M’s Nearing Cano Blockbuster, Trade Alex Colome to Ease the Tension
The M’s are about to trade 2B Robinson Cano and CL Edwin Diaz to the Mets – the actual Mets – in exchange for top prospects Jarred Kelenic, Justin Dunn, and the contracts of Jay Bruce and Anthony Swarzak. It’s a franchise-altering deal, one that sends off the biggest trading chip the franchise has moved in years, and one that firmly closes the door on any form of contention in the next few years. A deal this big takes time, so we’ve watched the initial speculation, counter-offers, and analysis play out publicly over several days. It’s at once fascinating and awful.
The M’s are obviously desperate to move on from Cano. The question is why: it can’t purely be a cost-saving move, as with the money they’d reportedly send to New York AND by taking on Bruce and Swarzak, they don’t really save a lot, especially in the next 2-3 years. Edwin Diaz garnered a lot of attention from other clubs – how could he not? – and the M’s still seem hell-bent on packaging him with Cano.
Now, I think Cano’s contract has always been overplayed. Yes, it’s a lot of money, and yes, it runs through his age-40 season, but what gets lost here is that Cano’s been productive in his time with Seattle. Yes, he missed 80 games last year, and that probably led to some of the urgency with which Jerry Dipoto shopped him this month, but people are referring to him as an albatross or simply as a cautionary tale about long contracts. No; Robinson Cano is *still* an excellent player, and will add value on the field wherever he plays next year. Is he worth his contract? He’s projected for 3 wins next season, and at ~8-9 per, that’s $24-27 million, or right in line with what he’ll get. The problem is that the M’s will be paying about half of that amount. At ~$12 M per year, Cano looks like a decent bargain, particularly in the early years. “What about his age 39-40 years?” you ask? Who cares? He’ll have provided plenty of surplus value once you account for the M’s kicking in all of that money. The M’s are building a contender, it’s just in New York.
That’s not to say the deal is as disastrous as it first appeared. The M’s now get two prospects that easily slide into the front end of their top 10, and Anthony Swarzak had a brilliant 2017 before an awful 2018 turned him into a salary-matching throw-in that probably undersells him a bit. I’m not sure I love this deal, especially without knowing what, say, Philadelphia would’ve traded for Diaz alone, but I’m just struck by the weirdness of it. What about Cano’s personality or what about the clubhouse’s demeanor in the 2nd half did Dipoto attribute to Cano? For a year or two, the M’s had been doing everything they could to counter the old narrative that Cano was selfish. We’ve seen him work with plenty of young hitters, going back to Justin Smoak, Ketel Marte, Jean Segura, and then youngsters this season. We watched the loose, laughter-filled competitions that Nelson Cruz and Robinson Cano would organize for the M’s in the spring, and as much as anything, that camaraderie was singled out as a reason why the M’s were blowing their pythagorean record out of the water in early 2018. Not long after, the M’s are apparently deciding to pay handsomely to be rid of one of the architects of that culture. Meanwhile, the Mets, long seen as loathe to spend money following the Bernie Madoff-fueled losses their owners absorbed, will take on a long-term contract right when they’re trying to extend Cy Young winner Jacob de Grom.
Both teams can probably come out of this claiming victory. The Mets get a ton of money to go along with their new obligations, they get one of the best relievers alive (who happens to be earning next to nothing), AND they keep their top prospects in Peter Alonso and SS Andres Gimenez. The M’s can say they get future flexibility to add star-level players AND get two very good prospects for a system that needs them desperately. They recognize that what the M’s of 2019-2020 need *least* are shut-down relievers, so better to move them now.
That approach also led to today’s rather more modest deal. The M’s are sending Alex Colome to the White Sox in exchange for catcher Omar Narvaez. At first glance, this is simply great for the M’s. The M’s do not need a great set-up man or closer in Colome, and I remain somewhat skeptical that he’s great at all. He’s had a FIP in the mid 3’s 3 of the past 4 years, and he hasn’t shown a *persistent* ability to strand runners the way he did in 2016. He’s a good player, but not a transcendent one – not when the average reliever has a K% just 2 percentage points behind Colome’s 2018 mark. Narvaez is an intriguing guy. He’s 26, bats lefty, and draws a ton of walks. Coming into 2018, that was essentially the sum total of his attributes: he had zero power, and hadn’t shown consistent hitting ability in the minors beyond a good walk rate and low Ks. Worse, he didn’t have a classic catcher’s arm, a Zunino-grade cannon to control the running game – he was a bat-first catcher with half a bat. But 2018 showed a lot of promise. Narvaez hit 9 HRs, tripling the 3 he hit in 2016-17 combined. There’s a bit more whiffs now, but a high walk rate and mediocre power is pretty darn good, especially at that position.
Paxton to New York, Rebuild to “On”
As you’ve no doubt seen by now, James Paxton’s been dealt to the Yankees for a package of three prospects, headed by SP Justus Sheffield. We can quibble with the deal – boy can we ever! – but ultimately, moving Paxton had to be done if the club didn’t see a way to meaningfully compete in 2019.
Interestingly, at least to me, is that the M’s don’t see that pathway now, even though they look, for the most part, like they did a year ago. They thought they could compete in 2018 despite a lot of people telling them they couldn’t. They went out and won 89 games, which is remarkable, but I think unsustainable. They apparently agree, meaning they learned something about contention and their hopes for it in 2019…in the midst of actually competing for a playoff spot in 2018. I’ve given this FO a lot of grief, and they’ve earned even more of it recently, but I think that’s a fairly clear-eyed realization, even if it’s a painful one.
Fundamentally, the problem is just that the Superteams in the AL got too good too quickly. The M’s can’t exactly wait for the Astros to decline through attrition and age; they’re much younger than the M’s, and so are the cores in Boston and New York. If they can’t really compete with them over the course of the next two years (Paxton had two years of control remaining), then moving Paxton for players who’ll be around longer is the necessary move, even if it makes the team worse in 2019.
So, was this the right package of players? The industry consensus seems to be “no,” as nearly everyone has argued that the return feels light for someone of Paxton’s ability. As the game gets more analytical, the trade value (or FA value) of players whose peripherals outpace their actual runs allowed grows – the best example may be the feeding frenzy going on right now for Nate Eovaldi, a player whose ERA doesn’t scream ace, but whose stuff might. Paxton’s ERA has lagged his FIP, DRA and whatever other advanced metric you want to look at since 2016, his first year of being JAMES PAXTON, ace-type starter. There are a number of reasons why that might be, from poor defense to issues with sequencing (luck), but the thought was that nearly every team could overlook a superficially high ERA this year. If so, I wonder if this really was the best package the M’s could’ve commanded.
The headliner is Justus Sheffield, a power pitcher despite a small frame, and who features a four pitch mix. While his four-seam fastball sits in the mid-90s, it’s got extremely low spin, meaning it functions more like a sinker. His spin rate ranked 8th lowest out of nearly 650 pitchers last year, sitting right around the rate of Willians Astudillo and Chris Gimenez. Gimenez is a catcher, and Willians Astudillo is a magical gnome, but neither are front-line, fastball-first starting pitchers. The closest thing to that near him is ex-Mariner Mike Montgomery, and then, further away, Sean Manaea. Manaea is actually not a bad comp: both are lefties who were big-name prospects, and both have been traded on their way up – Manaea was originally drafted by the Royals, while Sheffield was part of the Andrew Miller deal, going from Cleveland to New York a few years back. Both feature a good slider as the best pitch/outpitch, and both pitches have similar movement and are thrown from a similar release point. And, crucially, both have struggled at times with command – Manaea’s first year in the KC system, he put up a walk rate over 10%, which wasn’t great for a college-trained pitcher. Sheffield’s struggles with walks have been more consistent, and while Manaea’s control failed him a bit in 2017, he’s largely overcome the problem. Sheffield hasn’t quite figured that out yet, as his overall walk rate last year was still 10%. This (along with his 5’10” height) is why the industry isn’t as convinced Sheffield can stick as a dependable mid-rotation starter.
The M’s are thus betting that they can help Sheffield iron out the kinks in his mechanics and figure out a way to get his stuff to play up a bit. I like the movement on his change, and 94 MPH velo with sink sounds great from a lefty starter, but he’s less of a finished product than you’d want from a top prospect who’s already made his MLB debut. To balance that risk, the second piece of the deal, Erik Swanson, is a bit more of a classic high-floor guy. Swanson’s got very good control, he’s essentially solved AAA, and has nowhere to play on the Yankees loaded club. His projections for 2019 are actually better than Sheffield’s, thanks to that lower walk rate. Swanson’s a fly-baller with great stats but without a big-time arsenal. At 25, he was going to need to be added to the Yanks 40-man roster, and it wasn’t clear that the team was going to do that for a prospect who’d rank in the mid-20s in that system. But he feels a critical, critical need for Seattle, who have essentially no upper-minors starting pitching that they’d actually want to use. He was immediately added to the M’s roster, and would easily be a top-10 prospect in the M’s system. All of that said, Swanson reminds me of some players the M’s have moved, in large part because they couldn’t figure out how to make their pedestrian stuff but great command arsenal work. I think Andrew Moore’s the sine qua non of this type, but I think Ryan Yarbrough fits the template as well. The M’s have to believe that something in their development system has changed, and that they can help Swanson succeed where Moore failed.
The final piece is OF Dom Thompson-Williams, a former 5-th rounder who’d struggled a bit in the low-minors despite being a college draft pick. He didn’t strike out much, but absolutely couldn’t hit for power in games. After a season and a half of pro ball, he’d amassed 6 HRs, which wouldn’t cut it for a tweener CF/corner OF guy. Then, last year, he knocked 22, slashing .290/.356/.517, and getting his career back on track. For the Yankees, he was an afterthought – a great pop-up guy, but who didn’t have a real place to play on the big club, and who languishes behind other OFs in a loaded system. The M’s get another crack at the old Mitch Haniger template, a CF/corner guy who’d struggled and then made big changes and refashioned himself. Yes, his K% soared along with his ISO, but the M’s simply don’t have any OFs in the system who’ve put up a line like that. That says more about the M’s system than it does about Thompson-Williams value, perhaps. I can see why the M’s wanted him included, and I can see why the Yankees shrugged their shoulders and agreed.
Next year, I’d imagine Sheffield starts in Tacoma both for service time manipulation and to hone his control. Swanson’s probably ticketed there, though he could potentially crack the starting rotation, particularly if Mike Leake is traded. Thompson-Williams would probably flank Kyle Lewis in Arkansas, but could see Tacoma by the end of the year.
The M’s are now much worse, on paper, for 2019. James Paxton must shave and then shove for New York, who now has a rotation that can go toe to toe with Boston’s and even Houston’s. My biggest worry here is not that the M’s got too little for Paxton. It’s that they weren’t really able to get as much value out of Paxton’s unreal talent. BABIP woes, injury problems, then dinger issues this year – Paxton was awesome here, but anyone who watched his 16-K game against Oakland or his duel with Gerrit Cole last July knows he was a hell of a lot better than the 3.77 RA/9 he had with the M’s, a mark that’s better than average by far, but less than he probably deserved. My fear is that New York *will* figure something out, the way Houston did with Cole, Boston did with Chris Sale, and the way the Yankees eventually did with Luis Severino. The Yankees play in a bandbox and have lower-than-average HR rates. If Paxton can limit HRs AND BABIP (and let’s be clear, that SHOULD happen given his stuff), he can be even better in pinstripes. I hate saying that, but it feels almost inevitable.
Lorena Martin’s Ouster and Acute Pangs of Zduriencik
Let’s get the obligatory throat-clearing caveats out of the way: Lorena Martin and the Mariners are saying very, very different things about not only the circumstances of Martin’s departure, but about the M’s leadership’s attitudes towards players from Latin America. We don’t know what’s fact and what’s just frustration (on anyone’s part). We weren’t in the various rooms, and don’t know anything about intention. But we do know that Lorena Martin was relieved of her duties as Director of High Performance, and that she claims to have observed racist behavior from the M’s player development brain trust of Andy McKay, manager Scott Servais and GM Jerry Dipoto. Without knowing anything else, this is an unmitigated disaster.
A year ago, the M’s were confident they could end a playoff drought that had grown into a distraction in its own right. They came to that confidence not through free agent spending, or by a team whose projections showed a league-beating colossus. The projections *all* agreed that the M’s were somewhat mediocre. The M’s confidence was the result of what they thought was a superior process.
Here’s what I wrote back in Spring Training:
That’s really the main reason why the M’s feel confident ignoring PECOTA and Fangraphs: they believe they’re elite at coaching and teaching. This is why they angrily dismiss the consensus that their farm system is the sport’s worst. It’s why they brought in Dr. Lorena Martin to add new dimensions to their development process, and it’s why they actually give up real talent to acquire Healy, Shawn Armstrong, Nick Rumbelow and others whose projections are…uh…not encouraging. They’re betting that there’s untapped potential there that has never shown itself, and they believe they’re the org to uncover it. This approach, it must be said, hasn’t been all that successful, isolated wins like Nick Vincent aside. Confidence like this is what’s dividing the M’s fanbase, I think. To the saber-inclined, this is pure hubris- the team that’s burned its farm system to the ground now thinks they can teach up other teams’ cast-offs, their own meager talent reserves, turn Dee Gordon into a gold-glove CF, teach Ryon Healy patience, and turn Ariel Miranda back into an effective starter. To others, this is simply confidence, confidence borne of watching a development-focused plan come together, changing everything from how they train, what they eat, to how they look for and acquire talent.
The Mariners had scoured the world and brought in a person with an amazing resume in a variety of sports and brought her in to get more out of every player on the roster. This wasn’t about changing a workout routine, or re-thinking off-season training. The idea was not only to bring a quantitative view towards diet, exercise, skill-specific training, etc., but to meld her view of personality and mental attributes of successful players (in any sport) with the mental focus of McKay and others in player development. The idea was to integrate physical and mental training to unlock the potential in players, potential that would never show up in anything as black and white as ZiPS projections or a player’s Fangraphs page. The M’s were supposed to be able to get much more out of players than other teams had, and in doing so, sneak up on the playoffs. They knew – everybody knew – that they didn’t have the talent of many of their rivals. But they were working on making post-hoc talent evaluations meaningless.
The M’s went out and blew their projections out of the water for a while, but they couldn’t sustain those abnormal winning percentages in the second half. This was clearly intensely frustrating for all involved. Yes, Marco Gonzales was faring better than his projection, but Ryon Healy looked *exactly* like Ryon Healy, only with a slightly less explosive baseball. Dee Gordon couldn’t get out of a slump, nor could Kyle Seager. Things came to a head in a locker room fight between Gordon and Jean Segura that spilled out into the hall for the media to document. Scott Servais downplayed it, but in hindsight, it was clearly a bigger deal than they’d let on. The club’s culture had been set by Nelson Cruz and Robinson Cano, and that seemed to create a positive, fun-loving environment, as these old Spring Training stories document. There’d be contests, lots of trash talk, and lots of laughter. Somewhere in the second half, amidst Cano’s suspension for PEDs and the A’s insane hot streak, that all curdled.
I think it’s likely that both sides in this dispute would pinpoint the few weeks around this event as the reason we are where we are. For Martin, the M’s leadership – who’d already been oddly public about their expectations for Felix and their anger at his falling short of them – saw the clubhouse leaders as the primary culprits for the lack of cohesion, and that frustration took on racial overtones. Perhaps the M’s saw this as the final evidence that Martin’s methods simply wouldn’t work: she couldn’t force recalcitrant players to actually change their ways, and thus was a barnacle on the hull of the good ship Mariner. Performance wasn’t changing, and either players weren’t improving after implementing her suggestions or weren’t going to her at all.
One of these explanations is considerably worse. If the M’s management has ever displayed a hint of the behavior Martin alleges, then none of them should work in baseball again. It’s so shocking, so ugly, but it doesn’t require some imaginative leap, either. What WAS the Felix Hernandez situation about, really? And what has the FO done to really earn the benefit of the doubt? Doesn’t all of this just feel like the Jack Zduriencik situation? It was Zduriencik who hired a non-traditional high performance specialist from another sport. Just like the recent story about instructs without baseballs, there was this old story about the M’s conditioning program without weights. That revolutionary path to building a better system quickly foundered, and the M’s parted ways. Shortly thereafter, the M’s fired plenty of FO members, from the director of pro scouting to the director of analytics, and more. Just as now, people you’d have expected to be circumspect named names and absolutely blasted the GM and the culture of the team.
It’s easy to say that the ills of one FO don’t have any bearing on a new FO. That’s true to a point. But it’s pretty clear that you can’t hire someone to revamp a process without *everyone* being on board with it. My hunch is that plenty of people in the org weren’t enamored with Martin and her newfangled ways, informed by a bunch of other sports. My hunch is that players were somewhat resistant to her, and that coaches were reluctant to insist that players follow her methods. When the M’s season fell apart, people within the org blamed their high-profile leaders like Cano, while giving other struggling players a pass, whether due to injury, displaying classic signs of effort (#eyewash), or because those players reminded the M’s leadership of themselves. The M’s management may be racist, or they may simply be frustrated by a painful season. What they aren’t is building any kind of new model of player development. The dream of being better than the stats, better than the farm system rankings, better than their competition – all of that is dead right now. They can work on a new model tomorrow, but they’ll do so amidst the fallout of this failure. They’ll get to work needing to hire for a position that just blew up due to inability to work with *current* management. They’ll need to convince Dominican players to sign with them. They’ll need to get qualified women in a variety of positions to stay or come on board in the wake of the Kevin Mather scandal and now this. I’d say “good luck,” but I’m not sure I mean it.
’18 40-Man Preview Extravaganza
Is anything better than last year? Is something better than nothing? Such philosophical questions as into the nature of being and non-being have plagued man since started thinking too much. Me, I just write the minor league baseball material.
Last November, I wrote 1500+ words and the Mariners added no prospects to the 40-man. “How dare you say our system ranked last in baseball!” said the Mariners. “None of these guys are worth using space over lol,” also said the Mariners. We utilized the Rule 5 Draft to select and then reject first baseman Mike Ford, who went on to have a “meh” season for the Yankees triple-A affiliate, restocked on minor league catchers—a far more efficient tactic than converting every infielder who wasn’t quite twitchy enough, and lost a talented but often injured left-hander who went on to pitch more in one season in the D’Backs season than he had in the two previous years combined, though it only got him to 76.1 innings total.
Now we have the same batch of dudes if they’re still around! We also have prep and international signings to consider from back in 2014 as well as college picks from 2015, the exciting last draft of the Zduriencik era. In some other weird alternate universe, we’d be talking about adding Alex Jackson to the 40-man, gosh, remember him? A lot of people remembered him all-too-much after he had an .808 OPS between advanced- and double-A last season for the Braves. I didn’t hear a peep about him this year and oh look, .647 OPS at double- and triple-A, whoops. Considering the college picks of 2015 is less depressing although that finds us in a familiar position of “we would more strongly consider adding him were he still a member of the organization.” Fingers crossed that this won’t remain the case as we get to next year and the first draft under DiPoto. Of course, these are the Mariners, and for all we know we’ll have a different GM next year who has limited appreciation for the previous paradigm etc etc. NOTE: I am not speculating, I merely default to gallows humor as a large-scale coping mechanism.
It was a bad year for recent Aquasox as Michael Suarez and Andres Torres were both injured and neither Ronaldo Rosario nor Joseph Rosa could figure out how to hit. I’m also going to discount Chuck Taylor who, like Curletta, needed to be re-signed but was without being added to the 40-man. Other omissions included: Bryan Bonnell (not a good relief profile), Adonis de la Cruz (K numbers fascinate, but is without buzz), Marvin Gorgas (bad command), Spencer Herrmann (weak double-A debut), Ryne Inman (remains a bit wild), Anthony Jimenez (hit worse in a more favorable league), and Matt Walker (needs to “prove it” as a deception guy). I also found out while writing this that there are three guys named “Logan Taylor” in the minor leagues. White people, amirite? Darin Gillies and Anthony Misiewicz were considerations, but they’re less likely as major contributors and I ought to cut myself some slack more.
The First Big Trade and the M’s Approach to 2019
Sorry for the delay in writing this one up, but I ended up writing about this for Baseball Prospectus. Uh, yeah, so I’m going to be contributing over there now. It’s a big honor, as I’ve read BP for *almost* as long as I read this blog, and of course, it was through USSMariner that I found BP in the first place.
The upshot is that the M’s are essentially paying Tampa as a professional development contractor. The M’s have tried desperately to find a CF, and they’ve failed. Guillermo Heredia – also included in the trade – never developed despite the ability to work a walk and defense that looked good at times. Leonys Martin seemed to get into a slump midway through 2016 and just was never able to get out of it. Uh, until this year, in Detroit. Dee Gordon…the less said, the better.
Mallex Smith looked to be very Guillermo Heredia-like when the M’s sent him to Tampa as part of the ill-fated Drew Smyly acquisition. But as is the Rays’ wont, they were able to improve him and create a more-than-playable CF. Unsurprisingly for a guy with his speed, Smith hits the ball at a lower trajectory and hits plenty of ground balls. It may help his BABIP a bit to run out GBs in the SS/3B hole, so it’s not like the Rays wanted to get him to hit a lot of fly balls; as one of the weaker fly ball hitters in the game, that’d be a recipe for disaster. The problem was the nature of those low-to-negative angled hits. In 2016, the average Mallex ground ball came off the bat at 73.8 MPH (per Statcast). That was good for 466th out of 471 players with at least 50 balls in play, beating out the likes of Johnny Cueto and Max Scherzer. In 2017, he somehow dropped even more, all the way to an average of 72.3 MPH. That left him at 462 out of 466 players, but hey, in your FACE, RA Dickey. But last year, he was up to 80.3 MPH, which, while not good, at least ensured he was in the range of position players and not pitchers. Not only that, but Smith cut his K rate as well, meaning those grounders weren’t just hit harder, but they were coming at the expense of strikeouts. At all added up to a wRC+ pf 117 and a 3+ win season.
Things changed, though, when the Rays acquired Tommy Pham from St. Louis. With a full OF, and an OF that promised more power than Smith could provide, the Rays had a 3-win, club-controlled asset that they didn’t desperately need, and like anything they don’t desperately need, they shopped him immediately. The M’s get a massive, massive upgrade in CF, and they can finally bring Dee Gordon back to 2B. This does a couple of things. Not only does it improve the M’s defense, but it may help them dominate the market around the trade deadline. Dee Gordon is untradeable now, after an abysmal offensive season and the whole let’s-just-forget-it-ever-happened CF experiment. A solid 1st half back at his old position could help the M’s find a buyer, and a great 1/2 year from Smith could make him a guy who commands a premium. He’s still a pre-arb guy; he’ll have his first arb season in 2020. If the M’s aren’t bad in 2019, they keep him and let him be a cheap, useful piece to build around. If they’re horrible, they’d go into the deadline with players to sell that other teams might actually *want* for a change.
So much of what happens next depends on the market for James Paxton. There’s been a lot of talk in recent days about the M’s willingness to move him, with Ken Rosenthal talking about the Yankees interest today. The M’s don’t have to move him, and frankly *should* be listening to offers on their ace, but it’s nice that they don’t need to move him unless they’re blown away by an offer. If he stays, the M’s could again be semi-competitive. If the M’s drop out of contention, I think another healthy 1/2 year might make him a great win-now pick-up. But if someone offers two-three top 100 prospects, then I think the M’s take the deal now.
Mike Zunino’s volatility made it harder to assume he’d be decent trade bait. His value would’ve been fairly high at this time last year, but it had tanked by the time July of 2018 rolled around. The M’s clearly didn’t know how to bring him out of the slumps he was so often mired in, and decided to sell now when he had both a sterling defensive reputation and memories of his 2017 were fresh. It’s got to be a humbling situation; the M’s have been trying to develop a catcher since Dan Wilson (who was mostly developed in Cincinnati), and they finally did it, but it didn’t stick, and then they had to use that partial success to cover over their other glaring developmental failure: CF.
It’s a post of mine, so you know PD is going to come in for criticism, but putting that aside, this has the potential to make the M’s better in 2019. Yes, a great Zunino would’ve been the easiest path to improvement, but that was far from a sure thing. An easier improvement would be getting more than replacement-level production from your starting CF. The options in free agency at C aren’t great, but then, they don’t need to be. They need to replace Zunino’s overall performance, which, to be fair, was buoyed by his amazing defense. But his .259 OBP and .289 projected OBP aren’t exactly high bars to clear. AJ Ellis comes to mind as a cheap one-year stop-gap who has some of Zunino’s strengths in game-calling/managing a staff, while also offering a solid eye at the plate. No 450′ HRs, though, and his framing grades poorly on BP’s metric. Stephen Vogt lives locally, and had solid framing numbers the last time he was healthy; that “healthy” part means he’d come cheap, but it’d be tough to count on 120 games from him. Anyway, there are options for even a team that’s going to claim budget constraints.
Other notes/transactions:
1: Mallex Smith brings a ton of value on the basepaths, and that’s an area that the M’s have struggled with for years. Last year’s team should’ve bucked that trend, and maybe it would have if Dee Gordon had gotten on base more, but the M’s graded poorly in FG’s baserunning metric, which measures SBs/CSs, but also things like scoring from 1st on a 2B, going from 1st-3rd, etc. The problem is that the M’s have been bad every year, and while they’re better than they were in, say, 2015, they’re still grading poorly even after spending on speedy guys like Gordon. Some of this comes from signing Nellie Cruz and watching Kyle Seager’s speed slip away, but my guess is that the same factors that make it really hard to hit 2B and 3B in Safeco make it exceedingly hard to take extra bases on the basepaths. The OF is simply too small, meaning it’s harder to be certain a ball will find a gap, and it’s correspondingly easier for an OF to get a ball off the wall back to the IF quickly. It didn’t seem to bother Jarrod Dyson too much, but Gordon’s speed number sank along with…all of his other numbers last year. Here’s hoping Mallex is able to keep his amazing SB% and still go 1st-3rd on singles.
2: The M’s signed utility IF Dylan Moore out of the Brewers org. He’s hit well in recent years, but is 26 and AA/AAA, and is just now back on the map after a terrible stint in the Braves org after a trade from the Rangers for international bonus pool money. He put up gaudy numbers in High A in both High A leagues, but those were partially a product of great hitting environments (High Desert!). He collapsed for the Braves AA affiliate, slugging .292, and thus got released. He signed a minor league deal with the Brewers and blew away AA, eventually spending most of the year in AAA. He hit incredibly well, but then there’s that whole environment thing: he played in Colorado Springs. Still, as a young-ish guy with a promising bat, but perhaps not quite as promising as the stats show, he’s got enviable positional flexibility. In 2018 alone, he played SS, CF, 2B, 3B, 1B, and LF. He’s played all 3 OF spots in the past, and seems to know how to handle the middle infield without anyone losing their job over it. This could be your new Andrew Romine, or at least a more interesting AAA IF than the Rainiers have had in a while.
3: Speaking of the Rainiers, they’ve resigned reliever Ryan Garton, who’d been outrighted last year and played sporadically in Tacoma in 2018 while navigating a series of injuries. You may remember him coming over from, you guessed it, the Rays in the minor trade that netted the M’s Mike Marjama. That trade sent IF Luis Rengifo to Tampa, but they quickly moved him to Anaheim, whereupon he had a huge breakout, and now finds himself in the Angels’ top 10 prospect list, and a guy who will probably get some big league time next season.
The Rebuild is On?
The Hot Stove League’s season is still young, but the M’s are all over the news. Importantly, we’ve seen the M’s signal their willingness to move key members of the 2018 roster if a deal can be made. Perhaps even more importantly, they’ve revamped their coaching staff, indicating that they need a new approach to player development *at the major league level.*
Discussions of the M’s predicament are thick on the digital ground in the M’s blogosphere and nationally. The M’s remain mired far, far behind the likes of Houston and Boston, and now must contend with an up-and-coming A’s club as well as an Angels squad that still has 2-3 of the best players in the world, depending on your definitions. The M’s have the highest payroll obligations for 2019 *and* the worst farm system in the AL West, and they’re coming off of a year in which they finished 3rd in the division.
The M’s have a decision to make this offseason, but it’s set up with a series of smaller decisions. The former dominated the news cycle today, as news broke nationally that the M’s are taking offers on just about everyone and exploring a full-on rebuild. The M’s ability to pull off what, say, the White Sox did a few years ago or the Cubs before that is limited because of the fact that so much of their payroll is tied up not in young, exciting players like literally Chris Sale or, say, Jeff Samardzija. They’re tied up in Felix Hernandez and a weird version of Kyle Seager who just finished a full season with an OBP of .273. But that’s where the smaller decisions come in: the M’s made a very non-traditional hire at Pitching Coach by picking up the St. Louis Cardinals’ erstwhile Director of Pitching Analytics, Paul Davis. They’re looking for a new hitting coach, too, with Edgar Martinez stepping back from that role to more of an advisor position.That’s important because a lot of *why* the M’s are paying untradeable players is that they simply weren’t able to coach those players to higher levels of performance. Whether they do a tear-down now, or wait until the trade deadline, the M’s need to have coaches in place who are all about getting players to a fundamentally different level of performance. Population-level data was really revolutionary in the Moneyball era, but it’s all but meaningless now in an environment where all clubs have it, and any fan can access it. Successful teams are upending those general rules, and terrifyingly for the M’s, it doesn’t look like luck. There’s a reason Gerrit Cole and Charlie Morton got better in Houston, and there’s a reason players as disparate as Aaron Judge and CC Sabathia contributed more than anyone would’ve imagined in New York the past two years. Unless and until that changes, not even a free agent spending spree would fundamentally alter the M’s trajectory.
I’m sympathetic to the argument that the M’s could forego a rebuild by committing to be major players in free agency. With impact classes both now and next year, and with the M’s cash crunch easing after 2019 AND with the luxury tax level rising, there are no baseball reasons to worry about investing in some of the bigger names on offer this year. Ownership may not want to, and I know exceeding the luxury tax threshold in 2019 may be unpalatable, but it’s not some major impediment: the penalties really ramp up for exceeding the soft cap three years in a row, and the M’s don’t need to do that. Moreover, coaching changes can help the M’s become the team that helps free agents unlock hidden potential instead of remaining a team trying to compete against newly-Astrofied competition.
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I’m perhaps reading too much into the public statements, but it’s somewhat interesting to me that the M’s seem to be making Marco Gonzales all but untouchable, even as James Paxton becomes trade bait. A part of that may just be a testament to how much “club control” uh, controls discussions of player value, and it may be that the team doesn’t see their window of contention overlapping with Paxton’s remaining contract. But Gonzales (and Paxton!) are a good reminder of another way the club can start to chip away at the gap in current/projected talent: defense. M’s fans point to Gonzales finishing in the top 20 in Fangraphs’ WAR measure, and it’s true, there he is at #20! A low walk rate, moderate dingers keep his FIP low. But using Fangraphs’ own RA-9 based WAR, he drops to 39th. BBREF’s different version of RA-9 WAR slots him behind Wade LeBlanc, for example. Now, sure, a high BABIP pushed his ERA higher than his FIP, and that’ll regress, right? Well, we’ve been saying that about James Paxton now since this point in 2016, and it simply hasn’t. Paxton’s wOBA-allowed with men on base has remained stubbornly higher than his overall mark, and Gonzales’ is following the same path. Both of them have posted high BABIPs now for multiple years in a row, and it’s possible that neither is all that great at contact management. Again, that could be related to coaching to some extent, but some of it is clearly defense. The M’s have tried to build a great team defense, and it hasn’t quite worked out, just as the A’s own attempts to turn around an awful run-prevention group succeeded beyond anyone’s imagining this year. Other teams can do this. If Marco Gonzales is going to be a centerpiece of the next good M’s team and not just a perfectly cromulent, cheap #3-4 starter, then they need him to give up the runs FIP says he should, not the runs the scoreboard said last year.
Corey Brock’s got an interesting piece at the Athletic today about the M’s High Performance Camp in Peoria today. Instead of working on skills, the camp seems to be about building strength, diet/exercise habits, and about assessing their mental state after a grueling season of bus rides and fast food. There are no baseballs, but lots of wearable tech, cooking lessons and discussions. It’s a great idea, particularly given the brutal nature of the minor league season. But I also don’t think the M’s will get as much of a benefit from it unless the entire team – meaning coaches at every level – are on board. If the M’s want more players to cook and not eat out all the time, then they need a way to make that practical in Clinton, Iowa and Charleston, West Virginia, and Modesto, California. The M’s wanted a change in their primary big league coaches. More important than any one coach below them, though, they need every coach to be speaking the same language. I’m not sure that happened last year, impacting how well players developed and how they transitioned between minor league levels and between the minors and majors. Several of those coaching spots will turn over, as the M’s already know several minor league coaches won’t be back. That’s an opportunity to do things differently, of course, but it’s something they absolutely have to get right if they want to restock the team with prospects due to, say, and Edwin Diaz trade.
The White Sox embarked on a full-on rebuild in late-2016/early-2017 by shipping off Chris Sale, signed to an absurdly cheap extension, and Adam Eaton. Later in 2017, they offloaded another cheap/good starter, Jose Quintana, as well. With an excellent coaching staff led by Don Cooper, the Sox bet on themselves in opting for high-ceiling talent in return for Sale/Eaton/Quintana instead of league-average, high-floor closer-to-guarantees. It was an interesting approach, with super high-risk guys like Michael Kopech, Yoan Moncada, Lucas Giolito, Reynaldo Lopez and more coming to the Sox. If they were able to coach these guys to their potential, they’d pair with Carlos Rodon and high draft picks and build a team that could compete with the Cubs/Red Sox. It’s still early…kind of…but they haven’t gotten all they would’ve liked. Giolito’s been roughly replacement level in 200+ innings, Carson Fulmer’s been worth less than that, and Kopech needed Tommy John not long after debuting this year. Moncada’s improving, but led the league in Ks this year with a SLG% of exactly .400. He’s only 23, things can and will get better, but they gave up several absolute market-defining players and are still in wait and see mode, with two awful seasons in the books and more to come, it looks like. This is a collective failure – albeit one that they still have time to correct. The M’s won’t be trading anyone like Sale (though Diaz may come close), but whoever they get, they absolutely need to have a higher batting average on the players they get than Chicago’s had to date.
The M’s got here because they bet on their ability to develop players at the big league level and lost that bet. They’ve bet on their ability to build around a core of players locked up with long-term contracts, and while they’ve done OK at finding players to slot in around them, the core’s production has dropped alarmingly. They seem to recognize the danger here, and the changes in staffing and development processes are an attempt to address the risk. But this absolutely needs to be straightened out in advance, and thankfully, addressing the gap in player development (or the consistency of message in player development?) can help whatever path forward the M’s choose.