The newest manager in Major League Baseball is also not baseball’s newest manager, in that the Mariners have officially hired Lloyd McClendon to replace Eric Wedge, and McClendon has managed before, for about five years with the Pirates at the start of the millennium. The Mariners are still a young team, and on the face of it, it’s hardly surprising that they went with an experienced leader, since theirs is a team in need of leadership and since we’re all used to coaches getting recycled. But then, McClendon was the only one of the Mariners’ known candidates with prior experience managing in the bigs. Clearly, they didn’t make a track record mandatory. And by hiring the experienced guy, the Mariners actually bucked what seems to be a growing league-wide trend.

The Tigers just hired Brad Ausmus as manager, and he’s hardly ever been a manager, never having managed in the majors. In hiring Ausmus, the Tigers didn’t hire McClendon, who was an in-house candidate. The Nationals just hired Matt Williams to manage, and he’s only been a coach. The Reds promoted Bryan Price to replace Dusty Baker. Going into the recent past, the Rockies settled on the inexperienced but familiar Walt Weiss, the White Sox settled on the inexperienced but familiar Robin Ventura, and the Cardinals settled on the inexperienced but familiar Mike Matheny. In all of our heads, major-league teams value a managerial track record. The times, however, appear to be changing. Perhaps they’ve changed already.

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The “pure hitter” label befits Stephen Piscotty. The St. Louis Cardinals’ outfield prospect hit .341 in his three seasons at Stanford, and won a Cape Cod League batting title in 2011. He’s continued to produce line drives since being taken 36th overall in the 2012 draft.

Piscotty is coming off a productive first full professional season. Swinging from the right side, the 22-year-old hit .295/.355/.464 between High-A Palm Beach and Double-A Springfield. Helping dispel questions about his power, the former engineering major hit 15 home runs in 427 at bats. On the defensive side, he split time between center field and right field.

Piscotty talked about his hitting approach — including his improved power numbers — late in this past minor-league season. Read the rest of this entry »

Free Agency starts today. Well, sort of. Teams and agents are now allowed to start fully negotiating with each other, though they’ve been flirting with each other ever since the World Series ended, and no one really comes close to signing with a new team at this point in the off-season anyway. It’s kind of a symbolic opening, but it does bring with it one reliable event: the release of Top X Free Agent lists and predictions. Everyone does them, even though we’re all basically the saying the same thing — Jacoby Ellsbury and Robinson Cano are good players — and our predictions are all mostly useless.

We presented our version a couple of weeks ago, ordered by the total guaranteed dollars expected by our readers in our crowdsourcing project. I don’t necessarily agree with all of the prices or the ordering of the players relative to each other, but rather than present another Top 50 Free Agent list, let’s try something a little different. Today and tomorrow, I’ll go through the crowdsourced expected prices and present the players that I think are worth significantly more and significantly less than the crowd expects them to sign for. Today, let’s start with the guys who I’d target as values, if their market price was their crowdsourced expected signing price.

We’ll go in reverse order, because why not.

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What is the relationship between spin axis and the backup slider? Alan Nathan knows the answer. He also knows why fastballs move more than curveballs and why split-finger fastballs drop. A physics professor emeritus at the University of Illinois, Nathan is an expert not only on nuclear physics, he is the man behind The Physics of Baseball

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You guys keep asking questions about FIELDf/x. You guys really want to get some information out of FIELDf/x. The unfortunate reality is that, right now, FIELDf/x is more of a concept than a tool, and on top of that, even if it were turned into something flawless, the data probably wouldn’t be made public. But you want some novel ideas or new presentations, like we all got out of our glimpse of HITf/x. And as much as it’s just commonplace now, don’t forget that PITCHf/x is amazing. So many fascinating projects, the instant PITCHf/x went public. It changed the way we all analyze. It changed the way we look at the game.

One of the first things that really blew my mind, personally, was being able to visualize the actual strike zone, as it’s called, and not as it’s supposed to be. We all had our ideas, but PITCHf/x allowed us to know, for fact. We could see which parts of the rulebook zone don’t get calls. We could see which parts outside of the rulebook zone do get calls. We could see that righties and lefties get different strike zones, and I couldn’t believe it when I saw the typical called strike zone for left-handed batters. There were a ton of called strikes leaking off the outer edge, some several inches from the plate. This has been established over and over again as a thing that happens, and those pitches are commonly referred to as lefty strikes. At this point many of us just take them for granted.

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There’s an interesting comparison to be made between Jacoby Ellsbury and Michael Bourn, which is why I’m beginning this post with a couple paragraphs about Bourn before moving on to the meat. Bourn, you’ll remember, was a free agent just last offseason, and while he didn’t bring star power to the table, it would’ve looked like he did just by WAR alone. The big draw was supposed to be Bourn’s legs. Agent Scott Boras called him “by far the best defensive center fielder in the game.” He could run on the grass, he could run on the dirt, and he was a leadoff hitter who hardly embarrassed himself with the stick. Bourn was to be a fine hitter who really excelled in other areas.

There’s one thing, though, that did and still does get me fascinated. Bourn’s a little guy, and he doesn’t hit for pop. His spray charts convey as much, occasional dinger be damned. You don’t sign Michael Bourn in order for him to drive multiple runners to the plate at a time. But I played around on the ESPN Home Run Tracker, and according to the site, in April 2009, Bourn hit a home run 457 feet. Or, 456 feet, under standard conditions. He’s never come close to reaching that distance otherwise, which is a big reason why that discovery came as such a shock, but the way I took it was that that established a ceiling. Somewhere in there is a hitter capable of hitting a baseball 450 feet, because Bourn had done it before in a game, once. Maybe that’s a stretch, but then it’s a tough homer to fake.

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To be presented shortly: some statements, each of them more or less inarguable.

The Tampa Bay Rays are one of the best teams in baseball. This past season, they lost in the ALDS to the Red Sox. They’ve won at least 90 games four years in a row, they’ve won at least 84 games six years in a row, and in 2008 they advanced to the World Series. In terms of sustaining success, the Rays are a model organization.

The Rays are considered likely to part with ace David Price this offseason, not because he’s a free agent, but because he’ll be under expensive team control. In short, Price is going to cost more than the Rays would like to pay any one player, so the probability is that they’ll exchange their ace for youth, as they did with James Shields.

This coming season, the Rays, by choice, will pay several millions of dollars to outfielder David DeJesus. It appears the same could be said for 2015 as well. One of the more financially strapped organizations in the league is opening the wallet for a guy they picked up in exchange for a PTBNL in late August.

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Today is the first of the off-season’s many deadlines, as MLB has a pretty rigid schedule that determine the timing of various events over the winter. Today, being the fifth day after the end of the World Series, is the deadline for teams to extend qualifying offers to their own free agents, giving them the right to compensation if the player signs with another team this winter.

Last year, nine players received a qualifying offer of $13.3 million, and all nine rejected the contract and signed a larger deal thereafter. This year, the price of the qualifying offer has gone up to $14.1 million, and it seems likely that more than nine players will receive an offer. Here’s what we know so far.

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I’ve been working on an interactive tool that allows you to create spray charts using Game Day data from the past two years for a few weeks now. I’ve always loved the Katron Batted Ball tool, and it’s been a great resource of mine for years. However, I wanted to put something together that was a bit more interactive, allowed for more filtering, and made side-by-side comparisons easier.

Our writers here at FanGraphs have been kind enough to play around with it and offer suggestions. After some tweaks I am ready to officially release the tool into the wild so that anyone can use it.

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Joey Votto is a fantastic player. There is absolutely no denying this fact. Any and all arguments regarding the quality of Votto’s offensive ability should be, and generally are, made in terms of whether he is simply an excellent hitter, or one of the very best hitters currently playing baseball today.

The argument “against” Joey Votto commonly refers to his “inability” to “drive in runners”. In other words, Votto had a low RBI total in 2013, given his salary, place in the lineup, and position. Votto’s 73 RBI ranked 17th in baseball among first-basemen, and 65th overall.

We all know that RBI is not an effective way of measuring offense, or even the ability to drive in runners, because of its dependence on the offensive quality of the rest of the team. To rectify at least this flaw of the RBI, let’s look at a variant of the statistic, one that is reflective of its purpose, but more effectively measures said purpose. We’ll call it RBI per  Opportunity, or RBI/Opp. Simply, it is the percentage of runners, on base while a player is up, that are driven in by said player, removing plate appearances in which the player is intentionally walked:
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