12:03

Dan Szymborski: And away we go!

12:04

Dan Szymborski: Not even thinking about it until my two big year-end/winter projects (the elegies and the ZiPS are done).

12:04

Dan Szymborski: I had process writing.

12:04

Dan Szymborski: Depends who you ask. Based on ZiPS projections, I still get the best predictor of salaries players get in the mid 7s.

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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, and was expanded for inclusion in The Cooperstown Casebook, published in 2017 by Thomas Dunne Books. 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.

A three-time batting champion, five-time All-Star, and seven-time Gold Glove winner — not to mention an excellent base runner — Larry Walker could do it all on the diamond. Had he done it for longer, there’s little question that he’d already have a plaque in the Hall of Fame, but his 17 seasons in the majors were marred by numerous injuries as well as the 1994–95 players’ strike, all of which cut into his career totals.

Yet another great outfielder developed by the late, lamented Montreal Expos — Hall of Famers Andre Dawson, Vladimir Guerrero, and Tim Raines being the most notable — Walker was the only one of that group actually born and raised in Canada, though he spent less time playing for the Montreal faithful than any of them. He starred on the Expos’ memorable 1994 team that compiled the best record in baseball before the strike hit, curtailing their championship dreams, then took up residence with the Rockies, putting up eye-popping numbers at high altitude — numbers that hold up well even once they’re brought back to earth.

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If re-signing Darren O’Day (on November 8) and then signing Will Smith (on November 15) wasn’t enough to persuade you that the Atlanta Braves are determined to ensure that a middling bullpen doesn’t hold them back in next year’s NL East competition, yesterday’s agreement with 33-year-old Chris Martin should be enough evidence to convince you that Alex Anthopoulos is taking 2020 seriously.

In one sense, it’s not a great sign for Atlanta that Anthopoulos feels he has to spend this heavily on his bullpen, rather than taking a run at a front-line starting pitcher to pair with Mike Soroka, or another big bat to help put an already-strong offense over the top (their .332 wOBA last year was third-best in the National League but behind both Los Angeles and, perhaps more importantly, Washington).

Signing Martin for two years and $14 million, as the Braves have just done, puts the 2020 Atlanta payroll at an estimated $119 million, which despite ranking solidly in the bottom third of National League clubs, is right around the upper limit of what ownership has been comfortable spending in recent years. Ideally, at least from a payroll perspective, a few more of the Braves’ recently-vaunted young pitchers would have transformed into quality bullpen arms (and not in the Sean Newcomb way), thereby freeing up dollars for other parts of the roster. Read the rest of this entry »

This post is part of a series concerning the 2020 Modern Baseball Era Committee ballot, covering executives and long-retired players whose candidacies will be voted upon at the Winter Meetings in San Diego on December 8. For an introduction to JAWS, see here. Several profiles in this series are adapted from work previously published at SI.com, Baseball Prospectus, and Futility Infielder. All WAR figures refer to the Baseball-Reference version unless otherwise indicated.

He didn’t swing a bat, throw a pitch or write out a lineup card, but Marvin Miller had a greater impact on major league baseball than just about any man who ever lived. In 1992, former Dodgers announcer Red Barber numbered him among the three most important figures in the game’s history, along with Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson. As executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association from 1966 to ’82, Miller revolutionized the game, overseeing its biggest change since integration through the dismantling of the reserve clause and the dawn of free agency, thus shifting a century-old balance of power from the owners to the players. Miller helped the union secure a whole host of other important rights as well, from collective bargaining to salary arbitration to the use of agents in negotiations. During his tenure, the average salary of a major league player rose from $19,000 to over $240,000, and the MLBPA became the strongest labor union in the country. Yet both in his lifetime and since his death at the age of 95 in 2012, petty politics has prevented him from receiving proper recognition via enshrinement in the Hall of Fame — so much so that Miller, still feisty well into his 90s, took the unprecedented step of asking voters not to consider him.

Miller’s omission is particularly glaring in light of the extent to which the 21st century small-committee processes have honored nonplayers — executives, managers, and umpires — to a much greater degree than players. To some degree that’s understandable, given that the former group has have no other route into Cooperstown, unlike the post-1936 players under the purview of the BBWAA. Nonetheless, the contrast stands out; setting aside the 2006 Special Committee on the Negro Leagues, the count since 2001 is 15 execs, managers, and umps to seven players (four in the past two years). None of those people, from commissioners Bowie Kuhn and Bud Selig and owner Walter O’Malley on down, put their stamp on baseball to a greater degree than Miller. Somewhere within this mess is the galling reality that even the Hall of Fame players who benefited from the changes he wrought, who make up the largest portion of the committee process — and particularly who formed the vast majority of the electorate via the enlarged Veterans Committees from 2003-09 — have utterly failed in their capacity to honor him. Reggie Jackson, one of the earliest beneficiaries of free agency, never struck out in more embarrassing fashion than when he told reporters in 2003, “I looked at those ballots, and there was no one to put in.” Read the rest of this entry »

“Overconfidence is a powerful source of illusions, primarily determined by the quality and coherence of the story that you can construct, not by its validity.” – Daniel Kahneman

If the 2019 Indians thought they the lone contenders in the AL Central, the Minnesota Twins very quickly disabused them of that notion. Cleveland still fought their way to a 93-69 record, but after a quiet offseason, the loss of some key players, and a final run at the playoffs destroyed by a five-game losing streak, this is a team that ought to be haunted by their what-ifs. Much of the team’s core remains intact (at least for now), but with key contributors approaching free agency, these Indians may have peaked.

The Setup

If a baseball season is a marathon, the 2018 Indians were allowed to use a car. They grabbed first place in the AL Central in late April and never relinquished it. The Minnesota Twins ran afoul of the Regression Gods, and the rest of teams in the division were still firmly in the moribund section of their respective rebuilds. With the bullpen not rocking as it had in previous years, Cleveland traded top prospect Francisco Mejía to the San Diego Padres for Brad Hand and Adam Cimber, players who could reinforce the bullpen past 2018. Also added were Leonys Martin and Josh Donaldson, players the team believed could have upside for the playoffs. Read the rest of this entry »

There are many pieces detailing how the Astros appear to have cheated by using video to steal signs in real-time. Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich wrote a lengthy piece for The Athletic with quotes from former Astros’ pitcher Mike Fiers detailing the team’s practices in 2017. The basics are in that piece, but there are a several more that discuss what the team was reportedly doing and how they did it. We don’t yet know all the facts; it is still unclear precisely how long the team engaged in this practice, and who all of the responsible parties are. But what the evidence makes pretty clear is that the Astros stole signs with the aid of advanced technology and relayed those signs to hitters during games. That’s cheating.

What the Astros and their employees might receive in terms of punishment for engaging in that practice is less clear, though multiple precedents have been set to guide the league’s possible enforcement. Perhaps you’re of the mind that the consequences Astros deserve to suffer is to have won fewer games, including their 2017 World Series. But such an extreme result is unlikely. Astros wins and championship banners probably won’t be taken away or vacated like a farcical college athletics penalty. Even when players are caught cheating in the middle of games, the results aren’t vacated. So what might we expect? In looking to past scandals, we can get a glimpse at MLB and Rob Manfred’s approach. There are multiple factors that play into potential punishment, both for individuals and the franchise, but here are a few of the major ones:

• Is this the first time a team has been penalized for breaking the rules?
• Was the organization cooperative with MLB’s investigation?
• How high up the organizational chain does the knowledge and activity go?

For the first factor, let’s consider the Boston Red Sox’s penalty for breaking the rules surrounding signing international free agents. After the club exceeded the allowable pool amount to sign Yoán Moncada, it were restricted from signing any amateur international free agents for more than $300,000. To get around those restrictions, the Red Sox signed less well-regarded players for $300,000 with the expectation that money from some of those lesser players would go to the better players who should have received higher bonuses and were represented by the same agents. When the Red Sox penalty for circumventing the rules came down in 2016, they were prohibited from signing any international free agents for a year, and the players involved were declared free agents, with Boston unable to recoup their signing bonuses, which remained with the players. It was the first time a team had been penalized in this fashion. Read the rest of this entry »

The Camden Yards did not constitute what I would call a particularly inspiring work environment. The Orioles lost 108 games one season after it lost 115, with a pitching staff that set records for futility and an offense that was near the bottom of the majors as well. When the team initiated its rebuild in 2018, it did so by trading away its most sought-after talent — starting with Manny Machado, and later including Zack Britton, Brad Brach, Kevin Gausman, Darren O’Day, and Jonathan Schoop. Baltimore was finished pretending it could compete with the rest of the AL East and was going all-in on a scorched-earth plan in hopes to build the next 100-loss-team-turned-dynasty, giving away all the talent it could in the process. If you still found yourself on the Orioles’ roster at the start of the 2019 season, it’s probably because no contending team believed you could meaningfully improve their squad.

In many cases, those teams were right. They were right about Chris Davis and Mark Trumbo, and they were right about Dan Straily and Alex Cobb. There was good evidence to suggest those players, all of whom were once considered assets to teams trying to win, were not going to be of any value in 2019. Jonathan Villar, however, posed a more puzzling question. Contending teams might have seen his abysmal 2017 and continued struggles early in 2018 and concluded his skills were deteriorating. Instead, Villar then had the best season of his career.

Playing all 162 games for Baltimore, Villar finished with a .274/.339/.453 batting line with a career-high 24 homers, good for a 107 wRC+. He led the majors in baserunning runs with 10.5, and he stole 40 bases, good for third in baseball. All told, he finished the season with a career-best 4.0 WAR, ranking him fifth among all second basemen behind only Ketel Marte, DJ LeMahieu, Max Muncy, and Ozzie Albies. Read the rest of this entry »

With the offseason moving at it’s now customarily glacial pace, the story that’s dominated the baseball headlines for the past week has been the Astros sign-stealing scandal. Since the first story was published by Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich at The Athletic last Tuesday, we’ve seen bits of evidence confirming the Astros strategy: a crude system of live monitors and a trash can to relay the incoming pitch type to the batter. On Friday, Rob Arthur of Baseball Prospectus provided audio evidence from the TV broadcasts, on which the whacking of the trash can can be identified and analyzed. Rosenthal and Drellich followed up their post with another revelation that the Astros were exploring different ways to electronically steal signs. And then there’s the video evidence pulled from the 2017 Astros World Series documentary showing a computer — sometimes a monitor, sometimes a laptop — in the tunnel leading to the dugout with a trash can nearby.

MLB is still conducting its own investigation, but the evidence that’s been dug up publicly is pretty damning. Sign-stealing has always been part of the game, but the Astros crossed the line when they began using electronic means to relay information in real-time. And this isn’t the first time they’ve been accused of baseball skullduggery of some sort. There’s little doubt that some form of punishment will be handed down by the commissioner’s office once MLB wraps up its investigation. The only question is how harsh will the penalties be; will it be a slap on the wrist, or will the hammer come down hard to deter other teams who are likely exploring other ways to use technology to steal signs.

Gamesmanship and various forms of cheating are as much a part of the fabric of baseball as the unwritten rulebook, all in an effort to gain an upper hand against your opponent. But how much of a benefit does sign-stealing give to a batter? Knowing what type of pitch is incoming gives the batter a distinct advantage — more information is far better than just guessing — but they still need to translate that information into action, whether its a swing or a take. Since we have plenty of data to analyze, can we measure the effect of sign-stealing on the outcome of a pitch, play, or game? Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller talk to Paul Dickson, author of The Hidden Language of Baseball: How Signs and Sign-Stealing Have Influenced the Course of Our National Pastime, about, well, what the book’s subtitle says, including the origins of sign-sending, the earliest allegations of sign-stealing, historical precedents for the Astros’ sign-stealing scheme, the effects of sign-stealing, why so many players say they prefer not to know which pitch is coming, the frequent disagreements surrounding which types of sign-stealing are acceptable, the reluctance of the league to get involved in stopping or punishing sign-stealing, the future of policing sign-stealing, and more.

Audio intro: Damon Albarn, "The History of a Cheating Heart"
Audio outro: Brittany Howard, "History Repeats"

Link to Paul’s book about sign-stealing
Link to list of all of Paul’s books
Link to EW Secret Santa sign-up
Link to order The MVP Machine

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