Rumours and links: Monday, February 8
Rumours and links: Monday, February 8
On Marwin Gonzalez of the filthy Astros, Marwin Gonzalez as a potential Jays add, Rob Manfred's balls, upcoming rule changes, Florida geography, and more!
Spring training is right around the corner, and the Blue Jays’ number three starter is currently either Robbie Ray or Steven Matz. So, naturally, the club’s hottest rumour at the moment involves, uh, Marwin Gonzalez?
We’ll get to that in a moment, but first: as I’m probably going to mention around here several more times at least, I’d like to remind you that I’ve got a Facebook page up and running where I share everything that I write here just as soon as it gets posted. So if that’s your hellsite of choice, please give a like!
And now, it’s time for today’s rumours and links and things…
Marwin Gonzalez?
Sportsnet’s Shi Davidi tweeted on Sunday that the Jays "have shown interest" in Marwin Gonzalez, yet another player to have played for the 2017 Houston Astros.
"They’ve liked him in the past and he’s the type of universal adapter defender they often seek," Shi explains, before adding that it's "unclear if it’s just due diligence or more, amid club’s ongoing pursuit of pitching."
The Astros thing I bring up mostly just because it's funny, of course. But it's definitely noticeable how many people who were part of that tainted World Series championship have since become Blue Jays. Dave Hudgens, George Springer, Ken Giles, Tyler Clippard, Derek Fisher, etc. Clearly the Jays aren't terribly bothered by the whole trash can business, and frankly, a quick look at Gonzalez's numbers is a good reminder of just how murky the entire issue is, and how difficult it ought to be for us to draw conclusions from it. (Yes, I’m going to talk about all this again, skip ahead if you must!)
Gonzalez has been league average hitter for his career, though there have been some pretty big variations in his wRC+ — and one in particular that stands out. Here's a look at his wRC+ by year:
2012: 65
2013: 54
2014: 110
2015: 111
2016: 89
2017: 144
2018: 104
2019: 93
2020: 66
Ho ho ho! Damning stuff. At least until you take 10 seconds to look into his splits. Gonzalez was a better overall hitter on the road (150 wRC+ to 138), and much more difficult to strike out (14.8% strikeout rate on the road compared to 23.6% at home).
What do we make of that?
Per Jared Diamond of the Wall Street Journal, the Astros used their Excel-based application "Codebreaker" to decode other teams' signs while on the road as well as at home, but without the trash can to bang on — the team's preferred method of relaying incoming pitches while at their home park — it’s unclear how well that would have worked without having a runner on second base to relay signals.
Commissioner Rob Manfred’s official statement on the scandal claims that “witnesses explained that they initially experimented with communicating sign information by clapping, whistling, or yelling, but that they eventually determined that banging a trash can was the preferred method of communication.”
If the methods players would have had to resort to on the road were just as effective, it wouldn’t make much sense to keep banging on a trash can in such a conspicuous manner at home, would it?
I think it’s safe to believe that whatever the Astros were doing on the road was less effective than at home. So Gonzalez’s numbers aren’t nearly as clear evidence as wrongdoing as they maybe looks — especially when we consider that the Astros continued doing what they were doing into 2018. And were likely doing it before 2017 as well.
Last February, an anonymous scout claimed in a piece by Barry Svrluga and Dan Sheinin of the Washington Post, that the Astros’ cheating had been an open secret “for several years, not just starting in 2017. I would say probably 2016, maybe earlier.” (The 2016 Astros went 84-78 and ranked sixth in the American League by wRC+, for what it’s worth.)
And elsewhere in Manfred’s statement he claims that the league’s investigation concluded that “at some point during the 2018 season, the Astros stopped using the replay review room to decode signs because the players no longer believed it was effective.”
Gonzalez 2018 splits become interesting here, too. He had an 84 wRC+ in the first half of the year and a 134 wRC+ in the second half. Not what you’d expect — at least not until you recognize that whatever the Astros were doing was hardly foolproof.
How much of an impact did any of this stuff have on anybody? There’s no way for us to really know, exactly as was the case with the discussion around PEDs a generation ago. And just as then, when the biggest stars caught up in the scandals — Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens chief among them — were elevated in their villainy, by virtue of winning the World Series the Astros have become the league’s ultimate pariahs.
This is despite the fact that, as Manfred’s statement also notes, "in August 2017, the Boston Red Sox were caught transmitting sign information from their replay review room to individuals in the dugout wearing smart watches," and that in September 2017 the league announced a find for them, as well as "a fine of the New York Yankees for improperly using the replay review room phone."
There’s a very real chance even more teams were doing things that they shouldn’t, but simply weren’t caught — and maybe just weren’t good enough at it to get caught. Add in the fact that so many pitchers are cheating with illegal substances to increase grip that teams refuse to call out their opponents in order to protect their own pitchers doing it, and I think it’s safe to say that our righteous indignation about “cheating” in the sport is pretty confused and definitely overly simplistic. But I guess that’s nothing new.
As for whether this means adding Marwin Gonzalez would be a good idea for the Jays, that’s an entirely different question.
OK then, so would adding Marwin Gonzalez be a good idea for the Jays?
I mean, not really?
I'm not overly worried about the 66 wRC+ over 199 plate appearances in 2020 alone, because I imagine his .241 BABIP will likely bounce back to somewhere closer to his career norm (.306). Still, though, the highest projection on his FanGraphs page is calling for a 93 wRC+. That 144 wRC+ season was too long ago to give a lot of hope, even if you very optimistically believe a return to working with former Astros hitting coach Dave Hudgens, who is now the bench coach in Toronto, could maybe somehow give him a bit of a boost.
Then there's the defence. Gonzalez saw decent amounts of time over the last two seasons at first base, third base, second base, in left field, and in right field. The Twins, who were his employers over that span, played him for nine innings at shortstop in 2019, and that was it. His defensive numbers have fine enough across the board, but so what? He's more "versatile" than versatile, especially as far as the Jays’ roster goes. The team already has more outfielders than it can use, and they aren't exactly hurting for options at first or second base either. And though it would matter less on a roster with both Bo Bichette and Marcus Semien that the primary backup infielder wouldn't be an option at short, if the Jays were going to go that route it would make more sense to go with someone, oh, I don't know, good.
Gonzalez is a switch hitter, which in theory could help balance a Jays lineup that tilts pretty heavily to the right. But as a left-handed hitter over the last three seasons has slashed .238/.321/.390 (93 wRC+) over 741 plate appearances. He was great from the left side in 2017, but even given my sympathetic take on the filthy Astros, I’m seriously skeptical.
The Jays have shown over the last two seasons that they’re much less opposed to these types of players than I am. They gave both Eric Sogard and Joe Panik some real opportunities on the infield over the last two years, and to the club’s credit they both worked out rather well. I understand wanting a veteran for this sort of role, because depth-wise there’s not a whole lot behind Santiago Espinal, but I think the bar has to be set a bit higher here.
I don’t really see why this is a situation that would appeal all that much to Gonzalez, either. Despite never having a full-time position, he's been awfully close to a full-time player for at least the last five seasons and it's hard to believe he'd get anywhere near that kind of opportunity on this Blue Jays team. Certainly not without an outfielder getting moved out first.
I saw some discussion on Twitter on Sunday about the Jays' interest in Gonzalez possibly being contingent on an outfield move. I'll admit that he'd fit into the mix a little better if Lourdes Gurriel Jr. or Randal Grichuk was no longer around. But I would still, in that case, prefer to see the Jays go after someone better.
Rob Manfred wants to deaden his balls
Eno Sarris and Ken Rosenthal of the Athletic reported on Monday that MLB wants to reduce the big swings in home run rate that the league has seen in recent years, and to do so has worked with Rawlings to slightly alter the construction of the ball. They will also now require five more teams to store their balls in humidors, brining the total across the league to ten.
It's hard to know how much we can attribute the increase in home run rates to the launch angle revolution, and how much we can attribute it to the "juiced ball," but there's no doubt that home runs have become more and more a part of the game in recent years. The league's HR/9 rate was below 1.00 in four of the six seasons from 2010 to 2015, and in the two it was over the rate was 1.02. Since then we've seen rates of 1.17, 1.27, 1.16, a remarkable 1.40 in 2019, and 1.34 last year.
If we look at HR/FB rate the change is similar. Fewer than 10% of fly balls resulted in home runs in 2010 and 2011. In 2019 and 2020 the rate was 15%.
Personally, I tend to believe that the proliferation of home runs has actually done a decent job of balancing the rise of strikeouts. In both 2010 and 2011, batters struck out on an average of 7.13 times per nine innings. In 2019 the rate had jumped to 8.88, and last year it was 9.07.
Each of the last 13 seasons has seen MLB set a new record in league average K/9. And no, that's not a typo. The league set a new high fo 6.83 K/9 in 2008, broke that record in 2009 (6.99), then again in 2010 (7.13), by decimal points in 2011 (7.13), again in 2012 (7.56), and so on, and so on.
But sure, let's cut back on home runs! What could possibly go wrong?
More than nothing, actually!
Here we have Eno and Ken on what specifically is happening to Rob Manfred’s balls, and how changes to the ball’s COR — which they define as “the coefficient of restitution, or the relationship of the incoming speed to the outgoing speed” and say in this case should make it “less bouncy” — are similar to ones made by the KBO in 2019.
Research conducted by Rawlings says the balls will be centered more in the midpoint of the established COR range, which is from .530 to .570 with a midpoint around .550, as the (now missing) first report on the home run rate surge stated. So the COR likely changed around .01 to .02 at most, and the ball mass was likely reduced by less than 2.8 grams. That might seem like no big deal, until you compare this situation to what happened in Korea when the Korean Baseball Organization deadened the ball there.
On the field, Korean baseball was drastically different from one year to the next: Slugging in KBO was down 14 percent and homers were cut by a third. That happened after the KBO changed the ball size by one gram and moved the COR by .01 to .02 (from a midpoint at .4254 to one at .4134). So with changes of the same magnitude as those being implemented by MLB this offseason, the game in Korea changed dramatically from one season to the next.
Ruh-roh!
It’s important to note, as Eno and Ken explain, that the change in the KBO ball size was an increase, not a decrease, as will be the case with Rob Manfred’s balls. “Getting less bouncy while getting smaller might have effects that cancel each other out slightly,” they write.
It’s also important to note that the aim here overall is to make the ball more consistent, which should be a good thing! It’s just, according to an analyst quoted in the article, it will be “like adding five feet of outfield walls to every wall in the big leagues.
My sense is that guys like Teoscar Hernández, Rowdy Tellez, and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. probably won’t be quite as concerned by this development. (They hit piss rockets, is what I’m saying.)
It definitely will be something to watch, though. As will how pitchers respond to changes to the ball — something that it took Anthony Kay a bit of time to deal with when Triple-A leagues switched to the lower-seamed MLB ball back in 2019, and that Shun Yamaguchi had difficulty with last season after coming over from Japan.
Links!
• Hannah Keyser of Yahoo! Sports reports that MLB and the union “could have the health and safety protocols finalized as early as tonight.” She tells us that it will likely include the return of seven inning doubleheaders and runners starting on second base in extra innings, but not the DH in the national league. The universal DH thing is so stupid, because both the league and the players want it, but it was previously reported that the league wanted a concession from the union before they would accede to it.
Plenty of fans, I am sure, also think the runner on second in extra innings is stupid, too. I’m not one of those, though I’d prefer if they at least waited until the 11th inning, and I can’t help but wonder how much my stance is clouded by some bloggier form of “reporter brain.”
• More on upcoming changes, as Ken Rosenthal tweets that the league is revising the Grapefruit League schedule, which he says will see teams “in separate ‘pods’ on the east and west coasts of Florida.” The Jays, for those who failed geography, are on the west coast of the state. Jason Mackey of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette adds that he’s heard the west coast clubs “could actually look more like two pods by itself — south and north, with the Pirates and Orioles playing one or two teams from each.”
For those of you who, incredibly understandably, have not kept up with the changes to the Grapefruit League map over recent years, here’s some context:
Turns out the Dodgers are no longer in Vero Beach. WTF?
• Fire Shatkins!
• Daily Hive, and our old friend Ian Hunter, has spotted a Toronto Blue Jays shout out from none other than Stephen Colbert. Sadly, the shout out did not involve a time machine and Colbert’s old Comedy Central program, but instead came on his current show. Still though.
• MLB.com had a pair of interesting Jays-related ones back on Sunday, naming Hyun Jin Ryu among the nine MLB starters with the deepest arsenals, while Alejandro Kirk, who was snubbed on MLB Pipeline’s top 100 prospects list — and, even less explicably, on their top 10 catchers list — at least makes their “just missed” list.
• And lastly, a couple good ones from my old stomping ground over at Blue Jays Nation, where Tammy Rainey took a deep dive into the Jays’ rotation depth, while Cam Lewis brought us a review of the most interesting free agents remaining on the market.