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The Evolution of Free Agency
The big news of the morning is that Robinson Cano has fired Scott Boras as his agent, and is joining a newly created wing of the CAA group that will be led by hip hop artist Jay-Z. I don’t pretend to know anything about hip hop artists and their geographical biases, so I’ll just go along with the consensus that hiring Jay-Z as his agent is a pretty good sign that Cano wants to stay in New York. And, as Ken Rosenthal noted, CAA is the agency for many players who have re-signed with their current teams rather than test free agency, including being the representatives for Buster Posey, Matt Cain, Andre Ethier, Ryan Braun, Ryan Zimmerman, Ryan Howard, and Adam Jones.
Reading all the tea leaves, I think it’s probably fair to expect Cano to re-up with with New York before he ever gets to free agency. The Yankees can’t afford to let Cano leave, and despite their desire to get under the luxury tax, they’re still the Yankees. Avoiding a bidding war with the Dodgers is almost certainly in their best interests if they want to keep Cano in the Bronx, and so it seems like the interests of both parties are aligned to keep Cano from hitting free agency.
If we scratch Cano from the list of potential free agents for next winter, that leaves us with Jacoby Ellsbury, Josh Johnson, Roy Halladay, Tim Lincecum, and Shin-Soo Choo as the premier players likely to make it to the open market. And, that less than stellar class leads us the inevitable discussion of the changing role of free agency in Major League Baseball.
Elvis Andrus, Texas Ranger
The Texas Rangers have the best prospect in baseball, a 20-year-old shortstop named Jurickson Profar who the public projection systems think could be a league average player in the big leagues right now. He’s going to start the year in Triple-A, though, as neither middle infield position is currently available in Arlington, with Elvis Andrus and Ian Kinsler currently entrenched at shortstop and second base respectively. Kinsler is beginning the first year of a five year contract extension, and after posting the worst year of his career at age 30, he wouldn’t be particularly easy to trade at the moment. Thus, the presumption has been that Andrus was going to be the odd man out, especially since he’s represented by Scott Boras, an agent known for encouraging his players to get to free agency when they have the chance.
Well, apparently, we can throw that assumption down the drain, because Ken Rosenthal is reporting that the Rangers are getting close to signing Andrus to an eight year extension that would total approximately $120 million. Because it’s eight new years on top of the two he’s already signed for, the Rangers’ obligation to Andrus now runs $131 million over the next 10 years. It’s a long contract and a lot of money, but given Andrus’ skills and value, this is a deal worth doing for Texas.
Giants Wisely Lock Up Buster Posey Forever
If you hadn’t noticed, Major League teams have decided that the best way to use their current financial windfall is to keep their best players for essentially their entire careers. It wasn’t long ago that single team lifers like Cal Ripken and Tony Gwynn were the outliers, but now, it is becoming unusual for an elite player to not sign a mega-contract with his original franchise. Just in the last few years, we’ve seen the following players commit to spending the great majority of their careers with just one Major League team:
Joe Mauer, Joey Votto, Ryan Braun, Troy Tulowitzki, Evan Longoria, Felix Hernandez, Matt Kemp, David Wright, Cole Hamels, Matt Cain, Yadier Molina, Ryan Zimmerman, Justin Verlander, Adam Wainwright, and now Buster Posey.
Maybe not all of these players will stay with their current teams for the duration of these contracts, and a few might end up going elsewhere after these deals expire to squeeze an extra year or two out of the end of their careers. These aren’t necessarily contracts “for life”, but they do cover enough of the prime years of the game’s best players that it ensures that their legacy will be forever tied to one franchise. This represents a significant shift for Major League Baseball since free agency began.
Great players still change teams, of course. Albert Pujols left the Cardinals. Prince Fielder left the Brewers. David Price is almost certainly going to leave the Rays. Robinson Cano might leave the Yankees, though I’ll believe that when I see it. It isn’t true that every great player now retires with the team that brought him to the Majors. But there’s no question that MLB teams are moving to make that the more common occurrence, and fewer stars are waiting to get to free agency before cashing in on massive paychecks.
2013 FanGraphs Staff Predictions
After last year’s rousing success that included tabbing Albert Pujols for AL MVP, Devin Mesoraco for Rookie of the Year, and Arizona as the National League champions, we’ve decided to make fools of ourselves again. Yes, predictions are basically worthless, even ours. Yes, they’re still kind of fun, and provide a useful reminder of what we all thought was true before the season started. So, here’s the FanGraphs Staff predicting 2013.
Why Replacement Level?
This morning, we announced that we’d come to an agreement with Sean Forman of Baseball-Reference on a unified replacement level, allowing both WAR calculations to measure players on the same scale. In that post, though, I didn’t spend much time talking about why replacement level is the baseline to begin with, so I thought it was worth taking a little bit more time to talk about why replacement level is a necessary concept.
After all, we’re all used to metrics that use average as a baseline, and average is easily defined and measured. Why not just measure everyone against league average, and use WAA instead of WAR?
There are two answers to that question, really. Let’s tackle them in order of importance, beginning with the playing time issue.
Unifying Replacement Level
On Christmas Eve of 2008, David Appelman gave the world a present – “win values” on the pages of FanGraphs. It wasn’t labeled WAR for a little while longer, though it was an implementation of the model Tom Tango laid out at The Book Blog a few months prior. Over these last four years, the model has become quite popular, and even those who are not fans of analytics know what WAR stands for. Over time, the model grew in popularity, and in 2010, Baseball Reference added it to their collection of statistics. Because WAR is essentially a model of player value, there are decisions that have to be made about the way it is constructed that don’t have an obviously correct answer. In places where we had made one decision, Sean Forman (and Sean Smith, who assisted with their original implementation) made some other decisions, and the calculations differ in some significant ways.
We know that this is a source of frustration for some folks, having two sites both publicly display different calculations for a statistic of the same name. Often, the differences between the two have been used to discredit the entire model. For instance, Jim Caple wrote this on ESPN.com a few months back:
Actually, we know it isn’t always accurate because depending on your source — FanGraphs or Baseball-reference.com — you can get wildly different WAR scores… For example:
Does (Jack) Morris, in fact, belong in the Hall of Fame? No, he doesn’t, according to baseball-reference.com, which gives him a WAR score of 39.3, tied for 145th all time among pitchers. Maybe he does, according to FanGraphs, which gives him a 56.9 WAR, 75th all time.
When Caple wrote it, I wasn’t exactly sure why Morris’ value differed so much, but since we measure pitching in very different ways, I assumed that the 17.6 win gap was due to some differences between Morris’ FIP and his runs allowed. But, then, I looked it up, and Morris’ career ERA (3.90) was almost an exact match for his FIP (3.94). Adjusted for park, Morris’ career FIP- was 97, while his ratio of RA9 to league average on Baseball-Reference is 96. Even with very different inputs, both models came to the same conclusion about Morris – he was a slightly above average pitcher who had a very long career. So, why did we give him credit for an additional 17.6 wins?
The answer, quite simply, lies with replacement level. Our model used a lower baseline than Baseball-Reference did, so the same performance would result in a higher WAR in our model than in theirs. Over very long careers — like Morris’, for instance, or many of the old time pitchers who threw forever — this could really begin to add up, and give the appearance of large disagreements when the two systems didn’t actually see things all that differently. In the case of guys with substantial careers, many of the large discrepancies were simply driven by the fact that the two sites had a different definition of replacement level.
2013 Positional Power Rankings: Wrap-Up
Now that we’ve completed our journey through the positional power rankings for the upcoming season, I wanted to give an overview of each team’s forecasts for each spot, and then their overall forecast. Keep in mind that simply summing the linear weights contribution of each individual player is a very crude way to project a team’s performance, since it leaves out things that a good projection system should forecast, such as strength of schedule and the non-linear interactions that effect run scoring. However, for being a crude back-of-the-envelope calculation, it also works pretty well, so as long as you take these in the spirit they’re intended and not as the gospel truth, this kind of exercise can give you a lot of information about where teams stand heading into the coming season.
So, here’s the total results for each team’s forecast WAR from the Positional Power Rankings, and the conversion from that into projected wins.