Daily Clips
January 9, 2018
LOCAL
Recovered from fall, Yost to attend FanFest
January 8, 2018By Jeffrey Flanagan/MLB.com
Duffy, Kennedy atop projected Royals rotation
KC could deal veterans for younger arms before season opens
January 8, 2018By Jeffrey Flanagan/MLB.com
Ned Yost, recovering from broken pelvis, will be at Royals FanFest
January 8, 2018By Rustin Dodd & Pete Grathoff/KC Star
NATIONAL
What Is Lorenzo Cain Really Worth? More Than You May Think
January 8, 2018By Jay Jaffe/SI.com
MLB TRANSACTIONS
January 9, 2018 •.CBSSports.com
LOCAL
Recovered from fall, Yost to attend FanFest
January 8, 2018By Jeffrey Flanagan/MLB.com
If you know Royals manager Ned Yost, you would expect nothing less.
Yost said he will attend Royals FanFest on Jan. 26-27, despite suffering a serious fractured pelvis in late November after a 20-foot fall from a tree stand.
In fact, Yost told MLB.com that he has recovered enough to be back up hunting in the trees surrounding his Georgia farm ground.
"I'm ready to go," Yost told MLB.com. "I've been back up [in the trees stands]. Just didn't see anything."
Yost also said he is ready for Spring Training to start.
"I'll be ready to go," Yost said. "I'm going around just like I used to do. I don't use the wheelchair anymore. I can move. I'm mobile.
"I know what the doctors said, but hey, I'm good. I'm back to what I used to be. People that didn't know what happened won't know what happened to me."
Duffy, Kennedy atop projected Royals rotation
KC could deal veterans for younger arms before season opens
January 8, 2018By Jeffrey Flanagan/MLB.com
As it stands, left-hander Danny Duffy would be the Royals' Opening Day starter and the leader of the rotation going into 2018.
But the Royals are in rebuild mode, and general manager Dayton Moore has made it clear that virtually everyone on his roster is a potential trade asset to help restock the farm system.
And Duffy, predictably, received plenty of interest in terms of trade talks at the Winter Meetings last month and ever since.
So what will the Royals' rotation look like come March 29? Well, right-hander Ian Kennedy and his seemingly unmovable contract seem a lock. So do right-handers Nate Karns and Jakob Junis, whom the Royals consider part of the youth movement.
MLB.com is taking a look at the projected rotation of all 30 teams ahead of Spring Training. Here's how the Royals might stack up:
ROTATION IF SEASON STARTED TODAY
Danny Duffy, LHP
Ian Kennedy, RHP
Jason Hammel, RHP
Nate Karns, RHP
Jakob Junis, RHP
STRENGTHS
If the Royals don't trade Duffy, this could be a decent rotation. Duffy returns from an injury-plagued year but still has dynamite stuff, everyone knows that. Kennedy was excellent in 2016 (3.68 ERA in 195 2/3 innings) but never seemed to recover from a May hamstring injury last season. He should bounce back. Hammel had a solid post-All-Star break stretch (nine out of 12 starts giving up three runs or fewer) but struggled before and after. Before a thoracic outlet syndrome injury ended his season in May, Karns was a strikeout machine (51 K's in 45 1/3 innings with a 1.19 WHIP). Junis had a solid rookie year (9-3, 4.30 ERA), even better than his numbers suggest.
QUESTION MARKS
Can Kennedy and Hammel bounce back? Will Karns be ready for Opening Day and can he stay healthy? Will big league hitters adjust to Junis in his second year? Where is the depth outside of recently acquired Trevor Oaks?
WHAT MIGHT CHANGE
Duffy and Hammel still could be dealt before Opening Day. Someone else in the Royals' system could emerge, such as hard-throwing right-hander Josh Staumont or lefties Foster Griffin, Eric Stout or Eric Skoglund, and maybe even right-hander Brad Keller, whom the Royals got in a Rule 5 Draft trade.
Ned Yost, recovering from broken pelvis, will be at Royals FanFest
January 8, 2018By Rustin Dodd & Pete Grathoff/KC Star
For eight weeks, Royals manager Ned Yost passed the days on a recliner in his Georgia home. His shattered pelvis could not support his body weight, so he would sleep and think and sometimes turn the television on around 4 in the afternoon. Sometimes he would not move for 42 hours at a time.
He lost 25 to 30 pounds, he says, his muscles atrophying as the days piled up. He had little appetite. He also missed his annual trip to Major League Baseball’s winter meetings. Yet those long, boring days in his lounger were not as bad as he anticipated.
“The days went by quick,” Yost said Monday, speaking by phone from Georgia. “The time went by quick. I think I was just thankful I was alive.”
More than two months after a fall from a tree stand on his property nearly took his life, Yost, 62, is out of his recliner and back on his feet. He is walking again, without the aid of crutches. He is driving. He is working odd jobs on his farm, and helping his sons clean the deer shot in the family’s annual winter hunts.
“Kids are shooting deer; we’re cleaning deer,” Yost said. “As you can tell, I’m back to my old self.”
In fact, Yost is feeling so good that he decided last week that he would return to Kansas City on Jan. 26 for the Royals’ annual offseason FanFest at Bartle Hall. Toby Cook, the Royals’ vice president of publicity, said Yost had emailed the team and simply said: “Just let me know what you need me to do.”
Yost will join a list of players on the floor of Bartle Hall. He will likely have some stories to tell.
“I want to do FanFest,” Yost said. “I love coming and being with our fans.”
For now, Yost estimates that he is close to a month ahead of schedule in his recovery. He is attending physical therapy two times a week near his home. He expects to be ready for spring training in February as he enters his eighth full season as the Royals manger.
“I’m driving everywhere,” Yost said. “I’m walking. I haven’t used a wheelchair. I’ve been mobile. I’ve been moving. I’ve been going.”
For Yost, the current prognosis has lifted his spirits after his 20-foot fall left him with two rods and an assortment of plates and screws holding his lower body together. Yost says he never harbored any doubts about his managerial future. But his recent progress has quelled concerns about his ability to handle the grind of an 162-game season.
In the days after the surgery that saved his life, Yost contemplated the situation and listened to his doctor. She told him that he would not be mobile for close to eight weeks. His body could not support his own weight. His best option was a recliner, a chair in which he would pass the time.
“My doctor said no weight bearing for eight weeks,” Yost said. “And I did it.
“And then she said. ‘OK, you can do like 25 percent body weight on your leg.’ Shoot, I took off the first day, and I went with crutches for about the first three or four days, and then after that, it was like: ‘Gone.’”
For now, Yost says the most discomfort has surfaced in his back and neck, a result of his sitting in a reclined position for close to eight weeks. But he has begun to take on small projects on his property, a welcome release from the monotony of the last two months.
“Again, I got to go slow now,” Yost said. “I’m not running or anything like that. But if you didn’t know me, you wouldn’t know that anything ever happened.”
For close to eight weeks, Yost could do little but wait. He would take phone calls from general manager Dayton Moore, discussing the slow offseason. He would think about his team. He would appreciate the quiet moments and each breath he got to take. But if there is any doubt that Yost is progressing back to normal, crusty self, here is a snapshot from Monday afternoon.
Yost was enjoying another day on his property. He was preparing to catch a flight on Tuesday for a speaking engagement. At just before 1 p.m., he picked up a phone call from a reporter, who asked if he would be attending FanFest later this month.
“I don’t know,” Yost said, exaggerating his tone. “I’m thinking about it. We’ll have to see about that.”
He paused for a moment before finishing.
“You know, I’m just messing with you, right?”
NATIONAL
What Is Lorenzo Cain Really Worth? More Than You May Think
January 8, 2018By Jay Jaffe/SI.com
Eric Hosmer is the player most indelibly linked to the Royals' surprise 2014 AL pennant and 2015 championship, but Lorenzo Cain may have done more to help those teams achieve glory. Taking advantage of his outstanding speed and athleticism, the fleet-footed centerfielder coupled above-average offense with elite defense during the Royals’ pennant runs, and he's more or less continued to do so in the two seasons since. Now a free agent, the going-on-32-year-old centerfielder ranked fifth in The Reiter 50, but as with Hosmer and 16 of the other top 20 from among that group, he remains unsigned at this writing.
To date, several teams have shown interest in Cain, with the Rangers, Blue Jays and Brewers doing so most recently and the Giants and Mets checking in earlier this winter. No dollar figures have been tossed around, at least publicly, but we can get an idea of the range of possibilities via my What's He Really Worth system, a model that incorporates a player's last three years of performance, a projection of his future value, and estimates of the market cost for a win, the rate of inflation and an age-related decline.
Though he's played in the majors for parts of eight seasons, it's fair to call Cain a late bloomer. Drafted out of a Florida high school by the Brewers in 2004, he was slowed by a strain of his posterior collateral ligament in 2009 and didn’t make his major league debut until 2010, when he was 24 years old. Traded to the Royals as part of the Zack Greinke blockbuster in December 2010, he played just 67 major league games over the next two seasons due to the unexpected hot play of Melky Cabrera (2011) and further lower-body injuries (2011–12). He led all MLB outfielders with 24 Defensive Runs Saved, but hit for just an 80 OPS+ in 2013 (.251/301/.348)—his age-27 season—and looked like a bottom-of-the-lineup type who could be useful, but hardly a championship-caliber player.
Cain made dramatic improvements at the plate in 2014 (109 OPS+) and again in '15 (125 OPS+), becoming less pull happy but generating more hard contact and swiping 28 bases in each season. In 2015, he set career highs with 140 games, 16 homers—as many as he'd managed in the previous three seasons—and 7.2 WAR (Baseball-Reference version), the league's fourth-highest total. That same year, he made his lone All-Star team, dashed home with the pennant-winning run in the ALCS against the Blue Jays (he'd won ALCS MVP honors the year before) and helped the Royals to their first championship in 30 years.
Unfortunately, a left hamstring strain and a left wrist sprain each cost Cain about a month of the 2016 season. He played in just 103 games overall, and just 30 after June 28, shifting to rightfield—a position where he'd split time for most of his Kansas City career, generally with Jarrod Dyson coming off the bench late to take over center—due to the hamstring injury. Even with just a league average offensive contribution (100 OPS+), he produced a respectable 2.9 WAR thanks to his outstanding defense (+11 DRS).. Fully healthy, he rebounded in 2017, setting new career highs with 155 games, 175 hits and 54 walks and providing his typical blend of speed (26 steals in 28 attempts) and modest power (15 homers). He hit .300/.363/.440 for a 112 OPS+, nearly identical to the .300/.347/.436/113 OPS+ he'd hit in the previous three seasons combined.
Defensively, the good news is that Cain proved durable enough to play 151 games in centerfield. The bad news is that his +5 DRS was his lowest total since 2012, marking him merely as a good fielder instead of a great one; his +2 UZR is in the same ballpark. Interestingly enough, he did rank fifth among all outfielders in Statcast's newfangled Outs Above Average, which accounts for the probability of an outfielder making a play by taking into account the distance and direction he has to travel and the time to get there, all based on the direction, launch angle and exit velocity each batted ball. Cain's 15 Outs Above Average trailed only Byron Buxton, Ender Inciarte, Mookie Betts and Adam Engel. Meanwhile, Statcast's assessment of Cain’s sprint speed (top four percentile) jibes with his +8 baserunning runs, which ranked third in the majors behind only Buxton and Betts (both +9). All of which suggests that his legs (and baserunning smarts) are still in excellent shape going forward, an important consideration given that facet’s centrality to his value.
Cain’s 5.3 WAR in 2017 was good for 10th in the league, and even given his 2016 absences, his 15.4 WAR over the past three seasons is tied for 16th in the majors, fifth among all outfielders. Again, he's made just one All-Star team and hasn't won a Gold Glove, though he did win three straight (2012–14) spots on Wilson's Defensive Players of the Year teams. Based on the metrics, one can't begrudge the hardware of the Rays' two-time Gold Glove winner, Kevin Kiermaier (2015–16), but it's rather galling that Cain went home empty-handed in 2013–14 while outdoing the Orioles' Adam Jones in both DRS (+45 to 0) and UZR (+38 to +2) by wide margins. Even with a minimum of accolades, he's easily the best centerfielder in a free agent market where the alternatives (Dyson, Carlos Gomez, Austin Jackson, Jon Jay, Cameron Maybin) profile as part-time players or incomplete solutions.
Unlike Hosmer and J.D. Martinez, Cain doesn’t have agent Scott Boras bandying about $200 million contract demands, but via the WHRW, he’s got a better case for being paid big bucks (if not that stratospheric figure). In estimating Cain's value going forward, the WHRW model uses Tom Tango's Marcel the Monkey forecasting system ("the most basic forecasting system you can have, that uses as little intelligence as possible") to establish a baseline based upon a 6/3/1 weighting of WAR; that is, six times his 2017 WAR plus three times his 2016 WAR plus his 2015 WAR, divided by 10. Tango's model also includes regression and an aging curve, specifically:
• 20% regression in the first year (0.8 times that weighted WAR)
• A baseline loss of 0.4 WAR per year thereafter, adjusted for age: gaining 0.1 WAR for each year under 30 and losing 0.1 per year over 30 (so -0.2 for Cain's age-32 season).
For the cost of a win this winter's series, I've extrapolated from the results of two studies of last winter's market, a low-end estimate of $9 million per win for 2017 based upon Ben Markham's study of 101 free agent deals from last winter, and a high-end estimate of $10.5 million via Matt Swartz’s longer-range study. I'm applying the latter's 5.9% estimate for annual inflation to both. All of these figures represent a jump from last winter's series; despite the slow pace of free agent signings this winter, the industry is awash in cash, having set a revenue record for the 15th year in a row despite an attendance dip. What's more, each team is about to reap a $50 million windfall from the sale of a majority stake in MLB Advanced Media (now BAMTech) to the Disney Corporation.
While no reports of actual offers to Cain have been made public, it's safe to assume he'll be getting ones in the three-to-five year range given his age (all dollar figures in millions). (click link for chart)
Five years and $102.9 million does seem to be a big jump beyond the five years and $82.5 million Dexter Fowler received from the Cardinals last winter for his age-31 to 35 seasons, but then Cain has been far more valuable than Fowler thanks largely to his defense. Fowler's -31 DRS from 2014–16—nearly the inverse of Cain’s +34 DRS from 2015–17—limited his WAR to 8.2 in that span, and he had considerably less value on the bases than Cain as well.
At the $10.5 million per win figure, Cain's five-year forecast produces a valuation of $120 million; at $24 million per year, that would be the sixth-highest average annual value of any outfielder's contract, fitting in between Mike Trout ($24.083 million and Jason Heyward ($23 million). Again, timing is everything, including the fact that Trout's AAV includes salaries from his three years of arbitration eligibility. It’s hardly a guarantee that Cain’s deal will go that high, but it could.
Unlike the cases of Hosmer and Martinez, where charitable assumptions regarding shaky defensive metrics, injuries and intangibles are necessary to justify valuations that still don't match Boras’ asking price, Cain's case seems fairly straightforward. His age, injury history, likelihood of regression—all of those are incorporated into the model to some extent, and none of that needs to be waved off to justify a nine-figure deal.