The Padres are interesting because they have one of the game’s best farm systems. Talents like Fernando Tatis Jr. could be difference-makers and change fortunes.

The Padres are interesting because they gave Eric Hosmer an eight-year deal when similarly productive corner bats went for far cheaper this winter.

The Padres are interesting because they raided this very site of its previous managing editor and Face of the Franchise, Dave Cameron. The Padres were all about acquiring Faces of Franchises this offseason.

But the Padres are also of interest because they have one of the game’s more intriguing bullpens. As you might be aware, bullpens continue to gain a greater share of regular-season innings. Last season, relievers accounted for 38.1% of innings thrown in the regular season, a major league record. In the postseason that jumped to 46.4%. So if the Padres are really going to turn things around, they’ll probably need a quality reliever corps and they just might have one. Read the rest of this entry »

Between Shohei Ohtani’s strong six-inning start against the A’s on Sunday and home runs in back-to-back games against the Indians on Tuesday and Wednesday, it’s fair to say that the 23-year-old phenom’s major league career is off to an impressive and unprecedented start. Obviously, it will take much longer before Ohtani’s attempt to star as both a hitter and pitcher can be judged a true success, but as Travis Sawchik pointed out, he has, at the very least, already shown off the tools that created all the hype in the first place– namely the triple-digit heat/nasty splitter/slider combo as a pitcher, as well as the raw power as a hitter.

Ohtani is doing things that haven’t been done at the major league level in nearly a century. Not since June 13-14, 1921 has a player followed up a win as a starting pitcher with a home run as a position player in his next game, and not since 1919 has a player served as both a starting pitcher and position player with any kind of regularity. Both of those feats were accomplished by Babe Ruth, of course. The Bambino spent his final two seasons with the Red Sox, 1918 and 1919, pulling double duty, then made cameos on the mound as a Yankee in 1920, 1921, 1930 and 1933. His last two Yankees pitching appearances came on the final day of the regular season, allowing him no chance to homer the following day. The other three times — including an October 1, 1921 relief appearance — that he pitched, he homered in his next game. Of course he did.

While other players have split time between the mound and position playing in a given season, the majority of them predate Ruth. Combing through the Baseball-Reference Play Index, since the inception of the American League in 1901, 20 players pitched at least 15 times in a season and played a position (besides pinch-hitter) at least 15 times as well; four of them did so twice. Fifteen of those 24 player-seasons predated Ruth, with all but one of those falling between 1901-1909. Only two have occurred since the start of World War II:

That’s quite a motley assortment, one that will test your knowledge of deadball era team nicknames (the Orphans became the Cubs, the Blues and Naps became the Indians, the Superbas became the Dodgers). As you can see, most of the early two-way players were pretty lousy hitters and nothing special as pitchers, at least within the seasons in question. I’ve highlighted the ones who were better than average at both tasks. A few of these players stand out and deserve worth closer looks.

Zaza Harvey

On name alone, I had to include this guy, though I know almost nothing about him other than his real name (Ervin King Harvey) and the fact that he switched roles due to a trade. After debuting with the Orphans in 1900, he jumped to the White Sox in 1901 and pitched all of his games for them before being purchased by the Blues in mid-August, after which he was exclusively an outfielder; apparently, he requested not to pitch. He hit a sizzling .333/.375/.443 and stole 16 bases in 227 PA as a 22-year-old that year. Illness limited him to 12 games the next year, and he disappeared from baseball entirely.

Doc White

Known by a nickname due to his degree in dentistry from Georgetown University, White was a very good pitcher during a 13-year career that ran from 1901-1913, going 189–156 with a 2.39 ERA (89 ERA-) and 48.9 RA9-WAR. Though he played 85 games in the outfield, he simply wasn’t much of a hitter; baseball history makes no mention of his prowess at filling cavities. As a hurler, he led the NL in strikeout rate in 1902 (5.4 per nine) while serving as the staff ace and occasional left fielder for the seventh-place Phillies, hitting just .202/.331/.232 in 120 PA. He found more success after jumping to the White Sox in 1903, and posted ERAs below 2.00 from 1904-1906. In the first of those years, he reeled off 45 straight scoreless innings via a major league record five consecutive shutouts; he would live to see Don Drysdale break that record 64 years later.

He led the AL with a 1.52 ERA in 1906 and starred in the World Series as the “Hitless Wonder” White Sox upset the Cubs, pitching a complete game in the clincher after earning a three-inning save the day before. The next year, he led the AL with 27 wins in 1907. He spent about six weeks as the White Sox’s regular center fielder in May and June of 1909, posting a .398 OBP for that stretch and hitting .234/.347/.292 in 238 PA on the season before his focus returned to the mound.

Nixey Callahan

Callahan spent 13 years in the majors between 1894 and 1913, winning 20 games twice for the Orphans (1898 and 1899) and totaling 99 wins and 16.8 WAR (18.3 RA9-WAR) as a pitcher. He dabbled at other positions as early as 1897, when he pitched 23 games and made 18 or more appearances at second base, shortstop and in the outfield, and he played a total of 23 games in the pasture in 1902. That year, he threw the first no-hitter in AL history on September 20 against the Tigers, but by then, he was more or less done with pitching; he made just five more starts, three of them in 1903, the year he took over as the White Sox manager.

He led the Sox to a 60-77 record while serving as their regular third baseman, and was replaced as manager by Fielder Jones — who would lead the White Sox to the aforementioned upset of the Cubs — early in 1904. He spent that season and the next as the team’s regular left fielder; over the 1903-05 span, he produced a combined 7.0 WAR while hitting for a 115 wRC+. He missed out on the White Sox’s biggest triumph, spending 1906-10 leading the semipro Logan Squares, much to the consternation of AL president Ban Johnson, then rejoined the Sox as a player in 1911, and as their manager from 1912-14.

Jack Coombs

Coombs pitched a shutout in his July 5, 1906 major league debut for the A’s, and later that year pitched a 24-inning (!) complete game victory against the Red Sox, striking out 18. Perhaps unsurprisingly, he developed arm troubles that limited his effectiveness in 1907, and when A’s right fielder Socks Seybold broke his leg in spring training the following year, manager Connie Mack installed Coombs as his regular. He started hot, but by June he had played his way back to the mound. While he hit just .255/.287/.355 in 235 PA for the full season, he posted a 2.00 ERA over 153 innings the rest of the way. He continued to improve as a pitcher, and in 1910, led the AL with 31 wins (against nine losses) with a 1.30 ERA in 350 innings, setting a record with 53 consecutive scoreless innings along the way and adding three more wins in the A’s World Series victory over the Cubs. Though his ERA shot to 3.53 the next year, he had a league-high 28 wins and helped Philadelphia to another championship.

Later, he helped the 1916 Brooklyn Robins win the NL pennant, and got the team’s lone win in their World Series loss to Ruth and the Red Sox. As his pitching declined, he made a 13-game foray to the outfield for the 1918 Robins, but his .168/.223/.230 line in 122 PA confirms that was the wrong way to go about it.

George Sisler

As a rookie in 1915, Sisler dabbled on the mound, with seven relief appearances and eight starts, six of which were complete games. In one of them, he outdueled Walter Johnson. He hit a thin .285/.307/.369 in 294 PA as a rookie, but soon developed into a contact-hitting machine whose career bridged the dead-and live-ball eras, winning a pair of batting titles with averages above .400 in 1920 (when he set a longstanding record with 257 hits) and 1922 and placing among the league’s top five seven times in that category, mostly before scoring levels got silly. He occasionally took the mound after his rookie season, throwing a total of 41 innings from 1916-1928, but as his career .340/.379/.468 batting line, 2,812 hits and 1939 election to the Hall of Fame attest, he made the right call.

Johnny Cooney

In a 20-year major league career that spanned from 1921-44, with a five-year foray to the minors (1930-34) in between, Cooney did it all: played, coached and managed in both leagues (albeit on an interim basis, with his AL stint confined to one game while Al Lopez attended a funeral). He even umpired a game. He broke in primarily as a pitcher with the Braves, but hot hitting (.379/.414/.394 in 73 PA in 1923) and good defense led to additional work in center field, though he hit a meager .254/.302/.285 in 1924 while throwing 181 innings.

Focused almost entirely on pitching the next year, he set a career high with 245.2 innings while going 14-14 with a 3.48 ERA. And he again hit well enough (.320/.346/.388 in 112 PA) to resume double duty, which came in handy when he was beset with arm trouble that limited his mound work. He hit .302/.367/.357 in 147 PA, primarily as a first baseman, while throwing just 83.1 innings in 1926. He didn’t pitch at all in 1927, and did so only sporadicly from 1928-30, but after his lengthy minor league detour, he returned as a center fielder, first with the Dodgers (1935-37) and then back to the Braves (1938-42), averaging 120 games a year in that capacity from 1936-41. He finished his career with an 86 wRC+ in 3,675 PA and a 95 ERA- in 795.1 innings, totaling 10.9 WAR.

Willie Smith

Of all the players to pull significant double duty, Wonderful Willie Smith is the only one to do so since World War II, and is the only black player to do so. He played his first professional baseball in the post-integration Negro Leagues, with the Birmingham Black Barons, and was good enough to play in the Negro American League’s 1958 and 1959 East-West All-Star Games. As a 22-year-old southpaw, he pitched three scoreless innings of relief and singled in the winning run in the former, and started and hit an inside-the-park homer in the latter.

Signed by the Tigers, he spent 1960-62 in the minors, and got a cup of coffee in 1963, playing a total of 17 games, with 11 on the mound and the balance in pinch-hitting and -running roles. Traded to the Angels in 1964, he pinch-hit and threw 31.2 innings on the mound in 15 appearances, all in May and June, and nearly all in mop-up duty, with a 2.84 ERA. On June 8, manager Bill Rigney sent him to right field in the late innings. “I didn’t dare say I wouldn’t play out there,” Smith later said. Rigney then brought him in to pitch, but he faced three batters and gave up two homers.

After taking one of his four losses in relief on June 13, he started the nightcap of a doubleheader the next day in left field and homered. He made just one more mound appearance that year but became a semi-regular at the outfield corners, hitting .301/.317/.465 with 11 homers and seven steals in 373 PA. He would spend seven more years in the majors, never replicating that success (.248/.295/.395 lifetime) and making just three relief appearances in 1968 as his further mound work. The highlight of his post-double duty career was a game-winning pinch-hit homer for the Cubs on Opening Day in 1969.

…

As interesting as those players are, their relatively minimal success in one role or the other can’t hold a candle to the expectations for Ohtani. And while the accomplishments of the nascent Ruth in 1918-19 may stand as the closest analogue to what the Angels are attempting, it’s important to understand the on-the-fly nature of Ruth’s journey from star southpaw to Sultan of Swat. After breaking in as a 19-year-old in 1914, Ruth went 65-33 with a 2.02 ERA in 867.2 innings over the next three seasons, topping 20 wins twice, leading the AL with a 1.75 ERA and nine shutouts in 1916 (when he helped the Red Sox beat the Robins in the World Series) and with 35 complete games the following year. Through the end of the 1917 season, he hit .299/.355/.474 (148 wRC+) with nine homers in 405 PA, but his non-pitching work was limited to pinch-hitting.

Ruth was the Red Sox’s Opening Day starter on April 15, 1918, and started four times that month, with two pinch-hitting appearances thrown in as well. After another start on May 4, during which he hit his first home run of the season, he started Boston’s next game, on May 6, as a first baseman, batting sixth. He homered. He tied the major league record by homering again in his third straight game, and thereafter his pitching was sporadic. He made just two more starts on the mound that month, one in June (when he hit eight of his MLB-leading 11 homers), and three in July, then eight in August, the season’s final month; due to World War I, the regular season ended on September 2, and the World Series, in which Ruth beat the Cubs twice, ended on September 11.

In 1919, Ruth started nine times in May and June, but just six times the rest of the way; after he tied the major league record with nine homers in July (against just three starts on the mound), he took the hill just once in August and twice in September. He finished the year hitting .322/456/.657 with 29 homers, a record he would demolish in 1920, with 54 homers, and then 59 the following year. You don’t need me to tell you that part of the story.

Here’s a breakdown of Ruth’s 1918-19:

Even working within the Angels’ planned six-man rotation, Ohtani figures to surpass Ruth in games started; our Depth Charts forecast has him down for 24 (one to date plus 23 for the rest of his season). If he’s DHing three times a week, that’s another 78 starts, and while that may be less taxing than playing the field for nine innings, it’s also true that the caliber of competition he’s facing is much higher.

We’ve grappled with other ways of looking at players who have spent time as both pitchers and hitters, but we’re really in uncharted territory with Ohtani. And while the hype may be a bit much to endure, based on what we’ve seen so far, this promises to be a fun and fascinating ride. Buckle up.

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Dylan Bundy opened this season with a very good start, throwing seven shutout innings with seven strikeouts and just one walk against the Minnesota Twins. Due to an off-day, Bundy could have pitched on normal rest April 3, but the team opted to pitch Mike Wright, giving Bundy an extra day of rest before his start against the Astros. That’s not unusual–many teams opt to go with five starters early in the season even with extra rest. However, manager Buck Showalter seemed to indicate that this decision was directly due to Bundy’s own unique history.

Dylan is very important to us and just because somebody is feeling good and is throwing good, that doesn’t mean you push them more. We do everything possible to keep everybody on our staff healthy.

Showalter went on:

But with Dylan, we’re going to take every opportunity for that. We want him around for the long haul. Just because he got through last year healthy, doesn’t mean that we throw caution to the wind. We’re not going to do that.

Bundy debuted in 2012, but only pitched in two games. He missed 2013 with Tommy John surgery, and subsequent arm issues prevented him from returning to the majors until 2016, when he split time between the bullpen and rotation. He finally pitched a full season in 2017, making 28 starts and putting up a solid 4.38 FIP, 4.24 ERA and 2.7 WAR in a promising campaign. He was eventually shut down after three September starts–two of them poor–but the season has to be considered a positive one given his injury history.

Bundy has erased some doubts about his shaky end to 2017 with two strong starts this year. In his second, facing the vaunted Astros, Bundy pitched six innings, striking out eight batters while walking just two, and gave up two runs, only one of which was earned. After Wednesday’s game, Bundy had a 1.35 FIP, 0.69 ERA and was MLB’s WAR leader among pitchers. He’s mixing in a sinker more, but for the most part, he’s the same pitcher he was in 2017 when he was good and getting a lot of hitters to chase his excellent slider. Read the rest of this entry »

Among the reasons for optimism in Toronto is that Aaron Sanchez is back. Sure, you never really know when any pitcher will stay good and healthy, but Sanchez was able to start just eight games in 2017, due to significant blister problems. So far this year, the problem hasn’t recurred. As far as the Blue Jays go, the problem isn’t upper-tier talent. The problem is keeping all that talent on the field. If Sanchez can throw another 30-odd times, that’ll answer at least one major question.

Now that Sanchez is two starts into 2018, we can say that there’s been good and bad. He’s still throwing hard, and he’s getting ground balls. That’s good. Less good are the early problems with control, although maybe Sanchez deserves a break for struggling against the Yankees. Plenty of pitchers are going to struggle against the Yankees. Sanchez just looked fine against the White Sox, and, even more important than that, we’re seeing an adjusted Aaron Sanchez. Sanchez has unveiled a new weapon of his, something he’s never been able to consistently possess. From the looks of things, 2018 Aaron Sanchez has a far better changeup. It’s also one of the hardest changeups in the game.

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It’s been a little while since I emptied my scouting notebook of the draft prospects I’ve scouted, so I’ve split it into college and high-school portions. Below are all of the notable college draft prospects I’ve scouted in the last month, with thoughts on what I saw from them and how the industry views them. First, I’ll break down the prospects projected for the top two rounds, with embedded video. For reference, here are Eric and my preseason draft rankings, which will be updated soon. Below the likely first- and second-rounders are potential third- through sixth-rounds picks. Below that group is a collection of possible first- and second-rounders for the 2019 and 2020 drafts, the most recent rankings for which are available here.

Rounds One and Two

Alec Bohm, 3B, Wichita State

Bohm was seen by most scouts before the season as a first-rounder but also the second-best prospect on his own team behind Greyson Jenista (below). This spring, Bohm has clearly overtaken his teammate and had some scouts whispering that he did some things like Kris Bryant the night I saw him against ECU. To be clear, Bohm isn’t seen as that level of a prospect just yet, but he isn’t as far away as you may think. He has 70 raw power and, even at 6-foot-4, 205 pounds, does a great job at the plate keeping his hands tucked in and limiting his hand load to keep his stroke short. Even with with that, he still can do things like hit an opposite-field home run with a flick of the wrist, as you can see in the above video.

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With over 3,000 hits and his status as one of the greatest defensive third basemen in history, Adrian Beltre is already a lock for Cooperstown. On Thursday, he claimed a particularly cool slice of history. With his double off A’s starter Daniel Mengden, he collected hit number 3,054, surpassing Hall of Famer Rod Carew, whom he had tied on Tuesday night, for the most hits of any player born in Latin America.

Here’s the record-setting hit, whose significance was acknowledged by the Rangers’ broadcasters a few moments after the clip:

With this hit Adrian Beltre passes Rod Carew as the @MLB career hit leader for Latin-born players. Congratulations! pic.twitter.com/XlISb2HhG1

— Bally Sports Southwest (@BallySportsSW) April 5, 2018

At some point later this season, Beltre will likely overtake Ichiro Suzuki, now a 44-year-old reserve, as the all-time leader in hits for a player born outside of the United States:

Note that I’ve included Puerto Rico-born players here. Puerto Rico is an unincorporated US territory, and its citizens are US citizens, but the Caribbean island is also considered part of Latin America, and its ballplayers have long been recognized and celebrated within that context, particularly during and after the career of the iconic Clemente.

Looking at the above list, it’s remarkable that for all of the talented Latin American players that have starred in the game over the past several decades, only four have reached 3,000 hits (out of 24 such players since World War II), with Pujols poised to become the fifth; none has advanced much further than that. Clemente ranked 11th on the all-time hit list at the time of his December 31, 1972 death, but the total number of players above him has more than doubled in the 45 years since. He was 16th at the end of 1985, Carew’s final year, while Carew himself was 13th. Beltre, who turns 39 on April 7, is still playing at a consistently high enough level to think beyond 2018. Assuming he can total 200 hits over this season and next — a conservative assumption given that he had 106 in just 94 games last year — he’d climb to 14th all time, with 3,248, seven shy of Eddie Murray at number 13, and 35 shy of Willie Mays at number 12. He’d need a total of 3,320 to crack the all-time top 10.

(All of these rankings rely upon the inclusion of Cap Anson’s National Association stats from 1871-75 towards his career total of 3,435, as recognized by Retrosheet and Baseball-Reference. Elias Bureau and Major League Baseball, which do not recognize NA stats, credit him with 3,011 hits.)

Beltre is also bearing down on another very cool distinction within this group. His 84.2 WAR is the second-highest total of any player born outside of the US, trailing only Pujols, who’s at 89.1 but moving backwards (-2.1 since the start of 2017). Beltre will probably need at least another season to close the gap, but if he does, the Hall of Fame will have to break out a very narrow typeface for his plaque in order to fit all of his accomplishments.

I know the Dodgers don’t have Justin Turner right now, and I know Justin Turner is one of the best pure hitters in baseball. As such, the Dodgers are playing at less than 100%, but that still doesn’t make them bad. It certainly shouldn’t make them as bad as Patrick Corbin made them look on Wednesday. Corbin was good for 7.1 scoreless innings, and he racked up a career-high 12 strikeouts. He also allowed only one hit, a blooper to shallow right field. Corbin actually managed to out-hit the Dodgers all by himself on the evening, knocking a single and a double. Corbin performed as well as he ever has, and the Diamondbacks stretched their early lead over the Dodgers to 3.5 games. Everything counts, no matter how early it is in the season.

It should come as no surprise that, on a day Corbin proved nearly unhittable, he made great use of his best pitch. Of Corbin’s 12 strikeouts, he picked up a career-high ten of them with his slider. Corbin has always had a terrific slider — it’s the pitch that’s allowed him to be a big-leaguer. But he might only now be fully embracing it. The Dodgers just saw the new Patrick Corbin, and he’s a pitcher who’s decided to pitch to his strengths.

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Sometime late in the afternoon of March 11, word broke on Twitter that the Phillies were “moving close” to a deal with then-free agent Jake Arrieta. In the hours that followed, several national and local writers confirmed that the two sides had reached a verbal agreement on a complex multi-year contract, though all involved cautioned that no deal was official yet.

And indeed it wasn’t. Before any major- or minor-league transaction can become officially official—before, indeed, a player can appear on a team’s roster or begin receiving paychecks from said team for their services—team, league, and (mostly in the case of free agent signings) agency officials have to work together to confirm each and every minute detail of the transaction in baseball’s system of record: the Electronic Baseball Information System (eBIS).

The gap between when verbal agreement is reached and when a deal is finalized in eBIS is most familiar to us as the interstitial period that comes between word of a big deal breaking in public and the team making that deal official. But the same process applies to thousands of transactions every year, big and small, and when we speak of a deal becoming Official—or, for that matter, a player being placed on waivers or reassigned to the minor leagues or drafted—what we really mean is that that transaction has been recorded and approved in eBIS.

It’s possible that the details of how this system works are only interesting to me, A Known Process Nerd. But on the off chance that might also be interesting to you, I spent some time talking about how the system works with Morgan Sword, the league’s Senior Vice President for League Economics & Operations, and Ned Rice, one of three Assistant General Managers for the Phillies, and the man mostly responsible for that team’s eBIS interactions (you may also recognize him as one of the men who greeted Arrieta’s plane on the tarmac in Florida on the evening of March 13th—the two men have known each other since their time in Baltimore).

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