Here are brief notes on the prospects who were traded ahead of the 40-man roster deadline. The Padres had several prospects who needed to be added to the 40-man — including Chris Paddack and Anderson Espinoza — and were the most active team.

Cleveland gets:
Walker Lockett, RHP

San Diego gets:
Ignacio Feliz, RHP

Lockett will provide immediate rotation depth for a contending Cleveland team as a 5th/6th starter and will probably be on the 25-man bubble in the spring. His fastball, 91-94, is very average. He can also make it sink in the 87-90 range. Each of his off-speed pitches — a changeup and curveball — will flash above-average. His changeup has a tendency to sail a bit, but it moves.

I think Feliz, who turned 19 in October, was the best prospect traded today. He’s a very athletic conversion arm who can spin a good breaking ball. He was 88-92 with natural cut during the summer and should grow into more velocity. He’ll probably begin 2019 in extended spring training.

Boston gets:
Colten Brewer, RHP

San Diego gets:
Esteban Quiroz, 2B

Brewer was a minor league free agent signee after the 2017 season. He was up and down between San Diego and El Paso a few times in 2018, and was 92-94 with cut, up to 96. At times he’d take a little off and throw more of a slider around 87-88 mph. Brewer also has plus-plus breaking ball spin rates on an 82-85 mph curveball he doesn’t locate very well. If that improves, Brewer will be a good 40-50 inning relief option.

Quiroz is the most interesting prospect traded today. He was Team Mexico’s leadoff hitter in the 2017 WBC (he hit two homers and a double in 6 at-bats) and spent 2015-2017 crushing the Mexican League. He signed with Boston in November 2017 and had a hot April in 2018 at Double-A, but then missed three and a half months with an abdominal strain. He only played in 24 games at Double-A, then had 62 extra plate appearances in the Arizona Fall League.

Here in Arizona, Quiroz looked pretty good. He’s a stocky and strong 5-foot-6, and he has average, all-fields power. He hit two full-extension, opposite field shots this fall, including one that got out just left of center field at Sloan Park in Mesa. He’s patient and makes good decisions at the plate. He’s also fine at second base (below-average arm, below-average runner, above-average athlete, average hands) and played a lot of other positions while in Mexico. He’ll either need to be viable at other positions or just hit enough to play second base every day. It appears he has a chance to do the latter.

Cubs get:
Rowan Wick, RHP

San Diego gets:
Jason Vosler, 3B

Wick is a capable, generic middle reliever. He works 93-96, has an above-average slider, and a change-of-pace curveball.

Vosler is a an extreme fly ball hitter (over 50%) with huge platoon splits. He might be just a 30 bat, but Vosler can play third and first and he crushes lefties; I think he’s a corner bench bat or platoon player.

Colorado gets:
Jordan Foley, RHP

Yankees get:
Jefry Valdez, RHP

Foley was 91-93 this fall; his changeup and slider were average, and he struggled to throw strikes. He’s 25 and coming off a good year at Double-A.

Valdez didn’t sign a pro contract until he was 20, and Colorado didn’t push him to an age-appropriate level despite his success, so he’s a 23-year-old who hasn’t set foot in full-season ball. But he’s a really loose, wiry 6-foot-1 with a good arm action. He has been 92-94 with an above-average curveball in my looks. I like him as a late-blooming relief candidate.

Oakland gets:
Tanner Anderson, RHP

Pirates get:
PTBNL

Anderson is an average sinker, above-average slider righty reliever, who sits 92-95.

Patrick Murphy won’t be available in next month’s Rule 5 draft. Along with four other players, the 23-year-old right-hander was added to the Toronto Blue Jays’ 40-man roster yesterday. His addition was well-earned. A third-round pick in the 2013 draft, Murphy has been a picture of perseverance. As noted in the feature we did on him last February, Murphy has undergone Tommy John surgery, thoracic outlet syndrome surgery, and had a nerve moved in his elbow.

This season, he went from question mark to fast-mover. In 27 starts — all but one with High-A Dunedin — Murphy fashioned a tidy 2.64 ERA and fanned 141 batters in 152.2 innings. Those numbers earned him an accolade; Murphy was named the Florida State League’s Pitcher of the Year.

The innings total was especially meaningful to him, as was the fact that he made all of his scheduled starts. Calling it “a big step,” the Chandler, Arizona native was able to show the organization — and prove to himself — that his am and body could hold up over a full season.

He also showed that he could hit triple digits. But while he considered it “pretty cool” to have hit 100 mph on the radar gun, Murphy was more enamored with a pitch that traversed 60-feet-six-inches in a comparably meandering manner. Read the rest of this entry »

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Major league baseball teams closely guard their financial information. They have no problem talking about how much money players make, but they prefer to be more circumspect when disclosing the revenue teams take in or the scale of the profits owners make after those players have been paid and expenses accounted for. Because baseball’s ownership is a fairly insular group composed mostly of individuals and privately held businesses– and because there relatively few franchise sales to use as gauge–teams have been largely successful in preventing their financial information from going public. The Atlanta Braves present an exception.

Liberty Media, perhaps best known for its subsidiary SiriusXM Satellite Radio, purchased the Braves in 2007 for $400 million. Two years ago, they began offering stock in their separate divisions, which means the public can buy shares in the Braves as well as the real estate holdings around the stadium. It also means that, as a publicly traded company, the public is entitled to more information regarding the team’s finances than is typical. As I wrote in 2016, the club disclosed an $18 million loss in 2014 before depreciation and amortization. They were on the plus side in 2015 by about three million dollars before recording losses of about $20 million in 2016. During those three seasons, the team averaged 90 losses, with an average annual attendance of 2.1 million fans and a payroll just over $116 million per season. The financial losses in 2016 were largely attributable to a huge international signing class, most of the players from which were later declared free agents after MLB’s investigation into Atlanta’s signing methods.

But focusing exclusively on a team’s year-by-year profits obscures the financial reality of owning a baseball team because it doesn’t address the most profitable aspect of team ownership: the value of the franchise. Based on the calculations above, the Braves lost about $45 million from 2014 through the end of 2016. But Liberty Media CEO Greg Maffei has admitted profits weren’t always the main consideration for the Braves, indicating that “historically, the measurement was we didn’t lose money.” Maffei’s remarks are consistent with statements from another team owner, Rogers Communications, which owns the Toronto Blue Jays, though the Blue Jays’ financials are harder to trace because Rogers owns a whole host of assets along with the baseball team. Per Forbes:

The media giant’s CFO, Tony Staffieri, said at a conference that Rogers wants to “surface value” from the Blue Jays, which he said is a “very valuable asset for us that we don’t get full credit for.”

For the Blue Jays, “surfacing value” would likely come in the form of realizing the profits from selling the team, as Rogers might not be getting “credit” if the team isn’t reaping huge profits. Then there’s the matter of Rogers also broadcasting Blue Jays games, which might further cloud the revenues from the baseball team. (The Braves used to benefit from some of that same confusion back when Ted Turner owned the club and TBS showed Braves games, but the financial model has shifted, and the Braves now have one of the worst local television contracts in baseball.) It is clear the calculus of franchise ownership is more complicated than mere gate sales. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Tommy Milone and Willians Astudillo, Bryce Harper‘s awful fielding in 2018, two more examples of percentages greater than 100, and Adrian Beltre’s retirement and atypical, incredible career, then (23:34) bring on new FanGraphs managing editor Meg Rowley to talk about both sides of the Yankees-Mariners James Paxton trade, how good Paxton is, the Mariners’ future, the definition of acehood, and a few aspects of her new job, including anxiety about covering breaking news, the difficulty of replacing writers who get hired by teams, the balance between stats stuff and non-stats stuff, common writing pitfalls, representing (and extending opportunities to) women in a male-oriented industry, weekday vs. weekend website traffic, balancing writing and editing, and more.

Audio intro: Franz Ferdinand, "Darts of Pleasure"
Audio interstitial: Camera Obscura, "James"
Audio outro: Jerry Garcia & David Grisman, "Walkin’ Boss"

Link to Ben on Harper’s defense
Link to darts story
Link to Ben on Beltre
Link to Jeff on the Paxton trade
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For what felt like quite a while, the chatter last offseason was dominated by the Shohei Ohtani sweepstakes. Yusei Kikuchi isn’t Shohei Ohtani. For one thing, Kikuchi is a few years older. For a second thing, Kikuchi doesn’t routinely throw his fastball in the upper 90s. And for a third thing, no one has ever referred to Kikuchi as the Japanese Babe Ruth. I don’t know much about Kikuchi as a hitter, but I can assume that he is a bad hitter, because he is a pitcher who hasn’t made waves with his hitting. Kikuchi appears to have three career hits, now that I check. One of them was a double.

Shohei Ohtani was, and is, a sensation. The Kikuchi hype couldn’t possibly get close to that level, because Kikuchi won’t be trying to do something no one else has done in a lifetime. But somewhere in the next week or two, Kikuchi will be posted by the Seibu Lions, as the 27-year-old southpaw wants to make his mark in the bigs. He’ll be free to negotiate with any and every team, and he’s been rather heavily scouted. It’s time we talk about who Kikuchi is as a pitcher. It just so happens we’ve been given two fairly reasonable comps.

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Adrian Beltre has been many things to fans over the course of his amazing, 21 year career. Dodgers fans old enough to run for Congress got to see Beltre young and full of promise, including a 2004 season might be the greatest of all time by a third baseman. Since that year, only Mike Trout‘s 2012 and 2013, and Mookie Betts’s 2018 have topped the 9.7 WAR Beltre put up. Mariners fans had to settle for five years of Gold Glove-quality play at third base with a closer to an average bat, before a shoulder injury in 2009 forced him to take a one-year deal with the Red Sox. Boston fans watched one great year before Beltre moved to Texas and cemented his status as a surefire Hall of Famer.

On Tuesday, Beltre announced he is retiring.

He wasn’t necessarily thought of as such at the time, but in terms of offense and defense, Beltre was a modern-day Brooks Robinson. The great Orioles third baseman enjoyed an impeccable defensive reputation and aged well, averaging 4.4 WAR per season from his age-32 through age-37 seasons. And Beltre was up to the challenge, averaging 5.4 WAR during those same seasons. As offensive numbers around the league dropped, Beltre stayed the same. His .275/.328/.462 batting line when playing in the more cavernous ballparks in Los Angeles and Seattle turned into .304/.357/.509 when transplanted to the more hitter-friendly climes of Arlington. As strikeouts rose dramatically, Beltre struck out about once every other game. That consistency turned into one of the best third acts of a career we’ve ever seen.

There are only 10 position players since 1947 who accrued more WAR beginning at age 32 than Beltre has. Of those, only Barry Bonds, Edgar Martinez and Pete Rose haven’t been inducted into the Hall of Fame. The rest are inner-circle greats Willie Mays, Hank Aaron, Ted Williams, Stan Musial, Mike Schmidt, Ozzie Smith, and Roberto Clemente.

And Beltre’s own WAR-based case for the Hall is impenetrable. Jay Jaffe’s JAWS has Beltre as the fourth-best third baseman of all-time behind only Mike Schmidt, Eddie Mathews, and Wade Boggs. Looking at FanGraphs’ third base Leaderboards, Beltre’s 84 WAR places him seventh with Alex Rodriguez, Chipper Jones, and George Brett joining Schmidt, Mathews, and Boggs, though Jones and Brett each lead him by less than a single win. Jay Jaffe tracked Beltre this past season as he became the all-time leader in hits for players born in Latin America, as well as internationally. He might not have an MVP, finishing second in 2004 and third in 2012, and his Rangers fell a strike short of a World Series win in 2011, but by any metric, Beltre is an all-time great, and that’s before you consider that he hit a homer off his knee in the World Series.

Beltre’s career is the rare sort in which a player’s statistical accomplishments actually match the personality and joy he displayed on the field. Jeff Sullivan wrote in 2016 that Beltre would be remembered “for being an excellent third baseman, for having an aversion to being touched on the head, and for sometimes playing through inconceivable pain.” Beltre’s age-defying statistical feats may be his true legacy, and those feats have been covered in some detail here at FanGraphs. August Fagerstrom wrote about it way back in 2015. I discussed his refusal to age when he signed a two-year extension in 2016 that would ultimately take him to the end of his career. Travis Sawchik and Paul Swydan each took turns in 2017 as Beltre worked his way to his 3,000th hit.

But for all that, Beltre’s ability to defy age with his bat and glove doesn’t measure up to his ageless spirit. There is his aversion to being touched on the head, his enduring and humorous friendship with King Felix. His dancing on the basepaths was a sight. He alternated between demanding space and ceding it with infield partner Elvis Andrus. There’s a giraffe named after Adrian Beltre at the Fort Worth Zoo, and Beltre-the-third-baseman has gone to see it. He’s given fake signs to the opposition. When told by umpire Gerry Davis to get back in the on-deck circle, he reacted as any 38-year-old would, and opted to move the circle itself; he was ejected from the game. On MLB Network Radio this morning, former Rangers manager Jeff Banister described Beltre dressing up like a clubhouse attendant and sweeping the dugout while on the disabled list.

When I think about what I hope and wish to see in a baseball player, I want someone who is a marvel with the bat and superlative with the glove. I want years of greatness combined with longevity. A toughness that shows off commitment. Someone who flashes moments of unique brilliance. A player with energy, whose love for the game seems boundless despite the money and routine that can sap that life from the best of us. Adrian Beltre might not be a perfect player, but he is one to me. I imagine I’m not alone.

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There’s often a bit of weirdness on the fringes of the annual BBWAA Hall of Fame ballot, and 2019 entry, unveiled on Monday, was no exception. What transpires on those fringes rarely has any bearing on who will wind up on the podium in Cooperstown next July, joyously thanking families, teammates, and coaches. But with the news of the ballot’s arrival still fresh, and with the Very Serious Business of analyzing the top candidates a task best suited for after Thanksgiving, it’s worth considering the margins for a few moments.

Because the ballot’s release is a Big Deal to yours truly, writer of more words about the Hall of Fame on an annual basis than just about anybody with a claim to sanity, I had Monday’s article, “The Big Questions About the 2019 BBWAA Hall of Fame Ballot,” ready to go in advance of the Hall’s 12 pm ET official press release, save for the final total of candidates and the list of first-timers. While the official rules make anybody who played at least 10 seasons in the majors and has been retired for five seasons eligible — anybody who’s not on baseball’s ineligible list, that is, or has not otherwise exhausted his eligibility — not everybody who meets those requirements actually lands on the ballot. That’s because there’s a stage that involves some subjective choices by the BBWAA Screening Committee, a six-member panel that puts the ballot together.

To appear on the ballot, a player must be nominated by any two of the six members of that committee. That’s a mere formality for all of the obvious candidates, but it becomes a coin toss the further down the list you go. Historically, the worst slights probably belong to three-time Gold Glove winner and two-time All-Star Willie Davis, who racked up 60.7 WAR (Baseball-Reference version, which I’m sticking with for all things ballot-related) in an 18-year career that spanned from 1960-1979 and included a 1977-1978 detour to Japan that put him out of sight and out of mind, and Negro Leagues-turned-Brooklyn Dodgers staple Jim Gilliam, who accrued 40.7 WAR from 1953-1966.

That pair is hardly alone. Among recent examples, in 2014, outfielder Shannon Stewart (24.9 WAR from 1995-2008, highlighted by a fourth-place finish in the 2003 AL MVP voting) was left off the ballot, while his former Twins teammate Jacque Jones (11.6 WAR from 1999-2008) was included. That same year, Esteban Loaiza (23.0 WAR from 1995-2008, highlighted by a second-place finish in the 2003 AL Cy Young voting) was on the outside, while Armando Benitez (17.0 WAR from 1994-2008, highlighted by a cheap shot that set off an infamous brawl between the Orioles and Yankees in 1998) was on the inside. Yes, Jones had more homers than Stewart in less playing time, and yes, Benitez had more saves than Loaiza had wins, but none of them had a chance at actually being elected. It was completely arbitrary who among them received the honor of being on the ballot.

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