Blake Snell is already back in the minor leagues, but he probably shouldn’t be there for long. All the Rays need is an opening, and over the weekend Snell made his big-league debut in a spot start in Yankee Stadium. Everyone understood it would be a one-shot deal, but Snell got to get his feet wet. That counts for something. And we got enough data for a deep dive. That also counts for something.

Most of you probably learned about Snell for the first time last season. He got himself onto the radar for something extreme, which is to say, he made his 2015 debut on April 9, and he allowed his first run on May 23. Snell is forever going to have his scoreless streak, but what he did in the minors isn’t what’ll allow him to succeed in the majors. No — he needs to keep on performing, and in support of that, we can look to something else extreme. Snell’s a pitcher, so he throws a fastball. The fastball he throws is unlike almost any other.

Read the rest of this entry »

Back when the Rays finally got around to trading David Price, they took an awful lot of heat for the return. It’s not that the package was bad — it was that it appeared insufficient, to many observers. The argument in support of the Rays focused on the idea of surplus value. Willy Adames looked like a promising low-level prospect. Nick Franklin seemed useful, and Drew Smyly was a league-average starter. You can get plenty of value from a league-average starter in his team-control years. It wasn’t sexy, and it was hardly a blockbuster of the type that people imagined, but the Rays were going to be okay. The return was a little dull, but fair.

If you want to spin things in a negative way, you could observe that Franklin has more or less busted. Adames is still talented and still young, but he’s just getting accustomed to Double-A. And Smyly missed months with a labrum problem, while Price signed a massive free-agent contract he earned with his performance. There’s another way to spin things. Since that deadline deal a couple summers ago, Price has posted a 3.23 ERA, with 26% strikeouts. Smyly, meanwhile, has posted a 2.52 ERA, with 28% strikeouts.

No, Smyly hasn’t yet been durable. But Drew Smyly has whiffed more hitters, rate-wise, than the ace for whom he was traded. I don’t think even the Rays expected Smyly to develop into a strikeout machine.

Read the rest of this entry »

The negotiations for the next Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) will feature considerable back-and-forth between the players’ union and the league’s various ownership groups. This is only natural: those are the two parties which must ultimately agree upon the terms of a new deal. But it’s also not an entirely aimless point to make, because those negotiations won’t be the only ones taking place. The owners themselves could have some fairly contentious discussions in deciding their own strategy, particularly when it comes to sharing revenue among the teams. Big-market teams have long gained an advantage on revenues at the gate, but increasingly, the advantage has come from television revenue from local cable networks. Teams continue to sign billion-dollar deals that include an ownership stake, and determining how to divide that money could prove difficult.

Over the last few years, the Arizona Diamondbacks, Philadelphia Phillies, and St. Louis Cardinals have all agreed to new long-term local television deals with Regional Sports Networks (RSNs). It has been a few years at FanGraphs since Wendy Thurm documented the local cable television deals for all MLB teams, and this post aims to provide an update. The work she did helped inform this post as well as a few others to provide a base for research.

When we hear about television deals, we often think of them in terms of the average annual value they provide. That’s a familiar term in baseball, as most player contracts are structured to be paid evenly over the course of the contract. That practice is less common under other circumstances, however, with deals often paying a smaller sum at the beginning of a contract and increasing over time. Television contracts are often structured in this second way. To account for that practice, I have estimated 2016 television money by assuming a yearly 4% increase in money paid to teams in order to find a (hopefully) realistic estimate for how much teams are receiving this year. For example, the Phillies currently possess a 25-year, $2.5 billion dollar deal that begins this year. Instead of assuming they will receive $100 million every year, I am assuming they will receive around $60 million this year with 4% yearly increases over the course of the contract.

There is a full chart below with all the relevant information, but let’s focus on 2016 money first in the graph below.

I did my best to include only contracted revenue — i.e. to omit revenue generated from an ownership stake in a network. However, due to the lack of publicly available information, it’s best to regard these numbers as estimates. Note that, particularly with respect to the Chicago teams, as well as the Los Angeles Angels and Boston Red Sox, that the revenue estimates actually might include money from network ownership. It was difficult to parse those figures.

Read the rest of this entry »

You know about the Cubs. It’s the team that entered spring training as the consensus World Series favorite. It’s the team with the already impressive collection of young stars who tacked on with a splashy offseason. It’s the team that already threw a no-hitter. The team with the potentially historic blend of discipline and power. Maybe you’re tired of hearing about the Cubs already. Maybe you think the coverage and attention has been overkill. Or maybe you think they’re deserving of more coverage, and more attention, considering they’re 14-5 with a run differential (+64) nearly as large as the next two best teams by that measure combined (Cardinals and Nationals, +74).

Whatever your stance, you’re getting one more Cubs post for the time being, because for all the attention the lineup and rotation has received, there’s another area in which they’re deserving of attention, an area that often goes overlooked but that can very much matter. In addition to the lineup having a top-five adjusted batting line with the most runs scored, the rotation being the best in baseball by ERA and second-best by FIP, and the defense leading everyone in Defensive Runs Saved, the Cubs have also been the best base-running team in the sport. Not only is it a continuation of last year’s success in that department, but it’s something that was seemingly improved by one offseason acquisition, and perhaps more importantly, amplified by another.

Read the rest of this entry »

About eight years ago, Tanner Roark was pitching in the independent Frontier League after his college team released him. He had an ERA greater than 20.00 in three games. Then the Rangers drafted him, traded him to the Nationals, and he switched to throwing only two-seamers as his main fastball. A few years later, he put up a three-win, 198-inning season, and now — after largely unsuccessful work out of the bullpen in 2015 — he’s a few days removed from a 15-strikeout game. The career arc was pretty tumultuous and incredible before Saturday’s game, and now it’s the sort of thing about which someone writes a book a decade afterwards.

Let’s start with a table to reinforce this day of strangeness. Below is a list of all of the 15-plus strikeout games in the past five years. There are 21 of them, from Jered Weaver’s (!) 15-K game in April of 2011 all the way up to Roark’s gem this past Saturday. Average fastball velocity displayed is for that particular 15-plus strikeout game:

Read the rest of this entry »

The Rays called up left-handed pitching prospect Blake Snell from Triple-A to face the Yankees in a spot start on Saturday. Snell looked very good in his debut. Although he lasted just five innings, he yielded just two hits, one walk and zero runs. By fanning six, he maintained the ~30% strikeout rate pace he’d been keeping in the minors for the last year-plus.

Prior to his call up, he owned a 3.01 FIP and 33% strikeout rate in three Triple-A starts this season. Last year, he blew through three minor-league levels — High-A, Double-A and Triple-A — and posted a 1.41 ERA and 2.71 FIP. Snell struck out an eye-popping 31% of opposing hitters, tops among pitchers to record at least 120 minor-league innings last year.

Read the rest of this entry »

Brandon Guyer was hit by a pitch three times on Thursday, twice by David Price and once by Noe Ramirez. The Tampa Bay outfielder also had a pair of singles, reaching base a personal best five times as the Rays bested Boston 12-8.

The triple HBP feat tied a MLB record. It had happened 22 times previously, and Guyer was no stranger to the list. Last October, he hobbled to first base courtesy of three Mark Buehrle inside offerings. On the season, he was hit 24 times, the most of any American League player.

Following Thursday’s game, I asked the University of Virginia product about his proclivity to get plunked. Read the rest of this entry »

We’ve gotten to see many sides of Nolan Arenado over the past two years. The maker of ridiculous defensive plays. The hitter of a multitude of home runs. The effusive trotter of the base paths. With regard to his plate discipline, however, Arenado hasn’t changed much since he got to the majors. To call him a “free swinger” doesn’t really do him justice: between 2014 and -15, Arenado ranked 10th in overall swing percentage (53.5%) and eighth in swing percentage at pitches outside of the strike zone (38.7%). As a result, he hasn’t walked much since he was called up in 2014 — at just over half the league average the past two years — which, hey, is something you might do too if you had the talent and skill to hit 40-plus home runs in the major leagues. In 2015, he saw the 17th-fewest pitches per plate appearance out of qualified hitters. Arenado hasn’t really waited around, is the point. He’s been aggressive in and out of the zone, and the trade-off has been fewer free passes. The reward was ten first-pitch home runs last season.

Swinging as much as Arenado has in the past two years tends to require other skills to offset/complement that tendency, like above-average contact rates, great power, or speed on the base paths. An illustration: of the ten leaders in overall swing percentage from 2015, five had below-average contact rates:

• Marlon Byrd (100 wRC+)
• Adam Jones (109)
• Avisail Garcia (83)
• Starling Marte (117)
• Ryan Howard (92)

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s possible that more has been made of defensive positioning over the last five years than the prior hundred before it. Infield shifts are something we actually track now, and if the early season is any indication, the usage of those infield shifts is on the rise for a fifth consecutive season. Players and managers discuss them openly, television broadcasts take note — some going so far as to display the position of every fielder on the screen — and we see the benefits (and occasional drawbacks) of the shift on a daily basis.

But nearly all the attention we’ve paid to defensive positioning has gone to the infield. There’re more holes in the infield, less margin for error when the shift doesn’t work, and baseball is slow enough to adapt to any sort of change that it should come as no surprise we had to take this one step at a time. But now, slowly but surely, teams have begun shifting more in the outfield, and before long, the outfield shift, just like the infield shift, will become accepted as standard practice, rather than something that demands attention when it happens.

But shifts aren’t confined to lateral movement, the way we most often see. Players are free to move in and out, too, and thanks to new Statcast data, this is the kind of thing we’re starting to see measured and quantified.

Enter Dexter Fowler. Fowler was the center fielder behind Jake Arrieta for Arrieta’s no-hitter last night. Fowler’s been arguably the best player in baseball this year, owing to positive marks in the batter’s box, on the bases, and in the field. Fowler’s long been an above-average hitter, and he’s long been a plus base-runner, but the defensive marks haven’t been so kind. You could make the case the defensive marks are the thing that’s prevented Fowler’s reputation from exceeding “nice little player” to “borderline star.” An above-average hitter who runs the bases well with a reputation as a plus center fielder is a borderline star. But Fowler hasn’t had the reputation as a plus center fielder, because the tools we use to evaluate defense in this day and age have considered Fowler one of the worst defensive outfielders in baseball since he entered the league.

Since 2009, Fowler’s first full season, 28 players have registered at least 3,000 innings in center field — the kind of sample we prefer to have before working with defensive metrics. To contextualize Fowler’s place among his defensive peers, I took that pool of 28, weighted Defensive Runs Saved and Ultimate Zone Rating equally, and prorated the figures to roughly a year’s worth of playing time. The worst three regular center fielders over the last seven years, by the numbers, are as follows:

1. Matt Kemp, -11 runs saved per 1,000 innings
2. Dexter Fowler, -9
3. Angel Pagan, -4

Fowler stands 6-foot-5, 195, has good speed, and overall looks like an elite athlete, so his consistently league-worst defensive metrics have always been puzzling, the kind of guy the eye-test crowd uses as an example against the metrics by pointing at him and going, “Just look at him!” Which, I can’t blame them. Fowler looks like he should be fine defensively. It’s always puzzled me, too.

Which is why I was immediately captivated by this tweet from Mike Petriello last month:

Fun with #statcast data: There’s a 28 foot difference in raw avg positioning from deepest CF (Kiermaier) to shallowest (Jones/Fowler).

— Mike Petriello (@mike_petriello) March 23, 2016

Read the rest of this entry »

Ever since Voros McCracken revealed his DIPS theory, stating that pitchers had little control over the outcomes of batted balls, people have been looking for exceptions to the rules. The first ones identified were knuckleballers, who consistently and relisably post some of the lowest BABIPs of any pitchers during their careers. From there, it was found that flyball pitchers, especially ones who generate a lot of pop-ups, can also run relatively low BABIPs over long periods of time. And then there are guys like Bronson Arroyo, who don’t easily fit into a bucket of pitcher-types, but managed to suppress outs on balls in play for over a few thousand innings, showing that he had some ability to induce weak contact.

Often times, the guys who fit the mold of a FIP-beater are guys who wouldn’t be in the big leagues if they hadn’t figured out how to exploit this advantage. The list of guys that we have to write the “FIP is wrong about them” disclaimer currently includes the likes of Chris Young, Marco Estrada, Jered Weaver, Tyler Clippard, and Darren O’Day. You’ll notice that these guys all throw in the 80s, and in Weaver and Young’s case, the low-80s. The guys who don’t conform to the normal range of BABIP variance use their ability to generate weak contact to offset their lack of stuff. They can’t dominate the strike zone — O’Day is the exception to that point — so they get batters out by allowing the kinds of contact that their fielders can get to. I’m sure they’d rather just strike everyone out, but since they can’t do that, they’ve learned to succeed in another way.

But while Weaver and Estrada are still chugging along, soaking up innings and keeping their teams in the ballgame, there’s a new king of weak contact in Major League Baseball. And to make life unfair, he also happens to throw 95.

Read the rest of this entry »