Earlier today, Jeff Sullivan re-introduced this year’s positional power rankings. Hopefully, you are familiar with our methods for producing these rankings, but if not, a brief reminder: all 30 teams are ranked based on projected WAR from our depth chart projections. With those in place, our writers endeavor to provide additional commentary, some of it useful and some less so. We begin this year’s rankings with catchers.

The catcher rankings start, as they tend to do, with Buster Posey and the Giants. After a gap, the rankings cover the next 28 teams on a slow steady decline, and then there’s the Phillies. While Gary Sanchez and Willson Contreras represent a youthful contingent, the top of the list is still dominated by veterans, with Posey, Jonathan Lucroy, Brian McCann, Salvador Perez, Yadier Molina, and Russell Martin all placing their teams in the top 10. The last-place Phillies could make a big move up this list if former prospect Jorge Alfaro can take a leap forward.

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Unless another major deal comes out in the next few weeks, the Houston Astros have signed Jose Altuve to the biggest contract of the winter. The deal is notable for several reasons.

1. Under his previous contract, Jose Altuve would not reach free agency for another two years, after the 2019 season.
2. Jose Altuve’s agent is Scott Boras, and he has long been loathe to give away any free-agent years ahead of free agency.

As Travis Sawchik noted last night, Altuve will reportedly sign for five years and $151 million, and the contract will begin after Altuve’s current contract runs out. Altuve will earn just $12.5 million over the next two seasons in one of the biggest bargain contracts baseball has ever seen. While he wasn’t all that good when the Astros signed him back in 2013, Altuve has been one of the best players in baseball since 2014, with his 24 wins third to only Mike Trout and Josh Donaldson among position players in that span. Altuve just finished off a fantastic MVP season for the World Series champions, and historically, he’s on one of the better runs for a second baseman in history. The table below shows second baseman since 1947 through their age-27 seasons.

Five of the 11 non-Altuve players on that list are in the Hall of Fame. Grich and Whitaker, meanwhile, represent some of the biggest snubs of the last half-century, while Pedroia remains active still building a case.

When the Twins signed Logan Morrison to a deal for $6.5 million, most agreed it was a bargain. By comparison, the Astros have the reigning MVP locked up for that price in his prime for the next two seasons. That leads to obvious questions regarding the Astros’ motivation here. Why sign a player to an extension before it is necessary? Anyone who remembers the Ryan Howard contract, for example, might look at this extension and wonder if it’s simply a gift from the Houston front office.

This is not a gift, though. It’s a fair deal.

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Three years ago, Kris Bryant ranked as the best prospect in baseball. Then 23 years old, Bryant had brutalized minor-league pitching the year before and destroyed the competition in spring training with nine homers and 17 total hits in 44 plate appearances. Despite a clubhouse that now included Jon Lester and manager Joe Maddon among others — part of the Cubs’ signal to the world they were ready to compete — Bryant was easily one of the best 25 players in the organization, probably among the top five, and eventually proved during the season he was Chicago’s best position player.

And yet, the Cubs opted not to start the season with Kris Bryant on the roster. Once Bryant had spent enough days at Triple-A to extend his team control by a year — to become a free agent after the 2021 season instead of the 2020 campaign — the future MVP received a callup to the majors.

Bryant is still the most famous and most obvious case of a team’s effort to manipulate player service time to the potential detriment of the on-field product, but it happened before Bryant, has happened since Bryant, and is likely to keep happening. This season, there are several prominent players who might be kept off their major-league rosters for a time so that the team might save money and gain control of the player for an extra season.

For those unfamiliar with how service time works in these instances, here it is briefly. Players achieve free agency once they have six years of service time. Although the season lasts 187 days, a player is considered to have played a full season if he appears on an MLB roster or disabled list for 172 days. In any season where a player hits the 172-day threshold, that counts as one season of service time. If a player belongs to the roster for fewer than 172 days, he must combine those days with days from another campaign to reach the official “full season” mark.

Kris Bryant’s case is a useful example of this work. In 2015, he was on the roster for 171 days. That time counts only as a partial season. In the last two years, Bryant has been on the roster for more than 180 days each year, and each of those seasons count as one year of service time. At the end of the 2020 season, Bryant will have five seasons and 171 days of service, one day short of the six seasons necessary for free agency. As a result, he will need to play in 2021 to become a free agent. An extended discussion of service time appears in the FanGraphs glossary.

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This slow offseason has many fans and teams already looking toward — and maybe salivating over — next year’s free-agent class. The star power available next season is incredible. Josh Donaldson, Bryce Harper, and Manny Machado are among the top-nine position players on our Depth Chart Projections. All three will be free agents in November. With Charlie Blackmon, A.J. Pollock, Brian Dozier, Clayton Kershaw, Daniel Murphy, and Andrew McCutchen also set to hit the market, the class boasts quality depth, as well.

Those are certainly some impressive names. Notably, however, almost all of them belong to position players. While next year’s free-agent class could be unrivaled in terms of overall talent, it’s possible that the glow of the top hitters has obscured how lopsided that class is likely to be. Kershaw is great, but there’s only one of him. Multiple teams, meanwhile, will be searching for pitching upgrades next winter. A preliminary glance at things reveals that their options could be limited.

Before getting to next year’s crop of pitchers, let’s perform a brief refresher on the one wrapping up. We had Yu Darvish at the top of the class, with Jake Arrieta a rung below followed by Lance Lynn, Alex Cobb, Tyler Chatwood, Jhoulys Chacin, and Jaime Garcia. This year’s group of free-agent starting pitchers lacked both firepower and quality depth, an unexpected development considering how things looked heading into last season. In December 2016, I naively believed in this year’s crop of starters. The projections backed me up, too: at that time, three pitchers appeared likely to produce four-win seasons, six to top three wins, and eight pitchers total to put up at least 2.5 WAR. By November, only Yu Darvish hit free agency with a season above 2.5 WAR, and even he missed his projection by a full win.

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At a basic level, nearly every piece at FanGraphs represents an attempt to answer a question. What is the value of an opt-out in a contract? Why do the Brewers continue to fare so poorly in the projected standings? How do people behave in the eighth inning of a spring-training game? Those were the questions asked, either explicitly or implicitly, by Jeff Sullivan, Jay Jaffe, and Meg Rowley just yesterday.

This piece also begins with question — probably one that has occurred to a number of readers. It concerns how we evaluate pitchers and how best to evaluate pitchers. I’ll present the question momentarily. First, a bit of background.

Fielding Independent Pitching, or FIP, is a well-known tool for estimating ERA. FIP attempts to isolate a pitcher’s contribution to run-prevention. It also serves as a better predictor of future ERA than ERA itself. The formula for FIP is elegant, including just three variables: strikeouts, walks, and homers. It does not include balls in play. That said, one would be mistaken for assuming that FIP excludes any kind of measurement for what happens when the bat hits the ball. Let this be a gentle reminder that home runs both (a) are a type of batted ball and (b) represent a major component of FIP. There is, in other words, some consideration of contact quality in FIP.

Expected wOBA, or xwOBA, is a newer metric, the product of Statcast data. xwOBA is calculated with run-value estimates derived from exit velocity and launch angle. Basically, xwOBA calculates the average run value of every batted ball for a hitter (or allowed by a pitcher), adds in the defense-independent numbers, and arrives as a wOBA-like figure. The advantage of xwOBA is that it removes the variance of batted-ball results and uses a “Platonic” value instead.

The introduction of Statcast’s batted-ball data is exciting and seems like it might help to better isolate a pitcher’s contributions. But does it? This is where I was compelled to ask my own, relatively simple question — namely, is xwOBA better for assessing pitcher performance than the more traditional FIP? What I found, however, is that the answer isn’t so simple.

The differences between FIP and xwOBA, as well as the similarities, deserve some exploration.

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The Minnesota Twins continued a productive offseason over the weekend, signing Lance Lynn to a bargain-rate one-year, $12 million deal. Lynn turned down a $17.4 million qualifying offer from the Cardinals in November. He also reportedly turned down higher guarantees from other teams, per Jon Morosi. 

Not clear regarding those other offers is whether the average annual values of the contracts would have been equivalent or if Lynn would have had to forfeit the opportunity to explore free agency next offseason in exchange for a few extra million dollars. Whatever the case, it appears as though Lance Lynn will have to try his hand at free agency next winter if his ambition is to find a long-term home.

As for the Twins, they get great value on a player seemingly overlooked by the market. Indeed, the club seems to have specialized in this sort of deal over the winter. Heading into the offseason, for example, the crowd believed Addison Reed was in line for $27 million, the third-highest guarantee among relievers behind only the figures estimated for Wade Davis and Greg Holland. Reed ultimately agreed to join the Twins for just $16.75 million in mid-January — or less than the overall deals received by seven other relievers who’d signed at that point in the offseason.

The addition of Logan Morrison represents another instance in which the Twins have taken advantage of a slow market. The crowd expected Morrison to sign for $20 million. At the end of February, however, Derek Falvey et al. signed him for just one-third that amount.

Finally, there’s Lynn. Projected by the crowd to receive $60 million over four seasons, the right-hander settled for 20% of that figure. When the offseason began, it was reasonable to think that the Twins would need to guarantee $107 million to acquire all three players mentioned here. With just $35.25 million, though, the club signed the trio at a rate discounted by 67% from initial estimates.

The Twins’ bargain-shopping was not limited to free agency: the team also took on Jake Odorizzi and his $6.3 million salary in exchange for a prospect of little significance. Odorizzi went to the Twins not because of their willingness to provide Tampa Bay with considerable talent but because they were willing to pay his salary.

There are some logical explanations for the Twins’ apparent good fortune. For example, all the players acquired by the club come with significant question marks, and none are currently projected to provide more than two wins this season. That said, each possesses some kind of upside and a relatively recent track record of success. The combined five wins the club is projected to receive will cost just $33 million in 2018 salaries. Given the recent cost of wins on the free-agent market, the Twins’ efficiency should be lauded. More important than getting a good deal, though, they have also obtained solid major leaguers at areas of need.

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The prospect of a six-man rotation has either been discussed or confirmed by a number of clubs this offseason. The Angels will use one to help ease along Shohei Ohtani’s development as a pitcher. The Rangers also have plans to experiment with one (although Cole Hamels isn’t an advocate). Mickey Callaway mentioned at the beginning of February that the Mets might utilize six starters at points of the season.

The Rays, as they often do, are trying something different. In this case, they’ve announced plans to use just a four-man rotation in 2018.

#Rays Cash just said they could go with 4-man rotation all season, filling in with bullpen guys when needed to start

— Marc Topkin (@TBTimes_Rays) March 7, 2018

 

 

 

 

 

As manager Kevin Cash suggests here, it wouldn’t be pure four-man rotation. Instead, when a hypothetical fifth starter was needed, the club would just utilize relievers exclusively. So it’s four starters plus a bullpen game.

Given trends going in the opposite direction, this plan could lead to disaster, although it isn’t clear that the five-man rotation is obviously superior. Tampa Bay is in a fairly unique personnel situation, so there’s some logic behind the decision. The move isn’t likely to work, but it might be worth a shot.

When discussing the possibility of the Los Angeles Angels’ use of a six-man rotation, I noted the importance of having starting pitching depth and no ace. To effectively deploy a four-man rotation, the opposite is true; indeed, it’s the presence of an ace and little rotation depth behind him that give rise to the unique possibility. A team also requires a deep bullpen and multiple players with minor-league options, so that, whatever starting depth the club does possess, can be easily moved back and forth between the majors and minors.

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Over the past several years, we’ve seen a trend away from signing young stars to long-term extensions. As Bryce Harper and Manny Machado head to free agency in their mid-20s, Mookie Betts, Kris Bryant, and Francisco Lindor all appear on their way to the same. With stars saying no, teams have been forced to get creative, signing good players to extensions and taking more risk by signing players with very little service time in the majors. The Cardinals’ deal for their shortstop covering six years for $26 million along with two team options fits the bill on both accounts. Paul DeJong is a good player, but he has hardly proven himself with under a year in the majors.

The Cardinals have made a habit of such extensions, reaching agreements with Matt Carpenter, Allen Craig, Stephen Piscotty, and Kolten Wong in the recent past. Carpenter would have been a free agent this year without such a deal, and Wong is a solid player with the potential to provide considerably more value. Even when the contracts haven’t worked out, the Cardinals haven’t been troubled by them: they were able to deal Allen Craig, for example, before health derailed his career. The jury is still out on Stephen Piscotty, but the club netted two decent prospects when dealing him over the winter.

This deal, both in dollars and the proven quality of the player, mirrors the one for Tim Anderson and the White Sox a year ago.

Consider the following stat lines.

We have two young shortstops who strike out a lot and walk very little. DeJong has shown more power, while Anderson is the better baserunner and presumably better defender. (The sample size for the fielding metrics is too small to draw any conclusions from the numbers.) It remains way too early to pass judgment on the Anderson deal, as the potential benefit for the White Sox doesn’t really begin for another five years, but the first year did not go well. Anderson still struck out a ton, managed to walk even less, and his BABIP dropped by 50 points. He did put up good numbers on the basepaths, but his poor defensive numbers meant a basically replacement-level 0.2 WAR. Even with slightly above-average defense, he would still be a roughly average player. Paul DeJong carries some of those same risks.

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The Phillies don’t look like a very good team this season. They haven’t looked like a very good team in some time, really. That said, they aren’t all that far from contention in a muddled NL Wild Card race. After enduring 96 losses in 2017, the club enters the upcoming campaign with an improved roster, having replaced Freddy Galvis with J.P. Crawford and Tommy Joseph with Carlos Santana. They’re poised to receive a full season from Rhys Hoskins. They’ve also added Tommy Hunter to the bullpen.

The result of those additions to last year’s returnees is a projection for 74 wins. Improving by eight games in a single offseason is pretty impressive. The Phillies aren’t really expected to do that, though. By BaseRuns, which removes sequencing from a team’s run-scoring and -prevention, Philadelphia was actually a 70-win team last year. So the gain this offseason is more like four wins. Still, it’s something.

It’s also something that has come at little expense. Yes, the team added free-agent Carlos Santana this winter for an average of $20 million per season. Given the team’s financial wherewithal and the potential to compete now, however, it’s fair to wonder why the Phillies haven’t done more.

In recent weeks, Philadelphia has been connected both with Jake Arrieta and Lance Lynn but appear reluctant to continue moving forward this offseason. While a 74-win team will get nowhere near the playoffs, the current state of the club’s rotation means that the Phillies could easily spend their way to something closer to contention this season without greatly impacting their ability to contend in future years. In November, Travis Sawchik wondered when the Phillies would spend. With pitching still available in the free-agent market and a relatively mediocre set of Wild Card candidates, the time for the Phillies to spend at least a little bit of their reserves should be now.

Before getting to the Phillies’ present finances, let’s take a brief step back and remember where the club has been. Here are Opening Day payrolls for Philadelphia since they moved into Citizens Bank Park in 2004.

From 2010 to 2014, the Phillies’ payroll placed among the top four in the majors. It went down a bit in 2015, followed by a huge dip in 2016, and then another big drop this year. For some perspective, consider the Houston Astros’ tank-job, for which that club has been criticized. From 2009 to 2011, Astros payrolls averaged $91 million. Then, while tanking between 2012 and -14, the average payroll dropped 57% to $39 million. By comparison, the Phillies’ average payroll from 2013 to 2015 was $161 million, a figure which dropped 48% to $84 million in 2016-18. Philadelphia’s drop in payroll has been nearly as severe as the Astros’ own decline earlier this decade.

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Five years ago, the Los Angeles Dodgers signed an $8 billion television deal to broadcast games locally on a Time Warner cable station, SportsNet LA. While quite large, there was some precedent for an agreement of this size. By that point, the Angels, Astros, Giants, Mets, Padres, and Yankees had all received billion-dollar contracts of their own. The Dodgers’ deal is notable, however, for how poorly it worked out. Even today, half of Los Angeles can’t watch the club because Time Warner and DirecTV have yet to agree on terms to broadcast games in Los Angeles.

The combination of the Dodgers’ situation and the Astros’ own disastrous effort to create a regional sports network appeared to indicate that the RSN bubble was about to pop.

That didn’t happen, though. Not at all, really. Soon, the Mariners sold their rights for a billion dollars, followed by the Rangers, Phillies, D-backs, and Cardinals in subsequent years. The Reds likely received something close to a billion dollars for a pact that begins this season. And now even the Tampa Bay Rays seem to be getting a billion dollars of their own.

The Rays’ deal, reported by John Ourand and Daniel Kaplan of the Sports Business Journal, will begin next season and pay the Rays an average of $82 million per season over 15 years, which amounts to $1.23 billion. The Rays are set to receive $35 million in the last year of their current contract, and that will increase to roughly $50 million in 2019. Assuming a steady rise over the life of the deal, rights will increase at 6.7% annually. The Rays’ new agreement is worth significantly less than many of the others inked over the last few years and doesn’t appear to come with an ownership stake. However, the money for the Rays is an indication that tremendous value still exists in the acquisition of local rights even as the landscape of television changes.

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