Episode 911

This week we welcome an all-time great of baseball analytics, discuss Fernando Tatis Jr.’s big 14-year contract, and assess one of the frustrating teams in the NL Central.

• To begin the program, David Laurila welcomes baseball writer and statistician Bill James to the show. David and Bill reflect on The New Bill James Historical Abstract (2001), Bill’s rankings of the best players at each position, and how his opinions may have changed in the two decades since. How does new research inform what we know about the greatest players of all time, and how do the new greats match up? And how does Bill feel these days about his “most underrated player of all time?” [2:37]
• After that, Jay Jaffe and Kevin Goldstein get together to talk about Fernando Tatis Jr.’s extension. Jay recently wrote about Tatis’ Cooperstown chances while Kevin covered the future of giant contracts like Tatis’, and both topics come together in a conversation about the many ways things could go for the new face of the San Diego Padres. [18:48]
• In the final segment, Ben Clemens sits down with Dan Szymborski to talk about the Reds. Dan has written on Cincinnati’s disappointing offseason, which comes after a few encouraging winters. The pair discuss what they would like to see from a team that seemed to have found a window of contention — especially in a division that feels winnable. [50:39]

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Non-roster invitation season is prime time to Remember Some Guys, players who had their moments in the sun in some hazy but not-so-distant past before slipping beneath the radar for one reason or another. A subset of those Some Guys are left-handed pitchers, and as discussed here previously, lefties who can throw strikes have a chance to stick around forever, at least in this NRI limbo if not on a major league roster or, at the very least, its fringes. Within this subset one finds Scott Kazmir, a onetime fireballer who last appeared in the majors with the Dodgers in 2016. The now 37-year-old lefty agreed to terms on a minor league deal — and of course the requisite NRI — with the Giants earlier this week.

Kazmir, a 12-year veteran and three-time All-Star who owns a career 108-96 mark with a 4.01 ERA, 4.01 FIP, and 25.2 WAR, is no stranger to comeback attempts. After his career deteriorated during his run with the Angels, the former Mets-prospect-turned-Devil-Rays-phenom was released following his lone appearance in April 2011; he was still owed nearly $14.5 million through the following season. Just 27 years old when he was released, Kazmir overhauled his mechanics, restored some lost velocity, spent a season with the Sugar Land Skeeters of the independent Atlantic League, and resurfaced with Cleveland in 2013. Thus began a four-year, four-team run during which he was nearly as effective as ever, posting a 3.75 ERA and 3.79 FIP in 667.2 innings with additional stops with the A’s, Astros, and Dodgers. In that time, he made his third All-Star team and landed a pair of lucrative multiyear deals: a two-year, $22 million one with Oakland after the 2013 season, and then a three-year, $48 million one with the Dodgers two years later.

Alas, back and neck issues limited Kazmir to 136.1 innings with a 4.56 ERA and 4.48 FIP in 2016 with the Dodgers, including just one inning on September 23 after a month-long absence. Tightness in his left hip forced him to shut down in the spring of 2017, and he managed just 12 innings, all during abortive rehab stints at High-A Rancho Cucamonga, for the entire season. In December of that year, he was traded to the Braves as part of a five-player deal that brought Matt Kemp back to Los Angeles but mostly amounted to two teams shuffling bad paper for Competitive Balance Tax purposes. Though at one point Kazmir appeared on track to make the Braves out of spring training in 2018, diminished velocity and a bout of arm fatigue led to his late-March release. Read the rest of this entry »

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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