An Oakland Athletics offense that was already fourth in baseball in WAR has acquired Tommy La Stella — a man who has hit .265/.361/.461 this year (.287/.350/.480 over the last two), and who has the lowest strikeout among baseball’s qualified hitters at a paltry 5.6% (7.9% combined the last two years, also the lowest in baseball) — to solidify a second base situation that has been molten since Jed Lowrie’s most recent departure. The A’s traded 24-year-old infielder Franklin Barreto to the Angels in exchange for La Stella.

As his now twice former manager Joe Maddon once said when he was a Cub, La Stella could roll out of bed and hit, a notion he has since further reinforced, as La Stella’s strikeout and barrel rates have each trended in a positive direction since he left the north side. He makes the A’s lineup a top-to-bottom threat for the rest of the year before he hits free agency this winter.

La Stella is a clear upgrade over incumbent keystone Tony Kemp, who emerged from a crowded preseason group mostly made up of disappointing prospects. Kemp is hitting just .250/.377/.281, with the OBP portion of his line driven by an unusually high walk rate and BABIP compared to the five-year big leaguer’s career norms. Kemp, who also has experience in the outfield, is likely to shift to a bench role as a situational lefty bat, and a late-inning replacement for La Stella, who is neither a good defender nor runner.

There will likely also be some instances when La Stella serves as Oakland’s designated hitter in lieu of the struggling Khris Davis (who is hitting .155/.269/.241 this season, and .213/.290/.371 over the last two combined), with either Kemp or Chad Pinder starting at second base. In essence, La Stella bolsters the second base and DH spots simultaneously as he himself is an upgrade, and his addition means Bob Melvin can choose from whichever of Pinder, Kemp or Davis he thinks is more likely to do damage that day. For instance, Pinder could play more often versus lefties, Kemp versus righties, and Davis against pitchers who throw a lot of fastballs. I think this move may put Rule 5 pick Vimael Machín‘s roster spot in jeopardy, especially in light of Marcus Semien’s recent injury, which could leave Oakland without a viable defensive shortstop on their 40-man, perhaps necessitating a deal or Nick Allen’s addition to the active roster for a brief stretch. Read the rest of this entry »

The San Diego Padres have added another bat to 2020’s second-best lineup so far, acquiring first baseman Mitch Moreland from the Boston Red Sox for two prospects, third baseman Hudson Potts and center fielder Jeisson Rosario. Moreland will almost certainly slot in as the team’s full-time designated hitter, occasionally spelling first baseman Eric Hosmer.

If during a word association game prior to the season, you had said “stopgap first baseman,” I almost certainly would have answered with “Mitch Moreland.” Never amazing but also rarely terrible, Moreland has been a fixture as the long-term/short-term first baseman for Boston the last four seasons. Peaking at 2.2 WAR for the 2015 Rangers, he’s put up between 0.7 and 1.0 WAR in six other seasons, building a handy little pillow fort between average and replacement level.

This season, on the other hand, has been something better. Moreland has already hit the 1 WAR milestone in just 22 games thanks to a .328/.430/.746, 203 wRC+ line. No, he’s not suddenly channeling the shade of Ted Williams, but he’s legitimately hitting for more power than he typically does. By Statcast’s barrels per batted ball event, Moreland ranks second in baseball behind only Miguel Sanó. It’s not that he’s actually hitting the ball that much harder, but he’s gotten more loft in his swing; Moreland’s 20-degree average launch angle against fastballs and 19-degree average launch angle against breaking pitches are career highs, both nearly double his marks from 2019.

And while Moreland is unlikely to ever finish among the league leaders in home runs, he has become quite good at harvesting pitchers’ regrets. Statcast defines “meatballs” as middle-middle pitches; an average hitter swings at about 75% of those. Moreland’s rate is at 87.3% in 2019 and 2020 combined, meaning he’s only half as likely as the typical player to leave his bat on his shoulder for those pitches. Here’s his radial chart against middle-middle over those two seasons:

Read the rest of this entry »

The San Diego Padres came into 2020 with one of the best late-inning setups in baseball. Their plan was simple: offseason acquisitions Drew Pomeranz and Emilio Pagán would handle high-leverage situations in the middle innings before passing the baton to Kirby Yates, one of the most dominant relievers in the game. That plan hasn’t worked out this year, largely because Yates will miss the rest of the season after surgery to remove bone chips from his elbow. On Saturday, however, they made a move to replenish their planned area of strength, acquiring Trevor Rosenthal in a trade with the Royals.

Nationals fans might wonder whether acquiring Rosenthal is supposed to be a good thing. He was, no doubt, abysmal for them last year — he racked up a 34.9% walk rate over 12 games before getting the heave-ho. A slightly longer stint with the Tigers ended the same way — striking out 28.6% of the batters you face is good, but not when you’re walking 26.8% of them as well. The Royals signed him as a reclamation project, nothing more — a minor league deal that could escalate to as much as $4.25 million based on incentive bonuses.

Consider him reclaimed. In 13.2 innings this year, he’s been effective, striking out 37.5% of his opponents en route to a 3.29 ERA that, while still short of his peak, represents a huge improvement from last year’s disaster. It’s not all daisies and lollipops, even at surface level — he’s walked 12.5% of opposing batters and given up two home runs. Mid-three ERA relievers don’t grow on trees, though, and San Diego was intent on getting one.

In acquiring Rosenthal, the Padres are making a bet that they can fix him, because despite his acceptable results this year, there are worrisome underlying signs. As Johnny Asel pointed out, Rosenthal might resemble his St. Louis form superficially, but the way he’s doing it has changed completely. He’s flooding the center of the strike zone and daring batters to hit it, which explains the better walk rate but also the hard contact.

At his peak, Rosenthal was that most cherished baseball stereotype: effectively wild. He lived on the edges of the strike zone and just outside it. That ballooned his walk rate, but it also suppressed home runs; squaring up Rosenthal’s explosive fastball and where’d-it-go changeup was simply beyond most batters when he didn’t leave them hanging over the plate.

To wit, when batters swing at pitches he leaves over the heart of the plate, per Baseball Savant’s definitions, they’ve hit nine home runs in 774 swings. When they swing at pitches on the edges of the plate, they’ve hit two in 816 swings. That’s not wildly different from how major league pitchers work in general — Rosenthal suppresses home runs in a similar ratio in both places — but for a pitcher who will always allow some traffic on the bases due to his walk rate, home runs are an anathema. Read the rest of this entry »

Andrew Miller made his MLB debut on today’s date 14 years ago.Two months after bing drafted sixth-overall out of the University of North Carolina by the Detroit Tigers, the lanky left-hander pitched a scoreless eighth inning in a 2-0 loss to the New York Yankees. Five hundred-plus appearances later, he remembers it like it was yesterday.

“I faced some big names in old Yankee Stadium, which is hard to beat,” recalled Miller, who retired Melky Cabrera, Johnny Damon, and Derek Jeter. “It was part of a doubleheader, as we’d gotten rained out the day I was called up, and afterward, [pitching coach] Chuck Hernandez came over and put his hand on my chest. He asked if I was going to have a heart attack.”

A top-step-of-the-dugout exchange with Marcus Thames is also fresh in Miller’s memory. On cloud nine following his one-inning stint, Miller learned that his teammate had four years earlier taken Randy Johnson deep in his first big-league at bat. Ever the pragmatist, Miller acknowledges that Thames’s debut had his own “beat by a mile.” The previous day’s rain-delay poker game in the clubhouse was another story: Miller walked away a winner.

He wasn’t about to get a big head. Not only was Miller joining a championship-caliber club — the Tigers went on to lose to the Cardinals in the World Series — there was little chance he’d have been allowed to. While his veteran teammates treated him well, they also treated him for what he was — a 21-year-old rookie with all of five minor-league innings under his belt.

“It was a shocking experience all around,” Miller admitted. “In hindsight, it’s scary how little I knew, and how naive I was, when I got called up. Thank goodness Jamie Walker called my room and told me to meet him in the lobby to go over some ground rules and expectations. He saved me from a lot of mistakes. Of course, after that Jamie was maybe the hardest veteran on me. It was all good natured, but I couldn’t slip up around him.” Read the rest of this entry »

In November, teams will need to decide which minor league players to expose to other teams through the Rule 5 Draft, and which to protect from the Draft by adding them to their 40-man roster. Deciding who to expose means evaluating players, sure, but it also means considering factors like internal player redundancy, as well as other variables such as the number of option years a player has left, whether he’s making the league minimum or is deep into his arbitration years, and if there are other freely-available alternatives to a team’s current talent, which happens a lot at certain positions, like toward the bottom of bullpen barrels and with first base-only types.

Teams with both an especially high number of rostered players under contract for 2021 and many prospects who would need to be added to the 40-man in the offseason have what is often called a “40-man crunch,” “spillover,” or “churn,” meaning that the team has incentive to clear the overflow of players away via trade for something they can keep — pool space, comp picks, or typically younger players whose 40-man clocks are further from midnight — rather than do nothing, and later lose players to waivers or in the Rule 5 draft. This exercise can be done by using the RosterResource pages to examine current 40-man occupancy, subtracting pending free agents (on the payroll tab), then weighing the December ’20 Rule 5 eligible prospects to see who has the biggest crunch coming and might behave differently in the trade market because of it.

Teams seem to be getting better at preparing for this ahead of time. In my opinion, this year has fewer situations that can be leveraged by rebuilding clubs in the way, for instance, the Rangers were able to pluck Nick Solak from Tampa Bay last year. Nevertheless, here is a rundown of the (mostly) contending teams with some prospect overage that I think is worth discussing on Ops Zoom calls.

Some quick rules about 40-man rosters. Almost none of them contain exactly 40 players in-season because teams can add a player to the 40 to replace a player who’s on the 60-day injured list. In the offseason, teams don’t get extra spots for injured players and have to get down to 40, so if they want to keep some of the injury fill-ins (like Mike Tauchman of the Yankees), they have to cut someone to make room. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about how Albert Pujols has remained an RBI man without being a good hitter and the historic slimness of Cleveland rookie pitcher Triston McKenzie, then answer a listener email about whether all innings would be better with the extra-innings automatic-runner rule, followed by Stat Blasts about what would happen if all GMs traded as much as the most frequent trader, the record for the most identical final scores on the same day, and hitters who’ve struck out four times on 12 pitches in the same game, plus another listener email about how much shorter the average game has been this season because of seven-inning games and fewer extra innings, and closing banter about the bottom of the ninth’s history.

Audio intro: The Kinks, "Living on a Thin Line"
Audio outro: The Baseball Project, "Golden Sombrero"

Link to 2017 Pujols article
Link to sheet of lowest and highest BMIs
Link to scouts on McKenzie
Link to video of McKenzie’s debut
Link to story about McKenzie’s debut
Link to Lucas on McKenzie’s stuff
Link to Travis Sawchik on Cleveland’s pitcher development
Link to Tyler Stafford’s Stat Blast Song cover
Link to spreadsheet of days with most identical scores
Link to most common baseball scores
Link to three-pitch strikeouts spreadsheet
Link to Grant Brisbee on Lawrie’s sombrero
Link to Will Leitch on Lawrie’s sombrero
Link to A Game of Inches
Link to episode with discussion about Trout not flying
Link to Baseball-Reference Game Changer

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For the full introduction to the Replacement-Level Killers series, follow the link above, but to give you the CliffsNotes version: yes, things are different this year, and not just because the lone trade deadline falls on August 31. We’ve got a little over a month’s worth of performances to analyze (sometimes less, due to COVID-19 outbreaks), about a month still to play, and thanks to the expanded playoff field, all but six teams — the Pirates, Angels, Red Sox, Mariners, Royals, and Rangers — are within two games of a playoff spot.

While still focusing upon teams that meet the loose definition of contenders (a .500 record or Playoff Odds of at least 10%), I’ll incorporate our Depth Charts’ rest-of-season WAR projections into the equation, considering any team with a total of 0.3 WAR or less — I lowered the threshold by a point, starting with this installment, to keep these final lists from getting too overgrown — to be in the replacement-level realm (that’s 0.8 WAR over the course of 162 games, decidedly subpar). I don’t expect every team I identify to upgrade before the August 31 trade deadline, I’m not concerned with the particulars of which players they might pursue or trade away, and I may give a few teams in each batch a lightning round-type treatment, as I see their problems as less pressing given other context, such as returns from injury, contradictory defensive metrics, and bigger holes elsewhere on the roster.

Note that all individual stats in this article are through August 26, but the won-loss records and Playoff Odds include games of August 27.

This time, I’m covering third basemen and center fields, mainly so I could give a rather daunting left field herd — nine teams at 0.4 total WAR or less, and eight at 0.3 or less, when I ran the numbers on Thursday — another couple days to thin out, either by more representative performances or teams slipping below that odds threshold. Read the rest of this entry »

When the season is just 60 games long, it can be hard to wrap your head around seemingly simple concepts like whether or not a team has a decent shot of making the playoffs. In a normal season, we’ve had four months to assess teams by the time we get to the trade deadline, and get two months after that to see them potentially reap the benefits of the moves they make. Halfway through this season, however, there hasn’t been much time for separation, and instead of having two months left to go, there’s just a single, month-long sprint to the finish. Add in the expanded playoffs, and there’s even more confusion regarding what constitutes a good shot at the playoffs. To attempt to provide some clarity, I’ll go through every team’s playoff odds in tiers and compare them to other teams in similar positions over the last half-dozen seasons.

First, here are the playoff odds for every team through Thursday with roughly a month to go in the season:

And in graph form:

Read the rest of this entry »

Since Voros McCracken pondered the meaning of BABIP back in 2001, much of sabermetric research has had an increased focus on volatility. This is especially important when you run projections — as I do from time to time when the mood strikes me — since that volatility has a way of confounding your prognostications. While the evidence suggests that hitters have much more of an actual BABIP “ability” than pitchers do, it doesn’t mean that such an ability is on the same firm ground as, say, plate discipline or the ability to crush the ball into an alternate universe. Even still, outliers tell us a lot even if we expect some of those outliers to remain outliers to some degree.

As odd as it still seems, we’re essentially at the halfway point of the 2020 season for most teams. Weird BABIP numbers don’t magically just work themselves out in a normal 162-game schedule, so we would expect them to do so even less when the season is only 60 games. In a situation like this, estimates of what BABIP a player “should” have based on their advanced data will have more relevance to future seasons than the actual BABIPs do.

One feature built into ZiPS — and into the next iteration of the in-season model — are “z” stats, ZiPS’ attempt to make sense of volatile numbers. For stats like pitcher homers, zHR is far more predictive than the actual number of home runs allowed is (the most predictive model using just HR and zHR weighs the latter about nine times that of the former). zBABIP for hitters isn’t quite on the same level, with an r-squared of only 0.54 historically, but it does still add a lot of information about which players exceeding or falling short of typical BABIP numbers “deserve” to do so. Read the rest of this entry »