The Reds signaled their intentions to compete in 2019 by trading for Tanner Roark, Sonny Gray, and Yasiel Puig, among others. They did compete with a BaseRuns record above .500 that with neutral luck would have put them in contention until the end of the season. They were 4 1/2 games off the division lead at the All-Star break, but a crowded division and a lack of talent relative to their competitors left them with 75 wins at the end of the year.

Cincinnati also announced their intentions to compete in 2020 by acquiring Trevor Bauer at the trade deadline. Bauer is now a part of what should be one of the better rotations in baseball along with Luis Castillo, Gray, Anthony DeSclafani, and Tyler Mahle. Even with a good rotation, the present roster wasn’t going to be enough in 2020, so the Reds struck a big deal with Mike Moustakas for four years and $64 million, as first reported by Jon Heyman and Jeff Passan.

For Moustakas, this deal was a long time coming. Two seasons ago, Dave Cameron and the crowd here at FanGraphs expected Moustakas would get five years and somewhere between $85-95 million. At the time, the Royals third baseman was coming off a 38-homer, 113-wRC+ season, but there were some questions about his defense due to knee problems in addition to the stigma of a qualifying offer. Moustakas ended up settling for one year and a $6.5 million guarantee in returning to Kansas City. He improved his defense in his time with the Royals and Brewers in 2018, but he hit 10 fewer home runs and was just a bit above average on offense. Behind Manny Machado and Josh Donaldson in the third base pecking order, Moustakas again found his market lacking and signed with the Brewers for $10 million. Read the rest of this entry »

Kole Calhoun stood at his locker near the close of the 2019 season and talked about appreciating every moment of his eight seasons in Anaheim, knowing that any day could have been his last day. A few months later, the Angels declined his $14 million contract option. He departs Los Angeles having played a little bit of left and a smidgen of center, but mostly the Angels kept Kalhoun sequestered to right field, where in 2019 he hacked fiendishly amid frequent swing adjustments. His final season with the Angels produced inconsistency in his monthly outputs, as well as a new career high in strikeout rate (25.6 percent) and a modest 108 wRC+.

Calhoun is a member of the Fraternity of Less Effective Outfielders the Angels Have Put Next to Mike Trout. There have been many others over the years, placed out there in the corners beside the reigning AL MVP: Vernon Wells, Torii Hunter, Josh Hamilton, Ben Revere. And in 2019, Trout’s partners in the grass were Kole Calhoun and Justin Upton. Calhoun is gone, but Upton, another veteran who is not as good as Mike Trout, will remain. He doesn’t need to be as good as Trout to be of use, something that has to be true for him, since it’s true for every other player in the league. The question is, can Upton still be good, despite the obstacles ahead of him, and the comparisons to the outfielders around him?

Upton, at 32 years old, is a once fearsome slugger from the National League whose turf toe, wonky knee, and brief, passionate encounter with an outfield wall left him hurt and unproductive for most of 2019. Upton will be baseball’s active leader in errors among outfielders in 2020, and he may be entering the part of his career in which expectations are lowered, especially given how he got beat up so much and only made it into 63 games last season — the first time he’s played in fewer than 100 since 2008.

His durability has been one of his strengths; that, and his ability to do this. At 30 years old, he was worth 3.8 WAR for the Angels before baseball sent him into a wall this past season, so it’s not foolhardy to think Upton could be one of the Angels’ “new” contributors moving forward, or at least play a key role, even though he ended 2019 with a shot in the knee and a pair of crutches. Read the rest of this entry »

“If you don’t take an opponent serious, they surprise you.” – Canelo Alvarez

Coming into the 2019 season, the Cleveland Indians did not take the threat posed by the other teams in the AL Central very seriously. The Minnesota Twins made them regret it. With the most home runs in baseball history, the Twins sent Cleveland reeling and won 100 games for the first time since 1965. While the Twins benefited from baseballs being designed in a perfect, Flubber-y way for their lineup, every good success comes sprinkled with a dash of good fortune.

The Setup

Surprise is nothing new for the Twins. The 2017 team, still in the middle of its rebuild, shocked the American League by winning 85 games a year after going 59-103. That 26-game surge wasn’t caused by making dollars rain in free agency, but instead was mostly the work of the players the Twins already had. They even shocked themselves, and after losing six of seven games to enter the trade deadline below .500, they were sellers rather than buyers. Gone were the team’s closer, Brandon Kintzler, and Jaime García, a player they acquired just a week prior. Then they went 20-10 in August, enough to sneak into the second Wild Card spot. But the Yankees’ David Robertson and Tommy Kahnle shut down the offense for five and two-thirds innings in the Wild Card game, forcing Minnesota to make a characteristically quick postseason exit.

Regression to the mean is a cruel thing and the 2018 Twins, without wholesale changes, fell out of the playoff race quickly. An 11-3 run to end the season got the team’s record near the .500 mark, but it only shaved the edges off a disappointing season. Miguel Sanó and Byron Buxton, two hitters the team intended to build around, were injured and ineffective, and there weren’t enough pleasant surprises elsewhere. Brian Dozier’s OPS fell under .700, and with the exception of Zach Duke, none of the low-key offseason signings (Lance Lynn, Addison Reed, Logan Morrison) proved effective. The team became sellers at the deadline, trading Duke, Lynn, Dozier, Fernando Rodney, Eduardo Escobar, and Ryan Pressly. Read the rest of this entry »

Austin Hedges had a disastrous season at the plate. He batted .176/.252/.311, good for a 47 wRC+ that placed him last among batters with at least 300 plate appearances. But Hedges had a remarkable season behind the plate. He was worth 27.3 defensive runs above average, second only to J.T. Realmuto and first on a rate basis among all players in baseball.

WAR gives us a handy way to convert this, and WAR was pretty happy with Hedges in 2019. He was worth 1.4 WAR in 347 plate appearances, which works out to 2.4 WAR per 600 plate appearances. An average player would be worth just under 2 WAR per 600, which means Hedges was above-average despite his sub-Mendoza batting stats.

But when someone’s batting line is as poor as Hedges’, there’s an impulse to say that WAR doesn’t capture everything. Hedges isn’t a bad hitter; he’s an exceptionally bad hitter. He had a 47 wRC+! Six pitchers had better batting lines last year. My former colleague Sheryl Ring pointed this out recently, and opined that NL teams simply couldn’t afford to carry a bat that poor in addition to the pitcher’s spot. This made me think several things at once. My first thought was “Of course not! WAR works.” My second thought was “Actually yeah, two pitcher-level batters in a row would be awful. I’m not sure that a linear stat could handle that.” My third thought was: time to do some analysis.

At a high level, it’s clear that wRC+ isn’t simply additive. Consider a team with four batters who always walk or hit a single, and five batters who always strike out. This is an extreme example, of course, but that team would have a roughly average wRC+. It would also be an incredibly potent offense if you stacked your four productive hitters together; it would average something like 7.5 runs a game depending on the timing of singles and walks.

Of course, if you sequenced your hitters poorly, it could also average zero runs per game. When we’re looking at extreme examples (and Hedges is extreme, though not nearly this extreme), the order really does matter. How should one deal with this? It’s a bit of a cliche, but: very carefully. 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 2019 election, 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.

As much as Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera, and Bernie Williams, Andy Pettitte was a pillar of the Joe Torre-era Yankees dynasty. The tall Texan lefty played such a vital role on 13 pinstriped playoff teams and seven pennant winners — plus another trip to the World Series during his three-year run with Houston — that he holds several major postseason records. In fact, no pitcher ever started more potential series clinchers, both in the World Series and the postseason as a whole.

For as important as Pettitte was to the “Core Four” (Williams always gets the short end of the stick on that one) that anchored five championships from 1996 to 2009, he seldom made a case as one of the game’s top pitchers. High win totals driven by excellent offensive support helped him finish in the top five of his leagues’ Cy Young voting four times, but only three times did he place among the top 10 in ERA or WAR, and he never ranked higher than sixth in strikeouts. He made just three All-Star teams.

Indeed, Pettitte was more plow horse than racehorse. A sinker- and cutter-driven groundballer whose pickoff move was legendary, he was a championship-level innings-eater, a grinder (his word) rather than a dominator, a pitcher whose strong work ethic, mental preparation, and focus — visually exemplified by his peering in for the sign from the catcher with eyes barely visible underneath the brim of his cap — compensated for his lack of dazzling stuff. Ten times he made at least 32 starts, a mark that’s tied for seventh in the post-1994 strike era. His total of 10 200-inning seasons is tied for fourth in that same span, and his 13 seasons of qualifying for the ERA title with an ERA+ of 100 or better is tied for first with two other lefties, Mark Buehrle and CC Sabathia. He had his ups and downs in the postseason, but only once during his 18-year career (2004, when he underwent season-ending elbow surgery) was he unavailable to pitch once his team made the playoffs.

Even given Pettitte’s 256 career wins, he takes a back seat to two other starters on the ballot (Roger Clemens and Curt Schilling) who were better at missing bats and preventing runs, and who also had plenty of postseason success. Both of those pitchers have reasons why voters might exclude them from their ballots even while finding them statistically qualified, and the same is true for Pettitte, who was named in the 2007 Mitchell Report for having used human growth hormone to recover from an elbow injury. Between those dents and dings and the additional presence of both Roy Halladay and Mike Mussina, who were elected last year, Pettitte received just 9.9% in his ballot debut. In a less crowded field, he could build upon that, at least well enough to persist on the ballot, but he seems unlikely to make much headway towards 75% barring a significant change in the electorate’s attitudes towards PEDs.

About those wins: Regular readers know that I generally avoid dwelling upon pitcher win totals, because in this increasingly specialized era, they owe as much to adequate offensive, defensive, and bullpen support as they do to a pitcher’s own performance. While one needn’t know how many wins Pettitte amassed in a season or a career to appreciate his true value, those totals have affected the popular perception of his career.

Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Colorado Rockies. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from our own (both Eric Longenhagen’s and Kiley McDaniel’s) observations. For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of our prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this.

All of the numbered prospects here also appear on The Board, a new feature at the site that offers sortable scouting information for every organization. That can be found here.

Other Prospects of Note

Grouped by type and listed in order of preference within each category.

Upper-level Power Hitters
Vince Fernandez, OF
Casey Golden, OF
Josh Fuentes, 3B/1B
Brian Mundell, 1B

Take a good long look at this group because this is where both Mike Tauchman and Garrett Cooper would likely have been in a purely heuristic version of this list the last few years. The Rockies have had viable big league bats lurking at Triple-A and the Yankees pilfered both of them. Fernandez was suspended for amphetamine usage last year and he only hit .235 with two dingers after he returned. We’re still on him as a 55 raw power corner guy who walks and hits the ball in the air a lot, but he’s gotta come out of the gate hot in 2020 or he’s falling off the list. Golden has 77 homers in two and a half pro seasons but he’s also striking out a third of the time and is 25 years old. Fuentes might be a corner bench bat, but his power output was down last year and he needs to bounce back. Mundell has plus raw but lacks the positional versatility to be a role player.

Hard-throwing Dudes
Raymells Rosa, RHP
Justin Lawrence, RHP
PJ Poulin, LHP
Alexander Martinez, RHP
Juan Mejia, RHP
Salvador Justo, RHP
Boby Johnson, RHP
Mike Nikorak, RHP

There are lots of these guys in the system. Rosa is on track to be a low 40 FV once he’s at the upper levels since he has middle relief stuff. Lawrence is an upper-90s sidearmer with very poor pitch execution. Poulin is another UConn fireballer with a violent, low-slot delivery. Martinez will touch 97 and has a plus curveball, but he’s arguably a 30 athlete and has been old for his level the last two years. Mejia has a great arm action and has been into the upper-90s as a teenager, but he has 30-grade control. Justo is a fastball-only guy in his mid-20s, but he touches 100. Boby Johnson spent two years at Fort Scott Community College before he ended up at Bradley and was finally seen. He’s a pretty athletic 91-96 and throws a ton of strikes. Nikorak’s velo is back after Tommy John, but it doesn’t really play.

Young Sleepers
Bladimir Restituyo, CF
Walking Cabrera, OF
Yolki Pena, OF
Francisco Palma, OF

These are all frame-based projection lottery tickets, though Restituyo is also a 70 runner who might be an impact defender in center one day. The others are corner guys whose bodies and swing development should be monitored.

Depth Starters
Jared Horn, RHP
Nick Bush, LHP
Mitch Kilkenny, RHP

Horn has had a rough couple of years due to family tragedy and an emergency surgery that derailed the early part of his draft spring. At his best, he’ll touch 95 (he was up to 97 in high school), and flash a plus curveball and serviceable change and slider. Bush is a vertical arm slot lefty whose fringe fastball velocity plays up due to deception, and his curveball has terrific depth. He has a passable change that could help make him a spot starter. Kilkenny is coming off of surgery.

System Overview

This system is very heavy on corner bats because the club seems to be pretty good at picking them. There has to be some amount of consolidation of the infielders in this org, and probably soon. You can clearly see the layers of this farm the way you can in a well-made biscuit. The top is comprised of hitters, the bottom full of recently-acquired arms. Why so few up near the top with the other mature, or potential long-term impact talents? Well, so many of the pitchers Colorado has drafted over the last several years have either gotten hurt, been bad, or both. David Hill, Javier Medina, Nikorak, Kilkenny, Pint, Tyler — it’s a long list of pitchers who either have gotten hurt or fallen short of even modest expectations. Some of the very recent developments (Goudeau, Rolison) and acquisitions indicate improvement, but let’s wait a bit to see what kind of results this farm yields. It’s got to be tough to try to build a talent pipeline meant to fit your big league ballpark’s unique hitting environment, but the vanilla college pitchability guys just aren’t working.

We have to preface this by reminding you that Eric lives in Arizona and is horribly biased because he wants to see more players, but why the heck don’t the Rockies have an AZL team? Their exciting group of teenage hitters spent their summer facing college pitching when they’d probably have been better off against same-aged pupils in Arizona. There’s no evidence to which we can point that justifies this approach, and aside from Raimel Tapia, this org has struggled to develop homegrown players from Latin America who are all asked to jump right from the DSL to Advanced Rookie ball.

Eric Lauer is a Brewer now, Milwaukee having acquired the 24-year-old left-hander from the Padres on Wednesday as part of a four-player swap. He remains a work in progress. Two years into his big-league career, Lauer is still refining a five-pitch mix that was good enough to make him a first round pick. San Diego drafted the Elyria, Ohio native 25th-overall out of Kent State University in 2016.

Lauer leaned heavily on his fastball and his cutter this past season. The former, which he threw 53% of the time, is a four-seamer that averaged 92.1 mph. The latter, which he threw 22.2% of the time, is four ticks slower and delivered without undue effort. Unlike his other secondaries, it comes naturally.

“The angle my hand is at when I deliver a pitch is very cutter-y,” Lauer explained. “It’s on the side of the ball, so I can cut it easily. That’s why my changeup has never been a great pitch for me; I throw on the outer side of the ball, rather than the inner side, or directly behind it.”

His changeup is a two-seam circle he used just 4.4% of the time. He wasn’t tinkering with the grip when I spoke to him this summer, but he was trying to find the right release point to consistently get the angle he wanted. As he erstwhile Golden Flash put it, “Changeups and sliders come out of your hand two completely different ways. I have to focus on different keys for each.”

Laura’s slider is a pitch that has required continual tinkering. He told me that he used to grip it loosely, but on the suggestion of since-replaced pitching coach Darren Balsley, he’d begun putting it deeper in his hand. The result is a slider that “spins harder, but is a little harder to control.” In other words, it is a pitch that has remained, frustratingly, a work in progress. Last year’s usage rate dipped to 6.5% Read the rest of this entry »

Wednesday’s four-player Brewers/Padres swap was largely about two teams recognizing that they could trade puzzle pieces with each other to better complete themselves, and probably also revealed San Diego’s long-term pessimism regarding Luis Urías. Here’s the deal:

Padres get:

OF Trent Grisham
RHP Zach Davies

Brewers get:

INF Luis Urías
LHP Eric Lauer

With Lauer, the Brewers get an inning-eating lefty whose 2019 innings total is a big reason he generated 2.3 WAR despite his pedestrian 4.77 xFIP. He gives the Brewers yet another unique mechanical look, and chucks in a lot of varied breaking stuff, working heavily off of a cutter, curveball, and a slider that Lauer doesn’t use very much overall, but that he throws at a higher rate when opposing hitters have two strikes. That slider and cutter usage flipped last year (20% sliders and 6% cutters in 2018, with the inverse last year) and Lauer’s glove-side command of the cutter seemed to enable him to jam righties, as right-handed batter wOBA against him dropped from .341 in 2018 to .300 last year.

Lauer was still a little fly ball/homer prone last year, but PETCO has a fairly short porch to straightaway left field (334 feet down the line, 357 feed to left), and six of the 14 dingers he surrendered to righties last season were wall-scrapers, so Miller Park’s dimensions (344 feet, 371 feet) might prove helpful in that regard. Read the rest of this entry »

“Drew Pomeranz, star reliever” would have been an absurd claim five months ago, when the left-hander was laboring as a starter with the Giants. Since then, however, it’s become an eminently reasonable view. Beginning with a stint out of the bullpen in San Francisco and continuing with the Brewers, Pomeranz delivered a half-season of pure electricity.

Today that view goes mainstream. As first reported by Ken Rosenthal, the Padres have signed Pomeranz to a four-year, $34 million deal, further thinning out the free agent reliever market and besting the estimates of both Kiley McDaniel and the crowd on our Top 50 Free Agents list; Pomeranz ranked 24th on the list. Pomeranz will join Kirby Yates to further anchor what was already an above-average unit.

The terms of the deal were reported by Joel Sherman: Pomeranz will receive a $8 million signing bonus, and his annual salaries will be $4 million, $6 million, $8 million, and $8 million respectively. That works out to an average annual value of $8.5 million, with the money slightly front-loaded for the Padres.

I recently wrote about the changes Pomeranz made to his game as a reliever, but they’re worth reiterating, as they certainly figure heavily into San Diego’s move. Essentially, Pomeranz is the type of pitcher best suited to switch to relief. He has a great fastball that could use a bit of extra giddyup, a terrific secondary offering in his knee-buckling curve, and no business throwing any of his other pitches.

The returns on this new look were immediate. Pomeranz struck out nearly half the batters he faced over 30 innings of work, and he looked the part while doing it. The riding fastball went from a good pitch to one of the best fastballs in baseball. The curve wasn’t far behind; its 12-6 break looks best as an offset to the four-seamer, and batters loading up for the heat were blindsided by the curve. Read the rest of this entry »

In what is shaping up to be a very busy pre-Thanksgiving Hot Stove League, the Mariners announced on Wednesday that they have agreed with relief pitcher Carl Edwards Jr. on a one-year contract. Edwards will receive a base salary of $950,000, with the potential to make another $500,000 in performance incentives tied to appearances and games finished.

This is the type of move that you will likely see more of in Seattle this winter. The Mariners are rebuilding, and though it’s not the type of rebuild that tears everything down to the foundation, they probably won’t be competitive in 2020. Whether you call it a rebuild or a retool or a reimagining, finding low-cost pickups and reclamation projects are typically smart things for teams to do. It’s also a healthy situation for players seeking to rebuild their value and get better contracts down the road.

Seattle’s bullpen is a prime place for these types of low-risk additions. Spending on relievers tends to be the worst bang-for-the-buck signings when it comes to wins, so it’s natural to look for these kinds of transactions to fill out the relief corps. The Mariners are also a good candidate for this as they’re currently projected in our Depth Charts to have the worst bullpen in baseball. Read the rest of this entry »