The Giants made two acquisitions Tuesday evening, signing pitcher Kevin Gausman to a one-year contract and acquiring infielders Zack Cozart and Will Wilson from the Los Angeles Angels for future considerations.

These moves aren’t quite as earth-shattering as the Gerrit Cole signing, but both have short term upside for the Giants, which is consistent with the team’s goal of not completely gutting the roster while rebuilding.

Kevin Gausman is a long-term favorite of mine, and the $9 million the Giants will pay him in 2020 strikes me as a reasonable risk to take given the upside he represents. His stint with the Braves in 2019 is one he’d be happy to forget thanks to the 3-7, 6.19 ERA line he put up in 16 starts. It’s very easy to lose sight of the fact that his 4.20 FIP was nearly two runs better than his actual ERA, which was inflated by a .344 BABIP. Gausman’s strikeout rate had faded in recent years, dipping to a lackluster 7.3 K/9 in 2018, so his 9.6 K/9 in Atlanta was roughly a 30% improvement, which generally portends pleasant results rather than what actually happened.

When looking at Gausman’s 2019 hit data, the ZiPS projection system expects a BABIP of .309 rather than his actual .334. That’s still on the high side, but is enough to drop his batting average against in Atlanta from .290 to .252. Batters actually had the lowest exit velocity against Gausman since 2015 at 86.9 mph, which partially explains why even a struggling Gausman didn’t see his homer rate tick up. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I had some fun putting Austin Hedges into generic NL and AL lineups. It wouldn’t have been fun for those lineups, of course: Austin Hedges is a terrible hitter! He cost lineups something like 30 runs over a full season, and that’s with him replacing the worst hitter on the team.

So while the mental gymnastics of seeing how much damage Hedges would do was fun, it was a macabre kind of amusement. Look how bad your team could be at offense without being worse at baseball overall! That doesn’t really get the people going.

With this lineup approximating tool assembled, though, there’s no reason to limit its use to Hedges. Instead, let’s put Mike Trout in some lineups — all over lineups — and see if we can create some fun statlines.

I’ll be honest, this exercise started with me wondering what the Astros would look like with Trout. So to start, I plugged Trout into the Astros’ regular lineup. Their team now looks like this:

First of all, hoo boy. That’s almost too hot to print. I wasn’t really sure where to put everybody; I briefly considered having Altuve bat seventh, and it didn’t even look all that wrong, which should tell you everything you need to know about how good the lineup is. (I left Chirinos in as the catcher because I’m using 2019 season stats for this exercise, but that hardly matters to the results.) Read the rest of this entry »

The Royals aren’t known for their analytics department. They have one, of course. It’s not as though the organization is the Flintstones while everyone else is the Jetsons. That said, they’re still viewed as being old-school. In the eyes of many, scouting still rules the roost in Kansas City.

Just how true is that perception? According to the team’s longtime general manager, it’s far less accurate than it once was. Which isn’t to say that Dayton Moore has cast aside his roots in an attempt to become something he’s not. What he’s done is adapt to the changing times.

“My background is my background,” Moore told me at last month’s GM Meetings. “I’m not going to be ashamed of that. I grew up in a very traditional way. I grew up as a coach. I grew up as a scout. But the game has changed since I came to Kansas City in 2006.”

Moore remembers meeting with, among others, saber-smart baseball scribe Bradford Doolittle. That “created a pathway to us developing an understanding of analytics.” He went on to hire Michael Groopman as a baseball operations assistant in 2008, then promote him to Director of Baseball Operations/Analytics in 2015. In Moore’s words, Groopman “came in and built our analytics program.” Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2020 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.

Bobby Abreu could do just about everything. A five-tool player with dazzling speed, a sweet left-handed stroke, and enough power to win a Home Run Derby, he was also one of the game’s most patient, disciplined hitters, able to wear down a pitcher and unafraid to hit with two strikes. While routinely reaching traditional seasonal plateaus — a .300 batting average (six times), 20 homers (nine times), 30 steals (six times), 100 runs scored and batted in (eight times apiece) — he was nonetheless a stathead favorite for his ability to take a walk (100 or more eight years in a row) and his high on-base percentages (.400 or better eight times). And he was durable, playing 151 games or more in 13 straight seasons. “To me, Bobby’s Tony Gwynn with power,” said Phillies hitting coach Hal McRae in 1999.

“Bobby was way ahead of his time [with] regards to working pitchers,” said his former manager Larry Bowa when presenting him for induction into the Phillies Wall of Fame earlier this year. “In an era when guys were swinging for the fences, Bobby never strayed from his game. Because of his speed, a walk would turn into a double. He was cool under pressure, and always in control of his at-bats. He was the best combination of power, speed, and patience at the plate.” Read the rest of this entry »

In early June of 2012, my friend Ryan and I drove south on the Pennsylvania Turnpike to Wilmington, Delaware for the first half of a Carolina League doubleheader, because Dylan Bundy was matched up against Yordano Ventura. The two were so dominant that the seven-inning game was over in an hour and a half, and we had time to hightail it back to the Lehigh Valley for the second game of a doubleheader there (Mark Prior pitched in relief for Pawtucket). Afterward, a scout who now works for a team in a national capacity told me he thought Bundy, who was 19 at the time, could have pitched in the big leagues right then.

Bundy would reach the majors later that year, however briefly, before a rash of injuries would prevent him from pitching in Baltimore again until 2016. It was an ironic twist in what is perhaps this decade’s greatest baseball “what if?” career, because when the Orioles drafted Bundy in 2011, they asked him to scrap his dominant cutter in order to keep him healthy. This was the equivalent of baseball pseudoscience, an old wives’ tale. We were still in the dark ages of player development, and perhaps no dungeon was more medieval than Baltimore’s.

I’m not here to assign blame to anyone, nor would I call Bundy’s career to this point — 7.2 WAR over four full seasons, basically a No. 4/5 starter — a failure, but in high school, Bundy was throwing 100 mph and had a 70- or 80-grade cutter and curveball which, if you classify his pitches a certain way, is basically what Gerrit Cole works with right now. Through some combination of incompetent player development and sheer bad luck, Bundy went from a dominant, polished high schooler with three elite pitches to an oft-injured, low-90s righty who, for a while, used his changeup most often among secondaries. Read the rest of this entry »

Kole Calhoun stood at his locker near the close of the 2019 season and talked about appreciating every moment of his eight seasons in Anaheim, knowing that any day could have been his last day. A few months later, the Angels declined his $14 million contract option. He departs Los Angeles having played a little bit of left and a smidgen of center, but mostly the Angels kept Kalhoun sequestered to right field, where in 2019 he hacked fiendishly amid frequent swing adjustments. His final season with the Angels produced inconsistency in his monthly outputs, as well as a new career high in strikeout rate (25.6 percent) and a modest 108 wRC+.

Calhoun is a member of the Fraternity of Less Effective Outfielders the Angels Have Put Next to Mike Trout. There have been many others over the years, placed out there in the corners beside the reigning AL MVP: Vernon Wells, Torii Hunter, Josh Hamilton, Ben Revere. And in 2019, Trout’s partners in the grass were Kole Calhoun and Justin Upton. Calhoun is gone, but Upton, another veteran who is not as good as Mike Trout, will remain. He doesn’t need to be as good as Trout to be of use, something that has to be true for him, since it’s true for every other player in the league. The question is, can Upton still be good, despite the obstacles ahead of him, and the comparisons to the outfielders around him?

Upton, at 32 years old, is a once fearsome slugger from the National League whose turf toe, wonky knee, and brief, passionate encounter with an outfield wall left him hurt and unproductive for most of 2019. Upton will be baseball’s active leader in errors among outfielders in 2020, and he may be entering the part of his career in which expectations are lowered, especially given how he got beat up so much and only made it into 63 games last season — the first time he’s played in fewer than 100 since 2008.

His durability has been one of his strengths; that, and his ability to do this. At 30 years old, he was worth 3.8 WAR for the Angels before baseball sent him into a wall this past season, so it’s not foolhardy to think Upton could be one of the Angels’ “new” contributors moving forward, or at least play a key role, even though he ended 2019 with a shot in the knee and a pair of crutches. Read the rest of this entry »

When I was a little kid, I used to love reading Guinness World Records books. My childhood bookshelf at my parents’ house reflects this admittedly odd curiosity: There are several of the, I don’t know, adult(?) versions of the book from the mid-2000s — the ones that are text-heavy and include bummer-ish topics like war and crime. But then there are the “kids” versions, the ones whose pages are filled with large portraits of record-breakers, with little bar graphs in the corner to show what their performance looks like against the competition.

One of those kids’ books I had included a page dedicated to “Most MVP Awards” won in baseball. I remember seeing Barry Bonds‘ big smile, resting vibrant next to one of those graphs that showed just how transcendent he was. He’d won seven by the time this book published; the other names listed had won just three each. I knew Bonds, because I’d watched him often. The other names, I knew only from history books — names like Mantle, DiMaggio and Foxx. Pujols and Rodriguez hadn’t yet joined this class of three-time winners, hadn’t gotten the privilege of being immortalized as one of those short, stubby bars next to the tall structure looming above Bonds’ name on the tiny illustration intended to tell me who was the best ever at playing my favorite sport.

At the time I picked up this particular 2005 edition of my beloved book series, Mike Trout was just 13 years old. On Thursday, at the age of 28, Trout received the honor of joining this very silly-looking bar graph:

Read the rest of this entry »

In the third of a six-part series — you can see the AL East here and the AL Central here — I’ll be highlighting each team’s most notable free agents and how it could fill the resulting void on the roster. A player’s rank on our recently released Top 50 Free Agents list, along with Kiley McDaniel’s contract estimates from that exercise, are listed where relevant. In some cases, the team already has a capable replacement ready to step in. In others, it’s clear the team will either attempt to re-sign their player or look to the trade or free agent markets for help. The remaining cases are somewhere in between, with in-house candidates who might be the answer, but aren’t such obvious everyday players to keep the team from shopping around for better options.

Here’s a look at the American League West.

Houston Astros | Depth Chart | Payroll

Gerrit Cole, SP
FanGraphs Top 50 Free Agent Ranking: 1
Kiley McDaniel’s contract projection: 7 years, $242M

Wade Miley, SP
FanGraphs Top 50 Free Agent Ranking: 32
Kiley McDaniel’s contract projection: 1 year, $9M

It would be impossible to replace Cole, who might just be the best pitcher on the planet right now. With a projected payroll that is currently above $200 million for next season, the Astros do not appear to be in a strong position to re-sign the 29-year-old. But that doesn’t put them in desperation mode, by any means.

The return of Lance McCullers Jr., who missed all of 2019 recovering from Tommy John surgery, will help to offset the potential loss of Cole and give the Astros a formidable trio to lead their rotation along with Justin Verlander and Zack Greinke. Pitching depth is also strong with Jose Urquidy in line for a rotation spot and several others capable of helping out in 2020. But considering that Verlander and Greinke will be 37 and 36, respectively, on Opening Day, and McCullers hasn’t pitched in a game since last October, they aren’t expected to stand pat this offseason. Read the rest of this entry »

Please note, this posting contains multiple positions. All positions are paid.

Position: Baseball Operations Internship

Description:
The Los Angeles Angels Baseball Operations department is seeking passionate individuals to join their team for the 2020 season. Applicants can come from any discipline or background, as long as you have the curiosity, open-mindedness, and perseverance to take on difficult problems.

As a Baseball Operations Intern, you will be fully immersed in their department, and given the resources to learn, grow, and develop over the course of the season. The Angels’ goal is to find people with the necessary skills and traits to become long-term members of the department.

Examples of things you will do during the internship:

• Contribute to the ML advance scouting process
• Assist with preparation for the 2020 MLB Draft
• Develop visualizations and other mechanisms for communicating information to Baseball Operations personnel
• Perform player evaluations, combining statistics, video, and other data sources
• Assist with special projects as assigned

You should have:

• Creativity, strong attention to detail, and a growth mindset
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills
• Ability to work as part of a team on complex projects
• Willingness to both teach others and learn new techniques
• A flexible schedule with availability to work nights, weekends, and holidays

Physical Demands:

• Ability to sit for extended periods of time
• Ability to traverse office and stadium frequently
• Ability to work in inclement weather (when in stadium)

In addition to handling the essential functions of the Angels’ internship, the team desires counter-intuitive thinkers who will take initiative and explore new research opportunities. Previous interns have developed ideas that have changed the way the organization approaches important challenges and they hope you will bring the same mindset with you.

The Angels believe that diversity contributes to a more enriched collective perspective and a better decision-making process. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

To Apply:
Please provide (1) a current resume and (2) answer the following two questions in no more than 250 words each. These requirements are an integral part of your application. Incomplete applications may not be considered. Application deadline is 8:59 pm PST on Tuesday, November 5, 2019.

1. Detail a project or experience that you have worked on that you are proud of. Do you have any takeaways from this experience that have helped prepare you for this role? The project or experience does not need to be baseball-related.

2. What is the area in which you feel you need the most improvement? What are some steps you could take to improve upon this weakness?

Applications should be completed through this link.

Position: Player Development Internship

The Los Angeles Angels Player Development department is seeking passionate individuals to join their team for the 2020 season. Applicants can come from any discipline or background as long as you have the curiosity, open-mindedness, and perseverance to take on difficult problems.

As a Player Development Intern, you will be fully immersed in their department, and given the resources to learn, grow, and develop over the course of the season. Our goal is to find people with the necessary skills and traits to become long-term members of the department. The internship is based out of the Angels Minor League Complex in Tempe, Arizona and begins in early January.

Examples of things you will do during the internship:

• Collaborate with Player Development personnel to create, organize, and develop tools to support processes and players throughout the year
• Develop visualizations and other mechanisms for communicating information to Player Development personnel and minor league players
• Perform player evaluations combining statistics, video, and other data sources
• Assist with special projects as assigned across Player Development and other areas of Baseball Operations (i.e. Amateur Draft, Trade Deadline)
• Contribute to day-to-day operations of the Player Development department

You should have:

• Interest in the latest trends and research in Player Development
• Creativity, strong attention to detail, and a growth mindset
• Excellent interpersonal and communication skills
• Ability to work as part of a team on complex projects
• Strong willingness to work with individuals from a variety of linguistic, cultural, and socioeconomic backgrounds
• Enthusiasm to both teach others and learn new techniques
• A flexible schedule with availability to work nights, weekends, and holidays

Physical Demands:

• Ability to sit for extended periods of time
• Ability to traverse office and stadium frequently
• Ability to work in inclement weather (when in stadium)

In addition to handling the essential functions of their internship, the Angels desire counter-intuitive thinkers who will take initiative and explore new research opportunities. Previous interns have developed ideas that have changed the way the organization approaches important challenges and they hope you will bring the same mindset with you.

The Angels believe that diversity contributes to a more enriched collective perspective and a better decision-making process. All qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, gender, gender identity or expression, sexual orientation, national origin, genetics, disability, age, or veteran status, or any other characteristic protected by law.

To Apply:
Please provide (1) a current resume and (2) answer the following two questions in no more than 250 words each. These requirements are an integral part of your application. Incomplete applications may not be considered. Application deadline is 8:59 pm PST on Tuesday, November 5, 2019.

1. Detail a project or experience that you have worked on that you are proud of. Do you have any takeaways from this experience that have helped prepare you for this role? The project or experience does not need to be baseball-related.

2. What is the area in which you feel you need the most improvement? What are some steps you could take to improve upon this weakness?

3. What is your level of fluency in English and Spanish?

Applications should be completed through this link.

The content in this posting was created and provided solely by the Los Angeles Angels.

“Put all your eggs in one basket… the handle’s going to break. Then all you’ve got is scrambled eggs.” – Nora Roberts

For the Los Angeles Angels, 2019 looked a lot like most of the past decade. Despite starting off the roster with the best player they’ve ever had and probably the best player they ever will have in Mike Trout, Los Angeles finished below .500 for the fourth consecutive season.

In some ways, the Angels are baseball’s least interesting team. The organization’s 2002-2009 salad days are long in the past, and while these Angels are never spectacularly awful — 2019 was the club’s first 90-loss season since 1999 — it’s a team that’s blandly assembled to create indifferent results. Being truly awful would have at least elicited a kind of macabre fascination. But these Los Angeles Angels appear to be a franchise focused on blithely existing.

The Setup

Thanks to the presence of Trout, the Angels essentially start off every baseball season with a three-win head start over any team in baseball. Beginning every year with a guy who puts up nine- or 10-win seasons like clockwork is an amazing boon for a franchise. Suddenly, the challenge of building a 90-win team is simply assembling a .500 team using the other 24 players on the roster. It’s a bit like getting Gordon Ramsay for your elementary school’s bake sale; if you can’t sell cookies to your neighbors with the most famous chef in the world in your corner, you might want to double-check the recipe.

And it’s not as if those 10 wins are collected at a price that cripples the budget. With an average salary under $36 million for the next dozen years, the Angels couldn’t have gotten a better deal on Trout if he was bought in a shady marketplace after falling off a truck. Read the rest of this entry »