The baseball season is back! Rejoice! No time for bad feelings – it’s a celebration, and we’re all invited. I don’t really think the rest of this article is something you have to read right now, but I’ll level with you: I had already done the research for it, and it’s worth writing about, so before we descend into a non-stop festival of free agent signings and trades, you’re getting an article about a decision that the MLBPA won’t have to reckon with for a few months yet.

Before we got a merciful end to the CBA back-and-forth, a deal was proposed by MLB that would institute an international draft in exchange for eliminating the qualifying offer system. One detail of the reporting on this issue bugged me: at least one “industry source” gave an estimate for the value of the QO system that I found hard to believe:

1. It is difficult to know what dollar values the sides attach to the international draft or eliminating qualifying offer. Industry sources estimate QO to be worth $50m-$100m annually. Just because one side links two issues does not mean they are identically valued.

— Evan Drellich (@EvanDrellich) March 9, 2022

I don’t doubt Drellich’s reporting, but that number sounded wildly high to me. A single-digit group of players receive the qualifying offer each year; they’d have to be losing $10 million per player to make the math make sense. The draft picks that teams surrender to sign those players aren’t worth that much. The highest possible estimate for the cost of those picks comes in around $8 million per player, and that’s for teams with a luxury tax bill (or CBT, if you’re into acronyms).

To settle this question, I decided to look at all of the free agents who have received qualifying offers since the first year of the current QO system, the 2017-18 offseason. I’ve previously estimated what teams pay per WARin free agency, which gave me a useful database to start the investigation. Read the rest of this entry »

After another 24 hours of intense negotiations, MLB’s lockout of the players remains in effect. Just like the last time negotiations ticked past a league-imposed deadline, MLB announced that they had canceled a week (two series) of games, postponing Opening Day until April 14. That brings the total number of weeks canceled to two and series to four, with the possibility of more to come should the two sides not reach a compromise in their negotiation of a new collective bargaining agreement.

It’s unclear whether these games will remain canceled, or whether some newly structured season will change the schedule. After all, the league canceled a week of games last week, then spent most of this week saying they would un-cancel them and play a full 162 if the two sides reached a deal by their new deadline. Plus, the length of the season, and the salaries and service time that go with it, is itself a matter of bargaining. But let’s take the league at their word and assume that we’re now looking at a 150-game season. Read the rest of this entry »

You’ll have to bear with me at the start of this one, because I’m feeling expansive today. This article is about baseball trivia, but I’m getting there in an oblique way. It starts in Magnus Effect Baseball, but don’t worry, MLB fans, we won’t be staying there long on this winding journey to some fun facts.

I have a prospect crush on one of my virtual Phillies: a 17-year-old third baseman named Izzy de Santiago. He’s absolutely crushing the Dominican Summer League in 102 plate appearances, to the tune of a .375/.412/.583 line. His skillset is expansive; he hits for power and average and rarely swings and misses. He also has a huge infield arm and blazing straight-line speed. He looks like a potential future star, in fact. There’s just one problem:

My guy can’t take a walk to save his life, and he’s not projected to learn how to. Despite that huge hole in his game, he still has an OBP higher than his batting average, and it’s for one key reason: he’s quite good at getting hit by pitches. He’s racked up six so far in his abbreviated season, a frankly stunning pace. Six more HBPs than walks sounded extreme to me — and then I started spiraling back into the real world.
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Two weeks ago was Prospect Week here at FanGraphs. I didn’t contribute any analysis to it, because a) it was packed with really good analysis already and b) I wasn’t done compiling the thing I wanted to contribute. With some time to finish up my work — and not much else going on in our lockout-plagued sport — I’m ready to provide a bit of bonus analysis.

Last year, I used a variety of statistical techniques to come up with a list of players I thought stood a strong chance of putting together a meaningful major league career. This year, I’m … well, I’m using a variety of statistical techniques to come up with a list of players I think stand a strong chance of putting together a meaningful major league career. But this time, I’ve spent a bit more time refining my methods.

Here’s a quick overview of those methods. I used a variety of simple models based on historical minor and major league data. In each of them, I looked at a variety of key indicators in minor league hitters: statistics, age, position, level — anything I could download, essentially. I linked those minor league seasons to that player’s eventual major league career (or lack thereof).

This methodology carries many limitations, only some of which I have time to detail here. Baseball isn’t the same as it was in the past; while I think I’ve done a decent job of picking performance metrics that are stable over time, player development and the skills that are necessary to stick in the major leagues don’t look the same as they did 10 or 20 years ago.

That particular problem is inherent in everything that uses the past to predict the future, but don’t worry: my methods have way more shortcomings. For one, 2021 was a strange year to look at minor league statistics. With no 2020 season to gauge players’ skill levels, competition seemed far more variable within each league. I’m also basing much of this data on leagues that don’t exist anymore, as minor league realignment changed the makeup of the minor leagues significantly and also messed with my rudimentary park factors. I didn’t use Statcast or Trackman data, both because I don’t have a complete picture of it for 2021 and because it doesn’t exist at all in most of the years I used to train my various models. Finally, I’m using the position that each player played most in 2021 to give them a position, rather than where they’re projected to end up or what our prospect team thinks they’re best suited for.
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The 2028-29 offseason was downright bananas. In a matter of weeks, the Dodgers shelled out $2.3 billion in guarantees, a spending spree that upended the league. What had been a good class for first basemen turned into a single team cornering the market: Yordan Alvarez, Pete Alonso, and Alec Bohm created a veritable pileup at first in Los Angeles, one that pushed the team’s best holdover player, Michael Lindauer, from first to shortstop. It also pushed Bohm to third, which meant fellow free agent signee Carter Kieboom was getting $75 million to be a backup. The rest of the league was caught flat-footed, playing catch-up or giving up on free agency entirely.

That’s just how things go in Magnus Effect Baseball, an online baseball-industry Out Of The Park league that grew out of 2020’s COVID-19 lockdowns but has turned into a freewheeling, frenetic playground that shows no signs of slowing down. Those mighty Dodgers didn’t break the league; in fact, they’re not even the best team in their division. It’s a wildly competitive league, with even the bad teams trying to trade, sign, and develop their way into contention.

Magnus Effect Baseball started the way most online activities did in early 2020: out of sheer boredom. Smith Brickner, the league’s commissioner, wasn’t the originator. At the time, he was working for the Braves as a minor league video trainee, but his job had been put on hold by COVID. “I had just driven 20-plus hours from the Braves’ spring training complex back to Long Island when my buddy Sam Denomme asked if I had an interest in joining an industry-wide OOTP league run by some guys at Driveline,” Brickner told me. “When it became clear that someone needed to step up and actually run the league, I raised my hand.” Read the rest of this entry »

As you’ve probably heard, Major League Baseball canceled the first two series of the 2022 season yesterday, after a self-imposed deadline to finish negotiations with the Major League Baseball Players Association on a new collective bargaining agreement passed with no deal reached. The two sides didn’t appear to be close to an agreement before negotiations ended; indeed, they remained far apart on several key economic issues.

The gulf between them is significant, but it doesn’t seem unbridgeable. Negotiations in three areas – compensation for young players, the competitive balance tax, and postseason expansion – will be key to reaching an agreement when talks resume. Those are far from the only issues that separate the two sides, of course, but they dwarf the rest; presumably a compromise in those three areas would precipitate a deal. Or at least, that was my assumption when I began to look at the differences. Let’s see just how far apart MLB and the MLBPA actually are. Read the rest of this entry »

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As the lockout wears on, team financials have repeatedly been called into question. Are teams making money? What about if you ignore franchise value? Commissioner Rob Manfred recently claimed that owning a baseball team has been a worse investment than investing in the stock market, a claim that was quickly challenged by outside observers. Last week, Liberty Media, the principle owner of the Atlanta Braves, announced their 2021 financial results, shedding some light on the financial state of the league.

The Braves enjoyed a banner year in 2021. Per their filing, they turned a profit of $104 million. That’s full-year OIBDA, or operating income before depreciation and amortization. That brings their four-year operating income, including the pandemic-marred 2020 season, to $193 million.

OIBDA sounds like a great big pile of financial jargon, and it is, so let’s talk about what all of that means. Operating income refers to the money that the team has left over after it takes in all its revenue and pays all of its costs. More specifically, it’s revenue minus the cost of goods sold minus other operating expenses. If a team sells 100 hot dogs for a net $800, that’s $800 in revenue. If they paid $20 to buy those hot dogs in bulk, that’s $20 in cost of goods sold. If they pay the vendor who sells those hot dogs $15, that’s $15 in other operating expenses. Voila – $765 in operating income. Read the rest of this entry »

On a per-plate-appearance basis, you can probably guess the top five second basemen from last season. Trea Turner leads the pack, at least if you count him as a second baseman. Marcus Semien is close behind. Brandon Lowe, Jose Altuve, and Jake Cronenworth round out the group, and it’s not a surprise to see any of them at the top of a list of excellent players. Number six might surprise you: it’s Tony Kemp, who quietly put together a star-level season in his second year in Oakland.

As Jay Jaffe noted last year, Kemp isn’t doing it with barrels. He didn’t end the year in the zero-barrel club, but it was a near thing; he managed all of three. He didn’t quite finish last in barrels per batted ball, but the company he kept on that list — he’s wedged between Nick Madrigal and Adam Frazier, with Tim Locastro and Nicky Lopez in close proximity — isn’t one known for its power. That’s hardly a surprise given Kemp’s short stature (he’s listed at 5’6” and 160 pounds), but the lack of power didn’t stop him from compiling a juicy 127 wRC+, third-best on a solid Oakland offense.

How did Kemp do it? Without putting the ball in play, mainly. His 13.1% walk rate was 20th among batters with 300 or more plate appearances, and no one who walked more than he did struck out less frequently than his 12.8% mark (Juan Soto was close at 14.2%, but he might be a robot sent from the future to break baseball, so that’s good company to keep). Read the rest of this entry »