Consider the book thrown at the Astros. On Monday, commissioner Rob Manfred announced the results of MLB’s investigation into allegations pertaining to the Astros’ electronic sign-stealing efforts in 2017, the year they won the World Series, and handed down a set of sanctions that together form the most severe punishment administered to a single team since Judge Landis banned eight White Sox players for life in 1921. In this instance, no players were banned or even suspended; instead, Manfred took aim at the Astros’ braintrust, suspending both president of baseball operations Jeff Luhnow and manager AJ Hinch for the 2020 season but deferring punishment for bench coach Alex Cora, the most directly involved non-player, pending the results of a similar investigation into the 2018 Red Sox’s actions. Additionally, the team was stripped of four high draft picks and fined $5 million, the maximum amount allowed under MLB’s constitution. Finally, former Astros assistant general manager Brandon Taubman was placed on baseball’s ineligible list.

In announcing his decision via a 10-page report (PDF here), Manfred confirmed and elaborated upon a November report by The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich that the Astros systematically used their video replay system in an attempt to decode opposing teams’ signs and relay them to the team’s hitters via a trash can-based system of signals. The report was based on interviews with 68 individuals as part of this investigation plus an additional nine interviews related to Taubman’s inappropriate conduct towards female reporters during the team’s ALCS victory celebration.

As I wrote last week, MLB’s failure to anticipate the consequences introduced by the creation of video replay rooms in connection with the adoption of the instant replay review system in 2014 has echoes of the league falling behind in addressing the influx of performance-enhancing drugs in the 1990s. Both issues centered around highly competitive players crossing into gray areas while looking for that extra edge, but because of the key differences in the two issues — mainly the protection of the players’ union and the need for a collectively bargained system of testing and suspensions when it came to PED usage — commissioner Bud Selig never had the chance to bring the hammer down on PED users with the force that Manfred applied here. This is a hefty and impactful set of punishments that asserts the commissioner’s authority and is designed to deter other teams from similar behavior, but it won’t be the last set of them given the investigation into the Red Sox and the possibility of further inquiries. Various decisions within Manfred’s purview on this won’t please everyone, but since when has any commissioner managed to do so?

In the report, Manfred laid out a timeline for the Astros’ gradually more elaborate efforts to steal signs using electronic equipment, a practice broadly prohibited by MLB rules but not strictly enforced at the time, and one that arose with the introduction of reviewable replays. The Astros’ efforts “with the exception of Cora [were] player-driven and player-executed,” and began early in the 2017 season, with a simple system where employees in the team’s video replay room viewed live footage from the center field camera, then decoded and relayed the sign sequence to the dugout. From there it was signaled to a runner on second base, who would transmit the signal to the batter. Soon Cora began calling the replay review room to obtain the signals, and on some occasions the information was delivered via text messages on smart watches or cell phones. Read the rest of this entry »

There was an unusual flurry of contract extensions handed out last offseason. In March alone, teams guaranteed over $1 billion in new contract extensions to 11 players — Mike Trout’s record-breaking 10-year, $360 million contract was the centerpiece. In all, 26 players signed a new contract extension between the end of the 2018 World Series and the beginning of the regular season with seven more getting ink on the page in early April. It was an unprecedented outbreak of extensions for players young and old (ish). We’ve already seen five contract extensions since the end of the World Series this offseason, including new contracts for Aroldis Chapman, José Abreu, and Luis Robert. Now we have two more to add to the list in David Peralta and Miguel Sanó.

The first was signed on Friday when Peralta agreed to a three-year, $22 million contract extension with the Diamondbacks. The deal buys out the 32-year-old’s final season of arbitration and his first two years of free agency. He won’t receive a raise on his salary from last season ($7 million) like he would have in arbitration, but the guaranteed salary over the next three years makes it a nice trade-off. After suffering an injury to his AC joint in his right shoulder and spending time on the injured list three times in 2019, this contract extension gives Peralta some security if his injury woes continue.

For the Diamondbacks, Peralta represents an important piece of continuity as they enter the second year of their soft reset that started when they traded away Paul Goldschmidt and Zack Greinke. Peralta’s age and injury history precludes him from being considered part of Arizona’s core group of players led by Ketel Marte, but he’s certainly an important part of their roster as they try and compete for the NL Wild Card again. If his shoulder is healthy, his four-win season in 2018 provides a tantalizing glimpse at his potential ceiling. For an average annual value of just over $7 million, this extension could provide some excellent value for the Diamondbacks. It also provides some cost control for the organization in 2021 and 2022 when they have a sizeable group of prospects that could be graduating and the payroll room to supplement their young core with significant free agent additions. Read the rest of this entry »

For some time, the Rays have approached prospect valuation similarly to other small market clubs like Pittsburgh. The short version is that Tampa has valued their prospects more highly than almost any other club because their small payroll means cheap contributors are worth more because they have the least to spend. In recent years, they have also led the farm system rankings and had among the deepest 40-man rosters, causing them to trade valuable prospects like Nick Solak and
Jesús Sánchez due to these two pressures. This dynamic was also clearly at work in last week’s Matthew Liberatore trade.

Adding cheap, controllable major league talent to one of the best teams in baseball is key to the Rays both being better when their present competitive window is open and allowing the team to keep players who they’ve helped improve and create value, thus avoiding the same fate as they did with Avisaíl García. García signed a one-year make-good deal for 2019 for $3.5 million guaranteed; he then made good and got $20 million from the Brewers. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Friday was the deadline for all 155 arbitration-eligible players who have been tendered contracts to either agree to terms with their teams, or file desired salary figures ahead of an arbitration hearing. At the hearing, an arbitrator chooses either the figure submitted by the player or by the team; they cannot choose any other dollar amount. Those hearings will take place in the coming weeks. It might not be the most exciting day of the offseason, but it is a very necessary one as we move toward spring, and it certainly results in a high volume of transactions. By our count, 140 players reached agreements; you can see them all in our Offseason Tracker. Just click on the player to find out the amounts. Here’s what we learned from the contracts that did — and did not — get signed last Friday.

Some Clarity Emerged Surrounding Potential Trades

Trade rumors continue to circle Mookie Betts, Kris Bryant, and Francisco Lindor, and determining an official salary number for 2020 could be useful in setting up potential trades. Teams aren’t going to let a few million dollars stand in the way when negotiating the trade of a superstar, but knowing that Mookie Betts will make exactly $27 million (breaking Nolan Arenado’s final-year arbitration record of $26 million) provides some clarity. It also ensures that any team that trades for him would not have to go through the arbitration process with a player they just acquired. Francisco Lindor is still two years away from free agency and his $17.5 million salary is a bargain for Cleveland, just as it would be for any team looking to trade for him. Kris Bryant’s $18.6 million figure is an exception here. While we now know what he’ll be making in 2020, his grievance against the Cubs for service time manipulation has yet to be decided, and the chance that Bryant could be a free agent after 2020 instead of 2021 will likely continue to prevent meaningful negotiations.

File and Trial Produces Settlements and Unnecessary Arbitration

Several years ago, teams began to adopt an arbitration strategy where they would elect not to negotiate single-season salaries once arbitration figures had been exchanged. This strategy, called File and Trial, meant that any agreement needed to come before the arbitration deadline. Exchanging figures was no longer another step in an attempted settlement prior to a hearing, but instead, effectively ended negotiations. The strategy was designed to spur early settlements and extract lower figures from players, as they needed to ensure that they submitted a figure likely to result in an arbitrator siding with them in a hearing. The strategy has been successful, but its utility will come into question over the coming weeks. Read the rest of this entry »

Seattle Mariners GM Jerry Dipoto said the following when I spoke to him in November:

“The best we can do is lay out a game plan, a quality game plan, and then track our success. In this game, everything can be tracked.”

That includes trades, and it’s no secret that Dipoto has made a lot of them since he was hired to replace Jack Zduriencik following the 2015 season. The exact number — this based on a perusal of transaction logs — is a whopping 106, which works out to more than two dozen annually. The subject broached, Dipoto acknowledged that “it’s a long spreadsheet.”

What does the spreadsheet show in terms of wins and losses? The plethora of deals precludes a detailed response to such a question, but the 51-year-old executive did provide an overview when asked. Read the rest of this entry »

Imagine, if you will, running the Rays. As you ponder your next fleecing acquisition, a lackey rushes in. “Sir! I’ve found a new undervalued talent to acquire!” Before you can even ask, he continues. “He’s on the Cardinals, and his name is Randy Ar–.”

“The Cardinals?!?” You thought you’d trained your lackeys better. “They probably won’t even take our phone calls. They hate us! They never forgave us for that time we sent them Revelation Cabrera.”

“Génesis, sir. And I’ve got that angle covered. We’ve been working on our player operations department, as you know. And Kean, the new recruit we released to bring us back information from other clubs? He already has a mole.”

Of course, this isn’t how major league front offices work. They all have each other on speed dial. They go to the same conferences, hire people back and forth, and value players using roughly similar frameworks. One bad trade isn’t enough to jam up the works; teams understand that baseball players have unknowable and variable outcomes, that sometimes Tommy Pham is a key cog and sometimes he hurts his hip.

I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s talk details. Thursday night, the Rays sent Matthew Liberatore, Edgardo Rodriguez, and a Competitive Balance Round B pick to the Cardinals in exchange for Randy Arozarena, José Martínez, and a Competitive Balance Round A pick. That’s a lot of moving parts, so we’ll break them down one by one before talking about the overarching strategy behind it. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past few days, we’ve discussed the cost of a win in free agency and how that cost has been lowered for slightly below-average players. In this post, I want to examine some of the potential driving forces behind these changes. Specifically, I want to take a look at the following assumptions about how teams operate with respect to paying for wins on the free agent market.

• The closer teams get to the playoffs, the more money they will be willing to spend on players because of the monetary benefits that come from making the playoffs.
• The more money a team has, the more they will be willing to spend on a win on the free agent market because they can afford it, and vice versa (i.e. the Rays won’t spend the same dollars per win as the Yankees because the Rays have to hunt for bargains while the Yankees can afford to make the highest offer to any player they want).

We’ll take these assumptions one at a time. While there isn’t a great way to bucket teams by whether they’re “close” to the postseason without some degree of arbitrariness, I opted to look at a team’s projected win totals for each of the last two seasons, plus its current projected WAR for next season. I put teams into three categories: likely playoff teams, teams with a decent shot at the playoffs, and teams with little to no hope of making the playoffs. For the first group, I included teams projected to win at least 86 games, which usually provides a 50% or greater shot at the playoffs. For the second group, I included teams projected to win at least 77 games, but fewer than 86, which is roughly aligns with the 10%-50% range in terms of playoff odds. In the final group, I put teams with fewer than 77 projected wins.

The table below shows how much each group is spending over the last three offseasons, including this one:

Read the rest of this entry »

Last month, I set out to investigate whether the 2019-2020 offseason was a sea change in terms of teams outside the playoffs signing free agents. I can save you the click on that link — it wasn’t. At the time, things were leaning toward the less-egalitarian end of the spectrum; weighted by WAR, the average free agent was joining a team with a .545 record in 2019.

But that was a month ago, and many more signings have happened since then. All kinds of bad or in-the-middle teams have been getting into the act; the Blue Jays signed Hyun-Jin Ryu, the White Sox continued their bonanza, and the Diamondbacks signed Madison Bumgarner. There were smaller moves as well — Tanner Roark also joined the Blue Jays; Julio Teheran is an Angel now. Even the Tigers signed a few veterans.

Of course, playoff teams from 2019 added free agents as well. The Nationals fortified their bullpen with Will Harris and Daniel Hudson (plus bonus Starlin Castro action), and the Twins added Rich Hill and Homer Bailey. The point is, it’s not obvious whether the haves or have nots have done better since then.

Let’s look at a quick update first. First, there’s the rough cut; the total wins acquired in the offseason so far. Playoff teams are still acquiring more than half of the WAR available in free agency: Read the rest of this entry »

Héctor Rondón made a ton of appearances last year for a solid Houston bullpen. The Astros had a top 10 bullpen in both ERA and WAR, and Rondón made the third-most appearances on the team. If you only knew those two things, then, it would look like quite the deal when the Diamondbacks signed Rondón for a mere $3 million, with a club option for 2021 tacked onto the back end, as Nick Piecoro reported yesterday.

Of course, I cleverly avoided telling you anything about how good Rondón was last year aside from his appearances. And while he wasn’t abysmal, at least not completely — he had a 3.71 ERA, racked up positive WPA, and still sat 97 mph with his fastball — some of the underlying metrics looked rough. His FIP was a career-worst 4.96, his strikeout rate cratered to 18.7%, and he was below replacement level on the year in our FIP-based WAR accounting. By the playoffs, he was buried in the bullpen — seven relievers in the Houston ‘pen faced more batters, and his average entry leverage was a piddling 0.16.

So before we decide if this was a good signing for the Diamondbacks, we need to decide if Rondón is still good. At his peak on the Cubs, he was an impact reliever with pretty good stuff and great control. He’s still only 31 — this isn’t some kind of Fernando Rodney situation here, where there’s a picture in his attic with an increasingly tilted cap that keeps him in baseball shape. He’s still, age-wise at least, in his prime.

So what’s changed for Rondón? We can rule out the normal way relievers break. He’s been extremely durable, making at least 50 appearances for six straight years. He hasn’t lost velocity, either: he throws as hard now as he did when he was on the Cubs. And his postseason banishment wasn’t a matter of him losing steam at the end of a long slog of a year; his fastball averaged 96.8 mph in the playoffs, barely down from 96.9 during the regular season. Read the rest of this entry »

No pitcher who took the mound for at least 50 innings in 2019 threw their four-seam fastball more than Tampa Bay Rays reliever Colin Poche. Utilizing the pitch just over 88% of the time, it went far beyond the league average four-seamer deployment rate of 37.7%. As part of 2019’s strongest bullpen, the 25-year-old Poche produced 0.6 WAR with a 3.79 K/BB rate, which was juxtaposed by his 4.70 ERA (and 4.08 FIP).

There are a few pitchers who are able to live and die by their four-seamer. The question isn’t whether Poche should continue to throw his four-seam fastball roughly nine out of every 10 pitches he throws; it’s whether he actually needs to throw it that much?

Last year, Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel put a 70 FV on Poche’s four-seamer, noting in their write up last year:

Essentially, Poche has an average fastball with three separate characteristics that make it play up. Big league hitters may be less vulnerable to one or more of these characteristics, but if not, Poche’s fastball is going to play like a 7 or 8.

He throws his fastball with almost pure backspin, which creates 99%+ spin efficiency. Under these conditions, Poche (who led the league in FA-Z, min 50 IP) is able to induce a lot of rise on his fastball, or rather, the pitch drops much less than a typical four-seamer. This is advantageous because he lives high in the zone. Hitters who try to square up the elevated four-seamer may end up swinging under the pitch because they expect it to drop more, but in Poche’s case, Mangus Force keeps the pitch up longer than anticipated. That could at least partially explain how Poche was able to produce his 34.8% strikeout rate despite his elevated ERA. Read the rest of this entry »