Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan dissect the trade that sent catcher J.T. Realmuto from the Marlins to the Phillies for Jorge Alfaro, Sixto Sanchez, and Will Stewart, honor the legacy of Frank Robinson, and then (22:28) bring back 88-year-old 1950s two-way player and podcast king Johnny O’Brien, along with his 24-year-old grandson, current Tampa Bay Rays minor leaguer Riley O’Brien, for an inter-generational conversation about baseball and player development, touching on Robinson and the late Bob Friend, the relationship between Johnny and Riley, life in the minors, baseball’s salary structure, changes in how players train and spend their offseasons, advances in velocity, strikeouts, and technology, and much more (plus a postscript on MLB’s just-concluded Mariners and Dodgers investigations).

Audio intro: Real Estate, "It’s Real"
Audio interstitial: Frank Sinatra, Gene Kelly, and Jules Munshin, "O’Brien to Ryan to Goldberg"
Audio outro: The Byrds, "John Riley"

Link to Jeff’s post on Realmuto and Marlins Park
Link to Jeff on Realmuto as baseball’s best catcher
Link to Jeff on the Realmuto trade
Link to first interview with Johnny
Link to Seattle Times article on the O’Brien twins
Link to video of Riley
Link to SI report on the Dodgers and Kapler
Link to SABR Award voting
Link to preorder The MVP Machine

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Everyone is waiting for the Phillies to sign one of Bryce Harper and Manny Machado. It seems almost inevitable that the Phillies will sign one of Bryce Harper and Manny Machado. There’s some chance it even happens today! Who knows? But while the world has waited for the Phillies to signal that they’re going for it, they’ve already added a new everyday outfielder in Andrew McCutchen. They’ve already added a new everyday shortstop in Jean Segura. They’ve already added a new late-inning reliever in David Robertson. And now they’ve added a new regular catcher.

Phillies get:

• J.T. Realmuto

Marlins get:

• Sixto Sanchez
• Jorge Alfaro
• Will Stewart
• $250,000 international bonus-pool money

And so ends the drawn-out, months-long Realmuto sweepstakes, that saw him connected to a couple handfuls of teams. Just last week, I thought Realmuto was going to be traded to the Reds. The Phillies came almost out of nowhere. But, like the Reds, they’ve spent the offseason acting aggressively, and I can’t imagine they’re finished. The NL Central is going to be a hell of a division. And, the NL East is going to be a hell of a division. The Marlins are going to get beat up on the regular as a consequence, but then, they knew what they were getting into.

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It feels like, any minute now, J.T. Realmuto will officially be on the move. He might even get officially traded while I’m busy writing this article. According to the latest reports, Realmuto is likely to be dealt to the Phillies, in exchange for a package including Sixto Sanchez and Jorge Alfaro (plus more). I don’t know what might be left for the teams to overcome. Again, press releases seem almost inevitable. With Sanchez as the centerpiece, the Marlins ought to be satisfied.

If and when this reaches a resolution, it’ll mark the end of a drawn-out sweepstakes. Realmuto always seemed like baseball’s most probable trade candidate. As much as the Marlins have wanted to keep him around, a contract extension requires interest from both parties, and Realmuto has wanted out. So a trade was going to happen. A trade involving some manner of top prospect was going to happen. What we didn’t know was where Realmuto would ultimately end up. He’s now linked to the Phillies. He’s been linked to the Reds. He’s been linked to the Braves, and the Padres, and the Dodgers, and the Rays, and even more teams on top of that. A whole lot of baseball has wanted J.T. Realmuto.

So let’s talk about that for a few minutes. For many of you, this will be simple review. But, why has Realmuto been in such demand? It’s because he might well be the best catcher in the game.

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Late Wednesday afternoon, word broke that the Royals were “closing in” on a one-year contract with 30-year-old reliever Brad Boxberger. Jon Heyman reported the deal will be for $2.2 million guaranteed, plus $1 million in incentives. Boxberger wasn’t one of our Top 50 Free Agents here at FanGraphs, so we don’t have a crowdsourced contract prediction on record, but his deal strikes me as right around what you’d expect given recent reliever deals (a rejuvenated Óliver Pérez, for example, just signed for $2.5 million, albeit with an option for 2020) and the fact that the Diamondbacks chose to non-tender Boxberger last fall rather than pay the $4.9 million he was expected to get in arbitration.

Boxberger was an All-Star as recently as 2015, when he saved 41 games and posted a 27% strikeout rate for the Rays. But he struggled badly in 2016 and ended the year with a 17% walk rate and an ugly 4.81 ERA. 2017 was a bit of an improvement on both fronts (the walk rate was back down to 9%, and the ERA to 3.38), but Boxberberg’s 2018 campaign in Arizona saw the seesaw dip back yet again, with a 4.39 ERA and 14% free pass rate. The difference between those two bad 2018 numbers, and his two good ones — a 30 percent strikeout rate and 32 saves — is probably what led Arizona to cut ties with their closer last fall. Arbitrators like save totals perhaps more than they should, and with Boxberger’s season having trended in the wrong direction (compare a first-half ERA of 3.06 to a second-half mark of 7.00), Arizona was clearly ready to move on.

How you feel about Boxberger’s ability to return to form in 2019 depends a great deal on whether you believe he can recover some fastball velocity, or offset the loss with an adjustment to his off-speed offerings. With the exception of a slider that he throws fairly infrequently (just 3% of the time in 2018), Boxberger is basically a two-pitch guy: he’s got a four-seam fastball that he throws up and away to lefties and down and away to righties, and a changeup, which he throws down and away from lefties and just plain down to righties. Unfortunately for the reliever, a slight decrease in fastball velocity (from 94 mph just three years ago to 92 mph last year) without an attendant decrease in changeup velocity has left the pitches too easy for batters to distinguish from each other, and last year saw Boxberger generate fewer swings on pitches outside the zone (28%) than ever before. When he was humming in 2015, that figure was 34%.

Still, if Boxberger is able to get some mustard back on his fastball or otherwise distinguish it more meaningfully from his changeup, there’s little reason to think he can’t put up strikeout numbers that more closely resemble last year’s impressive mark while simultaneously reducing his walk rate to a more reasonable level. If he can, it’ll be a boon for a Kansas City bullpen that was, to put it mildly, atrocious last year. Their collective FIP of 4.85 was, by a fair margin, the worst in the game (the runner-up Mets posted a 4.61 FIP; the 24-point gap between the two teams is the same as the difference between the Mets and the seventh-worst Reds). Their 5.04 ERA was second-worst. They struck out a league-low 7.31 batters per nine innings, and walked 4.15 (sixth-worst). Kelvin Herrera was pretty good for a little while there, but then he got traded. Brad Keller was ok, too. The rest of the Kansas City ‘pen was pretty awful. By WAR, only six teams in the last twenty years have been worse:

In signing Boxberger, the Royals have taken a positive step toward correcting their biggest weakness. According to Baseball-Reference, Kansas City has acquired nine players since November 1, excluding Boxberger. Five are position players. The other four are relievers. Of those four, just one — Jason Adam, signed as a free agent in mid-December — threw any major league relief innings at all in 2018. Another, Michael Ynoa, had some modest success for the White Sox in 2016 and 2017 but was released in March of 2018 and did not pitch in affiliated ball last season. Andrés Machado was last seen posting a 22.09 ERA for the 2017 Royals, and barely counts as an acquisition; he was non-tendered on November 30th and re-signed to a minor-league deal on December 3. Winston Abreu is 41 and last pitched in the majors in 2009, when he threw 3.2 innings for Tampa Bay and 2.1 Cleveland. I wish them all well, but All-Star arms they are not. Boxberger was, and at least could be again.

Even if the Royals had signed Andrew Miller, Adam Ottavino, Jeurys Familia, David Robertson, and Craig Kimbrel this offseason, they likely wouldn’t have a winning team in 2019. As things stand, our depth charts have them besting only the Orioles in total roster WAR. There is, clearly, a lot of room to grow their win total without threatening Cleveland or even the Twins for the AL Central crown. But what we can say at this point is this: the 2018 Royals had one of the very worst bullpens of the last 20 years, and yesterday they went out and did something about it, despite having no real expectation of winning anything at all in 2019. I still think they could stand to bring on a few more relief pitchers, but in this era in which 30 teams seem to be in competition for the 2022 World Series but only ten or so are in competition for the one this October, there’s at least some consolation in what they did yesterday.

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for more than half a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Oakland Athletics.

Batters

From the projections, one can see why the A’s let Jed Lowrie go so easily, despite his legitimate star-level performance in 2017 and ’18. Five Oakland infielders — the starters plus Franklin Barreto — project to be league-average or better. Now, none of them project to reach the level of Lowrie’s 4.9 WAR in 2018, but then again, neither does Lowrie, and mid-30s middle infielders tend to have pretty steep aging curves. And really, if anyone thought Lowrie was going to perform at an All-Star level again in 2019, he likely would have done better than two years and $20 million. Jurickson Profar projects to be a worthy replacement for Lowrie, and his return from literally years of injury and then underperformance is one of my favorite stories in baseball.

Except for catcher and the four-headed chimera in left field — at least, as our depth charts have it figured so far — the A’s project to be average or better, and sometimes significantly so, at every position. Perhaps ZiPS is trying to do penance for missing on the A’s by something like 20 wins in 2018.

Don’t get too excited about the Matt Olson comp; this version is from when Ortiz was still in the “Wait, is that the same guy as David Arias?” portion of his career, before he became Big Papi.

Pitchers

Ok, the highs are not very high. That’s due in large part to the fact that ZiPS is projecting fairly low innings totals for Oakland’s pitchers across the board. The system is aware of the injuries to Sean Manaea and Andrew Triggs in very general terms, so these aren’t theoretical “healthy” projections. As such, Manaea’s projection isn’t unexpected, but Triggs’s was a legitimate surprise to me. But again, I’m going to de-wind your sails a little bit by noting that ZiPS sees the Triggs injury as a generic “shoulder” ailment because I don’t have the data on thoracic outlet syndrome recoveries that I do with those from Tommy John. Regardless, this is an injury that you really don’t want.

The rotation’s highs may not be very high, but ZiPS sees the group as incredibly deep. 18 pitchers project to be worth at least one WAR if playing in the majors, and though a few of them are relievers (Blake Treinen, Lou Trivino, and Joakim Soria) and Brett Anderson is a free agent, that’s still a lot of options.

Bench and Prospects

I hope that someday I can love somebody or something the way ZiPS loves Jesus Luzardo. No, the computer isn’t projecting him to actually have Steve Carlton’s career, but who wouldn’t take that as a top comp? ZiPS already sees Luzardo as the team’s best starting pitcher, a pretty shocking projection for a guy who started the season in A-ball and whose parent club isn’t, say, the Baltimore Orioles.

It also interests me that ZiPS pegs Sean Murphy as the team’s best catching option. I’m definitely interested to see where he falls on the McDongenhagen prospect list; he ranked sixth last year, but after a .285/.361/.489 year and a finish at Triple-A, I would imagine he’s moved up. Conversely, Oakland cooled on Dustin Fowler and now largely sees him as a fourth outfielder. Overall, ZiPS sees a lot more of interest in the minor league pitchers than the hitters.

One pedantic note for 2019: for the WAR graphic, I’m using FanGraphs’ depth chart playing time, not the playing time ZiPS spits out, so there will be occasional differences in WAR totals.

Ballpark graphic courtesy Eephus League. Depth charts constructed by way of those listed here at site.

Disclaimer: ZiPS projections are computer-based projections of performance. Performances have not been allocated to predicted playing time in the majors — many of the players listed above are unlikely to play in the majors at all in 2019. ZiPS is projecting equivalent production — a .240 ZiPS projection may end up being .280 in AAA or .300 in AA, for example. Whether or not a player will play is one of many non-statistical factors one has to take into account when predicting the future.

Players are listed with their most recent teams, unless I have made a mistake. This is very possible, as a lot of minor-league signings go generally unreported in the offseason.

ZiPS’ projections are based on the American League having a 4.29 ERA and the National League having a 4.15 ERA.

Players who are expected to be out due to injury are still projected. More information is always better than less information, and a computer isn’t the tool that should project the injury status of, for example, a pitcher who has had Tommy John surgery.

Both hitters and pitchers are ranked by projected zWAR — which is to say, WAR values as calculated by me, Dan Szymborski, whose surname is spelled with a z. WAR values might differ slightly from those which appear in full release of ZiPS. Finally, I will advise anyone against — and might karate chop anyone guilty of — merely adding up WAR totals on a depth chart to produce projected team WAR.

You’re all a great resource, and I love a good poll. I just polled you on Tuesday! In light of how this offseason has gone, I asked whether you’d prefer an MLB-style offseason, or an NBA-style offseason. Sure, the timing of the poll might’ve somewhat biased the results, but, anyway, thousands of you have voted, and two-thirds of you say you’d prefer an NBA-esque feeding frenzy. Yeah, things would die down almost as quickly as they picked up, but that must be a hell of a high, when all the action happens at once. Baseball could never contend with that.

Now I’m back to poll again, because once more I want to solicit your opinions. MLB and the MLBPA have been talking, and as you can read in this article from Jeff Passan, the two sides have exchanged several proposed changes to the game’s competitive and economic structure. Nothing has actually been agreed to yet, and most of the proposals will remain on paper, but for now, we all get to consider a bunch of ideas. You might find some of them agreeable. You might find some of them disagreeable. That’s why I want to collect information.

As far as I can tell, Passan highlighted ten different proposals. You’ll find them below. Some of them are more vague than others, but we can make do with what we have. For each proposal, I’ll offer a brief explanation. And then there are two polls. The first simply asks whether you approve or disapprove of the proposal, as you understand it. The second asks how much you actually care. Are you very passionate, or is it a struggle to so much as muster an opinion? I look forward to the results from running these in tandem. I’ll probably revisit the data later this week.

Off we go! Thanks in advance for your collective participation.

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With spring training just around the corner, I should remind you that you should feel safe ignoring just about everything anyone says. There’s so much noise, and so little signal. It makes sense that it would be that way, to be sure — it’s an optimistic time of year — but optimism has a tenuous relationship with the reality of the future. Every clubhouse has a great group of guys. Every team is talented enough to surprise some people. Every injury is buried in the past. Every new pitch is going to miss bats.

People say optimistic things about themselves, and coaches say optimistic things about strategy implementation. Here’s how these players are going to platoon. Here’s how the bullpen is going to shake out. Here’s how the team will fold in more shifts. How many times have we heard coaches say their clubs are going to run more often? The clubs typically don’t run more often. It’s just a thing to say when it’s still theoretical. When the games start to count, only then can you test one’s commitment to an idea.

With all of this in mind, I’d like to bring your attention to the 2018 Mets. The 2018 Mets operated under a new pitching coach, in Dave Eiland. Like many other coaches, Eiland voiced some ideas in spring training. But out of that fog, the Mets did something concrete. As is common, there was an idea. As is uncommon, there was subsequent follow-through.

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