The trade deadline is nearly here and once again, team behavior will be driven, at least in part, by 40-man roster dynamics. Teams with an especially high number of both rostered players under contract for 2022 and prospects who would need to be added to the 40-man in the offseason have what is often called a “40-man crunch,” “spillover,” or “churn,” meaning that the team has incentive to clear their overflow of players by trading for something they can keep — pool space, comp picks, or, more typically, younger players whose 40-man clocks are further from midnight — rather than do nothing, and later lose players to waivers or in the Rule 5 draft. In an effort to see whose depth might augment trade behavior, I enjoy assessing clubs’ 40-man futures every year. This exercise is done by using the RosterResource Depth Chart pages to examine current 40-man occupancy, subtracting pending free agents (on the Team Payroll tab), and then weighing the December 2021 Rule 5 eligible prospects to see who has the biggest crunch coming and might behave differently in the trade market because of it.

Some quick rules about 40-man rosters. Almost none of them contain exactly 40 players in-season because teams can add a player to the 40 to replace a player who’s on the 60-day Injured List. In the offseason, teams don’t get extra spots for injured players and have to get down to 40, so if they want to keep some of the injury fill-ins, they have to cut someone from the 40-man to make room.

In November, clubs have to add prospects to the 40-man to protect them from the Rule 5 draft. RosterResource is the most accessible resource for tracking the prospect timelines. Most teams add a handful of players every offseason, while some add just one, and others may add as many as 10. Read the rest of this entry »

As of Thursday night, the Mets’ starting rotation featured Marcus Stroman, Taijuan Walker, Tylor Megill, and a sentient ball of string who showed promise in Low-A. Fine, I made up the last one, but if you told the Mets front office about this ball of string, they’d at least ask you for its Trackman data. A seemingly unending string of injuries left the team grasping for pitching — any pitching at all. Enter Rich Hill, in a trade with the Rays:

We’ve acquired left-handed pitcher Rich Hill from Tampa Bay in exchange for right-handed pitcher Tommy Hunter and minor league catcher Matt Dyer. https://t.co/P24Fo2HoYd

— New York Mets (@Mets) July 23, 2021

At a very basic level, the Mets had to make this trade. Jacob deGrom is on the shelf. David Peterson broke his foot walking around. Carlos Carrasco and Noah Syndergaard aren’t ready. Joey Lucchesi tore his UCL. Robert Stock, who was already 10th or so on the depth chart, strained his hamstring. Forget replacement level — Hill represents an upgrade from subterranean level. To some extent, any trade at all would be a win, in that it would leave them able to field a roster.

But Hill isn’t merely roster depth. He’s one of the most interesting pitchers in baseball, a curve-and-fastball machine who has spent years pumping sub-90 mph gas past hitters while bamboozling them with a dazzling array of breaking balls. Heck, earlier this year he was named the AL Pitcher of the Month (it’s not the most prestigious award, but it’s an award) in May, when he posted a 0.78 ERA over 34.2 innings.

Of course, there are other months in the year, and the rest of Hill’s 2021 hasn’t gone nearly so well. In total he sported a 3.87 ERA and 4.55 FIP with the Rays, both of which are the highest marks he’s posted since bursting back onto the scene in 2015. His 9.9% swinging strike rate is better only than his abbreviated 2020 season, and he wasn’t exactly great then either. There’s a strong chance that Hill’s 2021 season will be his last stand. Read the rest of this entry »

With a week to go until the trade deadline, the Rays struck a blow against the other contenders on Thursday night, acquiring designated hitter Nelson Cruz and pitcher Calvin Faucher from the Twins for pitchers Drew Strotman and Joe Ryan. Seemingly immune to changes in offensive environment and the arrow of time, Cruz is having a typical Cruz season at 41, hitting .294/.370/.537 with a 142 wRC+, 19 homers, and a 1.8 WAR, the latter a spicy number for a DH in only 85 games.

Tampa Bay’s lineup has been decent but well below the level of the elite offenses in the American League, ranking eighth in wRC+ and fifth in overall runs scored. The outfield has been a particular work in progress when it comes to offense. Kevin Kiermaier and Brett Phillips have both been excellent defensively, but neither are run producers, and 2020 postseason standout Manuel Margot has been rather pumpkin-ified this year. Adding Cruz to the mix allows the Rays to use Austin Meadows and Randy Arozarena daily in the corners. The primary downside here is that Meadows has a rather long injury history for a player just in his mid-20s, and playing in the field every day could increase the risk of another trip to the IL. I think it’s worth the risk; the Yankees and Jays are slowly drifting out of the divisional race, and the Red Sox are dangerous just as long as their pitching rotation stays healthy.

Adding Cruz was worth about five percentage points of divisional probability for the Rays in the ZiPS projections, shifting the race from a fairly balanced 55/45 race to one tipping a bit in favor of Tampa Bay. Expect many more changes before we flip the calendars!

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Matt Wisler has thrown his slider 89.2% of the time this year, the highest percentage of any pitcher in either league. He’s done so over 32-and-two-thirds innings, the last 12-and-a-third of them with the Tampa Bay Rays, who acquired the 28-year-old right-hander from the San Francisco Giants on June 11 in exchange for minor league southpaw Michael Plassmeyer. Since coming to his new club, Wisler has made a dozen appearances and allowed just one earned run.

Wisler told the story behind his signature pitch over the phone earlier this month.

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Matt Wisler: “I’d say I learned [a slider] in high school. I’d always thrown a curveball growing up — from when I was 11 or 12 — and then around sophomore year I started throwing a slider. It was honestly more like a different variation of a curveball, though. It was just a little bit different spin.

“The slider I have now, I learned in Low-A way. My pitching coach was Willie Blair, and we were trying to get more separation between my curveball and my slider. We went through a bunch of different grips. Finally, the second time I tried his grip, it kind of clicked for me. That was in 2012. I’ve kept that one ever since, and have obviously started throwing it more and more over the last couple of years.

“My original slider was more like a slurve — it was probably high-70s, low-80s — and we were trying to find a pitch that I could get into the low- to mid-80s with a little bit different break. There are still times where it will get a little slurvy and be in the high-70s, and a little bigger and rounder. Read the rest of this entry »

We have speed limits for a reason. Excessive speed is a factor in more than a quarter of automobile fatalities and is particularly deadly when combined with other dangerous behaviors behind the wheel. And yet, the idea that we can drive 5-10 mph over the limit without repercussion is so entrenched in our collective psyche — and so effectively decriminalized in most American cities — that most people hardly think twice about driving 35 in a 30. Behind this normalization lies an unexamined, exceptionalist belief: “This speed limit may be a good idea, but I have the ability to exceed it safely.”

There are a number of behaviors that fit into this category of exceptionalism: I’m the one who can get away with not flossing, I can spend hours on social media without consequence, I can stay cool into my 40s. Narcissism lies at the end of this road, but most of us don’t make it nearly that far. In doses, it’s entirely normal to think that general principles don’t apply to you personally. The contradiction at play is just part of the human experience, and it’s not always unhealthy: from this wellspring comes hope and ambition, among other traits and emotions.

As far as baseball is concerned, a no-hitter is perhaps the most wholesome embodiment of this form of individual exceptionalism. In the modern game, chasing a no-no is a retrograde “screw you,” not only to the opponent, but to the conventions of our time. “Take your third time through the order penalty and shove it,” and all that. Understandably, there was a bit of no-hitter fatigue swirling through the audience earlier this season. For me though, even with the increased frequency, the no-hitter remains a rebellion, and it’s as badass as ever. Read the rest of this entry »

MLB passed the halfway mark of the 2021 season over the long holiday weekend, providing a convenient spot to take a break, look back over the preseason projections, and hopefully not cringe too much about how the predictions are shaking out. Since this is the big midseason update, I used the full-fat ZiPS model for individual players in addition to the normal depth chart reconfiguring, with all the high-fructose algorithms rather than the leaner one used for daily updates.

Let’s start with the American League standings.

I was making a “do not panic” argument on behalf of the Yankees back when they were 5–10 and some people were digging for their doomsday preparedness kits, and while it might not be time to find where you left those water purification tablets, the situation is bleaker now than it was three months ago. Not that the team is actually worse; New York has been on an 88-win pace in the games since that reference point. But an 88-win pace isn’t nearly enough to get out of an early-season hole in a division where there are three other teams with more than detectable pulses. Even projected to play solid baseball the rest of the season, the Yankees have gone from the favorite to the projected fourth-place team.

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“We gave Pham up for Renfroe and a damn slapdick prospect?” Blake Snell bemoaned live on Twitch. He was reacting to a trade between the Rays and the Padres that took place during the 2019-20 offseason. Snell’s annoyance caused a bit of controversy – he ended up reaching out to said prospect, Xavier Edwards, to smooth things over – but it also popularized the term, to the point that it’s now part of our baseball lexicon.

What does it mean exactly, though? Urban Dictionary informs us that a “slapdick” is more or less an incompetent person (to put it nicely), but that doesn’t feel quite right in a baseball context. For me and presumably others, a slapdick hitter is someone who doesn’t hit for power and earns his keep by spraying the ball around – someone like Nick Madrigal. Although the Rays currently do not roster Madrigal, they do have this: As of this writing, their hitters collectively have the highest BABIP (.264) and wRC+ (57) on groundballs. A slapdick hitting team.

If your sabermetric senses are tingling, I understand. Due to the fickle nature of BABIP, continued success on grounders is a tenuous endeavor. It’s entirely possible the Rays have gotten lucky over the past few months. But in the spirit of FanGraphs, I began to wonder if there’s an extra dimension to this. The numbers, in fact, do posit an interesting idea – that the Rays have set themselves up for success on grounders, more so than most teams this season. Read the rest of this entry »

We talk a lot about the “face” of baseball — a player who has the look, the excitement, the highlight reel, the things that make them an ideal candidate to be a poster child for the game. “Here,” we say, to would-be fans. “This is what you’re getting when you start to watch that sport.” It could be Bryce Harper with his GIF-worthy hair tosses, or Aaron Judge with his giant frame and home runs. It could be Mookie Betts or Mike Trout, whose talents defy generational lines and who we will likely be talking about for decades after they retire.

As baseball faces go, there are lots of options, even if it feels like no one can agree on them or decide who would be the best candidate to usher in a new generation of fans. Whose poster would these kids want on their walls? Whose stance would they most likely emulate in Little League games? Which superstar can surpass the limitations of team fandom to become beloved by all? It’s a tough request to fulfill, and that’s likely why there are no firm answers.

In recent months, I’ve begun to wonder if what baseball needs is a face at all. Perhaps what baseball needs instead is a voice.

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Because there are so few minor league baseball games on Mondays this year, you’ll see me play with the format of the Tuesday Daily Prospect Notes. I’m lucky that the top prospect in the sport, 20-year-old Tampa Bay Rays infielder Wander Franco, is likely to debut against the Red Sox this evening. The Franco report from the Rays/Top 100 lists still applies, and folks looking for a general overview of his talent should go jam on the clipboard here and read that if you haven’t already done so. Today I’m going to be breaking down his 2021 season using Synergy Baseball, a pitch-by-pitch video software program that is often used by MLB teams.

We made a decision to allocate scouting travel budget toward Synergy Baseball during the offseason, when the timeline for vaccines was still hazy but the presence of COVID was not. Unsure if/how much I’d be travelling again this year, we funneled money into Synergy in case I could not. It was initially useful for watching action in foreign pro leagues and during Spring Training as I worked on prospect lists, but Kevin Goldstein and I also have access to pitch-by-pitch video from Triple-A games (not the whole minors, just Triple-A), as well as metadata from each pitch. I can’t share video with you here (or anywhere) or I’d be in violation of MiLB.tv terms of service, but I can share with you some of the Franco metadata to illustrate the specific nature of his skills and put them in a big league context.

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Kevin Goldstein and I have updated the pro portion of the Top 100, which means we quickly reviewed the placement of players in the 50 FV tier and above, and considered who was not yet in those tiers but should be based on how they’ve looked during the first month of the 2021 season. I still have three total org audits to do — Milwaukee, Oakland and the Cubs — before I start peeling graduates off the list. Those will be completed shortly. You can find the updated list here.

Also, if you missed it, Kevin and I updated our draft rankings and posted a Mock Draft on Monday.

The lone change up near the top of the 100 is Riley Greene moving into the top 20; he’s in the mix with several other similarly-aged players with the talent to be consistent All-Stars, like Bobby Witt Jr., Julio Rodríguez, and Corbin Carroll.

DL Hall moved into the 55 FV tier on the strength of his stuff. He’s still walking a fairly high rate of opposing batters but just on the strength of his three plus pitches, could be a Haderesque relief weapon even if he can’t start. Read the rest of this entry »