Tuesday is the deadline to add Rule 5-eligible players to the 40-man roster, and teams with an excess of candidates for addition often find trade partners, especially if doing so enables them to fill holes on other parts of their own roster.

The Toronto Blue Jays have scavenged the overflow of talented rosters several times over the last few years. Billy McKinney, Brandon Drury, David Paulino and Teoscar Hernandez were all upper-level performers who were blocked by more dynamic talents. Toronto also has to contend a potential infield surplus of their own, especially with shortstop Troy Tulowitzki hoping to return to the field in 2019. Saturday’s trade with Houston helped both clubs inch closer to 40-man equilibrium.

Astros get:

INF Aledmys Diaz

Blue Jays get:

RHP Trent Thornton

The 28-year-old Diaz is coming off a 1.6 WAR season during which he slashed .260/.303/.453 and hit 18 homers. He instantly becomes the most versatile bench infielder on a roster that’s heavy on big-bodied 1B/3B/DH types, a fact which likely puts him first in line for reps should Carlos Correa and Jose Altuve continue to have injury problems.

Though he’s a below-average defender at short, Diaz’s lackluster lateral quickness can be hidden somewhat by modern defensive positioning. On days when he is at short, his relative inability to get to balls in the hole to his right should be more manageable if he’s playing next to Alex Bregman. With Marwin Gonzalez leaving via free agency, Diaz is also probably second in line for reps behind Altuve at second base even though he has barely played there (five games in 2017, six in the 2015 Fall League) because he’s likely better than Tony Kemp and Yuli Gurriel.

Diaz’s 2.7 WAR rookie season seems to have been a caricature of his skills, drawn by some BABIP luck and a walk rate that was twice what he has averaged during the last two combined seasons. His flat bat path made it difficult for him to lift the baseball early in his career despite his ability to hit the ball hard. This improved slightly in 2018 when his groundball and dribbler rates combined to make up 40% of his balls in play, down from 49% in 2017, according to xStats. Steamer is expecting him to SLG .438 next year, but that’s probably based on some regression instead of extrapolating improvement, and Houston is good at fixing swings. Because Diaz is so aggressive in the box, he’ll probably always be a low-OBP hitter, but he’s a versatile infielder with some pop and is under team control for another four years. He’ll play a valuable role for the Astros.

Trent Thornton is also likely to make a big league splash in 2019. The 25-year-old righty spent 2018 at Triple-A Fresno and just wrapped up an eye-opening stint in the Arizona Fall League. He has bat-missing big league stuff, sitting 92-95 and touching 96 in my multi-inning looks at him this fall, and sitting comfortably in the 95-96 range when he was asked to air it out for a single inning.

Thornton also has elite breaking ball spin rates. His 12-6 curveball spins in excess of 3,000 rpm and his firm, upper-80s slider often approaches that mark, which is rare for a breaking ball that hard. He also has a unique delivery that disorients hitters. His arm action is ugly but, short of a 7-day DL stint this year after he was hit with a comebacker, Thornton hasn’t been hurt as a pro. His usage has been atypical, however. Thornton’s starts were often spaced out by seven or eight days in 2018, and it’s unrealistic to expect him to have that kind of recovery time between turns on a big league pitching staff. If asked to throw every fifth day, his stuff may not be as nasty as it was this year. I have Thornton projected as a 120-130 inning starter with a FIP near 4.00, which puts him in the 1.5 to 2.0 WAR range annually, assuming his stuff holds on a normal schedule. He needs to be added to the Jays 40-man to be protected from the Rule 5 draft. I expect he will be, and that we’ll see him in the Majors next year.

If you’re tracking long-term transaction outcomes, you’ll likely already consider this deal a win for both clubs. The Astros took a 5th round college arm who was throwing 89-92 and touching 93 or 94, helped him turn into a guy sitting 92-96, then flipped him for four years of a power-hitting infielder who fills an immediate need. The Jays traded J.B. Woodman, who turns 24 in three weeks and struck out in 41% of his PA’s at Hi-A this year, to St. Louis for Diaz (himself a roster overflow guy who was expendable after Paul DeJong’s breakout) and then flipped him a year later to fill an immediate need.

Kieran Lovegrove is among the plurality of players currently available in the minor league free-agent market. That should change in the not-too-distant future. The 24-year-old right-hander throws gas, and while his location is sometimes scattershot, he’s moving in the right direction. Six years after being drafted by the Cleveland Indians out of a Mission Viejo, California high school, he finished this season in Triple-A Columbus.

Born in Johannesburg, South Africa — he came Stateside at age five — Lovegrove made giant strides this year. Pitching out of the bullpen, he punched out 10 batters per nine innings and put up a career-best 2.73 ERA in 41 appearances. Two months after being promoted to Double-A, he represented the World Team in July’s All-Star Futures Game.

It’s taken the 2012 third-round pick time, but he’s finally begun to figure things out — at least when it comes to what works for him, and what doesn’t. While he’s no dum-dum, his attempted deep dives into the hows-and-whys of his chosen craft have only served to muddy the waters.

“I’m a thinker, and if I’m given too much information I start to think about it,” reasoned Lovegrove, whose level of familiarity with Yogi Berra is unknown. “Because of that, I’ve kind of had to avoid the analytics thing. But I have found out that when my ball is down in the zone it tends to sink, and when it’s up in the zone it four-seams. When I can throw up is when I’ve been going down. It’s all about setting up hitters, and actually pitching as opposed to just throwing the ball.”

His heater has a mind of its own. Read the rest of this entry »

If you have followed the works of Carson Cistulli for any length of time, you know he often quotes Emil Cioran. As a tribute to our departing managing editor, I have attempted to combine Cioran’s work with Carson’s spirit by replacing the word “life” in a few select quotes with our dear friend’s name. The results speak for themselves.

• If someone incessantly drops the word “Cistulli,” you know he’s a sick man.
• Everyone must destroy Cistulli. According to the way they do it, they’re either triumphants or failures.
• If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of Cistulli which maintains itself without reason.
• One of the greatest delusions of the average man is to forget that Cistulli is death’s prisoner.
• The only thing the young should be taught is that there is virtually nothing to be hoped for from Cistulli.
• “What is truth?” is a fundamental question. But what is it compared to “How to endure Cistulli?”
• For a long time—always, in fact—I have known that Cistulli is not what I needed and that I wasn’t able to deal with it.
• Knowledge is the plague of Cistulli, and consciousness, an open wound in its heart.
• One disgust, then another – to the point of losing the use of speech and even of the mind…The greatest exploit of Cistulli is to be still alive.
• Someday the old shack we call the world will fall apart. How, we don’t know, and we don’t really care either. Since nothing has real substance, and Cistulli is a twirl in the void, its beginning and its end are meaningless.
• Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over Cistulli. For Cistulli is nothing but another word for this fear.
• By capitulating to Cistulli, this world has betrayed nothingness.
• To think all the time, to raise questions, to doubt your own destiny, to feel the weariness of living, to be worn out to the point of exhaustion by thoughts and Cistulli, to leave behind you, as symbols of Cistulli’s drama, a trail of smoke and blood – all this means you are so unhappy that reflection and thinking appear as a curse causing a violent revulsion in you.
• Sadness accompanies all those events in which Cistulli expends itself. Its intensity is equal to its loss. Thus death causes the greatest sadness.

• Cistulli is too full of death for death to be able to add anything to it.
• We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of Cistulli, survivors struggling to forget it. Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of Cistulli. We are reluctant, of course, to treat Cistulli as a scourge: has it not been inculcated as the sovereign good—have we not been told that the worst came at the end, not at the outset of our Cistulli? Yet evil, the real evil, is behind, not ahead of us.

• From the cradle to the grave, each individual pays for the sin of not being God. That’s why Cistulli is an uninterrupted religious crisis, superficial for believers, shattering for doubters.

• Cistulli is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.

• The pessimist has to invent new reasons to exist every day: he is a victim of the “meaning” of Cistulli.

• The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give Cistulli a meaning.

• In theory, it matters little to me whether I live as whether I die; in practice, I am lacerated by every anxiety which opens an abyss between Cistulli and death.

• In relation to any act of Cistulli, the mind acts as a killjoy.

• The fact that Cistulli has no meaning is a reason to live – moreover, the only one.
• Cistulli inspires more dread than death — it is Cistulli which is the great unknown.

By now, you’ve no doubt heard the news that current managing editor of FanGraphs, Carson Cistulli, is departing the site for the chilly northern climes of Toronto and the Blue Jays’ pro scouting department. Carson is a great editor and baseball mind, as well as a generous writer, friend, and podcast host, and while we’ll soldier on ably in his absence, I doubt we’ll ever hire anyone with exactly his same delightful perspective again. The Blue Jays will be richer for that, FanGraphs poorer.

You also may have heard that I will be stepping into his shoes as managing editor. What does that mean for you, the reader? Not much, as it turns out.

Since its inception, FanGraphs has delivered sabermetrically driven analysis that asks interesting baseball questions and tells interesting baseball stories, and it will continue to do so in the future. You, the reader, will still get to read the same smart, funny, incisive writing. You’ll enjoy the same rigorous statistical work, the same insightful prospect coverage, and the same thoughtful player and industry analysis as you always have, though I hope you’ll learn to tolerate a less fanatical devotion to hyphens.

My work as a writer here and as the managing editor of The Hardball Times had been animated by a desire to understand the game from the seams out; to bring the rigors of social science and statistical analysis to bear on baseball questions; to color the answers to those questions with philosophy and humor. To pick at, until we are satisfied, the “why” as much as the “what” and the “how.” To challenge what we assume we know about the game, those who run it and those who play it. All of that will inform my work as FanGraphs’ managing editor.

I’ll still be writing, chatting, and (for now) managing The Hardball Times. One thing that will change: I will serve as your new host of FanGraphs Audio. Chatting with folks about baseball is one of my favorite things to do, and I look forward to getting to do just that with members of our staff, as well as a few guests. But don’t you worry: Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass aren’t going anywhere.

Every editor brings with them their own vision and quirks, but each one’s success is largely the result of the writers with whom they work and the readers who consume all those good words. Our staff of full-time writers and contributors is in terrific shape, and you, our readers, are as thoughtful in your comments and generous with your reading hours as ever. We’ll miss Carson dearly, but we’ll press on. This is the new FanGraphs, same as the old FanGraphs. I couldn’t be more excited.

I submitted my American League Cy Young Award ballot at the very beginning of October. The results were just released yesterday, almost smack in the middle of November. A funny thing happens between the beginning of October and the middle of November: A lot of time passes, time that includes the entirety of the MLB playoffs. As I focused on other events, I mostly forgot about my selections. I was reminded yesterday that my own ballot read:

1. Justin Verlander
2. Blake Snell
3. Gerrit Cole
4. Blake Treinen
5. Corey Kluber

I was one of 13 voters to put Verlander in first. The other 17 voters, though, put Snell in first, and as such, Snell won, and Verlander was, once again, the runner-up. Clearly, it was a close race, and I think it should have been a close race. I don’t think that Verlander got robbed, and I don’t think that Snell is an undeserving winner or anything. But one of the perks of being an award voter is that voting grants you automatic editorial content. So on the off chance you care about my own thought process, allow me to quickly explain why Verlander was my first-place pick.

Read the rest of this entry »

This post is part of a series concerning the 2019 Today’s Game Era Committee ballot, covering executives, managers and long-retired players whose candidacies will be voted upon at the Winter Meetings in Las Vegas on December 9. Use the tool above to read the introduction and other installments. For an introduction to JAWS, see here. Several profiles in this series are adapted from work previously published at SI.com and Baseball Prospectus. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Over the course of his 18-year career, Lee Arthur Smith was consistently considered to be one of the game’s top relievers. Physically intimidating — officially listed at 6-foot-5, 220 pounds but reported as big as 6-foot-6, 269 pounds — and mellifluously middle-named, Smith pitched for eight teams, earned All-Star honors seven times, led his league in saves four times (and finished as runner-up in four other seasons), and placed as high as second in the Cy Young voting. He passed Jeff Reardon on April 13, 1993, to grab the all-time saves record and held it at 478 until September 24, 2006, when Trevor Hoffman finally surpassed him.

When Smith retired in 1998, just two relievers had been elected to the Hall of Fame: Hoyt Wilhelm (1985) and Rollie Fingers (1992). Since then, that number has tripled via the elections of Dennis Eckersley (2004), Bruce Sutter (2006), Rich Gossage (2008), and Hoffman (2018), with Mariano Rivera poised to join them via the 2019 BBWAA ballot. Smith appeared to be on track to join that company, debuting on the 2003 ballot at 42.3% and inching his way to 50.6% by 2012, his 10th year of eligibility. But over his final five years of eligibility, he got lost in a deluge of polarizing, high-profile candidates whose continued presence on the ballot made it tough to find room for Smith. By 2014, his share of the vote was down to 29.9%, and he never got back to 35%.

Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, I focused on creating objective measures by which to examine and value individual prospects and farm systems. Inherent in those objective measures is the knowledge that the rankings themselves are not. Prospect writers like our own Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel combine in-person scouting with their knowledge and experience of the game, information from industry sources, and statistical data to arrive at well-informed but still subjective rankings and grades. What follows is one study attempting to determine if there has been any historical bias based on the position of a player.

As with the prior studies, I’m using the Baseball America Top 100 rankings from 1996 to 2010. To get a sense of how players were ranked by position, here are the raw numbers for the number of players listed at any given position, with multi-position players listed at both positions.

It should come as no surprise to find pitchers and outfielders first given that they have more starting positions available to them. Generally, a pitcher isn’t going to make a prospect list if the person believes he will be a reliever because the value is less. That might be changing some now, but for the vast majority of Top-100 pitching prospects, the hope is that they will be starters. If we were to divide the pitchers by the five starting rotation slots and outfielders by the three starting spots, shortstops would then have the highest representation on prospect lists. After shortstops, we have pitchers and third basemen, with outfielders slotting in ahead of first basemen and catchers with second basemen way down the list. Conventional wisdom holds that ranking so many shortstops is acceptable because many will eventually slide down the defensive spectrum, taking up slots at third base or over at second, which makes up for the lack of prospects there. Read the rest of this entry »

On Wednesday, Cleveland and Pittsburgh swapped a combination of big league role players and prospects in a five-player deal that looked like this:

Cleveland gets

OF Jordan Luplow
INF Max Moroff

Pittsburgh gets

INF Erik Gonzalez
RHP Tahnaj Thomas
RHP Dante Mendoza

Over the last two seasons, Luplow owns a .194/.274/.371 line across 190 sporadic career big league plate appearances, but he’s been a .300/.378/.479 hitter at Triple-A Indianapolis during that time. His inconsistent usage while in the majors is at least partly to blame for his small-sample struggles. Of all the players in this deal, the 26-year-old outfielder is the one most likely to have an immediate big league impact as Cleveland looks to fill gaps left by departing free agents. He’s a pull-only hitter with plus power who has also exhibited slightly above-average strikeout and walk rate throughout his minor league career. He quite comfortably projects as a corner outfield platoon bat in a Cleveland outfield that is very left-handed.

The 25-year-old Moroff’s departure from Pittsburgh clears a 40-man spot for the Pirates and presents Cleveland with upper-level depth. A patient switch-hitter capable of playing several infield positions, Moroff became a KATOH sleeper as he reached base at an above-average clip for several consecutive years in the minors. He suddenly started hitting for power in 2017 at Triple-A but regressed significantly in 2018. He could play a bench role in 2019 based on his approach and versatility.

For Pittsburgh, this deal adds arm talent to a farm system in which it is largely lacking. Aside from Mitch Keller, most of the Pirates’ upper-level pitching prospects have a backend starter/relief profile while several of the lower level arms have dealt with injury and been slow to develop. 19-year-old Bahamian shortstop convert Tahnaj Thomas immediately becomes one of Pittsburgh’s best pitching prospects. Ultra smooth and athletic, Thomas has a gorgeous delivery that generates mid-80s velocity (92-95 in my looks at him this year) that plays well in the upper part of the strike zone. He can also spin a good breaking ball and has some nascent changeup feel that, for someone so new to pitching, is very promising. This is a prototypical teenage arm and, though that demographic of prospect has concerning attrition rates, Thomas has a good chance to be the best player in this deal one day.

The Pirates also acquired a big league piece in shortstop Erik Gonzalez, who has been blocked by two of the best players in baseball for the last several years. Gonzalez’s prodigious physical abilities have long been undermined by his lack of patience (3% walk rate) and complete inability to hit the ball in the air. He saw time at all four infield positions in 2018 and is capable at all of them (plus hands, plus arm, average range), which means Gonzalez could play any number of roles for the Pirates in 2019. He could compete for the starting shortstop role with Kevin Newman or platoon at third base with Colin Moran or at second base with Kevin Kramer.

There’s enough raw thump here that Gonzalez could have a breakout if Pittsburgh can tweak his swing. The change of scenery makes this more likely to occur than it would have been in Cleveland, where they’ve struggled to get Gonzalez and Yandy Diaz to lift the ball. But at age 27, it’s probably not happening.

For Pittsburgh, this deal also clears the runway for 2B/3B/OF Pablo Reyes, whose strong September — .293/.349/.483 — is supported by his underlying batted ball data. Both Reyes (Licey) and Gonzalez (Escogido) are playing in the Dominican Winter League right now.

The final piece of the deal is 19-year-old righty Dante Mendoza, a 12th round high school draftee in 2017 who spent 2018 in the AZL. At 6-foot-5, Mendoza joins a system full of huge-framed pitching prospects. He has been up to 93 but sits 87-90 with the fastball and has an advanced changeup and breaking ball. There’s a strong possibility that Mendoza’s stuff ticks up as his body matures and he turns into a good big league pitcher of some kind.

After a few years without dedicated complex-level coverage, the Pirates had multiple scouts scouring backfields in Florida and Arizona again this year. This deal is the first farm-system fruit from that labor. It also marks the second time in five months that Cleveland has traded away one of their very promising group of teenage prospects who began their pro careers in Arizona this year. In both cases, the outfielders are likely to play a big league role fairly soon (they traded teenage outfielder Jhon Torres for upper-level outfielder Oscar Mercado at the deadline) in anticipation of this offseason’s departures.

This post is part of a series concerning the 2019 Today’s Game Era Committee ballot, covering executives, managers and long-retired players whose candidacies will be voted upon at the Winter Meetings in Las Vegas on December 9. Use the tool above to read the introduction and other installments. For an introduction to JAWS, see here. Several profiles in this series are adapted from work previously published at SI.com and Baseball Prospectus. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Lou Piniella

“Sweet Lou” Piniella spent even more years managing in the majors (23, between 1986 and 2010) than he did playing the outfield (18, between 1964 and 1984). To both, he brought a flair for the dramatic and a fiery intensity — his dust-kicking, hat-stomping, base-throwing tirades became the stuff of legend — as well as tremendous baseball acumen. Like fellow Today’s Game candidate Davey Johnson, he won championships in both phases of his career, but his failure even to reach the World Series a second time as a manager cast a long shadow on every successive stop and could limit his chances for election.

A native of Tampa, Florida who was signed by the Indians as an amateur free agent in 1962, Piniella passed through the hands of the Senators, Orioles (for whom he played four games in 1964), Indians (again, with a brief 1968 cameo) and Pilots (in their lone spring training) before winning AL Rookie of the Year honors with the Royals in 1969. A high-average contact hitter who didn’t have a ton of patience or power (as his .291/.333/.409 line suggests), he was particularly potent as a lefty-masher on four pennant-winning Yankees teams, including their 1977 and 1978 championships.

He was also notoriously hot-tempered, known for breaking water coolers even before he arrived in the Bronx. “Yes, I had a bad temper,” Piniella said in 1974, his first spring as a Yankee. “I guess I was trying to succeed too much. I probably was trying to exceed my capabilities and was expecting perfection all the time. When I couldn’t reach it, I’d get mad at myself… Last year, they had a wire mesh screen around the water cooler at the new park in Kansas City so I couldn’t kick that one.”

As a left shoulder ailment limited Piniella’s playing time late in his career, he became the Yankees’ hitting coach in 1984, while still a reserve outfielder. By mid-June, he decided to retire as a player so as to take over first base coaching duties as well. In 1986, he became the team’s manager, that during an era when owner George Steinbrenner was eating managers for breakfast and lunch. Billy Martin, in his third of five stints managing the Yankees, had gone 91-64 in relief of Yogi Berra in 1985, as the Yankees finished second, but he was fired yet again, this time after a late-September brawl with pitcher Ed Whitson. Piniella’s Yankees won 90 games but finished second in 1986, 5.5 games behind the Red Sox, then slipped to fourth despite winning 89 games in 1987. When general manager Woody Woodward resigned following the season, Piniella spent half a year as the team’s GM before returning to the dugout in May, after Martin was canned yet again. Piniella himself was axed after the 1988 team finished with 85 wins. He had two years remaining on his contract, the first of which he spent in the Yankees’ TV booth.

Piniella returned to the dugout with the Reds, taking over as manager in November 1989 after Pete Rose received his lifetime ban for gambling. His first year was the most successful one of his managerial career. Driven by stars Barry Larkin and Eric Davis as well as the “Nasty Boys” bullpen of Norm Charlton, Rob Dibble, and Randy Myers, the Reds went 91-71, won the NL West (the Senior Circuit’s screwed-up geography somehow had both Cincinnati and Atlanta in the West and St. Louis and Chicago in the East) and the World Series, the last by sweeping the heavily favored A’s, the defending champions.

The Reds collapsed to just 74 wins in 1991, and while they rebounded to 90 in 1992, Piniella resigned at season’s end, just weeks after brawling with Dibble. His departure owed more to owner Marge Schott’s lack of support when Piniella was sued for defamation by umpire Gary Darling. Following the reversal of a home run call in a 1991 game, Piniella had claimed that Darling was biased; Schott refused to pay for a lawyer, forcing Piniella to do so out of his own pocket. The suit was eventually settled out of court and Piniella issued a statement of apology, retracting his comments and praising Darling and umpires in general. “But I got no backing,” he said of Schott, who by the time of his comments had been suspended for a year due to racially insensitive remarks. “It got in my craw. That was the big thing.”

Piniella wasn’t out of a job for long. In November 1992, he reunited with Woodward in Seattle, where the Mariners had finished with a winning record just once in 17 years. With young Ken Griffey Jr., Randy Johnson, Edgar Martinez, and later Alex Rodriguez, he oversaw the most successful stretch in franchise history. The Mariners finished above .500 in seven of his 10 seasons (1993-2002), making the playoffs four times (they’ve yet to return).

His 1995 team overcame a 12.5-game deficit to finish the lockout-abbreviated season tied with the Angels atop the AL West. The Mariners won the one-game tiebreaker, then beat the Yankees in a thrilling five-game Division Series that ended with Martinez bringing Griffey home with the winning run via The Double. The excitement of the moment helped generate the groundswell of support that secured the Mariners a new taxpayer-funded stadium within a week of the series’ end. Piniella won the first of his three Manager of the Year awards that year.

He took the Mariners back to the playoffs in 1997, 2000 (after Johnson and Griffey had been traded in advance of their free agency) and 2001 (after Rodriguez had departed via free agency). Fueled by the arrival of Ichiro Suzuki, the 2001 Mariners tied the major league record with 116 wins, and Piniella garnered his second Manager of the Year award. Yet his Mariners teams never advanced past the ALCS, falling at the hands of the Yankees in both 2000 and 2001. Often, they were limited by horrible bullpens, and Piniella made matters worse; the 1997-1999 units all finished with ERAs of 5.44 or above and totaled an AL-low 0.7 WAR over that span, squandering the last years of the Johnson/Griffey/Rodriguez nucleus.

After winning 93 games in 2002, Piniella, who still had one more year under contract, wanted to get home to Tampa to help care for his ailing mother. The Mariners obliged by trading him to the Devil Rays for two players. Though he guided the expansion team to its first 70-win season in 2004, the Devil Rays weren’t able to progress further, and he became frustrated by the team’s minimal payrolls. After agreeing to a buyout with one year remaining on his deal, he became the manager of the Cubs in October 2006, succeeding Dusty Baker.

With a cast led by Derrek Lee, Aramis Ramirez, Alfonso Soriano, and Carlos Zambrano (a man with an infamously hot temper of his own), Piniella guided the Cubs to back-to-back NL Central titles in 2007 and -08. He won his third Manager of the Year award in the latter year after leading the Cubs a league-high 97 wins, but in both of those seasons, Piniella’s squads were swept out of the Division Series. The Cubs declined to 83 wins in 2009, and in August 2010, with the health of his ailing mother again in mind, Piniella stepped down for the final time.

Because he managed for 21 full seasons plus two partial ones, Piniella ranks high in managerial counting stats. He’s 14th in games managed, third behind Gene Mauch and the still-active Bruce Bochy among skippers outside the Hall. Piniella is 16th in wins, trailing only Bochy, Mauch, and Baker among those not enshrined. He’s 13th in losses as well, with Mauch, Bochy and Jim Leyland the only unenshrined mangers ahead of him. Due in part to his time in Tampa Bay, he’s a modest 122 games above .500, 41st all-time; even if you wave off his time there (200-285, .412), he’d rank just 27th.

So the positives for Piniella’s case boil down to his longevity, a memorable run that legitimized major league baseball in Seattle, and one hell of a highlight reel for his tantrums. Those are offset by his lack of postseason success beyond 1990 — his teams won just three series in his final 18 full seasons — and a comparatively unexceptional winning percentage. Even if you exclude his lost-cause Devil Rays stint, his .533 would rank 30th among managers with at least 1,500 games.

Ultimately, Piniella’s case as a Hall of Fame manager rests more on longevity — which fellow candidates Johnson and Manuel lack – than it does sustained success. As I wrote when he stepped down in 2010, “In a world where [Whitey] Herzog and [Dick] Williams — two innovators who won multiple pennants, and made the playoffs more frequently without benefit of the wild card — needed a quarter of a century to gain election via the Veterans Committee, I just don’t see how Piniella has got enough to get into Cooperstown.”

George Steinbrenner

Often a bully and sometimes a buffoon, George Michael Steinbrenner III was unequivocally “The Boss,” and occasionally as unhinged as the British monarch with whom he shared both a name and a numeral. A football player at Williams College and an assistant coach at Northwestern and Purdue, he fully subscribed to Vince Lombardi’s “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” ethos, often failing to understand that running a baseball team on a daily basis required a more subtle touch and a deeper reserve of patience than his gridiron sensibility could muster.

Nonetheless, aside from Connie Mack and Walter O’Malley, no other owner in the history of baseball was as influential or successful over such a long period. Beyond O’Malley, who uprooted the Dodgers from Brooklyn, none provided his critics and detractors with more ammunition, or unified so many in their hatred. Steinbrenner spent much of his tenure as a cartoon villain, and was suspended from baseball by commissioners not once, but twice. Yet even in absentia, he had the foresight to embrace the dawn of the free agent era, and for all of his tyrannical meddling — hiring and firing 21 managers in his first 20 years, and burning through general managers at a similarly absurd clip — he stayed out of the way of what his baseball men built in his absences long enough to preside over four pennant winners and two world champions from 1976-1981, and six more pennants and four world champs from 1996-2003, adding one final championship in 2009, the year before his death.

And for all of his notorious bluster, Steinbrenner was a big softy at heart, quick to put the Yankees name behind charitable causes and to give players and other people in his organization second (and third, and fourth…) chances, just as he had received. In the end, he was the benevolent despot who restored the luster to the Yankees franchise, turning it into the most valuable property in professional sports at the time of his death, with an estimated worth of $1.6 billion. Now run by son Hal, its estimated worth has climbed to $4 billion as of March 2018 (both figures according to Forbes).

A shipbuliding magnate from Cleveland, Steinbrenner got his first taste of professional sports ownership with the Cleveland Pipers of the short-lived American Basketball League from 1960 to 1962; the league folded midway through its second season. He resurfaced in the world of sports when he led a group of investors that purchased the dilapidated Yankees — who hadn’t appeared in a World Series since 1964, or won since 1962 — from CBS in 1973 for about $10 million, $3.2 million less than CBS had paid in 1964. Initially, Steinbrenner pledged to keep his nose out of the team’s business, saying, “We plan absentee ownership as far as running the Yankees is concerned.” Soon enough, however, he was crowding out his fellow investors, starting with team president Mike Burke, who had run the Yankees during the CBS era and negotiated with the City of New York to renovate Yankee Stadium. “Nothing is more limited than being a limited partner of George,” minority owner John McMullen would later say.

Steinbrenner quickly ran afoul of baseball, pleading guilty in August 1974 to charges of making illegal contributions to Richard Nixon’s re-election campaign and of obstructing justice. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn suspended him for two years (later reduced to 15 months), during which time he exerted his influence via the direction of Gabe Paul, who, while still general manager of the Indians, had initially paired Steinbrenner and Burke. Desperate to restore glory to the franchise, Steinbrenner embraced the era of free agency, signing A’s ace Catfish Hunter to a five year, $3.35 million deal in December 1974, when A’s owner Charlie O. Finley failed to make an annuity payment in a timely fashion. He followed that by adding superstar slugger Reggie Jackson, Hunter’s ex-teammate, in November 1976 on a five-year, $3 million deal after arbitrator Peter Seitz’s landmark Messersmith-McNally decision kicked off the free agency era in earnest, and a year later added Goose Gossage via a six-year, $2.7 5 million deal — that despite the presence of reliever Sparky Lyle, who weeks earlier had won the AL Cy Young award.

Under manager Billy Martin, the Yankees won the pennant in 1976 but were swept in the World Series by the Big Red Machine. They beat the Dodgers the following year, with Jackson, “Mr. October,” tying the series record with five homers, three in the Game Six clincher. Amid so much turmoil that the team became known as “The Bronx Zoo” (not coincidentally the title of Lyle’s diary of that season), they repeated again in 1978, overcoming a 14-game mid-July deficit behind the Red Sox (whom they would beat in a Game 163 play-in) and a blowup between Martin and Jackson that led to the skipper’s dismissal after he said of the superstar and the owner: “The two men deserve each other. One’s a born liar, the other’s convicted.”

Fueled by more free agent signings, particularly those of Tommy John and Dave Winfield, the Yankees won the 1981 AL pennant, but lost a rematch with the the Dodgers. During the World Series, Steinbrenner injured his hand in what he claimed was a scuffle with two Dodger fans in the hotel elevator. Yet no police report was ever filed, no culprits ever found. Hmmm… As the Dodgers clinched in the Bronx, Steinbrenner issued a gauche public apology for his team’s performance, and a promise that plans to build a champion for 1982 would begin immediately.

Those plans did not come to fruition, as Steinbrenner’s profligate spending and meddling led to the team’s downfall. Prospects were swapped for over-the-hill veterans who flourished elsewhere while the Yankees, despite winning 89 games or more four times from 1983-1987, with a high of 97 in 1985, failed to win another AL East flag for more than a decade. After souring on Winfield (whom he nicknamed “Mr. May”), Steinbrenner tried to escape his 10-year contract by hiring a shady small-time gambler, Howard Spira, to dig up dirt. When commissioner Fay Vincent learned of the plot in 1990, he banned Steinbrenner from baseball for life, just over a year after President Ronald Reagan had pardoned Steinbrenner for his Nixon-era transgressions.

The ban didn’t last; Vincent reinstated Steinbrenner as of March 1, 1993, just before being ousted by the other owners. While he remained as feared as ever, Steinbrenner stayed out of the way of what general manager Gene Michael — whom he had already hired and fired as manager and GM in the early 1980s — had done during his absence. Michael curbed the team’s tendency to swap prospects, sowing the seeds of the forthcoming dynasty by astute drafting and amateur free agent signings such as “the Core Four” of Mariano Rivera, Andy Pettitte, Derek Jeter, and Jorge Posada, not to mention a brilliant deal that sent Roberto Kelly to Cincinnati for Paul O’Neill and freed up center field for Bernie Williams. He also hired Buck Showalter to manage the club. Showalter’s four-season tenure ran through 1995, when the Yankees reached and were ultimately eliminated from their first postseason appearance in 14 years — at the hands of Piniella’s Mariners — was the longest on Steinbrenner’s watch thus far.

Michael was shifted into an advisory role after 1995, while Showalter departed. Steinbrenner hired Bob Watson as GM, and Watson’s choice as manager was Joe Torre, a former National League MVP who in 14 seasons of managing the Mets, Braves, and Cardinals had won just one division title and produced a .470 winning percentage. The tabloids derided the choice of “Clueless Joe,” but Torre was more than up to the task of managing both the team and the Boss. The Yankees beat the Braves in the 1996 World Series, kicking off a 12-year run that included 10 division titles, six pennants, and four championships, earning him a spot in Cooperstown in 2014.

Steinbrenner’s persona as a benevolent despot emerged during this time in the form of his repeated lampooning on Seinfeld, with series creator Larry David giving voice to the owner’s long and often petty diatribes. His soft, paternalistic side revealed itself in the multiple second chances given to Steve Howe, Dwight Gooden, and Darryl Strawberry, all of whom had battled substance abuse problems. While attaching the Yankees’ name to charities, he bristled at the thought that they should include his competitors. “I would sooner send $1 million to save the whales than send it to the Pittsburgh Pirates” he told his fellow owners.

With the Yankees restored to the top of the heap, Steinbrenner withstood the temptation to sell the team (at various times, Donald Trump and Cablevision both expressed interest) or move it to the suburbs or Manhattan’s West Side. Whatever the legerdemain it took to build the $1.5 billion “House That Ruthlessness Built” next door to “The House That Ruth Built,” he ultimately understood that the Bronx was a key part of the Yankees’ brand, as was the big-dollar spending that brought in free agents Mike Mussina, Jason Giambi, Mark Teixeira, and CC Sabathia, and led to trades for Alex Rodriguez, Roger Clemens, and Kevin Brown. Though he chafed at the credit that Torre and GM Brian Cashman, who took the reins in 1998 at the tender age of 30 after rising through the front office ranks, received, and retained a semi-anonymous cabal of Tampa advisors who often undercut the Bronx brass, he finally ceded control of daily operations to sons Hal and Hank in late 2007. That chain of events, which was followed by Torre’s departure when the team was eliminated from the playoffs, led to Steinbrenner receding from the public eye.

Ultimately, the indomitable owner’s legacy is a mixed and complicated one. Neither a saint nor a pure font of evil, he understood that nothing drove financial success the way winning did. He won more often than any owner of his era, and rebuilt the Yankees into the most valuable property in baseball. For all of his transgressions, you can’t even begin to tell the story of a substantial stretch of baseball history without him. Unlike the eight other candidates I’ve reviewed on the Today’s Game ballot thus far, he’d have my vote. But as he came nowhere close to election with either the 2010 Veterans Committee or the 2017 Today’s Game ballots, he’s hardly a lock this time around.

I think most people know that Aaron Nola and Jake Arrieta are members of the Philadelphia Phillies’ rotation. I’m guessing that a lot of you — even those not from or otherwise affectionate towards Philadelphia — could identify Vince Velasquez as a Philly starter, too. It may interest you to know, then, that none of these three men, all possessed of relative fame, led their club in strikeout percentage as a starter last year. The man who did so struck out fully 27.1% of the batters he faced, which was the 14th-best such mark in the league among starters with as many innings thrown. He also posted, at 1.01, the second-highest differential between his ERA (4.80) and FIP (3.79) in the game. His name is Nick Pivetta. Nick Pivetta is 25 years old. You may wish to consider Nick Pivetta.

When my colleague Jeff Sullivan last considered Nick Pivetta, back in April, he called him “the newest good Phillies starter,” and gave particular attention to Pivetta’s renewed confidence in his curveball. Nothing in Pivetta’s 2018 performance suggested Jeff was off the mark in this assessment, and indeed there may now be more reasons to be optimistic about the right-hander’s future than there were before the year.

Here’s one of them: a heat map of all the curveballs Pivetta threw this year (from the pitcher’s point of view):

And here’s that same chart, but for 2017:

In 2017, the curveballs Pivetta threw were basically in the same spot — down and away to righties; down and in to lefties — whether he was ahead or behind in the count. As a pitcher, it’s good not to do the same thing all the time. So it’s very encouraging that this year, Pivetta found two new places to throw his curveball: in on right-handers’ hands, even when behind in the count, and down and away to lefties.

Pivetta used to have one curveball, and now he has four. Because of the way his pitches interact — as Jeff noted, he uses his curveball mostly to set up his fastball — that means an even greater increase in the number of possible pitch sequences available to him.

And it’s not as if Pivetta spent the entire year reliant on that promising curve. Although he ended 2018 having thrown the pitch 21.7% of the time — more than six points above his 2017 mark — he wasn’t consistent in his use of the pitch throughout the season. In April, when Jeff wrote about it, Pivetta was going to the curve around 27% of the time. By the end of the year, with the Phillies solidly out of contention and (presumably) with a tiring arm, Pivetta went to the curve a little less than 19% of the time. The difference was, for the most part, made up by his increased use of a sinker, which generates an unusually high percentage of whiffs for a pitch of its kind (8.3% in 2018). That ability to adjust an otherwise successful approach as the season goes along augurs well for his future.

Which brings me to another promising thing about Pivetta’s 2018 — he didn’t really get worse as the season went along, despite setting a career high in innings pitched:

When it comes to pitching, the best predictor of success in the future is success in the past, and we now have evidence that Pivetta can put up a FIP- better than league average (92) over a full season. That isn’t evidence we had before the season (Pivetta was never especially highly regarded as a prospect), and it means that it’s now reasonable to expect something at least close to that level of performance in 2019.

Pivetta is never going to be a guy who blows you away with his stuff or his velocity — his spin rate is just about average, and his velocity is fast but not otherworldly in this supercharged environment — but he can be a guy fully in command of four serviceable big-league pitches, and that’s not nothing today or any day. For a fourth starter, it’s very good indeed.

What I’ll be paying attention to in 2019 is whether the large gap between Pivetta’s ERA and his FIP, which I noted at the beginning of this piece but have left unmentioned until now, persists for a third consecutive season. There are some players who just consistently under-perform their peripherals for one reason or another, and a third season with an ERA more than a full point above his FIP might be reasonable evidence that Pivetta is one of those guys. It might also just be evidence that Philadelphia’s defense is unusually terrible.

Batters hit over .300 on ground balls against Pivetta in 2018, which is unusual given that the league average usually sits in the .240s; he also allowed an unusually high slugging percentage on fly balls. Maybe some of those balls will find gloves in 2019. Maybe they won’t. Again, Philly’s defense was very bad in 2018. Either way, we’ll learn something. For now, Pivetta remains one of the better young starters in the game, and a key component of what could be — depending on how free agency plays out — a very solid Phillies team in 2019.