Nick Loftin could get away with covering the entire plate against high school and college hurlers. That’s far harder to do in pro ball, which is why the 23-year-old Kansas City Royals prospect — per the tutelage of the organization’s hitting instructors — is now dialing in on pitches that can he do more damage on. The message he’s been receiving is pretty straightforward: Look for something in a certain zone, and when you get it, don’t miss it.

The dictum is simple; the execution is anything but. Not when you’re facing pitchers who are throwing high-90s heaters and breaking balls that are cutting and diving in either direction.

“It’s easier said than done,” admitted Loftin, whom the Royals drafted 32nd overall in 2020 out of Baylor University. “Hitting a baseball is one of the hardest things to do — besides hitting a golf ball. That’s really hard to do, as well.”

Wait. A golf ball isn’t moving unpredictably at great speed. Rather, it’s just sitting there, motionless, ready to be struck at the swinger’s leisure. For someone with the athleticism to play shortstop and centerfield in professional baseball, squaring up an immobile object should be as easy as pie.

Not necessarily. Read the rest of this entry »

This season, Eric and Tess Taruskin will each have a minor league roundup post run during the week, with the earlier post recapping some of the weekend’s action. Those posts will typically run Monday or Tuesday (since Monday is widely an off day for the minors), though they will occasionally be featured later in the week, as Eric’s notes are here.

Christian Encarnacion-Strand, 3B, Minnesota Twins
Level & Affiliate: High-A Cedar Rapids Age: 22 Org Rank: HM FV: 35
Line: 10-for-14, 3 HR, 2 2B, 1 SB, 15 RBI (!)

Notes
Wow! Encarnacion-Strand ended up at the bottom of our Twins list because we think he’s destined for first base and has more swing-and-miss going on than we’re comfortable with at that position. After transferring from Yavapai to Oklahoma State, he only struck out in about 19% of the plate appearances during his lone Division-I season, which is less than I’d have guessed based on my in-person notes on his contact ability. He certainly has big power, though. The universal DH helps Encarnacion-Strand’s cause since there are more 1B/DH jobs in the majors now, and teams are more open to platooning there and/or carrying a positionless bopper on their bench. Read the rest of this entry »

One of my favorite yearly preseason pieces is also my most dreaded: the breakout list. I’ve been doing this exercise since 2014, and while I’ve had the occasional triumph (hello, Christian Yelich), the low-probability nature of trying to project who will beat expectations means that for every time you look smart, you’re also bound to look dumb for some other reason.

Let’s start things off with a brief look at last year’s breakout hitter list and see how they fared.

• Vladimir Guerrero Jr.: .311/.401/.601, 166 wRC+, 6.7 WAR
• Alex Kirilloff: .251/.299/.423, 93 wRC+, 0.3 WAR
• Kyle Schwarber: .266/.374/.554, 145 wRC+, 3.1 WAR
• Gary Sánchez: .204/.307/.423, 99 wRC+, 1.5 WAR
• J.P. Crawford: .273/.338/.376, 103 wRC+, 3.1 WAR
• Nathaniel Lowe: .264/.357/.415, 115 wRC+, 1.6 WAR
• Ryan McMahon: .254/.331/.449, 95 wRC+, 2.5 WAR
• Luis Urías: .249/.345/.445, 111 wRC+, 2.7 WAR

On the plus side, nobody really embarrassed me. Alex Kirilloff came closest, but in his defense, he was playing with a wrist injury that eventually required surgery. Read the rest of this entry »

With the 2021-22 offseason in the books, it’s clear we’ll remember it, at least in part, for how the Twins of all teams took the reins and strengthened their roster. They flipped Mitch Garver for Isiah Kiner-Falefa, who then went to the Yankees along with Josh Donaldson in exchange for Gio Urshela and Gary Sánchez. It wasn’t much of a downgrade, and the move gave Minnesota the opportunity to sign Carlos Correa, the biggest free agent of the offseason.

And now, here’s the cherry on top. In an attempt to address the fragility of their rotation, the Twins had already traded for Sonny Gray. But one good pitcher can’t lift an entire staff, so they went ahead and acquired another starter. And as we’ll discuss later, there were several other intriguing players involved in the deal. A fairly complex trade on the morning of Opening Day? Don’t mind if I do. Here’s the basic breakdown:

Padres Get

• Taylor Rogers
• Brent Rooker
• Salary Relief ($6.6 million)

Twins Get

• Chris Paddack
• Emilio Pagán
• PTBNL

This started off as a discussion about the Twins, but let’s actually begin with the Padres’ return. Now, the bullpen down in San Diego was never projected to be an issue. If anything, it’s one of the league’s better ones, as evidenced by an 11th-place spot on this year’s positional power rankings. But it did lack a clear ninth inning stalwart after the departure of Mark Melancon, a problem made more obvious by last week’s Opening Day fiasco. With Rogers not yet with the team, Craig Stammen allowed a walk-off three-run bomb to Seth Beer (on National Beer Day, no less). Read the rest of this entry »

It arrived stressfully, chaotically, and slightly late, but the 2022 season is here. And that means it’s time for one last important sabermetric ritual: the final ZiPS projected standings that will surely come back and haunt me multiple times as the season progresses.

The methodology I’m using here isn’t identical to the one we use in our Projected Standings, so there will naturally be some important differences in the results. So how does ZiPS calculate the season? Stored within ZiPS are the first through 99th percentile projections for each player. I start by making a generalized depth chart, using our Depth Charts as an initial starting point. Since these are my curated projections, I make changes based on my personal feelings about who will receive playing time, as filtered by arbitrary whimsy my logic and reasoning. ZiPS then generates a million versions of each team in Monte Carlo fashion — the computational algorithms, that is (no one is dressing up in a tuxedo and playing baccarat like James Bond).

After that is done, ZiPS applies another set of algorithms with a generalized distribution of injury risk, which change the baseline PAs/IPs selected for each player. Of note is that higher-percentile projections already have more playing time than lower-percentile projections before this step. ZiPS then automatically “fills in” playing time from the next players on the list (proportionally) to get to a full slate of plate appearances and innings.

The result is a million different rosters for each team and an associated winning percentage for each of those million teams. After applying the new strength of schedule calculations based on the other 29 teams, I end up with the standings for each of the million seasons. This is actually much less complex than it sounds. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, the Twins got their dessert: they signed the top free agent in the market and installed him in the middle of the lineup. This week, they’re eating their vegetables, in the form of a one-year deal with Chris Archer:

Right-hander Chris Archer and the Minnesota Twins are in agreement on a one-year, $3.5 million contract, sources familiar with the deal tell ESPN. Archer, 33, will join the Twins' rotation and can earn up to $9.5 million this season with performance bonuses.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) March 28, 2022

Those incentives are a modern-day version of a games started bonus. Archer will receive them based on the number of games he either starts or pitches three innings of relief in – basically starting or being the headliner after an opener.

I like the idea of this contract quite a bit, for both Archer and the Twins. From Archer’s perspective, it’s a bet on himself with a financial cushion if things don’t work out. When he signed in Tampa Bay last year, he hadn’t pitched since 2019, and he didn’t even accrue 20 innings. He hurt his forearm in his second start of the year, missed four months, then hurt his hip not long after returning. A starting role in the majors seemed far from a certainty. Read the rest of this entry »

Spring training games may be underway but the abbreviated post-lockout free agency period means we’re still seeing a number of players find new homes for the upcoming season. This weekend, the Cubs and the Twins added some much-needed pitching depth. Let’s take a look at what they can expect from their new hurlers.

The Cubs, who appear to be on the outer fringes of contention, signed starting pitcher Drew Smyly to a one-year, $5.25 million deal with $2.5 million in incentives and a mutual option for 2023. At 32, the left-handed Smyly has had an up and down career thanks in part to health issues that include missing the entirety of the 2017 and ’18 seasons due to Tommy John surgery. He spent 2019 knocking the rust off with the Rangers and Phillies, and he didn’t quite look fully recovered until a resurgent stretch with the Giants in ’20, where he showed off a 2.5 mph boost on his fastball and a career-high 14.9% swinging strike rate. That performance secured him a $11 million deal with the Braves before last season, but his performance suffered; his ERA (4.48) and FIP (5.11) tumbled below league-average and he found himself left off of Atlanta’s playoff rotation. Smyly now looks to bounce back in a return to the Cubs, where he spent the 2018 season rehabbing.

The first thing to note about Smyly is that he’s still throwing a tick harder than earlier in his career, even if he has lost about half of his velocity gains from the 2020 season. This puts his 92.1 mph fastball right around league average for lefty starters. Performance-wise, his heater took a big hit, though, with hitters putting up a .415 wOBA as he surrendered 14 home runs. The likely culprit is the shape of the pitch, as both its drop and run became more average — not the direction you want your movement to go, especially with merely average velocity. Read the rest of this entry »

If Twitter determined reality, Carlos Correa would be a Yankee right now. A week after the World Series ended, he posed for a picture in front of Madison Square Garden wearing blue and gray, with former teammate Martín Maldonado playing photographer. You could see the writing on the wall, and many Yankees fans did.

If friendships determined reality, he’d surely still be an Astro. It was Maldonado with him in New York, and the charismatic catcher had a leg up in the recruiting pitch: he had all offseason to talk to Correa, while teams were maintaining radio silence due to the lockout. Houston came back to the table, too: they made several late offers to Correa in an attempt to woo him back.

But Correa has agency, and the Twins do too. Last night, he shocked the baseball world by signing a three-year deal to play in Minnesota:

MLB source: Free agent shortstop Carlos Correa has reached an agreement with the Minnesota Twins (@Twins) on a three-year deal worth $105.3 million with opt outs after the first two years. Highest average annual value for an MLB infielder.

— Mark Berman (@MarkBerman_) March 19, 2022

Read the rest of this entry »

I like to think of myself as a pretty reasonable baseball thinker. When I see a trade, I can put myself in both teams’ shoes and understand where they’re coming from. I might not agree with their evaluation of each individual player; heck, I might not agree with the direction they’re going overall. Usually, though, I can trace back their steps until I find the key thing driving the trade on both sides. Usually isn’t always, though. Meet the strangest trade I’ve seen in recent memory:

Catcher Ben Rortvedt is headed to the Yankees along with Josh Donaldson and Isiah Kiner-Falefa, sources tell ESPN. Catcher Gary Sanchez and Gio Urshela are going to Minnesota.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) March 14, 2022

This trade is a Rohrshach test, only more inscrutable. Sometimes I feel like the Yankees won. Sometimes I feel like the Yankees lost. Sometimes I feel like the Twins lost and the Yankees broke even. Sometimes I feel like they both lost, as strange as that may sound. Sometimes I feel like it was actually just Isiah Kiner-Falefa for cash. Sometimes I feel like Josh Donaldson will set the league on fire to get back at the Twins. Let’s look at this trade from as many angles as possible and see if we can figure out what’s going on.
Read the rest of this entry »

The Cincinnati Reds have been rumored to be interested in trading at least one of their top starters for over a year, with bits of buzz centered around Luis Castillo and Sonny Gray. Castillo remains in Cincinnati — at least for the moment — but Saturday, Gray was traded to the Minnesota Twins, one of a few weekend moves the Twins made. Heading to Cincy is Minnesota’s first round pick from last year, right-handed pitcher Chase Petty. A third player, A-ball reliever Francis Peguero also joins the Twins, but landing Gray was the fundamental purpose of this trade.

The reasons for the Twins’ sudden collapse in 2021 are varied, but the most pressing among them is obvious: the rotation. Minnesota’s starting pitchers combined to finish 25th in the league in WAR last season, with a 5.18 ERA and a 4.87 FIP. Even those marks kind of overstate the strength of the rotation given that the team no longer enjoys the services of José Berríos, who they traded to the Blue Jays last summer. Michael Pineda (and his 3.62 ERA over 21 starts) is a free agent, and Kenta Maeda’s September Tommy John surgery means that he won’t be pitching for most, if not all, of the 2022 season. Minnesota’s de facto ace, Dylan Bundy, is a pitcher coming off an ERA north of six; he significant missed time due to shoulder injuries and is taking a pay cut of more than half.

Suffice it to say, Minnesota’s lack of pitching, combined with a rapidly dwindling number of fixes in free agency, left them in a rather unenviable position even in one of baseball’s weakest divisions. Gray isn’t a true ace in the Gerrit Cole/Jacob deGrom vein, but he’s still a well-above-average starting pitcher who gave the Reds three seasons strong enough to largely erase the memory of his stint in New York. His 4.19 ERA and a 3.99 FIP in 2021 were a bit below the previous couple of seasons, but both ZiPS and Statcast’s x-stats think he was unlucky here. zHR is designed to be predictive and saw Gray as allowing three more homers last season than he actually earned from his velocity, angle, and direction data. Subtract those round-trippers out, and Gray’s 2021 looked a lot like his ’19 and ’20, though he did miss time due to injury. A sore back cost him a month of spring training and April games, and he lost another month due to a groin injury. Those maladies combined to limit him to 26 starts, most of the Five-Inning Special variety. Still, I’d take those injuries over a janky elbow or some nasty tear in the shoulder. Read the rest of this entry »