Last Saturday in the Bronx, Max Scherzer showed off the dominant form that has earned him three Cy Young awards and seven All-Star selections. Admittedly, he wasn’t exactly facing Murderer’s Row, but against a Yankees team that had recently righted itself with a 7-1 tear, he struck out 10 out of the first 14 batters he faced, finishing with 14 strikeout in 7.1 innings, that while allowing just two hits, one walk, and one run.

The Nationals wound up losing that game in 11 innings, but nonetheless, the outing was the latest example of the 36-year-old righty in vintage form. The 14 strikeouts was the most by a visitor in the new Yankee Stadium, which opened in 2009, and the most by any opponent in any iteration of Yankee Stadium since Pedro Martinez’s ultra-dominant one-hit performance against the defending champions in 1999:

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The news was as abrupt as a mid-afternoon tweet, and yet long overdue: On Thursday, the Angels designated Albert Pujols for assignment. The 41-year-old Pujols is a no-doubt Hall of Famer, one of four players to attain the dual milestones of 3,000 hits and 600 home runs. But he’s now a month into his fifth season of sub-replacement level production, an impediment to improving a team that needs all the help it can get to overcome a league-worst defense as it scrambles to return to the playoffs for the first time since 2014.

Mired in a 7-for-43 slump on a 13–17 team, Pujols is hitting just .198/.250/.372 with five homers and a 75 wRC+ in 92 plate appearances and making $30 million in the final season of the 10-year, $240 million deal that he signed following a remarkable 11-year run with the Cardinals. With his body unable to withstand a litany of leg and foot injuries — hamstrings, knees, plantar fasciitis — his megadeal provided little bang for the buck. Where he made nine All-Star teams and won three MVP awards as well as the NL Rookie of the Year award in St. Louis while helping the Cardinals to three pennants and two championships, he never approached such levels in Anaheim. As an Angel, he made just one All-Star team, finished no higher than 17th in the MVP voting, and was swept out of his lone playoff appearance.

This isn’t a move that the Angels have taken lightly, and it owes plenty to the pressures on new general manager Perry Minasian, who was hired last November, as well as the development of Jared Walsh and the continued health and presence of Shohei Ohtani. Walsh, a first baseman who has taken over most of the duties in right field since Dexter Fowler suffered a season-ending ACL tear on April 9, has hit for a 166 wRC+ in 222 PA since the start of last season. Ohtani, who this year has been available to serve as the designated hitter on days before and after his starts (which the Angels were reluctant to let him do previously), has hit for a 169 wRC+ with a major league-high 10 homers in 118 PA.

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Between the fireworks shows put on by 21-year-olds Juan Soto and Fernando Tatis Jr., and the big numbers put up by teammates Freddie Freeman and Marcell Ozuna, Ronald Acuña Jr. didn’t command as much attention as his talents merited last year. A two-week stay on the injured list didn’t help, particularly when it came to posting eye-opening counting stats. Even so, and even in abbreviated form, Acuña turned in his third straight stellar campaign. As he heads into his age-23 season, his place among the game’s elite shouldn’t be ignored.

Acuña entered the 2020 season on a high note, following up his 2018 NL Rookie of the Year campaign with his first as an All-Star. Playing in 156 games in 2019, he hit .280/.365/.518 (126 wRC+), bashed 41 homers and stole a league-high 37 bases in 46 attempts; three more steals, and he would have joined Barry Bonds, Jose Canseco, Alex Rodriguez, and Alfonso Soriano as the only members of the 40–40 club. Back in the Baseball Abstract days, Bill James introduced a simple stat called Power-Speed number, which takes the harmonic mean of a player’s home run and stolen base totals. Acuña’s 2019 season is tied for 16th overall, and sixth among players 25 or under:

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Given their blockbuster trade for Francisco Lindor and Carlos Carrasco, their additions of James McCann and Taijuan Walker, and their projected first place NL East finish, the Mets already had plenty of buzz about them this spring. As if they needed more, their best player, Jacob deGrom, has provided some during the Grapefruit League season by reaching triple digits with his fastball velocity. On Tuesday against the Astros, his heater reportedly reached 100 mph 11 times on the stadium scoreboard, topping out at 101 on a pitch to Alex Bregman.

This is nothing new for the 32-year-old righty, who hit 100 in his first outing of the spring on March 6, the same day he was named the team’s Opening Day starter. Statcast wasn’t available for that outing or his March 11 one (both of which also came against the Astros in a spring where travel restrictions limit the pools of exhibition opponents). Here’s a look at deGrom’s upper-level readings from Tuesday:

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Is Fernando Tatis Jr. the next Carlos Correa? The question has lingered in my mind in the wake of last week’s piece about Tatis’ already-substantial Hall of Fame chances, itself a response to the Padres’ shortstop landing a 14-year, $340 million deal at the tender age of 22. Digging into some of my previous research, I illustrated that even given the fairly slim sample sizes, the vast majority of players who perform as Tatis has through his age-21 season — whether based merely on offensive prowess or full value as estimated by WAR — are bound for the Hall of Fame.

That provocative conclusion certainly stirred the pot, perhaps even moreso than I intended, with critics offering a range of counterexamples, some of them so far off base as to be laughable (left fielder/designated hitter Joe Charboneau, AL Rookie of the Year at age 25, out of the majors by age 28), others a bit more subtle (Vern Stephens, a slugging shortstop who had some of his best years against lesser competition during World War II). The one that stuck in my mind, however was the example of Correa, whose performance through his age-21 season bore some striking similarities to that of Tatis, to the point that the pair were adjacent on multiple leaderboards. The comparison, which also includes some key differences, was still on my mind when I discussed the two shortstops and a small handful of other young players — most notably Francisco Lindor, Juan Soto, and Wander Franco — during a FanGraphs Audio podcast spot with Kevin Goldstein, who had a front-row seat to the professional progress of Correa, whom the Astros drafted with the first overall pick just three months before he joined their front office.

Correa, now heading into his age-26 season as well as his final year before eligibility for free agency, has had his ups and downs at the major league level. He won AL Rookie of the Year honors in 2015 while helping the Astros to their first playoff appearance in a decade. While he’s helped Houston to four more playoff appearances, including a World Series victory in 2017 and an AL pennant two years later, he’s been an All-Star just once, mainly due to injuries that have limited him to just one season with more than 110 games played: 2016, his age-21 season, when he played 153 games and set an as-yet-unsurpassed career high in WAR, whether by FanGraphs’ measure (5.2) or that of Baseball-Reference (7.0). More on that gap, which is driven by widely divergent defensive metrics, below.

Correa did play 58 out of the Astros’ 60 games last year, but hit just .264/.326/.383, setting career lows in slugging percentage and wRC+ (98) as well as more obviously counting-dependent stats like home runs (five) and WAR (0.9 by FanGraphs, 1.8 by B-Ref). To be fair, he was hitting .301/.367/.441 (125 wRC+) through September 7 before suffering through a 5-for-44 slump from September 8-22, so it’s not like his entire season was a slog; he had a very bad fortnight. He even hit his way out of that skid, closing the season by going 5-for-14 over his final four games and then batting a sizzling .362/.455/.766 with six homers in 55 PA in the postseason. That would have lifted his season line to .282/.340/.456 if we were to add it all up. Read the rest of this entry »

Fernando Tatis Jr. has agreed to the longest contract in baseball history, and one of the most lucrative — and yet looking at the jaw-dropping ZiPS projection for his career, his 14-year, $340 million deal might be underselling him. At the very least, Tatis’ contract and his production to date cast him as a generational talent, and his forecast suggests he’ll wind up ranking among history’s great shortstops. While it’s hard to believe that a player with only two partial years in the majors has a leg up on a berth in the Hall of Fame, the statistical history of players who’ve done what he’s done at such a young age suggests that it’s true: Tatis is already soaring towards Cooperstown.

Or if you prefer, stylishly shimmying there:

Hip-notized by @tatis_jr ? pic.twitter.com/25eBSeokFn

— San Diego Padres (@Padres) August 8, 2020

The skeptic in all of us may be saying, “Whoa, let’s pump the brakes on this kind of talk,” but it’s the Padres who have placed the bet on a Mookie Betts-like impact over the course of well over a decade, and looking at the comparisons and the company he’s keeping once we crunch the numbers, it’s tough to disagree. Nothing is guaranteed, least of all a player’s spot in the Hall of Fame a quarter-century from now, but the odds of him fulfilling that promise are substantial.

Regarding the Hall, consider first the baselines set by a player arriving in the majors at an early age. Repeating a study I did in relation to Ronald Acuña Jr. in 2018 (only this time catching a glitch in my accounting relating to 19th century players), I used Baseball-Reference’s Stathead to track the rates at which position players who made at least one plate appearance in their age-18 through 21 seasons reached the Hall:

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The good news is that the Hall of Fame will host an induction ceremony in 2021. The bad news is that it won’t be open to the public, and that just about everything else in connection with the Hall’s annual festivities has been canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic for the second year in a row. The institution announced as much in a press release on Friday:

“Though we are having to cancel our 2021 Hall of Fame Classic Weekend, the Hall of Fame is maintaining its commitment to hold an Induction Ceremony on July 25,” said Jane Forbes Clark, Chairman of the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. “We had hoped to be in a position to welcome loyal baseball fans back to Cooperstown for Induction Weekend, but with the continuing uncertainties created by COVID-19, the Board of Directors has decided not to hold Induction Weekend ceremonies at the traditional Clark Sports Center location. We have prepared alternative plans to conduct our annual Awards Presentation and Induction Ceremony as television events taking place indoors and adhering to all of the required New York State guidelines.”

Induction Weekend was scheduled to take place July 23–26, with the big ceremony at the Clark Sports Center on Sunday, the 25th. Instead, it will be broadcast live on MLB Network that day beginning at 1:30 pm ET.

Though nobody was elected from the 2021 cycle — the BBWAA voters pitched their first shutout since 2013, while the Early Baseball and Golden Days Era Committees had their meetings postponed — last year’s honorees did not get their moment in the Cooperstown sun. Thus, the Hall is making arrangements for Derek Jeter, Larry Walker, Ted Simmons, and whoever will represent the late Marvin Miller (it’s complicated) to receive their plaques and give their speeches via an indoor event that will adhere to all of the required New York State COVID-19 guidelines. Jeter and Walker were elected via the 2020 BBWAA ballot; Simmons and Miller were chosen via the Modern Baseball Era Committee.

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In a move that had become a foregone conclusion, on Monday Yadier Molina and the Cardinals finalized a one-year deal that returns the iconic catcher to the only team he’s ever known. The agreement caps an eventful 11-day stretch that included the return of longtime Cardinals righty Adam Wainwright, who was also a free agent, as well as the blockbuster trade that landed Nolan Arenado. While Molina’s new deal doesn’t ensure that he’ll end his career in St. Louis, it’s clear that the 38-year-old backstop is eying the finish line.

Drafted out of a Puerto Rico high school by the Cardinals in the fourth round in 2000, Molina had never tested free agency before thanks to a trio of multiyear extensions, the latest of which was a three-year, $60 million deal signed in April 2017. His new contract thus represents a significant pay cut, as he’ll get $9 million for the 2021 season, with no additional incentives or options. Then again, with 1,989 games caught so far — a total that’s sixth on the all-time list — he’s not the player he once was.

Molina hit a thin .262/.303/.359 with four homers in 156 PA in 2020, and walked a career low 3.8% of the time. His on-base percentage was his lowest mark since 2006, and both his slugging percentage and his 82 wRC+ were his lowest since 2015. His 84.7 mph average exit velocity was his lowest of the Statcast era; that figure placed him the fourth percentile overall, as did his 25.4% hard-hit rate. You’ll be shocked to learn — unless you’ve been following more than a decade’s worth of jokes on my Twitter account about the glacial movement of Molina and his older brothers José and Bengie — that his sprint speed finally reached the first percentile after years of… slow decline. Read the rest of this entry »

This year’s Hall of Fame election shutout halted a remarkable run: seven consecutive years of multiple candidates being elected, and 22 candidates over that span, both of which were modern voting era records. Even with this year’s shutout, and the possibility of another one next year — reactions to the specific candidates closest to election, it would appear, rather than to the process as a whole — it’s undeniable that the dynamics of Hall elections have changed.

Consider this: From 1966 to 2005, only three candidates recovered from debuts below 25% to reach 75%, even with 15 years of eligibility: Duke Snider (17.0% in 1970, elected in ’81), Don Drysdale (21.0% in 1975, elected in ’84) and Billy Williams (23.4% in 1982, elected in ’87). Since then, we’ve seen five players elected despite such slow starts, including three from 2017-20. From the 15-year eligibility period came Bruce Sutter (23.9% in 1994, elected in 2006), and Bert Blyleven (17.5% in ’98, elected in 2011), and then once the Hall unilaterally decided to cut eligibility from 15 years to 10 — less to clean up the ballots than to try moving the intractable debate over PED-related candidates out of the spotlight — Tim Raines (24.3% in 2008, elected in ’17), Mike Mussina (20.3% in 2014, elected in ’19), and Larry Walker (20.3% in 2011, elected in ’20).

This year, Gary Sheffield (11.7% in 2015), Billy Wagner (10.5% in ’16), and Todd Helton (16.2% in ’19) all crossed the 40% threshold, the point where the odds of eventual election really start to tilt in a candidate’s favor, and Scott Rolen (10.2% in ’18) topped 50%, the point at which eventual election becomes a near-certainty. If you’ve been reading my coverage for any length of time, you know my line about Gil Hodges being the only exception from the latter group besides the current candidates on the ballot, but consider what the data tells us about landing in the 40-49% range even once. Out of the 40 candidates who have done so since 1966 (the year voters returned to the annual balloting) and are no longer on the ballot, 20 were elected by the writers and another 14 by small committees.

In other words, it’s not unreasonable to think about the aforementioned players finding spots in Cooperstown sometime in the next five years, which is a lot more fun to consider than another year of quarreling over the quartet of polarizing players — Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Curt Schilling, and Omar Vizquel — whose character issues became the focus of the past election cycle.

In any event, it’s time to break out my crystal ball for my eighth-annual five-year election outlook, an exercise that requires some amount of imagination and speculation. While it’s grounded in my research into the candidates and the history and mechanics of the voting, the changes to the process that have occurred over those eight years raise the question of how valuable that history is from a prognostication standpoint. Revising this annually is a necessity because every incorrect assumption has a ripple effect; the presence of a high-share holdover means less space for and less attention paid to the midballot guys. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2021 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

The surge via which the Baseball Writers Association of America elected a record 22 Hall of Fame candidates over a seven-year span is over, as the voters pitched a shutout on Tuesday, their second in the past decade, fourth since the return to annual balloting in 1966, and ninth since the Hall’s inception in 1936. Collectively the 401 voters who participated showed enough ambivalence towards the top four returning candidates — Curt Schilling, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Omar Vizquel, all of whom have non-performance-related marks against them that were increasingly aired during the cycle — to keep them on the outside looking in, and that ambivalence spilled over to the other 21 candidates on the slate. The 5.87 votes per ballot was the lowest average since 2012, and the 14 blank ballots sent in was a record.

There’s more than just the top-line results to chew on, however, so as promised, here’s my candidate-by-candidate breakdown of the entire slate. Read the rest of this entry »