The Astros cheated. That’s not in dispute. The search for just how much the banging scheme helped the team, however, is ongoing. Rob Arthur got the party started. Tony Adams chronicled the bangs. Here at FanGraphs, Jake Mailhot examined how much the Astros benefited, which players were helped most, and even how the banging scheme performed in clutch situations. In a recent press conference, owner Jim Crane downplayed the benefit, saying “It’s hard to determine how it impacted the game, if it impacted the game, and that’s where we’re going to leave it.” It’s a rich literature, and not just because it’s fun to write “banging scheme” — but I didn’t want to leave it there.

I thought I’d take a different tack. All of these studies are based on reality, and reality has one huge problem: it’s so maddeningly imprecise. You can’t know if we captured all the right bangs. You can’t know if the system changed, or if it had details or mechanisms we didn’t quite understand or know about. And even when everything is captured right, those sample sizes, those damn sample sizes, are never quite what you need to feel confident in their results.

If we simply ignore what actually happened and create our own world, we can skip all that grubby, confusing reality. Imagine, if you will, a player who makes perfectly average swing decisions and achieves perfectly average results on those decisions.

Let’s further stipulate, while we’re far off into imaginary land, that pitchers attack our perfectly average batter in a perfectly average way. For each count, they’ll throw a league average number of fastballs, and those fastballs will be in the strike zone at — you guessed it — a league average rate. The same is true for all other pitches — with cut fastballs included in “all other pitches” in this analysis. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Sam Miller banter about why the Astros sign-stealing scandal won’t go away, and the reception to the team’s first attempts to apologize. Then they preview the 2020 Angels (28:13) with The Athletic’s Fabian Ardaya, and the 2020 Cardinals (1:03:49) with MLB.com’s Will Leitch. Lastly (1:37:15), Ben talks to FanGraphs’ Craig Edwards about Boston’s Mookie Betts Competitive Balance Tax myth, MLB’s reported 14-team playoff format idea, and the new three-batter-minimum rule (plus a postscript about the Mets’ new big-leaguers-only clubhouse).

Audio intro: Queen, "Scandal"
Audio interstitial 1: Teenage Fanclub, "Ain’t That Enough"
Audio interstitial 2: The Association, "Standing Still"
Audio interstitial 3: The Delgados, "Ballad of Accounting"
Audio outro: Isotopes, "Poison in the Clubhouse"

Link to story on Astros apologies
Link to The Athletic story on 2017 Astros clubhouse
Link to latest WSJ story on the Astros’ sign stealing
Link to Washington Post story on sign-stealing suspicions
Link to Bauer’s story on sign stealing
Link to Craig on Boston’s savings
Link to Zach Kram on Boston’s savings
Link to Rob Arthur on payroll flexibility
Link to story about MLB’s proposed playoff format
Link to Ben Clemens on the playoff format
Link to Cliff Corcoran on the three-batter minimum
Link to order The MVP Machine

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While Yasiel Puig remains unsigned, a couple of other free agent outfielders came off the board on Wednesday via one-year deals at rock-bottom prices that belie their potential productivity even in part-time roles. Cameron Maybin returned to the Tigers, with whom he debuted in 2007, via a $1.5 million deal that includes an additional $1.3 million in incentives, while Jarrod Dyson agreed to a $2 million contract with the Pirates.

The well-traveled Maybin, who turns 33 on April 4, has played for eight different major league teams and has already passed through the hands of the Tigers twice. They made him the No. 10 pick out of an Asheville, North Carolina high school in 2005, and brought him to the majors in 2007, but dealt him to the Marlins that December in the Miguel Cabrera blockbuster. After three years with the Marlins, four with the Padres, and one with the Braves, he sparkled in a return to the Tigers for the 2016 season (.315/.383/.418) but was nonetheless dealt to the Angels that November and continued on his merry way. After splitting the 2018 campaign between the Marlins (again) and Mariners, he went to spring training last year with the Giants but was cut in late March after being arrested on a DUI charge. He landed with the Indians and opened the season with the team’s Triple-A Columbus affiliate before being sold to the Yankees for all of $25,000 on April 25, a time when Giancarlo Stanton, Aaron Judge, Aaron Hicks, and Clint Frazier were all sidelined by injuries. Read the rest of this entry »

The Arizona Diamondbacks have a potential future ace in 24-year-old righty Zac Gallen. Making his debut for the Miami Marlins in June 2019, Gallen finished the season with a 1.6 WAR, and armed with a filthy changeup, became one of the more exciting young pitchers to appear in the major leagues last year.

This spring, Gallen will battle for the fifth spot in the Diamondbacks rotation. If he isn’t able to secure a starting role, Arizona may have him begin the season in Triple-A. Gallen could claim that rotation spot with an assist from an adjustment to one pitch, which in turn will tighten up his entire arsenal and help him become one of the tougher pitchers to face in baseball.

Though the sample is limited, Gallen did well during his first 15 big league starts. Through 80 innings pitched, Gallen produced an ERA of 2.81 (3.61 FIP), struck out 96 hitters, and posted a 2.96 K/BB ratio. Gallen also demonstrated good command last year, though his 10.8% walk rate indicated he may have struggled a bit with his control.

Gallen attacked hitters with a four-seam fastball, a knuckle curveball, a changeup, and two types of cutters: a sweeping (or hybrid) cutter and a backspinning cutter. Eric Longenhagen put a 50 FV on Gallen’s overall arsenal, with special consideration given to his changeup (55 FV). Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

The Mariners are bringing former top prospect Taijuan Walker back to the Northwest. Yesterday afternoon, the right-hander signed a one-year contract worth a base salary of $2 million, with incentives that could push the deal up to $3 million. As with Kendall Graveman earlier this winter, the Mariners have done well to round out their thin rotation with a low-cost option that could plausibly produce a significant return on their investment.

Unlike with Graveman, there’s plenty of sentimental value here, too. For most of the early part of the decade, Walker was the player Mariners fans salivated to see. Prior to Seattle’s current crop of farmhands, Walker led the vanguard of exciting Mariners prospects, the jewel in a class that also included Danny Hultzen, Brandon Maurer, and James Paxton. Stories of Walker’s athleticism and skill spread quickly as he blitzed through Seattle’s system — my personal favorite is the time he wrote “Tai was here” on a piece of athletic tape and then showed off his NBA-esque vertical by jumping and sticking the tape too high for anybody else to reach — and many pinned their hopes of a Mariners resurgence on his powerful shoulders.

But just when Walker looked ready to make his mark in Seattle, he suffered a few incremental setbacks. He needed the better part of two years of seasoning at the upper minors before reaching the big leagues for good in 2015, and then ran into plenty of bumps that first season. His secondaries backed up between Double-A and the show, and big league hitters routed his pin-straight fastball and sloppy secondaries over the first two months of the year — a period during which a promising Mariners club imploded in part because of Walker’s 7.33 ERA in his first nine starts. Read the rest of this entry »

“It feels like there’s still no closure and everything has been thrown into question — past outcomes are being second-guessed and even future games will be cast in doubt. There can be no redemption arc after an institutionalized scandal like this until there’s some accountability.” — Sean Doolittle, Nationals reliever

Sean Doolittle speaks for all of us. Four weeks after Commissioner Rob Manfred issued his report on the Astros’ illegal sign-stealing efforts and suspended both president of baseball operations Jeff Luhnow and manager AJ Hinch for the 2020 season, new revelations about the scheme continue to emerge, some of which challenge his findings or call his judgment into question. So long as such information keeps coming to light, Major League Baseball can’t make this scandal — or the justifiable outrage from players within the game and fans outside of it — go away. Not even a leaked report about a cockamamie 14-team playoff format will deflect attention from Houston’s various schemes.

Last Friday, the Wall Street Journal‘s Jared Diamond reported on an effort by the Astros’ baseball operations department to decode opponents’ signs and relay that information to hitters in real time, one that preceded the trash can banging scheme and that general manager Jeff Luhnow had awareness of, though it went unmentioned in the commissioner’s report. Later that day, MLB Network aired an exclusive interview with A.J. Hinch, one in which the Astros’ former manager expressed regret over his own role in failing to stop his players from participating in the sign-stealing scheme but gave a carefully parsed answer when it came to the possible use of wearable buzzers. On Monday, pitcher Mike Bolsinger, who retired just one of eight Astros hitters he faced in his final major league appearance on August 4, 2017, filed a civil lawsuit in Los Angeles Superior Court, “accusing the Astros of unfair business practices, negligence and intentional interference with contractual and economic relations,” according to USA Today’s Nancy Armour. 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 Toronto Blue Jays.

Batters

If you planned a Bond villain-esque scheme to abduct the sons of famous baseball players and put them to work in your baseball mines, it would make for a pretty good plot, and a hell of a lineup. Toronto’s storyline is still incomplete, however, as the next phase of the plan involved collecting a bunch of castoffs and tossing them into the batting order.

Perhaps this is a touch on the mean side. Whatever else you can say about the Jays, it’s unlikely they have a floor anywhere near as low as some of the other teams — like the Marlins or Royals — likely to land in the 70s for wins. The outfield has a lot of guys to juggle, as players like Dalton Pompey and Anthony Alford never developed into the types that carve out permanent roles. ZiPS remains skeptical of Lourdes Gurriel Jr.’s offense, and while the computer has him ticking up near an OPS+ of 100, that isn’t all that exciting when you’re talking about a corner outfielder instead of a middle infielder. The Jays don’t really have a center fielder in this group — at least among those likely to start — which raises some concerns about what their defense will look like. Read the rest of this entry »

Quinn Priester is a talented young right-hander with a lot to learn. Drafted 18th overall last summer by the Pittsburgh Pirates, he’s a 19-year-old Illinois native who came to pro ball with scant schooling on the baseball front. Unlike most high-profile preps, Priester didn’t have a pitching coach growing up.

He fared well in his inaugural efforts versus professional hitters. The 6-foot-3, 195-pound hurler got his feet wet with 36.2 innings split between the Gulf Coast League and short-season West Virginia, logging a 3.19 ERA while averaging over a strikeout per frame. Not that the numbers matter. What does is his potential. Our Pirates prospects list isn’t yet out, but you can expect to see Priester toward the top.

Priester talked about his repertoire, and the early stages of his development, at the tail end of the 2019 season.

———

David Laurila: What do you consider your best pitch?

Quinn Priester: “I’d say my curveball and my two-seam sinker. Those are the two pitches that stand out the most.”

Laurila: Let’s talk about your curveball. When you did you first begin throwing one?

Priester: “I was actually really young; probably too young, to be honest. When I was 11, we had a coach who didn’t allow us to throw curveballs, but he did tell us, ‘Hey, when you do throw a curveball, this is how you put as little stress on your arm as possible.’ We were taught one grip, and how to throw it that one way.

“Even though I had to keep it my back pocket, I started having a lot of fun with it. And I loved to throw it, so I’d always work on it. Then, when I was about 12 or 13, I was able to start using it [in games]. From that point on, I was able to get decent movement on it.”

Laurila: How were you taught to throw a curveball? Read the rest of this entry »

When publishing prospect lists — in particular, the top 100 — I am frequently asked who, among the players excluded from this year’s version, might have the best chance of appearing on next year’s version. Whose stock am I buying? This post represents my best attempt to answer all of those questions at once.

This is the third year of this exercise, and last year Kiley and I instituted some rules. First, none of the players you see below will have ever been a 50 FV or better in any of our write-ups or rankings. So while I think Corbin Martin will return from Tommy John and become a 50 FV again later next year, I’m not allowed to include him here (although I just sorta did). The second rule is that I am forbidden from using players who have ever been on this list before, which means no Gilberto Celestino (on the list two years ago) or Lenny Torres (who was on last year’s) even though they might soon be 50s. McDaniel and I were right about 18 of the 63 players we picked the first year, about a 29% hit rate, and we were right about 16 of the 55 players on last year’s list, which is also 29%. Two years still isn’t long enough to know whether that’s good or not, but it does appear as though a baseline is being established.

At the end of the piece, I have a list of potential high-leverage relievers who might debut this year, because readers seem to dig that category. These are not part of the 50+ FV forecasting; it’s just a way to point an arrow at guys I like who might have real big league impact in a smaller role very soon.

I’ve separated the players into groups or “types” to make the list a little more digestible and to give you some idea of the demographics I think pop-up guys come from, which could help you identify some of your own with The Board (with The Board, through The Board, in The Board). For players whose orgs I’ve already covered this offseason, there is a link to the applicable team list where you can find a full scouting report on that player. I touch briefly on the rest of the names in this post. If you want to peek at the previous lists, here is Year 1, and here is Year 2. Read the rest of this entry »