Héctor Rondón made a ton of appearances last year for a solid Houston bullpen. The Astros had a top 10 bullpen in both ERA and WAR, and Rondón made the third-most appearances on the team. If you only knew those two things, then, it would look like quite the deal when the Diamondbacks signed Rondón for a mere $3 million, with a club option for 2021 tacked onto the back end, as Nick Piecoro reported yesterday.

Of course, I cleverly avoided telling you anything about how good Rondón was last year aside from his appearances. And while he wasn’t abysmal, at least not completely — he had a 3.71 ERA, racked up positive WPA, and still sat 97 mph with his fastball — some of the underlying metrics looked rough. His FIP was a career-worst 4.96, his strikeout rate cratered to 18.7%, and he was below replacement level on the year in our FIP-based WAR accounting. By the playoffs, he was buried in the bullpen — seven relievers in the Houston ‘pen faced more batters, and his average entry leverage was a piddling 0.16.

So before we decide if this was a good signing for the Diamondbacks, we need to decide if Rondón is still good. At his peak on the Cubs, he was an impact reliever with pretty good stuff and great control. He’s still only 31 — this isn’t some kind of Fernando Rodney situation here, where there’s a picture in his attic with an increasingly tilted cap that keeps him in baseball shape. He’s still, age-wise at least, in his prime.

So what’s changed for Rondón? We can rule out the normal way relievers break. He’s been extremely durable, making at least 50 appearances for six straight years. He hasn’t lost velocity, either: he throws as hard now as he did when he was on the Cubs. And his postseason banishment wasn’t a matter of him losing steam at the end of a long slog of a year; his fastball averaged 96.8 mph in the playoffs, barely down from 96.9 during the regular season. Read the rest of this entry »

After a few cold, dreary, quiet hot stove seasons, free agency picked up its pace this winter. While Manny Machado and Bryce Harper got $300 million deals last offseason, it took until nearly spring to get those contracts finalized. This offseason, we’ve seen Gerrit Cole, Stephen Strasburg, Anthony Rendon, and Zack Wheeler sign for more than $100 million, and with the new year just eight days old, only a handful of decent free agents remain. While large deals and total spending near $2 billion have captivated us this offseason, it’s worth exploring what has made this winter different from years past. Is it just timing? Is it this class of free agents? Have teams changed their spending habits? Is the cost of a win still linear? A useful tool when examining those issues it to try to determine how much teams are paying for a win above replacement in the free agent market.

While putting dollar figures on players isn’t the most feel-good task, it’s helpful for framing conversations about costs in free agency. From the front office perspective, it helps to determine which free agents are good values and a worthy investment of resources compared to other free agents and veteran players. It also helps frame the value of younger players who have yet to reach the full six years of service time necessary to hit the market by showing the alternative cost to obtaining similar production. On the player side, these types of valuations tend to show how underpaid players are prior to reaching free agency, given the low cost of their tremendous on-field value compared to similarly productive free agents.

There are a variety of ways to go about determining how much teams are paying per win on the free agent market. Matt Swartz, having found that projections tended to overweight free agent player production and playing time when considered in the aggregate, instead considered actual production of past results to determine how much teams were paying for a win. He also used all players with at least six years of service time to account for players aging over the course of a contract. He acknowledged that there might be issues with including players on extensions. To be clear, Swartz wasn’t wrong about the way he formulated his dollars per win, but another approach can be helpful, and, if we are to look at the current offseason, necessary. Read the rest of this entry »

Once blessed with the greatest run of consistency ever achieved at shortstop, it’s now been a few years since the Baltimore Orioles have seen solid all-around play at that position. That probably won’t shock you, given how badly the Orioles have performed all over the diamond in recent seasons, but it has affected the shortstop spot as badly as it has anywhere else. J.J. Hardy still had big league defensive skills in 2017, but his 49 wRC+ that year dragged him down nearly a full win below replacement level. Manny Machado was the reverse of that in 2018 — an MVP-caliber hitter, but bad in the field, though a rebound in his defensive numbers after a trade to Los Angeles suggested he was better than a half season’s worth of defensive metrics made it appear. And Richie Martin might be a productive big league player someday, but bumping him from Double-A to the majors in 2019 after making him the first selection of the 2018 Rule 5 draft resulted in an ugly 50 wRC+ and -1.0 WAR.

With Martin likely better served to start next season in the minors and no one else on the roster with substantial major league experience at shortstop, the Orioles were left with little choice but to go get someone who could field that position. The Orioles opted for competence, signing José Iglesias to a one-year contract, as first reported by MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand. Read the rest of this entry »

In December, the free agent signings flowed like wine. You could hardly finish reading about one marquee free agent’s landing spot before another domino fell. Stephen Strasburg, Gerrit Cole, and Anthony Rendon signed on consecutive days, and Edwin Encarnación signed with the White Sox on literal Christmas. It was a hectic month, to say the least.

Of course, taking so many names off the board in December portends a slower January, and that was certainly the case this weekend. Take the Padres. In November, they signed Drew Pomeranz, the sabermetric darling of the offseason, whose relief work in 2019 makes him a potential bullpen ace. In December, they went wild with trades: they added Tommy Pham, Trent Grisham, Zach Davies, and Jurickson Profar to the team over three deals.

In January — well, January has barely started, but so far, they’ve moved down a rung on the urgency ladder. This Saturday, they signed Craig Stammen to a two year, $9 million dollar deal, with a club option for a third. Stammen has been a valuable part of the Padres bullpen over the past two seasons, and he’ll likely continue to appear in high leverage situations for the team, albeit now behind Pomeranz and Kirby Yates rather than just Yates. Read the rest of this entry »

“Clunk! Clang!” – Anonymous Garbage Can

In terms of winning baseball games, the Astros executed a model rebuild. When Jeff Luhnow took over after the 2011 season, Houston was a craggy mess. The team hired Ed Wade after the 2007 season to help transition from the Killer B’s era squads, but Wade’s drafts didn’t bear fruit for a long time, and at the major league level, his imagination appeared to find its limit at signing a lot of declining veterans. Luhnow’s task was to tear the team down to the foundation, and then build it back up into something that looked like a modern roster led by a modern front office. That task, he accomplished.

The Setup

Flags fly forever, and Houston secured their first World Series victory in 2017. That 2017 World Series was one of the more entertaining ones in recent memory, the perfect topper to the second 100-win season in team history. As importantly, the Astros were determined not to fall into the complacency trap that tends to snare the champs. Once a team wins baseball’s biggest prize, the natural impulse seems to be towards conservatism, to simply keep the band together and try to crank out albums identical to its prior hits.

But the post-2018 offseason was defined by a big move. Houston acquired Gerrit Cole from the Pittsburgh Pirates for a package led by Joe Musgrove and Michael Feliz. And it paid off wonderfully as Cole, no longer fettered by Pittsburgh’s increasingly dated philosophy of inducing grounders with his hard stuff, flourished in an environment that encouraged him to attack batters directly. Cole went from striking out 23% of batters faced to 35%, an improvement much greater than can be explained away by the overall increase in strikeouts around baseball. Houston’s other big pitcher pickup, Justin Verlander, continued to dominate in his post-Tigers career; the Astros had two Cy Young contenders on the roster that they did not have in July 2017. Read the rest of this entry »

The Marlins have spent this offseason quietly adding a number of high-upside veterans on the cheap. They’ve traded for Jonathan Villar after Baltimore unceremoniously dumped him, claimed Jesús Aguilar on waivers, and added Francisco Cervelli on a one-year contract worth just $2 million. They continued to upgrade their roster just after Christmas, signing Corey Dickerson to a two-year deal worth $17.5 million.

The left-handed outfielder fills a big need on the Marlins roster. In 2019, Miami utilized the uninspiring trio of Harold Ramirez, Curtis Granderson, and Austin Dean for the lion’s share of the innings in left field. They collectively cost the Marlins 1.7 wins, with just Ramirez rating above replacement level. For a rebuilding club, this isn’t necessarily concerning or surprising. In Dean and Ramirez, the Marlins were simply looking to see if either minor league veteran could make it in the big leagues, and Granderson was a classic clubhouse veteran playing out the last days of a long career.

But with the Marlins looking to break free from their endless rebuilding phase, adding Dickerson is a savvy move. He immediately upgrades their outfield and provides the club with a much-needed left-handed bat in the lineup. Since his debut in 2013 for the Rockies, he’s posted a 117 wRC+ and 11.5 WAR. After a good start to his career in Colorado, a strikeout problem and getting traded away from the Rays forced him to make some changes to his approach in 2018. In Pittsburgh, he started choking up regularly in an effort to make much more contact. The adjustments worked and he cut his strikeout rate by almost 10 points. Read the rest of this entry »

“I been shaking two nickels together for a month, trying to get them to mate.” – Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep

There is only one truly poor team in Major League Baseball, and 29 others that just cosplay as Dickensian street urchins. When the Chicago Cubs weep about how there’s just no money in this baseball thing, it’s impossible to take their statements at face value. When the Tampa Bay Rays do it, I take it a lot more seriously.

“Build it, and nobody will come.” Unlike their cross-state rivals, the Miami Marlins, the Rays have been able to build teams that win consistently. They drew moderately well in their debut season, but a decade of losing, in large part due to an incompetent Chuck LaMar-led front office, got things off to a rocky start. Winning 97 games and an AL pennant in 2008 couldn’t raise the team’s attendance to two million, and winning at least 90 games in five of six years appeared to do nearly nothing to bring fans to the ballpark. Tampa Bay drew fewer fans in 2018 and 2019 than they did in their 68-94, last-place 2016, the team’s worst year since they exorcised the Devil from their nickname. Read the rest of this entry »

Despite best-laid plans, seemingly nothing went right for the Mets’ bullpen in 2019, and the same can be said for Dellin Betances. The team is hoping both can change their luck in 2020, and earlier this week signed the 31-year-old righty to a one-year, $10.5 million deal that includes both a player option for 2021 and a vesting option for ’22. Though the move is hardly inexpensive or risk-free, it’s a worthwhile gamble on a reliever who prior to missing nearly all of the past season due to injuries spent five years as one of the AL’s best and most dominant with the crosstown Yankees.

After throwing more innings out of the bullpen than any other pitcher from 2014-18 (373.1), Betances didn’t complete a single frame at the major league level in 2019. First, his arrival in camp was delayed by the birth of his son, and after he showed diminished velocity in a March 17 Grapefruit League appearance, he was diagnosed with shoulder impingement. He began the regular season on the injured list, and worked towards a return, but following a rough showing during an April 11 simulated game, he received a cortisone shot for shoulder inflammation, a problem that was soon linked to a bone spur that the Yankees — but not the pitcher — had known about since 2006, the year they drafted him in the eighth round out of a Brooklyn high school. Moved to the 60-day injured list, Betances ramped up towards a return, but renewed soreness led to a June 11 MRI, which revealed that he’d suffered a low-grade lat strain. He finally began a rehab assignment with the Trenton Thunder on September 6, during the Eastern League playoffs, and made three postseason appearances for them before being activated by the Yankees, who hoped that he would augment their bullpen for the postseason.

Betances made his lone major league appearance for the season on September 15, striking out both Blue Jays he faced (Reese McGuire and Brandon Drury) and topping out at 95 mph. After the second strikeout, he did the slightest of celebratory hops and landed awkwardly on his left foot. Watch here around the 15-second mark:

Read the rest of this entry »

“Success is a science; if you have the conditions, you get the result.” – Oscar Wilde

Sometimes, the path to success is circuitous. Success in baseball is a zero-sum game, and your fortune is inevitably linked to the demise of your competitors. Those competitors strive to not make it easy, at least in those seasons where they haven’t decided to suddenly get their team payroll under, I don’t know, let’s say $208 million. Trials and tribulations make stories more interesting; Frodo and Sam going on a casual, uneventful stroll to Mt. Doom would make for painfully dull books and film adaptations. Read the rest of this entry »

This winter’s free agent class was once full of starting pitching. The offseason began with starting pitchers representing 10 of the top 20 free agents overall, and 21 of FanGraphs’ Top 50 Free Agents. After Dallas Keuchel signed with Chicago White Sox, Hyun-Jin Ryu, 40-year-old Rich Hill, and Homer Bailey were the only ranked starters remaining, and only Ryu represented a good bet for production next season. With many teams still in need of reinforcements for their rotations, competition for the lefty’s services was likely strong. Among potential contenders, the Twins and Angels presented the greatest need for a starter, but it was the Blue Jays who surprised and reached agreement on a four-year deal worth $80 million, per Jeff Passan.

Ryu will turn 33 years old in March, so the end of this contract will take him through his age-36 season. He’s got a complicated injury history (he hit the injured list again for a short time last season), but a strong 2019 combined with his status as the last man standing on the free agent market allowed him to far exceed the $48 million crowdsource median ($59 million average), as well as Kiley McDaniel’s $32 million estimate. In Ryu’s free agent capsule, Jay Jaffe noted the factors working in the left-hander’s favor, as well as those working against him, as he headed into free agency:

After being limited to 15 starts in 2018 due to a severe groin strain, the portly port-sider pitched enough innings to qualify for the ERA title for the first time since his 2013 rookie campaign. He didn’t just qualify, he led the NL with a 2.32 mark despite fading late. Through July, he posted a 1.53 ERA and 2.85 FIP, but that ballooned to 4.60 and 3.83 over the final two months, with a 10-day IL stint for neck soreness thrown in. Ryu’s success isn’t quite as enigmatic or unorthodox as his process, which includes rarely throwing bullpens between starts. Via a five-pitch arsenal, with his changeup the real star, he’s exceptional at limiting hard contact; his average exit velocity of 85.3 mph ranked in the 96th percentile, his .282 xwOBA in the 81st. His strikeout rate was a modest 22.5%, but he walked an NL-low 3.3%, so his 19.2% K-BB% ranked 12th, and his 3.10 FIP fourth. After accepting a qualifying offer last fall, he’s well-positioned for a multi-year deal despite the questions about his durability.

Read the rest of this entry »