When the Rays acquired Nate Karns from the Nationals back in 2014, the story was that he had fastball velocity and a power curve, and we’ll see about the changeup. We saw the changeup, and it was good enough, and the curve was as advertised. Unfortunately, something happened to the fastball along the way.

The Rays sent Jose Lobaton and Felipe Rivero to the Nationals for that curveball and hoped on the change. The change looked good in 147 innings for the Rays in 2015, so the Mariners took a leap that offseason, sending Brad Miller, Logan Morrison and Danny Farquhar to the Rays for Karns, right-hander C.J. Riefenhauser, and center fielder Boog Powell. Now, after a poor year, Karns has been traded again — to the Royals, this time — for outfielder Jarrod Dyson.

What happened last year, when Karns had an ERA over five? The curve and the change were fine in Seattle! But in the meantime, something may have happened to Karns’ fastball. And it could have to do with useful spin. Kansas City has to hope that what broke is fixable.

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On Friday morning, the Mariners made what looked like a weird trade, shipping useful outfielder Seth Smith to the Orioles for less useful starting pitcher Yovani Gallardo, who is both not as good as Smith but also more expensive. Sure, the Mariners needed some more pitching depth, but they weren’t really rolling around in extra good outfielders, so subtracting Smith seemed weird.

Then, though, they made a second trade, this time swapping a starting pitcher for an outfielder, that made the pair of moves make a bit more sense. In the second deal, they shipped Nate Karns to Kansas City in exchange for Jarrod Dyson, who is a better player than Smith, so the series of moves actually resulted in an OF upgrade, with the impact to the pitching staff depending on what you think of Karns, who has both obvious strengths and minuses.

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The Mariners, after trading Taijuan Walker away in the Jean Segura deal, have been looking for a back-end starting pitcher. How desperate were they? Well, desperate enough to take a pitcher that the Baltimore Orioles — who have one of the worst rotations in baseball — didn’t want to keep around.

The deal, as announced by both teams, is a straight-up swap of Seth Smith for Yovani Gallardo, with the Orioles including some cash in the deal, though Dan Connolly reports the Orioles save about $4 million in the deal, so the cash doesn’t offset the price differences. In Smith, the Orioles are getting a guy who can play right field against right-handed pitching; he doesn’t field well or hit lefties enough to justify an everyday job, but as the strong side of a platoon, he’s a decent role player. Given that the Orioles current right fielder was Joey Rickard, Smith is an upgrade over a replacement level hole, and picking him up at a reasonable price makes plenty of sense for Baltimore.

For the Mariners, this is a bit weirder. Yeah, they needed another arm for the rotation, since the back-end was pretty thin, but it’s not entirely clear that Gallardo is actually much better than what they already had. After a nice run with Milwaukee at the beginning of his career, Gallardo transitioned more into an innings-eater in 2013, and things have been steadily downhill since then.

As the strikeouts disappeared, Gallardo survived by avoiding walks, but even that went away last year, when he posted the second highest walk rate of his career. His stuff has diminished to the point that he’s now a nibbler, but he doesn’t get swings and misses out of the zone anymore.

His in-zone contact rates are fairly steady (though worse than in his prime), but the lack of whiffs out of the zone means that Gallardo doesn’t really have any way to put batters away anymore, and so now he’s just a pitch-to-contact guy who doesn’t throw enough strikes.

If you want to be optimistic, you can look at his prior track record of success and his age, and hope that maybe Gallardo can get some of his prior stuff back, but the trends here are all negative. As a guy who throws 90 and doesn’t have an out pitch or plus command, he’s really nothing more than a #5 starter at this point, and even that might be generous. And toss in the elbow problems that turned his initial three year deal with Baltimore into a two year deal following his physical, then landed him on the disabled list last year, he’s not even necessarily an innings sponge you can count on to stay healthy.

Perhaps when your internal options are Ariel Miranda or Nathan Karns, even Gallardo looks useful, but for a team looking to win in the short-term, they should probably do better than hand the ball to Gallardo every five days. Smith isn’t a huge loss, especially with the team having younger outfielders worth taking a look at, but this feels like moving a useful-but-flawed outfield for a less-useful-and-flawed pitcher. Sure, the Mariners needed a pitcher more, but unless they know how to get Gallardo’s velocity back, I’m not sure this is the arm they needed.

While the 2016 campaign is over and the flurry of moves after the season has come to a halt for the moment, a whole year’s worth of data remains to be examined. Today’s post is an easy one and a fun one. Let’s find the best pitches that were thrown regularly last year.

Before we begin: the word “results” appears in the headline, but I’m not going to use results judged by things like singles and doubles and the like. The samples gets pretty small if you chop up the ball-in-play numbers on a single pitch, and defense exerts too much of an influence on those numbers. So “results” here denotes not hit types, but rather whiffs and grounders.

I’ve grouped all the pitches thrown last year, minimum 75 for non-fastballs, 100 for fastballs. I combined knuckle and regular curves, and put split-fingers in with the changeups. So the sample per pitch type is generally around 300 — a lot less for cutters (89) and a bunch more for four seamers (500) — but generally around 300 pitches qualified in each category. Then I found the z-scores for the whiff and ground-ball rates on those pitches. I multiplied the whiff rate z-score by two before adding it to the ground-ball rate because I generally found correlations that were twice as strong between whiff rates and overall numbers like ERA and SIERA than they were for ground-ball rates.

The caveats are obvious. Pitches work in tandem, so you may get a whiff on your changeup because your fastball is so devastating. This doesn’t reward called strikes as much as swinging strikes, so it’s not a great measure for command. On the other hand, there isn’t a great measure for command. By using ground-ball rate instead of launch-angle allowed, we’re using some ball-in-play data and maybe not the best ball-in-play data.

But average-launch-angle allowed is problematic in its own way, and ground-ball rate is actually one of the best ball-in-play stats we have — it’s very sticky year to year and becomes meaningful very quickly. Whiff rates are super sexy, since a swing and a miss represents a clear victory for the pitchers over the batter — and also because there’s no room for scorer error or bias in the numbers. And while the precise way in which pitches work in tandem remains obscure in pitching analysis, we can still learn something from splitting the pitches up into their own buckets.

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After having typically appeared in the very famous pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past few years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Seattle Mariners. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Boston / Chicago NL / Cleveland / Detroit / Houston / Los Angeles AL / San Diego / San Francisco / Tampa Bay / Toronto / Washington.

Batters
Here’s the very easiest way to determine if a club is likely to possess at least an average collection of field players: determine if all the field players in question receive a forecast of two wins or better. Where the Seattle Mariners are concerned, that’s more or less the case.

The hypothetical right-field platoon of Seth Smith (410 PA, 1.4 zWAR) and Guillermo Heredia (523, 0.9) might represent a weak spot — as might a platoon of Dan Vogelbach (508, 1.0) and Danny Valencia (419, 1.4) at first. In both instances, however, there’s at least a path to competence. Beyond that, basically every other position in the starting lineup — including a left field occupied by the recently acquired Mitch Haniger (517, 1.9) — is average or better. Nor does this account for the nearly elite contributions of Robinson Cano (644, 4.2) and Kyle Seager (653, 4.8).

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Sort this year’s free-agent corner outfielders by last year’s production, and Angel Pagan’s name appears right at the top of the list. Sort that same list by projected production, however, and Pagan falls to seventh best, right behind the recently signed Matt Joyce. We all know how projections work: at the most basic level, they’re the product of past performance and age. For most veteran players, those two variables conspire to create a pretty dependable vision of the future.

Pagan has proven to be a difficult case for projection systems, however. He’s been particularly volatile over the course of his career — specifically with regard to his offensive production. If we could identify the causes of that volatility, perhaps we could improve upon the vision of Pagan’s future provided by the projections. And along the way, we might find him the right team.

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Here are the prospects changing hands in last night’s deal between Seattle and Atlanta as evaluated by KATOH projection system. KATOH+ represents a player’s WAR projection over his first six years in the majors and includes said player’s Baseball America’s ranking as a variable.

*****

Alex Jackson, RF, Atlanta

Jackson has struggled to make contact ever since the Mariners popped him sixth overall back in 2014. He hit decently in his second crack at Low-A last year, but KATOH is alarmed by his 27% strikeout rate. The fact that he’s a right fielder who neither steals bases nor grades out well defensively also hurts his case. He’s hit for decent power, but the statistical negatives far outweigh the positives. Of course, Jackson was viewed as one of the best prospects in the country a mere two-and-a-half years ago, so it’s likely he still has some potential that isn’t showing up in his on-field performance. The traditional KATOH also projects him for 0.4 WAR.

KATOH+ Projection for first six years: 0.4 WAR

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In all-prospect trade Monday night, the Atlanta Braves acquired OF Alex Jackson from Seattle in exchange for pitchers Max Povse and Rob Whalen. Jackson, the sixth-overall pick in the 2014 draft, is the headliner here despite poor performance in pro ball because he was one of this decade’s most decorated high-school hitters.

In 2012, Jackson led all California high-school hitters in home runs with 17. He was a sophomore. Later that summer, Jackson went to Area Codes, where he had one of the event’s most impressive batting practices. His swing length was exposed in games during the event, but Jackson made an adjustment and shortened up the next spring and continued to rake. He hit well against elite prep arms in showcases during his entire high-school career. The track record for hitters who have consistent success at those events is very good.

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The Mariners, who are operating with a pretty short-term competitive window, added Jean Segura right before Thanksgiving. Segura has been driving the headlines, and it’s no mystery why. He finished last year with a 5.0 WAR, and, for the sake of reference, that tied him with Joey Votto. It put him in front of Xander Bogaerts. To go a little more traditional, Segura led the National League in hits by 10, ahead of Corey Seager. It was a breakthrough season for the 26-year-old, and his ability to play shortstop plugs what had been a glaring hole. There’s no question that Segura fits the profile of a headliner.

Many who’ve written about the Mariners’ side have written about Segura. Many of the quotes from Jerry Dipoto have been about Segura. But, at risk of sounding like Dave, I have to wonder — was Segura really the Mariners’ best get? Or will we eventually reflect on this as being the move that brought Seattle Mitch Haniger?

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Apparently Mike Hazen and Jerry Dipoto don’t have anything better to do on Thanksgiving eve than make a big trade that makes those of us with stuff to do have to apologize to our family and start working. Thanks, jerks. Have some pie and take a day off already.

Personal aspersions at the GMs aside, Arizona and Seattle have pulled off a pretty fascinating trade. The particulars.

Taijuan Walker, SP
Ketel Marte, SS

Jean Segura, SS
Mitch Haniger, OF
Zac Curtis, LHP

Mike Hazen’s first big trade as Arizona’s GM is to sell high on the best player acquired by previous GM Dave Stewart. The Diamondbacks hit the jackpot buying low on Segura last winter, as a player who had racked up +3.6 WAR during his career in Milwaukee put up a +5 WAR season in his one year in the desert. Rather than bet on him coming back and having another career year, Arizona turned Segura into another buy-low guy in Walker, who has long been hailed as a possible frontline starter but hasn’t lived up to the potential yet.

It’s pretty easy to see Hazen’s rationale here; he turns a 27-year-old and a 26-year-old into a 24-year-old and a 23-year-old, picking up extra team control years in the process, and in Walker, he lands a guy who could easily be worth more than Segura long-term, especially if you don’t buy into Segura’s power spike. The Diamondbacks get younger and pick up some extra long-term value, and in reality, they probably don’t make themselves much worse in 2017 either; Haniger didn’t have a role on their team at the moment, and Curtis is mostly a throw-in.

From Seattle’s perspective, this looks reasonable enough if you buy into two things.

1. The team’s long-term future depends mostly on them winning in the short-term, given the age of the guys anchoring the roster, so current wins are worth a lot more to Seattle than future wins.

2. Haniger is a potential above-average regular. While Segura is going to be the guy everyone focuses on, Haniger might just be the guy who makes this deal work for Seattle — if it works for Seattle — by giving them a quality OF they don’t really have at the moment. Eric Longenhagen’s write-up on him from the Arizona Prospect Report is particularly useful now.

While big-league pitchers were able to exploit Haniger’s vulnerability to pitches down and away during his late-season cup of coffee, he’s an above-average runner with plus raw power. Players with that tool combination aren’t exactly easy to come by. Haniger was demoted to High-A as a 24-year old in 2015 after slugging a paltry .379 for Double-A Mobile. It looked like bad news to those of us on the outside who thought the Diamondbacks were souring on him, but in reality Haniger proactively told the D-backs he’d accept a demotion if it meant he could play every day which, with prospects Evan Marzilli, Socrates Brito and Gabriel Guerrero also in Mobile by mid-year, wasn’t going to happen at Double-A. Haniger made a swing change (profiled here and here by excellent D-backs beat writer Nick Piecoro) and took off. You can see the old swing here.

Scouts are a little bit apprehensive about Haniger’s propensity to swing and miss and think there’s a good chance he either ends up as a platoon bat or power-first fourth outfielder who can play center field in a pinch. Given Haniger’s purported makeup and clear ability to make significant adjustments, I think there’s a non-zero chance he’s a late-blooming average regular but it’s more likely he falls just short of that. The Diamondbacks acquired Haniger along with Anthony Banda from Milwaukee in exchange for Gerardo Parra.

If Haniger turns into a fourth OF, I don’t know if Seattle will get the upgrade they were looking for in turning Walker’s upside and whatever Marte might be into Segura’s 2017 and 2018 seasons, but there are reasons to think that maybe Haniger has some remaining value left. Most notably, he played 182 of his 258 innings with Arizona in CF, and D’Backs beat writer Nick Piecoro texted me after the trade was announced to say that he thought Haniger’s defense in center was quite good, and definitely better than just a get-away-with-it glove.

If Haniger is a good enough defender to be a regular CF, then the offense could make him more valuable than Segura, especially if his 2016 improvement was more breakout than fluke. The projections aren’t sold, especially after he didn’t hit that well in the big leagues, but if you’re into speculative buys on late-bloomers, there are some reasons to think that maybe Haniger could be on the late-developing-star track. From a Piecoro story in August.

A year ago, he was getting inconsistent at-bats with Mobile when the organization demoted him to High-A Visalia. While there, he began incorporating a leg kick. Then in the offseason, he continued to tinker with his swing mechanics, adjusting where he holds his hands and altering his swing path.

For Haniger, the changes were borne from a question: Why was it that other hitters who weren’t as big or as strong as he was were able to drive the ball to the opposite field with more authority? He began studying swings of players like Josh Donaldson and A.J. Pollock and read up on the hitting philosophies of Bobby Tewksbary, a coach who helped both of those hitters develop into All-Stars.

“I feel like now I’m able to recognize pitches better,” Haniger said. “I can make up my mind whether to swing or not later than I have in the past because my swing is deeper in the zone. I’m able to stay off close pitches. It’s easier for me to use all fields and to see pitches better.”

Donaldson and Pollock certainly aren’t bad examples to follow, and they aren’t the only guys who have improved dramatically after working with Tewksbury; Eno Sarris wrote about Ryon Healy also making similar adjustments, and he was a revelation for the A’s this year after not really being considered much of a prospect.

There’s a lot of ifs here. If Haniger’s glove really is as good as Piecoro thought — which could make him a very good defensive corner OF in Seattle, since Leonys Martin is still around — and if some of these swing changes were the reason for his 2016 breakout, then he could be an average or better hitter with some real defensive value. And with six years of team control, that would make him the real get in this deal for the Mariners, likely offsetting a lot of the long-term value they may lose with Walker and Marte gone gone.

If Haniger is just an ordinary defensive OF without enough bat to carry him, then I think Arizona will be happy with this deal, getting younger and selling high on a guy whose value didn’t really have anywhere to go but down. But if Haniger turns into a 100 to 110 wRC+ guy with plus defense in a corner or enough glove to play center? Well, all of the sudden, that’s a pretty great piece too, and would fill a hole the Mariners definitely needed to fill.

So, yeah, this is a fascinating trade. I don’t know if I’m sold enough on Haniger, so I’d probably prefer Arizona’s side, but for a win-now Mariners team, you can see the potential for this to make the team a lot better in the near future. And given that Walker is, at this point, more upside than realized value, it’s not that hard to see why the Mariners preferred to push in now, before their old stars stop playing like stars.

And for Arizona, while I might have short-changed them in words here, this is an easy deal to like from their end. If Walker turns into this year’s Segura, and they hit on another buy-low talent, Mike Hazen will be plenty happy with his first deal as the Diamondbacks GM.