We often hear the Cardinals being described as one of the best organizations in baseball for their ability to consistently put a winning product on the field, and that’s a reputation that they’ve earned though consistent excellence. It never seems that the Tigers get talked about in quite the same way, but perhaps that’s unfair. In the nine seasons since and including 2006, when the two met in the World Series, the Tigers have won 790 games. The Cardinals have won 789. The Tigers have made five playoff trips and suffered one losing season; the Cardinals have made six playoff trips and suffered one losing season.

If there’s a difference, maybe it’s that the Cardinals have two rings in that span while the Tigers haven’t yet made it to the top, or maybe we just perceive them differently because the Tigers were absolutely dreadful for most of the two decades preceding their recent run. But the real difference is that the Cardinals seem to continually reinforce themselves from a deep and talented farm system, while the Tigers have continually made win-now moves to add more talent around their iconic duo of Miguel Cabrera and Justin Verlander.

Needless to say, that’s a considerable difference in team-building philosophies, and it’s not a cycle that can last forever. We’re already seeing cracks in the core due to injuries and aging, and we haven’t seen a lot of coming from within to help support that. That’s not to say the Tigers are done, of course; they’ve won four division titles in a row, and they may very well win a fifth in 2015, even though their offseason was more than a little uneven (more on that in a minute). But more and more you start to wonder how long the window remains open, and while that’s not an unfair question — I asked this same question back in late 2013, after the Tigers lost to the Red Sox in the ALCS — what I want to know is, what happens here when the window closes? Read the rest of this entry »

There in the Giants clubhouse, behind the stars you’ve heard everything about, are two rare players. They’ve made a circuit that very few players have made before. After surviving the gauntlet, they took some time to pass on what they learned with their travels East.

New Giants’ third baseman Casey McGehee was pretty sure his Major League Baseball career was over when he packed his bags for Sendai in Japan. “Going over there, that was one of the toughest parts, I knew the chances of coming back weren’t great,” the player said before FanFest last week.

But both McGehee and Ryan Vogelsong made it back, and to the same team no less. Of the 167 foreigners that have played in Nippon Professional Baseball since 1998, Brian Cartwright found that only 11 position players have managed more than 100 plate appearances back in America, and only Julio Franco and McGehee managed as much as 300 in one season. Only nine pitchers pitched for more than one season after returning from Japan.

Or: nobody has come back from Japan since 1998 and become a full-time starter like McGehee, and only Eric Stults, Colby Lewis, and Ryan Vogelsong have returned and managed more than 100 innings twice in the big leagues.

Though the game itself isn’t very different there — they bunt a little more, swing a little more, and play for one run more often — it could be that the trip over has that sense of finality to it that you hear from McGehee. You don’t usually come back and become an important part of a good team.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

This morning, Kiley McDaniel released the FanGraphs Top 200 Prospects list, providing a remarkable source of information. We’re obviously biased, but Kiley’s doing great work with the prospect information provided here on the site. One of my favorite things he’s doing is working to break down the barriers of the ordinal ranked list, providing Future Value grades that allow for more reasonable tiers of prospects, so that less time is spent arguing over whether a particular player should be #23 or #28 on a particular list.

So, I wanted to see if I could come up with a piece that would complement the information he’s presenting, using the value of having additional information beyond just ordinal ranking. To that end, I took latest prospect valuation estimates from Kevin Creagh and Steve DiMiceli, and attempted to convert their tiered valuation estimations into numbers based on the Future Value calculations Kiley attached to each prospect on his list.

As I noted when we discussed the prospect valuation work a few months ago, the data is fascinating, but also slightly problematic for this purpose. For instance, here’s the table of values for prospect tiers according to Creagh and DiMiceli.

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The FIP statistic was created because of the inherent shortcomings of ERA; so much that was reflected in the traditional pitchers’ statistic was totally out of their control, and the new metric credited and debited hurlers for that which they did. As it turns out, FIP isn’t perfect either, as not all types of batted-ball contract are created equal. Still, FIP is preferable to ERA in just about every way imaginable, and is a much better anchor upon which to base pitcher evaluations. In any given year, however, there are pitchers who are much better (or worse) than both their ERA and FIP, once you adjust for quality of batted ball contact allowed. Today, let’s look at the two ERA title-qualifying AL starters who were most significantly better than both their ERA and FIP in 2014; Drew Hutchison and Jake Odorizzi. Read the rest of this entry »

I can pinpoint the exact moment when I started to understand and appreciate the potential impact of pitching coaches. I mean, I always had some suspicions, and I was one of those people really interested in Rick Peterson back in the day, but, in March of 2006, the Mariners traded Matt Thornton to the White Sox for Joe Borchard. You have to understand what Matt Thornton was at the time — though he had a big arm, he’d been infuriating with Seattle, incapable of throwing consecutive strikes. I remember being overjoyed about his departure; he’d walked one of every six batters, proving himself completely and utterly unreliable. A big arm without any control? There are a million of those. They just about never figure it out.

Instantly, Thornton figured it out. Because Don Cooper figured it out. Cooper had figured it out a couple years earlier.

 The left-hander always possessed a gifted arm, with a fastball in the mid 90s, but also has battled control issues. Thornton mentioned that Cooper noticed the flaw two years ago, while watching game film on him, at a time when the White Sox were interested in acquiring the one-time first-round draft pick from Seattle.

“I kidded him by saying, ‘You could have sent me a little note or something,'” said Thornton with a laugh. “It may have been a little different for me.”

Thornton, as a Mariner, threw 59% strikes. His first year with the White Sox, he threw 67% strikes. He’s maintained the same rate ever since, and though Thornton’s career is just about up, he’s 38 years old, and for a time he was a premier lefty reliever. He’s totaled more than $20 million in career salary. If it weren’t for Don Cooper, who knows what would’ve happened with Thornton’s professional path? Would he still be set for life? Would he be a realtor?

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This morning, Kiley McDaniel rolled out his much-anticipated FanGraphs Top 200 prospect List. If you haven’t had a chance to look through it yet, I strongly recommend that you do so. As a complement to Kiley’s rankings, I’ll be taking a quick look at how the players he ranked grade out according to KATOH — my methodology for projecting prospects’ career trajectories using solely minor league statistics.

I’ll start with a bit of a primer on the system. In sum, KATOH uses a series of statistical regressions that look at a prospect’s age and league-adjusted minor league stats. After taking all of this data into account, it spits out probabilities that a prospect will reach certain WAR thresholds through age 28. If you’re interested in a more nitty-gritty, technical explanation of how KATOH works, feel free to check out my pieces on KATOH for hitters and pitchers over at The Hardball Times. Read the rest of this entry »

I’m never really sure how much to review recent articles. Last week I wrote a lot about pitch comps. Compared Henderson Alvarez‘s changeup to Felix Hernandez‘s changeup. Compared guys to certain signature pitches like Aroldis Chapman‘s fastball and Clayton Kershaw‘s slider. Wound up with this Marcus Stroman absurdity, in which Stroman is flattered by some of the strongest comps in the game. The basic idea: Stroman’s regular fastball shares the same traits with Johnny Cueto‘s. His sinker shares the same traits with Roy Halladay‘s. His curveball shares the same traits with Jose Fernandez’s. And so on. The whole idea was comparing pitches to other pitches based on average velocity, horizontal movement, and vertical movement. It’s a little informative, and sometimes a lot of fun.

I wanted to put together this follow-up, which serves to caution you not to make too much of a good comp. There’s more that goes into a pitch than how it moves, and how fast it moves. There’s definitely more than that, when it comes to how a pitch works within a given repertoire of many pitches. And, our examples: Cole Hamels and J.A. Happ. Last week, when I ran some pitch comps, I found that Happ’s changeup compares the strongest with Hamels’ changeup. For one thing, we know Happ’s changeup isn’t as good as Hamels’ changeup. For another thing, it goes deeper than this.

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As the author has apparently had cause to mention here before, Apophatic [ap-a-FAT-ik] Theology is the method by which one endeavors to describe God by describing what God is not — the suggestion being that fewer persons and places and things belong to that latter category than the former.

Applied to something less substantial than an all-seeing and -knowing deity, however — like a human man, for example — apophasis [uh-PAW-fa-sis] naturally becomes a more time-consuming endeavor, on account of how human men are little more than walking husks of carbon consumed by vanity. Applied to the sort of very flawed human man who’s also the one composing this document, the process would become nearly infinite.

Which, what I mean to say is: among the many things I’m not, one of them is an expert in the field of college baseball. Accordingly, what follows ought not to be regarded as an attempt to analyze all collegiate baseball prospects. Instead, what I’ve done is merely to assemble — after having consumed the broadcasts of several games this weekend, read reports concerning others, and manipulated data from some of the top conferences — what I’ve done is to assemble a collection of five players whose performances this weekend were notable for one reason or another.

Here are some qualities which might contribute to a prospect’s notability for the purposes of this post:

• He appeared within Kiley McDaniel’s way-too-early draft rankings; or
• He played well relative to his age/level of competition; or
• Video is available for him from this weekend; or
• He possesses some other compelling feature.

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The original graphics and text omitted the Brewers, Cardinals, and Yankees. They have since been corrected.

If you’re on Twitter, you’ve probably noticed the current hashtag contest, #FaceofMLB, being run by MLB Network or the RBI Baseball advertising campaign. Social media has become an important platform that Major League Baseball teams use to communicate with their fans, especially during the off-season when there aren’t baseball games to watch or attend.  Twitter has also been touted for allowing teams or players to interact directly with fans, removing the need for an intermediary.  To measure that interaction, I gathered the timelines and favorited tweets from all 30 MLB clubs’ official Twitter accounts from November 1, 2014 until February 10, 2015 and ran an engagement analysis.

This particular analysis looks at how much effort each MLB team makes to interact with its fans, and not simply which team has the most followers. I’m looking at engagement three different ways: volume of tweets, media sharing and fan interaction. First, let’s look at volume of tweets.

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Tomorrow, we’ll be officially revealing our own version of the Top 100 prospects list that has become a staple of the baseball community. However, with more than 100 prospects receiving Future Value grades of 50 or higher, we decided to not arbitrarily cut off the list at 100 names, and ordered every prospect who achieved that FV score: 142 players in all. Because the Top 142 prospects sounds a little strange, however, I also included a secondary tier of unranked-but-still-listed prospects whose FVs fall on the higher side of 45; these are guys who weren’t too far off the list themselves, and in many cases, will be strong candidates for next year’s list.

So, tomorrow, we’ll unveil the FanGraphs Top 200 Prospect list. Today, though, I wanted to give you a little bit of background on how I arrived at these grades and rankings, as well as preemptively answering some questions that may arise about certain types of players.

Team Prospect Lists:
Rangers, Rockies, D’Backs, Twins, Astros
Cubs, Reds, Phillies, Rays, Mets
Padres, Marlins, Nationals, Red Sox, White Sox
Orioles, Yankees, Braves

Scouting Explained: Introduction, Hitting Pt 1 Pt 2 Pt 3 Pt 4 Pt 5 Pt 6

Cuban Coverage: Latest on Yoan Moncada and Latest on Four Notable Cubans

What The Tool Grades Mean

If you’re dropping into my minor league prospects rankings for the first time, thanks for coming, but there’s also a few things I should probably explain so that the list doesn’t look like gibberish to you. I use the 20-80 scouting scale, the same grading scale that pro scouts use to grade players at every level of baseball. It grades a player’s traditional tools — hit, hit for power, speed, fielding, throwing, each of a pitcher’s pitches, and his command — against major league average for each tool. Average is 50, above average is 55, below average is 45, plus is 60, plus-plus is 70 and 80 is just called 80 because it’s so rare and special that it doesn’t need another name; think Giancarlo Stanton‘s power, Billy Hamilton‘s speed, or Randy Johnson’s fastball. A 60 or better off-speed pitch is the standard for being called a “swing and miss” pitch; you need two 60 pitches and at least an average third pitch and command to be a #3 starter, for example.

If you want to go into further depth, then I’d suggest checking out the Scouting Explained links above, where I go into more detail about how scouts do what they do. These tool grades aren’t directly applicable to stats in every case — speed is just speed, not the ability to steal bases — but I go into much more detail on each player and project his potential big league numbers, his ETA to reach that level, a risk grade and more on the team prospect lists, linked to above and in each player’s capsule on the list. Since there are so many players that have tools that are 45 or 50, I use a + to denote 47.5 (fringe-average or fringy) and 52.5 (solid-average), or the half-grades between these most common grades, 45, 50 and 55.

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