A glimpse at Robbie Ray might look like an ace at work. Four times this season, Ray has struck out at least 10 batters while walking one hitter or fewer. Only Gerrit Cole, Chris Sale, and Max Scherzer have more matching games. Since the beginning of the 2016 season, Ray has struck out 31% of batters faced; among the 183 starters with at least 200 innings, only Scherzer and Sale have higher strikeout rates. The strikeouts are great, but Ray’s walk rates and inability to pitch deep into games has long held him back. While he has continued to work to get better, the changes have continued to lead Ray back to being the generally above-average pitcher he’s always been.

Ray’s first full season with the Diamondbacks in 2015 was a solid one, with a 22% strikeout rate, a 9% walk rate, and an ERA and FIP both in the mid-threes, about 10% better than average. Ray tried to get better by changing his delivery slightly, as he told David Laurila in 2016, and become a “strikeout madman”, as August Fagerstrom detailed. His strikeouts went way up, but so did his homers, though his 3.76 FIP was again about 10% better than average. Some bad luck on balls in play meant an ugly 4.90 ERA and the questions began about Ray’s ability to pitch deep into games and limit hard contact.

In 2017, Ray ditched his changeup as well as his sinker and used his curve much more, as Eno Sarris wrote at the beginning of the season. Ray increased his strikeout rate even more, though his walk rate climbed a bit as well and he still gave up his fair share of homers on the way to a 3.72 FIP that was 15% better than league average. It was Ray’s best season and whatever bad luck he had from 2016 turned itself around in 2017, to the tune of a 2.89 ERA and a handful of down-ballot Cy Young votes. Last year was a disappointing one, as Ray missed two months with an oblique injury and posted his first below-average FIP in Arizona. His walk rate surged, though after a rough start to open the second half, he closed the season well with a 3.78 FIP that was about 10% better than average and a 2.83 ERA thanks to a very low BABIP. Read the rest of this entry »

If you just glanced at his player page for a second, you might think Lucas Giolito was falling apart. After a triumphant first half, during which he paired a 30% strikeout rate with a 9.5% walk rate on his way to a 3.15 ERA and 3.23 FIP, he made the All-Star team. And this was no automatic invite extended to the best available White Sox player; he was simply one of the best pitchers in baseball, running comparable park-adjusted numbers to Stephen Strasburg, Walker Buehler, and Zack Greinke.

From that great height, Giolito’s second half has had a rocky beginning. In three post-break starts, he’s compiled a 5.6 ERA, with a FIP over five. A lot of that ugliness is driven by a pasting at the hands of the Twins, when he allowed four home runs and seven runs over five innings, but it’s not as though there weren’t other warning signs. In his last pre-break start, he went only four innings against the Cubs, walking five batters on his way to giving up six earned runs. All told, it was a beyond-forgettable July for Giolito.

Situations like this are among the most difficult for writers to assess. Pitchers are fickle, and there’s no better example of that than Giolito. In parts of three seasons from 2016 to 2018, he was below replacement level, whether you’re into runs allowed or FIP; over 240 innings, he ran a 5.48 ERA and 5.68 FIP. He only struck out 16.2% of batters he faced while walking 11%. He still had some prospect shine, but projection systems weren’t buying it: ZiPS projected him for a 5.03 ERA in a lower-scoring environment than what we’ve realized in 2019, while Steamer foresaw an even higher 5.32 ERA.

Of course, Giolito proceeded to make those projections look ridiculous. Through 16 starts, roughly the first half of his season, he pitched nothing at all like the projections. That 30% strikeout rate was nearly double what the two projection systems expected, and his walk rate was significantly lower — you get the idea. Essentially, Giolito looked like an ace. If there was cause for concern, it was unsustainable home run suppression — he’d allowed a 9.7% HR/FB rate in the first half, and for a fly ball pitcher, that adds up. The point, though, is that Giolito went from replacement-level disappointment to deserving All-Star. Read the rest of this entry »

After is appeared the Mets put some more eggs in their 2020 basket by trading for Marcus Stroman, there now seems to be a pretty distinct possibility that the club is merely moving eggs around as it attempts to deal Noah Syndergaard. With the relative dearth of impact arms on the market and the decreasing likelihood of a Madison Bumgarner deal, Syndergaard could be the biggest name and best pitcher to change teams this week, even including the recently acquired Stroman. The trade package necessary to land Syndergaard should be significantly richer than the one the Mets gave up for Stroman, given Syndergaard’s relative track record, age, and the extra season of team control through 2021. As was the case with Stroman, there are some discrepancies in how good Syndergaard is as a pitcher given his 4.33 ERA.

Nobody disputes that Sydergaard was an ace for the Mets back in 2016 when he put up a six-win season with a 2.29 FIP and 2.60 ERA. He missed most of 2017 with a torn right lat muscle. In 2018, despite missing more than a month with a finger injury and a little bit of time with hand, foot, and mouth disease, Syndergaard was still one of the best pitchers in the game, posting a four-win season, a 2.80 FIP and 3.03 ERA. This season, Syndergaard’s FIP is very good, but his ERA is not. There’s a fairy simple explanation for that disparity, and for the gap between Syndergaard’s FIP and ERA throughout his career. Simply put, the Mets infield defense is very bad and has been very bad throughout the right-hander’s career:

A .315 career BABIP, and and the lower FIP than ERA, could be an indicator that Syndergaard gives up hard contact. The Statcast numbers tend to disagree:

Read the rest of this entry »

Teams have been smiling at each another and making their fair share of prolonged eye contact, but the trade deadline tension had yielded little in the way of actual consummation until Saturday’s A’s and Royals trade that sent veteran lefty reliever Jake Diekman to Oakland for two prospects. Here’s the deal:

Oakland gets:

LHP Jake Diekman

Kansas City gets:

RHP Ismael Aquino
CF Dairon Blanco

Diekman, who has struck out 33.5% of opposing hitters and has a 3.37 FIP across 41.2 innings this year, immediately becomes the best lefty in Oakland’s bullpen, surpassing cutter/curveball/command lefty Ryan Buchter (who was also acquired from Kansas City via trade last year), and strike-throwing Taiwanese depth piece, Wei-Chung Wang. That’s less a knock on either of those two, and more to do with Diekman, who has been good with uncommon consistency for a reliever throughout his seven-year big league career. Read the rest of this entry »

Below are some changes we made to The BOARD in the past week, along with our reasons for doing so. There’s more info on all the players below on The BOARD. All hail The BOARD, prostrate yourself before it and bask in its infinite wisdom and benevolence and dynamic farm system rankings.

Note that with the trade deadline upon us, Kiley and I have been focused on seeing and making calls about players from contenders’ systems, since those are the teams most likely to move prospects in the coming days.

Remember these changes are announced as they happen by our Twitter account, @FG_Prospects.

Moved Up

Ryan Jeffers, C, Minnesota Twins:
After amateur scouts were skeptical about Jeffers’ ability to catch long-term, he has turned into a good receiver. He’s an offseason Top 100 candidate.

Bryan Mata, RHP, Boston Red Sox:
Once upon a time, Mata and Cubs righty Jose Albertos were almost identical prospects. Both had been teenagers who had unusually advanced stuff, including swing-and-miss changeups, but concerning control. For a stretch, each of them had stock-altering strike-throwing regressions, from which Mata has emerged and appears beyond, while Albertos’ season is grounded.

Alexander Vargas, SS, New York Yankees:
Vargas had $3 million on the table from Cincinnati but rather than wait until 2019 to sign the deal like the Reds needed him to, he got $2.5 million from the Yankees last year. It’s looking like quite the coup now. Vargas, still 17, was one of a handful of Yankees DSL prospects brought up to the GCL after very few games. He’s a projectable, athletic, switch-hitting shortstop with surprising power for someone his size and age. We moved him up just shy of the FVs of the late first round high school shortstops from this year’s draft. Read the rest of this entry »

Traditionally, the outfield corners are home to heavy hitters. This year’s crop of right fielders has combined for a 110 wRC+, one point ahead of first basemen for the current major-league high as well as the highest mark at the position since 2011. The left fielders’ collective mark of 106 is the majors’ third-highest, one point ahead of that of third basemen, and the position’s second-best mark since 2011.

Even so, several contenders — which for this series I’ve defined as teams who are above .500 or have playoff odds of at least 10.0%, a definition that as of today currently covers 17 teams — are getting meager offensive production at one corner or another, by which I mean receiving less than 1.0 WAR at the spot, which makes them eligible for a place among the Replacement Level Killers. As the July 31 trade deadline approaches, they may want to do something about that, particularly since there’s no August waiver period during which they can tweak the roster. Having said that, I’m somewhat less focused on these teams’ eventual solutions, whether via trades or internal options, than I am in pointing out the problems.

Also, note that I’ve ruled out including the Angels among the left fielders, since the mid-June return of Justin Upton, who had been sidelined for nearly three months by turf toe, has already provided the team a substantial upgrade; even while slumping lately, he’s accounted for 0.3 of the team’s 0.6 WAR in 25 games, a 2.0 WAR pace over 162.

Read the rest of this entry »

Watch a baseball game. Pick a side. Now, wait for a pitcher on the team you’re rooting for to fall behind in the count 3-0. It feels pretty bad, doesn’t it? There is, I think, no feeling quite like the helplessness that comes when your team is behind in the count 3-0. There are worse feelings, sure, even within the confines of baseball. There’s the feeling of losing a close game, coughing up a lead, or seeing a favorite player injured. Nothing is quite the same, though, as the long dread of trying to escape from 3-0.

Why does 3-0 feel so uneasy? I think it’s because there are no good quick ways out of the jam. You feel nervous, and you’re going to feel nervous for a while. Next pitch a ball? That’s disappointing for obvious reasons, but at least the tension is over. No, the real problem is that a strike doesn’t feel much better than a ball. So what are you hoping for? You certainly don’t want a swing — swings on 3-0 are tremendous for the batter.

Do you want a take, then? The pitcher grooves a fastball, and the batter watches it fly by? Sure, that’s probably the best outcome you can hope for in the situation, but that’s small consolation. Get a strike, and it’s still 3-1; time for another 30 seconds of watching your team in a tough situation. Even then, what are you hoping for? Batters are producing a .475 wOBA after 3-1 counts this year, better offensive production than any player in baseball’s overall line.

Even if, and this is a huge if, your team gets two straight strikes — now it’s 3-2. This is after a nerve-wracking minute of real time, potentially involving some loud foul contact. You’ve worried about walks for two straight pitches, wondered if the pitcher has it today, and still — 3-2 is a hitter’s count. At the beginning of the at-bat, if I told you it was headed for a 3-2 count, you wouldn’t have been happy. That’s the best case scenario after you reach 3-0. No wonder 3-0 feels so bad. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, FanGraphs wrapped up our annual Trade Value Series. As a window into teams’ valuation of players, it’s an invaluable resource, built as it is from a mixture of industry sources. One thing it isn’t, though, is a list of players we realistically expect to be traded. The top 10 players on the list, for example, have an average of six years of team control remaining, and all of them except Vladimir Guerrero Jr. play for teams that are currently contending. They’re great theoretical trade pieces, in other words, but not likely to actually be traded.

That conundrum, the fact that the most valuable players are among the least likely to be traded, has always been a feature of the exercise. Mike Trout topped the list for five straight years at one point, for example, and was quite literally too valuable for teams to be able to acquire, even if the Angels had been willing to deal him. Evan Longoria, likewise, was a repeat Trade Value champion, but his first extension with the Rays made him so valuable to the team that they couldn’t even contemplate moving him.

Most of the time, then, the Trade Value Series is more of a Theoretical Value Series. Most isn’t all, however, and that’s where this article comes in. One of the benefits of having 12 years of trade values is that we can look at things that don’t happen all that often. If only 1% of top-50 players get traded, we should still have six results in our sample. With the benefit of aggregation, then, let’s take a look at how often the trade in trade value comes into play.

The first question you probably have is how often a player on the Trade Value list gets traded at all. The answer to that is tricky. For example, here are the number of Top-50 and honorable mention players traded within the next year after appearing on a FanGraphs Trade Value list:

Read the rest of this entry »

As I noted yesterday, within the context of the 2002-19 period covered by our splits, second basemen have reached their offensive nadir, with a combined 90 wRC+ this year. At the same time, shortstops are building upon last year’s periodic zenith (97 wRC+) with an even 100 mark — in other words, one of the most demanding defensive positions is collectively producing league-average hitters. At least in part, that’s due to the kids. Last year, nobody older than 31 made even 150 plate appearances as a shortstop, and just three players over 30 played at least 100 games at the position, the lowest total since MLB expanded to 30 teams in 1998. This year, the Rangers’ Elvis Andrus, the Giants’ Brandon Crawford, and the Marlins’ Miguel Rojas are the only players on pace to do so.

Increasingly, shortstop is a young man’s position, and the crop of talent is remarkable: Alex Bregman, Carlos Correa, Paul DeJong, Francisco Lindor, Jorge Polanco Corey Seager, and Fernando Tatis Jr. are all in their age-25 seasons or younger, and of the 14 shortstops who have totaled at least 1.7 WAR thus far (including Gleyber Torres, who thanks to Didi Gregorius‘ injury has played more than twice as many games at shortstop than second thus far), 10 of them are 26 or younger.

Meanwhile, just seven teams, including three contenders, have gotten less than 1.0 WAR from their shortstops to date. For this series, my definition of contenders is teams who are above .500 or have playoff odds of at least 10.0%, a definition that currently covers 18 teams, with the surging Giants (52-50) joining the party since I kicked off this series. For as small as that group of shortstops is, I’m making it even smaller by omitting the Nationals, whose alternatives to Trea Turner have offset his 1.4 WAR with a combined -0.8, compiled mostly while he was sidelined with a broken right index finger. I’m skipping them and, as with last year, doubling up this entry with the third basemen, who are near their own offensive high for the period, with a 105 wC+ mark (they were at 107 in 2016, and 106 last year); just eight teams, including four contenders, are below 1.0. I’m omitting one of those as well, since the Brewers’ Mike Moustakas has not only delivered 1.1 of his 2.7 total WAR there while filling in for Travis Shaw, but has opened up second base for top prospect Keston Hiura, who’s off to a flying start (136 wRC+, 1.5 WAR in 39 games).

Read the rest of this entry »

With just a week to go before the trade deadline, it still isn’t entirely clear which teams will endeavor to make additions for a pennant run, and which teams will cash in their 2019 chips to play for another year. In the American League, nine of 15 teams have at least an outside shot at the postseason, with seven clubs having a legitimate chance. The National League is even more competitive, with every team but the Marlins possessing some chance at the playoffs, and eight clubs having a reasonable path to the postseason.

Below, we’ll go through the trade scenarios for the teams considering moves. Keep in mind, much of these proposed swaps are simply a framework for how a deal might look. Also important to keep in mind? Most of these predictions will be completely incorrect! Please consume the deals below responsibly, and use this as a preview of what teams need, want, and might do over the next week. Unless any of the predicted deals happen; in that case, I expect to receive full credit.

First, some things that won’t happen:

Star Pitchers Are Staying Put

The Tigers aren’t likely to get the kind of offer they want for Matthew Boyd, who has given up 15 homers in his last eight starts. The Mets aren’t going to get the young stars they want for Noah Syndergaard. Cleveland seems less likely to deal Trevor Bauer now that they are back in the race. Zack Greinke and Robbie Ray probably aren’t going anywhere. Even Caleb Smith of the Marlins, or Brad Keller and Jake Junis of the Royals, seem destined to stay put.

The big question remaining is San Francisco, which brings us to a few things that will (maybe) happen: Read the rest of this entry »