Wednesday night in Philadelphia didn’t start off as a celebration of Michael Lorenzen. Making his first home start after joining the team at the trade deadline, he struggled to get comfortable on the mound. The first batter of the game, CJ Abrams, smashed a pitch to the warning track in the deepest part of the field. The next three batters worked full counts, with one walking. Keibert Ruiz worked another walk to lead off the second inning. Lorenzen threw 53 pitches in the first three frames. Through four, he had three strikeouts and three walks.
Luckily, he didn’t need to be the focus, because a celebration in Philly was happening one way or another. Weston Wilson smashed a home run in his first major league at-bat. Nick Castellanos popped a two-run shot in the first and followed up with a solo shot in the third. The Phillies were romping over the Nationals on a glorious summer evening. And that’s leaving the best part for last: Ryan Howard was in the booth to celebrate opening a new chicken and waffles stand in the stadium.
I won’t lie to you; those waffles looked good. John Kruk was nearly rapturous as he contemplated them. At one point, he openly begged Alex Call to finish an at-bat quickly so the booth could go to commercial and he could eat. Howard seemed happy, too, and the Phillies continued to pile up runs while he recapped the genesis of his foodie vision. After four innings, the Phillies led 6-0, and the celebration was in full swing.
Obviously, though, you aren’t here to read about Howard’s chicken and waffles, or to learn, as I did, that Kruk avoids spicy food. You’re here because a funny thing happened in the back half of this game. Lorenzen, staked to an enormous lead, started attacking the strike zone. He dared the Nationals to swing – four-seamers middle-middle and belt-high sinkers, calling out to be swung at. When he fell behind in the count, he fired one down the pipe and said “hit it.”
This being the Nationals, they mostly didn’t hit it. Calling their offense punchless might be going too far, but they’re towards the bottom of the league in every offensive category, and that doesn’t account for the fact that they traded their best hitter at the deadline. Abrams is coming on, and Lane Thomas has been good all year, but we’re not quite talking about Murderers’ Row here.
Suddenly it was the seventh inning, and the Nationals were still hitless. Lorenzen pulled his secondary pitches back out; he buried Jake Alu under a pile of changeups for his fourth strikeout and then mixed four-seamers high with changeups low to coax a groundout (smashed, great play by Rodolfo Castro) out of Ildemaro Vargas. Seven innings, 100 pitches, no hits – was this happening?
That last out of the seventh inning awoke the Philadelphia crowd from its post-homer lethargy. They’d been enjoying a casual demolishing of the little brothers of the NL East. Now, they might be witnessing history. A roar broke out, and the crowd rose to its feet to collectively cheer Lorenzen as he strode off the field. Six outs, six measly outs – surely he could do it.
Lorenzen came out sharp in the eighth – by which I mean, he threw some good pitches when the count made that possible and otherwise made the Nationals beat him by putting the ball in play. It was a brilliant plan all night; the Phillies recorded 15 outs in the air, few of them threatening to be anything more than cans of corn. Most importantly for Lorenzen, that eighth inning took only 11 pitches, which gave him enough runway to come back out for the ninth.
I’ve spent a lot of this writeup talking about Lorenzen’s ability to adapt his pitching to the situation, and that was on display in his last inning of work. The strike zone widens when no-hitters near the finish line. Hitters’ pulses rise – you don’t want to be on that highlight reel, you know? Lorenzen aimed for the corners to get ahead, then snapped off ridiculous breaking balls whenever he had the chance, hoping for a miserable flail from a desperate opponent.
That plan dealt with Thomas and Joey Meneses, the latter a victim of a called strike three that was both clearly outside and clearly a pitch you have to swing at in the ninth inning of a no-hitter. That left only Dominic Smith, but he wasn’t going down easily. After falling behind 1-2, he took and fouled his way back to a 3-2 count. Lorenzen looked gassed. “One more pitch,” Kruk breathed on the broadcast, almost a mantra. And Lorenzen left it up to the gods of contact one more time. He threw a slider right down main street at 85 and dared Smith to do his worst:
After the momentous end to the seventh inning, Citizen’s Bank Park had turned raucous. That energy carried right through to the end of the game. The place positively shook when Meneses struck out, and erupted even more when Johan Rojas squeezed Smith’s fly ball for the final out. Sorry Weston, and sorry Ryan; it was Lorenzen’s night now, and the crowd bathed him in applause as he exulted in his achievement.
If you didn’t know he hadn’t allowed any hits, Lorenzen’s line wouldn’t turn any heads. Five strikeouts, four walks; it’s not exactly the stuff of aces. But Lorenzen has never been an ace, and he wouldn’t tell you otherwise. He’s never been a high octane strikeout pitcher, and now that he’s transitioned from the bullpen to the rotation, he’s leaning more than ever on his savvy. Tonight was the crowning achievement of that style.
As the stadium roared and Lorenzen’s mom beamed from the crowd, the team mobbed him. What a glorious feeling it must be to combine the pinnacle of individual achievement with your first real taste at team success. Lorenzen has played for a winning team exactly twice in his major league career – the 2020 Reds went 31-29 and the 2021 edition finished 83-79.
This year’s Phillies are a cut above that – the defending National League champions, near-locks to make the playoffs and another run at the title. And he’s one of them now, indelibly linked with this team, this city. You won’t be able to tell the story of the 2023 Phillies without mentioning this night, which means you won’t be able to tell it without mentioning Lorenzen. How wonderful that must feel after nearly a decade in the wilderness, hoping to start, then getting your wish only to toil in obscurity.
Baseball is about a lot of things. It’s about the crack of the bat and the roar of the crowd, the beauty of close plays and the shocking speed and strength of grown men wearing ridiculous pajamas. Increasingly, it’s about numbers too – teams are getting smarter and smarter about separating what seems important from what is important. But regardless of the numbers, tonight was important. Baseball isn’t just about who wins the trophy at the end of the year. It’s about nights like these, and players like these. What a glorious night for Lorenzen, and what a wonderful celebration of baseball.
Monday night, my wife posed a baseball question I couldn’t immediately answer. As the Angels and Giants went to the eighth inning with the Halos up by a run, she had a simple question: How often does a team that’s losing after seven innings come back and win? I guess I could have gone to our wonderful WPA Inquirer, a fun little tool for hypotheticals. That tells me that the Giants had around a 25% chance to win heading into the eighth. But I took her question as a broader one, concerned not just with that specific game, but with all games. How likely is a comeback?
I didn’t know the answer offhand, and I couldn’t find it on Google either (secret professional writer tip: use Google). So I did what anyone in my situation would do: I said “I don’t know, but now I’m going to write an article about this.” Two days later, here we are.
I’m hardly the first person to do research on comebacks. Russell Carleton has been looking into comebacks for a while. Rob Mains has too. Chet Gutwein investigated comeback wins and blown saves here at FanGraphs in 2021. Everyone loves to write about comebacks. Baseball Reference even keeps a list of the biggest comeback wins. They’re memorable games, and fertile ground for investigation. Read the rest of this entry »
One of the strange things about projecting baseball players is that even results themselves are small samples. Full seasons result in specific numbers that have minimal predictive value, such as BABIP for pitchers. The predictive value isn’t literally zero — individual seasons form much of the basis of projections, whether math-y ones like ZiPS or simply our personal opinions on how good a player is — but we have to develop tools that improve our ability to explain some of these stats. It’s not enough to know that the number of home runs allowed by a pitcher is volatile; we need to know how and why pitchers allow homers beyond a general sense of pitching poorly or being Jordan Lyles.
Data like that which StatCast provides gives us the ability to get at what’s more elemental, such as exit velocities and launch angles and the like — things that are in themselves more predictive than their end products (the number of homers). StatCast has its own implementation of this kind of exercise in its various “x” stats. ZiPS uses slightly different models with a similar purpose, which I’ve dubbed zStats. (I’m going to make you guess what the z stands for!) The differences in the models can be significant. For example, when talking about grounders, balls hit directly toward the second base bag became singles 48.7% of the time from 2012 to ’19, with 51.0% outs and 0.2% doubles. But grounders hit 16 degrees to the “left” of the bag only became hits 10.6% of the time over the same stretch, and toward the second base side, it was 9.8%. ZiPS uses data like sprint speed when calculating hitter BABIP, because how fast a player is has an effect on BABIP and extra-base hits.
ZiPS doesn’t discard actual stats; the models all improve from knowing the actual numbers in addition to the zStats. You can read more on how zStats relate to actual stats here. For those curious about the r-squared values between zStats and real stats for the offensive components, it’s 0.59 for zBABIP, 0.86 for strikeouts, 0.83 for walks, and 0.78 for homers. Those relationships are what make these stats useful for predicting the future. If you can explain 78% of the variance in home run rate between hitters with no information about how many homers they actually hit, you’ve answered a lot of the riddle. All of these numbers correlate better than the actual numbers with future numbers, though a model that uses both zStats and actual ones, as the full model of ZiPS does, is superior to either by themselves.
And why is this important and not just number-spinning? Knowing that changes in walk rates, home run rates, and strikeout rates stabilized far quicker than other stats was an important step forward in player valuation. That’s something that’s useful whether you work for a front office, are a hardcore fan, want to make some fantasy league moves, or even just a regular fan who is rooting for your faves. If we improve our knowledge of the basic molecular structure of a walk or a strikeout, then we can find players who are improving or struggling even more quickly, and provide better answers on why a walk rate or a strikeout rate has changed. This is useful data for me in particular because I obviously do a lot of work with projections, but I’m hoping this type of information is interesting to readers beyond that.
As with any model, the proof of the pudding is in the eating, and there are always some people that question the value of data such as these. So for this run, I’m pitting zStats against the last two months and all new data that obviously could not have been used in the model without a time machine to see how the zStats did compared to reality. I’m not going to do a whole post for this every time, but this is something that, based on the feedback from the last post in June, people really wanted to see the results for.
Starting with zBABIP, let’s look at how the numbers have shaken out for the leaders and trailers from back in June. I didn’t include players with fewer than 100 plate appearances over the last two months. Read the rest of this entry »
On Monday afternoon, the Astros had an off day before the start of a series in Baltimore, so they did what most defending World Series champions have done under those circumstances, and swung by the White House. There, Dusty Baker and his merry men were fêted by President Joe Biden, who commiserated with the beloved Astros manager over having to wait decades to reach the pinnacle of their respective professions.
What a lovely event, one that raises two questions. First: What the hell, Mr. President, I thought you were a Phillies fan? Between this and the similar ceremony for the Braves a year ago, Biden has used two of his three championship soirees to celebrate a hated division rival and the team that beat the Phillies in the World Series. The Bidens are already on thin ice after the First Lady showed up to watch a white-hot Phillies team in Game 4 of the World Series, only for them to get no-hit and lose three straight to end the season.
That leads into the second question: Encountering a sitting president has to be a provocative experience, even for a professional athlete. What effect does going to the White House have on a defending World Series champion? Read the rest of this entry »
Cole Hamels retired from baseball on Friday, causing significant consternation to people who read that headline and thought they’d been transported back in time to the winter of 2019. (Buy a house now, while you still can, and be sure to stock up on hand sanitizer.)
It’s been four years since Hamels pitched effectively in the major leagues; before the 2020 season, he signed a one-year deal with the Atlanta Braves, and was limited to just 3 1/3 innings by injuries to his triceps and shoulder. Two further comeback attempts, with the Dodgers and his hometown Padres, came to nothing. Hamels never quite recovered from a 2021 surgery to repair a torn rotator cuff, and was still unable to throw without pain when he decided, at age 39, that he’d finally had enough.
Hamels, the 2008 NLCS and World Series MVP, will probably appear on just one Hall of Fame ballot. But few players’ reputations suffered more by comparison to their immediate surroundings than Hamels’ did; he was one or two breaks from giving a speech in Cooperstown someday, even if nobody realized it at the time. Read the rest of this entry »
Jackson Jobe has added a cutter to the power arsenal that helps make him one of the top pitching prospects in the Detroit Tigers system. Every bit as importantly, he’s returned to full health following a back ailment that landed him on the shelf from early April to mid June. The recently-turned 21-year-old right-hander had incurred an L5 (i.e. bottom left vertebra) stress fracture, an injury he attributed to “rotating fast and throwing hard at a young age when I wasn’t really strong enough to support that.”
The pitch now augmenting his fastball/slider/changeup combination was portended in a conversation I had with him last August. As his second full professional season was concluding, Jobe told me that he wanted to develop something new, “probably a cutter,” and he went on to do just that.
“I added it in the offseason, and on paper it’s a really good pitch,” the third-overall pick in the 2021 draft explained prior to his last start, which came on Friday with the High-A West Michigan Whitecaps. “I dive into all the TrackMan stuff — the vertical movement, horizontal movement, the spin efficiency, the tilt — and use the data in pitch-design. The cutter has performed pretty well.”
Asking the analytically-minded hurler about the metrics on his cutter elicited a response that was preceded by a pregnant pause. Read the rest of this entry »
Ranked and briefly analyzed below are the prospects who have been traded during the loosely defined “2023 deadline season,” which for simplicity’s sake I consider all of July. Most of the deals these prospects were part of have been analyzed at length on this site. An index of those pieces can be found here, or by clicking the hyperlink in the “Trade” column below, which will take you to the relevant article. I’ve moved all of the 35+ FV and above players listed here to their new orgs over on The Board, so you can click through to see where they rank among their new teammates and read their full scouting reports. Our Farm System Rankings, which update live, also reflect these changes, so you can see where teams’ systems stack up following the draft and the deadline. Read the rest of this entry »
Well, that’s the end of that. The trade deadline has come and gone, and whatever teams have is, well, whatever they’re going to have for the stretch run. My colleague Ben Clemens has already done the traditional look at the winners and losers of the deadline, so now it’s the turn of ZiPS, as I do every year afterwards. This is a very targeted look, in that ZiPS isn’t really looking at whether teams did a good job on a general level, only how the deadline affects their 2023 chances. So a team like the Mets ranking at the bottom isn’t a reflection on their competence, but how the deadline changed their postseason probability.
The methodology is simple. I project the rest of the season (after the games on August 1) both with the current rosters and if I undid every single trade made in the final two weeks of the trade period. I’ve included the projections for playoffs, division, and World Series for each of the 30 teams, with the default sort being playoff probability. Read the rest of this entry »
When anyone but an absolute superstar gets traded at the deadline, we’ve come to expect that the player’s new team sees something they can improve. Thousands of scouts, data analysts, and coaches across the sport, poring over film and charts, looking for the one player they can point to and say, with total confidence, “I can fix him.” Sometimes it’s as simple as one conversation, one adjustment to a pitch grip or a player’s swing timing or his position on the rubber, and it all clicks. Sometimes in the player’s first game in his new environs.
Predicting and identifying these adjustments can make for a fun metagame around the trade deadline, but I’ve learned the hard way not to trust the headline-making debut. In 2019, the Astros made a deadline move for Aaron Sanchez, the onetime Blue Jays standout whose career had stagnated. Sanchez brought an ERA over 6.00 into his Houston debut, and promptly threw six innings of no-hit ball. You could not ask for a clearer example of a player being remade overnight by an organization that knew what to do with him.
After the no-hit bid, Sanchez made just three more starts for Houston, in which his ERA was 7.11. He pitched for three teams in 2021 and 2022, posting an ERA of 5.29. (But just a 4.32 FIP! I can still fix him!) Two weeks ago, he was released from the Twins’ Triple-A affiliate. Now, when you look Sanchez up on the internet, Wikipedia assumes you’re looking for celebrity chef Aarón Sánchez, who is definitely the best MasterChef judge but has never, to my knowledge, no-hit anything.
I lied, though. I haven’t learned a damn thing, because I’m going to get carried away over Lance Lynn’s first start with the Dodgers. I am ready to believe again. Read the rest of this entry »
The trade deadline was yesterday, which means it’s time for a winners and losers post. I don’t really have a clever introduction for you here; you know what these things are, and you know how they go. I consulted a bit with the FanGraphs staff in compiling these, but these are mostly just my opinions. Want a high-level summary of what you should care about following the deadline? Here it goes.
Winner: Teams Trading Pitchers
The market for pitching of all types was scalding hot this week. Most of the best prospects who moved were shipped out in exchange for pitching, including plenty of rentals. Lucas Giolito and Reynaldo López have been just okay this year, and they merited a 50 FV prospect plus more. Jordan Montgomery and Chris Stratton fetched a similar return. Noted old men Justin Verlander and Max Scherzer got the Mets both quality and quantity in return. Even rental relievers like Jordan Hicks and David Robertson brought back exciting prospects.
Of course, not every rumored move materialized. If teams were willing to offer this much in return for rental pitchers, it’s perhaps unsurprising that some of the big names rumored to be on the market stayed put. Three months of Montgomery is one thing, but what about two years of Dylan Cease or four years of Logan Gilbert? Given how much teams are willing to dole out for a few years of an aging, paid-down ace, you can imagine the sky-high price tag for young, controllable starters.
I think the activity we saw makes a lot of sense. It’s hard to know how many healthy and effective pitchers you’ll have in July, even if you start the season with a full complement of them. It’s also a position that everyone needs; realistically, every playoff contender could use another excellent reliever and another innings-eating starter. Heck, Lance Lynn has the worst ERA in baseball and the Dodgers still traded for him.
I used to think that if you weren’t sure whether your team was playoff bound, it was more effective to wait until July to build a bullpen. Bring in four or five relievers if you’re in the race; trade some guys if you aren’t. But at current valuations, I think that equation has changed. You can add pitching in July, no doubt, but these days, it’ll cost you.
Winner: Teams Acquiring Hitters
As hot as the market was for pitchers of all varieties, even good hitters didn’t fetch much this deadline. Jeimer Candelario has already racked up 3.1 WAR this season, and yet he got dealt for less than either Robertson or Hicks, two rental relievers who have combined for 1.5 WAR and 86.2 innings pitched this year. Mark Canha was dealt for a long-shot starter prospect. Tommy Pham only brought back a DSL lottery ticket.
I don’t think this crop of rental hitters is particularly weak, but there are no standout options. Perhaps that kept bids down. But Candelario, Pham, and Canha are the kinds of solid major leaguers that most teams can use in some capacity or another, in the same way that a fifth starter can chip in even without being particularly good.
Perhaps it’s just a fluke of the way the standings broke; among playoff contenders, only the Marlins, Brewers, Guardians, and Twins have truly dire offenses. The Twins and Guardians both seem to have been moved by the spirit of their division and decided lousy might work just fine, while the Brewers and Marlins both added. That’s a fairly small crop of needy teams overall, though I think at least four other contending clubs could have improved their fortunes markedly by adding Candelario.
The market has been heading this way in recent years; hitters are getting less and less at the deadline unless they’re true stars. Smart teams are surely taking note. If my team has to go into a given season with a weakness, I’d much prefer it to be at a corner offensive spot rather than in the rotation or bullpen. It’s easier to get competent upgrades at those positions at midseason than to restock a bad bullpen or bulk up a wimpy rotation.
Winner: The Mets Farm System
I’ve long thought that Steve Cohen’s financial might would eventually start helping the Mets’ farm system. It turns out, a surprisingly awful season was all the team needed to get going on that front. The equation is simple. Take a star on a market rate contract, then absorb enough of the money that they’re on a below-rate contract. Presto, changeo! You now have a valuable trade chip.
Four of the team’s top 10 prospects weren’t Mets a week ago. They’ve added across the entire scope of the minors; they acquired three players in the Dominican Summer League and several who are already performing well in Double-A. We have them as the 11th-best farm system now, just behind some vaunted organizations (Orioles, Rays, Diamondbacks), and that’s after Francisco Alvarez, Brett Baty, and Kodai Senga all graduated from our preseason list. They did most of that by trading pitchers who are 38, 39, and 40. That’s some kind of pivot.
Look, spending a bunch of money is a good way to get good baseball players. That’s hardly a shocking statement. Traditionally, wallet-flexing is mostly about supplementing your roster with star veterans. There’s nothing wrong with that, and I’m betting that the Mets will keep doing that where appropriate. But real long-term success requires a vibrant farm system that can churn out flexible role players and the occasional star. The Dodgers wouldn’t be such a juggernaut if they weren’t hitting on Will Smith, Bobby Miller, Walker Buehler, Tony Gonsolin, and so on. They wouldn’t have had the prospects to trade for Mookie Betts if they didn’t focus on developing them first.
One move I particularly liked: starting an AL West arms race and then profiting off of it. Sending Scherzer to Texas clearly lit a fire under the Astros. The Rangers already looked like a serious threat for the division title, but Scherzer and Montgomery might have made them the favorites. The Mets turned around and dealt Verlander back to Houston on the back of that, and they got the Astros’ best two prospects for him. That’s clean living.
Winner: Milwaukee Brewers
The Brewers didn’t come into the deadline planning to expend much prospect capital. Their team is hardly a juggernaut, and they could use a minor league talent infusion soon to offset the upcoming losses of Corbin Burnes and Brandon Woodruff. But thanks to the vagaries of the market, they were able to add two meaningful pieces in Canha and Andrew Chafin without doing much to affect their future plans.
That’s not a bad start, but it gets better than that. Luis Urías had turned into a sunk cost; he’s making $4.7 million in arbitration this year, but played poorly enough to get demoted to Triple-A. The budget-conscious Brewers were likely going to DFA him, but they traded him to the Red Sox instead and got Bradley Blalock, a 40+ FV starter who’s been on fire this year. Recouping value when players don’t pan out like you’d hoped is a key part of the Milwaukee strategy, and this is a good example.
And there’s more! The Reds are leading the NL Central, but they essentially sat out the deadline. Their core is made up mostly of rookies, and I’m sure they’re telling themselves that now is too soon to strike, but come on, man. The NL Central probably won’t be this winnable for years to come. The Cubs are on the rise. The Cardinals won’t stay down long. The Pirates… Well, fine, you can’t win them all. But the Reds sat on their hands, which meant the Brewers’ additions went unopposed.
Winner: Miami’s Strategy
Speaking of teams that understand their window, the Marlins were busy this week. They added a closer, a first baseman, a third baseman, and whatever role you want to assign to Ryan Weathers. They badly needed those corner infielders, and their bullpen could use some work too. The plan of “fix all our weaknesses and try to go make the playoffs” makes even more sense when you consider that they’ve only been there once since their 2003 World Series championship, and even that postseason trip was in the pandemic-shortened 2020 season. When you’re the Marlins, you need to take your shots where you can.
Loser: Miami’s Tactics
But, uh, maybe not like this. The Marlins gave up some promising youngsters in the trade for Robertson. Marco Vargas in particular is a buzzy name in scouting circles, the kind of hitter who everyone thinks is the best kept secret to the point where the secret isn’t particularly well kept. The public-side prospect watchers I listen to the most all think the Mets got the better of that deal.
And don’t even get me started on the first base situation. No one would disagree that the Marlins need help there; their first basemen have produced an anemic 96 wRC+ on the year, not exactly what you’d hope for from an offense-first position. Just one problem: Josh Bell, who they acquired from the Guardians, has a 95 wRC+.
That’s harsher to Bell than he deserves, which mirrors his batted ball luck this year. He’s making his customary loud contact and putting up good strikeout and walk numbers, but the power just hasn’t appeared. He also has a pretty horrendous .272 BABIP, especially vexing when you consider how many grounders and line drives he hits. Garrett Cooper, who Bell is replacing, had similar numbers but worse raw measurables; I think Bell is a small upgrade.
To make that small upgrade, the Marlins took on roughly $9 million in salary across the next two years. They also sent out post-hype sleeper Kahlil Watson. Neither of those is a huge loss, but the net of the whole thing is baffling to me. Money and a prospect for a hitter who you’re hoping ends up 15% above average? Just trade for Canha or Pham for way less, or something like that.
In a deadline where bats were there for the taking, the Marlins overpaid. I don’t think their Jake Burger/Jake Eder swap was quite so bad, because they’re getting future years of control from Burger and Eder is a phenomenally risky prospect, but it’s a sign of the same thing that bothered me about the other trades. Sure, Burger will be around for longer than a rental, but you could plug a series of veterans into that role, and there’s no guarantee that Burger will be playable for his entire Miami tenure. The Marlins got half of the equation right – it’s time to go out and get some hitters and relievers – but then they went about it in a bizarre way.
Loser: The Theory of Perpetually Increasing Prospect Hugging
Teams have been getting increasingly attached to their own prospects. Last year, only seven prospects we gave a grade of 50 FV or higher got traded, and three of them were part of the Juan Soto deal. With no one that good on the market this year (RIP, dreams of a Shohei Ohtanirental), I thought there was a chance that roughly zero top 100 prospects would get traded.
That didn’t happen. Six FV 50s got traded this deadline, headlined by Kyle Manzardo and Drew Gilbert. Plenty of interesting prospects just outside the fringes of the top 100 moved as well. That’s a big haul considering how quiet the deadline was; the Mets, White Sox, and Cardinals were the only sellers of note this year. If you weren’t interested in what those teams were offering, there wasn’t much to do.
I’m not ready to say that the tide has changed. Teams are still clinging to prospects in general; the Orioles and Reds, two of this year’s biggest surprises, went small at the deadline despite flourishing farm systems and not enough spaces to play their coterie of exciting young hitters. Both teams might regret that move down the road; give or take service time shenanigans, they’re taking a major disadvantage in one sixth of the team control years for their core.
You’re telling me that Heston Kjerstad is more useful in Baltimore as one of a bevy of might-work-out outfielders than as a trade chip to help this year’s team? I’m skeptical. The same goes for third basemen Noelvi Marte and Cam Collier in Cincinnati – you might have heard, but the team isn’t exactly short on infield prospects.
Prospect hugging isn’t defeated, and it probably never will be. But this year’s mix of deals feels a little closer to rational than the past few years, at least in my mind. I still think it’s a good time to be adding at the deadline, but not to quite the extreme that I feared the market would find equilibrium.
Loser: The Orioles
Let’s break that previous thought out a little bit more. The Orioles are a lock to make the playoffs this year, and yet their rotation is one of the worst in baseball. This deadline had a ton of impact rental arms, and while they would have cost a decent amount in terms of prospects, the Orioles were perfectly positioned to do just that. Kjerstad, Colton Cowser (currently on the big league club but scuffling), Joey Ortiz, Jordan Westburg; they have a surfeit of coveted hitting prospects, easily enough to swing a deal for at least a few impact starters. Somehow, they instead ended up with only Jack Flaherty, who looks like more of what their rotation already had.
That hurts! Adley Rutschman and Gunnar Henderson are going to be around for a long time, but it’s not literally forever. The AL East is consistently one of the toughest divisions in baseball. There’s no guarantee that the Yankees and Red Sox will stay down, and no guarantee that the Orioles will lead the division this late in the season in the immediate future. Their Pythagorean and BaseRuns records suggest that they’ve been playing better than their underlying talent, but that shouldn’t be a reason not to add. This is surely the best shot the O’s will have at a playoff bye in the next few years based on divisional competition alone. It’s criminal to let the deadline pass by without leaning into that chance.
My guess is that Baltimore’s front office is held back by the very thinking that has propelled them to this spot in the first place. They sold at the deadline last year despite being fringe contenders, and it paid off. They try to red paperclip every trade, always building towards a perpetually glorious future. They hoard prospects and work reclamation projects. The system works! Houston used that model to become a juggernaut, and the Orioles might follow in their footsteps one day. But that plan has its limits; it’s designed to build up your farm system while the big league club stinks, not to deal with the exigencies of a playoff contender.
The Orioles are run by a sharp group of people; you’ll get no objection from me on that score. They’re surely aware of the perils of constantly looking to the future; it’s not a deep secret. But subconsciously, I think they might be struggling to change mental models. Constantly dreaming about what players might become in three years leads to systematic mis-evaluations of how important the present is at any given time. Concentrating value into windows of contention by adding at some deadlines and restocking at others is the way that teams with good process convert their farm systems into titles. The Orioles will figure it out, but I don’t think they’ve gotten the math right just yet.
Winner: Midwestern Retools
I’ve already covered the Mets; the two other major sellers this year were the White Sox and Cardinals, both of whom had a truckload of pitchers with expiring contracts, the new coin of the realm. Giolito, Lynn, López, Joe Kelly, Kendall Graveman, Montgomery, Jack Flaherty, Hicks, Stratton… the names just kept on coming.
Out of that laundry list of players, only Graveman has a guaranteed contract next year. These teams expected to contend for the playoffs, and they were going to have to work hard in the offseason. They’ll still need to replace that production if they’re planning on reaching the postseason in 2024, but that was always the case; now, at least, they have a bunch of prospects that they wouldn’t have access to otherwise.
Each team acted according to its expected timeline. I don’t think the White Sox will be great next year, and they seemed to agree; the best prospect they got back in their deals is a 20-year-old catcher. The Cardinals targeted near-majors-ready pitching, which makes sense given their huge need there. It’s win-win to me; a ton of good players who are headed for free agency get to battle for playoff spots down the stretch, and two farm systems in need of rejuvenation got just that.
Loser: Excitement
We can go back and forth about who won and who lost all day, but the bottom line is that the only trades that felt like capital-n News were Verlander and Scherzer decamping to Texas. Big names, big salaries, splashy prospects coming back; those are the kinds of deadline deals that top SportsCenter and get my non-baseball friends buzzing.
No one really went all-in this year, unless you want to count the Rangers. No one did a full teardown. The only sellers who had much to move did so with the intention of competing again soon. The Cardinals and Padres held onto some high impact stars who might have shaken up the deadline, and the White Sox stopped short of trading Dylan Cease. It’s hard to blame any one team for their decision. Taken individually, I can mostly understand the tactics everyone chose, even if I quibble with what the Orioles and Reds did (or didn’t do). But the end result of all those rational decisions was a bit of a snooze.
I’m not sure there’s much of a solution to this. From an entertainment standpoint, it’s dull. From a process standpoint, baseball is big business these days, and risk aversion is on the rise. Taking a risky move or blowing things up on a whim doesn’t sound quite so enticing when you’re making multiple million dollars a year as a GM. It probably doesn’t sound as enticing for an owner, either. The deadline doesn’t have to be exciting, and there are some awesome playoff races to follow down the stretch, but I was hoping all day for some shocking blockbuster, and it never materialized.
