“Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection.” – Mark Twain

While you may have thought that the Orioles were officially eliminated sometime back in February, they actually lasted five months dangling in the aether between the realities of implausibility and impossibility. The Orioles don’t have as strong a claim to being the worst team in baseball as the Tigers do, given that the O’s had an easier path to their tragic number thanks to a division with two of the best teams in baseball and last year’s World Series winner. Camden Yards hosted a terrible team in 2019, but that’s alright and perhaps even a bit awesome.

The Setup

For the Orioles, there were no delusions about what 2019 would bring. While many teams should be faulted for not spending last winter, keeping their wallet shut as if they were method-acting in a local production of A Christmas Carol, the Orioles don’t bear that blame. In this case, there really was no reason to spend money. This wasn’t a team with any 2019 upside; the best thing that could have happened in Baltimore would have been Chris Davis retiring to be a professional juggler, medicine-show salesman, or Fortnite streamer. But short of that or another winter miracle, the O’s were going to fly the L flag frequently.

If someone in the organization had appointed me benevolent dictator of the team, I probably would have traded Mychal Givens in the offseason, given the rather short shelf life of non-Mariano relief pitchers. The Orioles either chose to go a different way or simply felt that the offers they received weren’t tempting enough. The team’s approach wasn’t necessarily wrong; Givens wasn’t predestined to struggle in the early months of 2019, and given that he’s not a free agent until after the 2021 season, the O’s will have other opportunities to trade him, perhaps during or after a stronger 2020.

In the end, there weren’t really that many big picture moves to make over the winter, as the team had already traded off most of their veterans with any kind of significant value. Trey Mancini and Andrew Cashner didn’t have much trade value going into last offseason; Mancini had a rather lousy 2018 season and Cashner was apparently only really fit for a team looking for guys who could pass as extras in a Civil War film.

Without much to trade or much reason to spend, Baltimore had a busy waiver and minor-league signing year, picking up some players in the Rule 5 draft, some catchers so that every pitch didn’t go right to the backstop, and frightening me with the signing of Alcides Escobar to a minor-league contract. None of the prospects the O’s acquired were obviously pushing for major league jobs in 2019 and it was too soon in the rebuilding process for them to have developed a stable of interesting fringe prospects to play with, so the team went with whatever mildly fascinating player they could dig up for free, and gave them every chance to stick in the lineup.

The Projection

Like every other projection system, analyst, beat writer, fan, or person foggily aware of the existence of baseball who hadn’t just gotten back from a sojourn in Brigadoon, ZiPS did not think the 2019 Orioles were going to be a particularly good baseball team. The amusing thing is that the bleak projection, a 59-103 record and playoff odds in the one-in-thousands, was actually significantly better than 2018’s final record. ZiPS projected a 12-game improvement in 2019, one of the largest bumps in the majors. Rather than hope, this was really just Bill James’s Plexiglass Principle in action, as the O’s weren’t just a lousy team in 2018 but a rather unfortunate one as well.

The Orioles had two jobs in 2019: find out useful baseball things about the various players who fell into the organization over the winter, and keep fan morale high enough to at least outdraw the Miami Marlins.

The Results

The Orioles allow home runs. I’d say all the home runs, but Dan Straily couldn’t pitch 1400 innings this season. The team made their bid for statistical infamy by setting the record for most home runs ever allowed by a pitching staff, accomplishing the feat with six weeks remaining in the season, but is that really so bad? Baseball is a nostalgic game, and the grossly inept seem to be remembered in the same treacly sepia tones as the greats. The 1962 Mets were a dreadful team that lost a ton of games, with a roster mainly consisting of The Wrong Frank Thomas, old Richie Ashburn, and the first two dozen fans to show up when they opened the gates in the season debut. What they weren’t is forgotten, and losers in baseball tend to be lovable when the memories of them don’t fade. How much did the Cubs wring out of not being able to win the World Series for over a century? If you’re going to be lousy, be amazing at it. Don’t be like the 90s Royals, who were actually trying and failing.

More importantly, the O’s did use the season to find out things about their players. They resisted doing anything that would obviously stand in the way of that exercise; Alcides Escobar didn’t make the team, and the organization resisted the bad idea of bringing back Adam Jones after he failed to sign a contract. Baltimore played pretty much all of their halfway-interesting role players to assess what they could do to help the team in the next four to eight years. And while they didn’t find any actual stars, they did find players who have some utility to a future team. Hanser Alberto, who had a near-.800 OPS for Triple-A Round Rock in 2018, showed tremendous versatility and a hit tool good enough to perhaps be Homer Bush for a while. John Means ought to be at least an innings-eater for the next six years, and a total of 16 pitchers have gotten starts for Baltimore this season. Mancini has shown he is more the 2017 version of himself than the 2018 one, and Chris Davis is conclusively not having a bounce back. The catching situation is likely tolerable already, unlike most of the rest of the team, and will get better thanks to a certain draft pick.

The farm system’s improvement continued; the organization’s ranking has jumped to 12th THE BOARD. That’s not Padres, Rays, or Dodgers territory, but the team entered the season ranked 26th, and while McDongenhagen didn’t explicitly rank the farm systems in the preceding years, the team’s system was…worse. They now have 11 players with a 45 FV or better and while we haven’t seen big power from No. 1 pick Adley Rutschman yet, he’s about as highly polished a hitter as you’ll find in the low minors.

The Baltimore Orioles are in a much better position than they were a year ago and a phenomenally improved one from 18 months ago. They know more about the players in the system, they’re developing talent, and while attendance is hardly promising, at least there aren’t dumpsters full of Boog’s pit beef hanging around on Russell St.

What Comes Next?

This was never going to be an easy rebuild, with the team opting not to retool before the situation became dire, something that helped the Brewers make a quick turnaround a couple of years ago. This was a total, full-on, tear-down-the-entire-termite-infested-house project, completely new construction on a barren plot of land. I’m still hopeful they trade Jonathan Villar this winter, as the team’s roster is filling out enough that they don’t need Villar quite as much to complete a roster card. It’s also time to release Chris Davis. The money is gone, and it’s much better to pay Davis not to play baseball for your team than to pay him an identical sum to be on the roster.

While I’m hopeful the Mike Elias/Sig Mejdal braintrust would avoid such a signing anyway, I’m crossing my fingers that the Orioles losing in the latest MASN drama will keep them from getting any bright ideas about an Eric Hosmer-esque signing to “jumpstart” the competitive cycle. The team still isn’t close and they once again need to look for lottery tickets; the odds are long but it’s infinitely better to have tickets for tomorrow’s lottery than losing tickets from yesterday’s.

There was a bit of a bloodbath in the scouting department this past week, but I think people overreacted to the news. The team isn’t banning scouting — even the most saber-friendly teams spend a ton on scouting — but the front office almost certainly wants scouts who speak the same language they do. From scouting to player development to (hopefully) eventual promotion to the majors, there’s a lot of non-statistical information that needs to be conveyed and it helps if everyone’s speaking the same language. There has been a lot written in the local press about the years of expertise lost, but when it comes down to it, that expertise didn’t prevent the Orioles from having one of basebll’s worst farm systems for years. Think of it as the scouting equivalent of the Moneyball movie quote: If he’s a good hitter, why doesn’t he hit good?

The Absitively, Posilutely, Way-Too-Early ZiPS Projection – Trey Mancini

The team could theoretically trade Trey Mancini, who has largely rehabilitated his value from 2018, but I’m not sure they need to, considering that there are three additional seasons until he hits free agency, and that 1B/corner OF/DH types are simply not valued as highly in baseball as they once were, perhaps to the point that they’re currently undervalued (see the Edwin Encarnación trade).

ZiPS still isn’t buying into Mancini completely (he was really awful in 2018), but his projection is now back in the league-average player territory. League-average players have value, else we’d use WAA instead of WAR for everything! I’m slightly more optimistic than ZiPS is as Mancini’s plate discipline has been slowly but steadily improving on a yearly basis, and one of the elements of his big 2017 — a BABIP that wasn’t supported by his peripheral numbers — isn’t present in the system. Of course, ZiPS takes that stuff into consideration as well, but I think given my history, nobody would accuse me of wearing black-and-orange colored glasses! Mancini’s a regular ol’ good player and there’s nothing wrong with that, apart from his outfield play, where he’s likely a win worse every year. It’s yet another reason to release Davis; any time you’re playing Davis at first, you’re likely sticking Mancini in the outfield, where his lousiness has been proven beyond a reasonable doubt.

Eric Hosmer is a hard man to shift against. Though he fits the two main criteria for an overshift (namely: he’s left-handed and plays baseball), that’s where his list as an ideal candidate ends. If ever anyone was going to poke a groundball the opposite way, it would be Hosmer — his groundball rate is perennially among the league’s highest, and he hits a fair number of them to the opposite field. Teams generally agree — he’s faced a shift in fewer than half of his bases-empty plate appearances this year, and only 40.7% overall. Both place him in the bottom third of left-handed batters when it comes to the defensive alignment.

You don’t have to dig into his groundball numbers for long to work out why. The reasoning behind a shift is simple; hitters pull groundballs. League-wide, a whopping 55.5% of groundballs have been pulled, against only 12.1% hit the opposite way. The split is the same regardless of handedness, but first base is conveniently located on the lefty pull side of the field, which makes shifting a left-handed batter a high-percentage move.

For some reason, though, Hosmer doesn’t fit that mold. In 2019, he’s pulled only 46.4% of his groundballs, almost exactly equivalent to his career average of 46.3%. He’s at 16.3% opposite-field groundballs for his career over a whopping 2,263 grounders. His pull rate is in the bottom 20% of batters this year, and was in the bottom 3% last year, the bottom 10% two years ago, the bottom 15% for his career — you get the idea.

This isn’t to say there’s no merit to shifting against Hosmer — you’d need a more detailed mapping of infielder speeds and groundball exit velocity to work the math out perfectly. But look at his groundball (and blooper) distribution from 2016 to 2019 and tell me you want to shift against this:

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Maybe his breakout has gone a bit unnoticed because his name broke out when inked to a huge signing bonus four years ago. Maybe it’s quiet this season because three years ago, he was involved in one of the biggest trades of the decade and the next spring he was the top prospect in all of baseball. In his first year and a half in the big leagues, he was merely an average player. He’s playing this season on a non-contending team and he’s lost time due to injury, but in the 100-plus games he has appeared in, Yoán Moncada has not just been one of the game’s most-improved players, he’s been one of the 10-best position players in baseball.

To provide some sense of where Moncada rates among today’s players, let’s start with the youngest set. Here are the best 2019 campaigns from players 25 years old and younger (all stats are through games on August 26):

There are only three players younger than Moncada with a higher WAR this season. Rookie Peter Alonso is having a monster season, yet Moncada has been just as valuable. Given Moncada’s lesser playing time, he’s arguably been better than Alonso  and a cut above a rising star like Juan Soto and a no-doubter like Francisco Lindor. How about his ranks among third basemen, Moncada’s new position this season? Read the rest of this entry »

Guillermo Martínez is 34 years old, last played pro ball eight years ago for the independent Grand Prairie (now Texas) AirHogs, and never made it above High-A in affiliated ball. He is also the rookie major league hitting coach for the Toronto Blue Jays. There’s a long history of men who never achieved much in their playing careers becoming outstanding in second acts as coaches, and in his responsibility for the offensive success of Toronto’s much-vaunted youth movement (the average age of their hitters, 26.2, is the youngest in the American League), Martínez has more than enough raw material to make his mark in his first season in the role.

Last week when the Blue Jays came to Seattle to take on the Mariners (dropping two out of three), I sat down with Martínez to talk about his first year of coaching in the majors, and in particular his first year of coaching another, much more famous, rookie: Vladimir Guerrero Jr.

After making his debut for Toronto late in April at the precocious age of 20, Guerrero has had an up-and-down — or, more accurately, a down-and-then-up — season for a middling Toronto club that is nonetheless understandably optimistic about the cohort of young hitters of which Guerrero is a part. First, the down: Through the end of June, across 226 big-league plate appearances, Guerrero had posted a wOBA of just .317, and — even more worryingly — was striking out far more (19% of the time) and walking less often (9% of the time) than at any previous level.

Some regression was to be expected, of course, upon facing big-league pitching for the first time. But it wasn’t just that the results that were underwhelming. It was that they matched up with the story told by the eyes. Read the rest of this entry »

Every year, hapless hitters with premium arm strength get moved to minor league mounds. With the help of Sean Dolinar, who combed the last few years of stats to scrounge up a more comprehensive list of converts than I was otherwise able to remember off the top of my head, I assembled the list below of former position players who are now prospects of note as hurlers. This is not a comprehensive survey of every recent conversion arm in the minors. Instead, these are the pitchers I think are interesting enough to include on an offseason list in some capacity.

Conversion arms who pan out typically put it together quickly. For example, it only took Kenley Jansen about a year after he first toed an affiliate’s rubber to reach Dodger Stadium. He likely threw during 2009 Extended Spring Training, then spent the back half of the summer at Hi-A before making a Fall League appearance. He breezed through Hi- and Double-A the following year, and was in Los Angeles by late July of 2010. Jason Motte started his conversion in 2006 and got his first big league cup of coffee in September of 2008. Joe Nathan’s first pro innings came in 1997; he was first called up to the majors early in 1999. Sean Doolittle threw just 26 minor league innings before the A’s brought him up. (Conversely, Alexi Ogando and Carlos Marmol each took about three years after moving moundward to become big leaguers.)

Who in the minors might be next to have impact, big or small, on a big league pitching staff? Here are some candidates. All of the 35+ FV and above players are now on THE BOARD, if they weren’t already.
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With three losses in a row against the Nationals at Wrigley Field this past weekend, the Cubs (69-61) slipped out of first place in the NL Central. They’re now three games behind the Cardinals (72-58), the furthest they’ve been from first since May 1, and just one game ahead of the Phillies (68-62) and two games ahead of the Mets (67-63) in the race for the second NL Wild Card spot. They’ll face the latter in an important three-game series starting today, but the bad news for them is that they’ve had to pack their suitcases to head to Citi Field. At 25-39, the Cubs own the major’s eighth-lowest winning percentage on the road (.391), and the lowest of any contender by 44 points (the Mets are 30-39 at .435 on the road).

In a race for a playoff spot, that’s quite a handicap, of course. In fact, in the Wild Card era, no team has ever won less than 40% of its games away from home and still reached the playoffs. Just a small handful of teams has won less than 45% and done so. Here’s the bottom 10:

Of the 10 teams above, the 2006 Cardinals, who won the World Series despite finishing with just an 83-78 record — the low-water mark for any World Series champ — and the 2005 Astros at least made it to the big dance, but aside from the 2015 Astros winning the AL Wild Card game, the 2008 Dodgers were the only other team from the above group to advance in the postseason.

I limited that list to 10 because beyond that, the rankings get pretty bunched up, with three teams at .458 (from the strike-shortened 1995 season), six at .469, 11 at .481, and so on. In all, 43 of the period’s 206 postseason teams (20.9%) had sub-.500 records on the road; if you’re a stickler for a full 162-game schedule, it’s 40 out of 198 (20.2%). Just 10 of those teams won a pennant, and only three — the aforementioned 2006 Cardinals, and the 1997 and 2003 Marlins, because of course — won the World Series. It’s not a particularly viable route to dog-piles and champagne showers. Read the rest of this entry »

Billy Hamilton has been a Brave for a little over a week — only since Atlanta picked him up off waivers from Kansas City on August 19 after losing Nick Markakis and Ender Inciarte to injury — and he’s already achieved that highest aspiration for any member of the Braves organization: He humiliated the New York Mets, and on their home turf at that. The play came with the score tied 5-5 in the eighth inning of Saturday’s second game of the weekend series, with Ronald Acuña Jr. at the plate, Rafael Ortega at second, and Hamilton at first. Acuña, who at that point was an uncharacteristic 0-for-4 on the night, wasted no time in taking a Brad Brach hanger on the outer third of the plate softly into left. Then, this happened:

J.D. Davis, the Met unfortunate enough to wind up holding the ball on this particular play, spoke to our own Jay Jaffe after the game:

I was going to make a play to third,” he said, in a clubhouse near-silent after a late loss to a division rival, “and then I saw that the runner [Hamilton] was already like three-quarters of the way … so I just held onto the ball, and I looked at first to see where that runner was. But then as I released it to throw it to ‘Rosie’, he was already rounding third and headed home … I should have just thrown it to ‘Rosie’ and got it in. [You feel kind of] helpless, with Hamilton and his speed … it was just perfect timing. It was a good, high-baseball IQ kind of play.

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Amir Garrett emerged from the bullpen into quite a jam. With the Reds up 5-1 heading into the eighth, all had seemed fine, but Michael Lorenzen allowed the first three batters he faced to reach base. As Garrett prepared to face Anthony Rizzo, one swing of the bat could tie the game. Knowing that, Garrett didn’t mess around — he went to his best pitch right away.

The first slider he threw might have clipped the inside edge of the zone, but it was called a ball. Still, down 1-0, he didn’t give in. He went back inside with a slider — and hit Rizzo. That free base drove in a run, and now Garrett was right back where he started with one less run to work with.

With free-swinging Javier Báez up next, it was time for another slider. Garrett again clipped the corner, and this time was rewarded with a grounder that Joey Votto threw home for a force out. Garrett breathed a sigh of relief. There was no time to relax, though — with only one out, the situation was still precarious.

Ian Happ, coming off of a scorching-hot six game stretch where he had compiled a 343 wRC+, stepped in next. Fortunately, though, Happ has one major weakness: sliders. Garrett took no prisoners:

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Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — JT Chargois, Brad Keller, and Adam Ottavino — on how they learned and developed their sliders.

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JT Chargois, Los Angeles Dodgers

“I was having trouble getting one to spin — to turn over — so my high school coach showed me a spike. Over the years I’ve manipulated where I hold my [pointer finger] on the ball, but it’s still a spiked-curveball grip. I just throw it like a heater. Instead of getting out front and pulling it like a curveball, I stay true on it as though it was a heater.

“When I get in trouble — maybe it’s backing up on me — and I need to make an adjustment, I tend to change my mindset to more of a curveball, to more of a downer-pitch. I want it to have two planes, as opposed to just moving horizontally.

“It was actually taught to me as a curveball. Then I started throwing harder as I got older. I got stronger and was literally trying to throw the crap out of it. That’s kind of how it migrated into a slider. As opposed to having more of a wrist-turn to get a bigger break, [a slider] is more about the manipulation of your hand position at release point. Read the rest of this entry »

After struggling for the first few months of the season, both José Ramírez and Cleveland broke out in a big way with Ramírez discovering his old form and Cleveland going on a big run to catch the Minnesota Twins for first place at one point this month. Cleveland couldn’t quite keep up that pace over the last few weeks, falling a few games back of the Twins, but still looked to be in great shape for the wild card race. With news of a broken hamate bone and the resulting surgery for Ramírez, the team is losing their best hitter for the rest of the season, leaving a massive hole in the lineup and at third base. The club’s path to the playoffs just got a lot more narrow.

Just two weeks ago, I discussed the remarkable turnaround Ramírez made in his game, eschewing an approach designed to be beat the shift but costing him power and going back to the pull-heavy, fastball-hunting approach that made him a star in the first place. In the second half of the season, Ramírez has put up a 168 wRC+ to go with 2.3 WAR that ranks behind only Anthony Rendon, José Altuve, Mike Trout, and Ketel Marte among position players. On the season, Ramírez had finally moved his wRC+ up to 100, and with solid baserunning and fielding, he was up to 2.9 WAR on the season. These totals are a huge drop from the 6.4-WAR average he produced over the three previous seasons, but 2019 was still shaping up to be a productive year despite his awful start. Unfortunately, Ramírez isn’t likely to get any more time to improve his numbers further.

One month of any one player isn’t likely to matter a whole lot to a team’s playoff chances over the course of an entire season, but when there’s only 31 games left and the player in question was set to be worth a full win over those 31 days and his substitutes are replacement level, that month can matter a great deal. To provide some sense of what Cleveland loses in terms of projections and playoff odds, here’s where the club stood after Saturday’s games compared to where they stand now with Ramírez’s injury factored in. Read the rest of this entry »