Losses have come to dominate the narrative when it comes to baseball finances over the past year as the world has struggled to deal with the COVID-19 pandemic. With just a 60-game schedule and no fans in the stands during the regular season, revenues dropped precipitously. The losses have been called “historic” and “devastating” by commissioner Rob Manfred and “biblical” by Cubs owner Tom Ricketts. Separating hyperbole from reality is difficult when there is little concrete information to contest bald assertions from interested parties, and the refusal of those parties to divulge any of their info invites skepticism. As a result, we need to turn to the Braves, who are traded publicly and issue quarterly reports about their finances, to get a better sense of the picture league-wide.

This is not the first time we’ve taken a look at Atlanta’ finances, though 2020 represents a radically different year, with operating income (Adjusted OIBDA) totaling around $150 million in 2018 and ’19 combined. Before taking a broader look, let’s run through the third quarter, which includes July, August and September, aka the regular season. During this time, the team played 60 games, including 30 at home. Baseball revenue stood at $102 million, half that of what came in during the third quarter in 2019. Due to paying players pro-rated salaries and not having fans at games, expenses (which include the Battery development outside the park) also dropped, from $167 million to $104 million. If we assume that The Battery, with $8 million in third quarter revenue, is a breakeven proposition at the moment, that means that on an operating basis, the Braves’ turned a $6 million profit during the season despite having no fans in the seats. While MLB might claim teams lost money for every game played this season, the Braves are the only club with any amount of transparency regarding their finances, and they didn’t. Read the rest of this entry »

Ah, the introductory paragraph of a free agency signing piece. Normally, this is a space to let loose and spend a while thinking up a pun about the team and the player linking up. I must sadly tell you, however, that I can’t bring myself to do it. The degree of difficulty is the fun, and Mike Minor’s name is too easy, so you’ll just have to settle for the facts: the Kansas City Royals signed Minor to a two-year deal over the weekend, as Ken Rosenthal first reported.

When Minor left the Royals after a dominant 2017 season of relief work, he looked like a classic conversion arm. He’d been workmanlike over parts of five seasons with the Braves, never overwhelming but also never disastrous. After a brutal series of injuries ending in shoulder surgery, however, Atlanta cut him loose, and he landed with the Royals on a two-year deal. Kansas City turned him into a reliever, and he promptly annihilated the AL Central — his 2.55 ERA and 2.62 FIP represented a new level of performance, and he looked like a relief ace created out of whole cloth.

As he returns to Kansas City three years later, the situation feels both familiar and strange. Familiar, in that he’s spent the last three years putting in a performance that was, in aggregate, a little bit better than average. His run prevention numbers look slightly worse for having played two years in an extreme hitter’s park, but even then, a 4.07 ERA and 4.37 FIP will play, and that works out to an 85 ERA- and 95 FIP- after park adjustments. Even including a rough 2020, Minor looks like a workmanlike pitcher again.

Is he heading back to Kansas City to relieve? Almost certainly not. You see, Minor’s 2019 raises hope that there’s a little bit more there than meets the eye. He started the season strong, with a 2.54 ERA and 3.78 FIP, which led to his first All-Star nod. He faded down the stretch, though he still finished with 4.1 WAR and did even better (6.4 WAR) if you focus on runs allowed rather than FIP.

Even if you want to disregard the half-by-half split and focus on the aggregate, something stood out: Minor threw 208.1 innings, a career high. He followed that up with another 11 starts in 2020, essentially a full season of work. A starter who can put up decent rate statistics over a full workload is a valuable commodity in today’s game, particularly given the fact that essentially every pitcher in baseball will throw many more innings next year than they did this year, which likely increases the chance of injury. 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 Cincinnati Reds.

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Season Two of Operation: Win Now almost ended like the first one did — outside the playoffs looking in — until the Reds snuck into the postseason by winning 11 of their last 15 games, with all but a Pirates series coming against playoff teams. Cincinnati’s quick playoff exit served to highlight one of the fundamental reasons the team’s reach the last two years has exceeded its grasp. No, the offense isn’t going to be shut out for 22 consecutive innings all that often, as the Braves did in the teams’ Wild Card Series, but the lineup is actively hindering the team. This recent development is the opposite of the traditional 21st century Reds dilemma, but it’s a real issue; Cincinnati has finished 13th and 12th in the NL in runs the last two seasons while playing in a moderate hitters’ park.

In a lot of ways, Cincinnati’s problem is the mirror image of Colorado’s most pressing issue. The Rockies have two MVP candidates at the top of the lineup, but an appalling lack of depth. The Reds, on the other hand, have very few true holes and admirable depth all over the diamond, but a real lack of superstar upside. And without a lot of positions open for the taking without the team being extremely aggressive and giving up on decent players with guaranteed deals, it’s hard to see the Reds flipping that script.

The one exception here is the shortstop position, where Jose Garcia would likely be the starter if the season began today, but likely won’t be when the 2021 season actually gets under way. There’s an unusual amount of shortstop talent out there for the taking — Marcus Semien, Andrelton Simmons, Didi Gregorius, and Ha-seong Kim — that could drastically improve a position that doesn’t have an apparent long-term solution otherwise. In an offseason where other NL competitors like the Cubs and Phillies crying poor, this is a golden opportunity for the team to swim against the current and take a real financial risk to get into the second tier of NL contenders. Read the rest of this entry »

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. 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.

At a moment when baseball is so obsessed with velocity, it’s remarkable to remember how recently it was that a pitcher could thrive, year in and year out, despite averaging in the 85-87 mph range with his fastball. Yet thats exactly what Mark Buehrle did over the course of his 16-year career. Listed at 6-foot-2 and 240 pounds, the burly Buehrle was the epitome of the crafty lefty, an ultra-durable workhorse who didn’t dominate but who worked quickly, used a variety of pitches — four-seamer, sinker, cutter, curve, changeup — moving a variety of directions to pound the strike zone, and relied on his fielders to make the plays behind him. From 2001-14, he annually reached the 30-start and 200-inning plateaus, and he barely missed on the latter front in his final season.

August Fagerstrom summed up Buehrle so well in his 2016 appreciation that I can’t resist sharing a good chunk:

The way Buehrle succeeded was unique, of course. He got his ground balls, but he wasn’t the best at getting ground balls. He limited walks, but he wasn’t the best a limiting walks. He generated soft contact, but he wasn’t the best at generating soft contact. Buehrle simply avoided damage with his sub-90 mph fastball by throwing strikes while simultaneously avoiding the middle of the plate:

That’s Buehrle’s entire career during the PITCHf/x era, and it’s something of a remarkable graphic. You see Buehrle living on the first-base edge of the zone, making sure to keep his pitches low, while also being able to spot the same pitch on the opposite side of the zone, for the most part avoiding the heart of the plate. Buehrle’s retained the ability to pitch this way until the end; just last year [2015], he led all of baseball in the percentage of pitches located on the horizontal edges of the plate.

Drafted and developed by the White Sox — practically plucked from obscurity, at that — Buehrle spent 12 of his 16 seasons on the South Side, making four All-Star teams and helping Chicago to three postseason appearances, including its 2005 World Series win, which broke the franchise’s 88-year championship drought. While with the White Sox, he became just the second pitcher in franchise history to throw multiple no-hitters, first doing so in 2007 against the Rangers and then adding a perfect game in 2009 against the Rays. After his time in Chicago, he spent a sour season with the newly-rebranded Miami Marlins, and when that predictably melted down spent three years with the Blue Jays, helping them reach the playoffs for the first time in 22 years.

Though Buehrle reached the 200-win plateau in his final season, he was just 36 years old when he hung up his spikes, preventing him from more fully padding his counting stats or framing his case for Cooperstown in the best light. A closer look suggests that beyond the superficial numbers, while he’s the equal or better of several enshrined pitchers according to WAR and JAWS, he’s far off the standards, and doesn’t have the peripheral collection of accomplishments to bolster his candidacy. Like Tim Hudson, he may receive a smattering of support on a ballot that’s hardly crowded, but his candidacy isn’t likely to lack staying power. Read the rest of this entry »

I have the honor of casting a Hall of Fame ballot for the first time this year. Jay Jaffe does as well, each of us having joined the BBWAA in 2010 while colleagues at Baseball Prospectus. A decade later — and in Jay’s case, countless words written on the subject at hand — we are the first FanGraphs writers to be granted voting privileges.

I’m sharing my ballot in this column, but before doing so, it’s only appropriate that I tip my hat to my fellow first-time voter. As most everyone reading this knows, Jay’s JAWS system is invaluable when assessing Hall of Fame credentials, as is his must-read Cooperstown Casebook. Given his extensive research and analysis, there may not be a greater authority on the subject.

That being said, the question of what defines a Hall of Famer is inherently subjective. Following Ryan Thibodaux’s Ballot Tracker will tell you as much. With barely over a dozen made public, we’ve already seen ballots with 10 checkmarks, while others have been left blank. As a “Big Hall” guy, I’m clearly not in accord with the latter camp.

Jay and I disagree on at least one player. Barring an earth-shaking surprise, Omar Vizquel won’t get his vote. Conversely, the iconic-yet-polarizing shortstop was a no-brainer for me. The first names I checked on my ballot were Vizquel and Scott Rolen. 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 Colorado Rockies.

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This is one of the worst teams in the majors — certainly the worst that seems blissfully unaware of that fact. The Rockies have two position players they can count on to be good, and one of them, Nolan Arenado, is no guarantee to start the 2021 season with Colorado. Even after a weak 60-game stretch in a year everyone would like to forget, if the Rockies do shop Arenado, they will get significant interest in the market. But would they actually close a deal? I’m not sure they will be realistic about the effect his contract and the unknown of an opt-out will have on trade offers. Regardless, ZiPS expects a bounceback season as he continues to make his mid-career Hall of Fame case.

If the Rockies do trade Arenado — and maybe even if they don’t — it would be hard for them to avoid trading Trevor Story if they actually do go for a full-on rebuild. Colorado has had poor fortune with some of its top offensive prospects, but Story has been one of the best kinds of surprises: a player who got far less press as a prospect than others in the organization (despite being a high draft pick) but kept hitting as he went up the ladder, got to the majors first and left the competition scrambling to find other positions. One of those players, Brendan Rodgers, is at risk of going the way of Ryan McMahon, in that he’s done everything he could in the minors to earn a chance in the majors only to find the team casually disinterested in distributing the necessary playing time.

Read the rest of this entry »

In 2017, Christian Yelich finished his last season as a Miami Marlin with a 117 wRC+. That figure, along with the help of his owner-friendly contract, was enough to make him a highly sought-after trade chip — valuable enough for Milwaukee to send the then-No. 13, No. 52, and No. 87 prospects in baseball to acquire his services. Yelich was widely recognized as an excellent baserunner and at least a passable defensive outfielder. But the Brewers were acquiring him for his bat, and they felt his offense from the previous season helped justify the price they were paying.

Fast forward three years, and there are a different set of expectations for Yelich. This winter, he’s coming off a season which he finished with a 112 wRC+, not far from that final season in Miami. But after back-to-back seasons in which he posted a 170 wRC+ and 15.4 WAR — both tops in the National League in that timeframe — and finished in the top two in the MVP voting, that number now looks like a disappointment. There were some positive aspects of his 2020: He walked more than 18% of the time, and while his .225 ISO was below the standard he’d set in his previous two seasons, it still leads all of his Marlins seasons by a substantial margin. But while that helped him maintain an above-average wOBA, they obfuscate a season full of bizarre and unexpected developments for the 28-year-old outfielder.

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It’s often said that there are no bad one-year deals, and the Braves have made a particular habit of using them to augment their young rotations — a habit that predates Alex Anthopoulos’ arrival as their general manager. After a season in which they fell one win short of their first trip to the World Series since 1999 despite a rotation thinned out by major injuries, the Braves have been been aggressive in pursuing that short-term approach. After signing Drew Smyly to a one-year contract last week, they’ve inked Charlie Morton to a one-year, $15 million deal, the same amount of money he would have been paid in 2021 had the Rays not declined his option in late October. Though a quirk of timing caused him to miss inclusion in our Top 50 Free Agents list, he’s the first major free agent to come off the board.

Morton, who turned 37 on November 12, is coming off a regular season in which he was limited to nine starts and 38 innings due to a bout of shoulder inflammation that sidelined him for three weeks in August. The Rays kept him on a short leash, but as the postseason reminded the baseball world, that’s how they roll. Morton pitched more than five innings just once (5.2 on August 4 against the Red Sox), and he topped 90 pitches just three times, maxing out at 94. He was used similarly in the postseason, and looked quite good, particularly in a pair of scoreless starts against the Astros in the ALCS; he threw five innings and 96 pitches in Game 2, then an ultra-efficient 5.2 innings while allowing just two hits on 66 pitches in Game 7. His removal while cruising along in that latter game foreshadowed manager Kevin Cash’s ill-fated decision to pull Blake Snell in Game 6 of the World Series, though in Morton’s case things turned out in the Rays’ favor. His lone postseason dud came in Game 3, when the Dodgers roughed him up for five runs in 4.1 innings.

Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2021 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.

Baseball at high altitude is weird. The air is less dense, so pitched balls break less and batted balls carry farther — conditions that greatly favor the hitters. Meanwhile, reduced oxygen levels make breathing harder, physical exertion more costly, and recovery times longer. Ever since major league baseball arrived in Colorado in 1993, no player put up with more of this, the pros and cons of playing at a mile-high elevation, than Todd Helton.

A Knoxville native whose career path initially led to the gridiron, ahead of Peyton Manning on the University of Tennessee quarterback depth chart, Helton shifted his emphasis back to baseball in college and spent his entire 17-year career (1997-2013) playing for the Rockies. “The Toddfather” was without a doubt the greatest player in franchise history, its leader in most major offensive counting stat categories. He made five All-Star teams, won three Gold Gloves, a slash line triple crown — leading in batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage in the same season — and served as a starter and a team leader for two playoff teams, including Colorado’s only pennant winner. He posted batting averages above .300 12 times, on-base percentages above .400 nine times, and slugging percentages above .500 eight times. He mashed 40 doubles or more seven times and 30 homers or more six times; twice, he topped 400 total bases, a feat that only one other player (Sammy Sosa) has repeated in the post-1960 expansion era. He drew at least 100 walks in a season five times, yet only struck out 100 times or more once; nine times, he walked more than he struck out.

Because Helton did all of this while spending half of his time at Coors Field, many dismiss his accomplishments without a second thought. That he did so with as little self-promotion as possible — and scarcely more exposure — while toiling for a team that had the majors’ sixth-worst record during his tenure makes such dismissal that much easier, as does the drop-off at the tail end of his career, when injuries, most notably chronic back woes, had sapped his power. He was “The Greatest Player Nobody Knows,” as the New York Times called him in 2000, a year when he flirted with a .400 batting average into September.

Thanks to Helton’s staying power, and to advanced statistics that adjust for the high-offense environment in a particularly high-scoring period in baseball history, we can more clearly see that he ranked among his era’s best players, and has credentials that wouldn’t be out of place in Cooperstown. But like former teammate Larry Walker, a more complete player who spent just 59% of his career with the Rockies, Helton’s candidacy started slowly. He received just 16.5% of the vote in his first year, 3.8% less than Walker did in his 2011 debut, but thanks to a less crowded ballot — and perhaps Walker’s coattails, as he jumped 22 percentage points and was elected in his final year of eligibility — Helton rose to 29.2% last year, making the fourth-largest gain of any returning candidate. Still, he’s got a ways to go before he can join his former teammate in the Hall of Fame.

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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 Kansas City Royals.

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The Royals are not a dreadful team. They likely won’t lose 100 games or find themselves setting any horrifying, ineptitude-based records like when the 2019 Orioles allowed 75% of the home runs hit in baseball history. But they’re a phenomenally uninspiring club and like most Royals squads since owner Ewing Kauffman passed away in 1993, one that looks forever stuck in the limbo between not really being close to contending and only half-heartedly rebuilding. The Royals briefly broke the wheel in the mid-2010s when the players acquired in return for Zack Greinke, late 2000s prospects, and a few reclamation projects all peaked simultaneously, but they never had a plan to sustain winning beyond those amazing highlights. Since the strike in 1994, the Royals have a .441 winning percentage, the worst in baseball and the third-worst since Dayton Moore replaced Allard Baird as the general manager.

As such, the Royals have several talented veterans, none of whom are remotely likely to be in Kansas City the next time the team is good. It’s not a great sign for a rebuilding club when the offensive players with the most projected WAR remaining in their careers are largely the oldest ones. Adalberto Mondesi is the exception at age-25, at the top of the team with 19.6 estimated wins remaining, followed by Whit Merrifield, Jorge Soler, Salvador Perez, and Franchy Cordero. If you’re keeping score, that’s a 32-year-old outfielder, a 31-year-old injury-prone catcher, a late-20s designated hitter, and a player who last had 200 plate appearances in a season in 2017. Bobby Witt Jr. is the only position player under 25 with a mean projection of five wins in the majors in his entire career. Only Lucius Fox and MJ Melendez even project above replacement level. Read the rest of this entry »