We have a pretty good idea of baseball’s best pitches. You’ve got the Aroldis Chapman fastball. You’ve got the Kenley Jansen cutter. The Adam Wainwright curveball. The Stephen Strasburg changeup. The Cole Hamels changeup. The Felix Hernandez changeup. The Corey Kluber whatever it is. The Clayton Kershaw curveball. The Kershaw slider. The Kershaw hypothetical splitter that, in my imagination, he doesn’t throw because he doesn’t need to because of his curveball and his slider. There’s no clear winner, but there are plenty of candidates, and all of them are amazing.

We don’t have as good an idea of baseball’s worst pitches. The truth is baseball’s worst pitches don’t get thrown often outside the bullpen. They’re projects in which pitchers don’t have confidence, so you don’t see them in games. But we can skip over to something related, something that might stand as a decent proxy: We have the data to identify baseball’s least-effective pitches. At least among pitches that are thrown more than once or twice a month. This is one of the uses of the FanGraphs pitch-value data, and if you set a 50-pitch minimum, the second-least effective pitch this year has been Wei-Chung Wang’s changeup. And the first-least effective pitch this year? That honor belongs to Drew Smyly.

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Jake Odorizzi arrived in the Tampa Bay organization with a slew of breaking balls, a decent fastball, and questions about his changeup. After more struggle with the change, he reached out to teammate Alex Cobb, who had once had a similar issue. Cobb taught him the grip for his splitter, and Odorizzi’s game took off.

The interesting thing, though, is that Odorizzi’s pitch is different — despite having the same grip. For two pitches that they’ve nicknamed Thing 1 and Thing 2, these aren’t the indistinguishable twins from The Cat in the Hat.

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Today was quite the deadline spectacle, with two of the best pitchers in baseball, Jon Lester and David Price, changing uniforms. The Lester deal hit early, and it was an eye-opener, with the “buyer” A’s “selling” their #4 hitter, Yoenis Cespedes in the process. The movement of established players, such as Cespedes, Allen Craig and Joe Kelly, by buyers in pursuit of their needs came to be one of the themes of the day.

As they often do, however, the Tampa Bay Rays zigged while everyone else zagged, and “sold” ace lefty David Price to the Tigers in a three-team deal that sent Austin Jackson to the Mariners, and lefty starter Drew Smyly and infielders Nick Franklin and Willy Adames to the Rays. The reaction of many media outlets to the Rays’ take had a quizzical or even disappointed tone. It takes a little more analysis – and an understanding of the way the underfunded Rays need to do business – to see what they’re up to here. To put it simply, the Rays are trusting their solid organizational evaluation skills as they have many times in the past, and see an abundance of talent and team control in this three-player package. Read the rest of this entry »

When the Royals and Rays matched up on the big James Shields/Wil Myers (and others) trade in the winter of 2012-13, the judgement from the baseball community was swift and decisive. It wasn’t necessarily that you couldn’t trade a budding star like Myers away under any circumstances; after all, plenty of people liked the Jeff Samardzija / Jason Hammel trade for Oakland even though it cost them Addison Russell. It was that the 2013 Royals, unlike the 2014 A’s, didn’t appear to be close enough to success to make a “win-now” move at that price. It was that the Royals already had a Jeff Francoeur-sized hole in right field and could have made a similar overall improvement by just putting Myers out there instead.

It seemed that Dayton Moore was trading the future for the present, even though the present wasn’t likely to work out, and so far, that’s been the case. The 2013 Royals won 86 games, a huge 14-game improvement over the 72-win 2012 team, but didn’t come close to the playoffs. The 2014 Royals are two games over .500, and our latest playoff odds give them just a 14.7 percent chance of making it to October. Recent reports that they’re looking for a right-handed right fielder have led to some pretty easy snark considering who they gave away. Dave wrote last week that they should trade Shields now, since he’s an impending free agent; I argued that they were the team most likely to mistakenly “go for it” before the deadline.

If the Shields trade was made on the premise that they needed to get to the playoffs for it to be a success, then it certainly looks like it’s going to be a failure, just as most predicted the day it was made. Needless to say, nearly two years later, the trade still looks bad for Kansas City… but maybe not exactly in the way that we might have thought. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a bit of an odd time to write about baseball. Some trades are trickling in, but we’re about a week removed from the All Star Game. The ASG break is a great time to do some summaries, compare some first halves, look at some guys who may be surprising or disappointing. But there’s only been a handful of days since everyone submitted those stories, and very little has happened since, at least as far as big-picture stuff goes. It is for this reason, and many other selfish reasons, that I am now writing about husky guys stealing bases.

This actually started as a tweet from fellow FanGraphs-er Jason Collette. It’s a fairly innocuous thing on its own. The fact that Molina has only scored three runs is a bit of an oddity, but more on a “weird baseball” level — which I assume Jason was going for. The fact that he has three steals is even less of a big deal. Lots of dudes don’t have many steals. As of this writng, 64 players have less than 3 steals. It is slightly noteworthy that Jose Molina has as many steals as both Starlin Castro and Andrelton Simmons, but only because guys like Castro and Simmons are smaller young guys that look like they should be speedy. Conversely, Molina looks like he should not be speedy. That is, he’s 39 years old and rotund.

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Kevin Kiermaier debuted for the Tampa Bay Rays in 2013. Here were his end-of-season numbers:

The Rays added Kiermaier to their 40-man roster on September 30 last season for their Game 163 tiebreaker against the Texas Rangers. Kiermaier debuted in the ninth inning when Joe Maddon subbed him in as a defensive replacement in center field, and as a result Kiermaier earned a spot on the Rays postseason roster for their Wild Card game against the Indians. An unusual debut, to say the least, but not surprising given what was thought of Kiermaier at the time.

Rays General Manager Andrew Friedman called Kiermaier the best defensive player in their organization at any level at the time of his callup last season. MLB.com’s Bernie Pleskoff, a former professional scout, called Kiermaier an “outstanding defender” and went on to say that Kiermaier could win multiple Gold Gloves.

It was always thought that Kiermaier had a future as an MLB player, probably as a fourth or fifth outfielder who mostly served as a late-inning defensive replacement or pinch runner. Now, Kiermaier has the highest WAR on the team projected to be best in the AL East, and he’s done it in less than half as much playing time as anyone else.

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Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.

This time around, I bring you tales of three teenagers who really stood out in recent viewings.

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Brent Honeywell, RHP, Tampa Bay Rays (Profile)
Level: Rookie-Advanced   Age: 19  Top-15: N/A   Top-100: N/A
Line: 8 IP, 2 H, 0 R, 10/1 K/BB, 0.00 ERA, 1.58 FIP

Summary
Honeywell already looks like a steal with the 72nd pick in the draft.

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Something I assume the Rays understand: From here on out, they project to be perhaps the best team in the American League East. Something else I assume the Rays understand: They’ve dug themselves into too deep a hole, so this year the playoffs presumably aren’t in the cards. And that’s why we’re probably going to see the Rays trade David Price within the next couple weeks. He can help them only so much in 2014, he’ll be difficult for them to afford in 2015 and pieces received in return could replenish what’s become an emptier system than usual. This is how the Rays do the Rays. Price’s status is no kind of secret.

Given how good Price is — and given how many teams consider themselves to be in the playoff hunt — the lefty has a number of potential suitors. Price is the premier impact player available, so no one out there can shift the balance like he can. He might be worth 2 WAR in the final two-and-a-half months; then there’s the playoff bonus, to say nothing of 2015. It’s pretty easy to plug in numbers and see how Price could improve any rotation. But how do those improvements translate to changes in the odds?

Another way of asking the same question: Who might stand to benefit the most — in 2014 — from acquiring a guy like David Price?

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Major League Baseball’s signing period for international prospects kicked off on Wednesday and will continue until June 15, 2015. Teams may sign players residing outside the United States, Canada and Puerto Rico who have or will turn 16 by September 1 of this year. Just a few years ago, teams were allowed to spend as much as they wanted to develop and sign international prospects. That all changed with the current collective bargaining agreement, which went into effect in 2012.

The CBA imposes bonus pool limits on international signings. The team with the worst winning percentage in the prior year receives the largest bonus pool for the next year. The team with the best winning percentage receives the smallest. The remaining 28 teams fall in between, again according to their winning percentage from the prior season. International players who are 23 years of age or older, and have played professional baseball for five or more years, are exempt from the bonus pool limits. Click here for the list of bonus pools by team, with the Houston Astros on top with $5,015,400 and the St. Louis Cardinals at the bottom with $1,866,300.

In additional to the bonus pools, MLB also assigns slot values for international prospects, even though there is no international draft. But the slot values are tradeable, and are therefore valuable for teams looking to spend more on international prospects than their assigned bonus pool would allow. A team can trade for up to 50% of its bonus pool, but it must trade for a specific slot value. For example, a team with a $4 million bonus pool can trade for up to $2 million in pool space, but it must receive in return specific slot values that add up to $2 million, or less. Click here for the list of 120 slot values assigned to each team. The Astros have the top slot value of $3,300,900 and the Cardinals have the lowest at $137,600.

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Each weekday during the minor-league season, FanGraphs is providing a status update on multiple rookie-eligible players. Note that Age denotes the relevant prospect’s baseball age (i.e. as of July 1st of the current year); Top-15, the prospect’s place on Marc Hulet’s preseason organizational list; and Top-100, that same prospect’s rank on Hulet’s overall top-100 list.

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Reymin Guduan, LHP, Houston Astros (Profile)
Level: Rookie-Advanced   Age: 22  Top-15: N/A   Top-100: N/A
Line: 7 IP, 5 H, 2 R, 6/4 K/BB, 1.29 ERA, 3.97 FIP

Summary
Can you feel the heat?

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