With just over three weeks before Opening Day, Craig Kimbrel remains a free agent, and the Red Sox, whom he helped win the World Series last fall, don’t have a bona fide closer. For as sensible as a reunion might seem, it’s unlikely to happen, as the Red Sox appear more willing to experiment with late-inning roles among relatively untested pitchers than to invest heavily in a dominant pitcher who nonetheless showed signs of decline last year, or to increase their considerable tax bill. It’s a set of choices that’s very 2019, to say the least, though the bullpen will need a breakout performance or two for their plan to succeed.

Kimbrel, who turns 31 on May 28, is coming off a season in which he saved 42 games, his highest total since 2014, and made his seventh All-Star team. But he struggled after the All-Star break (4.57 ERA and 3.58 FIP in 21.2 innings), and finished with the highest FIP (3.13) and home run rate (1.01 per nine) of his career and the second-highest ERA (2.74) and walk rate (12.6%). While his knuckle-curve remained unhittable (20.9% swinging strike rate, with batters “hitting” .082/.176/.098 on 68 PA ending with the pitch), the average velocity of his four-seam fastball slipped to 97.5 mph, his lowest mark since 2011, and the pitch was hit comparatively hard (.171/.292/.388) while accounting for all seven of the homers he yielded. In the postseason, he surrendered runs in his first four appearances before discovering that he was tipping his pitches; he corrected the problem by setting up with his glove at his waist, and was scored upon in just one of his final five October outings.

Fixed though he may be, Kimbrel has produced just one season out of the past four (2017, when he posted a 1.43 ERA and 1.42 FIP) that’s in the ballpark of his 2011-14 stretch, when he was the game’s top reliever (1.51 ERA, 1.52 FIP, 11.1 WAR). He entered the winter reportedly seeking a six-year deal worth over $100 million, a price tag that might have been a pipe dream even without his relatively shaky platform season given the frosty turn of the free agent market.

Not helping matters is that three of the majors’ highest-spending teams are already rather spent in the closer market, namely the Yankees (who signed Aroldis Chapman to a five-year, $86 million deal in December 2016), Dodgers (who re-signed Kenley Jansen to a five-year, $80 million deal in January 2017), and Giants (who signed Mark Melancon to a four-year, $62 million deal in December 2016). According to Forbes’ end-of-year figures, those teams are respectively ranked sixth, fourth, and third in payroll, with the two teams ahead of them, the Nationals and Red Sox, the only ones who actually exceeded the $197 million Competitive Balance Tax Threshold. More on both of those teams momentarily.

While a recent rumor that Kimbrel was willing to sit out the season if no team met his price was quickly debunked, he remains unsigned, and interest from teams like the Phillies and Braves has hinged on short-term deals. The latter, the team that drafted and developed Kimbrel, hasn’t done anything substantial to fix a bullpen that was below average last year, beyond hoping that midseason acquisition Darren O’Day, acquired as a poison pill in the Kevin Gausman trade, has recovered from season-ending right hamstring surgery. The unit’s current projection of 2.6 WAR ranks 16th out of 30 teams. The Phillies’ bullpen, which most notably added free agent David Robertson as well as former Mariners Juan Nicasio and James Pazos, are projected for 4.2 WAR.

The Nationals, who according to Cot’s Contracts are projected to be $10.5 million below this year’s $206 million CBT threshold, have maintained interest in Kimbrel, and given their recent bullpen debacles and their current reliance on oft-injured Sean Doolittle and Tommy John surgery returnee Trevor Rosenthal, they appear to have need for the fireballer. They would likely need to make a salary-cutting move or two to give themselves some breathing room under the tax threshold, particularly given that as three-time offenders, they will pay a 50% marginal tax rate on the overages.

And then there’s the Red Sox, who according to Cots are already [puts on special payroll-viewing goggles] nearly $31.6 million over the threshold, facing not only a 30% marginal tax rate as second-time offenders but also a 12% surtax for being between $20 million and $40 million over. Re-signing Kimbrel to even a one-year, $9 million deal would not only push them out of that range and into one that, if I’m reading this correctly, boosts their surtax to 42.5%; it would also mean that they would also have their top pick in the upcoming June amateur draft moved back 10 places. All of which seems rather draconian. MLB Trade Rumors, which uses slightly different payroll figures via Roster Resource, estimated that to pay Kimbrel a one-year, $17.5 million salary (thus exceeding Wade Davis‘ $17.33 million to set an AAV record for relievers) would cost an additional $11.564 million in taxes. Woof.

So that’s not happening, and while we wait for some other team to meet Kimbrel’s price — my money is still on Atlanta — Boston’s bullpen is worth a closer look. Last year, with Kimbrel in tow, the unit ranked a modest sixth in the AL in WAR (4.9), but third in FIP- (92), fourth in ERA- (83), and fifth in K-BB% (15.3%). In losing Kimbrel and the often erratic Joe Kelly, who after leading the team with 65.2 relief innings signed a free agent deal with the Dodgers, the team has shed a pair that accounted for 21.8% of their bullpen’s innings and 44.9% of their WAR (1.5 for Kimbrel, 0.7 for Kelly).

Nobody new of any note has come into the fold besides Jenrry Mejia, who signed a minor league deal in January after being reinstated from a PED-related, lifetime ban that cost him the past 3 1/2 seasons. Via our depth charts, the primary pool of relievers appears to consist of lefties Brian Johnson and Bobby Poyner, and righties Matt Barnes, Ryan Brasier, Heath Hembree, Tyler Thornburg, Hector Velazquez, Marcus Walden, and Brandon Workman, with knuckleballer Steven Wright coming along slowly after arthroscopic surgery on his left knee [update: and also suspended for 80 games due to a PED violation] and Carson Smith not available until sometime in midseason as he works his way back from last June’s shoulder surgery.

None of those pitchers besides Mejia, who saved 28 games in 2014 but did not even get a non-roster invitation to Boston’s big league camp, has much major league closing experience. Thornburg owns 13 career saves, all from 2016 with the Brewers, before he was traded (for Travis Shaw) and missed all of 2017 and half of ’18 due to surgery to correct thoracic outlet syndrome. Barnes owns two saves, Waldman and Wright one apiece, and that’s it, though some of the aforementioned pitchers did close in the minors. This apparently does not faze the Red Sox, who may not anoint a single pitcher for ninth-inning duties. From the Boston Globe’s Alex Speier:

As the Red Sox contemplate how they’ll handle ninth-inning responsibilities in a post-Kimbrel world, the team seems increasingly open to the possibility of taking a flexible approach to the later stages of the game rather than making an unwavering commitment to one person for the last three outs.

Manager Alex Cora reiterated on Sunday morning that he has “a pretty good idea of what I want to do” with the ninth inning, but that the topic is one that is currently subject to organizational debate — a conversation driven less by how individual pitchers perform in spring training than by what the organization is willing to do with them. He opened the door to the possibility of using matchups to dictate the back end of the bullpen structure.

“We know who [the relievers] are. We know the stuff. It’s just about the plan. The plan will be out there on March 28th,” Cora said, referring to the Opening Day date against the Mariners. “It’s just a matter of, see what we’re going to do as an organization, what plan we’re going to do, how comfortable are we with a closer or mixing it up, or getting people out in certain situations? We still have a lot of days to see how we feel about it.”

Those well-versed in Red Sox history may recall the team’s ill-fated 2003 “closer by committee” plan, which fared poorly and ultimately led to the late May acquisition of Byung-Hyun Kim from the Diamondbacks. As Speier points out, current pitching coach Dana LeVangie was that team’s bullpen coach. But those were different times, and the past few years have seen teams show more open-mindedness about late-inning reliever usage, with roles — including who finishes the ninth — less rigidly defined. Ninth-inning-wise, think the 2016-18 Indians, with Andrew Miller (or, when Miller was hurt in 2018, Brad Hand) occasionally taking save chances instead of Cody Allen; or last year’s Cubs, with Pedro Strop, Steve Cishek, and Jesse Chavez all used to cover for the second-half absence of Brandon Morrow; or last year’s Brewers, who had three pitchers (Corey Knebel, Jeremy Jeffress, and Josh Hader) save at least 10 games without manager Craig Counsell relying upon any one of them as his main guy.

There’s no reason why the Red Sox, an organization as analytically inclined as those teams, couldn’t get away with a similar approach, given a manager who’s comfortable with such an arrangement and talented pitchers who can boil the job down to “go in and get outs,” as Hader described his role last year. Cora, who as a rookie manager piloted the Red Sox to a franchise-record 108 wins and a World Series victory over the Dodgers, appears quite qualified and game for the challenge. Barnes and Brasier, the two pitchers most likely to figure into a late-game plan, both sound receptive and upbeat via Speier’s reporting. We’re a far cry from 2015, when Angels closer Huston Street declared that he’d rather retire than be used in high-leverage situations outside of the ninth.

Of course, the success of such a plan isn’t just dependent upon player buy-in but also execution, and it’s there that the Red Sox may have more to worry about. With the personnel on hand, the team’s bullpen projects to rank 23rd in the majors in WAR. Here’s how the key individuals that I mentioned stack up with regards to 2018 performance and 2019 projections:

Much depends upon the continued success of Barnes and Brasier, however they’re deployed. Barnes, a 2011 first-round pick who has spent virtually all of the past four seasons in Boston’s bullpen, more or less ditched his slider in favor of further emphasizing his curve, which generated a career-best 18.0% swing-and-miss rate (up from 12.5% to 13.5% from 2015-17); his 36.2% K rate ranked ninth among the 151 relievers with at least 50 innings last year, while his 2.71 FIP ranked 22nd.

Brasier didn’t join the Red Sox bullpen until July 9 last year, his first major league appearance since September 27, 2013, with the Angels, for whom he made seven appearances that season. In the interim, he lost a year and a half to Tommy John surgery, spent a year and a half in the A’s chain and then a season in Japan, and finally spent half a season closing in Pawtucket, where he pitched his way to the Triple-A All-Star Game on the back of a 1.34 ERA and a 40/8 K/BB ratio in 40.1 innings before getting called up and carrying over a similarly effective performance to the majors. Both pitchers came up big in October, which should lessen fears about whether they can handle the pressure of the ninth inning during the regular season, even if the usage pattern is less regular than your average ninth-inning guy.

It’s the rest of the cast that carries the bigger question marks; most of them project to be more or less replacement level, and they’ll need a few somebodies to step up — perhaps Thornburg rediscovering his pre-surgical form, Hembree avoiding the gopher balls (1.5 per nine over the past two seasons), Smith giving the team a midseason shot in the arm, and so on. Maybe Mejia shakes off the rust and pitches his way to an unlikely comeback. Maybe rookies like Poyner and Travis Lakins (10th on the team’s prospect list) break through. Perhaps president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski can augment this core with an inexpensive signing or a judicious trade, if not in March then by midseason. There’s little doubt that the Sox, even without Kimbrel, have the talent and firepower to repeat as division winners. But particularly if they hope to do so as champions, somewhere within this group, they’re going to have to get a little lucky.

Ben Lindbergh and guest co-host Steven Goldman of The Infinite Inning banter about Luis Severino’s injury and the perils of spring training, Sonny Gray’s slider problem and the perils of player development, and Ben’s series at The Ringer about scouting past and present, then preview the 2019 Cubs (34:19) with The Athletic’s Cubs beat writer Sahadev Sharma, and the 2019 Texas Rangers (1:13:15) with The Athletic’s Rangers beat writer, Levi Weaver.

Audio intro: Slothrust, "Baby One More Time"
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Audio interstitial 2: Hop Along, "Texas Funeral"
Audio outro: Teenage Fanclub, "Live in the Moment"

Link to article on Gray’s sliders
Link to first part of Ben’s scouting series
Link to second part of Ben’s scouting series
Link to Ruffcorn reports
Link to Levi’s story on Clyde and pensions
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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Seattle Mariners. 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.

Corner Hitters With Fringy Offensive Profiles
Joe Rizzo, 3B
Dan Vogelbach, DH
Joey Curletta, 1B
Eric Filia, 1B/RF
Keegan McGovern, 1B
Ariel Sandoval, RF

We’ve never been huge on Rizzo despite his obvious feel for contact because his frame has been maxed out since high school and we weren’t sure where sufficient power was going to come from, especially if he were to ever move off of third base. He’s still just 20 and had respectable peripherals at Hi-A last year, so we’ll continue to keep tabs on him despite our skepticism. Vogelbach and Curletta might each see big league time this year. Vogelbach’s approach prioritizes contact over the type of selectivity he’d need to have to get to all his power. His bat control makes this approach viable, but it may not generate offense that clears the bar at 1B/DH. He may be a good buy low target for an NL team trying to get ahead of the universal DH implementation. Like a lot of Dodgers and ex-Dodgers, Curletta’s batted ball profile has shifted and become flyball heavy over the course of several years. He did have 23 dingers last year, though he was a 24-year-old in Double-A and struck out quite a bit. Those two are both younger than Filia, who has raked for his entire college and pro career amid several off-field issues and a trade that fell through due to a medical red flag. He may fall into a late-career Lenny Harris type role if a team has enough defensive flexibility elsewhere on its roster. McGovern was a high-priority senior sign who remade his physique and had a tool uptick. He’s 23 and will need to move quickly. Sandoval has big power and runs well, but the 33% strikeout rate is ominous.

Sleeper Arms
Sam Delaplane, RHP
Deivy Florido, RHP
David McKay, RHP
Brayan Perez, LHP

Delaplane has a 2700 rpm curveball and low-90s sinker, and he hides the ball pretty well and K’d 100 hitters in 60 innings at Low-A last year. Because he’s a cold-weather college arm, it’s a little more acceptable that he performed that way at 23, and we think he’s an interesting sleeper who might get pushed quickly this year. Florido will be 18 all year. He sits 87-89, has modest physical projection, advanced fastball control, and feel for spin. McKay was part of a group of minor league players the Mariners acquired from the Royals for cash early in 2018, presumably for minor league depth reasons. Seattle ‘penned him, and it turns out McKay is actually a decent fastball/slider middle relief prospect. Perez is an 18-year-old pitchability lefty who threw well in the DSL; his stuff is currently a bunch of 45s and 50s and his arm action is good, but the frame limits projection.

Older Relievers
Nick Rumbelow, RHP
Art Warren, RHP
Brandon Brennan, RHP

These are all relief or depth types in the age 25-27 range. Seattle gave up Juan Then to acquire Rumbelow from the Yankees and he barely pitched last year due to a nerve issue in his neck. When healthy, he’s 92-95, and touches 97, with an above-average changeup and slider. Warren pared his repertoire down and is now a fastball/slider middle relief prospect of somewhat advanced age. Brennan was the team’s Rule 5 pickup; his report is available here.

System Overview

This list, of course, looks much different than last year’s iteration, which was arguably the saddest list we’ve ever done, the Charlie Brown Christmas tree of prospect lists. Of course, stocking this system with several of the high-profile names now present cost Seattle 2018’s best reliever, a shortstop with a 70 bat, a Dominican icon, an emerging if perhaps unassuming face of the franchise, and Mike Zunino.

Most of the prospects Seattle acquired in return are relatively close to the majors, supporting the front office’s public assertions that this will be a short-term rebuild. Additionally, the two teenagers in the system most likely to be stars (Rodriguez and Kelenic) are quite advanced for their age, and could be on an accelerated developmental path that enables them to overlap for a while in the big leagues with the other 50 FV prospects in the system, even though they are about four or five years older than Kelenic and Rodriguez on average.

There will be prospect entropy — J.P. Crawford, who doesn’t look so great thus far in the spring, is a great example of this. Not all of these guys will end up as good as we and the Mariners currently project them to be, and this system is still pretty thin beyond the names who were brought on this offseason. The structure of the rebuild indicates intelligent design, but chaos and entropy will play their role. Mitch Haniger (who looks like a star), Domingo Santana (who has the talent to be one), and the charismatic Mallex Smith (who may sneakily already be one) will be fun to watch while the kids grow up.

We still don’t know a lot about this org’s player development. The swollen physiques of the Jack Zduriencik era seem to be a thing of the past as the strength and conditioning program has improved, but this group really hasn’t had much talent to mold, let alone enough to draw results-based conclusions about the player dev approach, and the cement is pretty dry on the 50 FV prospects listed above.

How much better is this system now than at the end of the year? It was last by a good bit in Craig’s end-of-season analysis and, while we consider re-working our math, it has currently moved up into the 14-19 range in all of baseball.

On the heels of a 104-loss 2018 season, the Royals’ 2019 campaign was already heading nowhere in particular; projected for a mere 69 wins by our Depth Chart projections, only the Tigers (68 wins), Orioles (63), and Marlins (62) are expected to be worse. But on Friday, things went from bad to worse with the announcement that catcher Salvador Perez has damage to the ulnar collateral ligament of his throwing (right) arm. The 28-year-old backstop could miss the season due to Tommy John surgery, a procedure that’s relatively rare among catchers, without any resounding success stories on the level of other position players. Gulp.

A six-time All-Star and five-time Gold Glove winner who was the MVP of the 2015 World Series, Perez is a big (6-foot-4, 240 pound) free-swinging slugger with a powerful arm and a strong reputation for handling pitching staffs. He’s not without shortcomings — he hasn’t posted an on-base percentage of .300 or better since 2013, and has been about 10 runs below average as a pitch framer in each of the past three seasons according to Baseball Prospectus — but he’s immensely popular, a fan favorite who’s been elected to start the All-Star Game in each of the past five seasons. Last year, after missing the first 20 games of the season due to an MCL sprain in his left knee (a freak injury suffered while carrying a suitcase upstairs), he hit .235/.274/.439 with 27 homers, an 89 wRC+, and 1.7 WAR in 544 PA; by BP’s framing-inclusive stats, he was worth 1.3 WARP. For his career, he owns a 92 wRC+ and a total of 17.7 WAR.

Manager Ned Yost said that Perez began experiencing elbow soreness in January, at which time an MRI revealed that he had suffered a flexor strain, which resulted in the team shutting down his throwing program for four weeks. He was cleared to start throwing once he reached the Royals’ camp in Tempe, Arizona in mid-February, but soreness after live batting practice led to another MRI that revealed ligament damage. MLB Network’s Jon Heyman reported that surgery has been recommended for Perez, who will get a second opinion from Dr. Neal ElAtrache on Tuesday before a final decision is made. If he’s out, the team will likely turn to Cam Gallagher, a 26-year-old former second-round pick who has just 35 games of major league experience and figured to back up Perez.

As is the case with all position players, Tommy John surgery for catchers is much more rare than it is for pitchers, though because of the volume and intensity of throwing involved with the job, it’s more common for them than it is for any non-pitching position besides outfielders. Still, the limited number of such surgeries is striking. According to the Tommy John Surgery List kept by Jon Roegele, which now includes 1,669 surgeries, just 44 have been done on professional catchers, six of which occurred while they were still amateurs. As best I can tell, a total of 20 catchers who have had the surgery have played in the majors, eight of whom are still active:

So far, the returns haven’t been great, to say the least. We don’t have any information on the relative severity of these players’ injuries (Perez included) and, the further back we go, less information about players’ defense. But while it’s not hard to find examples of TJS recipients at other positions besides pitcher who have recovered to enjoy productive multi-year stretches or careers afterwards — Jose Canseco, Matt Carpenter, Shin-Soo Choo, Mike Greenwell, Kelly Johnson, Paul Molitor, Luke Scott, and Randy Velarde come to mind, and hopefully we’ll count Didi Gregorius and Corey Seager among them some day (Gleyber Torres too, though his surgery was on his non-throwing arm) — the best that can be said about the catchers is that some of them were able to slog onward with their careers.

Perhaps Knapp or Casali will eventually prove me wrong, but none of the eight catchers who underwent TJS in college or the minors have gone on to have substantial major league careers; Casali is the only one of that group who even reached 1.0 WAR post-surgery. It’s not like those guys were supposed to be stiffs, either. Teagarden was a third-round pick who made two Baseball America Top 100 Prospects Lists post-surgery, and the rest were all drafted in the first 10 rounds, too: Knapp (second, 2013), Tatum (third, 2004), House (fifth, 1999, and a two-time Top 100 prospect pre-surgery), Kieboom (fifth, 2012), Higashioka (seventh, 2008), Jimenez (ninth, 2008), and Casali (10th, 2011). Sure, many picks from the first 10 rounds don’t even reach the majors even without undergoing TJS, or fail to produce in their limited opportunities. Nonetheless, the extent to which the catchers in this subset failed to blossom in the aftermath of surgery is not encouraging.

Leaving those players aside, of the 10 who had major league experience prior to TJS, four (Christmas, Coste, Davis, and Wilson) never played in the majors again. That count doesn’t include d’Arnaud, who is in camp with the Mets and, his ongoing penchant for injury notwithstanding, seems likely to stumble into a game at some point. Of the other five, none has equaled his pre-surgical offensive potency or made a particularly large impact post-surgery. To be fair, the jury is still out on d’Arnaud and Vazquez, though the latter has never even come close to the solid offensive contributions he made at Single-A and Double-A levels.

The biggest name among this group besides Hundley — a two-time All-Star whose pre-surgical performance is clouded by his later appearance in the Mitchell Report, and whose post-surgery peformance featured back and hand woes — is Wieters, a player whose post-surgical plight had been on my mind even before the news about Perez was announced. When I began writing about the Nationals’ post-Bryce Harper era last week, Wieters — Washington’s regular catcher for the past two seasons, at least during the two-plus months of 2018 that he wasn’t sidelined by injuries — was still jobless. By the time that piece was published, the 32-year-old switch-hitting catcher had agreed to a minor-league deal with the Cardinals, still a rather humbling outcome for a player who made nearly $37 million over the past three seasons, and whose career was supposed to be so much more.

A former top-five pick (2007) and number one overall prospect (2009, according to both Baseball America and Baseball Prospectus), Wieters made a pair of All-Star teams in 2011-12, winning a pair of Gold Gloves and helping the Orioles emerge from a decade and a half of playoff-free futility along the way. Circa 2013, he was a candidate for a major contract extension, though at the time, agent Scott Boras reportedly countered with a request for something in the range of Joe Mauer’s eight-year, $184 million extension with the Twins, despite the fact that Wieters hadn’t racked up anything close to the accolades that Mauer, an MVP and three-time batting champion, had at the time he signed. Needless to say, Wieters didn’t get that kind of money; the Orioles explored trading him in the winter of 2013-14, and then the following season, he tore his UCL after playing just 26 games. While there was initial optimism he would avoid TJS, he ultimately went under the knife in June 2014, at which time I noted the dearth of positive outcomes from among the group above.

Since then, Wieters’ career has been spotty at best. He returned to major league action on June 5, 2015, 12 days shy of a year after surgery, made a solid half-season showing (.267/.319/.422, 102 wRC+, 1.1 WAR in 282 PA), and then, after making a combined $16 million in 2014-15, became just the second player to accept a qualifying offer, after the Astros’ Colby Rasmus. Playing for a $15.8 million salary, he made the AL All-Star team — to this date, he’s the only post-TJS catcher to garner such status — and finished 2016 with a modest 90 wRC+ (.243/.302/.409) and 1.8 WAR.

He’s been considerably less productive since. In February 2017, he signed a one-year, $10.5 million deal with the Nationals, which included a same-sized player option for 2018 (not to mention $5 million worth of deferred money), then stumbled to a 62 wRC+ with -0.3 WAR in the first year and, after exercising that option, something closer to his post-surgical level last year (.238/.330/.374 ,89 wRC+, 0.9 WAR) while making just 271 PA; he missed nearly 10 weeks due to an oblique strain and a left hamstring strain, the latter of which required in-season surgery. Unable to secure a major league deal this winter, he settled for a minor league one, with a base salary of $1.5 million assuming he’s in the majors, another half-million dollars worth of performance incentives ($100,000 apiece for reaching 40, 50, 60, 70 and 80 games), and a March 22 opt-out.

Admittedly, once the above catchers are broken into subgroups, we have rather small sample sizes, and as far as the performance outcomes are concerned, we see correlation with surgery but not necessarily causation. Wieters hasn’t made any trips to the DL for elbow problems since returning from surgery, and has continued to throw out would-be base stealers at a more-or-less league-average clip. His decline as a defender — using BP’s FRAA, from 47.9 from 2009-14 to -10.2 from 2015-18 — really began in 2013 and has been driven by subpar pitch framing (-15.8 runs from 2015-18), which depends primarily on his non-throwing arm anyway. Vazquez is still a well above average defender in all facets of the game, averaging nearly 11 FRAA in the past three seasons despite receiving only 798 PA in that span. From among the other active catchers who aren’t on the fringes of jobs, Casali has been solid on both sides of the ball but has only once topped 156 PA in a season, while Knapp has been a rather woeful defender (-15.6 FRAA while making just 419 PA), struggling both with throwing (19% caught stealing) and framing (-9.6 runs).

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that while I don’t think we can draw strong conclusions from the group of catchers who have preceded Perez in TJS, their history doesn’t offer him and the Royals a particularly great roadmap for success. He’s relatively young, and under contract for a total of $36 million through 2021, so it’s unlikely he’ll fade into oblivion like some of the aforementioned recipients, but if his post-surgical success approaches his pre-surgical performance, he’ll be breaking new ground.

The Padres announced Friday that they have signed 31-year-old Adam Warren, lately of Seattle, originally of North Carolina, and most notably of New York, to a one-year, $2 million deal, with a $2.5 million club option (and $500,000 buy-out) for 2020. In San Diego, Warren will join Kirby Yates, Craig Stammen, and Matt Strahm at the head of what should be a reasonably effective relief corps; the Padres’ 3.2 WAR projection is sixth-best in the NL and matches precisely that of division rivals Los Angeles and San Francisco. Warren might also, in the event the somewhat-less-impressive San Diego rotation does not perform at its best, throw a few innings at the beginning of games, either as a traditional starter or as an “opener.”

It is this mostly-theoretical capacity — to pitch relatively effectively both as a spot starter/long reliever and in more traditional relief roles — that has long tantalized the various clubs that have sought Warren out since his debut for the Yankees in 2012, though this appeal has dulled somewhat since a poor turn as a swing-man for the Cubs in the early part of 2016 (his 5.83 FIP during that half-season was his worst mark since 2.1 poor innings in his debut season by more than half a run). The Mariners, for whom Warren pitched from late July of last year to the season’s close, were unique among his three clubs in only using Warren out of the ‘pen, and he rewarded them somewhat poorly by posting his worst performance (4.82 FIP, 1.88 K/BB ratio) since that half-season in Chicago in 21.2 innings of work. He has not started a game since 2016, or more than one game a season since 2015. Read the rest of this entry »

Brock Burke was a relatively obscure pitcher in the Tampa Bay Rays organization when I first wrote about him in 2017. He was performing well at the time — a 1.23 ERA through nine starts — but context was a mitigating factor. A blip on most prospect radar, he was facing Midwest League hitters in his third full professional season.

He’s no longer quite so obscure. Nor is he Tampa Bay property. In December, the Texas Rangers acquired the 22-year-old southpaw in the three-team trade that sent former top prospect Jurickson Profar to Oakland. His appeal to the AL West cellar dwellers was understandable. Burke fashioned a 1.95 ERA, and fanned 71 batters in 55-and-a-third innings, after earning a second-half promotion to Double-A Montgomery.

I recently asked Texas GM Jon Daniels about the deal that brought Burke to the Lone Star State.

“We’ve had a lot of conversations about Profar over the years,” Daniels told me. “This winter, after a number of talks, we defined what we were looking for. Our priority was to get a young starter who was at the upper levels, and [Burke’s] had a lot of things we liked. His trajectory is really interesting — from Colorado, not a ton of development at a young age. Sometimes guys from those cold-weather states need a little time to lay a foundation.”

Daniels brought up Tyler Phillips — “He really burst onto the scene with us last year” — as another close-to-home example. A 21-year-old right-hander from New Jersey, Phillips emerged as one of the Rangers’ better pitching prospects with a stellar season in the South Atlantic League.

Where Burke’s professional development has taken place worked in his favor. Read the rest of this entry »

This winter’s two biggest free agent names signed the two biggest free agent deals in history over the last week. Manny Machado will receive $300 million over 10 years if he doesn’t exercise his opt-out after 2023, while Bryce Harper will take in $330 million over the next 13 seasons. For Harper and his agent, Scott Boras, waiting for Machado to sign was likely part of a plan to secure a higher payout. That plan appears to have worked as Harper received $30 million more in guaranteed money. But because those dollars will be paid out over more years and the contract has no opt-out, it’s not entirely clear whether Harper signed the best financial package. Let’s take a closer look.

Before getting to the contract breakdown, here is a reminder of how biggest doesn’t necessarily equal best. Back in December, I took all the major league contracts of at least $100 million and adjusted those amounts to 2019 MLB dollars. As we now have a few more entrants, here is the updated version of the chart from that post.

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And the winner for the hallowed title of the second-most impactful free agent signing of February 28, 2019 goes to … the Toronto Blue Jays, who inked Clay Buchholz to a one-year, $3 million deal that could include another $3 million in incentives. Yes, the move — which won’t become official until he passes a physical, no small matter given his injury history — is a fair bit behind that of the Phillies’ record-setting agreement with Bryce Harper in terms of both money and impact, but it could easily pay off, as the 34-year-old righty showed flashes of brilliance during his stint with the Diamondbacks last season.

Buchholz, who was limited to just two starts in 2017 — with the Phillies, before they were a twinkle in Harper’s eye — due to a partially torn flexor pronator mass that required surgery, began last year working on a minor league deal in the Royals’ camp. He made three starts for the team’s top two affiliates at the outset of the season, then exercised a May 1 opt-out clause and landed with the Diamondbacks, whom he helped to keep in contention for a playoff spot. In 16 starts spanning from May 20 to September 8, he threw 98.1 innings with a 20.6% strikeout rate, 5.6% walk rate, 2.01 ERA, 3.47 FIP, and 1.9 WAR — calling to mind similarly tantalizing partial-season performances with the Red Sox in 2013 and ’15. Alas, his performance was interrupted for a month (from late June to late July) by an oblique strain; he then suffered another flexor strain in mid-September, and was shut down for the year after receiving a platelet-rich plasma injection. Read the rest of this entry »

Scott Oberg had a breakout season in 2018. The 28-year-old right-hander came out of the Colorado bullpen 56 times and put up a 2.45 ERA and a 2.87 FIP. Working primarily in a set-up role — 45 of his appearances were in the seventh or eighth inning — he was on the winning side of all but one of his nine decisions.

His signature pitch is a slider. Oberg threw the late-breaker 37.4% of the time last year, often flummoxing opposing hitters who mistakenly read fastball out of his hand. According to the University of Connecticut product, that has been the key to his success. Oberg’s slider has emerged as a lethal weapon not just because he’s learned to manipulate it better — he’s also improved his fastball command.

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Oberg on learning his slider: “I was introduced to a slider in 2014, when I was in Double-A. I’d always been more of a curveball guy. At an earlier age, I guess it was easier to spin the ball that way, versus being very fine with a slider. It took a few years of maturing to get it to the point where it is now.

“As it was progressing, I started realizing that my slider and curveball were kind of morphing into each other a little bit. As a result, we ended up putting the curveball on the shelf and focusing solely on the slider. This was two seasons ago.

“In theory, you throw [sliders and curveballs] differently. There are different arm motions, different hand placements on the ball. With different finger placements, there isn’t as much confusion. That’s a problem I was having. The grips on my slider and my curveball were very similar. There wasn’t enough distinction between the two pitches in my hand. Read the rest of this entry »

The Nationals are now officially in the post-Bryce Harper era. With the news of his completion of a 13-year, $330 million contract with the Philadelphia Phillies, Washington will no longer employ the brash prodigy whose presence has more or less defined the franchise since his arrival as a 19-year-old on April 28, 2012. It’s clear that the Nationals have been bracing for this moment since the six-time All-Star slugger spurned a 10-year, $300 million offer that — as we’ve only learned recently — reportedly included roughly $100 million in deferred money. Save for a little less star power, and perhaps a little less swagger, the team does not appear to be that worse for wear.

In fact, the Nationals are currently projected to win the NL East, though Harper’s signing has shrunk the gap between them and the Phillies, who we now project for 86 wins to the Nationals’ 90. That a similar forecast last spring went awry was of a piece with Harper’s D.C. tenure, a period defined as much by what they did not accomplish as what they did. They were also the preseason favorites going into the two other seasons in which they missed the playoffs with Harper in tow, and while they did win four division titles in Harper’s seven seasons — including the first for the franchise since relocating from Montreal prior to the 2005 season — the Nationals failed to win a single playoff series. They went an excruciating 0-for-4 in the NL Division Series, losing to lower-seeded teams each time. Three of the four series went the distance; the Nationals squandered early leads and lost those decisive games on their home field by a total of four runs.

Lest you think that I’m attempting to hang the Nationals’ failures upon Harper himself, I’m not. While his overall playoff numbers are pretty unremarkable (.211/.315/.487), he went 7-for-15 with 17 total bases in those four elimination games. He won his MVP award in 2015, when the team missed the playoffs, and by WAR, he was more valuable in the other two seasons in which they fizzled (2013 and ’18), than in ’14 or ’16, when they won the NL East. Regardless, that era is history, and perhaps not the happiest one if you’re a Nationals fan, though it had its moments. Read the rest of this entry »