Hall of Fame debate season is upon us, and subjectivity is inherent in the process. For every no-brainer candidate there are always several for whom a thumbs-up or a thumbs-down is largely in the eye of the beholder. Pushing bias aside — not always an easy exercise — one must weigh a ton of factors. Think “The Scales of Justice,” but with WAR, win totals, and DRS taking the place of a blindfold, a balance, and a sword.
Cutting to the chase, Omar Vizquel — arguably the most-polarizing player on the current ballot — probably deserves to be enshrined in Cooperstown. Attempting to not clumsily put a thumb in my eye while stating his case, I hereby offer the following statistical facts:
Vizquel ranks 43rd all-time with 2,877 hits. Nine of the 10 players directly below him on that list — Brooks Robinson among them — are in the Hall of Fame. The one who is not is Harold Baines. Vizquel had more hits as a shortstop than did Cal Ripken.
Many of you are home, or traveling home, for the Thanksgiving holiday. Not only aren’t you in the mood to read about baseball — I bet you’re especially not in the mood to read about Derek Dietrich, who the Marlins designated for assignment on Tuesday. I’m not really in the mood to linger on Derek Dietrich, myself, which is why I’m going to do this fast. Won’t waste your time. I’ll get to the point and leave you alone.
Dietrich is a useful player. He’s 29 years old, and he has a career wRC+ of 109. He can play a lot of positions, albeit none of them all that well. Hidden in the numbers, however, is that Dietrich has a specialty. Now, whenever anyone talks about players getting hit by a lot of pitches, the name that ought to come to mind is Brandon Guyer. We’ve written about Guyer at FanGraphs before, and indeed, if you set a low enough minimum, Guyer is easily the all-time leader in HBP rate. But Guyer has 1,487 big-league plate appearances. What if you set the minimum at, say, 1,500?
Given that cutoff, here are the highest career HBP rates since the turn of the last century:
1900 – 2018, minimum 1500 career plate appearances.
Dietrich has a lower rate than Guyer, but he’s also played a lot more than Guyer. Dietrich’s the all-time leader with a 1,500 PA cutoff. He’s the all-time leader with a 2,000 PA cutoff. Yes, it’s true that Guyer is more anomalous, but Dietrich is anomalous as well. As these things go, that’s a pretty healthy lead Dietrich has over second place.
Dietrich’s the all-time leader, maybe with a minimum-related asterisk, but all rate-stat leaderboards come with some kind of minimum, and they’re always arbitrary. So I want to give Dietrich his moment in the sun, in what’s otherwise probably a pretty crappy week for him. Dietrich has been hit by 93 pitches. He’s been hit by 13 pitches in an 0-and-2 count. He’s been hit by 39 pitches with the pitcher ahead. He’s been hit by seven pitches by Tanner Roark.
Courtesy of Baseball Savant, here are all the pitches that hit Dietrich somewhere, or were at least judged to have done so:
Here’s that weird low one over the plate:
Here’s one close to the strike zone:
Here’s another one close to the strike zone:
Here’s one I just think is kind of quirky:
Here’s the one time he’s been hit with the bases loaded:
Here’s the one worth the most positive win probability added:
And here’s the one that happened in the lowest-leverage situation:
At least in terms of WPA, Dietrich’s career hit-by-pitches have been worth almost a combined three wins. Dietrich has been hit by 93 pitches while drawing just 144 walks — a dozen of which have been intentional. Dietrich hasn’t exactly built a career around getting hit by the baseball, but getting hit by the baseball has given his career a jolt, and it’s a career that’s going to continue, despite all of the aches and pains. Every year, Derek Dietrich feels a lot of pain in his legs and his elbow. And, every year, for pitchers facing Derek Dietrich, he is a pain in the ass.
In 2017, Corey Dickerson was 28 years old, playing for the Rays. He spent a lot of his time at DH, but still, he was a solidly above-average hitter, and he finished as a 2+ win player. He had another two years of team control, and he was due for a raise in his second year of arbitration. During the offseason, though, the Rays designated Dickerson for assignment. Shortly thereafter, he was sent to the Pirates for a modest return. Part of the Rays’ thinking at the time was that they could easily replace Dickerson with C.J. Cron.
In 2018, Cron was 28 years old, playing for the Rays. He spent a lot of his time at DH, but still, he was a solidly above-average hitter, and he finished as a 2+ win player. He has another two years of team control, and he’s due for a raise in his second year of arbitration. On Tuesday, though, the Rays designated Cron for assignment. He might be traded or claimed any day. If the Rays receive anything, it will be a modest return.
It doesn’t look good when one of baseball’s cheapest franchises cuts ties with a player who’s due for a raise. It doesn’t look good when anyone cuts ties with a player coming off a legitimately productive full season. Cron’s projected salary for next year is only a little north of $5 million. By the numbers, he was worth more than that last season. Yet, as is usually the case, it’s not hard to figure out what’s happening, when you take a closer look. A variety of factors have come together to make Cron almost freely available.
Here are brief notes on the prospects who were traded ahead of the 40-man roster deadline. The Padres had several prospects who needed to be added to the 40-man — including Chris Paddack and Anderson Espinoza — and were the most active team.
Lockett will provide immediate rotation depth for a contending Cleveland team as a 5th/6th starter and will probably be on the 25-man bubble in the spring. His fastball, 91-94, is very average. He can also make it sink in the 87-90 range. Each of his off-speed pitches — a changeup and curveball — will flash above-average. His changeup has a tendency to sail a bit, but it moves.
I think Feliz, who turned 19 in October, was the best prospect traded today. He’s a very athletic conversion arm who can spin a good breaking ball. He was 88-92 with natural cut during the summer and should grow into more velocity. He’ll probably begin 2019 in extended spring training.
Brewer was a minor league free agent signee after the 2017 season. He was up and down between San Diego and El Paso a few times in 2018, and was 92-94 with cut, up to 96. At times he’d take a little off and throw more of a slider around 87-88 mph. Brewer also has plus-plus breaking ball spin rates on an 82-85 mph curveball he doesn’t locate very well. If that improves, Brewer will be a good 40-50 inning relief option.
Quiroz is the most interesting prospect traded today. He was Team Mexico’s leadoff hitter in the 2017 WBC (he hit two homers and a double in 6 at-bats) and spent 2015-2017 crushing the Mexican League. He signed with Boston in November 2017 and had a hot April in 2018 at Double-A, but then missed three and a half months with an abdominal strain. He only played in 24 games at Double-A, then had 62 extra plate appearances in the Arizona Fall League.
Here in Arizona, Quiroz looked pretty good. He’s a stocky and strong 5-foot-6, and he has average, all-fields power. He hit two full-extension, opposite field shots this fall, including one that got out just left of center field at Sloan Park in Mesa. He’s patient and makes good decisions at the plate. He’s also fine at second base (below-average arm, below-average runner, above-average athlete, average hands) and played a lot of other positions while in Mexico. He’ll either need to be viable at other positions or just hit enough to play second base every day. It appears he has a chance to do the latter.
Wick is a capable, generic middle reliever. He works 93-96, has an above-average slider, and a change-of-pace curveball.
Vosler is a an extreme fly ball hitter (over 50%) with huge platoon splits. He might be just a 30 bat, but Vosler can play third and first and he crushes lefties; I think he’s a corner bench bat or platoon player.
Foley was 91-93 this fall; his changeup and slider were average, and he struggled to throw strikes. He’s 25 and coming off a good year at Double-A.
Valdez didn’t sign a pro contract until he was 20, and Colorado didn’t push him to an age-appropriate level despite his success, so he’s a 23-year-old who hasn’t set foot in full-season ball. But he’s a really loose, wiry 6-foot-1 with a good arm action. He has been 92-94 with an above-average curveball in my looks. I like him as a late-blooming relief candidate.
Patrick Murphy won’t be available in next month’s Rule 5 draft. Along with four other players, the 23-year-old right-hander was added to the Toronto Blue Jays’ 40-man roster yesterday. His addition was well-earned. A third-round pick in the 2013 draft, Murphy has been a picture of perseverance. As noted in the feature we did on him last February, Murphy has undergone Tommy John surgery, thoracic outlet syndrome surgery, and had a nerve moved in his elbow.
This season, he went from question mark to fast-mover. In 27 starts — all but one with High-A Dunedin — Murphy fashioned a tidy 2.64 ERA and fanned 141 batters in 152.2 innings. Those numbers earned him an accolade; Murphy was named the Florida State League’s Pitcher of the Year.
The innings total was especially meaningful to him, as was the fact that he made all of his scheduled starts. Calling it “a big step,” the Chandler, Arizona native was able to show the organization — and prove to himself — that his am and body could hold up over a full season.
He also showed that he could hit triple digits. But while he considered it “pretty cool” to have hit 100 mph on the radar gun, Murphy was more enamored with a pitch that traversed 60-feet-six-inches in a comparably meandering manner. Read the rest of this entry »
Major league baseball teams closely guard their financial information. They have no problem talking about how much money players make, but they prefer to be more circumspect when disclosing the revenue teams take in or the scale of the profits owners make after those players have been paid and expenses accounted for. Because baseball’s ownership is a fairly insular group composed mostly of individuals and privately held businesses– and because there relatively few franchise sales to use as gauge–teams have been largely successful in preventing their financial information from going public. The Atlanta Braves present an exception.
Liberty Media, perhaps best known for its subsidiary SiriusXM Satellite Radio, purchased the Braves in 2007 for $400 million. Two years ago, they began offering stock in their separate divisions, which means the public can buy shares in the Braves as well as the real estate holdings around the stadium. It also means that, as a publicly traded company, the public is entitled to more information regarding the team’s finances than is typical. As I wrote in 2016, the club disclosed an $18 million loss in 2014 before depreciation and amortization. They were on the plus side in 2015 by about three million dollars before recording losses of about $20 million in 2016. During those three seasons, the team averaged 90 losses, with an average annual attendance of 2.1 million fans and a payroll just over $116 million per season. The financial losses in 2016 were largely attributable to a huge international signing class, most of the players from which were later declared free agents after MLB’s investigation into Atlanta’s signing methods.
But focusing exclusively on a team’s year-by-year profits obscures the financial reality of owning a baseball team because it doesn’t address the most profitable aspect of team ownership: the value of the franchise. Based on the calculations above, the Braves lost about $45 million from 2014 through the end of 2016. But Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei has admitted profits weren’t always the main consideration for the Braves, indicating that “historically, the measurement was we didn’t lose money.” Maffei’s remarks are consistent with statements from another team owner, Rogers Communications, which owns the Toronto Blue Jays, though the Blue Jays’ financials are harder to trace because Rogers owns a whole host of assets along with the baseball team. Per Forbes:
The media giant’s CFO, Tony Staffieri, said at a conference that Rogers wants to “surface value” from the Blue Jays, which he said is a “very valuable asset for us that we don’t get full credit for.”
For the Blue Jays, “surfacing value” would likely come in the form of realizing the profits from selling the team, as Rogers might not be getting “credit” if the team isn’t reaping huge profits. Then there’s the matter of Rogers also broadcasting Blue Jays games, which might further cloud the revenues from the baseball team. (The Braves used to benefit from some of that same confusion back when Ted Turner owned the club and TBS showed Braves games, but the financial model has shifted, and the Braves now have one of the worst local television contracts in baseball.) It is clear the calculus of franchise ownership is more complicated than mere gate sales. Read the rest of this entry »
The headliner in the James Paxtondeal is LHP Justus Sheffield. He’s been a top prospect for so long that it’s easy to find updated reports on him and understand where he falls in the prospects landscape. The short version is that he has an above-average-to-plus four-pitch mix, but his command ranges from average to below average, so he could still fit in a number of roles in the big leagues, ranging from multi-inning relief power arm to mid-rotation starter.
The more intriguing pieces of this deal are the other two names, RHP Erik Swanson and CF Dom Thompson-Williams. Neither were on the year-end version of THE BOARD, but both were on our radar; we intentionally didn’t comb through every 40 FV candidate in the in-season update since that’s what we focus on in the winter.
If we were doing the Mariners list today, both would be 40 FVs; they’re good examples of guys who sneak up on you during the season and in whom you have greater confidence moving up once the season ends. Swanson works 92-94 with a rising four-seamer, hitting 98 mph at times with some deception and life, and backs it up with a solid average slider and advanced feel for how to use both pitches in tandem. He could be something like a back-end starter who mostly uses two pitches, but he’s more likely to be the 5th-7th best starting option for a contender, and fits most comfortably as a David Phelps-type multi-inning fireman who can also do the job of long relief and spot-starting. There’s upside as a 50 FV here (4th starter or setup guy) but he’s more likely to be a 45 FV in the big leagues as a useful utility-type arm, so a 40+ or 40 FV would be appropriate.
Thompson-Williams is a sneaky athlete who’s a solid average runner with an average arm that some think can play a solid center field, but that most think is a fourth outfielder-type who can play all three spots. He has plus raw power and some feel to hit, so there’s low-end everyday upside if things continue to come together at the plate as they did in 2018. But he was 23 years old in High-A, so he’ll need to move quickly to be likely to reach that upside. More likely, Thompson-Williams is a useful bench option as a platoon at multiple spots or as a player who can provide some thump off the bench. Given his shorter track record and age, that’s a 40 FV for now with a chance to turn into a 45 FV with more performance, certainty, and proximity to the majors.
I’ve been asked a few times where these prospects fall on the dollar scale of our new prospect valuation metrics. Sheffield likely won’t rank exactly 54th on our next Top 100 in January, but the $29 million figure is about right. Swanson and Thompson-Williams combine for about $5 million more. Paxton is due in the $20-$25 million range for his next two years via arbitration while projected–using the same $9 million per WAR figure that generated the prospect values–to be worth somewhere around $60-$69 million in that span. So the Mariners receive around $35 million in prospect value, and send $35-$50 million of value back, depending on where Paxton ends up in his range. That’s within the margin for error, but is a bit lighter than expected for a Paxton package given the wide interest. That said, this trade appears to bring the Mariners out of the cellar of our first farm system rankings.
Ray Black hasn’t received much attention here at FanGraphs. That’s understandable. The 28-year-old San Francisco Giants reliever has consistently been clocked at over 100 mph, but only when he’s not on the shelf. And he’s spent a lot of time on the shelf.
Black had Tommy John surgery as a high school senior, a knee issue in college, then missed his first two-plus professional seasons after undergoing labrum surgery. A seventh-round pick by the Giants in 2011, Black didn’t take the mound until 2014. More obstacles followed. Notable among them were a second elbow surgery — this time to remove a bone spur — which resulted in him missing almost all of 2017.
This past season he missed a lot of bats — and not just down on the farm. Black made his long-in-coming MLB debut in early July and went on to fan 33 batters in 23.1 innings. He was even more overpowering in the minors, logging 66 punch-outs in 35.2 innings between Double-A and Triple-A. Not surprisingly, velocity played a big role in that success; he reached triple digits numerous times.
His heater and a return to health weren’t the only reasons he reached the big leagues this summer. With the help of San Francisco’s minor league pitching coordinator, and the Giants analytics staff, Black has become a bit of pitching nerd.
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Ray Black on technology and his slider: “The increase of technology in the game is incredible. StatCast. TrackMan. The Rapsodo machines. They show you your release point, the way your fingers come off the ball — all of this in super slow motion. You can break it down to so many frames per second.
“After one game against the Diamondbacks, they showed me the side-by-side of my fastball and my slider. If I throw my slider correctly, it’s mimicking my fastball — I’m keeping it on the same plane long enough that the hitter can’t recognize it. The technology can basically tell you if you had a good one or a bad one, and I had it working that day. This was after I got sent back down to Triple-A in late August.
“I’d given up a walk-off home run on my slider, in Cincinnati [on August 17]. When I went back and looked at that one, side by side with my fastball, I could see a big hump. I looked at the velo as well, and it had gone from an 88-90-mph pitch down to an 83-84-mph pitch. It was slurvier, with a hump, and it got tagged. Read the rest of this entry »
The free-agent market includes names like Patrick Corbin and Dallas Keuchel. There’s been chatter the Mets might be willing to trade Noah Syndergaard. There’s been chatter the Indians might be willing to trade Carlos Carrasco or Corey Kluber. But when the Mariners signaled their intent to take a step back this offseason, James Paxton became an obvious trade candidate, and quite possibly the best pitcher available. At least, the best pitcher available under realistic circumstances, since I don’t even know what it would take to pry Kluber away. Paxton rumors circulated for a couple of weeks, and now we’ve arrived at a conclusion, since Jerry Dipoto is hardly opposed to making moves in November. Paxton will be on his way to New York, where he’ll share a rotation with Luis Severino.
Before too long, Paxton’s presence will be taken for granted, and attention will turn to the Yankees’ pursuit of still another starter in free agency. We’re seemingly always focused on what’s just in front of us, and what might be in front of Yankees fans soon is Corbin, or Keuchel, or somebody else. They seem likely to make another impact move to bolster the starting rotation. But for this moment, getting Paxton is a move to be celebrated. For a variety of reasons, Paxton has flown somewhat under the radar, but he’s a No. 1 starter, added to a team with a No. 1 starter.
The Nationals have signed free-agent catcher Kurt Suzuki for two years and $10 million. The Nationals have had Kurt Suzuki before. In August 2012, they got him from the A’s. In August 2013, they sent him back to the A’s. In between, he batted 445 times, with a backup catcher’s slash line. Suzuki is now 35 years old, and he spent a long time as a relatively unremarkable catcher, by major-league standards. Never good enough or bad enough to stand out. I still don’t think Suzuki stands out in any way in the public consciousness, but when you look at the numbers, his career has taken a turn.
Over the past two seasons, out of all regular and semi-regular catchers, Suzuki the hitter ranks fourth in wRC+. First place is only four points away. His wRC+ ranks above that of Gary Sanchez. It ranks above that of J.T. Realmuto. It ranks above that of Willson Contreras. I don’t mean to suggest that Suzuki and Realmuto are one and the same or anything, but statistics reflect performance, and for the most part, performance reflects ability. Suzuki has had the ability to be this productive, over 661 plate appearances.
