Back in April, 23 of our writers and contributors made predictions about the 2022 season. When guessing who would be the AL Rookie of the Year, nine different players were named, with Bobby Witt Jr. and Julio Rodríguez leading the pack. Not found among those nine names was the starting shortstop for the Astros, a rookie faced with the difficult task of replacing incumbent Carlos Correa, who had gone to the Twins. Jeremy Peña wasn’t pegged as a ROY frontrunner, but for much of the early season, he looked like a sudden superstar. However, he’s struggled offensively in recent months, raising some questions about whether the real Peña is the player with the .878 OPS through mid-May, the one with a .586 OPS since the All-Star Game, or somewhere in the middle.

Back in May, Witt, the preseason favorite, wasn’t even in the top 15; Rodríguez only put up a .544 OPS over April; and Adley Rutschman was days away from even debuting in the majors. While Peña wasn’t making Astros fans actually forget about Correa, he certainly did his best to alleviate any lingering worries about their former franchise building block heading to the AL Central. But since May 17, he has seen his control over the AL leaderboard disappear:

That’s not to say that Peña hasn’t continued to be a solid overall player, but his largest contributions in recent months have been with leather rather than wood. With his range measured at five runs above average at shortstop by Statcast’s RAA and a total of nine runs over all facets of defense by our estimate, he hasn’t disappointed defensively, which has enabled him to remain a legitimate starter even with his offense dropping to disappointing levels. But he’s a far more exciting player with his spring offense, so what went wrong there? Read the rest of this entry »

Maybe this isn’t charitable, but I picture Alex Bregman as being a lot like me. See, when I play a game – whether a sport or a board game – I’m always thinking about the most efficient way to win, what game actions are the most valuable, and how I can do those things more often. The best games don’t have clear best options at all times, but there’s almost always some strategy you can lean on to get ahead, and I greatly enjoy figuring that strategy out.

Bregman treats baseball like I treat Taverns of Tiefenthal, my favorite board game. He knows what the most valuable things to do in baseball are, and he does them more frequently than everyone else. If you look at his Statcast page, you’ll come away unimpressed. Hard hit rate? He’s in the 42nd percentile across the majors, below average. Think that hard hit rate is misleading? He’s average when it comes to maximum exit velocity (53rd percentile), barrel rate (50th), and even average exit velocity (59th). He’s well below average in sprint speed. It doesn’t sound like he should be an outstanding hitter, at least by the measurables.

Early in Bregman’s career, that would have been a laughable claim. He totaled 16.2 WAR on the back of a 162 wRC+ between 2018 and ’19, staking a claim as one of the best hitters in the game. But in the next two years, both injury-shortened, he fell back to earth. His .261/.353/.431 line was good for a 115 wRC+, a far cry from his earlier form. Was he a creation of the juiced ball? Sign stealing? Did pitchers figure him out? Read the rest of this entry »

Speculating about the playoffs in August always feels strange. The regular season isn’t over. It isn’t nearly over, either – the 45 or so games remaining on each team’s schedule will change how we think about them. The best two records in baseball belong to the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Houston Astros right now, but some team could go 35-10 and wrest that title away from them.

Still, today I’m going to speculate about the playoffs. Whether the Dodgers and Astros hold onto their top spots or not, they’re both playoff locks – our Playoff Odds give them both 100% odds of reaching the postseason. In the past week, they’ve also each gotten rotten injury news that will affect their playoff rosters. So suspend your inherent skepticism of articles in August that talk about October as we consider the playoff impact of losing Walker Buehler and Michael Brantley. Read the rest of this entry »

Justin Verlander wasn’t quite at his best on Wednesday night, yielding three runs in six innings against the Rangers in Houston — his first time surrendering more than two runs since June 24. Even so, the 39-year-old righty continued an impressive comeback following nearly two full seasons lost to injuries — first a forearm strain and then Tommy John surgery. In fact, he leads the American League in both wins (15) and ERA (1.85), and while those don’t carry the same currency at FanGraphs as they do elsewhere, it’s not hard to imagine him adding a third Cy Young award to his trophy room if he keeps this up.

Verlander won the award for the first time in 2011, when he went 24-5 with a 2.40 ERA and 250 strikeouts in 251 innings; by leading the league in wins, strikeouts, and ERA, he also claimed the pitching triple crown and added the AL MVP award as well. Over the next seven seasons, he finished as the runner-up for the AL Cy Young three times (2012, ’16, and ’18) but also endured some ups and downs, including a 4.54-ERA season (2014), an injury-shortened one (2015), and a late-season trade to the Astros that helped him claim a World Series ring (2017), albeit on a team that was later sanctioned for its illegal electronic sign-stealing efforts.

After narrowly losing out to Blake Snell for the award in 2018, Verlander finally won another Cy Young in 2019, going 21-6 with a 2.58 ERA and an even 300 strikeouts; in the same game he reached that plateau, he also became the 18th pitcher to surpass the 3,000-strikeout milestone. It’s taken more than two years to follow that up, however. After a spring in which he suffered both lat and groin strains, Verlander underwent surgery to repair the latter shortly after Major League Baseball was forced to postpone Opening Day due to the COVID-19 pandemic. When he finally did take the mound roughly four months later for the Astros’ season opener, he suffered a forearm strain, and after experiencing pain during a simulated game while rehabbing, he was diagnosed with a torn UCL and underwent Tommy John surgery in late September, which cost him all of 2021. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s the day after the trade deadline, which always means one thing: baseball writers begrudgingly cleaning up their gross, sparkling-water-can-filled workspaces. Oh, wait, actually it means two things: that, and a flood of “who won the trading deadline” articles.

This year, I’m going to do something slightly different. I won’t claim that I’ve re-invented the wheel, but I’ve always thought that those winner/loser columns are too deterministic and don’t leave enough room for nuance. I thought about listing each team that made a trade as a winner, with a “maybe” appended to indicate that we don’t know what will happen in the future; if you really want to know who won and who lost, check back in October… or maybe in October of 2025. I thought about making each team a “loser (maybe)” for the same reason. In the end, I settled on some broad archetypes. I’ll throw a subjective grade on how much I like the move, and also endeavor to explain the risks around each team’s deadline. You can find all of our deadline coverage here. Let’s get started. Read the rest of this entry »

The Braves made their biggest headlines on Monday with the announcement of Austin Riley’s 10-year, $212 million extension, but they did make a pair of trades to shore up their roster in advance of Tuesday’s deadline. They fortified their rotation by acquiring righty Jake Odorizzi from the Astros, and added outfield depth by getting Robbie Grossman from the Tigers.

Both deals were single-player swaps. For the 32-year-old Odorizzi they sent 33-year-old lefty reliever Will Smith to the Astros, while for the 32-year-old Grossman they sent 20-year-old lefty prospect Kris Anglin to the Tigers.

After a season in which he was about league average in 23 starts and 104 innings for the Astros last year, Odorizzi has improved to a 3.75 ERA and 3.61 FIP in 12 starts this year, averaging exactly five innings per turn, and bouncing back from what initially looked like a season-ending ankle injury suffered while running towards first base against the Red Sox on May 16. At the time, there was concern that he had ruptured his Achilles or fractured his ankle, but he didn’t break anything, and the damage to his tendons and ligaments did not involve his Achilles and wasn’t nearly as serious as initially feared. He missed seven weeks, and since returning on July 4, he’s had rough starts against the Royals and A’s but also two seven-inning scoreless starts against the A’s (whom he’s faced in three of his five post-injury games) and Mariners, including a two-hit effort with a season-high eight strikeouts against Seattle on Sunday. Read the rest of this entry »

The Red Sox dealing free agent-to-be Christian Vázquez by the trade deadline felt inevitable after the team went 8–19 in July, and that parting came to pass on Monday evening, when the 31-year-old catcher was sent to the Astros in exchange for prospects Wilyer Abreu and Enmanuel Valdez. It was a bittersweet moment for both player and club; Boston’s ninth-round pick in the 2008 draft, Vázquez, a product of the Puerto Rico Baseball Academy, was the organization’s longest-tenured player.

Vázquez represents a meaningful offensive upgrade for the postseason-bound Astros. The contact-oriented right-handed hitter is slashing .282/.327/.432 with eight home runs and a 111 wRC+ in 318 plate appearances. Martín Maldonado, Houston’s primary catcher to this point in the season, is slashing just .173/.239/.342 with 10 home runs and a 66 wRC+ in 262 plate appearances. As good as Maldonado is defensively, an upgrade was in order.

Experience on the big stage augments the new arrival’s resume. Vázquez has played in 25 postseason games, including four in the 2018 World Series and 11 last year. His most impactful October moment came in Game 3 of the 2021 ALDS, when he walked off the Rays with an 11th-inning, Monster-clearing home run. Read the rest of this entry »

The Astros shook up their first base situation on Monday, acquiring 1B/DH Trey Mancini from the Orioles as part of a three-way trade that also included the Rays. Mancini, the longest-tenured player on Baltimore’s roster, was having a solid, if not spectacular, season, hitting .268/.347/.404 with 10 homers and 1.2 WAR in 92 games, with most of his playing time this season split between first base and designated hitter and an occasional appearance in a corner outfield role. He’ll be a free agent at the end of the season, though there is a $10 million mutual option. To land Mancini, the Astros sent outfielder Jose Siri to the Rays and pitcher Chayce McDermott to the O’s, with Tampa shipping pitcher Seth Johnson to Baltimore and Jayden Murray to Houston.

To look at this trade more easily, let’s separate it into three different transactions.

The Baltimore Orioles acquire pitchers Seth Johnson and Chayce McDermott for 1B/DH Trey Mancini

From a PR standpoint, there will likely be some sharp elbows thrown at the Orioles locally. Baltimore is having its first even marginally playoff-relevant season in a long while, and Mancini has been with the team through the entire process. As its veteran rebuild survivor, he played a similar role that Freddie Freeman did for the Braves while they went through their own painful renovations. His battle with colon cancer, diagnosed on his 28th birthday, and subsequent grand return after surgery and six months of chemotherapy only served to make him more beloved in town.

Basically, the on-field case for keeping Mancini and letting him walk at the end of the season involved a very “now” outlook for the team. It does make the Orioles a bit weaker over the next two months, but it’s only a major loss if you look at the consequences in a very binary fashion, in that Baltimore is in the wild card race with Mancini and out of it without him. Once you move past that, the calculus for whether a trade like this is a good idea comes out very differently. Read the rest of this entry »

While still focusing upon teams that meet the loose definition of contenders (a .500 record or Playoff Odds of at least 10%), and that have gotten about 0.6 WAR or less thus far — which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season — this year I have incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. Sometimes that may suggest that the team will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included them here because the team’s performance at that spot is worth a look.

As noted previously, some of these situations are more dire than others, particularly when taken in the context of the rest of their roster. I don’t expect every team to go out and track down an upgrade before the August 2 deadline, and in this batch in particular, I don’t get the sense that any of these teams have these positions atop their shopping lists. With catchers, framing and the less-quantifiable aspects of knowing a pitching staff make it easier for teams to talk themselves out of changing things up unless an injury situation has compromised their depth.

All statistics in this article are through July 26, though team won-loss records and Playoff Odds are through July 27.

Cardinals

Yadier Molina may be a future Hall of Famer, but his final major league season hasn’t gone smoothly. The 39-year-old backstop reported late to spring training due to personal reasons, then hit just .213/.225/.294 (46 wRC+) in 138 plate appearances before landing on the injured list with right knee inflammation in mid-June. With the team’s permission, he soon returned to his native Puerto Rico, a move that did not escape the notice of his teammates, who value his presence and leadership even when he’s not able to play up to his previous standards. Molina finally began a rehab assignment on Monday.

In Molina’s absence, the Cardinals have started Andrew Knizner behind the plate 51 times, and he’s reminded them that even by the standards of backup catchers, he leaves something to be desired. The 27-year-old has hit .199/.291/.248 (64 wRC+) and is 5.5 runs below average in our framing metric; his WARs have now been in the red for all four of his major league seasons, with a total of -1.7 in just 443 PA. Baseball Prospectus’ comprehensive defensive metrics put him 5.2 runs below average for his framing, blocking, and throwing as well. His backup, Austin Romine, owns a 47 wRC+ while catching for four teams over the past three seasons; his most notable accomplishment as a Cardinal is in joining Paul Goldschmidt and Nolan Arenado among the ranks of unvaccinated players who were unable to travel to Canada for this week’s two-game series against the Blue Jays.

Back in June, St. Louis gave a look to Molina’s heir apparent, Iván Herrera, who entered the season at no. 75 on our Top 100 Prospects list and has hit .295/.385/.432 at Triple-A. The 22-year-old Panamanian has a plus arm and potentially a plus hit tool as well as average raw power; his framing is below average and his receiving average. He was called up to replace Romine for the Toronto series but did not play.

With the trade market not offering a lot of obvious solutions (an intradivision trade for Willson Contreras probably isn’t an option), the Cardinals, who have gone just 24–26 in June and July but are still entrenched in the second Wild Card spot, would probably be better off pairing Molina with Herrera than Knizner or Romine. One possible option is Oakland’s Sean Murphy, who will be arbitration eligible for the first time this winter and who placed 37th on our Trade Value list; he could pair with Herrera for the next year or two and still be dealt while having club control remaining. Read the rest of this entry »

In a race for a playoff spot, every edge matters. Yet all too often, for reasons that extend beyond a player’s statistics, managers and general managers fail to make the moves that could improve their teams, allowing subpar production to fester at the risk of smothering a club’s postseason hopes. In Baseball Prospectus’ 2007 book It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over, I compiled a historical All-Star squad of ignominy, identifying players at each position whose performances had dragged their teams down in tight races: the Replacement-Level Killers. I’ve revisited the concept numerous times at multiple outlets and have presented it at FanGraphs in an expanded format since 2018.

When it comes to defining replacement level play, we needn’t be slaves to exactitude. Any team that’s gotten less than 0.6 WAR from a position to this point — prorating to 1.0 over a full season — is considered fair game. Sometimes, acceptable or even above-average defense (which may depend upon which metric one uses) coupled with total ineptitude on offense is enough to flag a team. Sometimes a team may be well ahead of replacement level but has lost a key contributor to injury; sometimes the reverse is true, but the team hasn’t yet climbed above that first-cut threshold. As with Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of hardcore pornography, I know replacement level when I see it.

For this series, I’ll go around the diamond, pointing out the most egregious examples of potential Killers at each position among contenders, which I’ll define as teams who are above .500 or have playoff odds of at least 10.0%. That definition covers 17 teams, all of which have odds above 25% thanks to the new playoff structure (thanks for not saving me any work, Rob Manfred). And while I may mention potential trade targets, I’m less focused on these teams’ solutions than I am the problems, because hey, human nature.

This first installment will cover first basemen. All statistics within this piece are through July 20. Read the rest of this entry »