Here’s your chance to vote for the 2016 SABR Analytics Conference Research Award winners.

The SABR Analytics Conference Research Awards will recognize baseball researchers who have completed the best work of original analysis or commentary during the preceding calendar year. Nominations were solicited by representatives from SABR, Baseball Prospectus, FanGraphs, The Hardball Times, and Beyond the Box Score.

To read any of the finalists, click on the link below. Scroll down to cast your vote.

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The production of new data by means of new recording technology is exciting — and the more data we get, the better we can become at analyzing said data. We have come a long way since PITCHf/x was made available, but we still have much more to learn. We also now have Statcast data with defensive numbers and figures — as well as exit velocity for hitters and against pitchers — and right now that data is very interesting. But a lot of people are all working very hard to transform the data from merely interesting to actually useful. If it remains interesting without becoming useful, it is still fascinating information to have, but also trivial from an analytical perspective. Organizations want the information to be useful. Exit velocity, one of the streams of data rendered available by Statcast, appears to have the potential to be very useful. Right now, however, I am still unsure what we have, and I am not alone.

As Ben Badler of Baseball America recently noted on Twitter:

Common thing I’m hearing from execs: They have an enormous amount of new data, but they’re still learning to turn it into usable information. Even the more data-driven organizations are still just scratching the surface of separating signal from noise and understanding what has predictive value.

Back in September, I gathered a bunch of exit velocity data on major league pitchers, and attempted to make some sense of it. There seemed to be some evidence to suggest that if a low exit velocity was a repeatable skill, then it might be helpful in limiting home runs. Not exactly groundbreaking, but at least from my perspective, interesting. Others have studied the data and found that exit velocity was five parts the responsibility of the hitter and just one part the responsibility of the pitcher, so perhaps in retrospect, I should have focused on hitters. Below represents my current attempt.

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There’s a lot to talk about with any five-player trade. And with the trade that sent Jean Segura from the Brewers to the Diamondbacks, there are plenty of noteworthy angles. There’s the matter of Segura’s offensive upside vs. Segura’s offensive reality. There’s the matter of the Diamondbacks clutching onto their highest remaining draft pick, and there’s the matter of the successful if partial Aaron Hill salary dump, and there’s the matter of Isan Diaz being an awful interesting prospect. There’s something else the Brewers received, though, and while Chase Anderson doesn’t have Diaz’s breakout potential, you can think of him as the quieter upside play. Anderson is going into the rotation, and he could remain there for years.

Anderson’s whole presence to this point has been quiet. He’s been an unremarkable pitcher on an unremarkable team, and though he’s made just 48 big-league starts, he’s already 28 years old. He doesn’t have a top-prospect background, nor does he have a top prospect’s velocity — Anderson’s specialty has been an outstanding changeup. The numbers last year backslid, and Anderson wound up on the outside of the picture, looking in. Yet the Brewers still saw something they liked.

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I’ll tell you what this was supposed to be about. Over the weekend, Howie Kendrick was in the news, since he re-signed with the Dodgers. I was going to take the opportunity to write about how Kendrick just about never hits a pop-up. It’s one of those things that helps explain why he’s been able to run high batting averages, and even though I know I wrote about this very thing like a year ago for Fox Sports, Kendrick didn’t hit a single pop-up in the most recent season. Nor did he hit a single pop-up in the previous season. So, by our numbers, Kendrick has gone more than two regular seasons without a pop-up, which is insane and well worth re-visiting. Who doesn’t like to read about the weirdos?

But, you know, ideas evolve, especially when you give them a few days to simmer. Kendrick, pretty clearly, is exceptional in this regard. However, he’s not unique. You might be thinking right now about Joey Votto, and Votto is also pop-up averse, but this past year there were just two regular players who successfully avoided pop-ups: Kendrick and Christian Yelich. This is fitting, because over the past five years, if you set a 1,000 plate-appearance minimum, Yelich and Kendrick own the lowest pop-up rates in baseball. They both feature phenomenal bat-to-ball skills, reflected by these numbers, and they’re valuable because of the extra singles they can scratch out.

So, Kendrick doesn’t hit pop-ups. Yelich doesn’t hit pop-ups. By at least one source, neither hit a pop-up in 2015. Might it be possible to crown either the 2015 pop-up champion?

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On Wednesday, we took a look at the anomalous offensive outcomes of 2015: we had oppo homers from batters who have never hit them before, some of the slowest men in baseball hitting triples, and a guy with below average ISO marks hitting an almost 500-foot home run. It was a great reminder that baseball is really, really weird, and every season there’s at least few events that you will rarely — if ever — see again.

Today, we’re going to revisit that same idea except with defense. We can always watch highlight reels of the best defensive plays of the year, because watching Mike Trout perch on top of the wall in center field to rob a home run is a singular pleasure. It’s simple human nature to enjoy that. What highlight reels lack, however, is the context of the players making the plays: we expect Andrelton Simmons to go in the hole at shortstop to pick a ground ball, leap in the air, and fire a bullet across the diamond to get the runner at first. We do not expect Jhonny Peralta to do the same. That’s why if Peralta made that exact same play (he didn’t, but just suspend your belief for a moment), it wouldn’t necessarily be more impressive on an overall level, but it certainly would be on a personal one. For Simmons, that’s business as usual. For Peralta, it’s a once or twice in a career event. That deserves recognition — and celebration.

The usual caveats apply, given that we’re looking at only one-year samples of defensive data. There’s a lot of noise here — we know that. The aim of this post is to find the joy in that great mixture of noise and talent. There are a spectrum of posts on this illustrious website: toward one end we find incredible batted-ball breakdowns of pitchers and hitters that stretch our understanding of baseball; toward the other, we find the carnivalesque atmosphere of a GIF-addled home run post. This piece will stumble gleefully, Mardi Gras crown askew, in the direction of only one end of that spectrum.

On the technical side, we’re employing a few types of data for this pursuit: UZR/150, DRS, and Inside Edge fielding data, the latter of which ranks each defensive play made on a six-step scale of how often an average fielder at the position would make the play in question — from the categories of “Impossible” to “Almost Certain.” I’ve also used Baseball Reference’s always useful play index, as well as some Baseball Savant. Now onto the findings!
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Miguel Sano didn’t exactly sneak up on the league. The massive 22-year-old Dominican slugger had been considered a top-100 overall prospect in baseball for each of the last six seasons, a top-20 overall prospect each of the last four. He’d have been a perennial No. 1 prospect for most any organization in baseball, if not for the presence of super-prospect Byron Buxton. In the prospect world, Sano played Pippen to Buxton’s Jordan.

Last season, they both arrived. And for Sano, the debut couldn’t have gone much better. Sano batted 335 times in his rookie season. Set the playing time minimum low enough, to include Sano on our leaderboards, and he was a top-10 hitter in baseball. Immediately, Sano thrust himself into the company of Giancarlo Stanton, Jose Bautista, Edwin Encarnacion and Chris Davis, not only as one of the game’s premier power hitters, but as one of the most dangerous all-around at-bats in the league.

Pitchers who had faced Sano in the minor leagues already knew what to expect. Pitchers who hadn’t faced Sano before quickly learned what to expect. The most simple scouting report goes like this: true 80-grade power, the kind of power that necessitates lofty comparisons with Stanton. Proceed with caution.

And that’s exactly what pitchers did. A reputation as a feared hitter is the kind of thing most guys have to earn. Bautista, Davis, Encarnacion: they had to earn their reputations as truly premier power hitters, as the most dangerous at-bats in the game. It wasn’t simply assumed. Sano? Sano arrived with that reputation.

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In something of a curious trade, the Rockies flipped Corey Dickerson to the Rays for Jake McGee. Those two players were the headliners of the deal, but they weren’t the only two players involved. Also changing hands were third baseman Kevin Padlo and hard-throwing righty German Marquez, who head to the Rays and Rockies, respectively. Here’s what my fancy computer math says about the minor leaguers involved.

Kevin Padlo (Profile)

The Rockies drafted Padlo in the fifth round out of high school less than two years ago, but he wasted no time putting up gaudy numbers in the low minors. Padlo graded out extremely well by an embryonic version of KATOH and, nearly a year and a half later, his enticing combination of power, speed and youth still tips the scales. He placed 37th on KATOH’s newly-minted prospect list, with a projected 5.9 WAR through his first six years in the show.

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Christin Stewart is the top power-hitting prospect in the Detroit Tigers system. He aspires to be the best overall hitter.

The 22-year-old outfielder got off on the right foot after being drafted 34th-overall last summer out of the University of Tennessee. Swinging from the left side, the muscular slugger slashed ..285/.372/.508 and bashed 10 home runs in half a season. He did the bulk of his damage in West Michigan, where he helped lead the Whitecaps to a Midwest League championship.

Stewart is highly touted, although the accolades come with cautions. Baseball America has lauded his plus bat speed and raw power, but also opined that he’s “an aggressive hitter whose swing gets long.”

This past summer, I asked the first-year pro about the latter assessment.

“There’s not a lot of movement in my swing,” Stewart told me. “I think I have a short swing to the ball. My extension through the ball can get a little long at times, and maybe that’s what they mean.”

Phil Clark, West Michigan’s hitting coach last year, had a different take. He concurred with his charge on length, but then to pointed to the start, as opposed to the finish. Read the rest of this entry »

New York Mets ownership has come under increased scrutiny over the past few years. Lowering payroll in a gigantic media market and getting entwined in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme will bring that kind of attention. Back at the trading deadline, there were many, including myself, wondering why the Mets were acting like a small-market team in New York. The team quieted many doubters by bringing Yoenis Cespedes at the trade deadline and making the World Series, but due to insurance for David Wright’s injury and the PED suspension for Jenrry Mejia, the payroll increase was not significant. As a result, calls for the Mets to spend were heard again during the offseason, and again, the Mets have silenced their critics with Yoenis Cespedes.

The Mets’ revenues are driven by many factors, including the massive New York market that affords them a fantastic television deal that nets them around $100 million per year. However, nothing drives revenue like success, and the Mets, despite significant ownership debts and upcoming payments totaling over $60 million related to the Madoff scandal, the Mets were able to raise payroll due to their on-field success in 2015 and the fan response to that success. Team sources have pegged the revenue due to the Mets World Series run at around $45 million, per the New York Post. Fortunately for Mets fans, it appears almost all of that amount is being invested back on the field.

Let’s break it down.

Regular Season Revenue from 2015

Additional revenue from the regular season was not included in the $45 million estimate, but it is helpful to note that, due to the increased number of fans, the Mets did substantially better at the gate in their competitive 2015 season than they did the prior year. In 2014, the Mets drew 2.15 million fans and had an Opening Day payroll below $85 million — both figures down more than 30% from when Citi Field opened in 2009, but within a few-hundred thousand fans of the previous three seasons as the payrolls dropped beginning in 2011.

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I don’t much care for the move the Rockies made Thursday. I like Jake McGee just fine — he’s an excellent late-inning reliever — and maybe I could understand the trade under different circumstances. But the Rockies don’t actually project to be good, so it seems strange for them to add a reliever at the cost of an affordable, long-term outfielder. Not only that, but of the two prospects exchanged, I like Kevin Padlo more than German Marquez, and Padlo is joining Corey Dickerson in going from Colorado to Tampa Bay.

The trade won’t be the end of the world, and the Rockies could just decide to flip McGee in a matter of months, but for now, it’s an odd decision. This is a move you might expect from a competitive team with a thin bullpen, not a mediocre team with a thin bullpen.

So the Rays add value to the roster and to the farm, and the Rockies add late-inning impact. That’s essentially the summary, with one interesting offshoot being that this seems to set the Rays up for another outfielder trade. There’s another interesting offshoot, though, and it has to do with the Rockies, and with where they play. Sometimes it can be an easy thing to forget about, but the Rockies play baseball literally a mile above sea level, and that makes the team something of an ongoing experiment. It’s always fun to have an opportunity to investigate a new Coors Field question, and the McGee acquisition opens the door.

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