Pretty much every contender in baseball is looking for a reliever or two right now. The changing strategies relating to playoff baseball mean you can never have too many quality bullpen arms, and as the Cubs showed last year, you can’t necessarily count on guys who were good in the regular season being able to still go in the postseason. Even teams with strong current bullpens are kicking the tires on available arms because you can’t be certain that what you have now will still be ready to pitch at an elite level in a few months.

Which is why the price for relievers is always pretty high this time of year. And while there aren’t many Aroldis Chapmans or Andrew Millers available right now — Zach Britton would qualify if he were definitely healthy, but the Orioles sticking with Brad Brach as their closer right now is a pretty big red flag — we’re going to see a lot of bullpen arms traded over the next two weeks. The Nationals already paid a real price to add Ryan Madson and Sean Doolittle to their beleaguered pen, and they probably aren’t done adding relievers.

With all this demand and a somewhat limited supply, it’s not easy to find a decent arm to help for the stretch run that doesn’t cost something a team really doesn’t want to give up. But I think there might be one reliever who could probably be had who might not cost a fortune and could really help a team this year and maybe in the future as well. If you’re bargain hunting for a reliever right now, I’ve got one name for you: Danny Barnes.

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When Marlins reliever Brad Ziegler made the switch to throwing out of a submarine motion, his new mechanics made him sore. In the hips, as he remembers it. Ask fellow submariner Darren O’Day if his delivery was related to his hip labrum surgery, and his answer is succinct: “Absolutely.” Now fellow side-slotter Andrew Triggs is headed for that same surgery and it’s fair to ask: is the sidearm or submarine delivery hard on the hips?

It’s never easy to answer these sorts of questions because of the problem of sample. There might be two true submariners in baseball today (O’Day and Ziegler), and then a few who others who live low — a group that includes Steve Cishek, Pat Neshek, Joe Smith, and the like. Head any higher on the release-point list, and you’re already at Chris Sale, nobody’s idea of a sidearmer.

If you just take the list of pitchers who have recorded hip problems in the last 10 years, you get 33 different names. Hardly an epidemic. Take those 33 pitchers, and look at their average arm slot, and you might think you’ve found something.

Pitchers with hip problems release their pitches, on average, three-and-a-half inches lower than the general population.

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This is Matt Swartz’ fourth piece as part of his July residency at FanGraphs. A former contributor to FanGraphs and the Hardball Times — and current contributor to MLB Trade Rumors — Swartz also works as consultant to a Major League team. You can find him on Twitter here. Read the work of all our residents here.

The most distinct feature of my approach to calculating the cost per WAR on the free-agent market is my inclusion of the draft-pick-based costs to signing free agents, in addition the more obvious monetary costs. This requires a greater collection of assumptions than a simple focus on the dollars spent on free agency, but provides a more robust estimate of what teams give up when they dip into the free-agent market. It also requires a logical economic framework, including opportunity costs, so it also requires estimating the foregone costs of draft picks that a club could have received had they not re-signed their own players.

The gap between my actual estimates of the cost per WAR and the same calculation absent draft-pick compensation is not trivial. While it normally is only around 7%, it reached as high as 20% in 2015. Of course, with the new CBA lowering draft-pick compensation, this difference is likely to drop, making this part of the analysis somewhat less important. However, it remains essential to consider changes in draft-pick compensation to understand changes in cost per WAR over time. What may appear, in some years, like a collective decision by clubs to spend more aggressively in the free-agent market is frequently just a product of lower opportunity cost of foregone draft picks, leading teams to pump more dollars into free-agent contracts.

The biggest challenge when utilizing this framework is determining the appropriate discount rate to use. This isn’t easy to do and can easily vary from team to team and over time, as well. This article won’t pin down a perfect number; it’s almost certain that a better estimate of the discount rate requires a more detailed analysis of trades and other decisions that teams make when considering how to value player performance at different points in the future. It’s also challenging to use this approach to determine if the discount rate that teams use has changed, because it appears that the method of estimating said rate is noisy enough that it varies over time within a very large range. However, it’s worth understanding the approach.

In this article, I attempt to present that approach. Before I begin, one note: some of what follows is rather technical. I feel much of it is necessary, though, to establish the entirety of my methodology before moving on, in later posts, to actual illustrative cases.

The simpler part of using this analysis is looking at draft-pick bonus money saved. While this pales in comparison to lost WAR values from missing out on draft picks, a full picture does require netting out how much a team saves by not paying bonuses on those draft picks. I’ve performed a slightly more sophisticated nonlinear approach to estimate bonuses for this series than in my previous work, basically assuming that bonuses paid to draftees have the same exponential structure (relative to pick number) as the WAR they produce varies by pick number. I’ve also found better estimates of the specific slot values for draftees by pick, leading to a better estimate.

Of course, the larger issue is analyzing the picks themselves. While the average pick surrendered has been around roughly the 30th overall, this has varied significantly and has been higher (at times) in the past. It also will certainly be lower in the future due to the new CBA rules. To estimate the value of picks, I continue to use the Draft Pick WAR Calculator developed by Sky Andrecheck way back in 2009. While the precise outputs have possibly changed over time, they probably haven’t changed much, and Andrecheck’s model is certainly the best publicly available one.

In addition to this estimate of the WAR produced by players according to their draft pick, I’ve also found (in my own research) that prospects tend to debut roughly three years after being drafted. Therefore, a player’s WAR tends to accrue to the team who drafted him from three to nine years after said player is drafted, after which the player is a free agent. That’s roughly equivalent in value to all the WAR accruing exactly six years after the player is drafted, so that’s what I use in my estimate. I also had to net out the actual salaries through arbitration that successful draft picks will eventually receive, knocking down the net value of the WAR created by about 20%.

I decided to continue using a 10% discount rate (meaning that teams currently value the ability to obtain future WAR 10% less each year into the future). This is still my best guess about how teams are valuing draft picks. This means the team values the WAR 56% less than they would if it all came right away. And since they have to pay roughly 20% of market value due to arbitration in the latter years, they value the WAR 20% less than that.

In the three tables below, I’ve split the free-agent market data I have available into three time periods: 2006-09, 2010-13, and 2014-16. I’ve looked at all players who earned salaries at least $2 million in excess of the league minimum and compared the cost per WAR for those free agents with and without draft-pick compensation attached.

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Josh Harrison leads the majors in times getting hit by a pitch. He led the majors in April, and after a down month in May, he’s led the majors since the start of June. In June itself, Harrison was hit 10 times, which is tied for the second-most for any player in any month in baseball history. Back in April, Harrison got hit four times in a row. Harrison has nearly as many hit-by-pitches as walks, which is both good and bad, I suppose. Harrison is sitting on a career-best OBP.

Usually, when we’ve talked about hit-by-pitches, we’ve been talking about Brandon Guyer. It is, technically, a skill that some hitters can possess, typically because of their stances. The twist for Harrison is that he hasn’t been a pitch magnet in the past. He’s been drilled 20 times this season. He was drilled 26 times before this season. Shown in graphical form:

That’s a leap forward this season, depending on what your definition of “forward” is. Here now is a plot of Harrison’s career hit-by-pitches, separated by year:

The evidence suggests that Harrison has moved a little closer to the plate. Which, yeah; I can’t come up with any reasonable alternative explanation. He’s standing a little closer, and he closes himself off with his front leg. By which I mean, Harrison raises his leg with a standard kick, and then he steps forward in the box. He’s standing closer to the plate, and then he steps closer to the plate. This is where hit-by-pitches come from, since it’s not like there is just a sudden rash of opposing pitchers who are holding a Josh Harrison-specific grudge.

Here’s the kicker. Harrison, a year ago, was hit in about 1% of his plate appearances. Harrison, this year, has been hit in about 5% of his plate appearances. That seems like a big increase, but how much of an increase is it, really? I went all the way back to 1900. I looked at every player who’s ever batted at least 250 times in consecutive seasons. Here are the biggest year-to-year jumps in HBP%:

Okay then. For now, No. 1, and by a full percentage point over F.P. Santangelo. There’s more season to play, so Harrison isn’t totally locked in here, but as he plays in more games, he’s likely to get hit by more pitches. I’m sorry, Josh Harrison. I’m sorry for the painful, helpful free bases. Although I guess it’s as much Harrison’s fault as anyone else’s. To this point, he’s refused to back off.

Originally, this was going to be a little post about Jonathan Schoop. I wasn’t super jazzed to write about Jonathan Schoop, and you weren’t super jazzed to read about Jonathan Schoop, but, in case you weren’t already aware, Schoop is swinging a lot less than he used to. One of the very most aggressive hitters around has dropped his swing rate by right around 10 percentage points, and that’s big. That’s a significant change, for a player who had been in need of more polish. It seems like a step forward. It’s interesting.

But, at least as this post goes, the hell with Schoop, because I need to point you toward Mike Moustakas. Has it been a while since you checked in on him? I guess that depends on whether you’re a Royals fan. But let me summarize where Moustakas has been real quick. You remember he used to be a top prospect. Then he was a disappointing major-leaguer. Then the big story became that his approach matured, and he learned to take balls to the opposite field. Moustakas stopped trying to pull everything, and, at last, he found success. The game was coming together for him, and he had a strong start to 2016. Then he got hurt. Badly hurt — hurt enough to miss the rest of the year. For everyone involved, it was a tremendous disappointment.

Moustakas is back on the field. He’s played almost every game, and he’s already set a new career high for home runs. That opposite-field focus is gone; Moustakas has been killing the ball to right. In that sense, he’s reverted, although now it’s working. But that’s not what I want to draw your attention to. Before having surgery, Moustakas was more patient than ever. On the other side of surgery, he’s been more aggressive than ever. He’s jumped from one end of the spectrum to the other, as you can see in the following plot:

More swings in the zone. More swings out of the zone! More swings in and out of the zone. Moustakas has been trying to hit everything he can, and his numbers are fine, if not massively improved. To try to put this in some context, I consulted the extent of our historical plate-discipline data, which goes back to 2002. I looked at every player with at least 100 plate appearances in consecutive seasons, which gave me a sample of 5,205 individual player season-pairs. Here is a plot of their swing rates. Moustakas is highlighted in yellow.

Compared to last year, Moustakas’ swing rate is up 15 percentage points, which is the largest increase in the sample. Looking at absolute values, it’s also just the largest change in the sample, up or down. This season isn’t over yet, so, there’s that, but for now, in the past decade and a half, we haven’t seen a player so suddenly change like this. Moustakas went under the knife as a more disciplined bat. He’s come away as a hacker, and he’s really gotten no better or worse. He’s the same, but different, and to this point in 2017, Moustakas has yet to take a single called third strike.

Usually people want more from something like this. They want the author to determine whether a change is good or bad. I can’t do that. All I know is there’s been a change. It’s worked about as well as the previous changes. Mike Moustakas has already had one weird big-league career.

 
Not just anyone can close a game. The ninth inning is different than the first eight innings. Along with quality “stuff,” a certain mentality is needed to walk out to the mound and get those last three outs with your team leading by three runs or less.

Or is it?

Managers are typically averse to using someone other than their designated closer in a save situation — they do so only when necessary — but should that really be the case? Could most teams not realistically expect their “second-best reliever” to get those final outs if their “best reliever” was used in a high-leverage situation earlier in the game, and it was prudent to not have him return for the ninth?

I recently asked that question (albeit not always in those exact words) to a cross section of relievers, pitching coaches, and managers. Here is what they had to say.

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Cody Allen, Cleveland Indians reliever: “I understand that teams want to keep guys in roles — for the most part, even us — although I feel we’re kind of ahead of the curve in terms of usage. There are times we put guys in different situations, because it might be a bigger point in the game.

“If you have guys who have been here for awhile, or if you bring somebody over who’s proven, like we did last year with Andrew [Miller]… that’s a luxury we have that a lot of teams don’t have. [Bryan] Shaw has been here long enough that Tito knows he can handle just about any spot — any part of the lineup, any inning, any circumstance.

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The All-Star Game and its various related events are behind us, and the game has collectively taken a breath for a couple of days (except for the Cubs and White Sox, but I digress). The numbers for the first half are in the books, giving us an opportunity to reflect on what has already happened and what it might portend for the second half of the season.

In this space I will often analyze players by examining plate appearance frequency and contact quality (for hitters) and contact management (for pitchers) information for pitchers, using granular data to see how players “should be” performing to get a better handle on their true talent and performance levels. Today, let’s use some of this data in a slightly different manner, identifying players with common statistical markers that can tell us something very good or very bad about those player “families.”

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You can expect that Sonny Gray will be traded. Something could happen to get in the way, but it’s likely that Gray will shortly be on the move. Although the A’s are just as close to a playoff spot as the Braves, who have been talked about as a buyer, the A’s just yesterday dealt away from their bullpen, and so it’s clear to see what they’re doing. They saw what the White Sox got for Jose Quintana. They know that Gray is the next in line, as a cost-controlled quality starting pitcher.

Now, Gray is not Quintana. Gray’s had more recent arm trouble, and while Quintana has club options through 2020, Gray’s controlled through 2019. The A’s can’t expect the same kind of package, because the contract matters, and because just last season, Gray was not very good. Still, his value has rebounded, now that he again has his health. Gray could well be in the middle of the next blockbuster. He’s back, but as a different pitcher from before.

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A month ago, I looked at the teams that looked to be buying, selling, or still making up their mind as we headed towards the trade season. Now that trade season is officially here, and some things have changed in the last month, let’s take a look at where things stand with two two weeks before the deadline.

First, let’s just look at the changes in playoff odds for every team since the last time we looked at who would be buying and selling.

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At the beginning of the season, the Blue Jays were a clear playoff contender. In the American League, only Boston, Cleveland, and Houston had higher playoff odds than Toronto’s 52.1%. On June 1, those odds had dropped considerably, down to 36.3%, but were still near the top of the heap. The only other AL team that had passed them in those first two months of the season were the New York Yankees. Things improved briefly afterward, but then they took a turn south again. Let’s take a look:

That dark blue line on top represents the Blue Jays. Well, it’s on top for a portion of the graph on the left — the equivalent of a few weeks — before descending to roughly 25%, where it meets up with the rest of the pack. Now, Toronto’s no longer the top dog in the race for the second Wild Card, they’re just… dog.

All told, Toronto’s probability of qualifying for the postseason in any form has declined from 36.3% to 18.0%, including their loss yesterday in Detroit. In other words: not great.

But as Craig Edwards noted just over a month ago, there are quite a few American League clubs with a reasonable chance of claiming a Wild Card spot. Today, I’d like to focus on Toronto, specifically — and, in particular, why the odds might be in their favor.

No Strong Reason To Sell

Toronto doesn’t have a player who’s due to hit free agency after the season who’s also likely to bring back a sizable return. Some of their free agents to be — Darwin Barney, Chris Coghlan, Marco Estrada, J.P. Howell, Francisco Liriano, Miguel Montero, and Joe Smith — would fetch something of marginal value, but not the sort of package that’s going to kickstart a major rebuild.

Two of the club’s players, meanwhile — Russell Martin and Troy Tulowitzki — are well into their 30s and are signed to long-term contracts that will prevent a return of great substance. Tulowitzki might not even be tradeable at this point. As for Josh Donaldson, he would absolutely receive interest from many clubs. Given that he missed time this year and didn’t make the All-Star team, though, the Blue Jays wouldn’t exactly be selling high on him. The better strategy may be to let him remind everyone of his true MVP form and move him in the offseason.

Offense Can’t Be Any Worse

If you look at the team leaderboards, you’ll see that the Blue Jays appear near the bottom in terms of Offense. Specifically, they place 24th, when you take out pitchers’ hitting. But much of that stems from their horrid April. In April, the team’s wRC+ was just 71. It hasn’t been as bad since — 114 in May, 91 in June, and 85 in July. Obviously there’s a downward trend there since May, but April is still dragging down their season numbers. Also, some of the players who haven’t been hitting are either not playing now (Coghlan, Luke Maile) or are localized to one position (like Barney and Ryan Goins at second base).

More importantly, the projections haven’t given up on them. Our depth charts still see Toronto as possessing the seventh-best offense the rest of the way. Looking at season-to-date wOBA vs. projected rest-of-season wOBA, all of the team’s regulars save Justin Smoak and Russell Martin are expected to post wOBAs 10 points or more higher the rest of the way.

Second Base Can Be Upgraded

The depth-chart projections also reveal that the Blue Jays are projected to derive 0.0 WAR from their second-base situation the rest of the way. Literally replacement level. Devon Travis is an impressive talent, but he is frequently hurt. In his place, Barney and Goins have been a terrifyingly terrible platoon. Enter Dee Gordon rumors. It’s hard to know what the cost would be for the Marlins’ second baseman, given the possibility that the Marlins will take less if the team to which they deal him agrees to eat a bunch/all of his contract. Toronto has shown a willingness to do just that in the past, and may do so again. It would create a headache for the team when Travis is healthy enough to return, but the bet is that Travis could work his way into the outfield mix to stay in the lineup.

Gordon makes sense because he would not only be an upgrade for the rest of this season (0.6 WAR), but he’s signed to a cheap, long-term contract. But there could be other keystone players on the market. It’s not hard to see the Padres trading Yangervis Solarte or the Phillies dealing Howie Kendrick. Perhaps if Neil Walker can get back on the field the Mets will deal him. There will be options. When your current players are literally replacement-level players, then most anyone represents an upgrade. The Blue Jays can upgrade, in other words, without breaking into the vault.

The Bullpen Is Fine

One of the reasons the Blue Jays can avoid the fire sale for another year is that they really don’t need to upgrade their bullpen. As Jeff wrote last week, Roberto Osuna has been just about perfect, and with Aaron Sanchez back in the rotation, Joe Biagini is transitioning back to the bullpen. He’s working low-leverage situations for now, but it probably won’t be long before he’s back in a setup role. This is good news for Toronto. Biagini’s season splits for start vs. relief look similar now because he was rocked in his second relief stint back just before the break, but from the beginning of the season until May 3rd (before he was put in the rotation), he posted a 3.38 ERA / 2.82 FIP / 3.18 xFIP, with a 58.3% ground-ball rate and 19.7-point strikeout- and walk-rate differential (K-BB%).

Biagin will join Osuna, Danny Barnes, Joe Smith (who is set to return this week), seasoned-lefty killer Aaron Loup and less-seasoned lefty killer Jeff Beliveau. It’s not a group filled with household names, but they’ve been getting the job done. All told, they’ve been the eighth-best unit in the game by WAR.

Teams that need to spend big at the trade deadline to improve their bullpen are often in a precarious spot. Why make a big push to add players who may not make a huge difference in the grand scheme of things to aid a playoff push that may only result in one extra game? This may be the case for teams like the Mariners and Rays, but it won’t be the case for Toronto.

Aaron Sanchez

Last season, the California native posted a 3.00 ERA, and his 3.9 WAR was the 17th best among all pitchers and eighth best in the AL. This season, he’s made just seven starts and tossed just 32 innings while dealing with right-middle-finger issues. But he’s back now, and in his second start back from the disabled list on Friday, he threw six innings of one-run ball against Detroit. By Game Score v 2.0, it was his second-best start of the season, with his best coming in his season debut back in April. A healthy Sanchez will make a big difference for a starting rotation that has held its own without him.

Not much has gone right for Toronto this season. They started out as one of the favorites and have slunk further and further back to the pack as the season has progressed. But they should start hitting better, they have one of their best starting pitchers back, and they have a good bullpen. Second base is a major black hole, but it can be upgraded without costing them their future. Things have looked better for the Blue Jays, but don’t count them out just yet.