Any day week month now, Zack Wheeler is going to sign a contract that compensates him like a very good pitcher, and he’ll deserve it. He’s been consistently above average the past two years, the kind of guy you’d love to have as a No. 2 starter and one who can fake it as a No. 1. In short, he’s been what the Mets hoped for when he was a highly regarded prospect, after a brief detour into arm-injury-land.

But I think there’s still more there. Zack Wheeler, as currently constituted, does everything a bit better than average. He strikes out a few more batters than average, walks a few less, and suppresses hard contact just a smidge. That makes for an above-average pitcher, of course. But it doesn’t make for a world-devouring ace, the kind who opposing batters fear and hometown fans assume will never lose.

In 2019, Wheeler struck out 23.6% of the batters he faced, which placed him 45th among pitchers who threw at least 100 innings last year. That’s high enough to be effective, especially considering his excellent walk rate — Zack Greinke, Hyun-Jin Ryu, and José Berríos all posted lower K% and were All-Stars — but it’s a rate with plenty of room for improvement.

It’s also a surprising number in light of Wheeler’s arsenal. His fastball sits around 97 mph, and he’s topped out above 100 mph in each of the past two years. He throws it with more horizontal break than your average four-seamer (it has three more inches of horizontal break and one less of vertical break than Jacob deGrom’s four-seamer), but gets excellent movement nonetheless. Read the rest of this entry »

Jay Bruce loves to hit, and he loves to talk hitting. He’s good at both. The veteran outfielder has a well-earned reputation for being thoughtful and engaging, and the numbers he’s put up over 12 big-league seasons speak for themselves. Bruce has 649 extra-base hits in 6,500 career plate appearances, including 312 home runs.

A first-round pick by the Reds in 2005, Bruce debuted three years later as a 21-year-old and went on to spend eight-plus season in a Cincinnati uniform. The native of Beaumont, Texas has since bounced around, hopscotching from the Mets to the Indians, back to the Mets, from there to the Mariners, and last summer to the Phillies. At age 32, he’ll head into 2020 in the final year of his current contract.

Bruce sat down to talk hitting when the Phillies visited Fenway Park in mid-September.

David Laurila: How have you evolved as a hitter over the years?

Jay Bruce: “As I’ve gotten older and more experienced, a lot has happened in the game in terms of information and hitting philosophy. Numbers have started being attached to thoughts, or assumptions. I definitely pay attention to that. But I wouldn’t say I’m of the launch-angle revolution, or whatever you care to call it. I’ve always hit the ball in the air. I have a problem with hitting the ball on the ground.

“If your fly balls are your misses, that can cause some BABIP issues — there are issues that could potentially zap parts of your game. But if you have power, and are hitting the ball in the air, you’re giving yourself more opportunities to produce a positive outcome. That should be obvious.

“The thing I probably do the most is pull the ball in the air, and that’s one of the, if not the most, successful ways to hit a ball. So for me… I think the outside philosophy of hitting has changed a little bit. When I came up, you were taught to use the other side of the field. Stay up the middle. Even hit the ball on the ground sometimes.” Read the rest of this entry »

After a season that saw the Yankees win 103 games, an AL East title, and get within two victories of reaching the World Series, Aaron Judge called the season “a failure.” Brian Cashman was a little more diplomatic, saying “we failed in our ultimate goal but we did not have a failed season.” If winning the World Series is the only path to satisfaction for a team, failure is almost inevitable. That hasn’t always been true for the Yankees and their 27 titles — even after going a whole decade without a championship, the Yankees’ five World Series wins in 25 years is still the most in the sport. Only the Red Sox, Giants, Cardinals, and Marlins have multiple titles in that time span, with eight franchises boasting a single title and 17 franchises without a ring since the strike.

The Yankees are often known for operating in another financial stratosphere. Forbes put a $4.6 billion valuation on the club, roughly 40% higher than the Los Angeles Dodgers and essentially the same as the White Sox, Mariners, and Blue Jays combined. While the Yankees’ YES Network is valued at around $3.5 billion, 14 other teams’ networks combined recently sold for about one-fifth that cost on a per team basis. Forbes estimates that only two teams (Dodgers and Red Sox) have annual revenues within $200 million of the Yankees. Financially speaking in baseball, there’s the Yankees up top, then 50 feet of swimming pools full of gold, then there’s everyone else. But lately, when it comes to spending on the major league roster, the Yankees haven’t operated as a behemoth and have instead opted to swim in that gold. Such is their choice.

The Yankees don’t have to spend like they used to in order to be successful. They’ve been better with player development, better at holding on to top prospects, better with trades, and better at identifying diamonds in the rough. Getting there cost them several years of playoff baseball, but they are coming off consecutive 100-win seasons, and though those teams didn’t win the World Series, they put themselves in position to have a really good shot. Strengthening the organization overall has allowed them to spend on payroll like they are a run-of-the-mill rich team. They could do more to win even more games and provide a better chance at a title, but it is difficult to know how great the motivation is to do so when they are already winning a lot. It’s also hard to put into perspective just how much they could be spending when they have one of the top payrolls in the game. Read the rest of this entry »

“How ridiculous and how strange to be surprised at anything which happens in life.” – Marcus Aurelius, (translated from The Meditations)

The Arizona Diamondbacks didn’t enter last offseason with a plan to burn everything to ashes and then burn the ashes. After all, being able to choose how to rebuild is one of the benefits of not waiting until circumstances have eliminated more appealing options. Arizona remained in contention despite trading Paul Goldschmidt last offseason and shedding Eephus god Zack Greinke in July, and the club looks like a viable Wild Card contender entering 2020.

The Setup

The D-backs faced a Goldschmidt-sized conundrum after the 2018 season. The longtime middle-of-the-order slugger was a year from free agency, and the team couldn’t have been thrilled at the prospect of an extension for an aging first baseman, a deal likely to eclipse $25 million a year. The 2018 team went just 82-80 with Goldschmidt, and the improving farm system was still far from elite, so it made the decision to trade a single year of America’s First Baseman if the right package came along. The Cardinals made the winning offer in the form of Carson Kelly, Luke Weaver, Andy Young, and a Competitive Balance Round B pick; in Weaver and Kelly, Arizona received two players with the potential to contribute immediately in crucial roles, softening the loss Goldschmidt.

While there was some concern from the fan base that this move heralded the start of an old-fashioned fire sale, nothing quite so dramatic actually materialized. Endless rumors swirled around Greinke, but Arizona wasn’t, and the team was more than happy to have its ace return for the 2019 season. Arizona saw Christian Walker as the best candidate to replace Goldschmidt at first, and with Walker out of options, the team hoped he’d make a case for a starting job in spring training (he did). Read the rest of this entry »

“What about Whitaker?” That question, which has been on my mind for nearly two decades, came to the fore two years ago when longtime Tigers teammates Jack Morris and Alan Trammell, both of whom spent 15 often contentious and sometimes agonizing years on the BBWAA’s Hall of Fame ballot, were finally elected to the Hall by the Modern Baseball Era Committee. With five All-Star selections, three Gold Gloves, and a central role on the Tigers’ 1984 championship squad, Lou Whitaker had accumulated similarly strong credentials to Trammell while forming the other half of the longest-running double play combo in major league history, one that did a fair bit to prop up Morris’ wobbly candidacy. Yet Whitaker, who ranks 13th in JAWS among second basemen, did not get his 15 years on the writers’ ballot because in his 2001 debut — the last Hall of Fame election cycle that I did not cover, but a pivotal one in many ways — he failed to receive at least 5% of the vote from the BBWAA and thus fell off the ballot. Like so many other candidates who have suffered such a fate, he had never received a second look from a small-committee process. Until now.

Whitaker is one of 10 candidates on the 2020 Modern Baseball Era Committee ballot, which was announced on Monday and which covers players and other figures who made their greatest contributions to the game during the 1970-87 timeframe. He’s not the only one emerging from limbo, either. This marks the first small-committee appearance for longtime Red Sox right fielder Dwight Evans, an eight-time Gold Glove winner who lasted just three cycles on the ballot (1997-99) and peaked at 10.4%, and for late Yankees catcher Thurman Munson, a former MVP who lasted 15 years on the ballot (1981-95) but only in his debut year broke double digits. Munson was virtually ignored on the 2003, ’05, and ’07 ballots voted upon by an expanded Veterans Committee consisting of all living Hall of Famers (and assorted stragglers), receiving just 12 votes out of a possible 243 across those three cycles.

The other seven candidates — former Major League Baseball Players Association executive director Marvin Miller, and ex-players Steve Garvey, Tommy John, Don Mattingly, Dale Murphy, Dave Parker, and Ted Simmons — have each been considered before, some of them multiple times via the 2018 Modern Baseball ballot and its predecessors, the ’11 and ’14 Expansion Era Committee ballots. Indeed, while this slate includes candidates long overdue for a bronze plaque in Cooperstown, a good chunk of ballot space is occupied by candidates who have repeatedly failed to gain much traction with the voters and who fare poorly via JAWS. The extent to which they have crowded out better candidates has been frustrating. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to FanGraphs’ top-50 free-agent rankings. Dave Cameron had previously been responsible for this annual post; I took the reins last year. I’m back leading the charge again, with some assistance from my colleagues.

In what follows, I’ve provided contract estimates and rankings of the winter’s top free agents, along with market-focused breakdowns for the top-25 players. As for why I’ve provided commentary on only the top 25, you can decide for yourself whether it’s because my take on No. 49 Eric Sogard was too hot for the internet, or because all of the players just kind of seemed the same to me by that point. Meanwhile, a combination of Ben Clemens, Craig Edwards, Brendan Gawlowski, Jay Jaffe, Eric Longenhagen, Rachael McDaniel, and Dan Szymborski have supplied the more player-focused breakdowns, which are designed to provide some context for each player at this moment in his career.

Note that players are ranked in the order in which I prefer them, in terms of the overall guaranteed money I’d spend on them. Usually, this is very similar to the order of the overall contract values as both the crowd and I have projected. But in some instances, that’s not the case. I explain my rationale where relevant.

The main theme that I hit upon multiple times in my comments below is the continued evolution of free agency: how hard teams compete with one another in the market, how quickly players sign, the types of player helped or hurt by the changing landscape, and the methods agents use to position their clients, and the deals they eventually sign. If you’re interested in more notes and rumors, I’ll have a corresponding post up to that end shortly, but I didn’t want to make you scroll any further.

Now let’s get to the list.

– Kiley McDaniel Read the rest of this entry »

Josh Osich doesn’t bury his head in the sand when a change is in order. Compared to most hurlers, the 31-year-old southpaw has been chameleon-like in terms of his pitch usage. He’s switched teams, as well. Originally in the Giants organization, Osich spent 2019 with the White Sox, and just this past week he was claimed off waivers by the Red Sox.

Intrigued by what I saw in his pitch-type column, I asked the former Oregon State Beaver for the reasons behind all the ebbs and flows of his offerings.

“If the scouting report is the same every year, they know what you’re going to be throwing,” Osich said this summer. “It’s always nice to change things up, so that they don’t know what’s coming. In 2016, I was sinker-heavy. The year before that, I was fastball-changeup-cutter; it was more of a mix. In 2018, there were probably a few more changeups. This year I’ve been cutter-heavy.”

Very cutter-heavy. Roughly two out of every three pitches Osich threw in 2019 were classified as cutters. Might that not be contradictory to his “they don’t know what’s coming” comment? Read the rest of this entry »

The list of baseball’s winningest teams is one that any franchise would want to be on, but if we take that list and remove the World Series champions, it becomes something of a bummer. Everyone remembers the 2001 Mariners more for what they didn’t do than what they did. It’s not clear how history will remember the 2019 Astros. It seems likely this club will simply get tossed in with the 2017 team that did win it all, taking some of the sting away from not being able to claim a second championship this season. Though perhaps difficult for Houston and its fans right now, we should remember just how great this team was. There’s a reason the Astros’ World Series odds were so high for so long, and it’s because they put together a roster that, over the course of the regular season and much of the postseason, was a lot better than everyone else.

The table below feels almost obligatory, but here’s a list of the teams to win least 105 games, with how their seasons finished:

Read the rest of this entry »

In an interview that ran here last week, Red Sox Senior Vice President/Assistant General Manager Zack Scott suggested that Dave Dombrowski’s successor will be heavily invested in analytics. That turned out to be an understatement. On Monday, Chaim Bloom — an integral cog in Tampa Bay’s cutting-edge front office since 2005 — was formally introduced as Boston’s Chief Baseball Officer.

If you paid heed to the press conference, you’re aware that “collaborative” was the buzzword of the day. Bloom, principal owner John Henry, chairman Tom Werner, and president/CEO Sam Kennedy used the term (and variants thereof) as frequently and purposefully as “Trick or Treat” is heard on Halloween.

Dombrowski didn’t depart Fenway Park in a gorilla costume, as Theo Epstein famously did in 2005, but the reason he’s being replaced isn’t cloaked in mystery. However much the ownership group cares to dance around it, Dombrowski didn’t fully embrace the collaborative process that was deemed necessary to move the team forward, certainly not to the extent they expect Bloom to do so.

Couching his comments with, “I wouldn’t contrast the two,” Henry said from the dais that ownership was “extremely desirous of bringing in someone who would augment and add, as opposed to bringing in someone who might have been an autocrat.” Read the rest of this entry »

Five times, the Washington Nationals faced elimination from the 2019 postseason. Five times, they trailed in those games. And five times, they prevailed. The Washington Nationals are World Series Champions. They were 19-31 in the late days of May. They were down 3-1 in the Wild Card Game with Josh Hader coming in. They were down 3-1 in Game 5 against the Dodgers. They were down 2-1 yesterday, coming back to Houston after scoring just three runs in their three, first-ever World Series home games, and they were down 2-0 entering the seventh yesterday. But the Washington Nationals are World Series Champions. That’s how the story of the 2019 season ends.

***

The game already promised to be a monumental one. It was a Game 7. It was a showdown between two of the game’s longest-tenured and best pitchers, Scherzer vs. Greinke: Max Scherzer, the overpowering madman risen from the grave of debilitating neck pain to pitch in the biggest game of his career, and Zack Greinke, the big acquisition of the trade deadline, the player who had once nearly left baseball due to anxiety now calmly preparing to take on the most anxiety-inducing situation in baseball. For the first time in history, all six previous games had been won by the road team, the Nationals and the Astros stunning each other and their home crowds by turns. The series win expectancy flipped over and over on itself. Now, though, it was a matter of one game.

Right from the outset, Greinke was masterful. He retired the side in the top of the first on just eight pitches. A slider for a lineout snagged by Alex Bregman, a changeup and a slider for a pair of weak groundouts. A swinging strike on a 68 mph curveball. And for six innings, the game was exactly that: Greinke’s. He controlled the edges of Jim Wolf’s pitcher-friendly strike zone, controlled the infield with his sure-handed fielding of each of the many balls hit his way, as if to accentuate the degree to which the game was steady in his grip. Through six innings, the Nationals managed just a single hit and a single walk. Any lead, with that kind of performance ongoing, would seem like a clear path to the championship.

Read the rest of this entry »