Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the Blue Jays missing out on DJ LeMahieu and which remaining free agents might be bound for Toronto, follow up on their previous discussion about bagged milk and tax implications for free agency, marvel at LeMahieu’s unique invulnerability to the shift and his unlikely career trajectory, and examine his fit and future with the Yankees. Then they break down MLB’s hiring of Theo Epstein as a consultant regarding on-field matters (touching on Epstein’s potential as a savior of the sport, the obstacles he faces, what his future might hold, and more) and answer a listener email about attending games alone.

Audio intro: The Beatles, "Blue Jay Way"
Audio outro: Eliza, "Alone & Unafraid"

Link to Sportsnet on the Jays missing out again
Link to Happ on bagged milk
Link to bagged milk explainer
Link to Petriello on Lemahieu and shifts
Link to 2017 outfield shift against LeMahieu
Link to Jay Jaffe on LeMahieu re-signing
Link to Jay on LeMahieu and Yankee Stadium
Link to 2020 wOBA-xwOBA leaderboard
Link to Jeff on LeMahieu on 2018
Link to Jeff on LeMahieu and Jeter
Link to Theo Epstein press release
Link to Sahadev Sharma on Theo’s new job
Link to Joe Posnanski on Theo
Link to Theo on his hiring practices
Link to Tango on walks and the strike zone
Link to Craig Edwards on making baseball better

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The staredown is over, and the first of this winter’s top-tier free agents has signed. Per ESPN’s Jeff Passan, the Yankees are finalizing a six-year, $90 million deal to bring back DJ LeMahieu, who over the past two seasons has been one of the game’s top hitters and most valuable players.

That outcome — a surprise given his latter-day performances with the Rockies — has a whole lot to do with the way the now-32-year-old infielder adapted to the Bronx, to such an extent that “The Machine” likely has more value to the Yankees than to any other team. Even so, this is a comparatively reasonable deal that fits the Yankees well, as its lower average annual value will aid the team when it comes to the Competitive Balance Tax. At the same time, from a dollars-and-wins standpoint, it may not bode tremendously well for this winter’s other top free agents.

When the Yankees signed LeMahieu to a two-year, $24 million deal, he was coming off a tepid 91 wRC+ over the final two seasons of his seven-year run in Colorado. Even so, his glovework had boosted his value to 4.1 WAR in that span, giving him a reasonable floor, and our own Jeff Sullivan saw his high contact rate, right-handedness, ability to hit to the opposite field, and modest pop as reminiscent of one Derek Jeter. Due to a slew of injuries, the Yankees leaned upon LeMahieu more than most observers expected, and between his defensive versatility and indeed, his ability to go oppo with his fly balls — thereby taking advantage of Yankee Stadium’s short right field porch — he emerged as one of the toughest outs in the league.

LeMahieu, who had reached double digits in home runs just twice with the Rockies and topped out at 15 in 2018, hit a major league-high 16 opposite field homers at home in 2019-20 (out of 36 total) while continuing to pull enough groundballs hard enough to put up eye-opening numbers. After batting .327/.375/.518 (136 wRC+) with 5.4 WAR in 2019, he hit a sizzling .364/.421/.590 in ’20. His batting average in the latter season made him the first modern player to win batting titles in both leagues; Ed Delahanty won the NL in 1899, and the AL in 1902, his last full season before going over Niagara Falls. Read the rest of this entry »

The Giants continued to remake their starting rotation this week, signing former Dodgers swingman Alex Wood to a one-year, $3 million contract. Wood’s low salary reflects the fact that he’s struggled over the last two seasons, accumulating -0.2 WAR in 48 1/3 innings, courtesy of a bleak 6.02 FIP. The catch is that he was not truly healthy in either campaign, missing much of 2019 with back issues and a chunk of ’20 with shoulder inflammation. While he’s never been the picture of perfect health — he hasn’t qualified for an ERA title since 2015 — he was a key contributor to the Braves and the Dodgers, and before his disappointing 2019, his worst FIP over a season was 3.69 in ’15, a number many pitchers would be delighted to hit.

Similar to about 27 or 28 teams in baseball, San Francisco hasn’t made a splash this winter, but there’s been a real push to improve the starting pitching. Back when the Giants were winning a World Series every other season, a large part of the foundation was young, team-developed pitching. Few teams could match the accomplishment of producing Matt Cain, Tim Lincecum, and Madison Bumgarner over a rather short period of time. But since the team’s collapse in 2017, a year in which the Giants just barely avoided their second 100-loss year in franchise history, the rotation has been one of the worst in the league, ranking 25th in WAR. Any sort of magic at creating young aces seems to have dissipated, with a long list of names — Kyle Crick, Keury Mella, Tyler Beede, Ty Blach, Clayton Blackburn — failing to make an impact.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, the Phillies’ disastrous bullpen was a major reason why they missed out on the playoffs for the ninth consecutive season. If you go back to 1969 — the year MLB lowered the mound — the 2020 Phillies bullpen posted the absolute worst league-adjusted ERA in a single season. By FIP, they were only a little better, landing 16th worst among 1,438 team seasons. Upgrading the bullpen had to be a significant focus of their new front office tandem, president of baseball operations Dave Dombrowski and general manager Sam Fuld.

Their problems were numerous, but the Phillies’ relief corps suffered from a significant lack of gas in 2020. Their relievers threw the second lowest rate of fastballs thrown over 95 miles per hour in 2020. Indeed, just 10.5% of them reached that threshold. To address this dearth of heat, the Phillies have added a bunch of relievers who throw extremely hard fastballs. Just before the calendar flipped to 2021, they added José Alvarado in a three-way trade with the Rays and Dodgers — Alvarado’s fastball averages 97.7 miles per hour. Then a week ago, they acquired Sam Coonrod from the Giants — his heater comes in even faster at 98.7 mph. And yesterday, they added a third hard-throwing reliever to their bullpen, signing Archie Bradley to a one-year, $6 million contract. Adding elite fastball velocity won’t be a panacea for all their woes, but it should help.

Bradley’s fastball is the slowest of the bunch, averaging 94.4 mph in 2020. That’s actually a point of concern. It was the lowest average velocity for his four-seamer since he transitioned to the bullpen full-time in 2017.

Despite the drop in velocity, Bradley posted the best FIP of his career last season. His strikeout rate dipped a bit, from 27.4% to 24.7%, but he also slashed his walk rate to just 4.1%. In 2019, he had survived as the Diamondbacks closer with a 11.4% walk rate. During that season, his rate of pitches thrown in the zone dipped below league average for the first time as a reliever. He reversed that trend in 2020, getting his zone rate just above league average.

That dip in strikeout rate is just as concerning as his lower velocity. His fastball’s whiff rate was right in line with where it had been in years past. The biggest change for him in 2020 was the number of swinging strikes he was getting on his curveball. The whiff rate on his bender dropped from 30.5% to just 16.7%. Like his fastball, his curveball lost velocity last year, dropping down to 80 mph on average. It’s possible that lost velocity affected the effectiveness of the pitch enough to cause batters to spit on it more often. Now, he did record the highest rate of called and swinging strikes of his career in 2020, so it’s also possible that his falling strikeout rate was simply poor sample size luck.

The only reason why his overall swinging strike rate didn’t budge all that much in 2020 was because of his changeup. That third pitch had been a part of his repertoire back when he was a starter but it was inconsistent and he often lost his feel for it. He brought it back in 2019 with some success and increased his usage of it to 11.6% last year. He threw just 32 changeups in 2020, but its 38.9% whiff rate would have ranked 18th among all changeups thrown at least 100 times during the season.

Beyond his downward sloped strikeout and walk rates, Bradley worked through some odd results when opposing batters put his pitches in play. He induced the lowest hard hit rate of his career while also allowing the highest barrel rate of his career. His expected wOBA on contact of .370 was just a hair below league average so those additional barreled balls didn’t do much damage — he allowed just a single home run in 2020. His groundball rate had consistently been above league average throughout his career but it dipped below average for the first time in 2020. He threaded a very narrow needle by allowing more contact in the air, even though it was a little weaker contact overall, all while pitching in the zone more often with a fastball that was thrown a little less hard.

It was a bit of a surprise that Bradley was available as a free agent at all. He was entering his final year of arbitration and had pitched decently enough for the Reds after they acquired him at the trade deadline. But with all these red flags and concerning trends, you can see why they decided to non-tender him. He ended up getting a contract around his estimated arbitration salary anyway. If he can find that lost velocity on his fastball and curveball and continue to refine his changeup, he should be a stabilizing presence for the Phillies bullpen.

Simply based on his track record, Bradley will likely enter the season with at least a job-share in the ninth inning with Héctor Neris. Like every other Phillies reliever last year, Neris had his own problems and lost his handle on the closing duties when Brandon Workman was brought in. Between Bradley, Neris, and Alvarado, they’ll have plenty of options should any of them falter during the season. But there are enough question marks between the three of them that the Phillies should probably be in the market for another reliever, just in case.

Earlier this week, Ken Rosenthal reported that owners are unlikely to pursue expansion plans in the near future. At first, that sounds strange. Why would owners who are experiencing a cash crunch turn down a quick cash infusion, reportedly nearly $70 million per team? As it turns out, the math is straightforward. Let’s talk about perpetual cash flows, debt equivalence, and other fun stuff like that.

Per Rosenthal’s reporting, owners would stand to make an aggregate $2 billion from expansion fees, or $1 billion per new team. Split 30 ways, that amounts to $66.7 million per team, which would go a long way for clubs who are acting phenomenally cash-light. In exchange, however, they’d give up a small share of a lucrative enterprise that makes owning a baseball team a cash cow.

Again per Rosenthal, the league projected to make $2.4 billion in central revenue in 2020 before the pandemic laughed in the face of advance planning. Central revenue is everything generated by MLB rather than by individual teams — national TV contracts, national sponsorships, streaming revenue, consumer product sales, and assorted other line items, with TV contracts comprising the lion’s share of the money.

That works out to $80 million per team, and adding two teams to the mix would dilute teams’ share of the pie. With 32 teams, each team would only get $75 million in central revenue per year. That might not sound like much — $5 million over time weighed against $67 million in cold hard cash right now — but big enterprises like baseball teams don’t need to act to maximize their liquidity. They instead seek to maximize net present value, which is a financially stylized way to consider the value today of money you might receive in the distant future.

This is going to get annoyingly math-y, but I’ll try to keep it in somewhat relatable terms, so bear with me. Say your friend offers you the choice of $100 today or $200 in a year. Presumably, you’d prefer the $200 — it’s twice as much money! Things get trickier, however, if it’s a choice between $100 today or $110 in a year, or between $100 today and $200 in 20 years. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Minnesota Twins. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as my own observations. As there was no minor league season in 2020, there are some instances where no new information was gleaned about a player. Players whose write-ups have not been altered begin by telling you so. For the others, the blurb ends with an indication of where the player played in 2020, which in turn likely informed the changes to their report. As always, I’ve leaned more heavily on sources from outside the org than within for reasons of objectivity. Because outside scouts were not allowed at the alternate sites, I’ve primarily focused on data from there. Lastly, in effort to more clearly indicate relievers’ anticipated roles, you’ll see two reliever designations, both in lists and on The Board: MIRP, or multi-inning relief pitcher, and SIRP, or single-inning relief pitcher.

For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of our prospect content is governed, you can click here. For further explanation of Future Value’s merits and drawbacks, read Future Value.

All of the numbered prospects here also appear on The Board, a resource the site offers featuring sortable scouting information for every organization. It can be found here.

Editor’s Note: Danny De Andrade was added to this list after he agreed to a deal with the Twins on January 15.
Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 905

On this episode of FanGraphs Audio, the crew talks to a former Dodger about pitching and podcasting before taking time to remember one of the most iconic Dodgers of all.

• To kick things off, David Laurila welcomes Ross Stripling to the show. On top of being a major league pitcher, Stripling is the co-host of the Big Swing Podcast. He and David talk about what it’s like to be in the interviewer’s shoes, some playoff football picks, and how Stripling prepares for facing some of his toughest opponents at the plate — including Mike Trout. [2:09]
• Following that, Jay Jaffe is joined by Jon Weisman to discuss the late Tommy Lasorda. Both Jay and Jon recently wrote about the Hall of Famer’s passing. They reflect on what it was like to watch his storied and complicated career, from Frank Sinatra to Fantasy Island. [23:12]

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On Tuesday, Liam Hendriks signed a contract with the Chicago White Sox that will pay him $54 million. Craig Edwards covered the signing, and Tony Wolfe took a look at the South Siders’ new bullpen, which is now one of the best in baseball. But there was something confusing about Hendriks’ contract. It will pay him $54 million, but how many years he’ll play to earn that money isn’t yet set.

A quick overview: over the first three years of his deal, Hendriks will receive $39 million. After that third year, the White Sox have a team option to bring him back for a fourth year with a $15 million salary. If they don’t want to pay him for that year, they can pay him a buyout instead, a common structure in contracts with team options. Here’s the rub: that buyout is for $15 million, the same amount as the option salary. It’s deferred over multiple years, so it isn’t exactly the same, but Hendriks will get $54 million in cash, and he’ll do so whether he plays for the Sox for three or four years.

Why design such a strange tax structure? It’s in pursuit of one of the oldest American pastimes — tax avoidance. Let’s quickly walk through how Hendriks’ contract works in Chicago’s favor, and take a quick jaunt through other contract structures while we’re at it.

When the league came up with the CBT, they put some thought into working around loopholes. Consider, for example, a team who has plenty of room under the tax level in 2021 but projects to go near it in 2022. Now imagine that they sign Trevor Bauer to a two-year, $80 million deal. If they paid him $40 million in each year, it would look like this:

Assuming a tax threshold of $210 million, they’d be $30 million under the line in ‘21 and $20 million over in ‘22. Why not, then, pay Bauer $60 million in year one and $20 million the next year?

Why not? Because the league doesn’t fall for that nonsense. For the purposes of the CBT, salaries are spread out evenly across the term of the deal. Design wild roller-coasters all you want; a two-year deal for $80 million will count for $40 million each year, no matter when the actual checks go out.

Next, let’s consider a different way around the tax, and a different way the league closed that loophole. Consider a team going for it this year. They’re right up against the tax in this hypothetical world, and they’d prefer not to pay it. Instead, they offer a different deal, this time to a hypothetical closer. In year one, he’ll receive $10 million. Year two is a team option with a salary of $30 million. Should the team decline the option, they’ll pay a $10 million buyout.

One of two things will happen: either our closer will make $40 million for two years of service, or he’ll make $20 million for one year. That feels like a reasonable contract for both sides — and if the league didn’t look too hard at it, they might give the team a tax number of only $10 million in year one.

Let’s make it more absurd, though. What about a one-year deal for $5 million, with a team option for a second year at $60 million and a $15 million buyout. Now the team will certainly pay the buyout. Our pitcher still gets his $20 million over one year. Would anyone think that’s really only a $5 million salary in year one, though?

The league doesn’t. Buyouts of team options are treated as part of the total salary paid in guaranteed years. What does that mean? Let’s take a look at Ronald Acuña Jr.’s contract to explain it. His contract looks like this:

That’s $90 million over eight years. After that, there are two team options, the second of which we’ll ignore (given that it only kicks in if the team exercises the first one, CBT math ignores it). The first team option is for $17 million, with a $10 million buyout. That brings the total guaranteed money in the deal to $100 million over eight years — $90 million in salary plus the buyout. What’s Acuña’s CBT number in each year? $12.5 million, or $100 million split evenly over eight years.

Should the Braves exercise Acuña’s option, they’ll pay him $17 million in 2027, but $10 million of that will already have counted against their tax numbers in previous years. How does that hit the salary cap? The league has left it purposely ambiguous, but one interpretation is that the tax number will be lower to account for that previous hit. In Acuña’s case, he has another $10 million buyout the next year, so it’s hardly a lock, but we’re just using him as an example. Again, we don’t know exactly how the league accounts for buyouts — but in my mind, there’s a decent chance that having the cost of the buyout on previous years’ CBT numbers decreases the number the league uses in the option year.

With that explanation out of the way, let’s get back to Hendriks. He’s due $39 million over three years, an average of $13 million per year. After that, there’s his buyout, which also counts against the tax. It’s for $15 million deferred over time. The league discounts deferrals slightly, and without getting into the exact math there, let’s assume that they treat Hendriks’ buyout as worth $13 million in present-day terms. That means he’s due $52 million over three years for the purposes of the tax.

Should he remain with the team for a fourth year, the deal has only $2 million in “new money” — the difference in value between a deferred and present-day $15 million. That makes for big tax numbers in the first three years — roughly $17 million per year — and a minuscule $2 million hit in the fourth year. Again, I’m not certain that this is how options are treated — but it’s a reasonable guess, at the very least, and one of the best reasons I can see for structuring a contract in such a strange way.

Why would a team want to do this? The Sox are no dummies. They’re nowhere near the CBT threshold in 2021 — they check in around $160 million even after Hendriks’ contract. Will they be so far below the threshold in three years? It’s far less clear! Lucas Giolito will need a new contract by then. Nick Madrigal, Dylan Cease, Michael Kopech, and Codi Heuer, just to name a few, will be in their arbitration years. If they’re planning on keeping Lance Lynn, he’ll surely earn more than this year’s $9.3 million salary.

By taking a bigger tax hit now, the White Sox are setting themselves up to avoid paying taxes in the future. Are they actually considering declining the option? Almost certainly not. Why would they? Short of Hendriks being out for the season with an injury, they’ll keep him, because the difference between $15 million now and $15 million over 10 years simply isn’t much in the grand scope of things.

One thing worth monitoring: I’m not actually sure if the league is going to allow this nonsense. I feel reasonably confident that they wouldn’t have allowed a $15 million team option with a $15 million buyout if there were no deferrals involved. Even including that fig leaf, I don’t think there’s much confusion about what’s going on here. The league can treat vesting options that are very likely to be triggered as guaranteed, and it wouldn’t shock me if they did that here. For now, though, it sounds like Hendriks’ contract counts as $54 million over three years in the eyes of the tax man.

In other words, Hendriks signed a four-year, $54 million dollar contract this week. It won’t be reported the same way everywhere — it’s a complex contract, after all. At the end of the day, however, the White Sox wanted to pay Hendriks $54 million to secure his services for the next four years. They did just that — with a little financial chicanery thrown in for good measure.

It’s impressive that Pedro Báez stuck around the Dodgers for as long as he did. Think about how long the organization has been overflowing with arms — all the pitchers like Kenta Maeda, Ross Stripling and Julio Urías who would have been mid-rotation starters on plenty of good teams but often got relegated to the bullpen in Los Angeles, or the ones like Victor Gonzalez who are always sprouting from their minor leagues, or guys like Tony Cingrani and Dylan Floro whom they would trade for and then make great. Even when injuries are ravaging the team, as has been the case the last few seasons, a job pitching for the Dodgers is never earned easily. Yet for seven years, Báez did.

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