NEWS/RUMORS/AROUND MLB Thread (Oct 2016 - Feb 2017)

We didn't have the site

 

We were in another site then the closed it down and came here.

 

The "Top 10 Right Now" for 3B is on MLB Network, waiting to see where Ginger Jesus lands.

 

JT checks in at #5, behind Donaldson, Bryant, Arenado and Machado in some order.

 

I'll take that that's where he belongs. Seager might even be better tbh.

 

Bautista closing in a deal with the Jays. It will be interesting to see what he gets. I would have wanted to nab him for 2 around $20-24 mil, but was probably never likely.

 

Sounds like he is getting 2yrs at between 35-40. Hard to see him playing up to that.

 

It sounds like he has turned down higher offers to return to Toronto.

 

The only way it would've make sense for LAD considering the lux-tax and definitely not ideal to give up draft comp for a 1yr deal.
2yr deal or nothin..maybe a 3rd year buy out included.

Sounds like the " saving face " type of report.
As open as he was about trying to get as much $ as possible, I'd be shocked if he truly turned down more $

 

Eh, I mean it has been talked about that the Twins were kicking around on him. He really could prefer to go to a winning organization over a cellar dweller. Also, the other teams that were linked to him have fanbases(Orioles, Rangers) that hate his guts. So he may not be comfortable going into an environment like that at the tail end of his career. Besides those teams, who could have possibly tried to beat a 2 year $40 mil deal? The Braves maybe? Just hard to see a better situation.

I've said it before as well, Toronto would probably be my personal first choice to play in the whole league. Beautiful city and the people are awesome.

 

If LAD did at all toss around the idea of adding Bautista it'd make sense if Trumbo were also discussed.
Trumbo wasn't very good against LHP last season, but outside of last season he's done pretty well against LHP in his career..last year perhaps just a hiccup?
Started 95 games in RF for BMore last year, plenty of experience out there overall, currently no worse than Bautista in the OF defensively.
All that said, though, of course Trumbo should be more expensive than Bautista, so a harder hit tax-wise.

 

I think the Braves, absolutely.

 

His D in the OF is beyond atrocious and would likely need to be replaced with a lead late in games. His defensive metrics caused him to put together only a 1.7 WAR even with his .256/.316/.533 slash with 47 bombs. That Bad. I will say that I do not hate the idea though. He is supposed to be great at 1B and if AGon puts another year together like he did last season, he could potentially be the replacement for him with Bellinger going to LF. The way the org places OF'ers could help him somewhat as well with those numbers. He is apparently asking for around 3 yrs and 40 mil at this point which would be a pretty good deal.

 

If they're at all interested in adding a LF they'd probably take McCutchen off PIT's hands, along w/probably Harrison, if PIT wasn't asking for so much for McCutchen

 

2.2 WAR, 123 wRC+
Again, very bad defensively, same as Bautista who probably isn't really an OF anymore.
LAD has the depth to replace either guy late in games tho

And Trumbo's a hometown kid, so he'd probably fit in that JT group of guys and be accepted w/o much blow-back.

 

So Saunders then signs with the Phils and it sounds like they may have also been one of the teams kicking around the idea of bringing in Bautista. So yeah, it was likely down to places where he was hated or teams that were not competitive.

 

Mark Trumbo Is Still a Free Agent for Obvious Reasons
by Craig Edwards

The forces of supply and demand appears to be bringing the offseason to a standstill when it comes to heavy hitters. Not many teams are looking for that type of player, and yet a number of them remain available. Edwin Encarnacion had to take less than he wanted, while Jose Bautista and Mark Trumbo headline a group of bat-first guys still available on the market. It’s a group that also includes Chris Carter, who was non-tendered by the Brewers, as well as Pedro Alvarez, Brandon Moss, and Mike Napoli. The qualifying offer hurts for Bautista and Trumbo, but the real reason Trumbo remains unsigned is that he isn’t worth a multi-year deal, and he probably isn’t even worth the $17.2 million attached to the qualifying offer.

There’s certainly some sort of market for Trumbo and the 47 homers he hit in 2016. As a player, though, he only does one thing really well, and it’s tough for him to compensate for his deficiencies with that one strength. It’s not just that Trumbo is a poor defender and baserunner, it’s that he isn’t even that good on offense. Last season, Trumbo’s on-base percentage was .316, below the league-average mark of .323 for non-pitchers. Sure, his .533 slugging percentage was very good, but it wasn’t among the top 10% of baseball, and when combined with his lackluster OBP, his 123 wRC+ ranked a respectable 40th out of 176 qualified players last season. While respectable, getting such little mileage out of 47 homers is a little disconcerting.

The graph below shows all of the players who have hit at least 40 homers since the end of World War II and their respective wRC+, with Trumbo highlighted.



Trumbo didn’t produce the worst offensive season ever for a player with at least 40 homers, but he wasn’t that far off. There are 295 qualified players who’ve recorded 40-homer seasons. They’ve averaged 155 wRC+, collectively. Trumbo, meanwhile, finds himself in the bottom 10%; just 16 players have recorded a lower wRC+ and only Ryan Howard in 2008 hit more home runs (48) with a lower wRC+ (120). The reason for Trumbo’s low wRC+ totals relative to his homers is a combination of walks, strikeouts, and a low batting average on balls in play.

Trumbo tends to strike out a lot, having recorded a 25% career average and a similar 25.5% last season. Strikeouts limit the number of balls in play a hitter gets, limiting the number of opportunities a player has to get on base. Trumbo hits a lot of fly balls (43% in 2016), and a decent percentage of those fly balls (13% in 2016) are of the infield variety, leading to essentially automatic outs. Trumbo doesn’t leg out a lot of infield hits, and his lifetime .288 BABIP and his .278 BABIP in 2016 are not the product of bad luck, but of Trumbo’s approach and strategy to get the ball in the air and hit a lot of homers.

Trumbo’s approach isn’t necessarily a poor one for him, but that low BABIP combined with a low walk rate means his on-base percentage is never going to be high. For Trumbo, it seems, this is the best way for him to be an effective hitter, as he told David Laurila last season:

I’m not [disciplined enough] in a lot of people’s eyes, but that’s the way I’m most efficient. I’ve tried both. I’ve tried to be a high-walk guy, and that version of me is not even a major-league-caliber player. I have opinions on plate discipline, and the best version of me is the one that’s aggressive. If I swing at a few pitches out of the zone, so be it.

Trumbo’s lifetime walk rate is just under 7%; last season it was 7.6%, still below league average. To put Trumbo’s walk rate in some practical terms: if he’d walked in 10.6% of his plate appearances last season instead of 7.6%, he would have gotten on base 20 more times. Those 20 walks are worth roughly the equivalent of seven homers. If he walked more, he could afford to hit fewer homers, but as he suggests above — and 2014 helped to prove — that approach isn’t likely to work for Trumbo, as he ends up trading away more home runs than the walks he receives.

If he can’t walk more or strike out any less — and if he isn’t going to hit for a higher BABIP — that means the offensive version of Mark Trumbo we just saw is very likely the best version of Mark Trumbo we will ever see. After subtracting a couple runs for Trumbo’s baserunning and accounting for his defense, it means that, at his very best, Trumbo is an average baseball player. The graph below is a similar one to the one seen above, except this plots 40-homer seasons against WAR.



Trumbo’s 2.2 WAR ranks 287th out of 295 seasons. Only one Jose Canseco in 1998 has authored a season with at least 42 homers and been worse overall than Trumbo was last season. Of course, 40-homer seasons are generally going to self-select good players having good seasons, but Trumbo’s 2016 is one of the least valuable in that club. Nor was Trumbo’s seasonal WAR figure unduly deflated by randomly poor defensive numbers. Trumbo split the season between the outfield and designated hitter, and his UZR in the outfield was right in line with his career numbers, where he has been roughly 10 runs below average over a full season for a corner outfielder. That figure plus the positional adjustment for corner outfield (-7.5 runs) is equivalent to the adjustment for designated hitter (-17.5), which means that making Trumbo a designated hitter isn’t going to save him any more runs as a player overall.

Mark Trumbo just hit 47 homers but still only registered a 123 wRC+ and 2.2 WAR. Given the normal numbers for him elsewhere offensively in walks, strikeouts, and BABIP and the unlikely prospect of a change in approach, Trumbo’s 2016 offensively likely represents the absolute peak for what he can expect to do. His baserunning and defense cost him in total value and they aren’t likely to get any better, either. At age 31, he is at a level where we expect to see some decline offensively. As a result, Trumbo isn’t likely to provide any more value than the qualifying offer he received from the Orioles. Given his age and total value as a player, he certainly isn’t worth a multi-year deal, and because the team that signs him will lose a draft pick next season, he might not even be worth $10 million to sign. The current market is probably hurting Trumbo some, but his lack of value as a player should be hurting him more.

 

Meaning LAD didn't like him enough..they'd probably feel similarly about Trumbo.
Or not..watched my share of MLBTV last week and they kept saying Bautista's persona was factoring in negatively, so maybe there was more than just that sentiment coming from BMore and Texas?
But lets be real..Texas was never happening. Lol