Ruben Amaro had a reputation in Philadelphia. To many, the only evaluation tools he trusted were his scouts’ eyes. Basically, he was an old-fashioned — if not backwards-thinking — general manager.

The extent to which that’s accurate is debatable. Amaro wasn’t necessarily cutting edge — Matt Klentak, who replaced him as Phillies general manager, is clearly more analytical — but the perception was skewed. Amaro attended Stanford and learned from Pat Gillick, so his intelligence and knowledge base are anything but slight.

That’s not to say he didn’t make errors in judgement over his tenure. He made several, which is part of the reason he was relieved of his duties last September. Amaro is now with the Red Sox, having made an atypical move from high-ranking front-office executive to first-base coach.

On Sunday, Amaro took a few minutes to shed some light on his days as a decision-maker. The role of analytics in the evaluation process formed the crux of our conversation.

———

Amaro on analytics: “You can’t ever deny the numbers. That’s true for every GM and every baseball person, regardless of whether you’re ‘old school’ or ‘new school.’ When a scout walks in, the first thing he does is pick up a stat sheet and look at what the player does and what he’s been doing. The numbers don’t lie.

Read the rest of this entry »

I write some version of this post every spring, and each time, I’m more excited at first than I am as I get more involved. Whenever it comes back to me, I always like the idea, but then eventually I remember it just isn’t that important. It certainly isn’t something people are keeping in mind all season long — no one really worries about the standings until, I don’t know, July, and the league-wide landscape in baseball is pretty even, relative to other professional sports. Most fans operate under the assumption the schedules are more or less even, and they nearly are. Differences are subtle.

But, you know, differences are there, and remember that this is an MLB environment that considers a win on the free-agent market to be worth something like $8 million. Every single win is important, in some sense, and because the schedules aren’t truly identical, there’s no harm in examining the projected advantages and disadvantages. Acknowledging from the outset that this is all based on projections, and that you don’t agree with all the projections, let’s quickly go over the various schedule strengths.

Read the rest of this entry »

Every year, we go through spring training, and every year, we mostly ignore it, so, every year, we get asked what, if anything, really matters out of these preseason contests. For me, the answer has remained the same. As hitters go, it’s difficult to find substance, although you might be able to read into any newfound power to the opposite field. That’s what tipped me off a few years ago to the coming emergence by Michael Saunders. It’s a little easier to get into pitchers, and while it can be fun to track any progress by newly-adopted pitches, it mainly comes down to velocity. There’s not really any “faking” velocity. Any velocity spike warrants attention. Any velocity drop warrants different attention.

It’s simplistic, sure, and it can be a little annoying, because some pitchers are still building up their arm strength, and spring-training velocities aren’t widely available. If you focus on velocity, though, you have the best chance of keeping signal separated from noise. You have a decent chance of not being deceived, and with all this in mind, I’ve already seen one particularly encouraging note. When the Astros signed Doug Fister, he was something of a reclamation project. He might already be most of the way fixed.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, the Orioles agreed to terms with Pedro Alvarez, potentially bringing him in — though we’ve learned to not count our chickens with Baltimore signings — to add some additional left-handed power to their line-up. As August noted this morning, Alvarez is a weird fit for the Orioles, because the Orioles needed an outfielder, and Alvarez is a DH. Signing Alvarez forces Mark Trumbo to right field, where he’s terrible, the effect of weakening the team’s defense probably will cancel out most of the offensive gain Alvarez might bring at the plate, making this a non-upgrade, or at least an inconsequential one.

But there’s also another potential story with the Alvarez signing. Pedro Alvarez strikes out a lot. In that way, the Orioles are a natural fit for Alvarez, because the Orioles clearly don’t mind strikeouts. They have Chris Davis, after all, and they traded for Mark Trumbo, and most of their role players don’t make a lot of contact either. Last year, the Orioles ranked third in the majors in strikeout rate (22.2%), and with Alvarez and Trumbo now in the fold, that number is probably going up in 2016.

Read the rest of this entry »

While a few more moves will certainly occur here and there before the start of the season, team payrolls for the 2016 campaign are taking shape. After adding in the Baltimore Orioles’ signing of Pedro Alvarez, we have a pretty good idea of how the Opening Day payrolls will appear. Much of the offseason has been spent discussing the qualifying offer and “tanking,” but those issues are related to the larger issue of team spending. Revenue and payroll have been growing, but based on the team payrolls, it looks like the growth we saw over the past few years slowed down this offseason.

To determine Opening Day payrolls, I took the raw data from Cot’s contracts and added in minimum salaries to reach the 25-man total needed to field a team. Dead money paid to other teams was included. Over the next month, as players hit the disabled list or veterans with minor-league contracts earn their way onto rosters and get guaranteed deals above the minimum, the team payrolls will likely rise by a small amount, perhaps a few million dollars per team, but will not change the overall outlook by team.

Below is the current Opening Day payroll information for every team. To nobody’s surprise, the Dodgers lead the way.

Update: The Minnesota Twins have not been contracted and are included in the chart.

Also not a surprise: the Tampa Bay Rays bring up the rear. The average payroll right now is $128 million, and the median is right up there at $126 million. However, right after that median, there’s a major dropoff. The Chicago White Sox come in at $125 million, but after them, there is more than a $20 million drop to the Colorado Rockies. The top-four teams have a higher combined payroll than the bottom-ten teams combined, but that tier above $120 million speaks somewhat to the Royals’ success and the second wild card. Teams who might project for 75-80 wins can make a move or two and put themselves in contention for the playoffs, where anything can happen.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last year seems so long ago, but if you remember back to September, you probably remember Kyle Hendricks at his best. That month, he struck out nearly seven batters for every walk. He ended the season with 12 straight shutout innings and 17 strikeouts against two walks. Against the Royals and in Milwaukee.

What was the magic all about that month? Because, if Hendricks is that guy again, there’s no competition for his spot in the rotation. With regard to his pitching mix, though, nothing stands out as obviously different.

Read the rest of this entry »

For many irrational reasons, I have consciously decided to put myself through the experience of being an Oakland A’s season-ticket holder for the past three years. Every year since I joined this small, delusional, and fanatical club, the price of season tickets has gone up by a sizable amount. I say “sizable” as an intentionally unscientific term, as I realize there’s a lot that goes into it, but the increases have been more than noticeable for my section of the stadium, which is not one of the highest-priced nor one of the very-lowest. The A’s were really good between 2012 and 2014, so I understood that the increase was probably just the price of success, and left it at that. We all know what happened to the A’s in 2015, however: they lost 94 games. It was a woeful, terrible year. You can’t come up with a superlative to represent what trading Josh Donaldson and then losing 94 games is like. It felt — and feels — exactly what it sounds like reading that sentence.

It was with some confusion, then, that I looked at the prices of tickets this January and saw that the prices had stayed steady or increased, especially for those teams or dates that are denoted as top tier. As most teams now do, the A’s have adopted a dynamic pricing model for their ticket sales, which assigns higher pricing to favorable matchups, promotions, days of the week, etc. It’s a complicated and flexible model, and there’s the chance that holding off on buying tickets now might actually save money if certain circumstances arise. The possibility of the opposite is true, however, which is the point (for the A’s) of adopting the model. The fact remains, however: the A’s were one of the worst teams in baseball during 2015, yet one wouldn’t know it from the ticket-price differences between 2015 and 2016.

My own personal situation with the A’s is secondary to what we’re going to be looking at today, however, as it was simply the spark that caused me to ask a myself a few questions: what is the relationship between winning, losing, and ticket prices? How much do new stadiums increase ticket prices? What role does the larger economy play? And, on a deeper level — whether it’s actually the case or not — should teams have a moral obligation to own up to their team’s recent failures by adjusting ticket prices? With all those questions and a few more in mind, I set out to try to answer them.

The data for this sort of undertaking is inherently scattershot. There isn’t a great repository of, say, the lowest-priced ticket for every team over the past 10 years. At least not one I could find. The best resource I found was a site called Team Marketing, which assembles a yearly “Fan Cost Index” for each team and the league as a whole. In addition to factoring in the cost of beer, food, etc. into this index, they also log the cost of an average ticket — that is, the cost of a non-premium ticket based on season-ticket prices. The average is weighted to weed out the discrepancies of more or fewer seats in areas that don’t cost the same, so it’s actually a pretty representative figure of a strictly average ticket. The only knock against it is that the teams get to decide what is “general” seating and what is “premium,” but that’s splitting hairs a little bit, and this information is great in that it is one of the few available datasets not based on the secondary market for tickets. The data goes back to 2007, so I’ve pulled everything and assembled them in some tidy graphs for us to look at. For reference, here’s the source: 2015 Team Marketing MLB Report. It’s worth a look.

Read the rest of this entry »

ORIOLES DISCLAIMER: Signings are not official until announced by the team. Player must still pass physical, which is apparently very difficult.

Maybe I shouldn’t even be writing this. I’ve been burned once before. But I’m going to go ahead and submit to the gambler’s fallacy and say there’s no way another medical snafu happens in Baltimore this offseason. Not after the first two. Not this year!

Baltimore’s exploits in the free-agent market this year, at least with regard to bringing in new players, have been like the construction of the Swamp Castle. The Orioles nearly signed Dexter Fowler to fill their void in right field, but at the last second, that deal sank into the swamp. Then they were linked to Austin Jackson, but that idea burned down, fell over, and then sank into the swamp. But the third one! The third one stayed up.

Baltimore’s third attempt at building a castle in a swamp is Pedro Alvarez, with whom the team reportedly agreed to terms last night. Those terms are one year and $5.75 million, with another million or two in possible incentive dollars. It’s probably a little more than we’d expect a platoon bat without a position who was non-tendered in December to receive in early March, but when the terms of a deal begin with “one year and…” the money is almost always inconsequential. Alvarez got what he got, and now the Orioles stand to benefit from whatever he can offer them.

But what can Alvarez offer the Orioles? Well, he can offer them oodles of power, of course. If one were to distribute the $5.75 million Alvarez will reportedly earn according to the importance of his tools, north of $5 million would probably be attributed to his power. The power is Alvarez’s entire game, and it comes from the left-hand side, which helps protect Baltimore’s righty-heavy lineup.

And, despite the non-tendering, and the having-to-wait-until March, and the one-year deal, Alvarez’s bat is as there as it’s ever been. You probably wouldn’t guess it based on the inactivity surrounding Alvarez’s market, but, just last year, he tied a career-high in wRC+. He’s striking out less than he used to, and while the uptick in ground balls could be a small cause for concern, last year’s power output was second only to his 2013 season. Alvarez hits. The reason he had no market was because he needs to throw his glove into a swamp, and there just weren’t many designated-hitter openings for him in the American League.

But there’s a catch. With free-agent signings on March 7, there’s almost always a catch. For one, Alvarez can’t hit lefties at all, and so someone like Nolan Reimold or Joey Rickard will still have to take over for Alvarez in most, if not all, of Baltimore’s games against left-handed starters. But more importantly, the catch is that, in a more ideal world, Baltimore’s March 7 signing is an outfielder. In a perfect world, Baltimore would have already acquired a third outfielder by March 7. But we know about Fowler, and we know about Jackson. Alex Rios and Marlon Byrd were still available, and a trade was always an option, and so even after the first two whiffs, the expectation was that Baltimore would add a competent right fielder. Pedro Alvarez is not a competent right fielder. Neither is Mark Trumbo, but he’s the default square peg for Baltimore’s round hole.

Read the rest of this entry »

As a FanGraphs reader, you’re probably familiar with Brian Bannister. The former big-league right-hander — and current director of pitching analysis and development for the Boston Red Sox — has been featured here numerous times. Bannister has previously expounded on back-up sliders, spin rate, spin axis and more. Today, the subject is changeups.

———

Bannister on changeups: “The term changeup is actually somewhat deceiving. It’s traditionally been taught to be a pitch that is simply slower than your fastball. If you look at the pitchers who have the best changeups, and who have had the most success at the big-league level — the Felix Hernandezes and Zack Greinkes of the world — one, they’re hard, and two, they have a lot of movement. Pitchers who simply try to take speed off the changeup ultimtely fail with the pitch. That helps make the name a contradiction.

Read the rest of this entry »

The biggest story of the day is probably that Jhonny Peralta is hurt. It’s his thumb — seemingly a ligament tear — and it’s an injury that threatens to keep Peralta out of action for a few months. You don’t need to do a lot of overstating to make it clear this is significant, because Peralta is an everyday shortstop, and the Cardinals are trying to go to the playoffs. Playoff teams don’t want to lose regular up-the-middle players before the season even gets started. And then, who’s to say how well Peralta performs even when he comes back?

This is a problem, to be sure. Now, however, it should be noted this ought not destroy the year. For one thing, even though Peralta is the shortstop, we give him credit for a -0.4 second-half WAR last season, and in that same second half the Cardinals went 44-29. So while the Cardinals will have to win with Peralta absent, they’ve kind of already done that. Everything is survivable.

And then there’s the matter of replacing Peralta. It’s always tempting to look around for potential external options. Trades are fun, no matter when they happen, and at first glance it’s not like the Cardinals are particularly deep. For my taste, though, I don’t think they need to hurry out to get a new player. An awful interesting player is already in camp.

Read the rest of this entry »