Stetson Allie was undergoing a transformation when he was first featured here at FanGraphs in April 2013. A second-round pick by the Pittsburgh Pirates three years earlier, the burly right-hander was being converting from a pitcher to a position player. Initially, that went well. Allie raked in A-ball, prompting us to feature him again, this time in interview form, in February 2014. As noted in the introduction, he’d morphed into “a corner infielder with plus raw power and a lot of swing-and-miss.”

The pendulum wasn’t done swinging. Much as Allie’s high-octane fastball had been erratic, his ability to make consistent contact was found wanting as he climbed the minor-league ladder. Midway through the 2017 season, Allie — by then in the Los Angeles Dodgers system — was moved back to the mound.

Fast forward to the present day, and Allie is in camp with the Tampa Bay Rays, looking every bit like a viable arm out of a big-league bullpen. In five spring-training appearances, the 6-foot-2, 245-pound flamethrower has tossed five hitless innings, with six punch-outs. The only blemish on his stat line is five free passes. Read the rest of this entry »

Chris Paddack, Emilio Pagán, and Drew Pomeranz are all a big part of the Padres’ plans this season. The latter two promise to play prominent roles in the San Diego bullpen, while Paddack will be counted on to bounce back and further fortify what looks to be a fearsome starting rotation. Here are snapshots from recent conversations with all three, the first of which was prompted by a question from a member of the San Diego media (apologies for not recalling who posed it), and the others coming via inquiries by yours truly.

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Chris Paddack took a step backwards in 2020. Coming off a rookie campaign that saw him log a 3.33 ERA over 26 starts, the 6-foot-4 right-hander struggled to the tune of a 4.73 ERA, and an even-uglier 5.02 FIP. He threw plenty of strikes, issuing just 12 walks over 58 innings, but all too often they got whacked. Looking back, Paddack has a pretty good idea of what led to the crooked numbers.

“Being a taller pitcher on the mound, my biggest success is when I’m north to south,” Paddack said earlier this spring. “Last year I was east to west. I was pulling off. My spin direction was outside of one, for y’all that know the baseball term of that. The axis of the baseball… I was getting two-seam run on my four-seam fastball… So, I [looked at] a lot of video from 2019, and well as 2018 in the minor leagues, really breaking down some of my mechanics on my front side. The term I use is ‘staying grounded as long as I can with my legs,’ and letting my upper body pinpoint a strong direction to whoever it is I’m throwing to that day.”

Per StatCast, Paddack’s four-seam spin rate was 2170 rpm last year, versus 2230 in 2019. His vertical ride decreased by 2.1 inches, while his horizontal increased by 2.2 inches. Velocity-wise, he threw two ticks harder, going from 93.9 mph to 94.1 mph. The 25-year-old Austin, Texas native doesn’t profess to be a pitching-analytics nerd, but he’s clearly begun dipping his feet into those waters. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s a race that currently means nothing because it hasn’t actually begun, but at this writing, the Brewers have inched ahead of the Cardinals in our projected NL Central standings, albeit by a whopping 1.3 wins, 82.1 to 80.9. It’s the kind of thing that happens as we tweak the playing time inputs based upon spring training-related news and updated assumptions, but it’s a reminder that the gap between the two teams — or really, the Central’s top four, including the Cubs (projected for 79.5 wins) and Reds (78.1 wins) — is very small. Any edge could be the difference between snagging a division title or sitting at home in October, particularly given the unlikelihood of the division generating a Wild Card participant.

In that light, the Cardinals’ rotation rates as a moderate concern, at the very least. Last year, the unit entered the season projected as the majors’ 16th best in terms of WAR, but St. Louis soon took significant hits. Just before the pandemic-delayed season got underway, the team lost Miles Mikolas for the year due to a flexor tendon strain that required surgery and Carlos Martinez to a COVID-19 diagnosis after one turn amid a season-halting outbreak, then wound up losing Dakota Hudson to Tommy John surgery late in the year. The Cardinals made the expanded playoffs in spite of their rotation, which tied for 19th in the majors (and placed 11th in the NL) with 3.1 WAR and delivered a 3.86 ERA and 4.55 FIP, with Adam Wainwright as their only starter to deliver more than 0.6 WAR, and that in his age-38 season.

Like the vast majority of teams, the Cardinals appeared as though they would benefit from a dip into the free-agent market for some rotation fortification. Yet they sat on their hands for most of the winter before re-signing Wainwright to a one-year, $8 million deal, and otherwise eschewed any outside help. They kicked the tires on James Paxton, Taijuan Walker, and Jake Odorizzi, but despite saving money elsewhere — particularly by declining Kolten Wong‘s $12.5 million option, cutting Yadier Molina’s salary (from $20 million to $9 million via his new one-year deal), and flat-out stealing Nolan Arenado from the Rockies in exchange for five bodies of varying warmth while getting Colorado to pay the entirety of his $35 million 2021 salary ($20 million of it deferred) — they watched each of those starters sign elsewhere.

And so the Cardinals head into battle with basically the same rotation as before, minus Hudson. The unit is again projected to rank in the middle of the pack, 14th in our Depth Charts at 11.3 WAR. Yet already two starters are dealing with minor injury issues, and it’s tough to ignore all of the various question marks.

Read the rest of this entry »

Most of the time, I don’t like to make predictions. For one thing, they’re hard! The amount of public information out there is borderline overwhelming. Beating the wisdom of the crowd isn’t easy, particularly when the crowd is using fancy models and copious batted ball data to be wise.

The other big problem with making predictions is that they’re usually wrong if they’re bold. That’s the nature of the game — a bold prediction can’t be the majority of the probability mass, or it wouldn’t be bold. How fun can it possibly be to read a list of things that probably won’t happen?

Well, hopefully very fun, because I’m going to make some this week. These aren’t going to be completely wild guesses, of course, because I do have some idea what I’m doing, but I’m not expecting to go 100% on these. If I go two for four, I’ll definitely call that a win. These are merely the synthesis of some observations that I’ve made over the past year or so, sprinkled with a little bit of boldness dust where necessary to make them exciting instead of milquetoast. Read the rest of this entry »

How do projected wins translate into salaries in free agency? That’s a fundamental question that front offices have to answer and, in fact, have had to answer ever since free agency opened up baseball’s labor market after the 1976 season. No, no GM back then was using Wins Above Replacement or fancy-pants computers spitting out ZoRPs or Stonker projections. But decisions are always based on some kind of projection, whether that exercise is explicit or not. When Grizzled Greg the GM went after a player for X hundreds of thousands of dollars after the 1976 season, he was still estimating how the player would play in the future and whether that benefit was worth the cost. Heck, I’ve never made a taco-based projection system. Still, when I see a taco, I’m projecting whether or not the DAR (Deliciousness Above Refrigerator) is worth the dollars that will be debited from my bank account.

Naturally, one of the ways we estimate player salaries has been a linear relationship between dollars and wins above replacement. There’s still a debate over whether player salaries should be treated in this way. Many analysts have argued that the price of wins should not be linear because of the efficiency of getting a lot of wins from a single player. After all, there’s a limit on roster size and utilization; you can’t just sign five one-win first basemen and combined them into a horrifying amalgamation whose twisted, fear-inducing form approximates a Freddie Freeman season. And even if you could, I wager that the MLBPA would file some kind of grievance about players being used for twisted medical experimentation. Well, at least players on the 40-man roster.

Matt Swartz is probably the most prominent advocate for the opposite view, that worrying about whether to add a four-win player instead of a pair of two-win players don’t really come up in the real world all that often. I’ve come to side more strongly with the majority in recent years than I used to, simply because I believe — though I can’t prove it conclusively — that good teams are becoming better at not leaving as many obvious holes. For teams like the Rays, Dodgers, and Padres, as well as other teams that prize serious depth, replacement level is probably higher than replacement level. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Detroit Tigers. Scouting reports were compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as our 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 meaningfully altered begin by telling you so. Each blurb ends with an indication of where the player played in 2020, which in turn likely informed the changes to their report if there were any. As always, we’ve leaned more heavily on sources from outside of a given org than those within for reasons of objectivity. Because outside scouts were not allowed at the alternate sites, we’ve primarily focused on data from there, and the context of that data, in our opinion, reduces how meaningful it is. Lastly, in an effort to more clearly indicate relievers’ anticipated roles, you’ll see two reliever designations, both on team 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.

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about weirdness and whimsy in spring training, the Giants and Cleveland playing an unnecessary bottom of the ninth (without umpires), the 22-pitch plate appearance between Jordan Hicks and Luis Guillorme, Jacob deGrom’s ever-escalating velocity, and two recent research pieces, then preview the 2021 Twins (23:33) with Aaron Gleeman of The Athletic and the 2021 Tigers (59:27) with Evan Woodbery of the MLive Media Group.

Audio intro: Fruit Bats, "The Bottom of It"
Audio interstitial 1: Joel Plaskett, "Catch 22"
Audio interstitial 2: John Frusciante, "Central"
Audio outro: Will Butler, "Finish What I Started"

Link to story about Giants-Cleveland game
Link to Jesse’s Giants-Cleveland Twitter thread
Link to story about 22-pitch PA
Link to RJ McDaniel on the 22-pitch PA
Link to Forman tweet about timing the 22-pitch PA
Link to Russell Carleton on full-count fouls
Link to spring Statcast standouts
Link to story about deGrom’s spring speeds
Link to Matt Kelly on deGrom’s velo in 2020
Link to Travis Sawchik on deGrom’s velo in 2020
Link to Ben on moving the mound back
Link to Rob Mains on the modern TTO penalty
Link to Rob on the TTO penalty in the past
Link to Matt Trueblood’s Twins preview
Link to Aaron on impact Twins rookies
Link to Aaron on the playoff losing streak
Link to Aaron on the closer-less bullpen
Link to Aaron on Cruz
Link to Aaron on Colomé
Link to Aaron on Simmons’s defense
Link to Aaron on a Kirilloff extension
Link to Travis on Garver’s framing
Link to Dan Syzmborski on hitter bust candidates
Link to Evan on the Tigers’ spending
Link to Evan on Baddoo

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It’s the third week of spring training games, and the Orioles have added a new starting third baseman who’s been available since December: Maikel Franco, seven-year big league veteran with Philadelphia and Kansas City. Baltimore’s roster construction has hardly changed in that time, and I doubt Franco and his career 1.03 WAR/600 needed to be humbled out of demanding a hefty multi-year contract. Both parties have known their situations for months, but are only just now finding each other. This is an odd transaction. Let’s try to unpack it.

Maikel Franco: $800K salary, $200K incentives, bonus if traded, parties agree that option can be utilized first few weeks due to late start, MLB deal. #orioles

— Jon Heyman (@JonHeyman) March 16, 2021

It isn’t as though the deal doesn’t make sense. Baltimore’s incumbent at the hot corner is Rio Ruiz, who has gotten a majority of the team’s starts at third base since the O’s claimed him off waivers before the 2019 season and who’s showed some modest fence-clearing ability, hitting 21 homers in 617 plate appearances. But his overall offensive profile is mediocre: His 90 wRC+ in 2020 stands as his career best. At 26, he’s exhausted much of the faith people had in him as a prospect, and his Statcast data doesn’t suggest there’s anything exciting hidden under the surface numbers. Ruiz’s value might top out at less than one WAR, and he entered camp running virtually unopposed for the starting job.

Enter Franco, who signed a change-of-scenery deal with the Royals in 2020 after a disappointing tenure in Philadelphia and turned in his best season in years, hitting .278/.321/.457 with eight homers, a 106 wRC+ and 1.3 WAR. That value placed him ninth among all third basemen, just ahead of peers like Eugenio Suárez and Brian Anderson. The bump in Franco’s production didn’t come from some random explosion in power numbers or a big jump in walk rate, though. He just finally got a normal distribution of balls in play to land for hits.

Read the rest of this entry »

Spring training games get silly quickly. By the time the veterans have hit the showers, it’s time for raw prospects and reclamation projects to duke it out. So unless you’re a Carlos Estévez fan or a Padres loyalist, you probably didn’t see this live:

That home run, hit by Joshua Mears, is the hardest-hit ball of spring training so far — or, it was before a Giancarlo Stanton line drive yesterday that I’m totally ignoring for the purposes of this article. At 117.3 mph, it would have been one of the hardest-hit balls in the entire 2020 season. Laser beam home runs are fun to watch, though it’s a good thing a kid made a backhanded catch, or a reclining couple might have caught a baseball with their bodies.

Even if you didn’t see it live, you might have seen MLB Pipeline tweet about it. Failing that, maybe you read about it on MLB.com. Homers, especially smashed ones that show off Statcast, tend to make the rounds. Home runs are big business, and they get reported as such.

What you almost assuredly don’t know is that the previous inning, someone hit the third-hardest-hit ball of the spring (well, fourth now — thanks, Stanton). Feast your eyes on 115.6 mph of pure… well, pure groundball single to shortstop:

Surprisingly enough, MLB.com didn’t write an article about that one. This won’t be on any highlight reels for the year. And yet, that’s the hardest-hit tracked batted ball of Brendan Rodgers’ career. Given that he’ll be playing in the majors this year and Mears will be on a bus in some city you’ve never heard of, the grounder was more meaningful to this major league season. Read the rest of this entry »