If you’re a fan of that vastly inferior sport involving shoulder pads, helmets, and a vaguely oblong ovoid incorrectly dubbed a “ball,” you’re probably familiar with a northwestern franchise known as the Seattle Seahawks (interestingly, there is no such thing as a “seahawk”). You may also be aware of a 2017 second-round draft pick for the team named Malik McDowell, a rare talent who never suited up in a game for the Seattle fake-birds. That has led to the Seahawks suing McDowell in federal court for the return of a significant portion of his signing bonus.

It’s a rare step for an NFL team to sue a former top draft choice to recoup signing bonus money. The development with McDowell underscores a monumentally disappointing spiral with the club following his selection with the 35th overall pick in 2017 draft. Once considered a potential top-10 pick in that draft class, McDowell suffered a slide on draft night after an inconsistent junior season at Michigan State, then never played a snap for Seattle after suffering serious injuries in an ATV accident prior to training camp nearly two years ago. He was released by the team in March.

But in timing that is germane to this week’s lawsuit, McDowell signed a four-year, $6.95 million contract with $3.19 million in bonus money several weeks before his accident. As part of that contract, the Seahawks were to pay McDowell that bonus in four increments. The team ultimately paid out three installments and withheld a fourth for nearly $800,000 following the revelation of his injury. After negotiations with the NFL Players Association and going through arbitration, Seattle agreed to forfeit half of the agreed-upon signing bonus, which still required McDowell to repay $799,238. The suit alleges McDowell never did despite attempts by the team to recoup the funds, leading to this week’s lawsuit.

Why is McDowell’s case relevant for our purposes? There are three reasons. First, in the wake of last week’s MLB draft, McDowell’s case represents a fascinating look at what can go wrong between a team and a player, particularly because there’s very little here that is unique to football. Off-field injuries happen to professional baseball players; it wasn’t long ago that Giants ace Madison Bumgarner suffered serious injuries in a dirt bike accident. The Seahawks declared McDowell to be in breach of his contract for riding his ATV. The team couldn’t sue McDowell for breach of contract directly, because, just as with MLB’s Collective Bargaining Agreement, the NFL’s CBA is the sole remedy for disputes between teams and players (that’s a doctrine called “labor law preemption”). So instead, the team took him to arbitration, where they won a ruling requiring McDowell to forfeit almost $1.6 million of his signing bonus, and return almost $800,000 that he’d already been paid to the Seahawks. When McDowell didn’t pay it, the team filed this lawsuit in federal court. The lawsuit doesn’t relitigate the arbitrators’ decision – it simply enters the decision as an enforceable judgment, allowing the team to garnish his future wages.

By and large, major league teams aren’t this aggressive when it comes to their players but there’s no reason in the CBA that they couldn’t be. The Giants were without MadBum for months following his dirt bike injury; although there was talk at the time that his contract prohibited the hurler from dirt biking, San Francisco opted not to attempt to recoup a portion of his sizable salary or void his contract. Trevor Bauer famously was forced to leave a playoff start because of a finger laceration he suffered while working on his drone. The Indians, too, didn’t pursue Bauer for breach of his contract. The Giants didn’t void Jeff Kent’s contract after a motorcycle accident, despite Kent lying about the cause.

We’ve talked about other areas where teams and the league are strident in their insistence that players stick to the rules; here, at least, teams have, for the most part, been remarkably lax. The last time a team voided a player’s contract for a non-baseball injury was when the Yankees famously nullified Aaron Boone’s contract after he injured his knee playing basketball in the 2003-04 offseason, clearing the way for the acquisition of one Alex Rodriguez; Boone received a settlement and signed with Cleveland. What makes Boone’s situation really interesting is that he was honest with the Yankees, and had his contract voided – whereas Kent wasn’t truthful, and he kept his contract. But none of those situations ended up in court.

Now, major teams are self-interested, for-profit entities. The Giants’ unwillingness to take legal action against Madison Bumgarner likely had much more to do with the value Bumgarner has to the franchise — and the need to maintain a good relationship with the team’s marquee player and with the MLBPA — than with magnanimity. That said, one wonders what the result would have been had Bumgarner been a less important player. If the same thing happened to the 2019, still-good-but-not-an-ace version of the southpaw in a year where the Giants are actively rebuilding and looking to shed salary, would the team be so quick to look the other way?

This is the first instance in years I’m aware of in which a court is being presented with the contract language present in all major league sports agreements that bars a player from engaging in dangerous, off-field activities. We talked earlier this year about Kyler Murray’s choice between baseball and football; the Seahawks’ case against McDowell rests on the same contract language we discussed then, which prohibits football players from playing other sports (the same goes for baseball). If Murray had elected to try both sports and been injured playing baseball, his football team may have proceeded against him in much the same way the Seahawks have done against McDowell. That possibility may have factored into Murray’s decision to choose to focus on one sport. And Murray is in a similar position to McDowell in one respect. After the outfielder-cum-quarterback signed with Arizona’s Cardinals, he was in breach of his Athletics contract and required to repay Oakland the majority of his signing bonus. If he doesn’t, the A’s will have the right to pursue the same kind of legal action against Murray that the Seahawks are taking against McDowell.

But McDowell’s case is fascinating for one additional reason. Throughout the dispute, McDowell has argued that he is physically fit to play, citing clearances he received from his own neurologists. Seattle’s doctors, meanwhile, wouldn’t clear him, arguing that he wasn’t past the head trauma he suffered in the ATV accident. The result was Seattle cutting McDowell, perhaps to avoid a grievance hearing regarding the player’s medical status.

Disputes between teams and players over injuries are becoming more commonplace in MLB. Just since June began, we had the Mets arguing with Robinson Cano in the media about whether or not the second baseman was healthy. We talked earlier this year about the Yankees allegedly withholding the existence of a bone spur in his throwing arm from relief ace Dellin Betances, which has led to his prolonged absence this season.

One fascinating McDowell analogue might be New York Mets outfielder Yoenis Cespedes. The Mets’ slugger, already out for an extended period after surgery for bone spurs in both feet, broke his right ankle in several places during what General Manager (and Cespedes’ former agent) Brodie Van Wagenen insisted was not a fall off of a horse, but was nonetheless a “non-baseball-related activity” at the outfielder’s ranch. (The official explanation was that Cespedes stepped in a hole on his ranch and suffered a “violent fall.”) Ranching is probably not a contractually acceptable in-season activity for a baseball player who is supposed to be rehabbing from surgery, and that led to Sports Illustrated’s Michael McCann considering if the Mets had legal grounds to void the outfielder’s contract. And McCann is probably correct: if Cespedes’ injury really was an accident, there’s probably not much they can do. But if Cespedes was digging the hole (as opposed to accidentally stepping into it) or riding a horse (despite his and the team’s denials), there’s not much that is legally different between his situation and those of Malik McDowell, Jeff Kent, or Aaron Boone.

Now, McDowell’s case isn’t legally precedential. As we’ve noted, recourse already exists for baseball teams should their players injury themselves in pursuit of activities that violate their contracts. In one sense, it’s “just” the entry of an arbitration award. But in another, the idea of a major league professional sports team suing a former player is largely unprecedented, at least in this century. What the MLBPA and the Mets will likely be watching closely is whether, and to what extent, the NFL Players Association intervenes to defend McDowell. Notably, the Seahawks originally attempted to recoup everything they’d paid McDowell. However, the NFLPA intervened on McDowell’s behalf in the arbitration, arguing that the NFL CBA didn’t permit the team to claw back his entire salary. Eventually, the player, the union, and the team agreed to a compromise that cut that number in half. What we don’t know is whether the NFLPA will intervene again now that the case is in active litigation. The NFLPA is in a bit of a tactical bind here. On the one hand, if the union defends McDowell, they are defending the breach of an arbitration award they helped to negotiate. On the other hand, if the NFLPA opts to stay out of the dispute, they send a message to other professional teams that union defense of players in litigation isn’t necessarily a given.

So McDowell’s case here isn’t about just McDowell. Instead, it will be interesting to see whether it represents a sea change in how professional sports leagues approach off-field player injuries.

Baseball has changed a lot in the last five years, so much so that watching a game from 2014 already feels like a blast from the past. Offense was low, sinking fastballs were everywhere, and groundballs and defense were the order of the day. 2019 hardly feels like the same game — unless you’re watching Mike Soroka, that is. Though Soroka is only 21 years old, he pitches like he’s from a previous era. In a time of four-seam fastballs, Soroka pitches off of his sinker — he’s throwing only 16% four-seamers this year and 46.3% two-seam fastballs. In a world of exciting high-velocity young aces, Soroka sits around 93 mph. In a world of home runs, he has allowed only one all year. In short, Mike Soroka doesn’t fit in 2019. How does he do it?

As is almost always the case with pitching, Soroka isn’t doing one specific thing that makes him dominant. If it were that straightforward, that easy to reverse engineer, everyone would be doing it. Still, dominant is an apt description of Soroka’s 2019 season. He’s posted a 1.38 ERA over ten starts. His FIP is nearly as jaw-dropping — fifth in baseball at 2.70. Has he been a little lucky that only 2.9% of fly balls hit against him have become home runs this year? Certainly. Still, though, his 3.5 xFIP is no slouch, 20th-best among qualified starters.

Great pitching is always interesting, but the way Soroka is doing it is what makes him unique. His 21.9% strikeout rate is below league average, not the kind of thing you can say about most excellent pitchers. His 6.5% walk rate is better than average, but not absurdly so — it’s merely 38th-lowest among qualified starters. In short, Soroka is an evolutionary Mike Leake, or 2019’s Miles Mikolas. He’s effective in a way that resists categorization, that belies the easy tropes of analysis. Why is Mike Soroka good? He’s good because he gets every little edge he can.
Read the rest of this entry »

Below you’ll find a roundup of notable moves from the past few days, as well as future expected moves and a Minor League Report, which includes a list of recent major league debuts and a few players who are “knocking down the door” to the majors. For this column, any lineup regulars, starting pitchers, or late-inning relievers are considered “notable,” meaning that middle relievers, long relievers, and bench players are excluded. You can always find a full list of updated transactions here.

Lineup Regulars

Boston Red Sox
6/8/19: 1B Mitch Moreland (strained quad) placed on 10-Day IL, retroactive to June 8.

Back in the lineup after missing 12 days due to a strained lower back, Moreland grounded out twice in Friday’s game before he was removed with a new injury that has him right back on the injured list. With Steve Pearce still working his way back from a strained lower back—he’s been on the injured list since June 1—and rookie Michael Chavis scuffling as of late, the Red Sox are struggling to get production out of their first base spot with Moreland out of the lineup. J.D. Martinez is in Monday’s lineup, however, after missing the past four games because of back spasms.

Depth Chart | Roster Resource Read the rest of this entry »

If the postseason started today, the defending champion Boston Red Sox would not be playing. The presumptive American League Central winner Cleveland Indians would not be playing. Instead, the Texas Rangers, projected to lose 90 games before the season began, would be squaring off against the Tampa Bay Rays for a spot in the Division Series if current results were to hold the rest of the way. Now, with 60% of the season left to go, current results are unlikely to hold the rest of the way. But 40% of the season isn’t an insignificant portion of the schedule, perhaps making the Rangers the most surprising team of 2019.

The Twins and Rays might have better cases for being the biggest positive surprises based on their record, but neither team was projected to be bad like the Rangers. The graph below shows every teams’ projected winning percentage before the season started, and their winning percentage through Sunday’s games:

Read the rest of this entry »

On Saturday, Blue Jays rookies Cavan Biggio and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. added another item to their set of historic firsts: the first sons of Hall of Famers to bat consecutively in a single game. The particular sequence of events could have gone better, though. Facing the Diamondbacks’ Zack Greinke, Biggio flew out. Then Guerrero smoked a first pitch slider (106.4 mph off the bat) 404 feet off the center field wall, yet only wound up with a long single after beginning his home run trot while rounding first base. The gaffe — the Jays’ first miscue in a game they lost 6-0 — didn’t escape the notice of manager Charlie Montoyo, who, in reference to Guerrero’s rookie mistake, told reporters afterwards, “You should always go hard.”

After a slow start following his belated arrival, Guerrero is hitting .248/.313/.445 (102 wRC+) with seven homers in 150 plate appearances overall, and .292/.352/.563 (142 wRC+) in his last 105 PA, starting on May 11. That’s not too shabby for a 20-year-old who might be the most hyped prospect in baseball history. No, he wasn’t a number one overall pick like Ken Griffey Jr., Stephen Strasburg, or Bryce Harper. But he’s the only consensus number one prospect to be the son of a Hall of Famer, which made his debut, forestalled by several months due to injuries and service time hanky panky, that much more hotly anticipated.

The sons of Craig Biggio and Vladimir Guerrero (who debuted on May 24 and April 26, respectively) are the first to be teammates within a group that numbers just 15 thus far. Only seven of those 15 reached the majors after their fathers were enshrined, which means that the rest of this group joined retroactively. Comparatively speaking, we’re in a boom time for such familial connections, given the activity not just of the two young Jays but also Giants pitcher Dereck Rodriguez, son of Ivan Rodriguez. The younger Rodriguez even has a Cooperstown-linked teammate himself, namely outfielder Mike Yastrzemski — not just the grandson of Carl Yastrzemski but the first grandson of a Hall of Famer to reach the majors. Read the rest of this entry »

12:01

Dan Szymborski: The prophecy of the chat has been fulfilled.

12:01

Dan Szymborski: I actually had a dream about Brandon Lowe the other night that had no extra base hits and I decided to model ISO by BMI out of curiosity

12:02

Dan Szymborski: But for some reason, Lowe was 6-6 and huge in my dream, which he is not.

12:02

Dan Szymborski: The power is likely real, but I expect the BA to come down somewhat

Read the rest of this entry »

Because his name is right there in the title of the piece, I won’t ask you to play that little game where I give you two anonymized batting lines and ask you to guess who they are, only to reveal that one is Yuli Gurriel and the other is the re-animated corpse of Ike Van Zandt or something like that. I’ll just give you two batting lines, both from Gurriel, and ask you to note the difference in quality between the two:

That 47-point drop in wOBA doesn’t really give you a sense of relative performance, so let me put this another way: Gurriel’s wOBA from 2016-18 fell into the 38th percentile among players with as many plate appearances over that span. Fine but hardly exceptional. His wOBA this year — again only among those players with as many trips to the plate — falls into the third percentile. Only José Ramírez (with a .262 wOBA) and Starlin Castro (.249) have done worse.

Curiously, though, Gurriel’s walk rate and strikeout rate have both improved — albeit modestly — even as his overall performance has suffered. Little else about his plate discipline numbers seems much different this year than last, either. Gurriel’s swing rate last year was 50.3%, and this year it’s 49.1%. Last year, he made contact 85.9% of the time. This year, he’s improved to 87.1%. The numbers don’t change much when you look inside or outside of the strike zone, either, and where they do change it’s often for the better. So what’s going on? I think a clue is in the kinds of strikeouts he’s getting. Here’s a chart that shows Gurriel’s swing rates on all the pitches he saw with two strikes from 2016-2018:

And here is that same chart, but from this season:

I’ll save you the effort of adding up the swing rates on all the pitches inside the strike zone and tell you that from 2016-18, Gurriel saw 348 pitches in the zone with two strikes and swung at almost all of them: 330, or 95%. Most of those were fastballs. Some of the time, he struck out. Other times, he made hard contact. This year, by contrast, Gurriel has swung at 63 of 71 such pitches, or 89%. That six-point drop might not seem like a huge deal, but it’s meant that a whopping 39% of Gurriel’s strikeouts this year have been looking, which is by far the highest figure of his four-year career (his career mark is 23.2%, and last year’s 29% figure was by 11 points a career high). It’s also meant that Gurriel has made less contact when behind in the count this year than ever before.

I’m not sure what to ascribe these changes to. One possibility could be a general discomfort at being called upon to play around the diamond more often due to injuries to George Springer, Carlos Correa, and José Altuve. On its face, that argument doesn’t make much sense: Gurriel played 46 games away from first base even last season, and put up perfectly acceptable offensive numbers, and he’s moved around the infield since his Cuban playing days. Perhaps, though, this season’s situation is different. This year, Gurriel is fielding different positions not because it’s the best matchup given the Astros’ opponents but because A.J. Hinch has to play him there due to injury. That could mean Gurriel is being put into game situations in which he’s not comfortable and to which he hasn’t been exposed before. And he’s perhaps thinking just a little bit too hard about what he has to produce there while his talented teammates recover from injury.

If that’s true, it could explain other changes to Gurriel’s game as well. Prior to 2019, Gurriels’ average launch angle sat right around 10 degrees, but that average masked a distribution that showed that about a quarter of his hits went straight forward on a line (a zero degree launch angle) while another quarter left the bat at about 20 degrees — just enough to get over the heads of the infielders and drop in for hits. This year, his average launch angle has increased — to 15.4 degrees — while the range of angles at which he hits the ball has narrowed. Almost gone are the balls hit straight on a line, and significantly diminished are the 20 degree knocks. More and more of Gurriel’s hits, as a percentage, are coming in that dangerous middle zone where balls in play are somewhat more likely to turn into outs. As a consequence, Gurriel’s .264 BABIP this season is the lowest of his career, even as his hard-hit and contact rates have stayed level.

Whatever the cause, things can really only go up from here: Gurriel’s -0.4 WAR is among the 10 worst in the league among qualified players. And there are, despite the poor results, a lot of things going right for Gurriel. His hard-hit rate, contact rate, strikeout rate, and walk rate suggest that his eye at the plate and his ability to do damage to the ball when he makes contact are all working just fine. Perhaps he is trying to lift the ball a little more than is necessary to do damage at the plate, and perhaps that approach — combined with a newfound passivity possibly born of a little bit of overthinking — has turned Gurriel’s performance this year on its head. If that’s the case, it can be remedied: Gurriel’s wOBA has been as low as this before and still rebounded:

With a little perseverance, then — and perhaps a few more swings on strikes in the zone — he could be back to normal for the stretch run. And if this run of poor performance is the result of Gurriel trying to do a little too much at the plate? Well, maybe it’s all right to relax a little bit. All the evidence suggests that he and the Astros are going to be just fine.

Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers —Colten Brewer, David Hernandez, and Ryan Yarbrough — on how they learned and developed their cutters.

———

Colten Brewer, Boston Red Sox

“It started happening in the [2016] offseason that I got Rule-5’ed to the Yankees. When I got to spring training, they said, ‘Hey, the reason we got you is that we noticed some cut on your fastball; we like that.’ I was like, ‘Oh, really?’ I’d been five years with the Pirates, and they didn’t really use that analytical side to baseball. As a result, I didn’t really know much about myself until I got with the Yankees.

“That offseason I’d worked out at a place called APEC, in Tyler, Texas. They were using a Driveline system. Going to a new team, I wanted to show up in spring training in the best shape possible, so I spent a month and half there. That’s where the wheels started turning.

“In the spring, I started throwing more balls in to lefties, and was watching the ball work. From then on I started having natural cut on my fastball. I said, ‘I’m going to use this.’ With the Pirates I’d been more of a sinker guy — I thought arm-side run was better — but after I got to the Yankees I started ripping fastballs as hard as I could, and they were cutting. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about poor pronunciations, an oddity in Bash Brothers, a Byron Buxton hustle double, the running (but not running enough) Royals, whether to talk about and whether they did talk about the curiously contending Rangers, and a few takeaways from the Madison Bumgarner–Max Muncy kerfuffle, then discuss several insights they gleaned from Keith Law’s oral history of how Mike Trout was (and wasn’t) drafted a decade ago.

Audio intro: Stephen Malkmus, "Ocean of Revenge"
Audio outro: The Dream Syndicate, "Recovery Mode"

Link to Buxton hustle double
Link to “Fire it through the internet” shirt
Link to Keith’s oral history
Link to Ben Reiter’s 2012 Trout draft story
Link to Ben’s 2019 scouting reports series
Part 1 of study on geographical bias in the draft
Part 2 of study on geographical bias in the draft
Link to Dollar Sign on the Muscle
Link to story of Sam spiriting away Baptista in The Only Rule
Link to Ben on the career of Trout’s father
Link to order The MVP Machine

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Rhett Wiseman didn’t sign when he was drafted by the Chicago Cubs out of a Cambridge, Massachusetts high school in 2012. Instead, he attended Vanderbilt University. The reasons were twofold. Education was a priority — he’s since completed his studies and earned a business degree — and the new-at-the-time CBA had squelched any chances of his being coerced with a well-over-slot offer. As I wrote in the hours following that draft, Wiseman was viewed a second-to-fourth-round talent, and fell to the 25th round for just those reasons.

While signing was never a viable option, Wiseman did engage in dialogue with the Theo Epstein-led Cubs.

“We talked a little bit,” Wiseman told me recently. “I spoke to Theo, who I respect greatly, but just like the article you wrote at the time said, it was a situation where teams couldn’t come remotely close to the number that it would have taken to pull me away from the commitment to Vanderbilt. Looking back, I’m glad the slotting system changed in the way that it did, because it made my decision easy.”

The 24-year-old outfielder considers the three years he spent at Vandy “the experience of a lifetime,” but there were still dreams to chase. One year after being part of a team that won the 2014 College World Series, he was drafted by the Washington Nationals in the third round. This time he signed.

Pro ball has proven to be a challenge. Wiseman raked during his final collegiate season — 15 jacks and a .980 OPS — but he hasn’t come close to those numbers in the minors. There have been hot stretches, including this past April when he earned Eastern League player-of-the-month honors, but sustained success has eluded him. Even with his scalding start, he’s slashing .237/.325/.479 in the current campaign.

Wiseman knows as well as anyone that he needs to up his game if he hopes to reach the pinnacle of his profession. Baseball is, after all, a business. If you don’t perform, you’ll all too soon find yourself behind a desk, staring at a computer screen rather than at a man holding a baseball, 60 feet, six inches away.

In terms of truly understanding the ins and outs of the professional game, Wiseman might as well have been a million miles away when he turned down his first chance to sign.

“When you’re in high school, and looking at this whole process, it so isn’t what it seems,” said Wiseman. “You’re living at home and not playing every day. You have school commitments and are thinking about college. You’re still coming into full maturity. So even if you think you know what it’s like, you really don’t. It’s not until you’re in pro ball that you really understand how much of a business this is. It’s a livelihood, and it’s treated as such.” Read the rest of this entry »