One of the major pieces of breaking baseball news in recent days was the Braves’ signing of shortstop Andrelton Simmons to a seven year, $58 million contract extension. This is big news partially because Simmons is arguably the first, youngest and least experienced player to earn such a deal primarily because of his defensive excellence. That excellence is supported by both the metrics and the scouting eye, and he is almost universally regarded as the single most valuable defensive player in the game. We’re not going to focus on his glove today, however. Simmons was far from a total zero with the bat last year, hitting 17 homers, not an insignificant sum at his end of the defensive spectrum. It will be Simmons’ development with the bat that will eventually determine whether the Braves get great value from this deal instead of an average to solid return. Today we’ll take a closer look at his offensive profile to get a better feel as to what the future holds. Read the rest of this entry »

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Earlier today, polite and Canadian and polite Marc Hulet published his 2014 organizational prospect list for the Pittsburgh Pirates.

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 Pirates 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 / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Colorado / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Philadelphia / St. Louis / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Texas / Toronto.

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This began with an observation: Since 2008 — covering the bulk of the reliable PITCHf/x era — Miguel Cabrera has swung at just under 47% of pitches with the bases empty, and just over 53% of pitches with a runner or runners on. Now, in that span, 130 different players have faced at least 10,000 pitches. Out of all of them, Cabrera has the biggest positive difference in swing rate. As it happens, Derek Jeter has the biggest negative difference in swing rate, but maybe that’s a different article. Cabrera has swung more with men on; and at bats with men on are more important at bats.

I wanted to dig deeper.

The next step was to break things down by year, to see if there might be a developing trend or a steady pattern. As is often the case, I have to express my gratitude for the existence of Baseball Savant. This table suggests one thing:

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By now, the Stetson Allie story is well known. Drafted by the Pittsburgh Pirates out of a Cleveland-area high school in 2010, the big right-hander had a 100-mph fastball and little idea where it was going. Less than 30 innings into his professional career, his pitching days were over. He became a corner infielder with plus raw power and a lot of swing-and-miss.

Allie’s story remains mostly unwritten. Still just 22 years old, he is coming off a Jekyll-and-Hyde first full season as a position player. In 66 games at low-A West Virginia, he hit a loud .324/.414/.607, with 17 home runs. In the same number of games at high-A Bradenton, he hit .229/.342/.356, with 4 home runs.

There is no doubting Allie’s potential as a hitter. There is even less doubt about his comfort zone. A fish-out-of-water on the mound, he feels right at home in the batter’s box. Allie revisited his work-in-progress transition, including why he struggled as a pitcher, earlier this week. Read the rest of this entry »

The Pirates have one of the strongest systems in baseball. The club boasts both depth and impact talent. What’s also impressive is that fact that the club has impressive prospects both on the mound and in the field. The Pirates have also done a nice job of acquiring talent through both the amateur draft and the international free agent market. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Sam preview the Indians’ season with Susan Petrone, and Nick talks to MLB.com Indians beat writer Jordan Bastian (at 21:16).

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I’m probably not being biased at all when I say we offer a lot of different great features here at FanGraphs, but I’m personally a huge huge fan of our projected standings and playoff-odds pages. Now that we have ZiPS folded into the mix, things are pretty complete, and it’s exciting to be able to see the numbers whenever one wants to. The numbers are based on depth charts maintained by some of our own authors, and they’re living and breathing, so you can see the direct impact of, say, the Phillies signing A.J. Burnett. (It lifted their playoff odds about four percentage points.) FanGraphs is always improving, and these additions have been a big recent improvement.

Now, as discussed briefly yesterday, we never want the projections to be actually perfect. Thankfully, that’s never going to be a problem, on account of the damned human element. But we do want the projections to be meaningful, because otherwise, what’s the point? We want the data to be smart and more right than wrong. So that brings to mind the question: how did things go last year, in our first thorough experiment with depth charts and team projections?

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With the recent addition of the ZiPS projections to the present site, the playoff odds that are also available within these electronic pages now feature both the ZiPS and Steamer figures as the raw material for those calculations.

“How do those playoff odds compare, for example, to what might be offered by a notable sportsbook?” a weblogger with an interest in producing content might wonder. “Yes, how do those FanGraphs playoff odds compare to what’s offered by a sportsbook?” a reader might wonder, as well, as part of his or her attempt to locate a distraction from whatever work ought to be done right now.

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I’ve been thinking about Chad Qualls this week, because… well, because no one can stand thinking about Ervin Santana any longer, probably, but also because when I wrote about the Astros a few days ago, I linked to an Eno Sarris post over at RotoGraphs about the Astros bullpen. Eno briefly touched on how Qualls, who had been reliably the butt of jokes for several years, had returned to his old mechanics, helping him have something of a quietly successful 2013.

Since Qualls signed with Houston during that insane first week of December when there were approximately 40 new signings each day, we never really wrote him up, instead touching on him here and there. While that’s partially because middling relievers don’t always deserve their own posts, mechanical changes are always a bit fascinating when it comes to changes in performance — just check out the difference in where Jayson Werth held his hands during his monster second half last year. That being the case, I thought it’d be interesting to track down the source there and check this out.

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