Did you, like many others, come into this season wondering what to expect out of Robinson Cano? Did you believe that reports of his demise might be greatly exaggerated? Well, if three games are any indication, wonder no longer. He’s hit four home runs in 14 plate appearances! I don’t really need to dive too deep into his wRC+ (it’s 340), or many other stats at this point in the season, because they’ll simply reinforce for you that he’s been pretty impossibly good in 27 innings of baseball. The “I don’t need to hit the ball in the field of play” second baseman has a BABIP of .000. The point of this piece, then, is to tell you how and why Cano has been good, and the specific parts of his plate approach that are assuaging some of the fears people had about him last season.

Cano’s 2015 featured, at root, two halves. Every season of every player’s career features two halves, but Cano’s were relevant in that his production was starkly divided between the two of them. There was pre-July 1st Cano, he of the .105 ISO and 71 wRC+. And then there was post-July 1st Cano, he of the .209 ISO and 157 wRC+. Second-half Cano was literally 100% better than first-half Cano when compared to league average.

If you’re reading this, you probably know that everyone was trying to figure out what was wrong in that first half. Here’s Jeff mainly talking about him hitting too many ground balls. Here’s Dan going in-depth on how his hitting mechanics were a little messed-up. Here’s an interview in which Cano says a stomach parasite sapped his strength. There was obviously a lot going on, and his first-half performance was probably all of those negative forces coming together in the form of terrible baseballing.

The second half of 2015 was a complete turnaround, however. He started to hit more line drives and fly balls. He went to the opposite field at something closer to his career rates. His home run/fly ball rate and BABIP regressed toward (and surpassed) his career norms. His first half probably wasn’t as bad as it looked, but his second half was a pretty effective inversion of that. Players in their early 30s who play poorly for extended periods while on massive contracts tend to be placed under a microscope, however, so questions about Cano’s partial 2015 failures followed him into 2016.

He’s answered those questions pretty effectively in the early going. And, while we shouldn’t take anything away from what Cano’s done so far, we also need to ask some questions of how the Rangers approached him in their just-concluded opening series. Sure, we should remind ourselves that it’s just three games, but the very obvious way Texas pitched to him could act as a bit of a warning for those teams about to face him. So how did the Rangers approach him? The answer was, unequivocally, “witin the zone.” Take a look at Cano’s in-zone rate and rate of first-pitch strikes from 2013 to 2015 as compared to the series against the Rangers:

Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a list of the last 11 players selected first overall in the draft, in order of most recent to least:

• Dansby Swanson
• Brady Aiken
• Mark Appel
• Carlos Correa
• Gerrit Cole
• Bryce Harper
• Stephen Strasburg
• Tim Beckham
• David Price
• Luke Hochevar
• Justin Upton

A couple of the guys are too young to fairly judge, but for the most part this is a list of star players. And Luke Hochevar. He’s on there, too. When a team picks first overall, their chances of getting, not just a major leaguer, but a star, are the highest among any spot in the draft. Which makes sense. But even in the most advantageous position with which to draft a star, teams make mistakes, and take the wrong guy. The Royals took Hochevar over Evan Longoria, Clayton Kershaw, and Max Scherzer. The Rays took Beckham over Posey. The Astros took Appel over Kris Bryant. So it doesn’t always work out.

And then there’s the draft that I left out. The year before the Diamondbacks picked Justin Upton, the San Diego Padres had the first pick. There was a right-hander out of Old Dominion University in Virginia who was well regarded, but the Padres didn’t take Justin Verlander. Instead they took a local high-school shortstop named Matt Bush. Bush wasn’t the consensus best player available, but he was highly thought of, still a legit first-round pick if not a first-overall selection.

So the Padres picked him. He stood on the stage, smiled the smile of an 18-year-old who has no idea what’s in store for him, and modeled a Padres jersey. Things went downhill from there. Since that day, the greatest in his young life but the first of what was supposed to be many great days, Bush has spent more time in jail than on a major-league roster. He’s been arrested multiple times for offenses as serious as assault and battery, drunk driving, and hit-and-run while drunk driving. His life has been, to put it gently, a damn mess. He’s a man with personal demons and he’s let those demons define his life, destroy his career, and injure those unlucky enough to be situated nearby.

But Bush could always throw, and even at 30, his arm is apparently still present. He signed with the Rangers two months after being released from prison and he’s opened some eyes during spring training with his plus-plus velocity from the mound.

Read the rest of this entry »

The San Diego Padres were the most active team in baseball last winter, as newly-minted general manager A.J. Preller put his mark on the franchise with a mind-numbing mass of moves that aimed to quickly turn the Padres into a contender, mostly by injecting a bevy of ever-coveted right-handed power bats into a previously punchless lineup.

The plan didn’t work, for a host of reasons neither here nor there, and now a new plan has emerged. Justin Upton walked to free agency, Craig Kimbrel was shipped off to Boston, Wil Myers got out of center field, and Preller might not be done jettisoning the very players he acquired last year, the ones who were supposed to form The Next Good Padres Team.

Last week, Evan Grant of the Dallas Morning News reported that the Texas Rangers continue to covet an upgrade at catcher, though their top target may not be Milwaukee’s Jonathan Lucroy, as previously expected, but rather Padres’ backstop Derek Norris. The Rangers like Norris because he’s cheaper than Lucroy, he’s got an extra year on his contract, and the Padres have more pieces that could be packaged together with Norris to make for a potential blockbuster deal.

While Norris may not be the same caliber player as a healthy Lucroy, he would presumably offer an upgrade over Texas incumbent Robinson Chirinos, both behind the plate and with the bat, while also providing much-needed depth. But the glove has only been a plus for one year — Norris graded as a well below-average pitch-framer before last season — and the deeper you look into the bat, the less promising it becomes. And evidently, pitchers around the league agree.

Read the rest of this entry »

We’re about two weeks away from Opening Day, and with teams starting to get a sense for what they have — and more importantly, what they don’t have — we’re likely to see some trade talk pick up soon. Mostly, spring trades revolve around out-of-options guys or bench players who played their way out of an organization, but occasionally, teams find common ground on a major trade that reshapes their roster right before the season starts. Last year, the Padres were involved in just such a deal, acquiring Craig Kimbrel and Melvin Upton from the Braves right before the season started. And I think they should make another big trade before the season starts this year.

Over the last few days, talk has picked up that the Rangers have interest in acquiring Derek Norris, the Padres starting catcher. The Rangers don’t really have much catching depth, while the Padres have three catchers after their off-season of Christian Bethancourt, so a deal between the two teams makes a decent amount of sense. But rather than making a small deal in which the Rangers pick up Norris for some mid-level prospect or two, there’s a case to be made that the two sides should expand the talk and make a legitimate blockbuster.

Read the rest of this entry »

Indians’ starter Trevor Bauer prepares to collect data at Driveline Baseball.

Kyle Boddy spent years getting it wrong. “There were years of inconclusive results that led to more questions,” Boddy told me about his past work at his Driveline Baseball facility in Kent, Washington.

He had the best intentions. After years of day jobs, and coaching youth baseball with some competitive weightlifting sprinkled in, he started writing at The Hardball Times and studying injuries with Josh Kalk, now a member of the Tampa Bay Rays’ front office. They had some success using neural networks on PITCHf/x data in order to spot injuries earlier than usual.

In the end, though, the Seattle-based mechanics analyst wanted to take a look at pitcher development under the same data-based lens that he and Kalk had used to spot existing injury.

So he built a biomechanics lab, complete with high-speed cameras and objects of known size. (That object, known as the Cube, is a square box built of tubing that helps calibrate the cameras so that the video created is all comparable.) It was a lot of work with an uncertain reward. “We got a lot of great kinetic data,” said Boddy of that time. “Then we realized that there was a huge amount of noise.”

Helping Boddy with the realization was Dr. Murray Maitland in the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at the University of Washington. When approached with analysis based on limb movement and pitchers’ physical tendencies and the link to injury, Dr. Maitland smiled and dropped what might have been a bombshell to Boddy that day. “Just because the joint or limb moves in this direction doesn’t mean the underlying muscle is doing that,” said Maitland in Boddy’s recollection. “The movement could be due to inertia, it could be due to whatever. You can’t infer muscle activity.”

Read the rest of this entry »

In my earlier blogging days, many of my arguments were a little less, shall we say, nuanced. I was a man with opinions and a man with a platform, and I would frequently use my platform to express my opinion that players shouldn’t try to play through injury. The way I figured, while the players’ hearts were in the right place, someone needed to step in, because playing through pain is bad for performance, and playing through pain is bad for health. I identified it as a problem for the team and for the player, and it was something that always drove me nuts.

Speaking of nuts, in 2009 I watched Adrian Beltre remain in an extra-inning game and eventually score the winning run, even though he’d suffered a damaged testicle that he later estimated became the size of a grapefruit.

As the years have passed, my opinion has somewhat matured. Though I still don’t think players should push themselves too hard, since they’d be doing themselves a disservice, I do understand that you can’t always play at 100%. There are injuries you could make worse and there are injuries you might just have to deal with, and as clubhouse dynamics go, teammates respond to players they perceive to be warriors. This is when we get back to Beltre, who might be the ultimate baseball-playing warrior of his generation. He just last season won another battle against his own pain receptors.

Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t know how often Ian Desmond thinks about the nine-figure extension offer he turned down. He probably doesn’t think about it as often as people who write about Ian Desmond think about it. Desmond, after all, has to live his own life, and he still has to worry about the present and the future. Not to mention, he’s already earned some tens of millions of dollars, so it’s not like one tough decision has caused Desmond to go bankrupt. He’s doing fine, all things considered. He had the chance at a big payday, he didn’t take it, so he’s collected fewer millions — but still millions, and he could, in theory, go on to earn that whole sum anyway. Just has to prove himself on the baseball field. It’s the thing he’s best at.

In a way, it’s not fair to hold the decision against Desmond. He was justified in making his call, and now it’s in the past and no longer relevant. We have the advantage of knowing more now than we could’ve known back then, and of course what happened in 2015 made Desmond look a lot worse. His decision was a fine decision. But. But. There’s no way around the visual of all this. Desmond bet on himself as a soon-to-be free agent. He signed for one year and $8 million after spring training had already started. And he signed to play a position he hasn’t played.

Ian Desmond is doing fine. Ian Desmond is a major-league-caliber baseball player. It’s just been a hell of a drop. If it weren’t for Josh Hamilton, he might still not have a job.

Read the rest of this entry »

The 2010 Mariners were a dreadful baseball team, and an unexpectedly dreadful baseball team at that. They were designed to be competitive — they should’ve been competitive — and from a fan’s perspective, I’m not sure I’ve witnessed a bigger letdown. It was a difficult season for countless different reasons, but what’s been most upsetting, both now and back at the time, is that the Mariners being terrible cost me the opportunity to watch more Cliff Lee on my favorite team. I knew he was awesome when he was first brought in, but I didn’t appreciate the extent until I got to watch him every five days.

I bring this up because Lee is in the news:

Sounds like Cliff Lee’s career is over. His agent, Darek Braunecker, told me, “We don’t anticipate him playing at this point.”

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) February 23, 2016

Lee hasn’t officially retired, and you never know when someone might have a change of heart. Yet it’s never been less likely that Lee will return, so I want to take this chance to offer a quick retrospective. Not everyone is deserving of the treatment, because not everyone is equally interesting, but Lee developed into the perfect pitcher. It took him some time, and he’s not going to end up in Cooperstown, but for a good six-year stretch, there was nothing else you could’ve wanted Cliff Lee to be.

Read the rest of this entry »

You smell that? It’s baseball’s prospect-list season. The fresh top-100 lists — populated by new names as well as old ones — seem to be popping up each day. With the individual rankings coming out, some organization rankings are becoming available, as well. I have always regarded the organizational rankings as subjective — and, as a result, not 100% useful. Utilizing the methodology I introduced in my article on prospect evaluation from this year’s Hardball Times Annual, however, it’s possible to calculate a total value for every team’s farm system and remove the biases of subjectivity. In what follows, I’ve used that same process to rank all 30 of baseball’s farm systems by the surplus WAR they should generate.

I provide a detailed explanation of my methodology in the Annual article. To summarize it briefly, however, what I’ve done is to identify WAR equivalencies for the scouting grades produced by Baseball America in their annual Prospect Handbook. The grade-to-WAR conversion appears as follows.

Prospect Grade to WAR Conversion

Prospect Grade	Total WAR	Surplus WAR
80	25.0	18.5
75	18.0	13.0
70	11.0	9.0
65	8.5	6.0
60	4.7	3.0
55	2.5	1.5
50	1.1	0.5
45	0.4	0.0

To create the overall totals for this post, I used each team’s top-30 rankings per the most recent edition of Baseball America’ Prospect Handbook. Also accounting for those trades which have occurred since the BA rankings were locked down, I counted the number of 50 or higher-graded prospects (i.e. the sort which provide surplus value) in each system. The results follows.
Read the rest of this entry »

Major League Baseball is a profitable enterprise, and (not surprisingly) MLB owners tend to benefit from that profitability, generally through revenues directly related to operating those franchises. However, MLB owners have also profited from ventures only partially related to MLB ownership, as well. They’ve made money owning television stations that also happen to air the games of teams they own. Owners are also in the process of spinning off the non-baseball related arm of MLBAM for billions. Notably, MLB owners have begun capitalizing on another revenue stream: developing the land near their teams’ ballparks.

When the Atlanta Braves announced they were leaving a 20-year-old Atlanta-based stadium for a new one out in the suburbs of Cobb County, it took many by surprise. Cobb County made an appealling offer to the Braves, and one of the Braves’ promises was a $400 million mixed-used land development surrounding the stadium. While this has some likely benefits for Cobb County, it has the potential to be very beneficial for the Braves, as well — and it was one of their reasons for leaving Atlanta.

Bucking the trend of pro teams seeking stadiums and arenas closer to the city center, the Braves’ new facility will be part of a 60-acre development near Cobb Galleria mall. Plant compared it to new ballparks in Cincinnati, San Diego and Houston, as well as L.A. Live, which hosts the NBA’s Los Angeles Lakers and Clippers and the NHL’s Kings at Staples Center.

“With our current location, we couldn’t control that process,” Plant said. “This site allows us to do that.”

In Cincinnati, the Reds have their Hall of Fame across the street. In Houston, the Astros took over Union Station. However, the first major attempt to control an entire area of land around the stadium had mixed results. In San Diego, real estate developer JMI, owned by John Moores, the previous owner of the Padres before a messy divorce forced the sale of the team, built up the area around the park, mainly with housing after original plans for more office buildings had to be scrapped due to economic conditions. The area is still in flux, as it was also a potential site for a new stadium for the San Diego Chargers.

Read the rest of this entry »