In past years, I’ve often compared shopping in free agency to shopping at Whole Foods, in that everything is just more expensive than it should be. But given that I’m currently writing this post at my local Whole Foods — their oatmeal is actually pretty good, and not too expensive for mornings when work-from-home writers just have to get out of the house — I feel like that would be a hypocritical analogy to make today.

So, Whole Foods, you get a one-day reprieve from being the example of an overpriced market. And to be fair, maybe it isn’t the best analogy anyway, given that Whole Foods does sell mostly high quality stuff, while the free agent market is full of things other teams didn’t really want anymore. Maybe free agency is more like a really expensive Craigslist?

Regardless, you get the point. Free agency is expensive. The winner’s curse often applies, as teams are initially happy with their purchases, but eventually realize that the shiny new thing they just bought isn’t shiny or new. The average age of free agents is going up, and aging curves appear to be getting steeper, and that combination leads to a lot of players selling the last few years of their decline phase, which is not a great time to be investing heavily in an asset.

But, occasionally, the market does undervalue a player. Often it’s health related, but sometimes a bad platform year performance can convince too many buyers that decline has already begun to set in, and teams can buy low on a player poised for a rebound. It does happen, so today, I’m going to try and identify five potential bargains in this class. Of course, I tried this last year too, and came away with Brian McCann, the short Chris Young, Roberto Hernandez, Scott Kazmir, and Omar Infante; a whopping 20% of those guys were worth their contract last year. So, you know, take these opinions with as many grains of salt as you think are necessary.

But let me take another stab at this. Here are five guys I think could prove to be decent buys this winter. For reference, I’m going to list both the expected contracts from our Contract Crowdsourcing project and my own expectations. On to the list.

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You might think the rarest pitch in the game is the knuckleball — only two pitchers regularly throw it right now. But there is a pitch that only Brad Ziegler throws often.

Ziegler throws a changeup — out of a submarine arm slot. Nobody else throws the same pitch with the same mechanics.

Only six sidearmers threw at least 25 changeups last year, and if you up that number to 100 thrown, there’s only Ziegler and (lefty) Aaron Loup on the list. If you limit the list to just submariners, Ziegler’s the only one that throws a changeup regularly.

Turns out, the physics of throwing a ball from that angle could be the reason so few sidearmers boast a solid changepiece.

Take Ziegler’s slider as an example. Back when he threw overhand, before 2007, he was putting traditional slider spin on the ball from his old arm slot. Thanks to Matt Lentzner at The Hardball Times, we know what that slider spin looks like. From his piece, here are the spins on the ball on pitches leaving from your traditional three-quarter arm slots:

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Over the summer at ESPN and FG+, I wrote a piece that investigated just how terribly the recent trend of long-term extensions for players at least two years away from free agency had gone. While Ryan Howard was the obvious poster boy for “Wow, that was a bad idea,” the future deals given to Ryan Zimmerman, Ryan Braun, Joey Votto, Justin Verlander, Evan Longoria and others all look a little questionable now, either because of unexpected decline/injury in the period between the signing and the actual start date, or because of how much payroll space it’s taking up. Not all have gone badly — Felix Hernandez and Troy Tulowitzki have been worthwhile investments — but many have, and that’s without even knowing what’s going to happen when Miguel Cabrera’s eight-year extension kicks off in 2016.

Teams can’t exactly always wait until precisely one minute before free agency to give extensions to valuable players, but giving out these deals so far ahead of time is such a hugely risky proposition, because so much can go wrong, both on and off the field. Organizations may be buying the security of knowing that their player can’t walk away in the near future, but they’re trading off the very valuable ability to gain an extra year or two of information on that player, and it’s easy to see that some of these deals never would have been signed if the teams knew at the time what they knew when the original contract would have ended.

It’s with all that in mind that today I’m interested in looking at a youthful and valuable shortstop who is just about to start an eight-year extension he agreed to with his team two seasons ago. Texas’ Elvis Andrus is only 26, but he’s also coming off the two worst wOBA years of his career, years that came after ink hit paper. Is this contract doomed to sink the Rangers? Or is he still a valuable asset? Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Sam banter about non-revelatory rumors, replay-review revisions, and Barry Zito, then discuss the reported terms of the Marlins’ historic Giancarlo Stanton extension.

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Episode 504
Kiley McDaniel is both (a) the lead prospect writer for FanGraphs and also (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio — during which edition he considers his White Sox organizational prospect list in some even further depth.

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

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 58 min play time.)

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Two things stood out when I talked to Miami Marlins president Michael Hill in Phoenix this week. One was the importance of character when building a roster. The other was seemingly contradictory and had to do with the team’s home ballpark.

Hill brought up character after first citing track records, scouts evaluations, and statistical data.

“We look at if a player is a fit for what we are trying to do, and that’s a holistic statement,” Hill told me. “There’s more that goes into it than just the pitching, fielding and hitting. We’re bringing a personality into our clubhouse and put value in how a particular player may fit the context of our club.”

I wasn’t particularly surprised to hear Hill say that. When I visited the Marlins’ clubhouse this summer – technically, the visiting clubhouse in Atlanta – the vibe was positive. I spoke to several players and all were personable. But I did find it notable that Hill brought up character, so I asked just how much of a factor it is. Read the rest of this entry »

Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times, orange for TechGraphs and blue for Community Research.
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Over the last few years, the Pirates have developed a bit of a reputation for being exceptional at extracting value from discarded pitchers: Francisco Liriano, Edinson Volquez, and Mark Melancon are three of the more recent examples, for instance. However, before any of those three got to Pittsburgh, the Pirates worked their voodoo on A.J. Burnett, taking him off the Yankees hands in the winter of 2011 and extracting two excellent years from him after New York decided to pay him to play for anyone else but them.

Over the 2012-2013 seasons, Burnett threw 393 innings with a 92 ERA-/85 FIP-/82 xFIP-, providing well above average performance and durability, and because the Yankees were financing his costs, the Pirates paid just $13 million for those two seasons. However, the cost-conscious organization declined to make him a qualifying offer last offseason, and despite some mutual desire for another contract between both sides, Burnett ended up taking a two year contract to go pitch for the Phillies.

It didn’t go well for either side. Burnett was bad, his teammates were worse, and so both sides decided to opt-out of the second year of the contract, allowing Burnett to become a free agent again. And now, with the choice of where to pitch once again, Burnett has decided to go back to Pittsburgh, signing on for the 2015 season for $8.5 million. By opting out of his Phillies deal and signing with the Pirates, he ended up leaving $4 million on the table, so this represents a pretty significant pay cut for Burnett, but as a 38 year old who has made over $100 million in his career, happiness clearly came ahead of maximizing dollars earned.

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The Detroit Tigers are in an unusual position. There’s nothing unusual about a team trying to win now, but there’s something unusual about the Tigers’ particular sense of urgency. We can acknowledge it has something to do with Mike Ilitch, and his age, and that’s a little weird to talk about, but it’s out there. Ilitch wants to see a winner and people don’t live forever, so this is the current line of thinking: the Tigers will do anything to try to win right away, no matter what it means for the future, because what if there isn’t a tomorrow?

It’s pretty obvious where the Tigers’ priorities are. They just gave four more expensive years to a soon-to-be 36-year-old Victor Martinez, and that contract’s been identified as one that’ll look mighty bad pretty soon. But I think people might’ve gotten too far ahead of themselves in declaring that the future will be a mess, myself included. It’s easy to observe some of the parallels between the Tigers and the Phillies, but the future Tigers aren’t sure to be screwed. There’s a way to survive, such that the window doesn’t have to slam shut.

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Yesterday afternoon, Kiley McDaniel published his consummately researched and demonstrably authoritative prospect list for the Chicago White Sox. What follows is a different exercise than that, one much smaller in scope and designed to identify not Chicago’s top overall prospects but rather the rookie-eligible players in the White Sox system who are most ready to produce wins at the major-league level in 2015 (regardless of whether they’re likely to receive the opportunity to do so). No attempt has been made, in other words, to account for future value.

Below are the top-five prospects in the White Sox system by projected WAR. To assemble this brief list, what I’ve done is to locate the Steamer 600 projections for all the prospects to whom McDaniel assessed a Future Value grade of 40 or greater. Hitters’ numbers are normalized to 550 plate appearances; starting pitchers’, to 150 innings — i.e. the playing-time thresholds at which a league-average player would produce a 2.0 WAR. Catcher projections are prorated to 415 plate appearances to account for their reduced playing time.

Note that, in many cases, defensive value has been calculated entirely by positional adjustment based on the relevant player’s minor-league defensive starts — which is to say, there has been no attempt to account for the runs a player is likely to save in the field. As a result, players with an impressive offensive profile relative to their position are sometimes perhaps overvalued — that is, in such cases where their actual defensive skills are sub-par.

5. Trayce Thompson, OF (Profile)

As he had in 2013, Thompson spent all of 2014 in the Double-A Southern League. In roughly the same number of plate appearances as 2013, he recorded roughly the same walk and strikeout rates, roughly the same number of home runs, and roughly the same slash line. Despite the similarity between those two seasons — and seeming lack of development — Thompson’s projection for 2015 is about half a win greater than it was for 2014. Reason No. 1: Steamer puts more emphasis on recent performance, and an adequate season in the high minors is more valuable than a slightly better one in the lower levels. And No. 2: Thompson is still ascending towards his peak, so the any age curve adjustment is bound to help him.

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