With just a week to go before the trade deadline, it still isn’t entirely clear which teams will endeavor to make additions for a pennant run, and which teams will cash in their 2019 chips to play for another year. In the American League, nine of 15 teams have at least an outside shot at the postseason, with seven clubs having a legitimate chance. The National League is even more competitive, with every team but the Marlins possessing some chance at the playoffs, and eight clubs having a reasonable path to the postseason.

Below, we’ll go through the trade scenarios for the teams considering moves. Keep in mind, much of these proposed swaps are simply a framework for how a deal might look. Also important to keep in mind? Most of these predictions will be completely incorrect! Please consume the deals below responsibly, and use this as a preview of what teams need, want, and might do over the next week. Unless any of the predicted deals happen; in that case, I expect to receive full credit.

First, some things that won’t happen:

Star Pitchers Are Staying Put

The Tigers aren’t likely to get the kind of offer they want for Matthew Boyd, who has given up 15 homers in his last eight starts. The Mets aren’t going to get the young stars they want for Noah Syndergaard. Cleveland seems less likely to deal Trevor Bauer now that they are back in the race. Zack Greinke and Robbie Ray probably aren’t going anywhere. Even Caleb Smith of the Marlins, or Brad Keller and Jake Junis of the Royals, seem destined to stay put.

The big question remaining is San Francisco, which brings us to a few things that will (maybe) happen: Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a sentence that I didn’t think I’d be writing in 2019: Andrew Miller has accumulated -0.2 WAR this season. By FanGraphs’ version of WAR, he’s been less valuable than a replacement-level reliever. Here’s another sentence that makes a little more sense, but is at odds with the one I just wrote: Andrew Miller might be the Cardinals’ best reliever. Now, reliever performance is volatile and all, but we’re going to need an explanation. How can those two things be true at once?

Let’s start with Miller being below replacement level, because that would have been a surprising assertion before the year. Andrew Miller has faced 139 batters this season. He’s allowed eight home runs. 6% of his plate appearances have ended with the opposing batter trotting around the bases. That surely already sounds like a ton — indeed, Miller is second in the majors in home runs allowed per nine innings, behind only Josh Osich. You don’t need a sabermetric writer to tell you that’s bad.

As bad as 2.2 home runs per nine innings sounds, though, it might be underselling how wild Miller’s season has been on the home run front. Josh Osich is a great example of the kind of pitcher who normally leads the league in home runs allowed per nine. He’s a pitch-to-contact depth reliever who works by letting opponents put the ball in play and counting on his defense to make plays behind him. Now, that strategy mostly hasn’t worked — Osich has a career ERA of 5.11, and his FIP is 5.31, so it’s not as though he’s just been getting unlucky. Still, while Osich is homer-prone, he’s mostly just contact-prone, with the home runs a cost of doing business. Strike out only 19% of the batters you face, and there will be plenty of opportunities to give up home runs.

Andrew Miller’s case of the dingers isn’t like that at all. Miller is actually one of the least contact-prone pitchers in all of baseball this year. Only 51% of the batters he has faced have put the ball in play. That severely limits the opportunities they have to hit home runs. Osich, for comparison’s sake, has let 75% of batters put the ball in play. Miller is giving up home runs at a truly alarming rate considering how few opportunities he gives batters to put a ball in play. Read the rest of this entry »

Going into the trade deadline last year, I put on my Dictator of MLB hat and made some trade deadline moves of my own. Upon further review, it turned out that my declarations while wearing a magical, virtual hat were not binding on any team; I was unable to force those trades to actually happen. While I have not obtained the desired legal authority over the last calendar year, it was a fun exercise, so I am reviving it ahead of next week’s deadline.

The basic rules are simple. I can’t guarantee that every trade will be thought of as fair by every reader — indeed, I can guarantee the opposite — but I did make a real effort to at least construct trades that were plausible. That is, except for the very last section, where I am explicitly trying to make wild trades, spitballing how a team could pull off a trade that ought to be impossible.

The Milwaukee Brewers acquire P Marcus Stroman from the Toronto Blue Jays for SS Mauricio Dubon, OF Trent Grisham, P Aaron Ashby, and 2B Travis Shaw

Brandon Woodruff’s injury throws a monkey wrench into the works for the Brewers, and with one of the weaker rotations among first-tier playoff contenders, something’s gotta give. While Stroman has expressed a desire to go to the Yankees, the Brewers ought to have more motivation, unless James Paxton is secretly injured. Brice Turang is the shortstop horse to bet on in the Brewers system, and Dubon is sufficiently close to the majors to tempt the Blue Jays, who have seemed to prefer near-major league ready prospects for reasons that elude me. Grisham would give Toronto a near-future bat who is increasingly intriguing, and Ashby would fulfill the team’s need to have every player in the minor league system related to a former major leaguer. Shaw isn’t here to actually add much, but instead to give Toronto an opportunity to rehab his value, and clear the way for Keston Hiura for good. 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 — Nick Kingham, Mark Prior, and Adam Wainwright — on how they learned and developed their curveballs.

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Nick Kingham, Toronto Blue Jays

“I’ve been throwing a curveball since ninth grade, or maybe around 13 years old. I guess my dad originally taught it to me. But I never really had a good one. I threw a one-finger curveball for a little while. It was like a suitcase, you know? It kind of just spun and slowed down, and gravity would take it. Then someone told me to try spiking my finger. I’ve been throwing it that way ever since, probably for the last 15 years.

“It’s a standard spike. This is the horseshoe, the tracks go this way, and it’s right on there. Spike it up. There’s nothing… actually, I dig my nail into it. I set my index finger there and make sure that it has enough pressure. That’s comfortable to me. I like to have a secure grip on the ball. Read the rest of this entry »

Since June 1, the Oakland A’s have been one of the best teams in baseball, pushing themselves into the middle of the American League Wild Card race. But across the Bay, there’s been a team that’s been even better recently.

Since July 1, the Giants have posted the best record in baseball. They’ve lost just three games this month and have managed to claw their way back to .500 with an extra-innings, walk-off win over the Mets yesterday afternoon. That win clinched a four-game series that included two other extra-innings, walk-off wins. Sixteen games ago, the Giants were 10 games below .500 and possessed the second-worst record in the National League. They’re now tied for second in the NL West — though 16 games behind the Dodgers — and just 2 and 1/2 games out in the Wild Card race.

It’s been a remarkable turnaround for a club that looked like it was going nowhere less than a month ago. With a week and a half left until the trade deadline, the Giants suddenly face a tough decision about their mindset for the rest of the season. Madison Bumgarner and Will Smith have been continuously connected to trade rumors since this past offseason, but now that the team finds itself on the cusp of contention, they might not be as available as previously thought. This is how president of baseball operations Farhan Zaidi put it in an interview with Giants beat writer Henry Schulman on July 21:

“It’s just very difficult at this point to speak in black-and-white terms. We’re really in a period of transition in this organization. When you can manage a transition and continue to compete, and continue to keep a fan base as loyal as this one energized and excited about the team, that’s obviously the perfect scenario.”

The expectations were understandably low heading into this season. After a couple of ugly seasons in 2017 and 2018, the Giants were clearly looking to reset when they hired Zaidi this winter. In February, longtime manager Bruce Bochy announced that he would be retiring following this season. Just a handful of players remain from the teams that won three World Series in five years earlier this decade, and many of their contracts are expiring soon. Despite that, over the last several weeks, they’ve managed to stumble into the perfect scenario Zaidi laid out above. Read the rest of this entry »

When it comes to replacement level, first base is a very different beast than catcher. In general, teams prioritize catcher defense and staff handling over offense, and even in this age of advanced analytics, there’s room to quibble over whether the available metrics — including the pitch-framing sort — capture enough of their value. As we lack a good staff-handling metric (catcher ERA remains inadequate due to sample-size issues), there’s a whole gray area that, among other things, allows teams, particularly contending ones, to convince themselves they’re getting enough value behind the plate.

First base is another story. Offense is comparatively easy to measure, and the expectations for the position are high. A contending team that lacks a heavy hitter at the spot, or at least an adequate one, is bringing a spork to a knife fight. At this end of the defensive spectrum, it shouldn’t be that hard to find alternatives, even if they possess relatively clunky gloves; in this day of shortened benches, you can generally find a utilityman to fill in defensively at first in the late innings. Particularly with so many teams within range of a Wild Card spot, the upgrades available as the July 31 deadline approaches make for some fairly slim pickings, and so some teams may prefer to shuffle through internal options.

Among contenders (which, for this series, I’ve defined as teams who are above .500 or have playoff odds of at least 10.0%, a definition that currently covers 18 teams), seven have gotten less than 1.0 WAR at the position thus far. Again, a closer look at each situation suggests that not all of them will be in the market for external solutions. Between early-season injuries and slow-starting veterans, some of these teams aren’t in as dire a shape as their overall numbers suggest, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re out of the woods. Note that I’m skipping over the Yankees, for whom an 0-for-4 from Luke Voit on Sunday was the difference between slipping below the threshold or clearing it. Read the rest of this entry »

In a race for a playoff spot, every edge matters. And yet all too often, for reasons that extend beyond a player’s statistics, managers and general managers fail to make the moves that could improve their teams, allowing subpar production to fester at the risk of smothering a club’s postseason hopes. In Baseball Prospectus’ 2007 book It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over, I compiled a historical All-Star squad of ignominy, identifying players at each position whose performances had dragged their teams down in tight races: the Replacement Level Killers. It’s a concept I’ve revisited on several occasions, both at BP and beyond; last year, I brought it to FanGraphs in an expanded format. With the July 31 trade deadline looming, it’s once again time to point out some of the bigger holes at each position among contenders, and it’s worth noting that this time, there’s no August waiver period for teams to fall back on.

When it comes to defining replacement level play, we needn’t be slaves to exactitude. Any team that’s gotten less than 1.0 WAR from a position to this point might be considered fair game, even if in some cases that means an above-average starter and ghastly backups. Sometimes, acceptable or even above-average defense (which, of course may depend upon which metric one uses) coupled with total ineptitude on offense is enough to flag a team. Sometimes, a team may be well ahead of replacement level, but has lost a key contributor due to injury; sometimes, the reverse is true, but the team hasn’t yet climbed above that first-cut threshold. As with Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of hard-core pornography, I know replacement level when I see it. Read the rest of this entry »

In my piece last week discussing the age-related demographics of the Trade Value Series, I included multiple graphs showing how baseball has changed over the years with respect to the quality and quantity of the contributions of younger and older players in the game. This is is one of the graphs from that piece:

This graph, and the others like it in the post, did a good job of showing age-related changes. But I thought there might be interest in the data underlying those graphs, data that would have been much too cumbersome to include in the piece. Below is the data that drove those graphs; it even breaks the ages down into smaller subsets. The numbers in all of the headers below represent player ages.

Read the rest of this entry »

In an interview with Great Big Story, Kerry Maher, a Youngsan University professor and Lotte Giants superfan, described the difference between Major League Baseball and the Korea Baseball Organization (KBO) fan atmospheres like this: “To me, MLB is like an opera and the Lotte Giants in the Sajik [Stadium] is rock ‘n’ roll.” For those who have experienced sitting in the stands of both leagues’ ballparks, it probably seems like an apt comparison.

If you’ve followed my work, you’re likely aware of the KBO’s cheering culture. As I wrote when I interviewed several foreign-born players currently playing in the KBO, the league’s fan experience can strike those who aren’t from Korea as somewhat unusual compared to the quieter crowds of MLB. For starters, each KBO team has their own cheermaster and cheerleaders. Last week, I went over to the Incheon SK Munhak Stadium to talk to the SK Wyverns’ cheermaster and three of their cheerleaders. Read the rest of this entry »

A few bumpy outings aside, Shaun Anderson has had a solid rookie season with the San Francisco Giants. Since debuting in mid-May, the 24-year-old right-hander has won three of five decisions, and on six occasions he’s gone at least five innings while allowing just a pair of runs. Overall, he has a 4.87 ERA and a 4.37 FIP in 12 starts.

Anderson is comfortable on a big stage. He pitched in the College World Series while at the University of Florida, and last summer he took the mound in the All-Star Futures Game. The former Gator came into this year ranked eighth on our Giants Top Prospects list.

He was originally Red Sox property. A third-round pick in 2016, Anderson was shipped to San Francisco thirteen months later, along with now-19-year-old righty Gregory Santos, in exchange for Eduardo Nunez. The days-before-the-trade-deadline deal brought Boston a player who helped them win a World Series — Nunez has since been DFA’d — while San Francisco got an up-and-comer who doesn’t fit a conventional mold.

College relievers rarely become big-league starters, and this is an era where pitchers typically pump gas and miss a lot of bats. Anderson is an anomaly in both respects. The erstwhile closer has a pedestrian 92/93mph heater, and he’s punching out just 5.7 batters per nine innings.

Asked about his approach, Anderson described it as “attack.” Undaunted by big-league hitters in the box, he’s all about mixing and matching, and working down in the zone. Read the rest of this entry »