It’s time to begin FanGraphs’ annual offseason trip through our team prospect lists. Once again, we’ll aim to provide the most in-depth, comprehensive analysis in the public sphere. Before we get to the meat of the team-by-team rankings, we’ll first publish a few bigger pillars, including a list of international prospects and updates to my draft lists. Those will begin to roll out later this week along with the debut of, and some discussion surrounding, cosmetic changes to The Board, which houses the most robust, easily-accessible prospect scouting grades and data anywhere in media, all available for free but made possible by your support.

But I want to start the list parade by touching on the big leaguers who graduated this year, the complete list of which can be found on the Seasonal tab over on The Board. I’m doing this for a couple of reasons. First, while the player pages of younger big leaguers include their prospect-era tool grades and rankings, those are often from the offseason before they graduated. This year, I took the opportunity to comment on prospects who played in the big leagues for an extended stretch and update their tool grades where applicable so they’re not quite as stale.

This is also in response to reader feedback. People have sometimes been confused about the tool grades featured on player pages, thinking they represent the site’s up-to-date opinions on the abilities of big leaguers rather than a look at how they were evaluated as prospects. Others have expressed a desire to see prospects’ scouting reports on their player pages, but often there is not enough space on the screen for the whole report, and I’d rather readers head to either a team’s list or The Board to read these. With the help of Sean Dolinar, I’m attempting to solve the first issue and compromise on the second by putting little scouting snippets about top prospects and all graduates (similar to the TLDRs readers may be familiar with from my Top 100 lists) on the player pages. The graduates’ version of this will be written as a debriefing of sorts, discussing the player in the context of their rookie season or early career so readers will know when the tools grades are from. This also increases accountability on my part (or on the part of whoever is helming prospect coverage here) since our final thoughts on the prospect will live on their player page forever. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

My annual Hall of Fame series is well underway, and now that we’re past the Thanksgiving holiday, it’s time to launch what’s become a yearly tradition at FanGraphs. In the spirit of our annual free agent contract crowdsourcing, we’re inviting registered users to fill out their own virtual Hall of Fame ballots via a cool gizmo that our developer, Sean Dolinar, built a couple of years ago. We’re also going to use this page to lay out a tentative schedule for the remainder of the series.

To participate in the crowdsourcing, you must be signed in, and you may only vote once. While you don’t have to be a Member to do so, this is a good time to mention that buying a Membership does help to fund the development of cool tools like this — and it makes a great holiday gift! To replicate the actual voting process, you may vote for anywhere from zero to 10 players; ballots with more than 10 won’t be counted. You may change your ballot until the deadline, which is December 31, 2020, the same as that of the actual BBWAA voters, who have to scare up a postage stamp and schlep their paper ballot to the mailbox.

The ballot is here and contains all 25 candidates (sorry, no write-ins for those fixated on Pete Rose). We’ve got tables of career stats for hitters and pitchers, if that helps, as well as a checkbox that allows you to see the stats of those already enshrined. As with last year, I’ll write up the crowdsourcing results sometime in early January, when we’re all jonesing for Hall news in advance of the announcement of the official results on January 26. Read the rest of this entry »

Ah, the introductory paragraph of a free agency signing piece. Normally, this is a space to let loose and spend a while thinking up a pun about the team and the player linking up. I must sadly tell you, however, that I can’t bring myself to do it. The degree of difficulty is the fun, and Mike Minor’s name is too easy, so you’ll just have to settle for the facts: the Kansas City Royals signed Minor to a two-year deal over the weekend, as Ken Rosenthal first reported.

When Minor left the Royals after a dominant 2017 season of relief work, he looked like a classic conversion arm. He’d been workmanlike over parts of five seasons with the Braves, never overwhelming but also never disastrous. After a brutal series of injuries ending in shoulder surgery, however, Atlanta cut him loose, and he landed with the Royals on a two-year deal. Kansas City turned him into a reliever, and he promptly annihilated the AL Central — his 2.55 ERA and 2.62 FIP represented a new level of performance, and he looked like a relief ace created out of whole cloth.

As he returns to Kansas City three years later, the situation feels both familiar and strange. Familiar, in that he’s spent the last three years putting in a performance that was, in aggregate, a little bit better than average. His run prevention numbers look slightly worse for having played two years in an extreme hitter’s park, but even then, a 4.07 ERA and 4.37 FIP will play, and that works out to an 85 ERA- and 95 FIP- after park adjustments. Even including a rough 2020, Minor looks like a workmanlike pitcher again.

Is he heading back to Kansas City to relieve? Almost certainly not. You see, Minor’s 2019 raises hope that there’s a little bit more there than meets the eye. He started the season strong, with a 2.54 ERA and 3.78 FIP, which led to his first All-Star nod. He faded down the stretch, though he still finished with 4.1 WAR and did even better (6.4 WAR) if you focus on runs allowed rather than FIP.

Even if you want to disregard the half-by-half split and focus on the aggregate, something stood out: Minor threw 208.1 innings, a career high. He followed that up with another 11 starts in 2020, essentially a full season of work. A starter who can put up decent rate statistics over a full workload is a valuable commodity in today’s game, particularly given the fact that essentially every pitcher in baseball will throw many more innings next year than they did this year, which likely increases the chance of injury. 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 Cincinnati Reds.

Batters

Season Two of Operation: Win Now almost ended like the first one did — outside the playoffs looking in — until the Reds snuck into the postseason by winning 11 of their last 15 games, with all but a Pirates series coming against playoff teams. Cincinnati’s quick playoff exit served to highlight one of the fundamental reasons the team’s reach the last two years has exceeded its grasp. No, the offense isn’t going to be shut out for 22 consecutive innings all that often, as the Braves did in the teams’ Wild Card Series, but the lineup is actively hindering the team. This recent development is the opposite of the traditional 21st century Reds dilemma, but it’s a real issue; Cincinnati has finished 13th and 12th in the NL in runs the last two seasons while playing in a moderate hitters’ park.

In a lot of ways, Cincinnati’s problem is the mirror image of Colorado’s most pressing issue. The Rockies have two MVP candidates at the top of the lineup, but an appalling lack of depth. The Reds, on the other hand, have very few true holes and admirable depth all over the diamond, but a real lack of superstar upside. And without a lot of positions open for the taking without the team being extremely aggressive and giving up on decent players with guaranteed deals, it’s hard to see the Reds flipping that script.

The one exception here is the shortstop position, where Jose Garcia would likely be the starter if the season began today, but likely won’t be when the 2021 season actually gets under way. There’s an unusual amount of shortstop talent out there for the taking — Marcus Semien, Andrelton Simmons, Didi Gregorius, and Ha-seong Kim — that could drastically improve a position that doesn’t have an apparent long-term solution otherwise. In an offseason where other NL competitors like the Cubs and Phillies crying poor, this is a golden opportunity for the team to swim against the current and take a real financial risk to get into the second tier of NL contenders. 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. 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.

At a moment when baseball is so obsessed with velocity, it’s remarkable to remember how recently it was that a pitcher could thrive, year in and year out, despite averaging in the 85-87 mph range with his fastball. Yet thats exactly what Mark Buehrle did over the course of his 16-year career. Listed at 6-foot-2 and 240 pounds, the burly Buehrle was the epitome of the crafty lefty, an ultra-durable workhorse who didn’t dominate but who worked quickly, used a variety of pitches — four-seamer, sinker, cutter, curve, changeup — moving a variety of directions to pound the strike zone, and relied on his fielders to make the plays behind him. From 2001-14, he annually reached the 30-start and 200-inning plateaus, and he barely missed on the latter front in his final season.

August Fagerstrom summed up Buehrle so well in his 2016 appreciation that I can’t resist sharing a good chunk:

The way Buehrle succeeded was unique, of course. He got his ground balls, but he wasn’t the best at getting ground balls. He limited walks, but he wasn’t the best a limiting walks. He generated soft contact, but he wasn’t the best at generating soft contact. Buehrle simply avoided damage with his sub-90 mph fastball by throwing strikes while simultaneously avoiding the middle of the plate:

That’s Buehrle’s entire career during the PITCHf/x era, and it’s something of a remarkable graphic. You see Buehrle living on the first-base edge of the zone, making sure to keep his pitches low, while also being able to spot the same pitch on the opposite side of the zone, for the most part avoiding the heart of the plate. Buehrle’s retained the ability to pitch this way until the end; just last year [2015], he led all of baseball in the percentage of pitches located on the horizontal edges of the plate.

Drafted and developed by the White Sox — practically plucked from obscurity, at that — Buehrle spent 12 of his 16 seasons on the South Side, making four All-Star teams and helping Chicago to three postseason appearances, including its 2005 World Series win, which broke the franchise’s 88-year championship drought. While with the White Sox, he became just the second pitcher in franchise history to throw multiple no-hitters, first doing so in 2007 against the Rangers and then adding a perfect game in 2009 against the Rays. After his time in Chicago, he spent a sour season with the newly-rebranded Miami Marlins, and when that predictably melted down spent three years with the Blue Jays, helping them reach the playoffs for the first time in 22 years.

Though Buehrle reached the 200-win plateau in his final season, he was just 36 years old when he hung up his spikes, preventing him from more fully padding his counting stats or framing his case for Cooperstown in the best light. A closer look suggests that beyond the superficial numbers, while he’s the equal or better of several enshrined pitchers according to WAR and JAWS, he’s far off the standards, and doesn’t have the peripheral collection of accomplishments to bolster his candidacy. Like Tim Hudson, he may receive a smattering of support on a ballot that’s hardly crowded, but his candidacy isn’t likely to lack staying power. Read the rest of this entry »

I have the honor of casting a Hall of Fame ballot for the first time this year. Jay Jaffe does as well, each of us having joined the BBWAA in 2010 while colleagues at Baseball Prospectus. A decade later — and in Jay’s case, countless words written on the subject at hand — we are the first FanGraphs writers to be granted voting privileges.

I’m sharing my ballot in this column, but before doing so, it’s only appropriate that I tip my hat to my fellow first-time voter. As most everyone reading this knows, Jay’s JAWS system is invaluable when assessing Hall of Fame credentials, as is his must-read Cooperstown Casebook. Given his extensive research and analysis, there may not be a greater authority on the subject.

That being said, the question of what defines a Hall of Famer is inherently subjective. Following Ryan Thibodaux’s Ballot Tracker will tell you as much. With barely over a dozen made public, we’ve already seen ballots with 10 checkmarks, while others have been left blank. As a “Big Hall” guy, I’m clearly not in accord with the latter camp.

Jay and I disagree on at least one player. Barring an earth-shaking surprise, Omar Vizquel won’t get his vote. Conversely, the iconic-yet-polarizing shortstop was a no-brainer for me. The first names I checked on my ballot were Vizquel and Scott Rolen. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley talk to FanGraphs’ Craig Edwards and Eric Longenhagen about MLB’s approaching non-tender deadline, why a number of prominent players may not be offered contracts, the effect a non-tender deluge might have on the free agent market, how slowly this free agent market might move, whether owners’ claims of financial hardship should be believed, MLB’s offseason vs. the NBA and NFL offseasons, whether there’s a way to speed up MLB’s winter activity, whether the MLBPA should consider a salary cap (and floor), the tantalizing talent of Ha-seong Kim, the challenge of ranking prospects in 2020, and more.

Audio intro: First Aid Kit, "Tender Offerings"
Audio outro: Frank Sinatra, "(Love Is) The Tender Trap"

Link to FanGraphs’ top 50 free agents ranking
Link to Eric on the coming deluge of non-tenders
Link to Eric’s team-by-team non-tender predictions
Link to Craig’s crowdsourcing non-tenders post
Link to Craig on Sánchez
Link to Dan Szymborski on Kim
Link to Syndergaard’s tweet
Link to Ben on the uncertain offseason
Link to Tinkers baseball passage
Link to EW Secret Santa

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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 Colorado Rockies.

Batters

This is one of the worst teams in the majors — certainly the worst that seems blissfully unaware of that fact. The Rockies have two position players they can count on to be good, and one of them, Nolan Arenado, is no guarantee to start the 2021 season with Colorado. Even after a weak 60-game stretch in a year everyone would like to forget, if the Rockies do shop Arenado, they will get significant interest in the market. But would they actually close a deal? I’m not sure they will be realistic about the effect his contract and the unknown of an opt-out will have on trade offers. Regardless, ZiPS expects a bounceback season as he continues to make his mid-career Hall of Fame case.

If the Rockies do trade Arenado — and maybe even if they don’t — it would be hard for them to avoid trading Trevor Story if they actually do go for a full-on rebuild. Colorado has had poor fortune with some of its top offensive prospects, but Story has been one of the best kinds of surprises: a player who got far less press as a prospect than others in the organization (despite being a high draft pick) but kept hitting as he went up the ladder, got to the majors first and left the competition scrambling to find other positions. One of those players, Brendan Rodgers, is at risk of going the way of Ryan McMahon, in that he’s done everything he could in the minors to earn a chance in the majors only to find the team casually disinterested in distributing the necessary playing time.

Read the rest of this entry »

The 2020 playoffs were contested by the largest playoff field in MLB history. While the expanded tournament certainly felt like an oddity, in the context of a shortened season, the format was tolerable for both fans and executives. The sabermetrically inclined readily conceded that a 60-game sample was insufficient to separate contenders from pretenders, all seamheads got to enjoy a few more games in a year with too few of them, and owners made more money. In a difficult situation, an imperfect solution proved a surprisingly elegant way to give everyone something they wanted.

The question is whether that format is here to stay.

One the one hand, you can understand why the league and its owners will be tempted to chase profits and advocate for the expanded field going forward. Per Sportico, the extra games this fall netted MLB an additional $100 million – $4.5 million per contest. Collectively, owners made less money than usual in 2020 and this is not a group that suffers rainy years with any equanimity. The prospect of another fanless season has the billionaire class antsy.

But while an expanded field worked in a pandemic-riddled season, my sense is that most — though obviously not all — fans don’t really want it to stay. A September column in the Washington Post titled “If baseball keeps these grotesque expanded playoffs, it will have lost its soul” is probably overstating things but there’s a sizable number of baseball fans who are very turned off by the idea. If nothing else, the lousy ratings from the early-round games suggests that Americans are hardly banging on the table for a 16-team dance. Read the rest of this entry »