FanGraphs Baseball

Last fall, the Phillies purchased Pat Neshek from the Astros and exercised his $6.5 million option. He was easily their best reliever, and then he netted the team three prospects at the trade deadline. Now he’s back — for two years and $16.5 million (and a $500k trade kicker this time!) as Ken Rosenthal is reporting — and the Phillies hope he can continue his good work for the team.

Last year’s production was a high water mark for the pitcher, thanks to a change in philosophy against lefties, perhaps. He had his best career numbers against southpaws last year, thanks to a shift in his use of the slider. He not only used it more against lefties than he had since his first full year in the league, but he also varied its location better.

Take a look at his slider locations to lefties in 2016 (left), when they hit for a .379 wOBA against him, and then those locations in 2017 (right), when they hit for a .261 wOBA against him.

Wait a second. The bad year is the one where he located the slider to two spots and mixed it up. Last year he was awesome against lefties, and he basically threw it a ton and down the middle against them. Weird.

No matter. Against righties, Neshek has been consistently great. He has the sixth-best wOBA against right-handed hitters over the last five years.

Maybe he’ll only be dominant against righties, and then be traded again. That’ll be just fine.

Position: Atlanta Braves Major League Advance Scout Trainee

Location: Atlanta
Read the rest of this entry »

With two important players coming to Major League Baseball from Nippon Professional Baseball this season — Miles Mikolas and Shohei Ohtani, of course — we’re hearing a lot about how differently baseball is played in Japan. While it’s true that they take Mondays off and starters generally pitch just once a week, it’s also true that some of the differences between the two leagues are probably overstated.

Part of that might have something to do with the metrics on which we dwell when discussing the two leagues. Home runs certainly receive a lot of attention. Velocity readings, too. But what about other aspects of the game?

Curious, I decided to look through the lens of plate discipline and batted-ball spray to see how similar Japan’s league is to America’s leagues, major and minor.

Read the rest of this entry »

As I sit here in the winter meetings media room, there’s a press conference taking place in front of me, with Giancarlo Stanton being officially introduced as a member of the New York Yankees. If you’re a Yankees fan, you love it, and if you’re a fan of anyone else, you don’t, but one thing every fan understands is that this gives the Yankees something extraordinary. Your mind goes directly to one place: The Yankees lineup is about to feature both Stanton and Aaron Judge, and Stanton and Judge are amazing.

If you’re analytically inclined, you know that Stanton and Judge are Statcast outliers. They’re the two players who most frequently push the upper boundaries of exit velocity. And even if you’ve never heard the word “Statcast” at all, you can understand that Judge just led the American League in home runs, while Stanton led the majors. Stanton was Judge before Judge, Judge v1.0, and he’s as big a power threat as anyone in baseball. Stanton could hit the ball out anywhere even before the ball started flying, and he’s associated with his power in the way Aroldis Chapman is associated with his fastball. The Yankees have landed a premium slugger, to go along with their other premium slugger.

But Stanton’s reputation might be a little misleading. Power is his biggest strength, sure, but there’s more to his game. Stanton’s more of a complete player than you might realize, after making some changes in the regular season.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Baltimore Orioles were unlikely to sign Shohei Ohtani. He seems to have had little interest in teams east of the Mississippi — the Chicago Cubs represented the lone exception in that respect — and there was probably little that Peter Angelos, Dan Duquette, and Co. could have done to change that. Still, they had to try, right? That was the opinion held by 27 of the league’s 30 teams, at least. The Orioles weren’t one of them, though.

What was the Orioles’ logic for not pursuing the two-way star? Perhaps not what you’d think.

Huh. That is certainly interesting. While an organization might have (justifiably) felt as though they had little chance with Ohtani, this doesn’t appear to be Baltimore’s main reason for having abstained from courting him. The team’s objections appear to be founded on a greater underlying issue.
Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

The Red Sox have been talking about adding power all winter. The Yankees just traded for Giancarlo Stanton. Dave Dombrowski is unlikely to just let that move go unchallenged, so the Red Sox are probably more likely than ever to outbid everyone for J.D. Martinez. And the wheels to make that happen might be starting to turn.

The Boston #RedSox have let several teams know that CF Jackie Bradley is available in their pursuit of a power bat. #Cubs

— Bob Nightengale (@BNightengale) December 11, 2017

When the Jose Abreu rumors kicked up a couple of weeks ago, I wrote about how swapping Bradley for a slugger might make the team different but not necessarily better. And while Martinez is better than Abreu, the same principle applies here.

Unless the Red Sox get a great return for Bradley, swapping him out for whatever you can get for him in order to sign Martinez would be more rearranging the deck chairs than a massive upgrade. And it would cost a lot of money, since Bradley will make about $6 million in arbitration, and Martinez will cost north of $25 million per year to sign as a free agent. Martinez is better than Bradley, but he’s not $19 million per year better than Bradley.

Now, maybe there’s a big market for Bradley’s services, and Dombrowski is going to pull off a great trade that brings back a low-cost quality young first baseman or starting pitcher. There are scenarios where trading Bradley could make sense. But it feels more likely that the Red Sox would be selling low for the primary purpose of creating a spot in the outfield so they can justify overpaying Martinez. And if that really is the plan, this probably isn’t something Red Sox fans should be rooting for.

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for half a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Pittsburgh Pirates. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Batters
The Pirates’ position-playing cohort recorded the fourth-worst collective WAR mark in the majors this past season. The most immediate source of their troubles was evident. In last year’s version of these same projections, Jung Ho Kang and Starling Marte were forecast for nearly six wins between them. Due to a variety of indiscretions, they were limited to just 339 plate appearances and 1.2 wins, all of them Marte’s.

While Kang remains absent from the club indefinitely, a full season of Marte (504 PA, 2.6 zWAR) ought to address some of the pains endured by the 2017 edition of the team. With the exception of third base, ZiPS calls for the Pirates to extract two or three wins from every position. That points to the possibility of an average group of hitters. It also indicates there’s little margin for error here.

In light of the that, it’s not surprising to hear — as Buster Olney reported before dawn this morning — that the club might be searching for ways to trade Andrew McCutchen (630, 3.4). Whatever the return, his departure would almost certainly render the team less competitive in 2018.

Read the rest of this entry »

In a few hours, the Yankees will hold a press conference here in Orlando to officially welcome Giancarlo Stanton to their organization. They landed the reigning NL MVP just 24 hours after he vetoed trades to the Giants and Cardinals and said New York was one of just four destinations he would approve a trade to. Left with minimal leverage, Derek Jeter and Michael Hill engineered a trade with Jeter’s old club, sending Stanton to the Bronx for Starlin Castro and a couple of low-level prospects.

The reaction to the decision has been almost universally negative. The Marlins’ new ownership group began their tenure by behaving much like the old one, dumping their best player to cut payroll. Instead of hope and change, it looks like more of the same in south Florida.

But while Jeter has made a number of apparent missteps since taking over as the head of the organization, and made some mistakes with the Stanton negotiations specifically, I think it’s also worth pointing out that, on a pure baseball level, the Marlins seemed to come out okay here.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan discuss the Giancarlo Stanton trade’s impact on the Yankees, whether and why the Marlins are an embarrassment (and where they’ll go from here), the Orioles’ attitude toward international players, and the Hall of Fame admitting Alan Trammell and Jack Morris. Then they bring on listener Lazaro Rodriguez, a certified Marlins fan, to talk about his reaction to the Stanton trade and ask him to explain why he’s still a Marlins loyalist.

Read the rest of this entry »