Archive for January, 2011

Dickey Stays With Mets

There’s a popular phrase that claims, “you can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” Last season, R.A. Dickey turned that phrase on it’s head. Dickey reinvented himself as a knuckleballer, and at the ripe age of 35 managed to post the best season of his career. Dickey capitalized on that success Saturday, agreeing to a two-year deal with the New York Mets. The deal, said to be worth $7.5 million over the two seasons, also contains a club option for a third year. Dickey, however, doesn’t have a history of success in the majors outside of last season. With that in mind, the Mets are hoping Dickey has some new tricks up his sleeve this season.
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More Than Longoria

Since his debut in 2008, Evan Longoria has been one of the most valuable players in baseball according to Wins Above Replacement. Even scarier: Evan Longoria is only 25. But the main reason he’s most likely going to be at the top of Trade Value Leaderboard again this season is his ridiculous contract. The contract has been discussed many times, so I’ll just list the years and payouts of his contract as reported at Cot’s (in millions of dollars): 2008: $0.5, 2009: $0.55, 2010: $0.95, 2011: $2, 2012: $4.5, 2013: $6, 2014: $7.5 club option ($3 buyout), 2015: $11M club option, 2016: $11.5M club option.

There is no need to repeat how incredible the contract is for the team, the circumstances under which it was signed, or the effect it might have had on agent malpractice insurance premiums. It is generally understood that when pre-arbitration players get “locked up,” the contracts are almost always favorable to the team. Such players will be paid far less than less-talented, older players on the free agent market. However, for a different perspective on how much value this contract gives Longoria, let’s take a look at some of the lesser free agents of 2011 who will be getting paid more than Longoria in the coming season, while giving readers a chance to weigh in on how they are likely to perform.

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Joe Beimel Improves Bucs’ Bullpen

The Pirates announce the signing of Joe Beimel today, giving the organization a decent left-handed reliever since they traded Javier Lopez at this past summer’s trade deadline to the eventual World Series champs Giants. Beimel was originally drafted by the Pirates out of Pittsburgh-based Duquesne University (shout-out to former RotoGraphs author and friend Dan Budreika), debuting with Pittsburgh in 2001. As reported by MLB Trade Rumors, Beimel had several Major League offers and one two-year offer, but he chose to return to Pittsburgh for a minor league deal. He’s expected to make the Pirates’ Opening Day roster.

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Roy Halladay & Cliff Lee: Efficiency Experts

When Cliff Lee spurned both the Rangers and Yankees for the Phillies earlier this offseason, it set up the Phillies rotation to be akin to the Miami Heat starting five, except without all the reality shows/live tv specials and hatred, but with state income taxes (albeit a low one). Now teamed up with Roy Halladay, Roy Oswalt, Cole Hamels and (for the time being) Joe Blanton, everyone outside of the NL East is looking forward to the potential dominance of this rotation. And together, Halladay and Lee could also form one of the most efficient duos ever.

When I think of efficiency for a pitcher, I think of BB/9 and K/BB. You could easily make a case for BB%, K%, strike % or even P/PA, and you wouldn’t be wrong, but BB/9 and K/BB would be the two I pick, especially since they have readily available yearly leaderboards on baseball-reference. And looking at those two, we see that Halladay and Lee could be on the way to some serious history. Halladay has ranked in the top 5 in the Majors in each category each of the last three years, and Lee has almost matched him (he finished seventh in K/BB in 2009). In fact, last season, Lee ranked first in both, with Halladay right behind him, and no one was even remotely close to them:
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A’s Might Not Upgrade Greatly With Figgins

To call the Oakland A’s off-season aggressive might understate the fervor with which Billy Beane has rebuilt his roster. Already he has signed four major league free agents, exercised two options, and traded for two starters. They add up to nearly $50 million total. Beane would have spent more, too, if he had his way: the A’s reportedly had a $64 million offer to Adrian Beltre. This morning we learned that Beane might not be finished. Reports circulated that the A’s are interested in a swap with the Mariners: Kevin Kouzmanoff “and perhaps a pitcher” for Chone Figgins. Despite the Figgins’s name value, this trade might not greatly benefit the A’s.

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Review of Hitting Prospects, James Player Rater 1995

View a spreadsheet of all 81 prospects by clicking here.

Last week, I submitted for the readership’s consideration a review of the hitting prospects from the 1994 edition of the Bill James Player Ratings Book.

In what follows, I do something similar for the 1995 edition.

The reader might remember that, in the ’94 edition, there were many rookie-eligible players who (a) didn’t receive grades but (b) were still very clearly being regarded as prospects by James — Carlos Delgado and Manny Ramirez being two notable cases. The 1995 edition of the book goes even futher in this direction: there are 81 players whom James seems to indicate as prospects of one stripe or another, but only 20 receive grades.

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Top 10 Prospects: Minnesota Twins

1. Aaron Hicks, CF
Acquired: 2008 1st Round (Southern California HS)
2010 Level: Low A
Opening Day Age: 21.6

Notes: Prospect aficionados have a tendency to get a little antsy with highly-touted prospects. When a player doesn’t immediately light the world on fire he can be unfairly criticized, and, to some extent, I think Hicks has been subjected to this. When he was drafted, he was billed as a 5-tool player with solid power and speed highlighting his game, but the returns in those two areas have been just fair so far. In just over 1,000 career plate appearances, Hicks has only hit 16 home runs and has stolen only 42 bases. Those modest returns on top of the Twins’ decision to have him repeat the Midwest league in 2010 have some jumping off the bandwagon, but a look past those counting stats reveals a lot for Twins fans to be excited about.

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Do We Need More Home Field Advantage In MLB?

Yesterday, I was perusing Rob Neyer’s blog, and he did a post about a part of the new book Scorecasting. In the interview Rob linked to, Jon Wertheim discusses part of his findings on home field advantage, and how he believes they are mostly related to the subconscious desire of referees and umpires to avoid getting booed. Now, I don’t know if he’s right or wrong, but thinking about the ramifications if it were true led me down a thought path that I found interesting.

Unequal officiating is inherently not fair, and on the surface is a problem we would like to see resolved. But would any of us actually enjoy baseball – or any sport, really – more if there were no home field advantage?

I went to a lot of games in Seattle when I was a kid – mostly baseball, but also some basketball and a few football games. I remember having a distinctly different level of excitement about attending a Sonics game, both because the team was good and because the home team in basketball is a huge favorite, meaning I was far more likely to go home happy. The higher prices kept NBA games from being a family staple, but if that had not been a factor, I could have easily become infatuated with hoops instead of baseball.

What is the benefit in having more equality for the road team? While some fans certainly go for the experience, many go for the chance to see their team win, and leave disappointed when that doesn’t end up as the final result. If we were able to identify and alleviate any officiating biases that caused the home team to win more regularly, wouldn’t we just be degrading the enjoyment of the product for most of the people in attendance?

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Commenters Are $#!%ing Evil! (And Other Respectful Thoughts)

“I suggest this article is so bad that you should not only be fired but live-sacrificed on an altar to a pagan god of pestilence and your remains fed to gremlins.”

— bc, in response to my 12/30 article, “NHL Winter Classic: I’m Glad Selig Didn’t Think of That”

“Alex, your sabermetrical analysis continues to amaze me. Keep up the good job of destroying FanGraphs with this political bullshit.”

— Part-Time Pariah, in response to my 4/30 article, “Should You Boycott the Diamondbacks?”

If there’s a way to win a popularity contest by writing about baseball online, I haven’t figured it out. In fairness to the collective wisdom of the Fangraphs community, many of the lumps I take are at least somewhat justified — the harshest language is usually reserved for when I speak from ignorance or err in a statement of fact — but few of the insults are quite as well-thought out as bc’s gem, which remains my favorite burn that I’ve ever received. Other commenters don’t seem to really care whether the piece is good or not, and are simply opposed to the simple fact that my columns aren’t statistics-based, like the above from Part-Time Pariah.

Obviously, my experience isn’t particularly unique. Everyone knows that anonymity can bring out the worst in people online, and the longer a comment thread, the more likely it is to fall prey to Godwin’s Law or descend into a morass of personal attacks. Yet despite all that, there is an internal logic to comment threads, whether it’s in the wilderness of unmoderated message boards or a smart blog with smart readers like Fangraphs. The issue came to the fore recently, when Sports Illustrated’s Jeff Pearlman wrote a piece about confronting a few of his online attackers and discovering that they were much more reasonable on the phone than on their Twitter feed. But one of them responded with his side of the story, indicating that Pearlman had somewhat distorted the facts — they hadn’t tweeted @jeffpearlman, they just wrote about him; instead, he had gone after them, confronting them by phone even though they hadn’t directly contacted him.

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Position Players by WAR: Post-War Era

Baseball Prehistory | Deadball Era | Liveball Era | Post-War
Expansion | Free Agency | Modern Era

I mentioned in the Liveball Era article that over 500 MLB players served in WWII. Those gaps are a lot more apparent in many of the post-war players. Not only did players miss years (like Ted Williams), but they also had partial seasons due to service in the military. With so many players going off to serve, the quality of the Major Leagues dropped, and scoring dropped as a result. While I’m jumping from the Liveball Era to the Post-War Era, please keep in mind that players on the edges were more likely to be affected by the war.

If anyone has a full list of players that served, and the years they served, I would love to add that information to the charts to make the impact more obvious.

After the war, baseball started to change again. In 1947, Jackie Robinson was the first black player since the 19th century to play in the National League. He was joined 11 weeks later by Larry Doby in the American League, and baseball started integrating. 1947 also saw the first televised World Series. Baseball’s popularity soared after the war. During the Liveball Era it had been relatively stable, but the end of the war brought far more spectators than ever:

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