Big news everyone – Justin Upton is still on the trade block. He has been for about three years now, and he will continue to be until he is mercifully traded to a team that wants him more than Arizona seems to. With yesterday’s reports about Upton’s availability, more than a few people on Twitter asked me about Upton’s home/road splits, and whether or not we should expect him to regress significantly if he’s traded to a less hitter friendly ballpark. In case you haven’t seen them, Upton has enormous home/road splits, and it’s a career trend, not just a one year blip.

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With January here and a few big name free agents still on the market, one of the popular stories of the week is how the new compensation system is affecting free agent pricing. I wrote about it yesterday, as did Jeff Passan, and this morning, C. Trent Rosencrans documented some comments Kyle Lohse made on the radio. He seems to have a pretty good understanding of what’s going on:

“It’s not exactly an open, free market when you attach such things on a guy like myself, but yet a guy like a Zack Greinke or Anibal Sanchez got a get-out-of-jail-free card because they got traded midseason, so the rules don’t pertain to them,” Lohse said. “I’m obviously a little biased, but the rules could use some tweaking.”

Of course, Greinke and Sanchez also have the advantage of being younger and better than Lohse, but their lack of draft pick compensation almost certainly helped drive up their price a little bit, so Lohse isn’t wrong here. But, rather than spend another day talking about the rules themselves, I want to talk about the actual change that teams appear to be making this winter – significantly inflating the valuation of a draft pick.

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Update: As pointed out to me on Twitter, the CBA explicitly prohibits (page 90, section c) teams and agents from agreeing to avoid the qualifying offer in the way I suggest below. So, this entire post is now academic. But still kind of interesting, perhaps. The points about the imbalanced incentives are still true, and I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see the MLBPA negotiate significant changes into the next agreement.

This winter marked the first off-season under the new terms set out by the Collective Bargaining Agreement, which included a complete overhaul of the free agent compensation system. Back in November, teams had to decide whether their free agents were worth a one year, $13.3 million contract offer in order to receive a draft pick if the player chose to sign elsewhere. Only nine players received the qualifying offer, and in David Ortiz’s case, it was mostly academic, as he was working on a two year deal with the Red Sox and never even made it to free agency.

Interestingly, of the eight players who did receive a qualifying offer and elected for free agency, half of them remain unsigned. Adam LaRoche has a standing two year offer to return to the Nationals, but has had problems drumming up enough interest elsewhere to force Washington to give him the third year that he’s looking for. And then there’s Michael Bourn, Kyle Lohse, and Rafael Soriano, who each remain without a team and seemingly without any serious suitors. While we don’t actually know what conversations have taken place between teams and agents, speculation exists that the loss of a draft pick has been a significant deterrent to clubs pursuing these players.

That speculation gains some steam when we look at the prices for players who did not receive a qualifying offer, but were eligible to receive such an offer. Among those who didn’t receive an offer for 1/13: Read the rest of this entry »

The Pittsburgh Pirates have reportedly agreed to sign Francisco Liriano to a two year, $14 million contract. It’s an interesting deal, and we’ll talk about the specifics of Liriano and the Pirates in a second, but I first want to look at where this deal fits into an interesting off-season trend.

From a runs allowed perspective, Francisco Liriano was terrible last year. Just like he was the year before, too. By RA9-wins, Liriano has basically been a replacement level pitcher for the last two years, putting up an ERA- of 127 over that span. Of the 109 pitchers who have thrown 250 or more innings since the start of the 2011 season, Liriano’s ERA- ranks 104th. In terms of preventing runs, he’s been better than only Chris Volstad, J.A. Happ, Derek Lowe, Josh Tomlin, and Brian Duensing.

From a FIP perspective, though, Liriano has been a bit better. Not good, but better. We’ve got his WAR (based on walks, strikeouts, and home runs allowed) over the last two years at +2.9, making him a below average — but not abysmal — starter. Liriano’s stuff and peripherals suggest that he should get better results going forward than he’s gotten in the past. And if his stuff and peripherals are right, then 2/14 for Liriano could easily be a bargain for the Pirates.

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Last winter, I was flummoxed at the league’s apparent lack of interest in Edwin Jackson. He’d just put up his third straight solid season at age 27, and had established himself as a durable, effective +3 to +4 win starter. Unfortunately, in that post, I made a pretty bad assumption:

Someone’s going to get a steal with Edwin Jackson, and given what he’s likely to do for the price he’s going to cost, the signing team should probably want to lock him in at these rates for the next few years. From Jackson’s perspective, he’s just been given a thorough rejection in his efforts to land a long term contract in a market where he should have been a pretty well sought after commodity, so he shouldn’t expect that posting another 200 inning season with a decent ERA will land him a raise next winter.

Guess what? Jackson posted another 200 inning season with a decent ERA and now he’s landing a huge raise, as the Cubs are reportedly set to sign him to a four year, $52 million contract.

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Last year, FanGraphs was accepted into the BBWAA as an approved organization, and at present, we have four writers on staff who are members of the organization: David Laurila, Eno Sarris, Carson Cistulli and me. Once we’ve each been in the organization for 10 years, we will receive the right to vote for the Hall of Fame. So, in nine years, I might be publishing a Hall of Fame ballot. But, for now, I’ll run down who I’d vote for if I had a ballot.

We’ll do it in descending order of confidence in the pick, ranging from the easiest calls down to the toughest.

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As you probably know, there are multiple ways to calculate WAR, with our version (sometimes referred to as fWAR) and Baseball-Reference’s version (or rWAR/bWAR, depending on who is citing it) being the two most popular. And, as you probably also know, they can be quite different when it comes to evaluating pitchers. Two years ago, I wrote a couple of posts (Part One, Part Two) explaining why we constructed our pitcher WAR the way we did, and what we see as the pluses and minuses of both systems. Neither system is perfect, and neither system works in every situation, but we feel that using a FIP-based approach to evaluating pitchers is more transparent and more effective for the majority of pitchers in baseball.

But, there are pitchers who routinely outperform their FIP, and the way we do pitcher WAR will systematically underrate those pitchers. The primary group of pitchers who post results that are better than their BB/K/HR rates would suggest are knuckleballers.

Tom Tippett — who now works for the Red Sox — wrote about this extensively back in 2003, so this isn’t a new idea. When Voros McCracken released DIPS 2.0, he adjusted the system to account for the fact that knuckleball pitchers didn’t really fit into the normal trend. Even before R.A. Dickey ever started throwing the pitch, knuckleball pitchers were a well established exception to the norms of FIP. And that means that you don’t want to use standard “fWAR” for pitchers to evaluate Dickey, or any other knuckleball specialist.

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