The Texas Rangers brought a promising young hitter on board when they took Justin Foscue with the 14th-overall pick of last summer’s draft. A 21-year-old second baseman, Foscue put up a .958 OPS in his sophomore season at Mississippi State University, and he followed that up by slashing 321/.464/.509 in last year’s truncated collegiate campaign. Moreover, he displayed exemplary plate discipline and bat-to-ball skills. Foscue had 69 plate appearances with the Bulldogs in 2020, and drew 15 walks while striking out just three times.

What kind of hitter does the Huntsville, Alabama native view himself as, and how might that change as he advances through the professional ranks? Foscue addressed those questions, and much more, over the phone earlier this week.

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David Laurila: How would you describe your hitting approach?

Justin Foscue: “That goes into what your strengths are as a hitter. For the past two years — my sophomore and junior years — I was really keyed in on advantage counts. On 1-0, 2-0, 3-1, I was sitting on a middle, middle-in, fastball, and if it was there I was trying to hit it out of the ballpark. If it wasn’t there, I wasn’t swinging. In those advantage counts, you’ve still got more pitches to play with.

“As a hitter, you have to be very disciplined with your approach, because if you don’t stick to it, you’re not going to be as successful as you could be. I kind of just try to hit mistakes. I’m also sitting fastball, because when guys are throwing 94 to 98 [mph], you’ve got to be keyed in on that or you’re going to miss it. And if he hangs a breaking ball, you have to be ready for that, too. One reason I’ve been so successful is that I haven’t missed too many pitches that I should be hitting.”

Laurila: What about when you’re not in an advantage count? Read the rest of this entry »

Mickey Tettleton was largely underrated throughout a career that spanned from 1984 to ’97. A switch-hitting catcher who blossomed after finally getting an opportunity to play full time at age 28 — this after being released by the Oakland A’s — he quietly excelled thanks to plus power and a keen eye. Playing with the Baltimore Orioles, Detroit Tigers, and Texas Rangers, Tettleton had baseball’s third-highest walk rate (18.2%) from 1989 to ’95, a seven-year stretch where he slashed .245/.384/.474 with 185 home runs and a 133 wRC+.

There are those who took notice. In The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, published in 2001, Tettleton is ranked as the 37th-best catcher of all-time. A low batting average and high strikeout numbers may have sullied his reputation with casual fans, but those who truly understand the game know better. Tettleton — a proud son of Oklahoma — provided a lot of value to his teams.

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David Laurila: You’re from Oklahoma. Were you a big baseball fan growing up?

Mickey Tettleton: “I was. Of course, it was different back then. The one game a week was on Saturday, and you were glued to your TV to watch it. I was a huge sports fan in general — I played football and basketball growing up — and was always a big-time baseball fan.”

Laurila: Did you follow a specific team?

Tettleton: “Cincinnati was obviously very big, and their main rival was the Dodgers, who had Bill Russell at shortstop. He’s from Oklahoma. But with the Johnny Bench connection, Cincinnati was really big around here.”

Laurila: I’ve read that you were named after Mickey Mantle. Read the rest of this entry »

One of the “Best of 2020” articles that ran here at FanGraphs over the holidays featured an under-the-radar right-hander with a unique backstory and a knee-buckling bender. Titled Rangers Prospect Cole Uvila is a Driveline-Developed Spin Monster, the story chronicled, among things, a curveball that had spun upwards of 3,300 RPM in Arizona Fall League action. Honed with the help of technology, the pitch profiled as his ticket to Texas.

He’s no longer throwing it. Instead, Uvila is endeavoring to channel former Cleveland Indians closer Cody Allen.

“In my head, I was going to throw it until my career was over,” Uvila said of his old curveball. “Then the pandemic happened. There was a lot of time to look in the mirror, and you just don’t see big-league relievers throwing 76-mph curveballs. It’s not really a thing.”

Uvila started talking with people in the Rangers organization, as well as to the instructors he’s worked with at Driveline over the years. Their messages were essentially the same: With breaking balls — much like fastballs — velocity is king.

“Driveline R&D has this metric called Stuff Plus, which essentially takes every breaking ball over the last five years and gives it a number,” Uvila told me earlier this week. “It’s kind of like wRC+, where 100 is average. I think the highest one was a dude with the Cubs, named [Dillon] Maples, and his graded out at something like 240. So there’s this range of pitches, and looking at the list, I saw this theme of curveballs at 84-85 [mph]. I said, ‘Man, I need to throw this pitch harder.’” Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for nine years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Texas Rangers.

Batters

One initial note: ZiPS sees Globe Life Field as a fairly neutral park that leans just a skosh to the pitching side. We still have very little data about how the park plays and basing park factors on expectations tends to be a rather poor prognosticating urge.

The good news for Rangers fans is that, across the board and more than any other team in baseball, ZiPS sees Texas’ lineup in a more optimistic light than Steamer does. The bad news, of course, is that this represents the sunnier take on 2021. There’s no getting around the fact that this team will be in a fierce competition to grab the first pick in the 2022 amateur draft.

ZiPS anticipates a much better season in store for Joey Gallo, though one that just makes him a credible middle-of-the-order slugger rather than meeting any remaining star potential. It hurts to say it, but Gallo’s no longer all that young and it’s getting a little late in the day to talk about his future stardom. He’s put a lot of work into his plate discipline — he’s much better at laying off bad pitches than he was in his early years — but the fact remains that contact is a problem, and it’s unlikely to change at this point. That’s always going to put a hard ceiling on his batting average when he’s not having immense BABIP luck. Stardom would practically require him to smack 50 homers a year. A 40-homer Gallo pushes a team towards a pennant, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see him doing that… in another uniform before next year’s ZiPS projections.

Nick Solak’s 2020 was a nearly-unmitigated disaster. He took a step backward in nearly every aspect of the game and as a super-sub, played a whole bunch of positions equally poorly, ending up with a profile that was less like Tony the Tiger (Phillips) and more like Tony the Tiger (cereal spokestiger). Now, his year obviously wasn’t grrrreeeat, but there were a lot of reasons to like him before last season. And really, the Rangers are probably going to need until May or June 2022 to win 90 games, so it’s not like they have any better choices than giving Solak another go. 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 »

Taijuan Walker is coming off a strong 2020 season that followed a pair of lost seasons. The 28-year-old free agent fashioned a 2.70 ERA in 11 starts — five with the Seattle Mariners and six with the Toronto Blue Jays — after tossing just 14 innings in 2018-2019. We’ll hear from Walker on his return from Tommy John surgery and shoulder woes, as well as his pitch-design efforts, in the near future. Today we’ll touch on some of his career highlights. Earlier this week I asked the 2010 first-rounder for a ranking of his top performances to date.

“Numbers-wise it wasn’t my best, but I pitched a must-win game in Toronto,” recalled Walker, who was with the Mariners at the time. “This was [September 24, 2014] and while we didn’t end up winning, I feel like my fastball was the best it’s ever been. My breaking ball and my changeup probably were as well. We ended up losing 1-0, but stuff-wise I felt it was my best game.”

Out-dueled by Mark Buehrle in a contest that flew by in a crisp 1:59, Walker went eight innings and allowed four hits, one walk, and the game’s lone run. Six Blue Jays went down by way of the K.

Walker went on to cite his “two best games numbers-wise,” each of which was an 11-strikeout effort in a Mariners win. On July 31, 2015, he allowed just one hit — a solo home run by Minnesota’s Miguel Sanó — and a single free pass. On September 13, 2016, he threw a three-hit, no-walk, shutout against the Angels. 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. Originally written for the 2013 election at SI.com, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. 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.

Like Mark McGwire, his rival in the great 1998 home run chase, Sammy Sosa was hailed at the height of his popularity as a hero, a Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year, and a great international ambassador for baseball. In the same year that McGwire set a new single-season record with 70 home runs, Sosa hit 66 and took home the National League MVP award. Three times in a four-year stretch from 1998 to 2001, he surpassed Roger Maris‘ previously unbreakable mark of 61 homers, and he hit more homers over a five- or 10-year stretch than any player in history. In 2007, he became just the fifth player to reach the 600-home-run milestone after Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, and Barry Bonds.

As with McGwire, the meaning of Sosa’s home runs changed once baseball began to crack down on performance-enhancing drugs, with suspicions mounting about his achievements. He was called to testify before Congress in 2005, along with McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro, and several other players. Sosa denied using PEDs, but while he never tested positive once Major League Baseball began instituting penalties for usage, The New York Times reported in 2009 that he was one of more than 100 players who had done so during the supposedly anonymous survey tests six years prior. Read the rest of this entry »

MLB managers not named Tony La Russa did Zoom calls with members of the media this past week. Today’s column features highlights from several of those sessions.

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Two of the topics Dusty Baker addressed on Monday were job-related. One was the position he currently holds with the Houston Astros, the other was a role that’s never appealed to him. The latter is anathema to baseball’s Most Interesting Man in the World because it wouldn’t allow him to kick back and ruminate on life.

“One reason I never wanted to be a general manager is because you don’t really have an offseason,” Baker told a cohort of reporters. “He works all year, and doesn’t have much time off, but for the general manager, and front office people, this is the most busy time of the year.”

Baker is 71 years old with 23 managerial seasons under his belt. How much longer he’ll sit in that chair is a question he can’t answer, but he’s been around long enough to know that life can come at you from different directions. Much for that reason, he’s simply going with the flow.

“Depends on how I feel [and it] depends on how the team feels about me,” said Baker, who was hired by Houston prior to last season. “Changes are going to come about in life. I tend to think in terms of Walter Alston and Tom Lasorda. Those guys signed a series of 20 one-year contracts. I’m not lame anymore. You know what I mean? A lame duck can’t fly. But my wings aren’t clipped no more. I can always fly.” Read the rest of this entry »

Position: Database Engineer I, Baseball Systems

Job Description:
The database engineer will be responsible for maintaining and expanding the Rangers’ baseball operations data warehouse and data pipelines. The role is responsible for importing and integrating data from external providers, and interacting with the R&D department to implement models and build reports.

Responsibilities:

• Database design
• Export, Transform and Load multiple data feeds (ETL)
• Assist in creating and monitoring data quality initiatives, resolving issues, and communicating to stakeholders
• Writing and updating SSRS reports
• Collaboration with application/web developer on app development
• Basic support for end users of reports and applications
• Update and maintain documentation for database and applications

Read the rest of this entry »

Players like David Dahl aren’t supposed to be free agents. He’s a 26-year-old outfielder with an above-average career wRC+, and he’s played just four seasons. He was also a first-round pick with the prospect hype to back that up all the way until his debut. Even though his most recent season was very bad — very, very bad — most years, a team wouldn’t even consider cutting a player like him loose with three years of team control still ahead.

This isn’t most years, though. The Rockies didn’t think the chance that Dahl would bounce back would be worth the meager salary he’d garner in his first arbitration year and elected not to tender him a contract for 2021. It took just nine days for another team to pick up the slack, as late Friday night, the Rangers reportedly signed Dahl to a one-year deal worth $3 million. Because he has only three years and change of service time in the big leagues, you can think of this as a one-year contract with two team options; Texas can keep him through 2023 if it wishes, so long as it picks up his arbitration-year salaries along the way.

That fact boosted the appeal of one of the more head-scratching free-agency cases on the market. Dahl’s 2020 was bad enough — he had a wRC+ of 10 and -0.8 WAR in just 24 games — that a contending team looking to plug a hole in its outfield couldn’t do so by signing him. Any team with playoff aspirations would likely want Dahl to take on a bench role, which would limit him in re-establishing his value. Better would be steady playing time with a rebuilding team, but with so many of those organizations searching for ways to minimize payroll the same way Colorado is, it was unclear who might be willing to pay up.

Enter the Rangers, a fittingly confusing team for a confusing free agent. Texas has been a losing team for four years now, and its road back to contention has always felt rather narrow. Despite this, the Rangers embarked on what Dan Szymborski described as a skinny rebuild — refusing to tear the whole thing down and instead attempting to add modest prospect talent without trading stars while simultaneously spending money on win-now free agents. Some teams, like Milwaukee, have assembled playoff rosters while undergoing similar retoolings. In the case of Texas, the result has been a rotation frighteningly short on depth, a lineup that collectively produced one of the worst seasons ever, and a farm system that doesn’t boast a single prospect in the 55 Future Value tier or higher. All the while, the division around the Rangers is only getting tougher.

Despite the declining product on the field, the last few weeks have seen what looks like a continuation of that strategy. Texas made the obvious sell it needed to, trading Lance Lynn to the White Sox for Dane Dunning and Avery Weems. Then it turned around and traded a Top-100 prospect to Tampa Bay for Nate Lowe. These moves seemingly butt heads in raw buy/sell math, but both fit into a more broad strategy Levi Weaver outlined at The Athletic: Acquire players who are MLB-ready but young enough to still be helping the club when the team’s next crop of prospects mature.

Dahl fits that mold. Despite his years of big league experience, he’s a young player still waiting for his opportunity to break out. It certainly didn’t happen in 2020. He hit .183/.222/.247 with a walk rate on the wrong side of 5% and a strikeout rate approaching 30%. His exit velocity was down nearly three miles per hour from the previous two seasons. He was a poor defender, and he missed time with injuries, just as he has every year of his career. There were just six players in baseball who hurt their teams more than Dahl in 2020, and I’m surprised the number is that high.

If you’re a Rangers fan, you’re probably wondering what the good news is. Fortunately, there are plenty of caveats. This was only a 24-game span we’re talking about, a sample that would take us into the third week of April in a normal regular season. If someone pronounced a player’s career dead after the first 24 games of the year, you would politely shush that person, and maybe urge them to take a walk and get some air.

Dahl’s 24 most recent games also bear little resemblance to his career to that point. He entered 2020 with a career line of .297/.346/.521, a 111 wRC+ and 3.7 WAR. He was a power/speed combo threat who had a knack for posting high batting averages in both the majors and the minors, and he was hardly a liability on defense. In fact, despite center field in Coors being one of the game’s most difficult assignments, both UZR and Statcast’s OAA metric actually prefer Dahl there than in the corners. Prior to 2020, he had done a pretty good job of playing like someone once selected 10th overall in the draft.

But the issues that felled Dahl in 2020 were nothing new. He has always whiffed a lot, and he’s below-average at taking walks. He’s also never stood out much when it comes to Statcast’s exit velocity and hard-hit rate metrics, placing in the 36th percentile in the former and the 51st percentile in the latter in 2019, and those were both career-bests. That isn’t to say Dahl was getting lucky before last year, though his expected numbers do tend to lag behind his actual totals. He just hasn’t shown particularly loud tools to this point.

There’s also the issue of Dahl’s health. He was called up way back in July 2016, opened his big league career with a 17-game hitting streak, and finished the year with a 113 wRC+ in 63 games. Before he could build on that hype the following year, he was diagnosed with a stress reaction in his rib, which caused him to miss the entire 2017 season save for 19 minor league games on rehab assignments. He wouldn’t rejoin the Rockies until late April 2018 and stuck around for only a little more than a month before suffering a broken foot and hitting the shelf for the rest of the year. He managed to log 100 games in 2019 before an ankle sprain once again ended his season prematurely in the first week of August. Following the 2020 season, Dahl elected to receive shoulder surgery, but said he should still be ready for spring training.

It’s difficult to imagine how Dahl’s performance wouldn’t be impacted by such a constant barrage of injuries over these past few years, which is why the Rangers aren’t investing in him because of anything they saw in his horrific 2020 season, or in any of the more successful seasons that preceded it. They’re doing it because they believe none of us have seen what he truly has to offer, and they probably aren’t wrong. Here’s hoping 2021 turns out to be a year of good health — for Dahl, and for all of us.