Late Sunday, the Boston Red Sox and Xander Bogaerts agreed on a $120 million extension, keeping the team’s star shortstop in Boston until at least 2025. While the deal is being reported as worth $132 million, that figure already includes the $12 million Bogaerts was going to make in 2019, so it’s kind of cheating for the sake of headline inflation. There are two other significant contract stipulations: a vesting option for 2026 worth $20 million, and an opt-out for Bogaerts following the 2022 season. The opt-out ensures that Bogaerts will at least have the option to test free agency once somewhere near his prime during his career, his first year of free agency otherwise being his age-33 season if the option doesn’t vest.

Bogaerts is in a curious position for a star player at a key position on a very popular team: he might actually be underrated. When people discuss the top shortstops in baseball, the list rightly starts with Francisco Lindor, who is the best shortstop in baseball, but then you’ll generally hear Carlos Correa and Corey Seager’s names, then maybe some talk about Andrelton Simmons because of his glove. It’s only then that Bogaerts might be thrown in as a “oh yeah, him too” selection. Bogaerts still only has one All-Star appearance, one fewer than Scott Cooper, and only received back-end MVP votes in a single season. Even in 2018, a season in which Bogaerts was hitting .284/.353/.535 in the first-half, he failed to be named to the midsummer classic’s roster.

But over the last five years, by WAR, only Lindor has clearly contributed more on-the-field than Bogaerts has among shortstops. So why this lack of recognition? Call it the Curse of the Well-Rounded. Bogie does nothing truly poorly, but like a number of other all-around talents, he doesn’t have that one obvious highlight to point to in a culture that likes the ten-second soundbite. He’s topped out short of 25 homers, and only hit .300 the one-time. His glove is middling as shortstops go — there’s significant disagreement between UZR and DRS here — and in sabermetric language, his WAR hovers between three and five a year, so no crazy season like Lindor’s 2018 as of yet. There’s no signature postseason home run to hang his hat on. Bogaerts has played the enchilada in a world obsessed with tacos and burritos.

At just 26, Bogaerts ranks highly enough among shortstops through the same age that he’s on a realistic Hall of Fame trajectory. He’s not on the “hit by a bus and get in” path that Mike Trout finds himself on, and there are players who also ranked highly who have fallen or will fall well short of the Hall (Hanley Ramirez, Garry Templeton, Donie Bush, probably Elvis Andrus), but it’s still an impressive list of Cooperstownerati.

At $20 million, the Red Sox get a particularly good deal. Bogaerts likely left some money on the table given the fact that he’s not a two- or three-year player, but one who was only a single season away from free agency. Indeed, as someone who would have hit the market at age 27 and almost certainly is in the top five at his position, one might even characterize $20 million a year as a steal. But don’t take my word for it; what’s the fun of having the magic computer that makes projections if I’m not going to use it?

ZiPS has tended to be fairly close with Red Sox signings this era (for example, it came within $2 million of Dustin Pedroia‘s extension), but this one is a very large aberration. The projections from ZiPS estimate — and this includes the risk of projecting 2020-2025 now rather than after he actually has his 2019 season in the books — that Bogaerts left roughly $50 million on the table. If the projections prove to be accurate, as free agency-year contracts go, Bogaerts’s contract will rank in the upper-echelons of big contracts that worked out well for the team, in the territory of Miguel Cabrera’s first contract. Some of that money comes back to Bogaerts in the form of his opt-out, but his downside is much better than, say, Eric Hosmer, a player with a similar opt-out clause, so it’s less of a hit to the team.

Bogaerts will likely speak more on the subject, but two issues seemed to loom large for him in the decision-making process. By all accounts he enjoys playing for the Red Sox and has shared his concerns about the Bryce Harper/Manny Machado market this winter. Add in uncertainty about baseball’s next collective bargaining agreement and it’s understandable why Bogaerts and other free agents to-be have prioritized getting long-term deals done and in the books.

Does Bogaerts end up in Cooperstown? At this point, ZiPS would say no, projecting him to end up with around 45 WAR with 2429 hits and 264 home runs, a career reminiscent of Toby Harrah’s, who was way better than you think. It’s likely some of that will take place at third base as well, which will probably hurt how he is perceived by voters. But it’s not out of the realm of possibility; ZiPS gives him a 20% chance of passing 65 WAR, a number that would make him a likely Hall of Famer, though not a first-balloter. There are 18 shortstops with 60 WAR and the only ones not in the Hall are Alex Rodriguez (who is not yet eligible and will struggle for non-playing reasons), Bill Dahlen, and Jack Glasscock. I swear I didn’t make up the last guy. A one-in-five chance at a summer speech in Cooperstown ain’t bad.

As you’ve no doubt heard, we’re living in a golden age for position players pitching. Don’t believe me? Read the copious articles written about it in the past few years. At this point, you know the broad strokes of the genre. You know that position players are pitching a lot more often these days. You know that it’s funny because they’re not that good at pitching, but also funny because they’re not as bad as you’d think.

It’s gotten so common, so normal, that less than a week into the 2019 season, we’ve already had a game where position players pitched on both sides. That game had a little bit of everything: John Ryan Murphy was terrible, allowing seven runs in two innings. Russell Martin was perplexingly effective, setting the side down in order in his one inning of work to close out the Dodgers 18-5 win over the Diamondbacks. He was the first full-time position player to close out the ninth inning of a game since 1963.

There was one thing missing from that game, though — neither “pitcher” recorded a strikeout, and strikeouts have been, in my opinion, criminally under-reported in all the coverage of position-player pitchers. Those embarrassing-but-not-that-embarrassing pitching lines? They were compiled against real, honest-to-god major league hitters (and also occasionally pitchers pretending to be major league batters). We all know that position players pitch well enough to occasionally get strikeouts, and that’s a pretty great fact. Take a minute, though, to consider this: the pseudo-pitcher’s small triumph is also the batter’s great failure. He just struck out, the most miserable feeling in baseball, and he did it against a guy who’s out there goofing around.

In 2018, position-player pitchers struck out 22 batters. On the one hand, that doesn’t sound like a lot, but on the other hand — that’s a lot! Still, though, not all of these strikeouts were created equal. There’s a lot of distance between Gerrit Cole striking out against a utility infielder and Eugenio Suarez going down on strikes against a backup catcher. I wanted to chronicle this, because in a year there might be too many strikeouts for it to be interesting or too few to devote an article to. I sat down and watched all 22 strikeouts and separated them into tiers of embarrassment. These guys might be multi-millionaires. They might be unfathomably strong and coordinated baseball machines, but sometimes they mess up the easiest tasks. They’re just like us. Who couldn’t relate to that?
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12:01

Dan Szymborski: It’s April, but I’m still having this lousy Smarch weather!

12:02

Dan Szymborski: What format?

12:02

Dan Szymborski: Well, he could get a deal he likes, but yes, he’s rapidly becoming the only player in free agency!

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Pitchers learn and develop different pitches, and they do so at varying stages of their lives. It might be a curveball in high school, a cutter in college, or a changeup in A-ball. Sometimes the addition or refinement is a natural progression — graduating from Pitching 101 to advanced course work — and often it’s a matter of necessity. In order to get hitters out as the quality of competition improves, a pitcher needs to optimize his repertoire.

In this installment of the series, we’ll hear from three pitchers — Corbin Burnes, Ty Buttrey, and Steve Cishek — on how they learned and developed their sliders.

———

Corbin Burnes, Milwaukee Brewers

“Coming out of high school I was mainly fastball-curveball-changeup. When I got to college, my coach approached me and said, ‘Hey, what do you think about throwing a slider?’ I was all for it. My fastball had a little bit of cutting action, so if we could kind of extend that cut, it would make for a good deception pitch off my fastball.

“I’ve tinkered with grips a little over the years. What I’ve come to is basically … it’s like my four-seam fastball, but with a little pressure adjustment. Originally it was going to be more of an extended cutter — we were going to try to keep it hard — but the more I threw it, the more it turned into a slider. That was more natural for me. Read the rest of this entry »

The Brewers came within one win of a trip to the World Series last year thanks in part to the performance of a dominant bullpen that helped to offset a shaky, injury-wracked rotation. Thus far this spring, however, that bullpen has borne the brunt of the Brewers’ injuries. With Jeremy Jeffress having already started the season on the injury list due to shoulder weakness, the team just suffered an even bigger loss, as Corey Knebel revealed on Friday that he will undergo Tommy John surgery.

The 27-year-old Knebel originally suffered a partially torn ulnar collateral ligament in 2014, while pitching for the Rangers’ Triple-A Round Rock affiliate. He was just over a year into his professional career at that point, having been chosen as a supplemental first-round pick by the Tigers out of the University of Texas in 2013, then dealt to the Rangers in a July 2014 trade involving Joakim Soria. The injury wasn’t severe enough to require TJS, so he rehabbed it and kept pitching, establishing himself in the majors after being traded to the Brewers in the Yovani Gallardo deal in 2015, then taking over closer duties from the struggling Neftali Feliz in 2017. That year, he earned All-Star honors while saving 39 games, making an NL-high 76 appearances, and pitching to a 1.78 ERA, 2.53 FIP, and 2.7 WAR; the last mark ranked fourth in the majors among relievers with at least 50 innings.

The 2018 season was a different story for Knebel. He made just three appearances before missing a month due to a left hamstring strain, and pitched so erratically that he was sent back to Triple-A Colorado Springs with a 5.08 ERA and 4.29 FIP in late August. Fortunately for the Brewers, he was thoroughly dominant upon returning, holding batters to a .096/.175/.135 line while striking out 33 of the 57 he faced in 16.1 scoreless innings through the end of the regular season, then striking out 14 out of 33 hitters over 10 postseason innings while allowing just one run. Overall, his 3.58 ERA was more than double his 2017 mark, though his 3.03 FIP wasn’t so far removed; in both seasons, he posted top-five strikeout rates (40.8% in 2017, 39.5% last year) and top 10 K-BB% (27.8% and 29.6%, respectively), with a jump in home run rate (from 0.71 per nine to 1.14) the big difference. Still, between that and a lesser workload (from 76 innings to 55.1), his WAR dropped from 2.7 to 1.0. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh, Sam Miller, and Meg Rowley banter about Sam’s cabin sojourn, how well Major League has held up, an exciting development in strategic bat tosses, a big day for Willians Astudillo, the difficulty of drawing conclusions about baseball early in the season, the early-season home-run rate, the paradox of sports radio, Sam’s Jose Ramirez hot take, bunting against four-man outfields, service-time manipulation and Kyle Freeland, whether we would notice if MLB stealthily implemented robot umps, and check-swing mistakes, plus Stat Blasts about Luke Voit and perfect starts to the season, the most MLB games ever played in one day, the longest gaps between pairings of the same pitcher and catcher, and Yu Darvish and the most pitches thrown in a game before the first ball in play.

Audio intro: Disclosure, "Together"
Audio outro: Frank Sinatra, "We’ll Be Together Again"

Link to Sam on strategic bat tosses
Link to Swanson bat toss
Link to research on hitters being ahead of pitchers
Link to Martin pitching appearance stats
Link to article about position players pitching with leads
Link to day with the most games played
Link to longest gaps in pitcher-catcher pairings
Link to list of games with most pitches before first BIP
Link to box score for Darvish start
Link to box score for Martinez start
Link to article about MLBPA grievance
Link to preorder The MVP Machine

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Spring training numbers need to be taken with a grain of salt, but there’s no denying that Ryan McMahon has been a monster in the month of March. In 59 Cactus League at bats, the Colorado Rockies infielder banged out 25 hits while slashing a behemothic .424/.470/.763. His 1.233 OPS led the leaderboards in Arizona and Florida alike.

No, he isn’t about to approach those numbers in games that count — this isn’t Ty Cobb we’re talking about — but the 24-year-old is being counted on to provide value to the Rockies lineup. Three games into the regular season, he’s done just that. McMahon has four hits, including a pair of doubles, plus two walks, in a dozen plate appearances. Lilliputian sample size? Sure, but it’s nonetheless a nice start for the 2013 second-round pick.

His 2018 rookie season was a disappointment. In 202 big-league PAS, he fanned 64 times, and logged a .683 OPS. That came on the heels of spring training numbers which, while not as heady as this year’s, suggested he was ready to rake at the highest level. Instead, he scuffled.

McMahon is self-aware enough not to have forgotten last year. Asked a few weeks ago about his scorching spring, he reminded reporters that it had only been a few dozen at bats — spring training at bats, no less — and that “Baseball is a very humbling game. You never have it all the way figured out.” Read the rest of this entry »

UMP: The Untitled McDongenhagen Project, Episode 12

This is the 12th episode of a mostly weekly program co-hosted by Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel about player evaluation in all its forms. The show, which is available through the normal FanGraphs Audio feed, has a working name but barely. The show is not all prospect stuff, but there is plenty of that, as the hosts are Prospect Men.

This week we have a one topic show featuring special guest Meg Rowley of this very website. In honor of March Madness, we held a draft of active baseball players on major league 40-man rosters for a round robin basketball tournament. Listen to the episode to hear our logic and then use this poll to vote on who has the best squad. Warning: the poll contains a recap of our rosters, so don’t click on the link before listening if you don’t want those spoiled!

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @kileymcd or @longenhagen on Twitter or at prospects@fangraphs.com.

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

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 32 min play time.)

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Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about their Opening Day experiences, the pleasure of immersing themselves in baseball again, baseball players being better than ever, and MLB’s arbitration championship belt, then (22:25) talk to Joey Mellows, AKA “The Baseball Brit,” about how he became a baseball convert, his worldwide baseball travels and his quest to see 162 games this season, the logistics of his journey, the fan experience in the U.S. compared to South Korea and Japan, watching indy ball vs. watching MLB, baseball’s popularity in the UK, the upcoming MLB games in London, his best and worst ballpark experiences, how he explains baseball to non-fans, how he’s learned about baseball history, and much more.

Audio intro: The Mountain Goats, "First Few Desperate Hours"
Audio interstitial: The Pretty Things, "Joey"
Audio outro: Frank Sinatra, "Day By Day"

Link to Ben’s story about MLB’s improving caliber of play
Link to story about the championship belt
Link to THT piece about Joey Mellows
Link to story about Caps Off
Link to Bat Flips and Nerds
Link to Joey’s map of all the U.S. ballparks
Link to preorder The MVP Machine

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Phillies third baseman Maikel Franco has been with the Phillies since signing as an international free agent in 2010, and since he made his major league debut in 2014, the Phillies haven’t had a winning season. Before this season, he had only 59 career plate appearances batting eighth in the order. During the Phillies’ rebuild, Franco was a middle-of-the-order bat, despite never truly evolving into one. Of his career 2,115 plate appearances, over half of them (1,068) came in either the No. 3 or No. 4 hole.

On Thursday, Franco batted eighth, not because of any personal struggles on his part, but because of the Phillies’ depth up and down their lineup. In the sixth inning, in a 3-2 count (and on the seventh pitch of the at-bat), Franco turned on a Shane Carle fastball and drove a three-run home run into the left field seats. With one swing of the bat, the Phillies’ 3-1 lead became 6-1, with this at-bat serving as the icing on the cake in the Phillies’ eventual 10-4 win.

“Our eight-hole guy hit a three-run homer,” Phillies outfielder Andrew McCutchen told MLB.com. “It just shows you how deep the lineup is. Franco, he’s not an eight-hole hitter. Not the typical one. It just shows you what we can do, one through eight. Yeah, we can do it on a daily basis. It’s not going to be one or two guys that’s picking the team up, we’re going to picking each other up because we have that type of lineup to do it.”

Why did this one at-bat in this one Opening Day game pique my interest? It’s because this at-bat might foreshadow one of the key themes of the 2019 Phillies season: depth. Read the rest of this entry »