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Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of Offseason Notes.

1. Four Projections for Yoenis Cespedes
2. A Fifth Projection for Yoenis Cespedes
3. Crowdsourcing Broadcasters: Toronto Television

Four Projections for Yoenis Cespedes
As you are very likely aware, Cuban defector Yoenis Cespedes agreed to a four-year, $36 million contract with Oakland on Monday. Naturally, the next question to ask is, “How well will he play in the majors?”

Below are projections from four different sources — with some serious caveats. Caveat No. 1: from what I can tell, only the the ZiPS slash-line below is adjusted for park. This is a big deal, as the Coliseum depresses wOBA by about 5% for both left- and right-handed batters. Caveat No. 2: the WAR projections are per 600 plate appearances and very rough. Each one is derived merely from the slash line, working under the assumption that Cespedes is an average major-league center fielder. (If Cespedes is merely an average corner outfielder, remove about a win from each of the WAR600 projections.) Also, in terms of run environment, I’ve used league-average wOBA of .320. Caveat No. 3: generally speaking, I have no idea what I’m doing. If you sense any errors here, do not hesitate to inform me of same in the comments section below. The idea here is merely to put some offensive projections on equal footing with each other.

Now here are those projections, from most to least optimistic:

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Even before the theatrical release of Moneyball, Billy Beane’s actions as Athletics general manager were beginning to come under the microscope more often. This is just what happens to a general manager when his team doesn’t win, and Beane’s hasn’t reached the playoffs (nor sported a winning record) since the 2006 season. Now, the microscope falls upon his latest move: the signing of Cuban wunderkind Yoenis Cespedes to a four-year, $36 million deal, even with a full outfield of Seth Smith, Coco Crisp, Josh Reddick, Collin Cowgill and Jonny Gomes in tow. Although there are plenty of risks with the signing of a player like Cespedes, marginalizing players like Smith (much less Gomes or Cowgill) is not high on the list. Not when the Athletics so desperately need elite talent.

The post-2006 Athletics have been defined by a severe lack of elite talent, particularly on the position player side. Only nine position players have even reached 4.0 WAR overall since 2007, and only one player has posted a 5 WAR season in that stretch:

We talk a lot about winning on a budget here at FanGraphs — the concept of “$/WAR” is a big one, and especially when we talk about the Oakland Athletics, a team that has a restrictive budget due to a bad stadium and a less-than-ideal revenue stream. The A’s — and the Rays and other small-market teams — need to have a low $/WAR to win, not because $/WAR is the end-all be-all of baseball franchises but because there’s a strict upper limit on the “$” part of the expression.

The “WAR” part — which, ideally, means real wins — has to come from somewhere, and that’s where the need for elite talent comes from. Even in their down years, the Athletics have done a fine job of producing good, affordable pitching — Gio Gonzalez, Dallas Braden, Trevor Cahill, Dan Haren, and Brett Anderson are (or were) all solid pitchers when healthy. They’ve also done an admirable job of getting something out of cheap players like Mark Ellis and Ryan Sweeney and Cliff Pennington. Without the elite talent to buttress the team, though, the A’s have just been adding a bunch of spare parts into 70-win teams.

Seth Smith would be a fine piece on many teams. A team can make the playoffs with him as the seventh or eighth best position player if they have an Albert Pujols, Ryan Braun, Prince Fielder, or Matt Kemp type (or two) around as well. He’s a good bargain. The Athletics didn’t have to give up much to get him.

But the Athletics desperately need a star. The easiest way (at least mathematically) to get that $/WAR down is by increasing the “WAR” part, and it takes elite talent to make the kind of dent the A’s need to get back to respectability. Here’s where Yoenis Cespedes comes in. There’s uncertainty, there’s risk, but there’s also extreme potential. Kevin Goldstein called him the 20th-best prospect in the game today, and he has the tools to become an elite outfielder. The A’s had to take a risk on Cespedes — he’s the only free agent talent of his kind they can afford to bring into the organization.

The A’s still need more beyond Cespedes to compete with teams like the Rangers and Angels. He may turn out to bust, or he may turn out to be average. But the Athletics rarely get a chance to infuse their organization with talent unless it’s through the draft or unless they have to give away talent of their own. This time, they jumped, and if that means Seth Smith is relegated to the bench and the outfield is crowded for a few years, so be it.

Recently, one of our readers, Simon, noted that the Rockies might be targeting fly-ball pitchers with the recent additions of Guillermo Moscoso, Jamie Moyer and Jeremy Guthrie. I decided to examine if going after fly-ball pitchers was a practical method for limiting runs at Coors Field.

In an ideal world, the Rockies would love to have all extreme sinker-ball pitchers. The Rockies GM, Dan O’Dowd, stated this stance recently on Clubhouse Confidential.

In an ideal world, every single guy in Colorado would be a heavy sinker ball guy who would have a tremendous ground ball to fly ball ratio.

It is not an ideal world and he knows it. He goes on further to state:

Unfortunately not all of our decisions are made in an ideal world. When we balance fly ball rates, we really try to balance soft and hard.

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For fans wondering how new Red Sox manager Bobby Valentine will run the team, his recent comments on pitch counts and pitcher health could make fans of the Red Sox and/or logic cringe and make Red Sox pitchers fear for the health of their pitching arm. In a recent interview, Valentine made it clear that he was neither a fan of pitch counts nor innings limits on his pitchers. On the topic of pitch counts, Valentine offered:

The one thing that doesn’t compute is less is better. It doesn’t match. More is better.

Valentine is partially correct that there is little evidence to demonstrate that strict adherence to a pitch count prevents injuries to adult pitchers, but at the same time I am not aware of any studies that demonstrate that having a higher pitch count actually reduces the risk of injury.

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Read about the worst relative strikeout seasons here.

A natural extension of seeking to identify the worst pitching strikeout season in baseball history is to find the best. That covers the two extremes. I suppose I could do the most average strikeout seasons next, but (yawn) I had to go take a nap after just writing that sentence.

What I really enjoy about looking at baseball in this way is that it often gives me a fresh perspective on history that I’ve long lost the ability to recall. Such is the case here where exploring the topic of lots of strikeouts led me to a lot of reading about two pitchers in particular from baseball’s past that I hadn’t thought about, statistically, in a while.

Before I get to them, Pedro Martinez’s remarkable 1999 season deserves a digital nod of acknowledgement. It takes a mountain of talent to rack up enough strikeouts to more than double the league rate when that rate is already as high as 16%, but that’s what Pedro did in ’99, striking out 37.5% of batters he faced. It’s in the top ten of all time and the best since integration.

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Kansas City entered 2011 with the undisputed best minor league system in baseball. A year later the landscape has chanced somewhat thanks to promotions (Mike Moustakas, Eric Hosmer, Salvador Perez, Tim Collins, etc.) and injuries. The organization is not as deep as it once was but it still has some impressive talent and is easily in the Top 10, if not the Top 5, when discussing the best minor league systems.

1. Wil Myers, OF
BORN: Dec. 10, 1990
EXPERIENCE: 3 seasons
ACQUIRED: 2009 3rd round, North Carolina HS
2010-11 TOP 10 RANKING: 3rd

Drafted as a prep catcher, the organization made the difficult decision to move Myers to right field so his defensive development would not hold him back and would allow his potentially-plus bat to dictate his movement through the system. After a dominating performance in A-ball in 2010, Myers struggled at double-A and was merely “average” according to his wRC+ of .104. He continued to show patience (12.5 BB%) but his strikeout rate rose to almost 21 K% and his average slipped to .254. His power output also dipped considerably with his isolated power rate hitting .138. A knee infection knocked Myers out from mid-May until early June and could be somewhat to blame for his struggles; his best power displays came in April and August. Perhaps feeling that he had something to prove, Myers lit the Arizona Fall League on fire after being assigned there for the fall. He hit .360 with 14 extra base hits in 23 games (wRC+ of 178). With the strong showing in the AFL, Myers will likely move up to triple-A for 2012 and could reach Kansas City before the end of the year.

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For a catcher, the “tools of ignorance” is an endearing term used to sum up the challenges of the position in a neat and tidy phrase. Over the past three seasons, scouting well over 100 games and a few hundred prospects has led me to develop my own “tools of magnificence” as a handful of players have displayed 80-grade tools which are now seared into my scouting conscious.

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The Chicago White Sox have announced this afternoon the signing of outfielder Kosuke Fukudome to a one-year, $1 million deal that includes a club option for the 2013 season.

Fukudome, who turns 35 in April, had his roughest season as a major leaguer last year, posting a -0.2 WAR over 603 plate appearances with the Chicago Cubs and then, following a late-July trade, the Cleveland Indians — although, it should be noted that about one negative win of that comes from defense alone, which is much more subject to variation even over a year-long sample.

The White Sox are likely to deploy an Opening Day outfield of Alejandro De Aza in left field, Alex Rios in center, and Dayan Viciedo in right, meaning Fukudome will serve as fourth outfielder for the team.

Which, here’s a question: what are the criteria for a fourth-outfielder role? And also: how well does Fukudome fulfill those criteria?

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Yesterday, Carson Cistulli kicked of our coverage of the best pitches of the 2011 season — and the pitchers responsible for throwing them. Carson looked at fastballs, and I’ll be covering sliders. Carson laid out the number of criteria he considered when putting together his list, so, instead of writing it again, I’ll just link to his article.

I considered the same factors as Carson when looking at sliders, but also paid closer attention to relief pitchers. Some relievers actually throw sliders more than they throw their fastballs — think Brad Lidge or Carlos Marmol — so I felt it was important to weigh wSL/C a tiny bit more than Carson. Because while relief pitchers weren’t able to rack up a strong cumulative value in the category due throwing fewer innings, they deserve credit for having a wipeout slider. Without further introduction, let’s see who made the list this past season.

Note: The average movement for a slider in 2011 was 1.9 H-movement and 1.0 V-movement.
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Today’s edition of Offseason Notes is a graph.

Because I’m painfully disatisfied with the present, I spend a lot of my time thinking about the future. And because I spend a lot of my time thinking about the future, I spend a lot of time thinking about baseball prospects. And because I spend a lot of time thinking about baseball prospects, I spend a lot of time reading scouting reports of baseball prospects — which form of literature (i.e. the scouting report) I consider more important than most of what else is available in the entire Western Canon.

In reading scouting reports, I freqently see it suggested — as regards pitchers — that height is important because it allows a pitcher to throw on a “downhill plane.” Frequently, in those cases where a pitcher throws on a downfill plane, it is also suggested that doing so will allow said pitcher to induce ground balls (and, in turn, prevent home runs) with more frequency.

I do not intend to dispute the logic of this reasoning — nor to suggest at all that this is a statement made by every author of the literary form known as the scouting report — however, knowing that right-hander Chris Young both (a) is 6’10” and (b) has a career ground-ball rate in the high-20%s, I grew curious.

Accordingly, I looked at both the the height and ground-ball rate of every pitcher with more than 150 batters faced (i.e. the sample threshold at which ground-ball rate becomes reliable), 2002-11.

Here is the result:

As one will note by the r-squared, there is basically no connection whatsoever between height and ground-ball rate (and some internet browsing reveals that David Gassko reached a similar conclusion at the Hardball Times in 2006). Of course, not every pitcher has the same angle of release: Tim Lincecum, for example, throws almost straight over the top, while Justin Masterson is the rare starter to throw from a sidearm angle. Generally speaking, however, while there might be some advantage to pitcher height and the ability to throw on a downhill plane, it isn’t showing up in ground-ball rates.

Thanks to Mr. Jeff Zimmerman for running the sweet query that provided the above date.