If the Brewers had their druthers, Orlando Arcia wouldn’t have played much this year. After the 2019 season, they acquired Luis Urías from the Padres with the intention of making him their starting shortstop. Arcia, a former top prospect whose bat had stagnated, would be relegated to a backup and defensive replacement — or at least, that was the plan.

Things don’t always work out so cleanly, and 2020 had a way of ruining everything. Urías contracted COVID-19 in July and didn’t debut until August 10. The third base situation didn’t quite work out; Brock Holt and Eric Sogard struggled, and Jedd Gyorko played mainly first base — the addition of the universal DH meant that their brief Ryan Braun experiment at first never amounted to much.

In the end, Arcia racked up 189 plate appearances, nearly a full-time slate. That doesn’t sound great for Milwaukee — Arcia put up a 54 wRC+ in 2018 and a 61 in 2019, plumbing the depths of offensive futility. Those are bad numbers even for a glove-first shortstop, but hey, with a DH, you can just bat him at the bottom of the lineup and limit the leverage of those plate appearances, right? 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. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

LaTroy Hawkins was just about as well-traveled as they come. The 6-foot-5, 220-pound righty spent 21 years in the majors, pitching for 11 different teams (not counting a return engagement in Colorado) in 44 different ballparks. Generally a setup man (though he did spend time closing), he never made an All-Star team, but he did pitch in the postseason five times with four different franchises, including a World Series with the Rockies. He stuck around long enough to become the 16th pitcher to appear in 1,000 games, and today ranks 10th all-time:

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One of the “Best of 2020” articles that ran here at FanGraphs over the holidays featured an under-the-radar right-hander with a unique backstory and a knee-buckling bender. Titled Rangers Prospect Cole Uvila is a Driveline-Developed Spin Monster, the story chronicled, among things, a curveball that had spun upwards of 3,300 RPM in Arizona Fall League action. Honed with the help of technology, the pitch profiled as his ticket to Texas.

He’s no longer throwing it. Instead, Uvila is endeavoring to channel former Cleveland Indians closer Cody Allen.

“In my head, I was going to throw it until my career was over,” Uvila said of his old curveball. “Then the pandemic happened. There was a lot of time to look in the mirror, and you just don’t see big-league relievers throwing 76-mph curveballs. It’s not really a thing.”

Uvila started talking with people in the Rangers organization, as well as to the instructors he’s worked with at Driveline over the years. Their messages were essentially the same: With breaking balls — much like fastballs — velocity is king.

“Driveline R&D has this metric called Stuff Plus, which essentially takes every breaking ball over the last five years and gives it a number,” Uvila told me earlier this week. “It’s kind of like wRC+, where 100 is average. I think the highest one was a dude with the Cubs, named [Dillon] Maples, and his graded out at something like 240. So there’s this range of pitches, and looking at the list, I saw this theme of curveballs at 84-85 [mph]. I said, ‘Man, I need to throw this pitch harder.’” Read the rest of this entry »

In 2020 — this despite limited media access due to the pandemic — I once again had an opportunity to interview numerous people within baseball. Many of their words were shared in my Sunday Notes column, while others came courtesy of the FanGraphs Q&A series, or from feature stories. Here is a selection of the best quotes from this year’s conversations, with the bolded lines linking to the pieces they were excerpted from.

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“If you want to be a surgeon, you can’t just go into an operating room and start cutting people up. If you want to be a baseball analyst, you can start analyzing baseball data tonight. There’s a lot of public baseball data, and the sorts of modeling we do… a lot of it is open source and free.” — Sam Mondry-Cohen, Washington Nationals assistant GM, January 2020

“Going forward, I expect that we’ll be making fewer trades. We’re in a different growth pattern now. It’s about letting the young guys play.” — Jerry Dipoto, Seattle Mariners GM, January 2020

“You can’t control where you release the ball. The ball just naturally flies out of your hand. You can adjust where your arm wants to be when the ball flies out, but if the ball wants to fly out of your hand, it’s going to fly out out of your hand.” — Ethan Hankins, Cleveland Indians pitching prospect, January 2020 Read the rest of this entry »

In some ways, Tuesday’s three-way trade between the Phillies (who acquired relief lefty José Alvarado), Rays (who acquired first baseman Dillon Paulson and a PTBNL/cash) and Dodgers (who acquired bullpen lefty Garrett Cleavinger) was an extension of the Blake Snell trade from earlier in the week. In that deal, the Rays got two 40-man roster players back in return (Francisco Mejía and Luis Patiño) but sent away only one, which meant they needed to clear a 40-man spot via trade in order for the move to be announced without them losing someone for nothing.

As a result, the Rays were leveraged into giving up the most exciting player in a minor swap in Alvarado, a husky lefty with elite-level stuff, a troubling injury history and frustrating control. It wasn’t long ago that he looked like the Rays’ future closer or high-leverage stopper. In 2018, when he was routinely sitting 98–101 mph early in the year, he ranked seventh among MLB relievers in WAR despite throwing just 53 innings because he was striking out hitters at a 30% clip, and generating ground balls 55% of the time his pitches were put in play. Alvarado became .giffamous (pronounced like infamous) because nobody should be able to throw a ball that moves that much that hard.

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After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for nine years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Seattle Mariners.

Batters

Let’s go straight to the projection that will likely get the most grumbling: ZiPS does not think that Kyle Lewis is a budding star. It does like him better than Steamer does — it mostly comes down to ZiPS being more willing to believe he’s a .340 BABIP hitter — but not to the level where he projects as a good starter. He had a legitimately excellent rookie season, but it’ll take more than an abridged 2020 to convince ZiPS that the previous translations, generally in the .230/.270/.370 range, no longer have predictive value. That’s not to say Seattle should be actively seeking to replace or upgrade from Lewis. One of the “benefits” of being a rebuilding team is that you can give players chances to improve or show an improvement is for real, after all. But these projections see the 2020 AL Rookie of the Year race a little like 1992, with the runner-up, Luis Robert, playing Kenny Lofton and Lewis as Pat Listach. Bumping a projection up by 70 points of OPS from the results of a 60-game season remains an accomplishment.

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Hours after trading for Blake Snell, and hours before swinging a deal for Yu Darvish, the Padres continued their remarkable post-Christmas shopping spree by signing Ha-seong Kim. Kim, a 25-year-old infielder who spent last season with the KBO’s Kiwoom Heroes, was listed as our eighth-best free agent in our top 50 roundup this fall, just ahead of Didi Gregorius and Justin Turner. Per Kevin Acee of the San Diego Tribune, it will be a four-year, $25 million deal. Additionally, Kiwoom will collect a bit of a tax, taking a $5 million release fee from San Diego.

In Kim, the Padres get a player who should claim a starting job right away, and potentially ascend from there. The best way to characterize his recent KBO production is to say that he’s outgrown the league. As the starting shortstop for one of the circuit’s better clubs, Kim has notched a 140 wRC+ in each of the last two seasons. He produced a .306/.397/.523 line last year, with 30 homers and more walks than strikeouts. He’s also swiped 56 bases in 62 tries over the last two years, a 90% clip. Mel Rojas Jr.’s absurd power production deservedly won him the KBO MVP award last season, but make no mistake: Kim was the brightest prospect in the league.

The scouting report backs up the numbers. A tremendous athlete, Kim’s a plus runner with quick hands and a plus throwing arm. At the plate, he has a mature approach, displaying good patience without being passive. Most of his power comes to the pull side, and he adeptly hunts pitches he can drive: Both his swing rate and whiff rate were above average last year, notable in a league that runs a lot of deep counts. 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.

By any measure, my first opportunity to cast an official Hall of Fame ballot has been a long time coming. It’s been 10 years since I was admitted to the Baseball Writers Association of America, 17 since I introduced the system that became JAWS, 19 since I first broke down a BBWAA Hall of Fame ballot (making this my 20th election covered), and 51 since I arrived on this planet, kicking and screaming. That paper ballot, the most long-awaited envelope I’ve received since I applied to college, arrived on November 18, and while I’ve mostly known whom I planned to include all along, I went through my full process, give or take a few one-and-done stragglers whom I’ll cover in early January — just as I’ve done with my virtual ballots in years past — before arriving at my final slate.

The irony in getting a ballot in this particular year is that by the standards of recent elections, it’s a dud. A total of 14 players have been elected in their first year of eligibility over the past seven cycles, but this year’s first-year crop has nobody of that caliber. And in the wake of three beloved players overcoming minimal early support to gain entry on their final tries — namely Tim Raines, Edgar Martinez, and Larry Walker — there’s much less in the way of impending drama. Which isn’t to say that from among this year’s 25 candidates there aren’t some worthy of following in that trio’s footsteps, with the voting body won over by the efforts of statheads such as myself, but the best of those are a few years away from reaching 75%. Meanwhile, the top four returning candidates are particularly polarizing, with only one really within striking distance during this cycle. We’ve had far more fun with this process in years past, and we’ll have more fun with it in the future, but this year, there’s far less sunshine and fewer lollipops to go around. How very 2020.

If there’s good news, it’s that with a record 22 candidates elected over those seven cycles, what was once a nearly unmanageable backlog has cleared up. Circa 2014, the ballot had 17 players who exceeded the JAWS standards at their respective positions, and 14 who had a JAWS of at least 50.0 (or 40.0 for catchers), thus requiring all but the most small-Hall-minded voters to perform some kind of triage to winnow the field down to 10 candidates who could fit on their ballots.

Even so, there’s still no such thing as a perfect ballot. With my annual exercise comes an acknowledgement of the numerous subjective choices that go into selecting even the most objectively-minded slate. How much leeway to grant if one is using WAR and JAWS? How much emphasis to put on postseason performance, awards, and less quantifiable considerations? Where to draw the line with performance-enhancing drugs? Should we weight the things we’ve learned about these players’ off-field lives that we can’t stomach? Perfection may be unattainable, but that’s not to say it’s not worth pursuing, and if we don’t get there… well, we do the best we can. Read the rest of this entry »

After trading for Blake Snell on Sunday, it was fair to wonder just how far away the Padres are from the World Series-winning Dodgers in the NL West. That gap has narrowed even more if not closed entirely after their latest blockbuster, with Yu Darvish going from Chicago to San Diego on Monday night in a seven-player deal. As for the Cubs, the self-inflicted wounds continue as they cut salary and get worse heading into the final years of team control for the core members of the 2016 championship team.

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As is fast becoming a holiday tradition, the Padres and Rays made a high-profile trade last night. Blake Snell, the former Cy Young winner and Rays ace, is headed to San Diego, as Dennis Lin, Josh Tolentino, and Ken Rosenthal first reported. The Padres are sending a bevy of players back, both prospects and major leaguers: Luis Patiño, Francisco Mejía, Blake Hunt, and Cole Wilcox.

Last time the two teams hooked up, Snell was virally critical of Tampa Bay’s perennial strategy: trade players a year too early rather than a year too late, prioritizing team control and pre-arbitration salaries over current production. Last year, that was Tommy Pham, whose $7 million arbitration projection simply didn’t work in Tampa. This time, Snell himself is the monetary sacrifice. The extension he signed before 2019 has three years and $40.8 million remaining, which is a phenomenal bargain for his employer and also too expensive for the penny-pinching Rays.

Snell immediately becomes the best pitcher in the Padres rotation, which boasts Chris Paddack, Dinelson Lamet, Zach Davies, and a sampler platter of interesting prospects headlined by Mackenzie Gore and Adrian Morejon. Mike Clevinger will miss 2021 after undergoing Tommy John surgery, but he’ll return in 2022 to co-star in a spectacular rotation.

Snell may never recapture the overall production of his 2018 Cy Young season (1.89 ERA, 221 strikeouts in 180.2 innings), but he’s been consistently excellent for years now, albeit on a shorter leash than many elite pitchers. His strikeout rates hardly waver: 31.6% in 2018, 33.3% in 2019, and 31 % in 2020. His walk rates have been consistent as well: 9.1%, 9.1%, and 8.9% respectively. Read the rest of this entry »