Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the Mariners-A’s opening series, the emotional last game featuring Ichiro Suzuki, and the uncertain degree to which the recent rash of contract extensions reflects players’ anxiety about free agency, then preview the 2019 New York Yankees (38:17) with The Athletic’s Yankees beat writer, Lindsey Adler, and the 2019 Miami Marlins (1:14:31) with The Athletic’s Marlins beat writer, Andre Fernandez.
Back in 2011, the Yankees had a lot of fun after signing two aging starters to minor league contracts, when they brought on Bartolo Colon and Freddy Garcia. Colon was deemed to be done by many. He went so far as to get a stem cell injection in his shoulder to give it another go. Garcia had a so-so season in 2010 and was working with significantly diminished stuff from his prime, but the two combined for 4.8 WAR, helping the Yankees on the way to a division title. Eight years later, New York has signed Gio Gonzalez to a minor league deal. He will earn $3 million if he reaches the big leagues, with incentives based on games started. He has the ability to opt-out on April 20 should he not receive a major league assignment. The circumstances that led to signing Gonzalez now, and Colon and Garcia then, are different, but the best-case scenario might be the same: big bang for the buck from a veteran arm.
The Yankees already have depth arms with major league starting experience in Domingo German, Jonathan Loaisiga, and Luis Cessa. German and Cessa in particular are having pretty good springs, but we all know that spring training can be a bit of a mirage. Those three combined for 1.8 WAR last year, which isn’t inspiring. But they are young and have shown flashes of promise, so it is possible that they could break out this year. For now, they are talented question marks. And even if the Yankees decide to carry two of the three, they would still face issues when it comes to rotation depth. As we’ve seen from the 2016 Dodgers, anything could happen to human beings who throw baseballs for living. Read the rest of this entry »
Before the 2017 season, Aroldis Chapman signed a near-record-setting contract to play for the Yankees. The club knew what they were getting, both on and off the field — they had traded Chapman to the Cubs earlier that year, and now they were bringing him back. More broadly, baseball knew what the Yankees were getting — a dominant closer with a dominant fastball. Just how much of an outlier was Chapman’s fastball? Well, when MLB created a fastest pitches leaderboard to show off Statcast, they added a button called the “Chapman filter.” In 2016, Chapman threw the thirty fastest pitches in the majors. It’s not much fun looking at a leaderboard that’s just one guy’s name over and over again.
Fast forward a year, and all the signs were trending downward. Chapman put up a 3.22 ERA and a 2.56 FIP in 2017, both the highest marks since his rookie year. He struck out a career-low 32.9% of the batters he faced (which is still pretty good for a career-low). His average fastball velocity declined by a mile an hour. By early 2018, he’d even been dethroned atop the fastest pitch leaderboard by Jordan Hicks. The human brain is an amazing pattern-matching machine, and we’ve seen this one plenty of times. Closers often break — it’s one of the reasons Chapman’s five-year contract was considered a risk when he signed it. The king has his reign, and then he dies. It’s natural.
Well, a funny thing happened on the way to irrelevance. Aroldis Chapman reinvented himself in 2018, and while he didn’t quite get back to his game-breaking 2014 highs, he recorded a 2.45 ERA and an even more absurd 2.09 FIP. He struck out 43.9% of the batters he faced, the second-highest rate of his career. How did he do it? Did he reach back a little further and take the velocity lead back from Hicks? Not even close, as his average fastball velocity declined another tick in 2018, and he finished a distant third in that category, the first time he wasn’t the hardest thrower in baseball since 2011. Instead, he leaned on his slider — one that may be the best in the game today. Read the rest of this entry »
With 80% of the YES Network up for sale, the New York Yankees have formed an ownership group that will give the club a majority interest in the network. The deal is valued at $3.47 billion, more than four times the network’s estimated value when it was formed in 2002, though that figure is also about half a billion dollars less than it was when YES was last sold in 2014. Disney recently acquired the 80% share of YES as part of their acquisition of Fox, but they must sell Fox’s regional sports networks in order to gain government approval of the broader Fox purchase. The Yankees, not willing to go it alone on a multi-billion dollar investment, found financial backing in the form of Blackstone and a few other private equity groups. More important to the actual running of the network, Sinclair Broadcasting Group and Amazon will also be significant investors, with the Yankees possessing a majority interest.
A little over six years ago, Fox bought nearly half of YES Network for $1.5 billion. While the team was the most prominent owner of the network at the time, that deal most benefited Goldman Sachs, Providence Equity, and a group headed by former Nets’ owner Raymond Chambers. The latter three groups owned roughly two-thirds of the network at the time, and sold most of their share. The Yankees sold about 9% of their share, netting them around a quarter of a billion dollars. That deal allowed Fox to later purchase the rest of the equity groups’ shares, as well as a bit more of the Yankees’ share, for another billion or so dollars. Fox completed that purchase in 2014, owning 80% of the network; the Yankees owned the remaining 20%. In what would turn out to be a big part of the agreement and the current sale, the Yankees retained the ability to buy back the network. Read the rest of this entry »
The Yankees got a bit of a nasty surprise this week when their ace, Luis Severino, felt a twinge of pain in his right shoulder after throwing a slider while warming up for an exhibition game against the Atlanta Braves on Tuesday. The team immediately shut down Severino for the next two weeks, meaning that Opening Day is out, and even if everything goes smoothly, he’s looking at a mid-to-late-April return to the rotation.
The team reported nothing of concern from Severino’s MRI, but I think that the situation is scary enough that the Yankees need to move more urgently in the direction of acquiring short-term rotation help. Severino is the one pitcher the Yankees cannot afford to lose, as he is both their best starting pitcher and their most durable one.
Since Severino’s 2017 emergence, he’s been responsible for 35% of the rotation’s WAR and has thrown 50 more innings than the runner-up, Masahiro Tanaka. Severino is also not the only Yankee starter with concerns; James Paxton is a terrific pitcher, albeit one with a significant injury history, and CC Sabathia is coming off heart surgery and really just a five-inning starter as he enters his grand farewell season. Without making an additional free agent signing, the Yankees already faced pretty good odds that they’d have to turn to one of their in-house options already, even if we no longer consider Tanaka’s elbow a ticking time bomb as we did a few years ago.
There are three pitchers the Yankees are likely to turn to as their Plan Bs: Jonathan Loaisiga, Domingo German, and Luis Cessa. Loaisiga was ranked as the No. 2 prospect by my colleagues Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel in their recent review of the team’s top prospects, and the ZiPS projections for Loaisiga agree that he’d be a capable fill-in, with a projected ERA+ of 96 as a full-time starter. He also pitched better than his 5.11 ERA in his brief major-league stint suggested, striking out 12 batters per nine for a 3.53 FIP (it’s extremely unlikely he’s actually a .383 BABIP pitcher). Read the rest of this entry »
For a player whom the Yankees acquired from the Twins in exchange for a backup catcher who hasn’t posted a positive WAR since the deal, Aaron Hicks was already quite a steal. Now the team has inked the 29-year-old switch-hitting center fielder to a very club-friendly seven-year, $70 million extension. It’s the second extension they’ve handed out this month, after Luis Severino’s four-year, $40 million deal, and likely won’t be the last, as the team is reportedly working on extensions for Dellin Betances and Didi Gregorius as well
The Severino extension has the same average annual value as Hicks’, but the two situations are rather different. Severino’s deal buys out just one year of potential free agency for a just-turned-25-year-old Super Two pitcher. While his career has had its ups and downs — including a detour to the minors in 2016 after a tantalizing 2015 debut, as well as a two-month slump last year that featured a 6.83 ERA, a 4.99 FIP, and concerns about pitch-tipping that carried into the postseason — we’re still talking about a pitcher who ranked fifth in the majors in WAR over the past two seasons while making a pair of All-Star teams and receiving Cy Young votes in both years, with a third-place finish in 2017. He may well win the award before his new contract lapses.
Hicks, who could have become a free agent after this season, isn’t nearly as accomplished, in that he’s never made an All-Star team, and has a single 10th-place AL MVP vote to his name. Indeed, he’s something of a late bloomer, having taken until his age-28 season (last year) to qualify for a batting title, though it’s not as though his talent was unexpected. The 14th pick of the 2008 draft out of Woodrow Wilson High School in Long Beach, California, he made four appearances on Baseball America’s Top 100 Prospects lists from 2009-2013, ranking as high as no. 19 (2010). While I could spend a thousand words explaining how the Twins botched his development, Baseball Prospectus editor-in-chief Aaron Gleeman, who has covered the team since the days when blogs were a novelty, offered a succinct summary in less than 280 characters:
Twins rushed Aaron Hicks to the majors, skipping Triple-A, failed to help him develop even a little bit, criticized his work ethic publicly, gave up on him at age 25, and traded him for a backup catcher who played just 26 games for them. The end of the Terry Ryan regime was wild.
In 928 plate appearances spread from 2013-2015, Hicks hit just .225/.306/.349 for an 81 wRC+, though above-average (and occasionallyspectacular) defense pushed his WAR in that span to 2.5. But with top prospect Byron Buxton waiting to be similarly screwed up in the wings, Ryan sold very low on Hicks, trading him straight up for catcher John Ryan Murphy, a former second-round pick who through his age-24 season had shown promise on both sides of the ball, if not at a level that lands one on the upper reaches of prospect lists. Long story short, Ryan started his Twins career going 3-for-40 as a backup behind Kurt Suzuki, and never really had a chance in the organization before being dealt to the Diamondbacks in July 2017.
Though Yankees general manager Brian Cashman loved his athleticism, Hicks did not pan out immediately. Amid three trips to the injured list (once for each hamstring, and once for his right shoulder), he hit just .217/.281/.336 (64 wRC+, -0.1 WAR) in 361 PA as a fourth outfielder behind Brett Gardner, Jacoby Ellsbury, and Carlos Beltran in 2016, a step backwards from his modest but solid 2015 (96 wRC+, 2.0 WAR). He finally broke out in 2017 (.266/.372/.475, 15 homers, 10 SB, 3.3 WAR) despite oblique strains on both sides that limited him to 88 games. An intercostal strain sidelined him early in 2018, but he recovered to put together his best season yet, batting .248/.366/.467 with 27 homers, 11 steals, a 127 wRC+ and 4.9 WAR, the Yankee lineup’s second-highest WAR total behind Aaron Judge (5.0).
Hicks’ extension will pay him $10.5 million per year from 2020-2023, then $9.5 million in 2024-2025, with a $12.5 million club option and a $1 million buyout for 2026, his age-36 season. The deal incorporates the $6 million salary he and the Yankees had already hammered out for this year, sweetening the pot with a $2 million signing bonus.
That doesn’t change things all that much, but it makes it easier for apples-to-apples comparisons with the last two free agent center fielders to ink big contracts, namely Lorenzo Cain (five years, $80 million from the Brewers last winter) and A.J. Pollock (four years, $55 million from the Dodgers in January). Both were a bit older and more accomplished when they reached free agency. Cain hit the market after his age-31 season, having already made an All-Star team, helped the Royals to back-to-back pennants (with a 2014 ALCS MVP award, a 2015 ALCS-winning mad dash home, and a championship in that same season), and reeled off four straight seasons of above-average production totaling 17.0 WAR. Pollock reached free agency after his age-30 season, having made one All-Star team and won one Gold Glove. Those were both back in his monster 6.8-WAR 2015 season; since then, a variety of injuries has limited him to 237 games and 5.2 WAR.
Pollock’s deal included all kinds of bells and whistles: a $12 million signing bonus; an opt-out after 2021, with a potential $5 million buyout based upon his PA totals; a $10 million player option — which also increases based upon his PA totals as well as placement in MVP voting — with a $5 million buyout; a $1.5 million assignment bonus if he’s traded; and (probably) an extra popsicle out of the freezer every weekend night. Leaving all of that aside to focus on the guaranteed money, here’s a side-by-side comparison with Hicks, using ZiPS projections supplied by Dan Szymborski:
Aaron Hicks vs. A.J. Pollock Age 31-35 Comparison
Hicks
Pollack
Age (Year)
AVG
OBP
SLG
OPS+
WAR
Age (Year)
WAR
29 (2019)
.253
.354
.459
116
3.2
30 (2020)
.252
.353
.461
116
3.0
31 (2021)
.251
.350
.451
113
2.7
31 (2019)
2.7
32 (2022)
.247
.346
.438
108
2.3
32 (2020)
2.3
33 (2023)
.244
.338
.414
100
1.8
33 (2021)
1.9
34 (2024)
.238
.326
.388
90
1.1
34 (2022)
1.3
35 (2025)
.231
.313
.357
79
0.4
35 (2023)
0.8
Total
14.4
8.9
Ages 31-35
8.3
8.9
WAR-wise, the two players are just over half a win apart when it comes to their 31-to-35 projections; for that period, Hicks is guaranteed $50.5 million to Pollock’s $55 million, though the latter could reach $65 million if he maxes out his incentives with 600 PA in 2022 (a level he reached only in 2015), and go even higher if he finishes in the top 10 of the MVP voting in any of those four years (something he’s never done). Even before factoring inflation, Hicks is taking a discount relative to that guaranteed money, but again, he’s less accomplished in the traditional sense, even if he’s been the more valuable one over the past two or three seasons.
As with Severino’s extension (and most deals struck prior to a player reaching free agency), there’s a decent chance that Hicks has sold himself short. Then again, the past two winters’ trips through free agency haven’t been much fun for many players, and there’s also a chance Hicks might not merit a starting job by the middle of this deal, and thus be the kind of fourth outfielder who only a big-spending team like the Yankees — who are paying Gardner $7.5 million for a year in which he might wind up in that role, and have paid Ellsbury $42 million for the past two seasons, one of them a complete washout — can afford. If Mike Trout absolutely demands to wear pinstripes after the 2020 season, while Judge and Giancarlo Stanton are under contract, Hicks’ salary won’t be a huge impediment.
Seventy million dollars of guaranteed money isn’t nothing. For a player whose major league career seemed to take forever to get off the ground, and who, after one more good season before hitting the market, might at best have netted the same dollar amount but compressed into a shorter time period (say, five years and $70 million as Cain Lite) and then been forced to scramble for scraps given the way the market is treating outfielders in their mid-30s, it’s a solid payday. If this is Hicks’ one bite of the (Big) Apple, he did all right.
Prospects “graduate” from prospect lists when they exceed the playing time/roster days necessary to retain rookie eligibility. But of course, that doesn’t mean they’re all in the big leagues for good. Several are up for a while but end up getting bounced back and forth from Triple-A for an extended period of time. Others get hurt at an inopportune moment and virtually disappear for years.
Nobody really covers these players in a meaningful way; they slip through the cracks, and exist in a limbo between prospectdom and any kind of relevant big-league sample. Adalberto Mondesi, Jurickson Profar, A.J. Reed, and Tyler Glasnow are recent examples of this. To address this blind spot in coverage, I’ve cherry-picked some of the more interesting players who fall under this umbrella who we didn’t see much of last year, but who we may in 2019. 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 more than half a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the New York Yankees.
After I posted the Yankees’ WARtoon on twitter, lots of people responded by picking the overs, particularly when it came to Luke Voit. Don’t be greedy. This is essentially a mean projection of 96-99 or so wins. Didn’t you learn the meaning of A Christmas Carol? If you hoard all the WAR, you will be visited by George Steinbrenner’s ghost. Wait, that actually sounds pretty cool, unless he brings along a ghastly manifestation of the Ken Phelps trade. (What is a ghost’s favorite player? Jay BOO-hner.)
ZiPS may be low on Voit, but 2.4 WAR per 600 plate appearances is an above-average first baseman, and Voit doesn’t have a long track record of excellence. It was only in 2017 that ZiPS started being interested in him, seeing his combined major league time and minor league translation as a .283/.352/.481 line. In 2018, the combined line was .284/.361/.516, not all that different in the big picture. Voit’s not a young player, and while he has hit very well in the majors, a player’s minor league career doesn’t just evaporate the second they hit the bigs and rock the league in a cup of coffee (see: Chris Singleton or Shane Greene).
The Yankees appear to have an almost Dodgers-like level of flexibility, with a number of infielders who can theoretically play every other position on the diamond. It’s a bit of over-engineering, but ideally, top teams should accumulate depth in this manner. I’d argue that the Phillies ought to have tried to sign Mike Moustakas, though he may not have been all that interested upon realizing that he’d basically be the team’s backup in the event Manny Machado cares to sign.
ZiPS now projects Aaron Hicks to be the fifth best center fielder in baseball. It’s a weird timeline, but we’re in it. Hicks is a borderline star and the fluke talk should be more or less behind us. Read the rest of this entry »
As far as FanGraphs is concerned, we’re just wrapping up Prospects Week. But as far as Major League Baseball is concerned, it’s just wrapping up Extensions Week. Aaron Nola signed an extension with the Phillies. Both Max Kepler and Jorge Polanco signed extensions with the Twins. And now, as of Friday, Luis Severino has signed an extension with the Yankees. You’ll remember that Whit Merrifield had already signed an extension with the Royals. Other players are surely going to sign extensions with other teams. That’s what happens this time of year.
Severino is a Super Two player who was looking at a 2019 salary of at least $4.4 million in his first of four arbitration years. That’s all wiped out now, with the Yankees having bought out all four arb years for $40 million. There’s also a fifth-year club option, that would have this contract max out at $52.25 million. The terms are similar to what Nola got from the Phillies, although Nola signed away two would-be free-agent years, while Severino signed away one. This shouldn’t be his last opportunity to make a splash.
The explanations tend to mirror one another. Teams like these contracts because they provide cost certainty. Teams also like these contracts because they usually end up looking club-friendly. Players like these contracts because they’re opportunities to become financially stable and secure for the rest of one’s life. How could Luis Severino possibly turn down a chance to make forty million dollars? Especially as a pitcher in the age of Tommy John. Severino’s set. His family is set. You know how all this goes.
This still looks club-friendly. So many players just don’t want to chance it.
When publishing our lists — in particular, the top 100 — we’re frequently asked who, among the players excluded from this year’s version, might have the best chance of appearing on next year’s version. Whose stock are we buying? This post represents our best attempt to answer all of those questions at once.
This is the second year that we’re doing this, and we have some new rules. First, none of the players you see below will have ever been a 50 FV or better in any of our write-ups or rankings. So while we think Austin Hays might have a bounce back year and be a 50 FV again, we’re not allowed to include him here; you already know about him. We also forbid ourselves from using players who were on last year’s inaugural list. (We were right about 18 of the 63 players last year, a 29% hit rate, though we have no idea if that’s good or not, as it was our first time engaging in the exercise.) At the end of the piece, we have a list of potential high-leverage relievers who might debut this year. They’re unlikely to ever be a 50 FV or better because of their role, but they often have a sizable impact on competitive clubs, and readers seemed to like that we had that category last year.
We’ve separated this year’s players into groups or “types” to make it a little more digestible, and to give you some idea of the demographics we think pop-up guys come from, which could help you identify some of your own with THE BOARD. For players who we’ve already covered this offseason, we included a link to the team lists, where you can find a full scouting report. We touch briefly on the rest of the names in this post. Here are our picks to click:
Teenage Pitchers
Torres was young for his draft class, is a plus athlete, throws really hard, and had surprisingly sharp slider command all last summer. White looked excellent in the fall when the Rangers finally allowed their high school draftees to throw. He sat 92-94, and his changeup and breaking ball were both above-average. Pardinho and Woods Richardson are the two advanced guys in this group. Thomas is the most raw but, for a someone who hasn’t been pitching for very long, he’s already come a long way very quickly.
The “This is What They Look Like” Group
If you like big, well-made athletes, this list is for you. Rodriguez was physically mature compared to his DSL peers and also seems like a mature person. The Mariners have indicated they’re going to send him right to Low-A this year. He could be a middle-of-the-order, corner outfield power bat. Luciano was the Giants’ big 2018 July 2 signee. He already has huge raw power and looks better at short than he did as an amateur. Canario has elite bat speed. Adams was signed away from college football but is more instinctive than most two-sport athletes. Most of the stuff he needs to work on is related to getting to his power.
Advanced Young Bats with Defensive Value
This is the group that produces the likes of Vidal Brujan and Luis Urias. Edwards is a high-effort gamer with 70 speed and feel for line drive contact. Marcano isn’t as stocky and strong as X, but he too has innate feel for contact, and could be a plus middle infield defender. Perez has great all-fields contact ability and might be on an Andres Gimenez-style fast track, where he reaches Double-A at age 19 or 20. Ruiz is the worst defender on this list, but he has all-fields raw power and feel for contact. He draws Alfonso Soriano comps. Palacios is the only college prospect listed here. He had three times as many walks as strikeouts at Towson last year. Rosario controls the zone well, is fast, and is a plus defender in center field.
Corner Power Bats
Nevin will probably end up as a contact-over-power first baseman, but he might also end up with a 70 bat. He looked great against Fall League pitching despite having played very little as a pro due to injury. Lavigne had a lot of pre-draft helium and kept hitting after he signed. He has all-fields power. Apostel saw reps at first during instructs but has a good shot to stay at third. He has excellent timing and explosive hands.
College-aged Pitchers
It’s hard to imagine any of these guys rocketing into the top 50 overall. Rather, we would anticipate that they end up in the 60-100 range on next year’s list. Gilbert was a workhorse at Stetson and his velo may spike with reshaped usage. Singer should move quickly because of how advanced his command is. Lynch’s pre-draft velocity bump held throughout the summer, and he has command of several solid secondaries. Abreu spent several years in rookie ball and then had a breakout 2018, forcing Houston to 40-man him to protect him from the Rule 5. He’ll tie Dustin May for the second-highest breaking ball spin rate on THE BOARD when the Houston list goes up. We’re intrigued by what Dodgers player dev will do with an athlete like Gray. Phillips throws a ton of strikes and has a good four-pitch mix.
Bounce Back Candidates
The Dodgers have a strong track record of taking severely injured college arms who return with better stuff after a long period of inactivity. That could be Grove, their 2018 second rounder, who missed most of his sophomore and junior seasons at West Virginia. McCarthy was also hurt during his junior season and it may have obscured his true abilities. Burger is coming back from multiple Achilles ruptures, but was a strong college performer with power before his tire blew.
Catchers
We’re very excited about the current crop of minor league catchers. Naylor is athletic enough that he’s likely to improve as a defender and he has rare power for the position.
Potentially Dominant Relievers
These names lean “multi-inning” rather than “closer.” Gonsolin was a two-way player in college who has been the beneficiary of sound pitch design. He started last year but was up to 100 mph out of the bullpen the year before. He now throws a four seamer rather than a sinker and he developed a nasty splitter in 2017. He also has two good breaking balls. He has starter stuff but may break in as a reliever this year.
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