Carlos Correa is a Minnesota Twin. There’s a contract, there was a press conference, he joked about his son growing up Minnesota Nice — after almost a month of bizarre uncertainty, Correa’s future is locked down. Which probably means you’ll start trusting this in your gut somewhere around mid-August.

Spare a thought for the Mets and Giants, both of which were thought to have signed Correa last month, before those deals fell through. Neither club deserves that much sympathy, because both reneged on $300 million-plus contract offers on the basis of troubling medical reports. The Twins seem convinced that Correa’s fibulas are not made of marzipan, after all. And don’t be a coastal snob, they have good doctors in Minnesota — the Mayo Clinic, and so on.

But while it was the Mets and Giants who left Correa at the altar, and not the other way around, both teams were ostensibly making plans to build a lineup around one of the best infielders in baseball. And while there was never any official announcement, the public was in a frenzy. Unlicensed swag was sold, tickets purchased, blogs posted on the premise that Correa would be a Met and/or a Giant.

Now, both clubs are bereft of their erstwhile top free agent signing. And both teams are left to contemplate Bolton’s First Interrogative: How am I supposed to live without you? Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2023 Hall of Fame ballot. For a detailed introduction to this year’s ballot, and other candidates in the series, use the tool above; an introduction to JAWS can be found here. For a tentative schedule, and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Before Madison Bumgarner and Tim Lincecum carved their niches in Giants history, there was Matt Cain. Nicknamed “The Horse” thanks to his size (6-foot-3, 230 pounds) and durability, he was “the original homegrown hero of the Giants’ golden era,” to quote the headline of one tribute, serving as the bridge between the latter-day Barry Bonds teams and the Buster Posey ones. He played a significant role for the first two of the Giants’ three championships under manager Bruce Bochy and was particularly stingy in the postseason, posting a 2.10 ERA in eight starts totaling 51 innings.

In a 13-year career (2005–17) spent entirely with the Giants, Cain made three All-Star teams and received down-ballot Cy Young support in three seasons. On June 13, 2012, he threw the 22nd perfect game in AL/NL history. Alas, that 2012 season, the first year of a six-year, $127.5-million extension (briefly the largest deal ever for a right-handed pitcher), was his last good one. After that, mileage and injuries took their toll; he missed all of the Giants’ 2014 postseason run, having undergone season-ending surgery to remove bone chips in his elbow.

Poor run support, particularly early in his career, camouflaged some of Cain’s strongest seasons and knocked his career won-loss record below .500, but beyond his impact upon the Giants, he carved a unique niche among statheads. As old friend Eno Sarris explained at The Athletic just before his final start in 2017, “Cain retires third all time in pop-ups since we started tracking the play, and recognizing that this was a skill of his was important to statistical models. It’s not a stretch at all to say that his ability to elicit pop-ups is why pop-ups are now counted in pitching WAR on FanGraphs.”

Matthew Thomas Cain was born on October 1, 1984 in Dothan, Alabama. His father Tom worked in sales and management for a window and door wholesaler, and his mother Dolores was a schoolteacher. Tom’s job bounced the family from South Carolina to Alabama to Tennessee; the family moved to a 50-acre plot of land 30 miles outside of Memphis when Matt was 10 years old.

By that point, Matt’s baseball career was rolling along. At five years old, playing T-ball, he pulled off two unassisted triple plays in a seven-game season. At 11 years old, he came under the tutelage of former major leaguer Mauro Gozzo, who owned horses nearby and had a farrier in common with Cain’s grandfather, Guy Miller, who had sent his three grandsons to Gozzo for evaluation. “You never tell how a kid that young will develop,” Gozzo told the Bay Area News Group’s Andrew Baggarly in 2005. “But I definitely saw a loose arm, and I sensed some serious desire. Those are the two things you look for.” Gozzo soon quit his job in waste management to teach pitching full-time and schooled Cain in the importance of mound presence and confidence.

At Houston High School in Germantown, Cain’s drive to succeed was ahead of his physical ability; he was throwing his fastball in the 88–92 mph range, where he was up to 92–95 — accompanying that with a plus power breaking ball and a changeup — by the time he reached the majors. He began receiving attention from college scouts as a junior, and the following year, professional scouts were regularly attending his starts. In March 2002, Giants scout Lee Elder saw Cain pitch in place of teammate Conor Lalor, who was scratched due to a sore arm. “Elder saw the ball jump out of Cain’s hand and knew the kid was first-round draft material,” Baggarly wrote. After a senior season in which he went 7–3 with a 1.02 ERA, he was chosen by the Giants with the 25th pick in the 2002 draft and signed for a $1.375 million bonus.

Cain was just 17 years old when he began his professional career with the Giants’ Arizona League affiliate and still a teenager when he pitched in the Futures Game and reached Double-A Norwich in mid-2004, where he posted a 3.35 ERA with 7.5 strikeouts per nine in 86 innings. That performance vaulted him from 91st to 13th on Baseball America’s Top 100 Prospects list. After pitching to a 4.39 ERA with 10.9 strikeouts per nine at Triple-A Fresno in 2005, he got the call from the Giants, debuting with a five-inning, two run effort against the Rockies on August 29, 2005, pitching well but getting the loss because his teammates scored just one run. Twitter hadn’t been invented yet, but if it had, #Cained would have been trending.

The final batter of Cain’s debut was Todd Helton, literally the toughest out in the league that year via his NL-best .445 on-base percentage. Cain battled him for 14 pitches before retiring him on a warning track fly ball. “Here was this 20-year-old kid who kept throwing strikes against one of the most dangerous hitters in the game and refused to give in,” Baggarly told FanGraphs. “I think that’s when a lot of us knew he had what it took to be an impact performer for a long time.”

The 20-year-old Cain went 2–1 with a 2.33 ERA (but a 4.08 FIP) in 46.1 innings over seven starts, leaving his rookie eligibility intact for 2006. He made the team out of spring training, but things didn’t go well initially; through seven starts, he was 1–5 with a 7.04 ERA, earning him a trip to the bullpen. But after just one relief outing, he returned and threw a one-hit shutout against the A’s in Oakland on May 21, finishing the year 13–12 with a 4.08 ERA and 3.96 FIP in 31 starts and one relief appearance totaling 190.1 innings, good for 2.5 WAR and fifth place in the NL Rookie of the Year voting.

For the quiet Cain, the transition to the majors was jarring. “I was a 20-year-old kid who didn’t understand anything about city life, didn’t understand what it was like to be in a major city, in a huge media area,” he recounted to MLB.com’s Chris Haft in 2017. “I had a hard time at first… I’d always grown up around trees and grass and outdoors, and here I am. I kind of felt like I was trapped in a bunch of concrete.” Over time he adapted to San Francisco; he and his wife chose a different neighborhood to live in each season, helping them gain a greater appreciation of the city.

In the spring of 2007, Cain signed a four-year, $9 million extension, which he inaugurated by beginning a six-year streak of making at least 32 starts and throwing at least 200 innings, but he went just 7–16 despite a 3.65 ERA (123 ERA+). Between that season — Bonds’ final one — and the next (8–14, 3.76 ERA), the Giants’ decrepit offense, which ranked second to last in the league in scoring in both years, eked out just 3.2 runs per game on his behalf. By comparison, the team scored 4.6 runs per game for Lincecum in 2008, helping him to an 18–5 record to accompany a 2.62 ERA en route to his first of two Cy Youngs.

Cain did crack the NL’s top 10 in WAR in both of those seasons, with 4.6 in 2007 (seventh) and 4.5 in ’08 (ninth), then put together his best season to date in ’09, going 14–8 with a 2.89 ERA (good for seventh in the league as well as a career-best 147 ERA+) and 6.1 WAR (eighth) in 217.2 innings. He made the NL All-Star team for the first time, though he didn’t pitch in the game after being hit on the elbow by a line drive in his final turn before the break. Led by him and Lincecum, the Giants snapped a four-year streak of losing seasons, improving from 72 wins to 88 on the strength of their run prevention. In the spring of 2010, Cain and the Giants hashed out another extension; this one, which incorporated the $4.25 million salary for the final year of his previous deal, albeit with different bells and whistles, totaled three years and $27.5 million.

Bolstered by rookies Posey and Bumgarner (both of whom had cups of coffee the year before), the Giants improved to 92–70 in 2010, winning their first NL West title in seven years. Cain put together another very good season (3.14 ERA, 223.1 IP, 4.1 WAR) camouflaged by a 13–11 record, but he was stellar in the postseason. In Game 2 of the Division Series against the Braves, he threw 6.2 innings and allowed just one unearned run, departing with a 4–1 lead; a bullpen implosion cost the Giants the game, but they took the series in five. In Game 3 of the NLCS against the Phillies, he threw seven shutout innings and allowed just two hits, and this time the bullpen held. In Game 2 of the World Series against the Rangers, he went even further, with 7.2 shutout innings on just four hits. He thus became the fifth pitcher ever to throw at least 20 postseason innings without allowing an earned run, after the Giants’ Christy Mathewson (27 innings in 1905), the Yankees’ Waite Hoyt (27 innings in 1921), the Giants’ Carl Hubbell (20 innings in 1933), and the Tigers’ Kenny Rogers (23 innings in 2006); Hubbell yielded three unearned runs, Hoyt two.

The Giants beat the Rangers in a five-game World Series but slipped back to 86 wins and second place in 2011. Once again, meager offensive support (3.4 runs per game) led to a mediocre record (12–11) for Cain, but he pitched to a 2.88 ERA (eighth in the league) in 221.2 innings. He also made his second All-Star team but again didn’t pitch in the game itself.

Just before the 2012 season began, Cain agreed to another extension that rolled over the final year of his existing deal. At that point, his six-year, $127.5 million pact was surpassed only by those of lefties CC Sabathia (seven years, $161 million) and Johan Santana (six years, $137.5 million). It was a record for a righthander, supplanting Kevin Brown’s seven-year, $105 million deal, but that would stand only until the following winter, when Zack Greinke signed a six-year, $147 million contract with the Dodgers.

For only the second time in his career, Cain got robust run support in 2012, a comparatively gaudy 4.7 runs per game. Combined with a 2.79 ERA (126 ERA+) and a career-high 193 strikeouts in 219.1 innings, he went 16–5. And after having taken five no-hitters into the seventh inning and one perfect game into the sixth, he finally went the distance for one on June 13 at AT&T Park, when he retired all 27 Astros he faced, striking out 14 over the course of 125 pitches.

It was the majors’ second perfect game of the season and the fifth in a four-season span after those of Mark Buehrle (July 23, 2009), Dallas Braden (May 9, 2010), Roy Halladay (May 29, 2010), and Philip Humber (April 21, 2012); only one has been thrown since, that by Félix Hernández on August 15, 2012. Cain’s Game Score of 101 matched that of Sandy Koufax (1965) for the highest in a perfect game, and at the time, the only nine-inning start of any stripe with a higher score was Kerry Wood‘s 20-strikeout, one-hit gem from 1998 (105). Since then, only Max Scherzer‘s 17-strikeout no-hitter of the Mets from 2015 (104) and Clayton Kershaw’s 15-strikeout no-hitter of the Rockies from ’14 (102) — both blemished by a batter reaching on an error — have surpassed Cain’s score.

(In a cruel coincidence, this scribe missed Cain’s perfecto by one day at AT&T, having watched Bumgarner homer and strike out 12 the night before in the company of a handful of baseball writers. That group included FanGraphs contributor Wendy Thurm, who wrote up her own experience of watching Cain here.)

The perfect game probably helped Cain get the starting nod for the NL in the All-Star Game. Knuckleballer R.A. Dickey, who was 12–1 with a 2.40 ERA to Cain’s 9–3 with a 2.62 ERA, lobbied for the start by offering a hypothetical scenario of entering the game with men on base. But NL manager Tony La Russa chose Cain, who allowed one hit in two innings and was credited with the victory in an 8–0 win; Dickey threw a scoreless sixth.

In the postseason, Cain made five starts, pitching to a 3.60 ERA in 30 innings. Merely solid in Games 1 and 5 of the Division Series against the Reds, he yielded three runs in 5.2 innings in the finale but put the clamps on the Cardinals in the NLCS. After allowing three runs in 6.2 innings in a Game 3 loss, he returned to hold St. Louis scoreless for 5.2 innings in Game 7. He then went seven innings and allowed three runs in Game 4 of the World Series, departing in a tie game that the Giants won in the 10th, completing a sweep for their second championship in three years.

Unfortunately, it was mostly downhill from there for Cain. After a six-year stretch over which he ranked seventh in innings (1,299.2), ninth in WAR (26.2), and 10th in ERA (3.18, and 12th with a 126 ERA+) without missing a single start, he landed on the injured list for the first time in August with a forearm contusion suffered via a line drive. He still reached 30 starts for the eighth straight season, but his ERA ballooned to 4.00 (86 ERA+) and his WAR dipped to 0.8. He made just 15 starts in 2014 due to a cut on his finger, a hamstring strain, and surgery to remove bone chips that had been floating in his elbow for at least 10 years. “They’ve always been there,” he said of the bone chips. “It’s just that now they’re mad and they’re letting me know about it. For some reason, they got in a different spot and they got aggravated.”

The surgery turned Cain into a bystander during the Giants’ 2014 championship run but didn’t end his arm troubles. In the spring of 2015, he suffered a flexor tendon strain; between that and a subsequent bout of elbow inflammation, he made just 11 starts and posted a 5.79 ERA. A cyst removal, a recurrent hamstring strain, and lower back woes held him to 17 starts and a 5.64 ERA in 2016, and while he was healthy enough to make 23 starts the following year, he went 3–11 with a 5.43 ERA and was sent to the bullpen late in the season. After being idle for all of September, he made a farewell start on September 30, the season’s penultimate day. For five innings, he was the Cain of old, holding the Padres to two hits and one walk and striking out four, but he departed with a 1–0 lead that the bullpen couldn’t hold. #Cained one final time.

On that note, via Baseball-Reference: Cain ranks 57th in the Wild Card Era in games started (331), but he’s 31st in no-decision starts. Picking up on an area that Eno explored, he’s sixth in that period in quality starts (six or more innings, three or fewer earned runs) in which he received a no-decision (74) and 12th in quality starts in which he didn’t receive a win (112).

As Eno noted, Cain emerged at a time when statheads were gaining an appreciation of the distinction between defense-independent pitching outcomes (via Voros McCracken’s revolutionary DIPS) and the comparatively minimal amount of control a pitcher has over balls in play, with hurlers’ BABIPs often fluctuating wildly from year to year but eventually regressing toward league average in larger samples. Yet until 2015, Cain never posted a BABIP of .300 or higher, and six times, he qualified for the ERA title with a BABIP of .270 or lower, the most of any pitcher in the Wild Card Era; Scherzer and Ted Lilly are tied for second with five, and Justin Verlander, Ervin Santana, Tim Wakefield, and Barry Zito are tied for fourth with four. Among pitchers with at least 2,000 innings in the Wild Card era, only Kershaw has a lower BABIP:

Coincidentally enough, Arroyo, Dickey, and Weaver are all on this Hall of Fame ballot for the first time as well, and part of the One-and-Done subset just as Cain is. A key factor for these pitchers posting low BABIPs, and thus lower ERAs than FIPs — which 15 of the 16 of the pitchers above did over that time period, Martinez being the exception — is their skill at generating pop-ups. A gander at the Wild Card Era leaderboard shows only Weaver (13%) and Zito ahead of Verlander, Cain, and Arroyo (all 12.2%), with Kershaw (11.8%) just below. Pitching in home parks with large foul territories certainly factors into that; Zito, Cain, and Verlander were helped to their high rankings by the likes of the Oakland Coliseum, AT&T Park, and Comerica Park. Similarly, Cain has the lowest rate of home runs per fly ball (8.3%) of the era, with Cliff Lee (8.8%), Weaver and Verlander (both 8.9%) and Zito (9%) making up the top five, and Kershaw (9.4%) eighth.

How did Cain do it? Here’s Eno:

Talking to Joey Votto about his legendary ability to avoid pop-ups, he once admitted to me that the pop-up was the result of a pitch in the “perfect sliver of the strike zone, up and in-ish,” and that Cain was great at hitting that spot. During his peak seasons, Cain had a riding fastball that had a full inch more ride than the average fastball, meaning it dropped less than your average fastballs and jumped on hitters. Ride is associated with pop-ups, especially when you throw the pitch up and in, like Cain did.

We haven’t even talked about the step from BABIP suppression to quality of contact measures such as exit velocity and xwOBA, and unfortunately, only the not-so-pretty tail end of Cain’s career caught the Statcast era. But suffice it to say that these are topics of frequent discussion within sabermetrics, and within most such discussions, Cain’s name routinely… pops up. Alongside the great impact he had on a very successful era of Giants baseball, he’s left an outsized mark on our understanding of the game. That’s quite a legacy.

Every few years, the same old question sets the internet aflame: Why do Americans care so much about the British royal family Does batting average matter? If you haven’t seen my favorite formulation of the problem, here’s Tom Tango’s version of it:

Which is the more productive batter (all other things equal)

A.
.315 batting average
.365 OBP
.510 SLG

B.
.260 batting average
.365 OBP
.510 SLG

— Tangotiger ? (@tangotiger) January 9, 2023

I’ve taken a crack at this exact question before. The answer simply isn’t very surprising. If two hitters have the same on-base percentage and the same slugging percentage, they’re similarly valuable to their team’s offense. That’s why OPS is a popular offensive statistic despite its relative lack of precision; it does a lot of the same work as wOBA and wRC+ because its two component stats are mostly found in similar ratios and correlate well to offensive production. Linear weights are still better, because they do a better job of accounting for how important each plate appearance outcome is when it comes to run scoring, but you can get most of the way there with OBP and SLG.

There’s not much reason to go through the exact math of how wOBA works again, because the people who would be swayed by that math have already been swayed. But sabermetric forefather Voros McCracken mentioned a novel way of looking at the problem, and I thought I’d take a crack at it now that there are no more Carlos Correa free agency articles left to write. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley recap the conclusion of the Carlos Correa free agency saga, breaking down his new, actually finalized contract with the Twins, reviewing his offseason odyssey, and trying to anticipate his future. Then (28:20) they banter about Trevor Story’s elbow surgery, the Blue Jays’ and Marlins’ signings of Brandon Belt and Johnny Cueto, respectively (and Belt’s thoughts on chicken tenders), the Tigers moving in and lowering the fences at Comerica Park, and ballplayers’ belts and their handedness (dis)advantages as characteristics that set baseball apart. After that (54:47), they talk to two professors from the University of Illinois, Daniel Eck and Adrian Burgos, Jr., about their research into fans’ inflated appraisals of players from the distant past, the changing caliber of play in the majors over time, and adjusting traditional and advanced stats for the expansion of the player pool, followed (1:35:19) by a few updates and a Past Blast from 1954.

Audio intro: The Decemberists, “Red Right Ankle”
Audio interstitial: Uncle Tupelo, “Factory Belt”
Audio outro: Frank Sinatra, “I Don’t Believe in Rumors”

Link to Ben Clemens on Correa again
Link to Heyman on Correa
Link to Rosenthal on Correa
Link to Correa’s comments
Link to Mets’ Correa statement
Link to over/under draft results
Link to story on Story
Link to internal brace info
Link to Story’s arm strength
Link to Justin Choi on Belt
Link to Belt on chicken tenders
Link to Leo Morgenstern on Cueto
Link to Comerica alterations
Link to Miggy reaction
Link to HR park factors
Link to info on Miggy at Comerica
Link to long outs at Comerica
Link to more long outs at Comerica
Link to ballpark homogenization study
Link to lefty advantage research
Link to more on lefty advantages
Link to NYT on lefties and sports
Link to FG on the lefty pitcher edge
Link to Eck’s professor page
Link to Burgos’s professor page
Link to previous Burgos appearance
Link to adjusted WAR leaderboard
Link to technical model details
Link to Eck on era adjustments
Link to results part I
Link to results part II
Link to results part III
Link to MLB-eligible population
Link to Ben on quality of play
Link to 1954 story source
Link to article on baseball-fan age
Link to Jacob Pomrenke’s website
Link to Jacob Pomrenke on Twitter
Link to Nightengale on the Braves
Link to 2012 Anthopoulous article
Link to MLBTR on Vogt
Link to typesetting characters info

 Sponsor Us on Patreon
 Facebook Group
 Twitter Account
 EW Subreddit
 Effectively Wild Wiki
 iTunes Feed (Please rate and review us!)
 Get Our Merch!
 Email Us: podcast@fangraphs.com

Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

It’s been a busy offseason for the Angels, who have added to their superstar duo in Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani by trading for Gio Urshela and Hunter Renfroe, and signing Brandon Drury, Tyler Anderson, Carlos Estévez, and now Brett Phillips. Phillips has bounced around the league since his debut in 2017, maxing out at just 292 plate appearances in a season. In 2022, he spent time with the Rays and Orioles but was DFA’d by both and became a free agent. The 28-year old will earn $1.2 million in Anaheim this season.

Phillips is a baserunning and defensive specialist with some sneaky pop. To put it another way, he has struggled at the plate throughout his career and has never made it as a starting position player. While he was quite solid in 2021, slashing .206/.300/.427 with a 103 wRC+ (and a 138 wRC+ when he held the platoon advantage) and 2.3 WAR, that production was nowhere to be seen in ’22. In 900 career plate appearances, he holds a 71 wRC+, and his Steamer projection of 74 wRC+ suggests that’s what you should expect going forward.

Phillips’ biggest weakness at the plate is his struggle to put bat on ball. Over the past two seasons, he’s come up empty on over a third of his swings, ranking in just the third percentile of hitters during that timespan. His uppercut swing has a large hole up in the zone, where his whiff rates in that area approach 50%. While he doesn’t chase many pitches out of the zone, his approach at the plate is more passive than disciplined, as he also watches many pitches over the plate. The end result is that pitchers earn far more strikes against him compared to the average hitter; his 32.9% CSW ranks second-worst among all batters. Throughout his career, he has walked at an above-average 9.7% clip, but his enormous 37.8% strikeout rate makes Giancarlo Stanton look like Luis Arraez in comparison. And while many of his compatriots on the whiff rate leaderboard like Joey Gallo and Miguel Sanó have outlier raw power, Phillips has never hit a ball harder than 108 mph. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2022 AL Comeback Player of the Year Award went to Justin Verlander, but were it not for Verlander’s historic return from Tommy John surgery, the hardware could have gone to Johnny Cueto instead. In 2022, Cueto signed a minor league contract with the White Sox on Opening Day. There was little doubt he would eventually make the major league roster, but it was still telling that the former All-Star and Cy Young finalist was forced to sign a non-guaranteed deal. He hadn’t thrown a full season since 2016, and as he entered the back half of his 30s, the once great pitcher’s career seemed to be winding down.

The veteran right-hander went on to pitch 25 games for Chicago, tossing 158.1 innings with a 3.35 ERA and 2.4 WAR. Only two AL hurlers, Framber Valdez and Shane Bieber, averaged more innings per start (min. 100 IP). Best of all, Cueto kept off the injured list, and from his debut on May 16 through the end of the season, he never missed a start. As a reward for his bounce-back performance, he earned himself a big league contract with the Marlins worth $8.5 million. The deal comes with a $10.5 million team option for 2024 (or a $2.5 million buyout). Read the rest of this entry »

Just under a year ago, Jake Mailhot identified Texas first baseman Nathaniel Lowe as a player with breakout potential. In fact, he wrote a whole article called, “Nathaniel Lowe Has Breakout Potential.” Then the 2022 season happened, and — you guessed it — Nathaniel Lowe officially broke out. He hit 27 home runs and raised his wRC+ from 114 to 143. Good for Nathaniel Lowe! He’s a slugger. Good for Jake Mailhot! He’s a clairvoyant.

The thing is, Lowe didn’t exactly follow the script laid out for him. Jake noted that for the last month and a half of the 2021 season, Lowe added some “responsible aggression,” lowering his strikeout rate despite swinging more often. He did that by making a ton of contact in the zone. Jake broke Lowe’s 2021 plate discipline stats down in a table, using August 16 as the dividing line. I’ve gone ahead and added 2022 to that table:

Read the rest of this entry »

It looked like Spenser Watkins’s career might be over when he was released by the Detroit Tigers in July 2020. Six years had passed since he was drafted in the 30th round out of Western Oregon University, and at no point over that span was he viewed as more than a fringe prospect. Possessing neither plus velocity nor a difference-making secondary, the right-hander was coming off a minor league season where he’d logged a 6.07 ERA. That the only offers Watkins was receiving were for non-playing roles wasn’t exactly a surprise.

Then the Orioles came calling. That opportunity, fueled by an education in pitching that he never received with the Tigers, ultimately catapulted him to the big leagues. On July 2, 2021 — nearly a year to the day after Detroit gave up on him — Watkins walked onto a mound in a Baltimore Orioles uniform. A year and half later, the Scottsdale native has 39 major league appearances comprising 160 innings under his belt. Moreover, unlike in his Tigers days, he knows how his arsenal plays.

Watkins discussed his education-driven evolution as a pitcher late in the 2022 season.

———

David Laurila: Two years ago, you were a career minor leaguer who’d been let go by the Tigers. How did you go from there to where you are now?

Spenser Watkins: “I was released during the COVID season, so I wasn’t playing; I didn’t go to the alt site, or anything like that. Basically, it was ‘OK, let’s see what the free agent market has to bring.’ Come December, that became, ‘OK, I’ve got to figure out what the next step is; I’ve got to figure out a way to provide for my family.’ Read the rest of this entry »

Hey, did you hear about the free agent who signed on Tuesday morning? Yeah, his name is Core… y Dickerson. So, yeah, not that free agent. Our deal is Corey Dickerson, to Washington, for one year and $2.25 million guaranteed, plus another $750,000 in performance incentives.

This is Dickerson’s third trip through the NL East since 2019, which is pretty enticing as a blind item, but then you realize that he was with the Phillies in 2019 but not ’22 and the Nats in 2023 but not ’19, and he missed the Mets and Braves altogether. That’s something of a theme for Dickerson’s career. He came up with the Rockies and was traded to the Rays in 2016, missing the two seasons in the past decade in which Colorado was good and having to sit through two of the last seasons in which Tampa Bay wasn’t.

But for as much as Dickerson has dodged playing for good teams for most of his career, he does have playoff experience, with the Marlins in 2020 and the Cardinals last year. He’s spent the past decade as an exemplar of a particular kind of player: a second-division starter who can be a meaningful platoon or bench player on a contender. That kind of player gets punted around a lot. Indeed, this will be Dickerson’s 11th big league season and his eighth team. He’s been traded in midseason twice and four times in total. (One of those trades was the deal that sent Germán Márquez and Jake McGee to Colorado in 2016.) Read the rest of this entry »