The Giants continued to remake their starting rotation this week, signing former Dodgers swingman Alex Wood to a one-year, $3 million contract. Wood’s low salary reflects the fact that he’s struggled over the last two seasons, accumulating -0.2 WAR in 48 1/3 innings, courtesy of a bleak 6.02 FIP. The catch is that he was not truly healthy in either campaign, missing much of 2019 with back issues and a chunk of ’20 with shoulder inflammation. While he’s never been the picture of perfect health — he hasn’t qualified for an ERA title since 2015 — he was a key contributor to the Braves and the Dodgers, and before his disappointing 2019, his worst FIP over a season was 3.69 in ’15, a number many pitchers would be delighted to hit.

Similar to about 27 or 28 teams in baseball, San Francisco hasn’t made a splash this winter, but there’s been a real push to improve the starting pitching. Back when the Giants were winning a World Series every other season, a large part of the foundation was young, team-developed pitching. Few teams could match the accomplishment of producing Matt Cain, Tim Lincecum, and Madison Bumgarner over a rather short period of time. But since the team’s collapse in 2017, a year in which the Giants just barely avoided their second 100-loss year in franchise history, the rotation has been one of the worst in the league, ranking 25th in WAR. Any sort of magic at creating young aces seems to have dissipated, with a long list of names — Kyle Crick, Keury Mella, Tyler Beede, Ty Blach, Clayton Blackburn — failing to make an impact.

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Last year, the Phillies’ disastrous bullpen was a major reason why they missed out on the playoffs for the ninth consecutive season. If you go back to 1969 — the year MLB lowered the mound — the 2020 Phillies bullpen posted the absolute worst league-adjusted ERA in a single season. By FIP, they were only a little better, landing 16th worst among 1,438 team seasons. Upgrading the bullpen had to be a significant focus of their new front office tandem, president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski and general manager Sam Fuld.

Their problems were numerous, but the Phillies’ relief corps suffered from a significant lack of gas in 2020. Their relievers threw the second lowest rate of fastballs thrown over 95 miles per hour in 2020. Indeed, just 10.5% of them reached that threshold. To address this dearth of heat, the Phillies have added a bunch of relievers who throw extremely hard fastballs. Just before the calendar flipped to 2021, they added José Alvarado in a three-way trade with the Rays and Dodgers — Alvarado’s fastball averages 97.7 miles per hour. Then a week ago, they acquired Sam Coonrod from the Giants — his heater comes in even faster at 98.7 mph. And yesterday, they added a third hard-throwing reliever to their bullpen, signing Archie Bradley to a one-year, $6 million contract. Adding elite fastball velocity won’t be a panacea for all their woes, but it should help.

Bradley’s fastball is the slowest of the bunch, averaging 94.4 mph in 2020. That’s actually a point of concern. It was the lowest average velocity for his four-seamer since he transitioned to the bullpen full-time in 2017.

Despite the drop in velocity, Bradley posted the best FIP of his career last season. His strikeout rate dipped a bit, from 27.4% to 24.7%, but he also slashed his walk rate to just 4.1%. In 2019, he had survived as the Diamondbacks closer with a 11.4% walk rate. During that season, his rate of pitches thrown in the zone dipped below league average for the first time as a reliever. He reversed that trend in 2020, getting his zone rate just above league average.

That dip in strikeout rate is just as concerning as his lower velocity. His fastball’s whiff rate was right in line with where it had been in years past. The biggest change for him in 2020 was the number of swinging strikes he was getting on his curveball. The whiff rate on his bender dropped from 30.5% to just 16.7%. Like his fastball, his curveball lost velocity last year, dropping down to 80 mph on average. It’s possible that lost velocity affected the effectiveness of the pitch enough to cause batters to spit on it more often. Now, he did record the highest rate of called and swinging strikes of his career in 2020, so it’s also possible that his falling strikeout rate was simply poor sample size luck.

The only reason why his overall swinging strike rate didn’t budge all that much in 2020 was because of his changeup. That third pitch had been a part of his repertoire back when he was a starter but it was inconsistent and he often lost his feel for it. He brought it back in 2019 with some success and increased his usage of it to 11.6% last year. He threw just 32 changeups in 2020, but its 38.9% whiff rate would have ranked 18th among all changeups thrown at least 100 times during the season.

Beyond his downward sloped strikeout and walk rates, Bradley worked through some odd results when opposing batters put his pitches in play. He induced the lowest hard hit rate of his career while also allowing the highest barrel rate of his career. His expected wOBA on contact of .370 was just a hair below league average so those additional barreled balls didn’t do much damage — he allowed just a single home run in 2020. His groundball rate had consistently been above league average throughout his career but it dipped below average for the first time in 2020. He threaded a very narrow needle by allowing more contact in the air, even though it was a little weaker contact overall, all while pitching in the zone more often with a fastball that was thrown a little less hard.

It was a bit of a surprise that Bradley was available as a free agent at all. He was entering his final year of arbitration and had pitched decently enough for the Reds after they acquired him at the trade deadline. But with all these red flags and concerning trends, you can see why they decided to non-tender him. He ended up getting a contract around his estimated arbitration salary anyway. If he can find that lost velocity on his fastball and curveball and continue to refine his changeup, he should be a stabilizing presence for the Phillies bullpen.

Simply based on his track record, Bradley will likely enter the season with at least a job-share in the ninth inning with Héctor Neris. Like every other Phillies reliever last year, Neris had his own problems and lost his handle on the closing duties when Brandon Workman was brought in. Between Bradley, Neris, and Alvarado, they’ll have plenty of options should any of them falter during the season. But there are enough question marks between the three of them that the Phillies should probably be in the market for another reliever, just in case.

It’s impressive that Pedro Báez stuck around the Dodgers for as long as he did. Think about how long the organization has been overflowing with arms — all the pitchers like Kenta Maeda, Ross Stripling and Julio Urías who would have been mid-rotation starters on plenty of good teams but often got relegated to the bullpen in Los Angeles, or the ones like Victor Gonzalez who are always sprouting from their minor leagues, or guys like Tony Cingrani and Dylan Floro whom they would trade for and then make great. Even when injuries are ravaging the team, as has been the case the last few seasons, a job pitching for the Dodgers is never earned easily. Yet for seven years, Báez did.

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With the White Sox signing Liam Hendriks, the top option for teams looking to upgrade their bullpen is now off the market. Perhaps that will open up the floodgates for the other free-agent relievers, as nearly every would-be playoff squad is in the market for relief help. But whether it’s financially motivated or a matter of roster construction philosophy, there are a few contending teams who simply won’t be making a splashy addition to their bullpen. The Twins fall into that category.

In 2020, Minnesota’s bullpen was the unheralded strength of a division-winning team. The Twins’ relief corps was fifth in the majors by park- and league-adjusted FIP and ERA, and their relievers posted the majors’ third-best strikeout-to-walk ratio. But two of their best relievers from last year — Trevor May and Matt Wisler — have left via free agency. With their starting lineup and rotation mostly carrying over from last year, replacing them both should be a high priority.

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While there were plenty of good options in this year’s free-agent reliever class, with Trevor May, Brad Hand, Archie Bradley, and Blake Treinen representing the near-top tier, there was just one ace available: Liam Hendriks. That elite reliever is now off the board, with the White Sox continuing their aggressive offseason by signing the former A’s closer to a four-year deal worth $54 million. Yahoo Sports’ Tim Brown was the first with the news of the signing, and ESPN’s Jeff Passan was the first to report the unusual structure of the deal: Hendriks will be paid $39 million in the first three years, with the remaining $15 million coming either as a fourth-year team option or as a deferred buyout if the option is declined.

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In 2020, the Nationals had an outfield problem. You might not have noticed it, because of human cheat code Juan Soto, but think of it this way: Soto accounted for 2.4 WAR. The outfield as a whole, Soto included, managed 2.0 WAR. The other six players accounted for a whopping negative 0.4 WAR, and you don’t need a fancy analyst to tell you that’s bad.

On Saturday, the team made a step toward remedying that weakness for 2021. They signed Kyle Schwarber to a one-year deal worth $10 million, immediately upgrading their second corner outfield spot from Andrew Stevenson (projected near replacement level in 2021) to Schwarber’s league-average stylings. Jesse Dougherty first reported the deal.

What you think of Schwarber depends on when you picture him. If your mental image was formed in 2015, he’s an up-and-coming slugger with defensive issues. If it was formed in 2016, he’s a World Series hero. If it’s been formed since then, he’s an inconsistent but exciting hitter with a problem on defense, a cypher who might have his best days ahead of him but who might also never re-scale the heights of his 2015 debut.

When Schwarber is at his best, he embodies baseball’s move toward whiffs, walks, and home runs. In fact, that’s true even at his worst: in each of his seasons, he’s had a higher walk rate, strikeout rate, and isolated power than average. Whether each of those seasons turned out well or poorly depends on the balance between those three factors.

In 2020, nothing worked quite right. His strikeout rate, a gruesome 29.5%, might sound like a problem, and it’s certainly not great! It was also only 1.5 percentage points higher than his career average, and it wasn’t the worst single-season mark of his career. His 13.4% walk rate wasn’t the culprit, either: that mark is almost exactly the same as his career rate. No, the problem was in the power.

How do you think of power? Home runs are one obvious metric, and Schwarber set new lows in that category in 2020, though only marginally. He cranked 11 homers in 224 plate appearances, a 4.9% home run rate. That’s the worst mark of his career, but it’s only narrowly behind the 5.1% rate he posted in a disappointing 2017. In fact, if you care instead about home runs per fly ball, Schwarber’s 25.6% mark was instead his best.

Doubles are another important component of power. Schwarber managed only six in 2020, the second-worst rate of doubles per plate appearance of his career. In all, he produced extra base hits in 7.6% of his plate appearances, the worst rate of his career, and nowhere near his nearly 10% rate entering 2020.

Another way to measure power is to ignore the outcomes completely and focus on process. Schwarber’s barrel rate dipped from 13.8% (career before 2020) to 11.2%, and his groundball rate spiked above 50%. More grounders and fewer smashed balls in the air go hand in hand, and they conspired to limit the number of chances Schwarber had to get the extra bases he thrives on.

If you’d prefer to separate barrels into two categories, as Alex Chamberlain outlined here, something interesting emerges. Chamberlain created a new subdivision of barrels that he calls “blasts.” Essentially, they’re the hardest-hit half of the population of barrels, the most valuable half of the most valuable subset of batted balls. In this category, Schwarber’s 2020 looks different (my numbers differ slightly from Chamberlain’s because I removed untracked balls from the denominator):

In fact, that’s a more honest way of describing his most recent campaign. The balls he hit hardest, the ones that carry the most predictive power from year to year, looked basically like every other Schwarber season. An 11.2% barrel rate is solid — it places Schwarber in the top 25% of the league in terms of power on contact. He fares better in terms of blasts, where he’s in the 92nd percentile. In other words, Schwarber is still a premium power hitter, even if his doubles and homers wouldn’t tell you that in 2020.

Should we worry about the walks and strikeouts? Maybe a little bit, at least if Schwarber repeats his 2020 walk and strikeout rates. Expressed as one number, he would need to be 4% above average when he puts the ball in play to end up average overall. That’s not a problem — again, he’s a great hitter when he makes contact — but it helps set a rough idea for what Schwarber will be. His plate discipline will hurt him slightly, his power will make up for it, and it will probably work out to an above average but not standout offensive line.

Of course, baseball is more than just offense. Schwarber has to play the field — at least unless and until the NL switches to a DH for 2021 — and the picture there is decidedly less rosy than it is at the plate. Schwarber is a large gentleman — he’s listed at 6-foot and 235 pounds — and saying that he’s been bad on defense in his time in the majors undersells things. Schwarber is bad on defense in the way that Cleveland likes saving a little money or AJ Preller enjoys the occasional trade.

Per Statcast, Schwarber has been 29 runs below average as an outfielder in his career. That’s the fifth-worst mark in the majors over that period, ahead of only noted butchers Nick Castellanos, Matt Kemp, Melky Cabrera, and Shin-Soo Choo. He put together one solid defensive season, in 2018, and that season shows the best case scenario for Schwarber: he tallied a whopping 11 outfield assists that year, only one off the league lead, which was worth between 7 and 8 runs per both UZR and DRS.

Schwarber’s arm is no joke. When he first reached the majors, the Cubs still considered him a part-time catcher in large part because of that cannon arm. If the Nationals can somehow entice runners to take off against Schwarber, they might be able to wrangle another positive defensive season out of him despite his lack of range.

More realistically, Washington is hoping for a DH slot where they can hide Schwarber. With Howie Kendrick’s retirement, the Nationals don’t have an obvious candidate to fill that role, which means they can slide Schwarber there without losing anything on offense. That would leave them with Stevenson and Soto flanking defensive standout Victor Robles, which sounds to me like a solid defensive outfield. With Schwarber’s offensive value firmly in the green, that sounds like the best possible case here.

How does this deal work out poorly for Washington? The worst-case scenario is this: the NL plays 2021 without a DH, Schwarber’s plate discipline takes a step back, and he ends up as an average bat with painful outfield defense, more of the replacement level soup that they ran out around Soto in 2020. Even that, though, is hardly a disaster: at only one year, there’s no chance of this deal sticking around to haunt them.

For Schwarber, this contract fits his needs as well as can be expected. First, there’s the money: Schwarber will earn more on this deal than he projected to earn in arbitration with the Cubs. That’s a clear upside. Second, he’s still eligible for free agency after 2021 — his contract has a mutual option for 2022, but that’s merely a fancy way of telling a player you like them; the player can, after all, always decline his end of the deal.

More importantly, Schwarber will get everyday playing time in Washington. After the first five years of his career, I’m not sure that any team is clamoring to give Schwarber a long-term deal. That remains the brass ring for players: after six seasons at collectively-bargained low wages, free agency theoretically unleashes the forces of capitalism in their favor. For Schwarber, however, those forces aren’t yet guaranteed to work; bat-first corner types have found soft markets as teams realize they can replace those players with pre-arbitration talent without losing much on-field production.

For Schwarber to strike it rich, he needs to rise above the fray of slightly-above-average bats to become a premium one. For teams to believe that, he needs to do so in as big of a sample as possible. In that sense, the best thing Schwarber could do for himself is find somewhere with thin outfield and DH depth, and Washington fits the bill exactly. As a bonus, they’ll be playoff contenders, which is always a plus.

After their disappointing 2020, the Nationals could use some offensive help. After his arrested development, Schwarber could use some exposure. With this deal, both sides are getting what they want, at a rate that should make everyone happy. That’s a solid outcome for everyone — other than the rest of the NL East, perhaps.

After playing some pretty terrible baseball in 2019, the Detroit Tigers brought in a couple of veteran free agents to bolster their offense, taking it from very bad to only kind of bad. C.J. Cron only got to play 13 games in a Tigers uniform before he sprained his knee and was lost for the season. Jonathan Schoop worked out much better, producing a 114 wRC+ while playing excellent defense at the keystone, good for 1.4 wins in 44 games. Overall, the team wasn’t much better than their 2019 record, improving from an ugly 114 loss season to a pro-rated 98 loss season in 2020.

Just like last offseason, the Tigers turned to a veteran free agent to aid their beleaguered offense. Yesterday, they signed Robbie Grossman to a two-year deal with a $10 million guarantee and an additional $1 million in incentives, per Cody Stavenhagen and Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic. Craig Edwards had Grossman towards the bottom of our Top 50 free agents ranking, estimating he’d get a one-year deal worth around $6 million, while the crowd had him pegged for an average of just over a year and a half and $9 million.

The switch-hitting outfielder had a career renaissance in 2020, accumulating 1.3 wins for the Oakland Athletics, easily a career high that becomes even more impressive when you consider that he accumulated that much WAR in just 51 games. Grossman posted a 126 wRC+ in 2020, the second highest mark of his career, and that offensive outburst was fueled by a massive power breakout. During the first seven seasons of his career, he compiled a .119 ISO, a mark you’d expect a light-hitting infielder to produce. Most of his offensive value stemmed from his keen eye at the plate and an above average ability to make solid, if weak, contact. In 2020, Grossman upped his ISO from .107 to .241, launching eight home runs in the abbreviated season. That was more home runs than he had hit during the previous two seasons despite accumulating less than half the number of plate appearances than in ‘19 or ‘18. Among all qualified batters in 2020, Grossman’s 134 point ISO increase over 2019 was the second highest, behind only Wil Myers. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2018, Blake Treinen had one of the best relief pitching seasons of all time. A year later, his strikeouts went down, his walks doubled, and batters were getting the ball in the air and out of the ballpark. Oakland opted to non-tender Treinen after that 2019 season rather than pay him around $8 million. The Dodgers had no problems forking over $10 million in free agency and were rewarded with a solid season, including the final three outs of Game 5 of the World Series. Los Angeles liked what it saw from Treinen, and the 32-year-old righty appeared to have enjoyed his experience, as the parties reached an agreement on Tuesday on a two-year deal with an option for 2023.

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On Christmas, while I was some combination of calorically comatose and consumed by basketball, Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic reported that the Rangers had signed 28-year-old Japanese righty Kohei Arihara. The move continued an active Texas offseason and streak of curious, perhaps antithetical acquisitions made by a Rangers club that seems to have one foot in rebuilding and and the other in competing. What does Arihara bring to the table right now, and how does his acquisition fit as part of a broader shift in the strategy the org seems to be taking to team building?

Before I talk about Arihara, let’s remember the things that change when a pitcher goes from NPB (Nippon Professional Baseball) to MLB. In addition to the leap in hitter quality, there is also a heavier workload. Pacific League pitchers start once a week rather than once every five days as they typically do in MLB. It’s a strange cultural workload reversal from high school, where Japanese pitchers can be sometimes driven into the ground and asked to throw upwards of 120 pitches on little rest during important tournaments. There’s no way of knowing what kind of long-term consequences this has for the pitchers being developed there, good or bad.

The baseball itself is also different. The tackiness and seam height of NPB’s ball differs from MLB’s (there’s also variance within each population on its own), and those attributes play an important role in creating movement on pitches. This is why, more and more often, you’ll see MLB pitchers asking the umpire for a new baseball after feeling the seams on the one they’ve just been given and realizing they are lower than they like. All of these things, in addition to the complexities of a cross-planet move and cultural adjustment, play a role in augmenting teams’ understanding of the pitchers they have scouted, via tech and eyeball evaluators, in NPB or any other foreign league. Read the rest of this entry »

Hours after trading for Blake Snell, and hours before swinging a deal for Yu Darvish, the Padres continued their remarkable post-Christmas shopping spree by signing Ha-seong Kim. Kim, a 25-year-old infielder who spent last season with the KBO’s Kiwoom Heroes, was listed as our eighth-best free agent in our top 50 roundup this fall, just ahead of Didi Gregorius and Justin Turner. Per Kevin Acee of the San Diego Tribune, it will be a four-year, $25 million deal. Additionally, Kiwoom will collect a bit of a tax, taking a $5 million release fee from San Diego.

In Kim, the Padres get a player who should claim a starting job right away, and potentially ascend from there. The best way to characterize his recent KBO production is to say that he’s outgrown the league. As the starting shortstop for one of the circuit’s better clubs, Kim has notched a 140 wRC+ in each of the last two seasons. He produced a .306/.397/.523 line last year, with 30 homers and more walks than strikeouts. He’s also swiped 56 bases in 62 tries over the last two years, a 90% clip. Mel Rojas Jr.’s absurd power production deservedly won him the KBO MVP award last season, but make no mistake: Kim was the brightest prospect in the league.

The scouting report backs up the numbers. A tremendous athlete, Kim’s a plus runner with quick hands and a plus throwing arm. At the plate, he has a mature approach, displaying good patience without being passive. Most of his power comes to the pull side, and he adeptly hunts pitches he can drive: Both his swing rate and whiff rate were above average last year, notable in a league that runs a lot of deep counts. Read the rest of this entry »