Episode 413
Dayn Perry is a contributor to CBS Sports’ Eye on Baseball and the author of three books — one of them serviceable and one of them, against all odds, something more than serviceable. He’s also the guest on this unlistenable edition of FanGraphs Audio.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 1 hr 09 min play time.)

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C.J. Cron grew up with baseball. Three years into his professional career, he continues to grow as a player. The son of longtime minor league manager Chris Cron, he is the most-promising hitter in the Angels’ system. He also remains a work in progress.

A first-round pick in 2011 out of the University of Utah, Cron has power to match his size. Listed at 6-foot-4, 235 lbs,, he could become an impact hitter in the middle of a big league lineup. First he’ll have to rein in his free-swinging ways. In 1,281 plate appearances as a professional, he’s drawn just 50 free passes.

Cron spent the 2013 season with Double-A Arkansas, where he hit .274/.319/.428, with 14 home runs. He finished the year in the Arizona Fall League, hitting .413/.467/.700, in 80 at bats, for the Mesa Solar Sox. Cron talked about his game during the final week of the AFL campaign. Read the rest of this entry »

The votes are in, and Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine and Frank Thomas are in. Craig Biggio is out, barely. Jack Morris‘ 15 years of ballot eligibility are up, and his candidacy will be turned over to the Veterans’ Committee. Rafael Palmeiro didn’t receive the minimum 5% of the vote necessary to remain on the ballot. These results were certainly not the worst-case scenario, but they were far from the best. Let’s touch on a few of the points raised in my pre-results article from last week, and take a look at what the future might hold. Read the rest of this entry »

You. You, specifically. The person reading FanGraphs right now on your machine. Haven’t you ever thought about yourself as a player? You shouldn’t, you’d be terrible. You definitely wouldn’t want to even try to swing the bat. But, what if you were a batter, yet you never swung the bat? What might your numbers eventually look like against big-league competition?

It’s fun to think about the worst player possible, who would show up as essentially having the WAR of the complete absence of a player. The WAR of a vacuum, as it were, provided it weren’t such a strong vacuum that it attracted all batted balls in the field. A related thought project is putting yourself in the major leagues, and often, when people do this, they just comfortably assume a .000 wOBA. I mean, you’d never get on against a qualified big-league pitcher, right? That’s very kind of you to assume, but it’s also untrue. You could get on base sometimes. You’d just have to not swing the bat. How often could you reach if you followed that simple, single instruction?

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Earlier today, polite and Canadian and polite Marc Hulet published his 2014 organizational prospect list for the Los Angeles Angels.

It goes without saying that, in composing such a list, Hulet has considered the overall future value those prospects might be expected to provide either to the Angels or whatever other organizations to which they might someday belong.

What this brief post concerns isn’t overall future value, at all, but rather such value as the prospects from Hulet’s list might provide were they to play, more or less, a full major-league season in 2014.

Other prospect projections: Arizona / Baltimore / Chicago AL / Houston / Miami / Minnesota / New York NL / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Toronto.

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When you are the 726th player drafted in a draft, your odds of making it to the major leagues are incredibly slim. Only two players drafted in that spot (and signed) in the history of the draft have donned a major league uniform: Milt Hill and Dane De La Rosa.  It took De La Rosa five seasons of pitching, in any league, to throw his first pitch above A-ball. That time frame included stints in places such as Yuma, Helena, Long Beach, and Victoria with stops in between. It also included a stop in the real estate market in 2006 trying to close deals on houses.

The Rays gave him another chance in 2010, and he finally reached the major leagues on July 20th, 2011. He went on to pitch 11 more games in Tampa Bay before being traded to the Angels late in the 2013 Spring Training season. De La Rosa went to the Angels as a pitcher that struggled to command his fastball.  Yet another new location for De La Rosa, but with it came a new approach to his craft.

In looking at video of De La Rosa from the past two seasons, he has made some minor tweaks to his delivery. The first changes come in his setup for his delivery (click all images to enlarge).

The first image is from 8/27/12 when De La Rosa mopped up a 13-3 blowout against Boston while the second one came in his second save of his career against his former team. The 2013 image shows that De La Rosa has changed where he starts on the rubber while also starting his hands a bit higher, and closing off his front side more than he did in 2012.

At the max lift portion of his delivery, he now resembles the man he was called up to replace on the roster in 2013, Jered Weaver.

De La Rosa has more bend in his back leg, has brought his hands closer to his body, and has more twist in his upper body as he shows his back to the opposing hitter. These adjustments allowed him to stay closed easier in order for him to open his hips up to come to the plate in rhythm with his delivery.

One of the thing that stands out in reviewing De La Rosa from 2013 is his increased velocity.

The data from BrooksBaseball shows that shows that the average velocity on De La Rosa’s four-seam fastball rose nearly each month of the season in 2013, continuing the trend that started in 2012.

The data also shows that De La Rosa was throwing from a bit of a higher release point, which pitchers can use to add velocity while sacrificing horizontal movement. The increased velocity led to increased results. Opponents slugged just .277 against him last season, which was in the top tenth percentile of all relief pitchers that faced at least 200 batters in 2013. His Contact% as well as his opponents wOBA were both in the top-third of the same sample size. The improvements led to more success against right-handed batters as his swing and miss rate against those batters (35.5%) was higher than the likes of Koji Uehara (35.1%) and Craig Kimbrel (34.0%).

The Angels have had their issues in recent years harvesting pitching talent from their farm system, but they appear to have done quite well thus far here. They’ve turned an undrafted organizational middle reliever into an opportunity for a home town kid to go good. So far, so good.

After having typically appeared in the entirely venerable pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections were released at FanGraphs last year. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the New York Mets. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Detroit / Los Angeles NL / Miami / Minnesota / New York AL / Philadelphia / San Diego / Seattle / St. Louis / Tampa Bay.

Batters
A commitment of four years and $60 million was required to sign outfielder Curtis Granderson this offseason, while just one year and $7.25 million were sufficient for other outfielder Chris Young. Equally valuable, is more or less how ZiPS regards the pair, who are entering their age-33 and -30 seasons, respectively. Projected to save five runs as a center fielder, Young might reasonably be considered a candidate to save something like 10-15 runs given a full season in right field for New York.

It’s not unthinkable that certain readers will take exception to David Wright’s projection of 4.4 zWAR, after the last two seasons recorded by that handsome Face of the Franchise. “Ridiculous,” one might say. “Pffft,” another is likely to add, probably covering his monitor in saliva at the same time. While unqualified to comment at length about Dan Szymborski’s precise methodology, the present author understands enough about these projections, generally, to know that some combination of BABIP regression, aging curve, and Wright’s decidedly less impressive 2011 campaign are likely the main influences here.

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As I scoured the Angels farm system looking for a player or theme to write about I kept coming up empty. I don’t think it’s any great secret that the Halos have a fairly barren minor league system right now. That shouldn’t be interpreted as an aspersion on their scouting or front office – their job is always hard and it becomes that much harder when you’re giving up your first pick year after year to sign premium free agents. We should also remember that although it was under a different scouting director, drafting and signing Mike Trout might be the best piece of scouting business since Tony Lucadello. Yet when you look around the Angels minor leagues right now you just don’t see much that resembles major league impact talent.

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The loss of draft picks due to free agent compensation has hurt the organization over the past few years. The Angels have one of the weaker systems in baseball — both in terms of depth and impact prospects. The pitching depth is much more sparse than the hitting. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about hiring GMs, a Hall of Fame-level LOOGY, restructuring divisions, and more.

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