The Rangers sure are exciting these days. They’re only two games behind Houston for the AL West lead and one game up on Minnesota for the last Wild Card while still holding the title of The Best Team With a Negative Run Differential. That is, if nothing else, an unwieldy banner. It’s the banner equivalent of Jarrod Saltalamacchia’s name on a t-shirt in that it would start on one side and end on the other. Negative run differential or not, the Rangers are winning games and doing it in exciting fashion. Tuesday the Rangers beat the Padres while Elvis Andrus stole home. I’m happy that happened because that this is an article about Elvis Andrus stealing home and if he hadn’t stolen home this would be a pretty weird article.

The Rangers have had some good luck in addition to playing well. For example, the San Diego Padres just wanted to play a baseball game Tuesday. I’m not even sure they wanted to win it. I mean, they’d probably have been fine with winning, but they’d have been fine with not winning, too. Let’s just play a game, they probably thought, then get some sleep. Instead they got Tuesday’s game which was much, much worse.

Read the rest of this entry »

Three years ago, a struggling Red Sox team dumped a big part of their roster — and their payroll — on the Los Angeles Dodgers, shipping Adrian Gonzalez, Carl Crawford, and Josh Beckett to Los Angeles in exchange for a few prospects and a lot of financial relief. The deal freed up the team to reallocate a bunch of that money to free agents a few months later, and after hitting on signings like Shane Victorino, Mike Napoli, Stephen Drew, and Koji Uehara, the team celebrated a World Series title in 2013.

Things have fallen apart again since, however, and last winter’s free agent spending spree looks like a total disaster at this point. Hanley Ramirez and Pablo Sandoval have combined for -1.8 WAR while pulling in $40 million between them, and there’s no way the team can go into 2016 with this same defensive alignment. Ramirez is clearly not an outfielder, and Sandoval has been a bit of disaster at third base this year as well, leading to speculation that one of the two may move to first base next year. And that probably is the path of least resistance, but as rumors percolated of Red Sox-Padres trade discussion before last week’s deadline, I started wondering if there wasn’t an August deal to be made that might actually make sense for both sides.

Read the rest of this entry »

This breakdown starts with the Scott Kazmir deal on July 23, but there weren’t any trades from the 16th to the 23rd, so this covers the whole second half of the month, trade-wise, up until now. I count 25 total trades with prospects involved in that span that add together to have 58 prospects on the move. Check out the preseason Top 200 List for more details, but I’ve added the range that each Future Value (FV) group fell in last year’s Top 200 to give you an idea of where they will fall in this winter’s list. Also see the preseason team-specific lists to see where the lower-rated prospects may fall within their new organization.

40 FV is the lowest grade that shows up on these numbered team lists, with 35+ and 35 FV prospects mentioned in the “Others of Note” section, so I’ll give blurbs for the 40 FV or better prospects here. I’ve also linked to the post-trade prospect breakdown for the trades I was able to analyze individually, so click there for more information. Alternately, click on the player’s name to see his player page with all his prior articles listed if I didn’t write up his trade.

I opted to not numerically rank these players now, but I will once I’ve made the dozens and dozens of calls necessary this fall and winter to have that level of precision with this many players. Look for the individual team lists to start rolling out in the next month, with the 2016 Top 200 list coming in early 2016. Lastly, the players are not ranked within their tiers, so these aren’t clues for where they will fall on the Top 200.

Read the rest of this entry »

Every season, teams play roughly 100 games before the trade deadline. During that time, there are two kinds of teams: buyers and sellers. As sellers, it is their job to give buyers a hard time to trade worthwhile players to the buyers in exchange for players to be used in the future or moving financial obligations that selling teams no longer wish to possess. By all accounts, the San Diego Padres were clearly in the sellers’ camp, yet they held on to all of their players, both potential short-term rentals like Justin Upton, Joaquin Benoit, and Ian Kennedy and longer-term players like Tyson Ross and Craig Kimbrel. The Padres have desirable players on their team, and the decision to hold onto all of their players is curious, although they did make a small move, acquiring lefty reliever Marc Rzepczynski.

After the trade deadline passed, Padres general manager A.J. Preller was said to believe the Padres had a chance to make the playoffs this season:

#Padres largely standing pat because GM A.J. Preller believes the team can reach the postseason, source says.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) July 31, 2015

The Padres, as presently constituted, do not look like a playoff team. They are 49-53 with a -53 run differential, and BaseRuns, which strips out sequencing, indicates the Padres have actually been pretty lucky, as their BaseRuns record is actually five games worse than their present one. Our projections do not seem to hint at any great improvement moving forward either, as the team is projected to finish with an 80-82 record. They are currently eight games out in their division and 7.5 games out of the wild-card spot. More troubling than the deficit in the standings, they would have to pass four teams that all appear to be as good or better than the Padres to make the postseason. Their current playoff odds are under 4% for this season. Preller is either delusional or he simply could not get the type of return on his players that he expected. Given the huge amount of rumors associated with the Padres over the last few days, it is fair to assume the latter.

Read the rest of this entry »

Not to beat a dead horse, or any kind of horse, but the Matt Kemp trade has been lopsided. There’s still an awful long way to go, but for now the Matt Kemp trade is more like the Yasmani Grandal trade, and Grandal and the Dodgers couldn’t be happier. The other day on Twitter I was tipped off to an article about Grandal written by Matt Calkins. The headline: “Padres blew it with Yasmani Grandal.” It talks about Grandal’s limited playing time, and the lack of trust some Padres pitchers had in him. One paragraph stood out to me as particularly interesting:

Despite the general San Diego approach being to throw down and away, Grandal thought the power pitchers should be throwing inside in the early part of the count before using the outer half of the plate to record the out. But the veteran hurlers weren’t catching his drift, and as a result, he wasn’t catching their pitches.

Pitchers identified were Andrew Cashner, Tyson Ross, and Ian Kennedy. Last season, Grandal didn’t catch Cashner. Ross eventually stopped throwing to him, and Kennedy did too. They preferred working with Rene Rivera. This year, the Padres pitching staff has struggled. From the bottom of the same article:

San Diego’s pitching, however, has disappointed, and Grandal can’t help but wonder if that would be the case had his advice been heeded.

On the one hand, this doesn’t really matter. Grandal isn’t in San Diego anymore, so everyone just ought to move on. But on the other hand, this can be an interesting thing to investigate. So let’s talk about what Grandal talked about.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tyson Ross was always supposed to have bad command. Just look at his mechanics! He’s huge! Look at his minor-league walk rates! Then, Ross came up and — for his first 300+ innings in the big leagues at least — proved the doubters wrong. An better-than-average walk rate happened, at least.

Now, though, Ross has regressed in that category. But figuring out why a walk rate has grown is not the simplest affair. Swings and misses can turn balls into strikes, and changes in pitching mix can bring on command problems. Tentative approaches can turn aggressive stuff into long plate appearances that end with a free pass. More runners on base can beget more runners on base. Ross himself shakes his head at it, but we did our best to try and figure it out together.

Read the rest of this entry »

ATT Park, from behind home plate, at game time for a night game.

Justin Upton has hit the ground running in San Diego. His power stats have not suffered as much as you might expect, at least, as his isolated slugging (.194) and home runs per fly ball (16.7%) are right in line with career norms (.201 and 15.1%, respectively). When I asked him about hitting in San Diego, he shrugged it off. He also said something interesting about San Francisco’s park.

Read the rest of this entry »

It seems like a simple question to ask. Which recent home run was the least likely?

You could flippantly answer — the one Erick Aybar hit this year, or the one Melky Cabrera hit this year — and because they’ve got the lowest isolated slugging percentages with at least one homer hit, you would be right. But that doesn’t control for the quality of the pitcher. Aybar hit his off of Rick Porcello, who is having some issues with the home run right now.

A slightly more sophisticated approach might have you scan down the list of the worst isolated powers in the game right now, and then cross-reference those names with the pitchers that allowed those home runs. If you do that, you’ll eventually settle on Alexei Ramirez, who hit his first homer of the year off of Johnny Cueto earlier this year.

Read the rest of this entry »

O.co Coliseum prepares for the Athletics’ LGBT Pride Night.

The Athletics had an LGBT Pride event Wednesday night, and the night was peppered with love for many people that haven’t always felt comfortable at the ballpark.

Opera Singer Breanna Sinclaire, the first trans singer accepted into the San Francisco Conservatory of Music’s master’s program according to the San Francisco Chronicle, sang the anthem. According to Major League Baseball, she was also the first trans singer to perform the anthem.

MLB ambassador of inclusion Billy Bean was in the building, and was part of the impetus for the event, as the news of this event came out after he addressed the Athletics in Spring Training.

Sean Doolittle’s partner Eireann Dolan helped improve the event, as she not only offered to buy back tickets from disgruntled ticketholders with a heartfelt and funny letter, but also started a GoFundMe to help pay for even more donated tickets to members of Our Space, AIDS Project East Bay and Frameline, a nonprofit LGBTQ cinema foundation.

It seemed like a good time to ask the ballplayers willing to comment about the issue at hand: is baseball ready for an openly gay player, and what obstacles might they face when it happens? Even with a few “no comments,” the opinions given all had their own unique angle, and showed that even a ready country and sport will not make the first openly gay player’s professional life easy.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Padres fired their manager Monday, saying goodbye to Bud Black, who’d been around since 2007. It’s not that the Padres blamed Black for what they’ve considered to be a disappointing start. That’s always the idea whenever any coach gets the axe, but that’s a gross oversimplification. It’s not that Black was the whole problem. It’s that the Padres thought Black was *a* problem, the kind of problem they might be able to fix midseason. Easier to do that than to find a whole new front office, or a whole new group of players.

As we all observed, the Padres put together a roster they thought could win in 2015. It hasn’t happened yet, not consistently, and with the trade deadline a month and a half away, A.J. Preller might be thinking about the pieces he has to sell off. There’s still plenty of time for the group to turn it around and mount a charge toward the playoffs, but if the Padres do end up a midseason seller, this would be the first step toward admitting the plan didn’t work out. The first step, that is, if you don’t count losing as often as you win.

Read the rest of this entry »