Even if the team isn’t quite a contender, there are plenty of reasons to follow the 2020 Pittsburgh Pirates. Bryan Reynolds and Josh Bell are interesting hitters, though there’s a decent chance that neither ever replicates their 2019 success. Chris Archer is a fun puzzle; can he regain the scintillating form he flashed at times on the Rays, or will he be more 2019 Chris Archer, all homers and walks? Mitch Keller is awesome, except when he’s terrible. Those are all storylines you can follow as a Pirates fan. Me? I’m going to be watching Joe Musgrove.

Musgrove put together a nice season in 2019, his second straight year of more than 100 innings and more than 2 WAR. That sounds great, but it’s a little less impressive under the hood. His RA9-WAR has been significantly lower, and if you’re more of an underlying skill person than a runs allowed type, his above-average FIP’s have been misleading; they’re largely down to his suppression of home runs, and if that skill fades, his results might start to look more like his xFIP:

I’ll admit I’m not doing a good job of explaining my fascination with Musgrove so far. Even if you dig into the component parts of his game, nothing jumps off the page. He strikes out fewer batters than average but makes up for it by walking even fewer. He allows a roughly average number of grounders, gives up hard contact at a roughly average rate, and overall blends into the background. Read the rest of this entry »

Miami Marlins right-hander Sandy Alcantara showed a lot of promise when he was given a spot in the starting rotation last year. His 2.3 WAR and 3.88 ERA were impressive, but there’s much more going on that meets the eye. Alcantara has a very cohesive pitch ecosystem; the design of each offering makes for a lot of interchangeable parts. Being able to adapt to situations with flexible pitch options gives Alcantara an edge that a lot of pitchers don’t have with their arsenal.

Most pitchers have one, maybe two, pitch combinations that pair well together. Alcantara actually has four, which can allow him to easily flex and keep hitters on their toes.

Alcantara operates with five pitches: two fastballs (four-seam and sinker), a slider, a tight, classic curveball, and a heavy, fading changeup.

Below is the 2019 data on all five pitches: Read the rest of this entry »

Last Friday, Jake Seiner and Ben Walker of the Associated Press reported that Major League Baseball has opted to raise minor league player pay to, at minimum, $4,800 dollars a year. As usual, the change was announced unilaterally: minor league players are not unionized and cannot help but accept this compensation. Specifically, MLB decided to set minimum pay levels (not including spring training, which is unpaid, and not starting until the 2021 season) at:

• $400/week ($4,800 for a three-month season) for Rookie or short-season (up from $290/$3,480)
• $500/week ($10,000 for a five-month season) for Class A (up from $290/$5,800)
• $600/week ($12,000 for a five-month season) for Double-A (up from $350/$7,000)
• $700/week ($14,000 for a five-month season) for Triple-A (up from $502/$10,040)

Assuming that players work an eight-hour workday five days a week (which is an assumption you’d make only if you both knew nothing about how long minor leaguers work and also were feeling extremely generous towards the league), the new pay scale works out to an hourly minimum wage of $10, $12.50, $15, and $17.50, respectively. Assuming even 50 hours a week puts everybody below $15 an hour; 60 hours a week puts everyone below $12. And all of the scenarios assume either that players are independently wealthy or that they’ll fit their year-round conditioning and training in around finding some other way to make money seven or nine months out of the year. Read the rest of this entry »

On Friday, the Cleveland Indians found themselves in the middle of a classic good news, bad news situation. It was encapsulated by this tweet from their official Twitter account:

We would like to officially welcome Domingo Santana to The Land!

Additionally, Mike Clevinger will undergo surgery on his left knee today and his timetable is TBD. pic.twitter.com/3PSW9gPjeO

— Cleveland Guardians (@CleGuardians) February 14, 2020

First, the bad news. While participating in preseason drills earlier in the week, Mike Clevinger partially tore the meniscus in his left knee. After his surgery on Friday, the club announced a recovery timeline of six-to-eight weeks. The short end of his rehab timeline would put him on track to rejoin the team just after Opening Day. But since he’ll have missed all of spring training, it wouldn’t be surprising if he was brought along conservatively. Depending on how much time he needs to ramp up for the season, it’s possible he’d miss as much as the first month. Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

On Sunday afternoon, commissioner Rob Manfred held a press conference at Atlanta’s spring training facility in Florida. Per the typical protocol, the league tried to keep the news relatively muted. The conference was not broadcast on MLB Network — Bull Durham aired instead — nor did it stream on MLB.com. Whether this reflects a continuation of the league’s misguided damage control policy or a misunderstanding of the scandal’s resonance to fans, it was a strange way to downplay the commissioner’s remarks on such a topical issue.

Manfred’s comments themselves will likely not please any of those already skeptical about his ability to manage the biggest scandal the sport has seen in a generation. He again defended the league’s response while offering few fresh details. Listening to his remarks, one gets the impression that the league will remain in reactive mode perpetually as new details emerge, and that Manfred himself wants nothing more than to reach the other side of this. At one point he clumsily exclaimed “we’ll have baseball in 2020!” We’re all excited too, Rob.

Here are some takeaways from his press conference: Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks ago, Kris Bryant lost his grievance against the Cubs for manipulating his service time. The arbitrator, Mark Irvings, ruled that Bryant hadn’t proved that the Cubs held him down for nefarious reasons, essentially requiring a smoking gun, even though Irvings didn’t rule on whether teams have the right to manipulate service time if they so choose. As I wrote at the time, the decision essentially pushes any action on the question to the next Collective Bargaining Agreement, which expires at the end of the 2021 season. The result is that Bryant won’t become a free agent until after the 2021 season. The Cubs have yet to make any significant roster moves this offseason, and there are rumors, as there have been all winter, that Bryant could be dealt.

Over the weekend, Bryant emphasized to reporters that he bears no hard feelings against the Cubs:

I’ve always had the stance I want to play here, I love the city,” Bryant said.

The only thing that matters is what comes from my mouth, and never once have I said I never wanted to play here. … I’m always open to it, I’m always here to talk, it’s fun to talk about stuff like that. It’s a city that I love so much, people I love so much, fans, teammates, everybody here that I’m so comfortable with. Of course you want to be here. I don’t hold those cards.”

It’s the Cubs that hold those cards. Bryant’s statement comes on the heels of David Kaplan reporting that the Cubs were “absolutely motivated” to trade for Nolan Arenado. On the surface, trading Bryant makes little sense. He’s the Cubs’ best player, Chicago is expected to contend in 2020, and Bryant’s salary isn’t exorbitant at $18.6 million, roughly half the AAV Anthony Rendon just received in free agency. On the other hand, of the six Cubs making more than $15 million, Bryant is the only one with good trade value at the moment. If the Cubs are looking to make a change — and a change seems to be desired after a disappointing 84-win season that resulted in a new manager — trading Bryant is the most realistic option to move salary and get good, young talent in return. And based on the Rockies’ reports, Bryant might also provide an opportunity to actually upgrade at third base with a long term commitment. But first, a note about the competitive balance tax. Read the rest of this entry »

I started writing this article with an eye on it being brief because much of the rest of Prospect Week was not, and that’s part of what brought this piece about. The Board is out of control, growing and expanding like The Blob, consuming more rows and columns by the day, threatening to create a paucity of digital space once thought infinite. Since 2017, when we first breathed life into The Board, the amount of info we display there has grown and the number of players included has doubled from just over 600 to just over 1,200.

A little over a year ago, once we realized this was happening, Kiley and I began asking ourselves why and whether or not it was correct. We answered the latter question pretty quickly. It became more rare for players we didn’t cover at all to the reach the big leagues or be traded, which was better for readers. Carson Cistulli had a harder time finding Cistulli’s Guy prospects he felt strongly about, which was an indication that we’d plugged a statistical hole in our boat (until Alex Chamberlain’s Peripheral Prospects series arrived and helped highlight an age-related one). Plus, we received few accusations of frivolousness from industry contacts, though there was some, citing opportunity costs. Mostly, while mindful that not all of them will, we decided we liked it better to cover all the players we thought could make a big-league impact rather than work with a cap. It most aligned with what the goal would be were we running a hypothetical 31st team, and it is this statement that I ask you to put in your back pocket for later on. Read the rest of this entry »

Since 2014, I’ve cranked out the career numbers for every significant prospect, regardless of whether they’ve reached the level of the minors that would normally justify an official projection. After a one-year hiatus, those projections, more commonly known as the ZiPS Top 100 Prospects list, return for their FanGraphs debut. If you’re unaware of what ZiPS projections are and the purpose they serve, please consult this article and this article while I reconsider my public relations strategy.

These projections are not a replacement for scouting. Projection systems are very clever, and a smart analyst can figure out a lot of ways to approach some of the thornier data questions that emerge over 15 years of prognostication (as for me, I’ve muddled by). But they can’t capture everything and the farther down the minor league ladder you go, the worse the data gets and the shorter the players’ histories become. That’s why I usually need a compelling reason to create a yearly projection for a hitter with no High-A experience or a pitcher who has yet to make a Double-A appearance. ZiPS can use college data, but I prefer to avoid it. And ZiPS does not use high school data, as that would be preposterous. Without college stats or a major international league, ZiPS literally has nothing to go on for a player without minor league experience. So if you’re wondering why Jasson Dominguez is missing from the list, it’s not that he’s a lousy prospect, it’s just that ZiPS doesn’t have anything useful to say about him yet.

One of the biggest differences between ZiPS and most other prospect lists is that, given the uncertainty surrounding any prospect’s future performance, ZiPS projections tend to give higher career WAR forecasts to lower-risk, lower-ceiling players in the high minors. So ZiPS has historically given higher grades to prospects like Steven Matz, Kolten Wong, and Marcus Semien, though it turned out his ceiling was quite high, than any other prospect lists did. Some of the successes — players who ranked higher on the ZiPS list than any other I found — include Ozzie Albies (No. 49, pre-2015), Mookie Betts (No. 26, pre-2014), Trea Turner (No. 11, pre-2016), and Joc Pederson (No. 2, pre-2015). Naturally, there have been some dismal busts too, just like any prospect list, the worst possibly being the year ZiPS had Arismendy Alcantara ranked 13th. Whoops. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley banter about the latest developments in the escalating player war of words over the Astros sign-stealing scandal, José Altuve‘s alleged unfinished tattoo, Rob Manfred’s roundly criticized comments, Shohei Ohtani’s new driver’s license, and a modest pay hike for minor leaguers. Then they preview the 2020 Braves (34:29) with From the Diamond host Grant McAuley, and the 2020 Phillies (1:13:37) with The Athletic’s Meghan Montemurro.

Audio intro: The Who, "Tattoo"
Audio interstitial 1: The Replacements, "Someone Take the Wheel"
Audio interstitial 2: Cayetana, "South Philly"
Audio outro: Bud Light, "Mr. Fake Tattoo Inventor"

Link to story about Correa, Altuve, and Bellinger
Link to story about minor league pay hike
Link to possible Altuve tattoo sighting
Link to Darvish tweet
Link to Ben on the Braves rebuild
Link to post about Ozuna
Link to Grant’s Braves positional previews
Link to story on the Phillies’ spending
Link to story on the Phillies’ bullpen usage
Link to story on the Phillies’ sports science department
Link to Ben on the Phillies’ framing turnarounds
Link to Roger Angell interview
Link to order The MVP Machine

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