Back in September, we announced the creation of the FanGraphs Player of the Year Award, in order to have an outlet to honor the player we felt performed at the highest level of any player in Major League Baseball each season. We wanted to try and avoid a lot of the semantical arguments about the meaning of different awards, and eliminate many of the divisions between leagues or player types, and simply recognize the most outstanding performer of the season.

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I think my most recent seven posts here at FanGraphs were about the Giants or the Royals or both, a necessary side effect of being a regular baseball writer during the World Series. Sometimes it feels like there’s only so much you can say about James Shields or Joe Panik or Lorenzo Cain, but really, why bother talking about something else during the most important games of the year?

With that finally behind us, we can look forward to 2015, and I keep thinking about the team that seems most likely, at this far-too-early date before any real offseason moves have been made, to make a move next year. You probably think I’m talking about the Cubs. I’m not talking about the Cubs. I’m talking about the Cleveland Indians. I was asked, during a live chat of one of the World Series games, whether I thought the Royals could hold off the Tigers in the AL Central next season. At the time, I said I thought Cleveland might be better than both, and now it’s time to put some words behind that feeling. In fact, let’s do this internet style. On to the <h3>’s! Read the rest of this entry »

The baseball offseason arrived all of a sudden. As the Giants were parading around the streets of San Francisco, I was on my computer writing about the Cubs ditching Rick Renteria to hire Joe Maddon. And then Saturday brought the offseason’s first meaningful trade — Adam Lind to the Brewers, and Marco Estrada to the Blue Jays. I’m going to be completely honest with you. I was excited at first, thinking more of the players in the deal than I wound up doing following further examination. I think I was just excited to have the offseason really get underway, to fill the baseball void. But still, this is a trade, with players you’ve presumably heard of, and it was swung to serve a purpose, so it’s worthy of our consideration. What the heck else do we have to consider?

We’ll get to the Blue Jays’ side of things. We’ll get into more detail. But we can start by acknowledging the obvious, that being the Brewers’ motivation to get a deal done. Lind is slated to be the Brewers’ regular first baseman. Here are the least productive positions in baseball, by our numbers, over the past two seasons combined:

• Red Sox, third base, -2.2 WAR
• Astros, first base, -2.2 WAR
• Yankees, shortstop, -2.7 WAR
• Yankees, designated hitter, -4.3 WAR
• Brewers, first base, -4.6 WAR

I don’t know, either, but it happened. Over two years, Brewers first basemen combined to be worth almost an impossible five wins below replacement. The situation was better in 2014 than it was in 2013, but it’s also better to have your arm cut off than it is to have your arm cut off, successfully reattached, and then cut off again. For the Brewers, first base was a disaster, a disaster without any reasonable internal solution, so the front office acted quickly to address one of baseball’s very greatest needs.

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Scheduling Note: This week’s Sunday Notes column will appear in its usual format on Tuesday. Today we have a long conversation with Mike Elias on the subject of amateur scouting. Enjoy!

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Mike Elias joined the Houston Astros in January, 2012 and became their director of amateur scouting in August, 2012. The 31-year-old former Yale University lefthander is a perfect fit for the job. Not only does he possess analytic chops, he’s handy with a radar gun and recognizes raw talent when he sees it. Elias was weened in the St. Louis Cardinals organization as an area scout.

His drafts in Houston have been controversial. The first-overall selections of Mark Appel and Brady Aiken have resulted in a barrage of slings and arrows. Countless words have been written on each – for good reason – and the debating isn’t done.

Largely lost amid the hoopla are the other players picked and the philosophies that shaped their selections. Elias isn’t at liberty to discuss Aiken, but he has a lot to say about the way the Astros – under the direction of general manager Jeff Luhnow – go about their business. Read the rest of this entry »

Under pretty much all circumstances, relative to people involved in the game, we the public have a lesser amount of information. Sometimes, it’s close, like when it comes to specific player valuation — we have access to almost as much as the teams and executives do. But sometimes we’re bringing a straw to a knife fight. There’s perhaps nothing we understand less than the value of a manager. Analysts have tried to dig in deep, and within our heads we have ideas of which guys are better than others, but ultimately we’re always guessing on the impact. What are we supposed to do with charisma and leadership? The attempted evaluation of managers causes many people to just throw up their hands. Why even bother?

So, from the outside, we can barely say anything. We simply don’t know. And maybe teams don’t know much, either. Maybe they’re guessing almost as much as we are. But we can at least evaluate market behavior as an indirect reflection of a guy’s perceived value. And the market has responded strongly to Joe Maddon’s sudden and unanticipated free agency. The Cubs are going to hire Maddon, officially, maybe before I’m done writing this post. It’s pretty clear, then, how highly Maddon is thought of.

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“Grady did not know that. Grady had ignored Paul’s prodding to scout the players his computer flushed out. Paul had said the scouts ought to go have a look at a college kid named Kevin Youkilis. Youkilis was a fat third baseman who couldn’t run, throw or field. What was the point of going to see that? (Because, Paul would be able to say three months later, Kevin Youkilis has the second highest on-base percentage in all of baseball, after Barry Bonds. To Paul, he’d become Euclis: the Greek god of walks.)

Good nicknames in baseball are somewhat of a rarity these days. One of my favorite sections of The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract is “nicknames.” Nicknames like “Earache,” “Firebrand” and “The Grey Eagle” resonated a lot more than today’s silly trends of shortening people’s names, or adding “Y” or “IE” to the end of them. One notable exception was Kevin Youkilis. Blessed in the above passage in Moneyball as “The Greek God of Walks” nearly a year before his major league debut, the baseball world sat up and took notice of a previously anonymous player before his major league debut. No pressure. While that might not seem like much of an achievement in today’s prospect- and media-saturated world, things were quite a bit different back in 2003. Yesterday, it was reported that the Ohio native had retired. Throughout his career, he served as the perfect example for several well-worn baseball lessons.

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The 2014 World Series was an enjoyable contest. Not only did the Royals provide a fresh face and a different type of team than we’ve generally seen in the Fall Classic, but Madison Bumgarner gave us a performance for the ages. And, for the first time since the two Wild Card games, we actually got a winner-take-all contest; the first two rounds of the 2014 playoffs provided little in the way of drama about the outcomes of the series, as the winners combined for a 20-3 record in the division and league championship series. But, while the World Series gave us that elusive Game Seven, we also have to acknowledge that series had one of the lowest totals of in-game drama of any World Series in history.

One of the neat things about Leverage Index, besides giving a numerical representation of important situations, is that we can look at the average leverage index for an entire game and get a feel for how dramatic the game was as it went on. In a close contest where the lead is regularly changing, the average leverage index can push near two, as it did in Game Two of the NLCS; the aLI for that game was 1.94, meaning that each play carried something close to double the weight that it would have had in an average game. The 18 inning contest between the Giants and Nationals had an aLI of 1.81, so that was basically two full baseball games worth of drama similar to what you’d find protecting a ninth inning lead.

The World Series didn’t have any games like that. In fact, until the final game, it didn’t include a contest where the aLI was even over 1.0. The first six games were mostly blowouts, with the exception of game three, the one in which the Royals took a 1-0 lead in the first inning, built it up to 3-0, and then held on to win 3-2. Besides that we, had 7-1, 7-2, 11-4, 5-0, and 10-0 contests; the aLI of game six was a paltry 0.25, the third lowest number for a game in World Series history.

So, where does this series rank in terms of average leverage index for all of the games combined? Let’s take a look.

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It was following a half-decent season in 2013 that Royals general manager Dayton Moore said he felt a little like he’d won the World Series. The remark didn’t go over very well locally or nationally, and Moore conceded later he could’ve chosen better words, but at the core of a poorly-worded sentence was a legitimate message. Moore sensed that people were getting into the Royals again. Even though the team that season had fallen a little short of the playoffs, the roster was at least competitive, and the fans at least had a product to watch. What Moore meant to say was that the franchise was restoring its bonds with the city around it, after too many years of two-way neglect.

The bonds are restored now. They maybe have never been stronger. After a year of no playoffs, Moore felt like he’d won a title, so I can’t imagine how he feels after a year of coming one win away. The fans are in love again. Many of the fans, they were always in love, but they’re once again willing to act on it. And new fans have been gained, as well, fans who previously never gave baseball a second thought. Consider one anecdote, to represent many:

People are wearing blue proudly again. People filled Kauffman Stadium proudly again. People are chanting proudly again. Last year put the Royals back on the map; this year circled the Royals with dark ink and arrows. The fans sense an opening window of contention, and as heartbreaking as it is to lose in a seventh game, this doesn’t have to have been the last chance. The Royals could be back, and they could be powered in no small part by gains from having made so deep a run.

All that success, all that restored loyalty and enthusiasm — that’s money. What’s more, that’s money the Royals weren’t even budgeting for. I’ve never been confused for a financial wizard, or for any kind of wizard, but what the Royals have been gaining is pure profit, and the gains aren’t going to end with the playoff run. As a matter of fact, the Royals will be benefiting from this past month for a good while yet.

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Chip Hale replaced Kirk Gibson as manager of the Arizona Diamondbacks earlier this month. What approach will he bring to a franchise coming off a 98-loss season? Based on a conversation with Hale, it will be one closely entwined with that of Arizona’s new leadership up top. Dave Stewart is now the general manager and DeJon Watson is the vice president of baseball operations. Tony LaRussa was named chief baseball officer this past summer.

Hale’s voice will be heard. The 49-year-old has strong opinions about how the game should be played. He also has a lot of experience. He was Bob Melvin’s bench coach in Oakland the past two seasons and before that he was a third base coach for four years, two each with the Mets and Diamondbacks. From 2000-2006, he was a minor-league manager in the Arizona system. An infielder in his playing days, Hale spent parts of seven big-league seasons with the Twins and Dodgers after being drafted out the University of Arizona.

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Hale on his early influences: “I played throughout the minor leagues with the Twins and made it to the big leagues with them. That culture was about hard work and playing nine innings. It kind of filtered down from Tom Kelly and the things he preached. You saw that all the way down through the minor league instructors. Read the rest of this entry »

Imagine if, for some reason, you completely missed Game 7. Not only did you miss it — you didn’t hear anything about it, from friends or from family or from the Internet. You get home, and this is the first thing you see:

What on earth has to be going through your mind? It requires special circumstances for a third-base coach to end up with a postgame interview. And why is this one smiling? He must’ve made one hell of a decision. You know what the rules are, with regard to attention paid to base coaches. They only get it when they’ve done something controversial.

People want there to be a controversy here. The way the World Series ended was final, conclusive. Salvador Perez, 100% absolutely, made the last out on a foul pop-up. There is no what-might-have-been with Perez’s at-bat. So many have turned to the play before, when Alex Gordon was stopped at third after sprinting on a single and an error. It’s a frantic search for closure that resembles a frantic avoidance of such, and without any doubt in my mind, if Gordon had been waved around, it would’ve made for an all-time moment regardless. But while we can’t say for sure that Gordon would’ve been toast, since the play never happened, it sure seems to me the odds were too strongly against him. Mike Jirschele did the smart thing, and Alex Gordon did the smart thing, and Salvador Perez did the following thing. Barring a miracle, sending Gordon would’ve just ended the game a few minutes sooner.

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