We have arrived at the part of the season where teams start to identify themselves as buyers and sellers. In turn, we can start assessing which players are likely to be traded.

The San Francisco Giants are clearly sellers. Stuck in last place in the NL West, with one of the weakest farm systems in baseball, the Giants need an influx of young talent. Madison Bumgarner will almost certainly be traded, but come the end of the month, he shouldn’t be the only Giants lefty on the move.

Will Smith was once a failed starter for the Royals. The Brewers acquired him in exchange for Nori Aoki prior to the 2014 season, and quickly turned him into a successful reliever. He was traded to the Giants near the deadline in 2016, and after missing the entire 2017 season with Tommy John surgery, he came back as an even better reliever, maintaining his high whiff rates while throwing more strikes. Smith is now one of the top closers in the league, and contenders will be lining up for his services.

Several surface numbers — including his 40.9% strikeout rate and 6.1% walk rate – indicate that the lefty has pitched well this season. But perhaps nothing underscores the point like WPA. Relievers are often thrust into high-leverage situations without much room for error, and in that regard, Smith has starred:

WPA isn’t designed to predict a player’s future success: It’s just a measure of how they have harmed or enhanced their team’s chances of winning. Still, it’s useful in evaluating relievers, as the context in which they are deployed shapes our understanding of their performance. By this measure, Smith has clearly thrived.

Quietly, Smith has been a pretty solid reliever for a few years now. In 2018, he posted career-low walk rate (7.1%) while striking out well over a hitter per inning. Back in the offseason, Jeff Sullivan examined Smith’s brilliance, concluding that his strong numbers and San Francisco’s needs made him an obvious trade candidate. This season, he’s been even better. Here’s how he ranks among major league relievers in several important categories:

Smith’s rise from a good reliever to an elite one can be partly explained by a small shift in his pitch mix. Last year, Smith threw his slider 36% of the time, establishing it as his main go-to weapon. It induced a .129 wOBA and a .129 xwOBA. This season, it’s got even deadlier, good for a .120 wOBA and a .108 xwOBA, even as he’s thrown it more often (42.1%). To better illustrate his slider’s effectiveness, here are a couple of gifs for your viewing pleasure:

Smith will be a free agent this winter, and so he’s just a rental. That’s dings the potential return San Francisco’s brass can expect to receive, but Smith will still fetch some talent that could help the club long-term. To get an idea of how he could be valued, let’s compare his 2019 numbers to those of other relievers who were traded as half-season rentals in recent years.

Smith’s numbers look top-notch even when compared to this stellar group. One could make an argument that Smith has performed better this season than Aroldis Chapman at the time he was traded in 2016, though the Giants certainly won’t be acquiring a prospect of Gleyber Torres’s caliber.

As always, several teams pushing for the playoffs are in need of bullpen help. The following clubs in particular could really use Smith’s services:

While just about any contender could find a place for Smith, teams with deep bullpens — like the Rays, Brewers and Indians — will probably be looking to bolster other parts of their roster. In addition to the teams listed above, the Astros are also a potential partner. Houston’s relievers have pitched very well, but they don’t have a southpaw in their bullpen right now.

With so many contending teams needing to beef up their bullpens, Smith will attract plenty of calls to the Giants front office. That’s a good news for San Francisco: the more suitors, the better their leverage. The odds are that, come August, Smith is going to make someone else’s bullpen happier. We just don’t know who, and for what return, quite yet.

In April, Matthew Boyd gave up two homers. In May, five balls left the yard against the Tigers lefty. Last month, Boyd’s breakout season slowed as he gave up 10 homers. As we enter July, Boyd has a solid 3.57 FIP and a 3.72 ERA, and has been worth 2.6 WAR, which ranks 17th among pitchers this season. Those are good numbers to be sure, but as June began, Boyd’s ERA and FIP were both 2.85 and his 2.5 WAR ranked third for pitchers behind only Max Scherzer and Stephen Strasburg. Boyd’s strikeouts and walks have been slightly better than they were earlier in the season; his BABIP is slightly higher and his LOB% is a little bit lower. But that doesn’t explain his 5.90 ERA and 5.37 FIP. It’s the home runs that are hurting Boyd, and with the trade deadline a month away, trying to determine whether they are randomly bunching across a few starts or the beginning of a trend is an important exercise for teams looking to reinforce their rotations.

As for how Boyd broke out in the first place, the answer is a bit easier to find — the work has already been done for us. Sung-Min Kim detailed Boyd’s transformation earlier this season, showing how Boyd lowered his arm slot to gain spin on his fastball, and raised the location of the pitch. He also buried his slider more often, gained a consistency in his delivery, and basically eliminated the two-seamer. David Laurila also wrote on Boyd earlier this season, discussing his work with Driveline to create a better slider.

Boyd’s season can be carved up any number of ways depending on how you might want to use (and abuse) arbitrary endpoints. If we took away the first three spectacular Boyd starts of the season, where he struck out 29 and walked six, his FIP is 4.09, his ERA is 3.95, and he’s averaging nearly two homers every nine innings. If we look at just his first 10 starts, he’s one of the best pitchers in baseball. He has five starts with 0 or 1 runs. He’s only got two starts where his strikeouts don’t at least equal his innings pitched. The only time he walked as many as three batters, he struck out 13 Yankees. If Boyd had evenly spaced out his 17 homers across his starts, we’d be discussing a moderate breakout. Instead, we have a massive breakout followed by concern. Read the rest of this entry »

The New York Yankees are incredible. They control first place in a strong American League East division by seven games; our playoff odds project them as having an 88.3% chance of winning the division, with 16.2% odds to win the World Series. This, despite an astonishing volume of injuries suffered by key players over the first half of the season, a series of events that thrust bench bats and backups who once seemed somewhat redundant into the spotlight. DJ LeMahieu, for example, didn’t have a clear starting spot when the team signed him to a 2-year, $24 million contract over the offseason. But a week away from the All-Star break, he’s been the Yankees’ best player, and it isn’t particularly close.

At 3.6 WAR, LeMahieu is a full win better than the next-most valuable player on the roster. He leads his team in batting runs above average (20.8) and defensive runs above average (3.5). He is second in wRC+ (145) and wOBA (.389). He’s the AL’s leader in batting average (.345). The Yankees are an outstanding offensive team, ranking fourth in team wRC+ and hitting the fifth-most homers in baseball, despite the long absences of sluggers like Giancarlo Stanton, Aaron Judge, Miguel Andujar, Aaron Hicks, and Didi Gregorius. Yet, it is LeMahieu — he of the 94 career wRC+ and 61 total homers over nine seasons — who has served as the linchpin of the New York lineup.

LeMahieu has been popular around these parts for a while now. In early 2018, Travis Sawchik caught up with him to discuss his shift away from being an extreme opposite field hitter, and over this past offseason, Jeff Sullivan discussed his potential were he ever to unlock more power. This seems like a good time to check back in with LeMahieu, though, because he has spent the past few weeks setting the baseball world ablaze. Since going 3-for-5 against the Blue Jays on June 5, LeMahieu has hit .424/.467/.717, with six homers, eight walks, and 27 RBIs in 22 games. His production in that span gives him an absurd 213 wRC+ and 2.0 WAR, both of which lead the majors.

It’s been a long time since LeMahieu was this hot:

That previous spike came in August 2016, when LeMahieu rattled off a similarly torrid stretch. In 22 games from August 2-28, he hit .447/.544/.647 with four homers, 17 walks and just seven strikeouts. That happened to be his best year in the majors, as he finished with a .391 wOBA and 4.4 WAR as a member of the Colorado Rockies and won the NL batting title. Before that season, LeMahieu had always been a below average hitter; in the two seasons that followed, he was one again. Now, he’s back to being a revelation, and continues to show an ability to adapt.

One of the knocks against LeMahieu during his free agency was his predictably uncomfortable home/road splits. During his tenure with the Rockies, he recorded an OPS of .834 and a wRC+ of 96 at Coors Field, but had his OPS fall to .681 when he played on the road, with his wRC+ taking a corresponding dip to 84. That makes a good bit of sense. Because his low number of fly balls limits his power potential, LeMahieu’s offensive production relies upon him having a high BABIP, the way he did in 2016 when he hit .388 on balls in play. Coors’ spacious outfield will serve players like that well — between 2012 and 2018, three of the top four home BABIPs in baseball belonged to Rockies hitters, with LeMahieu ranking at the top of that list at .374. Away from Coors Field, his BABIP was .310. Skepticism over how valuable he could be when calling a different ballpark home was reasonable. This year, however, LeMahieu has done all he can to put that criticism to rest. At Yankee Stadium, he’s hitting a robust .335/.402/.555 with a BABIP of .357 and a wRC+ of 152 a tOPS+ of 108. His road numbers look pretty good too: .350/.375/.497, with a .385 BABIP and a 136 wRC+.

The matter of LeMahieu’s home/road splits wasn’t the only one he needed to address as a Yankee. He also needed to prove he could hit something other than a fastball. In 2018, LeMahieu was a solid fastball hitter, posting a wOBA of .356. That came honestly enough — from 2015 to 2018, only one hitter in baseball, Ben Revere, saw a higher percentage of fastballs than LeMahieu (65.8%). He struggled, however, against breaking and offspeed pitches, with wOBAs of .254 and .275 against them, respectively.

This year, opposing pitchers have begun to change the way they approach LeMahieu. Just 56% of the pitches he’s seen in 2019 have been fastballs, down 11% from a peak rate of 67% in 2017. Slider and cutter usage against him has gone up a combined 6.5% from just one year ago, and he’s seen about 2% more changeups and splitters. Added together, that’s a notable change, and in response to seeing a more balanced repertoire, LeMahieu has made himself into a more balanced hitter:

One of the keys to LeMahieu’s great 2016 season was his ability to get positive results out of just about any pitch thrown his way. With his resurgence in 2019, it’s no surprise he’s seeing similar results. LeMahieu has been one of the 10 best hitters in baseball against both the slider and the curve this year, after struggling with each of those pitches in the past. At the same time, he continues to hit fastballs well. In 2016, LeMahieu recorded a .412 wOBA against the fastball. In 2019, that number is .394. As you might imagine, striking this kind of balance isn’t easy. Across all of baseball, just two hitters have posted at least a wFB of 4.0, a wSL a 4.0, a wCB of 4.0, and a wCH of 3.0: LeMahieu, and former Rockies teammate Charlie Blackmon.

It’s easy to evaluate a recent free agent signee in the midst of an unsustainable hot streak and say a bunch of teams missed out on him. But LeMahieu makes the impulse difficult to resist. Just two teams have gotten at least LeMahieu’s 3.4 WAR out of their second basemen, and no team has gotten more value out of a position player free agent who signed this offseason:

With the return of Hicks and Judge, as well as their trade for Edwin Encarnacion, the Yankees are closer to full strength than they’ve been in a long time. But they still have a long way to go. Stanton and Cameron Maybin are likely out until at least August, while Andujar won’t return until 2020. Injuries persist on the pitching side. A deep postseason run remains very likely, but it will continue to require constant adjusting and refining for the team to reach its potential. Perhaps that makes LeMahieu the perfect player for the Yankees.

Luke Jackson has blown six saves this season, tied for the major league lead. His struggles as the Braves closer have given rise to a play on the chorus from OutKast’s “Ms. Jackson”: Back in mid-May, after blowing two save opportunities in a row, fans on the Atlanta airwaves and Twitter started singing “I’m sorry Luke Jackson (oooh).” His problems — and the singing — only got worse in early June after he allowed runs in five of his first seven appearances in the month. But if you look at Jackson’s peripherals outside of their game context, the next line in OutKast’s song becomes a lot more appropriate: “I am for real.”

A first-round draft pick by the Texas Rangers in 2010, Jackson never really lived up to his pedigree with his original organization. By 2015, he had transitioned to the bullpen full-time, though he did make his major league debut that year. He was traded to the Braves in an unheralded, change-of-scenery move in December 2016 for Brady Feigl (no, the other one) and Tyrell Jenkins. He was just as unremarkable in Atlanta, getting designated for assignment three separate times, each time going unclaimed on waivers. He made the Opening Day roster this year as a fall back option after injuries decimated the team’s bullpen during spring training.

In his first appearance of the season, he gave up a grand slam to Rhys Hoskins. Luckily it was a low-leverage situation since the Braves were already three runs behind. With Arodys Vizcaino injured and A.J. Minter and Dan Winkler ineffective, Jackson found himself thrust into high-leverage situations by mid-April. But despite the aforementioned struggles, he’s been the best reliever in the Braves bullpen this year. If you compare what he’s doing this year to what he was doing before, he looks like a completely different pitcher:

Read the rest of this entry »

Any new fans coming to major league baseball through this past weekend’s London Series between the Yankees and Red Sox got a rather distorted sense of the game’s scoring and temporal norms, particularly in the first inning of each contest. In Saturday’s series opener, each team sent 10 batters to the plate, scored six runs, and chased the other team’s starting pitcher (New York’s Masahiro Tanaka and Boston’s Rick Porcello). The 12-run, 58-minute inning was just the opening salvo of a slugfest that seemed to be imported straight from Coors Field, a 17-13 slog that took four hours and 42 minutes to play. Sunday’s game, won 12-8 by the Yankees, wasn’t quite as high scoring, but it did feature a four-run first inning by the Red Sox that clocked in around 26 minutes, not to mention a nine-run seventh inning by the Yankees in a game that lasted four hours and 24 minutes.

Though neither team in Saturday’s game came close to outdoing this year’s first-inning high score (10 runs by the Phillies on April 16 against the Mets), and the two teams fell short of the combined record of 16 runs most recently accomplished by the A’s (13) and Angels (3) on July 5, 1996, the rivals did make some history. According to STATS, this was the first time since June 23, 1989 (Blue Jays at A’s) and just the sixth time since 1912 that both teams scored at least six runs in the first inning. Via the Baseball-Reference Play Index, that game was one of just three since 1908 in which neither starter got out of the first inning after allowing at least six runs, with an August 4, 1948 game between the Red Sox and Browns, and an April 16, 1962 game between the Cardinals (not Bob Gibson’s best day) and Phillies being the others.

The Yankees’ big numbers in London helped them overtake the Twins for the major league lead in scoring (5.80 runs per game). While Saturday’s game was the second time in less than two weeks the team chased a former Cy Young winner in the first inning after clobbering him for six runs — they did so on June 19 against the Rays’ Blake Snell as well as Saturday against Porcello — they’re actually not the majors’ most prolific first-inning team. They entered Sunday ranked eighth in the majors with 0.62 first-inning runs per game, a per-nine rate of 5.56.

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On November 14, 2018, Blake Snell won the AL Cy Young award. It was a close vote, but no one could say Snell didn’t deserve at least to be in the discussion. He compiled a 1.89 ERA, best in the AL, and his peripherals (2.95 FIP, an outrageous 31.6% strikeout rate) weren’t far behind. He was, simply put, one of the best starters in baseball — unfair, as future Rays employee Jeff Sullivan put it. Just more than seven months later, on June 29, 2019, Blake Snell’s ERA was on the wrong side of 5. By RA9-based WAR, he was barely above replacement level in 2019. A strong start yesterday moved his ERA down to a still-inflated 4.87, but it’s worth asking: is something wrong with Blake Snell?

Now, as my RotoGraphs colleague Al Melchior recently put it: nothing is wrong with Blake Snell. Still, it seems like it might merit investigating. Guys with stuff like Snell’s aren’t supposed to even be capable of putting up near-5 ERA’s this far into the season. Al focused on Snell’s strike-throwing, and that’s always a make-or-break issue for a guy with such dynamite stuff, but Snell’s walk numbers, while high, aren’t crippling. He’s actually walking fewer batters than last year, and his K-BB% is a career high. No, Snell’s 2019 has been alarming because of his inconsistency, and that’s worth looking into.

In 2018, Snell made only four starts in which he didn’t last at least five innings. One was his first start back from injury, which hardly counts. This year has been an entirely different story. Snell’s start on June 25, when he survived only 3.1 innings against the Twins, was his sixth outing of 2019 to see him not finish the fifth inning. There’s always batted-ball luck involved in short outings, but still, Snell’s 2019 feels extreme. Did he change something in 2019 that’s leading to more abbreviated outings?

It’s worth saying again that Blake Snell is incredible. All four of his pitches are weapons. His four-seam fastball is the fastest thrown by any left-handed starter, and it generates whiffs on more than a quarter of batters’ swings against it. Its rise and fade are near-unmatched; only Justin Verlander gets more total movement on his four-seam. Snell’s curveball, which he’s throwing 27% of the time this year, is awe-inspiring. Batters whiff on 55% of their swings against it, the second-best mark for any starter who has thrown 100 curveballs this year. His changeup? It generates the fourth-most whiffs per swing, 44%. He rarely throws his slider (7.6% of the time so far this year), but you guessed it: no starter’s slider gets more whiffs per swing than Snell’s. Read the rest of this entry »

Our Playoff Odds page has a nice little feature that lets you display, for any two dates, the difference between a team’s playoff odds on Date A and its odds on Date B. Around the end of each calendar month, I like to use that feature to check in on which teams most improved their odds over the month that was and which lost ground. It’s a long season, and it’s easy to miss things. Here are the largest changes in playoff odds from June 1 to June 30:

There’s a story there. Let me start it by saying that 17 of 30 big-league teams saw no change at all to their playoff odds in June, or saw a change of less than 2%. Another five saw a change greater than 2%, but less than 10%. Of the eight teams whose playoff odds swung by more than 10% in June, fully half — the four teams at the top of the table — came from the same division: the National League East. To some extent, that kind of clustering is to be expected — when one team rises, another in its division must fall — but the relative quiet of every other division gives us an opportunity to reflect for a moment on what happened in the NL East in June, and what lies ahead in July. Read the rest of this entry »

Brendan McKay continued his fantastic season this past Saturday. Making his big-league debut with the Tampa Bay Rays, the 23-year-old left-hander retired 18 of the 20 Texas Rangers batters he faced. And his work on the farm had been every bit as dominating. In 66.2 innings between Double-A Montgomery and Triple-A Durham, McKay compiled a 1.22 ERA and allowed just 38 hits.

And then there’s the offensive side of the equation. As you know, McKay can swing the bat. Aspiring to be the major’s next Shohei Ohtani — sans the Tommy John surgery — the former Golden Spikes winner as a two-way player at the University of Louisville was 11 for his last 33, with three home runs, at the time of his call-up.

What is his approach on each side of the ball, and does he truly expect to be able to play both ways at baseball’s highest level? I addressed those questions with the 2017 first-round pick a few days before he arrived in The Show.

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Laurila: Nuts and bolts first question: What is your approach on the mound?

McKay: “I’m a pitcher who likes to get ahead — just like every other pitcher — and force the action, rather than letting the hitter have any control over the at-bat. That’s basically it.”

Laurila: Are you looking to induce contact, or are you out there trying to miss bats? Read the rest of this entry »

A number of years ago, Boston sports-TV anchor Bob Lobel used to say of former Red Sox players excelling for other teams, “Why can’t we get players like that?” Similar words are currently being uttered in Detroit, in regard to James McCann. In his first season with the Chicago White Sox, the 29-year-old catcher is slashing a robust .320/.378/.519, and he’s already gone deep nine times.

McCann wasn’t nearly that good with the stick in his four-plus years with the Tigers. When he signed with the ChiSox in December — a bargain-basement one-year deal for $2.5M, no less — he was a .240/.288/.366 career hitter. How did he suddenly morph into an offensive force?

“Honestly, the biggest thing for me this year is that I’m trying to be the best James McCann,” is how the Tigers castoff explained it prior to a recent game at Fenway Park. “I’m staying within myself and not trying to do too much. I’m taking my base hits the other way — I’m taking my singles — and not trying to hit the impossible six-run homer.”

The breaking-out backstop trained with Rangers infielder Logan Forsythe over the offseason — both live just south of Nashville — and as McCann pointed out, each has played with some great hitters over the course of their careers. Not that attempting to emulate one’s more-talented peers is always the best idea. Read the rest of this entry »

With last night’s announcement of the starters for the 2019 All-Star Game, baseball’s experiment with a new fan voting process officially came to its completion.

Ten of the 17 All-Star starters currently lead their respective league in WAR at their position, with two more — Gary Sanchez and Nolan Arenado — sitting in virtual ties.

Here’s the full breakdown, first for the American League:

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