We’re currently in the midst of a lull in the baseball calendar. The offseason has officially arrived and yet the Hot Stove hasn’t really been lit yet. I suppose I could get excited for Awards season, but the painfully slow roll out and the heated arguments wear me down fairly quickly.

So, instead, I try to make my own baseball entertainment. For me, one exercise is simply to look over the league and attempt to identify the players about whom I’m most excited for next season. Not superstars, necessarily: everyone is always excited to watch the game’s brightest lights. And not prospects who haven’t yet reached the Show, either. I’m not really qualified to talk about those players in a meaningful way, so I’ll leave those players to Eric (and Chris) and all the scouts out there.

Outside of those groups, though, there are still hundreds of players from which to choose. I’ll be excited to watch more than these 10, of course, but in surveying the league, these are ones who caught my eye. Note that this isn’t in any particular order. I’m equally excited about all 10. Perhaps you’ll agree with me, perhaps not. Feel free to conduct your own exercise and let me know who your 10 players are in the comments.

Rafael Devers

The new Red Sox third baseman enjoyed a meteoric debut month, swatting his way to a 224 wRC+ in his July call-up. That covered just 27 plate appearances, though, and as we moved into August and September, he cooled off significantly. He hit safely from his second game (July 26) through his eighth game (August 4). At that point, he was hitting .389/.463/.694, for a 205 wRC+. From August 5 through the end of the regular season, though, he hit .263/.312/.441, for a 92 wRC+. Doom and gloom, right? Not entirely, no, because in Boston’s abbreviated playoff run, he was one of the few bright spots, slashing .364/.429/.909. He slugged two homers — one off of Francisco Liriano and one off of Ken Giles. The latter was of the inside-the-park variety, but it was impressive nonetheless:

So, it’s hard to know what to expect from young Devers. Andrew Benintendi was similarly hyped coming into last campaign and was decidedly mediocre for large swaths of the season. Will that be Devers’ fate too? And what of his fielding? He made seven throwing errors and seven fielding errors in his short time in Boston. If the Red Sox acquire a legit first baseman this winter (or a legit DH and move Hanley Ramirez to first) and it turns out that Devers can’t hack at it at third, the Red Sox will have a conundrum to solve.

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Pitching and defense didn’t win in 2017. Offense did. Specifically, launching juiced balls into the air did.

That’s an oversimplification, of course. Charlie Morton played a significant role in winning two Game 7s. Justin Verlander was generally great. Pitching and defense were certainly part of it. But an examination of wRC+ and FanGraphs’ Offensive Runs Above Average (Off) statistic for 2017 playoff teams reveals a noteworthy finding.

Of the three clubs that won 100 games in the regular season and the two clubs that met in the World Series, each finished in the top four by FanGraphs’ Off and wRC+. The historically good Astros offense led the club to a World Series title.

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Regular readers of this column may recall the law school aspirations of Milwaukee Brewers prospect Jon Perrin. When he was featured here in May 2016, the Oklahoma State graduate was dominating Midwest League hitters — he’d fanned 47 and walked just one in 36 innings — but he was nonetheless contemplating saying goodbye to baseball. Perrin had applied to Harvard Law, and if accepted he was “probably going to be out of here.”

As we later reported, that didn’t happen. Perrin received a letter of rejection from the prestigious institution, and went forward with his pitching career. Harvard’s loss is proving to be Milwaukee’s gain. The 24-year-old right-hander spent this past season with Double-A Biloxi, continuing his stingy ways. In 105-and-a-third innings, he issued 21 free passes while fashioning a 2.91 ERA.

Perrin was pleased with his performance.

“I feel I proved that I can get advanced hitters out,” said Perrin, who relies heavily on his sinker. “A sub-3.00 ERA at the Double-A level is nothing to spit at. I had some up and downs and fought through an injury, but was able to finish on a strong note. I can’t complain.”

His Juris Doctor plans haven’t gone away. They’re simply on the back burner. Perrin was accepted into the University of Kansas’s law school program this past spring, and while he’s “100% committed to baseball,” he knows that a playing career only lasts so long. Once the spikes are hung up, he’ll begin his legal studies in his home state. Read the rest of this entry »

Heading into the 2017 campaign, a lot was expected of Jackie Bradley Jr. In 2016, he’d shown that his late-season breakout the previous year was no fluke. He recorded five wins, bashed a career-best 26 homers, and earned a place on the All-Star team for the first time. He was excellent on the defensive side of the ball, as well. There was sufficient reason to think he’d reach a new level.

Unfortunately, though, this season didn’t quite go as planned. If his career seemed to be trending up, the 2017 campaign changed that impression. It was an unexpected chapter in what has become a pretty strange career up to this point.

Let’s start with Bradley’s power output. In 2015, when then-interim manager Torey Lovullo finally gave Bradley a shot at regular playing time, he started pounding the ball with authority. For the 2015 season as a whole, he posted a .249 ISO. From his July 29 call-up to the end of the season, his ISO was .272. No one expected him to carry that over for a full season in 2016 — only 24 players have ever posted a .270 ISO for a whole season while manning center field, and the list of players who have done it more than one season is perilously short, including only Carlos Beltran, Joe DiMaggio, Jim Edmonds, Ken Griffey Jr., Mickey Mantle, Willie Mays, Duke Snider, Gorman Thomas, Mike Trout, and Hack Wilson. Ten guys.

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Today, the off-season begins in earnest, as free agents become eligible to sign with new teams at 5 pm eastern. And given the number of interesting players on the market and which teams look like buyers, it should be a more active free agent atmosphere than we’ve seen in past years. Toss in a number of high-profile trade targets, and we could be in for a pretty interesting winter.

But every year, it seems, a few teams end up driving the off-season action. Last year, White Sox GM Rick Hahn became the most popular guy in town, as he shopped Chris Sale and Adam Eaton around at the winter meetings, eventually making blockbuster trades for both. The Dodgers were the big spenders, bringing back their trio of top-tier free agents, though at rates that proved to be bargains in every case.

Of course, in prior years, teams like the Diamondbacks, Padres, and Tigers have dominated the off-seasons with their aggressive attempts to get better, only to see those moves push the franchise in the wrong direction. So being the hot stove kingpin isn’t always a good thing, and with a particularly risky set of premium free agents, there’s a decent chance that whoever makes the most big moves this winter will also end up wishing they had been a bit more cautious. But as we head into the time when a few teams are looking to remake their franchises in significant ways, let’s take a look at which teams might end up being the ones who have the most impact — one way or the other — on their clubs this winter.

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The postseason game is changing around us. Starting pitchers are being asked to go harder for shorter periods of time, allowing teams to begin playing matchups with the bullpen as early as the third inning. And while strategically sound in most cases, this trend has emerged without a major change in how we think about rest and schedules in the postseason. As much as we might love the high-intensity matchups that “bullpenning” provides, is it possible that pitchers are having to endure greater stress than in the past?

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Dave Dombrowski held a press conference yesterday following the Red Sox’ announcement that John Farrell won’t be returning as the club’s manager next year. He wasn’t particularly forthcoming when asked to explain why. Nor was he willing to address whether it would have happened had the Red Sox gone deeper into the postseason. The latter is an especially compelling question, as Dombrowski cited a need for change multiple times during the 30-minute media session.

Would Farrell have been retained as a reward for playoff success, even though the front office believed a different voice was needed? Or would that dynamic have changed with a World Series berth? In other words, does an October run transform a manager’s ability to lead in the forthcoming season?

I decided that Dombrowski’s deflection of the “what if” scenario deserved a follow-up. Well after the Boston Globe’s Alex Speier initially posed the question, I barked up the same tree, using distinctly different verbiage:

When acquiring or retaining a player, the future is more important than past performance. To what extent is that true for a manager, and does success or failure in the postseason impact a manager’s effectiveness going forward?

The extent to which his answer shed light on the Farrell decision is debatable.

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This past Sunday’s Notes column led with Alex Bregman talking about how hitting the ball in the air became a priority once he’d signed with the Astros. That approach paid off in spades yesterday. With his team down a run, the 2015 draft pick took a Chris Sale pitch over Fenway Park’s Green Monster to tie the game in the eighth inning. Houston went on to win 5-4 and advance to the ALCS.

When I approached Bregman after the game, his first words were, “How was the launch angle on that?” (I hadn’t looked it up yet, but it was 32 degrees.) Asked if he liked whatever the launch angle was, he smiled and said that he loved it.

Needless to say, the youngster was in seventh heaven.

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In the wild and remote southeast corner of Oregon, tucked near to the eastern side of the Owyhee River, there’s a canyon that used to be known as Dugout Gulch. It was renamed Leslie Gulch in remembrance of Hiram E. Leslie, an area rancher who, in 1882, was struck by lightning. It wouldn’t be fair to say that getting struck by lightning was a habit of Leslie’s. He was no more likely to get struck than any other rancher in the region. Yet get struck by lightning, Leslie did. Well past a century later, it’s how we recall him today.

Josh Reddick has spent a career being unclutch. Greatly unclutch, incredibly unclutch, almost unfathomably unclutch. Ben Lindbergh wrote about it at the end of June. We have a win-expectancy-based Clutch metric on our leaderboards, and, since Reddick debuted, no hitter has a lower Clutch score. We actually have this stuff going back to 1974, and, since then, on a per-600-plate-appearance basis, Reddick currently stands as the least-clutch hitter out of everyone. He just edges out Ron Kittle and Richard Hidalgo. If you think that this is somehow misleading, it’s not. When Reddick has batted with the leverage low, he’s posted a 121 wRC+. When he’s batted with medium leverage, he’s posted a 99 wRC+. When he’s batted with the leverage high, his wRC+ has been 70. The history is all right there, inarguable. Josh Reddick has not exactly risen to the occasion.

This always seems to lead to the same conversation, about how clutch performance isn’t predictive. That’s true — it’s not. Or at least, it’s not easy to spot when it is. Possibly, or even probably, Reddick isn’t an unclutch hitter. But Hiram E. Leslie probably wasn’t lightning-prone. At some point, you’re just defined by what’s happened. It’s not easy for Reddick to erase his own record.

Yet days like Monday can help. Monday, in Boston, Reddick drove in the go-ahead run in the top of the eighth. The Astros went ahead by one, and the Astros finished ahead by one, having eliminated the Red Sox in four games. A number of different players all helped the cause, but in the eighth, with baseball’s most unhittable pitcher on the mound with two outs, the least-clutch hitter in decades knocked an RBI single the other way. The Astros found themselves on the verge of advance.

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Leading 2-1 in the series, and 2-1 in game four, A.J. Hinch just summoned Justin Verlander from the bullpen to try and protect the lead and allow the Astros to finish the ALDS without having to go back to Houston for a winner-take-all finale. Given how good Chris Sale has looked for the Red Sox, and how dominant David Price was for Boston yesterday, it’s easy to see the appeal of putting your best arm on the mound and just riding him to victory.

But this decision just felt like an overreaction given the alternatives. Warming up next to Verlander was Will Harris. Will Harris isn’t a big name, but for the last few years, he’s been one of the best relievers in baseball.

Harris was his usual dominant self this year, allowing a .262 wOBA. He posted the lowest BB% and the highest K% of his career. He doesn’t have Verlander’s velocity, but his cutter/curveball combination has led to consistently dominant results.

But despite being warm, Hinch went with Verlander. I’m not going to pretend that Andrew Benintendi’s home run — hit just 90 mph, and a ball that Statcast gave just a 5% hit probability to — was the obvious outcome here, or that the decision was clearly a mistake because the outcome went badly.

But as much as it is refreshing to question whether managers are too aggressive in using their best pitchers this year, as opposed to watching Zach Britton sit in the bullpen as his team’s season ended a year ago, it feels like this was an example of the tide turning too far in the other direction. It’s great to have a guy like Verlander that you really believe in, but you can’t win a World Series with just a few pitchers. You have to trust your depth guys too.

If we’ve gotten to the point where we’re choosing to put a starter who has never pitched in relief in before a guy like Harris, a legitimately elite reliever, then I think the pendulum has swung too far the other direction. Especially when the Astros didn’t have to win Game 4. The worst case scenario for them in this game was that they head home with a fresh Verlander to take the mound, and Dallas Keuchel to bridge the gap between him and Ken Giles.

Now, they’re down 3-2 in this game, and might still head back to Houston for Game 5, only Keuchel will likely be the starter, and Verlander might be the guy pitching a few innings of relief instead. The Astros may have just unnecessarily reduced their worst-case outcome in Game 4 to an even worse position, because they didn’t trust a really good reliever.