The weakest free agent class in recent memory just got weaker again, as Francisco Cervelli has now joined Stephen Strasburg in taking a mid-season extension rather than testing the open market this winter.

Sources: Francisco Cervelli has signed a three-year contract extension with the Pirates. Total money is $31 million.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) May 17, 2016

As Passan notes in another tweet, Cervelli’s rise to a $31 million guaranteed contract has been pretty remarkable, given that he was suspended as part of the BioGenesis scandal in 2013, then spent most of 2014 on the disabled list. When the Pirates picked Cervelli up as Russell Martin’s low-cost replacement, he was a 29 year old without any real big league track record of success and a tainted reputation.

18 months later, Cervelli has established himself as one of the better catchers in baseball. Since the start of the 2015 season, he ranks behind only Buster Posey in catcher’s WAR, which actually undersells his value, considering that Cervelli also rates as one of the game’s best pitch framers. For last year, StatCorner graded him out as 27 runs better than average; Baseball Prospectus had him at +19.

Cervelli is an elite defender who also hits pretty decently, making him a very valuable contributor to a contending club. Selling $31 million for three free agent years is certainly light for what he brings to the field; this is the same price Denard Span got last winter, coming off an injury-shortened season, and only a little more than Gerardo Parra got. Cervelli is clearly more valuable than those two, so relative to his true value, this is a steal for the Pirates.

But there is some logic in Cervelli taking the deal now as well. The Pirates almost certainly would have made him a qualifying offer this winter — if that still exists, anyway — and that could have potentially limited his market if he was tied to draft pick compensation. He’s also a 30 year old catcher who has a long history of health problems, and given that teams are shying away from paying big money to aging players, Cervelli probably wasn’t going to cash in on a monster contract this winter, especially because a lot of his value comes from pitch framing, which the market has shown no willingness to pay for.

If he got to free agency and rejected the qualifying offer, maybe he could get four years and $50 million, arguing that he’s similar enough in overall value to Ben Zobrist that he should get near that deal despite the fact that 30+ catchers age very poorly. But there’s risk in that plan, as Cervelli could easily get hurt or see his production tumble over the rest of the season; he’s not exactly a sure thing, and it is worth noting his offensive production is BABIP-heavy.

So Cervelli probably left some money on the table with this deal, but he also sold some real risk that he was carrying, gets a solid guarantee from a contending club that he’s comfortable with, and doesn’t have to worry about where he’s going to spend the rest of his productive days. This isn’t a max-out-the-dollars contract, and the Pirates should be thrilled with the production they’ll get for the price, but there are enough reasons to see why he did this that it seems like a nice deal for both sides.

The Atlanta Braves are 9-28, the worst record in baseball through the first quarter of the season. So, today, they did what teams with the worst record in baseball do: they scapegoated the manager.

The #Braves have fired manager Fredi Gonzalez.

— David O'Brien (@DOBrienAJC) May 17, 2016

Because I don’t think we have a lot of insight into who is a good or bad manager, I don’t really think we know whether Gonzalez was part of the problem or part of the solution in Atlanta. Clearly, this team was not going to be any good this year, and Gonzalez’s job was to try and make chicken salad out of, well, you know. The team’s offense has been a complete and utter disaster, however, with imported veterans like Erick Aybar (.185 wOBA), A.J. Pierzynski (.238 wOBA), Jeff Francoeur (.250 wOBA), and Kelly Johnson (.295 wOBA) failing to provide any value in their stop-gap roles, and the kids who have been promoted haven’t shown that they’re ready for prime time. Gonzalez’s nightly line-up was Freddie Freeman and the seven dwarves, plus whatever lousy starting pitcher he had to roll out there that night.

Certainly, a lot of guys on the team are underachieving, and this is how baseball works; when the team performs poorly, the manager gets the axe. And it seems likely that the team was going to change managers at some point, as most managers don’t survive the transition from trying-to-win through rebuilding to make it back to the trying-to-win-again phase. Gonzalez knew this was the job he was being tasked with, and he had to know that it was probably going to lead to his dismissal if things got ugly. And they have.

But it’s also difficult to see that anyone else could have done significantly better with this team. The Braves assembled a collection of replacement level old guys to try and hold down the fort while their prospects developed; the old guys appear to have declined faster than they expected. This is the price the team is paying for focusing on future value. Things will get better in Atlanta when guys like Dansby Swanson start arriving, but for now, Gonzalez was tasked with trying to coax wins out of a terrible roster. He didn’t, so now someone else will try, and thanks to the power of regression to the mean, the team will look like it improved under the new guy.

Gonzalez couldn’t win with a team that isn’t good enough to win, so now the team will try someone else. It’s how baseball works, even if it isn’t really the managers fault that his team gave him a lousy roster.

Guess what! Here’s another place where the Cubs have been really super good. Ground balls — you’re familiar with them. When you’re the team pitching, you want those ground balls to get scooped up and turned into outs. From the Baseball-Reference Play Index, here are the best teams this year against grounders, as measured by slugging percentage allowed:

Twins in last. Cubs in first! Cubs in first by a decent amount. Now, we can track this historically. Here are the league-average marks since 1988:

Something truly bizarre happened between 2000 – 2002. That’s some bad data recording. Or at least, some inconsistent data recording. Those are the three crazy years, but just to be safe, let’s ignore the years before, too, and just focus on what’s happened since 2003. Since 2003, here are the top 10 lowest slugging percentages allowed on grounders:

SLG Allowed, Grounders, 2003 – 2016

Team	Year	SLG
Cubs	2016	0.202
A’s	2005	0.213
Cardinals	2004	0.213
Red Sox	2016	0.215
A’s	2010	0.221
Blue Jays	2008	0.222
Cardinals	2016	0.222
Astros	2006	0.222
A’s	2014	0.223
Mariners	2016	0.223

SOURCE: Baseball-Reference

2016 seasons very obviously incomplete.

Long way to go here — nothing is set in stone. The Cubs’ number will bounce around, and it isn’t quite fair to compare a partial season to a bunch of complete seasons, but this at least tells you about the Cubs’ pace. The Cubs are on pace to be phenomenally good against ground balls, as their lead above is one by 11 points over the 2005 A’s. That there are four teams in there from this season provides that necessary reminder that it’s too soon to go nuts, but, hey, all right, nice job Chicago.

StatCorner provides some related information. There, the Cubs have been 17 runs better than average on grounders. That ranks them No. 1, narrowly ahead of the Indians, and well ahead of the third-place Rockies. The Braves are at -15 runs because everything about the Braves has been terrible. This isn’t about the Braves, though. This is about the Cubs, and about another area where they’ve been an excellent baseball team. They can’t stay this good everywhere. But boy are they ever good.

Teams were waiting for months, literally months, to see what Tim Lincecum would look like on the other side of his hip surgery. He finally held his showcase, before scouts representing most of the organizations in the game, and, here, let’s put you in their shoes. It’s Tim Lincecum pitching!

All right, that is most definitely Tim Lincecum, and he is most definitely pitching. Is he pitching like a major-league-caliber starter? A major-league-caliber reliever? How many millions of dollars do you give him? Lincecum threw a few dozen pitches, looking like this. Based on that experience, teams had to get negotiating.

Lincecum was certain to sign somewhere. It always felt like he was most likely to sign somewhere out west, even with the Giants not super open to letting him start. Now we’ve just about got a resolution, and it’s the obvious one. Jon Heyman reported Lincecum was leaning toward the Angels, and Ken Rosenthal had some confirmation. This still isn’t finalized, but it’s almost there. I don’t know about the money, but it doesn’t really matter, because it’s not any of our money, and because we can guess that Lincecum is signing for a low base with some incentives. The Angels would’ve had to offer enough to stand out, but their location works to their benefit.

The Angels are obvious because they’re out west, because their rotation sucks, and because they’re somewhere around the fringes of the race. They just managed to sweep the Mariners in Seattle, which was very impressive of them, but their record is not good, and they could use the shot in the arm. The most interesting starter on the Angels is out for a year. The second-most interesting starter on the Angels is healthy and active, but he’s interesting because his velocity has fallen off of a cliff. Andrew Heaney might be done for the year. Tyler Skaggs has had some bumps in his recovery from Tommy John. C.J. Wilson is testing out a new arm slot. Jhoulys Chacin just got picked up from a horrible team for nothing and added to the rotation. Matt Shoemaker has an ERA of literally 9.12. Hector Santiago is useful, and Nick Tropeano is also looking useful, but, I mean, read this paragraph again if you have to. What do the Angels have to lose? How bad could Lincecum possibly be? And, people know him. They like him, and they’re intrigued by him. He generates buzz. That much is undeniable.

Lincecum, for what it’s worth, isn’t game-ready yet. Not for the majors — he’ll go to the minors for some kind of stretch, looking to settle in. No one could actually know how well he’s going to do, but Lincecum has always hung on to one thing. Even as his stuff declined, Lincecum kept on generating swings and misses.

The question now is how much stuff he has. Reports from the showcase had Lincecum topping out around 92, and in 2010, he was effective with a fastball that averaged 91.3. Talk from last fall suggested that Lincecum’s hip surgery could be restorative, and that’s why there’s the perception of upside. If he has some power back, that’s helpful. And even more important, if Lincecum doesn’t hurt anymore, he could achieve improved mechanical consistency, which is at the heart of everything. Better consistency = better location = better results. Every single time a player comes back from injury, you can see reason to hope, and this situation is no different. It’s easy to believe. Everyone wants to believe in a comeback.

The Angels, though, aren’t expecting Lincecum to be in Cy Young form. That would be silly of them to expect, and that would be silly for Lincecum to expect. Truth be told, I don’t know if the Angels are expecting anything. It’s just, their situation was this: The team isn’t good, and it’s been beset by injury. There was some money available, and Lincecum provides potential value, at minimal cost. If he doesn’t work out, well, Matt Shoemaker hasn’t been working out, and Lincecum is more interesting than he is. If he does work out, hey, that’s super, maybe something could happen here. This has been the most obvious potential match since the Garrett Richards news broke. Don’t listen to those people out there; sometimes you can predict baseball.

The slowest changeup thrown by an Angels pitcher does not belong to Jered Weaver, he of the 82-mph fastball. No, it belongs to right-handed reliever Mike Morin, whose fastball has touched 95 this year. And for that reason, I hereby declare Mike Morin’s changeup to be The Silliest Changeup in Baseball.

I’ve been wanting to write about this for a while, but despite solid peripherals, Morin struggled to prevent runs last year, and so all he had was this silly, silly changeup. As things stand now, though, he’s got a 1.84 ERA and a 3.10 FIP, and the changeup is still preposterous, so I figure this is my chance.

The changeup is silly for mostly this one reason:
Read the rest of this entry »

It requires but a single digit to understand how good Wade Davis has been over the last couple years. Scan the ERA column for this year or last, and the first thing with which you’re greeted is the number zero. You can stop right there. After the zero, the other digits don’t matter. For all intents and purposes, an ERA of 0.34 is the same thing as an ERA of 0.76 is the same thing as an ERA of 0.93. Whatever the number, as long as it starts with a zero, it signifies that the pitcher in question is allowing fewer than one run per nine innings, and it doesn’t get any better than that.

Sometimes, with metrics like Fielding Independent Pitching, it doesn’t even take a digit. It just takes a symbol, and you can stop reading. Like with Hector Rondon, all you have to see is the minus sign. Hector Rondon’s FIP this season is -0.15. That’s negative zero point one five. Rondon has broken the run estimator that is Fielding Independent Pitching.

Of course, even though it feels like we’ve been saying it for a while, it’s still early. And not only is it early, but Rondon is a reliever, and so the sample is even smaller. He’s thrown 13 innings. This means very little! But it is fun! And if the Chicago Cubs had one area that might’ve been viewed as a potential future weakness before the season began, it might’ve been the back end of the bullpen. Rondon, Pedro Strop and Justin Grimm have been great in recent years, but they didn’t have a Kenley Jansen or Craig Kimbrel-type name back there.

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Max Scherzer just threw a complete game in a victory over the Detroit Tigers. That’s not the important part. The important part is that the outs went like this:

1. Foul out
2. Strikeout
3. Strikeout
4. Strikeout
5. Strikeout
6. Strikeout
7. Strikeout
8. Strikeout
9. Strikeout
10. Strikeout
11. Ground out
12. Foul out
13. Strikeout
14. Strikeout
15. Fly out
16. Ground out
17. Strikeout
18. Strikeout
19. Fly out
20. Strikeout
21. Strikeout
22. Strikeout
23. Strikeout
24. Strikeout
25. Strikeout
26. Strikeout
27. Fielder’s choice

Sorry, I just had to see them all laid out like that.

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The Angels season has been wrecked by injuries, most notably the season-ending injury to Garrett Richards, leaving them with a big hole in their rotation. And with no pitching depth in the minors, the team has been scrambling to fill the hole. Today, apparently, they found an outside option.

#Braves are finalizing a trade of RHP Jhoulys Chacin to #Angels. He had been scheduled to start tonight for ATL.

— David O'Brien (@DOBrienAJC) May 11, 2016

Jhoulys Chacin has strung together five encouraging starts from an xFIP perspective, cutting his walks and upping his strikeouts while still getting his regular share of ground balls. His ERA is ugly, but that’s mostly due to a high BABIP and low strand rate, things that haven’t been a problem for Chacin throughout his career; his career 3.82 ERA is 23 points better than his 4.05 FIP/xFIP. So there’s no real reason to think Chacin’s got a new found contact problem, and if any of his strike zone improvement is real, he could be a decent back-end starter again.

Of course, Chacin isn’t going to save the Angels season, which was probably over even before Andrelton Simmons also was lost for the next few months. He will make their rotation less terrible, but he’s not going to make it good, so hopefully they didn’t give up too terribly much for a rotation stopgap in a lost season. But if they didn’t give up much, then it wouldn’t be clear why the Braves — who also have a terrible rotation — would give Chacin away. So we’ll see what this ends up being. Chacin probably isn’t anything special, but he’s at least interesting enough to acquire and see what he turns into. Of course, those are reasons the Braves could have kept him too.

We’ll see what this turns out to be once the final details are announced.

Last year, Jung-ho Kang became the first hitter to make the transition from the Korean Baseball Organization to Major League Baseball. To say it was a success would be a remarkable understatement, as Kang put up a 130 wRC+ on his way to a four win season and a third place finish in the NL Rookie of the Year balloting. Considering that Kang will cost the Pirates a grand total of $20 million, posting fee included, over the five years for which his contract runs, his signing was probably the best transaction any team made in 2015. The Pirates bet on a quality KBO hitter paid off in a massive way.

Thanks to Kang’s success, the door opened for more KBO hitters to follow, and this year, Byung-ho Park and Dae-ho Lee have joined Kang in the big leagues. But it’s not like Kang’s success led to instant riches for the pair; Park got a four year, $12 million deal from the Twins with an option that could push it to 5/$18M, and Lee got a minor league deal that would pay him up to $4 million if he made it to the big league roster and hit all his incentives. Teams were more open to KBO hitters — and in Lee’s case, a KBO hitter who had already made the transition to the more difficult NPB league in Japan — but the contracts suggest plenty of skepticism about the expected production levels from both hitters.

It’s obviously too early to be making any kind of declarations, but here’s what Park and Lee have done in their first six weeks of action.

Byung-Ho Park and Dae-Ho Lee

Name	PA	BB%	K%	ISO	BABIP	AVG	OBP	SLG	wOBA	wRC+
Byung-ho Park	102	8%	30%	0.300	0.283	0.244	0.324	0.544	0.368	138
Dae-Ho Lee	50	6%	16%	0.326	0.242	0.283	0.340	0.609	0.397	164

Park has 22 hits; 12 of them have gone for extra bases. Lee has 13 hits, and five of them have gone for extra bases, but they’ve all been home runs. Between them, they’ve launched 12 home runs in 152 plate appearances; Nolan Arenado currently leads the big leagues with 12 home runs in 145 plate appearances.

Now, they won’t keep hitting bombs at this rate. Lee’s HR/FB rate is a hilarious 46%, and Park is at 28%; the highest sustained HR/FB rate any hitter has put up during the last decade is Giancarlo Stanton’s 26%. Chris Davis, who is generally considered to have 80 power, has had 24% of his fly balls leave the yard during his career. Adam Dunn was at 22%. Chris Carter is at 21%. Bryce Harper and Mike Trout are at 20%. This is the reasonable range for top-of-the-shelf power hitters, and both Park and Lee are surpassing those levels, making it almost impossible to keep hitting for as much power as they have.

But power is also something that is very hard to fake, and the fact that both guys are showing off this kind of power suggests that they’re better equipped to handle MLB pitching than was advertised. While Lee has certainly benefited from being platooned — 60% of his at-bats have come against lefties — and Park’s contact rate might limit his upside even with real power, these guys both look like average-at-worst MLB hitters, and Park is probably a good bit better than that.

Combined with what Kang did in his first year in the big leagues, it seems likely that MLB teams have been overly skeptical of KBO hitters. And the three teams who were willing to make small bets on their ability to hit MLB pitching may get rewarded in a big way.

UPDATE: Strasburg gets fairly minor innings-based incentives, and he has what’s termed a “rolling opt-out” after years three and four. OK!

***

There was a lot of chatter last offseason about next offseason, and about how dreary it looked. There was a line of thought that teams were happy to throw money around because they didn’t want to have to pick through next year’s free-agent crop. The options were shaping up to be thin behind Stephen Strasburg. The options are thinner now.

Chelsea Janes broke the news that Strasburg has re-signed with the Nationals long-term. Jon Heyman puts the contract at $175 million over seven years, probably with deferrals and opt-outs. You remember how this stuff works — deferrals reduce the present-day value of the deal, but opt-outs work in the other direction. Opt-outs remain en vogue, while deferrals remain particularly en vogue with the Nationals. Nothing too surprising about the details of the contract. More surprising is the existence of the contract in the first place.

Strasburg is represented by Scott Boras, and he was five months from free agency. Boras clients have skipped free agency because of an extension before, but this one wasn’t expected, not with Strasburg so obviously the best free-agent pitcher due up. Look at this list. LOOK AT IT. With Strasburg off the board, what’s best of what’s left? Rich Hill? Potentially James Shields? Potentially Scott Kazmir? Nothing against any of those pitchers, but they don’t blend Strasburg’s talent and intrigue. Even if Strasburg isn’t officially an ace yet, he was going to be the closest thing. Now he’s just going to keep the same uniform.

Which is not to suggest that Strasburg and Boras aren’t doing well here. How much more could Strasburg really get? David Price got $217 million over seven years, with one opt-out, but Price has the better history, with no scar. That ligament replacement is meaningful, because there’s concern ligaments are vulnerable to re-busting, which makes Strasburg appear more of a risk. By no means should Strasburg be considered a ticking time bomb. He’ll either get hurt again or he won’t, and no one knows the answer. The Nationals know Strasburg pretty well. I think it’s safe to say there’s some additional risk, of either injury or under-performance, and when you factor that in, this is a hell of a deal. Strasburg’s talent + perfect health might = $250 million. Today we see Strasburg’s talent + Strasburg’s history = $175 million.

Over the past three calendar years, out of every starter with at least 300 innings, Strasburg ranks 17th in adjusted ERA, 10th in adjusted FIP, and fourth in adjusted xFIP. At present, for the first time in his career, Strasburg has four pitches he’s comfortable throwing at least a tenth of the time, and that could be a sign of his evolving toward someone better able to generate weak contact. And maybe that’s not the case, I don’t know, because Strasburg sure does throw a lot of innings against the Braves, but there’s no doubting his ability to strike batters out, and walks have never been a problem. This year, there are some other encouraging signs. Strasburg isn’t declining, is the point.

Perhaps his history means he’ll decline soon. Perhaps his history means he’ll get hurt again soon. We still don’t actually know that much about how guys bounce back from UCL replacement, but based just on the Strasburg example to this point, he’s got bullets left in him. The Nationals are counting on his having thousands. This is bad news for would-be spenders, and would-be buyers of Sonny Gray, but now Strasburg has cashed in, and the Nationals have demonstrated that they’re good to play for after all. After spending the winter mostly getting turned down, the Nationals have locked up one shiny prize.