Since August 1, 2018, the Tampa Bay Rays have compiled the third best record in the majors, winning just over 60% of their games. Their pitching staff has been the stingiest in all of baseball during this period, allowing just 3.5 runs to score per game. Their rotation deserves a ton of credit, as their starting five— and openers —posted a league and park adjusted FIP 24% better than league average. But their bullpen, including their bulk pitchers, has been almost as effective, posting a league and park adjusted FIP 11% better than league average. That’s even more impressive when you consider the sheer number of innings their relievers have thrown due to their opener strategy.

Here’s a list of relievers who have thrown 20 or more innings for the Rays since the beginning of August last year, with bulk pitchers removed:

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At first glance, any plan for the Rays to split their home games between the Tampa Bay area and Montreal — the exploration of which was reported last week by ESPN’s Jeff Passan — seems like a cockamamie idea. At second and third glances, too, not only because of the numerous legal and logistical hurdles involved, and the specifics of how those will be overcome so lacking, but because the underlying premise is so flawed.

That aspect was underscored on Tuesday, when Rays principal owner Stuart Sternberg and team presidents Brian Auld and Matt Silverman held a press conference in St. Petersburg to discuss the plan. Let’s cut to the chase:

Anyone who has followed the past quarter-century or so of Major League Baseball ought to be able to see the problem instantly. A franchise that has otherwise proven itself to be highly resourceful and competitive over the past 12 seasons has nonetheless been unable to convince area taxpayers and public officials to fund a new ballpark to replace Tropicana Field, where their lease expires following the 2027 season. Said franchise now hopes not only to build a new ballpark in that region, but also one in Montreal, a city the Expos and MLB abandoned in 2004 after a similar failure. You don’t need an Excel spreadsheet to do the math: convincing two cities to build ballparks for roughly half a season of usage per year is in no way going to be easier than convincing one city to build a ballpark for a full season of use, particularly given that in both cases the public will be expected to bear the lion’s share of the cost while the team profits.

Likewise, convincing two fan bases who have historically shown themselves to be particularly resistant to attending games to make a similar investment while confronting the reality of what amounts to a half-season road trip seems farfetched, to say the least. Let us consider the attendance histories of both cities:

The Expos spent their first eight seasons (1969-76) in Jarry Park before moving to Stade Olympique (1977-2004). Aside from 1970, their second season of existence, all of the seasons when they ranked among the NL’s upper half in attendance occurred during the 1977-83 span, when Stade Olympique was new. It helped that their lineup featured three future Hall of Famers (Gary Carter, Andre Dawson, and Tim Raines) for most of that period, but even so, they never ranked higher than third in the league in attendance, and made the postseason only in 1981.* From 1986 onward, only once did they rank higher than 10th (ninth out of 12 teams in 1987), and in their final seven seasons, they were dead last out of 16 teams, cracking one million fans just once.

*One aspect I neglected to note when I first published this was the fact that the team was robbed of a potential postseason berth — and with it, the long-term impact upon attendance and revenue — in 1994, when they had the majors’ best record (74-40) before the strike it. The powerhouse squad was dismantled before play resumed in 1995; attendance dropped by 26% that year, and for the remainder of the Expos’ tenure, only once did they even average half as many fans per game as in 1994.

In their final two seasons, they played a total of 43 games at Estadio Hiram Bithorn in San Juan, Puerto Rico. Despite the park seating just 18,000, they averaged more fans there (14,222 in 2003, 10,334 in ’04), than at Stade Olympique, which in its post-1992 configuration could seat 45,757 (12,081 in 2003, 8,876 in ’04). As Jonah Keri — a Montreal native who coincidentally wrote a book about the Rays — recently wrote of the two-city arrangement, which would seem to be relevant here: “[I]t was still a split-the-baby approach that ultimately left no one happy, and did nothing to help the health of the team in its original city.”

While much of the blame for the latter-day Expos’ attendance woes falls upon owner Jeffrey Loria (who bought the team in 1999) and MLB (which assumed control of the franchise in 2002 while allowing Loria to purchase the Marlins), the underlying reality is that the team could not secure public funding for a new ballpark. Ultimately, the franchise moved to Washington, D.C. following the 2004 season and became the Nationals.

The Rays are now in their 22nd season at Tropicana Field, where only twice have they ranked higher than 10th in the AL in attendance. They ranked seventh out of 14 teams in 1998, their inaugural season, and ninth out of 14 in 2010. They have ranked last or second-to-last in every season since, and, despite winning 90 games last year and being on pace to improve upon that record this year, are currently on their way to their fifth straight season of ranking last among the AL’s 15 teams. The ballpark’s location in downtown St. Petersburg is a major problem, as it’s far from the area’s corporate base and wealthiest suburbs, with significant traffic congestion problems and a lack of sufficient mass transit service. As Keri noted, “Fewer people live within a 30-minute drive of Tropicana Field than any other stadium.”

The Rays have spent more than a decade trying to get another ballpark built in the Tampa-St. Petersburg vicinity, but have been unable to get a plan off the ground. They can’t escape their lease, which has commonly been described as iron-clad. Earlier this week, colleague Sheryl Ring delved into their use agreement’s “exclusive dealings” clause, which forbids the team from even negotiating to play elsewhere. She also noted a similarly restrictive memorandum of understanding that allowed the team only to seek new stadium sites in the two Florida counties that encompass the Tampa-St. Pete area, Pinellas and Hillsborough.

You may recall that at the 2018 Winter Meetings, Sternberg made a show of announcing that a plan to build a glitzy, $900 million new ballpark in the Tampa neighborhood of Ybor City had fallen through, with MLB commissioner Rob Manfred blasting Hillsborogh County’s lack of specifics (read “public funding”). That came near the end of the three-year window granted by the aforementioned MOU, which expired on December 31, 2018.

If the Rays’ attempt to sell a dual-city plan weren’t already underwater enough, St. Petersburg mayor Rick Kriseman handed ownership an anvil last week when he said, “I have no intention of bringing this idea to our city council to consider.” Without that, the Rays can’t get another MOU that would allow them to discuss any proposal with Montreal. In fact, there’s already an inquiry into whether Sternberg violated the lease agreement by discussing his plan with Montreal mogul Stephen Bronfman, son of former Expos owner Charles Bronfman and a prime mover in a group spearheading effort to return baseball to Montreal.

If the Rays were hoping to find high-level civic support elsewhere, Pinellas County Commissioner and 2021 St. Petersburg mayoral candidate Ken Welch said, “I am not open to funding a part-time stadium where our home team is shared with another city.” Meanwhile, former St. Petersburg mayor Bill Foster likened the two-city plan to the team wanting a wife and a mistress. Good times.

“I’m confident it’s an amazing idea,” said Sternberg on Tuesday while denying that this plan was part of “a staged exit,” or “a page out of a playbook to gain leverage.” His main selling point appears to be the fact that both new ballparks would be intimate, open-air venues with 30,000 or fewer seats, which would be less costly than building parks with retractable roofs, as in Arizona, Houston, Miami, Milwaukee, Seattle, and Toronto (the Trop is currently the only dome). According to Neil deMause, who has spent the past two decades chronicling MLB’s stadium shell game in his co-authored book Field of Schemes and a long-running blog of the same name, the “ballpark figure” for such a roof is an additional $200 million to $300 million, though “it depends what kind of roof, and how it affects the overall design.”

Secondarily, Sternberg claimed that such an arrangement will drive plenty of Canadian fans to the region, the kind of vaporous “economic impact” claim so common in stadium proposals. As FloridaPolitics.com’s Noah Pransky wrote:

In short, he suggested losing 41 home games a year — while also paying for a new Rays stadium — would pay for itself, as new Canadian tourists would come down to see their “home” team early in the season.

Back-of-the-napkin math on this suggests St. Pete would need tens — or even hundreds — of thousands of new Canadian tourists to make this work, which seems somewhat ridiculous, given that no Montreal fan is going to want to watch their team in Florida’s June humidity when they could wait three weeks and watch them up north in July.

You could also simply count all the empty seats at Blue Jays’ spring training games in Dunedin to know hundreds of thousands of fans aren’t coming down to watch their home team play baseball in Florida.

DeMause has his own debunking of Tuesday’s presser at Field of Schemes. His conclusion:

Whatever exactly Sternberg has in mind, this is clearly a long, long con, or if nothing else a way to kill time and build momentum for something while waiting out the remaining eight years of his lease. It’s transparently a classic non-threat threat — even Twitter noticed — but the question now becomes what the Rays owner plans to do with any leverage that he’s savvily created, especially considering he faces an opponent in St. Pete Mayor Rick Kriseman who isn’t afraid to sue to enforce the lease’s gag rule on stadium talks.

Of course, it’s always possible this non-threat threat is all Sternberg plans to do, in hopes that it will shake loose more stadium talks in Tampa Bay, given that he’s tried that move (albeit without the Montreal gambit) roughly a billion times before:

DeMause then linked to a tweet promoting this Pronsky article enumerating five separate occasions over the past decade in which Sternberg suggested the Rays’ future in the region was in doubt.

The one unplayed card Sternberg appears to have is that once the Trop is replaced, the team will receive 50% of the revenues that come from redeveloping the current site’s 86-acre footprint — but only if they remain in St. Petersburg. Any escape route from their current lease probably runs through that arrangement, with the Rays either forgoing some percentage of that revenue or paying the city a lump sum. Even if that happens, the obstacles to building two part-time ballparks remain, and it is difficult to imagine the Major League Baseball Players Association signing off on putting its constituents through the extra hassle. Even though players are well compensated relative to most Americans (and Canadians) — admittedly, less well compensated in the case of anyone in a Rays’ uniform — they and their families already lead lives that are bifurcated by the realities of the baseball season. Adding another temporary residence to that arrangement, particularly one in a foreign country, will be a tough sell.

Given all of the above, it hardly seems worth scratching the surface as far as the Montreal aspect of this plan, which surely has its own obstacles. While it would be wonderful to imagine major league baseball returning to the city, which would appear to be at or near the top of any short list of desirable expansion sites, it’s nearly impossible to believe that this is how it will happen. While Bronfman’s group has made progress towards a downtown ballpark, as Keri wrote, “It’s even harder to imagine the city, provincial, or federal governments kicking in a big chunk of the construction cost (which could easily approach or even exceed $1 billion Canadian) for partial seasons.”

Thus, the Rays’ plan makes for an interesting thought experiment, but that’s about it. Don’t hold your breath for this tale of two cities to end happily.

By now, you’re undoubtedly aware that Major League Baseball gave the Tampa Bay Rays the go-ahead to explore playing a divided home schedule between St. Petersburg and Montreal. The plan is certainly ambitious, if nothing else:

Though no details of the overall plan are set, the basic framework is for the Rays to spend the first 2½ months or so of the season, playing about 35 of their 81 home games, in Tampa Bay, then move north by early June to finish the schedule in Montreal.

The Rays can pay the players for the inconvenience, similar to the stipends they get for taking international trips, and as part of a compensation package that also could offset other issues such as taxes, currency exchange (though they’re paid in U.S. dollars) and family travel costs.

But practical issues aside, the idea also faces a series of legal hurdles. First, the team’s use agreement with the city of St. Petersburg simply doesn’t allow it. That’s right – the Rays, unlike most teams, aren’t technically a tenant. They’re legally a licensee, as Eric Macramalla explains for Forbes:

The Rays never signed a traditional lease. Rather, they signed a Use Agreement, which, to say the least, is an onerous agreement that strongly favors St. Petersburg. A Use Agreement is in stark contrast to a traditional lease, where a tenant typically owes the landlord what’s left on that lease after breaking it.

As for sharing games with Montreal, the Use Agreement at Section 2.04 expressly provides that the Rays must “play all its homes games” at Tropicana Field unless St. Petersburg consents to the Rays playing some of its game elsewhere.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tyler Clippard got top billing in this column nine months ago. A Toronto Blue Jay at the time, he boasted a 3.17 ERA, and had allowed just 6.5 hits per nine innings over 696 career appearances. Thanks in part to a lack of save opportunities, he was one of the most-underrated relievers in the game.

Twisting a familiar phrase, the more things remain the same, the more they change. Clippard is now a Cleveland Indian, and while he’s still gobbling up outs — his 3.05 ERA and 5.2 H/9 are proof in the pudding — he’s getting them in a new way. At age 34, having lost an inch or two off his fastball, the under-the-radar righty has pulled an old pitch out of his back pocket.

“Toward the end of last season, I started to incorporate a two-seamer,” said Clippard, who’d scrapped the pitch after transitioning to the bullpen in 2009. The new role wasn’t the primary driver, though. As he explained, “I mostly got rid of it because it wasn’t necessarily sinking. I thought, ‘If it’s not sinking, why should I throw it?’”

A decade later, a reason for throwing it emerged.

“Traditionally, I’ve been a fly-ball pitcher and have given up home runs,” said Clippard, who has surrendered 99 of them at baseball’s highest level. “In the overall scheme of things, I have’t been too concerned about that. There was a year, 2011, when I gave up 11 home runs — which is a lot for a reliever — but I had a 1.83 [ERA]. I can give up home runs and still be fine. At the same time, if I can keep the ball in the ballpark a little bit more, that’s obviously going to benefit me.”

Hence the reintroduction of a two-seamer… this despite the fact that it isn’t diving any more now than it did a decade ago. Read the rest of this entry »

Matt Hicks has been Eric Nadel’s partner in the Texas Rangers radio booth since 2012. Prior to that, the Maryland native called games for the Frederick Keys (1989-1994), the El Paso Diablos (1995-2004), and the Corpus Christi Hooks (2005-2011). One month into his professional baseball broadcasting career, he learned an important lesson, courtesy of an incredulous Fat Jack.

“That first year in Frederick, we played in a Babe Ruth League park because the stadium was still being built,” Hicks told me recently. “Center field was 355 feet from home plate. As you can imagine, the stands were rudimentary; we had metal bleachers, we had a small roof. Anyway, it was April, freezing cold, and we were playing a doubleheader. There was hardly anybody there for the night portion — 100 people, if that.”

In the aftermath of a clumsy call of a boneheaded play, a voice punctured the chilly, nighttime air. Clear as a bell, it was directed at the rookie broadcaster.

“We had a runner on second base, and one of our guys laid down a bunt,” explained Hicks. “The play was made — the batter was thrown out — and when I looked up, I was expecting to see a runner at third base. He was still at second. I didn’t know what to say. When I got to that part of calling the play — the guy’s name was Scott Meadows — I said, ‘Meadows is still at second base; he didn’t go to third because…’ Then I paused and said something lame. I said, ’He didn’t have any choice.’

Cue up the choice words. Read the rest of this entry »

The Tampa Bay Rays are having a tremendous year so far, better than anyone could have expected. They’re a half game out of first in the perennially difficult AL East, and that might be underselling how good they’ve been this year — their BaseRuns record is the best in baseball. How have they done it? Their pitching staff has been the best in baseball by a huge margin, posting a 3.02 ERA and a 3.34 FIP, both of which are miles better than second place. The hitting has been good, but pitching has the Rays playing like a championship contender.

That pitching staff has been a many-headed monster this year, and Yonny Chirinos has been a key part of it. He’s bounced back and forth between starting and following an opener (headlining?) over 75 innings of work, compiling a 2.88 ERA and 4.05 FIP in his second major league season. He was above average last year as well — a matching 3.51 ERA and FIP over nearly 90 innings. He sports a 21.5% strikeout rate and a sterling 4.9% walk rate. In short, Chirinos looks like a mid-rotation major league starter for the foreseeable future. What’s truly amazing about him, however, is that he’s doing that while being the most predictable pitcher in all of baseball.

If you’re behind in the count against Yonny Chirinos, it’s going to be a long day for you. His splitter, which he only learned in 2017, is lights-out. It’s been the third-most-valuable splitter in baseball this year, behind relievers Hector Neris and Kirby Yates. It generates truly video game numbers: a 45% whiff rate, 2.5 ground balls for every fly ball, and a .155 wOBA on plate appearances that end with a splitter. When Chirinos has the advantage, he’s not shy about going to the split: he throws it 43% of the time, more than twice as often as his overall rate of splitters.

No, if you want to beat Chirinos, you need to avoid the splitter. If you end up in a two-strike count, you’ll probably wave at air before heading back to the bench. Get ahead in the count, however, and things change. Chirinos has an effective fastball, a 94-mph sinker with huge horizontal break that runs in on the hands of righties. Still, it’s a fastball, not a world-destroying offspeed pitch. There’s no question which offering you’d rather face. Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers —Colten Brewer, David Hernandez, and Ryan Yarbrough — on how they learned and developed their cutters.

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Colten Brewer, Boston Red Sox

“It started happening in the [2016] offseason that I got Rule-5’ed to the Yankees. When I got to spring training, they said, ‘Hey, the reason we got you is that we noticed some cut on your fastball; we like that.’ I was like, ‘Oh, really?’ I’d been five years with the Pirates, and they didn’t really use that analytical side to baseball. As a result, I didn’t really know much about myself until I got with the Yankees.

“That offseason I’d worked out at a place called APEC, in Tyler, Texas. They were using a Driveline system. Going to a new team, I wanted to show up in spring training in the best shape possible, so I spent a month and half there. That’s where the wheels started turning.

“In the spring, I started throwing more balls in to lefties, and was watching the ball work. From then on I started having natural cut on my fastball. I said, ‘I’m going to use this.’ With the Pirates I’d been more of a sinker guy — I thought arm-side run was better — but after I got to the Yankees I started ripping fastballs as hard as I could, and they were cutting. Read the rest of this entry »

At 2018’s trade deadline, the Pittsburgh Pirates made a surprising move, picking up underperforming Chris Archer from the Tampa Bay Rays in return for Tyler Glasnow, Austin Meadows, and the ever-popular Player To Be Named. Once that latter nom de guerre was revealed to be Shane Baz, it meant that all three players heading to Florida were names of serious prospectage. In Eric Longenhagen’s top prospect list for the Pirates going into 2018, Meadows and Baz ranked No. 2 and No. 3, respectively. Glasnow, who didn’t qualify for the list due to service time, ranked second the year before.

How did I feel about this trade last year? At the time, I thought it was eminently reasonable for both sides. My argument was that the Rays would have been hard-pressed, even in sorta-contention, to turn down this kind of return given that the team’s long-term win condition is an assembly line of impact prospects.

For the Pirates, I argued that if this was part of a change in approach to more of a short-term, win-now approach in the offseason, this move could be justified, even with the team having a similar path to winning as the Rays do. This kind of bold, win-now or win-soon attempt (along with picking up Keone Kela from the Rangers) was something that was missing from the Pirates in recent years when the strength of their roster was at its peak.

The Pirates did not end up pushing their chips this offseason, though their signing of Jordan Lyles looks way better so far than I ever expected. But the winter moves were largely the kind of low-impact, solid-value moves the team has excelled at. They’ve even done well in several of these so far, with Francisco Liriano currently sitting at a 2.73 FIP and Melky Cabrera at .339/.375/.471 (though admittedly BABIP-aided).

These are the types of moves that win at chess, trading your movement-hampered bishop for your opponent’s strongly placed knight or giving up having both bishops to weaken their pawn structure. The problem is, that’s frequently not enough in baseball. Looking up at the league with fewer financial advantages and a division in which every single other team was in win-now mode, the Pirates didn’t need value trades, they needed to put an opponent’s rook in their pocket when the latter went to the bathroom. Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Jalen Beeks, Dallas Braden, and John Means— on how they learned and developed their changeups.

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Jalen Beeks, Tampa Bay Rays

“I had a changeup in high school, but it wasn’t very good. When I got to college, I changed the grip; I moved my pinky finger down. It’s pretty much a circle change. I grip it hard and think about it almost like a fastball. I don’t pronate. No one taught it to me. I just threw it one day and it worked. You have to tinker. You have to figure out what works for you.

“It’s gotten better over the last year. I think that’s mainly from my mechanics having changed a little bit. I use my legs more, and have shortened my arm action. I’m not so tall on the mound now. I’m activating my legs more, by getting into more of a squat position. And like I said, I think fastball. I throw it as hard as I can. My average fastball is around 92 [mph] and my changeup is around 88. Read the rest of this entry »

Rowdy Tellez’s weapon of choice is 34 inches long, weighs 32 ounces, and is made out of maple. Trey Mancini’s is 33-and-a-half inches long, weighs 31 ounces, and is made out of birch. Both do damage. The Blue Jays first baseman is known for his light-tower power, while the Orioles outfielder is coming off of consecutive 24-home-runs seasons.

How they went about choosing, and then settling on, their bat models differs.

“When I first got into pro ball, I signed a bat contract with Victus,” explained Tellez, who was drafted by Toronto out of an Elk Grove, California in 2013. “I told them what I wanted, and they sent me bats. I didn’t really like it at first, so I tweaked it a little more. I got to what they called an AC24, which is kind of a combination of models. It’s kind of like a 271 knob and handle, maybe a little bit thicker heading towards the barrel, and then almost like an I13 barrel, but circumference-wise a little bit thinner, and a tick longer. I’ve kind of stuck with that. It’s a comfort thing.”

Mancini was drafted by Baltimore out of Notre Dame in 2013. Three years later, a C243 model Louisville Slugger became his bat of choice. Read the rest of this entry »