One of the more contentious issues facing Major League Baseball, the Major League Baseball Players Association, and baseball’s fans is the potential use of a pitch clock at the major league level.

The pitch clock, which has been in use in the minor leagues since 2015, was not among the wealth of changes announced in the latest agreement between MLB and the MLBPA, but it has been present and enforced during all of the 2019 spring training games played. Or so we think.

As it turns out, in MLB’s initial announcement of the spring training pitch clock, the league made one very important point:

Later in Spring Training, and depending on the status of negotiations with the Major League Baseball Players Association, umpires will be instructed to begin assessing ball-strike penalties for violations.

The pitch clock has seemingly been tabled in the mid-CBA rule change discussions, with Jeff Passan reporting in late-February that MLB will “scuttle the implementation of a pitch clock until at least 2022.” At least to me, that did not necessarily mean that the pitch clock would automatically go unenforced during the remainder of spring training, but despite there having been no announcement to this effect, that appears to be exactly what happened. Beat writers haven’t tweeted about its use; no stories have been written about a rattled pitcher who had a ball called against him; league officials haven’t commented on it. The clock has largely faded from the rule change conversation since Passan’s report. But I was still curious whether it was really being used as intended, and what effect that might have on time of game.

From the beginning of spring training through March 10, I recorded the game time of every single game, with the exclusion of exhibition games that weren’t played between two major league clubs. In my 254-game sample, I found that the average spring training game lasted two hours and 57 minutes. Read the rest of this entry »

I have a long history of abhorring of structural or rule changes in baseball. I wasn’t alive in 1969 to get upset, but going from two divisions to three seemed like an affront to everything that was right and decent in fifteen-year-old me. And a wild card? A team that can’t even win the division would make the playoffs? Somewhere in the WBAL-TV video archives is me in late 1994 arguing with Josh Lewin about how much I loathed the wild card. Hopefully it can’t be found.

Interleague play? Hated it. I still haven’t gotten to the point where I only mostly hate it. If I look deep into my soul, I still think of the Milwaukee Brewers as an AL East team with the best logo in baseball history and the Houston Astros as NL West stalwarts.

On Thursday, the announcement came down from Major League Baseball and the MLB Players’ Association that several of the significant rule changes proposed in recent weeks would now be implemented for the 2019 and 2020 seasons. Yet I flipped no tables over, and went on no weird Twitter rants that involved Norse gods smiting Rob Manfred under a vermilion sky (we’ll save that imagery for the CBA negotiations). I’m…happy? Apart from the decided lack of robots, that is.

First, the changes for 2019, in no particular order.

An Actual Trade Deadline, Not a Trade Deadline That Also Has This Weird Second Deadline With Secret Lists and Stuff

Baseball’s post-July 31 “bonus” deadline never really made all that much sense. It’s something we accepted because we were used to it, like how neon blue became the official color for raspberry-flavored candy for some reason. Why have a trade deadline if you’re going to have an additional one, before which some players can be traded, but only if they pass through a series of convoluted hurdles?

The August trade season was an opaque mess, full of waiver claims and revocable waivers and irrevocable waivers and pullbacks and teams trying to finagle a way to get prospects moved via players to be named later. It had largely become the “swap bad contracts” deadline and where’s the appetite for that?

The objections to removing this later deadline don’t make a lot of sense to me. I’ve heard a number of baseball and baseball-adjacent people wonder “What if you don’t know whether you’re contending or not?” or “What if something happens and you don’t have a Plan B in the minors?” Not these exact words perhaps, but you get the gist.

My answer: So? It’s good for the sport to have an element of risk in the decision-making process and it’s good for teams that plan their roster depth well to receive a benefit. One simple, straightforward trade deadline is the way to go. And really, if you need until the end of August to know if you’re a contending team or to receive the revelation that pitchers frequently become injured, you’ve got way bigger problems to worry about.

All-Star Election Day (Guest Starring: Extra Cash)

I’ll save the political parallels of election winners directly receiving cash bonuses for someone else!

All-Star voting has always been kind of weird, in that if you try to vote based on in-season performance, you end casting a ballot for an All-April team since the voting process starts very early and continues over a long period of time.

The All-Star Game has been the least interesting part of All-Star Week since interleague play started, but I do think there’s an opportunity here for baseball to create an event where they can market their top players. Hopefully upping the Home Run Derby prize to $1 million will prove a strong incentive for more top-tier sluggers to participate. Joey Gallo is already considering it.

MLB also snuck in the rule that for the All-Star Game, extra innings will start with runners on second base. Since this still won’t affect the real games, I’ll just hope this thing that nobody asked for, wants, or likes will die a quick death and just be a joke in 30 years, much like AfterMash.

Reduced Commercial Breaks

Anything that increases the baseball-to-no-baseball ratio is fine with me. The reduction from 2:05 to 2:00 in local games probably won’t be noticed, but the 2:25 to 2:00 in nationally televised games is a significant trimming. Saving a dozen views of the year’s horribly overplayed commercials in the World Series could do a lot for our collective mental well-being.

After 15 years, I still can’t completely forget the advertisement for Skin in which Ron Silver loudly reminds his daughter that her boyfriend’s father is the district attorney. If you weren’t old enough to remember the 2003 World Series, consider yourself blessed.

MLB/MLBPA Joint Committee

This isn’t really a rule change, but I’m hopeful that the MLBPA and MLB meeting years before the expiration date of the current collective bargaining agreement will result in more productive changes than we’ve gotten in recent agreements. Baseball’s revenue system is in serious need of modernization and it’s not something you can paper over by both sides agreeing to take money away from those rich, robber baron…uh…17-year-old international players. From incentivizing teams to win baseball games over subsidizing lower revenues, to gaming the service time clock, both sides have a lot of things to talk about. Rule changes aren’t likely to be quite as contentious as provisions that directly impact player compensation, but a constructive dialogue about what baseball should look like and how it should be played can only help to shape the harder conversations set to take place in 2021.

Visitation Rights Revoked

Baseball implemented a 30-second limit on mound visits before the 2016 season and capped the total number of mound visits per game without a pitching change at six before 2018. For 2019, this number has been further reduced to five visits, and while this won’t result in a significant change in total game times, it’s another moment where for the viewer, nothing is actually happening but some standing around and talking. Baseball isn’t a pub crawl, after all.

And coming in 2020…

Return of the 15-Day Injured List

The injured list (formerly the disabled list before the name change) will now return to being a 15-day list instead of a 10-day one; the minimum assignment period for pitchers sent to the minors will also increase to 15 days. The idea of the shorter injured list stint was to nudge teams into putting players with short-term injuries on the IL instead of keeping them active in the fear of having to lose them for a full two weeks, thereby risking further or worsened injury. In practice, some teams were using it as a taxi-squad, and baseball would prefer to not have to be the injury police to enforce whether or not injured list visits are due to chicanery. Unlike machinations such as openers or two-way players, exploiting rules meant to protect injured players isn’t what I consider in-game cleverness.

The LOOGYDämerung Beckons

Baseball’s rule changes frequently involve structural alterations to things like divisions and playoff spots or equipment. Changing how a player is allowed to be used on such a wide basis is a good bit rarer. There has always been some tinkering around the edges, like as the Pat Venditte rule, which is intended to keep baseball from degrading to an infinite loop as switch-pitchers and switch-hitters fight an endless battle for platoon superiority.

Going from a minimum of one batter faced to three, or until the half-inning concludes, is a significant change, and one I feel has been a long time coming, simply due to the nature of pitching vs. hitting in terms of how baseball itself is designed.

A left-handed pitcher can be rostered just for an ability to get out left-handed hitters as that’s all they have to do, but carrying a left-handed pinch-hitter to do nothing but hit righty relievers is much more difficult. There were always a lot more Randy Choates than Dave Clarks.

As players became more specialized, bullpens ballooned, and benches withered away. Knowing that a pitcher may have to pitch to three batters, or until the inning concludes, brings a bit of balance back to the issue as I see it. It makes the batting order more tactically relevant and instead of bringing in the lefty to face the lefty almost by reflex, managers will have to assess the risk-reward of bringing in that pitcher without the option to remove him easily.

One important thing to note is that people also greatly overestimate just how many one-batter stints there are in baseball.

Even in the season with the most one-batter appearances, 2015, teams still averaged only about eight a month. It’s too soon to be certain about the trend, but based on 2017 and 2018 at least, this type of usage may have hit its peak in 2011-2015.

I’m only half-joking when I say Bruce Bochy’s retirement would have reduced this number on its own. Three of the top four seasons in one-batter reliever usage in baseball history were Bochy-managed teams — the 2012, 2015, and 2016 Giants. There were 112 one-batter relief stints on the Giants in 2012 alone; only 15 other teams ever topped 70.

The players did not embrace this rule change, but agreed not to fight this particular adjustment. I suspect when we look back on this in 10 years, we’ll be surprised by how extreme people thought the change was at the time.

The 26/28 Man Roster

The size of standard active rosters will expand to 26. This strikes me as an eminently fair attempt to reverse the disappearance of benches. A team can still carry 13 pitchers (or whatever number is selected in the final rule) if it chooses to do so, but now American League teams will have at least a reasonably sized bench. My hope is that limits on resources cause innovation in both the bullpens and benches. If we see a wider variety of bullpen roles when combined with the three-batter rule and a comeback of situational hitters, I think this is a win.

Naturally, with a limit on pitchers, there needs to be a bright line to separate actual two-way players like Shohei Ohtani and Matt Davidson. Players will now have to be designated as either a pitcher or a position player in advance, and two-way players will have to meet certain criteria. The limit initially chosen of 20 innings pitched and 20 games of at least three plate appearances strikes me as a bit too steep. I have serious doubts that teams would try to “fake” a pitcher by allowing a .400ish OPS hitter to start ten games a year. For 2020 Ohtani, he’ll already have the required number of plate appearances from 2019 to qualify as a two-way player, but absent an injury exemption, until he gets the 20 innings thrown, he’ll have to be considered a pitcher, meaning he will take up one of the team’s pitcher slots for that period of time. After those 20 innings, he wouldn’t count against the team’s pitcher cap and could be reclassified.

Along with the three-batter rule, the pitcher limitation also seeks to improve the aesthetics of the game. I’ve long argued that baseball’s problem isn’t games that are long so much as it is games that are long and nothing is happening. A parade of constant reliever changes grinds things to a halt.

Where I’m not-so-excited is the effect on September rosters. I like seeing teams out of contention call up some of their minor leaguers to the 40-man roster. With 28 players on the roster, teams save on MLB salaries. If you think of some of that money going to the 26th-man during most of the season, it will likely function in many cases as a subsidy to older players from younger players. And this is sadly a theme of some changes the MLBPA and MLB have happily agreed to over the last decade.

Update: Following Seager’s surgery, it appears that he will now miss 10-12 weeks, rather than the six weeks or so estimated at the time this article was written. Please update your misery accordingly.

Last Friday, Kyle Seager dove for a ball that was smacked down the third-base line by the Cubs’ Javy Báez and hurt his hand in the process. Scott Servais removed Seager from the game during a subsequent pitching change, and the Mariners announced Monday that the third baseman would undergo immediate surgery to repair an extensor tendon in his left hand. I am not intimately familiar with extensor tendons as a matter of course, but I understand they’re what allow you to straighten your fingers and thumbs. Since you need to be able to do those things in order to play baseball, Seager will be out six weeks.

Because the Mariners aren’t expected to be very good this year — their 75-87 projection is better only than the Rangers’ in their division — this isn’t the kind of injury that you’d expect to materially affect the way the season plays out for Seattle, but it is kind of a bummer for Seager, who had a pretty bad year last year and could use a bounceback. Here are Seager’s numbers for 2011-2017 and 2018, respectively:

There’s a reasonable argument to be made that some of Seager’s under-performance last year was due to an unusually low BABIP (.251, compared to a career mark of .281), and that .178 ISO isn’t too far off his career mark of .183, but it’s hard to write off the sudden spike in strikeout rate — Seager posted a 14.3% full-season mark as recently as 2015 — especially when it comes, as it does, alongside a three-year slide in contact rate, from 83.4% in that 2015 season to 78.8% last year. Last year, for the first time in his career, Seager had a negative run value  on fastballs (-0.69 per hundred seen). Something, clearly, was a little off. Read the rest of this entry »

Nolan Arenado is one of the best hitters in the game. The 27-year-old third baseman has won four consecutive Silver Slugger awards, averaging a a 127 wRC+, 40 doubles, and 40 home runs over that stretch. Ensconced in the heart of the Colorado Rockies batting order, he’s driven in 503 runs, the most in MLB by a comfortable margin.

Like many players, Arenado has evolved. Unlike one of his new teammates, he’s done so in a more traditional —less nerdy, if you will — manner. On Tuesday we heard from Daniel Murphy on how he transformed himself into an elite hitter. Today we hear from Arenado.

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David Laurila: We first talked during your 2013 rookie season. How have you most changed as a hitter since that time?

Nolan Arenado: “When I’m going well, I’m good at staying on my back leg. I didn’t do that back then. I was a front-leg hitter. That’s why I wasn’t driving the ball out of the ballpark. I was good at putting bat to ball in 2013, but that’s it. I was just slapping the ball for a knock.

“I had to learn how to be quicker without jumping at the ball. I had to learn to control the middle-inside pitch, because they were beating me there. I was kind of drifting, and I was getting jammed. In 2014, I started focusing on getting the head out. Read the rest of this entry »

Late last year, Major League Baseball entered into a contract with MGM Resorts International to become the league’s official gaming and entertainment partner. Now we have the first significant change to the game as a result of that partnership.

In a move Major League Baseball hopes will “reduce integrity risks” involved with gambling on baseball, the organization has announced that teams must send their starting player lineups to officials at least 15 minutes before they’re publicly announced, according to the Associated Press. Doing so, the organization claims, will “reduce the risk of confidential information being ‘tipped’.”

At least, that’s the reason the league provided. But others have suggested that MLB is actually doing something a bit different with those lineups. Per Chad Finn (emphasis mine):

MLB, which in November reached a gambling partnership with MGM Resorts International, one of the world’s largest gaming operators, and also has a deal with daily fantasy site DraftKings, will confirm receipt of the lineups, then distribute the information to its partners. Releasing the lineups first to the commissioner’s office would allow MGM to set its betting lines before others have access.

In other words, according to some, in addition to the “integrity risks” cited as its public reasoning, MLB also appears to be collecting lineups so that its gaming partners can set betting lines on baseball games. As you might imagine, the new rule hasn’t been all that popular with managers and players.

Alex Cora, manager of the champion Boston Red Sox, addressed the gambling issue this week:

“This whole thing is serious. You guys know [catcher] Hector Villaneuva. He used to tell me stories from Taiwan, how the whole gambling thing was there. The pitcher was [stuck] in it, he was in it, then the umpire was in it. Nobody knew what to do. Throw pitches down the middle; he was taking pitches, and the umpire was calling them balls. For us to send the lineup, and if something happens, we have to re-send the lineup and then keep doing it — hopefully I don’t forget.”

Peter Gammons addressed the issue from another direction.

Read the rest of this entry »

With 80% of the YES Network up for sale, the New York Yankees have formed an ownership group that will give the club a majority interest in the network. The deal is valued at $3.47 billion, more than four times the network’s estimated value when it was formed in 2002, though that figure is also about half a billion dollars less than it was when YES was last sold in 2014. Disney recently acquired the 80% share of YES as part of their acquisition of Fox, but they must sell Fox’s regional sports networks in order to gain government approval of the broader Fox purchase. The Yankees, not willing to go it alone on a multi-billion dollar investment, found financial backing in the form of Blackstone and a few other private equity groups. More important to the actual running of the network, Sinclair Broadcasting Group and Amazon will also be significant investors, with the Yankees possessing a majority interest.

A little over six years ago, Fox bought nearly half of YES Network for $1.5 billion. While the team was the most prominent owner of the network at the time, that deal most benefited Goldman Sachs, Providence Equity, and a group headed by former Nets’ owner Raymond Chambers. The latter three groups owned roughly two-thirds of the network at the time, and sold most of their share. The Yankees sold about 9% of their share, netting them around a quarter of a billion dollars. That deal allowed Fox to later purchase the rest of the equity groups’ shares, as well as a bit more of the Yankees’ share, for another billion or so dollars. Fox completed that purchase in 2014, owning 80% of the network; the Yankees owned the remaining 20%. In what would turn out to be a big part of the agreement and the current sale, the Yankees retained the ability to buy back the network. Read the rest of this entry »

Who’s on first? This spring, it’s a question that both New York teams are figuring out through compelling job battles. While the Yankees attempt to decide between homegrown Greg Bird and mid-2018 trade acquisition Luke Voit — the latter of whom was the AL’s hottest hitter from August 1 onward, with a 194 wRC+ — the Mets are sorting out whether Dominic Smith or Peter Alonso will be their starter. I wrote enough about the Yankees’ pair late last season, when Voit seized the job from the struggling, oft-injured Bird, so today, it’s worth considering the Mets’ dilemma.

Of the two combatants, the 24-year-old Alonso, who currently lists at 6-foot-3, 245 pounds, is fresher in mind because he bopped 36 homers for the Mets’ Double-A Binghamton and Triple-A Las Vegas affiliates last year but didn’t receive a September call-up, a move that looked far more like a garden-variety attempt to manipulate his service time than it did a sound baseball decision. Taking a page from the playbook used by the Cubs for Kris Bryant and by the Blue Jays for Vladimir Guerrero Jr., the Mets even cited Alonso’s defense as one reason they were holding off. “His bat is his calling card and his defense is something he’s going to have to work at,” said director of player development Ian Levin last August, shortly after Alonso was named the Las Vegas 51s’ defensive player of the month for July.

To be fair, scouts did and do have concerns about Alonso’s defense, as well as his conditioning. Our own Eric Longenhagen noted concerns about his glove last April while ranking him seventh overall among the Mets’ prospects and grading his defense for both present and future at 40 on the 20-80 scouting scale; for what it’s worth, while Baseball America and MLB Pipeline don’t distinguish between present and future in their grades, both concur with the 40. BA’s Prospect Handbook 2019 calling him “an American League player in a National League organization.” But after the 2016 second-round pick out of the University of Florida slashed .285/.395/.579 between the two upper levels last year, his overall Future Value grade improved from 45 to 50 thanks to massive jumps in both his raw power (from 60/60 to a maximum 80/80) and game power (from 40/55 to 55/70) and modest advancement in his hit tool (from 40/50 to 45/50).

“Right/right college first basemen don’t typically work out (this century’s list of guys who have done nothing but play first since day one on campus and done well in MLB is Paul Goldschmidt, Rhys Hoskins, Eric Karros, and that’s it),” wrote Longenhagen for last year’s Mets list. Compare that to this year’s model from our Top 100 Prospects list, where Alonso landed at number 48: “This is what top-of-the-scale, strength-driven raw power looks like, and it drives an excellent version of a profile we’re typically quite bearish on: the heavy-bodied, right/right first baseman.” Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel referenced some of Alonso’s greatest hits including a single Arizona Fall League game where his exit velocities reached 116.3 mph on a double and 113.6 on a homer, as well as this Futures Game homer which, holy smokes:

Spring stats don’t count for doodly squat, but with four doubles and three homers so far in Grapefruit League play, as well as a .406/.457/.813 line, Alonso is turning heads. After he hit one over the Green Monster-like wall at the Red Sox’s Jet Blue Park last week, Boston manager Alex Cora called him “Probably the best hitter in Florida right now.” Catching peoples’ attention in a much different way was Monday’s unintentional leveling of the Astros’ Josh Reddick at first base:

Then there’s the lefty-swinging Smith, who was chosen as the 11th overall pick out of a Gardena, California high school in 2013, cracked BA’s Top 100 list three times (in 2014, ’16 and ’17, peaking at number 71 in the last of those years) and is currently listed at 6 feet and 239 pounds, 54 pounds more than when he placed 73rd on our Top 100 Prospects list two years ago. He actually tipped the scales at as high as 260 pounds before cutting out wet burritos, a factoid no consumer of 21st century New York baseball coverage will ever forget. Though he’s receded into the background somewhat as Alonso’s star has risen, he’s actually six months younger (he doesn’t turn 24 until June 15), and has 332 plate appearances of major league experience under his belt from 2017-18, though his .210/.259/.406 line (79 wRC+) is abysmal outside of the 14 home runs.

Smith does not have Alonso’s natural power. It took him four years of pro ball to reach a double-digit home run total in a single season (16 at Binghamton in 2016), though he did hit 25 between Las Vegas and the majors in 2017. For that year’s lists, Longenhagen graded his raw power at 55/55, and his game power at 40/55, with his hit tool and glove both at 50/60. That profile has led to comparisons to James Loney — the young version that former Mets manager Terry Collins oversaw from 2002-06 as the Dodgers’ minor league field coordinator and then director of player development, not the end-stage version that Collins managed in 2016. “I thought he’d at minimum replicate James Loney’s best years,” said Longenhagen when I asked about the post-prospect version of Smith. “Never huge home run power but 40 doubles, tons of contact, plus glove at first base.”

Nothing has really come together for Smith at the major league level, perhaps in part because the Mets have convinced him to try to pull the ball and hit for more power. Promoted from Triple-A on August 11, 2017, he played first base regularly over the final two months of the season following Lucas Duda’s trade to Tampa Bay but hit just .198/.262/.395 with nine homers in 183 PA, striking out 26.8% of the time. Last year, after showing up late for his first Grapefruit League game and getting scratched from the lineup, he suffered a right quad strain in his spring debut, an injury that sidelined him until mid-April. He slipped behind what was left of Adrian Gonzalez on the depth chart, then bounced between Las Vegas and New York all season, serving four stints with the big club.

Between the shuttling, an experiment in left field — the results of which were brutally Duda-esque (-3.1 UZR and -5 DRS in 90 innings) — and semi-regular play in September while Alonso went home, Smith didn’t hit, either in the majors (.224/.255/.420) or at hitter-friendly Vegas (.258/.328/.380). In the bigs, he walked in just 2.7% of his plate appearances while striking out in 31.5%. When he did make contact, his average launch angle rose from 9.7 degrees to 17.2, with his groundball rate dropping from 50.4% to 34.4%, but the approach didn’t pay off. What’s more, within the small sample of playing time across both seasons, his defensive metrics at first base have been unfavorable (-2.4 UZR, -8 DRS in 74 games).

Like Alonso, Smith has hit well this spring (.433/.500/.600, for what it’s worth). As bad as he was last year in the outfield, he’s expressed a willingness to continue the experiment. But with Michael Conforto and Brandon Nimmo slated for the outfield corners (manager Mickey Callaway recently said that Conforto would exclusively play right, but we’ll see), and infielder Jeff McNeil somehow squeezed into the picture, it’s difficult to see where outfield playing time for Smith would come from even if Conforto or Nimmo does log time in center instead of Juan Lagares. The pair combined for 81 starts there last year, with dreadful defensive metrics (-6.8 UZR, -10 DRS). Mets pitchers have to shudder at the thought of such an alignment that includes Smith.

Lately, McNeil — who made 52 of his 53 big league starts last at second base — has been seeing playing time at third base because both Jed Lowrie and Todd Frazier have been slowed by injuries (a capsule sprain in the left knee for the former, an oblique strain for the latter). Even that situation has spillover into the first base picture, as Lowrie’s arrival in free agency displaced Frazier, who, after struggling (.213/.303/.390, 90 wRC+) in his first season with the Mets, was slated to get more playing time at first base, where he’s started 82 major league games (but just eight since 2014). With a crowd that includes newly acquired second baseman Robinson Cano, the Mets were supposed to have enough bodies on hand to push at least one of the two first basemen (likely Alonso) back to the minors to open the season, conveniently obscuring the service time issues that have loomed since last year.

In contrast to Guerrero’s situation in Toronto and the way Alonso was handled by the Mets last fall, Callaway and general manager Brodie Van Wagenen are saying the right things. Last December, the new GM said that his intent was for Alonso to be the Opening Day first baseman, and the continued refrain in Florida has been “We’re taking the best 25 guys up north with us,” which would be a refreshing departure from the industry-wide trend towards service time manipulation. Until Opening Day, however, it’s all talk.

At some point, the Mets will have to choose a first baseman. For what it’s worth, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections gives a clear preference for Alonso, mainly because of Smith’s struggles in recent years. The numbers don’t jump off the page, however:

Lest you think that ZiPS is particularly low on Alonso, note that his Steamer projection for 2019 is nearly the same (.241/.319/.458). Last year, he tore up the Eastern League (.314/.440/.573, 180 wRC+) but relative to his league, saw a substantial drop-off at Las Vegas (.260/.355/.585, 139 wRC+). It’s worth noting that his slash numbers within that projection are held down by a low BABIP (.281 for 2019) that owes something to his 30-grade speed. It’s still a much more playable profile than the projections for Smith:

Woof. Again, it’s worth remembering that these are the result of heavy weighting of the player’s recent performances, which in Smith’s case have largely been struggle after struggle, though he did hit well at Vegas in 2017 (.330/.386/.519, 134 wRC+). Note that the gap between Alonso and Smith may be larger than shown above, as the former was projected for just 524 PA this year, the latter 587.

Ultimately, even with potential season-opening stints on the Injury List for Lowrie and/or Frazier, and so many other job battles among the team’s position players, it seems quite possible that the Mets will trade Smith, who has youth on his side and may be best served by a change of scenery anyway. One way or another, it should be very interesting to see how this all unfolds.

Daniel Murphy can rake. Since breaking into the big leagues in 2008, the 33-year-old infielder has slashed .299/.344/.458. Moreover, he’s become a better hitter — a more dangerous hitter — in recent seasons. While a knee injury limited him last year, Murphy’s left-handed stroke produced 146 extra-base hits and a 144 wRC+ between 2016-2017. And now he’ll get to play his home games in Coors Field. The Colorado Rockies signed him to a free agent deal back in December.

Murphy, who could accurately be described as a hitting nerd, talked about the art and science of his craft this past weekend at Colorado’s spring training facility in Scottsdale, Arizona.

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David Laurila: Hitting analytics are becoming an important part of the game. To what extent can they translate into improved performance? I’m referring primarily to the swing.

Daniel Murphy: “I think we were doing that even before there was a measure for it. If you talk to any hitting coach, he’s going to say, ‘I want you to get a good pitch to hit. I want you to hit it hard.’ — that’s exit velocity — ‘and I want you to impact it in the gap.’ — that’s measurable by launch angle. What’s really changed is that we can quantify, and measure, exactly what hitting coaches have always been telling us to do: Hit the ball hard, in the gap.”

Laurila: Basically, what Ted Williams was preaching 50 years ago.

Murphy: “That, and it’s measurable. If you talked to Ted, he would probably say, ‘I don’t want the infielders to catch my batted balls.’ Maybe I’d be putting words in his mouth, but that’s something I strive to do. I don’t ever want the infielders to catch my batted balls. No strikeouts, no popups, no ground balls. I want to hit line drives and fly balls. Line drives would be Position A, and if I miss, I want to miss in the air, over the infielders’ heads. Read the rest of this entry »

Like Craig Kimbrel, Dallas Keuchel remains a free agent — the highest-ranked one left from our Top 50 Free Agents list, in fact — his market stalled by a quest for a longer-term deal than any team appears willing to give, at least in this frozen winter market. With Opening Day fast approaching, his current situation is worth a closer look.

Keuchel, who turned 31 on New Year’s Day, is coming off his best season since his 2015 AL Cy Young-winning campaign in terms of both volume (204 innings, after averaging 157 in 2016-17), and quality (3.74 ERA, 3.69 FIP and 3.6 WAR, compared to a 3.79 ERA, 3.83 FIP and an average of 2.5 WAR over the previous two years). Part of that is likely due to health, as a season-ending bout of shoulder soreness limited him to 26 starts in 2016, none of which came after August 27, while a pinched nerve in his neck, and further discomfort related to that issue, held him to 23 starts in 2017.

He’s not a pitcher who misses a ton of bats, instead relying on soft contact and a ton of groundballs. Last year’s 17.5% K rate was the majors’ fourth-lowest among 57 qualifiers, and even with a fairly stingy walk rate (6.6%), his 10.9% K-BB% was still the ninth-lowest among that set. Meanwhile, he was first among that group in groundball rate (53.7%) and 15th out of 47 qualifiers (500 batted ball events) in average exit velocity (87.0 mph). Over the past five seasons, he’s second in groundball rate among pitchers with at least 500 innings (60.0%) and, for the four years of the Statcast era, 22nd out of 149 (1000 PA minimum) in average exit velo (86.2 mph). Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, Major League Baseball and the independent Atlantic League announced a partnership to test certain rule changes that could be coming to MLB. This deal is noteworthy for a few reasons. First, the introduction of an automatic strike zone suggests that the role of big league umpires could be changing. Second, the rule changes themselves, which range from the interesting to the just plain weird, suggest a continued emphasis on more balls being put in play, and greater action on the field. Third, the Atlantic League will become the first unaffiliated league with access to Trackman data, creating a more robust way of seeing potential differences between the leagues’ talent levels, and potentially creating a new pipeline for prospective major leaguers.

Let’s start with the rule changes themselves.

The following new rules will be in place for the 2019 Atlantic League Championship Season:

• Home-plate umpire assisted in calling balls and strikes by a TrackMan radar tracking system
• No mound visits permitted by players or coaches other than for pitching changes or medical issues
• Pitchers must face a minimum of three batters, or reach the end of an inning before they exit the game, unless the pitcher becomes injured
• Increase size of first, second and third base from 15 inches square to 18 inches square
• Require two infielders to be on each side of second base when a pitch is released (if not, the ball is dead and the umpire shall call a ball)
• Time between innings and pitching changes reduced from 2:05 to 1:45
• Distance from pitching rubber to home plate extended 24 inches, in the second half of the season only; with no change to mound height or slope.

Robot umpires? Robot umpires! We’ve talked before about how, given the way the ball and strike rules are currently worded, introducing robot umps would require pretty significant rule changes. Now some umpires have been maligned (often fairly) for the eccentricities of their unique strike zones. Joe West and Angel Hernandez certainly come to mind. But while having an automated ball and strike system might help, the difference might be less than you think. Read the rest of this entry »