The following article is part of Jay Jaffe’s ongoing look at the candidates on the BBWAA 2020 Hall of Fame ballot. Originally written for the 2013 election at SI.com, it has been updated to reflect recent voting results as well as additional research. 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.

Roger Clemens has a reasonable claim as the greatest pitcher of all time. Cy Young, Christy Mathewson, Walter Johnson, and Grover Cleveland Alexander spent all or most of their careers in the dead-ball era, before the home run was a real threat, and pitched while the color line was still in effect, barring some of the game’s most talented players from participating. Sandy Koufax and Tom Seaver pitched when scoring levels were much lower and pitchers held a greater advantage. Koufax and 2015 inductees Randy Johnson and Pedro Martinez didn’t sustain their greatness for nearly as long. Greg Maddux didn’t dominate hitters to nearly the same extent.

Clemens, meanwhile, spent 24 years in the majors and racked up a record seven Cy Young awards, not to mention an MVP award. He won 354 games, led his leagues in the Triple Crown categories (wins, strikeouts, and ERA) a total of 16 times, and helped his teams to six pennants and a pair of world championships.

Alas, whatever claim “The Rocket” may have on such an exalted title is clouded by suspicions that he used performance-enhancing drugs. When those suspicions came to light in the Mitchell Report in 2007, Clemens took the otherwise unprecedented step of challenging the findings during a Congressional hearing, but nearly painted himself into a legal corner; he was subject to a high-profile trial for six counts of perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to Congress. After a mistrial in 2011, he was acquitted on all counts the following year. But despite the verdicts, the specter of PEDs won’t leave Clemens’ case anytime soon, even given that in March 2015, he settled the defamation lawsuit filed by former personal trainer Brian McNamee for an unspecified amount.

Amid the ongoing Hall of Fame-related debates over hitters connected to PEDs — most prominently Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, and Sammy Sosa — it’s worth remembering that the chemical arms race involved pitchers as well, leveling the playing field a lot more than some critics of the aforementioned sluggers would admit. The voters certainly haven’t forgotten that when it comes to Clemens, whose share of the vote has approximated that of Bonds. Clemens debuted with 37.6% of the vote in 2013 and only in 2016 began making significant headway, climbing to 45.2% thanks largely to the Hall’s purge of voters more than 10 years removed from covering the game. Like Bonds, he surged above 50% — a historically significant marker towards future election — in 2017, benefiting from voters rethinking their positions in the wake of the election of Bud Selig. The former commissioner’s roles in the late-1980s collusion scandal and in presiding over the proliferation of PEDs within the game dwarf the impact of individual PED users and call into question the so-called “character clause.”

Clemens’ march towards Cooperstown has stalled somewhat in the two years since, as he’s added just 5.4% to reach 59.5%. Whether or not the open letter from Hall of Fame Vice Chairman Joe Morgan pleading with voters not to honor players connected to steroids had an impact, the end result is time run off the clock. He still has a shot at reaching 75% before his eligibility runs out in 2022, but like Bonds, needs to regain momentum.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last night, Gerrit Cole signed a record-breaking contract with the Yankees. Jay Jaffe broke down the signing, and mentioned one important part: the contract includes a player option after five years. In a contract as lengthy and lucrative as Cole’s, an opt out might seem like mere ornamentation. That’s not the case, though: as Stephen Strasburg’s earlier contract shows, sometimes the market in the future is simply better for a pitcher than we think. With that in mind, I took a stab at valuing the player option.

We use two player projection systems here at FanGraphs, and I ran both of them through the option pricing tool, as well as a hybrid. First, let’s take a look at the most optimistic: Steamer projects Cole for 6.3 WAR this year. From there, I applied a standard 0.5 WAR/year aging penalty and ran the numbers. You can read the methodology here, but as a quick refresher, I take an aging-inclusive projection, then bump each year by a random, normally distributed number to account for fluctuations in talent level.

The bumps persist year-to-year; if Cole improves to a 7 WAR projection for 2021, his mean projection for 2022 would be 6.5 WAR after the aging penalty, and I then apply another random talent bump to that projection. I do the same thing with the cost of a win in free agency; it generally trends upward, but jumps around, and the jumps persist year-to-year. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I had some fun putting Austin Hedges into generic NL and AL lineups. It wouldn’t have been fun for those lineups, of course: Austin Hedges is a terrible hitter! He cost lineups something like 30 runs over a full season, and that’s with him replacing the worst hitter on the team.

So while the mental gymnastics of seeing how much damage Hedges would do was fun, it was a macabre kind of amusement. Look how bad your team could be at offense without being worse at baseball overall! That doesn’t really get the people going.

With this lineup approximating tool assembled, though, there’s no reason to limit its use to Hedges. Instead, let’s put Mike Trout in some lineups — all over lineups — and see if we can create some fun statlines.

I’ll be honest, this exercise started with me wondering what the Astros would look like with Trout. So to start, I plugged Trout into the Astros’ regular lineup. Their team now looks like this:

First of all, hoo boy. That’s almost too hot to print. I wasn’t really sure where to put everybody; I briefly considered having Altuve bat seventh, and it didn’t even look all that wrong, which should tell you everything you need to know about how good the lineup is. (I left Chirinos in as the catcher because I’m using 2019 season stats for this exercise, but that hardly matters to the results.) 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 Chicago White Sox.

Batters

Yasmani Grandal was a tremendously important addition for the White Sox, giving the team an instant star behind the plate. He’s a good enough hitter that if the physical rigors of catching start to wear on him as he ages, he will still retain some value at first base or DH. ZiPS has been all over the map with Yoan Moncada, but believes that he’s finally turned the corner for good. I’ve declared this several times and been burned before, but I’m going to again make the claim, hopefully for the last time.

ZiPS sees Luis Robert and Nick Madrigal as instant contributors, though just how much the White Sox wring out of those positions will depend on how quickly they reach the majors in 2020. The computer thinks Danny Mendick is a serviceable stopgap who will have value as a utility guy when he eventually loses his job to Madrigal. The non-tendering of Yolmer Sanchez really makes the way the White Sox managed second base in 2019 seem odd in retrospect. If Sanchez’s performance was such that there was a chance the team wasn’t going to offer him a contract for 2020, why not give Mendick more time at second base? It’s not as if Sanchez’s projection got worse between September and November, so the team had to have been at least on the fence by late in the season. A more extensive audition for Mendick would have given the team more information. Read the rest of this entry »

While Silver Slugger awards reward the best hitters at every position and Gold Gloves are awarded to the best fielders, there hasn’t been a single award for the best player in every role. Now there is. Major League Baseball unveiled a pair of All-MLB teams on Tuesday at the Winter Meetings, with the squads including a player at each position to go along with a full five starters and two relievers. Since the main other piece of news today has involved Scott Boras’ love of birds, let’s take a quick look at the All-MLB teams and see what WAR has to say.

Here are the teams:

The 2019 All-MLB First & Second Teams!

LOVE seeing this concept for baseball… Love the idea of honoring the full season's contributions from players, MLB-wide.

More info on the honorees from @castrovince:https://t.co/vz7VU4eYsj pic.twitter.com/lU2nHncwnB

— Sarah Langs (@SlangsOnSports) December 10, 2019

Let’s run them down position by position. Read the rest of this entry »

Last winter, as Manny Machado and Bryce Harper became the first free agents to reach the $300 million plateau, the Yankees kept their powder dry, deciding both that they had enough depth at those players’ respective positions and enough money spent beyond the Competitive Balance Tax threshold. Despite a considerably more glaring need in their rotation, they bypassed the market’s top free agent pitcher, Patrick Corbin, as well, unwilling to go to a sixth year to secure his services, which ended up selling for $140 million to the Nationals. On Tuesday, the Yankees spent the money they had been squirreling away, agreeing to a nine-year, $324 million contract with 29-year-old righty Gerrit Cole.

The Yankees reportedly outbid the Dodgers, Angels, and multiple mystery teams (possibly the Astros and Giants) for Cole, a pitcher whom they have coveted since selecting him in the first round of the 2008 draft (28th overall), only to lose out to his commitment to attend UCLA. Three year later, he was the first overall pick by the Pirates, for whom he pitched from 2013-17 and helped to two Wild Card berths, before being traded to the Astros for four players in January 2018, just two and a half months after Houston had won its first World Series.

In Houston, Cole reconfigured his arsenal, scrapping his sinker and relying more upon his four-seamer and breaking balls, and ascending into elite territory. Over the past two seasons, only Jacob deGrom and Max Scherzer have outdone his 13.4 WAR and his 2.67 FIP, while only deGrom and Justin Verlander have bettered his 2.68 ERA; no starter in that span has outdone his 37.3% strikeout rate. In 2019, Cole set a record for an ERA qualifier by striking out 39.9% of all hitters while also leading the AL with 326 strikeouts, a 2.50 ERA, a 2.64 FIP, and 7.4 WAR. Not only was he poised to hit the market at the apex of his value to date, he was positioned to hit a trifecta unseen since the winter of 1974-75, when Cy Young winner Catfish Hunter of the three-time defending world champion A’s was suddenly declared a free agent after owner Charlie Finley failed to make deferred annuity payments in a timely fashion as stipulated by his contract. Read the rest of this entry »

Didi Gregorius has a new home, with a familiar manager. On Tuesday, the 29-year-old shortstop agreed to a one-year, $14 million deal with the Phillies, meaning that he’ll reunite with new skipper Joe Girardi, under whom he played from 2015-17 with the Yankees while developing into a strong two-way contributor. The short-term deal gives Gregorius a shot to rebuild his value after a subpar season in which he missed over two months due to a late-2018 Tommy John surgery and then hit for just an 84 wRC+, his lowest mark since his 2012 rookie season. It closes the door on a return to the Yankees, who declined to issue him a $17.8 million qualifying offer, and it’s a relatively low-cost bet on upgrading the Phillies middle infield, where the double-play tandem of Jean Segura and the recently non-tendered César Hernández both underperformed in 2019.

The Amsterdam-born, Curaçao-raised Gregorius had produced just 1.9 WAR in 191 games for the Reds (who signed him in 2007 and brought him to the majors in late ’12) and Diamondbacks (who acquired him in a three-team deal centered around Trevor Bauer in December 2012) before being dealt to the Yankees in December 2014; he arrived as part of a three-team deal that sent Robbie Ray and Domingo Leyba from the Tigers to the Diamondbacks and Shane Greene from the Yankees to Detroit. Given the nearly impossible task of filling the shoes of the just-retired Derek Jeter (to whom former Diamondbacks general manager Kevin Towers had audaciously compared Gregorius in 2012), he proved more than up to the task, quickly illustrating that he could cover far more ground at shortstop than the aging superstar, whose glovework was never his strength. Even with just an 89 wRC+ in 2015, Gregorius was worth a solid 3.1 WAR, 2.9 more than Jeter provided in his final season.

Developing a more pull-oriented approach with more consistent elevation of the ball, Gregorius’ left-handed swing played exceptionally well in Yankee Stadium at a time when balls began soaring out of the park at record rates. From 2016-18, Gregorius hit 72 homers, more than any other shortstop besides Manny Machado (107), Trevor Story (88), and Francisco Lindor (86), and over that span batted .277/.319/.472 (109 wRC+) with 8.8 UZR, and 11.6 WAR, seventh among shortstops. He set career highs with 27 homers, a 122 wRC+ (.268/.335/.494, the last two also highs), an 8.4% walk rate, and 4.7 WAR in 2018, but shortly after the Yankees were eliminated in the Division Series, the team announced he would need surgery on his right elbow.

His 2019 season debut on June 7 came inside of eight months following TJ surgery, making it one of the quickest returns by an infielder. Yet he hit just .238/.276/.441 with 16 homers in 344 PA overall, and just .207/.250/.420 for a 69 wRC+ from August 1 onward, managing just 0.9 WAR. He went 9-for-33 in the postseason, with a grand slam in Game 2 of the Division Series against the Twins.

Via Statcast, Gregorius’ quality of contact wasn’t the issue; he actually hit the ball a bit harder in 2019 than ’18, and in the air with a bit more frequency:

The big difference in his two seasons was what happened when he didn’t make contact. With his chase rate rising from 36.2% to a career-high 41.1%, Gregorius made less contact (67.0%) with pitches outside the zone than ever before, and matched his career high in swinging strike rate (11.4%) while setting a new high in strikeout rate (15.4%) even as his walk rate dipped back to 4.9% — hence the dent in his wOBA. The collection of stats paints a picture of a player who was pressing. Not that he ever admitted to it, but it wouldn’t be hard to understand why, given that Gregorius was attempting to demonstrate he was back to full health and worthy of a long-term contract after missing a good chunk of his walk year; in the spring, talks regarding an extension with New York had been scuttled.

Though Gleyber Torres‘ defensive metrics at shortstop were modest (-2.1 UZR, 1 DRS in 77 games), the Yankees apparently saw enough from him to be comfortable in returning the going-on-23-year-old to his natural position for 2020. Such an alignment would help to alleviate an infield logjam, by making DJ LeMahieu the regular at second base, the position he played while winning three Gold Gloves with the Rockies from 2015-18; he made 66 starts there in 2019, with another 75 at the infield corners. That would leave Luke Voit and Mike Ford to play first base, and Gio Urshela and Miguel Andújar to cover third base, with the latter, who missed nearly all of the 2019 season due to a torn right labrum, possibly subject to a move to first given his brutal defensive showing (-16.0 UZR, -25 DRS) as a rookie in ’18.

As for the Phillies, they recently non-tendered Hernández, who had yielded diminishing returns in recent seasons, declining from highs of 3.8 WAR (2016) and 111 wRC+ (’17) to 1.7 WAR and 92 wRC+ in ’19. While they signed Josh Harrison to a minor league deal late last month, and still have Scott Kingery, man of many positions, the addition of Gregorius — who also reportedly drew interest from the Brewers and Reds — means that the going-on-30-year-old Segura will move from shortstop to second base, where he spent 2016 with the Diamondbacks while setting career highs in WAR (5.0) and wRC+ (126). In 2019, he hit .280/.323/.420 for a 92 wRC+, an 18-point drop from the year before; his WAR dipped from 3.7 to 2.3 despite just a minor decline in defense (from 0.8 to -1.3, though via DRS the drop was from 5 to -5). Having both Segura and Gregorius in the lineup means getting walk rates of around 5% from both middle infielders, which could be a problem for a team on which only Rhys Hoskins and Bryce Harper walked more than 45 times.

Projection-wise, Gregorius is forecast to produce 2.5 WAR via ZiPS and 2.6 via Steamer, a performance that would be well worth the salary and would set the shortstop up for a multiyear deal, though probably nothing on the order of what he could have hoped as he put the finishing touches on his 2018 season. With Segura projected at 2.4 WAR but having recently been worth well more than that, the upside is a pair that could produce about 8 WAR instead of five, which is basically what the Phillies got from all of their second basemen and shortstops combined in 2019 (5.1 total).

The team still has to figure out what to do when it comes to third base, with Maikel Franco also non-tendered after a -0.6 WAR season, and in center field; Kingery will probably figure in the mix at one position or the other, perhaps keeping the hot corner warm for 2018 overall number three pick Alex Bohm, whom general manager Matt Klentak expects to arrive sometime in 2020. The Gregorius signing has reportedly taken the Phillies out of the hunt for Anthony Rendon, though they may still be “interested bystanders” when it comes to Josh Donaldson, which is a more plausible premise for a John Hughes movie featuring an unrequited crush at a high school dance than a major infield upgrade.

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley link up during the Winter Meetings for a brief bonus episode in which Meg tries to stump Ben about genuine and fake media-scrum statements supposedly made by baseball superagent Scott Boras.

Audio intro: Yo La Tengo, "If it’s True"
Audio outro: Jethro Tull, "Sparrow on the Schoolyard Wall"

Link to photo of Boras scrum
Link to order The MVP Machine

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