Archive for Daily Graphings

Let’s bring you up to speed, in case this has somehow eluded you: the Padres recently acquired Justin Upton, Matt Kemp, and Wil Myers. They also did more than that, too, but, as things stand, those guys project to be the Padres’ three starting outfielders, Kemp’s hip arthritis and all. (Matt Kemp reportedly has hip arthritis.) Because someone has to play center, it looks like Myers will play center. He’ll do so acceptably — Shin-Soo Choo played center for a team that won 90 games — but Myers looks like he’ll be a liability. The Padres are sacrificing outfield defense for outfield offense.

But that’s not the only defensive sacrifice they’re lined up to make. Now, before we proceed: who knows, right? Who knows what the Padres’ roster will look like in three months? Consider how the Padres’ roster looked just last month. A.J. Preller is a busy man. Answer the phone. It’s A.J. Preller. He’s calling you right now. You missed him. Preller still has moves to make, so we’ll just have to see how things look in the end, but given where things are now, the Padres are also going to be weaker behind the plate.

Coming into the offseason, the Padres had both Rene Rivera and Yasmani Grandal. At one point, they were briefly in possession of Ryan Hanigan. They were also a rumored landing spot for David Ross. All those guys have gone elsewhere. The Padres’ depth chart reads Derek Norris, supported by Tim Federowicz. Top prospect Austin Hedges remains in the system, but he’s not yet ready for the show, nor should he be for a while. The Padres right now would go into the season with Norris and Federowicz receiving.

Read the rest on Just A Bit Outside.

The MLB should be receiving a new crop of far eastern talent in the next year or two, which means it is worth reacquainting ourselves with the standouts and talent levels of these leagues — specifically the Korean Baseball Organization (KBO) and Japan’s Nippon Pro Baseball league (NPB).

Let’s start with Korea and Pittsburgh’s potential new infielder, Jeong-ho Kang:

NOTE: I am using wOBA+ here, which is merely my shorthand for wRC+ without park factors and using MLB linear weights. So the numbers are not perfect, but they’re better than OPS or OPS+.

The KBO is a hitter’s league. That is the refrain we hear most often whenever Kang’s surfaces. He slashed a filthy .356/.459/.739 with 40 homers in 2014, and his career stats suggest he’s a middle infielder who hits like he’s from the corner. But how good is he with respect to the league?

Answer: He’s the best. But a wide margin.

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Let’s talk about the Twins for a moment. No, you probably don’t want to talk about the Twins, I understand, but it’s Christmas Eve, and the eight or so of you who are unfortunate enough to be in an office right now will probably be happy to talk about something, I think. And the Twins, certainly, are something.

Yesterday, Jeff Sullivan took a look at projected 2015 team defenses, and within that piece was a list of teams that you wouldn’t really want to be included on:

Now, the three worst defensive teams, projected:

• Astros
• White Sox
• Twins

It’s difficult to dispute that from a Minnesota perspective, because while Jeff noted the obvious caveats of attempting to project defense, the 2014 Twins finished 29th in DRS, 24th in UZR/150, and 27th in Defense. One of the teams regularly behind them, Cleveland, will no longer have a left side of the infield that occasionally lined up as Asdrubal Cabrera and Carlos Santana. They’ll still be below-average, but they might not be a train wreck. The Twins? The Twins’ main non-pitching move this winter has been to import baseball’s worst regular defender from a year ago, Torii Hunter, and park him in right field.

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The 2014 season was, in no uncertain terms, a disaster for the Texas Rangers. Injuries destroyed a promising club and left them in the basement of the American League West with a 67-95 record, losing more games than even the lowly Astros.

As easy as it might be to write 2014 off to injury, the Rangers as currently constructed don’t appear much better than the club that limped to those 95 loses. With 2015 just around the corner, the biggest move of their offseason so far was the one to acquire Ross Detwiler from the Nationals and decline their contract option on Alex Rios, making him a free agent.

The Rangers front office believes it can better with the some health and the absence of “cursed by a coven of witches” bad luck. Their two huge acquisitions ahead of 2014 — Shin-Soo Choo and Prince Fielder — were both known for their durability and production before coming to Texas. Both players ended up vastly underperforming and managed just 700 plate appearances combined, where they hit a meagre .243/.345/.370 with 16 home runs – replacement level production from two superstars paid $38 million for their troubles.

Both players can’t help but improve on their 2014 seasons but what does that net the Rangers? Three more wins? Maybe four? They used 40 different pitchers (including three different position players) as the wide-ranging injuries pushed green players into positions they were not prepared to fill. They won’t have Martin Perez back until late this season (if at all) but the team as constituted looks like Darvish and Holland and pray for rain.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

There are people who think we make too much of projections, and that’s with regard to hitting and pitching projections. That is to say, the more reliable projections. We pretty much never talk about defensive projections, and there’s enough controversy over defensive non-projections. People can’t even agree on what’s already happened, so it’s asking a lot to expect people to look at defensive forecasts and take them seriously. Also, hey, by the way, it’s not even Christmas yet, so there’s plenty of offseason left to go. We don’t yet know what team rosters are going to look like in April. Projections we have right now are of limited utility.

But, there’s nothing happening. It’s the holiday season, so now baseball’s moving slowly, and one of the things we offer here are team defensive projections, so, let’s look at those. They’re coming from Steamer, as usual, and they’re based on our current author-maintained depth charts, as usual. Following, a big table, which I will try my very hardest to make sortable.

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The holidays are upon us, and transactional activity is about to take a short hiatus, if history is a guide. (Though I do remember Jeff Suppan signing as a free agent on Christmas Eve when I was with the Brewers, but I digress.) Just some fun data for readers to chew on as they sip their beverage of choice over the next few of days.

Today, let’s take a look at the 2014 offensive ball-in-play (BIP) frequency and production leaders and laggards in the American League. Sometime around New Year’s, we’ll check out the NL. Caution: there is a fairly healthy dose of Danny Santana information to follow. Continue at your own risk.

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Max Scherzer was on my fantasy baseball team in 2013. (Note: I recognize you don’t care about my fantasy team. This is in the service of a point, I promise.) My fantasy baseball team that year won the league championship, and Scherzer was a big reason why. I don’t remember if I thought to myself during the draft, “Hey, this guy is going to be really good because he had a 78 xFIP- last year,” or if I said, “Hey, whatever, it’s a late round, this pick won’t really matter. Why not take a flyer on this guy?” Scherzer wasn’t really much of anybody the year before, which is why I could get him late in my draft. Sure, he had a 3.74 ERA in 2012, and he won 16 games, but he certainly didn’t have the hype he does now.

Fast-forward to this offseason. Sooner or later, a real-life team will acquire Scherzer. He will be expensive, there’s no doubting that. And rightly so. Scherzer has established himself as one of the best pitchers in baseball. A true ace who has put up consecutive 5.5-win seasons, Scherzer now has a whole lot more value than pre-2013 Scherzer, who showed signs of promise but was just another pitcher who couldn’t put it together.

But how different is Scherzer now than he was two years ago? He’s two years older, of course. He’s a free-agent — as opposed to having two more years of team control. And he’s had three consecutive good (or better) years, instead of just one. But when you look closely, Scherzer is a very similar pitcher to who he was even before his Cy Young-winning 2013 campaign. And that’s not a bad thing.

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It’s soon going to be harder to be an agent certified by the Major League Baseball Player’s Association. The process is about to change, and though it’s been due for an update for a while, the new rules are not without questions. Will it change anything? Is it being done for the right reasons?

According to multiple sources familiar with the process, the MLBPA will soon be officially changing the process of agent certification. Right now, their site lists having a player on the forty-man, filling out an application, and submitting $500 as the main requirements.

The revised process will ask new agents to complete an in-person test, available twice a year. Fees may be raised (sources conflicted on this issue). Background checks will be beefed up. And the more informal rule governing having a player on the forty-man will be relaxed in one way and strengthened in another: agents must have a player on the forty-man once every three years, but presumably this will be enforced more often than it has been in the past.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

Last Friday, for Fox, I wrote something of a primer article on South Korean shortstop Jung-Ho Kang. I tried to make sure the timing coincided with an announcement, but instead, it just coincided with the closing of the posting window. We had to wait all weekend to find out which team put in the high bid, and now, Monday, we’ve got our answer: the Pirates won the bidding process for Kang, submitting a figure just north of $5 million. Now those same Pirates have an exclusive negotiating window, following the same process that Japan recently did away with. Reports say Kang is looking for about $5 million a year over four years.

The Pirates haven’t said much of anything about this, aside from an acknowledgment of the fact that they’ll be negotiating now. And because of the way this works, there is some possibility that the Pirates simply put in the high bid to block a rival. That’s not very likely. A bid intended to block someone probably would’ve been higher than $5 million, because that’s not actually very much money. The odds of this being a block aren’t 0%, but if we assume that the Pirates are serious about getting Kang locked up, then we’re free to think about the various possibilities. How would Kang fit in in Pittsburgh?

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It was an exciting thing that Phil Hughes pulled off — just last season, he finished with the best-ever ratio of strikeouts to walks. It sounds good. It is good. Strikeouts are good! Walks are bad. (For pitchers.) You want to have a lot of the former and few of the latter. There’s no taking away Hughes’ accomplishment, now that the season’s complete. But then, we have come to understand that strikeouts minus walks is more meaningful than strikeouts over walks. Ratios can go crazy with little denominators. By K-BB%, Hughes didn’t set any records. He did, though, finish in between Madison Bumgarner and Jon Lester. And he established a career-best for himself.

The story, really, isn’t that Hughes became one of the best pitchers ever. It’s just that he became a much better pitcher, which is plenty. Down the stretch, it came to public attention that Hughes finished one out shy of triggering a contract bonus. There was thought that the Twins should pay Hughes the bonus anyway, since he did enough to earn it. Turns out Hughes declined an opportunity to pitch out of the bullpen to make his extra money. And now it doesn’t even matter, because the Twins have given Hughes an extension. He’s getting an extra three years and $42 million, including an extra $1.2 million in each of the next two years. In a sense, the Twins just signed Hughes to a five-year, $58-million contract.

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