The 2015 season will forever go down as (literally) a banner year for the New York Metropolitans. A National League championship pennant will forever fly above Citi Field, and with youthful pitching studs Jacob deGrom, Matt Harvey, Noah Syndergaard and Zack Wheeler in place for the foreseeable future, a competitive future appears assured. As someone who has spent many years in a major league front office, I can assure you, however, that the page is turned from the present to the future at record speed in the game of baseball. The Mets, and all 29 other clubs, must quickly take stock of who they are and put the wheels in motion toward the club they which to become moving forward.

There is no such thing as a perfect ball club in this day and age. The champion Royals themselves lack offensive power, and their starting rotation was far from fearsome. One can easily make the argument that the Mets owned the starting pitching advantage in each and every World Series contest. Obviously, the Royals’ superior team defense, bullpen, position player durability and ability to make contact more than offset their shortcomings.

The Mets are a very curious case. On the last day of July, they stood 30th and last in the major leagues in runs scored. It’s pretty unique to travel from that low point to playing meaningful games in November. Their other chief weakness, which just happened to be the one that reared its ugly head when the stakes were the highest, was the Mets’ subpar team defense.

While no one would have placed the Mets’ overall defensive ability on par with that of their World Series opponents, both old-fashioned and new-age metrics agree that the National League champions profiled (at worst) as an average defensive club. You want old school? The Mets ranked fifth in the NL in fielding percentage, and made the fifth-fewest errors. You want a little more new-school? They ranked second in the NL in defensive efficiency, i.e., turning batted balls into outs. So far, they look positively above average.

Let’s get a little more cutting-edge, and move on to FanGraphs’ team defense page. Here we find the Mets 17th in overall defense, 13th in UZR/150, 19th in error runs, and 10th in range runs. Now we’re talking straight up major league average.

What if we were to take a look at the issue from a somewhat different perspective, both incorporating batted ball data into the equation, and evaluating team defense from a head-to-head perspective; how did clubs perform defensively as compared to their opponents over 162 games, in the same ball parks, with the same weather conditions?

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Yesterday, Carson Cistulli revealed the results of our Contract Crowdsourcing project, listing the aggregate salary projected for 82 different free agents this winter. The project is a very useful tool to get an understanding of what a broad spectrum of perspectives see as fair market value, but the nature of aggregation means that the totals — especially on the high-end — will almost always end up being a bit lower than what the players actually sign for. After all, players don’t sign for the median value of all of their offers; they take the highest one, in most cases.

So, as a follow-up, I’ve put together my predictions for the 50 largest free agent contracts signed this winter. I did this last year too, though I took some pretty big wild guesses when it came to putting players and potential teams together, so some of my guesses look pretty ridiculous in hindsight. I did get a few contract terms right, and managed to match the Yankees with Chase Headley and had the Tigers re-signing Victor Martinez, but we’ll see if we can clear last year’s pretty low bar.

Obviously, this is mostly just for fun, since predicting what teams will do in advance is very difficult. But it also serves as a chance to talk about what I think teams may do in general this winter, even if the specific players end up going elsewhere. As we did last year, we’ll go team by team, then put the full table of contracts at the end. Just for fun (or because that’s how I sorted the list in Excel), we’ll go in alphabetical order of team nickname.

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The Gold Glove Awards are getting better. They really are! Two years ago, when I did this post for the first time, the numbers and the MLB finalists agreed on 28 selections. Last year, it was 30. This year, it’s 32. Furthermore, there appear to be fewer notably egregious selections. There are still a couple here and there, and we’ll get to those, but the days of Rafael Palmeiro — or even Derek Jeter, for that matter — winning Gold Gloves are behind us. When MLB decided to begin folding advanced defensive metrics into the selection process, everything improved markedly.

For the thousandth time: no defensive metric is perfect. However, they’re the certainly better than fielding percentage, the eye test, and “who is the best hitter,” and they’re currently the best public way we have to evaluate defense, so they’re what we use. For a while, Gold Gloves were held to a high standard. It was an honor to win them. They meant something. Then, there was a stretch when the Gold Glove became a farce. People realized they weren’t being given to the best defenders — they weren’t being given to good defenders, even — and it was all a joke. Now, the Gold Gloves are earning their back their status, and that’s a good thing. The awards should matter. It’s nice to see the players who deserve to be recognized, recognized.

So let’s recognize. The way the finalists are determined now is part manager/coach vote, part metrics. But what if it was all metrics? Just the objective numbers, and no human bias. That’s what I aim to do here.
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12:01

Comment From Hairgame HELLO BROTHER

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For the last three years, the Baltimore Orioles and Washington Nationals have been engaged in a feud over television rights fees. As both Wendy Thurm and I have previously discussed, the origins of the dispute date back to 2005, and Major League Baseball’s resolution of Baltimore’s objections to the Montreal Expos being relocated to Washington, D.C. (territory belonging at the time to the Orioles).

In order to alleviate the Orioles’ concerns, MLB structured a deal in which Baltimore would initially own 87 percent of the newly created Mid-Atlantic Sports Network (MASN), the regional sports network that would air both the Orioles’ and Nationals’ games. In exchange, the Nationals were scheduled to receive an initial broadcast rights fee of $20 million per year from MASN, an amount that would be recalculated every five years.

Jump forward to 2012, when Washington requested that its rights fee be increased to $120 million per year. MASN and the Orioles refused, and as a result the dispute ended up in arbitration, with a panel of MLB team executives – the Mets’ Jeff Wilpon, the Rays’ Stuart Sternberg, and the Pirates’ Frank Coonelly – ultimately awarding the Nationals roughly $60 million per year in broadcast fees.

Still not satisfied, the Orioles and MASN then went to court in 2014, asking a New York judge to overturn the arbitration award on the grounds that the panel was biased. After initially blocking MLB from enforcing the arbitration decision that August, presiding Judge Lawrence Marks gave MASN and the Orioles a more lasting victory on Wednesday, officially vacating the arbitrators’ award.

As a result, the Orioles and Nationals are back to square one in their dispute, potentially impacting both teams’ 2016 offseason plans.

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It’s really easy for me to get sucked into our Clutch leaderboards. We spend so much time focusing on true-talent levels, because true talent is what’s mostly stable, but timing is a huge part of winning or losing, and just because it’s hard to predict doesn’t mean it can’t be analyzed later on. We have win-probability numbers since 1974. On a per-plate-appearance basis, the most clutch position player has been Jim Leyritz. The least has been Ron Kittle. The most clutch active position player has been Willie Bloomquist or, if you figure he’s about to retire, Eric Hosmer. The least has been Giancarlo Stanton. Doesn’t mean Willie Bloomquist has quietly been a better hitter than Giancarlo Stanton. It’s just, timing closes the gap. (It remains an enormous gap.)

Because of the Royals, I’ve thought about Clutch a lot lately. Good offensive timing was a critical part of their run to the playoffs and then to the title. And when you think of the Royals lineup, you also immediately think about strikeouts, and about how they don’t collect very many. It’s only natural to try to establish a link between one and the other. I’ve tried to glance at this before, but now I’m coming at it in a different way. And I’m also trying to investigate a different but related point. Question No. 1: is there a link between Clutch and strikeouts? Question No. 2: if there is, has it changed at all lately, with velocity and strikeouts on the rise?

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Aaron Harang may or may not have thrown his last pitch. The 37-year-old right-hander is a free agent, and as of last report was unsure of his future. He spent this past season – his 14th in the big leagues – with the Philadelphia Phillies. A hulking 6-foot-7, Harang has 128 career wins and a pitching style similar to that of Chris Young.

Harang’s four-seamer averaged 89 mph this year, and it hasn’t been as high as 90 since 2010. It’s not a normal slow fastball. Like Young’s, it induces a plethora of in-the-air outs when thrown up in the zone. Unlike Young’s, its effectiveness has little to due to spin rate. Per StatCast, Harang’s four-seam spin rate is 2,319 rpm, which ranked him 396th out of 500 pitchers who threw at least 100 four-seamers. Young ranked 53rd.

Harang talked about his approach to pitching when the Phillies visited Fenway Park in September.

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Harang on location and command: “I’ve always been good at locating pitches. As a kid, I’d go outside and duct tape a strike zone on a wall, and learn to hit that box. I’d play catch with it. I’d pitch little games to it. I’ve always been able to throw strikes. Read the rest of this entry »

Alex Gordon is going to be a hot commodity on the free-agent market. Little thought will be given to exercising his current 2016 option, and then he’ll be available to anyone and everyone. The FanGraphs crowd expects him to sign for something in the neighborhood of five years and $90 million, and the crowd can end up low when predicting the higher tier. Relative to other free agents, the crowd puts Gordon’s contract between Chris Davis‘ contract and Jeff Samardzija’s contract in total cost.

Maybe Dayton Moore will be the guy who gives the contract. The Royals love Gordon, as anyone would, and he’s been with the Royals his whole career, and you might’ve noticed those Royals recently winning a championship. On their side, then, there’s new extra revenue, and there’s a natural desire to keep the same core. On Gordon’s side, he could be willing to entertain a bit of a discount, to remain where he’s been. He likes the organization, and now the organization’s successful. Good reason to stay.

There’s a lot of money out there, though. This is business, and perhaps Gordon will elect to leave Kansas City on top. People are driven to pursue new, fresh opportunities. There’s a strong chance Gordon doesn’t return, is the point. Maybe it’s 40%, or maybe it’s 90%. Gordon has been an absolutely phenomenal defensive left fielder. So because this era might be about to change, I’d like to quickly review what’s been a period of team-level defensive dominance.

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Young Tiger Nick Castellanos has two seasons under his belt and hasn’t yet turned 24. He’s shown flashes of the talent he was supposed to have as a top prospect, but he’s on the wrong side of the leaderboards so far. The second half had some good news for him, particularly when it came to his plate discipline, but it’s fair to wonder how important he will be for Detroit.

So far he’s been a net negative. Can he turn that around in a big way this upcoming season?

Only five regulars have been worse over the last two years. And it’s worse than that, since most of the guys ahead of him on the list are no longer regulars. Matt Dominguez (released), Billy Butler (DH), Jay Bruce (future DH?), Ryan Howard (future DH / future release candidate), and Dayan Viciedo (released) aren’t good company to keep.

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I am not ready for November and everything that goes along with it. It’s dark early. I feel confused that there’s no baseball being played. I have been catching myself staring out the window at the fading light like a sad dog waiting for its owner to return. Winter isn’t my favorite time of the year, is what I’m trying to say. The day after the final game of the World Series marks the beginning of a liminal space many of us float through until that void ends, mercifully, on Opening Day.

Judging by the hundreds of comments on FanGraphs articles since the Royals won their championship a few days ago, it doesn’t seem like you, dear studious readers of these pages, are ready for baseball to be over either. And really, baseball isn’t over in any mortal sense; there is still the Arizona Fall League, if we require it. There are still the upcoming winter leagues. And, of course, there are these articles, where we get to relive the very best instances of strong men hitting baseballs meaningful distances.

So that’s what we’re going to do today! Let’s watch the most unlikely, improbable, and impressive home runs of the playoffs. The lowest, the highest, the furthest, the fastest. Let’s act like we don’t have a missing part of us that can only be filled with baseball. Let’s stop talking about it being winter (cough) and watch some homers.

As with the previous iterations of these articles, data has been farmed from Baseball Savant and HitTrackerOnline. Onward!

Hardest-Hit and Lowest-Apex Home Run
Michael Conforto, NLDS Game 2

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