The cruelty of 2020 is unending. Sunday might have been the day that Dick Allen was finally elected to the Hall of Fame, if not for the coronavirus pandemic that forced the Hall’s era-based committees to postpone their vote. Instead, on Monday, we learned that Allen had died at 78 years old after battling cancer.

Allen, who made seven All-Star teams and won the NL Rookie of the Year and AL Most Valuable Player awards during his 15-year career (1963–77), was one of the heaviest hitters in baseball history. Wielding bats weighing 40 ounces or more, Allen led the league in home runs and on-base percentage twice apiece and in slugging percentage three times, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. In each of the 10 years that he qualified for the batting title, he ranked among the league’s 10 most potent hitters, leading in OPS+ three times, finishing second twice, and placing among the top 10 five more times. His career 156 OPS+ matches those of Willie Mays and Frank Thomas, tied for 14th among players with at least 7,000 plate appearances, but Mays (12,496 PA) and Thomas (10,075 PA) played for far longer than Allen (7,315 PA). The comparative brevity of his career left him with modest hit and home run totals (1,848 of the former, 351 of the latter) that made it easier to downplay the impact of his raw batting line (.292/.378/.534), compiled during a pitcher-friendly era. Hall of Fame voters of all flavors bypassed him more often than not.

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Looking at the pitchers in the RosterResource Free Agent Tracker and sorting by projected WAR, we see 10 starters with a projection of at least two wins. The group is topped by Trevor Bauer and his 3.8 WAR projection and $100 million contract aspirations. Of the next nine pitchers, six have already signed contracts for next season. Two, Corey Kluber and James Paxton, come with significant injury concerns. That means that for teams in the market for solid production from a starting pitcher next season either need to pony up for Bauer, go after Masahiro Tanaka and his three projected wins, or look elsewhere. The White Sox opted for that last option yesterday when they traded for Lance Lynn, with Joel Sherman, Jeff Passan and Ken Rosenthal reporting on the players involved. Here’s the deal:

White Sox Receive:

• Lance Lynn

Rangers Receive:

• RHP Dane Dunning
• LHP Avery Weems

No matter the metric you use, Lynn has been one of the 10 best pitchers in baseball over the last two years. His 8.3 WAR here at FanGraphs puts him fifth while his 8.6 RA9-WAR is sixth. He’s second at Baseball-Reference with 9.8 WAR. He followed up a fifth-place finish in the 2019 AL Cy Young voting with a sixth-place spot this season. For those more inclined to traditional stats, he’s first in the majors in innings and sixth in strikeouts. For those using Statcast, his xwOBA over the last two seasons is .285 and ranks 15th among the 108 pitchers with at least 2,500 pitches thrown, right behind Walker Buehler, Hyun Jin Ryu, Mike Clevinger, and Charlie Morton, and just ahead of Noah Syndergaard, Shane Bieber, Zack Greinke, Clayton Kershaw, and Yu Darvish. Factoring in innings easily pushes Lynn into the top 10, if not the top five, of pitchers over the last two seasons. 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 nine years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Batters

Intending to compete in 2020, the Diamondbacks spent the first half of the abbreviated season in the hunt for one of the Wild Card spots. Arizona hit their high-water mark the morning of August 19, standing in the thick of the race with a 13-11 record. That’s not to say everything went as planned; the team’s pitching staff had an ERA of 5.17, and the offense ranked in the middle of the pack. But contending is contending, and the projections still looked relatively bullish, with Steamer giving Arizona a 62% chance of making the playoffs and ZiPS a 60% shot. Those prognostications turned out to be very overly-optimistic; the D-backs dropped 11 of their next 12 games, a mortal blow in a season of only 60 games. The result was a club that became an aggressive seller at the deadline. Gone were Archie Bradley, Starling Marte, Robbie Ray, and Andrew Chafin as Arizona signaled a significant rebuild.

The D-backs enters the offseason in a much less commanding position than they did last year. Yes, they have a great deal of payroll flexibility, with an estimated luxury tax number more than $100 million below the penalty threshold. The giant “but” here, however, is that they’re also a team that’s very hard to significantly upgrade, full of middling players but with few stars and few obvious gaping holes. Taking a quick peek at the handy-dandy depth chart graphic, Arizona’s lowest-ranked position is the Carson Kelly/Stephen Vogt combination, projected at 1.2 WAR, mostly due to ZiPS being bearish on the latter player. The Colorado Rockies aren’t likely to actually do much in free agency, but if they did, any free agent they’d sign would likely add more wins to their team than to Arizona’s. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2021 Hall of Fame ballot. It was initially written for The Cooperstown Casebook, published in 2017 by Thomas Dunne Books, and subsequently adapted for SI.com and then FanGraphs. 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.

It happened so quickly. Freshly anointed the game’s top prospect by Baseball America in the spring of 1996, the soon-to-be-19-year-old Andruw Jones was sent to play for the Durham Bulls, the Braves’ Hi-A affiliate. By mid-August, he blazed through the Carolina League, the Double-A Southern League, and the Triple-A International League, and debuted for the defending world champions. By October 20, with just 31 regular season games under his belt, he was a household name, having become the youngest player ever to homer in a World Series game — breaking Mickey Mantle’s record — and doing so twice at Yankee Stadium to boot.

Jones was no flash in the pan. The Braves didn’t win the 1996 World Series, and he didn’t win the ’97 NL Rookie of the Year award, but along with Chipper Jones (no relation) and the big three of Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and John Smoltz, he became a pillar of a franchise that won a remarkable 14 NL East titles from 1991-2005 (all but the 1994 strike season). From 1998-2007, Jones won 10 straight Gold Gloves, more than any center fielder except Willie Mays.

By the end of 2006, Jones had tallied 342 homers and 1,556 hits. He looked bound for a berth in Cooperstown, but after a subpar final season in Atlanta and a departure for Los Angeles in free agency, he fell apart so completely that the Dodgers bought out his contract, a rarity in baseball. He spent the next four years with three different teams before heading to Japan at age 35, and while he hoped for a return to the majors, he couldn’t find a deal to his liking after either the 2014 or ’15 seasons. He retired before his 39th birthday, and thanks to his rapid descent, barely survived his first two years on the Hall of Fame ballot, with shares of 7.3% and 7.5%. Last year, he jumped to 19.4%, offering hope that with seven years of eligibility remaining, he still has time to get to 75%.

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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 nine years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Houston Astros.

Batters

If you want a reason why the Houston Astros are still a dangerous team and were just a game away from making the 2020 World Series despite a losing record in the regular season, look no further than the Big Numbers in the lineup. The Astros have a lot in common with their 2019 World Series opponents, the Washington Nationals, in that they’re both teams that have been serious contenders for a numbers of years, have some extremely talented young superstars, and are suffering depth issues due to veteran attrition. Even with the loss (as of now) of Michael Brantley and George Springer, there are still a lot of highlights on the club. And the weak points of the lineup are glaringly obvious.

One of those is left field, which is a good reminder that our Depth Charts today will not be the same as they are three months from now. I would be extremely surprised if Houston started the season with Chas McCormick and/or Ronnie Dawson in left. McCormick projects better than Dawson does, but as long as the team’s still trying to contend in 2021, this is definitely a Too Soon thing. It would be a little odd to give McCormick time playing time so quickly after Kyle Tucker had to fight for years for an extended shot! Nor am I convinced that Myles Straw actually ends up the starter in center next season, though it’s more plausible than the current situation in left. Read the rest of this entry »

Dave Magadan nearly won a National League batting title in 1990. A first baseman for the New York Mets at the time, “Mags” finished with a .328 average, seven percentage points behind Willie McGee. A big final game of the season could have pushed him over the top — the math showed as much — although the odds were against him. So too was a cagey southpaw making his 547th, and final, big-league start.

“I think I needed to go 4 for 4,” recalled Magadan, who is now the hitting coach for the Colorado Rockies. Willie McGee had been traded to the American League around the end of August — he went to Oakland — so his batting average was frozen. Because of that, those of us who were chasing him had a number to shoot for.”

Magadan went into the Wednesday afternoon finale hitting .329 — Eddie Murray, then with the Los Angeles Dodgers, was at .328 — and the targeted 4 for 4 would indeed have allowed Magadan to match McGee’s mark… albeit only through rounding. Magadan would have finished at .3348 to McGee’s .3353, leaving the latter with the official title by the narrowest of margins.

No decimal points were needed. Magadan went 0 for 1, and then hit the showers with his lone plate appearance having served as a reminder that you can’t always believe what you’re told told. This is especially true when the words are spoken by the opposing pitcher. Read the rest of this entry »

When the 2021 season begins, the Rangers’ starting shortstop will not be Elvis Andrus. He has been Texas’ everyday starter there since his debut in 2009 — a remarkable run of longevity — but earlier this week, Rangers general manager Jon Daniels and manager Chris Woodward announced that Andrus would enter spring training as a utility infielder. Replacing him as the everyday shortstop? A former backup catcher.

Describing Isiah Kiner-Falefa as a backup catcher is a little misleading; after all, he won a Gold Glove for his excellent fielding at third base this year. But he reached the majors as a catcher after spending much of his minor league career as an infielder. That was a sacrifice he was willing to make to reach the highest levels with other, more heralded infield prospects ahead of him in the Rangers’ organization. It’s a credit to his determination and dedication that he outlasted those other prospects to earn this opportunity.

As Andrew Simon of MLB.com pointed out, a player moving from behind the plate to the most difficult infield position is almost unheard of in baseball history: Kiner-Falefa could become the first modern player to play at least 50 games at catcher, shortstop, and third base. He was drafted as a shortstop out of high school and gained plenty of experience on the dirt as a minor leaguer, so this isn’t unfamiliar territory for him. Still, simply due to the way he had to make compromises to work his way up to the majors, he’s in rare company.

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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 nine years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Washington Nationals.

Batters

There are a lot of names from the 2019 World Series championship that are no longer here, but the two most important ones are: Juan Soto and Trea Turner. After missing Opening Day due to a positive COVID-19 test result, Soto made up for lost time, playing like a man possessed and hitting .351/.490/.695, one of those lines mainly produced by players with Hall of Fame plaques. He now has a 152 wRC+ in 1,349 major league plate appearances and turned 22 a month after his season ended.

There are 14 players in major league history with a wRC+ of at least 130 in at least a thousand plate appearances before their age-22 season. The two other active players besides Soto, Mike Trout and Ronald Acuña Jr., are two of the other brightest young superstars in the game (or at least youngish in Trout’s case). Another is Tony Conigliaro, one of the game’s saddest examples of a brutal injury derailing a career. Everyone else on the list is a Hall of Famer. And I’m not talking run-of-the-mill Hall of Famers; this is a list that features Jimmie Foxx, Rogers Hornsby, Ty Cobb, and Mickey Mantle. The worst of this group is either Ken Griffey Jr. or Arky Vaughan. As such, Soto gets Ted Williams as his top offensive comp at his age. Not the Ted Williams who played in the minors for the Mariners, not a data error that led to an odd result, but the Ted Williams. I believe this is a first.

No matter where the Nats go from here, the team’s first priority ought to be locking up Soto’s services with a very, very lucrative contract for a very, very long time. Whether rebuilding, retooling, or pushing in the whole stack of chips, Soto is a foundational talent any team can build around. I’m a fan of Bryce Harper, but he was no Soto. Read the rest of this entry »

This is Part Two of an interview with Jim Gentile, who played for five teams, primarily the Baltimore Orioles, from 1957-1966. Part One can be found here.

——

David Laurila: You mentioned Boog Powell earlier. What can you tell me about him?

Jim Gentile: “You could tell when he was 18 years old that he had all the makings. I knew he was going to be a first baseman after I watched him, because he had great hands. They put him in left field when he came up with us — that would have been ’62 — and he did a real good job.

“I didn’t have a very good year in 1963, so I kind of knew they were going to make a trade. They signed Hank Bauer to be the manager. All of us that were living in Baltimore — Jackie Brandt, Milt Pappas, and myself — went down to the ballpark and met with Hank. He gave us a big talk. I was asked, ‘You gonna be ready for this year?’ I said, ‘Yeah.’ That night I get a phone call. I pick it up and [GM Lee] MacPhail says. ‘Jim, thank you for the great years you had with us. I just traded you to Kansas City. I think you’ll enjoy it.’”

Laurila: Were you surprised?

Gentile: “I was surprised I went to Kansas City — they usually made their deals with the Yankees — but I was lucky to meet a guy who became a dear friend of mine, Rocky Colavito. [Charlie] Finley said that he traded for the two of us because he wanted power. Well, it’s good to have power, but you’ve got to have pitching, too. A whole lot of clubs have proven that over the years. We weren’t very good. Anyway, I played there in ’64, and part of ’65. Last part of May, I was tied with Mickey Mantle for home runs, with 10, and Finley calls and tells me that I was sold to the Astros for $150,000, and two players [to be named later].” Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2021 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 youngest of the Oakland A’s Moneyball-era “Big Three” starting pitchers, and the last to join the organization and to debut in the majors, Barry Zito reached a higher peak than either Tim Hudson or Mark Mulder while helping the A’s to five postseason appearances from 2000-06. Renowned for a curveball that was considered the best in the game, he made three All-Star teams and is the only one of the trio to win a Cy Young award. He parlayed his success into a record-setting free agent contract with the Giants, though outside of his trademark durability, he rarely lived up to the expectations that it carried.

Then again, Zito rarely lived up to the standard expectations that come with being a high-profile professional athlete. Yes, he surfed, but he also played guitar, practiced yoga and meditation, traveled with scented candles and satin bed pillows sewn by his mother, and read books about the power of positive thinking. In the eyes of the often-hyperbolic agent Scott Boras, who netted him a seven-year, $126 million deal from the Giants in December 2006, he was “Zigasso… the artist-poet-intellectual.” Oookay.

Despite standing 6-foot-4 and 215 pounds, Zito was not a particularly hard thrower, but the rest of his repertoire made up for it, at least in the best of times. From a 2004 Sports Illustrated profile by Michael Silver:

Call it mind over batter: His unrivaled curveball with the roller-coaster drop and his crafty changeup set up a sub-90s fastball that isn’t nearly as hittable as it appears. “He throws strikes and dares you to hit it,” says New York Yankees manager Joe Torre, “and because you have to wait so long for that curve, it makes his fastball that much faster.”

Where Hudson — who’s also on this year’s ballot for the first time — finished his career with numbers worthy of a substantial Hall of Fame debate, Zito fell short; his JAWS is exactly half of the standard for starting pitchers. This figures to be his only appearance on a BBWAA ballot, but as this year’s only first-timer to win a major award, he gets a standalone One-and-Done entry in my series. Read the rest of this entry »