The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2022 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.

Content warning: This piece contains details about alleged domestic and gun violence. The content may be difficult to read and emotionally upsetting.

The new millennium hasn’t exactly been a banner one for the stolen base. Between soaring home run rates and the influence of analytics on front offices, the tactic has gone out of style, and per-game rates have fallen. As one-run strategies go, teams seem content to wait for a player to knock a ball over a wall rather than manufacture a run. During the first decade of the 2000s, as home runs kept flying, Carl Crawford stood out for his electrifying speed and skill on the basepaths.

In the first eight full seasons of his 15-year career (2002-16), Crawford led the American League in stolen bases four times, finished second once and third twice, stealing at least 46 bases in each of those seasons. He topped an 80% success rate in the first five of those seasons, and led the league in triples three times as well. Crawford’s wheels — as well as his midrange power and strong defense — helped him make four All-Star teams and win a Gold Glove while starring for the Rays’ first two playoff teams.

Alas, Crawford hit free agency, signed a massive seven-year deal with the Red Sox, and almost immediately went into the decline phase of his career due to injuries. After totaling 35.6 WAR with Tampa Bay from 2002-10, he managed just 3.5 WAR over his final six seasons spent with Boston and the Dodgers while missing substantial time due to Tommy John surgery, plus wrist, finger, oblique, and hamstring woes. He was released by Los Angeles with a year and a half still to go on his contract, and never played again. 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 a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Tampa Bay Rays.

Batters

Which team in baseball has the best middle infield? I imagine most fans would likely say the Rangers (Corey Seager and Marcus Semien) or the Padres (Fernando Tatis Jr. and mostly Jake Cronenworth). The Rays are another possible answer, though. Wander Franco’s very quickly become a star, and Brandon Lowe is my pick for the most underrated second baseman in the game. I talked quite a lot about Franco’s outlook when he he signed his big ol’ contract extension, so I won’t rehash that here. Confusingly, Lowe wasn’t even one of the American League’s four Silver Slugger finalists at second base in 2021, as his .863 OPS apparently wasn’t up to the standards of DJ LeMahieu (.711 OPS, about half his games not at second). I would be surprised if the best middle infield came from a team other than these three. Read the rest of this entry »

The Rays and Marlins love making trades. They’ve now combined for four trades this year, though this one is the most consequential. The terms are simple: Miami gets Joey Wendle and Tampa Bay gets Kameron Misner. That’s it!

Normally at FanGraphs, we try to tell you why the trade might make sense for both sides, and which way we would lean if we had to choose a winner. If we’re feeling feisty, we might throw in a joke or two, perhaps a Dick Monfort burn if Dan Szymborski is in the driver’s seat. Today, though, the two of us had wildly different views of who won this trade. So without further ado, here are Brendan’s (Marlins) and Ben’s (Rays) thoughts on which side got the best of the other in this very Floridian trade.

Brendan’s Take

Ben probably isn’t the first analyst to pan a deal where Miami sought to improve the big league club, but I can’t find much recent precedent. That the Fighting Jeters beefed up at all seems sufficient cause for celebration. MLB is at its best when teams put their top product on the field, and the Marlins often fail to clear that low threshold. But between the Avisaíl García signing, the Sandy Alcantara extension, the Jacob Stallings trade, and now the Wendle deal, the Marlins have the swagger of… well, not a contender exactly, but at least an upright major league team. Read the rest of this entry »

Lots of money flowed ahead of this week’s unofficial lockout deadline, but not all of the moves involved swimming pools of cash. Among the many made were some low-key bullpen additions, usually by contenders, all of which arguably upgraded their respective bullpens. Let’s talk about some of the more interesting ones!

Michael Lorenzen to the Angels

Lorenzen signed a one-year, $6.75 million contract to head to Anaheim, a surprisingly juicy figure for a pitcher with an ERA well in excess of five for the Reds in 2021. As you may have guessed, his peripheral numbers were better. A FIP just over four isn’t going to evoke prime Craig Kimbrel, but it’s a good bit better than the rest of the disasters in Cincy’s bullpen. The drop in strikeout rate was scary, but ZiPS doesn’t think it’s real when looking at the Statcast data, estimating that you ought to have expected him to finish up with 12 more strikeouts than he actually racked up — an impressive number in only 29 innings. Among relievers, that was the second-largest negative deficit, behind only Keynan Middleton of the Mariners. Scouting can also pick up this sort of thing, which is likely one reason the Angels were so willing to drop this amount of money.

The other is that Lorenzen wants to explore being a two-way player more than he got to in recent years. The Angels are apparently happy to grant this wish, given they’re the home of arguably the best (simultaneous) two-way player ever in Shohei Ohtani.

RHP Michael Lorenzen not only wants a shot at being a starting pitcher in 2022, but also wants the opportunity to get regular at-bats as an outfielder. Wants to get on the Ohtani routine. The Rangers, Pirates, Cubs and Giants are all believed to have inquired.

— Joe Doyle (@JoeDoyleMiLB) November 28, 2021

Lorenzen’s .233/.282/.429 line doesn’t scream “spare outfielder,” but one has to remember that his at-bats have been widely scattered, hampering his offensive development. In addition, a healthy chunk of them came as a pinch-hitter, a role in which players hit considerably worse compared to games they start.
Read the rest of this entry »

After trading away Blake Snell and declining Charlie Morton’s club option last offseason, the Rays made a flurry of smaller moves to bolster their rotation depth, bringing in Michael Wacha, Rich Hill, and Chris Archer on one-year deals. But Archer ended up spending the majority of the season on the Injured List, Hill was traded away in July, and while Wacha pitched better than his 5.05 ERA might lead you to believe, it was still a 5.05 ERA. Those three combined for 48 appearances for Tampa Bay and just 1.9 WAR, and all three won’t be returning in 2022.

With Tyler Glasnow projected to be sidelined for the entire season after Tommy John surgery, the Rays’ rotation once again looked rather pyramid-shaped heading into this offseason: lots of depth and plenty of options in the middle, but thin at the top. Shane McClanahan, Drew Rasmussen, Ryan Yarbrough, Luis Patiño, and Shane Baz are lined up to take on the bulk of the starter innings in 2022, but while that group was solid last season, putting up a cumulative 5.9 WAR in 112 combined games, no one present has all that much major league experience.

To that young group, the Rays have added a veteran who can also address their need for a frontline starter, signing Corey Kluber to a one-year, $8 million contract on Sunday. The deal includes incentives based on games started that could push the total up to $13 million — a safeguard given his recent and long injury history. He missed the majority of the 2019 season in Cleveland after a line drive fractured his throwing arm and made just one start in Texas the year after, leaving his only appearance with a shoulder injury after a single inning. He signed a one-year deal with the Yankees in January and started the season looking good, making nine starts through April and May, but left his tenth with another shoulder injury that kept him off the mound for two months; he returned at the end of August and made six more starts down the stretch.
Read the rest of this entry »

How good was phenom Wander Franco’s rookie season in 2021? So good that it actually compelled the Tampa Bay Rays to spend money. Just before Turkey Day, the team and Franco came to an agreement on a massive deal that could reach 12 years and $223 million.

Shortstop Wander Franco and the Tampa Bay Rays are in agreement on a 12-year contract that guarantees him around $185 million, sources tell ESPN. The deal is worth a maximum of $223 million. It is done, pending small details. The 20-year-old is going to be a Ray for a long time.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) November 23, 2021

Since this is baseball, this isn’t one of those NFL deals in which someone lands a comma-laden top number but, when you read the finer details, it turns out that a huge chunk of that money is a roster bonus due in four years that will never be paid off. Eleven years and $182 million of Franco’s deal is guaranteed, with the bulk of the rest coming from a $25 million club option for 2033 and a little more in incentives that kick in for finishing the top five in the AL MVP voting starting in 2028.

This deal is the new all-time record for a player with less than a full year of service time; the previous no. 1 was Ronald Acuña Jr.‘s extension worth up to $100 million, an agreement that this one essentially laps. Fernando Tatis Jr.’s contract is a larger one at 14 years and $340 million, but he was also a player who had cleared two years of service time when he signed on the dotted line, giving him more financial leverage over the Padres.

Franco finished “only” third in AL Rookie of the Year voting, but this was largely due to the fact that voters give a heavy penalty to a great player with less playing time, something I have direct experience with. The winner, his teammate Randy Arozarena, bested him in WAR, 3.3 to 2.5, but he needed twice as many games to get that far above replacement level. There was little question Franco was ready, as he hit .313/.372/.583 in 40 games for Triple-A Durham. These weren’t flash Albuquerque or Las Vegas numbers either; ZiPS translated that performance as a .281/.328/.473 line, not all that different from the actual .288/.347/.463 line he put up for Tampa Bay.

In case it already wasn’t clear after years of him being the consensus best prospect in baseball, the ZiPS projection for Franco is also that of a young star.

Obviously, the potential exists for him to hit higher numbers in his peak seasons; bottom-line projections are 50th-percentile projections and will naturally be much less volatile than what actually happens. But when I ran the 2022 projections for all the likely subjects, thanks to Acuña’s ACL injury, the only player that ZiPS projects to accumulate more WAR than Franco over the rest of their respective careers is Juan Soto.

The big question out there: is the contract fair to both parties? After all, one can make the argument that Franco may have earned much more by simply playing his way through baseball’s salary process and hitting free agency after the 2027 season.

To that question, I’m in the “yes” camp. The Rays have a great deal of financial leverage with Franco two seasons away from his first arbitration year, assuming that he would achieve Super Two status after the 2023 season at two years, 104 days of service time. But by the same token, I don’t expect the Rays to pay him as if he were a free agent, either. What I personally like to see is a contract that reflects the risks that both parties take in a long-term deal without being grossly weighted in one direction or the other. Call it actuarial fetishism, but a contract like Ozzie Albies‘ seven-year, $35 million contract offends me as an analyst in a way that this deal does not.

I’m not sure why I haven’t built this into the standard ZiPS model (I probably will after this ZiPS season is over), but I constructed a small simulation for how much Franco could make going year-to-year and then signing a mega-deal relative to what he will actually get. In the 50th-percentile projection, with near-minimum salaries in 2022 and ’23, arbitration projections, and free-agent contract projections, ZiPS estimates $297 million over the next 12 years. This is well above the $223 million he can max out at, but that’s not the whole story, either. The upside isn’t tremendously high, with the 90th-percentile projection going up to $360 million. Franco could figure out how to pitch like Jacob deGrom this offseason, and he’ll still get relatively paltry sums of money for the next few years; arbitration awards don’t scale up linearly for superstars. And the downside is significant. His 10th-percentile result ends up with him making less than $20 million over his career, and in 35% of the simulations, he falls short of $182 million. By comparison, at the time of their signings, Acuña falls short of his guaranteed deal only 17% of the time, and Albies does worse only 9% of the time. Another natural comparison is when the Rays signed Evan Longoria a week into his major league career to a contract worth a guaranteed $17.5 million over six years; ZiPS only had him doing worse than that contract in 11% of the simulations.

The future is a very uncertain thing, as demonstrated by the very weak 2021 seasons from Cody Bellinger and Gleyber Torres. Those young stars would probably be better off right now if they had signed $150 million contracts after their rookie campaigns. Since every Mets fan is born with a genetic catalog of tales of sadness and loss, ask someone in Queens their feelings about Gregg Jefferies, who put up an OPS over 1.000 as a 19-year-old for Double-A Tidewater and a .961 OPS in his first cup of coffee before settling into a respectable, but disappointing, 20-WAR career.

No matter what happens with Franco, he’s basically a fifth of the way to becoming a billionaire before the taxman gets involved. The Rays leveraged their position — as you expect people to do in salary negotiations — but not in a grotesque way. If I were an agent and Franco were my client, I’d raise no fuss about him taking this deal. He’s one of baseball’s bright young stars, one MLB would be wise to market around, and now he can afford an entourage worthy of his abilities. Thumbs up all around from me.

Please note, this posting contains four positions.

Position: Software Developer

The Tampa Bay Rays are looking for an experienced Ruby on Rails Developer to help the Baseball Systems department build the best software and analytics solutions in all of Major League Baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

After a one-year hiatus due to the oddity and non-celebratory feeling of a season truncated by a raging pandemic, we’re bringing back the Elegy series in a streamlined format for a 2021 wrap-up. Think of this as a quick winter preview for each team, discussing the questions that faced each team ahead of the year, how they were answered, and what’s next. Do you like or hate the new format? Let me know in the comments below! We’ve already tackled the AL and NL Central; now it’s on to the East, starting with the American League.

Tampa Bay Rays (100-62)

The Big Question

The Rays are one of the best teams in history at competing on a year-in, year-out basis with a budget dwarfed by their rivals, right up there with Connie Mack’s, Charlie Finley’s, and Billy Beane’s A’s. But in a very tough division, they walk a very high player churn tightrope without a safety net. Would the Blake Snell trade finally be the one to knock Tampa Bay off that tightrope? The team has to stay smarter than its rivals, which is a lot tougher to do than it was in the heyday of any of the other teams listed above. It’s not so much of a question of if they got good value for Snell — they got real players in return — but whether the team’s rotation depth, already relatively thin with Charlie Morton‘s departure and Tyler Glasnow’s injury history, would be sufficient to prevent the Rays from having another down period. Read the rest of this entry »

Curtis Mead has emerged as one of the most-intriguing prospects in the Tampa Bay Rays system. A native of Adelaide, Australia who is celebrating his 21st birthday today, the right-handed-hitting infielder is coming off an eye-opening season where he slashed .321/.378/.533. Playing primarily at the two A-ball levels, Mead swatted 38 doubles and 15 home runs while putting up a 141 wRC+. He’s currently with the Arizona Fall League’s Scottsdale Scorpions, where he has nine hits, including a pair of long balls, in 30 at-bats.

Mead discussed his ascent from Australian teenager to fast-rising prospect toward the tail end of the minor-league season.

———

David Laurila: You were signed out of Australia by the Phillies. How did that come about?

Curtis Mead: “I’d just turned 17 and was a development player for our local team in Australia. The team wasn’t going very well, and our second baseman was struggling. He was an older guy, 26, and I was a young guy doing all the right things; I was getting there early and putting in the hard work, so with the team having such a bad first half, our coach made the decision to play some of the younger guys. I ended up playing the back 20 of a 40-game season, and hit [.373].

“After the season, I played in the Under-18 National Tournament, which is held in Sydney. Everyone comes in from all the [Australian] States, and I carried that form over from the ABL; I ended up winning the MVP of that tournament. That kind of got me noticed. I’d say anywhere from five to 10 scouts spoke to my parents after the tournament. That made me realize, ‘Holy crap, this is something I could do.’

“In April — in our offseason — [Team Australia CEO] Glenn Williams created a baseball team of 16-to-18-year-olds to go to Arizona. The trip was kind of to show you the college experience; we walked college campuses, we trained on college fields. We also got the opportunity to play extended teams in the minors, so we got a lot of exposure to both college scouts and professional scouts. I was able to showcase my skills, and got really close with probably two or three teams. I ended up signing with the Phillies in May of 2018, at 17 years old.”

Laurila: Which other teams did you come close the signing with? Read the rest of this entry »

Tyler Glasnow deliverers his high-octane fastball with a standard four-seam grip. That hasn’t always been the case. Back in his Little League days, the Tampa Bay Rays right-hander relied on an extra digit when throwing a baseball.

“I used to throw my heater with three fingers on top,” explained Glasnow, who at 6-foot-8 has grown exponentially since those formative years. “One time I was throwing to one of the coaches with my three-finger grip, and he was, ‘Whoa. That’s weird. Try throwing with two fingers.’ I did, and I think the movement got a little better, and I threw it a bit harder, but I couldn’t throw it for strikes. So I stayed with that three-finger approach for a little bit — a four-seam grip with three fingers — and then as my hands got bigger, I went to two fingers.”

His curveball is another story. Glasnow told me that he first began throwing a breaker around his sophomore year of high school… or maybe it was prior to that? He’s not entirely sure. When I suggested that age-12 isn’t uncommon, the So. Cal native said that may well have been the case. Read the rest of this entry »