Archive for Daily Graphings

Times have changed, finally, in Philadelphia. Approximately two years after most of the rest of us thought it was time to blow things up, and six months after GM Ruben Amaro reportedly told closer Jonathan Papelbon that the team was still attempting to win now, the Philles have eventually seen the light and committed to the future. Jimmy Rollins is gone. Marlon Byrd is gone. Antonio Bastardo is gone. Cole Hamels may yet be gone. Cliff Lee, presuming he can show he’s healthy early in 2015, will almost certainly be gone by July. Papelbon probably follows. It’s possible Chase Utley sticks it out to maintain one last link to the past, but it’s clear the Phillies we knew are gone, and the next year or two (or more) are going to be a difficult transition.

I didn’t mention Ryan Howard because when you read a quote like this, as Amaro told a local radio station just before the holidays…

“We’ve talked to Ryan,” Amaro said in an interview with 97.5 The Fanatic’s Mike Missanelli on Friday afternoon. “And I told him that in our situation it would probably bode better for the organization not with him but without him. With that said if he’s with us, then we’ll work around him. We’ll hope he puts up the kind of numbers that we hope he can and we’ll see where it goes from there.”

…then it deserves its own section.

When your general manager says the team is better off without you and that if you’re still in town, then they will “work around [you],” well, it’s clear you’re definitely gone. Or, at least, will be at some point, since he’s not been moved yet. You can live with an aging Utley, because he’s still a solid player with no obvious successor. You can’t keep Howard around because he’s a negative for a National League club and each plate appearance that goes to him takes one away from Maikel Franco or Cody Asche or Darin Ruf. None are going to be the next great Phillies first baseman, but there’s value in simply removing an aging, ineffective Howard from the equation, if only emotionally.

I hardly need to remind you of how difficult it’s going to be for the Phillies to actually make a Howard move, because you know all the reasons why. Instead, let’s play a game. Let’s find Howard a new home. Would any team bother with the roster spot? Is there actually a place where he could be of value? Maybe this will be fun. Unless you’re a Phillies fan, of course. Then it won’t be much fun at all.

* * * Read the rest of this entry »

Joe Smith had a favorite team growing up. As is the case for most players, his allegiances changed when he began playing professional baseball. Smith was drafted by the Mets and has gone on to play for the Indians and now the Angels.

According to the side-arming reliever, the change in rooting interests goes beyond the company name on the paychecks being cashed. The logo on your laundry matters, but it’s not the only thing.

“You’re no longer an outsider looking in, so you become more a fan of the game,” said Smith.” You become a fan of people in the game. You get to know guys and find out who is a good person as well as a good player. Instead of being a Cubs fan, like I was when I was younger, now I’m more like, ‘What’s a cool ballpark to go to?’ and ‘Who am I excited to watch play in this series?’

Sometimes the players you’re excited to see play end up beating you. Smith has good career numbers – a 2.78 ERA over 515 relief outings – but like every pitcher, he knows what it feels like to be humbled. That doesn’t mean he can’t appreciate greatness. Read the rest of this entry »

Trades don’t get a lot cleaner than the deal we just recently saw between the Mariners and the Padres. The Mariners needed a left-handed semi-regular outfielder, and had relievers to spare. The Padres needed a reliever, and had left-handed semi-regular outfielders to spare. So the two agreed to swap Seth Smith and Brandon Maurer, and they’re both easy, simple fits. Smith joins Justin Ruggiano in a right-field platoon. Maurer adds another big arm to a team that needed a big arm more than it needed an occasional pinch-hitter.

Just by talent, Maurer is the more intriguing of the two players. With the Mariners, he frustrated as a starting pitcher, then flourished when bumped to relief. All of his stuff played up, and if the Padres keep Maurer in the bullpen, there’s no reason to think he can’t be a big help right away. Out of the Mariner bullpen in 2014, Maurer finished with 38 strikeouts and five walks, and two of those walks were intentional. Of the 209 relievers who threw at least 30 innings, Maurer wound up with the second-lowest unintentional walk rate, and he struck out a quarter of the batters he faced.

A useful statistic is strikeout rate minus walk rate. It holds greater significance than the more familiar strikeout-to-walk ratio. Last year’s bullpen leader in the statistic, naturally, was Aroldis Chapman. Maurer ranked 25th, placing him in the top 12 percent. He was tied with another recent Padres bullpen acquisition, Shawn Kelley. Maurer ranked ahead of names like Glen Perkins and Tyler Clippard. It’s pretty well established that Maurer can be good in relief. He’s a guy with future closer potential.

As a reliever-for-outfielder swap, the trade’s fair. Where it gets really interesting is if the Padres decide to try Maurer as a starter again. In Seattle, he’d had the door all but closed on the possibility. But the Padres say they don’t yet know how Maurer is going to be used, in the short-term or in the long-term. Probably, he’ll end up a reliever, but he’s just 24 years old, in a new organization. And though the Mariners grew frustrated by Maurer’s lack of progress out of the rotation, he shares a lot in common with a member of the current Padres staff, who was sold cheaply by the A’s.

The Padres picked up Tyson Ross in November 2012, giving up Andy Parrino and Andrew Werner. Parrino is a player of no consequence, and Werner hasn’t pitched in the majors since. Though Ross was inconsistent with the A’s, the Padres have turned him into a reliable front-of-the-rotation starter. That’s not an easy thing to do — if it were, it would happen a lot more often — but you can see where Ross changed, and you can see how Maurer might fit a similar profile.

Both Ross and Maurer are right-handed. One’s listed at 6-foot-5, 225 pounds, and the other’s listed at 6-5, 220. They’ve got powerful fastballs that can get into the mid-90s as a starter. Ross and Maurer have also shown powerful sliders, but early on they struggled to find a consistent weapon against lefties. As a starter with Oakland, Ross threw a fastball averaging 92 miles per hour, and a slider at 86. He occasionally dabbled with a changeup at 86. As a starter with Seattle, Maurer threw a fastball averaging 92 miles per hour, and a slider at 86. He dabbled with a changeup at 85, and a curveball at 74.

Read the rest at Just A Bit Outside.

For the American League version of this same exercise, click here.

The final page has been ripped from the old calendar, and 2015 is finally upon us. Before “The Offseason – Phase II” kicks in for earnest next week, let’s again take a look at some leftover 2014 data over this extended weekend. This time, let’s take a look at the offensive ball-in-play (BIP) frequency and production leaders and laggards in the National League.

Read the rest of this entry »

By their own standards, the Yankees’ offseason has been strangely quiet. Has the team’s offseason to date flown under the radar? They’re simultaneously busy and quiet, signing two reasonably high-profile free agents and engineering two trades for everyday players. They’re both smart, imminently defensible trades but they don’t quite qualify as Yankee-scale blockbusters.

The team improved, but as it currently stands, New York trails the Blue Jays and Red Sox in terms of talent. Steamer Projections rank the Rays and Yankees as equals, forecasting an offense that marginally outscores the runs their defense and pitching allow. The offseason is far from over, but the Yankees are clearly taking their club into another direction.

The Yankees, against all odds, are getting younger. In doing so, they’re adding an element unseen in the Bronx for many years: uncertainty.

For years, fans of rival AL East teams waited on the mighty Yankees to age, decline, and finally collapse like an Old Vegas hotel rigged with dynamite. For the most part, those fans never got their wish. The Yankees had some down years, but they always had the resources to paper over their mistakes, to throw good money after bad and put together a competitive team. The second wild card spot kept the 2013 and 2014 Yankees within shouting distance of the playoffs when the talent on hand suggested they didn’t belong.

But the one thing the Yankees and their core of established talents always have is known commodities. With all their money and ability to spot a salvage job worth undertaking, the Yankees always manage a reasonably high floor for their talent. They traffic in big leaguers with little mystery. The opposite of the 2015 Chicago Cubs, in other words.

The recent veteran-laden Yankees teams came with long resumes and a whole lot of plate appearances to look back on when looking to their future. Especially over the last few seasons, the Yankees bent but never broke. They won 85 and then 84 games in the past two seasons, unable or unwilling to blow up their roster. It was never stars and scrubs as much as stars and plugs – upmarket scrubs preventing the Yankees from wallowing in rebuild seasons and netting higher draft picks.

Read the rest on Just A Bit Outside.

About 16 months ago, I wrote this 3,000-word-plus diatribe about Courtney Hawkins, attempting to make sense of how a 2012 mid-first-round pick could collapse from a .284/.324/.480 line in his post-draft 2012 season (complete with reaching High-A at age 18) to an abysmal .178/.249/.384 mark in 2013 (complete with ghastly 37.6% strikeout rate).

For some, those numbers were grounds for Hawkins’ dismissal as a prospect; for others, his youth and level made that immediate, severe pessimism seem a bit over-the-top and premature; he did manage to slug nineteen homers in 103 games in the midst of all that whiffing, at least. The thought of this latter group was that Hawkins would repeat High-A in 2014 as a 20-year-old and that the tools that made him a first-round pick would again surface as he grew into the level.

A glance at the big outfielder’s 2014 end-of-season results shows that those who held out hope for improvement weren’t off base. Hawkins came through with a .249/.331/.450 line this past season, good for a .352 wOBA and 117 wRC+. He cut his strikeout rate to a more workable 27.8% while raising his walks from 6.8% to 10.3%. If his 2013 season didn’t exist, statistically-minded prospect-watchers would look at Hawkins’ age-20 campaign and declare it a solid success, or at least say he met expectations.

In this piece, I want to look beneath this superficial dramatic improvement and examine what drove Hawkins’ improvements, with an eye toward where his 2014 modifications might lead him in the future.

Read the rest of this entry »

It’s the end of the year. At the end of the year, we like to look back before we look forward to the upcoming year. In that vein, I thought it would be instructive — and perhaps a little bit fun — to pull the most popular posts from our fair site for this calendar year. If you read the Best Of post each week (or even some weeks, or maybe you glanced at it while your significant other was in the dressing room that one time and you were suuuuper bored???), you know that I like to throw a little shine at all of the blogs in our family, so we’ll also have a spot for the most popular piece for each blog as well, if they didn’t reach the actual top 10. Onward!

Wait, before we move onward, a note — just because I’m using the “Best of” post here, doesn’t mean that these were necessarily the best posts. They’re simply the most popular. I am grouping them under the “Best of” banner because it’ll be easier to find them at a later date. You know, if you’re curious to find them again at a later date (I know I will be). OK, onward!!!

Read the rest of this entry »

This is the final installment of a three-part series looking back at what has been an unusually eventful year for Major League Baseball in the courtroom. Part One recapped the legal maneuvering surrounding Alex Rodriguez’s suspension and the Oakland A’s proposed move to San Jose, while Part Two looked at MLB’s 2014 minimum wage and gender discrimination issues. This part concludes the series by reviewing the status of various television-related legal proceedings for MLB and its teams, as well as covering an assortment of other legal developments.

Television

Television revenues are vital to MLB’s business, so it should be no surprise that the league was involved in a series of important TV-related legal proceedings in 2014. Perhaps the most significant of these cases is Garber v. Office of the Commissioner of Baseball, a suit challenging MLB’s television policies under federal antitrust law.

Wendy Thurm has previously discussed the Garber suit on several occasions. By way of a brief recap, the case alleges that MLB’s television policies violate the Sherman Act in two ways: first, by imposing unreasonable blackout policies on fans; and second, by selling only league-wide pay-per-view subscription packages (MLB Extra Innings and MLB.tv) rather than allowing teams to offer their own individual out-of-market plans. Read the rest of this entry »

In 2014, I had the pleasure of interviewing hundreds of people within baseball. Many of their words were shared via the FanGraphs Q&A series. Others came courtesy of the Sunday Notes column, which debuted in February. Here is a selection of the best quotes from this year’s conversations.

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“Later on, when they went to the QuesTec system, the strike zone became more of a north-and-south than an east-and-west. I had to learn how to pitch inside more, which wasn’t an easy thing to do.” – Tom Glavine, Hall of Fame pitcher, January 2014

“In my first at bat, I hit a home run and thought to myself, ‘I’m going to hit 30 home runs in this league.’ I ended up hitting five.” – Clint Frazier, Cleveland Indians prospect, January 2014

“As a pitcher, you’re supposed to feel at home on the mound. You’re supposed to feel comfortable and strong. I didn’t feel that way.” – Jesse Biddle, Philadelphia Phillies prospect, January 2014

“My mind was free, because I was only concentrating on one thing, which was getting hitters out. I was in the big leagues, so I was able to relax and do my job.” – Matt Harvey, New York Mets, February 2014

“Twenty-four hours to vent and rage, break things. I punched my door and put a crack in it. I broke a few boat oars out back of the house. I was mad, because I felt I was being stolen from.” – Luke Scott, former big-league outfielder, February 2014

“When I brawled, I blacked out. I don’t really remember much outside of watching the videos. I do remember telling Dean Palmer, ‘They’re about to start hitting our guys and we’ll need to go out there.’ ” – Doug Brocail, former Detroit Tigers pitcher, February 2014

“When I stood on the mound while on Adderall, everything faded away except for the catcher’s mitt. No crowd noise, no distractions. It was almost like being in the Matrix. Although you were sped up, everything slowed down.” – Player X, March 2014 Read the rest of this entry »

Asdrubal Cabrera’s signing with the Rays. There was thought the free-agent middle infielder would get multiple years, given the number of teams looking for a shortstop or a second baseman, but by the reports, Cabrera is signing for one year and something in the vicinity of $8 million. Call it the A.J. Burnett contract, if you’d like. Cabrera’s an unexciting player, signing for unexciting terms.

Whenever you think about a fresh transaction, there’s a desire to find and identify that certain hidden something. That one thing about a given player that made him so appealing to his new team. I don’t think there’s a certain hidden something about Asdrubal Cabrera. He’s a fairly established entity: he’s a relatively poor defensive shortstop who used to be a better player than he is. He can play short but he fits better at second, and his overall offense is close enough to being average you can get away with calling it average. What do you have when you have an average hitter who’s roughly an average overall defender? That’s an average player. Cabrera’s close to that, and maybe a little bit worse.

This isn’t a franchise player, the Rays are signing. This isn’t a player many will remember as having been a Ray five or ten years down the line. This is just one of those small, fine deals every team has to make, and the most interesting thing about it is what it means for other players. The Rays are signing Asdrubal Cabrera, which means more and more people are talking about Ben Zobrist.

Read the rest of this entry »