This post is part of a series concerning the 2020 Modern Baseball Era Committee ballot, covering executives and long-retired players whose candidacies will be voted upon at the Winter Meetings in San Diego on December 8. For an introduction to JAWS, see here. Several profiles in this series are adapted from work previously published at SI.com, Baseball Prospectus, and Futility Infielder. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

From his matinee-idol good looks as he filled out his red, white, and Dodger blue uniform to the round-numbered triple-crown stats on the back of his baseball card, Steve Garvey looked like a Hall of Famer in the making for much of his 19-year playing career (1969-87). A remarkably consistent and durable player, he had a clockwork ability to rap out 200 hits, bat .300 with 20 homers, and drive in 100 runs, all while maintaining perfectly-coiffed hair and never missing a game. He holds the NL record for consecutive games played (1,207 from September 3, 1975, to July 29, 1983), a streak that’s still the majors’ fourth-longest after those of Cal Ripken Jr., Lou Gehrig, and Everett Scott. He was the most heralded member of the Dodgers’ legendary Longest-Running Infield alongside second baseman Davey Lopes, shortstop Bill Russell, and third baseman Ron Cey, earning All-Star honors in each of the eight full seasons (1974-81) the unit was together while helping the team to four pennants and a championship. After moving on from Los Angeles, Garvey made two more All-Star teams while helping the Padres to their first pennant.

As the most popular player on my favorite childhood team, and the one who seemed to shine most brightly on the biggest stages, Garvey felt larger than life. An Adidas poster of him standing upon what was supposed to be the moon, captioned, “The harder you hit it, the further it goes,” hung on the wall of my younger brother’s bedroom. Yet when I began reading Bill James in the early 1980s, I was struck by the extent to which the new numbers took Garvey down a peg, though to be fair, he’d entered his mid-30s already beginning his decline, postseason heroics aside. Likewise, when I began writing about the Hall of Fame in early 2002, Garvey’s lack of traction on the ballot in his nine previous tries stood out. While I don’t think particularly highly of his chances or his case, I felt it was worth expanding beyond the two or three paragraphs I’ve devoted to him countless times over the years (he was on the writers’ ballot through 2007, and this is his fourth committee appearance).

Born in Tampa, Florida in 1948, Garvey connected with the Dodgers when he was just seven years old. In 1956, his father Joe, a Greyhound bus driver, was assigned to drive charter buses for the defending world champions at their Vero Beach spring training base, and arranged for his son to serve as a bat boy for the team, a position he occupied for the next six springs. Garvey idolized first baseman Gil Hodges and dreamed of playing for Los Angeles. Though small for a high school athlete (5-foot-7, 165 pounds; he would grow to 5-foot-10, 192 pounds), he excelled at baseball and football. Bypassing a chance to join the Twins after being drafted in the third round in 1966, he drew a scholarship to Michigan State University. Read the rest of this entry »

When Will Harris entered Game 7 of the World Series, the Astros were in the driver’s seat. There was only one out in the seventh, and Houston was up by a lone run, but teams in that position usually win — per our Win Expectancy chart, that situation ends in victory 68.7% of the time.

68.7% is notably not 100%, however. When Harris threw Howie Kendrick an 0-1 cutter, Kendrick demonstrated why:

The game wasn’t over after that home run, but it proved decisive nonetheless. The Nationals never relinquished the lead, tacking on insurance runs in the eighth and ninth, and sharked their way to a World Series title. Harris gave up a single to Asdrúbal Cabrera before Roberto Osuna replaced him; after the game, he became a free agent, and may never pitch for the Astros again. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I discussed a few of the qualifying offer decisions facing teams and players this offseason. Yesterday, we learned which players found themselves on the receiving end of a QO. What happened and, given my analysis last week, what are the potential consequences? Let’s take a look.

Received a Qualifying Offer

The Obvious Ones
Anthony Rendon, Gerrit Cole, Josh Donaldson, and Stephen Strasburg all received offers. I think I’m on fairly safe ground by assuming all four will be turned down and that none of these players will have their markets seriously altered or damaged by the loss of a draft pick.

José Abreu
José Abreu is the one player I didn’t address last week who I probably should have. I didn’t actually expect there was much chance of the White Sox making this offer. Abreu should absolutely accept this contract; Nelson Cruz was considerably older last winter, but was had just had a better season and came with no loss of a draft pick, and received just a one-year, $14.3 million deal with a team option.

ZiPS suggests Abreu could fetch a one-year, $10 million contract, considerably less than the qualifying offer; that also doesn’t account for the value of the lost of a draft pick. I suspect Abreu accepts, lest he becomes one of the top candidates this winter for the free agent who doesn’t sign until June.

Madison Bumgarner
Madison Bumgarner was an obvious recipient of a qualifying offer, but he’s worth noting separately due to the likely consequences it will have for his next contract. I didn’t include Bumgarner’s projection in the previous piece, but given that Steamer just came out with a 2.1 WAR forecast for the left-hander in 2020, it’s probably worth demonstrating that Steamer’s not an outlier:

This projection is for a neutral park, which matters for Bumgarner more than most. Bumgarner is more of a fly baller now than he was during his best years and doesn’t throw particularly hard, which is risky in a park that isn’t death to home runs. For his career, Bumgarner has a 58% higher HR/9 on the road than at home and with nearly a decade in the majors, that’s enough of a sample to declare it a concern instead of mere noise. ZiPS doesn’t explicitly use home/road data for individual players but it does see Bumgarner’s tendencies, valuing him at about 0.7 WAR per season more in San Francisco than in a neutral park. When you take the value of the draft pick into account, I’m not sure that Bumgarner is an obvious choice over Wade Miley given otherwise identical contracts.

Jake Odorizzi
The Twins made the smart move and extended a qualifying offer to Jake Odorizzi. The loss of a draft pick for the signing team adds risk to Odorizzi’s decision. The ZiPS projection for the right-hander’s next four years (8.7 WAR) is better than Dallas Keuchel’s four-year projection was entering free agency last winter (8.5 WAR). The situations aren’t identical, but the experiences of Keuchel and other second-tier free agents with compensation attached ought to at least serve as a warning to Odorizzi.

Perhaps I’m being too optimistic, but I still think Odorizzi can get a contract in the four-year, $70 million range, even with the lost draft pick. I’d rather have Odorizzi now than Jake Arrieta after his final season with the Cubs and while it took until March, Arrieta still squeezed a three-year, $75 million deal out of the Phillies. If Odorizzi wants to roll the dice, it may not be the worst idea to take Minnesota’s offer and bet on himself to match 2019’s 4.3 WAR. If he does that two seasons in a row and enters free agency without any strings attached, he might be able to pass the $100 million mark.

Marcell Ozuna
The Cardinals gave Marcell Ozuna his QO and even though I don’t think his next deal will get within spitting distance of $100 million, the market for interesting, young-ish corner outfielders isn’t exactly deep, making Ozuna one of the more compelling options. I’d be surprised if he accepted.

Will Smith
I think the Giants’ decision to make Will Smith an offer was the right one. The question now whether Smith accepts and in this case, I think he should. It’s a fair one-year salary for an excellent closer and if 2019’s crazyball returns, Oracle Park is one of the safest places to be. Playing for the Giants will affect his save totals going into free agency, but really, how many teams are using save totals for evaluation purposes anymore?

Zack Wheeler
There was no trademark Mets unpredictability here, with the team extending a qualifying offer to Zack Wheeler just as it should have. It’s extremely unlikely that Wheeler accepts and, at least based on the ZiPS projections, appears headed for a deal somewhere in the five-year, $100 million range. I would personally have ranked Wheeler as the third-best starting pitcher available after Cole and Strasburg in our 2020 Top 50 Free Agent Rankings rather than Bumgarner, as Wheeler projects better over the next four years, in both their respective home parks and in a neutral one.

Did Not Receive a Qualifying Offer

The Yankees Trio
Suggesting that thrift will remain the watchword in New York, the Yankees did not extend qualifying offers to Didi Gregorius, Brett Gardner, or Dellin Betances. I still think the Yankees ought to have at least made an offer to Gregorius, who averaged 3.7 WAR in his first four seasons in New York. Gregorius will be just 30 for the entirety of the 2020 season and has to be tempting for a team with a short-term shortstop problem.

Kyle Gibson

As expected, the Twins did not extend a QO to Kyle Gibson, though the right-hander will still likely end up with a one-year deal. It might surprise you, but Gibson’s 2.6 WAR in 2019 was identical to his 2018 WAR. ERA-influenced perceptions are still a thing! Like Lance Lynn last winter, I think there’s a chance that Gibson is one of the best value signings for a team this winter.

Cole Hamels
I think Chicago made a mistake by not extending a QO to Cole Hamels. I know the Cubs have decided to do a whole song-and-dance routine about their so-called budget constraints, but they should have jumped at the chance to bring Hamels back so cheaply. There are no internal options that are better bets for 2020 than Hamels, and a better option in free agency will cost more. Would the Cubs be so curiously cheap if they didn’t already have the World Series win?

Rick Porcello
Despite my speculation as to what the case for an offer for Rick Porcello would consist of, I didn’t think there was ever a real chance the Red Sox would take this risk. With J.D. Martinez not opting out of his contract, the Red Sox may not have made the offer even if Porcello was a considerably better pitcher.

Wade Miley
Without a draft pick encumbering Wade Miley, I’d expect him to get a decent-sized, one-year deal in the range of $8-$12 million. Considering the last six weeks of the season, I don’t think he’ll get a multi-year deal.

Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers —Jace Fry, Mitch Keller, and Josh Taylor — on how they learned and developed their sliders.

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Jace Fry, Chicago White Sox

“I started throwing a slider when I was about 14, but it was a different grip, and a different kind of pitch. It was more of a big, sweeping slider. After my second Tommy John surgery, I stopped throwing that one and started throwing the slider I have now. J.R. Perdew taught it to me. This would have been in 2016. I gained a little more velocity, and get sharper action.

“Going back to the beginning, I started throwing a curveball when I was 10, and that one I’ve been throwing my whole career. The slider was added once I got into high school. Growing up, there were a lot of good coaches in my area [Beaverton, Oregon]. My pitching coach was Jim Coffman, who is an area scout for Oakland. I went to him for four or five years, and he’s the one who taught me how to spin the ball correctly, and how to be on time. Read the rest of this entry »

When J.D. Martinez signed his five-year, $110 million contract with the Boston Red Sox two years ago, it included multiple opt-outs, the first of which came this offseason. Martinez could continue with his current deal, which will pay $62.5 million over the next three seasons, or take a $2.5 million buyout and become a free agent, likely with a qualifying offer attached. Martinez has elected to stay with the Red Sox under his current contract, as first reported by Jeff Passan and Jon Heyman.

Martinez has certainly lived up to his end of the bargain in its first two years. In 2018, he put up a six-win season thanks to 43 homers and a 170 wRC+ as the Red Sox won the World Series. While Martinez didn’t come close to matching those numbers in 2019, a 139 wRC+ and 3.2 WAR still made him one of the better hitters in the game. As he heads toward his age-32 season, Martinez seems to have found the comfort of a $62.5 million guarantee more inviting than what might have awaited him on the open market. The move is a bit surprising, but with the Red Sox unlikely to pursue him should he have opted out and the Yankees perhaps out of the mix with their focus on pitching, the number of suitors in the American League in need of a designated hitter, even one as good as Martinez, might not have been as great as needed to significantly improve his current contract.

Of next year’s potential contenders, consider that the Astros, Indians, Twins, A’s, and Angels already have designated hitters pretty much locked in. Which teams remain that might have made big bids on Martinez? The Rangers or the White Sox perhaps, though the former would have had to cut bait with Shin-Soo Choo while the latter’s decision to extend Jose Abreu a qualifying offer probably would have made Martinez a less good fit. The Royals and Tigers, as well as the non-Yankees and Red Sox teams in the AL East, are either ultra-frugal (the Rays) or unlikely to be competitive next season (the Orioles and Blue Jays). The Mariners didn’t seem like a great fit for the same reason as that AL East duo, and the National League was likely off limits given Martinez’s defensive issues. The risk of the market drying up was reasonably high, and with another opt-out after next season, a good 2020 would position Martinez to only have to beat two years and just under $40 million.

In our Top 50 Free Agents list, where Martinez ranked fifth assuming that he would opt out, Kiley McDaniel predicted the DH would garner three years and $77 million as a free agent, while the crowd predicted about $10 million more. Those are reasonable forecasts, but the upside seems to have ended up being worth less than the potential downside. This what Kiley had to say:

I prefer Grandal as a player since he’s younger and has a much greater margin for error, but am projecting Martinez for a bit more money since he would be opting out of three years and $62.5 million to hit free agency. With another opt out after 2020, he could also effectively opt in for a one year and $23.75 million before hitting the market again. He’ll only opt out if he had very good reason to believe that there was at least $70 million out there for him.

The decision shows Martinez’s confidence level. Meanwhile, Jay Jaffe, in his free agent blurb for Martinez, raised concerns about his level of play:

Not only did he not hit the ball quite as hard in 2019 — his exit velocity dipped from 93.0 to 91.3, while his xwOBA dropped from .421 to .401 — he did far less damage against four-seam fastballs 95 mph or higher; over the past three seasons, his xwOBA against such pitches has dropped from .505 to .473 to .351, while his xwOBA against all four-seamers has fallen from .535 to .476 to .419. Between the suggestion that his bat is slowing down as he moves into his mid-30s and his defensive liabilities (-15.1 UZR and -17 DRS over the past three seasons), he could find the market less hospitable than his last time around.

While rumors swirl about the future of Mookie Betts, Alex Speier notes that the Red Sox could try to see what the market holds for Martinez.

While Martinez is a good bet to over-perform the value of his contract, the downward trend noted by Jay, plus the potential dearth of suitors as noted above, could make finding a trading partner difficult. If the Red Sox are only interested in dumping the salary, they shouldn’t have to try too hard to find a taker, but if they are looking to add talent in the deal as well, it could prove difficult. (Why the Red Sox feel the need to cut salary and move talent when they have a contending team in a tough division is a reasonable question.)

With Martinez back in the fold, the Red Sox have a luxury tax payroll of roughly $236 million. Taxes will add another $15 million to Boston’s spend if they make no moves. Trading Martinez would save his $23 million salary, plus another $12 million in taxes. Meanwhile, trimming three wins from the roster without an increase elsewhere will reduce Boston’s chances of making the playoffs. The club will have to decide where its priorities lie.

J.D. Martinez is a good hitter who earned his $110 million contract and all the provisions that came with it. He’s elected not to exercise his opt-out this winter and, at least for now, will stay with the Red Sox under the terms of that deal. It’s proved beneficial to both parties, though so some self-imposed budgetary constraints might end up putting Boston in a difficult spot this offseason.

“What about Whitaker?” That question, which has been on my mind for nearly two decades, came to the fore two years ago when longtime Tigers teammates Jack Morris and Alan Trammell, both of whom spent 15 often contentious and sometimes agonizing years on the BBWAA’s Hall of Fame ballot, were finally elected to the Hall by the Modern Baseball Era Committee. With five All-Star selections, three Gold Gloves, and a central role on the Tigers’ 1984 championship squad, Lou Whitaker had accumulated similarly strong credentials to Trammell while forming the other half of the longest-running double play combo in major league history, one that did a fair bit to prop up Morris’ wobbly candidacy. Yet Whitaker, who ranks 13th in JAWS among second basemen, did not get his 15 years on the writers’ ballot because in his 2001 debut — the last Hall of Fame election cycle that I did not cover, but a pivotal one in many ways — he failed to receive at least 5% of the vote from the BBWAA and thus fell off the ballot. Like so many other candidates who have suffered such a fate, he had never received a second look from a small-committee process. Until now.

Whitaker is one of 10 candidates on the 2020 Modern Baseball Era Committee ballot, which was announced on Monday and which covers players and other figures who made their greatest contributions to the game during the 1970-87 timeframe. He’s not the only one emerging from limbo, either. This marks the first small-committee appearance for longtime Red Sox right fielder Dwight Evans, an eight-time Gold Glove winner who lasted just three cycles on the ballot (1997-99) and peaked at 10.4%, and for late Yankees catcher Thurman Munson, a former MVP who lasted 15 years on the ballot (1981-95) but only in his debut year broke double digits. Munson was virtually ignored on the 2003, ’05, and ’07 ballots voted upon by an expanded Veterans Committee consisting of all living Hall of Famers (and assorted stragglers), receiving just 12 votes out of a possible 243 across those three cycles.

The other seven candidates — former Major League Baseball Players Association executive director Marvin Miller, and ex-players Steve Garvey, Tommy John, Don Mattingly, Dale Murphy, Dave Parker, and Ted Simmons — have each been considered before, some of them multiple times via the 2018 Modern Baseball ballot and its predecessors, the ’11 and ’14 Expansion Era Committee ballots. Indeed, while this slate includes candidates long overdue for a bronze plaque in Cooperstown, a good chunk of ballot space is occupied by candidates who have repeatedly failed to gain much traction with the voters and who fare poorly via JAWS. The extent to which they have crowded out better candidates has been frustrating. Read the rest of this entry »

While championship retrospectives are still being read and written, the rest of baseball is gearing up for the offseason. Immediately following the World Series, there’s always a flurry of activity as players come off the 60-day injured list, and teams get their 40-man rosters in order and begin the long process of building for next season. During these initial days of the offseason, the waiver wire is flooded with players who were removed from their team’s roster. With so many players shuffling around, these minor moves can get swept under the rug pretty quickly. After all, it’s unlikely a waiver claim in November will have much of an effect on a team’s fortunes next season. But sometimes the waiver wire holds a piece of true gold amidst all the pyrite.

Last year, the Rays claimed Oliver Drake from the Twins on November 1. It was the fourth time Drake had been claimed off waivers, with the Twins his seventh team in 2018. He was later designated for assignment three times that offseason, claimed by another team, and then traded back to the Rays in early January. That’s not exactly the ideal blueprint for how these waiver wire claims should go, but Drake’s performance during the 2019 season was as good as the Rays could have hoped for (3.87 FIP, 0.5 WAR).

The Twins are hoping to uncover their own piece of treasure in Matt Wisler. Claimed off waivers from the Mariners, Wisler certainly looks the part of roster chaff. A former top prospect, he was included in the first big Craig Kimbrel trade before he could make his debut with his original team, the Padres. He struggled in the Braves rotation for a couple of years before getting moved to the bullpen in 2017, and has bounced around the league the last two seasons, from Atlanta to Cincinnati in 2018, then back to San Diego in 2019, and finally to Seattle. Since making the transition to relief work, he’s posted an ugly 5.89 ERA and a 4.63 FIP across 123.2 innings, accumulating 0.4 WAR in three seasons.

Besides his long-forgotten prospect pedigree, Wisler looks exactly like the kind of depth that gets shuffled around in November before getting buried on the depth chart once the offseason begins in earnest. But digging below the surface reveals the potential for gold. Since 2017, Wisler has increased his strikeout rate at each stop in the majors, from 14.4% with the Braves to 30.5% with the Mariners. His ability to prevent runs hasn’t benefited from all those extra strikeouts, but it gives him an intriguing foundation that could be honed with a little development. Read the rest of this entry »

What actually makes a pitch effective? Is it the ability to induce whiffs or draw weak contact on a regular basis? Both? Are those factors actually the result of the pitch itself or the way others in a repertoire set it up? How about its movement? Can that alone make a pitch great?

Changeups and sliders are both interesting pitches, sliders in particular because there are so many variations. And changeups can be thrown with a variety of grips, making them all behave in different ways. The circle change, the Vulcan change, the “Fosh” change, the three-finger and split change — the list goes on.

Luis Castillo, Kyle Hendricks, Mike Minor, and Zack Greinke are a few pitchers who possess a great changeup. But there is another you might not think of in the same breath who deserves the same level of recognition. One that Pitch Info rated as having the most effective changeup in baseball through the 2019 season, namely former Los Angeles Dodgers starter and current free agent Hyun-Jin Ryu.

Before we dive into Ryu’s changeup, let’s go over what having an “effective” changeup, per Pitch Info, entails.

This evaluation of effectiveness comes from our Pitch Type Linear Weights (or ‘Pitch Values’), which attempt to measure how successful a pitcher (or hitter) has been with (or against) a particular pitch. Did batters regularly hit the pitch for productive outcomes, or does it tend to create outs? There is no real predictive value in these ratings. Instead, they are a reflection of what happened over the course of the season, which makes this stat particularly useful here.

A bit of caution, as there is some missing context here. If a pitcher throws a highly-graded pitch, it doesn’t always mean that it’s been strong across the board. A pitcher could have other pitches that make the pitch in question better. For example, maybe he has a dynamite fastball and a breaking pitch that, when thrown before or after the heater, regularly keeps the hitter off-balance and produces favorable results. Is it because of the pitch itself (in this case, the changeup) or is it an after-effect of the fastball? Is Ryu’s changeup elite because it’s a good pitch on its own, or because his fastballs complement it well? Read the rest of this entry »

Aroldis Chapman, most recently seen allowing a home run to José Altuve that sent the Astros to the World Series, has reportedly signed a contract extension with the Yankees that will keep him in New York through the 2022 season. The deal, as reported, adds one year and $18 million onto the two years and $30 million that were left on Chapman’s previous contract, and answers the question — open since that Altuve home run — of whether Chapman would exercise the opt out in his contract and become a free agent this offseason.

Last week, Jon Heyman reported that Chapman, 32, planned to exercise his opt-out in the event he was unable to reach a deal with the Yankees for an additional year. That move would almost certainly have resulted in the Yankees extending Chapman a qualifying offer (this year set at $17.8 million), Chapman declining to sign at that price, and Chapman and his agent subsequently seeking a deal that involved the signing team giving up a draft pick.

Having no doubt watched the Craig Kimbrel experience play out last offseason, and presumably wanting no part of it, it makes sense that Chapman would pursue an extension in New York rather than test free agency with a QO hanging around his neck. This is now the second time the left-hander has chosen to return to New York (the first time, when he signed his current contract, came in 2016) and this extension guarantees him three more years in the city he calls home — not to mention a worry-free winter.

The Yankees benefit too. Retaining Chapman means that their excellent 2019 relief corps can return mostly intact, and in particular that Zack Britton, Adam Ottavino, Tommy Kahnle, and Chad Green can return to the roles they played last season, and are presumably comfortable with (that’s especially true for Britton, who for obvious reasons threw in many of the same sorts of situations as Chapman). That’s not to discount Chapman’s contributions on their own terms, as they were excellent last year (a 2.28 FIP and a 36.2% strikeout rate over 57 innings pitched) despite modest declines in fastball velocity that began in the middle of 2018 and persisted in 2019:

It’s hard to know what to make of Chapman’s velocity decline or what it augurs for his future effectiveness. As far as I can tell, the conventional wisdom on relievers is that they’re good until they’re not, except for elite relievers, who are good for longer until they’re not. Chapman definitely falls into the latter category, and as Ben Clemen’s wrote earlier this year, he’s already demonstrated success in moving somewhat away from his fastball in favor of sliders inside the strike zone. Since Ben wrote that piece, Chapman has gravitated even more towards his slider, throwing it 31.1% of the time in 2019 against 19.7% two years ago and 19.3% on his career.

Perhaps most promisingly, Chapman has demonstrated a willingness to use that slider in most instances with the count even or behind, saving his fastball only for the first strike of the sequence (in the chart below, courtesy of Baseball Savant, his fastball is in red, his slider in yellow, and his little-used sinker in orange). That sinker only appears with two strikes and fewer than two balls, when Chapman uses it to try to generate swings and misses.

All in all, although I wouldn’t personally want to be on the hook today for paying a generic 35-year-old reliever $18 million in 2022, I think this is the right move for the Yankees, whose owners are significantly richer than I. Chapman has convincingly demonstrated that he is anything but a generic reliever, and finalizing their bullpen this early in the offseason gives New York the cost certainty they need to pursue other, Gerrit Cole-shaped projects. What’s more — and this is where it gets icky — the Yankees have clearly already decided that they’re comfortable with Chapman’s history and past suspension under the league’s domestic violence policy (Hal Steinbrenner, their owner, was quoted in 2017, not long after Chapman signed his first deal with New York, as saying of the incident, “Sooner or later, we forget, right?“).

Any other team that signed Chapman — save perhaps the Cubs — would no doubt have deservedly tarnished their reputation for doing so. For the Yankees, that decision was made three years ago, though that stretch hasn’t dimmed our memories quite like Steinbrenner thought, or perhaps hoped, it would.

With Chapman’s new contract will likely come ripple effects downstream in the relief market. Will Harris, Will Smith, Daniel Hudson, and Dellin Betances (not to mention Drew Pomeranz, Chris Martin, and Jake Diekman) are all available this offseason, and probably happy to see Chapman return to a team already rife with relief arms. There aren’t quite as many sure bets on the market this offseason as there were, perhaps, a year ago, when Kimbrel, Britton, Cody Allen, Jeurys Familia, Kelvin Herrera, Andrew Miller, Joakim Soria, David Robertson, and Ottavino were all available. But there are still enough that the teams most in the market will find plenty to consider this winter.

Last year, I wrote a post-length intro for our marathon Top 50 Free Agent list, which Carson Cistulli demanded I spin off into its own piece of scorching hot free agency takes. Like last year, I still have extra buzz that didn’t fit into today’s Top 50 post, and while Meg Rowley is less insistent on brevity than Carson was before her, she made the same request, so here it comes, at the molten lava temperatures that you prefer.

First, some bullet-pointed thoughts on specific teams likely to be active, as well as various player markets:

• There’s some buzz that the White Sox will be active for veteran help, particularly on short-term deals with lower guarantees. After getting under the luxury tax, the Dodgers seem poised to spend, with multiple sources tying them to Rendon, while the two top pitchers on the market (Cole, Strasburg) are SoCal natives. The Yankees had the third-best record and third-best run differential in baseball, but seem a player or two short and weren’t able to stay under the luxury tax to reset the penalties; they seem likely to spend in this area again. Philadelphia seems primed to spend again this offseason to help get past Washington and Atlanta. Speaking of which, Atlanta has a stable of young players to fill in the back of the roster, but needs a couple frontline types from the top 10 of the list to raise their upside. Cincinnati, San Diego, and the Mets all seem to be focused on a playoff run in 2020, which could result in them making moves more aggressively this winter than other teams with similar talent.
• Last year, Dallas Keuchel, Craig Kimbrel, and Mike Moustakas were among the free agents most-squeezed in terms of the deal they eventually got vs. the deal they wanted/deserved. Keuchel and Moustakas are back on the market and I rounded down a bit on their projected deals in the Top 50 since they’re still the same players, but a year older, though Keuchel has now rid himself of a qualifying offer and its accompanying draft pick compensation. Players over 30 who seem unlikely to post 3 WAR or more simply aren’t what most clubs are looking for on a multi-year deal, especially when the most successful clubs seem to be finding two-win players between the couch cushions, or in the second and third tier of their prospect lists.
• Teams want impact, durability, and youth when paying premium prices over a long term, and in this market, only Gerrit Cole and Anthony Rendon clearly possess all three attributes. The two profiles next-closest to that are guys who ended up moving up the board a bit throughout the process: Yasmani Grandal and Marcell Ozuna. They are entering their age-30 and age-29 seasons, respectively, with Grandal offering outstanding performance at a premium position, while Ozuna has youth, tools, and upside along with a pretty solid track record. I’d expect both to get four-year deals, which are increasingly rare below $100 million.

Read the rest of this entry »