By now, you know how the Tampa Bay Rays operate: Due to their small budget, their success hinges on whether they can replace formerly cost-controlled and talented players with currently cost-controlled and talented players. The process works (even as we wish they would flex their financial muscle more often), and the Rays have been to every postseason since 2019.

But inevitably, the Rays’ way results in a few bumps in the road. Sometimes, prospects or trade acquisitions don’t pan out as hoped. This season in particular, their rotation has suffered a spate of injuries. Shane Baz is injured. Luis Patiño is injured. Tyler Glasnow might miss the entire season. As for internal options, Josh Fleming failed to impress as a starter and was recently optioned to Triple-A Durham. Fortunately, the Rays always seem to materialize at least one good player out of thin air each season. Their latest trick? Making a starter out of Jeffrey Springs.

What’s surprising is that unlike Fleming, Springs had virtually zero prior experience starting in the big leagues, save for two opportunities in his rookie year. Nonetheless, his workload has begun to increase. He tossed 4.2 innings against the Blue Jays on May 15, followed by 5.2 innings against the Orioles on May 21. And in his latest start, Springs pitched a full six innings, striking out six Yankees while giving up just two runs. But it was their B-squad! I know, yankeesfan0567. But what matters to the Rays is that Springs passed with flying colors, his spot in the rotation now all but entrenched. Read the rest of this entry »

Last Saturday, Jalen Beeks had a thoroughly unimportant day at the ballpark. With the Rays trailing Toronto 5-1, he came in to pitch the top of the ninth inning. The stakes? Helping the team hit the showers 10 or 15 minutes earlier, I’d say – he wasn’t going to catapult Tampa to a win with a good performance, what with a four-run deficit and only three outs remaining, but everyone on the team would surely appreciate an efficient outing.

He did it! He got three straight groundball outs. After that, while he presumably changed into his street clothes in the clubhouse, the Rays failed to score in the bottom half of the inning, and the game ended. Thank you for coming to this episode of “FanGraphs Narrates Low-leverage Relief Outings.”

But wait! After this humdrum appearance, an anonymous tipster lit the FanGraphs signal (it’s like the Bat Signal, only with the FanGraphs logo instead). There was more to this half inning than first met the eye. I was on the case. Read the rest of this entry »

The main reason why the Astros have been able to survive and thrive despite the departure of a large percentage of the core of their 2017 World Series-winning team is their success in developing their young talent. One of the most prominent of these players, Kyle Tucker, had his breakout season in the shortened 2020 and cemented those gains with a .294/.359/.557, 4.9 WAR 2021 campaign that saw him get his first MVP votes. With Tucker heading to arbitration this winter for the first time, the Astros discussed a long-term contract with their incumbent right fielder in recent weeks, but the deal has apparently fallen through.

The Astros recently spoke with Kyle Tucker’s camp about a contract extension, but the sides were unable to come to a deal and are no longer engaged, sources tell me and @brianmctaggart. Tucker will become arbitration-eligible for the first time at the end of this season.

— Mark Feinsand (@Feinsand) May 16, 2022

While it hasn’t worked out, it’s the right idea. Teams want to lock up their best young players, and many players, especially before they get that first big arbitration bump, are interested in mitigating their personal risk. Wander Franco was more likely than not to beat the $182 million he’ll receive from the Rays and the team they trade him to around 2029, but it also provided him some real security, given he’s still a couple years from arbitration. These types of deals can be win-win.

So who should be the next players to get inked for the long haul? Here are my favorite picks. For each, I’ve included their ZiPS projections for both performance and a fair contract; after all, I don’t own a team, so I don’t have the motivation to pitch any absurdly team-friendly agreements like the one Ozzie Albies signed with the Braves. I’ve also omitted Juan Soto since we’ve already talked about him and a long-term deal quite a bit, most recently in Jay Jaffe’s piece before the season that already has the ZiPS projections. If you want a figure, let’s just say 10 years and all circulating US currency. Read the rest of this entry »

If there’s anything as inevitable as the Tampa Bay Rays trading away a top starting pitcher, typically for salary reasons, it’s their development of the next one. Shane McClanahan looks a lot like their next one. The Baltimore native was highly effective in his rookie season, putting up a 3.34 ERA and 3.31 FIP with 10 strikeouts per nine over 25 starts in 2021. Even more impressive, he did it with minimal professional experience, with only four games in the high minors before becoming the first pitcher to make his major league debut in a playoff game.

2021 was a fine rookie season for McClanahan, but 2022 is looking like something special. In seven starts, his ERA stands at 2.52, and with a FIP of 2.67, it’s not a BABIP-fueled mirage. His strikeout percentage has jumped by about 40% year-on-year, from 27% to 38%, a notable improvement even in a very pitcher-friendly season. Batters are making both less contact than last year (dipping from 70.4% to 63.6%) and worse contact — their average exit velocity declined from 91.7 mph to 89.3, while their Statcast sweet spot percentage dipped from 36.8% to 26.5%. Among all pitchers with at least 20 innings thrown this season, only Corbin Burnes and Michael King have lower contact rates.

One of the primary differences between this season and last season for McClanahan has been the development of his changeup. Despite a fastball that can hit the high-90s with some nasty late break, McClanahan does not use his heat to finish off batters the way pitchers like Brandon Woodruff or Lance Lynn tend to. In fact, when batters get to him, it’s usually on the fastball, with a batting average well over .300 and 12 of his 19 career home runs allowed coming on the heater. Read the rest of this entry »

As offense dips down, it was bound to happen. Reid Detmers of the Angels threw the first solo no-hitter of the year last night, facing only 28 batters as he beguiled the Rays’ lineup for nine innings. But this no-hitter wasn’t filled with drama, or even short on offense. The Angels put up 12 runs, powered by a two-homer game from Mike Trout. One of baseball’s unique charms is that the two halves of the game are disconnected; you can have a tense chase of a no-hitter on one side and silly season on the other. Silly season? Well, let’s get right to it.

Top of the Early Innings

Detmers didn’t exactly roll out of bed dealing. After a first-pitch ball, he laid one in there, and Yandy Díaz tagged it for the hardest-hit ball that anyone on either team managed all game. Luckily, it was into the ground and straight at shortstop Andrew Velazquez. Wander Franco followed with another hard-hit grounder, and Harold Ramirez ended the inning with a sinking liner right at left fielder Brandon Marsh.
Read the rest of this entry »

If you were looking for fast-paced, high-stakes baseball action, the tenth inning of Saturday’s Rays-Red Sox clash had everything you could ask for. Scoring? Five runs crossed the plate. Drama? There was a walk-off hit. Balls in play? The Red Sox hit a triple, and the Rays scored a run by combining a balk and a throwing error. Like home runs? It had one of them too.

If you were looking for grind-it-out, low-scoring, perfectly pitched baseball, the other nine innings would have been more your speed. Boston and Tampa Bay combined for two hits and seventeen strikeouts. They used ten pitchers. Runs? Only four runners so much as reached second base.

Which one is modern baseball? They both are. If you wish baseball had more balls in play, with more bunts and steals and plays at the plate, I can’t blame you. If you wish it had more dominant starting pitchers and more seven-inning starts that end with a mound conference and a manager talked into leaving his ace out there for just one more batter, I can’t blame you. But the game being played today is just as captivating, the performances just as impressive. They just come in different shapes and sizes.
Read the rest of this entry »

Drew Rasmussen was a Rays success story last year. A key part of the trade that sent Willy Adames to Milwaukee, Rasmussen profiled as a plus reliever. But after initially serving as a multi-inning bullpen arm, Tampa Bay slotted him into the rotation for the last two months of the season, and he delivered 37 innings of 1.46 ERA, 2.76 FIP excellence. Sure, it was over 4.5 innings per start, and the peripherals weren’t pretty, but quality over quantity has always been a deal the Rays will take, and you certainly can’t argue with his run prevention.

Rasmussen did it despite what could charitably be described as a predictable arsenal. He threw his fastball 65% of the time and his slider another 30% of the time. If we’re being honest, it was more like 1.5 pitches — his fastball did a lot of the heavy lifting, and the slider picked up the pieces. It’s one of those spin-and-speed four-seamers that are all the rage these days. Rasmussen didn’t always locate it well, but simply put, it’s a hard pitch to hit.

He paired that fastball with a slider that featured two-plane action. It wasn’t a big movement pitch; it had drop and arm-side run in roughly equal proportion, but its main standout quality was that it was an offspeed pitch when hitters were setting up for 98 mph at the letters. If you’re trying to cover a high fastball, particularly one that struck you out last at-bat like this:

Then it’s hard to adjust to a slow and low pitch like this:

When you look at it that way, it’s a pretty good pitch. And hey, by some metrics, it was: hitters had a lot of trouble squaring it up, mustering a woeful .226 wOBA on contact (and a 41% hard-hit rate). On the other hand, it hardly missed any bats; Rasmussen was in the bottom 10% of baseball for swinging strike rate and bottom 15% for CSW rate. Eno Sarris wrote about the pitch in the playoffs and came away similarly unsure of its efficacy. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week may have been highlighted by the start of the 2022 regular season, but it also featured a spate of contract extensions. Today I’m going to take a closer look at two such extensions, both involving glove-first outfielders entering their age-27 seasons.

We’ll begin with Myles Straw, the center fielder for the Cleveland Guardians, who signed a five-year, $25 million extension, according to Zack Meisel of The Athletic. The extension includes club options for the 2027 and ’28 seasons that would bring the total to $41.5 million over the next seven years. Remarkably, this is the Guardians’ third extension this month with the potential to keep a player in Cleveland through the 2028 season — the team also inked deals with star third baseman José Ramírez and closer Emmanuel Clase.

2021 was Straw’s first full season as an everyday player. He came over to Cleveland from the Astros at the trade deadline in exchange for Phil Maton and Yainer Diaz. After the trade, he continued to build on his breakout campaign. He ended the having posted stellar defense (11 OAA), great baserunning (30 steals in 36 attempts), and about league-average offense (98 wRC+). That well-rounded production quietly placed him among the best center fielders in baseball last season, finishing sixth in WAR at the position with 3.7:

That chart does a good job of showing how unusual Straw’s profile is compared to his peers’, as he’s the only center fielder on the list without a clearly above-average bat. These offensive limitations mostly come from a lack of power, and it is a serious lack of power at that, with Straw posting an ISO, Barrel% and HardHit% all below the fifth percentile. His max exit velocity is actually above average, which could be a sign that more consistently hard contact is hidden away somewhere, but there’s just not a lot to suggest that he’ll be putting up double-digit home run totals anytime soon. Read the rest of this entry »

It arrived stressfully, chaotically, and slightly late, but the 2022 season is here. And that means it’s time for one last important sabermetric ritual: the final ZiPS projected standings that will surely come back and haunt me multiple times as the season progresses.

The methodology I’m using here isn’t identical to the one we use in our Projected Standings, so there will naturally be some important differences in the results. So how does ZiPS calculate the season? Stored within ZiPS are the first through 99th percentile projections for each player. I start by making a generalized depth chart, using our Depth Charts as an initial starting point. Since these are my curated projections, I make changes based on my personal feelings about who will receive playing time, as filtered by arbitrary whimsy my logic and reasoning. ZiPS then generates a million versions of each team in Monte Carlo fashion — the computational algorithms, that is (no one is dressing up in a tuxedo and playing baccarat like James Bond).

After that is done, ZiPS applies another set of algorithms with a generalized distribution of injury risk, which change the baseline PAs/IPs selected for each player. Of note is that higher-percentile projections already have more playing time than lower-percentile projections before this step. ZiPS then automatically “fills in” playing time from the next players on the list (proportionally) to get to a full slate of plate appearances and innings.

The result is a million different rosters for each team and an associated winning percentage for each of those million teams. After applying the new strength of schedule calculations based on the other 29 teams, I end up with the standings for each of the million seasons. This is actually much less complex than it sounds. Read the rest of this entry »

In a normal baseball offseason, all the trades would have already happened. Front offices have all season to call each other up with a million permutations of deals, and the deals they make spawn other deals, and player injuries spawn other deals, and free-agent signings lead to surpluses or needs, and… well, you get the idea. Trading flurries happen in December, and during spring training, and teams work out their rosters that way.

With a compressed offseason thanks to the lockout, the timeline has gotten all mixed up. Now, trades are happening three days before opening day. It’s madness! And speaking of:

Tigers Get

• Austin Meadows

Rays Get

• Isaac Paredes
• Competitive Balance Round B Pick

This trade was announced last night, and I’m writing about it this morning, and so rather than write a block of text about one side’s return and then a block of text about the other, I’m going to try a slightly different framing tool: I’ll walk you through a few levels of how I’ve thought about this deal. It’s an interesting one, no doubt, as trades involving the Rays so often are. Let’s get started!
Read the rest of this entry »