I’m not going to sugarcoat it, it’s been a slow week for deadline trades. The way the haves and have-nots line up this year, impactful additions are few and far between. The teams out of the playoff picture don’t have a lot to give up, and the teams with intriguing rental players are mostly already in the race. But the Pittsburgh Pirates, consistent innovators in ways to do weird things without contending, have entered the fray by trading Ke’Bryan Hayes to the Cincinnati Reds in exchange for Taylor Rogers, minor leaguer Sammy Stafura and cash considerations, as Mark Feinsand first reported.

Hayes is about as far from a deadline rental as you can imagine. He signed a lengthy contract extension in April 2022 and is still on that deal; he’s under team control through as long as 2030, in fact, and for cheap! He’s due an average of $7.5 million annually for the next four years, and the pact’s 2030 club option is for just $12 million with a $6 million buyout. That’s the kind of deal that gets teams salivating: long team control at rates that would barely get you a good middle reliever in free agency.

It gets better! Hayes is one of the best defenders in baseball. Since his 2020 debut, he leads all major leaguers with 73 Outs Above Average. Think that’s a fluke? He leads all major leaguers in Defensive Runs Saved – by 28 runs! The distance between him and second place is the same as the distance between second place and 25th. There are plenty of good third basemen with good defensive numbers. Hayes is head and shoulders ahead of all of them, unquestionably, and he’s lapping the third base field again this year, with 15 OAA (second place is four guys tied with four). Read the rest of this entry »

There’s been a lot of chatter about surplus value around these parts in recent days. As Ben Clemens wrote last week, surplus value informs a large part of a given player’s appeal as a trade target. Count up all the projected WAR remaining on a player’s deal, multiply it by the price of a single win, subtract the remaining cost of the contract, and what’s left over is an estimate of the player’s surplus value. Anything less than zero, and the contract can be considered underwater; if a contract is underwater, a team seeking to offload that player would expect to receive nothing of value in a trade return.

A couple of months back, my assumption was that Mitch Keller’s contract was ever-so-slightly underwater. The right-hander inked a five-year, $77 million extension in February of 2024. His first year on that deal was thoroughly mediocre: He made nearly every start, but posted a so-so 4.25 ERA/4.08 FIP. Over the two years preceding the deal, it was much of the same. His 4.13 ERA between 2022 and 2024 ranked 68th out of 106 pitchers with at least 300 innings pitched; his 3.92 FIP ranked 51st. The strikeout and walk rates were nearly dead-on league average.

Is a roughly 2-WAR starter worth tens of millions of guaranteed dollars? Your mileage may vary. Patrick Corbin went to the Rangers for $1.1 million after posting a 1.8-WAR season last year. Andrew Heaney got two years and $25 million after delivering 2.2 WAR. Nick Pivetta, notably younger than both of those guys but still three years older than Keller, signed with the Padres for four years and $55 million. If Keller had hit the open market after the 2024 season, when he put up 2.2 WAR in 31 starts (178 innings), I’d imagine he would have received a contract similar to what Pivetta earned after his 2.0 WAR and 145 2/3 innings. Perhaps Keller’s deal wasn’t terrible, but it also wasn’t something teams would be dying to get on their books.

But now it’s the peak of trade deadline season, and the 29-year-old Keller is a hot commodity. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported last Tuesday that the Blue Jays are in on Keller. That’s in addition to reported interest from the Cubs, Mets and Yankees. Nearly half of the most serious World Series contenders are in on the Keller sweepstakes, suggesting that contract is now perceived as having surplus value. Perhaps this has something to do with the haggard state of these teams’ rotations, but I’m inclined to believe that isn’t the entire reason. Read the rest of this entry »

COOPERSTOWN, NY — During his 19-year major league career, Ichiro Suzuki rarely spoke English in public unless it was to express his thoughts about the temperature in Kansas City in August as it pertained to certain rodents. On Sunday in Cooperstown, however, he flawlessly delivered his 19-minute Hall of Fame induction speech in his second language, showing off his sly sense of humor while speaking about the professionalism, respect, and love for the fans that drove his career. “Today, I am feeling something I thought I would never feel again. I am a rookie,” he began, referring to his first seasons with the Orix Blue Wave in 1992 and the Seattle Mariners in 2001. “But please, I am 51 years old now. Easy on the hazing. I don’t need to wear a Hooters uniform again,” he quipped to the 52 returning Hall of Famers, four fellow entrants in the Class of 2025, and the estimated 30,000 people who attended the ceremony at the Clark Sports Center.

“The first two times, it was easier to manage my emotions because my goal was always clear: to play professionally at the highest level,” continued Suzuki. “This time is so different, because I could never imagine as a kid in Japan that my play would lead me to a sacred baseball land that I didn’t even know was here. People often measure me by my records: 3,000 hits, 10 gold gloves, 10 seasons of 200 hits. Not bad, eh?

“But the truth is, without baseball, you would say this guy is such a dumbass. I have bad teammates, right, Bob Costas?”

Elsewhere, Suzuki poked fun at having fallen one vote short of becoming just the second Hall candidate elected unanimously: “Three thousand hits or 262 hits in one season are achievements recognized by the writers. Well… all but one. And by the way, the offer for that writer to have dinner at my home has now expired.” On a more serious note, he advised distinguishing between dreams and goals: “Dreams are not always realistic, but goals can be possible if you think deeply about how to reach them. Dreaming is fun, but goals are difficult and challenging… If you are serious about it, you must think critically about what is necessary to achieve it.” Read the rest of this entry »

With the draft and the All-Star Game out of the way, the next waypoint on the baseball calendar is the trade deadline. In other words, it is officially Trade Season. And the Royals and Pirates kicked it off on Wednesday morning with the first deadline deal. I got a little excited; sometimes, when the Royals and Pirates make a deal, you end up with Sir Francis Drake’s invaluable contribution to the defeat of the Spanish Armada at the Battle of Gravelines in 1588.

This was not one of those times. Kansas City sent minor league infielder Cam Devanney to Pittsburgh in exchange for Adam Frazier. Read the rest of this entry »

Longtime readers of this site might remember my tremendous affection for Pittsburgh reliever David Bednar. It’s OK if you don’t; I last wrote about him in May 2023, which is so long ago the Pirates were in first place at the time. Bednar was a rock back in the day, a top-class closer for a team that frequently disappointed. But from 2021 to the end of 2023, he was terrific: ERAs in the low-to-mid-2.00s every year, with strikeout rates in the high 20s and low 30s.

That trend stopped abruptly in 2024. Again, this wasn’t front-page national news; wise fans had by this point learned to ignore any Pirate shorter than 6-foot-6. But Bednar posted a 5.77 ERA, blew a career-worst seven saves, and saw his strikeout rate plummet to 22.1%, more than 10 percentage points from where it was two years earlier.

A sad development, but not an unforeseeable one. Relief pitchers, even good ones, even reliable ones, have a shorter shelf life than most condiments. But he’s back this year; in 36 games, Bednar has a 2.53 ERA, a career-high 34.6% strikeout rate, a 6.9% walk rate (his lowest since he joined the Pirates five years ago), a 2.02 FIP, and 13 saves out of 13 opportunities. Read the rest of this entry »

Since 2021, Ke’Bryan Hayes is the leader in OAA among all infielders. As one of the best defenders in the sport, his floor is very high. Even with his career 87 wRC+, he has still been worth about 3 WAR per 162 games. If he could be a consistently average offensive player, he’d be one of the most valuable players at his position. This is a story we all know. With his name swirling in trade rumors, you have to imagine other teams are thinking about the possibility more so now than in the past. His issues stem from his suboptimal swing path, and if he’s traded, that will be what his new hitting coach tries to fix.

In the last calendar year (459 plate appearances), Hayes has a 60 wRC+. That is bad! But despite those struggles, it’s not like he is completely lacking offensive ability. His bat speed is only a little below average. His strikeout and whiff rates are better than league average over the past three seasons. He hits the ball hard more often than not, and he chases at about an average rate. Those are all things you could work with if you’re trying to manufacture a league average hitter. But if you’re doing all this and your path is rarely working in an ideal direction, you’ll always have limitations on what you do when you actually make contact. Read the rest of this entry »

Last December, 33 years after he last played, Dave Parker was finally elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame. The lefty-swinging, righty-throwing “Cobra” had once been regarded as the game’s best all-around player, a 6-foot-5, 230-pound slugger who could hit for power and average, had plenty of speed as well as a strong and accurate throwing arm, and exuded as much charisma and swagger as any player of his era. But injuries, cocaine use, and poor conditioning curtailed his prime, and while he rebounded to complete a lengthy and successful career, in 15 years on the writers’ ballots, he’d never drawn even one-third of the support needed for election. He hadn’t come close in three tries on Era Committee ballots, either, but buoyed by the positive attention he had generated while waging a very public battle with Parkinson’s Disease, and backed by a favorable mix of familiar faces on the Contemporary Baseball Era Committee, he finally gained entry to the Hall, alongside the late Dick Allen.

Unfortunately, Parker did not live to deliver the speech he said he’d been holding for 15 years. Just shy of one month from the day he was to be inducted into the Hall of Fame, he passed away at age 74 due to complications from Parkinson’s Disease, which he was diagnosed with in 2012.

Parker is the third Hall of Famer to die between election and induction. Eppa Rixey, a lefty who pitched in the National League from 1912 to ’33, was elected by the Veterans Committee on January 27, 1963. He died one month and one day later, at the age of 71. Leon Day, a righty who starred in the Negro Leagues from 1934 to ’46, and later played in Mexico and in the affiliated minor leagues, was elected by the Veterans Committee on March 7, 1995. He died six days later, at the age of 78. Read the rest of this entry »

In a post yesterday, I wrote about the BaseRuns approach to estimating team winning percentages and how it attempts to strip away context that doesn’t pertain to a team’s actual ability, so as to reveal what would have happened if baseball were played in a world not governed by the whims of seemingly random variation. In this world, a win-loss record truly represents how good a team actually is. Try as it might, the BaseRuns methodology fails to actually create such a world, sometimes stripping away too much context, ignoring factors that do speak to a team’s quality, or both.

I delayed for a separate post (this one!) a deeper discussion of specific offensive and defensive units that BaseRuns represents quite differently compared to the actual numbers posted by these teams. To determine whether or not BaseRuns knows what it’s talking about with respect to each team, imagine yourself sitting in the audience on a game show set. The person on your left is dressed as Little Bo Peep, while the person on your right has gone to great lengths to look like Beetlejuice. That or Michael Keaton is really hard up for money. On stage there are a series of doors, each labeled with a team name. Behind each door is a flashing neon sign that reads either “Skill Issue!” or “Built Different!” Both can be either complimentary or derogatory depending on whether BaseRuns is more or less optimistic about a team relative to its actual record. For teams that BaseRuns suggests are better than the numbers indicate, the skill issue identified is a good thing — a latent ability not yet apparent in the on-field results. But if BaseRuns thinks a team is worse than the numbers currently imply, then skill issue is used more colloquially to suggest a lack thereof. The teams that are built different buck the norms laid out by BaseRuns and find a way that BaseRuns doesn’t consider to either excel or struggle. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. I got a chance to see many of my favorite baseball happenings this week: catchers making tough plays, exciting pitching matchups, and stars of the game at their absolute best. We also have plenty of goofy but delightful coincidences, just as Five Things patron saint Zach Lowe intended. A quick programming note: I’ll be on vacation, a nice restorative pre-deadline trip, for the next week and change. Enjoy baseball in the meantime – it’s a wonderful time of year for it.

1. Athletic Catchers
It’s amazing how much baseball knowledge your brain absorbs without actively thinking about it. For example, when you see an outfielder throw the ball home to cut down a runner trying to score on a single, you’ll immediately anticipate that the batter who hit that single might try to advance to second base. You might not even realize you’re thinking this. It’s just the natural timing of the sport. Long throw, cutoff man missed — how in the world is the catcher going to attempt a tag and then find a way to get the ball down to second base? It just doesn’t happen.

Or, well, it’s not supposed to happen. But Carlos Narváez doesn’t care what heuristics are stored in your brain:

What a weird play. The Red Sox correctly played to prevent the runner from scoring, and that let Wilmer Flores round first and get a great look at the play at the plate to see if he should advance. Right around this point, Narváez seemed to have no shot at throwing out Flores:

Read the rest of this entry »

Like most people with an MLB.tv account and no serious responsibilities, I spent a large portion of Wednesday afternoon watching the Pirates-Brewers game. This midweek businesspersons’ special featured one of the most hotly anticipated starting pitching matchups of the season so far: Paul Skenes vs. Jacob Misiorowski.

Skenes, as you know, possesses such electrifying talent it became possible for a Pittsburgh Pirate to become one of the most famous ballplayers in the league. Misiorowski is just three starts into his big league career, but already his prodigious fastball velocity has made him a hipster favorite in baseball circles. Skenesian mainstream celebrity is sure to follow. Read the rest of this entry »