A year ago, Wade Miley went to camp with the Brewers as a 31-year-old minor-league free agent. He was coming off a disastrous season that saw him finish with a 128 ERA- with the Orioles. In truth, Miley wasn’t quite that bad — he also finished with an xFIP- of 106. But even 106 is unspectacular, and going into the season, expectations were modest. It wasn’t even guaranteed Miley would ever find a spot.

He wound up making 16 starts in a Brewers uniform, plus four more (technically) in the playoffs. In one sense, the Brewers got what they might’ve expected. Once again, Miley finished with an xFIP- of 106. But then, his ERA- settled at a ridiculous 63. In other words, while his xFIP- stayed exactly the same, he cut his ERA- in half. Miley finished with a better park-adjusted ERA than Corey Kluber. He finished with a better park-adjusted ERA than Gerrit Cole. He finished with a better park-adjusted ERA than Clayton Kershaw. The best and worst thing about baseball is that it doesn’t always have to make sense. Through one lens, Miley pitched as the ace of his team.

And now he’s going to take his pitching to Houston. Miley has signed with the Astros for a year and $4.5 million, with another $0.5 million in incentives. The Astros are likely to lose Dallas Keuchel. In Miley, they’re hoping to find an approximation.

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The last 15 months have not gone particularly well for Greg Holland. Coming off a solid return from Tommy John surgery with the Rockies in 2017 — albeit one with a lesser second half than first — he bypassed a reported multiyear offer to return, then was met with a frosty reception amid a free agent market that was generally more hospitable to relievers than other players. He finally signed a one-year, $14 million deal with the Cardinals after Opening Day, but struggled to the point of being released on August 1. After salvaging his season at least somewhat with a strong showing with the Nationals over the final two months, he hit free agency again. On Monday, the 33-year-old righty reportedly agreed to a one-year, $3.5 million-plus-incentives deal with the Diamondbacks, pending a physical. It’s a living, but ouch.

Admittedly, it’s suboptimal to carry a season with a 4.99 ERA, 3.83 FIP, 0.3 WAR, and just three saves into a market flooded with alternatives coming off stronger showings, but one might have thought that the Scott Boras client could have built upon his late-season resurgence in Washington and the lack of a qualifying offer this time around. Then again, it was presumably Boras’ misread of Holland’s market last winter that got him into this jam in the first place. At least this time, he’s going to spring training.

By not signing until two days after Opening Day last year — and that only after Luke Gregerson was lost to a hamstring injury — Holland missed the entirety of exhibition season, and after making just a pair of tune-up appearances with the Cardinals’ Hi-A Palm Beach affiliate, he walked four out of the five batters he faced in his April 9 debut. He didn’t get his first save chance until April 27, but he blew that, and he never assumed the full-time closer role. He never found his control in St. Louis, and a three-week stint on the disabled list for impingement in his right hip, from late May to mid-June, didn’t help. All told, in 32 appearances totaling 25 innings with the Cardinals, his walk, strikeout, and earned run totals were identical: 22 (7.92 per nine) — not what you want. Six days after being released, he joined the Nationals, and at least righted the ship, posting a 0.84 ERA and 2.97 FIP while striking out 31.3% of hitters in 21.1 innings as the team played out the string.

The key, or at least one of them, was a more reliable slider that generated more chases and less zone contact when he backed off using it quite so heavily:

 
According to Brooks Baseball, while with St. Louis, Holland’s slider was hit for a .268 average and .357 slugging percentage, with a 19.8% whiff rate (37.3% whiffs per swing), while with Washington, the slider yielded an .081 batting average (all singles) with a 25.2% whiff rate (48.5% whiffs per swing). His fastball became less of a meatball with the transition as well (.342 AVG/.463 SLG before, .208/.375 after, with a whiff rate climbing from 4.2% to 10.7%); via Baseball Savant, his xwOBA dropped from .354 with the Cardinals to .239 with the Nationals. Granted, we’re dealing with small samples in terms of innings and pitches, with the latter ranging from 30 plate appearances ending with fastballs in Washington to 60 PA ending with sliders in St. Louis, but whatever changed did seem to work, allowing him to recover his first-half 2017 form — when he earned All-Star honors with the Rockies — if not his magic with the Royals. Life is just different when your fastball averages 92.9 mph instead of 96.9 (his average in 2013, according to Pitch Info).

On that note, it’s worth a brief historical review. Once upon a time, Holland ranked among the game’s elite relievers. From 2011 — his first full season in the majors — to 2014, he posted ERAs below 2.00 three times out of four, with FIPS below 2.00 twice. Over that span, only three pitchers (Craig Kimbrel, Eric O’Flaherty, and Wade Davis) outdid his 1.86 ERA, and only Kimbrel surpassed his 1.92 FIP and 9.1 WAR. In August 2012, he assumed the closer duties for the Royals, and over the next two seasons became a key part of their march to respectability, aided by a dominant bullpen. He made the All-Star team in both 2013 and ’14, ranking second in the AL in saves each year. In 2013, he led all relievers in FIP (1.36) while ranking second in WAR (3.0), while in 2014, after placing within the top handful in ERA, FIP, and WAR, he went 7-for-7 in saves while yielding just one run and four hits in 11 innings while striking out 15 during the Royals’ postseason run.

Holland did not get to pitch during the Royals’ 2015 championship run. His velocity dipped from its typical 95-96 mph average into the low 90s in late August, and he was soon discovered to have suffered a partial tear in his ulnar collateral ligament. He tried to pitch through it — reportedly, he had been experiencing elbow discomfort as far back as August 2014 — but went to the sidelines in mid-September, yielding the closer’s job to Davis, and on October 2 went under the knife. He didn’t re-emerge until signing a one-year, $7 million contract with the Rockies in January 2017, a deal that included a mutual option, more on which momentarily.

Holland burst out of the gate in 2017, converting 23 straight save chances with a 1.09 ERA through June 14. He made the NL All-Star team on the strength of a 1.62 ERA and 2.80 FIP; a dreadful 9.1-inning, 14-run stretch in August blew up his second-half stats (6.38 ERA, 4.99 FIP), but he helped the Rockies snag an NL Wild Card berth, and finished with a league-high 41 saves along with a 3.61 ERA and 3.72 FIP (72 ERA- and 81 FIP-).

When Holland signed with the Rockies, he had a $10 million mutual option for 2018, with a $1 million buyout. By reaching either 50 games pitched or 30 games finished, that option converted into a $15 million player option, about on par with his total take in 2017 ($15.1 million) thanks to his having earned $9.1 million in incentive bonuses thanks to his 61 appearances, 58 games finished, and 2017 NL Comeback Player of the Year award. Holland declined the option and the $17.4 million qualifying offer that followed. Later he reportedly snubbed a three-year, $51 or $52 million deal from the Rockies, though whether that was a firm offer or a “conceptual” one (as Buster Olney phrased it) is up for debate. The Rockies instead signed Davis to a three-year, $52 million deal in late December — thanks, old pal — and a better offer apparently never came Holland’s way.

Hence, the mess in which Holland wound up, though he was hardly alone in misreading the market. The exact details of his new contract are unknown at this writing, but he can earn a maximum of $3.5 million in incentives, some of which probably depend upon his returning to closer duty. With Brad Boxberger departed in free agency (unsigned at this writing, actually), it’s not clear yet whether he or Archie Bradley, who excelled in a setup role, will be manager Torey Lovullo’s top ninth-inning choice. If Holland can stay healthy and maintain his old form, he stands to be quite a bargain for the Snakes regardless of his role, but one can’t help imagining that if he could play out the last year-and-change again, he’d be in a much better position than he is today.

Tuesday afternoon, Freddy Galvis, 29, signed a one-year contract to play baseball for the Toronto Blue Jays. The deal guarantees Galvis $5 million next year and either $1 or $5.5 million in 2020, depending on whether or not the Blue Jays exercise their team option on the contract. Even though contract expectations for Galvis were maybe a little bit higher than that coming into the offseason (you guessed he’d get two years and about $15 million), the deal he ended up accepting still seems like a pretty good get for a guy who posted a .294 wOBA last year and hasn’t ever posted a wRC+ above 85 (last year’s mark).

In Toronto, Galvis will join, at least to begin with, 25-year-old Lourdes Gurriel Jr. as a candidate for the Blue Jays’ starting shortstop job out of spring training, but he will likely thereafter end up spelling the younger man as a defensive replacement late in games and perhaps also against tough righties. Gurriel, the younger brother of Houston’s Yuli and son of Cuban baseball legend Lourdes Sr., had a reasonably strong debut season at the plate in 2018 (his .446 slugging percentage was particularly promising, paired as it was with a modest-for-today 22% strikeout rate) but injured his knee in August and his hamstring in September and worried observers with occasionally puzzling footwork at short.

In Galvis, the Blue Jays have an insurance policy against a scenario in which the bottom falls out of Gurriel’s offense (because he doesn’t walk very much, almost all of his value at the plate comes from his power stroke) and his defensive lapses therefore become intolerable. Galvis isn’t better as a hitter — in 2018, in fact, he was about 20% worse, at least as measured by wRC+ — but he’s always had a solid defensive reputation and, as a seven-year veteran, his approach at the plate is enough of a known quantity that it is unlikely to fall entirely off a cliff. If Gurriel’s offensive performance ever gets to the point that it begins to look like Galvis’, the deciding factor will be the defense, and Galvis is likely to win that battle. Read the rest of this entry »

On Thursday, word broke that the Mariners had signed 30-year-old righty Hunter Strickland to a one-year , $1.3 million deal with incentives totaling about the same for games pitched and finished. On Friday afternoon, the Mariners’ division-mates in Oakland announced a deal of their own, for one year and for $4 million, with 35-year-old Marco Estrada. Both pitchers are 2019 bounce-back candidates, and both will spend at least a portion of 2019 in the AL West. Let’s discuss.

Given the terms of his deal, it seems reasonable to assume that the Mariners hope Strickland will be able to step into the ninth-inning role recently vacated by Edwin Díaz, perhaps in concert with Cory Gearren or Anthony Swarzak, or perhaps all by his lonesome, depending on how things shake out in spring training. That kind of uncertainty is the natural consequence of entering 2019 with a bullpen that’s lost Díaz, James Pazos, Juan Nicaso, and Alex Colomé to trade this winter and seems unlikely to welcome free agents Nick Vincent, Zach Duke, and Adam Warren back to Seattle. Seattle had an excellent bullpen in 2018 but doesn’t, in any meaningful sense, have that bullpen any more. Strickland is one of the new guard, here to carry the M’s over the water into the next phase of their rebuild.

Which makes the question of whether Strickland will be any good in 2019 something of an irrelevance to the Mariners’ long-term plans — if he’s good, he can be traded midseason; if he’s bad, it’s “just” $1.3 million — although it presumably remains of considerable importance to Strickland himself. For my money, I’d bet against renewed success in 2019. After routinely sitting in the low triple-digits with his four-fastball during his first three years in the majors (2014-2016), Strickland’s mean velocity on the pitch has dropped to 95.7 miles per hour, and his whiff percentage on the pitch has dropped from its high of 18% in 2015 to 8% last year. Those fundamentals have generated poor results across the board:

It’s hard to know what precisely brought on Strickland’s decline, but given that fastballs don’t usually get faster with age and that Strickland’s particular fastball is already getting beaten up at 95-96 miles per hour, it’s hard to be too sanguine about his future. Then again, given the contract he signed and the Mariners’ current insistence on trading away all their best players, there really is very little downside to this deal for Seattle. Just maybe reinforce the clubhouse doors.

There’s far more reason to be optimistic about the A’s bounce-back candidate, Estrada, despite the fact that his 2018 was if anything even worse than Strickland’s (the 5.64 ERA and 1.82 HR/9 are the figures that jump out at you most immediately). For one thing, Estrada has never really relied on his velocity to generate outs and so last year’s mile-per-hour slide from 90.1 to 89.0 on the fastball isn’t really something to worry about — in fact, it puts him right around where he was in 2016, when he put up a 3.48 ERA over 176 innings for the Blue Jays. For another, Estrada’s game has always been up in the zone and so (a) bad years like 2018 were always going to happen from time to time and (b) you don’t have to wish for too much positive regression on the HR/9 to get him back into a range (say, 2016’s 1.18, or his career 1.41 mark) where you know he can have success.

In Oakland, Estrada will join Mike Fiers, who re-signed with the club in December, and holdovers/questionable starting pitchers Daniel Mengden, Chris Bassitt, and Frankie Montas in an A’s rotation that will be held together by hope and duct tape until Jharel Cotton (Tommy John), A.J. Puk (also Tommy John), and Sean Manaea (shoulder surgery) return to the field at some point mid-season (and maybe Jesús Luzardo comes up at some point). Given the circumstances, and the budget to which the club has decided to hew, Estrada is exactly the kind of guy you’d want to see the A’s sign: healthy (he’s never had an arm injury we know about), inexpensive, and a plausible candidate for solid numbers in 2019. If he’s good in the early going next year, he can slot in at the back end of a rotation that has a reasonable shot at the Wild Card if everything goes right. If he’s terrible, chances are the A’s are too, and — again — it’s just $4 million. Even for the A’s, that’s manageable — their 2018 payroll was $66 million and their commitments for 2019 total just $69 million so far. What could go wrong?

Last Friday afternoon, Ken Rosenthal of the Athletic reported that the Mets were in agreement with 31-year-old lefty Justin Wilson, lately of the Cubs, on a two-year deal later reported to be approximately $10 million over the life of the contract. A few minutes later, the Indians announced that they’d re-signed a lefty of their own — 37-year-old Óliver Pérez — to a one-year contract worth $2.5 million, with a 2020 option worth $2.75 million that will vest if he reaches 55 appearances in 2019. With Pérez and Wilson under contract for 2019, the lefty relief market is down to Jake Diekman and a handful of folks projected for zero WAR in 2019. Let’s talk about the two that signed this week, and what we can expect from them.

Wilson is probably the higher-upside of the two, though bouts of inconsistency mean he’s not a lock to repeat the .188/.301/.342 line he held lefties to in 2018. A strong start to the 2017 season, in which he threw 40 innings for the Tigers, striking out 55 and walking just 16, led to a mid-season trade to a Cubs team hunting for a second straight division title. They didn’t quite get what they were after: Wilson walked 19 in just under 18 innings of work, struck out just 25, and visibly lost manager Joe Maddon’s confidence down the stretch — after a three-run, two-walk, one-out appearance on September 2nd, Wilson appeared just once again for the next 10 days, and was entrusted with just 5.1 more innings the rest of the season. Wilson’s wild ways continued into the early part of 2018 but seemed to improve as the season wore on, and he finished the year with a 3.41 full-season ERA, even as his Cubs mark (5.09) fell well below his then-career 3.30.

Wilson has always been a pitcher the spin rate guys love — see his acquisition by Chicago in mid-2017, for example — and nothing in his recent performance suggests the raw stuff that’s so impressed scouts and spreadsheet-wranglers alike has gone anywhere. He has, if anything, become even more reliant on his four-seam fastball than ever (he threw it nearly three-quarters of the time in 2018, mostly at the expense of his sinker) and given its 82nd-percentile spin rate that seems as reasonable a strategy as any. Batters were slightly more successful against that pitch in 2018 than they were in previous years (familiarity breeds contempt, I suppose) but much less successful against Wilson’s breaking pitches than before, suggesting a successful ability to pick his spots and disrupt timing effectively.

In New York, Wilson will join new acquisition Edwin Díaz, a re-signed Jeurys Familia, and holdovers Robert Gsellman, Seth Lugo, and Drew Smith for what should be a vastly improved Mets ‘pen. The Mets were fairly terrible in relief in 2018 — their 4.96 ERA was second only to the Marlins for worst in the National League, and their FIP was worst outright — and they were heavily right-handed, getting just 62.1 inning out of southpaws in 2018, 42.2 of which came from the departing Jerry Blevins. Whatever else can be said about Justin Wilson, I think we can fairly say he is a better relief pitcher than Jerry Blevins, and his addition will give Mickey Callaway a strong seventh-inning option before heading to Familia in the eighth and Díaz in the ninth.

Pérez, meanwhile, is back in business after it appeared, even just a year ago, that his big-league career might be over. He started 2018 on a minor-league deal with the Yankees, showed enough to sign on with Cleveland on a big-league deal after a June 1 release from Scranton, and promptly posted a 36% strikeout rate and 1.39 ERA over 32 innings for Terry Francona’s squad. Most impressively, after spending a career mostly more effective against lefties than against righties, Pérez absolutely dominated right-handed hitters in 2018, holding them to a minuscule .138 wOBA (lefties posted a .213 mark). It’s hard to say precisely what changed for Pérez, but my money would be on his increased use of a newly-improved slider (up to 49 percent usage after sitting in the low 40s for most of his career) and a move away from a fading fastball.

If Wilson is a sensible move in the middle of a somewhat puzzling offseason for the Mets, Pérez is a sensible move in the middle of a straightforward, if disappointingly stingy, offseason for Cleveland. The bullpen could certainly use some help — it was nearly as bad as the Mets’ last year — but Pérez will at best help the ‘pen stand pat in 2019 rather than move forward, and he is (somewhat incredibly) the first major-league free agent acquisition of the offseason for Mike Chernoff. Ideally, we’d see Cleveland pick up a few more relievers off the market — all they cost is money — and perhaps spin off some of the leftover pieces for replacements for the departing Michael Brantley and the traded Edwin Encarnación and Yan Gomes. The plan instead seems to be to reduce payroll while hoping the departures don’t weaken the team enough to fall behind the rest of the Central. That isn’t likely, but seize the moment this approach is not.

Still, Pérez is a good pitcher and Cleveland needs a few of those. He had a terrific season in 2018 and there is reason to believe, despite his 16 seasons in the major leagues, that he has more left in the tank. He’ll be best served if the front office goes out and gets more arms to take some of the strain off of, say, him and Brad Hand, but if he pitches like he did last year, he’ll be useful anyway. Wilson, too, will probably be in the best position to succeed if the Mets go out and find another lefty reliever to take some of the load off (Diekman is of course still available) but has enough of an ability to get righties out that he should be a contributor. In an offseason that has been remarkably bereft of teams going out and getting players they need by paying money for their services, Cleveland and New York have done just that, even if these signings would ideally be part of a larger plan to spend money on good players at positions of need.

Because of who they are, and because of their extensive resources, the Dodgers have long been linked to Bryce Harper. When Harper’s market didn’t develop quite as expected, the Dodgers seemed a more likely fit. When they cleared some money by means of a large December trade with the Reds, the Dodgers seemed all the more likely a fit. Harper’s market at the moment isn’t entirely clear. We know the Phillies are in there. We don’t know who else is in there, if anyone. The Los Angeles connection has been increasingly easy to draw.

But now, it would seem the Dodgers have officially gone in another direction. Harper was maybe baseball’s best player in 2015, and while he’s been good since then, that season set the expectations awfully high. In a sense, Harper’s been a minor disappointment. Much of the same could be said of A.J. Pollock, who broke out to become a top-ten player in 2015. He hasn’t been quite the same player since. But he is now the newest player on the Dodgers. He’s getting, technically, a $60-million guarantee, spread over five years.

Pollock doesn’t completely close the door on Harper, in theory. The Dodgers could make it work if they wanted. We know they’re sufficiently creative. Yet it looks like the Dodgers are now focused on trying to add J.T. Realmuto. I wouldn’t say their Harper odds have improved. It’s Pollock who’s the man of the hour.

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The Chicago Cubs have made the playoffs for four straight years, getting to the National League Championship Series three times and quite famously winning it all to finish the 2016 season. Despite making the playoffs in 2018, the Brewers took the division in a tie-breaking game 163, before the Rockies got the best of the Cubs in the Wild Card game. After the disappointing defeat, the offseason has changed little about the Cubs’ 2019 outlook. The coaching staff has undergone some drastic changes with a new pitching coach, hitting coach, and bench coach. The team brought back Cole Hamels, but had to jettison the salary of Drew Smyly in the process; they failed to make a competitive offer on Jesse Chavez, a reliever they liked. Their biggest free agent addition has been that of utilityman Daniel Descalso. To top it off, the team decided to bring back Addison Russell despite his admission of domestic violence; Joe Maddon addressed the matter with fans in a way that could at best be described as clumsy.

Not much has gone well for the Cubs this offseason, but in bringing in Brad Brach for $3 million, as Ken Rosenthal reports, the club might have cheaply added a pitcher who can take some important innings for the club this season. If he does pitch well, the Cubs have an option to bring him back for 2020. With Brandon Morrow’s status uncertain and Carl Edwards, Jr. struggling near the end of the season, Chicago’s bullpen could use some help, and if Brach pitches anything like he has the past few seasons, the 33-year-old righty should provide it.

Back in 2008, Brach was drafted by the Padres in a round that no longer exists in the draft. Despite the low draft profile, Brach pitched well enough in the minors to make the majors in 2011, though he bounced up and down through the 2013 season. That winter, the Padres designated him for assignment and traded him to the Orioles for Devin Jones. Brach struck out 43 of the 101 Triple-A batters he faced in 2014 and became a useful multi-inning reliever for Baltimore that year. In 2015 and 2016, Brach reached nearly 80 innings in both seasons, striking out nearly 30% of batters and walking a third that amount.

In 2017, Brach pitched well again, filling in for injured closer Zach Britton for a time. He got off to a solid start in 2018, but a poorly timed swoon in June and July meant he had very little trade value and the Orioles were only able to pick up $250,000 in international pool money for him at the end of July. He pitched decently well for the Braves in the final two months of the season. Brach looks like a great bargain signing for a team that has decided it is allergic to spending this offseason, but there are some warning signs.

Brach’s strikeout rate has gone from nearly 30% in 2016 to 26% in 2017 to 21% last year. He’s still been able to pitch decently well by avoiding home runs, but if those numbers tick up a bit, he moves closer to being a replacement-level reliever. He’s lost a little bit off his fastball in recent seasons, which might help to explain the lower strikeout totals, though his swinging strike rate has remained solid. The Cubs should be adding a solid reliever at a low cost next season. It looks like a couple poorly timed months around the trade deadline this season might have soured some on his ability, but he still turned in a decent season overall. He is a reliever, so he might be awful, but as far as relief signings go, there’s not a lot to dislike here.

Everything here is always handled on a case-by-case basis, but there are certain free-agent contracts that get signed that just don’t rise to the threshold where we feel like it’s worthy of a post. Martin Perez recently signed one of those contracts with the Twins. Wilmer Flores recently signed one of those contracts with the Diamondbacks. Jordy Mercer signed one of those contracts with the Tigers. Matt Adams signed one of those contracts with the Nationals. Editorially, some moves have it, and some moves don’t. You sort of know them when you see them.

Interestingly enough, Nick Markakis has now signed one of those contracts with the Braves. Or, you’d think so, based on the terms — Markakis will make $4 million in 2019, and then there’s a $6-million club option for 2020, with a $2-million buyout. This is in that money range where we frequently ignore the transaction. But Markakis is again going to be a regular player. And he’s also coming off a year in which he made the All-Star Game for the first time in his 13-season career. It’s almost impossible to suggest the Braves aren’t getting a team-friendly deal. Markakis was evidently willing to take a discount. This just isn’t the impact move Braves fans have been looking for. It’s re-signing a 35-year-old Nick Markakis.

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If we consider 2018 performance and 2019 projections, the Texas Rangers signing Asdrubal Cabrera for one year and $3.5 million might be the biggest bargain a team got for a player taking a one-year deal. Ken Rosenthal had the news first, with Jeff Passan coming through with the contract. After five playoff appearances in seven years from 2010 through 2016, the Rangers fell to third place in 2017, then cut $30 million in payroll last season on their way to a last place campaign. The team appears to be cutting even more this season, but has made a handful of interesting cheaper, short-term moves, adding Lance Lynn, Drew Smyly, Shelby Miller, and Jesse Chavez. We can add Asdrubal Cabrera to that list.

In our list of Top 50 free agents, Cabrera ranked 27th, just behind Andrew Miller and ahead of Zach Britton. Kiley McDaniel thought Cabrera was in line for a two-year deal worth $16 million; the crowd agreed on the length though had him making a couple million dollars more per season. Eric Longenhagen described Cabrera like this:

The advent of fluid defensive positioning has enabled aging infielders to stay at shortstop longer, and Cabrera, who has plus hands and arm strength but quickly dwindling lateral range, is among them. Fold in a resilient, well-rounded offensive profile, and Cabrera still has value as a multi-positional infielder despite some clear deficiencies. He’s amassed about 2.5 annual WAR during the last half-decade and will continue getting short-term deals until his bat declines beneath playability.

In Texas, Elvis Andrus plays shortstop and Rougned Odor plays second base, leaving Cabrera as the best option at third. Cabrera’s positional flexibility leaves open the possibility that 27-year-old Patrick Wisdom could still earn his way to playing time and allow Cabrera to move around the diamond, but the more likely scenario is that Cabrera simply makes third base his home. Defensively, that’s is probably his best position, as he lacks the range to play shortstop regularly and range is less of an issue at third base compared to second.

Most teams already have decent third basemen. and the market was full of second basemen this offseason, so it is possible that Cabrera’s declining range hurt in terms of opportunities. He did struggle offensively after his trade from the Mets to the Phillies, but we are talking about under 200 plate appearances. On the season, Cabrera put up a 111 wRC+, nearly matching his 112 mark from the previous season. Factoring in a little decline, Cabrera should be average or better offensively and about the same defensively at third base. The Rangers just made themselves two wins better with barely any investment. If he plays well, the team should be able to trade him for a prospect who might help them down the line.

After he signed with the Yankees, Adam Ottavino became the ninth reliever on our Top 50 Free Agent list to get a contract for next season. The Yankees taking Ottavino off the board meant there were just two relievers to go. One is Craig Kimbrel, who has been one of the better relievers in baseball over the last half-dozen seasons. The other is Cody Allen, who was one of the better relievers in baseball in 2015, solid in 2016 and 2017, and not very good last year. His poor 2018 season showing plunged him down our rankings and left him as one of the less desirable proven-reliever types available this offseason. His track record did mean something, though, and per Ken Rosenthal, he’s landed a one-year, $8.5 million deal with the Angels that has the chance of being worth $11 million based on games finished.

Allen, picked in the 23rd round of the 2010 draft, moved quickly through the Cleveland system as a reliever, reaching Double-A a year after he was drafted and hitting the majors one year later. He was a good reliever in 2013 and 2014, with sub-3.00 FIPs and ERAs better than that. He took over the closer role in 2014 and had his best season the following year, striking out 35% of batters, walking 9% and giving up just two home runs all season, to go along with a 15% infield fly rate. When Cleveland acquired Andrew Miller in 2015, the club could afford to put the lefty in high leverage situations in the middle of games without worrying about the ninth because Allen was closing. He didn’t give up a run during their playoff run to the World Series and struck out 24 of the 55 batters he faced.

Allen had another solid season in 2017, though not as good as his 2015 peak due to a slight decline in strikeouts and an increase in homers. In 2018, Allen started off the first two months of the season pitching much like he had his prior two years. His strikeout rate had dipped to 25%, but his walk rate was good and he only gave up two homers on his way to a 3.54 FIP and 3.00 ERA. He wasn’t great, but he was getting the job done. From June to the end of the season, his strikeout rate was up at 29%, but his walk rate went up to 13% and his home run rate more than doubled. He had a 5.14 FIP and 5.65 ERA the last four months of the season, leading to an overall replacement-level campaign. In the playoffs, he faced nine batters and retired just three of them. Read the rest of this entry »