Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on 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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Ben and Sam banter about Kyle Gaedele, then share their thoughts on Mike Trout’s second MVP Award and what it does and doesn’t say about both Trout and the BBWAA.
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The Milwaukee Brewers claimed outfielder Adam Brett Walker off waivers today from Minnesota. Walker, who just turned 25, was originally selected in the third round of the 2012 draft out of Jacksonville University.
Here’s a distillation of roughly all his virtues as a ballplayer:
As a professional, Walker has recorded 124 home runs in 2,449 plate appearances — including 27 homers this past season in 531 plate appearances for Triple-A Rochester. He has considerable power. Indeed, by at least one measurement, he has nearly the most power. Because, consider: his home-run figures are also accompanied by a number of walks and an even greater number of strikeouts. All told, roughly 45% of all Walker’s plate appearances this year produced one of those two outcomes. That’s an unusually high figure. Which means that Walker was left with relatively few opportunities with which to actually hit those home runs.
Another domino is about to fall in the free-agent pitching market. The market would make tapioca look exciting, yes, but someone has to throw innings for baseball teams, and the Rangers have decided to have Andrew Cashner throw some of those innings for them.
Cashner has spent most of his time with the Padres and was traded to the Marlins around the trade deadline. Good 2013 and 2014 campaigns were followed up by a 2015 that saw a downward trend and then a 2016 that was a minor disaster. His strikeouts per nine fell while his walk rate in the other direction. His 12 appearances with the Marlins went even worse.
But, because of the state of the open market, Cashner was one of the more interesting options. His big fastball has always made him appealing — and, indeed, he’s experienced success for some time. But injuries have derailed him of late and a fastball that once averaged 96 mph is down to 94, per Brooks Baseball.
It would be fair to label me a skeptic of Dexter Fowler’s defense skills. Despite recording basically average fielding numbers over his two years with the Cubs, Fowler had graded out as a distinctly below-average center fielder in every season of his career before joining Chicago ahead of the 2015 season. In each of the past two years his name has appeared in my early-season defensive-outlier posts, and before last season, I wrote an entire piece wondering if Fowler had actually improved as a defender or if he had merely benefited from better positioning.
Of course, even if the pre-Chicago version of Fowler is the real one, he actually still profiles as a decent player. He has a fantastic walk rate, has exhibited average power as a major leaguer, makes good contact — and, since leaving hitter-friendly Coors Field, has managed to produce a 121 wRC+, well above league average. Dexter Fowler the Hitter and Dexter Fowler the Fielder present two different points from which to begin an analysis of his future value. Let’s take a look at both.
The Houston Astros have been the most aggressive team of the winter, acquiring Brian McCann, Josh Reddick, and Charlie Morton in the last few days, as they attempt to make their move from contender to division-favorite. The second most aggressive team so far? Probably the Atlanta Braves.
They started off the hot stove season last week by signing Bartolo Colon and R.A. Dickey to help fill out the back of their rotation. And now, according to reports, they’re aiming for an ace.
Braves are aggressively swapping offers for starting pitchers. Rival officials think Braves and Astros will add the most help this winter.
— Buster Olney (@Buster_ESPN) November 16, 2016
More specifically, there’s this from David O’Brien of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
They’ve had talks with teams about trading for still another starter, most notably Chris Sale, 27, a native of Lakeland, Fla. The five-time All-Star left-hander is under contractual control for three more seasons at below-market rates — $38 million total in that three-year span including two option years — and has finished in the top five of the American League Cy Young Award balloting for four consecutive seasons after finishing sixth in his first season as a starter in 2012.
The Braves have also inquired about the Rays’ Chris Archer and Athletics’ Sonny Gray, but Sale is their focus, a person familiar with the situation said.
The price for Sale could be enormous, likely a package including multiple top prospects. The Braves have said they’re not at a point in their rebuild where they’re ready to trade top prospects to fill in gaps, but to get an ace they seem at least willing to consider changing that plan.
On the one hand, this shouldn’t be that surprising: GM John Coppolella is a strong believer in the value of starting pitching, and especially so, in the value of frontline aces. This the kind of pitcher the Braves are always going to be looking for under his watch, and given that they’ve been outspoken that they want to win sooner than later, it shouldn’t be that surprising to see them pursuing players who could significantly improve their roster. Especially with their new stadium opening up next spring, the Braves don’t want to put a bad product on the field, potentially wasting the revenue boost that comes from opening a new ballpark.
But on the other hand, before the team aggressively turns future assets into present value, the Braves should make sure they’re not following in the footsteps of the Arizona Diamondbacks, whose desire to push their window to win forward by a year or two ended up doing a tremendous amount of destruction to the organization.
Earlier recaps: Episode 1 / Episode 2 / Episode 3 / Episode 4 / Episode 5 / Episode 6 / Episode 7.
Welcome to our recap of the eighth episode of Pitch, entitled “Unstoppable Forces & Immovable Objects”. As always, there are spoilers, so proceed with caution.
Prior to today’s Padres game, Mike Lawson (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) has a breakfast meeting with his agent. Mike has cleared waivers, and several teams are now interested in trading for him. The agent wants to know how open Mike is to waiving his no-trade clause. As of now, Mike isn’t especially amenable to this idea. “We’ll get rained out before I ever leave San Diego,” he declares.
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: Welcome to Friday baseball chat
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: If you’re late again, I swear to all holy heck…
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: I’m late literally every week
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: Hello, friend! Apologies for my absence last week.
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Credible baseball analysis, such as the sort which populates this website, is recognizable insofar as it begins with evidence and then works from that evidence towards a conclusion. The present document differs in this way from credible baseball analysis. For the purposes of this post, what the author has done is actually not to begin with evidence, but rather to start with the conclusion itself — and then worked to find evidence that might support that conclusion.
Here’s the conclusion, now and forever: Oakland minor-leaguer Max Schrock is a more promising baseball prospect than so-called “experts” would have everyone believe. Why it’s essential to reach this conclusion, that’s not entirely clear. The return on investment of this eventuality isn’t immediately evident. However, ever since the present author wagered his professional reputation on the suggestion that Schrock would someday become an MVP, any data which supports that unlikely hypothesis has held some interest for him. And so what one finds here is a post that supports that unlikely hypothesis.
This particular dispatch from the Max Schrock Propaganda Machine regards Schrock’s performance at the Arizona Fall League. As of today, the AFL has only a single game remaining on its schedule — namely, the championship contest between Surprise and Schrock’s Mesa squad on Saturday. In other words, the bulk of the data for this year’s edition of the Fall League has been recorded. And what that data suggests, if one can believe it, is that Max Schrock is a more promising baseball prospect than so-called “experts” would have everyone believe.
Let’s begin with a recent observation:
I can't see so good without my glasses, can someone tell me which batter has lowest strikeout rate in Fall League? pic.twitter.com/ooUo9FFkor
— Carson Cistulli (@cistulli) November 16, 2016
What one finds here is a leaderboard of the AFL’s top qualified batters by strikeout rate, current as of a few days ago. What one also finds is Oakland minor-leaguer Max Schrock at the top of that leaderboard.
The Astros had themselves a busy Thursday, picking up Brian McCann from the Yankees, and then signing Josh Reddick out of free agency. This is not intended as an overreaction to that. There’s no such thing as a team being “put over the top,” and the Astros haven’t been dramatically altered by adding a decent corner outfielder and a veteran catcher whose contract was partially paid down. The reality is that an awful lot was already in place. It’s just worth talking about what’s being constructed, instead of me focusing specifically on Reddick. The smaller story is that the Astros signed Reddick for four years and $52 million. The bigger story is that the Astros are entering the league’s upper class.
