Once blessed with the greatest run of consistency ever achieved at shortstop, it’s now been a few years since the Baltimore Orioles have seen solid all-around play at that position. That probably won’t shock you, given how badly the Orioles have performed all over the diamond in recent seasons, but it has affected the shortstop spot as badly as it has anywhere else. J.J. Hardy still had big league defensive skills in 2017, but his 49 wRC+ that year dragged him down nearly a full win below replacement level. Manny Machado was the reverse of that in 2018 — an MVP-caliber hitter, but bad in the field, though a rebound in his defensive numbers after a trade to Los Angeles suggested he was better than a half season’s worth of defensive metrics made it appear. And Richie Martin might be a productive big league player someday, but bumping him from Double-A to the majors in 2019 after making him the first selection of the 2018 Rule 5 draft resulted in an ugly 50 wRC+ and -1.0 WAR.

With Martin likely better served to start next season in the minors and no one else on the roster with substantial major league experience at shortstop, the Orioles were left with little choice but to go get someone who could field that position. The Orioles opted for competence, signing José Iglesias to a one-year contract, as first reported by MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand. Read the rest of this entry »

In an article that ran here 10 days ago, Chicago White Sox GM Rick Hahn was quoted as saying that people in his role tend to “spend a lot more time trying to unpack what goes wrong, as opposed to examining all the things that may have gone right.”

Danny Mendick fits firmly in the ‘right’ category. Unheralded coming into the 2019 season — he ranked No. 26 on our White Sox Top Prospects list — the 26-year-old infielder earned a September call-up and proceeded to slash .308/.325/.462 in 40 plate appearances. As the season came to a close, Sunday Notes devoted a handful of paragraphs to his Cinderella-like story.

Mendick’s story deserves more than a handful of paragraphs. With the calendar about to flip to 2020, let’s take a longer look at where he came from. We’ll start with words from Hahn.

“When we took him in the 22nd round, as a senior [in 2015], I think we all knew he’d play in the big leagues,” the ChiSox exec said when I inquired about Mendick at the GM Meetings. “OK, no. I’m messing with you. We didn’t know.”

Continuing in a serious vein, Hahn added that the White Sox routinely ask their area scouts to identify “one or two guys they have a gut feel on.” These are draft-eligible players who “maybe don’t stand out from a tools standpoint, or from a notoriety standpoint, but are true baseball players; they play the game the right way and have a positive influence on others.”

In other words, organizational depth. And maybe — just maybe — they will overachieve and one day earn an opportunity at the highest level. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2020 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2013 election at SI.com, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Like Mark McGwire, his rival in the great 1998 home run chase, Sammy Sosa was hailed at the height of his popularity as a hero, a Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year, and a great international ambassador for baseball. In the same year that McGwire set a new single-season record with 70 home runs, Sosa hit 66 and took home the National League MVP award. Three times in a four-year stretch from 1998 to 2001, he surpassed Roger Maris‘ previously unbreakable mark of 61 homers, and he hit more homers over a five- or 10-year stretch than any player in history. In 2007, he became just the fifth player to reach the 600-home-run milestone after Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, and Barry Bonds.

As with McGwire, the meaning of Sosa’s home runs changed once baseball began to crack down on performance-enhancing drugs, with suspicions mounting about his achievements. He was called to testify before Congress in 2005, along with McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro, and several other players. Sosa denied using PEDs, but while he never tested positive once Major League Baseball began instituting penalties for usage, The New York Times reported in 2009 that he was one of more than 100 players who had done so during the supposedly anonymous survey tests six years prior. Read the rest of this entry »

Jonathan Villar had a good year in 2019. He was second on the Orioles in WAR with 4.0, was really the team’s only effective base-stealer with 40 stolen bases, and hit 24 home runs and 33 doubles. In late November, Baltimore placed 28-year-old middle infielder on outright waivers right before the arbitration deadline. Everyone knew why.

The Orioles, who are still at the part of the rebuild in which good players are worth more to them on other teams, didn’t want to pay the 28-year-old middle infielder the money he would have been owed after the arbitration, which was projected to be over $10 million. They eventually managed to trade him to the Marlins in exchange for a minor league pitcher not listed among Miami’s top prospects.

Instantly becoming the best player on the 105-loss Marlins is quite the penance for a man who played 162 games for the 108-loss Orioles in 2019. Villar, who enters his final arbitration-eligible season in 2020, will have to once more make the best of a non-contending situation. Meanwhile, as their former best player lands in Miami, the Orioles and their remaining fans will stay behind in Baltimore, where the rain continues to fall.

There would be no Orioles FanFest this year at the Baltimore Convention Center, a decision made for approximately 108 reasons. The team likely projected a dip in off-season fan enthusiasm, and determined that the 1,225,000 square feet of the venue would be about a million more than they would need for a winter fan event. So, they set about “looking into other ways of connecting with fans,” and that was how the first ever Orioles Winter Warm-up at Camden Yards came to be, featuring food trucks, vendors, and live music, framed around the centerpiece of a fan Q&A with some of the team’s leadership. Read the rest of this entry »

The Royals aren’t known for their analytics department. They have one, of course. It’s not as though the organization is the Flintstones while everyone else is the Jetsons. That said, they’re still viewed as being old-school. In the eyes of many, scouting still rules the roost in Kansas City.

Just how true is that perception? According to the team’s longtime general manager, it’s far less accurate than it once was. Which isn’t to say that Dayton Moore has cast aside his roots in an attempt to become something he’s not. What he’s done is adapt to the changing times.

“My background is my background,” Moore told me at last month’s GM Meetings. “I’m not going to be ashamed of that. I grew up in a very traditional way. I grew up as a coach. I grew up as a scout. But the game has changed since I came to Kansas City in 2006.”

Moore remembers meeting with, among others, saber-smart baseball scribe Bradford Doolittle. That “created a pathway to us developing an understanding of analytics.” He went on to hire Michael Groopman as a baseball operations assistant in 2008, then promote him to Director of Baseball Operations/Analytics in 2015. In Moore’s words, Groopman “came in and built our analytics program.” Read the rest of this entry »

In early June of 2012, my friend Ryan and I drove south on the Pennsylvania Turnpike to Wilmington, Delaware for the first half of a Carolina League doubleheader, because Dylan Bundy was matched up against Yordano Ventura. The two were so dominant that the seven-inning game was over in an hour and a half, and we had time to hightail it back to the Lehigh Valley for the second game of a doubleheader there (Mark Prior pitched in relief for Pawtucket). Afterward, a scout who now works for a team in a national capacity told me he thought Bundy, who was 19 at the time, could have pitched in the big leagues right then.

Bundy would reach the majors later that year, however briefly, before a rash of injuries would prevent him from pitching in Baltimore again until 2016. It was an ironic twist in what is perhaps this decade’s greatest baseball “what if?” career, because when the Orioles drafted Bundy in 2011, they asked him to scrap his dominant cutter in order to keep him healthy. This was the equivalent of baseball pseudoscience, an old wives’ tale. We were still in the dark ages of player development, and perhaps no dungeon was more medieval than Baltimore’s.

I’m not here to assign blame to anyone, nor would I call Bundy’s career to this point — 7.2 WAR over four full seasons, basically a No. 4/5 starter — a failure, but in high school, Bundy was throwing 100 mph and had a 70- or 80-grade cutter and curveball which, if you classify his pitches a certain way, is basically what Gerrit Cole works with right now. Through some combination of incompetent player development and sheer bad luck, Bundy went from a dominant, polished high schooler with three elite pitches to an oft-injured, low-90s righty who, for a while, used his changeup most often among secondaries. Read the rest of this entry »

The Camden Yards did not constitute what I would call a particularly inspiring work environment. The Orioles lost 108 games one season after it lost 115, with a pitching staff that set records for futility and an offense that was near the bottom of the majors as well. When the team initiated its rebuild in 2018, it did so by trading away its most sought-after talent — starting with Manny Machado, and later including Zack Britton, Brad Brach, Kevin Gausman, Darren O’Day, and Jonathan Schoop. Baltimore was finished pretending it could compete with the rest of the AL East and was going all-in on a scorched-earth plan in hopes to build the next 100-loss-team-turned-dynasty, giving away all the talent it could in the process. If you still found yourself on the Orioles’ roster at the start of the 2019 season, it’s probably because no contending team believed you could meaningfully improve their squad.

In many cases, those teams were right. They were right about Chris Davis and Mark Trumbo, and they were right about Dan Straily and Alex Cobb. There was good evidence to suggest those players, all of whom were once considered assets to teams trying to win, were not going to be of any value in 2019. Jonathan Villar, however, posed a more puzzling question. Contending teams might have seen his abysmal 2017 and continued struggles early in 2018 and concluded his skills were deteriorating. Instead, Villar then had the best season of his career.

Playing all 162 games for Baltimore, Villar finished with a .274/.339/.453 batting line with a career-high 24 homers, good for a 107 wRC+. He led the majors in baserunning runs with 10.5, and he stole 40 bases, good for third in baseball. All told, he finished the season with a career-best 4.0 WAR, ranking him fifth among all second basemen behind only Ketel Marte, DJ LeMahieu, Max Muncy, and Ozzie Albies. Read the rest of this entry »

26-year-old southpaw John Means put together an impressive rookie season for the Baltimore Orioles. As the most valuable pitcher on a team that placed at the bottom of the league in 2019 for pitching WAR, Means was one of only three Orioles starters to exceed 100 IP. The runner up to Yordan Alvarez for American League ROY, Means managed 16 second-place votes on the back of a 3.00 WAR campaign. His 3.60 ERA was the lowest of any Orioles pitcher (minimum 100 IP) since Wei-Yin Chin put up a 3.34 in 2015. Means also led the team in wins (12) and had the pitching staff’s lowest hard-hit rate (27.5%). Granted, the Orioles were one of the worst teams in baseball, so that alone doesn’t mean much, but when compared to the 75 other pitchers who threw at least 150 innings in 2019 (the cutoff used for all the stats to follow), his chase rate was the seventh-lowest, his zone contact rate was the 24th-lowest, and Means fell just outside of the top-50 in swinging strike rate.

Means hasn’t shown he has the stuff to blow hitters away. His 19% strikeout rate was well below the league average of 23%, though his walk rate (6%) ratioed well with his strikeouts when compared to other starters. Means does, however, surrender quite a lot of fly ball contact, the vast majority coming from his changeup (45%) and four-seam fastball (40%). Still, he managed to keep his FB/HR rate stunted enough to be one of the five lowest in baseball.

Regardless of the kind of contact Means surrendered, his hard-hit rate topped all other pitchers by a fair amount. Messing with hitter’s timing through good sequencing, command, and control work just as well as an elevated strikeout rate. Read the rest of this entry »

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 this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Dylan Bundy, Cory Gearrin, and Dereck Rodriguez — on how they learned and developed their changeups.

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Dylan Bundy, Baltimore Orioles

“I’d tried a circle change, and throwing with these two fingers [the middle and ring], but I never could do it. First of all, it doesn’t make sense to throw with those two fingers when you don’t throw any other pitches with them. You throw every pitch with the [middle and pointer], and your thumb, right? I kind of got around to, ‘Why try it?’

“I decided to spread my fingers over the two seams — this was in 2016 — and while I don’t know if you’d consider it a split, I call it a split. Some people only consider it a split if you full on choke it. For me it’s not a choke so much as a spread. When you bring your thumb up, really far up to the side of the ball, that way you get the action. If your thumb is underneath the ball, you get more straight drop, if that makes sense. You’re throwing against your thumb.

“I first threw a four-seam [changeup] — same grip, same spread — but then, two years ago… actually, no. Last year was the first time I started doing a two-seam grip instead of a four-seam grip. My thought process had been to try to make it look exactly like my heater, because I thought hitters could read spin, but I was told that hitters can’t make up their minds on spin that quick. I was told, ‘Don’t worry about that; don’t worry about the spin, worry about the action.’ That’s when I went to the two-seam split-change. Read the rest of this entry »

The Orioles will not be hosting a FanFest this year; the team has indicated it will be “looking into other ways of connecting with fans,” according to the Baltimore Sun.

Perhaps there’s just isn’t really much to say right now. Adam Jones, Manny Machado, Zack Britton, Jonathan Schoop, Buck Showalter, and all the team’s other recognizable names have been shipped out or moved on. But Chris Davis remains, and he found a big way to connect with Baltimore this offseason, as he and his wife, Jill, recently donated $3 million to the University of Maryland Children’s Hospital. While talking to reporters, Davis said that the Orioles’ reshaping their franchise in the front office and the dugout had already made him feel more “hopeful.” Where in previous winters, he’d set about his workouts with motivation but no direction, there now seems to be a plan, devised by him and manager Brandon Hyde to keep him moving toward a goal.

And yet, it seems like we’re looking at a winter of hard truths for the Orioles slugger. Davis will turn 34 years old in the middle of spring training. He’s on a well-known and oft-despised seven-year deal worth $161 million that is scheduled to end in 2022. Even better-known are his struggles, which have seen him drop from an All-Star and Silver Slugger in 2013 to asking for the game ball after breaking an 0-for-54 hitless streak this past April.

At this stage in his development, he’s developed. The swing either works or it doesn’t. Once a hitter gets some experience and establishes his mechanics, his later years are the work of mental tweaks rather than physical ones. Sure, older players can make adjustments, but Davis is apparently not going to do that: Read the rest of this entry »