Last week, when the Red Sox jumped the starting pitching market — surrendering Anderson Espinoza, their best pitching prospect in the deal — to acquire Drew Pomeranz from San Diego, the general consensus was that the team overpaid, like they did in acquiring Craig Kimbrel some months earlier, as the team tries to take advantage of David Ortiz’s last year in baseball. After all, Pomeranz was traded for Yonder Alonso a few months earlier, and despite a great start to the year with the Padres, no one really knows how well he’ll hold up down the stretch, given that this size of workload isn’t something he’s handled before. And just days before the trade, Baseball America had rated Espinoza as the #15 prospect in baseball, 24 spots ahead of Manuel Margot, the primary chip the Padres acquired from the Red Sox in exchange for their closer over the winter.

Giving up a top-15 prospect for a guy with as many question marks as Pomeranz comes with is certainly a gamble, as the deal will look disastrous if Pomeranz can’t hold up through October and Espinoza reaches his upside. But I can’t help but wonder if this deal is perhaps an example of how public prospect ratings and a player’s current market value can diverge pretty significantly.

Read the rest of this entry »

Know this — Dave Dombrowski likes to make trades. He was first named a general manager back on July 5, 1988, assuming the title of “youngest GM in the game” back before it was cool with the Montreal Expos. He made his first trade on July 13. His aggressive nature was sometimes just off center stage, as the teams he had previously helmed — the Expos, Marlins and Tigers — have rarely been media darlings. But now he is running the Red Sox, and they get plenty of coverage. While that level of coverage might not be fair or warranted, his deals are being scrutinized hard these days. Is he gutting the farm system? Or does Dombrowski know how to pick ’em? I thought I’d take an objective stab at his trade record.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Padres continue to capitalize on the short-term success of their big leaguers by parlaying what might just be small-sample mirages into good prospects. For those of you missed my report on RHP Chris Paddack, who San Diego got from Miami in exchange for Fernando Rodney, that write up is here. The Padres arm du jour is Anderson Espinoza, one of baseball most electric young arms and, in my opinion, a great return for the likes of Drew Pomeranz. Read the rest of this entry »

The All-Star break is often just that — a much-needed break, for players and executives alike. You might’ve heard this before, but the regular season is something of a grind. Yet the break also comes just in advance of the trade deadline, so one can never get too comfortable. And as trades go, today there’s been a big one: Drew Pomeranz is going from the Padres to the Red Sox, and Anderson Espinoza is reportedly going from the Red Sox to the Padres.

Let’s get this out of the way now: The A’s look really silly. They looked silly even before this — Pomeranz was an All-Star! — but Espinoza is a major return, and quite preferable to Yonder Alonso and Marc Rzepczynski. This is a move I’m sure Oakland regrets. There’s another move I’m sure they regret more.

The Oakland part of this is funny. But the Boston and San Diego parts are also interesting, and obviously more relevant. For the Padres, this moves the rebuild forward, getting another boost from the Red Sox farm system. Perhaps the team learned a lesson from last summer’s inactivity. And for the Red Sox, they’ve now picked up one of the only quality starters known to be out there. Pomeranz’s sudden breakout appears to be legitimate. In question is how much he has left in the tank.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is stupid. I mean, honestly, I think it’s kind of smart, but the subject is stupid. This is arguing semantics on account of a single pitch thrown in an exhibition baseball game that, no matter what they say, doesn’t really matter. Just — I want you to understand, up front, there isn’t a real good point for this. This post needn’t exist, but I’m a pitching dork, and a pitch in Tuesday’s All-Star Game captured the attention of my dorkiness. It was the most talked-about pitch of the contest. This is how Jose Fernandez started David Ortiz in the third inning:

The thing to notice is that “80” down there. Sometimes, Jose Fernandez throws 80 mile-per-hour breaking balls. This wasn’t one of them. Ortiz said Fernandez threw a changeup. Fernandez smiled and said he threw a fastball. Obviously, it wasn’t a normal fastball. The normal fastball buzzes 96. So, did Fernandez actually throw a changeup, or a slow fastball? I believe the evidence points to the latter. I warned you this would be stupid.

Read the rest of this entry »

Most All-Stars weren’t born into baseball this way. Most of them had to alter their approach, or their mechanics, in order to find that a-ha moment. They threw a pitch differently, or decided to pull the ball more, or changed their swing, and then found a run of sustained success that put them in the All-Star game that’s being played tonight.

So, given fairly fettered access to the All-Stars from both leagues, that was the question I posed: what was the big adjustment, mechanical or approach-wise, that brought you to this podium today?

Read the rest of this entry »

After a promising start to the season, the Red Sox pitching staff is starting to again resemble the disaster that sank the 2015 season. Over the last two weeks, the starting rotation has put up a 6.89 ERA, as David Price‘s disappointing debut season in Boston has continued, Steven Wright’s knuckleball-magic has started to show signs of wearing off, and Clay Buchholz and Eduardo Rodriguez just took turns throwing batting practice. The Red Sox continue to hit well enough to stay in contention, but with the pitching staff imploding once again, even the team’s manager is admitting that it’s “obvious” that the pitching needs upgrading. Despite a thin supply of available arms, it seems pretty clear that Dave Dombrowski is going to be among the most active executives in scouring the market for a starting pitcher over the next month.

But as the team looks to load up for a playoff push, there’s a case to be made that the Red Sox biggest move this summer should be to add another bat to the line-up instead.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, Baseball America’s Ben Badler reported that Major League Baseball was going to levy penalties against the Boston Red Sox due to improprieties perpetrated during last year’s International Signing Period. Today, Jeff Passan at Yahoo! Sports elaborated on that report. I’ve spoken with several international scouts about this news in an attempt to gauge the implications not only for the Red Sox but for the international market in general. The results of those inquiries appear below.

Some background on the issue

Boston was in the J2 penalty box last year as a result of the Yoan Moncada signing the year before. They signed two Venezuelan prospects from the same training program last year, both for $300,000, and a third from that program for $200,000. MLB has found that the best of those three prospects, a catcher/outfielder named Albert Guaimaro, received most of that money. This allowed Boston to acquire a player whom they wouldn’t have been able to sign (since being in the J2 penalty box means you can’t sign players for more than $300K), the agent makes more money and two prospects who otherwise may not have had an opportunity to play in a Major League organization now have that chance. As a result of MLB’s findings, five players signed by the Red Sox during last year’s period will be declared free agents and the club is now banned from signing any international prospects during the Int’l Signing Period that begins tomorrow.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday morning, I published a post on the main site detailing Jose Altuve’s base-running woes of the past two seasons. Within that post, I noted that Altuve is a good base-stealer, citing his success rate on stolen-base attempts this season. “Among the 71 players with at least five steal attempts this year, Altuve’s success rate ranks third,” I said. The stat would’ve been cooler if I could’ve said he was first, but I couldn’t say that, because there were two Red Sox players in front of him.

Most efficient base-stealers, 2016 (min. five steal attempts)

1. Mookie Betts, 100% (11-for-11)
2. Jackie Bradley, Jr., 100% (5-for-5)
3. Jose Altuve, 95% (18-for-19)

Two Red Sox at the top! Bradley and Betts are a combined 16-for-16 on steal attempts this year. Interesting! Bradley has still never been thrown out on a steal attempt in his major-league career, about which fact I wrote in the offseason. He’s now eight successful steals away from tying the all-time record of consecutive successes to begin a career. And then Betts might just be the best all-around base-runner in the game.

So, those two have been perfect at stealing bases, but as I scrolled down the list of base stealing efficiency, something caught my eye. In 11th place is Hanley Ramirez — Hanley Ramirez! — who’s 5-for-6. Xander Bogaerts is four spots behind him, at 9-for-11. Two spots behind Bogaerts is Dustin Pedroia, 4-for-5.

It’s the whole team! But is it really the whole team? I made a new spreadsheet of team base-stealing efficiency. I think this plot is pretty fun:

Read the rest of this entry »

We often treat knuckleball pitchers as if they were members of some long-forgotten sect, practicing their secret ninjutsu on the rest of the league with a pitch that defies gravity and cannot be classified. That’s fine, the knuckler is the rarest pitch in baseball, and it has its iconic moments. Let’s not begrudge anyone a little fun.

But once you peal back the layers on the pitch, you start to see that each truism about the knuckler isn’t necessarily true. In fact, there are probably more ways in which the art of throwing a knuckleball is similar to the art of throwing other pitches than it is different. At least, that is, in terms of strategy and outcomes. Mechanics are obviously a different story.

Let’s unpack some of the things we might hear about knuckleballs, and then us the data and the words of R.A. Dickey and Steven Wright to guide our analysis.

Velocity doesn’t matter.

Maybe this isn’t a thing that’s said a ton, but nobody breathlessly reports knuckleball velocity readings the way they do fastball readings, so at least implicitly we’ve decided that speed doesn’t matter as much with the floating butterfly.

Read the rest of this entry »