Cactus League Game 7: White Sox at Mariners
Marco Gonzales vs. Dylan Cease, 6:40pm
Night baseball for the first time in quite a while. Should be a fun match-up of the command/weak contact style of Marco Gonzales against Dylan Cease’s stuff-over-everything, sitting-97, strikeouts, walks, and hard-hit contact approach. You really couldn’t pick two more dissimilar approaches, and it’s funny how both land near the same place in terms of overall results, at least by ERA. Gonzales got there by stranding runners, pitching to (weak) contact and pitching around long-balls that he’d give up when he’d challenge hitters, especially with no one on. Cease has had awful HR problems in the past, but posted a 3.91 ERA thanks to a gaudy K rate approaching 32%, an improved though still-not-good walk rate, and fewer HRs than you’d expect given the amount of hard hit and elevated contact he gave up. Add it all up, and FIP (and PECOTA) thought Gonzales was extremely lucky, giving him a closing-in-on-replacement level grade, whereas it thought Cease was essentially Robbie Ray, and that his solid ERA *undersold* his performance. Still, Gonzales has been doing this now for years. FIP is probably never going to buy it, and I still think he must’ve done something mean to PECOTA years ago, and it’s keeping a grudge. I’m not too worried about it, though.
It’s been about a week, so I’m trying not to read too much into things, but I’m bound by the code of preseason blogging to note that the M’s are hitting .194/.288/.316 thus far. The starters haven’t logged as many innings, though more so than they would have in a normal year. Peoria’s a lot more of a neutral park than many others in the Cactus League, but then, the M’s pitching numbers are similarly poor. I wouldn’t think much of it if it weren’t for the M’s struggling precisely in hitting for average in recent years. No, Jesse Winker isn’t going to keep hitting the way he is, but I’d love to see some signs that guys whose hit-for-contact/average numbers have tailed off – especially Mitch Haniger – will bounce back. We can all laugh about this after the M’s have an Arizona special game with like a 19-7 scoreline (Texas already won a 25-12 game this spring).
I still assume that the White Sox are just a better overall team than the Mariners, not that it’s especially meaningful. I think most people assume the White Sox win the AL Central, and thus aren’t really competition for one of the wild card spots. That said, it’s interesting to go through some of the projections: these teams are closer than I would’ve thought. The Sox have the edge at C, SS, 3B, CF, while the M’s are slated to be better at 1B, 2B, LF, RF. I’d note that the Sox have the best rated position player, in Luis Robert, but the projections for Julio Rodriguez are so incredible, that it’s kind of close; you could really close the gap just by starting Julio on day 1 and increasing his MLB PA totals.
To be fair, the White Sox advantage is really on the pitching side, with sizable advantages in the rotation AND the bullpen. As I looked at the other day, though, the M’s pitching staff could shave 40-50 runs off of their projected totals by not wasting innings on replacement level players and with modest growth from the likes of Logan Gilbert, who looked brilliant yesterday, and the debut of Matt Brash/George Kirby. That said, given the Sox lead in true talent, you could see them blowing their own projections out of the water. It was kind of a throwaway line, but Dylan Cease really could put it all together the way Carlos Rodon did last year. Still, the guy I’m most interested in is Robert. The tools are off-the-charts, but we just haven’t seen that much of him in the majors, and what we’ve seen is somewhat contradictory. It’s kind of like Kyle Lewis, really, only with the injury concerns a bit more towards “it’s an issue” versus “verging on apocalyptic.”
1: Frazier, 2B
2: France, 1B
3: Haniger, RF
4: Winker, DH
5: Suarez, 3B
6: Rodriguez, CF
7: Crawford, SS
8: Kelenic, LF
9: Raleigh, C
SP: Gonzales
Cactus League Game 6, Mariners at Guardians
Logan Gilbert vs. Cal Quantrill, 1:05pm on MLB.TV’s Cleveland feed, and available on 710am in Seattle
The M’s have, quite rightly, been pilloried by a segment of the fanbase for choosing not to spend in free agency this offseason. Their payroll may be a touch higher than last year, but not by much. They remain miles away from the competitive balance tax, which is how they’ve operated since the CBT became a thing. It’s frustrating, but the addition of Jesse Winker softens that a bit. This is a chance for the M’s to compete, and while the year isn’t over, and Jerry Dipoto’s pointed to mid-year acquisitions as something they’ll try and swing, it can sting to see a team that’s nominally desperate to compete sit on their hands and put out a good but inexpensive team, particularly after a few years of budget savings during their step-back (complicated a bit by the pandemic, I know). But what do we make of the Cleveland Guardians, set to run out a payroll of about $35 million despite remaining on the fringes of playoff participation?
It’s easy to say it’s whataboutism or that Cleveland being stingy and dumb doesn’t make it okay for the M’s to be scared out of the free agency arena. But more than that, I think *this* level of refusing to try completely obliterates MLB owners’ arguments that the CBT does what it’s supposed to. That’s a huge reason we just had a 99-day lockout, after all. The CBT probably *has* reduced spending at the top. We continuously see teams within a hair’s breadth of the CBT. This restraint on a team going hog wild on spending was supposed to make spending more even amongst teams. Instead, tanking or whatever you call what Cleveland is doing (“relying 100% on in-org pitching development?” “Competing with both hands and one leg tied behind their back?”) has resulted in stagnation or even declines at the *bottom* of the expenditure scale while the CBT ticks slowly upwards. In other words, the gap between the highest and lowest payroll has *grown* during the CBT era. It simply isn’t doing what it was designed to do, and it’s time to at least acknowledge that fact.
The Guardians slashed payroll from 2019-2020 and haven’t brought it back up. They did this despite winning a pennant a few years before, and maintaining a team poised to compete in a comparatively weak AL Central. Thanks to the development group that turned guys like Shane Bieber, Justin Clevinger, and Corey Kluber into stars, they just decided to trade off their offensive pieces and even much of their pitching depth, betting on another great draw from their prospect pool. This strategy has gone pretty much how you’d think, with the team struggling on offense (many of their top younger bats might debuted last year, or will this year) and being mostly solid in run prevention. They weren’t able to turn a new crop into Cy Young winners like Bieber/Kluber, and Clevinger now pitches for San Diego, but Cal Quantrill was one of their successes last year (and the primary return for Clevinger).
Quantrill is more of a pitch-to-contact, weak-contact kind of a guy, though it’s worth remembering that so many of the Guardians’ best pitchers came up that way originally. He throws a sinker at 94, a cutter in the high-80s, a change, and two breaking balls. He’s also got a four-seamer, giving him 6 pitches he threw at least 100 times in half a year last year. He’s not overpowering, nothing in his movement profile differs from league average, and his control – while good – isn’t anything remarkable. What’s going on? To this point, Quantrill has yielded a lot of weak contact, and perhaps gotten a bit lucky with the harder contact he’s yielded (to his credit, he hasn’t given up a lot of very hard hit balls, though again, his results aren’t too far off league averages).
1: Frazier, 2B
2: France, 1B
3: Winker, LF
4: Haniger, RF
5: Suarez, 3B
6: Crawford, SS
7: Toro, DH
8: Kelenic, CF
9: Murphy, C
SP: Logan Gilbert
The M’s added to their bullpen depth today by signing veteran righty and noted slider maven Sergio Romo to a big league deal (1yr, $2M). Don’t think that changes the projections too much, but depth is depth, and his leadership and experience could help out. The ‘pen was surprisingly experienced for a group of waiver-wire pick-ups last year, but this year’s group has even more experience.
It’s been cool to see Mike Ford in camp, and not just because, sadly, the team probably needs more 1B depth than Evan White can realistically provide. Ford was a Yankee farmhand that the M’s got in the Rule 5 draft back in December of 2017. He played the spring of 2018 with the M’s, but they ultimately passed on him, and he went back to the Yankees, whom he’d left due to their annual 40-man roster crunch. He’d gotten on the M’s radar due to absurdly good OBPs, but was available due to below 1B-standard power. A huge year in AAA in 2019 and injuries in the Bronx got him an extended trial for the Yankees, and he absolutely mashed, putting up a 134 wRC+ in 50 games. 2020 was something of a disaster for him (and so many of the rest of us), and he spent last year playing in the minors for three different orgs.
I bring him up because he’s likely to be a good player in Tacoma, but also to talk about what player development is *for*. The Yankees are probably the best example of a team that treats the Competitive Balance Tax as a salary cap, and Brian Cashman’s job for the past CBA has been to spend enough to create a year-in, year-out winner *without* exceeding it. He’s done so by building an enviable player development group, one that’s done wonders in pitching especially, turning international free agents and unheralded draft picks into hard-throwing prospects. Because they’re the Yankees, they know for a fact that not all of these prospects can be counted on to contribute to the big league club. There’s value in player development even if it doesn’t translate into wins (and *cheap* wins) for the major league team: the Yankees have been able to work the trade market so well (just last year they picked up Anthony Rizzo and Joey Gallo) because other orgs want Yankee pitchers. Mike Ford was an afterthought – an undrafted player out of noted baseball powerhouse Princeton – but he developed into someone with at least fringe MLB skills who made his minor league clubs better.
I’m not one to advocate for just trading away prospects. I believe there actually IS such a thing as a pitching prospect, and that the M’s have some. But I think in thinking about the 2022 M’s in particular, there’s been kind of an either/or thinking about player development and prospects. Because the M’s have such a good farm system, and because their pitching depth is so clustered right around the big league level, there’s a sense that utilizing free agency can be wasted – you bring in a good pitcher, but you simultaneously block a good pitcher. On the other hand, the M’s have been burned so many times, many fans want the team to cash in their highly-esteemed prospects for something a bit more of a certainty. There’s room for everything. The M’s likely *need* some of everything. Developing a Brandon Williamson has *alread* been a huge success for the M’s, just as the Yankees development of, let’s say, Glen Otto was a success. I’d love to see the M’s become *in this respect* the Yankees of the west. Build a lasting PD juggernaut and you simultaneously fix your big league depth, you get more value out of every trade you make, and of course you might develop the next big superstar. After Julio Rodriguez, who legitimately IS the next big superstar.
Cactus League Game 5, Cubs at Mariners
Robbie Ray vs. Kyle Hendricks, 1:10pm
Our first look at Robbie Ray in an M’s uniform in a sort-of-real baseball game. This should be fun. Yesterday’s game took place in Talking Stick, which is one of the parks with statcast data, allowing us to learn a bit more about the M’s two young phenoms, George Kirby and Matt Brash.
Kirby gave up some runs, but generally looked solid, with a high-90s fastball and a surprisingly good change-up. That made up for a curve that didn’t quite look ready and a slider that he had trouble commanding. It wasn’t a perfect start, but no one’s expecting that in his first outing of the spring. Ever since news of his velo spike broke in 2020, I’d been hoping it was real and not a hype-job based off of a nice workout or a one-inning relief appearance in a sim game. Well, it looks real. The super-elite command and control may have been a bit oversold, but the stuff is a heck of a lot better than it was described on his draft day.
Brash was even better, throwing a sinker with devilish movement and his slider (which MLB calls a knuckle curve, ala Lance McCullers Jr., I guess) was pretty much as-advertised. The spin on his slider was extremely high, powering its late break. I mentioned on twitter that the two pitches move like those of Reds reliever Tejay Antone. And that’s really why he’s special: he can be a part of a big league bullpen right now, but the promise of set-up man stuff from a starting pitcher? That’s good. Of course, like a lot of set-up men, he may struggle against lefties. Righties are in deep, deep trouble, but lefties held their own against Brash in AA.
All of this helps fuel the optimism about the M’s potential run prevention that I outlined in yesterday’s post. We didn’t even really talk about the bullpen, where the M’s just need to regress less severely than the projections to boast a very solid group. They also have the benefit of knowing more about who’s likely to be good rather than needing to throw things at the wall like they did last year. It took a while for them to turn to Paul Sewald, and away from Rafael Montero and Will Vest. Giving more innings to Brash can only help this club, and he might become a test of the FO. I’m sure they’d love to keep him down 19 days and bag another year of club control, but can you do that in a year you 1) want to compete and 2) are going to need every run/run saved to get a playoff spot?
As feasible as it might be for the M’s to save an additional 50 runs if things go right, I’d sort of missed just how much the offense is projected to improve. Fangraphs’ projection has the line-up down for 25 WAR. Last year, they put up just 11.5. They’re projected to more than double, and while you could argue that not one projection looks overly rosy, it’s stunning how much might need to go right for the club to contend. Pickups like Winker and Frazier have filled some line-up black holes, but it’s also harder to see where another 50 runs might be hiding in the projections. As always, the M’s best chance is that their prospects go nuts, but even there: every projection system already loves Julio Rodriguez, and he’s already projected to be a major contributor in 2022. The best chance of course is a big year from Jarred Kelenic, or out-of-nowhere contributions from the two guys 2021 destroyed: Evan White and Taylor Trammell, both of whom will need to break back into the line-up after starting in the minors.
1: Toro, 2B
2: Juliooooooo, CF
3: Suarez, 3B
4: Raleigh, C
5: Murphy, DH
6: Trammell, LF
7: White, 1B
8: Souza, RF
9: Moore, SS
SP: Ray, woooooo!
What Has to Happen? (Also, Cactus League Game 4: Mariners at Diamondbacks)
George Kirby vs. Humberto Castellanos, 1:10pm
Right now, the M’s are projected for 76 wins by Clay Davenport, 80 by Fangraphs, and 83 by Baseball Prospectus. Somewhere in that range that’s on the edge of the playoff hunt, now that each league gets six spots, but probably outside of it. There are too many teams that look a bit better, and of course the projections are looking at the M’s 2021 run differential a lot more than their 2021 record. The M’s seem done with major acquisitions, too. Sure, they’ve brought in an entire minor league team’s worth of depth pieces on minor league contracts – and just today, they added Billy Hamilton and Andrew Albers – but not much is going to change the math as far as the projections go. But the M’s, and probably many of you, can and probably should disagree with the assessment that’s shared by most of the projections, too. The projections last year never envisaged 90 wins, so it’s a fair point. What I’d like to do here is to try to sketch out what a team with wild card aspirations would look like given the M’s roster: where, specifically, would the improvements come from?
To me, a realistic goal to contend would target 86-87 wins or so. To have a good shot at *that* without relying too much on fun differential, I think the M’s would need to average about 0.3 runs scored per game than they give up. That would give them a run differential at the end of the year a bit below 50. Nothing crazy; we’re not trying to make them Blue Jays-West, or Dodgers-North. By their (in)actions, they’re pretty clearly not trying to be. If you want to think about a real-world example of a team that averages 0.3-ish more runs scored than runs allowed, look at last year’s Oakland A’s. They had a slightly better differential at 0.35, giving them a positive run differential over 50, but they’re right in the ballpark. They won 86 games last year; not good enough for the playoffs, but it might be if they could repeat that performance (note: they have no intention of even trying to do so). Given their ballpark and division, they got there by allowing only 687 runs on the year while scoring 743. (This is almost a perfect inverse of the 2021 Mariners, who scored 697 and gave up 748.) Right now, the M’s are projected to score 734-704 runs, with BP’s tally of 719 a pretty good midpoint.
Given everything that’s happened in baseball the past several years – with multiple balls used last year, a super-charged turbo ball in 2019, and a more demure 2018 version – I’m not even going to speculate on the run environment we’ll see in 2022. These run totals could be laughably high or low, which is why I’m trying to focus more on the per-game difference, rather than the seasonal total. But it can be helpful to convert them into seasonal totals, as that’s often what we think about when we think about a team’s strengths/weaknesses. So – BP’s total runs works out to 4.43 runs per game. They could add 10 runs by rounding that up to 4.5 runs/game. Where would the runs-allowed average need to go? If scoring’s at 4.5, it would need to be around 4.2, which works out to a stingy 680 runs on the year.*
You could get there another way, of course. Leave the runs-allowed in the 740s (as Fangraphs and Clay Davenport have them) and try to create a murderer’s row of an offense, but to me, that’s a harder sell. It’s hard because the M’s ballpark remains weird, and oddly hard to get hits in, and scoring runs without hits remains challenging. That same factor makes pitching improvements – or runs-allowed improvements – easier. Thus, I think much of the focus has to be on the pitching-and-defense side of the ledger. Thanks to the acquisition of Robbie Ray, the M’s starting pitching – a clear weakness last year – looks a lot better. Starting pitchers figure to get about 900 innings out of 1,400-1,450 total innings on the year, and FG seems them yielding 440 runs or so. Getting that down by 50 would require taking the total SP from 4.21 to 3.90. It’s doable, if a bit ambitious. But you don’t need to save that much, because…they have a bullpen, too. FG expects the M’s to allow about 244 runs in relief. So, let’s save 20 from the ‘pen and 30 from the rotation. That would look like a rotation with an ERA of 4.09 in about 900 IP, and a bullpen with an ERA of 3.63 in 555 IP.
This is considerable, but it’s also not unthinkable. One of the things that all of the projection systems ding the M’s for is Marco Gonzales’ FIP/DRA, etc. which has consistently been worse than his actual runs allowed (and especially his ERA). Just assuming Marco pitches to his actual-runs-allowed career average gets you a chunk of runs-saved. Robbie Ray’s career averages are higher than his projections, but it’s worth noting that no one forsees him repeating his 2021 success. There’s margin for error there, but obviously a re-run of his Cy Young campaign would come in handy. I’m not comfortable just assuming that, but it would do wonders for the team’s RA. The M’s could save more runs by simply not running out replacement-level starters, one of those things that *sounds* easy enough, but then James Paxton gets hurt in his season debut, and Nick Margevicius and Ljay Newsome are hurt and you still need someone to throw baseballs. But right now, Justus Sheffield is projected to be too close to that replacement-level line to really help. Thus, you can either assume a bounce-back year from him in a swing-man, 7th-starter kind of role, or you can assume that the M’s vaunted pitching depth is ready and able to give you more than the vets like Asher Wojciechowski and Andrew Albers can. Some of the projection systems *love* Matt Brash and George Kirby, so one way to get pretty far towards our goal here is to simply give the innings currently slated for Sheffield, Wojciechowski, Margevicius and company (that’s 117, by Fangraphs, or 102 by BP, just for a sense of scale) to Kirby/Brash, or perhaps to Kirby/Brash and Logan Gilbert.
This is, on the whole, optimistic, but it’s also not outlandish. It requires a ton of things to happen that did not happen last year, not least of which is the M’s staying healthy. Another would be improved OF defense. But all in all, it’s a bit easier to see a path towards contention than it was before I started this. Small improvements spread over 1,400 innings can really add up. But they can’t simply assume them, they actually have to make the improvements.
That’s why today’s game will be fun. George Kirby is starting this game, and could – COULD – have a path to an opening day job. I still think Brash has the edge just because of his 40-man spot, but Kirby probably needs to pitch in Seattle at some point if the M’s are going to keep their runs-allowed below 700. Is he ready? How many innings is a realistic goal for someone with a grand total of 90 2/3 IP in his pro career?
1: Crawford, SS
2: France, 1B
3: Winker, LF
4: Haniger, RF
5: Frazier, 2B
6: Toro, 3B
7: Kelenic, DH
8: Rodriguez, CF
9: Torrens, C
SP: Kirby
I’ve been enjoying the shortened spring training because teams know they have to get their starters work; we haven’t seen any true “Cactus League Special” line-ups with only 2-3 guys who’ll be on the MLB team thus far. I’m somewhat shocked they’ve given Luis Torrens his catcher’s glove back. They didn’t let him catch an inning down the stretch last season, and even worked him out at 1B instead of C. I’d assumed his catching career might be done, but given his batting projections, it’s probably good to keep him behind the dish for as long as they can. Julio in CF, as the M’s said they’d do…I really hope this works out, and I’ll get over it, but maaaaaan, Seiya Suzuki would’ve looked really good on this roster.
* This will never not shock me, but the 2014 M’s allowed a total of *554* runs in 2014. It wasn’t ancient history; this wasn’t the dead ball era. But the batting ice age of 2010-2014 was a massive change to the game, and the rebounding of scoring has been so dramatic. It all happened so fast that I think it’s hard to really see and think about. 554 runs! In a full season! By the Mariners! The 2021 LA Dodgers had one of the best pitching staff’s of my life, and put up a Pythagorean wins of 109. They gave up 561.
Cactus League Game 3: Angels at Mariners
Chris Flexen vs. Reid Detmers, 1:10pm
With Kris Bryant off the board, many M’s fans waited on news of Trevor Story, one of the last big free agents available, and someone who’d been linked with the M’s off and on since the pre-lockout days of the offseason. While earlier he’d insisted on playing SS, that stance had weakened, and he signaled he’d be willing to move off of SS if the right situation opened up. Last night, it did, and Story signed a contract to play 2B for Boston, giving the Red Sox one of the best infields in baseball, with the possible exception of division-mates, Toronto. The same day, Minnesota came from nowhere to sign Carlos Correa to a three-year deal with opt-outs, hoping he can stay healthy and test the market again before he’s 30.
To some in the fanbase, and presumably in the front office, these two moves brought a measure of relief: Correa seemed destined for a reunion with Houston, and getting him out of the AL West seems nice. The same could be said of Story, who would fit perfectly on an Angels team attempting to compete with David Fletcher as the starting SS. But the reality of the new 12-team playoffs is that divisions matter less and less (a point not lost on traditionalists and those who want the regular season to have more, not less, meaning) and you’re competing across the league with teams in every division. Nowhere is this more true than Seattle, who still has to contend with an Astros club who’s more talented at most position. That doesn’t mean they’re a longshot for the playoffs, but it means that they have to keep an eye on teams near them from a talent or projection point of view. And thus, while Story/Correa avoided the AL West, they landed right on teams who seem to be competing with the M’s for the final playoff spots: Boston and Minnesota.
Right now, there is a core group of teams that are pretty clearly a step ahead of Seattle in true talent: Toronto, Chicago, Houston, and New York. I think you could potentially put the Rays in that group as well, but their brutal divisional schedule may make it harder for them to repeat the success they’ve had in recent years. Below them is a large group of .500-to-a-bit-better clubs, from Boston, to Minnesota, LA, and Seattle. If things break right, the Tigers could join them, but they seem more like a year or two away. All of these teams have strengths and weaknesses, and these four are realistically competing for the final two wildcard spots. Minnesota, coming off a disappointing year, has been among the league’s most active clubs in trade and now in free agency. Boston held back for most of the offseason, but struck for a huge free agency coup in acquiring Story. The Angels have been quieter, but in getting Noah Syndergaard and Michael Lorenzen to help their rotation, they could be significantly better than last year. And of course, the Angels already made their big FA push last year when they picked up Anthony Rendon, who missed most of 2021 through injury. I’m not saying Seattle’s been asleep at the switch; the trade for Jesse Winker is huge, and it gives them some room for error on offense – something they haven’t had in years.*
Grant Brondson had a good twitter string this morning summing up Jerry Dipoto’s use of free agency (or lack thereof). Outside of a series of bargain-hunting relief moves, and two lower-risk pick-ups from Asia in Yusei Kikuchi and Chris Flexen, it’s not a path that’s interested the M’s. There is clearly higher risk when outlays crest $100 million, but even this is overstated. We were told that Robbie Cano’s contract made him unmoveable, or tied the M’s hands, only to see clearly that he wasn’t, and didn’t. Free agency *can* reduce flexibility, but it’s worth asking what that flexibility is *for.* Is it, you know, better to cycle through a series of in-house and waiver-wire options at a position rather than to commit to someone with established value? Did those “low-risk” reliever deals actually improve much? It’s one thing to consider risk and reward in a vacuum. It’s one thing to rely on your own projections from your vaunted prospect core. But what the past 24 hours tell us is you can’t simply ignore it. Other teams will make other calculations on risk/reward, and at the end of the day, *they will have better teams than you.* You can chuckle to yourself that it could all go wrong, or that they may not like the back end of these 5-6 year deals, but on the other hand, you’re at or past your self-identified contention window, and now your pitchers have to face a Sox line-up that goes Bogaerts/Story/Devers/Martinez or a Twins line-up that starts Buxton/Polanco/Urshela/Correa.
I’d hoped the M’s could land Seiya Suzuki to bolster their OF, but I suppose it’s sort of nice he landed in the NL with the Cubs. But it’s meant that the M’s went 0-for-free agency, and they’ll run with the guys they’ve got. Promises to add more in-season are fine, but can’t help if the other teams run away and hide. The expanded playoffs mean it’ll be harder for the M’s to be well and truly out of things, but I can see Dipoto arguing in July that mortgaging the future for a big add at the deadline would be irresponsible. That’ll be fun. So what you see is, for now, what you get with this club. By the projections, one of the M’s best hitters is Julio Rodriguez, and he’s looked the part thus far. One easy way to improve the M’s team projection (which could use some improving) is to give Julio more playing time. Let’s show baseball that service time manipulation is sooo early 21st century.
Today, the M’s face the Angels and lefty Reid Detmers, an absolutely critical part of the Angels playoff chances. The club hasn’t exactly struggled to develop pitchers as much as it’s struggled to *keep* them developed. They’ve seen a string of prospects and youngsters flash a half-season or more of solid performance only to collapse. They need solid starters behind Ohtani, and while Syndergaard is absurdly talented, he’s been off the field far too long to really count on. Detmers tore through the minors last year, but had a rude introduction to MLB, giving up both too many walks and HRs. He relies on a low-mid-90s fastball that he keeps at the top of the zone, and then his bread-and-butter whiff pitch, a hard slider at 85. He mixes in a slow curve and change-up, too. Pitching up helped improve the whiff rate on his fastball, but it made him an extreme fly-ball pitcher, and that’s just tough to do in today’s game. Still, this is a guy who rocketed through the minors in a half-year after being drafted in 2020. There’s talent here to be a good #3, but he’s got a ways to go to find that level.
1: Crawford, SS
2: Winker, LF
3: France, 1B
4: Haniger, RF
5: Frazier, 2B
6: Suarez, 3B
7: Kelenic, CF
8: Murphy, C
9: Raleigh, DH
SP: Flexen.
* By this I mean that Eugenio Suarez could bounce back and grab the starting 3B job and be a major contributor even if he never recaptures his peak form, OR he could continue his slide, either contributing the odd dinger with a low OBP (which, remember, was pretty much what Kyle Seager’s final year looked like) and open the door for Abraham Toro. Trading salary help for Winker works just fine even if Suarez is bad, but Suarez is not at all guaranteed to be bad.
Cactus League Game 1 (!)
Gonzales vs. Gore, 1:10pm – no ROOT telecast, but the Padres feed is free on MLB.tv
This bizarre, shortened pre-season is throwing me. The Mariners – the actual Mariners – play their first game of the Cactus League today against complex-mates, San Diego. It’s great to have baseball back, and it’s great to start the year off with a new-look line-up and a low-key fascinating pitching match-up.
The offseason has felt extremely short and never-ending, depending on the day. It’s probably more accurate to describe it as two brief, frenetic bursts of activity separated by 99 interminable days of the lockout. The M’s got their new #1 starter in the first of those bursts, and remade their line-up in the second. The A’s didn’t do much in the first, and thus gave themselves only about a week to tear their (good) club down, trading off Matt Champman, Matt Olson, Chris Bassitt and others and loading up on prospects. The Astros have been quiet, but may re-sign Carlos Correa, who’d looked certain to leave before the lockout. It’s a very different division, and a subtly re-made M’s club, but the M’s didn’t completely re-invent themselves.
Projections like ZiPS, Steamer, and PECOTA all see the M’s as a middle-of-the-pack team, a few games above or below .500 depending on which you look at. The pitching looks better than last year, and the lineup is similarly improved – but it all grades out as a team that looks set to give up about as many runs as it scores. The wonder of last year’s club was that it could win 90 games despite hitting .223/.303/.385. Their home park had a role in this display of abject ineffectiveness, but it also had to do with several prospects face-planting together. The arrival of Jesse Winker and Eugenio Suarez reduces the risk of that reoccurring and gives some of the same prospects who failed last year more protection. The M’s no longer need everything to go right with their young players, but it’s still true that if they’re going to blow their forecasts out of the water, they’ll need big seasons from the likes of Jarred Kelenic and, eventually, Julio Rodriguez.
Julio’s one of their best hitters by the projections, and may be an early test of the new CBA’s slight reductions in the incentives teams have to mess with service time. He’ll have to play his way on, but then, that’s exactly what Taylor Trammell did last year, and Rodriguez is a much, much better prospect. We’ll also have to see how the club deals with its many high-minors starting pitching prospects. By not targeting arms after acquiring Robbie Ray, the M’s made it clear that they want their starting pitching depth to come from the farm system. That may make sense, but it may be difficult to manage workloads if that’s the plan, just because the pandemic and minor injuries last year meant none of them pitched even 100 IP, and certainly didn’t come close to that in 2020. Still, the talent level in-house is quite high, and it’s been about a decade since the M’s had this much pitching talent in the high minors.
Today, Marco Gonzales takes the hill against enigmatic lefty MacKenzie Gore. Gore entered 2021 as perhaps the best SP prospect in the game. I got to see him in Cheney for his first start, and while he didn’t give up a lot of runs, he looked off; his control and command weren’t there, he had runners on the bases constantly, and he gave up tons of hard contact. After further struggles in the batter-friendly AAA-West (now back to its old name, the Pacific Coast League), he ended up spending a few months in instructs to get right mechanically and try to re-start a development path that had stalled out. I hope he’s back to the form he showed flashes of in 2019. There are so many young prospects whose development has been completely upended by the past few years, but Gore might have a claim to being the guy whose ascent was *most* impacted by the disruptions since 2020.
Line-up!
1: Crawford, SS
2: Winker, LF
3: France, 1B
4: Haniger, RF
5: Kelenic, CF
6: Suarez, 3B
7: Toro, DH
8: Frazier, 2B
9: Murphy, C
SP: Gonzales
There We Go: M’s Acquire Jesse Winker and Eugenio Suarez from Reds in Exchange for Dunn, Fraley, Williamson
Wow. Ok. Ask and you shall receive. Mere moments after demanding that the M’s take action now, and to target the two dismantling teams (Oakland and Cincinnati), Jerry Dipoto does *exactly that.* Today, the M’s traded SP Justin Dunn, LF Jake Fraley, and SP prospect Brandon Williamson to the Reds for 1B/LF Jesse Winker and 3B/DH Eugenio Suarez. We don’t know the future, Suarez in particular has some red flags, but it is nearly impossible to hate this trade. This is fantastic news.
Giving up Brandon Williamson is the part that could sting, but in exchange for a late-20s, power-hitting corner defender and a guy a few years off of hitting 49 HRs…well, we’ll run the risk of future stinging and sleep like babies. The Reds, as mentioned, want to tank. They don’t have much tied up beyond 2022, except for Suarez and Mike Moustakas. The M’s being willing to take on Suarez’s deal, which runs through 2024 and includes a 2025 team option, is probably what enabled this deal to reach fruition. Winker, 28, is coming off his first year of arbitration, and a year in which he put up a .950 OPS, and will thus see a good size increase over his $3.5M payday in 2021. Still, it’s Suarez’s $33M guaranteed through 2024 with at least another $2M in a buyout clause that made Cincinnati see what they could get for the 30 year old.
Suarez not only represents a good chunk of Cincy’s medium-term commitments, he’s coming off a disastrous year. He hit .198/.286/.428, and he did so in an offense-boosting home park. No one needs him to come back to his 2019 form (.271/.358/.572), but any kind of increase on his 2020-2021 doldrums would make him a valuable contributor. This is Kyle Seager’s spiritual successor: these past years, Suarez has still knocked some home runs, but his value has suffered as shifting and his hitting style have cratered his BABIP. Suarez a .214 BABIP in the shortened 2020 season, before improving modestly to a still-barely-possible .224 last year – a near dead ringer for Kyle’s .226 mark last year. I know all too well that Seattle’s not where you want to go if you want your BABIP to bounce back, but *any* improvement in his batted ball luck/results would be huge. If the M’s could cut his K rate slightly, that’d help, too. And even though we’re talking about his awful, BABIP-smothered season, the guy put up a better-than-.700 OPS, which on the M’s, is cause for celebration.
But that’s not even the good part. Just for taking on this sunk cost (who might still be a starting position upgrade), the M’s get Jesse Winker, the in-his-prime lefty with a lifetime wRC+ of 132, and coming off of 110 games of hitting at a 148 clip. He’s instantly the M’s best hitter (sorry Mitch, sorry Ty), and he fills a gaping chasm at LF. I suppose it made sense that this arb-eligible slugger would be available, just as Matt Olson was, but I still can’t quite wrap my mind around it. Winker will make a fraction of his value the next few years, and the Reds said “nahh, I don’t need that.”
Someone, somewhere may figure out Justin Dunn, but between injuries, command issues, and inconsistency, you can’t blame the M’s for flipping him now. Jake Fraley had a great OBP, but I’m still not sure it’ll carry over, particularly if he’s not able to drive the ball consistently. Still, he gives the Reds a non-black hole to stick in LF to replace Jesse Winker, and I can’t stop laughing as I type.
The M’s have made some head-scratching trades, and they’ve made some very good under-the-radar moves. I think the biggest blockbuster in Dipoto’s tenure is still the Tai Walker and Marte for Mitch and Jean Segura deal, which ultimately worked well for both parties. This one may, too, but this is as close as we’ve seen to an outright steal in many years. That doesn’t mean it works the way we want it to, but this is about getting the clear – CLEAR – better end of deal talent wise in exchange for absorbing salary money. For all the M’s have saved in their step-back, they needed to show they could get better and grow the payroll as they did so. This accomplishes that. Nice job.
So, We’re Doing This?
Major League Baseball’s lockout lasted 99 days. It was, to put it lightly, a trying time to be a baseball fan. Leaked proposals from owners seemed to indicate a group ready and willing to blow up the 2022 season to make a point; a group willing to forego the windfalls they make to crush a suddenly-united workforce. It was a crash we all saw coming since the last CBA was agreed to, and yet all the more aggravating because of everything that’s happened in the game since that time. I am beyond glad that this work stoppage is over, and we can begin to survey the landscape of baseball now that Cactus League games begin in a few days.
At the same time, I remain a bit angry that it all came to this. I understand that playing hardball at the bargaining table is part of what drives a mutually acceptable deal, but it has been exasperating to come up with ideas to write about that weren’t just profanity-laced diatribes. It incinerated the hot stove league and the potential deals the M’s could make, stuffing them all into a frenetic week that the M’s already appear to be missing out on. It’s such a strange blend of emotions – excitement, relief, bitterness – but ultimately familiar ones. In a way, this was a distilled version of the M’s fan’s experience of the last several years.
Part of that anger is something that goes beyond the lockout. It’s no one’s fault, but the pandemic, the reduced minor league teams, and the lockout may be setting prospects up for an at-best uneven and at worst wholly inadequate player development experience. That the league stepped back from the brink is great, and means so much for a guy like Julio Rodriguez, I still don’t know what to make of Jarred Kelenic spending all of 2020 in a Pierce County purgatory. Did that relate to his 2021 struggles in MLB? George Kirby’s yet to crest 100 total innings as a pro despite being drafted in 2019. What does that do to his ability to reach his ceiling as a workhorse starter? I’m not saying any of these concerns will play out in some kind of worst-case-scenario; you could make the case that the lighter (in-competition) workloads will benefit players. But the point is we have no idea how this will impact player development, and for a team whose claim to contention is precisely player development of a young, homegrown core, that’s kind of a problem.
Beyond that, the M’s step out into a new landscape. I’m happy to say that the most egregiously anti-competitive aspects of the previous CBA have been reduced, or more properly, counterbalanced. While the players weren’t able to move the free agency or arbitration timelines, and while their pitch on allowing more young players to qualify for Super 2 status ultimately failed, they were able to get the league to agree to a bonus pool for the best performers among the pre-arb set. This aligns performance and pay for at least some young players, and could help teams avoid gaming service time limits so much: if that player DOES turn out the way you hope, you probably don’t mind paying the bonus. In one of the more talked-about provisions, the Commissioner won the right to implement in-game rule changes with an advance notice of just 45 days, down from one year before. This opens up the possibility that the league will ban the infield shift, unfortunately depriving the M’s of something of a competitive advantage over the last few years.
I’d like to think that it changes the risk/reward on teams tanking, or just refusing to compete for one or more seasons. Sadly, much of the incentives for that, or the insulation from the risks of tanking, come from outside the CBA: they’re baked in to baseball’s current financial picture. Right around the time the players and league came to an agreement, Apple TV announced it won the rights to an exclusive Friday doubleheader telecast. Just this weekend, streaming service Peacock announced it would broadcast 18 Sunday games. Remember that before these deals were struck, the big national broadcast deals for ESPN and Turner promised over $60 million per team per year in broadcast rights, *not* including each team’s deal with its own regional sports network. Every team gets over $100 million per year before the first fan buys a ticket, and before the first sponsorship check cashes. It’s something we’ve talked about a lot on this blog, but owners and their employees have viewed competition and on-field results as a problem to be solved, a nail to be hammered down, and by and large they have. The Reds and A’s are in the process of tear-downs, and the Nationals, despite just signing Nelson Cruz, are currently in year 2 of theirs. This remains somewhat annoying, but it does give the M’s an opportunity, particularly if they’re not able to land their top free agent targets (beyond Robbie Ray, who’s awesome).
The A’s just sent Matt Olson to Atlanta to be Freddie Freeman’s replacement. The Braves prospect package includes their top 2 prospects, Cristian Pache and Shea Langeliers, as well as a third top-10 prospect. It’s…a lot. I know the M’s system is higher ranked than Atlanta’s, and I’d probably rather have Julio than Pache, but this is still quite a haul. Chris Bassitt, however, left Oakland for a much more modest package, befitting his status as a comprehensively underrated pitcher. Sonny Gray moved from Cincinnati to Minnesota in exchange for the Twins’ top pitching prospect, Chase Petty. There are deals to be made in trade, and the M’s need to start making them.
While the M’s remain in the mix to get Kris Bryant to anchor the 3B position, I’d argue that one of their remaining needs is in the OF, and CF in particular. The news that Kyle Lewis is further along is wonderful, but the part about Lewis not being quite ready for running and in-game work tempers that considerably. Kelenic gamely filled in at CF last year, but that was clearly not his best position, and the advanced fielding numbers were hide-your-eyes bad. He’s young and improving, and that poor cameo in CF doesn’t close the door on him playing there in the future, but I think Kelenic slotting in at LF might make more sense, and ultimately, I think Lewis’ future is in an OF corner as well. With Julio Rodriguez potentially ready for a starting job…nowish, why would the M’s get a CF in trade or free agency?
Because the M’s offense was ridiculously bad last year. They remain a seriously underwhelming group, and it’s why the team’s projections are so middling despite adding the reigning Cy Young winner. The M’s simply need to get better up and down the line-up, and can’t be too concerned about taking ABs away from incumbents. If Kyle Lewis comes back earlier than expected, that’s great. He might benefit from DHing a bit to save his knee. All of that to say that one of the more important free agents remaining out there isn’t one of the big three infielders, it’s NPB import Seiya Suzuki. Sure, the risk may be higher, but with the exception of Bryant, the fit may be better (OK, OK – Carlos Correa is a fit literally anywhere). The problem is that *so many of the M’s competitors* are in a similar spot.
The Rangers spent a forture before the lockout in remaking their infield. Marcus Semien and Corey Seager replacing Isaiah Kiner-Falefa and Nick Solak/some dudes is one of those rare times where the phrase “franchise-altering” is apt. They’re still looking for pitching, but their OF is a mess, with Adolis Garcia, new FA bargain-bin find Kole Calhoun, and Solak/Willie Calhoun tipped to start. That’s a disaster, and one the Rangers can’t afford while trying to sell the fanbase on near-term contention. Suzuki would be perfect there. The Red Sox are similar, if a bit further along: they have one of the game’s best young infields, and two solid options in the OF in Enrique Hernandez and Alex Verdugo. But their third starter, Jackie Bradley Jr., is projected to “hit” to a high-70s wRC+. This below the projections for Evan White, to drive the point home for M’s fans. One could argue that the increase from Bradley to Suzuki could be vital in an absolutely stacked AL East. The Detroit Tigers are banking on 1B prospect Spencer Torkelson and OF Riley Greene to help a developing rotation, and may be a year or two away, but replacing Victor Reyes with Suzuki would get them quite a ways closer. The San Francisco Giants could use an upgrade on CF Steven Duggar, and might benefit from having an additional right-handed bat (all three of their projected OFs are southpaws). You get the idea: lots of teams need upgrades at one position, and despite a good FA market, it’s very light on OF help.
The division and the league are going to look quite different, but the M’s remain behind Houston and need to hope that the Angels’ long-heralded return to greatness holds off in one of baseball’s longest-running cruel jokes. But the M’s know about those all too well. With Oakland stepping way back, and with Texas still building, the M’s have to make a move now. If they truly believe that the projections are all wrong, or don’t take fun differential as an input, fine. They simply can’t be wrong. Sure, the lockout angering fans isn’t something you can lay at the feet of the M’s as an org (though of course they, too, have an owner), but for the sake of fans’ sanity, this long-discussed plan, this rebuild and the Game’s Best Farm System needs to win. All of that would be easier if the M’s built around that young core, and obviously the Ray acquisition is a great example of doing so. But it won’t matter unless the offense hits, and for that, the M’s need more hitters. Happily, they recognize this themselves, but they need to translate interest into signings, and the pace of signings and trades now make it all the more important that the M’s move now.
The M’s New Addition
With the lockout in its third grueling month, it would be easy to miss. At a time when players on the 40-man can’t workout at team facilities, when MLB.com can’t show player pictures, and when numerous free agents are forbidden to talk with teams, I’d just sort of assumed that the Mariners couldn’t really do anything to improve right now beyond training minor leaguers while not paying them. (Damn it, this is *not* a cynical post).
I’m happy to learn that I was wrong. Yesterday, Seattle Times beat writer Ryan Divish tweeted that he ran into none other than Dave Cameron on the backfields at M’s camp. The M’s hired Dave away from San Diego, where he’d worked for the Padres since leaving Fangraphs in 2018. Dave Cameron, founder of this site and leader of Fangraphs, works for the Mariners. It’s…amazing.
I think for readers who weren’t around in this site’s – or sabermetric blogging in general – formative years, it’s hard to overstate just how outside the mainstream all of this was. It’s not just that Dave and DMZ presented ideas around player value or team-building strategy or even in-game strategy that was out of step with what you’d hear on a broadcast. It was that all of that strategy was undergirded and supported by equally radical notions about fundamental things like how runs are scored, or how you could evaluate a pitcher’s season. This is just years after Voros McCracken’s defense-independent-pitching-statistics article and around the time FIP was created as a DIPS measure.
If you weren’t on rec.sport.baseball.analysis where McCracken first presented his ideas, and where the founders of this blog met and argued about baseball and the Mariner Moose, all of this must’ve seemed pretty weird. But that’s where Dave shined. He was great at laying out the logic behind what he was saying. You didn’t have to agree (and I think most of my initial comments on this site were some small argument or nitpick to a Dave argument), but you always came away seeing how the pieces connected. You could follow the logic in a way that you often couldn’t when the color commentator would assert something on a broadcast.
But what really drew us to it all was not simply that we’re baseball fans. We were *Mariner* fans, and thus the relevant data points, the examples, the decision points all involved our team. Dave presented these interesting new means and deployed them to a great, great end: making the Mariners suck less (this was 2003-2012 or so). But again, it wasn’t just that this was often out of step with how teams were run, and how the M’s in particular were run at the time. Rather, there was a kind of dark comedy in just how FAR out of step it was. There seemed like an innate hostility from baseball lifers whose views were skewered mercilessly by Cameron, and the bloggers, ridiculed as over-confident non-entities not just by teams, but often by the media. This felt like a club. Insular, often absurdly so, but passionate.
That tension was perhaps always overstated. 2003 saw USSM created, but it also saw the Red Sox hire Bill James. Sure, the Bavasi-era M’s didn’t seem to be run the way Dave/DMZ/JMB would want, but the FO was often open to events with the readership – a tradition carried on by his successors. And it wasn’t like baseball – flush with new revenue, and increasingly convinced that ERA wouldn’t cut it – never hired saber/analytic people. Bavasi’s M’s had an analytics group. Still, part of the fun was reading Dave’s offseason plan or how Dave evaluated free agent pitchers all the time and watching the M’s do…something else.
One of the big things I remember, though, went way beyond criticizing the Carlos Silva deal or M’s draft picks. It was the excitement around a teenage phenom dealing in short season ball, and the growing fervor around his progress. JMB gave him a nickname, and it took. By the time of his debut, we were at fever pitch. And in those final years before all games were broadcast, that insular club (er, some of them) got to watch a single static camera broadcast King Felix’s MLB debut in Detroit. He was ours, and he looked every bit the royalty we wanted him to be. And that’s why his 2006 and early 2007 performance was so frustrating. And so, Dave wrote perhaps the most famous post in this site’s history, An Open Letter to Rafael Chaves. We may be coming at this in a different way, but we all want/need Felix to be great. Chaves passed it to Felix, and while Felix had a lot more to do with what happened next than Dave, it was a shocking turn of events for readers here. Insular, passionate, and perhaps able to have a real-world impact on our club?
It feels kind of amazing to think that it’s now Dave’s literal job to have an impact on the Mariners and the players they develop. Things have changed a lot since the letter and since this site began. Not only were some games *gasp* not televised back then, but we couldn’t even conceive of pitch tracking data, that MLB itself would roll out searchable databases with everything from pitch height, release point, movement and spin (what?). Despite the growing influence of data, and despite the massive increase in the volume of data and the concomitant rise in importance of data scientists and database programmers, there’s still a role for people asking really good questions and communicating ideas across an enterprise that probably looks a bit different than an FO looked in 2003. It’s part of why Jeff Sullivan’s with the Rays, or why the MLBPA hired Fangraphs’ Craig Edwards not long ago (give ’em hell, Craig). But there’s something so satisfying, like a multifaceted plot wrapped up *just so* about this hire.
The tension between a place like this and the M’s FO is kind of baked in. It was there more or less explicitly from the start, and the M’s provide so, so many reasons to be cynical. We love the Mariners, but we do not always see eye to eye with the people assembling and/or managing the team. Despite Dave’s presence among them, that doesn’t really change. I’ve never subscribed to the idea that I’m smarter than the FO. That kind of idea can’t survive first contact with some in the M’s analytics group, and, well, that was when I tapped out. But that doesn’t stop sites or writers from pointing out things that need improvement or signs that things aren’t quite working the way we were told. So I wish Dave well, and know that he’s probably more motivated for his new challenge than he’s ever been, or at least since June 27th, 2007. But I know for a fact he’s got thick skin. The development of our long-hyped prospect group is now, at some level or another, in Dave’s care. That gives me confidence. But I’d have more if the M’s seriously improved the line-up for 2022, you know. Just saying.
M’s Acquire IF Adam Frazier
Ok, it’s not the huge free agent acquisition that clarifies the M’s 2022 season, and it’s not a blockbuster trade. But the M’s have made a move that solidifies their 2022 infield, and they didn’t have to part with one of their highly-regarded starting pitching prospects. The M’s went back to one of their usual trading partners, picking up Adam Frazier in exchange for hard-throwing lefty RP prospect Ray Kerr and OF pop-up guy, Corey Rosier.
It’s a good deal, as Frazier was an All-Star last year and helps an offense that could use a lot more contact and batting average than they got last year. Frazier’s played some OF, and had a couple of appearances at 3B for Pittsburgh, but played 2B nearly exclusively last season. He’s a perfectly serviceable 2B as well, so the M’s don’t have to punt on defense. What they probably DO have to punt on is power. Frazier hit 10 HRs a few times for Pittsburgh, and had a decent-ish ISO for the Bucs in half a season in 2018, but gap power is kind of a stretch. In some ways, Frazier’s similar at the plate to his new double play partner, JP Crawford. Both guys had 46 XBH last year, nearly all doubles, and they posted ISOs in the barely-over-100 range. That said, both guys posted above-average wOBA/wRC+ rates, in Crawford’s case thanks to a decent walk rate, and in Frazier’s case by making tons of contact.
Frazier’s 10%+ K rate is one of the lowest in the game, and allows him to overcome one of the lowest average exit velocities in the game – another thing he has in common with Crawford. That sounds ominous, but given what we’ve seen from Ty France and Crawford, it may not be a problem. The key is that Frazier’s an all-field hitter who hits very few fly balls. A low exit velo fly ball hitter is not going to work. A guy who hits line drives in front of OFs can. Frazier posted a LD% of nearly 30% last year, boosting his BABIP and pulling his average over .300. That may be a bit much to expect going forward, but it’s a profile that can play in Seattle right now, and if we learned anything from 2021, it’s that not all profiles can do so.
In a way, he’s the antithesis of Kyle Seager at the plate. At the end of his M’s tenure, Seager had become a dead-pull hitter who hit for plenty of power, which helped overcome strikeouts. I still like Seager, and I think he can help a big league club, but he was perhaps the worst possible fit in T-Mobile, hence his 65 wRC+ at home. Seager’s style and T-Mobile’s BABIP-sapping park effects led Seager to a .165/.245/.329 line at home. If you care for Seager at all, you must do what the M’s have done and set him free. To be clear, I don’t think Frazier is Seager’s replacement, but it’s an acknowledgement that they needed a vastly different style of hitter in their line-up.
Still, T-Mobile didn’t just sap pull hitters’ BABIP – JP Crawford was a below average hitter at home, too. If there’s a concern here, it’s that a lower LD% and maybe some OFs playing shallower in Seattle’s physically small OF can turn him into David-Fletcher-in-2021 and not David-Fletcher-in-2020. Frazier had just a 1% barrel rate last season, less than half of Crawford’s concerning rate. That means there’s more volatility in the profile than you’d otherwise want from a super-high contact/low-strikeout hitter. But there’s volatility everywhere, and a player who can put the ball in play is critical for this M’s line-up. It’s a risk the M’s had to take.
The return for the Padres is former undrafted free agent RP Ray Kerr, who’d just been added to the 40-man roster. Kerr throws extremely hard, and posted an enticing combination of K rate and ground balls this year for Tacoma and Arkansas, but he only threw just shy of 40 innings in his first year as a full-time reliever. He’s already 27, but has a shot at the Pads bullpen given his skillset: a fastball from the left side approaching 100 MPH along with a good splitter. The Pads also get 2021 draft pick Corey Rosier, their 12th rounder out of UNC-Greensboro. Rosier got in 31 games for Modesto after the draft and hit a cool .390/.461/.585, buoyed by a .434 BABIP. It’s a great line, but it’s 31 games in low-A by a late round college hitter. This could be a disastrous trade if this lottery ticket works out for San Diego, but this kind of trade, with the M’s in the position they’re in, is one the M’s make 10 times out of 10.
If there’s a concern apart from Frazier’s volatility, it’s that the move may seem to close off options for the M’s to make a much bigger splash at 2B, say by picking up Marcus Semien. But Frazier’s positional flexibility and the low cost of the deal means he’d have value as a super-utility guy even if the M’s did convince a Semien or a Baez to come to Seattle. The M’s aren’t at a point where they need to closely watch playing time or worry about having too many IFs (or anything else). They simply need to get better, and this move certainly does that. It’s not enough, by any stretch, but it’s a nice first step.