In a few hours, Ken Griffey Jr will be announced as the newest member of the Baseball Hall of Fame. He may be joined by Mike Piazza, or he may end up going in alone, but there’s no question that Junior is going in. At this point, the only question is how many voters will leave him off their ballots, either for strategic reasons — thanks to the insane limitation on only being able to vote for 10 players — or because of some archaic notion of what a “first ballot” Hall of Famer is. But pretty much everyone who follows baseball agrees that Ken Griffey Jr belongs in the Hall of Fame.

What’s interesting about that near-unanimous agreement is that his career numbers are actually not that spectacular, or at least, aren’t the kind of numbers you’d necessarily expect from a guy who is considered a slam-dunk entrant to Cooperstown. Even though he played for 20 years, he didn’t get to 3,000 hits. His career wRC+ is 131, which puts him in a tie for 118th best among hitters with at least 5,000 PAs. His +78 WAR puts him closer to the tier of guys who are having a tough time collecting votes than the other guys who got nearly 100% support when they went on the ballot.

But, of course, the support for Griffey isn’t based on his career numbers; it’s based on what he did during the first 10 to 12 years of his career. And that stretch was spectacular. Here’s just the first decade of Junior’s career.

Griffey’s First Decade

Griffey	PA	BA	OBP	SLG	wRC+	WAR	WAR/600
1989-1998	5982	0.300	0.379	0.568	144	63.6	6.4

That +63.6 WAR? That’s the same as Roberto Alomar’s career total. It’s higher than the career totals of Duke Snider, Ernie Banks, Ryne Sandberg, or Andre Dawson, all of whom are enshrined in Cooperstown. By the time he finished his age-28 season, Griffey had already had a Hall of Fame career. And then he put up two more excellent seasons after that, giving him a dozen-year run at the kind of level that few players ever reach. The +74 WAR that Griffey put up from 1989-2000 ranked second only to Barry Bonds during that stretch, and the #3 guy on that list — Jeff Bagwell — wasn’t even within +10 WAR of Griffey’s total.

The first 60% of Griffey’s career was absolutely stunning. In graph form, here’s Junior essentially keeping pace with three of the best hitters baseball has ever seen.

Source: FanGraphs — Ken Griffey Jr., Barry Bonds, Hank Aaron

Right up through age-30, Griffey played at an inner-circle Hall of Fame level. The last decade of his career was marred by injuries and significant decline, which dragged down all his rate stats and left his totals significantly shy of the other all-time greats, but Griffey is perhaps the primary example for why peak performance should matter more than longevity when discussing the best players in the game’s storied history.

Griffey was simply capable of things other players weren’t capable of. There have been better hitters than Griffey, and better fielders than Griffey, but the list of players who could impact the game on both sides of the ball to that degree is quite small indeed.

In the long history of the game, there have 12,711 individual seasons where a position player got at least 500 plate appearances. Of those nearly 13,000 player-seasons, a hitter has managed to accumulate +50 runs of offensive value in the same season in which they were at least an average defensive player (+50 OFF/+0 DEF) only 135 times; Griffey did it twice.

Others who have pulled off that feat multiple times include guys like Mantle, Mays, Musial, Horsnby, Wagner, DiMaggio, and more recently, Bonds, Rodriguez, and Trout. Griffey’s 1997 season — where he put up a +50 OFF/+17 DEF — puts him in a group of just 19 seasons (out of almost 13,000) where a player has ever put up a offensive season 50 runs better than an average hitter while also producing at least 15 runs of defensive value more than an average fielder.

That’s the player that people are voting into the Hall of Fame, not the guy who finished his career with bad knees and limited range. For a little over a decade, Griffey was a transcendent performer, and then his body broke down.

But should we really care that Griffey didn’t age well? His first 12 years pushed him across the Hall of Fame threshold pretty easily, and he did more in the first half of his career than most players could do in 20. Griffey established his greatness from 1989 through 2000; that he was unable to hold onto it from 2001 through 2010 does not eliminate the fact that said greatness existed in the first place.

Griffey is, in some ways, the Sandy Koufax of center fielders, only he was great from the get go, rather than taking some time to work up to elite performances. The difference, of course, is that when Koufax’s body broke down, he stopped playing; Griffey continued to take the field for another decade after his physical abilities began disappearing. But like with Koufax, the greatness is essentially unquestioned, even if the career totals don’t necessarily stack up with other players of similar repute.

We didn’t need to see Griffey be a decent player in his 30s to know he was a remarkable player in his 20s. For a 12 year stretch, Junior was about as good as a player can be, and that’s what the Hall of Fame will be honoring. And rightfully so.

Welcome to Cooperstown, Kid.

Colby Lewis sits among the 20-worst pitchers by strikeout rate among qualified pitchers over the last two years. He has the second-worst ground-ball rate among that group. He has the fifth-worst fastball velocity. He basically only has two pitches, and only one of them rates as above-average on whiffs or grounders currently. He’s fifth on the Rangers’ starting-pitcher depth chart currently, and the team would probably admit that they are hoping that Chi-Chi Gonzalez and/or Nick Martinez take that job from him.

The point is, you wouldn’t think he was best in the league at anything.

The good news for our own personal senses of rankings and skills and value and Colby Lewis? That thing that he’s good at is something that people don’t think is really a skill.

Still. He’s been good at this thing, even as his ERAs over the last two years have been poor. And this thing? If you can repeat it, it’s good.

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Alan Trammell is about to fall off the Hall of Fame ballot. In his 15th and final year of eligibility, the long-time Detroit Tigers shortstop will once again fail to garner sufficient support from the BBWAA electorate. His Cooperstown chances will now rest in the hands of the Veterans Committee.

The following conversation with Trammell doesn’t address his Hall of Fame worthiness. I considered broaching the subject when I spoke to him this past summer, but ultimately opted against it. After all, what could he have offered besides humble platitudes?

I talked to Trammell about defense. More specifically, we discussed positioning and the proliferation of shifting. He knows the subject(s) well. A prolific defender in his day, Trammell — now a special assistant to the general manager — spends much of his summers tutoring infielders in the Tigers’ minor-league system.

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Trammell on defensive positioning in his era (1977-1996): “We were positioned very little. Our coaches gave us some direction, but it was more of us making those decisions. They wanted it that way. In the first half of my career, we didn’t have any video — our primary scouting report was watching our opponent. That’s how we did it. The video and all that is great — they’re great tools — but you need a combination. You should never lose sight of how important it is to watch the game.

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The list of athletes who are simultaneously good at their sport and social media is a short one. I don’t know much about the other sports, but in baseball, it’s pretty much limited to Brandon McCarthy, Brett Anderson, Glen Perkins and the recently-retired Dan Haren.

In Haren’s case, it starts with the handle, @ithrow88, a reference to the 13-year veteran’s diminished late-career velocity. Haren was never a hard-thrower, but by age 27 the decline had already begun, dropping from 92 mph to 91. By his age-30 season, Haren no longer averaged 90 mph on his fastball. The following year, the reality of throwing 88 was realized, and by his final season, last year, Haren’s fastball averaged just 86 mph, the second-slowest by a qualified non-knuckleballing starter.

The self-deprecating moniker serves as a refreshing departure from the false bravado we expect so many of our athletes to project. Coming to terms with our own physical decline is a near-unanimous realization among non-athletes at various ages, and so Haren’s ability to take his own deterioration in stride is something that resonates with the general public.

We like to be able to resonate with our favorite athletes, but we also enjoy being granted the opportunity to peek behind the curtain a bit. On Monday, an early afternoon session on the exercise bike led to an entertaining string of brutally honest tweets from Haren about his career. The topics range from plane crashes to Coors Field dread to pitcher-batter matchups and pitcher-pitcher matchups to the absurdity of the pitcher win to wine-drinking habits to poop, the latter of which is almost always funny if you’re a man-child like myself. It’s a fun stream-of-consciousness that’s worth a minute of your day. At the very least, you’ll get a chuckle out of it.

But one tweet struck me in particular, and I wasn’t the only one; it was the most popular tweet from the 14-message long rant. As soon as I read the tweet in question, I knew it required a follow up, and also that it would provide me an excuse to write a sendoff post to Haren, who had a remarkable career that hopefully won’t be overshadowed by it’s underwhelming conclusion.

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Over the holidays, Al Jazeera America released an explosive, undercover report on doping in professional sports. Included in the story were secretly recorded interviews with Charlie Sly, a pharmacist who boasted of having provided illegal performance enhancing drugs to numerous professional athletes.

Among the many athletes that Sly claimed to have supplied with PEDs were several baseball players, including Ryan Howard and Ryan Zimmerman. According to Sly, both players bought and used the drug Delta-2, a banned hormone supplement.

Initially, both Howard and Zimmerman issued a joint statement staunchly denying the allegations. The two have now gone one step further, each filing suit against Al Jazeera on Tuesday evening for defamation.

However, while filing suit may provide a boost to Howard and Zimmerman in the short-term in their public relations battle against the network, the players are incurring some degree of risk by initiating legal action, and ultimately appear unlikely to prevail in their respective cases.

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Yesterday, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the Boston Red Sox. In this companion piece, I look at that same Boston farm system through the lens of my KATOH projection system. There’s way more to prospect evaluation than just the stats, so if you haven’t already, I highly recommend you read Dan’s piece in addition to this one. KATOH has no idea how hard a pitcher throws, how good a hitter’s bat speed is, or what a player’s makeup is like. So it’s liable to miss big on players whose tools don’t line up with their performances. However, when paired with more scouting-based analyses, KATOH’s objectivity can be useful in identifying talented players who might be overlooked by the industry consensus or highly-touted prospects who might be over-hyped.

Below, I’ve grouped prospects into three groups: those who are forecast for two or more wins through their age-28 seasons, those who receive a projection of at between 1.0 and 2.0 WAR though their age-28 seasons, and then any residual players who received Future Value (FV) grades of 45 or higher from Dan. Note that I generated forecasts only for players who accrued at least 200 plate appearances or batters faced last season. Also note that the projections for players over a relatively small sample are less reliable, especially when those samples came in the low minors.

1. Rafael Devers, 3B (Profile)

KATOH Projection Through Age 28 (2015 stats): 9.6 WAR
KATOH Projection Through Age 28 (2014 stats): 2.3 WAR
Dan’s Grade: 55 FV

Devers destroyed two levels of Rookie Ball in 2014, which prompted the Red Sox to send him to the Sally league as an 18-year-old. He didn’t disappoint. While his numbers weren’t flashy, his power and strikeout rate were both better than the league’s average. That’s remarkable for a guy facing pitchers three or four years his senior. He could stand to walk a bit more, but that’s a minor concern considering how little walk rate tells us about players at Devers’ level. All in all, there’s a lot to be excited about with Devers. Read the rest of this entry »

There’s no perfect way to do this, because surprises are always relative to expectations, and I can’t speak to general, across-the-board expectations. You might personally expect more from Player X than the next guy, and I can’t quantify that. Given this caveat, it should be obvious the best thing to do is consider the preseason projections. Projections should always be around the center of the expectations, because we’re always projecting, even when we don’t think of it like that, and we all project in similar ways. We think about the track records, and we think about age. Your brain is but an endless series of spreadsheets.

To identify the most surprising hitter of the season, then, we compare actual numbers to forecasted numbers. Who beat the projections the most, basically. And now, try to think about this off the top of your head. The answer’s going to follow, of course, but what players are coming to mind? You’re thinking about Bryce Harper. Maybe, say, Kyle Schwarber, but mostly Harper. It’s not really surprising that Harper got to this level, but the suddenness of the transition was stunning. Harper made the leap, and I can tell you, yes, he’s near the top of the list. By this method he’s actually the runner-up. The winner? He’s so surprising that almost no one even noticed in the process.

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Welcome to the new year. The Chinese calendar says it’s the year of the monkey, the baseball calendar says it can’t possibly be the Royals year again, but most importantly, it’s the year you’ll finally do that thing you’ve been telling yourself for a long time that you’re going to do. “I’m going to do that thing,” you say to yourself. Go you! And what is that you’re talking about? It’s hard to tell with your mouthful of Cheetos-brand corn puffs so I’ll say it for you: you’re finally going to go to spring training!

Yay! Who cares about the kids? The husband and/or wife will be there when you get back, no matter what they say, probably. As for the job? You won’t have that for long anyway. Abuse it while you can! What’s more, you have vacation days for a reason, and nobody, not some highfalutin “boss,” is going to tell you when you can use ‘em!

So this is happening, dammit. The first step is go figure out who is coming. Call up your buddies! Email ‘em. Text ‘em. Record a message on a wax cylinder and strap it to a carrier pigeon. Round ‘em up! Figure out who you can goad into joining you, because this will be important information for the next step. You may want to start with a nice email. Something like this:

Hey jerks,

Hope you’re not dead yet. I’m going to spring training and you should come with me to help defray the cost. Also, because we’re friends! We’re going to see my favorite teams because I thought of this first. Baseball is baseball though so you should be happy, but even if it wasn’t I’m not interested in your opinion. Can’t wait to go! Send me a check ASAP.

Love,
You

The point is, get in touch with your peeps. You’ll need someone with intelligence, someone with money, and someone with the ability to behave like an adult occasionally. And it would be nice if all those attributes were found in one person so as to open up more spots for your actual friends.

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With the holiday break coming to an end, Phase II of the 2015-16 free agent and trade markets is about to kick off in earnest. As noted by August Fagerstrom earlier today, player movement is likely to be heavier than in the typical January, with plenty of top free agents, particularly on the position player side, still on the market.

The first wave of free-agent signings was particularly kind to starting pitchers, both at the top and middle of the market. Still, a handful of starters — Wei-Yin Chen, Yovani Gallardo and Ian Kennedy at the forefront — remain available. Does the market have enough suitors and dollars to satisfy those three? Today, we’ll look at the first of those three, who has spent all of his stateside career with the Orioles.

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