Today, we turn our attention to the second base Killers. While still focusing on teams that meet the loose definition of contenders (a .500 record or Playoff Odds of at least 10%), and that have gotten about 0.6 WAR or less out of a position thus far — which prorates to 1.0 WAR over a full season — this year I have incorporated our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation for an additional perspective. Sometimes that may suggest that the team will clear the bar by a significant margin, but even so, I’ve included them here because the team’s performance at that spot is worth a look.
As noted previously, some of these situations are more dire than others, particularly when taken in the context of the rest of a team’s roster. I don’t expect every team to go out and track down an upgrade before the August 1 deadline, and I’m less concerned with the solutions – many of which have more moving parts involved than a single trade — than the problems. Unless otherwise indicated, all statistics are through Sunday. Read the rest of this entry »
Last week, I published in rapid succession articles exploring the fascinating seasons of Spencer Strider (sort of) and Blake Snell. Both pitchers then went out and had outlier performances in their respective ensuing starts; Strider recorded 12 of his first 15 outs by strikeout, and Snell walked seven in just five innings but allowed merely a single run. So I joked on Twitter (I’m not using the new name, it’s silly) that if anyone wanted a pitcher to become newsworthy, pass along a name and I’d write about him.
The best kind of joke is the kind that lets you outsource coming up with ideas for posts, and sure enough, I encountered a reply that caught my attention.
Someone may have done it already, but Bailey Ober is pretty interesting in how uninteresting he is. Pretty much a lock for a quality start every time he pitches; nothing more, nothing less
Travis Jankowski is enjoying a career-best season with the Texas Rangers. Playing a platoon role on a first-place team, the 32-year-old left-handed-hitting outfielder is slashing .319/.407/.405 with a 133 wRC+ in 190 plate appearances. Speed and defense are his calling cards. Jankowski has swiped 15 bags in 16 attempts, and racked up five Defensive Runs Saved and four Outs Above Average while seeing time at all three fly-chaser positions.
His track record coming into the 2023 campaign was somewhat spotty. Drafted 44th overall in 2012 by San Diego out of Stony Brook, he spent 2015-19 with the Padres, then bounced from the Reds to the Phillies to the Mets to the Mariners before joining the Rangers this past January. Prior to inking a free agent deal with the Chris Young-constructed club, his cumulative hit total was 252, while his wRC+ over 1,215 plate appearances was an unbecoming 77. By and large, he’d been a spare part whose performance hadn’t merited consistent playing time.
A confluence of health and the right opportunity has helped fuel the Lancaster, Pennsylvania native’s breakthrough.
“It’s been finding a good spot with a great manager and a great lineup,” Jankowski explained when the Rangers visited Boston earlier this month. “I’ve been able to carve out a role, and a big part of that is being comfortable. Nine seasons in, I know what to expect at the big league level. Beyond that, it’s just clicking for me right now.” Read the rest of this entry »
Hanging from a rack are t-shirts and shorts, sweat-wicking warmup tops and Diamondbacks jerseys in white, black, red, gray and tan. Shelves and cabinets hold a smattering of personal effects; on the floor sits a three-tiered rack just for his shoes. But among these ballplayer trademarks are footlong white boxes found more often in the closets of baseball fans than in the lockers of the sport’s stars. Inside, they’re filled with baseball cards.
This year at Chase Field, it’s common to glimpse Longoria breezing into the clubhouse, a couple such boxes tucked under an arm. The 37-year-old veteran wants to share the joy of his favorite hobby. “He’s always bringing in cards like, ‘Hey, let’s open them,’” says rookie outfielder Corbin Carroll. Longoria’s teammates often oblige. They’ve unearthed a Gabriel Moreno card and ones featuring Arizona prospects Jordan Lawlar and Deyvison De Los Santos. Carroll has even pulled a couple of his own.
Longoria’s teammates may not know it, but the veteran third baseman is only sharing the scraps. He used to crack open boxes of cards like this more often – and indeed, it’s still fun – but Longoria has fashioned himself into more than just a hobbyist. What started as a pandemic-shutdown pastime has now turned into a serious endeavor. Longoria has inserted himself deep into the card-collecting world, quickly learning its intricacies. At home, he has “thousands and thousands” of cards, he says, many of which are a good deal more valuable than the ones he lugs into the office to show his coworkers.
There’s an autographed Mike Trout card that’s worth a fair amount of money. Longoria also collects Formula 1 racing cards and recently sold a 2021 Lewis Hamilton card that was one of just five of its kind. (One of those same Hamilton cards is currently listed on eBay for $5,000.) He’s also hot after classic cards from baseball’s golden age, both because he’s a fan and because he’s a savvy investor.
While the market for high-priced modern cards has been more volatile – softening last year after two years of skyrocketing investment, per an analysis in Sports Collectors Digest – top-grade classic cards, like sports franchises, steadily gain value.
“If I spent $40,000 on a Lou Gehrig card or a Babe Ruth card or something like that, in 20 years, it’s going to be worth $60,000,” he says. “It’s not going down. It’s like owning the S&P 500.”
All of this started with a different type of collectible. Desperate for something to do while the sport was shuttered in the summer of 2020, Longoria began buying Pokémon cards to open with his two oldest children, now 10 and 8 years old. The hobby caught on with him more than them, however, and now Longoria can’t get enough.
A novice to card collecting, he started by buying packs of baseball cards at Target and Walmart, but that approach never turned up anything special. Card manufacturers rarely sneak the truly valuable stuff into the cheap packs. “It’s like playing a slot machine,” he says. “You put in a hundred bucks and you’re probably going to lose it all.” To catch ‘em all, he learned, you gotta spend. So, he did his research and became more literate. He followed prominent collectors on social media and he watched card breakers on livestreams. He figured out which cards had value, which packs they came in, and how to procure them.
That attention to detail makes him unique among pro athletes who collect. “He gets it,” says Ryan Veres, owner of Burbank Sportscards, a Southern California clearinghouse that sells roughly 4,000 individual cards a day from a stock of 40 million. Most sports stars who collect tend to delegate, Veres has found, but Longoria pops into the shop whenever he’s in town. “A lot of those guys will just have guys buy stuff for them. ‘I don’t know a lot about it. Just buy me cool stuff,’” Veres says. “But he does everything himself. He’ll pound the pavement.”
With nearly $150 million in career earnings, Longoria has the scratch to be a serious collector. (Though don’t expect him to rival the nearly $100 millioncollection belonging to Diamondbacks owner Ken Kendrick.) He’ll frequently sell cards through his Instagram profile. The rest he keeps for his kids, in the hopes that they might someday appreciate them. They haven’t yet.
“In the meantime, it’s like a Picasso. You get to look at it, it’s a story. Somebody comes over, ‘Hey, check this out,’” he says. “That, to me, is the exciting part about it.”
It all makes for an amusing image – Longoria, a former Rookie of the Year and three-time Gold Glover, grinning as he plucks a card featuring some prospect who’d be lucky to accomplish half of what he has. “The future of the game is bright,” he says, and the cards serve to connect him to that future as he prepares to become the game’s past. This is Longoria’s 16th season, and it marks the beginning of his career’s final phase. But it’s a phase he entered willingly, signing with Arizona for one year and $4 million to play part-time and live in his offseason home.
He senses the end is near, which is why he’s begun collecting something other than cards. Over the last two seasons, Longoria has made a point of asking opponents to swap jerseys. He’s received personalized uniform tops from Austin Riley and Bobby Witt Jr., trading them one of his own. This year, Bryce Harper inscribed a message on a dirt-covered jersey he’d just pulled off his back. Longoria has also mined his connections to procure game-worn uniforms from athletes in other sports – including Devin Booker, Stephen Curry and even the GOAT himself, Tom Brady.
His collection could be even more robust – think Derek Jeter and David Ortiz – but he lacked the foresight in his early years to curate mementos as he went along. Like an actor absconding with a prop after a long shoot, it took until the end for Longoria to realize he wanted to bring home more than just memories. “I may not have another chance,” he says. He doesn’t want his young Diamondbacks teammates to take their time for granted. Carroll, one of the few players in the Diamondbacks clubhouse with a legitimate chance to surpass Longoria’s on-field exploits, sees the logic.
“His reasoning for it was kind of cool,” Carroll says. “It made me want to start getting some guys that I’ve played with and will play against. I think it’s a cool memento, a living collection of your career.”
The game is hardly done with Longoria yet. For the Diamondbacks, he’s provided cost-effective punch from the right side of the plate, with an 112 wRC+ overall and a 137 mark against left-handers. He’s a veteran presence on a striving and surprising young team, and one of the only men in the room with any postseason experience. The Diamondbacks have a 50% chance at a playoff berth, per FanGraphs’ projections, and they’ll need Longoria’s experience.
He has memories left to make, but in the meantime, there are packs to open. And so, every so often, he plops a box on a clubhouse table and beckons a few teammates. They rip open the packaging and rummage through like they’re kids once more, pondering which players are destined for stardom. And for a moment, time stops.
The Braves made two minor moves on Monday to fill out their bullpen headcount, acquiring right-handed reliever Pierce Johnson from the Rockies and lefty reliever Taylor Hearn from the Rangers. Heading to Colorado are righty relief pitcher Victor Vodnik, our no. 13 Braves prospect a few months ago, and minor league starter Tanner Gordon. The return for Hearn is unknown as of press time, but it’s unlikely the Rangers will be getting a prospect of much significance.
The Rockies have traded RHP Pierce Johnson to the Braves for a pair of minor leaguers, per source.
If these turn out to be the biggest trades made over the last week of July, it would be a mighty disappointing deadline, but the Braves get what they wanted here. Their bullpen hasn’t exactly struggled this season — it’s second in FIP, WAR, and ERA — but adding a bit of depth while they still can has a lot of appeal to it. Through graduations and trades in recent years, the top of their farm system is kind of shallow at the moment, so internal reinforcements would be a bit trickier. Not helping matters is that they currently have five relievers on injured lists, four of them on the 60-day IL, and basically have no additional relievers on the 40-man roster left to call up in a pinch without shoving a starting pitcher in there.
Johnson is probably the safer bet of the two pickups, and I don’t necessarily mean to damn him with faint praise considering the season he’s had so far. Even in a Coors Field environment, an ERA of six is not what you like to see, and even the FIP in the mid-fours hardly screams “pitcher you’re going to use in high-leverage situations.” Johnson took over the closer role when Daniel Bard had to step away from baseball temporarily earlier this season. He only blew a couple of saves before losing the gig last month, but his walk rate this season — never his strength — led to a lot of adventures like you’d see from Fernando Rodney in a down year. Johnson’s saving grace, and almost certainly the reason the Braves valued him, is that he misses bats and throws hard; if carefully managed, he can be an asset to the ‘pen. Read the rest of this entry »
Jose Trevino’s second season in the Bronx has taken a turn from bad to worse. After earning an All-Star selection in his first year with the Yankees, Trevino struggled to provide even serviceable offense in 2023. Then, on Friday, the 30-year-old catcher revealed he would undergo surgery on a torn wrist ligament he’s been dealing with since spring training. The injury might explain his sharp offensive downturn, but it also means he’ll miss the remainder of the season. It’s yet another tough blow for a Yankees squad that has dealt with more than its fair share of injuries.
On Opening Day, 26 of 27 FanGraphs staffers picked the Yankees to reach the playoffs. It wasn’t a bad prediction, by any means; they had the highest preseason playoff odds in the American League and more projected WAR than any team in baseball. Yet the roster we’ve seen this season is a sad facsimile of the one we imagined before the year began. According to the Injured List Ledger at Baseball Prospectus, the Yankees rank first by a mile in cumulative value lost to injury. Of the seven players on the roster who were All-Stars in 2022, five have spent significant time on the shelf: Aaron Judge, Giancarlo Stanton, Nestor Cortes, Carlos Rodón, and now Trevino. Other players who have missed time include Frankie Montas, Harrison Bader, Josh Donaldson, and Luis Severino. Read the rest of this entry »
The first FanGraphs Power Rankings of the second half of the season are here, and there are some significant movers in the rankings. As we hurtle toward the trade deadline, teams on the bubble have rapidly closing windows to get into the playoff picture or be left behind.
A reminder for how these rankings are calculated: first, we take the three most important components of a team — their offense (wRC+), their pitching (a 50/50 blend of FIP- and RA9-, weighted by starter and reliever IP share), and their defense (RAA) — and combine them to create an overall team quality metric. I also add in a factor for “luck,” adjusting a team’s win percentage based on expected win-loss record. The result is a power ranking, which is then presented in tiers below.
Tier 1 – The Best of the Best
Team
Record
“Luck”
wRC+
SP-
RP-
RAA
Team Quality
Playoff Odds
Braves
64-34
1
120
92
83
-8
159
100.0%
Rangers
59-41
-4
121
93
103
14
165
82.9%
Rays
61-42
-5
119
87
100
9
163
94.2%
The Braves haven’t exactly had the smoothest start to the second half, losing consecutive series to the White Sox and Diamondbacks before taking two of three from the Brewers over the weekend, but they’re still miles ahead of any other team in the National League. As long as Ronald Acuña Jr. continues playing like the MVP favorite and Spencer Strider continues pitching like the Cy Young favorite, they’ll have an easy time walking into the playoffs for the sixth consecutive year.
The Rangers raced out with six straight wins after the All-Star break, including a sweep of the Rays earlier this week. The good times came to a halt over the weekend, as they were outscored 31–16 by the Dodgers. To make matters worse, Corey Seager exited Friday’s game with a sprained thumb, putting him on the IL for the second time this season. His timeline to return is still unclear, but Texas was able to weather his absence back in April.
The Rays limped into the All-Star break, and things haven’t gotten better since. They won their first series against the Royals but were swept by the Rangers and then lost a huge four-game series against the Orioles over the weekend, dropping them into second place in the AL East for the first time this season. The biggest problem has been an offense that’s suddenly a little inconsistent; they’ve scored just 4.1 runs per game over their last 20 contests and have scored more than five runs just once over their last 10. Read the rest of this entry »
If you watch a random pitch from a major league game, there’s a better than even chance you’re going to end up picking out a fastball. The fastball is the core concept upon which pitching is understood, the theme upon which all variations, from changeup to knuckle-curve, are composed. Our society has three great establishments: “establish the fastball” in baseball; “establish the run” in football; and the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment.
Spencer Strider came up in a conversation I had with Max Scherzer prior to Friday night’s game at Fenway Park. We were talking about the veteran right-hander’s evolution as a pitcher — I’d first interviewed Scherzer in 2010 — and velocity and strikeout rates were predictably among the topics that popped up. Hence the mention of the 24-year-old Atlanta Braves hurler with the high-octane heater and eye-popping 39.7% strikeout rate.
“He’s got a heck of a fastball, for sure,” Scherzer said when I mentioned Strider. “And he’s still developing. One of the things Flash Gordon told me when I was a rookie coming up with the Diamondbacks is that you don’t walk into this league as an ace. His comments were, ‘Guess what? When Pedro and Roger first got in the league, they threw five innings. They were five-and-dive guys. Then they learned how to pitch; they learned how to get guys out multiple times through the order.’ It takes time to learn to be consistent at this level.
“Applying that logic — the wisdom that I heard many, many years ago — Spencer Strider is continuing to get better,” continued Scherzer. “He’s continuing to add stuff to his game while pitching great and striking out a lot of guys out in the process. As long as he stays healthy, he’s got a lot of upside with what he’s going to be able to do with the baseball.”
Strider is 23-8 with a 3.20 ERA, a 2.88 FIP, and 391 strikeouts in 250-and-two-thirds innings. He’s surrendered just 180 hits. The idea that he could become even better is a scary proposition for hitters. My staying as much elicited a strong opinion from the former Cy Young Award winner and seven-time All-Star. Read the rest of this entry »
Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! Welcome to the last July edition of my FanGraphs chat
