Today, we have a Killers two-fer, with lists covering a couple of important defensive positions, specifically second base and catcher. While still focusing on teams that meet the loose definition of a contender (a .500 record or Playoff Odds of roughly 10%) 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. All statistics are through July 12.

Padres

With Kyle Higashioka departing for the Rangers in free agency, the Padres — who ranked 24th in the majors last year in catcher WAR (1.1) — pencilled in Luis Campusano, the weaker partner of last year’s catching tandem, alongside late-season addition Elias Díaz to do the bulk of the work behind plate. The pair, augmented by 38-year-old free agent Martín Maldonado, ranked dead last in our preseason Positional Power Rankings. After optioning Campusano to Triple-A El Paso in March (he was recalled yesterday), they’ve approximated that billing, ranking 29th out of the 30 teams in catcher WAR. Read the rest of this entry »

Jose Altuve is having a Cooperstown-worthy career. Since debuting with the Houston Astros in 2011, the 35-year-old second baseman has logged 2,329 hits, including 246 home runs, while putting up a 129 wRC+ and 59.2 WAR. A nine-time All-Star who has won seven Silver Sluggers and one Gold Glove, Altuve captured MVP honors in 2017.

Turn the clock back to 2008, and the 5-foot-6 Puerto Cabello, Venezuela native was 18 years old and playing stateside for the first time. His manager with the rookie-level Greeneville Astros was Rodney Linares.

I recently asked the now-Tampa Bay Rays bench coach for his memories of the then-teenaged prospect.

“One guy that doesn’t get a lot of credit for Altuve is [current St. Louis Cardinals first base coach] Stubby Clapp, who’d been my hitting coach the year before,” Linares told me. “He always talked about Altuve, because he’d had him in extended spring. He was like, ‘You’ve got to watch this kid; this kid is going to be really good.’ I used to tell Stubby, ‘You think that because you’re small and played in the big leagues, anybody who is small can play.’”

Linares recalls the Astros organization’s wanting him to play 20-year-old Albert Cartwright at second, prompting him to tell Altuve ‘Go to short, go to third, go to left field. I’m going to make sure that you get your at-bats.” Read the rest of this entry »

In a race for a playoff spot, every edge matters. Yet all too often, for reasons that extend beyond a player’s statistics, managers and general managers fail to make the moves that could improve their teams, allowing mediocre production to fester at the risk of smothering a club’s postseason hopes. In Baseball Prospectus’ 2007 book, It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over, I compiled a historical All-Star squad of ignominy, identifying players at each position whose performances had dragged their teams down in tight races: the Replacement-Level Killers. I’ve revisited the concept numerous times at multiple outlets and have adapted it at FanGraphs in an expanded format since 2018.

When it comes to defining replacement level play, we needn’t hew too closely to exactitude. Any team that’s gotten less than 0.6 WAR from a position to this point — prorating to 1.0 over a full season — is generally in the ballpark, though my final lists also incorporate our Depth Charts rest-of-season projections, which may nose them over the line. Sometimes, acceptable or even above-average defense (which may depend upon which metric one uses) coupled with total ineptitude on offense is enough to flag a team. Sometimes a club may be well ahead of replacement level but has lost a key contributor to injury; sometimes the reverse is true, but the team hasn’t yet climbed above that first-cut threshold. As with Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of hardcore pornography, I know replacement level when I see it. Read the rest of this entry »

Starting pitchers prepare for games in three-stage fashion. A few days after taking the mound, they throw a bullpen session under the watchful eye of the pitching coach, typically with a Trackman recording each throw. At the start of every series, there is a pitchers’ meeting with all arms present, as well as the catchers and pitching coaches. On the day of a start, the pitcher will go over that day’s game plan with the catchers and coaches.

And then there are the talks pitchers have among themselves. While informal, they can likewise play a meaningful role in preparedness. Every time a hurler takes the hill, he brings with him knowledge gleaned from his peers. That was a big part of what I was interested in when I approached three starters — Lucas Giolito, Kevin Gausman, and Ryan Pepiot — to learn how they get ready for an outing from an information perspective.

Here are excerpts from my conversations with the pitchers:

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PRE-SERIES AND PRE-START MEETINGS

Giolito: “You go over a lot of things in the pre-series meeting. You go over guys who like to run — stealing bases and things like that — and you obviously go over the hitters. Considering that you have a bunch of dudes in the room that have wildly different stuff and attack plans, that’s more surface level. You’re not going down the line and saying, ‘This is how we’re going to attack this guy,’ because we’re all different. That’s for when you have your pre-start meeting.

“In the pre-start meeting — that’s with the coaching staff and the catchers — we go over each hitter, talking about strengths, weaknesses, and attack plans. The attack plans are based on the individual pitcher’s stuff.” Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I began a series of pieces about team win-loss totals as estimated by BaseRuns, first by taking a broad look at the methodology and its limitations, then by zooming in on the offenses that deviate most notably from their BaseRuns assessment in the run scoring department. Let’s wrap up with a look at the defenses that sit furthest from their runs allowed approximation.

In the offense edition, I used a game show format to evaluate whether the perspective offered by BaseRuns has a point, or if there’s something its methodology is overlooking. We’ll keep that framework going for the defenses as well. Here’s a reminder of how it works:

To determine whether or not BaseRuns knows what it’s talking about with respect to each team, imagine yourself sitting in the audience on a game show set. The person on your left is dressed as Little Bo Peep, while the person on your right has gone to great lengths to look like Beetlejuice. That or Michael Keaton is really hard up for money. On stage there are a series of doors, each labeled with a team name. Behind each door is a flashing neon sign that reads either “Skill Issue!” or “Built Different!” Both can be either complimentary or derogatory depending on whether BaseRuns is more or less optimistic about a team relative to its actual record. For teams that BaseRuns suggests are better than the numbers indicate, the skill issue identified is a good thing — a latent ability not yet apparent in the on-field results. But if BaseRuns thinks a team is worse than the numbers currently imply, then skill issue is used more colloquially to suggest a lack thereof. The teams that are built different buck the norms laid out by BaseRuns and find a way that BaseRuns doesn’t consider to either excel or struggle.

Read the rest of this entry »

In a post yesterday, I wrote about the BaseRuns approach to estimating team winning percentages and how it attempts to strip away context that doesn’t pertain to a team’s actual ability, so as to reveal what would have happened if baseball were played in a world not governed by the whims of seemingly random variation. In this world, a win-loss record truly represents how good a team actually is. Try as it might, the BaseRuns methodology fails to actually create such a world, sometimes stripping away too much context, ignoring factors that do speak to a team’s quality, or both.

I delayed for a separate post (this one!) a deeper discussion of specific offensive and defensive units that BaseRuns represents quite differently compared to the actual numbers posted by these teams. To determine whether or not BaseRuns knows what it’s talking about with respect to each team, imagine yourself sitting in the audience on a game show set. The person on your left is dressed as Little Bo Peep, while the person on your right has gone to great lengths to look like Beetlejuice. That or Michael Keaton is really hard up for money. On stage there are a series of doors, each labeled with a team name. Behind each door is a flashing neon sign that reads either “Skill Issue!” or “Built Different!” Both can be either complimentary or derogatory depending on whether BaseRuns is more or less optimistic about a team relative to its actual record. For teams that BaseRuns suggests are better than the numbers indicate, the skill issue identified is a good thing — a latent ability not yet apparent in the on-field results. But if BaseRuns thinks a team is worse than the numbers currently imply, then skill issue is used more colloquially to suggest a lack thereof. The teams that are built different buck the norms laid out by BaseRuns and find a way that BaseRuns doesn’t consider to either excel or struggle. Read the rest of this entry »

Welcome to another edition of Five Things I Liked (Or Didn’t Like) This Week. I got a chance to see many of my favorite baseball happenings this week: catchers making tough plays, exciting pitching matchups, and stars of the game at their absolute best. We also have plenty of goofy but delightful coincidences, just as Five Things patron saint Zach Lowe intended. A quick programming note: I’ll be on vacation, a nice restorative pre-deadline trip, for the next week and change. Enjoy baseball in the meantime – it’s a wonderful time of year for it.

1. Athletic Catchers
It’s amazing how much baseball knowledge your brain absorbs without actively thinking about it. For example, when you see an outfielder throw the ball home to cut down a runner trying to score on a single, you’ll immediately anticipate that the batter who hit that single might try to advance to second base. You might not even realize you’re thinking this. It’s just the natural timing of the sport. Long throw, cutoff man missed — how in the world is the catcher going to attempt a tag and then find a way to get the ball down to second base? It just doesn’t happen.

Or, well, it’s not supposed to happen. But Carlos Narváez doesn’t care what heuristics are stored in your brain:

What a weird play. The Red Sox correctly played to prevent the runner from scoring, and that let Wilmer Flores round first and get a great look at the play at the plate to see if he should advance. Right around this point, Narváez seemed to have no shot at throwing out Flores:

Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Boston Red Sox. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the fifth year we’re delineating between two anticipated relief roles, the abbreviations for which you’ll see in the “position” column below: MIRP for multi-inning relief pitchers, and SIRP for single-inning relief pitchers. The ETAs listed generally correspond to the year a player has to be added to the 40-man roster to avoid being made eligible for the Rule 5 draft. Manual adjustments are made where they seem appropriate, but we use that as a rule of thumb.

A quick overview of what FV (Future Value) means can be found here. A much deeper overview can be found here.

All of the ranked prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details (and updated TrackMan data from various sources) than this article and integrates every team’s list so readers can compare prospects across farm systems. It can be found here. Read the rest of this entry »

Mason Englert throws an array of pitches. The 25-year-old right-hander’s repertoire comprises a four-seam fastball, a sinker, a changeup, a cutter/slider, a sweeper, a “big curveball,” and a “shorter version of the curveball.” He considers his changeup — utilized at a 31.6% clip over his 13 relief appearances with the Tampa Bay Rays — to be his best pitch. More on that in a moment.

Englert, whom the Rays acquired from the Detroit Tigers in exchange for Drew Sommers back in February, will also break out the occasional… lets’s call it a baby curveball.

“I threw a few that were around 60 mph when I was in Durham,” explained Englert, whose campaign includes nine outings and a 1.84 ERA for Tampa’s Triple-A affiliate. “One of them was to the best man in my wedding. It was the first time I’d faced him in a real at-bat, and I just wanted to make him laugh.”

The prelude to Englert’s throwing a baby curveball to his close friend came a handful of weeks earlier. Back and forth between the Bulls and the bigs this season, he was at the time throwing in the bullpen at Yankee Stadium.

”I was totally messing around and wanted to see what kind of reaction I could get from Snydes (Rays pitching coach Kyle Snyder),” recalled Englert, whose major-league ledger this year includes a 4.84 ERA and a much-better 2.93 FIP. “I lobbed it in there, kind of like the [Zack] Greinke-style curveball, and landed it. I thought he would laugh it off, but instead Snydes goes, ‘Huh. You could maybe use that early in counts to some lefties.’ That was him having an openness to, ‘Hey, make the ball move different ways, do different things, use them all.’” Read the rest of this entry »

By most measures, the Rafael Devers trade happened suddenly. It came without advance notice of his availability, and the Red Sox reportedly weren’t shopping him around. Immediately, it drew comparisons to the Luka Dončić-Anthony Davis trade in the NBA, because hardly ever in our scoops-driven media landscape, where even the tiniest rumor is treated as currency, does a transaction involving a superstar catch us by surprise.

And yet, now that the shock has worn off, trading Devers feels like a logical outcome to the saga that began in March, when the Red Sox signed Alex Bregman to play third base without giving the incumbent a heads up. The details of the ensuing rift have been covered at great length, at FanGraphs and elsewhere, so I won’t go into them here. A lot of the reporting since the trade has described the situation in Boston as untenable, and the damage done to the relationship between Devers and the team as irreparable. But based on how badly the Red Sox botched their initial response to the conflict, and then kept bungling their subsequent attempts at reconciliation, from my perspective, it seems like they didn’t make repairing it much of a priority.

We’ll tackle your questions about the Devers trade and so much more in this week’s FanGraphs mailbag. But first, I’d like to remind all of you that while anyone can submit a question, this mailbag is exclusive to FanGraphs Members. If you aren’t yet a Member and would like to keep reading, you can sign up for a Membership here. It’s the best way to both experience the site and support our staff, and it comes with a bunch of other great benefits. Also, if you’d like to ask a question for next week’s mailbag, send me an email at mailbag@fangraphs.com. Read the rest of this entry »