We’re currently in the midst of a lull in the baseball calendar. The offseason has officially arrived and yet the Hot Stove hasn’t really been lit yet. I suppose I could get excited for Awards season, but the painfully slow roll out and the heated arguments wear me down fairly quickly.

So, instead, I try to make my own baseball entertainment. For me, one exercise is simply to look over the league and attempt to identify the players about whom I’m most excited for next season. Not superstars, necessarily: everyone is always excited to watch the game’s brightest lights. And not prospects who haven’t yet reached the Show, either. I’m not really qualified to talk about those players in a meaningful way, so I’ll leave those players to Eric (and Chris) and all the scouts out there.

Outside of those groups, though, there are still hundreds of players from which to choose. I’ll be excited to watch more than these 10, of course, but in surveying the league, these are ones who caught my eye. Note that this isn’t in any particular order. I’m equally excited about all 10. Perhaps you’ll agree with me, perhaps not. Feel free to conduct your own exercise and let me know who your 10 players are in the comments.

Rafael Devers

The new Red Sox third baseman enjoyed a meteoric debut month, swatting his way to a 224 wRC+ in his July call-up. That covered just 27 plate appearances, though, and as we moved into August and September, he cooled off significantly. He hit safely from his second game (July 26) through his eighth game (August 4). At that point, he was hitting .389/.463/.694, for a 205 wRC+. From August 5 through the end of the regular season, though, he hit .263/.312/.441, for a 92 wRC+. Doom and gloom, right? Not entirely, no, because in Boston’s abbreviated playoff run, he was one of the few bright spots, slashing .364/.429/.909. He slugged two homers — one off of Francisco Liriano and one off of Ken Giles. The latter was of the inside-the-park variety, but it was impressive nonetheless:

So, it’s hard to know what to expect from young Devers. Andrew Benintendi was similarly hyped coming into last campaign and was decidedly mediocre for large swaths of the season. Will that be Devers’ fate too? And what of his fielding? He made seven throwing errors and seven fielding errors in his short time in Boston. If the Red Sox acquire a legit first baseman this winter (or a legit DH and move Hanley Ramirez to first) and it turns out that Devers can’t hack at it at third, the Red Sox will have a conundrum to solve.

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Pitching and defense didn’t win in 2017. Offense did. Specifically, launching juiced balls into the air did.

That’s an oversimplification, of course. Charlie Morton played a significant role in winning two Game 7s. Justin Verlander was generally great. Pitching and defense were certainly part of it. But an examination of wRC+ and FanGraphs’ Offensive Runs Above Average (Off) statistic for 2017 playoff teams reveals a noteworthy finding.

Of the three clubs that won 100 games in the regular season and the two clubs that met in the World Series, each finished in the top four by FanGraphs’ Off and wRC+. The historically good Astros offense led the club to a World Series title.

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Some of you might be sick of hearing about him by now, I don’t know, but I’m endlessly fascinated by the fact that Aaron Judge just put in a whole season as the best player in baseball. Now, sure, that’s just me looking at WAR, and, sure, it was only possible because Mike Trout got injured, but think about what Judge was before, and think about what he became. We like to tell ourselves that we can see the best players coming. Judge, in spring training, was a major question mark. In his initial cup of coffee, he batted .179 with almost three times as many strikeouts as hits. Judge was terrible, and then, almost without warning, he was the best. That’s incredible!

Judge is endlessly fascinating just in general. One of the other interesting things about him is the sense I get that people remain unconvinced. Like, we all saw what he did in 2017 — it was impossible not to — but the jury’s still out on what Judge really, truly *is*. The playoffs left a certain impression. Judge was a fine hitter, by the results, but he struck out a whole bunch. He almost felt exposed, and there’s some doubt here that remains.

So this is another post built around some polls. There are three polls in here, the last of which will ask who you’d rather have next season: Aaron Judge or Paul Goldschmidt? The question itself is pointless, artificial. No one will actually have to make that choice in real life, certainly not based on WAR. But I want to know what all of you think. Judge is here for obvious reasons. Goldschmidt is here because he’s been super consistent. Nobody out there is a Paul Goldschmidt skeptic. Give this post feedback! Give this post the feedback I so deeply crave.

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The Detroit Tigers are in full rebuild mode, and Isaac Paredes projects as a big part of their future. His bat is the primary reason why. Despite an August swoon that caused his numbers to plummet, the 18-year-old shortstop finished the season with a .725 OPS. Given that he was one of the youngest players in the Midwest League, that’s not exactly chicken soup.

Paredes was acquired by the Tigers, along with Jeimer Candelario, in the trade-deadline deal that sent Alex Avila and Justin Wilson to the Cubs, and the news threw him for a loop. When I talked a him a week and a half later, the Hermosillo, Mexico native admitted to having been shocked and not particularly pleased. His initial thought was “this is something bad.”

Once his head stopped spinning, his attitude shifted to “this is a good thing.” Paredes realized he was going to an organization that would be relying heavily on players just like himself. Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday night, the Astros ended the Yankees season with a 4-0 shutout. For New York, even reaching Game 7 of the ALCS was a surprising accomplishment, as this was a team widely considered to still be in rebuilding mode heading into 2017. As a young team who became a good team faster than expected, the easy comparisons are to teams like the 2015 Cubs or the 2008 Rays, and expectations for the 2018 Yankees are now going to be particularly high given the team’s success this year.

And the Yankees are certainly setup well for the future. With Aaron Judge, Gary Sanchez, and Greg Bird, they have three enviable offensive building blocks for the middle of their order, and plenty of quality all-around performers like Didi Gregorius and Aaron Hicks, plus the potential upside of Clint Frazier and Gleyber Torres. And that’s just the young hitters. Few organizations in the game have a similar kind of talent base to build off of going forward.

But, similar to the Cubs, there are some legitimate questions on the pitching side of things, and a winter of inaction while counting on the kids to develop further and carry the team to the 2018 World Series is unlikely. The Yankees are both extremely well positioned for the future, but also need to do some real work this winter.

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Astros, Yankees, Game 7. This should be fun. This has been a pretty terrific ALCS already, and with a winner-take-all contest to decide it tonight, this could end up being one of the best league championship series we’ve seen in a while.

For the Yankees, the plan seems pretty obvious. CC Sabathia is going to start the game, and given how he’s pitched so far this postseason, Joe Girardi will probably ride his veteran until he gets in real trouble. And then the Astros will deal with Tommy Kahnle and Aroldis Chapman, probably for at least a couple of innings each, with David Robertson around to try and redeem his disastrous Game 6 performance if Sabathia-Kahnle-Chapman isn’t enough to get through nine innings. If anyone besides one of those four take the mound for the Yankees, it will probably be because one of the two teams turned it into an early blowout.

The Astros, though, head into a potential season finale without as much clarity.

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If we know anything about Dallas Keuchel it’s that he possesses some of the best command in the game. No starting pitcher more often targets and hits the lower third of the zone — and the borderline, 50-50 area at the bottom of the zone — according to Baseball Savant’s pitch data. Keuchel located 29.4% of his total pitches in these zones this season, tops among MLB starting pitchers.

The following graphic shows what and where Keuchel threw pitches in his stellar Game 1 start against the Yankees.

Below are the results of the Yankee plate appearances. Not surprisingly for a pitcher who’s recorded a 1.41 career ERA against New York in the regular season, they were basically all good for Keuchel:

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No one is lifting and launching like the Yankees this postseason.

More specifically, no one is lifting and launching like the Yankees at their home park, where the club is 6-0 this postseason after enjoying a sizable home-field advantage during the regular season (51-30), as well. If they can win Friday or Saturday at Houston, New York will be guaranteed at least two more home games at Yankee Stadium II, a launching pad in the year of launch angle.

According to Baseball Savant’s “barrel” and “solid contract” metrics — figures derived from Statcast data — the Yankees have a sizable lead on the playoff field in terms of quality contact on fly balls and line drives this postseason (see table below). And while their totals are higher than some other clubs’ simply for having advanced deeper into the postseason, they still have a sizable edge on their LCS contemporaries.

Nor is it just that the Yankees are driving more balls into the air with authority, it’s where they are engaging in this work: at their home ballpark.

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Dallas Keuchel didn’t overwhelm the Yankees like usual on Wednesday. Rather than continuing his career domination of the New York nine — which includes 14 scoreless innings in the postseason and a 1.09 ERA in eight starts overall — he did what Joe Girardi said before the game he rarely does: lay an egg. Keuchel was chased in the fifth, having surrendered seven hits and four runs.

In the lefty’s opinion, the egg was a matter more of results than process. Following the game, he wasn’t so much self-critical as he was complimentary of his competition.

“Outside of Castro’s double in the second — it was a backup cutter and he put a good swing on it — I don’t think I can pinpoint another mistake pitch,” Keuchel told reporters. “Sanchez’s double down the line was a pretty good pitch down and in, and he hadn’t had great success on that pitch. Judge… [the] cutter was in; maybe it wasn’t in quite far enough, but it was in enough to get an out. [Greg Bird] hit a good pitch. It was inside — it was off the plate — and he just stuck his hands in enough to get it over Yuli’s head.”

Yankees hitters expressed multiple viewpoints regarding Keuchel’s performance. Todd Frazier — presumably referring to more than just Castro’s knock — opined that his teammates “hit the mistakes.” (What constitutes a mistake from Keuchel is a point on which Frazier elaborates below.)

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