The Yankees rotation is looking rather thin these days. After losing Michael Pineda to a forearm injury, the team was left with a gaping hole in their rotation behind Masahiro Tanaka, Nathan Eovaldi, Ivan Nova and CC Sabathia. Even before Pineda’s injury, the team already had a hole at the back of their rotation in Sabathia, whose days as a productive pitcher appear to be well behind him. Overall, that’s an underwhelming rotation for team that’s likely headed to the playoffs.

Somewhat curiously, the Yankees didn’t acquire any rotation help at the trade deadline. Even more curiously, it doesn’t seem like they made much of an effort to do so. Instead, they seemed more interested in fortifying the back of their bullpen, which is already one of the best in baseball.

The imminent arrival of top prospect Luis Severino may have been the primary reason for the Yankees’ inaction. Minutes after the non-waiver trade deadline had passed, Brian Cashman revealed the 21-year-old’s next start would be in the big leagues. He debuts tonight against the Red Sox.

Severino has little left to prove in the minor leagues. The hard-throwing righty split time between Double-A and Triple-A this year, where he recorded FIPs of 2.34 and 2.53, respectively. Severino was similarly dominant last season, when he rattled off a 2.46 ERA and 2.46 FIP across three minor league levels: Low-A, High-A and Double-A. Read the rest of this entry »

This breakdown starts with the Scott Kazmir deal on July 23, but there weren’t any trades from the 16th to the 23rd, so this covers the whole second half of the month, trade-wise, up until now. I count 25 total trades with prospects involved in that span that add together to have 58 prospects on the move. Check out the preseason Top 200 List for more details, but I’ve added the range that each Future Value (FV) group fell in last year’s Top 200 to give you an idea of where they will fall in this winter’s list. Also see the preseason team-specific lists to see where the lower-rated prospects may fall within their new organization.

40 FV is the lowest grade that shows up on these numbered team lists, with 35+ and 35 FV prospects mentioned in the “Others of Note” section, so I’ll give blurbs for the 40 FV or better prospects here. I’ve also linked to the post-trade prospect breakdown for the trades I was able to analyze individually, so click there for more information. Alternately, click on the player’s name to see his player page with all his prior articles listed if I didn’t write up his trade.

I opted to not numerically rank these players now, but I will once I’ve made the dozens and dozens of calls necessary this fall and winter to have that level of precision with this many players. Look for the individual team lists to start rolling out in the next month, with the 2016 Top 200 list coming in early 2016. Lastly, the players are not ranked within their tiers, so these aren’t clues for where they will fall on the Top 200.

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Yesterday, David Ortiz hit two homers. That’s a good day for anyone, and especially for someone 39 years old. I’m 39, too, and I’m writing this article and also my hip hurts, so advantage Ortiz! But! Two days ago Ortiz was preemptively one-upped by Alex Rodriguez. Saturday, Rodriguez hit three homers while he continued his 39-year-plus-long streak of being almost four months older than Ortiz. Rodriguez’s three homers were more impressive than Ortiz’s two in both the binary way that three is better than two, and in the way that, to date, this is just more of the same from a guy who spent the better part of last season at the beach because baseball didn’t allow him to play. Then there was the whole thing about whether or not the Yankees would even let him play for them again. As it turns out they’re quite the magnanimous bunch, and Rodriguez got to attend spring training and everything. Had George Steinbrenner been alive, Rodriguez would have been traded to the Marlins for Mat Latos’s cat, Cat Latos, and yes, this whole article is an excuse to mention Cat Latos.

But Steinbrenner is as dead as Napoleon so Rodriguez returned to the Yankees unmolested and has somewhat bizarrely arrested his career slide and reverted to his late-aughts MVP-candidate self. As I write this, Rodriguez has an wRC+ of 151, a mark he last bested in 2008, when he finished with a 152 wRC+. This is late peak-era A-Rod so far this season minus the defense of course. At this rate, it won’t be too difficult for him to finish with a higher wOBA than he’s reached in any season since 2009, more homers than he’s hit since 2008, and a higher wRC+ than any season since 2007.

Rodriguez has missed considerable time over the last few seasons, so nothing over the remaining 65 games is assured, especially so when you consider he hasn’t played 150 games in a season since 2007. So extrapolating his season numbers is perhaps a foolish (though fun) exercise. The prudent thing to do is to not look a gift centaur in the mouth (or in any other orifice) and take what he’s given us so far this season. In that sense, I want to look back at his three-homer day on Saturday to see what it can tell us about the hitter Alex Rodriguez is right now.

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Whoa, that was a rough two days without baseball. But the wait is almost over. (And, in fact, the Royals and White Sox are in the first inning as of press time.) As we grind our nails into a fine paste waiting for the second half to start, here are 10 questions that I’ll be hoping the second half answers. Perhaps you have others. If so, let me know in the comments, but these are mine. Let’s get to it.

1. How many more younglings?

The first half saw the introduction of some really top-shelf talent, with some of those young players immediately vaulting to the top of Dave’s trade-value rankings, including Carlos Correa at #5 after just 32 major-league games. That probably won’t be topped, but the second half hasn’t even started yet, and we already know of one more prospect who is set for his big league debut in Frankie Montas. Montas was ranked 113th by Kiley before the season, and his 3.03 FIP ranks 10th across all of Double-A; his 2.47 ERA, 13th.

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A lesson you learn as you grow older is that everything is somewhere on a spectrum. Though we yearn for blacks and whites, for certainties and absolutes, the world is more complicated than that, littered with partials and mitigations. Seldom does everything point in one direction. Seldom do we even know about everything pointing. There is always much we can’t or don’t figure out. There is a neat thing, though, about spectra — each one has two extremes. So when we know enough, we might be able to identify points near an extreme. The least-talented running back. The most challenging summit. The worst called ball by an umpire.

Strikes and balls are most definitely on a spectrum. The strike zone might be precisely defined, but it’s impossible for humans to call it that way, given our own limitations, which means any given pitch has a certain likelihood of being called a strike, and a certain likelihood of being called a ball. Most controversial calls take place around the boundaries. That area where taken pitches end up as coin flips. But sometimes there are bad calls beyond the boundaries, within or without. These head toward our extremes. Armed with PITCHf/x, it’s possible to find the worst called ball, by looking for balls on pitches down the middle. They’re uncommon, but they happen. What’s been the worst called ball of the 2015 first half? The following pitch was called a ball, though it was 3.0 inches from the center of the strike zone:

The worst called ball is worse than this.

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The Yankees boasted one of the best offenses in baseball in the season’s first half. Heading into the All-Star break, the team ranks third in the American League wRC+ and second in runs scored. But very little of this run scoring has come from the second base position, where the team has mustered only a 64 wRC+. Stephen Drew, with his 229 plate appearances of 69 wRC+, has been the primary culprit.

The Yankees second base situation just got a bit better, however. Or at least it did on the offensive side of things. The team called up rookie second baseman Rob Refsnyder on Saturday. The Bombers faced off against two left-handed pitchers over the weekend, making it an ideal time to break in their right-handed rookie second baseman. Refsnyder accumulated two hits in his first two games, including a towering home run off of Alexi Ogando yesterday. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’re a Yankees fan, you probably know that Chris Young (the hitter) has been on a bit of a tear lately, forcing himself into the starting lineup on a daily basis. If you’re a general baseball fan, you also might know that Young is from Houston, Texas. How would you know a sort of random bit of information like that? Most likely because there are two known Chris Youngs, the hitter: Mr. Young the usually fringy outfielder, and Mr. Young when he’s playing in Houston.

The former Mr. Young we’ve known for some time. He had a ton of expectations put on him early in his career, a few momentary flashes of what could have been, then he’s bounced around in a fourth-ish outfielder role for a number of clubs in the past few years. He owns a career line that supports such a role:

A little power, a little speed, but not really enough there to merit full-time work. Young is almost 32 years old, so the ship sailed long ago on him becoming the guy people expected when he was called up. However, the main point: there’s a place on some major-league team for a guy like Chris Young, even if there barely is, and even if that role is limited in nature.

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Alex Rodriguez has had an interesting few years. Ok, so that’s a big understatement. Besides the controversies, the 3,000 hits, and the various arguments with management and professional baseball catchers, we’re now witnessing something most people didn’t expect: a 39-year-old A-Rod putting together an incredible offensive year. As he heads toward the final two years of his contract in New York, two questions arise: has Rodriguez been worth the incredible amount of money he’s received over the span of his current contract? And has he been worth the money he’s getting this year?

First, it’s important to establish just how great and anomalous Rodriguez has been this season for, well, how old he is. It is pretty well known that most offensive categories should have taken a serious hit by the time a slugger approaches 40, but A-Rod has bucked that trend — in fact, he’s been close to his former greatness, at least offensively.

We can measure his success this year in a number of ways: by simple numbers (his current 152 wRC+ is in line with some of his better previous seasons — he posted the same wRC+ in his stellar 2008 campaign), average batted-ball velocity (he’s top five in the league), and fly ball/home run distance. The short story: A-Rod is hitting the ball really hard, really far, and he’s even being pitched to like he’s a slugger in his prime.

Now that we’ve established how great he’s been this season, let’s talk about the contract, and free agent deals. We often hear about teams backending contracts. They do so because inflation will devalue the later years of a deal, and they might be able to deal the player to a team who will eat some of the contract later on. It’s the free agent version of kicking the can down the road: sign the player now, get the production, and deal with the hard decisions later.

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Alex Rodriguez nearly connected for his 3,000th career hit on Thursday night. Barring some very unfortunate incident, it seems like it will only be a matter of time before he does actually notch it. But rather than wait for it, let’s be proactive and break down his first 2,999 hits. There’s a lot of cool facts about them, and after playing around in the Baseball-Reference Play Index for a few hours, I want to share them with you.

Hits Breakdown By Type and Team

First, let’s do a pie chart of his hit breakdown, both by hit type and team.

I think it’s interesting that he remains among the top 10 in Mariners history in singles, doubles and home runs. As he’s fourth in homers, it’s safe to say he’ll probably be in that top 10 for a long time. But even in doubles and singles it’ll be awhile. He’s ninth in doubles at 194, and the next-closest active player is Kyle Seager in 18th place at 121. After that, it’s Dustin Ackley down in 30th place at 88. Singles is similar — Rodriguez is 10th with 570 singles, and Seager is back in 23rd place with 376 singles. There isn’t another current Mariners player in the team’s top 50.

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With two down in the ninth inning Monday night, Alex Rodriguez came up for the New York Yankees with a chance to be the hero. It didn’t work out that way, and the Yankees lost, but there was reason for hope. More reason, perhaps, than there would’ve been with nearly any other Yankee hitter. That’s saying something, considering where Rodriguez has been, considering where his relationship with the team has been and considering the team is pretty good.

Technically, a great story shouldn’t require anything more than interesting characters and a captivating plot. That’s not the way it’s used in conversation, though. The connotation is that a great story revolves around a character you want to root for, and the character earns a deserved payoff. For the average person, a great story should be uplifting. I’m not sure Alex Rodriguez is capable of broadly stirring such sentiment. His personal tale will forever be tainted, and that’s an obstacle for many even if you’re not among them. But the story Rodriguez is presently authoring is almost great. With just about everyone prepared to give up on him, a seemingly cleaned-up Rodriguez is soaring, allowing observers to ever so fleetingly forget about that other stuff.

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