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It’s time for the FanGraphs annual All-Star break tradition: distract ourselves from a lack of baseball by arguing about a subjective list of speculative value. Yes, it’s Trade Value time again. This is actually the 10th year I’ve done this list, as my first one came back in 2005, and it included immortals like Daniel Cabrera, Felipe Lopez, and Bobby Crosby. I moved the list to FanGraphs back in 2008, so this will be the seventh edition here on this site.

As always, I’d like to acknowledge that this project has been borrowed from Bill Simmons, who does his own NBA Trade Value series at Grantland. It’s a fun project, and one I’m glad he popularized.

As a quick overview for those who might be new to the series, he’s the basic concept: which players would bring the most return in trade if they were made available by their current clubs? To answer this question as best as we can, we not only look at a player’s performance — both now and in the future — but also the amount of years a team would be acquiring a player for, and how much that player would earn in salary before he could become a free agent. The most valuable assets in the game aren’t just great players, but they’re great players who offer significant value for multiple seasons at salaries below what comparable players earn on the open market.

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Next Monday, we’re kicking off one of the most popular things we do around here: the Trade Value series. It’s been an annual tradition for going on 10 years now, and I find it a nice distraction from the fact that the All-Star break fails to give us any interesting baseball to talk about. Plus, it gives you guys all kinds of ammunition to prove that I am, in fact, an idiot.

To that end, I’d like to look back at last year’s list, and make some comments about what we might have learned over the last calendar year. List first, then comments. Read the rest of this entry »

The Rockies 2014 season is essentially over. They stand 39-53, and our Playoff Odds model gives them a 0.1% chance of reaching the postseason. And that’s just a one-tenth-of-one-percent chance of getting to the Wild Card game, where they would be heavy underdogs and likely eliminated after Game 163. As Mike Petriello wrote earlier this week, the Rockies need to seriously think about changing course.

There are good arguments against trading Troy Tulowitzki, however. He’s a superstar signed to one of the most team-friendly contracts in baseball. They can rebuild around Tulo and build a winner while he’s still a productive player. He needs better teammates, but it’s generally easier to find new good role players than it is to develop another MVP-caliber shortstop and sign him to a long term extension for half of his market value.

But the key to building a winner around Troy Tulowitzki is to properly determine which players should be kept, and which players should be replaced. Given the recent rumors, it appears that the Rockies may not have figure that part out yet.

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Quick, name the worst team in baseball right now. The Houston Astros are a good choice, as they have lost at least 100 games in three consecutive seasons and are currently tied for the worst record in baseball. The Chicago Cubs are also a candidate, given that they are tied with the Astros in the win column and just traded away two of their best starting pitchers, weakening their roster going forward. Both teams are deep in rebuilding mode, and they are paying the price on the field each day.

However, I’d like to suggest that 2014’s worst team might not be either of these rebuilding clubs, but instead an organization that entered the year with high hopes of contention.

At 38-52, the Texas Rangers are just a game ahead of the Astros in the AL West standings, so if you were just judging by wins and losses, you wouldn’t put them behind Houston just yet. However, since the difference between a win and a loss can often come down to whether one crucial play gets made or not, a team’s record can be a bit misleading. Teams are more effectively evaluated by removing the context from when events occur, and just looking at the value of positive or negative events a team is involved in without regards to the situation of when those events happen.

At FanGraphs, we measure team performance through a model called BaseRuns, which calculates the number of runs a team would be expected to score and allow based on a normal distribution of events. With these expected run differentials, we can calculate team records based on overall performance without the influences of clutch performance, which is generally random and mostly beyond a team’s control.
And BaseRuns thinks that the Rangers have been baseball’s worst team so far this year, without any reasonable contender even coming all that close to their marks of futility.

Based on their total performance to date, we would have expected the Rangers to have been outscored by 105 runs, or a deficit of more than a full run per game played. The next worst total belongs to the Arizona Diamondbacks, but their expected run differential is only -62 runs. If you translate these expected runs scored and allowed totals into wins, the model would forecast the Rangers for a 34-56 record, four games worse than their actual record. As bad as they’ve played, the Rangers have actually been lucky to not be even worse off in the standings.

Read the rest on FoxSports.com.

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Note: I made a huge screw-up, and for whatever reason, I didn’t catch it, but Dustin Pedroia didn’t win the MVP award in 2011. He won it in 2008. I’m an idiot. Please try to enjoy the praise of Ian Kinsler without regard for the fact that the primary point of the post is wrong.

Over the weekend, the All-Star rosters were announced, and Ian Kinsler’s name was not among the participants. This probably isn’t a huge shock, given that Robinson Cano is one of the game’s most visible stars and Jose Altuve leads the league in batting average. Kinsler’s value has always been less obvious than many bigger name stars.

But just for fun, I’d like to offer a comparison between Kinsler’s 2014 season and a recent season from a second baseman that resulted in an MVP award resulted in a ninth place finish and this writer looking like a moron. For the sake of the comparison, Kinsler’s numbers have been extrapolated out to match the same number of plate appearances as Pedroia received that year.

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On Friday night, the A’s traded top prospect Addison Russell and some stuff for Jeff Samardzija and Jason Hammel. Mike Petriello did a great job of writing up the transaction, highlighting the pros and cons on both sides of things. Well, at least on the A’s side, because getting a prospect of Russell’s quality basically leaves this as a deal with no real cons for the Cubs. It might or might not work out — the nature of baseball makes this true of every decision ever made — but landing an elite young middle infielder in exchange for a player who has out-priced his own value and a rent-a-veteran is a huge win for the Cubs.

In fact, the inclusion of Russell in the deal led some pretty smart folks to compare this trade to one of the more controversial trades in recent history.

Is it me, or did Billy Beane just make basically the same trade that Dayton Moore got eviscerated for 15 months ago?

— Matt Meyers (@mtmeyers) July 5, 2014

So, the A’s just traded a consensus top 10 prospect for a 2 year shot at greatness. Therefore GMDM… uh I mean Billy Beane… is a genius.

— Russell A. Carleton (@pizzacutter4) July 5, 2014

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Over the last couple of years, the Padres have done some weird things. Despite being a lower revenue club, they spent a decent amount of money to have Huston Street close games, and then spent a decent amount more money to have Joaquin Benoit pitch in front of Huston Street. Instead of either extending or trading Chase Headley, they’ve done neither, and are now primed to either sell when his value is lowest or just let him leave as a free agent. They acquired and then extended Carlos Quentin, despite his health problems and their inability to offer him a designated hitter role.

All the way through, it has appeared as if the team couldn’t decide whether they were building for the future or trying to win now. They planted one foot firmly in both camps and ended up going nowhere, which is why they just fired Josh Byrnes and are looking for a new GM to provide direction to a franchise that has been swimming upstream for a while now.

Generally, firing your GM mid-season is a pretty good sign that you’re not a contender. And the Padres certainly are not. Despite having acting-GMs in place, they have a large for sale sign in the yard, and will likely be one of the more active sellers in July. But despite all this, the Padres are apparently not done being weird.

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