One of the last unsigned stars available, third baseman Anthony Rendon found his new home Wednesday night, signing a seven-year, $245 million with the Los Angeles Angels as first reported by Jon Heyman. Rendon, who finished third in the National League MVP voting and made his first All-Star appearance in 2019, hit .319/.412/.598 for 7.0 WAR in 2019, all career bests. A key member of the World Champion Washington Nationals, Rendon’s departure leaves a giant hole in D.C.’s lineup.

That Rendon has achieved this much is a fantastic comeback story given the obstacles he faced early in his career. While it’s hard to characterize a first-rounder as a true underdog, Rendon had multiple ankle surgeries in college from injuries and partially broke his other ankle in his second professional game for the High-A Potomac Nationals in a non-contact injury. But since 2015’s knee and abdomen injuries, he’s managed to stay healthy and crucially, the injuries didn’t appear to thwart his development. Over the last four years, Rendon’s only averaged 15 missing games a year. That’s not Ripken-like, but it’s enough to put the injury worries on the back-burner.

Among position players, Rendon has been fourth in WAR over the last three years, behind only Mike Trout, Mookie Betts, and Christian Yelich. Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Wacha was once one of the most promising young pitches in the game. In 2013, he pitched the Cardinals to the World Series, winning NLCS MVP. Through his first dozen starts in 2014, Wacha put up a 2.78 FIP, 2.45 ERA, and a 1.8 WAR that was among the top 15 pitchers in the game. Shortly thereafter, Wacha was diagnosed with a scapular stress injury that would ruin the rest of 2014, leaving him an innings eater the following three seasons, and something less than that over the last two years. Wacha hit free agency for the first time having barely held on to a rotation spot for most of the season and having failed to make the Cardinals postseason roster. The Mets, seeking depth in a rotation that already includes Jacob deGrom, Noah Syndergaard, Marcus Stroman, and Steven Matz, opted for a low-risk deal to position Wacha to close out the rotation with a one-year, $3 million contract that, with incentives, could bring the total to $10 million, as first reported by Joel Sherman.

Wacha still has his signature changeup, but his fastball rarely missed bats and he allowed 16 homers on the pitch last season. His strikeout rate dipped below 20%, and he might have been hurt by the rise in home runs last year. While Busch Stadium is a home run suppressor, Wacha gave up a ton of long balls both at home and on the road, though his road numbers were particularly brutal, with a 6.17 FIP. An indication that he probably wasn’t fully healthy, Wacha’s velocity moved all over the place throughout the season. Mike Shildt did say that Wacha was healthy as the season ended, but that he didn’t make the postseason roster due to a lack of need for an extra starter. Read the rest of this entry »

The Giants made two acquisitions Tuesday evening, signing pitcher Kevin Gausman to a one-year contract and acquiring infielders Zack Cozart and Will Wilson from the Los Angeles Angels for future considerations.

These moves aren’t quite as earth-shattering as the Gerrit Cole signing, but both have short term upside for the Giants, which is consistent with the team’s goal of not completely gutting the roster while rebuilding.

Kevin Gausman is a long-term favorite of mine, and the $9 million the Giants will pay him in 2020 strikes me as a reasonable risk to take given the upside he represents. His stint with the Braves in 2019 is one he’d be happy to forget thanks to the 3-7, 6.19 ERA line he put up in 16 starts. It’s very easy to lose sight of the fact that his 4.20 FIP was nearly two runs better than his actual ERA, which was inflated by a .344 BABIP. Gausman’s strikeout rate had faded in recent years, dipping to a lackluster 7.3 K/9 in 2018, so his 9.6 K/9 in Atlanta was roughly a 30% improvement, which generally portends pleasant results rather than what actually happened.

When looking at Gausman’s 2019 hit data, the ZiPS projection system expects a BABIP of .309 rather than his actual .334. That’s still on the high side, but is enough to drop his batting average against in Atlanta from .290 to .252. Batters actually had the lowest exit velocity against Gausman since 2015 at 86.9 mph, which partially explains why even a struggling Gausman didn’t see his homer rate tick up. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not the sort of splashy, high-profile move that would muffle some of the White Sox fan base’s simmering impatience, but acquiring two years of 24-year-old right fielder Nomar Mazara was a sensible, bird-in-the-hand trade for Rick Hahn and company. Up until this point, Mazara hasn’t had the kind of career many in baseball or baseball media (myself included) anticipated when he was an 18-year-old clubbing on Double-A pitching late in 2014. He’s produced just 1.7 WAR combined during his first four years in the big leagues, reaching base just a shade below league average (his biggest issue) without hitting for quite enough power to counterbalance it.

But he’s still a good fit for Chicago. The White Sox needed a corner outfield bat, and they needed it to be left-handed. Daniel Palka, a Mazara caricature, was jettisoned off the 40-man last month, Luis Alexander Basabe, a switch-hitter, is coming off a bad year, Blake Rutherford has a low-ball swing at a time when pitchers are attacking the top of the zone, Leury García, who also bats switch, is more of a versatile utility type than a true starting outfielder, and everyone else swings right-handed. Mazara has a .271/.337/.462 career line against righties, good for a 103 career wRC+, a number that has climbed in three consecutive seasons, as has Mazara’s Hard Hit % and Barrel % (the last one according to BaseballSavant). This is a 24-year-old (Mazara will turn 25 in April) who’s still getting better at the thing he’ll most often be called upon to do for the White Sox next year.

We’ve seen single-frame glimpses of elite physical ability from Mazara, like his 500 foot homer off of Reynaldo López, and perhaps at his age there’s some hope that he can continue to improve, though it’s more likely this is a perfectly fine corner platoon bat. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2020 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2013 election at SI.com, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. 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.

Roger Clemens has a reasonable claim as the greatest pitcher of all time. Cy Young, Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson, and Grover Cleveland Alexander spent all or most of their careers in the dead-ball era, before the home run was a real threat, and pitched while the color line was still in effect, barring some of the game’s most talented players from participating. Sandy Koufax and Tom Seaver pitched when scoring levels were much lower and pitchers held a greater advantage. Koufax and 2015 inductees Randy Johnson and Pedro Martinez didn’t sustain their greatness for nearly as long. Greg Maddux didn’t dominate hitters to nearly the same extent.

Clemens, meanwhile, spent 24 years in the majors and racked up a record seven Cy Young awards, not to mention an MVP award. He won 354 games, led his leagues in the Triple Crown categories (wins, strikeouts, and ERA) a total of 16 times, and helped his teams to six pennants and a pair of world championships.

Alas, whatever claim “The Rocket” may have on such an exalted title is clouded by suspicions that he used performance-enhancing drugs. When those suspicions came to light in the Mitchell Report in 2007, Clemens took the otherwise unprecedented step of challenging the findings during a Congressional hearing, but nearly painted himself into a legal corner; he was subject to a high-profile trial for six counts of perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to Congress. After a mistrial in 2011, he was acquitted on all counts the following year. But despite the verdicts, the specter of PEDs won’t leave Clemens’ case anytime soon, even given that in March 2015, he settled the defamation lawsuit filed by former personal trainer Brian McNamee for an unspecified amount.

Amid the ongoing Hall of Fame-related debates over hitters connected to PEDs — most prominently Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, and Sammy Sosa — it’s worth remembering that the chemical arms race involved pitchers as well, leveling the playing field a lot more than some critics of the aforementioned sluggers would admit. The voters certainly haven’t forgotten that when it comes to Clemens, whose share of the vote has approximated that of Bonds. Clemens debuted with 37.6% of the vote in 2013 and only in 2016 began making significant headway, climbing to 45.2% thanks largely to the Hall’s purge of voters more than 10 years removed from covering the game. Like Bonds, he surged above 50% — a historically significant marker towards future election — in 2017, benefiting from voters rethinking their positions in the wake of the election of Bud Selig. The former commissioner’s roles in the late-1980s collusion scandal and in presiding over the proliferation of PEDs within the game dwarf the impact of individual PED users and call into question the so-called “character clause.”

Clemens’ march towards Cooperstown has stalled somewhat in the two years since, as he’s added just 5.4% to reach 59.5%. Whether or not the open letter from Hall of Fame Vice Chairman Joe Morgan pleading with voters not to honor players connected to steroids had an impact, the end result is time run off the clock. He still has a shot at reaching 75% before his eligibility runs out in 2022, but like Bonds, needs to regain momentum.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last night, Gerrit Cole signed a record-breaking contract with the Yankees. Jay Jaffe broke down the signing, and mentioned one important part: the contract includes a player option after five years. In a contract as lengthy and lucrative as Cole’s, an opt out might seem like mere ornamentation. That’s not the case, though: as Stephen Strasburg’s earlier contract shows, sometimes the market in the future is simply better for a pitcher than we think. With that in mind, I took a stab at valuing the player option.

We use two player projection systems here at FanGraphs, and I ran both of them through the option pricing tool, as well as a hybrid. First, let’s take a look at the most optimistic: Steamer projects Cole for 6.3 WAR this year. From there, I applied a standard 0.5 WAR/year aging penalty and ran the numbers. You can read the methodology here, but as a quick refresher, I take an aging-inclusive projection, then bump each year by a random, normally distributed number to account for fluctuations in talent level.

The bumps persist year-to-year; if Cole improves to a 7 WAR projection for 2021, his mean projection for 2022 would be 6.5 WAR after the aging penalty, and I then apply another random talent bump to that projection. I do the same thing with the cost of a win in free agency; it generally trends upward, but jumps around, and the jumps persist year-to-year. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I had some fun putting Austin Hedges into generic NL and AL lineups. It wouldn’t have been fun for those lineups, of course: Austin Hedges is a terrible hitter! He cost lineups something like 30 runs over a full season, and that’s with him replacing the worst hitter on the team.

So while the mental gymnastics of seeing how much damage Hedges would do was fun, it was a macabre kind of amusement. Look how bad your team could be at offense without being worse at baseball overall! That doesn’t really get the people going.

With this lineup approximating tool assembled, though, there’s no reason to limit its use to Hedges. Instead, let’s put Mike Trout in some lineups — all over lineups — and see if we can create some fun statlines.

I’ll be honest, this exercise started with me wondering what the Astros would look like with Trout. So to start, I plugged Trout into the Astros’ regular lineup. Their team now looks like this:

First of all, hoo boy. That’s almost too hot to print. I wasn’t really sure where to put everybody; I briefly considered having Altuve bat seventh, and it didn’t even look all that wrong, which should tell you everything you need to know about how good the lineup is. (I left Chirinos in as the catcher because I’m using 2019 season stats for this exercise, but that hardly matters to the results.) 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 eight years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Chicago White Sox.

Batters

Yasmani Grandal was a tremendously important addition for the White Sox, giving the team an instant star behind the plate. He’s a good enough hitter that if the physical rigors of catching start to wear on him as he ages, he will still retain some value at first base or DH. ZiPS has been all over the map with Yoan Moncada, but believes that he’s finally turned the corner for good. I’ve declared this several times and been burned before, but I’m going to again make the claim, hopefully for the last time.

ZiPS sees Luis Robert and Nick Madrigal as instant contributors, though just how much the White Sox wring out of those positions will depend on how quickly they reach the majors in 2020. The computer thinks Danny Mendick is a serviceable stopgap who will have value as a utility guy when he eventually loses his job to Madrigal. The non-tendering of Yolmer Sanchez really makes the way the White Sox managed second base in 2019 seem odd in retrospect. If Sanchez’s performance was such that there was a chance the team wasn’t going to offer him a contract for 2020, why not give Mendick more time at second base? It’s not as if Sanchez’s projection got worse between September and November, so the team had to have been at least on the fence by late in the season. A more extensive audition for Mendick would have given the team more information. Read the rest of this entry »

Last winter, as Manny Machado and Bryce Harper became the first free agents to reach the $300 million plateau, the Yankees kept their powder dry, deciding both that they had enough depth at those players’ respective positions and enough money spent beyond the Competitive Balance Tax threshold. Despite a considerably more glaring need in their rotation, they bypassed the market’s top free agent pitcher, Patrick Corbin, as well, unwilling to go to a sixth year to secure his services, which ended up selling for $140 million to the Nationals. On Tuesday, the Yankees spent the money they had been squirreling away, agreeing to a nine-year, $324 million contract with 29-year-old righty Gerrit Cole.

The Yankees reportedly outbid the Dodgers, Angels, and multiple mystery teams (possibly the Astros and Giants) for Cole, a pitcher whom they have coveted since selecting him in the first round of the 2008 draft (28th overall), only to lose out to his commitment to attend UCLA. Three year later, he was the first overall pick by the Pirates, for whom he pitched from 2013-17 and helped to two Wild Card berths, before being traded to the Astros for four players in January 2018, just two and a half months after Houston had won its first World Series.

In Houston, Cole reconfigured his arsenal, scrapping his sinker and relying more upon his four-seamer and breaking balls, and ascending into elite territory. Over the past two seasons, only Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer have outdone his 13.4 WAR and his 2.67 FIP, while only deGrom and Justin Verlander have bettered his 2.68 ERA; no starter in that span has outdone his 37.3% strikeout rate. In 2019, Cole set a record for an ERA qualifier by striking out 39.9% of all hitters while also leading the AL with 326 strikeouts, a 2.50 ERA, a 2.64 FIP, and 7.4 WAR. Not only was he poised to hit the market at the apex of his value to date, he was positioned to hit a trifecta unseen since the winter of 1974-75, when Cy Young winner Catfish Hunter of the three-time defending world champion A’s was suddenly declared a free agent after owner Charlie Finley failed to make deferred annuity payments in a timely fashion as stipulated by his contract. Read the rest of this entry »

As first reported by Jon Heyman of MLB Network, the New York Yankees have signed Gerrit Cole to a nine-year, $324 million contract. That’s $36 million per season, making it both the most money and the highest average annual value a pitcher has ever earned, eclipsing the $35 million AAV contract Stephen Strasburg inked yesterday.

Cole’s deal fits a pattern we’ve seen this offseason where free agents — particularly big ticket signees — have earned more money than we anticipated at the outset of the winter. As has been the case for most contracts signed by players on our Top 50 Free Agents list, Cole signed for both more years and more money than we projected. Kiley McDaniel forecast that he’d sign a seven-year deal for $242 million ($34.5 million AAV), while our crowdsourcing effort estimated seven years and $224 million ($32 million AAV).

If any pitcher could command that kind of deal, it’s Cole, who is the consensus best pitcher in baseball. Though he narrowly lost out on the Cy Young to former teammate Justin Verlander, the 29-year-old’s dominant performance down the stretch and in October established him as a unique force to be reckoned with throughout the playoffs, and ensured he’d be the top free agent on the market this winter. Read the rest of this entry »