The Upside
The M’s are bullish on their chances this year, and while that’s sort of their job, you really can see a way for the M’s to make the playoffs this year. Yes, a lot of things would need to go right, and the injury gods would need to call on the M’s rivals a bit more as opposed to just hanging out in Seattle all summer, but there’s at least a chance. To state the obvious: they can get there by having certain players blow their projections out of the water. And hey, that happens all the time, right? Let’s take a look at where the projections could be hilariously wrong, and why we might get an out-of-nowhere 88-90 win team.
1: Marco Gonzales turns in an out-of-nowhere season and is essentially the M’s #2 starter all year
The M’s gave up their sole high-minors bat last year to acquire Marco Gonzales, and then rushed him to the majors when injuries decimated every other starter. It didn’t go well, as the Gonzaga product struggled mightily with HRs. His velocity’s up since draft day, and his control’s gotten better, but despite a great looking change-up, he’s never figured out right-handed bats. We all understand why the projection systems see a severely flawed starter, and there’s essentially nothing in his performance record to suggest a breakout is imminent. But then, you can’t blow your projections out of the water if they’re already on dry land. The entire point here is that the M’s would make changes to Gonzales’ repertoire and/or mechanics and fashion a wholly new pitcher out of his newfound velocity and solid cambio.
He’ll be using a new pitch this year, a cutter that he didn’t throw at all last year as he tried to help his elbow recover following TJ surgery. He’s thrown a tight slider/cutter a bit in the past, back before his elbow injury, and while it’s not exactly a bat-missing pitch, it has its uses. Especially in this day and age, Gonzales can succeed if he gets batters – especially righties – off of his fastball. They’re slugging over .530 off of it for his career, and Gonzales’ breaking stuff hasn’t fared a whole lot better. With batters clearly now stalking fastballs, Gonzales needs something else to show them, even if the point of it is to generated contact and not whiffs. That’s essentially what we saw from Gonzales this spring, where he put up a good but not great K:BB ratio, but limited hits and HRs like never before.
How about mechanical changes? John Trupin’s article on his lowered arm slot covers that. Did that lowered arm slot help him increase his velocity, or were they both the result of some other, larger change? I don’t know and don’t much care, frankly. If Gonzales can use the new arm slot to both throw harder and get more horizontal run on his pitches (a natural side effect of a lowered release point), then he’s got a chance to pick up more ground balls as well. You saw that a bit in his GB% increasing last year from where it was in his initial call-up with St. Louis in 2014. This horizontal run is important, because it would really play well with his cutter. Throwing more over-the-top produces fastballs without much run. Cutters, by design, have essentially no run. There’s simply not as much separation there, and unless the pitch is thrown much slower (which would make it a slider, most likely), you’ve got two very similar pitches overall. But a fastball with plenty of horizontal run and then a cutter WITHOUT that run? Now you’ve got a pitch that’s going to run in on the hands of batters and produce painful/poor contact.
The M’s could get more out of him with a few more subtle adjustments. Last year, I mentioned that whatever arm slot he uses, Gonzales shows markedly different release points for his change-up and fastball. This may be a reason why he’s struggled against righties despite throwing such a visually-pleasing cambio. It’s tough, because many pitchers release a breaking ball from a slightly different spot and get away with it. But at some point, a gap like this bleeds into tipping your pitches. As mentioned above, Gonzales needs to get hitters off of his fastball, and disguising his change is a big way to do that. Could a lowered arm slot help? Maybe? He seemed to throw his fastballs a bit more over the top as compared to his change-ups last year, and it may be as simple as letting his FB release-point slide towards 1B a bit.
I’m not arguing that these changes make Gonzales an ace. They don’t need to, though. Gonzales is slotted into the M’s rotation and could add several WAR through solid (not perfect) control and some HR-avoidance. What would that look like? Look at Michael Fulmer of the Tigers. A so-so K%, a good-not-amazing walk rate, and then low HRs and a terrible BABIP. He’s produced back-to-back 3 fWAR seasons, and by ERA, he’s been even better than that. Fulmer pitches in a park that seemingly generates a ton of hard-hit balls, and yet his entire game is centered around generating poor contact…and it’s working. Fulmer throws a two fastballs, a solid change-up and a hard slider/cutter, by the way.
2: Dan Vogelbach becomes the Good And Big Boy America needs
Dan Vogelbach needed to change something. As a player with a less-than-sterling defensive reputation, he needs to hit a ton to add much value. While he’s been a much better gap-to-gap hitter than scouts would’ve imagined, that line-drive approach has limited his power, and a first baseman without power or a solid glove is a guy who’s going to struggle to make a big league roster. Famously hefty, Vogelbach has put on BP displays for years, going back to his high school days in Florida- He made the finals of the HR derby last summer at Cheney Stadium. So what’s he doing with a sub-.200 isolated power for his MiLB career, and a sub-.200 ISO in the famously-HR-friendly Pacific Coast League?
Doing his best to change his reputation as a BP-only kind of player. As he said in an interview with FG’s David Laurila, he wanted to, “Be a good hitter first, and the power would come.” After two short face-plants in Seattle, and with 17 HRs last year for Tacoma, he’s now changed his approach. It paid huge dividends for him in Peoria, as Vogelbach led all of baseball this spring, hitting for average and power, and showing no signs of trading contact for increased loft.
Let’s be clear: Vogelbach needed to make a change. His approach worked fairly well in the minors, but he didn’t have, say, Dee Gordon’s bat control. Thus, little holes could be exploited by big league arms, and while a 25-30% K rate’s tolerable for a power hitter, it’s not tolerable from a 1B without a lot of over-the-wall potential. By making this adjustment, Vogelbach’s essentially made his current projection meaningless. Any projection is going to use his actual production to forecast how he’ll hit in 2018, and thus any projection still sees him as a single-the-other-way guy – someone with a high OBP potential, but who’s killed by a low average/slg%.
But the cactus league doesn’t matter, right? Between his power spike and drawing more walks than strikeouts, Vogelbach’s done all he can to suggest he’s a new player. Those sorts of stats stabilize quickly, and as I mentioned before, Dan Rosenheck’s study showed that including such numbers from spring training improve preseason projections.
The M’s 1B position last year ranked dead last in baseball. Incorporating all of 2008-2018, the M’s 1B position ranks…dead last again. Right now, Vogelbach has Ryon Healy (a player with an even worse projection) ahead of him. Rule 5 pick Mike Ford is back with the Yankees, so you figure Vogelbach can earn some at-bats. If he can show that his power spike is real, and that he’s taken the Yonder Alonso path to big league playing time, I think fans will embrace him, and he’ll be taking most of the 1B starts by June.
Beyond becoming something much more than an internet meme, a Vogelbach breakout would be an important sign that the M’s either a) can help players make vitally important changes or b) don’t actively impede players who are making vitally important changes with outside coaches. If Vogelbach’s new swing “works” in the regular season, I’m less concerned about who gets the credit (ultimately, it should go to Vogelbach), and more more concerned with how the M’s could replicate them with other player. A number of players have shown signs, many of them fleeting, of joining the so-called fly ball revolution. But by and large, the changes in the game that have led to 2017 setting records for HRs and Ks have been a net negative. Chris Taylor broke out elsewhere. Pitchers were already starting to adjust to Yonder Alonso by the time he arrived here. And, of course, the M’s keep giving up tons of HR with their “high fastball” strategy ran headlong into new, springier baseballs. We need a loft-angle revolutionary in Seattle, and I am surprisingly emotionally invested in that revolutionary being Dan Vogelbach.
3: The HR problems that plagued the M’s pitching staff the past two years sinks the Angels and Twins
I mentioned in the Risks post that both the Angels and Twins had done much more to shore up ~.500 clubs, and thus the M’s had fallen behind their closest rivals for the 2nd wild card spot. Injuries and youth left the Twins competing with a great young offense, but just a running-on-fumes Ervin Santana and youngster Jose Berrios in their rotation. The Angels had essentially Parker Bridwell (acquired from the famously pitching-deprived Orioles for a bag of baseballs) and 4 bullpen days/week by the end of 2017. The Twins picked up Lance Lynn, and the Angels got Shohei Ohtani, and will soon see the return of an entire rotation’s worth of injured players: Garrett Richards missed nearly all of 2017, and Andrew Heaney/Nick Tropeano really did miss all of 2017. Matt Shoemaker missed the last half of the season, and ex-M’s prospect JC Ramirez ended the year on the DL too. With improvements from Berrios, a solid season from Lynn, the Twins could be even better. And the Angels – despite injuries that may have even exceeded the M’s in severity/number – put together a better pitching staff last year, and that was before Ohtani. With the M’s still tilting at the windmill of the new rabbit-ball era, the M’s are screwed, right?
Not necessarily. For years, the Angels and Twins have had the reputation of playing in HR-suppressing parks. Indeed, for many years, they’ve had sub-100 HR park factors, and thus the clubs could afford to acquire fly-ball-focused staffs and get more out of somewhat homer-prone players who limited walks. If that sounds like Jerry Dipoto’s plan, it was Dipoto who *implemented* this strategy in Anaheim, squeezing the last drops of effectiveness out of Jered Weaver’s 86 MPH fastball, or plucking Matt Shoemaker from obscurity to the rotation. One of the keys to that was that their home park would give them a big advantage, and I talked about their huge home/road splits in this post three years ago. The problem is that with the changes to the ball, they don’t have any more room for error at home; there are no safe havens in baseball anymore.
The Twins should know this, as their park has had positive park factors for overall runs for a few years now. While it started off as HR-suppressing, it pretty clearly can’t help in that regard anymore. More interesting is the phenomenon I talked about last year, where even if Statcast says that a drive hit at speed X and angle Y is less likely to be a HR at Target Field, that ignores the frequency at which balls are barreled at Target Field. Two AL Central parks with the reputation/some data for being “pitcher friendly” are no longer playing like it because, for whatever reason, batters see the ball really well there (it helps, of course, that the Twins/Tigers ran out batter-friendly pitching staffs). Detroit’s seen the highest percentage of pitches hit for “barrels” (ideal contact) of any park in the game in the Statcast era, ahead of well-known launch pads like Arizona. The Twins’ Target Field ranks 6th, in the midst of the rest of the AL West: Anaheim, Oakland, Seattle and Texas. When batters are squaring up the new baseballs this often, whether a fly ball would’ve gone 5 feet farther or shorter in this or that park becomes irrelevant.
Last year, the M’s HR/9 was 1.48, an eye-wateringly high figure that ranked 4th in baseball behind the not-really-MLB Reds/White Sox, and the Orioles. But the Twins and Angels were right behind at 1.40 (the Padres, another team formerly thought to play in a park impossible to hit dingers in, were in between them at 1.42). What this shows, I think, is that, like the M’s, the Twins and Angels haven’t quite grasped the magnitude of the league-wide changes and their strategy isn’t reflective of baseball’s new reality. Matt Shoemaker just gave up 6 dingers in under 18 innings this spring, while Shohei Ohtani gave up 3 in 2 2/3 IP (you may have heard about it). The M’s/Twins/Angels were clumped together near the bottom of MLB in ground ball rate last year, with the Twins at 25th, the Angels at 27th and the M’s in 28th position.
But what about the new guys? Won’t Lance Lynn stabilize the Twins’ rotation? Lance Lynn made a career – and a FIP – for himself in St. Louis by keeping the ball in the park. Until last year, his *highest* HR/9 was 0.82 back in 2012. He missed the first full year of the HR explosion due to injury, but hey, he had a solid half-decade that *proved* he could avoid dingers, right? Wrong. His HR/9 shot up to 1.30 last year, pitching in a pitcher’s park, in a pitcher’s league. Take the most fastball-dependent guy and put him in a league that’s learned to wait for fastballs and swing like hell at them, in a park that generates really good contact…what could go wrong? Ask Jordan Zimmermann, another NL vet who moved to the AL Central after years of success. Almost immediately, he fell apart, brought low by a barrage of HRs and a drop in K%. Could Lynn put up a Zimmermann-in-2017 style season? It’s definitely possible. Phil Hughes has been the Twins most dinger-prone starter, and while his approach is a bit different than Lynn’s, it shows what can happen when a “challenge hitters with fastballs” mindset meets baseball in 2017-18.
Now, not even Anaheim is safe from the HR explosion. The Angels are making some adjustments, with Ricky Nolasco departing for one or more of the newly-recovered Angels (Richards/Heaney). They figure to induce more grounders, at least if Richards/Ramirez stay healthy. But given their injury history, it’s unlikely that the rotation they start with will make it to May, let alone September. Guys like Heaney and Tropeano haven’t pitched in a while, and may get ambushed the way Lynn was last year. More generally, we’re talking about comparatively rare events, and what matters is hitting more dingers than you give up. Even if the Angels “should” give up fewer, they could see a number of wins flipped to losses if their luck changes a bit. So could the M’s, of course, but the point is that the same risks that the M’s are dealing with apply in equal (or nearly equal) measure to their biggest wild card rivals. Here’s hoping luck’s a bit more favorable to the M’s in 2018.
I think most of this is spot on, but I don’t think Gonzales has to pitch like a number two. That would be a heck of a feat. He probably has that ceiling, but pitching like a solid mid-rotation starter would be dandy. Maybe Iwakuma coming back and offering something factors into all of this.
I still don’t get the Healy signing and I don’t agree with him being named the starter after missing the bulk of spring and watching Vogey improve, not just with power, but defensively as well.