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I have an early, hazy memory of Benito Santiago explaining to a reporter the approach that had led to his game-winning hit moments earlier. “I see the ball, I hit it hard,” said Santiago in his deep accent. From which game, in what year, I can’t remember. Also, it isn’t really important: it’s a line we’ve heard before. Nevertheless, it contains multitudes.

We know, for example, that major-league hitters have to see well to hit well. Recent research at Duke University has once again made explicit the link between eye sight, motor control, and baseball outcomes. This time, though, they’ve split out some of the skills involved, and it turns out that Santiago’s deceptively simple description involves nuanced levels of neuromotor activity, each predictive of different aspects of a hitter’s abilities. Will our developing knowledge about those different skills help us better sort young athletes, or better develop them? That part’s to be determined.

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Hey, something happened!

It's Jan. 10, and Jay Bruce's $39M deal with the #Mets is the 2nd biggest guaranteed payout for any position player this offseason. Carlos Santana's $60M from the #Phillies is the largest. Zack Cozart is 3rd at $38M from the #Angels.

— Jerry Crasnick (@jcrasnick) January 11, 2018

Jay Bruce deal with #Mets is backloaded. Breakdown, per source: $10M this season, $14.5M in 2019, $14.5M in ‘20.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) January 11, 2018

Outfielder Jay Bruce has signed with the New York Mets, and FanGraphs readers nailed the terms, having collectively produced a median projection of three years and $39 million. [Give yourself a pat on the back!] Six of Dave’s top-20 free agents have now signed.

Notably, the ballots for those crowdsourced predictions were submitted before it was clear just how slowly the free-agent market would unfold. Since contracts signed after Jan. 1 tend to compare less favorably to the crowd’s projections, this contract should be considered a win for the Bruce camp, especially with the supply of sluggers available.

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Given the relative novelty of Statcast data, it remains unclear for the moment just how useful the information produced by it can and will be. As with any new metric or collection of metrics, it’s necessary to establish baselines for success. How good is an average exit velocity of 90 mph? What does a 10-degree launch angle mean for a hitter? How does sprint speed translate to stolen bases or defensive ability?

In an effort to begin answering such questions, the Statcast team has rolled out a few different metrics over the past few years that attempt to translate some of the raw material into more familiar terms. Hit probability uses launch angle and exit velocity to determine the likelihood that a batted ball will drop safely. Another metric, xwOBA, takes that idea a step further, using batted-ball data to estimate what a player should be hitting.

Another example is Outs Above Average. In the case of OAA, the Statcast team has accounted for all the balls that are hit into the outfield, determined how often catches are made based on a fielder’s distance from the ball, and then distilled those numbers down to find what an average outfielder would do. The final result: a single number above or below average.

At Reddit, mysterious user 903124 has published research showing that the year-to-year reliability for Outs Above Average has been considerably higher than the Range component for UZR. The user was kind enough (or foolish enough) to create a Twitter account reproduce some graphs of his results, which are shown below. There is a subsequent tweet in the thread that shows left field.

Recalculate correlation of RngR and OAA with per 1000 inning data and for each outfield position (min. 400 innings). OAA still clearly has a lower year to year variance. @mitchellichtman @tangotiger pic.twitter.com/MZ4xB6YICV

— 903124 (@903124S) January 3, 2018

 

 

For those who can’t see the charts and would prefer not to open up a new window, what you’d see here is that, for the group selected, the r-squared is much higher for Outs Above Average than for the Range component for UZR. If Statcast could produce something that is much more reliable and much more accurate than the Range component of UZR, that would be a pretty significant breakthrough and win for Statcast, potentially improving the way WAR is calculated and providing a better measure of a player’s talent and results on the field.

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Gerrit Cole is reportedly on the verge of joining the Astros:

Source: #Astros and #Pirates have reached agreement on Gerrit Cole trade. @MLBNetwork @MLB

— Jon Morosi (@jonmorosi) January 10, 2018

Or… maybe he’s not:

Just spoke with Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow, who acknowledged he’s “talked to several teams about possible trades” but said “at this point, nothing is imminent."

— Jake Kaplan (@jakemkaplan) January 10, 2018

In any case, it sounds like a deal will get done eventually:

While a number of parties figure the Gerrit Cole-to-Astros deal will get done, multiple sources are cautioning that it's not there yet. Cole has not been informed of a trade to Houston. Generally, this sort of thing winds up with a deal being consummated. Just not at this point.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) January 10, 2018

Unless it doesn’t:

Source: "No deal" for Gerrit Cole to Houston. "False rumor."

As is the case with these things, talks could pick back up quickly. For now, though, Gerrit Cole to Houston is not happening.

— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) January 10, 2018

While something may or may not be imminent, such a trade would not be surprising: the Pirates have decided to retool at some level and Cole’s name has come up all offseason, first connected to the Yankees (though the Yankees were apparently unwilling to part with Gleyber Torres). The Astros are a top AL contender, the sort team looking to consolidate its position.

The possible return is not yet clear, though the Astros possess the sort of high-end prospects which the Pirates currently lack in their system. So, on the surface, this potential trade makes a lot of sense. A club headed for a rebuild sells two years of control of a top-of-the-rotation arm to a contender.

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After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for half a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Seattle Mariners. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Batters
When the Mariners took Kyle Seager (638 PA, 4.4 zWAR) in the third round of the 2009 draft, one could have been excused for assuming that the club had acquired him largely to play the role of Dustin Ackley’s Friend. While both players had served as starters on three consecutive College World Series teams at North Carolina, it was Ackley who was considered the real prospect, going second overall to Seattle in the same draft. Indeed, Seager was ranked by Baseball America just 30th among Mariners prospects during that next offseason — a reflection of industry opinion. Eight-plus years later, however, Ackley has become a journeyman, while Seager has become, if not the face of the franchise, then at least its metronome.

Complementing Seager on the current iteration of the Mariners is Robinson Cano (614, 2.9) and a collection largely of average talent. Indeed, ZiPS calls for five hitters — Nelson Cruz (574, 2.2), Dee Gordon (663, 2.3), Mitch Haniger (517, 2.1), Jean Segura (634, 2.1), and Mike Zunino (474, 2.1) — to produce a WAR figure within a half-win of 2.0 on either side. Recent acquisition and prospective first baseman Ryon Healy (619, -0.1) represents the weak link of the starting lineup according to Dan Szymborski’s computer.

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Ben Lindbergh and outgoing FanGraphs Managing Editor Dave Cameron review Dave’s decision to retire from writing to take a job as an analyst in the San Diego Padres’ front office, discussing his personal and professional past and future and the past, present, and future of public and private baseball analysis.

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I wrote my first post for FanGraphs on April 14th, 2008. It was about Gabe Kapler’s return from managing to be a productive big leaguer. It referenced WPA/LI as our version of a modern statistic and talked unironically about how Kapler was keeping up with Casey Kotchman. It wasn’t great.

Since then, I’ve published 3,501 other posts (or chats). Hopefully, most of them were better than that first one. In these last 10 years, the site has changed a lot. In 2010, I went from a freelancer to the company’s first full-time employee, then was joined by a host of absurdly talented coworkers, many of whom now also get to do this for a living. FanGraphs went from a niche site into the mainstream, and along the way, I’ve seen our little corner of the baseball world help change the language of baseball fans.

It’s been a remarkable run. But for me, it comes to an end today. This will be my last post at FanGraphs.

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Late in the 2017 season, I approached Sergio Romo to ask about backup sliders. More specifically, I wanted to know if he’s ever thrown one intentionally. A handful of pitchers to whom I’ve spoken have experimented with doing so. It can be an effective pitch when well located; hitters recognize and react to a slider, only to have it break differently than a slider. As a result, they either jam themselves or are frozen.

Romo, of course, has one of the best sliders in the game. The 34-year-old right-hander has lived and died with the pitch for 10 big-league seasons, throwing his signature offering 52.4% of the time. Among relievers with at least 250 innings, only Carlos Marmol (55.5%) and Luke Gregerson (52.7%) have thrown a slider more frequently over that span.

What I anticipated being a short conversation on a narrow subject turned into wider-ranging, and often entertaining, meditation on his slider (with a look at Zach Britton’s sinker thrown in for good measure). It turns out that Romo’s backups are all accidental — the exact mechanics behind them remain a mystery to him — but he does know how to manipulate the ones that break. He’s also knowledgeable about his spin rate, thanks to his “player-profile thingy.”

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Instead of covering free-agent signings like usual, members of baseball’s media have been forced to address the conspicuous lack of them this offseason. Dave outlined another possible explanation for the dearth of activity, noting that neither the Haves nor Have Nots are incentivized to spend money on a marginal win or two. There simply aren’t enough teams in the middle ground for whom a move might change their fortunes. There’s increasing speculation on and discussion about whether clubs might be colluding, as Zack Moser argues at BP Wrigleyville.

Wrote Moser:

“Free agency is the most important mechanism by which players can actually earn what they are due—after years of minor league, pre-arbitration, and arbitration salary suppression—and to argue for its obsolescence is to argue against the rights of labor in general.”

More than anything, I suspect the quiet offseason is a product of more clubs thinking alike and increasingly acting rationally. Emotion has largely been stripped out of the market (unless you can negotiate directly with an owner).

The other issue is the more potent luxury tax in the new CBA, which has essentially created a more rigid soft cap. There is an argument to be made that the players did this to themselves by focusing on issues like the qualifying offer instead of selecting bigger fights in the most recent round of bargaining.

While next year’s free-agent class — which features a rare wealth of young and talented players likely to be compensated handsomely — might give the impression that the system is operating in the players’ interest, it might just represent a temporary reprieve from the larger downward trajectory of the value of free agency. This is arguably the most important issue facing the MLBPA.

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