Cactus League Game 4 – Yusei Kikuchi’s Debut
Yusei Kikuchi vs. Alex Wood (Reds), 12:10pm (TV!)
The M’s got everything they could’ve wished for from Justus Sheffield’s debut yesterday, as the lefty brushed aside my concerns about his bat missing ability vs. opposite-handed batters by striking out *4* righties in 2 scoreless innings. Yusei Kikuchi, can you top that?
We get to see the big off-season acquisition against live batters today for the first time, and I’m irrationally excited about it. What will his velo look like (Sheffield sat 92-93, touching 94)? How will he mix his pitches? Does his deceptive delivery hide his breaking pitches?
If that wasn’t enough, former top prospect Kyle Lewis gets the start in RF. After years of injury rehab, Lewis almost feels like a forgotten man, and I’ve worried that he’s lost a step and years of developmental time, but maaaaan would this system look better with a breakout campaign from Lewis.
1: Long, 3B
2: Beckham, SS
3: Encarnacion, DH
4: Narvaez, C
5: Santana, LF
6: Healy, 1B
7: Lewis, RF
8: Thompson-Williams, CF
9: Negron, 2B
SP: KIKUCHI
Shed Long gets the start at 3B, as the M’s assess his flexibility/utility value. Also our first look at Edwin Encarnacion.
The Reds re-made their team this offseason, and I’m kind of interested to see how it goes. Ex-Dodger Alex Wood gets the start today, but they’ll see if they can coax a bounceback year from Sonny Gray, too. Good luck, Cincy, and thanks for Shed Long.
Go M’s.
Cactus League Game 3 – Mariners and Rockies
Wade LeBlanc vs. Jon Gray, 12:10pm (no tv)
The M’s face off with the Rockies, who’ll send Jon Gray to the mound. Wade LeBlanc gets the start, but the story of the day is getting our first look at two of the big prospects acquired in the James Paxton trade. Justus Sheffield figures to follow Wade, and then we should see Erik Swanson.
Sheffield’s opened eyes in camp, but I’m still curious to see if his command’s improving or if he’s able to generate some whiffs with his slider and sinking fastball. That’s not really been a problem in the minors, though even there, his K rate isn’t exceptional in this day and age. The issue is opposite handed batters; Sheffield’s K rate was much lower against righties. The slider is a pitch with large platoon splits, and it’s possible his arm angle exacerbates that. It’s also possible that his change-up comes along and renders concerns about the slider-to-righties thing moot. I’d take that.
1: Dee Gordon, 2B
2: Mitch Haniger, RF
3: Jay Bruce, 1B
4: Kyle Seager, 3B
5: Ryon Healy, DH
6: Ichiro! LF
7: Crawford, SS
8: Fraley, CF
9: Lobaton, C
SP: Wade LeBlanc
Hope to see Crawford make some solid contact, see if Seager’s re-worked physique comes with a re-worked approach at the plate and see what Ryon Healy does today. The downside of course is that this more traditional/”real” line-up means Shed Long, who homered yesterday, is relegated to the bench.
Cactus League Game 2 – First Felix
Felix vs. Bryan Mitchell, 12:10pm
Happy Felix Day.
Today’s game against the Padres offers our first look at the question mark that Felix has become. He is still one of my favorite Mariners ever, and I’m still not happy with how the M’s have managed his past two seasons, but with new coaches and perhaps a new approach, I’m eager to see if there’s still some royalty in Felix’s right arm.
The line-up features new prospects like Shed Long and Dom Thompson-Williams as well as drafted/developed guys like Eric Filia and Braden Bishop.
The Padres starter is ex-Yankee Bryan Mitchell, who put up a remarkably poor season last year, walking more than he K’d in 73 IP. He has mid-90s velo on his four seam, but the movement on it is mushy, without real rise or sink. He’s got a curve and cutter, but struggles to miss many bats.
The velo and 2018 results make me think of Justus Sheffield, and I don’t want to say I’m down on the new M’s starter or that he’s not a good prospect. Just IF Sheffield really struggled, it’d look like Mitchell, only left-handed. The M’s will be working with Justus on his fastball command, but they also have an advantage in that Sheffield’s slider is a better pitch than anything Mitchell throws. Still, it’s a reminder in this day and age that mid-90s velo from a starter isn’t enough on its own to make a great starter, even a 4-5.
With Manny Machado in the fold, I’d be stunned if the Pads stuck w/Mitchell in their rotation, but who knows.
1: Long, 2B
2: Beckham, SS
3: Santana, LF
4: Narvaez, C
5: Thompson-Williams, CF
6: Vogelbach, 1B
7: Negron, 3B
8: Filia, DH
9: Bishop, CF
SP: El Cartelua
The M’s and Being Honest – Cactus League Game 1
The Cactus League “season” will once again attempt to begin shortly with the M’s taking on the A’s. Yesterday’s contest made through 1 1/2 innings before being called off. Unlike in the last few years, though, the M’s are – by their own admission – not really attempting to make the playoffs this year. This is their step-back campaign, and as much as that should take the pressure off of the club, I think we’re beginning an absolutely critical year for the franchise and the game.
Put aside the strategic arguments for the step-back. The fact that Dallas Keuchel and Bryce Harper and any number of really good players remain unsigned as almost-real baseball begins is remarkable. It’s only possible because so few teams are actively trying to get better, or rather, actively trying to use free agency to get better.
Isn’t that good, though? Why not focus on development? After years of lambasting teams for ill-considered free agent splurges (Carlos Lee, where have you gone?), NOW the nerds are mad that teams stopped making them? Well, yes. The lack of a free agent market is just a sign that winning and revenue don’t line up anymore. The league and teams are arguing that payroll doesn’t align with winning percentage, and that’s sort of true. But the bigger problem is on the revenue side: it doesn’t matter what you do, it doesn’t matter who you roll out there, you can still make out like a bandit. We used to worry about inefficient methods of building a winner. Now, more than half the league isn’t terribly interested in trying at all.
This is not to say that the M’s were wrong to move on from their old core. Rather that there’s nothing about Keuchel, to say nothing of Harper, that doesn’t align with their own professed contention window. Does that mean they should go sign them now? I don’t know, but they should give it serious thought.
The M’s have overhauled their player development, and that’s a very welcome sign. But any honest accounting of this would say that they remain a ways behind the likes of Houston and perhaps even Anaheim. No one really knows how quickly this sort of thing can change, and maybe it’s not such a big problem. But one of the things they talked up in the past was the benefit of having a Nelson Cruz around for the youngsters to emulate. Their pitching development needed a ton of work, and hopefully they’re far down that path, but I would imagine Keuchel could help with that effort just by being around. I would love for Keuchel and Felix to talk sinkers for an hour a week, and with the M’s focus on throwing four-seamers up in the zone (as heard on this week’s Hot Stove podcast), guys like Justus Sheffield with some natural sink on their fastball might benefit from picking the brain of a guy like Keuchel. Ah well.
To fire off another cynical note in what’s supposed to be a happy day, I’d just note that in an environment where even FAs in their mid-20s struggled to latch on with a team, the M’s are building around late-bloomers and injury-delayed players. Mitch Haniger will be 32 when he hits free agency, as will Marco Gonzales. If things go right, Justin Dunn and Jake Fraley wouldn’t debut until they were at least 24. The pressure’s now off the team to sign extensions or lock up a chunk of prime-year production for a lot of these guys. Sure, they’ve also got Justus Sheffield (who won’t turn 23 until May) and JP Crawford (24, with over 1 year of service time) as big returns in their off-season deals, but if they play in AAA for a month or so, then the M’s could get an extra year of control.
The M’s faced the A’s today in Peoria that threatened more rain, but turned mostly sunny by the end of the game. The pitchers were very effective, with Mike Leake going 2 IP, Zac Rosscup, Shawn Armstrong, Dan Altavilla, Justin Dunn, Chase Bradford, and Ruben Alaniz keeping the A’s scoreless until the 9th, when the enigmatic Nick Rumbelow gave up a meaningless dinger in the M’s 8-1 win. Mitch Haniger homered, Ichiro singled and knocked in 2, and Kyle Seager went 2-2. Tito Polo made an acrobatic catch in CF, and Tim Lopes doubled off of top prospect Jesus Luzardo, too. If the game’s remembered for anything, though, it may be the debut of the pitch clock, the pace of play innovation that’s rolling out in MLB this year. Fans of the minors have seen them for a few years.
Edgar for Eternity
Edgar Martinez is going to Cooperstown. I’m early with this; I don’t know the final ballot total, and I’m writing this days before the announcement. But the vote trend this year is striking, and there’s essentially no way he can fail to reach 75% of the vote at this point. I’m on record as saying that Edgar would eventually get in, but only because of a veteran’s committee or whatever they replace it with. The early years of Edgar’s candidacy showed a bit of promise, but also just how daunting the task would be: Edgar would need to change the mind of around half of the voters.
Of course, he didn’t have to change their mind – he had to wait for a chunk of the voters to age out and be replaced with a more congenial set, a group who didn’t balk at the prospect of a DH in the hall. Still, there were two major factors that helped Edgar’s vote total rise. The first was that the anti-DH crowd faded when faced with Frank Thomas and the looming candidacy of David Ortiz. The increasing use of advanced stats helped show that Edgar and Thomas’ OBP translated into considerable value, but I think when people had to pick between keeping DHs out and keeping Big Papi/the Big Hurt out, they got over their objections (as they should).
Even more important was the rise of social media in these debates. Many of you may remember the first blog-based candidacy – that of Bert Blyleven, championed by Rich Lederer at the Baseball Analysts, and how Blyleven’s votes grew as people engaged with Lederer’s arguments and counter-arguments. It wasn’t about building a coalition of fans to support the candidate – it was that Lederer’s arguments were being bandied about by the voters themselves. The same thing happened a few years later with Tim Raines, and by that time, Ryan Thibodaux was collecting and publishing the ballots as they were tweeted out by voters. It’s this last advance that let blogs and fans tailor their arguments to on-the-fence voters and use Twitter to win over holdouts. Kate Preusser’s encomiums to Edgar weren’t just great pieces of writing, they were picked up by MLB Network, who’d use them to make a case directly to “no” voters and shame them when they couldn’t stand up to scrutiny.
Watching Edgar in his prime was an absolute joy, and it’s wonderful for M’s fans to celebrate a player like this, one who spent his entire career in an M’s uniform, who never asked to be traded, was never accused of quitting on a season, and who never became, in the minds of crazed fans, the embodiment of greed. He gave back to the team that had kept him in the minors far too long, and whose public persona and record has always been that of a genuinely nice person. This is a bit of unalloyed good news, and if it’s been delayed for too long, at least it arrived. Congratulations, Edgar.
The M’s Approach to Hitting Is Changing
In 2015, the M’s hired Jerry Dipoto and entrusted him with the task of remaking a disappointing team that finished 4th in the AL West. They did so despite hitting a bunch of home runs, posting the 5th-highest ISO in the AL, and the 3rd-highest strikeout rate. They worked around those Ks thanks to hitting the ball hard, but they gave away much of that production in sub-par defense and awful baserunning. This was Dipoto’s first impression of the team he’d be taking over, and it led to an abrupt change in philosophy, one that reached its apotheosis in 2018. The Mariners K rate has declined in every year of Dipoto’s tenure as GM despite an increase in the league-wide K rate, and the Mariners’ ISO has dropped to 11th in 2018, with a raw rate lower than in 2015 despite an increase in league-wide ISO. The M’s worked very hard to zig where the league zagged in the philosophy of hitting.
Jerry Dipoto stated his desire to craft a 1970s-style offense last year, putting far more balls in play than their opponents, and putting pressure on pitchers with lots of runners on base. In many ways, this worked; the M’s put more balls in play thanks to very low K *and* BB rates, and an aforementioned lack of extra-base hitting and HRs. If Mark Trumbo playing RF typified the 2015 M’s, last year’s team featured a line-up with Dee Gordon and Jean Segura hitting 1-2. Segura’s K rate was 4th-lowest of all qualified hitters, while Gordon was 19th-lowest. While the rest of the line-up wasn’t quite so contact-focused, many of the players Dipoto targeted struck out less than league average, including Ryon Healy and Ben Gamel, who played positions where most teams tolerate some swing-and-miss in exchange for power. The team got plenty of base hits out of all those balls in play, but…well, you know. Despite racking up more base knocks than Houston, and just five less than Oakland, they were outscored by 120 runs and 136 runs by their divisional rivals. They had a plan, they executed their plan, and the plan did not work.
So there’s a new plan. Segura’s gone, and in his place are the SS tandem of JP Crawford and Tim Beckham, two guys who’ve struggled at times to make contact, but exhibit some power potential. Ben Gamel’s off to Milwaukee in exchange for power-hitting strikeout-prone Domingo Santana. And then, today, the M’s jumped in to the Yankees/Reds Sonny Gray deal and picked up 2B/Util prospect Shed Long in exchange for 2018-draftee and CF prospect Josh Stowers (they DFA’d recently-acquired Kaleb Cowart to make room for Long). These are not the types of players they’d been targeting in the past, but then, they’ve remade some of their development group as well.
Last year and in previous years, the assumption seemed to be that it was easier to teach the finer points of hitting to players who already knew how to make contact. Think of Dan Vogelbach, a guy who was always described as polished and who put up low K rates in the minors despite lacking the in-game power you might want from a 1B prospect. Or Gamel, whose plate discipline and hit tool might make up for power that struggled to play in an OF corner. Or Guillermo Heredia, or Dee Gordon, etc. That logic seems to have been flipped on its head. I’m not suggesting that they only want players who strike out a ton and hit dingers; if that was the case, then Mike Zunino would still be here. Instead, they seem to want to identify players with power potential who may need a bit of help in unlocking it. If that skillset comes with strikeouts, well that’s no longer as big a red flag as it was a year ago.
We’ve seen the M’s target certain types of player before, and as always, there’s an assumption that their coaching staff can help that certain kind of player. Shed Long broke out in 2017, but fell back quite a bit in 2018. His swing produced fly balls and dingers in high A, but his GB rate soared in AA last season. Tim Beckham seemed to have broken out after a trade to the Orioles in 2017, but he cratered on one of the worst teams in recent memory. JP Crawford, like Vogelbach, posted great K:BB numbers in the minors, but looked overmatched at times in the big leagues, and scuffled a bit in the minors as well. If the M’s are right that their new-look staff can help these players, this off-season will be seen as pivotal in retrospect. But the M’s have to show that they can create a system where their coaches can succeed.
I’m no insider here, so I can’t say how the team and its player development staff communicate. But from the outside, the team seems like they’ve struggled in this area. The biggest example was the Dr. Lorena Martin fiasco, in which they seemingly hired someone to oversee all aspects of training, but then balked when the magnitude of that job description clashed with the day-to-day operations of several teams (how would you run workouts in Little Rock, Arkansas, Clinton, Iowa, etc. from Seattle, and how would you communicate your expectations to training staffs and managers, etc.?). I’m not sure what the right balance is between an overarching philosophy that applies organization-wide and granting autonomy/flexibility/adaptability to local coaches is, but I’d argue the M’s haven’t found it yet. This offseason shows some tantalizing evidence that they’ve seen those failures and are determined to correct them.
It’s not about hiring a bunch of new-school, data-driven coaches. Or at least, that’s only a part of it. The M’s reached out to some non-traditional spots to add to their pitching program last year, hiring Brian De Lunas and getting ex-Driveline trainees Cody Buckel to be a coach and Tyler Matzek to pitch. A year later, other orgs are being hailed as savvy modern orgs for hiring Buckel and picking up Matzek after an eye-opening session for scouts. The M’s were ahead of the curve! It didn’t matter! If things are changing, they’ll have plenty of opportunity to demonstrate it with this new crop of flawed-but-intriguing hitters, and we’ll see it when players change levels. If Long starts at Tacoma, as seems to be the plan, how does he improve there, and then how does he transition to the majors? The success of orgs like Houston, whose affiliates led their league in strikeouts *at every level*, demonstrate that PD can create massive advantages. The M’s, for all I find fault them, are not a stupid org. They’ve simply been behind the Astros and others, and haven’t figured out how to harness their own strengths. They seem to be working on doing that now, and I’m intrigued to see if it works.
Yusei Kikuchi and The M’s Pitching Plan
I’ll be the first to admit I didn’t see the M’s as a major player to land Yusei Kikuchi. Something about the way the Shohei Ohtani saga ended combined with general Mariners-specific pessimism made me think the M’s weren’t serious players, even as rumblings through December made it sound like they were. And here we are: the M’s signed the Japanese lefty to an interesting contract for anywhere between 3/$43 million to 7/$109 million. He’s got an opt-out after three years, but the M’s can void it by essentially signing him to a pre-agreed 4-year extension. As M’s fans, we’re all hoping that’s what the M’s do. If Kikuchi hits his ceiling and stays healthy, it’d be awesome to have him stick around for his early 30s. So, the question is: how can the M’s keep him healthy and effective?
The M’s sat down with Kikuchi’s agent, Scott Boras, and appear to have a plan to limit his innings in his first year in MLB. As Greg Johns article describes, the plan would be to use him as an opener every 5 or so starts, or about once a month. So, he starts like normal for 4 starts, and then on his fifth start, he pitches only the first inning or about 30 pitches. That limits pitches, innings, and keeps him fresh for the difficult transition between Japan’s 6-man rotations/one start per week and the US’s 5-man rotations.
That barrier, the additional high-stress pitches that accumulate over a longer season with more starts, has proven a difficult one to navigate for pitchers from Japan. Shohei Ohtani’s merely the latest pitcher to undergo Tommy John after coming over, joining Yu Darvish, Hisashi Iwakuma, Daisuke Matsuzaka and others. Masahiro Tanaka avoided the knife, but missed time with other arm injuries and seems to have some elbow injuries that simply haven’t necessitated surgery. Iwakuma and Kenta Maeda have had shoulder issues before coming over, and that’s factored into their usage in the US (think of Kuma’s initial usage as a reliever, and Maeda’s role as swingman this year for the Dodgers). Kikuchi’s had shoulder problems in the recent past as well, so thinking about how best to keep him healthy makes sense.
On paper, I’ve got no real complaint about the M’s plan. It’d be interesting to see how it would work, and what pitcher would pick up the innings that Kikuchi cedes as an opener – Johns’ article mentions using a youngster like Justus Sheffield the way the Rays used ex-M’s prospect Ryan Yarbrough as a somewhat gentler introduction to an MLB rotation, but they could also use them as true bullpen days once we figure out who’s actually in the M’s bullpen (Jerry Dipoto is, as always, looking for FA relievers at the moment). That said, I keep thinking that they may have missed an opportunity here.
There’s no real way to say for certain that a 6-man rotation results in higher average velocity for pitchers, but it seems clear that essentially every Japanese pitcher loses velocity when they come to the US. I say it’s impossible to pin it on the additional starts because our pool of pitchers is still too small, and then there’s the difference in the physical ball to contend with PLUS the fact that the ball itself has changed a few times *within each country* over the past 5 or so years. So this is all noisy as hell, but it’s pretty consistent. Kikuchi apparently sat 92, touching 95 in Japan, but I feel pretty comfortable taking the under on that even with the M’s innings-limit plan. Moreover, if Kikuchi loses velocity in 2019 due to the new workload or any other factor, he’ll have plenty of company. Mike Leake is coming off a year where his velocity was over a full MPH lower than the previous season. Marco Gonzales got attention for throwing harder post-TJ rehab in 2017, but those gains didn’t follow him into 2018. Felix Hernandez…you know all about Felix Hernandez’s velocity trends. The entire team has seen their velo drop, and sat comfortably at the bottom in average FB velocity last year.
With that context, if you’re trying to accomodate someone who’s used to 6-man rotations, why not – stay with me here – use a 6-man rotation? The Angels sort of tried with Ohtani, and sure, that didn’t save his elbow, but he sat at 97 MPH with his fastball. Literally every member of the M’s rotation, and every *potential* member of the M’s rotation, could stand an extra day of rest, because they could all use an extra tick on their fastball. The M’s have tried everything with Felix, from belittling him to having him do special off-season workouts to working with a peak performance trainer they hired and then got sued by. Surely, trying an extra day of rest every week is in order?
The opener strategy has the value of getting Kikuchi ready to be a “regular” member of a traditional rotation in his second year, and there’s value in trying to get additional innings out of a good pitcher. But while they don’t have a ton of depth at starter, I think they’re actually better positioned to go with a 6-man rotation than a series of bullpen days. Adding an extra pitcher would enable them to control the innings of every pitcher, which would make breaking in a Sheffield or Erik Swanson easier. Going whole hog enables them to assess the impact it has on their veterans, too. Wade LeBlanc, an ex-teammate of Kikuchi’s in Japan, is obviously familiar with the role, and I think it would help Leake, should Leake somehow make it to March on this roster. Moreover, they’re not really expected to contend in 2019, so I’d think there’d be less pressure to ride your top 2-3 pitchers down the stretch. If this year’s really about development, that make it about development, and not just Kikuchi’s adjustment to MLB.
As a FB/SL pitcher, Kikuchi needs to get every MPH he can get. Hisashi Iwakuma’s brilliant splitter reduced his dependence on velo, and Iwakuma struggled with slider consistency in the US after being known for his slider in Japan. Sliders see more of a drop-off in effectiveness as measured by average wOBA-against at lower velocities than do splitters/change-ups. Sliders lose effectiveness as they get slower, with sliders in the upper 80s having wOBA against in the mid .250s, but .300s in the high-70s. Change-ups are great at high velocities *and* very low velocities, though they’re worse in the middle ground than sliders (data from baseballsavant). Thus, in addition to limiting innings, the M’s need to keep an eye on Kikuchi’s velocity, and limiting his rest – even if they give him a short start each month – seems a less-than-idea way to do that.
This isn’t to suggest that the plan’s a dumb idea. They presumably worked it out with Kikuchi himself, and if he prefers it, well then, so do I. But the M’s need to do something pretty dramatically different to fix the hole left by James Paxton. They’ve got youth, and they’ve got depth, albeit not exactly bankable depth. Trying a 6-man rotation – really, actually committing to it – would be great to see, and it would herald a new approach to development at the big league level. I’d think it’d make them an attractive place to pitch for every subsequent pitcher that gets posted from the NPB as well. In any event, Kikuchi makes the M’s better in 2019 and beyond, and even the limited opener-based strategy will be fun to watch. But when you’re trying to catch up with the Astros/Yankees/Red Sox of the world – even if you don’t need to show it at the big league level in 2019 – you need to be open to radically transforming how you align your team. I’m still stunned that no team has given this a shot.
Mariners, Brewers Swap Extraneous OFs; Brewers a Good Team to Swap Extraneous OFs With
Last year, Domingo Santana was coming off a 3+ win season, punctuated by 30 HRs and a slash line of .278/.371/.505. He’d recently turned 25. Did the Brewers build around this young slugger, limited though he was due to contact and defense issues? Well, no, they went out and got Christian Yelich in trade from Miami, and watched him put together an MVP-winning season. They got Lorenzo Cain in free agency, deciding that they wanted to win right now. And win they did, even if it meant relegating Santana to the bench, the minors, and now, a year later, to a minor trade with a rebuilding club.
Last year, Ben Gamel was coming off a shockingly respectable season highlighted by a slash line of .275/.322/.413. His BABIP-fueled first half didn’t carry over into the second, but he seemed to be showing the line drive, bat-to-ball skills that made him a target of the M’s back in 2016. He was fast…ish, and had solid walk rates plus a lower than average K rate. Sure, the power was low for a corner OF, or really anybody in 2018, but if you squinted, and I get the feeling the M’s FO did this a lot when they watched him, you could sort of see 1990s M’s killer Rusty Greer. Low power, low Ks, but tons of line drives all over the park. The M’s talked up Gamel’s game in the offseason, but when the season started, a comedy of errors kept him out of the line-up. In April, it was Ichiro that took his spot in LF. With Dee Gordon in CF, he was relegated to platooning with Guillermo Heredia, and neither was doing all that well. When the season fell apart, the M’s decided to move on from the guy who epitomized their desire for a “more athletic” OF – a corner guy who didn’t hit like a corner guy, but slapped the ball around and put things in motion.
The Brewers simply don’t have room for Santana. The M’s now have plenty of room for Gamel, but they’ve realized – correctly – that their new, rebuilding club has no real *need* for a player like Gamel. I’ve been the low guy on Gamel for too long, and I will be the first to admit he’s been better than I would’ve ever guessed. But he is, in the absolute best case scenario, a complementary player – a nuisance 7th/8th hitter in a really good line-up. He will get to fill that exact role in platoon situations for a good Milwaukee club next year, and that’s great. The M’s need an underpowered 7th hitting corner OF like they need payroll excuses right now.
So having given up their vaunted athleticism, what have the M’s gotten here? Why pick up a good team’s scraps? Remember the 30 HR season thing? Seriously, it was just a couple of paragraphs up. The M’s get a high-variance hitter in Santana who’s quite capable of being a 4-5 hitter on a bad M’s team, and a guy with serious projection left. Santana is actually younger than Gamel by a few months, and while he’s coming off an abysmal year, he’s put up the better big league season in recent years. Neither of them are ever going to win a gold glove, but it’s worth mentioning that Santana’s clearly a worse defender. He’s also got a lot of swing and miss in his game, and so he represents a big change in philosophy for the M’s; it’s been a while since the M’s have gone out and targeted a hitter who’s going to strike out in 30% of his PAs. But after years of getting low-ish K guys and hoping to teach them power, it’s probably worth getting some guys with power and trying to teach them to make incremental improvements in pitch recognition.
The M’s also sent P Noah Zavolas, their 18th round pick out of Harvard last year, to Milwaukee to complete the deal. Zavolas is cool and all, but this deal doesn’t hinge on him. He wasn’t a top prospect in the M’s org, and won’t be one in Milwaukee. The odds are stacked against him becoming more than an org arm, but hey, he was decent in the NWL after pitching well in the Ivy League. How many of us can say that?
Ultimately, this is a very sound move for Seattle. They increase their volatility, getting a decent shot at a middle of the order hitter, and all it cost them was an enigmatic corner OF who’s been a platoon guy on decent M’s clubs. Could Gamel add some pop and make the M’s regret this? It’s possible, sure. If that’s ever going to happen, Milwaukee may be the place to do it; Yelich was a young corner OF who hit too many grounders to have corner OF power, and whose 2013-2015 look mighty Gamelish. He’d improved by the time of the trade, but clearly, Milwaukee tapped into power no one knew he had, and suddely Yelich was a complete player. Let’s be clear: Yelich already showed more power than Gamel can ever produce, but the Brewers have been excellent in developing hitters – so much so that their surplus of them made this deal possible. I’d love to think that the M’s are a great org for a player like Santana, but I don’t, at least, not yet. This is a great project for the new M’s hitting coaches, and a great way for them to show how their new approaches/pedagogy can work with a developing young team.
It Is Done
The Cano deal was finalized, and in the end the M’s “only” sent $20 million to New York in addition to taking on the contracts of Jay Bruce and Anthony Swarzak. To wrap a bow on this increasingly desperate tear-down (it’s not a rebuild quite yet), the M’s have finalized a trade to send Jean Segura to Philadelphia in exchange for 1B Carlos Santana and SS JP Crawford. Jean Segura and Robinson Cano made up a great middle of the infield, and for a brief moment, the M’s had one of the best keystone combinations in the game. That’s completely done now, and at the moment, the M’s can look forward to Dee Gordon resuming the 2B position and hoping Crawford can hit the way he was supposed to instead of the way he has in Philadelphia.
With the Cano/Diaz deal, you could argue that by getting Kelenic and Dunn, the M’s didn’t hurt their return for Diaz by including Cano. That’s debatable, of course. I think there was no way the M’s were getting, say, 1B Peter Alonso in any deal, but the point is the M’s got a couple of solid prospects even with all of the financial gyrations involving Cano/Bruce. With this second blockbuster, though, all doubt is removed: the M’s clearly – CLEARLY – hurt their own return by adding Juan Nicasio to the deal, making it harder for the Phillies to add in another young player. The M’s apparently asked them to, the Phillies refused, so the M’s sent them James Pazos as well (?). I…I don’t know either, folks.
Patrick Dubuque’s article on the trade at BP talked about the novelty for M’s fans of watching a true salary dump player like Bruce. As it turns out, Bruce wasn’t the only such player the M’s would acquire this week – now they’ve got Carlos Santana, who was an attractive free agent only a year ago, but now a player the Phils were desperate to move on from. I don’t think there’s anything really wrong with either player, and you can make the case that Santana in particular is due for a bounce back. But if the point of this frenzy of activity is to bring in and identify the next successful M’s core, then all of this is counterproductive. In a desire to shed themselves of completely fair contracts (Segura’s was more than fair, and even Cano’s wasn’t any kind of albatross, as he’s still a very productive player), the M’s have taken on the salaries of OTHER, less productive players, and forgone the opportunity to add a prospect lottery ticket or two. The M’s aren’t saving much in the next couple of years, and they hurt their odds to be competitive in the years beyond that. I don’t get it.
Apparently, the M’s clubhouse’s decline rankled the M’s front office, and they’ve prioritized remaking the culture and chipping away at the 2019-20 budgets more than bringing in new talent. I’m not sure there’s any other way to spin this. Even if you buy the premise that the M’s couldn’t win without a massive change in that culture, that seems like a slap in the face to the coaching staff, who are theoretically tasked with building/shaping a culture, and not-at-all-theoretically need to share the blame if 2018 was more toxic than we’d heard.
JP Crawford was a first-rounder in 2013, and was a potential target for the M’s. He’s a great defender, and had very good bat-to-ball skills, but his power was, shall we say, developing. In the minors, he showed a keen batting eye and limited Ks; pair that with his defense at SS, and he became a top-20 prospect in the game. He began 2017 in a huge slump, but turned it around enough to make his MLB debut. The Phils essentially gave him the starting job this past year, but he again kicked off the year by falling apart at the plate. He went on the DL, came back, and then broke his hand, so he doesn’t have much of a big league track record.
The one thing that jumps off his stats page is that his K rate has skyrocketed in his limited MLB duty. He can still take a walk, and he still plays SS, but the whole bat-to-ball thing…it hasn’t translated. M’s fans know a bit about this phenomenon from watching the travails of Dan Vogelbach, who maintains solid K rates and hits for average in the minors, then comes north and strikes out a ton. Crawford’s just 23 and is still a premium talent, but for a big-league-ready youngster, there’s more risk here than you’d like. He’s more than capable of making adjustments, and it sounds like part of the problem with the Phillies was that people were constantly tweaking his swing. The M’s could get a very Segura-like player, or Segura-plus-OBP if everything breaks right, but given everything that’s happened over the past 72 hours, they NEED everything to break right. There’s no plan B here; the M’s don’t really have any SS prospects above the Dominican League.
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.