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.

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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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For the better part of this decade, we’ve repeatedly published an article you can more or less predict. Nearly every year, a version of the same idea gets published. “You’re never going to believe it,” the article starts, “but fastballs got faster again this year.” There are usually some GIFs, maybe a winking joke about how we write this article every year and it keeps being true, and bam, 1,500 words out the door. Oh yeah! There’s also a kicker: “Fastballs keep getting thrown less frequently, too.”

Normally, I’d be writing that article again this year. There’s just one problem: four-seam fastballs didn’t get faster this year; in fact, they’ve been plateauing for a few years. This year’s four-seamers checked in at an average velocity of 93.9 mph. Adjusting for time of year (I used only data from August onward in each season so that we didn’t have any weather effects unique to 2020), here are the last five years of four-seam velocity:

The 2019 season was the fastest on record, and 2020 fell short of that mark. In fact, the last five years look overall unchanged. Look instead at sinkers, though, and you’ll see some velocity improvement:

Which one should we believe? Four-seamers are more common than sinkers, so the blended average looks like this:

Okay, so fastballs didn’t get any faster this year. Sinkers did, and that’s interesting for sure, but at the highest level, it feels like the inexorable march towards higher velocity might have stalled for the moment.

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The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2021 Hall of Fame ballot. It was initially written for The Cooperstown Casebook, published in 2017 by Thomas Dunne Books, and subsequently adapted for SI.com and then FanGraphs. 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.

It happened so quickly. Freshly anointed the game’s top prospect by Baseball America in the spring of 1996, the soon-to-be-19-year-old Andruw Jones was sent to play for the Durham Bulls, the Braves’ Hi-A affiliate. By mid-August, he blazed through the Carolina League, the Double-A Southern League, and the Triple-A International League, and debuted for the defending world champions. By October 20, with just 31 regular season games under his belt, he was a household name, having become the youngest player ever to homer in a World Series game — breaking Mickey Mantle’s record — and doing so twice at Yankee Stadium to boot.

Jones was no flash in the pan. The Braves didn’t win the 1996 World Series, and he didn’t win the ’97 NL Rookie of the Year award, but along with Chipper Jones (no relation) and the big three of Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, and John Smoltz, he became a pillar of a franchise that won a remarkable 14 NL East titles from 1991-2005 (all but the 1994 strike season). From 1998-2007, Jones won 10 straight Gold Gloves, more than any center fielder except Willie Mays.

By the end of 2006, Jones had tallied 342 homers and 1,556 hits. He looked bound for a berth in Cooperstown, but after a subpar final season in Atlanta and a departure for Los Angeles in free agency, he fell apart so completely that the Dodgers bought out his contract, a rarity in baseball. He spent the next four years with three different teams before heading to Japan at age 35, and while he hoped for a return to the majors, he couldn’t find a deal to his liking after either the 2014 or ’15 seasons. He retired before his 39th birthday, and thanks to his rapid descent, barely survived his first two years on the Hall of Fame ballot, with shares of 7.3% and 7.5%. Last year, he jumped to 19.4%, offering hope that with seven years of eligibility remaining, he still has time to get to 75%.

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