2015-2016 MLB Stove: Talk To Your Congressman About Stopping DH Expansion

It feels as though, in failing to coax the Marlins into accepting their (humongous) offer for Jose Fernandez, the Diamondbacks decided to pay the Braves for him, instead—even though all the Braves had was Shelby Miller. Dave Stewart and Tony La Russa have basically done what A.J. Preller did last winter: start out with some admirable grandeur, improve, get a glimpse of possible contention, and then totally lose their attachment to reality.

Miller improves the Diamondbacks at one of their key remaining areas of weakness. According to DRA, he was the 10th-best pitcher in baseball last season, despite his pedestrian strikeout rate and (as always) good-not-great command. He’s pitched three full, useful seasons in the majors, and the two best ones (2013 and 2015) look remarkably similar: ERAs of 3.06 and 3.02, FIPs of 3.64 and 3.47, identical cFIPs of 97. That last number stands out, because cFIP is the more predictive cousin of DRA, and indeed, our best way of using performance to project a pitcher’s talent level into the immediate future. Almost no matter how durable Miller is, if he’s really a 97 cFIP guy, he’s not going to repeat a top-10 season in overall pitching value. DRA says Miller was roughly as good as Cole Hamels and Corey Kluber; cFIP puts him in the company of Lance Lynn and Rick Porcello. Crucially, though, Miller developed a sinker in 2015, and found an approach that might help explain his defiance of cFIP’s predictive power.

Until 2015, Miller was Lance Lynn, more or less. He threw his four-seam fastball roughly 70 percent of the time, and most of the rest of his offerings were curves chasing strikeouts. Lynn’s 97 cFIP came with a 100 DRA- in 2015, meaning his results hewed closely to his peripheral stats, even after carefully accounting for context. In 2015, though, Miller more closely resembled Lynn’s teammate Jaime Garcia, who relied almost equally on his sinker and four-seamer, and used a slider to keep hitters honest. (Miller obviously used a cutter to achieve that effect, and still threw his four-seamer somewhat more often than the sinker, but the point stands.) Garcia had a 96 cFIP, but a 77 DRA-, not far from Miller’s 74, so they both beat cFIP by a healthy margin.

This is similar to the phenomenon I observed in studying Zack Greinke’s evolution when he signed with Arizona over the weekend: moving multiple pitches into the arm slot and velocity band naturally inhabited by a pitcher’s primary fastball can help him outpitch his peripheral numbers. It’s something about getting hitters to make contact, but on the wrong parts of the bat, or a hair off of their natural timing. If Miller is an astute student, maybe he can even learn something more about the art from Greinke, who is growing into one of its foremost practitioners. If the Diamondbacks are specifically seeking out guys who go about things that way, perhaps that strengthens the argument for believing in that skill. (Unfortunately, there’s little evidence of the latter. Arizona signed Greinke after Johnny Cueto spurned them, and dealt for Miller after Fernandez proved unobtainable.)

Anyway, Miller is still only 25, he’s generally durable, and if you buy into that DRA-driven 2015 WARP, he’s a solid second starter behind Greinke. He’s under control for three more years, at whatever salaries the arbitration system affords him, just as Fernandez would have been. Great. The Diamondbacks now have a starting rotation that can compete and win in the NL West.

At what cost, though? The Diamondbacks surrendered perhaps the National League’s best fourth outfielder, in Inciarte, a key cog in their run-prevention machine in 2015. They gave up Aaron Blair, a former first-round pick who split 2015 between Double-A and Triple-A, and who could have provided nice rotation depth in 2016. And they gave up Dansby Swanson, the top overall pick in the draft six months ago. If the Diamondbacks had any hope of extending their half-open competitive window further than the end of Paul Goldschmidt’s prime, they put a huge dent in it by agreeing to this trade.

That’d be okay if they were definitely, measurably better on this side of the trade, but that’s just not the case. Miller probably will prevent more runs than Inciarte and Blair will in 2016, but it won’t be by all that much, and the increased pressure on the likes of Yasmany Tomas and Peter O’Brien by the departure of Inciarte offsets some of that benefit. Stewart and La Russa continue to alternate good decisions with ghastly ones, which both imperils their organization in the long term, and calls into question their ability to leverage even this brief opportunity to contend.

Inciarte was one of the best defensive outfielders in baseball last season. In fact, he won the Fielding Bible Award for multi-positional defenders. He can play any of the three outfield spots well, but obviously, he was slightly limited in value by the presence of A.J. Pollock just above him on the center-field depth chart. Inciarte also has just 111 strikeouts in 1,008 career plate appearances and provides value on the bases. He doesn’t draw walks and doesn’t hit for power, but if his glove is all it has seemed to be early in his career, he’ll still be a three-win player or better for the next few years. It’s as though Andrelton Simmons never left.

In the big picture, this is a big step forward for the Braves. Blair’s performance hasn’t caught up to his scouting reports so far, and of course, there’s always a danger that it never will. Swanson played just a handful of games in the Northwest League after signing this summer, so he’s not likely to reach the big leagues anytime before 2017. Given the timeline the Braves claim to be targeting, though, Swanson is a huge acquisition, and it demonstrates a heretofore undocumented sense of competitive purpose on the part of the baseball people in Atlanta. Maybe their brutal corporate ownership situation still prevents them from getting back into contention soon, but on the long list of things that had to change before smart people could take this rebuild seriously, John Coppolella checked off several items in this one transaction.