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Tuesday afternoon, Freddy Galvis, 29, signed a one-year contract to play baseball for the Toronto Blue Jays. The deal guarantees Galvis $5 million next year and either $1 or $5.5 million in 2020, depending on whether or not the Blue Jays exercise their team option on the contract. Even though contract expectations for Galvis were maybe a little bit higher than that coming into the offseason (you guessed he’d get two years and about $15 million), the deal he ended up accepting still seems like a pretty good get for a guy who posted a .294 wOBA last year and hasn’t ever posted a wRC+ above 85 (last year’s mark).

In Toronto, Galvis will join, at least to begin with, 25-year-old Lourdes Gurriel Jr. as a candidate for the Blue Jays’ starting shortstop job out of spring training, but he will likely thereafter end up spelling the younger man as a defensive replacement late in games and perhaps also against tough righties. Gurriel, the younger brother of Houston’s Yuli and son of Cuban baseball legend Lourdes Sr., had a reasonably strong debut season at the plate in 2018 (his .446 slugging percentage was particularly promising, paired as it was with a modest-for-today 22% strikeout rate) but injured his knee in August and his hamstring in September and worried observers with occasionally puzzling footwork at short.

In Galvis, the Blue Jays have an insurance policy against a scenario in which the bottom falls out of Gurriel’s offense (because he doesn’t walk very much, almost all of his value at the plate comes from his power stroke) and his defensive lapses therefore become intolerable. Galvis isn’t better as a hitter — in 2018, in fact, he was about 20% worse, at least as measured by wRC+ — but he’s always had a solid defensive reputation and, as a seven-year veteran, his approach at the plate is enough of a known quantity that it is unlikely to fall entirely off a cliff. If Gurriel’s offensive performance ever gets to the point that it begins to look like Galvis’, the deciding factor will be the defense, and Galvis is likely to win that battle. Read the rest of this entry »

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 Los Angeles Dodgers.

Batters

Overall, the Dodgers still project as being among the best teams in baseball, but something feels curiously unsatisfying about the team’s offseason. The team appears to be shuffling the outfield again, but is the Cody Bellinger/A.J. Pollock/Guy in CF While A.J. Pollock is Injured/Maybe Alex Verdugo configuration really any better than the Bellinger/Joc Pederson/Yasiel Puig option — while still having Alex Wood and Kyle Farmer but not the Reds prospects — would have been? Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Pollock is a better player than Pederson, but riskier given his health history, and ZiPS has always been slightly underwhelmed by Verdugo. Given the team’s positional flexibility and their theoretical pocketbook, this depth chart could still change considerably over the next month; despite the tea leaves suggesting they’re out on Bryce Harper, I remain less than 100% convinced.

One wonders how much of Los Angeles’ apparent lack of interest in a big name isn’t a matter of feeling miserly, but is simply a reflection of the state of the NL West, which looks a lot less dangerous for the reigning champs than last year. Barring big changes, Arizona’s in a mostly-rebuilding phase, the Giants probably saw their last real opportunity to compete with their current core end last summer, and only part of San Diego’s prospect crop will be reaped this year, though a move for Manny Machado or J.T. Realmuto could accelerate the Padres’ timeline. That just leaves the Rockies, who while improved with Daniel Murphy at first, are unlikely to get quite as much awesomeness from their best players as they received in 2018. Colorado’s the biggest threat to the Dodgers in the division, but they’re also a passive team apparently content with their holes.

ZiPS is sold on Max Muncy, in large part due to his velocity data, the magnitude of his 2018 breakout, and the fact that his translated 2017 performance of .264/.351/.420 was more-than-adequate. That’s enough to effectively counteract his disappointing prior major league performance and meh-minus minor league translations of .218/.317/.346 and .219/.282/.359. In the end, ZiPS sees a lot more downside risk in Muncy’s batting average than his power, power being a difficult trick to fake.

Pitchers
Clayton Kershaw’s projection has to be the best OMG THAT’S HORRIBLE projection that ZiPS has ever spat out. The fact is, he’s missed time due to injury in four of the last five seasons and while no individual injury has been of the severe variety — the sort where ligaments are replaced or shoulders reconstructed — there’s evidence that he’s just not at the same level as he was from 2013-2016. ZiPS is still projecting him to be a star, but you can’t ignore his continued velocity decline and the loss of 20% of his strikeouts. That was enough to drop his yearly top comp from Sandy Koufax to “only” Tom Glavine. A brief aside: Kershaw was actually slightly easier to make contact against in 2018 than the average pitcher, which is really weird.

The bottom-line WAR projections aren’t generally in the stratosphere for the Dodgers, but that’s in large part due to the fact that the pitching staff has a checkered health record and ZiPS is only projecting Kershaw to qualify for the rate stat leaderboard. What the Dodgers don’t have in health they’ve been forced to make up for in depth, and of the pitchers on the 40-man roster, ZiPS projects a shocking 15 to have a league-average ERA or better (when adjusting for park, of course). Just on the major league roster, ZiPS sees both Caleb Ferguson and Ross Stripling as perfectly adequate fallback options if (when?) the rotation starts making DL trips.

I believe that Kenley Jansen is the first player to get a top comp of a prime Mariano Rivera (a few have gotten him as a minor-league starter). Seems kinda poetic given Jansen’s cutter, which ZiPS doesn’t actually know about, though he’s unlikely to retire as the best reliever in major league history. From a comp standpoint, a team shouldn’t be able to complain too much when a quarter of their pitching staff has Hall of Famers — easy ones rather than guys that just happened to be Frankie Frisch’s teammates — as their top comparisons.

Bench and Prospects

ZiPS doesn’t see the Dodger farm system as being as strong as it did in the last few years, but there’s still a lot of future major league value here. ZiPS isn’t on the Alex Verdugo star bandwagon, but at least sees him as an above-average starter in his prime, and the projections for Keibert Ruiz are of a similar level of quality. ZiPS thinks that both Dustin May and Dennis Santana wouldn’t embarrass themselves if dragooned into duty on the major league roster, and even Yadier Alvarez, a pitching prospect who a set of algorithms ought to have issues properly appreciating, gets a projection in the same zip code as league-average. ZiPS thinks that both Will Smith and Gavin Lux will be league-average regulars, but sees a significant quality dropoff after that pair. That’s not including Jeter Downs, who will get a projection for ZiPS Top 100 list, but I avoid giving official seasonal projections for players who’ve only played in the Midwest League outside of rookie ball unless I’m forced to by circumstance.

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.

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Perhaps the most commonly discussed issue with the current arbitration system is the pervasiveness of traditional metrics, like home runs and runs batted in, over more advanced metrics like WAR and wRC+. Last time, we talked about how arbitrators use those metrics, and how they have slowly begun to garner greater acceptance as part of arbitration decisions, despite misgivings from agents some agents about whether or not they are properly understood or used by arbitrators. This time, we’re going to explore in greater detail the metrics and evidence itself – and see where there might be a possibility for improvement.

The Collective Bargaining Agreement provides a fairly straightforward list of criteria arbitrators are allowed to consider when ruling on a player’s salary.

The criteria will be the quality of the Player’s contribution to his Club during the past season (including but not limited to his overall performance, special qualities of leadership and public appeal), the length and consistency of his career contribution, the record of the Player’s past compensation, comparative baseball salaries . . ., the existence of any physical or mental defects on the part of the Player, and the recent performance record of the Club including but not limited to its League standing and attendance as an indication of public acceptance . . . . Except as set forth in subsections 10(b) and 10(c) below, any evidence may be submitted which is relevant to the above criteria, and the arbitration panel shall assign such weight to the evidence as shall appear appropriate under the circumstances. The arbitration panel shall, except for a Player with five or more years of Major League service, give particular attention, for comparative salary purposes, to the contracts of Players with Major League service not exceeding one annual service group above the Player’s annual service group. This shall not limit the ability of a Player or his representative, because of special accomplishment, to argue the equal relevance of salaries of Players without regard to service, and the arbitration panel shall give whatever weight to such argument as is deemed appropriate.

Helpfully, the CBA also gives us evidentiary rules outlining what criteria is not admissible:

(i) The financial position of the Player and the Club;

(ii) Press comments, testimonials or similar material bearing on the performance of either the Player or the Club, except that recognized annual Player awards for playing excellence shall not be excluded;

(iii) Offers made by either Player or Club prior to arbitration;

(iv) The cost to the parties of their representatives, attorneys, etc.;

(v) Salaries in other sports or occupations.

Here’s further detail on what can be used:

Only publicly available statistics shall be admissible. For purposes of this provision, publicly available statistics shall include data available through subscription-only websites (e.g., Baseball Prospectus). Statistics and data generated through the use of performance technology, wearable technology, or “STATCAST”, whether publicly available or not, shall not be admissible.

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There aren’t many candidates for best player on the Kansas City Royals. Salvador Perez is a holdover from the team’s run to consecutive World Series’, including one title. Adalberto Mondesi has just 500 plate appearances across three seasons, but he showed considerable promise last season with 14 homers, 32 steals, and a 114 wRC+ in just half a season. The third candidate, and the subject of this post, is Whit Merrifield. The Royals second baseman has been the club’s best player over the past two seasons by putting eight wins, with the only other players above four (Lorenzo Cain and Eric Hosmer) not even on the team a season ago. Merrifield was a late bloomer, not playing a full season until he was 29 years old in 2017, and that makes him an unusual contract extension candidate, but he and the Royals reached a reasonable deal to buy out his remaining arbitration years.

At first glance, the terms of the deal look incredibly slight for Merrifield, getting just $16.25 million guaranteed with $2 million in performance bonuses, per Jon Morosi. With a second straight slow winter for free agents and Manny Machado and Bryce Harper unable to get the long-term deals they desire so far, seeing an All-Star second baseman coming off a very good season settle for such a small guarantee screams out as another piece of evidence of owners getting the better of players. However, that’s not really the case here due to Merrifield’s age and service time.

Merrifield got a late start to his major league career due to a slow crawl up the minors. He was solid in his first full minor league season, posting an average line in High-A back in 2011, and when he repeated the league in 2012, he was roughly the same player and then struggled in a brief promotion to Double-A. The next season he was the same roughly average player at Double-A. He then tore through Double-A in 2014 and held his own in Triple-A, getting to the cusp of the majors, but he took a step back the following season back in Triple-A, entering the 2016 campaign at 27 years old without a callup.

Finally making the big leagues, Merrifield proved to be an above-average player thanks to decent defense, great baserunning, and a roughly average bat. He broke out last season, increasing his walk rate, posting slightly-below-average power numbers with a great BABIP on his way to a 120 wRC+. His 45 steals in 55 tries plus good running -numbers on balls in play added another seven runs above average, resulting in a five-win season. His projections next season are closer to three wins, but there is little doubt that Merrifield is a good, solid player who will help the Royals win more games than they would have without him.

Unfortunately for Merrifield, he enters the 2019 season with just two-and-a-half seasons in the bigs. He’s not yet eligible for arbitration, and he won’t be eligible for free agency until after the 2022 season. Players with Merrifield’s service time and good track records in the big leagues are often approached about contract extensions. They are looking at one more season at the league-minimum salary, and teams take advantage of that lack of security by offering players millions of dollars. In exchange for that security, teams generally insist on a year or two of the player’s free agent seasons at a discounted rate. Those seasons often become massive bargains as players push out their free agent seasons and teams don’t have to pay for any of the player’s decline seasons. Whit Merrifield presents an interesting case.

When Merrifield hits free agency for the first time, he will be 34 years old. While the Royals certainly like Merrifield for his on-field contributions now, he’s not likely to be the same player at 34 that he is right now. Those free agent years might not be particularly valuable for the Royals, which lessens the club’s interest in guaranteeing money for those years. They might be interested in an option year, but that makes less sense for Merrifield. Security makes sense for Merrifield as opposed to playing out this season and then going to arbitration, where he might get around $4 million if he puts together a solid campaign. If he keeps playing well, he might get $6 million or $7 million in 2021, and then $10 million or $12 million in 2022. Going year-to-year in arbitration probably gets him around $20 million or so if he keeps playing well.

In the end, Merrifield gets his security and the Royals take a 20% discount on the likely outcome. This deal is reminiscent of the one the Twins signed Brian Dozier to four years ago. That contract paid Dozier $20 million over four seasons. Value-wise, Dozier had similar numbers to Merrifield with 7.4 WAR over the previous two years and a 4.5 WAR season just prior to signing the extension. Because Dozier had numbers that pay in arbitration, namely homers, he was likely to receive more money in arbitration than Merrifield. Dozier was also two years younger, making a decline less likely. It was important to Dozier at that time to be able to hit free agency now as opposed to a few years from now. A disappointing 2018 season meant just a one-year deal for Dozier, although if he had kept playing at his 2014-2017 level, he would have been able to cash in on free agency, even in this slow market.

Merrifield’s contract is just an update of the Dozier contract, where teams get some cost certainty and a discount in the arbitration years while the player gets security and doesn’t give up any free agent seasons. These contracts don’t happen often because there is little incentive for the team compared to most of the guarantees they offer to players before they hit arbitration. If the players want security, the cost is generally a free agent year or two. Merrifield’s late age compared to his service time peers created an opportunity for the Royals and their second baseman to reach a deal, and given these factors, it is a pretty reasonable one for both sides.

On Thursday, word broke that the Mariners had signed 30-year-old righty Hunter Strickland to a one-year , $1.3 million deal with incentives totaling about the same for games pitched and finished. On Friday afternoon, the Mariners’ division-mates in Oakland announced a deal of their own, for one year and for $4 million, with 35-year-old Marco Estrada. Both pitchers are 2019 bounce-back candidates, and both will spend at least a portion of 2019 in the AL West. Let’s discuss.

Given the terms of his deal, it seems reasonable to assume that the Mariners hope Strickland will be able to step into the ninth-inning role recently vacated by Edwin Díaz, perhaps in concert with Cory Gearren or Anthony Swarzak, or perhaps all by his lonesome, depending on how things shake out in spring training. That kind of uncertainty is the natural consequence of entering 2019 with a bullpen that’s lost Díaz, James Pazos, Juan Nicaso, and Alex Colomé to trade this winter and seems unlikely to welcome free agents Nick Vincent, Zach Duke, and Adam Warren back to Seattle. Seattle had an excellent bullpen in 2018 but doesn’t, in any meaningful sense, have that bullpen any more. Strickland is one of the new guard, here to carry the M’s over the water into the next phase of their rebuild.

Which makes the question of whether Strickland will be any good in 2019 something of an irrelevance to the Mariners’ long-term plans — if he’s good, he can be traded midseason; if he’s bad, it’s “just” $1.3 million — although it presumably remains of considerable importance to Strickland himself. For my money, I’d bet against renewed success in 2019. After routinely sitting in the low triple-digits with his four-fastball during his first three years in the majors (2014-2016), Strickland’s mean velocity on the pitch has dropped to 95.7 miles per hour, and his whiff percentage on the pitch has dropped from its high of 18% in 2015 to 8% last year. Those fundamentals have generated poor results across the board:

It’s hard to know what precisely brought on Strickland’s decline, but given that fastballs don’t usually get faster with age and that Strickland’s particular fastball is already getting beaten up at 95-96 miles per hour, it’s hard to be too sanguine about his future. Then again, given the contract he signed and the Mariners’ current insistence on trading away all their best players, there really is very little downside to this deal for Seattle. Just maybe reinforce the clubhouse doors.

There’s far more reason to be optimistic about the A’s bounce-back candidate, Estrada, despite the fact that his 2018 was if anything even worse than Strickland’s (the 5.64 ERA and 1.82 HR/9 are the figures that jump out at you most immediately). For one thing, Estrada has never really relied on his velocity to generate outs and so last year’s mile-per-hour slide from 90.1 to 89.0 on the fastball isn’t really something to worry about — in fact, it puts him right around where he was in 2016, when he put up a 3.48 ERA over 176 innings for the Blue Jays. For another, Estrada’s game has always been up in the zone and so (a) bad years like 2018 were always going to happen from time to time and (b) you don’t have to wish for too much positive regression on the HR/9 to get him back into a range (say, 2016’s 1.18, or his career 1.41 mark) where you know he can have success.

In Oakland, Estrada will join Mike Fiers, who re-signed with the club in December, and holdovers/questionable starting pitchers Daniel Mengden, Chris Bassitt, and Frankie Montas in an A’s rotation that will be held together by hope and duct tape until Jharel Cotton (Tommy John), A.J. Puk (also Tommy John), and Sean Manaea (shoulder surgery) return to the field at some point mid-season (and maybe Jesús Luzardo comes up at some point). Given the circumstances, and the budget to which the club has decided to hew, Estrada is exactly the kind of guy you’d want to see the A’s sign: healthy (he’s never had an arm injury we know about), inexpensive, and a plausible candidate for solid numbers in 2019. If he’s good in the early going next year, he can slot in at the back end of a rotation that has a reasonable shot at the Wild Card if everything goes right. If he’s terrible, chances are the A’s are too, and — again — it’s just $4 million. Even for the A’s, that’s manageable — their 2018 payroll was $66 million and their commitments for 2019 total just $69 million so far. What could go wrong?

Save for the actual inductions of this year’s six honorees — the late Roy Halladay, Edgar Martinez, Mike Mussina, and Mr Unanimity, Mariano Rivera, elected by the BBWAA last week and Harold Baines and Lee Smith by the Today’s Game Era Committee last month — the Hall of Fame circus is leaving town, at least until the July 19-22 induction weekend in Cooperstown. Before it departs, however, it’s time engage in my sixth annual attempt to gaze into the crystal ball to see what the next five elections will hold.

Admittedly, this is an exercise requiring some amount of imagination and speculation, though it is grounded in my research into the candidates and the history and mechanics of the voting. Having said that, the past half-decade of changes to the process raises the question of how valuable that history is, at least as a road map. As a response to the logjam of qualified candidates, the Hall’s own truncation of candidacies from 15 years to 10 — less to clean up the ballots than to move the intractable debate over PED-related candidates out of the spotlight — and its rejection of any variation from the long-standing 10-slot rule, the writers have responded by setting and breaking records for slots used per ballot, and for ballots filled to the max. As a result, the BBWAA has elected 20 players over the last six years, five more than in any other six-year stretch in voting history. We’ve had three quartets elected over the past five years, compared to two (plus the original 1936 quintet) over the previous 78 years.

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11:59

Dan Szymborski: OH GOD WE’RE LIVE PANIC TIME

11:59

Dan Szymborski: Yup

12:00

Dan Szymborski: Shoulder injuries are! If forced to guess, I’d guess that he was fullly healthy, but not yet full strength

12:00

Dan Szymborski: If that makes sense.

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