Ben and Slate’s Mike Pesca banter about incentive clauses, happiness, analogies, injuries, and the Mets, then discuss sabermetric thinking about non-baseball subjects, optimism, podcasting, and preparation.
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Tuffy Gosewisch isn’t known for his stick. The 33-year-old catcher had a .522 OPS in parts of four seasons with the Arizona Diamondbacks. But he does provide value behind the dish. His defensive acumen — including his ability to work with pitchers — is a primary reason the Atlanta Braves claimed him off waivers earlier this winter.
He worked diligently to turn himself into a big-league asset. Selected by the Phillies in the 11th round of the 2005 draft out of Arizona State University, Gosewisch made his MLB debut with the D-backs eight years later. He’s now in Atlanta, where he projects to serve as the Braves’ backup backstop behind Tyler Flowers.
Gosewisch discussed various aspects of his position when Arizona visited Boston last August.
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Gosewisch on learning to call games: “The first time I caught was freshman year of high school. I caught off and on throughout my high-school career — I also played third and pitched — and in college I caught exclusively. I was [at ASU] for four years.
“In high school, they would occasionally let me call games — which is rare — but for the most part, our coach called them. In college, I called all of my games in my junior and senior years. My manager, Pat Murphy, trusted that I could handle the responsibility. That gave me a lot of confidence and, learning-wise, it was huge.
“I don’t think enough guys get to call their own games in college. I think it would be beneficial to the player, for sure. It would help him learn the game a lot better. But I know that the coaches’ jobs rely on winning, and they don’t want to take a chance on losing a game because of pitch-calling.
The Mariners, after trading Taijuan Walker away in the Jean Segura deal, have been looking for a back-end starting pitcher. How desperate were they? Well, desperate enough to take a pitcher that the Baltimore Orioles — who have one of the worst rotations in baseball — didn’t want to keep around.
The deal, as announced by both teams, is a straight-up swap of Seth Smith for Yovani Gallardo, with the Orioles including some cash in the deal, though Dan Connolly reports the Orioles save about $4 million in the deal, so the cash doesn’t offset the price differences. In Smith, the Orioles are getting a guy who can play right field against right-handed pitching; he doesn’t field well or hit lefties enough to justify an everyday job, but as the strong side of a platoon, he’s a decent role player. Given that the Orioles current right fielder was Joey Rickard, Smith is an upgrade over a replacement level hole, and picking him up at a reasonable price makes plenty of sense for Baltimore.
For the Mariners, this is a bit weirder. Yeah, they needed another arm for the rotation, since the back-end was pretty thin, but it’s not entirely clear that Gallardo is actually much better than what they already had. After a nice run with Milwaukee at the beginning of his career, Gallardo transitioned more into an innings-eater in 2013, and things have been steadily downhill since then.
As the strikeouts disappeared, Gallardo survived by avoiding walks, but even that went away last year, when he posted the second highest walk rate of his career. His stuff has diminished to the point that he’s now a nibbler, but he doesn’t get swings and misses out of the zone anymore.
His in-zone contact rates are fairly steady (though worse than in his prime), but the lack of whiffs out of the zone means that Gallardo doesn’t really have any way to put batters away anymore, and so now he’s just a pitch-to-contact guy who doesn’t throw enough strikes.
If you want to be optimistic, you can look at his prior track record of success and his age, and hope that maybe Gallardo can get some of his prior stuff back, but the trends here are all negative. As a guy who throws 90 and doesn’t have an out pitch or plus command, he’s really nothing more than a #5 starter at this point, and even that might be generous. And toss in the elbow problems that turned his initial three year deal with Baltimore into a two year deal following his physical, then landed him on the disabled list last year, he’s not even necessarily an innings sponge you can count on to stay healthy.
Perhaps when your internal options are Ariel Miranda or Nathan Karns, even Gallardo looks useful, but for a team looking to win in the short-term, they should probably do better than hand the ball to Gallardo every five days. Smith isn’t a huge loss, especially with the team having younger outfielders worth taking a look at, but this feels like moving a useful-but-flawed outfield for a less-useful-and-flawed pitcher. Sure, the Mariners needed a pitcher more, but unless they know how to get Gallardo’s velocity back, I’m not sure this is the arm they needed.
The Giants aren’t a bad team. They just made the playoffs, and they signed a closer in Mark Melancon who (hopefully) won’t make the citizens of San Francisco tear their hair out. Hunter Pence should be healthy! That makes things fun. Fun baseball is good baseball, and the Giants are locked in to a pretty fun team at this point. Every position is accounted for, for the most part. Only left field offers a little room for finding something to write about pondering, so let’s ponder, shall we?
Currently, it looks like the Giants are going to deploy a platoon of Jarrett Parker and Mac Williamson there. Surprisingly enough, no, Parker and Williamson are not tertiary characters from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but actual baseball players. They’ve both seen some playing time since 2015 in fits and starts as depth players.
The Parker/Williamson combo package could, in theory, be fine. The Giants likely aren’t expecting more than league-average production here, after all, and they don’t necessarily need more than that. Parker also has some serious pop in his bat, and frankly, there’s always room for some highlight-reel bombs.
That’ll do! That kind of power works in San Francisco, and if he can meet his ZiPS WAR projection of 1.4 as the big side of the platoon, maybe they don’t need to go get Saunders after all. Parker is also out of options, and may have a hard time making it through waivers to Triple-A.
Ten plays. Ten plays can change a player’s career.
We talk all the time about how defensive numbers come in small samples. For an outfielder, the sample of plays that actually separate a good from a bad defender is even smaller.
In most cases, a batted ball to the outfield is either a can of corn or a clear hit. In between, there just aren’t many opportunities. For Rajai Davis as a center fielder, there are 19 plays that could have gone either way over the last two years. He missed 10 of them — which is bad — and then many of us stopped considering him as a center fielder. Ten plays!
After having typically appeared in the very famous pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past few years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Minnesota Twins. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.
Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cleveland / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / New York AL / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Toronto / Washington.
Batters
If you were to travel back to the winter of 2013-14 and inform the earlier version of yourself that, in just three years time, Joe Mauer (532 PA, 0.9 zWAR) would receive the worst projected WAR among all Twins starters, the young iteration of you would slap the older one right in the mouth. After that, he’d have some pretty understandable questions about how your journey to the recent past has been made possible and why you’ve chosen to make it. In that intial moment, however, the absurdity of your comments regarding Joe Mauer would overcome him.
On the one hand, this is a negative development for Minnesota. For the past couple years, they’ve typically run payrolls of about $100 million. Allocating nearly a quarter of that to a single win isn’t helpful.
On the other hand, this represents a very positive development for Minnesota — because Mauer’s projection isn’t that bad. Rather, a number of the other projections are just better. For the past couple years, the Twins have lacked an adequate supply of competent hitters and fielders. Regard: last season, their position players ranked 25th by WAR. The season before that? 27th. What the ZiPS numbers here depict is something much more like an average group — with serviceable depth, too.
On December 8, the Cleveland Indians’ Web site published a brief, 135-word story announcing James Harris as the club’s new farm director.
While filling such vacancies is typically not headline news, it was a modest announcement for one of the more inspired front-office additions of the offseason.
Why is it interesting?
Harris never played baseball professionally, in college, or high school.
In fact, Harris has never coached the sport at any level.
Today we’re introducing a new form of FanGraphs Membership: Ad Free Membership. With Ad Free Membership, you become a full-fledged member of the site and you will not see a single third-party advertisement on the FanGraphs website so long as you maintain your membership. The price of Ad Free Membership is $50 per year.
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Left-hander Marlon Arias hasn’t participated in affiliated ball since 2009, when he was a member of the Dodgers system. As for what he’s done in the meantime, it’s probably fair to say that his whereabouts haven’t been documented meticulously. His player page at FanGraphs suggests he’s passed at least a few of the subsequent years (2012 and 2014-15) in the Mexican League. Neither Baseball Reference nor Baseball Cube reveal much else of substance on the matter. Generally speaking, where the subject of Marlon Arias is concerned, mum has been the word.
After a short break for the holidays, it’s time to jump back into the saddle and continue our position-by-position look at 2016 hitter performance using ball-in-play data. We’ve gone around the horn in the infield — finishing there with National League third basemen — and now move to the outfield, starting with AL left fielders. Be forewarned: this was not a very productive group. Things will pick up a little bit next week when we deal with their senior-circuit counterparts. As a reminder, we’re utilizing granular exit-speed and launch-angle data to measure how position players “should have” performed in comparison to their actual stat lines.
