Under The Knife 7/18/22

Make The Break

Quick note to start: Since I started doing free previews for free subscribers, I’ve seen a bigger increase in paid subscriptions. To those of you that subscribe, thank you. To those that see the value and pay, double thank you. What this free preview does is give you a better idea of what you’re missing. I am showing you the intro - which is pretty freeform and can be anything - and the first player/injury comment. I normally do seven or eight longer pieces on players in each newsletter, plus 10-15 more shorter comments in “Quick Cuts.” Again, I hope you’ll see the value and become a UTK subscriber at five dollars a month.

Players have made it to the late All Star break and some will take the rest, some will get a moment of glory and some dark pixels in their permanent record. With a season where we had a weird start and a late uptick in injuries, that rest could be important or actually a problem. Ben Hansen did some work a few years back - sadly, I can’t find the link - where the workload dip from the time off actually caused some issues. Teams are smarter these days and even time off comes with a designed throwing program for most teams.

What I want to take a look at is something I’ve been explaining to a good friend (and reader) who is frustrated by the analytics-driven matchups used by the Giants. We’ll use Gabe Kapler as the personification of this, but acknowledge that the data department and front office as a whole is very involved. Kapler’s not sitting in his office doing data models between sets up bicep curls for precisely the reason that Joc Pederson is not batting against pitchers he doesn’t match up well against.

However, it is far, far more than the lefty-right platoon stuff that we’ve talked about for the better part of a century. It’s handedness, pitch type, pitch angle, run expectation (what’s likely to be on base when Pederson comes up), expected relief options, weather conditions, and about twenty more things. It’s not simple math - it’s combinatorics, which is the study of putting together bunches, sometimes hundreds, of factors and coming up with the most successful path.

This is the other thing to understand. Think of it like poker - any hand can win, even a bluff, but getting to the most likely path to the best result, more often and more frequently, is where an advantage can be found. What we don’t know is what the other team is doing. More than pitcher vs batter, it’s analytics staff vs analytics staff, plus the staff that tells the coaching staff, then the coaching staff that communicates it to a player, plus the adjustments in the moment. It’s nearly impossible to tell where the real advantage is, since most teams think “ours is better than theirs.”

Analytics has become a buzzword, but so often, it’s lost real meaning and no one is doing a good job of explaining it. It’s more than knowing Statcast exists, or that lefty-righty matchups aren’t the end-all of platooning. Instead, this complex mathematical modeling is leading to decision making that might not always be the easiest to understand from the outside.

That leads to the following issue: if announcers and writers don’t get insight into the methods, how do they tell the story and make it less complex for other to understand? Analytics has this as a major issue - how to change the storytelling - as well as the fact that the most ideal game situations aren’t terribly entertaining to watch. I’m not sure how to fix either and as someone who’s been a part of this fight for two decades, I’m no closer to a solution. The fact is, I don’t think any of us thought that it would have taken over the game so quickly and completely.

Coming up on Wednesday, I’ll take a look at team status at the break and whether we can learn anything. I think you’ll be surprised. With the All Star Game coming up, let’s take a quick look around the league at the injuries:

JUAN SOTO, OF WAS (no injury)

“Soto turns down $440 million” is the headline, but 15 years makes that less than $30m, well under what other, older, lesser players are making. Fault Soto all you want for turning down more money than you or I will ever see, but understand that is a below market offer from billionaires who turned down $1.8 billion for a franchise they purchased for $450 million. They turned down a 4x return, not to mention all the cash and tax breaks the Lerners have gotten, plus a nice stadium the city built them.

While the leak of the offer is typical ownership moves, the next thing is likely to be Soto bids from other teams. The Giants top the list, but there’s not a team out there that couldn’t benefit and couldn’t afford a better offer. Whether they will or not remains to be seen, since the Nats are going to put a very steep price on one of the best players in the game with a year-plus of control, which could also be said to be a year-plus of convincing a player to stay, which is how the Dodgers have dealt with Soto’s former teammate Trea Turner.

The speculation now moves to who could make a deal to get Soto. The Giants go to the top of that list, but it seems to go against where the franchise is and has been historically. The Mariners would be an interesting fit, with a decade of Julio Rodriguez and Soto on tap if a deal could be worked. How about the Red Sox, flipping Xander Bogaerts and more to get someone they feel they could lock up if they don’t think Bogaerts will? Would the Jays deal Bo Bichette, Nate Pearson, and a couple more for Soto? If not, they should. There’s infinite possibilities, and we’ll likely hear all of them in the next couple weeks.

The AAV of the deal is simply not where Soto needs to be. He could take a below market offer, sure, and his great grandkids could be not working — or, maybe a top draft pick in a few years, given how last night’s draft went. It’s life changing money, almost as much as the Lerners and their real estate billions paid for the franchise. This isn’t new. There was an old joke about what Joe DiMaggio could say to owners if players were allowed to take equity in place of payroll - "Hello, partner” was the answer and maybe we’re getting closer to that.

I’ve never bought a ticket to see an owner, nor do I see any of them going broke by owning teams. Until I see both, I’ll continue to hope that the players I do pay to see, the guys like Juan Soto who are simply amazing and levels above anyone else, continue to take their fair share from the system. And I equally hope that someone like Soto stays healthy and out of my column so he can put up historic numbers, if only to remind the Lerners that they had opportunities to lock up the guy who just put up record after record a decade from now.

JACOB DEGROM SP, NYM (fractured shoulder)

I often get frustrated when teams use a finite number of starts/pitches/opportunities in a season and waste them on the minors, in search of ten more pitches or something like that, as if they couldn’t short start, tandem, or any number of other creative ways to patch together a single game from a 13-deep pitching staff. It’s worse when they do it on a sim game, though with Jacob deGrom, there’s a bit of an argument to be made to keep him on schedule.

DeGrom only got to 42 pitches in-game in his last rehab start and with the ASB, he could have made another rehab start, or they could sim game him, as they chose to do. The goal here is somewhere north of 50; I’m told 60 is the real number, since 50 was where deGrom should have gotten (and likely did on the side) last time out.

Assuming this goes well, there’s every indication that deGrom will make his 22 debut for the Mets sometime either over the weekend (likely Sunday) or at the start of next week. There’s going to be a pitch limit and deGrom and the Mets have focused a bit more on pitch efficiency versus pure strikeout numbers, but we’ll see if that sticks. What he’s been able to do against minor leaguers might not translate.

What I need to emphasize is that there’s no evidence - despite a great rehab process - that deGrom is any less likely to re-injure himself. The initial stress reaction is because there was too much force in the delivery and his body was breaking down. He’s had shoulder, elbow, and even bony issues, all pointing to the same root cause. Until that changes, deGrom is both supremely talented and supremely risky. His contract status makes it even more challenging and if I were the Mets, I’d be very squeezy.