12:03

Dan Szymborski: It is a chat.

12:05

Dan Szymborski: No idea where, but I imagine we’re now at the verge of looking at 1 year deals, probably under $10 million

12:06

Dan Szymborski: I use unsupervised learning in awards model and my still experimental Hall model, but I mostly use more traditional techniques with ZiPS itself.

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It’s no secret that strikeouts are at an all-time high. Nor is it a secret that not every strikeout is “just another out.” Balls in play can advance baserunners, and that’s especially important when the 90 feet being traversed is from third to home. What fan, or manager, doesn’t bemoan one of the team’s hitters going down by way of the K with a man on third and less than two out? It’s an opportunity wasted, one that often leads to a squander.

Save for the rare occasions when a batter reaches on a wild pitch or a passed ball, a strikeout is also a guaranteed out. Making contact — even weak contact — at least gives you a chance. While last year’s .292 BABIP was baseball’s lowest in nearly three decades, that’s still markedly better than than the infinitesimal odds of taking first base on a punch-out. Moreover, fielders make errors. In short, contact matters.

Given MLB’s ever-increasing strikeout rate, I asked six managers a simple, straightforward question: Is the ability to hit with two strikes an undervalued asset in today’s game?

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Bud Black, Colorado Rockies

“It’s been undervalued in the history of the game. It’s probably lessened a little bit more [as] something that has been talked about. I think, more so than ever, because of the stuff today, it’s harder to hit with two strikes, especially the velocities that we’re talking about. The breaking pitches. The secondary pitches. The quality of those pitches. The swing-and-miss that’s happening now is a combination of maybe not shortening your swing, and maybe the stuff is that good to where it’s tough to make contact. Read the rest of this entry »

By now, you’ve presumably had some time to think about the enormity of the extension that Fernando Tatis Jr. signed last week. Fourteen years! Three hundred and forty million dollars! An excuse for me to use exclamation points! It’s such a huge deal, it would almost be unthinkable not to have spent a silly amount of time thinking about it.

As for me, I’ve thought a lot about it in a theoretical sense. You can math out the contract and say that our best estimates show the Padres getting meaningful value from it, which I did using Dan Szymborski’s projections. You can think about Tatis’ place in the pantheon of great young hitters, as Jay Jaffe did. You can think about the team-building implications of locking up a young star for so long. I decided to answer a different question, though: Why haven’t more players and teams agreed to these massive extensions so early in the arbitration process or even before it starts?

If you think that the Padres overpaid, this isn’t the article for you. I’m ignoring that outcome, because if that’s the case, we have an answer. Teams don’t try these deals because they’re negative value in expectation. That’s an unsatisfying answer, though. If you think that, imagine Tatis were good enough to merit the deal — give him Mike Trout’s numbers, let’s say — and indulge me in this one. Read the rest of this entry »

In the weirdest year of baseball history so far, 2020 featured a gigantic playoff field introduced right as the season began, turning a 10-team postseason into a 16-team format. Changing the basic structure of awarding the sport’s championship with no advance notice would have been an odd choice in a normal season. But given the 102-game reduction in the league’s schedule and its resulting small sample size season, it kind of made sense. When the decision was made, it wasn’t a surety that there would even be a season, to the point that people would have been happy if extra-inning games were decided by closers riding ostriches and jousting.

Before the World Series was even completed, commissioner Rob Manfred expressed the league’s desire to keep the new format in a normal season. The players need to agree to changes like this, of course, and that permission wasn’t granted after all MLB offered in exchange was a universal designated hitter. One of the concerns, not officially made public, is that a playoff system that is more of crapshoot will further reduce the already eroded incentives for teams to spend money to improve their rosters. That’s hardly a shock; at the 2020 trade deadline, 10 teams already had projected playoff probabilities above 97%. Combine that with the absence of the normal advantages afforded to higher seeds, and you had a trade deadline that saw only a single team, the San Diego Padres, aggressively improve, and even their moves were almost certainly made with an eye toward 2021 and beyond.

So what is the ideal playoff system? That’s a difficult question, one that’s impossible to answer to everyone’s satisfaction. I can only answer for myself, and for me, there are a few requirements that are particularly important. Basically, I want a system in which regular-season performance matters, thus maintaining one of the core aspects of the game. I also want a playoff system that more heavily awards quality over randomness without making the result a preordained one. The more a championship is decided by randomness, the less incentive there is for teams to innovate and invest. Read the rest of this entry »

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You probably haven’t thought about the Padres’ bullpen in a while, and you’d be forgiven for that. Most of the high-profile additions they’ve made in the last several months have come in the starting rotation. The other big moves, such as trading for Austin Nola and signing Ha-seong Kim, have been upgrades to the lineup. Oh, and there’s that whole record-setting contract they just gave to their 22-year-old superstar.

All of that has overshadowed the fact that the turnover in San Diego’s relief staff lately has been extreme. Seven of the team’s top eight projected relievers on our Depth Charts page were not on the roster at the end of the 2019 season. Like the rest of the Padres, though, that turnover has resulted in a unit that now looks like one of the best in baseball. It’s worth getting caught up, then, on who the newest arrivals are, who has recently departed, and where that leaves the group as a whole.

San Diego did a lot of its heavy lifting last offseason and at the trade deadline, but the team signed two notable big leaguers in the last few weeks. One was Mark Melancon, the 35-year-old veteran who will join the eighth team of his soon-to-be 13-year big league career. Melancon became famous at the back of Pittsburgh’s bullpen in the mid-2010s when his cutter made him one of the game’s most dominant closers for a few years, bringing about the obligatory comparisons to Hall of Famer Mariano Rivera. From 2013 to ’16, he threw 290 innings with a 1.80 ERA and 2.25 FIP, all while throwing his cutter about 67% of the time. After that, he landed a big contract with the Giants, who traded him to the Braves at the deadline in 2019. Melancon wasn’t as good over the past four seasons as the four previous, but he still managed to pitch effectively.

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Shin-Soo Choo’s seven-year contract with the Rangers didn’t end the way anyone wanted it to, either in the grand scheme or the specifics. In a season already shortened by the COVID-19 pandemic, he missed additional time due to oblique and calf strains, then sprained his right hand on September 7. He recovered in time to return to the lineup for the season’s final game, beat out a bunt to lead off the home half of the first inning… and then sprained his left ankle tripping over first base. D’oh!

Alas, that might have been the final play of Choo’s major league career. Though the 38-year-old outfielder/DH sought a contract for the 2021 season and had interest from as many as eight teams (some of them contenders), earlier this week he agreed to return to his native South Korea via a one-year deal with the SK Wyverns of the Korea Baseball Organization. “I want to play in Korea because I want to play in front of my parents and I want to give back to Korean fans,” he told the Fort Worth Star-Telegram’s Jeff Wilson.

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DL Hall isn’t No. 83 on our 2021 Top 100 Prospects list because of his command. Then again, he sort of is. With a better grasp of the strike zone than he’s shown, the 22-year-old left-hander would be ranked much higher. Since being drafted 21st overall by the Baltimore Orioles in 2017, Hall has walked just over five batters per nine innings.

But then there’s the power arsenal. These words, written by Eric Longenhagen, help explain why the 6-foot-2, 200-pound Hall has a chance to one day dominate hitters at the highest level:

“Ultra-competitive, athletic southpaws with this kind of stuff are very rare. Here’s the list of lefty big league starters who throw harder than Hall, who averaged 94.9 mph on his fastball in 2019: Jesús Luzardo, Blake Snell. That’s it.”

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David Laurila: Lets start with something Eric Longenhagen wrote in your prospect profile. Is “ultra-competitive” a good way to describe you?

DL Hall: “I do think that I’m a super-competitive guy. Everybody that steps in the box, I try to own. I like winning, and I hate losing.”

Laurila: Do you hate losing to the extent that it actually bothers you?

Hall: “That’s a tough question. It definitely bothers me, but I’ve also learned how to learn from it, if that makes sense. I learn from losses now, versus dwelling on them.” Read the rest of this entry »

Way back in mid-November, when the free agent market was still moving at a glacial pace, the Braves signed Drew Smyly to a one-year deal worth $11 million. After years of injury issues, Smyly finally appeared to be (relatively) healthy in 2020. He increased the velocity on each of his pitches by 2.6 mph, helping him post the highest strikeout rate and lowest FIP of his career, though it came in just 26.1 innings.

Eleven million dollars might seem like a bit much for an injury-prone starter who showed the briefest glimpse of a breakout last year, at least on a relative basis. Corey Kluber signed for $11 million; Garrett Richards got $10 million; and James Paxton signed for $8.5 million. If healthy, each of those other starters likely has more upside than Smyly. Still, Atlanta was willing to take the chance in the hopes that Smyly’s velocity holds and portends a bigger breakout in 2021.

Fast forward a few months and Atlanta is again betting on another injury-prone player who had a mini-resurgence in 2020. This time around the money risked is even lower. On Sunday, the Braves brought in Jake Lamb on a one-year, non-guaranteed, major league deal worth $1 million.

Since 2017, Lamb has played in just 165 games, with a major shoulder injury and a quad injury sidelining him for much of the ’18 and ’19 seasons, respectively. During those two years, his wRC+ hovered right around 78 and the power he displayed during his breakout seasons in 2016 and ’17 was glaringly absent. For the first 18 games of the 2020 season, the same struggles persisted. After limping to just a 14 wRC+ in 50 plate appearances, the Diamondbacks cut him loose on September 10. Five days later, he signed with the Athletics after Matt Chapman went down with a season-ending hip injury. With the A’s, Lamb looked completely rejuvenated, slugging three home runs in 13 games and posting a 141 wRC+.

Anyone can look good over a 13-game stretch, but for Lamb, it was a glimpse at what could be if his body was healthy again. His average exit velocity was right in line with what he had posted in years past, over half the balls he put in play came off the bat at 95 mph or higher, and his barrel rate was 10.8% in Oakland. But even though his power returned in this tiny sample, the excellent plate discipline skills he’s shown in the past disappeared.

It’s nearly impossible to glean anything from Lamb’s performance in Oakland, let alone take anything away from the combined 99 plate appearances between the A’s and the Diamondbacks. But the Braves felt like they had a need on their roster and were confident enough in Lamb’s health to bring him in for spring training. Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the farm system of the Pittsburgh Pirates. 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 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, I’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, I’ve primarily focused on data from there, and the context of that data, in my 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 my 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.