I get it — many relievers aren’t that exciting. There’s the highest tier, and then there’s all the rest, and it can be hard to tell which among the rest are really and truly good. This time of year, seemingly dozens of adequate relievers find new teams, and they always have their various upsides. They all seem okay, which means few of them stand out. No one pays close attention to the winter meetings to see who’ll get a new option for the seventh or eighth inning.

But, look. According to reports, Tommy Hunter is signing a two-year contract with the Phillies. Now, one notable thing is that the Phillies are not good. They’re not good, and yet they’re signing Hunter, to go with their signing of Pat Neshek. Might as well do something. Nobody wants a terrible bullpen. Hunter isn’t in the Kenley Jansen tier, and he’s not thought of as being close to Wade Davis. It’s very possible you didn’t even realize Hunter just appeared in 61 major-league games with the Rays. It was quiet. But Hunter brought his game up to a new level. As a reliever in 2017, Tommy Hunter was legitimately great.

This gets to the core of what I mean. Behold Hunter’s career year-by-year walk and strikeout rates.

Hunter has always thrown hard. His fastball rides in around 96, and, if you can believe it, he throws something resembling a cutter that averages 94. Hunter has never before been on the major-league disabled list with an arm injury. His arm has always been good, and this past season, Hunter best put it to use. Among relievers, he ranked in the 89th percentile in wOBA allowed, by names like Brad Hand and Raisel Iglesias. Even better, by Baseball Savant’s expected wOBA allowed, he ranked in the 97th percentile. Behind Roberto Osuna, and in front of Mike Minor. Hunter, you could say, broke out, and from the sounds of things, he went and got Raysed.

One thing the Rays did was have Hunter throw fewer and fewer four-seam fastballs.

Hunter leaned more often on his cutter, especially against lefties, and partially as a consequence, you can see a distinct change in Hunter’s overall pitch pattern. Below, on the left, you see where Hunter threw his pitches from 2014 through 2016. On the right, you have 2017.

Hunter stayed away against righties, and he stayed in against lefties. Armed with good command, Hunter was able to use his curveball off of that arm-side cutter, and lefties slugged just .261. Righties didn’t fare a whole lot better, so, when you combine everything, Hunter was a hard-throwing strikeout reliever who could retire opponents on both sides of the plate.

What Brandon Morrow had going for him, Hunter basically had, too, and Hunter is younger, with a better record of health. It’s a little strange, therefore, to see Hunter sign with a team unlikely to feature in the race, but then, every team wants late-inning stability, and obviously there’s the trade consideration down the road. It’s possible Hunter was met with some industry skepticism; teams might not have known whether Hunter could stay so successful as part of another, non-Rays organization. Now the Phillies will give him some dozens of innings, if everything goes well, and then if Hunter looks more or less the same, he’ll be in great July demand. Power pitchers who throw strikes in big situations are limited in number, and every team at the deadline wants a deeper bullpen.

There’s nothing unique here about the Phillies’ approach. Bad teams have long looked to flip relievers midseason. Hunter is the real story, looking like a potential shutdown setup guy a year after settling for a minor-league contract. All he needed was a handful of pointers from his handlers in Tampa Bay. The rest of it was all up to him.

Last fall, the Phillies purchased Pat Neshek from the Astros and exercised his $6.5 million option. He was easily their best reliever, and then he netted the team three prospects at the trade deadline. Now he’s back — for two years and $16.5 million (and a $500k trade kicker this time!) as Ken Rosenthal is reporting — and the Phillies hope he can continue his good work for the team.

Last year’s production was a high water mark for the pitcher, thanks to a change in philosophy against lefties, perhaps. He had his best career numbers against southpaws last year, thanks to a shift in his use of the slider. He not only used it more against lefties than he had since his first full year in the league, but he also varied its location better.

Take a look at his slider locations to lefties in 2016 (left), when they hit for a .379 wOBA against him, and then those locations in 2017 (right), when they hit for a .261 wOBA against him.

Wait a second. The bad year is the one where he located the slider to two spots and mixed it up. Last year he was awesome against lefties, and he basically threw it a ton and down the middle against them. Weird.

No matter. Against righties, Neshek has been consistently great. He has the sixth-best wOBA against right-handed hitters over the last five years.

Maybe he’ll only be dominant against righties, and then be traded again. That’ll be just fine.

When Travis Sawchick asked you which question was most important on Shohei Ohtani’s questionnaire, you answered overwhelmingly that the team capable of keeping him healthy — or of convincing Ohtani that they’d keep him healthy — would win out. Travis went on to use a metric, Roster Resource’s “Roster Effect” rating, to get a sense of which team that might be. The Brewers, Cubs, Pirates, and Tigers performed best by that measure.

Of course, that’s just one way of answering the question. Health is a tough thing to nail down. To figure out which team is capable of keeping Ohtani the healthiest, it’s worth considering the possible implications of health in baseball. Roster Effect, for example, considers the quality of the player and seems to be asking: which rosters were affected the most by poor health? That’s one way of approaching it. Let’s try a few others and see who comes out on top.

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Last week at the site, Craig Edwards attempted to estimate each club’s free-agent spending power for the offseason. The task is a difficult one. Because major-league clubs aren’t tax-funded public institutions, one can’t simply file a Freedom of Information Act request to view each team’s finances. It’s necessary, therefore, to use a club’s past payroll figures as a guide to the future.

One of the most interesting results from Edwards’ exercise concerns the Phillies. By Edwards’ methodology, Philadelphia has about $70 million available to spend this offseason, trailing only the rebuilding Tigers in that regard. They might even have more potential spending power than that: despite residing in one of the largest markets in the country, the Phillies have only an estimated $37 million in projected salary after arbitration.

The Phillies, like a host of teams, have been connected to Giancarlo Stanton this offseason. That makes some sense, as they could easily take on Stanton’s contract. The Phillies could add Stanton and still have another $40-plus million to add additional help and try and accelerate their return to competitiveness.

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Last night, the Rookie of the Year awards were announced, with Cody Bellinger and Aaron Judge getting every first place vote in their respective league, as expected. The rest of the ballots were more interesting, with plenty of options for second and third place in both leagues. Eno posted his NL ROY ballot last night, explaining why he went with Rhys Hoskins and Paul Dejong as his post-Bellinger votes.

I also had an NL ROY ballot this year, but it differed from what Eno turned in, and in fact, differed from what everyone else turned in too. I was the only voter to include Reds RHP Luis Castillo on a ballot, as I put him third behind Bellinger and Dejong, leaving off Hoskins, among others. And while I know down-ballot Rookie of the Year voting isn’t the most exciting thing going on right now, I think it is useful to use that vote as a way to think about how we balance quantity and quality when determining past value.

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Congratulations to Cody Bellinger for winning the National League Rookie of the Year Award! While I’m actually writing this post before the award is announced, the case for Bellinger is pretty clear — no National League rookie had a bat like his while playing in so many games. As a bonus, Bellinger also recorded strong numbers on the basepaths and became one of 12 first basemen to add four or more games in center field since free agency began in 1974. Using a swing that the Dodgers helped him build, he hit the third-most home runs in a rookie season, ever. Bellinger had a top-20 rookie season over that time span in the National League and deserves his award for regular-season excellence.

But, as a member of the Baseball Writers Association, I had the benefit and honor of fulling out a full ballot for this award, not just one name. It’s down the ballot where things got difficult. It’s down the ballot where I began to wonder how much the future matters when believing the past. It’s down the ballot where I hemmed and hawed, considering the qualities of players as differently excellent as Luis Castillo, Paul DeJong, and Rhys Hoskins.

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When a baseball player dies, as Roy Halladay did yesterday, it can be difficult to know what to say. I never met Roy Halladay. I don’t have any personal anecdotes to share or any insight into who he was as a person. I don’t know his family. I only knew him through the television, when I watched him work. And you can’t really know a person that way.

The people that really did know Roy Halladay seemed enamored of him. In awe of him, not just as a player, but as a person. In the last 24 hours, the universal reaction within the baseball community has been that the game lost not just a guy who was great at pitching, but an ambassador for the sport. The stories that have emerged are both heartbreaking and inspiring. Stories like Jayson Werth’s:

“For a guy that was very serious, quiet and reserved, I can remember it like it was yesterday, the look on his face to see us waiting for him to celebrate together,” Werth said. “He loved the game but played for his teammates, for us to love him back like that you could tell it meant a lot. I’d never seen him so genuinely happy. I’ll never forget the expression on his face.”

I never got to see that Roy Halladay. Most of us probably don’t have that kind of connection with him, but yet, there is still the natural desire to mourn. For most of us, Roy Halladay wasn’t really part of our lives anymore, but it still feels like we lost something. So, today, while acknowledging that our loss cannot compare to the sort endured by those who knew him in a more personal way, I’d like to honor the Roy Halladay I did know.

This guy.

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The Detroit Tigers are in full rebuild mode, and Isaac Paredes projects as a big part of their future. His bat is the primary reason why. Despite an August swoon that caused his numbers to plummet, the 18-year-old shortstop finished the season with a .725 OPS. Given that he was one of the youngest players in the Midwest League, that’s not exactly chicken soup.

Paredes was acquired by the Tigers, along with Jeimer Candelario, in the trade-deadline deal that sent Alex Avila and Justin Wilson to the Cubs, and the news threw him for a loop. When I talked a him a week and a half later, the Hermosillo, Mexico native admitted to having been shocked and not particularly pleased. His initial thought was “this is something bad.”

Once his head stopped spinning, his attitude shifted to “this is a good thing.” Paredes realized he was going to an organization that would be relying heavily on players just like himself. Read the rest of this entry »

Give it enough chances and baseball will make you look bad, because at the end of the day, baseball’s a fair game, sufficiently fair that everyone is bound to think it isn’t every once in a while. Baseball can be mean to players at the bottom of the roster, sure, but baseball can also be mean to, say, Miguel Cabrera. It can be mean to Mike Trout! And it can be mean to Clayton Kershaw. Monday evening, it made Kershaw look bad in the blink of an eye.

In his career, when the bases have been loaded, Kershaw hasn’t been perfect. Baseball makes it impossible to be perfect. Kershaw had allowed bases-loaded hits. He’d allowed a bases-loaded double, five times. He’d issued a bases-loaded walk, six times. Once, Kershaw was responsible for a bases-loaded hit-by-pitch. Another time, he was responsible for a bases-loaded balk. For good measure, there was also once a bases-loaded wild pitch. Even before Monday, with the bases loaded, Kershaw had made mistakes. But he’d never allowed a home run. When Kershaw woke up Monday morning, he didn’t know how it felt to give up a big-league grand slam. When he went to bed, it was probably all he could think about.

Aaron Altherr. Officially, Aaron Altherr is the reason Kershaw can’t ever catch up to Jim Palmer.

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A couple of weeks ago, I talked about why Rhys Hoskins‘ early process should give Phillies fans a reason for real excitement. His combination of frequently hitting the ball in the air while still making above-average contact is the foundation for high-level offensive production.

At that point, though, Hoskins had just 47 plate appearances in the Majors. Anyone can have a good 47 plate appearances, so I tried to emphasize that the results of his first 10 or so games shouldn’t have changed your opinion of Hoskins much. There were encouraging signs in the approach, and other hitters with similar skillsets also got overlooked by prospect rankings on their way to stardom, but I tried to avoid making a big deal about Hoskins running a 159 wRC+ for a couple of weeks.

Well, it’s been three weeks since that post went up, and now the results themselves are worth paying attention to.

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