The St. Louis Cardinals have taken seven players out of the state of Maine since the June amateur draft was instituted in 1965. None of them have reached the big leagues. Trejyn Fletcher is looking to change that. Selected 58th overall last summer out of Portland’s Deering High School, the tooled-up outfielder is No. 10 on our Cardinals Top Prospects list.

Scouting Fletcher — St. Louis’s first ever prep selection from the Pine Tree State — was unique challenge. He’d arrived on their radar in 2018 while playing in the East Coast Pro and Area Code Games showcases, but that was as an underclass invitee. Cardinals scouts were impressed by Fletcher, but with a plethora of draft-eligible players to assess, their focus was elsewhere.

That changed the following March when St. Louis learned that Fletcher had been reclassified and would be eligible for the upcoming draft. That left three months to more-intently assess a player now competing in a wholly-different environment. In charge of those efforts was Assistant GM Randy Flores, whose title includes Director of Scouting.

“As you know, the scouting format for players in the Northeast is different than it is in warmer regions,” said Flores. “In particular, the level of competition Tre was facing. That, along with the limited amount of fair weather before the draft, makes it difficult to accumulate spring at-bats that mirror evaluation periods of Southern California prospects.”

Flores and Co. embraced that challenge. Along the way, they discovered that Maine contains more than raw-but-talented athletes. The state is flush with culinary delights… and not just fresh lobster. Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 885

On this edition of FanGraphs Audio, I welcome FanGraphs writer Ben Clemens to the program. Ben and I discuss the upcoming KBO season, his series on whacky World Series tactics, and the form we’d like baseball to take when it returns in the US. Plus, Ben reveals a shocking predilection for drinking plain, hot water, and a not-so-shocking affinity for board games.

Ben’s primers on the KBO: Part One and Part Two

Ben’s Wild World Series Tactics series: 1990-1993, 1995-1997, 1998-2000, 2001-2003

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Audio after the jump. (Approximate 52 min play time.)

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In Friday’s FanGraphs Live stream with Paul Sporer, Ben Clemens, and Dan Szymborski, the Atlanta Braves head to New York to face off against the Mets in a weekend showdown between NL East rivals.

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This is the latest installment of a series in which the FanGraphs staff rounds up the latest developments regarding the COVID-19 virus’ effect on baseball.

Tampa Bay Rays to Furlough Employees

In order to save money, the Tampa Bay Rays have reportedly furloughed some of their full-time employees; the furloughs will take effect on Saturday. The furloughs will involve less than half of their staff, with other employees in baseball operations receiving pay cuts. Teams have unsurprisingly been happier to trumpet the employees they’ve kept on than the cuts they’ve made, such as the already reported news of the Pirates halting 401k contributions for baseball operations staff or the Mets cutting front office salaries after June 1, even if a partial season is played.

The Rays are the first team known to have furloughed employees, but they’re unlikely to be the last; the A’s have reportedly discussed what Ken Rosenthal and Alex Coffey described as “extensive layoffs.” Read the rest of this entry »

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Once upon a time, a long, long time ago, the game of baseball was much different than the three-true-outcomes style of play that has become prominent in this era. Back in the 1980s, there were a lot of contact hitters, stolen bases, sacrifice bunts by non-pitchers, middle infielders who couldn’t hit for average or power, complete games, astroturf, double-headers, This Week In Baseball, and the San Diego Chicken. There weren’t a lot of hitters willing to sacrifice batting average for home runs, five relief pitchers in every team’s bullpen who could throw 99 mph, or players changing teams much in free agency.

While a lot has obviously changed, the game was just as glorious back then, with many memorable performances by players who each had their own unique journey to the major leagues. Here’s a look back at how the NL MVPs of the 1980s were acquired.

A pair of shortstops selected in the 1971 amateur draft with the 29th and 30th picks would each win an MVP award nine years later as third basemen. Both players, George Brett of the Kansas City Royals (class of ’99) and Mike Schmidt of the Philadelphia Phillies (class of ’95), would spend their entire careers with their respective teams and enter the Hall of Fame by the end of the century. Read the rest of this entry »

We tend to think of decades in two ways. The first is to classify a set of years with the same number in the tens column i.e. 80s, 90s, etc. This makes for very easy groupings when looking at the best what-have-you of a decade, or an all-decade team, but it can also be fairly restrictive. Just because 1961 and 1969 are both in the 60s, doesn’t really make them the same; we certainly hope that 2029 looks both much different and better than 2020 is shaping up to be. This manner of grouping arbitrarily chooses endpoints. But there is another way to look at a decade, and that’s to see it as any 10-year period. It’s much less restrictive and provides for more comparisons, particularly when it comes to baseball players, who tend to have relatively short primes that overlap different decades.

That was a relatively long-winded way to lead into what I’ve done, which is to look at a rolling 10-year position player leaderboard for every year since 1909. It should come as no surprise that Mike Trout’s 74.3 WAR leads the 10-year period from 2010 to 2019. He also leads the period from 2009 to 2018 and from 2008 to 2017. Since he didn’t play in 2010 and only accumulated 0.7 WAR in 2011, he’s almost guaranteed to lead the periods ending from 2020 to 2022 as well. For reference, the only players since the 10-year period ending in 1909 to be 10-year WAR leaders in six separate seasons are Honus Wagner, Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Stan Musial, Willie Mays, Mike Schmidt, and Barry Bonds. Only 24 players have topped the 10-year WAR leaderboard even once in the last 111 seasons. Here are those players:

If Trout is even halfway decent over the next few years, he’ll end up in the top-five of that list with the potential to hit double-digits. This is what the top-three for position players has looked like over the last 10 years:

If you are wondering where Trout’s 73 WAR ranks historically, it’s 101th, though if Trout were to have standard Trout seasons in 2020 and 2021, he could get into the top 10 and potentially have the best 10-year period in history since Babe Ruth. Here are the very best decades in history:

Since World War II, only Willie Mays and Barry Bonds have averaged nine wins per season for an entire decade. The only other player in the last 75 years to hit 80 WAR in a 10-year period is Mickey Mantle. That’s a mark Trout would likely have gotten to this year with a full season’s worth of play, with an outside shot at topping Mays and Bonds with another Trout-like season in 2021. Even Trout’s 70 WAR puts him in pretty rare company. Below is the complete list of position players with 70-WAR decades:

Mike Trout is already guaranteed two more decades of at least 70 WAR, with an 80-WAR season a reasonable possibility. I should also note that Ted Williams hit his 70 WAR in 10 seasons from 1946-1955, but he also put together 67 WAR from 1939-1948 despite missing three years in that time due to World WAR II. Over the last 50 years only six players have bested Trout’s eight-year stretch over the course of a decade.

With a 5.5 WAR season in 2020, Trout would pass everyone on the list above except for Barry Bonds. There are a lot of ways to talk about just how good Mike Trout is as a baseball player, and this post is evidence that we haven’t run out of ways to show his brilliance on the diamond.

Lastly, for the sake of being a completist, here’s the top-three in WAR for every 10-year period going back to 1909:

Yesterday, I went over the foreign-born players who ply their trade for five KBO teams. Today, as we continue to ramp up for Opening Day, let’s hit on the other five teams. As before, this is a mix of former 26th men and talented-but-flawed players, some of whom have unlocked new levels of their game in the KBO.

LG Twins

Casey Kelly: Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Kelly was a fringy major leaguer who debuted in the majors in 2012 for the Padres and then bounced around the minors for years, sometimes making spot appearances when a team needed an extra starter or bullpen arm. A low-90s fastball and no obvious plus secondary — his closest is probably his two-plane, low-80s curve — simply don’t combine to stop major league hitters.

With the Twins, everything clicked. Kelly put up a stellar 2.55 ERA, which led to a $1.2 million contract with another $300,000 in incentives — Mel Rojas Jr. money. Under the hood, it wasn’t quite as pretty — his RA9 was 3.49 and his FIP was in the threes as well — but that’s still spectacular in a league where 4.6 runs are scored per game.

Like most pitchers in the KBO, Kelly forces opponents to beat him — he struck out 17% of the batters he faced and walked 5.5%. Between that glorious walk rate and a penchant for keeping the ball on the ground, he forced opposing hitters to play his game, and it paid off. This is what KBO teams are hoping for when they bring in a foreign-born pitcher: steady competence that adds up to ace-level numbers.

Tyler Wilson: Before Kelly, there was Wilson. After toiling in the Orioles system for six years with only 145.1 major league innings to show for it, he signed with the Twins before the 2018 season. In juiced-up 2018, he was awesome: a 3.07 ERA, a KBO-Haderesque 21.7% strikeout rate, and only 4.9% walks. He followed it up with a solid 2019, though a little worse after adjusting for the overall run-scoring environment: 18% strikeout rate, 5.6% walks, and tremendous home run suppression. Read the rest of this entry »

Unusual situations create interesting problems for analysts to solve. While it’s still not clear just what the 2020 season will look like — if indeed there is a 2020 season — the one thing that’s guaranteed is that baseball this year will probably look very different than any season in living memory. (Incidentally, I won’t say all-time: 19th century baseball saw a team disband during warmups because no one was in attendance and some of the home squad left with the visiting team.)

Interesting challenges are usually fun to tackle, though admittedly I much prefer those that don’t involve a lack of baseball. The general belief around the game is that we will get some baseball this year, making the challenge of the moment figuring out what a shortened season will mean for the projections; regardless of what form this season takes, come 2021, I’ll have to churn out ZiPS projections, which should prove to be a trickier-than-typical offseason task.

The natural hypothesis is that in the short-term, the projections will be worse than usual, due to greater uncertainty and simply fewer games played by the players in question. If the season opens in late June or early July, it’s likely that teams will play somewhere in the neighborhood of 100 games. The good news is that while we haven’t had a lost season, we have two strike-shortened seasons, in 1981 and 1994, that can help guide us. They’re not 100% comparable — 1981’s strike was in the middle of the season and 1995 was slightly shorter as well — but they’re the main historical comps we have to look at.

ZiPS projections didn’t exist during these seasons, as I was in high school in 1994 and was just figuring out how to use a toilet in 1981. So to get an idea, I ran some very simplified projections, using only the basic data and simple aging, a stripped-down projection that’s similar to Tom Tango’s Marcel the Monkey forecasting system. Read the rest of this entry »

Facing the prospect of a season without fans in the stands, Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley console themselves and fight baseball withdrawal by revisiting classic accounts of going to games. The authors of three revered books based on single games—Arnold Hano, the author of A Day in the Bleachers (1955), Dan Okrent, the author of Nine Innings (1985), and Rob Neyer, the author of Power Ball (2018)—join the show for a conversation about the enduring appeal of the genre their books belong to, the challenge of writing a book that describes a single game, the different approaches they took, the evolution of baseball’s spectator experience, Arnold’s memories of going to games in the 1920s and 1930s and seeing legends like Babe Ruth, Mel Ott, and Carl Hubbell, baseball’s capacity to offer comfort, and more.

Audio intro: Dan Bern, "A Day at the Ballgame"
Audio outro: Dan Bern, "Love, War and a Baseball Game"

Link to A Day in the Bleachers
Link to Nine Innings
Link to Power Ball
Link to 1954 World Series Game 1 box score
Link to June 10, 1982 Brewers-Orioles box score
Link to September 8, 2017 A’s-Astros box score
Link to previous interview with Rob about Power Ball
Link to video of Mays catch
Link to speech about Arnold at his Shrine of the Eternals induction
Link to info on documentary about Arnold
Link to Hano! A Century in the Bleachers
Link to A Secret Love
Link to Ben and Travis Q&A
Link to order The MVP Machine

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