Tag Archives: Los Angeles Angels

Yelich gets $215m Beer Money from Brewers

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Christian Yelich and the Milwaukee Brewers brought hope to many a so-called small-market fanbase this week in coming to terms on a new nine-year, $215 million contract. It’s a 7-year extension on top of his current deal and could keep him with the Brew Crew until he is 37 years old.

It’s fair to say that, had Yelich continued his recent MVP-type form over his remaining seasons before hitting free agency, he could have made a lot more money. But by all accounts it was Yelich who sparked the talks. 

“It’s a large sum of money and people are always going to ask the ‘what-if’s’ — did you leave [money on the table] or not? — but I play the game to win, and to be a part of a place that I feel comfortable and I take pride in representing. For me, this is that place.

“That’s how I made this decision. It wasn’t one that I took lightly. I spent a lot of time talking about it with my family and my representatives. At the end day, we felt that this was right.”

Yelich, as reported on MLB.com.

There are two parts to the story, of course. One is in the Milwaukee Brewers stepping up to lock down a true franchise player, and you have to give some credit to their principal owner Mark Attanasio in being prepared to do this, as the team has ‘had a go’ in previous years such as in the CC Sabathia and Zack Greinke trades. 

But the main story comes back to Yelich and what he wanted to do in being prepared to accept less money to stay somewhere he and his family are happy, in the knowledge that the money he will earn should still be more than he’ll never need. 

It doesn’t mean other players are wrong to look at it differently and want to get top dollar at free agency. Because they have the fortune to play this great game for a living, it’s easy to overlook that for almost all players free agency is the first time they’ve had any say whatsoever in where they get to play their baseball. 

Had Francisco Lindor ended up with the Dodgers or the Yankees as a prospect years ago, with no say himself on it, he wouldn’t have had to worry about a home-town discount on a contract extension. He’s hardly being greedy to think ‘if I was with another team I could get $100m more, so why not go to free agency in two years’ time’. However, the Yelich deal does add another factor to the situation.

We can all look askance at billionaire ownership groups coining it in and we should constantly hold them in suspicion when they start pleading poverty. But is it really true to say ‘every team’, including the Brewers, Indians, A’s and Rays can afford your Bryce Harper style $330m deal, or Gerrit Cole $324m? Maybe it’s not just carrying water for the owners in saying no, however, a multi-year deal such as Yelich’s ($215m with some deferrals) absolutely is possible for every single team. 

If the player, such as Lindor, wants to get full market value then I’ve no issues with that whatsoever, but if you love where you are from a playing point of view and a personal point of view and they offer you $200m+ guaranteed, it’s a big decision to turn that down.

More on the White Sox, AL West, and NY Yankee injuries

I will be a complementing my Weekly Hit Ground Ball columns with a regular video series on our Oakland A’s UK YouTube channel looking at news from around the Majors, or as I like to refer to it, “The Other Lot”.

The videos will cover the main news story or comment piece written about here, the Yelich contract extension in this case, with some additional commentary on other topics that caught my eye from the past week.

Sometimes they will be pre-recorded productions, as with this debut episode, and sometimes they will be recorded as a live-stream on our YouTube channel on a Sunday morning. Subscribe to the Oakland A’s UK channel to be notified when new videos are published and when live-streams begin.

Here’s the first video, handily embedded below:

Christmas shopping spree

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A week ago I wrote the following:

“The MLB Winter Meetings have begun in San Diego and plenty of people are speculating about what big free agent news will be announced over the next few days (likely very little, based on recent years)”.

You could say I was a long way off the mark with that comment, although maybe I can latch onto the final caveat to save a bit of face.

Over the past two off-seasons there has been considerable discontent among players as to how the free agent market has failed to develop in the way they expected. Both times the fall-out descended into an argument with teams on one side and players and agents on the other. It takes two sides to make a deal. Whether it was the players being greedy or the teams being cheap depended on which side of the fence you were shouting from.

The first month and a half of the 2019/20 off-season can’t help but make you lean towards the players and agents on this one.

Take Mike Moustakas as a prime example. He had to accept one year deals in each of the previous two off-seasons due to finding no multi-contact offers to his liking. This time around he’s signed a four-year contract with the Cincinnati Reds. Whilst we do have to take the qualifying offer, and resulting loss of a draft pick, into account, that doesn’t go far enough as an explanation as to why he suddenly is now worthy of a multi-year commitment. The difference this time is in a greater number of teams looking to add a quality infielder.

It comes back to a topic I discussed just over a month ago, that of the essential element of competition that drives a free agent market. The impasse in the past two off-seasons has come from teams not upping their offers because they knew that they didn’t have to as part of winning the bidding, whilst players and agents were waiting for better offers that they thought should come, but never did.

This year, things have changed.

The Philadelphia Phillies were one of the few teams to make a big push a year ago, not least in the Bryce Harper contract, and the end result was making it eight consecutive seasons without a play-off appearance. The Phillies were never going to stand still after that disappointment and they’ve acted by bringing in Joe Girardi as manager to replace Gabe Kapler and then signing Zack Wheeler to a five-year, $118m contract and Didi Gregorius to a one-year, $14m contract.

Their NL East rivals, the Washington Nationals, were not going to take their foot off the gas after winning the World Series either. Having lost Harper last year, and rightly expecting to lose Anthony Rendon this year, there was no way they were going to let Stephen Strasburg be tempted by another team’s offer. That was why they blew everyone else out of the water with their seven-year, $245m contract offer that Strasburg accepted on Monday. It’s a huge commitment in a pitcher who has had injury problems in the past and, by all accounts, was not looking to leave Washington anyway, but the Nationals were not prepared to take any chances. They could afford to offer that contract, so they did.

This immediately ignited the market for Gerrit Cole. Strasburg’s deal took the other outstanding starter off the board and also helped to set the parameters for the contract Cole clearly was going to command.

A year ago, everyone was waiting for the New York Yankees to jump in and ramp up the bidding stakes for Manny Machado and Bryce Harper. There was no waiting around this year. The Yankees’ record of making the World Series at least once in every decade from the 1920s on came to an end in their ALCS defeat to the Houston Astros. With no Bronx Fall Classics in the 2010s, and a team with a great offence and bullpen but questionable starting pitching, there was no way that the Yankees would allow Cole to go anywhere else. No messing about: they put the largest ever contract for a pitcher on the table, nine-years, $324m, to make sure he became a Yankee.

And that then put the LA Angels on the clock. It was already a source of embarrassment for owner Arte Moreno that his team had squandered the first eight full seasons of Mike Trout, genuinely in the running to be considered the greatest player of all-time by the end of his career, by turning it into just one Division Series defeat. Having given Trout the most lucrative contract ever (12 years, $426.5M) to stay with the team for years to come prior to the 2019 season, there was no way that the Angels could get through this off-season without signing a big-ticket free agent.

With Strasburg and Cole off the market, the Angels immediately offered Anthony Rendon a seven-year, $245m contract. Just as the Nationals couldn’t let Strasburg leave and the Yankees couldn’t let Cole sign elsewhere, the Angels were prepared to offer whatever it took to make sure they didn’t miss out on Rendon.

This is what happens when teams with big pockets are motivated to out-spend each other to win now. Whatever Rob Manfred may try to claim, that has not been the context in which the free agent market has played out over the past two off-seasons.

It’s made for an exciting Winter Meetings and sets up the rest of the off-season perfectly.

Weekly Hit Ground Ball: Rookie Managers Making It Look Easy

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Alex Cora and Mickey Callaway must have their feet up in their respective manager’s office thinking that this managing malarkey is easy.

Cora’s Red Sox sit astride the Major Leagues with a 12-2 record heading into Sunday’s games, with Callaway’s Mets close behind on 11-2 having had their nine-game winning streak brought to an end by Milwaukee yesterday.

Meanwhile, it turns out the Phillies’ manager Gabe Kapler might not be completely clueless – as some declared after his first three games – as his team have won five games in a row to second behind the Mets on an 8-5 record.

The Nationals’ Dave Martinez (7-8) and Yankees’ Aaron Boone (7-7) are holding steady in the early going too, which just leaves veteran Ron Gardenhire among the new managers for 2018 for whom the start of the season is proving to be a struggle.

Gardenhire has been in the game long enough not to be too envious of those whippersnappers. There are only 30 MLB manager jobs at any one time and even being in charge of a rebuilding Detroit Tigers is a post to be proud of.

However, it is interesting that so many potentially plumb positions ended up in the hands of rookie managers.

Sport teams generally will change a manager when things have gone badly, with the manager holding responsibility for the team’s performance and being the easiest big part to change as opposed to making significant changes to the playing staff.

That often leads to an ‘opposite ends’ approach to the recruitment of managers, especially in football.  If a ‘back-to-basics’ experienced British manager gets the boot then a younger continental manager is just what’s needed.  If relegation looms with said younger continental manager’s brand of ‘tippy-tappy’ football not working in England, well of course you need a ‘back-to-basics’ experienced British manager to shake things up.

It’s not quite the same in baseball as the manager here has a different brief to work towards (accepting manager/head coach roles vary among football clubs too), yet you still see that approach being taken and, to varying degrees, that goes for the six new managers in MLB this year.

The situation in Washington was the most extreme. Ex-manager Dusty Baker has his critics from previous managerial stints, yet it’s difficult to see quite what he did in his two years at the helm with the Nationals to deserve to be pushed aside over the off-season rather than to continue with the team. They won 95 and 97 games in 2016 and 2017 and whilst consecutive 3-2 Division Series exits were bitterly disappointing when expectations of a World Series were so high, in the cold light of day there wasn’t much about those series defeats that you could pin on Baker.

His departure was a classic case of the team wanting to change something to get over the Division Series hump and Baker being the easiest option.  They changed from a 68 year-old with 22 MLB managerial seasons of experience to Dave Martinez, a 53 year-old who is taking on his first MLB managerial job after serving an apprenticeship under Joe Maddon at the Rays and Cubs.

The changes in Boston and New York were more understandable.

The Red Sox won 93 games and the AL East before being knocked out of the play-offs by a formidable Houston Astros team, so it was hardly a disaster on the field last year. However, it never seemed like a happy camp under John Farrell and so bringing his five-year reign to a close and moving on to the dynamic young Alex Cora looked like a shake-up move at somewhere that needed a shake-up.

The same could be said for the Mets, although in their case the 2017 season undoubtedly was a disaster.  Terry Collins had outstayed his welcome so bringing him back for 2018 was never going to work. Mickey Callaway’s glowing reputation from his five years as pitching coach under Terry Francona in Cleveland made him an obvious candidate to take over at a team whose fortunes are so heavily invested in the form and fitness of their starting pitching.

Aaron Boone was a left-field choice for the Yankees, yet fits into the ‘opposite ends’ idea by virtue of his excellent communication skills – shown to all in his work with ESPN – being cited as a crucial factor in his appointment. Joe Girardi had served a decade as the Yankees’ manager and many on the New York beat had started bemoaning his increased willingness to say very little in his managerial briefings long before it was announce he would not be returning for 2018.  It wasn’t simply the New York press wishing for someone more quote-worthy – although I’m sure that makes their lives much easier – but more that their experience was indicative of what they were picking up from players too: that Girardi was failing to inspire his team any more.

Those four situations are all about winning now, which is different to the roles that Gabe Kapler and Ron Gardenhire are taking on. In Philadelphia, they are firmly on the way up with a young team and so switched the 66 year-old Pete Mackanin for 42 year-old rookie manager Kapler.  In Detroit, they are at the start of a rebuild and decided that the experienced head of Gardenhire was what was needed at this point to move on from first-time manager Brad Ausmus, whose four-year tenure produced mixed results.

These are early days in the 2018 season and none of us can be certain how the six managerial appointments will pan out over the next few years, but it is likely we can take a good guess at the type of manager they will be replaced by when that time comes.

That is, someone the opposite of who they are replacing.

The Sunday Smasher

The Bangles sang that “It’s just another manic Monday”.

In MLB the song goes: “It’s just another Shohei Sunday”.

The Angels’ Japanese star is back on the mound today and after he went six perfect innings against the A’s last time out, he now gets to face the Kansas City Royals who have the worst record in MLB so far this season.

In other words, this has ‘potential no-hitter’ written all over it.  Or it will produce a big shock of the Royals being the line-up to knock Ohtani out of his stride. Either way, it will be worth watching.

First pitch from Kauffman Stadium is at 19.15 BST and the game is available to watch on MLB.TV.

Thank You For The A’s: A Frustrating Opening Series

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Having won on Opening Day in walk-off fashion, for the Oakland A’s to lose the four-game series 3-1 to the LA Angels was a big disappointment.

It’s only four games, nothing is decided and we shouldn’t be quick to draw too many conclusions; however even a ‘Desmond’ 2-2 series split would have felt a lot better.

It was a good series from a UK point of view in that three of the four games were 21:05 BST starts so we could get the season off to a flyer by catching the team live at a relatively convenient time.

The only night-game came on Friday and that meant I missed Sean Manaea’s excellent performance. He quickly became one of my favourites soon after his A’s debut in 2016 and whilst his overall numbers in 2017 were good rather than great, that was predominantly due to a rough spell in and around August.  Although I don’t see him becoming an ace, he’s got more potential than your average MLB fan would realise and his first start of 2018 bodes well for him having a breakthrough year.

What didn’t bode well was the general sloppiness in the field and also occasionally on the basepads.

Use what fielding metrics you like, none of them made for pleasant reading for A’s fans last year. Matt Chapman proved again in this series that he can make a big difference with that all on his own, yet overall there were too many moments when extra bases, or even extra outs, were handed to the Angels. You can’t afford to do that against good teams and expect to get away with it.

Halos hype

I’m not sure we learnt all that much new about the Angels; they don’t look like world-beaters yet should be a solid enough outfit and in play for the second Wild Card.

Zack Cozart looks a good signing for them especially as he gives them flexibilty to cover for other players if needed, as has happened with Ian Kinsler lasting all of one start before knackering himself. It’s not exactly the same situation, but you can draw some parallels with the A’s putting Khris Davis in left field to cover for Matt Joyce’s ankle soreness as an example of how things can go wrong when shifting players around to cover for injuries.

Shohei Ohtani’s debut got a huge amount of fanfare yesterday and, Chapman’s three-run jack aside, his performance showed why as his pitching arsenal looks formidable. It’s worth remembering that the A’s hitters hadn’t seen him before and that, whilst it was his MLB debut, this isn’t your typical rookie as he is an experienced professional pitcher.

The A’s should face Ohtani again in their three-game series with the Angels over the coming weekend, probably on Saturday, so it will be interesting to see how they get on having faced him once and with the opportunity to review footage of him from his first start.

Coming up

The A’s welcome the Texas Rangers into Oakland for four games before the next Angels series. The final game on Thursday is a 20:35 BST start, with the others all being in the early hours. Their Game One starter tonight is Bartolo Colon, so that’s got to be a good opportunity to get back to winning ways.

And Another Thing

It was great to watch A’s baseball again with Glen Kuiper and Ray Fosse and first impressions of Dallas Braden being added to the NBC Sports California announcing crew were very positive.

His hiring started off on a bad note with Mark Mulder, who was excellent in his work replacing Fosse for some games last season, being messed around and not brought back (that’s how it looked from the outside at least), but you can understand it more in some ways now as the role Braden is playing is different to that of your usual announcer.  He’s down at field level chipping in with thoughts and that worked really well in this opening series.

Braden is a character and adds some humour to procedings, but he knows when to reign it in and adds real insight into the game with his comments. Hopefully the recently-acquired sun shade will save him from getting burned to a crisp and he will continue to add something extra to the coverage over the course of the season.

Oakland A’s Season Opener: 21:05 on Thursday

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As I’ve got the day off work and can’t think of anything but baseball, I thought I’d do something vaguely useful with my time and look ahead to the A’s opener tonight at 21:05 BST.

After inheriting the Opening Day assignment in 2017 due to Sonny Gray being ill, Graveman will take the mound this time as the A’s nominal ace.

I say nominal ace as even the most optimistic A’s fan wouldn’t really put him in the ace bracket, but he’s the leading starting pitcher among our current crop alongside Friday’s starter Sean Manaea.

Looking back at his Opening Day start a year ago, Graveman did a decent job in limiting the Angels to 2 runs over 6 innings.  He did that throwing his sinker almost exclusively. There were a few cut fastballs thrown in here and there, yet otherwise it was sinker, sinker, sinker.

Athough he does throw his sinker a lot, that was a bit extreme, perhaps with him not quite having a feel for his change and curve in his first start, and more generally over the 2017 season this was his pitch breakdown according to Brooks Baseball:

  • Sinker: 65% of the time (approx 94 MPH)
  • Cutter: 15% (91)
  • Change: 10% (86)
  • Curve: 6% (80)
  • Other 4%: varations of a fastball.

As with most pitchers, the overall numbers obscure the different approaches taken against right or left-handed hitters.  Against righties he went to the sinker almost 80% of the time, then 10% cutter, 10% curve (very occasionally chucking a change into the mix). Against lefties, he significantly increased his cutter (23%) and change-up (22%) usage, bringing his sinker use down to approximately 50% and then throwing a few curves in here and there.

For those new to baseball, that’s quite typical among pitchers. A right-handed pitcher will tend to use a curve against a right-handed hitter and a change-up against lefties, and vice versa for a left-handed pitcher.

The Baseball Savant website does a great job of visualising how a pitcher has approached different hitters and the outcomes of that.  Here’s a link to the page for Graveman’s work against the Angels.

Line-up

The starting line-up hasn’t been announced at time of writing. The A’s are facing right-hander Garrett Richards and faced a righty (Chris Stratton) in their final exhibition game on Tuesday, so if we use that as a guide then it would be:

  1. Joyce (LF)
  2. Semien (SS)
  3. Lowrie (2B)
  4. Davis (DH)
  5. Olson (1B)
  6. Piscotty (RF)
  7. Chapman (3B)
  8. Maxwell (C)
  9. Powell (CF)

I suspect Jonathon Lucroy will be in the line-up instead of Maxwell, but we’ll find out soon enough.

21:05 BST

The game is scheduled to begin at 21:05 BST and is available to watch online for MLB.TV subscribers. Join myself and the rest of the OaklandAUK fanbase on Twitter tonight.

 

Weekly Hit Ground Ball: The Other Teams

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At this time of the year it’s traditional to publish predictions of how the MLB season is going to pan out.

If you asked most fans which ten teams are going to make the playoffs right now, you’re likely to find a lot of similarities.

In the American League, Houston, Boston, New York and Cleveland all look strong favourites, with the LA Angels the trendy pick for the second Wild Card.

In the National League, LA Dodgers, Chicago and Washington are the probable division winners and you can then take your pick from a group of teams to meet in the Wild Card game.

So, rather than focus on the potential division winners, we’ll look at another team of interest in each division.

AL West

Let’s start in the division of the reigning World Series champions with the team that many are awarding the ‘won the off-season’ prize to.

What exactly should we expect from the LA Angels this year? Any team with Mike Trout in it has a chance and they’ve made some good additions, but have they made a big leap ahead or a more modest improvement?

Part of that will be determined by their headline acquisition, Japanese two-way talent Shohei Ohtani. Every team wanted him and it was a coup for the Angels to win his signature. An adjustment period is to be expected and that leads us to Ohtani’s Spring Training, which politely can be described as disappointing. Despite the ever-present caveat this time of year that ‘it’s only Spring Training’, were he not a highly touted player from Japan it’s possible the Angels would have considered sending him to Triple-A given how he has performed.

That’s not a viable option and so he’s going to need to develop his craft in the Majors. Ordinarily it would be fine for Ohtani to take some lumps here and there as he puts together an encouraging debut season to build on, and in isolation that remains the case. The problem with that for the Angels is the rest of their starting rotation comes with plenty of question marks. If Ohtani isn’t really good, will the additions of Ian Kinsler, Zack Cosart and renewing with Justin Upton alone make them more than a potential second Wild Card?

AL Central

The Minnesota Twins proved last year that you can’t always count a team out based on previous form. Few if any picked the Twins to make the play-offs, yet some good performances and other teams not meeting expectations for various reasons meant that the Twins could look around, see no one else was really making a claim for the second Wild Card and take it for themselves.

They did that with no expectations on their shoulders, other than the expectation from others that at some point someone else would overtake them. Now the expectations have changed. That’s not to say they are favourites, but they’ve got something to live up to.

Although they’ve not exactly become big spenders, you can’t accuse the Twins of standing still and failing to add to their roster.

They started with their bullpen, adding Addison Russell and Fernando Rodney, and then took advantage of the slow-moving free agent market by picking up Logan Morrison for their batting lineup and two good starting pitchers in Jake Odorizzi and Lance Lynn. On the negative side, Ervin Satana will miss at least the first month of the season due to a finger injury and shortstop Jorge Polanco will serve an 80-game drug suspension.

The Twins are no juggernaut, yet they are a good team and it shouldn’t be overlooked that they’ll play 57 games combined against the rebuilding Chicago White Sox, Detroit Tigers and Kansas City Royals. Few seem to be picking them for a Wild Card, but I wouldn’t be so quick to count them out.

AL East

The 2018 AL East looks set to be a heavyweight fight between the Boston Red Sox and New York Yankees. We’ve been there before a few times.

The other three teams have all taken turns at upsetting the order in recent years. I wouldn’t say any had a great chance at doing that this time around, yet if I had to pick a team that would be worth watching it would be the Toronto Blue Jays.

The Edwin Encarnacion-Jose Bautista Blue Jays have gone, with neither player now with the club and fellow star Josh Donaldson heading for free agency at the end of the 2018 season. Nothing lasts forever. Toronto had a really good team there for a few years but many of the leading players are now either gone, past their best or potentially heading towards an exit.

That makes the Blue Jays’ season all the more intriguing. Are they going to slip back again or do they have one last hurrah in them?

They haven’t made any impressive additions to their roster: tinkering with the bullpen, adding a couple of former Cardinals in Randall Grichuk and Aledmys Garcia, and signing veteran Curtis Granderson. They do still have good players on the roster though and will look even better if Aaron Sanchez’s blister issues can be a thing of the past. If not, June and July could be dominated by rumours of where Donaldson will be traded to.

NL East

Picking ‘another team’ from the NL East is a difficult task. The Washington Nationals were a country mile ahead of the rest of their division last year and that doesn’t look like changing in 2018.  The Miami Marlins finished second last year – yes, that surprised me too when I checked – but we all know what’s happened there over the off-season (fire sale number 4 or 5, it’s hard to keep count).

So, you’ve got the young talent of the Atlanta Braves, the young talent and two good free agent additions in the Philadelphia Phillies and the New York Mets.  Let’s go with the latter.

The period from mid-2015 to mid-2016 was a lot of fun for the Mets. They went to a World Series in October 2015 and then saw the Yankees trading away players the following summer.  It looked like the city was the Mets’s.

Well that didn’t last very long, did it? The Yankees, in a way that only the Yankees could, rapidly turned a rebuild into a strong Major League roster and loaded farm system.  The Mets lost the 2016 NL Wild Card game and then fell apart in 2017.

Frustratingly for their fans, they haven’t responded aggressively to this turn of events.  Jay Bruce and Todd Frazier are solid, experienced players, but they’re not going to convince a fan base that a team that lost 92 games last year is going to explode back into life.

As ever with these Mets, it all comes down to the starting rotation. If Syndergaard, deGrom, Harvey and Matz can make 100+ starts, and more starts than not reflecting their talent, then they’ll be a Wild Card threat. Mets fans have seen enough to be excited whilst also not being willing to bet their own money on it happening.

NL Central

Just as the Twins sprang a surprise in the AL Central, the Milwaukee Brewers were more competitive than most predicted in the NL Central last season.

Just as the Twins, the Brewers now have some expectations to live up to and, just as the Twins, they’ve not sat back and let the pack pass them.  However, they haven’t made the depth of signings as others and that may be their undoing, especially with Jimmy Nelson working his way back from shoulder surgery.

Lorenzo Cain and Christian Yelich are an excellent pair of signings to add to the outfield and the top of their batting order. It’s still not completely clear how the roster will shake out from there, with the original plan for Ryan Braun to play some first base already looking like an experiment too far.

It’s far from the worst problem to have as the outfield recruits offer plenty of reason to be excited for the Brew Crew, yet you get the sense that having started to push chips into the middle of the table, Milwaukee might have been better off – if not quite going all in – at least reaching for another starting pitcher to add to the group.

Within their division, you could argue they haven’t given up much to the St Louis Cardinals as they’ve also added an outfielder from the Marlins (Marcell Ozuna) but little else. Whether that’s going to be enough to beat others to a Wild Card remains to be seen.

NL West

I started planning this column in the middle of the week and had already decided to pick the San Francisco Giants for this spot.

Little did I know that the last few days would add more uncertainty to the Giants’ season.

Looking at 2017 in isolation you could say that everything fell apart for San Francisco and that wouldn’t be far from the truth.  What that disguises somewhat is that things started going awry in the second half of 2016. There was no ‘even year’ World Series that time around, they lost 11 of 13 after the All-Star break, and went 30-42 in total, to go from a 6.5 game lead at the top of the West to finishing four games behind the Dodgers.

Over the current off-season there was a clear decision to give it one last go with the Posey-Bumgarner-Crawford team and so trades were made to bring in experienced campaigners Evan Longoria and Andrew McCutchen.  Reliever Tony Watson was also signed as a free agent to add a quality lefty to the mix, hopefully behind last year’s big recruit Mark Melcancon if he’s fully recovered from forearm surgery.

But then it was announced that Jeff Samrdzija will miss several weeks with a strained pectoral injury and Madison Bumgarner took a line drive back on his left hand that fractured his little finger and could keep him out for the best part of two months.  Their Opening Day four-man rotation will consist of Johnny Cueto followed by Ty Blach, Chris Stratton and Derek Holland, which is a clear drop-off from what might have been.

The two starters shouldn’t have any lingering issues from their ailments so if the team can hold steady then they could build into the season and make a Wild Card run in the second half.  However, there’s an increased injury risk with a veteran team and their chances will depend on keeping their best players on the field, something that hasn’t started well.

Weekly Hit Ground Ball: Ohtani pitches, Honeywell doesn’t

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The weather gods clearly have been reading this column.

After I rejected the meteorological season’s definition of when winter turns to spring last week, in favour of the baseball season version, it looks like we’re going to get a ‘big freeze’ this coming week with snow storms and temperatures down to -8C.

Sorry about that!

Let’s take a positive from it though; it will make watching and listening to Spring Training games from sunny Arizona and Florida all the more appealing.

Ohtani debut

You don’t get many big events in Spring Training, but the first appearance of Japanese star Shohei Ohtani counted as one on Saturday.

Ohtani was on the same plan as the rest of his Angels starting pitchers: two innings or 30 pitches, whichever came first.  He left after 1.1 innings and 31 pitches, one batter after the Milwaukee Brewers’ Keon Broxton took him deep and on to the grass mound behind the left-field fence.

With so little else going on so early in spring, every little last detail was bound to be obsessed over by beat writers and columnists, all whilst accepting that a first start of 31 pitches doesn’t really tell you very much at all.

Watching the Angels’ FWS coverage via MLB.TV, Ohtani showed off one of his fabled splitters in striking out Minor Leaguer Nate Orf (“orf” being the sound some made as the pitch went by) and a big slow curve for a called strike in another at-bat.  His command of his pitches was a bit shaky at times, but that’s to be expected early in the pre-season.

More insightful than Ohtani’s performance was news from the Angels’ camp reported by Terry Smith and Jose Mota about Ohtani’s transition to being an MLB pitcher and also the adjustments the Angels will be making.  The six-man rotation plan seems to still be in play and, with Ohtani also being an option with the bat, it looks like the Angels’ bench will consist of just a back-up catcher, infielder and outfielder.

At first glance that would seem a short bench, not knowing quite how much Ohtani will be used as a hitter in 2018; however, it’s becoming increasingly common for American League teams to only roster three bench players. That allows most teams (i.e. those that don’t have a pitcher who can also hit like Ohtani promises to do) to have an 8-man bullpen to go alongside the 5-man rotation.

‘Bullpenning’ is en vogue in the play-offs and being used more during the regular season too and is one of the key reasons why the length of games has being going up in recent years (time taken for pitching changes, relievers traditionally being more ‘deliberate’ with their pace of play etc).  Whilst limits on pitching changes have not been introduced for 2018, it was mooted as an option being considered by MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred in his quest for increasing the pace of play and will be raised again if the trends of 8-man bullpens and lengthening game times continue.

Roth off to a good start

Although it didn’t get the fanfare of Ohtani’s debut, understandably enough, Great Britain pitcher Michael Roth got his spring off to a good start by pitching two score-less innings for the Chicago Cubs against the Milwaukee Brewers on Friday, giving up only one hit in the process.

Roth’s unlikely to make the Cubs’ Opening Day roster given the pitching depth that Chicago has, but some good performances in spring can only help his stock.

Non-roster invitee

Roth is classed as a non-roster invitee for the Cubs and is one of many NRI players across the 30 MLB clubs this spring.

If you’re new to baseball, a non-roster invitee is essentially as the term suggests: someone who is not on the club’s 40-man roster but gets an invite to come to their Major League Spring Training camp.

In Roth’s case, he’s an example of a player who signs a Minor League contract with a club over the off-season and then gets given an NRI to try to earn a spot on the roster or at least to impress enough to either remain in the organisation as a Minor League player or to be picked up by another team.

The other main type of NRI is a player who is already part of the club’s farm system and gets given the opportunity to spend some of spring with the Major League team before being sent on to Minor League camp.  Whilst some of those players will be in a situation of trying to earn a roster spot, in the main they will be there to give the Major League coaching staff a chance to work with them for a few weeks and also to help fill out the Spring Training line-ups.

As you’ll notice, Major League regulars often only play four innings or so at the start of spring – or may not play at all if it’s a road game – before being replaced by Minor Leaguers.

One quirk of the transaction rules is that Ohtani, as a non-MLB free agent, technically signed a Minor League contract with the Angels so he is as an NRI currently as he hasn’t yet had to be added to the Angels’ 40-man roster.

More Rays woes as Honeywell heads under the knife

It seems to happen every spring that a top pitching prospect on the verge of making their Major League debut has their progress cruelly halted by an elbow injury that requires ‘Tommy John’ surgery (named after the pitcher the experimental surgery was first tried on in 1974).

Last year it was the St Louis Cardinals’ Alex Reyes, this year it is the Tampa Bay Rays’ Brent Honeywell.

The pitcher took a pragmatic view to the situation, as reported on MLB.com: “We sign up to be pitchers. Bad things happen every now and then. There’s a couple of things that you can prevent, but I don’t think this is one of them. It’s either going to go or it’s not, the way I look at it”.

It was yet another blow this off-season for Rays fans, coming in the same week as Steven Sousa being traded away to the Arizona Diamondbacks in a three-team trade that also included the Yankees.

If we go by Baseball-Reference’s flavour of WAR (Wins Above Replacement), the Tampa Bay Rays’ most valuable players from 2017 were:

  1. Kevin Kiermaier – 5.1
  2. Steven Sousa – 4.2
  3. Logan Morrison – 3.6
  4. Evan Longoria – 3.6
  5. Corey Dickerson – 2.7
  6. Alex Cobb – 2.3.

The best you can say is that at least Kiermaier is still on the club, at time of writing at least.

Cobb and Morrison are free agents and clearly not coming back to the Rays, Longoria and Sousa have been traded, whilst Dickerson was recently Designated for Assignment (DFA’d) and picked up by Pittsburgh.

There’s an argument that when you add it all up, the Rays might not lose too much performance when additions are factored in and that they were unlikely to challenge the Red Sox and Yankees in the AL East this season even with those players.

Such logical thinking doesn’t make it less jarring for a fan who hangs on the results of all 162 games in a regular season.  Honeywell was one of the reasons Rays fans could look at the off-season departures and think ‘well at least we can enjoy watching him starting his Big League career’

Sadly that’s now going to be put off until sometime in 2019.

The Grandyman Can – and did

The first home run of Spring Training came courtesy of all-round good guy Curtis Granderson. He got off to the perfect start by taking a 1-1 pitch into right field whilst batting lead-off for Toronto.

Granderson signed a $5m contract with the Blue Jays over the off-season after spending time with the Mets and Dodgers last year.  He’s a fan favourite wherever he goes and has a place in the hearts of British baseball fans due to his Ask Curtis appearances on Baseball on 5 years ago.

 

The Most Wonderful Time of the Year (for those who get good presents)

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It’s the time of year when usual greetings are followed by variations on the same question: ‘have you got all your Christmas shopping done yet?.

Presents are on the mind right now, whether ones you are buying for others or ones you hope to receive.

Fans of the LA Angels and New York Yankees must feel like Christmas has come early this week after they both received the best type of present, a surprise one.

Oh, Shohei Ohtani

(Which is what Angels fans should be singing, to the tune of Seven Nation Army, if they have any sense whatsoever)

Ohtani choosing the Angels was a surprise, but not so much based on his destination and more that, as became apparent as the process played out, this was a completely unique situation.  There were plenty of rumours and second-guessing, yet the decision was a personal choice for Ohtani and no one outside his close confidants really knew what would sway him.

The tough part of Christmas is not receiving a present you hoped for and several teams are feeling that more than most with Ohtani.  The San Diego Padres briefly became the rumoured frontrunner and Padres fans haven’t had much going their way of late.  The Seattle Mariners and Texas Rangers also looked favourites at one time or another and have the added pain of seeing up-close what they have missed out on in the AL West over the seasons ahead.

“Stanton …

(… deliver, your fastball or your life”. Not sure if the Adam and the Ants 80’s classic is quite so well known in New York to be the basis of a chant, though)

The first team to be publicly shunned by Ohtani was the New York Yankees, a slight that prompted two typical responses.  Firstly, the New York press buried him for ‘not having the guts’ to play in New York.  Then the Yankees went and traded for Giancarlo Stanton instead.

Much as with Ohtani, Stanton’s choice – a product of his wisely negotiated no-trade clause – came at the cost of other teams who thought he would be wearing their uniform instead.  For all the progress they made with the Marlins, it never quite felt like the St Louis Cardinals would end up with Stanton, yet the Giants appeared to have a decent chance.  Both will need to turn their attention elsewhere now that Stanton is heading to the Bronx to team up with Aaron Judge in a two-man wrecking crew to strike fear in every opposing pitcher’s heart.

Meanwhile, new Yankee manager Aaron Boone must be expecting to get a stocking full of coal this Christmas to even things out.

Enjoying the presents

The Yankees now have some work to do in terms of roster decisions and potentially trading another regular to accommodate Stanton’s pay whilst meeting their target of staying below the $197m luxury tax threshold.  The whole point for the Yankees though is that they can happily find solutions to those ‘problems’ when it allows them to acquire such an outstanding proven talent as Stanton.

The deal has created plenty of funny tales of ‘Agent Jeter’ helping out the Yankees.  Many are coming from annoyed Boston Red Sox fans who are stoking the ‘Evil Empire’ fires once again.

In any case, what Jeter and his colleagues have done here makes complete sense given the situation they are in.  It was madness – well, more accurately short-term egotistical idiocy by former owner Jeffrey Loria – for the Marlins to give one player, however great, such a vast contract and they had little choice but to trade Stanton despite having a relatively weak negotiating position.

It creates yet more significant sympathy for long-suffering Marlins, but none whatsoever for Jeter and his ownership colleagues.  As the NY Post story linked to above notes, the Marlins are $400m in debt and losing money fielding an uncompetitive team, so major work is needed.  That’s a difficult position to be in, however, those were the same facts on the table when they agreed to pay $1.2bn for the team. It doesn’t exactly inspire much confidence in the new regime being shrewd negotiators, does it?

Mike Trout’s new best friend

(Other than his wife, that is)

As for the Angels, Ohtani’s decision to join them is a huge coup and one that will help them to respond to the justified accusation that they are failing to capitalise on having one of the best players the game has seen in many years.

Mike Trout has played in six-and-a-bit seasons so far and in only one of those, 2014, has the team reached the play-offs, which simply resulted in an ignominious 3-0 ALDS sweep at the hands of the Kansas City Royals. There is a good core of players there alongside Trout in Andrelton Simmons, Justin Upton, Kole Calhoun, Garrett Richards and others.  Adding Ohtani to it doesn’t obviously put them ahead of the Houston Astros in the AL West, but it definitely increases their Wild Card prospects.

The most exciting part of Ohtani’s arrival is how he and the Angels plan to help him become a two-way player and to get regular at-bats.  Losing the DH on his pitching days is the obvious starting point, but it seems like they will also be giving him DH opportunities on non-pitching days too (playing him in the field isn’t likely in his debut year, based on initial reports).

The reports suggest Ohtani is a legitimate hitting talent, not just a pitcher who can run into one every now and then, but he’s no different to any other hitting talent in needing regular at-bats and time to develop his craft in the Major Leagues.  Whether he will have the opportunity to do that over the next couple of years – for example, a few dodgy pitching performances in a row will quickly start comments on him being better off focusing on his pitching – will probably determine how well it goes.

Regardless, it’s going to be fascinating to watch how he gets on and if he does just end up as a home-run threat on days he pitches then that’s still going to be fun.

Unless it’s against your team, of course.  With my A’s hat on I naturally hope Ohtani doesn’t turn out as well as planned, just as I’d be more than happy if Judge-Stanton becomes a dud duo rather than a dynamic one when our pitching staff is facing them.

Such petty bias outstanding, the arrival of Ohtani to MLB and Stanton joining the Yankees are undoubtedly incredibly exciting developments that only add to the anticipation of the MLB season starting up again in the new year.

Whatever presents you do or don’t get this Christmas, the 2018 MLB season is sure to be a present well worth waiting for.

MLB 2016 – American League Preview

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MlbHlSqA new baseball season always creates plenty of excitement, yet 2016 promises to be something a bit special.

There are so many great potential story lines – a part of so many teams that potentially could make it to the play-offs – that it’s difficult to know where to begin in rounding them up.

That’s especially the case in the American League.

Whilst there are teams that likely will be out of the play-off conversation when September comes around (to my reckoning: Baltimore, Chicago White Sox, Minnesota, Oakland and Tampa Bay), none of them are punting on the season and it’s not beyond the realms of possibility that one of them could still be in with a sniff if things go their way.

You can put together realistic scenarios for most of the teams to at least have a shot at the Wild Card. Here are a couple of the main stories in the three AL divisions alongside my predictions (i.e. somewhat educated guesses) as to who will finish where.

AL East

The Toronto Blue Jays clearly had a good team last year and the logic of them winning the AL East division in 2015 made many overlook that this was a club that hadn’t made it to the play-offs since their back-to-back World Series triumphs in 1992 and 1993.

It was a tremendous achievement for John Gibbons and his men and they will hope that having taken that leap they are set for a period of success; however, there’s a shadow hanging over the club that may call that into question. Sluggers Jose Bautista and Edwin Encarnacion are both out of contract at the end of the season and neither have signed an extension as yet, with their own self-imposed ‘start of season’ deadlines about to expire. If that doesn’t change in the next few days, the possibility that two of their core players could both be leaving at the end of the season will add an extra dimension to their campaign.

The Boston Red Sox know that this will be David Ortiz‘s last season as he is set to retire and they will want him to go out on a high note. They’re an interesting team this year. The starting rotation includes plenty of question marks after the newly-recruited ace David Price, but from there this is a roster that should be competing at the sharp end. The thing is, you could have said the same before the 2014 and 2015 seasons and in both cases they didn’t just miss out on the play-offs, they finished dead last in the division. David Ortiz’s send-off is far from the only reason that 2016 has to be different.

AL Central

The projection systems have written off the Kansas City Royals yet again despite back-to-back World Series appearances and capturing the ultimate prize last year.

The Royals are not an extravagantly talented team loaded with stars and instead very admirably have found ways to work around their limitations to be more than the sum of their parts. Their Opening Day starting rotation of Edinson Volquez, Ian Kennedy, Yordano Ventura, Chris Young and Kris Medlen looks underwhelming, for example, but they’re an excellent fielding side and if they can hand over the game to their bullpen with a lead then that’s normally good enough to win the game. Doubting their ability to make it three Fall Classic appearances in a row isn’t unjust; however you shouldn’t be surprised if they do.

Conversely, the Detroit Tigers are still being looked at favourably despite falling to pieces in 2015 and falling to the bottom of the division. They’ve just become the first MLB team to hand out two $100m+ contracts in the same off-season – signing outfielder Justin Upton and pitcher Jordan Zimmermann – so their worst-to-first intentions are clear. If they get some luck with good health to their key players – and that’s a big if – then they just might do it.

AL West

Look through all the predictions and this is the division that has the most people scratching their head when trying to pick a winner. If in doubt, the best starting place is to look back to how things turned out last season, and that would mean the West being a Texas two-step battle once again.

The Houston Astros’ excellent 2015 was a surprise even to the team itself and they will be an exciting club again this year with Carlos Correa and Dallas Keuchel leading the way. It’s worth remembering, though, that they got off to a dazzling start by winning 15 of their 22 games in April and then played just a shade over .500 the rest of the way (71-69) to an 86-76. They will enter this season with expectations on their shoulders, so we’ll have to say how they carry that load.

The Texas Rangers went in the other direction. They struggled through April and on 3rd of May were bottom of the division on an 8-16 record, 9.5 games behind the leading Astros. The Rangers then swept a three-game series in Houston on their way to a 19-11 May and ultimately swept past their Lone Star State rivals on 15 September to go on and win the division.

All of which means that we shouldn’t overact to how the standings look at the end of the first month. The full 162-game regular season showed that both the Astros and Rangers were good teams in 2015 and, irrespective of their April records this year, that’s likely to be the case again in 2016.

My predictions

AL East – Toronto, Boston (WC), NY Yankees, Tampa Bay, Baltimore.

AL Central – Kansas City, Cleveland (WC), Detroit, Chicago WS, Minnesota.

AL West – Texas, Houston, Seattle, LA Angels, Oakland.

Trades completed and qualifying offers accepted as the 2015/16 MLB offseason begins

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It’s been an active start to the MLB offseason, with a couple of notable trades and three potential free agents becoming the first group to accept a ‘qualifying offer’ from their existing teams under the current system.

The idea of the qualifying offer is that it allows a team the chance to keep hold of a player that they’ve had for at least one full season rather than see them leave as a free agent with their contract having come to an end. In practice, that’s not really the way teams see it. They expect the player to leave and get a multi-year contract elsewhere; however by putting a qualifying offer on the table the team will then get an extra draft pick for the following year’s amateur draft as compensation.

The offer is set by MLB based on the average salary of the highest earning 125 players in the league that year. This year the qualifying offer was set at $15.8m, essentially £200k per week at current conversion rates, so it’s a sizeable salary on its own and teams will normally only offer it when they don’t expect a player to take it (i.e. it being judged they will be able to get a contract worth much more than $15.8m on the free agent market).

The Baltimore Orioles will be fine with catcher Matt Wieters accepting their qualifying offer. Had he not missed significant time due to elbow surgery over the past two seasons, Wieters likely would have been off and away, so getting at least one more season from him is a bonus for Baltimore. The Los Angeles Dodgers have more than enough money to make pitcher Brett Anderson’s $15.8m worth paying too.

The one team that perhaps isn’t quite so content is the Houston Astros. Outfielder Colby Rasmus is a decent player, as highlighted by his home-run hitting exploits in the playoffs a month ago, so he is hardly a booby prize, but it certainly looks like they were hoping to get a draft pick out of the offer rather than expecting to give a fair chunk of money to him, bearing in mind they look likely to have a relatively modest payroll again in 2016. That’s the risk you take with making the offer though.

Money is plentiful in MLB so for many teams those sort of risks are ones that can be absorbed easily enough. It’s a different proposition with trades though. The risk there is that the players you give away come back to make you look foolish for years to come.  Still, if you want to sign a good player, you have to accept that you’ll need to part with good players (or more commonly good prospects) to get them.

The two biggest trades of the week resulted in the Los Angeles Angels acquiring shortstop wizard Andrelton Simmons from the Atlanta Braves and the Boston Red Sox getting elite closer Craig Kimbrel from the San Diego Padres. The initial reactions suggest the Padres got a good haul of young talent for Kimbrel – less than one year after they gave up several prospects to acquire him from Atlanta – whilst the Braves’ return for Simmons was slightly underwhelming. As always with trades, only time will tell quite how they will be judged in the end.

There are two main subplots from the trades.

The first is that Dave Dombrowski has been brought into the Red Sox’s organisation as President of Baseball Operations with the intention of the team being aggressive in turning around their fortunes in short order. For a club with such significant resources, both financial and in terms of talented staff, it is incredible that they’ve produced a team that’s finished bottom of the AL East in three out of the last four seasons, even if the glory of their 2013 World Series triumph in the other year has dulled the pain of those losing seasons quite considerably. It should be expected that Boston will be one of the most active teams this offseason as they look to get back to the play-offs.

The second is that the Atlanta Braves’ decision to move to a new ballpark for the 2017 season onwards has had a far-reaching impact on the player market. First baseman Freddie Freeman is the only notable player left from their successful 2013 squad now that Simmons has been traded away. Kimbrel will be playing for the Red Sox under the four-year contract that he signed with the Braves back in February 2014 when it looked like he would be with the team for years to come, whilst this year’s free agent class is led by outfielder Jason Heyward who will be testing the market after being traded to the St Louis Cardinals a year ago by Atlanta.

The success of the Chicago Cubs and Houston Astros this year has shown the value of stripping everything down and starting again, just as the Braves are now doing. However, teams normally take this route in response to being left with an ageing and expensive roster well past its best. The difference in Atlanta’s case is that their 2013 team had a core of players who looked like being at the heart of a consistent contender for a good few years.

Some dreadful bad luck with injuries to their pitching staff played into the thinking that they should regroup and look to the future, but maybe that will prove to be a mistake. With the two Wild Card format and the apparent absence of any real dominant force in the game at present time, it’s becoming more the case that if there is a realistic chance of making it to the playoffs in a given year, teams will go for it rather than waiting for a perfect year that may never come.

The Braves have now amassed a deep group of prospects from which they hope to form the nucleus of a winning team in a few years’ time, yet they may find they gave up on a group that had a better chance of adding another World Series to the sole 1995 triumph since the franchise moved to Atlanta in 1966.

The unpredictable nature of baseball is summed up by pitcher Kris Medlen. He pitched brilliantly for the Braves as they won the NL East in 2013 and was one of the core players at the heart of the team, before he suffered an elbow injury in Spring Training 2014 requiring Tommy John surgery and a long spell on the sidelines. The Braves are now in a rebuilding spell, whilst Medlen has just earned a World Series ring as a reliever with the Kansas City Royals.