When I was a little kid, I used to love reading Guinness World Records books. My childhood bookshelf at my parents’ house reflects this admittedly odd curiosity: There are several of the, I don’t know, adult(?) versions of the book from the mid-2000s — the ones that are text-heavy and include bummer-ish topics like war and crime. But then there are the “kids” versions, the ones whose pages are filled with large portraits of record-breakers, with little bar graphs in the corner to show what their performance looks like against the competition.

One of those kids’ books I had included a page dedicated to “Most MVP Awards” won in baseball. I remember seeing Barry Bonds‘ big smile, resting vibrant next to one of those graphs that showed just how transcendent he was. He’d won seven by the time this book published; the other names listed had won just three each. I knew Bonds, because I’d watched him often. The other names, I knew only from history books — names like Mantle, DiMaggio and Foxx. Pujols and Rodriguez hadn’t yet joined this class of three-time winners, hadn’t gotten the privilege of being immortalized as one of those short, stubby bars next to the tall structure looming above Bonds’ name on the tiny illustration intended to tell me who was the best ever at playing my favorite sport.

At the time I picked up this particular 2005 edition of my beloved book series, Mike Trout was just 13 years old. On Thursday, at the age of 28, Trout received the honor of joining this very silly-looking bar graph:

Read the rest of this entry »

It seems like only last week, I was jamming 14 Will Smith movies into a single paragraph of free agent hype, taking an obvious joke well past its logical conclusion. What would I do when Will Smith actually signed? Use the same movie jokes again? I wasn’t too worried about it. Free agents take months to sign! The Giants had made Smith a qualifying offer. No less a reliever than Craig Kimbrel had languished on the vine until after the amateur draft in similar circumstances. The same jokes could be funny again in a few months.

Well, the joke’s on me, because Smith signed a three-year, $40 million contract with the Braves yesterday. What follows is a level-head, straightforward analysis of that transaction. Just know that, if it weren’t so close in time, I’d probably have written another article of movie names.

The Braves fit a classic archetype of team that looks for free agent help. Their young core gelled impressively in 2019. Ronald Acuña Jr. and Ozzie Albies keyed the offense, while Mike Soroka, Max Fried, and Mike Foltynewicz provided the starting pitching. The team had veteran help, of course: Freddie Freeman chipped in his usual stellar offense, Josh Donaldson was superb in a bounce back year, and Dallas Keuchel provided much-needed innings on his own one-year deal.

They also have payroll room. With Donaldson and Keuchel re-entering free agency, they only had $100 million in expected commitments for 2020 before the Smith signing. With Acuña and Albies signed long-term to (some would say exceedingly) team-friendly contracts, it makes perfect sense to spend on the rest of the roster, maximizing their playoff chances while they have a strong foundation to build from. Read the rest of this entry »

“Who doesn’t enjoy going downhill? That’s when you get to stop pedaling.” – Christian Finnegan

Every successful thing has a peak. The Romans had the Pax Romana. Napoleon had the Battle of Austerlitz. The Simpsons had the Who Shot Mr. Burns? cliffhanger. For the early 21st-century Cubs, it was Michael Martinez grounding out on a mild November evening, giving the team its first World Series championship since 1908. Moistened by celebratory alcohol, this was almost certainly the peak for these Cubs, and even a second championship probably wouldn’t touch the magic of this moment.

Since 2016, the Cubs finished each season a bit less successfully than the previous one. The 2017 team dropped four of five to the Dodgers in the NLCS, and the 2018 team’s end came in a wild card game against the Colorado Rockies. The 2019 team didn’t even make it into October.

The club’s dynasty was built on developing players from within and using their big-market financial heft to play in free agency. These two ingredients have faded into the background in recent years as the team’s farm system has been weakened from trades and graduations while ownership has increasingly embraced a more frugal financial strategy. The Cubs are a team in decline, to the point at which they’re just any old NL Central contender, not a behemoth pushing around the Cardinals or Brewers or Reds. Read the rest of this entry »

This post is part of a series concerning the 2020 Modern Baseball Era Committee ballot, covering executives and long-retired players whose candidacies will be voted upon at the Winter Meetings in San Diego on December 8. For an introduction to JAWS, see here. Several profiles in this series are adapted from work previously published at SI.com, Baseball Prospectus, and Futility Infielder. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

A five-tool player whose power, ability to hit for average, and strong, accurate throwing arm all stood out – particularly in the Pirates’ seemingly endless and always eye-catching assortment of black-and-yellow uniform combinations — Dave Parker was once considered the game’s best all-around player. In his first five full seasons (1975-79), he amassed a World Series ring, regular season and All-Star MVP awards, two batting titles, two league leads in slugging percentage, and three Gold Gloves, not to mention tremendous swagger, a great nickname (“The Cobra”), and a high regard for himself. “Take Willie Mays and Roberto Clemente and match their first five years up against mine, and they don’t compare with me,” he told Roy Blount in a 1979 Sports Illustrated cover story.

Parker, who had debuted with the Pirates just seven months after Clemente’s death and assumed full-time duty as the team’s right fielder a season and a half later, once appeared to be on course to join the Puerto Rican legend in Cooperstown. Unfortunately, cocaine, poor conditioning, and injuries threw him off course, and while he recovered well enough to make three All-Star teams, play a supporting role on another World Series winner, accrue hefty career totals and play past the age of 40, his game lost multiple dimensions as he aged. Hall of Fame voters greeted his case with a yawn; he debuted with just 17.5% on the 1997 ballot, peaked at 24.5% the next year, and while he remained eligible for the full 15 seasons, only one other time did he top 20%. He made appearances on both the 2014 Expansion Era ballot as well as the ’18 Modern Baseball one, but even after going public with his diagnosis of Parkinson’s Disease, he didn’t come close to election. Aside from the precedent set by Harold Baines‘ election last year — a small committee can throw us a wild card now and then — there’s little reason to believe his fate will be different this time. Read the rest of this entry »

Up against a deadline to either accept or refuse San Francisco’s qualifying offer, free agent reliever Will Smith signed a three-year, $40 million pact with the Atlanta Braves. Smith’s deal with Atlanta will pay him $13 million in each of the next three seasons, with the Braves retaining a club option for either a fourth season at $13 million or a $1 million buyout.

Now two seasons into his return from Tommy John surgery, Smith’s 2.66 ERA and 2.71 FIP to along with 3.2 WAR in 118 and a third innings in 2018-2019 firmly established him as the best free agent reliever available this winter. While on paper Aroldis Chapman electing to stay with the Yankees could have established a better negotiating environment for Smith, teams just aren’t in love with closers the way they were 10 or 15 years ago. Being in the next tier of relievers down from his fellow left-hander, and with the loss of a draft pick attached, Smith was unlikely to do much better; his deal exceeds Kiley McDaniel’s three year and $36 million estimate as part of our Top 50 Free Agents list, as well as the crowd’s median projection of three years and $30 million.

The Braves entered 2019 as a serious contender, but one with a bullpen problem. In our 2019 Positional Power Rankings, Atlanta’s pen ranked 18th in baseball. The team’s relief issues never reached the same level of notoriety as those of their division rivals in DC, but Atlanta’s corps was 20th in baseball in WAR over the first half of the season, prompting them to trade prospects Joey Wentz and Kolby Allard for Shane Greene and Chris Martin, respectively. Also acquired at the deadline was another member of the Giants’ bullpen, Mark Melancon.

With Greene, Melancon, and Luke Jackson all returning in 2020, the addition of Smith gives the Braves a deeper group than when they started the 2019 season. It would make sense for Smith to get first dibs on save opportunities, but if fellow lefty Sean Newcomb is given a chance to start in 2020, the team may very well decide they’re better served leaving Smith in a more flexible role that allows him to be used tactically against left-handed hitters.

The loss of Smith, when added to the plethora of relievers traded in July, leaves the Giants with a rather thin bullpen. However, that team has 99 more pressing problems than holding late-inning leads to worry about. We’ll have more on the Smith signing up on the site soon.

The Rangers entered this offseason in a unique position. While many teams appear to be content to wait patiently for the free agent market to get moving and a handful are actively trying to clear salary, the Rangers seem like one of the few clubs approaching the market aggressively. That stance isn’t necessarily reflective of their standing in the AL West — they finished a distant third behind the A’s and the Astros — but it’s partially an artificial urgency created by the opening of their new stadium in 2020.

General Manager Jon Daniels has made it clear that the team will be looking to improve its roster any way they can, including dipping into the top-tier free agent market. They’re reportedly “aggressively” pursuing Josh Donaldson and have been linked to a number of other big names. With their outfield more or less set, with Willie Calhoun, Joey Gallo, and Nomar Mazara manning the three spots from left to right, the infield is the likely target for an upgrade on the position player side of the roster.

Third base seems like the best place to pursue a high-end free agent simply because there are more of them on the market than any of the other infield positions. Plus, the Rangers have Elvis Andrus and Rougned Odor’s unmovable contracts entrenched up-the-middle. The problem is the Rangers infielder with the best 2020 projection is currently penciled in as their everyday third baseman. Read the rest of this entry »

Not a lot of people know this, but every baseball diamond is carefully balanced on a fulcrum and tilts in the direction of chaos. A ball is misplayed, a runner trips over a base, a swarm of wasps is unleashed from within a rolled-up tarp. A cat or squirrel runs onto the field in a precocious moment of levity that only later do we realize is the start of an ancient curse (this happens quite often in baseball). Whatever occurs in the game slants the playing field in a new direction, which is why baseball, a very normal, very boring activity, is always quietly teetering on the verge of going quite wild.

Your toughest opponent isn’t an eerily calm Mike Trout or a possibly rabid Max Scherzer; it’s the sheer volume of variables that can scatter even the most strategic and well-laid plans. You can stare at a spreadsheet until your brain melts before yelling “Aha!” with an index finger in the air, believing you’ve uncovered the formula to prevent strained hamstrings, but there’s no accounting for the back-up catcher tapping into some as-yet untapped power, or one of the teams recreating the musical “Stomp” only for it to be revealed that this is actually a highly technical form of cheating.

To possess the agility to evade poor luck and the skill to barrel through outside factors to achieve a moment of perfect balance in this silly game is the rarest of accomplishments. But on September 13, 2007, Martín Prado would do so.

I don’t know enough about how science works to say whether what happened during his at-bat was in line with or against physics. But what we do know is that what happened never happened again, and after a casual amount of research, we can say that it probably never happened before, either. And in baseball, that alone makes it an exceptional anomaly. This is a sport that loves to repeat itself, and having existed for so long, everything we see appears to be a repetition to the last time it happened.

Not this one. Read the rest of this entry »

The General Managers meetings provide a great opportunity to check in with executives from across the game. A pair of hour-long media sessions are held, with the majority of the GMs, and/or Presidents of Baseball Operations, making appearances at both. I spoke to a large number of them, with the goal of addressing a cross section of subjects.

Here are snapshots from six of those conversations, with more to come in the ensuing days.

———

The Toronto Blue Jays are coming off a 67-95 season, but their fans have a lot of reasons to be excited. Some of those reasons have names. Vladimir Guerrero Jr, Bo Bichette, Cavan Biggio, and Nate Pearson are the sort of building-blocks that can one day deliver postseason glory. Heading into 2019, the Jays’ farm system ranked amongst the best in the game.

Of course, there is no guarantee that the cadre of young talent will meet its lofty expectations. And even if it does, contention in the AL East is likely a few years down the road. While 2020 should be a step in the right direction, it’s hard to envision Canada’s team leap-frogging New York, Tampa Bay, and Boston.

Tempered expectations are one thing, Rogers Centre attendance having fallen by an average of 7,063 fans per game in 2019 is another. Ross Atkins recognizes the conundrum.

“The hardest thing to do in this job is to be patient,” said the Blue Jays’ VP of Baseball Operations. “Our fans are extremely important to us, and it’s not as though [GMs] don’t feel the same things. It’s very tough on us, physically and emotionally, to not be winning.”

A Hall of Fame executive who helped lead Toronto to a pair of World Series titles is a role model for the 46-year-old former minor-league pitcher. Read the rest of this entry »

After the World Series ended and the Nationals emerged victorious, I wrote about how the Astros had put together one of the greatest regular seasons of all time and joined the (perhaps ignominious) list of great teams without a title. In doing so, I created the below graph, which shows team winning percentage and WAR, highlighting some of the greatest teams of all time:

At the time, I didn’t mention the teams at the very bottom-left of the graph. If the teams at the top-right are the greatest, then the teams in the bottom-left are the worst. In trying to find a single number to determine just how good or bad a team was, I created an IQ-like score for both winning percentage and team WAR, where 100 is average and every standard deviation away from the mean was worth 15 points. Then I took the average of the two scores for one final number. For reference, this year’s Astros team ended up at 136.5; more than 90% of all teams from 1903 through this season were between 75 and 125. Read the rest of this entry »

This post is part of a series concerning the 2020 Modern Baseball Era Committee ballot, covering executives and long-retired players whose candidacies will be voted upon at the Winter Meetings in San Diego on December 8. For an introduction to JAWS, see here. Several profiles in this series are adapted from work previously published at SI.com, Baseball Prospectus, and Futility Infielder. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

In a span of just over 10 years, Thurman Munson hit just about every high note a ballplayer could. A first-round draft pick in 1968, he made his major league debut the following summer, and won AL Rookie of the Year honors in 1970. He made his first of seven All-Star teams in 1971, won the first of three Gold Gloves in ’74, and claimed AL MVP honors in ’76 while helping the Yankees to their first pennant in 12 years. They lost that year’s World Series to the Reds, but won back-to-back championships over the Dodgers in 1977 and ’78. Through it all, Munson stood out as an exceptional two-way player, a natural leader and a fiery competitor. He was tough and durable, with a gruff disposition towards the media and certain teammates, but a soft underbelly. As Gabe Paul, the Yankees’ general manager from 1973-77, said of him, “Thurman Munson is a nice guy who doesn’t want anybody to know it.”

Less than a year after the Yankees won the 1978 World Series, it was over — not just Munson’s stellar career but his life. Munson had taken up flying in the spring of 1978, earning his pilot’s license and flying home to his wife and three children in Canton, Ohio on his off days. On August 2, 1979, while practicing takeoffs and landings at the the Canton-Akron airport, Munson crashed his Cessna Citation twin engine jet — which he had purchased less than a month prior — 870 feet short of the runway after approaching at too steep an angle. His two passengers, one of them a flight instructor, escaped, but Munson, who was wearing his safety belt but not his shoulder harness, was paralyzed from the neck down. The wreckage was engulfed in flames before he could be rescued. He was less than two months past his 32nd birthday.

Unlike Roberto Clemente in 1973 and Roy Halladay in 2019, Munson was not posthumously elected to the Hall of Fame at the first opportunity. In fact, he never came close, debuting on the 1981 ballot (via a rule that waived the otherwise-mandatory five-year waiting period, adopted in the wake of Clemente’s death) with 15.5% of the vote and lingering for the full 15 years without again reaching 10%. His candidacy was further ignored when he was on the ballots of the expanded Veterans Committee in 2003, ’05, and ’07, but like Lou Whitaker and Dwight Evans, he’s finally getting his chance this year via the smaller committee format. His career is ripe for reevaluation. While his counting stats are understandably short given his premature death, his WAR totals — specifically his number eight ranking in seven-year peak and his number 12 ranking in JAWS — suggest that he would be a good fit for Cooperstown, particularly at an underrepresented position. Read the rest of this entry »