One of the jokes floating around the winter meetings this week in Las Vegas has been that activity has been low because Jerry Dipoto has been sick. As it turns out, the Mariners went so far as to take Dipoto to a local hospital for observation. That means the Mariners have understandably been operating at less than 100%. But that still didn’t preclude a meetings-closing three-way swap, which Dipoto at least partially engineered from his hospital bed. It is only ever so barely a three-way trade, as opposed to being two separate trades, but allow me to put this together for you.

Mariners

• GET:
  • Edwin Encarnacion
  • Indians draft pick (No. 77)
  • $5 million
• LOSE:
  • Carlos Santana
  • $6 million

Indians

• GET:
  • Carlos Santana
  • Jake Bauers
  • $6 million
• LOSE:
  • Edwin Encarnacion
  • Yandy Diaz
  • Cole Sulser
  • No. 77 draft pick

Rays

• GET:
  • Yandy Diaz
  • Cole Sulser
• LOSE:
  • Jake Bauers
  • $5 million

As noted, this is almost just two independent trades, both involving the Indians. The only thing that really links them together is the $5 million the Rays are paying, which is ending up with the Mariners. This is half a bad-contract swap, and half an interesting-young-player swap. But since it’s all pushed together as one, we can look at this on a team-by-team basis. Might as well start with the Mariners.

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With the end of the Winter Meetings comes the Rule 5 draft, where every team dreams about acquiring Johan Santana for a token sum of cash and often ends up with…less, or possibly nobody at all.

The highlights from the list of players taken in Rule 5 drafts, or its predecessor-drafts, is mighty impressive. On the sunny side, you have two Hall of Famers (Hack Wilson, Roberto Clemente), a couple of players who should have gotten more Hall of Fame attention (Johan Santana, Darrell Evans), and more than two dozen All-Stars. But that isn’t the likely result and getting those types of players involved a GM who didn’t understand the rules (Syd Thrift/Bobby Bonilla), predating of minor league affiliations (Wilson), or an older “bonus baby” rule that is no longer in effect (Clemente). Teams do pay attention to this kind of thing, so you see more teams protecting young, low-level players with upside rather than older, minor-league journeymen who may give a team a larger short-term boost.

But value can still be found. Brad Keller has a 3.08 ERA in multiple roles for the Royals and any of the playoff teams would have been happy to have him on their roster. Odubel Herrera, Delino DeShields Jr., Joe Biagini, Justin Bour, and Tommy Kahnle are all fairly recent picks and all have had some success in the majors. Here are the ZiPS projections for the players taken in this year’s Rule 5 draft; we’ll have full scouting reports on them soon.

The Orioles aren’t playing for 2019 of course, but I’m not sure that Jonathan Villar is actually the preferable candidate to be starting even if they were. Martin has a reputation as a glove man and the rudimentary, craptacular defensive measurements available for minor leaguers generally agree with this, while Villar is extremely stretched as a shortstop and isn’t part of Baltimore’s future. Martin did hit .300/.368/.439 for double-A Midland, but ZiPS is still going to need to see him to be sold. It would be a shame if in a rebuilding year, the O’s carried both Martin and Drew Jackson, and didn’t let either get full-time at-bats. Both are more interesting than Steve Wilkerson, who the Orioles can actually send down to the minors.

Connor Joe, who you may have seen erroneously listed as a catcher, still has some versatility, with experience at third, second, and first base, as well as in the outfield, though he’s not a plus defensive player at any of those positions. He may stick as a 25th-man in Cincinnati, a team that is short on experienced role players and would likely prefer players like Nick Senzel or Shed Long to play full-time when they’re called up. Drew Ferguson gets the best projection of the hitters and is a welcome as an additional spring training option given San Francisco’s paper-thin outfield, which will probably begin the year with three of Steven Duggar, Mac Williamson, Austin Slater, Chris Shaw, and Mike Gerber if the season started tomorrow.

The Royals picked up Sam McWilliams and Chris Ellis, the latter by way of the Texas Rangers. Ellis’ projection as a starter is not good, but as a fastball-slider pitcher, he’s long been expected to end up in relief if he ever makes it to the majors, and if that happens with the Royals, he’ll likely be the last pitcher on the roster. If Josh Staumont’s control ever improves, I think Ellis would find himself on the bubble fairly quickly. McWilliams has a more starter-friendly repertoire of pitches — Eric will surely have more on this — and he gets what amounts to a fairly impressive projection, relatively-speaking. I don’t want to predict that he’ll be Brad Keller, but the Royals may use him as a swingman in 2019.

Texas is doing more of a rebuild-lite than a full teardown, but the back of their bullpen might be able to squeeze in Romano; I don’t expect that the team will seriously look at him as a starter in 2019. Three of the four pitchers are genereally already used as relievers in the minors: Reed Garrett, Travis Bergen, and Brandon Brennen all project to be above-replacement level, though safely below-average (average ERA+ for a reliever tends to be somewhere around 108). Garrett throws a good deal harder than he did back in the days when he was a sorta starting prospect, but I think his lack of exploitable platoon splits gives him less of an obvious role in the majors right now than the other relievers. Bergen is the most interesting pitcher to me in that he missed most of the three seasons going into 2018 due to injuries, so his dominating 2018 in the minors is essentially all we have. He’s not a hard thrower and the limited data means his outcome is volatile, but you want volatile in a Rule 5er in most cases, given that the mean projections are never going to be exciting. Plus: left-handed!

Elvis Luciano is a rarity among this group, a throwback to other very young pitchers snagged from the low minors. He’ll be 19 in February, throws hard, and there’s enough projection there that the Blue Jays may be happy to just keep him and play with more-or-less a 24-man roster. This plan is subject to change if Toronto is actually good, something I think they will not be. Given his complete lack of upper minors, even that limited projection is likely crazy-optimistic.

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2019 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Lance Berkman could mash with the best of ’em. In a 15-year career spent primarily with the Astros, the native Texan and Rice University product arrived in the majors in time to become not just the next “Killer B” alongside Jeff Bagwell and Craig Biggio, but the centerpiece of the Houston offense as the iconic future Hall of Famers aged. Helped by the team’s move from the pitcher-friendly Astrodome to the more hitter-friendly Enron Field (later Minute Maid Park), he quickly established himself as one of the league’s elite hitters, and made five All-Star teams while helping the team win its first playoff series and its first pennant in franchise history.

The 6-foot-1, 220-pound Berkman did not fit the stereotypical image for a switch-hitting slugger of his prowess. “[H]e’s less Mr. Universe, more Mr. Kruk,” wrote Sports Illustrated’s Jeff Pearlman in 2001, referring to the lumpy ex-slugger whose famous quip — “I ain’t an athlete, lady. I’m a ballplayer” — later became a book title. Quotable and self-deprecating, he once said after pulling a leg muscle, “I guess I’m going to have to shut down the speed game,” and over the years, he acquired a pair of memorable nicknames, Fat Elvis and Big Puma. He conceded the former and embraced the latter, saying, “Pumas are fast and lean and deadly. That’s me.”

Though he may have looked the part of a DH, Berkman worked hard to turn himself into a competent runner and defender, and he primarily played the outfield corners on two World Series teams, one in Houston and one in St. Louis; his heroics with the latter were key in helping the Cardinals win a championship. Not that it doesn’t happen to even the most well-conditioned players, but injuries, particularly bad knees, eventually caught up to Berkman. After averaging 153 games a year from 2001-2008, he slipped to 102 per year from 2009-2013. His retirement at age 37 left him short in the one counting stat — hits, of which he compiled 1,905 — that seems to matter to modern day voters most of all. That alone means he faces an uphill battle for election.

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One great thing about the baseball Winter Meetings is that you have access to all 30 managers (this year that number is 29, as the Baltimore Orioles are currently sans a manager). A formal media session is held for each, and with 30 minutes of allotted time, a multitude of questions are asked by the collection of writers on hand.

I asked the following question, using roughly the same words, to a dozen of the managers: “We’ve seen some non-traditional coaching staff hires as of late, with pitching and hitting analytics being the driver. What are your thoughts on that?”

Here is what they had to say (answers edited slightly for concision and clarity):

———

David Bell, Cincinnati Reds: “I love having different perspectives in everything we do in this game. Having different opinions and perspectives, from people with different backgrounds and expertise, helps the decision-making process. You’re creating an advantage for yourself. I think it’s an exciting time in the game because of that. And it’s a great time to be a player, because you have all these different resources to pull from to make adjustments a lot faster. You can maximize who you are as a player.

“I do see it as a balance. There are certain parts of this game we all love that aren’t going away. The competition. The hard work. The teamwork. We just have more resource to make all of that work better. It’s important to communicate, and to work together with all departments, and really have no ego, and be able to work really well together.”

Bud Black, Colorado Rockies: “I like the creativeness of thinking from the people who were making hires. I think it shows that it’s not a closed box; it’s opened for whoever might have a skill set that a certain team is looking for, to give it a shot. I think that’s great. Read the rest of this entry »

The Cincinnati Reds have a strong collection of position players, but have remained near the bottom of the NL Central standings as they’ve struggled to develop pitching from within. It seemed likely that they’d add pitching either via trade or free agency this winter in an effort to compete before their core group of hitters begins to decline. After already adding a few minor pieces (Matt Bowman, Robby Scott), the Reds made their biggest splash of the winter so far by acquiring Tanner Roark from the Washington Nationals in exchange for 25-year-old relief prospect Tanner Rainey.

Roark has been a durable part of Washington’s rotation for six years and has thrown 180 or more innings in four of the last five seasons, only failing to do so in 2015 because he was relegated to the bullpen after Max Scherzer’s acquisition and because he was briefly on paternity leave. That quantity of innings drove mid-rotation WAR production during his tenure in D.C., though he has been declining in that regard (3.3 WAR in ’16, 2.5 in ’17, 1.9 in ’18) despite showing very little decline in stuff. Steamer and Depth Charts both project a continued gradual decline (1.5 WAR) in 2019, Roark’s final arbitration year before hitting free agency. Those projection systems assume Roark’s workload will scale back in his age-32 season, and they have him projected to make just 26 starts. Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections expect similar production.

For now, Roark probably slots into the no. 2 spot in the Reds rotation behind Luis Castillo. The Nationals should be able to back fill for Roark with some combination of Joe Ross, Erick Fedde, or perhaps a quick-moving Wil Crowe, to say nothing of what Washington may add via free agency.

For one year of Roark, the Reds sent relief prospect Tanner Rainey to Washington. Rainey has good stuff, with his fastball sitting in the 95-99 range and touching 100, and his upper-80s slider spinning in at an average of 2600 rpm, which is rare for a pitch of that velocity.

Each of those impact pitches theoretically give Rainey a shot to be a late-inning, high-leverage reliever, but his command, which is not great, might force him into a middle-relief role instead. The chance that one of Rainey or Jimmy Cordero — who is similarly talented and similarly flawed — figure things out and become a real late-inning option are pretty fair, and the Nationals have several years to polish Rainey’s talent. That Rainey is leaving a place that has struggled to develop pitching probably helps his chances of getting there.

Rainey was a 40 FV player on our recent Reds prospect list, ranking 18th. He was one of several hard-throwing Reds relief prospects in their mid-20s who are approaching the Majors. They’ve traded from a position of depth to acquire a player of great need, and the short window of team control over Roark would seem to indicate that they’re going to add more pitching in attempt to field a competitive team.

As reported by Yahoo! Sports’ Jeff Passan, the Angels have agreed to a one-year contract with free agent first baseman Justin Bour, pending the usual physical. Financial terms have not yet been disclosed.

The particulars of the deal are likely the least important part of the signing. While certain teams would no doubt accept the dare, it’s very difficult to fumble too badly on any one-year contract that doesn’t have enough absurdity to fill…uh…some kind of scientific vial or flask that can hold abstract ideas? Back to the drawing board with that one. In most situations, the money isn’t enough to matter in the big picture, and if it doesn’t work out, you don’t have to cancel it before next year like it’s some health magazine you subscribed to as part of a New Year’s resolution because you thought you were actually going to go to the gym.

Bour has seen his value plummet at a rate usually associated with a position player nearing 40 or a pitcher who has surgery for a mystery shoulder ailment. A year ago, he was coming off of a .289/.366/.536, 25 home run, 143 OPS+ season. Now that wasn’t over a full season’s play (an oblique injury cost him about a month of the season), but it was still enough for 2.4 WAR over 108 games for the Marlins. An average player has real value and Bour came with the feature most prized by baseball executives: he was cost-controlled.

After receiving $3.4 million (instead of the Marlins’ preferred $3.0 million) in arbitration, Bour looked to have at least some trade value, given that he could not become a free agent until after the 2020 season. First baseman, especially middling ones, are at a historical low point in terms of their value, but the Marlins would have likely received something for Bour had they traded him along with the entire outfield after the 2017 season.

2018 ended up being a more-or-less healthy season for Bour, but also one of many steps backwards. While he was more selective at the plate – swinging at fewer pitches, which resulted in a career-high 73 walks – he saw worse results when actually hitting the ball. Walks are nice and all, but one of the key benefits of plate discipline is to that on average you’re hitting more advantageous balls and, at least theoretically, doing more with those pitches. Bour’s exit velocity was the worst of his career; Statcast’s xSLG measure thought his profile should have only resulted in a .419 SLG, rather than his anemic .404. Nor does ZiPS provide any solace, seeing his hit profile as only deserving of a .281 BABIP versus his .270 actual (down from a .310 zBABIP in 2017 vs. his .322 actual).

Further complicating Bour’s value is the fact he has fairly steep platoon splits and only has a .220/.303/.335 slash in the majors against left-handed pitching. Philosophically, one would prefer an average player to have exploitable platoon splits in this matter, but in practice, it’s generally difficult to pull off a true first baseman platoon in an age of 13-man pitching staffs and in this case, the first baseman not having any positional flexibility otherwise.

But strangely enough, the Angels may be the best fit for Bour, assuming they could not land a better option. Albert Pujols is now a year past 600 homers (and unlikely to reach 700) and collected his 3000th hit. Now, the celebratory reasons for continuing to play him full-time are as weak as the performance-based ones. After number 3000, the Angels showed no real inclination to begin reducing Pujols’ playing time; he played in 117 of the team’s 133 games (all starts) by the time bone spurs ended his season.

With a new manager in Brad Ausmus, this could finally change. Even though I think the team should be at the point of simply releasing the future Hall of Famer, I’m not sure the team is actually there yet, and a time share in which Bour is the primary first baseman and Pujols plays against occasional tough lefties — even with me being far from convinced that this version of Pujols is any more valuable against southpaws — is better than simply letting Pujols have the job for yet another year. There’s a non-zero chance that Bour is just there to be a pinch-hitter for Pujols or Ohtani, but I can’t imagine he would sign this early in the offseason – at a time in his career where he still has a good shot at re-establishing some value – if he believed he would just be used as a pinch-hitter.

This Bouring little move won’t get the Angels to the playoffs, but it can cheaply shore up one of their weak spots in the lineup, and hopefully also demonstrate a real change in an organization that hasn’t always been as merciless at dealing with their weaknesses as they should have been. The Angels still have the cash after this move to get a difference-maker.

Last year, the Rays began with an opening-day payroll of around $76 million, which was among the lowest in baseball. That’s hardly unusual for the organization, but then the Rays went and won 90 games, which was the tenth-highest total. They finished with the 11th-best Pythagorean record, and they finished with the fifth-best BaseRuns record. The A’s won more games, and they had the lower initial payroll, but the Rays were a massive overachiever. And this is just the half of it.

After the season, the Rays lost Carlos Gomez and Sergio Romo to free agency. They designated C.J. Cron for assignment, and they swapped Mallex Smith (and more) for Mike Zunino (and more). Waking up this morning, the Rays had everyone they needed to field a young and competitive ballclub, and according to Cot’s, they had a projected opening-day payroll of…around $36 million. That’s lower than the Expos’ opening-day payroll in 2004. A team not spending isn’t a good thing, by any means, but it’s incredible the Rays have gotten to this point, considering what other teams do with more money. You could’ve fit the Giants’ entire payroll between the Rays’ projected payroll and the competitive-balance-tax threshold.

The Rays haven’t been content to stay as they were. Rather, this put them in the unusual position of being able to make a splash or two in the market. They were reportedly in the mix for Paul Goldschmidt. They seemed like a fit for Josh Donaldson. They’ve been connected to Nelson Cruz. And on Wednesday, they’ve signed Charlie Morton. They’ve given Charlie Morton two years, and $30 million. The Rays don’t often get to do this, but they found themselves surprisingly flexible, as they try to mount a push for the playoffs.

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Jayson Stark received a standing ovation from his BBWAA colleagues when it was announced that he is being honored with the J.G. Taylor Spink Award. The honor is well deserved. The award is given for meritorious contributions to baseball writing, and Stark, who currently writes for The Athletic, has been at the pinnacle of his profession for decades. (The National Baseball Hall of Fame announcement, which includes a snapshot of his career, can be found here.)

Following yesterday’s news, I asked Stark if he could share the story behind his love of writing with FanGraphs readers. Ever gracious, he told me the following.

———

Jayson Stark: “I love baseball, and I love the art of baseball writing. This is all I ever wanted to do. From the time I was nine years old, what I wanted was to be a sportswriter. Not a baseball player, but a baseball writer. All the time, I have to take a step back and think, ‘Oh my god, that happened. How lucky am I?’

“My mom (June Stark) was a writer. She wrote for a paper in Philadelphia — she knew Red Smith a little bit, because he worked there briefly — and was also the editor for Wear Magazine, Philadelphia. She was the president of the League of Women Journalists, Philadelphia chapter.

“She was a great writer with a love of turning a phrase. She loved reading great writing, and that inspired me to to have a love and appreciation of writing. Growing up, I had that and a love of sports. Read the rest of this entry »