The Joe Nathan era in Minnesota is officially over, leaving the team down to just one piece from the trade that sent A.J. Pierzynski to San Francisco for Nathan, Boof Bonser, and the eternally enigmatic Francisco Liriano. The deal looked like a huge win for the Twins in 2006 and 2010 — when Liriano looked fantastic — and like much less of a bargain in the years when Nathan was the sole producer of positive value.

For the first time since Nathan’s arrival in 2004, the Twins don’t have a long-term option at closer already on the team. They got a taste of what life post-Nathan was like in 2010 when Jon Rauch (21/25 in save opportunities) and Matt Capps (16/18 in save opportunities) split time, but neither Rauch nor Capps is currently with the team.

In theory, the team could go with closer by committee, but I find that to be extremely unlikely. Knowing that Nathan would be back for the 2011 season, they still went out and traded Wilson Ramos for Capps. Times may have been different then, but it does show something of a fundamental desire to have consistency at the end of games, something that closer-by-committee doesn’t really offer. To that end, here are a few names to keep in mind as potential options for the Twins’ next closer. Read the rest of this entry »

It was not so very long ago that Chien-Ming Wang was a Cy Young candidate and even received a handful of MVP votes. It’s even less time ago that his ankle injury — sustained while running the bases in Houston — created an outcry, or at least a tempest in a teapot, about AL pitchers having to hit in interleague play. Between that point, June 15, 2008, and July 29, 2011, Wang threw just 42 innings and looked pretty rotten doing it. He lost all of 2010 and the first few months of 2011 to shoulder surgery, and while he didn’t look like much of a world-beater when he returned, his reemergence from long absence has piqued my interest. Read the rest of this entry »

Their 30-something middle infielder of choice snatched out from underneath them, the Dodgers signed Mark Ellis to a two-year deal worth just under $9 million with a club option for a third year. The deal slots Ellis, who will turn 35 next season, between Aaron Hill — whose two-year deal is rumored to be worth 10-11 million, and who will turn 30 before next season — and Jamey Carroll, the soon to be 38-year-old that played 146 games for the Dodgers last season and who signed his own two year deal worth about $7 million. If the trend holds, there’s a 28-year-old second baseman looking to sign for about $13 million over the course of two seasons.

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The Twins have landed one of the absolute prizes of free agency in Jamey Carroll, who will be one of the keys to their rebuilding effort under new/old GM Terry Ryan and… What, you’re not buying Carroll as a major difference maker, the first real catch of the free agent period? Ok, I can’t say I blame you.

Free agency hasn’t always been the Twins’ strength, no matter who the GM was. Mike Lamb, Rondell White, Tony Batista, Nick Punto at $4 million a year, everyone has their favorite foible, but to be frank, I don’t see Carroll falling into that category. A lot of the dislike for this deal I saw on Twitter today centers around two things: First, that he was given a multiyear deal and second, that he’ll be the team’s starting shortstop.

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The standard timetable for a pitcher to return from Tommy John surgery is one year. At that point, the expectation is that a pitcher will be pretty close to the player they were before their injury. Some guys do it quicker than that, some guys never really make it back because of changes made to their motion or to their pitch selection, but at a year, the outlook is typically fairly clear.

For reasons I’ve yet to really hammer out, the status quo hasn’t been the case for the Minnesota Twins. Neither of the last two pitchers they had undergo the procedure, Francisco Liriano and Joe Nathan, hit the one year mark and showed anything resembling the stuff they had before their injury. Liriano’s issues are deeper than simply failing to recover from his injury, but Nathan looked like a husk of the pitcher who missed all of the 2010 season after tearing his UCL early in spring training.

In his first 17 appearances — from the start of the season until he went on the DL — Nathan simply could not get hitters out. He allowed 13 runs in his first 15.1 innings of work, posted a WHIP of 1.70, and allowed opposing hitters a .274/.370/.500 line. He recorded a few strikeouts along the way, but with Matt Capps getting the save opportunities, he couldn’t possibly strike out enough hitters to make him worth playing.

Following a month on the disabled list with inflammation in his elbow — though in all likelihood, the inflammation was as much in his ERA as in his arm — Nathan looked much better than he did in the early part of the season. He still wasn’t nearly the dominant reliever the Twins had hoped he would be, but he held hitters to a much more reasonable .193/.239/.367 line with a 3.38 ERA and a 28/5 K/BB ratio.

It comes as no surprise that the Twins declined his $12.5 million option for this year, especially in light of the fact that they may try to reduce payroll for 2012. Paying any reliever that kind of money is questionable, but allocating that high a percentage of payroll to a player the team isn’t convinced will be a world-beater is an unnecessary risk. Nathan has been linked to both the Twins and Mets as a closer candidate and is likely to come cheaper than Jonathan Papelbon or even Francisco Rodriguez, which may make him a undervalued source of saves.

Obviously it’s important to see where Nathan lands before putting him on your draft board. For example, if he joins the rest of the Twins’ free agents in Philadelphia and you don’t play in a holds league, don’t bother. However, I think there’s a very real chance that he opens the season getting save chances for someone, the question is if he’ll finish the season in the same role.

As a brief aside, I’ve run into the belief that closers on good teams are more valuable than those on bad teams. It makes logical sense, but it doesn’t always work that way. The 80-win Nationals recorded 49 saves, while the 102-win Phillies had just 47; the 91-win Rays recorded 32 saves and so did the 63-win Twins. The Astros did finish with the league’s worst record and a league-low 25 saves, but generally speaking, I’d rather grab a closer on a bad team who is going to get close to 100 percent of the save opps than a pitcher on a good team who will get some of the closing duties, but who will have to share.

Much of the concern over Nathan is due to his drop in velocity and it’s not hard to see why. Immediately after returning to the majors, Nathan’s velocity was well below his career levels, which helps explain why he was giving up such hard contact. After his month on the DL, his velocity was much closer to at least his 2009 levels before slipping a bit to end the year. With a full offseason of traditional strength and conditioning work, it seems likely that he’ll have more consistency in his velocity rather than a huge jump at midseason and a slide at the end.

Working against Nathan is the fact that he’ll be 37 this season and while age matters less for closers than for other position players — see Hoffman, Trevor or Rivera, Mariano — Nathan is likely to see something of a dip in his velocity sooner or later whether he’d had surgery or not. There’s no way to know when that drop will come for Nathan, but his age does complicate the value calculation.

Nathan is not Joel Zumaya; he has solid secondary offerings to get hitters out if the velocity isn’t there, though he uses his fastball to set up hitters for the slider or curveball. I think he can function without getting back the extra tick on his fastball, but he’ll need to be more aggressive in the strike zone early in counts so that hitters can’t sit on a pitch they know they can drive. In 1-0, 2-0, and 3-0 counts, Nathan was extremely dependent on his fastball, making it all the more important for him to throw his curveball effectively on 0-0 or on 1-0 to keep the count close and the hitters off balance.

As I mentioned above, any long-term planning regarding Nathan should wait until he settles on a team, but he’s worth keeping on your radar for cheap saves. I think the velocity issues he had last year will be less problematic for him in 2012, especially if he can use his curveball as a strong set up pitch for his wipeout slider.

It probably didn’t escape too many people’s attention, but it bears repeating: Adam Dunn had a terrible year.

If you knew he was struggling, but didn’t own him, it may not have sunk in just how bad his year was. His line tells much of the story: at .159/.292/.277 he did contributed for the White Sox — nor indeed for fantasy owners. Every one of those statistics was a career low, and his .569 OPS was .250 points lower than his previous career worst. His ISO of .118 put him in league with the likes of Jemile Weeks, Michael Brantley, and Rafael Furcal, which would be fine…if he were a defensively-minded middle infielder instead the third highest-paid DH of all time. He was caught stealing more times — one — than he was intentionally walked; it was the first time in his career he had failed to draw a single intentional pass.

I can understand the excitement for Dunn going into the season in light of his move from Nats Park to US Cell, one of the most hitter-friendly parks in the majors, but he was probably still a slight reach at 37. At the end of the day, it matters little whether his projected production would have merited a choice in the early rounds, his actual production made him virtually unplayable.

He won’t be taken in the 30s next year, that much I will guarantee you, but it remains to be seen whether he’ll slip into a range where he could plausibly be called a sleeper. I’m guessing most fantasy players will be willing to write off 2011 as a fluke and look at his career numbers when drafting, but that could still push Dunn into the 50s or 60s in mixed drafts.

My early sense is that he’ll be 2012’s Justin Morneau, who was the next first baseman drafted after Dunn in most leagues. He was taken about 25 picks after Dunn and 20 picks before Kendrys Morales, clearly setting him away from not only the top tier first baseman, but also from the perceived weaker options. Like Morneau in 2011, there is uncertainty about what Dunn will do, but there is an expectation of improvement.

So the question is: Was Dunn’s miserable 2011 a fluke?

2011 was Dunn’s second straight year of declining production, and while the difference between 2009 and 2010 wasn’t nearly so drastic as the drop between 2010 and 2011, it does mean that 2011 isn’t isolated or counter to Dunn’s career arc. The difference between Dunn’s useful 2010 and his painful 2011 comes down to the contact he was making, which manifested itself in two major ways: his BABIP and his flyball rate.

While Dunn will never be a high average hitter, the time spent waiting for his power to show up would have been less painful if he had hit above .250. Instead, his BABIP fell 89 points from 2010 to 2011 and sat 50 points below his career average. He actually had a good line drive percentage, but his flyballs seemed drawn to gloves. His BABIP will rise next year, the conditions for it failing to do so are hard to imagine, but that won’t help Dunn’s home run numbers.

Dunn hit fewer flyballs this year than he had in any season since 2008 and had less than 10 percent of them leave the yard. The low HR/FB rate is the bigger issue, but it was compounded by the fact that he gave himself the fewest chances to hit a home run ever. Prior to last season, Dunn had never hit fewer than 130 flyballs, but in 2011, he hit just 114. His 47.5 percent flyball rate was his lowest since 2008. Add in his highest pop-up rate since 2003 and it would seem that Dunn simply struggled to make good contact. Few balls in play were hit hard enough to turn into hits and even fewer were hit squarely enough to leave the park.

His swinging rates and contact numbers would seem to support this idea. While he swung at fewer pitches overall than he did in 2010, he frequently made contact on pitches that were out of the zone — a career high 57 percent in fact. He made contact on pitches in the zone, pitches he could actually drive, at his worst rate since 2004. Pitchers certainly weren’t looking to give Dunn any help as he saw the lowest number of pitches in the strike zone in his career. A bit more patience might have given Dunn and tremendous AVG/OBP split fueled by a huge walk rate, but he swung at pitches out of the zone and threw opposing pitchers a lifeline.

Unless Dunn simply lost his ability to identify pitches — doubtful — I don’t see him having the same issues again next year. Whether he was pressing because of his new contract or for some other reason, I find it somewhat hard to believe that it’ll be present again next year. If he’ll challenge for 40 HR again, I can’t say, but with his BABIP bouncing back and a little better pitch selection, there’s no reason to believe Dunn can’t get his OPS back into the .850-.900 range.

Well, Tuesday was certainly a busy day in the AL Central. And while I’d love to drop 1500 words or so on Bill Smith’s exit and the return of Terry Ryan, unless you’re in an AL-Only front office league, that’s not exactly fantasy relevant. Also, if you’re in a league that counts front office members, tell me in the comments, I’d love to see that.) The Sanchez-for-Cabrera swap, on the other hand, is worth looking into.

I love this deal, not for either team per se, but as an observer with no rooting interest. This is a deal that could make either GM look really good, and while I have my suspicions as to who will look better come this time next year, I wouldn’t bet much money either way. Jonathan Sanchez is a high strikeout arm who can’t keep runners off base, while Melky Cabrera hasn’t exactly been the model of consistency throughout his career either. It will be an interesting story line to follow next year.

From a fantasy perspective, I don’t see Sanchez being an option except in very deep mixed and by default in AL-Only. His strikeout rate — the 11th highest in baseball (min 100 IP) — makes him alluring, but he was owned in just 44 percent of Yahoo! leagues last year because of his substantial downside.

In 2010, his .252 BABIP kept his hit rate down, which meant he posted a WHIP you can live with, 1.23, despite a BB/9 of nearly 4.5. In 2011, his BABIP didn’t even fully regress to his career average, but a jump of 20 points up to .272 was enough to pull his hit rate back into the 7s. In and of itself, a H/9 of 7.1 is fine, but when it’s paired with a BB/9 of 5.9, his resulting WHIP of 1.44 is tough to swallow. He’s never been particularly good at run prevention, and he matched his career ERA of 4.26 precisely in 2011. The strikeouts and walks are part-and-parcel of Sanchez at this point, and while perhaps a new pitching coach will know how to help him, I’m not banking on that happening. A change of scenery will be nice, I’m sure, but it’s not going to help him a lick statistically speaking.

A good rule of thumb when a pitcher switches from the NL to the AL is to add half a run to his ERA — as of 2008, the actual number was .41 runs, but if your just looking for a ballpark figure, .5 is easier to remember — which would give Sanchez an ERA of nearly 4.75. He’s also moving from one of the most pitcher-friendly parks in the majors to a relatively even park in KC. Home runs haven’t been one of his major issues in the past, but he’ll need to be a little more careful in a stadium that doesn’t suppress them the way AT&T Park does. If his HR rate does jump with the park switch, his walk rate will make those bombs all the more costly.

One thing working in Sanchez’s favor, and it isn’t much, is that he was injured for a large portion of the 2011 season. Biceps tendinitis and an ankle sprain caused him to miss nearly 80 days of the season, limiting him to just 19 starts, his fewest since he became a full-time starter in 2008. It isn’t too much of a stretch to suggest that the biceps injury may have been causing him trouble before it pushed him to the disabled list, but suggesting that it made a profound difference is going too far. He should be healthy next year, which is a good foundation, but it’s not going to solve his location issues.

It may seem odd, given the rather grim take I’ve presented above, but I like this deal for the Royals. To understand what they see in Sanchez, I think it’s important to look at what they gave up. Part of the reason I like this deal for the Royals is that they’ve essentially purchased two lottery tickets with found money. They grabbed Cabrera last offseason for $1.25 million, and by moving him at what was almost surely peak value, have now turned him into two players who could be useful parts. Yes, both have serious flaws and Cabrera could well prove to be the best player in this deal, but with Lorenzo Cain waiting in the wings, it’s an interesting gamble to take.

If the choice was a player like Sanchez, who may or may not be valuable or someone like Bud Norris, who will be more consistent at a similar WAR level, I think the Royals made the right call. Sanchez is likely to give them at least a handful of starts where he has his good stuff and shuts down an opponent, but I just don’t see them coming often enough for him to be worthwhile in most fantasy contexts. Anything he produces above and beyond that is found money once again for KC.

Now we have to move out of the realm of pitchers who contribute in nearly every category. Now we have to start looking at arms with notable drawbacks, whether it’s a strikeout rate in the 5-6 range, a WHIP and ERA built on unsustainable peripherals, or a lack of a track record. There aren’t many arms left that offer sure success. Jaime Garcia might have more in common with the tier above than with the rest of this crowd, but the difference is minimal.

Recapping the day’s top story:

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If the Cardinals have any hope for Adam Wainwright to return next year to the form that made him a top-of-the-line pitcher, they need only to look at another pitcher already in their rotation. Jaime Garcia missed most of the 2009 season after undergoing the procedure following the 2008 season. In his first full season back, Garcia not only pitched quite well, he did so in the majors, having broken camp with the Cards in something of a surprise move.

In a weaker field, he might have been able to earn Rookie of the Year honors, but 2010’s class was stocked — Buster Posey was the winner over Jason Heyward, Garcia, Gaby Sanchez, and Starlin Castro — so stealing the prize was somewhat out of the realm of possibility.

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We are getting into pitchers that may or may not be National League eligible next year, particularly Hiroki Kuroda and Javier Vazquez. Until we know for sure what’s happening with retirees, I’m going to leave them out, though it’s worth mentioning that I don’t think I’d keep anyone who has talked about retiring or generally leaving MLB, unless someone has declared their intent to retire and I missed it. Unlikely.

A lot of these pitchers are guys I’d like to have on my staff, but it’s a value question. Anibal Sanchez could be a really nice strikeout option, but there’s no way I want him at or near the cost of Zack Greinke. If you can keep Vance Worley at one round earlier than you drafted him last year — likely the last round, since he wasn’t often drafted — I’d do it. If you have to use a 5-6th round pick to keep him, I’m much less interested. Read the rest of this entry »