While Shutdowns and Meltdowns are a month away from being one year old, they still feel like relatively new statistics to me. They’ve only recently been added to player pages, and although there have been used in a handful of articles on FanGraphs written over the past year, they still aren’t widely used yet. This seems like a crying shame to me, as Shutdowns and Meltdowns are…well, awesome. For the longest time, saberists would denigrate the Save, commenting about how its rules were convoluted, it didn’t properly value relief pitchers, and it put an undo stress on the ninth inning. And all that is true, but we couldn’t get people to stop and listen as we didn’t have any alternatives to point at. Now, though, those days are past.

There are four main reasons why I like Shutdown and Meltdowns, and why I think everyone should use them more often. Let me explain:

Read the rest of this entry »

After reaching the World Series last season, it’s easy to forget about all the struggles the Rangers have had in the past 11 years. After winning the AL West in 1999 with an impressive 95 wins, the Rangers spent the next the next nine seasons wallowing in mediocrity. They always had a good offense and never lost more than 91 games in a season, but until 2009 they only had one season where they finished with above a .500 record.

Over the past few years, though, the Rangers have gone through a transformation: their major league team is the strongest in the AL West, their minor league system is much improved, and they finally have a new ownership in place that has already expanded their payroll.

Present Talent – 83.33 (8th)

Rangers Season Preview

Future Talent – 80.0 (16th)

Rangers Top 10 Prospects

Financial Resources – 83.46 (5th)
Baseball Operations – 84.17 (8th)

Overall Rating – 83.08 (7th)

Read the rest of this entry »

Make no mistakes: this is a good major league team. Most projection systems suggest Milwaukee will end up with around 84-86 wins, putting them in close contention for the NL Central crown with the Cardinals and Reds. When ranking their overall organization’s health, though, the Brewers’ depleted minor league system really brings them down.

Present Talent – 77.73 (15th)

Brewers Season Preview

Future Talent – 65.00 (four way tie for last)

Brewers Top 10 Prospects

Financial Resources – 75.83 (19th)
Baseball Operations – 76.82 (21st)

Overall Rating – 75.02 (22nd)

Read the rest of this entry »

Have you ever noticed how debates have a tendency to polarize a conversation? I sometimes feel like engaging in a debate with someone makes it less likely that we’ll find a common ground on some issue, as both sides dig in, believing they are 100% accurate while the other side is spewing garbage. Points get exaggerated in an effort to prove the other person wrong, and the debate becomes a black-or-white affair with none of the all important shades of gray. I’ve noticed this before with players: if the mainstream media likes a player more than I feel they’re worth, I have a tendency to push back against that and over-exaggerate the player’s flaws in an attempt to balance out the other side. Jason Bartlett didn’t deserve to be named the Rays’ MVP in 2008, but he was certainly more valuable than the amount of flak he received from saber-Rays fans as a result.

When the Luis Castillo news came out last Friday, I was immediately reminded of the old sabermetric discussions over “grit” and team chemistry. Up until a few seasons ago, many mainstream writers (and fans) loved to tout the importance of chemistry in leading a team to success, and they had a tendency to treat gritty players that work hard and play the game “the right way” as demigods. That’s not say that these type of arguments have vanished; there are still plenty of writers and fans that value chemistry and grit, but it’s become tougher and tougher to find articles espousing that point of view. For the most part, this is a debate that the saberists have won: it’s not that character attributes don’t exist, but that they have a very small influence on performance and are impossible to separate from all the surrounding statistical noise.

But just because something has a small and indeterminate effect doesn’t mean we can ignore it completely.  In fact, I’d argue that a General Manager should take a player’s makeup into account…just not as much as the grit lovers would have you believe.

Read the rest of this entry »

Even since Dark Overlord Dave Appelman updated the FanGraphs leaderboards to allow multi-year analyses, I’ve been meaning to do something fun with them.  The feature lends itself well to answering questions with a large scope, like: who’s been the best first baseman over the last five seasons? What team has had the best bullpen over the last three seasons? What’s the highest single-season strikeout rate any starting pitcher has had over the last ten years? The possibilities are nearly endless.

While this feature obviously has analytical purposes, I feel it has a larger, much more important use: trivia! As pointless as inane baseball statistics can be, what baseball fan doesn’t love their trivia? It’s something we all grew up with, as you can’t escape digesting large amount of pointless facts if you watch or listen to baseball, and I’ve found that even the most ardent statheads love a bit of mindless fun every now and then. Numbers don’t always have to mean something; sometimes, it’s enough for them to merely provide a chuckle or a shake of the head.

So let’s use this amazing multi-year leaderboard to take a look back through time. What sort of fun superlatives will we find if we flip open the yearbook to The Aughts (2000-2009)?

Read the rest of this entry »

There are plenty of words in the English language that rankle my sensibilities, but few of them so consistently annoy me as “always”. It seems like such an innocent word, but how many times is the word “always” used correctly? It’s a sloppy word, used when someone is putting together a hasty argument and doesn’t have the time to merit defenses or facts to support them. “The Yankees always field a good team.” “Steroid use is always immoral.” “The better team always wins.” As much as we may want arguments (and life) to be black and white, cut and dried, very rarely is this the case. Life is full of contradictions, nuances, and shades of gray.

There are many baseball debates that tend to get polarized, but one common one during Spring Training is the debate over what to do with top prospects. If a team starts a top rated prospect in the minor leagues, there’s a public outcry about how the team is manipulating that player’s service time to serve their own best interest, keeping the player for an extra season and keeping the player’s salary lower for a longer period of time. The demotion has nothing to do with talent, but everything to do with money.

In most instances, though, the debate is far from this simple.

Read the rest of this entry »

“The death of the Rays is greatly exaggerated.” – Joe Maddon, Spring Training 2011

I know I’m going to be accused of homerism, but here it is: the Rays are better than you think they are. Yes, I know they just had a rough off season, losing Carl Crawford, Carlos Pena, Joaquin Benoit, Rafael Soriano, Matt Garza, Jason Bartlett, Grant Balfour, and Dan Wheeler. Those players contributed a total of 15 wins to the Rays last season, and the Rays didn’t add much free agent talent to compensate for these losses. Manny Ramirez, Johnny Damon, and Kyle Farnsworth were their only notable roster moves, and they are easy to write off as they are aging or (in the case of Farnsworth) have a spotty track record. How could the Rays possibly hope to compete with the Yankees and the restocked, reloaded Red Sox?

And yet, that’s exactly what the Rays plan to do.

The Starting Nine

Behold, the mind of Joe Maddon!

Read the rest of this entry »

After suffering through five straight seasons of 90+ losses, this off season was an exciting time to be an Orioles fan. While the O’s front office has remained relatively quiet over the past few winters, preferring to let their young talent develop, this year the Orioles starting making moves as if they were a contender. Derrek Lee and Vladamir Guerrero were added on one year deals for around $7-8M each.  Defensive wiz J.J. Hardy and masher Mark Reynolds were acquired in trades. Kevin Gregg, Jeremy Accardo, and Justin Duchscherer were signed to help shore up the pitching staff. It was an off season full of movement and action.

But the skeptic in me isn’t sure what to think. Sure, the Orioles have improved their team in the short term, but to what end? When competing in a division with the Yankees and Red Sox, does it matter if you win 79 games as opposed to 69? Did the Orioles improve their long-term competitiveness, or were these moves the product of a frustrated ownership that wants to win now?

The Projected Starting Nine

2B Brian Roberts
RF Nick Markakis
1B Derrek Lee
DH Vladimir Guerrero
LF Luke Scott
3B Mark Reynolds
CF Adam Jones
C Matt Wieters
SS J.J. Hardy

Read the rest of this entry »

All this recent talk about the contract status of Barry Zito caused me to visit the Cot’s Baseball Contracts page on the most expensive players of all time. Any FanGraphs reader worth their salt already knows this, but there are only 26 players in all of baseball history that have ever been given total contracts worth more than $100M. The first player to break the $100M barrier was Kevin Brown, signing a 7-year, $105M deal before the 1999 season. Since then the barrier has been utterly destroyed, culminating so far in Alex Rodriguez’s recent 10 year, $275M deal (although of course, that could be passed this upcoming offseason by Albert Pujols).

But 1999 is a long time ago (as scary as that may be). Seven of the $100M contracts have already finished, and another three of them are finishing this season. Although $100M is an arbitrary cut-off, can these completed contracts tell us anything about the wisdom or folly of large, long-term contracts?  Let’s take a peek, shall we?

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s not easy admitting you’re no longer the person you used to be. This is something that all of us, no matter our profession, struggle with; we all get old and our skills deteriorate, and it takes a large amount self awareness and humility to gracefully deal with this fact. Many people go kicking and screaming into their forties, and pride can keep us from acknowledging our declining skills. I’m still young! Of course I can train for a marathon! Reality, though, can sometimes beg to differ.

While everyone sees their body, memory, and skills decline over time, very few of us make our living based on our physical ability. Very few of us have to acknowledge to a national audience that we’re getting older and declining, and that a younger person is better at our job than we are. This fact may be obvious to outside viewers, but on a personal level, that’s a difficult admission to make.

However, this morning Carlos Beltran did just that: he told manager Terry Collins he’s ready to switch to playing right field, allowing Angel Pagan to roam center field in his stead. At this point in his career, Beltran moving to right field is the best move for the Mets and, yes, Beltran too.

Read the rest of this entry »