We’ll learn more about what the 30 teams have in store for the offseason in the coming days. Not in any great detail (and some subterfuge is inevitable), but with varying degrees of forthcomingness, information will indeed be shared. The GM meetings begin tomorrow, in Scottsdale, with media sessions scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday.

Will your favorite team actively pursue a trade for Mookie Betts? Do they have their eyes trained, and checkbooks already open, on free agents such as Gerrit Cole and Anthony Rendon… or perhaps Andrew Cashner or Jordy Mercer? Answers to those kinds of questions are reliably vague at best, but inquiries of a different ilk often elicit thoughtful responses.

I got a head start on the executive-Q&A front during last month’s NLCS. Eschewing anything roster-related — not the right time and place — I asked St. Louis Cardinals Vice President/General Manager Michael Girsch if he and his front office cohorts had anything cooking behind the scenes. His answer reflected just how much the game continues to evolve.

“We’re kind of reorganizing our baseball development group a little bit,” said Girsch. “The amount of data keeps increasing exponentially. It’s gone from your basic back of a baseball card, 10 or 15 years ago, to TrackMan, to StatCast, and beyond. The infrastructure that worked at one point doesn’t work anymore. When I started, everything was in Excel, on my laptop. That became nonviable pretty quickly, and now we’re moving beyond the servers we have, to other issues.”

Is keeping up more a matter of adding staff, or streamlining the process already in place? Girsch’s response reflected the fact that bigger fish — relative to the here and now — still needed to be fried. Read the rest of this entry »

In the second of a six-part series — you can see the AL East here — I’ll be highlighting each team’s most notable free agents and how it could fill the resulting void on the roster. A player’s rank on our recently released Top 50 Free Agents list, along with Kiley McDaniel’s contract estimates from that exercise, are listed where relevant. In some cases, the team already has a capable replacement ready to step in. In others, it’s clear the team will either attempt to re-sign their player or look to the trade or free agent markets for help. The remaining cases are somewhere in between, with in-house candidates who might be the answer, but aren’t such obvious everyday players to keep the team from shopping around for better options.

Here’s a look at the American League Central.

Chicago White Sox | Depth Chart | Payroll

Jose Abreu, 1B/DH
FanGraphs Top 50 Free Agent Ranking: 44
Kiley McDaniel’s contract projection: 1 year, $11M

Andrew Vaughn, the No. 3 overall pick in the 2019 amateur draft and the White Sox’s first baseman of the future, isn’t likely to need much time down on the farm. But it’s rare that any prospect, even one as advanced at the plate as the 21-year-old Vaughn, doesn’t spend at least one full season in the minors. Therefore, the White Sox will require a stopgap at first base in 2020 and have already taken a necessary step to keeping Abreu around for at least one more season.

The 32-year-old was tendered a qualifying offer, which will hurt his value if he wants to test the free agent waters. He could just settle for the one-year, $17.8 million contract or work out a long-term deal that would ensure he’s around to mentor the next wave of prospects, which could include Vaughn, second baseman Nick Madrigal, and outfielders Luis Robert and Luis Alexander Basabe, all who could arrive during the next two seasons. Read the rest of this entry »

While championship retrospectives are still being read and written, the rest of baseball is gearing up for the offseason. Immediately following the World Series, there’s always a flurry of activity as players come off the 60-day injured list, and teams get their 40-man rosters in order and begin the long process of building for next season. During these initial days of the offseason, the waiver wire is flooded with players who were removed from their team’s roster. With so many players shuffling around, these minor moves can get swept under the rug pretty quickly. After all, it’s unlikely a waiver claim in November will have much of an effect on a team’s fortunes next season. But sometimes the waiver wire holds a piece of true gold amidst all the pyrite.

Last year, the Rays claimed Oliver Drake from the Twins on November 1. It was the fourth time Drake had been claimed off waivers, with the Twins his seventh team in 2018. He was later designated for assignment three times that offseason, claimed by another team, and then traded back to the Rays in early January. That’s not exactly the ideal blueprint for how these waiver wire claims should go, but Drake’s performance during the 2019 season was as good as the Rays could have hoped for (3.87 FIP, 0.5 WAR).

The Twins are hoping to uncover their own piece of treasure in Matt Wisler. Claimed off waivers from the Mariners, Wisler certainly looks the part of roster chaff. A former top prospect, he was included in the first big Craig Kimbrel trade before he could make his debut with his original team, the Padres. He struggled in the Braves rotation for a couple of years before getting moved to the bullpen in 2017, and has bounced around the league the last two seasons, from Atlanta to Cincinnati in 2018, then back to San Diego in 2019, and finally to Seattle. Since making the transition to relief work, he’s posted an ugly 5.89 ERA and a 4.63 FIP across 123.2 innings, accumulating 0.4 WAR in three seasons.

Besides his long-forgotten prospect pedigree, Wisler looks exactly like the kind of depth that gets shuffled around in November before getting buried on the depth chart once the offseason begins in earnest. But digging below the surface reveals the potential for gold. Since 2017, Wisler has increased his strikeout rate at each stop in the majors, from 14.4% with the Braves to 30.5% with the Mariners. His ability to prevent runs hasn’t benefited from all those extra strikeouts, but it gives him an intriguing foundation that could be honed with a little development. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the lowdown on Tyler Rogers: A 6-foot-5 right-hander from Littleton, Colorado, he’s the twin brother of a left-hander closer, he made his MLB debut this past August, and he’s a submariner. Moreover, he kills a lot of worms. The 1.02 ERA that Rogers put up in 17 games out of the San Francisco Giants bullpen was augmented with a 69.4% ground ball rate.

Unlike his traditional-arm-slot sibling, he’s not a power pitcher. Taylor Rogers — fittingly, a Minnesota Twin — features a 95-mph fastball and an 83-mph slider. Tyler features an 82-mph sinker and a 73-mph slider. The latter pitch, which the atypical hurler throws roughly a third of the time, is atypical in itself.

“I call it a slider, but it’s almost a curveball,” Rogers said in September. “I kind of curl it like people do when they throw a curveball overhand. It’s the same thing, I’m just bent over doing it. So yeah, basically it’s just a normal curveball grip that I throw from underneath.”

Rogers began dropping down his freshman year of junior college. He did so at the suggestion of a coach, and from there progressively got lower and lower. The transformation to an actual submarine-style delivery came after the Giants took him in the 10th round of the 2013 draft. Irony being what it is, the genesis of the more-extreme verticality was horizontal in nature. Read the rest of this entry »

Ah, another Yankees-Twins playoff series. A retelling of a familiar tale. A classic first-round matchup simmering with revenge narratives. A chance for the Twins to change the course of — oh.

It’s over already.

While both NLDS series proceeded to white-knuckle Game 5’s, and the Rays forced the Astros to contemplate elimination, over in Minnesota, the Twins were quietly dispatched by the Yankees in exactly the way pretty much everyone feared that they would be.

This was a brutal tradition of the 2000s, in which the little-guy Twins would arrive, fresh from contention, and the Yankees, cementing their legacy as the underdog-kicking playoff behemoths, would squash them with elite talent and the favor of some twisted gods. Yet another Twins postseason defeat is behind us, and we’re left with more questions than answers. These games have historically been comprised of bummers, boners, and brims pulled low. Today is the anniversary of one of them, and we’re going to examine it.

For Twins fans, this story needs no retelling, but unfortunately, we must relate the tragic set dressing: The Twins dropped Game 1 of the 2009 ALDS 7-2, but had singled together a 3-1 lead late in Game 2. Alex Rodriguez shattered the delicate balance with a two-run shot off All-Star Twins closer Joe Nathan to tie it up. The game went into extras, and in the top of the 11th, Joe Mauer led off, and this happened:

On the one hand, this is baseball: It is nothing without its X-factors. Its chaos. Its precious human element. On the other, you can tell this is a conspiracy because of how grainy the footage is, or at least reasonably speculate. Read the rest of this entry »

For a moment, it looked like Will Smith would be the hero. In the bottom of the ninth, sandwiched between the two cataclysmic half-innings that abruptly ended the 106-win Dodgers’ season, they had a brief flicker of hope when with one out and one on, Smith hit a drive off Daniel Hudson that looked as though it might — might — make him the hero, with a walk-off home run that sent the Dodgers to the NLCS. It was hardly implausible given that the 24-year-old rookie had hit two of the Dodgers’ major leauge-leading seven walk-off home runs this year, or that nearly half the drives hit to the specifications of which he struck Hudson’s hanging slider — 100.3 mph, at a 26 degree launch angle — have left the yard over the past five seasons.

It wasn’t to be.

Smith’s drive fell short as, ultimately and in more gruesome fashion, did the Dodgers. There will be plenty of time to dissect the larger situation but for the moment, consider the batted ball, which had a 69% of becoming a hit and a 46.1% chance of going out based on similarly struck spheroids. When it didn’t, it was just the latest in the genre of hold-your-breath moments that wound up producing mutterings that maybe the baseball has been de-juiced this October — that is, that the postseason ball is different from what’s been used in the regular season.

It’s not hard to understand why this notion has taken hold. So far this month, we’ve seen home runs hit at a lower frequency than during a regular season that set all kinds of records for long balls, and scoring rates have fallen as well. In the blur of Division Series games, many a hard-hit ball appeared bound to go out — at least based upon the way our brains have become calibrated to this year’s nearly-numbing frequency — only to die at the warning track. Yet it’s harder to make the case that something is different given a closer look at the numbers, both traditional and Statcast, at least if you’re not Baseball Prospectus’ Rob Arthur, whose model to calculate the drag on the baseball by measuring a pitch’s loss of speed does suggest something is afoot. More on his latest findings below, after I present my own analysis. Read the rest of this entry »

The 16-straight postseason losses is a story hard to ignore. So is the fact that 13 of those defeats — Monday night’s ALDS ousting being the latest in that inglorious stretch — have come at the hands of the Bronx Bombers. October has indeed been a cruel month for the Minnesota Twins.

Remember Prince singing, “Two thousand zero zero, party over”? Since the dawning of the 21st century, Kirby Puckett’s old club has been a playoff piñata.

That’s not going to be the primary focus here. Words will be spilled on the just-completed series — mostly from the mouths of the participants — but let’s not forget that the future is what matters most (not just for the Twins, but for all of us.) As Henry Ford once said, “History is more or less bunk… the only history that is worth a tinker’s dam is the history we make today.”

Back in 2004, with the Red Sox on the brink of elimination in the ALCS, Kevin Millar defiantly told the Yankees: “Don’t let us win today.” With the Twins facing their own lose-one-and-you’re-done scenario, I mentioned Millar’s proclamation to Trevor May in Sunday’s workout day press conference.

”Don’t give us an inch, because we’ll take a mile,” May responded. “That’s been something — when doors have been opened for us all year, we’ve exploded through them. That’s what we’re looking to do.”

That’s not what happened, of course. Monday’s 5-1 loss put Minnesota’s 2019 season in the history books, and what comes next is some meaningful tinkering. Without it, an implosion looms as a possibility. Read the rest of this entry »

Minnesota Loses 5-1 to New York

Sports fans tend to have an inferiority complex. You can see it in the lexicon: East Coast bias, curses of billy goats and Bambinos, jinxes, stadiums where we just never win, bad umpires, scheduling conspiracies, unfair rules, pithy charges of Southern Exceptionalism. The NFL now reviews plays for pass interference, mostly because a bunch of Louisianans rioted after a bad call in a big moment. Speaking of replay, I’d wager that we’ll be stuck with the tedious and disruptive system we’ve got now for a good long while: Not because it’s necessarily the best way to do things, but because such a setup seems like the most effective bulwark against those stinkin’ umps who just have it out for (insert team here).

These inferiority complexes are silly, of course. They are the whiny and simplistic dimension of the fanhood experiences that nobody else cares to hear about, alongside stories about your fantasy team and the time you got a great deal on tickets at the last minute. It reflects poorly on just about everyone.

I’ll grant a temporary exception for fans of the Minnesota Twins.

It has now been 15 years and three days since the Twins won a playoff game. That evening, Johan Santana started at the Stadium. Minnesota wore gray pinstripes and hats with an ‘M’ above the brim. Jacque Jones hit a two-run homer to account for the only scoring. Hall of Famers Mike Mussina and Mariano Rivera pitched for the Yanks; John Olerud played first base. Somehow, MLB managed to run a playoff game in less than three hours. It was a different time.

By this point, it seems callous to run the numbers again, so we’ll be quick. The Twins have lost 16 playoff games in a row. That’s five divisional exits, four at the hands of the Yankees, with a Wild Card game defeat to the Bombers mixed in for good measure. There’s nothing magical or predictive about this little run. There isn’t any thread between the Corey Koskie–Torii Hunter Twins and the ballclub that lost last night; they don’t even share a home stadium.

The Twins have usually been underdogs in these games, though only slightly so. The Orioles were far bigger long shots in every matchup they had against New York this year and last, and even that feeble and overmatched club managed to win a quarter of those games. For Minnesota, the streak is undoubtedly frustrating. It’s a narrative that has fed on itself for at least a decade now. It sucks and it’s a shocking confluence of events, but that’s all there really is to say about it from an analytical perspective. Read the rest of this entry »

Bryan Reynolds was a pleasant surprise in a Pittsburgh Pirates season that was anything but. While the frustratingly-frugal team he plays for plodded to a last-place finish in the NL Central, the 24-year-old outfielder put up a .314/.377/.503 slash line. Displaying better-than-expected pop, he stroked 37 doubles and went deep 16 times.

Clint Hurdle wasn’t expecting that kind of production from the switch-hitting rookie when the Pirates broke camp in Bradenton. The since-ousted manager admitted as much when I asked him about Reynolds in the waning days of the season.

“I don’t think I had on the radar that Bryan Reynolds would be hitting .314 on September 25th,” Hurdle said. “From what I’d heard from our scouts, and what I’d seen in the spring, I thought we had a good young player… and it would be interesting to see how he developed. [But] I didn’t have any expectations.”

Nor did a lot of people, although he didn’t exactly came out of nowhere. Reynolds was a second-round pick out of Vanderbilt in 2016, and he came to Pittsburgh from San Francisco as part of the Andrew McCutchen trade. He ranked ninth on our Pirates Top Prospects list coming into this season, with the following commenting his bio standing out: “We keep waiting for Reynolds’ BABIP to regress (it hasn’t).”

Those same words could be written today. His impeccable bat-to-ball skills were no less impressive at the highest level, as Reynolds logged a .387 BABiP in 546 plate appearances against big-league pitching. The approach he brought with him from college played a big role in his success. Read the rest of this entry »

NEW YORK — Thus far in the Division Series, a Yankees lineup whose relentless efforts to control the strike zone yielded an American League-high 5.82 runs per game despyte myriad injuries is treating the Twins with a familiar ferocity that has become their signature. On Saturday evening, for the second night in a row, two teams that looked quite evenly matched on paper and pixel, and far disconnected from a history that produced four Division Series pummelings by the Yankees from 2003-10, yielded a lopsided result. Grinding out at-bat after at-bat with their signature plate discipline, the Yankees staked themselves to an early lead against starter Randy Dobnak, then pounced when the 24-year-old rookie got into a jam. Didi Gregorius‘ grand slam off reliever Tyler Duffey was the coup de grâce in a seven-run third inning that backed yet another impressive postseason start from Masahiro Tanaka and carried the Yankees to an 8-2 victory. They’ve pushed the 101-win Twins to the brink of elimination as the series heads to Minnesota and have now won 15 of 17 postseason over the Twins dating back to 2003, including a major league record 12 straight. The Twins have lost a record 15 consecutive postseason games overall.

Of the Yankees’ first 21 batters, 14 reached base, via 10 hits, three walks and one hit-by pitch. Amid that parade, every member of the lineup save for Giancarlo Stanton reached at least once, and Stanton, for his part, delivered a sacrifice fly. For the night, the Yankees collected 11 hits and eight walks — against a team whose walk rate was an AL-low 7.2% — while striking out just six times.

“Up and down the lineup, guys are hungry,” said Aaron Judge, who while batting second walked and had two singles within that early span, and later added another walk.

“I absolutely do think it’s contagious,” said manager Aaron Boone regarding his team’s plate discipline before the game. “It’s something we preach ad nauseam… I do think those guys take that to heart and really, as a group, have some faith and trust in each other and take some pride in knowing that, when they do that as a group, it benefits all of them because it wears people down. It nets more mistakes over time, and more often than not, when we do that, we’ve been able to kind of break through at some point.” Read the rest of this entry »