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. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

LaTroy Hawkins was just about as well-traveled as they come. The 6-foot-5, 220-pound righty spent 21 years in the majors, pitching for 11 different teams (not counting a return engagement in Colorado) in 44 different ballparks. Generally a setup man (though he did spend time closing), he never made an All-Star team, but he did pitch in the postseason five times with four different franchises, including a World Series with the Rockies. He stuck around long enough to become the 16th pitcher to appear in 1,000 games, and today ranks 10th all-time:

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One of the “Best of 2020” articles that ran here at FanGraphs over the holidays featured an under-the-radar right-hander with a unique backstory and a knee-buckling bender. Titled Rangers Prospect Cole Uvila is a Driveline-Developed Spin Monster, the story chronicled, among things, a curveball that had spun upwards of 3,300 RPM in Arizona Fall League action. Honed with the help of technology, the pitch profiled as his ticket to Texas.

He’s no longer throwing it. Instead, Uvila is endeavoring to channel former Cleveland Indians closer Cody Allen.

“In my head, I was going to throw it until my career was over,” Uvila said of his old curveball. “Then the pandemic happened. There was a lot of time to look in the mirror, and you just don’t see big-league relievers throwing 76-mph curveballs. It’s not really a thing.”

Uvila started talking with people in the Rangers organization, as well as to the instructors he’s worked with at Driveline over the years. Their messages were essentially the same: With breaking balls — much like fastballs — velocity is king.

“Driveline R&D has this metric called Stuff Plus, which essentially takes every breaking ball over the last five years and gives it a number,” Uvila told me earlier this week. “It’s kind of like wRC+, where 100 is average. I think the highest one was a dude with the Cubs, named [Dillon] Maples, and his graded out at something like 240. So there’s this range of pitches, and looking at the list, I saw this theme of curveballs at 84-85 [mph]. I said, ‘Man, I need to throw this pitch harder.’” Read the rest of this entry »

Of the thousands of pitchers who have reached the majors, fewer than a hundred mastered the knuckleball — that maddeningly erratic, spin-free butterfly — well enough to rely upon it as their primary pitch. None of them succeeded to the extent that Phil Niekro did. “Knucksie” learned the pitch from his father, a coal miner and semiprofessional hurler, at the age of eight, and while he didn’t establish himself as a big league starter for another 20 years, he carved out a 24-year-career in the majors, winning 318 games, striking out 3,342 batters, starting more games than all but four pitchers, and earning a spot in the Hall of Fame.

Alas, in the final days of 2020, Niekro joined an all-too-inclusive subset of Hall of Famers, passing away on Saturday at the age of 81 after a long bout with cancer. He is the seventh Hall of Fame member to die this year, after Al Kaline, Tom Seaver, Lou Brock, Bob Gibson, Whitey Ford, and Joe Morgan. That’s a record, either surpassing the total from 1972 or tying it, depending upon whether one counts the posthumous induction of Roberto Clemente via a special election in 1973.

Niekro spent the first 20 years of his major league career (1964-83) with the Milwaukee and Atlanta Braves before moving on to the Yankees (1984-85), Indians (’86-87) and Blue Jays (’87). He was nearly six months past his 48th birthday when he returned to make one final start for Atlanta on September 27, 1987. A five-time All-Star and five-time Gold Glove winner, he never won a Cy Young award, but he started more games (716) than all but Young, Nolan Ryan, Don Sutton, and Greg Maddux, taking more turns than any starter who never pitched in a World Series. He’s one of 10 pitchers to attain the dual milestones of 300 wins and 3,000 strikeouts — six of them cohorts from “That Seventies Group“— and ranks 16th overall on the all-time list for the former and 11th for the latter. He’s also 11th in the Baseball-Reference version of WAR, fifth in losses (274), fourth in innings (5,404), hits allowed (5,044), and home runs allowed (483), third in walks (1,809) and second in earned runs allowed (2,012) behind only Young. With his death, three of the top 15 pitchers in JAWS have died this year, with Niekro one spot below Gibson (14th) and seven below Seaver (eighth). He and his brother, Joe Niekro, who was born in 1944 and spent 22 years in the majors (’67-88) with eight teams, combined for more wins (539) than any other brotherly combination.

As you’d guess from those numbers, Niekro’s knuckler baffled hitters, making even All-Stars look foolish.

Phil Niekro, Knuckleball. ? #RIPKnucksie pic.twitter.com/LGYfXEOEz4

— Rob Friedman (@PitchingNinja) December 27, 2020

“Trying to hit against Phil Niekro is like trying to eat Jell-O with chopsticks,” outfielder Bobby Murcer once said. “Sometimes you get a piece, but most of the time you get hungry.”

“It actually giggles at you as it goes by,” outfielder Rick Monday told Sports Illustrated in 1983.

“I work for three weeks to get my swing down pat and Phil messes it up in one night,” said Pete Rose. “Trying to hit that thing is a miserable way to make a living.” 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 Texas Rangers.

Batters

One initial note: ZiPS sees Globe Life Field as a fairly neutral park that leans just a skosh to the pitching side. We still have very little data about how the park plays and basing park factors on expectations tends to be a rather poor prognosticating urge.

The good news for Rangers fans is that, across the board and more than any other team in baseball, ZiPS sees Texas’ lineup in a more optimistic light than Steamer does. The bad news, of course, is that this represents the sunnier take on 2021. There’s no getting around the fact that this team will be in a fierce competition to grab the first pick in the 2022 amateur draft.

ZiPS anticipates a much better season in store for Joey Gallo, though one that just makes him a credible middle-of-the-order slugger rather than meeting any remaining star potential. It hurts to say it, but Gallo’s no longer all that young and it’s getting a little late in the day to talk about his future stardom. He’s put a lot of work into his plate discipline — he’s much better at laying off bad pitches than he was in his early years — but the fact remains that contact is a problem, and it’s unlikely to change at this point. That’s always going to put a hard ceiling on his batting average when he’s not having immense BABIP luck. Stardom would practically require him to smack 50 homers a year. A 40-homer Gallo pushes a team towards a pennant, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see him doing that… in another uniform before next year’s ZiPS projections.

Nick Solak’s 2020 was a nearly-unmitigated disaster. He took a step backward in nearly every aspect of the game and as a super-sub, played a whole bunch of positions equally poorly, ending up with a profile that was less like Tony the Tiger (Phillips) and more like Tony the Tiger (cereal spokestiger). Now, his year obviously wasn’t grrrreeeat, but there were a lot of reasons to like him before last season. And really, the Rangers are probably going to need until May or June 2022 to win 90 games, so it’s not like they have any better choices than giving Solak another go. Read the rest of this entry »

In some ways, Tuesday’s three-way trade between the Phillies (who acquired relief lefty José Alvarado), Rays (who acquired first baseman Dillon Paulson and a PTBNL/cash) and Dodgers (who acquired bullpen lefty Garrett Cleavinger) was an extension of the Blake Snell trade from earlier in the week. In that deal, the Rays got two 40-man roster players back in return (Francisco Mejía and Luis Patiño) but sent away only one, which meant they needed to clear a 40-man spot via trade in order for the move to be announced without them losing someone for nothing.

As a result, the Rays were leveraged into giving up the most exciting player in a minor swap in Alvarado, a husky lefty with elite-level stuff, a troubling injury history and frustrating control. It wasn’t long ago that he looked like the Rays’ future closer or high-leverage stopper. In 2018, when he was routinely sitting 98–101 mph early in the year, he ranked seventh among MLB relievers in WAR despite throwing just 53 innings because he was striking out hitters at a 30% clip, and generating ground balls 55% of the time his pitches were put in play. Alvarado became .giffamous (pronounced like infamous) because nobody should be able to throw a ball that moves that much that hard.

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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 Seattle Mariners.

Batters

Let’s go straight to the projection that will likely get the most grumbling: ZiPS does not think that Kyle Lewis is a budding star. It does like him better than Steamer does — it mostly comes down to ZiPS being more willing to believe he’s a .340 BABIP hitter — but not to the level where he projects as a good starter. He had a legitimately excellent rookie season, but it’ll take more than an abridged 2020 to convince ZiPS that the previous translations, generally in the .230/.270/.370 range, no longer have predictive value. That’s not to say Seattle should be actively seeking to replace or upgrade from Lewis. One of the “benefits” of being a rebuilding team is that you can give players chances to improve or show an improvement is for real, after all. But these projections see the 2020 AL Rookie of the Year race a little like 1992, with the runner-up, Luis Robert, playing Kenny Lofton and Lewis as Pat Listach. Bumping a projection up by 70 points of OPS from the results of a 60-game season remains an accomplishment.

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On Christmas, while I was some combination of calorically comatose and consumed by basketball, Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic reported that the Rangers had signed 28-year-old Japanese righty Kohei Arihara. The move continued an active Texas offseason and streak of curious, perhaps antithetical acquisitions made by a Rangers club that seems to have one foot in rebuilding and and the other in competing. What does Arihara bring to the table right now, and how does his acquisition fit as part of a broader shift in the strategy the org seems to be taking to team building?

Before I talk about Arihara, let’s remember the things that change when a pitcher goes from NPB (Nippon Professional Baseball) to MLB. In addition to the leap in hitter quality, there is also a heavier workload. Pacific League pitchers start once a week rather than once every five days as they typically do in MLB. It’s a strange cultural workload reversal from high school, where Japanese pitchers can be sometimes driven into the ground and asked to throw upwards of 120 pitches on little rest during important tournaments. There’s no way of knowing what kind of long-term consequences this has for the pitchers being developed there, good or bad.

The baseball itself is also different. The tackiness and seam height of NPB’s ball differs from MLB’s (there’s also variance within each population on its own), and those attributes play an important role in creating movement on pitches. This is why, more and more often, you’ll see MLB pitchers asking the umpire for a new baseball after feeling the seams on the one they’ve just been given and realizing they are lower than they like. All of these things, in addition to the complexities of a cross-planet move and cultural adjustment, play a role in augmenting teams’ understanding of the pitchers they have scouted, via tech and eyeball evaluators, in NPB or any other foreign league. Read the rest of this entry »

Hours after trading for Blake Snell, and hours before swinging a deal for Yu Darvish, the Padres continued their remarkable post-Christmas shopping spree by signing Ha-seong Kim. Kim, a 25-year-old infielder who spent last season with the KBO’s Kiwoom Heroes, was listed as our eighth-best free agent in our top 50 roundup this fall, just ahead of Didi Gregorius and Justin Turner. Per Kevin Acee of the San Diego Tribune, it will be a four-year, $25 million deal. Additionally, Kiwoom will collect a bit of a tax, taking a $5 million release fee from San Diego.

In Kim, the Padres get a player who should claim a starting job right away, and potentially ascend from there. The best way to characterize his recent KBO production is to say that he’s outgrown the league. As the starting shortstop for one of the circuit’s better clubs, Kim has notched a 140 wRC+ in each of the last two seasons. He produced a .306/.397/.523 line last year, with 30 homers and more walks than strikeouts. He’s also swiped 56 bases in 62 tries over the last two years, a 90% clip. Mel Rojas Jr.’s absurd power production deservedly won him the KBO MVP award last season, but make no mistake: Kim was the brightest prospect in the league.

The scouting report backs up the numbers. A tremendous athlete, Kim’s a plus runner with quick hands and a plus throwing arm. At the plate, he has a mature approach, displaying good patience without being passive. Most of his power comes to the pull side, and he adeptly hunts pitches he can drive: Both his swing rate and whiff rate were above average last year, notable in a league that runs a lot of deep counts. Read the rest of this entry »

In roughly 24 hours, the San Diego Padres traded away a total of six players who, were they dropped into the amateur draft tomorrow, would come off the board somewhere in the top 50 picks. It’s the kind of talent few orgs have in their systems at all, never mind in such excess that they can ship it away without totally nuking the farm. Rumors that the Padres were in pursuit of Yu Darvish spread through the industry a few days before Christmas, but it’s taken years of focused rebuilding through the draft, international signings, and trades for pro prospects, and the GM himself sometimes roaming the backfields looking at raw, young players, to build toward a week like the one the Padres and their fans have had. On Monday, the rumors became an in-principle agreement to swap Darvish and C/1B Victor Caratini for several exciting young players most recently scouted on the Peoria, Arizona backfields: Reginald Preciado, Ismael Mena, Yeison Santana, and Owen Caissie. I was lucky enough to see more Padres instructs action than any other club’s, and other than Caissie, I’ve had year-over-year looks at all of them.

You can see where I had all the prospects involved evaluated before my Instructional League looks for some context to the movement I’m about to describe, because two of the traded prospects have moved up quite a bit, and a third might still. Let’s start with Panamanian infielder Reggie Preciado, who is the best prospect in the trade and will be on this offseason’s top 100 prospect list as a 50 FV player. Preciado has the overt physical traits that teams have traditionally coveted in the international market. He’s a big-framed (about 6-foot-4) switch-hitter who is athletic enough to stay on the infield. Players like this have a wide range of potential outcomes, and one is for their body to develop in the Goldilocks Zone where they remain agile enough to stay at shortstop, but become big and strong enough to hit for impact power. Though some teams have shown evidence of a philosophical shift in this area, prospects like Preciado are the ones who typically get paid the most money on the international market, and indeed Preciado received $1.3 million, a record for a player from Panama.

When Preciado came to the States for 2019 instructs, he looked like you’d expect a 16-year-old his size to look: raw and uncoordinated. He still had not gained athletic dominion over his frame, and he looked much more like a third base defender than a shortstop. Fast forward a year (because there was no minor league season) to the Fall of 2020 and Preciado now has a batting stance and swing that look an awful lot like Corey Seager’s. It allows him to be relatively short to the baseball despite his lever length, and whether it had to do with the swing change or not, he looked much more comfortable in the box this Fall than he did last year. Because of the missing minor league season, most teams in Arizona brought an older contingent of player to instructs than they usually would, and still Preciado (who is just 17) was striking the ball with consistency and power from both sides of the plate. I still think he ends up at third, but there’s rare hit/power combination potential here and it just takes confidence in one’s eyes to see it might already have arrived. I now have him rated ahead of Cubs first rounder Ed Howard and, barring any more deals, Preciado is likely to rank third or fourth on the Cubs list this offseason. Read the rest of this entry »

After trading for Blake Snell on Sunday, it was fair to wonder just how far away the Padres are from the World Series-winning Dodgers in the NL West. That gap has narrowed even more if not closed entirely after their latest blockbuster, with Yu Darvish going from Chicago to San Diego on Monday night in a seven-player deal. As for the Cubs, the self-inflicted wounds continue as they cut salary and get worse heading into the final years of team control for the core members of the 2016 championship team.

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