Many of you are home, or traveling home, for the Thanksgiving holiday. Not only aren’t you in the mood to read about baseball — I bet you’re especially not in the mood to read about Derek Dietrich, who the Marlins designated for assignment on Tuesday. I’m not really in the mood to linger on Derek Dietrich, myself, which is why I’m going to do this fast. Won’t waste your time. I’ll get to the point and leave you alone.
Dietrich is a useful player. He’s 29 years old, and he has a career wRC+ of 109. He can play a lot of positions, albeit none of them all that well. Hidden in the numbers, however, is that Dietrich has a specialty. Now, whenever anyone talks about players getting hit by a lot of pitches, the name that ought to come to mind is Brandon Guyer. We’ve written about Guyer at FanGraphs before, and indeed, if you set a low enough minimum, Guyer is easily the all-time leader in HBP rate. But Guyer has 1,487 big-league plate appearances. What if you set the minimum at, say, 1,500?
Given that cutoff, here are the highest career HBP rates since the turn of the last century:
1900 – 2018, minimum 1500 career plate appearances.
Dietrich has a lower rate than Guyer, but he’s also played a lot more than Guyer. Dietrich’s the all-time leader with a 1,500 PA cutoff. He’s the all-time leader with a 2,000 PA cutoff. Yes, it’s true that Guyer is more anomalous, but Dietrich is anomalous as well. As these things go, that’s a pretty healthy lead Dietrich has over second place.
Dietrich’s the all-time leader, maybe with a minimum-related asterisk, but all rate-stat leaderboards come with some kind of minimum, and they’re always arbitrary. So I want to give Dietrich his moment in the sun, in what’s otherwise probably a pretty crappy week for him. Dietrich has been hit by 93 pitches. He’s been hit by 13 pitches in an 0-and-2 count. He’s been hit by 39 pitches with the pitcher ahead. He’s been hit by seven pitches by Tanner Roark.
Courtesy of Baseball Savant, here are all the pitches that hit Dietrich somewhere, or were at least judged to have done so:
Here’s that weird low one over the plate:
Here’s one close to the strike zone:
Here’s another one close to the strike zone:
Here’s one I just think is kind of quirky:
Here’s the one time he’s been hit with the bases loaded:
Here’s the one worth the most positive win probability added:
And here’s the one that happened in the lowest-leverage situation:
At least in terms of WPA, Dietrich’s career hit-by-pitches have been worth almost a combined three wins. Dietrich has been hit by 93 pitches while drawing just 144 walks — a dozen of which have been intentional. Dietrich hasn’t exactly built a career around getting hit by the baseball, but getting hit by the baseball has given his career a jolt, and it’s a career that’s going to continue, despite all of the aches and pains. Every year, Derek Dietrich feels a lot of pain in his legs and his elbow. And, every year, for pitchers facing Derek Dietrich, he is a pain in the ass.
In 2017, Corey Dickerson was 28 years old, playing for the Rays. He spent a lot of his time at DH, but still, he was a solidly above-average hitter, and he finished as a 2+ win player. He had another two years of team control, and he was due for a raise in his second year of arbitration. During the offseason, though, the Rays designated Dickerson for assignment. Shortly thereafter, he was sent to the Pirates for a modest return. Part of the Rays’ thinking at the time was that they could easily replace Dickerson with C.J. Cron.
In 2018, Cron was 28 years old, playing for the Rays. He spent a lot of his time at DH, but still, he was a solidly above-average hitter, and he finished as a 2+ win player. He has another two years of team control, and he’s due for a raise in his second year of arbitration. On Tuesday, though, the Rays designated Cron for assignment. He might be traded or claimed any day. If the Rays receive anything, it will be a modest return.
It doesn’t look good when one of baseball’s cheapest franchises cuts ties with a player who’s due for a raise. It doesn’t look good when anyone cuts ties with a player coming off a legitimately productive full season. Cron’s projected salary for next year is only a little north of $5 million. By the numbers, he was worth more than that last season. Yet, as is usually the case, it’s not hard to figure out what’s happening, when you take a closer look. A variety of factors have come together to make Cron almost freely available.
Here are brief notes on the prospects who were traded ahead of the 40-man roster deadline. The Padres had several prospects who needed to be added to the 40-man — including Chris Paddack and Anderson Espinoza — and were the most active team.
Lockett will provide immediate rotation depth for a contending Cleveland team as a 5th/6th starter and will probably be on the 25-man bubble in the spring. His fastball, 91-94, is very average. He can also make it sink in the 87-90 range. Each of his off-speed pitches — a changeup and curveball — will flash above-average. His changeup has a tendency to sail a bit, but it moves.
I think Feliz, who turned 19 in October, was the best prospect traded today. He’s a very athletic conversion arm who can spin a good breaking ball. He was 88-92 with natural cut during the summer and should grow into more velocity. He’ll probably begin 2019 in extended spring training.
Brewer was a minor league free agent signee after the 2017 season. He was up and down between San Diego and El Paso a few times in 2018, and was 92-94 with cut, up to 96. At times he’d take a little off and throw more of a slider around 87-88 mph. Brewer also has plus-plus breaking ball spin rates on an 82-85 mph curveball he doesn’t locate very well. If that improves, Brewer will be a good 40-50 inning relief option.
Quiroz is the most interesting prospect traded today. He was Team Mexico’s leadoff hitter in the 2017 WBC (he hit two homers and a double in 6 at-bats) and spent 2015-2017 crushing the Mexican League. He signed with Boston in November 2017 and had a hot April in 2018 at Double-A, but then missed three and a half months with an abdominal strain. He only played in 24 games at Double-A, then had 62 extra plate appearances in the Arizona Fall League.
Here in Arizona, Quiroz looked pretty good. He’s a stocky and strong 5-foot-6, and he has average, all-fields power. He hit two full-extension, opposite field shots this fall, including one that got out just left of center field at Sloan Park in Mesa. He’s patient and makes good decisions at the plate. He’s also fine at second base (below-average arm, below-average runner, above-average athlete, average hands) and played a lot of other positions while in Mexico. He’ll either need to be viable at other positions or just hit enough to play second base every day. It appears he has a chance to do the latter.
Wick is a capable, generic middle reliever. He works 93-96, has an above-average slider, and a change-of-pace curveball.
Vosler is a an extreme fly ball hitter (over 50%) with huge platoon splits. He might be just a 30 bat, but Vosler can play third and first and he crushes lefties; I think he’s a corner bench bat or platoon player.
Foley was 91-93 this fall; his changeup and slider were average, and he struggled to throw strikes. He’s 25 and coming off a good year at Double-A.
Valdez didn’t sign a pro contract until he was 20, and Colorado didn’t push him to an age-appropriate level despite his success, so he’s a 23-year-old who hasn’t set foot in full-season ball. But he’s a really loose, wiry 6-foot-1 with a good arm action. He has been 92-94 with an above-average curveball in my looks. I like him as a late-blooming relief candidate.
Patrick Murphy won’t be available in next month’s Rule 5 draft. Along with four other players, the 23-year-old right-hander was added to the Toronto Blue Jays’ 40-man roster yesterday. His addition was well-earned. A third-round pick in the 2013 draft, Murphy has been a picture of perseverance. As noted in the feature we did on him last February, Murphy has undergone Tommy John surgery, thoracic outlet syndrome surgery, and had a nerve moved in his elbow.
This season, he went from question mark to fast-mover. In 27 starts — all but one with High-A Dunedin — Murphy fashioned a tidy 2.64 ERA and fanned 141 batters in 152.2 innings. Those numbers earned him an accolade; Murphy was named the Florida State League’s Pitcher of the Year.
The innings total was especially meaningful to him, as was the fact that he made all of his scheduled starts. Calling it “a big step,” the Chandler, Arizona native was able to show the organization — and prove to himself — that his am and body could hold up over a full season.
He also showed that he could hit triple digits. But while he considered it “pretty cool” to have hit 100 mph on the radar gun, Murphy was more enamored with a pitch that traversed 60-feet-six-inches in a comparably meandering manner. Read the rest of this entry »
Major league baseball teams closely guard their financial information. They have no problem talking about how much money players make, but they prefer to be more circumspect when disclosing the revenue teams take in or the scale of the profits owners make after those players have been paid and expenses accounted for. Because baseball’s ownership is a fairly insular group composed mostly of individuals and privately held businesses– and because there relatively few franchise sales to use as gauge–teams have been largely successful in preventing their financial information from going public. The Atlanta Braves present an exception.
Liberty Media, perhaps best known for its subsidiary SiriusXM Satellite Radio, purchased the Braves in 2007 for $400 million. Two years ago, they began offering stock in their separate divisions, which means the public can buy shares in the Braves as well as the real estate holdings around the stadium. It also means that, as a publicly traded company, the public is entitled to more information regarding the team’s finances than is typical. As I wrote in 2016, the club disclosed an $18 million loss in 2014 before depreciation and amortization. They were on the plus side in 2015 by about three million dollars before recording losses of about $20 million in 2016. During those three seasons, the team averaged 90 losses, with an average annual attendance of 2.1 million fans and a payroll just over $116 million per season. The financial losses in 2016 were largely attributable to a huge international signing class, most of the players from which were later declared free agents after MLB’s investigation into Atlanta’s signing methods.
But focusing exclusively on a team’s year-by-year profits obscures the financial reality of owning a baseball team because it doesn’t address the most profitable aspect of team ownership: the value of the franchise. Based on the calculations above, the Braves lost about $45 million from 2014 through the end of 2016. But Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei has admitted profits weren’t always the main consideration for the Braves, indicating that “historically, the measurement was we didn’t lose money.” Maffei’s remarks are consistent with statements from another team owner, Rogers Communications, which owns the Toronto Blue Jays, though the Blue Jays’ financials are harder to trace because Rogers owns a whole host of assets along with the baseball team. Per Forbes:
The media giant’s CFO, Tony Staffieri, said at a conference that Rogers wants to “surface value” from the Blue Jays, which he said is a “very valuable asset for us that we don’t get full credit for.”
For the Blue Jays, “surfacing value” would likely come in the form of realizing the profits from selling the team, as Rogers might not be getting “credit” if the team isn’t reaping huge profits. Then there’s the matter of Rogers also broadcasting Blue Jays games, which might further cloud the revenues from the baseball team. (The Braves used to benefit from some of that same confusion back when Ted Turner owned the club and TBS showed Braves games, but the financial model has shifted, and the Braves now have one of the worst local television contracts in baseball.) It is clear the calculus of franchise ownership is more complicated than mere gate sales. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Tommy Milone and Willians Astudillo, Bryce Harper‘s awful fielding in 2018, two more examples of percentages greater than 100, and Adrian Beltre’s retirement and atypical, incredible career, then (23:34) bring on new FanGraphs managing editor Meg Rowley to talk about both sides of the Yankees-Mariners James Paxton trade, how good Paxton is, the Mariners’ future, the definition of acehood, and a few aspects of her new job, including anxiety about covering breaking news, the difficulty of replacing writers who get hired by teams, the balance between stats stuff and non-stats stuff, common writing pitfalls, representing (and extending opportunities to) women in a male-oriented industry, weekday vs. weekend website traffic, balancing writing and editing, and more.
Audio intro: Franz Ferdinand, "Darts of Pleasure" Audio interstitial: Camera Obscura, "James" Audio outro: Jerry Garcia & David Grisman, "Walkin’ Boss"
For what felt like quite a while, the chatter last offseason was dominated by the Shohei Ohtani sweepstakes. Yusei Kikuchi isn’t Shohei Ohtani. For one thing, Kikuchi is a few years older. For a second thing, Kikuchi doesn’t routinely throw his fastball in the upper 90s. And for a third thing, no one has ever referred to Kikuchi as the Japanese Babe Ruth. I don’t know much about Kikuchi as a hitter, but I can assume that he is a bad hitter, because he is a pitcher who hasn’t made waves with his hitting. Kikuchi appears to have three career hits, now that I check. One of them was a double.
Shohei Ohtani was, and is, a sensation. The Kikuchi hype couldn’t possibly get close to that level, because Kikuchi won’t be trying to do something no one else has done in a lifetime. But somewhere in the next week or two, Kikuchi will be posted by the Seibu Lions, as the 27-year-old southpaw wants to make his mark in the bigs. He’ll be free to negotiate with any and every team, and he’s been rather heavily scouted. It’s time we talk about who Kikuchi is as a pitcher. It just so happens we’ve been given two fairly reasonable comps.
Adrian Beltre has been many things to fans over the course of his amazing, 21 year career. Dodgers fans old enough to run for Congress got to see Beltre young and full of promise, including a 2004 season might be the greatest of all time by a third baseman. Since that year, only Mike Trout‘s 2012 and 2013, and Mookie Betts’s 2018 have topped the 9.7 WAR Beltre put up. Mariners fans had to settle for five years of Gold Glove-quality play at third base with a closer to an average bat, before a shoulder injury in 2009 forced him to take a one-year deal with the Red Sox. Boston fans watched one great year before Beltre moved to Texas and cemented his status as a surefire Hall of Famer.
Before heading to the Rangers, Beltre’s career matched up well with a handful of Hall of Famers, but also with a handful of players whose Cooperstown ambitions would ultimately fall short, as the table below shows.
He wasn’t necessarily thought of as such at the time, but in terms of offense and defense, Beltre was a modern-day Brooks Robinson. The great Orioles third baseman enjoyed an impeccable defensive reputation and aged well, averaging 4.4 WAR per season from his age-32 through age-37 seasons. And Beltre was up to the challenge, averaging 5.4 WAR during those same seasons. As offensive numbers around the league dropped, Beltre stayed the same. His .275/.328/.462 batting line when playing in the more cavernous ballparks in Los Angeles and Seattle turned into .304/.357/.509 when transplanted to the more hitter-friendly climes of Arlington. As strikeouts rose dramatically, Beltre struck out about once every other game. That consistency turned into one of the best third acts of a career we’ve ever seen.
And Beltre’s own WAR-based case for the Hall is impenetrable. Jay Jaffe’s JAWS has Beltre as the fourth-best third baseman of all-time behind only Mike Schmidt, Eddie Mathews, and Wade Boggs. Looking at FanGraphs’ third base Leaderboards, Beltre’s 84 WAR places him seventh with Alex Rodriguez, Chipper Jones, and George Brett joining Schmidt, Mathews, and Boggs, though Jones and Brett each lead him by less than a single win. Jay Jaffe tracked Beltre this past season as he became the all-time leader in hits for players born in Latin America, as well as internationally. He might not have an MVP, finishing second in 2004 and third in 2012, and his Rangers fell a strike short of a World Series win in 2011, but by any metric, Beltre is an all-time great, and that’s before you consider that he hit a homer off his knee in the World Series.
Beltre’s career is the rare sort in which a player’s statistical accomplishments actually match the personality and joy he displayed on the field. Jeff Sullivan wrote in 2016 that Beltre would be remembered “for being an excellent third baseman, for having an aversion to being touched on the head, and for sometimes playing through inconceivable pain.” Beltre’s age-defying statistical feats may be his true legacy, and those feats have been covered in some detail here at FanGraphs. August Fagerstrom wrote about it way back in 2015. I discussed his refusal to age when he signed a two-year extension in 2016 that would ultimately take him to the end of his career. Travis Sawchik and Paul Swydan each tookturns in 2017 as Beltre worked his way to his 3,000th hit.
But for all that, Beltre’s ability to defy age with his bat and glove doesn’t measure up to his ageless spirit. There is his aversion to being touched on the head, his enduring and humorous friendship with King Felix. His dancing on the basepaths was a sight. He alternated between demanding space and ceding it with infield partner Elvis Andrus. There’s a giraffe named after Adrian Beltre at the Fort Worth Zoo, and Beltre-the-third-baseman has gone to see it. He’s given fake signs to the opposition. When told by umpire Gerry Davis to get back in the on-deck circle, he reacted as any 38-year-old would, and opted to move the circle itself; he was ejected from the game. On MLB Network Radio this morning, former Rangers manager Jeff Banister described Beltre dressing up like a clubhouse attendant and sweeping the dugout while on the disabled list.
When I think about what I hope and wish to see in a baseball player, I want someone who is a marvel with the bat and superlative with the glove. I want years of greatness combined with longevity. A toughness that shows off commitment. Someone who flashes moments of unique brilliance. A player with energy, whose love for the game seems boundless despite the money and routine that can sap that life from the best of us. Adrian Beltre might not be a perfect player, but he is one to me. I imagine I’m not alone.
The headliner in the James Paxtondeal is LHP Justus Sheffield. He’s been a top prospect for so long that it’s easy to find updated reports on him and understand where he falls in the prospects landscape. The short version is that he has an above-average-to-plus four-pitch mix, but his command ranges from average to below average, so he could still fit in a number of roles in the big leagues, ranging from multi-inning relief power arm to mid-rotation starter.
The more intriguing pieces of this deal are the other two names, RHP Erik Swanson and CF Dom Thompson-Williams. Neither were on the year-end version of THE BOARD, but both were on our radar; we intentionally didn’t comb through every 40 FV candidate in the in-season update since that’s what we focus on in the winter.
If we were doing the Mariners list today, both would be 40 FVs; they’re good examples of guys who sneak up on you during the season and in whom you have greater confidence moving up once the season ends. Swanson works 92-94 with a rising four-seamer, hitting 98 mph at times with some deception and life, and backs it up with a solid average slider and advanced feel for how to use both pitches in tandem. He could be something like a back-end starter who mostly uses two pitches, but he’s more likely to be the 5th-7th best starting option for a contender, and fits most comfortably as a David Phelps-type multi-inning fireman who can also do the job of long relief and spot-starting. There’s upside as a 50 FV here (4th starter or setup guy) but he’s more likely to be a 45 FV in the big leagues as a useful utility-type arm, so a 40+ or 40 FV would be appropriate.
Thompson-Williams is a sneaky athlete who’s a solid average runner with an average arm that some think can play a solid center field, but that most think is a fourth outfielder-type who can play all three spots. He has plus raw power and some feel to hit, so there’s low-end everyday upside if things continue to come together at the plate as they did in 2018. But he was 23 years old in High-A, so he’ll need to move quickly to be likely to reach that upside. More likely, Thompson-Williams is a useful bench option as a platoon at multiple spots or as a player who can provide some thump off the bench. Given his shorter track record and age, that’s a 40 FV for now with a chance to turn into a 45 FV with more performance, certainty, and proximity to the majors.
I’ve been asked a few times where these prospects fall on the dollar scale of our new prospect valuation metrics. Sheffield likely won’t rank exactly 54th on our next Top 100 in January, but the $29 million figure is about right. Swanson and Thompson-Williams combine for about $5 million more. Paxton is due in the $20-$25 million range for his next two years via arbitration while projected–using the same $9 million per WAR figure that generated the prospect values–to be worth somewhere around $60-$69 million in that span. So the Mariners receive around $35 million in prospect value, and send $35-$50 million of value back, depending on where Paxton ends up in his range. That’s within the margin for error, but is a bit lighter than expected for a Paxton package given the wide interest. That said, this trade appears to bring the Mariners out of the cellar of our first farm system rankings.
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