Alderson Broaddus University carries an enrollment of fewer than 1,000 undergraduate students and sits in a town — Philippi, West Virginia — with a population just under 3,000 people. Its baseball team plays in the NCAA’s Division II and has produced just two players who were drafted by MLB teams, neither of whom ever actually played in the big leagues. In fact, Alderson Broaddus had never claimed a single major leaguer before Randy Dobnak was called up by the Twins in 2019. Two years before that, he had been playing in a four-team independent league in Michigan, assuming he’d give up baseball for good at the end of the season. After he got to the minors, he drove for rideshare services to make extra money. Even after his first full season in the Twins’ rotation, the team went out and signed two starting pitchers and bumped him to the bullpen. Dobnak’s baseball career has been non-stop uncertainty.

On Sunday, that finally came to an end, as the 26-year-old righty signed a five-year contract extension worth $9.25 million guaranteed and with a potential value of $29.75 million over eight years, per ESPN’s Jeff Passan. The deal offers Minnesota a good deal of flexibility and grants the pitcher a nice guarantee a couple of years before arbitration would have.

Right-hander Randy Dobnak and the Minnesota Twins are in agreement on a five-year, $9.25 million contract extension with three club options, sources familiar with the deal tell ESPN. The deal can max out at $29.75 million with the options and can grow with escalators.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) March 28, 2021

USA Today’s Bob Nightengale provided more details Monday morning.

The breakdown of pitcher/former Uber driver/Randy Dobnak's 5-year, $9.25M contract with the #Twins:
2021: $700,000
2022: $800,000
2023: $1.5M
2024: $2.25M
2025: $3M
2026: $6M Club option or $1M buyout
2027: $7M club option or $100K buyout
2028: $8.5M club option or $100K buyout

— Bob Nightengale (@BNightengale) March 29, 2021

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Positional versatility has become increasingly important now that teams are carrying 13 or 14 pitchers on their rosters. That leaves benches bereft of depth, meaning that an ability to move around the diamond makes a player especially valuable — if not essential. One-dimensional non-regulars are marginal assets unless they excel in a specific area.

In the opinion of A.J. Hinch, the term “utility player” is anything but a pejorative. Moreover, everyday players who display versatility make a manager’s job easier.

“I don’t want “utility” to be explained as a negative thing,” the Tigers’ skipper told reporters recently. “A utility player has traditionally been defined as a guy who can’t play every day. And that’s not true. Some guys it is, some guys it isn’t. I caution everybody that it’s not a slight.

“When you have an everyday guy that is elite at that position, absolutely, you’re going to leave him at that position,” continued Hinch, who circled back to his Astros days and cited Alex Bregman having played short when Carlos Correa was hurt. “That’s a multiple position for an elite player.”

Hinch’s Detroit team clearly lacks the top-end talent that he had at his disposal during his Houston tenure, which suggests mixing-and-matching might be common in Motown this summer. If spring training is any indication, it might even be the M.O. Hinch has done no shortage of shuffling, and come the regular season, the likes of Jeimer Candelario, Niko Goodrum, Jonathan Schoop, and Harold Castro will be utilized as moving pieces in hopes of optimizing the lineup. Ditto Isaac Paredes, once he’s called up from the alternate site. Read the rest of this entry »

Rick Porcello’s time with the Mets in 2020 began by allowing seven runs in two innings to the Braves. A normal season would have offered him many more starts to help his numbers recover from that performance, but as it was, he took to the mound just 11 more times. So despite giving up two runs or fewer in five of his remaining appearances, his ERA for the season landed at an unsightly 5.64 — the second straight year in which it finished above 5.50.

With that in mind, it isn’t a huge surprise that Porcello, 32, is still unemployed one week before the regular season begins. Throughout his 12-year career, his value rests more on the quantity of his innings than the quality — over 2,000 in total now, and a pre-2020 average of 185 a year. It makes sense that teams would want to be cautious if his skills seem to be deteriorating. I’m not convinced that’s the case. The Porcello of last season bore a lot of resemblance to the Porcello of years before, including the one when he won a Cy Young award. He’s still deserving of a big league job. Let’s find him one.

It’s hard to assess how good or bad Porcello actually was last year. His ERA was the worst of his career, but his 3.33 FIP was his best. At 1.7 WAR, he was just inside of our top 25 pitchers in baseball, tied with Sonny Gray. Mets fans likely thought of him as a disaster, but he actually would have been the most valuable pitcher on 14 different teams.

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Between the fireworks shows put on by 21-year-olds Juan Soto and Fernando Tatis Jr., and the big numbers put up by teammates Freddie Freeman and Marcell Ozuna, Ronald Acuña Jr. didn’t command as much attention as his talents merited last year. A two-week stay on the injured list didn’t help, particularly when it came to posting eye-opening counting stats. Even so, and even in abbreviated form, Acuña turned in his third straight stellar campaign. As he heads into his age-23 season, his place among the game’s elite shouldn’t be ignored.

Acuña entered the 2020 season on a high note, following up his 2018 NL Rookie of the Year campaign with his first as an All-Star. Playing in 156 games in 2019, he hit .280/.365/.518 (126 wRC+), bashed 41 homers and stole a league-high 37 bases in 46 attempts; three more steals, and he would have joined Barry Bonds, Jose Canseco, Alex Rodriguez, and Alfonso Soriano as the only members of the 40–40 club. Back in the Baseball Abstract days, Bill James introduced a simple stat called Power-Speed number, which takes the harmonic mean of a player’s home run and stolen base totals. Acuña’s 2019 season is tied for 16th overall, and sixth among players 25 or under:

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The week before the regular season begins is usually extension season, as teams and players scramble to complete deals before the day-to-day rigors of playing baseball for six straight months get in the way of discussions. While this year hasn’t seen many extensions so far, it hasn’t seen none; on Wednesday, the Astros signed Lance McCullers Jr. to a five-year, $85 million extension, as FOX 26’s Mark Berman first reported.

McCullers would have reached free agency after this year; all five years of his extension would have been free-agent years, which makes comparisons easier. This deal is essentially a pre-agreement to a free-agent contract, with none of that squirrely nonsense of buying out arbitration years or extra team options on the end. Five years and $85 million, simple as that.

How does that rate look next to comparable free agents? For once, I’m stumped. The pandemic-shortened season, and teams’ subsequent financial retrenching, makes using past years as a guidepost a poor idea. Madison Bumgarner, for example, signed a five-year, $85 million deal — the exact terms! — but did so before the world changed. This offseason, no comparable pitchers hit the market; the only pitcher who signed a multi-year deal with an average annual value above $10 million was Trevor Bauer, and that’s not a useful comp here either.

You could, if you were so inclined, use Dan Szymborski’s research from last week that estimated the cost of one WAR in future years. The estimate has wide error bands, because it’s based only on multi-year contracts signed this offseason, but it looks like so:

With that in hand, we next need to estimate how good McCullers will be in the relevant 2022–26 timeframe. Luckily, ZiPS has us covered there as well:

With the projection in tow and a cost per WAR (I added $250,000 per year after the years in the table), we can just do the math. That’s a 9.3 WAR projection overall, and after applying the relevant yearly multipliers, the projections would suggest a $75 million contract. That implies the Astros overpaid, but take a gander at those innings projections. McCullers’ past injury history leads ZiPS to a pessimistic playing time assumption. An extra 15 innings per year would move the deal up to fair value. So would four seasons of 150-inning production and a single missed season. In other words, it comes in pretty close to what we’d expect after accounting for his skill and risk factors.

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The Detroit Tigers have a number of promising young pitchers, as well as a handful of veteran arms who retain upside. The bulk of them will have to thrive if the club hopes to compete in the AL Central anytime soon. But while there’s little doubt that Detroit’s rebuild is moving steadily in the right direction, the franchise’s fortunes will largely be determined by how soon and to what extent the pitching staff blossoms. Now under the watchful eye of Chris Fetter, Tigers pitchers head into the 2021 season with a plethora of potential, but also no shortage of question marks.

Here are conversational snapshots from, and about, six Detroit hurlers.

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Tyler Alexander has the most-varied mix on the Tigers’ staff. The 26-year-old left-hander has five pitches in his arsenal, and last season he threw each of them between 103 and 140 times (per Statcast). His second-most-frequent offering was a slider that yielded middling-at-best results. Despite an improved movement profile and a 31% whiff rate, opposing hitters logged a .333 batting average and a .606 slugging percentage when they put the pitch in play.

I mentioned that lack of success to Alexander, pointing out that he got, on average, nine more inches of drop, and slightly more horizontal, compared to the previous year. Why the lack of results?

“Well, I throw good sliders and I throw bad sliders,” was his reasoned response. “And I would assume the bad ones got hit. You know, I’ve worked a lot on that pitch. I’ve worked really hard on on finding the consistency with it. For instance, I thought I was really good yesterday. The outing before that, I thought it was terrible. It’s a feel pitch for me, and I’m slowly starting to get there. I’ve had issues getting it down in the zone; I’ve had issues getting it backdoor. In every interview I’ve ever had, I’ve said, ‘I’m working on my slider, I’m working on my slider.’ I’m always going to be working on it. Sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad.” Read the rest of this entry »

It may seem a little bit early to start talking about postseason hardware, but what’s the fun of a projection system if you’re not looking at every way to separate the best of the best? In any case, it’s not as interesting an exercise when the season ends, given that we already know what happened (though it’s way more accurate).

Naturally, voting is not going to be a simple ranking of WAR. Each award has 30 different voters, all with differing priorities and philosophical beliefs in the way of excellence. Rather than kidnapping my colleagues and subjecting them to a series of lab tests about voting, our best solution is to use past votes to infer how they’ll vote going forward.

While using a neural network is always tempting, we’re handicapped by the real scarcity of data; 30 votes per award is not a lot to work with. As I’ve worked with the models over the years, the other issue is that there does seem to be a change in how voters are voting, enough to have an effect on who is winning the awards and by how much. I’ve found that chucking out anything before 2000 improves every model and every approach I’ve tried. By and large, we’re not voting on WAR, but it and other analytics have affected the results both directly (more sabermetric-friendly writers joining the BBWAA) and indirectly (influencing existing voters). I could probably make a very accurate model for how I vote, but we’d be treading far too deep into meta territory at that point.

So, what’s new this year? One variable I’ve added to the mix is past award performance — something I wish I had checked in the past, but better later than never. Essentially, players who have received votes recently tend to do slightly better than equally excellent players who have not received votes recently.

Let’s jump right in.

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On Monday, the Blue Jays announced that Kirby Yates had been diagnosed with a strained flexor in his throwing elbow. A day later, that injury turned into something far more serious, as the righty will need Tommy John surgery (the second of his career) to repair a torn ulnar collateral ligament. Signed to a one-year, $5.5 million deal earlier this offseason, it’s likely he’ll never pitch an inning in a Blue Jays jersey.

Elbow issues have derailed a promising late-career upswing for Yates. Between 2018 and ’19, he was arguably the best reliever in baseball, worth a league-leading 5.2 WAR and with 53 saves to his name as the Padres’ closer. But bone chips in his elbow limited him to just 4 1/3 innings in 2020, and his age — he turns 34 in just a few days — combined with the uncertainty surrounding his health likely led to the below-market deal he signed with Toronto. That elbow reportedly sunk a potential deal with the Braves earlier in the offseason, and his physical with the Jays showed more damage than expected, costing him more money.

Yates’ potential ability to anchor the bullpen was enticing enough for Toronto to take the risk that his elbow could hold up for the whole season. Instead, he didn’t last through spring training, and now the Blue Jays have to figure out how to organize the back end of their bullpen. They already had a number of strong options for high-leverage work; the trick will be determining the best way to cover up the gaping hole in the ninth inning.

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Last week, Jay Jaffe wrote about the rumors that the Nationals were considering a contract extension for wünderkind Juan Soto, the team’s first step toward keeping him in town for the majority of his career. Though just 22 years old and four years away from free agency, Soto receiving an extension in the $400 million range would hardly be premature. Projection systems — which by their nature are supposed to be dispassionate and shoot for the middle — see him as having a no-doubt Hall of Fame career.

Yet if you’re a Nationals fan, you have cause to be suspicious that an extension gets done. You’ve seen your super-talented homegrown players leave unceremoniously in free agency as soon as they could, and while Soto has a more favorable outlook than Bryce Harper or Anthony Rendon did, you don’t want to see these negotiations drag out any longer than they have to.

It would be enough if Washington had just one young player’s future to stew upon this spring, but in fact, there are two. As Soto has been fielding questions about a possible extension in spring training, so too has shortstop Trea Turner, who at 27 is much closer to free agency; he’s set to hit the market after the 2022 season. That makes any extension decision that much more urgent. Turner knows it, and he’s been open about wanting to get an agreement done. From the Washington Post’s Barry Svrluga:

“I would love to play here my entire career,” Turner said Tuesday. “I’ve said it in the past. I’ve always liked it here, and don’t think the grass is greener on the other side. … I love it here. I love the atmosphere and the ballclub that [General Manager Mike] Rizzo and the coaching staff has put together every single year. We’ll see. I think those talks have happened in the past, and hopefully they’ll happen in the future.”

The Nationals’ position is a tricky one. Turner’s free agency would come two years before Soto’s, but the latter’s contract may still be the most important one, as it will be the larger of the two and must fit within Washington’s payroll. But retaining Turner in 2023 and beyond won’t come cheap. One of the top prospects in baseball when he debuted in 2015, he has slowly but surely started living up to that billing, turning into one of the league’s best shortstops over the last three seasons.

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I asked Baltimore Orioles hitting coach Don Long a question on Monday morning, and he responded with a lengthy answer. I wanted to know, relative to years past, how much more frequently players are approaching him with ideas of changing their swing, and what he tends to tell them when that happens.

“Honestly, I’m not a believer in changing swings,” the veteran hitting instructor responded. “I operate under the thought that [for] every hitter, their best swing, they already possess. The thing that gets in the way of them being able to access their best swing, consistently, usually has to do with their thinking, their timing, their position, or their ability to be really good with their eyes.

“You’ve probably heard the old Michelangelo story, right? Supposedly, he carved this statue of David out of this block of granite, and they said, ‘How did you carve such a beautiful statue out of a block of stone?’ He said, ‘I simply chipped away at the stone until the statue revealed itself.’ That’s how I look at a hitter’s swing. You already possess your best swing — it’s already there — so let’s not spend time chasing a good swing, or chasing something that you already know how to do. Let’s chip away at the thing that’s getting in the way of that. And for most guys, the thing that interrupts the physical part of their game is the mental part of the game.

“I can give you an example. I had a guy come to me a couple days ago in the cage with an exasperated, ‘Man, what’s going on? I don’t know what to do.’ I said, ‘Let me ask you a question.’ I picked a ball up out of the basket and said, ‘What’s this pitch going to be?’ He looked at me and said, ‘I don’t know.’ I said, ‘Yeah, you do.’ Read the rest of this entry »