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
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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. 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.

If Roger Clemens has a reasonable claim as the greatest pitcher of all time, then the same goes for Barry Bonds as the greatest position player. Babe Ruth played in a time before integration, and Ted Williams bridged the pre- and post-integration eras, but while both were dominant at the plate, neither was much to write home about on the base paths or in the field. Bonds’ godfather, Willie Mays, was a big plus in both of those areas, but he didn’t dominate opposing pitchers to the same extent. Bonds used his blend of speed, power, and surgical precision in the strike zone to outdo them all. He set the single-season home run record with 73 in 2001 and the all-time home run record with 762, reached base more often than any player this side of Pete Rose, and won a record seven MVP awards along the way.

Despite his claim to greatness, Bonds may have inspired more fear and loathing than any ballplayer in modern history. Fear because opposing pitchers and managers simply refused to engage him at his peak, intentionally walking him a record 688 times — once with the bases loaded — and giving him a free pass a total of 2,558 times, also a record. Loathing because even as a young player, he rubbed teammates and media the wrong way and approached the game with a chip on his shoulder because of the way his father, three-time All-Star Bobby Bonds, had been driven from the game due to alcoholism. The younger Bonds had his own issues off the field, as allegations of physical and verbal abuse of his domestic partners surfaced during his career.

As he aged, media and fans turned against Bonds once evidence — most of it illegally leaked to the press by anonymous sources — mounted that he had used performance-enhancing drugs during the latter part of his career. With his name in the headlines more regarding his legal situation than his on-field exploits, his pursuit and eclipse of Hank Aaron’s 33-year-old home run record turned into a joyless drag, and he disappeared from the majors soon after breaking the record in 2007 despite ranking among the game’s most dangerous hitters even at age 43. Not until 2014 did he even debut as a spring training guest instructor for the Giants. The reversal of his felony obstruction of justice conviction in April 2015 freed him of legal hassles, and he spent the 2016 season as the Marlins’ hitting coach, though he was dismissed at season’s end.

Bonds is hardly alone among Hall of Fame candidates with links to PEDs. As with Clemens, the support he has received during his first seven election cycles has been far short of unanimous, but significantly stronger than the showings of Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, and Rafael Palmeiro, either in their ballot debuts or since. Debuting at 36.2% in 2013, Bonds spun his wheels for two years before climbing to 44.3% in 2016 and 53.8% in 2017 thanks to a confluence of factors. In the wake of both Bonds and Clemens crossing the historically significant 50% threshold, the Hall — which in 2014 unilaterally truncated candidacies from 15 years to 10 so as to curtail debate over the PED-linked ones — made its strongest statement yet that it would like to avoid honoring them in the form of a plea to voters from vice chairman Joe Morgan not to honor players connected to steroids. The letter was not well received by voters, but in the two cycles since, Bonds has gained just 5.3 percentage points. Like Clemens, he needs to recapture his momentum to have a shot at reaching 75% by the time his eligibility runs out in 2022.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Minnesota Twins brought back another piece of their 2019 starting rotation when they re-signed righty Michael Pineda to a two-year, $20-million contract (pending physical). With another 39 games left in his 60-game suspension due to testing positive for PEDs (hydrochlorothiazide), the deal works out to roughly $17.6 million over two years.

Prior to his suspension in September, Pineda was instrumental in helping the Twins capture the American League Central. Anchored by a top-20 rated changeup (minimum 15% usage), Pineda accumulated 2.7 WAR (his highest mark since 2016) and posted his lowest ERA (4.01) in five years. The rest of Pineda’s stats were in line with his career averages, although his xFIP and hard-hit rate was by far the worst of his six seasons in the major leagues.

Nevertheless, Pineda was helped by an element of deception as he was one of the best overall pitch tunnelers of 2019, as exemplified in the chart below sorted by PreMax (average distance between back-to-back pitches at the tunnel point). Read the rest of this entry »

Picture a beautiful defensive play in your head. For me, it’s Andrelton Simmons charging, slightly to his right. He picks an awkward hop cleanly, transfers it smoothly, and fires a strike to first base to get a speedy runner:

Maybe you’re the outfield defense type — you see Victor Robles at a full-out sprint, a seamless transition to a slide, and a line-drive double transmogrified into an out. Either way, beautiful defensive plays are a combination of impossibly fast-twitch muscles and learned grace.

Next, picture a team that excels at run prevention. This one is more abstract, so I’ll guide you a little. The best four teams in terms of ERA- last year were all among the top six in strikeout rate. They were all among the top six teams in preventing walks. In fact, out of the top half of the league when it comes to ERA-, only four teams had a below-average strikeout rate, and two of those were almost exactly average. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller follow up on (o)possums playing dead, discuss the Nationals signing Stephen Strasburg to a record contract for a pitcher and the implications for the Nationals, Scott Boras, Anthony Rendon, and Gerrit Cole, banter about the possibility of Shohei Ohtani hitting on the days he pitches, the elections of Marvin Miller and Ted Simmons to the Hall of Fame, MLB moving the amateur draft site to Omaha, and the end of marijuana testing for minor leaguers, then review the first 14 of Bill James’s 30 recent suggestions for counteracting baseball’s slowing pace of play and rising strikeout and home run rates.

Audio intro: Grateful Dead, "St. Stephen"
Audio outro: The Apples in Stereo, "Stephen Stephen"

Link to opossum post
Link to Ben on the Strasburg signing
Link to Jeff on Bruce Chen
Link to Bill James Handbook 2020
Link to order The MVP Machine

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Stephen Strasburg entered the Nationals organization in 2009 as a 21-year-old super-prospect, an essentially finished product ready to pitch in the majors. A decade later, he has more than lived up to the hype, averaging four wins per season even after missing nearly all of the 2011 season due to Tommy John surgery. The decade culminated with Strasburg’s best season, 36.1 brilliant postseason innings, and a World Series championship. After opting out of the final four seasons and $100 million owed to him under his previous contract, the Nationals made Strasburg’s return their top priority, with the team and player agreed to a record $245 million deal covering the next seven seasons as first reported by Jon Heyman. Ken Rosenthal reports that Strasburg also receives a no-trade clause with multiple award incentives with annual salaries of $35 million with $80 million in deferrals spread out equally over the contract to be paid with interest. Joel Sherman has indicated the deferrals will be paid in the first three years after the contract’s end.

In his post earlier this afternoon, Dan Szymborksi posted Strasburg’s ZiPS projections for the duration of the deal. Those projections gave Strasburg an impressive 27.5 WAR for his age-31 through age-37 seasons. According to Szymborksi’s projection, the $245 million figure is essentially a fair one. But the deal is still surprising for its magnitude. When FanGraphs crowdsourced free agent contracts for the Top 50 Free Agents post, the median contract estimate for Strasburg came out to $140 million with an average of about $154 million; Kiley McDaniel’s prediction came in at $150 million. With Strasburg and Gerrit Cole the only bonafide aces available, and multiple teams willing to dole out large sums of money for those aces, the market for Strasburg was evidently robust. As Scott Boras looks set to pit the Yankees and Angels against each other for Cole, Strasburg sat waiting as a potential backup option. Rather than run the risk of losing Strasburg to the Cole runner-up, Washington opted to jump the market and paid to avoid a potential bidding war.

There are certainly risks involved with signing a pitcher into his mid-to-late 30s. Strasburg has a Tommy John surgery in his past. From 2015 through 2018, he averaged under 150 innings, but innings totals can be a double-edged sword when looking at longevity. Strasburg’s low innings totals in the past can be held against him, just as the 245.1 innings he threw in 2019 can be held against him due to the extra mileage it put on his arm. Ultimately, the Nationals are paying Strasburg for what they expect him to do in the future. As noted above, Strasburg’s projections are good. To get a slightly better sense of how pitchers like Strasburg have performed, I looked for players within two wins of Strasburg’s 18 WAR from age 27 through 30 years old. I took out any player with more than 200 innings than Strasburg’s 662 during that time and looked at players within two wins of Strasburg’s 5.7 WAR total in 2019. I was left with eight players:

Strasburg comes up a bit short in his innings total, though his 50.1 postseason innings aren’t included above. It’s also worth mentioning that the two players closest to Strasburg in terms of innings were Curt Schilling and Roy Halladay. Four of the eight players above are already Hall of Famers. Kevin Brown and Schilling both have good cases for induction as well. Here’s how those eight players performed over their next three seasons:

There isn’t a bust in the group, and the players above actually got better in their early 30s, averaging five wins per season. The worst comp during those years is Bert Blyleven, who still managed to pitch close to 400 innings and average more than three wins per season. It’s possible that showing Strasburg’s near-term future as a largely positive one doesn’t say much that we don’t already know. What about the out years of the contract, when Strasburg’s deal might become a liability? Here’s how those same eight pitchers fared from age-34 through age-37, in what will be the last four years of Strasburg’s contract:

Out of all of Strasburg’s comps, only one pitcher, Shane Reynolds, aged poorly. Roy Halladay’s injuries prevented him from pitching longer, but he still managed 10.5 WAR after his age-33 season. While Randy Johnson’s incredible career is doing a decent amount of work above, the pitchers averaged four wins per year in their mid-to-late-30s. Even looking at the median gives us 3.7 WAR per season during that time. We don’t know for sure how Strasburg will age, and injuries could certainly derail the latter half of his career, but pitchers who have pitched like Strasburg have aged incredibly well. The average WAR totals for these pitchers from age-31 through age-37 was 32.1 WAR with a 28.7 WAR median, even beating the ZiPS projections.

The Nationals are taking a risk with Strasburg, but it’s possible their bigger risk isn’t in signing Strasburg, but in what that signing might mean for the team’s pursuit of Anthony Rendon. Mark Lerner recently indicated the club would not be able to sign both Strasburg and Rendon, though as I noted at the time, even if both were given contracts for $30 million per year, it would represent only $6 million more than they made with the Nationals in 2019. Earlier today, I posed a question to our readers asking who they think the Nationals would be better off pursuing between the two free agents. In the hours that followed, more than 1,000 readers weighed in; by nearly a 2-1 margin preferred Rendon to Strasburg. Tilting the scales even more given what we know now, the expected contract in the poll for Strasburg was $100 million less than what he’s actually set to receive, while Rendon’s contract came in at $210 million. The Nationals probably won’t regret signing Stephen Strasburg, but it’s possible they might regret letting Rendon go, if that’s what transpires.

Even with Strasburg’s $35 million salary (with some deferrals with interest), the Nationals payroll still comes to just $165 million, well below the $200 million-plus payrolls they’ve been carrying the last few years. If the team doesn’t keep Rendon, perhaps they will sign Josh Donaldson, but it certainly looks like the team has payroll room. Outside of Rendon and Donaldson, there aren’t any other impact position players available. The team is roughly one good player away from making themselves favorites in the National League East. Bringing back Strasburg is a positive move for next season and beyond, but they still have a little more work to do if they want to get back to the playoffs next season.