This morning, David Appelman announced some minor upgrades to the way we calculate WAR, including the addition of a factor for doubles plays grounded into. While the results aren’t dramatic, some players do tend to hit into more double plays than others, and those rally-killing ground balls do have a tangible harm on a team’s offense, so they should be reflected in a metric attempting to assign a single value to a player’s performance. The swing isn’t huge, but the best player at double play avoidance in 2014 — Mike Trout, because of course he was — created an additional three runs above the league average, while the worst player — Casey McGehee — took five runs off the board by hitting into 31 double plays.

These names at the extremes make plenty of logical sense, as Trout as one of the fastest players in baseball, while McGehee is a slow ground ball machine who makes a ton of contact. And if you look at the leaderboard for valued added by double play avoidance since 2002, you’ll find names that make a lot of sense. At the top, there’s Ichiro Suzuki, adding 23 runs above the league average by almost never hitting into double plays. Right behind him is Johnny Damon, another speedy left-handed batter who made his living off his legs.

Now, if I worked for BuzzFeed, I’d have some cliffhanger sentence here, something like this.

“You’ll NEVER BELIEVE who is ALSO at the top of this list!”

But since I already put his name in the headline, you’ve probably already figured out that I’m talking about Adam Dunn. That’s right; when it comes to the best double play avoiders during the years in which we have batted ball data, Adam Dunn has created as much value as any other hitter in baseball.

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We have stats to help us understand which players are least replaceable in general. But the rosters are almost set, and now we can ask a specific question. Which players are least replaceable by the personnel on the team around them, right now?

To do this, we can use the depth charts on FanGraphs, manned by the writers on staff. These oft-updated team maps dole out the playing time by keeping an eye on health and current spring training updates.

So let’s compare the position players in baseball to their backups. Because players can be listed at multiple positions, these depth charts do a decent job of looking at what might actually happen should a player go down. Take a look at the Indians, for example. Brandon Moss won’t be on the bench waiting for Carlos Santana to be hurt, but if Santana is out of the lineup, it’s most likely Moss that will step in.

We can’t use counting stats to compare the starter to the backup, that should be obvious. Since defense is still an important part of the discussion, Wins Above Replacement is a good framework for us. Let’s pro-rate everyone’s WAR to 600 plate appearances so they are on the same footing. We used decimal points with the projected WAR just because we have to — there’d be a lot of backups with zeroes otherwise.

Now all we have to do is subtract the backup’s WAR/600 from the starter’s number, and we’ll get a list of the least replaceable players in baseball. Let’s group them by the number of wins their team would lose if they had to start the backup all season.

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Last week, Kiley McDaniel published his write-up of the Milwaukee Brewers farm system, marking the 25th installment of his “Evaluating the Prospects” series. Once he makes it through the five teams left on the table, he’ll be publishing his ranking of all thirty teams’ farm systems. In anticipation of this release, I thought it would be interesting to create an organizational ranking based exclusively on KATOH — my prospect projection system. The methodology for making this list seems pretty obvious: Simply add up all of the KATOH projections for the players on each team. In practice, however, this isn’t nearly as straightforward as it sounds.

First, I had to decide what to do with players who appeared in only a small number of games. For example, Carlos Rodon — the White Sox top prospect — receives a projection of 7.9 WAR through age-28. That projection seems pretty reasonable for Rodon, but it’s only based on 95 batters faced over 21 innings. That  sample’s not nearly large enough to mean much of anything.

To address this problem, I decided to only consider players who logged at least 200 plate appearances last season (or 200 batters faced for pitchers). This inevitably means that some big-name prospects (like Rodon) wind up being excluded, but there’s really no other way to go about it. KATOH projections are based on 2014 stats, and for guys who only appeared in a few games, the 2014 stats are almost meaningless.

There’s also the issue of knowing the affiliations for thousands of minor league players. My database of 2014 stats includes each player’s organization from the 2014 season, but a lot has changed since then. It would be easy enough to account for the players who were traded, but what about the hundreds of nondescript minor league free agents who changed organizations over the winter? It would be futile to try to figure out where each one ended up.

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Most people know Daniel Norris as the bearded guy who lives out of his VW van. Despite the fact that he prefers the coast instead of down by the river, it’s still a pretty unique background, and that’s not all: Norris also happens to throw baseballs, and do it exceptionally well. Those two descriptions don’t find a confluence often, so the media attention is not unexpected, but it’s also not unwarranted: as one of the Blue Jays’ top prospects by projected WAR for 2015, Norris has expectations — the sort of expectations and hopes organizations put on promising young left-handed pitchers.

In truth, we might not even be talking about Daniel Norris this soon if it weren’t for another young Blue Jays phenom, Marcus Stroman, who will miss all of 2015 with a torn ACL. Stroman’s injury left a huge whole in the rotation, and with everyone moving up one rung on the ladder, the final spot was left up for grabs. Marco Estrada and Norris have been seen as the favorites during the spring up until this point, but it now sounds like the job is all but locked up for the young lefty. Because of that recent news, and because of his great prospect status, he warrants a closer look from us.

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What do we have here? For an explanation of this series, please read this introductory post. As noted in that introduction, the data below is a hybrid projection of the ZIPS and Steamer systems, with playing time determined through depth charts created by our team of authors. The rankings are based on aggregate projected WAR for each team at a given position.

Yes, we know WAR is imperfect and there is more to player value than is wrapped up in that single projection, but for the purposes of talking about a team’s strengths and weaknesses, it is a useful tool. Also, the author writing this post did not move your team down ten spots in order to make you angry. We don’t hate your team. I promise.

As we kick off the 2015 Positional Power Rankings with catchers, let’s start with a chart of the projected WAR totals, and…

…and good lord, Giants and Diamondbacks, for two entirely different reasons.

Immediately obvious: Buster Posey isn’t just the best catcher in baseball, he’s the best by a considerable amount. Also equally obvious: It’s going to be a really, really long season in Arizona. In between, you’ve got some pretty clear tiers of 4-6 teams apiece, and that’s far more important than the actual rankings themselves. After the Giants, the next 10 teams break down easily into two blocks, and then beyond that, starting with the Mets at No. 12, there’s a soft decline from “acceptable” to “poor” to, well, the Diamondbacks.

Remember, please, that there’s just not a lot of meaning in tenths of a point of WAR, so while (for example) we have the Mets and Rays separated by nine spots, they’re only 0.4 WAR from one another. Remember, also, that our WAR formula doesn’t currently account for pitch framing, which has been pretty well acknowledged here and elsewhere as being a real thing that exists. You’ll just need to mentally account for additions (or demerits) for those catchers well-known to be valued (or avoided) based on that skill. Read the rest of this entry »

Travis Snider is a breakout candidate. Sound familiar? He’s owned the label for years, and maybe – just maybe – this will be the season he finally explodes. It’s not implausible. Somehow, Snider is still just 27 years old.

Skeptics will surely scoff at the idea, but the 2006 first-round pick feels ready to come into his own. Acquired by the Orioles in the off-season, the former Toronto and Pittsburgh outfielder is settling into his swing after nearly a decade of trying to reinvent the wheel.

‘I think I’ve had about eight different swings in eight years,” Snider told me on Friday. “In the last two years, I’ve been working toward recreating the same swing as much as possible.

“It’s about trying to create a consistent swing through the zone that can cover pitches in different quadrants, and not just be a low-ball hitter, or an inside hitter, or an outside hitter. Understanding, and being able to adjust to, the way pitchers are attacking you is often more important than mechanics.”

Mechanically, Snider said he’s concentrating on allowing his hips to clear and his hands to flow through the zone. He cited Miguel Cabrera as a hitter who can generate torque with his lower half, thus allowing his top half to uncoil. Snider admits to sometimes falling into the habit of trying to use every muscle in his body instead of taking a smooth, effortless swing. Read the rest of this entry »

The Orioles are projected to have the seventh-best offense this season, and they had the seventh-best offense last season. Yet looking at the offenses projected to be better and slightly worse than the Orioles reveals something interesting about Baltimore, and how you can take it one of two ways. We’ll get to that part later.

First, let’s go through and examine just how many players on each team are projected to have a positive and negative batting runs above average.
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I don’t have to be talked into writing posts about Dellin Betances. If I just supplied 10 consecutive GIFs of his fastball followed by his breaking ball, we’d probably all walk away happy (don’t worry, there will be plenty of GIFs). It’s special when a pitcher comes along and dominates major league hitters with just two pitches. It’s something to be celebrated. Yes, Betances has had a tough spring so far compared to his 2014 performance (a four inning sample size will do that), but there’s no denying the leap he took last year in regard to control that elevated his game to an elite level.

Our 2015 projections have him regressing a bit in terms of that control, but that’s bound to happen when a player shows such vast improvement in one year over past chronic issues. However, this isn’t an article discussing his projections for this coming year, though they are stellar. Today, we’re going to go over Betances’ repertoire, then try to find contemporary comparisons for one of his pitches. That’s hard to do given the quality of the offerings he has and the numbers he puts up, but we’re going to try anyway. Why are Betances’ two pitches so successful, and who has a curveball that moves like his? Let’s find out.

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Over the last 40 seasons, there have been 752 player seasons where a reliever pitched at least eighty innings out of the bullpen and averaged at least 1 1/3 innings pitched per appearances. Last year was the first and only season of the last 40 where not a single player met that criteria. Increased reliever specialization and larger bullpens have minimized the long reliever, and those who have been given the long reliever role tend to be the low man in the bullpen hierarchy. That was not always the case, and the decreased offensive environment could be a good opportunity to reintroduce the good long reliever to baseball.

In the not too distant past, long relievers were a regular fixture on teams. Relievers making regular appearances longer than two innings has always been a rarity, but some teams had relievers truly earning the the title of long relievers. From 1975-2014, just 110 relievers pitched at least 80 innings and averaged more than two innings per appearance, but those seasons have all but disappeared in the last two decades.

Strike seasons of 1981 and 1994 are omitted
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