One area of potential weakness for the 2020 New York Mets is their bullpen. Even the seemingly strong backend of Seth Lugo, Dellin Betances, and Edwin Díaz leave more questions than answers. Lugo has been the most stable, but he may be competing for the fifth spot in the rotation. The Mets took a chance on Betances, who pitched in one game last season before going down again with a “freak injury” — what he’ll be capable of in 2020 is anyone’s guess. Díaz, whom the Mets traded for back in December 2018, and who was once one of the most dominant closers in baseball, ended up becoming a major liability for the bullpen.

The supporting cast of Brad Brach, Robert Gsellman, and Justin Wilson present some uncertainty as well. Brach pitched well after being released by the Chicago Cubs, but projects for less than a win. Gsellman is an average reliever, and Wilson is an injury concern after missing 10 weeks in 2019 with elbow soreness.

And if things do go south for the bullpen, the Mets’ reinforcements are limited. Among them is 29-year-old righty Paul Sewald, who might be an option in 2020, but there are some adjustments he’ll have to make before he can be a meaningful contributor. As it stands, Sewald may not even make the 2020 Opening day Roster. Sewald possesses good command of his three-pitch arsenal, which consists of an average four-seamer and changeup, with an above-average slider. Sewald mainly goes to the fastball and slider, with some changeup cameos from time to time:

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Last winter, a whopping 33 contract extensions were signed between the end of the World Series and early April, nearly as many as the previous two offseasons combined. In all, over $2.2 billion in new money was guaranteed to these 33 players, with seven of those extensions crossing the nine figure mark. It was the largest total outlay for contract extensions in a single offseason in baseball history, beating the previous record set during the 2011-2012 offseason.

Perhaps the most interesting thing about the rash of extensions signed last year was the diversity of the types of players teams extended. Established stars like Mike Trout, Paul Goldschmidt, and Chris Sale all signed massive contracts befitting their status as legitimate stars. Then there were players like Nolan Arenado, Xander Bogaerts, and Jacob deGrom, all members of the most common group of players to sign extensions: young, established players on the verge of hitting free agency.

In recent seasons, we’ve seen more and more players sign long-term contracts before reaching arbitration, like Alex Bregman, Blake Snell, and German Márquez all did last year. The newest frontier for contract extensions moves even earlier on the arbitration timeline. Some teams are now extending their top prospects before or not long after they make their major league debuts — Eloy Jiménez, Ronald Acuña Jr., and Brandon Lowe all fell into that category last year. Read the rest of this entry »

My first ever conversation with Jarren Duran took place prior to spring training when the Red Sox held their annual rookie development camp. Things started off clumsily. The speedy outfield prospect has a certain intensity about him, and his responses to my initial inquiries came couched with edgy caution.

Duran has a 50% ground-ball rate since turning pro, and when I noted that worm-killing isn’t exactly de rigueur in today’s game, his reply was a terse, “Yeah, but I can’t beat out a fly ball. That would be a waste of my speed, so why not use the tool that I have?”

Fair enough. Duran has plus-plus wheels — he swiped 46 bags last season — and he profiles as a table-setter as opposed to a bopper. Even so, is a willingness to stay on the ground really in his best interest?


“I’m willing to accept any ball that will give me a hit,” Duran proclaimed. “Ground balls. Line drives. Even fly balls. I’m just trying to make hard contact.”

Again, fair enough. But it’s not as though the 23-year-old Long Beach State product is wholly without pop. The 2018 seventh-round pick did leave the yard five times between high-A Salem and Double-A Portland, and he’s by no means built like a beanpole. Plus, fence-clearing ability is a quality any hitter should aspire to. Right?

“Bobby Dalbec is the big guy, the home run hitter,” Duran said of his muscular minor-league teammate. “I’m the little guy who gets on for the bigger guys.” When I pointed out that he’s bigger than Mookie Betts, Duran shrugged and deadpanned, “He’s got more power than me.” Asked if power is something he’s hoping to grow into, his response was an equally-shrug-worthy, “If it comes it comes. If it doesn’t it doesn’t.” Read the rest of this entry »

Around this time last year, Scooter Gennett was unhappy. He was coming off the best season of his career, and entering his final year of team control with the Cincinnati Reds, the team that claimed him off waivers from the Milwaukee Brewers two years prior. In an interview with the Cincinnati Enquirer’s Jon Fay last February, Gennett said he wanted to stay in Cincinnati, and that he and his agent had communicated a desire for a contract extension to the Reds’ front office. He was miffed, though, because he said the Reds hadn’t responded. The state of free agency seemed incredibly bleak at the time, and Gennett was a 28-year-old middle infielder with a short, and somewhat complicated, track record of success. It was reasonable for him to be motivated to lock in a deal that would keep him off the market for the foreseeable future.

The deal never came, and before the regular season could begin, Gennett’s circumstances suddenly turned south. He tore his groin while diving for a groundball in a spring training game on March 22, an injury that caused him to miss the first three months of the season. Upon returning in late June, he struggled through 21 games with the Reds before being traded to San Francisco, where he continued to flounder until the Giants released him after just 21 more games. Six months later, a new round of spring training games have begun, but Gennett still hasn’t found a new home. It’s understandable that clubs are hesitant to give a job to a middle infielder with a limited skillset who might be in questionable health. It’s also a magnificent bummer to see a player who seemed so close to landing life-changing money be unable to get a job just a year later.

The ups and downs of the last few years of Gennett’s career are enough to give you whiplash. A 16th round pick in 2009, he worked his way into being a good-not-great prospect with Milwaukee before his 2013 debut, when he impressed with a 129 wRC+ and 2.0 WAR in just 69 games. In each of the next three seasons, however, he regressed, accumulating a total of just 0.4 WAR from 2015-16. As the Brewers sorted through their infield options the following spring, Gennett didn’t make the cut, and was waived by the team less than a week before the season started, with the Reds claiming him on March 28, 2017. Read the rest of this entry »

While the heavily-favored Yankees deal with the loss of Luis Severino, the Red Sox have a rotation problem of their own, albeit on a significantly smaller scale. On Thursday, interim manager Ron Roenicke told reporters that Chris Sale will begin the year on the injured list. While his delay is related to a bout of pneumonia rather than the elbow injury that curtailed his 2019 season, it’s yet another reminder of the concerns that surround the going-on-31-year-old lefty.

Last year, Sale made just 25 starts, the final one on August 13. He was then shut down due to what was termed elbow inflammation, and while he paid a visit to Dr. James Andrews for a second opinion, he avoided surgery, though he did receive a platelet-rich plasma injection. The headlines at the time were to the tune of “avoids Tommy John surgery,” but there’s never been any indication that Sale’s complaint or his PRP injection were related to his ulnar collateral ligament. His elbow is now said to be fine; he’s been throwing bullpen sessions and is scheduled to throw an extended batting practice session this weekend. However, he’s behind the schedule of his rotation-mates due to back-to-back cases of the flu and pneumonia that he contracted earlier this month. Here’s what Roenicke said, via ESPN:

“With the sickness, it cost him two weeks’ time, and that two weeks is what we’d like to give him to make sure that he’s right,” Roenicke said. “He’s worked hard on getting his arm right, and we didn’t think four starts in spring training was fair to him.

…”Nothing at all with the arm. He’s doing really good with that,” Roenicke said. “We’re really happy with that.”

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As consumers have been given more and more entertainment options, their choices have become more fragmented when choosing what to watch and how to spend their time. Cable television took away the absolute dominance of network television, and due to its ubiquity, viewing options for most Americans were readily available and universal. Whether someone preferred to watch sports, home and garden shows, Mad Men, cable news, or Friends re-runs, all were available, and the customers of one preference subsidized the viewing habits of the others in a cable bundle. (This is the third piece in this series with first one covering MLB’s prior reliance on national television money, and the second one on MLB’s massive rise in revenues since the strike).

That bundled philosophy is still strong, and even newer streaming entrants to the market like Sling, Hulu, and YouTubeTV stuck with the bundle. However, as HBO, Disney+, Netflix, and Amazon Prime begin to siphon off customers, and with NBC joining the fray as well, the bundle is threatened. While the solution to the slow dwindling of cable subscribers is not readily apparent for content producers and providers, it’s representative of the difficult decisions Major League Baseball faces with their television contracts, their attendance, and their ability to bring in new fans. Unfortunately, MLB seems to be focused on short-term gains at the potential expense of the long-term health of the sport.

As streaming services grow in popularity, MLB is well-positioned with their technology and their reach. In 2017, MLB.TV was the fourth-biggest OTT service, behind only Netflix, Amazon, and Hulu, and ahead of HBO Now, which reportedly had close to five million subscribers at the time. MLB has the ability to serve fans with a streaming-only option and keep or maintain revenue levels even if every team were to lose their cable television contracts tomorrow. If we assume there are around five million customers paying $120 per year for MLB.TV, and teams receive $1.8 billion under their local RSN contracts, they would need just 12 million customers nationally who were willing to pay $200 a year to sustain revenues before considering advertising that mostly goes to cable companies right now. The problem with that plan is that it denies access to close to 100 million potential or actual fans who were able to watch the teams on their standard cable package. Long-term, that’s an awful idea if the goal is to create new fans. Read the rest of this entry »

The “problems” the Los Angeles Dodgers face must seem foreign to most other major league teams. When Dave Roberts discussed his Opening Day rotation last weekend, it wasn’t in the same way most managers do. You know that way, because your favorite team’s manager probably does it. “Here are three good starters, one starter who we hope is good, and one starter who we hope is decent.” Not every team takes this approach, of course, but the league isn’t awash in great fourth starters, never mind fifth starters.

But the Dodgers aren’t the league. Their top three — Clayton Kershaw, Walker Buehler, and David Price — are locks. The team is using Julio Urías, who has bounced between starting and relieving, in the rotation. And Alex Wood, who was an above-average pitcher each of his last two years in Los Angeles before injuries ruined his 2019, is overqualified as a fifth starter.

It doesn’t stop there; the next four starters are all interesting as well. Dustin May, who might have made the rotation decision tougher for Roberts if he weren’t injured, is a top 15 prospect in all of baseball. Jimmy Nelson may not pitch, but if he does, he’s potentially excellent. Tony Gonsolin filled in last year in the rotation when the team faced injury issues and acquitted himself well. Read the rest of this entry »

Generally speaking, exactly how much money baseball teams make on an annual basis isn’t public knowledge. We can take a look at the sale of MLB franchises and know that when they are sold, teams generally make 8% annually after accounting for inflation. Profits are more difficult to decipher because owners don’t want to disclose just how much money they make, though they are sometimes quick to trumpet an operating loss. The absence of many owners claiming losses is arguably deafening, but in addition to that silence, the publicly traded Braves report their revenues every year. Over the last two seasons, they have provided Liberty Media with nearly $150 million in profits.

Baseball ownership hasn’t traditionally been an avenue for massive yearly profits. In 2001, MLB self-reported unaudited numbers to Congress after MLB’s antitrust exemption was threatened. They had announced that two franchises might be contracted, and that drew the ire of the elected representatives in Washington. It’s fair to take these numbers with a grain of salt, but on average, teams lost around $5 million per year from 1996-2001. MLB did not have a great television contract during that time, but revenues have skyrocketed since then, with significantly better TV deals (both locally and nationally) along with increases in attendance and ticket prices.

Even so, when Liberty Media purchased the Braves in 2007, it wasn’t necessarily an expectation that the club would turn a profit every year, at least according to Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei a year ago. It was that lack of profits that made many speculate that Liberty wouldn’t be holding on to the Braves for a long period of time, but they’ve had a change in philosophy, with huge profits affecting their previous strategy. Read the rest of this entry »

Zack Littell was stellar out of the Minnesota Twins bullpen in 2019. In his first big-league season as a full-time reliever, the 24-year-old right-hander went an unblemished 6-0 with a 2.68 ERA in 29 outings covering 37 innings. His slider was a big reason for his success. Make that his pair of sliders.

“They’re two different pitches,” Littell told me late in the campaign. “When I got moved to the pen and got rid of the curveball — a pitch I’d had my whole career — they said, ‘We’re going to go predominantly slider-fastball, and mix in a few changeups.’ I kind of got used to that, throwing a lot of sliders.”

That would be an understatement. The North Carolina native threw the pitch… er, the two pitches, a full 49.6% of the time last year. He threw his four-seam fastball 48.6% of the time.

Littell, who we first wrote about in 2016 when he was a 19-year-old unranked prospect in the Seattle Mariners system, originally developed a slider in 2017 after being traded to the New York Yankees. At the time, “it was more lateral than downward,” and while the righty called it a slider, it was “pretty much a big cutter.” Read the rest of this entry »

In lieu of real accountability, this season, Houston Astros players will face opposing fans making an ‘oooooo’ sound at them whenever they step on the field. Grating on the nerves, perhaps, or simply just annoying on the ears; but in either case, they’ll likely learn to tune out the noise and focus on playing baseball, a sport that requires a little more focus when you don’t know exactly what’s going to happen next.

When they aren’t tuning it out, though, the Astros would probably like to respond. They will have to pick their spots, as there is little winning to be done from a public relations standpoint. But these are young, competitive, professional athletes whose reputations have been irreversibly tarnished. They might know that they’re the bad guys in this story, but they don’t want to be booed. They want to be celebrated. They want to be championed. They want to shut their critics up by hitting something really hard, and since that something can’t be one of their critics, they’ll have to settle for a baseball.

George Springer walked out of the Astros dugout yesterday to the predictable sea of boos. In addition to the jeers, seven Astros hitters have been hit by pitches this spring, something that has been noted with delight by those waiting for drama to spill out onto the field. Springer hasn’t been one of them yet, but there was a moment during his at-bat against the Mets on Wednesday in which we seem to witness him attempt to send a message to the crowd.

Springer, while being booed, is not able to turn around and yell at the audience to shut the hell up. He has to act like he can’t hear them, even though he might really, really want to acknowledge them somehow. He might want to scream some kind of counterargument about how the Astros aren’t the only team that has cheated, or about how it wasn’t his fault, or how the cheating that happened was actually good for baseball, you see, presenting a detailed powerpoint entitled “Cheating = Good?” all while still screaming, of course.

But Springer can’t do that. Anything an Astros player says in regards to cheating or other people’s reactions to cheating will be an ill-conceived defense and received poorly. We’ve learned throughout this whole thing that while some Astros are better at apologizing than others, it’s difficult to believe any of them are sorry at all. Read the rest of this entry »