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 »

Early in the 2019 season, Yoenis Céspedes suffered a mysterious injury on his ranch. Described as a “violent fall,” there had been some discrepancy in exactly how the Mets outfielder suffered a fractured ankle (this while still rehabbing from surgery on both heels). According to fresh reports on the matter in the New York Post, he broke his ankle by stepping in a hole while trying to “sidestep a boar.” The story was confirmed by the Mets, as well as officials from MLB and MLBPA.

There have been many questions in response to this information, such as “Why?” and “How?” and “Again, I ask you… why?” But these put the wrong information in focus. Instead, we must look at the historical context of Céspedes’ misstep, and attempt to understand that the paths of men and boars do not easily cross; and yet, even in this niche of the natural world, baseball has a legacy.

We may not know what draws typical ballpark wildlife, the lost squirrels and panicking cats, to our infields and outfields. But we do know that their slashing claws and snapping mandibles have been on display in the realm of big league baseball for generations. With nature’s fury finding its way into man-made structures, it seems unwise to venture out into the domain that birthed it. Beyond our city limits and past the closest tree line, the creatures that spill into our stadiums are in their natural habitat, and that much more eager (and able) to kill or maim.

Boars have about the same reputation as dinosaurs: Their vision is based on movement. They are produced in formidable sizes (a male tusker can be 36 inches tall and weigh over 400 pounds). They can cause damage and be the bane of farmers. An August 23, 1911 report in the Oroville Daily Register warned that valley-dwelling boars are even more dangerous than those that live in the mountains and come equipped with “death-dealing tusks.” Read the rest of this entry »

It’s no secret that free agency has changed over the last decade. As more teams have embraced analytics by focusing on paying for future, rather than past, performance, and owners have pinched pennies, we’ve seen slower winters, and in the case of last offseason, teams paying significantly less for a win on the open market. This offseason has seen a welcome return of activity, with good players receiving top-dollar contracts. When we consider the health of free agency for players, the big deals seem to grab a lot of attention, as with Gerrit Cole, Anthony Rendon, and Stephen Strasburg‘s this season, and Manny Machado and Bryce Harper’s a year ago. Mega-deals create the impression that all is well, and the size of those deals can have an outsized affect when calculating dollars per win, as in my piece yesterday on the cost of a win in free agency. But the players who don’t receive those big contracts deserve a bit more attention because it is possible that as free agent spending has shifted, the money teams are paying for wins may no longer be linear.

When we talk about the linear cost of a win, we’re talking about there being a uniform amount teams are generally willing to pay per win on the free agent market; if the cost of a win is $9 million, a three-win player gets $27 million, a two-win player gets $18 million, and a one-win player receives $9 million. And while we recognize the three-win player doesn’t actually receive a one-year deal worth $27 million, when the money is spread over a multi-year deal and the presumed decline from aging is factored in, the wins paid for over the life of the contract come out in roughly that manner. For example, Hyun-Jin Ryu is projected to be roughly a three win player in 2020. But over the course of four seasons, he is likely to be worth closer to nine wins; he signed a contract for $80 million, which comes out to right around $9 million per win. Not every case fits so neatly, but Ryu is one example.

The question now is whether the above is still true. In 2017, Matt Swartz examined the seasons through 2016 and found that the cost of a win was still linear. Since then, a narrative has emerged of slightly lesser players getting squeezed. Heading into the 2017 season, Travis Sawchik discussed baseball’s embattled middle class as players appeared to be getting frozen out of free agency. He followed that up in 2018 after another slow winter provided more evidence of a market in dire straights. Providing further support, the crowdsourced contract estimates our readers provide as part of our annual Top 50 Free Agents exercise have generally overshot free agent contracts under $40 million the last few years. Read the rest of this entry »

A new avenue to pursue a competitive advantage, a gray area as to whether it’s considered cheating, a paper ban that goes unenforced, bad behavior spreading around the league through player movement, executives shocked — shocked! — that such behavior is happening on their teams, a commissioner sounding out of touch as he publicly downplays the severity of the problem, once-celebrated achievements now tainted… if the outlines of baseball’s current sign-stealing scandal sound familiar, it’s because they’ve followed a pattern similar to that of the performance-enhancing drug problem that enveloped the game in the 1990s and early 2000s. Of course, there are key differences between the two, but both found Major League Baseball well behind the curve and struggling both to catch up and regain credibility on the issue.

That thought came to mind on Tuesday, as the sign-stealing saga took a new turn when The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich reported that in 2018, the Red Sox used their video replay room in an attempt to decipher opponents’ sign sequences, a practice that proliferated after instant replay reviews were introduced in 2014, one that was broadly prohibited but generally unenforced until 2018. Three members of the 2018 Red Sox told The Athletic that multiple teammates used the team’s video room, which was just a few steps from the home dugout, to break down opponents’ signs. Unlike the bang-on-a-trash-can system Rosenthal and Drellich reported the Astros having used in 2017, the Red Sox did not directly communicate to batters what pitch was coming, instead relaying that information through the dugout to the baserunner and then to the hitter.

While the efficacy of either system is still murky, both the Astros and Red Sox flouted the rules, and both went on to win the World Series in the year they did so, coincidentally beating the Dodgers. While rumors have circulated regarding other teams’ usage of replay rooms and other means to steal signs electronically, thus far the substantiated allegations have been limited to those two clubs, who share a common denominator: Alex Cora, who as bench coach of the Astros in 2017 is said to have played a key role in their sign-stealing system, and who left following that season to manage the Red Sox, a job he still holds. Read the rest of this entry »

After a few cold, dreary, quiet hot stove seasons, free agency picked up its pace this winter. While Manny Machado and Bryce Harper got $300 million deals last offseason, it took until nearly spring to get those contracts finalized. This offseason, we’ve seen Gerrit Cole, Stephen Strasburg, Anthony Rendon, and Zack Wheeler sign for more than $100 million, and with the new year just eight days old, only a handful of decent free agents remain. While large deals and total spending near $2 billion have captivated us this offseason, it’s worth exploring what has made this winter different from years past. Is it just timing? Is it this class of free agents? Have teams changed their spending habits? Is the cost of a win still linear? A useful tool when examining those issues it to try to determine how much teams are paying for a win above replacement in the free agent market.

While putting dollar figures on players isn’t the most feel-good task, it’s helpful for framing conversations about costs in free agency. From the front office perspective, it helps to determine which free agents are good values and a worthy investment of resources compared to other free agents and veteran players. It also helps frame the value of younger players who have yet to reach the full six years of service time necessary to hit the market by showing the alternative cost to obtaining similar production. On the player side, these types of valuations tend to show how underpaid players are prior to reaching free agency, given the low cost of their tremendous on-field value compared to similarly productive free agents.

There are a variety of ways to go about determining how much teams are paying per win on the free agent market. Matt Swartz, having found that projections tended to overweight free agent player production and playing time when considered in the aggregate, instead considered actual production of past results to determine how much teams were paying for a win. He also used all players with at least six years of service time to account for players aging over the course of a contract. He acknowledged that there might be issues with including players on extensions. To be clear, Swartz wasn’t wrong about the way he formulated his dollars per win, but another approach can be helpful, and, if we are to look at the current offseason, necessary. Read the rest of this entry »