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oblig:

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august fagerstrom: this is what he tried to post:

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This year’s New Year’s Eve party was just way too crowded. A total mess. Chris Davis bumped into me and spilled my drink nearly as soon as I got there. He didn’t even apologize because he hadn’t realized he’d done it, due to the fact that he couldn’t hear anything over the way-too-loud, awful music Justin Upton was DJ’ing. The food ran out way too quick, no thanks to Yoenis Cespedes eating all the bacon-wrapped chicken bites, and I don’t even want to guess what was in that casserole Alex Gordon brought. Yovani Gallardo told me the same story like a dozen times. Doug Fister took it way too far with the noisemakers. Denard Span and Ian Desmond wore the same outfit, Juan Uribe got sick all over Howie Kendrick, and I don’t know who thought it was a good idea to invite Mat Latos and Ian Kennedy to the same party, but of course they got into it over Jessica again. I feel bad for the host, Wei-Yin Chen. He had so much running around to do, I don’t think he ever got a chance to enjoy himself.

The one redeeming quality was that everyone at the party (myself excluded — I don’t know why I was invited) had something in common, in that they were all major league baseball players. Not only that, but when the clock struck midnight and the ball dropped to take us into the new year, every player was still a free agent. It was the most crowded Still a Free Agent New Year’s Party in years.

It felt like it, at least. But was that really the case? There were certainly more people there than Max Scherzer’s dud of a party last year, but how did it compare to the banger Mark Teixeira threw in 2009?

Most of the guests of this year’s party were listed above. But when those guys aren’t all cooped up in Wei-Yin Chen’s apartment for an awkward, crowded New Year’s party, they’re playing baseball. This is where the NYE party metaphor ends, by the way. This is all interesting to us because of baseball, so let’s see what a baseball team made up only of unsigned free agents looks like.

In the interest of brevity, I stopped short of a full bullpen or bench, because this is good enough. But, look! You can still field a whole team! It’s not the greatest rotation in the world — Chen isn’t the ace of any realistic playoff contender — but it’s five major league-caliber starters who are all either likely or have a chance to be an above-average starter next year. The bullpen could use some work, but look at that lineup. The outfield is killer, and that’s with Dexter Fowler coming off the bench. Gordon-Upton-Cespedes-Davis at the top’s gonna score you some runs.

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You should be well aware of the general offensive trend: Offense is down, relative to the previous era. At the turn of the millennium, the league combined for almost 25,000 runs. A couple years ago, baseball fell short of the 20,000 mark. Last season’s rebound was encouraging, but only partial, and driven by an increase in home runs. There’s nothing more valuable for offense than homers, but the biggest problem are strikeouts, the frequency of which has soared past one-per-five plate appearances. To sum this up: Runs are harder to score than they used to be, with strikeouts now higher than ever.

That’s the most important thing. Also, it’s the easiest to notice. It’s plainly obvious that strikeouts are reaching an absurd level, and we know a 3.50 ERA isn’t what we used to think. So as far as the commissioner is concerned, he’s going to want to keep his eye on the overall run level. But if you dig in deeper, there’s another trend. Hitters are producing fewer runs, sure, but the runs being produced are also made in kind of a different way. It’s an intuitive way, and an interesting way, given yet another trend that’s taken the game by storm. It would appear that, league-wide, hitters are getting better at using all fields.

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The Yankees have assembled one of the most intimidating bullpens imaginable. This is covering ground that’s been covered, but seriously, you’re not doing anything better with your time — think about this again. The Yankees have Aroldis Chapman, Andrew Miller, and Dellin Betances. Last year they threw 212 innings, with 347 strikeouts and a 1.66 ERA. The year before, they did the same thing. It would be a luxury to have just one of these pitchers, and this feels like something off of a fantasy roster. If the Yankees keep this group together, it’s going to help the starting rotation, and it could be an unhittable daily force in the playoffs.

As I wrote about the Chapman trade last week, I discussed how this should only continue an organizational pattern. Last year’s Yankee bullpen was outstanding, with Justin Wilson in place of Chapman. The Yankees have gotten used to strong bullpens, with Joe Girardi proving himself a skilled high-leverage manager. I didn’t think too much about this a few days ago, but now that I’ve taken the time to look back, it’s been ages since the Yankees had unreliable relief. According to how they’ve actually performed, the Yankees haven’t had a below-average bullpen in two decades.

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The real nice thing about having Clayton Kershaw and Zack Greinke in the same starting rotation, aside from all the wins, is that they allow a team to lose two key starters for the season — Hyun-Jin Ryu to a shoulder injury suffered in spring training and a Brandon McCarthy to Tommy John Surgery after just four starts — without it crippling the team. The Dodgers would’ve preferred Ryu and McCarthy stay healthy, but with top-end talent like the Dodgers had, a lot can go wrong for things to still go right.

This year, the Dodgers had a chance to retain Greinke, but they narrowly missed out, with Greinke heading to Arizona. Whether or not they “missed out” on guys like David Price and Johnny Cueto doesn’t matter; the point is, those guys play for different teams, too. Without Greinke, the Dodgers rotation will be much different than it was in 2015, but in certain ways, it will be very much the same.

You start with Clayton Kershaw. We’re talking pitching here, so you always start with Clayton Kershaw. Kershaw is the best in the world and he’s got a clean bill of health when it comes to his arm, so there’s no better place to start. But after Kershaw, there’s still Ryu, who’s clearly an injury risk, and there’s still McCarthy, who’s clearly an injury risk, and there’s still Brett Anderson, who made 31 healthy starts last year, but made just 32 starts the past four years combined, and so he’s clearly an injury risk.

The Dodgers knew that’s what they had going into the offseason, and their first move to address the rotation, having missed out on the top flight arms, was an attempt to sign Hisashi Iwakuma. Iwakuma’s 34 years old, had an injury history in Japan and hit the disabled list last year, so he’s clearly an injury risk. So much so, in fact, that he failed his physical and the Dodgers decided to move on.

The guy they moved on to ended up being Scott Kazmir, who signed a similar contract to the one the Dodgers were prepared to give Iwakuma. When you think Scott Kazmir, you probably think injury risk. Granted, Kazmir’s averaged 31 starts a year over the past three seasons and has avoided the disabled list, so most recently, he’s been something resembling durable. Yet, still, there’s been the occasional skipped start due to shoulder concerns or early, precautionary removal due to tricep tightness and of course the three years of injuries that derailed Kazmir’s career and left him jobless, not too long ago. After all, the best predictor of future injury is past injury. While he’s been healthy lately, we’ll never live in a world where Scott Kazmir isn’t considered an injury risk.

So, to quickly recap, after Kershaw, the Dodgers had three injury question marks, who they tried to tandem with an injury question mark, but when that didn’t work, they went out and got a different injury question mark. Got it. With that in mind, let’s look at some numbers and graphs.

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Going into the 2015 season, we had a pretty good idea that the Toronto Blue Jays were going to hit a lot of home runs. After all, they hit the third-most home runs in baseball during 2014, and then added Josh Donaldson; the pieces were there for a huge offensive season from the entire team. But even with the talented personnel and a hitter-friendly home stadium, 2015 was the kind of season that was probably on the high-end of expectations: the Jays hit 232 home runs, the most by any team since the Yankees hit 245 in 2012.

As Matt Snyder pointed out in late September, the 2015 Blue Jays were only the 14th team in major league history to have three players with 35+ home runs each, and were the first team to have three since the 2006 White Sox. Those players, of course, were Josh Donaldson, Jose Bautista, and Edwin Encarnacion. Digging deeper into the stats, the offensive approach shown by those players at the Rogers Centre was a driving force behind the team’s power explosion.

By July, we had a sense that Donaldson was intentionally altering his plate approach at home to hit more homers: he was striking out more, walking less, and pulling the ball far more often when playing at the Rogers Centre than on the road. In short, he was being ultra-aggressive at the plate when at home, and it turned out to be a big part of what would become an MVP season for the third baseman. A quick look at the increase in his pull rate at home in 2015 when compared to 2013 & 2014 tells a big part of the story of his year:

Big power seasons often follow short-term increases in pull tendencies, and Donaldson was no different. And, looking further down the lineup, he wasn’t alone in changing his approach to get the most out of playing in Toronto’s hitter-friendly environment during 2015. Donaldson’s main partner in adopting these more aggressive changes was Bautista, who showed a few important tweaks to his Rogers Centre approach between 2014 and 2015. To begin with, he pulled the ball in Toronto more than he ever had before, owning the third-highest change in pull tendency out of all qualified hitters when at home.

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Traditionally, baseball teams spend most of their money before Christmas and then, after the New Year, they start bargain hunting. Historically, free agents who are still on the market six weeks before Spring Training begins start getting lowballed, as teams begin to exert some leverage knowing that players want to have a job lined up before the calendar starts pushing too far towards Opening Day. There are still big contracts signed in January and February — after all, Max Scherzer got $210 million on January 19th last year — but, for the most part, January and February deals come a bit cheaper than deals signed in November and December.

So perhaps messages like this one shouldn’t be that surprising:

The Chicago #WhiteSox want to sign free agent OF Alex Gordon or Yoenis Cespedes, but only if they're willing to take 3-year deal or less.

— Bob Nightengale (@BNightengale) January 1, 2016

The idea of Cespedes taking a three-year deal is probably a pipe dream. He’s a 30-year-old coming off a +7 WAR season, and there’s probably not a great reason for him to try and hit the free agent market again after his age-32 season, when his physical skills — where he derives almost all of his value — have begun to decline. If Cespedes can’t get a five- to seven-year deal this winter, he’s probably best off just signing a deal with an opt-out for next winter, when he could reasonably expect to be the best free agent bat on the market, given the weak supply of available talent in next year’s class. Maybe the White Sox can get him to sign a three-year deal if they gave him the first year opt-out and a high-enough AAV, but I’d still expect some team to step up and give Cespedes north of $100 million.

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n 1960, when he was playing in the South Atlantic League, Phil Niekro was told that he could pitch in the big leagues if he could get his knuckleball over the plate more consistently. Those words, which came from manager Red Murff, were the springboard to a Hall of Fame career.

“No one had ever told me that before, and it was my motivator,” Niekro told me recently. “It was then that I hunkered down and really worked on my knuckleball.”

Niekro’s younger brother, Joe Niekro, had to wait much longer for similar encouragement. He wasn’t pushed to throw the pitch that made his family famous until he’d been in the big leagues for nearly a decade.

“When Joe came up through the minor leagues, he was your normal, conventional pitcher,” explained Niekro. “He did have a knuckleball, but the Cubs didn’t want him to throw it. When he got to Detroit, they wouldn’t let him throw it. He had a good one, but his managers weren’t comfortable with him using it in games.” Read the rest of this entry »

Your immediate reaction to the Aroldis Chapman trade was right on. The Yankees have assembled something silly, a three-headed bullpen monster to rival any in the history of the game. On talent, Chapman, Andrew Miller, and Dellin Betances are three of the five or ten or so best relievers in baseball, and now if this plan comes together, one will hand the ball to the other, who will then in turn hand the ball to the other. While the 2016 Yankees aren’t going to feature a roster full of All-Stars, it’s going to feel like a pitching staff full of All-Stars in the most important moments, and that’s not going to be any fun for half the people watching.

There’s something important to be said, though. On talent, the 2016 Yankees bullpen should be better than the 2015 Yankees bullpen. Yet on performance, it’ll be hard for this coming year’s group to improve on the group that was. You’ve probably seen some of the numbers, like how the Yankees were 66-3 when leading after six, and 73-2 when leading after seven. Honestly, that probably already says enough, but we can make use of some of our own statistics. Whether you go superficial or analytical, last year’s bullpen almost always got the job done, when the job was important.

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In 2015, I once again had the pleasure of interviewing hundreds of people within baseball. Many of their words were shared via the FanGraphs Q&A series. Others came courtesy of my Sunday Notes column. Here is a selection of the best quotes from this year’s conversations.

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“We have to understand how a pitcher’s movements affect the ball, how the movement on the ball affects the hitter’s reaction, and how the batted-ball results average out over the course of a long season. To effectively map out this sequence of events, you need to have a thorough understanding of pitching mechanics, pitch data, and sabermetrics, because they all work together.” — Brian Bannister, Red Sox pitching analyst, January 2015

“You can take two guys with the exact same stuff and have them put up the exact same type of contact, but if the defense is one step slower, or they’re not shifted properly, that can be the difference between having an 4.01 ERA or a 3.01 ERA.” — Chris Archer, Rays pitcher, January 2015

“I would equate that to throwing my cutter… It’s the pitch I throw more than anything. The other pitches could be other songs, and the song I always come back to is my cutter.” — Evan Meek, journeyman reliever and guitar player, January 2015

“I was like a squirrel. I could turn left, turn right, go up, go down. Basically, everything that caught my eye, I was going straight for. I wasn’t ready – especially spiritually – for the journey that’s coming.” — Mark Hamburger, Twins minor league pitcher, January 2015 Read the rest of this entry »