Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about the latest revelations about Red Sox sign-stealing, MLB’s impending punishment of the Astros, and long-term sign-stealing solutions, then answer listener emails about banning executives, the offseason coverage of the Cubs and White Sox and what it means to win the winter, why bench players aren’t displayed in box scores, the merits of MLB’s approach to instituting an automated strike zone, and what makes errors and misplays memorable, plus a Stat Blast about the positional patterns of multi-position players.

Audio intro: Uncle Tupelo, "Steal the Crumbs"
Audio outro: Otis Redding, "Everybody Makes a Mistake"

Link to The Athletic’s report on Red Sox sign-stealing
Link to Verducci on Boston’s sign-stealing
Link to Venezuelan Winter League brawl video
Link to Tropeano strikeout story
Link to order The MVP Machine

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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 Houston Astros.

Batters

Let’s get the garbage receptacle in the room out of the way: there are no adjustments for sign-stealing related shenanigans baked into ZiPS. The simple truth is that the data to do so doesn’t really exist, and any adjustments made for an unknown effect on unknown players for an unknown amount of time would lack any precision. It’s one of those unknowables floating around in the aether that makes up part of the error bars.

Houston’s front-end offensive talent remains an absolute battering ram. The great players are, well, great, and there are few holes in the lineup, though there will be less offense behind the plate in 2020, and Gurriel’s age means he’s always a cliff-diving risk in any given season. Read the rest of this entry »

Héctor Rondón made a ton of appearances last year for a solid Houston bullpen. The Astros had a top 10 bullpen in both ERA and WAR, and Rondón made the third-most appearances on the team. If you only knew those two things, then, it would look like quite the deal when the Diamondbacks signed Rondón for a mere $3 million, with a club option for 2021 tacked onto the back end, as Nick Piecoro reported yesterday.

Of course, I cleverly avoided telling you anything about how good Rondón was last year aside from his appearances. And while he wasn’t abysmal, at least not completely — he had a 3.71 ERA, racked up positive WPA, and still sat 97 mph with his fastball — some of the underlying metrics looked rough. His FIP was a career-worst 4.96, his strikeout rate cratered to 18.7%, and he was below replacement level on the year in our FIP-based WAR accounting. By the playoffs, he was buried in the bullpen — seven relievers in the Houston ‘pen faced more batters, and his average entry leverage was a piddling 0.16.

So before we decide if this was a good signing for the Diamondbacks, we need to decide if Rondón is still good. At his peak on the Cubs, he was an impact reliever with pretty good stuff and great control. He’s still only 31 — this isn’t some kind of Fernando Rodney situation here, where there’s a picture in his attic with an increasingly tilted cap that keeps him in baseball shape. He’s still, age-wise at least, in his prime.

So what’s changed for Rondón? We can rule out the normal way relievers break. He’s been extremely durable, making at least 50 appearances for six straight years. He hasn’t lost velocity, either: he throws as hard now as he did when he was on the Cubs. And his postseason banishment wasn’t a matter of him losing steam at the end of a long slog of a year; his fastball averaged 96.8 mph in the playoffs, barely down from 96.9 during the regular season. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

No pitcher who took the mound for at least 50 innings in 2019 threw their four-seam fastball more than Tampa Bay Rays reliever Colin Poche. Utilizing the pitch just over 88% of the time, it went far beyond the league average four-seamer deployment rate of 37.7%. As part of 2019’s strongest bullpen, the 25-year-old Poche produced 0.6 WAR with a 3.79 K/BB rate, which was juxtaposed by his 4.70 ERA (and 4.08 FIP).

There are a few pitchers who are able to live and die by their four-seamer. The question isn’t whether Poche should continue to throw his four-seam fastball roughly nine out of every 10 pitches he throws; it’s whether he actually needs to throw it that much?

Last year, Eric Longenhagen and Kiley McDaniel put a 70 FV on Poche’s four-seamer, noting in their write up last year:

Essentially, Poche has an average fastball with three separate characteristics that make it play up. Big league hitters may be less vulnerable to one or more of these characteristics, but if not, Poche’s fastball is going to play like a 7 or 8.

He throws his fastball with almost pure backspin, which creates 99%+ spin efficiency. Under these conditions, Poche (who led the league in FA-Z, min 50 IP) is able to induce a lot of rise on his fastball, or rather, the pitch drops much less than a typical four-seamer. This is advantageous because he lives high in the zone. Hitters who try to square up the elevated four-seamer may end up swinging under the pitch because they expect it to drop more, but in Poche’s case, Mangus Force keeps the pitch up longer than anticipated. That could at least partially explain how Poche was able to produce his 34.8% strikeout rate despite his elevated ERA. Read the rest of this entry »

12:02

Dan Szymborski: Happy current year everyone!

12:02

Dan Szymborski: It is now time. A time for chats.

12:03

Dan Szymborski: Like most teams, they’re essentially done simply because there’s not a lot left out there! I’m comfortable in the mid-80s somewhere, but we’ll see as we get closer to the year.

12:03

Dan Szymborski: I’m happy they have a deal with Luis Robert which means no games on that front.

Read the rest of this entry »

The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2020 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. For a tentative schedule and a chance to fill out a Hall of Fame ballot for our crowdsourcing project, see here. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

Batch five hundred thirty-seven — no, wait, it’s just batch five, the rest of that was my daughter’s drawing — of my completist series features a pair of hard-throwing relievers who took a long time to get a shot at the majors, and even longer to become closers. Not much went right for either of them as Mets, and by the time they crossed paths in Arizona, both had seen better days, but somewhere in the middle of all of that, they became All-Stars. We could quibble as to whether they should be on this ballot, but why not celebrate two guys who made the most of their relatively brief careers?

Heath Bell

It took Heath Bell until he was nearly 27 years old to reach the majors, and he turned 31 before he claimed the closer’s job. Big-bodied (6-foot-3 and as much as 275 pounds) and with a big personality, he radiated joy on his best days, showing his exuberance with his signature sprints to the mound, making three straight All-Star teams, converting 41 straight save opportunities at one point, and netting a big deal in free agency — not too bad for a guy who was a 69th-round draft pick by the Devil Rays. Read the rest of this entry »

Early in the 2019 season, Yoenis Céspedes suffered a mysterious injury on his ranch. Described as a “violent fall,” there had been some discrepancy in exactly how the Mets outfielder suffered a fractured ankle (this while still rehabbing from surgery on both heels). According to fresh reports on the matter in the New York Post, he broke his ankle by stepping in a hole while trying to “sidestep a boar.” The story was confirmed by the Mets, as well as officials from MLB and MLBPA.

There have been many questions in response to this information, such as “Why?” and “How?” and “Again, I ask you… why?” But these put the wrong information in focus. Instead, we must look at the historical context of Céspedes’ misstep, and attempt to understand that the paths of men and boars do not easily cross; and yet, even in this niche of the natural world, baseball has a legacy.

We may not know what draws typical ballpark wildlife, the lost squirrels and panicking cats, to our infields and outfields. But we do know that their slashing claws and snapping mandibles have been on display in the realm of big league baseball for generations. With nature’s fury finding its way into man-made structures, it seems unwise to venture out into the domain that birthed it. Beyond our city limits and past the closest tree line, the creatures that spill into our stadiums are in their natural habitat, and that much more eager (and able) to kill or maim.

Boars have about the same reputation as dinosaurs: Their vision is based on movement. They are produced in formidable sizes (a male tusker can be 36 inches tall and weigh over 400 pounds). They can cause damage and be the bane of farmers. An August 23, 1911 report in the Oroville Daily Register warned that valley-dwelling boars are even more dangerous than those that live in the mountains and come equipped with “death-dealing tusks.” Read the rest of this entry »

It’s no secret that free agency has changed over the last decade. As more teams have embraced analytics by focusing on paying for future, rather than past, performance, and owners have pinched pennies, we’ve seen slower winters, and in the case of last offseason, teams paying significantly less for a win on the open market. This offseason has seen a welcome return of activity, with good players receiving top-dollar contracts. When we consider the health of free agency for players, the big deals seem to grab a lot of attention, as with Gerrit Cole, Anthony Rendon, and Stephen Strasburg‘s this season, and Manny Machado and Bryce Harper’s a year ago. Mega-deals create the impression that all is well, and the size of those deals can have an outsized affect when calculating dollars per win, as in my piece yesterday on the cost of a win in free agency. But the players who don’t receive those big contracts deserve a bit more attention because it is possible that as free agent spending has shifted, the money teams are paying for wins may no longer be linear.

When we talk about the linear cost of a win, we’re talking about there being a uniform amount teams are generally willing to pay per win on the free agent market; if the cost of a win is $9 million, a three-win player gets $27 million, a two-win player gets $18 million, and a one-win player receives $9 million. And while we recognize the three-win player doesn’t actually receive a one-year deal worth $27 million, when the money is spread over a multi-year deal and the presumed decline from aging is factored in, the wins paid for over the life of the contract come out in roughly that manner. For example, Hyun-Jin Ryu is projected to be roughly a three win player in 2020. But over the course of four seasons, he is likely to be worth closer to nine wins; he signed a contract for $80 million, which comes out to right around $9 million per win. Not every case fits so neatly, but Ryu is one example.

The question now is whether the above is still true. In 2017, Matt Swartz examined the seasons through 2016 and found that the cost of a win was still linear. Since then, a narrative has emerged of slightly lesser players getting squeezed. Heading into the 2017 season, Travis Sawchik discussed baseball’s embattled middle class as players appeared to be getting frozen out of free agency. He followed that up in 2018 after another slow winter provided more evidence of a market in dire straights. Providing further support, the crowdsourced contract estimates our readers provide as part of our annual Top 50 Free Agents exercise have generally overshot free agent contracts under $40 million the last few years. Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 876

On this edition of FanGraphs Audio, Ben Clemens shares his impressions of the Winter Meetings, before we discuss a recent piece of his exploring free agency, and which types of teams are actually keeping the hot stove burning. Ben also shares which rosters have him the most excited for the 2020 season, and the answers may surprise you. Lastly, we discuss the latest updates from the realm of sign-stealing, and Ben discourages you from committing financial crime. 

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

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Audio after the jump. (Approximate 44 min play time.)

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