When does the season start, again?

An off-season wish list, some Corbin Burnes discourse and a farewell to a sweet Tortuga prince

Nov 24, 2021

Happy Thanksgiving, fellow rich people.

RPC has been on a bit of a sporadic publishing schedule ever since the Brewers were eliminated from the postseason, but…we….are…back.

The off-season is in full swing—and by “full swing” I mean “there have been a couple of transactions and the owners are about to lock us all out ASAP” so that’s fun!

Let’s eat some turkey and converse.

Twins shopping list

~Jake

Black Friday and Cyber Monday are just a single food coma away and shopping is on a lot of people’s minds as they put the finishing touches on their letters to Santa. It’s no different for pro ball clubs, either, as some teams are already bolstering their lineups for next year. San Francisco is looking like Mama Schultz getting their shopping done way early--they already re-signed Brandon Belt and Anthony DeSclafani with reports indicating Alex Wood isn’t far behind.

Meanwhile, the Twins have been characteristically quiet. Maybe that’s because of an expected lockout and negotiations for a Collective Bargaining Agreement. Or maybe they just don’t have their wishlist ready yet? OK, that’s not it. But let’s put together a list just for fun anyways.

This week, I’ll start with the pitchers, and we’ll look at the rest next week.

Any good wish list starts with a simple question: What do we need? And ooooo boy, have you seen the Twins starting rotation right now? FanGraphs currently predicts Bailey Ober to be the Opening Day starter, followed by Joe Ryan, Randy Dobnak, Griffin Jax and Lewis Thorpe. That’s like the Scott Baker-Nick Blackburn-Kevin Slowey days. It’s dire.

The problem with those starters wasn't that they were bad, necessarily--to be clear, they definitely weren’t good--but they clearly missed a frontline guy. Carl Pavano, Phil Hughes and Ervin Santana all served as decent pitchers, too, but they always missed a true ace. Of course, they had that with Jose Berrios, but he was traded away and just signed a seven year, $131 million extension in Toronto. They need an anchor to the rotation, so what are the best options?

Best Option -- Max Scherzer

Of course Mad Max is the top option. This is a free agent class with plenty of decent starters but very few topline guys and only one on the truly elite plane. Scherzer is coming off a season where he was once again considered a Cy Young candidate, logging 5.4 fWAR while splitting time between the Nationals and the Dodgers.

I know, that all leads to a surely expensive price tag. The knock against Scherzer, though, is his age. At 37, he’s not exactly young and can’t be looking for a huge multi-year deal. He’s likely looking for a 2-3 year deal at a huge cost. The Twins will almost certainly never shell out $35 million a year for a pitcher over a huge contract (like Gerrit Cole), but would they do that for a couple of years? They ought to.

Contrary to last year’s abysmal performance, they ought to be pushing in the chips soon. Byron Buxton may only be around for next year, Josh Donaldson isn’t likely to get any better and guys like Jorge Polanco, Max Kepler, Mitch Garver and Miguel Sano are theoretically at their peaks. If you’re going to build around this team, do so with the best pitcher on the market while not locking yourself into a team-altering agreement for a decade.

Good Options -- Clayton Kershaw and Marcus Stroman

It’s hard to imagine this, right? Somehow even harder than Max. And yet, if you strip away the Dodger history, it makes sense. Kershaw is a 34-year-old lefty with tons of historical success who can still sling it. He’s adjusted his stuff over the years as he’s lost velocity, but he’s still a strong pitcher, logging 3.4 fWAR in 2020.

He has some arm troubles that kept him out of the playoffs, but reportedly does not require Tommy John surgery. You have to know he won’t be peak Kershaw, and that’s OK. Steamer projects 3.1 fWAR in 2022, which is almost surely higher than anyone currently on the Twins roster will do next year.

Much like Scherzer, his age will likely keep the contract to a more attainable length for the Twins, too.

Stroman is different in that he’s younger and doesn’t have the high-end history. Like Kershaw, though, he’s consistently strong. He had a throwaway 2018 and sat out 2020, but otherwise he’s consistently around his career 3.63 ERA and 3.62 FIP. He won’t strike out a ton of guys, but he’ll keep the ball in the park and have fun doing it. Selfishly, he’s one of my favorite pitchers to watch, so I’d love to see it. Ben Clemens of FanGraphs ranked him as the No. 8 free agent on his list of top 50 and he estimates a 4 year, $100 million deal. Given that all of the Twins starters will combine for less than $5 million of their salary, they can probably afford the $25 million tag.

Now, is it a problem that the Twins had a below average infield defense even with the wizard Andrelton Simmons at short? Yes, probably. Do I care? Well, yes, but I still want to see it.

Fine Options -- Robbie Ray, Carlos Rodon and Kevin Gausman

It’s weird to say signing the guy who just won the AL Cy Young is fine but here we are. Robbie Ray represents this trio of pitchers who are going to give general managers throughout the league fits. Was 2021 the real version of these pitchers or was that the peak?

All three pitched their best in 2021, and any team would be happy to have that version. Do I want to pay $100 million for any of these guys, though? No way.

It may not take that. Rodon was the No. 17 free agent in FanGraphs’ Top 50 ranking and the writer Ben Clemens estimates a 3 year, $45 million deal for him, while clocking Ray (No. 7) at 4 years, $112 million and Gausman (No. 14) at 3 years, $54 million.

Rodon is a year removed from being non-tendered, hence the lower price. It’s not like Gausman and Ray have notably better histories, though. In 2019, Gausman made his way to the Cincinnati Reds via waivers and was relegated to a bullpen role. Ray, meanwhile, had a 6.62 ERA in 12 games with two teams in 2020.

If you take money out of the equation, the Twins would be happy to have any of these pitchers. You can’t do that, of course, though, and it just seems like a treacherous investment.

Don’t shrivel into a corncob

~Curt

“The greatest trick the nerds ever pulled was convincing people innings don't matter,” the tweet read.

You know the one. It was a statement from a national reporter in the moments following Corbin Burnes’ 2021 Cy Young award announcement. And it was the straw man of all straw men.

The unspoken premise behind the tweet, of course, was that Zack Wheeler was robbed of the award as the best pitcher in the National League because he pitched a heavier load of innings than Burnes--46 more of them, to be specific--and did so with excellent run prevention with a 2.78 earned run average.

It was a disingenuous argument at its core. Nobody, not the nerdiest of nerds, would tell you that innings don’t matter. If you’re offering a team the option between a 3.00 ERA in 200 innings and a 3.00 ERA in 250 innings, they will always take the latter. There is no war on innings pitched in baseball.

What there is, though, is a different direction that the game has moved toward. Innings matter, but they don’t matter as much. Pitchers don’t go as deep into games not because they aren’t capable of doing so but because large amounts of data exist that tell us that very few remain as effective the third and fourth times through a lineup. With the type of velocity and movement that relievers can bring in short spurts, it just isn’t nearly as big a priority for teams to shoulder heavy innings loads.

If innings simply didn’t matter, then Josh Hader would have won the Cy Young. No pitcher was as dominant as he was in as many high leverage spots, after all. But, obviously, Hader didn’t win. He didn’t even get a vote. Because innings do matter. You know this. Voters know this. The national writer who logged online and fired off a bunch of tweets because his preferred candidate who did not have one of the most dominant per-inning seasons of any starter ever didn’t win knows this.

The question, in the context of Cy Young voting, came down to “at what point do innings matter enough to matter more than statistical dominance?”

We, of course, could go to WAR for the answer to this question. It’s a copout, sure, but WAR takes into account innings pitched among its many other components. It’s an accumulated stat. Burnes led in Fangraphs’ version of WAR, Wheeler in Baseball Reference’s. (Joe Posnanski did a good job of summing up my thoughts on pitcher WAR in the context of these two sites; I don’t particularly like using either but I do believe Fangraphs does a better job at achieving its goal.) Baseball Prospectus leaderboards had the two well within the margin of error.

But...like I said, going to WAR is somewhat of a copout for pitchers in particular. Baseball Reference, for example, significantly weights its WAR based on the team defense the player pitches in front of. The Brewers objectively had a better defense over 162 games than the Phillies, but Burnes did not pitch in 162 games. His numbers over his 26 starts, rather, indicated that Burnes was the recipient of a lot of bad luck after contact. Whether it was directly the defense or simply bad BABIP luck most of the time, rWAR is calculating Burnes’ value as if he was the benefactor of a “better” outcome than he deserved when balls were put into the field of play when that simply was not the case. This, as Posnanski mentions, is how we get Aaron Nola’s 10.2-WAR season in a year when he finished third in Cy Young voting.

So, back to the innings talk.

Innings eaters are great, no doubt, especially on teams without particularly strong bullpens. But at what point does pitching deep into games no longer deserve a pat in the back (or a Cy Young award) because it results in additional runs?

I’d argue it’s around this point:

These are Wheeler’s splits by inning.

While it’s not necessarily great practice to knock a pitcher for giving up runs because he’s going deep...if one of the primary premises for his Cy Young case is that he pitches more innings, it’s a fair critique.

Wheeler, from the seventh inning and on, allowed 18 earned runs in 33 innings. That’s an ERA of 4.91, the type of production you could get from a below-average big leaguer reliever.

Burnes threw only 11 innings total after the sixth, a significantly lower number than Wheeler’s 33. But in this modern day age of baseball, where the Brewers could hand the ball off to Brad Boxberger, Devin Williams and Josh Hader and walk away with a win, does it really matter all that much that Wheeler threw 22 more innings with an ERA of nearly 5.00 in our arbitrary “late-game” situations?

It shouldn’t.

None of this even delves into Burnes’ statistical dominance. You already know all about how good he was. But when a pitcher leads the league in ERA and strikeout-to-walk ratio and has every possible underlying metric pounding on the door and screaming in a mansplaining voice that ACTUALLY HIS RUN PREVENTION NUMBERS DESERVED TO BE EVEN BETTER BY A SIGNIFICANT MARGIN, it’s a good idea to pay attention.

FIP isn’t a particularly effective predictive measure, but it sure as heck is good at telling us how a pitcher did at limiting three of the things over which he has greatest control: strikeouts, walks and homers. And when Burnes posts the second-best FIP of all-time, again, it’s a good idea to pay attention.

When Burnes is the best pitcher in baseball at preventing extra-base hits, again, it’s a good idea to pay attention.

When Burnes is in the 97th percentile in baseball in wOBA against and does so with an xwOBA even 14 points lower than that, it’s a good idea to pay attention.

Burnes would have had to pitch to a 4.10 ERA over 46 innings to match Wheeler’s season ERA. And, again, that’s starting with an ERA far higher than it deserved to be.

Burnes was the best pitcher in baseball in 2021. The Cy Young making its way onto his mantle is only a deserving finish.

Goodbye to our sweet, sweet boy

~Tom

This is our first real offseason edition of Rich People Conversations. And we’ve got some bad news to report.

*Tom the Town Crier reports to the stage and unveils a scroll*

HERE YE, HERE YE.

ON THIS DATE OF WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER THE 24TH, YEAR OF OUR LORD JESUS CHRIST

THE GENTLEMEN OF HOUSE RICH PEOPLE CONVERSATIONS ARE ANNOUNCING

THE DEPARTURE OF NOTED UTILITY MAN AND TURTLE EXTRAORDINAIRE

WILLIANS ASTUDILLO

*crowd gasps*

*man faints*

*baby cries*

That’s right, folks.

Willians Astudillo, our beloved La Tortuga and a suspected member of the Twins bullpen based on how many blowout appearances he made last season, was designated for assignment by the Twins on Friday.

And you know what? Easy jokes aside, I respect the hell out of him.

Astudillo, all of 5-foot-9 and 225 pounds, played parts of four seasons in the big leagues for the Twins.

Right on brand, Astudillo debuted in the fifth inning of a 14-9 loss to the Chicago Cubs … in left field. He switched over to center field for the eighth and ninth frames and, oh yeah, hit a run-scoring single in his first at-bat. It’s the perfect anecdote for his Minnesota career.

That couldn’t describe his career with Minnesota any better.

Astudillo started at least one game in seven different positions. He made five appears on the mound -- four during last year’s disaster of a season alone.

The baseball world fell in love with Astudillo on his sprint to home plate in 2018. Wearing the old-school Twins script jerseys (miss those, by the way), Astudillo’s helmet flew off as he rounded third and slid safely for a pivotal run in a 3-1 victory over the New York Yankees.

And thus, the nickname La Tortuga was born.

Every spring for the last three years we’ve had the same conversation: How will Astudillo make the team? Thankfully, MLB added a 26th man to its rosters in 2020. It was perfectly cut out for Astudillo, who could fill in short- or long-term at basically any position.

As he kept coming back, defying the odds and making the roster, the GIFs piled in.

Playing in the Venezualan Winter League, Astudillo was fooled by a pitch and swung so hard he ended up on one knee. Only … the ball left the park. It was a home run.