Just under two weeks ago, when I was writing a piece connecting the unsigned players from among our Top 50 Free Agents list to teams that appeared to have needs, Wade Miley came off the board by signing a one-year deal with the Astros. A similar thing happened in writing that piece’s sequel, covering a handful of the best of the unranked and unsigned free agents, as Brett Anderson pre-empted the publication by re-signing with the A’s on a one-year deal. He’ll cost a pittance, as he’s guaranteed a modest $1.5 million, with another $1 million possible in undisclosed incentives.

Though it feels like he’s been around forever, Anderson just turned 31 on February 1. That said, the 2006 second-round pick by the Diamondbacks (out of high school in Stillwater, Oklahoma) has already spent parts of 10 seasons in the majors. I should emphasize the word parts there because, well, we’ve rarely seen a whole season from him. As a rookie with the A’s in 2009 — a season in which he entered ranked seventh on Baseball America’s Top 100 Prospects list — he made 30 starts and threw 175.1 innings en route to 3.5 WAR. But only once since then has he started 30 times in a major league season. Hell, only once since then has he even reached 20 starts in the bigs: in 2015, he completed a solid 31-start, 180.1-inning campaign for the Dodgers (3.69 ERA, 3.94 FIP, 1.6 WAR). Read the rest of this entry »

Dustin Fowler may need to make an adjustment. The 24-year-old outfielder is coming off a rookie campaign that saw him slash an anemic .224/.256/.354, with six home runs, in 203 plate appearances. The Triple-A portion of his season was encouraging — a .310 BA and an .817 OPS — but his performance against big league pitching fell short of expectations. He went into the year ranked as Oakland’s No. 4 prospect.

He’d already made a notable adjustment. Prior to being acquired by the A’s in the 2017 trade deadline deal that sent Sonny Gray to the Yankees, Fowler had lowered his hands at the urging of then hitting coach, P.J. Pilittere. The reason was twofold: the team that drafted Fowler out of a Dexter, Georgia high school felt it would help him tap into his power. Every bit as importantly, his left-handed stroke wasn’t consistently catching up to high-octane heat.

Fowler talked about the 2016 adjustment midway through last season.

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Dustin Fowler: “I hadn’t had much coaching growing up, so I was very raw. I’d just had small-town coaching — not the big coaching I needed — so going into pro ball was the first time I got some real one-on-ones on how to hit.

“I was very tall in my stance. I was upright, and my hands were over my head. Ever since grabbing a bat, I’d put them up there. My hand-eye coordination was good enough to make it work against pitching that wasn’t as good — slower pitching — but it worked less and less here. There’s a big difference from high school to pro ball. The pitches here harder, and I wasn’t catching up to balls. I was just fouling them off, or making fly-ball outs. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for more than half a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Oakland Athletics.

Batters

From the projections, one can see why the A’s let Jed Lowrie go so easily, despite his legitimate star-level performance in 2017 and ’18. Five Oakland infielders — the starters plus Franklin Barreto — project to be league-average or better. Now, none of them project to reach the level of Lowrie’s 4.9 WAR in 2018, but then again, neither does Lowrie, and mid-30s middle infielders tend to have pretty steep aging curves. And really, if anyone thought Lowrie was going to perform at an All-Star level again in 2019, he likely would have done better than two years and $20 million. Jurickson Profar projects to be a worthy replacement for Lowrie, and his return from literally years of injury and then underperformance is one of my favorite stories in baseball.

Except for catcher and the four-headed chimera in left field — at least, as our depth charts have it figured so far — the A’s project to be average or better, and sometimes significantly so, at every position. Perhaps ZiPS is trying to do penance for missing on the A’s by something like 20 wins in 2018.

Don’t get too excited about the Matt Olson comp; this version is from when Ortiz was still in the “Wait, is that the same guy as David Arias?” portion of his career, before he became Big Papi.

Pitchers

Ok, the highs are not very high. That’s due in large part to the fact that ZiPS is projecting fairly low innings totals for Oakland’s pitchers across the board. The system is aware of the injuries to Sean Manaea and Andrew Triggs in very general terms, so these aren’t theoretical “healthy” projections. As such, Manaea’s projection isn’t unexpected, but Triggs’s was a legitimate surprise to me. But again, I’m going to de-wind your sails a little bit by noting that ZiPS sees the Triggs injury as a generic “shoulder” ailment because I don’t have the data on thoracic outlet syndrome recoveries that I do with those from Tommy John. Regardless, this is an injury that you really don’t want.

The rotation’s highs may not be very high, but ZiPS sees the group as incredibly deep. 18 pitchers project to be worth at least one WAR if playing in the majors, and though a few of them are relievers (Blake Treinen, Lou Trivino, and Joakim Soria) and Brett Anderson is a free agent, that’s still a lot of options.

Bench and Prospects

I hope that someday I can love somebody or something the way ZiPS loves Jesus Luzardo. No, the computer isn’t projecting him to actually have Steve Carlton’s career, but who wouldn’t take that as a top comp? ZiPS already sees Luzardo as the team’s best starting pitcher, a pretty shocking projection for a guy who started the season in A-ball and whose parent club isn’t, say, the Baltimore Orioles.

It also interests me that ZiPS pegs Sean Murphy as the team’s best catching option. I’m definitely interested to see where he falls on the McDongenhagen prospect list; he ranked sixth last year, but after a .285/.361/.489 year and a finish at Triple-A, I would imagine he’s moved up. Conversely, Oakland cooled on Dustin Fowler and now largely sees him as a fourth outfielder. Overall, ZiPS sees a lot more of interest in the minor league pitchers than the hitters.

One pedantic note for 2019: for the WAR graphic, I’m using FanGraphs’ depth chart playing time, not the playing time ZiPS spits out, so there will be occasional differences in WAR totals.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here at site.

Disclaimer: ZiPS projections are computer-based projections of performance. Performances have not been allocated to predicted playing time in the majors — many of the players listed above are unlikely to play in the majors at all in 2019. ZiPS is projecting equivalent production — a .240 ZiPS projection may end up being .280 in AAA or .300 in AA, for example. Whether or not a player will play is one of many non-statistical factors one has to take into account when predicting the future.

Players are listed with their most recent teams, unless I have made a mistake. This is very possible, as a lot of minor-league signings go generally unreported in the offseason.

ZiPS’ projections are based on the American League having a 4.29 ERA and the National League having a 4.15 ERA.

Players who are expected to be out due to injury are still projected. More information is always better than less information, and a computer isn’t the tool that should project the injury status of, for example, a pitcher who has had Tommy John surgery.

Both hitters and pitchers are ranked by projected zWAR — which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those which appear in full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR.

In the first installment of the seventh annual Effectively Wild season preview series, Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Bryce Harper, Scott Boras, team meetings with free agents, the season preview series, the Super Bowl, and mortality, then preview the 2019 Reds (12:11) with The Athletic’s C. Trent Rosecrans, and the 2019 Athletics (47:46) with the San Francisco Chronicle’s Susan Slusser.

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Audio outro: Beck, "Seventh Heaven"

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On Thursday, word broke that the Mariners had signed 30-year-old righty Hunter Strickland to a one-year , $1.3 million deal with incentives totaling about the same for games pitched and finished. On Friday afternoon, the Mariners’ division-mates in Oakland announced a deal of their own, for one year and for $4 million, with 35-year-old Marco Estrada. Both pitchers are 2019 bounce-back candidates, and both will spend at least a portion of 2019 in the AL West. Let’s discuss.

Given the terms of his deal, it seems reasonable to assume that the Mariners hope Strickland will be able to step into the ninth-inning role recently vacated by Edwin Díaz, perhaps in concert with Cory Gearren or Anthony Swarzak, or perhaps all by his lonesome, depending on how things shake out in spring training. That kind of uncertainty is the natural consequence of entering 2019 with a bullpen that’s lost Díaz, James Pazos, Juan Nicaso, and Alex Colomé to trade this winter and seems unlikely to welcome free agents Nick Vincent, Zach Duke, and Adam Warren back to Seattle. Seattle had an excellent bullpen in 2018 but doesn’t, in any meaningful sense, have that bullpen any more. Strickland is one of the new guard, here to carry the M’s over the water into the next phase of their rebuild.

Which makes the question of whether Strickland will be any good in 2019 something of an irrelevance to the Mariners’ long-term plans — if he’s good, he can be traded midseason; if he’s bad, it’s “just” $1.3 million — although it presumably remains of considerable importance to Strickland himself. For my money, I’d bet against renewed success in 2019. After routinely sitting in the low triple-digits with his four-fastball during his first three years in the majors (2014-2016), Strickland’s mean velocity on the pitch has dropped to 95.7 miles per hour, and his whiff percentage on the pitch has dropped from its high of 18% in 2015 to 8% last year. Those fundamentals have generated poor results across the board:

It’s hard to know what precisely brought on Strickland’s decline, but given that fastballs don’t usually get faster with age and that Strickland’s particular fastball is already getting beaten up at 95-96 miles per hour, it’s hard to be too sanguine about his future. Then again, given the contract he signed and the Mariners’ current insistence on trading away all their best players, there really is very little downside to this deal for Seattle. Just maybe reinforce the clubhouse doors.

There’s far more reason to be optimistic about the A’s bounce-back candidate, Estrada, despite the fact that his 2018 was if anything even worse than Strickland’s (the 5.64 ERA and 1.82 HR/9 are the figures that jump out at you most immediately). For one thing, Estrada has never really relied on his velocity to generate outs and so last year’s mile-per-hour slide from 90.1 to 89.0 on the fastball isn’t really something to worry about — in fact, it puts him right around where he was in 2016, when he put up a 3.48 ERA over 176 innings for the Blue Jays. For another, Estrada’s game has always been up in the zone and so (a) bad years like 2018 were always going to happen from time to time and (b) you don’t have to wish for too much positive regression on the HR/9 to get him back into a range (say, 2016’s 1.18, or his career 1.41 mark) where you know he can have success.

In Oakland, Estrada will join Mike Fiers, who re-signed with the club in December, and holdovers/questionable starting pitchers Daniel Mengden, Chris Bassitt, and Frankie Montas in an A’s rotation that will be held together by hope and duct tape until Jharel Cotton (Tommy John), A.J. Puk (also Tommy John), and Sean Manaea (shoulder surgery) return to the field at some point mid-season (and maybe Jesús Luzardo comes up at some point). Given the circumstances, and the budget to which the club has decided to hew, Estrada is exactly the kind of guy you’d want to see the A’s sign: healthy (he’s never had an arm injury we know about), inexpensive, and a plausible candidate for solid numbers in 2019. If he’s good in the early going next year, he can slot in at the back end of a rotation that has a reasonable shot at the Wild Card if everything goes right. If he’s terrible, chances are the A’s are too, and — again — it’s just $4 million. Even for the A’s, that’s manageable — their 2018 payroll was $66 million and their commitments for 2019 total just $69 million so far. What could go wrong?

Would MLB actually go so far as to ban the shift? Asked about that conjecture, David Stearns made it clear that he’s no fan of the idea. Not because he’s against change, but rather because change is already a big part of baseball. More specifically — yes, there have been exceptions to the rule — organic charge is already a big part of baseball.

“Teams have evolved,” the Brewers GM said during the Winter Meetings. “Strategies have evolved. Players adjust, and they will on this one as well. If shifts become completely deflating to certain profiles of players, we will value them accordingly. Things will balance themselves out. Look, we’ve been moving fielders around for decades. I would not be in favor of a ban on shifts.”

Ron Gardenhire feels otherwise. He favors an inorganic fix to the perceived (and arguably nonexistent) problem.

“I like two guys on each side,” the Detroit manager stated in equally-stern terms. “I’ve always said that. Or at least keep them all in the dirt rather than in the grass. Ask Victor Martinez. He might have hit .300 this year if they just had them on the infield. Yeah, I am old school in that respect.”

The veteran skipper elaborated on his viewpoint in a manner suggestive of… an organic substance? Going pure Gardy, he name-checked the man erroneously credited with inventing the game, another sport, and a comedy duo from a bygone era. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2019 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.

We continue our quick look at the 14 players on this year’s Hall of Fame ballot who are certain to fall below the 5% threshold — with most of them being shut out entirely — but are worth remembering just the same.

Placido Polanco

A valuable player who started for five playoff teams, Polanco didn’t pack much punch with his contact-oriented approach at the plate, but he was quite a glove whiz, rangy and sure-handed, at home at both second base and third. In fact, he was just the second player to win Gold Gloves at multiple positions (after Darin Erstad), and his 136 career fielding runs ranks 31st among all infielders.

Born on October 10, 1975 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, Polanco came to the U.S. on a student visa, attending Miami Dade Community College. Drafted by the Cardinals in the 19th round in 1994, he began his minor league career as a shortstop, and though he spent all of 1996 and ’97 as a second baseman, played more short than second during his 45-game callup in 1998. He spent most of his five-season tenure in St. Louis as a utilityman, earning an increasing amount of playing time as his offense improved. In 2000, he hit .316/.347/.418 in 350 PA, while in 2001 he upped his playing time to 610 PA while batting .307/.342/.383; he was a combined 23 runs above average at third base (his primary position), second and short, boosting his WAR to 4.5. The Cardinals made the playoffs in both of those seasons.

Read the rest of this entry »

In 2018, I once again had the pleasure of interviewing hundreds of people within baseball. Many of their words were shared in my Sunday Notes column, while others came courtesy of the FanGraphs Q&A series, the Learning and Developing a Pitch series, the Manager’s Perspective series, and a smattering of feature stories. Here is a selection of the best quotes from this year’s conversations.

———

“My slider will come out and it will be spinning, spinning, spinning, and then as soon as it catches, it picks up speed and shoots the other way. Whoosh! It’s like when you bowl. You throw the ball, and then as soon as it catches, it shoots with more speed and power. Right? “ — Sergio Romo, Tampa Bay Rays pitcher, January 2018

“One of the biggest lessons we learn is that iron sharpens iron. That is 100% how we try to do things with the Rockies — hiring people that are smarter than we are, and more skilled, and have different skills that can complement, and train people to be better at their jobs than I am at my job. That’s how you advance an organization.” — Jeff Bridich, Colorado Rockies GM, January 2018

“We could split hairs and say, ‘Hey, you’re playing in front of a thousand drunk Australians instead of 40,000 drunk Bostonians, and you’re living with a host family instead of at a five-star hotel.’ But The Show is The Show, and in Australia the ABL is The Show.” — Lars Anderson, baseball nomad, January 2018

“Baseball is heaven. Until our closer blows the game.” — Michael Hill, Miami Marlins president of baseball operations, January 2018 Read the rest of this entry »

Last Sunday’s column led with J.D. Martinez, whose non-quantifiable impact on the Red Sox lineup was widely lauded. Deeply enmeshed in hitting mechanics and theory, the veteran slugger was both a sounding board and lead-by-example influence on several of his teammates. That didn’t go unnoticed by people around the game.

“J.D. rightfully so got credit for doing that,” said Milwaukee manager Craig Counsell, one of three managers I broached the subject with at the Winter Meetings. “It’s an important part of being a teammate — being connected and sharing. A player’s eyes are probably on each other more than they are on the coaches. They have a way to help each other, just as much as coaches do. You want to foster that environment. It’s something all teams should try to do.”

Asked for an example of a positive influence on his own team, Counsell cited Ryan Braun. Responding to that same question, Oakland manager Bob Melvin named a player who may or may not be wearing an A’s uniform next year.

“Jed was the guy last year for us,” Melvin said of now-free-agent Jed Lowrie. “(He) understands mechanics. He understands launch angles and exit velocities. (He) was a nice kind of player/coach for us to help out Bushy (hitting coach Darren Bush) with some of our younger guys.” Read the rest of this entry »

J.D. Martinez received a lot of props this year for how he helped his Red Sox teammates approach at bats. A direct correlation between the cerebral slugger’s arrival in Boston and the increased offensive production from the likes of Mookie Betts and Xander Bogaerts is impossible to prove, but there’s no disputing his influence. Few hitters hone their craft as studiously — and pass on their knowledge as effectively — as does Martinez.

A question about his mindset jump-started a conversation this summer. I asked the outfielder/DH if he processes information in much the same manner on both sides of the ball. In other words, does he approach defense — 83% of his career games have been in the outfield — like he approaches offense.

“That’s kind of a weird question,” opined Martinez. “I think I evaluate them the same, but you’re not going to be as analytical with your defense, because there’s not nearly as much data to help you go about it.”

I countered that a lot of work goes into defense, including how to position opposing hitters against certain pitchers, and in different counts. Read the rest of this entry »