Cactus League Game 12: Cubs at Mariners
Marco Gonzales vs. Duncan Robinson, 5:40pm TV GAME woooo
I’ve been talking about the weird landscape baseball finds itself in, and how the current CBA couldn’t or didn’t foresee what Tommy Craggs calls post-competitive baseball. Craggs’ article is a wonderful summary of our current moment, one that sees the Indians both selling off pieces and also forecasted to win their division going away, for example. Or a recent Cy Young winner unsigned with opening day looming. Or the farcical stories about this year’s top prospect not being quite ready to start the season in the majors for reasons that have nothing whatsoever to do with service time manipulation.
This is pretty bad. Execs are forced, or force themselves, to say things they don’t believe to an audience who doesn’t believe them either. Mid-tier player who reach free agency are no longer seen as worthy additions to clubs, *including* clubs that are ostensibly in contention. I get why the Astros don’t need Denard Span or Adam Jones, but I’m not sure why a bunch of other teams don’t. The issue, as Craggs and others point out, is that teams make money for things that have nothing to do with winning games. This isn’t new, exactly. It’s been true for as long as teams have received huge, guaranteed influxes of cash in exchange for local cable rights, and the spasms of spending that often happened after deals were renegotiated. Those revenue sources haven’t dried up just yet, but for many teams, the spending has. With ticket sales shrinking as a percentage of revenue, and as teams find that revenue sharing and cable means that their overall revenue is much less sensitive to winning percentage, there’s no real need to push to improve.
I know people don’t want to read about the business of the game, but I think it’s important to understand why Justus Sheffield won’t break camp with the M’s, or why JP Crawford is likely ticketed for Tacoma, too. I’m not rooting for a strike, but I think it’s time all parties agreed that the next CBA address incentives. Having the pay structure that the game has not only hurts minor leaguers, who try to get by on subsistence wages, but it’s now clearly hurting free agents, too. The game thought parity would increase the stock of teams looking to improve, but revenue trends and player development advances mean that teams either don’t need to improve or prefer to improve with younger players. The league desperately needs to incent winning, and that means going back on a generation of effort to introduce more competitive balance. Can they do this in time for the next CBA? I don’t see why not. Fangraphs had one suggestion this week; I’m sure there’ll be more. If they don’t, I think it’s going to be hard to fight the perception that many teams – the majority, in fact – aren’t really trying to win in any kind of reasonable time frame, and that even wild card contenders are ambivalent about reaching the playoffs.
The AL is highly stratified already, and while the NL is more bunched, it has seemingly no impact on teams motivations. This long-term drive for competitive balance produces only sporadic bouts of it (as with Milwaukee’s push last year), and, of course, it hasn’t helped the M’s reach the playoffs since 2001. Let’s try something different.
Today’s game features Marco Gonzales against Cubs prospect Duncan Robinson, a former 9th-round pick out of noted baseball-factory Dartmouth. A command/control righty with a low-90s FB and a curve ball, he’s parlayed low walks and hits-allowed into a quick ascent up the ladder; he finished 2018 in AAA and hasn’t really struggled at any stop.
1: Gordon, 2B
2: Haniger, CF
3: Bruce, 1B
4: Encarnacion, DH
5: Seager, 3B
6: Santana, LF
7: Narvaez, C
8: Crawford, SS
9: Ichiroooo, RF
SP: Gonzales
Cactus League Rolls On: Where the Focus Should Be
It’s 2019, the M’s are rebuilding/stepping back, and they’ve remade their roster. The pitching staff gets a lot of attention for being a question mark, but I think most of that is focused on the bullpen, and that’s fine. Many/most of these guys won’t be in featured roles on the next great M’s team, and it may not make sense to assemble a high-grade bullpen on a team that by its own estimation isn’t really competing this year. But the group that’s really pulling the M’s down in the minds of projection systems isn’t the pitchers. It’s the infield.
The M’s are a bit unsettled at SS, with the heralded but streaky JP Crawford coming over as the long term solution, but who will almost assuredly start in Tacoma due to service time manipulation the veteran presence of Tim Beckham. Neither is projected to do a whole lot, but Crawford’s growth is perhaps the story of the season, at least as position players go (Justus Sheffield is the story of the season for pitchers). At 2B, Dee Gordon tries to bounce back from an unmitigated disaster of a 2018, but at 30 years of age, it almost doesn’t matter what he does. If he posts career highs, he’d likely be moved at the deadline. If he struggles again, he’d be sidelined for Dylan Moore or Shed Long. The options at 1B are younger, but project as the weakest of the bunch. Ryon Healy figures to get some time at 1B, and like Gordon, he needs to prove his 2018 was some sort of aberration. Dan Vogelbach’s spring line is great, but then, it was great last year, too, and he still couldn’t take the job from the imploding Healy. Edwin Encarnacion’s still here, as is Jay Bruce, but their performance doesn’t matter so much as it’s an insurance against the kind of 1B black hole the M’s have featured so often.
Crawford, Sheffield, perhaps Domingo Santana, and then the AA group of Evan White, Kyle Lewis and Jake Fraley – that’s who we’ll all be watching in 2019 as we try to suss out whether the M’s have a complement to Mitch Haniger. All the same, that means that this is the first year in quite some time when we *won’t* be too interested in Felix or Kyle Seager. I’d love both of them to bounce back; that would make the season more watchable on a nightly basis. But their success or failure just won’t provide much information about how the M’s are supposed to take two steps forward after this off-season’s step back. Crawford’s ceiling’s probably seen as being lower now than in the past, after struggling to both stay healthy and demonstrate consistent pop and even contact skill. But that’s all subject to change. I think the same could be said for Sheffield’s ceiling, but he’s moved it higher just by what he’s done this spring. He’s still a top prospect, but one who looks a bit better now than he did last October/November. That’s a good sign, and hopefully he’ll be joined by others throughout the year.
Today’s game sees the M’s take on the Reds in Goodyear. Cincy sends righty flamethrower Luis Castillo to the mound. Castillo averages 97+ on his four-seam, though it was down a bit in 2018 as he logged more innings. It’s got run, but not a ton of rise, and he pairs it with an interesting sinker that’s been solid vs. RHBs, but which LHBs have demolished. His best pitch is a hard change-up at 87 or so. Batters have offered at at nearly 60% of the time he’s thrown it, and they’ve come up empty on over 40% of those swings. This is a legitimate outpitch, but his breaking ball (a slider) has lagged far behind. Between the issues with lefties and a small home park, HR troubles have bedeviled him, though it’s good to remember he’s 26, throws 97, and has a good cambio. This is a base a good team can work with, and while Cincinnati hasn’t been a good team in a while, Castillo could be really good in the right situation.
1: Fraley, CF
2: Lewis, RF
3: Narvaez, C
4: Healy, 1B
5: Vogelbach, DH
6: Ichirooooo
7: Beckham, SS
8: Long, 2B
9: Negron, 2B
SP: KIKUCHI woooo
Cactus League Game 9, Mariners at Royals
Yusei Kikuchi vs. Brad Keller, 12:10pm
A year ago at this time, I talked about how home runs were becoming more important to scoring, and thus the M’s emphasis on stringing base hits together didn’t sound like a great plan, especially if they couldn’t figure out how to arrange a pitching staff capable of keeping the ball in the yard. I focused on HR differential as opposed to the M’s vaunted “Control the Zone” metric, and noted that the M’s were giving up more HRs than they hit. So, thus far this spring, the M’s have hit 12 dingers and yielded just 8. Kyle Lewis can’t stop hitting the snot out of the ball, and meanwhile no one can touch Justus Sheffield. I’ve said it already this spring, but I don’t think the M’s could have looked any better.
Does that change their projections for the season? Eh, no, not really, but 1) it’s fun to see, and 2) you can dream on changes in PD that could produce such wonders as Dee Gordon drawing 2 walks in a game and sporting on OBP north of .500. Yes, yes, tiny samples, I get that. But I’m just not sure we’ve seen even tiny samples in which Gordon’s looked this patient, or Lewis this dangerous. Justus Sheffield looks like a different pitcher from his scouting reports, set aside his disastrous couple of innings in the Bronx. Domingo Santana looks like his 2017 self and nothing like the 2018 model.
Brad Keller is a righty with an arrow-straight four-seamer that almost looks cutter like, and then a sinker with a bit of armside run. His breaking ball is a solid slider, and he’s developing a change. He can get it into the mid-90s, but doesn’t miss a ton of bats – instead, he uses his odd four-seam movement and decent command of his slider to generate ground balls and avoid dingers. It all added up to a surprisingly good season for the Royals last year – not bad for a Rule 5 pick. It’s interesting – he doesn’t do the typical sinker/slider thing of pounding the knees with low and sinking pitches. Instead, he’ll throw any pitch in any location. Something about his delivery and then the movement on his pitches allows him to get ground ball contact pretty much everywhere. Sure, he’ll get a few more at the bottom of the zone or below, but I’m still kind of amazed a guy can get a fair number of groundballs throwing four-seamers in the middle of the zone. Elevate, Mariners, elevate!
1: Long, 2B
2: Crawford, SS
3: Santana, LF
4: Vogelbach, DH
5: Healy, 1B
6: Lewis, CF
7: Ichiro!, RF
8: Moore, 3B
9: Freitas, C
SP: KIKUCHI