Archive for Daily Graphings

If you watch the Athletics, you may have noticed something about their pitching staffs over the last few years. They’re… shorter than average. Sonny Gray, Scott Kazmir, and Jarrod Parker are all six foot one or shorter, and none of the A’s pitchers are taller than six foot six.

Look across the country at the Phillies, and the difference becomes more stark.

@enosarris Phillies have 4 guys 6'6" or taller to the Athletics 0, it would be interesting to see if it is an org philosophy or just random

— Matt Winkelman (@Matt_Winkelman) February 20, 2015

Turns out, these two staffs define the range between the tallest and shortest pitchers in the majors.

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When the New York Yankees make a signing, it is big news in baseball. When the Yankees fail to make to a big signing, it is even bigger news. The Yankees targeted Yoan Moncada. They worked him out multiple times. They offered the potential star $25 million, willing to commit $50 million with penalties, showing they believed in his talent. Yet they let the rival Boston Red Sox outbid them by $13 million.

The Yankees are rich and they spend like it. In 2015, their payroll will grow past $200 million for the sixth time in seven years. One offseason ago, the Yankees made $483 million in salary commitments to free agents. Just last summer, the Yankees blew past the international spending limits to sign the biggest international free agent class in Major League Baseball. The high level of spending is confusing when the difference in offers to Moncada is less than the amount they committed to pay a 39-year old Carlos Beltran in 2016 and the total cost is roughly one-third of the commitment they made to obtain Masahiro Tanaka.

As Miles Wray pointed out earlier this month, with the exception of last offseason, the Yankees have used considerable restraint in free agency since winning their last World Series in 2009. The first few sensible years made sense. They went on a spree after 2008, signing Mark Teixeira, CC Sabathia, and A.J. Burnett to big contracts that helped them to the World Series. They continued winning, putting up 95 wins in 2010 and followed that season up with 97 wins and 95 wins the next two years. Even before the 95-win 2012 season, Yankees ownership put a plan in place to save the team millions of dollars.
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This is it. This is the year Adrian Beltre finally declines.

Yep, you heard it here first, folks. Adrian Beltre is donezo. I mean, come on — dude’s about to be 36 years old. He’s logged 10,001 plate appearances since he entered the league in 1998, a number topped by only Derek Jeter. His defense has declined significantly the past two seasons, no matter what metric you use. He only hit 19 dingers last year after averaging 32 over the previous four seasons. Clearly, all that wear and tear has taken its toll on Beltre. The jig is up! The fat lady has sung.
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On Friday, I talked about the current iteration of the Royals, and their propensity toward making contact on a lot of pitches outside the strike zone. In one of the graphs I created, I presented the relationship between O-Contact% and ISO. After some spirited comments on the article about the lack of correlation (given the small sample size and lack of R2), I got to thinking: What is the actual relationship between the percentage of times a batter makes contact on pitches outside of the strike zone (O-Contact%) and offensive production, especially power?

We know certain facts related to the topic of the impact of plate discipline statistics — like players that swing at more pitches out of the strike zone tend to have lower walk rates — but today we’re interested in just O-Contact% and the headline maker, power. This is in large part due to my sometimes unhealthy fascination with the Royals of the past few years, who have been known for winning (at least last year) while not exactly crushing the ball. They only hit 20 home runs through the first 43 games of 2014 and were dead last in ISO (.113) at the end of the season. They also came within a game of winning the World Series, because baseball.

While the Royals might make a great case study, we shouldn’t be too quick to jump to conclusions given their unusual plate discipline statistics and lack of power: we should let the much larger sample size I’m about to go over tell the story. We’re going to focus on two statistics today in relationship to plate discipline: one is ISO, so we can look at raw power, and the other is wOBA, so we can have a look at a more general, catch-all measure of offensive value. Then we’re going to look at a player who truly stands out in the data.

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Part 1 is over. Part 1 was figuring out which team was going to sign Yoan Moncada, and now we know, with the Red Sox having given up more than $60 million for the right to try to make him into something. Most conspicuously, the Sox beat out the Yankees; less conspicuously, the Sox beat out everyone else. Moncada joins an organization with a silly amount of talent and resources, and he is now presumably Boston’s No. 1 prospect. Not a whole lot of prospects better than Blake Swihart, either. So that’s meaningful.

Now we move on to Part 2. What’s Part 2? Figuring out what Yoan Moncada is going to be. You can kind of deduce what teams expect him to be — based on the price, and based on all the attention, Moncada figures to be some kind of big-leaguer, with a high ceiling. But what have we seen from prospects like this before? Moncada’s going into his age-20 season. We can put some numbers to this, trying in a way to project the unfamiliar. Let’s scan some historical top-prospect lists.

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I’m pleased to announce that FanGraphs now has an auction calculator!

In terms of methodology, we are using a method that is pretty similar to the Last Player Picked methodology.

Besides all the usual features of an auction calculator, we have a couple of unique features that are worth some addition explanation:

– There is an “experimental” check box, which adds in replacement level value for players with incomplete playing time. If a player was to have a .300 batting average for the season in 450 plate appearances, it would add in an extra 150 plate appearances at a .220 average (numbers for illustration only) for that player and calculate the auction values off his new batting average.

This is something that could be useful if your league allows you to carry a lot of bench spots and you have the ability to supplement potentially high risk injury players with a replacement level player. Chad Young wrote about this a few years ago.

Please feel free to check the box and see how it changes player values if you feel it’s appropriate for your league. And like the option says, this is still an experiment and should be considered a “beta” feature.

– There is also an option to artificially increase or decrease relief pitcher value. Since we don’t project holds, this might be particularly useful for ottoneu leagues or other leagues where holds are considered. By not taking into account holds for a league that might consider them, relief pitcher values will most likely be inflated.

This could also be a useful option if the players in your league generally undervalue (or over value) relievers and you would like to put relief pitcher values more in line with reality as opposed to theoretical value.

Please let us know if you run into any issues!

For the last few months, the baseball world has been speculating about Yoan Moncada. The question of who would sign him was less interesting, as the structure of the deal — a 100% tax on the signing bonus, due by the middle of the summer — meant that this was a bidding war that only teams with significant cash flows could justify winning. From the beginning, the Red Sox, Yankees, and Dodgers were identified as the heavy favorites, and in the end, Boston won the battle of the big spenders.

More interesting was the question of how much Moncada would sign for, because this was a bit of a unique situation in MLB. Because Moncada could only be lured with a signing bonus, and because of the tax on the signing, teams were being asked to spend significant present dollars for a chance to buy potential future wins. While this happens on a small scale in the draft and with other young international prospects, teams generally do not have to make these kinds of short-term investments without getting short-term rewards.

The last time I wrote about Moncada, I noted some similarities between signing Moncada and paying the posting fee for a player coming over from Japan, which pushed over $50 million for both Daisuke Matsuzaka and Yu Darvish. Those players also came with a steep up-front cost and hadn’t proven themselves as big league contributors, but neither one spent a day in the minor leagues before jumping into their team’s rotations; they were viewed more as major league free agents, just without the track record that other big league free agents bring.

Moncada has the short track record in common, but unlike Darvish, Matsuzaka, and Masahiro Tanaka, he’s not big league ready. The consensus is that he needs a year or two in the minors, and given that he’s just 19, that might even be aggressive. It wouldn’t be at all strange for him to not make a significant impact at the big league level until he’s 22 or 23, as even the prospects teams are most sold on don’t always develop as quickly as expected. So, the Red Sox $63 million investment — once you double the signing bonus to account for the tax — will likely return little or no value for several years, and because even very good prospects still have high failure rates, there’s a real possibility that this investment never returns anything at all.

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Despite all the gains advanced stats have made in gaining public acceptance over the years, there’s always going to be some cases that seem inexplicable to one side or the other. Jason Heyward is generally a good example of that, because if you still rely on traditional stats, you see a right fielder who hit .271 with 11 homers and 58 RBI and consider him a disappointment. If you believe in defensive metrics and understand the effects of age and the current offensive environment, you see a star who just put up a 5 WAR season at age 24 and could command a $200 million contract in free agency next winter.

One thing isn’t really disputable, however: Heyward hasn’t really delivered on the offensive promise he showed by putting up a 134 wRC+ at 20 in his rookie season of 2010. It was one of the finest age-20 seasons in baseball dating back to 1900, and everyone on the list ahead of him — with the exception of Dick Hoblitzel, who had his career cut short by World War I — ended up becoming either an inner-circle Hall of Famer or is a more recent player well on his way there.

Heyward followed up that smashing debut with a disappointing 96 wRC+ in 2011, due in part to a right shoulder injury, then put up three straight seasons in the 110-121 wRC+ range. While that all sounds similar, how he’s made it there hasn’t been. Heyward’s power has decreased — homers down from 27 to 14 to 11, slugging percentage down from .479 to .427 to .384 — while his on-base skills have improved, going from .335 to .349 to .351. It’s still valuable, it’s just a different kind of valuable, and not what we might have expected a few years ago.

So maybe this is what Heyward is now, and maybe that’s just fine. But to listen to Heyward himself, he seems to think he knows where the power has gone, and how he can get it back. Here’s two different bits from a St. Louis Post-Dispatch story on Sunday morning: Read the rest of this entry »

With all of the arbitration cases heard and the major free agent signings completed, save for perhaps a Cuban free agent or two and a few relievers, we can come up with a solid estimate the Opening Day Payrolls for 2015. In 1998, the Baltimore Orioles’ payroll of $70.4 million topped all of Major League Baseball followed by fifteen straight seasons of New York Yankees payroll dominance. For the first time this centruy, the Los Angeles Dodgers finally unseated the Yankees last year. Despite Alex Rodriguez‘s suspended salary returning to the Yankees payroll and the signing of Chase Headley, the Dodgers remain well ahead. Trades for Jimmy Rollins and Howie Kendrick, the signing of Brandon McCarthy and agreeing to pay for much of Matt Kemp’s salary this season were more than enough to keep the crown for highest MLB payroll.

Figures from Cots. Minimum salaries of $507,500 added to guaranteed contracts to complete the 25-man roster.

For the second straight year, the Dodgers will have the highest payroll in baseball as the season starts. The Dodgers’ $266 million payroll figure appears staggering, more than 25% higher than the Yankees second place number and more than the ninth (Philadelphia Phillies) and tenth (Toronto Blue Jays) highest payrolls combined. However, the Dodgers’ buying power is still not at the level of the Yankees’ last decade. As a percentage of total team salaries, the Yankees’ payroll from 2004-2010 averaged 8.2%, never dipping below 7.5% before finally falling to 7.3% in 2011. The Dodgers’ payroll in 2015 accounts for 7.3% of total team payroll.
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In the opinion of some, baseball is broken. Not irreparably, but it’s become borderline boring and badly in need of an infusion of offense. Pace is a problem. Games last beyond the bedtimes of millions of young fans, many of whom have short attention spans.

There are myriad issues, and they can’t be ignored simply because certain indicators suggest the sport is thriving. What, if anything, to do about them? In the opinion of John Thorn, the official historian of Major League Baseball, there are no obvious answers.

“It’s conflated,” Thorn told me a few days ago. “It’s tangled. People have a vague unease that things aren’t right — not the way the ought to be – and somebody ought to do something. The problem is, there’s no magic bullet.”

But based on historical precedent, an arsenal of options exists. For instance, following the 1968 season – aka “The Year of the Pitcher” – the mound was lowered by five inches. The measure had the desired effect: In 1969, OPS jumped from .639 to .689 and runs-per-game shot up from 6.84 to 8.14. (In 2014, OPS was .700 and runs-per-game 8.13).

It’s important to note that the game-altering move was necessitated by another game-altering move. Read the rest of this entry »