Being more or less snowed in over the weekend provided plenty of time to leaf through this year’s BP annual. I was originally just going to rant about the Cardinals chapter, but figured I’d go ahead and do the whole division.
Chicago Cubs
Sahadev’s essay was excellent but not really news to those of us who follow the team as closely as we do. My only reaction was to knock on wood when he mentioned the bullet that the Cubs dodged when the Astros took Mark Appel…things wouldn’t look quite as exciting down on the farm without Kris Bryant becoming Death, Destroyer of Baseballs.
Player capsule of note: Starlin Castro
“…While some might say that the year and a half experiment adjusting Castro’s approach was a failure, the results suggest that 2014 actually represented the synthesis of Castro’s natural approach and the Sveum-Rowson teaching. Though he technically can cover a few inches off the plate, Castro took more of those pitches, swinging at a career-low 30 percent of the pitches he saw outside the zone…while he gets dinged for lapses in concentration that lead to sloppy errors or base running mistakes, they were infrequent last year…his third All-Star performance served to scold those in the baseball world who wrote him off too hastily after 2013.”
I’m looking forward to what he can do this year, especially with Addison Russell waiting in the wings.
Cincinnati Reds
R.J. Anderson’s essay focused on the difficult job Reds GM Walt Jocketty faced this offseason, namely that 80% of the rotation was due to hit free agency after 2015 while last year’s offense didn’t even manage to scrape together 600 runs. The solution – trading Latos (who took a massive dump on the Reds training staff and clubhouse culture in an interview with Rosenthal last week) and Alfredo Simon, who is pretty much the platonic ideal of a regression candidate. It looks like he’s going all in to keep Cueto (good luck) and/or Leake (uh…okay). The Reds season basically hinges on bounce backs from Votto and Bruce along with hoping the young pitching filling the holes in the rotation can put everything together.
Player capsule of note: Marquez Smith
I was leafing through the player capsules and was probably going to pick Votto or one of the aforementioned young starters, but then I saw a name I vaguely recognized. It’s everyone’s favorite 30 year old in high-A ball!
“You know your friend who likes to play MLB: The Show and hit .350 with 70 HRs and 150 RBI while refusing to increase the difficult level from “Beginner”? That’s smith, who laid waste to the Cal League at 29…Smith reached AAA back in 2010 with the Cubs, OPD’d .958, repeated the league in 2011 and lost 130 points of slugging percentage, spent half of 2012 in the Atlantic and Mexican leagues and has played most of the last two years at [high-A] Bakersfield.”
His line at high-A Bakersfield: .323/.438/.623, 29 HR, 126 RBI. So I guess now we know what happened to him.
Milwaukee Brewers
J.P. Breen’s essay was pretty interesting – it focused on how the Brewers tendency to “mortgage the future” for guys like Sabathia, Marcum, and Greinke to go all in hasn’t really burned them that badly. Brantley was the most successful guy going the other way in the Sabathia trade, but this is six years later and I don’t think anyone thought he would post a year like he did in 2014, the Indians included. Lorenzo Cain is another guy that kind of screamed 4th outfielder (to me, at least), and we can’t forget about the Most Exciting Player in Baseball. They’ve done a good job signing mid-tier FAs to fill those gaps, and it’s easy to forget how good they’ve been since 2008. As was pointed out on the recent BP Brewers preview podcast, their farm system has been rated poorly since they’ve done a terrible job developing capital-S Stars, but they crank out a ton of low ceiling, high floor MLB-ready players like Khris Davis and his ilk.
Player capsule of note: Jonathan Lucroy
“…Back in 2010, he failed to make the BP 101 top prospect list. In 2014, he was the best catcher in baseball….His 6.0 WARP was tops at his position and eight best overall, but of course that doesn’t factor in framing, where steady-heady added more than two full wins if you believe the methodology [ed note: still kinda skeptical]…when the Brewers signed him to a long pre-arb extension before the 2012 season, it landed somewhere between “huh” and “oh”…three years in he’s produced about 10 [WARP] and he’s still under contract for $12.8 million over the next three years.”
Brewers fans trolling the Cardinals with Luc vs Yadi might have been my favorite thing last season.
Pittsburgh Pirates
It was kind of a weird year for the Pirates and Pirates fans in general, whereafter two decades of futility they made their second playoffs in a row and yet were a disappointment, partially in thanks to relying on dumpster fire-diving acquisition and perennial ROY candidate Edinson Volquez in the wild card playoff game. Given how random that game is I think the team made the right decision to try for the division, despite the long odds.
Player capsule of note: Josh Harrison, 3b
“…From BP2012: ‘It’s a shame Harrison has no interest in taking free passes, since he could be a useful player if his walk rate ever exceeded his height’
From BP2013: ‘Figuring out why the Pirates like Harrison enough to keep him around is tough’
From BP2014: ‘Realistically, it’s hard to see the pipsqueak sized Harrison hitting for much pop heading forward, and that leaves his ability to produce effectively in doubt’
…we went from unconvinced that he should be on a big league roster to agreeing with those who thought he deserved down-ballot MVP votes. But us being us, we can’t help but wonder if Harrison will ever approximate his production again. Usually legitimate breakouts bring with them improvements in underlying areas, Harrison’s? Not so much. He did walk more, but not by much, and his career best ISO wasn’t far removed from his effort in 2013. Even his plate discipline stats are mixed: He swung about as often, made a little less contact and chased out of the zone more than he had in 2013….none of this is meant to take away from Harrison or his incredible 2014, we’d just like to see a little more before we buy in to the idea he’s an above-average player”
A 5 WARP season out of nowhere is pretty nuts. N.B., his BABIP was .353 last year. At the .300ish BABIP PECOTA is projecting his line looks more like .282/.321/.415, and that’s with a walk rate ‘improving’ to 4.3% from last year’s 4%.
Honorable mention: Andrew McCutchen’s player note was simply “Practically the perfect franchise player”
St Louis Cardinals
Grab a drink before reading this, you’ll need it.
I had to go find more beer after reading Howard Medgal’s team essay about the Cardinals. It basically read like any thing written here about the 2009 Cubs season – it was amazing how much shit went wrong that year and the team still had a winning record. The same went for the 2014 Cardinals except they still won the division anyway, because Cardinals. Yadi got hurt and missed much of the season (and the playoffs), Kolton Wong and Jhonny Peralta were putrid for the first few months of the year, Matt Carpenter’s power disappeared, Matt Holliday slugged below .400 in the first half, offseason acquisition Peter Bourjos made the struggling Wong and Peralta look like Babe Ruth at the plate, Allen Craig suddenly wasn’t an RBI machine anymore, Oscar Taveras didn’t hit, Waino pitched with an injury all year (but still posted a 2.85 ERA because Cardinals), Michael Wacha was diagnosed with some rare shoulder injury, Trevor Rosenthal gave up roughly 500 HRs, and other previously shutdown bullpen types struggled with command. But they turned it around and won the division anyway. The final quote from the essay:
“Even accounting for bad luck, it doesn’t look like that streak [4 years in the postseason] is ending anytime soon. Because while fans of 29 other teams don’t want to hear it, the St. Louis Cardinals are actually due for a few breaks to come their way.”
*headdesk* *headdesk* *headdesk* *bourbon*
Good thing they got that competitive balance pick to even out their bad luck and market.
Player capsule of note: Yadier Molina, C
” ‘It’s almost like he can look right into a hitter’s soul’, Shelby Miller said about Molina’s game-calling ability last spring. It’s exactly the sort of intangible quality that has made Molina the beating heart of the Cardinals, and with the retirement of Derek Jeter, perhaps all of baseball. Molina has never led the Cardinals in quantifiable value measures like WARP…it’s been his other contributions — leadership, game-calling and the pitcher confidence it spawns, the suppression of the running game — that continue to make him one of the most valuable players in baseball. “
Good lord, it looks like the national columnists will have someone that they can do a search-and-replace with Derek Jeter’s name for all their lazy columns this year. Should also mention that there was at least one appeal to ‘fans in the heartland’ in other player comments.