Twins Sign J.A. Happ to One-Year Deal
Twins Sign J.A. Happ to One-Year Deal
The 38-year-old lefty has posted sub-4.00 ERAs in five of the last six seasons
On Wednesday, Jeff Passan of ESPN reported that the Minnesota Twins had signed left-handed starting pitcher J.A. (pronounced Jay) Happ.
The possibility of an addition had been teased earlier in the day by Darren Wolfson of KSTP.
Let’s just get the basics out of the way. Happ is left-handed, turned 38 in October and had a 3.47 ERA with the New York Yankees last season. He’s actually had an ERA under 4.00 every season since 2015 — with the exception of 2019 — and has generally been good for 150-170 innings on a regular basis since leaving the National League in 2012.
Happ’s best season was probably 2018, when he was an All-Star who split time between the Yankees and Toronto Blue Jays and finished with a 3.65 ERA. For those into that sort of thing, Happ won 20 games in 2016 with the Blue Jays and 17 in 2018, and he finished sixth in the Cy Young balloting in the former.
Happ has pretty much always been around the 8.0 strikeouts per nine innings range — except when he fanned 9.8 per nine in 2018 — but he really turned a corner command-wise in his second full season in Toronto. His walk rate dropped from 4.4 per nine innings in 2013 to 2.9 in 2014, and hasn’t been back over 3.0 since.
Pitch-wise, it doesn’t appear he made any meaningful changes to his repertoire to spur such a change — he’s largely been a fastball-slider guy with the occasional change — but his velocity did spike a bit to 93.3 mph and he’s largely held it in the 92-93 range since.
Happ has kind of been all over the map as far as inducing grounders vs. fly balls, which leaves one with the sense that he can likely tailor his approach a bit based on fit. With that said, he was largely in the 40-42 percent range for grounders — 45 percent is about average — and he still allowed too many home runs (1.6 per nine innings).
That rate spiked in 2019 when he allowed 1.9 homers per nine innings, but again that was the year of the juiced baseball. Still, Happ would seem to have a safer landing spot in Minnesota with a more spacious park than Yankee Stadium and a capable defensive outfield — even if the jury is still out on who will play left field.
Happ has struggled a bit with right-handed hitters in his career — as many lefties do — with a .251/.319/.424 slash line against as opposed to a .237/.297/.374 line against left-handed hitters.
With that said, even that has ebbed and flowed over his career, and been markedly better since his breakout
Since 2014, he’s allowed the following wOBA figures against righties:
2014 - .327
2015 - .307
2016 - .292
2017 - .317
2018 - .313
2019 - .345
2020 - .296
Again, that 2019 season sticks out like a sore thumb — but it was likely in large part to the juiced baseball mixed with Yankee Stadium.
From a repertoire standpoint, Happ’s always been about the fastball. Last year, he threw his four-seamer about 45 percent of the time and his sinker about 22 percent of the time, and he threw the slider just a hair under 20 percent and his change just above 13 percent.
The 20 percent usage on his slider will naturally pique the interest of Twins fans knowing what this current regime likes — and it’s the highest mark of his career — but the pitch hasn’t exactly been a show-stopper for him.
The swinging-strike rate on it last season was a respectable 12.9 percent, but over his career, it’s just 9.6 percent, which is well below average and not terribly far off the rate on his four-seamer (9.0 percent).
Now what that might mean is that there’s room for it to improve — even at his age — when working with Wes Johnson, but it’s awfully hard to expect that. Opposing batters have hit .249/.274/.415 against Happ’s slider over his career — .188/.212/.375 last year — but one has to grade on a curve (pun intended, I guess) which makes his career numbers on the slider less impressive. It’s usually a power pitch for whiffs and low opponent slash lines, and that just hasn’t been the case for him, in general.
It’ll be worth monitoring how the Twins and Happ structure his fastball usage. The sinker had a 14.0 percent swinging-strike rate last season — in general, I’d say about 10 percent is average for fastballs, and a bit lower on sinkers — but that was way out of whack with his career rate of 6.7 percent in a much shorter season. It was 8.3 percent the year before.
Opposing batters hit just .210 on Happ’s four-seam fastball last season, but it came with a price — a .329 on-base percentage and a slugging percentage of .452. The sinker — in just 178 instances, by the way — induced a slash of .132/.179/.245 with an astonishing 75.7 percent groundball rate.
If I had to guess, I’d imagine the Twins will attempt to turn him into a sinker-slider guy from a tunneling standpoint, and then address the infield defense with a shortstop like Andrelton Simmons, Didi Gregorius or Marcus Semien.
Happ’s Statcast metrics aren’t especially sexy from last season, but take a look especially at how he fared later in the season:
image credit: Statcast
The last 50 and 100 plate appearances are especially illuminating. In September, Happ faced 117 batters — so basically the middle chart on the bottom of the graphic — and allowed a slash line of .220/.261/.385 with 31 strikeouts and just five walks in 29.1 innings (and four home runs too, which is still modestly worrisome).
If we look under the hood at Brooks Baseball, we can see that Happ largely shifted his pitch usage to favor sinkers as the season went on.
In July and August, Happ threw his four-seam fastball 42.7 percent of the time and his sinker 18.3 percent of the time. From Sept. 1 on, he still threw the four-seam fastball 42.8 percent, but the sinker jumped to 27.5 percent with the cuts coming at the expense of his changeup and slider.
From Sept. 1 on, opponents hit .262 against Happ’s fastball and .158 against his sinker, while slugging .595 and .237, respectively.
Again, I get the sense that the shift toward the sinker — which can be an unsexy pitch in sabermetric circles — is more than just a short-term trend.
I also think the expected stats (notated by an x in front of them) are especially interesting. In short, the expectation based on his batted-ball data was that he’d allow much lower wOBA/AVG/SLG marks than he did. Opposing batters hit .208/.273/.382 against Happ in 2020 — which is respectable on the surface and a .280 wOBA — but the x marks on those stats were a .222 average and just a .342 slugging percentage. There’s no such thing as wOBP — because it isn’t strictly based on batted balls but also walks — but in other words, he was a little lucky hits-wise but unlucky power-wise.
The end calculation was that his ERA of 3.47 was slightly unlucky against an xERA of 3.28. For $8 million, that’s actually a pretty solid bargain. Keep in mind that the Twins paid Homer Bailey a prorated $7 million to throw 133 pitches for them last season, and nobody would even think of him as a poor value when assessing the team’s 2020 budget (even if he actually was).
People might know that Jeremy Maschino is my go-to pitching guru in this market (he’s on Twitter here). These were the CliffsNotes he sent to me:
For those unfamiliar with Twitter DMs, the blue comments are me and the gray are his.
Ultimately, my deduction would be that this is solid signing for the back-end of the rotation, and strangely enough with a guy approaching 40, there’s some upside here. It’s almost a hybrid of the Rich Hill and Bailey signings from a year ago.
The Twins still need to add a No. 4 starter — or No. 5 if Happ really pitches well — but this is a step in the right direction, especially if they supplement with a shortstop who is good defensively (and I think they will).