Archive for December, 2014

Effectively Wild Episode 592: Listener Emails (The Holiday Edition)

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about the Hall of Fame, the best baseball gifts, GM track records, and more.


FanGraphs Audio: Jeff Sullivan Analyzes All Baseball

Episode 516
Jeff Sullivan is a senior editor at FanGraphs. He’s also the nearly willing guest on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.

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 55 min play time.)

Read the rest of this entry »


Examining the Projected Team Defenses

There are people who think we make too much of projections, and that’s with regard to hitting and pitching projections. That is to say, the more reliable projections. We pretty much never talk about defensive projections, and there’s enough controversy over defensive non-projections. People can’t even agree on what’s already happened, so it’s asking a lot to expect people to look at defensive forecasts and take them seriously. Also, hey, by the way, it’s not even Christmas yet, so there’s plenty of offseason left to go. We don’t yet know what team rosters are going to look like in April. Projections we have right now are of limited utility.

But, there’s nothing happening. It’s the holiday season, so now baseball’s moving slowly, and one of the things we offer here are team defensive projections, so, let’s look at those. They’re coming from Steamer, as usual, and they’re based on our current author-maintained depth charts, as usual. Following, a big table, which I will try my very hardest to make sortable.

Read the rest of this entry »


Ball-in-Play Leaders and Laggards: American League Hitters

The holidays are upon us, and transactional activity is about to take a short hiatus, if history is a guide. (Though I do remember Jeff Suppan signing as a free agent on Christmas Eve when I was with the Brewers, but I digress.) Just some fun data for readers to chew on as they sip their beverage of choice over the next few of days.

Today, let’s take a look at the 2014 offensive ball-in-play (BIP) frequency and production leaders and laggards in the American League. Sometime around New Year’s, we’ll check out the NL. Caution: there is a fairly healthy dose of Danny Santana information to follow. Continue at your own risk.

Read the rest of this entry »


The Top-Five Mets Prospects by Projected WAR

Earlier today, Kiley McDaniel published his consummately researched and demonstrably authoritative prospect list for the New York Mets. What follows is a different exercise than that, one much smaller in scope and designed to identify not New York’s top overall prospects but rather the rookie-eligible players in the Mets 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 Mets 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.

t4. Cory Mazzoni, RHP (Profile)

IP K/9 BB/9 HR/9 FIP WAR
150 7.7 2.9 1.0 3.94 0.9

After recording just 66.0 innings in 2013 — all in a starting capacity — Mazzoni didn’t surpass that total by much in 2014, owing to a lat strain that forced him to miss roughly three months of the season. Upon returning, he proceeded to produce almost the precise strikeout and walk figures (75:20 K:BB) as he had the previous year (74:19 K:BB) — although most of them in his first exposure to Triple-A, in this case. Perhaps because of his health difficulties or for other reasons, the notion persists that the Mets will move Mazzoni to the bullpen. It seems like he’d be entirely competent there, but that he also appears to have the tools (if not the health) to survive as a starter.

Read the rest of this entry »


Evaluating the Prospects: New York Mets

Evaluating the Prospects: RangersRockiesD’BacksTwinsAstrosRed SoxCubsWhite SoxRedsPhilliesRaysMets & Padres

Scouting Explained: Introduction, Hitting Pt 1 Pt 2 Pt 3 Pt 4 Pt 5 Pt 6

I mentioned this with the Reds system as well, but I was surprised how strong the Mets system ended up being after I made all of my calls. They have a nice crop of talent on the MLB growth assets list, upper level talent that could be everyday players and some intriguing guys at the lower levels.  The organization has been aggressive in targeting top minor league talents in trades (Zack Wheeler, Noah Syndergaard, Travis d’Arnaud, Dilson Herrera), going after top talent on July 2nd and doing well in the draft, with all recent top picks still on the prospect radar.

One thing to keep an eye on in spring training is the MLB/AAA pitching glut.  With the big league rotation looking right now like it’ll be Matt Harvey, Zack Wheeler, Jacob deGrom, Jon Niese and Bartolo Colon, that leaves seven arms with prospect value (Noah Syndergaard, Rafael Montero, Dillon Gee, Matt Bowman, Cory Mazzoni, Steven Matz and Gabriel Ynoa) as candidates for five Triple-A rotation spots or the big league bullpen.  This logjam is what made Logan Verrett expendable in the Rule 5 draft; it should cause roster crunch issues and also valuable depth to a Mets team on the rise.

Read the rest of this entry »


Jeff Sullivan FanGraphs Chat — 12/23/14

9:01
Jeff Sullivan: Hello there friends and welcome to Christmas Eve eve baseball chat

9:01
Jeff Sullivan: I will be attempting to perform this live baseball chat with what appears to be a loose A button on my keyboard

9:02
Jeff Sullivan: wish all of us luck!

9:02
Comment From adam
the best candidate for replacing Rube in Philly?

9:02
Jeff Sullivan: This is the default answer: http://www.fangraphs.com/bl…

9:02
Comment From Invisible Man
Tell me mean things about Nelson Cruz

Read the rest of this entry »


Did Max Scherzer Really Have His Breakout in 2012?

Max Scherzer was on my fantasy baseball team in 2013. (Note: I recognize you don’t care about my fantasy team. This is in the service of a point, I promise.) My fantasy baseball team that year won the league championship, and Scherzer was a big reason why. I don’t remember if I thought to myself during the draft, “Hey, this guy is going to be really good because he had a 78 xFIP- last year,” or if I said, “Hey, whatever, it’s a late round, this pick won’t really matter. Why not take a flyer on this guy?” Scherzer wasn’t really much of anybody the year before, which is why I could get him late in my draft. Sure, he had a 3.74 ERA in 2012, and he won 16 games, but he certainly didn’t have the hype he does now.

Fast-forward to this offseason. Sooner or later, a real-life team will acquire Scherzer. He will be expensive, there’s no doubting that. And rightly so. Scherzer has established himself as one of the best pitchers in baseball. A true ace who has put up consecutive 5.5-win seasons, Scherzer now has a whole lot more value than pre-2013 Scherzer, who showed signs of promise but was just another pitcher who couldn’t put it together.

But how different is Scherzer now than he was two years ago? He’s two years older, of course. He’s a free-agent — as opposed to having two more years of team control. And he’s had three consecutive good (or better) years, instead of just one. But when you look closely, Scherzer is a very similar pitcher to who he was even before his Cy Young-winning 2013 campaign. And that’s not a bad thing.

Read the rest of this entry »


FG on Fox: Changes Coming to Agent Certification

It’s soon going to be harder to be an agent certified by the Major League Baseball Player’s Association. The process is about to change, and though it’s been due for an update for a while, the new rules are not without questions. Will it change anything? Is it being done for the right reasons?

According to multiple sources familiar with the process, the MLBPA will soon be officially changing the process of agent certification. Right now, their site lists having a player on the forty-man, filling out an application, and submitting $500 as the main requirements.

The revised process will ask new agents to complete an in-person test, available twice a year. Fees may be raised (sources conflicted on this issue). Background checks will be beefed up. And the more informal rule governing having a player on the forty-man will be relaxed in one way and strengthened in another: agents must have a player on the forty-man once every three years, but presumably this will be enforced more often than it has been in the past.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.


Fitting Jung-Ho Kang in Pittsburgh

Last Friday, for Fox, I wrote something of a primer article on South Korean shortstop Jung-Ho Kang. I tried to make sure the timing coincided with an announcement, but instead, it just coincided with the closing of the posting window. We had to wait all weekend to find out which team put in the high bid, and now, Monday, we’ve got our answer: the Pirates won the bidding process for Kang, submitting a figure just north of $5 million. Now those same Pirates have an exclusive negotiating window, following the same process that Japan recently did away with. Reports say Kang is looking for about $5 million a year over four years.

The Pirates haven’t said much of anything about this, aside from an acknowledgment of the fact that they’ll be negotiating now. And because of the way this works, there is some possibility that the Pirates simply put in the high bid to block a rival. That’s not very likely. A bid intended to block someone probably would’ve been higher than $5 million, because that’s not actually very much money. The odds of this being a block aren’t 0%, but if we assume that the Pirates are serious about getting Kang locked up, then we’re free to think about the various possibilities. How would Kang fit in in Pittsburgh?

Read the rest of this entry »