The Diamondbacks are building a Boston culture in the desert. That’s according to Amiel Sawdaye, who has the title of Senior Vice President, Assistant General Manager. Sawdaye came to Arizona over the offseason along with Mike Hazen, who stepped into the GM role in October. Both had long tenures with the Red Sox, with Sawdaye most recently serving as Vice President of Amateur and International Scouting.

They didn’t travel west alone. Jared Porter was with the Red Sox for over a decade before spending last season as Director of Professional Scouting for the Chicago Cubs. His title with the D-Backs is the same as Sawdaye’s. Meanwhile, Torey Lovullo, Arizona’s new manager, was Boston’s bench coach the past four seasons.

Sawdaye explained what the foursome’s Boston roots mean for the organization, including its use of analytics and the adaptation of a flat hierarchy.

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Sawdaye on coming to Arizona from Boston: “From the standpoint of coming here, we’re in a different league — we have to look at things a little differently — but despite what people might think, a lot of things were being done really well. A lot of good was happening behind the scenes. There are some really good people here. Mike Bell, who oversees the player development department, has done a great job.
 
“There are a lot of really good young people in the front office. Read the rest of this entry »

Geography is a powerful force. In his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, for instance, Jared Diamond argues that geography is the most powerful force to have shaped civilization. Societies that have benefited from favorable geography and access to resources have enjoyed more prosperity than those that have not.

In baseball, geography has mattered quite a bit, too.

Generally, teams residing along the coasts are located in larger markets and enjoy more fans — which means they enjoy more paying customers, more advertising dollars and corporate sponsors, and greater TV deals, too. The Yankees, residing in the game’s largest market, own 27 World Series titles. Teams based in the fly-over country cities of St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Kansas City and Milwaukee, have combined for 32 World Series titles, with the Cardinals alone accounting for 11 of those.

So perhaps the lasting legacy, the top achievement of Bud Selig, was ushering in an era of greater competitive balance that made geography and market size less deterministic. The small-market Royals won the World Series in 2015, and small-market Cleveland was one more timely hit away from doing so last fall. Twenty-one of the sports’ 30 franchises have advanced to the postseason since 2013, and every team has reached the postseason in the 21st century.

In the 1990s, competitive balance, the divide between the large- and small-market clubs, was a frequent talking point. In the latest round of collective-bargaining talks, it was not often the subject of discussion outside caps placed on international spending. For The Hardball Times last month, Gerald Schifman demonstrated objectively that “hope and faith” are at record levels in baseball. The majority of teams enter the season with a plausible path to at least the No. 2 Wild Card. I wrote in 2015, about how fly-over country was no longer irrelevant.

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Last week, I wrote up what I thought were the 10 best transactions made this winter, looking at teams that helped themselves the most with quality upgrades. Today, we tackle the flip side of that coin, and look at the moves that I liked the least.

However, because of the significant improvements teams have made in their decision-making processes, the reality is that this list simply lacks the magnitude of the best moves of the winter. It was really quite difficult to find even 10 transactions that I think did real damage to the franchises that made them, and the ones that ended up towards the end of this list are the kinds of boring little moves that most fans aren’t even going to realize happened.

Even at the top of this list, we’re looking at teams spending a little inefficiently on useful players who can help them win, with no real huge overpays or franchise-killing contracts that will be regretted for years to come. There were no “what were they thinking?” trades this year, no insane free-agent signings that show a huge gap between the market’s perception and a player’s on-field value. So, these are deals I liked the least in a winter full of mostly good moves. At this point, every team knows what they’re doing, and they just aren’t giving us much meat for these kinds of columns.

But symmetry says we have to publish it anyway, so here are the 10 moves for which I didn’t entirely care this offseason.

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Mike Montgomery threw the pitch that ended 108 years of frustration for Cubs fans everywhere. Three-plus months later, he’s in camp competing for the fifth-starter spot in Chicago’s rotation. If that doesn’t come to fruition, the southpaw will settle for being a valuable bullpen arm on a juggernaut.

A lot has changed in 12 months. Montgomery was a Mariner at this time last year — he came to the Cubs in July — and his old club wasn’t expecting much from him.

“Seattle basically told me I wasn’t going to make the team,” Montgomery said during the World Series. “I bet on myself. I said I was going to show up and earn a spot, and that I was going to pitch well. I had some success — I had some failures, too — but it was kind of my breakthrough.”

Eight years after being drafted 36th overall the Kansas City Royals, the now 27-year-old lefty finally stepped up his game. He made 47 appearances between Seattle and Chicago — all but seven as a reliever — and fashioned a 2.52 ERA over 100 innings.

An improved curveball was the catalyst. The pitch was a primary focus going into the season, and it became an even bigger one once Montgomery got to Chicago. Pitching coach Chris Bosio played a major role. Read the rest of this entry »

Here are some undeniable facts.

1. Dellin Betances was the third-best reliever in baseball by WAR last year.
2. He has the third-best strikeout rate, all-time, among pitchers who have thrown at least 250 innings.
3. He has 22 career saves, with 12 of them coming last year.

Betances, eligible for arbitration for the first time, filed for a $5 million salary this winter; the Yankees countered at $3 million. This was the second largest gap for any player that got to the filing stage this year, only $100,000 behind the $2.1 million difference that Drew Pomeranz ($5.7M request) had with the Red Sox ($3.6M offer), and unlike the Red Sox, the Yankees decided to not split the difference and instead head to a hearing.

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With apologies to Pedro Alvarez, just about every decent bat in this winter’s free-agent class has signed. We heard all winter about how the market for the offense-first, defensively limited sluggers was a bad one this offseason, and we saw many players sign contracts for less than expected. This happened to those at the highest levels — like Edwin Encarnacion who took a shorter deal than anticipated — as well as at the lower end, where many players expected to receive multi-year deals had to settle for one-year contracts. There was a general lack of talent among free agents this offseason, but the glut of mediocre options likely played into a depressed market.

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Living amidst the rolling hills of Western Pennsylvania, ignoring a snow-and-ice covered driveway isn’t an option for me. Our property’s concrete access to the garage includes what seems like a 30-degree slope to reach the street. While I work from home, my wife does not. My wife and I do not own four-wheel drive automobiles. So, as is the case for many others, knowing that pitchers and catchers have reported is one of the first signs the thaw is near.

Visual evidence, courtesy the author.

But spring officially remains, of course, more than a month away.

While “pitchers and catchers reporting” is a romantic phrase that warms the heart and while it boosts the morale to see footage of players stretching and playing catch on sun-soaked diamonds in Arizona and Florida via MLB Network, another snowfall or two likely awaits. It’s still very much winter and spring training remains a really long period, though it will be shortened by two days in 2018 in accordance with the new CBA to allow for extra days off in the regular season.

Still, the length of spring training is increasingly unnecessary for the vast majority of those involved, a point made by Adam Kilgore for the Washington Post. Pitchers require – or at least baseball thinks they require – about six weeks to stretch out their arms for the regular season. For everyone else, though, the length spring training provides little benefit. Said Ryan Zimmerman to the Post:

“People are showing up more ready than they used to be, and we haven’t really changed anything,” Zimmerman said. “We haven’t adjusted to what the professional athlete does in the offseason now. I understand it. For me as a position player, it’s unnecessary.”

Zimmerman didn’t supply alternatives to reshape and re-imagine the spring, but perhaps spring training’s length and format has become a prisoner to tradition. Has anyone or any team thought about a dramatically different way to maximize spring training? I’m not aware of one, though perhaps there are incremental changes being implemented that go mostly unnoticed or unreported.

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You might have heard that Clayton Kershaw is good at pitching. He’s Hercules and Sandy Koufax merged together at the molecular level. He’s faster than a speeding bullet, more powerful than a locomotive, and able to throw over tall buildings with a single curve. He’s SuperPitcher. Much like Mike Trout, Kershaw is the sort of athlete who could easily serve as the genesis of a daily newsletter with interesting factoids about said athlete. The more you dig around on statistical leaderboards and in his ledger, the more ridiculous little nuggets of gold you can dig up.

Take, for instance, this:

One of these things is not like the other. WHIP isn’t a perfect indicator of pitcher success, because the number of hits allowed by a pitcher is impacted by the defense playing behind him, and walks are affected by the framing quality of a pitcher’s catcher. It is, however, a generally fun statistic and is usually useful when one is in pursuit of a general picture of a pitcher’s ability to limit baserunners. The full leaderboard is here, and as you can see, it generally consists of pitchers who kicked ass in 2016.

Let’s talk about the top portion of that leaderboard, though, which has been reproduced in the table above. Of the 10 pitchers included here, Kershaw is the only one who’s a full-time starting pitcher. (Devenski started five games but had the bulk of his success in relief.) You have to go down to the 16th spot on the leaderboard to find the next starter, Max Scherzer (who’s followed by Kyle Hendricks and Rich Hill). Scherzer’s WHIP was 25 points higher than Kershaw’s. This is largely due to the fact that Kershaw walked just 11 men all year, and would have set the modern record for strikeout-to-walk ratio had he been a qualified starter.

One of the great injustices of baseball is that Kershaw hurt his back last year, because we’ll never know if he would have been able to keep up that sheer lunacy over the course of a full season. His 1.69 ERA in 149 regular-season innings was lower than Pedro Martinez’s 1.74 in his ridiculous 2000 campaign. Kershaw also bested Pedro’s 2000 in FIP and WHIP, with Pedro taking the edge in DRA. If you look at all starting-pitcher seasons since 2000, set the minimum innings requirement at 140, and sort by WHIP, Kershaw’s 2016 and Pedro’s 2000 represent the top two figures. Four of the top 10 seasons over that timeframe belong to Kershaw. The fact that we’re even conducting a flawed (Pedro threw 217 innings that year, and in a different offensive era) comparison of these two men and not totally throwing the stats out with the bathwater is remarkable.

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Pitchers and catchers are in the house, we unfortunately have our first major spring training injury, and our offseason series of contact management/quality articles rolls toward its conclusion. Earlier this week, we examined American League pitching non-qualifiers; today, our eyes turn to the senior circuit.

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The 2016 season was a great one, statistically, for Ian Kinsler. By WAR, wRC+ and wOBA, it was (at least) one of the best three seasons of his career — a career that should garner a modicum of Hall of Fame debate when he retires. But in looking at his Steamer projection for this season, I started to wonder — is this the season we should start to worry about Ian Kinsler?

What immediately stands out in Kinsler’s Steamer projection is a drop in wOBA and WAR. Steamer forecasts him for just a .320 wOBA. It would be the second-worst mark of Kinsler’s soon-to-be 12-year career, and only by one point (he posted a .319 wOBA in 2014, his first year in Detroit). Steamer calls for Kinsler to produce 2.8 WAR. While that would represent a good year for most second basemen, it would be the second-worst mark in 10 seasons for Kinsler (who posted 2.6 WAR in 2013). Simply put, Kinsler is generally a lot better than those numbers.

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