The Mets missed out on signing Trevor Bauer, and they didn’t sign J.T. Realmuto or George Springer, either. That’s not to say they’ve had an unsuccessful winter — their blockbuster deal for Francisco Lindor and Carlos Carrasco significantly upgraded the team, and they’ve made other solid moves as well, but center field remains an area of need. Jackie Bradley Jr. is clearly still the top center fielder available, and would make for a sensible fit, but the Mets aren’t the only team pursuing him. Over the weekend, they made a smaller-scale addition signing center fielder Albert Almora Jr. to a one-year deal worth $1.25 million plus incentives. The question is whether that constitutes an insurance policy or an all-too-familiar half-measure.

Almora is best remembered as the player who scored the go-ahead run for the Cubs in the 10th inning of Game 7 of the 2016 World Series. Pinch-running for Kyle Schwarber after a leadoff single, he alertly tagged up and took second base on a Kris Bryant fly ball to deep center field, and came home on Ben Zobrist’s double. He was a 22-year-old rookie at that point, a 2012 first-round pick who had arrived in midsummer and made a solid showing as a bench player. After the Cubs won the World Series, they let Dexter Fowler depart as a free agent and handed the keys to center field to Almora.

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It was bound to happen once the odds shifted in favor of baseball starting on time, but the offseason has ramped up quickly over the last week. Some of the top free agents have come off the board, and a five-player trade, some smaller signings and all sorts of 40-man roster shuffling took place. Buried among it all was a quick move by the Cardinals on Thursday, as they sent outfielder Dexter Fowler to the Angels per Jon Heyman, with St. Louis picking up all but $1.75 million of his 2021 salary.

It’s not a transaction that really moves the needle for either team in terms of the standings. And it’s not a transaction that creates any kind of real financial flexibility for future moves. Instead, this is a deal that illustrates how one player may fall on different points on the insurance vs. opportunity spectrum depending on which uniform he’s suiting up in.

I’m not here to argue that Dexter Fowler is that good now. He wasn’t a star necessarily, but he spent a nice-sized chunk of the last decade firmly in the “very good” category. He got on base and had some sneaky pop, and from 2011-17 averaged a .370 OBP with an .800-plus OPS and a 116 wRC+. And while he was certainly athletic enough to be a good center fielder, but he’s never been a good defender. His jumps and routes have always been substandard, and his habit of catching the ball at his chest has driven fundamentals-focused coaches insane for 13 years now, though he at least does tend to catch it. I remember Fowler’s 2014 campaign with the Astros and how I’d wince every time the ball was hit his way. I’d hoped to find a video to illustrate this tendency, and it didn’t take long. I thought I might need to go through a few videos from MLB’s vault to uncover a good example, but it was right there in the first video provided, his last putout of the 2020 season.

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For years, there’s been one refrain in Anaheim: get Mike Trout some pitching help. The last time an Angels pitcher accrued 4 or more WAR was Garrett Richards in 2014, and there’s been a carousel of arms in the half-decade since. Yesterday, the Angels wholly misunderstood that refrain, sending Jahmai Jones to Baltimore in exchange for professionally cromulent starter Alex Cobb.

Cobb, who is in the last year of a four-year, $57 million contract, reached free agency after years of quiet competence. In the three intervening years, he’s alternated between being competent or hurt. He gets to it in a strange way — few strikeouts, fewer walks, and enough grounders to blot out the sun — but it adds up to something a little worse than average but significantly better than replacement level.

For the Angels, that may or may not be a meaningful upgrade to start the season. Shohei Ohtani will return in 2021, but certainly not for the whole season. When he does, he’ll likely be part of a six-man rotation. The top three starters will be Andrew Heaney, Dylan Bundy, and new acquisition José Quintana. That leaves two spots for other pitchers. Before the acquisition of Cobb, that meant Griffin Canning and Patrick Sandoval. Both are interesting, albeit unproven, options. Read the rest of this entry »

Mitch Keller has only thrown 69-and-a-third big-league innings, and he’s already had a remarkable career. The baseball gods are a big reason why. In his 2019 rookie season, the now-24-year-old Pittsburgh Pirates right-hander had a 7.13 ERA to go with a 3.19 FIP, and this past season he had a 2.91 ERA to go with a 6.75 FIP.

Hello, BABIP.

In an almost-inexplicable quirk of fate, Keller followed up a .475 BABIP — the highest one-season mark in MLB history — with a .104 BABIP in 2020. No pitcher who threw 20-or-more innings in last year’s pandemic-truncated campaign had a smaller percentage of balls put in play against him fall safely to the turf. This happened with an average exit velocity of 88.5 mph, which was higher than the 87.6 he’d allowed in 2019.

Ben Lindbergh wrote about Keller’s snake-bit season for The Ringer last spring, and the conversation they had prior to publication is what brought the data to the fore.

“I remember getting off that phone call and looking it up myself,” said Keller. “I was like, ‘Oh, my goodness. That’s crazy.’ I knew that I had a high BABIP, but I had no idea it was the highest in history. Once he told me, it wasn’t like I was coming back to the dugout thinking, ‘Man, I think I’m having some bad luck.’ It was actually on paper, as a stat. It was, ‘No, seriously. I was having bad luck.” Read the rest of this entry »

Don Sutton did not have the flash of Sandy Koufax, or the intimidating presence of Don Drysdale. He lacked the overpowering fastball of Nolan Ryan, and didn’t fill his mantel with Cy Young awards the way that Tom Seaver or Steve Carlton did. He never won a World Series or threw a no-hitter. Yet Sutton earned a spot in the Hall of Fame alongside those more celebrated hurlers just the same. He was one of the most durable pitchers in baseball history, as dependable as a Swiss watch.

Alas, durability does not confer immortality. Sutton died on Monday at the age of 75, after a long battle with cancer. Son Daron Sutton, a former pitcher and broadcaster in his own right, shared the news on Twitter on Tuesday:

Saddened to share that my dad passed away in his sleep last night. He worked as hard as anyone I’ve ever known and he treated those he encountered with great respect…and he took me to work a lot. For all these things, I am very grateful. Rest In Peace. pic.twitter.com/cvlDRRdVXa

— Daron Sutton (@lifeisgreatsut) January 19, 2021

Sutton is already the second Hall of Famer to pass away in 2021. His former manager, Tommy Lasorda, died on January 7. Both deaths follow a year in which a record seven Hall of Famers died. Friends, we’ve got to stop meeting like this.

In a career that spanned 23 years and was bookended by stints with the Dodgers (1966-80, ’88), with detours to the Astros (’81-82), Brewers (’82-84), A’s (’85), and Angels (’85-87), Sutton started 756 games, more than any pitcher besides Young or Ryan. The wiry, frizzy-haired righty listed at 6-foot-1 and 185 pounds not only avoided the Disabled List until his final season at age 43, he never missed a turn due to injury or illness until a sore elbow sidelined him after his penultimate start in the summer of 1988. Upon retiring, he went on to a successful second career as a broadcaster, primarily with the Braves.

Like Lasorda, Sutton occupied a special place in this young Dodger fan’s life. I was nine years old and riding in the way-back of my family’s maroon-and-faux-wood-panel Chevy Caprice station wagon on a road trip to California on August 10, 1979 when my father conjured up a radio broadcast of the Dodgers game. It was my introduction to the golden voice of Vin Scully, who shared booth duties with Jerry Doggett, calling Sutton’s franchise record-setting 50th shutout, a 9-0 victory over the Giants fueled by a Derrel Thomas grand slam and Mickey Hatcher’s first career homer. You could look it up. Thereafter, no matter where he roamed, I always rooted for Sutton, and grew to love the wit and brutal honesty that accompanied his workmanlike approach and made him eminently quotable, during and after his career.

“Comparing me to Sandy Koufax is like comparing Earl Scheib to Michelangelo,” he once said after surpassing his former teammate on some franchise record list. Read the rest of this entry »

Another day gone by, another former Cubs starting pitcher joining another team. Three weeks ago, Chicago shipped away its ace by trading Yu Darvish to the Padres for Zach Davies and a quartet of prospects. On Monday, it watched two more rotation members find new employers in free agency, as Jon Lester signed with Washington and Tyler Chatwood inked a deal with Toronto. One day later, a fourth veteran starter is officially out the door, with left-hander José Quintana signing a one-year, $8-million contract to join the Angels, as reported by The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal.

Quintana, who will turn 32 next week, pitched in just four games in 2020 while dealing with thumb and lat injuries. That’s hardly the norm, though: The thumb injury was a freak laceration suffered while he was washing dishes and resulted in the first IL stint of his nine-year career. Otherwise, he’s been the portrait of durability, averaging more than 192 innings per season from 2013 to ’19, with his lowest total being 171 in that last year. That durability would be welcome in Los Angeles, which has been notoriously unable to keep pitchers on the mound: Since 2017, just two Angels starters have eclipsed 150 innings in a season.

Being able to pile up innings is a valuable trait by itself, but there is more to Quintana than quantity. In the middle of the last decade, he was sneakily one of the best pitchers in baseball, with his 18.2 WAR from 2014 to ’17 ranking sixth in that span. It took a bit for people to take notice of him, though, because the White Sox teams he pitched for didn’t win many games, and because he was overshadowed in his own rotation by Chris Sale. Since writers and analysts love to talk about which guys they supposedly aren’t talking about enough, Quintana eventually became a staple of columns decrying his underappreciation. By the time the White Sox traded him to the Cubs in 2017, Jeff Sullivan theorized in this space that, to whatever degree Quintana actually was underrated, he would cease to be if he excelled while pitching for a pennant chaser.

Not much has gone according to plan for the Cubs since then, though. The team’s young core never made it back to the World Series, and the general manager, skipper, and a lengthy list of key players have left the organization. The prospects they traded to sustain a contender during those years, meanwhile, have blossomed in their new organizations, including Eloy Jiménez and, to a lesser extent, Dylan Cease, two of the players the Cubs exchanged for Quintana. Jiménez is already terrorizing pitchers in the majors, and Cease still has plenty of potential in his arm. It might have been easier for Cubs fans if Quintana were simultaneously earning Cy Young votes and making All-Star teams, but he did neither of those things, and by falling short of those lofty expectations, his acquisition gets labeled as a historically bad move for the franchise.

The reality, though, is that Quintana was still pretty good during his time on the North Side. He was the Cubs’ best pitcher over the remainder of the 2017 season, and though the following year was his worst as a major leaguer, he still managed a 4.03 ERA, 4.43 FIP and 1.7 WAR. His 2019 season looked more like his White Sox days, as he posted 3.5 WAR, a 3.80 FIP and a 4.68 ERA, the latter of which was hurt by his left-on-base rate being nearly nine points lower than his career average. Last year was a lost one for Quintana, but as disappointed as some Cubs fans may be in his tenure with the club, his numbers haven’t deteriorated over the years the way some would think.

Quintana was regarded as a model of consistency with the White Sox, and those days aren’t over. He still succeeds with the same general mix of pitches he always has, and his velocity is steady.

Yet Quintana’s contract with the Angels suggests skepticism within the industry. He got the same deal as Robbie Ray, who is coming off a 6.50 FIP in 51.2 innings last year, and fell a few million short of Corey Kluber, Drew Smyly and Mike Minor. Those pitchers arguably possess greater upside, but it’s still surprising to see his durability and consistency not get him a larger reward. In his Top 50 Free Agents list, Craig Edwards suggested one year and $11 million for him, while the crowdsource median handed him two years and $20 million. The vast majority of free agents have been able to beat their projections this winter, some by a lot, but Quintana fell well short.

The beneficiary of that is Los Angeles, which is perpetually in search of quality pitching help. Angels starters had the second-worst ERA in baseball in 2020 after missing out on the Gerrit Cole sweepstakes last winter and getting only five outs out of Shohei Ohtani before he was shut down for the year. Dylan Bundy proved to be a good pick-up from Baltimore, and Griffin Canning and Andrew Heaney put together solid seasons, but others like Julio Teheran and Patrick Sandoval struggled badly at the back of the rotation.

Quintana will slot in somewhere in the middle of what manager Joe Maddon says will be a six-man rotation in 2021, and his performance could hinge on which direction the Angels’ defense tilts behind him. In 2019, Statcast’s Outs Above Average metric ranked Los Angeles fifth in baseball. Last year, it was dead last. The infield combination of David Fletcher at second, Anthony Rendon at third and newly-acquired José Iglesias at shortstop has the potential to be very good, but the outfield is less certain. Justin Upton is on old legs, Mike Trout’s defense can fluctuate wildly from year to year, and neither Jo Adell nor Jared Walsh look like good fielders in right. Quintana can be quite successful in Los Angeles, but his style of pitching will put some extra responsibility for his numbers in the hands of an uneven group of fielders.

Even if the Angels can get vintage Quintana, they could still have trouble reaching the playoffs if he’s the last starter they add this winter. Trevor Bauer is the most obvious fit here, since he’s far and away the best pitcher available in free agency. But if he’s outside their intended price range, the team could still try to use the trade market to add to the top of its rotation, the way it did with Bundy a year ago. I think Quintana is still better than he’s getting credit for, and better than this contract would indicate. But like in Chicago, the problems in Los Angeles are too big for him to solve by himself.

The Angels added some catching depth over the weekend, signing Kurt Suzuki to a one-year contract worth $1.5 million. This will be the 15th season of Suzuki’s career, his longevity the result of an unusually late offensive peak in his mid-30s that has largely compensated for his defensive shortcomings. In 129 plate appearances in 2020, Suzuki hit .270/.349/.396, a respectable triple-slash but also amounting to his lowest wRC+ since 2016, his final season with the Twins.

As I showed through projections last week, the Angels look like they’re in that zone where each additional win or loss has a larger-than-average effect on a team’s playoff destiny. Add in the general desire for a team with a $180 million luxury tax number — more than half from just four players — not to have that payroll go to waste, and you have a formula for being aggressive in adding plausible Plans B to the roster. And really, $1.5 million is just about peanuts, no matter how MLB will suggest otherwise.

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The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2021 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.

Earlier in this series, I profiled 2021 Hall of Fame candidates Tim Hudson and Barry Zito, who together made up two-thirds of the “Big Three” starters who helped the Moneyball-era A’s make four straight postseason appearances from 2000-03 despite their shoestring budgets. Inevitably, the economic realities of playing in Oakland forced general manager Billy Beane to trade away Hudson and Mark Mulder, the third member of the Big Three, as they grew more expensive, and to let Zito depart via free agency.

In doing so, Beane was able to replenish his roster, keeping the A’s competitive for a few more years before heading into rebuilding, and then repeating the cycle. The two players in this installment of my One-and-Done series were part of that endless process. Dan Haren was one of three players acquired from the Cardinals in exchange for Mulder in December 2004, and a key starter on the AL West-winning A’s in ’06. Nick Swisher, the team’s 2002 top first-round pick — compensation for losing center fielder Johnny Damon to free agency — was the starting left fielder on that ’06 squad. Both players were subsequently traded away in the winter of 2007-08, with two players acquired from the Diamondbacks in exchange for Haren, namely lefty Brett Anderson and first baseman Chris Carter, contributing to their 2012 AL West champions, and one player acquired from the White Sox for Swisher, namely lefty Gio González, traded again to net catcher Derek Norris and left-hander Tommy Milone, contributors to the team’s 2012-14 run. And the cycle continued… 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 »

The offseason remains slow, but the reliever market saw some moves this week, with a trio of free agents scoring new contracts. Greg Holland signed a one-year, $2.75 million deal to come back to the Royals, who continue to act aggressively this winter. Former Brewers lefty Alex Claudio signed a one-year, $1.25 million commitment to join the Angels, who recently traded for closer Raisel Iglesias. And speaking of the Angels, Keynan Middleton signed a one-year contract with the Mariners, who also added Rafael Montero via a trade with Texas this week.

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