Taijuan Walker is coming off a strong 2020 season that followed a pair of lost seasons. The 28-year-old free agent fashioned a 2.70 ERA in 11 starts — five with the Seattle Mariners and six with the Toronto Blue Jays — after tossing just 14 innings in 2018-2019. We’ll hear from Walker on his return from Tommy John surgery and shoulder woes, as well as his pitch-design efforts, in the near future. Today we’ll touch on some of his career highlights. Earlier this week I asked the 2010 first-rounder for a ranking of his top performances to date.

“Numbers-wise it wasn’t my best, but I pitched a must-win game in Toronto,” recalled Walker, who was with the Mariners at the time. “This was [September 24, 2014] and while we didn’t end up winning, I feel like my fastball was the best it’s ever been. My breaking ball and my changeup probably were as well. We ended up losing 1-0, but stuff-wise I felt it was my best game.”

Out-dueled by Mark Buehrle in a contest that flew by in a crisp 1:59, Walker went eight innings and allowed four hits, one walk, and the game’s lone run. Six Blue Jays went down by way of the K.

Walker went on to cite his “two best games numbers-wise,” each of which was an 11-strikeout effort in a Mariners win. On July 31, 2015, he allowed just one hit — a solo home run by Minnesota’s Miguel Sanó — and a single free pass. On September 13, 2016, he threw a three-hit, no-walk, shutout against the Angels. Read the rest of this entry »

Last month, we at FanGraphs put out a call for broadcaster ratings. The votes are now in. Starting yesterday and continuing today, we are releasing a compilation of those rankings, as well as selected commentary from each team’s responses. A similar survey of radio broadcasts will follow early next year, with a final summation at some point after that.

As a refresher, our survey asked for scores on four axes. If you’d like a thorough explanation of them, as well as a listing of each team’s broadcast groups, you can read our articles for the East, Central, and West divisions. I’ll also recap them briefly here before starting off with the bottom third of the league.

The “Analysis” score covers the frequency and quality of a broadcast team’s discussion of baseball. This isn’t limited to statistical analysis, and many of the booths that scored best excelled at explaining pitching mechanics. This score represents how much viewers feel they learn *about baseball* by watching.

“Charisma” covers the amount of enjoyment voters derive from listening to the announcers fill space, which takes on many forms. The booths that scored best on charisma varied wildly, from former players recounting stories of their glory days to unintentional comedy and playful banter between long-term broadcast partners.

“Coherence” focuses on play-by-play, but it also covers how well broadcasters stay in tune with the game. The most coherent broadcasts strike a balance between telling stories and informing viewers of the current state of the game. That’s a tough balance to strike, and many broadcasts that scored well on charisma did worse in terms of coherence. Read the rest of this entry »

When an organization has a potential glut of players who play the same position, it’s usually more of a nuisance than a serious problem. Having more major league-caliber players than your roster can hold is never a bad thing, and the issue can often be solved by sliding players down the defensive spectrum. It can be inconvenient to shift a middle infielder into an outfield corner or a corner outfielder to first base, but it’s worth doing if the bats are worth it.

It gets trickier, though, if the overcrowded area happens to be behind the plate. Lifetime catchers rarely possess the athleticism necessary to move to another up-the-middle position and usually can’t hit enough to clear the offensive bar required at a corner spot. It’s incredibly difficult to find sustained playing time for more than two catchers over the course of a season, though because of the scarcity of talented catchers around the majors, it’s rare that a team needs to worry about that.

The Blue Jays are facing exactly that predicament. If you look at our Depth Charts, you’ll find them ranked fourth in the majors in projected catcher WAR for next season, which could come as a surprise to a lot of baseball fans, since none of their backstops are household names. But three of them — Danny Jansen, Alejandro Kirk and Reese McGuire — rank inside the top 30 catchers in baseball according to the 2021 ZiPS projections. What’s more, all three of those catchers are at similar stages in their development: Each is young and has little left to prove in the minors but has yet to break out in the big leagues. All that’s left to learn is how they handle the majors, which creates the challenge for Toronto of deciding just how best to divvy up opportunities between the three. Read the rest of this entry »

What strikes me most about Howie Kendrick’s career is how close we came to missing it entirely. The line drives, the slick grin, the home run that sealed the 2019 World Series and the epic celebration with Adam Eaton that followed: Were it not for a dutiful scout in the right place at the right time, we’d have missed it all.

As you’ve probably heard by now, Kendrick announced his retirement Monday afternoon. The 37-year-old is just a year removed from arguably the best season of his career, but he slumped badly in 2020 and suffered yet another hamstring injury in September. We can’t say for sure whether those two factors weighed on his mind when he decided to hang them up. But what we do know is that while he’s not going to have a plaque in Cooperstown, Kendrick was one of the best second baseman of his time. He retires with a ring, 30 WAR, and a starting spot on the “what do you mean that guy only played in one All-Star Game?” team.

Kendrick was born in Jacksonville and grew up in nearby Callahan. In high school, he was a good but undistinguished shortstop who graduated with no professional prospects. He was short back then, just 5-foot-7 at the time, and he didn’t even play summer ball. Nobody recruited him, and he actually got cut from a few junior college teams before landing at St. John’s River Community College.

The program at St. John’s has flourished in recent seasons, but when Kendrick made the team at the turn of the century it was an obscure baseball outpost with no recent history of producing talent. Tom Kotchman, an Angels scout in Florida then and the kind of baseball lifer who sneaks into these sorts of stories all the time, only saw him play by chance, thanks to a tip from another coach in the region. St. John’s wasn’t exactly a regular pit stop for him: He once quipped that “the last guy drafted out of that school went to Vietnam,” and while that isn’t true, you get the point he’s making.

Still, it didn’t take long for Kotchman to realize that Kendrick’s bat was special. He spent the spring hoping nobody else would stumble onto his sleeper, and when none did, his reports glowed brightly enough for the Angels to draft him in the 10th round. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2021 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Earlier in this series, I profiled 2021 Hall of Fame candidates Tim Hudson and Barry Zito, who together made up two-thirds of the “Big Three” starters who helped the Moneyball-era A’s make four straight postseason appearances from 2000-03 despite their shoestring budgets. Inevitably, the economic realities of playing in Oakland forced general manager Billy Beane to trade away Hudson and Mark Mulder, the third member of the Big Three, as they grew more expensive, and to let Zito depart via free agency.

In doing so, Beane was able to replenish his roster, keeping the A’s competitive for a few more years before heading into rebuilding, and then repeating the cycle. The two players in this installment of my One-and-Done series were part of that endless process. Dan Haren was one of three players acquired from the Cardinals in exchange for Mulder in December 2004, and a key starter on the AL West-winning A’s in ’06. Nick Swisher, the team’s 2002 top first-round pick — compensation for losing center fielder Johnny Damon to free agency — was the starting left fielder on that ’06 squad. Both players were subsequently traded away in the winter of 2007-08, with two players acquired from the Diamondbacks in exchange for Haren, namely lefty Brett Anderson and first baseman Chris Carter, contributing to their 2012 AL West champions, and one player acquired from the White Sox for Swisher, namely lefty Gio González, traded again to net catcher Derek Norris and left-hander Tommy Milone, contributors to the team’s 2012-14 run. And the cycle continued… Read the rest of this entry »

Last month, we at FanGraphs put out a call for broadcaster ratings. The votes are now all in, and over the following days, we’ll be releasing a compilation of those rankings, as well as selected commentary from each team’s responses. A similar survey of radio broadcasts will follow early next year, and a final summation at some point after that.

As a refresher, our survey asked for scores in four areas. If you’d like a thorough explanation of them, you can read the introductory article, but I’ll also recap them briefly here before starting off with the bottom third of the league.

The “Analysis” score covers the frequency and quality of a broadcast team’s discussion of baseball. This isn’t limited to statistical analysis, and many of the booths that scored best excelled at explaining pitching mechanics. This score represents how much viewers feel they learn about baseball by watching.

“Charisma” covers the amount of enjoyment voters derive from listening to the announcers fill space, which takes on many forms. The booths that scored best on charisma varied wildly, from former players recounting stories of their glory days to unintentional comedy and playful banter between long-term broadcast partners. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2021 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2014 election at SI.com, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Jeff Kent took a long time to find a home. Drafted by the Blue Jays in 1989, he passed through the hands of three teams who didn’t quite realize the value of what they had. Not until a trade to the Giants in November 1996 — prior to his age-29 season — did he really settle in. Once he did, he established himself as a standout complement to Barry Bonds, helping the Giants become perennial contenders and spending more than a decade as a middle-of-the-lineup force.

Despite his late-arriving stardom and a prickly personality that sometimes rubbed teammates and media the wrong way, Kent earned All-Star honors five times, won an MVP award, and helped four different franchises reach the playoffs a total of seven times. His resumé gives him a claim as the best-hitting second baseman of the post-1960 expansion era — not an iron-clad one, but not one that’s easily dismissed. For starters, he holds the all-time record for most home runs by a second baseman with 351. That’s 74 more than Ryne Sandberg, 85 more than Joe Morgan, and 86 more than Rogers Hornsby — all Hall of Famers, and in Hornsby’s case, one from before the expansion era (note that I’m not counting homers hit while playing other positions). Among players with at least 7,000 plate appearances in their career who spent at least half their time at second base, only Hornsby (.577) has a higher slugging percentage than Kent’s .500. From that latter set, only Hornsby (1.010) and another pre-expansion Hall of Famer, Charlie Gehringer (.884), have a higher OPS than Kent (.855). Read the rest of this entry »

I didn’t want to write this article. One of my favorite things to do, back when I was a full-time Cardinals fan and part-time writer, was wait for the first few weeks of the season and then start ogling velocity changes. There’s almost nothing that made me feel so unabashedly happy as seeing an extra tick or two out of some arm I’d written off the previous year. Why spoil that magic by looking into whether it actually matters?

Nothing fun can come of using data to look at incuriously held beliefs, but that’s never stopped me before, so I decided to examine pitchers who experienced velocity gains from one year to the next. Do their fastballs grade out better? Do they strike out more batters? Walk more? Do they hold the gains from one year to the next? I had no clue, but I decided to find out.

First things first: 2020 goes right out the window. The season started in late July, and no one had anything approaching their normal offseason routine. Temperatures were weird, workloads were changed on the fly, and some teams were affected by COVID-related cancelations; trying to tease something out from that noise is pointless and unnecessary. I’ll just use 2015 through 2019 instead.

Why 2015? That’s when Statcast first arrived, and with it a new tracking system. I could, I suppose, use data since 2008, but I wanted to minimize the chances of false readings stemming from the change in systems. 2020 also featured a change — to camera-based readings instead of radar — but we’re already throwing it out anyway, so no big deal there.

In each year, I looked at the population of starters who threw at least 500 four-seam fastballs. I then found the year-to-year changes for each pitcher-season combination. Justin Verlander, as an example, averaged 93.4 mph in 2015, 94.1 mph in 2016, 95.3 mph in 2017, 95 mph in 2018, and 94.6 mph in 2019. That means his ‘15-’16 change was 0.7 mph, his ‘16-’17 change was 1.2 mph, his ‘17-’18 change was -0.3 mph, and his ‘18-’19 change was -0.4 mph. This gave us a database of 236 pitcher-seasons from 2016 to 2018 — I’m leaving out changes between 2018 and 2019 because I want to know what happens the year after a pitcher gains velocity. Read the rest of this entry »

MLB managers not named Tony La Russa did Zoom calls with members of the media this past week. Today’s column features highlights from several of those sessions.

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Two of the topics Dusty Baker addressed on Monday were job-related. One was the position he currently holds with the Houston Astros, the other was a role that’s never appealed to him. The latter is anathema to baseball’s Most Interesting Man in the World because it wouldn’t allow him to kick back and ruminate on life.

“One reason I never wanted to be a general manager is because you don’t really have an offseason,” Baker told a cohort of reporters. “He works all year, and doesn’t have much time off, but for the general manager, and front office people, this is the most busy time of the year.”

Baker is 71 years old with 23 managerial seasons under his belt. How much longer he’ll sit in that chair is a question he can’t answer, but he’s been around long enough to know that life can come at you from different directions. Much for that reason, he’s simply going with the flow.

“Depends on how I feel [and it] depends on how the team feels about me,” said Baker, who was hired by Houston prior to last season. “Changes are going to come about in life. I tend to think in terms of Walter Alston and Tom Lasorda. Those guys signed a series of 20 one-year contracts. I’m not lame anymore. You know what I mean? A lame duck can’t fly. But my wings aren’t clipped no more. I can always fly.” Read the rest of this entry »

A week ago, the Rays’ 40-man roster had a single catcher on it: Ronaldo Hernández, a 23-year-old prospect who had never played above High-A. Fast forward to Friday, and Tampa has doubled its collection of backstops after re-signing Mike Zunino, who has been with the team the past two seasons. That was not the only move the club made, though, as the Rays also signed free-agent pitcher Michael Wacha. Both deals came in at $3 million, with Zunino’s total figure including a buyout on a 2022 option. The deals make sense, though it is worth noting that the two players combined for 0.1 WAR last season, so the Rays must see something beyond their recent performances to justify even a modest investment.

The Rays need a bunch of innings behind the plate, and Zunino, who turns 30 in March, should supply some of them; just don’t expect much out of them. The last two seasons, he’s been one of the worst hitters in baseball, with his 49 wRC+ ranking 337th out of 342 players with at least 300 plate appearances. Zunino does have some power, with a career ISO around .200, and he bested that number in 84 plate appearances last season, but he just doesn’t get to it enough to make himself anywhere near a decent hitter. Even his walk rates, which were double-digit levels back in his good offensive years with the Mariners in 2016 and ’17, have dropped below league average the last three years. Zunino has always swung and missed a lot, with a 35% career strikeout rate, and he whiffed 37 times last year while putting the ball in fair territory on just 38 occasions. He’s average to maybe slightly above average at throwing out runners, but last season, he was below average in framing for the first time in his career. There are reasons the Rays declined Zunino’s $4.5 million option at the end of last season, and it isn’t because they’re cheap.

Read the rest of this entry »