A year ago, Ervin Santana was a free agent saddled with a qualifying offer. He was coming off a 2.9 WAR season, but he massively misread the market and his own worth, attempting to pitch teams on a deal that exceeded $100 million. Ultimately, he remained unsigned until March, when the Braves gave him the financial equivalent of the qualifying offer largely because injuries to Kris Medlen, Brandon Beachy and Mike Minor ruined Atlanta’s rotation depth.

As of this moment, Santana again is a free agent saddled with a qualifying offer. This time, he’s coming off a 2.8 WAR season. According to at least one report, he’s “seeking a five-year deal.” Assuming he’s not planning to take a pay cut in any of those years, that’s at least $75 million.

This all worked out terribly for Santana last year, when he said free agency “wasn’t what I expected, it was hard” and that he “[didn’t] know what the difference is” between himself and pitchers who landed massive deals. In part because of that, he parted ways with agent Bean Stringfellow. Santana’s outlook on free agency doesn’t appear to have changed at all. But has he? Is there any reason this will work out better this time around? Read the rest of this entry »

As a BBWAA member, I was privileged to be asked to vote on two awards this year; the NL Manager of the Year and the Most Valuable Player. As you just saw on MLB Network, Matt Williams was just named the winner, with Clint Hurdle finishing second and Bruce Bochy rounding out the top three. Below, I’ll list my ballot, as well as explain my line of thinking in how I approached the voting.

Before I get to the ballot, I feel like it’s necessary to state that, during the entire process, I felt a bit unqualified for the job. Evaluating player performance is tricky enough even with all the amount of information we have about their performance; with managers, we’re basically just guessing. We can speculate about things that we think matter, but we don’t really have much objective data to support these thoughts.

Often, we judge our opinions of a manager’s quality based on how well their in-game strategy lines up with the public research, but measuring a manager by how often he bunts or how he sets his line-up is like measuring a catcher solely based on how well he controls the running game. It matters, and there’s a point at which you’re too poor at that specific skill to qualify for the pool of candidates, but in-game strategy isn’t even a manager’s primary responsibility. And it’s pretty much the only thing we see.

So, in determining my vote for Manager of the Year, I honestly didn’t put a lot of weight on in-game strategy. Instead, I tried to focus on the leader-of-men part of the job, looking for candidates whose teams overcame some legitimate adversity, or who succeeded in accomplishing a difficult task. Isolating a manager’s impact on these results is near impossible from the information we have available, so I focused less on trying to figure out exactly how much they mattered, and looked for places where it seems reasonable to assume that another manager might not have been able to do as much with what they were given.

That said, there’s plenty of room for reasonable disagreements with my approach and my results. Feel free to think my picks are terrible. I won’t push back much, as they might be terrible. Maybe in 20 or 50 years, we’ll have a way to evaluate a manager’s impact, and we’ll learn that I got this all wrong. I tried not to, but I went in to the process knowing that evaluating the performance of a manager from our perspective is very difficult, and I don’t think I figured out the secret during the process.

So, with that caveat in place, on to my ballot.

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Shortly before people were making too much of the Mets signing Michael Cuddyer, people were making just enough of the Royals very nearly winning the actual World Series. It was an enjoyable race for a championship, and a part of the Royals’ game that got an incredible amount of attention was their habit of stealing bases. Against the A’s in the wild-card playoff, the Royals stole seven bags. Against the Angels in the ALDS, they stole another five. Then, against the Orioles, they stole just one. And against the Giants, they stole just one. The Royals’ base-stealing game was more or less shut down. In large part, presumably, because the opponents became prepared.

Along those lines, Billy Hamilton. Hamilton was supposed to be something different, something unique. Hamilton was going to make it with his legs, and Hamilton was going to challenge long-held records. It was a significant news item when Hamilton stole his first big-league bag. It was a significant news item when Hamilton was first thrown out. Coming into 2014, people wondered how extreme Hamilton would be. In the end, he stole a lot of bags. But he was also caught a lot of times, and he has a line like any other speedy slap hitter. Hamilton finished 25th in base-stealing runs — at +2.0 — behind guys like Danny Santana, Sam Fuld, and Kolten Wong. Why was Billy Hamilton not able to run like crazy?

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A quick look over a list of free agent pitchers produces many different types of arms. Top-end near-aces, mid-rotation stalwarts, backend veterans, and high-ceiling lottery tickets. Brandon Morrow is an intriguing lottery ticket for any team willing to take the plunge. Long on promise but short on results, Morrow is the kind of electric arm that front offices simply cannot resist.

At some point, however, potential and stuff lose some of their magnetism. When a guy’s only thrown 90 odd innings over two years, you start to wonder if maybe he isn’t worth the risk?

The thing about Brandon Morrow, of course, is this has always been the knock on the hard-throwing right hander. Remember, this was a pre-arb pitcher traded to Toronto for reliever Brandon League and a minor league outfielder still yet to surpass double-A.

Like so many other power arms, Morrow flashed brilliance and looked the part of a top-of-the-rotation ace at times. Other times, he lacked command, floundered through laborious starts and struggled to stay healthy.

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As in other recent offseasons, FanGraphs once again facilitated this offseason a contract-crowdsourcing project for baseball’s free agents, the idea being to harness the wisdom of the crowds to the end of better understanding the 2014-15 offseason market. The result: a single post featuring the league’s top-55 free agents, ordered by projected size (in dollars) of contract.

The numbers produced by the crowd are imperfect — demonstrating, most notably, a streak of conservatism wherein the most talented free agents (Max Scherzer, Hanley Ramirez, etc.) are concerned. Even with certain biases present, however, the crowd’s estimates are useful for cultivating an understanding of the offseason market as a whole.

What follows is similar exercise as that offseason free-agent one — designed, however, not to estimate the values of the league’s free agents, but rather of those players who are both (a) candidates to be traded this offseason, but also (b) signed to contracts of disproportionate cost relative to the player’s likely benefit to a team in wins.

The purpose of this exercise: to estimate the actual market values (in dollars) of those same contracts for the years that remain on them. So, for example, Dodgers outfielder Matt Kemp is owed $107 million through 2019 — that is, over five years. The question of interest here — and certainly one of interest to those general managers who might consider trading for Kemp — is thus: Were you a GM, how much would you pay for five years of Matt Kemp? Something more than $0, presumably, but also probably something less than $107 million.

Below are 10 players with regard to whom that sort of question is a relevant one.

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Free agency is the land of false hopes and dreams. While nearly every major signing is heralded as good news for the organization making the commitment, they often turn quite poorly; note the very high number of overpaid veterans being shopped around the league at this moment. Signing the wrong free agent can actually do more damage than not signing any free agents at all, and especially for teams with average or below average budgets, payroll efficiency is a necessity.

So, with that in mind, I’m going to present my annual list of free agent landmines, or players to be most actively avoided based on my expectations of what they’re going to produce versus what they’re going to get paid. Appearing on this list doesn’t make you a bad player, but just one where I think the market’s assessment of your value is too high for the actual production.

For reference, here’s last year’s version of the list, which included some of the more notable free agent busts of last winter: Joe Nathan, Jarrod Saltalamacchia, and Curtis Granderson, as well as two of the three guys who got rejected by the market after turning down the qualifying offer: Kendrys Morales and Nelson Cruz. I don’t expect an 80% failure rate for the five players listed below, but I think there are enough warning signs that I probably wouldn’t pursue them this winter.

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There are a couple of general time frames in the baseball calendar that are particularly difficult to write about in an analytical fashion – that May-June period when the season is young, and sample sizes are still small, and right about now. The postseason has recently ended, and hot stove season is imminent. I could simply write an article speculating about the destination of free agents and potential blockbuster trades, only for 95% of the contents to be blown to bits in a matter of days, or I could create a somewhat esoteric diversion. I choose the latter. It is said that a picture is worth 1000 words. How many, then, is a table of granular batted ball data worth? Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Cuddyer wasn’t expected to receive a qualifying offer from the Rockies, so, he received a qualifying offer from the Rockies. Michael Cuddyer was expected to accept the qualifying offer, so, he didn’t accept the qualifying offer. Michael Cuddyer wasn’t expected to forgo the qualifying offer because of just a few extra million dollars, so, he forwent the qualifying offer because of just a few extra million dollars. And the Mets weren’t expected to pursue Michael Cuddyer after the compensation was attached, so, the Mets pursued him after the compensation was attached. The Mets pursued him, and they got him: Michael Cuddyer’s off to New York, for two years and $21 million.

The Mets, then, are out the 15th pick of next summer’s draft. The Rockies, then, are up one compensation pick in next summer’s draft. Cuddyer’s got himself a multi-year guarantee, and he’ll pull $8.5 million in this coming season, and $12.5 million in the next. The initial response, as is common, is that the Mets did something silly. Given a little more thought, it settles to merely questionable. Of greatest interest is what the Mets seem to be signaling.

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Today’s the day that Jose Abreu wins the 2014 American League Rookie of the Year Award. Seems like they’re doing a whole announcement show, and nothing’s official yet because they don’t want to spoil the suspense, but the suspense has already long been spoiled, by Abreu and by the rest of the AL rookie class. There’s been a little bit of chatter that Abreu might have an MVP case. Now, he’s not going to have an MVP case, as reflected by the voting, but if a guy is getting talked up in some circles as a dark-horse MVP, he’s your Rookie of the Year.

A little over a year ago, the White Sox signed Abreu to a six-year contract. At that point, it looked like a heavy investment in a player whose value would be entirely tied up in his bat. Now, Abreu’s looks like one of the more valuable contracts in the game, as he’s coming off a season that saw him answer most of the questions about his productivity. Abreu wasn’t an outstanding defender at first base. He wasn’t a stealth quality base-runner, so everything really did come down to the hitting, but the hitting was phenomenal from start to finish, and it seems worthwhile now to reflect upon Abreu’s scouting reports around the time of his signing.

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Are foul balls a skill? Do they lead to better outcomes? Should all hitters have a two-strike approach?

These are the kinds of things (among others) that Sam Fuld has been thinking about in the outfield.

Let’s try to answer some of those questions the best we can.

If fouling a ball off was an easily measured skill — if percentage of balls fouled was a good measure of that skill at least — then you’d expect the skill to show through most years. Strikeout rate, for example, is fairly decent at measuring your ability to make contact. Strikeout rate stays fairly stable — you could use shorthand to say that almost 90% of your strikeout rate next year is described by your strikeout this year.

Foul percentage doesn’t work that way. Your foul percentage this year describes about 40% of the variance in your foul percentage next year. That makes foul percentage more unstable than batting average, batting average on balls in play, or your rate of doubles per plate appearance. Brian Roberts was 11th in baseball foul percentage this year, he was barely above average in 2013. So it goes.

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