By now — and barring a mid-career role reversal — the arguments over the relative greatness of Mike Trout and Bryce Harper have been settled in favor of the Millville Meteor. Trout has perennially played at an MVP-caliber level since 2012, winning the award twice while finishing second four times and fourth once, the year that he missed more than a quarter of the season due to a thumb injury, and — as of this week — has climbed to sixth in the JAWS rankings among center fielders. Harper owns one MVP award and might have won a second if not for a late-season knee injury in 2017, but in terms of consistency and overall levels of accomplishment, he’s second banana. Trout has chalked up five seasons worth at least 9.3 WAR, which matches Harper’s best, but the latter’s second- and third-best seasons merely add up to 9.2 WAR. As Jeff Sullivan put it in his penultimate post, “Mike Trout Has Been as Good as Manny Machado and Bryce Harper Combined.”

Yet Trout and Harper remain inextricably linked in the minds of many (including this scribe) in part because on the day that Harper debuted in the majors (April 29, 2012), Trout returned from Triple-A for good, and both players took their respective leagues by storm en route to Rookie of the Year awards. Though separated by about 14 months in age, they’re part of a baseball cohort in a way that Trout and Paul Goldschmidt or Giancarlo Stanton (whose totals of plate appearances are all in the same vicinity), or Harper and Machado (whose free agencies coincided) are not. The relatively stoic Trout and the more demonstrative Harper pair well as contrasts, too. Trout is so routinely great without calling attention to himself that he sometimes recedes into the background, to the point of being forgotten, while Harper’s combination of hot streaks and exuberance is more eye-catching — in grabbing our attention, he also reminds us that hey, that other guy is playing even better.

The dynamic duo are currently scalding the ball, in case you haven’t noticed. Harper, who signed a record-setting 13-year, $330 million contract, is off to a flying start with the Phillies (.314/.500/.743, four home runs, and a 198 wRC+ through Wednesday).

Trout, who signed a record-setting $12-year, $430 million extension less than three weeks after Harper inked his deal, is flying even higher (.406/.592/.938, five home runs, and a 288 wRC+).

The coincidence of their current hot streaks got me wondering whether we’re seeing their collective apex, the peak pair. The answer, within the way I chose to address the matter, is “pretty damn close.” For this, I called upon our player graphs tool — putting the graphs in FanGraphs, after all — to calculate each player’s rolling 10-game wRC+ since the aforementioned point of arrival in 2012. This ignores defense, for which we can’t get any kind of reliable read across 10 games anyway, and makes the familiar squiggly pictures, like so…

…And so…

Using that page’s “Export Data” function, I calculated the pair’s combined wRC+ for every date on which they both played and had the requisite 10 games in the sample (we’re not yet to 15 games for either player in 2019, hence this choice). That means that if one player was on the disabled list, or even had an off day, there’s no data point for that day. On the other hand, each player’s 10-game range might have different dates attached due to such absences.

Here’s the top 20 of the pair’s most productive stretches, with overlapping 10-game spans included:

As it turns out, April 9 — the point at which Harper reached 10 games this year (Trout had done so two days earlier), and the last point for which we have data, because Trout hasn’t played since then due to a groin strain that we’re all praying is minor — is the end of the seventh-best such stretch. Trout’s videogame-like numbers you saw above; Harper was hitting .333/.511/.788 for a 210 wRC+ before taking an 0-for-3 and an early exit from Wednesday night’s 15-1 drubbing by the Nationals. The heavyweight championship belongs to a stretch in late April 2017 during which Harper hit .588/.674/1.206 with five homers, with Trout at .375/.432/.725 and three homers.

One aspect of this that’s particularly striking is that we have to dig down to the 19th spot to find a combined performance that lands in an even-numbered year. Harper hit for a career-low 111 wRC+ in that 2016 season, four points lower than in 2014 and nine points lower than in 2012. For some weird reason, he’s simply been better in odd-numbered years, like two-time Cy Young winner Bret Saberhagen.

Condensing the above table to remove the overlapping streaks (i.e., tossing out the third-ranked streak, because most of it is already represented within the second-ranked streak) yields this top 10:

From a contemporary standpoint, that’s more satisfying, as this season’s opening salvo climbs to fifth (not third, as I originally had it when this published — score that E6). Streaks from every season except 2014 and ’18 are represented, with the 2015 season, Harper’s MVP year, dominating the charts, as separate streaks from May, June, July, and September all rank among the top six. Harper pulls his weight here, owning the higher wRC+ of the pair (highlighted with the bold-faced numbers) in five of the streaks .

As for the coldest spells, I’ll skip to the mirror image of the second table, identifying only the extremes of each discrete streak:

Above we’ve got almost entirely even-year streaks, with one exception apiece from 2013 and ’15. Every season but 2017 and this one is represented, with 2016 the most common one. During the very worst stretch, in September 2016 — a rare instance of both players falling well below 100 — Harper hit .094/.310/.188, with a home run representing one of his three hits, and Trout hit .229/.317/.229 without a homer. For eight of the 10 stretches, it’s Harper dragging the pair down, with a wRC+ below 70; that conforms to the general impression that he’s the more slump-prone player of the two.

One could certainly look at the matter in other ways, using larger sample sizes — going by 15-game stretches with the same methodology, for example, or simply by our monthly splits, or even full seasons. On that last front, 2015 gets the nod on the basis of combined wRC+ (184) or WAR (18.6) if we’re bringing defense into this. By the monthly splits, the pair’s combined wRC+ of 243 for March and April (which we customarily lump together, as we do for September and October) would rank first, but with an asterisk, as it’s the only month besides April 2012 for which the pair has combined for fewer than 100 PA. Discarding what would be the second-ranked month (June 2014) on the grounds that Harper had just four PA, the best combined month for the pair is July 2015, when Trout (260) and Harper (172) combined for a 214 wRC+ in 193 PA. Incidentally, by this method the pair has combined for a 120 wRC+ or better in every month for which we have a meaningful sample from both save for July 2016, when Trout (144) and Harper (65) combined for a 104 mark.

Still, I do like the immediacy of the 10-game sample and the fact that it places what we’ve witnessed so far this season near the top of the heap. If Trout doesn’t miss too much time, there’s a chance we can see that number climb. All of which serves to remind us that while major league baseball has problems on and off the field that shouldn’t be ignored, the level of talent today is astounding, and anytime Trout and Harper are both firing on all cylinders is a great time to be watching.

The Atlanta Braves locked up another one of their key foundational pieces on Thursday, signing Ozzie Albies to a seven-year contract extension worth $35 million. Also included, since the Atlanta Braves felt like they didn’t get quite enough value in this deal somehow, are two team options at $7 million a year with a $4 million buyout, taking the total possible contract term up to nine years and $45 million.

The Evan Longoria long-term contract was probably the gold standard in team value when it came to these sorts of deals, but this one eclipses it. For those who don’t remember, Longoria signed an extension early in his rookie season for six years and $17.6 million, with three team option years. While the guaranteed dollars are a little lower, the team options were more generous at $7.5 million, $11 million, and $11.5 million. Here, the Braves buy out as many as four of Albies’ free agent years for less money than he’d likely be paid in a single year of free agency. In addition, Longoria had yet to succeed in the majors while Albies already had a full star-level season under his belt.

Quite frankly, this is a bit shocking. There’s risk aversion for a player, and then there’s risk aversion. Obviously, Albies wouldn’t get a contract equivalent to what he would get in free agency under any circumstances with a year of service time, but when I think of a risk-benefit tradeoff that isn’t horrific for a player, I think Blake Snell’s contract is a better representation of a team-friendly deal that doesn’t cross the line into, let’s be honest, exploitation. For those who didn’t read my piece on the Snell signing because you wanted to make me sad, ZiPS estimated that year-to-year, Snell was giving up $23 million on average to have a guaranteed $50 million in his pocket.

So, umm…yeah.

ZiPS is a fan of Ozzie Albies’ future, a weird quirk of the system in that it finds young, phenomenally talented infielders with a star season in the books to be totally awesome. All told, among the game’s hitters, ZiPS projects Albies with the fourth-most WAR remaining in his career, behind only Mike Trout, Juan Soto, and Francisco Lindor. If you’re wondering where Ronald Acuña is, he’s all the way down at…fifth.

ZiPS expects that, going year-by-year, Albies could be expected to make $282 million through the theoretical ninth and final season of his contract extension. In other words, ZiPS is estimating that Albies, in return for this contract, is giving up more than $200 million on average. But let’s say that ZiPS is being way too kind on Albies and is overrating him by two WAR a year. That knocks a shocking 18 WAR off his projections for the next nine years, in which case, ZiPS projects him to make a mere $153 million going year-to-year. So even in the case that ZiPS is horribly overrating Albies, he’s still likely to be underpaid by at least $100 million for his contributions to the Braves. And remember, this is relative to what he would expect to get under the current collective bargaining agreement, not some fanciful world in which he could otherwise just become a free agent right now.

(One side note since somebody will notice, reducing his projected WAR by 18 doesn’t have the exact same linear value as WAR in his real projection does because the better a player is, the lower a percentage of their expected free agent value they get in arbitration).

If I made a deal like this when I was a kid, and had offered my friend Alan a candy bar for his Super Nintendo (he had one a few months before I did, the jerk), you can bet my mom would have marched right down to Alan’s house and made me undo that particular transaction.

Ozzie Albies is, of course, an adult and I highly value the right of two consenting adults entering into freely negotiated contracts with each other. But I can sure as sugar express that I think he got an absolutely rotten deal here!

For the Atlanta Braves, the value of this trade is obvious. They get a star player for the entire length of his twenties for next to nothing, at least in baseball terms. Already having signed Ronald Acuña to a team-friendly deal — but at least, not as team-friendly a deal — the team has no excuse now to not open their pocketbooks for big free agents in coming seasons, something they really should have done beyond Josh Donaldson this winter.

This is not a contract that players should forget at the bargaining table. With higher minimum salaries for young players and earlier arbitration, players would have more leverage in negotiations and we’d likely see fairer terms for players in their prime as a result. If nothing else, it’s a sign that to keep salaries growing in baseball, players will need to fight for the Ozzie Albieses of the league, and advocate for a system that doesn’t require salary growth to be tied to teams signing 34-year-olds to crazy contracts like it’s 1986.

These are notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Cole Tucker, SS, Pittsburgh Pirates
Level: Triple-A   Age: 22   Org Rank: 5   FV: 50
Line: 3-for-5, HR, 2 SB

Notes
Readers are often looking for a prospect outside the top 50 who might break out and move near the top of our overall list. My answer to that question is typically some big, projectable teenager who I expect to experience sizable physical growth. Tucker is rare in that he’s also a viable answer to this question even though he turns 23 this summer. Having answered once-relevant, shoulder-related questions about his arm strength, Tucker is now seen as a plus-gloved shortstop who has good feel for contact. But because he still has this big, seemingly unfinished frame on him, we think it’s possible that he comes into power a little late, and he might take a sizable leap. A source indicated to me that Tucker looks noticeably bigger and stronger this year. He hit for power during the first week of the season, and his batted ball data should be monitored for a possible indicator that he’s made a mechanical adjustment, too.

Tarik Skubal, LHP, Detroit Tigers
Level: Hi-A   Age: 22   Org Rank: HM   FV: 35
Line: 6 IP, 2 H, 1 BB, 1 R, 6 K

Notes
Kiley saw Skubal last night and had him up to 97, with an average breaking ball. A possible second or third rounder as a college underclassman, Skubal’s amateur career was derailed by an elbow injury that required Tommy John. He missed his junior year, instead throwing side sessions in front of scouts close to the draft. Nobody was confident enough to pull the trigger on drafting him, and he went back to school and couldn’t throw strikes. The Tigers signed him after his redshirt junior year for $350k and he threw almost all fastballs during his first pro summer. Things seemed to have clicked a bit.

Michael Baumann, RHP, Baltimore Orioles
Level: Hi-A   Age: 23   Org Rank: 28   FV: 35+
Line: 5 IP, 1 H, 0 BB, 0 R, 10 K

Notes
Orioles pitching prospects should be considered potential movers this year as the new front office applies the player dev philosophy that seems to be working in Houston. Baumann already has some components Houston might have otherwise tried to install; he has a vertical release point that looks like it creates backspin, he throws hard, and he works up in the zone. Maybe that just means he has less to fix and is likely to improve more quickly than others in the system. He was up to 96 last night.

Brendan McKay, LHP, Tampa Bay Rays
Level: Double-A   Age: 23   Org Rank: 2   FV: 60
Line: 4.2 IP, 2 H, 1 BB, 3 R, 11 K

Notes
McKay’s stuff is not especially nasty — he was 91-95 last night — but his fastball plays up because of good extension. All of his pitches look the same coming out of his hand, and he has shockingly good feel for pitching even though his attention has been split between the mound and the plate for much of his career. If he keeps dominating Double-A hitters like this, it’s fair to start considering him as a potential big league option sometime this year.

Shed Long, 2B/3B/LF, Seattle Mariners
Level: Triple-A   Age: 23   Org Rank: 6   FV: 50
Line: 4-for-5, BB, walk-off HR

Notes
Shed’s defensive assignments mimic what we saw during spring training. He remains a 40 glove at second base who survives through a combination of athleticism and will, but he’s going to mash enough that you want him in your lineup every day. I tend to think of multi-positional players as individuals who excel defensively at various spots, but maybe it’s time to consider if players who can really hit can be barely playable at several positions and just spend each game at a different spot in the field, wherever they’re the least likely to touch the ball that day. Willians Astudillo would seem to be another candidate for a role like this, and perhaps it could be taken to a batter-by-batter extreme. Hiding your worst defensive player is old hat in other sports; maybe there’s a better way to do it in ours.

A Quick Rehabber Update
I saw Angels lefty Jose Suarez rehab in Tempe yesterday. He looked good, sitting 91-93, with command and an above-average curveball (it’s slow but has good bite, and he commands it), and some plus changeups. He didn’t break camp due to a sore shoulder, which is kind of scary, but the stuff looks fine. The Angels rotation has struggled with injuries, so Suarez might see the big leagues this year. He’s in our top 100.

On Pedro Avila
Padres righty Pedro Avila makes his big league debut tonight against Arizona. Expect him to sit 90-94 and touch 96, have scattered fastball command, and try to work heavily off secondary stuff — a change and curveball — that is consistently plus. His long term role may ultimately be in the bullpen, especially since three-pitch relievers may become more necessary due to forthcoming rule changes.

Late last year, news broke that Major League Baseball had reached an agreement for players to leave Cuba using a posting system similar to that which exists between MLB and the Japanese NPB or the Korean KBO.

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.

While the proposed agreement generated a great deal of excitement at the prospect of a boon of talented Cubans coming to the majors, I wrote at the time that a good deal of caution was warranted given that the United States government considered the Cuban Baseball Federation (“FCB”) to be covered by the decades-old trade embargo.

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.

Last week, the Trump administration blocked the agreement from taking effect for exactly that reason.

The White House and members of Congress took the position that the proposal “amounts to paying the Cuban government ransom for baseball players.”

“The U.S. does not support actions that would institutionalize a system by which a Cuban government entity garnishes the wages of hard-working athletes who simply seek to live and compete in a free society,” said Garrett Marquis, a National Security Council spokesman. Marquis said the administration will work with MLB “to identify ways for Cuban players to have the individual freedom to benefit from their talents, and not as property of the Cuban State.”

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The baseball world suffered a brief moment of shock on Tuesday night. Mike Trout, who needs no introduction within this interrupting clause to emphasize his greatness, was replaced by Peter Bourjos in the fourth inning of the Angels-Brewers game. Afterwards, Trout was diagnosed with a mild groin strain, and baseball collectively breathed a large sigh of relief. It appears that he plans to miss just a single game with the injury.

Before Trout exited on Tuesday, however, he had already gone 2-for-2 at the plate, adding yet another game to his hot start; in 49 plate appearances this season, Trout is slashing .406/.592/.938. Even in a brief outing, his WAR total still managed to increase, moving from 1.2 to 1.3. As of Wednesday, he is tied with Cody Bellinger for the major league lead in WAR rounded to one decimal place.

As we all know, Trout is the WAR king. He’s already put up 66.2 WAR in his career, making him the most valuable player in baseball since 2006, even though his career didn’t even start until 2011 and his first full season didn’t even come until 2012. I could go on and on about how great Mike Trout is at producing WAR, but a lot of those articles have already been written here and at other places.

One article that did catch my attention, however, was this 2015 piece from August Fagerstrom titled “Getting Mike Trout to 168.4 WAR.” In this piece, Fagerstrom outlined a potential career curve for Trout to hit 168.4 total WAR, a mark that would tie him with Babe Ruth for the most WAR produced by a single player in baseball history.

In this piece, I plan to do something similar but different. As in Fagerstrom’s piece, I want Trout to tie Ruth, but on a different WAR leaderboard: the all-time single-season mark. Read the rest of this entry »

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This offseason, a narrative emerged surrounding the big contract extensions we saw signed that, after a couple of slow winters, players are afraid of free agency. That narrative is not without support. First, we have the presence of all of the extensions to star-level players, which indicate that players are at least willing to forego free agency and sign long-term deals. Mike Trout, after signing his extension, told Business Insider that, “People want to stay away from free agency.” That seems like a pretty clear indicator that players have trepidations about entering the market, presumably worried that the riches once there for them are no longer available. But while I wouldn’t want to be accused of doubting Mike Trout, not all extensions are created equal, and many of the extensions we saw signed this winter were for players for whom the free agency picture was still likely rosy.

When we talk about contract extensions as an indicator of a new reluctance to participate in free agency, it’s important to distinguish between players in different phases of their careers. Deals made by players like Aaron Nola, Blake Snell, Luis Severino, Alex Bregman, or Ronald Acuna, Jr., are quite different than those for players like Trout or Chris Sale or even Nolan Arenado. Players in Acuna and Bregman’s cohort were all three or more years from free agency. If we can make assumptions about their state of mind, they seem less likely to worry about what happens when they get to free agency, though that is no doubt still a concern, and more concerned about getting there in the first place, worrying about succumbing to injury or ineffectiveness before they’re able to sign a big deal.

The chilliness of today’s market, and concerns over service time manipulation delaying free agency further, may have exacerbated those concerns, but MLB owners have been capitalizing on those fears for more than a decade. The extension that buys out arbitration and free agency years is not a new phenomena. These players present a related but importantly different case from the Trouts and Sales, who, prior to their extensions, faced free agency much sooner, while the current collective bargaining agreement is still in effect. Indeed, 10 of the big contracts agreed to this winter were for players within one or two years of free agency, making them less likely to worry about reaching free agency and more concerned about the state of the market when they get there. That is the population I’m interested in exploring today.

Seven recent contract extensions went to players who would have been free agents at the end of this season, with another three deals going to players who would have been free agents after the 2020 campaign. We generally see contract extensions as team-friendly deals motivated by owners wishing to provide a guarantee now in exchange for cheaper free agent years later. That reasoning is less clear when players are so close to hitting the market. If free agency was working poorly for those players who signed contract extensions one season early, then the players should be taking a discount now on what would be expected of them had they waited. To help uncover potential motivations from both the players and the owners, we need to attempt to determine the size of the discount the players took. To make such an attempt, I enlisted the readers of FanGraphs.

I asked our readers two questions. First, I asked them to gauge the contract the players would have received if they were free agents right now. Second, I asked them what those players’ expected contracts would have been had they reached free agency. There are some problems with attempting to crowdsource this way, the main one being that we already know what type of extension the players actually signed. That can have an anchoring effect. Another issue is that we know considerably less about potential market factors and player performance now compared to when free agent contracts are typically crowdsourced. Despite these issues, inviting readers, who do a pretty good job estimating contracts in the offseason, should shed some light on potential fear on the part of players.

First, here are the results of the crowd when it comes to the 10 players who signed extensions, as well as a bonus player who might.

For the most part, these figures look pretty reasonable. It’s interesting to compare similar players like Chris Sale and Jacob deGrom, as well as Kyle Hendricks and Miles Mikolas. The crowd favored Hendricks slightly at present, but when factoring in the distance from free agency, we see a slight reversal. That makes sense. We don’t see the same scenario with Sale and deGrom, and it seems possible that Sale’s early struggles might have entered into the crowd’s thinking as he saw the biggest percentage drop off of the players just one year to free agency outside of Verlander, whose proximity to retirement limits the number of years he would receive. It also seems like Anthony Rendon might be a tad underrated, or at least the crowd expects him to receive much less than Arenado, despite similar profiles.

Likely more interesting is how the players’ actual deals compared to the crowdsourced estimates. First, the players just one year from free agency.

While anchoring to the already-known extension is certainly a factor, the seven potential free agents above basically signed for their expected free agent totals. We could argue a little about how much opt-outs are worth, but it certainly seems as though teams have received little to no discount for signing free agents. As to the crowd’s accuracy, we clearly can’t reproduce the exact same sample used in the offseason, but generally speaking, the crowd has come pretty close to forecasting the big contracts over the past five seasons, undershooting the totals by less than 10% overall.

Now, here are the three extensions signed by player who would have been eligible for free agency after the 2020 season.

Players two years from free agency had to take a significant discount to get their deals done. That makes sense because there is more risk for the team making the guarantee and more risk for the player to wait two years. In the case of deGrom and Hendricks, that is even more true because their 2020 contracts weren’t guaranteed as they would have been in their final year of arbitration. We see potential bargains in the last group, but the group of pending free agents above is lacking in that regard. Maybe Arenado, Sale, and Bogaerts could’ve gotten more in free agency, but all three have opt-outs that will prevent any real steals by their teams. Goldschmidt and Verlander are older, while Hicks and Mikolas don’t have long track records.

I know I’ve brought up the potential of anchoring distorting these contracts a few times, but keep in mind that the narrative that players have trepidations about free agency and are therefore taking contracts at a discount due to that fear is also prevalent. We could be seeing a general lowering of expectations for free agent contracts, but we just saw two $300 million contracts handed out plus another $140 million to Patrick Corbin. Most of the players above are closer to Machado, Harper, and Corbin compared to others who have struggled to get their desired deals.

When we see players avoiding free agency, concluding that players are afraid of the open market strikes a cord because it ties in well with recent slow free agent periods and owners generally having the upper hand over players financially. It’s not clear that these particular examples, especially the pending free agents, are a symptom of a potential larger problem. What seems to be the case is that teams have an enormous amount of money to spend and they are offering what are pretty close to free agent prices to players at the top of the market. For the players’ side, free agency is designed to get veterans large amounts of money. These contract extensions are very much a favorable outcome in service of that goal. Players get their free agent money without putting themselves at risk for another season. Could they have gotten more by hitting free agency next winter? That’s certainly possible, but the most likely scenario for most of these players is playing out the season and getting a contract very similar to the one that was already offered by their current team.

This study doesn’t address the players who have yet to see a big contract and sign away multiple free agent seasons because it takes 6-7 years just to get to free agency. It also doesn’t address the many players in the league’s middle-class who get to free agency only to fail to find desirable contracts after having their salaries capped for more than half a decade. There are certainly issues with free agency, minimum salaries, the arbitration system, the split of revenue between owners and players, and the CBA as a whole. Those concerns will no doubt drive the next CBA negotiation. But when looking at the holes in free agency, this study would seem to suggest that the big-money extensions for pending free agents is not the void you’re looking for.

12:01

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon folks, and welcome to today’s chat. I’m going to give the queue a few moments to fill up while I order lunch, please hang tight.

12:04

Jay Jaffe: Ok, poke bowl ordered. On with the show

12:08

Jay Jaffe: Kenny, that’s a fundamental question that the union and owners really need to think hard about in advance of the next Collective Bargaining Agreement, because the current rules have clearly made rebuilding — while profiting handsomely by fielding low-payroll teams with much less threat to decreasing revenue — an enticing option. Baseball is a business, but also entertainment, and if you can’t convince fans that you have SOMETHING to see, even if it’s green prospects finding their way at the major league level for the first time, then something is wrong. I do think the next CBA needs to work on tightening the connection between winning and revenue (especially revenue sharing) in order to prevent so many teams from being non-competitive at the same time.

12:13

Jay Jaffe: For all of the lineup’s losses (Stanton, Andujar, Gregorius, Hicks), the offense has scored over 5 runs per game and is fourth in wRC+ (127). Where they’re feeling the injuries the most, i think, is the bullpen, where Betances’ absence has exacerbated the struggles of Britton, Green, Kahnle and even Chapman. Let’s remember that the one thing that makes managers look the worst in the public eye is when the relievers he calls upon don’t do the job — regardless of his options or what the data says, the knee-jerk reaction is that he’s chosen poorly.

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Getting a major, non-emergency surgery is a strange experience. One moment you are yourself, living in the body you have always inhabited, even if that body is now dressed in an unfamiliar and unflattering set of garments foisted upon you by the nurses. You are then wheeled into a cavernous room, where you are laid out on a slab for dissemination, surrounded by a motley crew of strangers with covered faces. Some bustle around with arcane metal implements; others pat you on the shoulder and tell you to have good dreams, thereby placing an unnecessary amount of pressure on you not to have bad dreams, in which case you would have failed at one of your two tasks in this scenario. (The other task is, of course, not dying.) And in what seems like moments (but also seems like a very long time, somehow), you wake up confused, unable to move or speak, with your body permanently altered in ways that you will likely never be able to fully understand. In just a few hours of unawareness, your experience of reality is fundamentally changed. There is nothing you can do but try to adjust. 

The last baseball game I watched before I went under was the Mariners home opener. The Mariners played this game against the defending World Series champion Boston Red Sox and ace Chris Sale, and they won 12-4. Save for their poor defense, they looked all-powerful. The Red Sox looked uniformly awful. The baseball season is full of these little flauntings of expectation: fun, ultimately insignificant. A larger data set irons everything out in the final reckoning. When I got knocked out for surgery in the early morning on March 29th, I had differently-arranged bones, no titanium screws or plates in my body, and a fundamental, unshakeable understanding that the 2019 Seattle Mariners were not, and the 2019 Boston Red Sox were, a reliably excellent baseball team.

I spent the several days post-surgery in a quasi-real state, drifting in and out of consciousness, oozing blood from various orifices, unable to eat much more than hospital-issue jello. When I got home, I tried to watch some baseball. My attention drifted with such hazy determination that it seemed as though a higher power were directing it away, and even without that, I couldn’t stay awake for three hours on end. As my energy and ability to function gradually returned, I was confronted by the massive backlog of undone tasks and unresponded-to emails that appears when you disconnect from the world for a few days.

And so it happened that I didn’t really get a chance to clue back into the baseball universe until this weekend. The world that greeted me was nothing short of astonishing. While I was gone, the Mariners had become the greatest offensive juggernaut that has ever been seen in the history of professional baseball. The Red Sox, meanwhile, had continued to be awful. Just awful! It was astonishing, an astonishing truth to reckon with, especially while on four different kinds of medication.

One reliable element of this new reality, though, was that the Blue Jays were terrible. The team has a collective wRC+ of 63, which in layman’s terms could be described as “ass.” I have seen the Red Sox beat the Blue Jays many, many, many times, and I have seen Chris Sale dominate the Blue Jays many, many times since he made the move to the Red Sox. In 43 innings pitched against the Jays with the Red Sox prior to this season, he allowed but 11 earned runs, and struck out 37.9% of the batters he faced, which has made for some frustrating baseball-watching experiences as a Jays fan. But as an appreciator of all things Sale — the violence of his pitching motion, the sweep of his slider, his cryptid-like frame and terrifying demeanor, his alleged belly-button piercing — watching him pitch against the Jays is a treat.

And there he was on Fenway’s Opening Day, a day of celebration, a reminder of the indomitable World Series championship team of last season, and a reminder that the team taking the field this season is much the same one. The fans were loud, and the weather was gloomy. This was the first game since my surgery that I had a chance to sit down and really focus on; and this, at last, was comfortingly familiar. The Red Sox were an anchor in my sea of uncertainty, the team connecting my pre-op baseball experience to my post-op existence.

For the first three innings, the game wasn’t much more than a great opportunity to catch up further on my rest. Sale retired the first seven batters he faced. His fastball velocity, a matter of justifiable concern for him this season, was up from his last start (though he still failed to generate any swinging strikes with the pitch). Same old 2019 Blue Jays. Same old Chris Sale. The Red Sox managed to score a pair of runs off Matt Shoemaker; everything was as it should be. Sale struck out Richard Urena to lead off the top of the third.

Then Alen Hanson poked a high slider into left field.

It was not a good pitch — Sale’s slider, like virtually all his other pitches, has not had its characteristic venom so far this season. He has not located the pitch well, and this one, too, was poorly placed, high and hanging over over the center of the plate. The ball was not exactly well-hit either, though, and it was just the one baserunner. No big deal. Nothing to see here.

Then Billy McKinney poked another high slider into center field. This slider was a better one — harder, coming at 81 mph instead of 77, and floating less casually over the plate — and McKinney hit it softly, without much conviction. But now, all of a sudden, the Jays had a rally brewing. (The Jays have had three or fewer hits in four of their 12 games this season.) And on Sale’s first pitch to Freddy Galvis, with the hit and run on, the Jays turned that rally into a scoring play. A sac fly tied the game on the next batter before the inning came to a close.

This sequence of events was bizarre to witness — the hit and run actually working, and the Jays managing to get enough runners on base to make the hit and run a viable possibility. As it turned out, the real break in the fabric of reality was yet to come.

The top of the fourth began with yet another single, this time by Randal Grichuk, off a slider that failed to sweep across the plate, instead hanging up and out of the zone on Sale’s armside. (Last year, 48% of swings generated by Sale’s slider were whiffs; this year, that number has dropped to only 28%. Sale threw 26 sliders against the Blue Jays; he generated five swinging strikes against seven balls in play.) This was promptly followed by a Danny Jansen single on a fastball out of the zone, which was promptly followed by an aborted bunt attempt by Lourdes Gurriel Jr. Perhaps confused by the sudden switch from bunting to not-bunting, Christian Vazquez let the ball bounce off his glove.

Grichuk advanced to third. And after a long plate appearance, which included at least one other failed bunt attempt, Gurriel finally shot a single into right field. The Jays had their second three-hit inning of the day, and they had the lead again.

By this point, I felt like I was losing my mind. While all of these singles were certainly the result of some amount of contact-related BA(d)BIP luck, and the passed ball was certainly not his fault, the fact that Sale was allowing this much contact at all — that, almost two weeks after that fateful game the day before my surgery, he looked almost as bad as he had back then — that the Reliably Excellent Red Sox had the same number of wins as my sad little Blue Jays, and that those same Jays now had the lead — none of it made sense. None of it tracked with the concept of baseball reality I had nurtured through my absence. I wondered if the painkillers were eating away at my brain cells.

A sacrifice bunt moved the two baserunners over. Hanson struck out swinging for the second out of the inning. The put-away pitch was Sale’s first swinging strike generated on a four-seamer this season, yet another fact that makes me feel that I have phased into a different dimension of existence. Sale stood for a moment, his jersey rippling gently in the wind, signifying a peace and tranquility that would never come. He threw to the plate, and Vazquez assumed an ideal catching position.

The ball sprang away. One runner came home; the other, Gurriel, scampered to third — from whence he proceeded to do this.

A straight steal of home, on a ball thrown a mile wide of the plate, after an inning where a catcher was possessed by the departed spirit of Rudy Kemmler, and a team with a .193/.268/.320 collective line put together two three-hit rallies. How does one even react appropriately to this? What’s the precedent?

The inning ended with no further runs, and Sale left the game, but its effects lingered, rippling through the chilly air, through the frequency of the boos that rained down onto the field from the Red Sox faithful. Something was off. This was not what was supposed to be happening. The team faded out for the winter, and when they woke up in the spring — the same team with the same players who had won the World Series — their experience of reality had fundamentally changed.  The Red Sox fell to 3-9, in the cellar of the AL East. Their playoff odds, sitting at 88.7% on Opening Day, have nosedived to 63.4%.

Yet that’s still a better chance than not. It’s still better than the Rays, who have flapped their slimy ray wings and glided into first place. Sale says that he’s never felt this lost, but the likelihood of him remaining lost forever seems slim. The experience of reality has changed, but most of the time, things have a way of smoothing over, of returning to the way that they’re supposed to be. Most of the time, the statistics normalize; the issues are problem-solved; the physical and mental injuries are recovered from. The pitcher who’s losing his fastball finds different ways to pitch. The cracks where the bones were separated fuse together again. Something has changed — it will heal, eventually. The titanium screws will always be there, but you’ll largely forget they exist. You just have to survive the adjustment period.

Heading into this season, Matt Carpenter was in the final guaranteed year of a $52 million contract with a $18.5 million 2020 option that he signed back in 2014. Yesterday, Carpenter and the Cardinals agreed to an extension that will guarantee that option year, which was already very likely to be picked up, and add an additional year at the same price along with a vesting option for 2022 with a $2 million buyout. Derrick Goold first reported the parties had apparently reached an agreement ahead of a mystery press conference, and later confirmed with contract details.

For the Cardinals this isn’t exactly an extension the team needed to do, but the club has operated similarly in the past when it comes to players they really like, handing out a three-year extension to Yadier Molina in 2017 a year before he would’ve been free-agent eligible and giving Paul Goldschmidt a $130 million deal this spring. Given that Carpenter was still two years away from free agency, and will be 35 years old in 2021, it’s fair to say the Cardinals really want to keep the third baseman around. As for why the club might reward him for past performance, Carpenter’s track record speaks for itself. Since becoming a full-time player in 2013, here’s where Carpenter ranks among all position players by WAR.

Carpenter has been one of the best players in the game over the last six-plus seasons, likely bettering some players who are more highly regarded. Removing some of those early seasons pushes Carpenter further down the list, but never out of the top-40. Last season, Carpenter caught fire midway through the season and ended with a five-win campaign that ranked 19th among position players. This season, his 4.1 projected WAR according to ZiPS is the 25th-best among position players. At his $14.5 million salary this season, that production is a bargain. Carpenter has moved all over the infield in his career, amassing more than 200 games at second, first, and third base. The majority of his starts have come at third, where he plays now, but prior defensive concerns pushed him to first base in previous seasons.

With the addition of Goldschmidt, Carpenter moved back to third. His reputation there is probably worse than his performance. His clunky throwing motion doesn’t inspire confidence, but over the course of his career, he’s been just slightly below average at the hot corner. At 33 years old, Carpenter isn’t likely to get better in the field, and with Goldschmidt with the club through 2024, Carpenter is going to have to make third work absent the designated hitter coming to the National League.

As opposed to solely being a reward for past play, expectations are still decent for Carpenter going forward. We now have three-year ZiPS on FanGraphs player and projections pages, and Carpenter’s forecast a productive player over the next three seasons.

The Cardinals certainly could have waited to see if Carpenter reaches the four-win mark before picking up his option, and then for a good three-win season in 2020 before trying to sign him in free agency. If Carpenter did put up those projected seasons, he might have gotten two more years at a salary similar to what Michael Brantley received in free agency this season. The Cardinals remove that option by guaranteeing an extra $20.5 million. If Carpenter still performs well in 2021, the team can bring him back for one more year at the same salary; Carpenter can make 2022 vest by reaching 1100 plate appearances in 2020 and 2021 as well as 550 plate appearances in 2021. Those aren’t easy milestones for Carpenter to reach, but if he does, he will likely still be playing at a high level.

In terms of justifying this new contract for the Cardinals, we don’t need to do too much of a deep dive. The team is only guaranteeing one extra year beyond his previous 2020 option, and even if Carpenter falls off a cliff in the next two seasons, a salary under $20 million isn’t going to break the bank. One thing this contract does do for St. Louis is help them avoid free agency, both with Carpenter and with other potential options at third base, and builds a bridge to last year’s first round draft pick, Nolan Gorman. Still 18 years old, but already performing well in Low-A, an extra year of Carpenter could build a bridge to Gorman as he advances through the minors. A lot has to happen on Gorman’s end to make that plan work, but it certainly has to be in the back of the Cardinals’ minds as they made this deal with Carpenter.

As for free agency generally, it would be fair to say that the Cardinals haven’t been particularly good at it in the last half-decade. Deals for Mike Leake, Dexter Fowler, and a parade of relievers haven’t worked out as planned while the team has missed on their larger targets. Since watching Albert Pujols leave, the Cardinals have avoided free agency with Adam Wainwright and Yadier Molina (twice), and recently with Miles Mikolas and Paul Goldschmidt while signing Matt Carpenter, Carlos Martinez, Paul DeJong, and Kolten Wong to extensions long before they reached free agency. The Cardinals can attribute a lot of their success and sustained contention to the work they’ve done to avoid free agency, while their failures to reach 90 wins the last three seasons can be traced to their deficiencies in free agency. This deal fits in with the Cardinals preferred mode of operation, though it changes little for their long term future.