Last week, David Laurila asked me an interesting question. He’d been talking baseball with some baseball players – it’s true, we really do have great jobs – and the conversation landed on Josh Hader. That got Laurila thinking about Hader’s similarities to Spencer Strider. The crux of the discussion: Would Hader have ended up as a lefty version of Strider if, after appearing in the major leagues as a reliever, he’d transitioned back to the starting role he held in the minors?

I love questions like this. They’re fun to research, and I also feel no pressure to reach a definitive answer. Would Hader have ended up as a great starter? It’s clearly unknowable. That gives me a lot more latitude to speculate. In addition, this question isn’t just about Hader. It’s about whether future pitchers with Hader-esque profiles make more sense as starters or in the bullpen. No wrong answers and broad implications? Sign me up.

First things first, let’s talk about what it means to look like Strider as a starter. Strider has two standout pitches, but it’s really one standout pitch and a capable understudy. His fastball explodes through the top of the zone and screws hitters into the ground. It’s not so much the velocity – though that doesn’t hurt – but the shape and release point that combine to bamboozle opposing hitters. Read the rest of this entry »

With Instructional League underway in Arizona (casts look of disappointment toward Florida) and Fall League rosters likely about two weeks out, the time has come to line the coffers with data and re-worked scouting reports in preparation for another round of farm system audits. Especially at the up-the-middle positions, defense is both very important and also a bit of a black box for readers, as there aren’t many publicly available minor league defensive stats and so much of evaluating defense is visual. I’ve recently been working on a video deep dive on the position players currently graded as 50 FV prospects or better, specifically to evaluate their defense in detail. Here I’ve taken a pass at the shortstops, providing video supplements for the prospects who I’ve evaluated in the 55 FV tier and above. I’ve made changes to their defense and arm tool grades over on The Board as a result of this exercise, and highlight the instances where this has caused a change to the player’s overall FV grade in the analysis below.

I’ve cut the videos in such a way that you can see each shortstop making similar plays one right after another. The videos feature plays to their left where I want to see them flip their hips and throw, plays that show the extreme end of their range, backhand plays in the hole to their right, plays coming in on the grass, and double play attempts. The fewest balls in play I watched for an individual player was 36 (Colson Montgomery and Dyan Jorge) and the most was closer to 70 (Jackson Holliday, Carson Williams and Marcelo Mayer). Read the rest of this entry »

Padres fans in 2023 don’t have a ton to be excited about. The Friars have been in win-now mode for the last four seasons and are staring down their second losing campaign during that span. One of the two winning seasons was kind of ruined — for everyone in the world — by a raging pandemic, leaving fans with only one year that was both normal and an enjoyable experience since 2010. Unlike a lot of teams with a similar performance record, it’s not for lack of investment in the team. Just a few months after the gigantic trade that brought Juan Soto to town, the team signed Xander Bogaerts to a $280 million contract and kept Manny Machado from opting out with an even spicier $350 million pact. The Padres also agreed on a $100 million contract for Joe Musgrove and locked up Yu Darvish for $108 million. That’s more than $800 million, so we’re not talking about the case of, say, the White Sox having issues in part because they couldn’t be bothered to fill giant holes in the lineup because that would have required money.

As gloomy as the season feels right now, there are still legitimate reasons to think the Padres are a good baseball team. Their 68–54 Pythagorean record is 10 wins above their actual record, and records derived from run differential are more predictive than win-loss record. The projections all still agree there’s a lot to like and similarly have a good record, relatively speaking, of predicting the future. And this holds true even when talking about teams with the largest disagreement between the projections and the record. Looking at the 25 teams that FanGraphs like better than their seasonal winning percentage the most, coin flips missed their rest-of-season winning percentages by an average of 86 points, season to-date records by 81 points, and FanGraphs records by 65 points. Those 25 teams had played .396 ball through August 14 of their seasons; FanGraphs projected a .476 RoS winning percentage, and the actual RoS winning percentage for those teams was .458. We weren’t imagining things.

But the fundamental problem the Padres face is that it’s simply far too late to be the team they hoped they were. Our projections still believe they are a .572 team, but that’s only good enough for a 19% chance of making the postseason with a divisional probability that rounds to zero; the ZiPS projections have it at 15%. While those are still pretty good odds, especially compared to how the season has felt, it’s still far more likely than not that this year ends up being a dark companion to the 2021 season that also ended in stunningly bleak fashion.

And here’s the problem: the Padres project to be worse in the future than they are now. You could say that about most teams, but the Padres are also a team that has a massive amount of payroll already tied up in a declining roster, an unsigned Soto approaching free agency, and probably not a lot of room left to grow in a payroll sense. Complicating things even further is the financial collapse of Bally Sports, as the team has not yet figured out how to replace that revenue. Forbes estimated the Padres lost $53 million in 2022, and things are likely to get worse from there. Peter (Seidler) actually saw a wolf.

Running some up-to-date projections for players signed long-term demonstrates the enormity of the team’s challenge. I’m going to start with the Padres’ core of six players who have guaranteed contracts with annual salaries of at $10 million or more through at least the 2026 season. Whatever happens elsewhere on the team, these six are almost certainly going to be part of the foundation.

You may cringe looking at the end of Machado’s contract, but ZiPS already expected that before the season. Machado put together a strong enough July — though he’s slumped since then and is nursing a sore hamstring — and experienced a clear return to defensive form to cause his 2024-and-on projections to tick up slightly. While ZiPS didn’t like the deal, it doesn’t like it any less than it did in February.

Bogaerts was mired in a deep slump in May and June, aided by a sore wrist, but has hit a more Xanderian .290/.351/.413 since the start of July, in-line with preseason expectations. As with Machado’s recent deal, the Padres go into this contract knowing that they’re paying for Bogaerts to decline.

This is a bit of an awkward projection because it highlights an assumption in team construction that turned out not to be true. Typically, a decent defensive second baseman who can credibly fake playing shortstop will usually fare well at first base, but that just has not happened, at least so far, with Jake Cronenworth. With Ha-Seong Kim 김하성 firmly entrenched as a starter, the Padres have a player with value but not a logical place to play him in order to get that value. The difference is extreme enough that ZiPS thinks that Cronenworth is now more than a win per season less valuable at first than second base.

Add in the fact that Cronenworth is having a down year (and a pretty odd one in terms of Statcast data), and there’s just a lot less reason to like his future than there was before.

Where the positional gods punished the Padres with Cronenworth, they were far kinder here. Tatis’ bat isn’t quite where it was, but he’s actually turned out to be an excellent defensive outfielder, at least so far. Given his age, he’s the one player who projects to finish out his contract as a plus contributor to the team.

ZiPS was always fairly pessimistic about the Darvish extension, and without him reversing the continued slow decline in his peripherals, it hasn’t changed direction since the start of the season. While I always say “hitters age, pitchers break,” Darvish is at an age where cliffs do, in fact, beckon. ZiPS didn’t even want to project the final two seasons of his extension; I’ll be kind and not force it to, so we’ll call those zero-WAR seasons, which is sunnier than what ZiPS would say if I made it.

The performance projections of Musgrove have stayed about the same — hardly surprising considering that when he was healthy, he was having a similar season to last year. But his return this season remains up in the air, and new injuries create new risk for a pitcher, so his projected innings totals have dropped considerably.

OK, let’s throw everybody into one table, complete with their salaries.

If the projections hold true, these six will make up less than a third of the WAR needed to be a 90-win team as soon as 2026, when they combine for $120 million in salary. Unless the team continues to spend more and more money, it’s going to get harder and harder to use dollars to patch holes, which means that the farm system has to get back to producing very quickly. The Padres aren’t likely to be able to win on the backs of these six players for very long, which means that they likely have to come up with a whole new core of talent around these players.

The risk here is one of dynastic failure. I’m not calling the Padres a dynasty in terms of baseball success, but more how the term has been used historically. Lots of warlords in history managed to get a throne, but to establish long-term rule, they had to survive the transition to the next rulers. The Astros are an example of a team that has avoided dynastic failure; only a handful of the players on the team that won the World Series in 2017 were still on the roster when Houston won the World Series in 2022. Only Jose Altuve and Alex Bregman remain among the Astros’ offensive contributors today, and the only pitcher still in Houston, Lance McCullers Jr., won’t pitch again until 2024 [and Verlander who I forgot about for some very odd reason -DS]. They basically came up with nearly an entirely new team in five years.

Baseball history is riddled with successful teams that were unable to transition to the next era without a significant interregnum, such as the Utley-Howard Phillies and the Tigers during the peak Miguel Cabrera years. But those Phillies won a World Series, and while the Tigers didn’t, they had more playoff success than these Padres teams have had. To achieve that success, the Padres are going to have to be extremely creative over the next five years, lest they end up as one of the great “what ifs” in baseball history. Spending money and having a few big stars won’t be enough.

Look, Juan Soto is going to be fine. In fact, he’s probably fine already. At some point during every season, we start worrying that Juan Soto isn’t performing like Juan Soto anymore, and then he starts performing like Juan Soto again. You know why? Because he was Juan Soto the whole time, and as we all know, Juan Soto was built by robo-umpires from the future and sent back in time to teach us the exact parameters of the strike zone. The robo-umps also gave him the ability to hit dingers and do a little dance in the batter’s box to help him blend in with us humans. Point is, Juan Soto will be fine.

I pitched this article on Monday afternoon, when Juan Soto was definitely not fine. He was in a bit of a slump, batting .121 with a -14 wRC+ over his last eight games. We’re talking about a very small sample here, but once there’s a minus sign in front of your wRC+, it’s not just bad for a time-traveling strike zone robot. It’s bad for a regular human, too. Still, that’s not what made me want to write about Juan Soto. This is what made me want to write about him:

Read the rest of this entry »

If I have one criticism of Shohei Ohtani, it’s that he has singlehandedly ruined baseball’s great parlor discussions. Admittedly, this is the only valid criticism of Ohtani that I can think of. But questions like “Which player would you want to start a franchise with?” or “Who’s the most talented ballplayer you’ve ever seen?” are so much less fun now than they were a decade ago. First person to answer just says, “Ohtani,” and there’s a brief but grave silence until someone pipes up and asks if anyone is watching the new season of Billions.

Setting Ohtani aside, Fernando Tatis Jr. would be on my short list of most talented or dynamic baseball players I’ve had the good fortune to witness. In the past, I’d compared his physicality to that of a 3–4 outside linebacker, but watching him scramble around the diamond is like watching an alien who’s holding something in reserve so he doesn’t get outed by the humans. If that is his goal, Tatis is not doing a great job of blending in.

Read the rest of this entry »

For a team with a losing record, the Padres were aggressive in advance of the August 1 trade deadline, swinging three trades in order to patch holes on the major league roster without fretting about the impact of further increasing their payroll. Yet their first week since upgrading their roster hasn’t gone well. Not only did they lose Joe Musgrove to the injured list on Friday, but they also followed that by losing three of four to the Dodgers this weekend at Petco Park, missing a golden opportunity to get to .500 for the first time in nearly two months and gain ground on the NL West leaders.

The 30-year-old Musgrove was scratched from his start last Wednesday in Colorado due to what was initially termed “minor” shoulder soreness. The thinking at the time was that he would just miss one turn and be able to start against the Mariners in a two-game series starting on Tuesday. But when Musgrove flew home to San Diego to be examined, an MRI revealed that he had inflammation in his right shoulder capsule. Surgery is not yet a consideration, but he’ll be shut down from throwing for at least three weeks, meaning that at best he’ll return sometime in September. The Padres won’t have much clarity until he is examined after his rest period, and then he’ll need at least a couple of weeks to rebuild his pitch count.

The injury caught Musgrove by surprise. “I honestly thought we were going in for a pretty routine checkup… but they went in and found some injury to the capsule,” he told reporters. “Every part of me wants to go out there and throw. But everything’s telling us that we needed to step back and give it some rest.”

The injury caught the Padres by surprise as well. Said general manager A.J. Preller, “At the time of the deadline, we honestly were not looking at Joe as missing a few weeks or extended time or anything like that.” Preller did reinforce the pitching staff by acquiring starter Rich Hill from the Pirates in one deadline-day trade and reliever Scott Barlow from the Royals in another, but they don’t add up to a healthy Musgrove. Read the rest of this entry »

AJ Preller couldn’t keep it going forever. For years, he had his fingerprints on every major trade and free agency signing. He got Juan Soto! He got Josh Hader! He made a last-second pass at Aaron Judge before signing Xander Bogaerts. He built up a solid farm system and then lovingly tore it apart for established major leaguers, and he did it so frequently that he seemed to be in on every last deal.

This deadline, Preller finally rested. Earlier in the day, he engaged in some light veteran-snagging activity, adding Rich Hill and Ji Man Choi in exchange for a prospect sampler platter. A bit later, he swapped Ryan Weathers for Garrett Cooper and Sean Reynolds, but there was no seismic move to follow. The Padres’ last involvement with the trade deadline was another modest swing. They acquired Scott Barlow from the Royals in exchange for prospects Henry Williams and Jesus Rios.

I’ll level with you: this one won’t move the needle much. Barlow is a reliever archetype, reliably unreliable thanks to devastating stuff and lackluster command. He had a 3.62 FIP last year and checks in at 3.63 so far this year. Consistent like you wouldn’t believe! But he had a 2.18 ERA last season and has a ghastly 5.35 mark so far this year, so whoops.

That ERA can be attributed to a .340 BABIP and a teensie strand rate, but to be honest, watching Barlow pitch doesn’t give me the vibe of a mid-3.00s ERA reliever. He’s been quite hittable thanks to his lack of command. He’s often so far behind in the count that he’s laying one in there. When he doesn’t do that, he’s often missing his target and leaving the ball over the middle anyway. His slider and curveball are both excellent, and he’s going to get his fair share of strikeouts no matter what, but he feels like a constant implosion risk. Guys like him go from effective to can’t-buy-a-strike faster than you’d think sometimes. Read the rest of this entry »

The Marlins, who acquired some thump earlier on Deadline Day in the form of Jake Burger, went out and acquired some more right after the bell rang, picking up Josh Bell in exchange for Jean Segura and prospect Kahlil Watson. Nearly simultaneously, news broke that the Marlins were trading Garrett Cooper and pitching prospect Sean Reynolds to the Padres for left-hander Ryan Weathers. (The Marlins are also paying down Cooper’s salary to the league minimum.)

Burger’s addition made Segura surplus to requirements; if the Marlins had seen enough of him, it made sense to trade him to the only team that loves slap hitters more than they do. But the Guardians are releasing Segura and in the process eating the remainder of his salary for 2023 and ’24 ($8.5 million), plus a $2 million buyout for ’25. In exchange, they pick up a prospect and jettison Bell’s even more expensive salary for next year. Here, I made a handy chart:

I explored the Marlins’ reasons for jettisoning Segura in the Burger piece, but it’s pretty easy reasoning to follow: They want to make the playoffs, and Segura is hitting .219/.277/.279.

The swap of first basemen is the most interesting piece of this trade for me. Both Cooper and Bell had highly decorated 2022 campaigns — the former made the All-Star team, and the latter won a Silver Slugger — but have disappointed in ’23. On the surface, this looks like the Marlins are swapping one moderately disappointing first baseman/DH for another more expensive one.

So why would the Marlins do this? I can think of a few reasons. First, Bell is a switch-hitter, and Cooper is a righty with similar weaknesses to Burger — namely, lots of strikeouts and relatively few walks. And Bell has attributes that make him more attractive than Cooper as a bounce-back candidate. He walks more, he strikes out less, he’s two years younger, and he has superior raw power, even if accessing it in games has always been an uncertain proposition.

Then there’s the contract. Cooper makes $3.9 million this year and is a pending free agent. Bell is in the first season of a two-year deal that pays him $16.5 million annually. If the Marlins consider Segura a sunk cost — i.e., if they were going to release him anyway — what they’ve done is essentially bought a one-year, $6 million flyer on Bell as a bounce-back candidate for 2024, assuming he doesn’t opt out. That strikes me as a pretty reasonable gamble.

From the Padres’ perspective, why would they want Cooper? First of all, they are only giving up Weathers. Yes, he is just 23, is a former top-10 pick, and is under team control until 2027. But he made his major league debut in the 2020 playoffs and has been given numerous opportunities to claim a spot on San Diego’s pitching staff over the three seasons that followed, and he simply has not done so. Right now, over 143 big league innings, he has a 5.73 ERA, a 5.54 FIP, and a K% of just 16.8. Maybe the potential that inspired the Padres to draft him is still in there, but if it is, they would’ve been able to access it by now if that were within their capability.

The Marlins, meanwhile, have made young change-of-scenery lefthanders into their side hustle over the past couple years, with Jesús Luzardo and A.J. Puk among their current examples. They’d have reason to be optimistic that they can right whatever is wrong with Weathers. But for the Padres? Now feels like a good time to let him go.

In exchange, San Diego gets a prospect, Reynolds (more on him later), plus Cooper. Earlier, I wrote about the Padres’ acquisition of Ji Man Choi, a player who was built to form the left-handed side of a platoon at either first base or DH. At the time, the most logical platoon partner for him seemed to be whichever of the team’s two catchers wasn’t wearing the tools of ignorance on that particular evening. Cooper is well-suited to that role. And with the Marlins kicking in a little over $1 million to even out the salaries, the Padres get to try him out basically for free.

As for Reynolds, he’s a 25-year-old conversion project currently at Triple-A. The 6-foot-8-inch righty was once a first baseman himself and has got mid-90s velocity with good feel for both a breaking ball and a changeup. The no. 22 prospect in Miami’s system before the trade, he’s hardly a headliner, but he’s close to the majors now and could be a useful big league reliever under the right circumstances. That, plus a bat the Padres could use, is a suitable return for a pitcher they can’t use.

Now for Cleveland. A cynical reading of this trade says the Guardians are dumping a disappointing contract for a moderately less expensive one. Two years at $16.5 million per isn’t a backbreaker for most ownership groups, but it is for the Dolans. They save about $9 million, all-in, by swapping Bell for the right to release Segura. Raise a banner.

But Watson is an interesting prospect. The no. 16 overall pick as a North Carolina high schooler in 2021, he has explosive tools and was the no. 49 global prospect on the 2022 preseason top 100. Switch-hitting middle infielders who can get on base don’t come along every day. Since then, unfortunately, he has been suspended by the Marlins for using his bat to pantomime shooting an umpire and failed to hold his own against older competition in the Midwest League. As is the case with so many talented high school position players, Watson still needs to prove he can hit professional pitching. At the time of the trade, he was the no. 8 prospect on our Marlins list, with a FV of 45.

For taking on the less useful and slightly expensive end of a bilateral salary dump, Cleveland could’ve done worse. The modal outcome for Watson is probably that he doesn’t have a meaningful big league career, so in that respect acquiring him is a risk. But if he even comes close to figuring things out and reaching his potential, he’ll be the best player in the trade, unless Bell gets first-half-of-2022 hot again. Suffice it to say, there’s a lot going on here.

If I were to criticize this trade from Cleveland’s perspective, it would be on the grounds that the Guardians got cheaper and worse while they were a game out of a playoff spot. Yes, they’re under .500 and half their rotation (the good half, in fact) is on the IL, but they are just as much in the playoff race than the Padres are. And as disappointing as Bell has been so far this year, if the Guardians had a better internal replacement, they would’ve used him already. That’s disappointing. The rebuttal to that argument is that Bell has been so close to replacement level that losing him doesn’t hurt that much, and Watson and that $9 million in savings could be meaningful down the road. So it goes.

The Marlins have a decent shot at getting better now, the Guardians might get better in the long term, and the Padres stay about the same but with a player pool that better suits their immediate needs. Plus everyone’s accountants get some extra work. Everyone has the opportunity to win.

Some players are irreplaceable because they’re especially good. Some players are irreplaceable because they’re weird. In the hours before the deadline, the Padres have acquired two of the latter: left-handed pitcher Rich Hill and first baseman Ji Man Choi, both late of the Pittsburgh Pirates. First baseman Alfonso Rivas is headed east, along with prospects Jackson Wolf, a left-handed pitcher, and Estuar Suero, an outfielder.

The Padres are in an awkward position; they’re coming off a trip to the NLCS, including a corner-turning defeat of their Southern California rivals, the Dodgers. Last deadline, they traded for Juan Soto and Josh Hader before signing Xander Bogaerts this past offseason. With team payroll in excess of $250 million, the time to win is now, now, now.

Unfortunately, the team’s performance has failed to live up to expectations. As the deadline looms, the Padres are three games under .500 and five games out of a Wild Card spot. That number is imposing enough on its own with just two months to play, but no fewer than three teams stand between San Diego and even a brief appearance in the postseason. Their playoff odds, as of Tuesday afternoon, stood at 34.3%. And with Blake Snell and Hader bound for free agency at season’s end, San Diego had just as good a case for selling as for buying at the deadline. Read the rest of this entry »

With the trade deadline just a day away, at last we reach the end of my annual series spotlighting the weakest positions on contenders. While still focusing upon teams that meet that loose definition (a .500 record or Playoff Odds of at least 10%), 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.

At the other positions in this series, I have used about 0.6 WAR or less thus far — which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season — as my cutoff, making exceptions here and there, but for the designated hitters, I’ve lowered that to zero, both to keep the list length manageable and to account for the general spread of value. In the second full season of the universal DH, exactly half the teams in the majors have actually gotten 0.0 WAR or less from their DHs thus far, five are in the middle ground between 0.0 and 1.0, and 10 are at 1.0 or above. DHs as a group have hit .242/.321/.419 for a 102 wRC+; that last figure is up one point from last year. This year, we’re seeing a greater number teams invest more playing time in a single DH; where last year there were three players who reached the 500 plate appearance threshold as DHs, this year we’re on pace for five, and the same is true at the 400-PA threshold (on pace for nine this year, compared to seven last year) and 300-PA threshold (on pace for 15, compared to 12 last year). That said, many of the teams on this list are the ones that haven’t found that special someone to take the lion’s share of the plate appearances. Read the rest of this entry »