An interesting thing about Corey Kluber is that he just won the 2014 American League Cy Young Award, narrowly edging out Felix Hernandez. Though it was virtually impossible to separate the two, statistically, there was no arguing with Kluber’s win — he was at least the co-best pitcher in his league. Another interesting thing about Corey Kluber is that, in the minors, he was never highly thought of. Everybody in the minor leagues has talent, but no one would argue with the statement that Kluber has basically come out of nowhere. He’s overachieved, relative to his earlier expectations.

Kluber’s not alone. I mean, at his talent level, Kluber is almost alone, but he’s not the only current pitcher to overachieve. Dallas Keuchel was never highly regarded. Neither was Tanner Roark, who I think has taken everybody by surprise. Jose Quintana wasn’t much of a prospect, and neither was Doug Fister, and neither was Tyson Ross. I could keep going. You know Matt Shoemaker? Shoemaker, for the Angels, was outstanding. His Triple-A ERA is over 5.

But we shouldn’t pretend like this is strictly a pitching phenomenon. One of the most valuable players of the last few years has been Josh Donaldson, and Donaldson is a little like a hitting version of Kluber. Donaldson just took a slightly more complicated route to astonishing stardom. Ben Zobrist has been hugely valuable, and didn’t come up as a top prospect. Jonathan Lucroy wasn’t a big-time prospect. Jose Bautista and Yan Gomes have been different sorts of surprises. Baseball players will surprise you. You’ve heard this before, in different forms.

So this brings us to one question: do we observe more surprising starting pitchers, or do we observe more surprising position players? The other day at FanGraphs, I analyzed how many good players had previously been considered good prospects. I based it on Wins Above Replacement (WAR) and the Baseball America top-100 prospect lists. To keep things simple, that was my definition: a “good prospect” was any prospect who had ever appeared in a top-100. It’s not perfect, but it’ll do. Afterward, someone asked for a breakdown between hitters and pitchers. I was also curious, and this is that breakdown.

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Despite television deals with ESPN, FOX, and TBS that will net Major League Baseball an average of $1.5 billion per year over the next years, franchises derive most of their revenue locally. Ticket sales, advertising, naming rights, local radio broadcasting rights, and local television rights constitute the majority of each team’s revenue. In recent years, new local television deals have generated incredible revenues with one-third of all teams now having signed deals worth at least one billion dollars. The deals have raised a question: When will this television rights bubble burst and send these skyrocketing guarantees back to earth? The Arizona Diamondbacks new television deal, believed to be in excess of one billion dollars, partly answers the question: Not yet.

Skepticism regarding the continual rise of local television contracts is justified. There have been indications recently that all is not well for the regional sports networks. The Los Angeles Dodgers generated news when they signed a contract worth more than $8 billion two years ago. Unfortunately for the Dodgers, that contract is still generating news as Time Warner Cable has been unable to successfully negotiate with the rest of the television providers in the Los Angeles area, leaving 70% of LA homes without the ability to watch Dodgers games on television. The San Diego Padres have had trouble getting their product in local homes before reaching a deal prior to the start of last season, and Houston’s deal has been a disaster as they try to charge high subscriber prices to watch a team they had no plans to make successful for several seasons.

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Earlier this week, lead prospect analyst Kiley McDaniel published our top 200 prospect list. Later that day, I made my FanGraphs debut looking at how the players on that list graded out according to KATOH — my prospect projection system. Now I’m back with more stats-based prospect analysis only this time, I’ve compiled a list of the top 200 minor leaguers ranked by their KATOH projections.

Just to be clear, this list isn’t intended to compete with or undermine Kiley’s rankings in any way. KATOH isn’t meant to be the the final word on prospect evaluation, but should instead be used as a tool to complement the work done by Kiley and other prospect experts. What follows is simply the output of a (flawed) statistical model that’s been sorted from largest to smallest without any sort of adjustment. But while it may be an imperfect exercise, ranking players exclusively by their KATOH projections makes it easy to spot instances where the stats disagree with the general scouting consensus. Even if, as they likely are in many cases, the scouts turn out to be correct, it’s still worth highlighting the players for which there is a significant difference. Some of the guys below are going to prove scouts wrong; figuring out which is the tricky part.

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In yesterday’s post, I focused on the decrease in winter signings over the past few years. As pitchers and catchers trickle into camp a new signing season begins and that season has seen a considerable increase in activity over the past few years. From 2008-2011 teams averaged around 9 contract extensions in the period starting now and ending near the beginning of June. In the last three years, the average for spring signings has been nearly 13 with a high of 16 in 2012.

From 2008-2011, 35 players signed during the spring, compared to 47 during the winter. Those numbers have reversed in recent seasons. The three-year spring period from 2012-2014 has already seen 38 players sign contract extensions compared with 22 winter signings from 2012-2015. Just like with the winter signings, the service time of the spring signers has not changed over the years. The players that sign in the period between late February and early June skew younger, but the service time has remained consistent, 2.4 from 2008-2011 and 2.5 from 2012-2014.

It is possible that the increased number of signings in the spring is having an effect on future winters. A large number of spring signings in 2012 and 2014 preceded very meager numbers the following winters. The spring signers are younger than their winter counterparts. Increasing the number of young players signing in the spring could bring down the number of players available to sign in the following winters. Of the 38 players who have signed extensions the past three springs, 33 had under five years of service time and 24 were below three years of service time. Many of those players might have been candidates for extensions in later periods had they not signed early in their careers, but it does not appear to have affected the number of quality free agents.
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Each year, it seems, there’s a hot new Cuban making an impact in the big leagues. In 2011, we got our first full season of Aroldis Chapman. In 2012, it was Yoenis Cespedes in Oakland. The next year, Jose Fernandez and Yasiel Puig finished 1-2 for the NL Rookie of the Year. In 2014, Jose Abreu won the AL version for the White Sox, while the Red Sox and Cubs got brief late looks at Rusney Castillo and Jorge Soler, respectively. This winter, we’ve already seen the Diamondbacks pick up Yoan Lopez and Yasmany Tomas, and we’re currently waiting to see just how mind-blowing the bonuses Yoan Moncada and Hector Olivera (among others) will wring out of rich, talent-hungry teams.

Cubans in baseball aren’t exactly a new phenomenon, of course. According to Baseball-Reference’s Play Index, 185 Cuban-born players have taken at least one plate appearance since the start of the 20^th century. That includes some very well-known names like Luis Tiant, Rafael Palmeiro, Jose Canseco, and Tony Perez, as well as more recent non-elite starter types including Adeiny Hechavarria, Yunel Escobar, Yasmani Grandal, and Yonder Alonso. And also, Yuniesky Betancourt!

Much has been written, here and elsewhere, about the reasons why. Baseball keeps restricting access to spend on young, non-union talent. Cuba’s evolving political situation has made it something of an untapped pipeline. The consistent recent jackpots on these largely unknown Cuban players – remember, when Puig was signed, the reaction was largely, “wait, who?” – have made teams more willing to jump into the market, and the prices, it seem, keep going up.

That will be the trend until one of these players busts, that is, and that’s generally been the feeling around these investments. They keep working, so why not? Which is fine, except that we’ve already seen two relatively expensive Cuban imports well on their way down that “this isn’t going to work” path, and I’m not talking about Dayan Viciedo or Yunesky Maya.  I’m talking about Dodger infielders Alex Guerrero and Erisbel Arruebarrena, who combined to receive $53 million from the team last winter, and who currently couldn’t possibly find themselves less in the team’s plans. Read the rest of this entry »

Usually you see this the other way around — how many good prospects became good players? It’s the foundation of any worthwhile prospect analysis, and based on the research, what we indeed observe is that higher-ranking prospects have worked out better than lower-ranking prospects, thereby granting validity to the prospect rankings themselves. If we didn’t see any differences in future performance, we’d have to think, welp, someone’s doing something wrong.

But when you focus just on the future of prospects, you ignore a massive part of the player pool — those players who weren’t considered good prospects. Now, professional baseball is selective for good baseball players. The majors are even more selective. Everyone with a job in baseball has a job because he has some amount of promise, and there’s no such thing as an untalented big-leaguer. But there are the guys who had a lot of hype, and there are the guys the hype never touched. So we return to the headline question: how many good players were good prospects?

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Maybe it was all a setup for the headline, but in Anthony Fenech’s piece about Justin Verlander and his effort to return to glory — titled “Tigers’ Verlander ‘way ahead of the curve’ early this spring” — the pitcher points to the current state of his curveball as a sign of early success.

“I’ve seen a pretty dramatic difference,” he said. “The curveball seems to be a lot better already than it was at any point last year.”

Catcher Bryan Holaday, who stood in for the final few pitches of the session, agreed, saying the spin was nice and tight.

Verlander notices the difference, especially in the break, from last year, when his breaking pitches, “Neither one of those pitches was good at all last year. They didn’t have the same bite.”

Much of the previous analysis of Verlander’s poor year focused on his fastball velocity and fading release points. And the pitcher himself referenced those factors a bit when, later in the piece, he admits that he was underweight due to last year’s offseason surgery on his core.

But this might be the first time we’ve heard about the curve missing tightness.

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On February 17, 2011, Jose Bautista signed a five-year, $65 million extension with the Toronto Blue Jays. Bautista’s contract was one of a dozen similar extensions signed by players that Winter. From the 2008 to 2011, at least 11 players signed extensions similar to Bautista’s every winter (Extensions between end of the postseason and February 17th, using MLB Trade Rumors Extension Tracker). At the time, Bautista had fewer than six years of service time, agreed to a contract exceeding two years, and the contract bought out at least one free agent season. Offseason extensions are a fairly common practice, but in recent years, they have become increasingly rare. Since 2011, no offseason has seen double-digit extensions. Only Giancarlo Stanton, Kyle Seager, Wade Miley, and Devin Mesoraco signed similar contracts this Winter, matching a recent low of four from two offseasons ago.

While the number of extensions has gone down considerably in winter, the costs associated with these contracts have not experienced the same downturn. From 2008 to 2011, 47 Winter extensions cost teams $1.66 billion while the last four winters have seen teams sign extensions totalling $1.51 billion in guaranteed money to just 22 players. $150 million dollars is hardly a small amount, but the number of deals dropped by more than half, causing the cost to sign an individual extension with a player to go up considerably.

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Navigate to Ron Wolforth’s website and you’ll immediately see this.

Normally I’m hesitant to engage with places that approach me like I’m watching the pitching equivalent of QVC at 4 a.m., but Ron Wolforth has the track record to make bold statements: he’s worked with Trevor Bauer since the first round pick was 14 years old, and most recently he took Scott Kazmir from out of baseball to pumping mid-90’s gas for Cleveland in the span of a year. That second achievement is what we’re going to pay attention to today, because the news came down this past week that the Oakland Athletics signed Barry Zito to a minor league deal with an invitation to spring training. Why is this of specific interest to us, you may ask? Because Zito has been working with Wolforth for the past four months to completely revamp his delivery and regain his lost velocity. The most recent reports say Zito is throwing in the high-80’s after the training, with Wolforth guaranteeing 90 MPH by “April or May”.

Ron Wolforth is more scientist than scout – the type of outsider that the baseball establishment views with a sideways look. His reputation improved with Bauer getting drafted in the first round in 2011 (he even secured an invitation to spring training with Cleveland in 2013 after Bauer was traded from the Diamondbacks), but the feeling you get is that he’s still not completely trusted – that his methods are out of keeping with the entrenched mentality of the game’s established coaches. The same resistance to intellectual approaches that kept sabermetrics out of the game (and still does in some circles) is part of what is keeping Wolforth out of it.

That’s where Barry Zito comes in. There are differences in Kazmir and Zito’s cases: there is the age difference — which is nearly five years — and the fact that Kazmir is a power pitcher while Zito is known more for relying on secondary offerings. The fact remains, however, that both have one major thing in common: they were out of baseball, struggling with an almost total loss of fastball velocity, and turned to Ron Wolforth for help. Kazmir was written off; he regained almost ten MPH and made it back. Can Zito follow the same path? Read the rest of this entry »

Throughout the early stages of the calendar year, I’ve been taking a pre-spring training look at each of the six MLB divisions from a slightly different perspective. Utilizing batted ball data, we’re going back over the 2014 season, attempting to calculate each club’s true talent level. Making adjustments for teams’ offensive and defensive K and BB rates and team defense, each team’s true talent 2014 won-lost record is calculated. Then, we’ll take a look at the current Steamer projections for 2015, evaluate key player comings and goings, and determine whether clubs are constructed to be able to handle the inevitable pitfalls along the way that could render such projections irrelevant. The next to last installment of this series features the NL West. Read the rest of this entry »