Free agency begins five days after the end of the World Series. As in other recent offseasons, FanGraphs is once again facilitating this offseason a contract-crowdsourcing project, the idea being to harness the wisdom of the crowds to the end of better understanding the giant and large 2015-16 free-agent market.

Below are links to ballots for five of this year’s free agents, the first collection of starting pitchers.

Other Players: Nori Aoki / Alex Avila / Marlon Byrd / Asdrubal Cabrera / Yoenis Cespedes / Chris Davis / Rajai Davis / Alejandro De Aza / Ian Desmond / Stephen Drew / Dexter Fowler / David Freese / Alex Gordon / Jason Heyward / Torii Hunter / Chris Iannetta / Austin Jackson / John Jaso / Kelly Johnson / Matt Joyce / Howie Kendrick / Justin Morneau / Daniel Murphy / David Murphy / Mike Napoli / Dioner Navarro / Gerardo Parra / Steve Pearce / Alexei Ramirez / Colby Rasmus / Alex Rios / Jimmy Rollins / Geovany Soto / Denard Span / Justin Upton / Juan Uribe / Chase Utley / Will Venable / Shane Victorino / Matt Wieters / Chris Young the Outfielder / Ben Zobrist.

Brett Anderson (Profile)
Some relevant information regarding Anderson:

• Has averaged 89 IP and 1.0 WAR over last three seasons.
• Has averaged 2.2 WAR per 200 IP* over last three seasons.
• Recorded a 1.7 WAR in 180.1 IP in 2015.
• Is projected to record 2.8 WAR per 200 IP**.
• Is entering his age-28 season.
• Made $5.4M in 2015, as part of deal signed in December 2014.

*That is, a roughly average number of innings for a starting pitcher.
**Prorated version of 2016 Steamer projections available here.

Click here to estimate years and dollars for Anderson.

Read the rest of this entry »

Minor league players scored an important victory in their minimum wage lawsuit against Major League Baseball on Tuesday, with a federal court agreeing to allow the players’ case to proceed as a class action lawsuit. As a result, Tuesday’s decision paves the way for potentially hundreds of additional current and former minor league players to join the lawsuit, dramatically increasing the scope of MLB’s possible liability in the case.

MLB’s minor league pay practices have been the subject of several different lawsuits over the past two years. One of those cases – asserting that MLB’s league-wide, uniform minor league wage scale violates federal antitrust law – was dismissed by the trial court last month.

Tuesday’s decision came in an earlier and more promising lawsuit, one that challenges MLB’s minor league pay practices under federal and state minimum wage and overtime laws. In Senne v. Office of the Commissioner of Baseball, a number of former minor league players contend that MLB routinely violates these legal requirements by paying minor league players as little as $3,300 per year – without overtime – for what is, in many respects, a year-round job.

Although the plaintiffs in the Senne suit had always hoped that their case would eventually be expanded to cover most current and former minor league players, until Tuesday the suit technically involved only the 50 or so players who had been formally named as a plaintiff in the case. Now, anyone who played in the minor leagues between 2011 and 2015, without being promoted to the major leagues, is eligible to join the lawsuit.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s right there in the name. Change-up.

It’s right there in all the names, really. The best fastballs, usually, go the fastest. The best curveballs, usually, curve the most. The best changeups, then, would change the most. That property — change — isn’t quite as intuitive as the first two, but really, in a good changeup, you just want difference. You want separation from the primary pitch.

As my colleague Eno Sarris wisely pointed out on Twitter last night, measuring the characteristics of a changeup, on its own, is a mostly useless endeavor. If the main purpose of a changeup is to give hitters a different look off the fastball, don’t you also need the characteristics of that fastball to give context to the change?

On the surface, Marco Estrada’s repertoire might not be eye-popping. He doesn’t throw hard. He doesn’t have great movement. But what he does have, is this:

On average, Estrada drops nearly 11 mph off his four-seam fastball with every changeup, giving him the largest difference of any right-handed starter in baseball. But we can take this a step further! There can be more to getting separation than just speed. There’s movement, too.

Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball really is something else. Coming into this postseason, there was no shortage of potential playoff narratives. You had the teams with the three best records in baseball, all hailing from the same division. There was the Toronto offensive juggernaut, and the Royals proving they weren’t a one-year phenomenon. There was phoenix-like rise of the Astros, America’s introduction to Rougned Odor, the two-headed Kershaw/Greinke monster from Los Angeles, the Cubs’ young bats, and the Mets’ young arms.

Enter, against this backdrop, Mets’ second baseman Daniel Murphy, who prior to this October drew attention only for arguably being baseball’s most average regular, the game’s equivalent of vanilla ice cream, suddenly deciding to morph into a latter-day version of Babe Ruth.

While the effect of Murphy’s sudden power explosion on the Mets’ postseason run has taken center stage, the near-term future of both player and club has become an enduring secondary plot line. Will the Mets extend a qualifying offer to free-agent-to-be Murphy? Until yesterday, the answer appeared to be no, though the rumor mill is now listing in the opposite direction. Might Murphy accept? The odds of that appear to be declining, in inverse proportion to the possibility that at least one club could lob a lucrative four- or five-year deal in his direction.

Most observers tend to agree on one thing, however: Murphy’s power surge just has to be a fluke. While I’m not going to be the guy suggesting that Murphy has 30-homer seasons in his future, I am going to go out on a limb and state that Murphy is a better player than the 2.5 WAR guy we’ve grown to know and, well, like. It’s just not for the reason playoff observers might guess.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

The manager of the Royals was his typical Yostian self heading into Game Five of the American League Championship Series. He went into the game with a 3-1 lead, needing just one victory out of four games to advance to a second straight World Series. He joked about the possibility of “watching 35 drunk guys try to get through customs” if the Royals clinched in Toronto. He put Alcides Escobar in leadoff spot so Escobar could work his magic. He sent 32-year-old Edinson Volquez to the mound against the Toronto Blue Jays to try and clinch the American League crown, and for a time he got nearly the best performance he could ask for from the right-hander.

Volquez, pitching for his fifth team in five years, had his best season in half a dozen years after the Royals signed him to a two-year, $20 million contract with an option for a third season. From 2009 to 2014, Volquez pitched nearly 800 innings, putting up a mediocre 4.46 ERA (121 ERA-) and 4.35 FIP (114 FIP-) and amassing just four wins above replacement in six seasons. He put up a good 3.04 ERA in 2014, aided by a low .263 BABIP and a very good Pittsburgh Pirates defense as his 4.15 FIP indicated not much had changed. Despite high velocity, Volquez struck out players at a below average rate, although he had dropped his walk rate in recent seasons. He pitched well in two postseason games entering yesterday, with 13 strikeouts and just 3 runs conceded in 11.2 innings over two starts, but spread out eight walks and was the clear third option behind Yordano Ventura and Johnny Cueto.

Read the rest of this entry »

Coming into game four of the NLCS, Lucas Duda was having the worst postseason of any hitter on any team who qualified for the postseason. During the playoffs, he had come to the plate 27 times and made 22 outs, 13 of them via the strikeout. All three of his hits were singles, and the only run he had knocked in came on a groundout. Things were going so poorly for Duda that, in game three, he attempted a bunt after Yoenis Cespedes led off the sixth inning with a single to right field. When your slugging first baseman is just trying to beat the shift to get himself on when the go-ahead run is already standing on first base, you know he’s not exactly abounding in confidence in his own abilities.

So when Jason Hammel watched Curtis Granderson steal second base during Cespedes’ first inning at-bat tonight, part of him had to be okay with that; it opened up first base, and with two outs and a slumping Duda on deck, pitching around Cespedes become the obvious course of action. It wasn’t officially an intentional walk, but Hammel wasn’t pound the strike zone, and seemed quite content to face Duda with men on rather than letting Cespedes get a real shot at driving Granderson in.

So, after four balls to Cespedes, up stepped Duda. Hammel, struggling with his command, fell behind 2-0, but then challenged him with a fastball right down the middle; Duda fouled it off. Of course he did. Hammel then came back with a curveball on the inner half, and Duda swung through that, pushing the count to 2-2. Hammel was just one strike away from getting out of the inning unscathed, and one strike away against a guy with a 49% strikeout rate in October.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

Ben and Sam talk to recently resigned Dodgers VP of Medical Services and Head Athletic Trainer Stan Conte about hidden injuries, fighting fatigue, and Brett Anderson’s almost-miraculous season.

Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

The consolation you hope for is that these uncertainties don’t end up making a difference. That way, you can talk about them, and you can investigate them, but you don’t have to worry about the results hinging on a decision one way or the other. It worked a little like that with the Rangers’ weird go-ahead run in Game 5 of the ALDS — as strange as that was, the Blue Jays still won, so it didn’t really matter in the end. Of course, that wasn’t true uncertainty, because the rules weren’t ambiguous. It was an unfamiliar play, but a legitimate run. With Edinson Volquez’s last full-count pitch to Jose Bautista in Wednesday’s sixth inning, there’s no getting to that point. You can see in the pitch whatever you want.

And you can say, all right, but the Blue Jays won by six. You can say, even as the pitch was being delivered, the Jays were heavy in-game favorites. You can try to claim the call didn’t end up too significant. But the call, in the moment, was huge. It was the difference between bases loaded and nobody out, and two on with one out. The score, you’ll recall, was 1-0. If the Royals get the call their way, maybe the inning is completely different. Maybe the Jays score, but not too much, and they have to turn to David Price out of the bullpen. The game and series didn’t turn because of one pitch, but that one pitch did some of the pushing. That one pitch was also the very definition of borderline. The only thing we know is Volquez’s breaking ball was perfect. What happened? Unfortunately, it’s a mess, in a very baseball way.

Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 604
Jeff Sullivan is a senior editor at FanGraphs. He’s also the thirty-something guest on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.

This edition of the program is sponsored by Draft, the first truly mobile fantasy sports app. Compete directly against idiot host Carson Cistulli by clicking here.

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 1 hr 8 min play time.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS