Things haven’t been going the Mariners’ way lately. With Tuesday’s loss to the Yankees, they fell to 19-19, thereby setting a record for the fastest plunge to .500 for a team that started the season 13-2. In the third inning of Thursday night’s contest, second baseman Dee Gordon departed the game after being hit on the right wrist by a J.A. Happ fastball, and after manager Scott Servais pinch-hit for fill-in Dylan Moore in the top of the eighth, he resorted to calling upon first baseman Edwin Encarnacion to shift to second base, a position he’d never played before during his 20-year professional career. When the Yankees’ DJ Lemahieu led off the bottom of the eighth with a 100-mph grounder towards second, the 36-year-old Encarnacion gamely dove for the ball, not only coming up empty but rolling the wrist of his left (glove) hand.

Encarnacion was able to continue, but Gordon is still being evaluated. So much for one wag’s theory that the move would improve the Mariners’ defense, which has been downright dreadful, as I noted in passing during my look at the Nationals’ porous defense and disappointing start. Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — “It’s probably more rare than a perfect game, I’d guess,” said Mets manager Mickey Callaway on Thursday afternoon. “To hit a homer and win 1-0 with a shutout, that’s got to be one of the rarest things in baseball.”

Callaway was speaking of Noah Syndergaard’s two-way tour de force against the Reds at Citi Field, and he was correct. Dating back to the 19th century, major league pitchers have thrown 23 perfect games, the most recent on August 15, 2012, by the Mariners’ Felix Hernandez against the Rays. By the most generous count, just nine other pitchers have accomplished what Syndergaard did, the last of them the Dodgers’ Bob Welch on June 17, 1983, also against the Reds.

You don’t see that every day.

“Awesome,” said the 26-year-old Syndergaard when informed that he’d accomplished something that hadn’t been done in 36 years.

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The Milwaukee Brewers signed a famous lefty starting pitcher out of free agency Wednesday, bolstering the back of the rotation. No, not that famous lefty starting pitcher, but a still quite respectable one in Gio Gonzalez, most recently biding his time with the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre Rail Raiders. In MLB terms, Gonzalez’s contract with the team is barely even a wallet-opener at one-year, $2 million with performance incentives.

Milwaukee’s rotation necessitated another arm after the early season struggles of Corbin Burnes. Burnes struggled to hit locations with his hard stuff, resulting in a slugging percentage over 1.000 against his fastball and a total of 11 home runs allowed in 17 2/3 innings. That’s a 58% home run to fly ball ratio! Gonzalez was brought in as an emergency option for the Yankees, and with the team’s injury emergencies largely being hitters, they never called up Gio and he exercised his out clause.

The Brewers and Gonzalez have a recent history, one that went swimmingly after the late August trade with the Washington Nationals. In 2018, Milwaukee was generally content to let Gonzalez go through five solid innings and then go to the bullpen, something that worked out well, at least during the regular season (3-0, 2.13 ERA/3.63 FIP in five starts). ZiPS projects 1.0 WAR for Gonzalez, assuming 100 innings for the rest of the season, which is comparable to the team’s other options. There’s a catch of course, in that the other options aren’t actually available at this moment; Burnes shouldn’t be working out his problems in a pennant race and Jimmy Nelson and Freddy Peralta haven’t yet returned from injury, even though they’ve made progress. Gonzalez doesn’t really add wins to the standings directly so much as serving as inexpensive insurance for other pitchers.

Gonzalez joining the Brewers is only a bit of a surprise in that they weren’t actually the team most in need of Gonzalez’s services. The buzz has been that about a third of baseball was interested in Gio, but why didn’t a team more in need blow away a measly one-year, $2 million option. After all, if you’re in desperate straits and you’re not going after Dallas Keuchel, where else are you going to get viable a starting pitcher outside of the system in late April? It’s not as if the Giants are begging (yet) to trade Madison Bumgarner. Read the rest of this entry »

It would be inaccurate to say that Jeff McNeil came out of nowhere, but unless you were a Mets fan with a deep knowledge of the team’s minor league system, chances are that you hadn’t heard of him before he was called up last July 24. Since then, he’s done nothing less than post the majors’ fourth-highest batting average (.339) as part of a contact-centric profile with echoes of yesteryear. Having additionally shown himself capable of manning multiple positions, the 27-year-old lefty swinger has become a staple of manager Mickey Callaway’s lineups, and a key cog in a much-improved offense.

McNeil arrived as a man of mystery largely because of his age and injury history. A 12th-round 2013 draft pick out of Cal State Long Beach, he hit for high batting averages with minimal power (a total of four home runs) in his first three professional seasons, most notably leading the Florida State League with a .373 on-base percentage in 2015. Just as he reached the high minors, surgeries to repair a pair of sports hernias and a torn labrum in his hip limited him to a mere three games in 2016; he played in just 48 games in 2017 due to a groin injury. Between the lack of playing time and minimal power, he barely grazed even the deepest prospect lists. Just before the injury bug bit, Baseball America included him as a 40-grade prospect, 27th in the Mets’ system, in its 2016 Handbook. He was an honorable mention on FanGraphs’ Mets list that same year.

Finally healthy, and sporting 40 pounds of additional muscle relative to his pre-injury days, the 26-year-old McNeil broke out to hit .327/.402/.626 (182 wRC+) with 14 homers (five more than his previous career total) in just 57 games at Double-A Binghamton last year, then .368/.427/.600 (165 wRC+) with five more homers in 31 games at Triple-A Las Vegas. He began garnering attention, from prospect hounds, though even Baseball America’s midseason Mets top 10, published four days before his debut, merely consigned him to the “Rising” category. He arrived in Queens in late July, just before the team traded incumbent second baseman Asdrubal Cabrera to the Phillies. As the Mets went nowhere amid an otherwise sour season, he hit .329/.381/.471 (137 wRC+) in 248 PA while playing a credible second base (0.4 UZR in 54 games), good for 2.7 WAR. Notably, he struck out in just 9.7% of his plate appearances, the second-lowest mark of any player with at least 200 PA. Read the rest of this entry »

Pete Alonso, it should first be said, really isn’t a great defender. The Mets were quick to let everyone know this throughout 2018, when they didn’t call him up early in the year, when he won Defensive Player of the Month for the Mets’ Triple-A affiliate in July, and when they didn’t make him a September call-up in a completely lost season for the big league club. Seventeen games into his major league career, however, I can say one thing with certainty: I don’t care that he’s supposedly bad at defense. Alonso’s plate appearances are turning into appointment viewing, because he flat-out crushes the ball. I’m not talking garden-variety “boy, that large man can hit,” either. Alonso might not have the best strike-zone recognition, or the best general plate discipline, but when he makes contact, he’s doing damage like almost no one else in baseball.

If you want to understand how truly incredible Alonso’s start has been, you need to look past the WAR leaderboards. Heck, you need to look past the wRC+ leaderboards — like I said, his plate discipline is a work in progress. Alonso has a near-200 wRC+ with a 31% strikeout rate — the three players at the top of the wRC+ leaderboard check in at 11.5%, 8.6%, and 15.0%, respectively. No, the magic really starts when Alonso puts the ball in play, and I do mean magic. Take a look at the top 10 players in baseball in terms of barrels (a Statcast designation that basically means a ball that is tremendously likely to be an extra-base hit) per batted ball:

Think of it this way: about a third of the time that Alonso puts the ball in play, he’s hitting an absolute rocket. Just being on this list, let alone at the top of it, tells us something. This isn’t a list of guys who have lucked into some game power. It’s not a list you can get on just by taking some walks, like a wRC+ leaderboard — Alex Bregman might have had a nice 2018 at the plate, but it’s hard to fake hitting the ball this hard and this optimally (Bregman ended 76th in barrels per batted ball last year). This isn’t just home run power, either, though it’s certainly that — Alonso has six homers already, including a 118.3-mph, 454-foot missile off of Jonny Venters that had SunTrust Park looking like a water hazard at the Masters:

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T.S. Eliot once mused that April is the cruelest month, but for me, it’s the most curmudgeonly one. While baseball returning is always a good thing, a good portion of my April job is to (partially) crush the hopes and dreams of fans excited about hot starts from their favorite players. While stats don’t literally lie, April numbers, thanks to our old friend and scapegoat small sample size, only tell a little bit of the story of 2019. But as cautious as I try to be about jumping to conclusions in baseball’s first month, at least some of those torrid beginnings will contain more than the customary grain of truth. So let’s go out on that proverbial limb and try to guess which scorching Aprils represent something real.

Yoan Moncada

I’ve been burned before touching this hot stove, but there’s something so compelling about Moncada’s early-season performances as to once again disarm the skeptic in me. In 2018’s version of this piece, Moncada’s high exit velocity and his .267/.353/.524 April line had me believing that he had finally turned the corner, the one long-expected from a young, talented player with impressive physical tools.

As the narrator meme goes, he had not turned that corner. Moncada spent the next two months with an OPS that didn’t touch .600, and his final 2018 line represented no real improvement over his 2017.

Moncada is hitting the ball just as hard as he did last year, with his average exit velocity ranking sixth in baseball. But this time around, his performance is also coming with some significant progress in his contact statistics. Moncada’s profile has always been a bit weird in that he doesn’t seem to have a serious problem chasing bad pitches, certainly not as you would expect from a player who just led the league in strikeouts with the fourth-highest total in baseball history. But Moncada was in the top 20 in not swinging at pitches outside the zone.

In 2019, he’s been more aggressive, swinging at more bad and good pitches, but there hasn’t been a corresponding contact tradeoff, and he’s in fact making more contact overall, especially against good pitches. Given that one of the purposes of plate discipline is for hitters to actually hit the good pitch they eke out of the dude on the mound, I once again return to the ranks of the believers. Read the rest of this entry »

Through the Mets’ first nine games this season, J.D. Davis has 28 plate appearances. Jeff McNeil has 27. This, despite our playing time projections; we expected Davis to make just 67 trips to the plate all season. McNeil, on the other hand, was pegged for 509.

Davis, to say the least, has made the most of his early boon in playing time. He’s slashed .280/.357/.600, with two homers, three walks, and six strikeouts. He has also hit the ball incredibly hard. And, when I say incredibly hard, I really do mean it. Of Davis’ 17 batted balls, two have already left the bat at 108+ mph. Why is 108 mph a significant figure? Because, as Rob Arthur wrote in The Athletic in April 2018, “For every mile per hour above 108, a hitter is projected to gain about 6 points of OPS relative to their predicted number.” (Arthur looked at this correlation using a hitter’s projected OPS from PECOTA, Baseball Prospectus’ player projection system.)

On Saturday, Davis hit this home run off of Patrick Corbin at a whopping 114.7 mph off the bat, the hardest hit ball he has hit all season:

Going off of Arthur’s findings, this would mean Davis could gain up to 40 points of OPS off of his projected value, which our Depth Chart projections have as .718. By no means would 40 “bonus” points take Davis into elite territory — it only ups his projected OPS to .758 — but having a max exit velocity of 114.7 mph this early in the season is clearly not a bad sign. In fact, it’s the third-highest max exit velocity of any hitter in the big leagues (minimum 10 batted ball events), behind only Aaron Judge (118.1 mph!) and Joey Gallo (115.4 mph). That is some pretty good company to be in. And perhaps it means that Davis could be tapping into new potential. Read the rest of this entry »

Jacob deGrom’s 2018 will go down in history as one of the best pitching seasons of all time. There’s almost no way it couldn’t — pitchers don’t put up sub-two ERAs very often, and they record sub-2 FIPs even less frequently. By those stats alone, deGrom had the seventh-best ERA and eighth-best FIP since integration. Adjust for the run-scoring environment, and he falls all the way to ninth. Simply put, deGrom was sublime in 2018.

After a season of such historic magnitude, we’d be crazy to not expect regression. Everything broke so well for deGrom in 2018 that he could pitch every bit as well in 2019 and end up with meaningfully worse results. Indeed, ZiPS and Steamer both projected deGrom’s ERA to increase by essentially a run this season. Despite that, both projected him to put up the second-best ERA and FIP among starters, behind only Chris Sale. When you’re as far ahead of the pack as deGrom, you can significantly regress and still be one of the best.

It isn’t just projection systems that peg deGrom to come back to earth — the broad sweep of history suggests it as well. No matter how you slice it, pitchers who record a season like deGrom’s decline the next year. Want to focus on ERA? There have been 26 times since 1947 when a pitcher qualified for the ERA title and had an ERA below two. Excluding 2018 deGrom and 1966 Sandy Koufax (he retired after 1966 and so didn’t have a next season), these pitchers averaged a 1.77 ERA. The next year, they recorded a 2.78 ERA. Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this spring training, everyone cringed a bit when it was reported that Brandon Nimmo became sick after eating under-cooked chicken (his own recipe, naturally). I think most people had the same thought about it: what the heck? It turns out that his illness was a result of a virus instead of food poisoning, so now Nimmo is free to eat as many under-cooked chickens as he wants, but the (subjective) fact remains that it is quite gross.

Anyway, this isn’t about Nimmo’s illness or his ill-advised recipe. This is about baseball. Nimmo had one of the biggest breakouts of 2018. Because the Mets were not great last year, I don’t think a lot of people appreciated how well he performed. Nimmo put up a 4.5 WAR, which was 29th-highest among all positional players, coming in his age-25 season. Among all 25-year-old position-player seasons from 2010 to 2018, Nimmo’s campaign ranks 24th. There are some nice names on the list as well — Christian Yelich, Trea Turner, and Nolan Arenado, for instance.

FanGraphs’ own Eric Longenhagen told me that there’s an untapped potential in Nimmo that could be uncovered as he plays more. “There’s always a chance that he grows and changes into a different player as he ages, and that might be especially true here because his amateur background is so bizarre compared to most pro baseball players.” Nimmo is from Wyoming and did not get to play regular high school baseball. He had to drive anywhere between 45 minutes to 10 hours to play American Legion ball to get exposure. Nimmo has a cool story that could get cooler as he gets more playing time in the majors. This invites the question that applies to every young player: who can Nimmo be? Is there a particular role model?

ZiPS expects him to hit .240/.359/.402 (116 wRC+) with a 2.3 WAR, with his No. 1 comparison being Andy Van Slyke. That feels conservative, but that’s the nature of projection systems — Nimmo doesn’t have a long history of being an excellent major league player, and he did put up 89 and 118 wRC+ marks in the previous two seasons.

I became curious and decided to search for someone whose numbers resembled Nimmo’s walk and power tendencies from the 2018 season. Why those two? For one, Nimmo boasted a high walk rate of 15%, which engineered a .404 OBP. The only players who were ahead of him in on-base percentage last year were Mike Trout, Mookie Betts, and Joey Votto. Nimmo was ahead of known superstars such as Bryce Harper, Alex Bregman, and Yelich, which is significant, especially for a youngster playing in his first full major league season. Nimmo also put up a .219 isolated power mark, which is above average and contributed to his 4.5 WAR. It’s not a top-notch number yet, but because of Nimmo’s youth, one might expect it to rise in coming years. I looked up seasons from 2000 to 2018 to find players whose walk and power numbers profiled similarly to Nimmo’s, and one name in particular stood out.

First off, let’s compare Nimmo and the mystery player’s ages 23 to 25 seasons:

The walk and power numbers aren’t the only similarities. Their batted ball profiles also share a resemblance. We actually don’t have the mystery player’s ages 23-to-25 data for that, so we’ll use his career numbers from 2002 to 2014.

Lastly, here’s an excerpt of one of the mystery player’s scouting reports from 1995:

Physical description: Athletic actions, frame has chance to carry more strength.

Strong points: Outstanding approach to hitting, sweet short compact stroke w/outstanding balance, knowledge of K-zone, good 2-strike hitter, spray ball to all fields. Gap to gap guy, run well especially 1st to 3rd, arm avg to above w/ good carry and rot (rotation?), 4.16 speed to 1B, can play LF-RF fairly well occasionally gets good jumps.

Summation: Young good looking hitter. Mark Grace type and when strength comes he should be able to linedrive some HRs. Defense skills are a little short and experience will help improvement. 3 tool guy now with a high ceiling.

And here’s an excerpt of Brandon Nimmo’s scouting report from Baseball America (subscription required) after the 2015 season:

 On-base ability always has been the bedrock of Nimmo’s game, for he excels at working counts and lining the ball to left field if pitchers work him away. He shows pull-side power in batting practice but prefers to work the entire field in games with a handsy, lefthanded swing geared more for line drives than home runs. Nimmo tracks the ball well in center field and grades as at least an average defender with ordinary running speed. He’s graceful and reliable in the outfield, though his average arm would be stretched in right field, if he has to move. Nimmo hasn’t attempted many stolen bases as a pro, and that probably won’t change.

The scouts’ eyes saw similarities as well. They both point out line-drive power that could develop into more home runs in the future (which it did for the mystery player). The scout from 1995 noted the mystery player’s “outstanding approach to hitting” and “good knowledge of K-zone” while the BA praised Nimmo for his plate discipline.

If you haven’t identified the mystery player yet, the answer is Bobby Abreu. The thing is, there are also quite a lot of differences between these two. As you saw from the first table, Nimmo struck out way more than Abreu did. In 2018, Nimmo’s strikeout rate was 26.2%, which is much higher than Abreu’s career average (18.3%), and his career high in a full season (22.6%). Nimmo could improve there, of course. Young hitters tend to lower their strikeout rate until their peak age. According to research from Jeff Zimmerman, Nimmo is at the age where his strikeout rate might be as low as it will get, but we can give him the benefit of the doubt due to his weird amateur background and relative newness to the majors. When I looked up Nimmo’s walk rate and strikeout rate compared to hitters’ seasons from 2000 to 2018, he profiled closer to Adam Dunn and Jim Thome — two sluggers that had way more power than Nimmo is projected to have. Due to Nimmo’s scouting profile, particularly his walk and power tendencies, I felt Abreu would be a better fit.

It is worth noting that hitters strike out much more now than they did during Abreu’s time. One can assume that Abreu would have struck out more if he were to play today than in the early 2000s. As for Nimmo, there have been instances where players drastically improve their strikeout rate, but it’s not really something to count on. You can expect improvements, but as far as the pure numbers go, Nimmo is likely to stay a bigger strikeout hitter than Abreu was.

I mentioned the batted ball profile before. There’s also a stark difference between those two on that score.

Something that jumps out here is the infield fly ball rate. Also, Nimmo seems to have a more pull-happy approach, which became more apparent in 2018, when he pulled 44.7% of his batted balls. Travis Sawchik examined this back in June, noting that his new pull approach may have helped his overall power numbers. Perhaps it’s not something Nimmo would like to give up for now — it did help his power breakout last year, after all.

Writing this, I was originally thinking along the lines of “how Nimmo can become Abreu,” because becoming a two-time All-Star who enjoyed a fruitful 18-year career is a heck of a thing. But after realizing that a major difference between those two — Nimmo’s pull tendency — actually helped the youngster’s ascendance to being an exciting major league regular, I’m not so sure anymore. Would he change his swing for a different approach? Longenhagen doubts it.

“I think that kind of thing is harder to change. I’d expect him to be pull-heavy for the duration of his career,” he said.

There are numbers that indicate that he could be the newer-age Abreu while not completely being an Abreu. I’m not guaranteeing that Nimmo will end up a player who will get Hall of Fame consideration, but there are stats that indicate similarities with a player who will certainly be on next year’s HOF ballot. Some things are nice to dream on.

In last season’s awards voting, there were 24 players who finished in the top-six of MVP and Cy Young in their leagues, with Jacob deGrom the only one to finish in the top-six in both categories. Of those 24 players, 10 have signed contract extensions this winter to push free agency further down the road. Ten of the best players in baseball have reached an agreement with their teams on contracts worth roughly $1.2 billion. Five of those players (Nolan Arenado, Paul Goldschmidt, Miles Mikolas, Chris Sale, and Justin Verlander) were set to become free agents after this season. Mike Trout became the first player this offseason to sign a major extension two years from free agency, and now Jacob deGrom has become the second, as first reported by Andy Martino.

The contract is set to pay deGrom a total of $137.5 million over the next five years, but it includes an opt-out after 2022 and a team option for 2024. The deal is further complicated by deGrom’s arbitration status. His 2019 salary was already set at $17 million, and he receives the same amount of money this season but $10 million now comes in the form of a signing bonus, per Joel Sherman’s breakdown, which looks like this.

In one sense, it looks like there is $120.5 million in new money being guaranteed to deGrom, but that $23 million in 2020 is roughly what deGrom would have received in his final year of arbitration. In terms of free agent seasons, the Mets guarantee the equivalent of a $23 million team-option in 2020 and $97.5 million over the following three seasons. Comparing this deal to the one Chris Sale just signed presents some interesting similarities and differences. One interesting similarity is that both deGrom and Sale receive $90 million beginning in 2020 over a three-year period before an opt-out can be triggered. However, Sale has $55 million coming to him after the opt-out compared to deGrom’s $30.5 million, which is a function of two big differences. Read the rest of this entry »