Here’s your chance to vote for the 2015 SABR Analytics Conference Research Awards winners.

The SABR Analytics Conference Research Awards will recognize baseball researchers who have completed the best work of original analysis or commentary during the preceding calendar year. Nominations were solicited by representatives from SABR, Baseball Prospectus, FanGraphs, The Hardball Times, and Beyond the Box Score.

To read any of the finalists, click on the link below. Scroll down to cast your vote.

Contemporary Baseball Analysis

• Russell Carleton, “N=1,” Baseball Prospectus 2014: The Essential Guide to the 2014 Season, January 2014.
• Jay Jaffe, “The Case of the Disappearing Slugger: Where Did MLB’s Power Go?” SI.com, September 3, 2014.
• Harry Pavlidis and Dan Brooks, “Framing and Blocking Pitches: A Regressed, Probabilistic Model,” Baseball Prospectus, March 3, 2014.
• Jon Roegele, “The Effects of Pitch Sequencing,” The Hardball Times, November 24, 2014.
• Jeff Sullivan, “Alex Gordon Barely Had a Chance,” FanGraphs, October 30, 2014.

Contemporary Baseball Commentary

• Grant Brisbee, “Rumors, Rumors, Every Where, Nor Any Drop to Drink,” SB Nation, December 15, 2014.
• Dave Cameron, “If Someone Has A Good Way To Evaluate Managers, Let Us Know,” FoxSports.com, September 5, 2014.
• Lewie Pollis, “If You Build It: Rethinking the Market for Major League Baseball Front Office Personnel,” Brown University, senior honors thesis, Spring 2014.
• Eno Sarris, “Learning the Language of the Clubhouse,” The Hardball Times, March 13, 2014.
• Jason Turbow, “The Essence of Velocity: The Pitching Theory That Could Revolutionize Baseball, If Only The Sport Would Embrace It,” SB Nation, June 18, 2014.

Historical Analysis/Commentary

• Frank Jackson, “Shots Fired But Not Heard ‘Round the World,” The Hardball Times, October 7, 2014.
• Erik Malinowski, “Swing Away: The Untold Story of the First Home Run Derby,” FoxSports.com, July 10, 2014.
• Sam Miller, “Baseball’s Seven Wonders: Kerry Wood’s 20-K Game,” Baseball Prospectus, March 18, 2014.
• Bryan Soderholm-Difatte, “The 1914 Stallings Platoon: Assessing Execution, Impact, and Strategic Philosophy,” SABR Baseball Research Journal, Fall 2014.
• Steve Treder, “The Strikeout Ascendant (and What Should Be Done About It),” The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2014.

Voting will be open through 11:59 p.m. MST on Monday, February 16, 2015. Details and criteria for each category can be found here. Only one work per author was considered as a finalist.

Mobile or Safari users, click here to access the survey

Results will be announced and presented at the fourth annual SABR Analytics Conference, March 12-14, 2015, at the Hyatt Regency Phoenix in Phoenix, Arizona. Learn more or register for the conference at SABR.org/analytics.

A month ago, we put out an open call for applications for a writing position here on FanGraphs. The responses were overwhelming, which is why it took us nearly a month to sort through the hundreds of received resumes and conduct as many interviews as we could. In the end, what was intended to be one open position turned into five new people joining the team, as we simply had too many good candidates to turn away.

If you were one of those who applied, I highly encourage you to keep writing and prove that we missed the boat by not hiring you this time around. The Community Blog is a great place to get noticed, as four of the five people joining the writing staff had previously published work there, and we’ve hired a handful of others directly after noticing their contributions to the Community Blog previously. We’re really excited about the five new people joining our staff, but we know many of you would be great contributors as well, so don’t give up.

With that said, let me briefly introduce the five new writers whose work will be debuting on these pages very soon.

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What follows is a brief excerpt from the latest edition of FanGraphs Audio featuring Kiley McDaniel, and also the approximate moment when I started conducting research for this post and subsequently stopped giving my undivided attention to the aforementioned podcast:

A very literal transcript, for those unable to listen to the embedded audio for whatever reason:

Carson Cistulli: Starling Marte is really — uh, is so good.

Kiley McDaniel: How good is he?! (sarcastically)

CC: Well, he’s good! He also has a strange profile — you’re probably aware of this. But, his plate discipline is still not particularly well-developed. But he probably has, at least, one of the best batted ball profiles of any major leaguer at this point.

KM: I remember when I was in Pittsburgh, the sort of — well, I don’t want to speak for the organization — but the question I was asking is, is he the guy that can walk very little and still, like, has the bat-to-ball skills to make it work? And, y’know, hit .280 with a 4% walk rate or whatever his numbers are. And I watched him in Altoona — he was in Altoona the year I was there — and I thought yes, but I wasn’t willing to bet tens of millions of dollars on him being, like, one of the very few guys that can do that. Yeah, he’s definitely a unique fit.

So now you know where I’m coming from.
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As we move tantalizingly close to pitchers and catchers reporting dates, with many players already descending on spring training complexes in Arizona and Florida, the New York Mets are beginning to draw a little buzz. It’s understandable, but there’s just one problem — those pesky projection systems. While the three systems that I regularly reference don’t bury the Mets, they aren’t exactly pushing them into any sort of pole position — be it for the National League East or Wild Card. That’s not to say the Mets can’t get back to October for the first time since 2006, but much will depend on which version of the starting rotation they get.

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It’s become well-known that minor league players earn meager salaries. Little attention has been paid to the earnings of the instructors responsible for their development. They’re not getting rich either.

Salaries at the big league level are fairly generous. Some managers make seven figures. Hitting and pitching coaches are paid anywhere from $150,000 to $350,000, with a select few earning far more. Bench coaches earn between $150,000-$250,000. Third base coaches are around $130,000-$140,000. First base coaches are in the $100,000-$110,000 range. Bullpen coaches bring home roughly $90,000.

It’s a different story down on the farm.

Minor league coaches get paychecks year round – unlike minor league players — but that doesn’t mean the majority can afford to spend their winters on the golf course. One baseball lifer I talked to said he managed in the minors for over a decade and never made more than $42,000 a year. He worked camps and substitute taught in the off-season to help make ends meet. Others manage winter ball in Mexico or Venezuela to earn extra money.

Not everybody I spoke to would get specific with salaries, but a front office type told me his club pays minor league coaches and managers a minimum of $35,000. Another put that number at $30,000. Multiple sources estimated the high end to be in the $150,000-$175,00 range, with long-time managers and coordinators typically at the top of the pay scale.

Player development staff salaries vary by organization. One contact cited the Marlins as a team that pays poorly, and the Braves as one of the more generous. Qualifying that he doesn’t know the exact difference in dollars – he’s with another club – he said, “That’s why Miami has a lot of turnover and Atlanta doesn’t.” Read the rest of this entry »

Some weeks ago, I was tooling around on the Baseball Prospectus PITCHf/x leaderboards, and one thing led to another, and I noticed that Marcus Stroman had developed a sinker that looked and worked an awful lot like Roy Halladay’s sinker. It was a pitch that just came to Stroman during the course of the 2014 season, and he debuted it early in the second half, and this is the FanGraphs post that resulted. Blue Jays fans derived a modest thrill from seeing Stroman compared to one of the best franchise pitchers ever.

This week, I’ve run some posts calculating certain pitch comps. I’ve developed a method that’s different from the method I used when I compared Stroman and Halladay, and here, you can see, for example, the best comps for Sonny Gray’s curveball. I thought today I’d put Marcus Stroman under the microscope. Stroman is a genuine six-pitch pitcher, and here’s his second-half breakdown, by usage, according to Brooks Baseball:

• Sinker: 32%
• Four-seam: 23%
• Curve: 16%
• Cutter: 15%
• Slider: 8%
• Changeup: 6%

For each of the six pitches, I calculated the best comps, out of right-handed starting pitchers during the PITCHf/x era, spanning 2008 – 2014. The results are absurd. Marcus Stroman has got some weapons. Consider him excessively armed and absolutely terrifying.

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At times, last season felt particularly rough for young hitters just getting their feet wet. There were problems in Boston, where, for example, neither Jackie Bradley nor Xander Bogaerts performed anywhere near the level of expectation. In St. Louis, the late Oscar Taveras had trouble getting into a groove and earning a regular job. Javier Baez mostly looked like a mess for Chicago, and for all the hype, Gregory Polanco eventually came up to join Pittsburgh and underwhelmed. Nick Castellanos was fine, but nothing revelatory. Billy Hamilton had a terrible second half. Jake Marisnick didn’t hit, and Jon Singleton didn’t hit, and so on and so forth. There’s nothing quite like top prospect hype, and there’s nothing quite like watching a top prospect struggle to hit at the highest level, after all the anticipation.

In each case, there was just anecdotal evidence, but put enough anecdotal evidence together, and you have a story. For at least several months, people have been discussing the theory that there’s a widening gap between the major leagues and everywhere else. Alex Speier is currently writing about this at the Boston Globe. There are reasons to believe this to be true; there are elements to playing in the majors that haven’t always been present. Most importantly, there’s more information than ever, so young players don’t show up as unknowns. Reports get generated, and reports get spread, and, faster than ever before, opponents are able to zone in on a given hitter’s weaknesses.

The feeling is that the majors have never been this hard for rookies. The feeling is that rookie hitters are facing an uphill battle, and hitting a baseball is no walk in the park even at the best of times, where you’re facing Kyle Davies in Colorado. There are feelings, and then there’s information. Let’s see what we can do with this. How have the majors lately been treating rookie bats?

Read the rest at Just A Bit Outside.

Yesterday, I covered the moves of the winter that I liked the most. Today, we look at the moves that I like less, though I’ll note that this year simply doesn’t have the collection of clear mistakes that last year’s list had. While there were some transactions this winter that probably won’t work out that well, the risk associated with a lot of these moves is significantly lower than the ones we saw a year ago. No team really screwed themselves this off-season the same way the Rangers did last year with their Prince Fielder/Shin-Soo Choo acquisitions, and the free agent overpays seem to be getting smaller each year.

So, in reality, most of these moves are more suboptimal than outright disasters. Perhaps there were better alternatives each case, but the downside potential is often limited here, and a good amount of these will probably end up not having a major negative impact on their clubs.

In that spirit, no (dis)honorable mentions this time around; let’s just get straight to the moves that I didn’t particularly care for this off-season.

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Play the player-profile game every day this week at 11:15am ET. We’re giving away a free annual subscription to FanGraphs+ to the first reader who guesses correctly the identity of that day’s mystery player. (Limit one copy per customer).

As Eno Sarris announced Monday, the newest iteration of FanGraphs+ is now available for purchase with money. As in recent years, we’re celebrating the release of FG+ by way of the player-profile game.

Said game is easy: the author offers the text of an actual player profile from the newest iteration of FG+, being careful to omit any proper names that might reveal the identity of the player in question. The reader, in turn, attempts to identify the player using only the details provided in the profile.

First reader to guess correctly (in the comments section below) gets a free annual subscription to FanGraphs+.

Today’s entry was composed, once again, by FG+ editor Eno Sarris.

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“Tom Seaver, he had the whole package. Power, deception, command, everything,” said Giants pitching coach Dave Righetti last week before FanFest. We’d been talking about tipping pitches, and deception, but any time you hear about an icon in the same sentence as Yusmeiro Petit, you put down your recording device and start looking at some moving images.

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