Tanking is a problem. Professional sports like baseball are built on the assumption that both sides are trying to win. Organizations putting forth less than their best efforts hurts the integrity of the sport and provides fans with little reason to engage. That said, the perception of tanking might have overtaken the reality of late. Competitive imbalance is not the same as tanking. Sometimes teams are just bad, even if they are trying not to be.

Tanking concerns are not new. Two years ago, just after the Astros and Cubs had turned their teams around, the Phillies were attempting to dismantle their roster by trading Cole Hamels. The Braves had traded multiple players away from a team that had been competitive. The Brewers, who traded away Carlos Gomez, would soon do the same with Jonathan Lucroy after he rebuilt his trade value.

The Braves, Brewers, and Phillies all sold off whatever assets they could. Two years later, though, those clubs aren’t mired in last place. Rather, they’re a combined 54-37 and projected to win around 80 games each this season in what figures to be a competitive year for each. While the Braves and Phillies could and/or should have done more this offseason to improve their rosters, neither resorted to an extreme level of failure, and the teams are better today than they would have been had they not rebuilt. While accusations of tanking dogged each, none of those clubs descended as far as either the Astros or Cubs. None came close to the NBA-style tank jobs many feared.

One might suspect that I’ve cherry-picked the three clubs mentioned above, purposely selecting teams with surprising early-season success to prop up a point about the relatively innocuous effects of tanking. That’s not what I’ve done, though. Rather, I’ve highlighted the three teams Buster Olney cited by name two years ago — and which Dave Cameron also addressed — in a piece on tanking.

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Trey Mancini did some tinkering prior to the start of the season. Hoping to “limit a bit of pre-swing movement,” he decided to lower his leg kick. The Baltimore Orioles outfielder hit that way throughout the offseason, and he continued the experiment in spring training.

Then, about a week and a half before opening day, he returned to doing what feels natural.

“I am who I am,” Mancini told me last weekend. “The leg kick is just something that works for me — there’s a comfortability factor involved — so once I realized what I was trying didn’t feel totally right, I went back to my old one.”

Mancini felt that the lower kick disrupted his timing. Read the rest of this entry »

Bryan Price finally took the fall on Thursday, but as the manager of a team short on major-league talent, with a rebuilding effort that isn’t yet close to paying off, it was only a matter of time. It’s difficult to see why the Reds waited until now instead of dismissing him last October — after four full seasons, another 18 games shouldn’t have changed the thinking of the Reds’ brass — but one thing that didn’t enhance Price’s chances for survival was the early-season struggles of Joey Votto. On the heels of one of the best seasons of his career, the 34-year-old first baseman is off to an uncharacteristically bad start, one that can’t help but stand out even given the small sample sizes.

Votto is currently hitting just .258/.315/.273, with one extra-base hit and five walks — as many as he had in a single game last August 27 — in 73 plate appearances. That’s from a five-time All-Star who hit .320/.454/.578 last year, with the majors’ best on-base percentage and walk total (135) and the NL’s top wRC+ (165). His SLG and .258 ISO were his highest since 2010.

In fact, before we dig into this year’s dismal numbers, it’s worth noting that Votto may have done more to enhance his Hall of Fame case last year than just about any player. With his second seven-win season in three years (according to Baseball-Reference WAR, which I continue to use for my JAWS system), he surpassed the seven-year peak score of the average Hall of Fame first baseman and put himself in range of surpassing the JAWS standard as well.

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We thought the Reds were going to be pretty awful. FanGraphs’ preseason projections had Cincinnati finishing last in the NL Central with 71 wins, a 2% chance of reaching the postseason, and zero chance of winning the World Series.

The Reds have been even worse than expected to begin he season, entering play Thursday with a 3-15 record, the most losses in the majors and also (along with Kansas City) the fewest wins. The Reds are also the owners of the major’s worst run differential (-46).

So Cincinnati gave us the most traditional of responses Thursday morning, firing manager Bryan Price. In four-plus seasons with the Reds, Price had a 279-387 mark. He recorded one season of 70 wins or better, a 76-win 2014 campaign. The club also removed pitching coach Mack Jenkins. Read the rest of this entry »

GOODYEAR, Ariz. — As you might imagine, Joey Votto has excellent eyesight.

And as you might also suspect, Votto knows his exact quality of eyesight, improved after undergoing LASIK surgery as a minor leaguer.

“20-13 and 20-17,” Votto told FanGraphs of his most recent right and left eye test scores. “I had good vision beforehand. It started going wonky [early in my professional career]. I didn’t want to deal with contacts.”

At 33, Votto was the best hitter in the NL last season. After a down 2014 season, in which he was limited to 62 games, he’s shown no signs of aging– if anything, he has improved, “aging” like a bottle of Mouton-Rothschild.

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Eugenio Suarez is young, and, last year, he was very good. He wasn’t about to leave the Reds any time soon, but now a separation could be even further away. See, Suarez was looking at three more years of team control, but now he and the club have agreed to a seven-year contract with an eighth-year club option. The breakdown is as follows, and what isn’t shown is Suarez’s $2-million signing bonus.

• 2018: $2.25 million
• 2019: $7 million
• 2020: $9.25 million
• 2021: $10.5 million
• 2022: $11 million
• 2023: $11 million
• 2024: $11 million
• 2025: $15-million club option ($2-million buyout)

Suarez’s first free-agent year would’ve been 2021. He’s signed away four of them, and maybe a fifth, and the total guarantee works out to $66 million. There are no other bonuses or escalators included, and Suarez also hasn’t received a no-trade clause. We’ve seen a lot of increasingly complicated contracts. This one’s simple. The Reds are locking up a good player for a while, and that player is now guaranteed life-changing money that will afford his family great comfort.

Everyone right now is saying the right things. The mood is typically pleasant when a contract is announced. The Reds say they’re thrilled to keep a building block. They see Suarez as someone who can lead them out of the rebuild and into contention. And Suarez says he’s ecstatic to commit to Cincinnati, where he’s come to excel. I can’t imagine being upset about sixty-six million dollars. It’s very, very easy to see how this is a triumphant moment for Suarez as a player. It’s also easy to see how Suarez might’ve been undervalued. The timing here probably isn’t a coincidence.

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GOODYEAR, Ariz. — Right before the start of spring training, Cincinnati prospect Nick Senzel received a phone call at his home in Knoxville, Tenn. It was from Reds headquarters. The club had a question for its top rookie-eligible player: could he handle shortstop?

“I said, ‘Yeah,’” Senzel told FanGraphs recently in Arizona. “And they got me there now.”

Even before taking the call, the No. 2 pick of the 2016 June draft was taking ground balls at third, second, and shortstop — and even fly balls in the outfield — on the playing surface of Lindsey Nelson Stadium, the baseball home of his alma mater, the University of Tennessee. A third baseman in college, Senzel wanted to make himself as versatile as possible entering this season.

It was prescient planning, as the Reds have since begun one of the great experiments of the spring.

As players advance through professional baseball, as they age at the major-league level, they typically move down the defensive spectrum. What is so interesting about Senzel playing shortstop, even if it’s short-lived, is that it represntns a case of a player moving up the spectrum.

There is an argument to be made that more teams should be identifying players who can move to more challenging positions. Why? Because over the last decade, about 20% of defensive opportunities — as in batted balls in play — have evaporated. In this three-true-outcomes environment, it’s easier to hide a bat, to trade some glove for bat, when the ball is less of a threat to reach the field of play.

There were 60,249 “plays” by defenders in 2007, according to FanGraphs data. Last season, there were just 49,809 — or roughly 10,000 fewer.

Consider opportunity trends by position:

It’s not just Senzel. Paul DeJong, who appeared at a variety of positions during his junior campaign at Illinois State, received over half the Cardinals’ starts at shortstop last season. Lonnie Chisenhall and Jason Kipnis were deployed in center at times in 2017, aided by a staff that recorded the highest strikeout rate of all time. Dee Gordon is transitioning to center field in Seattle.

Could it work? Could teams benefit from more aggressive defensive assignments? Could it be the next big thing? Or at least a little thing at no cost to clubs ever in search of efficiency and hidden value?

***

Senzel believes he can stick at short and has ambitions to make the team as the club’s starter out of spring training, although the realities of how clubs manipulate service time make that all but impossible. Still, Senzel reported early to camp. He’s worked with Barry Larkin. He’s participated every day in a particular drill where rubber balls are thrown off a wall, forcing Senzel to quickly reset his feet and transfer the ball into throwing positions.

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“This is the stupidest thing I’ve heard in my life.”

– Billy Hamilton on the following proposal

GOODYEAR, Ariz. — There has always been some debate about where to bat Billy Hamilton in the lineup.

He has the world-class speed that managers traditionally prize out of a leadoff hitter. Hamilton, for example, was the fastest man in the game by some measures in 2016 and has trailed only Byron Buxton (30.2 feet/second) in Statcast’s “sprint speed” each of the last two seasons.

The problem, of course, is the rate at which he gets (or doesn’t get) on base. Hamilton recorded a .299 OBP last season, 11th worst amongst qualified hitters. His career mark is almost precisely the same (.298). In the modern era of lineup construction, avoiding outs is regarded as a greater asset for leadoff hitters than speed alone.

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Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about the Logan Morrison signing and the Twins’ potent lineup, the Rays’ potentially lucrative new TV deal, and two tidbits from a game played in 1870, then preview the 2018 Red Sox (19:49) with The Boston Globe’s Alex Speier, and the 2018 Reds (55:47) with The Athletic Cincinnati’s C. Trent Rosecrans.

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The St. Louis Cardinals selected Paul DeJong in the fourth round of the 2015 draft. DeJong was taken more for his bat than his defense. According to his alma mater Illinois State, for example, DeJong spent time at “second base, third base, catcher, right field, and as the team’s designated hitter” during his third and final season with the Redbirds. While suggestive of positional flexibility, that’s not the usual path of a defensive wizard. During that same campaign, however, DeJong also slashed .333/.427/.605 in 246 plate appearances. That kind of offensive performance can play at multiple positions.

The Cardinals used DeJong mostly third base after drafting him. He played 62 games at the hot corner in his first pro season and followed that up with 112 more starts at third in 2016 — but also 11 starts at shortstop. After some more work at short in the Arizona Fall League and a couple months in Triple-A, DeJong became the starting shortstop for the actual Cardinals, a contending major-league club. He finished second in balloting for the National League Rookie of the Year.

Minor-league third basemen don’t generally develop into major-league shortstops. If playing first base is incredibly hard, playing an adequate shortstop is nearly impossible. Even so, MLB is a copycat league. If an experiment works once, others will try it. Which brings us to the Cincinnati Reds and top prospect Nick Senzel.

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