Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Manny Machado signing with the Padres and what the news means for the free-agent market and the futures of the NL West, the Phillies, and Bryce Harper, then preview the 2019 Los Angeles Angels (31:34) with The Athletic’s Angels beat writer, Fabian Ardaya, and the 2019 Milwaukee Brewers (1:02:42) with The Athletic’s Brewers beat writer, Robert Murray, plus a postscript on Machado and Don Newcombe.

Audio intro: The Frames, "Finally"
Audio interstitial 1: The Minus 5 (Feat. Ben Gibbard), "I See Angels"
Audio interstitial 2: Chip Taylor, "Why Milwaukee"
Audio outro: Led Zeppelin, "Ten Years Gone"

Link to Ben’s Machado piece
Link to Jeff’s Machado piece
Link to Padres celebration thread
Link to Ben’s Calhoun article
Link to Baseball Mogul offer
Link to preorder The MVP Machine

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According to those estimated franchise values at Forbes, the San Diego Padres are in the bottom half of baseball’s 30 organizations. Perhaps even more relevant, the Padres are routinely among baseball’s bottom ten spenders. The Padres have pretty much never behaved like a big-market team, and after long enough, that creates a pretty rigid impression. One thinks of the Padres the way one might think of, say, the Reds. When it comes to high-profile free agents, you feel comfortable ruling them out. Why would you think the Padres would be a player?

Of course, teams can choose to change. And as much as we might still think of free agency as directing players toward certain big spenders, you never know when someone might surprise you. One offseason ago, the biggest free-agent contract went to Eric Hosmer, and it was given by the Padres. And now this offseason, the biggest free-agent contract so far is going to Manny Machado, and it’s being given by the Padres. According to reports, the deal will be worth $300 million over ten years, with an opt-out after year five. It’s close enough to the contract we’ve always expected. I just don’t think anyone really expected the team.

The Padres read the market, and they chose to be aggressive, where other clubs were more cautious. Now the door could be open a year ahead of schedule.

Read the rest of this entry »

Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives and careers. 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 — Ray Black, Tanner Scott, and Matt Strahm— on how they learned and developed their sliders.

———

Ray Black, San Francisco Giants

“When I was in high school, I had the privilege of working with Andy Ashby, who is pretty much a legend around Wilkes-Barre. We messed around a little bit with a slider at the time, but I really started developing it more coming back from my Tommy John surgery. I blew out my senior year.

“My curveball was too big, too loopy, and easy to distinguish. I think I was throwing it almost 20 mph slower than my fastball. When you’re younger, you see this big breaking ball, somebody is diving out of the way, and you’re like, ‘Man, that’s nasty.’ But when you get up to the higher levels, you realize it’s more deception; it’s not just movement. I tried to develop a slider like a cutter. That’s what I think when I throw my slider: cutter. If I don’t, I always end up trying to make it bigger than it should be. I need to try to keep it tight, keep it small. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a rare day when a player looks back on a championship-winning season with something approaching regret, but then, Dustin Pedroia didn’t get much chance to contribute to the Red Sox during their World Series-winning 2018 campaign. After being limited to 105 games in 2017, largely due to ongoing discomfort in his left knee, Pedroia underwent an experimental cartilage restoration procedure that was expected to cost him the first couple months of last season. He returned in late May, but played just three games before inflammation forced him back to the injured list, and he spent the rest of the season as a bystander as the Sox overcame his absence while romping to their fourth title in the last 15 seasons.

“I don’t regret doing it, but looking back and knowing what I know now, I wouldn’t have done it,” Pedroia told reporters in Fort Myers last week, referring to the surgery, called osteochondral allograft transfer surgery, which involves grafting cartilage from a cadaver. While basketball and soccer players had undergone the procedure prior to Pedroia, teammate Steven Wright was the only baseball player who had done so.

The 35-year-old second baseman, who had previously undergone surgery to repair a torn meniscus in his left knee in October 2016 (among his numerous other ailments), believes both that he pushed himself too hard and that some of the expectations with regards to recovery times were “a little off.” In retrospect, he believes that avoiding the surgery in favor of longer rest and rehab might have been a more productive route. “It’s a complicated surgery,” said Pedroia. “The cartilage in my knee is great now. The graft is the thing. You’re putting somebody else’s bone in your body. To get that to incorporate fully, there are so many things going into it that.”

For what it’s worth, Wright, who was limited to 53.2 innings last year by three separate trips to the injured list for left knee inflammation (as well as a 15-game suspension for violating the league’s domestic violence policy) and missed the entire postseason, is similarly less than enamored with the results of his cartilage restoration surgery, which took place on May 8, 2017, 5 1/2 months prior to Pedroia’s. “It’s been tougher mentally than physically,” he told reporters last week. “It’s a game where it’s tough on your body, but then when you’ve got a flat tire going out there trying to pitch, it makes it a little bit tougher.” Wright later said that his knee currently feels like it’s been from a flat tire to a spare.

In anticipation of Pedroia’s early-2018 absence, the Red Sox retained July 2017 acquisition Eduardo Núñez in free agency, but both he and utilityman Brock Holt struggled in the role, to the point of topping my Replacement Level Killers list in late July. To that point, Sox second sackers had combined for a sad-sack -0.7 WAR. On July 30, they traded for the Tigers’ Ian Kinsler, who was replacement-level as well, though he did represent a defensive upgrade. In all, the eight players Boston used at second base — a cast rounded out by Brandon Phillips, Tzu-Wei Lin, Mookie Betts (!), and Blake Swihart — combined to hit .252/.308/.350 for a 75 wRC+ and -0.3 WAR. Only the Giants and Tigers were worse in the last two categories.

All of the participants save for Phillips and Kinser (who signed with the Padres) remain on the Red Sox’s 40-man roster. President of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski told reporters last week that he’s not expecting Pedroia to play 150 games. “We’re hopeful that he’s a 125-game player at this point,” said Dombrowsk. “We do feel we have some people who are solid and can fill in. To fill in if [Pedroia] plays 120, guys like Holt, a guy like Nunez coming over there. Even some depth with Tzu-Wei Lin in our organization we like a great deal.”

Our current depth charts projections, which feature Pedroia getting 74% of the team’s plate appearances at second base, forecast him for a .272/.344/.390 line with 2.0 WAR, and for the group as a whole to return 2.5 WAR, good for 12th in the majors. While the Red Sox would probably be overjoyed if things unfold that way, history suggests there may be less reason for optimism. Along the lines of what I did for Troy Tulowitzki last August, I asked Dan Szymborski to put together a list of infielders who are over 30 — shortstops and third basemen as well as second basemen, in order to start with a larger pool than the Tulo study — and missed all or nearly all of a season, then returned to the majors. I used 100 plate appearances as the upper limit for the “missed” season (Pedroia had 13), and confirmed with a variety of resources that the players’ absences were due to injuries, not detours to foreign leagues or mere attrition. As before, I considered only players from 1980 onward. The resulting list of 18 players was less than encouraging, to say the least:

One can wave off individual results here and there on various grounds. Sports medicine has improved vastly over the past four decades, and in considering Pedroia, it’s debatable how much we can extrapolate from players’ failures to recover from injuries to other body parts, such as Jeter’s ankle, the shoulders of Burleson, Glaus, and Perry, or the elbows of Fernandez, Howe (who also underwent ankle surgery), and a quartet of Tommy John surgery recipients (Furcal, Izturis, Santana, and Velarde). We can also debate the propriety of comparing the fates of players who were 30 or 38 at the start of these sequences to that of a 34-year-old.

Even so, within the timeframe, I couldn’t find any examples of an over-30 infielder who was significantly above replacement level both before missing most or all of a season and then again in his return year. Gonzalez (the “Sea Bass” one) underwent microfracture surgery in his left knee in March 2008 and did post a big 3.0 WAR season in 2010; he’s in this table twice thanks to a 2012 torn ACL. And Velarde, who underwent Tommy John surgery, totaled about 10 WAR from 1999-2001, but both needed at least one more year to recover form.

That said, three players who had dreadful seasons pre-injury did rebound substantially upon returning. Lansford, the regular third baseman for the A’s from 1983-1990 (including their three pennant-winning teams from 1988-1990) was pretty lousy in the last of those seasons, then suffered serious right shoulder and left knee injuries while snowmobiling in Oregon in January 1991. A’s vice president Sandy Alderson said at the time, “Carney’s contract doesn’t say he can snowmobile and it doesn’t say he can’t,” adding that the team declined to pursue terminating his employment. Lansford played just five games in the 1991 season, but returned for a solid 1992 season before retiring.

Fernandez, who racked up 43.5 WAR in a career that spanned from 1983-2001, endured a career-worst season as the Yankees’ starting shortstop in 1995, then fractured his right elbow in March 1996. The Yankees turned to the 22-year-old Jeter, who went on to win AL Rookie of the Year honors while helping the team win its first championship in 18 years. Fernandez missed the entire season, then resurfaced with the Indians in 1997, hitting for a 93 wRC+ with 2.1 WAR; he spent three more years in the majors and accumulated 4.9 WAR.

Spezio, a useful infielder for the Angels (6.6 WAR from 2000-2003), struggled in the first year of a three-year, $9.15 million deal with the Mariners (67 wRC+ and -0.1 WAR in 415 PA) in 2004. Between being relegated to a backup role by the free agent signings of Adrian Beltre and Richie Sexson, missing 10 weeks due to an oblique strain, and then drawing his release in late August, he was limited to 51 PA in 2005. Divorce, depression, and substance abuse — the last two of which would further derail his career years later — were contributing factors to his 2005 struggles. Nonetheless, he played a significant role for the Cardinals’ 2006 championship team, posting a 123 wRC+ and 1.3 WAR in 321 PA.

Even with that trio in my quick-and-dirty study, the group of players I identified averaged a meager 83 wRC+ and 0.2 WAR in their returns. Limiting the player pool to those whose pre-injury seasons were worth at least 1.0 WAR, which clears out some light hitters whose careers were essentially on their last legs anyway, the averages are 81 wRC+ (down from 105 pre-injury) and 0.0 WAR (down from 2.4) — an even steeper drop that probably owed something to more complete players getting longer leashes.

All of which is to say that if history is a guide, the 2019 Red Sox may not get anything close to the Pedroia they’re used to, the one who has never really had a below-average season. Even in his most injury-wracked campaigns, when his bat has been about average (98 wRC+ in 2014, 101 in 2017), he’s played at a three-win pace, solidly above average if not up to the standard that helped him make four All-Star teams and win four Gold Gloves from 2008-14. That said, even a slog of a season is unlikely to mean the end of the line for Pedroia, given that he’s still owed $40 million through 2021 via the eight-year, $110 million extension he signed in July 2013.

If Pedroia can recover some semblance of form, the stakes are high; he still has a shot at a Hall of Fame berth. He’s got the hardware (AL MVP, AL Rookie of the Year, three World Series rings, two of them as starter), but with 1,803 hits, he needs two seasons worth of playing time to reach 2,000, a number that has functioned as a bright-line test for Hall voters when it comes to post-1960 players. Likewise he’s still short in JAWS. He’s 19th among second basemen at 47.3, 9.6 points below the standard, but he’s only 2.0 WAR below the seven-year peak standard (42.4 versus 44.4). Given Chase Utley’s retirement short of 2,000 hits, Kinsler’s fade, and the PED suspension of Robinson Cano, none of this era’s aging second baseman have clear paths to Cooperstown, but a functioning if not fully resurgent Pedrioa would be best positioned to change that.

Of course, talk of any resurgence is premature when discussing a player whose availability can’t yet be taken for granted. If he’s batting leadoff on Opening Day, per manager Alex Cora’s promise for when he’ll return, Pedroia will have hit the first big mark.

Prospects “graduate” from prospect lists when they exceed the playing time/roster days necessary to retain rookie eligibility. But of course, that doesn’t mean they’re all in the big leagues for good. Several are up for a while but end up getting bounced back and forth from Triple-A for an extended period of time. Others get hurt at an inopportune moment and virtually disappear for years.

Nobody really covers these players in a meaningful way; they slip through the cracks, and exist in a limbo between prospectdom and any kind of relevant big-league sample. Adalberto Mondesi, Jurickson Profar, A.J. Reed, and Tyler Glasnow are recent examples of this. To address this blind spot in coverage, I’ve cherry-picked some of the more interesting players who fall under this umbrella who we didn’t see much of last year, but who we may in 2019. 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 more than half a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the New York Yankees.

Batters

After I posted the Yankees’ WARtoon on twitter, lots of people responded by picking the overs, particularly when it came to Luke Voit. Don’t be greedy. This is essentially a mean projection of 96-99 or so wins. Didn’t you learn the meaning of A Christmas Carol? If you hoard all the WAR, you will be visited by George Steinbrenner’s ghost. Wait, that actually sounds pretty cool, unless he brings along a ghastly manifestation of the Ken Phelps trade. (What is a ghost’s favorite player? Jay BOO-hner.)

ZiPS may be low on Voit, but 2.4 WAR per 600 plate appearances is an above-average first baseman, and Voit doesn’t have a long track record of excellence. It was only in 2017 that ZiPS started being interested in him, seeing his combined major league time and minor league translation as a .283/.352/.481 line. In 2018, the combined line was .284/.361/.516, not all that different in the big picture. Voit’s not a young player, and while he has hit very well in the majors, a player’s minor league career doesn’t just evaporate the second they hit the bigs and rock the league in a cup of coffee (see: Chris Singleton or Shane Greene).

The Yankees appear to have an almost Dodgers-like level of flexibility, with a number of infielders who can theoretically play every other position on the diamond. It’s a bit of over-engineering, but ideally, top teams should accumulate depth in this manner. I’d argue that the Phillies ought to have tried to sign Mike Moustakas, though he may not have been all that interested upon realizing that he’d basically be the team’s backup in the event Manny Machado cares to sign.

ZiPS now projects Aaron Hicks to be the fifth best center fielder in baseball. It’s a weird timeline, but we’re in it. Hicks is a borderline star and the fluke talk should be more or less behind us. 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 more than half a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Minnesota Twins.

Batters

In a league that is largely dominated by teams at the extremes of winning and rebuilding, the Minnesota Twins represent an increasingly rare breed: the excruciatingly, unbearably, average team. If you look at the lineup from top to bottom, there just aren’t any horrible weaknesses, with the bottom of the ZiPS ranks (Jorge Polanco, and the catching and first base timeshares) still living in the neighborhood of league-average; no scary negatives or zero-point-somethings lurk in there. But the highs aren’t really that high, either; Nelson Cruz tops the projections at 2.6 WAR, thanks to a .266/.348/.500 line. That’s the lowest top projected offensive WAR for any team that hopes to be a realistic contender in 2019.

This situation is not entirely the team’s fault, of course. ZiPS, like the Twins and most prospect-watchers, thought that Byron Buxton and Miguel Sano would, by this point, be players who formed the core of Minnesota’s lineup. There are a number of valid criticisms of how the Twins have managed Buxton and Sano, especially the former. Buxton’s inconsistent performance has been maddening, but so has the team’s tendency to go back-and-forth on whether he needed to be in the majors or the minors at any given time. His regular injuries add another frustrating complication. ZiPS has generally been optimistic about Buxton’s future, even when he’s struggled in the majors, but at this point, it’s only buying him as a league-average overall performer thanks to his excellent glove. It’s a good thing I don’t believe in curses; several years ago, I noted that ZiPS was rather cruel in assigning Carlos Gomez as Buxton’s top offensive comp, but it’s been more on-target than a computer can understand.

One of the problems with having a team full of average players is that it becomes damned hard to upgrade. There’s nowhere in the lineup where the Twins can be improved by any significant margin by adding a two-win player; really, even a three-win player would be an underwhelming addition at most positions. To upgrade the team’s offense, they need to add a legitimate star. And if that’s less likely to come by way of giant breakouts from Sano or Buxton than it once appeared, money becomes the best option in the short-term. After chasing Yu Darvish last year, I thought the Twins might sneakily be real players in the free agent market this offseason, but they really haven’t been. In a division with three rebuilding teams and a Cleveland squad whose plan in the outfield includes a heavy dose of Jordan Luplow, it feels like Minnesota should be more carpe diem and less dimitte diem.

Pitchers

The theme of being largely average continues with the pitching staff. Only Jose Berrios (at 14-10, 3.93, and 3.2 WAR) really pushes out of that middling range in the rotation. While his 2018 looked vaguely similar to his 2017, Berrios bumped up his strikes by a batter a game, and it still feels like that he has some ceiling left, even if ZiPS sees him continuing to pitch at about the same level. Berrios’s changeup has always looked nastier than it’s actually played on the field. I can’t speak for Twins fans, but to me, it’s looked like a pitch that should have struck out more than a mere 15 batters (against 11 home runs) in the right-hander’s brief career.

ZiPS remains unexcited about Blake Parker — one of the Twin’s “big” offseason moves — getting the highest-leverage innings, and instead sees Taylor Rogers or Trevor May (higher upside) as being better suited for the role. The projections are also bullish on Andrew Vasquez, a big lefty who serves up more sliders than White Castle and who rose from the Florida State League to the American League in ten weeks. But overall, the back of the bullpen looks shallower than other contenders’ and the highs are not quite as high. Of the teams that look to be around .500 or better, ZiPS projects Minnesota’s bullpen to be around the bottom, along with the Washington Nationals.

Bench and Prospects

Nick Gordon‘s offensive development has been a bit spotty, but ZiPS still sees him as a league-average regular in his prime, on the level of a slightly-better Polanco. That’s fine, but Royce Lewis’s projection is more exciting, with ZiPS seeing him peak as a 20-25 home run hitter, with projected lines in the .260/.330/.460 range, which will still work if he ends up playing center field rather than short in the majors. He even projects as useful if he were to play in the bigs this year, which is an impressive feat for a player with two months of Hi-A experience. As for Alex Kirilloff, while ZiPS doesn’t see him ever being a high-OBP player when his batting average inevitably comes down, his prime projections check in with just over a .280 batting average, with slugging percentages peeking just over the .500 mark.

One pedantic note for 2019: for the WAR graphic, I’m using FanGraphs’ depth chart playing time, not the playing time ZiPS spits out, so there will be occasional differences in WAR totals.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here at site.

Disclaimer: ZiPS projections are computer-based projections of performance. Performances have not been allocated to predicted playing time in the majors — many of the players listed above are unlikely to play in the majors at all in 2019. ZiPS is projecting equivalent production — a .240 ZiPS projection may end up being .280 in AAA or .300 in AA, for example. Whether or not a player will play is one of many non-statistical factors one has to take into account when predicting the future.

Players are listed with their most recent teams, unless I have made a mistake. This is very possible, as a lot of minor-league signings go generally unreported in the offseason.

ZiPS’ projections are based on the American League having a 4.29 ERA and the National League having a 4.15 ERA.

Players who are expected to be out due to injury are still projected. More information is always better than less information, and a computer isn’t the tool that should project the injury status of, for example, a pitcher who has had Tommy John surgery.

Both hitters and pitchers are ranked by projected zWAR — which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those which appear in full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR.

Free agency was supposed to be different for Mike Moustakas this time around. Last winter, coming off his second All-Star appearance and a career-high 38 home runs, the longtime Royals third baseman turned down a $17.4 million qualifying offer in anticipation of a multiyear contract, only to receive a frosty reception on the open market. Ultimately, he made a belated return to Kansas City on a one-year deal, was traded to the contending Brewers in late July, and hit free agency again this fall — this time without a qualifying offer and associated draft pick compensation. Yet once again, he only landed a considerably discounted one-year contract. He’ll return to the Brewers on a $10 million deal that includes a mutual option for 2020.

Moustakas, who turned 30 on September 11, hit a combined .251/.315/.459 with 28 homers, a 105 wRC+, and 2.4 WAR in 2018. His offense wasn’t quite what it was in 2017 (.272/.314/.521, 114 wRC+) but his defense improved significantly in terms of both DRS (from -8 in 2017 to 2 in 2018) and UZR (from -4.5 to 1.0). Given that he was finally more than a year removed from the right ACL tear that limited him to 27 games in 2016, that shouldn’t be tremendously surprising; according to Statcast, his average sprint speed also increased substantially, from 24.0 feet per second to 25.7, though even that puts him somewhere around the 15th percentile of major league regulars.

Moustakas’ defensive rebound helped offset his slight offensive downturn; his overall WAR was a bit ahead of his 2.1 from 2017, if still shy of his career-best 3.8 in 2015. He’s not what you’d call the most disciplined hitter; his 37.0% rate of swinging at pitches outside the zone places him in the 15th percentile among qualifiers, while his 7.7% walk rate puts him in the 35th percentile. He doesn’t strike out much (16.2%, 72nd percentile), but even so, 2018 saw his highest K rate since 2012, his first full major league season. A pull-happy hitter, he had 372 plate appearances against a traditional shift, the majors’ third-highest total. He hit for just a .243 average with a .311 slugging percentage and a 43 wRC+ in those plate appearances, which is 14th percentile stuff. Combine that with his non-blazing speed and you get a .259 BABIP, the majors’ 15th lowest among qualified hitters.

Read the rest of this entry »

Taylor Williams is a tad shorter than the 5-foot-11 he’s listed at in the Milwaukee media guide. But as the saying goes, size doesn’t matter. His fastball averaged 96.1 mph, and ticked up even higher, in his 2018 rookie season. More importantly, he consistently recorded outs. In 56 appearances out of the Brewers bullpen, Williams fanned 57 batters in 53 innings, and fashioned a 3.95 FIP. All in all, it was a successful campaign for the 27-year-old right-hander who hails from Camas, Washington.

He faced a speed bump on his way to Beer City. Seemingly on the fast track after a stellar first-full professional season, the 2013 fourth round pick suddenly began feeling elbow discomfort. Rest didn’t help, nor did a platelet-rich plasma injection. He underwent Tommy John surgery and missed all of the 2015 and 2016 seasons.

He barely missed a beat after returning to action. Williams pitched well enough at Double-A Biloxi to earn a five-game cameo with the Brewers in September 2017. Then came last season’s further step forward, which portends a continuation of what could arguably be called a David-slays-Goliath career.

The undersized — but by no means underperforming — hurler discussed his path to the big leagues midway through last summer.

———

Williams on being drafted out of Kent State: “I was originally at Washington State, but decided that I didn’t want to go back. This was after after my freshman year. I transferred to Mount Hood Community College, in Oregon, in part because I didn’t want to have to sit out a season. I finished my associates degree at Mount Hood, then transferred to Kent State.

“I’d played summer ball with some Kent State guys after my freshman year. That was up in the New England Collegiate Baseball League. The team I was with played out of Keene, New Hampshire. The NECBL is a good league. Our All-Star team actually beat Team USA that year. Read the rest of this entry »

The Cincinnati Reds did more than hire a new manager over the offseason. They also revamped their coaching staff. Two of the additions will be entrusted with optimizing the offense. Turner Ward, formerly with the Dodgers, is now the hitting coach. Donnie Ecker, who came over from the Angels, will serve as the assistant hitting coach. Neither will be faced with the challenge of helping Billy Hamilton turn a corner. The Reds non-tendered the enigmatic speedster, who subsequently signed with the Royals, back in November.

I recently asked Dick Williams about the decision to cut ties with Hamilton, who slashed .245/.298/.333 in his five seasons as Cincinnati’s centerfielder. Before we get to that, here is the team’s President of Baseball Operations on Ecker:

“We’ve had some really interesting sessions the last couple of days, where coaches have gotten up and talked about their areas. Donnie Ecker is a movement specialist. He has a bio-mechanical approach to the swing. We had some great hitters in the room, like Barry Larkin and Eric Davis. Donnie gave a bio-mechanical explanation of some of the things he sees in hitters, using descriptions and examples that all of us could understand.”

Would Ecker, along with Ward, have been able to transform Hamilton into the productive hitter he’s thus far failed to become? Read the rest of this entry »