Kole Calhoun stood at his locker near the close of the 2019 season and talked about appreciating every moment of his eight seasons in Anaheim, knowing that any day could have been his last day. A few months later, the Angels declined his $14 million contract option. He departs Los Angeles having played a little bit of left and a smidgen of center, but mostly the Angels kept Kalhoun sequestered to right field, where in 2019 he hacked fiendishly amid frequent swing adjustments. His final season with the Angels produced inconsistency in his monthly outputs, as well as a new career high in strikeout rate (25.6 percent) and a modest 108 wRC+.

Calhoun is a member of the Fraternity of Less Effective Outfielders the Angels Have Put Next to Mike Trout. There have been many others over the years, placed out there in the corners beside the reigning AL MVP: Vernon Wells, Torii Hunter, Josh Hamilton, Ben Revere. And in 2019, Trout’s partners in the grass were Kole Calhoun and Justin Upton. Calhoun is gone, but Upton, another veteran who is not as good as Mike Trout, will remain. He doesn’t need to be as good as Trout to be of use, something that has to be true for him, since it’s true for every other player in the league. The question is, can Upton still be good, despite the obstacles ahead of him, and the comparisons to the outfielders around him?

Upton, at 32 years old, is a once fearsome slugger from the National League whose turf toe, wonky knee, and brief, passionate encounter with an outfield wall left him hurt and unproductive for most of 2019. Upton will be baseball’s active leader in errors among outfielders in 2020, and he may be entering the part of his career in which expectations are lowered, especially given how he got beat up so much and only made it into 63 games last season — the first time he’s played in fewer than 100 since 2008.

His durability has been one of his strengths; that, and his ability to do this. At 30 years old, he was worth 3.8 WAR for the Angels before baseball sent him into a wall this past season, so it’s not foolhardy to think Upton could be one of the Angels’ “new” contributors moving forward, or at least play a key role, even though he ended 2019 with a shot in the knee and a pair of crutches. Read the rest of this entry »

Austin Hedges had a disastrous season at the plate. He batted .176/.252/.311, good for a 47 wRC+ that placed him last among batters with at least 300 plate appearances. But Hedges had a remarkable season behind the plate. He was worth 27.3 defensive runs above average, second only to J.T. Realmuto and first on a rate basis among all players in baseball.

WAR gives us a handy way to convert this, and WAR was pretty happy with Hedges in 2019. He was worth 1.4 WAR in 347 plate appearances, which works out to 2.4 WAR per 600 plate appearances. An average player would be worth just under 2 WAR per 600, which means Hedges was above-average despite his sub-Mendoza batting stats.

But when someone’s batting line is as poor as Hedges’, there’s an impulse to say that WAR doesn’t capture everything. Hedges isn’t a bad hitter; he’s an exceptionally bad hitter. He had a 47 wRC+! Six pitchers had better batting lines last year. My former colleague Sheryl Ring pointed this out recently, and opined that NL teams simply couldn’t afford to carry a bat that poor in addition to the pitcher’s spot. This made me think several things at once. My first thought was “Of course not! WAR works.” My second thought was “Actually yeah, two pitcher-level batters in a row would be awful. I’m not sure that a linear stat could handle that.” My third thought was: time to do some analysis.

At a high level, it’s clear that wRC+ isn’t simply additive. Consider a team with four batters who always walk or hit a single, and five batters who always strike out. This is an extreme example, of course, but that team would have a roughly average wRC+. It would also be an incredibly potent offense if you stacked your four productive hitters together; it would average something like 7.5 runs a game depending on the timing of singles and walks.

Of course, if you sequenced your hitters poorly, it could also average zero runs per game. When we’re looking at extreme examples (and Hedges is extreme, though not nearly this extreme), the order really does matter. How should one deal with this? It’s a bit of a cliche, but: very carefully. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2020 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2019 election, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

As much as Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera, and Bernie Williams, Andy Pettitte was a pillar of the Joe Torre-era Yankees dynasty. The tall Texan lefty played such a vital role on 13 pinstriped playoff teams and seven pennant winners — plus another trip to the World Series during his three-year run with Houston — that he holds several major postseason records. In fact, no pitcher ever started more potential series clinchers, both in the World Series and the postseason as a whole.

For as important as Pettitte was to the “Core Four” (Williams always gets the short end of the stick on that one) that anchored five championships from 1996 to 2009, he seldom made a case as one of the game’s top pitchers. High win totals driven by excellent offensive support helped him finish in the top five of his leagues’ Cy Young voting four times, but only three times did he place among the top 10 in ERA or WAR, and he never ranked higher than sixth in strikeouts. He made just three All-Star teams.

Indeed, Pettitte was more plow horse than racehorse. A sinker- and cutter-driven groundballer whose pickoff move was legendary, he was a championship-level innings-eater, a grinder (his word) rather than a dominator, a pitcher whose strong work ethic, mental preparation, and focus — visually exemplified by his peering in for the sign from the catcher with eyes barely visible underneath the brim of his cap — compensated for his lack of dazzling stuff. Ten times he made at least 32 starts, a mark that’s tied for seventh in the post-1994 strike era. His total of 10 200-inning seasons is tied for fourth in that same span, and his 13 seasons of qualifying for the ERA title with an ERA+ of 100 or better is tied for first with two other lefties, Mark Buehrle and CC Sabathia. He had his ups and downs in the postseason, but only once during his 18-year career (2004, when he underwent season-ending elbow surgery) was he unavailable to pitch once his team made the playoffs.

Even given Pettitte’s 256 career wins, he takes a back seat to two other starters on the ballot (Roger Clemens and Curt Schilling) who were better at missing bats and preventing runs, and who also had plenty of postseason success. Both of those pitchers have reasons why voters might exclude them from their ballots even while finding them statistically qualified, and the same is true for Pettitte, who was named in the 2007 Mitchell Report for having used human growth hormone to recover from an elbow injury. Between those dents and dings and the additional presence of both Roy Halladay and Mike Mussina, who were elected last year, Pettitte received just 9.9% in his ballot debut. In a less crowded field, he could build upon that, at least well enough to persist on the ballot, but he seems unlikely to make much headway towards 75% barring a significant change in the electorate’s attitudes towards PEDs.

About those wins: Regular readers know that I generally avoid dwelling upon pitcher win totals, because in this increasingly specialized era, they owe as much to adequate offensive, defensive, and bullpen support as they do to a pitcher’s own performance. While one needn’t know how many wins Pettitte amassed in a season or a career to appreciate his true value, those totals have affected the popular perception of his career.

Read the rest of this entry »

Eric Lauer is a Brewer now, Milwaukee having acquired the 24-year-old left-hander from the Padres on Wednesday as part of a four-player swap. He remains a work in progress. Two years into his big-league career, Lauer is still refining a five-pitch mix that was good enough to make him a first round pick. San Diego drafted the Elyria, Ohio native 25th-overall out of Kent State University in 2016.

Lauer leaned heavily on his fastball and his cutter this past season. The former, which he threw 53% of the time, is a four-seamer that averaged 92.1 mph. The latter, which he threw 22.2% of the time, is four ticks slower and delivered without undue effort. Unlike his other secondaries, it comes naturally.

“The angle my hand is at when I deliver a pitch is very cutter-y,” Lauer explained. “It’s on the side of the ball, so I can cut it easily. That’s why my changeup has never been a great pitch for me; I throw on the outer side of the ball, rather than the inner side, or directly behind it.”

His changeup is a two-seam circle he used just 4.4% of the time. He wasn’t tinkering with the grip when I spoke to him this summer, but he was trying to find the right release point to consistently get the angle he wanted. As he erstwhile Golden Flash put it, “Changeups and sliders come out of your hand two completely different ways. I have to focus on different keys for each.”

Laura’s slider is a pitch that has required continual tinkering. He told me that he used to grip it loosely, but on the suggestion of since-replaced pitching coach Darren Balsley, he’d begun putting it deeper in his hand. The result is a slider that “spins harder, but is a little harder to control.” In other words, it is a pitch that has remained, frustratingly, a work in progress. Last year’s usage rate dipped to 6.5% Read the rest of this entry »

Catcher week continued Tuesday in Arizona as the Diamondbacks signed Stephen Vogt, 35, to a one-year, $3 million deal that could extend to two years and $7 million if Vogt reaches various threshholds during his first year in Phoenix. Vogt missed all of 2018 after fairly serious shoulder surgery undergone whilst with the Brewers, but performed credibly in 280 plate appearances for the Giants in 2019, hitting 10 home runs and posting a 107 wRC+.

Arizona, meanwhile, was in the market for a veteran catcher to replace Alex Avila, who seems likely to depart in free agency after spending most of the last two years mentoring the Diamondbacks’ young backstop Carson Kelly. Kelly, 25, finally got more than 75 plate appearances in 2019 after three disappointing campaigns with the Cardinals left his once-elevated prospect status in doubt.

He made the most of his chances, triple-slashing .245/.348/.478 while walking 13% of the time and posting a 108 wRC+. Those aren’t All-Star figures, to be sure, and I’m certain the Diamondbacks are hoping for a little bit more out of him, but it isn’t bad for catcher, given the state of the position, was presumably enough promise to allow the Arizona brain trust to feel comfortable passing on bigger-name catching options for 2020. I suspect, given Arizona’s aspirations for 2020, that a disappointing start for Kelly might push the D-backs into the trade market come July, but they don’t need to decide that now. Read the rest of this entry »

Two winters ago, the Rangers weren’t looking to contend, but they were looking for undervalued pitching. They gave reliever money to starter-turned-very-good-reliever Mike Minor in early December to join the rotation with a three-year, $28 million deal that has proved to be a massive bargain, as Minor’s 6.7 WAR over the last two seasons ranks 29th among all pitchers. Last December, the still-rebuilding Rangers signed Lance Lynn, whose very good FIP in 2018 was marred by an ugly 4.77 ERA across stints with the Twins and Yankees, to a three-year deal worth $30 million. Lynn delivered with a seven-win season and a fifth-place finish in the AL Cy Young award voting. Now the Rangers have reached a three-year deal with Kyle Gibson worth $30 million, according to Jeff Passan, with Jon Morosi first reporting the team and player.

How Gibson fits in with Lynn and Minor goes beyond just the identical contracts. Over the last two years, Gibson put together a pair of solid 2.6-WAR seasons with the Twins, but a low BABIP in 2018 meant a 3.62 ERA, while a higher one last season resulted in a 4.84 ERA that made him look worse than he deserved. Gibson’s strikeout rate climbed to 23% with his walk rate dropping to 8%, all while maintaining his high groundball rate. His home run rate went up in a fashion consistent with the rest of the league. With his sinker, assuming a good infield defense (yet to be determined, given that the Rangers likely aren’t done making moves), he should put up very good numbers even in a hitter’s park (we don’t yet know how Texas’ new ballpark will play).

Gibson’s peripheral numbers aren’t the only aspect of his game that could make him an underrated signing. The prescient Kiley McDaniel had this to say in FanGraphs’ Top 50 Free Agents post:

It’ll surely hurt the Division Champion Twins to lose 9.6 WAR and 60% of their rotation with Gibson, Odorizzi, and Pineda hitting free agency. Gibson was the player with the most helium amongst team-side analyst-types consulted for the first iteration of this list. Some have him over Keuchel, in part because his 92-95 mph heater gives more margin for error in games, in projecting his future, and in projecting a role in a playoff rotation. His ERA indicators suggest he’s a sub-4 ERA type and he’s made 25-plus starts six years in a row. Gibson seems like a solid candidate for a sneaky big and/or early deal from a club confident he offers the best value among the 10 or so starters with a solid chance at a multi-year contract.

Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2020 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2018 election at SI.com, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

On the field, Curt Schilling was at his best when the spotlight shone the brightest. A top starter on four pennant winners and three World Series champions, he has a strong claim as the best postseason pitcher of his generation. Founded on pinpoint command of his mid-90s fastball and a devastating splitter, his regular season dominance enhances his case for Cooperstown. He’s one of just 18 pitchers to strike out more than 3,000 hitters, and is the owner of the highest strikeout-to-walk ratio in modern major league history.

That said, Schilling never won a Cy Young award and finished with “only” 216 regular-season wins. While only one starter with fewer than 300 wins was elected during the 1992-2014 span (Bert Blyleven), four have been tabbed since then, two in 2015 (Pedro Martinez and John Smoltz) and two in ’19 (Roy Halladay and Mike Mussina), suggesting that’s far less of an obstacle than before.

Schilling was something of a late bloomer who didn’t click until his age-25 season, after he had been traded three times. He spent much of his peak pitching in the shadows of even more famous (and popular) teammates, which may have helped to explain his outspokenness. Former Phillies manager Jim Fregosi nicknamed him “Red Light Curt” for his desire to be at the center of attention when the cameras were rolling, while Phillies general manager Ed Wade said, “Schilling is a horse every fifth day and a horse’s ass the other four.” Whether expounding about politics, performance-enhancing drugs, the QuesTec pitch-tracking system, or a cornerstone of his legend, Schilling wasn’t shy about telling the world what he thought.

That desire eventually extended beyond the mound. Schilling used his platform to raise money for research into amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (Lou Gehrig’s disease) and, after a bout of oral cancer, recorded public service announcements on the dangers of smokeless tobacco. In 1996, USA Today named him “Baseball’s Most Caring Athlete.” But in the years since his retirement, his actions and inflammatory rhetoric on social media have turned him from merely a controversial and polarizing figure to one who has continued to create problems for himself. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been more than two weeks since the Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich’s bombshell report at The Athletic, which revealed a massive sign-stealing scandal implemented by the Houston Astros beginning in 2017. Since then, we’ve seen reports that the official investigation launched by Major League Baseball has confirmed the system as described by Mike Fiers in that original report; they are continuing to look into other ways the Astros may have cheated during the 2017 postseason and beyond. Whether the Astros were using a modified method on the road relying on “buzzers,” as some have speculated, has yet to be confirmed.

What we do know is that the Astros broke the rules by using technology to steal signs in real-time. Members of Houston’s front office and coaching staff could face significant penalties, and with Alex Cora and Carlos Beltrán implicated as sign-stealing ringleaders, there could be impacts felt in organizations beyond Houston. It remains to be seen just how severe the punishment will be — though our own Craig Edwards argued last week that they could be quite severe indeed — and if any players are caught up in the fallout.

Last week, I took an initial look at whether or not the on-field value of the Astros sign-stealing scheme could be parsed out in the data. Between the changing roster, the changing ball, and the at times non-linear effect of coaching and player development, there was a lot of noise in the data. At a broad level, it’s hard to make any conclusive statements about the specific effects of the Astros sign-stealing, though as I noted, the fact that the team persisted in the practice suggests they believed they derived an appreciable benefit from it. On Friday, two more attempts to answer that same question were made.

Over at The Ringer, Ben Lindbergh concluded:

“Knowing the next pitch just has to help, right? But no matter how we slice and dice the data, the statistical case is less compelling than it would be if sign-stealing made hitting as simple as it seems like it should. Great as the Astros were at the plate in 2017, the most fascinating aspect of their sign-stealing scandal is that it didn’t make them even better.”

Rob Arthur was a little more confident in his conclusions in a piece for Baseball Prospectus:

“We can tentatively conclude that their sign stealing probably had a major impact on the team’s plate discipline numbers. This was not innocent cheating that barely affected the game; according to the available data, it may have yielded an unprecedented improvement in the Astros’ ability to make contact and lay off outside pitches, helping to turn a talented lineup into one of the best-hitting teams of all time.”

In my previous piece, I landed somewhere in between these two positions: sign-stealing probably had an impact, but it was nearly impossible to determine the exact benefit at a team level due to all the noise. But what happens if we drill down to the per-pitch level, as I did with the run expectancy (RE288) data in my article last week, and this time focus on individual players? Read the rest of this entry »

In the first few weeks of the offseason, just a few teams have been making the headlines by means of improving their roster. The Chicago White Sox, of course, just spent money to acquire the best catcher on the market in Yasmani Grandal while also retaining first baseman Jose Abreu for the next three years. Meanwhile, the Atlanta Braves have held onto two important relievers while acquiring a third in Will Smith via free agency and bringing in catcher Travis d’Arnaud on a two-year deal. Most teams, however, haven’t budged much. There’s no reason to get squeamish about that — we’re still a couple of days away from Thanksgiving, and the Winter Meetings are a few weeks away. Many teams are still likely in the process of mapping out just what the free agent and trade markets could look like in the coming months, and thus are treading lightly during November.

The Cincinnati Reds are not one of those teams. They are rumored to have big plans for spending money and getting back to contention this winter, but that hasn’t stopped them from making a string of more minor transactions before much of the league has made any at all. Since the end of the winter, they’ve added four players from outside the organization to their 40-man roster, more than any team in the majors. It began with the organization claiming outfielder Travis Jankowski from San Diego on Oct. 31, and it continued with a trade for Rays right-hander José De León last week. On Monday, Cincinnati added two more players, trading for Toronto Blue Jays right-hander Justin Shafer and claiming another Padres outfielder in Nick Martini. Shafer was acquired for just cash, while the Rays trade will involve either cash or a player to be named later.

Each of these players comes to the organization with varying levels of intrigue. Perhaps the most interesting is Shafer, 27, who pitched 39.2 innings with Toronto in 2019 and held a 3.86 ERA and a 5.18 FIP. An eighth-round pick in 2014, this was just his second season seeing big league competition, and as is evident in the ERA and FIP split, results were mixed. He’s walked far too many batters as a major leaguer, with 6.0 BB/9 over 48 total innings, especially when combined with the seven homers he’s allowed (1.3/9) and his lack of gaudy strikeout numbers (8.8 K/9 in 2019). Read the rest of this entry »

Josh Donaldson is among a group of free agents who bet on themselves last winter. He certainly could have gotten a multi-year deal from some team, but likely at a lower salary than the $23 million he received last season. Going two or three years also would have meant hitting the free agent market again heading into his age-35 or age-36 season, when another multi-year deal would have been far less likely. Donaldson opted to get a jump on free agency last winter, take the best one-year deal he could get, and let his play do the talking heading into free agency again. While Donaldson’s risk hasn’t paid off yet, he is coming off a five-win season that ranked 20th among position players, just behind Yasmani Grandal and just ahead of Peter Alonso and Juan Soto. Despite turning 34 years old next month, Donaldson should receive a multi-year deal paying him just as much as he earned a year ago.

We’ve already seen Grandal bet on himself and have the move pay off in free agency this season. The same is likely to be true for Hyun-Jin Ryu as well. It might also finally pay off for Mike Moustakas. Turning down greater guarantees in the hopes for a better market when the player is a year older is a risky play. It was particularly risky for Donaldson given how injuries prevented him from playing most of the 2018 season, and when he did play, his hitting was well below his previously high standards. Another year like 2018 and Donaldson would’ve been looking at very small guarantees heading into next season. As it stands, Kiley McDaniel predicted Donaldson would receive $71 million over three years while the crowd came in at $60 million. He only needs half of McDaniel’s prediction to beat the expected contract from a year ago. A good 2019 should pay off for Donaldson, but let’s look at how his future performance could pay off for a team. Read the rest of this entry »