Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Tuesday and Friday I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.
For Friday’s column, I took the time to run down a long list of players who could be placed on irrevocable waivers and claimed prior to September 1, which is the deadline for them to be playoff eligible with their new teams.
The Rangers were the most intriguing of the teams I covered in that piece, for the obvious reason that they are the reigning World Series champs. Many of the players from last year’s club are still around, though some of them are currently injured, and even as Texas struggled this season, the organization and its fans held out hope a surge wasn’t far off. That said, the Rangers are simply running out of time. The trade deadline has passed and their playoff odds are below 2%. The reality of their situation has led me to ask the following question: Could the team that just won the World Series become the Angels less than a year later?
Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. August is always a down period for me when it comes to baseball watching. July has everything now. There’s the All-Star Game, the draft, and the trade deadline. Our trade value series comes out sandwiched in between. From late June through July 31, it’s full tilt baseball, and the first few weeks of August are a letdown by comparison. This year, the Olympics fit into that gap perfectly, and I’ve been watching whatever random event catches my eye the same way I usually flip between baseball games. But fear not: There’s plenty of baseball still going on, and I can’t stay away for long. I’m back in the saddle, and this week has a ton of great plays to choose from. And thanks, as always, to ESPN’s Zach Lowe for the format I’m borrowing here.
1. Twists and Turns in Pittsburgh
What kind of lunatic would say that August is the baseball doldrums? Oh, me? Well, ignore me, because some of the games this week have had juice. The Pirates are clinging to the periphery of the Wild Card race, while the Padres are roaring toward October with an absolutely scalding month of baseball. When the two teams faced off for their series opener in Pittsburgh this week, the Pirates were a game above .500, and after dropping that first game, they came back strong on Wednesday.
Some early offense staked the Pirates to a 6-5 lead even after starter Marco Gonzales got roughed up. Their best relievers were available. It looked like they might wriggle through. But Aroldis Chapman was a bit wild, and the Padres put two runners in scoring position with Manny Machado at the plate. No problem – Chapman just pulled out maybe the best pitch I’ve ever seen: Read the rest of this entry »
Welcome back to Top of the Order, where every Tuesday and Friday I’ll be starting your baseball day with some news, notes, and thoughts about the game we love.
Last week, I explained how players can still change teams even as trades are no longer allowed. Now that we’re a week-plus into August, I’d like to run down the list of players who could be placed on irrevocable waivers before the month ends, which is the latest that a team can claim them and still have them be eligible for the playoffs. Players placed on waivers are first offered to the worst team in the league, then to the other clubs in ascending order all the way up to the one with the best record at the time of the waiver placement.
I’ll be focusing on teams with playoff odds below 5%, though contending teams teams could see if a rival wants to bite on an onerous contract. (Spoiler alert: they will not.) As a reminder, when a player is claimed off waivers, it’s a straight claim. The team that loses the player gets nothing more than salary relief, as the new team is responsible for the remainder of the contract. Read the rest of this entry »
You didn’t really think teams were done swapping relievers after Friday and Saturday, did you? If you thought maybe they were tapped out for late relief help on Sunday and Monday, well, you thought wrong! If your bullpen doesn’t look like there are enough dudes to capture Helm’s Deep, you’re woefully short-armed.
The San Diego Padres acquired LHRP Tanner Scott and RHRP Bryan Hoeing from the Miami Marlins for LHSP Robby Snelling, RHSP Adam Mazur, 3B/2B Graham Pauley, and 3B/SS Jay Beshears
As one of baseball’s elite closers on an expiring contract, Tanner Scott was arguably the best short-term option available among relievers. His walk rate has peeked up a little to the numbers of the bad old days, but his first-strike percentage has stayed firmly in positive territory, which is an important indicator of where walk numbers will settle. Scott is likely to help the Padres in a very tight NL Wild Card race, but he’ll probably be even more important for them in the playoffs if they can get there. In San Diego, he teams up with Robert Suarez to asphyxiate opposing lineups late in the games. As far as elite closers who occasionally walk a few too many batters go, Scott is one of the less stressful of the genre, because he’s so hard to hit against with any authority, giving him a good shot at escaping jams following those free passes.
Bryan Hoeing is a sinker/slider reliever who has never quite clicked, as he’s never really been able to induce many swings-and-misses, nor has he mastered the art of inducing weak groundballs. He strikes me mostly as a depth guy who has plenty of years of club control left, and barring a breakout, he seems destined to be shuffled back and forth between San Diego and Triple-A El Paso a lot over the next few years. This trade is about Scott. Read the rest of this entry »
Sergio Estrada-USA TODAY Sports; David Richard-USA TODAY Sports
Pitching wins championships. It’s a cliché, but it’s a cliché for a reason: It’s true, and everyone knows it. It’s why the best available pitchers can cost such a premium at the trade deadline. So, what if there were a way for a team to improve its pitching staff without trading for a pitcher? It’s easier said than done, but the Red Sox and Rangers are hoping they pulled it off after acquiring new catchers to help them over the final two months of the season.
Just two weeks after Jac Caglianone fell to them in the draft, the Kansas City Royals have acquired another beefy two-way college player: Michael Lorenzen. After spending the first seven seasons of his major league career with the Cincinnati Reds, the former Cal State Fullerton star is now on his fifth team in the past 24 months. And for the second time in as many seasons, he’s parlayed a strong first half into a midseason trade to a contender. In return, the Rangers receive Walter Pennington, a 26-year-old lefty reliever who made his MLB debut earlier this month.
And for a while, it looked like the steal of the offseason. In contrast to other late signees like Blake Snell and Jordan Montgomery, Lorenzen didn’t seem adversely affected by his short ramp-up. He debuted on April 15 and threw 79 pitches over five scoreless innings. Lorenzen followed that up by finishing six innings over his next eight starts, all while holding opponents to a .204/.296/.343 batting line. At the end of that run, Lorenzen’s season ERA was below 3.00.
Though if you want a microcosm for how the Rangers’ season has gone, Texas rewarded Lorenzen’s outstanding first two months with insultingly meager run support: enough to go just 3-6 in those nine starts.
Which is how we got to a point where the Rangers are selling to Kansas City. It’s pretty common historically for these two teams to exchange players; in fact, it was just a year ago tomorrow that Texas acquired Aroldis Chapman from the Royals for a package including pitching prospect Cole Ragans. It worked out for both sides: The Rangers won a championship, and Kansas City was able to magically turn Ragans into a no. 1 starter overnight.
It’s less common for Texas to be in a position to sell to Kansas City. The Royals are currently in possession of the last AL Wild Card spot, and according to our Playoff Odds, they’re a little less than even money to hang onto it. The Rangers, at 51-55, aren’t out of hope yet, but they’re taking on water. Well, they’ve already taken on water and the ship could capsize any day now. The Royals haven’t been good while the Rangers were bad since 2014, which was a one-off anomaly in a highly competitive decade for Texas. Before that, you have to go back to the 1980s.
With all that said, why are the Rangers trading off one of their early-season successes for a 26-year-old rookie who was undrafted out of (checks notes) the Colorado School of Mines?
Well, as good as the first two months of the season were to Lorenzen, the last two months were less so. Since June 7, his ERA is 4.79 and his FIP is 6.19, and he’s allowed 10 home runs in just 47 innings. Over the past 30 days, his ERA is 6.20. His past two appearances were the apotheosis of a pitcher on his way out: On Saturday, Lorenzen threw 40 pitches and allowed four runs but failed to get out of the first inning. A day later, the Rangers brought him back for a four-inning relief appearance totaling 55 more pitches.
Some regression was always going to happen. Lorenzen has never been a big strikeout guy, and this season he’s increased his walk rate by more than half. Out of 80 pitchers with at least 100 innings this season, Lorenzen is dead last in K-BB%. All of this while allowing a higher-than-average HR/9 rate.
Some internet weirdos think that the metrics we put out here at FanGraphs have their own thoughts and emotions, so as to be vindictive against certain players or teams. Of course that’s not the case — something like WAR or FIP is just an equation. It does not love or hate. But if FIP did have a mind of its own, self-awareness, or even a soul, it would look at Lorenzen’s numbers from this season, hold its nose and go, “Oooooh, stinky!”
So the other shoe — in Lorenzen’s case, that shoe is an extremely cool custom Vans cleat — was always going to drop. And it’s happening just as the Rangers’ need for Lorenzen is disappearing. Scherzer is back already, and deGrom, Mahle, and Cody Bradford are close behind. Lorenzen was going to be out of the rotation pretty soon no matter what, so now he has a chance to make another team’s rotation.
Lorenzen’s contract calls for $2.5 million in workload bonuses, and I was curious how many of those markers he’s hit. He gets $200,000 reaching 60 innings pitched, and another $200,000 for every 10 innings from 60 to 100. Throwing 40-plus pitches on consecutive days might be the kind of thing you’d expect from, well, Cal State Fullerton a generation ago, but that last outing also got Lorenzen over 100 innings before the trade. So that’s $1 million in the bag so far, with the following bonuses still on the board: $300,000 for 120 innings, $350,000 for 140 innings, $400,000 for 160 innings, and $450,000 for 180 innings.
Unless Lorenzen gets hurt, 120 innings feels like a lock. But there are only 10 or 11 trips through the rotation left in the regular season; unless Lorenzen does a 2008 CC Sabathia impression, 180 innings isn’t going to happen, and even 160 innings feels unlikely.
For the second time in as many years, the team Lorenzen is joining at the deadline counts its rotation as its greatest strength, and there’s not an obvious place for the 32-year-old to slot in. Ragans and Seth Lugo are All-Stars, Brady Singer and Michael Wacha have been excellent so far this year, and even no. 5 starter Alec Marsh has had better results and peripherals than Lorenzen.
I would imagine that Lorenzen is going to serve as a middle reliever and swingman. The Royals not only need to make the playoffs, they need to make sure not to wear out their rotation along the way. This is not a rotation that’s used to making 30 starts in the regular season, then five more in October.
Wacha and Lugo have both pitched in the postseason, but collectively, this rotation’s last MLB playoff start came in 2015, when Wacha was 23 years old and two seasons removed from winning NLCS MVP. Lugo is going to pass his major league career high in innings the next time he takes the mound. Ragans has already thrown more innings this year than he has in any professional season. It doesn’t sound like the worst idea in the world to toss in a guy who can piggyback or serve as a no. 6 starter.
So what of Pennington? The other half of this trade has two-thirds of an inning of career big league experience and a sinker that sits in the low 90s — for a reliever, even a lefty, that’s fringy. But Pennington also has above-average feel for a breaking ball, which has allowed him to put up eye-popping numbers in the high minors: a 32.9% strikeout rate with a .179 opponent batting average and a 2.26 ERA in 59 2/3 Triple-A appearances.
A finesse-and-soft-stuff lefty is obviously going to fare well against Triple-A opposition and have questions over whether he can sneak that breaker past big leaguers with any consistency. For that reason, he came in at no. 36 on Travis Ice’s Royals prospect list a few weeks ago. It’s a token return for a pitcher who was as hot as Lorenzen was two months ago, but a non-trivial return for someone who was trending toward getting DFA’d. Even if the Rangers right the ship and make a surprising run for the playoffs, I’d argue that a dedicated lefty reliever, even a low-leverage one, is more valuable to the Rangers right now than Lorenzen. Particularly as any such run would require Mahle and deGrom returning to the rotation and pitching well.
I usually don’t care even a little about team control for relief pitchers in a trade — especially if that reliever isn’t, like, Devin Williams or Mason Miller. But it’s also worth mentioning that Kirby Yates and José Leclerc are going to be free agents next year, and David Robertson could join them on the open market if his $7 million mutual option doesn’t get exercised. (Mutual options tend to have a narrow window for both sides to agree.) Also, next year Yates is going to be 38 and Robertson will be 40. So if nothing else, Pennington gives the Rangers useful depth.
The Rangers get a prospect, the Royals get some depth, and Lorenzen improves his chance of playing into October. It might not be the blockbuster everyone was waiting for, but trades like this keep the wheels moving.
I updated the Top 100 Prospects list today. This post goes through the pitchers and why they stack the way they do. Here’s a link directly to the list, and here’s a link to the post with a little more detail regarding farm system and prospect stuff and the trade deadline. It might be best for you to open a second tab and follow along, so here are the Top 100 pitchers isolated away from the bats. Let’s get to it. Read the rest of this entry »
At last we reach the end of my annual series spotlighting the weakest positions on contenders. While still focusing upon teams that meet that loose definition of contenders (Playoff Odds of at least 9.5%), I have also incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. Sometimes that may suggest that the team will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included them here because the team’s performance at that spot is worth a look.
At the other positions in this series, I have used about 0.6 WAR or less thus far — which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season — as my cutoff, but for the designated hitters, I’ve limited the list to the teams below zero, both to keep the length manageable and to account for the general spread of value. In the third full season of the universal DH, exactly half the teams in the majors have actually gotten 0.0 WAR or less from their DHs thus far, four are in the middle ground between 0.0 and 1.0, eight are between 1.0 and 2.0, and three are above 2.0. DHs as a group have hit .245/.321/.421 for a 109 wRC+; that last figure is up three points from last year, and seven points from the last time I did this list, via a slash line that’s virtually identical (the majors’ slugging percentage as a whole has dropped 17 points from last season).
This year, we’re seeing a greater number of teams invest more playing time in a single DH. Whereas each of the past two seasons saw three players reach the 500 plate appearance threshold as DHs, this year we’re on pace for five; similarly, 11 player are on pace to reach 400 PA as DHs, compared to eight last year. That said, many of the teams on this list are the ones that haven’t found that special someone to take the lion’s share of the plate appearances.
Today the Killers list turns the corner — or rather turns to the teams receiving less-than-acceptable production in the outfield corners. While still focusing on teams that meet the loose definition of contenders (Playoff Odds of at least 9.5%), and that have gotten about 0.6 WAR or less out of a position thus far — which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season — I have also incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. Sometimes that may suggest that the team will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included them here because the team’s performance at that spot is worth a look.
As noted previously, some of these situations are more dire than others, particularly when taken in the context of the rest of their roster. I’ve batched the two corners together into one supersized roundup because three of the seven teams below the WAR cutoff for left field also make the list for right field, and because there’s plenty of crossover in play with regards to personnel. The capsules are listed in order of their left field rankings first, while noting those three crossover teams with an asterisk. As always, I don’t expect every team here to go out and track down upgrades before the July 30 deadline, but these are teams to keep an eye on. All statistics are through July 14.
Today, we have a two-fer of Killers lists covering a couple of key defensive positions, specifically the hot corner and behind the plate. While still focusing on teams that meet the loose definition of contenders (a .500 record or Playoff Odds of at least 9.5%), and that have gotten about 0.6 WAR or less out of a position thus far — which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season — I have also incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. That may suggest that some of these teams will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included them here because their performance at that spot thus far is worth a look.
2024 Replacement-Level Killers: Catchers
Team
AVG
OBP
SLG
wRC+
Bat
BsR
Fld
WAR
ROS WAR
Tot WAR
Cubs
.181
.227
.273
41
-23.8
-1.8
-5.8
-1.3
0.7
-0.6
Pirates
.189
.266
.333
68
-13.5
-1.3
-2.9
0.2
0.9
1.1
Rangers
.228
.270
.334
68
-13.7
-2.5
0.4
0.4
1.3
1.7
All statistics through July 14.
Cubs
Following the free agent departure of Willson Contreras, last year the catching corps of Yan Gomes, Tucker Barnhart, and rookie Miguel Amaya ranked 21st in WAR. Heading into this season, it made at least some sense on paper to have the 25-year-old Amaya — a former Top 100 prospect who lost significant development time to the pandemic and November 2021 Tommy John surgery — get more playing time while moving the 37-year-old Gomes, whose framing metrics had declined, into a backup role. Unfortunately, both have been terrible. Amaya has hit just .201/.266/.288 (59 wRC+) with average-ish defense (good blocking, poor throwing) en route to -0.1 WAR. Gomes was even worse both at the plate (.154/.179/.242, 15 wRC+) and behind it (-5 DRS, -4 FRV, -3.9 FRM) before getting released on June 21, replaced by Tomás Nido, who had just been released by the Mets. Nido has hit .202/.229/.331 (57 wRC+) overall but is just 4-for-41 as a Cub. Defensively, he’s got a mixed bag of metrics, though he’s been a whisker above average framing-wise. Read the rest of this entry »
