Archive for Featured

There’s a fairly prevalent belief that teams should be reluctant to trade with other teams in the same city. Something to do with rivalries, or whatever. You don’t want to have a valuable former asset helping out some other club just a few miles away. Indeed, if you examine trading histories, these moves are fairly uncommon. Baseball has established a precedent by which intra-city ballclubs seldom come together for a swap. However, that’s stupid. The Cubs and White Sox realize that’s stupid, and so, as of Thursday morning, we’ve got ourselves a blockbuster.

Cubs get:

• Jose Quintana

White Sox get:

• Eloy Jimenez
• Dylan Cease
• Matt Rose
• Bryant Flete

It’s long been fairly obvious that Quintana was going to get moved. While he’s a long-term asset, he’s really a short-term asset under long-term control, and the White Sox probably would’ve liked to have moved him last winter. Seeing Quintana get dealt isn’t surprising. It’s also not surprising to see the Cubs jump on a cost-controlled, somewhat young starter. This has been the rumor for what feels like years. They developed their bats, and they’ve needed to acquire pitching. Quintana is said pitching. Everything about this makes sense, once you move beyond whatever shock you might feel about the two Chicago teams reaching an agreement. This is a sensible exchange. It’s also a total doozy.

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Welcome to the fifth installment of this year’s Trade Value series; you can find links to the previous four posts above. If you’re not familiar with this project, there’s an explanation of the process in the HM post, so that’s the best place to start.

As a reminder for those who don’t like clicking links, however, the five-year WAR projections are based on Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS forecasts, though the players aren’t ranked based on those projections; these figures are included merely as a piece of information to help round out the picture. The guaranteed-dollars line measures the amount of money the player is owed outside of team options or arbitration years; for most of these guys, team options are very likely to be exercised, and many of them will end up making more than the guaranteed-dollars number reports.

Now let’s turn our attention to today’s 10 players, as we get ever so close to the top 10.

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Welcome to the fourth installment of this year’s Trade Value series; you can find links to the previous three posts above. If you’re not familiar with this project, there’s an explanation of the process in the HM post, so that’s the best place to start.

As a reminder for those who don’t like clicking links, however, the five-year WAR projections are based on Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS forecasts, though the players aren’t ranked based on those projections; these figures are included merely as a piece of information to help round out the picture. The guaranteed-dollars line measures the amount of money the player is owed outside of team options or arbitration years; for most of these guys, team options are very likely to be exercised, and many of them will end up making more than the guaranteed-dollars number reports.

Now let’s turn our attention to today’s 10 players.

If Jon Gray pitched in any other stadium in baseball, he’d probably be considered one of the game’s best young hurlers by now. With premium velocity and a very good slider, he profiles as a guy who can miss bats and manage contact well enough, and if his command takes a step forward, there’s ace potential here.

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Welcome to the third installment of this year’s Trade Value series; you can see the links to the honorable mentions and the last 10 guys in the list in the toolbar above. If you’re not familiar with this project, there’s an explanation of the process in the HM post, so that’s the best place to start.

As a reminder for those who don’t like clicking links, however, the five-year WAR projections are based on Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS forecasts, though the players aren’t ranked based on those projections; these figures are included merely as a piece of information to help round out the picture. The guaranteed-dollars line measures the amount of money the player is owed outside of team options or arbitration years; for most of these guys, team options are very likely to be exercised, and many of them will end up making more than the guaranteed-dollars number reports.

No need to delay any further; let’s look at the 10 guys who made today’s cut.

If this was just Dave’s Top 50 Franchise Players or something, Russell might not be on this list. I’ve maintained some skepticism over the years about his eventual offensive upside, given his moderate power and low contact rates. His poor start to 2017 isn’t helping the idea that the bat is headed in the right direction. But feedback from friends in the game suggested that his stock within MLB is still pretty high, with multiple reminders that this is a guy who put up +7 WAR at ages 21-22, and he doesn’t need to crush the ball to be an elite player given his defense.

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It’s that time of year again: baseball is taking most of the week off to host an exhibition game, and we’re ranking the 50 most valuable trade chips in baseball while they do so. If you aren’t familiar with the series, go read the honorable-mentions post, which includes the introduction and an explanation of what this whole thing is.

As one additional point of explanation, the tables that we’re including below show a few pieces of information: the years remaining before the player is eligible for free agency, whether those years are covered by the arbitration system or a multi-year contract, the guaranteed money owed to the player if a long-term deal is in place, and the ZiPS projections for the player for each year that he’s under control of his current club. The ZiPS forecasts are there to help you get an idea for what one forecasting system thinks of the player’s long-term future, though the players are not ranked solely based on these projections. At the end of the post, we’ll summarize each individual player’s information box with a grid showing all the players ranked in the series so far, and that grid includes the same reference information.

With that said, let’s get right to the guys who made the final 10 spots on the Trade Value list this year.

This last spot was really tough. There are so many players you could put here, with probably 10 to 15 guys having just as strong a case as Lamb for this spot. Even just within third baseman, you could make a case for Justin Turner or Kyle Seager, and then there are all the other good players at other positions who didn’t quite make the cut. If you feel strongly that some other player should be No. 50, I probably don’t disagree with you. Rounding out the list turned into an exercise of picking one of many similarly valuable players.

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Welcome to All-Star week, which around here means it’s once again time for our annual Trade Value series. I’ve been doing this project now for 13 years, dating back to 2005, and have been doing it here since 2008. The project has grown in scope over time, but thanks to help from friends like Dan Szymborski and Sean Dolinar, I think the current presentation is as good as it’s ever been.

For those new to the series, the list is an attempt to answer the question of who would bring back the most in trade for his team if he were to be put on the market and made available before the deadline. Because different teams have varying resources and roster needs, we’re not saying that if one player is ranked ahead of another player, the team with the lower-ranked player would make a one-for-one swap for the higher-ranked player; there are some teams that will put more of a premium on short-term value while others who are looking to maximize long-term potential, and salary is a larger factor for some organizations than others. Of course, every team would love to have a player who contributes both now and in the future, and does so without consuming a large part of their budget; guys who check all of those boxes will rank at the very top of this list.

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Four years ago, Manny Margot was 18 years old and playing against older competition in short-season ball. He was more than holding his own. Equal parts precocious and promising, he was one of the highest-ceiling prospects in the Red Sox system. Intrigued by the parallels, I wrote an article titled Manuel Margot: Boston’s Next Bogaerts?

That never came to fruition. Following the 2015 season, Margot was sent to the Padres as part of the package that delivered Craig Kimbrel to the AL East. The change of scenery has been to his liking. One year removed from a stellar season in Triple-A, the native of San Cristobal, Dominican Republic is now San Diego’s starting centerfielder.

While some things have changed, others remain the same. In 2013, Margot told me the game is “all enthusiasm” for him, and that he “never wants to leave this dream.” He echoed those thoughts when I caught up to him earlier this week.

“You always have to play happy,” Margot told me with the help of Padres translator (and Baseball Operations assistant) David Longley. “That doesn’t change as you go through baseball. You’re going to go through some bad streaks, but you put on a good face and those bad times are going to get better. Always play happy.” Read the rest of this entry »

Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on 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.
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On Monday, while investigating Jonathan Lucroy’s mysterious framing decline, I noted that Buster Posey and Yadier Molina have also had noticeable falls from the framing elite this season.

Posey ranked as the game’s best framing catcher last season (26.5 framing runs), according to Baseball Prospectus , and has fallen to 28th thus far this season, with just 0.5 framing runs to his credit. Molina has fallen from ninth last season (9.0 framing runs) to 38th (with a mark of -0.5).

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Over the winter, the Dodgers re-signed Rich Hill. They did so because they knew that, when he was able to pitch, Hill looked like one of the best starting pitchers in the game. And then 2017 went and got underway. Through the earlier part of 2017, Hill looked like one of the more frustrating starting pitchers in the game. The stuff, for the most part, remained there, but Hill didn’t have his same control, and his remarkable curveball was no longer working. I wrote about Hill in the middle of June, at which point his curveball had the lowest run value among all curveballs, out of everyone. It made me wonder where, exactly, Rich Hill was. Could someone who reappeared so suddenly disappear with similar speed?

Since I wrote about Hill and his struggles, he’s gone back to looking like one of the best starting pitchers in the game. In three starts, he’s allowed four runs over 19 innings, with six walks and 26 strikeouts. The easy explanation is that Hill has simply regressed to the mean. That is, his newer mean, the one he began establishing a couple years ago. That explanation would ignore the changes that Hill has folded in. Regression to the mean isn’t an automatic process. Rich Hill has simultaneously simplified and grown more complex.

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