Yesterday, Major League Baseball officially declared Yoan Moncada — perhaps the most coveted player to defect from Cuba in the last few years — free to sign with any Major League club. The bidding is expected to be intense, with the Yankees, Red Sox, and Dodgers tabbed as the early favorites. Given the tax that will be levied on on the team that signs Moncada, the high-revenue clubs are at a significant advantage, and Moncada’s signing will likely be used as evidence of the need for an international draft.

In his conversation with Ken Rosenthal last week, Commissioner Manfred publicly supported such an idea, stating that his “long haul goal” would be “to get to an international draft.” With the big money clubs blowing up the league’s system for signing young international free agents, an overhaul of the process is inevitable. But while the draft has become the de facto method for sports leagues to distribute incoming young talent — under the guise of competitive balance, but with the primary goal of holding down acquisition costs — I’d like to suggest that Major League Baseball go the other direction instead.

The logistics of incorporating international players into a draft are problematic, which is why baseball settled on its current recommended bonus system instead. And there is merit to the structure that the league created; if you have various spending allocations in place, you don’t actually need to go through the process of draft positions. The best players want the most money, so by simply creating a system where some teams have more money to spend than others, you can funnel incoming talent to certain types of teams even without handing out specific draft positions.

The problem lies in the execution of MLB’s international system, as the bonus pools are akin to speed limits instead of actual barriers. Because teams have calculated that Moncada’s talent is worthy of paying the penalties associated with blowing their budgets out of the water, the limits are functionally useless. But if the limits were firm caps, and teams were unable to exceed their pool allocations, then we wouldn’t be facing a situation where the richest teams in baseball were flexing their financial muscles to add an elite talent while the have-nots sit on the sidelines wishing for a more level playing field.

So what if there was no draft? Instead, what if we just lumped all new players — foreign or domestic — into a single acquisition system where each player was free to sigh with the team of their choice, only with firm spending caps in place to ensure that young talent flows more freely to clubs who can’t compete on Major League payroll alone? In other words, a team’s talent acquisition budget would be inversely tied to their Major League payroll; the more you spend on big leaguers, the less you get to spend on prospects, and vice versa.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

When we talk about the Philadelphia Phillies around here these days, it’s rarely in a positive light. It’s usually about wondering what they’re doing with Cole Hamels, or how Ryan Howard is completely unmovable, or just generally wondering how many years it might take to return the team to relevance. They’ve brought this on themselves with their direction — or lack of it — over the past few years. When you look at the fact that they have six different positions ranking in the bottom three in our 2015 projections, you really start to understand just how bad this team is going to be.

But it’s not all bad. It can’t be. Even the Phillies are going to have a bright spot. Since I’m in a charitable mood, and since there’s very little happening in baseball right now, and since we haven’t really talked about him yet, let’s focus today on Ken Giles, who very well might be the team’s closer this year should Jonathan Papelbon get moved.

Let’s start with some small sample sizes to output a ranking that is technically accurate, yet obviously flawed: Read the rest of this entry »

Now that football’s officially over for a while, countless sports fans are going to look ahead to the baseball season, with 2015 promising to be The Year Of Mookie Betts. This comes on the heels of 2014, which at one time promised to be The Year Of Billy Hamilton. And, to be fair, it was in a sense The Half-Year Of Billy Hamilton, but then Hamilton fell on harder times, losing a Rookie-of-the-Year race he once had all but locked up. Hamilton is now presumably older and presumably wiser, and he remains a player of unusual intrigue, along with being an important player for a Reds team that steadfastly refuses to tear down and start over.

Hamilton, naturally, has things to improve on. Every player in baseball has things to improve on — Clayton Kershaw has things to improve on — but Hamilton’s things are bigger than Kershaw’s things. Kershaw, for example, might want to polish his changeup a little more. Or maybe not. It’ll cross his mind. Hamilton, meanwhile, wants to not suck at hitting. His own manager has some ideas.

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After a classic ending to football season featuring an absurdly controversial decision — it’s indeed a travesty that Falcor was passed over for Puppy Bowl MVP — the sporting nation prepares to turn its eyes to baseball. Amid the oncoming rush of “best shape of my life” stories common to the February sports pages, one high-end free agent, James Shields, remains unsigned. He’s certain to be locked up soon, but almost as certain to land a financial guarantee much less than he was seeking just a couple months ago. Who is James Shields, what is his value and whose uniform might he be donning in the coming weeks? Read the rest of this entry »

There are all sorts of prescriptions for a good changeup. We talk about things like ‘velocity gap’ and ’tilt’ and ‘fade’ when we talk about how good a changeup will be. But what about the curveball? Can we spot a good one coming?

We can use our Arsenal Score work to identify good curveballs in general, just as we used to find bad changeups a couple weeks ago. Basically, by weighting grounders and whiffs on a pitch, we can assign it a score based on those easy-to-identify and important outcomes.

According to this metric, here are the best curves thrown at least 100 times last year.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

This is all the excuse I need:

#Rockies sign SS Omar Quintanilla, a utility INF for 2005-09 teams, and re-sign veteran RH reliever Rafael Betancourt

— Matt Eddy (@MattEddyBA) January 30, 2015

I’ve developed a very minor obsession with Rafael Betancourt. If you’ve paid close attention over the years, you might’ve noticed, but I wouldn’t blame you for not paying close attention whenever I write about Rafael Betancourt. But here I am doing it again, because I don’t think I’ve talked about this for more than two years, and each time I do it, I have a little more data. Do you like fun facts? Betancourt comes with a couple awesome fun facts. They’re almost totally irrelevant, in the grand scheme of things, but then, what isn’t?

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As I write this on the afternoon of February 1, the Diamondbacks catching depth chart looks like this:

#31 Diamondbacks

That’s a position for a major league baseball team! A not particularly good or even interesting team, but a major league team nonetheless. Look at it. Bask in it. If the concept of “replacement level” needed a human face, well, here’s a bunch of them. With barely more than two weeks before pitchers report to begin throwing to those catchers, that’s what the Diamondbacks look like they’re going to have. It’s been nearly two months since Miguel Montero was dealt to the Cubs, and everyone assumed that another move would be coming, some way to ensure that the team would have at least a single dependable catcher to make it through the season.

Despite some rumors, nothing’s happened. Dioner Navarro is still a Blue Jay, despite Russell Martin. Welington Castillo, seemingly made redundant by Montero and David Ross joining the Cubs, is still in Chicago, and if a deal was going to be there, it seems like it would have been there within the Montero deal. Carlos Corporan is a Ranger. Geovany Soto went to the White Sox. A ton of other catchers — Ryan Hanigan, Rene Rivera, Yasmani Grandal, Derek Norris, Hank Conger, etc. — found themselves on the move. The top remaining free agent catcher is probably 35-year-old Gerald Laird, which is to say, there’s no longer any remaining free agent catchers.Update: Of course they did.

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Last week, people talked a lot about shifts. People talked about shifts because baseball’s new commissioner talked about shifts, and baseball’s new commissioner talked about shifts because shifts are up and runs are down. Now, it’s been mostly demonstrated that shifts are far from the main reason why run scoring is on the decline, but we all can at least agree that shift usage has skyrocketed. Last year there were almost six times as many shifts employed as there were in 2011. That’s a huge increase in not very much time. Seeing arrangements like this is becoming more common, and these days it’s a surprise when a pull-hitting slugger doesn’t face an adjusted infield.

With shifts on the rise as a defensive strategy, we’ve tried to figure out ways to counter the strategy with a different one at the plate. Ben Lindbergh wrote an excellent recurring column at Baseball Prospectus, detailing bunts against the shift. That’s the obvious bit — it seems almost too easy to get a free single when the third baseman is hugging second. Somewhat famously, bunts against the shift remain unusual. But there’s also the matter of hitting the other way. If a batter starts to spray the ball more, it could effectively undo the shift, and some players have talked about emphasizing an all-fields approach. So, out of curiosity, have we seen any progress? Have hitters demonstrated a better ability to go the other way?

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If you’re a Rays fan, you want Mark Sappington to make the team this year. If you’re a member of the Tampa Bay media, you really want Mark Sappington to make the team. Trust me on this one.

A 24-year-old right-hander from Peculiar, Missouri (yep), Sappington is 6-foot-5, throws 100 mph, and supplies quips at a mile a minute. Think Justin Masterson, smiling, sans a sinker.

The Rays acquired the happy-go-lucky hurler from the Angels in November – in the middle of the Arizona Fall League season – for Cesar Ramos. Going strictly by the numbers, it was a curious deal. A fifth-round pick in 2012 out of Rockhurst University, Sappington was 4-11, 6.04 this year between high-A Inland Empire and Double-A Arkansas.

I asked Sappington why the Rays were interested.

“Shoot, you got me,” responded the big righty. “I did kind of find my groove after moving into the bullpen, where I was able to harness all of my energy into one inning. I get pretty amped up on the mound. I get in the zone. I get in the Z.”

His mid-season move to the pen resulted in more mid-90s velocity readings. There were a few 98s and 99s, and Sappington told me he hit 100 in the AFL. Command is his biggest issue. He said it’s a matter of “getting through the baseball,” and when his timing is down he can throw the ball where he wants to. When it’s not, “That’s when there’s a little craziness.”

Mike Foltynewicz told me this summer that his control improves when he dials down from 100 to 94-95. Mentioning that to Sappington elicited admiration. Read the rest of this entry »

Last time, I looked at which MLB teams do and don’t pursue players born in the five most prolific non-draft-eligible countries (the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Cuba, Mexico, and Japan). Part of the goal there was to identify which of the 30 MLB organizations are the most aggressive and/or progressive in terms of finding the best talent they possibly can o’er the entire globe.

Of course, looking at how teams approach well-established springs of baseball talent like the Dominican is hardly the only way to identify whether or not a team is looking for new and novel opportunities outside of the Nifty Fifty. In the past twenty or so years, there are five other countries who — while they have not produced a similar total number of MLB players as the aforementioned Established Five — are producing more and more MLB-caliber players as time goes on: Australia, Colombia, Curacao, South Korea, and Taiwan. Teams who sign the most players from these locales are, at the very least, in admirable pursuit of new and unexpected sources of that rare gem: an MLB-caliber player.

This time I will only be tallying which team signed which player as an international free agents — I will not be tallying other MLB teams that each player eventually played for during their careers stateside. Players who were born in these countries but who were eventually drafted in the rookie draft are excluded from the count. I used a lot of help from Baseball Reference and Baseball Almanac. Here we go!

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