My two previous posts on the contentious PBA negotiations between MLB and MiLB focused on the most significant portion of MLB’s proposed plan: eliminating short-season baseball and contracting or reclassifying the 40 teams that go with it. As Baseball America noted, significant changes would be made to current leagues:

The proposal also completely reorganizes the full-season minor leagues. While there would still be Triple-A, Double-A, high Class A and low Class A, those four levels would be completely reworked to make the leagues much more geographically compact. In Triple-A, the Pacific Coast League would shift from 16 teams to 10. The International League would grow to 20 teams. The 14-team low Class A South Atlantic League would be turned into a six-team league with a new Mid-Atlantic league springing up.

The short-season Northwest League would move to full-season ball.

Part of MLB’s stated motivation for those changes is a desire to improve facilities at the minor league level and make travel, both between the majors and minors and between affiliates during the minor league season, less taxing for players. As Morgan Sword, recently promoted to executive vice president of baseball economics and operations, indicated in this New York Times piece regarding MLB’s plan, there are several factors in determining a minor league team’s affiliation:

One was a team’s proximity to its parent club and to potential opponents. Another was the condition of the facilities. A third concerned everyday life, such as hotel availability and general security.

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Black swan events are a defining feature of each baseball season. Like any good sport, the contours of the game and its season elicit a comfortable and familiar warmth. But also like any good sport, the details that make up the fabric of a particular contest or campaign are essentially unpredictable. It’s the round ball, round bat game: Weird stuff happens all the time.

Once they happen though, unexpected events have a way of enmeshing themselves in the game’s broader narrative as if they were just another ad on the outfield wall. Our brains struggle to handle surprises, and so we rationalize them. For a time, it was very weird that Lucas Giolito suddenly looked like one of the best pitchers in baseball; by the time the Cy Young ballots were tallied, his breakout season was just another event from 2019, a feel-good moment and a developmental win, but no longer a curiosity. Lucas Giolito is now good and we accept this for what it is.

But there’s so much more fun to be had with unexpected events. They’re worth celebrating on their own merits. In one form or another, they happen every day and to every team and we should remember the most notable of those surprises. More to the point, one of these is coming for your team in 2020. Like a birthday present waiting to be unwrapped, each team is just a month or so away from discovering something weird about itself. Today, we’re going to use recent history as a guide to imagining what that will look like.

Below, I’ve recounted the most unexpected thing that happened to each team from last year — with a twist. Instead of simply reflecting on what happened, I’ve assigned that very same outcome to a different, random team in 2020. For example, the Cleveland Indians saw one of their cornerstones play like Triple-A flotsam for three months, for no apparent reason. What would that look like if it happened to the Rays?

This is the longest article I’ve ever written for FanGraphs, so Meg (sensibly) made me break it into two pieces. Today, you get the American League teams; the NL will follow early next week. Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 879

FanGraphs’ lead prospect analyst Eric Longenhagen joins the program to discuss Prospect Week, the process of assembling the Top 100, how players move up and down in the rankings, his 2021 Picks to Click, and the upcoming college baseball season. He also signs the Ballad of Oneil Cruz and Tahnaj Thomas, two players you ought to know.

Eric’s book Future Value, co-written with erstwhile FanGraphs prospect analyst Kiley McDaniel, is available for pre-order now.

All of our Prospect Week coverage can found in the handy navigation widget below, and be sure to follow the FanGraphs Prospects twitter account for prospect news throughout the season.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @megrowler on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximate 1 hour and 3 min play time.)

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Trading a star player is easier to sell to a fanbase when said player’s potential replacement is part of the return package. When the Pirates traded Andrew McCutchen, they got back Bryan Reynolds. When the Marlins traded Christian Yelich and J.T. Realmuto, they got back Lewis Brinson and Jorge Alfaro. The exit of a star player always begs the question of who will take his spot, and if the team can point to a shiny young newcomer from another organization and say he’s the answer, it helps to maintain at least an illusion of stability at that position. Fans might miss their old star player, but fear not, because the new guy could be just as good, and so on. This has worked out better in some situations (McCutchen to Reynolds) than others (Yelich to Brinson), but it’s easy to see why a front office would want to employ this kind of strategy.

That’s how the Boston Red Sox behaved when scouring the market for potential returns in their efforts to dump the transcendent Mookie Betts (and, importantly, mountains of salary commitments), and they found their match in the Dodgers, who offered 23-year-old outfielder Alex Verdugo as part of their package in a deal that was completed earlier this week. On the outset, it seemed like a seamless transition. Verdugo certainly won’t be as valuable as Betts in any phase of the game, but he’s a decent enough bat and capable fielder who the Red Sox can plug into right field and forget about. Seems easy enough, right? Well, not necessarily. Verdugo, a left-handed hitter, will be replacing the right-handed-hitting Betts. The other two presumptive starting outfielders for Boston, Andrew Benintendi and Jackie Bradley Jr., are also lefties. Since the plan for right-handed-hitting J.D. Martinez should be to use him in the field as little as possible, and the rest of the projected bench combining for little-to-zero big league outfield experience, the Betts trade still left Boston in a vulnerable spot where outfield platoons are concerned. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for eight years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Tampa Bay Rays.

Batters

One of the things that amazes me about the Rays is how easily they seem to be able to find solidly average talent. Give Tampa’s front office a list of minor league free agents and guarantee that those they talk to will sign with them, and I bet they end up with a bushel of 1.5 WAR players. Heck, send them into a dollar store and they’ll probably find a second baseman who can hit .270/.330/.380 and some off-brand Doritos.

Just one player, Austin Meadows, is projected to be worth at least three wins, so the team’s lineup will tend to max out at “good” rather than competing with the Yankees, A’s, or Twins; they just don’t have enough high-upside talent (right now at least, someone is coming). But it also makes them an incredibly safe lineup, one of the few groups that could survive an obscene number of injuries. Read the rest of this entry »

The Astros cheated. That’s not in dispute. The search for just how much the banging scheme helped the team, however, is ongoing. Rob Arthur got the party started. Tony Adams chronicled the bangs. Here at FanGraphs, Jake Mailhot examined how much the Astros benefited, which players were helped most, and even how the banging scheme performed in clutch situations. In a recent press conference, owner Jim Crane downplayed the benefit, saying “It’s hard to determine how it impacted the game, if it impacted the game, and that’s where we’re going to leave it.” It’s a rich literature, and not just because it’s fun to write “banging scheme” — but I didn’t want to leave it there.

I thought I’d take a different tack. All of these studies are based on reality, and reality has one huge problem: it’s so maddeningly imprecise. You can’t know if we captured all the right bangs. You can’t know if the system changed, or if it had details or mechanisms we didn’t quite understand or know about. And even when everything is captured right, those sample sizes, those damn sample sizes, are never quite what you need to feel confident in their results.

If we simply ignore what actually happened and create our own world, we can skip all that grubby, confusing reality. Imagine, if you will, a player who makes perfectly average swing decisions and achieves perfectly average results on those decisions.

Let’s further stipulate, while we’re far off into imaginary land, that pitchers attack our perfectly average batter in a perfectly average way. For each count, they’ll throw a league average number of fastballs, and those fastballs will be in the strike zone at — you guessed it — a league average rate. The same is true for all other pitches — with cut fastballs included in “all other pitches” in this analysis. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about why the Astros sign-stealing scandal won’t go away, and the reception to the team’s first attempts to apologize. Then they preview the 2020 Angels (28:13) with The Athletic’s Fabian Ardaya, and the 2020 Cardinals (1:03:49) with MLB.com’s Will Leitch. Lastly (1:37:15), Ben talks to FanGraphs’ Craig Edwards about Boston’s Mookie Betts Competitive Balance Tax myth, MLB’s reported 14-team playoff format idea, and the new three-batter-minimum rule (plus a postscript about the Mets’ new big-leaguers-only clubhouse).

Audio intro: Queen, "Scandal"
Audio interstitial 1: Teenage Fanclub, "Ain’t That Enough"
Audio interstitial 2: The Association, "Standing Still"
Audio interstitial 3: The Delgados, "Ballad of Accounting"
Audio outro: Isotopes, "Poison in the Clubhouse"

Link to story on Astros apologies
Link to The Athletic story on 2017 Astros clubhouse
Link to latest WSJ story on the Astros’ sign stealing
Link to Washington Post story on sign-stealing suspicions
Link to Bauer’s story on sign stealing
Link to Craig on Boston’s savings
Link to Zach Kram on Boston’s savings
Link to Rob Arthur on payroll flexibility
Link to story about MLB’s proposed playoff format
Link to Ben Clemens on the playoff format
Link to Cliff Corcoran on the three-batter minimum
Link to order The MVP Machine

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While Yasiel Puig remains unsigned, a couple of other free agent outfielders came off the board on Wednesday via one-year deals at rock-bottom prices that belie their potential productivity even in part-time roles. Cameron Maybin returned to the Tigers, with whom he debuted in 2007, via a $1.5 million deal that includes an additional $1.3 million in incentives, while Jarrod Dyson agreed to a $2 million contract with the Pirates.

The well-traveled Maybin, who turns 33 on April 4, has played for eight different major league teams and has already passed through the hands of the Tigers twice. They made him the No. 10 pick out of an Asheville, North Carolina high school in 2005, and brought him to the majors in 2007, but dealt him to the Marlins that December in the Miguel Cabrera blockbuster. After three years with the Marlins, four with the Padres, and one with the Braves, he sparkled in a return to the Tigers for the 2016 season (.315/.383/.418) but was nonetheless dealt to the Angels that November and continued on his merry way. After splitting the 2018 campaign between the Marlins (again) and Mariners, he went to spring training last year with the Giants but was cut in late March after being arrested on a DUI charge. He landed with the Indians and opened the season with the team’s Triple-A Columbus affiliate before being sold to the Yankees for all of $25,000 on April 25, a time when Giancarlo Stanton, Aaron Judge, Aaron Hicks, and Clint Frazier were all sidelined by injuries. Read the rest of this entry »

The Arizona Diamondbacks have a potential future ace in 24-year-old righty Zac Gallen. Making his debut for the Miami Marlins in June 2019, Gallen finished the season with a 1.6 WAR, and armed with a filthy changeup, became one of the more exciting young pitchers to appear in the major leagues last year.

This spring, Gallen will battle for the fifth spot in the Diamondbacks rotation. If he isn’t able to secure a starting role, Arizona may have him begin the season in Triple-A. Gallen could claim that rotation spot with an assist from an adjustment to one pitch, which in turn will tighten up his entire arsenal and help him become one of the tougher pitchers to face in baseball.

Though the sample is limited, Gallen did well during his first 15 big league starts. Through 80 innings pitched, Gallen produced an ERA of 2.81 (3.61 FIP), struck out 96 hitters, and posted a 2.96 K/BB ratio. Gallen also demonstrated good command last year, though his 10.8% walk rate indicated he may have struggled a bit with his control.

Gallen attacked hitters with a four-seam fastball, a knuckle curveball, a changeup, and two types of cutters: a sweeping (or hybrid) cutter and a backspinning cutter. Eric Longenhagen put a 50 FV on Gallen’s overall arsenal, with special consideration given to his changeup (55 FV). Read the rest of this entry »

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