Ben and Sam answer listener emails about how much steroids help, the best farm systems in baseball, and how they’d try to negotiate a hypothetical trade.
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Episode 294
FanGraphs author and proprietor of Mariners SB Nation blog Lookout Landing Jeff Sullivan analyzes a certain portion of baseball less than all of it, but more than none.
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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 49 min play time.)
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Coming into the offseason, Rafael Soriano had a choice: return to the Yankees in 2013 for $14 million, or opt out, collect $1.5 million, and become a free agent. Consensus around these parts was that Soriano should stay put. Soriano opted out. The Yankees extended to Soriano a $13.3 million qualifying offer, and there was a strong argument that Soriano should accept it and stay with New York. Soriano turned it down and entered the market with compensation reducing his appeal. Many of those players who declined qualifying offers have struggled to find the contracts they wanted. For a while, Soriano’s market, at least publicly, wasn’t developing. It was unclear for a while what was going to happen to Rafael Soriano, and it was easy to conclude that he’d made the wrong decisions.
Soriano just signed a two-year contract with the Nationals worth $28 million. He turned down $14 million over one year, a year in which he wouldn’t close much, and ended up with $14 million over two years, years in which he’ll at least initially be the closer. There’s also a $14 million vesting option at the end, just in case the contract wasn’t good enough for Soriano already. Soriano, and his agent Scott Boras.
Back in High School, my pitching coach used to sit down all of the starting pitchers (all three of us) from the varsity squad to have a chat about pitching philosophy. Coach was a former minor league pitcher who flamed out after injury and ineffectiveness, but his love of pitching was obvious, if not a little obsessive. He used to preach about a lot of things, controlling your emotions, mechanics, pacing, etc. But it was always the video I looked forward to.
He’d roll out the rickety old metal stand with a crummy 18 inch TV and antiquated betamax player. Not only had we seen it before, but we would never really understand the usefulness of the demonstration. But it was still fun to watch.
Michael Bourn is a pretty terrific defensive center fielder. Last year, he was the best defensive outfielder in baseball by UZR (after you account for the positional differences), grading out as 25 runs above an average defensive player, and it wasn’t a one year aberration, as no player has a higher FLD+POS rating over the last four years either. With over 6,500 innings big league innings, we’re not dealing with problematic small samples either. Bourn has been a tremendous defensive asset this far in his career.
However, teams are no longer as willing to pay for past performance as they used to be, as front offices are now populated with people who are more interested in projecting a player’s future than they are with paying for an established track record. So, while Bourn’s defensive performances are notable, they’re only worth paying for to the extent that they inform our understanding about what they mean for his defensive value in the future. Now 30-years-old, Bourn’s getting further and further from his peak, and defensive skills seem to plateau earlier than offensive skills, so there’s some legitimate questions about just how much of his defensive value he will retain in future years.
To try and shed a light on that question, we can identify players who were valuable defensive outfielders in their twenties, and then see how much of that value carried over to their thirties. If you’re Michael Bourn, or Michael Bourn’s agent, you might want to stop reading now, because the answer probably isn’t something you’re going to want to hear.
Despite having covered the headliner arms of Pirates instructs — Gerrit Cole (covered last week) and Jameson Taillon (looking basically the same as when I covered him midseason) — there were still some interesting high ceiling arms on display.
First up is righty Nick Kingham, whom the Pirates signed for an over-slot bonus just under $500,000 in the 4th round of the 2010 draft from a Las Vegas area high school. Kingham made his full season debut in Low-A West Virginia as a 20 year old in 2012 and had a solid campaign—groundballs, good control and a solid K rate despite what appears to be a fluky home run rate fueling a 4.39 ERA.
Those stats imply an evaluation close to what I saw from Kingham in instructs. In a two inning stint, he sat 92-94 with consistent above average two-seam life down in the zone and solid location. Kingham’s 82-83 mph slider was above average at times with long action, occasional hard bite and three-quarters tilt. His changeup was the better off-speed pitch, consistently above average with better command, fade and bottom at 82-85 mph and he threw one that was plus.
Scott Boras has several clients who are yet to be signed for the 2013 season. Three of those clients — Kyle Lohse, Rafael Soriano, and Michael Bourn — received qualifying offers from their former teams, and rejected those offers. As a result, whatever teams sign those players will give up a sandwich round draft pick in June’s Rule 4 draft and a percentage of its draft bonus pool. Much has been written here and elsewhere about this new compensation system, which replaced the Type A/Type B free-agent system used in the old collective bargaining agreement. Not surprisingly, Boras isn’t too fond of the new rules, not only for their effect on his current free-agent clients, but for the effect on future clients who may be skipped over by teams that have lost a significant percentage of their bonus pool.
But Boras doesn’t look solely to the new rules as the reason his three big free-agent clients are still unsigned. No, he says teams are just being stingy with their payroll. Too stingy, he says, in light of booming MLB revenues. According to Boras, most teams have lower payrolls heading into the 2013 season than the highest payroll those teams had from 2000-2012. “Only five teams have higher payrolls,” Boras told Murray Chass over the weekend. “Everybody else is below even though revenue is up 200 percent and franchise values are up 300, 400 percent. What we’re seeing is not many teams are spending on payrolls despite the fact that their profits are extraordinary. You’d expect teams to have their highest payrolls, but they don’t.”
Is Boras right? Are payrolls lagging behind the growth in MLB revenues?
Table of Contents
Here’s the table of contents for today’s edition of Daily Notes.
1. Nerds Stats for Canadia’s Provisional WBC Team
2. For Reference Sake: Maps of Canada
3. Video: Team Canada’s Best Reliever, Sort Of
Nerds Stats for Canadia’s Provisional WBC Team
It has come to the attention of the author that a certain number of this site’s readers are from Canada. In not entirely unrelated news, certain representatives from Canada have recently announced that country’s provisional roster for the World Baseball Classic (which itself begins in early March).
Below are the members of that roster, accompanied by various nerd stats.
