Joey Gallo is a Yankee, Eduardo Escobar is a Brewer, and Starling Marte will finish his season in Oakland. It’s already been a fast-paced trade season, and there are still a lot of deals that could be done before Friday’s deadline. But as I noted in a piece on Wednesday that looked at the most impactful players on the IL for American League contenders, there are top-flight pitchers and hitters who are not going to be traded but are waiting in the wings. Today I want to look at the NL side of things.

As a reminder, I calculated team injury impact to date this season by looking at the injury ledger data from Baseball Prospectus to determine each team’s injury impact to date in FanGraphs WAR compared to preseason projections. Additionally, while most of the teams I identified as contending had at least one impactful player on the IL, one did not; I’ll still spend some time on the Padres, but they will need to look to the trade market for reinforcements.

Finally, the cutoff for contending is defined as having playoff odds greater than 30%. I’m sure that will frustrate some Philadelphia and Atlanta fans who believe their teams still have a chance to chase down the Mets. For what it’s worth, the Braves are hoping that Ian Anderson and Drew Smyly can return to throw meaningful innings and that Travis d’Arnaud will return to catch them. The Phillies have zero projected position player WAR on the IL at the moment, although starting pitcher Zach Eflin’s return from the 10-day IL should bolster the rotation. Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, I wrote about the American League clubs whose trade deadline behavior might be influenced, at least in part, by impending 40-man roster crunch. That piece, which includes an intro diddy explaining this whole exercise, can be found here. As a reminder, All of these rosters have a talent foundation at the major league level that won’t be moving, and which I’ll ignore below. Instead, I’m focused on the number of players on the 40-man right now, how many free agents will come off that number at the end of the season, which prospects might be added (or not), and who currently on the 40-man is in danger of being passed by the prospects. For the two categories where the rubber meets the road and it’s unclear what will happen (fringe current 40-man members vs. prospects who’ll possibly be added), I italicize the players I view as less likely to stay, or be added to the 40-man. Today, we’ll consider the National League teams with such crunch.

Los Angeles Dodgers

Current 40-man Count: 46 (40 + six 60-day IL players)
Pending Free Agents: 7 (Clayton Kershaw, Corey Knebel, Corey Seager, Chris Taylor, Kenley Jansen, Jimmy Nelson, Albert Pujols), plus Joe Kelly’s club option
Must-Add Prospects: Jacob Amaya, Michael Grove
Current 40-man Fringe: Billy McKinney, Luke Raley, Jimmie Sherfy, Sheldon Neuse, DJ Peters, Darien Núñez
Prospects on the Fringe: Jose Martinez, James Outman, Jeren Kendall, Guillermo Zuniga, Zach Willeman, Gus Varland, Devin Mann, Ryan Noda

The Dodgers have lots of both low-impact overage and viable big leaguers, but aside from Jacob Amaya, none are likely to be more than a 1-WAR type of role player or middle inning relief piece. The number of departing free agents is high, making Amaya and Grove (who has the best stuff of the potential additions but has been wild this year) comfortable adds, but the rest of the group might find roster equilibrium elsewhere. Read the rest of this entry »

As of Thursday night, the Mets’ starting rotation featured Marcus Stroman, Taijuan Walker, Tylor Megill, and a sentient ball of string who showed promise in Low-A. Fine, I made up the last one, but if you told the Mets front office about this ball of string, they’d at least ask you for its Trackman data. A seemingly unending string of injuries left the team grasping for pitching — any pitching at all. Enter Rich Hill, in a trade with the Rays:

We’ve acquired left-handed pitcher Rich Hill from Tampa Bay in exchange for right-handed pitcher Tommy Hunter and minor league catcher Matt Dyer. https://t.co/P24Fo2HoYd

— New York Mets (@Mets) July 23, 2021

At a very basic level, the Mets had to make this trade. Jacob deGrom is on the shelf. David Peterson broke his foot walking around. Carlos Carrasco and Noah Syndergaard aren’t ready. Joey Lucchesi tore his UCL. Robert Stock, who was already 10th or so on the depth chart, strained his hamstring. Forget replacement level — Hill represents an upgrade from subterranean level. To some extent, any trade at all would be a win, in that it would leave them able to field a roster.

But Hill isn’t merely roster depth. He’s one of the most interesting pitchers in baseball, a curve-and-fastball machine who has spent years pumping sub-90 mph gas past hitters while bamboozling them with a dazzling array of breaking balls. Heck, earlier this year he was named the AL Pitcher of the Month (it’s not the most prestigious award, but it’s an award) in May, when he posted a 0.78 ERA over 34.2 innings.

Of course, there are other months in the year, and the rest of Hill’s 2021 hasn’t gone nearly so well. In total he sported a 3.87 ERA and 4.55 FIP with the Rays, both of which are the highest marks he’s posted since bursting back onto the scene in 2015. His 9.9% swinging strike rate is better only than his abbreviated 2020 season, and he wasn’t exactly great then either. There’s a strong chance that Hill’s 2021 season will be his last stand. Read the rest of this entry »

For the full introduction to the Replacement-Level Killers series, follow the link above. 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 July 30 deadline, and in this two-position batch in particular, I don’t get the sense that any of these teams have these positions atop their shopping lists. With catchers in particular, 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.

Note that all individual stats in this article are through July 18, but the won-loss records and Playoff Odds include games of July 19. Read the rest of this entry »

For all of the anticipation and hype that surrounded the long-awaited participation of two-way phenom Shohei Ohtani as well as distance king Joey Gallo in their first Home Run Derbies — and at mile-high Coors Field, no less — it was easy to overlook the one contestant in the field who’d done this before. Because there was no Derby last year due to the coronavirus pandemic, 2019 winner Pete Alonso entered Monday night as the reigning champion, and he defended his title successfully and emphatically.

Indeed, the Mets’ 6-foot-3, 245-pound slugger seemed built for this competition, and he practically toyed with his opponents. After hitting a contest-high 35 homers in the quarterfinals, Alonso didn’t need his full allotment of time to win either of his final two rounds, capping his run by beating Trey Mancini in the finals, 23-22. In victory, he became the fourth player to win multiple Home Run Derbies, after Ken Griffey Jr. (1994, ’98-99), Prince Fielder (2009, ’12) and Yoenis Céspedes (2013-14). Mancini, who missed the 2020 season while undergoing chemotherapy for stage three colon cancer, put forth a valiant effort with a quick compact stroke that contrasted with Alonso’s long swing, but ultimately, he was outhit and outdistanced.

Alonso and Mancini were both part of the wave of upsets that characterized the night. In the quarterfinal round, all four lower seeds advanced, knocking out the Vegas-favored heavyweights, Ohtani and Gallo. While Ohtani’s loss to eighth-seeded Juan Soto rated as something of a disappointment given his headliner status, their battle was epic, requiring two rounds of tiebreakers. It’s worth noting that Coors Field favors right-handed hitters when it comes to homers, and three of the four lower seeds that advanced — the fifth-seeded Alonso, sixth-seeded Mancini, and seventh-seeded Trevor Story — swing righty. The seedings, by the way, were based upon the participants’ home run totals as of July 7; it wasn’t as though any Derby- or Statcast-related science went into the matchups. Read the rest of this entry »

You’re not as good at your job as Jacob deGrom is at his. That’s no knock on you — I don’t even know who you are, much less have access to your performance reviews or job history. But deGrom is one of the very best, in all of history, at the thing he does. I’m sure you’re a great accountant or whatever, but you just don’t stack up.

There’s good news, though. As it turns out, deGrom is actually relatable at times. Last Thursday, deGrom came into the office and had an absolutely miserable hour of work. He got smacked around the park and gave up three runs before recording three outs. And if one of the best of all time at a job can have an off day, then anyone can.

What does a deGrom off day look like? Like anyone’s, kind of. It starts with being a little sloppy, making a silly mistake that you know, even as you make it, isn’t right. For example, don’t leave a fastball, the second pitch of the game, here:

That’s not where pitches are supposed to go. It was a 100 mph fastball, but middle-middle is still not a good look, and Ehire Adrianza laced it past Dominic Smith and into the corner for a leadoff triple. Two pitches in, nothing was going right for the best pitcher in the game. Read the rest of this entry »

The Mets got a rare bit of good injury news on Wednesday. Marcus Stroman was pulled in the second inning on Tuesday after three pitches due to soreness in his left hip. Given the season the Mets are having in the injury department — there are 13 players on an Injured List as I type this — and really, the seemingly cursed history of the Mets and pitcher injuries, Stroman’s departure caused a lot of worries. But his MRI revealed no damage to the hip that would have resulted in a 14th name on the shelf.

That’s not to say the Mets are out of danger. The same day Stroman tweaked his hip, the team announced that Joey Lucchesi would undergo Tommy John surgery, ending his 2021 (and likely most of his 2022) season, and that Michael Conforto‘s return from the IL would be delayed. Given the team’s dissipating rotation depth, losing two pitchers instead of just one would have been a significant blow. Carlos Carrasco has yet to make his 2021 debut, Noah Syndergaard’s return date was pushed back due to elbow inflammation, and all-galaxy ace Jacob deGrom has had multiple injury scares already this season.

Now, the exercise here isn’t to depth-shame the Mets. In past years, the team had a bad habit of entering the season with interesting five-man rotations and highly worrisome Plans B, C, and D, generally consisting of converting relievers back to starters or leaning on whatever random Quad-A starting pitcher was playing decent ball for Syracuse. The additions of Carrasco, Lucchesi, Taijuan Walker, Jordan Yamamoto, Jerad Eickhoff, and Sam McWilliams provided the team a lot of fallback options on the pitching staff. That’s a notable improvement from a shrug-emoji-or-possibly-Walker-Lockett strategy.

Every team has a point at which they run out of good options. Even teams like the Rays, Dodgers, and Padres would be in dire straits if five starting pitchers suddenly decided to retire and sail around the world or sign with NASA to train full-time for a mission to Mars. The Mets were well-designed to support a number of significant losses, but the limits still exist. And they might have already come up against those limits — players like Johneshwy Fargas, Brandon Drury, and Mason Williams ought to be quite far down the depth charts — if not for the fact that no other team in the division has seized the opportunity. Despite all the injury losses, the rotation exceeding expectations and the division disappointing have been enough for the Mets to only be a single win off from where the preseason ZiPS projections saw them at this point.

ZiPS still projects the Mets as a .563 team going forward, just about where it pegged the club three months ago, and that’s with playing time assumptions in many cases far worse than they were in March. But a four-game lead in the division is not an unassailable position, and outside of not regressing toward the bleak history of Met injury management, there’s not much they can do to prevent a new rash of nasty surprises on that front.

So the question that comes to mind is just how much bad news can the Mets absorb before their postseason positioning proves perilous? Let’s start with updated ZiPS standings as of Thursday morning.

The combination of a poor start to the season and both Wild Cards likely being from the NL West (ZiPS sees 2.8 average playoff spots from that division) has probably rendered the Marlins a lost cause for the 2021 season. However, the other three teams remain threats even if the Mets are the deserving favorites at this point. To get an idea of how much margin for error the Mets have, I ran the 2021 rest-of-season simulation repeatedly, with different assumptions for the Mets roster.

When looking at these two graphs (DanGraphs?), the first thing I notice is the direct effect the Giants are having on the playoff race. If the Mets struggle and don’t win the division, they usually fall behind the Giants or Padres. And when the Mets are good enough to win a Wild Card, they usually win the division anyway.

The Mets’ roster is currently about three wins ahead of the highest-leverage point in their win curve. They don’t really start seeing diminishing returns until one or two additional wins on the roster, making a strong case for the team continuing to be aggressive despite their relatively strong position in the division.

Relative to the rest of the league, third base and catcher feature on our depth charts as the team’s weakest spots, making those positions arguably the best places to add wins. That seems unlikely behind the plate; I was never much of a fan of a four-year contract for James McCann, but it doesn’t seem likely the team would make an upgrade here. The rotation is hardly a source of weakness, but I still think that given Syndergaard and Stroman’s status as free-agent-to-be status and deGrom’s injury risk, adding a starting pitcher would be helpful. The Mets should not be panicking at this point, but continuing last winter’s aggression at the trade deadline would be a welcome sight.

Kevin Goldstein and I have updated the pro portion of the Top 100, which means we quickly reviewed the placement of players in the 50 FV tier and above, and considered who was not yet in those tiers but should be based on how they’ve looked during the first month of the 2021 season. I still have three total org audits to do — Milwaukee, Oakland and the Cubs — before I start peeling graduates off the list. Those will be completed shortly. You can find the updated list here.

Also, if you missed it, Kevin and I updated our draft rankings and posted a Mock Draft on Monday.

The lone change up near the top of the 100 is Riley Greene moving into the top 20; he’s in the mix with several other similarly-aged players with the talent to be consistent All-Stars, like Bobby Witt Jr., Julio Rodríguez, and Corbin Carroll.

DL Hall moved into the 55 FV tier on the strength of his stuff. He’s still walking a fairly high rate of opposing batters but just on the strength of his three plus pitches, could be a Haderesque relief weapon even if he can’t start. Read the rest of this entry »

Jacob deGrom is on another planet right now. You don’t need me to tell you this, but it’s fun to just marvel at his stats. Through 10 starts, deGrom has a 0.56 ERA, a 46% strikeout rate, and a 4% walk rate. He’s produced 3.7 WAR, which is nearly a half-win better than the next-best pitcher, Corbin Burnes, who has “merely” put up 3.3.

deGrom is quite possibly in the midst of one of the best pitching seasons in baseball history, particularly on a per-inning basis. Pedro Martinez’s 1999 campaign currently holds the single-season pitching WAR record at 11.6, and though deGrom almost certainly won’t hit that mark, he’d blow it away if he pitched the same number of innings at his current rate. Give deGrom Martinez’s 213.1 innings, and at this pace, he’d put up 12.3 WAR. Say what you will about injuries and starting pitching workloads in this era, but that’s just a primer on the level of dominance deGrom has reached so far in 2021.

So if you’re a hitter stepping in against deGrom, how in the world do you get a hit off this guy? Batters are slashing just .121/.152/.220 against him, good for a .163 wOBA allowed. That’s the best mark among the 294 pitchers with at least 100 batters faced this season, and deGrom has more than doubled that threshold (223 TBF). If you’re hitting against deGrom, you’re lucky if you just put the ball in play, let alone get on base.

Is there an alternative strategy that works here? deGrom is raking up all of these strikeouts — without allowing virtually any walks — while boasting the seventh-lowest Zone% in baseball. Hitters are flailing against pitches that aren’t even strikes anyway: 60.5% of the time, deGrom is throwing the hitter a ball. If you’re in a two-strike count, he’ll throw you a ball 64.5% of the time, putting him in the 91st percentile in O-Zone%. Read the rest of this entry »

Please note that this posting contains three positions.

Position: Product Designer, Baseball Systems

Department: Baseball Systems
Supervisor: Director, Baseball Systems
Location: Citi Field; Flushing, NY

Summary:
The New York Mets are seeking a Product Designer. This designer will work with leadership to design and own the user experience of mobile and web applications that enrich the Mets data ecosystem and inform decision-making within Baseball Operations. This position requires a designer that is comfortable designing low- and high-fidelity mockups for a wide array of stakeholders within Baseball Operations. The ideal candidate would have a strong grasp of modern design tools with prior experience rapid prototyping and working collaboratively within a software engineering team. Prior experience in or knowledge of baseball is a plus but is not required.

Essential Duties & Responsibilities:

• Collaborate with leadership, engineers, and cross-functional stakeholders to understand requirements and provide thoughtful solutions
• Own the product design process for the Baseball Systems department from ideation to iteration
• Own the organizational style guide and design standards for baseball-oriented tools
• Facilitate user interviews and testing across the organization to validate the development and adoption of new tools and features
• Provide high-level design strategy to help drive the organization’s ability to capture and leverage data to improve player outcomes
• Enrich product development sprints by infusing feature work with a consistent and empathetic design expertise
• Adapt the speed and fidelity of design work to the phase of product design and development, e.g. capability to rapidly prototype or refine high-end mocks as necessary

Qualifications:

• 5+ years of relevant work experience in product design, strategy, and vision
• Portfolio of UX and interface design projects
• Strong proficiency in the Adobe suite and collaborative design and prototyping tools
• Ability to work cooperatively with others, and to take control of large-scale projects with little daily oversight
• Strong written and verbal communication skills
• Prior experience in front-end development, including CSS, is a plus
• Prior experience in baseball is a plus

To Apply:
To apply, please follow this link.

Position: Software Engineer, Baseball Systems

Department: Baseball Systems
Supervisor: Director, Baseball Systems
Location: Citi Field; Flushing, NY

Summary:
The New York Mets are seeking a Software Engineer. This engineer will design, build, test, and deploy mobile and web applications that enrich the Mets data ecosystem and inform decision-making within Baseball Operations. This position requires strong background in mobile and web development. The ideal candidate would be a strong engineering generalist with prior experience building rapid prototypes and comfort in working on UX-focused products for users with varying levels of technical familiarity. Prior experience in or knowledge of baseball is a plus but is not required.

Essential Duties & Responsibilities:

• Develop exciting user-facing applications by designing, building, and deploying reliable, readable code for platforms within Baseball Operations
• Collaborate with a variety of internal stakeholders to validate designs and facilitate clean rollouts and deployments of new products
• Build and maintain backend APIs to facilitate scalable flow of baseball data
• Integrate with a variety of third-party APIs to enrich the New York Mets data ecosystem
• Work with data engineers to facilitate the easy collection and access of valuable baseball data
• Maintain and scale a broad collection of internal applications that enhance player development, scouting, and executive decision making

Read the rest of this entry »