On Tuesday night, the Los Angeles Dodgers traded for Mookie Betts and David Price. Assuming the parties involved can hammer out the details, the deal obviously makes the Dodgers a better baseball team, both in the here and now and, to a lesser extent, in the future. For Los Angeles fans tired of October flameouts and agonizing World Series defeats, this is fantastic news: Betts alone is something like a five-win upgrade and he’ll make a long lineup that much more daunting come the playoffs.

As far as simply reaching the playoffs goes though, Betts barely moves the needle. Of all the teams in baseball, it’s not like this one “needed” to get better, at least when it comes to maximizing its playoff chances. Dan Szymborski took great pains to express that the ZiPS projections he’s cooking up are still under-baked and not yet fit for public consumption; that caveat aside, he has the Dodgers projected to win the NL West by 12 games without Betts. With him in the fold, that jumps to 16. Los Angeles has already won the division seven times in a row; with a loaded roster, and a deep farm system, their streak wasn’t in any jeopardy this year and won’t be for some time yet.

Whether or not the trade looks redundant in a competitive sense for the Dodgers, it must feel like just another body blow in Phoenix, Denver, and San Diego. Through the realities of geography, vagaries of expansion, and a league-wide desire to limit travel costs, four other franchises are stuck perpetually competing with the West Coast’s foremost superpower. The Giants have the resources to remain competitive in spite of their southern rival, but the other three teams have looked comparatively hapless. The Giants and Dodgers have captured all but one division title since 2007. In that period, the Padres, Diamondbacks, and Rockies have only reached the playoffs five times combined, never escaping the NLDS. For the little three, the Dodgers are an immovable barrier blocking any real chance of sustained success. That’s a problem in a league that emphasizes postseason glory first and foremost, particularly in a sport that is primarily consumed locally. 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 Miami Marlins.

Batters

I’ll share the good news first: The Marlins won’t have a good offense, but there are fewer gaping holes now than there were in 2019, when the team was able to outscore the Detroit Tigers, but couldn’t say the same of anyone else. (The team with the third-fewest runs, the San Francisco Giants, scored nearly half a run more per game than Miami did.) A lot of the team’s worst offensive performances — Curtis Granderson and Martín Prado combined for more than 600 plate appearances for some odd reason, hitting .183/.281/.356 and .233/.265/.294, respectively — are being replaced by players the Marlins brought in this winter. In Marlins terms, adding Corey Dickerson, Jesús Aguilar , Matt Joyce, Brandon Kintzler, and Francisco Cervelli constitutes a veritable orgy of spending. Along with players like Matt Kemp and Sean Rodríguez, who are signed to minor league deals, all of these guys are veterans, known quantities with few surprises. Read the rest of this entry »

Until last year, Wilmer Flores had spent his entire professional career — from the time that he was signed out of Venezuela on his 16th birthday in 2007 through the ’18 season — with the Mets. After being non-tendered in November 2018, he landed with the Diamondbacks and put together the best season of his career, at least from an offensive standpoint. This week, he parlayed that success into a modest two-year, $6 million deal with the Giants, who suddenly have a rather crowded infield.

Flores, who’s still just 28 years old, hit a sizzling .317/.361/.487 for a 120 wRC+ in 2019, numbers that represent across-the-board career highs. That said, he missed nearly two months after suffering a fracture in his right foot when he was hit by a Drew Pomeranz pitch on May 19, and wound up making only 285 plate appearances, his lowest total at the major league level since 2014. When he wasn’t pinch-hitting — which he did 23 times, hitting just .190/.261/.238 — he played mostly second base, making 56 of his 60 starts and 64 of his 80 total defensive appearances there; the balance of his appearances came at first base. Even in that limited playing time, his 1.1 WAR was his highest mark since 2015.

Thirty-one of Flores’ starts at second base came against lefties — whom he hit to the tune of a 151 wRC+ — and all but a handful of those starts bumped Ketel Marte to center field. That the Diamondbacks desired to move Marte back to the infield in hopes that it would be less physically demanding likely played a big role in the team’s decision to decline Flores’ $6 million option for 2020; instead, they paid him a $500,000 buyout. Last week, Arizona acquired center fielder Starling Marte from the Pirates so as to further the Ketel-to-the-Keystone plan. Read the rest of this entry »

Max Muncy is a Dodgers success story. He’s compiled 10 (10!) WAR over the past two seasons, walking and homering and standing at second base in ways that would have been hard to predict two years ago. What would have been easy to predict, though, is his salary. As a pre-arb player, the Dodgers had absolute discretion over his pay (subject to the major league minimum) and chose to give him $545,000 in 2018 and $575,000 in 2019.

Muncy was scheduled to head to an arbitration hearing with his club. He asked for a $4.675 million salary for 2020, and Los Angeles countered with $4 million. We’ll never know what the outcome of that hearing will be, though, because as Ken Rosenthal reported yesterday, he signed a three-year extension worth $26 million dollars. The contract also includes a team option for a fourth year, at a salary of $13 million, with a $1.5 million buyout (the contract is actually for $24.5 million plus the buyout, which places the option year at $11.5 million net).

At first glance, this looks low. Muncy has been worth 10 WAR over the past two seasons! He’s one of the best hitters on one of the game’s best teams. Look upon his ZiPS, ye mighty, and despair:

Read the rest of this entry »

Just when you thought every angle of the Astros sign-stealing scandal had been covered, a new wrinkle emerges. Previous attempts to discern the true impact of the banging scheme were always limited by the lack of granular data. Without going through the effort of scanning all of the available audio and video, we had very little idea how often the Astros banged on their trash can. Were they using their scheme in every plate appearance? Only in high-leverage situations? Without answers to these questions, we were using incomplete data that included a ton of noise.

Enter Tony Adams. He scanned through 58 Astros home games with available video and audio and logged every single instance of a bang using a custom application he built. He ended up logging over 8,200 pitches and over 1,100 bangs. Last Wednesday, he made his data public on his site.

With Adams’ data in hand, we have answers to some of the questions that thwarted earlier attempts at analysis. The data still isn’t comprehensive. The 23 home games with missing video are still shrouded in mist, and we can’t assume the banging scheme was in effect during plate appearances where the batter only saw fastballs. We also don’t have insight into other possible methods of communicating stolen signs, like whistling, buzzers, or the like. Still, the new data provides us with a thorough look at those 58 games, helping us draw some more definitive conclusions. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about probability, the baseball significance of a Super Bowl comeback, and whether win expectancy stats are more useful for fans during or after a game (featuring a cameo from Meg Rowley, who sort of settles the debate). Then Ben and Sam preview the 2020 Padres with MLB.com’s AJ Cassavell (23:47), and the 2020 White Sox (58:32) with The Athletic’s James Fegan.

Audio intro: Tall Tall Trees, "Expectations"
Audio interstitial 1: The Cranberries, "Chocolate Brown"
Audio interstitial 2: Bombadil, "Goodwill Socks"
Audio outro: Super Furry Animals, "White Socks/Flip Flops"

Link to FiveThirtyEight tweet
Link to ESPN’s Super Bowl win probability graph
Link to Ben Clemens on Tatis’ defense
Link to James on the evolution of White Sox player development
Link to BP roundtable on Madrigal
Link to order The MVP Machine

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The human orbital bone is shaped like a pear and contains about half the juice. Your optic nerve lives at the small end and throws images to your retina in the back, which relays what you’re looking at to your brain. It’s the window through which baseball reaches us; in the blink of an eye, we go from seeing to reacting.

All eyes were on the Red Sox and Tigers at Fenway Park on August 17, 1967. During batting practice, Detroit’s Dick McAuliffe sent a line drive into the stands toward nine-year-old Mike Hughes, who threw his hands up to catch it just a hair too late.

“Right between my hands,” Hughes tells me. “I was in the hospital for five days with an orbital fracture and all that stuff.”

It would be a blood-splattered weekend for the sport in Boston. The next day at Fenway Park, Red Sox outfielder Tony Conigliaro was hit by a pitch in about the same place as Hughes. It dislocated his jaw, fractured his cheekbone, and permanently damaged his left retina. He was carried off the field on a stretcher.

A year and a half after his injury, Conigliaro was back in the majors, hitting 20 home runs. The next year, he would hit a career high 36. Today, MLB’s Comeback Player of the Year award is named after him.

But for a nine-year-old boy in a hospital bed, the injury was far more than physical. When he was well enough to get back on the field, his instincts tried to pull him off of it.

“I started stepping in a bucket,” Hughes recalls. “My average went from about .480 to about .180. I lost my, you know… I loved the game still, but I wanted to be good.”

So he left. And for 25 years, Mike Hughes didn’t play baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

By now, you know the drill. Earlier this week, I highlighted contending teams with weak points in the infield and on the mound. We’ve still got eight teams to cover today, so there’s no time to waste. Let’s dive in!

St. Louis Cardinals

The Hole: Two years ago, the Cardinals were so overloaded with outfielders that they traded Tommy Pham to open up playing time for promising youngsters Harrison Bader and Tyler O’Neill. This offseason, they had enough of an outfield surplus that they traded Randy Arozarena and José Martínez, but the top-end talent the team hoped for still hasn’t materialized.

That’s not to say that the Cardinals don’t have outfielders. O’Neill and Bader are still around. Dexter Fowler is solidly in his decline phase, but will likely take up a season’s worth of plate appearances. Tommy Edman will see some time in the outfield in addition to sharing third base with Matt Carpenter.

But while they have bodies, they’re lacking in upside. Bader looks like a long-shot to ever recapture his 2018 offensive line, O’Neill’s 2019 was gruesome (35.1% strikeout rate), and Fowler is subsisting on walks at this point. They might field an entire outfield of sub-100 wRC+ batters, and only Bader can make up for that with his glove. Read the rest of this entry »

The Yankees’ path to a second straight AL East title got a bit easier with Red Sox’s trade of Mookie Betts to the Dodgers, but they won’t emerge from this week unscathed. On Wednesday, the team announced that lefty James Paxton, their most effective starter in 2019, will be out of action for three to four months after undergoing surgery to alleviate a herniated lumbar disc. Even with the addition of Gerrit Cole to the fold, this is a loss that will test the Yankees’ depth.

The 31-year-old Paxton, whom the Yankees acquired from the Mariners in a four-player deal in November 2018, had an uneven first season in pinstripes. He surrendered 29 runs and 12 homers in the first innings of his 29 starts, and was cuffed for a 6.38 ERA and 5.84 FIP in June and July, shortly after he returned from a 25-day absence due to left knee inflammation. Even so, he was strong enough on either side of that two-month stretch that he still finished the season with 3.5 WAR, a 3.82 ERA, and 3.86 FIP (the last two both good for an 83 on their respective “minus” scales), all tops among the team’s starters; he was the only one to take a substantial workload (150.2 innings, third on the team) while finishing with either an ERA or a FIP under 4.28. Indeed, in a season where Luis Severino was limited to a grand total of 12 innings due to a bout of rotator cuff inflammation and then a Grade 2 strain of his latissimus dorsi, Paxton was something of a staff savior.

Paxton wobbled a bit through three postseason starts, allowing five runs in 13 innings while striking out 20. The first two were shortened, but he was at his best in Game 5 of the ALCS against the Astros. With the Yankees down three games to one, he worked around four walks and a wild pitch to turn in six innings of one-run ball while striking out nine; the team won 4-1 and sent the series back to Houston. His October work came on the heels of a bout of nerve irritation in his left glute, which forced him from his final regular season start after just one inning and led to a cortisone shot. Per the New York Post’s Joel Sherman, his surgery is connected to that issue. Read the rest of this entry »