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Eight months ago, Craig Kimbrel declared for free agency. A lot has happened since then. There were rumors in November that Kimbrel wanted a six year deal. We don’t know what happened to Kimbrel’s demands or when. We don’t know what offers were made and then rejected, or not made because of those perceived demands. We don’t know if draft pick compensation was a legitimate concern or simply an excuse for teams to hide behind. What we do know is that Craig Kimbrel is no longer a free agent. Ken Rosenthal first reported that Kimbrel had agreed to a deal with the Chicago Cubs for three years and roughly $45 million, with Jeff Passan reporting Kimbrel will make $10 million this season and $16 million in each of the following two years with a $1 million buyout on a team option for 2022.

Every team could use Craig Kimbrel. The Red Sox — whose current saves leader, Ryan Brasier, has a 5.30 FIP and ERA over four as the team has struggled to stay above .500 — wasn’t interested in bringing Kimbrel back and paying the 75% tax on his salary. The Atlanta Braves — who are in a fight for first place with a below replacement level bullpen performance that is worse than every teams outside of Miami and Baltimore and payroll flexibility coming off a division title and new taxpayer-funded stadium — opted not to get involved. The Nationals — with an MLB-worst 6.66 bullpen ERA as they try to get back into playoff contention — chose to try and stay below the competitive balance tax. The Brewers — who watched Corey Knebel go down with a season-ending injury and watched their 2018 strength turn into a liability outside of Josh Hader — sat and watched Kimbrel go to their rival. Read the rest of this entry »

Think back to the first weeks of the season. Those few weeks of time are disproportionately important, because they shape our understanding of the baseball season in a way that two random weeks normally wouldn’t. It’s taken quite a while, for example, for everyone to realize that Christian Yelich is excellent but probably not the second coming of Babe Ruth, or that Paul DeJong is a good shortstop who isn’t one of the best five players in baseball. Marco Gonzales was a no-strikeout pitching phenom, compiling a 3.1 FIP (2.8 ERA) and 1.3 WAR. He’s been below replacement level since, but you wouldn’t know that if you didn’t take the time to look. Yes, the first few weeks of the season exert a powerful hold on our minds.

What if they didn’t, though? What if, for some crazy reason, the first month-plus of baseball didn’t happen, and the season started on May 1? The narratives and the takes would be extremely different. We don’t see them now, because a month of March and April stats camouflage the full-season lines, but here’s a glimpse of what could have been. Read the rest of this entry »

Draft Week rolls on with breakdowns of all the picks from Day 1. We don’t do grades, as it would be silly to project how these picks are going to work out five-plus years from now the day after they happen, and because you can get a sense of our opinion of a pick from our rankings and the tone of our comments. As you can see above, there will be a podcast reviews Days 1 and 2 with a couple of minutes spent on each team, then a notebook wrap-up of the odds and ends we’ve heard when the draft concludes. For more complete reports and tool grades on these players, head over to THE BOARD.

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With the MLB draft set to kickoff this evening, here is our latest mock, compiled using industry chatter from team personnel and player reps, our own in-person scouting, and educated guesses informed by how we believe individual teams have operated recently. For more information on the players mentioned below, head over to The BOARD, which we’ll continue to flood with player info over the next few days, as well as our first three mocks.

We’ll do one more names-only mock tonight just before the draft kicks off, and based on how we characterize the process surrounding a few of the picks, we expect some behind-the-scenes fireworks just before dinner time on the East Coast tonight.

1. Orioles – Adley Rutschman, C, Oregon State
Clubs still think there’s a real chance for a cut-rate option here, with Vaughn and Bleday the two leading candidates and Witt less likely. This crew keeps a tight lid on things, and may not call someone’s adviser to really get down to brass tacks until sometime late this afternoon. Even the advisers of those potential backup options don’t yet know if they’re going 1-1, or how to handicap it. Contact hasn’t been made with Rutschman’s reps for weeks, which is also to be expected to maximize leverage. We think a lot of the buzz here is being mentioned as posturing, and that the odds are high the pick is just Rutschman; it’s something like an 80% chance, but by no means a slam dunk. It’s worth noting that some of the concerns on Rutschman’s medical are more likely to be flagged by Baltimore given their specific medical staff. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Wednesday, Cubs outfielder Albert Almora Jr. hit a foul ball. That is not an unusual occurrence at a baseball game, except that this particular foul ball hit a four-year-old girl in the stands. Almora, quite understandably, was visibly shaken.

Unsurprisingly, the incident ignited another round of debate over a topic we first discussed last year: protective netting at ballparks. Brian Johnson, a former major league catcher and current scout for the San Francisco Giants, told CNN’s Jeff Pearlman that the existence of seats without netting is like building cars without seat belts. But, as we discussed last year, the law doesn’t see it that way:

As explained in the Restatement [of Torts], there exists in the law a doctrine called “assumption of the risk.” In the context of baseball, that basically means that if you sit in an area without protective netting and you know it’s a possibility that a foul ball might come your way, you can’t sue the team for getting injured by that foul ball. As one court put it in a case called Edward C. v. City of Albuquerque, a fan ‘must exercise ordinary care to protect himself or herself from the inherent risk of being hit by a projectile’ — even if that projectile is traveling upwards of 100 mph.

There’s a really excellent write-up on this that you can read here. In short, however, this “baseball rule” represents the majority rule in the United States. If a foul ball comes your way at a ballpark, the law basically says you should have seen it coming. You’ll probably find language on your ticket saying you assume the risk of injury by foul ball, like the Yankees have on theirs.

Read the rest of this entry »

Stephen Nogosek got one step closer to the big leagues when he was promoted from Double-A Binghamton to Triple-A Syracuse On May 24. The next rung on the ladder is New York, and the 24-year-old right-hander will be bringing more than a four-pitch mix with him when he arrives at Citi Field. He’ll bring a mule-deer mindset, as well.

Nogosek was a Duck before becoming a Met. In between, he was Red Sox property, having been selected by the AL East club in the sixth round of the 2016 draft out of the University of Oregon. Thirteen months later, he was included in the trade-deadline deal that brought Addison Reed to Boston. The address change didn’t shake him up so much as wake him up.

“I was asleep on this bus,” explained Nogosek, who was with high-A Salem at the time. “We were our way to Winston-Salem, and Adam Lau nudged me and said, ‘Hey, you just got traded.’ I was like, ‘Whatever,’ and fell back asleep. When I kind of woke up a little, I was like, “OK, did I really get traded?’

Shenanigans were certainly possible — teammates can’t always be trusted on such matters — but this was no tomfoolery. Once the cobwebs cleared, Nogosek learned that he would indeed be receiving his paychecks (meager as they are in the minors) from another organization. Read the rest of this entry »

Today the NCAA Baseball Tournament begins, which means you can tune in and cram for Monday’s MLB Draft by enjoying our country’s highest level of amateur baseball. While we think the entire tournament is worth checking out just for the baseball, we have compiled pro prospects playing in each regional below for readers to reference while they watch, and included some of our thoughts on those players. We’ve roughly ranked each regional in order of prospectyness. For more on these players, head over to THE BOARD. Seniors are indicated below by an asterisk, ages are on draft day of their draft class.

Horn and Williamson will face each other on Friday, while Lodolo is scheduled to throw Saturday. It sounds like Arkansas is also saving Campbell and Wicklander for later in the weekend, as their opening game is against the fourth seed in the bracket. This postseason could be a coming out party for any of the Razorback underclass hitters (Eric’s pick is Casey Martin) the way last postseason was for Adley Rutschman. We recommend eating at Arsaga’s at the Depot if you’re in town for this regional. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not a secret that baseball at every level is being changed by the information gleaned from advanced tech like TrackMan, StatCast, and about a dozen other platforms. There are examples of changes in swing plane, pitch grips, sequencing, and location from every team in the big leagues derived purely from this data. It’s also generally known that this progressive approach has reached into the minor leagues for many teams and is also spreading to amateur baseball. Because the pitching end of this march began early (PITCHf/x came about nearly a decade before we heard the term exit velo), progressive hitting knowledge has lagged years behind pitching, and now the fact that colleges haven’t fully embraced it is affecting the draft and what kind of talent gets to campus.

Eric and I have spoken with numerous scouts in recent weeks about a topic that came up innocently in our draft prep but that, when we dug deeper, appears to be indicative of a larger trend in the game. There are an unusual amount of high school position player prospects who are signable in the $250,000 to $500,000 bonus range. One crosschecker said his region normally has at most one prospect per year of this sort, and this year there are at least seven. Every other regional or national scout we’ve asked has confirmed that they’ve noticed the same thing, but none had a ready-made explanation for why it is happening. We put together a hypothesis, and got universal agreement that we were onto something.

Colleges Coach Hitters for College
Many, if not most, top collegiate hitting prospects need a substantive swing change right after they’re drafted to match what’s going on in pro ball. Last year South Alabama’s Travis Swaggerty (reduce effort/movement) and Wichita State’s Alec Bohm (extend arms/increase loft), our fourth and fifth prospects in the draft, most needed to modernize their swings. This year our 12th and 26th prospects, Texas Tech’s Josh Jung (more pull/lift/loft) and Missouri’s Kameron Misner (eliminate toe tap/improve timing), are the two prospects in greatest need of a swing change. It’s not every player, and some prospects I haven’t mentioned need less obvious adjustments, but this is also choosing from a group of the most elite tools and performances in the country.

You may ask why collegiate hitting coaches aren’t addressing these issues. A more fully actualized and pro version of these hitters would surely help their college team in the short term, right? Not necessarily. BABIPs are much higher in college because of the lower skill level, particularly on defense. It’s common for some top programs (especially on the west coast) to have middle-of-the-order batters bunt early in games, and since those bunts result in errors much more often in college, it’s a better strategic play than it is in the majors. An opposite field, line drive, and grounders approach also results in more hits than it would in pro ball while a groundball, at any level of baseball, is more likely to result in a hit than a fly ball. Read the rest of this entry »

You’ve surely heard the sentiment: that pitcher is boom-or-bust. When he’s dialed in, he’s unhittable, but sometimes he just doesn’t “have it.” It’s a non-falsifiable claim, of course. It’s nearly impossible to say what constitutes having it or not, and harder still to know if it’s predictive. For the most part, your talent level is your talent level. Great pitcher? You’ll have fewer blowup games. Bad pitcher? Random chance is going to give you your fair share of crooked numbers.

This unprovable fact, however, set me onto an interesting train of thought. What if run clustering isn’t a purely random process? What if some pitchers, not through any innate streakiness but merely by virtue of the outcomes they allow, give up runs in interesting patterns? Take a groundball-heavy pitcher, for example. When a run scores against him, it’s almost certainly due to a series of groundball singles and walks. If one run scores, there’s often another runner in scoring position right away. The state of the world upon giving up one run, for this Zack Britton-wannabe pitcher, is such that he’s immediately threatened with more runs.

Contrast that to a different type of pitcher, a Nick Anderson-style strikeouts and dingers fly ball pitcher. When our punch-outs and fly balls pitcher gives up a run, it’s often on a solo shot. When that’s the case, one run is in, but the resulting situation isn’t threatening anymore. The bases are empty, the damage done in a single instant. Wouldn’t it be reasonable to wonder whether the two allow runs in different bunches?

Still, those are a lot of words with no real evidence behind them. Who’s to say which of those pitchers allow more big innings? Who’s to say if they’re even equally good pitchers? The guy who allows a lot of home runs sounds like he might allow a lot of big innings, just by virtue of being someone who allows a lot of home runs. We need to be more precise to say anything with conviction. Read the rest of this entry »