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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Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
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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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Are you nostalgic for 2015? There are a few reasons to be, not the least of which is Fetty Wap’s Billboard dominance. Or, you know, when home runs were more rare. Back when the ball’s seams were probably higher and balls didn’t travel as far. Back when hitting 20 homers by the half was tough to do, and there weren’t 24 players that had done so by the All-Star Game.

What if we could go back?

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It’s that time of year again: baseball is taking most of the week off to host an exhibition game, and we’re ranking the 50 most valuable trade chips in baseball while they do so. If you aren’t familiar with the series, go read the honorable-mentions post, which includes the introduction and an explanation of what this whole thing is.

As one additional point of explanation, the tables that we’re including below show a few pieces of information: the years remaining before the player is eligible for free agency, whether those years are covered by the arbitration system or a multi-year contract, the guaranteed money owed to the player if a long-term deal is in place, and the ZiPS projections for the player for each year that he’s under control of his current club. The ZiPS forecasts are there to help you get an idea for what one forecasting system thinks of the player’s long-term future, though the players are not ranked solely based on these projections. At the end of the post, we’ll summarize each individual player’s information box with a grid showing all the players ranked in the series so far, and that grid includes the same reference information.

With that said, let’s get right to the guys who made the final 10 spots on the Trade Value list this year.

This last spot was really tough. There are so many players you could put here, with probably 10 to 15 guys having just as strong a case as Lamb for this spot. Even just within third baseman, you could make a case for Justin Turner or Kyle Seager, and then there are all the other good players at other positions who didn’t quite make the cut. If you feel strongly that some other player should be No. 50, I probably don’t disagree with you. Rounding out the list turned into an exercise of picking one of many similarly valuable players.

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Welcome to All-Star week, which around here means it’s once again time for our annual Trade Value series. I’ve been doing this project now for 13 years, dating back to 2005, and have been doing it here since 2008. The project has grown in scope over time, but thanks to help from friends like Dan Szymborski and Sean Dolinar, I think the current presentation is as good as it’s ever been.

For those new to the series, the list is an attempt to answer the question of who would bring back the most in trade for his team if he were to be put on the market and made available before the deadline. Because different teams have varying resources and roster needs, we’re not saying that if one player is ranked ahead of another player, the team with the lower-ranked player would make a one-for-one swap for the higher-ranked player; there are some teams that will put more of a premium on short-term value while others who are looking to maximize long-term potential, and salary is a larger factor for some organizations than others. Of course, every team would love to have a player who contributes both now and in the future, and does so without consuming a large part of their budget; guys who check all of those boxes will rank at the very top of this list.

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Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
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Over the winter, the Dodgers re-signed Rich Hill. They did so because they knew that, when he was able to pitch, Hill looked like one of the best starting pitchers in the game. And then 2017 went and got underway. Through the earlier part of 2017, Hill looked like one of the more frustrating starting pitchers in the game. The stuff, for the most part, remained there, but Hill didn’t have his same control, and his remarkable curveball was no longer working. I wrote about Hill in the middle of June, at which point his curveball had the lowest run value among all curveballs, out of everyone. It made me wonder where, exactly, Rich Hill was. Could someone who reappeared so suddenly disappear with similar speed?

Since I wrote about Hill and his struggles, he’s gone back to looking like one of the best starting pitchers in the game. In three starts, he’s allowed four runs over 19 innings, with six walks and 26 strikeouts. The easy explanation is that Hill has simply regressed to the mean. That is, his newer mean, the one he began establishing a couple years ago. That explanation would ignore the changes that Hill has folded in. Regression to the mean isn’t an automatic process. Rich Hill has simultaneously simplified and grown more complex.

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According to this weekend’s ESPN Sunday Night Telecast, Bryce Harper has, in recent years, often performed his pregame routine and taken batting practice indoors, in the bowels of major-league ballparks, much to the disappointment of ballhawks across America. But Harper revealed himself over the weekend in St. Louis, taking BP on the field, and any time a star like Harper deviates from a routine, it raises curiosity. During the broadcast, ESPN’s Jessica Mendoza related how she’d asked Harper about the change. He said he wanted to hit some batting practice home runs, wanted to see the ball travel.

Perhaps he wanted to see how an adjustment, something akin to an R&D prototype, would work outside a lab setting, outside of an indoor batting cage.

When I think about Harper’s swing, I think about the violence of it. The leg kick, the force compelling his back foot — his left foot — to rise from the ground. Former Nationals beat writer Adam Kilgore wrote an excellent multimedia piece about Harper’s swing for The Washington Post several years ago.

From that piece:

[Nationals video coordinator Rick] Schu scanned through video and found film of Harper hitting. He arranged clips of Harper and Ruth side-by-side on the monitor and stopped at the moment each hitter’s bat connected with a pitch. In each still picture, he saw a stiff front leg, an uncoiling torso and a back foot lifting off the ground. “Wow,” he thought. “That’s identical.” …

“The full thing is God-given,” Harper said. “I don’t know how I got my swing or what I did. I know I worked every single day. I know I did as much as I could with my dad. But I never really looked at anything mechanical. There was nothing really like, ‘Oh, put your hands here.’ It was, ‘Where are you comfortable? You’re comfortable here, hit from there.’ ”

What’s interesting, at least to this author, is that Harper is willing to tinker with a gift that allowed him to reach the majors at 19. What’s perhaps troubling for the opposition is that he continues to look for ways to improve despite already possessing an NL MVP on his resume and returning close to that form thus far in 2017. He’s still just 24 — he won’t turn 25 until October — and is four months younger than Aaron Judge. His youth suggests he’s still learning himself and the game. And on the ESPN telecast, Harper debuted an apparent decision to trade power for control — or at least explore it. It’s not a swing I recall him taking — at least not regularly — a swing seemingly executed at 80% effort.

Against the hard-throwing Carlos Martinez, Harper shelved his signature leg kick. To commence his swing, he slightly raised his right foot but not completely from the ground, and took a much less explosive movement. He seemed to consciously trade power for control.

Consider Harper’s first swing of the evening:

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We are very nearly ready for this season’s All-Star Game. Now that the rosters have been announced, it’s mostly academic. We’ll have the annual injury replacements and then the pitcher replacements and, of course, the Final Vote. By the time they line up along the bases for intros next Tuesday, many of the players who were originally denied a roster spot will have found a place by other means. That’s the nature of this process. Let’s take a look at what this year’s game is likely to offer.

It strikes me this year, as I scroll through the leaderboards, how few deserving players have been omitted from the initial rosters. In the National League, there are a couple of big snubs in Justin Turner, Anthony Rendon and Alex Wood, but Turner and Rendon are candidates for the Final Vote, and Wood is a good bet to make the roster, especially if Clayton Kershaw starts on Sunday and thus becomes ineligible to pitch in the ASG.

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