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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We’ve reached, at long last, the finale of our series on how to fix salary arbitration. The previous installments have all focused on how the arbitration process works, and how it might work better – from changing evidentiary rules, to granting greater independence to the arbitrators, to eliminating the either/or model. But today, we’re going to look at something different: who is eligible for arbitration, and how we might replace the current system with one designed to adapt to the realities of the current market for player labor. Doing so requires addressing service time manipulation, and ensuring that both sides can opt-in or out of a particular arbitration hearing and also that players are paid even in a slow free agent market. Can we do all of that without breaking teams’ payroll? I think the answer is yes.

A little over a year ago, Travis Sawchik floated the idea of adding restricted free agency to baseball, which would bring the sport more in line with the NFL and NBA. More recently, he revisited the topic.

Players with more than three years of service time but less than six are eligible for arbitration. The first year of arbitration eligibility is supposed to garner a player about 40 percent of their open-market value, the second year 60 percent, and the third year of arbitration approximately 80 percent, though that estimate does not always apply. While arbitration earnings are far greater than pre-arbitration salaries, which are typically near the minimum salary, they are still short of market value.

The type of restricted free-agency system that owners attempted to implement in 1994 seems increasingly beneficial to players today. That system could have made young star Francisco Lindor a 25-year-old free agent this winter and Mookie Betts a 25-year-old free agent last winter.

An approach similar to other sports leagues could address many of the problems inherent to baseball’s current system. So let’s examine how Travis’ system might work in practice. To start, let’s look at current rules for arbitration eligibility, courtesy of the fantastic FanGraphs Library (which, if you’ve never used, you should).

Players are eligible for arbitration hearings if they meet any of the following requirements:

• They have at least three full seasons of MLB service time, and less than six. Players with six or more years of service time become free agents after their contracts have expired, while players with less than six seasons are under team-control. Up until players have acquired three seasons of service time, their salary is determined solely by their team. For years three through six, players can take their salary demands to an arbitration panel if they can’t reach an agreement with their team.
• If they have less then three full seasons of MLB service time, but are within the top 22% of players with more than two years of service time. This is called the “Super Two” exception, and it often leads to top prospects being held down in the minor leagues until they have passed the Super Two threshold. For more on this, see our Super Two page.

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Last week brought with it a flurry of relatively minor pitching deals — the sort that weren’t enough to divert the industry from the apparently never-ending saga of bigger stars left unsigned, and which are fairly typical of this time of year. Here they are:

• The Orioles signed 31-year-old Nate Karns to a one-year deal worth $800,000, with an additional $200,000 possible in incentives.
• Cleveland signed 32-year-old Alex Wilson to a minor league deal that could be worth $1.25 million in guaranteed money and an additional $750,000 in incentives should Wilson make the squad out of spring training.
• The Diamondbacks signed 36-year-old Ricky Nolasco and 33-year-old Marc Rzepczynski to minor league deals and invited both to join big league spring training. Rzepczynski’s deal could be worth $1.5 million guaranteed if he makes the team, with $500,000 in incentives besides. The terms of Nolasco’s deal have not yet been reported.
• Lastly, the Royals inked 33-year-old Homer Bailey to a minor-league deal with an invite to spring training; they did not disclose the terms of the deal.

Bailey’s probably the best-known of the names on that list, but I also think he’s among the least likely to accomplish much in 2019. You may recall that, earlier this winter, Bailey played the part of “salary offset” in the deal that sent Matt Kemp, Yasiel Puig, and Alex Wood to Cincinnati. So underwhelming was his 2018 — in which he allowed 23 home runs in just over 106 innings pitched — that even the Dodgers’ brass, who stash spare pitchers in their overcoats when they’re just going around the corner for a gallon of milk, released Bailey immediately upon his arrival in Los Angeles. He was in blue and white for less than 20 minutes. In Kansas City, he’ll join Brad Keller and Jakob Junis in the Royals’ rotation and work to find a second wind.

Nate Karns — another 30-something with success in his past and a terrible team in his present — has always been a little bit interesting for his ability to keep the ball on the ground with a four-pitch mix that features a two-seamer, a curveball, a change-up, and a heavy sinking fastball. The big question at the moment is how he’ll recover from the thoracic outlet surgery that ended his 2017 season near the end of May of that year, and kept him off the field for the entirety of 2018. Before the injury, Karns was carrying a terrific 50% groundball rate and 27% strikeout rate for the Royals — both improvements on his already-solid 2016 for the Mariners and in line with his 27 and 23% strikeout rates during his heyday with the Rays in 2014-15.

Karns going to Baltimore, which is under new management, is probably good news for everybody involved. Karns, obviously, would like the opportunity to prove that he is healthy and can return to being the quality big-league starter he has already been at various points throughout his career. The Orioles would like that too — Karns has one year of arbitration left, and the Orioles will still need rotation help in 2020. Alternatively, depending on the state of the trade market next summer or the summer thereafter, Karns could be traded to a contender in exchange for some area of need for Baltimore. That, too, would presumably be welcome news for Karns.

I already wrote a little bit about Cleveland’s bullpen situation in my writeup of the Óliver Pérez deal last month, so I won’t say much more about the Wilson deal except what I said then:

Pérez is a good pitcher and Cleveland needs a few of those. He had a terrific season in 2018 and there is reason to believe, despite his 16 seasons in the major leagues, that he has more left in the tank. He’ll be best served if the front office goes out and gets more arms to take some of the strain off of, say, him and Brad Hand, but if he pitches like he did last year, he’ll be useful anyway.

Alex Wilson, apparently, is one of the arms destined to take the strain off of Óliver Pérez and Brad Hand. He was remarkably consistent for the Tigers during his last four years in Detroit, posting a 3.20 ERA and a 2.77 K/BB ratio over 264.2 innings pitched. Importantly, too, he’s demonstrated an ability to throw in different roles: over the course of his career, he’s pitched 50.1 innings in the sixth, 84.1 in the seventh, 97 in the 8th, and 54.1 in the ninth or later. The question, then, is whether the Tigers’ decision to non-tender him this winter was due to some concern about his future not visible to external observers or simply a consequence of the cost-cutting ethos that seems to have overtaken Detroit. I suspect it’s the latter, and like this pickup for Cleveland.

As for Rzepczynski and Nolasco, it’s hard to get too worked up about those deals either way. The Diamondbacks’ bullpen wasn’t outright terrible last year, though it certainly had room for improvement with a 4.08 collective FIP, and Rzepczynski is second bit of the two-part bullpen improvement plan that started with Arizona signing Greg Holland. He got beat up pretty badly between Seattle, Cleveland, and Triple-A last year (an 8.25 ERA in 12 minor-league innings!), so I’m not sure how well that’ll work out, but given his past success against lefties (he’s held them to a .227/.296/.305 career line), it’s worth a shot. Nolasco, too, had some good years for the Twins once upon a dream, but didn’t pitch in the majors last year and will struggle to win a rotation spot this year. These are the kinds of deals you make at the end of the winter, when spring seems close at hand and the snow just days away from melting.