Last year, Dan Uggla hit .179 and was worth +0.5 WAR, eventually getting left off the Braves playoff roster. He’ll turn 34 next March. He is due $26 million over the next two years. And this winter, the Braves are going to try to convince another organization that he just needs a fresh start in a new location to salvage his career. Take him out of Atlanta, and maybe the bat speed will come back. Maybe he just needs a change of scenery.

In reality, it is much more likely that any observed change of scenery effect is really just positive regression to the mean, since you only really need new “scenery” when you’re coming off a bad year, leaving nowhere to go but up. Players who change teams in these situations likely underperformed in the prior year, leaving plenty of opportunity for improvement after they arrive in their new city.

Of course, it can go deeper than that as well. Sometimes, when going from one team to another, a pitcher or hitter acquires park dimensions that better fit their game or a clubhouse that might better fit their demeanor. Or maybe they’re a pitcher and they move to a better defensive team. Or they finally get platooned in their new city, allowing them to only play when they have the advantage. There are plenty of reasons why a player could be more effective on one team than another.

Read the rest of this entry »

Brian Wilson is a weird guy. You know that because you have eyes and watch baseball, and you’ve heard all about the beard and the Taco Bell ads. Honestly, I’m really not sure anything I say can sum up what he is better than this:  Read the rest of this entry »

Standing in between Arizona Fall League All-Star teammates Byron Buxton and man-child Jorge Alfaro is Boston’s soon-to-be-star: Mookie Betts. Maybe you didn’t notice the 5’9″ second baseman or his less-than-impressive numbers when you were scanning the AFL leaders, but that would be a mistake. Because the last time he struggled, he made adjustments and went on a tear that will have him zooming up prospect lists this winter.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Kansas City Royals were pleased with the numbers Hunter Dozier put up this summer. The 22-year-old infielder hit .308/.397/.495 between rookie-level Idaho Falls and Low-A Lexington. Given that many considered Dozier an overdraft, the Royals also likely were relieved.

First-year stats aren’t all that meaningful, but Dozier’s performance helped validate the decision to take him with the eighth-overall pick out of Stephen F. Austin State University. What the 6-foot-4, 220-pound right-handed hitter needs to do next is continue to swing a productive-enough bat to justify his move to third base. Drafted as a shortstop, Dozier saw the majority of his time at the hot corner after signing for an under-slot $2.2 million.

Dozier talked about his approach to the game — and his position in the future — near the end of his first professional season. Read the rest of this entry »

Writers and readers of this site found their way here via many different avenues, but with relatively the same goal in mind: to try and dig deeper into baseball, to deduct meaning from things that perhaps aren’t evident on the field. I think it’s fair to assume that we were brought to the game as a whole for totally different reasons. This is especially true for young people, but it’s generally the look of the game — the aesthetics — that draw people in initially. You may not (or know someone who does not) fall into this category — I understand I’m painting with broad strokes here — but the presentation of the game still appeals to the lizard parts of our brain. We think it’s pretty, we think it’s exciting, we think it’s fun to watch. This is why we scoff when the tired adage of “you can’t watch a game on a spreadsheet” gets bandied about. We do watch the games, of course. It’s what drew us in in the first place.

As far as the baseball season goes, we’re in a limbo of sorts at the moment. The World Series is over, and free agency has yet to start. Fans (and certainly writers) are waiting for that other shoe to drop. We’re in a holding pattern until we can start discussing and analyzing front-office moves, and looking ahead to the rookies, signings, and trades that will start shaping what a team will look like next season. There are a few of these dead spots in a year — when things just don’t really happen in a real meaningful baseball sense. It’s times like these when we can turn back to the aesthetic, to the eye candy. Read the rest of this entry »

The 2013 postseason was a wild ride. We witnessed crazy endings, ill-timed errors, bizarre managerial gaffes, and plenty of the usual heroics. Perhaps you may be interested to learn how certain plays affected a team’s odds of winning the World Series. Luckily, we have a stat for that.

Read the rest of this entry »

Somewhere during the playoffs, Dave was hosting and running a live game chat, and some hitter in some game took a hack at what appeared to be ball four. That prompted a reader to comment that he wished somewhere kept track of those, FanGraphs specifically, and while it isn’t always easy to fire off an email when you’re actively in charge of a live chat, Dave took a minute to pass the comment on to me as a suggestion. He said that it could be an offseason post, knowing that it’s the kind of thing that’s right up my alley, and would you look at that, it’s the offseason now. I know it’s the offseason because Twitter is already full of free-agency rumors. Baseball can’t stop, nor will it stop.

We’ve all seen hitters on our favorite teams chase fourth balls, and we’ve all sighed and rolled our eyes. We have a good idea of who’s over-aggressive and who isn’t, but swinging at that last ball is worse than swinging at an earlier one, because swinging at ball four denies a hitter a sure base. Every so often, it’ll work out, with the hitter singling or doubling or tripling or dingering. It doesn’t work out nearly often enough. No hitter on the planet is good enough to justify going after pitches out of the zone in three-ball counts.

Read the rest of this entry »

Worth noting: Joel Sherman of the New York Post suggests that pretty much everything written below is wrong.

It is certainly possible that I’ve interpreted the luxury tax calculations incorrect. The post will be updated once I have clarification.

Derek Jeter is going to stay with the Yankees, surprising absolutely no one. This was never really in doubt, especially because Jeter had the right to ensure he played 2014 in New York, thanks to a player option that was added to the end of his three-year, $51 million option on the deal he signed in 2010. He could have exercised his right to become a free agent, but heading into his age-40 season and coming off the worst year of his career, interest probably wouldn’t have been overwhelming. And it’s unlikely he wanted to end his career in any other uniform, so this was always the expected outcome.

However, the actual announcement sheds some fun light on the details of how the CBA works and how the luxury tax is calculated. The Yankees could have just let Jeter exercise his player option — listed as $8 million, but reported by Jon Heyman to actually be worth $9.5 million — but instead, they signed him to a new contract that will pay him $12 million next year instead. Why the $2.5 million to $4 million raise over what his own player option called for?

Three words: the luxury tax. The Yankees have been desperately trying to get under the $189 million threshold, and by paying Jeter more, their tax calculation is actually going to go down.

Read the rest of this entry »

Thanks to the initial hard work from Steve Adams at MLB Trade Rumors, we were able to provide some custom leaderboards for free agents back in August. Well, with the postseason officially over and the hot stove season kicking off, we’re rolling out updated versions of these leaderboards, which also account for some of the transactions we’ve seen over the last few months; say goodbye to Hunter Pence and Tim Lincecum, for instance.

These lists are still a bit fluid, as there are option decisions that still have to be made, so I’ve made some assumptions about which options are going to get picked up versus getting declined. Over the next few days, as players officially can put on or taken off the market, I’ll update these lists to reflect that information. Since these are manually created, there are almost certainly going to be some mistakes, so feel free and point out which players are on the list and shouldn’t be or which players are missing from the leaderboards.

Also, I’ve set the default viewing timeline as 2011 to 2013, as making a decision based on a player’s longer track record is better than simply targeting players who performed well in 2013. This also serves to list players who missed the entire 2013 season, and wouldn’t otherwise appear if the data only displayed most recent year. The great thing about the custom leaderboards, though, is that you can change all of this, and tweak it to display what you want to see.

Without further ado, the 2014 free agent custom leaderboards.

Read the rest of this entry »

Goodbye, 2013 season. Hello, Hot Stove. Stop sobbing. Really, stop. We’re going to get through this. There will be qualifying offers, declined options, over-the-top free agent signings and rumors galore. Before you know it, we’ll be complaining about beat writers’ spring training play-by-play tweets.

Today we’re going to talk about the effect of the new national TV contracts on 2014 payrolls:

• The teams that have already built their 2014 payrolls on the revenue expected from those contracts.
• The teams that haven’t already accounted for that revenue, and have money to play with this winter.
• The teams that have revenues so high and payrolls so large that another $15 million means close to nothing.

Read the rest of this entry »