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Projecting the Prospects Traded Over the Weekend

A bevy of trades went down over the weekend, as this year’s trade deadline-season entered into full swing. Here are the prospects who changed teams the last couple of days, as evaluated by my newly updated KATOH system. KATOH denotes WAR forecast for first six years of player’s major-league career. KATOH+ uses similar methodology with consideration also for Baseball America’s rankings.

The Andrew Miller Trade

Clint Frazier, OF, New York (AL)

KATOH: 2.7 WAR
KATOH+: 4.7 WAR

Frazier had been promoted to Triple-A a week ago after slashing a strong .276/.356/.469 with 13 steals at Double-A this year. He pairs a high walk rate with decent power and speed, making him one of the most promising offensive prospects in baseball. Despite possessing average speed, Frazier plays mostly the corner-outfield spots these days, and hasn’t graded out particularly well there defensively. This suggests most of his big-league value will come from his hitting. Still, considering he’s a 21-year-old who’s already mastered Double-A, his future looks bright.

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Nationals Acquire Elite Reliever for Relative Bargain

The Washington Nationals started with their sights on Aroldis Chapman. They’d deemed their bullpen to be in need of an upgrade, and Chapman was the most obvious candidate. Obviously, that didn’t happen. And not only did it not happen, but the return for Chapman was so high that clubs still interested in Andrew Miller could be seen as effectively priced out. From Washington, the Yankees reportedly asked for top prospect Lucas Giolito in exchange for Miller, and no matter what the tweets say, that was never going to happen.

So the Nationals had to lower their sights a bit. But they didn’t have to lower them far, because after Chapman and Miller, they might have gone out and gotten the next-best thing:

It’s a trade that makes sense for both teams, as they all should. The Pirates may not be strong current contenders, but they remain future contenders, if that makes sense. We’ve got their playoff odds at 16%, which is still very much in the race, but makes them a longshot. What the Pirates have beyond this year, though, is a strong core coupled with a handful of promising, near-ready prospects that ought to keep the club’s contention window open for years to come. They’re not going away anytime soon, but they’ve been largely done in this season by uncharacteristically poor starting pitching.

So they moved an expiring piece. Mark Melancon’s been a fixture of Pittsburgh’s recent revival, but he’s gotten expensive, and he’ll be a free agent at year’s end. Teams like the Pirates typically don’t retain relievers like Melancon when they hit the market, so they got what they could. That means Felipe Rivero, a lefty reliever who touches the high-90’s in the majors right now, and that means Taylor Hearn, a lefty (future) reliever who stands 6-foot-5 and touches the high-90’s in the minors right now. They’ve got Rivero for five more years. They’ve got complete control of Hearns. The Pirates sold, but not really. They made this year’s team slightly worse in going from Melancon from Rivero, but they’ve made future year’s teams better by adding Rivero (and Hearns) for a player who was set to be gone anyway. It’s the perfect kind of retooling move for a small-market team operating within a window of contention.

And yet, it’s hard not to view this return as relatively light, at least up against what the Yankees just received for Chapman. The Yankees got a top-25 prospect in Gleyber Torres, a fringe-100 prospect in Billy McKinney, a pitcher capable of starting with major league success under his belt in Adam Warren, and then some. Speculation around a Melancon-to-Washington trade invoked names like right-handed starter Erick Fedde, who ranked 61st in Baseball America’s midseason update. The actual return featured a pair of lefty relievers. Exciting lefty relievers, but lefty relievers nonetheless; one of whom has already had his clock started, the other of whom didn’t crack top-10 prospect lists in the Nationals’ system at the start of the season.

Of course, Chapman throws 105 and because of that, is Aroldis Chapman. Melancon isn’t that. But he’s closer than one might think! Like, for instance, since joining the Pirates in 2013, Melancon’s 1.80 ERA is the lowest among all 255 pitchers with at least 200 innings thrown. He’s been better at preventing runs than literally everyone over the last three-plus years. And while he might not do it with the sort of eye-popping stuff to which we’re accustomed from seeing of the game’s top relievers, there’s no arguing with the results:

Most Valuable Relievers, 2013-Present
Name IP K% BB% K-BB% GB% HR/9 ERA FIP WAR RA9-WAR tWAR
Aroldis Chapman 218 44.2% 10.9% 33.3% 37.8% 0.54 2.03 1.81 8.5 8.2 8.4
Dellin Betances 229 40.7% 9.0% 31.7% 48.2% 0.55 1.88 1.89 8.0 8.5 8.3
Kenley Jansen 240 37.8% 5.6% 32.2% 35.2% 0.71 2.13 1.95 8.4 8.1 8.3
Mark Melancon 260 23.8% 4.2% 19.7% 56.8% 0.31 1.80 2.27 6.9 8.7 7.8
Wade Davis 183 32.2% 8.8% 23.4% 45.3% 0.15 1.08 1.97 6.0 9.3 7.7
tWAR: 50/50 split of RA9-WAR and FIP-WAR

Again, the style is a bit different, but when we’ve talked about the Chapman’s and Jansen’s and Davis’ of the world, Melancon’s been right there all along. Here’s another way to view things, if you’re not as keen on using WAR to evaluate relievers:

Win Probability Added, all relievers, 2013-Present

  1. Mark Melancon, +11.74
  2. Tony Watson, +10.63
  3. Zach Britton, +10.55
  4. Wade Davis, +10.42
  5. Dellin Betances, +10.07

By WPA, no reliever’s been more valuable than Melancon during his time in Pittsburgh. By WAR, it’s only Chapman, Betances, and Jansen. You see the second name there on the WPA leaderboard also plays for the Pirates, so it’s not like they’re suddenly hurting for high-leverage relief options, and Watson will still be there next year, too. But the Nationals just added one of the game’s elite to an already great bullpen.

Not that there aren’t flags with Melancon. I’m hesitant to call them red flags, but they’re orange or maroon, maybe. His walk rate is still great, but it’s also the highest it’s been during his Pittsburgh tenure. The curveball’s being spotted less often at the bottom edge of the zone, and is more often winding up in the dirt, and batters are laying off:

Brooksbaseball-Chart

Fewer swings against the curve explains the slight uptick in walks, and it explains the downtick in ground balls — the curve has always been Melancon’s big ground ball pitch. Melancon doesn’t possess top-shelf raw stuff, so he’s thrived by limiting walks and homers. Limiting walks and homers are predicated on elite command, and there’s some evidence that the command could be starting to slip. For now, though, the command still looks great. And those maroon flags can be the next team’s concern, anyway; the Nationals only care about the next three months.

Funny thing about the Nationals bullpen is, before the Melancon trade, they were projected for 1.8 rest-of-season WAR, and after  they’re Melancon trade, they’re projected for… 1.8 rest-of-season WAR. But what they’ve done is shift their leverage, the sort of thing that a WAR projection might struggle to grasp. Melancon is now clearly the best option in Washington’s bullpen, and he’ll receive the most important innings. Less important innings are to follow for Jonathon Papelbon, as should be the case. Shawn Kelley remains elite. It’s the kind of 1-2-3 punch we’ve become accustomed to seeing in the late innings of playoff games.

And while I’ve referred to the cost as a bargain within this post, it’s really only a bargain relative to Chapman. Really, it’s the kind of return we should expect for three-plus months of an elite reliever. The kind of return we might’ve expected, say, a week ago. The Chapman move was just an outlier, for whatever reason. Take that how you will. The Pirates retooled, as they should have. The Nationals improved their high-leverage innings for the stretch run by acquiring one of the game’s best run preventers. It looks like a win for both clubs, and yet somehow it also feels like something of a steal by Washington, based on what we’ve recently seen. Maybe the Pirates could have done better for Melancon. Or maybe the Cubs just gave up a ton for Chapman.


The Pirates Have the Easiest Schedule Left

Baseball schedules aren’t totally balanced. They get most of the way, but they’re well short of perfect, part by accident, and part by design. At this point, every team in baseball has something like 70 games left before the start of the playoffs. Among the remaining team schedules, it looks like the Pirates have the easiest one. The Yankees, meanwhile, would appear to have the hardest one. Good for the Pirates. Bad for the Yankees.

You can leave now if you want. You’ve already got two pieces of information, and I’m not one to mess around with you. Imagine all the time you could save! But maybe you want to see the rest of the landscape. Maybe you want a bit of an explanation. It’s your call — I’m writing this now no matter what. I’m also now moving to the next paragraph.

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Andrew McCutchen’s Reminder That Baseball Is Cruel

Every baseball player has bad days — it’s an inevitability in a sport so deeply tied to failure. For the most part, these failures are quickly dismissed and/or forgotten. A rough seven-run outing for a pitcher is a day when he just didn’t have “it” or batted balls had eyes. An 0-for-4 game at the plate is barely a hiccup in the span of a 162-game season. But, on occasion, there are days so bad that they elicit sympathy from even the most hardened baseball fans. You know the ones I’m talking about, the games that make you cringe when you check a box score. The games like the one Andrew McCutchen had on Sunday.

It wasn’t all McCutchen’s fault. Eighteen-inning games are freaks of nature which result from a convergence of a great many (un)lucky coincidences. If Mark Melancon had thrown a different pitch to Daniel Murphy in the ninth inning, McCutchen’s day may have ended up much differently. If any hitter for either the Pirates or Nationals had executed just one more quality swing earlier in the game, McCutchen could have been spared. But none of those things happened and, instead, McCutchen stepped to the plate eight times on Sunday and failed to reach base even once.

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Projecting Pirates Call-Up Josh Bell

Almost right after after treating us to Tyler Glasnow day, the Pirates are giving us another promising debutante to fuss over. First base prospect Josh Bell will debut for Pittsburgh in tonight’s game against the Cubs. Bell crushed Triple-A pitching this year to the tune of .324/.407/.535.

Bell posted a healthy .212 ISO in Triple-A this year, but in years past, he’s hit for an underwhelming amount of power — especially for a 6-foot-4 first baseman. Between 2014 and 2015 combined, he managed just 16 homers, and didn’t exactly compensate with loads of doubles and triples. Instead, he made lots of contact, which resulted in loads of singles. Read the rest of this entry »


Fixing the Pitcher the Pirates (!) Made Worse

The Pirates have developed a reputation for their work with pitchers. Ray Searage seems to receive most of the credit, but the club’s recent successes with arms like Francisco Liriano, Edinson Volquez, A.J. Burnett, J.A. Happ, and Joe Blanton is probably a group effort to some degree. No matter who the true pitcher whisperer is, the Pirates have clearly become a team that takes pitchers who weren’t great and turns them into pitchers who are good.

It’s not clear if the club is particularly adept at targeting pitchers who are poised to recover or if they have a formula for fixing arms with strong potential. In either case, all their recent success suggests the Pirates have something working for them that most teams don’t. And when a reputation like that takes hold, it’s easy for us to fall into the trap of assuming they’re going to go on like this forever. Call it a Ray Searage halo.

Unfortunately for the Pirates, the halo has not protected Jon Niese.

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Scouting Debutante Pirate, Tyler Glasnow

When I first lay eyes on a prospect, especially one who has a unique physical build, I search my mind’s eye for precedent. Making a “body comp” is a somewhat outdated way for scouts to communicate and describe a player’s physicality to a person who has never seen that player. The advent of the internet has made this kind of communication obsolete (why bother telling you that I think Jeff Hoffman is built like Jamal Crawford when I can just show you a video of Hoffman pitching and you can see it for yourself?) and now I mostly make body comps as an personal exercise to help project a player’s physical trajectory a little more accurately.

When I first saw Tyler Glasnow, who is an ectomorphic 6-foot-8, I wracked my brain trying to find a similarly built pitcher before I gave up and moved on to small forwards. Still, I came up empty, and I ended up writing “construction crane” and “pteranodon” in my notes. Glasnow has long legs, a small torso and relatively short arms for someone his size. I’ve seen only on other pitcher (White Sox righty Alec Hansen) whose physique closely resembles his. His unique physical makeup is the foundation upon which one of baseball’s most bizarre prospects has been built and influences his entire repertoire.

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The Good Outweighs the Bad with Pittsburgh’s Tyler Glasnow

Less than a month ago, the Pirates called up top prospect Jameson Taillon from the minor leagues, and slotted him into their struggling rotation. With Taillon now sidelined by shoulder fatigue, the Pirates have once again dipped into their minor-league repository. Today, they’ve called up yet another top-tier pitching prospect in Tyler Glasnow. Glasnow’s spent the past three months putting up sick-nasty numbers with the Pirates’ Triple-A affiliate. In 96 innings across 17 starts, he boasts a 1.78 ERA and 2.94 FIP. He’s struck out a remarkable 30% of batters faced this year, which is tops among qualified Triple-A hurlers. Triple-A hitters proved to be no match for his filthy fastball-curveball combination.

Glasnow’s mowed down minor-league hitters, but many are concerned that his lackluster command will prevent him from succeeding at the next level. That’s a big reason why the Pirates kept him in the minors as long as they did, and why they passed him over for Taillon when they needed a pitcher last month. As lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen noted in a recent chat, “His stuff is hellacious and pitchers with that body type often develop command late, but there’s a non-zero chance Glasnow never throws enough strikes to dominate.”

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Pirates’ Prospect Austin Meadows, Then and Now

The Pirates are currently only four games out of the last Wild Card spot, and their star center fielder is currently under contract for two more years after this one. Regardless, that hasn’t stopped people from wondering if Pittsburgh should trade Andrew McCutchen, even if the lack of an obvious trade partner makes a deal unlikely. Usually part of the argument is that the team has a near-ready replacement in Austin Meadows.

The 21-year-old center fielder just laid waste to Double-A and is now learning the ropes at the highest level in the minor leagues. His power has finally blossomed, and he looks like the five-tool prospect that’s made him a top prospect ever since he entered affiliated baseball as a top-10 pick in the 2013 draft.

It wasn’t always super easy for the player, though. I caught up with Meadows in the Arizona Fall League last October, when he was coming off an up-and-down season that saw him slug at a below-average rate both in High-A and in the Fall League. We talked about what he needed to work on. Then I asked lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen how well Meadows has addressed those issues, so as to get the best sense of Meadows over the course of the last year.

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The Time Is Not Right to Trade Andrew McCutchen

A few weeks ago, when the Pirates got swept by the Cardinals, while also losing Gerrit Cole and Francisco Cervelli to the DL the same weekend, I noted that the Pirates might have to be a seller this summer, as their playoff odds has dropped down to 14%, and it was looking like this might not be their season. Well, in the two weeks since I wrote that post, their playoff odds have continued their freefall.

chart (36)

As it stands this morning, we’re projecting the Pirates to finish at 80-82, and with the Cubs, Nationals, and Giants all looking like they’ll finish north of 90 wins, that leaves the Mets, Dodgers, Cardinals, and Marlins all looking like Wild Card contenders, each with expected totals between 85-90 wins. To make it into the Wild Card game, the Pirates would have to leapfrog over three of those four teams; that would require them to play at over a .600 clip the rest of the season, most likely, and this doesn’t look like a team that is likely to go on that kind of sustained run.

So barring a miraculous turnaround over the next month, the Pirates are going to be sellers. According to the rumor mill, teams are already kicking the tires on Mark Melancon and Francisco Liriano, and as the deadline draws closer, it’s easy to imagine interest growing in the team’s other contract-year role players like David Freese, Neftali Feliz, and Sean Rodriguez. But with the team looking like a likely seller, attention has turned to a less-likely trade target, with speculation mounting that perhaps now is the time for the Pirates to trade Andrew McCutchen.

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