It feels like a long time ago that the Oakland A’s won the AL West. Partially, that’s because everything feels like it lasted forever in 2020 — the last year has been the longest decade of our lives. Partially too, though, it’s because the team has spent the vast majority of the offseason doing nothing.

Marcus Semien, Liam Hendriks, Joakim Soria, Yusmeiro Petit, Mike Minor, and Tommy La Stella all left in free agency. On Saturday, the A’s made their first major transaction of the offseason, trading Khris Davis and Jonah Heim for Elvis Andrus. Later that day, they issued their first (!) major league contract of the offseason, signing Mike Fiers to a one-year, $3.5 million deal, as Ken Rosenthal and Alex Coffey first reported.

Fiers was an important but unsung part of a run-prevention monster in 2020. He made 11 starts for the A’s, who reached the playoffs on the back of a simple strategy: prevent some runs with starting pitching, hold some leads with a phenomenal bullpen, and sprinkle excellent defense around it to make it all play up. Fiers wasn’t an ace, and he didn’t need to be.

That appears to be Oakland’s plan again this year. Their projected rotation is close to unchanged (Minor started a handful of games, but the other five top starters are all back):

Fiers will be the worst everyday starter, like he was last year, but he’ll take the ball every five days, and the A’s would have struggled on that front otherwise. Daulton Jefferies, A.J. Puk, and Grant Holmes are the next three starters up, and all have had serious injury issues in the past few years; the team will likely want to limit all of their innings this year. Read the rest of this entry »

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Amidst the blizzard of free agent deals announced last Friday, Jonathan Schoop re-signed with the Detroit Tigers. It’s a one-year deal worth $4.5 million per Jeff Passan and, as far as I can glean, there are no performance incentives.

The second baseman is coming off of a productive 2020, when he hit .278/.324/.475 (114 wRC+) while racking up 1.4 WAR in just 44 games. Despite that, his salary for the upcoming year is actually a small cut from the $6.1 million contract he signed last winter, though he’ll wind up earning more money in 2021 than the prorated earnings he accrued in last year’s shortened season.

You probably haven’t thought all that much about Schoop lately. If he wasn’t on your fantasy squad or real-life team of choice, you may have a vague impression of him as a once-promising Oriole who gradually faded into irrelevance. At a glance, that’s about right. He had a breakout campaign as a 25-year-old back in 2017, when he made the All-Star team, notched 3.7 WAR, homered 32 times, and posted career highs in just about every offensive category. A slow start the following year spiraled into a miserable summer after a mid-season trade to Milwaukee. Minnesota picked him up for 2019, where he played a competent if forgettable second base before ultimately losing his job to Luis Arraez. Soon after, he signed on with the Tigers and all of the obscurity that that implies. Read the rest of this entry »

It was bound to happen once the odds shifted in favor of baseball starting on time, but the offseason has ramped up quickly over the last week. Some of the top free agents have come off the board, and a five-player trade, some smaller signings and all sorts of 40-man roster shuffling took place. Buried among it all was a quick move by the Cardinals on Thursday, as they sent outfielder Dexter Fowler to the Angels per Jon Heyman, with St. Louis picking up all but $1.75 million of his 2021 salary.

It’s not a transaction that really moves the needle for either team in terms of the standings. And it’s not a transaction that creates any kind of real financial flexibility for future moves. Instead, this is a deal that illustrates how one player may fall on different points on the insurance vs. opportunity spectrum depending on which uniform he’s suiting up in.

I’m not here to argue that Dexter Fowler is that good now. He wasn’t a star necessarily, but he spent a nice-sized chunk of the last decade firmly in the “very good” category. He got on base and had some sneaky pop, and from 2011-17 averaged a .370 OBP with an .800-plus OPS and a 116 wRC+. And while he was certainly athletic enough to be a good center fielder, but he’s never been a good defender. His jumps and routes have always been substandard, and his habit of catching the ball at his chest has driven fundamentals-focused coaches insane for 13 years now, though he at least does tend to catch it. I remember Fowler’s 2014 campaign with the Astros and how I’d wince every time the ball was hit his way. I’d hoped to find a video to illustrate this tendency, and it didn’t take long. I thought I might need to go through a few videos from MLB’s vault to uncover a good example, but it was right there in the first video provided, his last putout of the 2020 season.

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Garrett Richards has an uncanny ability to spin a baseball. Per Statcast, the 32-year-old right-hander — recently signed to a free-agent contract by the Boston Red Sox — was 99th percentile in curveball spin last year, while his four-seam spin ranked in the 97th percentile. Moreover, the most-effective weapon in his arsenal, a 2,746-RPM slider, was topped only by Sergio Romo’s 2,913 RPMs among hurlers who threw the pitch at least 200 times.

Richards’s least-effective offering in 2020 was a two-seamer that’s hard to put a positive spin on. The erstwhile San Diego Padre threw 66 of them, and the ones that were put into play tended to get punished. Opposing hitters whacked them to a tune of a .467 batting average and an .867 slugging percentage. And it was even worse in 2019. While a 28-pitch sample obviously needs to be taken with a huge grain of salt, numbers like .500 and .875 stand out like a sore thumb. I asked Richards about his plans going forward, anticipating that the pitch might be going into mothballs.

Au contraire.

“It’s definitely not a pitch that I’m not going to throw,” said Richards. “I’ve always been able to cut the ball to both sides of the plate, but it’s nice to have something moving in the other direction. I need to get it back to sinking, or even having some more arm-side run. Come spring training, I’ll be back on the mound, trying to figure it out.” Read the rest of this entry »

Just as the baseball industry was catching its breath following the news of Trevor Bauer signing with the Dodgers, the free agent market’s top hitter, Marcell Ozuna, agreed to a deal as well. After a monster season in which he helped the Braves come within one win of their first trip to the World Series this millennium, he’ll stay in Atlanta on a four-year, $65 million deal. If that contract — which includes a club option for 2025 that can take the total package to $80 million — seems light compared to what the free market’s other top players have received, your eyes aren’t deceiving you.

Consider for a moment that Bauer, a 30-year-old righty who won the NL Cy Young award during the pandemic-shortened 2020 season, has yet to put together a 30-start season with an ERA or FIP below 4.00 in parts of nine major league seasons, during which he’s been about nine or 10 percent better than average according to FIP- and ERA-. Via the structure of his three-year, $102 million deal with the Dodgers, he’ll set single-season records for salary in the first two years ($40 million and $45 million), with an average annual value of $34 million if he doesn’t opt out after years one or two.

The 30-year-old Ozuna is coming off the best season of an eight-year major league career during which he’s been 17 percent better than average according to wRC+. In 2020, he set across-the-board career highs in his slash stats, hitting .338/.431/.636, all of which ranked third in the NL, as did his 179 wRC+. Additionally, his 18 homers, 56 RBI, 145 total bases and 267 plate appearances all led the league, while his 2.5 WAR — which matched that of Bauer, interestingly enough — ranked seventh. Yet the $16.25 million AAV of his contract isn’t half that of Bauer, and it’s well below those of two of the four other position player free agents who have landed deals of at least four years:

Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the latest developments for their minor league free agent draft teams, then discuss the Dodgers signing reigning NL Cy Young Award winner Trevor Bauer to an unexpected and unusually structured record contract, touching on the good and bad of Bauer, the incredible Dodgers-Padres arms race, and much more. Then (39:04) they draft their favorite responses to a recent viral tweet about the best, worst, and weirdest beliefs about baseball.

Audio intro: Someone Still Loves You Boris Yeltsin, "Trevor Forever"
Audio outro: T. Rex, "Dandy in the Underworld"

Link to Ben Clemens on the Bauer signing
Link to Bauer’s announcement video
Link to Bradford Doolittle on Bauer
Link to Sarah Griffin’s tweet
Link to article about Dandy

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The top free agent pitcher in baseball is no longer a free agent. After an interminable PR tour, Trevor Bauer has signed with the Los Angeles Dodgers, as Jon Heyman first reported. The deal, a three-year, $102 million pact with opt outs after each year, bolsters an already-stout Dodgers rotation and ups the NL West arms race after the Padres’ busy offseason.

It would hardly be honest to write about Bauer without mentioning who he is as a person, so let’s do that first. For lack of a better way to say it, he’s a jerk, a troll. That’s not harsh enough, but it points in the right direction. “Troll” undersells it: time and again, Bauer has stepped up to the line and then gone past it, lashing out and inducing his fans to harass someone before acting shocked at the fallout, claiming innocence.

I won’t detail each individual incident, but suffice it to say that this goes beyond your typical Twitter sniping. The pattern is shockingly similar each time: Bauer takes offense at some perceived slight on social media, berates and otherwise insults the source of that slight (sometimes at great length), and then with a quote tweet, points his fans and followers in the woman’s direction (and it’s almost always a woman), who then proceed to harass her.

Eventually, Bauer issues a banal non-apology about how he never intended to harm anyone and doesn’t believe he did anything wrong, despite the glib falsity of that statement. This isn’t an isolated incident, a poor decision made in his rash youth. It’s a pattern, and a well-documented one.

I’m not here to legislate how you feel about that. I’ll simply invite you to consider how it feels to root for someone who repeatedly takes advantage of his popularity and power to make life worse for people without those things; how it feels to be one of those people. For the remainder of this article, though, I’m going to talk about what this means on the field, on the days where Bauer is pitching, though that hasn’t always been without conflict either. Read the rest of this entry »

2:00	Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon and welcome to today’s chat — the first time I’ve gone back-to-back weeks with a chat since… September! Some housekeeping while we wait for the queue to fill…

2:01	Jay Jaffe: On Monday I published my latest five-year outlook for the Hall of Fame voting https://blogs.fangraphs.com/changing-times-the-next-five-years-of-bbwa…

2:02	Jay Jaffe: And then yesterday and today I published a two-part series on the remaining free agents with spring training less than two weeks away. Here are the position players https://blogs.fangraphs.com/still-on-the-shelves-part-i-top-remaining-…

2:02	Jay Jaffe: And here are the pitchers https://blogs.fangraphs.com/still-on-the-shelves-part-2-top-remaining-…

2:02	Jay Jaffe: Seems quite possible it could go down while we’re in this chat. We’ve all got one eye on it

Read the rest of this entry »

After sitting idly by for most of the winter, the Phillies suddenly sprung into action last week. They finally got their long-term deal done with J.T. Realmuto, emphatically answering one the biggest lingering questions of their offseason. They re-signed Didi Gregorius, addressing another major area of need at shortstop. But those moves overshadowed two smaller ones aimed at shoring up the back of their starting rotation, with Philadelphia signing Matt Moore to a one-year, $3 million deal with additional performance bonuses last Friday, then adding Chase Anderson on Thursday on a one-year contract worth a guaranteed $4 million. It’s no secret that many teams are worried about the workload of their pitching staffs after the abbreviated season last year, and a number have already committed to using six-man rotations to lighten the load on their starters. It appears the Phillies could be pursuing a similar strategy.

With Aaron Nola and Zack Wheeler leading the way, the Phillies’ rotation was actually a strength in 2020. That duo accumulated a combined four WAR last year, and both are returning for 2021. Zach Eflin’s revamped curveball, meanwhile, translated into a breakout season for the 26-year-old, making him a solid mid-rotation starter if those adjustments hold.

But the rest of the starting five is filled with question marks. Jake Arrieta’s three-year deal expired this offseason, so he’s out of the picture. Vince Velasquez continued to be an unpredictable enigma, posting an ugly 5.56 ERA that far outpaced his 4.16 FIP. Top pitching prospect Spencer Howard made his MLB debut in 2020, but it was an experience he’d like to forget. Poor conditioning and the delayed start to the year sapped him of his stamina during the season, with his fastball velocity noticeably dropping as the innings wore on in each of his starts. With two shoulder injuries in his recent past, it’s hard to say what to expect from Howard in 2021.

So while neither Moore or Anderson are projected to be better than back-end starters at best, they do give the Phillies some options when filling out their rotation.

Read the rest of this entry »