Archive for Featured

Unless another major deal comes out in the next few weeks, the Houston Astros have signed Jose Altuve to the biggest contract of the winter. The deal is notable for several reasons.

1. Under his previous contract, Jose Altuve would not reach free agency for another two years, after the 2019 season.
2. Jose Altuve’s agent is Scott Boras, and he has long been loathe to give away any free-agent years ahead of free agency.

As Travis Sawchik noted last night, Altuve will reportedly sign for five years and $151 million, and the contract will begin after Altuve’s current contract runs out. Altuve will earn just $12.5 million over the next two seasons in one of the biggest bargain contracts baseball has ever seen. While he wasn’t all that good when the Astros signed him back in 2013, Altuve has been one of the best players in baseball since 2014, with his 24 wins third to only Mike Trout and Josh Donaldson among position players in that span. Altuve just finished off a fantastic MVP season for the World Series champions, and historically, he’s on one of the better runs for a second baseman in history. The table below shows second baseman since 1947 through their age-27 seasons.

Five of the 11 non-Altuve players on that list are in the Hall of Fame. Grich and Whitaker, meanwhile, represent some of the biggest snubs of the last half-century, while Pedroia remains active still building a case.

When the Twins signed Logan Morrison to a deal for $6.5 million, most agreed it was a bargain. By comparison, the Astros have the reigning MVP locked up for that price in his prime for the next two seasons. That leads to obvious questions regarding the Astros’ motivation here. Why sign a player to an extension before it is necessary? Anyone who remembers the Ryan Howard contract, for example, might look at this extension and wonder if it’s simply a gift from the Houston front office.

This is not a gift, though. It’s a fair deal.

Read the rest of this entry »

Each week, we publish in the neighborhood of 75 articles across our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
Read the rest of this entry »

Eugenio Suarez is young, and, last year, he was very good. He wasn’t about to leave the Reds any time soon, but now a separation could be even further away. See, Suarez was looking at three more years of team control, but now he and the club have agreed to a seven-year contract with an eighth-year club option. The breakdown is as follows, and what isn’t shown is Suarez’s $2-million signing bonus.

• 2018: $2.25 million
• 2019: $7 million
• 2020: $9.25 million
• 2021: $10.5 million
• 2022: $11 million
• 2023: $11 million
• 2024: $11 million
• 2025: $15-million club option ($2-million buyout)

Suarez’s first free-agent year would’ve been 2021. He’s signed away four of them, and maybe a fifth, and the total guarantee works out to $66 million. There are no other bonuses or escalators included, and Suarez also hasn’t received a no-trade clause. We’ve seen a lot of increasingly complicated contracts. This one’s simple. The Reds are locking up a good player for a while, and that player is now guaranteed life-changing money that will afford his family great comfort.

Everyone right now is saying the right things. The mood is typically pleasant when a contract is announced. The Reds say they’re thrilled to keep a building block. They see Suarez as someone who can lead them out of the rebuild and into contention. And Suarez says he’s ecstatic to commit to Cincinnati, where he’s come to excel. I can’t imagine being upset about sixty-six million dollars. It’s very, very easy to see how this is a triumphant moment for Suarez as a player. It’s also easy to see how Suarez might’ve been undervalued. The timing here probably isn’t a coincidence.

Read the rest of this entry »

“What are you trying to ask me? About launch angle?”

– Eric Hosmer

PEORIA, Ariz. — We’ve written quite a bit about Eric Hosmer this offseason.

Former FanGraphs manager editor and current Padres front-office official, Dave Cameron, ranked Hosmer as his No. 1 free-agent land mine of the offseason. Not long before that, I’d identified Carlos Santana as a superior free-agent option at first base.

Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Miami Marlins. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from our own (both Eric Longenhagen’s and Kiley McDaniel’s) observations. 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 the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this.

60 FV Prospects

Brinson has loud physical tools: plus raw power, plus speed, plus arm strength, and the ability to play center field despite mediocre instincts. He didn’t hit for as much power as was expected at hitter-friendly Colorado Springs in 2017, but scouting reports on the raw power, and Brinson’s ability to get to it in games, remain strong. Provided he’s able to make continuous adjustments — and he’s exhibited the ability to do that on his ascent through the minors — Brinson has 25-homer potential. He has had several soft-tissue, lower-body injuries during his career, including multiple hamstring issues, one of which ended his 2017 season. He’s still a plus runner underway but doesn’t reach top speed as quickly as he once did.

50 FV Prospects

This is what it looks like when things start to click on the baseball field for a premium athlete: a .272/.350/.481 line split between two levels, 51 extra-base hits (including 21 homers), and 27 bases stolen at a 87% success rate. Harrison has always had late-bloomer traits. He was a multi-sport stud — not multi-sport athlete, multi-sport stud — in high school and only committed to baseball full time after turning pro. In parts of three pro seasons entering 2017, Harrison missed time with a hamate fracture and broken leg, which prevented him from getting the reps he needed and diluted the way his tools looked on the field when he was.

Read the rest of this entry »

The last thing you probably want to read right now is another summary of the slow-moving pace of free agency. And it wasn’t just that the market moved slowly — for so many players, the contracts they’ve signed have fallen well short of expectations. It’s still too soon to know whether this will be an aberration, but it does feel as if something has shifted. One explanation would be that the free-agent market, from the team perspective, worked rationally. The player perspective would be less charitable. Teams are certainly behaving as if they’re not thrilled to pay players much money as they get deeper into their 30s.

If we take it to be true that free agency is changing, well, there would be several contributors to that. And if we take it to be true that free agency is changing, that should raise the level of urgency to shift more money to players earlier in their careers. That’s the real issue for baseball to deal with. But let’s go back for a second. I want to talk about one single contributor to a depressed market. I don’t think it’s something that’s been happening intentionally, for teams to try to save money. I think the impact on the market is one arguably unfortunate side effect. This is an exciting time for baseball — the age of information. What that can mean has probably been under-discussed.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll get to Lucas Giolito in a moment. But first, James Paxton. Paxton has always had pretty good stuff, but for a while, he didn’t know quite where it was going. Here are two screenshots from before Paxton broke out.

Paxton would reach back, and, with his glove arm, he’d reach up. Like, way up. And that sort of set the tone, because Paxton’s throwing arm would then come over the top. There are good over-the-top pitchers — there are great over-the-top pitchers — but Paxton didn’t become one. Not quite. Early in 2016, Paxton changed his angles. Almost instantly, he gained some gas, and he gained some control. Paxton turned into an ace-level starter, when he’s been healthy enough to start, at least. Two more screenshots, now.

Paxton’s glove arm has calmed down. And while he’s still not a side-armer or anything, Paxton has lowered his arm slot. His release point is down several inches, from where it had been. The way Paxton describes it, this is his natural slot, and it certainly looks more comfortable to the eye. Paxton has settled on better mechanics, and it’s among the reasons why he’s gotten so good.

To Giolito, now. There’s something I was just never able to shake.

Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks ago, I wrote a piece for this site wherein I noted that the Chicago White Sox rotation was (a) projected to be very bad in 2018 and (b) composed to a great extent of starting pitchers of whom the following could be said: “That guy? Who knows what he’ll do this year.” My editor Carson Cistulli titled the piece “The White Sox’ Rotation Could Be Anything,” and he was right. The White Sox’ rotation could be anything, because it’s full of players whose track records cause most projection systems to raise their digital shoulders, put on their best Robert De Niro face, and shrug magnificently right in your face.

In the comments to that piece, some of you expressed an interest in reading more about variance in player projections. So, here are some words and tables on that subject.

Read the rest of this entry »

The combination of a Cy Young award, a strong postseason track record, a relatively low total of innings thrown, and a history free of major arm injuries was supposed to carry Jake Arrieta to a nine-figure free-agent deal this winter. Agent Scott Boras was said to eye Justin Verlander‘s $180 million extension and Max Scherzer’s $210 million free-agent contract as ballpark figures for and templates for Arrieta. But in a winter during which the hot stove’s pilot light went out, the 32-year-old righty didn’t come anywhere close to landing such a megadeal. Instead, he settled for a three-year, $75 million contract with the Phillies, albeit one with some bells and whistles that could make it considerably more lucrative.

Via FanRag Sports’ Jon Heyman, Arrieta will make $30 million in 2018 and $25 million in 2019, before having a chance to opt out. If he doesn’t opt out, he’ll make $20 million in 2020. If he does opt out, the team has the option to override that by triggering a two-year extension at a minimum of $20 million per year, with incentives (whose exact parameters are unknown at this writing) based on 2018-19 games started that could take those years to $25 million, and further incentives based on Cy Young finishes that could take them to $30 million. The maximum deal becomes five years and $135 million.

Nobody is going to weep for Arrieta, but based upon the guaranteed money, it does appear that Boras overplayed his hand. In early January, USA Today’s Bob Nightengale reported that the Cubs, for whom Arrieta pitched from mid-2013 through 2017, were willing to bring Arrieta back via a four-year deal “for about $110 million,” which represents a higher average annual value ($27.5 million) than he ultimately got, unless one simply assumes he’ll opt out without the Phillies overriding. A month ago, just before they closed a six-year, $126 million deal with Yu Darvish, the Cubs reportedly circled back to Arrieta with a similar offer. As he had done when the team tried to secure him via long-term extensions in 2016 and 2017, Arrieta declined.

Read the rest of this entry »

Kris Medlen was a top-shelf pitcher in the 2012-2013 seasons. Over that two-year stretch, the righty fashioned a 2.47 ERA in 335 innings with the Atlanta Braves. Then things went south. His elbow began barking, and in March 2014 — for the second time in his professional career — he underwent Tommy John surgery.

The road back proved arduous. Medlen was decent after returning to a big-league mound in July 2015 — he went 6-2, 4.01 in 15 games with the Royals — but then his rotator cuff became cranky. A truncated and abysmal 2016 season spent mostly in the minors was followed by some serious soul searching.

“I considered calling it quits,” admitted Medlen. “It would have been out of injury frustration. I’d had two Tommy Johns, and that last season in Kansas City I had three rotator cuff strains. I was on my ass, on my couch, with my kids, until late January or early February (2017). My wife was supportive — she said it was fine if I wanted to stop, and it was fine if I wanted to keep going — but I think she could tell I was a little down.” Read the rest of this entry »