Pablo Sandoval is perhaps the most interesting free agent of the offseason. He’s both good and fairly young for a free agent these days, so there’s an argument to be made that his contract might not carry him very far into the steepest of the aging curve, which is when teams have often gotten burned with big money deals. Of course, he’s also a big guy, with the body type of the kind of player who often ages poorly, and he’s spent a significant chunk of time on the DL during his tenure with the Giants.

This makes him a bit of a unique free agent, as you can argue that he’s either lower risk (due to age) or higher risk (due to body type), depending on which one you one put more stock in. And both arguments have their merit. Projecting future playing time is difficult enough for a normal player, much less a guy on the extreme ends of two variables that offer different conclusions.

So, it seems inevitable that whatever Sandoval signs for, it’s going to be a polarizing contract. Especially if he lands the six year deal that he’s seeking. From his agent, Gustavo Vazquez, via Henry Schulman:

“Pablo is 28,” Vasquez said. “He is still young. Maybe if he was 30 or 31 we could talk about four or five years. But he’s 28. He deserves more than that.”

The immediate reaction is to imagine what a 34-year-old Sandoval might look like, and shrink back from the idea of guaranteeing real money to, as Grant Brisbee put it, a “less athletic David Wells.” The odds of Sandoval still being a highly productive player in 2020 are pretty slim, and a six year deal would make it very likely that the signing team would have paid a hefty premium for a pinch-hitter or part-time platoon guy by the time the contract ends. However, in and of itself, that doesn’t make a six year contract for Sandoval a bad idea.

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My very first post at FanGraphs just over five years ago was about the King of Little Things. It might be seen as another annual junk stat-based post like the Carter-Batista Award and the reader is free to think of it that way. However, while both are in some way about the murky issue of situational hitting, the Carter-Batista Awared is about how RBI can exaggerate a player’s offensifve value, while the King of Little Things is about what might be seen (rightly or wrongly) as a hitter’s response to the overall game state beyond what is measured by traditional linear weights (as measured by wOBA, for example).

What does that mean, and who is 2014’s King of Little Things?

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Let’s start with four Tampa Bay Rays-related facts we know to be either true or at least have been recently publicly stated as such:

1. The team’s 85 losses in 2014 were more than the franchise has had since 2007, when they were still the Devil Rays, had Brendan Harris, Akinori Iwamura and Delmon Young in the regular lineup, and were finishing off a run off 10 consecutive 90-plus-loss seasons.
2. The two men most publicly associated with turning the franchise around, general manager Andrew Friedman and manager Joe Maddon, both departed in the past month in search of higher salaries and greater visibility.
3. The 2015 payroll, as disclosed by owner Stu Sternberg in September, is “clearly going to be lower” than the $76 million Opening Day figure it was this year, a franchise record that nonetheless ranked as one of the lowest numbers in baseball and was referred to by Sternberg as “an enormous aberration.” While there are plenty of very valid reasons not to shift blame to the fan base, this is no doubt impacted by a third consecutive season at the bottom of the average attendance standings.
4. The battle to find the team a new stadium, clearly the main impediment towards long-term success and stability in the Tampa Bay area, continues to go nowhere, with a recent Tampa Bay Times editorial clearly showing the exhaustion and frustration with the issue, and forcing franchise officials to deal with rumors of a move to Montreal.

This isn’t all going to be doom-and-gloom, I promise, but it’s going to start out that way, because those four items are all irrefutably bad news. While new baseball boss Matt Silverman is well-respected and a replacement for Maddon hasn’t yet been named, it’s probably time to investigate the Rays as the offseason gets moving and ask the question: Have we seen the best this franchise has to offer? Has the miraculous run of success that lasted longer than anyone thought would finally come to an end? Read the rest of this entry »

Technically, free agency has started, but it hasn’t really started. The Yankees re-signed outfielder Chris Young. The Mets signed a minor league catcher. Things have gotten underway, but not in the way that many people care about.

What we really care about are the big moves. But before those start coming in, I want to look at something.

Here’s a fact: The Angels have a huge advantage over every other team with Mike Trout. Like, crazy huge. Using our team depth charts and a little math, we can determine that the Angels center field group, because of Trout, have a projected WAR that is 3.6 standard deviations above the mean. Statistically, anything above three is considered to be an “outlier.” Mike Trout is an outlier, but you don’t really need math to know that.

Other teams with similarly huge advantages in talent are the Giants with Buster Posey and the Rockies with Troy Tulowitzki. But that’s neither here nor there. We’re talking about free agency, where you don’t need to sign a player if you’ve already got a great one. Instead, let’s look at the other side of the spectrum and see which positions have a projected WAR furthest below the league average. No team has a positional disadvantage that’s as large as the Angels advantage in center field, because if they did, that team would just get different players. There’s a cap on how poorly one can play and still be on a roster. There’s really no cap on how good one can be. But somebody’s got to be the worst. Before free agency really gets kicks off, let’s take a look at baseball’s biggest current holes.
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Clint Coulter is no longer a catcher. The 21-year-old Milwaukee Brewers prospect is currently playing right field in the Arizona Fall League, and it’s not a temporary assignment. According to farm director Reid Nichols, “The plan is for him to stay in the outfield.”

Based on this summer’s performance, his bat will play anywhere. Playing for the low-A Wisconsin Timber Rattlers, the Camas, Washington native hit a husky .287/.410/.520, with 22 home runs. It was a breakout season for the 2012 first-round pick, but only on the offensive side of the ball. In 61 games behind the plate, Coulter was plagued by passed balls (17) and errors (10). He was in the lineup 64 times as a designated hitter.

One year ago, in his first full professional season, Coulter looked like a bust in the batter’s box. A sculpted 6-3. 225, he was solid in an Arizona-rookie-league cameo but failed to hit his weight in the Pioneer and Midwest leagues. His power numbers and walk-strikeout rate were sub par.

I asked Coulter about his 2013 struggles at the tail end of the current campaign – specifically, did the challenge of simultaneously developing as a hitter and as a catcher take its toll?

“Absolutely,” Coulter admitted. “And not only physically. You can have a great day at the plate, but also clank a few balls [behind the plate] and affect the game that way. Both mentally and physically, I’d never experienced that kind of rigor, day in day out. It was a lot, but it was a great experience. You learn the most from failure, so I’m glad it happened.”

There was less failure this year, but the Brewers clearly feel Coulter’s future will play out best at a position less burdensome on the bat. The former high school wrestling champion can certainly impact a baseball, and he did a better job of it this year by reining himself in.

“Before, I was so anxious to hit that I was swinging at pitches I couldn’t really do much with,” explained Coulter. “This year I was better at being patient and hitting the pitches I wanted to hit.” Milwaukee’s player development staff saw the improvement, but also saw a work in progress. After saying, “Clint has done a good job converting to the outfield,” Nichols added that Coulter’s AFL objectives include “working on pitch recognition and slowing down at the plate.“

One thing Coulter doesn’t need work on is an already-impressive appreciation for good quotes. His Twitter page includes the following from 19th century French novelist Gustave Flaubert: Read the rest of this entry »

It’s never easy to try to figure out intent after the fact. Consider questionable hit-by-pitches. Some of them are more obviously intentional than others, but there’s nothing we can do in a database to separate the intentionals from the accidentals. It gets a little tricky with bunting for a hit, too, because bunting can also serve a very different purpose, but there’s one thing we can look at as a proxy. Let’s focus only on bunt attempts with nobody on base. Sometimes, a hitter might be trying to bunt for a hit with somebody on, but that’s relatively uncommon, and when the bases are empty, at least we know with absolute certainty the idea. A bunt with no one on is a bunt attempt for a hit. Or it’s a bunt attempt by a guy inexplicably playing through a strained oblique, but, generally, it’s a bunt attempt for a hit.

So, 2014. Let’s use some data from Baseball Savant, combining bunts in play with foul and missed bunts, to come up with total attempts. Here’s something that won’t surprise you: Billy Hamilton led baseball with 77 bunt attempts with the bases empty. We can think of those as 77 bunt attempts for a hit. In second place, again unsurprisingly, we find Dee Gordon, with 70 attempts. Then there’s Leonys Martin, with 52, and Adeiny Hechavarria, with 40. All makes perfect sense. This only gets weird when you consider rate stats.

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The GM meetings kick off in Phoenix next week, and while that gathering is generally more a time to lay groundwork than to get deals done, don’t be surprised if we see the first few free agents go off the board while everyone is gathered in one place. So, before things start happening, let’s have a little fun, and see how good I am at prognosticating both where the primary free agents will sign, and how much they’ll get on the open market.

For the purpose of this exercise, I’m going to project the same 55 players that you guys crowdsourced. This means that I’m skipping all the international free agents, but realistically, I don’t think I know enough about those guys to make educated guesses anyway. So, domestic free agents only. We’ll go team by team, and then I’ll list the whole table of my picks at the bottom. And yes, they’re probably going to be hilariously wrong. Predicting what other people are going to choose to do is not easy! Off we go, and we’ll do it by division.

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Let’s get this out of the way as quickly as we can: my favorite team is the Mariners, which means I want them to win more than I want other teams to win. Been that way for a long time. That perspective comes with certain biases, which I sometimes can’t even help, but in this instance, understand that I have nothing to do with the numbers you’ll see. As a matter of fact, I was taken by surprise, and so it feels only natural to write this up, because who doesn’t love discussing surprises? I should clue you in on what I’m talking about.

It’s the offseason now, you’ve noticed. Joe Maddon’s changed teams. Hank Conger’s changed teams. Cesar Ramos has changed teams. Right now, teams are reaching out to connect with free agents and with other front offices, as groundwork is laid for future transactions. Eyes have turned to 2015, with 2014 entirely in the books, and wouldn’t you know it, but we’ve already got 2015 player projections. You can find them at FanGraphs, and they go by the name Steamer. It’s not the only projection system around, but all of them are pretty similar, and with Steamer, we can start to get an idea of how things look for the moment.

Now, a small group of FanGraphs authors maintains depth charts for all 30 teams in the majors, updated on a regular basis. Those same depth charts have been updated to prepare for the offseason, with free agents gone and with certain minor leaguers showing up. Steamer provides individual player projections. However, when you combine player projections with team depth charts, you end up with team projections. I’m always interested to see how things are looking, so recently I glanced at the order of team projections with the offseason getting under way. Who has the most work to do? Who’s already sitting pretty?

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

Madison Bumgarner pitched quite a bit this past season. Including the regular and post season, he threw a total of 4,074 pitches, which wasn’t even the season’s top total; James Shields bested him by throwing six more, for a total of 4,080 pitches in 2014, not including spring training. So with all of the pitches thrown this season (and one month less of rest), how should we expect these two to produce next season? Let’s look at some comparable pitchers.

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In some ways, this feels like a blog post from ten years ago. The idea template, at least, is the same, but then, we weren’t complete idiots ten years ago. We knew less, but we didn’t know nothing. Brandon McCarthy is a free agent. He looks like a potentially valuable free agent, at least as far as free-agent values go. I’ll explain, starting here: James Shields is also a free agent. He’s one of the high-profile ones, considered just a little below Jon Lester and Max Scherzer. According to our contract crowdsourcing, the audience projects Shields for a five-year contract worth about $90 million, and McCarthy is projected for a three-year contract worth about $36 million. Shields is nearly 33. McCarthy is more newly 31. Shields was extended a qualifying offer.

Here’s what Steamer sees from Shields in the year ahead:

• 19% strikeouts
• 6% walks
• 3.70 FIP

Here’s what Steamer sees from McCarthy in the year ahead:

• 19% strikeouts
• 5% walks
• 3.75 FIP

Let’s continue.

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