Archive for Daily Graphings

I’m back again to close out your week by talking about pitch comps. I’ve talked about pitch comps a lot lately, looking at Henderson Alvarez, and Mariano Rivera, and Cole Hamels, and so on. Pitch comps love Marcus Stroman. Not coincidentally, I also love Marcus Stroman, but this is going to be about a different guy — this is focusing on Carlos Carrasco. And while I’ve written about Carrasco already in the recent past, I want to add something to that. Carlos Carrasco throws a changeup. No one else really throws Carlos Carrasco’s changeup.

To quickly review the methodology, I use the Baseball Prospectus PITCHf/x leaderboards and look at velocity, horizontal movement, and vertical movement. For this, I looked at right-handed starting pitchers who, last year, threw at least 50 changeups, according to the page. For each of the three categories, I calculated the z-score difference between a given number and Carrasco’s changeup’s number. Then I simply added up the three absolute values, yielding a comp rating. That’s all the boring stuff. Below is the more interesting stuff.

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Jason Giambi announced his retirement on Monday, after 20 seasons as a major leaguer. For most of those 20 years, Giambi was one of the best hitters in the game. I won’t waste your time putting down the narrative of his career — Jay Jaffe already did that better than I would anyway. But I thought today that we would celebrate his career with a few choice facts and/or moments from a career that at the very least belongs in the Hall of Very Good.
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The Chicago Cubs scored a preliminary victory on Thursday in the lawsuit filed last month by the owners of several of the rooftops looking into Wrigley Field.  As I explained at the time the suit was filed, the case is the latest in a series of legal proceedings challenging the on-going Wrigley Field renovations, and in particular the Cubs’ construction of two new outfield scoreboards.   Unlike earlier legal challenges to the project – which are focused on trying to overturn the city’s approval of the renovation plans – the rooftop owners’ suit against the Cubs charges the team with a variety of legal violations (antitrust, defamation, unfair business practices, breach of contract).

Last week, the rooftop owners asked the court to issue a temporary restraining order (“TRO”) preventing the team from building the scoreboards until the case is resolved.  Following four hours of argument on Wednesday, Judge Virginia Kendall issued a decision on Thursday morning denying the rooftops’ request, helping clear the way for the Cubs to move forward with construction of the disputed scoreboards.

In order to receive a TRO, the rooftops generally had to show that they: 1) were likely to prevail in the case, and 2) would suffer an “irreparable” injury (i.e., one that cannot be fully remedied by money) if the restraining order was not granted.  The rooftop owners believed they had established both requirements, arguing in particular that the imminent construction of the scoreboards would destroy their business. Meanwhile, the Cubs argued that the rooftops were unlikely to prevail on any of the claims they had asserted in the lawsuit, and that they could easily be compensated for any damage to their business resulting from the construction of the scoreboards through the payment of monetary damages.

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You might expect the Kansas City Royals to have a big offseason after their fabled run to the World Series that reignited a love of baseball in the entire region of Missouri which doesn’t root for the Cardinals. Maybe they would sign someone to fill the offensive power void and boost run production, or try to extend James Shields, who was hitting free agency. That didn’t happen. Instead, their offseason can be summed up by the front office giving 17 million dollars to Kendrys Morales, which is still a surprisingly strange sentence to type, even a few months after the deal.

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All winter, the focus on the Phillies has centered on Cole Hamels. He’s their best player, they’re an obvious seller, and the remainder of his contract is a bit of a discount relative to the current market price for frontline starting pitchers. Of course, those last two factors also mean that the Phillies asking price has been quite high, as they look for multiple young prospects in return, with the acquiring team also absorbing the entirety of the rest of his contract. For reasons that have been covered ad nauseum, no one has been willing to give up that kind of talent while also taking on $96 million in salary commitments, and so for now, Hamels remains in Philadelphia.

At some point sooner than later, now that spring training is beginning, pitchers are going to start getting hurt. Pitchers on contenders. Guys that win-now teams were counting on are going to report some stiffness in their elbow, and after a few days of assuming its just normal dead arm, they’ll be told they need Tommy John Surgery. And then the rumors will begin to kick up, and that team will get attached to Hamels as a potential suitor, and eventually, Hamels will have a new home. At least, as long as he isn’t one of the guys complaining about dead arm anyway.

From now through the trade deadline, the asking price for Hamels probably only goes up. The Phillies are already paying the cost in awkwardness of bringing him to spring training, so there’s no reason for them to give in and take a deal similar to what they’ve been offered at this point. Amaro is betting on injuries depleting the supply of arms on contending teams, pushing the demand for Hamels higher, allowing him to get the kind of return he’s been seeking all winter. As long as Hamels stays healthy, it will probably work.

But Cole Hamels isn’t the only interesting piece of trade-bait in Philadelphia. And in fact, if I was a team like the Red Sox or the Padres, I might actually target Cliff Lee instead.

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An interesting thing about Corey Kluber is that he just won the 2014 American League Cy Young Award, narrowly edging out Felix Hernandez. Though it was virtually impossible to separate the two, statistically, there was no arguing with Kluber’s win — he was at least the co-best pitcher in his league. Another interesting thing about Corey Kluber is that, in the minors, he was never highly thought of. Everybody in the minor leagues has talent, but no one would argue with the statement that Kluber has basically come out of nowhere. He’s overachieved, relative to his earlier expectations.

Kluber’s not alone. I mean, at his talent level, Kluber is almost alone, but he’s not the only current pitcher to overachieve. Dallas Keuchel was never highly regarded. Neither was Tanner Roark, who I think has taken everybody by surprise. Jose Quintana wasn’t much of a prospect, and neither was Doug Fister, and neither was Tyson Ross. I could keep going. You know Matt Shoemaker? Shoemaker, for the Angels, was outstanding. His Triple-A ERA is over 5.

But we shouldn’t pretend like this is strictly a pitching phenomenon. One of the most valuable players of the last few years has been Josh Donaldson, and Donaldson is a little like a hitting version of Kluber. Donaldson just took a slightly more complicated route to astonishing stardom. Ben Zobrist has been hugely valuable, and didn’t come up as a top prospect. Jonathan Lucroy wasn’t a big-time prospect. Jose Bautista and Yan Gomes have been different sorts of surprises. Baseball players will surprise you. You’ve heard this before, in different forms.

So this brings us to one question: do we observe more surprising starting pitchers, or do we observe more surprising position players? The other day at FanGraphs, I analyzed how many good players had previously been considered good prospects. I based it on Wins Above Replacement (WAR) and the Baseball America top-100 prospect lists. To keep things simple, that was my definition: a “good prospect” was any prospect who had ever appeared in a top-100. It’s not perfect, but it’ll do. Afterward, someone asked for a breakdown between hitters and pitchers. I was also curious, and this is that breakdown.

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Despite television deals with ESPN, FOX, and TBS that will net Major League Baseball an average of $1.5 billion per year over the next years, franchises derive most of their revenue locally. Ticket sales, advertising, naming rights, local radio broadcasting rights, and local television rights constitute the majority of each team’s revenue. In recent years, new local television deals have generated incredible revenues with one-third of all teams now having signed deals worth at least one billion dollars. The deals have raised a question: When will this television rights bubble burst and send these skyrocketing guarantees back to earth? The Arizona Diamondbacks new television deal, believed to be in excess of one billion dollars, partly answers the question: Not yet.

Skepticism regarding the continual rise of local television contracts is justified. There have been indications recently that all is not well for the regional sports networks. The Los Angeles Dodgers generated news when they signed a contract worth more than $8 billion two years ago. Unfortunately for the Dodgers, that contract is still generating news as Time Warner Cable has been unable to successfully negotiate with the rest of the television providers in the Los Angeles area, leaving 70% of LA homes without the ability to watch Dodgers games on television. The San Diego Padres have had trouble getting their product in local homes before reaching a deal prior to the start of last season, and Houston’s deal has been a disaster as they try to charge high subscriber prices to watch a team they had no plans to make successful for several seasons.

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Earlier this week, lead prospect analyst Kiley McDaniel published our top 200 prospect list. Later that day, I made my FanGraphs debut looking at how the players on that list graded out according to KATOH — my prospect projection system. Now I’m back with more stats-based prospect analysis only this time, I’ve compiled a list of the top 200 minor leaguers ranked by their KATOH projections.

Just to be clear, this list isn’t intended to compete with or undermine Kiley’s rankings in any way. KATOH isn’t meant to be the the final word on prospect evaluation, but should instead be used as a tool to complement the work done by Kiley and other prospect experts. What follows is simply the output of a (flawed) statistical model that’s been sorted from largest to smallest without any sort of adjustment. But while it may be an imperfect exercise, ranking players exclusively by their KATOH projections makes it easy to spot instances where the stats disagree with the general scouting consensus. Even if, as they likely are in many cases, the scouts turn out to be correct, it’s still worth highlighting the players for which there is a significant difference. Some of the guys below are going to prove scouts wrong; figuring out which is the tricky part.

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In yesterday’s post, I focused on the decrease in winter signings over the past few years. As pitchers and catchers trickle into camp a new signing season begins and that season has seen a considerable increase in activity over the past few years. From 2008-2011 teams averaged around 9 contract extensions in the period starting now and ending near the beginning of June. In the last three years, the average for spring signings has been nearly 13 with a high of 16 in 2012.

From 2008-2011, 35 players signed during the spring, compared to 47 during the winter. Those numbers have reversed in recent seasons. The three-year spring period from 2012-2014 has already seen 38 players sign contract extensions compared with 22 winter signings from 2012-2015. Just like with the winter signings, the service time of the spring signers has not changed over the years. The players that sign in the period between late February and early June skew younger, but the service time has remained consistent, 2.4 from 2008-2011 and 2.5 from 2012-2014.

It is possible that the increased number of signings in the spring is having an effect on future winters. A large number of spring signings in 2012 and 2014 preceded very meager numbers the following winters. The spring signers are younger than their winter counterparts. Increasing the number of young players signing in the spring could bring down the number of players available to sign in the following winters. Of the 38 players who have signed extensions the past three springs, 33 had under five years of service time and 24 were below three years of service time. Many of those players might have been candidates for extensions in later periods had they not signed early in their careers, but it does not appear to have affected the number of quality free agents.
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Each year, it seems, there’s a hot new Cuban making an impact in the big leagues. In 2011, we got our first full season of Aroldis Chapman. In 2012, it was Yoenis Cespedes in Oakland. The next year, Jose Fernandez and Yasiel Puig finished 1-2 for the NL Rookie of the Year. In 2014, Jose Abreu won the AL version for the White Sox, while the Red Sox and Cubs got brief late looks at Rusney Castillo and Jorge Soler, respectively. This winter, we’ve already seen the Diamondbacks pick up Yoan Lopez and Yasmany Tomas, and we’re currently waiting to see just how mind-blowing the bonuses Yoan Moncada and Hector Olivera (among others) will wring out of rich, talent-hungry teams.

Cubans in baseball aren’t exactly a new phenomenon, of course. According to Baseball-Reference’s Play Index, 185 Cuban-born players have taken at least one plate appearance since the start of the 20^th century. That includes some very well-known names like Luis Tiant, Rafael Palmeiro, Jose Canseco, and Tony Perez, as well as more recent non-elite starter types including Adeiny Hechavarria, Yunel Escobar, Yasmani Grandal, and Yonder Alonso. And also, Yuniesky Betancourt!

Much has been written, here and elsewhere, about the reasons why. Baseball keeps restricting access to spend on young, non-union talent. Cuba’s evolving political situation has made it something of an untapped pipeline. The consistent recent jackpots on these largely unknown Cuban players – remember, when Puig was signed, the reaction was largely, “wait, who?” – have made teams more willing to jump into the market, and the prices, it seem, keep going up.

That will be the trend until one of these players busts, that is, and that’s generally been the feeling around these investments. They keep working, so why not? Which is fine, except that we’ve already seen two relatively expensive Cuban imports well on their way down that “this isn’t going to work” path, and I’m not talking about Dayan Viciedo or Yunesky Maya.  I’m talking about Dodger infielders Alex Guerrero and Erisbel Arruebarrena, who combined to receive $53 million from the team last winter, and who currently couldn’t possibly find themselves less in the team’s plans. Read the rest of this entry »