Archive for Daily Graphings

In meeting with the press recently, Rob Manfred mentioned a “fun fact” that the small-market Kansas City Royals boasted a bigger payroll than the big-market New York Mets. That fact might not be quite as fun for Mets fans who want their club to spend “commensurate with the economic resources available to them,” to use the commissioner’s words. With increased revenue from higher attendance, a playoff run, and rising projected attendance in 2016, the Mets could be poised to increase attendance, but if they choose to keep the status quo with salaries, they might not have a lot of maneuverability in free agency this winter.

Earlier this week, I took a look at all the American League teams and their current payroll situations as we head into free agency. This post repeats the same exercise for those teams in the National League. When determining a team’s payroll, first we need to look at every team’s guarantees heading into the 2016 season. To nobody’s surprise, the Dodgers have a commanding lead, per Cot’s Contracts.

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This is the second piece in a two-part series previewing the upcoming 2016 collective bargaining negotiations between Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association. Part I of the series examined the new leadership dynamic at MLB and the MLBPA, various economic issues (including the players’ declining share of league revenues, the qualifying offer system, and service time manipulation), and possible changes to the league’s Joint Drug Agreement.

In this post, I will be looking at bargaining issues related to the draft (international and domestic), along with various pace-of-play and scheduling issues, before offering a preliminary assessment of the likelihood that a work stoppage will impact the 2017 season.

International Draft

Since taking office, Rob Manfred has repeatedly suggested that one of his top priorities as commissioner is to implement a worldwide MLB draft, in one form or another (whether it be holding a single draft for all domestic and international prospects, or alternatively creating a separate draft for international players). As a result, one can safely assume that reaching an agreement on a “single method of entry into the game” – as Manfred likes to say – will undoubtedly be a top priority for MLB in the coming negotiations.

It is unclear whether the MLBPA will be willing to agree to subject international players to a draft, however. Read the rest of this entry »

The most prevalent questions in our weekly chats this time of year are “What areas should [insert favorite team here] be looking to address this offseason?” and “Who should they target to fix them?” People really like to predict the offseason, which is an impossible thing to predict.

We can’t anticipate trades or say with any confidence where free agents will land, but we can figure out who needs a boost the most. Using our team depth charts, powered by the 2016 Steamer projections, we can pretty quickly calculate current league WAR averages and z-scores for each team by position to get a sense of which positions need the most help. So, before free agency really gets underway, let’s do just that. The American League version is what you’re reading now, and the National League edition will follow this one, tomorrow.

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Honorable mentions: Orioles LF, Royals RF, Orioles RF, Angels rotation, Orioles 1B, Red Sox bullpen, White Sox SS, White Sox 2B, Tigers rotation, Mariners catcher.

#10 Angels – LF

And to think, it was just a couple months ago when the Angels had enough left fielders for the entire American League West. Matt Joyce, Shane Victorino, David Murphy and David DeJesus are all free agents now, though, and the Angels are left with a gaping hole that will clearly be filled before the offseason is over.

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With free agency now officially underway, we’ve reached the point in the off-season where baseball scribes roll out our annual warning to Major League teams: DON’T DO IT! The history of the $100 million contract is served up as a reminder that these mega-contracts have often turned out poorly, with names like Mike Hampton and Carl Crawford trotted out as reminders that big pricey off-season additions don’t come with any kind of guarantee of success. Because most free agents reach the open market around (or after) their 30th birthday, teams are often signing players whose best days are behind them, and end up paying big money to players who are in decline before they even put their new uniforms on.

The newest entry in the annual reminder of big contract risk comes from Will Leitch over at Sports on Earth. In his piece on Tuesday, Leitch notes that players who have been paid an annual average value of $20 million or more during their long-term deals have fared particularly poorly of late.

That is the dirty secret of every free-agent season: Almost every long-term deal that will be signed will be bad. In FanGraphs’ rankings over the summer of the worst five contracts, all five were massive free agency “victories” for the team that signed them, all within the past three years. These deals are terrible business. I know this is exciting. I know we can’t wait to talk about them all. I know some long-term deals even work out (though the only one immediately coming to mind is Matt Holliday). There are 34 players — not counting the free agents signing new deals — who will be making $20 million or more in 2016. The majority of them will absolutely not be worth it.

Leitch goes on to note that just eight of the 34 players scheduled to make $20+ million next year are “boons” to their franchise, while another eight are “up in the air”, leaving 16 as “drains”, including several players who might not even have jobs next year if it weren’t for their guaranteed contracts. It’s unquestionably true that a lot of these major signings in recent years have gone poorly, and undoubtedly, many of the teams who will be celebrating their new acquisitions over the next few months will end up wishing they’d been outbid instead.

But while I agree with Leitch’s overarching point about free agency being an inefficient way to build a roster, I think there are a couple of reasonable counters to his claims. Let’s attempt them.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

Last Wednesday, we looked at the most extreme home runs of the 2015 postseason. There was Daniel Murphy‘s off-the-shoetops homer, one of many ridiculous Kyle Schwarber blasts, and Jose Bautista’s now-infamous bat flip that caused such an uproar. And, while it was great to relive all of those home runs from the playoffs, a simple constraint to that piece was this: there were only 91 home runs hit during the postseason. We’re searching for extreme home runs, and that wasn’t the largest sample size from which to draw. Fun, absolutely, but there is more fun when more homers are involved.

And so we find ourselves here, staring at a sample of every home run hit during the regular season: all 4,907 of them. There are a lot of strange occurrences in that many separate events, and so I’ve pulled out some of the finest moments involving home runs during the entire 2015 regular season. As always, data has been mined from Baseball Savant and HitTrackerOnline. Let’s get to it!

Hardest-Hit Home Run: Josh Donaldson, 4/23/15

Josh Donaldson might win the American League MVP award this year. However, regardless of whether he wins or not, he beat out his biggest competitor in that award (Mike Trout) by almost a full mph in this category, producing an exit velocity of 120.5 mph on a belt-high changeup from Chris Tillman. Whether that fact will give Donaldson any solace if he loses the MVP award cannot be known, as we do not have an accurate knowledge of whether he reads these digital pages, or puts any stock into made-up awards related to home run compilation articles.

Also of note: the sound that emits from this particular contact of ball on bat. I’ve been trying to think of a way to describe it, and the best I can come up with is that something shattered. That something could’ve been the bat, or the ball, or might simply be the sound of a small fusion reaction. Read the rest of this entry »

I don’t know if Clayton Kershaw is going to win the Cy Young Award, but I know he deserves to as much as anybody else. Three years ago, he won the Cy Young by allowing a .521 OPS. Two years ago, he won the Cy Young by allowing a .521 OPS. This year, he might win the Cy Young after allowing a .521 OPS. Maybe he wouldn’t mind a loss so much; he’s already won three of these things, plus a league MVP. He’s not hurting for hardware. But then, it’s not like Clayton Kershaw likes to lose.

He is the total package, as a pitcher, as a player, as a person. On the field, he’s proven his durability. He’s turned himself into a good hitter for his position. He’s also a good defender, who’s difficult to run against. Few pitchers have Kershaw’s know-how, and few pitchers have his command. Kershaw throws what rates as one of the best fastballs in baseball. He throws what rates as one of the best sliders in baseball. He throws what rates as one of the best curveballs in baseball. He does everything, and he’s 27. There’s no such thing as an actually perfect pitcher, but Kershaw is as close as it gets. There are no meaningful weaknesses. He’s even now proven himself in the playoffs.

There’s just this one thing. This one nearly irrelevant thing, that bothers Kershaw even if it doesn’t bother anybody else. Ask anyone else, and they’d tell you that Kershaw is as good as they come. Ask Kershaw, and he’d tell you he wishes he could throw a decent changeup.

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The Royals have got all of us thinking. It’s not so much about the Royals finding the only way to win, but they’ve definitely found an interesting way to win, and given their accomplishments you can’t just sweep it away as luck. The Royals have won with a bullpen-heavy model, and now it’s going to be interesting to see if other teams respond by putting more resources toward their relief. On the one hand, according to reports, there are a lot of excellent relievers on the market, as sellers try to meet perceived demand. On the other hand, I guess, every reliever addition is also a reliever subtraction, so. The point is, expect bullpens to be in focus.

And bullpens, I think, are something we struggle to measure. So much attention is paid to the difficulty of evaluating defense, but we also run into some trouble trying to value really good or really bad relievers. We’ve got reliever WAR, which takes leverage somewhat into consideration, but there’s an argument reliever WAR is missing something, something that, say, underrates how much a great reliever is really worth.

The goal here isn’t to try to answer everything. Bullpens are complicated and I can’t develop a model for everything in a day. I’ve simplified, to try to address one point. We already have reliever WAR. How have teams with an elite reliever actually done, compared to teams without one?

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“A pitcher, you throw 100 miles per hour, you are the shit.”

That’s Omar Vizquel, former longtime Cleveland Indians shortstop and current Detroit Tigers first base, fielding and baserunning coach, in a Maxim.com article by Hunter Atkins last month.

Vizquel’s not wrong. We love guys who can throw 100. It’s not much different than throwing 99 — no more different than 99 is to 98, at least. But there’s something about that number, 100, that appeals to us. For a while, there just weren’t that many guys who could do it, so the ones who could really stuck out. Even now, when plenty of guys can do it, the number is enticing. Maybe it’s the third digit. Maybe it’s the fact that the number starts with a one, when all the rest start with sevens, eights and nines. Maybe it’s those nice, round zeroes, their cleanliness and sense of closure. In the Maxim piece, Joba Chamberlain describes it as “sexy.”

So we’ve got 100, this big, clean, round, even, sexy number that pitchers can make appear on a radar gun for which crowds cheer regardless of the result or quality of the 100. But there are times when baseballs travel 100 miles per hour not having been thrown by a pitcher, and those aren’t given nearly the same attention.

This was the year of the exit velocity. It was our first season with Statcast data, and the number that infiltrated the public domain more than any other was batted ball velocity. Hitting 100 off the bat is nice, too, but it isn’t nearly as impressive as a pitcher throwing 100. For exit velo, the holy 100 is more like the holy 110, and that’s not nearly as fun a number. Let’s stick with 100.

Occasionally, an outfielder will get a running head start, whether on a single or a sac fly, and throw a bullet to home plate, just like a pitcher, and it elicits a response. We can see with our eyes that the ball was thrown exceptionally hard, but we don’t see it on the radar gun, so these throws go unrecognized. You’ll hear about “pitchers who can throw 100,” but you never hear outfielders regarded in the same light. The pitchers who can throw 100 have their own exclusive, little clubs. Some can do it, but most just can’t. Outfielders are the same way, just without the club.

This season, there were 24 pitchers who threw a pitch that registered in the triple digits. There were 15 outfielders. Let’s give them their own club.
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Baseball’s hot stove season got off to an uncharacteristically early start this time around, as the Rays and Mariners made a “challenge” type of trade, centering around two young, inexpensive players with plenty of years of control remaining, shortstop Brad Miller and starting pitcher Nate Karns. I agree with most of Dave Cameron’s thoughts in the immediate wake the trade: one’s opinion of this deal largely depends on whether one believes Miller is truly a regular shortstop, and whether ones believe Karns is a long-term rotation fixture.

While there are no absolutes in the projection of either player’s future, and there are other players in the deal who will eventually impact the net result, this trade will likely come down to Miller vs. Karns. What does the weight of the evidence suggest at this point in time regarding those two players?

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With Major League Baseball’s 2015 season in the books, focus has shifted to 2016. And one of the story lines that you’ll be hearing a lot about in the next year is the upcoming negotiation of a new collective bargaining agreement between MLB and the Major League Baseball Players Association. Indeed, rather than wait for the current agreement to officially expire on December 1, 2016, the league and the players union will likely begin discussing a new agreement sometime in the next few months.

For the uninitiated, the CBA is the contract that governs the relationship between MLB (and its 30 teams) and the players. It dictates the rules governing free agency, players’ salaries, revenue sharing, and the length of the playing season, among a host of other issues.

As in any collective bargaining process, the league and union will discuss a variety of topics during the 2016 negotiations. And while new issues will inevitably emerge between now and next December, based on statements made over the last couple years by MLB and MLBPA officials, we can generate a pretty reliable list of what are likely to be among the most pressing issues the parties will face during the upcoming negotiations.

I’ll be examining these bargaining issues in a two-part preview of the 2016 CBA negotiations. In this initial post, we’ll take a look at: (i) the new leadership dynamic at MLB and the MLBPA, (ii) various economic-related issues that are likely to be discussed during the negotiations (including the players’ declining share of league revenues, the qualifying offer, and service time manipulation), and (iii) possible changes to the league’s Joint Drug Agreement.

Part II will then consider bargaining issues related to the draft (both domestic and, potentially, international) as well as various pace-of-play and scheduling-related issues, before offering a preliminary assessment of the likelihood that a work stoppage will impact the 2017 season.

New Leadership

While not a bargaining issue per se, one story line that is likely to emerge during the 2016 collective bargaining process is the fact that both MLB and the MLBPA will be represented by new leadership during the upcoming negotiations. On MLB’s side, the talks will be the first of Rob Manfred’s commissionership. Manfred is well acquainted with the collective bargaining process himself, having negotiated the 2002, 2006, and 2011 CBAs on behalf of MLB as its Executive Vice President for Labor Relations & Human Resources. However, with Manfred now in the commissioner’s chair, MLB’s chief legal officer, Dan Halem, will likely serve as the league’s lead negotiator.

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