One of the first things Rob Manfred did after becoming MLB commissioner was talk about his idea of limiting or outright banning the shift. The shift has only become increasingly popular! Here is one proxy measure, courtesy of our own leaderboards. This shows the percentage of time there was some kind of shifted alignment in the field when a batted ball was hit in play:

Defenders move around all the time. Defenders move around more than ever. Different places categorize different alignments differently, and it’s not clear where you draw the line between shift and no shift, but the exact definition doesn’t really matter. Shifts are way up, compared to ten years ago. Shifts are way up, compared to five years ago. It’s impossible to watch baseball and not notice, unless you’ve only started watching baseball very recently.

Back then, killing the shift was only an idea. Ideas, for the most part, are harmless. There’s nothing wrong with a thought exercise. But now this is all back in the news. I’ll excerpt a section from an article just written by Jayson Stark:

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 was initially adapted from The Cooperstown Casebook, published in 2017 by Thomas Dunne Books, and then revised for SI.com last year. 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.

It happened so quickly. Freshly anointed the game’s top prospect by Baseball America in the spring of 1996, the soon-to-be-19-year-old Andruw Jones was sent to play for the Durham Bulls, the Braves’ Hi-A affiliate. By mid-August, he blazed through the Carolina League, the Double-A Southern League, and the Triple-A International League, and debuted for the defending world champion Braves. By October 20, with just 31 regular season games under his belt, he was a household name, not only the youngest player ever to homer in a World Series game — breaking Mickey Mantle’s record — but doing so twice at Yankee Stadium.

Jones was no flash in the pan. The Braves didn’t win the 1996 World Series, and he didn’t win the 1997 NL Rookie of the Year award, but along with Chipper Jones (no relation) and the big three of Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and John Smoltz, he became a pillar of a franchise that won a remarkable 14 NL East titles from 1991-2005 (all but the 1994 strike season). From 1998-2007, Jones won 10 straight Gold Gloves, more than any center fielder except Willie Mays.

By the end of 2006, Jones had tallied 342 homers and 1,556 hits. He looked bound for a berth in Cooperstown, but after a subpar final season in Atlanta and a departure for Los Angeles in free agency, he fell apart so completely that the Dodgers bought out his contract, a rarity in baseball. He spent the next four years with three different teams before heading to Japan at age 35, and while he hoped for a return to the majors, he couldn’t find a deal to his liking after either the 2014 or 2015 seasons. He retired before his 39th birthday, and thanks to his rapid descent, barely survived his first year on the Hall of Fame ballot.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Cincinnati’s 2018 Minor League Hitter of the Year isn’t a slugger, nor is he among the club’s higher-profile prospects. That’s not to say TJ Friedl won’t be roaming the Reds’ outfield in the not-too-distant future. Blessed with a smooth left-handed stroke and plus-plus wheels, he is — according to our own Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel — “almost a lock to hang around the big leagues for at least a few years in some role.”

His background is unlike that of most players who reach the doorstep, let alone get invited inside. Friedl entered pro ball in 2016 as a non-drafted free agent out of the University of Nevada. More on that in moment.

At 5-foot-10 and 170 pounds, the 23-year-old Friedl looks the part of a table-setter, and the numbers match the image. In a 2018 season split evenly between Hi-A Daytona and Double-A Pensacola, the speedster slashed .284/.381/.384 with five home runs and 30 stolen bases.

His top-of-the-order-friendly OBP was fueled by a change that occurred shortly before his 2017 campaign ended prematurely due to injury. Wanting to recognize pitches earlier, he tweaked his timing mechanism. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for more than half a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Cleveland Indians.

Batters
Mind the gap! One wouldn’t think of the Colorado Rockies and Cleveland Indians as having similar front offices or philosophies, but they ended up in a similar place when it came to their offenses, with each boasting a of couple MVP-types who carried a disproportionately large portion of the load. Now, the Indians don’t have a replacement level Ian Desmond in the lineup, and the lesser lights don’t cost quite as much, but it still leaves Cleveland with a fairly unbalanced offense. The outfield is the biggest problem, with Michael Brantley, who did not receive a qualifying offer, still possessing the third-best batter projection on the team. While Cleveland’s still good enough otherwise that they can win the Central without much of a struggle — even if they trade a starting pitcher and go into the season with their existing outfield — it’s not ideal.

Pitchers
ZiPS really, really likes Shane Bieber. It likes him to such a degree that when I saw the nearly four-WAR projection, I fired up his profile page and checked the Steamer projection to make sure I hadn’t accidentally broken something. Like the time I initially projected Jose Molina to have a 1.200 batting average. I talked more about this in Cleveland’s Elegy for ’18 just a few days ago, but it’s understandable why the Indians are willing to talk pitcher trades. The team is still hopeful about Danny Salazar and while I can’t get in their brains, I suspect they feel the difference between Danny Salazar (or the other fallback options) and Corey Kluber or Trevor Bauer is smaller than the difference between nothing and the prospects they could get in return. While I would’ve preferred the team to at least give Brantley a qualifying offer and pinch pennies a few years down the road, one can at least understand their thinking.
Read the rest of this entry »

No offense to Josh Donaldson, Steve Pearce, and Kurt Suzuki, but it appears the first big domino has fallen in this winter’s free agent class. Patrick Corbin is reportedly set to sign a six-year contract with the Nationals, per Chelsea Janes. Jon Heyman has reported the deal is for $140 million and, as most Nationals contracts do, it includes deferrals, per Ken Rosenthal, which lower somewhat the actual value of the contract. The Diamondbacks will get a draft pick after the first round for their troubles.

This might not quite qualify as mystery team material, but the industry consensus seemed to be that Corbin was likely to sign with the Phillies or the Yankees, making the Nationals moving in a bit of a surprise. Now, it would be appropriate to say the Nationals didn’t need pitching given that they already have Max Scherzer and Stephen Strasburg at the top of the rotation. But it would probably be even more appropriate to say every team needs pitching, and signing a pitcher of Patrick Corbin’s quality does a lot to help the Nationals as they try to recapture the division after a disappointing season and the seemingly likely departure of Bryce Harper.

As for how Corbin will perform, our own Dan Szymborksi was kind enough to pass along the following ZiPS projections: Read the rest of this entry »

The Indians are one of the best teams in baseball. The Indians have also been one of the best teams in baseball. Last year, they won their division. The year before that, they won their division. The year before that, they won their division, and they nearly won the World Series. The Indians possess an incredible core of star-level players, and they don’t really need to do anything in order to look like a title contender in the season ahead. It’s a good time to be a baseball fan in Cleveland.

Yet the Indians recently unloaded Yan Gomes. As a result, they could use another catcher. And far more significantly, for the past month or so, there’s been talk of the Indians trading one of Corey Kluber, Trevor Bauer, and Carlos Carrasco. Nothing has actually happened, of course, but the rumors haven’t gone away, and a trade seems fairly likely. Such a trade would be atypical, to say the least. A first-place team selling would be nearly without precedent. There’s no easy way to look that up, but just about all of the time, good teams buy, and bad teams sell. That is the nature of things.

The Indians being who they are, they’re trying to think about payroll, and they’re trying to think about their window. No one’s ever happy to trade an ace-level starter. At the same time, as much as that kind of trade would suck, the Indians also have a unique opportunity. The Indians are a smaller-budget operation. And they’re the envy of other smaller-budget operations.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2019 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Baseball at high altitude is weird. The air is less dense, so pitched balls break less and batted balls carry farther — conditions that greatly favor the hitters. Meanwhile, reduced oxygen levels make breathing harder, physical exertion more costly, and recovery times longer. Ever since major league baseball arrived in Colorado in 1993, no player put up with more of this, the pros and cons of playing at a mile-high elevation, than Todd Helton.

A Knoxville native whose career path initially led to the gridiron, ahead of Peyton Manning on the University of Tennessee quarterback depth chart, Helton shifted his emphasis back to baseball in college and spent his entire 17-year career (1997-2013) playing for the Rockies. “The Toddfather” was without a doubt the greatest player in franchise history, its leader in every major offensive counting stat category save for triples, stolen bases, caught stealing and sacrifice hits, none of which were major parts of his game. He made five All-Star teams, won three Gold Gloves, a slash line triple crown — leading in batting average, on-base percentage, and slugging percentage in the same season — and served as a starter and a team leader for two playoff teams, including its only pennant winner. He posted batting averages above .300 12 times, on-base percentages above .400 nine times, and slugging percentages above .500 eight times. He mashed 40 doubles or more seven times and 30 homers or more six times; twice, he topped 400 total bases, a feat that only one other player (Sammy Sosa) has repeated in the post-1960 expansion era. He drew at least 100 walks in a season five times, yet only struck out 100 times or more once; nine times, he walked more than he struck out.

Because Helton did all of this while spending half of his time at Coors Field, many dismiss his accomplishments without second thought. That he did so with as little self-promotion as possible — and scarcely more exposure — while toiling for a team that had the majors’ sixth-worst record during his tenure makes it that much easier, and as does the drop-off at the tail end of his career, when injuries, most notably chronic back woes, had sapped his power. He was “The Greatest Player Nobody Knows,” as the New York Times called him in 2000, a year when he flirted with a .400 batting average into September.

Thanks to Helton’s staying power, and to advanced statistics that adjust for the high-offense environment in a particularly high-scoring period in baseball history, we can see more clearly see that he ranked among his era’s best players — and has credentials that wouldn’t be out of place in Cooperstown. But like former teammate Larry Walker, an even more complete player who spent just 59% of his career with the Rockies, Helton will likely struggle to make headway with voters. He deserves better than that.

Read the rest of this entry »