The White Sox swung a deal yesterday to acquire slugging third baseman Todd Frazier from the Reds. To do so, they sent Trayce Thompson, Micah Johnson and Francelis Montas to the Dodgers. The Dodgers sent Jose Peraza, Scott Schebler, and Brandon Dixon to Cincinnati. Here’s the skinny on the sextet of prospects changing hands in this trade. As usual, the numbers you see below come from my KATOH projection system. Read the rest of this entry »
Episode 617
Nick Piecoro is a friend of the program and a beat writer for the D-backs at reputable news organ The Arizona Republic. He’s also the guest on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.
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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 41 min play time.)
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Ben and Sam discuss whether the awe-inspiring 2018 free agent class is something MLB teams should be planning for already.
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I detected a real sense of impatience as far as the Dodgers were concerned. Not impatience on the part of the Dodgers — rather, impatience on the part of people observing the Dodgers. Not that they’d been totally quiet, but they had been inactive. Now, Wednesday, the Dodgers have gotten themselves involved in a doozy. It’s a three-way trade, with the best player neither leaving the Dodgers, nor joining them. Instead, the Dodgers helped facilitate the Reds sending a quality third baseman to the White Sox. The full player breakdown:
White Sox get:
White Sox lose:
—
Reds get:
Reds lose:
—
Dodgers get:
Dodgers lose:
Frazier to Chicago, three Chicago prospects to Los Angeles, three Los Angeles prospects to Cincinnati. It stands to reason the Dodgers had to get involved because the Reds and White Sox couldn’t find an easy match straight up. Implying the Reds are higher on, say, the Peraza centerpiece than they would’ve been on a Montas centerpiece. These things can be kind of complicated to analyze, but let’s go team by team.
Talking to Mets pitching coach Dan Warthen last year, he mentioned something about the strategy of his brand of slider that has stuck with me. We normally think of sliders as hard curveballs, maybe. Loopy but hard pitches. Try figuring out if Craig Kimbrel throws a hard curve or a slider, and you’re down that normal path.
But Warthen said something a little different about the slider: “We don’t want to make it break, we want to think about getting our fingers to the front of the ball and spinning the baseball. Then you take another breaking ball and you separate the speeds, and it doesn’t have to be a great breaking ball, it just has to be a different speed.”
So, in effect, Warthen was talking about changing speeds with the slider. Normally that’s something you talk about with the changeup, which is obvious because of the way the pitch is named. But now we can talk about it with respect to the slider.
After Jerry Dipoto was hired as the general manager of the Mariners late in the 2015 season, his early tenure with club became one of the most anticipated programs of the fall season. How would he remake one of the most disappointing teams in the major leagues? Would he tear it down, or would he attempt to reload on the fly and stay relevant in 2016? One thing is for certain: it didn’t take very long to find out.
The champagne was barely dry in the road locker room in Citi Field when Dipoto began his handiwork. Much like an accident scene on the highway, the Mariners’ 2015 season and roster was briefly cordoned off, the gruesome but necessary cleanup work performed, and the road re-opened as good as new. Now that the first 13-week installment of “The Jerry Dipoto Show” is in the books, let’s look back at the highs and lows, and try to make sense of what it all means for the near- to intermediate-term future of the Seattle Mariners.
Episode 1 – The Pilot
Traded SS Brad Miller, 1B Logan Morrison and RHP Danny Farquhar to Rays for RHP Nate Karns, OF Boog Powell, LHP C.J. Riefenhauser.
Dipoto hit the ground running, just a few days after the end of the World Series, with one of the two largest and perhaps most controversial deals of his first offseason. Outfield and starting depth were two prime Mariner concerns for 2016, and middle infield one of their few areas of depth. Exit Miller, who was supplanted late last season by Ketel Marte at shortstop, only to struggle in a multi-positional role afterward.
After rumors of a Dodgers-White Sox trade surfaced earlier, the teams have now completed a trade, but it’s really a White Sox-Reds trade that the Dodgers helped facilitate. Overall, the deal will send Todd Frazier to Chicago; Micah Johnson, Trayce Thompson and Francelis Montas go to LA, and Jose Peraza, Scott Schebler, and Brandon Dixon end up in Cincinnati.
The biggest name in this deal is third baseman Todd Frazier. The 29-year-old hit 35 home runs with a line of .255/.309/.498 this past season, for a solid 114 wRC+, leading to his second straight four-win season. Frazier avoided arbitration last season with a two year, $12 million contract that will pay him just $7.5 million this season. After this season, the White Sox will have one more season of control on Frazier as he hits his final year of arbitration eligibility.
The White Sox, earlier in the offseason, made a trade for Brett Lawrie — and, at the time, he appeared ticketed for third base — but with the addition of Frazier, he will presumably move back to second base, where has considerable experience. The White Sox were one of the most active teams in last year’s offseason, but a stars and scrubs-like roster hurt them as they received little-to-no production from multiple positions including both second base and shortstop.
Micah Johnson was the presumptive starter at second base this season, making him expendable in the trade. Trayce Thompson was set to get decent playing time in an outfield including Avisail Garcia and Melky Cabrera in the corners, making the corner spots still something of a hole for the White Sox while the Dodgers are apparently receiving depth in both the outfield and infield. Montas was named to Kiley McDaniel’s Top-200 list entering last season:
Montas has steadily improved, with his average slider taking a big step forward this year to now flashing plus, his changeup is now enough to give him a starter’s repertoire and he still hits 100 mph at times. The question is whether his delivery and command fit as a starter and most think he ends up as a closer, but there’s still a chance he figures out a way to fit as a mid-rotation starter.
Montas made his debut in the majors last season, recording two starts and five relief appearances. In 15 innings, he struck out 20 while walking nine batters.
Jose Peraza was a part of the deal that sent Hector Olivera to the Braves and Alex Wood to the Dodgers at last season’s trade deadline. Ranked in the Top-50 at the beginning of last season, Peraza’s star had dimmed a bit at the time of the trade.
Compared to Luis Castillo or Juan Pierre early in his pro career, Peraza’s light has dimmed a bit in 2015 due to offensive questions, but he’s still an elite runner that’s near big league ready and can play multiple positions up the middle.
Scott Schebler is an outfielder who made his debut last season with the Dodgers after ranking 14th in McDaniel’s Dodgers prospect list to start the season. Dixon is a second baseman who played across three levels last season, reaching Double-A and hitting 22 home runs on the season.
The White Sox are at it again, and it remains to be seen if they are finished retooling their roster to attempt a run after a disappointing 2015 season. The Reds rebuild is continuing at full speed ahead, and the Dodgers swapped a few prospects for a few prospects they liked better; it will be interesting to see whether LA or Cincinnati made the right call on which young package is better long-term. Industry consensus right now heavily favors LA.
The San Francisco Giants have made a decent amount of noise this offseason, signing two of the five biggest starting-pitching contracts in free agency this year. Bringing in Johnny Cueto and Jeff Samardzija certainly solidifies a rotation that needed help. Last season, Madison Bumgarner, Chris Heston, and Jake Peavy made just over half (82) of the Giants’ starts and were worth about eight wins above replacement, most of that from Bumgarner. The other 80 starts came primarily from Ryan Vogelsong, Tim Hudson, Matt Cain, and Tim Lincecum, and that group was below replacement level. Bolstering the rotation makes a lot of sense for the Giants, but the team now appears unlikely to pursue a major signing for the outfield, leaving it as the team’s primary weakness.
Having just one weakness instead of two is a positive development for the Giants, but perhaps the brightest spot for the club heading into next season is not their newfound rotation depth, but the return of an emergent infield after some breakout seasons last year from Brandon Crawford, Matt Duffy, and Joe Panik. Add in Brandon Belt, and that quartet in the field more than tripled their production, going from 5.7 WAR in 2014 to 18.1 WAR this past season. The lack of pitching depth and the issues in the outfield kept the Giants out of the playoffs, along with an unusually high bar for entry — if they had won 84 games in 2014, they still would have qualified for the postseason — but their infield was amazing and should be again next year.
The graph below shows the FanGraphs Depth Chart projections for every infield in Major League Baseball (catchers included). As we might expect, the Giants rate very highly.
The Chicago Cubs, with Kris Bryant, Anthony Rizzo, Addison Russell, and newly signed Ben Zobrist, look to be the class of MLB when it comes to the infield, but the Giants are not that far behind. There is a decent gap between the Giants and the Josh Donaldson-led Blue Jays. Unfortunately, the outfield is not quite as promising.
Well, this is interesting.
Source: Dodgers, White Sox nearing a trade. Top pitching prospect Frankie Montas is going to Los Angeles, so it could be pretty big.
— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) December 16, 2015
The obvious guess here is that the Dodgers are shipping an outfielder to Chicago, and with a significant prospect like Montas going to LA, it would seem more likely to involve Yasiel Puig than a salary dump like Andre Ethier or Carl Crawford. Of course, David Robertson could also be a fit for the Dodgers, who already tried to trade for Aroldis Chapman, and the Dodgers are seemingly always looking to take on bad contracts to acquire prospects, so perhaps they could be taking Adam LaRoche off the White Sox hands in order to buy some more minor league inventory.
I’d imagine we’ll find out more soon. Stay tuned.
| 12:00 |
: Alright, let’s get this chat fired up.
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| 12:01 |
: For those who haven’t seen it, Jeff Passan just noted on Twitter than the Dodgers and White Sox are nearing a trade that would send CHW’s top pitching prospect Frankie Montas to LA. It could be lots of things, but Yasiel Puig seems to be the most obvious thing that LAD would want to move for young talent that would interest CHW.
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| 12:01 |
: So we can speculate about that, or talk about other off-season stuff.
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| 12:01 |
: Where does Cespedes land? Tigers? Nationals? Rangers? Somewhere completely random?
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| 12:02 |
: Tigers, in an Ilitch-engineered deal in January, probably makes the most sense. If they’re really going for it, they’re a player or two short, and he’d help them a lot. No point pushing in halfway.
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| 12:02 |
: Over the past 4 weeks, have the Braves made themselves much better in the long run?
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