When I first dreamt this post up, I figured the title would somehow include the phrase, “Billy Hamilton Effect.” That was before I discovered Eno already wrote a post called “Todd Frazier and the Billy Hamilton Effect” back in July. Point is, there are a lot of unusual ways in which Billy Hamilton affects the game, because Billy Hamilton is an unusual player. We know this because stealing 155 bases in a single season is not usual, and neither is this.

I wrote a post about Frazier last week, examining how he was able to steal 20 bases despite possessing what appears to be just mediocre speed. In that post, I noted that three of Frazier’s 20 steals “were essentially catcher’s indifference.” Catchers indifferences are typically insignificant, but these three were noteworthy because they all happened for the same reason. At the time, I didn’t get into the details because I didn’t want to spoil the premise of this piece, but after I saw the first one, I knew I had to write a post about it.
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I’m gonna go ahead and write about Todd Frazier again.

I wrote about Frazier last week, with a focus on the combination of both power and speed he displayed in 2014. According to a metric devised by legendary historian Bill James in an attempt to quantify one’s combination of power and speed, Frazier’s Power/Speed was third in the major leagues, behind Carlos Gomez and Ian Desmond and ahead of Mike Trout and Andrew McCutchen.

That’s really impressive for a third baseman who we didn’t know had this kind of speed and blah blah blah I’m starting to repeat myself from last week. Point is, Frazier did these two things really well. I focused moreso on the power in last week’s post, but the more surprising part is the steals, so I wanted to investigate that a bit further.
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Do you guys want to yell about the Hall of Fame just a little bit more? I feel like there hasn’t been enough of that lately. It’s not my intention for this post to cause yelling, but it seems any discussion about the Hall of Fame inevitably leads to yelling, so let’s get to it.

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Sometimes, you read something or find a stat that changes your perception of a player. It probably shouldn’t be just one stat that changes your entire perception, but seeing that one stat may cause you to dig a little deeper into who that player is and what they’ve been doing, and your collective research could lead to a shift in perception.

Hey, Todd Frazier.

I spend enough time on FanGraphs that sometimes I forget about the little, exclusive stats offered by other websites. It’s fun to go dig around in the lesser-known parts of a site like BaseballReference, because it can make you think about things you might not have thought about while digging around on FanGraphs. Some deep BR digging led to a post I wrote a couple months back about David Price and the art of the three-pitch strikeout, and now it’s going to lead to a post about Todd Frazier.

The metric that caught my eye is called PwrSpd. It was developed by Bill James, and it’s a very basic metric. The leaderboard that caught my eye was topped by Carlos Gomez in 2014, who’s probably one of the first few people to come to mind when you think of elite combinations of power and speed. Ian Desmond was second and Jacoby Ellsbury was fourth. Mike Trout is in the top 10, and so is Andrew McCutchen. These names all make sense.

But sitting up there at No. 3, right above Ellsbury, is Todd Frazier. It sticks out like a sore thumb when you look at it. Really, it’s just a fancy way of saying Frazier was one five players who had 20+ homers and 20+ steals last year, alongside Gomez, Desmond, Michael Brantley and Brian Dozier. But either way you put it, that’s surprising. In the top 10, you’ve got five center fielders, two shortstops, a second basemen, a left fielder, and Todd Frazier. It’s not a top 10 meant to be inhabited by third baseman, yet there he is.
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Hiroki Kuroda didn’t actually retire, but he did for all intents and purposes. The 39-year-old free agent pitcher, most recently of the New York Yankees but also formerly of the Los Angeles Dodgers, decided to return to his former team, the Hiroshima Toyo Carp, in his homeland of Japan. Kuroda had worked on one-year contracts each of the last four years — weighing the decision of whether or not to return to Japan heavily each season. This year, something tipped the scales.

It certainly wasn’t a matter of the demand for his services. Kuroda is coming off a three-win season and took just $3.3 million to play in Japan. It almost certainly is a matter of a nearly 40-year-old man simply desiring to go home, back to the place in which he grew up and lived for the first 32 years of his life. And back to the team he called his own for the first 11 years of his professional baseball career.

Kuroda was never the best pitcher in the league; he was never the best pitcher on his team. But he wasn’t supposed to be. What he was, was consistent. In an era where pitchers are more volatile than ever, Kuroda was anything but. Since coming to the USA in 2008, he made at least 31 starts in six of his seven MLB seasons. In the other, he made 20.
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It’s been a busy offseason. Don’t believe me? Dave Cameron started out a post with the words “Screw it, I can’t even keep up anymore.” Take a look at this guy’s picture from the winter meetings. That’s the face of a writer at 1 a.m. who knows he’s going to be up until 4 a.m. because of all these damn trades the Dodgers are making.

A lot has gone on. By a quick count, well over 100 players have changed teams due to trades alone since the start of the month, and that’s so many players. That many transactions can be overwhelming, and sometimes it’s easy to forget who is on which team. To keep yourself in check, an incredibly useful site is RosterResource.com, which used to go as MLBDepthCharts.com. Jason Martinez and his crew do a great job of staying on top of recent transactions, the projected lineups and 25-man rosters are interesting to see change in real-time, and there’s other nifty tools to play with on his pages.

One of those tools recently caught my eye and held my attention, due to the bevy of aforementioned trades. It’s the “How Assembled” pages. They’re hardly a new concept, and the idea is simple: each player on the 40-man roster for each team was acquired in a specific year, and in a specific way. Whether it be through the draft, free agency, trade, or some other means, this table lets you know.

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Everyone knew heading into the offseason that the Red Sox starting rotation was going to need some help, and so the first thing they went and did was sign Hanley Ramirez and Pablo Sandoval. Those guys are not pitchers, so while it gave the Red Sox perhaps the best lineup in the MLB, they still needed pitching.

The Red Sox rotation essentially consisted of a bunch of question marks — plus Clay Buchholz and Joe Kelly, who are question marks themselves. Buchholz is 30 years old, has never thrown 110 innings in consecutive seasons and had a 5.34 ERA last year. Kelly’s numbers as a starter aren’t particularly impressive. Some clubs entered the offseason looking for a frontline starter. Some clubs needed depth to fill out their rotation. The Red Sox needed both.

A Cole Hamels trade or James Shields signing are still possibilities for the Red Sox, as they’re still in the market for that frontline starter after whiffing on Jon Lester, who was the crowd favorite to return to Boston and fill the void at the top of their rotation.

The depth, on the other hand, appears to be shored up. As I was writing this post, the Sox dealt Yoenis Cespedes to the Tigers in exchange for Rick Porcello. (By the time I was done, they’d inked Justin Masterson). A full analysis of the Porcello deal will come in a different post, but for now we’re going to focus on Wade Miley, who the Sox are expected to acquire in the very near future for starting pitchers Rubby de la Rosa and Allen Webster. de la Rosa and Webster are both guys who had higher stock a couple years ago. Both have electric stuff, both have serious command issues, and both may be destined for the bullpen. Dave Cameron wrote up a quick InstaGraphs post on the deal last night, which you can read here.
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Clubs rebuild. It’s a part of the process. Just look at what’s happening in Oakland right now. Every year, franchises begin rebuilds, continue rebuilds and occasionally start them all over again when the first one sinks into the swamp.

Rebuilds take patience. They can be exciting, and they can be frustrating. Those feelings are not mutually exclusive, in this case. The start of a rebuild can be exciting, because it ushers what is oftentimes a much-needed change in direction. There are typically big transactions that occur at the start of a rebuild, and big transactions are exciting.

The middle part of the rebuild sucks, and is the frustrating part. For several years, the on-field major league product is bad, and watching bad teams isn’t fun. The hopes of the team lie in minor league prospects, and minor league prospects don’t always pan out. When they don’t pan out is when the rebuild starts all over again, and that’s the worst kind of rebuild.

But as exciting as the beginning of a rebuild can be, nothing tops the realization of a successful rebuild and the expectation of imminent success that looms. Years of patience are awarded by the arrival of top prospects reaching their potential, coupled with a couple of marquee additions to compliment the shiny budding plants that are the homegrown prospects. The successful rebuild culminates with the flip of a switch, seemingly overnight, from “rebuild” mode to “contend.” It’s as liberating a switch as there is to be flipped as a front office executive of a major league franchise, and it’s a switch the Cubs are flipping as we speak.
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With the Winter Meetings officially underway, the Cleveland Indians wasted no time making a splash, acquiring first baseman/outfielder Brandon Moss from the Athletics in exchange for second base prospect Joey Wendle, the team announced Monday afternoon.

We’ve already got a couple Moss pieces up on the site, which I suggest you read. Dave Cameron compared Moss’ offensive production over the last three years favorably to Matt Kemp, and Eno Sarris speculated what kind of fantasy production Moss could bring with his move to Cleveland.

As for the logistics of the trade itself, it’s interesting. The deal was first rumored as early as last Wednesday, but took nearly a week to complete, despite it being a one-for-one trade. This makes some sense, given the recent history of the players involved. Let’s analyze this move from the Indians perspective by breaking it down into five pieces.
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Last night, the Twins signed outfielder Torii Hunter to a one-year, $10.5 million contract, presumably to end his career. Hunter will play right field in Minnesota, the same place where he made his debut as a center fielder in 1997.

The move really doesn’t mean much. The Twins had somewhere in the vicinity of $10-$20 million of available cap space, and they’re not a team that has a realistic chance to contend in 2015. It’s an understandable fit as a reunion tour signing, and that’s essentially what this is, as Dave Cameron noted in his instant analysis of the move last night.

The Twins signing Torii Hunter probably doesn’t need an entire post for itself. Hunter is 39 years old and he’s coming off a season in which he was worth just 0.3 WAR. He posted his worst wRC+ in nearly a decade, his worst OBP in over a decade, and his outfield defense appears to have declined to an almost unbearable level. Defensive Runs Saved and Ultimate Zone Rating each agreed that Hunter’s defense in right field was worth -18 runs last season, both MLB-worsts in right. Of course, defensive metrics in one-year samples are noisy, and we can’t expect Hunter to be quite as bad in 2015, but it’s hard to imagine him being anything but a negative defender at this point in his career.

But again, this signing wasn’t so much about Torii Hunter’s production or the Twins winning in 2015. It was more about holding the fans over, and maybe drawing a few more back in, for 2016 – when things could actually start mattering again.
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