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Kiley McDaniel: video from Luis Patino from the Futures Game:   FanGraphs Prospects @FG_Prospects   Padres RHP Luis Patino is our 10th-ranked pitcher and 31st-ranked prospect in the minor leagues. Here’s our footage from the Futures Game when he sat 96-99 mph w/cut, mixing in a plus slider, at least an average changeup and starter traits, despite his youth (19 y/o) & loud stuff 24 Jul 2019

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Getting traded has long been a part of the game. Players move from team to team on the whims and wishes of general managers looking to make their clubs better — be it in the near term, for a pennant push, or down the road. Sometimes these deals happen during the winter months. Other times they happen in-season, most commonly at the July trade deadline. Either way — and regardless of whether the player is happy with the change of address — more than the name on the front of uniform is going to be different. To varying degrees, getting dealt impacts the day-to-day lives of players, particularly those who have families.

With this year’s deadline fast approaching, I went in search of interesting trade stories. With a broader perspective in mind, I talked not only to current players, but also to former players, a coach who managed in the minors for nine seasons, and a couple of broadcasters. All of these conversations took place last week when the Red Sox hosted the Blue Jays at Fenway Park.

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Trent Thornton, Blue Jays pitcher

On November 17, 2018, the Houston Astros traded Thornton to the Toronto Blue Jays in exchange for Aledmys Diaz.

“I got a call from one of the front office guys with the Astros, Armando Velasco. I’d just gotten back from the [Arizona] Fall League, so I thought they were putting me on the 40-man roster. Instead, it was, ‘Hey, you were just traded to the Toronto Blue Jays.’ I almost blacked out. I kind of just said, ‘OK, thanks,’ then went in to tell my parents.

“I ended up calling [Valasco] back about five minutes later, because I hadn’t really heard anything he’d said. He was like, ‘Yeah, someone from the Blue Jays will be calling you in about 15 minutes. He’ll give you a little rundown of what’s going on.’

“About 15 minutes later, someone does call. I’m having this conversation with the guy and he’s saying, ‘We’re super excited to have you,’ blah blah blah. At the end of the conversation, I said, ‘Who are you again?’ I’d never caught his name. He goes, ‘Ross Atkins.’ I go, ‘Oh, OK.’ Then I hung up the phone. Read the rest of this entry »

With just a week to go before the trade deadline, it still isn’t entirely clear which teams will endeavor to make additions for a pennant run, and which teams will cash in their 2019 chips to play for another year. In the American League, nine of 15 teams have at least an outside shot at the postseason, with seven clubs having a legitimate chance. The National League is even more competitive, with every team but the Marlins possessing some chance at the playoffs, and eight clubs having a reasonable path to the postseason.

Below, we’ll go through the trade scenarios for the teams considering moves. Keep in mind, much of these proposed swaps are simply a framework for how a deal might look. Also important to keep in mind? Most of these predictions will be completely incorrect! Please consume the deals below responsibly, and use this as a preview of what teams need, want, and might do over the next week. Unless any of the predicted deals happen; in that case, I expect to receive full credit.

First, some things that won’t happen:

Star Pitchers Are Staying Put

The Tigers aren’t likely to get the kind of offer they want for Matthew Boyd, who has given up 15 homers in his last eight starts. The Mets aren’t going to get the young stars they want for Noah Syndergaard. Cleveland seems less likely to deal Trevor Bauer now that they are back in the race. Zack Greinke and Robbie Ray probably aren’t going anywhere. Even Caleb Smith of the Marlins, or Brad Keller and Jake Junis of the Royals, seem destined to stay put.

The big question remaining is San Francisco, which brings us to a few things that will (maybe) happen: Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh, Sam Miller, and Meg Rowley banter about “minimum innings,” striking out the side, and an anecdote about Barry Larkin bunting, then spend the rest of the episode answering a listener request to name the five best hitters and five best pitchers of the decade—but to make matters more interesting, they do so without looking at WAR and then compare their picks to the stats at the end.

Audio intro: Hot Snakes, "This Mystic Decade"
Audio outro: The Muppets, "Mah Na Mah Na"

Link to Larkin bunting story
Link to spring training Greinke story
Link to Joe Posnanski’s Greinke story
Link to Jeff’s Greinke tweet
Link to Jay on Greinke’s HOF trajectory
Link to Ben’s Beltré story
Link to 2010-19 B-Ref batting WAR leaderboard
Link to 2010-19 FanGraphs batting WAR leaderboard
Link to 2010-19 B-Ref pitching WAR leaderboard
Link to 2010-19 FanGraphs pitching WAR leaderboard
Link to order The MVP Machine

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Even before it began, the 2019 season seemed poised to become the year of the rookie hitter. That seems true every year nowadays, but it seemed especially so this year. Vladimir Guerrero Jr. and Fernando Tatis Jr. had a ton of anticipation surrounding their debuts, but there were other big names ready to introduce themselves as well. Eloy Jimenez was about to unleash his prodigious power upon the big leagues for the first time, Victor Robles was embarking on his first full season of showing off his game-changing speed in the majors, and Nick Senzel was going to finally try to put his injury problems behind him and show why he was the second overall draft choice in 2017. National prospect lists consistently laid out the excitement surrounding the next generation of great hitters, with our own Top 100 list featuring nine hitters in the top 10 prospects, and 17 in the top 20 (along with one two-way player).

Nearly two-thirds of the way through the season, many of those rookie hitters have shown the potential to carry the weight of a franchise on their shoulders. Unfortunately, most play for teams that won’t be challenging for postseason spots this season, so they will have to wait their turn to show off their talents in important fall baseball games. Others are playing on teams that will certainly be around in October, but they play at a spot that their organization was already doing quite well with. This piece isn’t about one of those guys, though. We’re here to talk about someone I think means more to his team’s postseason hopes than any other rookie in baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s a sentence that I didn’t think I’d be writing in 2019: Andrew Miller has accumulated -0.2 WAR this season. By FanGraphs’ version of WAR, he’s been less valuable than a replacement-level reliever. Here’s another sentence that makes a little more sense, but is at odds with the one I just wrote: Andrew Miller might be the Cardinals’ best reliever. Now, reliever performance is volatile and all, but we’re going to need an explanation. How can those two things be true at once?

Let’s start with Miller being below replacement level, because that would have been a surprising assertion before the year. Andrew Miller has faced 139 batters this season. He’s allowed eight home runs. 6% of his plate appearances have ended with the opposing batter trotting around the bases. That surely already sounds like a ton — indeed, Miller is second in the majors in home runs allowed per nine innings, behind only Josh Osich. You don’t need a sabermetric writer to tell you that’s bad.

As bad as 2.2 home runs per nine innings sounds, though, it might be underselling how wild Miller’s season has been on the home run front. Josh Osich is a great example of the kind of pitcher who normally leads the league in home runs allowed per nine. He’s a pitch-to-contact depth reliever who works by letting opponents put the ball in play and counting on his defense to make plays behind him. Now, that strategy mostly hasn’t worked — Osich has a career ERA of 5.11, and his FIP is 5.31, so it’s not as though he’s just been getting unlucky. Still, while Osich is homer-prone, he’s mostly just contact-prone, with the home runs a cost of doing business. Strike out only 19% of the batters you face, and there will be plenty of opportunities to give up home runs.

Andrew Miller’s case of the dingers isn’t like that at all. Miller is actually one of the least contact-prone pitchers in all of baseball this year. Only 51% of the batters he has faced have put the ball in play. That severely limits the opportunities they have to hit home runs. Osich, for comparison’s sake, has let 75% of batters put the ball in play. Miller is giving up home runs at a truly alarming rate considering how few opportunities he gives batters to put a ball in play. Read the rest of this entry »

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While defensive concerns generally outweigh offensive ones when it comes to second basemen, it nonetheless rates as a surprise that the position’s denizens are producing just a 90 wRC+, their lowest in the period covered by our splits (since 2002) and the lowest of any position this year save for catcher. After all, in 2016, the group reached its high-water mark for the period with a 106 wRC+. Even as teams have squeezed offense-minded players like Mike Moustakas and Max Muncy into the keystone, the collapses of several formerly solid second-sackers — Robinson Cano, Starlin Castro, Brian Dozier, Josh Harrison, Kolten Wong, and many others mentioned below — have eroded the overall production here, as have the shifts of Daniel Murphy and Neil Walker to first base and the possibly career-ending knee woes of Dustin Pedroia. Perhaps that’s the point; the core of players that shined in 2016 has aged, and as Baseball Prospectus’ Aaron Gleeman suggested last month, it may just be a changing-of-the-guard moment.

Among contenders (which, for this series, I’ve defined as teams who are above .500 or have playoff odds of at least 10.0%, a definition that currently covers 17 teams), five have gotten less than 1.0 WAR at the position thus far. I’m including a sixth here, since we’ve had a bit of a reshuffle since I began writing the series: the Giants have won nine out of 10 and 16 out of 19 to climb to 51-50, while the Rangers have lost eight straight to fall to 50-50, that after I’d already written their entry, and I’m not making two stops. As at the other positions I’ve examined thus far, a closer look suggests that some of these teams are likely to remain in-house while shuffling through potential solutions rather than make a deal before July 31, but given the finality of this year’s deadline, this is an exercise worth doing at this juncture nonetheless.

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Going into the trade deadline last year, I put on my Dictator of MLB hat and made some trade deadline moves of my own. Upon further review, it turned out that my declarations while wearing a magical, virtual hat were not binding on any team; I was unable to force those trades to actually happen. While I have not obtained the desired legal authority over the last calendar year, it was a fun exercise, so I am reviving it ahead of next week’s deadline.

The basic rules are simple. I can’t guarantee that every trade will be thought of as fair by every reader — indeed, I can guarantee the opposite — but I did make a real effort to at least construct trades that were plausible. That is, except for the very last section, where I am explicitly trying to make wild trades, spitballing how a team could pull off a trade that ought to be impossible.

The Milwaukee Brewers acquire P Marcus Stroman from the Toronto Blue Jays for SS Mauricio Dubon, OF Trent Grisham, P Aaron Ashby, and 2B Travis Shaw

Brandon Woodruff’s injury throws a monkey wrench into the works for the Brewers, and with one of the weaker rotations among first-tier playoff contenders, something’s gotta give. While Stroman has expressed a desire to go to the Yankees, the Brewers ought to have more motivation, unless James Paxton is secretly injured. Brice Turang is the shortstop horse to bet on in the Brewers system, and Dubon is sufficiently close to the majors to tempt the Blue Jays, who have seemed to prefer near-major league ready prospects for reasons that elude me. Grisham would give Toronto a near-future bat who is increasingly intriguing, and Ashby would fulfill the team’s need to have every player in the minor league system related to a former major leaguer. Shaw isn’t here to actually add much, but instead to give Toronto an opportunity to rehab his value, and clear the way for Keston Hiura for good. Read the rest of this entry »