Trevor Larnach projects as an impact bat at the big league level. Ranked second on our Minnesota Twins Top Prospect list, and 55th on our 2020 Top 100 Prospects list, the 23-year-old Oregon State University product has, in the words of our own Eric Longenhagen, “titanic raw power… and a refined approach.” Moreover, he makes consistent hard contact. Last season, 51.9% of Larnach’s batted balls were hit 95 mph or higher.

Larnach worked to further fine-tune his left-handed stroke over the offseason, and he continues to do so during the current pandemic-necessitated hiatus. He has a specific objective in mind. Larnach slashed .309/.384/.458 last year between High-A Fort Myers and Double-A Pensacola — heady enough numbers to merit an invitation to big-league camp — but an inefficiency has stuck in his craw. The extent to which he can conquer it remains unknown, but given that he draws much of his inspiration from the preparedness of Navy Seals, there’s a pretty good chance that he will.

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David Laurila: To start, how are you preparing while the season is on hold?

Trevor Larnach: “I’m hitting every day. I’m working with the hitting guy I’ve been with for quite a few years now, Tyler Graham. He recently went from Oregon State’s baseball staff over to the [Texas] Rangers’ staff, where he’s working with their Triple-A team. We’re basically taking what I learned from spring training into kind of an offseason format. I’m pretty much doing everything I did in the offseason, but incorporating a couple of things into my routine that got exposed in big-league camp.“

Laurila: What got exposed?

Larnach: “In big league spring training you’re facing big leaguers and upper level minor league guys. Of course, early on they’re still trying to work out the kinks — just as the hitters are — but putting that aside, I was experiencing big league level pitching: the stuff, the speed, the consistency. It kind of shapes your frame of mind to where you need to be to put yourself in the best position to succeed.

“A big positive for me was getting to talk to Nelson Cruz, Torii Hunter, Justin Morneau, Josh Donaldson, Marwin Gonzalez, and all these different guys. I was picking different things that each one had to say, and incorporating them into my game. Spring training is a perfect time to test things out. I was putting what I worked on in the offseason to test, while at the same time taking in things I took from those guys.”

Laurila: How does the pitching you were facing tie into that? Read the rest of this entry »

The end of March featured a bit of relatively good news on the baseball front, as MLB and the MLBPA agreed on a deal that appeared to address issues like service time and player compensation during this unusual season, allowing for a smooth path forward once and if it is safe to begin play. (Amateur players, who saw the rounds of the June draft dramatically reduced, got a far less good bargain.) The deal looked to be a good compromise from both sides, seemingly ensuring that labor questions would not get in the way of an abbreviated season. However, recent reports, which keyed off comments from Mets owner Fred Wilpon to New York governor Andrew Cuomo, indicate that the peace is not quite as secure as was once thought.

As initially reported, the deal seemed fairly straightforward. The players would receive a salary advance of $170 million that would not need to be paid back in the event of a cancelled season. In addition, the players were to receive service time consistent with what they had accrued in 2019 if no season was played. The players and owners agreed that player salaries would be pro-rated to the number of games played, with service time calculated in the same fashion. The owners received a guarantee that players would not sue for their 2020 salaries. The owners were also given the ability to defer more than a quarter of a billion dollars of draft and international bonuses to future years while the reduction in rounds would eliminate between $50 million and $100 million from the draft pool entirely. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I began looking at strange decisions made in past World Series. Partially, it’s very interesting to me, and partially, there’s no baseball happening at the moment, but we have to write about something. This week — yep, still no baseball. And so here is the next installment in Wild World Series Tactics.

1998

The one thing you definitely know about the 1998 World Series is that the Yankees swept the Padres. It wasn’t pretty — the Padres were outscored by 13 runs in four games. But the Padres had a sweet lineup, for the most part. Tony Gwynn anchored the lineup from the two hole, and even though he was nearing the end of the line, he still put up a 130 wRC+ this year. Quilvio Veras was a credible leadoff hitter, their worst hitters were at the bottom of the lineup — this batting order wouldn’t raise eyebrows today.

The Yankees were no slouches in the roster construction department either. Part of this might be due to who the number two hitters are; Gwynn and Derek Jeter were both great hitters who happened to fit the old stereotype of a bat control guy. The leadoff hitters still fit the speed mold. Whatever the case may be, however, both of these lineups looked great for the time.

For the first six innings of Game 1, if you ignore the graphics, this could almost be a recent game. There were no bunts, no intentional walks, and three home runs. Both pitchers went deep, but Kevin Brown was a 10-WAR pitcher in 1998, and David Wells was the Yankees’ ace; that’s hardly weird. Read the rest of this entry »

Whether you’re assembling a fantasy baseball team or a real-life one, my number one rule is to never trust pitchers. Don’t trust that a pitcher will stay healthy. And even if they can avoid an extended stint on the Injured List, don’t trust a pitcher to put up numbers that resemble any previous season.

But even in the wildly unpredictable game of baseball, there is a very small group of starting pitchers who stand above the rest due to a rare combination of command, stuff, consistency, and durability. The winners of the Cy Young Award often come from this group of aces. Several have won the award multiple times. Twenty-one pitchers have accounted for more than half of the 118 Cy Young awards handed out since the honor was created in 1956 (Don Newcombe was the first recipient).

Back in 1981, a 19-year-old rookie named Fernando Valenzuela won the hearts of Cy Young voters after “Fernandomania” ran wild through the baseball world. But he’s the rare exception, an overnight sensation who won the award. The Cy Young typically goes to well-established stars with track records of success. Where they differ is the beginning of their paths and how it led them to their respective team.

Here’s a look back at how the NL Cy Young winners of the 1990s were acquired. Read the rest of this entry »

What this winter’s free agent market ends up looking like — and how lucrative it proves to be for players — is unsurprisingly very much in flux. The 2020 season is still in flux, and how it plays out, or if it ends up being played at all, will have a significant affect on the offseason. If there’s no season, we know that players will still receive service time, making guys like Mookie Betts, James Paxton, and J.T. Realmuto free agents. Players will receive raises in arbitration. For competitive balance tax purposes, no season would mean no tax payments. The Red Sox would still need to stay under the $210 million tax threshold in order to reset their tax amount, though with 2021 being the final season of the current CBA between the players and owners, the ramifications of such a move are very much unknown and could end up being completely nullified by a new deal.

Ifsome version of the season does get played, there might be slightly fewer questions, but the winter will still bring about considerable uncertainty. With that in mind, and the season still a ways off, let’s take a moment to see how team payrolls are shaping up this offseason. For the graph below, I looked at competitive balance tax payrolls, which take the average annual value of contracts and include around $15 million in benefits, with a few million for 40-man players not on the active roster, as well as expected minimum salaries players. I estimated arbitration-eligible players by giving them a 50% raise over 2020 figures and for the most part, I declined club options. The only options shown as exercised below are for Adam Eaton, Starling Marte, Anthony Rizzo, and Kolten Wong. All others are presumed declined. All figures are from our RosterResource Payroll pages. If rosters remain the same with a season played in 2020, this is what we might see as payroll heading into free agency.

Read the rest of this entry »

Hu? The name took me back, and even more than a decade later, accounted for a substantial percentage of what I knew about Taiwanese players in the professional ranks. Circa 2008, Chin-Lung Hu was considered a Top 100 prospect by both Baseball America (no. 55) and Baseball Prospectus (no. 32), and the third-best prospect on the Dodgers behind Clayton Kershaw, who panned out, and Andy LaRoche, who did not. I’d written about him a couple of times for the Baseball Prospectus annuals, noting that his acrobatic fielding conjured up comparisons to Omar Vizquel and forecast for future Gold Gloves as well as the bat speed to hit .300 at the major league level. A dozen years later, here he was, halfway around the globe and fresh off a milestone and a bit of history: his 1,000th hit in the Taiwan-based Chinese Professional Baseball League — due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the only professional baseball league currently playing its regular season, albeit to empty ballparks — and with the fewest games played (704) to reach that mark to boot.

Alas, I had actually missed the momentous knock, but caught up with it on Twitter a short while after via the Eleven Sports Taiwan account, which was streaming an English-language broadcast of Saturday’s game between the Rakuten Monkeys and the Fubon Guardians (Hu’s team). The Guardians had been on the short end of a 12-2 rout in the eighth inning when Hu, who had gone 0-for-4 in pursuit of hit number 1,000, singled just to the right of second base, plating a run.

NO.1000 HIT for #HuChinLung #???
He is a former @MLB @Dodgers player #Hu become the fastest to reach this goal in #CPBL history @fubonguardians pic.twitter.com/OEQczSBv31

— DAZN Taiwan (@DAZNTaiwan) April 18, 2020

An inning and maybe 45 minutes later — shortly after 9:30 AM in Brooklyn, where I had my 3 1/2-year-old daughter in my lap as we peered at a foreign but recognizable version of the national pastime — the announcers were still talking about Hu’s hit, because he was up again in what was now a 12-5 game. With men on first and second and two outs, he grounded into a potential game-ending double play, but the second baseman’s throw had pulled the shortstop well off the bag, and Hu beat the throw to first. The Guardians’ manager actually challenged the call via instant replay but was denied. The inning continued, and the game eventually ended 12-9, still a win for the undefeated (4-0) Monkeys.

My appetite had been whetted, to say the least. Read the rest of this entry »

Life isn’t fair, as it continually reminds us, but we try to keep sports as far from the harsh light of reality as we can. The New York Yankees and Tampa Bay Rays certainly don’t start in the same place when creating a roster, but when those players are on the field, everybody has to play by the same rules. Whether you’re facing Gerrit Cole or whatever fifth starter the Baltimore Orioles Mad-Libbed onto the roster, you have to get actual hits, score actual runs, and make actual Statcast-blessed defensive plays.

It’s extraordinarily difficult to keep the schedules teams face fair. Ideally, we’d want every team to face the same strength of schedule. With complete discretion over the design of the season, that’s still a nearly impossible task, without knowing which teams will be the best and worst ones ahead of time. And it becomes definitely impossible with unbalanced division schedules, series played mostly in three or four-game chunks, and a need to avoid having teams travel thousands of miles every day, like some character in the final season of Game of Thrones.

And even if you avoid all these things using some dark magics from the Necronomicon or Carson Cistulli’s personal notes, you’re still bound by the laws of the physical universe. Teams can’t play themselves, so even if every team played every other team the same number of games each season, the Yankees get a bonus by not having to play the Yankees, while Orioles’ hitters never get the opportunity to feast on Orioles pitching. Read the rest of this entry »

This is the latest installment of a series in which the FanGraphs staff rounds up the latest developments regarding the COVID-19 virus’ effect on baseball.

Baseball Invokes UEC Contract Provisions

Per a report by Ken Rosenthal, Major League Baseball will invoke a force majeure provision in the Uniform Employee Contract signed by all non-player personnel on May 1. The provision allows for the suspension of contracts in extraordinary circumstances. The provision has been available to teams since the declaration of a national state of emergency on March 13, but until now hadn’t been used.

The consequences of this decision aren’t yet known. Teams could do anything from leaving everything exactly as-is to furloughing all of their non-player workers, though healthcare benefits will remain the same. Still, even if teams don’t immediately act, it’s a tough situation for workers, including front office personnel, coaches, and scouts, who must now face the prospect of reduced salary or even unemployment while planning for an uncertain season. (Non-player personnel are not unionized.)

The Braves, Giants, and Phillies have already committed to paying their employees until May 31. Other teams will surely follow suit. But it’s hard to read this move as anything other than a bargaining chip for teams. With the specter of unemployment looming over them, employees might be more amenable to changing the terms of their contracts. The Players’ Association has already reached an agreement with MLB on salary changes in the event of a shortened season, and it appears that non-player employees may soon need to do the same. Read the rest of this entry »

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 — Anthony Kay, Pablo López, and Zac Lowther — on how they learned and developed their changeups.

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Anthony Kay, Toronto Blue Jays

“I’ve been throwing this changeup ever since I’ve been pitching. I never really had a curveball until I was 16 or 17 years old. Growing up, it was mainly just fastball-changeup because my dad didn’t want me [throwing curveballs]. My older brother played, and he also didn’t have a curveball until he got older.

“I first learned a circle change, and I still pretty much throw it to this day. Of course, there has been a little bit of variation. When I came back from [Tommy John surgery] in 2017 it was pretty inconsistent, and I was trying to find a grip that made it more reliable. I used to be on the seams, like a two-seamer, and now I’m kind of moved over to where it’s almost the same, but just off the seams. I was cutting it a lot, and I think being on the seams was a big reason for that. Now that I’m off them, I feel I get a truer release to it.

“It was mostly an inconsistency issue. There were some days where it would be really good, and there were days where it wouldn’t be good at all; it would cut. So I figured I might as well just mess around with it a little bit and try and get it more consistent. I don’t know that I really understand why [the adjustment makes made it more consistent], but it did. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m not privy as to whether the Cincinnati Reds assign a grade to character in their draft reports. I also don’t know how much the San Diego Padres weigh that attribute when pondering possible acquisitions. I do know that Taylor Trammell projects as more than a quality big-league outfielder. He projects as a role model.

Trammell became a Padre last summer. Part of the trade-deadline deal that sent Trevor Bauer to the Queen City, he’d been selected 35th overall by the Reds in the 2016 draft out of Kennesaw, Georgia’s Mount Paran Christian School. Blessed with plus raw tools, Trammell is slotted No. 69 on our 2020 Top 100 Prospects list.

A prima donna he’s not. When he reaches the big leagues, Trammell will do so with a genuine appreciation for what life has presented him. Moreover, he doesn’t just embrace the game of baseball. He embraces the people who come to see it played.

“I have thoughts on fans,” Trammell told me in Padres camp last month. “I love them. There are people who come to games and want to heckle, and they have the right to do that. Do I agree with it? No, but if you want to pay money to come yell at us, I mean, do whatever you want. Go to a boxing match. Go to a baseball game. Go to a basketball game. Any game. When there are a whole bunch of fans in the stands, whether they’re rooting for you or not rooting for you, it’s great for baseball. They want to see a game and we’re putting on a show for them.”

If you’re rolling your eyes with skepticism upon reading that, you shouldn’t be. By all accounts, that’s who Trammell is. Part of a working-class family — his father is a post office employee, his mother once balanced two jobs — he hasn’t forgotten where he came from. The values he grew up with remain the same. Read the rest of this entry »