The White Sox and Cubs swung a trade on Thursday, with the South Siders acquiring righty reliever Ryan Tepera from their crosstown counterparts. In exchange, the Cubs received left-handed relief prospect Bailey Horn.

The move is a comparatively small one for both teams, with the White Sox adding ever-so-desired relief depth, while the Cubs focus on trading their more important pieces; Anthony Rizzo is on his way to the Yankees, and possible deals for Kris Bryant and Craig Kimbrel still loom. But, as a seller, it never hurts to get some of the smaller trades out of the way, and a solid reliever on an expiring contract fits the bill.

Tepera, 33, might best be known to fans outside of Chicago for his errant 18th-place finish on the 2020 NL MVP ballot, but he is having a pretty successful season. He has a career-best 2.79 FIP thanks to a strikeout rate that’s above 30% for just the second time in his career (2020 was the first) and a 7% walk rate. That 23.0% strikeout-minus-walk rate doesn’t put him at the top of the reliever leaderboards, but ranking 29th out of the 163 qualifiers is nothing to sniff at, either. He’s riding a 2.91 ERA and while his FIP would suggest that is more or less sustainable, we could raise his .196 BABIP allowed and 7.7% HR/FB rate as a slight concern. But other ERA estimators think Tepera’s propensity to avoid hard contract is legit. Just look at his sterling expected statistics from Statcast:

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The White Sox have been in need of a stopgap at second base ever since Nick Madrigal tore tendons in his right hamstring and required season-ending surgery in mid-June. Since then, they’ve frequently been connected to trade candidates such as Adam Frazier and Eduardo Escobar, but with both of those players dealt within the past week and the team getting nowhere in its pursuit of Trevor Story, they had to turn elsewhere to fill the spot, though they didn’t have to go far. On Thursday they acquired Cesar Hernandez from division rival Cleveland.

In exchange for Hernandez, Cleveland will receive Konnor Pilkington, a 23-year-old lefty who was the team’s third-round pick out of Mississippi State in 2018, and who had been pitching for Chicago’s Double-A Birmingham affiliate. This is just the fourth trade between the two teams have since the formation of the AL Central in 1994. In the most recent one in December 2018, Cleveland traded Yonder Alonso to Chicago for minor league outfielder Alex Call.

The 31-year-old Hernandez was in his second season with Cleveland after a seven-year run in Philadelphia, which non-tendered him following a mediocre 2019 season. After an excellent 2020 campaign (.283/.355/.408, 110 wRC+, 1.9 WAR) during which he made the prorated share of $6.25 million plus incentives, he took a pay cut, signing a $5 million, one-year deal with a $6 million club option and no buyout for 2022. Read the rest of this entry »

The trade deadline is upon us, but as I was thinking about the deals that could get done between now and Friday, I kept looking at the Baseball Prospectus Injury Ledger, since quite a few contenders have some very good players waiting in the wings. So today I wanted to take a look at the most impactful players who are currently on, or just off, the injured list for AL contenders as the trade deadline looms; I’ll follow it up with a look at NL contenders later this week.

There are players on these lists who could make or break their teams’ ability to make it to the postseason, and there are players who may not make it off the IL in time to help, which leads me to some important caveats. First, injuries are not all created equal, and players have setbacks all the time. These are projections that can and will shift.

Second, I don’t have a crystal ball; I used our playoff projections and only included teams that had at least a 30% chance of making the playoffs. That means the Blue Jays, who were in the first draft of this piece, ultimately just missed; our odds currently have them at 27.5% chance to make the playoffs. For any Blue Jays fans who are annoyed by this, I get it. That said, they were both borderline in terms of playoff odds and in terms of the most impactful players returning; only Danny Jansen and Alek Manoah would have pinged on this list.

Finally, having a 30% shot at the playoffs doesn’t mean you have players sitting on the IL who can push you over the top. Chad Pinder isn’t going to be the hero of Oakland’s season, which is no shade to either. But if the A’s are going to compete in the second half, they probably need to focus on the trade market, like they did Monday night in adding Andrew Chafin to their bullpen. Read the rest of this entry »

Please note, this posting contains two positions.

Position: Baseball Operations Analyst

Location: Chicago, IL

Description:
The Chicago White Sox seek a passionate, knowledgeable, and dedicated individual with a desire to work in Baseball Operations. The position will focus primarily on the numerical methods that drive Baseball Analytics, however there will be additional exposure to all facets of baseball operations. This position will report to the Director of Baseball Analytics. Read the rest of this entry »

What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think about Aaron Bummer? It’s an odd question I know. For many, the answer might not be a whole lot besides the fact that he has an amusing name. He is a reliever, after all; given his role, he’s not the most recognizable player. For the initiated, however, the first quality that comes to mind at the mere mention of Bummer is likely his supreme ability to generate groundballs. Bummer’s has been in the majors since 2017; in five seasons, he has posted groundball rates of 54.4%, 61.2%, 72.1%, 68.4% (I will note he only threw 9.1 innings in 2020), and 73.7%. Over that time frame, he ranks fourth in groundball rate among all pitchers who have tossed at least 50 innings.

The leading culprit behind his prolific groundball rates is his sinker. Sinkers have sharp downward movement that fade away from a pitcher’s glove-side. The downward movement, coupled with the pitch generally being lower in the zone, prevents hitters from squaring up the ball, instead impacting the upper-half, driving the ball into the dirt. This season, the average groundball rate for a sinker sits at 56.4% compared to 41.7% for all other pitch types. And Bummer has a great sinker, one that inspired a post from Devan Fink on these very pages last February. Devan demonstrated with a tidy model that Bummer’s sinker is an elite blend of velocity and arm-side and vertical movement, the perfect recipe for inducing piles of groundballs from the opposition. And Bummer’s sinker has remained excellent; in 2021, the pitch has a laughable 82.4% groundball rate. The pitch is so effective that it inspired its own profile from The Athletic’s James Fegan, which included an amusing story of Bummer picking up the pitch after watching Zack Britton pitch while the former dined at an Applebee’s.

Overall, Bummer has been an excellent reliever throughout his major league career. The White Sox signed him to a five-year contract prior to the 2020 season, with two club options tacked on to the end that can keep him on the South Side until 2026. Given the volatility of relievers, that’s quite the endorsement of Bummer’s skills and I find it difficult to fault Chicago for doing so. He has a career 3.23 ERA, a figure 26% better than league average when you consider the difficult confines of his home park. The park-adjusted FIP is just as impressive, sitting at 23% better than league average over 161.2 career innings. Read the rest of this entry »

A surprisingly deep group of free-agent pitchers this winter became a little less so over the weekend, as Lance Lynn agreed to a two-year extension with the White Sox. The deal guarantees at least $38 million for the veteran hurler through the 2023 season and will pay him $18.5 million in each of ’22 and ’23, with the Sox holding an option for ’24 worth $18 million and a $1 million buyout.

If you happened to surf over to our in-house depth charts, you would find the White Sox only looking up at the Mets when it comes to pitching, and given that six of the 10 Mets listed are currently out with injuries, I’d prefer to have Chicago’s starting five if I’m the benevolent dictator of a contending team. The rotation is currently projected to finish with 19.3 WAR, topping the majors and enough to give the Sox one of the top 20 rotations since we survived the Y2K bug. That’s an impressive accomplishment considering that they’re currently projected to finish right around 900 innings, about a hundred short of the rest of that top 20. And as there are good reasons to think the contending years are just starting, Chicago has an obvious interest in keeping such a high-performing group together for years to come; Carlos Rodón is now the team’s only significant free agent this offseason.

It’s been an impressive reversal of fortune for Lynn, who didn’t attract a ton of interest in his first two go-arounds in free agency. After posting a 4.82 FIP in 2017 upon returning from Tommy John surgery, he only fetched a one-year contract with the Twins, but despite seeing his walks and ERA balloon to career-worsts in ’18, he closed a three-year pact with the Rangers, albeit with a pay cut. Ranking fifth in the AL in pitching WAR this season and only 1 2/3 innings shy of qualifying for the AL ERA title, he looks like a good bet to pick up Cy Young votes for his third consecutive season.

Could Lynn have made more in free agency? It’s a more complicated question than you think. It’s also one that he had little interest in testing.

“When you start getting older in this game, you realize that where you want to play and where you want to be and what kind of organization you want to be a part of weighs a lot,” he said Saturday. “Over the first half of the season, just being able to see how everybody goes about their business here, the group that’s here and the group that’s going to be here for the next couple of years, it seemed like a pretty easy fit.

It’s not surprising to see Lynn go for stability over uncertainty. By all accounts, Chicago has been a terrific fit for him, and he’s become a favorite of the fanbase. The White Sox would have been quite content to start Dane Dunning; last December’s swap was about them wanting Lynn rather than not wanting Dunning.

The ZiPS projections liked Lynn to have a gentle decline through his 30s, but not one that was likely to merit a gigantic payday. The aging curve for pitchers tends to be more attrition-based than for hitters, but a long-term deal for Lynn would start to get him into his late 30s, where you do start seeing a significant dropoff in skills along with the playing time. ZiPS would have given him a longer-term deal — four years, $84 million — but the $45.5 million projection for the next two years is not a galaxy apart from his $38 million guarantee.

Recent free-agent classes have been relatively shallow when it comes to pitching talent, but this autumn’s harvest looks far more bountiful. ZiPS projects eight pending free-agent pitchers —  Max Scherzer, Clayton Kershaw, Justin Verlander, Kevin Gausman, Zack Greinke, Eduardo Rodriguez, Robbie Ray, and Marcus Stroman — to be worth at least three wins in the first years of their new deals, more than the seven it did for the previous two offseasons combined. There are some big names in that group, including several veterans also looking for two-or-three year deals. That also doesn’t include Noah Syndergaard, a pitcher who retains dizzying upside, and some interesting injury gambles in Corey Kluber and James Paxton. Given some of the name brand stars available, there was at least some risk Lynn ended up once again being a team’s consolation signing.

The league’s finances have to be considered as well. While the bottom line is certainly better than the Dickensian pauper status the owners usually suggest, it’s not at all clear that there are going to be a lot of teams hungry to spend this go-around. The vast majority of teams now appear to consider baseball’s de facto soft salary cap as if it were a harder one. On top of that, the collective bargaining agreement between MLB and the MLBPA expires on December 1, and unless the negotiations go shockingly smoothly, those talks will cast a shadow over baseball that’s likely to discourage teams from spending.

Whether or not he left money on the table, Lynn got a reasonable offer to stay on the team he wants to play for. The White Sox can now turn to the short-term need of picking up another bat and/or a second baseman for the season’s concluding chapters.

In 2017, my friend Marty and I made a bet. A lot of hot young prospects were making their way to the show and Marty is a big Red Sox fan. He was convinced that Andrew Benintendi was the next big thing, while I was adamant that honor belonged to a rookie the Red Sox had traded to the White Sox who hadn’t really gotten quite as good of a look yet: Yoán Moncada. The terms of the bet were simple. I had Moncada, he had Benintendi, and the best player would be determined by whichever player put up the most WAR (FanGraphs WAR, of course) over the next three seasons. The loser owed the winner dinner at the restaurant of their choice. Benintendi’s 5.9 WAR from 2018-20 is nothing to sneeze out, but Moncada’s 9.2 takes the cake. Which reminds me, Marty still owes me dinner.

If Marty had asked me to bet on who would win the AL Central this year, I would have put my dinner money on the White Sox. Chicago’s American League team is running away with a weak division, but they aren’t doing it the way I would have predicted. The big story on the South Side of Chicago is the injuries they’ve weathered on their way to a 54-35 record. Hitting phenom Eloy Jiménez tore a pectoral muscle trying to rob a home run in spring training, and hasn’t seen a major league pitch in 2021, though he hit a home run in the first at-bat of his rehab assignment before moving to Triple-A on Tuesday. Luis Robert played all of 25 games before he tore a hip flexor. Contact stalwart Nick Madrigal had season-ending surgery after a severe hamstring tear a month ago. As the clock ticked towards the Midsummer Classic, catcher Yasmani Grandal (who was having quite a strange season at the plate) had surgery on a torn tendon in his knee. Fortunately, that injury is not expected to be season-ending. Read the rest of this entry »

The White Sox have spent the past two months atop the American League Central despite a lineup that’s been nothing close to whole. On a more or less monthly basis, the team has lost a key member of its starting lineup to the Injured List, beginning with left fielder Eloy Jiménez, who ruptured his left pectoral tendon just before Opening Day, and followed by center fielder Luis Robert, who strained his right hip flexor in early May, and then second baseman Nick Madrigal, who tore a pair of hamstring tendons in early June. Now they’ll be without Yasmani Grandal for at least the next four to six weeks, as the switch-hitting catcher tore a tendon in his left knee.

Grandal was already banged up, having departed last Friday’s game in the middle of the fifth inning due to tightness in his left calf. He didn’t play again until Monday. While batting in the sixth inning against the Twins’ Caleb Thielbar, his left knee buckled as he checked his swing on a high 0-2 fastball. He hobbled out of the batter’s box and was soon rolling on the grass in apparent agony, pounding his fists on the ground before being tended to by the White Sox’s head athletic trainer, James Kruk. Initial hopes that he had merely suffered a cramp were doused by manager Tony LaRussa, who in his postgame comments said that Grandal was on crutches in the clubhouse.

The White Sox called the injury a calf strain at the time, but on Tuesday, Grandal was diagnosed with a torn tendon. “I just think it was the twist he made as he made his swing,” La Russa told reporters. “Something got caught. It didn’t free up. You make a turn on it and it got caught and something popped.” The manager said that Grandal would return to Chicago to get a more complete diagnosis. [Update: Shortly after this was published, the White Sox announced that Grandal underwent surgery to repair the torn tendon, and that they will provide an updated timeline, though doctors “continue to expect Grandal to return during the 2021 regular season.”] Read the rest of this entry »

MLB passed the halfway mark of the 2021 season over the long holiday weekend, providing a convenient spot to take a break, look back over the preseason projections, and hopefully not cringe too much about how the predictions are shaking out. Since this is the big midseason update, I used the full-fat ZiPS model for individual players in addition to the normal depth chart reconfiguring, with all the high-fructose algorithms rather than the leaner one used for daily updates.

Let’s start with the American League standings.

I was making a “do not panic” argument on behalf of the Yankees back when they were 5–10 and some people were digging for their doomsday preparedness kits, and while it might not be time to find where you left those water purification tablets, the situation is bleaker now than it was three months ago. Not that the team is actually worse; New York has been on an 88-win pace in the games since that reference point. But an 88-win pace isn’t nearly enough to get out of an early-season hole in a division where there are three other teams with more than detectable pulses. Even projected to play solid baseball the rest of the season, the Yankees have gone from the favorite to the projected fourth-place team.

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These are notes on prospects from Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

There were lots of notable performances in the minors last night, so I covered more players than usual and shortened up some of the notes. Additionally, the 2021 Futures Game rosters were announced today and they are freaking loaded. You can see the entire rosters and access players’ scouting reports on The Board’s seasonal tab. Thanks to Sean Dolinar for his speedy help in getting that up.

A.J. Puk, LHP, Oakland Athletics
Level & Affiliate: Triple-A Las Vegas Age: 26 Org Rank: 2 FV: 50
Line: 2 IP, 1 H, 0 BB, 0 R, 4 K

Notes
Puk has now had two consecutive scoreless outings after he surrendered multiple runs in each of his previous six (!). When I saw him during the spring, his velo was only in the low-90s, well below the 96-99 range a fully healthy Puk would typically be operating in. Per Synergy, that velocity has returned to peak levels during the regular season. Today I noticed a change in Puk’s arm slot. This change occurred earlier this month. I don’t know if that velo rebound occurred in concert with this change, or if this is something Puk was instructed to do, or if it just began happening naturally. Regardless, this is still a lefty with big velo and a deep coffer of impact secondaries. If he can get right at some point this season, he can be an impact relief weapon for a team fighting for its division, and I still like Puk as a multi-inning reliever long-term. Read the rest of this entry »