| 12:03 |
: OH GOD WE’RE LATE TYPE 3% FASTER!
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| 12:03 |
: NO TIME TO UNCHECK CAPS LOCK
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| 12:04 |
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| 12:04 |
No. Don’t type faster. Extend chat for four hours!!! |
| 12:05 |
: Cannot do! One, nobody should have to listen to me for four hours and I have a piece to finish!
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| 12:05 |
So Strasburg’s top comp is Mark Prior. How depressing. |
Here’s your chance to vote for the 2014 SABR Analytics Conference Research Awards winners.
The SABR Analytics Conference Research Awards will recognize baseball researchers who have completed the best work of original analysis or commentary during the preceding calendar year. Nominations were solicited by representatives from SABR, Baseball Prospectus, FanGraphs, The Hardball Times, and Beyond the Box Score.
Bruce Chen has had a pretty weird career. He was a top prospect with the Braves, got to the Majors at 21, and had his first excellent season at age-23. And then he fell apart and became the definition of a replacement level pitcher. From 2000 to 2003, he played for the Braves, Phillies, Mets, Expos, Reds, Astros, and Red Sox. He changed teams at least once in each of those four years, and was officially a journeyman by the time he was 26.
A decade later, he just re-signed with the Royals for another $4.25 million in guaranteed money, with an option that could actually keep him around through the end of his age-37 season. This wasn’t a particularly easy outcome to see coming, given how mediocre he was for most of his career, but his late career revival is almost something of a reminder about just how much of a pitcher’s performance is driven by home run rates.
The 2013-2014 free agent season isn’t over yet. Ubaldo Jimenez, Ervin Santana, A.J. Burnett, Stephen Drew, Kendrys Morales, Nelson Cruz, and Bronson Arroyo are still on the market and in most cases are looking for multi-year contracts. Between just those seven, I’d imagine MLB teams will probably commit somewhere between $250 and $300 million, and when they do, they’re going to push total spending on free agent contracts handed out this winter over $2 billion.
I’m not breaking any news here, but the rapid increase in free agent contracts over the last five years is still pretty staggering. Just for fun, I pulled all the data for Major League contracts signed for each of the last five years from ESPN’s free agent tracker, and dumped the data into a spreadsheet. Here are some total numbers for each of the last five free agent classes.
| 11:42 |
: After a week off for a ski vacation in West Virginia, I’m back for the regular Wednesday chat. Queue is open, you know the drill.
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| 12:00 |
: Alright, lets get this started.
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| 12:00 |
What’s a fair return for two years of Jeff Samardzija? |
| 12:01 |
: A few solid prospects, the best of the bunch being a back-end Top 100 type. He’s not worth any elite prospects or big league pre-arb contributors.
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| 12:01 |
AJ Burnett… does his return to the open market mean the Indians are more likely to have Ubaldo return? |
| 12:01 |
: I doubt it. Ubaldo’s going to get a 3 year deal, and I still think the Blue Jays are the team that will give it to him.
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Early in the off-season, Ricky Nolasco signed with the Minnesota Twins for $49 million over four years. Over the weekend, Matt Garza signed with the Milwaukee Brewers for $50 million over four years. While these contracts are nearly identical, the two pitchers could hardly be more different.
Over the last three seasons, Nolasco has averaged 199 innings per year, while Garza’s averaged just 152 innings per year. Nolasco has been reliably durable, avoiding the disabled list entirely for each of the last three seasons, while Garza has had three separate stints on the DL since the start of the 2011 season. Nolasco’s strongest selling point is his health track record; health is Garza’s weak point.
Nolasco has his own weak points, however. He’s consistently underperformed his FIP for nearly his entire career, as his 108 ERA-/92 FIP- is the largest spread of any active starting pitcher in baseball at the moment. While Nolasco’s BB/K/HR rates are all solid, he has a long history of giving up hits on balls in play and failing to strand runners, so his run prevention has never matched up with the estimators. Garza, on the other hand, has a below average BABIP for his career, and has a slightly positive ERA/FIP differential, though that hasn’t held true over the last three years.
I was on vacation last week, so in my absence, Jeff Sullivan handled the write-ups relating to Masahiro Tanaka signing with the Yankees. When the news broke on Wednesday, he wrote a couple of posts about it, and in typical Jeff Sullivan fashion, the second post was explicitly “not an evaluation of the Masahiro Tanaka contract.” Jeff’s takes are smart and nuanced, and you should read them, but I also think the Tanaka contract is worth an evaluation, especially because it is so different from most free agent contracts.
In general, most free agent deals are not that difficult to evaluate. The majority of free agents are already on the downside of their career, so there’s a tension in the negotiations between the player trying to get as many years as possible and the team trying to limit their obligations to an aging player who is expected to be get worse in every subsequent season. In recent years, it seems that negotiations have mostly shifted away from bidding in annual average value into almost entirely bidding on years, where the signing team is the one who guarantees one year more than the rest of the bidders. Negotiations for free agents can be pretty accurately described as a push and pull between teams and players over the number of guaranteed years the player is going to receive, with most everything else being secondary to that agreement.
| 12:00 |
: Begin Communiqué.
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| 12:01 |
When are the Nats’ Zips projections going to be up? |
| 12:02 |
: I believe they’re scheduled to go up Thursday.
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| 12:02 |
: That lily-livered mountebank Cistulli has the Astros projections for tomorrow, then Rangers, Nats, A’s, Giants final order.
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| 12:02 |
Woo! |
| 12:03 |
: Woo backwards is oow, which means something that I can’t figure out.
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| 12:00 |
: And awaaaaay we go!
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| 12:01 |
: canta saee anything cat in front of minorot
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| 12:02 |
: OK fixed.
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| 12:02 |
: The cat has been eliminated. Or pushed out of the way. One of those.
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| 12:02 |
Jays wins in 2014 over/under 83.5? |
| 12:02 |
: I’d guess over, but I think it’s close.
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Clayton Kershaw signed the largest contract for any pitcher in baseball history on Wednesday. In doing so, he became the first player in MLB to agree to a long term deal for an annual average value of more than $30 million, so on a per season basis, he’s also the highest paid player in baseball history. And he got that deal a year before he was eligible to hit free agency, so this price reflects a discount over what the Dodgers believe he would have gotten with competitive bidding. Given these facts, it’s easy to look at this deal as a harbinger of escalating prices and further proof of significant inflation in Major League Baseball.
Interestingly, however, it’s really not that at all. I walked through Kershaw’s expected value about a half hour before the contract was announced on Wednesday, and my guess for the total price came out to $230 million over seven years, a little less than what he actually signed for, but also didn’t include the value to Kershaw of getting to opt-out after year five. Including that offsetting value, I think my guess was pretty decent.