Wins Above Replacement isn’t a household statistic, and it never will be. It’s too complicated, too theoretical, too unnecessary for most baseball fans. With that said, today more people know about WAR than ever, with the metric routinely coming up on websites and on television. It is, rather understandably, controversial, and plenty of people out there dismiss it without a second thought. While it’s been around for years, I think what really launched WAR to the greater public was the first go-round of the Mike Trout vs. Miguel Cabrera MVP debate. That’s when WAR started getting a lot of play at places like ESPN, and more people were introduced to the framework and to some of its declarations.

Most of the ways WAR gets used are for comparative purposes. People love to see rankings, and people love to know which players are better than others. It also gets used in contract analysis, especially around these parts, and it’s hard to remember how we used to write those posts before we had the numbers we have today. With WAR, it’s really easy to get wrapped up in the details, because the metric allows for such detailed interpretation. But the one most important thing I’ve personally learned from WAR is probably the most general of its points. That is, WAR has provided me with an idea of what baseball players are worth to a team.

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Let’s acknowledge that we can’t quite figure out Ervin Santana or Ubaldo Jimenez. I’ve been trying, off and on, for months. Jimenez is a prize of the free-agent market. As recently as 2012 he was below replacement level. Santana is another prize of the free-agent market. As recently as 2012 he was also below replacement level. These guys were good, then bad, then good, and they stand as fine examples of how domestic veterans aren’t always more predictable than international free agents or minor leaguers. For multiple reasons, it’s not a complete shock that neither of them has signed yet.

But let’s just simplify things with an assumption: let’s assume Santana and Jimenez will be pretty good in 2014. Not aces, but fine starters. I think it’s safe to say that’s how they’re perceived by the market, and it’s not like anyone’s ignoring them because they’re bad. It’s just a matter of finding the right price tags, and it shouldn’t be much longer before we know where they’re both going. They’re sought after, and they represent immediate upgrades. So there’s an important question: who would they upgrade the most?

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Oliver Perez has had a pretty fascinating career path, and while I hardly need to bring you through his entire history, it’d be remiss to start an article about him without at least touching on his backstory briefly. Drafted by the Padres, he was shipped to Pittsburgh in the Brian Giles trade, where he put up one shining age-22 season — 4.4 WAR, 239 strikeouts in 2004 — before posting an ERA north of 5.00 in four of the next six seasons.  Most of that time was spent with the Mets, where he was so awful (other than a solid 2007) that they cut him just before camp ended in 2011, despite still owing him $12 million for the season. Perez spent some time in the minors for Washington that year, never appearing in the bigs, and considering how long it had been since that wonderful 2004, it wasn’t hard to think of his career as being over.

Except, it wasn’t. Perez resurfaced as a reliever in Seattle in 2012 and was good enough that it shocked our resident Mariners fans into writing posts titled “Oliver Perez Is Good Now. Seriously.” (Cameron, 2012) and “Oliver Perez. Pitcher You Want.” (Sullivan, 2013). His reputation was so terrible that the mere fact that he was in the bigs and adding any kind of value was seen as a jaw-dropping event. Read the rest of this entry »

I think it’s safe to say Stephen Drew’s in a pretty weird position. He’s a free agent, and he’s 30, so he’s not super old. He spent last year playing with the eventual MLB champion. By our numbers he was worth 3.4 wins, and he was worth 3.4 wins in 124 games, as a team’s regular shortstop. It’s easy to make a case that Drew ought to be highly desirable, but here he is, available at the end of January, and no one seems to want to give him more than two years. If reports are to be believed, Drew’s got himself a pretty weak market.

And more than that, increasingly there are rumors that Drew would be willing to play other positions. That is, Drew would be willing to not play a premium up-the-middle position, to make himself more marketable. According to Peter Gammons, a year ago Drew wasn’t quite so flexible. This could be interpreted as a sign of desperation, as teams just aren’t really looking for shortstops anymore. Desperation or not, if the rumors are true, Drew starts to look a little different. But what could be expected if Drew were to shift to second or third base?

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I was on vacation last week, so in my absence, Jeff Sullivan handled the write-ups relating to Masahiro Tanaka signing with the Yankees. When the news broke on Wednesday, he wrote a couple of posts about it, and in typical Jeff Sullivan fashion, the second post was explicitly “not an evaluation of the Masahiro Tanaka contract.” Jeff’s takes are smart and nuanced, and you should read them, but I also think the Tanaka contract is worth an evaluation, especially because it is so different from most free agent contracts.

In general, most free agent deals are not that difficult to evaluate. The majority of free agents are already on the downside of their career, so there’s a tension in the negotiations between the player trying to get as many years as possible and the team trying to limit their obligations to an aging player who is expected to be get worse in every subsequent season. In recent years, it seems that negotiations have mostly shifted away from bidding in annual average value into almost entirely bidding on years, where the signing team is the one who guarantees one year more than the rest of the bidders. Negotiations for free agents can be pretty accurately described as a push and pull between teams and players over the number of guaranteed years the player is going to receive, with most everything else being secondary to that agreement.

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Tom Glavine is going into the Hall of Fame for a reason. The long-time Atlanta Braves lefthander was a great pitcher. He won over 300 games and was an All-Star 10 times. A pair of Cy Young awards adorn his mantle.

Paradoxically, some of the numbers Glavine put up over his 22 seasons are atypical of the elite. One reason is that his stuff was anything but electric. Glavine didn’t overpower hitters. Not that he needed to. A master of nuance, he consistently induced outs with impeccable command.

Glavine talked about the secrets to his success, including the subtle adjustments he made to his approach, late last week. Read the rest of this entry »

The FanGraphs community exists in an echo chamber. As far as echo chambers go, it’s not a bad one. We expect baseball teams to (mostly) make objective, rational decisions. But we do have our own pre-conceived ideas about what makes a decision objectively rational. We also have a lot of contrarians in our midst, which prevents an echo chamber from becoming stodgy and outdated. Bill James is a noted contrarian as are many other sabermetricians. That basic instinct – it’s almost an assumption that conventional thinking is wrong – has helped our little closet industry grow to one that front office personnel read on a regular basis.

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Look, I’m not one of those people who thinks that baseball season starts with pitchers and catchers reporting. There’s a whole lot of time between that date and the date at which meaningful things start to happen. But I’ll grant that we consume baseball differently upon pitchers and catchers, that it means the start of daily baseball-y updates, and the first team’s pitchers and catchers report on February 6. That’s less than two weeks away. It’s sneaked up on us, because even now there’s a lot left to happen in the offseason. We just all had to wait for Masahiro Tanaka to pick a damned hat.

The offseason’s most important decision left is the Rays’ decision to either trade or keep David Price. I don’t really even have to think about that to assert it with confidence — such a trade would make a good Rays team worse, and it would presumably make another contender better. There’d be a significant total change in 2014 playoff odds. But there’s another big decision left, and it’s bigger than Ervin Santana and Ubaldo Jimenez making up their minds. It’s a decision that affects the Pirates, and the Pirates only.

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Spring training is just around the corner. (Finally! At long last! Hallelujah!) Pitchers and catchers for the Diamondbacks and Dodgers report on Feb. 6 and Feb. 8, respectively, as those two teams get ready to open the season in Australia on Mar. 22. All other pitchers and catchers report the week of Feb. 10. It’s not just the players and coaches who need to practice for the season, though. Marketing and ticket sales representatives need to get in shape, too. So do the fans.

Which brings us to the season of Fan Fests and Caravans. Fan Fests are typically one, two, or three-day public events sponsored by teams, at which fans have the opportunity to talk directly to players, coaches and team executives; wait in long lines for autographs; check out the latest team gear and merchandise; and buy tickets for the upcoming season. Caravans take players and coaches on the road to the fans.

Most MLB teams host some kind of come-one, come-all Fan Fest, either at the ballpark, or a hotel or convention center nearby. Those teams with fan bases spread throughout a state or several states also conduct Caravans. Some do both.

But not all teams. The Yankees, Mets, Red Sox, Angels and Marlins will not be hosting any type of public, fans-meet-players event before the 2014 season starts.  One of those teams is not like the others. Or is it two teams? More on that later.

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Something somebody once said about Greg Maddux is he could throw a ball into a teacup. I don’t know why a teacup was chosen to represent a small target, but it certainly conveys the intended idea. Something somebody else said about pitchers is this:

“And don’t believe it when you hear that a pitcher can throw the ball to a two-inch slot. A foot and a half is more like it, I mean with any consistency. When I first came up I thought major-league pitchers had pinpoint control, and I felt terrible that the best I could do was hit an area about a foot square. Then I found out that’s what everybody meant by pinpoint control, and that I had it.”

Jim Bouton was referring to a lot of pitchers when he wrote that, and Bouton wasn’t wrong. Bouton also wrote that in the time before Greg Maddux, which was a time that didn’t know how dark it really was. It’s possible there’s been no pitcher in recent history more able to hit a spot when he wanted to, and Maddux usually wanted to.

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