Tuesday is the deadline to add Rule 5-eligible players to the 40-man roster, and teams with an excess of candidates for addition often find trade partners, especially if doing so enables them to fill holes on other parts of their own roster.

The Toronto Blue Jays have scavenged the overflow of talented rosters several times over the last few years. Billy McKinney, Brandon Drury, David Paulino and Teoscar Hernandez were all upper-level performers who were blocked by more dynamic talents. Toronto also has to contend a potential infield surplus of their own, especially with shortstop Troy Tulowitzki hoping to return to the field in 2019. Saturday’s trade with Houston helped both clubs inch closer to 40-man equilibrium.

Astros get:

INF Aledmys Diaz

Blue Jays get:

RHP Trent Thornton

The 28-year-old Diaz is coming off a 1.6 WAR season during which he slashed .260/.303/.453 and hit 18 homers. He instantly becomes the most versatile bench infielder on a roster that’s heavy on big-bodied 1B/3B/DH types, a fact which likely puts him first in line for reps should Carlos Correa and Jose Altuve continue to have injury problems.

Though he’s a below-average defender at short, Diaz’s lackluster lateral quickness can be hidden somewhat by modern defensive positioning. On days when he is at short, his relative inability to get to balls in the hole to his right should be more manageable if he’s playing next to Alex Bregman. With Marwin Gonzalez leaving via free agency, Diaz is also probably second in line for reps behind Altuve at second base even though he has barely played there (five games in 2017, six in the 2015 Fall League) because he’s likely better than Tony Kemp and Yuli Gurriel.

Diaz’s 2.7 WAR rookie season seems to have been a caricature of his skills, drawn by some BABIP luck and a walk rate that was twice what he has averaged during the last two combined seasons. His flat bat path made it difficult for him to lift the baseball early in his career despite his ability to hit the ball hard. This improved slightly in 2018 when his groundball and dribbler rates combined to make up 40% of his balls in play, down from 49% in 2017, according to xStats. Steamer is expecting him to SLG .438 next year, but that’s probably based on some regression instead of extrapolating improvement, and Houston is good at fixing swings. Because Diaz is so aggressive in the box, he’ll probably always be a low-OBP hitter, but he’s a versatile infielder with some pop and is under team control for another four years. He’ll play a valuable role for the Astros.

Trent Thornton is also likely to make a big league splash in 2019. The 25-year-old righty spent 2018 at Triple-A Fresno and just wrapped up an eye-opening stint in the Arizona Fall League. He has bat-missing big league stuff, sitting 92-95 and touching 96 in my multi-inning looks at him this fall, and sitting comfortably in the 95-96 range when he was asked to air it out for a single inning.

Thornton also has elite breaking ball spin rates. His 12-6 curveball spins in excess of 3,000 rpm and his firm, upper-80s slider often approaches that mark, which is rare for a breaking ball that hard. He also has a unique delivery that disorients hitters. His arm action is ugly but, short of a 7-day DL stint this year after he was hit with a comebacker, Thornton hasn’t been hurt as a pro. His usage has been atypical, however. Thornton’s starts were often spaced out by seven or eight days in 2018, and it’s unrealistic to expect him to have that kind of recovery time between turns on a big league pitching staff. If asked to throw every fifth day, his stuff may not be as nasty as it was this year. I have Thornton projected as a 120-130 inning starter with a FIP near 4.00, which puts him in the 1.5 to 2.0 WAR range annually, assuming his stuff holds on a normal schedule. He needs to be added to the Jays 40-man to be protected from the Rule 5 draft. I expect he will be, and that we’ll see him in the Majors next year.

If you’re tracking long-term transaction outcomes, you’ll likely already consider this deal a win for both clubs. The Astros took a 5th round college arm who was throwing 89-92 and touching 93 or 94, helped him turn into a guy sitting 92-96, then flipped him for four years of a power-hitting infielder who fills an immediate need. The Jays traded J.B. Woodman, who turns 24 in three weeks and struck out in 41% of his PA’s at Hi-A this year, to St. Louis for Diaz (himself a roster overflow guy who was expendable after Paul DeJong’s breakout) and then flipped him a year later to fill an immediate need.

For all the ups and downs of St. Louis’ 2018 season, the team finished with an 88-74 record, fully in that 85-90 win-window that forms the team’s bog-standard result. The Cardinals made it interesting over the summer after the merciful guillotining of manager Mike Matheny, but a bleak September left them a distant third in the NL Central.

The Setup

Some teams are wild gamblers, throwing caution and giant wads of money to the wind, hoping to end up as either spectacular successes or failures that are quickly forgotten as attentions shift to the next crazy scheme. The St. Louis Cardinals stand in opposition to that. They are the safe, sensible team that reminds you on nickel-shots night that you have work tomorrow and really should stop for the evening because the chair you’re talking to isn’t actually W.C. Fields.

St. Louis builds from within, signs reasonable players to reasonable contracts, and when a beloved franchise player hits free agency, won’t spend exorbitantly to chase crazy bids. Even Albert Pujols, the team’s soul for a decade, was allowed to move on when the numbers got too uncomfortably high.

That’s not to say the Cardinals don’t make moves, but rather, that they make reasonable ones. Marcell Ozuna, coming off a .312/.376/.548 breakout campaign with the Marlins, was the team’s big offseason pickup, one that didn’t demand the team’s crown jewels. And with Ozuna in tow, giving the Cardinals an easy Ozuna-Tommy Pham–Dexter Fowler outfield rather than the juggling act of recent years, the team felt comfortable enough to trade Stephen Piscotty and Randal Grichuk to claw back some of the value given to the Marlins.

Another quiet move was the signing of former Padres relief prospect Miles Mikolas to a two-year, $15.5 million contract after he was reinvented as a harder-throwing Bob Tewksbury for the Yomiuri Giants. It was another sensible move compared to the prospect of overpaying for one of the multitude of third-tier starters otherwise found in a weak free agent market.

For a smart, well-run team with a knack for punching above their market size, there was always a worry on the horizon stemming from the team’s longtime rival, the Chicago Cubs. Being safe and sensible was a better playbook when the Cubs were in their Jim Hendry years or during the long rebuilding phase; there was no heavy in the division that could use cash to suffocate St. Louis’s measured approach.

But the Cubs happened, a team with the unfortunate tendency of being rich while also not being completely insane with their money. A Jason Heyward-size error would have really hurt St. Louis’s flexibility but the Cubs could seemingly say “Nah, it’s cool, bro, that wasn’t even our favorite Scrooge McDuck vault of gold coins.”

Even in a 2017 season when everything went wrong, the Cubs still won 92 games, enough to win the NL Central by six games. Could a high-floor, low-ceiling St. Louis team full of three-win players really provide a consistent threat to the Cubs? Or would the Cardinals be better served by taking a little more risk, given their division? That was the key uncertainty as the team entered 2018.

The Projection

This question was precisely what worried ZiPS going into the season. With a 94-win projection for the Cubs, ZiPS only gave the Cardinals and Brewers about a combined one-in-three shot of catching Chicago. St. Louis’ 87 forecasted wins looked a lot like the typical Cardinals season; that aforementioned 85-90 wins that has led the team to consistent contend for a playoff spot while never really being spoken of as an elite team.

The Results

The team started the season with Adam Wainwright on the disabled list with a hamstring pull, but St. Louis had already moved on from the days when they counted on Wainwright being in the rotation. Jack Flaherty, the eventual fifth-place Rookie of the Year finisher, filled in. Wainwright struggled upon his return, but the rest of the starters pitched as well as could have been expected, combining for a 3.00 ERA through the end of May, the third-best in baseball behind the Astros and Nationals.

Until the final month of the season, when St. Louis struggled in a variety of interesting ways, the rotation held up admirably, with little fault attached during the year’s doldrums. Wainwright was back on the DL by the end of April with elbow problems and Michael Wacha’s oblique strain ended his season in June, though he was set to return in September before a setback. But Flaherty was already a superior option to Wainwright and John Gant and Austin Gomber picked up most of the rest of the missing starts; the starting pitching was never really a serious problem.

The offense, on the other hand, was a regular problem. Matt Carpenter started out heat-death-of-the-universe cold, but while he heated up to a blazing MVP-like level for the middle months of the season, other pieces who were expected to contribute, like Ozuna and Fowler, largely didn’t.

Except for a brief period at the top of the division in May, after a fun week in which they swept both Chicago teams, the team hovered around the .500 mark for most of the first half. Milwaukee was the team to take advantage of Chicago not putting away the division early, which resulted in a great deal of tension surrounding St. Louis, something that’s fairly unusual for a Cardinals team.

Pham had already expressed displeasure with his contract situation before the season — the unfortunate result of being a late bloomer scheduled to hit free agency right before his age-34 season. Fowler and John Mozeliak publicly traded barbs and while the latter clarified his comments in the press, there were indications bubbling to the surface that manager Mike Matheny had lost the team.

Matheny was always kind of an oddball fit for the Cardinals; an old-school style manager they hoped would embrace at least some analytics and handle the team, and especially the pitching staff, well. The latter characteristic matched his reputation as a veteran catcher.

The analytics-embracing never really happened and Matheny was a fairly poor in-game tactician, who generally ran his bullpen in a manner that could most kindly be described as slapdash. But he generally kept past teams together and had gotten results.

With the clubhouse melting down, Matheny fighting with the media, and incidents such as tacitly allowing Bud Norris to bully Jordan Hicks marring the season, the argument for keeping Matheny evaporated quickly.

I’m usually skeptical of the idea of managerial changes being a big reason for a team’s sudden improvement, but things in St. Louis calmed down quickly once Mike Shildt took over the job on an interim basis, performing well enough to lose the interim tag just six weeks after he inherited the job. The public infighting quickly stopped and the team went on a tear, going 28-13 through the end of August.

Gone was Pham, traded to the Rays at the deadline, a destination likely to please him even less from a financial perspective; Harrison Bader and his shockingly good glove were given centerfield. Also out was Greg Holland, who pitched so poorly in 2018 that even Matheny noticed and stopped using him in high-leverage situations.

In the midst of their best run of the season, Shildt showed little resistance to using the team’s secondary talents. Pitchers like Gomber, Tyson Ross, and Daniel Poncedeleon assumed more flexible roles, a drastic change from Matheny’s rigid pitcher usage.

September, though, was a tough one. The rotation had its first really weak stretch, with a 4.60 ERA and a 4.72 FIP, and the offense once again fell back to the middle of the pack, with a 90 wRC+ for the month. Carpenter dropped out of the MVP conversation almost completely, with a .170/.313/.245 line for the month. Ozuna was the only player on the team with an .800 OPS. The bullpen, though never the team’s strong suit, had shown some life tapping into the team’s Triple-A depth but regressed to a 4.99 FIP.

Going into the last week of the season, the Cardinals actually had a game-and-a-half lead over the Colorado Rockies for the second wild card spot. The team controlled their destiny, but then lost five of the last six games to the Brewers and Cubs by a 39-20 scoring margin.

What Comes Next?

One interesting thing about the Cardinals is that there’s a very real sense the team is willing to be more aggressive this winter, especially financially, than they have in the past. While they aren’t going to shout “Hey, we have $400 million, make us an offer,” I suspect that at a minimum, the team will contemplating entering the Bryce Harper or Manny Machado sweepstakes.

The Cardinals are a hard team to upgrade in that they’re just so solid in most places. The starting lineup is deep enough that, outside of Dexter Fowler, they really need to be exciting to justify the term. Taking a chance on Josh Donaldson is one of those moves that does have interesting upside, but the rest of the market’s second-tier should be rather uninteresting, at least as it concerns the lineup. It may seem a stretch for St. Louis to spend more than twice what they’ve ever spent on a player contract, but remember, they were a team connected with Giancarlo Stanton, and reportedly made a significant offer to David Price when the pitcher was a free agent.

Where second-tier free agents could prove more useful is the bullpen. While the pen has never really been as bad as advertised — many fans think the team’s relievers were Old Testament-bad — but the team could use a left-handed pitcher like Andrew Miller or Zach Britton and the stakes are high-enough that there’s an argument for overpaying a bit.

Early ZiPS Projection – Miles Mikolas

Given that Nippon Professional Baseball is a high-level league, Mikolas didn’t exactly come out of nowhere; he wouldn’t have been given a $7 million contract with a career 5.32 MLB ERA and no prospect pedigree if he had. But he’s also a pitcher who allows a lot of contact for someone who can hit 95 MPH with a slider that will be given a lot more respect the second go-around.

Despite the foreboding introduction, ZiPS is actually quite optimistic Mikolas’s regression still leaves him as a solid number two starter. A few more home runs come out in the projections, but ZiPS also sees a bump in his strikeout rate and top-notch control. Though not directly shown here, ZiPS also sees a lot more upside in his strikeout rate than downside; Mikolas obviously doesn’t throw as hard as Hicks, but he isn’t Jered Weaver either.

One last pedantic note: Mikolas will be a free agent after the 2019 season, not after 2022 as you would expect from a pitcher with his service time. Mikolas came to St. Louis as a pure free agent and the team agreed to him becoming a free agent at the end of his contract rather than entering the arbitration track like most three-year players. So the Lizard King gets to hit the open market fairly quickly after a terrific “rookie” season.

Kieran Lovegrove is among the plurality of players currently available in the minor league free-agent market. That should change in the not-too-distant future. The 24-year-old right-hander throws gas, and while his location is sometimes scattershot, he’s moving in the right direction. Six years after being drafted by the Cleveland Indians out of a Mission Viejo, California high school, he finished this season in Triple-A Columbus.

Born in Johannesburg, South Africa — he came Stateside at age five — Lovegrove made giant strides this year. Pitching out of the bullpen, he punched out 10 batters per nine innings and put up a career-best 2.73 ERA in 41 appearances. Two months after being promoted to Double-A, he represented the World Team in July’s All-Star Futures Game.

It’s taken the 2012 third-round pick time, but he’s finally begun to figure things out — at least when it comes to what works for him, and what doesn’t. While he’s no dum-dum, his attempted deep dives into the hows-and-whys of his chosen craft have only served to muddy the waters.

“I’m a thinker, and if I’m given too much information I start to think about it,” reasoned Lovegrove, whose level of familiarity with Yogi Berra is unknown. “Because of that, I’ve kind of had to avoid the analytics thing. But I have found out that when my ball is down in the zone it tends to sink, and when it’s up in the zone it four-seams. When I can throw up is when I’ve been going down. It’s all about setting up hitters, and actually pitching as opposed to just throwing the ball.”

His heater has a mind of its own. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about a big day for Willians Astudillo, the still-overlooked greatness of Anthony Rendon, the mystery of Jeff Mathis, John Middleton’s comments about the Phillies’ impending spending spree, and the Orioles hiring the Astros’ Mike Elias as their new GM. Then (26:50) they bring on outgoing FanGraphs managing editor Carson Cistulli to talk about how he got a job with the Blue Jays and what it will entail, his initial suspicion that the offer was a prank, his (low) level of confidence in his own abilities, how he’s managed to identify overlooked players, why teams are hiring a new type of writer, his feelings about leaving FanGraphs, why he gradually grew on the readers, and how his life will change.

Audio intro: The Zombies, "Moving On"
Audio interstitial: Iggy Pop, "I’m Going Away Smiling"
Audio outro: Gord Downie, "Christmastime in Toronto"

Link to R.J. on Mathis
Link to Sam on Mathis vs. Napoli
Link to Sam on Mathis vs. Napoli again
Link to Carson’s first FanGraphs post
Link to Carson’s Fringe Five results summary
Link to Carson’s 2018 Fringe Five results
Link to Carson’s farewell post
Link to listener’s extra-effort visualization
Link to EW Secret Santa sign-up

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Episode 844

The now nearly-erstwhile managing editor of FanGraphs, Carson Cistulli, hands over the reins to new managing editor, and host of FanGraphs Audio, Meg Rowley, in what can only be described as a riveting bit of radio.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @megrowler on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximate 45 min play time.)

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If you have followed the works of Carson Cistulli for any length of time, you know he often quotes Emil Cioran. As a tribute to our departing managing editor, I have attempted to combine Cioran’s work with Carson’s spirit by replacing the word “life” in a few select quotes with our dear friend’s name. The results speak for themselves.

• If someone incessantly drops the word “Cistulli,” you know he’s a sick man.
• Everyone must destroy Cistulli. According to the way they do it, they’re either triumphants or failures.
• If I were to be totally sincere, I would say that I do not know why I live and why I do not stop living. The answer probably lies in the irrational character of Cistulli which maintains itself without reason.
• One of the greatest delusions of the average man is to forget that Cistulli is death’s prisoner.
• The only thing the young should be taught is that there is virtually nothing to be hoped for from Cistulli.
• “What is truth?” is a fundamental question. But what is it compared to “How to endure Cistulli?”
• For a long time—always, in fact—I have known that Cistulli is not what I needed and that I wasn’t able to deal with it.
• Knowledge is the plague of Cistulli, and consciousness, an open wound in its heart.
• One disgust, then another – to the point of losing the use of speech and even of the mind…The greatest exploit of Cistulli is to be still alive.
• Someday the old shack we call the world will fall apart. How, we don’t know, and we don’t really care either. Since nothing has real substance, and Cistulli is a twirl in the void, its beginning and its end are meaningless.
• Whoever has overcome his fear of death has also triumphed over Cistulli. For Cistulli is nothing but another word for this fear.
• By capitulating to Cistulli, this world has betrayed nothingness.
• To think all the time, to raise questions, to doubt your own destiny, to feel the weariness of living, to be worn out to the point of exhaustion by thoughts and Cistulli, to leave behind you, as symbols of Cistulli’s drama, a trail of smoke and blood – all this means you are so unhappy that reflection and thinking appear as a curse causing a violent revulsion in you.
• Sadness accompanies all those events in which Cistulli expends itself. Its intensity is equal to its loss. Thus death causes the greatest sadness.

• Cistulli is too full of death for death to be able to add anything to it.
• We do not rush toward death, we flee the catastrophe of Cistulli, survivors struggling to forget it. Fear of death is merely the projection into the future of a fear which dates back to our first moment of Cistulli. We are reluctant, of course, to treat Cistulli as a scourge: has it not been inculcated as the sovereign good—have we not been told that the worst came at the end, not at the outset of our Cistulli? Yet evil, the real evil, is behind, not ahead of us.

• From the cradle to the grave, each individual pays for the sin of not being God. That’s why Cistulli is an uninterrupted religious crisis, superficial for believers, shattering for doubters.

• Cistulli is possible only by the deficiencies of our imagination and memory.

• The pessimist has to invent new reasons to exist every day: he is a victim of the “meaning” of Cistulli.

• The only minds which seduce us are the minds which have destroyed themselves trying to give Cistulli a meaning.

• In theory, it matters little to me whether I live as whether I die; in practice, I am lacerated by every anxiety which opens an abyss between Cistulli and death.

• In relation to any act of Cistulli, the mind acts as a killjoy.

• The fact that Cistulli has no meaning is a reason to live – moreover, the only one.
• Cistulli inspires more dread than death — it is Cistulli which is the great unknown.

Read the rest of this entry »

By now, you’ve no doubt heard the news that current managing editor of FanGraphs, Carson Cistulli, is departing the site for the chilly northern climes of Toronto and the Blue Jays’ pro scouting department. Carson is a great editor and baseball mind, as well as a generous writer, friend, and podcast host, and while we’ll soldier on ably in his absence, I doubt we’ll ever hire anyone with exactly his same delightful perspective again. The Blue Jays will be richer for that, FanGraphs poorer.

You also may have heard that I will be stepping into his shoes as managing editor. What does that mean for you, the reader? Not much, as it turns out.

Since its inception, FanGraphs has delivered sabermetrically driven analysis that asks interesting baseball questions and tells interesting baseball stories, and it will continue to do so in the future. You, the reader, will still get to read the same smart, funny, incisive writing. You’ll enjoy the same rigorous statistical work, the same insightful prospect coverage, and the same thoughtful player and industry analysis as you always have, though I hope you’ll learn to tolerate a less fanatical devotion to hyphens.

My work as a writer here and as the managing editor of The Hardball Times had been animated by a desire to understand the game from the seams out; to bring the rigors of social science and statistical analysis to bear on baseball questions; to color the answers to those questions with philosophy and humor. To pick at, until we are satisfied, the “why” as much as the “what” and the “how.” To challenge what we assume we know about the game, those who run it and those who play it. All of that will inform my work as FanGraphs’ managing editor.

I’ll still be writing, chatting, and (for now) managing The Hardball Times. One thing that will change: I will serve as your new host of FanGraphs Audio. Chatting with folks about baseball is one of my favorite things to do, and I look forward to getting to do just that with members of our staff, as well as a few guests. But don’t you worry: Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass aren’t going anywhere.

Every editor brings with them their own vision and quirks, but each one’s success is largely the result of the writers with whom they work and the readers who consume all those good words. Our staff of full-time writers and contributors is in terrific shape, and you, our readers, are as thoughtful in your comments and generous with your reading hours as ever. We’ll miss Carson dearly, but we’ll press on. This is the new FanGraphs, same as the old FanGraphs. I couldn’t be more excited.

In April of 2009, FanGraphs CEO David Appelman announced that his growing site would be adding two part-time writers effective immediately or something like immediately. Having produced some vaguely analytical work for my own weblog, I sent a collection of story ideas, a CV, and an overwrought cover letter to the email address provided in his announcement. In a turn of events that speaks both to Appelman’s discretion as a leader and his capacity for identifying talent, he made a decision that would benefit FanGraphs for some time — which is to say, he hired someone else.

As if to prove, however, that even the most towering intellects aren’t immune from errors in judgment, Appelman and his future managing editor Dave Cameron would undo their good work just a few months later. Acting on a recommendation from Jonah Keri, who’s culpability in this process can’t be overstated, Appelman and Cameron invited me, at the beginning of August 2009, to begin contributing twice a week to fangraphs dot com.

To suggest that my first posts at the site were met with a “mixed response” would be to make full use of the rhetorical device known as “euphemism.” While I received no actual threats of bodily harm to my person, that didn’t prevent my person from crawling into the fetal position and weeping like a child. And while the vigor with which some readers expressed their dissatisfaction was probably unnecessary, the basic gist of their comments — namely, that I was single-handedly ruining whatever goodwill FanGraphs had cultivated with the public — seemed, at times, to possess merit.

When I asked Appelman if I should stop, lest I topple his fledgling empire, he suggested I not do that. “Keep going,” in fact, was more or less the tenor of his message. And whether that was the soundest advice or not, it seems in retrospect to have worked out. I have kept going for over nine years, enjoying (like other FanGraphs writers) an editorial freedom and collaborative spirit that is rare for any publication. One of Appelman’s great strengths as this site’s guardian has been to trust his writers. It’s an ethic from which I’ve benefited as a contributor and which I’ve attempted to preserve as an editor.

Starting today, however, I will no longer serve as a writer or editor for this site. After a tenure that has lasted far beyond even my most optimistic projections, I’m leaving FanGraphs to become a member of the Toronto Blue Jays.

Read the rest of this entry »