Archive for Daily Graphings

According to Dennis Lin of the U-T San Diego, the San Diego Padres — despite rumors to the contrary — aren’t interested in flipping the recently acquired Wil Myers to the Phillies in exchange for Philadelphia left-hander Cole Hamels.

Writes Lin:

Indications from sources within the organization… are that the Padres intend on playing all three of their newest outfielders, including Myers. The early plan is for the 2013 American League Rookie of the Year to start in center field, flanked by fellow power-hitting right-handers Justin Upton and Matt Kemp.

The bold is mine and the bold is of some interest insofar as center field, with the exception of 51 innings in 2013, isn’t a position at which Wil Myers has spent much time as a major leaguer. He played it to a greater extent in the minors, making about two-thirds as many starts there as he did in right field while still a member of the Royals organization. But one also notes that minor-league defensive assignment aren’t necessarily excellent indicators of future major-league defensive prowess. Miguel Cabrera, for example — on something more intimate than just nodding terms with inertia even as a 20-year-old rookie — nevertheless made more minor-league starts at shortstop than any other position. Michael Morse made 95% of his nearly 500 minor-league starts at shortstop leading up to his 2005 major-league debut. His physique now isn’t identical to his physique then, but he’s still the same human — and that human wasn’t a good shortstop in 2005.

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It’s been a busy offseason. Don’t believe me? Dave Cameron started out a post with the words “Screw it, I can’t even keep up anymore.” Take a look at this guy’s picture from the winter meetings. That’s the face of a writer at 1 a.m. who knows he’s going to be up until 4 a.m. because of all these damn trades the Dodgers are making.

A lot has gone on. By a quick count, well over 100 players have changed teams due to trades alone since the start of the month, and that’s so many players. That many transactions can be overwhelming, and sometimes it’s easy to forget who is on which team. To keep yourself in check, an incredibly useful site is RosterResource.com, which used to go as MLBDepthCharts.com. Jason Martinez and his crew do a great job of staying on top of recent transactions, the projected lineups and 25-man rosters are interesting to see change in real-time, and there’s other nifty tools to play with on his pages.

One of those tools recently caught my eye and held my attention, due to the bevy of aforementioned trades. It’s the “How Assembled” pages. They’re hardly a new concept, and the idea is simple: each player on the 40-man roster for each team was acquired in a specific year, and in a specific way. Whether it be through the draft, free agency, trade, or some other means, this table lets you know.

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Is there a more infuriating player in the game than Colby Rasmus? Rasmus put up a 4-win age-23 season with St. Louis in 2010 and looked like a future star thanks to power, on-base skills (combining for a 130 wRC+) and adequate center field defense. By the end of 2011, though, he was a Blue Jay — pushed out of St. Louis amid reports that he (and, at times, his father) couldn’t find a way to coexist with Tony LaRussa. Rasmus would put up a career-worst 2012 but then had a smashingly successful 2013, matching his 2010 production and adding better defense for what was essentially a 5-win age-26 season. But in 2014, he saw all his progress collapse. He missed a month with a hamstring injury, and he was eventually benched in favor of Dalton Pompey and Anthony Gose in September.

Now he’s a free agent, and he’s among the only intriguing hitters remaining. If you look at the free-agent list, you’ll see that only four active unsigned outfielders are projected for even a single win: Rasmus, Nori Aoki, Chris Denorfia and Andy Dirks. Aoki is the safest bet, easily, though with little remaining upside — he’ll plug a hole, but won’t move the needle. Denorfia turns 35 next year and is coming off the worst year of his career; Dirks missed the entire season due to a back injury and was recently non-tendered.

Rasmus, 28, is the most frustrating of the bunch, with his two star-level seasons stuck amid three replacement-level campaigns. But how true is that? For all the talk that Rasmus’ offense fell apart in 2014 — and a .287 OBP obviously isn’t acceptable — he still hit for enough power to be a league-average hitter (103 wRC+), which isn’t exactly the disaster you might have expected. His batted-ball distance increased from 2012 to 2013, and then again in 2014. Last season’s 290.09 batted-ball distance was equal to or better than Carlos Santana’s, Anthony Rizzo’s, Chris Carter’s and Edwin Encarnacion’s. Rasmus also had a career-best line drive rate, and a career-best HR/FB rate. His infield fly ball rate dropped for the third year in a row.

His plate discipline and contact skills weren’t good last year, which explains a large part (as does a BABIP drop) of his lessened offensive production, but the items above all make for things to like. After all, even in a bad year, he was a league-average hitter. For his career, he’s been a league-average hitter. In 2015, Steamer projects him to be a league-average hitter. It’s rarely that simple, though, because prior to 2014 he’d gotten to “league-average” by a combination of ups and downs. Still, bear with me for a moment and ponder this: If Rasmus were a league-average hitter with an equal chance of breakout as collapse — and paired that with league-average defense in center field — that would make for a valuable player who could help many teams.

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Last Sunday’s column included several perspectives on the strike zone. Arizona Diamondbacks’ senior vice president of baseball operations De Jon Watson wasn’t one of the people quoted, but I did address the subject with him at the winter meetings.

Watson told me his club is paying attention, and is thus aware the 2014 zone was lower than it’s been in the past. He said teams need to be cognizant of everything going on in the industry, including how umpires are calling games. As for how a lower strike zone relates to player acquisition, Watson – like others in the industry – wasn’t very forthcoming.

“With each player, we assess and evaluate what they handle best and what balls they’re putting in play on a consistent basis,” said Watson. “We do our homework to make sure we’re procuring guys who fit our ballpark, our need, and really, where the game is going. We’re always studying trends.”

What Watson said about the strike zone as it pertains to player development was far more intriguing. Read the rest of this entry »

A move that wasn’t a Padres move happened Friday.

Yankees send to Marlins:

• Martin Prado
• David Phelps
• $6 million

Marlins send to Yankees:

• Nathan Eovaldi
• Garrett Jones
• Domingo German

German is a prospect. Eovaldi has three more years of team control, while Jones has one. Prado has two more years of team control, and Phelps has four, although he’s a Super-Two asset. The way it’s being phrased, the Yankees are chipping in $3 million in each of the next two years to partially pay down Prado’s salary. But if you’d like, you can mentally cancel out the $6 million and German. Now, German is actually an intriguing, live-armed prospect, so his value is probably a little north of $6 million, but they’re close enough to being even. This is mostly about the major-league players, and the one who grabs your attention is Eovaldi. That’s the guy with the big, big upside.

From their end, you can see what the Marlins are doing. They didn’t need Eovaldi, and Phelps is useful enough, and Prado can play all over the place. But from the other side, the Yankees might well be ecstatic. Theirs was a roster in need of help in the rotation. It’s not often you can land an arm like Eovaldi’s without paying through the nose. It was this very player who, a few years ago, got traded for Hanley Ramirez. Eovaldi’s not even 25 years old, and he can run it up to the triple digits.

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For the first time since perhaps lovable Tony Gwynn Sr. was swattin’ singles around the yard, the San Diego Padres have commanded the full attentions of the baseball world. The architect of these numerous wheelings and dealings, first-year General Manager A.J. Preller, would be hard for even dedicated fans to pick out of a crowd simply because he has been on the job for slightly over four months (and one of those months was the thrilling playoffs, when nobody was too concerned about the Padres).

Today, let’s get to know Preller a little bit via the stray scraps of video interviews that have been released since his hire. Personally, count me a fan of his simultaneously methodical and relaxed demeanor. More importantly, let’s comb through this unofficial archive in search for any clues that the Padres would dramatically reshape their team this offseason. Presented in chronological order:

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There are plenty of ways to poo-poo Nathan Eovaldi. Dude has thrown 300 changeups and they’ve been bad, for the most part. Dude has gas, but his four-seamer gets only gets average whiffs. Dude’s thrown almost 500 innings and been league average. Dude’s done this in pitcher-friendly parks and leagues and now is headed to Yankee Stadium. Dude.

There’s at least one way to get excited about Eovaldi. By arsenal shape, speed, and peripheral results, he’s pretty much Garrett Richards.

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What if I told you there’s a shortstop in his 20s, available for presumably less than Ervin Santana money, coming off a year in which he hit 40 dingers with a four-digit OPS? It’s true — all of those things are true. The shortstop’s name is Jung-Ho Kang, and he really did have such a season. It just didn’t take place where you were looking.

It did take place where several different major-league organizations were looking. Maybe you can try to think of Kang as the Troy Tulowitzki of Korea, and while that’s a stretch, it’s pretty damn promising, at least until the “of Korea” part. There’s no debating Kang’s record; the 27-year-old just batted .356 while slugging .739 for Nexen in the KBO. He owns a career OPS of .886. In 2012, he finished second in the league in OPS. In 2013, he finished ninth. In 2014, he finished first, by dozens of points. The real concern is simple: Kang is trying to become the first KBO position player to reach the major leagues. So such a transition would be unprecedented.

It’s true, we have Hyun-Jin Ryu, but then Ryu was (and is) a starting pitcher. As far as Korean hitters are concerned, Shin-Soo Choo and Hee Seop Choi have each had success, but then they were raised within big-league organizations, so they didn’t come over from the KBO as vets. That’s why so many people wonder about Kang’s potential. This is why he could be a bargain, and this is why he could be a bust.

Read the rest on Just A Bit Outside.

This week, the Padres have acquired Matt Kemp, Justin Upton, and Wil Myers. There is a chance that they keep all three and play them side by side as their 2015 outfield. It would be an experiment in testing the limits of the offense/defense balance, essentially betting that fielding matters very little in relation to hitting the ball over the wall yourself. If the Padres keep all three in the outfield, they’re likely to have one of the best offensive and worst defensive outfields in baseball next year.

They wouldn’t the first team to try this, however. For fun, I decided to look back through the years for which we have UZR data and find teams that have punted outfield defense to maximize their own HR totals. To do this, I took all the team seasons since 2002, and looked for teams who ranked at the top and bottom of the league in home runs and UZR in the same season. Here are three examples of teams that have tried this same strategy in the last 13 years.

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If I had to sum up the offseason for the Oakland Athletics and San Diego Padres, it would be thusly:

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