This time of year, everyone’s a contender. So everyone’s talking about the things they can do in 2016, and the A’s are no different, highlighting their improved bullpen and increased power. Just last week they picked up Khris Davis, and when I was reading about that move, team officials noted that Davis will provide critical right-handed pop, along with Danny Valencia. Just from reading that sentence, you know two things: (1) the A’s won’t be anyone’s AL West favorites, and (2) Valencia has won himself some organizational fans.

It’s not as if Valencia has been hurting for chances, as teams have long recognized his ability to punish left-handed pitchers who dare enter the strike zone. Valencia has been treated as one of those useful players good enough to have but not good enough to keep. He debuted in 2010, and Oakland is his sixth major-league team, having been claimed off waivers from the Blue Jays in August. The Blue Jays had themselves a roster crunch, and they weren’t buying the initial evidence that Valencia had made himself more whole. You can understand why Toronto wound up doing what they did, but Oakland seized the opportunity and now they seem to have themselves an asset. The A’s could afford to see how real Valencia really was. All he did was conquer his biggest problem.

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As we count down the days until spring-training games begin, let’s continue to take a position-by-position look back at the ball-in-play (BIP) profiles of 2015 semi-regulars and regulars to see if we can find any clues as to their projected performance moving forward. Last time, we reviewed first basemen and designated hitters; today, let’s take a look at second basemen.

First, some ground rules. To come up with an overall player population roughly equal to one player per team per position, the minimum number of batted balls with Statcast readings was set at 164. Players were listed at the position at which they played the most games. There is more than one player per team at some positions and less at others, like catcher and DH. Players are listed in descending OPS+ order. Without further ado, let’s kick it off with AL second sackers.

BIP Overview – AL Second Basemen

Name	Avg MPH	FB/LD MPH	GB MPH	POP%	FLY%	LD%	GB%	CON	K%	BB%	OPS+	Pull%	Cent%	Opp%
Forsythe	89.22	92.10	87.23	3.2%	37.4%	19.8%	39.6%	115	18.0%	8.9%	123	39.1%	36.3%	24.6%
Altuve	86.29	90.26	83.92	3.0%	32.2%	18.1%	46.7%	104	9.7%	4.8%	122	45.3%	35.5%	19.1%
Kipnis	89.88	92.58	87.37	1.9%	26.2%	26.8%	45.0%	119	16.7%	8.9%	121	35.3%	36.1%	28.6%
Zobrist	89.05	92.22	86.89	3.6%	28.8%	18.6%	49.0%	93	10.5%	11.6%	120	45.7%	31.7%	22.6%
Cano	90.88	94.74	88.06	1.1%	24.2%	24.2%	50.5%	110	15.9%	6.4%	118	36.3%	41.1%	22.7%
Kinsler	86.38	88.29	84.69	5.2%	35.5%	25.4%	33.9%	98	11.9%	6.4%	113	41.9%	34.1%	24.0%
Pedroia	88.47	91.77	86.27	4.5%	27.3%	17.7%	50.5%	100	12.0%	8.9%	113	40.1%	38.6%	21.3%
Schoop	90.79	94.36	88.89	5.3%	32.4%	19.3%	43.0%	142	24.6%	2.8%	110	43.2%	31.0%	25.8%
Odor	88.44	92.93	86.35	7.6%	32.1%	14.6%	45.8%	105	16.8%	4.9%	107	46.9%	31.6%	21.5%
Dozier	87.51	92.32	80.34	8.7%	35.4%	22.6%	33.3%	104	21.0%	8.7%	101	60.2%	24.2%	15.6%
Holt	86.65	88.85	85.46	1.1%	22.4%	23.8%	52.7%	100	19.1%	9.0%	96	33.4%	40.1%	26.5%
Giavotella	85.62	87.87	83.78	3.0%	27.5%	23.7%	45.8%	75	11.8%	6.4%	96	36.7%	38.6%	24.7%
Goins	87.36	89.16	86.62	3.1%	24.8%	18.0%	54.1%	81	19.4%	9.1%	86	34.1%	36.4%	29.5%
Drew	86.53	88.56	84.51	6.1%	40.5%	15.7%	37.7%	66	16.6%	8.6%	78	47.0%	33.2%	19.8%
Sanchez	86.07	89.15	84.31	2.0%	21.1%	22.8%	54.1%	67	19.3%	4.5%	66	30.8%	36.5%	32.7%
Sogard	84.52	86.71	84.17	3.1%	30.5%	22.0%	44.3%	60	12.5%	5.7%	66	35.6%	39.9%	24.5%
Infante	84.41	86.88	83.75	3.8%	33.9%	21.0%	41.2%	57	15.2%	2.0%	49	43.5%	34.5%	22.0%
AVG	87.53	90.51	85.45	3.9%	30.1%	20.8%	45.1%	94	15.9%	6.9%	99	40.9%	35.3%	23.9%

Most of the column headers are self explanatory, including average BIP speed (overall and by BIP type), BIP type frequency, K and BB rates, and BIP by field sector (pull, central, opposite). Each player’s OPS and Unadjusted Contact Score (CON) is also listed. For those of you who have not read my articles on the topic, Contact Score is derived by removing Ks and BBs from hitters’ batting lines, assigning run values to all other events, and comparing them to a league average of 100.

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Ben and Craig preview the Orioles’ season with Jon Bernhardt, and George talks to MASN/MASNSports.com Orioles reporter Roch Kubatko (at 25:52).

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Yesterday, I ran down my 10 favorite moves of the winter, highlighting the acquisitions that I thought were the best combination of return on investment and franchise impact. Today, we’re going to tackle the flip side of that coin, and look at the 10 moves I wasn’t quite as high on.

This side of the list has become increasingly difficult in recent years, as the people running MLB teams have become much more efficient with their decisions, and there are many fewer obvious mistakes than there used to be. These days, the worst moves of the winter are more marginal, with teams spending a little too much money for a still useful player here or there, or trading something from their farm system that perhaps should have brought back something more impactful.

We don’t see that many franchise-crippling moves anymore, however, so a transaction appearing below isn’t condemnation of that franchise; it’s more just that these teams may have had better options rather than going down the path they ultimately decided upon. And since there aren’t as many candidates for this part of the list, we’ll skip the dishonorable mentions, and get right to the ten moves that I didn’t really care that much for. Read the rest of this entry »

Like many of this site’s readers, the author of this post has occasionally entertained a fantasy in which he’s tasked — as the general manager of a major-league club — with constructing a championship roster. As with many fantasies, this one is burdened by awful, dumb reality: apart from an impressive combination of talent and experience, the position of general manager also requires one to work “all the time” or at least “nearly all the time.” For those among us who have already allocated a portion of the day to assuming the fetal position and weeping gently, that sort of obligation is untenable. As assorted industry contacts have confirmed for me, employment in a front office allows almost zero time for reflection on the horror of merely existing.

Still, this doesn’t prevent one from contemplating how one would conduct the affairs of a club were he given the opportunity. This post is designed to do that, briefly.

This post is also built on a reasonable assumption — namely that, among the general manager’s most important duties (and the scouting director’s and team president’s) is the acquisition of amateur talent. With few exceptions, organizations exercise great control over players whom they procure by means either of the draft or international free agency. In addition to owning the rights to such players for years in the minors, clubs are then entitled to six or seven years of player control in the majors. One can (and maybe should) debate the merits of the system; however, that debate lies outside the scope of this very modest report. What’s relevant here is the fact that it exists.

Even if a club doesn’t have space for a talented player on its 25-man roster, this doesn’t render that player’s value moot. The Detroit Tigers, for example, have maintained a strong major-league club for much of the last decade in part by exchanging young, cost-controlled prospects for more expensive, more proven major leaguers. While the Tigers have frequently placed among the bottom third of farm-rankings lists, this isn’t to say that the organization hasn’t reaped the benefits of its amateur scouting department. Rather, they’ve attempted to leverage those benefits in a different way — by exchanging future for present value.

What’s the best place to find such players, though? That’s the question a GM et al. must answer — and the more accurate the answer, the better situated a club to win.

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Yesterday, I utilized my KATOH projection system to rank the 30 farm systems. By my math, the Milwaukee Brewers are the top dog. And it isn’t particularly close. Here’s a graphical representation of each team’s cumulative projected WAR according to KATOH.

The Brewers farm system outpaces everyone else’s by a fairly wide margin by this metric. That’s interesting in and of itself. But the path David Stearns and company have taken to put their farm system in this position is perhaps even more interesting.

For one, they’ve acquired a large chunk of their minor league talent in the very recent past. Orlando Arcia, their consensus top prospect, has been around for a few years; but many of the others are very new additions. In fact, KATOH’s #2 through #8 prospects all joined the organization within the past seven months. That’s Ramon Flores, Jacob Nottingham, Brett Phillips, Josh Hader, Isan Diaz, Zach Davies and Javier Betancourt. Domingo Santana would fall in that group as well were he still prospect eligible. They’ve also added Rymer Liriano, Keon Broxton, Garin Cecchini, Jonathan Villar, Adrian Houser, Bubby Derby (who I’m still not convinced is a real person) over that same period. Not to mention lower-tier prospects Freddy Peralta, Trey Supak, Colin Walsh, Zack Jones, Carlos Herrera, Daniel Missaki and Manny Pina.

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Today, we’re excited to introduce FanGraphs Membership. What is FanGraphs Membership? Quite simply, it is a voluntary way for you to help support all the baseball content we produce each and every day. If you’ve been looking for an opportunity to help contribute to the long-term growth of the site, this is your chance to do just that, and partner with us to help continue to provide data and content that helps us all understand the game of baseball a little bit better.

FanGraphs Membership is not a paywall; we are not creating a separate section of the site that will only be available to members. In fact, we’re actually taking the content that was previously available to FanGraphs+ subscribers and making it available to everyone. We want every person who visits the site to feel that they are getting the most out of their experience, and believe that, with a broad base of support from the fantastic community here, we can continue to provide that information without restricting access to anyone.

With the introduction of FanGraphs Membership, all the content produced on FanGraphs will now be accessible for free, without logging in, or being a FanGraphs Member. If you are not a FanGraphs Member, we will occasionally ask if you’d like to join in supporting the site, but it will always be your decision to make. Think of FanGraphs Membership as something akin to the model used by NPR.

Now you may be asking yourself, why is FanGraphs doing this?

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Khris Davis has four career outfield assists. Have you ever been curious about how he got them? Of course you haven’t. You’re a grown person, with responsibilities. A person trying to answer the big questions, a person who reads books, a person wondering what a gravitational wave is. This has never really crossed your mind, but, now you’re here. Now you’re curious. This is obviously a setup and human nature will force you to see this all the way through. You’re not as in control of you as you think.

Davis is relevant right now because he was just traded. He debuted in 2013 and, since then, on a rate basis, he ranks fifth-worst among outfielders in the DRS version of the arm-value statistic. He ranks seventh-worst in the UZR version of the arm-value statistic. According to the Fan Scouting Report, he ranks fifth-worst in release. He ranks fourth-worst by arm strength, and he ranks eighth-worst by arm accuracy, and if you put all three components together, he ranks second-worst by arm overall. Khris Davis has a bad arm. It’s been that way for as long as you’ve known about him. We don’t get to say this kind of thing very often, but there might genuinely be some of you capable of out-throwing Khris Davis, who is a major-league baseball player.

And he’s a player with four assists. Bad arm, four assists. Which means he’s been involved in throwing people out. Time to walk through the assists, like we did with Ben Revere back whenever that was. For some reason, in this moment, it’s important to know what’s happened.

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Not long ago, we made available the results of the 2015 Fan Scouting Report. August already made use of them last week, and everything is right up there for your easy perusal. The measure obviously isn’t without its flaws, but no defensive measure is without its flaws, and as you’ve probably come to understand by how often I poll the FanGraphs community, I love to see what you people think about things. Even when the public might be wrong, there’s the opportunity to learn from its perception. The Fan Scouting Report is all about perceptions.

If you don’t know quite how it works, people submit ballots, evaluating player defense based on seven categories: instincts, first step, speed, hands, release, arm strength, and arm accuracy. Everything gets combined into an overall rating, and last year’s top rating was a four-way tie between Jackie Bradley Jr., Brandon Crawford, Jason Heyward, and Andrelton Simmons. According to the fans, those were the best defenders in the game, and each of them is recognized as being outstanding. This is one fun way to sort the leaderboards — see who the fans think was awesome, either overall, or within a particular category.

You can also do the opposite of that. Every leaderboard that has a top has a bottom.

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With pitchers and catchers reporting soon, we just about have all the major free-agent signings wrapped up. It looks like Yovani Gallardo is about to sign with the Orioles, and there are rumors that Dexter Fowler could soon join him now that Baltimore has apparently decided to give up their first-round draft pick. With so many good outfielders available this winter, as the music stops, the available chairs for Fowler seem less desirable than we might have thought at the end of last season. Fowler’s defensive numbers have been pretty bad over the last few seasons, but his UZR figure was close to average in his only year with the Chicago Cubs. Determining change in skill from small sample size can be difficult, but it does not seem likely Fowler greatly improved his defense last season.

Defensive statistics are much-maligned outside of the analytic community, and even among those who use advanced statistics, there’s a degree of doubt regarding their utility. Much of the criticism stems from a misunderstanding about how to use defensive statistics given the larger sample size necessary to draw meaningful conclusions. Looking at three seasons worth of UZR can seem like going too far into the past, leading to rationalizations about short-term spikes in defensive numbers.

Over the last four seasons, Fowler has put up a UZR numbers in center field of -13.6, -1.7, -21.8, and last year’s -1.9 mark. Taken on the whole, it would be reasonable to conclude that Fowler is a below-average center fielder. It might be easy to look at the last three years, point to two that are pretty close to average, and call the -21.8 an outlier. This isn’t advisable, however, as doing so completely ignores a full year of data and merely cherrypicks the good seasons. The graph below shows two lines: yearly UZR for Fowler over the past five seasons, and a three-year average of UZR over the past five seasons, which is more representative of Fowler’s defense.

Using three years of data smooths Fowler’s numbers considerably. The inconsistency of the yearly numbers largely evaporates and places Fowler’s defense somewhere between six and 12 runs below average at center field over the past few years. That inconsistency carried over to his WAR numbers as well, as the graph below shows.

Instead of a 1.4 WAR season followed a 3.2 WAR season, we see a pair of 2.5 WAR seasons the last two years. Not surprising for the soon-to-be 30-year-old, ZiPS sees Fowler as a 2.4 WAR player heading into next season.

But what about the possibility that Fowler’s defensive improvements are real? It does happen. Jhonny Peralta made himself a much better shortstop later into his career — and improved positioning could have helped Fowler last season, as could getting out of the ballparks in Colorado and Houston. That narrative was getting pushed early last season and it does have some validity.

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