At the beginning of this offseason, Dayton Moore had two goals: sign a starting pitcher and add a middle-of-the-order bat. When Kansas City pounced early in free agency and signed Mike Minor and Michael A. Taylor, the jokes were easy to make. Minor is a decent approximation of a starter, but Taylor a middle-of-the order bat? Surely there was more, right?

There’s more. Yesterday, the Royals signed Carlos Santana to a two-year, $17.5 million dollar deal, with incentives that could add $1 million to the total. Santana is now one of the top three or four hitters in a Royals lineup that feels underpowered, but less so than it did a week ago. He’ll slot in somewhere in the middle of the order (mission accomplished!) and bring his much-walking, much-taking, some-homers game to a lineup light on both (26th in walk rate in 2020, 20th in home runs).

Santana checked in at 41st on our list of the top 50 free agents this offseason. This ranking is no knock on his career production — he’s been a useful hitter for a decade now, and has become an excellent defender at first base. It’s merely the way that baseball works now; bat-first players, particularly those confined to first base, left field, or DH, are a dime a dozen these days. Add that to his age — he’ll turn 35 early in the 2021 season — and Santana looked destined for a deal of roughly this size. Read the rest of this entry »

It doesn’t feel like hyperbole to say one of the most important days in the recent history of the White Sox was Dec. 7, 2016, when they traded Adam Eaton to Washington in return for Lucas Giolito, Reynaldo López, and Dane Dunning. Giolito is now the staff ace and one of the best pitchers in the American League, having compiled 7.1 WAR over the past two seasons. López has been less successful as a back-of-the-rotation arm who hovered just below league average from 2018 to ’19 before falling below replacement level last year, but he’s still provided 4.1 WAR over the last three seasons. Dunning was just shipped out to acquire another right-handed ace in Lance Lynn from the Rangers. A lot of wins can already be credited to the Eaton deal, and more will be added to the ledger by the time all is said and done.

Perhaps it’s cosmically fair, then, that Eaton will now reap the rewards of the roster he played such a key role in rebuilding. NBC Sports Chicago’s Chuck Garfien reported on Tuesday that Eaton will be rejoining the White Sox on a one-year deal, with a team option in place for 2022. The signing comes four years and one day after the team traded him to Washington.

White Sox in agreement with free agent outfielder Adam Eaton, source tells @NBCSChicago. It's a 1-year, $7 million deal with a second year team option for $8.5 million.

— Chuck Garfien (@ChuckGarfien) December 8, 2020

Chicago first acquired Eaton after the 2013 season, in a three-team, six-player deal with the Diamondbacks and Angels that also established new homes for Mark Trumbo, Hector Santiago and the late Tyler Skaggs. Eaton, a former 19th-round pick out of the University of Miami (Ohio), immediately broke out in Chicago’s outfield, compiling 13.5 WAR over three seasons thanks to a .290/.362/.422 line (119 wRC+) and sometimes elite defense. His best season — a 2016 that included a 117 wRC+, 26 defensive runs saved in the outfield, and 5.9 WAR — earned him down-ballot MVP votes, but it came on a White Sox team that finished 78–84, spinning its tires despite the presence of stars like Jose Quintana and Chris Sale. Chicago hit the reset button, and with Eaton coming off a career year and having four years left on his owner-friendly contract extension, he became quite a valuable trade chip.

Eaton seemed like a good fit for a championship-ready Nationals squad with holes to fill in its outfield, but his honeymoon with Washington was short-lived. His 2017 season lasted just 23 games before he tore his ACL running out a ground ball, and he missed two more months in ’18 with bone bruises on his ankle. He finally turned in a full season for the title-winning 2019 Nationals and compiled 2.3 WAR with a 107 wRC+, only to return as a shell of himself in 2020, hitting just .226/.285/.384 (75 wRC+) with four homers in 41 games. He was half a win below replacement level, and Washington declined his $10.5 million team option after the season.

Eaton was able to recoup most of that with his one-year deal in Chicago, which was in need of a starting right fielder after non-tendering Nomar Mazara. Filling that spot in the order was seen as a chance for the White Sox to aim high — George Springer and Marcell Ozuna are potentially transformative bats at the top of the market, while other options like Michael Brantley, Joc Pederson, and Jackie Bradley Jr. rank in the top half of our Top 50 Free Agents list. Craig Edwards’ most recent payroll analysis has the White Sox spending much less than their market size warrants, so the resources to add a big name should be available.

Instead, Chicago opted for a 32-year-old with a modest power ceiling and waning defensive skills coming off the worst season of his career. Eaton had various problems in 2020. He raised his swing rate nearly seven points to the highest mark of his career, resulting in a walk rate of just 6.8%, more than two points below his career average. All of that swinging resulted in a lot of contact — he was in the 91st percentile of baseball in whiff rate — but he still posted his highest strikeout rate since 2015.

When Eaton put the ball in play, he also couldn’t achieve the same luck he has in the past. His ability to leg out bunt and infield singles declined, and a career .335 BABIP plummeted to a .260 mark in 2020. Because Eaton doesn’t hit for much power, his offensive value is sustained by his ability to convert line drives and grounders into singles and to work an above-average rate of walks. When he can’t do that and doesn’t have even average defensive numbers to bolster his case, you’re probably better off calling up someone from Triple-A to take his spot in the lineup.

The White Sox clearly don’t think Eaton has reached that point, likely for a few reasons. He just turned 32 this week, an age that typically means you’re past your prime but not one where you expect production to tank completely. Despite the knee and ankle injuries, Eaton can still run pretty well — he was in the 74th percentile of Statcast’s sprint speed metric this year and up to the 81st percentile the year before, which is pretty close to where he was when he was having his best seasons on defense as well as on the bases. He should avoid challenging Luis Robert to pre-game foot races, but his legs and instincts should still help add value.

His raw tools appear to be holding up in other areas as well. Eaton’s exit velocity in 2020 was down from the previous year, but only by a single mile per hour. He isn’t having trouble catching up to fastballs, as his whiff rate against the hard stuff actually just hit its lowest point since 2014. His line-drive rate has remained steady, as has his distribution of where he’s hitting the ball.

The White Sox, then, are betting that Eaton’s problems are easier to solve than it may appear. If he still runs well, perhaps fixing his defense — where he’s dropped from +27 DRS in 980.1 innings in right in 2016 to -6 DRS in 335 innings in 2020 — could be solved with better positioning, or other subtle tweaks. If his contact skills are still in place, maybe you can salvage his K/BB rates by nudging him back toward his more selective approach of the past. Perhaps there’s a 3-WAR player still here, and it’s just going to take a little elbow grease to bring him back out. The idea of achieving that while reuniting with a former fan favorite might make all that work seem worth it.

Once upon a time, though not too long ago in the grand scheme of things, Matt Wisler was a hot prospect. When he debuted for Atlanta in 2015, he was a top 50 prospect in baseball, the prize of Atlanta’s return for trading Craig Kimbrel to San Diego. He came out slinging, too — he threw eight innings and allowed only one run on the way to his first major league win.

The rest of that season didn’t go according to plan. Though Wisler stuck in Atlanta’s rotation, he struggled to the tune of a 4.71 ERA, 4.93 FIP, and a strikeout rate only 6.7 percentage points higher than his walk rate, one of the worst marks in baseball. 2016 and 2017 didn’t go much better, and by the trade deadline in 2018, Wisler was merely a throw-in, one of three pieces the Braves sent to Cincinnati for Adam Duvall.

You already know the broad story beats of the pitching prospect who falls from grace, but what the heck, I might as well fill them in here. The Reds turned around and traded Wisler back to the Padres, his first professional team, in exchange for Diomar Lopez, a lottery ticket arm. To add insult to injury, the Padres traded Wisler on to Seattle in exchange for the dreaded “cash considerations.” When the Mariners tried to sneak him off their 40-man roster that offseason, the Twins claimed him. Finally, after a year in Minnesota, the team non-tendered him rather than pay him an arbitration salary.

Boy, that sounds rough. Traded for a lottery ticket? Traded for cash? Waived to save a little bit of that aforementioned money? It’s an ignominious end for a once-glamorous prospect. One issue — Wisler isn’t done, at least not yet. Today, he signed a bargain $1.15 million deal with the San Francisco Giants, who will give him one more shot to recapture the form that had him ranked next to luminaries like Rafael Devers, Aaron Nola, and yes, fine, Kevin Plawecki (hey, they aren’t all hits) only five years ago. Read the rest of this entry »

The cruelty of 2020 is unending. Sunday might have been the day that Dick Allen was finally elected to the Hall of Fame, if not for the coronavirus pandemic that forced the Hall’s era-based committees to postpone their vote. Instead, on Monday, we learned that Allen had died at 78 years old after battling cancer.

Allen, who made seven All-Star teams and won the NL Rookie of the Year and AL Most Valuable Player awards during his 15-year career (1963–77), was one of the heaviest hitters in baseball history. Wielding bats weighing 40 ounces or more, Allen led the league in home runs and on-base percentage twice apiece and in slugging percentage three times, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg. In each of the 10 years that he qualified for the batting title, he ranked among the league’s 10 most potent hitters, leading in OPS+ three times, finishing second twice, and placing among the top 10 five more times. His career 156 OPS+ matches those of Willie Mays and Frank Thomas, tied for 14th among players with at least 7,000 plate appearances, but Mays (12,496 PA) and Thomas (10,075 PA) played for far longer than Allen (7,315 PA). The comparative brevity of his career left him with modest hit and home run totals (1,848 of the former, 351 of the latter) that made it easier to downplay the impact of his raw batting line (.292/.378/.534), compiled during a pitcher-friendly era. Hall of Fame voters of all flavors bypassed him more often than not.

Read the rest of this entry »

Looking at the pitchers in the RosterResource Free Agent Tracker and sorting by projected WAR, we see 10 starters with a projection of at least two wins. The group is topped by Trevor Bauer and his 3.8 WAR projection and $100 million contract aspirations. Of the next nine pitchers, six have already signed contracts for next season. Two, Corey Kluber and James Paxton, come with significant injury concerns. That means that for teams in the market for solid production from a starting pitcher next season either need to pony up for Bauer, go after Masahiro Tanaka and his three projected wins, or look elsewhere. The White Sox opted for that last option yesterday when they traded for Lance Lynn, with Joel Sherman, Jeff Passan and Ken Rosenthal reporting on the players involved. Here’s the deal:

White Sox Receive:

• Lance Lynn

Rangers Receive:

• RHP Dane Dunning
• LHP Avery Weems

No matter the metric you use, Lynn has been one of the 10 best pitchers in baseball over the last two years. His 8.3 WAR here at FanGraphs puts him fifth while his 8.6 RA9-WAR is sixth. He’s second at Baseball-Reference with 9.8 WAR. He followed up a fifth-place finish in the 2019 AL Cy Young voting with a sixth-place spot this season. For those more inclined to traditional stats, he’s first in the majors in innings and sixth in strikeouts. For those using Statcast, his xwOBA over the last two seasons is .285 and ranks 15th among the 108 pitchers with at least 2,500 pitches thrown, right behind Walker Buehler, Hyun Jin Ryu, Mike Clevinger, and Charlie Morton, and just ahead of Noah Syndergaard, Shane Bieber, Zack Greinke, Clayton Kershaw, and Yu Darvish. Factoring in innings easily pushes Lynn into the top 10, if not the top five, of pitchers over the last two seasons. 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 Arizona Diamondbacks.

Batters

Intending to compete in 2020, the Diamondbacks spent the first half of the abbreviated season in the hunt for one of the Wild Card spots. Arizona hit their high-water mark the morning of August 19, standing in the thick of the race with a 13-11 record. That’s not to say everything went as planned; the team’s pitching staff had an ERA of 5.17, and the offense ranked in the middle of the pack. But contending is contending, and the projections still looked relatively bullish, with Steamer giving Arizona a 62% chance of making the playoffs and ZiPS a 60% shot. Those prognostications turned out to be very overly-optimistic; the D-backs dropped 11 of their next 12 games, a mortal blow in a season of only 60 games. The result was a club that became an aggressive seller at the deadline. Gone were Archie Bradley, Starling Marte, Robbie Ray, and Andrew Chafin as Arizona signaled a significant rebuild.

The D-backs enters the offseason in a much less commanding position than they did last year. Yes, they have a great deal of payroll flexibility, with an estimated luxury tax number more than $100 million below the penalty threshold. The giant “but” here, however, is that they’re also a team that’s very hard to significantly upgrade, full of middling players but with few stars and few obvious gaping holes. Taking a quick peek at the handy-dandy depth chart graphic, Arizona’s lowest-ranked position is the Carson Kelly/Stephen Vogt combination, projected at 1.2 WAR, mostly due to ZiPS being bearish on the latter player. The Colorado Rockies aren’t likely to actually do much in free agency, but if they did, any free agent they’d sign would likely add more wins to their team than to Arizona’s. Read the rest of this entry »

With Qualifying Offers decisions made, the non-tender deadline at our backs and free agency still just getting started, it’s a good time to check in on every team’s payroll before the offseason reaches full bore. With this year’s 60-game season came a substantial reduction in revenues as well as player pay. How much owners plan to cut team payrolls for next season is uncertain, but substantial reductions are expected. To get a sense of where current major-league payrolls fall, here are our projections from our RosterResource payroll pages:

There are a few things to keep in mind here. First, these figures are salaries for 2021, not the average annual value numbers used for the competitive balance tax payroll, which we’ll get to in a bit. In addition, these figures don’t include buyouts for this past year or next season, which stand at around $40 million total potentially owed as of the end of the season. These numbers do include estimates for arbitration-eligible players, as well as an expected number of minimum-salaried players to make it through a season. They do not include the roughly $2 million per team that will be spent on players on the 40-man roster who aren’t in the majors, or the roughly $15 million per team that will be spent on player benefits. Both of those figures will be included in the competitive balance tax numbers below.

The defending champs top this list by a healthy margin with an expected payroll of roughly $190 million if the season started today; they also seem to be well-equipped for another run next season, as they are about five wins clear of every other team in our Depth Charts. The Dodgers could still conceivably add to their infield, bring Justin Turner back, or add some depth to the rotation or bullpen, but by signing Mookie Betts to a contract extension earlier this year, they ensured the best potential free agent in the game will call Los Angeles home next season. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about MLB’s long-shot attempt to recoup COVID-related losses from its insurance providers, Tomoyuki Sugano getting posted, and why the Phillies’ rebuild has stalled, then (36:45) talk to Sean Gibson, the great-grandson of Hall of Famer and Negro Leagues great Josh Gibson and the executive director of the Josh Gibson Foundation, about his campaign to get MLB’s MVP award renamed after Gibson, how he learned about his great-grandfather’s life, why he decided to devote himself to honoring the legacy of his great-grandfather and the Negro Leagues, common misconceptions about Gibson, Gibson’s skill as a catcher, what-ifs about Gibson’s career, efforts to collect Negro Leagues stats, the centennial of the Negro Leagues, the Gibson Foundation’s programs, and more.

Audio intro: The Mountain Goats, "Insurance Fraud #2"
Audio interstitial: Dan Bern, "Josh Gibson"
Audio outro: Neil Young, "Goodbye Dick"

Link to AP story about MLB suing its insurance providers
Link to Rob Mains on the MLB lawsuit
Link to Craig Calcaterra on the MLB lawsuit
Link to story about minor league lawsuit getting dismissed
Link to FanGraphs international prospect rankings
Link to Wheeler trade rumors
Link to Jeff Passan on the Wheeler trade rumors
Link to Sam Miller on the Phillies’ rebuild
Link to Josh Gibson Foundation website
Link to Sean Gibson’s article for The Undefeated
Link to MVP petition
Link to Pittsburgh Magazine article about Gibson
Link to Pittsburgh Post-Gazette article about Gibson
Link to Ben on MLB reclassifying Negro Leagues stats
Link to Gibson’s Seamheads page
Link to Shakeia Taylor on Dick Allen
Link to Jay Jaffe on Allen

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With no in-person Winter Meetings this year, the FanGraphs crew is getting together on Zoom to see some of our friends across the industry. We’ll enjoy a beverage and discuss a range of baseball-related topics with guests including The Athletic’s Lindsey Adler and Sahadev Sharma, Baseball Prospectus’ Craig Goldstein and Shakeia Taylor, Jake Mintz and Jordan Shusterman of Céspedes Family BBQ, Dennis Wyrick of Rosenhaus Sports, and Emma Baccellieri of Sports Illustrated.

So grab your crispest business casual and your drink of choice, and join us Tuesday at 4:30 PT/7:30 ET on the FanGraphs homepage or on Twitch.

We hope you can make it!

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