to contribute 2.0 WAR, but a team’s projection models indicate that he could be as valuable as 4.0 WAR or as unproductive as replacement level. Player B, on the other hand, is also projected for 2.0 WAR, but the models expect him to end up somewhere between 1.3 and 2.7 WAR. It’s not necessarily inherently better to choose one player over the other; it’s ultimately a matter of the club’s priorities at the time. This could depend on all sorts of factors: the size of the investment in the first place, where this player is expected to fit on the roster, how much the team anticipates competing for a title, maybe even player development insights that the front office or coaching staff thinks might help push the player toward the top of his projected spectrum.
As this winter’s free agency was unfolding, I was curious if there were insights to draw from how the disparity of players’ varied outcomes were playing out on the market. A handful of players with relatively uncertain futures (let me stress “relatively”) like Robert Suarez, Zach Eflin, and Masataka Yoshida were commanding larger — and longer — contracts than projected. Meanwhile, some relative knowns — veterans like Jean Segura and Noah Syndergaard — were coming in under their projections, and players like Elvis Andrus and Brad Hand are still out there looking. There are counterexamples, to be sure, but it made me want to explore whether there was particular interest in (and resources being allocated to) players that offered a high ceiling, even if that meant taking on the risk of a lower floor. Read the rest of this entry »
