Matthew Trueblood

Can I interest you in a trade that would bolster the Cubs' rotation by drawing from the Twins' bullpen, and upgrade the Twins' big-league outfield while also giving them payroll flexibility? The first thing you need to know about this potential trade is that it's just a sketch, meant to bring light to a couple of more important issues affecting each team. While I would find this specific trade proposal compelling, it's unlikely that either side would actually pull the trigger on it, and that itself is part of the story. The second thing you need to know is that Griffin Jax wants to be a starting pitcher again, after spending the last two seasons becoming increasingly dominant at the back end of the Minnesota Twins bullpen. The third thing you need to know is that Kevin Alcántara is blocked in Chicago and in need of an outlet to the big leagues. Let's stop counting, now, but here's some other vital information about these two teams and their fit on a potential trade this winter: The Twins continue to face self-inflicted, self-destructive payroll constraints, making it functionally impossible for them to keep both Christian Vázquez and Ryan Jeffers, whom they've deployed in an unprecedentedly even timeshare over the last two seasons but who will cost roughly $15 million as a duo in 2025. The Cubs enter the offseason with money to spend on a big bat somewhere in their lineup, but they also need to get creative about improving the front end of their starting rotation. Specifically, they suffer from a lack of sheer velocity and overall stuff from their starters, and the problem runs much deeper than Kyle Hendricks. Chicago helped Miguel Amaya unlock his offensive upside last season, but he's a subpar defender behind the plate, and the Cubs front office is unlikely to accept below-average work from that position--arguably the most important on the diamond for run prevention, other than pitcher. Ok, enough throat-clearing. Let's lay out the trade I think would help both of these teams quite a bit, and then expand on the reasons why I think so. Cubs Get: Griffin Jax, RHP: Will turn 30 years old next month. Three years of team control remaining. MLB Trade Rumors projected arbitration earnings for 2025: $2.6 million. Christian Vázquez, Catcher: 34 years old. Entering final season of three-year, $30-million deal. Will make $10 million in 2025. Twins Get: Kevin Alcántara, OF: 22 years old. No. 27 overall prospect in baseball, according to FanGraphs. Already on 40-man roster, but can be optioned for one more season. Got a cup of coffee to close this season. Brody McCullough, RHP: 24 years old. No. 13 prospect in Cubs system, according to FanGraphs. Has made only a very brief appearance at Double A, but also doesn't need to be added to 40-man roster for protection from Rule 5 Draft until after 2025. This trade would clear as much as $13 million in expected salary for the 2025 Twins, and it would immediately fill a critical role for them. Alcántara is a right-handed hitter who's essentially ready for the majors, and is a plus defensive center fielder. He's not currently ready to be an average-plus hitter in the big leagues, but he has All-Star upside and six years of team control left. He would be the fallback plan for Byron Buxton in center field, a platoon partner for both Trevor Larnach and Matt Wallner in the corners, and an important step toward making the brutally slow, unathletic Twins a more dynamic team. He's a premium piece, despite his lack of offensive refinement. McCullough is a throw-in, but an interesting one. Knee surgery ended his 2023 season, and after a late start, his 2024 season had an abrupt, premature end with another injury. When he's been on the mound, though, the 2022 draftee has been very impressive, and he could fall in line with the rest of the flowing Twins pitching pipeline, if he can just get healthy enough to benefit from the team's superb pitching development system. That's what the Twins stand to gain: a role player with humongous upside and flexible team control, a 40-man roster spot to play with, and some serious spending power. For the Cubs, it's a much more present-focused move, but no less variable. The key to this proposal is that Jax wouldn't come in as a prospective relief ace for next year's team, alongside Porter Hodge. Instead, he'd convert back to the starting rotation, taking with him much of the velocity he gained when he first moved from that unit to the bullpen in 2022. That's because that bump isn't all about his compressed workload since becoming a reliever. He's also made major mechanical improvements over that span. Chris Langin, the director of pitching for Driveline, laid out the case for Jax as a starter earlier this year, in a compelling YouTube video: Jax is already 30, but his arm isn't. Because his service in the Air Force kept him away from the game for stretches throughout his ascent through the minors, and because of the move to the pen upon reaching the big leagues, he's thrown fewer than 600 total professional innings--despite not having notable injury problems at any point. Even if you bake in his collegiate work, he's thrown fewer than 1,000 innings of competitive baseball through the end of his 20s. That doesn't mean Jax will be good until he's 40, but for the three seasons of team control he has left, there's good reason to hope he could be the next Garrett Crochet, Reynaldo López, or Seth Lugo. He throws five different pitches, including both a sweeper and a changeup that can be devastating. Even if his fastball shrinks back from sitting 97 and touching 99 to sitting 95 and touching 97, he has the profile of a starter with elite upside. In this scenario, the Cubs would give up one of their top prospects, but they'd do it with the idea that they can slot Jax in alongside Justin Steele, Shota Imanaga, Jameson Taillon and Javier Assad in a fully-stocked, top-tier rotation for the next two or three years. There would be injuries and failures, but Jordan Wicks, Cade Horton, Ben Brown, and Brandon Birdsell would be available to backfill when those breaches took place. The team would also solve its catching conundrum, because Vázquez is the perfect complement to Amaya. Since Amaya is still making the league-minimum salary, he and Vázquez would represent a reasonable investment in the position, and Vázquez is a good enough all-around defender--good framer, fine thrower, excellent handler of pitchers both in terms of game-planning and in terms of managing difficult innings or outings--to justify more playing time than a true scrap-heap pickup like this year's Christian Bethancourt and Tomás Nido experiments could. His contract has negative value, especially to the cash-strapped Twins, but the Cubs could take it on easily. Unlike the Twins, they can win without efficiently spending every remaining dime. The Twins could just keep Jax, but they don't need him as a starter, and therefore, they don't need to take the risks that still exist if he does try to move back into that role. He could anchor their bullpen and they could trade Jhoan Durán, who actually projects to make anywhere from $1 million to $1.5 million more than Jax, but Durán's diminished velocity this year will have teams asking careful questions before turning over top talent for him. Nor will any team trade as much for a pure reliever, like Durán, as they would for a player they would view as a starter. If you doubt this, note the surprise that met the deals signed by López, Jordan Hicks, and Lugo last winter. Those free agents had been considered relievers, so when they signed for guaranteed amounts ranging from $30 million to $45 million, fans were briefly shocked--until each team announced their intentions to move those players into starting roles. Now, two of those deals look like bargains. The Cubs could shop Alcántara for starters who have already proved their ability to stay healthy and succeed in that role. Jax hasn't yet done that, which is why he should be available for a prospect package starting with Alcántara, rather than Matt Shaw. However, this move is perfect for them, because it allows them to leverage their wealth advantage without plunging into free agency and locking into a long-term deal. Thought they would receive Vázquez, taking on his salary would effectively be a benefit to the Twins, like throwing in another prospect alongside Alcántara and McCullough. Each side would be accepting significant risk, because that deal is a loser for the Cubs if Jax doesn't make it as a starter, and it's a loser for the Twins if Alcántara doesn't figure out how to lift the ball and/or make more consistent contact. Each side also faces difficult constraints and/or substantial risks associated with inaction, too, though. The Cubs don't have the available playing time to give all their intriguing position players enough run to prove themselves, and they need to win now, not wait around. The Twins need to clear Vázquez's salary so that they can address other needs on their roster, and they need to turn away from the plodding, pull-and-lift, defensively limited player profile they've clung to for the last few years. Again, I really like this framework, but it's only an outline. The idea is to illustrate the creative options each side needs to ready themselves to pursue this winter, and the way their respective needs and surpluses might overlap. It's not designed to be a done deal, as-is. I'm posting this piece at both North Side Baseball and Twins Daily, in a rare bit of cross-posting to get both of our communities talking. If you don't think your side comes out well enough in this trade, you might be right--but check out the other version of the article, where you might see fans of the other team saying the same thing. View full article

Unlike his more famous fellow up-the-middle youngster, the Cubs' backstop did a lot of things you figure will last en route to a brilliant second half. Alas, unlike his teammate, he also has dubious defensive value, and that's a problem. Image courtesy of © David Banks-USA TODAY Sports After his brief benching for a reset and a mechanical adjustment in early July, Miguel Amaya got a whole lot better, in a way that figures to be sticky going into 2025--at least to some extent. Whereas Pete Crow-Armstrong's torrid August gave way to a September that reminded everyone how much he still has to work on, the remade Amaya is capable of some very impressive things in the batter's box. In August, I wrote about Amaya's changes, and the way they followed a logical, almost linear pattern: At the behest of his coaching staff, he ditched the leg kick in his load phase. He struggled for a while to generate the same bat speed or exit velocity that he'd shown with his old mechanics. Over time, though, he rediscovered that explosiveness, and was able to integrate it into a better overall setup, with less swing-and-miss. Nothing stays exactly the same over a stretch as long as the one we're talking about, especially for a young hitter, but Amaya would continue his impressive hitting over the final five weeks. It sure looks like he can be consistently above-average at the plate with his altered mechanics and a cleaned-up approach. Span PA AVG OBP SLG In-Zone Swing % Chase % Contact % LA > 2 deg. % wSSEV Through June 187 .189 .253 .260 71.8 33.1 74.7 59.8 84.8 July-Sept. 176 .277 .326 .459 77.1 33.8 80.6 65.5 93.1 Amaya is an aggressive hitter, but well within the realm of average or normal--as opposed to Crow-Armstrong, whose free-swinging tendencies are as extreme as almost any hitter in the league. Once he tweaked his swing to simultaneously emphasize loft and make more contact, he really took off, and it didn't require anything crazy to happen. He ran a sub-.300 BABIP even in his strong second half. To explain the rightmost columns above quickly: the truly calamitous batted-ball outcomes are on low-hit grounders--balls hit not only on the ground, but actually downward or on a straight line off the bat. There's merit in both line drives and fly balls, and even in the high-trajectory grounder, since those get through the infield considerably more often than others. Amaya was fairly extreme in his tendency to hit low-trajectory grounders in the first half of the season. Thereafter, his launch angle distribution got much more healthy. That's also reflected in my homespun weighted sweet spot exit velocity (wSSEV), which correlates with real run production as well as almost any metric you could cook up. It's the hitter's average exit velocity on batted balls with a launch angle between 10 and 35 degrees, weighted according to the per-at-bat frequency of generating such batted balls. A good wSSEV is in the high 80s or low 90s; Amaya went from subpar to excellent in this regard. All of the offensive adjustments are encouraging, even if the real Amaya is most likely to be somewhere between his disastrous first half and his stellar second. It's not unreasonable to envision using him as a major part of the catching corps next year, in terms of getting offensive jolt from that position. However, we have to talk about Amaya, the defender, too. Of the 59 catchers who played at least 250 innings this season, Amaya ranked 40th in Baseball Prospectus's Deserved Runs Prevented. Prospectus rated him as 2.7 runs below average as a pitch framer, and while he came out as the best blocker of errant pitches in the majors, that skill is relatively low-value: he only saved an estimated 1.5 runs that way. He also cost the team that same amount, per Prospectus, as the third-worst throwing catcher in the league, better only than Jonah Heim and Yasmani Grandal. That tracks, because Statcast pegs Amaya with the fifth-slowest pop time on steal attempts among 83 qualifying catchers. If you believe in both his bat and his intangible skills as a game-caller and partner to pitchers, Amaya can still be a productive player with this relatively mild defensive deficiency. However, as the league adapts to the new rules of the pitch timer era, Amaya's inability to control the running game will only get more glaring. If he were a plus framer, it would be easier to work around that weakness, but he's settling in on the wrong side of average there, too. Defensively, the future doesn't look especially bright for him. Given the market they'll face this winter, the Cubs probably can't and shouldn't move on from Amaya. While they further groom Moises Ballesteros and hope he sticks at the position, though, they should bring in a stout defensive partner for Amaya in the short term. If he was as well-liked as he appeared to be within the clubhouse. Christian Bethancourt would be a fine re-signing. He has the very thing Amaya lacks: an excellent arm behind the dish. He could come in as a catching relief specialist, which would also give Craig Counsell an excuse to take Amaya down for left-handed pinch-hitters in some good situations. That would be a creative and novel use of a roster spot, but Bethancourt isn't a fully qualified timeshare catcher, so the plan would need to be to start Amaya a lot and counteract his early workload by phasing in either Ballesteros or some external acquisition during the season. The catcher's spot is still a question mark for the Cubs this winter, but the tone of the question is a bit more hopeful and a bit less resigned than it might have been a few months ago. Amaya has earned some form of extended opportunity. Unless there's a very eager trade partner out there, that will mean starting the season as the Cubs' primary catcher. It just leaves a lot of important work to do in filling the secondary catcher's role. View full article

With the softest-tossing starter in the league on the way out the door, the North Siders have a chance to turn a new page and get back into the velocity game. Image courtesy of © Benny Sieu-Imagn Images From Aug. 1 through the end of the season, the Cubs' average fastball--as a team--hummed in at 92.1 miles per hour. A decade ago, that would have been acceptable, and two decades ago, it might have made them one of the more formidable staffs in the big leagues. This season, though, and specifically over that stretch to end it, the team not only had the least hot average heat in the majors, but lagged 29th place by a full mile per hour--or the same amount by which that team, the Rangers, trailed the 11th-place Milwaukee Brewers. You can do a lot without velocity, even now. Kyle Hendricks is delightful proof of that. Then again, though, the team is likely to part ways with Hendricks after the season, and for good reason. His ERA was just under 6.00 for the campaign, and that largely because everyone treated the penultimate game of the season as a getaway day before a getaway day, allowing him to slice through the Reds for 7 1/3 scoreless innings. Having Hendricks around for the last decade has been a good reminder of the value of movement, deception, sequencing, and location, but at plenty of times, he's also been a reminder of what it looks like to pursue outs against the huge, powerful hitters who make up the modern game, without the ability to overpower them. Nor will the problem leave along with Hendricks. If you simply take him out of the equation for that final two-month stretch--if you take the slowest thrower in any MLB rotation out of the Cubs' sample and leave everyone else's as is--the team still had slower fastballs than every other club, albeit by a smaller margin. That can't continue. It's just too important to throw hard, in the modern game. Velocity explains about 40 percent of variation from one pitcher to another in whiff rate on four-seamers and sinkers, and there's no correlation between velocity and exit velocity--meaning the old saw that harder fastballs get hit harder, too, is just false. It is a bit harder to throw strikes for harder throwers, but they also benefit from more chases on non-fastballs outside the zone, setting other things equal. As I've written a few times this year, the Cubs are cognizant of the problem, except that they don't necessarily view it as one. Their goal is to minimize injury risk and maximize pitchability by prioritizing traits other than velocity, and it's a noble cause, if those ends are attainable. Just as often, lately, they haven't been. Rather than erratic, injury-prone hard throwers, the team has had... erratic, injury-prone soft-tossers. The bizarre weather patterns at Wrigley Field this past season partially cloaked the issue, but the pitching staff simply wasn't good enough in 2024, and that was partially because they didn't throw hard enough. Eighteenth in MLB in strikeout rate on the season, they were fifth-worst in that crucial category from Aug. 1 onward. They traded one hard thrower (Hunter Bigge) and one distinctly non-hard thrower (Mark Leiter Jr.) at the deadline, and collected two hard throwers, in Nate Pearson and Jack Neely. Nonetheless, they were unimpressive. Happily, the team can easily address this with some offseason shopping. No fewer than six impending free agents threw at least 400 pitches at or above 95 miles per hour last season. Signing any of them could be a superb move, at the right price, and a few are sufficiently interesting as reclamation projects. The group consists of: Corbin Burnes, well-known ace Blake Snell, very much the same Nathan Eovaldi, aging stalwart fireballer Luis Severino, the Mets' wildly successful turnaround man in the rotation this year Frankie Montas, who retains something like ace upside but has only tapped into it in spams during his career Yusei Kikuchi, whose velocity is often underrated. Most of these are aging arms, as players tend to be when you get ahold of them via free agency. Jameson Taillon has already lost a tick on his fastballs since joining the Cubs, though he's been effective, anyway. It wouldn't be wise to put all the team's velocity-upgrading eggs into any of these baskets. They need to maintain their balance of softer-tossing players with extra funk in their arsenal or delivery with flamethrowers like Daniel Palencia, and eventually, they need to have more guys like Palencia. However, in the short term, any of the above starters could help the team climb the fastball velocity and strikeout leaderboards for next season. So can internal options, of course. Of the 178 starters who threw at least 200 four-seamers last year, Ben Brown ranked 11th in velocity. Alas, there's not yet any evidence that Brown can hold up over a long season, but for as long as he's around, he can help the team throw more heat and enjoy the benefits thereof. Pearson was an intriguing pickup in July and could certainly play a role in reversing this trend. Triple-A live arm Michael Arias touches 99 with his sinker and could matriculate to MLB next year, if his command improves. Cade Horton, the team's top pitching prospect, throws hard--just not freakishly hard, the way a prospect must in order to garner much hype these days. Still, the team needs to replace innings in their rotation this winter, and they need to sign at least one reliable veteran to do that job. They might as well kill two birds with one stone. Many of these pitchers will be enviable bargain buys, anyway--not in that they won't get paid handsomely, but in that the market is likely to bear less than they're truly worth, Throwing hard will probably never be the top criterion by which Tommy Hottovy or Hottovy-led coaching groups will judge a pitcher, but it needs to take on a larger role in their evaluations than it has had for the last several seasons. These six names fling open the door for that kind of change. View full article

No, not at all! Just riffing. Yeah, the number of variables involved in this kind of question is one of the fun things about baseball, in that it makes it so inscrutable--unsolvable.

And to do that, you'd have to capture God in a birdcage and make him tell you what they all are. 😄 Yes. My method is not the end-all, be-all. Just a way of breaking things down to gain a clearer sense of what was going on, however imperfect that sense remains.

One secondary cost of signing a free-agent manager at the last moment, last winter, was that the Cubs didn't get to build the coaching staff their new skipper might want in the long run. Now, they've cleared their path to doing so. Image courtesy of © Benny Sieu-Imagn Images On the day after the end of the season, the Cubs dismissed coaches Mike Napoli, Jim Adduci, and Darren Holmes--among others. Jesse Rogers of ESPN reported that the firings also included strength coaches, on the heels of a season in which injuries were a significant hurdle to success. The early indications, ahead of Jed Hoyer's season-summarizing press conference Tuesday morning, are that the rest of the staff is likely to remain intact. If anything, it might be more surprising that there haven't been more dismissals, but the team believes strongly in--and Craig Counsell worked well and established rapid rapport with--Ryan Flaherty, Tommy Hottovy, and others. Last November, the team surprised everyone--including, in some senses, itself--by firing David Ross and replacing him with Counsell. It gave them what they viewed as a newfound competitive advantage, because Counsell is arguably the best skipper in baseball. However, changing managers relatively late in the game's annual hiring cycle made it difficult for the team to make more than cosmetic changes to the staff working beneath Counsell, and the positions they did turn over had to go to whoever was available. There will be more time, more latitude, and more leverage for the team this time. They might or might not pry away some of the coaches with whom Counsell worked during his tenure with the Milwaukee Brewers, like Chris Hook, Ozzie Timmons, Jim Henderson, Quintin Berry, or Walker McKinven. Even if they can't or don't want to do so, though, they'll be able to chase the best possible coaching talent. The market is not as dried up, not as constrained as it was last fall. Coaches, of course, are not wizards. The Cubs' problems this year--maybe even the ones that aren't explainable by their talent shortfalls, the ones that seemed to come from maddening failures of approach or preparation--can not necessarily be solved even by superb coaching, and since hiring coaches is an inexact science, we can't even really know whether the Cubs will end up with a better staff than they had this past season. That said, they never believed they had the right, final, permanent mix in the coaching staff they pulled together for Counsell's first season. And while it's important not to oversell the extent to which their underachievement on the field was attributable to coaching, it's equally important to understand that great coaching is a force multiplier, helping teams get more out of their talent, rather than less. Organizationally, the team has viewed a few changes to this staff as a critical step in an offseason that will need to include a lot of change, and this barrage of dismissals lays the groundwork for the transformations they've been envisioning. A manager is an extremely valuable member of a big-league organization. Some fans and analysts don't believe that, but plainly, the Cubs do. That's why they ponied up for Counsell. However, in the job title of the manager, you can sense what's really going on. A manager's effectiveness and their impact are bounded by the talent with which you surround them, including player talent and coaching talent, and by their familiarity and ability to work with all that talent. The Cubs will have a manager who's had more time to get familiar with and more chances to shape his own staff next season, and that should be substantially valuable. It doesn't diminish what they need to do to upgrade their roster, but it's still an important development at the front end of their offseason. View full article

The fault was not in the air of the (pitcher-)friendly confines, but in the thing flying through it. Image courtesy of © Stan Szeto - USA Today Images If you tuned into any Cubs games down the stretch this season, you probably heard an allusion or two by Marquee Sports Network play-by-play man Boog Sciambi to the weird weather patterns and drastic splits for the team at Wrigley Field this year. Behind the scenes, members of the Cubs themselves believe this was a real factor in their frustrating inability to consistently score runs at home this year, too. As a pivotal offseason looms, the team needs to properly evaluate its own players before deciding where to make key upgrades, and that means testing and fully comprehending those theories. The basic math backs up both the seasoned observers and the cloak-and-dagger team apologists. Only at T-Mobile Park in Seattle did teams score fewer runs per game this year than at Wrigley, and at only four full-time parks--Oakland Coliseum, Busch Stadium, Kauffman Stadium, and Oracle Park in San Francisco--did a lower percentage of plate appearances end in home runs. That's all very unusual for the century-old ballpark, the offense-friendly reputation of which has sometimes been overstated but which has always played at least fair. It's drawn plenty of concern, because it would seem to distort the real production of players like Seiya Suzuki, Cody Bellinger, and Ian Happ. It even risks leading the team to give up too soon on hitters who go through periods of deep struggle, the way Pete Crow-Armstrong, Miguel Amaya, and--gulp--Christopher Morel did. Without getting to the bottom of the issue, it's very hard to figure out what the team should do to improve a roster that fell short of the playoffs for (in all important respects) the seventh straight season. Let's try to do that, then. We've taken a surface-level measurement of the reality of the effect, but now, let's interrogate the nature of it. If the weather--temperature, air pressure, some funky interaction between new construction in the neighborhood and prevailing wind patterns or an overabundance of night games--were at fault, we would expect to see a wide gap between expected and actual results on batted balls. We would expect to see long fly balls die shorter, leading to long hits turning into loud outs. That's somewhat in evidence, but only very imperfectly. As a test sample, let's take all batted balls at 95 miles per hour or harder, within a launch-angle band of 10-35 degrees. We're not using Baseball Savant's reverse-engineered formula, here, but we can call these Barrels just as credibly. If a ball is hit at least 95 MPH and is on a medium line or is a non-lazy fly ball, it was barreled, and it fits into a bucket of batted balls worthy of study for these purposes. On such batted balls, this year, batters at Wrigley Field enjoyed the 19th-highest home-run rate, the 22nd-best BABIP, the 22nd-best OPS and the 20th-best ISO in the league. The park was, in other words, unfriendly to balls hit hard in the air, but they were closer to average than to the true bottom of the barrel. That doesn't mean it was the air quality or the wind knocking the ball down, though. The league's average exit velocity on those barreled balls at Wrigley was just the 24th-highest of the 30 parks. Using the specific speed and trajectory of each batted ball, Wrigley yielded more home runs and more triples (and fewer doubles, but by a smaller margin than the homers it added) than should have been expected. In total, 40.8% of barreled balls at Wrigley went for extra-base hits, whereas only 39.4% were expected. No, the problem with the barrels at Wrigley was, there were radically few of them. No other park in the league saw fewer hard-hit balls in the air. The median number of such batted balls at a park, league-wide, was 736. At Wrigley, there were only 661. It's hard to blame the weather for the fact that hitters never generated the kind of batted balls weather hurts, in the first place. You could make the case, if you wanted, that the frigidity of April--there were 679 plate appearances at Wrigley that month in games in which the temperature was below 50 degrees, over 300 more than at any other park in the majors all year--made it harder for hitters to access their 'A' swings and blast the ball, but it's a bit of a reach. And even in those games, the park played essentially neutral, when the ball was well-struck in the air. It just didn't happen enough. Let's consider another possibility, then. What if the Cubs themselves are driving this? This is a key thing to consider about the whole topic, by the way: If you're eager to excuse the Cubs hitters who didn't create enough home offense, you have to also reckon with the fact that the team's pitchers benefited from this phenomenon. Or else, maybe an underpowered Chicago batting order and a wily Chicago pitching staff helped create an environment that mirrored their own habits--a game with fewer truly zapped baseballs? In short: it didn't happen that way. We do still need to think about the way these park effects quietly made Justin Steele, Jameson Taillon, and Shota Imanaga look better than they were, but it's not just about the Cubs being involved. As proof: the Cubs and their opponents combined to generate a Barrel Rate 4.8% higher on the road than the Cubs and their opponents at Wrigley. By far, that is the widest differential in MLB. So, it's only fractionally weather that made Wrigley such a tough place to hit this year, and it's not the Cubs themselves, at all. What, then? We know it's not the ball. After all, the league now standardizes pre-game care for the baseballs, including providing a humidor in which the balls are stored before use. It's one safeguard put into place to blunt the differences between parks in terms of what was possible offensively. My response to that is: Maybe the humidor sucks. Maybe the clubhouse staff are bad at using it, or Craig Counsell leaned on a dial back in April while having a conversation with Yan Gomes, and no one ever noticed he had changed the settings. I would not rule out that the ball has been deadened, inadvertently, by something in the chain of custody through which they pass at Wrigley Field. Hitters aren't lifting the ball as often, or hitting it hard as often, as they should be. It's hard to name a way that the humidor-stored baseballs and the surrounding environs could combine to kill the ball's coefficient of restitution, without making it fly less well, but maybe there's something there. One way or another, though, hitters aren't generating good contact in the first place. That was the theme of this year at Wrigley Field--not good contact unrewarded, but surprisingly little good contact, period. Notably, the league is also hitting more ground balls than average at Wrigley this year--that is, the Cubs and their opponents hit more grounders there than when the team is on the road. To be safe, I lopped off all games prior to May 1, and ran the same numbers. I then tried lopping off all games with a game-time temp under 60 degrees. No material changes whatsoever. Regardless of conditions, when at Wrigley, the Cubs and their opponents hit the ball harder (and hit it hard more often), hit it on the ground less (and concentrated more of their in-air contact in the best possible cluster of launch angles), and got much better results at other parks than at Wrigley. This could be a random fluke, resolved by no remedy other than time and the slow erosion of memory. The data say, though, that there's more here than peculiar, persistent, despair-inducing weather patterns. The ball didn't do normal things at Wrigley Field this year. The team and the league should look closely at how to adjust that this winter, if possible. If not, the mystery of the extra ground balls and missing barrels will have to continue next year. View full article

Robles is 6'0" in shoes, though. Just changes the power upside, the ability to shorten the swing, all of it. I think the low-end comp is Victor Reyes or Lewis Brinson, where they'll tantalize but you know they'll never really make it, and the higher-end comp is decidedly not Judge or Judge-like for me; it's Alex Rios.

With injuries mounting at the end of a long season, the Cubs called up one of their top prospects to make his debut Wednesday night. It will be just a cup of coffee, but it's a good chance to discuss what he can do for them in the short and medium term. Image courtesy of © Kyle Ross-Imagn Images None of the traditional tools are in all that much doubt for Kevin Alcántara. He's demonstrated good speed, impressive and improving defense in center field, and a feel to hit that belies his 6-foot-6 frame. His power is still coming together, as is always the case with such long-levered, lanky hitters at his age, but it's already in evidence. For a guy who just turned 22 in July and has that length and gawkiness to manage, Alcántara's top exit velocities--he hit three balls at least 110 miles per hour in his month and a half at Triple-A Iowa--are phenomenal. Right now, however, he swings and misses so much that little else matters. He whiffed on over 30 percent of his swings during his time in Triple A this year, He struck out 43 times in 148 plate appearances there, although he balanced that--just as he has throughout his climb up the minor-league ladder--with a good walk rate and solid power output. He's not yet ready to make contact at a high enough rate for much else to matter in the majors, but he could play a role for the team by the middle of next season, if he can clean that up a bit--and if he can more consistently lift the ball in the process. That's a daunting challenge, in general. Most hitters trade a bit of contact when they try to focus on elevating the ball, because that usually means altering one's swing path to get slightly more uphill. The slight uppercut, which has to be kept distinct from the severe one, is not a flaw, and it can put a player on plane with the ball longer than a flatter swing. However, keeping that uppercut slight can be very difficult, and even when one achieves it, there are some pitches--like flat, riding fastballs at the top of the zone--that a lot of big-league pitchers can throw and that chew through that kind of swing, racking up swinging strikes against it. The good news is that a dramatic swing change isn't required here. Alcántara does have to make some adjustments, but you can see the way he can do it without overhauling everything. At his height and with those aforementioned long levers, it can take a while to learn to work uphill without getting long and loopy in the early phase of the swing. He's clearly focused, so far, on being direct to the ball. The elements of a swing that can lift the ball are there, though. KA Swing.mp4 Alas, another problem at his height is that you can end up hitting the top half of the ball just because your body wants to carry the bat higher than the pitcher is likely to throw it. Alcántara falls victim to this a lot. He doesn't just hit ground balls. He hits an extraordinary number of balls almost straight down, as he did for his first big-league hit Wednesday. KA Hit.mp4 He also grounded out earlier in the game on a ball hit just about straight down. It wasn't a fluke, or a case of nerves. Alcántara has done this throughout his pro career to this point. Because of his speed and the extent to which infielders have to respect his higher-end exit velocities, he will get a fair number of infield hits this way, but that's only a real consolation if you believe he'll hit that kind of ball reasonably rarely. If it's taking up a third of his batted balls, it's a real problem. Well, in Triple-A, it took up a lot more than that. I created a different way to divide up batted balls into buckets earlier this year, splitting them all up into three even launch-angle bins: low, medium, and high. There are some balls coded traditionally as ground balls that go in the medium range. There are some flies that go in the medium range. The idea was to get away from the narrow definition of line drives and capture the fact that higher launch angles engender better results on grounders, so the ones hit at more than 2 degrees get binned with line drives under this system. Here's a graph of Alcántara's rolling five-game Low Hit% for his time in Iowa. He hits the ball down--not even hard, long one-hoppers likely to get through the infield 40 percent of the time, but choppers--on over half his batted balls. As you can see, he made adjustments and had some success lifting the ball late in his I-Cubs run. Still, that has to be his area of greatest developmental focus going into next year: how to simultaneously whiff less and lift more. It's a solvable baseball puzzle, especially for a player with such dazzling tools. If he cracks it, he would become the top prospect in the Cubs system and should replace any of the team's current outfielders. As we watch his first few at-bats in the majors, though, we'll get lots of reminders that it's not going to be as simple as "cracking it". View full article

The Cubs' chief baseball decision-maker believes his team is creeping steadily toward contention. If only that was how this worked. Image courtesy of © Charles LeClaire-USA TODAY Sports Cubs president of baseball operations Jed Hoyer discussed the state of the franchise Monday, and while he fell in line with the tone of urgency and needed improvement set by manager Craig Counsell over the weekend, he framed it more optimistically. “We talk about the gap, I think that we’ve come a long way, and I feel really good about the position we’re in, but there’s still a gap, and that last stretch, that’s what we have to make up," Hoyer told reporters. "We have a lot of room to get to those 90-win teams that we need to have." Hoyer's hurry to highlight the team's closeness to genuine contention is a little bit self-serving, but it's also not unwarranted. After all, the Cubs are going to have a second straight winning season, after two straight lousy ones. Their run differential in each season will end up suggesting they're more like a 90-win team, just underachieving. They have steadily built up their farm system. What Hoyer sees is a team with a lot of pieces in place for the medium term, a lot of young talent rising through the ranks, and a defensible case as a co-favorite in the NL Central going into 2025--even as both he and Counsell acknowledge that the gap between the Cubs and the Brewers is real and persistent. Whether the reality of the situation is more fairly described by the team's run differentials or their records, their fundamentals or their place in the standings, is up for some debate. It's an important question, too, since if you choose to focus on the Cubs' failure to keep up with Milwaukee in either of the last two divisional races and their having missed the postseason both years, you're likely to prescribe an active and fairly bold winter. If, on the other hand, you think this is a team that could as easily have won the division either of the last two years as not, you're likely to agree that the gap is closing and want to keep the train more or less on the tracks. They're kind of boxed into it, but Counsell and Hoyer seem to be walking both sides of that fence. They have to believe, with separate parts of their own brains, that they're already making major progress, but also that they have a long way to go. It's the only way they'll find both the confidence and the urgency to do what needs doing. I want to focus on one element that Hoyer seems to me to be overlooking or underrating, though: time. When Hoyer talks about closing that gap, he's talking about the last four years. He's talking about a series of trades that offloaded veterans en route to free agency and brought in youngsters. He's talking about an upward trajectory in win totals, starting around the middle of 2022 and continuing through the last two full seasons. He's seeing trend arrows pointing upward. The problem with building great baseball teams, though, is that entropy acts on the process. It exerts a huge amount of drag on the process. Hoyer sees himself as building a team that can sustain competitiveness across half a decade or more. He might be right. He's rolling the dice, though, because it might turn out what he's building is going to erode faster than he can rebuild and refuel it. Seiya Suzuki, Ian Happ, and Dansby Swanson are all 30 years old. They're key cogs of this team--arguably, its three best position players, and inarguably its three highest-paid. It's unlikely that any of them will be shipped out this winter, but it's also unlikely that any of them will be as good next year as they were this year, and they weren't good enough this year. Hoyer can, and almost must, go out and usurp that trio by acquiring a position player better than any of them, but if he's thinking in incrementalist, sustainability-focused terms, he's unlikely to do so. He's much more likely to count on a collective improvement from the younger half of his positional corps, in Miguel Amaya, Nico Hoerner, Isaac Paredes, and Pete Crow-Armstrong, plussed up by the imminent arrivals of Kevin Alcantara, Matt Shaw, Owen Caissie, James Triantos, and Moises Ballesteros. Maybe that will play out just as Hoyer expects, but there's risk in the approach. An accelerating decline by one of Swanson, Suzuki, or Happ is well within the realm of possibility. An injury or a failure to sustain linear developmental improvement from any of the younger players could also derail the plan. More importantly, keeping three guys in the lineup--including at shortstop, with Swanson--who are 31 years old means putting a certain cap on your team's defensive excellence. The Cubs need to be an elite defense to have an above-average run-prevention unit, because their pitching isn't likely to be at that level on its own. Jameson Taillon, Shota Imanaga, Javier Assad and Justin Steele gave the team about 620 innings at an aggregate ERA around 3.10. Given the ages and health histories of those four guys, they're not likely to give them that much value next year. They might get considerably more value from Ben Brown, Cade Horton, and Jordan Wicks to balance things out, but then again, they might not. None of those hurlers have proved durable or established an ability to thrive in the big leagues across a full season of work. Already, there's a story making the rounds that the Cubs will spend big on a frontline starting pitcher this winter. That's a good idea, but it will tie up resources. The team has to both score more runs and better prevent them next year, and the age, health, and performance profiles of the roster Hoyer has assembled make it hard to see how they'll do so. His methodical approach has been Hoyer's way of trying to survive the difficulty of getting better by the margin required. He knows attrition and aging will erode this core, which never got quite good enough to do anything satisfying, anyway. Building up the farm system and resisting the temptation to splurge on a superstar are supposed to give the team sufficient reinforcements when that happens, as long as Hoyer can keep finding values he likes on medium-term free-agent deals, like those he's recently handed out to Imanaga, Taillon, and Cody Bellinger. Now that he's locked into another half-decade with Swanson and two more years each with Suzuki, Happ, Bellinger, and Taillon, though, Hoyer has a bit less flexibility than he might have hoped. He's at some risk of having the core erode faster than expected, without getting the boost he hoped for from young talent. The way to make up for that is to find more of those good values he likes than usual this winter, bringing in high-impact free agents both for the pitching staff and for the positional group. The problem with that strategy is that finding those good values is hard. At some point, Hoyer probably needs to break out of that value-focused mode of thought and splurge, after all--be it in the form of money or a trade from his prospect depth, or both. He needs to push in more chips and try harder to win in 2025, not because the team is perfectly positioned to do so or in order to trade the future to make the present better, but because the present isn't going to get good enough to make anyone happy unless he does so, and in that case, the future he envisions might never come. View full article

What if every run counted, for a change? Image courtesy of © Jeff Curry-Imagn Images As another season winds down under new rules that have traded in Game 163s for tiebreakers that can determine division championships and playoff spots, there's a small but real risk that all-important postseason entries could come down to some silly things. The first tiebreaker between any two teams at season's end is the head-to-head record between the two clubs, but after that comes intradivisional record. That's a profoundly strange way to determine playoff seeding or qualification, given that many of the spots up for grabs are Wild Card spots, designed to degrade the importance of divisions. Since many teams fighting for Wild Card berths play six games against each other each year, going forward, we might often see that tiebreaker coming into play. That's one problem the game is facing these days. Here's another: everyone is tired of position players pitching. What was once a fun bit of novelty to break the tension in blowout games has now become much too common, and it's started to make a mockery of the sport. And here's a third problem: almost everyone seems to hate the automatic runner rule in extra innings. Personally, I don't find it as odious as others, but public opinion has been very unfriendly to the rule. People don't like to see the hard work of scoring runs cheapened, be it at the end of a game long decided or precisely when the drama is highest in one that nine innings couldn't settle. I rise to offer a solution all three problems at once: Eliminate extra innings. If two teams finish nine innings tied, call the game a draw, and establish a points-based standings system akin to that of the NHL or any soccer league. A win is worth three points. A tie is worth one. A loss is worth zero. And here's the kicker, also drawn from soccer: Should two teams finish the season equal on standings points, let the first tiebreaker be run differential. Game 163 was a fun way to settle season-long ties. Those games were rare, beautiful, utterly exhilarating spectacles, and I would love to have them back. Realistically, though, given the playoff expansion they've already done and the further steps in that direction to which they aspire, the league is never going to reestablish those games. Given that fact, we should switch to a system that makes such ties more remote possibilities. In a standings points system, two teams who finish 88-74 under the current way of doing things probably wouldn't end up tied. One would go 82-68, with 12 ties, amounting to 258 points. Another would go 84-70 with just eight ties, good for 260 points. A points total that can easily range from roughly 150 to 300 isn't likely to include many ties between any two teams of 30, in a given season. When it does happen, though, just use run differential as the tiebreaker. That way, every run scored or allowed in a game is of real importance. Teams would have to build better depth to avoid letting ugly run differentials happen, or understand that they were risking embarrassment and costly loss by letting the other team run up a score. We'd see more tautly contested games. Changes like these would have been unthinkable even a few years ago, but MLB has a pitch timer now. The extra-inning runner exists. Infielders don't have the freedom to wander to the other side of second base or set up in the outfield grass. Winning the division has become functionally meaningless, to all but those of us who hold the division title in sacred memory from an earlier form of the game, and it's only going to get less relevant in the next decade. A lot of the things we thought were beyond discussion have come to pass in the game recently. Maybe one more big shift is in order. Eventually, shortening the season should be part of the plan, too. Given the way the league has neutered the regular season, it doesn't make sense for it to stretch 162 games anymore. Again, I take the side of George F. Will, who wrote when the league first introduced the Wild Card in the early 1990s that baseball should be above such things--that the season should be "a long gathering of summer heat, culminating in a single clap of October thunder; the World Series" and that second place should remain not-quite-good-enough. Will and his cohort got drubbed in that debate, though. Progress happened, and then backed up like a truck over a not-quite-dead bit of roadkill and happened again and again. There are three Wild Cards in each league now, and we'll never get rid of them. Playing 162 baseball games to decide who gets them is a ludicrously wasteful self-indulgence. The league should explore starting in mid-April and playing just 144 games, but they absolutely have to collapse it back down to 154, at least, to make the whole season more manageable for all parties. A shorter season in which there are no extra innings played until the playoffs come would be a better labor environment for players, and a better fan experience than the current formula. Small incentives at the margins to make everyone care more about keeping a one- or two-run game close, whether to go for the tie or just to manage run differential, would make individual games spark with more friction and energy. To make the best of the game in the future, we have to let go of some things that belong to its past, even if the goal in doing so is to bring some of the overheated and/or undirected progress happening under control and slow it down a bit. View full article

There's been a lot of talk about Wrigley Field playing differently this season, due to pitcher-friendly weather patterns. That appears to be real, but it won't repeat itself. Another key park factor, however, isn't changing any time soon. Image courtesy of © Matt Marton-Imagn Images Offense has been way, way down at Wrigley Field this season--for the Cubs, and for opponents, too. It's a strange phenomenon, but it seems as though the fickle winds, temperature patterns, and air pressure have buffeted fly balls and held up line drives, leading to a remarkably lousy year for hitters at the Friendly Confines. That's remarkable, sure, but it's not necessarily that important. Be sure not to give up on a Cubs hitter due solely to a lack of power generated this season, because there seems to be extra gravity pulling down their numbers in half their games. Next year, though, things are more likely to go back to normal than to persist this way, on a macro level. It's a one-year blip, as best we can discern or guess, even if it's an extreme and enigmatic one. Go down a rabbit hole, though, and sometimes you end up in Wonderland. Thus, I find myself asking this question about a three-year park factor for Wrigley, and perhaps one with more staying power: Do lefty hurlers have a systematic advantage at the Cubs' home park? Let me offer a disclaimer, right up front: There is a Justin Steele effect acting upon these numbers. Add Shota Imanaga to the mix this year, and yes, a couple of very talented lefty hurlers are oversampled in any comparison of the park's statistics based on handedness. Nonetheless, I believe what we're about to discuss is legitimate. Here's a chart showing the weighted on-base average achieved by all batters against all left-handed pitchers at each MLB park, dating to the start of the 2022 season. If you don't see Wrigley Field right away, don't panic. You might just need to scroll down more. Now, here's the same chart for right-handed pitchers. Overall hitter- or pitcher-friendliness--most often, fence distances, but also things like elevation and weather--shape these lists as much as anything else. The pitchers who call a given park home can also have an influence. Don't try to use Steele or Imanaga to fully explain away this disparity, though. Facing a right-handed pitcher at Wrigley the last three years has led to exactly average production. Facing a left-handed one has led to the worst production in the league. Flip this to view it from a hitter's perspective, and we can see something truly vexing going on. Only Camden Yards yields a bigger platoon differential for left-handed batters than does Wrigley Field. In other words, only that park has seen a bigger difference between the production by lefties against right-handed hurlers and that against southpaws. On the other hand, right-handed batters have actually been better against right-handed pitchers than against lefties over the last three years, making Wrigley the park that yields the smallest platoon differential for those hitters. The effects run deeper than raw results. There's a significant gap in the chase and whiff rates lefties induce against lefty batters at Wrigley and the ones right-handed pitchers induce against those same lefty batters. Here's all 30 parks charted on those two stats in left-on-left matchups: And here's the same chart for righty pitchers facing lefty batters: Though it's an easy-to-pick-out outlier in the first chart, Wrigley is tough to see in the second, so for those struggling, it's part of the inoffensive thicket on the left, just above the average line for whiff rate on swings. Let's look at the same chart for left-handed pitchers facing righty batters: And then for right-on-right showdowns: This is weird, right? Except, isn't it also kind of understandable? For decades--but especially for the last 30 years, since the team planted juniper bushes where there used to be unoccupied bleachers and then replaced the bushes with the batter's eye lounge--Wrigley has had an off-center batter's eye. The whole field is, in ways so subtle that some people miss it, quite asymmetrical. The wells in each outfield corner and the matching 368 signs in right- and left-center invite casual viewers to think of the place as symmetrical, but the well in left is longer and flatter, and the wall slopes away to a deeper gap in right-center, and the 368s are not at identical distances from the foul lines. The 400 sign is not in dead center field, but a bit to the right. The second tier of the bleachers and the manual scoreboard are slightly offset toward right-center. The cumulative effect of all this is a subliminal parallax that fools plenty of people, from fans to commentators--to hitters themselves. It also means that some left-handed pitchers' ball seems to come out of the crowd just off the edge of the batter's eye. That's not really the case, even to the extent that Jered Weaver's ball did appear to come out of the rockpile at Angel Stadium during that stellar righthander's heyday. It's just that the slight misalignments and not-quite-symmetries invite a hitter to experience a slight visual distraction. As a hitter, you want to keyhole a pitcher. You want a tight focal point with plenty of visual contrast. Some lefties can refuse a hitter that at Wrigley. Photo By User Thechitowncubs on en.wikipedia Again, unless a pitcher is about 11 feet tall and uses a crossfire delivery from a three-quarter slot, they're not actually throwing the ball from a place where the hitter is likely to lose it in a light-colored shirt in the crowd. It's more insidious than that. Still, the effect appears to be real. This has been mentioned by some hitters visiting Wrigley over the years, but it doesn't always show up in the numbers. Maybe it's another fluke, like the shifting weather patterns--albeit one that has had an impact across multiple seasons. Maybe it's a function of the league as a whole working harder by the day to create tough release points for hitters, and it's just been magnified a bit by the presence of Steele and Imanaga on the Cubs roster recently. The effect isn't completely illusory, though, just like the park's symmetry isn't completely real. Camden Yards's huge platoon differential for left-handed batters is there because of its cavernous left field, with the deep, high fences. PNC Park also has a big platoon differential for lefties, because of its very deep left-center alley. Minute Maid Park (Crawford Boxes) and Tropicana Field (that very shallow left-field corner, with the cutout in the wall, where Isaac Paredes became famous) have the smallest platoon differentials for lefties. The takeaway there is that much of the variance can be explained by the ability to hit opposite-field home runs, or not. The biggest platoon differential for right-handed batters, unsurprisingly, is at Fenway Park, where righties can't count on hitting homers to right and right-center. The smallest one, other than Wrigley, is Yankee Stadium, because Aaron Judge could hit a ball out to right-center there with his bare hand if he really had to. These are all explained by park dimensions, and the extremes all correspond with parks that are highly asymmetrical. That Wrigley is at one end of the spectrum for lefty batters and the other end for righties, with fairly symmetrical dimensions, tells us something else is going on. The differences in the way batters see the ball, resulting in more bad swings against lefty pitchers than against righty ones, tells us something else is going on. One way or another, a visibility issue has crept into the equation at Wrigley. Maybe hitters don't want to mention it, or even admit it to themselves, because of the psychological games pitchers might play in the wake of such an admission. Maybe they're not even fully aware of it. But right-handed batters are doing better against right-handed pitchers than against lefties, and left-handed batters are experiencing a huge platoon effect going in the normal direction. That's despite dimensions and wind patterns that, if anything, slightly favor lefties hitting against lefties, not righties hitting against righties. In the short term, the Cubs should keep stockpiling left-handed hurlers. It's almost certain that they're aware of this phenomenon, whether they set any store by it or not, and it might be part of why they elected to retain Drew Smyly on a surprisingly rich deal two winters ago. It might be why they made themselves the high bidders on Imanaga last offseason. They can seize a bit of an edge, while whatever conditions have led to this trend perdure, by having more southpaws on the mound than their opponents at home. Beyond that, though, it's less clear what they should do. This feels like an unmanageable enigma, especially from the offensive side. Whether this is a component of or a mere coincidence with the broader offensive depression that settled over Wrigley this year, it's going to be hard to find a reliable plan for dealing with this effect when setting a lineup or building a roster. If we accept that this is just about the way the ball is carrying, the implication would be that it's not carrying at all to left field, turning Wrigley into a version of Walltimore or Pittsburgh, but that it is carrying exceptionally well to right, just like it does at Yankee Stadium and at Truist Park in Cobb County, Georgia. The data doesn't back that up, and neither does the historic pattern of play at Wrigley. The solution is just to build a great roster that wins with or without the help of small environmental factors, but since the Cubs haven't shown the financial gumption to do that lately, they face a daunting challenge in the coming months: construct a roster that can compete with the Brewers and Dodgers and Phillies and Atlanta, while dealing with a couple of inscrutable park factors that will complicate their player evaluation and their projections for 2025 and beyond. View full article

For two years, many Cubs fans have struggled with the inarticulable feeling that Seiya Suzuki's whole is less than the sum of his parts, offensively. That might not be true, but at last, I think I can help clarify where the feeling comes from. Image courtesy of © David Banks-Imagn Images The thing about Seiya Suzuki is, he does almost everything well on offense. His baserunning is inconsistent, but when he's healthy, he balances the key skills of a batter--making contact, controlling the strike zone, generating power and using the whole field--as well as almost any hitter in MLB. He's been worth somewhere between 20 and 25 more runs than an average hitter, according to both Baseball Reference and FanGraphs. That's a few runs better than he was in almost identical playing time last season, and it makes him a valuable hitter. Part of the frustration some fans feel with Suzuki is rooted not in anything he does wrong, but in the fact that the team lacks any hitters better than he is. Shohei Ohtani has been worth 67 runs more than an average hitter in 2024, according to Baseball Reference. Juan Soto has been worth 61. Each has played considerably more than Suzuki, but even if we even out those differences, those guys are worth an extra 25 or 30 runs per year, relative to the Cubs' top slugger. For a lot of fans, though, there's something else that nags about Suzuki--a sense that his overall numbers oversell his real production. It feels like he's not creating as many runs as he should, given how good he really is. Does that vague notion carry any validity? To take the question from abstract to concrete, we can turn to an invaluable tool provided by FanGraphs--the + stats suite. On their leaderboards page, the site allows one to select a time period and get the numbers for all players within it set on an indexed scale, where 100 is average, higher is better, and everything is anchored to the league average and adjusted for park factors. It's a way to see how a player compares to the rest of the league in which they play, not just on an overall production basis, but within specific component stats. Suzuki is, as you can probably sense just from watching him or holding a passing familiarity with his raw numbers, better than average at almost everything. Looking at the last two seasons as a pair, to maximize the robustness of these comparisons and wash out fluky weather, park, or ball effects, he's about 20 percent better than a typical hitter in terms of walk rate, batting average on balls in play, and isolated power. In other words, he takes a very disciplined approach, has a plus knack for generating extra-base hits, and can line the ball all over the diamond, making him hard to defend. He does strike out about 10 percent more than average. That's his tradeoff. This year, alone, it's even a bit higher than that, but he's gotten the ball off the ground more often and is hitting for a higher average on balls in play as a result, so the swap has worked. Swinging at the first pitch only about 13 percent of the time and remaining patient throughout the at-bat, Suzuki sets himself up to strike out sometimes, but that's part of how he finds success. The fun thing about the + stats, really, is that it makes it easy to find comparable players, both within and beyond a player's specific context. Suzuki's particular flavor of balance, though, turns out to be a fairly unique one. I did my best to find some comps. Let's see what we make of them. For this exercise, I used 2023-24, then searched for similar hitters in 2008-09, 1991-92, and 1983-84, to figure out how what a player like Suzuki looks like has changed over time. Here are the best comps I could rough out. Player Seasons BBr+ Kr+ ISO+ BABIP+ AVG+ OBP+ SLG+ Seiya Suzuki 2023-24 121 111 124 119 114 112 118 William Contreras 2023-24 126 91 112 115 115 115 114 David Wright 2008-09 135 110 120 117 114 115 116 Matt Holliday 2008-09 125 92 131 116 119 119 123 Ray Lankford 1991-92 101 138 132 114 105 104 114 Jeff Bagwell 1991-92 137 109 126 111 110 116 115 José Cruz 1983-84 115 85 120 118 120 116 120 Kent Hrbek 1983-84 122 100 150 112 115 115 127 The hardest thing to find, it turned out, was a hitter who could make a similar impact on the ball and showed similar plate discipline to Suzuki, who nonetheless struck out more than an average hitter. The closest comp of the lot, here, is David Wright from 2008 and 2009. Those were the peak seasons of a near-Hall of Fame player. Alas, that one comes with a major caveat. The Mets moved from the defunct Shea Stadium to Citi Field between those two seasons, and in the first year in his new home, Wright's production crashed. His strikeout rate shot up, and his power cratered. He was a much better hitter than these adjusted numbers imply in 2008--and, maddeningly, worth just a few runs fewer than Suzuki has been this year in that second campaign. Jeff Bagwell is the next-closest comp, but before you get too excited, those were Bagwell's first two seasons in the majors. At ages 23 and 24, he hadn't yet refined his zone to the extent he eventually would, and his power was evident but nascent. He only managed 103 extra-base hits in almost 1,400 plate appearances between the two seasons, and only 33 of those were homers--although those unimpressive numbers can be partially explained by the fact that Bagwell played his home games at the pitcher-friendly Astrodome. Suzuki turned 30 last month. There's no next level coming for him. José Cruz is the only player on this list who was also in his 30s when he put together such similar production, and his comes with the warning that he didn't strike out nearly as much as Suzuki, even adjusting for their respective eras. Cruz was very good in those seasons--better than Suzuki would be even if we gave him an extra 100 plate appearances of the same level of production this year--but got a substantial share of that value from putting the ball in play at a solid rate. Coincidentally, Cruz also had exactly 103 extra-base hits in something approaching 1,400 trips to the plate across the two seasons we're talking about here. Only 26 of those were homers. Kent Hrbek had 123 in his 1,217 plate appearances in the same years, and 43 of those were homers. For Suzuki, in just 1,151 trips, it's already a total of 109 extra-base hits, of which 41 are dingers. Yet, look how much greater Hrbek's adjusted isolated power is. Cruz had a similar ISO+ to Suzuki's, with six fewer extra-base hits in 200 more plate appearances. That tells us one important thing about the players themselves, and the context that sets production on a value scale. The league-wide power inflation has made it harder to stand out as a power hitter, and even a player with obvious and impressive power like Suzuki's doesn't derive as much relative value from it as a player like early-career Hrbek did. We know, too, what pressure the global rise in strikeout rate applies to hitters. With that patient approach that will lead to some strikeouts anyway, Suzuki has to fight hard to create positive value, because the confluence of that approach and the league's out pitches forces him to get a lot of hits on balls in play, draw ample walks, and find a lot of power just to be above-average. Just as importantly, but far more subtly, notice what all the above means for the value of a player with a Suzuki-shaped skill set. Because the league's baseline for batting average and OBP has sagged over the last several years, there's been some leakage in the value teams used to be able to create by chaining together good hitters in their lineup. It would be hyperbole to say that all offense is short-sequence offense at this stage of the evolution of MLB, but it comes nearer the truth than would be optimal for a player like Suzuki to have the most possible value. His skill set is built around both keeping the line moving and bringing around runners when they're on base, without truly excelling in either regard. Remember Derrek Lee's 2007 and 2008 campaigns, when his power was still semi-dormant after a broken wrist in 2006 but he was healthy enough to be a very good overall hitter? He's a pretty excellent comp to Suzuki. What's missing from the current Cubs are threats as dynamic as Alfonso Soriano (159 ISO+, even though it came at the cost of any meaningful walks and with a lot of strikeouts) or Aramis Ramírez (146 ISO+, plus great bat-to-ball skills), but it's also very hard to be that caliber of power hitter these days. There were 32 qualifying hitters with an ISO+ over 140 in MLB in 2007-08. In 2023-24, that number is 21. When the baseline rises, it gets harder to be exceptional, and in a zero-sum game, exceptionalism is a key aspect of value, because all value is relative. This doesn't mean Suzuki isn't a good hitter. On the contrary, it seems very safe to say that he's worth about 20 runs per year more than an average hitter going forward, with the understanding that it will require the team to replace him for a handful of weeks each year and baking in the aging curve that will gain gravitational force as he moves into his 30s. However, his balanced skill set won't lead to any kind of breakout from here, and his value as a complementary piece is slightly diminished by broader changes to the way the game works. The Cubs can't plan to win with a Suzuki-style player as the linchpin of their lineup. They need a player who's clearly better, making him a partner to Ian Happ, Michael Busch, and perhaps Dansby Swanson and Isaac Paredes as complementary weapons. They need one of the 10-15 players worth over 30 runs at the plate in each of the last few seasons, and that player needs to fit one of the positions they're capable of opening up in the everyday lineup. Unfortunately, such players are extremely difficult to acquire, and it's not clear whether this front office is up to the task. View full article