The deepening cold war between Major League Baseball and the MLB Players Association has touched on topics ranging from shoes to minor league pay to free agency. What it hasn’t garnered as much attention are player benefits, such as pensions and healthcare.

There’s a popular misconception that any professional baseball player who spends even one day on a major league roster will receive free health care for life. In reality, that’s not true. Instead, what one day of service gives you is the right to buy into a healthcare plan, which isn’t really the same as free, comprehensive coverage. A player’s eligibility for health and pension benefits is tiered, and depends on how much time the player spent on a major league roster, how much service time he accrued, and can even be a matter of which years he played, as different benefits are available to different eras of players. Different plans carry different co-pays and have varying coverage maximums.

In other words, this isn’t that dissimilar from any other employer-based health insurance system. But playing baseball isn’t like other employment, and that can lead to trouble for former players.

The Major League Baseball Players Association has, throughout its history, done a poor job securing benefits and pensions for its members and their families during collective bargaining negotiations. Read the rest of this entry »

For Bryce Harper, the comparisons to Mike Trout have faded with time. While the Angels’ center fielder has played at an MVP-caliber level in each of his seven full seasons — taking home two awards and finishing as runner-up in the voting four times — his ex(?)-Nationals counterpart has ridden a performance rollercoaster since winning his lone MVP award in 2015, with injuries, struggles against the shift, and shaky defense dimming his star at least somewhat. There’s little doubt that inconsistency is one factor in slowing down Harper’s market now that he’s a free agent, and may prevent him from reaching a record-setting payday, though it is hard to sort out how much of him remaining unsigned is the result of Harper-specific concerns, and how much is the market’s generally tepid temperature. Still, Harper is just 26 years old, as is Manny Machado, his top-tiered counterpart on the free agent market. Both players remain unsigned, even as camp has opened for pitchers and catchers.

Measured against what the 27-year-old Trout has accomplished — last May, Trout surpassed the JAWS standard for center fielders, the average of each Hall of Fame center fielder’s career WAR and his seven-year peak WAR (Baseball-Reference flavors), and he now ranks seventh in the metric — the two free agents’ resumés pale by comparison. Even so, at a time when so many teams are finding excuses not to invest in them, or at least not on the terms they’re seeking, it’s worth considering how the pair stack up historically. This isn’t about haggling over dollars, and it’s less about finding recent comparisons for the past few seasons put up by Harper and Machado, as Craig Edwards did earlier this winter, and more about situating the pair within a broader context, appreciating their accomplishments to date and where their careers might take them. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve officially entered extension season. This happens every year around the start of spring training, with arbitration hearings ending and with opening day coming up. Some expect that this particular extension season will be unusually busy, given the concerns players have about the state of the free-agent market. Aaron Nola just signed an extension with the Phillies. Jorge Polanco just signed an extension with the Twins. And Max Kepler has also just signed an extension with the Twins. Nothing against Polanco, but I find the Kepler move more interesting.

Kepler was already looking at a 2019 salary of $3.125 million, in the first of four arbitration years. He’d qualified as a Super Two. That’s wiped out now, with Kepler and the Twins agreeing to a five-year contract worth $35 million. There’s also a sixth-year club option, worth $10 million. Kepler, therefore, has signed away up to two years of would-be free agency. From Kepler’s own standpoint, he’s now guaranteed his own long-term wealth, as a German kid made good. He wouldn’t have agreed to this if he weren’t happy to do so. At the same time, you wonder what could’ve been. Where is Kepler going to be, as a player, a year from now?

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No matter what you think about the current market dynamics, one thing is becoming increasingly clear: Free agency is leaving more and more players at best annoyed, and at worst pissed off. Many free agents are signed, of course, and some of them are signed to big, healthy contracts, but other premium players are still without employers, and the messaging has hardly been subtle. Players and the union aren’t pleased. Even if the team side of the equation isn’t doing anything wrong, the state of things is far from harmonious. A greater number of players are talking about what they see as a problem.

Imagine yourself, then, as a player who’s not yet a free agent. You might be inclined to believe you’re exceptional. Maybe you figure things’ll be worked out by the time it’s your turn. But you keep hearing about how free agency isn’t what it used to be. Even if most of the money is still there, nothing happens fast. There’s a lot of uncertainty. The idea of reaching free agency has been somewhat devalued. At least in theory, you’d figure this could lead to an increase in the number of long-term contract extensions.

It’s too early to know if there’s a trend. And no player is going to come out and say “I signed this extension because free agency is bad now.” But Aaron Nola has become the latest player to give up a free-agent year or two. Not for free, obviously. He’s going to get paid. It’s a question of whether he’ll get paid enough. It’s getting harder to calculate what “enough” even is.

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Just under two weeks ago, when I was writing a piece connecting the unsigned players from among our Top 50 Free Agents list to teams that appeared to have needs, Wade Miley came off the board by signing a one-year deal with the Astros. A similar thing happened in writing that piece’s sequel, covering a handful of the best of the unranked and unsigned free agents, as Brett Anderson pre-empted the publication by re-signing with the A’s on a one-year deal. He’ll cost a pittance, as he’s guaranteed a modest $1.5 million, with another $1 million possible in undisclosed incentives.

Though it feels like he’s been around forever, Anderson just turned 31 on February 1. That said, the 2006 second-round pick by the Diamondbacks (out of high school in Stillwater, Oklahoma) has already spent parts of 10 seasons in the majors. I should emphasize the word parts there because, well, we’ve rarely seen a whole season from him. As a rookie with the A’s in 2009 — a season in which he entered ranked seventh on Baseball America’s Top 100 Prospects list — he made 30 starts and threw 175.1 innings en route to 3.5 WAR. But only once since then has he started 30 times in a major league season. Hell, only once since then has he even reached 20 starts in the bigs: in 2015, he completed a solid 31-start, 180.1-inning campaign for the Dodgers (3.69 ERA, 3.94 FIP, 1.6 WAR). Read the rest of this entry »

Rocco Baldelli knows Charlie Montoyo well. Not only did they spend the last four seasons together on Tampa Bay’s coaching staff, but Baldelli once played for the 53-year-old Montoyo in the minors. Minnesota’s new manager counts Toronto’s new manager as both a mentor and a friend.

Not surprisingly, Baldelli was effusive in his praise when I asked him about Montoyo. Citing his experience and leadership skills, he opined that the Blue Jays are getting “a tremendous manager and a great person.” Fittingly, Montoyo was hired on October 25, the same day his 37-year-old protege was tabbed by the Twins.

Baldelli wasn’t caught by surprise when he heard the news from north of the border. He knew that Montoyo had interviewed with the Cincinnati Reds, and that he would soon be doing the same with Toronto. The second of those sit-downs obviously went well. Mere days after meeting with him, the Blue Jays announced Montoyo’s hiring.

All told, five candidates went through the interview process in Toronto. Baldelli didn’t want to go on the record as to whether he was one of them, but he did allow that his post-season vacation plans were put on hold for a period of weeks. Multiple teams met with him about their openings. That was to be expected. The “future-manager” tag was assigned to him by myriad members of the media over the course of the 2018 season. Read the rest of this entry »

Among the proposals exchanged by MLB and the MLBPA was the idea of studying the mound. More specifically, baseball is interested in studying what might happen were the mound to be lowered, or were the mound to even be moved back. In a sense, adjusting the mound might seem radical, but of course, the mound has been lowered before, and baseball wants to see if it might be able to combat the ever-increasing strikeout rates. The league-average strikeout rate in 1998 was 16.9%. A decade later, it was 17.5%. Yet a decade later than that, it was 22.3%. That’s a 27-percent increase in strikeouts over the course of ten years. You can see why people might want to nip this in the bud.

Why have strikeouts been on the rise? How might you explain all the swinging and missing? I suppose there are the people who might just grumble the term “launch angle” and leave it at that, but a more compelling explanation might be the league-wide increase in velocity. It’s been hard not to notice — as they say, now every bullpen has a half-dozen guys who come out throwing 95 miles per hour. Billy Wagner used to throw 96. Now everybody throws 96. And the less time hitters have to react, the more often they’re going to whiff. Case closed! We’ve all solved it, together.

Except for the part where velocity has ceased increasing. The velocity surge was something I think a lot of us just took for granted. Teams like velocity, and players are training harder than ever before. But the surge has slowed, if not stopped. You don’t need to dig too deep to find evidence.

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On February 1, I checked in on the 10 players who made our Top 50 Free Agents list in November but had yet to sign contracts, attempting to match them up with teams still in need of that missing piece. Since then, the much-anticipated J.T. Realmuto trade has gone down, and the first camps have opened to pitchers and catchers, but none of those 10 players has come off the board. Instead we’re left with an endless swirl of rumors and rationalizations. Bryce Harper has talked to the Padres and Giants, but they don’t want to pay him $300 million! The Yankees have continued to check in on Manny Machado, but won’t improve upon an offer termed “low” by a source close to the player! Mike Moustakas may return to the Brewers! This is quite a party.

Alas, not really. It’s frustrating to watch this broken system playing out, and it has to be even more so for the players — not only the aforementioned ranked ones, but the dozens upon dozens beyond them who are being frozen out as well. These are real people who don’t know yet where they (and their families, in many cases) are going to spend the better part of the next year, and they’re being squeezed to the point of accepting a fraction of the money they might have reasonably expected just a couple of years ago. In many cases, the fates of these unranked, unsigned players are interconnected with the pricier options; a team in the market for rotation help, pursuing the likes of Dallas Keuchel (No. 4 on our list) or Gio Gonzalez (No. 33) might wind up going for one of the starters below if they don’t land their top choice.

As with my previous roundup, what follows here is an attempt to match the best of the rest of those currently unemployed with teams in need, using a combination our projected standings and Depth Charts, MLB Trade Rumors, Roster Resource, Cot’s Contracts, and some imagination. Consider it prescriptive, rather than predictive; the further down the pecking order one goes, the more one may as well be throwing darts. Read the rest of this entry »

Dustin Fowler may need to make an adjustment. The 24-year-old outfielder is coming off a rookie campaign that saw him slash an anemic .224/.256/.354, with six home runs, in 203 plate appearances. The Triple-A portion of his season was encouraging — a .310 BA and an .817 OPS — but his performance against big league pitching fell short of expectations. He went into the year ranked as Oakland’s No. 4 prospect.

He’d already made a notable adjustment. Prior to being acquired by the A’s in the 2017 trade deadline deal that sent Sonny Gray to the Yankees, Fowler had lowered his hands at the urging of then hitting coach, P.J. Pilittere. The reason was twofold: the team that drafted Fowler out of a Dexter, Georgia high school felt it would help him tap into his power. Every bit as importantly, his left-handed stroke wasn’t consistently catching up to high-octane heat.

Fowler talked about the 2016 adjustment midway through last season.

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Dustin Fowler: “I hadn’t had much coaching growing up, so I was very raw. I’d just had small-town coaching — not the big coaching I needed — so going into pro ball was the first time I got some real one-on-ones on how to hit.

“I was very tall in my stance. I was upright, and my hands were over my head. Ever since grabbing a bat, I’d put them up there. My hand-eye coordination was good enough to make it work against pitching that wasn’t as good — slower pitching — but it worked less and less here. There’s a big difference from high school to pro ball. The pitches here harder, and I wasn’t catching up to balls. I was just fouling them off, or making fly-ball outs. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, Jeff Passan wrote about talks between Major League Baseball and the MLBPA. As part of those talks, both sides proposed a series of changes that would alter the way the game works, both on the field and off of it. I was able to identify ten discrete proposals — some of them well-defined, and some of them a little more vague. Still, there was more than enough information to proceed to a polling post, where I gave the entire FanGraphs audience a chance to weigh in. The proposals are out there. Some of them might be scrapped; some of them might be pursued. What do you think about each? Good idea, or a virtual non-starter?

Whenever I run a polling project, I never actually specify exactly when the polls close. In part, that’s because most people tend to vote right away. In part, that’s because, once enough votes have rolled in, nothing that happens later on meaningfully changes the results. And in part, that’s because every polling project on FanGraphs is completely inconsequential. There are no stakes. Only opinions. So with all of that said, let’s now take a look at the crowdsourced data. I’ve gathered all the information I needed, and I’ve created a couple of plots.

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