Sometimes I’ll write a post I know is going to be popular. Like, some weeks back, I wrote about how the Cubs seem like the best team in baseball, and that was obviously going to be big. Sometimes the popularity of a post takes me by surprise. A good example would be when I wrote over the summer about Ryan Goins taking pitches and hitting other pitches hard. And then there are the posts almost exclusively for the nerds. For the nerdiest of the nerds. For the people who love thinking about baseball simply for the exercise. This is one of those. Nothing contained here is all that important, but this is the stuff I find most interesting, and I touched on this briefly last night when writing about Justin Upton on the Tigers. The Tigers play half the time in Comerica Park, and Comerica Park suppresses strikeouts.

I’ve written about some of these weird park factors before. The obvious park factors don’t require much explanation. It’s easy to see why there are more homers in Colorado. It’s easy to see why there are more triples in San Francisco. It’s confusing, though, to think about why some environments might increase or decrease strikeouts or walks. It feels like those things should happen independent of the ballpark, and the effects tend not to be huge, but effects do exist in some places. Detroit is one of them. People always ask how these factors can be. It’s never easy to know for sure, but that doesn’t mean we can’t have a conversation.

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Ben and Sam talk to former international cricketer Kieran Powell about his attempt to become a professional baseball player.

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No two offseasons are alike. Some free-agent crops are bountiful, some less so. Sometimes, like last year, the trade market is on fire. Last winter, position players were on the move in huge numbers, due in part to a spate of new GMs — in particular, A.J. Preller — attempting to make their respective marks. Some years, the Winter Meetings are a virtual swap meet, while in others, they’re marked by a bunch of meetings leading to nowhere. Sometimes, the free-agent market dries up quickly, while in other years, Yoenis Cespedes, Justin Upton, Dexter Fowler, Ian Desmond, Yovani Gallardo, Doug Fister, Mat Latos and many others are still looking for work more than halfway into January.

When I wrote the first draft of this post yesterday, I was going to focus on the first two names in that list. Both entered the offseason with designs on a $150-million guarantee. Despite the relative lateness of the free-agent season, Justin Upton nearly reached that mark last night. Yoenis Cespedes remains available, however — and that availability has forced both him and all 30 clubs to step back and reassess his market.

For Cespedes, that means deciding whether to prioritize short- or long-term financial goals, while also considering competitive issues and quality of life. Meanwhile, clubs which might not have previously considered themselves as a possible destination for Cespedes are now having to decide whether to make a move in the event that his asking price drop far enough. After all, there really is no such thing as a “buyer” or a “seller”; hypothetically, if the price drops sufficiently low, all 30 clubs should dabble in the buyers’ end.

So let’s remove all preconceptions and determine which of the 30 clubs have a hole that could best be addressed by the signing of Cespedes, and examine whether the finances make sense both for player and club.

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This post was written by Adam Guttridge and David Ogren, the co-founders of NEIFI Analytics, an outfit which consults for Major League teams. Guttridge began his MLB career in 2005 as an intern with the Colorado Rockies, and most recently worked as Manager of Baseball of Research and Development for the Milwaukee Brewers until the summer of 2015, when he helped launch NEIFI. As part of their current project, they tweet from @NEIFIco, and maintain a blog at their site as well.

Analysts in the public space often assume a very deferential position. Surely, they may say, teams are doing similar work with far more information, using far more sophisticated tools, and know vastly more than those working in the public sphere.

We’d venture that the true size of that gap is far, far smaller than is often suspected. Injury information? Of course teams have far greater detail. But as regards primary questions like “who has pitched better?” or “how should one separate batted ball skill from variance?” — in terms of the salient data, there simply has not been a remarkable gap between what’s available to teams and what’s available to the public.

At least, perhaps until recently.

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Somebody finally signed Justin Upton to a contract late Monday night, and it was the Tigers who seemingly came out of nowhere to lock up the 28-year-old slugger to a seven-year contract. It’s reportedly worth $132 million with a second-year opt-out, but the details aren’t important — at least not in this post. Jeff Sullivan’s got the details, if you want the details.

I’m interested in something specific, something I saw pop up a few times on Monday night after news of the signing broke. I’ll use this one tweet, from the esteemed Jon Paul Morosi of FOXSports, as an example of a common line of thought:

Justin Upton gives #Tigers one of deepest lineups in #MLB, albeit very right-handed. Detroit went 53-70 vs. RH starters in ’15.

— Jon Morosi (@jonmorosi) January 19, 2016

There’s no denying the Tigers now have Justin Upton on their baseball team, and there’s no denying the Tigers now have a deep, formidable lineup. The Tigers already had a formidable lineup, before Upton, and now it’s deeper, and even more formidable. There’s no denying, either, that the Tigers lineup leans very right-handed. It’s something worth questioning, whether it’s a cause for potential concern. It sounds less than ideal, but is it really a problem, given the quality of the right-handed bats in question?

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On February 27th, 1997, the cover of the then newly-released March issue of Sports Illustrated featured two baby-faced baseball players — with the headline “Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez head up the finest group of shortstops since World War II.” The next season, Nomar Garciaparra had his breakout, and he joined the two in what was an embarrassment of riches at the position. Three years later, the trio was elected to the 2000 All-Star Game — a recognition of what was one of the finest multi-year periods by a group of three shortstops in the history of the game.

A historical convergence of that type of talent happens rarely in baseball, and it happens far more rarely at one position – and in just one league. During any particular season, there are usually only a certain number of players that are above a particular production level. Take, for example, the number of players that produced at least 6.0 Wins Above Replacement in 2015. We’ll focus on 6.0 WAR because above that level we consider production to be in the realm of a possible “MVP” performance.

In 2015, there were only ten players in all of baseball who had greater than 6.0 WAR. In 2014, there were only nine, and in 2013 there were also ten. Some years have more players and some years have fewer, but the point is that there are usually few players who are in this upper echelon of production. It’s also important to understand that shortstop is usually a less talented position than others on the field: the skill set to be successful both offensively and defensively at shortstop simply narrows the range of potential players down. Case in point: there hasn’t been a full-time shortstop with at least 6.0 WAR since Hanley Ramirez and Derek Jeter both topped that mark in 2009.

In 1998, Jeter, A-Rod, and Garciaparra all had over 6.0 WAR. They were all shortstops. They were all in the American League. The confluence of circumstances that came together for that to happen should be celebrated by its own holiday. In fairness, 1998 was a ridiculous year for great position players – there were 24 players with at least 6.0 WAR – the result of both great timing and, well, steroids. Still, there has rarely been a time when talent among American League shortstops – and shortstops in general – was more top-heavy than in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s.

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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 Detroit Tigers. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles NL / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / San Diego / Seattle / Texas / Toronto.

Batters
This entry regarding Detroit’s position players and their relative strengths looked different at roughly 4pm ET yesterday, when the idiot author originally composed it. That version of the Tigers featured some combination of Anthony Gose (561 PA, 0.9 zWAR) and Mike Aviles (347 PA, 0.3 zWAR) in left field, accounting for little more than a win between them. What happened in the meantime, however, is Detroit signed Justin Upton to a six year, $132.8 million deal. The move, broadly speaking, appears to have added slightly more than two wins to the club’s projections.

While certainly benefiting the Tigers, the acquisition of Upton does little to counteract the team’s recent history of employing stars (on the one hand) and scrubs (on the other). Miguel Cabrera, Ian Kinsler, J.D. Martinez, and Upton are all projected to record a mark of 3.5 WAR or higher; every other field player on the roster, 1.6 WAR or lower. Of course, a distinct advantage to this particular method of roster construction is that it becomes much easier to upgrade this or that position — especially if the club’s owner is both (a) fabulously wealthy and (b) motivated by the proximity of his own, real death.

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The first of them cracked. Justin Upton and Yoenis Cespedes remained on the free-agent market, and all around the league, teams indicated they didn’t want to make the necessary commitments. The players wanted five or six or seven years. The teams wanted to give one or two or three. It was enough to make you think there could maybe be a potential bargain, but the market just doesn’t turn out like that. More often than not, a team gives in, and few should be surprised the team that gave in Monday was the Tigers. As always, all Mike Ilitch wants is to win. He’ll now get to watch his team try to win with Upton every day in left field.

The agreement is for six years and a little over $130 million, with Upton also having the opportunity to opt out two years in. That’ll give Upton the chance to hit the market again at the same age that Cespedes is now, and as we’ve written so many times, the opt-out clause has good value to the player. But at the same time, this is the Tigers — Ilitch’s Tigers. On one hand, Ilitch makes these analyses complicated. On the other hand, you could argue they couldn’t be simpler. Upton’s a good player. Ilitch was willing to pay for a good player.

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To be perfectly honest with you, I don’t think about park factors very much anymore. Obviously, they matter as much as ever, but you just encounter them less since so many advanced numbers automatically fold them in. They go somewhat unseen, but they’re important, and I was recently reminded that three years ago, Petco Park and Safeco Field debuted new dimensions. There are other factors that affect how stadiums play, like weather patterns and nearby construction, but what’s most important tends to be the shape of a given field itself. So now that we have a good amount of data, let’s see how Petco and Safeco have played more recently.

To be straight, what follows isn’t very rigorous. I didn’t make adjustments or regressions, and almost anyone would tell you that the ideal involves more than three years of information. There are ways to do this more precisely. But, three years are three years, and it shouldn’t be hard to observe any significant changes. Off we go!

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