To whatever extent the Astros are going to have issues, they probably won’t have to worry too much about the lineup. As Mike Petriello recently wrote, said lineup looks to be incredibly deep. Based just on Steamer and our present depth charts, the Astros project to have easily the best-hitting lineup in the American League. The Red Sox come in second, but they trail by more than 30 runs. Steamer is just one system, and ZiPS will join it soon, but the point is made clear: The Astros offense looks good. They’ll score a bunch.

Yet something else has taken place, quietly. As the Astros have built a better order, there’s also been a rather significant side effect. I can’t tell you whether it’s been intentional, or whether it’s been a coincidence. But if you can believe it, the Astros are going to make contact. In fact, they project to be very nearly the best contact-hitting lineup in the game.

Read the rest of this entry »

Word came out over the weekend that the Royals have signed Brandon Moss to a two-year contract, pending a physical. There’s nothing too strange about it, and Moss should have little trouble finding himself regular plate appearances. He won’t cost the Royals too much, and he will bring a power bat. You can think of him as being pretty similar, overall, to Chris Carter. Decent eye, lots of power, lots of fly balls. Moss is a little more versatile, while Carter is a little bit younger. It’s a fine player signed to a fine contract by a team with an opening. Most people wouldn’t raise an eyebrow.

And — look, team profiles don’t mean very much. Every team just wants to win, and it doesn’t matter how it happens. Front offices wouldn’t often refer to themselves as having one particular style. Value is value. And as far as the Royals are concerned, transition was inevitable. Everyone knew about their impending free-agent situation coming into the winter. At some point, the Royals were going to look different. Teams go through phases.

I’d just like to point something out about how the Royals look today. We’ve spent so much time in the past discussing the Royals’ style of baseball. From the looks of things, these Royals aren’t those Royals. It’s just a team with a few familiar faces.

Read the rest of this entry »

It wouldn’t be fair to refer to MLB’s disciplinary record as toothless. There exists a relatively tough PED policy, and as of not all that long ago, there also exists a relatively tough policy on domestic violence. And last summer, the Red Sox were dealt a decently severe penalty for international signing violations, even though their behavior wasn’t exactly unique to them. The Red Sox were hit hard. Individual players have been hit hard when they’ve crossed the line. There’s not a consistent history of the commissioner being too light.

What we have now, though, are two penalties that have drawn similar reactions within the league. Many teams and team-people thought the Padres got off way too easy when A.J. Preller was suspended a month for withholding medical information in trade talks. And now, there’s a similar consensus belief about the penalty dealt to the Cardinals for Chris Correa’s repeated hacks of the Astros. Everyone had been waiting for a while to see how baseball would deal with an unprecedented conduct violation. In the end, the Cardinals are out a couple draft picks.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

In two months or so, we’ll roll out our 2017 positional power rankings. Between now and then, not a whole lot should change, so perhaps I shouldn’t go out of my way to issue spoilers. But, what the hell, here’s our current ranking of the catchers. The Giants are in first. Buster Posey is amazing! The Rockies are in last. Their catchers are also amazing, but less amazing relative to all the other amazing catchers in the majors.

Maybe this is a good way to sum it up: Tony Wolters is expected to get the bulk of the playing time behind the plate, and 11 months ago the Rockies grabbed him off waivers from the Indians. Wolters isn’t projected to hit much, because he’s never hit much, because he’s not much of a hitter.

What he is, though, is a defender. He emerged last year as one of the better pitch-framers in the league. And now the Rockies overall project to get quite good pitch-framing in the season ahead. This is the silver lining — perhaps the Rockies catchers won’t hit so much, but it looks like they could combine to provide the best receiving skills the Rockies have ever had.

Read the rest of this entry »

The other day, I asked you to participate in a community project. The polling was both simple and very complicated — there was one poll for every team, and I asked each of you to issue a rating for your favorite team, based on basically everything. There were six options, going from 0 to 5, with 0 being the worst, and 5 being the best. I wanted to end up with a landscape of organizational health. Ratings were to be based on both short-term and long-term considerations, and while I know that crowdsourcing doesn’t always suss out the truth, we can’t know the *actual* truths. So we might as well see what the community thinks.

The polling and ensuing conversation is always fun, but there’s nothing quite like the analysis, whenever I run a community polling project. For this one, this morning, I collected all the votes and calculated all the necessary numbers. Below, your FanGraphs community organizational ratings, as of this very week in January 2017.

Read the rest of this entry »

I think we can all agree that baseball is amazing. If we weren’t all on the same page, it stands to reason we wouldn’t all be here. I think we can also all agree that baseball is stupid. Sometimes it is extremely stupid. Other times, it is more forgivably stupid. But it is very stupid. Following in the true spirit of baseball, let’s take a quiz! There are nine questions, and for each, you select one answer from five options.

Read the rest of this entry »

One of the criticisms we get most often is that we sometimes overreact to small sample sizes. It’s true that we do, and it’s true that we probably shouldn’t, given how hard analysts have worked over the years to caution people against that very act. I can tell you this much: Our intentions are always good. And I can also tell you this: Players like Daniel Murphy are why we can’t stop.

Everyone wants to be first to see the breakout, and in the 2015 playoffs, if you’ll remember, Murphy homered seven times in 14 games. We can only identify that as a breakout in hindsight, but that streak sent everyone to the video. There was a search for a reason, a search for understanding, and that’s when the world learned of Murphy’s work with Kevin Long. The Nationals subsequently took the chance on Daniel Murphy, Quality Hitter.

Look, you’ve read about Murphy already. You know what he did. But do you really know what he did? They don’t make many players like this. There don’t exist many seasons like that. It’s really quite extraordinary.

Read the rest of this entry »

Below, please rate your favorite baseball team. Is that so hard?

In last Friday’s Effectively Wild podcast, we evaluated the Orioles against every other team. Of course, we did it subjectively, and we did it on the fly, but most of the time it wasn’t hard for us to make up our minds. The question we tried to answer 29 times: Would this given team trade everything for the Orioles’ everything?

I liked the exercise, but we only did it for Baltimore. That, in turn, left me wishing we had some information about the entire landscape. And so, per usual, this is where I’m bringing you into the fold. You all can provide that information about the entire landscape. Because our audience comprises fans of everyone out there, and you’re a knowledgeable bunch. So I’m very excited to see how you respond.

Beneath the fold, there are 30 polls, one for every organization. You probably have a favorite one. You might have a favorite two or three. For your favorite team(s), I’d like for you to select a rating, based on as many factors as you can imagine. This isn’t just about the short-term; this isn’t just about 2017. Think of it as a rating of your team’s overall outlook, weighted according to your own priorities. Consider the players on the roster today. Consider their contract statuses. Consider the strength of the farm system. Consider the financial resources available, and consider the people responsible for how all that money gets assigned. In a sense, it’s a different way of asking how many games you think a team will win over the coming five or 10 years. Is your organization looking awesome across the board? Is it miserable across the board? Do you love the future more than the present? Is the team competitive but approaching a cliff? How do you feel about that, personally?

With every one of these polling projects, I know that nothing is perfect. At the end of the day, you’re a fan, and you can know only so much. But it’s not like there’s way superior information available, and this is the easiest way to get it all in one place. In short: Please rate the health of your favorite baseball organization. Think about the players, young and old, and think about the people in charge of them. In a day or two, I’ll be able to analyze how everyone answered. And that’s going to be a whole lot of fun! Thank you in advance for your participation and enthusiasm. Onward.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sometimes there are trade rumors that aren’t really true. We tend not to know about those until after the fact, but the false rumors tend to be the fleeting ones. Then there are the rumors that just don’t go away. That’s when you know there’s smoke. And there was all kinds of smoke billowing out of the rumors that linked the Dodgers to Brian Dozier.

It all added up, and there was no point in anyone issuing any denials. The Dodgers needed a second baseman, and Dozier is a good one. The Twins could stand to flip some quality assets, and Dozier is a good one. We got to know more than we usually do — the Dodgers put Jose De Leon on the table. That’s where the teams got stuck. The Dodgers liked what they’d be getting, and the Twins felt the same. They just couldn’t reach an agreement on a second prospect to go to Minnesota. The Twins held out, and the Dodgers wouldn’t budge.

And so, in the end, the Dodgers haven’t added Brian Dozier. Instead, they called up the Rays, and added basically Brian Dozier. The cost was De Leon, and nothing else.

Read the rest of this entry »