Tuesday was trade deadline day, and you know what that means: enough trades of marginal relievers to blot out the sun. Every team in the playoff race can look at its bullpen and find flaws, and so every one of them was in the market for a reliever who can come in for the fifth, sixth, or seventh inning and do a more reliable job of getting out alive than the team’s current bullpen complement. That’s just how baseball works; every year, a new crop of pop-up relievers posts great numbers, while the old crop enjoys middling success. It’s a brisk trade market, even if the returns are rarely overwhelming. Here’s another roundup of such trades. 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%), 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.

At the other positions in this series, I have used about 0.6 WAR or less thus far — which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season — as my cutoff, making exceptions here and there, but for the designated hitters, I’ve lowered that to 0.3, both to keep the list length manageable and to account for the general spread of value; in the first full season of the universal DH, exactly half the teams in the majors have actually gotten 0.1 WAR or less from their DHs thus far, and only 10 have gotten more than 0.6. DHs as a group have hit .239/.317/.404 for a 104 wRC+; that last figure matches what they did as a group both last year and in 2019, and it’s boosted by the best performance by NL DHs (103 wRC+) since 2009, when their 117 wRC+ accounted for a grand total of 525 PA, about 32 per NL team.

Read the rest of this entry »

Bryan Shaw will reach two milestones the next time he takes the mound. The 34-year-old Guardians reliever has made 499 regular-season appearances in a Cleveland uniform, and he’s thrown 999-and-two-thirds professional innings. Neither should come as a surprise. Shaw has never been a star, but he’s always been a workhorse. Moreover, he’s a Terry Francona favorite.

“He’s like a lineman,” the Guardians manager said of Shaw. “When they allow a sack, everybody notices. When [Shaw] gives up runs, people want to bury him. But he saves our ass, time and time again. He pitches when other guys can’t… He’s been a trouper for a long time.”

Now in his 12th big-league season, and in his second stint with Cleveland, Shaw has led the American League in appearances in four different seasons, each time with his current club. The right-hander has appeared in 733 games overall — he’s also pitched for the Diamondbacks, Rockies, and Mariners — which ranks fifth-most among active pitchers.

He knows where he stands among his peers. 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 »

The trade deadline is nearly here and once again, team behavior will be affected by 40-man roster dynamics. Teams with an especially high number of currently-rostered players under contract for 2023 and prospects who need to be added to the 40-man in the offseason have what is often called a 40-man “crunch,” “overage,” or need to “churn.” This means the team has incentive to clear its overflow of players by either packaging several to acquire just one in return, or by trading for something the club can keep — international pool space, comp picks, or, more typically, younger players whose 40-man clocks are further from midnight — rather than do nothing and later lose some of those players to waivers or in the Rule 5 Draft. Teams can take care of this issue with transactions between the end of the season and the 40-man roster deadline in November, but a contending team with a crunch has more incentive to do something before the trade deadline so the results of those deals can bolster the club’s ability to reach the postseason.

In an effort to see whose depth might influence trade behavior, I assess teams’ 40-man futures every year. This exercise is done by using the RosterResource Depth Chart pages to examine current 40-man situations, subtracting pending free agents using the Team Payroll tab, and then weighing the December 2022 Rule 5 eligible prospects (or players who became eligible in past seasons and are having a strong year) to see which clubs have the biggest crunch coming. I then make an educated guess about which of those orgs might behave differently in the trade market as a result.

Some quick rules about 40-man rosters. Almost none of them contain exactly 40 players in-season because teams can add a player to the 40 to replace one who is on the 60-day injured list. In the offseason, teams don’t get extra spots for injured players and have to get down to 40 precisely, so if they want to keep some of their injury fill-ins, they have to cut someone else from the 40-man to make room. Read the rest of this entry »

Who has been your most influential teammate? I asked that question to 10 major leaguers — two each from five different teams — and all of the answers came after a moment of thoughtful consideration. Most couldn’t name just one, and there was another common theme that emerged, as well. A combination of appreciation and admiration was genuinely expressed with each and every response.

———

Harrison Bader, St. Louis Cardinals

“Paul Goldschmidt. I like to watch just enough video to familiarize myself with the pitcher in terms of his tempo in the stretch, in the windup, his arm slots on different pitches, and maybe his tells on the base paths. Anything past that, I don’t like to watch. Paul has been the most influential, because I trust his assessment of the pitcher and his approach far more than anything I would create on my own. That’s because he keeps it really simple; he keeps it very straightforward. That approach helps him be very successful for his team. Because of that, I’ve learned to understand pitchers — when to open up a little more, when to stay focused on maybe driving the ball back up the middle. Little things like that allow you to be successful over nine innings.”

———

Tucker Barnhart, Detroit Tigers

“Four come to mind, and it starts with Skip Schumaker. Skip and I played together in 2014 and 2015, and he was the guy I defaulted to if I had any questions. This was back when I was trying to figure out what the big leagues were like. So, Skip was one of my guys. We still talk. Read the rest of this entry »

John Schreiber has been a find for the Red Sox. Claimed off waivers by Boston from the Detroit Tigers prior to last season, the 28-year-old sidewinder has come out of the bullpen 30 times this year and allowed just 12 hits and two earned runs over 29 innings. Schreiber has 35 strikeouts to go with three saves and a pair of wins in as many decisions.

He’s not the same pitcher who failed to distinguish himself in Detroit.

“I’d mainly been a four-seam/slider guy,” explained Schreiber, who logged a 6.28 ERA over parts of two seasons with the Tigers. “In college and for most of my pro-ball career, that’s all I threw. Two years ago I started working on a better changeup, and last year I started throwing my sinker. Paul Abbott is our Triple-A pitching coach, and he helped me work on a two-seam sinker. I’ve gotten really comfortable throwing that.”

Schreiber still features his old mix prominently — this year he’s thrown 35.3% four-seamers and 35.8% sliders — but his 22.5% sinker usage has added a whole new twist. The 2016, 15th-round draft pick out of the University of Northwestern Ohio is now far less predictable, and just as importantly, he’s better able to match up with hitters who do damage on high heaters. Read the rest of this entry »

Eli Morgan is one of the best-kept secrets in baseball. He’s not a high-leverage reliever for a marquee team. He’s not even the best or most famous reliever on his own team. Heck, he was a middling five-and-dive starter in the majors just last year. But none of that matters anymore, because now he has a cheat code:

That changeup is absolutely ludicrous. It looks like no other pitch in baseball. It’s slow, much slower than the rest of Morgan’s arsenal. Every other one of his pitches is in the vicinity of league average, while his changeup is the slowest in baseball. That makes for huge separation from his fastball; if the two started on the same trajectory, the changeup would fall 30 more inches than the fastball on its way to home plate. That’s nearly half an Altuve. Read the rest of this entry »

In the bottom of the 10th inning of last night’s Guardians/Rockies game, Charlie Blackmon made a bad read. No, not this one:

That wasn’t the greatest baserunning decision ever – if Andrés Giménez had snared that ball, Blackmon would have been stuck at second – but you can at least understand his hesitation. The ball was still in the air nearly the whole way there, a double play would be disastrous, and hey, if it gets through Giménez, a runner on third with no one out almost always scores, right?

Right? Wrong:

This was a series of tough decisions that went awry, and since I love bad baserunning, I had to break it down.

Let’s start with the first step. I can’t tell whether the Rockies had the contact play on, forcing Blackmon to head home with the crack of the bat and re-evaluate based on the ball’s path. He was hardly blazing headlong down the line at first contact:

Read the rest of this entry »

Shane Bieber has been one of the best pitchers in baseball in recent years. From 2019-21, he used pristine command and nasty breaking balls to rack up elite levels of strikeouts while posting an ERA- of 64 (tied for second-best in baseball over that span); he even won the AL Cy Young Award in 2020. That elite level of performance lasted until a 2021 shoulder strain cost him over three months of the season; he returned just in time to make a couple of late September starts before officially shutting it down. Coming into the 2022 campaign, Bieber said he was “100%.” Yet through his first eight starts of the season, there are warning signs all over his underlying metrics:

Bieber has still been an effective pitcher. He has an above-average ERA and an even better FIP and SwStr%, but these numbers still represent a drop in performance. For a pitcher who is just shy of 27 years old, it’s certainly notable, but we might chalk it up to a wonky eight-start rough patch were it not for the dip in velocity and the injury last season. But Bieber has lost three ticks on his heater from his Cy Young peak, when he averaged 94.3 mph. I wonder if we might be seeing the lingering effects of his shoulder injury. Just prior to the injury, Bieber’s velocity dipped to 92 mph and during his late September cameo, it was down to 91.4 mph. Throughout the season’s early going, Bieber has been asked repeatedly about his velocity dip and insisted that he feels fine and expects his velo to trend up as the season goes on. As we reach the end of May, however, no such increase has occurred:

Regardless of the cause, it isn’t a good development. And beyond just the lost velocity, there are some interesting mechanical changes that are worth taking a closer look at. We’ll start with an establishing shot of Bieber’s mechanics in 2020 and then this season. You may be able to pick up on some changes, like how this year’s windup is quite a bit faster:

Next we’ll look at his arm path. The following clip is synced to when his front foot lands, giving us a better look at his hand position at that pivotal point in a delivery. To me, it looks like his entire upper body is more closed off, giving Bieber a more circuitous hand path from his glove separation all the way through to the release of the ball. The result is an arm that needs to play catch-up as his foot lands:

These mechanical changes could mean a number of things. It’s possible this is an intentional change to try and add velocity, or to mitigate a recurrence of his shoulder issue. Or these could be subconscious changes as Bieber’s body tries to find a pain-free path to delivering a pitch. If you want to assume that this change is part of the loss in velocity and that it’s helping him stay healthy, then it could be a worthwhile tradeoff. However, if this is a less intentional tweak and it’s the result of his body subconsciously favoring his shoulder, it could lead to added stress on other areas that are currently healthy.

Given that we’re about a quarter of the way into the season, we have a pretty good sample by which to gauge how Bieber is trying to pitch through his velocity decline. It might seem like the obvious solution to a diminished fastball would be for Bieber to lean in to his two good breaking balls. Look no further than the success of Clayton Kershaw in recent years for a blueprint to mimic. Kershaw has evolved from throwing 94 mph fastballs 60% of the time to throwing a 91 mph fastball only 36% of the time. He is now a slider-first pitcher and it has allowed him to have a tremendously successful decline phase – if you can even call his 72 ERA- over the last five seasons a decline. A Kershaw-like evolution from Bieber may not be so straightforward, however, as he’s never relied on his fastball nearly as much as Kershaw did and has always heavily featured his breaking stuff. In fact, it may come as a surprise to see that Bieber hasn’t decreased his fastball usage at all; at 38.3%, it’s pretty much right in line with his 2020 season:

Bieber’s continued use of his declining fastball has come at a cost. While his wOBA allowed on his fastball is only .364 so far this season, his xwOBA has risen somewhat ominously up to .435, compared to .320 last season and .290 in 2020. Instead of throwing fewer fastballs, Bieber has opted to change his breaking ball usage, throwing more sliders in lieu of his curveball. The problem is that his slider hasn’t been that effective for him this season (.300 wOBA, 18.8% SwStr%) after being one of the best sliders in baseball last year (.207 wOBA, 24.8 SwStr%). More than just its increased usage, the movement profile of the pitch has undergone a change as well:

Bieber is getting significantly less depth on his slider while gaining a small amount of horizontal movement. These changes come from him putting more back-spin on the pitch than in years past; previously, the spin he imparted on the ball was much closer to that of his curveball. As a result, his slider has more cutter-like qualities and he’s lost about 200 rpm from last year, leading to a pitch that is generating fewer whiffs and fewer swings outside the zone than at any other time in his career. If you look closely, you can see the subtle change in his fingers, which are pushing a bit more behind the ball, giving the pitch a touch more backspin than before:

These changes to his slider have given him a bigger movement and velocity difference between his slider and curveball, which is helping to diversify his arsenal after years of having a slider and curveball that were eerily similar. But it’s hard to say whether this is a good change, especially considering that it is now his most used pitch. His curveball, on the other hand, has been his best pitch (.201 wOBA, 16.8% SwStr%) and may be benefitting from these changes to his slider.

This new movement profile coupled with the mechanical changes highlighted earlier may be creating some issues when it comes to his typically great command of the pitch. Bieber is currently leaving double the number of sliders up in the zone compared to 2020. Check out his slider heat map and you’ll get a better sense of the frequency of his mistakes this season:

There’s been a lot of doom and gloom in this piece so far, and I would like to leave things on a more optimistic note. For that, I’ll mention Bieber’s most recent start against Detroit last Sunday afternoon. Things were a bit rocky in the beginning, with Miguel Cabrera ripping a hanging slider for an RBI double, but Bieber eventually settled in to what turned out to be a dominant performance. It was the best his slider has looked since before his injury. He found success with the pitch by consistently commanding it to the low-and-away corner, earning whiffs all afternoon — he generated 11 whiffs on 39 such pitches thrown (28.2% SwStr%) with an 84.9 mph average exit velocity. On the day, he notched a season-high 10 strikeouts over seven innings.

Of course, it’s only one start and it came against the Tigers and their league-trailing offense. Bieber’s fastball velocity didn’t tick up any, and even though his slider was great, none of the underlying metrics suggest it was all that different from what it has been in previous starts this season, still lacking the spin rate and vertical bite of years past. But that doesn’t have to mean that this start is an aberration. Bieber could be finding better ways to use his slider, and his command of the pitch could be improving as he gets more used to its new movement profile. Bieber really needs his breaking pitches to carry the weight if he’s going to remain successful with below average fastball velocity, and this outing serves as a proof of concept for how he can still dominate a lineup even if his Cy Young stuff stays firmly in the rear view mirror.