Josh Hader is a lefty relief pitcher for the Milwaukee Brewers. You know this; you read this site. Josh Hader has had, statistically speaking, an awesome season. You don’t accidentally strike out 17 guys per nine — in this case, better than half of all batters he’s faced. And Hader seems to have embraced a role of which other pitchers might be wary of great. So it wasn’t surprising when Jon Heyman tweeted this:

By now, you probably know the rest of this story. During the All-Star Game, whilst Hader was in the midst of a surprisingly poor performance on the mound, Hader’s high-school record suddenly came back to light. As the Washington Post’s Kevin Blackistone explained,

Tuesday night’s revelation [was] that Josh Hader, one of the pitchers showcased in Major League Baseball’s 89th All-Star Game, was a serial hate tweeter as a star athlete at Old Mill High School in suburban Baltimore’s Anne Arundel County.

It’s probably important before continuing to understand what kind of hate, exactly, we’re talking about. (Warning: the content is pretty offensive.)

What we have here is unmistakably racist, homophobic, antisemitic, and misogynistic hate speech. And that doesn’t happen by accident, either.

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Notes on prospects from lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen. Read previous installments here.

Luc Rennie, RHP, New York Mets (Profile)
Level: Low-A   Age: 24   Org Rank: NR   FV: 30
Line: 7 IP, 4 H, 0 BB, 0 R, 14 K

Notes
Rennie is four appearances deep into his first year back in affiliated ball since 2015, when he was with Baltimore. He’s spent the last several seasons with Evansville in the independent Frontier League and was injured for a portion of that time. He was dominant for the Otters this spring and signed with the Mets earlier this month. Last night he pitched the game of his life and struck out 14 hitters, a Columbia franchise record, with most of them coming on a plus upper-70s 12-6 curveball. Rennie has five pitches. His fastball has natural cut, he has a two-seamer, an average mid-80s slider, that curveball, and a below-average changeup. He’ll run the fastball up to 95 but sits 90-92 and mixes his breaking balls well. Rennie is carrying a 0.83 ERA through 21.1 innings at Low-A.

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The first pitch Blake Snell ever threw as an American League All-Star ended up in the left-field bleachers. I assume he had other plans.

That this might, for some, represent an enduring image of Snell’s All-Star experience is a bit of a shame, because most of the pitches he threw last Tuesday night were actually pretty good. In his first inning of work, he got Javy Báez to reach out on a letter-high fastball and bounce the ball back to the mound; he walked Paul Goldschmidt on a borderline 3-2 fastball; he struck out Nolan Arenado with a gorgeous curveball on the fourth pitch of the sequence; and he retired Freddie Freeman via ground out. In his second inning, he struck out Matt Kemp and Bryce Harper consecutively before losing Nick Markakis, of all people, on a 3-1 fastball that missed badly. He was pulled after that in favor of Joe Jiménez. All in all, though, not bad for a 25-year-old.

In fact, of the 39 pitches Snell threw on Tuesday, just one — the one Willson Contreras deposited into the left-field seats — was hit in the air at all. The rest were either taken or, in the cases of Báez and Freeman, hit into the ground. I want to fixate on this for a moment because I think it’s at least somewhat relevant to Snell’s breakout 2018, in which he’s finally managed to pitch ahead of his peripherals (and up to his potential) to the tune of a nifty 2.27 ERA in 119 big-league innings. After long being part of the future for Tampa Bay, Snell is now firmly part of the club’s present and has established himself — albeit tenuously, for the moment — a place among the top-25 or -30 starters in the game. But how?

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In a race for a playoff spot, every edge matters, yet all too often, for reasons that extend beyond a player’s statistics, managers and general managers fail to make the moves that could improve their teams, allowing subpar production to fester at the risk of killing a club’s postseason hopes. In Baseball Prospectus’s 2007 book It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over, I compiled a historical all-star squad of ignominy, identifying players at each position whose performances had dragged their teams down in tight races: the Replacement-Level Killers. It’s a concept I’ve revisited on several occasions over the past decade, both at BP and beyond, albeit not for a while. With the trade deadline looming, this seems an ideal moment to dust it off and identify some of the bigger holes at each position among contenders.

When it comes to defining replacement-level play, we needn’t be slaves to exactitude. Any team that’s gotten less than 1.0 WAR from a position to this point might be considered fair game, even if in some cases that means an above-average starter and ghastly backups. Sometimes, acceptable or even above-average defense (which, of course may depend upon which metric one views) coupled with total ineptitude on offense is enough to flag a team. In theory, a team may be well ahead of replacement level at a given position but has lost a key contributor due to injury. As with Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s definition of hardcore pornography, I know replacement level when I see it.

For this series, I’ll start with the catchers and go around the diamond, pointing out the most egregious examples of potential Killers at each position among contenders, which I’ll define as teams with playoff odds of at least 15.0%, a definition that currently covers 15 teams (sorry, Angels, Giants, and Pirates, and fuhgeddabout it, Mets and Blue Jays). I’m less focused on these teams’ solutions; colleague Dan Szymborski will examine the potential trade candidates at each position.

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Episode 824
Travis Sawchik, past author of one book and future author (with The Ringer’s Ben Lindbergh) of another one, utilizes this appearance on FanGraphs Audio to catalog the virtues of realignment and convert the masses to his vision of the future.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

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

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 1 hr 1 min play time.)

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When I approached Ross Stripling at the All-Star Game media session, I knew that he was in the midst of a breakthrough season. The 28-year-old Los Angeles Dodgers right-hander went into the midsummer classic with a record of 8-2, a 2.08 ERA, and a 10.2 K-rate in 95-and-a-third innings.

I didn’t know that he was a nerd.

“Are you taking about things like spin rate and spin efficiency? I’m a believer in that for sure,” was Stripling’s response when I asked if he ever talks pitching analytics with anyone in the organization. “When I got called up in 2016, I thought that what made me good was my high arm angle leading to good downward angle on my fastball, so I should pitch down in the zone. But I tried that, and I was getting walloped.”

Then came a conversation that jumpstarted his career. Optioned to the minors in midseason to help limit his workload — “I was basically down there sitting on innings” — Stripling picked up a ringing cell phone and was soon standing at rapt attention. The voice on the other end belonged to Dodgers president of baseball operations Andrew Friedman. Read the rest of this entry »

Whereas the first notable reliever acquisition of the trade deadline saw Cleveland receive, in Brad Hand and Adam Cimber, two pitchers who will remain with the club for future seasons, the Athletics this afternoon have performed a swap with a more traditional rent-a-player flavor, getting Jeurys Familia from the New York Mets in exchange for right-handed reliever Bobby Wahl, third baseman William Toffey, and an unspecified pile of international slot money, the 2018 version of a player-to-be-named-later.

There’s an argument to be made that, at this point, Familia may be slightly underrated among relievers. The extra couple of walks per nine that Familia picked up in a 2017 season mostly ruined by surgery to remove a blood clots from his shoulder have disappeared in 2018. Familia’s not relying on his hard, heavy sinker as much as he has in the past — especially against lefties — but given that the A’s have an infield whose four primary players, Matt Chapman, Marcus Semien, Matt Olson, and Jed Lowrie have all been above average by UZR (Lowrie a couple of runs in the negative in DRS), I’d be happy to see him go to that well a bit more often again. Even without relying on the sinker, Familia’s pitching as well as he was in 2016, which was enough to earn him an All-Star appearance and a rather odd MVP vote. Familia is in the top 20 of relievers in WAR and among the top 30 in FIP, so it’s a real upgrade to the A’s bullpen. Blake Treinen will remain the closer, which I believe is absolutely the right tack to take.

Despite Sandy Alderson’s insistence earlier this season that the Mets have no plans to go full-scale rebuild, the team’s at least been listening to offers on pretty much the entire roster. Familia doesn’t necessarily indicate a stronger organizational willingness to go that route, of course, as he was likely to be traded anyway given his contract and the team’s position in the standings.

Bobby Wahl is an interesting flier for the Mets to take. It’s hard to characterize a 26-year-old reliever as some kind of top prospect — and I won’t — but Wahl throws in the upper 90s, has an effective slider (that really feels more like a slurve to me), and can change speeds at least tolerably well. His control’s been an issue at times, though not on the Bobby Witt scale, and one of the reasons he’s not been a bit higher in the pecking order is that he has a long history of injury, losing parts of most years with varying ailments, most recently surgery for a thoracic outlet issue last season. He was fine by spring training and, as far as I know, hasn’t had any significant issues along those lines since.

Prospect-watchers tend to like Will Toffey more than Wahl, and ZiPS agrees that he’s a bit above-average defensively, placing him at about two runs per 150 games better than average based on the rough estimates ZiPS makes from play-by-play data. I’m really not sold on his bat: 23 is just too old for a player not in the middle infield or catching to not be killing the ball in the California League. While there’s obviously more time for Toffey to develop into something more than Wahl, I think the latter is more likely to actually contribute to a major-league team. The Mets’ squadron isn’t that deep in relief pitching and I wouldn’t be the least bit surprised to see him in the back end of the team’s bullpen in April (or even this year!) depending on what other moves the Mets make.

It’s interesting to see Oakland positioning themselves as buyers, at least in the bargain section. To find the last time Oakland was the team trading prospects for a veteran rather than vice-versa, you actually have to go back to the 2014 Jeff Samardzija trade, which saw the team give up Addison Russell, Dan Straily, and Billy McKinney to the Cubs for Samardzija and Jason Hammel. (They picked up Jon Lester later in that month, but you’d be hard-pressed to describe Yoenis Cespedes as a prospect.) While one doesn’t really think of the A’s as front-line, top-tier contenders, the fact is they’re essentially in a two-team race for the second Wild Card with the Mariners, a team that only has a Pythagorean record of right around .500 and likely isn’t as good as their seasonal record when you talk the rest-of-season projections. Even four games back, that it’s a two-team race is quite important: I’d rather be four games behind one team than two games back and fighting with seven other teams. But the 2018 National League is highly competitive one and the American league, the bifurcated stars-and-scrubs league, a flip of the situation a few years ago.

I’m not a believer in going all-in for a Wild Card unless it comes with a significant chance of also capturing the division title, but with what Oakland is giving up, they’re not going all-in, but simply making an incremental addition to enhance their Wild Card odds. Being less risk-averse with Familia is better in this situation than rolling the dice with Wahl would be. In all, the A’s add a significant part of their present without giving up a significant part of their future.

Wins on both sides here, with both teams getting what they need from this trade. I daresay that I’d be happier with Familia at this price than Zach Britton at the price he eventually fetches.

Each week, we publish in the neighborhood of 75 articles across our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
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It’s so funny, the things that stick with us from when we were kids. I don’t remember learning to read, but I do vividly recall the time my father told me I shouldn’t eat raisins because they are actually roly-poly bugs. I’ve since come to learn that Dad was fibbing, but I still don’t care for raisins. I carefully pick them out of trail mix in favor of M&Ms and peanuts. Part of it is the taste and some of it is the little seeds, but at least a bit of it is a concern that one of them will start moving around in my mouth as I chew. I know I’m not appreciating raisins as I should, but I just can’t shake what my dad said. And I think baseball types, so long enamored with batting average, might be similarly stuck when it comes to on-base streaks, even though our tastes have matured past thinking we’re eating bugs.

Shin-Soo Choo has a 51-game on-base streak, and we aren’t really talking about it much. We are talking about it some, of course. Back on July 6, when Choo’s streak was 44 games long, Jay Jaffe checked in on the venerable company Choo could soon be keeping if he kept streaking. The Rangers have mentioned it on their broadcasts. But a search of MLB’s twitter account for “Choo on base” since May 13, when the streak began, doesn’t return any results. I don’t recall any At-Bat notifications about it. It seems to have gone largely unremarked upon, which suggests it isn’t thought to be that remarkable, and I’ve been trying to figure out why.

I should say, hitting streaks have a greater degree of difficulty. After all, there is only one thing you can do to extend a hitting streak — which, most obviously, is to get a hit. No player has really come close to challenging Joe DiMaggio’s famous 1941 56-game hitting streak; the next closest batter, Pete Rose, tapped out at 44 hits during in 1978.

But it’s more than just the degree of difficulty. I think it’s that we see too much charity in the walks and hit by pitches that find their way into on-base streaks. We tend to think of hits in terms of action and, importantly, in terms of having earned something. They’re about the hitter doing. Walks, or a pitch that plunks a guy in the ribs, on the other hand, seem to carry with them the generosity of strangers. Sometimes it’s the pitcher’s, for being unable or unwilling (undoubtedly the worst sort of charity in this calculus is the intentional kind) to locate. Sometimes it’s a fielder, who doesn’t get an error but really ought to have gotten that ball. Or else it’s the umpire’s, for balls that really ought to be strikes. Even though we know that patience is a skill — a skill we prize! — we can’t shake the sense that the batter has been given a little gift. Has done a little less doing. And while that’s partly fair, I would assert that how we seem to think of Choo’s streak suggests that we see too much of the charity in walks and hit by pitches (a rather mean sort of present!) and too little of the charity in hitting.

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