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Just fourteen months after having been selected first overall in the draft by the Arizona Diamondbacks, Dansby Swanson is making his Major League debut for the Atlanta Braves on Wednesday. While Swanson doesn’t have a robust collection of plus tools and won’t be setting the National League ablaze with top-of-the scale speed or monster raw power, his skillset is air tight with nothing but the smallest of nits to pick. Combined with his ability to play most valuable of position in baseball, Swanson should provide All Star-level value for the Braves. Read the rest of this entry »

On Sunday, and for the second time this season, Mookie Betts launched three home runs in a game. He now has 26 home runs on the season; for comparison, Giancarlo Stanton has 25, Chris Davis has 24, and Mike Trout has 23. Mookie Betts has a higher isolated slugging percentage this season than Miguel Cabrera, Ryan Braun, or Carlos Gonzalez. This is not what anyone expected.

I’ve long been one of Betts biggest supporters, but it’d be dishonest to pretend that we saw this coming. Even back in 2014, when I wrote the “Don’t Trade Mookie Betts” post extolling his value, I included the following paragraph.

Due primarily to his size (5-9) and the potential limits that puts on his power, Betts has not generally been viewed as a franchise cornerstone type of prospect the way Xander Bogaerts was as he ascended the ranks. And while it might seem unfair to make generalities about Betts’ future based on his height, there is merit to the idea that he probably won’t become a big-time power hitter in the big leagues.

In that piece, I noted that Betts’ combination of a low swing rate and a high contact rate put him in the company of mostly low-power slap hitters, but noted that it looked like he had enough doubles-power to become a Matt Carpenter or Ben Zobrist type of hitter, and those guys were worth holding onto. I liked Betts a lot, but I liked him because of the overall game, not because I thought he was going to turn into a slugger.

Even the following spring, when Betts went bananas in the Grapefruit League, his teammates sought to praise him by comparing him to Andrew McCutchen. And those comparisons were met with pushback, even by myself, as I continued to not see that kind of power development as Betts’ likely path to success. But now, a year and a half later, the McCutchen comparison looks wrong not because Betts didn’t develop McCutchen-level power, but because he’s already surpassed McCutchen-level power, and has become a very different player than he looked like coming up through the minors.

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Each August, the best and brightest minds in the game come together in Boston for Saberseminar. Like the five conferences that preceded it, Saberseminar 6 was a fantastic weekend of friends and baseball research, and most importantly, raising money for cancer research.

We helped kick off the weekend with a Friday night event at Mead Hall in Cambridge. Anecdotally, it was the best attended pre-Saberseminar meetup yet, and it was wonderful to see so many new faces, as well as familiar ones.
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Christian Yelich is one of the best young hitters in baseball. He’s not one of the best when it comes to talking about his craft. Twice I’ve tried, and twice I’ve failed to draw much out of the Miami Marlins outfielder.

Yelich is unfailingly polite — this by no means a criticism of his character — but he’s swatted away my queries like errant curveballs. The 24-year-old batting-champion-in-waiting is “up there trying to hit the ball hard, and whatever happens, happens.”

One thing happening is increased power. Yelich has gone yard 12 times — he had seven long balls all of last year — and he’s slugging a robust .496. As for his home-run production going forward, that’s another subject to be sidestepped. Read the rest of this entry »

I cannot venture to say that Alex Rodriguez is a complicated individual any more than any other person, but I can fairly easily say that Alex Rodriguez the baseball player is full of complications. He’s an all-time great who has twice signed two of the most expensive contracts in baseball history, been suspended for PED use, and is currently being shoved out of the organization he has played for the past 13 seasons despite putting up colossal numbers and leading the team to a World Series championship during the 2009 season. This post is not meant to analyze Rodriguez’s career, celebrate his accomplishments or discuss his flaws. The question here is should Alex Rodriguez retire, and like most Rodriguez-related issues, it is complicated.
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Dear reader, please allow this internet article to serve as the official announcement of the fourth annual FanGraphs Boston Meetup on Saber Seminar Eve. As the title makes clear, this year that day is Friday, August 12th. We’ll kick off around 7 pm, and the televisions will display the baseball match between the Boston Red Sox and Arizona Diamondbacks. We’ll talk about it, and baseball, and beer, and maybe how ridiculous it is that the other TVs in the bar are showing preseason football because who watches those?
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On Tuesday, we learned that Prince Fielder’s career has come to an end following his second major neck surgery in just the last three years. Jeff Sullivan provided a fitting eulogy for Fielder’s career a couple days ago. While the news is certainly devastating for Fielder on a personal level, this post concerns another matter — namely, the potential financial implications of Fielder’s injury, both for the Texas Rangers and Fielder himself. At the heart of the matter: the nine-year, $214 million contract Fielder signed in 2012, a deal that guarantees him another $24 million annually from 2017 through 2020.

For starters, it’s important to note that Fielder is not officially retiring from baseball, but rather has been declared medically disabled and therefore is no longer considered to be physically able to play the game. This is an important distinction legally, because had Fielder voluntarily decided to retire, then he would have forfeited the roughly $104 million remaining on his contract. Instead, by being declared medically unable to play, Fielder remains entitled to the full amount he’s owed under his contract.

Because Texas reportedly has an insurance policy covering his contract in the event of injury, the Rangers will not be on the hook for the entirety of the team’s remaining financial obligation to Fielder. Instead, the club will apparently only be responsible for paying Fielder $9 million per year from 2017 to 2020, with the rest of his salary covered by the team’s insurer (who will reportedly contribute another $9 million per year) and the Detroit Tigers (who are on the hook for the final $6 million per season, based on the terms of the trade that brought Fielder to Texas in exchange for Ian Kinsler in 2013).

That having been said, although the precise terms of the Rangers’ insurance policy are not publicly available, it appears likely that this $9 million in cost savings will not come without some strings attached for the club. Moreover, it’s also possible that the team’s insurance company could still yet find a way to avoid paying some or all of its share of Fielder’s contract.

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Just about one year ago, the Houston Astros were trying to get to the playoffs, and they decided Carlos Gomez was worth a bushel of pretty good prospects. In the present day, the Astros are again trying to get to the playoffs, and they decided Carlos Gomez isn’t worth much of anything. Wednesday, Gomez was designated for assignment, and that’s a tough break for someone coming up on free agency. Of course, the damage was already done.

You might not realize how swift the fall has been. Though the scenarios aren’t exactly the same, Gomez has kind of Shelby Millered. On the season, Gomez has been among the least-valuable regulars. He’s not even 31 years old. And between 2013 – 2014, here are the position-player top five, by WAR:

1. Mike Trout, 18.5 WAR
2. Andrew McCutchen, 15.3
3. Josh Donaldson, 14.1
4. Carlos Gomez, 13.1
5. Miguel Cabrera, 12.6

McCutchen this year has been a disappointment, but the Pirates aren’t on the verge of dropping him or anything. The Astros have set Gomez free, and anyone can have him. Someone will take the chance; the track record alone demands it. Plenty of team officials will look at Gomez and see a player they might be able to rescue. Yet I honestly don’t know how to be encouraged.

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Following a 4-2 win over the Red Sox in late July, Detroit Tigers ace Justin Verlander was asked about pitch selection. His response to a small group of reporters was as follows:

“It’s different when it’s a [close] ballgame. You don’t think about pitch count as much; it’s just about getting outs. It’s a different situation with more runs. Maybe you take a shot at throwing some more-hittable pitches to get some quick outs. But not in a one-run ballgame.”

As the media scrum broke up, I asked Verlander a point-blank question: “Do you pitch to the score?” His answer was a short and simple, “Yes.”

He’s not the only one. Jack Morris has been criticized — if not mocked — for saying that he pitched to the score. Others have certainly done the same, but how many? Is the practice prevalent, or are pitchers like Morris and Verlander the exception rather than the rule?

I decided to explore the subject. Prompted by Verlander’s answer, I asked a collection of pitchers, catchers, pitching coaches and managers if big-league pitchers do indeed pitch to the score. Here are their responses.

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Alex Avila, Chicago White Sox catcher: “For a starter, it’s probably a little bit different than it is for a reliever. Some starters can’t. They’re kind of oblivious to the score — they don’t want to know the score — and they don’t want to let up.

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Let’s peer into the future for a moment. The time: roughly one year from now. I’m hosting my weekly Tuesday chat, and a reader wants to know: who is the most underrated player in baseball? It’s a common question. It’s a question without an answer, but an answer everyone wants to know. Ben Zobrist’s time with the belt has come and gone. It’s no longer Jose Quintana — not after winning last year’s Cy Young Award. Another one of my go-to answers for this question is Mike Trout, and I might still believe that, but I know it’s not what the reader’s looking for. No, they want the star-not-perceived-as-a-star. The guy flying under the radar as one of baseball’s best at his position without the national recognition. They want what Zobrist was in his heyday. What they want is Devon Travis.

But they’re not going to get Travis as the answer to that question a year from now, because what I’m here to do now, in the present, is exactly what they don’t want you to do in any movie that involves time travel, like that one with Ashton Kutcher or any one of the dozen Final Destination films. I’m here to do something in the present that changes the future. I’m here to prevent Devon Travis from becoming the most underrated player in baseball, because he deserves to be recognized as one of the best second baseman in baseball already.

Travis checks all the boxes of a player doomed to be underrated. The first key of being overlooked as a major leaguer is to be overlooked as a minor leaguer. Check. Travis lasted until the 13th round of the 2012 draft, selected as the 424th pick between Phildrick Llewellyn and Alan Sharkey largely because teams were wary of his 5-foot-9 stature. By 2014, he’d worked his way up to cracking Baseball America’s top-100 prospect list, but even then came in at just 84th, and shortly thereafter was traded from Detroit to Toronto for Anthony Gose, whose own stock was rapidly plummeting.

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