When one is asked to name the game’s very best starting pitchers, a tight circle of names usually dominate the discussion. Clayton Kershaw likely gains the most mentions, with Felix Hernandez and Cliff Lee among the names closely behind. Justin Verlander and Cole Hamels had off years in 2013, arguably dropping back in the pack a bit. Matt Harvey and Jose Fernandez entered the fray loudly last season, and Stephen Strasburg’s pedigree is as good as anyone’s. Justin Masterson? Doubt his name comes up very often. Should it? Let’s take a look at some batted ball profiles and make the call. Read the rest of this entry »

Play the player-profile game every day this week at 1:00pm ET. We’re giving away a free annual subscription to FanGraphs+ to the first reader who guesses correctly the identity of that day’s mystery player. (Limit one copy per customer).

As the absurdly coiffed Eno Sarris announced on Monday, the newest iteration of FanGraphs+ is now available in exchange for your hard-earned money — and any other kind of money, too.

As in recent years, we’re celebrating this important Moment in History by way of the player-profile game.

Said game is easy: the author offers the text of an actual player profile from the newest iteration of FG+, being careful to omit any proper names that might reveal the identity of the player in question. The reader, in turn, attempts to identify the player using only the details provided in the profile.

First reader to guess correctly (in the comments section below) gets a free annual subscription to FanGraphs+, worth roughly the equivalent of Alec Baldwin’s watch in Glengarry Glen Ross.

Today’s entry comes to us by way of 18th century frontiersman Patrick Dubuque and is absolutely the most obscure of the profiles considered this week. (Note: Paul Swydan will provide a clue after 50 wrong, and zero correct, responses.)

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Major League Baseball may still enjoy immunity from federal antitrust laws, but that immunity doesn’t mean the league or its teams can ignore federal and state laws that require employees be paid a minimum wage.

So say several lawsuits and other legal actions filed against MLB and several teams in the last year. The latest lawsuit, filed last week in federal court in San Francisco, could significantly change the economics of the league were it to succeed. In that case, three former minor league players filed a complaint against MLB, the Giants, Marlins and Royals on behalf of 6,000 current and former minor leaguers claiming that minor league salaries violate federal and state wage and hour laws.

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A strong crop of rookie performers in 2013 and a so-so amateur draft has hurt the organization’s minor league depth. However, the club still has some intriguing prospects on the way. Read the rest of this entry »

Derek Jeter announced today that the 2014 season will be his last, bringing an end to a career that will have spanned 20 years. And while Jeter may be most famous in the statistical community as the poster boy for modern defensive metrics, the reality is that even with his lack of range at shortstop, he’s still easily one of the greatest players of all time.

The basic numbers: Among players who have played at least 25% of their games at shortstop — the qualification needed to show up at the position on our leaderboards — Jeter ranks 6th in WAR. Of the five guys ahead of him, three played (at least in part) in the 19th century. One of the others spent nearly as much time at third base as he did at shortstop. Essentially, over the last 100 years, Cal Ripken is the only full time SS we’ve seen that has posted a higher career WAR than Jeter.

So maybe the mainstream media has overrated Jeter over the last 20 years, but if they have, they’ve slightly exaggerated the greatness of one of the greatest players of all time. This isn’t a Ryan Howard or Jack Morris situation, where the narrative has turned an okay player into a superstar based on myth and legend. Jeter is a legitimate legend on his own merits, with no embellishments needed.

We don’t need to do any kind of career retrospective now, since his career is not yet over, but as a member of the community who has often pointed out Jeter’s defensive deficiencies, I will happily point out that even those flaws don’t keep him from being one of the premier players of his generation. Congratulations on a terrific career, sir.

A.J. Burnett’s been real good for two years, and he was better last year than he was the year before, so there’s good reason to believe he’ll be an effective pitcher in 2014. On paper, he was one of the best pitchers available this offseason, but for the longest time he was a special case because it seemed like he’d either retire or return to the Pirates. Only more recently did Burnett express his desire to play, and his openness to playing elsewhere. Immediately he looked like an interesting short-term target for probable contenders. What’s happened instead is that the Phillies have signed him, for a year and $16 million.

The Phillies were long thought one of the finalists. It seems Burnett didn’t want to stray too far from home, and that eliminated plenty of would-be interested baseball teams. And I want to make it clear that one-year deals for good players are usually good deals, and for the Phillies, I don’t have a big problem with this roll of the dice. But Burnett probably took the biggest contract, and he wound up with a mediocre ballclub. Burnett probably doesn’t make the Phillies a playoff team, and an interesting question concerns what might happen in June or July.

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There’s this town in Wisconsin near where I grew up. To put it bluntly, it stinks. Not in the high school sports “you stink!” sense, the town actually smells bad. It is home to some paper mills, and the byproduct of paper mills is a certain odor. I don’t mean to make it as if the place smells like a garbage dump or sewer, but it’s pungent enough to cause a nose wrinkle. That is, it wrinkles the noses of the outsiders. The people who live there, the people exposed to it every day, they don’t notice it anymore. It’s the phenomenon known as the shifting baseline. When a town has smelled the same way for so long, people tend to shift their perspectives about how towns should smell. This idea, of course, applies to pretty much anything. But for this town in Wisconsin, it’s the smell. For the Minnesota Twins, it’s the middle infield.

The Minnesota Twins have put up some pretty poor seasons as of late. But they were pretty good not that long ago having made the playoffs six times between 2002 and 2010 (what they did in those playoff games is a different story).  They have employed Johan Santana when he was good, Francisco Liriano when he was good the first time, Joe Nathan, Joe Mauer, Torii Hunter, a pre-concussion Justin Morneau, and even squirreled some late-career heroics out of Jim Thome in the past few years. They were a mid-market team in a fairly week weak division, and some good development and some luck swung in their favor. Their middle infield has been an exception, however.

The middle infield for the Twins has been a veritable wasteland for the past 15 years. Players like Luis Rivas, Alexi Casilla, Matt Tolbert, Luke Hughes, Brendan Harris, Cristian Guzman, Juan Castro, Adam Everett, Eduardo Escobar, and Tsuyoshi Nishioka have been the Twins’ representation up the middle. They traded Carlos Gomez for J.J. Hardy. They then traded J.J. Hardy for two relievers who have yet to make the majors. Nishioka was supposed to be their next big hope, as they paid $5.3 million in posting fees to negotiate bringing him over from Japan. He stunk, broke his leg, came back and continued to stink. They sent him and his $3 million salary to Triple A for 101 games, in fact, to no avail. It’s been a rough going, is the point of this paragraph.

And so when one Brian Dozier provided even the faintest hint of being close to decent, the Twins looked like they may have shaken their no-hit-infielder blues. Dozier was drafted as a college shortstop in the 8th round of the 2009 draft. He played multiple infield positions in the minors, but  got most of his work in at shortstop. When he was called up in 2012, he was deposited at short. It did not go well. He had a dismal 64 wRC+ while being so-so defensively. The Twins were struggling as a team, so they had no problem letting Dozier try and work things out during the season. It never happened. It seemed as if Dozier was destined to succumb to the destiny of Twins infielders past.

In 2013, Minnesota decided to place Pedro Florimon’s glove at short. Florimon can’t hit either, but the Twins saw his glove as at least some kind of asset at the position. Dozier was moved to second base, and, at least in comparison to past performances, flourished. His defense improved. He started hitting for more power, knocking 18 homers in 623 PA. He nearly doubled his walk rate. Everything was coming up Brian Dozier. By now, you’ve clicked on Brian Dozier’s player page and seen that his 2013 performance ended with a 101 wRC+. This is true. But for Twins fans, he must seem like a godsend. The baseline has shifted a little over the past 15 years.

These are the Twins second baseman since 1998 who have accumulated at least  400 PA in a season.

Dozier comes in tied for second in WAR, and tied for second in hitting. I’m going to repeat that for clarity; over the past 15 years of Twins second baseman, the second-best hitting performance came in at 101 wRC+.

So, what changed? What turned Dozier from a failed experiment at shortstop to a viable option at second? He turned 26 near the start of the 2013 season and had three full seasons in the minors, so it’s not as if he was rushed. Though he could just be a late bloomer, that’s not out of the question. He cut down on his overall swing percentage, with a 10% drop in swings at pitches outside of the zone. It could be that he needed more time against major league pitching to figure things out. Another component could come from his switching defensive positions.

While it’s hard to quantify, there are many stories of players turning things around offensively after switching to a position they were more comfortable in. If defensive metrics are telling a true tale, Dozier didn’t seem all that comfortable at short. One of his bigger problems was getting the ball to first. While errors certainly don’t tell the whole story, he committed nine throwing errors at short in 2012 versus just one at second in many more attempts in 2013. It could be that his arm just wasn’t strong enough, or it could be that his lack or range lead to hurried and off-balance throws. He seems to have decent enough range, but could also have been getting help from Florimon in reducing the ground he needs to cover.

It could be that the reduced pressure of playing second helped him at the plate. Perhaps not having to work as hard on defense allowed him more time in the cage, or just a clearer head in the batters box. It could be that these things are mutually exclusive, but it’s probably a safe bet that the defensive move helped his hitting at least a little.

Steamer, Oliver, and ZiPS project Dozier to regress offensively. Oliver sees a big jump in defense, but the others see it staying about the same. He’s only had one season at second, so it becomes hard to project, especially if the uptick in offense thanks to the defensive switch is a real thing. The Twins are on the upswing, but still have a good amount of things to address. Their bullpen was pretty much the only bright spot last season. They have some heavy hitters coming up in the system, and have switched philosophies slightly when it comes to pitching — looking to collect more hard-throwing pitchers rather than their usual low-velocity strike throwers. If Dozier can play well enough to keep his spot, he may be around long enough to see the team’s latest renaissance. If he does, the middle-infield baseline will have shifted for the first time in a long time for Minnesota.

Last week, Colin Zarzycki reviewed the Milwaukee Brewer bullpen on RotoGraphs. The projected bullpen included the likes of Jim Henderson, Brandon Kintzler, Tom Gorzelanny, Michael Fiers, and Will Smith, among others. The 12 names on the depth chart combined for 12.009 years of MLB service time, with Gorzelanny accounting for half of that total. The depth chart contained some intriguing upside, but was certainly lacking in experience. Enter Francisco Rodriguez, again.

Read the rest of this entry »

Play the player-profile game every day this week at 1:00pm ET. We’re giving away a free annual subscription to FanGraphs+ to the first reader who guesses correctly the identity of that day’s mystery player. (Limit one copy per customer).

As the absurdly coiffed Eno Sarris announced on Monday, the newest iteration of FanGraphs+ is now available in exchange for your hard-earned money — and any other kind of money, too.

As in recent years, we’re celebrating this important Moment in History by way of the player-profile game.

Said game is easy: the author offers the text of an actual player profile from the newest iteration of FG+, being careful to omit any proper names that might reveal the identity of the player in question. The reader, in turn, attempts to identify the player using only the details provided in the profile.

First reader to guess correctly (in the comments section below) gets a free annual subscription to FanGraphs+, worth roughly the equivalent of Alec Baldwin’s watch in Glengarry Glen Ross.

Today’s entry comes to us by way of noted American falconer Brett Talley and is purposely more vague than Monday’s or Tuesday’s selections.

Read the rest of this entry »

If one championship belt per position were to be awarded on an ongoing basis within major league baseball, a great deal of debate would ensue. Certainly, Mike Trout would get one outfield spot. But what if each outfield position had to be represented? Would Andrew McCutchen have a centerfield argument? Yadier Molina and Buster Posey would duke it out for catching honors. At first base, a changing of the guard is about to occur, and not just because Miguel Cabrera and Joe Mauer are headed in that direction. Freddie Freeman and Paul Goldschmidt are young and exceptional, and possess the well-rounded profiles necessary to inject themselves into the positional championship discussion in the very near future. Read the rest of this entry »