This offseason, Bryce Harper failed to reach an agreement with 29 teams on a long term contract that will pay him more millions in any one deal than any baseball player has ever received before. Fortunately for Harper, there are 30 teams in major league baseball, and after a winter (and arguably, a life time) of waiting, the 26-year-old and the Philadelphia Phillies have agreed to a contract that will pay Harper $330 million dollars over 13 years, with a no-trade clause and no deferrals or opt-outs, per Jon Heyman and Jeff Passan. In exchange for that large guarantee, the Phillies get a star player, both in reputation and performance. His five-win 2019 projection is one of the very best in the game, and he greatly improves the Phillies’ chances of a playoff spot in a tough division.

Prior to adding Harper, the Phillies had already made several big moves, adding J.T. Realmuto, Andrew McCutchen, Jean Segura, and David Robertson. Despite those additions, the Phillies were still projected for a win total in the low 80s, and found themselves in a real fight with the Braves and Mets for second place in the division. Harper jumps into a corner outfield spot with the Phillies and improves the team by around four wins over what Nick Williams would’ve provided, vaulting the Phillies past the Mets and Braves and into a conversation with the Nationals for best team in the division and potentially the National League. Harper gets his record-breaking contract, topping Machado’s free agent deal and Giancarlo Stanton’s $325 million extension. The money is more spread out, with a roughly $25 million average annual value that could benefit the Phillies as they navigate the competitive balance tax in the future, so go ahead and start (or continue) the rumor that Mike Trout will make his way to Philly after the 2020 season.

While the wait this winter has been a long one, as free agency drags into spring training, this deal has been an even longer time coming for the former teen phenom. Ten years ago, a 16-year-old Harper was asked what he wanted from baseball, and he responded with all the bravado of a teenager, mentioning the Hall of Fame, pinstripes, and becoming “the greatest baseball player who ever lived.” As for the criticism that came with the comparisons to LeBron James and seeming hubris of a wunderkind gracing the cover of Sports Illustrated when he could barely drive, Harper embraced it, saying “I love the way people talk crap. I hear it all the time. Overrated. You suck. I’ll just do something to shut them up, like, I’ll show you.”

A decade later, he’s still on track for the Hall of Fame, though New York’s trade for Giancarlo Stanton made pinstripes unlikely, and Mike Trout’s existence all but ensures that Harper won’t even be the greatest player of his generation. That Harper might have to settle for Cooperstown speaks to the great expectations placed on the former number one overall pick and NL Rookie of the Year. As for those trying to cut him down, a decade has likely wisened Harper to the reality that nothing he can do will ever stop the naysayers or the perception that he hasn’t done enough. After putting up consecutive four-win seasons at 19 and 20 years old, Harper was rewarded by his peers by being voted the most overrated player in the game two years in a row. While multiple All-Star-level campaigns should have been enough to draw positive attention, Harper wasn’t satisfied; he got better. At 22 years of age, he put up one of the greatest single hitting seasons of all-time and won the NL MVP award unanimously. Just two seasons later, he was again considered the most overrated player in the game by his peers.

The expectations placed upon Harper by the media, his agent Scott Boras, and by Harper himself have shaped the way he is viewed by players and fans. The Commissioner opted to single Harper out for daring to think a $400 million contract was a reasonable ask. When greatness is the standard, slumps, team failures in the playoffs, injuries that have shortened seasons, and one season’s worth of poor defensive metrics garner more attention than a Hall of Fame pace. With this contract, those expectations aren’t going away, but if his track record, projections, and comps are any indication, some of the boasts of a 16-year-old might well become reality, as Harper continues to put up Hall of Fame caliber numbers.

Comparisons help frame our understanding of players, but in free agency, historical comparisons can often do a disservice to a player like Harper. Most free agents are older than he is. Andrew McCutchen became a free agent for the first time this winter at age 32. When Harper reaches McCutchen’s age, he will be in the seventh year of his contract. Comparing Harper’s contract to 10-year deals is nearly meaningless when those deals miss on multiple prime years at the beginning and instead mostly contain multiple years in the late-30s when age decimates nearly all players. Perpetuating the owner’s message that 10-year deals don’t work out is an exercise without utility.

Since Jackie Robinson joined the majors in 1947, only 13 players have put up a WAR within five of Harper’s 30.7 and within 20% of his 3957 plate appearances through their age-25 seasons, including Manny Machado. The 11 players who preceded this year’s free agent pair averaged 39 WAR from age 26 through age-35, and eight of the 11 players are in the Hall of Fame. Even ignoring Harper’s MVP season, his comps create an incredibly high floor. According to my colleague Dan Szymborski, ZiPS, which uses some fairly conservative playing time estimates due to the length of the deal, still has Harper worth more than 30 wins over the life of the contract even with the last few seasons projected to be below replacement-level.

In the past two decades, the only players at Harper’s age or younger to reach free agency with a similarly high level of play are Alex Rodriguez, whose 140 wRC+ through age-25 is identical to Harper, and Manny Machado. The latter just received his own $300 million deal, while the former signed for $252 million nearly two decades ago. Those dollar figures can also deceive in free agency, as Rodriguez’s deal is worth close to $600 million in today’s payroll dollars. Machado’s contact might be the first free agent contact to reach $300 million, but it’s the 10th MLB contract to reach that amount in today’s dollars, while 22 deals have been worth $252 million or more adjusting for MLB payroll inflation.

It’s possible that Harper’s defense has taken a more lasting turn for the worse, and will limit his value going forward. It’s possible Harper gets hurt. He might age poorly. There is inherent risk in making any decade-long-plus commitment when you only get to see a single outcome. It’s important to bake that risk and that downside into future expectations. When we factor that risk with the very good player Harper has mostly been, the great player he’s sometimes been, and the upside associated with a star’s late-20s–make no mistake, even at this high cost, there is still substantial upside–this is an objectively good deal. Adding Harper for 2019 is always going to look good. Every single team in baseball would love to have had Harper for this season. The reason those 29 other teams don’t is their unwillingness to make the substantial commitment that comes after this season. Those teams undoubtedly have their reasons for not making that outlay, but based on everything we know, the Phillies did a very good job in securing a likely Hall of Famer fairly early on his career while paying a reasonable price to do so. For both sides, it has been a long time coming.

The Rockies have made the postseason in back-to-back years for the first time in the 26-year history of the franchise. They’ve done so despite regularly playing Ian Desmond, a two-time All-Star whose decline at the plate and shift away from shortstop has rendered him one of the majors’ least valuable players over the past couple of years, both in terms of WAR and on a dollar-for-dollar basis. If the Rockies are to continue their run of success, they need better results from the 33-year-old outfielder.

Once upon a time, Desmond was a very solid everyday shortstop. A former third-round pick by the Expos (!) out of Sarasota High School in 2004, he spent 2010-15 as the Nationals’ regular shortstop, maturing into a potent hitter with a solid glove. From 2012-2014, he averaged 4.2 WAR, hitting .275/.326/.462 (116 wRC+) with an average of 23 homers and 22 steals, and playing more or less average defense (1.9 UZR) while helping the Nationals win two NL East titles. But after spurning a reported seven-year, $107 million extension following the 2013 season in favor of a two-year, $17.5 million deal to cover the remainder of his arbitration years, he flopped miserably in 2015 (83 wRC+, 1.4 WAR), his final year before free agency. Like so many other free agents, he was adversely affected by the qualifying offer system, and settled for a one-year, $8 million deal from the Rangers that required him to learn the outfield, where he had just 7.1 innings of previous major league experience.

That move actually paid off, as Desmond spent most of 2016 in center field, made the American League All-Star team on the strength of a 15-homer first half, and despite a second-half slump, finished with 3.4 WAR and a 103 wRC+. He parlayed that into a five-year, $70 million free agent deal with the Rockies, who misunderstood his skill set and decided, despite three years of evidence that his bat was more or less league average (98 wRC+), that he would be their new first baseman. After a fractured metacarpal in his left hand cost him the first month of the 2017 season and Mark Reynolds started strongly in his stead, the team reversed course and sent Desmond to left field. He made two further trips to the IL for a right calf strain, and hit just .274/.326/.375 with seven homers, a 69 wRC+, and -0.8 WAR in 95 games. Even so, the Rockies apparently decided he was a much better option at first base than 23-year-old prospect Ryan McMahon, and while Desmond ultimately dabbled at both outfield corners, his overall performance (.236/.307/.422, 81 wRC+, -0.7 WAR) was quite dreadful, his 22 homers and 88 RBI notwithstanding. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve talked a couple of times over the last few months about the current stalemate between the former California Angels and the city of Anaheim. Even after a recent short-term lease extension, the Angels have to vacate Angels Stadium at the end of the 2020 season. Given the Angels’ desire for a new, publicly-funded stadium – one which Anaheim has no desire for, given the current fractured relationship between the parties – the team has been casting about somewhat publicly for a new home. An obvious local alternative site has yet to materialize, however, leading to speculation that the team may consider Las Vegas or the new ballpark being built in Portland as a potential new home.

Recent developments, however, have taken this saga in an unexpected direction. Earlier this week, the City of Long Beach confirmed that it had reached out to the Angels to discuss the possibility of the team moving to a planned waterfront ballpark. The site in question is the former home of the Ringling Brothers circus, and is known as the “elephant lot.”

Now, the Long Beach municipal government, for its part, downplayed the extent of the talks.

“As part of our efforts to create a downtown waterfront development plan, we are exploring the feasibility of a downtown sports venue on the Convention Center parking lot,” Long Beach Mayor Robert Garcia said in a statement.

‘We are in the early stages of our due diligence and are exploring a variety of options for this property. We have approached the Angels to express our interest and discuss the possibilities of this opportunity. This is very preliminary and discussions are ongoing.”

That said, there’s reason to believe that a move to Long Beach could be a plausible outcome for the Angels, and an attractive one for the City. First, Long Beach has been discussing the possibility of offering the Angels not only a publicly funded stadium but a publicly funded headquarters as well, and reportedly has been looking for a building to purchase for that purpose. Second, the team does have history with Long Beach, and nearly ended up there instead of Anaheim.

The Angels negotiated with Long Beach in the 1960s, but the talks ended when then-owner Gene Autry rejected Long Beach City Manager John Mansell’s demand that the team be called the Long Beach Angels.

But most interestingly, Long Beach is already going to be developing the elephant lot for the 2028 Olympics, which are slated to be held in Los Angeles.

Essentially, the Long Beach waterfront will become a waterfront sports park, hosting a variety of sports and events including BMX, water polo, sailing, marathon swimming, triathlon events, and the good ol’ nail-biter that is handball. Like the Valley Sports Park being proposed at the Sepulveda Basin Recreational Park, much of Long Beach will have temporary structures that are decorated with purple-pink-yellow spectrum of the Olympic bid’s branding.

The problem for Long Beach is that the odds of an economic boon from hosting the Olympics are low, because the costs of hosting the Games are staggeringly high. The Council on Foreign Relations, for example, reported last year that cities have actually begun withdrawing bids because of the cost of building the necessary infrastructure.

Altogether, these infrastructure costs range from $5 billion to over $50 billion. Many countries justify such expenditures in the hopes that the spending will outlive the Olympic Games. For instance, some 85 percent [PDF] of the Sochi 2014 Games’ more than $50 billion budget went to building non-sports infrastructure from scratch. More than half of the Beijing 2008 budget of $45 billion went to rail, roads, and airports, while nearly a fourth went to environmental clean-up efforts.

And those infrastructure costs are often not recouped, as structures built for the Olympics can sit unused and vacant for years on end.

Also problematic are so-called white elephants, or expensive facilities that, because of their size or specialized nature, have limited post-Olympics use. These often impose costs for years to come. Sydney’s Olympic stadium costs the city $30 million a year to maintain. Beijing’s famous “Bird’s Nest” stadium cost $460 million to build and requires $10 million a year to maintain, and sits mostly unused. Almost all of the facilities built for the 2004 Athens Olympics, whose costs contributed to the Greek debt crisis, are now derelict. Gangwon, the South Korean regional government responsible for most of the 2018 Games’ infrastructure, is expected to incur an $8.5 million annual deficit due to upkeep of unused facilities.

A comprehensive study of the 2010 Salt Lake City Games found that these costs weren’t defrayed by economic growth. In fact, the study’s authors found that “the Games had a modest short-run impact on employment and no significant
impact on total employment in the long run.” More recently, an analysis of the Sochi Games predicted that “the accounting loss will probably be one of the highest on record, as average official ticket prices are generally lower than at comparable recent events while costs may be the highest in the history of the Games (estimates have been revised multiple times since 2007, to reach around US$ 50 billion but are yet to be confirmed).” And current analysis has found that the Olympics have no long-term positive impact on economic growth.

The end result is what are called “Olympic Ruins” – abandoned structures that require millions of dollars in upkeep, yet have no real purpose. The “Bird’s Nest” stadium in Beijing is among the most famous examples of this, but it’s hardly alone.

So if you’re Long Beach, about to spend a significant amount of money constructing venues and infrastructure for the Olympic Games, it makes a lot of sense to think about what would happen to those venues after the pomp and circumstance ends. In that vein, inviting the Angels to Long Beach makes a lot of sense. A modern multi-sport venue could potentially both host the Angels and the 2028 Games, and ensure that the venue doesn’t sit vacant for months or years after the closing ceremonies. That doesn’t make publicly funding the Angels’ new ballpark a good idea – the data consistently says it isn’t – but if Long Beach really is committed to hosting the 2028 Games, having the Angels occupy the Olympic arena before and after the Games may make a certain amount of economic sense, if for no other reason than to mitigate very real economic damage by keeping some part of those facilities in use after the Olympics leave town.

And if you’re the Angels, this is – for the most part – a dream come true: a publicly funded, modern stadium, close to Los Angeles and in a large market, complete with corporate headquarters. The question is whether the Angels are willing to share the park in 2028.

None of this means a deal is done, or is even likely to get done. But a marriage between the Angels and Long Beach arguably makes more sense than continuing the existing pact between Anaheim and the team, which may be fractured beyond repair after years of animosity. If nothing else, it will be fascinating to see how this unfolds.

Major league baseball is at its best when the game’s most talented players are able to showcase their skills at the sport’s highest level. Anything that serves to limit these displays is to baseball’s detriment. Of course, sometimes, fate intervenes. The game’s best players are susceptible to injury, and though major league organizations and the players themselves take great care to try to stay on the field, seasons are lost to tweaked knees and torn elbow ligaments. Some obstacles are impossible to avoid fully. But other absences are the result of careful, intentional planning. Take the example of service time manipulation.

Vladimir Guerrero, Jr. is generally considered to be the best prospect in baseball. He probably earned a callup last season when he was destroying minor league pitching. Right now, Steamer projects the younger Guerrero to put up 4.6 WAR in 545 plate appearances. That’s the 13th-best projection among position players, right behind Nolan Arenado and just ahead of Jose Altuve. He’s not a player who needs to spend more time in the minors, and yet yesterday, Blue Jays General Manager Ross Atkins said that, “I just don’t see him as a major league player. He’s 19.” To start with, Guerrero is older than Juan Soto was when the latter debuted last year, and will turn 20 before Opening Day. Atkins assertion that Guerrero isn’t ready is belied by his minor league performance and industry consensus, and it is hard to interpret the GM’s comments as anything other than an attempt to provide some public, baseball-related justification for keeping Guerrero in the minors so that he can stay under team control through 2025 instead of hitting free agency after the 2024 campaign. That’s service time manipulation.

The practice isn’t unique to Toronto. Kris Bryant was famously held down at the beginning of 2015; he won’t be a free agent until after the 2021 season instead of in 2020. Last season, Ronald Acuña didn’t start the season with the Braves. The White Sox’s Eloy Jimenez is likely to spend time cooling his heels in Charlotte despite being much better than the players ahead of him on the depth chart. Vladimir Guerrero, Jr. is ready now, and the Blue Jays will be worse for every game that Guerrero spends in Buffalo, but that is exactly where he figures to begin this season.

The incentives for teams are obvious, but they are deliberately choosing not to field their best roster, depriving the sport of its best possible product, and delaying deserving players from fulfilling life-long dreams and obtaining market contracts. The easiest solution would be for teams to simply call up players when they are capable of meaningfully contributing, but given that teams could easily do that right now and don’t, another solution is likely necessary. Others have offered solutions to this issue in the past. In 2015 in response to the Cubs’ treatment of Bryant, FanGraphs alum Mike Petriello proposed changing the a full year of service to time to 100 days on the major league roster. Erstwhile Baseball Prospectus scribe Russell Carleton proposed an age-based free agency model as a means of curtailing the practice. Sheryl Ring proposed that a player accrue a year of service if he spends the majority of the league year on the major league roster. And while a solution might not even be possible until the players and owners negotiate a new Collective Bargaining Agreement in 2021, I’d like to put forth my own proposal to eliminate service time manipulation. The problem is fairly straightforward, but as most potential solutions have unintended consequences, this one is a multi-parter.

First, a player’s first year of service time will be reached with 90 days of MLB service. This is a fairly direct solution, but unfortunately, it could also incentivize teams to keep players down even longer than they do now. While it might make clubs’ decisions more difficult if they are potential contenders, organizations might still opt to keep players in the minors, and non-contending teams might be more likely to do so than those with playoff aspirations; in a year where the Blue Jays are only projected for 77 wins, they might decide that Vlad Jr.’s defense at third needs yet more time, bad PR and a potential grievance be damned.

As a result, it will be necessary to give players half-service time for their days on the 40-man roster. If a player spends the entire season on the 40-man roster in the minors, he will reach 90 days of service time at the end of the season. To prevent shenanigans for those with MLB experience, players can earn one year of MLB service time in the minors at any point in their careers, but can only accrue one year this way. This will get some players closer to free agency without actually playing in the big leagues, and incentivizes putting a team’s best players on the active roster. After all, if a player’s free agency clock is going to start anyway, why not have him lend his talents to the big league club if he’s ready? Unfortunately, teams don’t put players on the 40-man roster until they have to, and many top prospects won’t be on the 40-man roster as a result.

To combat the phenomena described in the previous paragraph, it will be necessary to put more teeth behind the Rule 5 draft by making players draft-eligible a year earlier than they are under the current system. Players who signed their first pro contract at age 18 or younger would now be eligible after four years of minor league service instead of five, while those who did so at age 19 or older would be eligible after three years instead of the current four. This would make many more good prospects eligible for the Rule 5 draft and in order to protect them, teams would then put them on the 40-man roster.

Unfortunately, making so many more players eligible for the Rule 5 draft would create a massive roster crunch, and could result in teams being unable to get the prospects they develop to the majors. To prevent this situation, and to keep the Rule 5 draft roughly as it is, the 40-man roster would become a 50-man roster. Teams would then have no difficulty protecting eligible players, but would still be encouraged to promote their prospects as those prospects would end up with a year of service time. While teams would move more players to the majors earlier, those players accruing service time in the minors are a limited set of players: those who are close to the majors or have star potential after multiple years in the minors, hence creating the need to protect them from the Rule 5 draft. For players, it would also have the added benefit of welcoming hundreds more players into the union with better minor league wages as players who have been named to the 40-man, now 50-man, roster are paid at a higher rate thanks to union protections. As a benefit to teams, an additional option year could be added.

So to review:

• Players receive their first, and only first, year of service time after 90 days
• Players receive half-service time for days spent on 50-man roster, but not in the majors
• Rule 5 Eligibility moved up one year
• 40-man roster increased to 50 players
• Teams receive an extra option year

This proposal is admittedly complicated. The irony of this idea is that Kris Bryant, the poster-boy for service time manipulation, actually wouldn’t have been spared due to his rapid ascent to the majors, though the Cubs would have had to hold Bryant out until the All-Star Break in 2015 to get an extra year of his services. While this deal favors the interests of the players at the expense of teams and team owners, it is a much more reasonable proposal from ownerships’ perspective than cutting the service time necessary for free agency to less than six years. A union proposal that cuts free agency down to five years and deals with service time manipulation in some other way would mean less team control for those young, ready stars that this proposal is designed to protect, and might make it a non-starter come 2021. Negotiating this solution is likely to be difficult and part of a much larger deal. Teams are going to be highly resistant to any change that deprives them of cost controlled years of their best players. But the union focusing some of their attention on getting players like Vlad Jr. to the majors, as well as getting better benefits to the minor leaguers left behind, can only be to the game’s benefit. Many of baseball’s stars of tomorrow are ready today. Let’s watch them play, shall we?

Ty Buttrey has come a long way since being selected by the Red Sox in the fourth round of the 2012 draft out of a Charlotte, North Carolina high school. Following six often-tumultuous seasons in the minors, the 25-year-old turned a developmental corner last year and made his MLB debut in August. He did so with the Los Angeles Angels, who acquired him in the trade deadline deal that sent Ian Kinsler to Boston.

His future is bright. As Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel wrote in yesterday’s Angels Top Prospect list, Buttrey will likely be a significant part of the team’s bullpen this season. He logged four saves in last year’s 16-game, 16.1-inning cameo, and could very well earn the closer’s job.

His biggest strides have been mental. The power arm has always been there — Buttrey’s fastball sits in the mid-90s, and he’s reached triple digits — but as he readily admits, his mindset wasn’t where it needed to be. Rather than staying true to what came naturally, the 6-foot-6 righty too often found himself trying to fix things that weren’t necessarily broken. In short, he became a tinkerer.

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Buttrey on finding himself as a pitcher: “Starting out, I was listening to too many people, versus going out there and doing what makes me who I am, doing what got me drafted. There was a lot of noise that I wasn’t able to block out. I was trying to do so many things, just to make people happy. The next thing you know, I’d gotten really mechanical. I lost some ground on who I was as a pitcher.

“All coaches have things they preach, and some things work for players and others don’t. I’m not saying any of it was bad, or ill-intended, but if you listen to too many people, everything just kind of clouds over. You’re hearing, ‘Hey, stay taller on your back side,’ or ‘Let’s change this grip on this pitch,’ or it could be ‘Let’s get your front side at a different angle.’ Everyone is telling you something. Read the rest of this entry »

If you watch American football, you’re probably familiar with the concept of “icing the kicker.” For the uninitiated, icing the kicker is not actually the process of freezing the kicker in Carbonite, though that would probably be more fun. Instead, icing the kicker refers to the opposing team calling a time out just before the kicker is about to attempt a field goal or extra point, with the aim of disrupting the kicker’s timing or focus, and causing the kicker to miss said attempt. We saw it happen to the Chicago Bears’ Cody Parkey in the most recent NFC Wildcard game.

Why does this matter? Because a recent rule change has raised the question of whether such a tactic would work in baseball. The twenty-second pitch clock is currently being tested in spring training.

While this has been the rule in the minors for a while, it will be an adjustment for major league veterans who came up before 2015 and aren’t as familiar with it. And that’s led to the question of whether hitters should attempt the tactic of icing the pitcher. FanGraphs alum Travis Sawchik explained the reasoning thusly, while our own Dan Szymborski highlighted the loophole that makes it possible:

In other words, the new rule says that a pitcher has 20 seconds to begin his windup and come set from the time he receives the ball, provided it isn’t the first pitch of an at-bat. However, the rule doesn’t require the hitter to stay in the batter’s box during that time. So is Travis right? Could hitters “ice the pitcher” by waiting until five seconds before the pitch clock expires, thus forcing the pitcher to rush his delivery?

The answer is actually fairly complicated. The idea behind icing the pitcher is that it will make him deliver a worse pitch. It’s a mind game. But it might not be a mind game that works all that well. The evidence from other sports is mixed as to whether such a mind game would even be effective. Older research suggested a correlation between icing the kicker and missed field goals, but more recent research is all over the map. Some studies, for example, have found that icing the kicker can be effective, but only on longer distance kicks. Other studies of the effectiveness of iced kickers have found no statistically significant difference between the success rates of iced kickers and those who were allowed to proceed with their kicks without interruption. In fact, some of the research even found that the effectiveness of iced kickers was better than kickers who weren’t iced.

Now obviously, there’s a significant difference between kicking a football and throwing a baseball. So let’s look at the other sport where “icing” is a thing: basketball, where teams sometimes ice the opposing team’s free throw shooters. There, too, there’s no real evidence that icing a free throw shooter reduces the odds of making a free throw. The odds of a successful free throw are pretty much the same, whether or not the other team decides to ice the player. Interestingly, though, there is some evidence that icing can be effective when used against specific players. Pitchers are creatures of routine, and presumably could suffer from mind games just as their compatriots in other sports might. Further study would be required to verify if the practice had any baseball-specific effects. But the results from football and basketball suggest the practice’s efficacy might be limited.

So how likely are we to see icing the pitcher when the pitch clock makes its way to the majors? It’s unclear. We don’t see much – if any – pitcher icing in the minors, where the pitch clock has been in use for years. That might be the result of minors prioritizing player development over winning, but you’d think if it was at all effective, at least a few teams would have tried it.

And remember that a rule was implemented in 2015 that required hitters to keep one foot in the batter’s box between pitches, which could preempt this strategy. That is, it could preempt the strategy if the rule were enforced, which it really isn’t. As Eduardo Encina explained:

In 2015, MLB made a rule that hitters had to keep at least one foot in the batter’s box, but enforcement of the rule varied. Hitters received warnings for being slow and repeat violators were fined, but no penalty impacted the game itself.

But even if hitters followed this rule, a hitter could still ice the pitcher just by waiting to put his second foot in the batter’s box until five seconds were left on the pitch clock. Icing the pitcher as a strategy might be reduced, but it wouldn’t be eliminated.

So what could pitchers do instead? Under the proposed rule being tested in spring training, a pitcher has a few options. He could, first of all, come set and then step off the pitching rubber, thereby icing the hitter right back. Depending on how often this is used, the pitch clock could thereby actually lengthen games if we had a lot of the tit-for-tat icing contests, though I assume at some point we’d reach a homeostasis of sorts. The pitcher, if there’s a runner on base, could simply feint a throw there. Most relief pitchers, who are likely in the game in the highest-leverage spots, pitch from the stretch anyway, meaning it takes not much time at all to go from “staring in” to “coming set.” Even Dellin Betances, who is notoriously slow to the plate, doesn’t need five seconds to do that. And it’s worth noting that the pitcher might not even have to rush his delivery, even if he did have only five seconds left. The rule says that the pitcher merely has to begin his windup, not that he has to actually deliver the ball. In other words, it really doesn’t matter how fast you are to the plate. It just matters how quickly you can come to a set position, though pitchers will likely be loath to alter their mechanics in such a manner.

It’s also possible – though perhaps unlikely – that the catcher might be impacted by icing if a hitter waited fifteen seconds to get in the box. All of a sudden, the catcher has to call a pitch and get the pitcher to agree to it, in five seconds. The catcher can, of course, think about what to call when the hitter’s not in the box, but he can’t give the signs until the hitter settles in. Ordinarily, we’d probably see the catcher trot out to talk to the pitcher about it…but there’s that pesky mound visit rule. Of course, right now there’s no real way to quantify this, because it’s all theoretical, but it would be interesting to look at in a baseball-specific study of the phenomena.

All in all, icing pitchers seems unlikely to be a widely used strategy. Even if it became a Thing, it might be one of the more easily fixable Things in baseball history. One would imagine that if batters tried to press their advantage, opposing pitchers and managers would certainly have something to say about it. The desire to gain a small advantage might finally inspire greater adherence to the one-foot-in-the-batters-box. After all, all umpires would have to do to address the issue is start enforcing that rule, and icing would be essentially mitigated. In fact, it might make sense for umpires to start enforcing that rule now, along with the pitch clock. After all, the pitcher can’t delay a game all by himself.

Brett Hanewich opened a lot of eyes last year in his first full professional season. Thanks largely to a take-notice fastball, the 24-year-old right-hander logged a 2.61 ERA, and fanned 74 batters in 69 relief innings, between Low-A Burlington and Hi-A Inland Empire. The Los Angeles Angels took Hanewich in the ninth round of the 2017 draft out of Stanford University, where he graduated with an engineering degree.

Command is his biggest question mark. Hanewich issued six free passes every nine innings last season, and his walk rate as a collegian wasn’t anything to write home about either. A max-effort delivery is part of the reason, and therein lies a conundrum. Hanewich believes that his delivery — a byproduct of a summer spent with a former Cy Young Award winner — is partially responsible for his plus velocity.

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Hanewich on his heater: “I have a heavy fastball. That’s what everybody who catches me calls it. It feels like a bowling ball as opposed to, say, a Whiffle ball. I think it has to do with spin rate. My spin rate is anywhere between 2,300 and 2,400, which is above major league average.

“Another thing that makes my fastball different is my motion. I get very good extension. It’s somewhere between seven and eight feet, which is way above average. The way I throw, the ball jumps on the hitter — there’s more life to it because of the extension. The plate is sixty feet six inches from the mound, so a pitcher with a six-foot extension is throwing 54 feet six inches from where the ball is being released. There’s a thing called perceived velocity. The ball looks like it’s coming in faster than what it actually is. My perceived velocity is a plus, and the fact that I throw hard to begin with is obviously a factor as well. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Los Angeles Angels. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from our own (both Eric Longenhagen’s and Kiley McDaniel’s) observations. For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of our prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this.

All of the numbered prospects here also appear on The Board, a new feature at the site that offers sortable scouting information for every organization. That can be found here.

Other Prospects of Note

Grouped by type and listed in order of preference within each category.

Current Pitching Depth
Jeremy Beasley, RHP
Miguel Almonte, RHP
Brett Hanewich, RHP
Williams Jerez, LHP

All of these guys are between 23 and 26 years old, and could contribute to the big club in some capacity this year or next. Beasley has the best long-term prognosis as a potential fifth starter. His splitter is plus, the rest of his stuff average. Almonte debuted way back in 2015 but injuries have kept him list-eligible. He has a plus curveball and fastball velo but the injuries and command issues are worrisome, and he was unclaimed after being DFA’d fairly recently. Hanewich is a one-pitch guy but it’s a great pitch. His fastball is 97-99 with plus-plus extension but his delivery is erratic and his secondaries are inconsistent, though his change plays well off the heater when he locates it competitively. Jerez is a mid-90s lefty with a good splitter and 40 control, and might be a reliever if the command improves.

Some Younger Sleepers
Robinson Pina, RHP
Hector Yan, LHP
Julio De La Cruz, INF
Sadrac Franco, RHP

All of these prospects are about 19 years old and currently in the lower levels of the minors. Pina sits 91-94 with 7-foot-2 of extension, and has an above-average slider. He may end up as a late-inning arm but looks more like a reliever who’ll take a few years. Yan is a lefty with presently average velo and an arm action that promises more. He has feel for a curveball that could be plus at peak but he’s probably also reliever due to a lack of changeup feel. De La Cruz isn’t a good defensive infielder but he has 55 bat speed and pull-side power; he’s a 50 runner with a 55 arm. He may end up in right field, but if the glove improves, he’ll be quite interesting. Franco will flash a plus curveball and he also sits about 90-94, but he’s less projectable than the typical 19-year-old due to a smaller frame.

Old Friends and Long Shots
Michael Santos, RHP
Mayky Perez, RHP
Adrian Almeida, LHP
Oliver Ortega, LHP
Adrian De Horta, RHP

Santos was a favorite of ours when he was a Giants AZL arm. He was part of Tampa’s return for Matt Moore but had a shoulder injury and was released. When healthy, he was 91-94 with a bevy of average secondaries and a chance one of the breaking balls would be above at peak. Perez was a hard-throwing, big-bodied relief type who was released by prospect-laden San Diego. Almeida was a minor league Rule 5 pick a few years ago. He sits 93-96 and has a plus curveball but 30 control. Ortega and De Horta both throw hard, peaking in the 95-96 range. All of these arms are age 22 to 24.

System Overview

Once clearly the worst system in baseball, this group is now pretty exciting, if somewhat monochromatic. There are some clear trends at play, the first being that the club’s draft strategy has taken on a toolsier, more athletic vibe in recent years, with several high picks spent on splashy high schoolers like Adell, Adams, and English. The club has also targeted versatile defenders with good plate discipline on the pro side, yielding Rengio and Soto, while doing everything it can to hoard pitching depth behind what has been a snake-bitten big league staff, even at the expense of some interesting young arms like Elvin Rodriguez, who would have fairly prominent placement in the 40 FV tier on this list had he not be dealt for Ian Kinsler (though Buttrey would rank higher). The Angels clearly have a type or two now, but they’re types we like.

The player development arm of the org is one of the more aggressive groups in the league, and is unabashed about mechanical tinkering. Trent Deveaux’s multitude of swings look bad because he has struggled so mightily, but there have been more prospects improved by the changes than there have been players who have gone backwards. Taylor Ward graduated off the list, but he made positive alterations before his call-up, and the changes made by Walsh, Thaiss, and Hermosillo have all been clear improvements, while the jury is still out on Jahmai Jones’ tweaks. Brandon Marsh may show a dramatic shift this year as the gap between his BP raw power and in-game approach to contact is quite, quite vast.

Another trend on this list: lots of pitchers throwing harder. Canning throws harder now than he did in college, Suarez and Madero had velo spikes last year, and Soriano’s uptick, while predictable because of his build, came sooner than expected. The scouting staff has given what appears to be a good player dev group lots of malleable athletes to work with and, so far, results have been positive even though most of the guys we’re excited about haven’t done anything in the big leagues yet.

For a player whom the Yankees acquired from the Twins in exchange for a backup catcher who hasn’t posted a positive WAR since the deal, Aaron Hicks was already quite a steal. Now the team has inked the 29-year-old switch-hitting center fielder to a very club-friendly seven-year, $70 million extension. It’s the second extension they’ve handed out this month, after Luis Severino’s four-year, $40 million deal, and likely won’t be the last, as the team is reportedly working on extensions for Dellin Betances and Didi Gregorius as well

The Severino extension has the same average annual value as Hicks’, but the two situations are rather different. Severino’s deal buys out just one year of potential free agency for a just-turned-25-year-old Super Two pitcher. While his career has had its ups and downs — including a detour to the minors in 2016 after a tantalizing 2015 debut, as well as a two-month slump last year that featured a 6.83 ERA, a 4.99 FIP, and concerns about pitch-tipping that carried into the postseason — we’re still talking about a pitcher who ranked fifth in the majors in WAR over the past two seasons while making a pair of All-Star teams and receiving Cy Young votes in both years, with a third-place finish in 2017. He may well win the award before his new contract lapses.

Hicks, who could have become a free agent after this season, isn’t nearly as accomplished, in that he’s never made an All-Star team, and has a single 10th-place AL MVP vote to his name. Indeed, he’s something of a late bloomer, having taken until his age-28 season (last year) to qualify for a batting title, though it’s not as though his talent was unexpected. The 14th pick of the 2008 draft out of Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach, California, he made four appearances on Baseball America’s Top 100 Prospects lists from 2009-2013, ranking as high as no. 19 (2010). While I could spend a thousand words explaining how the Twins botched his development, Baseball Prospectus editor-in-chief Aaron Gleeman, who has covered the team since the days when blogs were a novelty, offered a succinct summary in less than 280 characters:

In 928 plate appearances spread from 2013-2015, Hicks hit just .225/.306/.349 for an 81 wRC+, though above-average (and occasionally spectacular) defense pushed his WAR in that span to 2.5. But with top prospect Byron Buxton waiting to be similarly screwed up in the wings, Ryan sold very low on Hicks, trading him straight up for catcher John Ryan Murphy, a former second-round pick who through his age-24 season had shown promise on both sides of the ball, if not at a level that lands one on the upper reaches of prospect lists. Long story short, Ryan started his Twins career going 3-for-40 as a backup behind Kurt Suzuki, and never really had a chance in the organization before being dealt to the Diamondbacks in July 2017.

Though Yankees general manager Brian Cashman loved his athleticism, Hicks did not pan out immediately. Amid three trips to the injured list (once for each hamstring, and once for his right shoulder), he hit just .217/.281/.336 (64 wRC+, -0.1 WAR) in 361 PA as a fourth outfielder behind Brett Gardner, Jacoby Ellsbury, and Carlos Beltran in 2016, a step backwards from his modest but solid 2015 (96 wRC+, 2.0 WAR). He finally broke out in 2017 (.266/.372/.475, 15 homers, 10 SB, 3.3 WAR) despite oblique strains on both sides that limited him to 88 games. An intercostal strain sidelined him early in 2018, but he recovered to put together his best season yet, batting .248/.366/.467 with 27 homers, 11 steals, a 127 wRC+ and 4.9 WAR, the Yankee lineup’s second-highest WAR total behind Aaron Judge (5.0).

Hicks’ extension will pay him $10.5 million per year from 2020-2023, then $9.5 million in 2024-2025, with a $12.5 million club option and a $1 million buyout for 2026, his age-36 season. The deal incorporates the $6 million salary he and the Yankees had already hammered out for this year, sweetening the pot with a $2 million signing bonus.

That doesn’t change things all that much, but it makes it easier for apples-to-apples comparisons with the last two free agent center fielders to ink big contracts, namely Lorenzo Cain (five years, $80 million from the Brewers last winter) and A.J. Pollock (four years, $55 million from the Dodgers in January). Both were a bit older and more accomplished when they reached free agency. Cain hit the market after his age-31 season, having already made an All-Star team, helped the Royals to back-to-back pennants (with a 2014 ALCS MVP award, a 2015 ALCS-winning mad dash home, and a championship in that same season), and reeled off four straight seasons of above-average production totaling 17.0 WAR. Pollock reached free agency after his age-30 season, having made one All-Star team and won one Gold Glove. Those were both back in his monster 6.8-WAR 2015 season; since then, a variety of injuries has limited him to 237 games and 5.2 WAR.

Pollock’s deal included all kinds of bells and whistles: a $12 million signing bonus; an opt-out after 2021, with a potential $5 million buyout based upon his PA totals; a $10 million player option — which also increases based upon his PA totals as well as placement in MVP voting — with a $5 million buyout; a $1.5 million assignment bonus if he’s traded; and (probably) an extra popsicle out of the freezer every weekend night. Leaving all of that aside to focus on the guaranteed money, here’s a side-by-side comparison with Hicks, using ZiPS projections supplied by Dan Szymborski:

WAR-wise, the two players are just over half a win apart when it comes to their 31-to-35 projections; for that period, Hicks is guaranteed $50.5 million to Pollock’s $55 million, though the latter could reach $65 million if he maxes out his incentives with 600 PA in 2022 (a level he reached only in 2015), and go even higher if he finishes in the top 10 of the MVP voting in any of those four years (something he’s never done). Even before factoring inflation, Hicks is taking a discount relative to that guaranteed money, but again, he’s less accomplished in the traditional sense, even if he’s been the more valuable one over the past two or three seasons.

As with Severino’s extension (and most deals struck prior to a player reaching free agency), there’s a decent chance that Hicks has sold himself short. Then again, the past two winters’ trips through free agency haven’t been much fun for many players, and there’s also a chance Hicks might not merit a starting job by the middle of this deal, and thus be the kind of fourth outfielder who only a big-spending team like the Yankees — who are paying Gardner $7.5 million for a year in which he might wind up in that role, and have paid Ellsbury $42 million for the past two seasons, one of them a complete washout — can afford. If Mike Trout absolutely demands to wear pinstripes after the 2020 season, while Judge and Giancarlo Stanton are under contract, Hicks’ salary won’t be a huge impediment.

Seventy million dollars of guaranteed money isn’t nothing. For a player whose major league career seemed to take forever to get off the ground, and who, after one more good season before hitting the market, might at best have netted the same dollar amount but compressed into a shorter time period (say, five years and $70 million as Cain Lite) and then been forced to scramble for scraps given the way the market is treating outfielders in their mid-30s, it’s a solid payday. If this is Hicks’ one bite of the (Big) Apple, he did all right.

Last year, we discussed the lawsuit that former Yankees top prospect and current Athletics outfielder Dustin Fowler filed against the White Sox for the injury he suffered after colliding with a concealed electrical box while chasing a fly ball at what was then called U.S. Cellular Field (a vastly superior name to Guaranteed Rate Field). When last we checked in, the White Sox and the Illinois Sports Facilities Authority (the two defendants in the case) had removed the case to federal court and were trying to use something called labor law preemption to argue that the case should be dismissed.

The White Sox invoked the Labor Management Relations Act (“LMRA”), a federal law Section 301 of which states that federal courts, and federal law, govern all employment disputes where the rights of the parties have been collectively bargained. The team argued that “Plaintiff . . . was injured as a result of an incident that took place only because he was employed as a Major League Baseball Player pursuant to a highly regulated contractual employment relationship that specified all of the rights and duties of the respective parties – including with respect to Players health and safety.” Here, the White Sox pointed to Article XIII of the CBA, which governs players’ safety and health, and included a committee set up to assess potential player hazards.

Fowler, of course, disagreed, and noted the limitations of the Committee created by Article XIII.

At the time, I noted that while the issue wasn’t clear cut, I thought Fowler had the better argument. Last July, Judge Gary Feinerman agreed with Fowler, sending the case back to state court for adjudication of Fowler’s state law claims in a blistering opinion.

A state law claim is not completely preempted where a defendant contending that the claim requires interpretation of a CBA advances a frivolous or insubstantial reading of the agreement; rather, preemption applies only where the defendant’s interpretation of the CBA is arguable or plausible. . . .But the White Sox’s reading of Article XIII [of the CBA] is not plausible.  No club could have reasonably believed, based on the text of Article XIII, that the Committee would be able to identify safety risks so comprehensively and effectively that, as long as the Committee raised no objections, the club could simply assume that nothing in its premises posed an unreasonable risk to players.

In other words, Feinerman concluded that the team’s argument was implausible on its face, because it provided a means for teams to ignore real hazards to players simply by deferring to the Committee’s judgment. To Feinerman, that argument represented an absurd interpretation of the CBA – not to mention one that would have significant negative public policy ramifications.

Article XIII leaves no doubt that the clubs were in a vastly better position than the Committee to assess the safety of their own premises.  The clubs did not give up any control over their premises to the Committee, nor did they even grant it any consistent supervisory role.  . . . When the Committee does address a safety concern, its recommendations are only advisory, leaving final authority over the premises with the clubs.  It would have been wholly unreasonable for any club to delegate its responsibility to ensure the safety of its playing field to the intermittent and weak Committee described in Article XIII.

That language – calling the Committee weak – was an intentional swipe at Major League Baseball. Judge Feinerman was, in essence, finding that Fowler was entitled to a remedy in tort law because the CBA didn’t provide an appropriate remedy, either through the committee or through arbitration.

Feinerman also emphasized that the electrical box being a hidden hazard made the team’s argument implausible because it improperly placed the burden on the player rather than on the team. It was not the job of the player, held Feinerman, to alert teams to hazards on the playing field.

That conclusion applies with particular force to a small, hidden hazard like the metal box that injured Fowler.  Because the box was hidden from players’ view … no player could have realized the risk it posed and attempted to convene the Committee to address the problem.  And it strains credulity to suppose (and the White Sox do not assert) that the Committee would examine such granular details of individual ballparks in its occasional meetings “for purposes of review and planning.”  It follows that the White Sox’s interpretation of Article XIII is not plausible, that the Basic Agreement therefore will not affect the White Sox’s duty of care to Fowler, and therefore that Fowler’s claims are not completely preempted under Section 301.

Feinerman concluded by calling Fowler’s claims “true state law claims,” and remanded the case to the Circuit Court of Cook County, Illinois, for a disposition on the merits; it remains pending there before Judge Kathy Flanagan.

I think Feinerman got it right here, even if, legally speaking, I thought this was a closer call than he did. That said, there’s no doubt that this case, for a lot of reasons, represents a possible sea change in how tort law will deal with these claims moving forward. Last June, in the context of Reggie Bush’s $12.5 million verdict against the Rams, I noted that victories like that were exceedingly unusual.

Remember that it’s really hard — and therefore really rare — for a professional athlete to sue for an injury sustained on the field. Verdicts like the one in Bush’s case, for an injury sustained in game activity and without the intentional act of another, are incredibly rare in the modern law.

One of the main reasons for that is the issue of labor law preemption, which was raised in Bush’s case. And yet, in two major cases in consecutive years, a court has ruled that doctrine inapplicable in favor of applying state law tort claims. Feinerman’s ruling is a first for professional baseball, and carries the implication that teams are, in fact, liable in tort for injuries suffered by players as the result of on-field hazards. In fact, Feinerman’s decision could be read to require teams to adhere to the same duty of care towards athletes as they would towards any other person.

Nevertheless, Feinerman’s decision did contain some interesting limitations. First, Feinerman made a distinction between a duty owed by a team to its own players and a duty owed by a team to visiting players. While Feinerman didn’t explicitly say that a team doesn’t owe a state law duty of care to its own players, or that CBA preemption would apply in those circumstances, he nonetheless did state that a team’s duty to players not its own differs. On one hand, that makes a certain degree of sense, both from an employment law perspective (suing your employer is different than suing someone else’s employer) and a tort perspective (in theory, you will know your own home ballpark better than a visiting player will).

Second, Feinerman held that Fowler’s injury was reasonably foreseeable assuming all facts in the complaint to be true. That’s significant, because it essentially states that as a matter of law, hazards on a baseball field are reasonably foreseeable to cause injury where not expressly addressed by the CBA. That holding necessarily means that a team that camouflages a sprinkler, or an electrical box, or even an unpadded wall, could face liability if a player is injured coming into contact with it.

That doesn’t mean Fowler will necessarily win his case. The team may well have state law tort defenses, or Fowler’s legal team could prove unable to prove his case at trial for several different reasons. That said, we now have case law that the courthouse doors aren’t closed to a player who suffers an on-field injury during the ordinary course of a baseball game. And that’s a really significant development.