MLBTR Chat Transcript: 12/16/19
Click here to read a transcript of tonight’s chat with Connor Byrne of MLBTR.
Astros Re-Sign Joe Smith
The Astros have announced a two-year deal to bring back reliever Joe Smith. The deal includes $8MM in guaranteed money, per Joel Sherman of the New York Post (via Twitter). Smith is a client of Excel Sports Management.
Smith missed a big chunk of 2019 owing to a torn Achilles, but bounced back with aplomb and threw 25 excellent innings down the stretch. The 35-year-old sidearmer obviously convinced the Houston brass that he has plenty left in the tank.
Though he has rarely been a major strikeout pitcher, Smith has always produced strong groundball numbers. Outside of his tendon tear, he has been quite durable. And he has a long and consistent history of befuddling opposing hitters. In 695 1/3 frames at the game’s highest level, he carries a 2.98 ERA and has yet to finish a season with an ERA over 3.83.
Upon his return last year, Smith sat comfortably in his typical range in terms of velocity and swinging-strike rate. He attacked the zone more than ever and lived to tell the tale, unlike many 2019 pitchers in a longball-laden season.
Despite his relatively late return to action, the Astros had gained full trust by the end of the season. They went to Smith frequently in the postseason, with four appearances each in the ALCS and World Series after a pair of divisional showings. He ultimately allowed three earned runs in 8 2/3 innings.
Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports Images.
Pirates Sign Luke Maile
4:50pm: The club has announced the signing.
3:30pm: The Pirates have agreed to a deal with free agent catcher Luke Maile, per Jon Heyman of MLB Network (via Twitter). It’ll be a MLB pact, with financial details still unknown. Maile is a client of Pro Star Management.
Maile, 28, has turned in abysmal showings with the bat in two of the past three seasons. He was nearly a league-average hitter in 2018, when he slashed .248/.333/.366 in 231 plate appearances. But Maile owns just a 48 wRC+ for his career and was worse than that in 2019.
Clearly, the Bucs aren’t making this move on the presumption that Maile will be a valuable offensive contributor. The hope is that he’ll be capable of delivering at least palatable work from the batter’s box, though the team surely knows even that can’t be relied upon.
When the Pirates decided to drop Elias Diaz at the outset of the winter, the club made clear it wanted to improve defensively. That’s an area that Maile can be trusted. He grades as an above-average overall defender, generally receiving positive reviews in the framing department, and has been trusted by the Rays and Jays in spite of his occasionally dreadful offensive output.
Yankees To Sign Adam Warren
The Yankees have reached agreement on a minor-league contract with righty Adam Warren, per Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic (via Twitter). He’ll receive an invitation to MLB camp as a non-roster invitee. It’s a two-year arrangement, MLB.com’s Mark Feinsand notes on Twitter, which recognizes the fact that Warren is returning from Tommy John surgery.
The contract includes a $800K salary in the event that Warren is able to earn his way onto the big league roster. He can also pick up another $700K in incentives based upon appearances. The deal includes an August 28th opt-out clause, Rosenthal adds, which perhaps suggests that Warren is hoping to rehab on a fairly aggressive timetable from his September procedure.
Warren, 32, first cracked the majors with the Yanks and has spent parts of seven seasons in two prior stints in the Bronx. He pitched for the Padres in 2019, struggling to a 5.34 ERA in 28 2/3 innings with 7.8 K/9 and 3.8 BB/9.
Rangers Sign Blake Swihart, Brian Flynn, 3 Others
The Rangers announced a host of minor-league deals this afternoon. Catcher/outfielder Blake Swihart, southpaw Brian Flynn, and righties Tim Dillard and Arturo Reyes all received spring invites. Reliever Matt Bush inked a two-year minors deal that doesn’t promise participation in MLB camp.
Swihart, 27, has just not managed to turn the corner at the game’s highest level. But he remains an intriguing talent and could be an interesting potential final bench piece if he shows well in camp. The former top-100 prospect owns a .243/.301/.355 batting line in 696 career plate appearances at the game’s highest level.
It seems harder to imagine Flynn cracking the Rangers’ relief unit after another tough season. Through 187 2/3 frames in the big leagues, he carries a 4.41 ERA with 6.4 K/9, 4.4 BB/9, and a 42.4% groundball rate. The 29-year-old showed somewhat reduced velocity last year as well. But he has been able to keep the ball in the yard, which is something that couldn’t be said of quite a few fully established major leaguers in 2019.
Dillard, a former MLBTR contributor, will continue to function as a Triple-A pitching sage and bringer of merriment after a surprising return to the rotation in 2019. No small part of his role will be to help bring along players such as Reyes, a 27-year-old former Cardinals and Rays farmhand who has yet to crack the majors. Reyes owns a 4.96 ERA with 7.1 K/9 and 3.5 BB/9 in 330 career innings at Triple-A.
As for Bush, he’s going to miss a large portion of the coming season after undergoing Tommy John surgery in July. The Rangers obviously still see reason to hope that the 34-year-old can return to the form he showed in 2016-17, when he pitched to a 3.08 ERA over 114 innings.
Rangers Sign Joely Rodriguez
DECEMBER 16: Texas has announced the signing.
DECEMBER 9: The Rangers have agreed to a two-year, $5.5MM contract with left-hander Joely Rodriguez, pending a physical, Jon Morosi of MLB.com reports. He’s represented by Daniel Szew of L.A. Sports Management.
The pact comes with a club option for a third year, per Jeff Passan of ESPN, and MLBTR’s Steve Adams further reports that the contract would be worth $8MM if the option is exercised. Rodriguez spent most of the previous two years, including all of last season, in Japan as a member of the Chunichi Dragons.
This move represents something of a homecoming for the 28-year-old Rodriguez, a reliever who pitched with the Rangers’ Triple-A affiliate in 2017. However, Rodriguez didn’t take a major league mound as a Ranger during his prior stint with the club. To this point, all of his MLB experience has come as part of the Phillies, with whom he combined for 36 2/3 innings from 2016-17. Rodriguez struggled to prevent runs over that short span, evidenced by a 5.40 ERA, and posted a dismal K/BB ratio of 1.32 with 6.14 K/9 and 4.6 BB/9. He did, however, induce groundballs at a strong 58.3 percent clip.
Rodriguez hasn’t thrived in the majors thus far, and the same applies to his time in Triple-A. At the minors’ top level, he owns a 5.38 ERA with 6.8 K/9 and 4.3 BB/9 across 164 innings. To Rodriguez’s credit, though, he starred in Japan. Over 87 2/3 frames as a Dragon, Rodriguez put up a stingy 1.85 ERA and logged 10.6 K/9 and 2.9 BB/9. He parlayed that success into an unexpected payday in the majors, where he’ll return to join a Rangers team that has been aggressive on the pitching market this winter. They previously added starters Kyle Gibson and Jordan Lyles on contracts worth a combined $44MM.
As was the case with their rotation, the Rangers entered the offseason with bullpen issues, as their relief corps finished 2019 with mediocre marks. Going forward, it seems likely they’ll count on Rodriguez as one of their late-game bridges, though it’s anyone’s guess whether he’ll be able to carry the excellence he displayed in Japan to Texas.
Mets Designate Stephen Nogosek For Assignment
The Mets announced Monday that they’ve designated right-hander Stephen Nogosek for assignment. His spot on the roster will go to right-hander Rick Porcello, whose previously reported one-year, $10MM contract is now official.
Nogosek, 24, was the last of three remaining pitchers in the organization that the Mets had acquired when trading Addison Reed to the Red Sox back in 2017. Fellow righties Gerson Bautista (traded to Seattle in the Robinson Cano/Edwin Diaz deal) and Jamie Callahan (outrighted and signed with the Giants) have both gone to other clubs within the past 13 months.
Nogosek made his MLB debut with the Mets this past season but was roughed up for eight runs on a dozen hits and two walks with six strikeouts in 6 2/3 innings out of the bullpen. The 2016 sixth-round pick posted an eye-popping 1.07 ERA in 50 1/3 innings between Double-A and Triple-A in 2019, although his control (4.9 BB/9, 12.8 BB%) wasn’t great and he benefited from a .155 BABIP in 31 1/3 innings of Triple-A ball.
On the one hand, Nogosek is a fairly young reliever with minor league options remaining, a heater that averaged 95.1 mph in his brief MLB cup of coffee an a longstanding knack for avoiding home runs (0.81 HR/9 in 199 minor league innings). On the other hand, he’s a pronounced fly-ball pitcher with a persistent control issues who’ll need to continue avoiding the long ball against the game’s best hitters due to that limited ability to locate the ball. He’ll turn 25 in July and is more or less MLB-ready, so a club could take a look at him via a minor trade or a waiver pickup. The Mets will have a week to trade Nogosek or place him on outright waivers in hopes that he’ll clear and remain in the organization.
Mets Sign Rick Porcello
Dec. 16: The Mets have formally announced the signing.
Dec. 12: The Mets have struck a deal with free agent righty Rick Porcello, according to Ken Rosenthal and Eno Sarris of The Athletic (via Twitter). It’s a one-year, $10MM deal, per Jon Heyman of MLB Network (Twitter link).
This is a long-rumored match that’ll put the New Jersey native back in familiar territory. It’s a bit surprising to see now, though, after the Mets reportedly agreed yesterday to ink Michael Wacha. Both of these buy-low hurlers would figure to command rotation jobs, leaving the Mets with six clear candidates for the five-man unit. Whether or not that could produce a trade remains to be seen, but now appears plausible on paper.
Porcello, who’ll turn 31 later this month, is far removed from his surprising Cy Young season. There have been some lean years in between, but he has always answered the bell. Porcello has taken the ball for at least 32 starts in each of the past four campaigns and has only once failed to top 170 MLB frames in a season (2010, when he threw 162 2/3).
Any pitcher is a theoretical health risk, but Porcello’s record of durability is second to none. The Mets can safely assume they’ll get innings from their new starter … but of what quality?
Outside of a few particularly good and bad seasons, Porcello has mostly hovered around the low-4 ERA range. Through more than two thousand innings in the majors, he carries a 4.36 ERA that lines up with his lifetime peripherals: 6.7 K/9, 2.1 BB/9, 47.5% groundball rate. Fielding-independent pitching metrics largely concur with the results (4.09 FIP; 4.03 xFIP; 4.09 SIERA).
The Mets would be glad to see Porcello take the ball thirty-plus times and settle right around that four-earned-per-nine mark. But will he? Other teams reportedly offered three-year arrangements in an effort to woo Porcello, so there’s obviously some belief in the game that it’s plausible. But he’s also coming off of his ugliest season as a big leaguer.
In 2019, Porcello struggled to a 5.52 ERA in 174 1/3 innings. ERA estimators weren’t much more positive (4.76 FIP; 5.15 xFIP; 4.86 SIERA). He isn’t allowing an alarming rate of home runs per flyball (13.1%), but hitters have had greater success getting the ball in the air against him. He averaged a personal-worst 38.1% grounder rate and personal-high 41.5% flyball rate in 2019.
Perhaps it’s just a matter of a few well-conceived tweaks. Porcello has lost a bit of arm speed, though he’s still within range of his typical velocity levels. Opposing batters produced bigger-than-usual levels in hard-hit rate (37.2%) and launch angle (15.5 degrees), though neither figure was wildly out of line with Porcello’s prior history. Likewise, Porcello’s swinging-strike rate of 8.0% was on the low side for his recent track record but not a signal of a drastic shift in physical tools or efficacy.
Photo courtesy of USA Today Sports Images.
Jay Bruce Hires Excel Sports Management
Phillies outfielder Jay Bruce has changed representation and is now a client of Excel Sports Management, tweets Robert Murray. He’d previously been repped by Sosnick, Cobbe and Karon but sought new representation after his agent, Matt Sosnick, left the company following an arrest on charges of domestic violence. The agency has since rebranded as Apex Baseball.
Apex still retains a number of notable high-end clients (Pete Alonso, Blake Snell, Max Kepler, Blake Treinen, Mitch Haniger and Brendan McKay among them). Right-hander Chad Bettis also departed prior to the rebrand, hiring CAA Baseball to represent him moving forward.
The 32-year-old Bruce had a bizarre 2019 season, ranking ninth in the Majors (min. 300 plate appearances) with a career-high .306 isolated power mark (slugging minus batting average). But despite being one of baseball’s most powerful hitters in 2019, Bruce’s .261 OBP ranked 270th of 273 hitters with that same 300-PA minimum.
One might think that Bruce suddenly became extremely prone to strikeouts or infield flies to drive down his average and OBP, but that wasn’t the case. His 24.6 percent strikeout rate wasn’t outlandish by today’s standards, nor were the eight infield flies he registered. He batted just .121 on grounders, though, suggesting that he was particularly prone to outs via the shift. Even still, his .200 average on balls in play seems ripe for positive regression in 2020.
Bruce is signed through the 2020 season under the three-year, $39MM contract he inked with the Mets prior to the 2018 campaign and will be a free agent for the second time in his career next offseason. He’ll join Didi Gregorius, Michael Brantley, Joc Pederson and Jake Odorizzi among notable Excel free agents next winter.
The change in representation for Bruce has been updated in MLBTR’s Agency Database, which contains agency info on more than 2,500 players in both the big leagues and the minors. If you see any errors or omissions, please let us know via email: mlbtrdatabase@gmail.com.
Brewers, Avisail Garcia In “Advanced” Talks
The Brewers are in “advanced” talks with free-agent outfielder Avisail Garcia, per Marc Topkin of the Tampa Bay Times. The Athletic’s Ken Rosenthal tweeted on Saturday that Milwaukee was “trying hard” to complete a contract with the 28-year-old.
Garcia spent the 2019 season with the Rays, hitting .282/.332/.464 with 20 home runs, 25 doubles and a pair of triples in 530 trips to the plate. It was the second above-average offensive season from Garcia in the past three years, as he also turned in a career-best .330/.380/.506 line with the White Sox in 2017 (albeit with the help of a sky-high .392 average on balls in play). Garcia’s hard-hit rate and exit velocity both deteriorated in 2019 but were still better than league average. And while most wouldn’t expect it based on his 6’4″, 250-pound frame and middling stolen base totals, Garcia rates among the game’s best in terms of sprint speed, per Statcast.
Milwaukee’s outfield is already rather full, with Ryan Braun, Lorenzo Cain and Christian Yelich lined up from left to right field. But Braun has seen time at first base in recent seasons, and a more permanent move in that regard would open some at-bats for Garcia in the outfield, perhaps setting up a platoon with the left-handed-hitting Ben Gamel. The right-handed-hitting Garcia was a bit better against righties than lefties in 2019, but his career platoon splits suggest that he’s been much better against southpaws (.296/.352/.456) than against righties (.264/.312/.418).
Braun, Cain, Keston Hiura and Luis Urias give the Brewers four right-handed bats on whom to rely in 2020, and backup catcher Manny Pina has also been serviceable against lefties in his career. The Brewers, though, look like a club that could struggle to match up against left-handed starters — particularly if Cain doesn’t bounce back from a lackluster 2019 season at the plate. At the very least, Garcia would give manager Craig Counsell some extra thump against lefties, but he’s still a relatively young option who has more than held his own against right-handed pitchers over the past three seasons as well, creating the possibility that he could occupy a more regular role.
From a payroll vantage point, the Brewers have trimmed off quite a bit of money with an aggressive slate of non-tenders, the trade of Chase Anderson and the departure of free agents Yasmani Grandal and Mike Moustakas. After opening the 2019 season with a club-record $122.5MM payroll, they currently have about $67MM committed to 10 players (plus pending arbitration raises for Omar Narvaez, Josh Hader and Brent Suter as well as pre-arbitration salaries to round out the roster). Even if owner Mark Attanasio prefers not return to last season’s level of spending, there should still be room for Garcia and others to be added to the mix for the 2020 season.