Next week, the Dolan family, owners of the Cleveland Indians, are being honored with a lifetime achievement award at the Greater Cleveland Sports Awards. The criteria for determining the winner of that particular prize is vague; it usually goes to a retired player. The Dolans are the only ownership group to have won it.

***

The Cincinnati Reds are a proud franchise in the midst of a tough run. A small market team in one of the league’s smallest cities, they’ve posted a losing record in each of the past six years. They haven’t won a playoff series in 30. TV ratings are solid — nothing attracts more eyeballs on a summer night in Cincinnati than Reds baseball — but fans haven’t had much to cheer lately. Franchise icon Joey Votto appears to be playing out the string. The Reds, even in a mediocre division, were buried in fourth place last season.

The Cleveland Indians are also a proud franchise, and they’re on a splendid run. They too are a small market team in one of the league’s smallest cities. But they’ve been plucky. The Tribe have notched seven consecutive winning seasons, and were a game away from a championship back in 2016. TV ratings are robust, the second-highest in all of baseball. Promising young players line the roster and shortstop Francisco Lindor is one of the game’s precious few superstars. The Indians missed the playoffs last season, but were relevant into the season’s final week and entered the winter with plenty of talent on hand.

So far this winter, Cincinnati has spent $100 million on Mike Moustakas, Wade Miley, and Shogo Akiyama. Cleveland has spent less than $10 million and dealt Corey Kluber for a reliever and an extra outfielder. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this week, I asked our readers to rank the star players rumored to be on the trade block. I asked just two questions. The first asked readers to rank the players by how good they are right now. The second asked readers to rank the players by their trade value.

The first question proved to be an easy one, as 42% of the more than 2,500 responses had the exact same ranking.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ethan Hankins has one of the highest ceilings in Cleveland’s pitching pipeline. The 6-foot-6 right-hander possesses a first-round pedigree — he went 35th overall in 2018 — and a heater that sits mid-90s with late life. Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel ranked him 15th in Cleveland’s system last year. Moreover, he’s wise beyond his years. Still just 19 years old, Hankins is studious enough about his craft that he could reasonably be referred to as a pitching nerd.

Hankins split his first full professional campaign between Short-season Mahoning Valley and Low-A Lake County, logging a 2.55 ERA and fanning 71 batters in 60 innings. No less impressive are the strides he’s continued to make between the ears. The former Forsythe, Georgia prep may have bypassed Vanderbilt University to sign with the Indians, but his quest for knowledge has by no means waned. Influenced heavily by his off-season experiences at Full Count Baseball, it continues unabated.

Hankins discussed his cerebral approach, and the improvements he’s made to his repertoire, late in the 2019 season.

———

David Laurila: Is pitching more of an art, or more of a science?

Ethan Hankins: “The game we’re playing right now, with all the analytical stuff we have access to, and use — especially with the Indians — it’s starting to become more of a science. I feel like it used to be more an art. Even a few years ago. But it’s been growing into something that can be called a science, because of the average velocities, the spin efficiencies, true spin, 2D spin, 3D spin. There are all of these numbers that can be beneficial if you know how to use them in the right way.“

Laurila: It sounds like you lean science.

Hankins: “Yes, but that’s not because the Indians have thrown it in my face. It’s because I’ve taken to learning how these numbers can benefit you. Granted, the Indians help a lot. They obviously have all of this knowledge. But not everybody uses it. We don’t get pressured to use it.”

Laurila: How do you use it?

Hankins: “There are a million different ways that… oh gosh. I’d say that I’m using it to develop my offspeed, more than anything. My curveball has made a huge jump over the past year. I don’t credit that solely to the Rapsodo, or any of the other technology we have access to, but that does give you a lot of insight. It tells you, ‘This is where you are.’ From there, you’re able to say, ‘OK, I want to be here; I want this pitch to have this much efficiency. This is the direction I want.’ Read the rest of this entry »

Who will man the shortstop position for the Indians once the Francisco Lindor era is over? That largely depends on when Cleveland’s best player moves on, but the down-the-road answer could very well be Brayan Rocchio. The 18-year-old switch-hitter came into last season ranked No.4 on our Indians Top Prospects list.

Borrowing a boxing term, Rocchio punched above his weight in 2019. Listed at 5-foot-10 and 150 pounds, he slashed a wholly respectable .250/.310/.373 for the Mahoning Valley Scrappers in the short-season New York-Penn League. Stateside for the first time, the Caracas, Venezuela native put up those numbers against pitchers typically several years his senior.

Moreover, he did so as a comparable flyweight. With that in mind, I asked Indians GM Mike Chernoff just how impactful Rocchio’s bat can ultimately be, given his whippet-like frame.

“We have a lot of young international players who, when we signed them, were sort of undersized,” said Chernoff. “He’s one of those guys. But we see a ton of potential in his bat-to-ball ability, and in his defensive capabilities. He’s also held his own while super young for his level, and to us that’s a huge indicator of future success. We feel that as Brayan matures, as his body gets stronger and can handle the demands of a full season, he has a chance to be an impact guy.”

But again, just how impactful? While Rocchio’s physique will almost certainly fill out, he’ll be doing so from a 150-pound baseline. That’s water-bug territory, not future-thumper. Right? Read the rest of this entry »

In an article that ran here 10 days ago, Chicago White Sox GM Rick Hahn was quoted as saying that people in his role tend to “spend a lot more time trying to unpack what goes wrong, as opposed to examining all the things that may have gone right.”

Danny Mendick fits firmly in the ‘right’ category. Unheralded coming into the 2019 season — he ranked No. 26 on our White Sox Top Prospects list — the 26-year-old infielder earned a September call-up and proceeded to slash .308/.325/.462 in 40 plate appearances. As the season came to a close, Sunday Notes devoted a handful of paragraphs to his Cinderella-like story.

Mendick’s story deserves more than a handful of paragraphs. With the calendar about to flip to 2020, let’s take a longer look at where he came from. We’ll start with words from Hahn.

“When we took him in the 22nd round, as a senior [in 2015], I think we all knew he’d play in the big leagues,” the ChiSox exec said when I inquired about Mendick at the GM Meetings. “OK, no. I’m messing with you. We didn’t know.”

Continuing in a serious vein, Hahn added that the White Sox routinely ask their area scouts to identify “one or two guys they have a gut feel on.” These are draft-eligible players who “maybe don’t stand out from a tools standpoint, or from a notoriety standpoint, but are true baseball players; they play the game the right way and have a positive influence on others.”

In other words, organizational depth. And maybe — just maybe — they will overachieve and one day earn an opportunity at the highest level. Read the rest of this entry »

Managers and front office executives have media obligations at the Winter Meetings, and here at FanGraphs we do our best to engage in, and report on, as any those sessions as possible. Today we’ll share some of what I learned in San Diego, with the five American League Central teams front and center.

———

How do trade talks typically work at the Winter Meetings? Twins President of Baseball Operations Derek Falvey touched on that subject as things were winding down in San Diego.

“A lot of it is continuation of previous conversations,” Falvey told a small group of reporters. “End of season, everyone kind of takes a breath and looks at what’s going on. Then you have the GM meetings and start a lot of the conversations. This is just an extension of that. In many ways, we sit in our suites and text, and call, other teams. We’re not necessarily even walking down the hall, or going to another floor.”

The Twins aren’t unique in that respect. I subsequently overheard an executive from a National League team saying he’s not sure if anyone came to their suite all week.

As for the level of non-face-to-face exchanges, some clubs were more engaged than others. The AL Central champs fit into the “less” category, their attention directed more toward non-trade acquisitions.

“Last year was a little bit slower Winter Meetings,” Falvey said of expectations going in. “Could it be slower again? We weren’t sure. If anything, this gave us some more clarity around what our next few weeks will look like. We’ve already assessed the players. I’ll say this: The conversations with teams seemed a little less frequent than the free agent conversations.” 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.

Like Johan Santana, Roy Oswalt, and many a great pitcher before them, Cliff Lee burned brightly but briefly. Though he lacked a high-velocity fastball, the 6-foot-3, 205-pound lefty — “lean like a knife blade, with a club fighter’s big jaw,” as Pat Jordan described him in 2011 — had a deceptive delivery and precision command of a broad arsenal of weapons. His mid-career addition of a cut fastball, inspired by — who else? — Mariano Rivera turned him from an innings-eater into an ace.

From 2008-13, Lee was arguably the best pitcher in baseball. His 36.8 WAR over that span was nearly four full wins ahead of the second-ranked Clayton Kershaw, who to be fair was a late-May call-up at the start of that stretch (by fWAR, Lee had a 1.5-WAR lead over second-ranked Justin Verlander). Over that six-year span, Lee had the majors’ second-lowest ERA (2.89), the lowest FIP (2.85) and walk rate (1.33 per nine), and the highest strikeout-to-walk ratio of any pitcher with at least 600 innings. During that time, which began when Lee was 29 and fresh off the sting of having spent a good chunk of the previous season in Triple-A while his teammates came within one win of the AL pennant, he won a Cy Young award, pitched for two World Series teams, was traded three times, made four All-Star teams, and signed the third-richest deal for a pitcher to that point.

Lee threw 1,333.2 innings in that span, the fifth-highest total in baseball. Unfortunately, his elbow could only handle so much. A flexor pronator strain limited him to 13 starts in 2014, his age-35 season, and aside from a single spring training outing in 2015, he never pitched in a game again. As I noted in the context of Oswalt’s Hall of Fame case last year, Lee’s total of 2156.2 innings is fewer than all but one enshrined starter — not Sandy Koufax but Dizzy Dean. While not truly a viable candidate for Cooperstown, he nonetheless merits a full-length entry in this series.

Read the rest of this entry »

Since the start of the 2016 season, Corey Kluber has been baseball’s sixth-best pitcher by WAR. That’s despite making just seven starts last year. Even over the last three seasons, he’s still in the top 10 and just two years ago, his 5.5 WAR ranked eighth. One season lost to injury later, Corey Kluber’s trade value plummeted. Despite no strong trade offers, an indication of Kluber’s perceived low value around the league, Cleveland didn’t want to keep their former ace and dealt him for the best offer available to the Texas Rangers. Here’s the deal, as first reported by Ken Rosenthal.

Rangers Receive:

• RHP Corey Kluber

Indians Receive:

• RHP Emmanuel Clase
• OF Delino DeShields Jr.

To help frame Kluber’s talent as it stands right now, here are the righty’s ZiPS projections as supplied by Dan Szymborski:

Kluber will be 34 years old in April. Even before the 2019 season began, there were questions about his effectiveness. He posted that 5.5 WAR season is 2018, but his velocity and swinging strike dropped in 2019. His 2017 represented a career year, but going from a 34% strikeout rate that season to a 26% strikeout rate in 2018, along with slightly diminished velocity moving into his mid-30s, likely prevented Cleveland from trading him last offseason when no team was willing to blow them away. While it might have been reasonable to expect a slightly diminished Kluber in 2019, predicting he would be hit by a comebacker that would break his forearm is more of a fluke. An oblique injury during rehab meant that Kluber didn’t make it back to the majors, taking his on-field expectations and trade value to new lows.

If we were to look at Kluber’s value through the lens of the projections, the return for Kluber is light, but not unconscionably so. Emmanuel Clase is an exciting reliever. Ben Clemens wrote about him in August, after he threw this 101 mph cutter:

He is still just a reliever, though. He was graded as a 40+ FV player on our 2019 midseason update, and Eric Longenhagen told me he’ll probably be a 45 this offseason. Clase will be 22 years old in March and will be making the minimum salary through 2022. Generically, a prospect like Clase would be worth around $4 million or so in present value. Kluber’s projections minus his salary above provide a $16 million surplus in present value. We could be generous and assign Clase a bit of extra value for having already making the majors, making his success more likely, but we’ll probably still come up short relative to Kluber’s projected value.

There were reports that Cleveland had asked the Angels for Brandon Marsh, a 50 FV prospect who is in the top 100 on THE BOARD. Looking just through the prism of prospect surplus value, Marsh is too much to give up for Kluber based on Kluber’s expected performance. Cleveland perhaps should have gotten a little bit more objectively, but they were never going to get a haul dealing him this winter. Claiming Cleveland should have gotten more because Kluber’s trade value is high is question-begging. The question actually raised by this deal is if Kluber’s current trade value is so low, why on earth would Cleveland bother to deal him now? The answer likely isn’t a great one for Cleveland as an organization.

After consistently keeping payroll in the bottom quarter of major league teams for the early part of the decade, Cleveland jumped close to league average after making the World Series in 2016. Attendance rose by roughly 400,000 fans after the payroll increase and the team kept most of those gains in 2018 as payroll remained steady. Last offseason, the club dropped payroll by more than $20 million and failed to address glaring weaknesses in the outfield; attendance at Progressive Field dipped by 200,000 and Cleveland barely missed the playoffs. While the offseason isn’t complete, the team is down another $20 million-plus in payroll thus far.

What’s most bizarre about this Kluber trade is that if he weren’t already on Cleveland, the team would be an ideal landing spot for him. They are a small-market club with a good team trying to make the playoffs. Taking on a one-year commitment for $17.5 million and having an option for a second year at a similar cost for an ace one season removed from a very good season feels like a no-brainer. It’s a low-risk, high-reward deal that a team like Cleveland should be all over. Kluber might not pay dividends, but if he recaptures some of his prior form, it turns Cleveland from a good team into a great one. If he’s good, but Cleveland is not, then his trade value next season will be well above where it is right now. This deal says that either Cleveland has no faith in Kluber as a pitcher or that cutting payroll is more important than trying to win. Even if it is the former, there’s still arguably a chance that Kluber contributes next season. If it’s the latter, and last offseason fails to provide Cleveland with the benefit of the doubt, that’s just bad for baseball.

Of course, another ideal fit for Kluber is the Texas Rangers. Kluber’s salary goes up $1 million with the trade to $18.5 million, but that’s basically what Madison Bumgarner just received, except for five seasons. The team option is now a vesting one should Kluber get to 160 innings and doesn’t end the season on the injured list, though if that happens, the option would look like a good deal. The vesting option shouldn’t lower Kluber’s trade value as the innings requirement still serves to raise the floor of the deal by decreasing the chances of being stuck with two poor seasons. Texas isn’t good right now, but they have a rotation that doesn’t need Kluber, with Lance Lynn, Mike Minor, Kyle Gibson, and Jordan Lyles as their top four. They could have gotten another low-end starter and still had one of the better rotations in the game. That low-end starter might increase the team’s floor, but for a club trying to get back into contention in what should be a tough division, raising the ceiling might be more important.

The Rangers still have a lot of work to do on the position-player side, but they now have one of the 10-best pitching staffs in baseball. Giving up Clase and a near-replacement-level outfielder in Deshields is a hard move not to make. A lot of other teams might have been able to put together similar offers, but it is possible many systems, like the lower-level heavy Angels, just couldn’t match up with the 2020 value Cleveland was looking for. That helps explain why Texas might have been able to pull off this deal where other teams couldn’t, but it doesn’t do much to help understand why Cleveland made this deal at this time when Kluber’s value to them should have been much higher than what he returned in trade. What ended up being good for the Rangers also seems pretty bad for baseball.

Ben Cherington stepped into a conflicted situation when he took over the GM reins in Pittsburgh last month. On the heels of a 93-loss season, an understandably-frustrated Pirates fan base wants to see a competitive team on the field in 2020. At the same time, a complete rebuild is arguably the more prudent course of action. Given the current roster and farm system, paired with ownership’s notoriously-tight purse strings… let’s just say that while Cherington is smart, he doesn’t possess magical powers. Patchwork moves alone aren’t going to turn this team around.

Nevertheless, that might be the plan. The former Red Sox and Blue Jays executive wasn’t willing to embrace the rebuild idea when I suggested it earlier this week during the Winter Meetings.

“There can be reasonable opinions from reasonable people, smart people, about the right direction, the right way to build,” said Cherington. “I can tell you that within our room, within baseball operations, we’re not thinking about it that way. We’re thinking about it more as ‘needing to get to a winning team.’ There’s no one path toward that.”

Cherington opined that there is untapped potential on the roster, and added that he’ll explore ways to add more talent. But what exactly does that mean? While he intimated that moves will be made, these are Bob Nutting’s Pittsburgh Pirates he’s working for now. I’d venture to guess that Scott Boras doesn’t have PNC Park phone numbers on speed dial. 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. Originally written for the 2017 election at SI.com, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. 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.

A savant in the batter’s box, Manny Ramirez could be an idiot just about everywhere else — sometimes amusingly, sometimes much less so. The Dominican-born slugger, who grew up in the Washington Heights neighborhood of upper Manhattan, stands as one of the greatest hitters of all time, a power-hitting right-handed slugger who spent the better part of his 19 seasons (1993–2011) terrorizing pitchers. A 12-time All-Star, Ramirez bashed 555 home runs and helped the Indians and the Red Sox reach two World Series apiece, adding a record 29 postseason homers along the way. He was the World Series MVP for Boston in 2004, when the club won its first championship in 86 years.

For all of his prowess with the bat, Ramirez’s lapses — Manny Being Manny — both on and off the field are legendary. There was the time in 1997 that he “stole” first base, returning to the bag after a successful steal of second because he thought Jim Thome had fouled off a pitch… the time in 2004 that he inexplicably cut off center fielder Johnny Damon’s relay throw from about 30 feet away, leading to an inside-the-park home run… the time in 2005 when he disappeared mid-inning to relieve himself inside Fenway Park’s Green Monster… the time in 2008 that he high-fived a fan mid-play between catching a fly ball and doubling a runner off first… and so much more. Read the rest of this entry »