The Padres announced Bob Melvin’s 2022 coaching staff earlier this week, and the group is at once progressive and diverse. Notable among the new hires is 27-year-old hitting coach Michael Brdar, who comes to San Diego via the San Francisco Giants organization. Asked about him in Zoom session, Melvin — himself a newcomer to the club — told reporters that Brdar “Talks a language that I don’t talk; he talks the language that younger hitters are talking now.”

Clarifying that he does “talk it a little bit,” the 60-year-old, three-time Manager of the Year went on to say that “You need to be able reach these guys and speak their language.”

Following up on the question posed by MLB.com’s AJ Cassavell, I asked Melvin how much the hiring process has changed since he first joined the managerial ranks in 2003.

“I came here from Oakland, where we did everything pretty much in-house,” said Melvin, whose 11-year tenure with the A’s followed managerial stints in Seattle and Arizona. “We would look in-house to begin with; that was just kind of how the organization flowed. This was a little bit of a different process, knowing we were probably going to bring some guys in from the outside. We wanted it to be diverse in age, we wanted it to be diverse in thinking. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2022 Hall of Fame ballot. 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.

As I continue to play catch-up with my coverage with the holidays approaching, it makes sense to take a fresh look at a trio of pitchers who have done just enough to remain on the ballot. Mark Buehrle, Tim Hudson, and Andy Pettitte all cleared the 200-win mark during their exceptional careers while producing some big moments and playing significant roles on championship-winning teams, but none ever won Cy Young awards, produced much black ink, or dominated in the ways that we expect Hall-caliber hurlers to do. When Buehrle and Hudson debuted last year, I was skeptical that they would even clear 5% and retain their eligibility, but with the ballot traffic having thinned out, enough voters — particularly those on ballots that went unpublished — found room for them to do so, though the results were hardly resounding. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Los Angeles Angels.

Batters

The good news: the Los Angeles Angels have Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen. The bad news: the Los Angeles Angels play a sport where you have to give almost as many shots to Luc Longley and Stacey King as Jordan and Pippen. The Angels are a very star-driven team, and if something terrible happens to a star or two, it’s going to be hard to eke out first place in a division with four plausible contenders. If you can ensure that Mike Trout, Shohei Ohtani, Anthony Rendon, and Noah Syndergaard all have full, healthy seasons, I think this is the team that can make the Astros sweat the most this summer. If not, I think the Angels’ playoff relevance will be on life support by the trade deadline. That is, assuming that Rob Manfred’s dystopian fever dream of every mediocre club getting a chance to knock off a 100-win team in the postseason by winning two of three games comes to pass. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2022 Hall of Fame ballot. 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.

Mark Teixeira was not The Natural, but he was a natural, at least. A switch-hitter who was adept at the game from an early age, he was positioned to be a first-round pick out of high school, but instead went to college, where he became not only the best player in his conference but in the entire country — as a sophomore. Despite missing significant time due to a broken ankle during his junior year, he became a top-five pick, and two years later the game’s number one prospect. Forced to learn a new position upon reaching the majors, he won the first of his five Gold Gloves two years later. Upon reaching free agency at age 28, he received the sport’s fourth-largest contract ever, then helped his team to a championship in the first year of that deal.

Teixeira wasn’t flashy or particularly colorful. He was rarely controversial, except when agent Scott Boras was locking horns with owners and general managers on his behalf. He was especially consistent at the plate, reeling off eight straight seasons with 30 homers, 100 RBI, and an OPS+ of at least 120; during his 14-year career (2003-16) with the Rangers, Braves, Angels, and Yankees, only Miguel Cabrera, David Ortiz, and Albert Pujols had more such seasons, and only Pujols did so while playing good defense. That Teixeira kept his streak intact despite changing teams three times in a three-year span from 2007-09 was a testament to his focus and professionalism.

Through his 20s and perhaps even his early 30s, Teixeira appeared to have a shot at making it to Cooperstown. But between the trend towards defensive shifts against pull hitters and a seemingly endless string of injuries — calf, wrist, shin, neck, knee — he was derailed in his mid-30s, and chose to walk away upon completing his eight-year contract with the Yankees. Retiring at 36 years old left his career totals short of the type of numbers that would generate consideration for Cooperstown; indeed, through 52 ballots published thus far in the Ballot Tracker, he’s received just one vote. Still, it’s worth remembering what he did accomplish in his exceptional career. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the St. Louis Cardinals.

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Can we just say 87 wins and call it a day? It feels like that’s what I’ve been projecting for the Cardinals for the last 15 years or so. That’s an exaggeration, but not an extreme one: ZiPS hasn’t projected St. Louis outside the 85–90 win range in a full season since 2011. Going back to the first official ZiPS team standings in 2005 — I only did players in the first couple of years — the team’s projections have been below .500 once (2008) and above 90 wins once (2010).

The lineup rarely has superstars at the top, but the Cards have a knack for keeping their floor incredibly high. Does that line sound familiar? It might; it’s what I wrote last year. And it still applies today. For a while, it looked like it wouldn’t happen in 2021, with the team 44-47 right around the All-Star break. Now, if you still considered the Cardinals an 89-win team or thereabouts, the normal thinking would have been to say, “Oh, OK, so they’ll play at an 89-win pace the rest of the way and finish around .500.” But the Cards care not for you and your fancy-pants Gambler’s Fallacy. After a loss against the Kansas City Royals on August 8, St. Louis stood at 55-56. This was the last time they were below .500, as they went 35-16 the rest of the way, capped by a 17-game winning streak in mid-September. The Cards didn’t just sneak back into the Wild Card conversation; they talked over the Padres and Reds and flipped the table, spilling all the hors d’oeuvres onto the floor. In the end, they made the playoffs with seven games to spare. Read the rest of this entry »

Ah, sinkers. Wait three years, and the “smart” view of them will change. In the early 2010s, they were the coolest. A few years later, they were a laughingstock, a sure way to make your franchise seem old-fashioned. Between 2015 and 2019, the league abandoned sinkers (and two-seam fastballs, which I’m including in today’s analysis) en masse. In the former, pitchers threw 148,000 sinkers. By the latter, that number fell to 116,000. That trend is still ongoing; 2021 saw only 109,000 sinkers.

Despite the downward trend in usage, sinkers are cool again. When the league switched to Hawkeye tracking technology in 2020, the public could suddenly see the impact of seam-shifted wake, an effect that creates movement that previously wasn’t being measured. Pure transverse spin — like a backspinning four-seam fastball — is one way to create movement. Seam-shifted wake is another, and sinkers have it in spades, though they also generate plenty of movement from spin.

What does that word salad mean? Basically, sinkers drop and fade more than you would expect given the spin that pitchers impart on them. It’s not like sinkers started moving more in 2020 when cameras caught this effect, but quantifying something makes it easier to look for and teach.
Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2022 Hall of Fame ballot. 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.

In my previous multi-candidate roundup, I lumped together four 10th-year candidates — Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Curt Schilling, and Sammy Sosa — about whom there’s little left to be said at the tail end of a decade’s worth of debate, and few minds likely to be changed. Three of those candidates were linked to PEDs, and all four have some pretty dark corners beyond the baseball diamond. As a means of completing my coverage of the major candidates before the December 31 voting deadline, it made sense to group them into a single overview while inviting those readers wishing to (re)familiarize themselves with the specifics of their cases to check out last year’s profiles.

As the holiday season approaches, I’m still playing catch-up with my coverage, but the two candidates in this roundup don’t have the same type of underlying connections. Both hit a lot of homers during their long careers, both were sometimes overshadowed by more famous teammates, and both have struggled to generate a ton of support through multiple election cycles to the point that neither is likely to get to 75% via the writers before their 10 years run out. Beyond that, they’re very different players and cases.
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After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Minnesota Twins.

Batters

Hey, that doesn’t look half bad! I’m talking about the hitters, mind you, and it shouldn’t be that much of a surprise given that the Twins returned the entire lineup that was roughly middle-of-the-pack in offense in the American League. Given that last season was certainly more than half bad as a whole, and I’m going to get grumpy below, here’s the chance to say some nice things.

This is one place where I believe the ZiPS estimate of Byron Buxton’s playing time more than I do that of our depth charts. Minnesota’s extension was a fair deal on both sides, I feel, simply because you’d be lying or batty if you said that his health didn’t represent a significant risk that impacts his value in the open market. A seven-year contract worth $150–$200 million probably just isn’t out there, even if he were a free agent right now. It’s hard for the Twins to walk away, though, since a healthy season from Buxton, while possibly a unicorn, remains one of the biggest sources of possible upside on the roster.

Elsewhere, the offense generally looks fine. The only real position you could call an actual problem is perhaps the Trevor Larnach/Brent Rooker mix in left, with ZiPS not entirely enthralled with either. The Jimmy Kerrigan defensive projection turned my eye enough that I double-checked it, but ZiPS gave him the best defensive performance of a corner outfielder in the minors it ever has. If his glove is anywhere near what the computer thinks, he’s a more interesting back-of-the-roster talent than, say, Jake Cave.

Man, Jose Miranda. I admit to not really having paid much attention to his season in the minors, but he killed it in 2021 after a rather uninspiring history, and given his straight-up performance, he really ought to be considered one of the team’s top prospects. ZiPS is getting antsy about Royce Lewis, and really, he hasn’t actually been healthy and playing well since 2018. ZiPS may be too pessimistic about his mean projection long term, but I think he really ought to tumble down the prospect lists considerably. It’s hard to miss two years of development time.
Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2022 Hall of Fame ballot. 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.

The road to becoming a reliever, even a Hall of Fame one, is rarely a straight one. Dennis Eckersley spent a dozen years starting in the majors, making two All-Star teams and throwing a no-hitter. Hoyt Wilhelm, Rollie Fingers, Rich Gossage, and Lee Smith were starting pitchers in the minors, and each took detours to the rotation during their major league careers. Mariano Rivera was an amateur shortstop who reached the majors as a starter. Trevor Hoffman began his professional career as a shortstop before switching to pitching after two seasons.

Like Hoffman, Joe Nathan began his pro career as a shortstop, but after one rough season of pro ball, the Giants concluded that his future lay on the mound — a notion so jarring to the 21-year-old Nathan that he chose to step away and focus on completing his college degree. Even after committing himself to pitching, injuries and ineffectiveness prevented him from finding a permanent home in a major league bullpen until his age-28 season, but once he did, he excelled, making six All-Star teams, helping his teams to six postseason appearances, and saving at least 30 games in a season nine times and at least 40 four times. From 2004 to ’13, only Rivera notched more saves or compiled more WAR, and only two other relievers struck out more hitters — and that was with Nathan missing a full year due to Tommy John surgery (Rivera missed most of a year in that span as well).

With Hoffman, Rivera, and Smith elected in 2018 and ’19, the standards for a Hall of Fame reliever have become a bit more fleshed out, and current candidate Billy Wagner is trending toward election. To these eyes, Nathan wouldn’t be out of place in joining the small handful of enshrinees, but there’s no guarantee he’ll even draw the 5% needed to stay on the ballot. At the very least, he deserves a longer look.

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Position: Atlanta Braves Developer, Baseball Systems

Location: Atlanta, GA (Remote possible)

Description:
The Baseball Systems Developer position emphasizes software and web development as it relates to the Baseball Operations department. The Developer’s main responsibilities will be to build and enhance proprietary applications for displaying baseball information and visualizations, maintaining existing information management systems, and developing additional productivity tools to aid in Baseball Operations decision making. Candidates must have proven experience with application and/or web development, with interest in baseball and sports analytics research as a strong plus. The position will report to Assistant General Manager, Research and Development. Read the rest of this entry »