On (day of week), the Padres acquired (talented pitcher) from the (spendthrift team) in exchange for a seeming pittance, including (name of decent but not overwhelming Padres prospect). Now, surely, AJ Preller is done. Or is he?

Oh, hello there! Sorry about that. That’s actually the Mad Libs-esque form that I normally use to cover Padres pitching transactions. Today, I’ve got some details for you. It’s Joe Musgrove heading to the best weather in baseball, Hudson Head and Endy Rodriguez highlighting the group headed out (in a three-team trade involving the Pirates and Mets), and Andrew Friedman gently whispering words of affirmation to himself: “We’ll still win the long game, we’ll still win the long game, the Dodger Way can’t be beat.”

Musgrove isn’t an ace, at least not in the way that new teammates Yu Darvish and Blake Snell are. He would have been Pittsburgh’s number one starter this year, which isn’t the same thing. In San Diego, he’ll slot in as the Padres fourth starter. Let the words of Anakin Skywalker speak for the rest of the NL West: “This is outrageous! It’s unfair!”

Seriously, take a look at our Depth Charts predictions for the Padre rotation:

There simply aren’t other teams throwing out pitchers like Musgrove after a whopping three other pitchers. We think that the Padres, Yankees, and Mets will accrue roughly equal value from starting pitchers next year, but the New York teams are doing it with Gerrit Cole and Jacob deGrom, the consensus best two pitchers in the game. Yu Darvish is nice, but not that nice. The Padres are building their own Death Star rotation, and they’re doing it with volume. Read the rest of this entry »

The Yankees’ big free agent signing last week came when the team brought back DJ LeMahieu for six years and $90 million. That deal raises both the floor and the ceiling in the Bronx next season. LeMahieu is a dependable player who should be average at a minimum, ensuring the infield doesn’t have a black hole, while a repeat of his performance since the beginning of 2019 would elevate the Yankees’ chances of a great season. The Yankees’ other signing last week came late Friday in the form of Corey Kluber. Kluber does less to shore up the Yankees’ floor given his recent injury history; indeed, there’s a non-zero chance Kluber doesn’t contribute much to the Yankees at all this year. What Kluber and his two Cy Young awards do manage to do is substantially raise the Yankees’ ceiling, as the team should face a tough battle in the AL East.

Jeff Passan was first with the news that Kluber would be signing with the Yankees for one year and $11 million. Kluber’s contract sits between my $9 million prediction and the $12 million median crowdsource estimate from our top 50 free agent ranking. Despite making just eight starts over the past two seasons, including just a single inning last year, a couple factors worked in Kluber’s favor in securing a decent pillow contract. The first is that Kluber threw for scouts and impressed. The second relates more specifically to the Yankees.

1/When it comes to Kluber, no team will have a better understanding of his physical condition than the #Yankees. The mound session today was at Cressey Sports Performance. The rehab is being done by Eric Cressey, who also is the NYY’s director of health and performance.

— Joel Sherman (@Joelsherman1) January 13, 2021

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Chris Perez didn’t get many opportunities to swing the bat during his seven big-league seasons. As a short reliever who played primarily in the American League, that was to be expected. Somewhat less expected was what happened when he did have a chance to dig into the batters box.

“I had two [plate appearances], and I’m bitter about one of them,” Perez told me recently. “In 2008, my rookie year with St. Louis, we were in Florida at the old stadium, playing the Marlins. I came into the game in the eighth inning with one out, and got a double play with the bases loaded. When I went back to the dugout, Tony La Russa told me, ‘Hey, Chris, you’re still in there. Stay focused, because you’ve got the ninth.’”

The Cardinals were up by a run at the time, and Perez was due up sixth in the top half. Three hits and two outs later — an insurance run having crossed the plate — La Russa approached Perez again. This time the message was less welcome: “Go up to the plate and look dangerous, but don’t swing. I want you to take every pitch.”

La Russa was a veteran manager on his way to the Hall of Fame. Perez was a fresh-faced rookie. He took every pitch. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Minnesota Twins. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. As there was no minor league season in 2020, there are some instances where no new information was gleaned about a player. Players whose write-ups have not been altered begin by telling you so. For the others, the blurb ends with an indication of where the player played in 2020, which in turn likely informed the changes to their report. As always, I’ve leaned more heavily on sources from outside the org than within for reasons of objectivity. Because outside scouts were not allowed at the alternate sites, I’ve primarily focused on data from there. Lastly, in effort to more clearly indicate relievers’ anticipated roles, you’ll see two reliever designations, both in lists and on The Board: MIRP, or multi-inning relief pitcher, and SIRP, or single-inning relief pitcher.

For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of our prospect content is governed, you can click here. For further explanation of Future Value’s merits and drawbacks, read Future Value.

All of the numbered prospects here also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It can be found here.

Editor’s Note: Danny De Andrade was added to this list after he agreed to a deal with the Twins on January 15.
Read the rest of this entry »

Clarke Schmidt is more than a talented, 24-year-old right-hander who made his major league debut with the New York Yankees in 2020. He’s also a bona fide pitching nerd. Selected 18th overall in the 2017 draft out of the University of South Carolina, Schmidt leans heavily on analytics as he strives to further develop an already formidable four-pitch arsenal.

His top two offerings — per Eric Longenhagen, “a power-sweeping, mid-80s breaking ball” and a two-seamer with “nasty tailing action” — have each been honed with the help of data. A third pitch, his four-seamer, is currently on that same path, while his changeup has likewise been undergoing nuanced tweaks. Big-league hitters have barely gotten a glimpse of Schmidt’s smart weaponry — last year’s cup of coffee comprised just six-and-a-third innings — but they can expect to see a lot more of him in the future. Clarke heads into the 2021 season as a strong candidate to capture a spot in New York’s starting rotation.

———

David Laurila: You have a plus breaking ball. What is the story behind it?

Clarke Schmidt: “In college, I was a slider and curveball guy — mainly a slider guy — and my sophomore year, I think I led the SEC in strikeouts. I had [129] strikeouts, and if I had to guess, I got 90 of them on sliders. That was like my go-to pitch. It wasn’t very hard, but it was hard for hitters to see the spin. It was an interesting-spinning slider, and it had a good movement profile, but it wasn’t a sharp-breaking slider.”

Laurila: What made the spin interesting?

Schmidt: “It was very depth-y. Normally, when you see sliders from guys who throw mid-90s [fastballs], it’s like a Gerrit Cole slider, or more of a sharpness with it staying on the plate longer. Mine was more of a sweepy slider, kind of like Chris Sale has. It was a low-80s slider. Read the rest of this entry »

Planning a starting rotation for 2021 carries innumerable pitfalls. Nearly every pitcher in the league saw a reduced workload last year, and they did it in strange circumstances to boot. It’s not merely that the short season set everyone’s innings back — though that’s a huge component. A large number of cancelations and postponements also meant more doubleheaders and more cobbled-together games, another way to throw pitchers off their rhythm.

Put it all together, and protecting arms sounds like an appealing plan for 2021. The Mariners announced that they’ll use a six-man rotation next year, a continuation of the plan they leaned on for all of 2020. The Red Sox are talking workload management. Since initially publishing this piece, Jeff Zimmerman pointed out that the Tigers will use a six-man rotation as well. Is an embiggened rotation the solution to this universal problem? Let’s do the math.

It depends, first of all, on what you give up. The innings tradeoff of a six-man rotation is straightforward. Giving your pitchers an extra day off limits their workloads, naturally enough. The math on that is straightforward if you assume it doesn’t affect their in-game workload. Take a pitcher who averages six innings per start. In a five-man rotation, that’s 192 innings of work. Adding a sixth pitcher to the rotation cuts that down to 162 innings.

How much do those 30 innings of work matter when it comes to health? I’ll level with you — I’m not sure. We simply don’t have the data to say with any amount of certainty, because the number of comparable situations is so small. Pitchers have light workloads all the time, but in most cases it’s due to age or injury. Looking at what a 21-year-old pitcher did in first building up stamina probably can’t tell us much about how many innings Jake Odorizzi, to pick a random example, should throw in 2021. Likewise, a pitcher’s workload in his first year back from Tommy John surgery can’t tell us how many innings Trevor Bauer can be effective for. Read the rest of this entry »

While there were plenty of good options in this year’s free-agent reliever class, with Trevor May, Brad Hand, Archie Bradley, and Blake Treinen representing the near-top tier, there was just one ace available: Liam Hendriks. That elite reliever is now off the board, with the White Sox continuing their aggressive offseason by signing the former A’s closer to a four-year deal worth $54 million. Yahoo Sports’ Tim Brown was the first with the news of the signing, and ESPN’s Jeff Passan was the first to report the unusual structure of the deal: Hendriks will be paid $39 million in the first three years, with the remaining $15 million coming either as a fourth-year team option or as a deferred buyout if the option is declined.

Read the rest of this entry »

Consider the plight of the base stealer. In the 1980s, their role was sacrosanct. Get on base first, then cause havoc. For fans of speed and baserunning, it was a veritable golden age. Rickey Henderson and Vince Coleman each stole 100 bases in three separate seasons. Since 1980, the 13 top seasons in terms of stolen bases per plate appearance were 1980 through 1992.

Alas, the scurrilous forces of math and efficiency conspired to dethrone the stolen base. As it turns out, advancing one base is less good than creating an out is bad. It’s bad enough, in fact, that you need about three successful stolen bases to make up for the downside of getting caught once. The very best thieves managed that level of efficiency, but in aggregate, the league only crested a 70% success rate once from 1980 to 1992. Steals simply weren’t advancing teams’ goal of scoring as many runs as possible.

For a time, there was a reasonable counter-argument: what if attempting a stolen base has positive value that isn’t solely contained in reaching second base? Perhaps the pitcher has steals on the brain, or the defense loses its cohesion while attempting to cover the base for a throw. It doesn’t need to add much edge to make the math add up.

In 2007, the authors of The Book took up this question. They found a large advantage to batters when a runner was on first — exactly what proponents of steals suggested. There was a big problem, however. That advantage was for all runners on first base. The faster the runner, the smaller the advantage. In addition, actually attempting a steal carried a huge hit to the batter, more than enough to offset the advantage of having a runner on base. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Boston Red Sox. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. As there was no minor league season in 2020, there are some instances where no new information was gleaned about a player. Players whose write-ups have not been altered begin by telling you so. For the others, the blurb ends with an indication of where the player played in 2020, which in turn likely informed the changes to their report. As always, I’ve leaned more heavily on sources from outside the org than within for reasons of objectivity. Because outside scouts were not allowed at the alternate sites, I’ve primarily focused on data from there. Lastly, in effort to more clearly indicate relievers’ anticipated roles, you’ll see two reliever designations, both in lists and on The Board: MIRP, or multi-inning relief pitcher, and SIRP, or single-inning relief pitcher.

For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of our prospect content is governed, you can click here. For further explanation of Future Value’s merits and drawbacks, read Future Value.

All of the numbered prospects here also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It can be found here.

Editor’s Note: Miguel Bleis was added to this list after he agreed to a deal with the Red Sox on January 15.

Frank German was added to this list after he was traded to the Red Sox from the Yankees as part of the Adam Ottavino trade.

Lucas Sims was one of Cincinnati’s best pitchers in 2020, and his slider was a big reason why. The Reds right-hander threw the firmer of his two breaking balls 34.1% of the time while registering a 2.45 ERA, and 11.9 strikeouts per nine innings, over 20 relief appearances. Per StatCast, opposing batters slugged a paltry .133 against the pitch. The story behind it reflects the vagaries of the art of pitching itself.

“I learned my slider from from Sonny [Gray], but it’s Sonny’s curveball grip,” explained Sims. “I was toying around with it one day — this was in 2019 — and when I threw it, it swept a lot. His is a downer curveball. I thought, ‘Well, that’s a little bit different.'”

So was the manner in which he unveiled the pitch. Sims spent a few days experimenting with Gray’s grip, but only on flat ground. It wasn’t until he toed the rubber in a game that he delivered one off a mound. The Reds were playing Pittsburgh, and Starling Marté at the plate with a two-strike count.

“I was like, ‘You know what? I might as well try it,’” recalled Sims, whom the Reds had acquired from Atlanta the previous year as part of the Adam Duvall deal. “I didn’t want to hang it — I wanted to make sure it didn’t get deposited — and ended up spiking it in the [left-handed] batter’s box. But then I threw another one and got a swing-and-a-miss. I decided, ‘All right, this is going to be a new pitch for me.”

Which brings us to the offering itself. Is Sims throwing a slider with Gray’s curveball grip, or does Gray throw a curveball with a slider grip? Read the rest of this entry »