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.
Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Justin Verlander’s contribution to the juiced-balls debate, home runs, and a frank Justin Upton interview about how teams treat players, then preview the 2018 Cardinals (27:08) with FanGraphs’ Craig Edwards, and the 2018 Braves (57:28) with broadcaster Grant McAuley.

Read the rest of this entry »

Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

Marco Gonzales got to the big leagues in a hurry. Drafted 19th overall by the Cardinals out of Gonzaga University in 2013, he was in St. Louis 12 months later. And he more than held his own. Pitching for a division winner, the crafty southpaw appeared in 10 games and went 4-2 with a 4.15 ERA. Thanks in part to a mesmerizing changeup that many had considered to be one of the best in the minors, his future looked bright.

Then it dimmed. Shoulder issues hampered Gonzales in 2015, and then things got worse. Burdened by a barking elbow, the Fort Collins, Colorado, product succumbed to Tommy John surgery in April 2016. Fate had thrown a monkey wrench into what had started off as a shooting-star career.

Smoothing out the kinks has taken some time. Gonzales returned to the mound last summer, and while his minor-league numbers were solid, he logged a 6.08 ERA in 11 big-league outings covering 40 innings. The bulk of those frames came with a new team. In July, the Cardinals traded the now-26-year-old offspeed specialist to Seattle in exchange for Tyler O’Neill.

Gonzales discussed his signature pitch, and his return to health, last week at the Mariners spring training complex in Peoria.

——

Gonzales on returning to health: “The obvious speed bump in the road was Tommy John, almost two years ago. Coming back from that, I’m finally getting my repertoire to where I want it to be. I feel a lot more confident in my arm now. It feels as if I’ve gotten a breath of fresh air and a second attack to my career.

Read the rest of this entry »

Miguel Andujar clubbed two homers against the Phillies on Thursday, running his Grapefruit League total to four, which isn’t the kind of thing one normally notes when the calendar reads “March 1” or any March date before the 29th, which is Opening Day this year. However, Andujar is a legitimate prospect, a 23-year-old third baseman with an apparent shot to make the make the Yankees’ 25-man roster this spring, and part of a large pool from which the team will fill its two open infield positions (second base being the other).

Andujar’s early power display has people excited. Today (Friday) is his actual birthday, and sooner or later, manager Aaron Boone, general manager Brian Cashman, and the rest of the Yankees brass will have to figure out how all the pieces fit together, so the situation merits a closer look.

Back in December, the Yankees traded starting second baseman Starlin Castro to the Marlins in the Giancarlo Stanton deal and dealt third baseman Chase Headley to the Padres in a salary dump. They also let July acquisition Todd Frazier, who relegated Headley to a part-time corner-infield role, depart via free agency. Though they entertained the possibility of bringing back Frazier, their reluctance to give him a multi-year contract led the New Jersey native to sign a two-year, $17 million deal with the Mets instead.

Those departures leave Andujar, mid-2016 acquisition Gleyber Torres, holdovers Ronald Torreyes and Tyler Wade, the recently acquired Brandon Drury — who has more major-league experience than the other four put together — and non-roster invitees Danny Espinosa and Jace Peterson battling to join first baseman Greg Bird and shortstop Didi Gregorius as the team’s regular infielders. All but the two NRIs have minor-league options remaining. Let’s meet the contestants.

Miguel Andujar, 23, R/R (Profile)

Signed out of the Dominican Republic in 2011, Andujar broke out in 2017, translating his raw power to game power, improving his pitch selection, and hitting a combined .315/.352/.498 with 36 doubles and 16 homers in 125 games split between Double- and Triple-A (58 games at the latter, his first taste of the level). He briefly and memorably saw major-league action, going 3-for-4 with a walk and four RBIs in his major-league debut on June 28, then getting sent back down for two-and-a-half months due to a roster crunch! He’s got a collection of above-average to plus tools, headlined by his arm (70 Present Value and 70 Future Value on the 20-80 scouting scale) and raw power (60/60), with his hit tool, game power, and fielding all grading out at 45/55.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

This is Sung Min Kim’s fourth piece as part of his February residency at FanGraphs. (He gets a couple extra days because of the month’s brevity.) Sung Min is a staff writer for River Avenue Blues, the biggest independent New York Yankees blog on the web, and has freelanced for various publications including Deadspin, Sporting News, VICE Sports, the Washington Post, and more. He can also be found on Twitter. He’ll be contributing regularly here this month. Read the work of all our residents here.

Knuckleballers are rare. Lefty knuckleballers, even more so. Consider: Wikipedia’s list of knuckleball pitchers features 29 names. Only four of them are left-handers.

Knuckleballers are even more rare in the Korea Baseball Organization (KBO). In the 36-year history of the league, there’s only been one ever. This one happens to be a lefty, though.

Some MLB fans will recognize the name: LHP Ryan Feierabend. Selected in the third round by the Mariners out of an Ohio high school back in 2003, Feierabend made it to the majors as a 20-year-old in 2006 but had only 25 major-league appearances with Seattle in three seasons. From 2010 to 2013, he was a journeyman, making the rounds through the Mariners, Phillies, Reds, and Rangers systems, as well as the Atlantic League. In 2014, Feierabend resurfaced back in MLB for six appearances with Texas, but after that season, he signed a deal with Nexen Heroes of the KBO.

Feierabend told me that the Nexen Heroes showed interest in him about a year before the signing. “The time was summer 2013. I was in Triple-A Round Rock and was having a pretty good season,” Feierabend recalled. (He produced a 6-5 record and 3.66 ERA in 120.1 IP.) “As the season went on, more and more teams from Korea became intrigued with me. About four different scouts gave me their business cards, but only one of them — from Nexen Heroes — stayed in touch.” Later, in November 2015, the Heroes finally made an offer and told him that he had 72 hours to make a decision.

“Well, here I am four years later, so I definitely signed,” Feierabend said.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ronald Acuna is a very, very good prospect. As a 19-year-old last season, he played his way to Triple-A and recorded one of the top adjusted batting lines across the entire level. According to ZiPS, he currently projects as the fourth-best position player on the Atlanta Braves. By Steamer, he’s sixth best. Both systems regard him as the organization’s second-best outfielder.

For all this, however, Ronald Acuna will probably not appear on the Braves’ Opening Day roster.

If he doesn’t, it’s possible that Atlanta will provide a legitimate baseball reason. Given the scarcity of 20-year-olds in the majors, choosing not to roster one typically doesn’t require an elaborate explanation. There were no 20-year-old qualifiers last year, for example, or the year before that or the year before that.

But Acuna is also pretty special and, as noted, already one of the best players on his own team. If Atlanta chooses to break camp without him, it’s likely due to another reason — namely, to manipulate his service time.

Because 172 days represents one big-league season of service time, a team can leave a player in the minors until he’s capable of accruing only 170 days, thus buying the club an extra year of control. If they leave Acuna at Triple-A, the Braves will hardly be the first club to do so. The Cubs did it with Kris Bryant, the Yankees appear likely to do it with Gleyber Torres. None of this is new.

What I’d like to consider here, though, is a legal argument that might compel clubs to include these players on their Opening Day rosters.

A couple of years ago, Patrick Kessock wrote an excellent article for the Boston College Law Review in which he argued that service-time manipulation was probably a violation of the CBA. The basis of his argument was that, by keeping a player in the minor leagues for the purpose of gaining an extra year of control, the team was violating what is called the “implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing.” So: what is this covenant? And, more importantly, is Kessock right?

The “implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing” is a legal doctrine governing contracts. In a case called United Steelworkers of America v. Warrior & Gulf Navigation Co., the United States Supreme Court held that a collective bargaining agreement is “more than a contract.” But we also know from a Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals case called United Steelworkers of America, etc. v. New Park Mining Co (yes, the Steelworkers have a lot of lawsuits) that “the covenant of good faith and fair dealings which must inhere in every collective bargaining contract if it is to serve its institutional purposes.”  That’s just a fancy way of saying that the covenant of good faith and fair dealing is a part of CBAs, too.

So having established that this doctrine applies, what does it mean? You’ll remember from a previous post that we talked about Restatements, books which explain the majority rules in certain areas of the law. If we look in Section 205 of the Restatement (Second) of Contracts, we find this: “Every contract imposes upon each party a duty of good faith and fair dealing in its performance and its enforcement.” And each Restatement has what are called “comments,” which are really explanations and examples of what the rule means. The comments to Section 205 are pretty long, so I won’t reproduce them here, but they do provide a pretty useful definition, as follows:

“Good faith performance or enforcement of a contract emphasizes faithfulness to an agreed common purpose and consistency with the justified expectations of the other party; it excludes a variety of types of conduct characterized as involving “bad faith” because they violate community standards of decency, fairness or reasonableness.”

It’s the “justified expectations” language on which Kessock hangs his hat. Teams, after all, are supposed to compete for championships. Kessock argues that, therefore, “[t]he MLBPA can assert that its reasonable expectation is that MLB clubs will assign players to the major league roster once club executives believe that players have reached full minor league development and can help the
team compete for a championship.”  But that might not be not so clear-cut. After all, it’s also a justifiable expectation that teams are also supposed to try to win multiple championships. Therefore, gaining that extra year of control over a good player is reasonably geared more towards that goal.

But I still think Kessock is on to something here, and there might be another way to argue this using the covenant of good faith and fair dealing. Remember that minor-league players aren’t members of the MLBPA until they get called up. And that means that, by keeping a player in the minor leagues, a team is deliberately postponing a player from becoming a member of the union for the club’s own benefit. And that (arguably) could be regarded as bad faith.

It seems to me that a viable argument can be made that it is unfair to postpone a player’s entry into the union solely for a team’s pecuniary gain. Article II of the CBA states that “[t]he Clubs recognize the [MLBPA] as the sole and exclusive collective bargaining agent for all Major League Players, and individuals who may become Major League Players during the term of this Agreement, with regard to all terms and conditions of employment” (emphasis mine). I think the MLBPA could argue, based on Article II, that its justified expectations are that MLB won’t attempt to circumvent players’ pecuniary gain by keeping them out of the union, because future major leaguers were an anticipated part of the CBA.

Now, there is an obvious counterargument: since future major leaguers were an anticipated part of the CBA, they should have reasonably expected MLB teams to do something which the CBA doesn’t expressly prohibit.  And even if a player could make the argument work from a legal perspective, there are a whole host of practical problems to solve. After all, I’ve never seen a prospect without any flaws at all (especially pitchers), so proving a prospect is being kept in the minor leagues solely for service time reasons is a tall order. Even Ronald Acuna struck out in over 30% of his plate appearances in A-ball last year, providing a plausible path for the Braves to argue he needed more seasoning in the minors. Also, we’re talking here about the player filing a grievance, not a lawsuit. Grievances take a long time to resolve: Kris Bryant, who filed one in 2015 for service-time manipulation by the Cubs, was still waiting for a resolution two years later.

But, with all that said, I do think that Kessock is right: there’s at least a plausible argument to be made that service-time manipulation violates the spirit of the CBA, if not its letter. And the spirit of the CBA is what the covenant of good faith and fair dealing is designed to protect.

Time is undefeated. To fight it is to lose, and a waste of it. To kill some is a waste of your own. The knighted bloke best known for proclaiming time was on his side? He’s 74 now. Time — as one lord of it has said — is a wibbly wobbly timey wimey enterprise.

Apparently, Major League Baseball likes a challenge. Among their new pace-of-play solutions is to limit “mound visits” to six per team every nine innings, with one bonus visitation for each extra inning.

Everybody knows that visiting a pitcher to take the ball away from his failed, sweaty hands does not count as a mound visit, but the new limitation still leads to many questions — and varying, vague answers. The punishment for a forbidden seventh “mound visit,” for example. Commissioner Rob Manfred said there would be an automatic pitching change. MLB chief baseball officer Joe Torre then said that would only happen if a pitching coach or manager had the seventh chat. Or the catcher gets ejected. Or everybody gets to stay, because the seventh visit is allowed if the pitcher and catcher clearly get “crossed up.”

What counts as a “mound visit”? This is the official explanation on MLB’s website:

Any manager, coach or player visit to the mound counts as a mound visit under this rule, though visits to the mound to clean cleats in rainy weather, to check on a potential injury or after the announcement of an offensive substitution are excepted. Normal communication between a player and pitcher that doesn’t require either to vacate his position on the field doesn’t count as a visit.

Torre has been touring spring training camps to better explain to each team what the actual rules are. So far, managers have said they have a better understanding following Torre’s visit without elaborating as to how, exactly. The umpires aren’t entirely clear on the rules yet, either. Umpire Jeff Kellogg told the Twins there was a “mound visit” the other day when pitcher Phil Hughes walked over to his catcher Mitch Garver after taking a foul ball to the helmet. “When a guy takes a ball off the mask, [I’m] just checking to see if he’s all right and give him a second,” Hughes told the Star-Tribune. “We’re not talking about strategy or anything. [Kellogg] said as he understands it now, [it counts anyway], but he wouldn’t be surprised if some memos go out to clarify things.”

Read the rest of this entry »

Again, I don’t know how we define a “super-team era,” but it sure feels like we’re in one. At the moment, seven teams are projected to win at least 90 games in the season ahead. Just about every division appears to have a clear favorite, with the exception of the AL East, and that one’s only unclear because two teams are really good. There’s an argument to be made that having so many strong teams has slowed down the market. After all, what hope could the other teams have?

And yet, there’s an opening. It all comes down to setting a goal. If you’re one of the non-super-teams, you can do only so much to climb into the tier. It’s tremendously difficult to turn a decent team into a great one over the course of one offseason. But what if the goal is to simply make the playoffs? Five teams from each league make it every year. Each league doesn’t have five obvious favorites. From one point of view, the playoffs are nearly random, and once a team makes it in, anything can happen. And, you know, when the best teams are winning so many games, the barrier for playoff entry can actually be lowered.

Read the rest of this entry »