Here at FanGraphs, we devote a lot of time to analyzing baseball. I flatter myself to think that our analysis, in some cases, helps shape the way you consume the sport. Measured in that way, however, we fall far short of the influence that your local broadcast of choice exerts. We may grace your brainwaves for a handful of minutes every day, but every time you watch a game on TV, the announcers are granted three hours to shape your view and enjoyment of the sport.

In fact, I would venture that no one group contributes more to your enjoyment and understanding of baseball than your most frequently-viewed broadcast crew. Despite that, it has been over four years since we last compiled a ranking of broadcast groups. Over the course of the next three days, we will post a series of surveys, one for each major league franchise. We will then use the results of these surveys to compile a comprehensive fan-based ranking of all television broadcast crews.

When you peruse the section for your team or teams of choice, you will find a link to a poll. That poll covers three categories, as well as an overall ranking. In addition, there is a separate space for any additional comments you would like to make. The eventual ranking of broadcast teams will be quantitative, but I will include relevant comments from this section in my writing of those rankings. Read the rest of this entry »

Why was Greg Maddux as good as he was? In the opinion of longtime pitching instructor Brian Vikander, the biggest reason is that Maddux took baseball-is-a-chess-match to whole new level. Moreover, he did so in much the same manner as that with which Boris Spassky tackled the likes of Bobby Fischer.

That Vikander and I happened upon that particular subject is somewhat ironic. When we spoke earlier this week, it was to discuss his assertion that Steve Dalkowski threw 110 mph. Vikander is the co-author of a book about the legendary left-hander, who along with having extraordinary velocity was the antithesis of Maddux when it came to command. “Dalko” walked 1,236 batters in 956 minor league innings.

(We’ll hear from Vikander on Dalkowski and velocity in the coming week.)

“A big part of pitching is preventing on-time contact,” said Vikander, whose three-plus decades of experience includes working with Tom House and a plethora of professional hurlers. “Maddux was able to take all of the components — pitch selection, sequencing, location, and movement — and put them together to do that. It wasn’t any different than a Grandmaster in chess; it was like Boris Spassky. Most people don’t understand how that unusual opening would be used in a World Title game. Bobby Fischer did, but there aren’t many who are capable of that level of thinking.”

Vikander cited Miguel Cabrera as an example of a hitter capable of thinking along with pitchers in grandmaster fashion. He offered Ted Williams, with whom he’d conversed with over the years, as second example. In Vikander’s view, it’s that ability which separates “the truly great ones” from mere mortals. Read the rest of this entry »

Before I get to the names, if you missed Monday’s post, you’re going to want to read that straight away. Please know that this doesn’t preclude anyone else on staff from offering their own opinions on this matter. I also think readers should know how I put the list together. Similar to the recipe for my mock drafts, I’m using a combination of informed speculation by industry folks and myself, with some concrete dope mixed in. My own speculation is driven by:

• Weighing each player’s ability and importance to their team against their projected arbitration number (duh).
• How their team/front office has behaved in the non-tender market before.
• Whether the team behaves in a cost-conscious way, generally.
• Whether the team has behaved in a cost-conscious way lately due to the pandemic (ops layoffs, decisions on player options, etc.).
• If there are major league-ready prospects behind said player.
• Miscellaneous, subjective stuff, like strongly-perceived player/team discord and whatnot.

Let’s take a quick peek at each club’s number of non-tenders since 2015 so we’re all on the same page for the second category above. The table below is sortable.

I’m not just touching on the players for whom there’s an argument to non-tender; I’m trying to predict these as best as I can. Like my mock drafts, the goal is to try to predict what will happen, not say what I think should happen. I don’t even bother mentioning some arbitration-eligible stars, like Cody Bellinger and Lucas Giolito, for reasons I hope are obvious. These go alphabetical by team name. Read the rest of this entry »

Drey Jameson is one of the more-intriguing pitching prospects in the Arizona Diamondbacks’ system. Drafted 34th overall in 2019 out of Ball State University, the 23-year-old right-hander possesses a lean frame — he is listed at six-foot-even and 165 pounds — yet he consistently pumps mid-to-high-90s gas. Moreover, the secondary pitches he throws from a deceptive delivery all grade out as plus. A native of Greenfield, Indiana, he entered the year ranked 13th on our 2020 D-Backs Top Prospects list.

Jameson discussed his repertoire and how COVID-19 impacted what would have been his first full professional season during the final week of Arizona’s fall instructional league, which wrapped up earlier this month.

———

David Laurila: What should people know about you as a pitcher?

Drey Jameson: “I’d say I’m kind of electric, kind of fast-twitch with a really fast arm. It’s more like [deception]; I’m not a guy who is standing tall on the mound and has that straight downhill with his fastball. And my stuff separates. With my changeup, I’m a pronation guy, so my changeup works really well for me. Outside of that, I consider myself a fierce competitor who goes out and attacks guys.”

Laurila: You’re listed at six foot and 165 pounds. Is that still accurate?

Jameson: “I’m six foot, but I’m ranging anywhere from 170 to 178. I guess I’m usually around 175.”

Laurila: When our 2020 Diamondbacks Top Prospects list came out, your writeup included, “His high-maintenance delivery is hard to repeat.” Is that accurate? Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, Eric Longenhagen wrote about the looming non-tender deadline and the expectation that the number of available players after the December deadline will increase relative to normal. While the deadline will reveal which arbitration-eligible players have been tendered contracts and which will be made free agents, there will be some trade and waiver activity ahead of the deadline as well. Some players are likely to be placed on waivers to spur a trade while others could be moved before it reaches that point. Last season, the A’s traded Jurickson Profar to the Padres just ahead of the non-tender deadline. The Orioles placed Jonathan Villar on waivers ahead of his eventual trade to the Marlins, and Miami kept busy by claiming Jesús Aguilar off waivers from the Rays. Other players will reach agreements on a contract with their teams ahead of the deadline to avoid uncertainty.

While there should be considerable activity ahead of and at the deadline, it’s a bit unclear just how big the names that move in the next few weeks will actually be. To that end, I am asking for your assistance in assessing expectations around the non-tender deadline by focusing on the biggest names. Each player will have three options:

1. Tendered a contract by his current team.
2. Traded or waived and tendered a contract by his new team.
3. Non-tendered and heads to free agency.

The player’s estimated 2021 salary from MLB Trade Rumors (which also appear on our RosterResource payroll pages) is in parentheses. For these purposes, treat reaching agreement on a contract ahead of the non-tender deadline the same as a player being tendered a contract by his current team. We’ll look at the results next week. Thanks for your help! Read the rest of this entry »

While scrolling The Athletic’s site recently, I came across a headline that gave me pause, citing Kansas City Royals general manager Dayton Moore saying he “expects to win” in 2021. Front office personnel in every organization do a bit of work hyping up their teams during the offseason; just a year ago, Rockies owner Dick Monfort predicted a 94-win season for a club that had won just 71 games the year before. Moore, to his credit, was much more vague when assessing the Royals. From Athletic beatwriter Alec Lewis:

“We expect to win next year. What does that look like? Is it going to be enough wins to make the playoffs? We’ll find out. But our mindset is going to be to go out and win every single pitch, every inning, every game. That’s the only way we’re ever going to win another championship.”

Moore isn’t guaranteeing a playoff spot, or even a winning record; all he vows is an intent to win games, which is a pretty easy promise to keep. Every team wins games, because the season lasts a very long time, and baseball itself is a weird sport in which a very bad team can defeat a very good team on any given day with only a couple of things breaking the right direction. Even if Moore is hedging here, though, his tone is unambiguously positive, and not even in some “trust the process” sort of way. He thinks his team has a fighting chance, just five months after drafting in the top four selections for a second year in a row.

That kind of faith inspired me to figure out for myself if Royals fans should share that optimism. I’d never previously considered Kansas City to be a threat in 2021. I still don’t, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Peek over at our current Depth Charts projections, and the Royals’ WAR total ranks 21st in baseball. That’s far above 100-loss territory, and even within spitting distance of plausible playoff territory; it’s within two and a half wins of the Phillies, Reds and Cardinals, three teams you wouldn’t be shocked to see in the postseason next year. That would also constitute a downgrade from where the Royals finished this season, when they ranked 15th in the majors in batting WAR and 19th in pitching WAR.

You may not have noticed, since they never stumbled into the playoff hunt the way other rebuilding teams like Detroit and Baltimore did, but the Royals actually improved quite a bit in 2020. They added nearly 70 points to their win percentage in one season, going from 59–103 to 26–34. Their pythagorean record was actually slightly better at 27–33. Part of the reason for that could certainly be the shortened season, but it isn’t as though limiting the previous year to 60 games would have done them any favors. Kansas City went 19–41 over its first 60 games in 2019 and 16–44 over its final 60. This was a step forward — the first big one of the rebuild.

Where did those improvements come from? The most obvious source would be the pitching staff, which featured two rookies — Brady Singer and Kris Bubic — joining the rotation full-time after never previously appearing in the majors, or even in Triple-A for that matter. Those two wound up holding their own, while staff ace Brad Keller turned in a career year.

As it stands right now, the top five names here are the likeliest to fill out the rotation in 2021, and it’s a solid enough group. Bubic was No. 110 on Eric Longenhagen’s global Top Prospect list entering this season, and Singer, the team’s first-round pick in 2018, ranked just one spot below Bubic on his Royals list. The success of those two were significant victories for the organization this year.

The lineup saw modest gains as well thanks to two veterans who weren’t around the year before. Salvador Perez was the headliner: After missing the entire 2019 season because of Tommy John surgery, he burst back into the offense by hitting .333/.353/.633 with 11 homers in 156 plate appearances, getting a bit lucky on balls in play while also hitting for more power than he ever had. Perez’s terrific season at the plate received an enthusiastic cosign from Statcast, which rated him in the 96th percentile in xwOBA despite the fact that he walked in less than 2% of his plate appearances.

Then there was third baseman Maikel Franco, who signed with the Royals after being non-tendered by Philadelphia and rewarded his new club by slashing .278/.321/.457 for a 106 wRC+ and 1.3 WAR while starting all 60 games at the hot corner. It was Franco’s best offensive season since 2015 and, despite the shortened season, his best WAR total since ’16. With Jorge Soler, Hunter Dozier and Whit Merrifield all still hitting at an above-average clip, Kansas City recovered some of the thump it had sorely missed out on in recent years; its 92 wRC+ as a team was its highest since 2015, the year it won the World Series.

To have so many things go well in 2020 — the successful return of the star catcher, the bounce-back of the change-of-scenery–free-agent signing, solid seasons from two rookie starters and the established core players meeting expectations — should certainly give a GM a jolt of energy heading into the winter. The flip side is that in spite of all that good news, the Royals still couldn’t contend, and it’s hard to see much more room for growth from the players currently on the roster.

As good of a sign as it was to see the young pitchers quickly settle into the rotation, neither Singer nor Bubic are projected to be much more than No. 3 or 4 starters, which wouldn’t be far above what they did in 2020. Meanwhile, Keller outperformed his xwOBA by more than 80 points last year according to Statcast, making him more likely to regress than to improve.

The offense doesn’t appear to be standing far below its ceiling, either. Dozier and Soler could help by returning to their 2019 numbers, but that may be offset by any regression that comes for Perez. Perhaps Adalberto Mondesi taps into the pop he showed in 2018, or one of the Irish Ryans at first base — McBroom or O’Hearn — makes some kind of jump. But a scan of this roster doesn’t really reveal any good hitters who woefully underperformed this season or some dormant former top prospect waiting to break out. The offensive performance this team showed in 2020 may be as good as this current group is going to get.

There is help coming from the minors, but it’s unlikely the impact will be felt in 2021. Wunderkind shortstop Bobby Witt Jr. is just 20 and has all of 37 rookie league games to his resume. Left-hander Asa Lacy, the No. 4 overall pick in 2020, has yet to throw a pitch in a professional game. Fellow southpaw prospect in Daniel Lynch hasn’t pitched above Advanced-A and is said to have the same limited ceiling Bubic and Singer. Asking any of these players to contribute much in 2021 would require speeding up their developmental timelines considerably.

If Kansas City wishes to take another step forward in the coming season, then, it will require moves to be made this winter. And even though no one is expecting the Royals to be one of the major players in free agency, there may be some reason for optimism that the team could be active in some meaningful way. Again from Lewis:

“There’s a fine line between aggressive and reckless, and Moore has walked it, finding comfort in the former. When the Royals signed Gil Meche in the winter of 2006, they agreed to an extra year so that they could make the acquisition. In the winter of 2013, Moore executed a similar deal in signing Omar Infante. Through experience, he understands teams must reach deep into their pocketbooks. If that time comes again, the Royals will do so again.”

There is no shortage of ways for Kansas City to improve via free agency. It could replace second baseman Nicky Lopez, who has been below replacement level in each of his first two big league seasons, on the open market with Kolten Wong or Tommy La Stella. It could add Joc Pederson or Michael Brantley to its outfield, or sign a starter like James Paxton or Mike Minor. An offseason that includes two or three of these moves wouldn’t break the bank for a team currently on track to spend just $76 million on payroll in 2021, and could add upwards of six or seven wins to the Royals’ projected WAR total, vaulting them into about the 16th-ranked spot in the majors.

Unfortunately, the front office may not see much reason to attempt that kind of run. According to our Depth Charts, Kansas City could add nine wins to its projected WAR total and still not surpass the next-closest AL team, the Red Sox. Boston is one of 10 AL teams currently expected to outperform the Royals in 2021, and that’s before those teams have added free agents and made trades. If Kansas City played in the NL Central, it might be able to spend its way to contention. But in the challenging AL Central, the obstacles are simply too great.

The Royals’ encouraging steps forward in 2020 place them closer to baseball’s middle class than you may have expected. They’re just in the wrong league to take advantage of that. To make the jump in the AL, they will need to develop this line of top draft picks — Witt Jr., Lacy, the No. 7 pick in 2021 and likely another top-10 pick in 2022 — into stars. Moore’s ambitions for ’21 are noble, but this time next year, he’ll probably be happy he didn’t make any bold predictions.

Not too long ago, Robinson Canó appeared to have a real shot at becoming the first second baseman to reach the twin milestones of 3,000 hits and 400 home runs, as well as an eventual berth in the Hall of Fame. In May 2018, however, while playing for the Mariners, he drew an 80-game suspension after testing positive for a banned diuretic. Now, as a member of the Mets following a blockbuster trade that has thus far looked like a flop, he’s drawn another suspension for violating the game’s joint drug agreement. As his second offense, this one will cost him the entire 2021 season as well as all of his $24 million salary. That’s a situation that could benefit the Mets, who under new owner Steve Cohen are already primed to be one of the winter’s more aggressive teams.

It’s the latest bum note for Canó in his second tour of New York. Acquired from the Mariners on December 3, 2018 along with Edwin Díaz and cash in exchange for a five-player package headlined by first-round picks Jarred Kelenic and Justin Dunn, the former Yankees star was limited to 107 games due to hamstring and quad injuries in 2019. Both his 93 wRC+ and 0.8 WAR represented his worst numbers since 2008, and the deal looked even worse due to Díaz’s collapse; the pair’s underperformance probably cost the Mets a Wild Card berth, as they finished with 86 wins, three fewer than the lower Wild Card seed, the Brewers. Adding insult to injury, Eric Longenhagen placed Kelenic 11th on his Top 100 Prospects list in the spring, the same ranking that both Baseball America, and MLB.com gave him.

Canó did fare better in 2020. Though he served a 10-day stint on the Injured List due to a groin strain in early August, he hit .316/.352/.544 while tying for second on the team with 10 homers, and placing fourth via both his 141 wRC+ and 1.3 WAR. It wasn’t nearly enough to help the Mets, who sputtered to a 26-34 record and a fourth-place finish in the NL East. Read the rest of this entry »

Allow me to present you with assorted statistics from two players. They aren’t exhaustive, of course, and I’m trying to mislead you, but still:

Batter A looks a little bit better. He hit the ball hard more frequently and topped out at a higher exit velocity. Player B had a better xwOBACON — a mouthful of letters that simply means using xwOBA to measure a player’s quality of contact — but I think I’d take the hard hit rate and maximum EV of Player A anyway.

Here’s a further wrinkle: both of these players are, by reputation at least, among the best defenders at their respective positions. Player A is the better defender relative to his peers — he’s won five Gold Gloves to Player B’s zero — but Player B plays a position 20 runs up the defensive spectrum, meaning he has provided more defensive value per plate appearance in his career than Player A. Who would you rather have had on your team in 2020?

From these statistics — and specifically these statistics — it’s not exactly obvious. You might have a leaning one way or the other, but it can’t be more than a 60/40 decision. That’s not to say that you would have a tough choice going forward — Player A just turned 28, while Player B will turn 38 before the start of the 2021 season. Also, you don’t actually get to pick which one to add to your team, because Player A is under contract for next year. You could totally add Player B, though: he’s a free agent after a two-year run with the fifth team of his major league career.

Enough with the blind nonsense: Player A is Mookie Betts. You should have taken him! Player B is Jeff Mathis, frequent butt of incompetent-hitting jokes and widely reputed to be one of the worst hitters of all time. Sounds like we’re going to need to do some further digging. Read the rest of this entry »

When looking at statistics for the 2020 season, everything should be taken with a grain of salt. The players had to prepare and then play in the middle of a pandemic with adjusted routines and preparation, as well as a lack of fans in the stands. Added to the mix is the 60-game season, which is just over a third of a normal year. All of that is going to lead to some weird-bad stat lines — like, for example, the one Gary Sánchez put up.

Sánchez stepped up to the plate 178 times in 2020 and got just 23 hits for a batting average of .147. Among the 18,273 batters with at least 150 plate appearances since 1969, that figure ranks 18,259th. His rate of hits per plate appearance was 13%, a touch behind Mike Trout’s rate of extra-base hits in his career. Thanks to the walks (18 and a 10.1% rate) and homers (10), Sánchez’s 69 wRC+ is merely awful instead of historically bad, but it’s still a gruesome line.

But as I said, we need to take these numbers with a grain of salt. Unfortunately, the overall picture of Sánchez as a player isn’t a pretty one right now. Over at ESPN, Buster Olney wrote how fixing Sánchez was a top priority this offseason for the Yankees, and what the problems are.

Well, a theory of some rival evaluators is that Sánchez’s confidence is all but shot, with his failures at the plate compounding it. Others note his increasing inability to cope with sliders, a pitch that seems to mystify him and accounts for a lot of his career-high 13.8% swing-and-miss rate in 2020, the worst of his career. At least some evaluators think that Sánchez has a hard time separating his offense from his defense, so that when he makes a mistake behind the plate, that tends to carry over to his hitting, and vice versa. And like many other young players, he seems to struggle to make in-game adjustments.

Some of the mental claims are somewhat dubious. Sánchez was a pretty bad catcher making plenty of mistakes back when he was hitting really well. As for in-game adjustments, he has generally hit the best in the fourth through sixth innings in his career, and since the start of 2019, his numbers in the first three innings match up with the last three innings, while the average player sees a 10-point drop.

The swing-and-miss issues on sliders are pretty indisputable, but they also aren’t new. Sánchez whiffed on 18% of sliders last year, which was right in line with his career averages. The problem for him is that he used to be able to run into a few of them: Last season he posted an .083 ISO on sliders, making him completely ineffective on the pitch. Further compounding things was a more than 50% increase on whiffs against four-seam fastballs: Sánchez went from a 10.7% swing-and-miss rate on four-seamers entering the season to 17% of those fastballs in 2020. That was also the second straight year in which Sánchez saw a big increase in four-seamer whiffs. He’s been swinging through fastballs at roughly the same rate as sliders, and neither number is good.

But wait, it gets worse. I noted Sánchez’s inability to hit the slider for power when he did make contact, and his general inability to get a hit when a ball is put in play ruins his chances of getting on base. Jeff Zimmerman looked at Sánchez’s poor BABIP and found the shift was killing his batting average despite his hard contact. While his high barrel rate makes it seem as though he should hit for a higher average, 10 of his 16 barrels last year were homers; his .281 xwOBA on balls in play is 30 points below league average.

Add that all up, and you get an offensive performance that hit new lows this past season and has been trending downwards for quite some time. Over the last three years, Sánchez has a .200/.296/.453 slash line with a 98 wRC+ in roughly 1,000 plate appearances. Since the middle of June 2019, he’s batting .168/.272/.379 with a 74 wRC+ in close to 400 plate appearances. Some of the blame could go to varying injuries over time, but catching takes a toll on the body, so we can’t exactly wish those away in the future.

While a dip this big in production didn’t seem possible a few years ago, there were always concerns about how Sánchez would profile. In Dave Cameron’s Trade Value Rankings back in 2017, he ranked 12th (which should provide some idea of his star production at the time), but:

That said, there are enough red flags to keep him out of the top tier for now. He’s one of the most extreme pull hitters in baseball, and you’ll note that the guys he’s hanging out with aren’t running BABIPs over .300. Toss in the pop-up problem and a below-average contact rate, and it’s easy to see Sánchez running a .240 batting average one of these years.

As predicted, the extreme pull rate, the popups, and the contact rate combined to make Sánchez a replacement-level player last season.

So what now? If Sánchez could field his position well, the Yankees could justify waiting for the bat to come around. There may be some hope there: He worked on a new catching stance in spring training, and in a very small sample, his framing was pretty close to average, and he still did a solid job with baserunners. If that holds and he is merely a little below-average behind the plate and at least average with the bat, then Sánchez is an average to slightly above-average player. If his catching regresses and the bat is average, then he’s a below-average player and a decent backup. And if he doesn’t get the bat back up to average, he’s the third catcher/26th man on the roster who can pinch-hit and rarely starts.

Unfortunately, the upside is more limited than it has been, too. If Sánchez’s bat really comes back, it might be best to let him make only occasional starts at catcher and take most of his turns at designated hitter —something that isn’t possible if he is just an average hitter. It’s hard to see a reasonable path back to more than anything than a three-win player, and the projections put Sánchez in the one- to two-win range that shouldn’t make him a starter on a contending club.

That leaves the Yankees with a difficult choice. They can hold on to Sánchez and see if he regain the ability to be a star hitter, but that likely entails bringing in another catcher to be the regular starter, as neither he nor Kyle Higashioka can be counted on for full-time (or really half-time) duty. The Yankees are supposedly “open” to trading him, but who is going to give up decent players and pay Sánchez his $5 million salary when he isn’t really projected as a starter-level player? There are a bunch of teams who would likely be willing to take a chance on him — the Rockies, Rangers, Marlins, and Tigers come to mind immediately — but they’re probably unwilling to give up any promising or useful players in exchange. The Yankees could just non-tender Sánchez and move on, but that’s a move that could backfire if he hits well, though signing J.T. Realmuto would likely make any regrets moot.

The Yankees and Sánchez, then, are likely stuck with each other for another season. He’ll get some opportunity to recapture his form, and the Yankees will pay him his relatively modest salary. They can’t trade him for nothing, and they shouldn’t let him go for free. But they also shouldn’t head into 2021 with Sánchez and Higashioka as the starting tandem at catcher. It makes Sánchez something of a potential bonus for the Yankees, and given their history together, it might actually benefit them both to give them one more season to get him back on track.

On Friday, when the Marlins announced they had hired Kim Ng as their new general manager, they set off a tidal wave of celebratory reactions from people both inside and outside baseball. That’s to be expected when a glass ceiling is broken. Her success was a triumph for women who have always had to fight for their place in the sport.

As soon as the news of Ng’s hiring went public, a question quickly gained prominence: How do you pronounce Ng? Media outlets reporting her hiring revealed a checkered understanding of the answer. The worst offender went with the extremely phonetic interpretation of “N-G.” Most got close, and those familiar with her work in baseball got it right. (To be clear, she pronounces it “ang,” which differs from the pronunciation of some Chinese Americans, who might pronounce it “ing.”

The widespread confusion about something as basic as Ng’s name is an extension of a few all too common questions most Asian Americans are familiar with: What are you? Where are you from? These reductive questions flow from the perpetual perception of foreignness that colors the experience of many Asian people in America. And it shows why Ng’s ascent to the top position in the Marlins organization is so important for Asian Americans, too.

Ng is the second Asian person to hold the position of general manager in major league baseball, and the first Asian American as well as the first Chinese American to rise to the top. Farhan Zaidi, who is of Pakistani descent, is Canadian-born and became the first Asian person to hold the title of general manager when he reached that position with the Dodgers in 2014. Ng also became just the second Asian American to become the GM in any of the major men’s North American professional sports — Rich Cho was the first when he was named GM of the Portland Trail Blazers in 2010. This dearth of Asian people in leadership positions extends to the field as well. There have been just two field managers of Asian descent in baseball, and there are just a handful of others across the other major men’s sports. Read the rest of this entry »