When Jay wrote up the Martín Maldonado deal earlier, he called it “a minor move.” This deal, which sends Max Stassi to the Angels in exchange for minor-league outfielders Rainier Rivas and Raider Uceta, is the minor move attendant to that minor move.

With Maldonado in-house, the Astros simply didn’t have room for the 28-year-old Stassi, and so some sort of deal for his services was inevitable. This is that deal. Angels catching has been bad this year, what with Jonathan Lucroy out with a broken nose (and not playing terribly well before that), and Kevan Smith and Dustin Garneau, while pulling hard, not coming up with much but air against their oars. Smith, with his 105 wRC+, has been the bright spot, but he’s 31 and trending down in July after a strong May and June. Stassi isn’t anything to write home about with the bat either, but he’s got a good reputation with the glove and, unlike Lucroy, is under control until 2022. That’ll have to do until the Angels figure out how to develop a catcher (Jack Kruger, their best catching prospect, is still in Double-A).

Going back to Houston are two rookie-league outfielders: Rivas (18, in his second rookie league season and first stateside) and Uceta (18, ditto). Neither were listed among the Angels’ top 31 prospects, but Eric, who’s seen them in Arizona, reports both as big-bodied guys (particularly Uceta) with little physical projection and reasonably powerful bats. Uceta is unlikely to be able to stay in the outfield long-term, and Rivas is likely destined for a corner spot if he does. Both are about 35 FV organizational types. These are the kinds of prospects you get when you’re trying to trade for Max Stassi. They could make the majors, but they probably won’t, and if they will we probably won’t know about it for another year or two. At least the Angels still have Mike Trout.

For the second time this month, catcher Martín Maldonado has been traded, and for the second time in just over a year, he’ll join the Astros. The well-traveled backstop, who began this season filling in for the injured Salvador Perez as the Royals’ starter, played just four games with the Cubs after being acquired on July 15.

Astros get:

C Martín Maldonado

Cubs get:

IF/OF Tony Kemp

It’s fair to say that Maldonado, who turns 33 on August 16 and has also spent time with the Brewers (2011-16) and Angels (2017-18), is a consistent hitter — consistently subpar. He’s batting .217/.285/.349 in 276 plate appearances this year, with six homers and a 72 wRC+; that line bears an uncanny resemblance to his career one (.219/.288/.350, 72 WRC+). He actually went hitless (0-for-11 with two walks) in his brief Chicago stint, which began when the Cubs obtained him from the Royals on July 15, complementing their placement of Willson Contreras on the injured list due to a right arch strain. Contreras has since returned, and with young Victor Caratini serving as a useful backup, there wasn’t room for Maldonado. Read the rest of this entry »

Tampa Bay’s pre-deadline activity — trading bat-first prospect Nick Solak for electric reliever Peter Fairbanks, then moving recently-DFA’d reliever Ian Gibaut for a Player to be Named, and sending reliever Hunter Wood and injured post-prospect infielder Christian Arroyo to Cleveland for international bonus space and outfielder Ruben Cardenas, a recent late-round pick who was overachieving at Low-A — got us thinking about how teams’ anticipation of the fall 40-man deadline might impact their activity and the way they value individual prospects, especially for contending teams.

In November, teams will need to decide which minor league players to expose to other teams through the Rule 5 Draft, or protect from the Draft by adding them to their 40-man roster. Deciding who to expose means evaluating players, sure, but it also means considering factors like player redundancy (like Tampa seemed to when they moved Solak) and whether a prospect is too raw to be a realistic Rule 5 target, as well as other little variables such as the number of option years a player has left, whether he’s making the league minimum or in arbitration, and if there are other, freely available alternatives to a team’s current talent (which happens a lot to slugging first base types).

Teams with an especially high number of rostered players under contract for 2020 and with many prospects who would need to be added to the 40-man in the offseason have what is often called a “40-man crunch,” “spillover,” or “churn,” meaning that that team has incentive to clear the overflow of players away via trade for something they can keep — pool space, comp picks, or typically younger players whose 40-man clocks are further from midnight — rather than do nothing, and later lose players on waivers or in the Rule 5 draft.

As we sat twiddling our thumbs, waiting for it to rain trades or not, we compiled quick breakdowns of contending teams’ 40-man situations, using the Roster Resource pages to see who has the biggest crunch coming and might behave differently in the trade market because of it. The Rays, in adding Fairbanks and rental second baseman Eric Sogard while trading Solak, Arroyo, etc., filled a short-term need at second with a really good player and upgraded a relief spot while thinning out their 40-man in preparation for injured pitchers Anthony Banda and Tyler Glasnow to come off the 60-day IL and rejoin the roster. These sorts of considerations probably impacted how the Cubs valued Thomas Hatch in today’s acquisition of David Phelps from Toronto, as Hatch will need to be Rule 5 protected this fall.

For this exercise, we used contenders with 40% or higher playoff odds, which gives us the Astros, Yankees, Twins, Indians, Red Sox, and Rays in the AL and the Dodgers, Braves, Nationals, Cubs, and Cardinals in the NL, with the Brewers, Phillies, and A’s as the teams just missing the cut. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been a weird season thus far for Justin Verlander. On the one hand, the 36-year-old righty has enjoyed dominant stretches and generally pitched well enough to put himself in the conversation for another All-Star appearance (perhaps even a start) and that elusive second Cy Young Award, all while advancing his case for eventual election to the Hall of Fame. On the other hand, he’s struggling to keep the ball in the park like never before — but then, that describes most pitchers in a year of record-setting home run rates. The combination has created some very unusual, extreme statistics

On Sunday, Verlander threw seven strong innings against the Yankees in the Bronx, allowing just four hits, two walks, and three runs while striking out nine. The runs all came via a three-run homer by DJ LeMahieu, but the blast was of trivial importance, hit at a time when the Astros owned a commanding 9-0 lead. The trivia was shared by both teams. It was the 26th straight game in which the Yankees homered, a franchise record and one short of the major league record, held by the 2002 Rangers. It was also the first time since April 15, 2017 — back when he was still a Tiger — that Verlander had surrendered a three-run homer.

I’ll get back to the home runs momentarily. The Astros’ 9-4 win gave Verlander his 10th victory of the season and the 214th of his career; he’s second among active pitchers behind only CC Sabathia, who claimed his 250th win last week. His 142 strikeouts trail only teammate Gerrit Cole for the league lead, while his 2.67 ERA is good for fourth. However, because he’s served up 21 homers in 114.2 innings — a career-high 1.65 per nine — his FIP is a less-impressive 3.77, and his ERA-FIP differential of -1.10 ranks third in the AL. Depending upon one’s choice of pitching value metrics, he either looks like a Cy hopeful (second in bWAR at 3.8) or just a solid All-Star candidate (tied for ninth in fWAR at 2.5). Read the rest of this entry »

Because his name is right there in the title of the piece, I won’t ask you to play that little game where I give you two anonymized batting lines and ask you to guess who they are, only to reveal that one is Yuli Gurriel and the other is the re-animated corpse of Ike Van Zandt or something like that. I’ll just give you two batting lines, both from Gurriel, and ask you to note the difference in quality between the two:

That 47-point drop in wOBA doesn’t really give you a sense of relative performance, so let me put this another way: Gurriel’s wOBA from 2016-18 fell into the 38th percentile among players with as many plate appearances over that span. Fine but hardly exceptional. His wOBA this year — again only among those players with as many trips to the plate — falls into the third percentile. Only José Ramírez (with a .262 wOBA) and Starlin Castro (.249) have done worse.

Curiously, though, Gurriel’s walk rate and strikeout rate have both improved — albeit modestly — even as his overall performance has suffered. Little else about his plate discipline numbers seems much different this year than last, either. Gurriel’s swing rate last year was 50.3%, and this year it’s 49.1%. Last year, he made contact 85.9% of the time. This year, he’s improved to 87.1%. The numbers don’t change much when you look inside or outside of the strike zone, either, and where they do change it’s often for the better. So what’s going on? I think a clue is in the kinds of strikeouts he’s getting. Here’s a chart that shows Gurriel’s swing rates on all the pitches he saw with two strikes from 2016-2018:

And here is that same chart, but from this season:

I’ll save you the effort of adding up the swing rates on all the pitches inside the strike zone and tell you that from 2016-18, Gurriel saw 348 pitches in the zone with two strikes and swung at almost all of them: 330, or 95%. Most of those were fastballs. Some of the time, he struck out. Other times, he made hard contact. This year, by contrast, Gurriel has swung at 63 of 71 such pitches, or 89%. That six-point drop might not seem like a huge deal, but it’s meant that a whopping 39% of Gurriel’s strikeouts this year have been looking, which is by far the highest figure of his four-year career (his career mark is 23.2%, and last year’s 29% figure was by 11 points a career high). It’s also meant that Gurriel has made less contact when behind in the count this year than ever before.

I’m not sure what to ascribe these changes to. One possibility could be a general discomfort at being called upon to play around the diamond more often due to injuries to George Springer, Carlos Correa, and José Altuve. On its face, that argument doesn’t make much sense: Gurriel played 46 games away from first base even last season, and put up perfectly acceptable offensive numbers, and he’s moved around the infield since his Cuban playing days. Perhaps, though, this season’s situation is different. This year, Gurriel is fielding different positions not because it’s the best matchup given the Astros’ opponents but because A.J. Hinch has to play him there due to injury. That could mean Gurriel is being put into game situations in which he’s not comfortable and to which he hasn’t been exposed before. And he’s perhaps thinking just a little bit too hard about what he has to produce there while his talented teammates recover from injury.

If that’s true, it could explain other changes to Gurriel’s game as well. Prior to 2019, Gurriels’ average launch angle sat right around 10 degrees, but that average masked a distribution that showed that about a quarter of his hits went straight forward on a line (a zero degree launch angle) while another quarter left the bat at about 20 degrees — just enough to get over the heads of the infielders and drop in for hits. This year, his average launch angle has increased — to 15.4 degrees — while the range of angles at which he hits the ball has narrowed. Almost gone are the balls hit straight on a line, and significantly diminished are the 20 degree knocks. More and more of Gurriel’s hits, as a percentage, are coming in that dangerous middle zone where balls in play are somewhat more likely to turn into outs. As a consequence, Gurriel’s .264 BABIP this season is the lowest of his career, even as his hard-hit and contact rates have stayed level.

Whatever the cause, things can really only go up from here: Gurriel’s -0.4 WAR is among the 10 worst in the league among qualified players. And there are, despite the poor results, a lot of things going right for Gurriel. His hard-hit rate, contact rate, strikeout rate, and walk rate suggest that his eye at the plate and his ability to do damage to the ball when he makes contact are all working just fine. Perhaps he is trying to lift the ball a little more than is necessary to do damage at the plate, and perhaps that approach — combined with a newfound passivity possibly born of a little bit of overthinking — has turned Gurriel’s performance this year on its head. If that’s the case, it can be remedied: Gurriel’s wOBA has been as low as this before and still rebounded:

With a little perseverance, then — and perhaps a few more swings on strikes in the zone — he could be back to normal for the stretch run. And if this run of poor performance is the result of Gurriel trying to do a little too much at the plate? Well, maybe it’s all right to relax a little bit. All the evidence suggests that he and the Astros are going to be just fine.

Owners of the majors’ fourth-best record (37-20) and second-best run differential (+92), the Astros have been humming along in typical powerhouse fashion, but a recent rash of injuries is testing their depth. In a 15-day span they sent Jose Altuve, Collin McHugh, George Springer, Max Stassi, and Aledmys Diaz to the injured list, all for comparatively mundane-sounding injuries to muscles and joints. On Wednesday they gave us something new, namely the news that Carlos Correa had suffered a fractured rib while receiving a massage at his home, which will sideline him for four to six weeks.

It’s a bizarre injury worthy of a Jayson Stark column, and one that set off speculation as to its veracity, to say nothing of the jokes. Unlike the Mets’ handling of Yoenis Cespedes’ recent eyebrow-raising ankle fractures, which the outfielder suffered on his ranch, the Astros gave no hint that Correa’s injury was the result of any mischief. Via The Athletic’s Jake Kaplan:

“Players do a lot of things outside of the field that we’re never aware of or not aware of. Everybody’s trying to get better in their own way, and I’m sure he was receiving treatment for specific reasons,” Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow said. “It’s unfortunate that it happened that way, but we’re concerned right now mostly about getting him back. He’s going to have to rest for a little bit, let the bones heal and get back to doing the physical activity that will help him be back on the field.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Around this time last year, Ken Giles fell prey to the right hook… of Ken Giles.

On May 1, while with the Astros, Giles came into a scoreless game against the Yankees. After an Aaron Judge single, Didi Gregorius double, Giancarlo Stanton strikeout, Gary Sanchez homer, and an Aaron Hicks single, Giles exited the game, which, by this point, was no longer scoreless. The Yankees had mounted a four-run lead, and Giles had only recorded a single out. One might say that, as Giles left the field, he was not happy.

Read the rest of this entry »

Friend, you’re a baseball fan. You don’t need me to tell you that the Astros are great, because you already know it. You probably know they’re playing .650 baseball so far this year. If you look at their run differential, you might notice that their Pythagorean record is actually better than their record — they “should” have one more win based on their run differential. Heck, if you look at BaseRuns standings, which look at underlying production rather than runs, they “should” have three more wins. Their offensive and defensive statistics work out to a projected .700 winning percentage. That’s a 113-win pace for a full season, and playing well enough to have a 113-win season with neutral luck is outrageous.

You also don’t need me to tell you that the Astros offense is great. Their team batting line so far this year is .275/.349/.488, good for a 126 wRC+. If the entire Astros offense were a player, they’d be a top-60 hitter in all of baseball. Not the Astros starters. Not qualifying Astros batters. The entire team, backup catchers and minor league call-ups and all, is producing slightly better than Ronald Acuna this year. Ronald Acuna signed a $100 million contract this year and people protested how underpaid he is. Again, the entire Astros team is hitting like that.

The thing is, though, you also already knew that. Astros offense superlatives and near-superlatives are endless. They strike out less than any team but the Angels. They hit for more power than any team other than the Twins. They get on base more than any team in baseball. In a stadium that doesn’t help offense, they’re scoring 5.2 runs a game, with underlying statistics that look like they should be scoring 5.5. They’re hitting for the highest batting average in baseball and simultaneously have the third-most home runs, all without having played the Orioles. Average or power? Porque no los dos?

Yes, finding new and interesting things to say about the Astros offense is challenging. I’m going to try, though. One of the strengths of this Astros team is their incredible star power. George Springer is vying with Mike Trout for the most WAR in the American League, with a 172 wRC+ that’s sixth in baseball. Alex Bregman is replicating his breakout 2018 — a 152 wRC+ with more walks than strikeouts. He’s running a BABIP of .237 despite an xBABIP of .316 — he could actually be due for some positive regression! Michael Brantley has turned the Astros’ one lineup hole from 2018, left field, into a point of strength. He’s striking out a what-are-you-talking-about 9.5% of the time while hitting for power on his way to a 144 wRC+.

Those three players have been worth a combined seven wins above replacement. They have a collective 156 wRC+. The only teams with a better-hitting top three (minimum 100 PA per batter) are the Dodgers and the Cubs (the Pirates are a close fourth). The Astros’ stars, in other words, are the envy of nearly all of baseball. As an aside, the best three Marlins batters have put up a cumulative 99 wRC+. What’s an article about a great offense without a fun fact about the inverse?

That’s all well and good — the cream of the Astro crop is incredible. You probably knew that, because all three players are drawing headlines. Great, cool, amazing. What you might not know, though, is that the rest of the offense is incredible as well. Think of it this way: George Springer just went on the 10-day IL with a hamstring strain. How will the Astros offense fare without him? Well, the rest of their team has combined for a 122 wRC+ this year, which would be the second-best batting team in the majors, behind only the equally hot Twins.

We can take this further. Let’s get rid of Bregman as well. Without Bregman and Springer, the Astros would have a 116 wRC+, good for the fifth-best non-pitcher wRC+. Two MVP candidates down, the Astros are nipping at the Cubs’ heels for fourth-best offense in baseball. Heck, let’s go further and take out Brantley. With all three of the Astros’ top trio removed (and again, they’re one of the best groups in baseball), the remaining Astros have compiled a 112 wRC+ this year. That batting line would be fifth-best in baseball, just ahead of the Braves. The Braves have a dynamic offense, with sensational young talent backed by Freddie Freeman. That’s how good the Astros are after you get rid of three MVP candidates. If that doesn’t make much sense to you, well — good. It’s outrageous!

We can go further. The weighted wRC+ of the Astros’ 4th-6th best hitters (Carlos Correa, Jake Marisnick, and Robinson Chirinos) is 137. Want to replace Marisnick’s small sample with a larger sample of a worse batting line from Josh Reddick? It’s still 133. As you might expect, this group of 4th-6th offensive options is the best such group in baseball. The Rangers’ trio of Logan Forsythe (not as washed up as I expected), Elvis Andrus, and Danny Santana are within striking distance at a 127 wRC+, but no one is particularly close to matching the Astros’ trio. Heck, this Astros group is better than 15 other teams’ top three hitters, even if you use the lower-wRC+ Reddick group. The Astros’ mid-tier guys are simply unlucky — they’d be the best three guys on plenty of teams.

Let’s get really crazy now. Let’s exclude the six best hitters from the Astro lineup. I’m cutting Reddick out here in the interest of making the remaining lineup score as poorly as possible. With none of their top six hitters, the Astros have a remaining team wRC+ of 98. The back half of the team, the part that is largely comprised of fifth outfielders and utility infielders and backup catchers, is almost as good at batting as the league as a whole.

If that sounds absurd, it’s because it is. There’s an MVP candidate having a so-so year in this group (Jose Altuve and his 117 wRC+), which is only notable because it’s not one of the best eight batting lines on the team. Aledmys Diaz has a 118 wRC+, which would rank among the top 10 second basemen in baseball if he could get on the field enough to qualify. Heck, even Tony Kemp’s 86 wRC+ isn’t too bad — it’s certifiably great for a fifth outfielder, but it’s not even embarrassing for the worst regular starter on a team, which Kemp most emphatically is not.

How stacked is this Astros team? If the top six Astros weren’t allowed to bat and instead of replacing them with minor leaguers, the team filled in the missing plate appearances with the remaining players’ 2019 lines, the team would project to score roughly 4.5 runs a game after accounting for park factors. With the team’s great pitching (3.53 runs per game allowed), their Pythagorean winning percentage would be .611. The hobbled Astros would have the fifth-best Pythagorean winning percentage in baseball. Want it in BaseRuns? That still works out to a .610 expected winning percentage, fourth-best in baseball.

Now, in reality, this is more of a fun fact about the Astros pitching staff than one about their hitters. Replace the historically dominant Astros offense with a sub-100 wRC+ bunch, and the team would still be one of the best in baseball. Their pitching is just that good. But it’s also an Astros offense fun fact because that 100-ish wRC+ team just so happens to be the Astros’ offense after subtracting out their six best hitters in 2019.

Just to drive the point home, here’s a table of the Astros offense, only subtracting out their x best hitters. The distance you have to go down the line to make a bad team is staggering. The Astros minus their top nine hitters would have the same wRC+ as the Indians this year!

The 2019 Astros are an exercise in baseball absurdity. Their best hitters are as good as any team’s best hitters. Their mid-tier hitters are better than a bunch of other teams’ best hitters. Their worst hitters are league average. If it’s hard to wrap your head around how good this team is, that’s reasonable. Teams don’t bat this well for full seasons. Since 1900, the only team with a better league-adjusted full-season line is the 1927 Yankees, who were literally nicknamed Murderer’s Row. Teams that hit like the Astros are dimly remembered myths, not flesh-and-blood modern concerns. That’s not a comparison you can make in your head, most likely, because it isn’t one I can make in mine.

Getting rid of the good players makes a comparison a little more mentally reasonable. Remove three MVP candidates, and the Astros are still one of the best-hitting teams in baseball. Remove three more of the best hitters in baseball, and the dregs of the team still hit like the A’s or the Nationals. So don’t focus on the aggregate line, the pure statistical absurdity of the 2019 Astros. Focus on how well every part of the Astros lineup is hitting, how their utility infielder hits like your All-Star second baseman. This performance almost certainly won’t keep up, but it’s still amazing to marvel at the extent of their excellence in 2019.

What does ZiPS have for Yordan Alvarez’s translation?

Is Alvarez for real?

Do the Astros need to call up Alvarez right now?

Scattered within my weekly chat questions about cat and chili, there were quite a few questions revolving on Yordan Alvarez, who has spent the first two months of the 2019 season traumatizing minor league pitchers. So naturally, instead of answering the questions, I greedily saved the Alvarez talk for an article on the subject.

Prior to this season, Alvarez was ranked seventh in Houston’s farm system by Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel on the strength of his raw power potential. Ranking seventh on the Astros says more about the team’s organizational strength than any negative about Alvarez; he’s not someone who would appear in a Fringe Five column. While with a lot of minor league outfielders, you try to see if they can stick in center as long as possible, this was never a realistic option for Alvarez, who is cut from the massive slugger template.

But if you thought he was a one-dimensional type of hitter, a Pedro Cerrano type, you’d be wrong. While it’s not believed that he’ll maintain high batting averages in the majors, I think he might hang onto better averages than many think. For one, he has an efficient, easy swing and is willing to use the entire field, making him less likely to be subject to shift abuse than some other sluggers in the majors. Just to illustrate, here’s Alvarez’s spray chart in the minors in 2019 compared to Max Kepler, a more pull-heavy left-handed hitter.

Alvarez has kept his swinging strike rate under 10% in the high minors, and in the early going, he has cut off about a quarter of his 2018 strikeout rate. His walk rate has also edged higher; Alvarez is a hitter who eats what he hunts. ZiPS uses play-by-play data to estimate a version of xBABIP that I refer to as zBABIP (you don’t win the Kewpie doll for guessing what the z stands for). Alvarez won’t keep the .424 BABIP that’s currently driving his .400 batting average in the minors, of course, but the hit data suggests he may keep quite a lot of it. 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 —Ryan Pressly, Trent Thornton, and Justin Verlander — on how they learned and developed their curveballs.

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Ryan Pressly, Houston Astros

“I started throwing a curveball when I was around 14-15 years old. Steve Busby was my pitching coach growing up — the guy played in the big leagues for a long time and threw a couple of no-hitters — and he taught me his curveball. He told me I could only throw it with him during our pitching lessons. Once I got to eighth grade, or freshman year, is when I started throwing it in games.

“How my curveball works is kind of just a natural thing. My spin rate… I mean, I know why my spin rate increased. You hear all of this stuff about the Astros, but it’s not nearly the case. My spin rate increased because my velocity started increasing. I tore my lat in 2015, and when I came back my velocity kept going up. As the velocity goes up on your curveball, the spin rate is going to go up as well. I’ve also been throwing it more and more, and getting consistent with it. That’s a big reason it has gotten better. Read the rest of this entry »