CLEVELAND — In early March, Neil Walker was confronted by the most bizarre of sights. At the grounds of the quiet IMG Academy baseball complex in south Bradenton, Fla., he found himself surrounded by acres of farm land, a sprawl of housing developments, and some 25 fellow free-agent ballplayers. They had all authored long, successful careers. None had a contract for the coming season.

Last winter was an unusual one, historically unusual, as readers of this Web site well know.

At the end of February, still unemployed and with little if any clear interest from major-league teams, Walker left his offseason home in the north hills of Pittsburgh and reported to the free-agent camp. The camp at IMG had enough players for three- and four-inning intrasquad games. The free agents there also competed against a Japanese minor-league team, Walker said.

“I was thinking something isn’t right,” Walker told FanGraphs. “Typically, you think about about the consistency of the player [in free agency]. Maybe there’s factors that go into the middle tier of free agents not getting years or something along those lines, but to not get either the years or the figures… that was somewhat alarming. I’ve had a few injury things over the last couple of years, but it’s nothing that they could say… is going to cause me to keel over as a 32-year-old. It was alarming, not just for myself but for a lot of people.”

Walker represented the middle-class tier of player that has been squeezed in recent offseasons. Because of his experience, and with the beginning of the next offseason just four-plus months away, FanGraphs recently approached Walker when the Yankees visited Cleveland. Walker’s fear is that the trend for the middle tier of player like himself will only continue.

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When it comes to replacement level, first base is a very different beast than catcher. In general, teams prioritize catcher defense and staff handling over offense, and even in this age of advanced analytics, there’s room to quibble over whether the available metrics — including the pitch-framing sort — capture enough of their value. As we lack a good staff-handling metric (catcher ERA isn’t it due to sample-size issues), there’s a whole gray area that, among other things, allows teams, particularly contending ones, to convince themselves they’re getting enough value behind the plate.

First base is another story. Offense is comparatively easy to measure, and the expectations for the position are high. A contending team that lacks a heavy hitter at the spot, or at least an adequate one, is bringing a spork to a knife fight. At this end of the defensive spectrum, it shouldn’t be that hard to find alternatives, even if they possess relatively clunky gloves; in this day of shortened benches, you can generally find a utilityman to fill in defensively at first in the late innings. With upgrades available as the July 31 deadline approaches, there’s no excuse for letting a Replacement-Level Killer drag your contending team down.

Among contenders (which, for this series, I’ve defined as teams with playoff odds at least 15.0%, a definition that currently covers 15 teams), five have gotten less than 1.0 WAR at the position thus far. That said, a closer look at each situation suggests not all will be in the market for external solutions (an area that colleague Dan Szymborski will examine). Between early-season injuries and slow-starting veterans, some of these teams aren’t in as dire a shape as their overall numbers suggest, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re out of the woods.

Working from the order of the table above, from the worst to the most borderline…

Rockies

As I noted in the catchers’ installment, eight out of 12 Rockies with at least 100 PA have a wRC+ below 90. While it’s understandable how the team could convince itself that the defensively sound Chris Iannetta and Tony Wolters might be adequate enough, there’s no fig leaf of an excuse to cover the team’s ongoing inability to find competence at first base, where Ian Desmond, Ryan McMahon, and Pat Valaika have combined for an 85 wRC+. Desmond himself hasn’t been quite that bad with the bat (.238/.309/.468, 92 wRC+), but his defensive numbers at the position are lousy (-1.7 UZR, -4 DRS), and at this point it feels like the Rockies are playing him mainly because they still owe him about $50 million, preferring a sinking ship to a sunk cost.

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Every single baseball team has a manager. Some of them get paid a few millions of dollars. Given how they’re compensated, it follows that organizations believe a good manager is very important. But, who is a good manager? How do you identify a good manager? How do you measure a good manager? How do you compare one manager against another, or against the entire major-league landscape? I don’t know! I don’t know very much about managers, myself. But I do know that FanGraphs readers pay a lot of attention to baseball, and to specific baseball teams. What a terrific opportunity to crowdsource.

A little over a week ago, the Cardinals fired Mike Matheny. A little under a week ago, on the FanGraphs front page, I ran a polling project, asking what you think about your favorite teams’ managers. The polls were designed very simply — there’s not a lot of room for nuance, even though human beings are complicated, with upsides and downsides. Still, I saw this as a way to generate useful data. Useful data that doesn’t exist in other places. In this place, right now, we can dig into the results. Let’s take a look at what the FanGraphs community thinks of the 2018 managers!

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Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In the eighteenth installment of this series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Trevor Bauer, Joe Biagini, and Noe Ramirez — on how they learned and/or developed a specific pitch.

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Trevor Bauer (Indians) on His Slider

“I wanted to add a Kluber-esque lateral breaking pitch, so I studied everything about it — spin axis, spin rate, trajectory, movement — and tried to copy it. I’ve done a pretty good job so far.

“It doesn’t come out of my hand the same way Kluber’s does or Stroman’s does, but I’m able to generate the same movement profile on it, because… it’s an iterative process. OK, this is happening and it’s not exactly what I want, so let me find a different way to hold it, or a different way to throw it, or a different cue. Let’s look at that at 2,000 frames per second. OK, does that have the desired effect? Yes or no. Read the rest of this entry »

Let’s play a little game. Here’s a table ranking five pitchers in a mystery stat for 2018:

One of these pitchers is not like the others. One of these pitchers didn’t get any All-Star consideration and, barring a miracle, won’t get any Cy Young votes at the end of the year. Obviously, it’s not Sale or Scherzer, who started the All-Star Game, and it’s not Bauer, who was on the AL squad.

That leaves Paxton and Maeda, and you can bet that AL manager A.J. Hinch was thinking about the former much harder, at least before his recent struggles and lower back stiffness, than NL manager Dave Roberts was about the latter — and Maeda is Roberts’ own pitcher!

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Josh Hader is a lefty relief pitcher for the Milwaukee Brewers. You know this; you read this site. Josh Hader has had, statistically speaking, an awesome season. You don’t accidentally strike out 17 guys per nine — in this case, better than half of all batters he’s faced. And Hader seems to have embraced a role of which other pitchers might be wary of great. So it wasn’t surprising when Jon Heyman tweeted this:

By now, you probably know the rest of this story. During the All-Star Game, whilst Hader was in the midst of a surprisingly poor performance on the mound, Hader’s high-school record suddenly came back to light. As the Washington Post’s Kevin Blackistone explained,

Tuesday night’s revelation [was] that Josh Hader, one of the pitchers showcased in Major League Baseball’s 89th All-Star Game, was a serial hate tweeter as a star athlete at Old Mill High School in suburban Baltimore’s Anne Arundel County.

It’s probably important before continuing to understand what kind of hate, exactly, we’re talking about. (Warning: the content is pretty offensive.)

What we have here is unmistakably racist, homophobic, antisemitic, and misogynistic hate speech. And that doesn’t happen by accident, either.

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The first pitch Blake Snell ever threw as an American League All-Star ended up in the left-field bleachers. I assume he had other plans.

That this might, for some, represent an enduring image of Snell’s All-Star experience is a bit of a shame, because most of the pitches he threw last Tuesday night were actually pretty good. In his first inning of work, he got Javy Báez to reach out on a letter-high fastball and bounce the ball back to the mound; he walked Paul Goldschmidt on a borderline 3-2 fastball; he struck out Nolan Arenado with a gorgeous curveball on the fourth pitch of the sequence; and he retired Freddie Freeman via ground out. In his second inning, he struck out Matt Kemp and Bryce Harper consecutively before losing Nick Markakis, of all people, on a 3-1 fastball that missed badly. He was pulled after that in favor of Joe Jiménez. All in all, though, not bad for a 25-year-old.

In fact, of the 39 pitches Snell threw on Tuesday, just one — the one Willson Contreras deposited into the left-field seats — was hit in the air at all. The rest were either taken or, in the cases of Báez and Freeman, hit into the ground. I want to fixate on this for a moment because I think it’s at least somewhat relevant to Snell’s breakout 2018, in which he’s finally managed to pitch ahead of his peripherals (and up to his potential) to the tune of a nifty 2.27 ERA in 119 big-league innings. After long being part of the future for Tampa Bay, Snell is now firmly part of the club’s present and has established himself — albeit tenuously, for the moment — a place among the top-25 or -30 starters in the game. But how?

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Episode 824
Travis Sawchik, past author of one book and future author (with The Ringer’s Ben Lindbergh) of another one, utilizes this appearance on FanGraphs Audio to catalog the virtues of realignment and convert the masses to his vision of the future.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 1 hr 1 min play time.)

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When I approached Ross Stripling at the All-Star Game media session, I knew that he was in the midst of a breakthrough season. The 28-year-old Los Angeles Dodgers right-hander went into the midsummer classic with a record of 8-2, a 2.08 ERA, and a 10.2 K-rate in 95-and-a-third innings.

I didn’t know that he was a nerd.

“Are you taking about things like spin rate and spin efficiency? I’m a believer in that for sure,” was Stripling’s response when I asked if he ever talks pitching analytics with anyone in the organization. “When I got called up in 2016, I thought that what made me good was my high arm angle leading to good downward angle on my fastball, so I should pitch down in the zone. But I tried that, and I was getting walloped.”

Then came a conversation that jumpstarted his career. Optioned to the minors in midseason to help limit his workload — “I was basically down there sitting on innings” — Stripling picked up a ringing cell phone and was soon standing at rapt attention. The voice on the other end belonged to Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman. Read the rest of this entry »

Whereas the first notable reliever acquisition of the trade deadline saw Cleveland receive, in Brad Hand and Adam Cimber, two pitchers who will remain with the club for future seasons, the Athletics this afternoon have performed a swap with a more traditional rent-a-player flavor, getting Jeurys Familia from the New York Mets in exchange for right-handed reliever Bobby Wahl, third baseman William Toffey, and an unspecified pile of international slot money, the 2018 version of a player-to-be-named-later.

There’s an argument to be made that, at this point, Familia may be slightly underrated among relievers. The extra couple of walks per nine that Familia picked up in a 2017 season mostly ruined by surgery to remove a blood clots from his shoulder have disappeared in 2018. Familia’s not relying on his hard, heavy sinker as much as he has in the past — especially against lefties — but given that the A’s have an infield whose four primary players, Matt Chapman, Marcus Semien, Matt Olson, and Jed Lowrie have all been above average by UZR (Lowrie a couple of runs in the negative in DRS), I’d be happy to see him go to that well a bit more often again. Even without relying on the sinker, Familia’s pitching as well as he was in 2016, which was enough to earn him an All-Star appearance and a rather odd MVP vote. Familia is in the top 20 of relievers in WAR and among the top 30 in FIP, so it’s a real upgrade to the A’s bullpen. Blake Treinen will remain the closer, which I believe is absolutely the right tack to take.

Despite Sandy Alderson’s insistence earlier this season that the Mets have no plans to go full-scale rebuild, the team’s at least been listening to offers on pretty much the entire roster. Familia doesn’t necessarily indicate a stronger organizational willingness to go that route, of course, as he was likely to be traded anyway given his contract and the team’s position in the standings.

Bobby Wahl is an interesting flier for the Mets to take. It’s hard to characterize a 26-year-old reliever as some kind of top prospect — and I won’t — but Wahl throws in the upper 90s, has an effective slider (that really feels more like a slurve to me), and can change speeds at least tolerably well. His control’s been an issue at times, though not on the Bobby Witt scale, and one of the reasons he’s not been a bit higher in the pecking order is that he has a long history of injury, losing parts of most years with varying ailments, most recently surgery for a thoracic outlet issue last season. He was fine by spring training and, as far as I know, hasn’t had any significant issues along those lines since.

Prospect-watchers tend to like Will Toffey more than Wahl, and ZiPS agrees that he’s a bit above-average defensively, placing him at about two runs per 150 games better than average based on the rough estimates ZiPS makes from play-by-play data. I’m really not sold on his bat: 23 is just too old for a player not in the middle infield or catching to not be killing the ball in the California League. While there’s obviously more time for Toffey to develop into something more than Wahl, I think the latter is more likely to actually contribute to a major-league team. The Mets’ squadron isn’t that deep in relief pitching and I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to see him in the back end of the team’s bullpen in April (or even this year!) depending on what other moves the Mets make.

It’s interesting to see Oakland positioning themselves as buyers, at least in the bargain section. To find the last time Oakland was the team trading prospects for a veteran rather than vice-versa, you actually have to go back to the 2014 Jeff Samardzija trade, which saw the team give up Addison Russell, Dan Straily, and Billy McKinney to the Cubs for Samardzija and Jason Hammel. (They picked up Jon Lester later in that month, but you’d be hard-pressed to describe Yoenis Cespedes as a prospect.) While one doesn’t really think of the A’s as front-line, top-tier contenders, the fact is they’re essentially in a two-team race for the second Wild Card with the Mariners, a team that only has a Pythagorean record of right around .500 and likely isn’t as good as their seasonal record when you talk the rest-of-season projections. Even four games back, that it’s a two-team race is quite important: I’d rather be four games behind one team than two games back and fighting with seven other teams. But the 2018 National League is highly competitive one and the American league, the bifurcated stars-and-scrubs league, a flip of the situation a few years ago.

I’m not a believer in going all-in for a Wild Card unless it comes with a significant chance of also capturing the division title, but with what Oakland is giving up, they’re not going all-in, but simply making an incremental addition to enhance their Wild Card odds. Being less risk-averse with Familia is better in this situation than rolling the dice with Wahl would be. In all, the A’s add a significant part of their present without giving up a significant part of their future.

Wins on both sides here, with both teams getting what they need from this trade. I daresay that I’d be happier with Familia at this price than Zach Britton at the price he eventually fetches.