The Chicago Cubs have had two sets of negotiations involving Jeff Samardzija. The two sides have talked about a long-term extension — so far nothing’s been agreed to — and the sides seem pretty far apart. The front office also has fielded some trade offers, and while you can never be entirely certain about rumors, certain reports have painted the asking price as astronomical. From the Toronto Blue Jays, the Cubs supposedly wanted Aaron Sanchez, Marcus Stroman and more. From the Braves, the Cubs supposedly wanted Justin Upton or Jason Heyward. Even if the names are off, the message is clear: the Cubs are looking for a massive haul. Last year, Samardzija posted a worse ERA than Kevin Correia and Jeremy Hefner.

It’s been suggested the Cubs want more for Samardzija than the Rays have been looking for in return for David Price. Samardzija, of course, isn’t as good as Price. On the other hand, he’s considerably cheaper, and Samardzija isn’t coming off a season with an arm injury. His big-league health history is clean. So it’s not an outlandish position, but nothing’s been agreed to yet, because no one’s been willing to give up what the Cubs have wanted. More recent reports have suggested the Cubs intend to revisit the Samardzija trade market in the middle of the season. At first, it seems like this could only deflate Samardzija’s value. It would, after all, leave him with less time to make a contribution to a new employer. But there are good reasons for the Cubs to stick to their guns. Come June or July, they could still turn Samardzija into a blockbuster.

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Camps are opening across Florida and Arizona. Baseball is happening! Yet we’re still talking about Stephen Drew (and the other remaining qualifying offer players) because he doesn’t have a job, in no small part due to a system that absolutely does not work as currently constituted. It’s endless. I’m sick of it, and so, I imagine, are you. At least we have a new wrinkle to discuss: Scott Boras’ indication that he reportedly now wants an opt-out clause for Drew after the first year.

Predictably, this was met with a chorus of “oh yeah, well I want a pony” indignation from the internet, no doubt shocked by the impertinence of a new demand coming from an agent representing a player who, again, is still unemployed as spring training begins, and will come at the cost of a draft choice. (This also comes with the obvious caveat of believing a word that Boras says as anything other than simple leverage, especially through “a source,” but for the sake of argument let’s go with it for now.) Read the rest of this entry »

Once upon a time, Tommy Hanson’s career seemed like it would be spun into legend. He was one of the best young pitchers in baseball, in one of the best organizations. Now, heading into his age-27 season, his story seems more like a particularly cruel choose-your-own-adventure story. Shoulder injuries will do that. On Monday, he agreed to a deal with the Rangers. There are conflicting reports as I write this as to whether it is a minor league or major league deal. Either way, this will be Hanson’s third team in three years, and if things don’t work out for him in Texas, this could be his last chance.

That is not to imply that Hanson has some sort of tragic career. Far from it. If you slice and dice enough data, you can find plenty of comparable cases to Hanson. By the end of his age-24 season, which was his third season in the majors, Hanson had crossed the 450-inning threshold in his career. Since the expansion era started in 1961, there have been 105 other pitchers who have accomplished such a feat. To wit:

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Swinging strikes are the best. The batter tried to make contact and failed in a head-to-head matchup of will and strength and coordination. That moment is also great, statistically. Swinging strike rate is a per-pitch metric — meaning they become meaningful much faster than per-plate-apperance metrics — and it represents the closest proxy we have to ‘stuff’ that’s easily available.

That said, the fastball is still king, and it has the lowest swinging strike rate of any pitch. The league throws the pitch almost 60% of the time, after all. And if you’re throwing them as much as Shelby Miller and Jordan Zimmerman throw their fastballs, your swinging strike rate is going to suffer. That’s how two great young pitchers have such modest swinging strike numbers.

Is it possible to judge how many more strikes a pitcher with a certain arsenal is getting over a mythical pitcher (Average McAverageson) with the same arsenal where every pitch is league average? Yes. Yes it is.

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Pitchers and catchers report to spring training this week, but there are still some pretty good unemployed players. And the most prominent of the remaining job-seekers — Ubaldo Jimenez, Ervin Santana, Stephen Drew, Kendrys Morales, and Nelson Cruz — all remain on the market in part due to the fact that they received a qualifying offer from their previous organization, attaching draft pick compensation in the process. All five will eventually sign, and like Kyle Lohse a year ago, most of them will probably end up with multi-year contracts for more than the $14 million in guaranteed money that they turned down in November.

However, several players and the MLBPA have been vocally unhappy with the way that the tax has encumbered some of the non-star players who have received qualifying offers, and even if we accept that the rule is designed to deflate player salaries and not actually compensate teams for losing players of value — if the system was just about compensating for a loss, it wouldn’t need to tax the signing team in the process — the drawn out process of keeping quality major leaguers on the market until February or March isn’t good for anyone. It is almost certain that the player’s association is going to ask for the qualifying offer system to be renegotiated in the next CBA, while MLB is likely to want to continue to keep some kind of compensation tax in place to help deflate free agent prices.

So, in thinking about potential alternatives to the qualifying offer system, I wonder if perhaps a very small tweak to the rules could actually produce a large change in how the system operates, and resolve perhaps the primary sticking point for the players. That change? Remove the expiration date from the qualifying offer itself.

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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 yesterday, 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 wealthy importer-exporter Mike Podhorzer.

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This year’s Top 100 Prospects list comes with a warning: This might be the thinest compilation of the top 100 players, in terms of future ceilings, since I’ve been writing about prospects (approximately 10 years).

Most teams are now more willing to save money by entrusting starting roles to rookies, rather than overpay for modest performances from established and overpaid (replacement level or worse) veterans. Although I don’t have specific numbers to back up the following comment, it seems as thought clubs, for the most part, are also more willing to aggressively push their top prospects (especially pitchers) through their systems — with players such as Jose Fernandez, Michael Wacha, Archie Bradley and Robert Stephenson as recent examples.

In the case of the pitchers, it could be a matter of front offices wanting to ensure the players’ most effective seasons occur at the big league level during cost-controlled years while also ensuring the club can closely monitor their investments in an effort to mitigate injuries. It’s also possible that more of the top pitching talents are rising through the minors with premium velocity, which allows them to better hold their own as inexpensive, replacement-level talents (ie. No. 4/5 starters), or better, while working on their secondary offerings and command/control at the big league level.

Click on the players’ names to see their player pages and full stats breakdown. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s pretty convenient and informative to have two different and legitimate versions of something. For example, there are a bunch of different baseball stat projection systems. Most of the time, they’re going to agree with one another, because they’re founded on more or less the same information and in the end all projection systems project based on recent performance. But it can be fascinating to identify players or teams where projection systems don’t see figurative eye to figurative eye. For example, for this coming season, Steamer doesn’t love the Reds’ starting rotation. ZiPS, meanwhile, is considerably more optimistic. It’s of interest to examine the reasons why that might be.

Along the same lines, we can turn our attention to player defense. FanGraphs keeps track of both UZR and Defensive Runs Saved, and those are two different methodologies, yielding two different sets of results. On several occasions, people have compared and contrasted the two. But FanGraphs also keeps track of the results of the annual Fan Scouting Reports. To my knowledge, less has been attempted with that data, and I thought it could be fun to see how fan opinion compares to stat opinion.

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The other day, Buster Olney tweeted that some executives see regression in the Pirates’ immediate future. Projection systems seem to be in agreement, and Dave talked about this very thing as soon as the Pirates were eliminated from last year’s playoffs. Nobody thinks the Pirates are going to go back to being terrible — there’s way too much talent there — but people see them more as fringe contenders than NL Central favorites, and it’s not like they’ve had the most constructive offseason, with the biggest move to date being the loss of A.J. Burnett.

Of course, the offseason isn’t over. The Pirates might still be able to get Burnett re-signed, which would be a significant improvement. They’re another one of those teams in a high-leverage position on the win curve, so any kind of improvement should be pursued. And with that in mind, right now the situation at first base involves Gaby Sanchez and unknown others. You probably know that Gaby Sanchez is a real player, but he’s never done much to draw attention to himself, and he’s not a regular. It seems like the Pirates are ripe for a first-base upgrade. But then, what’s really available to them?

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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 this morning, 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 courtesy Mike Petriello.

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