Like most teams that win the World Series, the 2018 Astros did not complete the two-peat, winning 103 games during the regular season but falling to the Red Sox in five, thus keeping the 2000 Yankees as the most recent team to win more than one World Series in a row. Russia may be the stumbling block for empire-builders, but despite arguably having a better team than in 2017, the Astros’ failed to repeat due to the implacable foe of World Series champions: a ten-team playoff in a sport in which teams are relatively close together in quality.

The Setup

Well, the 2017 Astros won the World Series. Which, if you didn’t already know that for some odd reason, you should probably at least have noticed unless you have a strange habit of not reading the opening paragraph to articles.

In my not-so-humbly-expressed opinion, borne from decades as a baseball fan and a couple more as a curiously paid observer, the greatest danger facing any championship team is inaction. When everything has gone right and a team has won baseball’s top honor, there’s a real tendency for that team to decide that each and every player on that championship roster helped lead the franchise to the fated promised land, like some sort of strange, baseball-specific Calvinism. Teams like the 2002 Angels, the 2005 White Sox, and the 2015 Royals all had disappointing follow-ups to their trophy runs and faded out of contention quickly.

While 2017’s follow-up wasn’t the most action-packed one for the Astros, as the team didn’t have many glaring weaknesses, they did still find it in themselves to pull of one off the offseason’s biggest trades, picking up Gerrit Cole from the Pittsburgh Pirates and making a deep rotation even deeper. The trade was a bit of a dice roll; Cole had never really fulfilled his early promise in Pittsburgh except for one shining season. But Houston thought the short-term upside in Cole was greater than the long-term value in the pitchers they gave up to acquire him, and showed they weren’t afraid to continue to tinker with the rotation, even leaving Collin McHugh in the bullpen.

With a deep rotation made deeper by the addition of Cole, and the quartet of Jose Altuve, Carlos Correa, Alex Bregman, and George Springer all still in their twenties for a few more years, Houston, like the other large-market teams, largely avoided dipping their toes into a weak free agent market.

The Projection

Houston didn’t have as obvious a cakewalk as the Cleveland Indians coming into the 2018 season, but very few saw a lot of real resistance for them in the AL West. Of the 40 FanGraphs writers and contributors who made 2018 staff predictions entering the season, 38 chose the Astros to win the West. In ESPN’s panel, 29-of-29 picked Houston.

And the ZiPS SuperComputer© didn’t beg to differ. While the computer thought the Angels had at least some path to a division title if certain not-too-crazy things went right for them, with a 95-67 projected record for Houston, ZiPS projected the Astros to have the second-easiest divisional crown, with 83.9% odds of winning, just behind the Indians at 84.4%.

The reasons for the optimism were, in foresight and hindsight, quite obvious. The Astros were overflowing with awesome, deep talent and had the resources to trade for in-season help if UCL tears somehow proved to be contagious. The team’s weak spot in 2017, designated hitter, looked to be an improved if not a league-beating spot, with the retirement of Carlos Beltran. And in any case, there wasn’t a lot of help available in free agency at that spot.

The Results

Somewhat boringly, a lot of things went right for the Astros; 103-win teams tend to have more than their fair share of breaks go their way, simply because lucky 100-win teams are more likely than unlucky 106-win ones.

That’s not to say everything fell on the sunny side for Houston. Some wounds were self-inflicted. The team made the controversial decision to acquire then-suspended reliever Roberto Osuna at the end of July, a move that read to many as unforced error, given the nature of Osuna’s suspension and the availability of other relievers on the market.

Others were just the way the game goes. Josh Reddick didn’t repeat the best season of his career and Yuli Gurriel’s power dropped off (not surprising for a 34-year-old). Carlos Correa and Jose Altuve both missed time due to injury, the former more seriously with a larger dropoff in play.

But as in the 143 episodes or so of The Simpsons in which Homer gets fired from the power plant before the first commercial break, things mostly worked out. The offensive losses hurt, but the team’s choices in role players arrested some of the loss, with Max Stassi, Tony Kemp, and Tyler White all making very real contributions to the team’s win total. The offense dropped from first in the AL in runs scored to fifth, but this was mirrored by an improvement from fifth to first in the team’s ERA.

Justin Verlander’s 2018 post-trade mojo continued to prove strong, and Gerrit Cole finally had became as unhittable as furious Pirates fans spent years hoping he’d be, seeing an almost 50% bump in his strikeout rate from 2017 after mostly giving up on his sinker, which batters had slugged nearly .500 against that year.

All told, Houston’s rotation collected 22.5 WAR in 2018, a franchise best. Not even the mid-1980s Astros, with Nolan Ryan and Mike Scott’s changeup and the weird world in which Jim Deshaies was a strikeout machine, were able to match that.

Probably the weirdest 2018 phenomenon for Houston was that despite winning games at an impressive clip, they weren’t truly able to pull away from the rest of the division until the last week or so of the season. Pythagorean Magic may sound like a really bad educational video game someone buys for their kids, but it was enough to keep Seattle in the race, to the extent that the Astros actually lost first place for a few days during a twelve-game winning streak.

And after the Mariners returned to earth or their Soundgarden albums or whatever it is Seattle people do in 2018, the Oakland A’s proved nearly as resilient. Despite finishing with 103 wins and never having a losing month in 2018, Houston never established a division lead greater than six games.

What Comes Next?

The big challenge facing the Astros in the present, and over the next few years, will be in dealing with what is a transitional phase in the team’s rotation, one of the big 2018 strengths. Of the five primary starting pitchers for the Astros in 2018, three are already gone: Dallas Keuchel and Charlie Morton to free agency, and Lance McCullers to Tommy John surgery. Verlander, Cole, and McHugh are all free agents after the 2019 season.

Even with an optimistic return from McCullers, that’s an awful lot of quality pitching turnover in a very short period. The team still has an above-average farm system with legitimate rotation candidates, one of whom, Josh James, looks assured of a 2019 spot. But it’s easy to see why when talking with the Miami Marlins about a possible J.T. Realmuto trade, Houston has reportedly been adamant about not giving up Forrest Whitley.

2019 ZiPS Projection – Alex Bregman

I’m going with Bregman here simply because I received a barrage of requests during his breakout 2018 for a ZiPS look into his future. And since I occasionally like to give the people what they want, let’s crank out some Alex Bregman goodness.

Yup, that’s a bonafide star. Enough of one that if Carlos Correa roars back in 2019, the Astros face some very interesting long-term questions. Imagine a world in 2020 in which the Astros are able to make a long-term deal with Bregman but not Correa. Bregman’s defensive numbers at third were hardly amazing, but he did a decent job filling in at short for Correa in 2018. At what point do you start to talk about a Correa trade, especially for a piece that fills up another hole, say in the rotation? It’s not so far-fetched.

Earlier this month, Jay Jaffe wrote about the Hall of Fame case for former Yankees southpaw Andy Pettitte. Pettitte, of course, was known for his cut fastball, his glare towards the hitter as he awaited the sign from Jorge Posada, and his pickoff move.

This pickoff move.

Pettitte’s pickoff move became legendary over the course of his long career, and led to teams essentially abandoning the running game against the lefty until late in his career. Pettitte retired as the active leader in pickoffs, despite baserunners often arguing that his move was really a balk. So let’s find out if Pettitte’s move was generally legal or not.

We’ll start, of course, with the rule. For our purposes, we’re concerned with Rule 6.02(a), which defines “Pitcher Illegal Action[s].”

(a) Balks.
If there is a runner, or runners, it is a balk when:
(1) The pitcher, while touching his plate, makes any motion naturally associated with his pitch and fails to make such delivery;
(2) The pitcher, while touching his plate, feints a throw to first or third base and fails to complete the throw;
(3) The pitcher, while touching his plate, fails to step directly toward a base before throwing to that base;
(4) The pitcher, while touching his plate, throws, or feints a throw to an unoccupied base, except for the purpose of making a play;
(5) The pitcher makes an illegal pitch;
(6) The pitcher delivers the ball to the batter while he is not facing the batter;
(7) The pitcher makes any motion naturally associated with his pitch while he is not touching the pitcher’s plate;
(8) The pitcher unnecessarily delays the game;
(9) The pitcher, without having the ball, stands on or astride the pitcher’s plate or while off the plate, he feints a pitch;
(10) The pitcher, after coming to a legal pitching position, removes one hand from the ball other than in an actual pitch, or in throwing to a base;
(11) The pitcher, while touching his plate, accidentally or intentionally has the ball slip or fall out of his hand or glove;
(12) The pitcher, while giving an intentional base on balls, pitches when the catcher is not in the catcher’s box;
(13) The pitcher delivers the pitch from Set Position without coming to a stop.

We generally think of a balk as an attempt to deceive a baserunner. But as you can see, while that’s certainly the purpose of the rule (MLB’s official glossary even says so), it’s also not the actual language of the rule. And really, that makes sense: if deceiving the runner were illegal across the board, all pickoffs would be illegal too. That’s because a pickoff, generally speaking, means the runner was fooled. The rule does prohibit some actions that would serve the purpose of deceiving the runner, like stepping towards a different base or pitching without facing the batter (a line Johnny Cueto and Hideki Okajima both straddled at various times during their careers). Most of the comments to the prohibited pitcher action rules mention player safety as a primary consideration, which makes sense given the pitcher is often hurling a hard sphere at 95 mph. So, it’s probably most accurate to say that the balk rule means that you can’t deceive the runner in a manner which MLB has deemed to threaten player safety, or in a way that would disrupt the balance between base runners attempt to steal and the pitcher’s attempt to get outs. In other words, you can only fool the runner so long as you don’t take one of the actions proscribed by the Rule.

All of those elements are things a pitcher can’t do without a balk being called. When assessing Pettitte’s move, we can eliminate some of them pretty quickly. Pettitte isn’t throwing home, so (5), (6), (12), and (13) are out. He has the ball, so (9) doesn’t apply. He actually throws, so (2) doesn’t apply. He’s not throwing towards an unoccupied base, so (4) is irrelevant also. Pettitte also generally keeps his foot on the pitching rubber, so (7) doesn’t apply either.

The most likely arguments for saying Pettitte balks on these throws are under (1) and (3), and fortunately, there are comments to the Rule that can help us suss this out.

Let’s start with 6.02(a)(1). Here’s the comment.

Rule 6.02(a)(1) Comment: If a left-handed or right-handed pitcher swings his free foot past the back edge of the pitcher’s rubber, he is required to pitch to the batter except to throw to second base on a pick-off play.

Does Pettitte do that? It’s actually hard to tell. Here’s one angle from a game against the Red Sox.

Pettitte comes really close there. How about here, in the 2005 World Series?

It’s safe to say that Pettitte swings his front leg towards the pitching rubber. Here, it looks like he may well have gone past at least the front of the rubber. (Interestingly, it looks like the call may have been blown twice here; in addition to failing to call a balk on Pettitte, Iguchi was safe.)

So whether Pettitte regularly swings his front foot past the back of the pitching rubber seems inconclusive. Given how close he comes, however, it’s likely he did technically violate the rule on at least some of his pickoffs.

So how about 6.02(a)(3)? Here’s what that rule means.

Rule 6.02(a)(3) Comment: Requires the pitcher, while touching his plate, to step directly toward a base before throwing to that base. If a pitcher turns or spins off of his free foot without actually stepping or if he turns his body and throws before stepping, it is a balk. A pitcher is to step directly toward a base before throwing to that base and is required to throw (except to second base)because he steps. It is a balk if, with runners on first and third, the pitcher steps toward third and does not throw, merely to bluff the runner back to third; then seeing the runner on first start for second, turn and step toward and throw to first base. It is legal for a pitcher to feint a throw to second base.

In other words, this Rule means that Pettitte, when throwing towards first base with his back foot on the rubber, had to actually step toward first base before throwing.

There, it looks like he does. But here’s that pickoff from the 2005 World Series again:

There, it doesn’t really look like he’s stepping towards first base until the very end, when he puts his foot down. And the rule doesn’t really say how “step directly” is defined. Is that determined by the pitcher’s body when his foot comes down? Or when he lifts his foot? Pettitte seems to circumvent this rule by where he plants his foot, not by where he lifts it. It’s a plausible interpretation, but it’s also equally possible that an umpire could view Pettitte as not really stepping “directly toward” first base.

A lot of Pettitte’s pickoffs came before modern camera angles, which makes a conclusive determination difficult. Still, it’s helpful is to take a look at a pitcher with a similar move to Pettitte’s: Julio Urias.

Now, interestingly, Urias also comes dangerously close to swinging his front foot past the back of the pitching rubber. But he does the same thing that Pettitte did. It’s what the announcers to those game aptly described as “a weight shift towards home but the step towards first.” Here’s a different pickoff where you can see it more clearly:

Now, there you can see that Urias steps towards first the whole time, but moves the rest of his body towards home plate. The only issue is that it looks from this angle like his front toe swings past the back of the rubber, which may well mean this should have been called a balk.

So what does this mean? Pettitte and Urias certainly, at the very least, tested the outer boundaries of the balk rule. It seems certain that at least some of Pettitte’s pickoffs should have been called balks. At the same time, the basic premise of the move – shifting your body towards home plate as you step towards first – isn’t prohibited by the rule. Jeff Sullivan has talked in these pages about pitches so good they fool the umpire as well as the hitter. The very best pickoff moves, it seems, aren’t any different.

In 2018, I once again had the pleasure of interviewing hundreds of people within baseball. Many of their words were shared in my Sunday Notes column, while others came courtesy of the FanGraphs Q&A series, the Learning and Developing a Pitch series, the Manager’s Perspective series, and a smattering of feature stories. Here is a selection of the best quotes from this year’s conversations.

———

“My slider will come out and it will be spinning, spinning, spinning, and then as soon as it catches, it picks up speed and shoots the other way. Whoosh! It’s like when you bowl. You throw the ball, and then as soon as it catches, it shoots with more speed and power. Right? “ — Sergio Romo, Tampa Bay Rays pitcher, January 2018

“One of the biggest lessons we learn is that iron sharpens iron. That is 100% how we try to do things with the Rockies — hiring people that are smarter than we are, and more skilled, and have different skills that can complement, and train people to be better at their jobs than I am at my job. That’s how you advance an organization.” — Jeff Bridich, Colorado Rockies GM, January 2018

“We could split hairs and say, ‘Hey, you’re playing in front of a thousand drunk Australians instead of 40,000 drunk Bostonians, and you’re living with a host family instead of at a five-star hotel.’ But The Show is The Show, and in Australia the ABL is The Show.” — Lars Anderson, baseball nomad, January 2018

“Baseball is heaven. Until our closer blows the game.” — Michael Hill, Miami Marlins president of baseball operations, January 2018 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. It draws upon work originally written for previous elections at SI.com, and has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. 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.

The venue has changed but the song remains the same: there’s no such thing as a perfect Hall of Fame ballot. Even with the BBWAA electing a record-setting 16 players over the past five years, the backlog on the ballot is such that there are more plausible candidates than will fit within a voter’s 10 allotted spots.

In an ideal world, a voter could fill out his or her ballot entirely according to merit, selecting every candidate who meets the Hall of Fame standards by his or her own reckoning. This is the so-called “binary ballot,” as the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s Derrick Goold christened it several years ago. In reality, any voter who identifies more than 10 candidates worthy of the honor is required to perform a kind of triage — weighing some tough questions before selecting his or her top 10 candidates while hoping the traffic abates enough to allow consideration of those who just missed the cut next year. Beyond simply worrying that they’ll catch hell from the public for supporting Player X, or will miss an opportunity to support the low-polling Player Y, voters have to deal with thorny issues such as candidates linked to performance-enhancing drugs and the (mis)application of the so-called “character clause.”

The notion that there may be more than 10 candidates at a time worthy of the game’s highest honor might raise some eyebrows, but study the history of the Hall of Fame and its denizens and you’ll quickly be reminded that they can’t all be Willie Mays. While voting for everyone better than Bad Choice Player Q based on a lowest common denominator standard isn’t the right answer, the writers and the institution have failed to keep pace in terms of electing modern players, not just those who played in the 1990s and 2000s, but further back as well. Limiting the field to those elected by the BBWAA, and calling upon research I compiled for The Cooperstown Casebook, here’s a breakdown of the average number of Hall of Famers per team per season for select periods:

I’ve omitted the World War II years, when several future Hall of Famers entered the service, and placed other cutoffs right at the point of two rounds of expansion (from 20 teams to 24 in 1969, and from 26 to 28 in 1993). My point is that the level of representation is below 1.0 from 1997 onward, and has been higher than 0.63 just once since 1999. All of which is to say that relative to long-term historical norms, we’re missing about 15-20 Hall of Famers from the post-strike era. Some of that, and the ballot’s backlog, owes to the split in the electorate regarding the handing of candidates linked to PEDs, with the Hall’s ham-fisted attempts to interject — from their unilateral 2014 decision to truncate the eligibility window from 15 years to 10 to last year’s plea from Joe Morgan — only exacerbating the problem.

Despite the work I put into my annual series and into Hall of Fame research in general, I do not yet have a ballot of my own. Under BBWAA rules, I am two years away from that privilege. Nonetheless, every year I create my virtual ballot to illustrate the hard choices a voter faces, and do so by the ballot submission deadline (December 31). As always, I am guided by my JAWS system, but not bound by it, for there are considerations that a Wins Above Replacement-based methodology — which can account for the widespread variations in scoring from era to era and ballpark to ballpark (producing the occasional double-take) — can’t capture, including pennant race and postseason contributions, awards and honors, and historical importance.

Over the past six weeks, I’ve analyzed the top 21 candidates on the ballot, the ones who are in serious consideration for those 10 precious spots (beyond the odd courtesy vote). I’ll get back to the remaining 14 “one-and-done” guys — who between them have gathered a grand total of four votes from among the 135 published ballots thus far — later this week, as they’re fun to write about without fixating upon how short of Hall standards they are. But now, it’s time to fish or cut bait.

Of those top 21 candidates on this year’s ballot, nine exceed the JAWS standard — the average of the enshrined players — at their position. Six of those nine top the career WAR, peak WAR, and JAWS standards across the board, while the other three from among that group are short only on peak. Separately, four other candidates exceed the peak standard. Beyond that is one “candidate of interest,” a player who falls shy on JAWS but about whom I remain particularly open-minded, for reasons explained below. That’s 14 players; the other seven are mainly guys whom other voters are considering, but are just along for the ride here as far as I’m concerned. I’ll include them for illustrative purposes…

…And then bid them adieu. If you want to know more about why Berkman, Kent, McGriff, Oswalt, Pettitte, Sheffield, and Vizquel don’t make my cut, I’ve got a few thousand words to that effect on to each, which you can access by using the navigator widget atop this article

As I’ve said repeatedly throughout this series, when it comes to candidates connected to PEDs, I draw a line between those whose allegations date back to the time when the game had no testing regimen or means of punishment (i.e., prior to 2004) and those that came afterwards. With no means of enforcing a paper ban, and with players flouting such a ban being rewarded left and right amid what was truly a complete institutional failure that implicated owners, the commissioner, and the players’ union as well as the players, I simply don’t think voters can apply a retroactive morality to say that a Bonds or a Clemens or a Sosa should be disqualified on that basis alone. I’ve done enough research to believe that this is a reasonable place to start, but it must be acknowledged that there’s no consensus within the electorate over how to handle the issue, and voters’ views on the topic range from “performance only” to “hang ’em high at the first hint of suspicion.”

Thus, two spots on my ballot go to Bonds, the all-time home run leader, and Clemens, the best pitcher since World War II. As noted within my profiles of the gruesome twosome, the pair made big gains on the 2016 and 2017 ballots, surpassing the 50% mark in the latter year, but saw their momentum slow in 2018, with Clemens receiving 57.3% and Bonds 56.4%. They won’t be elected this year, but with three years of eligibility remaining beyond this one, they still have reasonable shots, needing to pick up about five percentage points per year.

By that same rule of thumb, I’m crossing Ramirez off the list. On a performance-only basis, he would get my vote, as he’s one of the greatest hitters of all time; his 154 OPS+ ranks 20th. But I simply can’t get past the two failed tests, not when better players who never tested positive are being kept out over more nebulous PED allegations.

That leaves 11 players for eight spots. Easily making the cut, with my lightning-round summaries of their cases, are the following six:

• Rivera (2nd among relievers in JAWS): The greatest closer of all time in terms of both saves and win probability added, and a player with an unequaled body of postseason work — a 0.70 ERA in 141 innings, with 31 saves of four outs or more, and four times on the mound for the final out of the World Series — as well.
• Halladay (43rd among starters in JAWS): No, he’s not above the JAWS standard, but he’s at the vanguard of a wave of pitchers who probably won’t get to that point due to workload constraints, with a magnificent, above-standard peak that surpasses every pitcher on this ballot except Clemens. Despite qualifying for the ERA title just eight times, he had seven top-five finishes in that category, and eight in WAR. It’s a tragedy that he didn’t live to see his election, but he’s worthy of this honor.
• Mussina (29th among starters in JAWS, 63.5%% in 2018): Despite his lack of a Cy Young, championship ring or major milestone (300 wins or 3,000 strikeouts), his long-term success at run prevention and his outstanding strikeout rate and strikeout-to-walk ratio make him eminently worthy of Cooperstown. With three years of big gains in a row, his election is a matter of when, not if.
• Rolen (10th among third basemen in JAWS, 10.2% in 2018): An exceptional but underappreciated two-way player, Rolen combined power and patience at the plate with some of the best glove work the hot corner has ever seen. Even in a career that contained numerous injuries and ended at age 37, he ranks third at position both in fielding runs (+175) and in Gold Gloves (eight) and, depending upon your choice of metric, belongs among the top 10 or 20 hitters for the position as well. Particularly at an underrepresented spot — there are just 14 third basemen in the Hall, compared to 26 right fielders and 19 to 21 of every other position besides catcher — he merits enshrinement. His candidacy is off to a slow start, but he’s picked up some support and several voters have mentioned adding him in the future.
• Martinez (11th among third basemen in JAWS, 70.4% in 2018): With apologies to David Ortiz, Martinez is not just the best designated hitter of all time but one of the best hitters ever, ranking 14th in OBP and tied for 30th in OPS+ (7,000 PA minimum), with 500-plus average-ish games at third base bolstering his value. As of 2015, his candidacy looked like a lost cause, with just 27.0% of the vote and his remaining time on the ballot having shrunk from nine years to four, but three straight years of double-digit gains has put him within reach of completing a Tim Raines-like ascension to Cooperstown this year, his final one on the ballot.
• Walker (10th among right fielders in JAWS, 34.1% in 2018): A legitimate five-tool player, Walker was outstanding at defense and base running as well as hitting. Even after adjusting for the time he spent at high altitude, he’s tied for 43rd all-time in OPS+. His injury-shortened career has provoked some resistance among voters, but they are finally coming around; in his second-to-last year on the ballot, he’s received 65.2% of the vote from those published at @NotMrTibbs’ Ballot Tracker thus far, a remarkable surge that should at least get the attention of the Today’s Game committee if he falls short next year.

That’s eight spots filled, leaving five players vying for the final two:

• Schilling (27th among starters in JAWS, 51.2% in 2018): He was the best postseason pitcher of his generation, with an outstanding strikeout rate and the best strikeout-to-walk ratio since the pitching distance moved to 60-foot-6. And contrary to his conspiracy theory — no, not the Qanon one — he was trending towards election in spite of his abrasive public persona and political views, at least until his November 2016 praise of a pro-lynching tweet stopped his momentum, costing him 7.3 percentage points relative to 2016; he regained most of that ground last year.

  Thus far I’m six-for-six in including Schilling on my virtual ballots, despite my increasing distaste for that persona. Garden-variety political differences I can abide, and his politics had no bearing on his playing career; it’s a mistake to connect Schilling’s words to the “integrity, sportsmanship, character” portion of the Hall’s voting instructions. That said, I will freely admit that I can’t stomach the lynching tweet, his sharing of a transphobic meme, or his alignment with a white supremacist congressional candidate that even the alt-right Breitbart site backed away from. (Belatedly, after the horse was out of the barn, so did Schilling.)

  Though he’s polling at 72.6% in the Tracker, Schilling is no real threat to come close to 75% this year; he received votes on just 32.4% of the unpublished ballots last year. All of which means we’re going to have to rehash the litany again next year. For all of the above — the stuff that crosses lines beyond politics, and the sheer agita he causes us all in this process — I’m skipping him this year. This isn’t a character clause matter, it’s a ballot-management one.

• Jones (11th among center fielders in JAWS, 7.3% in 2018): If 2018 Hall of Fame honoree Chipper Jones was the Braves dynasty’s offensive cornerstone, Andruw Jones was its defensive one, an elite fly-chaser who won 10 Gold Gloves and ranks first in fielding runs (+236). He could hit, too, bopping 434 career homers. His career collapsed at age 31, however; he played just 435 games over his final five seasons, disappearing from the majors at age 35. So while he’s well above the peak standard, he’s short on the career one and in JAWS. I’m not so bothered by that, given his relative ranking and the fact that the standard in center field and right field are a few points higher than every other position.
• Sosa (18th among right fielders in JAWS, 7.8% in 2017): A towering figure in baseball’s return from the strike, and just the sixth player to reach 600 home runs, he’s nonetheless below the bar in JAWS. That matters more to me than the report that he was on the supposedly anonymous 2003 survey test, which as noted above, belongs to the “Wild West” era before the game had a coherent PED policy. What’s more, commissioner Rob Manfred basically disavowed it in the context of celebrating David Ortiz, on the grounds that some disputed results were never resolved because the threshold to implement testing had been reached. That doesn’t mean Sosa was clean, but if MLB couldn’t penalize him, I’m not going to — though it still doesn’t mean I’m obligated to vote for him.
• Helton (15th among first basemen in JAWS): An exceptional hitter who served as the face of the Rockies franchise, he put up very big numbers in the first half of his career, numbers that hold up once we adjust for his park and league scoring environment. Injuries caused him to fade away, as he had just one good season out of his last four, but it’s not out of the question that his time at altitude accelerated his physical decline. And anyway, his peak ranks 10th among first basemen, about four wins above the standard, and his JAWS is less than a point below it.
• Wagner (tied for 20th among relievers in JAWS, 11.1% in 2017): The holder of the all-time record for strikeout rate and opponent batting average, albeit at just an 800-inning threshold. He’s short of the admittedly slapdash standard established by the seven enshrined relievers, but since I’ve never been entirely satisfied with how JAWS handles relievers, I’ve remained open-minded, seeking alternate ways to evaluate them using advanced stats, namely Win Probability Added (WPA) and situational or context-neutral wins (WPA/LI), both of which paint the pair in question in a better light than WAR. When I combine those with career WAR, averaging the three stats, he’s sixth behind Rivera, Dennis Eckersley, Hoyt Wilhelm, Rich Gossage, and Hoffman, ahead of Smith, Bruce Sutter, and Rollie Fingers.

At this point, I feel like a vote for Sosa is a wasted one, as he’s clearly going nowhere on the writers’ ballot. Jones is down there, too, at 8.1% in the tracker, but he’s in just the second year of his candidacy, so I’d be more inclined to vote for him simply to keep him on the ballot; he’s the only one from this quartet who made mine last year. Wagner (14.8%) and Helton (18.5%) are probably safe from being dropped.

None of this, not even bumping Schilling aside for a year, is easy. But Helton’s the closest on JAWS of the remaining four, and that’s good enough for me. And since I’ve wanted to include Wagner for the past two years but haven’t been able to find room, I’m going to use my 10th spot this time for him instead of Jones.

Bonds, Clemens, Halladay, Helton, Martinez, Mussina, Rivera, Rolen, Wagner, Walker — there it is, input into our crowd-sourcing ballot project under the wire (if you’re a registered FanGraphs user, you can do the same).

Of the 135 ballots input into the Tracker as of Sunday night, exactly one of them matches. When I saw whose it was, I nearly fell out of my chair: 2005 Spink Award winner Tracy Ringolsby, whose BBWAA badge number is 20 — a fancy way of saying that they don’t get much more venerable.

Once upon a time, at my first Winter Meetings in 2003, a few of my Baseball Prospectus colleagues and I — none of us credentialed, mind you — spent three days trying to avoid feeling starstruck while watching the swarm of baseball executives, agents, and writers milling around the lobby of the lobby of the New Orleans Marriott. Ringolsby, who had been vocal in his criticism of Michael Lewis’ Moneyball (published earlier that year), was as recognizable as anyone in the room thanks to his signature black cowboy hat and oversized belt buckle — the subject of giggles from us chipmunks. But times change; Ringolsby came around on Bert Blyleven’s Hall of Fame candidacy before most of his peers, and in recent years, he’s cited JAWS in connection to Larry Walker’s case. At the Winter Meetings in Las Vegas, I found myself sitting next to him in the media room and thanked him for the Walker citation, the start of an enjoyable 20-minute conversation on Hall of Fame stuff.

Yes, Hall of Fame voting, even of the virtual variety, can make for strange bedfellows. Tracy Ringolsby covered the Messersmith-McNally decision in 1975, helped found Baseball America in 1981, and has spent four decades as a beat reporter. I haven’t done any of those things, haven’t even gotten my first official Hall vote, and yet we’ve come to the same conclusions about this year’s ballot. Our ballots may not be perfect, but this particular full-circle moment feels like a perfect one.

Last Sunday’s column led with J.D. Martinez, whose non-quantifiable impact on the Red Sox lineup was widely lauded. Deeply enmeshed in hitting mechanics and theory, the veteran slugger was both a sounding board and lead-by-example influence on several of his teammates. That didn’t go unnoticed by people around the game.

“J.D. rightfully so got credit for doing that,” said Milwaukee manager Craig Counsell, one of three managers I broached the subject with at the Winter Meetings. “It’s an important part of being a teammate — being connected and sharing. A player’s eyes are probably on each other more than they are on the coaches. They have a way to help each other, just as much as coaches do. You want to foster that environment. It’s something all teams should try to do.”

Asked for an example of a positive influence on his own team, Counsell cited Ryan Braun. Responding to that same question, Oakland manager Bob Melvin named a player who may or may not be wearing an A’s uniform next year.

“Jed was the guy last year for us,” Melvin said of now-free-agent Jed Lowrie. “(He) understands mechanics. He understands launch angles and exit velocities. (He) was a nice kind of player/coach for us to help out Bushy (hitting coach Darren Bush) with some of our younger guys.” Read the rest of this entry »

I last met Miguel Montero on April 29, 2017, when he was with the Chicago Cubs and I was with The Athletic. That was 12,348 days after Montero was born in Caracas, Venezuela, and 341 days before he’d take three plate appearances for the Washington Nationals on April 5, 2018, and thereafter leave the game, apparently for good. Nick Piecoro of the Arizona Republic reported recently that Montero is “pretty much” retired these days, and in this world of oh so very much uncertainty, “pretty much” is good enough for me. Eight months and a few days after he last took the field for a major league team, and forty years before he can reasonably expect his time to end, Miguel Montero the player is about to pass out of our present and into our memories, while Miguel Montero the man lives on.

It seems like a good time to remember the man.

When I last met Miguel Montero, he was in the process of being passed by. Kyle Schwarber had returned from a knee injury that had taken him away from all but the beginning and brilliant ending of the Cubs’ 2016 campaign; Willson Contreras was about to embark upon a sophomore season that seemed to confirm the highest aspirations of his debut. Montero, then 33 and already trailed by the whispers of self-interest which would crescendo into a shout and chase him out of the Chicago clubhouse two months later, was standing in the visitor’s clubhouse in Fenway Park, not all that far from the door, rocking from side to side on heels that weren’t yet ready to play the backup role assigned to them.

At the time, I had the impression of a man torn between what he knew he was and what he wanted to be. Miguel Montero wanted to be a leader, and for a time there in Chicago, he was. The Cubs wouldn’t have won the World Series in 2016 without his brittle, prideful energy — they wouldn’t have beaten the Dodgers 8-4 in Game 1 of the NLCS, they wouldn’t even have gotten to the NLCS that without Montero hard on their asses, chasing them on. The Cubs were led by their catchers in 2016, and Montero and David Ross were the catchers they had. Montero wasn’t the leader of his dreams in 2016, but he was a leader nonetheless, and by early 2017 in Boston he could feel the moment that had placed him there moving on.

For most of us, our daily acts of self-creation are private — contained in the moments in which we choose this, not that, to love this person, not that one, and to do this thing, and not the other. For major league baseball players, that is not so. They are created once the way all people are created, then again in private, over and over, just themselves and the people they love, and then a third time — this is the time that is different — in thousands of moments in the lives of other people. In our lives. Baseball players become the signifiers of other childhoods, and of childhood’s end; they become totems to mark the passage of time, to mark the bounds between one part of life and another that comes after it, and the men behind the totems become incidental to their meaning to us. That is what Miguel Montero became to me. That is what other Monteros have become to others.

I grew up a Cubs fan, but I’m not sure I am one anymore. The team has changed, of course, but far more consequentially to me, so have I. In the spring of 2015, I wrote my first word for Baseball Prospectus, in part about Miguel Montero. That fall, I sat in the press box at Wrigley Field covering the Cubs in the postseason. The next October, I watched them win the World Series. Miguel Montero was one of the last generation of Cubs who I could, ever-so-briefly, worship as larger than life. He was among the last who I first imagined into being when I could not reasonably imagine later standing before him in a cramped Boston clubhouse, watching the man and not the idea of him come to grips with a time passing him by. He was among the last who I did not expect to see swearing at his misfortune, standing awkwardly in his in-betweenness, checking his phone for the latest from his children, smiling and laughing in that ribald childish way of men in the company of men. He was among the last who was not fully real to me.

And now he is not real to any of us, in the way that most of the baseball players of our times are not real. Now he is Miguel Montero, C, 2006-2018. Now he is fixed in our memories as a point of light, whether for his five good seasons and three bad ones with the Diamondbacks, his two years and three months with the Cubs, or those last gasps of relevance with the Blue Jays and Nationals. Most ballplayers pass out of our consciousness this way. They can’t all be Chipper Jones or Mariano Rivera. They can’t all say farewell, and be enlarged permanently in their absence. Most of them are there with us, filling our summers and lengthening our falls, until one day we look up and find them gone. They remain then linked in our memories as signs of that time in our lives, even as the men whose human forms those signs took on continue to age and change before a diminished crowd of spectators. Miguel Montero will likely live many more years. He could become a grandfather, the patriarch of a strong and growing family. He will, apparently, be an agent to as many players as he can get his hands on. He might even pick up a mask and glove one of these days and catch a ball or two in his backyard. He will tell stories of his days in our memories. But he will not be real to most of us, anymore. He will remain fixed in time, as we last knew him. He will not fade away.

Ben Lindbergh, Jeff Sullivan, and ESPN’s Sam Miller review the top candidates for the most enduring baseball memory of 2018, then conduct the sixth annual Effectively Wild Minor League Free Agent Draft, selecting 11 minor league free agents each and competing to see whose roster will accumulate the most combined MLB playing time in 2019 (followed by a Nelson Cruz signing addendum).

Audio intro: DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince, "Here We Go Again"
Audio outro: Teal Wicks, "I Know He’s Out There"

Link to Sam’s article about 2018 memories
Link to video of Bregman play
Link to MiLB FA list
Link to Moreland video
Link to EW competitions and drafts sheet

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Nelson Cruz, a man seemingly determined to hit 30 home runs in every ballpark in America, has signed a one-year deal to hit 30 home runs for the Twins. Jon Heyman reported the contract is for $14.3 million for 2019, with a $12 million club option for 2020. That puts 2019’s value right around Kiley McDaniel’s AAV estimate from our Top 50 Free Agents list. That seems like a perfectly reasonable price to pay for the services of a man who, at age 38, is projected to produce about 2.7 WAR next year, though both Kiley and the crowd expected Cruz to secure a two-year deal, even with his market largely confined to the American League.

Cruz will likely spend much of his time in Minnesota as the Twins’ primary designated hitter, ably backed in that capacity by C.J. Cron, a fine power hitter in his own right and a recent waiver acquisition from Tampa. Cruz might also play a little right field from time to time, allowing Max Kepler to spell Byron Buxton in center; Cron will split time between DH and first base (sorry, Tyler Austin) though he could also, of course, be spun off in exchange for someone else, now that the Twins have reeled in Cruz. The winter certainly isn’t over yet, and the gap between the Twins and the Indians is still large enough that if the Twins mean to compete in 2019, we might expect another move or two from them before they’re done.

Here’s the reason for the deal in a nutshell:

You can quibble with the playing time projections a bit, because people are going to move around or out of town, but the overall message is clear: the Twins want to get better right now and are willing to pay real money to do so. In an AL Central division marked by rebuilding and a Cleveland roster that’s not getting any younger, that’s a refreshing change of pace. And there’s room to grow yet. The Twins’ payroll, even with Cruz in hand, is just slightly north of $100 million, and they don’t have a single guaranteed contract in place for 2020. Cruz stabilizes their lineup for 2019 without taking a single iota of flexibility away from the team in the future. That’s a deal you should do every time.

It’s true that you’d usually be concerned about a 38-year-old designated hitter falling off a production cliff, especially in a new ballpark. But Cruz has shown time and again that the usual rules don’t apply to him. That 132 wRC+ projection seems eminently sensible to me (it would be his lowest mark since 2013) and nothing about his 2018 performance at Safeco suggests the final, inevitable collapse is near at hand. Cruz may not be the hitter he was in 2018 next year, but even if he’s half that he’s a valuable addition for Minnesota. He will certainly be better than Logan Morrison.

And however you slice it, the Twins just added a lot more power in the short term; at least right now, they have three players (Cruz, Cron, and holdover Miguel Sano) who might reasonably be expected to hit 30 home runs, and two more (Eddie Rosario and Jonathan Schoop) who could match that figure with luck and a fair wind.

The Twins may not be so far away from contending. Pretty much everything went poorly for them in 2018, and they still won 78 games. If Sano’s titanium leg gets him back on the field with any consistency, if Buxton can bounce back from a wildly disappointing 2018, and, critically, if this Cruz signing is paired with other moves, you could squint and see how the Twins have the chance to be respectable in a division running low on respectability. The only thing standing between them and the postseason in the Central is a still-dangerous but weakened Cleveland squad (the Wild Card field, while theoretically an easier sell, is relatively crowded). The White Sox are still probably a year or two away from contention, and the Royals and Tigers are for the most part concerned with figuring out which way is up. If you’re the Twins and you still have money to spend, why not go for it?

Maybe Cruz will be bad in 2019. Maybe the Twins will be, too. But it isn’t a foregone conclusion coming into the season, and that’s more than can be said for a number of teams around the league today, including at least two in their own division. Nelson Cruz is a good baseball player and the Twins need a few more of those to be a good baseball team in 2019. They got him, and all they had to pay was money. This move won’t seal the division or the postseason for them, but it’ll get them much closer than they were last year. And if this is the beginning of a series of moves, it might be just enough to make the Indians think about spending money, which is a win in and of itself. This is a good signing for the Twins. On to the next.

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2019 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2013 election at SI.com, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. 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.

Like Mark McGwire, his rival in the great 1998 home run chase, Sammy Sosa was hailed at the height of his popularity as a hero, a Sports Illustrated Sportsman of the Year, and a great international ambassador for baseball. In the same year that McGwire set a new single-season record with 70 home runs, Sosa hit 66 and took home the National League MVP award. Three times in a four-year stretch from 1998 to 2001, he surpassed Roger Maris‘ previously unbreakable mark of 61 homers, and he hit more homers over a five- or 10-year stretch than any player in history. In 2007, he became just the fifth player to reach the 600-home-run milestone after Babe Ruth, Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, and Barry Bonds.

As with McGwire, the meaning of Sosa’s home runs changed once baseball began to crack down on performance-enhancing drugs, with suspicions mounting about his achievements. He was called to testify before Congress in 2005, along with McGwire, Rafael Palmeiro, and several other players. Sosa denied using PEDs, but while he never tested positive once Major League Baseball began instituting penalties for usage, The New York Times reported in 2009 that he was one of more than 100 players who had done so during the supposedly anonymous survey tests six years prior.

Though his case doesn’t exactly parallel with those of either McGwire or Palmeiro, Sosa received similar treatment from BBWAA voters in his 2013 ballot debut, getting just 12.5% of the vote. Since then, he’s sunk into the single digits (7.8% in 2018) suggesting he’s more likely to fall off the ballot à la Palmeiro than to persist for the full 10 years, as McGwire did. Even beyond the Hall of Fame voting, however, he’s been snubbed by the Cubs, first frozen out of the centennial anniversary of Wrigley Field in 2014, then similarly shunned amid the team’s 2016 championship run. While Bonds, Roger Clemens and others are trending towards eventual election as voters reconsider their hardline stances and their position as the morality police, it’s worth considering Sosa’s exile.

Read the rest of this entry »

The incredible dangers faced by baseball players attempting to defect from Cuba in order to play professional baseball in the United States are by now well-documented. Yasiel Puig had to buy his freedom from smugglers. Yoenis Cespedes and his family were “abandoned for two days on a strip of sand more than 600 miles southeast of Florida.” Jose Abreu had to leave his son behind. Alexei Ramirez, Jose Iglesias, Aroldis Chapman, Yulieski Gurriel – all faced unspeakable hardships escaping from Cuba, often using smugglers or human traffickers, and risking kidnapping or worse. The situation led to a federal grand jury investigation into baseball’s links to human trafficking, particularly as it concerned the Dodgers.

Last week, MLB finally took action, reaching a deal with the MLBPA and the Cuban government that aims to end human trafficking by allowing Cuban players to access a posting system.

Major League Baseball, its players’ association and the Cuban Baseball Federation reached an agreement that will allow players from the island to sign big league contracts without defecting, an effort to eliminate the dangerous trafficking that had gone on for decades.

The agreement, which runs through Oct. 31, 2021, allows Cubans to sign under rules similar to those for players under contract to clubs in Japan, South Korea and Taiwan.

There will be further analysis in the coming weeks of the baseball implications of such an agreement. For our purposes, though, I’d like to focus on one aspect of the deal in particular that might prove problematic.

MLB teams will need to pay the FCB [the Cuban Baseball Federation, Cuba’s baseball authority] for the contractual release of players who are 24 years old or younger and who have five or fewer years of service. The fee will reflect 25% of the signing bonus. It will be up to the FCB to decide whether to release such a player. In contrast, MLB teams will be able to sign Cuban players who are 25 or older and who have at least six years of experience in FCB without the consent of the FCB (MLB teams will, however, need to pay the FCB 15% to 20% of the total value of those players’ contracts).

On the surface, this seems similar to the posting agreements negotiated with Japan and South Korea’s professional leagues. There’s just one problem: the FCB is an arm of the Cuban government, and has even been run by Fidel Castro’s son, who served as its vice president. This agreement means that MLB, an American business entity, would be paying money to an unofficial arm of the Cuban government. Because of the United States’ trade embargo, which remains in effect, it’s questionable at best whether this arrangement will survive legal scrutiny.

As to the embargo, it is not one law but rather a catchall moniker for various statutes, executive orders, regulations and other proclamations that are designed to prevent or impede economic relations between the two nations. It began largely through executive orders issued by President John F. Kennedy and years later would become codified into statutes, including the Cuban Democracy Act of 1992 and the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act of 1996. Numerous regulations promulgated by the U.S. Treasury Department and the U.S. Commerce Department have also clarified and altered the scope of the embargo. The larger point is that despite the warming of diplomatic and economic relations between the U.S. and Cuba, the embargo remains in effect.

Dan Halem, MLB’s chief legal officer, told Reuters that the Obama Administration signed off on a deal of this type before it was finalized, due mostly to the fact that the FCB isn’t officially a government agency. And in 2016, the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which is responsible for implementing and overseeing the Cuba embargo, did grant MLB a license to explore a deal with Cuba.

But the Trump Administration has taken a different view, with the State Department telling NPR that, despite the agreement, nothing has changed: “baseball players will still have to go to another country to apply for a work visa, in accordance with U.S. policy.” The White House has signaled that it isn’t likely to approve the deal for the same reason, as the New York Times reported.

On Wednesday, a White House statement criticized baseball’s agreement with Cuba, saying the administration would continue to restrict Cuba’s ability to profit from American businesses.

The Office of Foreign Assets Control could revoke M.L.B.’s license to negotiate with the Cubans. If it does, it would signal a shift in policy that could affect many other companies doing business in Cuba.

And prominent members of Congress agree.

Some, like Sports Illustrated’s Michael McCann, have argued that MLB would have a legal remedy should that happen. The problem is that the “arbitrary and capricious” standard referenced by McCann in his piece typically applies more to domestic administrative proceedings, not foreign ones. And the reality is that the executive branch is given wide latitude to implement and enforce economic sanctions. As Alexander Cohen and Joseph Ravitch bluntly – and correctly – wrote for the Yale Journal of International Law,

The President’s constitutional and statutory authority includes the power to impose virtually any type of economic sanction. Thus, any challenge to an economic sanctions program on the grounds that the President is acting beyond his authority will fail.

So, to me, if the administration decides to scuttle the deal on the grounds of national security – i.e., that it violates the embargo – there likely isn’t much MLB can do about it. Certainly the league could seek a legal remedy, but its chances of obtaining one from a court are quite slim. It seems more likely that, if this deal is to be approved, it will require either a change of administration, or a change of heart by the present one.