While the end of the ownership lockout looks increasingly far away after the owners’ latest proposal to the players underwhelmed, at some point, major league baseball will return. And when it does, there’s a lot of unfinished business remaining before actual games can be played; at this point, 56% of the positive projected player WAR in 2022 is still available on the free agent market. One prominent name in that group is outfielder Seiya Suzuki. When teams can talk to and sign free agents again, the four-time Nippon Professional Baseball All-Star is expected to draw heavy interest and provide an exciting alternative to the other top outfielders remaining on the market, such as Michael Conforto and Nick Castellanos.

The Hiroshima Toyo Carp may have struggled to get out of the .500 range in recent years, but Suzuki has provided plenty of highlights and one can easily understand why a player like him would intrigue teams in the other hemisphere. Last season, his 38 home runs lapped the rest of his team (Ryosuke Kikuchi was next with 16 dingers), while his 1.073 OPS bested all of his teammates by more than 200 points; that last number also led NPB by a significant margin. Suzuki will play most of the 2022 season as a 27-year-old. Even if he’s not necessarily a significant improvement on Conforto or Castellanos, Conforto’s 2021 dimmed his profile somewhat and Castellanos is a few years older. Read the rest of this entry »

The International Players tab on The Board has once again enjoyed a sweeping update, the second such update since the pandemic shifted the international signing calendar back about six months. Rankings and reports for the current class of amateur players set to sign in January 2022 (though that date could be delayed due to the lockout) have been expanded on The Board with help from Kevin Goldstein, while updates and additions to the notable pro players in other markets have been completed with help from Tess Taruskin and Brendan Gawlowski.

CBA/COVID Complications

There are a few factors that could potentially complicate the upcoming signing period. Remember that fallout from the pandemic has already pushed this signing period back six months. When most of the international amateur players on The Board agreed to their deals with teams, they assumed that they’d have put pen to paper by now and perhaps have spent the fall in Florida or Arizona for instructional league. Instead, they haven’t yet signed, and now a lockout may further delay or complicate their coronation. Read the rest of this entry »

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 »

As many readers have likely deduced from some of the early offseason transactions and the flurry of cuts made to scouting, player development, and other parts of baseball ops, owners are tightening their belts after a gate-less season and the repercussions are diffusing across the industry. If these early moves — like Brad Hand’s $10 million option being declined, and no team picking him up on waivers — are indications of how teams are going to behave this offseason, then this will, among other things, modulate some of the already-changing, pre-COVID shifts in the thinking surrounding payroll allocation and roster construction, which was already cutting deeper into the bottom of rosters.

I’d like to specifically talk about how I think the COVID-19 financial ripples will impact the way teams approach non-tendering players this offseason. It’s logical to assume that teams will be apt to non-tender players more often this year than ever before because of financial fallout from the pandemic, but based on recent trends, the game was perhaps likely to see a record number of non-tenders anyway. Here are the past 12 years of league-wide non-tender totals:

Read the rest of this entry »

Brandon Mann has had a fascinating career. Drafted out of a Seattle-area high school by the Tampa Bay Devil Rays in 2002, the now-36-year-old southpaw has played for six major league organizations, and he’s had multiple stints in both independent ball and NPB. His big-league experience consists of seven games with the Texas Rangers in 2018. With the Chiba Lotte Marines last year, Mann rejoined the Rangers this past offseason, only to be released on June 1.

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David Laurila: You’ve been in pro ball for nearly two decades, with almost none of that time spent in the majors. Why have you kept at it?

Brandon Mann: “I’ve asked myself that question a lot. Pretty much every year I go into the offseason thinking, ‘Man, this might have been my last one.’ But I’ve always had that desire. I know that I can pitch in the big leagues, so I’ve just never felt ready to walk away. Every time I’ve been released has kind of built up the ‘I’ve got to prove somebody wrong’ mentality that I have.

“Over the years I kept training harder and harder, and as I got older I actually started throwing harder. Meeting Driveline, and a lot of the right people, has been a big part of that. But it’s a great question, because I’ve contemplated it many, many times.”

Laurila: How much money have you made in baseball? Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball in Korea and Taiwan is in full swing — my apologies for the pun — and a third major professional league is set to join them on Friday when NPB (Nippon Professional Baseball) starts up its delayed 2020 season. The novel coronavirus has shown that it has little care for the vagaries of baseball scheduling, so as with other leagues, NPB will naturally play a shortened slate.

Unlike a certain other league – it would be far too gauche of me to identify it by name – NPB is trying to fit as much baseball into the summer as it can. By virtue of being able to start in June, each team is scheduled to play 125 games, with the main change being the suspension of interleague play. (Normally, each team plays three home games against three teams in the opposite league, and three road games against the remaining cross-league competition.)

So with Japanese baseballing imminent, it’s time to run the ZiPS projections for the league, as I did last month with the Korean Baseball Organization (KBO). With a league closer to MLB in quality, slightly better data, and more personal experience working with said data, I’m more confident about ZiPS’ NPB projections than the KBO ones.

Without interleague play, both leagues will have .500 records, helpful for the Central League, which has lost the interleague battle against the Pacific League 14 times in 15 seasons. Ties aren’t something ZiPS normally has to account for, but after doing research on the topic, I’ve found they’re even more random than one-run wins in MLB (as we all would have expected). On to the projections!

Read the rest of this entry »

Daniel Moskos was drafted fourth-overall by the Pittsburgh Pirates in 2007. It was a dream come true for the Clemson University product, who went into that June day not knowing what to expect. Some teams viewed him as a starter, others saw him as a reliever, and he hadn’t been at his best in the ACC tournament. The uncertainty led to, in his own words, “a lot of stressful emotions.”

He thought his most-likely destination was Colorado. The Rockies (who ended up taking Casey Weathers) had the eighth pick and were reportedly looking for a close-to-ready college reliever who could conceivably contribute down the stretch. The Pirates more or less came out of the blue. While they’d shown interest, Moskos hadn’t receive a phone call prior to the pick being announced, nor had his advisor/agent.

Moskos isn’t in denial of what Pittsburgh probably had in mind.

“Given the way things played out, I have to assume they didn’t see me as someone would cause a financial concern,” said Moskos. “That’s something that steered their draft around that time: they looked more in the bargain-hunting bin than they did at the highest-profile guys. Whatever fault you want to put to that, they didn’t see me a signability issue.”

Moskos, whom Baseball America had projected to go eighth-overall, inked a $2.475M contract and set forth on a professional career that went anything but smoothly. Hampered by injuries and an inconsistent breaking ball, he ended up playing just one big-league season. In 2011, the southpaw came out of the Pirates bullpen 31 times and logged a 2.96 ERA over 24-and-a-third innings. Then his elbow started barking. Read the rest of this entry »

The NPB season is currently slated to start on June 19th, with hopes of playing a 120-game schedule followed by a condensed playoff docket. The 120 isn’t arbitrary. Per the league’s bylaws, that’s the number required for a season to be considered official. In a normal year, each NPB team plays 143 games.

The MLB season? That remains an unanswered question. It is also an angst-inducing question. As everyone reading this knows all too well, there may not even be a season.

Frank Herrmann knows baseball on both sides of the planet.The Harvard-educated hurler is heading into his fourth NPB season after playing professionally stateside from 2006-2016. As you might expect, he’s monitoring not only what’s happening in Japan, but also what’s happening back home.

“The schedule alignment here is essentially the opposite of what is being proposed by MLB clubs, who want fewer regular season games with longer playoffs,” Herrmann told me via email from Chiba, Japan. “Like most things, the motivation in both cases is money. NPB doesn’t have the lucrative TV deals that MLB does. Japanese teams rely heavily on ticket sales, merchandise, and concessions to generate income and offset salaries. There have been discussions to incrementally allow fans into games starting as soon as July 10. More regular season home gates for each team, stretching into mid-November, affords teams the best chance to cover losses.”

Salary structures and legal language weigh heavily into that equation. As Herrmann pointed out, high-end salaries in Japan are “more in the $7-8 million a year range, as opposed to the $30Ms in MLB.” Moreover, NPB contracts differ from those in MLB in that they “lack a specific clause for national emergencies, therefore players have been receiving their full salaries since February.” Herrmann expects NPB will add such a clause once the season is completed. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last week or so, several players who had been playing pro ball in Korea or Japan (some originally from those countries, others former big leaguers kicking back to the States) have signed contracts with major league clubs. I had notes on several of them in our Top 50 Free Agents post, but wanted to talk about them at greater length now that we know their employers and the details of their contracts.

LF Yoshitomo Tsutsugo, Tampa Bay Rays
(Two years, $12 million, $2.4 million posting fee)

Tsutsugo’s deal came in a bit beneath what Kiley predicted on the Top 50 Free Agents post (Kiley had two years at $8 million per), where we ranked him No. 42 in the class, but multiple public reports have confirmed that Tsutsugo had more lucrative offers from other teams and chose to sign with Tampa Bay because of comfort with the org.

In addition to regular DH duty, Tsutsugo seems like an obvious platoon partner for Hunter Renfroe in one of the two corner outfield spots. The Rays have indicated he’ll see some time at third and first base, positions he hasn’t played regularly since 2014, and the notes I have from pro/international scouts and executives indicate he’s not athletically capable of playing there, though there’s no harm in seeing whether or not that’s true during spring training. Yandy Díaz isn’t good at the hot corner (he used to be, but he’s just too big and stiff now), but still played third situationally, so perhaps Tsutsugo can be hidden there, even if it’s for a few innings at a time. Read the rest of this entry »