In recent years, moving a middling starter to relief and discovering a stud has become something of a baseball trope. Spare Andrew Miller or Drew Pomeranz on your hands? Chuck them in the bullpen and they’ll improve. Wade Davis doesn’t thrill you as a starter? Let him relieve and he’ll add velo and win you a World Series.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that we should simply make every starter a reliever. The gains you would get from making Max Scherzer a reliever (An even higher strikeout rate! Even more velo! Even more grunts!) don’t come close to the losses in innings pitched. When you have a great pitcher, it’s key to give them as much playing time as possible, even at the cost of efficiency. Reliever Scherzer might be untouchable, but then you get 60 innings of him and 150 innings of starts from Joe Triple-A.

This logic brings us, unerringly, to Carlos Martínez. Martínez is an excellent test case for the boundaries of starter-to-reliever conversions. As a reliever, he’s been spectacular — he had a 3.17 ERA, 2.86 FIP, and sparkling strikeout and walk numbers out of the bullpen in 2019, and was similarly good there in 2018. At the same time, he’s an above average starter. He boasts a career 3.36 ERA (and 3.61 FIP) in the rotation.

So where should the Cardinals use him? There’s some chance the decision is made for them — in 2019, he started the season on the Injured List and the team prioritized getting him back to the majors over getting him stretched out for starting. But in 2020, it will come down to a philosophical question: would you prefer an effective starter or a phenomenal reliever?

The reason our brains know without hesitation that borderline starters make good conversion candidates while moving Scherzer makes no sense is an intuitive application of marginal value. The value of a bullpen conversion comes down to two things: how much run prevention the pitcher provides relative to the next available pitcher in each role, and how many innings they can pitch in that role. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for eight years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Atlanta Braves.

Batters

The foundation of Atlanta’s offense consists of Freddie Freeman, Ronald Acuña Jr., and Ozzie Albies. There’s little to worry about with this trio, short of the usual concerns about injuries. Albies and Acuña are still absurdly young, and the question isn’t whether they’ll play worse than in 2019, but just how much they’ll continue to grow. People tend to overrate the growth curves of young phenoms. Just because a guy hits 40 homers at 20 doesn’t mean he’ll 60 at age 27, though I do think Acuña will get his 40/40 year in 2020. While there’s always room for improvement, more typically, players who are great very quickly have limited additional upside. If we examined the greatest hitting phenoms in history — Mike Trout, Ted Williams, Ty Cobb, Alex Rodriguez, Ken Griffey Jr., Al Kaline, Mel Ott — we’d find they really didn’t grow as hitters after their early 20s. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, I asked our readers to rank the star players rumored to be on the trade block. I asked just two questions. The first asked readers to rank the players by how good they are right now. The second asked readers to rank the players by their trade value.

The first question proved to be an easy one, as 42% of the more than 2,500 responses had the exact same ranking.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I put every fastball thrown in baseball last year into a giant spreadsheet to come up with expected pitch values. Well fine, it was a small snippet of code, not a giant spreadsheet. But the output came in a giant spreadsheet! In any case, the idea is pretty straightforward: look at a player’s pitches, substitute in xwOBA-based contact numbers instead of actual results, and call it a metric.

Today, I’m completing the set. Well, I’m kind of completing the set; I ignored knuckleballs because there aren’t enough of them, and secondary offerings are more complex. Due to differing classification systems, I scraped breaking balls (sliders, curveballs, knuckle curves, and even cutters) and offspeed pitches as a single pitch type. Otherwise, we might end up with something like Nick Anderson — classification systems can’t decide if he throws a curve or a slider.

One more thing: the system is heartless. No human could argue that this wasn’t the best curveball of the year:

Or if not that one, then this one, with bonus Eric Lauer bewilderment and Greinke sprinting:

Slow curves are undoubtedly the best curves, results be damned. But the soulless calculation robot doesn’t agree with me on that, caring about “whether the opposition hit it” and “whether it gets strikes” instead of “whether Ben audibly giggles when the pitch is thrown.” To each their own, I suppose. Read the rest of this entry »

When the investigation into the Astros’ electronic sign-stealing operations concluded, Houston was hit hard, losing draft picks, dollars, and their general manager and manager. Jay Jaffe went over the penalties for FanGraphs, but Jeff Luhnow, AJ Hinch, and Brandon Taubman weren’t the only people mentioned in the report. New Mets manager Carlos Beltrán was identified as having substantial role in the so-called “banging scheme,” though given that he was a player at the time, he will not face suspension; whether the Mets will retain him as manager is still unclear. And Alex Cora’s name was littered throughout, with the former Astros bench coach identified as having played a prominent role in the team’s cheating scheme. While discipline wasn’t meted out to Cora in the Commissioner’s Monday memo, as he is also the subject of an investigation into more cheating while with Boston in 2018, a suspension is inevitable, and hoping to move forward quickly, the Red Sox and Cora, using language so euphemistic as to almost defy accuracy, “mutually agreed to part ways.”

As soon as the Astros investigation’s findings came out, Cora was as good as gone. From the Red Sox release:

“Today we met to discuss the Commissioner’s report related to the Houston Astros investigation. Given the findings and the Commissioner’s ruling, we collectively decided that it would not be possible for Alex to effectively lead the club going forward and we mutually agreed to part ways.”

As for those findings and that report, Cora’s name is mentioned five times in the Rules Violation section:

Early in the season, Alex Cora, the Astros’ Bench Coach, began to call the replay review room on the replay phone to obtain the sign information.

…

Cora arranged for a video room technician to install a monitor displaying the center field camera feed immediately outside of the Astros’ dugout.

…

Witnesses consistently describe this new scheme as player-driven, and with the exception of Cora, non-player staff, including individuals in the video replay review room, had no involvement in the banging scheme.

…

Rather, the 2017 scheme in which players banged on a trash can was, with the exception of Cora, player-driven and player-executed. The attempt by the Astros’ replay review room staff to decode signs using the center field camera was originated and executed by lower-level baseball operations employees working in conjunction with Astros players and Cora.

Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re into FanGraphs’ linear pitch values, there was a many-way tie for the single most valuable pitch of the year. As the pitch values are context-neutral and count-adjusted, the best pitch you can throw is a 3-0 pitch that retires a batter. 3-0 is the worst count you can be in as a pitcher, and an out is the best possible outcome. Here’s one:

Wait a second. That doesn’t look like a very good pitch at all! Yasiel Puig got robbed there; that’s a 400-foot laser beam, at pretty much the optimum home run angle. He just happened to catch the deepest part of the park, and Starling Marte is fast.

Yes, linear weights aren’t perfect. We all know that. Many of their problems are nearly impossible to fix; if a pitcher’s fastball helps set up his slider, should it get credit for some of the slider’s effectiveness? If he’s staying away from Juan Soto with first base open and a man on third, should we dock those pitches for being outside the strike zone? Pitch values have their fair share of problems.

But if we can’t fix all of those problems, we can at least tackle one. When a ball is nailed like Puig did with that one, it’s usually a hit. Since 2015, we’ve had access to xwOBA, which (roughly speaking) considers the speed and angle of a given hit to assign it a value. Rather than look at the result on the field, it looks at the results of all similar batted balls. It has its shortcomings (largely related to spray angle), but it sure beats calling that Jordan Lyles pitch a good one. Read the rest of this entry »

The Twins won 101 games last year, set a major league record with 307 homers, and ranked second in the American League in scoring at 5.80 runs per game, yet they found a way to improve that juggernaut of an offense by signing Josh Donaldson to a four-year, $92 million deal. The just-turned-34-year-old slugger will man the hot corner, while incumbent third baseman Miguel Sanó will take over first base duties. It’s a risky move given Donaldson’s age and injury history, but it’s a bold one that improves the Twins’ chances of winning another AL Central title and returning to the postseason for the third time in four years.

Donaldson spent the 2019 season with the NL East champion Braves, and stayed healthy for the entire year for the first time since 2016, playing 155 games; by comparison, he played a combined 165 games for the Blue Jays and Indians in 2017-18 while battling shoulder and calf injuries. He hit a robust .259/.379/.521 (132 wRC+) with 37 homers, up from eight in 2018, and won NL Comeback Player of the Year honors.

Donaldson finished with 4.9 WAR thanks to above-average defense that resulted in his being a Gold Glove finalist. By UZR, he was 2.4 runs above average at the hot corner, by DRS he was second among all third baseman at 15 runs above average (trailing only Matt Chapman), and by Statcast’s new Outs Above Average, he was third at eight OAA (trailing only Nolan Arenado and Chapman). Read the rest of this entry »

The 2020 Tampa Bay Rays arguably have one of the best front-end starting rotations in the American League, with Charlie Morton, Blake Snell, and Tyler Glasnow as the headliners. Last season, Glasnow flashed moments of brilliance prior to and following a mid-season injury that halted his torrid start in early May and kept him out of the rotation until September. Glasnow already has the ability to be the ace of the Rays staff — in his 60.2 innings, the right-hander was worth 2.3 WAR and posted a 1.78 ERA and 2.26 FIP — but a couple of minor adjustments could vault him into 2020 Cy Young Award discussions.

Glasnow, who avoided salary arbitration last Friday by agreeing to a one-year, $2.05 million deal, operates with three pitches: a straight, backspinning four-seam fastball that has some carry and can sometimes have cutting action; a 12-6 diving curveball; and a hard changeup that exceeds 90 mph.

Let’s start by looking at Glasnow’s four-seamer, one of the straightest in baseball with a good amount of rise:

Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for eight years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Milwaukee Brewers.

Batters

There’s been quite a bit of turnover in the Brewers’ starting lineup, but the team has avoided opening any serious holes.

ZiPS was a fan of Orlando Arcia, but it’s hard to avoid the fact that he’s backslid developmentally at ages when he should have been breaking out. Even worse than not improving offensively, Arcia is probably a worse hitter than he was two years ago. Add to that that his glove hasn’t matched up to his minor league reputation, and good on the Brewers for seemingly moving on to Luis Urías, who ought to be a significant improvement. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for eight years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Houston Astros.

Batters

Let’s get the garbage receptacle in the room out of the way: there are no adjustments for sign-stealing related shenanigans baked into ZiPS. The simple truth is that the data to do so doesn’t really exist, and any adjustments made for an unknown effect on unknown players for an unknown amount of time would lack any precision. It’s one of those unknowables floating around in the aether that makes up part of the error bars.

Houston’s front-end offensive talent remains an absolute battering ram. The great players are, well, great, and there are few holes in the lineup, though there will be less offense behind the plate in 2020, and Gurriel’s age means he’s always a cliff-diving risk in any given season. Read the rest of this entry »