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 »

It was a hectic day on the trade market. First, news broke that the Pirates had traded Tyler Anderson to the Phillies. Shortly after, the Mariners provided extra heat to the stove by sending relievers Kendall Graveman and Rafael Montero to the Astros in exchange for Abraham Toro and Joe Smith. They didn’t stop there, swooping in to nab Anderson and taking advantage of an issue that surfaced with one of the two Phillies prospects originally headed to Pittsburgh.

The number of tweets dwindled as the night rolled in, signaling an end to the frenzy. We would have to wait until tomorrow for more deadline shenanigans, but I suppose a bonus transaction couldn’t hurt, because out of the blue, the Yankees’ Twitter account dropped this bit of news:

The New York Yankees have announced that following Tuesday’s game they traded RHP Luis Cessa and LHP Justin Wilson to the Cincinnati Reds in exchange for a player to be named later.

— New York Yankees (@Yankees) July 28, 2021

A trade announcement at 12:35 AM Eastern Time? Sure, why not. Let’s break this one down.

Read the rest of this entry »

The trade deadline is nearly here and once again, team behavior will be driven, at least in part, by 40-man roster dynamics. Teams with an especially high number of both rostered players under contract for 2022 and prospects who would need to be added to the 40-man in the offseason have what is often called a “40-man crunch,” “spillover,” or “churn,” meaning that the team has incentive to clear their overflow of players by trading for something they can keep — pool space, comp picks, or, more typically, younger players whose 40-man clocks are further from midnight — rather than do nothing, and later lose players to waivers or in the Rule 5 draft. In an effort to see whose depth might augment trade behavior, I enjoy assessing clubs’ 40-man futures every year. This exercise is done by using the RosterResource Depth Chart pages to examine current 40-man occupancy, subtracting pending free agents (on the Team Payroll tab), and then weighing the December 2021 Rule 5 eligible prospects to see who has the biggest crunch coming and might behave differently in the trade market because of it.

Some quick rules about 40-man rosters. Almost none of them contain exactly 40 players in-season because teams can add a player to the 40 to replace a player who’s on the 60-day Injured List. In the offseason, teams don’t get extra spots for injured players and have to get down to 40, so if they want to keep some of the injury fill-ins, they have to cut someone from the 40-man to make room.

In November, clubs have to add prospects to the 40-man to protect them from the Rule 5 draft. RosterResource is the most accessible resource for tracking the prospect timelines. Most teams add a handful of players every offseason, while some add just one, and others may add as many as 10. Read the rest of this entry »

Depending on how one frames Monday’s Yankees and Pirates swap of reliever Clay Holmes for upper-level minor leaguers Hoy Park and Diego Castillo, it can look pretty rough. Holmes, who is out of options, is walking over five per 9 IP and has an ERA just a shade under 5.00 in a middle relief role for one of the worst teams in baseball, while Park and Castillo are annihilating the upper levels of the minors and play valuable defensive positions. But even though my shoot-from-the-hip reaction to this deal was that the Yankees took a bit of a bath because I think Castillo has the most long-term upside of the players exchanged, there are indications that Holmes is better than his superficial stats and really special in a few ways. There are also minor league roster dynamics at play for New York that make parting with these two middle infielders more palatable.

But let’s start with Holmes since he’s the one most likely to play an immediate big league role in the Bronx pressure cooker. He owns the highest groundball rate in baseball at 72.8%. It’s well above Holmes’ career rates, but he’s also experienced a 3 mph uptick in velocity to his fastball, cutter and curveball. For a pitcher generating a league-leading rate of groundballs, his HR/FB rate, a whopping 18.8%, feels unusually high and seems likely to regress to his career mean or below, considering how sinkery his improved, harder fastball is playing. It’s part of why his FIP and xERA are at least a run below his ERA to this point.

Holmes has also had a shift in his pitch deployment, as his cutter/slider has taken precedent over his curve. The combination of repertoire alteration, newfound arm strength, and rust (Holmes barely threw in 2020 due to a foot fracture and a forearm strain) may be contributing to that poor control. Holmes’ walk rates (15% career, 13% this year) are troubling, though he’s slowly improved in that regard every season of his career. The Yankees are walking a tight rope here. Holmes is out of options and he had forearm trouble last year (he’s about a half decade removed from a 2014 Tommy John). He’s a little wild. He’s also superlative in a particular sense and joining a team that has been one of the best at developing pitchers in the last five years. Read the rest of this entry »

For a brief period on Saturday night, it appeared possible that not only would the single-season record for no-hitters fall, but that two pitchers — the Angels’ Patrick Sandoval and the Astros’ Framber Valdéz — would spin no-hitters on the same day for just the third time in history. Neither was successful, but on Sunday, the Yankees’ Domingo Germán put in his own no-hit bid, one that not only fell short but turned into a debacle. While this season’s breakneck pace of no-hitters has slowed down drastically, with just one in June and none in July after six in April and May, the drop in the number of close calls hasn’t been quite as sharp, but even so, the concentration of such games from Saturday and Sunday was notable.

Valdéz had the earlier of the two no-hit bids on Saturday night. The 27-year-old lefty has generally pitched well this season, but in his first four outings of June had struggled with his mechanics and compromised his command, walking 15 in 22.1 innings, and getting tagged for 27 hits and 15 runs (13 earned). Even against a Rangers team that entered having lost 10 straight games, his command woes — which had abated somewhat in his July 18 outing against the White Sox, when he walked just two hitters in 6.1 innings — returned, but this time he was effectively wild, walking six in six innings without allowing a hit or a run; he threw just 53 strikes out of 99 pitches. Despite sandwiching two first-inning walks around a wild pitch, and walking two more in the second, he escaped both jams and kept the Rangers off the board. Only twice did he retire the side in order, but each of the other two walks he issued came with two outs.

Valdéz needed a game-high 23 pitches to get through the sixth, with the final two hitters of the frame — Nate Lowe, who walked, and Curtis Terry, who struck out looking — each battling through eight pitches. For manager Dusty Baker, it was a no-brainer to remove him even given that he hadn’t given up a hit. Via MLB.com’s Brian McTaggert, “If we’d left him out there to get the no-hitter, he’d be up to 140 pitches,” said Baker, who decades ago gained a reputation for pushing his young pitchers too far, one that’s no longer applicable. “You’ve got to think logically what’s best for him.” Read the rest of this entry »

These are notes on prospects from Tess Taruskin. Read previous installments of the Daily Prospect Notes here.

Anderson Espinoza, RHP, San Diego Padres
Level & Affiliate: High-A Fort Wayne Age: 23 Org Rank: 8 FV: 40+
Line: 2.2 IP, 6 H, 1 BB, 1 R, 6 K

Notes
San Diego acquired Espinoza in the Drew Pomeranz trade in 2016, but he was shutdown before the start of the 2017 due to elbow discomfort. That began five years of developmental delays in the form of multiple Tommy John surgeries and the canceled 2020 minor league season. Now the 23-year-old is back on the mound and looking to recapture the stuff that once earned him top prospect status.

His longest outings this season have gone three innings (a mark he’s matched five times), so his 2.2 innings of work is on par with his understandably stringent workload restrictions. The six hits he allowed were all singles and the ones that came in the first and second innings were all weakly hit, though well placed. Espinoza’s outing ended when those softer hits turned into more solid contact in the third, but not before recording a season-high six strikeouts. His pitch count was already pushing 70 by the end of his short outing. On paper that may seem like cause for concern regarding Espinoza’s command and feel to pitch, which he struggled with earlier this year in his sole spring training appearance with the big league club. But that wasn’t the case on Thursday; the only walk he issued was to the first batter of the game, after which only one other hitter saw a three-ball count, and many of the pitches that were called for balls were extremely close and could just as easily have been called for strikes. Read the rest of this entry »

On June 28, baseball media swarmed to the story of Gwen Goldman, a 70-year-old New York Yankees fan who after 60 years was finally granted a wish she’d made as a 10-year-old. In 1961, Goldman wrote to then Yankees general manager Roy Hamey asking for an opportunity to be a Yankees batgirl.

The response she received from Hamey was rife with the kind of sexism one might expect from a missive penned in 1961. “While we agree with you that girls are certainly as capable as boys, and no doubt would make an attractive addition to the playing field, I am sure you can understand that in a game dominated by men a young lady such as yourself would feel out of place in a dugout.”

While it’s hard to overlook that Hamey thought it appropriate to tell a 10-year-old that adding women to baseball would be “an attractive addition,” it’s clear that he was also dismissing any arguments Gwen might have made in favor of her merit in her original appeal, which unfortunately has not been recovered. Baseball, and especially the Yankees, were clearly important enough to Gwen to risk applying for the job, and thankfully her rejection was not enough to dampen her enthusiasm for the game. 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.

Read the rest of this entry »

Aroldis Chapman set off some fireworks at Yankee Stadium on July 4, though Mets fans almost certainly enjoyed them more than Yankees fans. For the seventh time in his last 14 outings, Chapman was scored upon, and for the second outing in a row, he served up a game-tying home run that led to a crushing defeat. The 33-year-old fireballer is in the midst of an ill-timed career-worst stretch, one that has dealt the Yankees’ playoff hopes a significant blow.

In the opener of a Subway Series doubleheader necessitated by Friday night’s rainout, Chapman entered in the seventh inning to protect a 5-4 lead. Under normal circumstances, that would have been a no-brainer move, but the decision raised some eyebrows not only given the closer’s recent struggles but the fact that setup man Chad Green had thrown just two pitches to retire Dominic Smith, the only batter he faced, to end the sixth.

Chapman got ahead of Alonso 1-2 via a three-fastball sequence: a 96.7 mph called strike on the outside edge of the plate, a 98.4 mph ball even further outside, and then a 96.9 mph swinging strike above the zone. When he switched to a slider (a pitch that Alonso has feasted upon this year, slugging .681 when he connects) and hung it in the lower middle of the zone (where Alonso has a .796 xSLG), the slugger crushed it, launching it 406 feet into the visitors’ bullpen:

Read the rest of this entry »

On hiatus since the onset of the COVID pandemic, the Learning and Developing a Pitch series returned last week with three pitchers telling the stories behind their sliders. Today, in the second of this year’s installments, we hear from Jake Brentz, Brooks Kriske, and Hirokazu Sawamura on their changeups and splitters.

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Jake Brentz, Kansas City Royals

“I never had a changeup in the minor leagues. I was fastball slider/breaking ball, but I always mixed around my breaking ball. I didn’t really find a breaking ball that worked for me until probably a year and a half, two years ago — not until I got to Triple-A.

“Paul Gibson is our pitching coordinator here with the Royals, and last year at the alternate site he told me, ‘Hey, I would like you to develop a changeup; I think it would be a very valuable pitch for you.’ So I really focused on developing one, throwing it as many times as I could during an outing. We were just playing each other — nothing really mattered — so it was just developing and whatnot. I’d throw it back to back to back, and messed around with grips. I found one that really worked for me, and then worked on it more over the offseason. In spring training I wasn’t throwing it a lot at first, but Mike [Matheny] came to me said, ‘I think your changeup can be a devastating pitch, so we’re going to throw that a lot.’ Over time, I’ve continuing to throw it. Read the rest of this entry »