The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2021 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2015 election at SI.com, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. 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.

Wherever Gary Sheffield went, he made noise, both with his bat and his voice. For the better part of two decades, he ranked among the game’s most dangerous hitters, a slugger with a keen batting eye and a penchant for contact that belied his quick, violent swing. For even longer than that, he was one of the game’s most outspoken players, unafraid to speak up when he felt he was being wronged and unwilling to endure a situation that wasn’t to his liking. He was a polarizing player, and hardly one for the faint of heart.

At the plate, Sheffield was viscerally impressive like few others. With his bat twitching back and forth like the tail of a tiger waiting to pounce, he was pure menace in the batter’s box. He won a batting title, launched over 500 home runs — 14 seasons with at least 20 and eight with at least 30 — and put many a third base coach in peril with some of the most terrifying foul balls anyone has ever seen. For as violent as his swing may have been, it was hardly wild; not until his late thirties did he strike out more than 80 times in a season, and in his prime, he walked far more often than he struck out. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2021 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.

Bobby Abreu could do just about everything. A five-tool player with dazzling speed, a sweet left-handed stroke, and enough power to win a Home Run Derby, he was also one of the game’s most patient, disciplined hitters, able to wear down a pitcher and unafraid to hit with two strikes. While routinely reaching the traditional seasonal plateaus that tend to get noticed — a .300 batting average (six times), 20 homers (nine times), 30 steals (six times), 100 runs scored and batted in (eight times apiece) — he was nonetheless a stathead favorite for his ability to take a walk (100 or more eight years in a row) and his high on-base percentages (.400 or better eight times). And he was durable, playing 151 games or more in 13 straight seasons. “To me, Bobby’s Tony Gwynn with power,” said Phillies hitting coach Hal McRae in 1999.

“Bobby was way ahead of his time [with] regards to working pitchers,” said his former manager Larry Bowa when presenting him for induction into the Phillies Wall of Fame in 2019. “In an era when guys were swinging for the fences, Bobby never strayed from his game. Because of his speed, a walk would turn into a double. He was cool under pressure, and always in control of his at-bats. He was the best combination of power, speed, and patience at the plate.” Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2021 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2019 election, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. 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.

As much as Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera, and Bernie Williams, Andy Pettitte was a pillar of the Joe Torre-era Yankees dynasty. The tall Texan lefty played such a vital role on 13 pinstriped playoff teams and seven pennant winners — plus another trip to the World Series during his three-year run with Houston — that he holds several major postseason records. In fact, no pitcher ever started more potential series clinchers, both in the World Series and the postseason as a whole.

For as important as Pettitte was to the “Core Four” (Williams always gets the short end of the stick on that one) that anchored five championships from 1996 to 2009 — and to an Astros team that reached its first World Series in ’05 — he seldom made a case as one of the game’s top pitchers. High win totals driven by excellent offensive support helped him finish in the top five of his leagues’ Cy Young voting four times, but only three times did he place among the top 10 in ERA or WAR, and he never ranked higher than sixth in strikeouts. He made just three All-Star teams.

Indeed, Pettitte was more plow horse than racehorse. A sinker- and cutter-driven groundballer whose pickoff move was legendary, he was a championship-level innings-eater, a grinder (his word) rather than a dominator, a pitcher whose strong work ethic, mental preparation, and focus — visually exemplified by his peering in for the sign from the catcher with eyes barely visible underneath the brim of his cap — compensated for his lack of dazzling stuff. Ten times he made at least 32 starts, a mark that’s tied for seventh in the post-1994 strike era. Within that span, his total of 10 200-inning seasons is tied for fourth, and his 13 seasons of qualifying for the ERA title with an ERA+ of 100 or better is tied for first with two other lefties, Mark Buehrle (a newcomer to this year’s ballot) and CC Sabathia. He had his ups and downs in the postseason, but only once during his 18-year career (2004, when he underwent season-ending elbow surgery) was he unavailable to pitch once his team made the playoffs.

Even given Pettitte’s 256 career wins, he takes a back seat to two other starters on the ballot (Roger Clemens and Curt Schilling) who were better at missing bats and preventing runs, and who also had plenty of postseason success. Both of those pitchers have reasons why voters might exclude them from their ballots even while finding them statistically qualified, and the same is true for Pettitte, who was named in the 2007 Mitchell Report for having used human growth hormone to recover from an elbow injury. Between those dents and dings and the additional presence of both Roy Halladay and Mike Mussina, Pettitte received just 9.9% in his 2019 ballot debut, and even on a less crowded slate, his share only increased to 11.3% last year. He seems unlikely to make much headway towards 75% barring a significant change in the electorate’s attitudes towards PEDs.

About those wins: Regular readers know that I generally avoid dwelling upon pitcher win totals, because in this increasingly specialized era, they owe as much to adequate offensive, defensive, and bullpen support as they do to a pitcher’s own performance. While one needn’t know how many wins Pettitte amassed in a season or a career to appreciate his true value, those totals have affected the popular perception of his career.

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When looking at statistics for the 2020 season, everything should be taken with a grain of salt. The players had to prepare and then play in the middle of a pandemic with adjusted routines and preparation, as well as a lack of fans in the stands. Added to the mix is the 60-game season, which is just over a third of a normal year. All of that is going to lead to some weird-bad stat lines — like, for example, the one Gary Sánchez put up.

Sánchez stepped up to the plate 178 times in 2020 and got just 23 hits for a batting average of .147. Among the 18,273 batters with at least 150 plate appearances since 1969, that figure ranks 18,259th. His rate of hits per plate appearance was 13%, a touch behind Mike Trout’s rate of extra-base hits in his career. Thanks to the walks (18 and a 10.1% rate) and homers (10), Sánchez’s 69 wRC+ is merely awful instead of historically bad, but it’s still a gruesome line.

But as I said, we need to take these numbers with a grain of salt. Unfortunately, the overall picture of Sánchez as a player isn’t a pretty one right now. Over at ESPN, Buster Olney wrote how fixing Sánchez was a top priority this offseason for the Yankees, and what the problems are.

Well, a theory of some rival evaluators is that Sánchez’s confidence is all but shot, with his failures at the plate compounding it. Others note his increasing inability to cope with sliders, a pitch that seems to mystify him and accounts for a lot of his career-high 13.8% swing-and-miss rate in 2020, the worst of his career. At least some evaluators think that Sánchez has a hard time separating his offense from his defense, so that when he makes a mistake behind the plate, that tends to carry over to his hitting, and vice versa. And like many other young players, he seems to struggle to make in-game adjustments.

Some of the mental claims are somewhat dubious. Sánchez was a pretty bad catcher making plenty of mistakes back when he was hitting really well. As for in-game adjustments, he has generally hit the best in the fourth through sixth innings in his career, and since the start of 2019, his numbers in the first three innings match up with the last three innings, while the average player sees a 10-point drop.

The swing-and-miss issues on sliders are pretty indisputable, but they also aren’t new. Sánchez whiffed on 18% of sliders last year, which was right in line with his career averages. The problem for him is that he used to be able to run into a few of them: Last season he posted an .083 ISO on sliders, making him completely ineffective on the pitch. Further compounding things was a more than 50% increase on whiffs against four-seam fastballs: Sánchez went from a 10.7% swing-and-miss rate on four-seamers entering the season to 17% of those fastballs in 2020. That was also the second straight year in which Sánchez saw a big increase in four-seamer whiffs. He’s been swinging through fastballs at roughly the same rate as sliders, and neither number is good.

But wait, it gets worse. I noted Sánchez’s inability to hit the slider for power when he did make contact, and his general inability to get a hit when a ball is put in play ruins his chances of getting on base. Jeff Zimmerman looked at Sánchez’s poor BABIP and found the shift was killing his batting average despite his hard contact. While his high barrel rate makes it seem as though he should hit for a higher average, 10 of his 16 barrels last year were homers; his .281 xwOBA on balls in play is 30 points below league average.

Add that all up, and you get an offensive performance that hit new lows this past season and has been trending downwards for quite some time. Over the last three years, Sánchez has a .200/.296/.453 slash line with a 98 wRC+ in roughly 1,000 plate appearances. Since the middle of June 2019, he’s batting .168/.272/.379 with a 74 wRC+ in close to 400 plate appearances. Some of the blame could go to varying injuries over time, but catching takes a toll on the body, so we can’t exactly wish those away in the future.

While a dip this big in production didn’t seem possible a few years ago, there were always concerns about how Sánchez would profile. In Dave Cameron’s Trade Value Rankings back in 2017, he ranked 12th (which should provide some idea of his star production at the time), but:

That said, there are enough red flags to keep him out of the top tier for now. He’s one of the most extreme pull hitters in baseball, and you’ll note that the guys he’s hanging out with aren’t running BABIPs over .300. Toss in the pop-up problem and a below-average contact rate, and it’s easy to see Sánchez running a .240 batting average one of these years.

As predicted, the extreme pull rate, the popups, and the contact rate combined to make Sánchez a replacement-level player last season.

So what now? If Sánchez could field his position well, the Yankees could justify waiting for the bat to come around. There may be some hope there: He worked on a new catching stance in spring training, and in a very small sample, his framing was pretty close to average, and he still did a solid job with baserunners. If that holds and he is merely a little below-average behind the plate and at least average with the bat, then Sánchez is an average to slightly above-average player. If his catching regresses and the bat is average, then he’s a below-average player and a decent backup. And if he doesn’t get the bat back up to average, he’s the third catcher/26th man on the roster who can pinch-hit and rarely starts.

Unfortunately, the upside is more limited than it has been, too. If Sánchez’s bat really comes back, it might be best to let him make only occasional starts at catcher and take most of his turns at designated hitter —something that isn’t possible if he is just an average hitter. It’s hard to see a reasonable path back to more than anything than a three-win player, and the projections put Sánchez in the one- to two-win range that shouldn’t make him a starter on a contending club.

That leaves the Yankees with a difficult choice. They can hold on to Sánchez and see if he regain the ability to be a star hitter, but that likely entails bringing in another catcher to be the regular starter, as neither he nor Kyle Higashioka can be counted on for full-time (or really half-time) duty. The Yankees are supposedly “open” to trading him, but who is going to give up decent players and pay Sánchez his $5 million salary when he isn’t really projected as a starter-level player? There are a bunch of teams who would likely be willing to take a chance on him — the Rockies, Rangers, Marlins, and Tigers come to mind immediately — but they’re probably unwilling to give up any promising or useful players in exchange. The Yankees could just non-tender Sánchez and move on, but that’s a move that could backfire if he hits well, though signing J.T. Realmuto would likely make any regrets moot.

The Yankees and Sánchez, then, are likely stuck with each other for another season. He’ll get some opportunity to recapture his form, and the Yankees will pay him his relatively modest salary. They can’t trade him for nothing, and they shouldn’t let him go for free. But they also shouldn’t head into 2021 with Sánchez and Higashioka as the starting tandem at catcher. It makes Sánchez something of a potential bonus for the Yankees, and given their history together, it might actually benefit them both to give them one more season to get him back on track.

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for nine years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the New York Yankees.

Batters

The possible loss of DJ LeMahieu is a real hit to the Yankees, but even if they don’t come to an agreement with him, I don’t expect the club to actually be cruising with Tyler Wade and Thairo Estrada come April. But even if they did, as long as the team remains healthy — a big condition given their recent experiences — it’s still an extremely potent lineup even if they tank a position or two. Brett Gardner is a free agent as well after the team declined his option, but I expect him to return anyway. After all, Gardner didn’t attract a ton of interest in last year’s free agent market, and with him being a year older and coming off a worse season, and with baseball’s economics, I doubt he gets more phone calls this time around. Like Mitch Moreland in Boston, Gardner appears to have a de facto arrangement where he can just show up at some point and the team will give him a one-year contract for $X million.

Did you really think that ZiPS would fall out of love with Gleyber Torres after his power went missing for six weeks? I do think he’s at the point at which I’d try to get him moved to third base. If the Yankees don’t re-sign LeMahieu and instead go after one of the players in the surprisingly deep shortstop pool, could Gio Urshela theoretically play second base? He’s likely a better third baseman than Torres, who hasn’t been great at second, and the team did work him out some at the position in summer training. How the infield gets shuffled will be one of the more interesting questions for them this offseason. Read the rest of this entry »

He was born in Manhattan and raised in Queens, but it was in the Bronx where Edward Charles Ford made his name — “Whitey,” just one of several colorful nicknames — as the most successful pitcher in Yankees history. Amid the team’s longest run of American League dominance, the street-wise, fair-haired southpaw set several franchise records during his 1950-67 run, and carved a spot among the league’s elite, making 10 All-Star teams, leading the American League in pitching triple crown categories five times, and winning a Cy Young award. A near-ubiquitous presence in October, he also set numerous World Series records that still stand and are probably unbreakable given the expansion of the postseason field; he pitched in 11 World Series, six on the winning side, and his count would have been even higher if not for a two-year military stint. In 1974, he was elected to the Hall of Fame alongside teammate and longtime friend Mickey Mantle.

Ford died on October 8 at his home in Long Island. He was 91 years old, and had been suffering the effect of Alzheimer’s disease in recent years. He was the second-oldest surviving Hall of Famer at the time of his death, with Tommy Lasorda the oldest. He’s the fifth Hall of Famer to pass away in 2020, after Al Kaline, Tom Seaver, Lou Brock, and Bob Gibson, and as I write this, news of the death of a sixth, Joe Morgan, has just been reported. It’s been a very tough year for baseball legends.

Standing just 5-foot-10 and 180 pounds, Ford measures up physically as the shortest of the post-World War II pitchers elected to the Hall, but what he lacked in brawn, he made up for in brains. The prototypical crafty lefty, Ford “delivered his assortment of breaking stuff (including a devastating spitball, enemy batters claimed) and inside fastballs with commanding intelligence,” wrote Roger Angell in a 1989 New Yorker piece. “He was brusque and imperturbable on the mound — the Chairman of the Board — and light-hearted in the clubhouse. Say ‘Whitey Ford‘ to a fan over forty-five and east of Altoona, and the sun will come out.”

“He never throws a pitch without a purpose,” said pitching coach Johnny Sain in 1961, Ford’s Cy Young-winning season and his biggest one statistically. “He’s always bearing down, never careless.”

“Whitey, you never saw him in a bad mood,” said former teammate Roy White on the occasion of Ford’s 90th birthday. “He always had a smile on his face. Good at a joke, a funny guy.”

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There are stories athletes must tell themselves to kick in an extra gear of motivation totally foreign to many of us. To feed the adrenaline that needs to flow through your body in order to square up a fastball thrown at 100 miles per hour. They are stories about the athlete being under attack; by a public that doesn’t believe in them, by the media that unfairly targets them, by the rival who has crossed and provoked them. Some of those stories are completely true, others less so — most people probably expect professional baseball players to do well, and the grudges they hold may be ones we aren’t aware of.

Everyone, however, was aware of the grudge between Mike Brosseau and Aroldis Chapman. The heater Chapman threw at Brosseau — who dodged it at the very last moment with mere inches to spare — has been replayed and analyzed since it caused the benches to clear during an otherwise quiet game on September 1, and served to ratchet up a tense division rivalry. So when Brosseau came up to bat against Chapman with the game tied in the bottom of the eighth of Friday’s do-or-die ALDS Game 5, the idea of the at-bat deciding both team’s seasons was simultaneously far-fetched and a narrative far too convenient.

Ten pitches later, Brosseau’s swing made the far-fetched reality. That terrifying fastball darted not toward his head, but over the inside corner of the plate, and Brosseau snuck the barrel of his bat through the zone just hard enough to send the ball over the Petco Park fence, and the Rays’ dugout into pandemonium. It was the go-ahead run the Rays needed to defeat the Yankees, 2-1, and punch their ticket to the ALCS.

The Rays will face the Houston Astros in Game 1 of the ALCS on Sunday at 7:37 p.m. EST. Read the rest of this entry »

Without a true minor league season on which to fixate, I’ve been spending most of my time watching and evaluating young big leaguers who, because of the truncated season, will still be eligible for prospect lists at the end of the year. From a workflow standpoint, it makes sense for me to prioritize and complete my evaluations of these prospects before my time is divided between theoretical fall instructional ball, which has just gotten underway, and college fall practices and scrimmages, which will have outsized importance this year due to the lack of both meaningful 2020 college stats and summer wood bat league looks because of COVID-19.

I started with the National League East, then completed my look at the American League West and Central. Below is my assessment of the AL East, covering players who have appeared in big league games. The results of the changes made to player rankings and evaluations can be found over on The Board, though I try to provide more specific links throughout this post in case readers only care about one team. Read the rest of this entry »

Beyond Giancarlo Stanton going electric and Gerrit Cole proving that investing $315 million in him was one of Brian Cashman’s better decisions, not a whole lot else has gone right for the Yankees against the Rays. Going into Game 4 needing a win to stay alive, they’d found no answer to the Ruth and Gehrig cosplay of Randy Arozarena and Ji-Man Choi. They’d struggled to do much of anything when faced with Tampa Bay’s best relievers. Most of the lineup aside from Stanton, Aaron Hicks, DJ LeMahieu and (unexpectedly enough) backup catcher turned starter Kyle Higashioka hadn’t shown up. New York had come by its series deficit and a potential trip home fairly.

But the biggest problem for the Yankees in this series is the one that was the biggest problem in the 2019 playoffs and the biggest problem in the 2018 playoffs and the biggest problem in the 2017 playoffs: a pitching staff that hasn’t performed consistently. Granted, that’s a small sample, with only six starts so far and two of those belonging to Cole. But Masahiro Tanaka, normally the postseason stalwart, has been bludgeoned in his two turns, including Game 3. Aaron Boone’s attempt at a Rays-style opener gambit in Game 2 quickly went pear-shaped. Game 4 rested on Jordan Montgomery, who hadn’t pitched in over two weeks and could at best provide three or four innings in what would be his postseason debut. If he went south early, making it to Game 5 was highly unlikely.

Yet for the first time this month, Boone got a capable start from a non-Cole pitcher, and his bullpen was able to hold it together for a 5–1 win. Even better, Game 5 will be in the hands of Cole, who held the Rays in check in Game 1, bulldozed the Indians in the Wild Card round, and would be a popular pick league-wide for “man you most want on the mound in an elimination game.” Read the rest of this entry »

The Yankees lost to the Rays for the second night in a row on Wednesday night to fall behind in the Division Series, two games to one, but Giancarlo Stanton continued his rampage. The 30-year-old slugger, who was limited to just 23 games this year due to a Grade 1 left hamstring strain, has now homered in all five of the Yankees’ postseason games, with a consecutive games steak that’s one short of the record.

Stanton’s latest blast, his sixth of the postseason, came in the eighth inning off Shane McClanahan, a 23-year-old lefty who in Game 1 became the first pitcher in major league history to debut in the postseason without having pitched in a regular season game. He got out of that one unscathed, but not so on Wednesday:

The homer, Stanton’s second hit of the night, came with a man on base and trimmed the Rays’ lead to 8-4, but the Yankees could draw no closer. To date, they’ve scored 18 runs in the Division Series, 10 of which have been driven in by Stanton with his four homers. He broke open Game 1 with a ninth-inning grand slam off John Curtiss, extending a 5-3 lead to 9-3:

Stanton followed that up with a pair of homers off Tyler Glasnow in Game 2, first with a game-tying opposite field liner in the second inning, and then a three-run blast — and I do mean blast — in the fourth, which cut a 5-1 lead to 5-4, though the Rays eventually pulled away for a 7-5 win:

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