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Padres Designate Kyle Tyler For Assignment

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The Padres announced they’ve designated reliever Kyle Tyler for assignment. San Diego also sent righty Pedro Avila — whom the club hadn’t previously indicated was in DFA limbo — outright to Triple-A after he went unclaimed on waivers. The moves clear a pair of 40-man roster vacancies for Adrian Morejón and Michel Báez, each of whom have been reinstated from the 60-day injured list and optioned to the minor leagues.

Tyler is no stranger to the DFA process, as he was something of the 41st man for a few teams earlier this season. The righty was successively designated for assignment and waived by the Angels, Red Sox, Padres and Angels a second time before being claimed off waivers by the Friars (for the second time in as many months) on April 12. At that point, he finally stuck on a 40-man roster for a couple months, but he’ll lose his spot yet again after a rough start to the season at Triple-A El Paso.

The 25-year-old has tossed 16 2/3 innings across 11 outings with the Chihuahuas, posting a 5.51 ERA. Tyler has punched out a solid 26.8% of batters faced but walked an untenable 19.7% of opponents. That marked a rather surprising turn of events for the former 20th-round pick, who had filled up the strike zone for essentially his entire minor league career prior to this season. That track record earned him his first five big league outings with the Halos last season and caught the attention of a few organizations during the first few weeks of this year. Tyler will now be traded or waived yet again in the coming week.

Avila has gotten to the big leagues in three of the past four years, but he’s made just four cumulative appearances. A well-regarded prospect early in his pro career, he’s seen his stock dip since undergoing Tommy John surgery in September 2019. He didn’t pitch in 2020 and spent almost all of last season in the upper minors after being non-tendered and re-signed to a minor league deal. San Diego selected him to make a start during last season’s final weekend after falling out of playoff contention, and he’d been on the 40-man roster since then.

He’s spent the bulk of this season as a member of the Chihuahuas, only making two MLB appearances. Avila has a disappointing 8.10 ERA in El Paso, where he’s allowed five homers in 23 1/3 frames and walked 15.6% of batters faced. That rough stretch cost the 25-year-old his roster spot. Avila has never been outrighted in his career and has barely any MLB service time, so he can’t refuse the assignment. He’ll remain in El Paso and try to earn another MLB crack.

Morejón will also be on that roster for the time being, as San Diego has optioned him to Triple-A. A one-time top pitching prospect, the southpaw opened last season in the Friars’ rotation. He required Tommy John surgery after just two starts, though, and the procedure obviously ended his campaign before it really got going. Morejón opened this year on the IL as he continued his recovery, but he’s spent the past few weeks in the minors on a rehab appearance. The 23-year-old has thus far topped out at three innings in a game as the team gradually builds his arm strength back.

Pitchers are allotted up to 30 days for rehab stints (although that can be extended for pitchers recovering from TJS with commissioner’s office approval). Whether the club applied for a lengthier rehab leash or not is unclear, but Morejón will now reassume a 40-man roster spot while the optional assignment provides him something of an unofficial rehab opportunity. The Padres already have a rotation logjam, so they can afford to take their time bringing along a young pitcher who is no doubt still viewed as a key piece of the organizational future.

It’s a nearly identical situation for Báez, who has been optioned to Double-A San Antonio. The 26-year-old reliever saw some MLB action between 2019-20, but he underwent a Tommy John procedure late last spring. He’s been on the IL since then but has made nine minor league appearances as he builds his arm back up.

Yankees Trade Luke Voit To Padres

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After months of speculation, Luke Voit’s time with the Yankees organization drew to a close Friday. The Yankees and Padres agreed to a trade sending the slugging first baseman to San Diego in exchange for minor league right-hander Justin Lange, according to announcements from both clubs. The Padres moved right-hander Michel Baez to the 60-day injured list in order to open a spot on the 40-man roster Voit.

Luke Voit | Vincent Carchietta-USA TODAY Sports

The writing for Voit has been on the wall at least since New York re-signed Anthony Rizzo — and quite arguably longer than that. The Yanks acquired Rizzo last summer while Voit was on the injured list for the third time that year alone, and since the 2021 season ended they’ve been connected to Rizzo, Freddie Freeman and Matt Olson as they made no secret about pursuing alternative options to the incumbent Voit.

Voit’s trade marks the culmination of a swift shift in the organization’s stance on him. Just one year ago, Voit was heading into Spring Training as the clear everyday first baseman, having just led the Majors with 22 home runs during the truncated 2020 season. However, a knee injury in camp led to meniscus surgery that kept Voit out of action for the season’s first six weeks. Voit returned in early May, but just two weeks later he headed back to the 10-day IL due to an oblique strain. That issue kept Voit out another three-plus weeks, and he lasted only a month before going back on the IL in mid-July due to lingering inflammation in his surgically repaired left knee.

All told, Voit was limited to just 68 games and 211 plate appearances in 2021. When he was on the field, Voit remained somewhat productive, slashing .239/.328/.427 (111 wRC+), but his offensive output was nowhere near its peak levels. Looking beyond leading the Majors in long balls during the brief 2020 season, Voit had raked from the moment the Yankees acquired him from the Cardinals in exchange for relievers Chasen Shreve and Giovanny Gallegos.

Largely blocked from regular playing time in St. Louis, Voit immediately proved to be a hidden gem unearthed by the Yankees. He belted 14 home runs in less than two months down the stretch in 2018, and in 892 trips to the plate as a Yankee from ’18-’20, he batted .279/.372/.543 with 57 home runs, 31 doubles, a triple and an 11.5% walk rate against a 26.3% strikeout rate. Even adding in his “down” year this past season, Voit’s time with the Yankees will draw to a close with a stout .271/.363/.520 batting line in 1133 plate appearances.

That type of production would be a boost to any lineup, and the Padres in particular could use some thump of that nature at first base and/or designated hitter. San Diego first basemen, led by Eric Hosmer, hit a combined .275/.337/.412. That’s not terrible production by any means, but the resulting 106 wRC+ ranked 20th in the Majors. Of more concern was that the Padres, as a team, hit just .241/.324/.380 against left-handed pitching (94 wRC+, 24th in MLB). Voit, a career .264/.344/.516 hitter against left-handed pitching, ought to be particularly helpful with regard to that deficiency — though it’s important to note that he shouldn’t be regarded as a platoon player. To the contrary, Voit actually has slightly better career numbers against right-handed pitching.

Productive as he’s been at the plate throughout his Yankees tenure, Voit is a below-average defender at first base. The Yankees have made improving the defense a clear priority of late, evidenced not only by bringing Rizzo back but also moving Gleyber Torres to second base, acquiring Isiah Kiner-Falefa to take the reins at shortstop and moving Gary Sanchez to the Twins in favor of what currently projects to be a glove-first pairing of Kyle Higashioka and Ben Rortvedt (acquired in that deal with the Twins).

Voit now heads to the Padres not only for the 2022 season but perhaps all the way through 2024. He’s still arbitration eligible, projected by MLBTR contributor Matt Swartz to earn $5.4MM in 2022 before earning a pair of raises on top of that sum. It’s an eminently reasonable price to pay for a hitter of Voit’s caliber, particularly if he can boost his production away from his 2021 output and closer to its 2018-20 levels.

As for the Yankees’ return, they’ll acquire a 20-year-old righty who can reach triple digits with his fastball but has drawn questions from scouts about his command. The 6’4″, 220-pound Lange was the No. 34 overall pick in the 2020 draft and made his pro debut with the Padres’ Rookie-ball club in 2021. There, he pitched 22 innings with a 6.95 ERA, a 28.4% strikeout rate and a bloated 14.7% walk rate. When ranking Lange 13th among San Diego farmhands, The Athletic’s Keith Law wrote that the righty has “huge stuff and a workhorse build” but questionable command in addition to a recent knee issue.

Lange adds a power arm to the lower levels of the Yankees’ system, albeit a high-risk one who’ll be a bit of a project for their development staff. Trading Voit drops the Yankees’ projected 2022 payroll a bit south of $240MM, although in terms of luxury-tax obligations, they’re still a bit over $253MM, which places them squarely in the new new CBA’s second tier of penalization.

Ken Rosenthal of The Athletic first reported the Padres’ interest in Voit. MLB Network’s Jon Heyman first reported that Voit had been traded to the Padres (Twitter link). Joel Sherman of the New York Post reported the return (Twitter link).

Michel Baez To Undergo Tommy John Surgery

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Padres right-hander Michel Báez is slated to undergo Tommy John surgery, Jeff Sanders of the San Diego Union-Tribune was among those to relay (Twitter link). The 25-year-old will miss the entire 2021 season and quite likely a significant portion of 2022.

Báez is a former top prospect but he has yet to carve out a consistent MLB role. Working almost exclusively out of the bullpen, the hard-throwing righty has picked up 34.1 innings at the major league level over the past two seasons. He has a 3.67 ERA/4.53 SIERA with slightly worse than average strikeout and walk rates (22.7% and 10.4%, respectively) over that time.

The loss of Báez deals a bit of a blow to San Diego’s bullpen depth this season. The Padres’ relief corps has a good amount of talent but also has a significant number of hurlers who are out of minor-league option years. That could lead to a bit of a roster crunch as the season progresses.

The Pitcher To Receive The Most Extra Strikes In 2019 Was…

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In a recent bout of strike zone curiosity, I started looking into umpire accuracy metrics to try to visualize the baseball world at our doorstep: a world in which balls and strikes are called by robot umpires. While referring to an electronic strike zone as “robot umpires” no doubt adds an unnecessary measure of Asimovian flourish, the reality of baseball’s future is bearing down on us. Electronic strike zones are coming to baseball.

Then again, COVID-19 threw a wrench into all pockets of predicting baseball’s future, and there’s no longer any certainty in, well, just about anything. So there will be no more crystal ball voyeurism from me today, no more speculation, only a cold, hard look at the past.

Of course, the issue of umpire accuracy is hardly reserved for the future. Until electronic strike zones are implemented, the human models making the calls behind the plate remain incapable of ridding themselves entirely of human error – try as they might. Sometimes a ball misses the plate, and they call it a strike. Sometimes it crosses the dish, and the arm stays at the umpire’s side. The question for today is this: which pitcher got the most extra strikes in 2019?

With my previous look into Statcast pitch data, I looked for clusters of pitchers that would illuminate certain things about how umpires called balls and strikes. Today is about passing along some of the trivia. Statcast data, after all, holds a ton of information, including whether or not each ball or strike was correctly called. Using machine learning, we can pretty cleanly find those pitchers who benefited the most from gifted strikes, as well as those who were hurt the most by stolen strikes.

And that brings us to Adam Warren of the San Diego Padres (frequently and presently a member of the New York Yankees). Of the pitchers who threw as many as 200 pitches in the majors in 2019, it wasn’t close: Warren benefited more than any other pitcher in 2019 from umpires gifting extra strikes.

To be perfectly clear, a gifted strike here is a pitch that lands outside the strike zone that the umpire calls a strike. This alone does not make Warren the luckiest pitcher in baseball. Nor does it make him the umpires’ favorite (though it probably gets him a look). In a vacuum, that Warren led the league in percentage of called strikes that were gifted means only this: no pitcher had a higher percentage of their called strikes come from pitches that missed the zone.

This was important for Warren because, even with the added help, only 31.4% of his pitches landed in the zone (league average was 39.4%). And while batters swung and missed at a relatively average rate when Warren was throwing strikes, batter O-Contract% – the percentage of times a batter makes contact when swinging at a ball outside the zone – was just 61.9%, much lower than the 67.3% average. So the more Warren got batters to chase, the more effective he became (surprise, surprise). Still, he only registered 7.85 K/9 versus 3.77 BB/9.

For context, MLB pitchers – on average – had ~16% of their called strikes come on pitches outside the zone. Warren, by contrast, received a gifted strike on almost 42% of his strike calls. This was an extreme outlier. The second-place finisher for highest percentage of gifted strikes was Michel Baez at ~30% – interestingly, also of the Padres (and the conspiracy is on!). Not for nothing, but Warren also fits the profile of the type of pitcher more prone to getting extra calls. He averaged just 86.4 mph this season (fastball clocking at 91.4 mph), he’s right-handed, and both his fastball and curve register in the bottom quartile for spin rate.

If he were a starter, he’d fit the mold exactly. Of course, sample size is likely a culprit here in Warren’s numbers being so far outside the norm. Warren wasn’t exactly a spotlight pitcher in 2019. He threw 555 pitches for the Padres across 25 games, 28 2/3 innings. He ended the year 4-1 with a 5.34 ERA/6.91 FIP making his season worth -0.2 bWAR/-0.8 fWAR. This is not to say he will be a total disaster if he suits up for the Yankees sometime this season, nor is it to say he’ll receive the same measure of umpire error if he does. Though Warren has been received favorably by umpires in the past, his overall average percentage of gifted strikes over the past 5 seasons is just under 28%. That still puts him two standard deviations above the mean, but nowhere near the outlier of his 2019.

Padres Promote Michel Baez, Adrian Morejon

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SUNDAY: The promotions of Baez and Morejon are official. The Padres made room for them by optioning outfielder Josh Naylor and righty Trey Wingenter to Triple-A El Paso. They also transferred injured pitchers Adam Warren and Miguel Diaz to the 60-day IL.

SATURDAY: Righty Michel Baez’s promotion to the Padres from Double-A Amarillo is “imminent,” per the San Diego Union-Tribune’s Kevin Acee. Baez, who was a nominal starter prospect – and near-consensus top-100 name – prior to the 2019 season, has worked strictly in relief for Amarillo since returning from a back injury in mid-May.

It’s the third in a string of high-profile prospect promotions for the plummeting Padres this weekend, who also recalled INF Luis Urias from Triple-A El Paso and are set to select the contract of touted lefty Adrian Morejon, also from Double-A. The San Diego ’pen has been in shambles lately: apart from the untouchable Kirby Yates, who’s on pace for one of the best reliever seasons in MLB history, the revolving high-leverage door for the Friars hasn’t yielded a single reliable arm.

Baez’s prospect stock has slid considerably this season, with FanGraphs now characterizing his once-solid command as “fringe” and bemoaning an unforeseen velocity drop in the latter stages of the 2018 season. The 6’8 righty’s size can be a “hindrance,” per Baseball America, who notes that Baez has struggled to repeat his delivery of late. MLB.com is the high team on the 23-year-old: they place him at a solid #70 on the site’s top 100 list.

In 27 innings for Amarillo this year, Baez has set down 38 and walked 11 en route to a 2.00 ERA. Like soon-to-be teammate Morejon, Baez isn’t on the club’s 40-man roster, so two players will need to be jettisoned from the group shortly. The club also must make room for lefty Jose Castillo, who’s set to return soon from a lengthy injury absence.

Padres Agree To Deal With Right-Hander Michel Baez

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The Padres have agreed to sign 20-year-old Cuban right-hander Michel Baez and will pay him a $3MM signing bonus, reports Jesse Sanchez of MLB.com (via Twitter). Because the Padres are already over their allotted international bonus pool, Baez will come with a 100 percent luxury tax and cost the team a total of $6MM.

Sanchez lists Baez as 6’8″ and 230 pounds, noting that he has a fastball which sits in the 93-97 mph range. Baez comes without much in the way of publicly available information, as he didn’t rate in MLB.com’s list of top 30 international prospects, nor did he appear among the 47 international prospects that were listed on Fangraphs’ sortable scouting board. Baseball America’s Ben Badler ranked 50 players when listing his top international prospects this year — though he didn’t list Cuban players that had not yet been declared for free agency — and didn’t mention Baez’s name, either. Per Baseball-Reference, Baez pitched in part of just one pro season in Cuba — the 2014-15 season — and posted a 5.22 ERA with 17 strikeouts against 17 walks as an 18-year-old. Dennis Lin of the San Diego Union-Tribune tweets that he could start next season in A-ball and is a former teammate of fellow Padres signee Ronald Bolanos.

The lack of information on Baez is not to suggest that he’s lacking in any sort of appreciable talent. Players often fly under the radar and come with unexpectedly large signing bonuses when they do. A player of Baez’s age with that sort of frame and velocity certainly sounds appealing on the surface, though a great deal of additional context would be required before fairly assessing him. Regardless, Padres scouts are clearly enticed by Baez’s abilities, and the sum of the bonus itself seemingly indicates that San Diego faced some degree of competition for his services.

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