The run on relievers is officially underway. The latest one to sign is Anthony Swarzak, who’s getting $14 million and two years from the Mets. Like, say, Tommy Hunter, or Brandon Morrow, Swarzak wasn’t that highly thought of a year ago. Then he was great. There’s no other way around it, and, while every front-office executive would tell you they want to find the next Anthony Swarzak, or Tommy Hunter, or Brandon Morrow, you can’t very well not sign a guy who just did what Swarzak did for the White Sox and the Brewers.

Swarzak is 32 years old, and through 2016, his career WAR was 1.2, over nearly 500 innings. Last year alone, Swarzak was worth 2.2 WAR, which ranked him eighth among all relievers, between Andrew Miller and Mike Minor. Part of that was a matter of increased effectiveness, and the rest was a matter of increased trust, which saw Swarzak throwing high-leverage innings for the first time. Swarzak’s average leverage index last season was 1.49. His previous high was 0.95, when he was a rookie starter. Swarzak’s personal stock skyrocketed.

A few images here can tell the story. More recently in Swarzak’s career, he’s started getting strikeouts, which is linked to a sharp uptick in his usage of his slider.

Beginning in 2016 and carrying over into last year, Swarzak has thrown his slider slightly more often than his fastball. He’s not the only reliever to do that, but things just truly came together, as Swarzak got as many missed swings as Brad Hand. Swarzak’s contact rate this past season plummeted.

And to really cap it off, Swarzak’s velocity has increased as he’s gotten older. It’s not the way this usually goes, and I’m not sure how Swarzak has pulled this off, but the trend is undeniable. Swarzak had problems with his rotator cuff in 2012 and 2016. In 2017, he was healthy, and he was blowing his fastball at 95.

Swarzak’s is a forgettable name, because, for most of his career, he was a forgettable pitcher. Even last season, as he was terrific, he was both terrific and out of the spotlight, so for Mets fans he’s not a familiar acquisition. But this does seem like a big bullpen add, for a Mets team that isn’t as far out of the race as it seems. A healthy Noah Syndergaard should make a whale of a difference, and the Marlins, Phillies, and Braves could and should all struggle to reach 70-75 wins. The Mets still aren’t the Nationals, but they’re the only threat in the division, and that very division gives them a better shot at the wild card. There’s something here, and Swarzak ought to help.

Investing in free-agent relievers can be an uncomfortable exercise. Relievers are constantly appearing and disappearing, with Swarzak being a case in point. So many relievers seem to suddenly emerge that it’s tempting to try to find the next pop-up guy before he pops. With a guy like Swarzak, though, you don’t have to squint or project. The Mets can comfortably assume he won’t forget what he just put together. He appears to be good now, and while that’s a little bit weird, there’s no reason those points can’t both be true.

When Travis Sawchick asked you which question was most important on Shohei Ohtani’s questionnaire, you answered overwhelmingly that the team capable of keeping him healthy — or of convincing Ohtani that they’d keep him healthy — would win out. Travis went on to use a metric, Roster Resource’s “Roster Effect” rating, to get a sense of which team that might be. The Brewers, Cubs, Pirates, and Tigers performed best by that measure.

Of course, that’s just one way of answering the question. Health is a tough thing to nail down. To figure out which team is capable of keeping Ohtani the healthiest, it’s worth considering the possible implications of health in baseball. Roster Effect, for example, considers the quality of the player and seems to be asking: which rosters were affected the most by poor health? That’s one way of approaching it. Let’s try a few others and see who comes out on top.

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After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for half a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the New York Mets. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Batters
Mets position players actually put together a pretty strong campaign in 2017, recording the 11th-best WAR in the majors among their peers. That would normally represent some cause for optimism in terms of next season — would, that is, were the current roster to feature the same personnel as this past year’s. An inspection of that roster, however, reveals that four of the club’s top seven players by WAR from 2017 are no longer employed by the organization. Curtis Granderson (2.3 WAR for the Mets in 2017), Jay Bruce (2.0), Jose Reyes (2.0), and Neil Walker (1.4) have all departed either by way of trade or free agency.

The exodus of talent might pose some challenges to the 2018 edition of the Mets. According to Dan Szymborski’s computer, however, it also might not. ZiPS calls for over seven wins combined from Yoenis Cespedes (projected for 500 PA and 3.4 zWAR) and Michael Conforto (513, 3.7), which would go some distance towards mitigating the losses of the club’s departed outfielders. The projections here also suggest that young shortstop Amed Rosario (594, 2.2) and young first baseman Dominic Smith (652, 2.5) could produce nearly five wins as a pair — this, after recording -0.3 WAR collectively in 2017. Those sorts of return would likely place the Mets’ field-playing contingent among the league’s middle third again.

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Not every team approaches the offseason looking to get better in the same way. That much is obvious: budget alone can dictate much of a club’s activity on the free-agent market. A little bit less obvious, though, is how the present quality of a team’s roster can affect the players they pursue. Teams that reside on a certain part of the win curve, for example, need that next win more than teams on other parts. That can inform a team’s decisions in the offseason.

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We’re currently in the midst of a lull in the baseball calendar. The offseason has officially arrived and yet the Hot Stove hasn’t really been lit yet. I suppose I could get excited for Awards season, but the painfully slow roll out and the heated arguments wear me down fairly quickly.

So, instead, I try to make my own baseball entertainment. For me, one exercise is simply to look over the league and attempt to identify the players about whom I’m most excited for next season. Not superstars, necessarily: everyone is always excited to watch the game’s brightest lights. And not prospects who haven’t yet reached the Show, either. I’m not really qualified to talk about those players in a meaningful way, so I’ll leave those players to Eric (and Chris) and all the scouts out there.

Outside of those groups, though, there are still hundreds of players from which to choose. I’ll be excited to watch more than these 10, of course, but in surveying the league, these are ones who caught my eye. Note that this isn’t in any particular order. I’m equally excited about all 10. Perhaps you’ll agree with me, perhaps not. Feel free to conduct your own exercise and let me know who your 10 players are in the comments.

Rafael Devers

The new Red Sox third baseman enjoyed a meteoric debut month, swatting his way to a 224 wRC+ in his July call-up. That covered just 27 plate appearances, though, and as we moved into August and September, he cooled off significantly. He hit safely from his second game (July 26) through his eighth game (August 4). At that point, he was hitting .389/.463/.694, for a 205 wRC+. From August 5 through the end of the regular season, though, he hit .263/.312/.441, for a 92 wRC+. Doom and gloom, right? Not entirely, no, because in Boston’s abbreviated playoff run, he was one of the few bright spots, slashing .364/.429/.909. He slugged two homers — one off of Francisco Liriano and one off of Ken Giles. The latter was of the inside-the-park variety, but it was impressive nonetheless:

So, it’s hard to know what to expect from young Devers. Andrew Benintendi was similarly hyped coming into last campaign and was decidedly mediocre for large swaths of the season. Will that be Devers’ fate too? And what of his fielding? He made seven throwing errors and seven fielding errors in his short time in Boston. If the Red Sox acquire a legit first baseman this winter (or a legit DH and move Hanley Ramirez to first) and it turns out that Devers can’t hack at it at third, the Red Sox will have a conundrum to solve.

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There’s no doubt that Mets shortstop Amed Rosario had a tough debut. He walked three times and struck out 49. Though he showed some power, he usually hit the ball softly and on the ground. Really the only thing that went well, looking back, is that he provided good defense at a position where the team could use an upgrade.

But. How much do we really know about a player after 170 plate appearances? Especially one who hasn’t turned 22 yet? How pessimistic should we be?

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This season, 144 players reached the 502-plate-appearance threshold necessary to qualify for the batting title. On the opposite end of the spectrum, there were 190 position players who tallied between one and 99 PA for the season. In between, there were 291 position players. Some of these were starters who simply missed time due to injury (Bryce Harper, for example) or the nature of their position (Salvador Perez) or because they weren’t major leaguers yet at the start of the season (Paul DeJong), but some of them are what we’d call true part-time players. At this time of year, we generally focus on the very best players. It’s awards season, after all. Part-time players get less shine. So let’s focus on them today, at the very least.

I’ve done this exercise once before, back in 2012. Now, as then, I’ve parsed the list to give us a clear picture of who is really a part-time player. My favorite tool for this exercise is the “Lineups and Defense” pages on Baseball-Reference. When they redesigned the website recently (I think it was recently? Maybe it was last year? I don’t know, I don’t even remember what I had for dinner on Thursday.) I experienced a few panicky minutes when I couldn’t find the pages, but fortunately they’re still there. Phew.

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The Mets’ quick slide from a National League championship in 2015 to 90 losses this season had to claim a victim. Manager Terry Collins appears to be one of them: according to reports, he’s unlikely to return next year. Now, pitching coach Dan Warthen is a candidate to join him on the chopping block in New York.

It makes sense to some degree. The Mets’ fate over the past few years has been tied closely to the quality of the pitching staff. Once a clear strength of the club, that staff represented a weakness for this year’s team. But much of that weakness was a product of injury, and injuries hit every team at a seemingly random pace. Is Warthen a scapegoat here, or is he somehow directly responsible for the current situation?

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Yoenis Cespedes has had a roller-coaster year. Hamstring, quad, hip, and heel injuries have cut weeks off his season. On the field, his overall performance isn’t inspiring; his walk rate is down, his exit velocity is diminished, and his wRC+ has dropped by 16 points. The outfielder’s hitting has fluctuated between dominant and poor, with his worst month coming in July: in 89 plate appearances, Cespedes launched just a single home run and recorded an isolated-power figure that was 43 points below league average.

Small windows of playing time can bring big performance swings, but Cespedes’ power drought wasn’t a product just of bad luck in a limited sample. Consider the chart below, which uses the LOESS method to smooth through Cespedes’ launch angle over the course of the season. Batted balls are ordered from the first (his first BIP on Opening Day) through the most recent (his last BIP yesterday). Horizontal bars are included to show his average launch angle in each of the four calendar months that make up the slugger’s season.

Cespedes’ average launch angle of 24.6 degrees in April was among the steepest in baseball. After sitting out May to recover from injuries, Cespedes returned for the next month and averaged a similarly high angle. He ended June with a .929 OPS, so his overall production didn’t signal anything out of the ordinary. But the real story is told by the smoothing curve, which shows how Cespedes was changing as a hitter. In June, his launch angle began a drop that accelerated into a plunge. By the latter part of July, he bottomed out at 12 degrees, a mark more fitting for a line-drive hitter than a slugger. His angle has climbed a bit higher in August, but it remains far below April’s range.

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This has been a forgettable season for the Mets.

With their playoff odds having been effectively reduced to 0%, with one of most promising staffs in the game decimated by injury, the club has recently raised something of a white flag by trading Jay Bruce and Neil Walker, though the season has felt like it’s been over for some time.

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