Amid a dearth of baseball news, the Nationals took a starring role this week, not only via the retirement of franchise cornerstone Ryan Zimmerman but also the report that before the lockout, the team offered Juan Soto a 13-year, $350 million extension. While we’ve now seen nine deals of at least $300 million in recent years — not to mention a report of a pending extension offer to Soto in the wake of Fernando Tatis Jr.’s $340-million deal last March — the price tag produced the usual sticker shock on social media, as well as incredulity given that the slugger declined it.
Via ESPN Deportes’ Enrique Rojas, the 23-year-old Soto confirmed the news, saying, “Yes, they made me an offer a few months ago, before the lockout. But right now, my agents and I think the best option is to go year by year and wait for free agency. My agent, Scott Boras, has control over the situation.” Read the rest of this entry »
The Yankees starting rotation sits in an odd position while rosters are frozen during the owner’s lockout. No one can question Gerrit Cole’s dominance as the team ace, but after him, there are some real concerns about the health of the rest of the rotation. Luis Severino returned from Tommy John surgery to pitch in four relief appearances in 2021 plus one additional outing in the American League Wild Card game. Jameson Taillon’s season ended prematurely after he tore a ligament in his ankle, and his previous health history isn’t exactly spotless. It’s hard to know what to expect from Nestor Cortes or Domingo Germán either. That leaves Jordan Montgomery as the presumed number two starter behind Cole.
Montgomery missed nearly two seasons after his own Tommy John surgery back in 2018. He returned to the mound late in 2019 and struggled through the abbreviated ’20 season. Last year, he put together his most complete season of his short career, posting a career-best 3.69 FIP while accumulating 3.3 WAR. It was a solid performance in his first true full season since his rookie campaign back in 2017.
Ignoring his four-inning cup of coffee in 2019, Montgomery posted the highest strikeout rate of his career last season. Nearly all of those punch outs are fueled by two phenomenal secondary pitches. Both his changeup and curveball feature whiff rates around 40% and he uses both to dispatch batters. When the count gets to two strikes, he throws one of those two pitches over 60% of the time and opposing batters can’t help but swing and miss. Read the rest of this entry »
Today marks the 79th day of the owner-initiated lockout. It still remains to be seen how long the lockout will last, but whatever its length, we’re likely to see a whirlwind of a mini-offseason as soon as the league and the players come to terms on a new collective bargaining agreement. While that kind of thing is fun to cover — the week before the lockout was a thrilling frenzy — there’s still quite a lot for baseball to do. So let’s roll up our sleeves, lend a hand, and find some new homes for a few of the remaining free agents. The trick here is that they actually have to make at least a lick of sense for the team signing them. But just a lick.
As we have a lot of work to do, we’ll nail down the hitters first and then divvy up the pitchers in another piece to follow.
Carlos Correa to the Angels – Seven years, $240 million
While there has been some speculation around the interwebs about Carlos Correa possibly landing a $300 million deal, I don’t think that is the likeliest result. Correa had a fabulous 2021 season, reminding people of the phenom he was when he won American League Rookie of the Year back in 2015, but there’s going to be at least some concerns about his durability. Not alarming ones, mind you, but the fact is that before 2021’s 148-game campaign, Correa hadn’t played in 120 games since ’16, a long time for a young player, and that’s even ignoring a pandemic-shortened season during which no one could play 120 games. That’s probably not going to scare teams off, but it will inevitably be priced into his offers since front offices these days are populated more by mean nerds like me than they are dewy-eyed optimists. Read the rest of this entry »
Is baseball just a bummer these days? For the most part, yes. So let’s mope together with another episode of Chin Music. I’m joined by FanGraphs editor-in-chief managing editor Meg Rowley as we try to help you laugh through the pain. We begin by assessing where we stand in terms of the lockout (wobbly at best), then move on to the Eric Kay trial and what it means for baseball overall, before spending a small amount of time trying to find something positive to say about the current state of the game. Then it’s special guest time, as we are joined by Lincoln Mitchell, one of the preeminent experts on post-Soviet Russia. Lincoln explains what’s really going on in the Ukraine so we can all be a little smarter about world affairs and stop listening quite so much to the talking heads on network news. From there, it’s your emails on Rule 5 draft pick trades and high-altitude baseball, followed by some new television and music recommendations. As always, we hope you enjoy, and thank you for listening.
On this week’s episode, David Laurila welcomes veteran major league reliever Adam Ottavino to the program.
Ottavino shares his thoughts on the lockout and spring training before the pair go in-depth on pitching itself. We hear about the nuances of slider usage, who the right-hander models himself after, and the idea of evolving your pitching game before hitters can adapt to it. Ottavino also describes how pitching in different parks can feel, what it was like to play for both the Yankees and the Red Sox, the story of his pair of major league hits, and what his own future may have in store.
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Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about Ben’s embarrassing use of a definite article, the latest non-developments in the MLB-MLBPA CBA discussions, the career and retirement of Ryan Zimmerman, a rejected extension offer to the new Nationals franchise player, Juan Soto, a digital recreation of Truist Park and what “the metaverse” means, the outcome of the Erik Kay trial, MLB aiming to downsize the minor leagues more, a baseball rule proposal known as “The Scramble,” and a listener email about what an eccentric billionaire would have to pay a player to retire.
I have a secret to tell you. Most writers don’t read the comments on their articles. I know, I know, but your well-thought-out rejoinders and witty jokes! It’s mostly a bandwidth issue: there are just so many words. But we pop in from time to time, and boy am I glad that I did this Monday, because I got a softball question to answer (get it?):
Yes! Forget CBA negotiations and lockouts and missed spring training. Forget major league baseball, too. Heck – for this article, forget baseball! Today, like the 1992 Springfield champions, we’re talking rec league softball.
The question is an apt one, and far more useful for the average slow-pitch softball player than an examination of backup sliders or novel sinkers or whatever the heck it is I’m normally writing about. It’s a simple question: how aggressive should you be on the basepaths in a world where almost no one makes outs? For the rest of this article, I’ll be applying the same math that we use for steals in the majors (that golden 75% success rate target) to decide whether to go for an extra base on a single. It could also apply to a steal, if that’s something your league does; I haven’t played in a few years, but the basepaths weren’t exactly lively when I did. For today’s article, though, we’re not going to consider the etiquette or technique, merely how to make your opportunities mathematically advantageous. Read the rest of this entry »
Some articles need an elaborate introduction, but not this one. Let’s cut straight to the chase:
That is a graph showing the number of plate appearances, by team, given to below-replacement-level hitters last season, with pitchers excluded so as to not penalize the DH-less National League. The hallmark of a good team is the strength of its roster, from stars to regulars to the benchwarmers. It’s worth noting that the Angels, with a roster characterized by a serious imbalance of talent, rank seventh by this measure. It’s also worth noting that the Rays, a club littered with usable bats and arms, rank 28th.
We can create a similar graph for pitchers, using total batters faced rather than plate appearances:
During the 2022 Hall of Fame election cycle, I introduced S-JAWS, an experimental version of my starting pitcher metric, in the service of evaluating candidates on the Golden Days and BBWAA ballots. I promised to return to the topic for a broader look at pitchers from other periods, but before doing so took a littledetour related to the representation rates and demographics of the players elected to the Hall. This larger exploration helps to illustrate the importance of looking at the situation in a new light.
Like JAWS, S-JAWS is a Hall of Fame fitness metric based upon Baseball Reference’s version of WAR, though those shouldn’t be the only factors under consideration in a Hall of Fame case, whether we’re discussing pitchers or position players. They’re nonetheless critical to my analysis, a useful first-cut mechanism to tell me, “Is this a candidate worthy of consideration for a spot on a ballot?” but as I’ve stressed through my annual series and elsewhere, other factors such as awards, postseason play, and historical importance are germane as well. Whether we’re using JAWS or S-JAWS — both of which you can see on the Starting Pitchers page at Baseball Reference — that doesn’t change. In fact, that page now defaults to sorting by S-JAWS, though you can see rankings by JAWS or any other category you choose, whether it’s WAR or innings pitched or ERA+ or some other stat.
Like JAWS, S-JAWS uses an average of a pitcher’s career and peak WAR (best seven seasons at large) for comparisons to the averages of all Hall of Fame pitchers. The idea behind S-JAWS is to reduce the skewing caused by the impact of 19th century and dead-ball era pitchers, some of whom topped 400, 500, or even 600 innings in a season on multiple occasions. The way I’ve chosen to do this is by prorating the peak-component credit for any heavy-workload season to a maximum of 250 innings. I chose 250 because it’s a level that the current and recent BBWAA candidates rarely reached, and only one active pitcher (Justin Verlander) has, albeit by a single inning a decade ago. Over the past 22 162-game seasons — in other words, every one since 1999, save for the pandemic-shortened 2020 campaign — only eight out of 44 league leaders topped 250 innings, with Hall of Famers Roy Halladay, Randy Johnson, and Mike Mussina accounting for five of those eight seasons. Only two of the past 32 league leaders topped 250 inning, Halladay in 2010 and Verlander the following year, and between them they were a grand total of five outs over the threshold. The various emphases on pitch counts, innings limits, and times through the order make it unlikely we’ll see such levels again, at least on a consistent basis, and while we can debate, lament, and discuss whether it’s worth trying to reverse that trend, that’s not my focus here. Given the current trends in the game regarding starting pitcher usage, five or 10 years from now, looking at candidates on a 200- or 225-inning basis might make more sense, but I think this is a reasonable place to start the adjustments (I’ll have a look at a 200-inning basis at some point). Read the rest of this entry »
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Dan Szymborski
