Tuesday marks the 83rd day of the owner-initiated lockout. It still remains to be seen how long it will last, but whatever its length, we’re likely to see a whirlwind of a mini-offseason as soon as the league and the players come to terms on a new collective bargaining agreement. While that kind of thing is fun to cover — the week before the lockout was a thrilling frenzy — there’s still quite a lot for baseball to do. So let’s roll up our sleeves, lend a hand, and find some new homes for a few of the remaining free agents. The trick here is that they actually have to make at least a lick of sense for the team signing them — but just a lick.

We gave out a half-billion of fictional dollars to hitters last time, but our imaginations could use some pitching too, so let’s get cracking! 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 »

Kody Clemens’s game is built around pop. Playing almost exclusively with Triple-A Toledo, the 25-year-old second baseman went deep 18 times last year in just 424 plate appearances. He knows what he brings to the table. Asked for a self-scouting report, Clemens began by saying he’s “grown to learn that a good part of my game is power.”

Born to a baseball family — his father is the seven-time Cy Young Award winner who shares his surname — Clemens grew up swinging from the left side. That was a matter of happenstance, not of design.

“It just came out that way,” explained Clemens, who is No. 21 on our Detroit Tigers Top Prospects list. “When I was young, my dad put a little bat in my hand and said, ‘Hey, hit the ball.’ I guess I stood up from the left side of the plate. It felt comfortable, so I kept swinging that way.”

The tutelage that followed was predictably based on the perspective of a pitcher. “The Rocket” primarily taught his three sons — Kacy and Koby have also played professionally — about attack plans and how to approach at bats. Mechanics were never much of a focus. Read the rest of this entry »

The Twins starting rotation is a clear area of weakness for the team as they head into the 2022 season. The departures of José Berríos, J.A. Happ, and Michael Pineda, plus Kenta Maeda’s elbow injury, drained the group of some serious talent. Before the lockout, Minnesota’s only move to address this concern was to add Dylan Bundy on a one-year deal. For all sorts of reasons, it seems clear the team just isn’t likely to bring in another quality starter from outside the organization. Instead, I suspect the Twins are hoping some of their young starters will take a significant step forward in 2022.

Bailey Ober, Joe Ryan, and Randy Dobnak have fewer than 50 career starts between them but each is likely to hold down a significant role this year. Earlier this week, I examined Ober’s deep arsenal and the path he could take toward a breakout sophomore season. Despite being injured for most of 2021, the five-year extension Dobnak signed before the season should give him a long leash to prove he can be a successful major league starter. Luke Hooper already investigated the intriguing addition of Jharel Cotton to the pitching staff (though his role is far from defined at this point). As for Ryan, he has a fascinating profile that has the potential to be the best of the bunch.

Ryan was a seventh round pick in the 2018 draft out of Cal State Stanislaus. He was assigned to Low-A that same year and started racking up tons of strikeouts. After blowing through three levels of the minors in 2019, he started appearing on Rays prospect lists, debuting at 13th on the 2020 list as a 45 FV. In all, he compiled a 36.7% career strikeout rate as a member of Tampa Bay’s farm system. Questions about his fastball, which sat around 90-94 mph, and a lack of quality secondary stuff held him back from rising any higher on our prospect lists despite the elite results he was putting up at each level.

Eventually, Ryan was traded to the Twins in the Nelson Cruz deal and made his major league debut on September 1. The strikeouts continued to come in the big leagues, as he sent down 30% of the batters he faced on strikes. He wound up with a 3.43 FIP and a phenomenal 6.00 strikeout-to-walk ratio across his five starts during the final month of the season. Read the rest of this entry »

After trading away José Berríos and J.A. Happ last season and losing Kenta Maeda and Michael Pineda to Tommy John surgery and free agency, respectively, the Twins rotation was in serious need of rejuvenation. Instead of diving into the pre-lockout free agent frenzy in November, the Twins stayed on the periphery, only signing Dylan Bundy to a one-year, bounce-back contract after his ugly season for the Angels. With Byron Buxton newly signed to a long-term extension, the Twins have indicated their intention to compete for the AL Central crown in 2022. But even with Bundy added to their staff, their starting rotation looks exceedingly thin.

Under president of baseball operations Derek Falvey and general manager Thad Levine, Minnesota has been notoriously risk averse when it comes to committing to pitchers for any significant length of time. It was probably a long shot to assume the Twins would be among the suitors for the top names in a strong class of free agent starting pitchers and once the lockout is lifted, it seems like it’ll be difficult to add another arm to their rotation. Of the 16 starters ranked in our top 50 free agents, all but six have already signed with a new team. That doesn’t leave many options for the Twins when it comes to outside help.

Instead of bringing in another quality arm from outside the organization, I suspect the Twins are hoping some of their young starters take a significant step forward in 2022. Bailey Ober, Joe Ryan, and Randy Dobnak have less than 50 career starts between them but each will likely hold down a significant role this year. Additionally, top pitching prospects Jordan Balazovic and Jhoan Duran could make their major league debuts some time during the season. It may not be an inspiring group of names, but one of those young pitchers holds potential that could provide some upside for Minnesota.

Among that group of inexperienced starters populating the Twins’ projected rotation, Ober compiled the most innings in 2021. He made his major league debut in mid-May and wound up throwing 92.1 innings with a 4.19 ERA and a 4.56 FIP that was just a step behind. Even more impressive was his 5.05 strikeout-to-walk ratio, the 13th highest in the majors among starters who threw at least 90 innings. Those excellent peripherals formed the foundation of his 4.01 xFIP, with only his extremely high home run rate holding him back.

A 12th round pick in the 2017 draft, Ober compiled a 31.9% strikeout rate during his minor league career. He paired that lethal ability with a 3.4% walk rate; astonishingly, his walk totals never crossed double-digits in any of his minor league stops. With such phenomenal results, you might expect Ober to be highly ranked on the Twins prospect lists, but he never reached higher than 22nd on the 2021 list with a 40 FV. His command was an obvious strength but his fastball consistently sat below 90 mph in the minors. There was some considerable dissonance between his scouting reports and the results he was putting up.

During the 2020 season, Ober wasn’t invited to the alternate site but worked on smoothing out his mechanics on his own. Upon reaching the majors in May 2021, his fastball averaged 92.3 mph, a big uptick in velocity. The raw velocity he showed in the big leagues was a significant improvement over what he was showing in the minors, but 92 mph isn’t exactly head-turning. Fortunately, his gigantic 6-foot-9 frame allows him to impart a ton of additional effective velocity on his pitches. Just six other pitchers had a higher release extension than Ober’s 7.3 inches. That elite extension helped him add more than 2 mph to his heater, the largest difference between raw velocity and effective velocity among all fastballs thrown at least 100 times in 2021.

With a heater that plays up due to his extension and uncommon delivery, he leaned on that pitch pretty heavily during his rookie season. His excellent command allowed him to locate his fastball up in the zone regularly. The combination of effective velocity and location led to a 24.8% whiff rate, slightly above the league average for four-seamers. Even though batters often had trouble making contact with the pitch, they did tremendous damage against it when they did put it in play. Throwing hard stuff up in the zone comes with its drawbacks if batters are able to connect with those pitches. Nearly 60% of the balls in play off Ober’s fastball were fly balls or line drives and he allowed a .578 expected wOBA on those elevated batted balls.

Ober’s repertoire also includes a slider, changeup, and curveball. Of those three secondary pitches, the two breaking balls are the most interesting. Along with his fastball, those three pitches each ran swinging strike rates in the double digits, forming a deep arsenal to give Ober plenty of options with which to attack batters. What’s more, he completely revamped his slider mid-season. In an effort to differentiate his slider from his curveball a little more, he tinkered with a new slider grip and started implementing it in mid-August. He detailed his process in an interview with David Laurila in September:

I started throwing a new slider [in early-to-mid-August]. I wanted something a little bit harder. It had been around 78-80 [mph] and I wanted to give hitters something different. It was kind of blending with my curveball, too. Basically, the idea was something with a bigger speed difference between my curveball and my slider.

Before, I had it a little deeper in my hand and it had a lot more horizontal movement on it. It wasn’t as depth-y as my new one. My new one is harder [82-84] and has a little more depth, and it’s also not as horizontal anymore.

Here’s how different his two sliders looked in practice. This slider was thrown in mid-July:

And here’s his overhauled slider from a game in mid-August:

They’re completely different pitches. Ober still used them both similarly, locating them on the outer edge against right-handed batters to generate swings and misses. Here’s what the physical characteristics and results of the two pitches looked like:

Despite the drastic changes to the pitch’s shape, his results were nearly the same as they were with the slower, looping slider. But with his harder slider established in his repertoire, his curveball suddenly became vastly more effective. From August 11 through the end of the season, Ober’s curveball ran a 45.5% whiff rate, a 26.5 point improvement over the 19% whiff rate he ran during the first half of the season. Differentiating the two pitches really helped him mold his breaking balls into two separate weapons that should give batters fits at the plate.

The path towards a breakout season for Ober seems pretty clear. He has three pitches that produce excellent results and he has excellent command of his entire arsenal. His fastball is decent, especially with its effective velocity helping it play up, but he could probably stand to throw it a bit less in favor of his two breaking balls. Pounding the strike zone with his heater is a fine strategy in the minor leagues, but he needs to learn how to better incorporate his two breaking balls into his pitch mix to avoid allowing so much loud contact off his elevated fastballs. I haven’t even mentioned his changeup, which was graded his best secondary offering as a prospect. With such a deep repertoire, Ober has plenty of avenues to take to build on his promising debut.

Coming off of a disappointing last-place finish in the AL Central, the Twins made it clear that they were looking to compete in 2022. That would seemingly require them to rebuild their starting rotation after trading away José Berríos last season, losing Kenta Maeda to Tommy John surgery, and the departure of Michael Pineda via free agency. But as the rest of the baseball world was gobbling up free agents with a fervor that can only happen when Thanksgiving and an impending lockout collide, they were seldom heard from and hardly involved on some of the top arms. Maybe this should’ve been expected given their lack of history spending on pitchers, but their inaction has understandably drawn some criticism. But while they may not have made a big splash so far this offseason, they did make one smaller move that I find quite intriguing: adding right-handed pitcher Jharel Cotton.

Cotton found his way to the Twins after a series a setbacks that have, up to this point, derailed a once promising career. A former top 100 prospect with the Dodgers, he made 29 starts for the A’s in 2016 and ’17 before requiring Tommy John surgery during spring training in ’18. Hamstring surgery came next, just as he was working his way back in 2019. He spent the shortened pandemic season with the Cubs, but with a thick layer of rust needing to be knocked off and no minor league season to assist, he didn’t last long in Chicago. Finally, after three and a half long years, he returned to the big leagues late last season for the Rangers and more than looked the part of a quality pitcher with a 3.52 ERA and 3.72 FIP in 30.2 innings, albeit mostly in mop-up outings and entirely out of the bullpen.

The Rangers, afraid of his upcoming arbitration cost, cut him loose, and the Twins were able to work out a deal for only $700,000, barely above the league minimum. Luckily for Cotton, he’s now on a team that desperately needs quality arms; Minnesota’s rotation, as currently constructed, is shockingly thin and inexperienced.

Cotton may lack the shine of some of the younger arms like Ober and Ryan, but I think he represents a nice bit of upside, and when you take a look at some of the skills he displayed in his return last season, he starts to look like a guy that could pitch some valuable innings.
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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 »

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.

Torii Hunter could go get it. Fluid and graceful while patrolling center field, he was renowned for his leaping, acrobatic catches and his willingness to sacrifice his body. He made a strong enough impression upon those who watched him that he won nine Gold Gloves during his 19-year career, more than all but three center fielders, namely Willie Mays, Ken Griffey Jr., and Andruw Jones. Hunter earned the nickname “Spider-Man” for his ability to climb outfield walls to steal home runs — something he did more than just about anybody else during his career — though one attempt to do so at Fenway Park left him with a broken ankle, and another a concussion.

“I’ll do anything to get that little white ball. I’ll put my life on the line,” Hunter told Sports Illustrated’s Albert Chen in 2005, sounding very much like the football player he was during his high school days in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Hunter rose from difficult circumstances in Pine Bluff, including a father who was addicted to crack cocaine and friends who fell into the dead-end life of drugs, guns, and gangs. His athleticism helped him escape, though when he entered professional baseball as a first-round pick of the Twins in 1993, his talent was more raw than most. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Minnesota Twins.

Batters

Hey, that doesn’t look half bad! I’m talking about the hitters, mind you, and it shouldn’t be that much of a surprise given that the Twins returned the entire lineup that was roughly middle-of-the-pack in offense in the American League. Given that last season was certainly more than half bad as a whole, and I’m going to get grumpy below, here’s the chance to say some nice things.

This is one place where I believe the ZiPS estimate of Byron Buxton’s playing time more than I do that of our depth charts. Minnesota’s extension was a fair deal on both sides, I feel, simply because you’d be lying or batty if you said that his health didn’t represent a significant risk that impacts his value in the open market. A seven-year contract worth $150–$200 million probably just isn’t out there, even if he were a free agent right now. It’s hard for the Twins to walk away, though, since a healthy season from Buxton, while possibly a unicorn, remains one of the biggest sources of possible upside on the roster.

Elsewhere, the offense generally looks fine. The only real position you could call an actual problem is perhaps the Trevor Larnach/Brent Rooker mix in left, with ZiPS not entirely enthralled with either. The Jimmy Kerrigan defensive projection turned my eye enough that I double-checked it, but ZiPS gave him the best defensive performance of a corner outfielder in the minors it ever has. If his glove is anywhere near what the computer thinks, he’s a more interesting back-of-the-roster talent than, say, Jake Cave.

Man, Jose Miranda. I admit to not really having paid much attention to his season in the minors, but he killed it in 2021 after a rather uninspiring history, and given his straight-up performance, he really ought to be considered one of the team’s top prospects. ZiPS is getting antsy about Royce Lewis, and really, he hasn’t actually been healthy and playing well since 2018. ZiPS may be too pessimistic about his mean projection long term, but I think he really ought to tumble down the prospect lists considerably. It’s hard to miss two years of development time.
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.

The road to becoming a reliever, even a Hall of Fame one, is rarely a straight one. Dennis Eckersley spent a dozen years starting in the majors, making two All-Star teams and throwing a no-hitter. Hoyt Wilhelm, Rollie Fingers, Rich Gossage, and Lee Smith were starting pitchers in the minors, and each took detours to the rotation during their major league careers. Mariano Rivera was an amateur shortstop who reached the majors as a starter. Trevor Hoffman began his professional career as a shortstop before switching to pitching after two seasons.

Like Hoffman, Joe Nathan began his pro career as a shortstop, but after one rough season of pro ball, the Giants concluded that his future lay on the mound — a notion so jarring to the 21-year-old Nathan that he chose to step away and focus on completing his college degree. Even after committing himself to pitching, injuries and ineffectiveness prevented him from finding a permanent home in a major league bullpen until his age-28 season, but once he did, he excelled, making six All-Star teams, helping his teams to six postseason appearances, and saving at least 30 games in a season nine times and at least 40 four times. From 2004 to ’13, only Rivera notched more saves or compiled more WAR, and only two other relievers struck out more hitters — and that was with Nathan missing a full year due to Tommy John surgery (Rivera missed most of a year in that span as well).

With Hoffman, Rivera, and Smith elected in 2018 and ’19, the standards for a Hall of Fame reliever have become a bit more fleshed out, and current candidate Billy Wagner is trending toward election. To these eyes, Nathan wouldn’t be out of place in joining the small handful of enshrinees, but there’s no guarantee he’ll even draw the 5% needed to stay on the ballot. At the very least, he deserves a longer look.

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