Last year, in all of baseball, the lowest team strikeout rate was 18.7%, and it belonged to the Indians. This is considering only non-pitchers, so as to put the National League on the same level as the American League. Projections, as you know, are by their very nature conservative. And now the 2019 Astros project for a team strikeout rate of 18.4%.

Last year, in all of baseball, the highest team wRC+ was 118, and it belonged to the Dodgers. The second-highest team wRC+ was 111, and it belonged to three different ballclubs. This is considering only non-pitchers, so as to put the NL on the same level as the AL. Projections, as you know, are by their very nature conservative. And now the 2019 Astros project for a team wRC+ of 115.

This is where the Astros stand after having come to a two-year agreement with free-agent Michael Brantley, worth $32 million. It’s not yet official-official, and I guess there’s some chance it all blows up, but I wouldn’t count on that happening. Brantley is good, and he’ll be the Astros’ newest regular.

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The Pirates have made official a move that first popped up last week. I’d wanted to write something about their low-cost pickup of free-agent Jordan Lyles, but it was a low priority, and it got lost in the chaos of being in attendance at the winter meetings. This post, then, is a little delayed, but something that’s happened in the meanwhile is that the Dodgers signed Joe Kelly for three years and $25 million. The Pirates signed Lyles for one year and $2.05 million. This seems like a good job by the Pirates.

Based on some early indications, the free-agent market hasn’t cratered, and it might even be a bit healthier than it was a year ago. Kelly got paid over three years. Jeurys Familia got paid over three years. Andrew McCutchen got paid over three years. Lance Lynn got paid over three years. There’s money out there, and there’s interest in pitchers, and that’s the context in which the Pirates made this Lyles acquisition. I know that Lyles isn’t likely to win the Cy Young, and I know the Pirates aren’t likely to win the World Series, but I’d at least like to dedicate a few paragraphs to Lyles’ quiet emergence in 2018. This is a guy who’s still only 28 years old.

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Earlier this month, Mets general manager Brodie Van Wagenen made the first big splash of his tenure with a blockbuster trade geared towards contending in 2019, bringing Robinson Cano and Edwin Diaz from Seattle in exchange for two former first-round picks and some expensive ballast. After considering a variety of trade scenarios involving Marlins catcher J.T. Realmuto, Van Wagenen went a more conservative route to fill one of the team’s glaring needs, signing free agent Wilson Ramos to a two-year, $19 million deal with a club option for 2021. It’s an appropriate bit of restraint that nonetheless provides a solid upgrade.

The 31-year-old Ramos split his 2018 season between the Rays (78 games) and Phillies (33 games), hitting .306/.358/.487 with 15 homers. His 131 wRC+ was tops among catchers, and his 2.4 WAR fifth. He earned All-Star honors for the second time in three seasons but missed the game itself due to a left hamstring strain that sidelined him for a month. During his time on the disabled list, he was traded to Philadelphia for a player to be named later or cash on July 31.

The big knock on Ramos is that he’s had a hard time staying healthy during his nine-year major league career. The 2015 and 2016 seasons are the only ones in the past seven years in which he’s avoided the DL. He’s had three surgeries (two in 2012, one in 2017) to repair the meniscus and ACL in his right knee, served three stints for hamstring strains (2013 and 2014 being the others), and suffered a foul tip-induced fractured hamate that required surgery in his left wrist in 2014. He’s averaged just 92 games a year since arriving for good in the majors in 2011.

The hamate fracture was a fluke injury, but the lower-body woes are of a concern for a catcher who lists at 245 pounds. In our Top 50 Free Agents rankings, Ramos was 17th, nine spots lower than fellow free agent catcher Yasmani Grandal, in part due to his size and durability issues. While he’s been the slightly better hitter of the pair over the past three seasons, with a 120 wRC+ to Grandal’s 116, he’s made 296 fewer plate appearances in that span, including 102 fewer in 2018. He’s also 15 months older, and nowhere near Grandal’s class as a defender. Baseball Prospectus’ pitch framing-inclusive metrics have Ramos 6.1 runs above average over the past three seasons but slightly in the red in both 2017 and 2018. By comparison, Grandal was 79 runs above average in that three-year span, including an MLB-best 15.7 above average in the framing department in 2018; by DRS, the three-year, framing-inclusive tally is -11 runs for Ramos, 39 for Grandal.

Thus you can understand why teams might prefer Grandal, though his postseason pitch-blocking woes might hurt the perception of him. Also working against Grandal is his attachment to a rejected qualifying offer for the Dodgers. Had the Mets signed him, they would have forfeited their second 2019 draft pick and $500,000 of international pool money.

The surprise is in Ramos’ price tag. The New York Times‘ James Wagner reported that Ramos will make $8.25 million in 2019 and $9.25 million in 2020. He’s got a $10 million club option for 2021, with a $1.5 million buyout for a total guarantee of $19 million. The salary is just over half of the $36 million (spread over three years) that both Kiley McDaniel and our crowdsource project estimated he would receive when we made up our free agent list. By comparison, the estimates for Grandal range from $39 million to $45 million for three years.

As for Realmuto, the Mets were reportedly very interested in him, but balked at the possibility of including major league talent such as Michael Conforto, Brandon Nimmo, and/or Amed Rosario in exchange — to say nothing of a rumored three-way trade involving the Yankees that would also have required dealing Noah Syndergaard.

Now that they have Ramos, the key for the Mets is finding another catcher with whom to pair him. Between Kevin Plawecki, Devin Mesoraco, Tomas Nido, Jose Lobaton and Travis d’Arnaud, the team got just an 82 wRC+ offensive showing (.208/.297/.355) from its catchers in 2018, and a total of 0.7 WAR by our measures (0.8 via Baseball-Reference, and 1.5 WARP via Baseball Prospectus). Mesoraco and Lobaton are both free agents, while the going-on-30-year-old d’Arnaud, the best defender of the bunch (41.8 FRAA career, 11.4 FRAA in 2017) is coming off April 2018 Tommy John surgery and has a track record for health that would make Ramos blanch.

All told, our Depth Charts projections suggest that the signing of Ramos eyeballs as about a one-win upgrade over a Plawecki/d’Arnaud pairing. Given that the Mets now project as an 86-win team, this is exactly the type of move they should be making, one that significantly increases their odds of securing a playoff spot without compromising their longer-term resources. When was the last time anybody could say that about a move that the Mets made?

Cleveland made a big trade last week, netting Carlos Santana from the Mariners and Jake Bauers from the Rays, while sending Edwin Encarnacion, Yandy Diaz, Cole Hulser, and a draft pick off to the other two teams in the trade. Jeff Sullivan already covered that trade, which was pretty interesting for Cleveland, slightly interesting for the Rays, and not very interesting for the Mariners, who essentially just moved contracts around and received a draft pick for their trouble. On Friday, Cleveland made another move, trading Yonder Alonso, a one-time Carlos Santana replacement, as Alonso has now been replaced by the guy he replaced. Alonso heads to the White Sox in a deal that figures to help both AL Central clubs this season.

Indians Receive:

• OF Alex Call

White Sox Receive:

• Yonder Alonso

Last season, Yonder Alonso was the discount version of the Carlos Santana who was on Cleveland’s 2016 pennant winner. Sure, Alonso is left-handed, not a switch-hitter, but he can play an adequate first base with a bat that is a little worse than Santana. He required just a $16 million guarantee to go to Cleveland while Santana received $60 million from Philadelphia. Having signed Edwin Encarnacion for $60 million after 2016, the Indians elected to let Santana go and brought in Alonso coming off a career year in Oakland and Seattle. “Career year” is a bit of a misnomer; Alonso hit 20 homers and put up a 147 wRC+ in the first half of 2017 before settling in closer to his career norms with a 114 wRC+ in the second half, much of it with the Mariners.

Alonso was a bit out of place in Cleveland as an everyday player. In his breakout season in Oakland, only 15% of his plate appearances came against left-handers; that figure jumped to 24% in Cleveland. Alonso has a career wRC+ of 80 against lefties in his career, including a dreadful 64 wRC+ last season. If Alonso had half as many plate appearances against lefties last year, and had hit closer to his career average against them, he would have been worth about half a win more last year. The White Sox might be able to get more value out of Alonso next year by aggressively platooning him. Read the rest of this entry »

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.

As much as Derek Jeter, Jorge Posada, Mariano Rivera, and Bernie Williams, Andy Pettitte was a pillar of the Joe Torre-era Yankees dynasty. The tall Texan lefty played such a vital role on 13 pinstriped playoff teams and seven pennant winners — plus another trip to the World Series during his three-year run Houston — that he holds several major postseason records. In fact, no pitcher ever started more potential series clinchers, both in the World Series and the postseason as a whole.

For as important as Pettitte was to the “Core Four” (Williams always gets the short end of the stick on that one) that anchored five championships from 1996 to 2009, he seldom made a case as one of the game’s top pitchers. High win totals driven by excellent offensive support helped him finish in the top five of his leagues’ Cy Young voting four times, but only three times did he place among the top 10 in ERA or WAR, and he never ranked higher than sixth in strikeouts. He made just three All-Star teams.

Indeed, Pettitte was more plow horse than racehorse. A sinker- and cutter-driven groundballer whose pickoff move was legendary, he was a championship-level innings-eater, a grinder (his word) rather than a dominator, a pitcher whose strong work ethic, mental preparation, and focus — visually exemplified by his peering in for the sign from the catcher with eyes barely visible underneath the brim of his cap — compensated for his lack of dazzling stuff. Ten times he made at least 32 starts, a mark that’s tied for seventh in the post-1994 strike era. His total of 10 200-inning seasons is tied for fourth in that same span, and his 12 seasons of qualifying for the ERA title with an ERA+ of 100 or better is tied for second. He had his ups and downs in the postseason, but only once during his 18-year career (2004, when he underwent season-ending elbow surgery) was he unavailable to pitch once his team made the playoffs.

On a ballot with two multi-Cy Young winners (Roger Clemens and Roy Halladay) as well as two other starters (Mike Mussina and Curt Schilling) who were better at preventing runs and racking up strikeouts — and also had plenty of postseason success — Pettitte would appear to be a long shot for Cooperstown. And that’s before factoring in his 2007 inclusion in the Mitchell Report for having used human growth hormone to recover from an elbow injury. Thanks to his championship rings and his high win total, he’ll probably receive enough support to persist on the ballot nonetheless.

About those wins: Regular readers know that I generally avoid dwelling upon pitcher win totals, because in this increasingly specialized era, they owe as much to adequate offensive, defensive, and bullpen support as they do to a pitcher’s own performance. While one needn’t know how many wins Pettitte amassed in a season or a career to appreciate his true value, those totals have affected the popular perception of his career.

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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 Arizona Diamondbacks.

Batters

Well, the good news is that Paul Goldschmidt’s departure doesn’t turn the offense into a burnt husk of a lineup. Not that it’ll be a good group, of course. But there’s a wide gulf between a mediocre offense and what our planet will look like in a few hundred years, strewn with artifacts from an earlier time as kids dodge packs of feral dogs in the hopes of snagging food from the dumpster near an abandoned bowling alley. On paper, Arizona has a lot of average hitters, and while that’s not so bad a thing if that’s where your offense ends up, it’s not what you want as your Plan A. Simply put, life comes at you fast — I get most of my wisdom from internet memes — and not everyone in the lineup will get 600 plate appearances.

If they manage to stay healthy, this crew has a surprisingly high floor, but a very low ceiling; there’s literally no one in this group I would take as a great candidate to have a breakout season.

Pitchers

This is the more interesting set of predictions for Arizona, as there is upside here. I won’t lie to you and say that Patrick Corbin isn’t a gigantic loss at the front of the rotation. He was one of the hardest pitchers to hit in 2018, and will likely remain so in 2019. But the 2018 Diamondbacks had almost no Taijuan Walker and lost some starts from Robbie Ray as well, both of whom will help soften the loss of Corbin, and of Clay Buchholz. Not that I expect Buchholz to be great in 2019, but he earned real wins for the team in 2018, wins they’ll have to replace.

Like Miles Mikolas last year, ZiPS gives Merrill Kelly, recently of the KBO, a league-average projection after keeping the ball in the park, which is no easy task in Korea; KBO pitchers had a league average of 2.44 homers per game and an ERA of 5.20 in 2018. Kelly is also reportedly throwing harder now than he did when he was a mostly forgotten Rays prospect. I actually had to look at a couple of those rosters to jog my memory; it feels like a lifetime ago.

Bench and Prospects

The bullpen will probably be reasonable, and the computer sees Jon Duplantier and whichever Taylor is the good one as being legitimate, if ordinary, options for 2019 if something goes wrong. Given Arizona’s insistence that they’re not rebuilding, I wouldn’t be surprised if, without some of the pitching depth including Kelly, they would have been more interested in re-signing Patrick Corbin or in letting Zack Greinke play out his deal. In theory, if Arizona could trade Greinke for at least one legitimate offensive prospect who is close to the majors, such a move would be survivable. I would wager the team is disappointed that Pavin Smith didn’t essentially force the Goldschmidt trade; ZiPS is now at the point where it doesn’t see him as being more likely than not to emerge as even a one-win player in the majors.

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.

Water is wet. Grass is green. Kyler Murray is a talented athlete. These are statements we know to be true. The first two aren’t especially relevant to FanGraphs, but the third one is.

In case you aren’t aware, the Oakland Athletics drafted Murray with the ninth overall pick of the most recent Major League Baseball Rule 4 draft. Back in April, before he was drafted, our own Eric Longenhagen was taken with the outfielder’s athleticism.

Evaluators see him as a crude but gifted speedster with good pop for his size who possesses more projection than most because of his athleticism. Murray is performing this year (.290/.390/.520 at publication) on the baseball field despite little prior in-game experience.

Murray was ranked 20th on FanGraphs’ 2018 Draft Board; his pre-draft report noted:

Despite [his limited playing time], he has been electric, showing even more physical ability than he had in high school and performing, slashing .290/.390/.550. He shows everything scouts could want to see after this kind of layoff and his only clear weakness is swing-and-miss against good off-speed stuff, both somewhat allowed with his power-based approach.

Take a look at that power-based approach for yourself:

One MLB executive, speaking with ESPN, even dropped the ultimate praise on Murray, comparing the young player to Mike Trout. \ Kyler Murray is a young, gifted hitter with star potential despite his rawness, which is why the A’s drafted him in the first round and gave him a $4.66 million signing bonus.

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