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: Happy afternoon start! Well, for those in the good time zone.
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: I woke up early for me and was surprisingly productive – wrote a Shields piece, set up some presidents *and* showed up for chat!
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When will I be able to export ZiPS projections into an excel spreadsheet for further analysis? |
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: Not too long – weekend or early next week
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As the new baseball year starts, we celebrate at FanGraphs by compiling an annual of sorts; we call it FanGraphs+. An equal mix of fantasy analysis and real world breakdowns, our articles in this annual take advantage some of our best resources here at FanGraphs in order to scout baseball players, research topics, and, in general, think about baseball as best we can.
For the non-fantasy player, our 1200 player capsules can serve as gentle prods in the direction of the most interesting aspects of a player’s production. Or for a tickle on a rainy spring day. You don’t have to be interested in fantasy baseball to wonder how the clustering of a pitcher’s release point is correlated to their command peripherals, or how changing a team’s on base percentage affects the individual hitters in the lineup. Just be a baseball geek and you’ll love Dan Farnsworth’s breakdowns of a few key hitters and their mechanics at the plate — remember, this is the man that spotted the changes J.D. Martinez made that launched the Tiger into stardom.
But if you are a fantasy player, there’s gobs here for you at FanGraphs+. We hope you enjoy! It’ll only cost you $5.99 to receive access to the following:
After having typically appeared in the very hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past couple years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Cincinnati Reds. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.
Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Los Angeles AL / Los Angeles NL / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Oakland / Pittsburgh / San Diego / San Francisco / St. Louis / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Texas / Washington.
Batters
For a club that was compelled to trade some useful major-league pieces this offseason, the Cincinnati Reds feature a remarkably competent and seemingly competitive group of hitters. Depending on how one chooses to determine such a thing, the star of team (per ZiPS) is either Todd Frazier (605 PA, 3.6 WAR) or Joey Votto (468 PA, 3.4 WAR) — the former for his overall WAR projection; the latter, for his projected WAR per plate appearance. It’s not surprising to find something less than full complement of games forecast for Votto: two of his last three seasons have been interrupted by injury.
So far as weak links, however, there’s little to be found among Cincinnati’s starting eight field players. The batting projections for Zack Cozart (.282 wOBA), Billy Hamilton (.310 wOBA), and Brandon Phillips (.303 wOBA) are all below average, but each of those players is also projected to save five or more runs at a position already on the more challenging side of the defensive spectrum.
Last week, I had the pleasure of being present at a panel of baseball people talking about 2015’s big stories, and one of the questions was, “are the Padres contenders?” Some said yes. Others said no. Most of the discussion centered on the rebuilt outfield of Justin Upton, Matt Kemp, and Wil Myers, mainly about how that could possibly come together on defense. Now, we’re hearing about how they may yet be the team that comes away with James Shields, who would inject some stability into what is a talented-but-fragile rotation.
Jeff will have more on that signing later, but obviously: Shields will help! Adding him makes for a rotation front four of Shields, Andrew Cashner, Ian Kennedy, and Tyson Ross, which is potentially pretty impressive. More innings from Shields means fewer that you need to rely upon from Odrisamer Despaigne, Josh Johnson and Brandon Morrow, and that’s a good thing. Signing Shields and trading for Cole Hamels would help! Lots of things, likely and less so, would help. Here’s what I had wanted to ask that panel, though, especially those who believe that the reworked Padres are now contenders: How many people can actually name all four Padres starting infielders?
Obviously there’s a bit of hyperbole there, but the point is that this isn’t a question you want to be asking about a team that wants to be included in the October conversation. If you didn’t follow the team closely, would you be able to come up with Yonder Alonso, Jedd Gyorko, Alexi Amarista, and Will Middlebrooks off the top of your head? Because this group, despite returning only one player who took more than 50% of the plate appearances at the same position last season, doesn’t look good. It’s actually a considerable issue, if you look at Steamer’s 2015 projections combined with our curated depth chart playing time inputs:
Ben and Sam preview the Phillies’ season with Michael Baumann, and Sahadev talks to News Journal Phillies beat writer Meghan Montemurro (at 30:41).
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Episode 528
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 discusses the denotations of fringe and a consequence of the Yoan Moncada signing (when it happens).
Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.
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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 50 min play time.)
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Burke Badenhop signed with the Reds yesterday, and he’ll bring more than a sinker with him to Cincinnati. The 32-year-old (as of today) righty will arrive with a sabermetric suitcase stuffed with theories and thoughts.
Badenhop has an economics degree and a track record of pitching well in a variety of relief roles. Usage and value were on his mind the last time we spoke.
“I’ve been thinking about something you might term bullpen clustering,” said Badenhop. “With the randomness of a baseball season, there is going to be an ebb and a flow to the wins a team ends up with, and what those wins look like. How you use your bullpen is going to vary by how close the game is.
“Say you’re a reliever and pitch in 12 games in a month. In those 12, are you throwing five games out of seven in the beginning, and then not pitching for a week? A long winning streak is good, but it can also be taxing if all the games are close and you are using the same high leverage guys on a nightly basis. A blowout or a complete game can be huge.”
Badenhop made a career-high 70 appearances last year and threw 70-and-two-thirds innings. I asked how hard it would be to take on an even heavier workload. 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.
Read the rest of this entry »
I’ve got Coors Field on the mind. And while usually I’m able to flit from one subject to another — probably too easily, to be honest — when I think about Coors, it tends to stick, because the Rockies are one of baseball’s greatest experiments and we still aren’t quite sure what to make of them or what to make of baseball at altitude. The game that’s played within Coors Field is recognizably baseball, of that there’s no question, but it’s the oddest brand of baseball that exists in the major leagues, so it’s fascinating to consider as many angles as is possible. Just what is it really like to play there?
For this post, I want to examine pitch selection. And not just for pitch-selection’s sake; this should, in theory, reflect what effects people think Coors has on pitching. There’s a thought out there that Coors is bad news for breaking balls. What would we expect, then? A reduction in breaking-ball rate in Colorado, because teams and pitchers aren’t idiots. Let’s say Pitcher B has an optimal mix of 60% fastballs, 20% breaking balls, and 20% offspeed pitches. Let’s say he senses that he doesn’t have a good breaking pitch on a particular day. Then we might expect, I don’t know, 65% fastballs, 10% breaking balls, and 25% offspeed pitches. That’s the theory. So what do we see in Colorado? That’s what these big giant tables are for.
Blackouts suck. We don’t like them. This isn’t news. What is news is that Major League Baseball is driving hard to get the ball rolling on lifting blackouts, potentially for good. Yesterday, Maury Brown laid out an idea for this over at Forbes. And as it turns out, the league is trying to execute just such a plan.
The plan, in case you don’t feel like clicking both links, involve the league getting its biggest media partner, FOX, on board with streaming games. Brown notes that 37 percent of all games last year were shown via FOX regional sports networks (or RSNs). That’s a pretty huge chunk. Comcast checks in next at 17 percent. That gets you up to 54 percent, and then it is drips and drabs from there. While a big network like FOX might be able to unilaterally make these moves, there is going to be a couple of sticking points. The first, as Brown notes, is who exactly gets to stream these games? Obviously MLB wants the exclusive rights, since they have a decade-old product that people know and love. FOX doesn’t appear to see it that way, and it’s hard to blame them. That really rolls up into a second sticking point, which is cost.
In thinking about this the other day, I postulated on Twitter about the creation of a Super Premium MLB.tv package. The theory goes, essentially, that you would add to the normal $130 cost of an MLB.tv Premium account in order to get a service that would solve your blackout problems.
Each cable company charges a carriage fee for carrying it. We know that last year, NESN — which is owned jointly by the owners of the Boston Red Sox and Bruins (though mostly by the Red Sox) — charged as much as $4.22 for its carriage fee. As a long-running RSN, with a very dedicated fan base, that is probably close to the top of the food chain. ESPN, which charges the largest carriage fee, charges less than two dollars more than that.
Continuing to use NESN as the example, when we multiply that over 12 months — 12 rather than six since NESN charges the carriage fee every month and not just during baseball season — that comes out to a high end of $50.64. Let’s call it $50 for simplicity sake. So, the plan would be to say to MLB.tv subscribers who live in the Red Sox territory, and can presumably get NESN as part of their basic cable package, that if you want a version of MLB.tv with no Red Sox games blacked out, you can get that for $180. During commercials, instead of the six or seven MLB.tv ads you normally get ’til you have them memorized, you would get the normal NESN ads, with the MLB.tv ads spliced in every now and then in place of a NESN house ad (which, as any Red Sox fan will tell you, are plentiful).
Doing it this way satisfies a number of things. First, NESN doesn’t need to lose money on carriage fees. That’s huge, since carriage fees are essentially the way these networks stay in business. Second, it wouldn’t hurt ad rates during games — the customer base would be the same, they’d just be watching on different mediums. Theoretically, that shouldn’t change much, except maybe ads with small words in them would need to be rethought if they want to impact customers watching on smaller mobile devices. Not a huge deal, as advertisers should already be taking this sort of scale into account. It would also allow MLB.tv to recover a modicum of revenue from the few ads that they sell each season (not that they need that money, or can’t find a way to get it in some other fashion).
The best-case scenario for the RSNs, of course, would be to have that loyal consumer who not only buys the super-premium MLB.tv package, but also doesn’t cancel their cable package. Going back to NESN, they show a lot more than Red Sox games. In fact, the actual Red Sox games only make up a tiny portion of their programming each year. Less than half, certainly. They also show Bruins games, Hockey East college hockey games, and a number of other live sporting events, as well as long-running shows like Charlie Moore Outdoors. So, there is a chance that a lot of consumers, even if given the option to purchase this super premium MLB.tv package and get rid of cable, wouldn’t actually get rid of cable. That’d be sweet, because then the RSN would be double dipping the carriage fee, and could maintain their customer base for ads that run during all the non-Red Sox game-times. And if the NHL or NBA worked out similar deals, RSNs could be triple or even quadruple dipping, depending on the teams that play on that particular RSN.
There are a number of drawbacks. The first is the aforementioned ad rates. In talking to Nathaniel Grow, our resident sports business expert, he mentioned that the RSNs probably aren’t keen on being able to say that their customer base has shrunken dramatically for all those times when a live baseball game isn’t being played. So that’d be an issue, and the number one reason why the cable companies or RSNs might force you to keep your cable package as a part of any agreement between MLB and FOX. That would not alleviate the problem for people who are blacked out of a specific team without having the opportunity to watch them on their local cable package.
Another drawback is that this plan is, as Homer Simpson would say, needlessly complicated from MLB and MLB Advanced Media’s perspective. While it might be peachy keen for the RSNs to sit back and collect stacks on stacks on stacks on stacks, MLB would be put in the position of expending energy on a product that sees the revenue split between it and its partners. And what of the total cost? Sure, Red Sox fans could justifiable have to pay an extra $50, but what about Astros fans, whose RSN hasn’t been able to get on the air and whose viewership is going to be much lower given all the tanking the Astros have done the last few years. In other words, should the package cost a different amount for each team? Or should they set a price based on the most expensive market and go from there? There’s no easy answer, and there would undoubtedly be some headache-inducing accounting issues, at the very least. For RSNs that are owned by a team, it wouldn’t be as big of an issue, since the league already has relationships with the teams, but it would still require a lot of logistical thinking.
Still another issue is for the fans with overlap, be it geographic or otherwise. A couple of examples. Say you live in New York, and are accustomed to watching the Mets and Yankees on TV. Now under this plan, if you want stream both blackout free, you can, but you would be in the position of having to buy a super-super-premium package, where you pay to eliminate blackout restirctions for both teams. Is that fair? Or, say you live in the Chicago area, and you as a Cubs fan married a White Sox fan. Do you want to pay for the privilege to stream both teams blackout free? Perhaps there is a compromise, but that seems unlikely.
The extreme version of this, of course, is areas such as Las Vegas and Iowa, where as many as six teams are blacked out. Do you pay to alleviate all six blackout restrictions, in a package that could end up being close to $400, or do you simply pick the one team you want to see and live with the blackouts in other areas? That is, of course, if MLB allows such options. Which, as we mentioned above, just might not be in the cards.
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Baseball fans don’t like blackouts, or anything else that restricts their access to the game, and these sometimes artificial restrictions are as old as the game itself. That is unfortunate. What is encouraging though is that the league is working on the problem, and has generally been at the forefront of digital streaming in sports — so much so that their technology is used as the “backbone” when companies and leagues make streaming products. So while we may have to pay for the privilege, hopefully the blackout restrictions will be solved soon, say the next five-10 years. Whether it’s a super premium package like what I have suggested here or something else, the initial solution probably will be messy. There are a lot of cable companies involved and a lot of money at stake, and so a clean solution seems unlikely right from the jump. And of course, none of this addresses what is the ultimate problem — the territory rights and how they can be resolved. But that is for another day. This reported agreement between MLB and FOX is a nice first step. Hopefully we’ll see more steps soon.