Before the 2020 season, the Cincinnati Reds were a team on the rise. For two straight seasons, they’d built for the present, acquiring a dynamic pitching staff and attempting to rebuild their once-potent lineup. 2020 was going to be their year, the last year before Trevor Bauer’s free agency and the first with Mike Moustakas, Nick Castellanos, and Shogo Akiyama in tow.

The year didn’t work out particularly well for them, though. Their pitching was excellent, but the offense sputtered, and they scored a literal zero runs in their two playoff games, one of which went 13 innings. Just like that, the season was over. The team has been busy so far this offseason — they non-tendered Archie Bradley and Brian Goodwin, extended Bauer a Qualifying Offer before seeing him leave, and traded relievers Raisel Iglesias and Robert Stephenson. They’re also reportedly open to dealing Sonny Gray. Is the Reds’ brief run over?

I’m not so sure. Yes, the Reds have gotten worse this offseason. There’s no arguing that. Their Cy Young winner left in free agency (assuming he doesn’t return to Cincinnati, which seems unlikely). They traded their closer to save $8 million. They might be trading one of their other two great starters to save a little more money. That all sounds bad, no doubt.

Heck, though: you can make anything sound bad by describing it that way. The Cubs non-tendered two high draft picks who both contributed in 2020 to save a few bucks. The Cardinals declined an option on Kolten Wong that would have been a bargain — they explicitly stated that it was entirely to lower their payroll commitments for next year. The Brewers didn’t want to pay Corey Knebel, so they sent him to the Dodgers, who very much wanted to pay Corey Knebel. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the World Series Champion Los Angeles Dodgers. 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: Jesus Galiz and Wilman Diaz were added to this list after they agreed to deals with the Dodgers on January 15.

Josh Sborz (previously ranked 39th on this list as a 35+) was traded to the Rangers in exchange for Jhan Zambrano. Sborz will appear on the forthcoming Rangers list. Zambrano sat 86-91 in 2019 and would not have been ranked on the Rangers list.

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for nine years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Detroit Tigers.

Batters

Let’s get the bad news out of the way first: the Tigers are quite clearly the worst team in the AL Central. They may not be the worst team in baseball — the Orioles, Rangers, and Pirates will likely have something to say about that — but the Royals have made enough short-term improvements and Cleveland isn’t selling off fast enough to drop down into Tigers-territory.

But rather than belabor the point (none of this is remotely controversial), we can focus on some of the green shoots that sprouted during the bizarre 2020 season. These developments are extremely important because while Detroit has an array of quality pitching prospects, their lumber doesn’t match up. Where spot-fillers such as Jonathan Schoop, Austin Romine, Jordy Mercer, and C.J. Cron have been useful in recent years when the cupboard was empty, those types aren’t as necessary this time around. There are few possible stars among this group, but there are several guys who are at least interesting, kind of like the O’s and their supply of Quad-A 1B/DH types. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about secret baseball-playing robots and non-secret baseball-rooting robots, how coverage of NFL scoring changes compares to coverage of MLB scoring changes, and Meg’s research about changes in access to minor league games, follow up on the Mets signing James McCann, the Phillies hiring Dave Dombrowski, and the significance of those moves for the Mets, the Phillies, and the free-agent market, and discuss the Cleveland baseball team’s intention to change its name (eventually). Then (1:00:26) they welcome oldest living former big leaguer Eddie Robinson back to the show to discuss his 100th birthday, his new podcast, weathering the pandemic, serving in World War II, his memories of Larry Doby, Whitey Ford, Joe Morgan, Dick Allen, Ned Garver, and Charley Pride, and—with an assist from his wife Bette—the secret to 65 years of marriage.

Audio intro: Charley Pride, "A Whole Lotta Things to Sing About"
Audio interstitial: Florence + The Machine, "100 Years"
Audio outro: Simon & Garfunkel, "Mrs. Robinson"

Link to rooting robots video
Link to NFL scoring info
Link to Craig Edwards on McCann
Link to LeMahieu rumor
Link to Rob Arthur on the slow offseason
Link to Matt Gelb on Dombrowski
Link to Evan Drellich on minor league owners
Link to Meg and Ben Clemens on the minor leagues
Link to New York Times report about Cleveland
Link to Paul Dolan interview
Link to Jeff Passan on Cleveland’s name change
Link to Joe Posnanski on the old name’s origins
Link to Eddie’s podcast
Link to first EW interview episode with Eddie
Link to EW sign-stealing episode with Eddie
Link to EW interview episode with Garver
Link to SI on Charley Pride and baseball
Link to Eddie and Bette at the 1955 World Series
Link to video of Eddie and Bobby Brown
Link to MLB.com on Eddie’s 100th birthday
Link to BP on Eddie’s 100th birthday
Link to Craig Wright on Eddie’s 100th birthday
Link to Pages from Baseball’s Past
Link to Eddie’s autobiography

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Players like David Dahl aren’t supposed to be free agents. He’s a 26-year-old outfielder with an above-average career wRC+, and he’s played just four seasons. He was also a first-round pick with the prospect hype to back that up all the way until his debut. Even though his most recent season was very bad — very, very bad — most years, a team wouldn’t even consider cutting a player like him loose with three years of team control still ahead.

This isn’t most years, though. The Rockies didn’t think the chance that Dahl would bounce back would be worth the meager salary he’d garner in his first arbitration year and elected not to tender him a contract for 2021. It took just nine days for another team to pick up the slack, as late Friday night, the Rangers reportedly signed Dahl to a one-year deal worth $3 million. Because he has only three years and change of service time in the big leagues, you can think of this as a one-year contract with two team options; Texas can keep him through 2023 if it wishes, so long as it picks up his arbitration-year salaries along the way.

That fact boosted the appeal of one of the more head-scratching free-agency cases on the market. Dahl’s 2020 was bad enough — he had a wRC+ of 10 and -0.8 WAR in just 24 games — that a contending team looking to plug a hole in its outfield couldn’t do so by signing him. Any team with playoff aspirations would likely want Dahl to take on a bench role, which would limit him in re-establishing his value. Better would be steady playing time with a rebuilding team, but with so many of those organizations searching for ways to minimize payroll the same way Colorado is, it was unclear who might be willing to pay up.

Enter the Rangers, a fittingly confusing team for a confusing free agent. Texas has been a losing team for four years now, and its road back to contention has always felt rather narrow. Despite this, the Rangers embarked on what Dan Szymborski described as a skinny rebuild — refusing to tear the whole thing down and instead attempting to add modest prospect talent without trading stars while simultaneously spending money on win-now free agents. Some teams, like Milwaukee, have assembled playoff rosters while undergoing similar retoolings. In the case of Texas, the result has been a rotation frighteningly short on depth, a lineup that collectively produced one of the worst seasons ever, and a farm system that doesn’t boast a single prospect in the 55 Future Value tier or higher. All the while, the division around the Rangers is only getting tougher.

Despite the declining product on the field, the last few weeks have seen what looks like a continuation of that strategy. Texas made the obvious sell it needed to, trading Lance Lynn to the White Sox for Dane Dunning and Avery Weems. Then it turned around and traded a Top-100 prospect to Tampa Bay for Nate Lowe. These moves seemingly butt heads in raw buy/sell math, but both fit into a more broad strategy Levi Weaver outlined at The Athletic: Acquire players who are MLB-ready but young enough to still be helping the club when the team’s next crop of prospects mature.

Dahl fits that mold. Despite his years of big league experience, he’s a young player still waiting for his opportunity to break out. It certainly didn’t happen in 2020. He hit .183/.222/.247 with a walk rate on the wrong side of 5% and a strikeout rate approaching 30%. His exit velocity was down nearly three miles per hour from the previous two seasons. He was a poor defender, and he missed time with injuries, just as he has every year of his career. There were just six players in baseball who hurt their teams more than Dahl in 2020, and I’m surprised the number is that high.

If you’re a Rangers fan, you’re probably wondering what the good news is. Fortunately, there are plenty of caveats. This was only a 24-game span we’re talking about, a sample that would take us into the third week of April in a normal regular season. If someone pronounced a player’s career dead after the first 24 games of the year, you would politely shush that person, and maybe urge them to take a walk and get some air.

Dahl’s 24 most recent games also bear little resemblance to his career to that point. He entered 2020 with a career line of .297/.346/.521, a 111 wRC+ and 3.7 WAR. He was a power/speed combo threat who had a knack for posting high batting averages in both the majors and the minors, and he was hardly a liability on defense. In fact, despite center field in Coors being one of the game’s most difficult assignments, both UZR and Statcast’s OAA metric actually prefer Dahl there than in the corners. Prior to 2020, he had done a pretty good job of playing like someone once selected 10th overall in the draft.

But the issues that felled Dahl in 2020 were nothing new. He has always whiffed a lot, and he’s below-average at taking walks. He’s also never stood out much when it comes to Statcast’s exit velocity and hard-hit rate metrics, placing in the 36th percentile in the former and the 51st percentile in the latter in 2019, and those were both career-bests. That isn’t to say Dahl was getting lucky before last year, though his expected numbers do tend to lag behind his actual totals. He just hasn’t shown particularly loud tools to this point.

There’s also the issue of Dahl’s health. He was called up way back in July 2016, opened his big league career with a 17-game hitting streak, and finished the year with a 113 wRC+ in 63 games. Before he could build on that hype the following year, he was diagnosed with a stress reaction in his rib, which caused him to miss the entire 2017 season save for 19 minor league games on rehab assignments. He wouldn’t rejoin the Rockies until late April 2018 and stuck around for only a little more than a month before suffering a broken foot and hitting the shelf for the rest of the year. He managed to log 100 games in 2019 before an ankle sprain once again ended his season prematurely in the first week of August. Following the 2020 season, Dahl elected to receive shoulder surgery, but said he should still be ready for spring training.

It’s difficult to imagine how Dahl’s performance wouldn’t be impacted by such a constant barrage of injuries over these past few years, which is why the Rangers aren’t investing in him because of anything they saw in his horrific 2020 season, or in any of the more successful seasons that preceded it. They’re doing it because they believe none of us have seen what he truly has to offer, and they probably aren’t wrong. Here’s hoping 2021 turns out to be a year of good health — for Dahl, and for all of us.

Going into the offseason, the Mets had a huge hole at catcher, and with Steve Cohen taking over as owner, they also had a lot of money to spend. Those two forces have apparently combined, resulting in free-agent catcher James McCann making his way to New York. Robert Murray indicated a four year-deal was likely two weeks ago, last week Andy Martino reported talks were serious, with Ken Rosenthal reporting the sides were close to a four-year deal. On Sunday, it was Rosenthal who first reported a deal in the range of $40 million, pending physical, with Jeff Passan saying the deal was just over the $40 million mark. But while McCann is certainly an upgrade for the Mets at the position, the deal is curious given the years involved and J.T. Realmuto’s continued availability.

In our Top 50 Free Agents, I ranked McCann 33rd and expected a contract in the range of two years and $14 million; the average crowdsource numbers were in that same ballpark. Over at ESPN, Kiley McDaniel ranked McCann higher at 14th, but expected a modest deal of two years and $21 million, while Keith Law left McCann off his top-40 at The Athletic entirely. In his write-up for us, Jay Jaffe went over McCann’s plusses and minuses:

Quality catchers aren’t easy to come by these days, and for teams that can’t afford to offer a nine-figure deal to Realmuto and are loath to invest in a 38-year-old [Yadier] Molina (or simply aren’t the Cardinals), McCann offers a reasonable alternative. Admittedly, his track record for above-average play isn’t a long one; he was 0.7 wins below replacement as recently as 2018, and netted -0.1 WAR from 2014-18, that while hitting for just a 75 wRC+. Even so, his 3.8 WAR over the past two seasons is tied for fifth among catchers, while his 116 wRC+ is eighth. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2021 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2015 election at SI.com, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. 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.

Wherever Gary Sheffield went, he made noise, both with his bat and his voice. For the better part of two decades, he ranked among the game’s most dangerous hitters, a slugger with a keen batting eye and a penchant for contact that belied his quick, violent swing. For even longer than that, he was one of the game’s most outspoken players, unafraid to speak up when he felt he was being wronged and unwilling to endure a situation that wasn’t to his liking. He was a polarizing player, and hardly one for the faint of heart.

At the plate, Sheffield was viscerally impressive like few others. With his bat twitching back and forth like the tail of a tiger waiting to pounce, he was pure menace in the batter’s box. He won a batting title, launched over 500 home runs — 14 seasons with at least 20 and eight with at least 30 — and put many a third base coach in peril with some of the most terrifying foul balls anyone has ever seen. For as violent as his swing may have been, it was hardly wild; not until his late thirties did he strike out more than 80 times in a season, and in his prime, he walked far more often than he struck out. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for nine years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the San Francisco Giants.

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There have been many unpleasant stories in baseball over the last year, but Mike Yastrzemski’s tale is one of the exceptions. Never really considered a prospect — not even close enough to the fringe for a legendary last name to get him undeserved chances — Yastrzemski had to sweat out his opportunities the old-fashioned way, slowly improving his game in the minors. Hard work can always use a bit of good fortune, and Little Yaz got it when the Orioles traded him to the Giants, a team that has generally needed two or three starting outfielders. The best defensive corner outfielder in the minors in 2017-2018 according to the Gameday-based coordinate system ZiPS uses for minor league defense, he hit enough to earn a starting job in 2019. 2020 saw Yastrzemski get MVP votes, and if there had been an All-Star Game, he likely would have added that accolade as well. There’s a real disagreement between ZiPS and Steamer over just how good he is — ZiPS projects him for a 120 OPS+ while Steamer foresees a more modest 101 wRC+ — but he’s a real major leaguer and one of the few current starters who seems likely to be on the team in a few years.

But what will the Giants look like in a few years? The crystal ball is rather foggy on this point. While San Francisco has been surprisingly competitive the last two seasons, flirting with playoff contention both times, it hasn’t actually been a good team. Ownership not blowing up the entire organization has given the franchise breathing room to improve from the 2017 nadir, but it’s still hard to see a lot of short-term upside. There are more adequate starters in the lineup than a couple of years ago, but the offense remains very, very old. Brandon Belt, Buster Posey, and Brandon Crawford all project to still have their moments, but they’re the past, not the future. Read the rest of this entry »

Last year, as part of the negotiations over a new Professional Baseball Agreement (PBA) with Minor League Baseball, Major League Baseball introduced a proposal that would dramatically reimagine the minor leagues. The proposal included plans to shift the timing of the amateur draft and realign some parent-club affiliations, league geographies, and club levels. Most importantly, it proposed stripping more than 40 clubs of their affiliated status, though it also suggested that some of the newly unaffiliated teams would assume other formats, either as so-called professional partner leagues, or as amateur summer wood bat leagues. The plan got us thinking about how access to in-person baseball across the United States would change. We were interested in how many people would lose their ability to watch affiliated baseball in person, or would see that access shift from the relatively affordable confines of the minor leagues to more expensive major league parks.

Those studies relied on a New York Times list of teams reportedly slated for contraction, as well as Baseball America’s excellent reporting. Thirteen months, a pandemic, and one extremely contentious negotiation later, MLB has informed minor league teams of their proposed fates, with 120 franchises “invited” to be part of the new, MLB-developed minor league system. Many are still reviewing the terms of their “invitations”; several find themselves occupying a new rung on the minor league ladder, or with a different parent club than before.

Meanwhile, 25 clubs find themselves ticketed either for summer wood bat leagues, including the newly formed MLB Draft League, or for pro partner leagues for undrafted players and released minor leaguers. Eighteen teams face futures that are, as of this writing, uncertain, though as Baseball America’s JJ Cooper notes, “Major League Baseball has indicated that it will pay entry fees for these teams that were left out of affiliated baseball to join new leagues. MLB will pay their way in, but as a condition those teams are expected to waive a right to sue.” The complete list of the 43 franchises slated to lose their affiliated status can be found below. Of the 43, 11 are full-season clubs:

Read the rest of this entry »