Archive for Daily Graphings

Here’s the thing about projections: we always want them to get better, but we never want them to be perfect. Not that perfect is anywhere within our grasp, but in the hypothetical reality where we knew for sure what was going to happen, sports would be ruined. We don’t want to know the future — we just want to think we do, so we can talk about and analyze things that haven’t fully played out. With that in mind, hey look, we have complete combined 2014 data for Steamer and ZiPS!

We have combined 2014 season projections, and we have author-generated team-by-team depth charts. So what we have is an idea of the projected upcoming standings, an intelligent declaration of how things will go that we know will look kind of silly in six months. Reality always deviates from the projections, but that doesn’t mean the projections are valueless, and I thought it could be worth looking at which teams appear the most and least improved from last season.

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The non-appendix portion of The Book is 367 pages long. Chapter 9, “To Sacrifice or Not” is 50 pages long and represents nearly 14% of the entire book.  The math within may not be for everyone to read, but the information is simplified with the addition of several “The Book Says” callouts that would be easy for any reader, say a manager, to find.

Ron Washington tells us to take those “analytics on that and shove it up our [bleep][bleep]”

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Nelson Cruz got tired of unemployment and signed a one year, $8 million deal over the weekend, taking nearly half of the salary he turned down when the Rangers made him a qualifying offer back in November. However, according to agents Scott Boras and Bean Stringfellow, fellow remaining free agents Ervin Santana, Kendrys Morales, and Stephen Drew aren’t particularly interested in following in Cruz’s footsteps, and are even openly talking about waiting until after the June draft — when they will no longer have compensation picks attached — before signing a new contract. The theory is that, without the encumbrance of draft pick tax, teams would be lining up to sign these players.

There’s a problem with this theory, however; the math simply doesn’t work. Over at MLBTradeRumors, Tim Dierkes did a great job laying out the picks that each team would have to surrender if they signed any of the remaining qualified free agents. He also helpfully included the pool amount allocated to each pick, so we can see that the exposed draft pick “values” range from $2.8M down to $600K.

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It was back during the winter meetings when major league baseball made headlines by announcing their intention to eliminate home plate collisions. On Monday, MLB and the players’ association announced that a new rule will take effect in time for the 2014 season. The rule will be reviewed and possibly tweaked prior to the 2015 season.

The impetus to make a change is obvious, many teams count their catcher as one of their best players. In an otherwise non-contact sport, catchers get knocked off the field all too often. Baseball is a bit behind the curve. Other sports have been protecting exposed players for over a decade, like quarterbacks and kickers in football or goaltenders in hockey. Players like Buster Posey and Yadier Molina have been injured in recent seasons, as these two videos show (video one, video two).

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In Part One of this series, published yesterday, I ranked the projected 2014 Opening Day payrolls, estimated the number of pre-arbitration players on each Opening Day roster, and calculated the percentage of each team’s payroll attributed to the highest paid player.

Today, in Part Two, I break down the payrolls even further, into four component parts: the starting rotation, the starting lineup, the bullpen and the bench. In so doing, I made a judgment on who was likely to slot into these roles to start the season. FanGraphs’ Depth Charts and MLB Depth Charts were my go-to sources, but I made a deliberate decision to exclude all non-roster invitees from Opening Day rosters, as those players’ salaries aren’t included on Cot’s Contracts. Invariably, some of my judgment calls will be wrong. Feel free to note those in the comments, as many did yesterday in Part One.

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So we’re agreed: it’s interesting to see where different projection systems disagree. After all, the projections are based on the same information, for the most part, so it could be telling where there might be significantly different interpretations. Monday, I compared and contrasted 2014 Steamer and 2014 ZiPS for position players. This is the natural and obvious follow-up, for pitchers.

You’d think this would be just as simple as the position-player version. In truth, it’s more complicated, and analysis required a few more judgment calls. I’m okay with them — I’m the one who made them — but if you’re dissatisfied, you’re free to go into the spreadsheets and run the numbers the way you’d prefer to. One of the neat things about our hosting the projection data is that it’s all so easily exportable. Now then, let’s walk through the process so we can get to the end of walking through the process.

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It was only a matter of time. The team turned out to the Phillies, but it could have been anyone, and the player turned to be Oregon State LHP Ben Wetzler, though it too could have been anyone. The disconnect between the NCAA rules and the reality governing the mating ritual between major league clubs and amateur prospects ensured that it would eventually come to this, with a player’s eligibility being compromised for doing what the vast majority of players in his position have done without incident, in the simple course of doing business. Read the rest of this entry »

A short while ago, I wrote a post comparing and contrasting the Steamer projections and the FAN projections. It can be potentially really interesting to see where different projections diverge, but that particular exercise faced two problems: fan bias, and fan-projection sample size. It wasn’t as satisfying an exercise as it could’ve been, and I’m okay with that, but now we have ZiPS all nice and uploaded, and we can try this kind of thing again. On which players do Steamer and ZiPS most disagree? Is there anything to be learned?

This’ll be broken down into two posts — looking at position players today, and looking at pitchers tomorrow. And it’s worth noting this is a slightly different exercise from the one involving the fans. Fans might be informed by observations, or by gut feelings, or whatever. Steamer and ZiPS will arrive at their conclusions based more or less on the same data. So, you’d expect them to be very similar, and of course they are. It’s interesting, then, where they are not.

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How you view the near-unprecedented teardown of the Houston Astros depends largely on how you view the sport of baseball as a whole. If you’re in it for the long haul, for the joy of seeing teams attempting to build dynasties from within and using their resources effectively, you probably appreciate the commitment to the vision. If you’re a fan who doesn’t enjoy spending your hard-earned dollars to go watch a bunch of players you’ve never heard of (“Look, kids, Marwin Gonzalez!”) lose over 100 games for the third season in a row, then you probably find it to be an abomination.

It’s safe to say that the majority of FanGraphs readers fall under the first category, though there’s a certain validity to both sides. But all that really matters is how ownership feels about it, because while Jim Crane’s commitment to letting Jeff Luhnow blow things up and start from scratch has been admirable so far, there’s only so many 0.0 television ratings a businessman can suffer. That’s especially true as attendance has continued to shrink — down from just over three million in 2007 to half that in 2013, ahead of only three other clubs — and as reports surfaced in December that MLBPA head Tony Clark was “monitoring” the Houston situation, given that the club’s $549,603 average per player was the lowest the sport had seen since the 1999 Royals, who paid out $534,460 per player while losing 97 games. (Luhnow disputes the accuracy of that report, but the fact that Houston’s payroll was particularly low is unavoidable.) Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, the Yankees gave Brett Gardner $52 million to not exercise his right to become a free agent next winter. Instead, he’ll now stay in New York and play left field alongside Jacoby Ellsbury, rather than testing free agency to see if he could land a bigger deal as the best center fielder on the market. And that means Gardner has just signed up for four more years of criticism from those who think a left fielder should be “a run producer”, a guy who knocks the ball out of the ballpark and hits in the middle of the line-up.

Gardner is not that guy. He has more career triples than home runs, and a large part of his value comes from running down balls in the outfield. He’s a speed-and-defense guy, and traditionally, speed-and-defense guys have not been paid the same level of wages as similarly valuable sluggers. But while these kinds of labels help us describe the ways in which a player creates value, there’s also a trap to using these kinds of generalities, and we shouldn’t be so confined by player types that we miss the fact that Brett Gardner is actually a pretty good offensive player.

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