When the Angels signed Michael Lorenzen this offseason, it was hard to say what to expect from him. A longtime member of the Reds’ bullpen for nearly his entire major league career, he entered his first time through free agency looking for an opportunity to start again; making that jump to the rotation came with all sorts of uncertainty. But after just two starts for his hometown team, the early returns have been promising.
The former 38th overall pick began his career as a member of the Reds’ rotation, making 21 starts during his rookie season back in 2015 but posting a 5.45 ERA and a 5.48 FIP and getting relegated to the bullpen by the end of the year. He enjoyed a bit of success in shorter outings the next year and wound up in that role for the rest of his time in Cincinnati. At various points during his time there, Lorenzen regularly expressed a desire to return to the rotation, but spring injuries often played a role in pushing him back to the bullpen. In 2016, it was a sprained ligament in his elbow; in ‘18, a shoulder injury. He was on track to join the rotation last spring until another shoulder injury derailed that plan again.
The fact that Lorenzen made it through spring training without an injury and actually made a start this season has to be seen as an accomplishment. Not only that, but his first outing against the Marlins was outstanding: two hits over six innings and a single run that scored on a Jesús Sánchez solo home run. He didn’t walk a batter and struck out seven. His next start was a much stiffer challenge against the Astros in Houston, where he lasted into the fourth inning but was done in by a lapse in command, issuing a walk and hit by pitch both with the bases loaded. He wound up allowing four runs on four hits and two walks in 3.1 innings of work, striking out two.
While the start in Houston didn’t go as well as his first, Lorenzen has shown some interesting changes to his pitch arsenal that could indicate some more success on the horizon. In his postgame comments after his Angels debut, he discussed his pitch profile:
“I worked really hard this offseason to get my stuff where it needs to be. It’s a lot more fun in the rotation. I’m able to use everything and set guys up certain ways for the next time through. It’s just more fun to do that instead of being limited. I have too many pitches to be limited in the bullpen, so I was just able to take advantage of my pitch profile.”
Even as a reliever, Lorenzen continued to use a full, six-pitch repertoire. He leaned on his four-seam fastball and cutter for the most part, but also sprinkled in a sinker, changeup, slider, and curveball. Read the rest of this entry »
Yesterday, I wrote about the intentional walk heard ‘round the world. It was mostly reflex, really. When someone issues a strange intentional walk, I can’t help but dig through the numbers. But this one, I was quite sure from the start, was bad. The math was just a way of rubbernecking, staring at a baseball accident from across the highway and saying “Wow, I wonder how that happened?”
But in doing so, I didn’t engage Joe Maddon on his weird, hipster-glass-wearing turf. Maddon didn’t say he was trying to minimize run expectancy (though he should have been). He didn’t say he was trying to maximize his team’s chances of winning the game (though he should have been). He said he was trying to “avoid the big blow,” or prevent a big inning in other words.
Bad news, Joe! Using the same simulation I used to estimate run and win expectations, I can work out the chances of a “big blow” for some arbitrary definition of big. Take my initial simulation. I estimated that the Rangers stood to score roughly 1.75 more runs in the inning when Corey Seager came to the plate, before any intentional walk shenanigans. We aren’t limited to looking at that in terms of average runs, though. It can also be expressed as some likelihood of scoring zero runs, one run, two runs, etc:
Intentional walk. Bases loaded. Mike Trout staring homeward in disbelief:
Was this a solid baseball decision by the numbers? No. No, it was not. I don’t really have to do the math to tell you that. But doing the math is what we do here at FanGraphs, so just to be certain, and also just for the sake of doing it, I ran through the details. You don’t have to read this article to learn whether it was a good choice or not. I’m telling you that part right up front – it wasn’t. Read the rest of this entry »
One of my favorite yearly preseason pieces is also my most dreaded: the breakout list. I’ve been doing this exercise since 2014, and while I’ve had the occasional triumph (hello, Christian Yelich), the low-probability nature of trying to project who will beat expectations means that for every time you look smart, you’re also bound to look dumb for some other reason.
On the plus side, nobody really embarrassed me. Alex Kirilloff came closest, but in his defense, he was playing with a wrist injury that eventually required surgery. Read the rest of this entry »
The plight of the Los Angeles Angels is well known by now. Despite employing two generational talents in Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani, they’ve made the playoffs just once in the last 12 seasons. Even worse, they’ve had a winning record in just four of those 12 seasons, and haven’t finished above .500 since going 85-77 in 2015. It’s not for lack of trying either. They’ve signed plenty of big name free agents to massive contracts to try and get them over the hump. Those efforts haven’t paid off yet, however, and the latest veteran to get kicked to the curb before hitting free agency is Justin Upton, who was designated for assignment on Sunday with a year left on his contract.
Since 2011, the Angels have signed four free agents to contracts that are five years or longer, with four additional extensions of similar length. The track record for those signings has been pretty ghastly:
C.J. Wilson, Josh Hamilton, Albert Pujols, and Upton didn’t finish out their contract term with the Angels, while the jury is still out on Rendon; Mike Trout’s deals can comfortably be scored wins. Injuries cut Wilson’s career short while a combination of injury and off-field issues led the Angels to trade Hamilton just two years into his huge contract. Pujols’s production in Anaheim was a shadow of his career-defining tenure in St. Louis, though he did manage some late season magic for the Dodgers last year. He’ll finish out his career where it started. By signing all of these players to large, long-term contracts, the Angels were doing exactly what you’d expect them to do in their position: spend to supplement their established stars. Its unfortunate, then, that the majority of these contracts didn’t pan out, particularly when pitching remained such a consistent need. Read the rest of this entry »
It arrived stressfully, chaotically, and slightly late, but the 2022 season is here. And that means it’s time for one last important sabermetric ritual: the final ZiPS projected standings that will surely come back and haunt me multiple times as the season progresses.
The methodology I’m using here isn’t identical to the one we use in our Projected Standings, so there will naturally be some important differences in the results. So how does ZiPS calculate the season? Stored within ZiPS are the first through 99th percentile projections for each player. I start by making a generalized depth chart, using our Depth Charts as an initial starting point. Since these are my curated projections, I make changes based on my personal feelings about who will receive playing time, as filtered by arbitrary whimsy my logic and reasoning. ZiPS then generates a million versions of each team in Monte Carlo fashion — the computational algorithms, that is (no one is dressing up in a tuxedo and playing baccarat like James Bond).
After that is done, ZiPS applies another set of algorithms with a generalized distribution of injury risk, which change the baseline PAs/IPs selected for each player. Of note is that higher-percentile projections already have more playing time than lower-percentile projections before this step. ZiPS then automatically “fills in” playing time from the next players on the list (proportionally) to get to a full slate of plate appearances and innings.
The result is a million different rosters for each team and an associated winning percentage for each of those million teams. After applying the new strength of schedule calculations based on the other 29 teams, I end up with the standings for each of the million seasons. This is actually much less complex than it sounds. Read the rest of this entry »
Frankie Montas was a late scratch from his Saturday start and instead, on Sunday, threw in an early-morning sim game on Oakland’s backfields. Opposing scouts in attendance were from (in totality) Boston, Kansas City, Minnesota, and Tampa Bay.
Montas threw about 80 pitches, warming up and then working in eight-to-ten minute chunks against A’s big league hitters, with staff adding batters to the end of some innings and rolling others to stay within that window (which is commonplace in this setting). Then the whole group took a break for four or five minutes before Montas returned to the mound for another simulated inning. With no umpires, the A’s used the TrackMan pitch locations to call balls and strikes from their seating area behind the backstop; the unit began malfunctioning at the very end of his outing, but only for four pitches.
I have video of his entire outing below, and in addition to it being a topical scouting artifact given trade rumors around Montas, it is also a glimpse into big league minutiae in a quiet setting with just a few scouts, A’s staff, and player families around. You can often hear communication between A’s players and personnel around pitch type and velocity, but there’s no exposure of sensitive ops stuff, something I vetted while cutting this together.
Montas’ fastball ranged from 92–95 mph, but he was consistently pumping in a heavy 93–94 sinker. He was clearly coasting, as a big league vet of this stature should during a morning sim game, so the fact that this velo band is abnormally low for him — his fastball averaged 96 in 2021 and had been sitting close to that so far this spring — is fine. The pitch had big sinking action toward the bottom of the zone early during his outing and induced several ground balls, though hitters had an easier time elevating it later on. As the movement on his fastball dwindled throughout his outing, the length and movement of his upper-80s slider increased, and he found more consistent feel for locating it later in the sim game. At times he uses it like a bat-breaking cutter, at others as a finishing pitch out of the zone. Though it was his least consistent offering, many of his sliders were plus. Read the rest of this entry »
Last year, Shohei Ohtani returned from a string of injuries and put together a season for the ages, excelling both on the mound and at the plate en route to a unanimous American League MVP award. On the days he pitched, however, he left the Angels vulnerable, because his exits from the mound generally meant his removal from the game, costing the Angels the services of their best (active) hitter and placing the team’s relievers in the batting order. That problem is no more, as last week Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association formally announced a handful of rule changes going into effect for 2022, one of which allows a starting pitcher who also serves as his team’s designated hitter to remain in the game in the latter capacity after he’s done pitching.
That rule, and other more mundane ones, had been proposed earlier in March and tentatively agreed to later in the month. They weren’t part of the new Collective Bargaining Agreement, so implementing them required a separate vote of the owners, which did not happen until last week. MLB did utilize the “Ohtani Rule” in last year’s All-Star Game; after Ohtani threw one scoreless inning as the AL starter, he stuck around to bat out of the leadoff spot a second time and then was replaced by other DHs.
In theory, the Ohtani Rule encourages other teams to develop such two-way players, but the ones who showed promise in recent years such as Ohtani’s teammate Jared Walsh and 2017 first-round picks Hunter Greene and Brendan McKay, eventually wound up on one track or the other. Thus in practice the rule is very specifically targeted at a single player — and an international superstar, at that. In baseball, the closest precedent for such a singularly oriented rule dates back to the 19th century and is linked to three-time batting champion Ross Barnes, though in that case, the change was designed to hinder his play, not aid it.
From 1871 through ’76, a batter could reach base safely on a ball that first landed in the infield and then bounced or rolled into foul territory. Barnes, a second baseman first with the National Association’s Boston Red Stockings and then the National League’s Chicago White Stockings, particularly excelled at hitting balls (not all of them bunts) that landed fair and went foul, making them nearly impossible to defend against. Via such tactics, he topped a .400 batting average four times, leading the NA in both 1872 and ’73 with marks of .430 and .431, and the NL in ’76 with a .429 mark. After the 1876 season, the NL adopted a rule defining balls that went into foul territory before passing first or third base as foul balls.
As MLB official historian John Thorn told FanGraphs, “Ross Barnes may have been the principal target of fair-foul hit change but the bunt (or ‘baby hit’) game had long been criticized as unmanly … or worse, a remnant of cricket.”
Barnes never hit higher than .272 after the adoption of the rule, though to be fair, a debilitating malaria-like chronic disease limited him to just 22 games in 1877, and 146 over the next four seasons, two of them washouts, before he retired in ’81. Notably, he lost a court case over whether the White Stockings had to pay him while he was sick.
Thorn offered the 1893 change of the pitching distance — from 50 feet at the front of the box (and 55 feet 6 inches at the back) to home plate to the now-familiar 60 feet 6 inches — as another example of a targeted rule. “It could be argued that the retreat of the pitching distance in 1893 was designed to muffle the speed of Amos Rusie and Cy Young.”
Indeed, the fastball velocities of Rusie (who had to that point led the NL in strikeouts twice and walks three times) and Young, the league leader in wins and ERA in 1892, were said to strike such fear into the hearts of batters that they insisted the league increase the distance. Peter Morris’ A Game of Inches traces the change to a more generalized aesthetic concern regarding the restoration of the equilibrium between batter and pitcher in the wake of the legalization of overhand pitching in 1884, and a distaste for the proliferation of strikeouts (does this sound familiar?). While Rusie and Young continued to flourish at the new distance, many of the game’s most accomplished hurlers to that point, such as John Clarkson, Pud Galvin, Tim Keefe, Tony Mullane, and Mickey Welch, retired just before or shortly after the distance change.
In the past decade, MLB has introduced two rules that have been closely identified with individual players, namely the “Posey Rule” that protects catchers from collisions and the “Utley Rule” that protects middle infielders from egregious takeout slides, but both of those are generalized rules, and oddly enough, they’re linked to those players from opposite directions — and, in Buster Posey’s case, perhaps the wrong player, at that. The former was adopted in 2014, three years after Posey suffered a season-ending broken leg on a collision; its advent was more directly preceded by Alex Avila’s knee injury in the 2013 ALCS, but one way or another, it protects all catchers. The latter was adopted in in 2016 after Chase Utley broke infielder Rubén Tejada’s fibula while attempting to break up a double play the previous season, and it protects all middle infielders. (Where do Avila and Tejada go to claim their royalty checks?)
Anyway, the Ohtani Rule should help the Angels by granting its namesake extra plate appearances. By my count, players batting in his stead in games from which he was removed as a pitcher — including the dud in the Bronx that I attended, where he took a first-inning exit — totaled 22 PA last year, about one per start; he also made three starts in April and May where he did not hit and the Angels used a conventional DH. At the level at which Ohtani played last year, an extra 30 to 35 PA would have worth something on the order of two runs relative to a replacement level hitter. Not nothing, but hardly season-turning (have you seen the Angels lately?), and a good way to showcase a singularly talented superstar.
The Ohtani Rule does not preclude other teams from using their pitchers as DHs, but the likelihood of, say, the Diamondbacks using Madison Bumgarner in that capacity seems vanishingly small as even they can surely offer a better hitter than one with a 44 wRC+ (21 since 2018) to bat four times a game. Incidentally, one previous candidate for two-way duty, Michael Lorenzen, is now an Angel himself, and a starting pitcher at that, though he’s lost interest in the double-duty exploits he pursued with the Reds. Lorenzen made 34 appearances in the outfield from 2018-21, starting six times (all in 2019). He owns an 84 wRC+ for his career; last year, the Halos gave over 2,000 PA to non-pitchers with lower marks, including David Fletcher, José Iglesias, Juan Lagares, Kurt Suzuki, and Albert Pujols.
The Ohtani Rule is in place for the life of the new CBA, while the other new rules to which the league and the union have agreed — the ones that weren’t part of the CBA (which you can read about here) — are applicable to 2022 only, under the health and safety protocols related to the COVID-19 pandemic. What follows is a quick rundown of those.
Roster Sizes
As in 2020, the abbreviated spring training has not allowed starting pitchers enough time to build up their pitch counts to where they would typically be at the start of the season. Thus, teams will be allowed to carry 28 players instead of 26 from Opening Day through games of May 1, with an extra player added on days in which teams play doubleheaders.
For those first few weeks, the limitation on the number of pitchers on the active roster — 13 out of 26, per a rule put in place for 2020 that has yet to be enforced — will be relaxed as well. Which, alas, means some very bloated pitching staffs. The Dodgers, who open their season against the Rockies at Coors Field, are apparently planning to use 16 of their 28 roster spots on pitchers:
Dave Roberts said the Dodgers will open the season with 16 pitchers. The Dodgers open the season in Colorado.
Ugh. Ugh. Ugh. The good news (?) is that they’re probably going to carry five left-handed relievers, so we can really watch Roberts dig into those matchups. The Yankees, who don’t even have the Coors Field excuse, are “leaning towards” carrying 16 pitchers into their opening series against the Red Sox as well.
May 2 can’t come soon enough.
Injured List
For the 2017 season, MLB reduced the minimum number of days for a player to be on what was then the disabled list from 15 to 10 (not including the 7-day concussion list); the next year, they renamed it the injured list. Given the general consensus that some teams were using the IL as yet another means to expand their pitching staffs, the league planned to implement a rule lengthening the minimum stays for pitchers and two-way players to 15 days in 2020, but that one fell by the wayside with the COVID-19 health and safety protocols.
Now, it will be implemented as of May 2. Until then, pitchers, position players, and two-way players can be placed on the 10-day IL, but from that point onward, only position players can use the 10-day IL. The various other ILs (COVID, 7-day concussion and 60-day) will continue to function as they did last year.
Minor League Options
The minimum number of days that a pitcher or two-way player must remain on option or outright assignment prior to being recalled or re-selected is 10 days until May 2, and 15 thereafter. This is another throwback from 2020 that’s finally going into place, designed to reduce the amount of churn in bullpens.
Additionally, those option assignments before May 2 don’t count against the seasonal limit of five, which was put in place by the new CBA.
Extra Innings
As was the case in 2020 and ’21, each extra inning will begin with a runner on second base, namely the player occupying the spot in the batting order preceding that of the inning’s leadoff hitter (unless it’s a pitcher, which is much more unlikely now with the universal DH). As of last summer — hell, as recently as early March — the Manfred Man (or zombie runner) was presumed to be a relic of the past, but according to The Athletic’s Matt Gelb and Jayson Stark, it returned as part of the league’s health and safety protocols.
This one isn’t a popular rule among fans; when I polled FanGraphs readers after the 2020 season, just 23.6% favored keeping the rule, an even lower percentage than favored retaining seven-inning games for doubleheaders (32.9%). Gelb and Stark cited a March 2021 Seton Hall Sports Poll in which just 17% of the general population approved, with 28% of sports fans and 41% of avid fans approving. Here’s the thing, though: the players like it, as pitching staffs don’t get burned out as often by epic contests and pitchers with options remaining aren’t “rewarded” for emptying the tank with another trip to the minors. Managers favor it, too, with the likes of the Yankees’ Aaron Boone, the Brewers’ Craig Counsell, and the Diamondbacks’ Torey Lovullo among those speaking up on the rule’s behalf.
Speaking of doubleheaders, if and when they’re necessary, games will be of the nine-inning variety. The seven-inning ones have been sent back to the minors, where they belong.
…
Beyond those changes, a few others have been made that will persist beyond 2022, but merit mention here. The first concerns rookie qualification. As before, a player is still considered a rookie if he hasn’t exceeded 130 at-bats (not plate appearances), 50 innings, or 45 days on the active roster (time on the IL doesn’t count). Amid the abbreviated 2020 season, the powers that be decided that September (and October) days on the active roster would no longer be excluded from the 45-day count, and last year, with September rosters limited to 28 players instead of 40, that rule was retained. Now it looks as though it’s becoming permanent.
Shortly before this article was published, ESPN’s Buster Olney reported that MLB will allow teams to use wearable PitchCom signaling devices during the regular season as a means of countering sign-stealing efforts and improving pace of play. Several teams have tested the devices this spring and they’ve drawn glowing reviews. We’ll have a closer look at the ramifications of that in a separate article soon.
As for the other changes you’ll see in 2022, from the universal designated hitter and the five-option limit to the expanded playoffs, those are part of the new CBA. So is the 45-day notification window for the league to implement new rules, which will likely introduce a pitch clock, larger bases, and some kind of ban on infield shifts next year. There will be ample time to yell at those clouds, I promise.
Free agent signings come in several flavors. There are the big splashy ones – ooh, Kris Bryant and Freddie Freeman are in the NL West now! There are good-fit signings – Mark Canha on the Mets and Yusei Kikuchi on the Blue Jays fill necessary roles on exciting clubs. There are even feel-good reunions, like Zack Greinke returning to the Royals.
There are also reliever signings. So, so many reliever signings. Not every team can sign a star first baseman, but everyone needs a flock of middle-inning arms. There are nine innings every game, and starters don’t pitch as many frames as they used to, and – well, you get the idea, there are a ton of reasons to go out and find some innings, even if you’re not planning on winning 257 games like the Dodgers or overthrowing the established order of things like the Blue Jays.
To that end, the Cubs signed three relievers yesterday, and the Angels signed two of their own. Chicago gave Daniel Norris one year and $1.75 million plus incentives, David Robertson one year and $3.5 million plus incentives, and Mychal Givens one year and $5 million plus incentives. For their part, the Angels signed Archie Bradley for one year and $3.75 million, but also went up-market and signed MVP vote-getter Ryan Tepera to a two-year, $14 million deal. Read the rest of this entry »
The Angels made a low-key move over the weekend, re-signing catcher Kurt Suzuki to a one-year contract worth $1.75 million. The 38-year-old veteran hit .224/.294/.342 over 72 games in 2021 with a 76 wRC+ and -0.4 WAR.
While Suzuki never quite fulfilled the promise he showed in the majors as a surprisingly competent catcher at a young age in Oakland, he’s carved out an impressive career, now at 16 seasons, based on being everyone’s emergency backstop. Don’t have a tantalizing in-house option? Suzuki was always on call, ready and willing to put up a win or so over 350 plate appearances, and at a reasonable price. That’s easier said than done; he’s now 34th all-time in games at catcher, alongside a lot of far bigger names.
Suzuki’s role with the Angels will be a little lighter as he approaches the end of his career. The Angels don’t need him to take a significant chunk of a timeshare, as Max Stassi’s 2021 season ought to have put the question of just who the starter is at a firm conclusion. The Angels are rather thin at backstop, with the catching spots in the high minors likely to be largely filled with non-roster invitees like Chad Wallach. There’s one exception here in Matt Thaiss, who was moved back to catcher last season, his original position he played in college. But the Angels are rightly concerned about having Thaiss as the primary backup just a few months after his return to the position. If they really want to see if he can be a competent catcher — and they should — he likely needs more playing time than he would receive as Stassi’s backup. Read the rest of this entry »
