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The MLB Daily Dish is a daily feature we're running here at MLBDD and rounds up roster-impacting news, rumors, and analysis. Have feedback or have something that should be shared? Hit us at @mlbdailydish on Twitter.
Good morning baseball fans.
The 2016 Arizona Diamondbacks season can only be viewed as an absolute failure.
Manager Mike Matheny is expected to be retained by the St. Louis Cardinals for the 2017 season.
An overview of the American League playoff health report shows some injured Indians pitchers on it.
Sadly, Hoynes could be right. Save for a slew of injuries over the final weekend, the Indians will enter the postseason as the American League’s most handicapped squad after losing both Carrasco and Danny Salazar to long-term injuries. Carrasco was hit on the hand by a batted ball on September 17 and will be out for the season. Salazar could feasibly return – he threw off a mound on Monday – but likely won’t have the stamina to rejoin the rotation. The Tribe might go with a three-man rotation for the ALDS, and could even start Bauer in Game 1 if Corey Kluber’s strained quad doesn’t heal in time. Josh Tomlin would be the likely Game 3 starter.
Cleveland’s injury report doesn’t stop there, though. They have been without outfielder Michael Brantley for most of the season due to a lingering shoulder injury – Brantley had a second surgery in August and is out for the year – but the rest of the outfield has not missed a beat. Cleveland’s outfield ranks fourth in baseball with a combined 12.1 fWAR, a total made more impressive when you consider most of the Angels’ 12.7 fWAR comes from Mike Trout alone. The Indians are also without catcher Yan Gomes, who is likely out for the year with a fractured wrist.
The 2016 Pirates were set up to succeed, but they couldn’t catch the needed breaks to make the postseason.
Here is a roundup of news from around the National League East.
Front office value is going up, and is surpassing some players values.
On the one hand, it’s very easy to think that this means that high level executives are still being wildly underpaid. A couple of years ago, Lewie Pollis — now working for the Phillies — put forth this very argument in his Honors Thesis at Brown University, building a model that claimed the best executives in baseball were worth something like seven or eight wins per year to their franchises, which would translate to something like $50 million per year in value. Previously, Benjamin Morris has argued that Billy Beane has been worth hundreds of millions of dollars to the A’s, and that the Red Sox screwed up by not luring him out of Oakland.
Of course, the Red Sox failure to land Beane led them to hire the very same Theo Epstein, and things worked out pretty well in Boston during his tenure. Epstein’s success makes it difficult to accept Morris’ argument that the team made a mistake by failing to spend enough to lure Beane out of Oakland, and more broadly, raises the primary challenge in determining fair executive compensation; what is the baseline we’re measuring against?
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Today in Baseball History: In 1980, A’s outfielder Rickey Henderson sets the AL single-season stolen base record, stealing his 98th base in a 5-1 victory.