José Ramírez is subtly bending the fabric of space and time. It’s the only way I can explain it. How else can you square the particular details of his hitting prowess? He’s impossibly quick to the ball, creating consistent loud contact. That should require a wild swing, but it doesn’t. He’s one of the best contact hitters in baseball. He has one of the best approaches in the game; sometimes it seems like he knows what’s coming before the pitcher throws it. He’s one of the best defenders in the game. It all feels vaguely magical.
Until today, he was also the most underpaid star in baseball. A five-year, $26 million extension he signed before the 2017 season (with two team options for another $26 million) immediately preceded his ascent to one of the best players in the game. That’s no longer true; today, he more than tripled his career guaranteed earnings by agreeing to a five-year, $124 million extension with the Guardians.
BREAKING: Star third baseman José Ramirez and the Cleveland Guardians are in agreement on a five-year, $124M contract extension, sources familiar with the deal tell ESPN. Deal includes full no-trade clause. With this year and pickup of a 2023 option, Ramirez is guaranteed $150M.
This deal, which starts after the 2023 season, should keep Ramírez in Cleveland for the rest of his peak, and quite possibly the rest of his career. For fans of a franchise that had seen its home-grown stars leave quite a bit of late, it’s a welcome turn of events. For Ramírez, it’s financial and — thanks to a no-trade clause — workplace stability.
I know this article is about a contract, but I can’t help it: I just want to talk about how great Ramírez is. I wasn’t exaggerating up above; I really do struggle to wrap my head around his talent. Most hitters have identifiable holes, places where they sacrifice one thing to gain greatly in another area. Level, four-seam-punishing swing? You likely struggle with sinkers low in the zone. Patient approach that hunts fastballs and waits out secondary pitches? Breaking balls in the zone will be your Kryptonite. Whip-quick pull hitter? You might struggle with pitches away. Read the rest of this entry »
On Tuesday, ESPN’s Buster Olney reported that Major League Baseball is expected to allow players to use wearable signal devices to call pitches this season. Later in the day, the Associated Press reported that the league did indeed approve the use of such devices and sent a five-page memorandum to teams’ general managers, assistant GMs, managers and equipment managers outlining the rules regarding such devices. Known as the PitchCom system, the devices were tested in the minors last season and have made their way around the majors during this year’s spring training, drawing glowing reviews. Aimed at improving the pace of play and countering sign stealing — by both legal and illegal means — their adoption addresses two issues that have been hot-buttons in recent years and have resurfaced this spring. In that light, the league could be doing more to reassure the public that it’s on top of potential abuses of the system.
Created by a company called ProMystic that provides modular technology to mentalists and magicians (!), the PitchCom system consists of a push-button transmitter that fits into a wristband worn by the catcher, and receivers that fit into the padding of the catcher’s helmet and the sweatbands of the caps worn by the pitcher and other fielders. In the transmitter’s nine-button grid, each button corresponds to a given pitch type as well as a location, the latter akin to the familiar three-by-three strike zone grid. From the AP report: “four seam high inside, curve hi middle, slider hi outside, change mid inside, sinker middle, cutter mid out, splitter low inside, knuckle lo middle, two seam low outside.” The other three buttons to the left of the grid are to cancel the selection and to adjust the volume up or down.
Through an encrypted signal, the choice of pitch and location is conveyed, with an audio output that uses a proprietary variant of bone-conduction technology (bypassing the ear canal) and has preprogrammed English and Spanish options, though players can record their own audio. Olney reported that as many as three teammates besides the battery will be allowed to wear receivers so as to aid defensive positioning; generally those will be the middle infielders and the center fielder. Read the rest of this entry »
The plight of the Los Angeles Angels is well known by now. Despite employing two generational talents in Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani, they’ve made the playoffs just once in the last 12 seasons. Even worse, they’ve had a winning record in just four of those 12 seasons, and haven’t finished above .500 since going 85-77 in 2015. It’s not for lack of trying either. They’ve signed plenty of big name free agents to massive contracts to try and get them over the hump. Those efforts haven’t paid off yet, however, and the latest veteran to get kicked to the curb before hitting free agency is Justin Upton, who was designated for assignment on Sunday with a year left on his contract.
Since 2011, the Angels have signed four free agents to contracts that are five years or longer, with four additional extensions of similar length. The track record for those signings has been pretty ghastly:
C.J. Wilson, Josh Hamilton, Albert Pujols, and Upton didn’t finish out their contract term with the Angels, while the jury is still out on Rendon; Mike Trout’s deals can comfortably be scored wins. Injuries cut Wilson’s career short while a combination of injury and off-field issues led the Angels to trade Hamilton just two years into his huge contract. Pujols’s production in Anaheim was a shadow of his career-defining tenure in St. Louis, though he did manage some late season magic for the Dodgers last year. He’ll finish out his career where it started. By signing all of these players to large, long-term contracts, the Angels were doing exactly what you’d expect them to do in their position: spend to supplement their established stars. Its unfortunate, then, that the majority of these contracts didn’t pan out, particularly when pitching remained such a consistent need. Read the rest of this entry »
It arrived stressfully, chaotically, and slightly late, but the 2022 season is here. And that means it’s time for one last important sabermetric ritual: the final ZiPS projected standings that will surely come back and haunt me multiple times as the season progresses.
The methodology I’m using here isn’t identical to the one we use in our Projected Standings, so there will naturally be some important differences in the results. So how does ZiPS calculate the season? Stored within ZiPS are the first through 99th percentile projections for each player. I start by making a generalized depth chart, using our Depth Charts as an initial starting point. Since these are my curated projections, I make changes based on my personal feelings about who will receive playing time, as filtered by arbitrary whimsy my logic and reasoning. ZiPS then generates a million versions of each team in Monte Carlo fashion — the computational algorithms, that is (no one is dressing up in a tuxedo and playing baccarat like James Bond).
After that is done, ZiPS applies another set of algorithms with a generalized distribution of injury risk, which change the baseline PAs/IPs selected for each player. Of note is that higher-percentile projections already have more playing time than lower-percentile projections before this step. ZiPS then automatically “fills in” playing time from the next players on the list (proportionally) to get to a full slate of plate appearances and innings.
The result is a million different rosters for each team and an associated winning percentage for each of those million teams. After applying the new strength of schedule calculations based on the other 29 teams, I end up with the standings for each of the million seasons. This is actually much less complex than it sounds. Read the rest of this entry »
Bailey Falter is unique. As erstwhile FanGraphs scribe Devan Fink explained when he wrote about the 24-year-old Philadelphia Phillies left-hander last summer, Falter features a 92-mph fastball that is, for all intents and purposes, a 95-mph fastball. The effective velocity comes courtesy of extreme extension. A 6-foot-4, 195-pound native of Chino Hills, California, Falter has a delivery that puts him seven-plus feet off the mound when he releases the baseball.
Projected to be a valuable part of the Phillies bullpen this year — some evaluators feel he’ll ultimately secure a spot in the starting rotation — Falter is coming off of a rookie campaign where he logged a 5.61 ERA and a 3.79 FIP over 33.2 innings. He’s been impressive this spring; with the caveat that Grapefruit League performances need to be taken with a large grain of salt, the southpaw has been sharp, allowing just five baserunners in seven innings.
Falter discussed his delivery, and the repertoire that comes with it, following a recent game in Clearwater.
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David Laurila: You’re known primarily for your delivery, particularly the amount of extension you get. Have you always thrown that way?
Bailey Falter: “Yes. I’ve had the same delivery and extension ever since I can remember. Honestly. I had a pitching coach back home, when I was growing up, named Steve Lefebvre. He tried to tweak me up a little bit — kind of shorten me up — because I was a guy that was never going to light up a radar gun, and we thought it could possibly be due to me having such a long stride. I ended up throwing the same speed.” Read the rest of this entry »
Frankie Montas was a late scratch from his Saturday start and instead, on Sunday, threw in an early-morning sim game on Oakland’s backfields. Opposing scouts in attendance were from (in totality) Boston, Kansas City, Minnesota, and Tampa Bay.
Montas threw about 80 pitches, warming up and then working in eight-to-ten minute chunks against A’s big league hitters, with staff adding batters to the end of some innings and rolling others to stay within that window (which is commonplace in this setting). Then the whole group took a break for four or five minutes before Montas returned to the mound for another simulated inning. With no umpires, the A’s used the TrackMan pitch locations to call balls and strikes from their seating area behind the backstop; the unit began malfunctioning at the very end of his outing, but only for four pitches.
I have video of his entire outing below, and in addition to it being a topical scouting artifact given trade rumors around Montas, it is also a glimpse into big league minutiae in a quiet setting with just a few scouts, A’s staff, and player families around. You can often hear communication between A’s players and personnel around pitch type and velocity, but there’s no exposure of sensitive ops stuff, something I vetted while cutting this together.
Montas’ fastball ranged from 92–95 mph, but he was consistently pumping in a heavy 93–94 sinker. He was clearly coasting, as a big league vet of this stature should during a morning sim game, so the fact that this velo band is abnormally low for him — his fastball averaged 96 in 2021 and had been sitting close to that so far this spring — is fine. The pitch had big sinking action toward the bottom of the zone early during his outing and induced several ground balls, though hitters had an easier time elevating it later on. As the movement on his fastball dwindled throughout his outing, the length and movement of his upper-80s slider increased, and he found more consistent feel for locating it later in the sim game. At times he uses it like a bat-breaking cutter, at others as a finishing pitch out of the zone. Though it was his least consistent offering, many of his sliders were plus. Read the rest of this entry »
In a normal baseball offseason, all the trades would have already happened. Front offices have all season to call each other up with a million permutations of deals, and the deals they make spawn other deals, and player injuries spawn other deals, and free-agent signings lead to surpluses or needs, and… well, you get the idea. Trading flurries happen in December, and during spring training, and teams work out their rosters that way.
With a compressed offseason thanks to the lockout, the timeline has gotten all mixed up. Now, trades are happening three days before opening day. It’s madness! And speaking of:
This trade was announced last night, and I’m writing about it this morning, and so rather than write a block of text about one side’s return and then a block of text about the other, I’m going to try a slightly different framing tool: I’ll walk you through a few levels of how I’ve thought about this deal. It’s an interesting one, no doubt, as trades involving the Rays so often are. Let’s get started! Read the rest of this entry »
Last year, Shohei Ohtani returned from a string of injuries and put together a season for the ages, excelling both on the mound and at the plate en route to a unanimous American League MVP award. On the days he pitched, however, he left the Angels vulnerable, because his exits from the mound generally meant his removal from the game, costing the Angels the services of their best (active) hitter and placing the team’s relievers in the batting order. That problem is no more, as last week Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association formally announced a handful of rule changes going into effect for 2022, one of which allows a starting pitcher who also serves as his team’s designated hitter to remain in the game in the latter capacity after he’s done pitching.
That rule, and other more mundane ones, had been proposed earlier in March and tentatively agreed to later in the month. They weren’t part of the new Collective Bargaining Agreement, so implementing them required a separate vote of the owners, which did not happen until last week. MLB did utilize the “Ohtani Rule” in last year’s All-Star Game; after Ohtani threw one scoreless inning as the AL starter, he stuck around to bat out of the leadoff spot a second time and then was replaced by other DHs.
In theory, the Ohtani Rule encourages other teams to develop such two-way players, but the ones who showed promise in recent years such as Ohtani’s teammate Jared Walsh and 2017 first-round picks Hunter Greene and Brendan McKay, eventually wound up on one track or the other. Thus in practice the rule is very specifically targeted at a single player — and an international superstar, at that. In baseball, the closest precedent for such a singularly oriented rule dates back to the 19th century and is linked to three-time batting champion Ross Barnes, though in that case, the change was designed to hinder his play, not aid it.
From 1871 through ’76, a batter could reach base safely on a ball that first landed in the infield and then bounced or rolled into foul territory. Barnes, a second baseman first with the National Association’s Boston Red Stockings and then the National League’s Chicago White Stockings, particularly excelled at hitting balls (not all of them bunts) that landed fair and went foul, making them nearly impossible to defend against. Via such tactics, he topped a .400 batting average four times, leading the NA in both 1872 and ’73 with marks of .430 and .431, and the NL in ’76 with a .429 mark. After the 1876 season, the NL adopted a rule defining balls that went into foul territory before passing first or third base as foul balls.
As MLB official historian John Thorn told FanGraphs, “Ross Barnes may have been the principal target of fair-foul hit change but the bunt (or ‘baby hit’) game had long been criticized as unmanly … or worse, a remnant of cricket.”
Barnes never hit higher than .272 after the adoption of the rule, though to be fair, a debilitating malaria-like chronic disease limited him to just 22 games in 1877, and 146 over the next four seasons, two of them washouts, before he retired in ’81. Notably, he lost a court case over whether the White Stockings had to pay him while he was sick.
Thorn offered the 1893 change of the pitching distance — from 50 feet at the front of the box (and 55 feet 6 inches at the back) to home plate to the now-familiar 60 feet 6 inches — as another example of a targeted rule. “It could be argued that the retreat of the pitching distance in 1893 was designed to muffle the speed of Amos Rusie and Cy Young.”
Indeed, the fastball velocities of Rusie (who had to that point led the NL in strikeouts twice and walks three times) and Young, the league leader in wins and ERA in 1892, were said to strike such fear into the hearts of batters that they insisted the league increase the distance. Peter Morris’ A Game of Inches traces the change to a more generalized aesthetic concern regarding the restoration of the equilibrium between batter and pitcher in the wake of the legalization of overhand pitching in 1884, and a distaste for the proliferation of strikeouts (does this sound familiar?). While Rusie and Young continued to flourish at the new distance, many of the game’s most accomplished hurlers to that point, such as John Clarkson, Pud Galvin, Tim Keefe, Tony Mullane, and Mickey Welch, retired just before or shortly after the distance change.
In the past decade, MLB has introduced two rules that have been closely identified with individual players, namely the “Posey Rule” that protects catchers from collisions and the “Utley Rule” that protects middle infielders from egregious takeout slides, but both of those are generalized rules, and oddly enough, they’re linked to those players from opposite directions — and, in Buster Posey’s case, perhaps the wrong player, at that. The former was adopted in 2014, three years after Posey suffered a season-ending broken leg on a collision; its advent was more directly preceded by Alex Avila’s knee injury in the 2013 ALCS, but one way or another, it protects all catchers. The latter was adopted in in 2016 after Chase Utley broke infielder Rubén Tejada’s fibula while attempting to break up a double play the previous season, and it protects all middle infielders. (Where do Avila and Tejada go to claim their royalty checks?)
Anyway, the Ohtani Rule should help the Angels by granting its namesake extra plate appearances. By my count, players batting in his stead in games from which he was removed as a pitcher — including the dud in the Bronx that I attended, where he took a first-inning exit — totaled 22 PA last year, about one per start; he also made three starts in April and May where he did not hit and the Angels used a conventional DH. At the level at which Ohtani played last year, an extra 30 to 35 PA would have worth something on the order of two runs relative to a replacement level hitter. Not nothing, but hardly season-turning (have you seen the Angels lately?), and a good way to showcase a singularly talented superstar.
The Ohtani Rule does not preclude other teams from using their pitchers as DHs, but the likelihood of, say, the Diamondbacks using Madison Bumgarner in that capacity seems vanishingly small as even they can surely offer a better hitter than one with a 44 wRC+ (21 since 2018) to bat four times a game. Incidentally, one previous candidate for two-way duty, Michael Lorenzen, is now an Angel himself, and a starting pitcher at that, though he’s lost interest in the double-duty exploits he pursued with the Reds. Lorenzen made 34 appearances in the outfield from 2018-21, starting six times (all in 2019). He owns an 84 wRC+ for his career; last year, the Halos gave over 2,000 PA to non-pitchers with lower marks, including David Fletcher, José Iglesias, Juan Lagares, Kurt Suzuki, and Albert Pujols.
The Ohtani Rule is in place for the life of the new CBA, while the other new rules to which the league and the union have agreed — the ones that weren’t part of the CBA (which you can read about here) — are applicable to 2022 only, under the health and safety protocols related to the COVID-19 pandemic. What follows is a quick rundown of those.
Roster Sizes
As in 2020, the abbreviated spring training has not allowed starting pitchers enough time to build up their pitch counts to where they would typically be at the start of the season. Thus, teams will be allowed to carry 28 players instead of 26 from Opening Day through games of May 1, with an extra player added on days in which teams play doubleheaders.
For those first few weeks, the limitation on the number of pitchers on the active roster — 13 out of 26, per a rule put in place for 2020 that has yet to be enforced — will be relaxed as well. Which, alas, means some very bloated pitching staffs. The Dodgers, who open their season against the Rockies at Coors Field, are apparently planning to use 16 of their 28 roster spots on pitchers:
Dave Roberts said the Dodgers will open the season with 16 pitchers. The Dodgers open the season in Colorado.
Ugh. Ugh. Ugh. The good news (?) is that they’re probably going to carry five left-handed relievers, so we can really watch Roberts dig into those matchups. The Yankees, who don’t even have the Coors Field excuse, are “leaning towards” carrying 16 pitchers into their opening series against the Red Sox as well.
May 2 can’t come soon enough.
Injured List
For the 2017 season, MLB reduced the minimum number of days for a player to be on what was then the disabled list from 15 to 10 (not including the 7-day concussion list); the next year, they renamed it the injured list. Given the general consensus that some teams were using the IL as yet another means to expand their pitching staffs, the league planned to implement a rule lengthening the minimum stays for pitchers and two-way players to 15 days in 2020, but that one fell by the wayside with the COVID-19 health and safety protocols.
Now, it will be implemented as of May 2. Until then, pitchers, position players, and two-way players can be placed on the 10-day IL, but from that point onward, only position players can use the 10-day IL. The various other ILs (COVID, 7-day concussion and 60-day) will continue to function as they did last year.
Minor League Options
The minimum number of days that a pitcher or two-way player must remain on option or outright assignment prior to being recalled or re-selected is 10 days until May 2, and 15 thereafter. This is another throwback from 2020 that’s finally going into place, designed to reduce the amount of churn in bullpens.
Additionally, those option assignments before May 2 don’t count against the seasonal limit of five, which was put in place by the new CBA.
Extra Innings
As was the case in 2020 and ’21, each extra inning will begin with a runner on second base, namely the player occupying the spot in the batting order preceding that of the inning’s leadoff hitter (unless it’s a pitcher, which is much more unlikely now with the universal DH). As of last summer — hell, as recently as early March — the Manfred Man (or zombie runner) was presumed to be a relic of the past, but according to The Athletic’s Matt Gelb and Jayson Stark, it returned as part of the league’s health and safety protocols.
This one isn’t a popular rule among fans; when I polled FanGraphs readers after the 2020 season, just 23.6% favored keeping the rule, an even lower percentage than favored retaining seven-inning games for doubleheaders (32.9%). Gelb and Stark cited a March 2021 Seton Hall Sports Poll in which just 17% of the general population approved, with 28% of sports fans and 41% of avid fans approving. Here’s the thing, though: the players like it, as pitching staffs don’t get burned out as often by epic contests and pitchers with options remaining aren’t “rewarded” for emptying the tank with another trip to the minors. Managers favor it, too, with the likes of the Yankees’ Aaron Boone, the Brewers’ Craig Counsell, and the Diamondbacks’ Torey Lovullo among those speaking up on the rule’s behalf.
Speaking of doubleheaders, if and when they’re necessary, games will be of the nine-inning variety. The seven-inning ones have been sent back to the minors, where they belong.
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Beyond those changes, a few others have been made that will persist beyond 2022, but merit mention here. The first concerns rookie qualification. As before, a player is still considered a rookie if he hasn’t exceeded 130 at-bats (not plate appearances), 50 innings, or 45 days on the active roster (time on the IL doesn’t count). Amid the abbreviated 2020 season, the powers that be decided that September (and October) days on the active roster would no longer be excluded from the 45-day count, and last year, with September rosters limited to 28 players instead of 40, that rule was retained. Now it looks as though it’s becoming permanent.
Shortly before this article was published, ESPN’s Buster Olney reported that MLB will allow teams to use wearable PitchCom signaling devices during the regular season as a means of countering sign-stealing efforts and improving pace of play. Several teams have tested the devices this spring and they’ve drawn glowing reviews. We’ll have a closer look at the ramifications of that in a separate article soon.
As for the other changes you’ll see in 2022, from the universal designated hitter and the five-option limit to the expanded playoffs, those are part of the new CBA. So is the 45-day notification window for the league to implement new rules, which will likely introduce a pitch clock, larger bases, and some kind of ban on infield shifts next year. There will be ample time to yell at those clouds, I promise.
If I told you that two contending teams swapped major leaguers, you’d probably have an idea of what that looks like. Maybe a reliever and a fourth outfielder changed hands, or something like that. The Blue Jays and the White Sox didn’t do that, though; they swapped catchers, as Jeff Passan first reported:
The Chicago White Sox and Toronto Blue Jays are in agreement on a trade that will send catcher Zack Collins to the Blue Jays in exchange for catcher Reese McGuire, sources familiar with the deal tell ESPN.
But even though both Reese McGuire and Zack Collins play catcher, they do so in very different ways. Amusingly, as we at FanGraphs work through our Positional Power Rankings, Collins is essentially positionless power. His home run totals in the minors and batted ball metrics in the majors tell a consistent story; if he can figure out a way to limit his strikeouts, he’ll be a fearsome hitter.
In a previous era, that might have secured him a starting catching role. But our newfound understanding of the value of receiving has exposed Collins as one of the worst defenders at the position — one who was worth a ghastly 14 runs below average in only 506 innings of catching last year. It’s not an easy skill to show with a GIF or two, and that sounds like a ton of runs to surrender in such a short time. But that matches up with the eye test, and the Blue Jays will likely use Collins mainly as a first baseman and DH. Read the rest of this entry »
If you thought the Padres were done tinkering with the starting rotation, you thought wrong. On Sunday morning, San Diego agreed to a deal with the Athletics, acquiring pitchers Sean Manaea and Aaron Holiday in exchange for pitcher Adrian Martinez and infielder Euribiel Angeles.
In a season in which teams continued to be conservative at stretching out their starting pitchers, the A’s were more aggressive with the injury-prone Manaea last year. Over the short-term, that proved to be successful, as he remained healthy and threw 179 1/3 innings, his most as a professional. The plaudits aren’t just quantity; he set career-highs all over the place, from WAR (3.3) to full-season FIP (3.66) to strikeout rate (25.7%).
How did Manaea do it? The likeliest reason is velocity. No, he didn’t suddenly become Aroldis Chapman or Brusdar Graterol, but every pitcher — with the possible exception of knuckleballers — requires some level of velocity to achieve effectiveness. In Manaea’s career there’s nearly a 100-point delta in batter slugging percentage between his sinkers going 91 mph or slower (.491) and those traveling 92 mph or faster (.397). On a player-to-player comparison, I get in the neighborhood of 40 points of SLG being the norm.
Similarly, Manaea also gets a lot more strikeouts when he’s throwing harder. More than three-quarters of his career strikeouts from sinkers come from the harder ones despite less than half of his sinkers being in the category. It’s not just chicken-and-egg; this pattern existed prior to this season. Sinkers aren’t traditionally used to punch out batters, but for Manaea, they’re an important weapon. Statcast credits him with 114 strikeouts on sinkers in 2021, the third-most of the Statcast era and the most since Chris Sale had 124 in 2015 (David Price has the crown with 125 in 2014).
It’s not even that Manaea’s sinker is a particularly nasty pitch, such as a splitter in fastball’s clothing; he actually gets less break on his than the average pitcher. It’s that his deceptive delivery and his excellent control basically function as a force multiplier to his velocity, effectively reducing the distance between the mound and home plate. Even a 30-mph fastball can strike out Juan Soto if you get to determine the sliver of time he has to make a decision. Read the rest of this entry »
