“Overconfidence is a powerful source of illusions, primarily determined by the quality and coherence of the story that you can construct, not by its validity.” – Daniel Kahneman

If the 2019 Indians thought they the lone contenders in the AL Central, the Minnesota Twins very quickly disabused them of that notion. Cleveland still fought their way to a 93-69 record, but after a quiet offseason, the loss of some key players, and a final run at the playoffs destroyed by a five-game losing streak, this is a team that ought to be haunted by their what-ifs. Much of the team’s core remains intact (at least for now), but with key contributors approaching free agency, these Indians may have peaked.

The Setup

If a baseball season is a marathon, the 2018 Indians were allowed to use a car. They grabbed first place in the AL Central in late April and never relinquished it. The Minnesota Twins ran afoul of the Regression Gods, and the rest of teams in the division were still firmly in the moribund section of their respective rebuilds. With the bullpen not rocking as it had in previous years, Cleveland traded top prospect Francisco Mejía to the San Diego Padres for Brad Hand and Adam Cimber, players who could reinforce the bullpen past 2018. Also added were Leonys Martin and Josh Donaldson, players the team believed could have upside for the playoffs. Read the rest of this entry »

“The timid man calls himself cautious, the sordid man thrifty.” – Publius Syrus

The Mets always feel like an organization on the verge of a giant, hilarious meltdown. But for all the drama that can surround the franchise — whether it’s the manager and a pitcher threatening a beat writer or the team’s strange obsession with Tim Tebow — it frequently puts a competent product on the field. So it was in 2019, as the Mets outlasted most of the National League in the fight for the last playoff spot, eventually finishing a respectable 86-76. The Mets enter the offseason with most of that squad returning, but uncertainty about how much they are actually willing to spend will limit the team’s upside.

The Setup

Is there a franchise with a more pronounced tendency to back their way into success? The Mets didn’t fully commit to Michael Conforto until an All-Star appearance in 2017 made their apparent casual disinterest untenable, and there always seemed to be a bit of annoyance at “having” to play Brandon Nimmo. Despite a .329/.381/.471 debut from Jeff McNeil, the Mets spent much of the winter bringing in veterans who man the positions McNeil was likely to play in the majors. In 2020, McNeil and Conforto will be keys to the team’s success, as will a hopefully healthy Nimmo.

After Sandy Alderson’s contract expired, the Mets turned the page on the era and hired Brodie Van Wagenen, the co-head of the baseball division of CAA Sports. Ignoring for a moment the potential conflicts of interest involved in moving from an agency to the front office, Van Wagenen was a bold hire. I don’t usually think of the Mets as visionaries, but I’d rather teams try something new than go with the safe veteran choice. Aside from those aforementioned conflicts, much of the skillset of a good agent ought to extend to being a good front office executive. Agents have to negotiate contracts, so generally ought to have a keen grasp of how players are valued around the league, and the job of player representation necessarily involves some knowledge of modern analytics. Call me biased, but anyone who knew to go out and hire Russell Carleton and Andrew Perpetua has to be at least somewhat knowledgeable. Read the rest of this entry »

“Who doesn’t enjoy going downhill? That’s when you get to stop pedaling.” – Christian Finnegan

Every successful thing has a peak. The Romans had the Pax Romana. Napoleon had the Battle of Austerlitz. The Simpsons had the Who Shot Mr. Burns? cliffhanger. For the early 21st-century Cubs, it was Michael Martinez grounding out on a mild November evening, giving the team its first World Series championship since 1908. Moistened by celebratory alcohol, this was almost certainly the peak for these Cubs, and even a second championship probably wouldn’t touch the magic of this moment.

Since 2016, the Cubs finished each season a bit less successfully than the previous one. The 2017 team dropped four of five to the Dodgers in the NLCS, and the 2018 team’s end came in a wild card game against the Colorado Rockies. The 2019 team didn’t even make it into October.

The club’s dynasty was built on developing players from within and using their big-market financial heft to play in free agency. These two ingredients have faded into the background in recent years as the team’s farm system has been weakened from trades and graduations while ownership has increasingly embraced a more frugal financial strategy. The Cubs are a team in decline, to the point at which they’re just any old NL Central contender, not a behemoth pushing around the Cardinals or Brewers or Reds. Read the rest of this entry »

“Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre.” – Albert Camus

The 2018 Boston Red Sox won 108 games and dominated the postseason, going 11-3 and winning the World Series. The 2019 Red Sox…did not. It’s hard to call an 84-78 season an unmitigated disaster. Still, the Red Sox were out of the divisional race by June, resulting in president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski getting his pink slip. Replacing Dombrowski is Chaim Bloom, poached from the Tampa Bay Rays, and a public mandate to get the payroll under the luxury tax threshold. Boston, perhaps more than any near-playoff team in 2019, faces an uncertain future.

The Setup

Winning the World Series is every team’s (eventual) goal, and no matter what the Red Sox had done to follow-up on their big 2018 win, nobody was going to take down that flag. For the sequel, the Red Sox decided to go the route of keeping the band mostly together and hoping people would buy the Greatest Hits album. Whether or not it was due to excessive thrift — the Red Sox were safely over the luxury tax threshold — the team did little in the offseason aside from re-signing 2018 midseason acquisitions Nathan Eovaldi and Steve Pearce.

There’s an argument to be made that a roster that wins 108 games one year ought to be at least a serious contender the following year without too many alterations. The danger of that argument, however, is that a team is far more likely to win 108 games when an excessive number of things go right than when the majority of things go sour. Boston’s farm system wasn’t likely to provide much in the way of reinforcements in 2019, making the cost of either inaction or losing players to free agency higher than it would be for teams with greater internal depth.

When it came to the bullpen, inaction would have been an upgrade. Boston’s relief corps was far from the portable fire-starter of this year’s champs, ranking 13th in WAR and sixth in FIP in 2018, but it wasn’t a particularly deep group. The team let Craig Kimbrel and Joe Kelly go, something that 2019 hasn’t exactly forced the organization to regret. Still, the Red Sox needed to replace those contributions somehow, as Kimbrel and Kelly combined from two of the bullpen’s 4 WAR. But Boston didn’t do any of that, instead opting to move the returning relievers up a place, a bit like Darth Vader did with empire personnel every time he lost his temper and force-choked a commanding officer.

The Projection

As someone from Baltimore who grew up rooting against the Yankees, it irked me a bit that even while the Red Sox were winning the World Series, ZiPS thought the Yankees were the better team. That pattern continued in 2019; ZiPS forecast the Red Sox to finish four games behind the Yankees at the start of the season. Of course, Boston’s projected 94 wins were the fourth-most in baseball, so it’s not as if the projection system’s baseline expectation was a disappointing season.

There were, however, some troubling signs in the margins. The rotation projected for a more-than-healthy 18.1 WAR, but ZiPS also saw an enormous gulf after the front five starters. Beyond that group, ZiPS saw non-prospects Matthew Kent and Chandler Shepherd and journeyman reliever Ryan Weber as the team’s best spare options, a troubling ranking considering the propensity pitchers have for breaking. ZiPS loved it some Mookie Betts but saw the team’s lineup as top-heavy, and after Michael Chavis, was unimpressed with the offensive depth. ZiPS’ mean projection for the team was four games worse than the Yankees, but its 10th percentile projection was 10 games worse, which was more a reflection the weakness of the “break glass in case of emergency options” than of the riskiness of the team’s talent.

The Results

Boston started the season by dropping eight of 10 games, failing to win a series outright until they swept the Tampa Bay Rays in late April. Through the end of April, Red Sox starting pitchers posted a 4.73 FIP, better than the likes of teams such as the Orioles, but firmly in the bottom-third of the league. Chris Sale, Nathan Eovaldi, and Rick Porcello all struggled at the start of the season, enough for manager Alex Cora to use a six-man rotation for much of the first half in an attempt to give the starters more rest. Sale recovered somewhat as the season went on, though he never pitched at his usual level of awesomeness; a sore elbow ended his 2019 season early, but as of now, it looks like he has managed to avoid Tommy John surgery. David Price also bowed out early due to a cyst on his wrist that made throwing breaking pitches painful.

A roaring comeback never came for Porcello or Eovaldi. Porcello’s ERA didn’t dip below five after the midseason, and he likely only kept his spot in the rotation because of the various misfortunes of others. Eovaldi missed part of the season with sore biceps, and in order to facilitate a quicker return to action, Boston used him in relief for a spell.

As may have been expected given the team’s lack of depth, once the rotation’s Fab Five fell to ruin, the pitching picture was painted with a bleak palette. Outside Boston’s planned 2019 rotation, the team’s starting pitchers combined for a 6.79 ERA and 23 homers in 119.1 innings. The situation was dire enough that the team banked on Andrew Cashner being able to continue his surprisingly adequate 2019.

He didn’t.

Things were a good deal brighter offensively. Dustin Pedroia was only able to make it into six games, but any contribution was notable. Betts and J.D. Martinez regressed somewhat from their 2018 seasons, but no more than ought to have been reasonably expected by an impartial observer.

Xander Bogaerts had his best season yet, hitting .309/.384/.555 for a 141 wRC+ and 6.8 WAR, with all of those numbers representing career-bests. The Red Sox are lucky they were able to ink Bogaerts to a contract extension in April, as he would certainly have been much more expensive this winter.

It wasn’t all sunny, however. He wasn’t the worst performer on the offense, but Andrew Benintendi was arguably the most disappointing one. In a season that saw 53 players hit 30 or more home runs, Benintendi failed to find another 15 long balls in his bat. He turned some of his liners into fly balls, but a more aggressive approach at the plate hurt his contact numbers more than it helped his bottom line offensive stats. Benintendi looked a lot more like the middle-of-the-pack starter of 2017 than the star-level performer of 2018. He just turned 25 this season, so there’s still time, but as of this moment, I’d struggle to call him a player a team should build around.

In the end, the rotation’s struggles were too much for the offense to overcome. Realistically, even giving Betts and Martinez their 2018 lines wouldn’t have been enough to get the Sox to the playoffs.

What Comes Next?

This question is a pretty big matzah ball for the Red Sox (or whatever the Boston-equivalent of that Seinfeld colloquialism is). The Sox have expressed a public desire to get below the luxury tax threshold for the 2020 season. There’s always the chance that this is a bluff, and that ownership is not really as obsessed with this idea as they’re indicating, but it’s a dangerous game to signal to your paying customers that the product is going to get worse soon.

I’m not sure how this goal can be achieved by just cutting fat here and there. RosterResource projects the Red Sox to be over the luxury tax threshold even if they do nothing this offseason. That means no free agent replacement for Porcello and no veteran signings, short of other moves giving them additional space with which to play. The team is likely to trade Jackie Bradley Jr. and is not-so-subtly shopping Betts. The obvious problem here is that the Red Sox don’t have the in-house replacements to mitigate a JBJ loss, let alone Betts, who my colleague Ben Clemens just argued should not be traded. Betts will fetch real prospects, but if those theoretical prospects could effectively replace Betts in 2019, their current team would likely just play them instead of swapping them for the 2018 AL MVP.

Just as before the 2019 season, Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel have the Red Sox farm system last in future value. Triston Casas‘ first full professional season was enough to get his FV moved up to 50; the Red Sox didn’t have a 50 FV prospect coming into the season, so that’s something, I guess.

Chaim Bloom’s charge with the Red Sox is to restock the farm system while not throwing in the towel on 2020 or 2021. It’s going to be a challenge.

The Absitively, Posilutely, Way-Too-Early ZiPS Projection – Rafael Devers

Rafael Devers’ 2018 line (.240/.298/.433, 90 wRC+, 1.0 WAR) was underwhelming on its face. But it shouldn’t be forgotten that Devers was only 21 in 2018; any 21-year-old prospect who debuted with those numbers would have been hailed as a 2019 breakout candidate. That’s just what Devers did, hitting .311/.361/.555 with 32 homers, 54 doubles, and a spine-tingling 5.9 WAR. Devers rose to elite territory in average exit velocity (16th in the majors), and there’s still room in his swing to get more loft and turn some of those doubles into home runs. Devers is unlikely ever to be a serious Gold Glove candidate — I won’t say never because of Marcus Semien — but he made great strides in his defense in 2019, cutting his errors by a third.

Devers is a legitimate star at the hot corner and should be a foundational player for the Red Sox over the next decade or so. Coming into 2019, ZiPS had Devers as the seventh ranked third baseman in terms of career WAR remaining, behind Vladimir Guerrero Jr., Jose Ramirez, Alex Bregman, Manny Machado, Matt Chapman, and Kris Bryant. That’s a tough crowd to break into, but I would not be shocked to see Devers ascend into the top five.

Devers’ WAR obviously won’t be quite this stable — this is a projection after all — but that’s the forecast of a top third baseman.

“Unhappiness lies in that gap between our talents and our expectations.” – Sebastian Horsley

If you had any questions about where in their rebuilding cycle the Phillies saw themselves as being, the signing of Bryce Harper and the trade for J.T. Realmuto should have been big clues. Philadelphia planned to build on 2018, a surprisingly competitive season that ended in an even more surprising total collapse and residual, Fortnite-related stress. Instead, the Phils ended up winning just one more game than last year, a failure that ended manager Gabe Kapler’s brief reign.

The Setup

The Phillies had every reason to look forward to the offseason after 2018. The year may have ended on a sour note due to a late collapse, but there were plenty of optimism. Unlike the team’s luck-infused 71-91 record in 2016, its surge to an 80-82 record had some real force behind it. With the exception of Carlos Santana, the entire starting lineup was still in their 20s, Aaron Nola had stepped into Cy Young contender territory, and the team’s young bullpen arms were beginning to work out.

And most importantly, the Phillies had “stupid money.” These aren’t even my snarky words, but a direct quote from ownership. In an offseason when most teams were looking to refinance their mortgages, the Phillies planned to build a fancy new casino. No free agent was out of reach, and while it took them until nearly March to close the deal, the team landed Harper on a 13-year, $330 million contract.

But the Phillies weren’t aggressive in the market otherwise. Andrew McCutchen was brought in for three years and $50 million, and David Robertson was scooped up for two years to make the front end of the team’s bullpen look a bit scarier. But one thing was missing in free agency: another starting pitcher to join Nola. Read the rest of this entry »

“How ridiculous and how strange to be surprised at anything which happens in life.” – Marcus Aurelius, (translated from The Meditations)

The Arizona Diamondbacks didn’t enter last offseason with a plan to burn everything to ashes and then burn the ashes. After all, being able to choose how to rebuild is one of the benefits of not waiting until circumstances have eliminated more appealing options. Arizona remained in contention despite trading Paul Goldschmidt last offseason and shedding Eephus god Zack Greinke in July, and the club looks like a viable Wild Card contender entering 2020.

The Setup

The D-backs faced a Goldschmidt-sized conundrum after the 2018 season. The longtime middle-of-the-order slugger was a year from free agency, and the team couldn’t have been thrilled at the prospect of an extension for an aging first baseman, a deal likely to eclipse $25 million a year. The 2018 team went just 82-80 with Goldschmidt, and the improving farm system was still far from elite, so it made the decision to trade a single year of America’s First Baseman if the right package came along. The Cardinals made the winning offer in the form of Carson Kelly, Luke Weaver, Andy Young, and a Competitive Balance Round B pick; in Weaver and Kelly, Arizona received two players with the potential to contribute immediately in crucial roles, softening the loss Goldschmidt.

While there was some concern from the fan base that this move heralded the start of an old-fashioned fire sale, nothing quite so dramatic actually materialized. Endless rumors swirled around Greinke, but Arizona wasn’t, and the team was more than happy to have its ace return for the 2019 season. Arizona saw Christian Walker as the best candidate to replace Goldschmidt at first, and with Walker out of options, the team hoped he’d make a case for a starting job in spring training (he did). Read the rest of this entry »

“A pessimist gets nothing but pleasant surprises, an optimist nothing but unpleasant.” – Rex Stout, Fer-de-Lance

Of all the realistic playoff contenders in 2019, the one that surprised me the most was the Texas Rangers. I have a feeling the Rangers were equally startled. Without successfully developing a new rotation from within or reaching the point when the wallets would be opened for prime free agent talent, the Rangers spent much of 2019 with realistic Wild Card hopes. Texas played under the .500 mark after the All-Star break and fell safely out of postseason contention, but you can’t say it wasn’t enjoyable.

The Setup

It’s always hard to say goodbye to your greatest victories. The Rangers have a rich and storied history of decent-but-unspectacular success since moving to Texas. Never triumphant as the Washington Senators II: Electric Boogaloo, the team had plenty of interesting eras populated with fascinating seasons, but it took until the 1990s for the team to make the playoffs and nearly another 15 years for the team to start winning there. While I’d be hard-pressed to call the 2010s Rangers a true dynasty, five playoff appearances in seven seasons, including two World Series, is a track record a lot of teams would envy.

But anything that can’t last forever won’t. The team’s core faded or departed, and by the time their most recent winning season rolled around in 2016, the Rangers were mainly running on the fumes of past squads. Not helping matters were two giant financial gambles meant to forestall the decline that I argued were monumental blunders: swapping Ian Kinsler for Prince Fielder and signing Shin-Soo Choo to a seven-year, $130 million contract.

The team avoided doing the full slash-and-burn rebuild, hoping instead that a few of the youngish players such as Joey Gallo and Rougned Odor were part of the foundation for the next contending Texas team. Developing a new rotation was slower progress, and the veteran fill-ins meant to eat innings mostly bombed in 2018. Ten pitchers started at least five games for the 2018 Rangers, but only three returned to the team in 2019: Mike Minor, Ariel Jurado, and Yohander Méndez. Jurickson Profar was shipped out to enhance minor league depth. Otherwise, the team’s most significant offseason move was a three-year, $30 million contract with Lance Lynn; Shelby Miller’s one-year deal was of the lottery ticket variety. Bringing in Lynn was an interesting FIP vs. ERA gamble, for while Lynn added a run in ERA from 2017 to 2018, he also subtracted a run in FIP.

The Projection

At the start of the season, ZiPS was quite pessimistic about Texas’ chances of cobbling together an adequate rotation. At 68-94, ZiPS gave the Rangers the second-worst chances of making the playoffs in the American League, only barely escaping the rounding-to-zero humiliation of the Baltimore Orioles. While there was a very good argument to be made that the Rangers had more going for them than the AL Central also-rans, they also played in a significantly tougher division.

ZiPS expected little from the pitching staff after league-average Mike Minor/Lance Lynn projections, and while the offensive projections were slightly less bleak, only Joey Gallo was forecast to eclipse the two-win mark. Even the team’s younger hitters, like Rougned Odor and Nomar Mazara, had serious concerns that held down the projections. When would Odor stop going into half-season slumps? How do you shape Mazara’s raw power into a more refined version?

Better seasons were on the menu — a large market team with a new park would be unlikely to cry poor — but the computer did not see one of those as coming in 2019.

The Results

The Rangers didn’t burst out of the gate in 2019, but they played far better baseball than I expected. I was quite harsh about the team keeping Hunter Pence on the roster over Willie Calhoun, but Pence had a lot more baseball remaining than I expected and hit .294/.353/.608 before a groin injury sidelined him in mid-June. Minor and Lynn weren’t just adequate, but elevated the rotation to near-adequacy in the first half of the season, combining for 232 innings with a 3.22 ERA. Minor made the All-Star Game for the first time in his career, and Lynn spent much of the season leading the American League in FIP.

One of the best bits of news for the Rangers was Joey Gallo finally breaking out. It may seem odd to talk about a player with two 40-homer seasons as a disappointment, but Gallo’s low batting averages — even by 2010s standards — suppressed his on-base and slugging percentages enough to make it a stretch to call him a star. While you didn’t see it in his pure strikeout rate, Gallo knocked a whole quarter off of his out-of-zone swing percentage in 2019. That resulted in him getting far more non-homer hits than usual, enough to add 50 points to his batting average. Gallo’s not a speed demon, but he’s not Albert Pujols-slow either, and combined with his raw power, ZiPS was always befuddled why his career BABIP lingered stubbornly around the .250 mark. It will be hard to maintain the .368 BABIP he posted this year, but I think Gallo’s a more well-rounded hitter than he used to be.

Texas lingered around .500 for most of the summer, but that success was shallow and predicated on riding the bullpen and a small number of elite performances. The non-Lynn and Minor parts of the rotation contributed an abysmal 6.63 ERA. The offense’s 94 wRC+ was largely Gallo-driven, and when he broke the hamate bone in his wrist in July, ending his season with a .253/.389/.598 line, Texas’s offense collapsed; the Rangers put up an 80 wRC+ in the second half, which led only the Detroit Tigers.

Still in contention at the trade deadline, the organization faced a difficult question. Throwing in the towel when your playoff chances are more than theoretical is a tough decision, and if the Rangers were going to stay in the race, they’d have to figure out how to replace Gallo’s bat. The team decided — rightly, in my opinion — not to become buyers, but consistent with their skinny-rebuild, didn’t dump everyone with value. Their one big deadline trade, picking up Kolby Allard from the Braves for reliever Chris Martin, was one that would have been hard for any team to pass up. Likely getting unimpressive offers for Mike Minor in light of the weak return for Marcus Stroman, the Rangers kept the rest of the team together and played out the string.

What Comes Next?

As pleasant as it was to play meaningful baseball in 2019, the Rangers didn’t answer many questions. Picking up Nick Solak was a coup, but Rougned Odor was still undependable, Nomar Mozara’s breakout continued to elude him, and Delino DeShields lost 30 points of OBP over the summer. Elvis Andrus’s .242/.283/.322 second half again raises questions as to whether his 2016-2017 “comeback” was temporary. José Leclerc recovered from his early-season struggles, but I’d be lying if I said I was as high on him entering 2020 as I was in 2019.

I hate to say it about a team that decided not to go the full-tank route, but I feel that 2019’s success will be hard to build on in 2020. You can’t expect Lynn and Minor to match their 2019s, and given their ages and contract situations, winter trades are likely still in the club’s interest. A Calhoun-DeShields-Gallo outfield ought to be fine, but I don’t share that optimism with the non-Solak parts of the infield.

Looking at THE BOARD does not fill me with optimism either. The farm system boasts far more quantity than quality as it currently stands. The team has a whopping 44 prospects with a projected 40-grade or higher, but only a single 50. And that 50, Solak, is already accounted for above. ZiPS only shows significantly more promising results in Leody Taveras. There are no pitching prospects in the top 100 (and nobody I’d quibble with Eric and Kiley over) and few signs of a long-term first baseman or catcher.

The team has money to spend and could theoretically land Gerrit Cole and Anthony Rendon and Yasmani Grandal, should the mood strike them. The problem is that I’m no longer sure that would be quite enough. Some of their lesser prospects will work out, but when sorting through that many maybes, you need time and a lot of roster space.

I’m not as down on the team’s future as this may make me sound, but I’m very down on its turnaround happening as quickly as 2019’s record suggests.

The Absitively, Posilutely, Way-Too-Early ZiPS Projection – Lance Lynn

I liked the Lance Lynn signing and you can’t claim Texas didn’t win this one. While ZiPS never got too excited about Lynn in 2019, I think a lot of that was due to the nature of the in-season model being simpler than the season-to-season model. Lynn had the best fastball velocity of his career in 2019, a relevant stat for a player whose repertoire largely consists of three fastball variants. His two-seamer/sinker has always been the weakest of the three, with batters hitting nearly .300 against it over Lynn’s career. Lynn dialed back the use of the pitch in 2019, relying more on his bog-standard fastball and cutter. The extra velocity on the regular fastball — Lynn could push it to the high 90s at times — gave him some separation from the cutter. Lynn even added a bit of velocity to his vertically oriented curveball, enough to fool pitch algorithms into sometimes thinking it was a splitter.

The computer’s buying it. Meeting this projection actually makes Lynn one of the most valuable veteran pitchers potentially available this offseason. While I’m not sure whether the team will actually go that route, I think Lynn showed enough to net a package I wouldn’t have thought possible for him a few years ago.

“He who never made a mistake, never made a discovery.” – Josh Billings

The Cincinnati Reds used an unusual strategy during the 2018-2019 offseason: trying. OK, that’s a bit hyperbolic, but while last winter’s actual weather was mild, we saw a veritable blizzard of excuses in baseball. As top free agents remained unsigned going into spring training, we heard all sorts of reasoning from teams about why they couldn’t sign this guy or couldn’t afford that guy or why that player over there in the corner was impossible for them to acquire. No, the Reds didn’t pursue Bryce Harper or Manny Machado, but they did make aggressive moves to turn the team into a winner in the short-term, seeing an opportunity in an NL Central where every team had serious flaws. It didn’t quite work out, but many of the reasons they looked like a promising team in 2019 apply to the club in 2020 as well.

The Setup

I appreciated Cincinnati’s ambition last winter, even if I didn’t like every move they made. To be fair, the Reds didn’t go into the offseason intending to please one particularly sarcastic, overweight, middle-aged baseball analyst. But as noted above, there moves were a refreshing departure from baseball’s version of Rasputitsa.

Cincinnati went 67-95 in 2018, and adding 25 wins in one offseason was always going to be difficult. To start with, they needed all of their returning players to be the best versions of themselves. That meant Joey Votto needed to hold off serious decline for another year. Scooter Gennett had to play like an All-Star again. Ideally, Nick Senzel and Jesse Winker would have both been healthy and All-Star candidates themselves. Second-half Luis Castillo would have to become both-halves Luis Castillo. Read the rest of this entry »

“No man is rich enough to buy back his past.” – Oscar Wilde

With three World Series wins over the last decade, it would be a bit greedy for fans of the Giants to bemoan the team’s current state too strenuously. San Francisco fell out of their even-year championship pattern in 2016 and finished the last three seasons with losing records. With the key players of the dynasty either past their prime or gone completely, the club’s laudable goal of putting a quality team on the field every year has become a tricky one to fulfill.

The Setup

Unlike other formerly competitive teams such as the Tigers and Orioles, the Giants were in no mood to head full-bore into a rebuild in 2018. San Francisco rightly realized that the outfield was a major weakness, but the club struck out in their attempts to acquire Giancarlo Stanton, Christian Yelich, and Marcell Ozuna. Unable to be one of the teams pillaging the Marlins during that organization’s latest payroll temper tantrum, the Giants picked up Andrew McCutchen in a trade with the Pittsburgh Pirates in return for Bryan Reynolds, Kyle Crick, and international bonus money. That trade doesn’t look all that phenomenal in 2019 terms given the season Reynolds had, but it was a necessary one given San Francisco’s 2018 goals. Evan Longoria was also acquired in the hopes he could bounce back to being the star he had been for most of his 20s.

As we all know now, 2018 firmly demonstrated that 2017’s 64-98 record wasn’t some horrifying outlier. While the Giants were clearly had not given up on competing, the team’s attempts to stay under the luxury tax threshold made any October aspirations more difficult to achieve. There would be no Lorenzo Cain, no J.D. Martinez, and no Yu Darvish signed in free agency to reinforce the team’s declining core. In any event, none of those signings would have salvaged San Francisco’s 2018 campaign. McCutchen himself didn’t even finish the season with the Giants, as he was sent to the Yankees at the August trade deadline.

San Francisco entered last winter with competitive aspirations, and a combination of a $10 million bump in the luxury tax threshold and $25 million in expiring contracts to Hunter Pence and Matt Cain gave the team a bit of breathing room to add to the roster. One big addition, though not of the roster variety, was that of Farhan Zaidi, formerly the GM of the Dodgers, as head of baseball operations. Zaidi wasn’t brought in — at least at that point — to spearhead a full rebuild, and the Giants went after one of the offseason’s top prizes in free agent outfielder Bryce Harper. The Giants offered Harper 12 years and $310 million, but Harper instead took Philadelphia’s 13-year, $330 million offer. Read the rest of this entry »

“Life is like a sewer; what you get out of it depends on what you put into it.” – Tom Lehrer

Coming off of three consecutive NL East titles from 1990 to ’92, the Pirates lost Bobby Bonilla and Barry Bonds in back-to-back offseasons and quickly descended into the divisional basement. Unlike Chuck Cunningham in Happy Days, the Pirates didn’t just take the stairs and disappear forever. Vanishing from history would probably have been more merciful than what actually happened; the Pirates became the justified butt of baseball jokes. Run by Cam Bonifay and Dave Littlefield for the 15 years that followed, Pittsburgh filled out the entire Bingo Card of Incompetence. They drafted poorly, and gave bizarre contracts to players like Pat Meares and Kevin Young, who couldn’t even be called tertiary talent, and appeared to be on a mad quest to trade any developed star for as little as possible.

Unlike many organizations, which have one single, horrific move worth mocking, it’s difficult to decide which situation was the most embarrassing for the Pirates. Was it the time they signed Meares to a one-year contract after he was non-tendered, then gave him a four-year deal after a week of a .508 OPS? Was it trading Aramis Ramirez and not getting a single real prospect in return? Was it picking up Matt Morris and his contract for no particular reason? Or was it paying Derek Bell $4.5 million to live on his boat? I’d be hard-pressed to choose when the Pirates were the most de-pantsed.

Overcoming 15 years of haplessness was the challenge set to Frank Coonelly and Neal Huntington when they took over the Pirates’ day-to-day operations in September 2007. They cleaned the Augean stables, remaking the organization from top-to-bottom and turning it into one that looked like its more modern contemporaries. They brought in analysts, integrated contemporary sabermetric approaches, and found a pitching coach in Ray Searage who could help them turn straw into gold. And for a while, it worked. Blowing through the .500 threshold, the Pirates won 94, 88, and 98 games, making three consecutive postseasons for only the second team in the team’s history. Read the rest of this entry »