Jay Groome recently found himself in the news for reasons not of his doing. Thirteen months ago, he was in the news for reasons that were: the 6-foot-6 left-hander was drafted 12th overall by the Red Sox out of a New Jersey high school. He could have gone even higher. As our own Eric Longenhagen wrote this spring, Groome was “arguably the most talented prospect in the 2016 draft.”

Given his age and experience level, it is very much raw talent. The 18-year-old southpaw has just 10 professional games under his belt, the last four of which have come with Low-A Greenville. Groome’s calling card is a curveball that Longenhagen called “potential plus-plus,” and his fastball has been clocked as high as 97 mph.

Groome talked about his nascent development — and his power repertoire — in late June.

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Groome on having a simple approach: “Everything I’ve learned — everything I know — comes from my father, or from myself, just trying to perfect my craft. I’ve always done what feels good for me and what looks good. I just throw all of my pitches.

“A couple of times on the showcase circuit they would have the Trackman, but I never paid attention to it. I’ve never looked into what my spin rate is, or anything like that. I’m not a big physics guy on how all that stuff translates to them hitting the ball or not hitting the ball. I just go out there and throw the ball and try to hit my spots; and if they hit it, they hit it, and if they don’t, they don’t.”

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There was a time when Griffin Canning looked like a sure-fire first-round pick in this year’s draft. The UCLA ace had a dominant 2017 season, ranking sixth in the nation in total strikeouts while exhibiting promising stuff, good command, and smooth mechanics. He seemed like the type of pitcher who could fly through a farm system and quickly make a big-league impact. Three days before the draft, Baseball America predicted that Canning would be selected by the Yankees with the 16th-overall pick.

Yet when draft day came on June 12, dozens of picks passed by without his selection. Every team in the first round passed on him, as did every team in the competitive-balance round. In the latter stages of MLB Network’s draft telecast, Canning was chosen by the Angels with the 47th-overall pick. On June 9, he appeared destined for a $3,458,600 bonus — that is, the value MLB had assigned to the 16th pick. Instead, he took the $1,459,200 earmarked for the 47th selection. In a matter of days, Canning watched his expected price tag get slashed by 58%.

The cause of Canning’s draft-stock plummet was an ominous MRI that revealed a vulnerable pitching elbow and shoulder. These injury concerns are not a surprise; last month, I examined the workloads of the draft’s top college pitchers and found that the star UCLA Bruin was used very heavily. His alarming usage rates and murky MRI warrant a deeper investigation of how longtime UCLA head coach John Savage manages his pitchers. Is Canning’s case emblematic of a culture of overuse in the program? Let’s check.

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No trade-deadline need has ever been clearer, has ever been more obvious, than the Nationals’ need to acquire some help in the bullpen. It’s been an annual concern, which means you could call the Nationals front office experienced, but the bullpen this year has been a disaster. They still have a massive lead in their division! A playoff entry is all but guaranteed. Yet the Nationals want to someday get beyond just making the playoffs. They’d like to win a damn series, and these last few months, they haven’t had good relievers.

Do you consider yourself a fan of our in-house statistics? The Nationals bullpen ranks last in baseball in WAR. Do you prefer to give more credit for events that have actually happened? The Nationals bullpen ranks last in baseball in RA9-WAR. If you’re bigger on storytelling statistics, the Nationals bullpen ranks 26th in baseball in WPA. To address the area, the Nats have swapped with the bullpen that ranks 27th in baseball in WPA. Here are the players:

Nationals get

• Sean Doolittle
• Ryan Madson

Athletics get

• Blake Treinen
• Jesus Luzardo
• Sheldon Neuse

On paper, this is a big double-get for the Nats. On paper, these were some of the better relievers available. Certainly, moving forward, Dusty Baker can feel better about his bullpen than he did yesterday or the day before. The risk is that things aren’t always as promising as they look on paper. The Nationals know that better than most teams.

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When I first spoke to Clint Frazier, he was 18 years old and playing in the rookie-level Arizona Summer League. A few months removed from being selected fifth-overall by the Cleveland Indians, he had a sky-high ceiling and a lot to learn. He also had — as I wrote in the introduction to the interview — “as much power as any player who was taken in the 2013 draft.”

The Loganville, Georgia native is now a Yankee, having gone to the Big Apple as the centerpiece of last year’s trade-deadline deal that sent Andrew Miller to Cleveland. He made his big-league debut thirteen days ago.

On Friday, I asked the colorful outfielder if he is essentially the same guy I interviewed four years ago.

“I’m a more experienced guy,” answered Frazier. “When I was younger, I was seeing beyond the fence — I was trying to hit a lot of home runs. Now it’s more of just being a hitter, trying to square up the baseball and letting the tools that I have play.”

I reminded the rookie that he’d talked about the importance of using the whole field in our earlier conversation. Read the rest of this entry »

Rob Manfred seems intent on expanding Major League Baseball’s footprint north and south of the contiguous United States, and he again stated that desire during the All-Star break as reported by CBSSports.com’s Dayn Perry.

When asked about expansion he reiterated to reporters his support of Montreal and Mexico City as candidates and added a domestic option in Charlotte. Said Manfred:

As much as I hope that both Oakland and Tampa will get stadiums, I think it would be difficult to convince the owners to go forward with an expansion until those situations are resolved.

Once they’re done, I think we have some great candidates. I know the mayor of Montreal has been very vocal about bringing baseball back to Montreal. It was not great when the Expos left. The fact of the matter was baseball was successful in Montreal for a very long time. Charlotte is a possibility. And I would like to think that Mexico City or some place in Mexico would be another possibility.

Baseball is currently in the midst of its longest expansion drought in the modern era. The sport has not grown since admitting the Diamondbacks and Rays in 1998. Eventually, in order to grow business, new markets are required. And there are significant untapped markets remaining in North America. Baseball would figure to jump from 30 to 32 teams, which would also help on a number of logistical fronts.

So if this is a game of musical chairs — three cities for two spots (though Las Vegas, Portland, and San Antonio might also be among the domestic candidates) — let’s examine the cases of the three cities Manfred cited.

Montreal
Metro population: 4,098,927
City population rank in North America: 8th
Elevation: 122 feet
GDP per capita: $38,867 (2013)
Nearest MLB cities: Boston, 220 nautical miles; Toronto, 273 nautical miles

Montreal seems to be the most serious about bringing the sport back to the city, and unlike any other candidate, it has hosted a major-league team before, bettering 2.1 million in attendance four times in its history. Montreal would give the sport a new geographic footprint, a natural rival for Toronto, and a new language (French broadcasts!). The recent exhibition games played in Montreal have been well supported.

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This is Matt Swartz’ third 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.

In this series of articles, I analyze the average cost per WAR on the free-agent market, as well as looking back at previously discovered market inefficiencies to see how they have changed over time. However, in doing this analysis, it is important to ensure that any assumptions I make have theoretical and empirical backing, including perhaps the largest such assumption — namely, the linearity of the Cost per WAR on the free-agent market. Does a four-win player earn twice as much as a two-win one? Some analysts have argued that, due to scarcity, a 4-WAR player could earn more than twice as much, although I have shown in the past why I believe this is not likely. Today, I will confirm linearity is still a fair assumption to make.

First, it’s useful to discuss the economic implications in theory. The question of linearity comes down to how easy it is to replace a four-win player on the free-agent market, and if teams would be better off going after two 2-WAR players. If so, teams would drive up the price of 2-WAR players and drive down the price of 4-WAR players as they got smarter over time, until both methods of acquiring 4 WAR cost the same. However, perhaps teams cannot upgrade at any enough positions to enable this kind of arbitrage. As revealed by analysis I’ve performed in the past, there are, in practice, many different options a teams has. Nearly every team has a lineup spot, a rotation spot, and a couple of bullpen spots open in any given offseason. Many have more, and teams also have the option of conducting trades, as well, to make room for upgrades if so desired.

None of this says that some teams would never choose to take the approach of going after more 2-WAR players in lieu of going after big names. Individual teams are bound to have different assessments of replacement level both for their own team and the market in general. A team that felt that they had a high replacement level internally would be more inclined to go after big-name players and fill in the remaining spots with their internal high-replacement-level players. Alternatively, a team that felt replacement level was much lower than the market suggests would spread their spending across multiple players to avoid having to fill a vacancy with such a poor player.

As mentioned, my previous findings suggested that Dollars per WAR was linear. To see if this is still true, I split the market into three periods — 2006-09, 2010-13, and 2014-16 — and looked at the cost per WAR using my framework discussed in the previous article in different ranges of salaries (net of the league minimum). This does lead to some sample-size issues, but here is the relevant table:

And here’s that data rendered into visual form:

As you can see, the dollar amounts per win retain a general proximity to the overall averages for each time period. Early numbers did show some non-linearity in the very low-$ part of the market (under $2 million net AAV) but that was probably related to measurement error. Such deals are often one-year deals with sizable incentives that are poorly reported. They also overwhelmingly go to players just above 0 WAR, and therefore are highly vulnerable to measurement error of WAR itself if replacement level isn’t measured correctly. A slightly higher approximation of replacement level could lead to a much higher $/WAR estimate in this range.

I probably was less likely to miss out on incentives in more recent deals when collecting data, and there is actually a large over-correction where $/WAR is very high in the lowest salary bucket for 2014-16. Overall, I think it is best to focus on deals more than $2 million above the league minimum. You will see that the above issue led me to focus only on deals in excess of the amount for much of the subsequent analyses.

But once we get past that first row, we can see strong evidence of linearity in all ranges. The most recent years (2014-16) do show a little bit higher cost per WAR in the high-salary ranges, but since they also do in the low-salary ranges, I suspect this is just noise, and I am comfortable using a linear framework to Dollars per WAR in subsequent articles. This jump in $/WAR at high-$ levels (in the last column) is probably also a function of the small sample sizes as well. There are just 80 and 74 player-seasons respectively in the top two salary groupings for 2014-16.

Any non-linearity in cost per WAR would severely complicate the analysis of the free-agent market. I would certainly welcome this complexity if it were warranted, but I think the evidence and theory both clearly point to linearity making far more sense.

In my next article, I will explain the calculation of draft-pick cost in the Dollars per WAR framework, and the importance of discount rate while doing so. Once that piece is finished, the framework will be defined clearly enough that we can begin looking at the evolution of market inefficiencies.

By now, you’ve probably heard of The Freeze. Although many would say he flopped in his All-Star Game appearance, The Freeze has nevertheless become a sensation in Atlanta. There’s a reason he was invited to the All-Star Game in the first place. The premise: Between innings, some lucky fan gets to try to run pole to pole, in the outfield. The fan is given a head start of several seconds, after which The Freeze gets to sprint after him. It’s a regular footrace, except that one of the contestants is some random individual with limited training, and the other is a world-class sprinter. Hence the head start. It tends not to matter. You’ve seen the footage, and, every damn time, it’s amazing. The closing speed is unfathomable.

On a related note, Mike Trout is back. Most importantly, that’s great news for Trout and for the Angels, but hereabouts, we don’t have a particular Angels lean. They’re one of 30 ballclubs, and it doesn’t make a real difference to me what they do. We’re people who love Trout and statistics, and, officially, Trout will have missed a month and a half with a tear in his thumb. Which means that, if Trout stays healthy the rest of the way, he’ll play three quarters of one season. The other top players should play four quarters of one season. Where is Trout going to finish in WAR?

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Welcome to the final installment of this year’s Trade Value series; you can find links to the previous five posts above. If you’re not familiar with this project, there’s an explanation of the process in the HM post, so that’s the best place to start.

As a reminder for those who don’t like clicking links, however, the five-year WAR projections are based on Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS forecasts, though the players aren’t ranked based on those projections; these figures are included merely as a piece of information to help round out the picture. The guaranteed-dollars line measures the amount of money the player is owed outside of team options or arbitration years; for most of these guys, team options are very likely to be exercised, and many of them will end up making more than the guaranteed-dollars number reports.

Now let’s turn our attention to today’s top 10. In reality, this ended up being two groups of five, with plenty of room for movement within those two groups. And at the very top of the list was the toughest call I’ve ever had to make in putting this project together. The amount of great young talent in the game right now is simply remarkable.

Just as a note: I’ll be chatting about this list at 12 p.m. ET, so if you have any questions, feel free to swing by and I’ll answer as many as I can. Now, on to the top 10.

Corey Kluber was already amazing. He might actually be getting better, though. His strikeout rate has jumped from 26% to 34%. His ground-ball rate is at a career high, but so is his infield-fly rate. He still throttles contact quality. With the way he’s pitching now, he’s in that next tier of non-Kershaw starters. He’s everything you want in an ace.

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It’s the All-Star break, and the Houston Astros have 60 wins. That’s more wins than they had in all of 2013. It’s more wins than they had in all of 2012. It’s more wins than they had in all of 2011. Now, those Astros teams were supposed to be bad, and this Astros team was supposed to be good. No one ever expected it to be this good. No baseball team is ever expected to be this good.

There’s credit to be spread all around, but this is a post that’s focusing on the hitters, so, let’s focus on the hitters. I pretty much always choose to eliminate pitcher hitting performance, so, keep that minor factor in mind. The Astros, in April, had a 106 wRC+. They scored 4.5 runs per game. In May, they had a 129 wRC+. They scored 6.2 runs per game. In June, they had a 131 wRC+. They scored 5.8 runs per game. And so far in July, they have a 191 wRC+, and that’s a 191, not any other number, like 181 or 171 — it is not a typographical error. They’ve scored 9.8 runs per game. Over the past 30 days, the Astros as a team have combined for a 153 wRC+, which is incidentally right where you find Paul Goldschmidt. It’s been a month of a team of Paul Goldschmidts.

These Astros hitters have been insane. In just a short few minutes, I’d like to provide you with some historical context.

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There’s a fairly prevalent belief that teams should be reluctant to trade with other teams in the same city. Something to do with rivalries, or whatever. You don’t want to have a valuable former asset helping out some other club just a few miles away. Indeed, if you examine trading histories, these moves are fairly uncommon. Baseball has established a precedent by which intra-city ballclubs seldom come together for a swap. However, that’s stupid. The Cubs and White Sox realize that’s stupid, and so, as of Thursday morning, we’ve got ourselves a blockbuster.

Cubs get:

• Jose Quintana

White Sox get:

• Eloy Jimenez
• Dylan Cease
• Matt Rose
• Bryant Flete

It’s long been fairly obvious that Quintana was going to get moved. While he’s a long-term asset, he’s really a short-term asset under long-term control, and the White Sox probably would’ve liked to have moved him last winter. Seeing Quintana get dealt isn’t surprising. It’s also not surprising to see the Cubs jump on a cost-controlled, somewhat young starter. This has been the rumor for what feels like years. They developed their bats, and they’ve needed to acquire pitching. Quintana is said pitching. Everything about this makes sense, once you move beyond whatever shock you might feel about the two Chicago teams reaching an agreement. This is a sensible exchange. It’s also a total doozy.

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