The Rays and Jays pulled off a minor trade on Sunday, sending utilityman Eric Sogard to Tampa Bay for a player or players to be named later, or a player or players to be named soon.

Sogard is a good example of a player who wrings the most out of limited physical tools. You won’t often see him crushing deep homers with drool-worthy exit velocities. Like David Fletcher of the Angels, Sogard’s game is a bit of a throwback to a more contact-oriented game. Of active players with at least 500 plate appearances, Sogard has been the second-best at making contact with pitches in the strike zone, behind only Michael Brantley.

Sogard’s .300/.363/.477 triple-slash line (and 123 wRC+) this season is surprising, though not nearly as surprising as the 10 homers he’s hit. While 10 homers doesn’t exactly put Sogard into Pete Alonso territory, it’s an impressive total through the end of July for a 33-year-old who entered the season with just 11 career round-trippers. He may be an example of a player who is getting the most out of MLB’s different-but-not-different-swears-Rob-Manfred baseball; Statcast’s xSLG number gives Sogard just a .346 slugging percentage. The culprit is that Sogard still isn’t hitting the ball hard, with an 84.4 mph exit velocity and only three barrels. Despite that, more of his balls than usual have snuck over the right field fence.

After knee surgery cost Sogard his 2016 season, he was forced to settle for a minor-league contract and the chance to compete for a bench spot with the Brewers in 2017. Sogard posted pleasantly surprising production while filling in for Jonathan Villar when the latter was dealing with back pain in June of that year; his .273/.393/.378 line was enough to get him a major league contract with the Brewers in 2018, but he played poorly and was released by Milwaukee in July.

Neither Steamer or ZiPS were excited about Sogard coming into 2019, projecting a wRC+ of 79 and 69 respectively. The rest of baseball wasn’t much more excited; Sogard signed a minor-league contract with the Blue Jays in December. The projection systems now see him as a .250-.260 hitter with an OBP around .330 and a high .300s slugging percentage, which is a promising enough line for him to have value for a contender looking for depth. Sogard is an excellent fit for the Rays; they don’t need him to play much shortstop, a position where Sogard is stretched, but with many of the team’s second and third base options currently injured (Brandon Lowe, Yandy Diaz, Daniel Robertson, Christian Arroyo), Tampa will find a lot of use for him in coming weeks. I might be inclined to promote Kean Wong from Triple-A Durham, but this is a short-term addition, and the Rays have good reason to pick the safer option in a pennant race.

The cost for adding Sogard is likely to be a minimal one. While there have been conflicting rumor-inations about the players in return, it strikes me that no matter who’s ultimately identified, it’s likely that we’re talking low-level organizational players. If there were prospects of significance involved, I suspect the Rays would have considered promoting Wong more seriously.

Sogard’s acquisition is a low-key signing, but he’ll provide value to the Rays for the next two months, and the trade seems likely to be reasonable for both sides. While I reserve the right to change my opinion if the Rays give up Wander Franco or Brendan McKay, they’re not going to give up Wander Franco or Brendan McKay.

Position: Data Quality Engineer, Baseball Systems

Location: Minneapolis, MN

Description:
The Minnesota Twins are seeking a Data Quality Engineer to join the Baseball Research and Development group. This position offers wide-ranging exposure to current programming methods and frameworks in a fast-paced agile environment. With creativity and passion, this candidate will collaborate with the Baseball Operations staff to ensure good data hygiene across a growing set of disparate data sources. This position requires an intuitive and exacting passion for data detective work. By identifying patterns that affect data quality and by working directly with data scientists, the candidate will help to develop, deliver, and maintain tools to enhance model and decision accuracy. This position requires independent curiosity and a commitment to achieving excellence within a team framework. Strong communication and interpersonal skills will enable the candidate to enjoy engaging relationships with product users.

Essential Duties and Responsibilities:

• Build data quality assurance tools and procedures to identify and correct data inaccuracies.
• Design, maintain, and support data warehouses for reporting and analysis.
• Develop, optimize, and automate data workflows and pipelines ensuring data integrity and quality from external data integrations.
• Support the individuals of the Baseball Operations team by providing assistance and education on best practices when querying the data warehouse.
• Work with data scientists to ensure models and analyses follow best practice for accessing the data and are properly integrated into scheduled data processing workflows.
• Explore emerging technologies and recommend new tools and techniques for collecting and processing data.
• Develop visualization tools and reports that showcase research findings in creative, effective ways for a variety of different end users and use cases.
• Use an agile software development approach for quick roll-outs combined with incremental improvement process to existing systems and environments.
• Provide courteous and timely first-level contact and problem resolution for all Baseball Department users.

Qualifications, Skills, and Abilities:

• Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Science, Data Engineering, or a related field or equivalent work experience.
• Software development experience, including requirements definition, design, development, testing, implementation, and iterative improvement.
• Expertise with SQL, relational databases, database design, and data cleaning techniques.
• Ability to process and transform data from a variety of sources and formats.
• Experience with C#, Java, Python, R or other similar language that interacts with data.
• Knowledge of data visualization packages such as Plotly or ggplot is a plus.
• Proficiency evaluating and improving the performance of SQL queries.
• Understand software development best practices and long-term maintainability of code.
• 2+ years of relevant work experience.
• Strong work ethic, curiosity, initiative, and problem-solving skills.
• Open mindedness to learn new technologies and embrace different ways of thinking.
• Passion for baseball is preferred; passion for problem solving is required.

Physical Requirements:

• Ability to lift and transport items up to 55 lbs.
• Must be able to sit for extended periods of time.
• Must be able to move throughout all areas and levels of the ballpark.
• Ability to relocate to the Twins Cities area.

To Apply:
External applicants should apply using the application found here.

The content in this posting was created and provided solely by the Minnesota Twins.

If you looked at the eighth inning play-by-play of Wednesday’s game between the Boston Red Sox and Tampa Bay Rays, you might have spotted something unusual, though not that unusual:

The unusual part is that Adam Kolarek pitched to two batters in the inning but did not do so consecutively. This isn’t that unusual. The Rays have employed a similar strategy before. Joe Madden has done it with the Cubs. Whitey Herzog did it with the Cardinals back in the 1980s. It may be unconventional, but it isn’t against the rules. It should not cause great delays in games. It did, however, cause an issue in this game. After Kolarek had moved to first base, Chaz Roe got Mookie Betts to fly out for the second out of the frame. Then Kolarek moved from first back to the mound, and trouble ensued.

Instead of seeing baseball on their screens, fans saw baseball types standing around.

The umps are befuddled:

Alex Cora is mad:

Kevin Cash isn’t mad, he’s just disappointed:

The umps don’t want to hear anymore from either manager and start a silent disco:

Finally, Angel Hernandez goes to the Red Sox dugout to see if Alex Cora really does have BINGO:

The switch was a little tricky, but come on. It shouldn’t have taken this long. To give some sense of how lengthy the delay was, go read my piece where I predicted what will happen at the trade deadline with scenarios for all 30 teams. Back? Good. Now listen to one of your favorite songs of standard radio single length, let’s say “American Girl” by Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers. Finished? Okay, now back to the game action:

One pitch and one out to end the inning. Commercial break and then back to more game action, right? I have bad news:

So what did everyone think of the silent disco?

Some spicy lineup card action:

Someone just asked Alex Cora if his refrigerator was running:

Can I interest you in a different lineup card?

The Rays dugout is absolutely riveted:

Maybe they missed seeing the lineup card the first time?

In the time between when the pitch that ended the top of the eighth was thrown and the action in the bottom of the eighth actually commenced, you could have read Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel’s announcement that farm system rankings are now on THE BOARD and this Ben Clemens piece on Andrew Miller. In all, fans saw one pitch in about 23 minutes. The delay was not caused by an illegal move per se, but by the umpire’s lineup card not reflecting quickly enough which spot Adam Kolarek was taking in the lineup. That decision would have been up to Kevin Cash if he so chose; otherwise the umpire gets discretion. But Alex Cora believed the umpire didn’t put Kolarek in the lineup at the time of the change and protested the game.

The Rays won 3-2. The rest of us weren’t so lucky.

In November of last year, Craig Edwards published new research on how to value prospects by Future Value tier. We’ve used that research in conjunction with our prospect evaluations to assess the value of all 30 teams’ farm systems and arrive at our farm system rankings. Starting today, those rankings and valuations are available to view on The BOARD in the Farm Ranking tab. These rankings will automatically update as we move prospects between Future Value tiers, prospects change systems following a trade, or prospects graduate and lose prospect eligibility.

Within that tab, you’ll find:

• A team’s rank
• The value of a team’s system
• A count of how many prospects a team has on THE BOARD
• The average dollar value per player in a given system

We also break down how many pitching and position player prospects each team has within each Future Value tier. You can also sort on each batter and pitcher column within a given tier. Two-way prospects are split (0.5/0.5) between the batter and pitcher tiers for valuation purposes, as you can see below.

To navigate to the players contained within a particular team’s FV tier, just click on the number in the team’s row within that tier.

You’ll be automatically directed to the relevant part of THE BOARD — in this instance, Minnesota’s 13 hitting prospects with a 40 FV.

There’s some wiggle room in this otherwise fairly objective method of rankings farm systems, as two organizations with the same monetary total could end up being separated by which club has the higher per-prospect average. As we’ve discussed in the Trade Value Series and other places, all things being equal, teams would prefer that their WAR accumulate in as tight a time frame — and be concentrated in as few players — as possible. We don’t yet have an empirical way to express this, so for the time being, let’s say the the bonus you can give a system for concentration maxes out at about 10%.

We have a meaty roadmap of features we’d like add to the farm system rankings (more crosstab metadata on the makeup of a farm system, historical values, etc.), along with new columns and features we plan to add to THE BOARD before next season begins. Let us know what’s on your wishlist of new features to added by the wizard Sean Dolinar and the dark overlord David Appelman in the comments.

In my piece last week discussing the age-related demographics of the Trade Value Series, I included multiple graphs showing how baseball has changed over the years with respect to the quality and quantity of the contributions of younger and older players in the game. This is is one of the graphs from that piece:

This graph, and the others like it in the post, did a good job of showing age-related changes. But I thought there might be interest in the data underlying those graphs, data that would have been much too cumbersome to include in the piece. Below is the data that drove those graphs; it even breaks the ages down into smaller subsets. The numbers in all of the headers below represent player ages.

Read the rest of this entry »

Terrance Gore’s job is to come into games as a pinch-runner and steal bases. He might want to do more, but at the major league level, baserunning is his calling. Entering this season, Gore had totaled one hit, one walk, and one HBP in his career, including the postseason. Despite almost never reaching base, Gore has 32 career steals and had been caught just five teams before this year. Of his 61 appearances before 2019, 55 have come in September, when rosters are larger, or in the playoffs, when fewer pitchers are required. The Royals gave Gore a shot at slightly more playing time this year, but ultimately designated him for assignment. After he cleared waivers, he was traded to the New York Yankees for cash considerations, so Gore might once again loom large in September and the postseason.

What’s weird about Gore this season is that his stolen base numbers aren’t very good. He’s 13-of-18 on steals, and while that might be just fine for most players, when stealing bases is a huge part of your job, it’s really not that great. His sprint speed is one of the best in the game, so it’s pretty curious that he’s been caught stealing five times. Maybe teams are onto him, though that never stopped him before. Let’s take a closer look.

Gore’s first caught stealing happened on April 17 in the eighth inning. He didn’t get caught stealing so much as he got caught leaning as the photo shows below.

Gore’s next misadventure on the basepaths happened against the Yankees on April 21. Second one same as the first. Read the rest of this entry »

For the first time in three years, the Hall of Fame Induction Weekend won’t be overshadowed by the arrival of the July 31 trade deadline. This year’s festivities will take place July 20-21 in Cooperstown, New York. Saturday, July 20, will feature the presentation of this year’s Ford C. Frick Award for broadcasters (to the late Al Helfer, who passed away in 1975) and the J.G. Taylor Spink Award for writers (to Jayson Stark, who is still very much alive) as well as the Parade of Legends. Sunday, July 21 will feature the induction of six former players, namely BBWAA honorees Roy Halladay (posthumously), Edgar Martinez, Mike Mussina, and Mariano Rivera, and Today’s Game Era honorees Harold Baines and Lee Smith. For a full schedule, including extended museum hours, see here.

If you want to read more about this year’s inductees, I’ve got lengthy, JAWS-flavored profiles of all six of them here at FanGraphs:

• Baines, the 1977 number one overall pick, was easily the most shocking committee choice in decades.
• Halladay, a two-time Cy Young winner, died in 2017; his election makes him the first player chosen posthumously by the writers in a regular election since Rabbit Maranville in 1954, and the only other one elected by the writers in his first year of eligibility besides Christy Mathewson in the Hall’s inaugural election in 1936 (he died in 1925).
• Martinez, a top-30 hitter (in OPS+) spent his entire career with the Mariners and excelled to such a great degree that MLB named its award for the top designated hitter in his honor. I recently interviewed him about his new autobiography.
• Mussina, who spent his entire 18-year career pitching in the crucible of the AL East, cracked the top five in bWAR seven times and finishing among the top five in Cy Young voting six times.
• Rivera is the all-time saves leader, the most dominant postseason pitcher ever, and the first player ever elected unanimously by the writers.
• Smith is the former all-time saves leader.

If you’re among the many thousands of people making the pilgrimage to Cooperstown — driven by Rivera, this year’s crowd could surpass last year’s estimated 53,000, which was the second-largest ever — you can purchase a signed copy of my book, The Cooperstown Casebook (which was released two years ago this month; see Paul Swydan’s review here and an excerpt here) and perhaps even talk a little baseball with me on Saturday. From 11 AM to 1 PM, I’ll be hawking my wares in front of Willis Monie Books at 139 Main St. Other authors will be signing there all weekend long as well. More details can be found here.

If you’re in Cooperstown on Sunday, I will be one of four authors making presentations at the Cliff Kachline Chapter’s post-induction meeting, which will be held at 6 PM, at Tillapaugh’s Funeral Home, 28 Pioneer St., Cooperstown. C’mon, you’re dying to go! It’s open not just to SABR members but to the general public. Also on the bill are Jeff Katz, former Cooperstown mayor and author of Split Season 1981; Jane Leavy, the author of The Big Fella: Babe Ruth and the World He Created, as well as bios of Sandy Koufax and Mickey Mantle; and Erik Sherman, co-author with Art Shamsky of After the Miracle: The Lasting Brotherhood of the ’69 Mets. For more information, see here.

Whether or not you buy a book or are a SABR member, you can also catch me on Thursday’s MLB Now from 4-5 PM ET, discussing this year’s class and other baseball matters with Brian Kenny, Jon Heyman, and Dan O’Dowd. Spot cancelled due to rain, boo.

Finally, while it’s not Hall of Fame-related, I’ll also be part of the Gelf Magazine Varsity Letters tribute to Jim Bouton on Thursday, July 18, at 7:30 PM at Le Poisson Rouge (158 Bleecker Street, New York, NY). Neil deMause, Paul Lukas, and Mitchell Nathanson (the author of a forthcoming Bouton biography) and I will all be reading from the work of the great pitcher-turned author, discussing its monumental impact, and sharing stories of our own interactions with Bouton.

At the beginning of June, I experimented with a metric designed to determine how exciting it has been to watch a team. Using leverage index, I factored in how often a team played in games with something at stake, and looked at how often the team actually delivered in those moments using WPA. I separated both categories into hitting and pitching and made 100 the major league average. I took the geometric mean of those four numbers; the result is the Exhilaration Index. At the same time, I took the difference between the team’s leverage index scores and their WPA scores to determine how often a team let fans down in big situations, a number that I called their Horror Score.

Here is the Exhilaration Index for June:

Here are the Horror Scores for June:

Here’s the Exhilaration Index for the first half of the season:

And finally, the Horror Scores through the All-Star Break:

Fans of the Red Sox, Dodgers, Braves, and Rays seem to be getting their money’s worth this season, while the Tigers, Royals, Marlins, and Mets have provided their faithful an awful lot of heartache. We’ll check back as the second half progresses to see if the horrified receive any relief, or if the fortunes of the delighted shift.

Last night, Lance Lynn got the second half of the season off to a very good start for the Texas Rangers by striking out 11 while issuing just two walks in seven shutout innings. Even with that great start, Lynn is still second to Max Scherzer, who leads all pitchers with 5.5 WAR, but he’s now accumulated 4.4 WAR and is a full win clear of Charlie Morton and Gerrit Cole, who are tied behind him. When Lynn shut down the Astros, he wasn’t just dominating an average team. Houston has the best hitting offense in all of baseball, with a 118 wRC+ and an 18% strikeout rate that ranks second in the majors. Three weeks ago, I noted Lynn’s perch atop the AL WAR Leaderboard as an interesting peculiarity, an unexpected development. His performance since then has thrust him to the forefront of the American League Cy Young race.

On June 20, I wrote about how Lynn’s ERA was misleading, how he lessened his sinker usage in favor of the cutter, and how he used a different approach with runners on base to minimize damage. One thing I missed when writing that piece was Lynn’s slightly different arm slot, which Michael Ajeto wrote about at Pitcher List and which likely helped make his cutter better. In what ended up being less than fortuitous timing for my article, Lynn immediately went out and gave up four runs in the first inning of his June 22 tilt against the White Sox. Since that inning, Lynn has pitched 28 more frames, struck out 31 batters, walked just three, and allowed only three runs. His ERA at the time of the article was around four; it has since dropped to 3.69. That might not seem too low, but consider that Baseball-Reference’s version of WAR, which is primarily run-based as opposed to the FIP-based version here at FanGraphs, also thinks Lynn is excellent. His 4.5 WAR there is second in the AL to Mike Minor and third in baseball with Scherzer also ahead of him. Over at Baseball Prospectus, Lynn leads the AL with 4.2 WARP.

Here’s where Lynn ranks in a bunch of stats, both traditional and modern:

His relatively low poor ERA showing (13th) is mitigated by having no unearned runs, which is unusual, and pitching in a hitter-friendly park. Lynn’s case as AL’s best pitcher this season stands on its own, but he’s actually been even better since a so-so start to the season:

Consider this your Lance Lynn Cy Young update.

Futures Game rosters were announced today. We’ve compiled them and added them to a tab on THE BOARD for your perusal. There you’ll have access to things like our scouting reports, tool grades, and video of the prospects.

You probably already know most of the names on the rosters because they’ve been discussed and/or prominently ranked at this website, but I want to touch on some interesting inclusions. First, I had to create a new BOARD record for, and source a fresh report on, Brewers RHP Devin Williams, who has been in pro ball since 2013 and is this year’s oldest participant. Injuries constantly sidetracked the first five years of Williams’ career and this season was his first above A-ball. I saw him as a starter in 2016 and 2018 sitting about 90-93 with a plus curveball. He was finally ‘penned this year and has been 91-97 and has touched 100 while showing plus breaking stuff. In my opinion he’s still too wild and has too lengthy an injury history to FV him the way we have other relievers with similar stuff (he was in the honorable mention section of the Brewers’ offseason list), but it’s a great story and an in-person look in Cleveland might change our minds. He’ll likely be a 40-man add this offseason.

Also of note is the Red Sox’s 2018 seventh round pick Jarren Duran, who was the biggest individual riser on our post-draft list update and is on the roster. As far as I know, he’s the lowest-drafted player to make a Futures Game in the following season. Boston’s system is not good and that’s part of why he’s their representative, but his rise has been quite incredible and his evaluation is arguably the game’s most important.

Of course, it’s important to note that these rosters are subject to change due to either injury or big league call-ups. Cubs RHP Adbert Alzolay and Rays LHP/1B Brendan McKay are both in the big leagues right now and would seem to be the most likely to be replaced, while Nationals SS Carter Kieboom, Cleveland OF Daniel Johnson and Rockies LHP Ben Bowden are, in my opinion, in the next tier of likelihood to be replaced. For logistical simplicity, replacements for Alzolay and McKay would be, and this is just an educated guess on my part, Midwest League arms from those teams. Rays prospects Shane Baz or Matthew Liberatore, both on Bowling Green’s roster, would be fine inclusions whose throwing schedules wouldn’t have to be adjusted much for this game, while Cubs LHP Brailyn Marquez, who is at South Bend, is a logical talent/proximity sub, but he’s have to be shorted a day’s rest (compared to what he’s used to, not based on typical big league rest) to throw that night.