The Marlins have spent this offseason quietly adding a number of high-upside veterans on the cheap. They’ve traded for Jonathan Villar after Baltimore unceremoniously dumped him, claimed Jesús Aguilar on waivers, and added Francisco Cervelli on a one-year contract worth just $2 million. They continued to upgrade their roster just after Christmas, signing Corey Dickerson to a two-year deal worth $17.5 million.

The left-handed outfielder fills a big need on the Marlins roster. In 2019, Miami utilized the uninspiring trio of Harold Ramirez, Curtis Granderson, and Austin Dean for the lion’s share of the innings in left field. They collectively cost the Marlins 1.7 wins, with just Ramirez rating above replacement level. For a rebuilding club, this isn’t necessarily concerning or surprising. In Dean and Ramirez, the Marlins were simply looking to see if either minor league veteran could make it in the big leagues, and Granderson was a classic clubhouse veteran playing out the last days of a long career.

But with the Marlins looking to break free from their endless rebuilding phase, adding Dickerson is a savvy move. He immediately upgrades their outfield and provides the club with a much-needed left-handed bat in the lineup. Since his debut in 2013 for the Rockies, he’s posted a 117 wRC+ and 11.5 WAR. After a good start to his career in Colorado, a strikeout problem and getting traded away from the Rays forced him to make some changes to his approach in 2018. In Pittsburgh, he started choking up regularly in an effort to make much more contact. The adjustments worked and he cut his strikeout rate by almost 10 points. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2019, I once again had the pleasure of interviewing hundreds of people within baseball. Many of their words were shared in my Sunday Notes column, while others came courtesy of the FanGraphs Q&A series, the Learning and Developing a Pitch series, the Talks Hitting series, and a smattering of feature stories. Here is a selection of the best quotes from this year’s conversations, with the bolded lines linking to the pieces they were excerpted from.

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“I think Abner [Doubleday] when he set this game up a long time ago, he set it up the right way. Boom, boom, boom… Let’s try to keep it normal here. I was a shortstop. If you stuck me on the other side, then I became a second baseman. I played shortstop as a second baseman. That’s confusing. That’s Laurel and Hardy stuff.” — Ron Gardenhire, Detroit Tigers manager, January 2019

“[Gaylord] Perry threw a spitter. He wasn’t going to share that. Not unless I brought $3,000 to the park. That’s how much he said he’d charge to teach me the spitter. I was taking home $8,500. I didn’t want to give him 40% of my yearly take-home pay to try to learn a pitch that very few people can master.” — Steve Stone, Chicago White Sox broadcaster, January 2019 Read the rest of this entry »

In an article that ran here 10 days ago, Chicago White Sox GM Rick Hahn was quoted as saying that people in his role tend to “spend a lot more time trying to unpack what goes wrong, as opposed to examining all the things that may have gone right.”

Danny Mendick fits firmly in the ‘right’ category. Unheralded coming into the 2019 season — he ranked No. 26 on our White Sox Top Prospects list — the 26-year-old infielder earned a September call-up and proceeded to slash .308/.325/.462 in 40 plate appearances. As the season came to a close, Sunday Notes devoted a handful of paragraphs to his Cinderella-like story.

Mendick’s story deserves more than a handful of paragraphs. With the calendar about to flip to 2020, let’s take a longer look at where he came from. We’ll start with words from Hahn.

“When we took him in the 22nd round, as a senior [in 2015], I think we all knew he’d play in the big leagues,” the ChiSox exec said when I inquired about Mendick at the GM Meetings. “OK, no. I’m messing with you. We didn’t know.”

Continuing in a serious vein, Hahn added that the White Sox routinely ask their area scouts to identify “one or two guys they have a gut feel on.” These are draft-eligible players who “maybe don’t stand out from a tools standpoint, or from a notoriety standpoint, but are true baseball players; they play the game the right way and have a positive influence on others.”

In other words, organizational depth. And maybe — just maybe — they will overachieve and one day earn an opportunity at the highest level. Read the rest of this entry »

Despite best-laid plans, seemingly nothing went right for the Mets’ bullpen in 2019, and the same can be said for Dellin Betances. The team is hoping both can change their luck in 2020, and earlier this week signed the 31-year-old righty to a one-year, $10.5 million deal that includes both a player option for 2021 and a vesting option for ’22. Though the move is hardly inexpensive or risk-free, it’s a worthwhile gamble on a reliever who prior to missing nearly all of the past season due to injuries spent five years as one of the AL’s best and most dominant with the crosstown Yankees.

After throwing more innings out of the bullpen than any other pitcher from 2014-18 (373.1), Betances didn’t complete a single frame at the major league level in 2019. First, his arrival in camp was delayed by the birth of his son, and after he showed diminished velocity in a March 17 Grapefruit League appearance, he was diagnosed with shoulder impingement. He began the regular season on the injured list, and worked towards a return, but following a rough showing during an April 11 simulated game, he received a cortisone shot for shoulder inflammation, a problem that was soon linked to a bone spur that the Yankees — but not the pitcher — had known about since 2006, the year they drafted him in the eighth round out of a Brooklyn high school. Moved to the 60-day injured list, Betances ramped up towards a return, but renewed soreness led to a June 11 MRI, which revealed that he’d suffered a low-grade lat strain. He finally began a rehab assignment with the Trenton Thunder on September 6, during the Eastern League playoffs, and made three postseason appearances for them before being activated by the Yankees, who hoped that he would augment their bullpen for the postseason.

Betances made his lone major league appearance for the season on September 15, striking out both Blue Jays he faced (Reese McGuire and Brandon Drury) and topping out at 95 mph. After the second strikeout, he did the slightest of celebratory hops and landed awkwardly on his left foot. Watch here around the 15-second mark:

Read the rest of this entry »

Financially savvy or cheap? Like beauty, the fundamental essence of thriftiness lies in the eye of the beholder. In truth, either adjective adequately describes the Blue Jays under the stewardship of club president Mark Shapiro and general manager Ross Atkins. In their teardown, the Jays have done much to rebuild the farm system and add a youthful vigor to the big league team. Recent trades to unload veteran talent, most notably the Kevin Pillar and Marcus Stroman deals, were difficult but justifiable moves for a team unable to compete in the short term.

But the Jays have also come under criticism for leaning a bit too far into the rebuild. They were all set to play the service-time manipulation game with Vladimir Guerrero Jr. (a hamstring injury allowed them to delay his call-up without resorting to that tactic) and have been so aggressive in culling their veterans that Anthony Alford, with all of 59 career plate appearances to his name, is now the club’s longest tenured player. The makeover led an obviously delighted Shapiro to gush: “The combination of young talent along with the lack of future commitments, it will never be this again. It’s just for this moment.”

Surprisingly soon after achieving that spiritual high, the Jays started adding major league players. The big signing was Hyun-Jin Ryu, but they’ve made other moves to fill out their hollow roster. The additions of Chase Anderson and Tanner Roark give them a respectable rotation, and by signing of Travis Shaw, Toronto may well lengthen the middle of the lineup. Taken together, these moves make the Jays quite a bit better in the here and now. I don’t know if I’d call them playoff contenders quite yet, but it’s been a far more expeditious winter north of the border than many anticipated.

Shaw signed a one-year contract for $4 million, with incentives that could carry the deal to nearly $5 million if he plays well. Of course, he was only available for that price because he was non-tendered by Milwaukee after his horrible, no good, very bad 2019 season. After producing 3.5 wins in 2017 and 2018, his production fell off a cliff:

For a player who was only 29, the regression was as surprising as it was dramatic. Few players pumpkin overnight and the ones who do usually aren’t in their 20s, nor holding their own at a demanding defensive position.

Knowing nothing else, signing Shaw makes sense for a rebuilder like Toronto, particularly given the terms. It’s a classic pillow contract, a one-year, low-dollar commitment that won’t disrupt the club’s burgeoning young core. A third basemen by trade, Shaw will likely slide across the diamond to first to fill the vacancy left by Justin Smoak’s departure. The new man will get a chance to start and rebuild his value after a nightmare season, a mutually beneficial proposition; if last season proves an aberration, the Jays can flip Shaw for a prospect near the deadline. For his part, Shaw would then hit free agency without his 2019 numbers looming over his recruitment.

The challenge here is that Shaw didn’t merely have an off year, or put up lousy numbers after battling an injury. Rather, he was simply one of the worst players in the league last season. Among players with at least 250 plate appearances, only Mike Zunino offered less at the plate:

Everywhere you look, there’s a damning statistic. He struck out in 33% of his plate appearances, which is troubling on its own and also nearly double how often he fanned in 2018. His .157 batting average was the lowest in the league, which is bad, though not nearly as bad as the fact that his .270 slugging percentage also brought up the rear.

But a glance at Shaw’s batted ball profile suggests that all may not be lost just yet. His average exit velocity has barely budged throughout his major league career, and he actually set a career best in 2019, at 88.7 mph. His hard hit rate was only a tiny bit lower in 2019 than in previous seasons. For what it’s worth, he hit just fine in Triple-A after a midseason demotion.

Shaw had two problems last year, and they may well be related. The first is that he swung and missed far too often, and way more than he normally does. He made contact 70% of the time he swung last year, which is bad relative to the league and terrible compared to his career norms. There isn’t a key split here, mostly because none of them are good: He didn’t swing any more often (on either pitches in or out of the zone) but he missed a whole lot more, and his whiff rate rose on fastballs, offspeed pitches, and breaking balls. The uptick in missed fastballs was particularly substantial, from 18% of the time in 2018 to nearly 30% last year. Interestingly, a lot of those increased whiffs were concentrated in the upper part of the strike zone and above. His whiff rate was worse just about everywhere, but the difference is especially glaring above the belt:

That feeds into the second problem, which is what happened when he did connect. Always a guy who put the ball in the air a lot, Shaw’s average launch angle shifted from 16.6 degrees to 24.5 degrees (the league average was 11.2) in 2019. That was the second highest launch angle in baseball, and as you’d expect, it produced a corresponding increase in fly balls and popups from previous campaigns.

Critically, this change was clearly counterproductive for Shaw. On this site, we’ve often covered how hitters try to change their launch angle in an effort to hit more balls in the air, and how this tends to lead to a better offensive output. But there’s a limit to how high you want to go. It’s not necessarily that Shaw climbed into dangerous territory — Rhys Hoskins had the third highest launch angle last year, and Edwin Encarnación and Mike Trout occupied similar real estate — but it may well be dangerous territory for him. After all, Shaw was a pretty darn good hitter pre-2019, and with a higher launch angle than most bears. Raising that launch angle produced more harmless flies and far more swings and misses, particularly up in the zone, as we’d expect from a player using a steeper swing plane. All of this suggests that he wasn’t getting his bat in the hitting zone for nearly long enough.

It’s a trend that started early in 2019. At FanGraphs, we’ll often talk about how spring training numbers are meaningless, and usually they are. At the very outer fringes of the extremes though, we can sometimes detect something meaningful, for either good or ill. Such was the case with Shaw last year, who struck out 25 times without a walk in 52 trips to the plate. He hit the ball pretty well when he did connect last spring, which somewhat masked the issue at the time, but in hindsight it’s clear that this was a season-long problem for him.

Despite the depths of his struggles, this seems like a reversible trend. It’s far easier to fix glaring and identifiable problems than to grasp for solutions in the dark. Toronto’s challenge is to either help Shaw make more and better contact with the swing plane he employed in 2019 or to help him return to what worked in previous seasons. Simply knowing what to do doesn’t ensure that Shaw can do it, of course, but at least it’s a theoretically fixable issue. We’ve seen plenty of players successfully adjust their launch angles and there’s no reason to think Shaw can’t do the same.

Ultimately, for one-year and $4 million, this is the kind of move rebuilding clubs should be lining up to make. If Shaw doesn’t hit, the team can swallow the money and find someone else to man first base. But even modest improvement makes this a bargain of a contract, and given Shaw’s underlying batted ball indicators and recent history of success, there are plenty of reasons to think he can bounce back. A return to form won’t necessarily propel Toronto to the top of a very competitive AL East, but combined with a number of promising young players, it would go some way toward making the Blue Jays a fun club to watch in 2020. Between that and his potential re-sale value, what’s not to like?

Editor’s Note: Mark Newman is the author of the No. 1 bestseller Diamonds from the Dugout and Yankee Legends, and was most recently a writer for MLB.com from 2002-18. On the occasion of his 20th Hall of Fame vote, we’re happy to host his ballot reveal column.

There were 499 total ballots submitted by baseball writers for the Hall of Fame Class of 2000. I was one of those, helping Carlton Fisk and Tony Perez into Cooperstown’s hallowed gallery of plaques that summer. It was my first such privilege after having met the required 10 consecutive years of membership in the Baseball Writers’ Association of America, a membership that began when I was covering the Giants for the San Jose Mercury News at gusty Candlestick Park.

In the 20 years since I mailed back that first ballot of check marks, 41 major league greats have been elected via the BBWAA vote, most in a record-smashing torrent of inductions since the 2013 shutout. As Mariano Rivera and Edgar Martinez symbolized last year – and as Derek Jeter and Larry Walker might replicate next summer — some of those 41 selections were no-brainers and others were add-ons in their final year of eligibility. This is the business of retrospection, and in hindsight I can see how thankful I am that Jim Rice and Andre Dawson were elected without my help, how badly we failed Kenny Lofton and Lou Whitaker, among others, how tumultuous these two decades have been thanks to PEDs and overreaction, and how much things have changed for the better in our process.

The results have always been the same: Awestruck faces gazing at a wall, heads tilted like in the Louvre at the bronze visage and text on each new plaque in an upstate New York hamlet, allowing fans who make the pilgrimage to relive the wonders of their youth while sharing heroic stories with their children as a rite of passage. Now I am commemorating my own 20th anniversary by observing some voting trends while checking the boxes of these 10 legends, in order: Barry Bonds, Derek Jeter, Roger Clemens, Larry Walker, Scott Rolen, Curt Schilling, Todd Helton, Andruw Jones, Andy Pettitte, and Billy Wagner. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s nothing like a good homecoming story during the holidays, and in this tale, Kole Calhoun will serve as our protagonist. The Arizona native and Arizona State alumnus will return to the desert in 2020, as Calhoun and the Diamondbacks agreed to a two-year, $16 million contract according to multiple reports on Tuesday. The deal includes a team option for 2022 valued at $9 million.

Calhoun, now 32, became a free agent in early November after the Angels declined his $14 million team option in favor of a $1 million buyout. Though he was effective last season, the decision was an easy one for Los Angeles; with top prospect Jo Adell waiting in the wings to play right field full-time, it made little sense to keep Calhoun around.

Calhoun is a much clearer fit for the Diamondbacks. He’ll slot in quite nicely at his primary position, where he will essentially replace Adam Jones, who signed with Japan’s Orix Blue Wave earlier this offseason. Though he started his 2019 campaign hot, Jones was effectively a replacement-level player across 137 games last year, posting an 87 wRC+ in 528 plate appearances; he was worth -0.1 WAR. In total, Diamondbacks right fielders produced a total of 0.9 WAR, good for 26th in the majors. Read the rest of this entry »

This winter’s free agent class was once full of starting pitching. The offseason began with starting pitchers representing 10 of the top 20 free agents overall, and 21 of FanGraphs’ Top 50 Free Agents. After Dallas Keuchel signed with Chicago White Sox, Hyun-Jin Ryu, 40-year-old Rich Hill, and Homer Bailey were the only ranked starters remaining, and only Ryu represented a good bet for production next season. With many teams still in need of reinforcements for their rotations, competition for the lefty’s services was likely strong. Among potential contenders, the Twins and Angels presented the greatest need for a starter, but it was the Blue Jays who surprised and reached agreement on a four-year deal worth $80 million, per Jeff Passan.

Ryu will turn 33 years old in March, so the end of this contract will take him through his age-36 season. He’s got a complicated injury history (he hit the injured list again for a short time last season), but a strong 2019 combined with his status as the last man standing on the free agent market allowed him to far exceed the $48 million crowdsource median ($59 million average), as well as Kiley McDaniel’s $32 million estimate. In Ryu’s free agent capsule, Jay Jaffe noted the factors working in the left-hander’s favor, as well as those working against him, as he headed into free agency:

After being limited to 15 starts in 2018 due to a severe groin strain, the portly port-sider pitched enough innings to qualify for the ERA title for the first time since his 2013 rookie campaign. He didn’t just qualify, he led the NL with a 2.32 mark despite fading late. Through July, he posted a 1.53 ERA and 2.85 FIP, but that ballooned to 4.60 and 3.83 over the final two months, with a 10-day IL stint for neck soreness thrown in. Ryu’s success isn’t quite as enigmatic or unorthodox as his process, which includes rarely throwing bullpens between starts. Via a five-pitch arsenal, with his changeup the real star, he’s exceptional at limiting hard contact; his average exit velocity of 85.3 mph ranked in the 96th percentile, his .282 xwOBA in the 81st. His strikeout rate was a modest 22.5%, but he walked an NL-low 3.3%, so his 19.2% K-BB% ranked 12th, and his 3.10 FIP fourth. After accepting a qualifying offer last fall, he’s well-positioned for a multi-year deal despite the questions about his durability.

Read the rest of this entry »

Count the Texas Rangers among teams who are tweaking their approach to hitting. That much was clear when I spoke to Chris Woodward during the regular season, and again during the Winter Meetings. In our recent conversation, I asked the 43-year-old manager who stands out as having made the most progress in 2019.

“In my eyes, Willie Calhoun probably made the biggest jump,” said Woodward. “Joey Gallo, as well, before he got hurt. But Willie really, really bought into a lot of things that made him successful. He had different swings for different pitches. He’d go into a game knowing, ‘Is this guy sinking the ball, or is he going to be spinning me with curveballs?’ He’d know what kind of swing path he needed. Willie was able to manipulate, and be versatile enough with his swing, to almost have two or three different swings.”

Calhoun would sometimes use different bats for different pitchers. While the biggest determiner was the hurler’s handedness, repertoires were also a consideration.

The flexibility paid dividends. Previously unproven and unpolished,the 25-year-old (as of last month) outfielder slashed .269/.323/.524, and went deep 21 times in just 337 plate appearances. A year earlier, he’d scuffled to the tune of a .602 OPS in a 35-game big-league cameo as the club’s No. 1 prospect. Read the rest of this entry »

Since 2016, only one other team has lost more players to the Injured List than the Los Angeles Angels. They’ve cumulatively lost over 5,600 days to various injuries during the last four seasons, the second highest total in the majors behind the Padres. And a significant number of those injuries have decimated their pitching staff.

The pitchers listed above account for over 2,200 days lost to injury over the last four years, nearly 40% of the team’s cumulative total. And that doesn’t even take into account the relievers and other less established starters who also lost time to injuries, or Tyler Skaggs’ tragic passing earlier this year (the days listed above include his 2019 IL stint, not the season days following his death). The Angels’ trouble keeping their pitching staff healthy has been one of the major reasons they haven’t come close to sniffing the postseason since 2014 despite employing the best player in baseball. Read the rest of this entry »