A few weeks ago, the Cardinals signed Matt Carpenter to a six year, $52 million contract. Today, the Indians have signed Jason Kipnis to a six year, $52.5 million contract. Both players were four years from free agency, and in essence, they both signed the same basic contract. Which makes sense, because they’re pretty similar players. Here are their career performances, side by side:
FanGraphs is proud to be the keynote sponsor of this year’s Saberseminar: Sabermetrics, Scouting, and the Science of Baseball. The weekend event takes place in Boston on August 16th and 17th, and the line-up is already looking pretty fantastic. Confirmed speakers include Astros GM Jeff Luhnow, Red Sox GM Ben Cherington and analyst Tom Tippett, physicist Alan Nathan, SABR President Vince Gennaro, noted analysts Mitchel Lichtman, Dan Brooks, Harry Pavlidis, and others, including Matt Swartz and myself representing FanGraphs.
The event is always a great time, with lots of really interesting presentations and a lot of fantastic people. Even better, however, is that the event is put on entirely as a fundraiser, with 100% of the proceeds going to the Jimmy Fund. Every speaker donates their time and travel costs, and the entire event is put on with the goal of raising as much money for cancer research as possible. So, not only do you get to spend a few days hanging out with other baseball nerds, you get to do so while also helping save lives. It’s a win-win.
Tickets for the weekend start at $140 (and are only $65 if you’re a student, which is an incredible deal), and can be purchased now from their website. If you’re anywhere near the Boston area that weekend, you should absolutely buy a ticket. If you’re not near the Boston area, you should consider coming anyway. It’s a great event, and I couldn’t endorse it any stronger.
I hope to see you guys there.
The rise of the early career contract extension has, in some cases, made it clear just how much impact one contract extension can have on future contract negotiations. For instance, nine months after Justin Upton signed a six year, $51 million contract with the Diamondbacks, Jay Bruce signed a six year, $51 million deal with the Reds. A year after that, Andrew McCutchen signed a six year, $51 million deal with the Pirates. A couple of years ago, Madison Bumgarner, Jon Niese, Derek Holland, and Chris Sale all signed long term deals with very similar parameters at similar levels of service time. Even just a few weeks ago, Starling Marte signed a $31 million contract that is almost exactly a clone of the deal Paul Goldschmidt signed last spring.
This is basically how the extension market works. There are parameters in place that drive the fundamentals, but by and large, a lot of the negotiation boils down to making sure that the deal is in the same range of what the last few similar players signed for. And so it’s not surprising that the two most recent extensions for young, early career pitchers come with almost exactly the same terms.
This morning, David Appelman rolled out our site’s newest feature: Game Odds. Essentially, this tool takes our Depth Chart forecasts and applies them to every match-up, and then takes it a step further by calculating the odds based on that day’s actual line-up and starting pitcher, once they are known. Using a few mathematical tools, we use these inputs to calculate an expected odds of each team winning that particular game, so we can beyond things like “the Red Sox are better than the Orioles” and see that, when it’s Ubaldo Jimenez versus John Lackey and the game takes place in Baltimore, the Orioles are actually very slight favorites. When the line-ups come out and replace the depth charts — which still give fractional playing time to injured guys like Shane Victorino — the needle will probably move even further towards the Orioles.
This is the kind of result that makes these numbers interesting and useful, because before seeing them, I probably would have assumed that the Red Sox would be favored tonight. After all, our projections have the Red Sox as a schedule-neutral 87 win team, with the Orioles as a schedule-neutral 78 win team. That’s a pretty decent sized gap, and it doesn’t feel like the difference between Jimenez and Lackey should really push the game towards the Orioles all that much. In fact, our depth chart forecasts have Lackey as a slightly better pitcher than Jimenez, so what’s the deal with the Game Odds suggesting that Baltimore is a 50.2% favorite before the line-ups get posted?
| 11:29 |
: We’ve got real, actual baseball. Let’s talk about it.
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| 11:29 |
: Queue is open, chat will begin in 15-20 minutes.
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| 12:01 |
Still too early to be legitimately optimistic about the M’s playoff odds? |
| 12:02 |
: It’s two games. They count, and the gap between the Angels and Mariners is now smaller than it was a few days ago, but I have the gap much larger than the FG Playoff Odds do, and I still don’t see the Mariners as more than a .500ish team.
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| 12:02 |
Is BJ Upton fixable? Obviously a SSS but he has not had a good past few games. |
| 12:03 |
: Remember last April? The one where Justin Upton was Babe Ruth? Don’t overreact to small samples.
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With the real Opening Day behind us — sorry Astros and Yankees, you’re just late — we now have real 2014 data from almost every team on the leaderboards. Of course, besides answering trivia questions, we all know that there’s really nothing insightful to be learned from one day’s performance, and we’re not going to find useful information to be analyzed there until the samples get a lot bigger.
But there are some numbers that became useful in very short order. Strikeout rate, for instance, only has to be regressed 50% to the mean at a much lower number of batters faced than most other pitching metrics, and big changes in K% over even a few starts can prove somewhat meaningful. It’s hard to fluke your way into getting a bunch of Major League hitters to swing through your pitches, and if you’re consistently throwing pitches by people, it’s a pretty good sign for the future.
The Major League season is, I guess, already three games old, but for basically everyone who isn’t the Dodgers, today is still the real Opening Day. We have a nearly full slate of games on the docket, and we’ll be live blogging throughout the day here on the site. But before we get to the actual games, let’s run through a few more preview-ish things I believe about the 2014 that you might not infer from my picks in the Staff Predictions (NL, AL) posts from Friday.
1. I believe that the Cubs might be better than we think.
According to Alden Gonzalez, the Angels and Mike Trout are close to finalizing a six year contract that will pay Trout $144.5 mlilion over the 2015-2020 seasons.
Trout deal for $144.5M. Average annual value is nearly $24.1M. Makes Trout third #Angels player with AAV of at least $24M (Pujols, Trout).
— Alden Gonzalez (@Alden_Gonzalez) March 29, 2014
Those six years cover Trout’s three arbitration eligible seasons and his first three free agent seasons. Instead of hitting free agency after his age-25 season, he’ll play for the Angels through at least his age-28 season.
The 2014 Major League Baseball season kicks off for real on Monday — no, random days where the Dodgers play someone and it’s the only game of the day don’t count — and so, as a baseball site, we are compelled to offer our staff’s predictions for the upcoming season. We are compelled because you like to read our staff predictions, even though they are terrible. And boy are they terrible.
Among last year’s gems were things like Aaron Hicks, American League Rookie of the Year. Aaron Hicks did not get a single vote by any one voter on a Rookie of the Year ballot last year. We also had the Angels and Blue Jays making the playoffs. Predicting baseball is silly. Everyone is terrible at it, including us. But as long as you know that going in, it’s still kind of a fun exercise.
The 2014 Major League Baseball season kicks off for real on Monday — no, random days where the Dodgers play someone and it’s the only game of the day don’t count — and so, as a baseball site, we are compelled to offer our staff’s predictions for the upcoming season. We are compelled because you like to read our staff predictions, even though they are terrible. And boy are they terrible.
Among last year’s gems were things like Aaron Hicks, American League Rookie of the Year. Aaron Hicks did not get a single vote by any one voter on a Rookie of the Year ballot last year. We also had the Angels and Blue Jays making the playoffs. Predicting baseball is silly. Everyone is terrible at it, including us. But as long as you know that going in, it’s still kind of a fun exercise.