Baseball Twitter was abuzz last Wednesday when Tim Tebow announced his retirement … wait, strike that; the subject changed drastically that same evening when Fernando Tatis Jr. inked a 14-year extension worth a reported $340 million. You could argue that Tatis actually left money on the table, as he was potentially lined up to be one of the best free agents in baseball history due to his age and talent. But “potentially” is carrying a ton of water in that statement, and it’s either bad or dishonest logic to fault a 21-year-old for taking close to record-breaking money as security when it’s presented to him.

The Tatis extension isn’t the largest in baseball history, eclipsed as it is by those of Mookie Betts and Mike Trout, but it is larger than the free-agent record of $330 million held by Bryce Harper. All of these numbers, though, left me wondering: Who will be the first to top the $400 million mark? We’ve already seen the first $40 million-plus AAV this offseason in Trevor Bauer, and that number combined with double-digit years could get us there. So who are the top candidates?

Let’s get one technicality out of the way. You could say, and would be correct in spirit, that Trout has already topped the $400 million mark with the extension he signed prior to the 2019 season. While that deal created a commitment of more than $400 million ($426.5 million to be exact) over 12 years, contractually, it was 10 years tacked on to an existing deal. Still, if you want to answer “Who’s The Next $400 Million Player?” with “Mike Trout,” I’m not going to argue semantics. Let’s have fun with this anyway. Read the rest of this entry »

Two days after pitchers and catchers officially reported to spring training, the Mets augmented their rotation — which they’d already upgraded significantly this winter — by landing one of the top remaining free agents, Taijuan Walker. The 28-year-old righty agreed to a two-year, $20 million deal that carries a player option for a third year, making him just the fourth free agent starter this winter to secure a multiyear contract.

A former supplemental first-round pick (2010) and consensus top-20 prospect (2012-14) while with the Mariners, Walker has been beset by injuries for most of his major league career. Shoulder woes wiped out much of his 2014 season, while ankle, foot, and blister problems limited him to an average of 27 starts from 2015-17 with Seattle (the first two of those seasons) and Arizona. He made just three starts in 2018 before needing Tommy John surgery, and then sprained his shoulder capsule in May ’19 while rehabbing; he threw a single inning that year in a start on the final day of the season.

Given that litany, it rated as quite the pleasant surprise that Walker was healthy enough to make 11 starts totaling 53 innings in 2020; he did that while splitting his season between a return to the Mariners and an August 27 trade to the Blue Jays. His 2.70 ERA was outstanding, 38% better than league average; after posting a 4.00 mark through his five starts with Seattle, he delivered a 1.37 mark in six starts for the Blue Jays, who won five of those six games while qualifying for the expanded playoffs, though he did not get a chance to pitch in the Wild Card Series.

Alas, that sterling ERA was something of a mirage. Not only did it conceal seven unearned runs, for a still-respectable RA-9 of 3.88, but his 4.56 FIP was actually six percent worse than league average. Relative to the major league averages for starting pitchers, both Walker’s 22.2% strikeout rate and 8.4% walk rate were slightly subpar, while his 1.35 homers per nine, for as gaudy as it was, was slightly better than average.

Statcast-wise, Walker’s 88.4 mph average exit velocity and 7.2% barrel rate were both similarly middling, ranking in the 50th and 48th percentiles, respectively. His 32.9% hard-hit rate was up in the 74th percentile, his .325 xwOBA down in the 29th percentile. Just as his 1.86 gap between his ERA and FIP placed him second among the 71 pitchers with at least 50 innings last year, his 39-point gap between his xwOBA and .286 wOBA placed him in the 91st percentile among pitchers who threw at least 500 pitches last year, all of which suggests some amount of regression ahead. Read the rest of this entry »

On Friday, the Yankees and Brett Gardner came to a one-year, $4 million agreement. The deal includes a player option for 2022 and a team option if Gardner declines it. The contract solidifies the outfielder’s plan to spend his entire career in New York. Nominally, his return had been up in the air: The Yankees declined to exercise his $10 million option last fall and announced that Clint Frazier would be the club’s starting left fielder in 2021. But Gardner wanted to stay in New York, and he was willing to sign on for part-time duty in lieu of other options.

Had Gardner wanted a starting gig, he probably could have found it, as he seems to have plenty left in the tank. Prior to 2020, he had accrued 2.5 WAR or better every year since 2012. Last season, he posted a 110 wRC+ and 0.6 WAR in 49 games, numbers that probably undersell his ability. He got off to a dreadful start, batting just .165/.293/.299 through his first 36 games. In most years, that’s a bad April, but in 2020 that was his batting line when he woke up on September 10. He hit nearly .400 the rest of the way though, and then mashed in October to alleviate concerns that age had eaten into his offensive ability.

On the contrary, Gardner has aged spectacularly well. Just about the only thing that seems to have changed in his 13 years in the majors is the size of his neck, and even that’s been pretty subtle. Last year, Gardner posted a career-best walk rate, and also his highest average exit velocity since Statcast started tracking that metric. He did strike out and whiff more often than normal, but also raised his launch angle; sometimes there’s a bit of a tradeoff there. Perhaps most encouragingly, the Yankees still saw fit to use him in center field several times, and while his wheels may not spin quite as fast these days, he’s still a plus runner. ZiPS projects 1.8 WAR for him in 118 games, which would make him a 2-3 win player in an everyday role. For Aaron Boone, that’s a hell of an option to have on the bench. Read the rest of this entry »

There were so many concerning and reprehensible elements to Kevin Mather’s address to the Bellevue Breakfast Rotary Club — given earlier this month, but unearthed, in YouTube form, by commenters on Lookout Landing yesterday — that it would be beyond the scope of a single post to adequately address them all. Mather, still the President and CEO of the Mariners at this writing and even after the Seattle Times reported his history of alleged workplace harassment in 2018, managed in the course of 45 minutes to offend on a multitude of different levels, none of which were mentioned specifically in his apology statement. Here, though, I will specifically address the element of his speech that I have the most knowledge and experience with — the one that, as a result, was the most infuriating to me. In the course of his question period, Mather, twice and entirely unprompted, denigrated his players’ ability to speak English.

The video has since been deleted from the Bellevue Breakfast Rotary Club’s channel, where it was originally updated, but it has been uploaded elsewhere; Lookout Landing also posted a full transcript here. The quotes below are pulled from the Lookout Landing transcript. First, Mather was asked by one of the members of the Club to “tell [them] about Julio Rodríguez.” Mather’s answer began like this:

Julio Rodríguez has got a personality bigger than all of you combined. He is loud, his English is not tremendous.

Later, another member asked about what support the Mariners offered to players who don’t speak English as their first language. Mather described the improvement in such supports over the last 20 years, before deciding to illustrate his point with this example:

As far as Korea, Japan, Taiwan, those players are typically older. They don’t come over as 16- or 18-year-olds, they come over as 28, 30, 32 year olds. We typically…it frustrates me…For instance, we just re-hired Iwakuma, he was a pitcher with us for a number of years. Wonderful human being, his English was terrible. He wanted to get back into the game, he came to us, we quite frankly want him as our Asian scout, interpreter, what’s going on with the Japanese league. He’s coming to spring training. And I’m going to say, I’m tired of paying his interpreter. When he was a player, we’d pay Iwakuma X, but we’d also have to pay $75,000 a year to have an interpreter with him. His English suddenly got better, his English got better when we told him that! For the older players from the Far East, we have an interpreter that travels with them. For the younger Dominicans, Venezuelans, Caribbean players, we really invest in them at a young age before they get here. Good question! It’s important.

Read the rest of this entry »

As a rule, teams tend to be less aggressive, and take fewer chances, when behind in games. The logic is sound, but at the same time, is it really necessary? Is there not often something to gain by pushing the envelope and putting pressure on the opposing side, regardless of the score? I asked that question to Derek Shelton earlier this week.

“I think it’s game-situational,” the Pirates manager replied. “The question I would [throw] back to you — this is rhetorical, of course — is ‘What’s the variation in terms of number of runs when you start to take chances, or don’t take chances?’ If it’s three or less, you probably have a greater chance of being aggressive. If you get to the point where you’re at four-plus, you have to be very careful… because the risk-reward may not play out.”

Going deep with runners on is arguably the best way to erase multi-run deficits, but that’s not a reward Shelton has seen much of since taking the helm in Pittsburgh prior to last season. The Pirates hit just 22 home runs with men on base in 2020. Only the Texas Rangers, with 20, hit fewer. And there weren’t a ton of solos, either. All told, Willie Stargell’s old team out-homered only the Arizona Diamondbacks and the St. Louis Cardinals.

Of course, not every good team has a lineup full of bashers. Your father’s Cardinals are a prime example. In the 1980s, St. Louis had multiple championship-caliber clubs that were largely bereft of power. They made their hay by motoring around the base paths. I brought up how it might be interesting to look back at how often they ran when trailing by multiple runs.

Shelton retorted with unassailable logic. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, Travis Shaw signed a non-guaranteed deal with the Brewers that will pay him $1.5 million if he makes the big league roster, with another $1.5 million available in incentives. (Our Jay Jaffe has the particulars in a piece from Thursday on Milwaukee signing him and Brett Anderson.) There’s also an opt-out date in mid-March, one he’ll presumably exercise if he isn’t tracking to earn a spot on the Opening Day roster. He’ll have to beat out some combination of Luis Urías and Daniel Vogelbach for at-bats, and while that may not sound likely, I think he’s a reasonable bounce-back candidate.

I’ve long been fascinated by Shaw’s career path and the way his production has bounced around with his launch angle. One notable aspect of the launch angle revolution is how frequently swing adjustments seem to pay off. Perhaps we can attribute some of that to a juicy baseball; we’ll see how well all the new flyball hitters hold up with a deader pill this year. Most players who steepened their launch angle, though, have benefited from doing so — but not everyone.

Logically, we can intuit that too steep of a launch angle leads to popups, flyouts, and more swings and misses. Anything above a 45-degree launch angle, for instance, is almost always an out (unless you’re a freak like Pete Alonso). And while nobody has an average launch angle anywhere near 45 degrees, it makes sense that someone with a comparatively high figure may be reaching for too much of a good thing.

That brings us back to Shaw. After posting consecutive 3.5-WAR seasons for the Brewers in 2017 and ’18, he slumped horribly the following year. In baseball’s most homerific season to date, Shaw went from 32 round-trippers to seven. Unsurprisingly, he lost his job, got demoted to Triple-A twice, and was non-tendered after the season. A quick look at this contact profile highlights the problem:

Read the rest of this entry »

Forrest Whitley has slid precipitously in the rankings. A helium-filled No. 4 in 2019, the 23-year-old right-hander fell to No. 15 on last year’s FanGraphs Top 100 Prospects list, and has now slid out of the top 100 altogether. When Eric Longenhagen released our 2021 list on Wednesday, Whitley — “as enigmatic as any pitcher in the minors” — was on the outside looking in, coming in at an after-the-fact No. 106 as a 50 FV prospect.

He’s hell-bent on proving any, and all, doubters wrong. Following an offseason where he worked diligently to fine-tune both his physique and his repertoire, Whitley is in camp with the Houston Astros looking to show that the earlier hype wasn’t misplaced. A first-round pick in the 2016 draft, he’s now aiming to emerge as a front-line starter at baseball’s highest level.

———

David Laurila: Let’s start with your height and weight. Where are you at right now?

Forrest Whitley: “I’m 6-foot-6 and 205 pounds.

Laurila: That’s low for you, right?

Whitley: “Compared to where I was the last couple years, it would be considered low. But I’ve experimented a lot, in many different ways. This is where I feel the most comfortable.”

Laurila: By “most comfortable,” I assume you’re referring primarily to being able to repeat your mechanics.

Whitley: “Yes. I feel like I have a lot more stability and body control, which plays a premium at my size. It’s definitely been a grind to get consistent mechanics down, and I think a lot of that had to do with strengthening all parts of my body, because there’s a lot more surface area to me than most guys. Hammering down all those areas was pretty much my main focus this offseason — getting everything as stable as possible. From the many bullpens I threw before I came here [to spring training] it seems to be paying off.” Read the rest of this entry »

Fernando Tatis Jr. has agreed to the longest contract in baseball history, and one of the most lucrative — and yet looking at the jaw-dropping ZiPS projection for his career, his 14-year, $340 million deal might be underselling him. At the very least, Tatis’ contract and his production to date cast him as a generational talent, and his forecast suggests he’ll wind up ranking among history’s great shortstops. While it’s hard to believe that a player with only two partial years in the majors has a leg up on a berth in the Hall of Fame, the statistical history of players who’ve done what he’s done at such a young age suggests that it’s true: Tatis is already soaring towards Cooperstown.

Or if you prefer, stylishly shimmying there:

Hip-notized by @tatis_jr ? pic.twitter.com/25eBSeokFn

— San Diego Padres (@Padres) August 8, 2020

The skeptic in all of us may be saying, “Whoa, let’s pump the brakes on this kind of talk,” but it’s the Padres who have placed the bet on a Mookie Betts-like impact over the course of well over a decade, and looking at the comparisons and the company he’s keeping once we crunch the numbers, it’s tough to disagree. Nothing is guaranteed, least of all a player’s spot in the Hall of Fame a quarter-century from now, but the odds of him fulfilling that promise are substantial.

Regarding the Hall, consider first the baselines set by a player arriving in the majors at an early age. Repeating a study I did in relation to Ronald Acuña Jr. in 2018 (only this time catching a glitch in my accounting relating to 19th century players), I used Baseball-Reference’s Stathead to track the rates at which position players who made at least one plate appearance in their age-18 through 21 seasons reached the Hall:

Read the rest of this entry »

While it’s not quite the cakewalk that the NL Central projects to be in 2021, the AL West is up for grabs this year. The Astros project as comfortable favorites, but that’s just one team. The Rangers and Mariners aren’t likely to be competitive. That leaves room for the A’s and Angels to take a crack at the division. On Thursday, Oakland took a stab at it, signing Trevor Rosenthal to a one-year, $11 million deal, as Jon Heyman first reported.

If you glanced at our list of the top 50 free agents, you won’t find this deal particularly odd. Projector emeritus Craig Edwards saw a two-year, $16 million deal for Rosenthal, while crowdsourcing came in at two years and $13 million. One year and $11 million is a better deal than those, but not by a huge amount, and Jeff Passan reported that he turned down multi-year deals in that range. Rosenthal’s contract includes deferrals — he’s due $3 million in 2021, $3 million in 2022, and $5 million in 2023. That’s essentially $11 million, though; at a 2% interest rate, it’s the same as $10.75 million in 2021. Don’t focus too much on that — it’s mere window dressing, and the interesting part of the contract is Rosenthal himself.

Rosenthal is hardly a standard free agent, and the fact that he’s signing a perfectly ordinary contract is in itself remarkable. This time last year, he had reported to camp with the Kansas City Royals on a minor league contract. The deal wasn’t for the league minimum — it guaranteed him $2 million if he made the major league roster, with another $2.25 million in incentives. Earnable money is different from a guaranteed contract, however, and if he’d had a bad spring training or tweaked something before camp ended, he’d never see the money.

With the benefit of hindsight, that deal was great for both Rosenthal and the Royals. He appeared in 14 games and struck out 21 opponents, good for a 37.5% strikeout rate that echoed his best years with the Cardinals. Did he walk 12.5% of opposing batters? Sure, but you have to crack a few eggs to make an omelet, and he had been plenty effective in St. Louis even with slightly elevated walk rates. The Royals dealt him to San Diego in exchange for Edward Olivares and Dylan Coleman, two mid-level prospects, and everyone walked away happy.

Wait, hold up. Rosenthal has a career 2.75 FIP (and a 3.46 ERA and 3.32 xFIP, it’s hardly smoke and mirrors). He had a career 2.79 FIP before his solid 2020. He got flipped for two real prospects after 13 innings of relief work, after 233 pitches. Teams seemed to agree that he had value. Why did he have to take a minor league deal to prove himself? Read the rest of this entry »

For the Toronto Blue Jays of 40 years ago —  a young team, an expansion team, a Major League Baseball team in a non-American country — finding an identity, something for fans to cling to beyond regional affinity and a desire for entertainment, was an uphill battle. They played in Exhibition Stadium, a field not made for baseball, pummeled by wind and snow off the lake. They lost, and lost, and lost again, their roster an endlessly rotating door.

After the buzz of novelty wore off, their attendance dwindled, from fourth in the American League to 11th just four years later. The tainted atmosphere of MLB at the time, with collusion and the constant threat of labor stoppages looming large, didn’t help either. The strike-shortened 1981 season ended in a fifth consecutive last-place finish. The most press the Jays got in the stretch run that year was about struggling third baseman and NBA draftee Danny Ainge’s dreams of switching sports. He finished the season, his last as a major leaguer, batting .187; from the stands of the Ex, a fan threw a basketball at him.

The following year, for the first time in history, the Jays climbed out of last place in the division. (They were sixth out of seven.) And then, in 1983, a breakthrough: They put together a winning record. Dave Stieb was great again; Lloyd Moseby and Jesse Barfield broke out. Though they didn’t, in the end, come close to a playoff spot, they were a very competitive 89-73. More fans attended than ever before; suddenly, there was life here. 

It was in September of that year that Tony Fernandez made his debut. He had been signed in 1979, a teenager out of San Pedro de Macoris in the Dominican Republic; he was, still, just 21. He came in as a pinch-runner, and he scored on a wild pitch. That was the beginning.

Read the rest of this entry »