Ben and Sam banter about an Elvis Andrus glove toss, an odd triple play, and A-Rod, then discuss the Johnny Cueto and Troy Tulowitzki trades.
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There’s no such thing as ideal circumstances under which to trade Troy Tulowitzki. The best-case scenario is that Tulowitzki is both healthy and performing well, and then, you’re still a front office trading one of the most talented players in baseball. And in Colorado, of course, Tulowitzki has been more than just a good player, having been the beloved face of the franchise. Do something like this, and it’s going to hurt, regardless. But it’s been increasingly clear that a separation would be necessary. That both parties needed to move on. The Rockies just couldn’t get Tulowitzki to stay at peak level. So they did what they did, doing about the best they could do at the time, and with Carlos Gonzalez probably following Tulowitzki out the door, this is a watershed. No longer will the Rockies be caught trying to build future success around present-day veterans.
Tulowitzki was no stranger to trade rumors. There was thought he could go a year ago, but after lighting the league on fire, he got injured. The injury questions hung over him during the offseason, making it tricky to find a match, and now that he’s been mostly healthy in 2015, his performance has been uncharacteristically mortal. So the injury questions morphed into performance questions, and the Rockies had to accept that. Your opinion of the trade is dependent on your level of Tulowitzki optimism. Given what he’s capable of being, you could argue the Rockies sold low. Alternatively, you could consider it meaningful that the Rockies had trouble getting the 30-year-old Tulowitzki both healthy and great.
| 10:45 |
: Hey guys
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| 10:45 |
: Obviously this is quite late, but I wasn’t planning on having Troy Tulowitzki get traded
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| 10:45 |
: So I had to finish writing about that before I could start this. But now that’s done! So I’ll be with you just as soon as I’m done tweeting that link and this link
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| 10:47 |
: OK!
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| 10:48 |
: By the way, I’ve swapped with Kiley this week because he wasn’t available today, but he will be on Friday.
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| 10:48 |
: Back to normal for me, next week
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For the second time in a span of four days, the Mets have dipped into their surplus of young pitching talent to strengthen their 2015 roster. Over the weekend, they dealt two unremarkable pitching prospects — Rob Whalen and John Gant — to add Juan Uribe and Kelly Johnson to their sputtering offense. Last night, they cut a deal with the Athletics for Tyler Clippard. In return, they coughed up another fringy arm in Casey Meisner.
Kiley McDaniel saw the 6-foot-7 righty in person over the weekend and provided a nice little write up (with video!) in a post last night. He concluded that Meisner’s fastball-curveball combination made him a potential league-average (#4) starter. That’s not particularly sexy, but it would be a fine return for 2-3 months of a reliever.
Meisner’s stat line isn’t quite as optimistic. Meisner split the 2015 season between Low-A and High-A, where he’s pitched to a sparkling 2.35 ERA as a 20-year-old. Sounds great, right? Not so fast. His .265 BABIP disguises his unremarkable 3.98 FIP. His 20% strikeout rate and 7% walk rate, meanwhile, are merely average.
As a result, KATOH forecasts Meisner for just 1.6 WAR through age-28, which is actually a notch down from his 2.2 mark following his performance in the New York-Penn League last season. The statistical comps paint a similarly dismal picture.
| Rank | Mah Dist | Pitcher | IP thru 28 | WAR thru 28 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 0.14 | Cristobal Correa | 0 | 0.0 |
| 2 | 0.20 | Kennil Gomez* | 0 | 0.0 |
| 3 | 0.21 | Tim Melville* | 0 | 0.0 |
| 4 | 0.21 | Corey Powell | 0 | 0.0 |
| 5 | 0.25 | Scott Randall | 27 | 0.6 |
| 6 | 0.26 | Doug Johnston | 0 | 0.0 |
| 7 | 0.33 | Jake Woods | 162 | 0.0 |
| 8 | 0.37 | Frankie Sanders | 0 | 0.0 |
| 9 | 0.42 | Carlos Chantres | 0 | 0.0 |
| 10 | 0.44 | Micah Bowie | 71 | 0.0 |
| 11 | 0.44 | Ronnie Ventura | 0 | 0.0 |
| 12 | 0.48 | Kevin Kloek | 0 | 0.0 |
| 13 | 0.48 | Shawn Morimando* | 0 | 0.0 |
| 14 | 0.49 | Mitch Talbot | 232 | 0.8 |
| 15 | 0.50 | Kyle Lobstein* | 87 | 0.9 |
| 16 | 0.53 | Jacob Faria* | 0 | 0.0 |
| 17 | 0.53 | Nick Pesco | 0 | 0.0 |
| 18 | 0.56 | Michael Foltynewicz* | 0 | 0.0 |
| 19 | 0.58 | Jason Shiell | 24 | 0.0 |
| 20 | 0.58 | Zach Miner | 357 | 2.2 |
*Pitchers who have yet to play their age-28 seasons.
Meisner appears to be one of those pitchers whose performance lags behind his stuff. He’s 6-foot-7 and throws a mid-90s fastball, so the ingredients for success are certainly there. So far, however, he hasn’t performed in a way that suggests he has much of a big-league future. At age-20, though, he still has plenty of time to figure things out.
We are in the thick of Trade Deadline Week, and it is exciting. If you are like me, you have activated push notifications on your phone for trade-rumor tweets. There are a lot of moves made this week, specifically on July 31, the non-waiver trade deadline. While we are bogged down by the details and the rumors, I want to present the frequency of trades throughout the year.
Before diving into the graph, let’s look at a little history. Trades were rather restrictive until 1986 when the rules changed to establish the current trade deadline. The trade deadline didn’t have activity level we have come to expect until the 1990s. In 1994-1995, there was a players’ strike that halted play and subsequently many baseball personnel transactions, so I chose 1996 as the starting point for the data set — that is, the first full year of baseball after the strike. All of the trade data is from Pro Sports Transactions. This data set contains the full spectrum of trades, not just major trades. This also includes trades for international signing-bonus slots.
July 31 has an average of 8.3 trades with an exponentially growing lead up to the deadline. I’ve annotated a few time frames within which there are lot of different trades: Spring Training, the non-waiver trade deadline, the postseason roster deadline and the winter meetings.
This is a more detailed version of the graph above, focused on July and August exclusively. The light blue highlights indicate an average greater than one trade per day. July 2 sees a bump in trades, mainly due to international-prospect signings. The August 31 roster deadline has a significant bump, but it has a quarter of the number of trades compared to July 31.
While many of you were snuggled up in your beds last night, Alex Anthopoulos and his henchmen were hard at work acquiring Troy Tulowitzki from the Rockies. You can read Dave Cameron’s piping hot take on the trade here and Kiley McDaniel’s scouting-oriented contribution on the three pitching prospects going from Toronto to Colorado here. Below, I’ll be taking a data-driven look at those same three prospects, as follow: Miguel Castro, Jeff Hoffman, and Jesus Tinoco.
Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by viscount of the internet Rob Neyer, and expanded at the request of nobody, NERD scores represent an attempt to summarize in one number (and on a scale of 0-10) the likely aesthetic appeal or watchability, for the learned fan, of a player or team or game. Read more about the components of and formulae for NERD scores here.
Most Highly Rated Game
Los Angeles at Houston | 20:10 ET
Wilson (128.0 IP, 103 xFIP-) vs. McHugh (127.0 IP, 100 xFIP-)
The entertainment value provided by a text or performance is typically a direct result of the stakes which face the characters in that same text/performance. For example: while profound in its own way, the portion of a bar mitzvah during which the young man chants his haftorah is typically an exercise in abject boredom. Here one finds a 13-year-old who, rather than awkwardly chanting Hebrew in front of his bubbe, would probably much rather be awkwardly doing something else. Were that same young man, however, to receive electric shocks of increasing intensity for every pronunciation error he made — this would facilitate much greater entertainment for those gathered. Would it be horrifying? Yes. But, as everything everywhere proves, horrifying and compelling are not mutually exclusive.
For the duration of this series, the Angels and Astros will resemble, in no small part, a young boy who, while becoming a man, is also becoming unconscious due to all the aforementioned electric shocks. The clubs are currently separated by a mere game atop the AL West and only a handful of playoff-odds percentage points. The consequences, if not tremendous, at least resemble something approaching tremendous.
Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Houston Radio.
Lead Prospect Analyst Kiley McDaniel is currently scouting the East Coast Pro prep showcase in Tampa, Florida. What follows is a collection of scouting reports written by McDaniel concerning the three players traded by Toronto to Colorado in exchange for Troy Tulowitzki — compiled and updated to account both for recent developments and/or likely role with the Rockies.
Jeff Hoffman, RHP, Colorado Rockies, FV: 55
In Hoffman’s offseason scouting report, I noted that he was in contention to go #1 overall until his elbow surgery just before the 2014 draft, in which he went ninth overall. He made his first pro appearance this year and started making buzz right away, showing big velocity in a late big-league spring-training appearance, then in extended spring training and in his regular season debut at High-A Dunedin (he was just promoted to Double-A in the last few days). In the video, the first game shown is when I saw Hoffman about a month ago and the second game is when our own Chris King saw his first start for Dunedin about a month before that.
I like to keep all the clips we have of a player in the official video on the FanGraphs YouTube page (now over 1 million views and 1,000 videos in less than a year) for reasons just like this, so we can see the changes over time. Notice from the third game in the video (the summer before he was drafted, in the Cape Cod League) how aggressive Hoffman’s delivery is (and the knockout curve at 3:00) and note that much of that is still there in the second game, his pro debut in Dunedin. Now look at the first game, the most recent one, and notice how much more upright, stiff and generally tall-and-fall his delivery is, rather than attacking the plate.
Episode 582
Dave Cameron is both (a) the managing editor of FanGraphs and (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio, during which edition he discusses multiple implications of Kansas City’s deal for Johnny Cueto and the dollar-per-win value of pitchers at the deadline.
Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.
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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 41 min play time.)
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