Shortly before Walter Pennington was acquired by the Texas Rangers from the Kansas City Royals at last month’s trade deadline, Eric Longenhagen wrote that the 26-year-old left-hander had “caught some helium of late after striking out 35% of the hitters he’s faced in Triple-A.” Our lead prospect analyst went on to note that Pennington had recently made his MLB debut, adding that he “has a middle relief profile with little margin for error due to his underwhelming velocity.” Longenhagen assigned the 2020 non-drafted free agent out of the Colorado School of Mines a not-overly-enthusiastic 35+ FV.

Through his first seven big-league appearances — one with the Royals and now six with the Rangers — Pennington has fanned 10 batters and allowed three earned runs while attacking hitters with an array of sinkers, sliders, and cutters (he’s also thrown a smattering of four-seamers) in eight-and-two-thirds innings of work. Down on the farm, he’d heavily featured his slider while fanning 82 batters and allowing 43 hits in 63-and-a-third frames.

His velocity is indeed underwhelming. And not only has Pennington been averaging just 91.7 mph with his heaters, his arsenal doesn’t include a breaking ball that sweeps or dips in eye-catching fashion. Your stereotypical power pitcher he’s not.

Asking Pennington how he profiles on the mound elicited some intriguing answers. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s quite a lot of bickering in sports, and not many things bring out more vehement disagreement than discussions involving who should get various awards. Even now, nearly 30 years later, when I think about Mo Vaughn beating out Albert Belle for the 1995 AL MVP, or Dante Bichette finishing second in that year’s NL race despite putting up just 1.8 WAR, I have to suppress a compelling desire to flip over a table. This year, thankfully, it’s hard to imagine the MVP voting results will be anywhere near as egregious as the ones we saw in ’95. That’s because the way MVP voters in the BBWAA evaluate players has changed dramatically since then.

Aaron Judge has easily the best traditional case for the AL MVP award if the season ended today. He leads the league in two of the main old-school batting stats: home runs and RBI. Bobby Witt Jr. and his .347 batting average is all that would stand between Judge and the Triple Crown. For what it’s worth, Judge would win the MLB Triple Crown, with twice the emeralds, rather than the AL one.

For most of baseball history, beginning with the first time the BBWAA handed out the award in 1931, numbers like these usually would’ve been good enough to win MVP honors. It also would’ve helped Judge’s case that the Yankees have one of the best records in baseball. If this were 30 years ago, Judge would all but officially have this thing wrapped up, barring an injury or the worst slump of his career.

But it’s the 2020s, not the 1990s, and I doubt anyone would dispute too strenuously the notion that ideas on performance, and their related awards, have shifted in recent years. Now, when talking about either an advanced offense statistic like wRC+ or a modern framework statistic like WAR, Judge certainly is no slouch. He currently leads baseball with 8.3 WAR, and his 218 wRC+ would be the eighth-highest seasonal mark in AL/NL history, behind only seasons by Barry Bonds, Babe Ruth, and Ted Williams. But by WAR, his lead is a small one, roughly two-tenths of a run (!) over Bobby Witt Jr., who has surged since the start of July (.439/.476/.803, 247 wRC+ in 33 games) to supplant Gunnar Henderson as Judge’s main competition for the award. Henderson was right there with Judge for much of the early part of the season, and though he’s fallen off a bit, he’s still fourth in the majors with 6.4 WAR and capable of catching fire again at any time. With a month and a half left, Juan Soto can’t be completely counted out either.

A similar dynamic persists in the NL. Shohei Ohtani has looked a lot like the obvious MVP choice for much of the season, as he’s done, well, one half of the Shohei Ohtani thing: He is murdering baseballs and pitchers’ dreams. But as with Judge, there’s some serious competition when you look at WAR. Ohtani stands at the top, but by a fraction of a run ahead of Elly De La Cruz. Ketel Marte and Francisco Lindor are both within five runs of Ohtani, and nobody serious has ever claimed you can use WAR to conclusively settle disputes on differences that small. De La Cruz has more WAR than Ohtani since the start of June, and the latter two have more than the Dodgers slugger since the beginning of May. Marcell Ozuna, who has strong traditional stats (.302 BA, 35 HR, 90 RBI) shouldn’t be completely discounted if the Braves show signs of life; those numbers still matter, just not to the extent that they once did. With a fairly wide open race, there are plenty of stars with name power lurking just behind the leaders, such as Bryce Harper and Freddie Freeman.

The answer of who should win the MVP awards is one we probably can’t answer beyond me giving my opinion, which I won’t do given the likelihood that I will be voting for one of the awards. But who will win the MVP awards is something we can make a reasonable stab at predicting. It’s actually been a while since I approached the topic, but I’ve long had a model derived from history to project the major year-end awards given out by the BBWAA. It was due for some updates, because the voters have changed. Some of the traditional things that voters prioritized, like team quality, have been de-emphasized by voters, though not completely. And the biggest change is the existence of WAR. Whatever flavor you prefer, be it Baseball Reference, Baseball Prospectus, or the smooth, creamy swirl that can be scooped by our display window, this general stat has changed a lot about how performance is perceived.

There have been 47 MVP awards presented to position players who finished their seasons with fewer than 6.0 WAR; that’s more than a quarter of all hitter MVP seasons. However, excluding 2020, a hitter has not won an MVP without reaching that threshold since ’06, when both winners fell short: the NL’s Ryan Howard had 5.92 WAR, while AL winner Justin Morneau had 3.77 WAR.

When modeling the data, I use all the votes, not just the winners, and WAR is a pretty lousy variable when predicting voter behavior throughout most of history. That’s not surprising on its face since we’ve had WAR to use for only the last 15 years or so, making it impossible for most awards to have explicitly considered it. But there also appears to be only marginal implicit consideration, in which voters based their votes on the things that go into WAR without using the actual statistic. There’s a great deal of correlation between winning awards and high WARs in history, but that’s only because two of the things that voters have really liked, home runs and batting average, also tend to lead to higher WAR numbers. As an independent variable, WAR doesn’t help explain votes very well. That is, until about the year 2000.

If you only look at votes since 2000, all of a sudden, WAR goes from an irrelevant variable to one of the key components in a voting model. Voters in 2002 may not have been able to actually look at WAR, but even before Moneyball was a thing, baseball writers were paying much more attention to OBP, SLG, and defensive value at least partially because of analysts like Bill James, Pete Palmer, and John Thorn in the 1980s and ’90s. Now, depending on your approach, once you deal with the correlations between variables, WAR comes out as one of or the most crucial MVP variable today. Could you imagine a world, even just 20 years ago, in which owners would propose paying players based on what sabermetrics nerds on the internet concocted?

The model I use, which I spent most of last week updating, takes modern voting behaviors into consideration. I use all three WAR variants listed above because it’s not clear which one most voters use. Here is how ZiPS currently sees the two MVP races this season:

This model thinks Judge is the favorite, but his odds to lose are nearly a coin flip. Witt is the runner-up, followed by Soto, Henderson, and the somehow-still-underrated José Ramírez. If we look at a model that considers all the BBWAA-voting years rather than just the 21st century results, this becomes a much more lopsided race.

Over in the NL, the updated ZiPS model sees a race that’s far more uncertain than the one in the AL.

Ohtani comes out as the favorite, but he has less than a one-in-three chance to win it. Behind him are the other WAR leaders, plus Ozuna.

Some of the WAR leaders without strong Triple Crown numbers, like Lindor, drop off considerably based on the entire history of voting, while Ozuna becomes a co-favorite with Ohtani. I haven’t talked about pitchers much in this article; they’re still included in the model, but none make the top 10 in the projected probabilities. Simply put, the willingness to vote pitchers for MVP seems to have declined over time. ZiPS doesn’t think any pitcher has been as dominant this season as the two most recent starters to win the award, Clayton Kershaw in 2014 and Justin Verlander in ’11, and closers these days typically can’t expect to get more than a few stray votes at the bottom of ballots.

It’ll be interesting to see how voting continues to change moving forward. In any case, no matter who you support for the MVP awards, strap in because there’s still plenty of baseball left to be played.

Thomas White is having an impressive first full professional season. Drafted 35th overall last year by the Miami Marlins out of Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, the 19-year-old left-hander has a 2.84 ERA, a 2.99 FIP, and a 29.6% strikeout rate over 76 innings between Low-A Jupiter and High-A Beloit. His late-May promotion to the higher of those two levels came for a simple reason. As our lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen explained when assigning him a 45+ in early June, White’s stuff was simply too good for the Florida State League.

I had an opportunity to talk to the promising youngster when Beloit played at West Michigan earlier this week, and one of the things I made it a point to learn about was the mindset that augments his arsenal. I began by asking him how much of a role analytics are playing in his development.

“I’m starting to learn more about the actual numbers and how all that stuff works,” White told me. “At the end of the day, I like to just go out and get outs — I’ve never been a big tech guy — but I definitely know a lot more about my pitches now that I have access to all the data. So, I’m still learning, and I want to learn, but the best measurement for me is how hitters react to them.”

The pitches that hitters are reacting to include a four-seam fastball that has been averaging, according to White, 95.6 mph and 17.5 inches of vertical ride. He is also throwing a two-seam changeup and a sweeper-slider. Currently in the works, but not yet part of his repertoire, is “a shorter gyro pitch,” either a cutter or a hard slider. Read the rest of this entry »

When Dan Szymborski published his 2024 ZiPS Projections prior to Opening Day, the Kansas City Royals were penciled in for a 73-89 record and a fourth place finish in the American League Central. Coming off of a cellar-dweller season where they lost 106 games — no previous Royals team had lost more — that would have represented a clear step in the right direction.

The predicted step has materialized into a sizable stride. With two months left in the regular season, the Matt Quatraro-managed club is not only currently projected to finish with 86 wins, their postseason odds are hovering around a promising 59%, up from 13.2% at the start of the campaign. Dan hinted at that possibility in his March 27 piece. My colleague wrote that “a Royals playoff appearance would be unlikely but not unreasonably so.”

How have the Royals managed to exceed expectations? I sat down with Quatraro on the eve of the All-Star break — his team has since won nine of 13, and added Lucas Erceg, Paul DeJong, and Michael Lorenzen prior to Tuesday’s trade deadline — to get his perspective.

———

David Laurila: Your team has been better than expected. Why?

Matt Quatraro: “Pitching is the name of the game. Our starting pitching has been tremendous. [Seth] Lugo, [Cole] Ragans, [Michael] Wacha, [Brady] Singer. [Alec] Marsh, as well. They’ve taken the ball. They’ve been durable. They’ve kept us in a million games. All in all, the bullpen has been pretty solid, too. There have been some ups and downs, but they’ve weathered some storms. Read the rest of this entry »

You didn’t really think teams were done swapping relievers after Friday and Saturday, did you? If you thought maybe they were tapped out for late relief help on Sunday and Monday, well, you thought wrong! If your bullpen doesn’t look like there are enough dudes to capture Helm’s Deep, you’re woefully short-armed.

The San Diego Padres acquired LHRP Tanner Scott and RHRP Bryan Hoeing from the Miami Marlins for LHSP Robby Snelling, RHSP Adam Mazur, 3B/2B Graham Pauley, and 3B/SS Jay Beshears

As one of baseball’s elite closers on an expiring contract, Tanner Scott was arguably the best short-term option available among relievers. His walk rate has peeked up a little to the numbers of the bad old days, but his first-strike percentage has stayed firmly in positive territory, which is an important indicator of where walk numbers will settle. Scott is likely to help the Padres in a very tight NL Wild Card race, but he’ll probably be even more important for them in the playoffs if they can get there. In San Diego, he teams up with Robert Suarez to asphyxiate opposing lineups late in the games. As far as elite closers who occasionally walk a few too many batters go, Scott is one of the less stressful of the genre, because he’s so hard to hit against with any authority, giving him a good shot at escaping jams following those free passes.

Bryan Hoeing is a sinker/slider reliever who has never quite clicked, as he’s never really been able to induce many swings-and-misses, nor has he mastered the art of inducing weak groundballs. He strikes me mostly as a depth guy who has plenty of years of club control left, and barring a breakout, he seems destined to be shuffled back and forth between San Diego and Triple-A El Paso a lot over the next few years. This trade is about Scott. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been awhile since we’ve seen the Royals act like contenders, but given that they entered the morning of the trade deadline with a one-game lead for the third AL Wild Card spot, the behavior is merited. On Monday they added righty starter Michael Lorenzen in a deal with the Rangers, and on Tuesday afternoon they swung deals for A’s reliever Lucas Erceg and White Sox infielder Paul DeJong. None of them are blockbusters, but they all fortify Kansas City’s roster, with the DeJong move a step to address a particularly weak bench.

The Royals acquired the 30-year-old DeJong, who’s making $1.75 million this year and has another $250,000 in bonuses within reach for attaining the 400- and 500-plate appearance thresholds, in exchange for 21-year-old righty Jarold Rosado, a reliever with the Royals’ A-level Columbia affiliate. The trade took place about four hours before the Royals were set to play the White Sox at Guaranteed Rate Field, so DeJong joined his new club — his fourth since the start of the 2023 season — by walking from one dugout to the other.

Paul DeJong has walked over to the other dugout pic.twitter.com/Olm4BoirNH

— James Fegan (@JRFegan) July 30, 2024

Drafted and developed by the Cardinals, DeJong was once considered a foundational player. Coming off a 25-homer 2017 season in which he was the runner-up in the NL Rookie of the Year voting, he signed a six-year, $26 million extension, a record at the time for a player with less than one year of service time. He hit 30 home runs and made the NL All-Star team in 2019, but by May ’22, in the midst of his second consecutive season with a sub-.200 batting average, the Cardinals optioned him to Triple-A Memphis to revamp his swing. His performance rebounded, though not to his 2017–19 level, and so on August 1, 2023, he was traded to the Blue Jays. He went an unfathomable 3-for-44 for the Jays before drawing his release three weeks later, and then just 9-for-49 after being picked up by the Giants. For the season, he hit .207/.258/.355 (66 wRC+). Read the rest of this entry »

Just two weeks after Jac Caglianone fell to them in the draft, the Kansas City Royals have acquired another beefy two-way college player: Michael Lorenzen. After spending the first seven seasons of his major league career with the Cincinnati Reds, the former Cal State Fullerton star is now on his fifth team in the past 24 months. And for the second time in as many seasons, he’s parlayed a strong first half into a midseason trade to a contender. In return, the Rangers receive Walter Pennington, a 26-year-old lefty reliever who made his MLB debut earlier this month.

The Rangers signed Lorenzen at the very end of spring training to a one-year, $4.5 million contract, intending to use him to plug one of the various holes in the rotation left by injuries to Tyler Mahle, Jacob deGrom, Max Scherzer, and I’m sure I’m forgetting someone, but you get the idea. Lorenzen wanted to start, and the defending World Series champions had a need.

And for a while, it looked like the steal of the offseason. In contrast to other late signees like Blake Snell and Jordan Montgomery, Lorenzen didn’t seem adversely affected by his short ramp-up. He debuted on April 15 and threw 79 pitches over five scoreless innings. Lorenzen followed that up by finishing six innings over his next eight starts, all while holding opponents to a .204/.296/.343 batting line. At the end of that run, Lorenzen’s season ERA was below 3.00.

Though if you want a microcosm for how the Rangers’ season has gone, Texas rewarded Lorenzen’s outstanding first two months with insultingly meager run support: enough to go just 3-6 in those nine starts.

Which is how we got to a point where the Rangers are selling to Kansas City. It’s pretty common historically for these two teams to exchange players; in fact, it was just a year ago tomorrow that Texas acquired Aroldis Chapman from the Royals for a package including pitching prospect Cole Ragans. It worked out for both sides: The Rangers won a championship, and Kansas City was able to magically turn Ragans into a no. 1 starter overnight.

It’s less common for Texas to be in a position to sell to Kansas City. The Royals are currently in possession of the last AL Wild Card spot, and according to our Playoff Odds, they’re a little less than even money to hang onto it. The Rangers, at 51-55, aren’t out of hope yet, but they’re taking on water. Well, they’ve already taken on water and the ship could capsize any day now. The Royals haven’t been good while the Rangers were bad since 2014, which was a one-off anomaly in a highly competitive decade for Texas. Before that, you have to go back to the 1980s.

With all that said, why are the Rangers trading off one of their early-season successes for a 26-year-old rookie who was undrafted out of (checks notes) the Colorado School of Mines?

Well, as good as the first two months of the season were to Lorenzen, the last two months were less so. Since June 7, his ERA is 4.79 and his FIP is 6.19, and he’s allowed 10 home runs in just 47 innings. Over the past 30 days, his ERA is 6.20. His past two appearances were the apotheosis of a pitcher on his way out: On Saturday, Lorenzen threw 40 pitches and allowed four runs but failed to get out of the first inning. A day later, the Rangers brought him back for a four-inning relief appearance totaling 55 more pitches.

Some regression was always going to happen. Lorenzen has never been a big strikeout guy, and this season he’s increased his walk rate by more than half. Out of 80 pitchers with at least 100 innings this season, Lorenzen is dead last in K-BB%. All of this while allowing a higher-than-average HR/9 rate.

Some internet weirdos think that the metrics we put out here at FanGraphs have their own thoughts and emotions, so as to be vindictive against certain players or teams. Of course that’s not the case — something like WAR or FIP is just an equation. It does not love or hate. But if FIP did have a mind of its own, self-awareness, or even a soul, it would look at Lorenzen’s numbers from this season, hold its nose and go, “Oooooh, stinky!”

So the other shoe — in Lorenzen’s case, that shoe is an extremely cool custom Vans cleat — was always going to drop. And it’s happening just as the Rangers’ need for Lorenzen is disappearing. Scherzer is back already, and deGrom, Mahle, and Cody Bradford are close behind. Lorenzen was going to be out of the rotation pretty soon no matter what, so now he has a chance to make another team’s rotation.

Lorenzen’s contract calls for $2.5 million in workload bonuses, and I was curious how many of those markers he’s hit. He gets $200,000 reaching 60 innings pitched, and another $200,000 for every 10 innings from 60 to 100. Throwing 40-plus pitches on consecutive days might be the kind of thing you’d expect from, well, Cal State Fullerton a generation ago, but that last outing also got Lorenzen over 100 innings before the trade. So that’s $1 million in the bag so far, with the following bonuses still on the board: $300,000 for 120 innings, $350,000 for 140 innings, $400,000 for 160 innings, and $450,000 for 180 innings.

Unless Lorenzen gets hurt, 120 innings feels like a lock. But there are only 10 or 11 trips through the rotation left in the regular season; unless Lorenzen does a 2008 CC Sabathia impression, 180 innings isn’t going to happen, and even 160 innings feels unlikely.

For the second time in as many years, the team Lorenzen is joining at the deadline counts its rotation as its greatest strength, and there’s not an obvious place for the 32-year-old to slot in. Ragans and Seth Lugo are All-Stars, Brady Singer and Michael Wacha have been excellent so far this year, and even no. 5 starter Alec Marsh has had better results and peripherals than Lorenzen.

I would imagine that Lorenzen is going to serve as a middle reliever and swingman. The Royals not only need to make the playoffs, they need to make sure not to wear out their rotation along the way. This is not a rotation that’s used to making 30 starts in the regular season, then five more in October.

Wacha and Lugo have both pitched in the postseason, but collectively, this rotation’s last MLB playoff start came in 2015, when Wacha was 23 years old and two seasons removed from winning NLCS MVP. Lugo is going to pass his major league career high in innings the next time he takes the mound. Ragans has already thrown more innings this year than he has in any professional season. It doesn’t sound like the worst idea in the world to toss in a guy who can piggyback or serve as a no. 6 starter.

So what of Pennington? The other half of this trade has two-thirds of an inning of career big league experience and a sinker that sits in the low 90s — for a reliever, even a lefty, that’s fringy. But Pennington also has above-average feel for a breaking ball, which has allowed him to put up eye-popping numbers in the high minors: a 32.9% strikeout rate with a .179 opponent batting average and a 2.26 ERA in 59 2/3 Triple-A appearances.

A finesse-and-soft-stuff lefty is obviously going to fare well against Triple-A opposition and have questions over whether he can sneak that breaker past big leaguers with any consistency. For that reason, he came in at no. 36 on Travis Ice’s Royals prospect list a few weeks ago. It’s a token return for a pitcher who was as hot as Lorenzen was two months ago, but a non-trivial return for someone who was trending toward getting DFA’d. Even if the Rangers right the ship and make a surprising run for the playoffs, I’d argue that a dedicated lefty reliever, even a low-leverage one, is more valuable to the Rangers right now than Lorenzen. Particularly as any such run would require Mahle and deGrom returning to the rotation and pitching well.

I usually don’t care even a little about team control for relief pitchers in a trade — especially if that reliever isn’t, like, Devin Williams or Mason Miller. But it’s also worth mentioning that Kirby Yates and José Leclerc are going to be free agents next year, and David Robertson could join them on the open market if his $7 million mutual option doesn’t get exercised. (Mutual options tend to have a narrow window for both sides to agree.) Also, next year Yates is going to be 38 and Robertson will be 40. So if nothing else, Pennington gives the Rangers useful depth.

The Rangers get a prospect, the Royals get some depth, and Lorenzen improves his chance of playing into October. It might not be the blockbuster everyone was waiting for, but trades like this keep the wheels moving.

I updated the Top 100 Prospects list today. This post goes through the pitchers and why they stack the way they do. Here’s a link directly to the list, and here’s a link to the post with a little more detail regarding farm system and prospect stuff and the trade deadline. It might be best for you to open a second tab and follow along, so here are the Top 100 pitchers isolated away from the bats. Let’s get to it.
Read the rest of this entry »

A more-consistent arm slot related to a move back to the third base side of the rubber has contributed to Cole Ragans’s success this season. The raw stuff was obviously already there. As Ben Clemens wrote back in March, the Kansas City Royals left-hander “looks like an absolute terror on the mound.” My colleague went on to say that if he “were designing a pitcher in a laboratory, he’d look a lot like Ragans.”

When I talked to the 2024 American League All-Star on the eve of the break, he told me that going into full attack mode following last year’s oft-reported velocity jump played a huge role in his emergence as a front-line starter. As he put it, “I kind of had to teach myself that I could get away with a little more of a miss compared to when I was throwing 90-91 [mph]. I have a good arsenal in my opinion, so I can just go after hitters.”

And then there’s the work he does in the laboratory.

“I use TrackMan in my bullpens, especially with the slider and the cutter, to kind of see where I’m at,” said Ragans, whose heater is now mid-to-high 90s. “The biggest thing for me is my release points, making sure that my pitches are in a tight cluster. I want everything coming out of the same tunnel. I don’t want to be throwing a fastball from this release height, and my slider from a lower release height.” Read the rest of this entry »

At last we reach the end of my annual series spotlighting the weakest positions on contenders. While still focusing upon teams that meet that loose definition of contenders (Playoff Odds of at least 9.5%), I have also incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. Sometimes that may suggest that the team will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included them here because the team’s performance at that spot is worth a look.

At the other positions in this series, I have used about 0.6 WAR or less thus far — which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season — as my cutoff, but for the designated hitters, I’ve limited the list to the teams below zero, both to keep the length manageable and to account for the general spread of value. In the third full season of the universal DH, exactly half the teams in the majors have actually gotten 0.0 WAR or less from their DHs thus far, four are in the middle ground between 0.0 and 1.0, eight are between 1.0 and 2.0, and three are above 2.0. DHs as a group have hit .245/.321/.421 for a 109 wRC+; that last figure is up three points from last year, and seven points from the last time I did this list, via a slash line that’s virtually identical (the majors’ slugging percentage as a whole has dropped 17 points from last season).

This year, we’re seeing a greater number of teams invest more playing time in a single DH. Whereas each of the past two seasons saw three players reach the 500 plate appearance threshold as DHs, this year we’re on pace for five; similarly, 11 player are on pace to reach 400 PA as DHs, compared to eight last year. That said, many of the teams on this list are the ones that haven’t found that special someone to take the lion’s share of the plate appearances.

Read the rest of this entry »