In a race for a playoff spot, every edge matters. And yet all too often, for reasons that extend beyond a player’s statistics, managers and general managers fail to make the moves that could improve their teams, allowing subpar production to fester at the risk of smothering a club’s postseason hopes. In Baseball Prospectus’ 2007 book It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over, I compiled a historical All-Star squad of ignominy, identifying players at each position whose performances had dragged their teams down in tight races: the Replacement-Level Killers. I’ve revisited the concept numerous times at multiple outlets, and have presented it at FanGraphs in an expanded format since 2018.

Things are different this year, as you may have noticed. With six days to go before the August 31 deadline, just a month’s worth of performance to analyze — if, that is, a team has avoided a COVID-19 outbreak that has blown a hole in its schedule — and 23 teams within two games of spot in the expanded playoff field through Monday, putting together this year’s set of Replacement-Level Killers is a challenge like no other. The sample sizes are tiny, especially when players are sharing a position; month-long slumps are hardly unique. Even without being a complete devotee to exactitude, normally I’m able to curate a tidy list at each position by focusing on the subset of contenders (teams with .500 records or at least a 10% chance of reaching the playoffs) who have gotten less than 1.0 WAR at that spot through roughly two-thirds of the season. Scale that down to 30 games, and the threshold becomes 0.3 WAR or less, in which case a single good day by a player at the position in question might boost him from Killer to mid-pack producer.

Thus, I’m doing things a bit differently this time around. While still focusing upon teams that meet the loose definition of contenders (apologies in advance to fans of the Royals, Angels, Tigers, Red Sox, Rangers, Mariners, and Pirates), I’ll incorporate our Depth Charts rest-of-season WARs into the equation, considering any team that comes out with a total of 0.4 WAR or less to be in the replacement-level realm (that’s 1.1 WAR over the course of 162 games, decidedly subpar), though I may give a few teams in each batch a lightning round-type treatment, as I see their problems as less pressing given other contexts (returns from injury, contradictory defensive metrics, bigger holes elsewhere on the roster etc.) and I’ve pledged to keep these from becoming 3,000-word tomes. Read the rest of this entry »

Back before the Chicago Cubs decided to go full-on Ebenezer Scrooge, they aggressively pursued top players in free agency to improve their roster. One of those players was Yu Darvish, an ace for the Rangers and Dodgers after seven years of dominating the Japan Pacific League, a feat he accomplished while still a teenager. Darvish was the best pitcher available after the 2017 season and the Cubs signed him to a six-year, $126 million contract, a sum commensurate with his abilities. And unlike his first deal in the majors, Darvish didn’t have to contend with a posting fee; when the right-hander came to the States, the Nippon Ham Fighters got nearly as much ($51.7 million) as he did ($56 million).

The initial returns were not promising. The Cubs won 95 games in 2018 before being bounced in the Wild Card game by the Colorado Rockies, while triceps and elbow issues limited Darvish to just eight games. Those were mostly ineffective games to boot, as his walk rate jumped to career highs, his ERA and FIP ballooned to near five, and he failed to complete the fifth inning in five of his starts. MRIs revealed no structural damage to his arm, but the team was careful; the triceps is important in the arm deceleration phase of a pitcher’s delivery:

Activity of the triceps muscles, as well as activity of the anconeus and wrist flexor muscles, helped the joint’s ligaments apply a compression force during this phase in order to stabilize the elbow and prevent elbow distraction.

Darvish was already a veteran of one Tommy John surgery and the Cubs were rightly conservative about rushing their ace to full-time duty. The first victory of 2019 was just staying healthy, which he achieved; Darvish only missed a single start down the stretch due to forearm pain. But the control wasn’t there in the early-going and a third of the way through the season, his ERA was at 5.40 with an extremely worrying 38 walks in 11 starts. Indeed, even late as Independence Day, Darvish’s ERA was north of five. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller follow up on two Stat Blasts from the previous week and banter about the Dodgers’ impressive winning percentage pace, the surprisingly normal state of the standings, the Phillies’ bullpen, and the record-setting sale of a Mike Trout baseball card before discussing some of the ways in which the 2020 season has forced them to adjust their prior beliefs about baseball.

Audio intro: RJD2 (Feat. Homeboy Sandman), "One of a Kind"
Audio outro: The Bigger Lovers, "Change Your Mind"

Link to story about Trout card
Link to episode with interview about baseball cards
Link to article about 2020’s unbalanced schedule
Link to Ben on BABIP

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With two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning of last night’s game between the Braves and Phillies, the visiting Phillies were holding on to a two-run lead. Dansby Swanson stood on first base with Adeiny Hechavarría on second. Freddie Freeman was facing off against new Phillies acquisition Brandon Workman. In terms of compelling endings, this is pretty close to what you hope for. One of the better hitters in the game had a chance to hit a walk-off home run to end the game, while making an out would mean victory for the other side. Freeman did get a hit, pushing a double into the gap, but the game ended when Swanson was thrown out at home trying to score the tying run. The play, already compelling given the game state, was made more interesting by two factors:

1. Andrew Knapp might have blocked the plate in violation of the rules designed to prevent collisions at home.
2. Swanson decided to try to score the tying run on the play, but made the final out instead.

Before getting to the collision rule and whether Knapp was where he shouldn’t have been, let’s first consider Swanson’s decision to attempt to score from first base. While Freeman hit the ball pretty far, it was cut off by Roman Quinn. One of the fastest runners in the game, Quinn got to the ball in the gap before left fielder Andrew McCutchen. While McCutchen’s arm strength isn’t terrible, it isn’t much more than average, while Quinn has thrown an easy 87 mph pitch from the mound, and made this throw earlier this month:

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

David Fletcher is 5 feet and 9 inches tall. By the standards of professional baseball, that’s quite short. He makes up for it a bit by standing upright in the batter’s box, but no one is going to confuse him for Aaron Judge anytime soon. That makes it all the more confusing that on Friday night, he did this:

First of all, wow! Are you kidding me? That ball was nearly five feet off the ground. Halfway to home plate, it was unclear whether Fletcher was taking a swing at a major league pitch or a piñata:

If you’ve been paying attention throughout his career, Fletcher making contact with that pitch will be less surprising. He’s a singular player, a contact machine who will defend the strike zone at all costs when the count reaches two strikes. So far this year, he’s swung at 51 pitches outside the strike zone and only missed nine of them. That 87.3% out-of-zone contact rate is higher than the league contact rate on pitches in the strike zone. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2019 season couldn’t have gone much better for Stephen Strasburg, but his follow-up performance is already over. After making just two long-delayed and abbreviated starts, the 32-year-old righty has been transferred to the 60-day Injured List and is slated to undergo surgery to alleviate carpal tunnel neuritis in his right hand. He becomes the latest top-flight pitcher to land on the IL this season, and leaves the already-struggling Nationals just that much more shorthanded as they defend their title.

After averaging just 24 starts per season from 2015-18 due to a variety of ailments, Strasburg didn’t miss a single start in 2019. He struck out a career-high 251 batters in a National League-high 209 innings, received enough run support to notch an NL-high 18 wins as well, and finished with a 3.32 ERA, 3.25 FIP, and 5.7 WAR, the last of which ranked third in the NL behind Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer. He followed that stellar season with a dominant postseason performance, pitching to a 1.98 ERA with 47 strikeouts and just four walks in 36.1 innings, and won World Series MVP honors while helping the Nationals win their first championship in franchise history. After opting out of the final four years and $100 million of his contract, he signed a new seven-year, $245 million deal. It was a very good year.

Strasburg appeared to be on track to make his season debut on July 25, in the Nationals’ second game, but he was scratched from the start just hours before first pitch due to what was described as a nerve issue. He was replaced by Erick Fedde, and received an injection of cortisone. At the time, he admitted that he had been pitching through numbness in his hand for weeks. From NBC Sports’ Todd Dybas:

“Started out, probably, like the end of the first week of camp. I was waking up in the middle of the night and my hand was asleep. Kept falling asleep and I was getting these feelings, and it wasn’t really bothering me throwing. It seemed like once I tried starting to ramp up and stuff, the symptoms started to increase. It really’s something the last two [intrasquad] games was feeling it pretty regularly. Just something you try to throw through. After I got out of the last start problems, issues, just kept persisting. Saw that there was nerve impingement in my wrist. Got a cortisone shot to hopefully create more space in there to get it to calm down and get back to normal.

…”It got to the point where I didn’t have the same feeling in my hand holding the ball. It was affecting my ability to command the baseball the way I’m accustomed to. It’s something that I feel like if I take some time now to get that feeling back to normal, I can be out there much sooner than if I try to just gut it out at this point.”

Read the rest of this entry »

We’re a week from the Trade Deadline and still, almost all of the available information on pro prospects is limited to the big league level. That’s where I’ve been focusing my attention, with new player opinions then reflected on The Board, to which I made the following updates over the weekend.

Entering the 100

Padres infielder Jake Cronenworth becomes the first 2020 Pick to Click to, well, click. He moves into the top 100, ranked 93rd. At 26.6 years old, he becomes the oldest player on the hundred, pacing A’s catcher Sean Murphy by about seven months. Most of his pre-season scouting report holds water except that Cronenworth suddenly has relevant pop. He hit a ball 110 mph this year, up from a max of 106 mph last season in the minors. He now looks like an everyday player at a premium position rather than a super utility type, so he slots into the top 100 ahead of similar players who are a couple years away (like Brayan Rocchio) but behind players who are either there or who are close but much younger (like Washington infielder Luis García).

Cleveland righty Triston McKenzie made his big league debut in what was his first competitive game since 2018 due to multiple injuries and the global pandemic. Not only is he healthy, but McKenzie is throwing harder. His fastball lived in the 90-93 range in 2018 and was 90-94 this spring as he prepared for the season. He’s now living in the 93-96 range and leaned on the heater in big spots during his debut, shaking off Roberto Pérez to get to it. Hopes that McKenzie would eventually develop a third pitch have more than come to fruition, as both his slider and changeup have evolved to complement the fastball/curveball combo that headlines his arsenal.

So how about Dane Dunning? The 25-year-old, who debuted last week, also had not pitched since 2018, with his layoff due to Tommy John surgery. His stuff looked as it did pre-surgery, with the fastball in the 91-94 range, and both breaking balls effective. Read the rest of this entry »

Nothing can deflate the excitement surrounding a hopeful contender like a leaky bullpen, but as is the case most years, several teams have encountered just that kind of luck in the opening weeks of the 2020 season. At various times, the relief corps of the Cubs, Reds, and Padres have all been a hurdle for those teams to overcome, rather than an asset assisting them in their playoff pursuits. As much as those units and others have struggled this season, however, no team’s group of relievers has made victories harder to achieve than that of the Phillies. Their bullpen ERA of 8.00 is the worst in baseball by more than two runs. Unsurprisingly, that has had a big impact on Philadelphia’s postseason hopes — at 10-14, the team is last in its division, and second-worst in the National League.

Instead of packing it in, however, the Phillies have dialed up some assistance from the last place team in the other league. Late Friday night, Philadelphia struck a deal to acquire right-handed relievers Brandon Workman and Heath Hembree from the Boston Red Sox in exchange for right-hander Nick Pivetta and minor league arm Connor Seabold. Boston also sent $815,000 in cash to complete the swap, assisting the Phillies in paying the $1.05 million owed to the two relievers for the rest of the season.

Of the pair heading to Philadelphia, Workman offers the most upside. A Tommy John survivor who was still spending significant time in the minors as recently as 2018, Workman broke out in 2019 with some truly elite numbers — a 1.88 ERA, 2.46 FIP, 2.1 WAR, and 13.06 K/9. When I examined him near the end of last season, I found he’d made a number of changes to his approach. He was suddenly throwing his curve nearly half of the time, and had found a way to to dramatically reduce the number of strikes he threw without suffering a noticeable drop in opponents’ swing rate. Read the rest of this entry »

Five of the first 12 picks in the 2016 draft were high school pitchers. In order, those selections were: Ian Anderson to the Braves (third overall), Riley Pint to the Rockies (fourth), Braxton Garrett to the Marlins (seventh), Matt Manning to the Tigers (ninth), and Jay Groome to the Red Sox (12th). Not surprisingly, their respective development paths have varied, injuries hindering the progress of fully half.

Chris Mears — at the time a pitching crosschecker for the Red Sox — was especially enamored with Manning.

“I liked his athleticism, his looseness, his fastball quality,” said Mears, who is now one of Boston’s two pitching coordinators, along with Shawn Haviland. “I thought he would be a longer-term development type guy — the Tigers have done a really good job; he’s made adjustments faster than I would have anticipated — but I remember him being a guy I really wanted.”

Asked why he’d viewed him as a longer-term project, Mears cited Manning’s basketball background, and “less pitching experience than many high-school draftees have at that point in their careers.” Moreover, Manning is 6’ 6” and “usually those long-lever guys take a little bit longer to get the feel of repeating their delivery.” Mears also saw a breaking ball that while having good shape and spin, wasn’t always consistent.

Which doesn’t mean he wasn’t enthralled with his potential. Mears first saw Manning at the Arizona Fall Classic, and based on that look he and Josh Labandeira, Boston’s Northern California area scout, went to see him early the following spring. Read the rest of this entry »