This offseason has been so full of thrills and spills it’s been easy to forget that two of the FanGraphs Crowd’s four most-valued free agents went unsigned well into 2015, with Max Scherzer waiting to become a Washington National until January 19. We don’t yet know why Scherzer waited so long to sign, or why the almost-as-valuable James Shields has waited even longer. Perhaps they have been sitting with fingers crossed in hopes that they would receive a substantial offer from a team other than the Houston Astros. Maybe they just want to take their time making such a big life decision.

Regardless of their reasons for remaining on the free agent market for so long, we’re just about reaching that point in the offseason when Pitchers & Catchers Reporting is visible on the horizon’s crest. One of the perks of being a phenomenal major league player on the level of Scherzer and Shields is that you are afforded comparatively ironclad job security, especially compared to their journeymen peers, many of whom have to annually shuttle their families to new locales across the nation.

Read the rest of this entry »

When I first dreamt this post up, I figured the title would somehow include the phrase, “Billy Hamilton Effect.” That was before I discovered Eno already wrote a post called “Todd Frazier and the Billy Hamilton Effect” back in July. Point is, there are a lot of unusual ways in which Billy Hamilton affects the game, because Billy Hamilton is an unusual player. We know this because stealing 155 bases in a single season is not usual, and neither is this.

I wrote a post about Frazier last week, examining how he was able to steal 20 bases despite possessing what appears to be just mediocre speed. In that post, I noted that three of Frazier’s 20 steals “were essentially catcher’s indifference.” Catchers indifferences are typically insignificant, but these three were noteworthy because they all happened for the same reason. At the time, I didn’t get into the details because I didn’t want to spoil the premise of this piece, but after I saw the first one, I knew I had to write a post about it.
Read the rest of this entry »

Sunday was quite a day for the hardcore sports fan. An iconic NFL playoff game, with the Packers somehow losing the unlosable game to the Seahawks, took place while the baseball hot stove restarted for what promises to be a very active next month. News began to trickle out that Max Scherzer was about to sign with Washington Nationals for lots of years and dollars. Really, when one surveyed the free-agent landscape way back in November, this is one many saw coming; another union of Scott Boras and the Nationals. Just like that, one season segues into the next. Sure, we’ve got a big football game to watch in a couple of weeks, but it’s baseball season again. In the short term, this clearly makes an already fearsome team even more so, but how will this move impact player and club over the long haul? Read the rest of this entry »

At first glance, Monday’s Yovani Gallardo trade probably seems more significant than it really is. Gallardo is a recognizable name, someone who’s pitched important innings, but he is no longer what he once looked like, and he’s a year away from free agency. Luis Sardinas is a real prospect, recently ranked No. 7 in the Rangers’ system by Baseball America, and he has big-league experience, yet his offensive ceiling is very low. Corey Knebel is another real prospect, with his own big-league experience, yet he’s a reliever with control issues and an elbow injury. And while Marcos Diplan has what they call a live arm, he almost couldn’t possibly be further from the bigs, for a baseball-ing professional. This feels like the Rangers just made a major upgrade to a middling staff, but in reality, Gallardo is something around league-average, and he could be gone by November.

So in that sense, it’s a bit underwhelming. The Rangers did need rotation help, and they got it, but they presumably still aren’t going to the playoffs. And the Brewers have made room in the rotation for Jimmy Nelson, but now they have weaker depth, unless they turn around and make a play for, say, James Shields or Jordan Zimmermann. But there is one part of this that I find particularly fascinating. Yovani Gallardo is changing teams, and Yovani Gallardo is changing leagues, but maybe most importantly, Yovani Gallardo is changing catchers.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s no secret the Nationals have been having a lot of conversations behind the scenes. For much of the offseason, there’ve been rumors the team was open to moving guys like Ian Desmond and Jordan Zimmermann. As hard as it was before to see the Nationals deliberately making themselves worse in the short-term to get better in the future, now the situation has changed — with Max Scherzer on board, the Nationals could subtract and still come out ahead. And with a new ace in the rotation for a while, it’s possible to see a different name on the move: Stephen Strasburg.

No, nothing is on the verge of happening. No, the Nationals don’t need to trade Strasburg, or anybody. They might well elect to go ahead and steamroll through the NL East, preparing for a deep postseason run with an October roster that’s absolutely stacked. On the other hand, there are things like this:

Hearing #Nats RHP Stephen Strasburg is very much available and both sides believe it is time to move on. #MLB

— John Perrotto (@JPerrotto) January 19, 2015

Odds are, Strasburg won’t get moved. But the odds he does get moved aren’t 0%, or even close to that low. So it’s worth wondering: just how high is Stephen Strasburg’s trade value?

Read the rest of this entry »

Both the Astros and the Cubs are in the process of a long-term build, yes. And in third baseman Luis Valbuena, starting pitcher Dan Straily, and outfielder Dexter Fowler, they’re moving three players that average close to 28 years old. Not everything these teams do needs to be focused on the far-term, though. With the second wild card, this year can be as important as any other.

When the Astros today sent Fowler to the Cubs for Valbuena and Straily, both teams traded from current surpluses to fill current needs.

The Cubs have infielders. With Starlin Castro, Javier Baez, Arismendy Alcantara, Luis Valbuena, Kris Bryant, and Addison Russell, they had an infield twice over. Once you factor in bust rates, that’s probably a good way to go about things. Since some in the community think the six-foot-five Kris Bryant is headed to the corner outfield, and Alcantara was already playing in the outfield, they might be have been able to fill both the infield and outfield eventually.

Read the rest of this entry »

The pro-changeup argument is unassailable. Still, there are many many pitchers out there that can’t manage the pitch. And not every single one of them is destined for the bullpen. There is an alternative.

Pitchers who throw the changeup a lot may have the best injury outcomes. Based on research done by Jeff Zimmerman, below is a table that shows the disabled list percentages for starters based on their favorite pitch. Looks like there’s something healthy about the changeup. For each bucket, we tried to use cutoffs that led to similar samples, so the slider-heavy pitchers (starters that use the slider more than 30% of the time) throw more sliders than the change-up pitchers (starters that use the change more than 20% of the time) throw changes, but that’s just because there are fewer heavy-change pitchers.

Beyond health, there are plenty of reasons to promote the changeup as many organizations do. They bust platoon splits by offering a pitch that breaks in a different direction than sliders and curves, at least. And they go slower than sliders and faster than curves, so they also offer a change of pace.

But there is one pitch that can do many of these things almost as well as the straight change. The roundhouse curve.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

Scott Boras has done it again. After months of what appeared to be mild interest from the clubs one would assume would be in the bidding for the best free agent on the market, Boras found an unexpected bidder with $200 million burning a hole in their pockets. Or, more precisely, $210 million in this case, as the Nationals joined the club of teams paying $30 million per year for premium talent.

Or, at least, they did on paper. Scherzer signed a seven year contract, and in exchange for pitching for them for those seven years, the Nationals have agreed to pay him $210 million in salary. Divide $210 million by seven years and you get $30 million in AAV, which is how this deal will be reported. But because of how this deal was structured, it’s not really $30 million per year.

Instead, the Nationals will pay Scherzer $15 million per season, but do so for 14 years; essentially, they’ve deferred half of each season’s salary seven years into the future. Effectively, they signed Scherzer for $105 million over the seven years that he’ll pitch for them, and then they’ll pay him the next $105 million after the contract ends, making this the most deferred money contract in baseball history.

Teams have been deferring money in contracts forever — the most famous case is Bobby Bonilla’s deal with the Mets that has them paying him through the 2035 season — but never before have we seen this size of a deferral, and so this deal serves as a nice reminder that the payment terms of a deal can have an impact on the actual value of contract. And in this case, the significant deferral has a pretty big impact.

Read the rest of this entry »

Mets fans aren’t happy. I live in New York City, so perhaps I’m just overexposed to this, or maybe it’s because I was surrounded in close proximity by disappointed Mets fans at last week’s Pitch Talks event, or that I keep reading about fans trying to crowdsource a “sell the team” billboard, but the anger is clear. After six straight losing seasons, with multiple young pitching prospects ready now, with Matt Harvey on his way back and the Braves and Phillies on the way down, the sum of the off-season’s shopping has been a confusing contract for 36-year-old qualifying offer recipient Michael Cuddyer and the addition of John Mayberry for the bench.

That means no trade of an excess starter (though Dillon Gee is expected to go soon), no help for the bullpen, and, seemingly most egregious of all, no shortstop. Right now, the team is insisting they’ll be fine with 23-year-old Wilmer Flores, who may or may not be able to handle the position defensively, backed up by 25-year-old Ruben Tejada, who is generally despised by fans.

On Friday, one local beat writer vocalized the prevailing opinion:

The Wilpons obviously are too broke to find and pay a real shortstop, too cash-poor to have built on the signing of Michael Cuddyer.

No one is defending the mistakes of owner Fred Wilpon — other than MLB itself, since Wilpon was recently inexplicably named as the chairman of baseball’s finance committee (!) — because a New York team with less than $100 million on the books, even after arbitration is factored in, is obscene. But how true is that in regards to shortstop? Was there really something the Mets could have or should have done there? And is the current shortstop situation as dire as it seems? Let’s dig into that. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s maybe the simplest way to put this: a season ago, by his peripherals, Tanner Roark was about a three-win pitcher. By his actual runs allowed, he was about a five-win pitcher. He actually finished with a higher RA9-WAR than Jordan Zimmermann and Doug Fister and a lot of other guys too. At present, the Nationals will have to pitch Roark out of the bullpen, because the rotation doesn’t have space.

We knew the Max Scherzer negotiations were going to go on for a while. We knew that, eventually, Scherzer would sign somewhere, for a whole lot of years and something vaguely in the neighborhood of $200 million. He wasn’t going to wait until after the start of spring training, so it stood to reason Scherzer was nearing a decision even several days ago. The only question, really, was where he’d end up. People talked about the Tigers. People talked about the Cardinals. The actual team is the Nationals. And from the looks of things, that Nationals team might be a super-team.

Read the rest of this entry »