As you by now are well aware, Josh Donaldson was traded to the Toronto Blue Jays over the weekend in a blockbuster deal that sent Brett Lawrie back to Oakland. The Blue Jays gave up Lawrie and a few prospects to immediately get better, because Josh Donaldson is a guy that immediately makes any team better. Over the last two years, only Mike Trout and Andrew McCutchen have a higher WAR than Donaldson, and Donaldson’s been three wins better than the next-best third baseman. Donaldson can hit, he runs pretty well for a third baseman, and he’s good with the glove. Add those up and you’ve got a hell of a player.

But there’s something to that last point — that he’s good with the glove — that’s been on my mind for awhile. It’s something I was going to write about when the Gold Glove winners were announced, but then Donaldson didn’t win, so I saved it for another day. Now that Donaldson is back in the news, today is that day.
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Barry Bonds. You remember Barry Bonds. If he’s been on your mind recently, I’d bet it’s because Hall of Fame voting is again upon us. Bonds is arguably the greatest player in the history of the sport and this is his third year on the ballot. It’s arguably the greatest player in the history of the sport’s third year on the ballot, because arguably the greatest player in the history of the sport wasn’t elected to the Hall of Fame in either of his first two eligible years. But I digress. Despite your personal opinions on Bonds, including recent allegations of him glassing, his numbers are staggering. Search pretty much any offensive leaderboard where a high number is a good thing and Bonds will have some of the highest numbers.

I’m gonna switch gears here, and I’m gonna switch tremendously. We were just talking about Barry Bonds and now we’re going to talk about Jose Molina. Has that ever happened before? It will all make sense in a minute.

The Tampa Bay Rays released veteran catcher Jose Molina on Thursday, ending their three-year stint with the pitch-framing aficionado and perhaps putting a fork in his 15-year major league career. Molina has remained a major league player far longer than many imagined largely due in part to the skill named in the prior sentence; he’s never really been able to hit, but his ability behind the plate has always made up for his lack of ability at the plate. This year, however, his offense dropped to a new low and seemingly tipped the scales. Jeff already wrote about all this when it happened and there probably shouldn’t be two Jose Molina posts in a week, but Jose Molina’s offensive performance in 2014 — similar to Barry Bonds in the early 2000’s — was of historical significance. It was just the type of significance for which one would rather not be recognized. But we might not have another opportunity to talk about this, so it’s now or never. I hereby submit Jose Molina as: Bizarro Barry.
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It’s funny. The team I know the most about is the team I try hardest not to write about for FanGraphs. I write about the Indians enough as it is for my job, and it’s nice to be able to write about other teams once in a while. But also, I don’t want my posts to be viewed as tainted with potential homerism. I’d like to believe I don’t let much, if any, bias slip into my writing, but it could be viewed that way. Nevertheless, here I am writing a post called “Where the Indians Are Baseball’s Most Valuable Team.”

But! I’m not the only one who is high on the Indians for 2015. A couple weeks back, Mike Petriello called the Indians his sleeper team for 2015, and when he claimed the post on our internal message board, he called them “your 2015 World Champion Indians.” That’s right, Petriello. I just put you on blast. You all should call him out on this when it doesn’t happen.

Then, yesterday afternoon, the always excellent Jonah Keri sent out a tweet that inspired me to write a post I’ve been considering writing for several weeks now.

Started working on favorite article series of the year, MLB Trade Value. Early reaction: Indians are in pretty good shape.

— Jonah Keri (@jonahkeri) November 18, 2014

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Corey Kluber won the American League Cy Young Award on Wednesday, beating Seattle’s Felix Hernandez by 10 points, with 17 first place votes to Felix’s 13. In doing so, Kluber became the first Indians pitcher to win the award since Cliff Lee in 2008, the first Indians right-hander to win the award since Gaylord Perry in 1972, and the first player in the entire MLB with the initials C.K. to win a Cy Young since Clayton Kershaw, like, 20 minutes earlier.

This came as a bit of a surprise! Most people expected Hernandez to win. Four of five CBSSports MLB writers polled here selected Hernandez. This Washington Post article from September had Kluber third. 62% of the 18,000 individuals polled by SportsNation picked Felix. This ESPN forecast gave Hernandez a 70% chance to win. Nobody actually thought Kluber was going to win this.

And that makes sense. Kluber had an awesome year, but Felix had an awesome year, too, and he was more awesome in some of the ways that have historically been rewarded. Jeff put it pretty well in his post from yesterday in saying that there really was no right choice for this award. Kluber and Felix were damn near equal. But you know that already. You’ve read countless posts about it, and your mind is already made up for who you would have voted. I agree with the selection of Kluber, personally, but this isn’t about who should have won, or my thoughts on that matter. It’s about who did win, and what that can tell us about the voting process in 2014.
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David Price is known for some things. Most notably, he’s known for being a pitcher. A pitcher for the Detroit Tigers. Beyond that, he’s known for some more specific things within pitching. He’s known for being one of the best. He’s known for having a really great changeup. He’s known for being one of the best because of his elite ability to command his pitches and not walk anybody. He’s known for throwing a ton of innings and consistently working deep into games. And, as of lately, he’s known for becoming an elite strikeout pitcher.

Sometimes, those last two things can work against each other. When you think about throwing a lot of innings and working deep into games, you think about pitch count. Pitch counts have to remain relatively low for one to consistently work deep. Only Clayton Kershaw and Adam Wainwright have more complete games since the start of 2012 than Price, so clearly, he does a good job of this. The biggest reason is the walk rate. Price never gives hitters the free pass, which is one of the most important things about keeping a pitch count low. But Price also strikes a ton of guys out, which is something that can drive a pitch count up. You can’t get a strikeout on the first pitch, and at-bats that end in a strikeout often require five or more pitches.

Unless you do it like David Price.
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Technically, free agency has started, but it hasn’t really started. The Yankees re-signed outfielder Chris Young. The Mets signed a minor league catcher. Things have gotten underway, but not in the way that many people care about.

What we really care about are the big moves. But before those start coming in, I want to look at something.

Here’s a fact: The Angels have a huge advantage over every other team with Mike Trout. Like, crazy huge. Using our team depth charts and a little math, we can determine that the Angels center field group, because of Trout, have a projected WAR that is 3.6 standard deviations above the mean. Statistically, anything above three is considered to be an “outlier.” Mike Trout is an outlier, but you don’t really need math to know that.

Other teams with similarly huge advantages in talent are the Giants with Buster Posey and the Rockies with Troy Tulowitzki. But that’s neither here nor there. We’re talking about free agency, where you don’t need to sign a player if you’ve already got a great one. Instead, let’s look at the other side of the spectrum and see which positions have a projected WAR furthest below the league average. No team has a positional disadvantage that’s as large as the Angels advantage in center field, because if they did, that team would just get different players. There’s a cap on how poorly one can play and still be on a roster. There’s really no cap on how good one can be. But somebody’s got to be the worst. Before free agency really gets kicks off, let’s take a look at baseball’s biggest current holes.
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Do you understand how preposterous that title would have sounded last offseason? Ridiculous. You might still think it sounds ridiculous. But before you begin drawing conclusions, let me just present you with a few facts about each player and then some tables to support those facts.

Cliff Lee

• You might have forgotten, but Cliff Lee used to be really bad
• Like, for a while
• One year, he decided to stop walking people
• He also stopped giving up home runs
• As a result, he became very good
• Then, over the course of several seasons, he also started striking people out
• As a result, he went from “very good” to “most dominant pitcher in baseball“

Phil Hughes

• You probably haven’t forgotten, but Phil Hughes used to be really bad
• Like, for a while
• One year, he decided to stop walking people
• He also stopped giving up home runs
• As a result, he became very good

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The World Series can be a stressful time for a lot of folks. It can be stressful for friends, family and players of the two teams involved, because every pitch seems like the most important pitch of the year. It can be stressful for writers, because we’ve got to find something interesting from each game and come up with a unique take on it in a very short amount of time. And it can be stressful for fans of other teams, because they wish it was their team playing in the World Series.

But that’s over now, and we’re on to the offseason, which is about as sad as the World Series is stressful, because there won’t be any more major league baseball played for several months. 🙁

In these sad, stressful times for baseball fans, I’d like to start the offseason with something fun: the little league homer. Alex Gordon nearly did it to tie game seven of the World Series with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning. Had he scored, it would have been one of the greatest moments in World Series history. However, he was wisely held up at third base. But there were 18 other players during the regular season who weren‘t held at third base, after the defense kicked the ball around for a little while, and came home to score.

Rather than show you all 18 little league homers, I watched film of them all and selected the six most representative of little league play, along with a choice quote from one of the broadcasters. The first clip is the only instance, to my knowledge, of a player being thrown out while trying to stretch a little league homer this season. The other five are ranked, in descending order, by the value of various postgame “team snacks” received as a child when playing little league. Do not debate with me on this. The snack list is final.
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If you missed the American League edition of this post from Friday, you can check it out right here.

I’m not going to bog this section down with a bunch of new words, I’d rather just get right into it. But first, if you want to gloss over the methodology really quick, I’ll re-publish it from Friday’s post:

First, our player pool. For catchers and infielders, I’m simply going with qualified batters. This is pretty standard. For outfielders, I’ve lowered the innings threshold to 600 innings, because outfielders move around more than infielders, and I don’t think an everyday outfielder should be discounted because he had to split his time between left field and center field.

Now, for the numbers. We’ve got Defensive Runs Saved and we’ve got Ultimate Zone Rating. Neither are perfect, and sometimes they disagree with each other, but when put together, I think we can all agree they do a pretty good job. I’ve prorated each to 1,000 innings and simply used a 50/50 split to determine each player’s total defensive value, per 1000 innings (tDEF/1000). In the tables, I’ve also decided to include each player’s Revised Zone Rating and Fielding Percentage, just because.

Catchers, as we know, are a whole other beast. We’ve got three main components of catcher defense that we can measure: controlling the running game, blocking pitches and receiving pitches. Only two of them are included in the advanced defensive metrics we use, and the one we’re leaving out (receiving) appears to be the most important skill. To make up for that, I simply added up the run values of each of these three components, using StatCorner’s catcher framing report for my framing numbers. Some people don’t agree with how much weight is given to catchers in framing data, and I kind of agree with that, but as the National League results will show, the top spot doesn’t simply go to the best framer.

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The finalists for the 2014 Rawlings’ Gold Glove Awards were announced on Thursday afternoon, and if you’re here on the internet with me, you know how much people hate the Gold Glove Awards.

Part of that is for good reason. For a long time, the Gold Glove Awards were pretty much a joke. Rafael Palmeiro has three. Derek Jeter has five. There have also been tons of worthy defenders to earn Gold Gloves, but throughout history it’s seemed to be more of an award that valued good hitters who weren’t terrible at defense, rather than the game’s best actual defenders.

But! Things appear to be getting better. Last season, the MLB introduced a “sabermetric component” to the decision making process. Advanced defensive metrics are still a hotly debated topic, but I think we can mostly agree that they do a better job than the “errors and the eye test” method that has been used for decades. There were still some questionable choices last year, sure, there are questionable choices this year and there will continue to be questionable choices in the future, because awards are subjective and people are never going to see eye-to-eye.

I think the eye test has its merits, but since this is FanGraphs, let’s imagine a world where the Gold Glove Awards are decided strictly by the numbers. I did a similar post last year when I was still a wee Community Blog writer, and I’m going to use a similar method this year.
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