Archive for Daily Graphings

The proposed renovation of Wrigley Field continues to keep Chicago-area lawyers busy. A week and a half after the owners of rooftops overlooking the stadium filed their second lawsuit against the city of Chicago – arguing that the city’s approval of the renovation was legally invalid – the owners of two rooftop businesses sued the team itself on Tuesday.   The new lawsuit asserts a variety of claims against the Cubs, including illegal monopolization, deceptive trade practices, defamation, and breach of contract.  A copy of the complaint is available here.

I discussed the history of the dispute between the rooftop owners and Cubs in a post last week.  In short, though, the rooftop owners contend that the team’s renovation plans – including two new scoreboards to be constructed in left and right field – will block their views into Wrigley Field.  Although property owners traditionally do not have any legal right to an unobstructed view – meaning that your neighbor can lawfully build a structure blocking your ocean view, for instance – in this case the Cubs and rooftop owners entered into an agreement back in 2004 giving the rooftops some limited rights to an unobstructed view into the stadium.

Despite this agreement, until yesterday the rooftop owners had focused their legal efforts on challenging the city’s approval of the Wrigley Field renovation.  This was due to contractual language in the rooftop owners’ 2004 agreement with the Cubs stating that “Any expansion of Wrigley Field approved by governmental authorities shall not be a violation of this Agreement.”

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On Monday, while the world was reacting to the news of Max Scherzer’s signing, the Texas Rangers made a nifty little trade, acquiring Yovani Gallardo from the Milwaukee Brewers for three so-so prospects that they probably won’t miss too much. Gallardo immediately slides in behind Yu Darvish and Derek Holland as the team’s #3 starter, giving them some much needed pitching depth in their quest to avoid a repeat of their disastrous 2014 season.

The Rangers clearly needed at least one more reliable starting pitcher, and Gallardo has made 30 or more starts in six consecutive years, proving to be a durable innings eater at worst, while occasionally flashing some front-of-the-rotation stuff. But there’s a reason the Brewers traded him, and it wasn’t just to open up a rotation spot for young hurler Jimmy Nelson; Gallardo’s slowly becoming a different kind of pitcher than he was earlier in his career.

The graph below is the easiest way to see Gallardo’s evolution as a pitcher:

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Here’s what we know about what’s left on the free agent market: If you wanted a bat, you should have acted months ago. Hanley Ramirez, Pablo Sandoval, Michael Cuddyer, Russell Martin and others came off the board pretty quickly. With Nori Aoki in San Francisco and Colby Rasmus in Houston, the best remaining bat might be… who? Geovany Soto? Rickie Weeks? It’s similar for starting pitchers, because while James Shields is still out there, after him, it’s something like Kyle Kendrick and the remains of Chad Billingsley.

But relievers… well, relievers are another story. The big fish like Andrew Miller and David Robertson are long gone, and guys like Zach Duke and Luke Gregerson got paid too, but you could still put together an entire big league bullpen, at reasonable cost and decent productivity, with what’s still left out there.

In fact, let’s play a quick game. “Free agents” are listed as though they’re baseball’s 31st team on our Depth Charts, mostly so that players without a home have a place to be listed so that we can see their projections. With the caveat that WAR isn’t exactly the best way to rate a reliever and that this is for entertainment purposes only, look at where the Free Agent team ranks on the per-positional projection pages:

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I don’t think one should require much convincing that the Houston Astros are taking a worthwhile shot in signing Colby Rasmus. Most simply, it’s a one-year contract for a 28-year-old, and it’s worth just $8 million. Rasmus has had a volatile career — last year he finished with a .287 OBP — but he was still overall an average hitter. The season before, he was a lot better than that. The Astros had a role for Rasmus, after dealing Dexter Fowler. If he’s good, he’ll help. If he’s really good, he’ll be worth a qualifying offer. If he’s bad, well, lots of Astros have been bad, and Rasmus alone won’t stop the Astros from getting where they’re trying to go. At the end of the day, 2015 is just a season the Astros have to play out before the seasons they want to play out.

So I don’t think the contract is necessarily that interesting. Rasmus is talented, and he’s trying to bounce back. The Astros, as a team, aren’t as good as the Mariners, Angels or A’s, so it seems like they’ll be fighting the Rangers for fourth in the American League West. A year from now, I doubt we’ll be thinking much about this. But there is one interesting note we can discuss in more detail: Rasmus strikes out a lot. Several Astros strike out a lot. It seems like the Astros are going to strike out a lot.

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This offseason has been so full of thrills and spills it’s been easy to forget that two of the FanGraphs Crowd’s four most-valued free agents went unsigned well into 2015, with Max Scherzer waiting to become a Washington National until January 19. We don’t yet know why Scherzer waited so long to sign, or why the almost-as-valuable James Shields has waited even longer. Perhaps they have been sitting with fingers crossed in hopes that they would receive a substantial offer from a team other than the Houston Astros. Maybe they just want to take their time making such a big life decision.

Regardless of their reasons for remaining on the free agent market for so long, we’re just about reaching that point in the offseason when Pitchers & Catchers Reporting is visible on the horizon’s crest. One of the perks of being a phenomenal major league player on the level of Scherzer and Shields is that you are afforded comparatively ironclad job security, especially compared to their journeymen peers, many of whom have to annually shuttle their families to new locales across the nation.

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When I first dreamt this post up, I figured the title would somehow include the phrase, “Billy Hamilton Effect.” That was before I discovered Eno already wrote a post called “Todd Frazier and the Billy Hamilton Effect” back in July. Point is, there are a lot of unusual ways in which Billy Hamilton affects the game, because Billy Hamilton is an unusual player. We know this because stealing 155 bases in a single season is not usual, and neither is this.

I wrote a post about Frazier last week, examining how he was able to steal 20 bases despite possessing what appears to be just mediocre speed. In that post, I noted that three of Frazier’s 20 steals “were essentially catcher’s indifference.” Catchers indifferences are typically insignificant, but these three were noteworthy because they all happened for the same reason. At the time, I didn’t get into the details because I didn’t want to spoil the premise of this piece, but after I saw the first one, I knew I had to write a post about it.
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Sunday was quite a day for the hardcore sports fan. An iconic NFL playoff game, with the Packers somehow losing the unlosable game to the Seahawks, took place while the baseball hot stove restarted for what promises to be a very active next month. News began to trickle out that Max Scherzer was about to sign with Washington Nationals for lots of years and dollars. Really, when one surveyed the free-agent landscape way back in November, this is one many saw coming; another union of Scott Boras and the Nationals. Just like that, one season segues into the next. Sure, we’ve got a big football game to watch in a couple of weeks, but it’s baseball season again. In the short term, this clearly makes an already fearsome team even more so, but how will this move impact player and club over the long haul? Read the rest of this entry »

At first glance, Monday’s Yovani Gallardo trade probably seems more significant than it really is. Gallardo is a recognizable name, someone who’s pitched important innings, but he is no longer what he once looked like, and he’s a year away from free agency. Luis Sardinas is a real prospect, recently ranked No. 7 in the Rangers’ system by Baseball America, and he has big-league experience, yet his offensive ceiling is very low. Corey Knebel is another real prospect, with his own big-league experience, yet he’s a reliever with control issues and an elbow injury. And while Marcos Diplan has what they call a live arm, he almost couldn’t possibly be further from the bigs, for a baseball-ing professional. This feels like the Rangers just made a major upgrade to a middling staff, but in reality, Gallardo is something around league-average, and he could be gone by November.

So in that sense, it’s a bit underwhelming. The Rangers did need rotation help, and they got it, but they presumably still aren’t going to the playoffs. And the Brewers have made room in the rotation for Jimmy Nelson, but now they have weaker depth, unless they turn around and make a play for, say, James Shields or Jordan Zimmermann. But there is one part of this that I find particularly fascinating. Yovani Gallardo is changing teams, and Yovani Gallardo is changing leagues, but maybe most importantly, Yovani Gallardo is changing catchers.

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It’s no secret the Nationals have been having a lot of conversations behind the scenes. For much of the offseason, there’ve been rumors the team was open to moving guys like Ian Desmond and Jordan Zimmermann. As hard as it was before to see the Nationals deliberately making themselves worse in the short-term to get better in the future, now the situation has changed — with Max Scherzer on board, the Nationals could subtract and still come out ahead. And with a new ace in the rotation for a while, it’s possible to see a different name on the move: Stephen Strasburg.

No, nothing is on the verge of happening. No, the Nationals don’t need to trade Strasburg, or anybody. They might well elect to go ahead and steamroll through the NL East, preparing for a deep postseason run with an October roster that’s absolutely stacked. On the other hand, there are things like this:

Hearing #Nats RHP Stephen Strasburg is very much available and both sides believe it is time to move on. #MLB

— John Perrotto (@JPerrotto) January 19, 2015

Odds are, Strasburg won’t get moved. But the odds he does get moved aren’t 0%, or even close to that low. So it’s worth wondering: just how high is Stephen Strasburg’s trade value?

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Both the Astros and the Cubs are in the process of a long-term build, yes. And in third baseman Luis Valbuena, starting pitcher Dan Straily, and outfielder Dexter Fowler, they’re moving three players that average close to 28 years old. Not everything these teams do needs to be focused on the far-term, though. With the second wild card, this year can be as important as any other.

When the Astros today sent Fowler to the Cubs for Valbuena and Straily, both teams traded from current surpluses to fill current needs.

The Cubs have infielders. With Starlin Castro, Javier Baez, Arismendy Alcantara, Luis Valbuena, Kris Bryant, and Addison Russell, they had an infield twice over. Once you factor in bust rates, that’s probably a good way to go about things. Since some in the community think the six-foot-five Kris Bryant is headed to the corner outfield, and Alcantara was already playing in the outfield, they might be have been able to fill both the infield and outfield eventually.

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