Cody Allen throws a lot of curveballs. As a matter of fact, the Cleveland closer has thrown the second-highest percentage (38.9%) of curveballs among qualified relievers since the start of the 2014 season. It’s hard to argue with success. Allen’s signature pitch has helped him amass 147 saves, the most in Indians history.

His grip, while not uncommon, isn’t entirely traditional, either. The 29-year-old right-hander throws a spiked curveball, which he learned and developed through the insistence of someone whose advice he’s always taken to heart. It was career-altering advice. Were it not for the pitch, Allen’s day-to-day experiences with rotation would be markedly different than they are on a mound.

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Cody Allen: “My freshman year of college, I was pretty much just a fastball-slider guy. My slider was OK. I have a twin brother, Chad, who pitched at the University of West Florida, and he had a really good breaking ball. He spiked his. He would always tell me, ‘Hey, man, try spiking it.’ I did, but I had no feel for it. It had good spin and was doing the things I wanted it to, but I felt there was no way I could throw it for a strike.

“When I was coming back from Tommy John surgery the next year, I had an extended throwing program. That gave me a window to see if I could maybe iron this pitch out. So the fall of 2009, and the spring of 2010, is when I really stuck with it. I kept throwing it, and it got better and better.

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Through Monday morning, José Ramírez has nearly accomplished something very unusual, which to-date has only been done once in baseball history. With just 0.1 WAR in separation, or roughly one run, Ramírez has almost caught Mike Trout. While one might ideally like Derek Fisher – or at least someone named Fry, Cook, or Giantbearpaw – to best a Trout, it’s Ramírez, the still-young Cleveland third baseman, overshadowed as a prospect by Francisco Lindor, who is leading the charge.

Trout, of course, hasn’t just been squeaking out WAR leads, as the average result during his five full, healthy seasons has been a 1.1 WAR lead over the second-place position player, terrorizing the error bars as thoroughly as major-league pitching. Only Bryce Harper has matched Trout so far, a player linked with the Angels center fielder while a prospect but one who has generally fallen short.

Even in Trout’s injury-trimmed 2017, during which he only played 114 games, he still finished fourth among hitters with a 6.9 WAR. That was good enough to be the fifth-best season for a player who appeared in fewer than 120 games since 1901, behind George Brett, Joe DiMaggio, Ted Williams, and Mike Schmidt, all players you may have heard of.

Ramírez didn’t explode onto the baseball scene as Trout did; in fact, he has been a bit of a surprise. The ZiPS projection season liked him as a prospect, but it didn’t fall CPU-over-RAM in love with him, seeing him more as a cordial fan. Trout is still the favorite, but ZiPS gives him a 35% chance of being surpassed by Ramírez in the year-end WAR count, something that’s awfully hard to do.

After his 2013 stint in Double-A, Ramírez got his first official ZiPS projection for the 2014 season. The computer pegged him at .267/.308/.346 at second base, good for 1.5 WAR in 116 games. While a league-average projection for a 21-year-old is impressive, I can’t make any claim to ZiPS predicting players achieving superstar status.

In 2015, Ramírez’s projection was similar at .263/.304/.360, good for a 90 OPS+ and 2.2 WAR over 138 projected games. This was largely thanks to a .302/.360/.441 Triple-A season in 2014 followed by a .262/.300/.346 line in his first real stint with the Indians. That was enough to get him almost into the top 20 in ZiPS (he would’ve been a top-five prospect in my 2015 list if he hadn’t already lost his Rookie of the Year qualifications).

In 2015, Ramírez began the season as the starting shortstop for Cleveland, and while I don’t have any inside knowledge of Cleveland’s reasoning, I would imagine they wanted to see what they had in Ramírez at short before Lindor hit the majors and cleared out the rest of the suitors, as Odysseus did in legend upon his return to Ithaca.

And what he showed wasn’t that much, at least initially. His defense wasn’t great, at -6 in UZR and -2 in DRS over fewer than 400 innings in 2015. When demoted in June, he was only hitting an Alcidian .180/.247/.240. By the time he returned to the majors in August, Ramírez had lost the shortstop job to the aforementioned Lindor for good, and hit .259/.337/.438, mostly filling in for Jason Kipnis and Giovanny Urshela, both nursing shoulder injuries.

ZiPS still believed in Ramírez going into 2016, but didn’t see quite as much upside, with his 2015 dropping him to 43rd in rest-of-career ZiPS WAR with a .262/.316/.383 line and a 1.9 WAR projection.

By now, you know how the rest of this story went. Ramírez burst into stardom in 2016, hitting .312/.363/.462, good for a 121 wRC+ and 4.8 WAR. Then he got even better in 2017. And this year, he’s ridden the saber-limousine all the way to Crazyville. As of Monday morning, Ramírez stands at .300/.409/.631 with 33 home runs, 26 stolen bases, a 175 wRC+ and 7.5 WAR, all already career highs (except for batting average) and by substantial margins. You can even make a case that he’s actually been a little unlucky, doing all of this with a .277 BABIP, down 23 points from his career average of .300. From his hit profile, ZiPS thinks Ramírez “ought to” have a .315 BABIP this year, or .302 by Andrew Perpetua’s model.

My colleague Jay Jaffe wrote about the greatest seasons by a third baseman a few months ago, so I won’t go too into detail, but I will touch on a few important points.

For position players as a group, the 10-WAR seasons in history can be distributed into a few buckets:

• Hall of Famers, plus one that ought to be on performance alone (Barry Bonds)
• Players who are not yet eligible (Alex Rodriguez, Trout)
• Norm Cash
• Fred Dunlap

Out of those 52 seasons, 50 were players in the first two categories, all with nearly indisputable Hall of Fame talent. Cash isn’t quite as obvious, but he’s at least a borderline category and better than quite a few other Cooperstown-immortalized sluggers. That just leaves Dunlap and his curious 1884 for the St. Louis Maroons, as he hit .412/.448/.621 as a 25-year-old and never hit .275 again. I am unable to find any accusations of performance-enhancing tincture or tonic, so I’ll assume that this was another case of 1800s-baseball-gonna-1800s-baseball, given the variability of play quality at the time.

The mean projection for Ramírez by ZIPS for the rest of the season puts him at 9.7 WAR, tantalizingly close to the 10-WAR barrier, which has been broken by exactly zero third basemen in MLB history. Only Darrell Evans, Adrian Beltre, Rodriguez, and Ron Santo made it to within a half-win of ten. What this means is that as of right now, ZiPS is projecting José Ramírez to have a 53% chance at the greatest season by a third baseman in history and a 20% chance of being the first to hit ten WAR.

Ramírez’s season is not being driven by some freakishly high defensive WAR number, something you occasionally see given how volatile defensive measurements tend to be. The former shortstop’s defense only amounts to 8.7% of his total WAR, 51st among the 85 seven-WAR seasons by third basemen. A few players have seen this share go to over a third, headed by Brooks Robinson’s 1968, in which fielding makes up 58% of his WAR, (Graig Nettles and Robin Ventura both had seasons over 33%).

Naturally, all this uncontrolled awesomeness has altered Ramírez’s career-trajectory, tempora mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis and all that jazz. In this year’s FanGraphs trade value series, Kiley McDaniel ranked Ramírez as the player with the greatest trade value in baseball, up from 15th in last year’s edition.

Unsurprisingly, the occasionally anthropomorphic projection system on my desk has also adjusted its gaze. Ramírez’s 2016 campaign got him back up to 25th in future WAR and over 2000 hits for his career. His 2017 rocketed him up to 8th, third-best of players 25 or older for the 2018 season, behind only Trout and Mookie Betts (and their 2500 hits).

As you probably have guessed, 2018 shoots Ramírez even higher in the long-term projections. His top-five near-age offensive comps are all Hall of Famers or should be (Santo, Ernie Banks, Scott Rolen, Chipper Jones, and Brett). Over the next five years, ZiPS projects 32.5 WAR, more than six wins a year, and 52 total WAR remaining, third among position players only behind Trout and Lindor. He already passed the 2500 hit mark in the projections; now he’s up at 350 homers as well. And with some simple math, all of a sudden, his projected final rank among third basemen puts him in Hall of Fame territory.

You can shift these rankings around a little depending on how you categorize players like Rodriguez and Miguel Cabrera, but there’s only limited play possible with these numbers, and however you shuffle the deck, Ramírez is one of the very few players projected to finish with a career of historical, plaqued significance. Projection systems just aren’t designed for exuberance.

José Ramírez is heading on a course that could see him end up as one of the greatest Indians players in history and one of the greatest third basemen, period. And thanks to some shrewd wheeling-and-dealing by the team’s front office to sign him to a five-year, $26 million contract after his initial breakout in 2016, he’s going to be doing it in Cleveland through the 2023 season. Ramírez is now in his third consecutive year of doing things we didn’t know were possible for him; if he manages to pull this off for a fourth, he may just break baseball.

The Indians’ center-field woes — which is how you describe it when four players combine for a 55 wRC+ and 0.2 WAR — earned them a spot on the center-field edition of my Replacement Level Killers series. On Tuesday afternoon, however, the club did something about that, acquiring 30-year-old flychaser Leonys Martin from the Tigers in exchange for 21-year-old switch-hitting Double-A shortstop Willi Castro, whom our own Eric Longenhagen called “Cleveland’s most realistic trade chip this summer” back in April.

The well-traveled Martin, who joins his fourth team since the end of the 2015 season — he spent 2016 and most of 2017 with the Mariners before being dealt to the Cubs on August 31 and then signing with the Tigers in December — is in the midst of his best offensive season, hitting .251/.321/.409 with nine homers and seven steals. As modest as that line looks, it’s good for a 98 wRC+, 16 points above his career mark and a strong turnaround from last year’s dismal .172/.232/.281 (35 wRC+) line, a performance so bad that he wound up making 388 plate appearances at Triple-A Tacoma. The uptick in production appears to be the result of a newfound ability to elevate the ball: his current ground-ball rate of 35.6 % is nearly 13 points below his pre-2018 mark and his ground-ball-to-fly-ball ratio of 0.77 basically half of what it was. According to Statcast, his average launch angle has increased from 9.4 degrees for the 2015-17 seasons to 16.8, with his xwOBA jumping a neat 100 points, from .264 to .364.

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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 the nineteenth installment of this series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Marco Estrada, Brad Hand, and Jake Odorizzi — on how they learned and/or developed a specific pitch.

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Marco Estrada (Blue Jays) on His Changeup

“I never really threw a changeup in high school or college. When I got to High-A, I met a kid named Clint Everts who threw a really good changeup, so I asked him how he held his. It was a pretty simple grip. I grabbed it and threw it a couple of times, and it came out pretty good. I actually took it into a game two or three days after that, and got a lot of swings and misses on it. That’s basically where it began.

“The way I hold it has been the same ever since, although I feel the action on it has been a little different lately — last year and this year. There’s a lot of talk about the balls being different and whatnot, and maybe that’s affecting it a little bit? But I just don’t feel that it’s been what it was. There are days where I throw a good one and kind of tell myself, “What did I do different?’ It felt the exact same, so, is it the ball? I don’t know what it could be.

Marco Estrada’s changeup grip.

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They can’t all be Mike Trout, and this year, with the Millville Meteor posting a career-best 191 wRC+, the rest of the center-field pack has been as unproductive as any time in recent history. The collective 95 wRC+ recorded by all center fielders (including Trout) is the lowest it’s been since 2006, back when Trout was a high-school freshman.

Even with that fairly modest production, only a small handful of contenders — which for this series I’ve defined as teams with playoff odds of at least 15.0% (a definition that currently covers 15 teams) — are receiving less than 1.0 WAR from their center fielders, which makes them eligible for a spot among the Replacement-Level Killers.

By the way, since I don’t have anywhere else to put it — this is the last article in the series, since the RLK concept doesn’t work so neatly for pitchers and just one AL team has a DH who could be classified a Killer. Sorry if that was awkward; continue as you were…

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Notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Starling Joseph, OF, Texas Rangers (Profile)
Level: Short-Season   Age: 19   Org Rank: NR   FV: 35+
Line: 3-for-4, HR

Notes
Joseph is a physical 6-foot-3 outfielder with plus raw power. He’s raw from a bat-to-ball standpoint due to length and a lack of bat control, but the power/frame combination here is interesting for a 19-year-old. Joseph has a 67:10 strikeout-to-walk ratio in domestic pro ball and is as high-risk of a prospect as you’ll find, but he has the power to carry the profile if he ever becomes sentient in the batter’s box.

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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 the eighteenth installment of this series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Trevor Bauer, Joe Biagini, and Noe Ramirez — on how they learned and/or developed a specific pitch.

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Trevor Bauer (Indians) on His Slider

“I wanted to add a Kluber-esque lateral breaking pitch, so I studied everything about it — spin axis, spin rate, trajectory, movement — and tried to copy it. I’ve done a pretty good job so far.

“It doesn’t come out of my hand the same way Kluber’s does or Stroman’s does, but I’m able to generate the same movement profile on it, because… it’s an iterative process. OK, this is happening and it’s not exactly what I want, so let me find a different way to hold it, or a different way to throw it, or a different cue. Let’s look at that at 2,000 frames per second. OK, does that have the desired effect? Yes or no. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I took up the mantle from Dave Cameron and published this site’s 11th annual Trade Value series. If you’re new to the concept, the Trade Value series represents an attempt to rank the most valuable assets in baseball, accounting for each player’s current skill level, age, and health while factoring in controllable years or contract status (with lots of advice from scouts and execs). Few, if any, of the players are likely to be traded in reality; however, the rankings represent an opportunity to see how the industry is and isn’t valuing players.

An unusual thing happened in this year’s series — namely, the top two spots in the rankings went to a pair teammates, Francisco Lindor and Jose Ramirez. By my reckoning, the combined eight years for which their contracts are controlled by Cleveland are worth around $385 million*. They’re incredibly valuable.

*To arrive at this figure, I used ZiPS projected WAR, projected dollar-per-WAR inflation, discounted values for years further into the future, and a linear concept of dollar-per-WAR. This is more of a ballpark number since clubs on either extreme of the payroll spectrum may value each win much more or less than the average team that’s assumed in this sort of calculation.

In the wake of this year’s edition, I began thinking: would any clubs have sufficient ammunition for Cleveland even to consider a possible trade of Lindor and Ramirez? As with the Trade Value series itself, this is mostly a hypothetical question. The Indians, as a contending club, have little incentive to deal two of the majors’ best players. Still, I was curious if any club could put together enough assets even to make it possible.

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The Indians traded blocked top prospect Francisco Mejia to the Padres for relievers Brad Hand and Adam Cimber today. It’s worth noting that the Dodgers, Indians, and Padres have all swung important deals within the past 24 hours and all have one thing in common: each has created depth by turning low-risk investments into real trade assets, via multiple avenues.

The Dodgers filled out the Machado deal with four prospects who weren’t touted until the last year or so. The Padres got Brad Hand on a waiver claim, while Cimber was completely off the radar until this year. The Indians, for their part, could afford to trade Mejia with Yan Gomes and Roberto Perez representing superior options behind the plate. These aren’t the only instances of these clubs turning nothing into something, but a couple instances ended up driving these big deals.

The Orioles have announced they will create better infrastructure to do this sort of thing more often going forward. There’s also been buzz in scouting circles today that at least one of the clubs that attempted to land Machado believes their package ultimately fell short because of substandard scouting and/or development.

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On the Tuesday prior to the All-Star break, at a game which this author observed from the Progressive Field press box, Trevor Bauer left his start after eight innings with the Indians holding a 4-0 lead. Then a call to the bullpen, complete with a miscommunication error, followed. Dan Otero faced Joey Votto. The Indians lost. It was not necessarily a great surprise: so often something has gone amiss for Cleveland this year after such calls to the bullpen.

As readers of this Web site are likely aware, the Indians’ bullpen has struggled mightily this season, sitting in the bottom quartile by many notable bullpen skill metrics.

The group ranks 28th in WAR (-0.9), 23rd in WPA (-1.07), 29th in ERA (5.28), and 29th in FIP (4.85). There has not been any positive regression, either. Over the past 30 days, the Cleveland relief corps has posted a 4.87 ERA, a 5.10 FIP, and a -0.15 WPA.

Bullpens are fickle beasts. The Indians’ 27th-ranked left-on-base percentage (68.7%) suggests some poor first-half fortune was bound for second-half positive regression. Oliver Perez and Neil Ramirez have been useful finds, with Ramirez perhaps building on his physical talents by learning more how to harness his high-spin fastball and breaking ball in concert. But the Indians had a clear manpower shortage in their bullpen, particularly with Andrew Miller still sidelined and out for much of the first half.

As the All-Star break approached, it felt like the Indians had to do something. Baseball knew the Indians had to do something, so if the Indians were to do something, it was not going to be done cheaply. And on Thursday, the Indians did something.

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