The past week has been particularly instructive for those interested in the real world implications of the word “value.” Despite league-wide offense nearing 40 year lows, some good hitters found themselves either looking for work or on the move with salary concerns in tow.

If you asked most armchair general managers, they would  jump at the chance to add a hitter claiming a 135 wRC+ over the last two years, especially for the low price of $7.5 million for 2015 (plus an option for 2016.) But that describes Adam Lind, traded by the Blue Jays (so they weren’t forced to decline his 2015 option) for Marco Estrada, a swingman who plans on taking the “serviceable” descriptor to its logical conclusion.

Meanwhile, the Kansas City Royals declined the option they held on Billy Butler, another homegrown talent and hitter guy with a reasonable price tag ($12.5 million for 2015).  This is hardly shocking as Butler comes off his worst professional season and the Royals are a team for which times are perpetually tight. But given the going rate for a hitter projecting to produce 20% better than league average, $12.5 mil is a steal, no?

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Billy Beane once famously said that his poop doesn’t work in the postseason, and ostensibly he wasn’t talking about his digestive system. The Athletics will spend another offseason wondering about it. The rest of baseball’s fandom usually thinks about the victors as models. Do the Giants and Royals represent some sort of sea change, do they represent a way to succeed in the postseason?

I thought I’d run some numbers to see what I could find. What I found is — it’s very difficult to study the postseason as an entity.

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The Yankees have found new ways to exploit their financial advantage in recent years.  For a long time, they were the team spending the most money on big league payroll by a good margin, then other teams caught up after the addition of the luxury tax along with an Hal Steinbrenner being more focused on the bottom line than his father.  The Yankees never really blew things out in the draft when they had the opportunity, but now there are essentially hard caps on draft spending and extra picks are tougher to come by with recent changes to the CBA.

The Yankees saw these two market opportunities dry up while their revenues stayed high and they pinpointed the international market as a target.  As a result of spending nearly $30 million dollars on teenagers last summer, the Yankees now cannot sign a player for over $300,000 for the next two summers.  If they get lucky with some timing, they may still be able to make this one-year international blowout even more advantageous, but their competitive advantage has mostly passed in these three markets for the time being.

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The World Series is over, and though the San Francisco Giants have nailed down their third championship in the last five seasons, there is seemingly no time to savor the accomplishment. Qualifying offers are being extended, the first offseason transactions have begun to trickle across the wire, and hot stove season will soon begin in earnest. This week, however, let’s take one last look at the two World Series participants from a top-sided, macro perspective. How good were the Giants and the Royals, in various aspects of the game? Today, let’s take a look at the champion Giants. Read the rest of this entry »

The word we’re supposed to use is “introduced”. As in, the Cubs introduced Joe Maddon on Monday as the team’s new manager. Really, Maddon’s a guy who needs no introduction, and in addition to that, Maddon isn’t a guy you bring in, as an organization, unless you feel like you’re on the verge of something. Maddon isn’t a guy you give five years and $25 million, as an organization, unless you feel like you’re entering a new era. The Cubs didn’t want to get rid of Rick Renteria, but at the same time, this wasn’t an opportunity they could let pass by. As was noted in the days prior to Monday’s press conference:

On Friday, Epstein said Maddon “may be as well-suited as anyone in the industry to manage the challenges that lie ahead of us.”

About those challenges — there are always challenges, for everyone, and there are certainly always challenges in Chicago, but the challenges that lie ahead now are quite different from the challenges that were ahead a few years back when the Cubs overhauled the front office. The idea now is that Maddon can help the team transition from loser to winner, and though that’s what all losers want, the Cubs are in a particular position. Maddon spent a chunk of his press conference talking about the 2015 playoffs. Theo Epstein, at the end of the regular season, also talked about the 2015 playoffs. The Cubs see Joe Maddon as the first step in a new level. The Cubs now intend to be serious about the present. So how far away are the Cubs from looking like a competitive team?

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Jackie Bradley, Jr. might win a Gold Glove tonight. He should. The Red Sox centerfielder is an American League finalist at his position along with Adam Eaton and Adam Jones. He easily outpaced both in Fielding Bible balloting, with only National Leaguer Juan Lagares ranking higher.

Then again, Bradley probably didn’t hit well enough to win a traditional Gold Glove. [Yes, the ghosts of Derek Jeter and Rafael Palmeiro continue to haunt.] The 24-year-old rookie put up a scary-bad .198/.265/.266 slash line in 423 plate appearances.

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I noted in my FanGraphs Player of the Year voting explanation that I very badly wanted to find a place for Aroldis Chapman. Ultimately I couldn’t do it, not with Chapman being a reliever and with other guys not being relievers, but I wanted to give Chapman some support for a season that was almost impossibly outstanding and extraordinary. Aroldis Chapman is coming off one of my favorite single seasons ever, and with everything in the books, none of the numbers are changing. Because I couldn’t give Chapman a vote, I decided I wanted to give him one last front-page post.

I know the headline sucks and I know lists seem lazy, but I don’t know a better way to capture what I want to be captured. I want to touch on my five favorite Chapman facts, and this is the simplest way to keep them organized. These are not the five best 2014 Aroldis Chapman facts, recovered after hours of mining — probably, there are things he did that have so far escaped my attention. These are just my five favorite facts, out of the facts I’m aware of. There are some good ones that didn’t qualify. Against left-handed batters, Chapman last season posted a negative FIP. He allowed a .121 batting average and a .172 slugging percentage, while National League pitchers batted .125 and slugged .156. Chapman was great! Here now are five better facts, that I haven’t bothered to order. It’s like trying to pick a favorite child, except none of these facts will spill grape juice on the carpet.

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The World Series can be a stressful time for a lot of folks. It can be stressful for friends, family and players of the two teams involved, because every pitch seems like the most important pitch of the year. It can be stressful for writers, because we’ve got to find something interesting from each game and come up with a unique take on it in a very short amount of time. And it can be stressful for fans of other teams, because they wish it was their team playing in the World Series.

But that’s over now, and we’re on to the offseason, which is about as sad as the World Series is stressful, because there won’t be any more major league baseball played for several months. 🙁

In these sad, stressful times for baseball fans, I’d like to start the offseason with something fun: the little league homer. Alex Gordon nearly did it to tie game seven of the World Series with two outs in the bottom of the ninth inning. Had he scored, it would have been one of the greatest moments in World Series history. However, he was wisely held up at third base. But there were 18 other players during the regular season who weren‘t held at third base, after the defense kicked the ball around for a little while, and came home to score.

Rather than show you all 18 little league homers, I watched film of them all and selected the six most representative of little league play, along with a choice quote from one of the broadcasters. The first clip is the only instance, to my knowledge, of a player being thrown out while trying to stretch a little league homer this season. The other five are ranked, in descending order, by the value of various postgame “team snacks” received as a child when playing little league. Do not debate with me on this. The snack list is final.
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Talk to the players as much as you can. Read about what they think. They are smart about baseball, and they can tell you things you never thought of before.

Nobody knows as much about the physical aspect of game play as the men who actually suit up to play it. Knowledge of the mechanics of the game of baseball should inform best practices, even if those insights come in a different form and language from the results we get from empirical research. So talk to the players. I have, and they’ve said some very smart things.

10) Sam Fuld, Athletics’ outfielder: “Ever notice that nobody talks about the length of the games when they talk about injuries being up around baseball?”

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Earlier this afternoon, we announced that Clayton Kershaw was the winner of the 2014 FanGraphs Player of the Year Award. In this post, we have asked each of the 10 FanGraphs authors who received a ballot to explain briefly explain the process they used to reach their conclusions. Their full ballots are included below, followed by that explanation.

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