While titans of industry like Matt Olson, Nelson Cruz, and Josh Donaldson were changing teams, a few other things happened in the baseball world. For example: Sean Doolittle, Brad Hand, Ian Kennedy, and Chad Kuhl all found new teams. Sure, they weren’t the headliners of the last few days, but they’re all interesting in their own way. Let’s run down these signings alphabetically and maybe tell a joke or two while doing so.

Nationals Sign Sean Doolittle

When the Nationals traded for Sean Doolittle in 2017, he brought much-needed bullpen stability to an already-competitive team. Things aren’t quite the same for either side in their reunion. Doolittle had a down 2020, then signed a one-year, $1.5 million deal with the Reds. With Cincinnati out of the running and Doolittle losing high-leverage opportunities, they put him on waivers, and he finished his season as a middle reliever in Seattle. Read the rest of this entry »

As expected, the first weekend after the end of the lockout gave us a flurry of moves. Relievers in particular were a hot commodity, with teams trying to bolster their bullpens as the pool of quality pitchers continues to shrink. Let’s take a closer look at a few of these moves from over the weekend.

White Sox Sign Joe Kelly

Kelly comes to Chicago on a two-year, $17 million deal with a club option for a third year. At 33, the veteran is coming off of a great season with the Dodgers, probably his best as a reliever. Underneath his 2.86 ERA, he posted a career-best swinging-strike rate (11.6%) and exit velocity (85.5 mph), as well as his lowest walk rate (8.2%) ever. Even with all the success, a pair of injuries raise questions about his durability moving forward. Kelly got a late start in 2021 because of an offseason surgery to clean up his shoulder, and his year ended with him walking off the mound in the playoffs after suffering a forearm injury. Luckily, he avoided the worst case scenario; all reports have him ready for the upcoming season.

Kelly’s successful 2021 came on the back of a dominant low-spin sinker. In each of the previous five seasons, his four-seam fastball was his most used heater, but after years of middling results with the pitch, he all but shelved it in 2021. A new sinker-heavy pitch mix helped increase his groundball rate over the years; his three primary pitches — sinker, curveball, and changeup — all generate grounders more than 55% of the time. Read the rest of this entry »

The itinerant gunslinger is a time-worn trope in Westerns, but baseball experienced a resurgence of its own version of it over the weekend. Andrelton Simmons and José Iglesias, two older free agents with sterling defensive reputations, are each headed to a new team. Simmons signed with the Cubs, a one-year, $4 million deal with incentives that could push his total payout higher. Meanwhile, Iglesias signed a one-year, $5 million deal with the Rockies. Rather than cover them both separately, let’s go through the deals together so that I can force some metaphors on you and compare two delightfully shrewd defensive wizards.

The glove-only shortstop isn’t what it used to be, particularly if you hit like Simmons did in 2021. He stumbled to a .223/.283/.274 batting line, and while his defense was predictably excellent, that’s simply not enough to lock down an everyday starting role. The Twins weren’t good last year, and even then, Simmons started to lose playing time as the season wore on. The Cubs will be his third team in the past three years, and he’s solidly into the short-term-stints-on-okay-teams phase of his career.

For his part, Iglesias must think Simmons is downright sedentary. The Rockies will be his sixth team in five seasons; he’s bounced around on one-year deals since 2019, and even got traded in-season last year. He wasn’t an offensive black hole to the extent that Simmons was in 2021, but he’s hardly Carlos Correa with the bat in his hands; he’s compiled a 93 wRC+ in his last four seasons. His defense doesn’t grade out as well as Simmons’ does, though; depending on who you listen to, he was somewhere between acceptable and quite bad defensively last year after being solid throughout his career. Read the rest of this entry »

Connor Joe has had a turbulent couple of years. In the spring of 2019, he made his big league debut as the Opening Day left fielder for the Giants. Just a week prior, San Francisco had acquired him in a trade with the Reds, who had selected him in the Rule 5 draft just three months before that. His time with the Giants would also prove short-lived: after 11 days and a 1-for-15 start to the season, he was designated for assignment. As a Rule 5 pick, he was returned to his original team, the Dodgers, and spent the rest of the 2019 season in Triple-A, where he posted a 132 wRC+ and a 16.1% walk rate but never got the call to return to the big leagues.

The following year, Joe was expected to compete for a roster spot with the Dodgers, but just as spring training was getting underway, team doctors found a tumor that was later diagnosed as testicular cancer. He underwent chemotherapy treatments and was declared cancer-free later in the summer, but the risks posed by the COVID-19 pandemic kept him away from baseball for the whole season. He elected free agency in November 2020 and signed a minor league deal with the Rockies later that month.

The 2021 season finally gave Joe an opportunity to shine at the big league level, but it was not without its ups and downs. He started the season in the minors thanks to his lost 2020 and ended the season on the injured list due to a hamstring injury he suffered in early September. Between those endpoints, he struggled enough to get sent down, got hot enough to become the everyday leadoff hitter, and even celebrated his anniversary of being cancer-free by smashing his first career home run. All told, he had 211 plate appearances with a .285/.379/.469 triple slash, eight homers and a 116 wRC+. Read the rest of this entry »

Per the JAWS leaderboard, Adrián Beltré (4) and Scott Rolen (10) rank highest among third basemen not in the Hall of Fame. Beltré will almost certainly get the nod once he becomes eligible, while the currently-on-the ballot Rolen has been making strong headway toward Cooperstown. If and when both players are enshrined, which non-Hall of Fame third baseman will rank highest in JAWS?

The answer is Graig Nettles, who ranks 12th (11th if you don’t include Edgar Martinez). In terms of WAR, Nettles (65.7) ranks right in front of Martinez (65.5), and close behind Rolen (69.9). Beltré (84.1) is comfortably ahead of all three.

Should Nettles be in the Hall of Fame? His accolades and accomplishments include 390 home runs, six All-Star berths, two Gold Gloves — he’d have won more were it not for Brooks Robinson — and a pair of World Series rings. All told, he played in five Fall Classics. Back when Jay Jaffe was writing for Sports Illustrated, my esteemed colleague tabbed Nettles as the most-overlooked player at his position when it comes to Hall of Fame worthiness.

Meanwhile, was Beltré better than Robinson? A clear majority of the people who voted in a Twitter poll I ran yesterday feel that he was. Of the 337 people who weighed in, 61.7% opted for Beltré, while only 38.3% sided with the legendary Baltimore Orioles Hall of Famer. Read the rest of this entry »

Some articles need an elaborate introduction, but not this one. Let’s cut straight to the chase:

That is a graph showing the number of plate appearances, by team, given to below-replacement-level hitters last season, with pitchers excluded so as to not penalize the DH-less National League. The hallmark of a good team is the strength of its roster, from stars to regulars to the benchwarmers. It’s worth noting that the Angels, with a roster characterized by a serious imbalance of talent, rank seventh by this measure. It’s also worth noting that the Rays, a club littered with usable bats and arms, rank 28th.

We can create a similar graph for pitchers, using total batters faced rather than plate appearances:

Read the rest of this entry »

Ryan Vilade knows what he does best with a bat in his hands. He also knows what he needs to do better. The son of a longtime coach — James Vilade has tutored hitters at both the college and minor-league levels — the 22-year-old outfield prospect possesses a smooth right-handed stroke, albeit one that has propelled fewer balls over fences than his size would suggest. Since being selected 48th overall out of a Stillwater, Oklahoma high school in 2017, the 6-foot-2, 225 pound Vilade has gone yard just 29 times in 1,783 professional plate appearances.

But he can square up a baseball. Playing at Triple-A Albuquerque this past season — his first action above High-A — Vilade slashed a solid .284/.339/.410, earning himself a late-September cup of coffee in Colorado. Prior to the 2020 COVID shutdown, Vilade put up a .303/.367/.466 slash line for the California League’s Lancaster JetHawks.

Vilade — No. 3 in our newly-released Rockies Top Prospects list — discussed his hitting approach, and the adjustment that should lead to more dingers, late in the Arizona Fall League season.

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David Laurila: To start, who are you as hitter? What do you do well?

Ryan Vilade: “If I had to give a scouting report on myself, I would say that I drive the ball the other way really well. That’s my strength. One thing that I continue to work on is pulling ball in the air. I can do that well with off-speed; it’s the fastball that I go [opposite field] with. That doesn’t really bother me, because I feel like pulling the fastball is something that you just react to. But yeah, staying the other way and reacting off-speed. That’s kind of who I am.”

Laurila: Why is your swing conducive to driving the ball the other way? Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Colorado Rockies. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. This is the second 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.

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

All of the numbered prospects below also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It has more details 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 »

José Cruz Sr. had an outstanding career. Playing for three teams — most notably the Houston Astros — from 1970-1988, the Puerto Rico-born outfielder logged 2,251 hits while putting up a 119 wRC+ and 50.8 WAR. As his grandson, Detroit Tigers infield prospect Trei Cruz put it, the family patriarch may not be a Hall of Famer, but he is in “The Hall of Very Good.”

Moreover, the father of 1997-2008 big-leaguer José Cruz Jr. is a 74-year-old in a younger man’s body.

“He has more energy than anybody I’ve ever met in my life,” explained Trei, who calls Houston home and is No. 14 on our 2022 Tigers Top Prospect list. “I actually work with him, every single day. He throws BP for hours, and it’s some of the best left-handed BP you’ll ever see. He’s got a lot of life in his arm — he’ll really chuck it in there — and along with gas he’ll mix in sliders and changeups. Guys actually come to hit with me, because his BP is so good. He’s amazing, man. I don’t know how he does it.”

The smooth left-handed-stroke that produced 650 extra-base hits is still there, as well. The septuagenarian may not be able to catch up to mid-90s heat anymore, but he hasn’t forgotten what to do with a bat in his hands. According to Trei, his abuelo isn’t shy about standing in the box when the situation calls for it. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2022 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Like his longtime teammate Joe Mauer, Justin Morneau won an MVP award, spent a stretch as a perennial All-Star, helped the Twins to a handful of division titles and all-too-brief playoff appearances — and had his career indelibly altered by a series of concussions. Though neither player was stopped in his tracks to the extent of former teammate Corey Koskie, who never again played in the majors after sustaining a severe concussion in 2006, both players suffered the lingering effects of multiple traumatic brain injuries, which compromised their performances but also helped to raise awareness within the sport.

Unlike Mauer, Morneau — a Canadian who grew up playing hockey, where he likely suffered the first of his several concussions — wasn’t on a Hall of Fame path when he got injured, and he actually recovered to win a batting title later in his career. Yet his career can be divided into everything that came before the July 7, 2010 collision of his head with the knee of Blue Jays second baseman John McDonald during a routine takeout slide, and what came after. Morneau hit for a 138 OPS+ from 2006 to the point of the injury while averaging 4.3 WAR over those 4 1/2 seasons. He managed just a 106 OPS+ over his six final seasons while totaling 5.5 WAR, only once topping 1.3, and not all of that can be chalked up to age-related decline.

“It’s something that will always be with me,” Morneau told ESPN’s Jim Caple in the spring of 2015. “I look at it like a pitcher who has had Tommy John surgery — every time he throws or his elbow gets sore or something happens, you’re going to go back to that.” Read the rest of this entry »