The Cardinals are trying to trade for Giancarlo Stanton. They’ve made no secret of their off-season plan to consolidate some of their young talent into a trade for an impact hitter, and Stanton seems to be Plan A. But they aren’t the only team trying to trade for the reigning NL MVP, and reports have suggested the Giants might be the most aggressive bidder so far. Additionally, Stanton might have some preference for playing on the west coast, and since he has a full no-trade clause, Stanton could just veto a trade to STL if he thought he had some chance of going to SF instead.

So the Cardinals might want Giancarlo Stanton and even line up best with the Marlins in a trade, but that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen. And thus, the Cardinals should have some kind of Plan B. So let me suggest that, while the Blue Jays continue to say they aren’t trading their star player, the Cardinals should be pestering Mark Shapiro and Ross Atkins about making a deal for Josh Donaldson.

Because a Donaldson-to-STL trade might make even more sense than a Stanton trade.

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We love debating which baseball players deserve to be designated as the “best of all time.” In the last year alone, I personally have written about Larry Walker‘s case to be regarded as one of them, as well as Andruw Jones’s. Over at The Hardball Times, we publish a piece that explores this notion seemingly every month, sometimes more. Two years ago, we devoted a whole week to the matter. In almost every case, these debates revolve around a player’s credentials for induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, N.Y. But now, more than ever, the institution is unworthy of that authority.

I’m not suggesting everyone should cease attempting to identify baseball’s top players or most influential figures. History is important. I just don’t think that the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum should be the focus of this attention or serve as the arbiter of these decisions. One thing that struck me repeatedly while reading Jay Jaffe’s book, The Cooperstown Casebook, earlier this year is just how relentlessly the Hall of Fame has failed at the task of electing the best players to its institution.

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Last week at the site, Craig Edwards attempted to estimate each club’s free-agent spending power for the offseason. The task is a difficult one. Because major-league clubs aren’t tax-funded public institutions, one can’t simply file a Freedom of Information Act request to view each team’s finances. It’s necessary, therefore, to use a club’s past payroll figures as a guide to the future.

One of the most interesting results from Edwards’ exercise concerns the Phillies. By Edwards’ methodology, Philadelphia has about $70 million available to spend this offseason, trailing only the rebuilding Tigers in that regard. They might even have more potential spending power than that: despite residing in one of the largest markets in the country, the Phillies have only an estimated $37 million in projected salary after arbitration.

The Phillies, like a host of teams, have been connected to Giancarlo Stanton this offseason. That makes some sense, as they could easily take on Stanton’s contract. The Phillies could add Stanton and still have another $40-plus million to add additional help and try and accelerate their return to competitiveness.

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The Cincinnati Reds didn’t pitch well in 2017. Their 5.17 team ERA was the worst in the National League, as was their 5.08 FIP. They also gave up more runs and issued more free passes than any senior circuit staff. A plethora of arms contributed to those woeful results. In all, 31 hurlers took the mound for the Central Division cellar dwellers.

Dick Williams sees a light at the end of the tunnel. When I talked to the Reds GM earlier this month, he sounded anything but pessimistic about his club’s pitching future.

“We’ve built up our roster to a young exciting group,” said Williams. “One thing I’m really pleased with is the progress we’ve seen with our young pitching. People were a little concerned about their pace of development this year, but we had to fill a lot of innings with pitchers we weren’t necessarily expecting to be in the big leagues.”

Williams went on to explain that they learned of Homer Bailey’s elbow maladies shortly before spring training, and that Anthony Desclafani joined him on the shelf not long thereafter. A third member of the projected starting rotation, Brandon Finnegan, was subsequently injured in April. As a result, “the Sal Romanos and Rookie Davises and Amir Garretts were making big league starts early in the season, which wasn’t part of their original development plans.” Read the rest of this entry »

The pitch clock is coming. It’s coming to the major leagues, and it is inevitable. It’s existed in the minors for a handful of years, and the whole idea there was that it was a trial. A test, before implementation on the biggest stage. From the sounds of things, you can expect to see pitchers — and hitters! — operating with a clock as soon as 2018. Whether you love it or hate it, don’t blame me. I’m just the messenger. And actually, no, Buster Olney is the messenger. I’m just the messenger’s messenger. An excerpt from his report:

But the foundation of the changes to come in 2018 will be in the implementation of a pitch clock, sources say, and MLB is intent on using the same limit used in the minor leagues the past three seasons — 20 seconds between pitches when there are no runners on base.
[…]
Twenty seconds, with pitchers required to begin their motion within 20 seconds of the previous pitch.

There are two key points in there:

1. 20 seconds
2. when there are no runners on base

If you check out our leaderboards, you’ll see that the league-average pace this past season was a hair over 24 seconds. Pace is the average time between pitches — cutting out pick-offs and mound visits and whatnot — and 24 is greater than 20. Now, the writing suggests pitchers would just have to begin throwing at 20 seconds, so maybe it would work out to be more like a 21- or 22-second cap. Your takeaway might be that a great number of pitchers will be affected. To say nothing of the hitters who have developed their own particular time-wasting quirks.

But the runners-on-base part is significant. There’s a truth you might feel, without truly knowing: Pitchers work faster when the bases are empty.

Pedro Baez is probably the current face of slow pitchers. He did average the slowest pace in all of baseball last season, and so it’s deserved. I want to show you something, with help from Baseball Savant. Here are all of Baez’s career games. I’m not talented enough to just pull all of Baez’s actual pace data when there have and haven’t been runners, but I can show you all his individual game paces, along with the rates of pitches thrown in those games with runners on. It works! The relationship is clear.

As Baez has thrown more and more pitches with runners on, he’s worked slower and slower. He’s made 24 career appearances in which he threw every pitch with a runner on, and his average pace in those games is 36.6 seconds. He’s made 62 career appearances in which he threw every pitch with no runner on, and his average pace in those games is 27.6 seconds. Still slow! Still needs to be sped up. But that’s a nine-second difference. Baez has responded to the situation, and he isn’t alone.

I found a post from January of 2015, written, coincidentally enough, by Sean Dolinar. He found that, with the bases empty, pitchers tended to deliver pitches within roughly 20 seconds. With runners on, however, they slowed down substantially, by eight, nine, or ten seconds. And it makes sense; those runners might be threats to advance, and the situations are more important, more threatening. Pitchers have to be more careful, and their attention is divided.

So while a pitch clock would make a real difference in the majors, it wouldn’t be as dramatic as you might be inclined to think, if it’s only active when the bases are empty. Certain pitchers would be forced to speed up, pitchers like Baez and dozens of others, but most pitchers would be able to work more or less like normal. Which, I think, is how the pitch clock has been received in the minors — most players have said they’ve hardly even noticed it. The real slow-downs take place when there’s a runner or two or three, and it doesn’t look like those situations are being targeted. Not as Olney wrote his report.

Maybe that just means this can be taken further down the road. And we can’t reach any certain conclusions when we don’t yet have an actual rule, with actual, explicit details. This is for baseball to sort out in the coming months. But it sounds like we’re about to have a pitch clock. And it sounds like it should have only a modest effect. Maybe that’s a good thing and maybe that’s a bad thing, but it’s a thing, and it’s for us and everyone else to get used to.

Shohei Ohtani does not yet belong to a major-league team. No one really knows where he’s going to go, and he hasn’t even been actually posted. There are still some remaining hurdles to jump, but they’re only getting smaller and smaller. Ohtani will play in the majors in 2018. The odds of that are effectively 100%. It’s felt that way for a while, but as of later Tuesday, it’s almost official.

You probably read about how the players union wasn’t thrilled with the various proposed posting agreements between MLB and Nippon Professional Baseball. The union has its own interests, and it also had a place at the table, so it held out until it was satisfied. An eventual agreement nevertheless felt inevitable, and you can read about the terms right here. All that’s left is MLB owner approval, which will come on December 1. Ohtani will then be free to be posted. Teams will have about three weeks to negotiate. Of course, those negotiations will involve comically insufficient sums of money, but Ohtani is okay with that. This is what he’s chosen to do. It looks like he’ll have a contract by Christmas.

From the union’s perspective, it’s happy that this won’t drag out too long. The market won’t be paralyzed all winter. But no one’s reading this because they care about the union. It’s all about Ohtani, and about the team that he selects. We know with virtual certainty that he’s coming. He’ll report to a big-league camp in the middle of February. No one knows how good he’ll actually be, but when he chooses a team, baseball is going to be different. Ohtani can change an entire league’s outlook.

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With the Marlins looking to cut payroll, Giancarlo Stanton seems likely to be traded at some point this winter. Stanton not only takes up a lot of that payroll, but his talents are desirable to other teams. The grounds for a trade are obvious. At the same time, the 10 years and $295 million remaining on his contract present a roadblock to acquiring him. So does his no-trade clause, which he could use to block a trade to one of the clubs willing to take on his salary.

Another concern is Stanton’s opt-out clause. While less of an obstacle to the eventual completion of a deal, it’s a factor. By the terms of the opt-out, Stanton will have the choice, in three years, either to become a free agent, or exercise a player option for seven years and $218 million. In late June, when Stanton had a 131 wRC+ and looked to be on pace for “only” a four-win season, the opt-out didn’t seem to matter too much; the probability that he’d exercise it seemed pretty low. A monster second half and MVP Award later, though, and that opt-out is back in play, and it negatively affects Stanton’s value.

Without revisiting whether player opt-outs benefit a team (Dave Cameron wrote about it over the course of multiple posts two years ago with the last one here), let’s just dig into the numbers a bit and see what they say. Last week, Eno Sarris advocated for trading for Stanton, noting that if Stanton ages normally, there’s a big surplus on the contract. Sarris also noted that, even if Stanton ages poorly, the contract would remain pretty close to the current market rate.

Here’s an estimate of Stanton’s value were he to age normally, starting with $9 million a win. I’ve used Steamer’s win projection (5.3 WAR) for Stanton’s 2018 season.

As structured, the deal looks pretty good for the team, with a surplus of over $100 million. Except for one thing, though: this version of reality isn’t ever likely to occur. In three years, Stanton will be just one year older than J.D. Martinez is right now. If he puts up three five-win seasons in a row — better than what Martinez just did in one season — his value on the free-agent market is going to exceed the $218 million he is owed. In that case, Stanton would almost certainly opt out, cutting the surplus by 30%.

The above case represents just one scenario, though. To play this out, let’s consider a bunch more and see where it leads. For the purposes of this exercise, let’s assume the 5.3 WAR figure is a good estimate of Stanton’s present talent. Note that the higher estimate you put on his talents, the more likely Stanton is to opt out. If you put a six-win talent estimate on Stanton and give him 18 WAR over the next three seasons, that place among the greats. The only primary right fielders to do better than that from 28 to 30 since 1947 are Hank Aaron, Stan Musial, and Frank Robinson. Even in that scenario, the surplus is under $100 million. There’s a limit on how much high-end value Stanton can provide because of that opt-out.

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Not every team approaches the offseason looking to get better in the same way. That much is obvious: budget alone can dictate much of a club’s activity on the free-agent market. A little bit less obvious, though, is how the present quality of a team’s roster can affect the players they pursue. Teams that reside on a certain part of the win curve, for example, need that next win more than teams on other parts. That can inform a team’s decisions in the offseason.

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Yesterday, we covered my five favorite buys in this free-agent class relative to their expected contracts. Today, we’re doing the other side of the coin, looking at five players I wouldn’t have any interest in signing at the prices they’re likely to command this winter.

This exercise is a little easier than finding bargains. Last year, I highlighted Mark Trumbo, Kendrys Morales, Mark Melancon, Edwin Encarnacion, and Matt Wieters as the players to avoid. Those five combined for a grand total of +0.8 WAR in 2017 despite Encarnacion accounting for +2.5 WAR all by himself — and Encarnacion notably signed for significantly less than was expected. If we knew he was going to get three years, $60 million, he wouldn’t have made the landmine list.

While the game has gotten significantly better about allocating resources to legitimately good players, there are still some cases where blindspots exist, and these guys were the representation of those overvaluations last year.

Who are the five guys who you probably don’t want to win a bidding war for this year? Let’s find out.

Of the 75 pitchers who threw 150-plus innings in 2017, 74 of them posted lower contact rates than Andrew Cashner. Cashner just entirely stopped missing bats last year, focusing on trying to generate weak contact instead. It sort of worked, as he got his fly-ball exit velocity down from 94.0 mph in 2016 to 91.2 mph last year, but despite getting weaker fly balls, the total lack of strikeouts just isn’t worth it.

Unless you think Cashner can sustain a .213 BABIP with men on base and a .171 BABIP with runners in scoring position — he can’t, by the way — he’s just going to give up a lot more runs even with weaker contact. In this day and age, a 12% strikeout rate just doesn’t cut it, especially for a guy who has a worse-than-average walk rate.

Ten years ago, Cashner would have turned his 3.40 ERA into a nice contract, but the league has stopped paying for ERA like it used to, and Cashner’s lack of strikeouts is going to keep interest somewhat contained. Even still, any multi-year commitment could look quite silly by mid-season if hitters keep making contact at the rate they did against Cashner last year. And there’s not even the floor of a guy who eats innings, since Cashner has a long history of health problems. At anything more than one year, I’d expect Cashner to be a disappointment for his signing club.

At the contract for which I’ve forecast him — two years, $20 million — Nunez would probably be a non-offensive signing, a slightly overpaid utility guy who can at least provide some versatility. But if the crowd is right and he gets 3/$33M, the winning bidder is likely to wonder what they were thinking.

While he’s been worth north of +2 WAR each of the last two seasons, no player had a larger gap between his results and his expected outcomes based on Statcast data last year. His .275 xwOBA ranked 138th out of 143 hitters with at least 450 plate appearances in 2017, ahead of five guys who are only in the lineup because of their speed or defense.

Nunez isn’t slow, but he’s not an elite runner, and his defense has generally graded out poorly everywhere. If his offensive results in 2018 look more like his expected results in 2017, Nunez will quickly play himself out of a job in the first year of his contract. His versatility and stolen-base ability make him a decent bench guy, but he’s one or two lost steps away from replacement level. This isn’t the guy you want to sign into his mid-30s.

Lynn’s last three seasons — which occurred over the last four years, since he was sidelined in 2016 after Tommy John surgery — have established him as one of the game’s foremost FIP-beaters. His 3.06 ERA is 80 points better than his 3.86 FIP during that stretch, and 109 points better than his 4.15 xFIP. Both represent the largest gaps in baseball among starters with 500 or more innings. After three straight years of posting excellent ERAs with mediocre peripherals, it might be tempting to think that Lynn is one of the guys for whom the ERA estimators just don’t work.

Don’t buy it, though. More complicated metrics like DRA don’t see anything here to support Lynn as a true-talent frontline starter. Statcast puts his xwOBA at .310, placing him in the same tier of NL starters as Tanner Roark, Taijuan Walker, and Trevor Williams. These are useful pitchers, to be sure, and Lynn has his strengths, but he’s a fastball-heavy right-hander who has stopped getting chases out of the zone and is still awful against left-handed hitters.

The NL Central happens to be pretty right-handed offensively, so Lynn faced a proportional mix of RHBs and LHBs last year, but if Lynn ends up in a division where managers can force him to regularly have to get left-handers out, his numbers could suffer.

I wouldn’t mind him at back-end-starter prices, something like 3/$36M, but Derrick Goold speculated that he’s looking for Jordan Zimmermann money and expects to get over $100 million. I don’t think he gets anywhere near that, but the crowd is projecting around $55-$60 million and others have guessed as high as $75 million. If he gets anywhere near those prices, I want no part of his deal, especially with a TJ surgery on the resume. Lynn is a solid pitcher whom most teams could use in their rotation, but if he wants to get paid like a frontline guy, run away.

If you look at Holland’s monthly splits, you can talk yourself into his results being dragged down by just one lousy month. In August, he allowed a .455 wOBA and ran a 13.50 ERA; in every other month, he ran a wOBA allowed under .300 and an ERA under 2.25. For five of the six months, he got outs and saves, at times looking like the dominant relief ace he was in Kansas City.

But the reality is that several of Holland’s good months were high-wire save acts, and this version of Holland only really has one trick that works: throw a slider in the dirt and hope the batter chases it. It’s a good slider, most of the time, and gets enough strikeouts for him to get by, but Holland no longer misses bats in the zone like he used to. If hitters can manage to take his slider, he doesn’t have much else with which to go after them.

A slider-heavy 32-year-old with a recent history of arm problems isn’t someone to whom I want to give a big contract, but he’ll probably get a nice deal based on his track record and the 41 saves he racked up in Coors last year. And maybe he’ll trust his fastball more when he’s not pitching in Colorado. It wouldn’t surprise me much if Holland were just fine again in 2018.

But Holland walked away from a $15 million player option for 2018 because he wants that kind of salary in a long-term deal, and you can imagine his representatives will be comparing him to Mark Melancon while asking for similar money. I doubt he gets the fourth year, but even at three years, there’s too much risk here for me. I want my highly paid relief aces to have a plan of attack besides throwing breaking balls out of the zone.

It isn’t that hard to see why scouts like Eric Hosmer. He makes contact, hits the ball hard, and runs much better than most guys who play the position. And his small-market team reached the World Series two years in a row, so it’s easy to draw up a narrative about how he has magic winning beans or something.

But Hosmer is also now 28 years old, has over 4,000 plate appearances in the big leagues, and has a career wRC+ of 111. For the sake of comparison, here are other players who have the same adjusted batting line since 2011, Hosmer’s rookie year: Matt Adams, Todd Frazier, David Freese, Chase Headley, Howie Kendrick, and Josh Reddick. None of those guys are seen as franchise superstars. For the bulk of Hosmer’s career, he’s been a slightly above-average hitter while playing a position where hitting is the primary job description.

Using career numbers is a bit unfair to Hosmer, since aggregating everything puts equal weight on his terrible 2012 season as his excellent 2017 season, and obviously those two shouldn’t be counted as equals. But even just looking at the last three seasons, his 120 wRC+ ties him with Chris Davis. It puts him one point ahead of Lucas Duda, and two points ahead of Carlos Santana, whose contract he’s expected to dwarf.

Hosmer’s big 2017 offensive season was mostly driven by a .351 BABIP, and Statcast doesn’t support a batted-ball profile that can sustain those results. He still hits the ball on the ground far too often to really tap into his power, and while maybe another organization can tweak the swing enough to get more production, they’ll have to pay like he’s already made that adjustment in order to have the chance to try.

If Hosmer were really an elite defensive first baseman, that would be one thing. But the numbers suggest otherwise. Whatever you think of UZR and DRS, a lot of their problems tend to get washed away once a player has played 9,000 innings in the field, as Hosmer has, and his career totals put him at -29 UZR and -21 DRS. Even if you think those figures are selling him short, you’re still looking at a conclusion that he’s maybe a slightly above-average defender even if the systems are wildly underrating him. It’s almost impossible to believe that he’s really a great defender who has just been incorrectly rated as a poor one for seven straight years.

None of this makes Hosmer a bad player. Steamer projects him for +2.7 WAR in 2018, and you can round that up to +3 pretty easily if you think that UZR is low on his fielding abilities. He’s an above-average big leaguer in the prime of his career, coming off the best season of his career, so Hosmer should get a nice contract this winter.

But a nice contract for this kind of skillset would be $80 or $90 million. I guessed that he’s actually going to get $125 million. Jon Heyman projected $160 million. At those kinds of prices, Hosmer could very easily become one of the most overpaid players in baseball, especially if he continues to just pound balls into the ground.

There’s enough youth and upside here that a team can rationally justify $20 million a year for four years, but once they pass either of those marks, they’d very likely be better off just signing one of the cheaper first baseman and throwing the difference at another quality free agent. Especially if the price gets up to $150 million; for that kind of money, you might be able to sign both Carlos Santana and Lorenzo Cain, and it’s not clear that Hosmer is definitively better than either one of those two, much less both of them.