Otto von Ballpark

Also worth noting the MLB record full season OPS+ during this time frame is 123. And Seattle is still the team leader for 2019, at 133 OPS+. How the heck did that happen?

This is especially curious, when you consider our biggest FA contract offer this past offseason was to catcher Yasmani Grandal (reportedly 3 years, $39-45 mil or so).

May was optioned to the minors for awhile last year too, so he's actually up to 65.2 regular season innings since the surgery. That's basically a full season for a reliever. (Plus another 8 innings in spring training.)

Update at MLBTR: https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2019/04/nick-burdi-suffers-arm-injury.html "ESPN’s Jeff Passan tweets some encouraging news following Burdi’s MRI. While the imaging did reveal strains in the right-hander’s biceps tendon and flexor mass, there’s no break or complete tear of anything in Burdi’s arm. He’ll be sidelined for an indefinite period of time, but it seems that he may have avoided the need for another surgery."

I don't know. It's still early, but Allen has a 8.69 FIP in 9 games for the Angels, and his K% has dropped by 5% in each of the last two years. Kind of highlights the risks of trying to find two FA bullpen arms in the same offseason. It's not clear you'll actually get two quality arms that way, plus their high salaries will likely compel you to give them a long leash, and gives you fewer resources to make another move later if necessary. That's all part of the value of keeping Pressly around at $2.9 mil.

Sure. Although even if they are willing to spend more, it's still harder to sign two new good relievers than one. It's also riskier / less flexible if your top two relievers are both making $10+ mil, as opposed to having one of them making only $2.9 mil. Even a team that spends more -- like the Astros -- is going to derive benefits from having a good reliever under control at $2.9 mil over a comparable FA reliever making $10+ mil. (Both money to allocate elsewhere this year, plus more leverage to negotiate a team-friendly extension too.)

His brother Zack Burdi is in the White Sox system...

I suspect that Gonzalez didn't start the offseason with a realistic asking price. Not that he would have been offered 3/30, but maybe someone would have given him a Perez style deal but he and his agent were holding out for more.

Here are the FA RP signings from last offseason: https://www.mlbtraderumors.com/2019-mlb-free-agent-tracker/sort_column-aav__sort_direction-0__positions-rp__status-1 Without the benefit of hindsight, I'd much rather have Pressly at $2.9 mil and only need to add one name from that list, rather than push all my chips in on two of those FA.

I'm not trying to make excuses for them, but they're only $9 mil below last year's (record) payroll. That's not a lot to work with, to make a splash in the pen. They had a lot of money to work with at the beginning of the offseason, but they also had a lot of positions to fill, plus some extensions to get done. They arguably already went cheap on their rotation addition. Without the benefit of hindsight, it might be hard to make that all work and include meaningful bullpen upgrades too. It undoubtedly would have been much easier with a potentially dominant Pressly already under contract at only $2.9 mil. I have the feeling that Alcala's going to have to turn out pretty darn good in order to justify that kind of gamble from a midmarket team with contending aspirations.

From 1989-2012, MLB averaged 1 new stadium opening every year. Since 2012, the only new park has been Atlanta's (2017). It's definitely complicated, but I feel the 2000-2010 period attendance was probably inflated by this factor.

He signed late (March 20).

Thanks for these posts. Regardless of how they turn out, every player has a story.

So we can look 2 months ahead to count on signing a Pressly replacement when evaluating this trade, but we couldn't look 2 months ahead to even think about pending free agents Mauer, Dozier, Lynn, Morrison, or Escobar. Got it.

I wouldn't quite "blah blah blah" that small sample. His first start in AAA stunk, but he had virtually no spring training. His next 2 starts in AAA were dominant. I don't know if this suggests any kind of decline from his 2018 level yet.

But it's not like we had a good pen to begin with. Keep in mind, Rogers hadn't even had his dominant run yet. Rodney may have been our second best reliever after Pressly. We already needed to add another reliever (and hope they turned out) *before* we traded Pressly. After that, then we needed to add two. And we didn't have unlimited payroll space to do it, considering the other holes we had to address (2B, 1B, DH, maybe 3B, SP). That's kind of a big gamble just to get two 40 FV prospects who probably won't contribute until 2020, if ever.

FWIW, Gonzalez hasn't appeared in relief since 2009.

Severino is still out, but the Yankees rotation seems mostly intact with Tanaka-Paxton-Happ-Sabathia-German. So they didn't really have a spot to roster Gio Gonzalez right now.

Would you bounce Perez?

Last year we had a bunch of 40 FV guys too -- several have already dropped off: Jaylin Davis Jake Reed Zack Littell Andrew Bechtold Ryley Widell Tyler Jay Alex Robinson Plus Lewin Diaz was downgraded to a 35+. Also, Curtiss, Bard, and Granite probably would have dropped off had they stayed in the org. 40 FV depth is better than not having it, I guess, but those guys seem pretty fungible. I guess Hildenberger was rated at 40 FV 2 years ago, and Cave last year too. Burdi was 40 FV too, and is still there on the Pirates list.

Thanks for sharing. For reference, here's a direct link to last year's list: https://blogs.fangraphs.com/top-30-prospects-minnesota-twins/ Lewis and Kirilloff are both +10 FV compared to last year, Graterol +5 FV. (Edit to add: Duran is also +5 FV from Arizona's list last year.) Gonsalves and Gordon are both -10 FV. Blankenhorn, Rooker, Wade, Baddoo are all -5 FV.

There's a rumor that he's coming up for Tuesday's game: https://sports.yahoo.com/yet-another-report-suggests-vladimir-guerrero-jr-will-debut-tuesday-163035832.html I don't know why they wouldn't just announce it now, though. Sell those tickets!

It would be interesting to see how well players can accurately judge the strict zone in real time. I suspect they'd be no better, on average, than the average MLB umpire. Chiefly, because MLB umpires are largely selected for this one specific ability, while players are selected for this plus many other abilities (like reflexes, coordination, strength, etc.) -- heck, there are probably some players like Astudillo or Vlad Guerrero who could be relatively poor at it, but it doesn't really matter given their other abilities and approach. Plus players would seem to have a disadvantage of perspective -- the batter stands off to one side looking away from the plate most of the time, while the pitcher is much farther away from the plate. (The catcher might have the best view, I suppose. I wonder how they'd agree with Statcast? Although they would seem to be an example of the differences of perspective too -- I don't think that catchers generally have a better eye when batting.) Anyway, it seems to me that players would have their own disagreements with a strict Statcast zone -- and many of these would overlap with the umpire's. For example, let's say there is a ball clipping the edge of the zone, a spot where the umpire generally calls it a strike 75% of the time, and a ball 25% of the time. Even with a 100% accurate robo-ump, calling it a strike 100% of the time, a player still won't be able to detect it as anything that close to 100% a strike, in real time from their vantage point -- they may have the same 75/25 split as the ump. In which case, you may not see any "true performance" difference in that situation under a robo-ump system. And extending that to something like the umpire's "two strike bias" referenced in the study -- players could have their own similar "two strike bias", because 25% sure may not always be sure enough to take with two strikes.

90% of calls are half strikes, maybe?

Just to re-iterate: my observation, that some players may not want to make the adjustment to a strict Statcast zone, was meant as nothing more than that. It was not a statement of advocacy for those players relative to other players. Perhaps there is an exaggeration of players who benefit from the current system too -- there's been plenty of skepticism about the pitch-framing value estimates, for example. But also perhaps players exaggerate the umpire zone adjustments they have to make under the current system. This study pegs the umpire-Statcast disagreement rate at 9.21% for 2018. There were an average of 79 called pitches per team game, so each team experiences just over 7 such disagreement pitches per game. That's 0.8 such pitches per lineup spot, per game. The best umps lower that to under 0.6; the worst raise it to 1.0. And again, that's not considering the magnitude of the disagreements, or that players won't agree 100% with Statcast either in real time -- for some (most?) of those 0.6-1.0 pitches per game, the disagreement will be virtually undetectable to players. None of that really strikes me as absurd. Perhaps it was a bigger concern for former players, as the study suggests this disagreement rate has been dropped considerably in recent years.