Back on the other side of the weekend, word got out the Rockies were re-signing Carlos Gonzalez for a year and $8 million. In one way, it’s great news, because now Gonzalez has a job. Furthermore, Nolan Arenado said bringing Gonzalez back “would be the greatest thing ever.” So, from the Rockies’ standpoint, and also from Gonzalez’s standpoint, it’s terrific to preserve some familiarity. In another way, this is disappointing news. It’s disappointing to Gonzalez, because a year ago, he turned down what would’ve been a lucrative three-year extension. And it’s disappointing to some fans, who now wonder what to make of the Rockies’ outfield picture. There are some younger players who are knocking on the door.

When I chatted last Friday, I received several inquiries related to Raimel Tapia, David Dahl, and Mike Tauchman. There’s an argument to be made that all of them are major-league ready. Gonzalez now gets in the way, because he’s not re-signing to platoon, or to sit on the bench. Gonzalez is going to play, and that playing time comes at the expense of other Rockies. What I would say is not to worry too much. Gonzalez now occupies a spot in a nine-man lineup, but I see this more as helping the depth. There’s value in having moving pieces.

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Because his high school is only about 40 minutes away via the 101 Loop in Arizona, I am going to see an awful lot of LHP Matthew Liberatore this spring. At the second of two fairly disparate starts from the senior, several teams picking in the top ten had a little extra heat in attendance to observe him. Indeed, after Liberatore sat 93-97 in his first start, there’s been some admittedly premature discussion about how high he might go in the draft. But now that we have a few appearances worth of information this spring, it’s reasonable to begin considering where he might go in June. We can do that by ignoring the other prospects in this year’s draft class and instead comparing Libby to other recent prep lefties.

This style of temperature check is useful for a few reasons. At some point, we have to line up every prospect in this year’s draft class, but it’s hard to do that with precision right now because evaluations are constantly shifting and we don’t know everything about things like signability or injuries. By comparing a current prospect — in this case, Liberatore — to his peers in previous draft classes, we’re now only dealing with one moving target and can more easily get an idea of where he’s likely to be selected.

There are several factors besides mere talent that influence where a player is selected in the draft — especially early in a draft — and, of course, the quality of talent in a given class is also relevant. We can’t control for that stuff and probably don’t need to because, again, we’re just trying to get a feel for a realistic range of potential outcomes.

With that in mind, here are the draft-day evaluations of the high-school lefties who have been taken in the first round since 2014. I have them listed in order of preference based on talent at the time they were drafted, with other factors (size, makeup, delivery) noted. The “x” indicates that attribute was essentially value neutral, or at least not so impactful that it affected the player’s stock. These were all future, not current, pitch projections, and if a kid had two breaking balls I just picked the better of the two.

So where does Matthew Liberatore stack among this group? Last week, he was up to 94, sitting mostly 91-92 for most of his start, with a fairly upright delivery that I think negatively impacts extension. His slowest fastball was at 88; it came from the stretch late in his start. Liberatore’s curveball flashed plus several times. It’s fair to question if a 70-72 mph curveball will be effective in the big leagues, but there’s remarkable feel for spin here and it’s likely Liberatore’s breaking ball will have more power to it at maturity. He flashed an above-average changeup, which projects to plus at peak as he utilizes it more in pro ball.

From a strike-throwing and consistency perspective, Liberatore was disappointing. He failed to get on top of many fastballs and breaking balls, forcing a number of pitches to sail up and to his arm side. The quality of his stuff was also inconsistent throughout much of his outing. He’s a good athlete for his size and has some room on his frame for more mass, so it’s possible more velocity is coming. As the spring rolls on, this evaluation is likely to change a little but, but right now here’s where we think Liberatore is at.

Groome and Allard probably go higher in their respective drafts if not for off-field and injury issues, respectively. I think it’s fair to place Liberatore in the picks No. 3 to 7 range right now, just based on how his talent stacks up with recent precedent. A lot can still happen between now and the draft to change this. If his velocity ticks comfortably into the mid-90s as the draft approaches, we’re talking about something closer to Gore than to Garrett. We can use similar methodology (especially during the summer prior to a draft) across a draft class to loosely tier players, while being mindful of changing industry norms. As the draft approaches, though, it’s necessary to polish up the order within a given tier or move players around because of makeup, medicals, and other considerations.

GOODYEAR, Ariz. — Right before the start of spring training, Cincinnati prospect Nick Senzel received a phone call at his home in Knoxville, Tenn. It was from Reds headquarters. The club had a question for its top rookie-eligible player: could he handle shortstop?

“I said, ‘Yeah,’” Senzel told FanGraphs recently in Arizona. “And they got me there now.”

Even before taking the call, the No. 2 pick of the 2016 June draft was taking ground balls at third, second, and shortstop — and even fly balls in the outfield — on the playing surface of Lindsey Nelson Stadium, the baseball home of his alma mater, the University of Tennessee. A third baseman in college, Senzel wanted to make himself as versatile as possible entering this season.

It was prescient planning, as the Reds have since begun one of the great experiments of the spring.

As players advance through professional baseball, as they age at the major-league level, they typically move down the defensive spectrum. What is so interesting about Senzel playing shortstop, even if it’s short-lived, is that it represntns a case of a player moving up the spectrum.

There is an argument to be made that more teams should be identifying players who can move to more challenging positions. Why? Because over the last decade, about 20% of defensive opportunities — as in batted balls in play — have evaporated. In this three-true-outcomes environment, it’s easier to hide a bat, to trade some glove for bat, when the ball is less of a threat to reach the field of play.

There were 60,249 “plays” by defenders in 2007, according to FanGraphs data. Last season, there were just 49,809 — or roughly 10,000 fewer.

Consider opportunity trends by position:

It’s not just Senzel. Paul DeJong, who appeared at a variety of positions during his junior campaign at Illinois State, received over half the Cardinals’ starts at shortstop last season. Lonnie Chisenhall and Jason Kipnis were deployed in center at times in 2017, aided by a staff that recorded the highest strikeout rate of all time. Dee Gordon is transitioning to center field in Seattle.

Could it work? Could teams benefit from more aggressive defensive assignments? Could it be the next big thing? Or at least a little thing at no cost to clubs ever in search of efficiency and hidden value?

***

Senzel believes he can stick at short and has ambitions to make the team as the club’s starter out of spring training, although the realities of how clubs manipulate service time make that all but impossible. Still, Senzel reported early to camp. He’s worked with Barry Larkin. He’s participated every day in a particular drill where rubber balls are thrown off a wall, forcing Senzel to quickly reset his feet and transfer the ball into throwing positions.

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The Minnesota Twins continued a productive offseason over the weekend, signing Lance Lynn to a bargain-rate one-year, $12 million deal. Lynn turned down a $17.4 million qualifying offer from the Cardinals in November. He also reportedly turned down higher guarantees from other teams, per Jon Morosi. 

Not clear regarding those other offers is whether the average annual values of the contracts would have been equivalent or if Lynn would have had to forfeit the opportunity to explore free agency next offseason in exchange for a few extra million dollars. Whatever the case, it appears as though Lance Lynn will have to try his hand at free agency next winter if his ambition is to find a long-term home.

As for the Twins, they get great value on a player seemingly overlooked by the market. Indeed, the club seems to have specialized in this sort of deal over the winter. Heading into the offseason, for example, the crowd believed Addison Reed was in line for $27 million, the third-highest guarantee among relievers behind only the figures estimated for Wade Davis and Greg Holland. Reed ultimately agreed to join the Twins for just $16.75 million in mid-January — or less than the overall deals received by seven other relievers who’d signed at that point in the offseason.

The addition of Logan Morrison represents another instance in which the Twins have taken advantage of a slow market. The crowd expected Morrison to sign for $20 million. At the end of February, however, Derek Falvey et al. signed him for just one-third that amount.

Finally, there’s Lynn. Projected by the crowd to receive $60 million over four seasons, the right-hander settled for 20% of that figure. When the offseason began, it was reasonable to think that the Twins would need to guarantee $107 million to acquire all three players mentioned here. With just $35.25 million, though, the club signed the trio at a rate discounted by 67% from initial estimates.

The Twins’ bargain-shopping was not limited to free agency: the team also took on Jake Odorizzi and his $6.3 million salary in exchange for a prospect of little significance. Odorizzi went to the Twins not because of their willingness to provide Tampa Bay with considerable talent but because they were willing to pay his salary.

There are some logical explanations for the Twins’ apparent good fortune. For example, all the players acquired by the club come with significant question marks, and none are currently projected to provide more than two wins this season. That said, each possesses some kind of upside and a relatively recent track record of success. The combined five wins the club is projected to receive will cost just $33 million in 2018 salaries. Given the recent cost of wins on the free-agent market, the Twins’ efficiency should be lauded. More important than getting a good deal, though, they have also obtained solid major leaguers at areas of need.

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The combination of a Cy Young award, a strong postseason track record, a relatively low total of innings thrown, and a history free of major arm injuries was supposed to carry Jake Arrieta to a nine-figure free-agent deal this winter. Agent Scott Boras was said to eye Justin Verlander‘s $180 million extension and Max Scherzer’s $210 million free-agent contract as ballpark figures for and templates for Arrieta. But in a winter during which the hot stove’s pilot light went out, the 32-year-old righty didn’t come anywhere close to landing such a megadeal. Instead, he settled for a three-year, $75 million contract with the Phillies, albeit one with some bells and whistles that could make it considerably more lucrative.

Via FanRag Sports’ Jon Heyman, Arrieta will make $30 million in 2018 and $25 million in 2019, before having a chance to opt out. If he doesn’t opt out, he’ll make $20 million in 2020. If he does opt out, the team has the option to override that by triggering a two-year extension at a minimum of $20 million per year, with incentives (whose exact parameters are unknown at this writing) based on 2018-19 games started that could take those years to $25 million, and further incentives based on Cy Young finishes that could take them to $30 million. The maximum deal becomes five years and $135 million.

Nobody is going to weep for Arrieta, but based upon the guaranteed money, it does appear that Boras overplayed his hand. In early January, USA Today’s Bob Nightengale reported that the Cubs, for whom Arrieta pitched from mid-2013 through 2017, were willing to bring Arrieta back via a four-year deal “for about $110 million,” which represents a higher average annual value ($27.5 million) than he ultimately got, unless one simply assumes he’ll opt out without the Phillies overriding. A month ago, just before they closed a six-year, $126 million deal with Yu Darvish, the Cubs reportedly circled back to Arrieta with a similar offer. As he had done when the team tried to secure him via long-term extensions in 2016 and 2017, Arrieta declined.

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Kris Medlen was a top-shelf pitcher in the 2012-2013 seasons. Over that two-year stretch, the righty fashioned a 2.47 ERA in 335 innings with the Atlanta Braves. Then things went south. His elbow began barking, and in March 2014 — for the second time in his professional career — he underwent Tommy John surgery.

The road back proved arduous. Medlen was decent after returning to a big-league mound in July 2015 — he went 6-2, 4.01 in 15 games with the Royals — but then his rotator cuff became cranky. A truncated and abysmal 2016 season spent mostly in the minors was followed by some serious soul searching.

“I considered calling it quits,” admitted Medlen. “It would have been out of injury frustration. I’d had two Tommy Johns, and that last season in Kansas City I had three rotator cuff strains. I was on my ass, on my couch, with my kids, until late January or early February (2017). My wife was supportive — she said it was fine if I wanted to stop, and it was fine if I wanted to keep going — but I think she could tell I was a little down.” Read the rest of this entry »

A rough winter and spring got rougher for the Rays this week, as the team learned that Jose De Leon has suffered a torn ulnar collateral ligament and will require Tommy John surgery. Acquired from the Dodgers in January 2017 in exchange for Logan Forsythe, the now 25-year-old righty ranked among the game’s top-40 prospects by multiple outlets heading into both the 2016 and 2017 seasons. Alas, a trio of stints on the disabled list for a variety of arm ailments limited him to just 41 innings last year, 2.2 of them in his lone major-league outing.

De Leon is the second Rays pitching prospect to require Tommy John surgery this spring, 22-year-old righty Brent Honeywell, a consensus top-15 prospect (including 15th on the FanGraphs Top 100 list), having become the first. The loss of those two righties isn’t the only reason that the Rays plan to work with a modified four-man rotation. Their teardown, which includes the departure of Alex Cobb via free agency and the trade of Jake Odorizzi to the Twins, has led the team to try something different and cost-efficient with the fifth-starter spot, an experiment that could have larger ramifications around the game.

Because De Leon and Honeywell belong to the same team and because their injuries occurred during the same spring — one in which just two other professional pitchers have had Tommy Johnsurgery thus far — it’s natural to wonder if the Rays have a problem in this area. Historically speaking, it seems, quite the opposite has been true. According to the data in the Tommy John Surgery List kept by Jon Roegele, Rays major- and minor-league pitchers have undergone fewer TJs than any other organization since the start of 2010:

Roegele classifies every pitcher in organized ball who undergoes the surgery by the last level at which he pitched prior to going under the knife (in De Leon’s case, High-A via a rehab assignment). For the purposes of this accounting, I excluded all of the hurlers classified as high school or college because of the discrepancies in surgical timing. Consider the cases of a pair of 2015 first-round picks, Brady Aiken and Walker Buehler. Aiken underwent March 2015 surgery before being (re)drafted by the Indians, while Buehler had surgery in August of that year, after being selected by the Dodgers but before throwing a professional pitch. Neither injury is attributable to their respective teams. I chose to start with 2010 because that’s where Travis Sawchik’s recent illustration of declining league-wide levels of TJ surgeries cut off as well. More on that shortly.

Including De Leon (who hasn’t actually undergone the procedure yet), the Rays’ total of 10 surgeries in that span is the majors’ lowest, less than one-third that of the MLB-leading Mets — who, to be fair, haven’t had a pitcher above A-ball suffer that fate since 2015. Even so, using the start of 2016 as a cutoff, the Mets organization’s six TJs, though all from the low minors, place them third among the 30 teams, behind the Giants’ eight and the Reds’ seven. No other team has more than three, which is where the Rays will sit once De Leon goes under the knife.

Returning to the larger data set, one finds this: of the eight other pitchers in the Rays organization who’ve undergone TJ since the start of 2010, four have never reached the majors, including 2011 first-round pick Taylor Guerrieri and supplemental first-rounder Grayson Garvin. Two others had pitched elsewhere in the majors prior to going down — namely Burch Smith (April 2015 surgery; 10 appearances for the 2013 Padres) and Shawn Tolleson (May 2017 surgery; 215 appearances for the Dodgers and Rangers from 2012-16). The other two homegrown products who became rotation staples were Matt Moore (April 2014) and Cobb (May 2015).

Even without the 2010 cutoff, the Rays’ track record in this area is rather remarkable. As I noted at SI.com at the time of Moore’s surgery, the last Rays major leaguer to undergo the procedure before him, and the only one since the beginning of 2007, was Jason Isringhausen in 2009. Izzy was 36 at the time and particularly battle-scarred, having endured at least six previous arm surgeries, including 1998 and 2008 TJs, while with the Mets and Cardinals, respectively.

The Rays’ low total of TJs is said to owe something to the fact that Dr. James Andrews is their team physician. Andrews, of course, is one of the industry’s leading orthopedic surgeons and, according to Roegele’s data, the all-time leader in TJs performed (193, or 110 more than runner-up Dr. Lewis Yocum and 159 more than the procedure’s creator, Dr. Frank Jobe). Andrews is also the co-founder of the American Sports Medicine Institute, which has worked to dispel common myths about the surgery and offer recommendations for keeping youth, amateur, and professional pitchers healthy.

Until the end of last season, the Rays also employed Josh Kalk, an analyst who in February 2009 wrote for The Hardball Times about using PITCHf/x data in a neural network to identify injuries and very soon afterwards was hired by the team, eventually rising to the rank of director of pitching research and development. The Tampa Bay Times‘ Marc Topkin described Kalk as “an expert in PITCHf/x data and injury prevention studies and modeling” at the time of his departure from the organization. (He landed with the Twins.) From Yahoo Sports’ Jeff Passan we learn that, in 2015, the Rays broke ground by installing Kinatrax, a markerless system of capturing biomechanical data, at Tropicana Field. (The Cubs followed suit in 2016, and at least one other team has done so as well.)

Back to Sawchik’s work. Two months ago, he asked via his article title, “Have we Reached Peak Tommy John?” The whole piece is worth a read, but here’s a simplified presentation of the data he cited, with position players and the aforementioned high-school and college hurlers weeded out:

At the major-league level, 18 pitchers underwent TJ last year, one fewer than in 2016. The high total in this span was 35 in 2012, and it was 30 as recently as 2014. In terms of all professional pitchers, last year’s total of 69 TJs was down 12.7% from 2016 and 36.7% from 2015. We can hope that the industry may be past that two-year spike, though it’s probably too early to tell whether it’s just randomness as opposed to better means of prevention.

Which isn’t to say that there haven’t been advances or successes that could be having an effect, thanks not only to the efforts of Kalk and (presumably) other analysts but also other routes of treatment. For example, where platelet-rich plasma injections once appeared to be a Hail Mary when it came to avoiding Tommy John surgery, recent years have seen Masahiro Tanaka (diagnosed with a UCL tear in mid-2014) and Aaron Nola (mid-2016) flourish at the MLB level without surgery. Seth Maness underwent a modified Tommy John procedure called primary repair surgery that allowed him to return to the majors inside of nine months.

Maybe the industry is turning the corner, but if history is any guide, the next few weeks will feature more stories like those of De Leon’s, as pitchers face the hard facts that they just can’t continue without repair. Just under 30% of the surgeries from the past four seasons took place in March or April, with the figure varying only between 25-30% in that span; last year, it was 19 out of 69. Within the next two months, we’ll have a better idea of the trend’s direction.

In my weekly chats or in the comments section of certain posts, readers often ask a question like, “Does Pitcher X have ace potential?” or some variant of it. While it makes sense that people would be curious about such a thing, the answer is (by definition) almost always “No.” Because there are so few aces in the majors, the probability that any prospect would develop into one is necessarily low.

When I’m at games — and especially when I’m at spring-training games — I’ll occasionally run into someone like Corey Kluber, though. And while I realize nobody’s wondering if Kluber has a chance of succeeding in the majors, there’s some value in writing up guys like this as an exercise, to illustrate what an ace looks like on paper. So that’s what I’ve done here. (Note, as well: context is important when reading the following, as it’s the product of an abbreviated spring look.)

Kluber was 90-92 in my viewing, with enough movement on his fastball to merit a half-grade bump. That’s about 1.5 ticks slower than his average fastball velocity from last year, but this is typical of early-spring Kluber. I put a 55 on his fastball while observing im and imagine it’s plus during the season when he’s throwing harder.

He mixed in a cutter, slider, changeup, and a curveball. The cutter was 86-88 with tight, late movement. It was consistently plus, flashing plus-plus, and Kluber put it where he wanted to when he wanted to. It’s likely that the slider and curveball are the same pitch and that Kluber can just manipulate the shape and depth of the pitch, but the ball acts differently enough when Kluber does this that he functionally has both, even if the catcher puts down the same sign for both. When his breaking ball behaved more like a curveball, it was a 50, a deep, but blunt, 80-82 mph curveball. The slider was one of the best I’ve ever seen, and Kluber threw a few 80-grade sliders in the outing, while most were 70s in the 83-85 mph range. These had more horizontal movement and, like everything else Kluber does, located with precision. I saw a few changeups that I thought were average.

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The State of West Virginia – or, rather, certain legislators in the State of West Virginia – have decided that they want to legalize sports gambling. This has created a kerfuffle in the Commissioner’s office, which has lobbied hard against the bill. Said Rob Manfred last Friday regarding the bill: “Major League Baseball and the other professional sports also have a strong interest, because it is, after all, our product that people are seeking to bet on… Unfortunately in West Virginia, there’s only one interested group that has dominated the substance of this bill, and that’s the gaming industry – the people seeking to make money from sports betting.” Manfred also voiced concerns that the proposed legislation doesn’t sufficiently protect gambling addicts.

Assuming West Virginia governor Jim Justice signs this bill, West Virginia will have legalized sports gambling. For our purposes, “sports gambling” means pretty much what it sounds like — things like betting on the outcome of baseball games. West Virginia wants to legalize it to make money off of it; fees and the like appended to sports gambling are expected to generate $30 million for the state’s coffers in just the first year.

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Mickey Haefner, man.

*****

That left-handed knuckleballer. Hit Ted Williams with a pitch in a tune-up game before Teddy’s only World Series. Williams said his arm “swelled up like a boiled egg,” whatever that means, then went just 5-for-25. All singles. Red Sox lost in seven. Thanks to ol’ Mickey.

*****

It wasn’t his idea to have the Red Sox scrimmage against the American League All-Stars while the National League had their best-of-three playoff to decide their World Series representative. Still. How did Ted Williams not have him killed? How did Mickey Haefner survive long enough to make history?

*****

*****

Paul Lukas admitted the bullpen historical record is imprecise. He also wrote that a 1950 newspaper report mentioning a “little red auto” was the first known instance of a report on bullpen vehicles. Then you found it: Chicago Tribune, July 6, 1950. You trust Lukas. You trust the Tribune. Cleveland 5, White Sox 2. Cleveland didn’t need a reliever that day. White Sox brought in Haefner first. Might as well figure it was Mickey freakin’ Haefner.

*****

That game was in Cleveland. The Cultural Encyclopedia of Baseball, 2d ed. sounds trustworthy and regal. Said Cleveland GM Hank Greenberg came up with the whole bullpen cart idea.

*****

Mickey damn Haefner.

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