Torey Lovullo didn’t have a lot of game-changing hits over the course of his career. The Arizona Diamondbacks manager finished his playing days with just 60 RBIs in parts of eight big-league seasons as a utility infielder. But he did have a handful of memorable knocks, three of which he recounted in a conversation earlier this week.

The first of Lovullo’s standout moments came in his second-ever game. Called up by the Detroit Tigers in September 1988, he plated a run with an 18th-inning single against the New York Yankees. Adding to the thrill was the fact that the Tigers were in a three-team pennant race with the Bombers and the Boston Red Sox. The balloon burst in short order. Claudell Washington walked off Detroit southpaw Willie Hernandez with a two-run shot in the bottom half, negating Lovullo’s heroics in blunt fashion.

Five years later, the Santa Monica native turned the tables with an extra-inning walk-off of his own. Lovullo had signed with the California Angels — a team he’d grown up cheering for — prior to the 2013 season. On a July afternoon, he made the most of a second chance.

“In the bottom of the 11th inning, [Yankees manager] Buck Showalter walked the bases loaded in front of me and I popped up with one out,” recalled Lovullo. “We ended up going deeper into the game, and in the 14th inning he did the exact same thing [issued two intentional walks to load the bases]. This time I got a base hit. That was a proud moment for me, because I didn’t want it to happen again. A manager targeted me, and I came through.” Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the Marlins hiring Kim Ng and the significance of Ng becoming MLB’s first woman GM, the Angels hiring Perry Minasian and the team’s ownership issues, Kyuji Fujikawa and an NPB unwritten rule, Ryan Tepera’s accidental MVP vote, and how FanGraphs readers feel about 2020’s new rules, plus a Stat Blast about Brandon Belt, Brandon Crawford, and the most prolific putout tandems in MLB history. Then (43:30) they talk to The Athletic’s Eno Sarris and former MLB pitcher David Aardsma about MLB’s problem with pitchers using banned foreign substances, touching on how foreign substances help, how prevalent they are, Aardsma’s personal experience with foreign substances, how players learn to use them, whether getting a better grip really helps hitters’ safety, Trevor Bauer’s possibly substance-enhanced Cy Young award, whether sticky stuff will be baseball’s next big scandal, what MLB can do to address its widespread rule-breaking behavior, the future of player development, and more.

Audio intro: Imperial Teen, "The First"
Audio interstitial: Della Mae, "It’s About Time"
Audio outro: Courtney Barnett, "Kim’s Caravan"

Link to Lindsey Adler on Kim Ng
Link to Christina Kahrl on the first woman GM
Link to Christina Kahrl interview episode
Link to Rosenthal’s report on Minasian
Link to Bill Shaikin on Moreno’s ownership
Link to Fujikawa unwritten rules story
Link to video of Saito’s last batter
Link to story about Mantle and McLain
Link to Tepera explanation
Link to Tepera tweet
Link to Jay Jaffe’s rules survey results
Link to putout tandems data
Link to Ben on foreign substances
Link to Eno on foreign substances
Link to Rob Arthur on foreign substances
Link to Eno on Bauer’s 2018 experiment
Link to Defector on Bauer’s 2020
Link to Pineda ejection video
Link to Angels foreign substance lawsuit story
Link to article about Blue Jays layoffs

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The polls are closed, the results are in, and with no need for a recount after being certified by the firm of Fwar, Dips, Winshares, Gritt, Babip, Pecota, Vorp & Eckstein, they can now be considered official if not actually binding. On Wednesday, I invited FanGraphs readers to weigh in on half a dozen rules that were introduced for 2020 as part of the COVID-19 health and safety protocols but whose status for next year is up in the air and must be negotiated between the players’ union and the owners. The most prominent of those are the universal designated hitter and the expanded playoffs — a pair that might prove to be a bottleneck, since commissioner Rob Manfred and the owners want the players to agree to some form of the latter in exchange for the former — but some of the other ones were an even more radical break from baseball tradition, and they drew very mixed reviews.

Stealing a page from the great Jeff Sullivan, for each of the six rules I asked voters not only whether they were in favor of keeping the rule, but also how much they cared about the issue, on a scale from 1 (very little) to 5 (very much) — call this the passion rating. One purpose in soliciting these answers was to provide some points of comparison with the responses Sullivan received to his February 11th, 2019 poll with respect to the universal DH, the three-batter minimum for pitchers, and the runner-on-second extra innings rule, none of which had been used in MLB at that point and all of which received an audition in 2020. Do people approve of the rules more or less than before? And do they care about those changes more or less than before?

While I’m sure what I’ve done here falls short of actual science — particularly given the fact that for most of the questions, I presented some data that might have an impact upon voters’ choices — I do think the results are interesting enough to share and compare. 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 New York Yankees.

Batters

The possible loss of DJ LeMahieu is a real hit to the Yankees, but even if they don’t come to an agreement with him, I don’t expect the club to actually be cruising with Tyler Wade and Thairo Estrada come April. But even if they did, as long as the team remains healthy — a big condition given their recent experiences — it’s still an extremely potent lineup even if they tank a position or two. Brett Gardner is a free agent as well after the team declined his option, but I expect him to return anyway. After all, Gardner didn’t attract a ton of interest in last year’s free agent market, and with him being a year older and coming off a worse season, and with baseball’s economics, I doubt he gets more phone calls this time around. Like Mitch Moreland in Boston, Gardner appears to have a de facto arrangement where he can just show up at some point and the team will give him a one-year contract for $X million.

Did you really think that ZiPS would fall out of love with Gleyber Torres after his power went missing for six weeks? I do think he’s at the point at which I’d try to get him moved to third base. If the Yankees don’t re-sign LeMahieu and instead go after one of the players in the surprisingly deep shortstop pool, could Gio Urshela theoretically play second base? He’s likely a better third baseman than Torres, who hasn’t been great at second, and the team did work him out some at the position in summer training. How the infield gets shuffled will be one of the more interesting questions for them this offseason. Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 896

The big awards have been given out, but the FanGraphs crew is keeping an eye on offseason roster moves. This week, we welcome a major league manager to the program before digging into a pile of of recently named-later players.

• To start the show, David Laurila is joined by Gabe Kapler, former player and current manager of the San Francisco Giants. They discuss Kapler’s history with the game, working with his childhood favorite player, and sympathizing with Kevin Cash when it comes to having to make difficult in-game decisions. They also go over the highs and lows of the Giants’ 2020 campaign after they narrowly missed a playoff spot. [2:00]
• After that, Ben Clemens and Eric Longenhagen spend some time on the Cy Young award winners before digging into the PTBNL stack. A number of transactions were recently completed, and there were some intriguing names on the move. What is Jorge Mateo’s role? How can orgs evaluate the progress of their prospects in 2020? And what is the strategy with players like Jason Vosler? [17:48]

Read the rest of this entry »

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Over the last three seasons, DJ LeMahieu’s 9.9 WAR ranks fifth among all free agents. Just ahead of him is George Springer (11.3), Trevor Bauer (11.6), and J.T. Realmuto (12.3), who comes in second place. But topping all current free agents over the past three seasons is Marcus Semien, with 12.6 WAR. Semien isn’t some older free agent, either; at 30, he’s younger than Springer and LeMahieu and within a handful of months of Bauer and Realmuto. If we looked at just the past two seasons, the production gap between Semien and his peers is even greater. But for a whole host of reasons, Semien doesn’t look like he’ll come close to earning as much as those peers in free agency, and that could make him the biggest bargain.

When examining the various free agent lists, it becomes clear that my fourth-place rank when it comes to Semien is the high-water mark. Keith Law and Kiley McDaniel both have him sixth. MLB.com’s Anthony Castrovince placed him seventh, CBS Sports’ R.J. Anderson put him 11th, and MLB Trade Rumors slotted him all the way down at 15th. I either need to justify my ranking with a little more explanation or admit that I might have had Semien too high. This article will probably be one of those things.

Let’s start with the negatives. Semien wasn’t a particularly good player until 2018 and has had exactly one above-average hitting season in his career (’19), and his production in ’20 wasn’t very good. Add in questions about his defense at shortstop and a very crowded market at the position over the next few seasons, and we have a recipe for someone whose value certainly seems down. Semien’s market was helped slightly by the lack of a qualifying offer from Oakland, but compared to the other factors working against him, it’s a small gain. It isn’t really production or age that is keeping Semien from landing a big contract, though; it’s uncertainty. The error bars surrounding his performance would seem to be significantly higher than many other players due to defensive questions and the truncated 2020 campaign. Read the rest of this entry »

As one of the market’s top position players, George Springer is expected to draw heavy interest this winter, and already there have been reports of the Mets and Blue Jays expressing just that. The 31-year-old center fielder is coming off a strong season; not surprisingly, on Wednesday he was among the four free agents who declined qualifying offers from their 2020 teams, along with Trevor Bauer, DJ LeMahieu, and J.T. Realmuto. Springer, however, could be the winter’s only free agent besides Realmuto to land a contract of at least $100 million.

Springer got off to such a slow start in 2020 that he was hitting .194/.331/.388 as late as September 2nd while pulling the ball an astronomical, out-of-character 51.3% of the time. But while the Astros struggled down the stretch, he finished strong with nine homers and a .703 slugging percentage in his final 23 games and 100 plate appearances. Overall, he hit .265/.359/.540 with 14 homers and finished in virtual ties for ninth in the AL in both wRC+ (146) and WAR (1.9). Given the shortened season, he couldn’t approach the career highs he set in either homers (39) or WAR (6.5) in 2019, and while the same turned out to be true about his wRC+ (156), the difference wasn’t nearly so large as it appeared to be given that season’s raw rate stats (.292/.383/.591):

Springer hit more fly balls than grounders for the first time in his career in 2020, and his final pull rate of 48.0% was 7.7 percentage points above last year’s mark and eight points above his career mark. His average launch angle increased significantly, but his expected batting average and slugging percentage were more or less unchanged from 2019. The hits just didn’t fall in to the same extent: His .259 BABIP was a career low and placed him in the bottom quintile among qualified hitters. Still, his September hot streak suggests he ironed things out, and his 146 wRC+ was five points above his career mark. Plus, he struck out a career-low 17.1% of the time, lest anyone think that his gains in that area — which started to show up in 2017, after he’d struck out 26.0% of the time in his first three seasons — were simply a product of the Astros’ sign-stealing shenanigans. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, Marcus Stroman accepted the Mets’ qualifying offer, returning to the team on a one-year deal worth $18.9 million. Later in the day, Kevin Gausman accepted his own qualifying offer, making them the only two players to accept their QOs this year. Gausman reportedly had multi-year offers in hand but chose to stay with the Giants anyway, taking the guaranteed $18.9 million salary over any long-term security a multi-year contract would provide. It’s not a surprising decision on Gausman’s part, especially since he and the Giants have made some progress on negotiating an extension already.

Stroman’s decision to accept the QO wasn’t exactly a surprise either. The Mets traded for him a year earlier than expected, in July of 2019, when he still had a year and a half of club control remaining. He pitched well enough down the stretch last year, but the Mets were already looking forward to 2020 when they acquired him. Unfortunately, a calf injury sustained towards the end of summer camp sidelined him to start this season, and he eventually decided to opt out of the entire campaign in early August. Because he didn’t pitch in 2020, he would have entered the free agent market at a serious disadvantage. Taking the QO defers some of that risk since he’ll be a free agent again after the 2021 season, but the hope is that he’ll have another full year of innings under his belt at that point.

For the Mets, this was their first major move since Steve Cohen finalized his purchase of the team. Stroman’s QO was offered by the outgoing executive vice president and general manager Brodie Van Wagenen before he was dismissed by Cohen, making for a potentially awkward situation. But in his announcement, Stroman voiced great enthusiasm for Cohen and the winning culture he laid out in his first press conference as owner. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll admit it: I think about Corbin Burnes way more often than is healthy. Not in a Swimfan way, or anything; his blowup 2019 and standout ’20 are just my favorite example of a pitcher adjusting his pitch mix to match his natural talents, and Burnes has no shortage of talent. His fastball sits in the mid-90s with a naturally robust spin rate, and his slider turns batters into pretzels. He also posted a 6.09 FIP in 2019, driven by allowing 17 home runs in only 49 innings.

What was Burnes’ problem? While his fastball has a lot of spin, it’s not the same kind of spin as your average fastball. His fastball is heavy on gyroscopic spin — the football spin that gives sliders and cutters their signature “dot” — and light on transverse (or “active”) spin, which imparts movement. Of the 601 pitchers who threw at least 250 fastballs in 2019, Burnes’ active spin percentage ranked 585th.

That’s not a death knell for pitchers. The bottom of the list is dotted with sinker-ballers (the two types of fastballs are grouped together), and sinkers are unlike four-seamers in two ways. First, they have less transverse spin in general. Second, they don’t need as much transverse spin, because the effect they produce is a pitch that rises less than a batter expects. As they’re still thrown with backspin, less movement means less rise. Read the rest of this entry »