Editor’s Note: Sources have indicated to FanGraphs that Fernando Romero has been awarded an additional option year. This post originally stated that Romero was out of options, and has been updated.

The need to define a scope, to create a boundary of coverage, creates a hole in prospect writing. Most public-facing prospect publications, FanGraphs included, analyze and rank players who are still rookie-eligible because, contrary to what you might think after seeing the length of my lists, you just have to stop somewhere, if only for the sake of your own sanity. Because of this, every year there are players who fall through the cracks between the boundaries of prospect coverage and big league analysis. These are often players who came up, played enough to exhaust their rookie eligibility, and then got hurt and had a long-term rehab in the minors. Some are victims of the clogged major league rosters ahead of them; others are weird corner cases like Adalberto Mondesi.

Regardless, prospect writers are arguably in the best position to comment on these players because they fall under the minor league umbrella, but simply adding them to prospect lists would open a can of worms — what do you do with other young big leaguers? So every year, I examine a subset of the players caught in this limbo to give curious readers an update on where once-heralded prospects stand now. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the weekend, the presumptive second-best team in the AL East sent a key contributor from a recent playoff run to sunny California. In exchange, they received a package including a major league outfielder and a minor league catcher. That’s right — Emilio Pagán is headed to San Diego. As Josh Tolentino first reported, the Rays traded Pagán to the Padres in exchange for Manuel Margot and catching prospect Logan Driscoll.

At first glance, this trade seems pretty straightforward. Pagán was the most valuable pitcher in one of the best bullpens in baseball last year. His fastball/slider combination overwhelmed batters to the tune of a 36% strikeout rate and only a 4.9% walk rate. With Nick Anderson, Diego Castillo, José Alvarado, and a host of others ready to pick up the slack, however, he was surplus, and as noted last week, the Rays lacked a right-handed platoon partner to play center alongside Kevin Kiermaier.

Enter Margot, or exit Margot from San Diego’s perspective. Over three seasons as the team’s regular center fielder, he provided spectacular defense and forgettable offense. Per Statcast’s OAA, he’s been the eighth-best defensive outfielder in baseball since the beginning of 2017. His batting line of .248/.301/.394, on the other hand, works out to an 85 wRC+, a cool 207th among qualifying players. The whole package came out to 4.1 WAR over those years, and while that’s a valuable contribution, it’s a fourth outfielder’s line overall, even with the shiny defense. Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday night, the Los Angeles Dodgers traded for Mookie Betts and David Price. Assuming the parties involved can hammer out the details, the deal obviously makes the Dodgers a better baseball team, both in the here and now and, to a lesser extent, in the future. For Los Angeles fans tired of October flameouts and agonizing World Series defeats, this is fantastic news: Betts alone is something like a five-win upgrade and he’ll make a long lineup that much more daunting come the playoffs.

As far as simply reaching the playoffs goes though, Betts barely moves the needle. Of all the teams in baseball, it’s not like this one “needed” to get better, at least when it comes to maximizing its playoff chances. Dan Szymborski took great pains to express that the ZiPS projections he’s cooking up are still under-baked and not yet fit for public consumption; that caveat aside, he has the Dodgers projected to win the NL West by 12 games without Betts. With him in the fold, that jumps to 16. Los Angeles has already won the division seven times in a row; with a loaded roster, and a deep farm system, their streak wasn’t in any jeopardy this year and won’t be for some time yet.

Whether or not the trade looks redundant in a competitive sense for the Dodgers, it must feel like just another body blow in Phoenix, Denver, and San Diego. Through the realities of geography, vagaries of expansion, and a league-wide desire to limit travel costs, four other franchises are stuck perpetually competing with the West Coast’s foremost superpower. The Giants have the resources to remain competitive in spite of their southern rival, but the other three teams have looked comparatively hapless. The Giants and Dodgers have captured all but one division title since 2007. In that period, the Padres, Diamondbacks, and Rockies have only reached the playoffs five times combined, never escaping the NLDS. For the little three, the Dodgers are an immovable barrier blocking any real chance of sustained success. That’s a problem in a league that emphasizes postseason glory first and foremost, particularly in a sport that is primarily consumed locally. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about probability, the baseball significance of a Super Bowl comeback, and whether win expectancy stats are more useful for fans during or after a game (featuring a cameo from Meg Rowley, who sort of settles the debate). Then Ben and Sam preview the 2020 Padres with MLB.com’s AJ Cassavell (23:47), and the 2020 White Sox (58:32) with The Athletic’s James Fegan.

Audio intro: Tall Tall Trees, "Expectations"
Audio interstitial 1: The Cranberries, "Chocolate Brown"
Audio interstitial 2: Bombadil, "Goodwill Socks"
Audio outro: Super Furry Animals, "White Socks/Flip Flops"

Link to FiveThirtyEight tweet
Link to ESPN’s Super Bowl win probability graph
Link to Ben Clemens on Tatis’ defense
Link to James on the evolution of White Sox player development
Link to BP roundtable on Madrigal
Link to order The MVP Machine

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By now, you know the drill. Earlier this week, I highlighted contending teams with weak points in the infield and on the mound. We’ve still got eight teams to cover today, so there’s no time to waste. Let’s dive in!

St. Louis Cardinals

The Hole: Two years ago, the Cardinals were so overloaded with outfielders that they traded Tommy Pham to open up playing time for promising youngsters Harrison Bader and Tyler O’Neill. This offseason, they had enough of an outfield surplus that they traded Randy Arozarena and José Martínez, but the top-end talent the team hoped for still hasn’t materialized.

That’s not to say that the Cardinals don’t have outfielders. O’Neill and Bader are still around. Dexter Fowler is solidly in his decline phase, but will likely take up a season’s worth of plate appearances. Tommy Edman will see some time in the outfield in addition to sharing third base with Matt Carpenter.

But while they have bodies, they’re lacking in upside. Bader looks like a long-shot to ever recapture his 2018 offensive line, O’Neill’s 2019 was gruesome (35.1% strikeout rate), and Fowler is subsisting on walks at this point. They might field an entire outfield of sub-100 wRC+ batters, and only Bader can make up for that with his glove. Read the rest of this entry »

San Diego Padres right-hander Chris Paddack had a pretty good first major league season. He struck out 153 hitters in 140.2 innings and posted a 0.98 WHIP with a 3.33 ERA and a 3.95 FIP. Amazingly, he did it with basically two pitches: a four-seam fastball and a changeup. Paddack also has a curveball that he has often tinkered with, but its use never eclipsed 15% in any count. It mainly appeared as the first pitch of the at-bat or when he was ahead in the count. Despite being able to keep hitters under control with two options for most of last season, one of the multiple curveball variations Paddack resorted to works best, both statistically and as an ideal fit with his four-seam and changeup.

Here’s a visual summary of Paddack’s three pitches in an isolated overlay example, which accounts for the typical location of each pitch last season:

Paddack has a well-designed, pure backspinning four-seam fastball with a 12:50 spin direction and nearly 100% spin efficiency. In terms of whiffs, the pitch was best when Paddack kept it high in the zone. When it came to contact, the four-seamer didn’t really have an advantageous location, with the exception of keeping the pitch out of the middle of the strike zone. Paddack held hitters to a .276 wOBA and demonstrated good control of the pitch as evidenced by his 0.18 BB/K-rate. Read the rest of this entry »

At times, Fernando Tatis Jr. is an absolutely incredible fielder. Try to imagine someone other than Tatis, Javier Báez, or Andrelton Simmons making this play:

The speed, presence of mind, and arm strength needed to turn that ball into an out are simply breathtaking.

If Tatis can do that, then why does every fielding metric dislike his defense? DRS rated him as two runs below average over 731.1 innings in the field last year, and it was the highest on him. UZR saw him 5.8 runs below average, and Statcast’s new infield OAA pegged him as 13 outs below average. What gives?

If you’re a suspicious type, your mind might immediately go to the fallibility of defensive metrics. After all, they’re far less precise than offensive statistics. They don’t always agree with each other, for one thing, and they take forever to stabilize. Whoever invented the saying “lies, damn lies, and statistics” clearly wasn’t up on modern baseball fielding, or they would have fit UZR and DRS in there somewhere. Read the rest of this entry »

Free agent left-hander Robbie Erlin threw 55.1 innings across 37 appearances in a mediocre 2019 campaign. He gave up a lot of hard contact (43.7%), posted a 5.37 ERA, and saw his walk rate balloon to almost three free passes per nine innings. Erlin’s WHIP also skyrocketed from 1.14 in 2018 to 1.57 last year.

We can’t ignore that some bad luck may have found him; his BABIP was .373, almost 60 points higher than his career norm. That, coupled with the big jump in walk rate (2.7% to 6.0%), put Erlin in a lot of bad situations. Although he did manage to post a 3.61 FIP, that doesn’t sound like a pitcher destined for an especially promising 2020 season, if he’s picked up at all. So what value can be drawn from Erlin?

Well, for starters, Erlin mixes his pitches really well. The ability to keep hitters on their toes is advantageous regardless of how good your stuff is. In Erlin’s case, his stuff needs to be good, and there are ways in which he can make that happen.

Let’s first take a glance at Erlin’s five-pitch arsenal: a two- and four-seamer, a slider that is sometimes mistaken for a cutter, a curveball, and a changeup: Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2020 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. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Batch five hundred thirty-seven — no, wait, it’s just batch five, the rest of that was my daughter’s drawing — of my completist series features a pair of hard-throwing relievers who took a long time to get a shot at the majors, and even longer to become closers. Not much went right for either of them as Mets, and by the time they crossed paths in Arizona, both had seen better days, but somewhere in the middle of all of that, they became All-Stars. We could quibble as to whether they should be on this ballot, but why not celebrate two guys who made the most of their relatively brief careers?

Heath Bell

It took Heath Bell until he was nearly 27 years old to reach the majors, and he turned 31 before he claimed the closer’s job. Big-bodied (6-foot-3 and as much as 275 pounds) and with a big personality, he radiated joy on his best days, showing his exuberance with his signature sprints to the mound, making three straight All-Star teams, converting 41 straight save opportunities at one point, and netting a big deal in free agency — not too bad for a guy who was a 69th-round draft pick by the Devil Rays. Read the rest of this entry »

In December, the free agent signings flowed like wine. You could hardly finish reading about one marquee free agent’s landing spot before another domino fell. Stephen Strasburg, Gerrit Cole, and Anthony Rendon signed on consecutive days, and Edwin Encarnación signed with the White Sox on literal Christmas. It was a hectic month, to say the least.

Of course, taking so many names off the board in December portends a slower January, and that was certainly the case this weekend. Take the Padres. In November, they signed Drew Pomeranz, the sabermetric darling of the offseason, whose relief work in 2019 makes him a potential bullpen ace. In December, they went wild with trades: they added Tommy Pham, Trent Grisham, Zach Davies, and Jurickson Profar to the team over three deals.

In January — well, January has barely started, but so far, they’ve moved down a rung on the urgency ladder. This Saturday, they signed Craig Stammen to a two year, $9 million dollar deal, with a club option for a third. Stammen has been a valuable part of the Padres bullpen over the past two seasons, and he’ll likely continue to appear in high leverage situations for the team, albeit now behind Pomeranz and Kirby Yates rather than just Yates. Read the rest of this entry »