There’s a lot of talk about market inefficiency in the long aisles of the baseball analysis superstore: which teams find value where others don’t, and, conversely, which teams see value that maybe isn’t there anymore (or even in the first place). For small market teams, finding inefficiencies is a matter of successful survival, and for large market teams, it’s a way of adding something extra to the x-factor that works: money.

Whatever the case may be, it’s part of our job to measure how teams are faring in the efficiency department, and we do that generally by looking at how much teams are spending in relation to what they’re actually getting, production-wise. Today, we’re not exactly going to go into specific strategies, like what the most recent Billy Beane magic wand looks like, but rather see which position players are projected to provide the most amount of production (WAR) for the least amount of money ($).

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We know that ERA isn’t a perfect indicator of a pitcher’s talent level. It depends a lot on the defense behind the pitcher in question. It depends a lot on luck in getting balls in play to fall where the fielders are. It depends a lot on luck in getting fly balls to land in front of the fence. It depends a lot on luck in sequencing — getting hits and walks at times where it doesn’t hurt too much.

That’s why we have DIPS. Stats like FIP, xFIP, SIERA, my recent SERA, and Jonathan Judge’s even more recent cFIP all attempt to more accurately measure a pitcher’s talent by stripping those things out. But what if there was an easy way to figure out how much ERA actually can vary? How likely a pitcher’s ERA was? What the spread of possible outcomes is? The aforementioned ERA estimators do not address that issue. They can tell you what the pitcher’s ERA should have been with all the luck taken away (or at least what they think the ERA should have been), but they can’t answer any of the questions I just posed.

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In my post yesterday, I broke down the starters at every position and determined an average salary for all the positions in Major League Baseball. Several comments noted the large amount of minimum-salaried players at several positions and indicated that could be skewing the results. I had indicated that teams appeared to value starting pitching and power hitting over the prime defensive positions. However, it is possible that minimum salaries are weighing the average down, and that the free agent market actually values the differing positions similarly.

As a result, I have dug a bit deeper and separated the salaries into three categories. The first category is players who are making the major league minimum. These are players who have not reached arbitration or signed a contract extension increasing their salary. The second group of players contains arbitration eligible players. This group of players all have less than six years of service time. The group also includes the relatively small number of players who are not yet arbitration eligible, but signed a contract extension prior to arbitration eligibility increasing their salary from the minimum. The third group of player is those with more than six years of service time. These players all signed contracts as free agents or agreed to an extension prior to free agency that bought out free agent years.

In dealing with top starters yesterday, I used the highest salaried starter for each team. For today’s post, I made a modification. The top starter for this post is the starter with highest WAR in the FanGraphs Depth Charts. Yesterday, the top starting pitchers averaged a salary of roughly $15 million. For today, that number drops to $10 million, which would still have put the top starter as one of the top two position groups from yesterday. There are 11 positions total, with the eight position players, one starting pitcher, a designated hitter for American League teams, and a closer. Of those 315 starters, here is how the starters broke down by service class:
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The first thing you might notice about Kris Bryant is not the prodigious power. You’d have to watch a couple of plate appearances before you could really understand that side of him.

The first thing you would probably notice about Kris Bryant is that he’s tall. But when you ask him how that’s affected his plate discipline, you’ll stump him for a second.

At least when it comes to walks, Bryant hasn’t worried too much about having a bigger strike zone. “I haven’t been 6’5″ my whole life,” he laughed. He may not be an Eddie Stanky, but as he’s grown, he’s “figured out” his own strike zone, and begun focusing on getting to pitches in order to use his length as a strength.

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What if I told you Allen Craig played hurt last year, and I could prove it? You’d probably say something like “uh” or “that won’t be necessary.” Submitted as evidence: last season, Allen Craig sucked. He finished with a wRC+ that was just about half his previous season’s mark. Submitted as further evidence: Craig and everyone around him admitted he was playing hurt (Update: actually, maybe not!). There was absolutely zero mystery Craig had an injured foot, and hitters like to say almost all their success comes from the lower body. We can’t pin all of Craig’s struggles on his ailment, but it sure would make sense as an explanation.

Conveniently, though, we see other indicators. It was widely understood Craig was hurt. Because Craig was hurt, he had a different swing. Because he had a different swing — and different levels of strength — Craig was attacked in a different way. Allen Craig’s pitch pattern in 2014 strongly hinted at something being wrong, and so Craig’s pitch pattern in 2015 will tell us, and tell us quickly, to what degree he’s recovered. Even before Craig has much of a batting sample size, the pitchers will tell us if he seems like a threat.

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Ben and Sam preview the Tigers’ season with Ken Funck, and Sahadev talks to MLB.com Tigers writer Jason Beck about the big league club (at 21:25).

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It can be a bit tricky to do this job from the west coast. As soon as you wake up, you’re behind, and I find I always have to begin my days reading. On the plus side, it’s usually reading I’d have to do anyway. Also on the plus side, you never know where you might find an idea. Earlier today, I was reading Eno’s latest post, on Joey Votto and Jay Bruce. Not only did the post provide excellent insight — it also took me back to something from last July. Eno was talking to Bruce about shifts, and using the whole field. An excerpt of a response:

But you hear people talk all the time, ‘I don’t know why he doesn’t just hit the ball to left field, or bunt.’ Well, the shifts are getting more sophisticated, where the third baseman is playing in. And the other guys are over. How many guys do you really know that hit for power that hit ground-balls to the opposite side of the field?

This is data I’ve played with a little before. Nori Aoki, for example, hits a ton of grounders toward the opposite field. Aoki also has 19 career home runs. Not a power threat. You already know many of the guys with stronger pull tendencies on the ground. They see a lot of shifts, and the group includes players like Chris Davis, Ryan Howard, and David Ortiz. But let’s see about answering Bruce’s question. Are there any powerful hitters who send grounders the other way? I know I already ruined the surprise before I even started the body of the post, but, do play along, won’t you?

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What follows does not constitute the most rigorous of statistical analyses. Rather, it’s designed to serve as a nearly responsible shorthand for people who, like the author, have considerably more enthusiasm for than actual knowledge of the collegiate game — a shorthand means, that is, towards detecting which players have produced the most excellent performances of the college season.

As in the first two editions of this same thing, what I’ve done is utilize principles recently introduced by Chris Mitchell on forecasting future major-league performance with minor-league stats.

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Eddie Butler of the Colorado Rockies is one of baseball’s most highly-regarded pitching prospects. In addition to wielding lights-out stuff, the 24-year-old righty has pitched admirably in the upper levels of the minor leagues. Butler put up a respectable 3.58 ERA in Double-A Tulsa last year, which earned him a three start cameo with the big club.  If he’s not big league ready right now, he’s very close. Given this combination of stuff and performance, it’s no surprise that Kiley McDaniel is a big fan of Butler’s. He ranked him 42nd overall in his top 200 list and gives him a FV of 55 — equivalent to a #3 or #4 starter or a closer.

Despite his redeeming qualities, KATOH hates Butler. It hates him lot. It pegs him for a putrid 0.7 WAR through age-28, which puts him very, very far outside of KATOH’s top 200 list. His KATOH projection was far worse than most similarly-ranked prospects on Kiley’s list.

KATOH’s down on Butler for a couple of reasons. For one, he was a little old for his level last year. If you’re a 23-year-old in Double-A, KATOH’s not going to like you unless you’re dominant, and Butler was much closer to mediocre than dominant. Read the rest of this entry »