Archive for Teams

If it’s possible to both buy low and sell low simultaneously, then that might be just what the Rockies and Athletics did by swapping 25-year-old lefty starters Drew Pomeranz and Brett Anderson on Tuesday afternoon at the Winter Meetings. (The A’s are reportedly also sending $2 million; Colorado sends 23-year-old righty starting prospect Christopher Jensen, who has has yet to make it out of A-ball and is on no one’s top prospect list.) Read the rest of this entry »

In the past 24 hours, we have learned that the Indians are open to at least listening to offers for both Asdrubal Cabrera and Justin Masterson. We can debate the merits of trading Masterson, but moving Cabrera is a slam dunk decision. On the whole though, the willingness to listen on two players who are nearing free agency and may fetch something juicy on the trade market shows that Cleveland is very much conducting their offseason properly.

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It appears, once again, that Domonic Brown’s name is out there cooking up in the hot stove.  Dave and Jeff each touched on Brown when his name last came up in rumors last month when a Brown for Jose Bautista rumor was floated out of Philadelphia. Both pieces laid out the caveats of such a move in that Brown’s career is still immature enough that it could go in either direction. 2013 could as much be his baseline as much as it could be his peak.

Brown’s major league career has consisted of just 1032 plate appearances. Prior to 2013, Brown was on the Philly to Reading shuttle a number of times and also had to recover from a hamate injury, which sapped some of his power through the recovery process. The amount of plate appearances he received in parts of three seasons from 2010 to 2012 were nearly identical to the ones he received in his 2013 as a full-time player for the first time. Not only were the plate appearance totals nearly identical, so were the skills.
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Yesterday, I wrote a mini diatribe on the value (or lack thereof) provided by Nelson Cruz. Because he has earned the label of “right-handed power hitter”, teams are apparently ignoring the fact that he’s not actually that good of a hitter and doesn’t really do anything else to help a team win. Bat only players where the bat isn’t that special are probably the most overrated players in the game, and that is certainly a club to which Cruz belongs.

That description also works pretty well for the eminently available Mark Trumbo. His name is perhaps the most popular of the morning, as the Diamondbacks are apparently working multiple avenues to try and acquire his power from the Angels in exchange for some of their excess pitching. Keith Law has even reported that there’s a chance that they could get the White Sox involved in a three way trade in order to find the right fit to help them acquire Trumbo, and it seems likely at this point that the Angels will move Trumbo in a quest to upgrade their rotation.

If the reported price tag of Adam Eaton and Tyler Skaggs is even remotely close to true, it seems fairly clear that the Diamondbacks are drastically overrating the value of Mark Trumbo, an unsurprising result given that he possesses the skillset that is most often overrated. To give up a prospect like Skaggs for the right to swap a speed-and-defense +2 WAR player for a dingers-and-ribbies +2 WAR player suggests that the Diamondbacks are following the trend of putting far too much emphasis on the ways players create runs and not the amount of runs they create.

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After having typically appeared in the entirely venerable pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections were released at FanGraphs last year. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Atlanta Braves. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Boston / Cleveland / Philadelphia / St. Louis.

Batters
Of some interest this offseason will be how various projection systems attend to the quite possibly anomalous Chris Johnson. With nearly 2,000 major-league plate appearances now recorded, Atlanta’s third baseman has a career BABIP of .361 — i.e. about the highest figure one will find from any batter with a sample of that magnitude. ZiPS projects Johnson to record a .338 BABIP in 2014; Oliver and Steamer, .345 and .342, respectively.

Johnson will rely on his batted-ball profile to remain even an average player in 2014, however, it appears. ZiPS projects him to post something between one and two wins — a roughly equivalent total to fellow infielder Dan Uggla, whose 2013 campaign was much less successful. Both players are projected to post nearly league-average offensive lines. Rather, it’s their defensive shortcomings for which they suffer most significantly.

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According to Ben Nicholson-Smith of Sportsnet, the Tigers have agreed to terms on a two year contract with Rajai Davis. Davis will give the Tigers a little outfield depth and form a nifty little platoon with Andy Dirks in left field. Davis isn’t a great hitter, but he’s historically done well against left-handers, and should be a nice complement to the underrated Dirks.

The Tigers aren’t really signing Rajai Davis for his bat, though. They’re signing him for his legs, because those are the reasons he’s still employed in Major League Baseball. They’re the reason he’s valuable.

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Imagine, if you will, that the Yankees signed Matt Garza. Alternatively, imagine that the Yankees signed Ervin Santana, or Ubaldo Jimenez. Those guys have been considered the three best domestic free-agent starting pitchers, and if the Yankees were to pick up one of them, it would be a major investment and it would be considered a major improvement to a rotation in some need. It would make headlines, and it would cost the Yankees three or four or five guaranteed years at something in the neighborhood of $15 million each. It would be a splash, the latest in what would be a series of offseason splashes for the front office.

The Yankees just recently signed a free agent who was more valuable than each of those guys in 2013. They signed a free agent who was more valuable than each of those guys between 2011-2013, and they signed a free agent who projects to be more valuable than each of those guys in 2014. I’ll grant that what Hiroki Kuroda doesn’t have on his side is age, but what he does have is ability, and for a year and $16 million, he ought to be Hiroki Kuroda again. Which is likely to be under-appreciated, again.

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The goal, always, is to win a championship, and indeed there’s nothing better than being able to win a championship, but such a triumph can come with certain consequences. Prominent among them is the common desire to keep a championship team together, even if other moves might be more useful. There’s also the tendency to over-favor a championship model, since, you know, the plan already worked once. But an advantage of winning it all can be that other people want to join the team, or that quality members want to come back. After the Red Sox won it all, Mike Napoli became a free agent. And late last week, Napoli re-signed, reportedly leaving money and years on the table to give the Sox a discount.

Consider that Napoli is 32 years old, and he re-signed for two years and $32 million. Curtis Granderson is 32 years old, and he signed for just about twice that much despite coming off a bad year. Carlos Beltran is 36 years old, and he signed for an extra year despite age leaving him a mess in the field. All three players were extended qualifying offers. It’s not directly comparable, but Tim Lincecum was given a slightly bigger contract than Napoli despite having allowed a billion runs over the last two seasons. Napoli’s getting up there, yeah, and the issue with which he was diagnosed a year ago hasn’t gone away, but as players in his situation go, he’s signed to something of a bargain deal that fits right within Boston’s organizational model.

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Roy Halladay is calling it a career, having been prematurely pushed out of the game by a shoulder that simply would no longer cooperate. According to Jon Heyman, the Blue Jays will officially sign Halladay to a one day contract and announce his retirement this afternoon, so that he can finish his career with the organization where he made his mark as one of the game’s best pitchers. And make no mistake; Halladay is one of the best hurlers of his generation, and he belongs in the Hall of Fame.

Halladay doesn’t have the legacy numbers that usually go with Hall of Fame induction. He will finish with 203 career wins and just 2,749 innings, putting him at the very low end of acceptable totals for induction among starting pitchers in those two categories. But, thankfully for Halladay, baseball is moving away from evaluating pitchers by career win totals, and his run of dominance makes him deserving of a place in Cooperstown.

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Lest we get totally overwhelmed by $200 million contracts and Jacoby Ellsbury jumping from Boston to the Yankees and the Astros actually signing major league free agents, let’s not let a smaller yet incredibly fun story pass us by.

27-year-old Indians catcher Carlos Santana, who hasn’t played third base with any regularity since way back in Single-A in 2006 (for a town [Vero Beach] that doesn’t even have a team any more, and for a club that had 43-year-old Pat Borders seeing time behind the dish) wants to give his old position a try next season.

In fact, he really wants to, as GM Chris Antonetti told reporters a few days ago: Read the rest of this entry »