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 »

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about Marcus Stroman accepting the qualifying offer and tweeting about Tony La Russa, what the AL Cy Young voting says about the Dodgers, and the singular greatness of the 2014-15 Royals, then answer listener emails about Noodles Hahn and how quickly former star players get forgotten, whether there should be three winners of each award in 2020, and proposed rules that could distinguish the AL from the NL in the post-pitcher hitting era (and whether it’s desirable to differentiate the leagues), plus a Stat Blast about a quirk in the MLB rulebook concerning rule 6.07 (the one about batting out of order).

Audio intro: Sloan, "Marcus Said"
Audio outro: John Lee Hooker, "I’m Leaving"

Link to Stroman’s comments on La Russa
Link to Sam’s ranking of NLCS team trades
Link to FiveThirtyEight on the 2014-15 Royals
Link to The Athletic article on the Hosmer play
Link to video of Hosmer play
Link to Ben on combining the Orioles and Royals
Link to Bill Hands interview episode
Link to Noodles Hahn book passage
Link to story about Bellinger and Seinfeld
Link to Conan O’Brien interview

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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 Oakland Athletics.

Batters

Marcus Semien’s BABIP-aided regression to the mean was unwelcome, but Oakland received surprising production elsewhere from sources such as Robbie Grossman. That being said, the loss of Semien to free agency does create a bit of a vacuum, as a fair amount of the team’s depth at shortstop from the last few years (Franklin Barreto, Jorge Mateo, Jurickson Profar theoretically) has moved on to other organizations. Chad Pinder is likely the de facto shortstop if the season started today, but there’s a good chance that Oakland’s starter in 2021 is not in this set of projections, unless Semien returns. Normally I’d think a player of his caliber would be loath to sign a one-year deal, but given the circumstances of baseball in 2020, who knows if a multi-year deal is in his future. Suffice it to say, it would have been highly useful for the minor leagues to exist last season so that the A’s could have seen more of Vimael Machín or Nick Allen.

Oakland’s offense will go as far as their current Big Three — Matt Chapman, Ramón Laureano, and Matt Olson — take them. Second base and right field do show up as weaknesses in the projections, and this is another place where the lack of a minor league season hurts the A’s; they don’t sign free agents to big contracts, so getting to look at some of that Quadruple-A talent is a valuable exercise. ZiPS is sort of optimistic about Khris Davis, but after a second down season, the ceiling has been lowered farther than that early scene in the Wonka factory. Oakland’s top-level talent still keeps it in the high-80s in wins without a single move, but I’m quite uneasy about the team’s overall depth. Read the rest of this entry »

Devin Williams won the NL Rookie of the Year Award with 27 innings of pitching. They were 27 historically great innings, but 27 innings all the same — 22 appearances out of the bullpen, the equivalent of five or so starts if he were placed in the rotation. You could fit all of Williams’ 2020 inside one month if you wanted to; the only reason that wasn’t considered a more serious demerit is that the actual regular season only lasted two months. This year was about accomplishing as much as possible in a very short amount of time. With that in mind, let’s talk about Ke’Bryan Hayes.

Hayes, the Pirates’ 23-year-old third baseman, finished sixth in Rookie of the Year voting, trailing the three finalists as well as Dodgers right-handers Tony Gonsolin and Dustin May. You just saw a lot of Gonsolin and May, but there’s a good chance you still haven’t watched Hayes at all. He didn’t debut for the Pirates until September, after the team was already well on its way to securing the No. 1 pick with the worst record in baseball. No one sought this team out on MLB.TV, and two thirds of all teams didn’t even have Pittsburgh on its schedule. In case you haven’t updated yourself on Hayes outside of his annual prominence on top prospect lists, here’s what he did in his first game:

The very next inning, Kris Bryant decided to test out Hayes’ arm at third by charging home on a ground ball. It was a mistake: Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday, I wrote about the National League’s current state of limbo regarding the continued use of the designated hitter. The Senior Circuit’s adoption of the DH was one of several rules changes included as part of MLB’s 2020-specific health and safety protocols, though both the league’s operations manual and commissioner Rob Manfred made clear that all of those changes would be undone once the season ended unless the players’ union agreed otherwise. While rules-related proposals are usually in place in time to be voted upon at the annual November owners meetings, this year’s assembly was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic, and with MLB hoping the players will agree to some kind of expanded playoff format in exchange, it could be awhile before we get a resolution.

In writing Tuesday’s piece, I thought it would be interesting to take a page from the Jeff Sullivan playbook and invite FanGraphs’ readership to weigh in regarding not only the universal DH, but also the other rules that were adopted for 2020 but could revert back to their previous state. Several of these rules, or variations of them, had been kicked around in proposals for years, but few of us dreamed they would be put into action given their relatively radical nature. The shortened season created conditions that allowed some of them to audition on the big stage, and while many purists were mortified, a significant share of players, fans, and media found that even some of the more radical ones weren’t so bad after all. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the honest truth about baseball analysis: Most of the ideas I look into don’t work. That’s mostly hidden under the surface, because it’s not very interesting to read an article about absence of evidence. Hey, did you know that batters who hit very long home runs see no meaningful effect on the rest of their performance that day? I did, because I looked into that at one point, but imagine an article about that and you can kind of see the problem. Read a whole thing looking for a conclusion and find none, and you might be more than a little irritated.

Now that I’ve told you how bad of an idea it is to write about failed ideas, I’d like to introduce you to an article series about ideas that didn’t pan out. I know, I know: I was bemoaning the difficulty of writing such an article just sentences ago. Some failures, however, are more interesting than others, and I’d like to think that I know how to tell the difference. In this intermittent and haphazardly scheduled series, I’ll write about busted ideas that taught me something interesting in their failure, or that simply examine parts of the game that might otherwise escape notice.

In September of this year, I came up with an idea that spent the next month worming its way into my brain. We think of pitch movement as relative to zero, but that’s obviously not true. Sinkers rise more than a spin-less pitch thrown on the same trajectory would; they’re “risers”, in fact. Don’t tell a player that, though, because they’re not comparing these pitches to some meaningless theoretical pitch that no one throws. They’re comparing them to other fastballs, four-seamers to be specific, and if your brain is used to seeing four-seamers, sinkers do indeed sink. Read the rest of this entry »