Ah, relievers. Can’t predict them, can’t live without them. Between the changing demands of a modern game and the fact that bullpen arms seem to fluctuate randomly between unhittable and unreliable, everyone always needs more relievers. Both New York teams, set at many other positions, made moves to bolster their bullpens yesterday. The Yankees are signing Darren O’Day, while the Mets are adding Aaron Loup (pending a physical).

Let’s address O’Day first. Only two days ago, the Yankees traded Adam Ottavino to the Red Sox for a bag of baseballs. Actually, it was worse than that: they traded Ottavino and a prospect and $850,000 to the Red Sox for future considerations. As Dan Szymborski detailed, the Yankees made that trade to dodge the Competitive Balance Tax, but doing so left a right-handed hole in their bullpen.

One thing that no one can dispute is that Darren O’Day is right-handed. That has, in fact, been his calling card for 13 major league seasons: O’Day breaks right-handed batters down, end of story. Over his lengthy career, he’s held them to a .248 wOBA, with a 27.5% strikeout rate doing most of the heavy lifting. His sidearm delivery is a rarity these days, and it turns righties into… well, into whatever you want to call Bobby Dalbec on this swing:

That goofy (though not in a skateboarding sense) arm angle turns an 86 mph fastball into a devastating weapon, a pitch that batters think will hit them in the leg before it explodes up and away. He complements it with a sweeping slider he commands well to his glove side, a useful counter when hitters start to adjust to the unexpected release point.

The last time O’Day allowed even league average production to opposing righties was in 2011, when he faced only 43 of them. ROOGY is an overused term — at this point, even LOOGYs hardly exist — but O’Day might be the rare pitcher who fits the bill.

By using O’Day strategically against righty-heavy patches of the opposing lineup, the Yankees hope to get a steady diet of strikeouts and weak fly balls. Unlike most sidearmers, O’Day works up in the zone, something which surely adds to batters’ confusion. It’s not so much the velocity, the location, or the delivery; the combination of everything is simply too strange to deal with.

You might think that a sidearmer throwing high in the zone to lefties — three batter minimum and all — would undo all the good that O’Day does against righties. You’d be right — O’Day has been brutal against lefties as his career has worn on. Since the beginning of the new lively ball era in 2015, he’s allowed 1.5 HR/9 against lefties, good for a 4.67 FIP (ERA isn’t really compatible with splits like these). For comparison, his FIP against righties over the same window is a stellar 2.61.

The onus is on the Yankees to find good spots to use such a situational reliever, but the opportunities will certainly be there. Consider the rosters of the Yankees’ three division rivals (sorry, Orioles). The Blue Jays signed righties George Springer and Marcus Semien to join righties Bo Bichette, Teoscar Hernández, and Vladimir Guerrero Jr., while the Red Sox have only three lefty batters on their roster. The Rays — well, yeah, the Rays will be a problem. Even then, though, sending O’Day out to face a dangerous righty with two outs will often be worth the gamble — he’s bad against lefties, but not enough to offset his mastery of righties.

At $2.45 million, O’Day doesn’t need to set the league on fire to meet expectations. The Yankee bullpen is strong at the top — Aroldis Chapman, Zack Britton, and Chad Green provide quantity and quality, and two of them are even lefties. If O’Day can contribute 40 to 50 innings of right-handed filth, the Yankees will be pleased — that’s Ottavino production at a quarter of the price.

Speaking of New York teams signing situational relievers, the Mets signed Aaron Loup, who will become the only left-hander in an already-excellent bullpen. Calling him reverse O’Day misses the mark — he throws harder and doesn’t display such extreme platoon splits. Still, though, bringing in a southpaw in an all-right-handed bullpen tells you what the Mets want from Loup: come in against opposing leftys, sit them down, and tread water against the righties.

Okay, fine, there’s one major similarity between Loup and O’Day:

Like his new borough neighbor, Loup comes at hitters from a novel angle. Unlike O’Day, he lives in the bottom of the zone with a sinker. He complements his fastball, which sits around 92 mph, with a cutter, curve, and changeup that he uses almost exclusively against righties — the last time he threw a changeup to a lefty was in 2017.

The terms of Loup’s deal haven’t yet been disclosed, but they’ll likely closely mirror O’Day’s contract. So, too, will his role, though this time I mean mirror in the sense of the same thing in reverse. Loup will face dangerous lefties and then try to survive against the righties who follow them, shielding the Mets’ top relievers from the slings and arrows of outrageous Juan Soto highlights.

Neither of these deals are going to turn into wild, runaway success stories. Neither player is going to garner Cy Young votes. But teams need innings out of the bullpen, and both the Mets and Yankees are in competitive divisions. Filling those innings with quiet competence might be the difference in a game or two, and a game or two might be the difference in the playoff race.

How might these signings backfire? It all depends on what you mean by “backfire.” The most obvious downside is that O’Day and Loup might simply not be very good. O’Day throws a mid-80’s fastball and Loup is a 33-year-old reliever who struck out only 22.9% of opponents last year. It would hardly be shocking for one of these pitchers to be a roster casualty within the year — a few bad weeks, a pressing need for 40-man space, and that might be that.

Short of that, the downsides are all opportunity cost. If you’re out of the Loup market, you might be in the market for an exciting call-up from Triple-A. Giving innings to known and medium quantities is all well and good, but it lowers your odds of making exciting discoveries with that roster spot. The odds of O’Day turning into the next hot reliever du jour are essentially nonexistent.

For two presumptive playoff teams, however, that’s a negligible downside. It’s fun to discover new young relievers, but the downside is no joke: they might be bad! For teams far from contention, volatility is good. If you’re right in the thick of things, though, reliever volatility is definitely not where you want to be. By lowering their odds of failure, the Yankees and Mets are increasing their chances of success. Not bad for two sidearmers.

It would be inaccurate to say the Giants have been big spenders on the market this winter, but it also wouldn’t be right to say they’ve done nothing. Coming into this week, they had added six players on major league contracts, improving their rotation, bullpen, catching and infield depth with nothing other than cold hard cash. What all of those players had in common, though, is that they all were willing to agree to cheap one-year deals. San Francisco has been willing to fill holes and add talent, but only in low-risk situations.

Consider Tuesday’s news, then, somewhat of a reprieve from that strategy. The Giants signed infielder Tommy La Stella to a three-year contract, a few days before his 32nd birthday. Though we don’t know the exact dollar figure yet, it’s the first three-year deal the team has given since Tony Watson’s before the 2018 season, and it will likely be the most money the team has committed to a free agent since Mark Melancon heading into 2017. The risk involved with this deal, however, isn’t anything to sweat over, even if La Stella was basically a career pinch-hitter until just two years ago.

To call La Stella a unique player in 2021 would be an understatement. He’s coming off a season in which he struck out in just 5.3% of plate appearances, with a walk rate more than double that. It was his second-straight season with a strikeout rate under 10%. Even more impressively, La Stella’s transition into a truly elite resistance to whiffs has also included him hitting for more power than he ever has. Doing both of those things at once is something few hitters can accomplish.

Read the rest of this entry »

Everybody Signs an Infielder Tuesday concluded with the Twins reaching agreement with Andrelton Simmons on a one-year contract worth $10.5 million. Originally a Brave until a 2015 trade for Erick Aybar and prospects sent him to the West Coast, Simmons hit .297/.346/.356 over 30 games for the Angels in 2020. Unless something incredibly bizarre happens, he will become Minnesota’s starting shortstop, prevent a bunch of runs, and assist the Twins in their quest to win their first playoff game in forever.

Let’s start with the least fun part of this article: the grumpy caveat. Back in May of 2019, Simmons injured his left ankle trying to beat out a grounder and, after a misstep, was unable to put weight on it. It landed him on the injured list for a month, and he missed another month later in the season with an injury to the other side of the same ankle. In the first week of 2020, he did it again, spraining his ankle in a July game against the Athletics, costing him nearly half of the abbreviated 2020 season. Leg and foot injuries are no laughing matter for a middle infielder: There have been plenty of aging second basemen and shortstops who had their careers dramatically waylaid by such injuries. Jose Offerman is the first example that comes to mind; when his legs started being an issue, he went from a .391 OBP second baseman to out of baseball in a blink of an eye.

Simmons hasn’t been fully healthy in two years, and a player with his skill set is more reliant on having healthy feet and legs than a plodding slugger at first base or DH. But $10.5 million is practically peanuts, and the Angels are getting even more of a discount than the associated risk entails. Over 2017 and ’18, he hit .285/.333/.419 to go with his typical sterling defense, enough to combine for over 10 WAR. The Twins may not get that player, but they’re also not paying for that player; if you pay 2018 Andrelton Simmons on merit, $10.5 million would be long gone before you even get to the All-Star break.

Read the rest of this entry »

It was a busy day for free agent infielders yesterday. A flurry of moves saw Marcus Semien, Andrelton Simmons, and Tommy La Stella find new homes in Toronto, Minnesota, and San Francisco, respectively. Those big names overshadowed a couple of smaller signings that occurred earlier in the day. Cleveland re-signed Cesar Hernandez to a one-year, $5 million deal with a club option for 2022, while Baltimore signed Hernandez’s former double-play partner, Freddy Galvis, to a one-year, $1.5 million contract.

Both switch-hitting infielders came up through the Phillies farm system and established themselves at the major league level around the same time. Galvis left the Phillies in 2018 and bounced from San Diego to Toronto to Cincinnati over the last two years. Hernandez lasted in Philadelphia a little longer; 2020 was his first season on a new team. Both are defensively-minded infielders who have holes in their offense that have held them back from bringing in a bigger payday.

Hernandez is clearly the better of the two. He’s the reigning AL Gold Glove winner at second base and has quietly been one of the better second basemen in the league since claiming a full-time role in 2015. During that window, he’s sixth in the majors in WAR among qualified second basemen, accumulating 14.3 wins. Last year, Cleveland signed him to a one-year, $6.25 million deal to be their primary second baseman. That deal worked out nicely and they’ve returned to the same well, albeit with a new shortstop installed to his right — either Amed Rosario or Andrés Giménez.

His keen eye at the plate has always been the strongest part of his offensive profile, but he saw his walk rate dip to 6.7% in 2019 after posting a 11.1% rate over the previous four years. The most confusing aspect of his 2019 was his swing rate. He was much more aggressive at the plate, upping his swing rate to 45.5%. That would explain why his walk rate fell but he made enough contact with all those additional swings that his strikeout rate actually fell, though it didn’t offset the lack of free passes. Last Fall, Tony Wolfe wrote about Hernandez’s slipping plate discipline in his final year in Philadelphia:

“There is some real head-scratching to be done over Hernández’s 2019 season, but the numbers we’ve seen seem to indicate this year saw him employ a completely different approach from the one he’d used throughout his career. That provides an easy excuse for his struggles, but it also makes him more difficult to project. His changes resulted in a few positives, but overall, they didn’t make him a better hitter.”

Read the rest of this entry »

The Blue Jays had already made a splash in free agency, signing George Springer to a six-year deal last week. They added to their haul yesterday, signing Marcus Semien to a one-year, $18 million contract, as Jeff Passan first reported.

Most of the deals that have gone through so far this offseason have exceed both Craig Edwards’ projections and our crowdsourced estimates. It’s been a slow offseason, sure, but not an abnormal one when it comes to the players who have actually signed. Semien breaks that trend, and it’s worth looking back at his career to see how we ended up here.

Stop your tape after 2018, and Semien looked like a competent but unspectacular regular. His batting line was almost metronomic — 97 wRC+ in 2015, 98 in ‘16, 97 in ‘17, and 97 again in ‘18. There were glimmers of something interesting going on — his strikeout rate kept dipping, he increased his contact rate without sacrificing power, and he put the ball in the air to the pull side frequently. Still, at some point you are what you are, and Semien looked like an average hitter.

One very interesting thing happened to Semien in 2018, however. He’d long been regarded as a defensive liability, both by the eye test and by advanced defensive metrics. From 2013 to 2017, DRS pegged him as 8 runs below average at shortstop, while UZR was far more pessimistic at 20 runs below average. Worse than average (for a shortstop) with his glove, roughly average with his bat — Semien looked like a league average player, a nice but forgettable piece for the A’s.

In 2018, Semien’s defense suddenly improved. It’s possible that it was already headed that way, that opinion (and noisy statistics) lagged reality. In 2015, the A’s went full Brad-Pitt-in-Moneyball and brought in Ron Washington to teach Semien defense, and it worked. Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday afternoon, the Phillies answered one of the biggest questions of their offseason in decidedly positive fashion, reportedly coming to terms with J.T. Realmuto on a five-year, $115.5 million contract. A physical is still pending, but the contract will keep Realmuto in Philly until the end of the 2025 season assuming all goes well. The number-one free agent in our offseason top 50, Realmuto’s signing removes the best option for anyone looking to make a race-changing upgrade at catcher.

The Philadelphia Phillies and JT Realmuto are in agreement on a 5 year $115.5 million dollar contract. Pending physical. Per source.

— Craig Mish (@CraigMish) January 26, 2021

It’s hard to overstate Realmuto’s importance to the Phillies. Indeed, his presence is so crucial that if Philadelphia were for some reason only able to retain one of him or Bryce Harper, I’d have to choose Realmuto, a two-time All-Star who has led the team in WAR over the last two seasons. Harper’s a very fine player and will likely still be in baseball years after Realmuto retires, but the short-term alternatives behind the plate looked bleak if the organization had had to scramble for a Plan B. There’s no combination of Andrew Knapp, Rafael Marchan, and non-roster invitee Christian Bethancourt that would have given the Phillies a fighting chance to avoid being near the bottom of the league at the position. Nor would the free agent options have provided a panacea; James McCann, Jason Castro, and Kurt Suzuki are already gone, and Yadier Molina is ancient.

Read the rest of this entry »

Enrique Hernández’s phone should have been busy over the last three months, because he’s the kind of player every team has a roster spot for. If you have a hole in your lineup at second base, third base, or any outfield spot, consider Hernández. If your starting infield is set but you need a good replacement off the bench, consider Hernández. If your starting outfield is set but you want a backup who can capably man center, consider Hernández. If you simply want to add a veteran with loads of postseason experience to your clubhouse, consider Hernández. It is impossible not to find a use for one of the few players who can play every position in the field (minus catcher) and whose asking price is modest enough that even Pittsburgh could afford it. The only question is whether Hernández will hit.

The Red Sox believe he will, signing Hernández to a two-year contract worth $14 million on Friday — the only multi-year deal the team has handed out this winter. Boston reportedly agreed to terms with the former Dodger after missing out on Jurickson Profar, a similarly versatile player who signed with San Diego for the same AAV but for one additional year. As noted over on The Athletic, Hernández could address either of Boston’s two most glaring needs at second base or in center field and provide assistance at any other spot at which he might be needed.

Red Sox fans are no stranger to having a Swiss Army Knife on the roster. That same role was occupied for most of the last decade by Brock Holt, before he signed with Milwaukee a year ago. Like Hernández, Holt was able to log lots of playing time by providing serviceable defense everywhere on the field. But while Holt’s lack of pop limited his potential to be an impact hitter, the same can’t be said about Hernández, who has a .195 ISO going back to 2017. That power has had a knack for showing up in big moments during his playoff career, including two different game-tying homers in last year’s NLCS, one of which was a pinch-hit dinger in Game 7.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the early surprises of the offseason was Cleveland opting to pay Brad Hand a $1 million buyout rather than spend $10 million to pick up his option for the 2021 season. Perhaps even more of a surprise was that Hand cleared waivers, which meant every other team in baseball opted not to commit $10 million despite him putting up his fifth straight one-plus win season even in a shortened slate of games. While Hand was likely seeking more than a one-year deal in free agency given his performance (and both the crowd and I predicted as much), he still did better than the option, getting a $10.5 million deal with the Nationals as first reported by Jon Heyman and Jeff Passan.

Including the buyout, Hand will receive $11.5 million this year, or $1.5 million more than he would have if Cleveland had simply retained his services. Eric Longenhagen wrote his profile in the Top-50 Free Agents piece, noting both the positives and negatives for the lefty:

His velocity fell for the second consecutive year (it trended up throughout the season) but Hand still struck out more than 30% of opposing hitters for the fifth straight season and had a career-best 2.05 ERA and 1.37 FIP. He’s a funky, low-slot lefty who can throw his trademark curveball for strikes whenever he wants and consistently locate it just off the plate to his glove side for swings and misses.

Aside from some elbow soreness that sidelined him late in 2019 (and perhaps limited his workload throughout that season), Hand has also been remarkably durable for a reliever, pitching in excess of 70 innings every year from 2014 to 2018, some of those in a swingman role. His lower arm slot gives Hand rather pronounced platoon splits, which means he may not be universally deployable in high-leverage situations, but his curveball quality and his ability to execute it consistently should still enable him to be a second or third bullpen banana for the next several years, even if his velocity keeps gradually sliding.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s become a common narrative in baseball recently: the veteran player, struggling to secure a job in America, heads overseas to play in Japan or Korea. They spend some time there, rediscover or reinvent part of their game, and return to America to find much greater success in the majors than before. Anthony Bass made his way to Japan in 2016 after toiling away for five years on three different teams. In his one season in Nippon Professional Baseball, he played for the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters during their championship season. He ended up pitching in five of the six games in the Japan Series that year and was the winning pitcher in the championship clinching Game 6.

After getting a taste of winning in Asia’s highest league, he returned to the States in 2017 but continued to struggle to earn a regular job in the majors until latching on with the Mariners in May of 2019. By the end of the season, he had worked his way into high-leverage innings for Seattle. He was claimed on waivers by the Blue Jays after the season and continued to work as a late-inning reliever in 2020. On Friday, he signed the first multi-year contract of his career, a two-year deal with the Marlins worth a guaranteed $5 million with a club option for 2023. The 33-year-old has taken the journeyman moniker to it’s extreme but finally found a school to call home in Miami.

The success he found in Japan gave Bass a huge boost of confidence. Getting over that mental hurdle was a significant step toward realizing his talent on the field. In an interview from February of last year, he recounted that mental process to Kaitlyn McGrath of The Athletic:

“Cause I was having success there and I was like, ‘I can do it. I can come back to the States and do exactly what I’m doing here in the States and have success. When I really started telling myself I’m a really good pitcher, and just attack the strike zone with everything I have, a switch turned on in my head and it just completely changed my career from pitching almost passively and a little timid, trying to stay in the major leagues versus, ‘No, I can do this and I want to dominate at this level.”

Read the rest of this entry »

When the Padres traded for Jurickson Profar before the 2020 season, they had a hole at second base. By the time the season started (give or take a week), Jake Cronenworth had filled that hole. But luckily for the Padres, Profar was flexible. He played the outfield for the majority of the season, more than doubling his career innings played total on the grass, and backed Cronenworth up at second while putting together the best batting line of his career. In a shortened season with heightened injury problems, his flexibility was exactly what the team needed.

On Friday, the Padres and Profar agreed to reunite, with San Diego signing him to a three-year, $21 million deal that includes opt outs after each of the first two seasons. But while Profar is headed back to southern California, what role he’ll play there remains undecided. A Padres team without many holes has spent the offseason filling in what cracks it has, leaving precious little space for more cooks in the kitchen — or so it seems.

One of the greatest unknowns facing NL teams is the DH rule. Will it come back next season? Opinions vary, and whether you can give an extra player at-bats changes roster construction significantly. The pre-Profar Friars straddled the gap between building for an extra hitter and for traditional rules. Ha-seong Kim, their prize position player signing this offseason, currently profiles as a super-utility player who starts on the bench. He could fill the DH position, but using a middle infielder (Kim is a shortstop by trade) there feels wasteful. Meanwhile, the team’s two corner outfielders, Tommy Pham and Wil Myers, are both mixed in the field. Either of them could slide to DH — Pham played DH during his tenure in Tampa — if the team could find a suitable defensive replacement. Read the rest of this entry »