Between Jose Quintana, J.A. Happ, and Joe Biden, quite a few old lefties have found new homes lately. The news on Happ came relatively late yesterday, so if you missed the details, he’s now a Twin after agreeing to a one-year deal worth $8 million, per ESPN’s Jeff Passan and MLB Network’s Jon Heyman.

The departures of Rich Hill and Jake Odorizzi left a hole in the back of Minnesota’s rotation. Happ’s a perfectly capable fill-in, though the move does raise questions about whether the Twins are done enhancing their rotation, and whether the team is good enough to retain the AL Central crown as currently constructed.

In nine starts for the Yankees last season, Happ notched a 3.47 ERA and a 4.57 FIP. That second figure was a significant improvement over his 2019 production, as home runs were a major bugaboo for him back when we last had fans: Yankee Stadium’s cozy confines and a drag-free baseball led to a 1.90 HR/9 ratio and a FIP well over five. While his homer rate dropped a tad below 1.50 per nine in 2020, it was the .220 average batters hit on balls in play that buffed up his ERA.

In a way this marks a return to form. More than a decade ago, Happ first made his name in Philadelphia as a starter who significantly outpitched his peripherals; the gap between his ERA and FIP in Philly was so wide that when the Astros acquired him in a trade for Roy Oswalt, all we had to say about him was “while he has some value as a league minimum guy for the next couple of years, he can be replaced.”

It wasn’t exactly a straight line between then and now, but Happ again looks like a durable innings eater who can provide something approximating league average production out of the rotation. He’s 38 now, but hasn’t shown too many signs of aging. His velocity has dipped a tick over the last two years, though he’s within half a mile per hour of the gas he had in his Blue Jays days. He’s barely missed a start over the last three years and just posted the highest swing-and-miss rate of his career. Steamer, ZiPS, and intuition all have him pegged as the fourthiest No. 4 starter who ever slotted into the fourth spot of a rotation. Read the rest of this entry »

The Blue Jays made the biggest free-agent move of the offseason late Tuesday night by signing George Springer. By the next morning, they looked like they were on the verge of adding his friend and former teammate Michael Brantley too. But reports early Wednesday that he had put pen to paper turned out to be a bit too aggressive, and while he did end up signing by day’s end, it wasn’t with Toronto. Instead, Brantley is returning to Houston on a two-year, $32 million contract, as first reported by FOX 26’s Mark Berman.

While Brantley would have helped Toronto’s offense, he’s a bit of a better fit for the Astros. After signing Springer, the Jays already had four major league-quality outfielders in him, Lourdes Gurriel Jr., Teoscar Hernández, and Randal Grichuk. Adding Brantley would have meant putting him at designated hitter every day (or trading a good player away), which would hurt roster flexibility if Vladimir Guerrero Jr. can’t handle third base and also taken playing time away from Rowdy Tellez. Brantley wasn’t a horrible fit, but given the options still available and potential needs in the infield and the rotation, the Blue Jays didn’t have to have him.

Where he plays is less of an issue for the Astros, who already have a regular DH as long as Yordan Alvarez is healthy. What they really needed was a leftfielder, and Brantley was far and away the best option on a market full of replacement-level options. He was a DH more than he was on the field last season, but that was more out of convenience than necessity due to an early-season quad injury that cost him a dozen or so games, the emergence of Kyle Tucker, and the presence of veteran Josh Reddick. Since 2017, Brantley has graded out as average by UZR and well above-average by DRS, and his -8 Outs Above Average at Statcast make him a roughly average corner outfielder. His defensive skills will decline as he ages, and his speed is gone, but he should still be able to handle playing in the field. And he’s been relatively healthy the last three years after suffering through multiple injuries earlier in his career.

Read the rest of this entry »

Another day gone by, another former Cubs starting pitcher joining another team. Three weeks ago, Chicago shipped away its ace by trading Yu Darvish to the Padres for Zach Davies and a quartet of prospects. On Monday, it watched two more rotation members find new employers in free agency, as Jon Lester signed with Washington and Tyler Chatwood inked a deal with Toronto. One day later, a fourth veteran starter is officially out the door, with left-hander José Quintana signing a one-year, $8-million contract to join the Angels, as reported by The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal.

Quintana, who will turn 32 next week, pitched in just four games in 2020 while dealing with thumb and lat injuries. That’s hardly the norm, though: The thumb injury was a freak laceration suffered while he was washing dishes and resulted in the first IL stint of his nine-year career. Otherwise, he’s been the portrait of durability, averaging more than 192 innings per season from 2013 to ’19, with his lowest total being 171 in that last year. That durability would be welcome in Los Angeles, which has been notoriously unable to keep pitchers on the mound: Since 2017, just two Angels starters have eclipsed 150 innings in a season.

Being able to pile up innings is a valuable trait by itself, but there is more to Quintana than quantity. In the middle of the last decade, he was sneakily one of the best pitchers in baseball, with his 18.2 WAR from 2014 to ’17 ranking sixth in that span. It took a bit for people to take notice of him, though, because the White Sox teams he pitched for didn’t win many games, and because he was overshadowed in his own rotation by Chris Sale. Since writers and analysts love to talk about which guys they supposedly aren’t talking about enough, Quintana eventually became a staple of columns decrying his underappreciation. By the time the White Sox traded him to the Cubs in 2017, Jeff Sullivan theorized in this space that, to whatever degree Quintana actually was underrated, he would cease to be if he excelled while pitching for a pennant chaser.

Not much has gone according to plan for the Cubs since then, though. The team’s young core never made it back to the World Series, and the general manager, skipper, and a lengthy list of key players have left the organization. The prospects they traded to sustain a contender during those years, meanwhile, have blossomed in their new organizations, including Eloy Jiménez and, to a lesser extent, Dylan Cease, two of the players the Cubs exchanged for Quintana. Jiménez is already terrorizing pitchers in the majors, and Cease still has plenty of potential in his arm. It might have been easier for Cubs fans if Quintana were simultaneously earning Cy Young votes and making All-Star teams, but he did neither of those things, and by falling short of those lofty expectations, his acquisition gets labeled as a historically bad move for the franchise.

The reality, though, is that Quintana was still pretty good during his time on the North Side. He was the Cubs’ best pitcher over the remainder of the 2017 season, and though the following year was his worst as a major leaguer, he still managed a 4.03 ERA, 4.43 FIP and 1.7 WAR. His 2019 season looked more like his White Sox days, as he posted 3.5 WAR, a 3.80 FIP and a 4.68 ERA, the latter of which was hurt by his left-on-base rate being nearly nine points lower than his career average. Last year was a lost one for Quintana, but as disappointed as some Cubs fans may be in his tenure with the club, his numbers haven’t deteriorated over the years the way some would think.

Quintana was regarded as a model of consistency with the White Sox, and those days aren’t over. He still succeeds with the same general mix of pitches he always has, and his velocity is steady.

Yet Quintana’s contract with the Angels suggests skepticism within the industry. He got the same deal as Robbie Ray, who is coming off a 6.50 FIP in 51.2 innings last year, and fell a few million short of Corey Kluber, Drew Smyly and Mike Minor. Those pitchers arguably possess greater upside, but it’s still surprising to see his durability and consistency not get him a larger reward. In his Top 50 Free Agents list, Craig Edwards suggested one year and $11 million for him, while the crowdsource median handed him two years and $20 million. The vast majority of free agents have been able to beat their projections this winter, some by a lot, but Quintana fell well short.

The beneficiary of that is Los Angeles, which is perpetually in search of quality pitching help. Angels starters had the second-worst ERA in baseball in 2020 after missing out on the Gerrit Cole sweepstakes last winter and getting only five outs out of Shohei Ohtani before he was shut down for the year. Dylan Bundy proved to be a good pick-up from Baltimore, and Griffin Canning and Andrew Heaney put together solid seasons, but others like Julio Teheran and Patrick Sandoval struggled badly at the back of the rotation.

Quintana will slot in somewhere in the middle of what manager Joe Maddon says will be a six-man rotation in 2021, and his performance could hinge on which direction the Angels’ defense tilts behind him. In 2019, Statcast’s Outs Above Average metric ranked Los Angeles fifth in baseball. Last year, it was dead last. The infield combination of David Fletcher at second, Anthony Rendon at third and newly-acquired José Iglesias at shortstop has the potential to be very good, but the outfield is less certain. Justin Upton is on old legs, Mike Trout’s defense can fluctuate wildly from year to year, and neither Jo Adell nor Jared Walsh look like good fielders in right. Quintana can be quite successful in Los Angeles, but his style of pitching will put some extra responsibility for his numbers in the hands of an uneven group of fielders.

Even if the Angels can get vintage Quintana, they could still have trouble reaching the playoffs if he’s the last starter they add this winter. Trevor Bauer is the most obvious fit here, since he’s far and away the best pitcher available in free agency. But if he’s outside their intended price range, the team could still try to use the trade market to add to the top of its rotation, the way it did with Bundy a year ago. I think Quintana is still better than he’s getting credit for, and better than this contract would indicate. But like in Chicago, the problems in Los Angeles are too big for him to solve by himself.

The last time he was a free agent — and one of the top free agents in the game, at that — Jon Lester struck gold, and so did the Cubs, who won their first championship in 108 years in the second season of his six-year, $155 million deal. This time around, the stakes are much lower. On the heels of a disappointing 2020 campaign, Lester didn’t even crack our Top 50 Free Agents list, but per ESPN’s Jeff Passan, he’s leaving Chicago to take a one-year, $5 million contract with the Nationals.

The exact terms and structure of the deal have not been officially announced, though Passan also reported that it includes a mutual option for 2022 for an as-yet-undisclosed amount. USA Today’s Bob Nightengale reported that the deal actually pays Lester just $2 million in salary for 2021, with $3 million in deferred money due in 2023. The Cubs have already paid Lester a $10 million buyout on his $25 million mutual option for 2021.

Lester, who turned 37 on January 7, is a nine-time postseason participant, six-time All-Star and three-time World Series champion with 193 career wins and 2,397 career strikeouts, but he’s coming off the worst of his 15 major league seasons. Though he went to the post 12 times and ran his streak to making an essentially full complement of starts for the 13th straight year, he was cuffed for a 5.16 ERA (116 ERA-) and a 5.15 FIP while striking out just 15.8% of the hitters he faced, the third-lowest mark of any qualifying pitcher. His drop of nearly six percentage points relative to 2019 was the fourth-largest among the 22 pitchers who qualified for the ERA title in both seasons:

Read the rest of this entry »

A day after signing Tyler Chatwood to solidify their options out of the bullpen, the Toronto Blue Jays made a much bigger splash by signing Kirby Yates to a one-year contract worth $5.5 million and an additional $4.5 million in potential performance bonuses. Yates’ addition may have been overshadowed just a few hours later by the massive contract Toronto signed with George Springer, but adding Yates to the bullpen has the potential to make a significant upgrade to a team weakness. Between 2018 and 2019, Yates was the best reliever in baseball. He posted a 1.67 ERA backed by a 1.93 FIP. He was the only qualified reliever during that two-year span to have a FIP below two, he accumulated a league-leading 5.2 wins, and racked up 53 saves as the Padres’ closer.

Unfortunately, bone chips in his right elbow limited him to six appearances and just 4 1/3 innings in 2020. The uncertainty surrounding his health paired with his advanced age — he’ll turn 34 in March — explains why his deal seems like a bargain for a pitcher who was just recently one of the game’s premiere relievers. His $5.5 million guarantee falls short of the $8 million average annual value our readers estimated as part of our top 50 free agent exercise, but it’s right around what Craig Edwards thought, though with one less year on the deal. Still, after his outstanding 2019, this one-year pact has to be seen as a bit of a let down for Yates.

Yates was positive after undergoing his arthroscopic surgery. “Everything went really smooth. Everything was very positive,” he told the media in August. It’s likely that Yates’ elbow issues are behind him now that he’s recovered from his surgery. Regaining the level of success he enjoyed during that magnificent two-year span may prove more difficult, but he still has the pitches to be an outstanding reliever for the Jays. Read the rest of this entry »

The thing about walking 95 batters in 103.2 innings is that it sticks with you. That’s what Tyler Chatwood did in 2018, the first season of his three-year, $38 million contract with the Cubs. While never known for his command, he’d never approached that degree of wildness before that season, and he hasn’t since. In fact, he’s often been pretty good: Over his last two seasons, his ERA- and FIP- both stand at 92, and there are signs that he is getting better. But two years isn’t a lot of time to distance yourself from walking nearly a batter an inning for a full season, especially since Chatwood has also dealt with injury woes. The increased questions about his control and health meant that his second foray into free agency couldn’t get him a tenth of the guaranteed money his first one did, as he signed a one-year, $3 million deal with the Blue Jays on Monday. The actual talent in his arm, however, could prove to be worth much more.

Chatwood’s contract includes incentives that could push its total value to $5.5 million, though the specifics of those incentives haven’t been reported. An educated guess would assume they are based on his innings. As for his role, Sportsnet’s Shi Davidi reported that Chatwood is expected to be used out of the bullpen, as Toronto already has a starting rotation in place consisting of Hyun Jin Ryu, Robbie Ray, Tanner Roark, Ross Stripling and Nate Pearson. Because he’s been a starter for most of his career, Chatwood would probably be first in line to replace one of those five if injuries or ineffectiveness sideline them. If the incentives are innings-based, that essentially turns this into two separate deals — $3 million if he is mostly a reliever, and almost double that if he’s mostly a starter.

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The Angels added some catching depth over the weekend, signing Kurt Suzuki to a one-year contract worth $1.5 million. This will be the 15th season of Suzuki’s career, his longevity the result of an unusually late offensive peak in his mid-30s that has largely compensated for his defensive shortcomings. In 129 plate appearances in 2020, Suzuki hit .270/.349/.396, a respectable triple-slash but also amounting to his lowest wRC+ since 2016, his final season with the Twins.

As I showed through projections last week, the Angels look like they’re in that zone where each additional win or loss has a larger-than-average effect on a team’s playoff destiny. Add in the general desire for a team with a $180 million luxury tax number — more than half from just four players — not to have that payroll go to waste, and you have a formula for being aggressive in adding plausible Plans B to the roster. And really, $1.5 million is just about peanuts, no matter how MLB will suggest otherwise.

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On (day of week), the Padres acquired (talented pitcher) from the (spendthrift team) in exchange for a seeming pittance, including (name of decent but not overwhelming Padres prospect). Now, surely, AJ Preller is done. Or is he?

Oh, hello there! Sorry about that. That’s actually the Mad Libs-esque form that I normally use to cover Padres pitching transactions. Today, I’ve got some details for you. It’s Joe Musgrove heading to the best weather in baseball, Hudson Head and Endy Rodriguez highlighting the group headed out (in a three-team trade involving the Pirates and Mets), and Andrew Friedman gently whispering words of affirmation to himself: “We’ll still win the long game, we’ll still win the long game, the Dodger Way can’t be beat.”

Musgrove isn’t an ace, at least not in the way that new teammates Yu Darvish and Blake Snell are. He would have been Pittsburgh’s number one starter this year, which isn’t the same thing. In San Diego, he’ll slot in as the Padres fourth starter. Let the words of Anakin Skywalker speak for the rest of the NL West: “This is outrageous! It’s unfair!”

Seriously, take a look at our Depth Charts predictions for the Padre rotation:

There simply aren’t other teams throwing out pitchers like Musgrove after a whopping three other pitchers. We think that the Padres, Yankees, and Mets will accrue roughly equal value from starting pitchers next year, but the New York teams are doing it with Gerrit Cole and Jacob deGrom, the consensus best two pitchers in the game. Yu Darvish is nice, but not that nice. The Padres are building their own Death Star rotation, and they’re doing it with volume. Read the rest of this entry »

Taijuan Walker came back strong in 2020. Coming off two seasons lost to Tommy John surgery, the 28-year-old right-hander put up a 2.70 ERA over 51-and-a-third innings. Six of his 11 starts came with the Toronto Blue Jays, who acquired Walker from the Seattle Mariners at the tail end of August in exchange for Alberto Rodriguez.

A return to health wasn’t the only thing that buoyed Walker’s rebound. Like many modern-day hurlers, the 43rd-overall pick in the 2010 draft has become an adherent of analytics and data-driven pitch-design. Currently a free agent, Walker is looking to move forward with a team that embraces those very things.

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David Laurila: What is your background with analytics and pitch design?

Taijuan Walker: “I went to Driveline about a week after the 2019 season ended. I spent a few days there and got assessed — all of the numbers, threw a bullpen — and it was nice to see where I was at with my fastball spin rate, and more. We talked about the numbers, and how to use those numbers to know what I’m looking for.

“That was part of the reason I signed with the Mariners [in February]; they had a lot of that same technology. Woody [Pete Woodworth], the pitching coach there, is smart, and really good.”

Laurila: I assume you’d been exposed to analytics previously?

Walker: “Yes, but I had a chance to really learn the numbers, whereas before it was more like, ‘Hey, these are your numbers,’ but never really having them explained to me. It was never, ‘This is what they mean, and this is how to make [a pitch] better.’”

Laurila: How are you going about making information actionable? Read the rest of this entry »

The Red Sox didn’t have much to write home about in 2020, skidding to a 24–36 record and a fifth-place finish in the AL East. Though they have yet to make a major splash thus far this winter, they did make a move on Saturday, re-signing southpaw Martín Pérez to a one-year deal that constitutes a pay cut and opens questions about a rotation that was the majors’ worst in 2020.

Pérez, who turns 30 on April 4, joined the Red Sox after an uneven 2019 spent with the Twins, during which he was very good in the first half and nearly useless in the second. He was the only Boston pitcher to make more than nine starts last season, and, well, the results weren’t stellar, as he once again faded late in the year. He did start 12 times, tied for fifth in the majors, and his 4.50 ERA in 62 innings was actually a bit better than league average (97 ERA-) despite a 5.58 ERA over his final six starts. His 4.88 FIP, though, was a significant step down from league average (111 FIP-); his 17.6% strikeout rate was only a bit off his career-high 18.6% in 2019, but his 10.7% walk rate was a career worst. All told, his season was worth 0.4 WAR, which prorates to about 1.0 over a full campaign. Pérez had been worth more in five of his previous seven seasons in Texas and Minnesota, so there’s no mistaking this for being the top of his game.

What was interesting about Pérez’s performance — and I admit I may be stretching the definition of “interesting” — was that he posted the lowest groundball rate of his career. His 38.5% rate was 12 points below his previous career mark and 9.5 below  his 2019 mark; eyeballing our season stat grid, I found only half a dozen bigger drops over the past decade, though 62 innings doesn’t tell us as much as a full-season workload. Anyway, Fenway Park isn’t a great place to start serving up fly balls, but Pérez’s 1.16 homers per nine was his lowest mark since 2017, and he had no real difference between home and road splits, which may tell you a bit about the East Coast ballparks in which he toiled.

Since Pérez is going back to Fenway, the fly balls do rate as a concern, but his Statcast numbers do show that he’s done a good job of limiting hard contact since ditching his slider in favor of his cutter in 2019. In 2020, his 29.2% hard-hit rate ranked in the majors’ 90th percentile, and his average exit velocity of 86.3 mph was in the 85th percentile, versus 96th for the former and 93rd for the latter the year before. Before that, he’d never been better than middling in either category, and sometimes bad enough to slip into the bottom quartile.

Pérez threw the cutter 30.8% of the time in 2019 and 32% in ’20, and he’s gotten good results with the pitch. When batters have made contact with his cutter in that span, they’ve produced the majors’ second-lowest exit velocity and xwOBA:

While Pérez got fewer grounders via the cutter in 2020 (34%) than 2019 (44%), that alone doesn’t compensate for his shifting profile. He also dialed back his sinker usage from 24.8% to 17.7% and compensated with his curve and changeup. That cost him some grounders, and he also got fewer grounders this past year via his four-seam fastball — a drop from 40% to 19% — while doing a much better job of keeping those pitches out of the center of the strike zone:

Thanks to the better location, batters went from hitting .370 and slugging .740 when they connected with Pérez’s four-seamer in 2019 to .233 and .533 in ’20, respectively — and he did that despite the average velocity on that pitch dropping from 94.2 mph to 92.2.

Still, it was an unremarkable season all told for Pérez, and effectively, he’s taking a small pay cut after making $6 million in 2020 and then accepting a $500,000 buyout after having his $6.85 million club option declined. He’ll get a $4.5 million base salary for 2021, with additional boosts of $100,000 for passing the 130-, 140-, 150-, 160-, and 170-inning thresholds. Those same thresholds also add $100,000 apiece to his $6 million club option for 2021, while reaching 180 innings adds another $250,000, meaning that he could max out with a $6.75 million option.

While Pérez is a solid choice to provide stability at the back of a rotation, the real question is how much closer to the front of the Red Sox rotation he’ll be in 2021. Between the departure of Rick Porcello via free agency, the inclusion of David Price in the Mookie Betts trade, and the subsequent losses of Chris Sale to Tommy John surgery and Eduardo Rodriguez to COVID-19-related myocarditis, the Sox had just one rotation holdover from 2019 to ’20: Nathan Eovaldi, who was limited to nine starts by a right calf strain. As a result, the team was forced to call upon the likes of rookies Tanner Houck and Chris Mazza, veterans Colten Brewer, Zack Godley, Nick Pivetta, and Ryan Weber, and assorted openers to round out their starting five. The results were dismal: The unit’s 5.34 ERA ranked 25th in the majors; its 5.50 ERA 29th; and its 0.4 WAR dead last.

The plan is to have Eovaldi — who hasn’t made more than 21 starts in a season since 2015 — and Rodriguez in the rotation to start 2021. Sale, who went under the knife last March, will hopefully be back by midseason, as the team is taking a conservative approach with his rehab. The Sox are still in the market for a mid-rotation upgrade, with the Boston Globe’s Alex Speier listing names such as Rich Hill, Jake Odorizzi, James Paxton, José Quintana, and Masahiro Tanaka among the potential targets. Unless they land one of them, then Houck, Pivetta, and the recently signed Matt Andriese will be in the mix to fill the other two spots at the start of the season. Prospects Bryan Mata and Connor Seabold, who have 18 starts between them at Double-A and nothing higher than that yet, could be in play for later in the year. Most of those pitchers may be better fits in the bullpen than the rotation, but if the Red Sox aren’t pushing to compete, now is the time to find out what they’ve got. Meanwhile, chief baseball officer Chaim Bloom is reportedly considering the possibility of a six-man rotation given the increased workloads his starters will face. Besides Sale and Rodriguez, none of the other pitchers currently on the roster threw more than 135 innings in 2019.

All of which is to say that amid so many question marks, Pérez brings the Red Sox a bit of certainty if not a great deal of upside. He’ll eat innings in what isn’t likely to be the most memorable Red Sox season of the millennium. If he’s good enough, he might pitch himself onto a contending club down the stretch.