The Red Sox may have won the World Series, but in many ways, it was the Oakland Athletics that were baseball’s hot summer jam. Winning 97 games, the most since the heady Moneyball days of yore, Oakland returned to the penthouse from the outhouse. And quite literally, given that the 2018 version featured stories of a possible privately financed new ballpark rather than tales of raw sewage befouling the clubhouse. No, their…stuff…doesn’t yet work in the playoffs, but getting there is half the battle.

The Setup

The A’s were largely a victim of their own success, with their stathead shenanigans and a movie in which their GM was played by an A-list actor helping to usher in a new era in baseball, one in which every team in baseball has embraced modernity to at least some extent.

Much of the praise Oakland received 15 years ago had to do with a front office that was largely playing in a world in which many of their opponents didn’t know all the rules. Once the people you’re playing Monopoly with realize that they too can build houses and hotels on properties, things get a lot harder.

Baseball got a lot smarter and the A’s saw their edge harder to maintain. It’s one thing to be smart while the other guy is rich, but what happens when the rich teams are also smart?

Times have been lean in Oakland since the frustrating finish to the 2014 season, when the team lost ten games to the Angels over a two-week period in late summer, falling from a first-place battle to nearly missing the playoffs entirely.

The A’s have generally been content to just survive on a yearly basis, holding their head safely above baseball’s true pits of despair, but never keeping together enough of a core to win consistently. The front office is far from incompetent and has continued to cleverly acquire under-appreciated talent like Blake Treinen and Khris Davis, even if it’s frequently more expensive to do so than it used to be.

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A year ago, the Cardinals and Marlins agreed to a trade that would have sent Giancarlo Stanton to St. Louis. Stanton exercised the no-trade clause in his contract, and ended up with the Yankees instead. The Cardinals continued to engage the Marlins, likely preferring eventual NL MVP Christian Yelich, but ending up instead with Marcell Ozuna, as he was who the Marlins made available at the time. Trading for Ozuna made sense, as waiting for Yelich carried the risk of him not becoming available at all. Most Cardinals moves make sense. But Ozuna was not the Cardinals’ first choice, and the trade likely wasn’t even Plan B. Last winter was not the first time St. Louis missed out on its top choice and resorted to lesser options. If they opt to do so again, they risk missing the postseason for a fourth straight year despite not having a losing season.

Let’s review. The winter of 2016 saw potential trade targets in Adam Eaton and Charlie Blackmon go unacquired; the Cardinals signed Dexter Fowler right after the Eaton trade. Three years ago, the team famously missed out on David Price and Jason Heyward and ended up with Mike Leake.

Ozuna struggled with shoulder problems most of the season, which limited his defense and eliminated the power surge that made him a very good player the season before. The Cardinals jettisoned Leake in the middle of 2017 and had to give the Mariners $17.5 million to do so. Fowler put up a solid 2017 but followed it up with a miserable 2018 that brought his two-year WAR total with St. Louis down to 1.3. He’s owed roughly $50 million over the next three years and would require a similar buyout to the one that sent Leake to Seattle in order to be traded. And those were the good Cardinals free agent signings. The club has used some of its payroll room and guaranteed around $56 million to Luke Gregerson, Greg Holland, and Brett Cecil, and received a 5.62 ERA and 0.4 WAR in 137.2 combined innings from that trio. Read the rest of this entry »

Seth Lugo has a quality bender, and he relied on it heavily this year. The New York Mets righty ranked seventh among qualified relievers in curveball frequency at 33.9%. It’s hard to argue with the results. Lugo made 54 appearances — all but five out of the bullpen — and logged a 2.66 ERA and a 3.17 FIP while fanning 103 batters in 101.1 innings.

The increased usage — and the effectiveness that went along with it — stood out to Travis Sawchik. My former FanGraphs colleague likened Lugo to a right-handed Rich Hill in this informative piece that ran on these electronic pages back in mid-June.

Two months later, I asked Lugo for the story behind his go-to pitch, and about his approach to attacking hitters.

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Seth Lugo on learning to throw a curveball: “My dad was my coach growing up. We used to go to a local college — Centenary College, in Shreveport, Louisiana — and the coach there showed my dad how to teach young pitchers to throw breaking balls, curveballs. He showed him what he thought was safe, what would keep your elbow healthy.

“He used a tennis-ball container. You’d throw it, and make sure that it went end-over-end. That way you’d be taking pressure off your elbow. I was throwing a tennis-ball container and making sure it was spinning the same way. Or maybe a Pringles container. Either one. If it started to spin sideways instead of going end-over-end … that’s not how you want to throw it. Anyway, you’d practice that a few times, then switch to a curveball. That’s how I learned. This was when I was 10 or 11 years old. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2019 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2014 election at SI.com, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research, and was expanded for inclusion in The Cooperstown Casebook, published in 2017 by Thomas Dunne Books. 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.

Unlike 2014 Hall of Fame honorees Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine or 2015 honoree Randy Johnson, Mike Mussina didn’t reach 300 wins in his career. Nor did he ever win a Cy Young award, in part because a teammate practically stole one out of his hands on the basis of superior run support. For as well as he pitched in October, his teams never won a World Series, because even the best relievers sometimes falter, to say nothing of what happens to the rest of them.

Though lacking in those marquee accomplishments, Mussina nonetheless strung together an exceptional 18 year career spent entirely in the crucible of the American League East, with its high-offense ballparks and high-pressure atmosphere. A cerebral pitcher with an expansive arsenal that featured a 93-mph fastball and a signature knuckle-curve — and at times as many as five other pitches — he not only missed bats with regularity but also had pinpoint control.

Mike Mussina, Wicked 85mph Knuckle Curve. ? pic.twitter.com/9aiYm9tVIE

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) November 15, 2018

In a prime that coincided with those of the aforementioned pitchers — as well as 2015 inductees Pedro Martinez and John Smoltz and ballotmates Roger Clemens, Roy Halladay, and Curt Schilling — “Moose” never led the AL in either strikeouts or ERA, but he ranked in the league’s top five six times in the former category and seven times in the latter. He earned All-Star honors five times and received Cy Young votes in eight separate seasons across a 10-year span, at one point finishing in the top five four times in five years. He even did a better job of preventing runs in the postseason than he did in the regular season, though it wasn’t enough to put his teams over the top.

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If your perception of Jesse Chavez, who on Tuesday signed with the Texas Rangers for two years and $8 million, is anchored by his time with the A’s from 2012-2015 — or even, honestly, with the Blue Jays (2016), Dodgers (2016), Angels (2017) or Rangers (for the first half of 2018) — then I think it’s probably worth spending a little time familiarizing yourself with the following table:

After July 21st, when he joined the Cubs in exchange for an A-ball reliever, Chavez wasn’t just the best reliever in Joe Maddon’s much-taxed bullpen, though he was that. He wasn’t even just the best reliever in the N.L. Central, though he was that, too. After July 21st, there’s a reasonable case to be made that Jesse Chavez was among the most valuable relievers in baseball. Just three — all Rays, for obvious reasons — threw more innings than Chavez’s 39; just four bested his .211 wOBA over the period. Nobody better than Jesse Chavez threw more innings after July 21st; nobody who threw more innings was better.

Here is, perhaps, one reason why:

Chavez first picked up his cutter during the 2013 season, and for a few years the pitch worked much as it did in 2018: when used more, his ERA went down; when used less, his ERA went up. In 2015, that changed, as a season-long velocity decline brought on by overuse in the rotation sapped the pitch of much of its zip. By the time Chavez got his arm strength back, he’d arrived in Los Angeles for the 2016 and 2017 seasons, where he was asked to pitch up in the zone more than he wanted to, further diminishing the value of a pitch that gets outs by generating balls on the ground. The pitch didn’t click until Chavez dropped his arm slot on Mother’s Day, 2018, a month before he arrived in Chicago. See if you can pick it out on the graph above.

There are reasons to think, in other words, that this particular version of Jesse Chavez is better than the one we’ve become used to seeing. If that’s the case, it’s good news for the Rangers, who had a middling ‘pen (their 4.23 FIP was 16th in the majors last year) and a downright bad rotation (their 5.18 FIP was 27th) in 2018. Chavez can start, if that’s the way the Rangers want to go, or pitch in long relief like he did last season, or even jump into a two-inning opener role. Whatever he takes on, Chavez seems poised to bring some stability to a Texas squad that’s likely to experience another rocky season in 2019, and if he performs anything like he did last year, he should be trade bait once again come July.

I think it’s probably unreasonable to expect a 1.15 ERA out of Chavez for a full season next year — that 97 percent strand rate will almost certainly come down, and Adrián Beltré won’t be around to convert quite as many ground balls hit to third base into outs — but even splitting the difference between his strong second half and his career numbers gets you a perfectly adequate pitcher, and that’s pretty much exactly what Steamer thinks he will be. I’d take the under on his 3.85 projected ERA, especially if he comes out of the ‘pen, and I suspect the Rangers would be perfectly happy to have him hit that number on the money out of the rotation.

In fact, the case for Texas signing Chavez is pretty clear: he’s a known quantity who comes relatively cheap, had a great second half, and can do a number of useful things in the rotation or in the ‘pen. What’s odd about that case is that it’s also the case for the Cubs signing Chavez, instead, which they didn’t do. And that’s very strange. Word is apparently getting around that the Cubs aren’t planning to “spend big” this offseason. But in what universe is signing Jesse Chavez “spending big”? And if the rumors are false, and the Cubs plan to blow past the luxury tax threshold and sign one or both of Bryce Harper and Manny Machado, why not throw in an extra $8 million for Chavez?

It sure sounds like Chavez would have given Chicago a discount, if they’d tried for one: when the season ended, he was overheard telling teammates that “if I’m not wearing this [Cubs jersey] next year, I’m done.” Maybe he got a good night’s sleep and decided he’d been a little rash. Maybe the Cubs’ budget really is stretched. Maybe something else happened. We don’t really know, and in the end it doesn’t matter that much. Now Jesse Chavez is a Texas Ranger. And he’s far from done.

For all the reasons that made running the Giants appealing to Farhan Zaidi, there’s one major, unavoidable negative: The roster is in pretty bad shape. That’s the roster of the big-league team, and, really, that’s the overall organizational depth chart. It’s an expensive and mediocre club with few reinforcements on the way, and while Zaidi obviously knows all this, that doesn’t change the fact he’ll be doing hard work, requiring hard decisions. Navigating this kind of situation is always unpleasant, when there exists a fan base rather accustomed to winning, so you can understand why Zaidi hasn’t yet said much about trading Madison Bumgarner. It’s something the Giants will have to confront, but it’s a troublesome concept to voice.

Still, the Giants are reportedly open to it. They don’t want to frighten the public, but they also don’t want to close themselves off to potential opportunities. It’s time for the Giants to change their direction, and Bumgarner is one of few players on the roster with trade value. According to the linked article, the Giants are likely to target “at least one high-end pitching prospect.” Bumgarner’s under contract only one more year, at a $12-million salary.

James Paxton has already been traded. Noah Syndergaard, Trevor Bauer, Carlos Carrasco, and Corey Kluber have all been the subject of rumors. Patrick Corbin is a free agent. Dallas Keuchel is a free agent. Yusei Kikuchi is going to be posted. You can add Bumgarner to the list of available starting pitchers. However, if Bumgarner is to be dealt, you shouldn’t expect the Giants to get a massive haul back. There’s a considerable gap between the perception of Bumgarner and the reality.

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As we get closer to deals for Manny Machado and Bryce Harper, the time has come for warnings about mega-deals gone bad. You know about Albert Pujols, Chris Davis, Miguel Cabrera, and Jacoby Ellsbury as prime examples of why guaranteeing big money long-term to players on the wrong side of 30 is a bad idea. Robinson Cano’s current contract is not one of those examples. There were alarm bells when Cano signed his 10-year, $240 million contract with the Mariners five years ago, but he has more than held up his end of the contract by averaging more than four wins per season. If Cano hits his projections next year and continues a normal age-related decline, he could easily live up to the $240 million contract he signed.

Over the past five seasons, the Mariners have paid Cano just over $108 million and Cano, in turn, has delivered 20.7 WAR. According to our values at the bottom of Cano’s player page, his play has been worth around $160 million. He’s currently projected by Steamer for three wins next season. With standard aging curves, here is what Cano’s production and value are expected to be over the next five years.

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The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2019 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2013 election at SI.com, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research, and was expanded for inclusion in The Cooperstown Casebook, published in 2017 by Thomas Dunne Books. 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.

All Edgar Martinez did was hit — the statement is almost entirely true in both the literal and figurative sense. Even after adjusting for his high-scoring surroundings, Martinez could flat-out rake. A high-average, high-on-base percentage hitting machine with plenty of power, his numbers place him among the top 30 or 40 hitters of all time even after adjusting for the high-offense era. Martinez played a key role in putting the Mariners on the map as an AL West powerhouse, emerging as a folk hero to a fan base that watched Ken Griffey Jr., Randy Johnson, and Alex Rodriguez lead the franchise’s charge to relevancy, then skip town for more lucrative deals. But while Griffey and Rodriguez were two-way stars at key up-the-middle positions and Johnson a flamethrowing ace, Martinez spent the bulk of his career as a designated hitter. In that capacity, he merely put a claim on being the best one in baseball history.

More than 40 years after it was introduced — in the most significant rule change since the AL adopted the foul strike rule in 1903 — the DH continues to rankle purists who would rather watch pitchers risk injury as they ineptly flail away (Bartolo Colon excepted). In 2004, Paul Molitor became the first player elected to the Hall after spending the plurality of his career (44% of his plate appearances) as a DH, while a decade later, Frank Thomas became the first elected after spending the majority of his career (57% of his PA) there. By comparison, Martinez took 72% of his plate appearances as a DH, while David Ortiz — whose 2016 victory lap spurred plenty of Hall of Fame discussion — took 88%.

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Last month, we talked about the potential conflicts of interest raised by the New York Mets hiring former CAA super agent Brodie Van Wagenen, who used to represent several high-profile Mets, as their new General Manager. Since then, we’ve gained additional information regarding the terms of Van Wagenen’s contract and how he and the Mets have attempted to address those conflict of interest concerns.

It’s worth noting that at the outset, the Mets didn’t offer a terribly specific answer to the question of how Van Wagenen had avoided breaching the fiduciary duty he owed to clients like Jacob deGrom and Yoenis Cespedes (among several others) when he accepted the Mets’ GM job. The day after my initial piece on the subject, John Delcos noted for Forbes that reporters asked Van Wagenen about the conflict of interest.

That was the subject of one of the first questions asked of him this afternoon, and before Van Wagenen could answer, Wilpon interrupted and said he had spoken with the commissioner’s office and Major League Players Association chief Tony Clark, adding, “We have provisions in Brodie’s contract to deal with any conflicts of interest.”

What those provisions are, neither Wilpon nor Van Wagenen would say. Van Wagenen, who, as expected, appeared polished and highly professional, said, ‘The goals between players and management are more in line than people think.'”

That answer doesn’t adequately address the issues attendant with Van Wagenen’s hiring. As I explained on Flipping Bats and Winning Games, agents have knowledge teams don’t, ranging from players’ medical conditions to their desired salaries. And even if players and management were to have similar goals, they’re still adverse negotiating parties. When we found out more about the contractual provisions that addressed conflicts, the details also left something to be desired. Per the New York Post:

Though he is no longer their agent, the 44-year-old is privy to information regarding his former clients that could give the Mets an advantage over a player. And that could also include negotiations for a long-term deal, because Van Wagenen might know their final asking price.

“We didn’t discuss specifics on any one player like that,’’ Wilpon said of deGrom’s future. “I think [deGrom] is to be determined and Brodie is going to have to recuse himself from some of those discussions. He will have to set an overall tone for the organization, which way he wants us to go, and then we’ll have to have some others be responsible for doing the actual contract.”

There are two problems with this approach. First, remember that, as we discussed last time, Van Wagenen was legally required to obtain a waiver of conflict of interest, with informed consent, from each player separately. Based on Jeff Wilpon’s comments, that didn’t happen. We do know that Van Wagenen kept his clients informed.

But based on the available reporting, it appears unlikely those conversations included informed consent waivers. For instance, Jacob deGrom told MLB.com that Van Wagenen’s “transition was ‘a little confusing,’ adding that he’s still trying to ‘wrap my head around it.'” And deGrom told the New York Post that “I don’t really know how to feel” about the “conflict-of-interest stuff.” MLB.com relays a conversation between the two that illustrates just how confusing this can get.

Shortly after Van Wagenen became GM, divesting himself of all interests in CAA and forfeiting the chance to represent deGrom in contract negotiations, he chatted again on the phone with his ex-client.

“Have you talked to my agent?” deGrom recalled asking him.

“I don’t know who that is,” Van Wagenen deadpanned.

“Yeah, me neither,” deGrom said, laughing.

For now, deGrom is still working out that detail, as he tries to determine how Van Wagenen’s move to the Mets’ front office might affect him.

That doesn’t sound like someone who provided informed consent for Van Wagenen’s new job, and there have been no reports confirming that deGrom – or any of Van Wagenen’s other ex-clients – signed any such written waivers.

Now, Van Wagenen did say that he would recuse himself from dealings with his former clients, which is good. But Wilpon suggested something else.

“The GM gives some guidance, but he’s not totally involved with every last detail,” Wilpon said. “[Van Wagenen] can give us direction. He just can’t be involved in the negotiation. Is it something we are worried about? No. We gave it a lot of thought and obviously I went through the process of making sure that everybody was OK with doing this kind of arrangement, of bringing an agent in to our side.”

For legal purposes, if Van Wagenen is providing “guidance” or “direction,” it really doesn’t matter if he is or isn’t in the room for negotiations. A true recusal would require him to have nothing whatsoever to do with his former clients’ contract negotiations. Direction and guidance creates the possibility – or at least the appearance – that he could disclose private information to those doing the negotiating. Avoiding that possibility would require the Mets’ General Manager to be absent from dealings regarding the Mets’ biggest stars, which creates a host of practical problems, as Phil Mushnick correctly notes.

Exactly how is that going to work? When, for example, deGrom’s future is discussed and determined, Van Wagenen will leave the room or, to be extra cautious, leave the country? Or will that determination be a quick process completed while the new GM, with no say whatsoever, is out to lunch?

His input won’t be solicited, known, weighed or, at the very least, fully suspected? Or are we to believe that the Mets hired a GM whom they’ll gag and handcuff when it’s time to make big decisions? Van Wagenen seems too smart to not know better. But we’re not?

So far, we haven’t seen Van Wagenen recuse himself from Noah Syndergaard trade talks, even though he represented the ace right-hander before taking the Mets job. And Van Wagenen raised eyebrows when he said that ex-client Tim Tebow, who this year posted a 106 wRC+ (along with a 34.6% strikeout rate and an unsustainable .418 BABIP) in Double-A, would nevertheless get promoted to start the 2019 season.

““I reject the notion that I’m going to be in a conflict of interest now or that I’m going to compromise my own reputation, past behavior and my own integrity,” Van Wagenen said to the New York Times‘ James Wagner. But that’s sort of the problem – Van Wagenen doesn’t appear to give the possibility of conflicts of interest its due consideration. And there are potential issues on the other side of trades, too. As Wagner notes: “Some G.M.’s may be leery of what inside information Van Wagenen has if he, say, offers a Met who is a former client of his in a trade.”

So the concerns now go beyond internal conflicts of interest. Can Brodie Van Wagenen run the Mets as he needs to with such significant limitations? Or will he circumvent those limitations in order to get the best deals for his team? At this point, we just don’t know. It would be a relatively simple fix, too; if the parties did follow the law, they could confirm they had written conflict waivers from all involved. But the fact that the Mets and Van Wagenen have allowed the situation to percolate suggests they may not have taken that step – and now, for better or worse, every move Van Wagenen makes will be viewed through that lens moving forward.

Five years after leaving his hometown Braves for New York City, and two years after winning a title in Houston, Brian McCann returned to Atlanta Monday night on a one-year deal worth $2 million. This deal would have made sense even if the Braves hadn’t also signed Josh Donaldson Monday night; Kurt Suzuki and Tyler Flowers shared catching duties for Atlanta in 2018, and Suzuki is now a Washington National. But with Donaldson also in the fold, the picture is crystal clear: The Braves expect to win the National League East for a second straight year, and Brian McCann, fresh off the high of two straight trips to the LCS, wants a piece of the action.

The upside for the Braves here is pretty obvious. McCann probably isn’t going to put up a wOBA above .350 ever again, as he did five times in his previous nine seasons for Atlanta, but he’s only one season removed from three consecutive years of wOBAs above .320, and Baseball Prospectus‘ catcher metrics still have him as a passable if not exceptional defensive receiver. Package that on-field skill-set with the kind of gruff, beardy clubhouse leadership that big-league executives always seem to think young teams need, and you’ve got a perfectly solid backup catcher at a reasonable price. In a catching market that saw Jeff Mathis get $3 million a year on a multi-year guarantee, the Braves could have done a lot worse. Steamer certainly thinks so: Read the rest of this entry »