Play the player-profile game every day this week at 11:00am 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 earlier today, the newest iteration of FanGraphs+ is now available for the price of a cup of coffee that’s roughly twice as expensive as it ought to be.

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+, worth its weight in whichever precious metal one cares to name.

Today’s entry comes to us by way of the Sarris himself.

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Let’s ignore, for a moment, James Shields‘ actual major-league track record in what one might consider to be big games. We’ve all had fun at his expense, and the playoff ERA over 5 makes the nickname seem ironic. What’s interesting is that Shields has pitched a lot of big games in the first place. He debuted for a team that had never won more than 70 games, and the (Devil) Rays shortly blossomed into something of a second-tier powerhouse. And when Shields got dealt, he got dealt to a team that hadn’t been good since 1994.

The idea was to return the Royals to glory, and after a promising first year, in the second Shields got to start twice in the World Series. Now Shields has joined the Padres, signing for a four-year term, and the Padres’ hope is similar to what the Royals were looking to do: the organization wants to graduate from irrelevance. The Padres haven’t even been sufficiently relevant to be a laughingstock, but a whirlwind offseason has put the team on everyone’s radar, and in that way signing Shields is in large part symbolic. You don’t sign Big Game James unless you figure he’s going to start some. These Padres ain’t the Padres no more. Not the way you knew them.

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Matt Kemp, Wil Myers, Justin Upton, and now James Shields. No team has had a splashier off-season than the San Diego Padres, as new GM A.J. Preller overhauled the team’s roster to ensure that the 2015 Padres would actually be able to score some runs. This team now has an unmistakable identity — they might as well call themselves the San Diego Right-Handed Sluggers — and nearly as much star power as any team in the league. The organization is now a far cry from one whose best players were Rene Rivera and Seth Smith.

The Padres are now undoubtedly interesting. Are they going to be good, though? I remain a bit skeptical. As Mike noted this morning, their infield is still kind of dreadful, and while their outfield will hit a lot of home runs, they’re primarily one dimensional players who aren’t as valuable as their reputations. The pitching staff is deep — especially if Brandon Morrow and Josh Johnson figure out how to stay healthy — but not as strong up front as the other contenders in the NL.

Mostly, I see a lot of solid contributors, but very few players who are likely to be among the best players in the league. The Padres have imported three big names (and a former big time prospect) but I’m not sure any of them are going to perform like All-Stars in 2015. Given what Petco Park is likely to do to the raw numbers of Upton and Kemp, Joaquin Benoit might actually still be the team’s most likely All-Star representative.

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As the new baseball year starts, we celebrate at FanGraphs by compiling an annual of sorts; we call it FanGraphs+. An equal mix of fantasy analysis and real world breakdowns, our articles in this annual take advantage some of our best resources here at FanGraphs in order to scout baseball players, research topics, and, in general, think about baseball as best we can.

For the non-fantasy player, our 1200 player capsules can serve as gentle prods in the direction of the most interesting aspects of a player’s production. Or for a tickle on a rainy spring day. You don’t have to be interested in fantasy baseball to wonder how the clustering of a pitcher’s release point is correlated to their command peripherals, or how changing a team’s on base percentage affects the individual hitters in the lineup. Just be a baseball geek and you’ll love Dan Farnsworth’s breakdowns of a few key hitters and their mechanics at the plate — remember, this is the man that spotted the changes J.D. Martinez made that launched the Tiger into stardom.

But if you are a fantasy player, there’s gobs here for you at FanGraphs+. We hope you enjoy! It’ll only cost you $5.99 to receive access to the following:

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Last week, I had the pleasure of being present at a panel of baseball people talking about 2015’s big stories, and one of the questions was, “are the Padres contenders?” Some said yes. Others said no. Most of the discussion centered on the rebuilt outfield of Justin Upton, Matt Kemp, and Wil Myers, mainly about how that could possibly come together on defense. Now, we’re hearing about how they may yet be the team that comes away with James Shields, who would inject some stability into what is a talented-but-fragile rotation.

Jeff will have more on that signing later, but obviously: Shields will help! Adding him makes for a rotation front four of Shields, Andrew Cashner, Ian Kennedy, and Tyson Ross, which is potentially pretty impressive. More innings from Shields means fewer that you need to rely upon from Odrisamer Despaigne, Josh Johnson and Brandon Morrow, and that’s a good thing. Signing Shields and trading for Cole Hamels would help! Lots of things, likely and less so, would help. Here’s what I had wanted to ask that panel, though, especially those who believe that the reworked Padres are now contenders: How many people can actually name all four Padres starting infielders?

Obviously there’s a bit of hyperbole there, but the point is that this isn’t a question you want to be asking about a team that wants to be included in the October conversation. If you didn’t follow the team closely, would you be able to come up with Yonder Alonso, Jedd Gyorko, Alexi Amarista, and Will Middlebrooks off the top of your head? Because this group, despite returning only one player who took more than 50% of the plate appearances at the same position last season, doesn’t look good. It’s actually a considerable issue, if you look at Steamer’s 2015 projections combined with our curated depth chart playing time inputs:

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Burke Badenhop signed with the Reds yesterday, and he’ll bring more than a sinker with him to Cincinnati. The 32-year-old (as of today) righty will arrive with a sabermetric suitcase stuffed with theories and thoughts.

Badenhop has an economics degree and a track record of pitching well in a variety of relief roles. Usage and value were on his mind the last time we spoke.

“I’ve been thinking about something you might term bullpen clustering,” said Badenhop. “With the randomness of a baseball season, there is going to be an ebb and a flow to the wins a team ends up with, and what those wins look like. How you use your bullpen is going to vary by how close the game is.

“Say you’re a reliever and pitch in 12 games in a month. In those 12, are you throwing five games out of seven in the beginning, and then not pitching for a week? A long winning streak is good, but it can also be taxing if all the games are close and you are using the same high leverage guys on a nightly basis. A blowout or a complete game can be huge.”

Badenhop made a career-high 70 appearances last year and threw 70-and-two-thirds innings. I asked how hard it would be to take on an even heavier workload. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve got Coors Field on the mind. And while usually I’m able to flit from one subject to another — probably too easily, to be honest — when I think about Coors, it tends to stick, because the Rockies are one of baseball’s greatest experiments and we still aren’t quite sure what to make of them or what to make of baseball at altitude. The game that’s played within Coors Field is recognizably baseball, of that there’s no question, but it’s the oddest brand of baseball that exists in the major leagues, so it’s fascinating to consider as many angles as is possible. Just what is it really like to play there?

For this post, I want to examine pitch selection. And not just for pitch-selection’s sake; this should, in theory, reflect what effects people think Coors has on pitching. There’s a thought out there that Coors is bad news for breaking balls. What would we expect, then? A reduction in breaking-ball rate in Colorado, because teams and pitchers aren’t idiots. Let’s say Pitcher B has an optimal mix of 60% fastballs, 20% breaking balls, and 20% offspeed pitches. Let’s say he senses that he doesn’t have a good breaking pitch on a particular day. Then we might expect, I don’t know, 65% fastballs, 10% breaking balls, and 25% offspeed pitches. That’s the theory. So what do we see in Colorado? That’s what these big giant tables are for.

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Blackouts suck. We don’t like them. This isn’t news. What is news is that Major League Baseball is driving hard to get the ball rolling on lifting blackouts, potentially for good. Yesterday, Maury Brown laid out an idea for this over at Forbes. And as it turns out, the league is trying to execute just such a plan.

The plan, in case you don’t feel like clicking both links, involve the league getting its biggest media partner, FOX, on board with streaming games. Brown notes that 37 percent of all games last year were shown via FOX regional sports networks (or RSNs). That’s a pretty huge chunk. Comcast checks in next at 17 percent. That gets you up to 54 percent, and then it is drips and drabs from there. While a big network like FOX might be able to unilaterally make these moves, there is going to be a couple of sticking points. The first, as Brown notes, is who exactly gets to stream these games? Obviously MLB wants the exclusive rights, since they have a decade-old product that people know and love. FOX doesn’t appear to see it that way, and it’s hard to blame them. That really rolls up into a second sticking point, which is cost.

In thinking about this the other day, I postulated on Twitter about the creation of a Super Premium MLB.tv package. The theory goes, essentially, that you would add to the normal $130 cost of an MLB.tv Premium account in order to get a service that would solve your blackout problems.

The Plan

Each cable company charges a carriage fee for carrying it. We know that last year, NESN — which is owned jointly by the owners of the Boston Red Sox and Bruins (though mostly by the Red Sox) — charged as much as $4.22 for its carriage fee. As a long-running RSN, with a very dedicated fan base, that is probably close to the top of the food chain. ESPN, which charges the largest carriage fee, charges less than two dollars more than that.

Continuing to use NESN as the example, when we multiply that over 12 months — 12 rather than six since NESN charges the carriage fee every month and not just during baseball season — that comes out to a high end of $50.64. Let’s call it $50 for simplicity sake. So, the plan would be to say to MLB.tv subscribers who live in the Red Sox territory, and can presumably get NESN as part of their basic cable package, that if you want a version of MLB.tv with no Red Sox games blacked out, you can get that for $180. During commercials, instead of the six or seven MLB.tv ads you normally get ’til you have them memorized, you would get the normal NESN ads, with the MLB.tv ads spliced in every now and then in place of a NESN house ad (which, as any Red Sox fan will tell you, are plentiful).

Doing it this way satisfies a number of things. First, NESN doesn’t need to lose money on carriage fees. That’s huge, since carriage fees are essentially the way these networks stay in business. Second, it wouldn’t hurt ad rates during games — the customer base would be the same, they’d just be watching on different mediums. Theoretically, that shouldn’t change much, except maybe ads with small words in them would need to be rethought if they want to impact customers watching on smaller mobile devices. Not a huge deal, as advertisers should already be taking this sort of scale into account. It would also allow MLB.tv to recover a modicum of revenue from the few ads that they sell each season (not that they need that money, or can’t find a way to get it in some other fashion).

The best-case scenario for the RSNs, of course, would be to have that loyal consumer who not only buys the super-premium MLB.tv package, but also doesn’t cancel their cable package. Going back to NESN, they show a lot more than Red Sox games. In fact, the actual Red Sox games only make up a tiny portion of their programming each year. Less than half, certainly. They also show Bruins games, Hockey East college hockey games, and a number of other live sporting events, as well as long-running shows like Charlie Moore Outdoors. So, there is a chance that a lot of consumers, even if given the option to purchase this super premium MLB.tv package and get rid of cable, wouldn’t actually get rid of cable. That’d be sweet, because then the RSN would be double dipping the carriage fee, and could maintain their customer base for ads that run during all the non-Red Sox game-times. And if the NHL or NBA worked out similar deals, RSNs could be triple or even quadruple dipping, depending on the teams that play on that particular RSN.

Drawbacks

There are a number of drawbacks. The first is the aforementioned ad rates. In talking to Nathaniel Grow, our resident sports business expert, he mentioned that the RSNs probably aren’t keen on being able to say that their customer base has shrunken dramatically for all those times when a live baseball game isn’t being played. So that’d be an issue, and the number one reason why the cable companies or RSNs might force you to keep your cable package as a part of any agreement between MLB and FOX. That would not alleviate the problem for people who are blacked out of a specific team without having the opportunity to watch them on their local cable package.

Another drawback is that this plan is, as Homer Simpson would say, needlessly complicated from MLB and MLB Advanced Media’s perspective. While it might be peachy keen for the RSNs to sit back and collect stacks on stacks on stacks on stacks, MLB would be put in the position of expending energy on a product that sees the revenue split between it and its partners. And what of the total cost? Sure, Red Sox fans could justifiable have to pay an extra $50, but what about Astros fans, whose RSN hasn’t been able to get on the air and whose viewership is going to be much lower given all the tanking the Astros have done the last few years. In other words, should the package cost a different amount for each team? Or should they set a price based on the most expensive market and go from there? There’s no easy answer, and there would undoubtedly be some headache-inducing accounting issues, at the very least. For RSNs that are owned by a team, it wouldn’t be as big of an issue, since the league already has relationships with the teams, but it would still require a lot of logistical thinking.

Still another issue is for the fans with overlap, be it geographic or otherwise. A couple of examples. Say you live in New York, and are accustomed to watching the Mets and Yankees on TV. Now under this plan, if you want stream both blackout free, you can, but you would be in the position of having to buy a super-super-premium package, where you pay to eliminate blackout restirctions for both teams. Is that fair? Or, say you live in the Chicago area, and you as a Cubs fan married a White Sox fan. Do you want to pay for the privilege to stream both teams blackout free? Perhaps there is a compromise, but that seems unlikely.

The extreme version of this, of course, is areas such as Las Vegas and Iowa, where as many as six teams are blacked out. Do you pay to alleviate all six blackout restrictions, in a package that could end up being close to $400, or do you simply pick the one team you want to see and live with the blackouts in other areas? That is, of course, if MLB allows such options. Which, as we mentioned above, just might not be in the cards.

…

Baseball fans don’t like blackouts, or anything else that restricts their access to the game, and these sometimes artificial restrictions are as old as the game itself. That is unfortunate. What is encouraging though is that the league is working on the problem, and has generally been at the forefront of digital streaming in sports — so much so that their technology is used as the “backbone” when companies and leagues make streaming products. So while we may have to pay for the privilege, hopefully the blackout restrictions will be solved soon, say the next five-10 years. Whether it’s a super premium package like what I have suggested here or something else, the initial solution probably will be messy. There are a lot of cable companies involved and a lot of money at stake, and so a clean solution seems unlikely right from the jump. And of course, none of this addresses what is the ultimate problem — the territory rights and how they can be resolved. But that is for another day. This reported agreement between MLB and FOX is a nice first step. Hopefully we’ll see more steps soon.

Dayan Viciedo was supposed to be good. In retrospect, we probably should have known better. He now finds himself a free agent, and the question is whether or not there is a team for him.

In his initial signing story back in 2008, there is a lot of excitement. It is intimated that the South Siders traded Nick Swisher and Javier Vazquez in order to make room for Viciedo. That seems like a stretch, but we can say that the team did some planning in order to get them there. Just before the chess moves are mentioned, the article also casually mentions — in the seventh paragraph — that the White Sox would like him “drop some weight.” He was already at 246 lbs., and they wanted him to get down to 230.

Despite the risks (like that he swings at everything), which Baseball America noted in their 2009 capsule on him, his debut was hotly anticipated. As Marc Hulet detailed in that September, 2009 piece I just linked to, Viciedo had hype. As a 20-year-old Cuban refugee playing his first ball stateside in Double-A, you can see why. Alas, he didn’t do much in that 2009 season. In 2010 though, he stepped up his slugging, from .391 in Double-A in 2009 to .493 in 2010 in Triple-A. Not a bad jump, and ever since his full-season debut in 2012, he’s been able to bop. Not at an elite level, but at an above-league average level:

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Did you know the Rockies tend to put up big home and road splits? Of course you did. The Rockies are the very most important example of why park effects matter. Also, the most obvious. Over the past decade, the Rockies rank first in baseball in total runs scored at home, by more than 200. Over the same period, the Rockies rank last in baseball in total runs scored away from home, by more than 100. Hitting in Coors is easy! Hitting not in Coors is hard. Or so the Rockies make it look, at least.

Coors Field just does strange things to baseball. It’s not an unsolvable problem, and it might not necessarily be a problem, but, it’s something. Again, over a decade, the Rockies rank 14th in winning percentage at home. Meanwhile, they rank 28th in winning percentage on the road. If you observe the following table, you’ll note that the Rockies are exceptional in this way. They experience either a home-field advantage, a road-field disadvantage, or both.

It’s the Rockies, then the Pirates, some distance away. It’s pretty obvious the Rockies haven’t been as comfortable on the road as they have been in Colorado. Every team plays worse in other places, but the Rockies perform especially so, and because this is so consistent year to year, that causes people to theorize. Everyone wants to figure out why the Rockies have been so lousy away from home. Answer that, and maybe one could find a solution.

I remember reading, many many years ago, about a proposed Coors Field hangover. This was supposed to affect the bats, and the idea was that, upon reaching sea level, Rockies hitters would have to get re-accustomed to seeing pitches break normally. That is, in Colorado, pitches don’t move like they do in other places, and Rockies players get used to that. So when they go on the road, normal movement looks like abnormal movement, and then it takes time to adjust. Time that the Rockies don’t always have. I remember thinking the evidence was pretty compelling. Unfortunately I don’t have a link, but what I do have is a re-examination. I wanted to look at this for myself. Have Rockies hitters just taken a few days to get used to conventional pitching on road trips?

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