J.D. Martinez is one of the best hitters on the planet. Last year he posted a 170 wRC+ and 43 home runs, which is probably good. This year, he “only” has a 128 wRC+ and an obscenely-low-for-a-power-hitter 17.1% strikeout rate. When a .291/.373/.513 triple-slash means you’re having a “down” year, you’re either ridiculously good or your name is Mike Trout.

Martinez is not without problems, however. As Scott Holland explains for the Cook County Record:

A baseball agent has sued Merrill Lynch for allegedly conspiring to steer a superstar client to a rival agent Scott Boras just before the player landed a huge contract. . . . In a complaint filed May 10 in Cook County Circuit Court, agent Bob Garber, president of RMG Sports Group, sued Merrill Lynch; Pierce Fenner & Smith; and Bruce Lee, a financial adviser in Merrill Lynch’s Chicago office, alleging tortious interference with contractual relations.

Let’s break this down. Bob Garber is Martinez’s former agent. Days before he hit free agency, Martinez fired Garber and hired Scott Boras. Martinez and Boras then went on an offseason-long courtship with baseball before the slugger finally signed a five-year, $110-million contract with three opt-outs.

Now, whether Martinez would’ve been better off with Garber instead of Boras is anyone’s guess. It’s worth noting that Garber isn’t an inexperienced agent; his most notable negotiations include those for erstwhile Astros ace Roy Oswalt a 5-year, $73 million extension in 2006 and a five-year, $77 million deal between free agent southpaw C.J. Wilson and the Angels in 2011. More recently, Garber obtained a three-year, $38 million commitment for Tyler Chatwood from the Cubs. So Garber isn’t a neophyte, is the point, and that gives his lawsuit significantly more credence.

What is his lawsuit about? According to the complaint, which you can read here, Martinez was using a financial adviser at Merrill Lynch named Bruce Lee to manage his money. Garber alleges that he and Lee were friends, and that he referred his clients to Lee because he had personally invested with Lee himself. But, according to Garber, Lee told Martinez to drop Garber and hire Scott Boras, because Lee wanted to obtain a financial benefit from having Boras’ book of superstar clients invest with him. Garber is seeking the 5% commission that he would have received had he negotiated Martinez’s Red Sox contract himself. Read the rest of this entry »

Nothing says more about the state of Major League Baseball in 2019 than the fact that one of the biggest stories during the MLB Draft is the possible signings of two of last winter’s biggest name-brand free agents. Unencumbered by the signing team’s loss of draft picks with the conclusion of the MLB Draft, Dallas Keuchel and Craig Kimbrel have suddenly become a lot more exciting to clubs.

While it’s become commonplace to point to these non-signings as proof of MLB’s broken system of player compensation, I’m not actually buying it. Not that I’m disputing that there’s a serious issue, but I’d argue that the signings that are most problematic are when players like Ozzie Albies feel the need to take pennies on the dollar in their early twenties just so they can guarantee getting some of the win-related revenue they generate.

For free agents that aren’t elite contributors, I don’t think there’s any financial system that puts the genie in the bottle. Teams may not generally use straight WAR measures as unerring scripture, but they are more widely aware — even the teams run relatively poorly — of the limited impact of any one player. Mike Trout, as amazing as he is, isn’t the LeBron James of baseball, because the very design of the game itself prevents any one player from having as much of an impact on a team as LeBron or Steph Curry or James Harden or Tom Brady or Patrick Mahomes.

The demands of the players matter as well. It was widely reported over the winter that Craig Kimbrel was looking for a contract worth over $100 million for six years. While you’ll never get these rumors backed up with ironclad verification, nobody I’ve talked to inside baseball about Kimbrel’s demands has done anything but accept that as his camp’s demands.

At his best, Kimbrel was possibly the most dominating reliever of this generation, arguably even better than Mariano Rivera at his best (remember, what made Mo special wasn’t just how good he was, but how good he was for two decades). Baseball’s system no doubt underpaid Kimbrel — and the system for cost-controlled player needs serious addressing — but the Yankees or Red Sox or Cardinals or whichever team signs him has no interest in “making up” missing dollars to him that the Braves didn’t have to pay. Read the rest of this entry »

Six in a row, 10 out of 11, 16 out of 19, 27 out of 35 — however you slice it, the Dodgers have been steamrolling everything in their path lately. They haven’t lost a series since dropping two of three to the Giants April 29 to May 1, and now own the NL’s best record (42-19) by a margin of 7.5 games. Their +96 run differential is nearly equal to the sum of those of the league’s second-ranked Cubs (+53) and third-ranked Diamondbacks (+46). Their offense owns the league’s highest wRC+ by a wide margin (117 to the Cubs’ 109), and their rotation owns the NL’s best ERA (2.88) and FIP (3.46) while also the most innings per start (5.89).

Which brings us to their bullpen. Sure, it hasn’t been a dumpster fire on the order of the Nationals’ (6.81 ERA, 5.08 FIP) or Orioles’ (5.84 ERA, 5.66 FIP), but there are only so many teams who can be that lucky. Through Monday, the Dodgers’ bullpen ranked 10th in the NL in ERA (4.71) and ninth in FIP (4.48). The former number doesn’t even account for the fact that the unit has allowed 43% of the runners inherited from the starters to score, the league’s second-worst mark; include all inherited runners and the rate falls to 39%, third-worst. While their relievers’ 7.6% walk rate is a league low, their 22.2% strikeout rate is the second-lowest, and their 1.37 homers per nine is mid-pack. Their clutch score — a measure of whether a player or team has done better or worse than expected in higher-leverage situations — of -2.54 is second-to-last in the NL, ahead of only the Nationals.

As you can see from those numbers above, the offense and rotation have largely papered over the bullpen’s problems. The week-long span from Sunday, May 26 through Saturday, June 1 — during which Dodger relievers combined for a 7.08 ERA and 6.64 FIP in 20.1 innings — illustrates the point in dramatic fashion:

• Sunday, May 26 vs. Pirates: Caleb Ferguson entered with a seven-run lead and turned it into a four-run lead, though the Dodgers still won, 11-7.
• Monday, May 27 vs. Mets: Joe Kelly entered with a five-run lead and failed to retire any of the three hitters he faced, the highlight of whom was a two-run homer by Adeny Hechavarria, the owner of a career .346 slugging percentage and a total of 29 homers compiled in eight seasons. When Kelly’s successor, Dylan Floro, got into trouble, manager Dave Roberts called upon Kenley Jansen for a five-out save, which he converted in the 9-5 win.

Read the rest of this entry »

Over the weekend, I saw the Yankees’ Double-A affiliate, the Trenton Thunder, host the Nationals’ Double-A affiliate, the Harrisburg Senators. These are my thoughts on a few of the prospects I saw, starting with those on the visiting Senators.

Harrisburg (WAS)

Luis Garcia, MIF, Top 100 Rank: 53, Org Rank: 3

An average-sized, sturdy teenager, Garcia is a bit thick in his lower half and might need to watch his weight moving forward. He continues to show solid feel to play but did not show tools during Saturday’s game that would lead me to believe he’d be anything more than a utility player in the major leagues. He has good hands and an arm strong enough to stay on the left side of the dirt but showed just fringy speed and below-average twitch. I’m skeptical about his ability to play shortstop as anything more than a fill-in, and think he likely migrates to second base as he reaches full maturity.

Any teenager who only strikes out 14.9% of the time in the Carolina league and 18% of the time (as of writing) in the Eastern League deserves credit for his bat-to-ball ability, and Garcia is not an exception, but his inability to drive the ball consistently leaves some cause for concern. Garcia’s hands and bat path are fine, but he does very little in the way of utilizing his lower half, which leads to him simply slapping at the ball and guiding it to all fields. This approach might work for an 80-grade runner, but it likely won’t work for someone like Garcia long-term. Ruling out the possibility of Garcia improving would be foolish given that he just turned 19 last month, so I will reserve final judgment as he continues to refine and improve his hitting mechanics. The current iteration of his swing, however, produces little impact. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Imagine being a pitcher who has to face the Angels this year. It’s not hard to figure out which batter you most need to prepare for. When the Angels played the Cubs last night, Albert Pujols batted third, which is a lot less imposing in 2019 than it was in 2008. Shohei Ohtani had the night off, which meant that Tommy La Stella was the best non-Trout bat in the lineup. He’s having a good year, as Jay Jaffe noted, but unfortunately for him, he’s still Tommy La Stella. Cesar Puello batted fifth, and hey, good for him. Still, though — the scouting report was probably just Mike Trout written in various fonts over and over again.

It’s safe to say that every game the Angels play, the opposing team has spent a lot of time trying to work out a way to get Trout out. Los Angeles has a robust 109 wRC+ this year among non-pitchers, which sounds good until you realize that non-Trout Angels have a 100 wRC+. The team is scuffling — two games below .500 in a division where you might need 100 wins to topple the Astros, and potentially a little lucky to be there given their BaseRuns record. The pitching staff is essentially made of duct tape and fervent prayers — Ty Buttrey leads the staff in both fWAR and RA/9 WAR, and their starting rotation looks like a horror story told to kids to keep them from becoming Angels fans.

Amidst this chaos, this unending deluge of mediocrity, Mike Trout is putting together another masterpiece of a season. It’s boring to say, almost — his 180 wRC+ is both the fourth-highest in baseball and the lowest Trout has recorded in the last three years. Being one of the best players in baseball is old hat for him. Still, he’s improving his craft incrementally, slowly shoring up weaknesses and adding to strengths. His unintentional walk rate, a gaudy 19%, is the highest of his career. His strikeout rate, a minuscule 16%, has never been lower. Trout’s 2019 might be the best he’s ever hit, a crazy thing to say about undoubtedly the best player in baseball.

Baseball is largely a game of failure and limitations, which makes talking about Trout’s plate discipline feel somewhat surreal. Consider this — Trout has started making contact with basically everything he swings at in the strike zone. His zone contact rate of 94.9% is sixth in baseball and the highest of his career. That’s strange, because for the most part, guys who make contact with everything are contact hitters who sacrifice power to put the ball in play. David Fletcher and his .137 ISO top the list.

This makes a rough kind of sense — hitting everything you swing at in the strike zone means you are probably putting some tough pitches in play, and cutting down on your swing to make more contact means those swings generally have less behind them. That, at least, is the logic that constrains mortals. Mike Trout started hitting everything in the strike zone, and he’s still slugging .600. That slugging percentage might be selling Trout short — he has the highest xSLG (a Baseball Savant statistic that predicts slugging percentage from angle and speed of hits) of his career, a gaudy .643.

What does making contact with every pitch in the strike zone look like? Well, in 2018, Trout was great, but he was great while being only very good against high and outside pitches. Take a look at the upper righthand corner of this chart, the percentage of swings he made contact on by zone in 2018:

Pitchers know about this marginal weakness, and they do their best to exploit it. The book on Trout is to get him high and away. Take a look at where pitchers are attacking him in 2019:

That’s good pitching right there. Find out where a hitter is most likely to get bad results, and aim for that spot. Maybe their focal point is a little too low, but the general idea of throwing away is certainly easy to see. Major league pitchers are tremendously skilled, and they spend countless hours perfecting their craft. That should work out to their advantage, right? Well, bad news, pitchers — this is Mike Trout we’re talking about here. Look at his contact rate in 2019:

It would be one thing to protect a weak point in your swing with some defensive hacks. Plenty of good hitters punch outside pitches the other way, sacrificing power for contact on pitches that are hard to drive. Again, though, Mike Trout isn’t “plenty of good hitters.” He’s the best hitter in baseball. Trout is punishing outside and high pitches in 2019, doing a tremendous amount of damage when he puts the ball in play:

You’re reading this chart right — Trout is now getting his greatest production on balls in play in the very part of the strike zone where pitchers are attacking him most. That, in a nutshell, is what pitching to Trout is like. You might think you’re attacking a weakness, doing your research to put yourself in an advantageous position. Trout’s better at adapting than you are; he’s better than everyone. He reacts to your changes faster than he can be solved.

Pitch location isn’t the only part of Trout’s plate discipline pitchers have focused on this year. They’ve changed how they attack him on the first pitch of a plate appearance, and Trout is yet again using that to his advantage. For years, the book on Trout was that he was patient on the first pitch to the point of somnolence; he basically never swung at first-pitch breaking balls, for instance. Over the past few years, Trout has turned this trend around, becoming increasingly aggressive on the first pitch — he swung at 19.7% of first pitches in 2017 and 18.3% in 2018, the two highest rates of his career.

To combat this trend, pitchers are going out of the zone on first pitches more than they ever have. Trout is seeing strikes on 47% of first pitches, down from his career average of 55% and below the major league average of 51%. This adjustment was largely out of self-preservation. Trout slugged 1.061 with a .485 batting average when he put the first pitch into play last year. He hit five home runs on first pitches, a career high. Sticking with get-me-over first pitch fastballs was no longer an option.

In classic Trout fashion, though, he’s turned pitchers’ adjustments into another tool in his tool belt. Now that pitchers throw him fewer first-pitch strikes, he’s simply swinging less. He’s down to a 17% swing rate on first pitches this year while still swinging at 27% of pitches in the zone. He’s also missing less — he’s swung and missed at five first pitches this year, a 2% rate that would be his lowest since 2015, the last year of his extreme passivity on first pitches. Between this improved swing discipline and pitchers avoiding the zone like the plague, Trout is falling behind in the count 52.9% of the time this year, a career low and 5.2% below last year’s level.

2019 is arguably Mike Trout’s finest batting season so far. His xwOBA of .473 is the highest it’s ever been and 30 points higher than his wOBA, suggesting that he’s been unlucky this year to put up “only” a 180 wRC+, the third-highest of his career. He has the highest walk rate in baseball and a strikeout rate in the lowest 21% of qualified batters. He’s getting on base at the highest rate in his career despite the lowest BABIP in his career (excluding his brief 2011). The two changes pitchers have made to how they approach him this year sure don’t seem to have worked.

Pitchers will try to make other adjustments. They’ll start challenging him in the strike zone more on the first pitch — maybe with offspeed pitches, something that pitchers mostly haven’t tried yet. They’ll aim inside, where Trout’s power is down this year. They’ll continue to hunt holes in his game, small edges that they can use to blunt Trout’s effectiveness.

But until I see some evidence to the contrary, I don’t think it will matter. Pitchers can adjust all they want, try any gambit they’d like. For the most part, it seems like adjusting to beat Trout only plays into his hands. Someday, Mike Trout will grow old. He’ll slow down, get worse at recognizing pitches, stop instilling terror into opposing pitchers the way he does now. That day still feels infinitely far off, though. For now, he’s three steps ahead, putting up unreal numbers while shrugging off regression. Pitchers can plan all they want. Trout won’t stop laughing his way around the bases any time soon.

A year ago, Kyle Freeland had a very good season. For some, it was almost too good. Here at FanGraphs, Freeland put up a 3.67 FIP, and playing half his games in Colorado meant a 4.2 WAR in over 200 innings and one of the 10 best pitching seasons in the National League. Freeland’s ERA was even better than his FIP, and with a 2.85 mark, his RA/9WAR was 7.5, the fifth-best mark in all of baseball. The distance between his ERA and FIP likely created a gap between those who believed Freeland was one of the best pitchers in baseball and merely a good one. The latter group thought that Freeland was in for some regression this year. After a rough two months, including time on the injured list, Freeland has been dispatched to the minors. That’s not regression. Allow me to explain.

Before being sent down, Freeland had a 6.37 FIP, a 7.13 ERA, and had given up 16 homers in 12 starts after giving up 17 in all of 2018. After last season, it’s possible some were expecting another sub-three ERA, but doing so would have been unrealistic. Expecting some regression might have meant that Freeland’s BABIP would go up from the .285 where it was a year ago and his LOB% would go down from 83%. Those numbers wouldn’t affect his 3.67 FIP, but it might take his ERA closer to his FIP. Maybe Freeland’s 8.5% HR/FB would creep up closer to average, leading to a higher FIP and ERA. In fact, projections considered many of those factors and forecast Freeland for a roughly average season with an ERA and FIP around 4.50. If regression had come for Kyle Freeland, that might have been what it looked like. If Freeland were pitching just like last season, we might expect a similar FIP and worse ERA. The problem is that Freeland isn’t pitching like he did last season. This isn’t regression (or reversion). This is Kyle Freeland being not as good of a pitcher as he was a year ago.

Freeland is a command lefty who excelled last season by pitching to his spots. In late 2018, Jeff Sullivan wrote about how good Freeland’s command had been all season, using multiple heat maps. We’ll engage in a similar exercise below, showing Freeland last year and this year. First, here are all of his pitches in 2019 compared to all of his pitches last season:

Read the rest of this entry »

Draft Week rolls on with breakdowns of all the picks from Day 1. We don’t do grades, as it would be silly to project how these picks are going to work out five-plus years from now the day after they happen, and because you can get a sense of our opinion of a pick from our rankings and the tone of our comments. As you can see above, there will be a podcast reviews Days 1 and 2 with a couple of minutes spent on each team, then a notebook wrap-up of the odds and ends we’ve heard when the draft concludes. For more complete reports and tool grades on these players, head over to THE BOARD.

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 — Alex Cobb, Ryan O’Rourke, and Carl Willis — on how they learned and developed their splitters.

———

Alex Cobb, Baltimore Orioles

“I started throwing it in high school. When you’re that age, you’ll see things on TV and try to replicate them — kind of like Backyard Baseball. I thought a splitter sounded cool, so I split my fingers on the baseball, got some action on it, and got some good results with it. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about whether it would make sense for one team to “blow up the draft” by ignoring the bonus slotting system for one year, paying a premium for the top amateur talent, and incurring the maximum financial penalty. Then they discuss Ben’s new book about baseball’s player-development revolution, The MVP Machine: How Baseball’s New Nonconformists Are Using Data to Build Better Players, which is out today. (Go get it now!)

Audio intro: The Tragically Hip, "Machine"
Audio outro: George Harrison, "Try Some, Buy Some"

Link to Passan on the MLB draft
Link to first excerpt from The MVP Machine
Link to Foley’s book-signing event
Link to order The MVP Machine

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