Every player on the Cubs’ roster should be considered a trade candidate. That much should be clear after their decision to ship Yu Darvish out of town with three years remaining on his contract. He’s far from the only high-profile veteran who could be on the chopping block: Kris Bryant, Javier Báez and Anthony Rizzo are each entering their final years of team control, and Willson Contreras will be a free agent in two years.

We don’t know what will happen with any of those players in the immediate future, but it feels right to say most of them won’t be Cubs by 2022. Chicago seems willing to capitalize on Contreras’ multiple remaining years of control by dangling him in trade talks. Bryant and Báez could be moved in the coming months as well, but both are coming off dreadful seasons at the plate. Even if they aren’t traded, it’s difficult to envision them signing long-term contracts with the team: They’ll still be in their 20s when they finish this season, they play premium defensive positions, and the allure of their MVP-level past selves is likely to put their price higher than Chicago is willing to stomach.

In the case of Rizzo, though, I’m not sure I’d say the same. He will be 32 at season’s end, which means his next contract won’t be nearly as long as those of his teammates. He also plays the lowest non-DH position on the defensive spectrum (albeit very well, winning four Gold Gloves in the last five seasons) and probably doesn’t have the same ceiling that Bryant and Baez do. His price should be more manageable, giving the Cubs an opportunity to offer him an extension that would keep him in Chicago for the duration of his career.

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For years, rumors have circulated that Francisco Lindor was available in trade. Cleveland, ever penny-pinching, always looked unlikely to sign him to an extension. He’s due to reach free agency after this season, which put a clock on the situation. Today, that clock struck midnight. As first reported by Jeff Passan, the Mets have acquired Lindor and Carlos Carrasco in exchange for Amed Rosario, Andrés Giménez, Josh Wolf, and Isaiah Greene.

It’s easy to like New York’s side of the deal. Lindor is one of the 10 or so best position players in baseball, and at 27, he’s just entering his prime. In addition, he’s one of the best defensive shortstops in the game, a huge upgrade for a team that induces a ton of grounders.

He’s a free agent after this year, of course, which limited Cleveland’s return for him, but the Mets have talked all offseason about signing marquee free agents, and Lindor blows this year’s crop out of the water. None of the available free agents this winter project for more than J.T. Realmuto’s 4.1 WAR, and none of the top 10 are younger than 30. Lindor is better, younger, and arguably more marketable than anyone on that list, and it’s not particularly close.

Most of the best hitters in baseball get there by, well, hitting. Lindor does that too — Steamer and ZiPS think he’ll be the third-best batter at the shortstop position in 2021 — but he gets an outsize proportion of his value from defense. From 2018 to 2020, he’s been the second-best shortstop defender in baseball per UZR, behind only Andrelton Simmons. DRS has him fourth, behind Simmons, Paul DeJong, and Nick Ahmed. Per Outs Above Average, he’s second only to Ahmed. No matter how you slice it, his defense is stellar.

If you plug Ahmed or Simmons (and probably DeJong, too) into your lineup, you’re sacrificing offense for defense. Not so with Lindor. His worst season at the plate was 2020, but even then, he managed a .258/.335/.415 line, good for a 100 wRC+. For his career, he’s a .285/.346/.488 hitter, a line buoyed by his phenomenal contact skills. Despite an aggressive approach at the plate, he strikes out only 14.1% of the time while walking at an average rate, which gives him a high floor.

Though he brings plenty of other positive qualities to the table, that contact skill is his only true standout offensive ability. He displayed shocking power in 2018, barreling up 9.3% of his batted balls on the way to 38 home runs, but for the most part, he gets to his stats by being roughly average when he makes contact while making far more contact than the average hitter. In his career, he’s accumulated a .383 xwOBA on contact and a .380 actual wOBA on contact, a hair higher than the .376 and .370 marks the league as a whole has accrued over the same time period. Even average power plays up when you get so many opportunities, though, which is how he put together three straight 30-homer seasons from 2017 to 2019. Read the rest of this entry »

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12:02

Dan Szymborski: And welcome to 2021!

12:02

Dan Szymborski: IT STARTS NOW, EVERYTHING ELSE WAS 2020.2

12:02

Dan Szymborski: I am in the top 100% of all chats.

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Injuries, though that’s harder to actually *work* with

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A couple of weeks ago, I was chatting with PitcherList’s Alex Fast about four-seam fastballs swinging strike rates (SwStr%) and their relationship to pitch height — or, perhaps more specifically, their lack of relationship. At the pitcher-season level (e.g., “2020 Clayton Kershaw“), the correlation between SwStr% and pitch height appeared weak at best. When you consider that no fastball is created equal and then introduce small-sample variance to the equation, the relationship could, understandably, become blurred at the pitcher level.

As a retort, I sent him the following graph, which shows SwStr% by pitch height for the three broad pitch classes as defined by Statcast, the source of the data. For reference, I’ve added black lines to indicate the average bottom, heart, and top of the strike zone:

If we zoom out and consider the question at the macro level, independent of context (what’s the average swinging strike rate for all fastballs by pitch height?), we can see that fastballs generate more swinging strikes up in the zone, a phenomenon our own Jeff Zimmerman touched upon here. This finding is mildly interesting in and of itself. But as I considered the matter further, the importance of swing frequency (Swing%) to SwStr% became clear (both use all pitches as a denominator). Regardless of efficacy, more swings will afford more chances for swinging strikes. As such, I anticipated that fastballs probably induce more swinging strikes up high than down low simply because hitters swing more frequently at high fastballs. Similarly (but inversely), non-fastballs would generate more swinging strikes down low instead of up high. The next graph all but affirmed my intuition:

Although the peaks of the bell curves cluster near the heart of the zone, we can see distinct differences in swing rate by pitch class at the thresholds of the strike zone. At its bottom edge, hitters are half as likely to swing at fastballs as they are at non-fastballs; at its top edge, twice as likely. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the course of this offseason, FanGraphs is compiling a crowdsourced ranking of our readers’ favorite broadcasts. Last month, we announced the results of the crowdsourced vote on TV broadcasts. Now we are once again asking for your help, this time for each team’s radio broadcast.

The radio broadcasts will follow the same general format as our earlier TV broadcast surveys. When you peruse the section for your team or teams of choice, you will find a link to a poll. That poll covers three categories, as well as an overall ranking. In addition, there is a separate space for any additional comments you would like to make. The eventual ranking of radio teams will be quantitative, but I will include relevant comments from this section in my writing of those rankings.

The “Analysis” score covers the frequency and quality of a broadcast team’s discussion of baseball. Of note, this doesn’t mean sabermetric or statistical analysis, though some broadcast teams certainly excel in that area. Rather, it covers all the ways in which a broadcast team attempts to inform listeners about the players on the field and the game situation they find themselves in.

Is a color commentator particularly adept at breaking down a hitter’s adjustments? That’s excellent analysis. Does a broadcaster mention a player’s DRS, then use that number without context to explain why someone is a good or bad defender? That’s bad analysis, despite its use of advanced metrics. This category’s score should represent how much you feel you learn about baseball while you watch the game.

The “Charisma” score covers the amount of enjoyment you derive from listening to the announcers. Does the booth’s camaraderie make you feel like you’re listening to a game with friends? Does an announcer’s wistful recounting of his playing days leave you in stitches? Do you find yourself just downright having fun listening to their stories? All of that is contained in this category.

The “Coherence” score was the most difficult category to name. It covers how well the broadcast explains the action on the field as it happens. Is the play-by-play crisp and informative? Do the announcers keep listeners abreast of the count and game situation in discussing team strategy? When a strange situation comes up, do they convey what happened and what it means for the two teams effectively? I expect that this category will prove more divisive in radio than it did in the TV ratings, because play-by-play announcers carry more weight when there’s no visual component. Read the rest of this entry »

Eric Jagers is on the fast track in the pitching world. Little more than seven years after discovering Driveline during his freshman year of college, the 25-year-old Iowa native is now the assistant pitching coach for the Reds. Promoted to the position last month — he replaced Caleb Cotham, who is now the Phillies’ new pitching coach— Jagers spent last season as the club’s assistant pitching coordinator. Previously Driveline’s Manager of Technical Development, he remains with the Seattle-area training facility in an advisory role.

Jagers touched on a handful of pitching-related topics, and a pair of Cincinnati hurlers, earlier this week.

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David Laurila: What do many people not really understand about the technological aspects of pitching development?

Eric Jagers: “That’s a good question. With all the pitch-tracking technology — and there are a lot of people who do understand this — it’s all the pieces together, as opposed to the segmented ways we tend to look at things: a pitch has got this movement, and it’s also got this location. But really, those things morph together. The location piece adds to the movement piece. A fastball with a lot of hop that’s also up in the zone is maximized. Same with a sinker that’s at the bottom of the zone. Conversely, with a sinker at the top — when we’re looking at short-form movement — it’s easy for the data to fool you into thinking it’s something it’s not.

“I think a lot of people are pretty comfortable viewing movement on TrackMan, Rapsodo, and now Hawk-Eye. But those are just giving us a piece of the equation. We need to factor in all the variables.”

Laurila: Can you elaborate on what you mean by data fooling you into thinking it’s something it’s not?

Jagers: “It’s easy to come up with an answer, and the easiest person to fool is yourself. It’s like the Richard Feynman quote. Basically, it makes it really easy for us to tell us the story that we want to tell, and we don’t have a full understanding — at least on surface-level stats — of what a complete pitch is. Going back to location and movement, in order to get a true vertical-break number, it’s not just 18 inches of spin-induced vertical movement. It’s that, plus where it was released from, plus where it entered the zone. All of those things together equate to one true number. Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2021 Hall of Fame ballot. 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. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Aramis Ramirez hit more homers than all but six players who spent the majority of their careers at third base, and he also ranks among the top half-dozen from the hot corner in RBI, and fourth in slugging percentage among those with at least 7,000 plate appearances. While that’s not enough to make him a serious Hall of Fame candidate once his 18-year career is placed in its proper context, the three-time All-Star deserves his due as the final entry in the One-and-Done portion of my annual series.

Ramirez put up big offensive numbers while spending his entire career in the NL Central, bookended by stints with the Pirates (1998-2003, ’15) that included a chance to finally represent them in postseason play. He was part of three playoff teams during his 8 1/2-season stint with the Cubs (2003-11), for whom he was a two-time All-Star, and made the last of his All-Star berths during three lean years in Milwaukee (’12-14). The man could hit: Ramirez batted .300 or better seven times, with a high of .318 in 2004; swatted 25 or more homers in a season 10 times, topping 30 four times; and drove in 100 or more runs seven times; he set highs in the last two categories in 2006, when he hit 38 homers and drove in 119 runs. Tellingly, in a hitter-friendly era he only grazed the leaderboards in those triple crown categories, with eight top-10 finishes but just one higher than seventh place.

Aramis Ramirez was born on June 25, 1978 in Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Unlike so many Dominican players who come from poverty, he was comparatively well off, as his father was a doctor and his mother an accountant. Basketball was his first love; he didn’t start playing baseball until age 13, but the fact that he owned three gloves made up for his deficit in skill relative to other kids in his neighborhood. “I was really bad,” he told Sports Illustrated’s Jamal Greene in 2001, “But if they didn’t let me play, they wouldn’t have enough gloves.” Read the rest of this entry »

After playing some pretty terrible baseball in 2019, the Detroit Tigers brought in a couple of veteran free agents to bolster their offense, taking it from very bad to only kind of bad. C.J. Cron only got to play 13 games in a Tigers uniform before he sprained his knee and was lost for the season. Jonathan Schoop worked out much better, producing a 114 wRC+ while playing excellent defense at the keystone, good for 1.4 wins in 44 games. Overall, the team wasn’t much better than their 2019 record, improving from an ugly 114 loss season to a pro-rated 98 loss season in 2020.

Just like last offseason, the Tigers turned to a veteran free agent to aid their beleaguered offense. Yesterday, they signed Robbie Grossman to a two-year deal with a $10 million guarantee and an additional $1 million in incentives, per Cody Stavenhagen and Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic. Craig Edwards had Grossman towards the bottom of our Top 50 free agents ranking, estimating he’d get a one-year deal worth around $6 million, while the crowd had him pegged for an average of just over a year and a half and $9 million.

The switch-hitting outfielder had a career renaissance in 2020, accumulating 1.3 wins for the Oakland Athletics, easily a career high that becomes even more impressive when you consider that he accumulated that much WAR in just 51 games. Grossman posted a 126 wRC+ in 2020, the second highest mark of his career, and that offensive outburst was fueled by a massive power breakout. During the first seven seasons of his career, he compiled a .119 ISO, a mark you’d expect a light-hitting infielder to produce. Most of his offensive value stemmed from his keen eye at the plate and an above average ability to make solid, if weak, contact. In 2020, Grossman upped his ISO from .107 to .241, launching eight home runs in the abbreviated season. That was more home runs than he had hit during the previous two seasons despite accumulating less than half the number of plate appearances than in ‘19 or ‘18. Among all qualified batters in 2020, Grossman’s 134 point ISO increase over 2019 was the second highest, behind only Wil Myers. Read the rest of this entry »