Archive for Daily Graphings

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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It both makes a lot of sense and it doesn’t. Grant Balfour is good, and the Rays have signed him for two years and $12 million. You’ll recall that’s $3 million less than it looked like he would be getting earlier in the offseason. That’s the sensible bit. This is the more confusing bit:

There’s also a price to pay with that, as Friedman acknowledged their payroll is projected to be higher than the franchise-record of $72.8 million in 2010.

“I think it’s an unaffordable figure for our franchise,” Friedman said.
[…]
“But it’s certainly not a sustainable number in terms of where we are revenue-wise, but we felt like we had a really good chance to be great next year, that’s why we’re doing what we’re doing.”

That’s from the beginning of January. That’s when the guy in charge of the Rays’ roster referred to the payroll as “unaffordable” and not sustainable. You wouldn’t expect that team to add another eight-figure player, especially with that player being a relief pitcher. But, let’s just assume the Rays have a better idea what they can afford than I do. Let’s assume they’re prepared to move ahead with David Price in the rotation, salary and all. If you grant that the Rays can afford this, then it would appear like the Orioles gave them a gift.

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All along, it was suspected that Masahiro Tanaka was holding up the whole available pitching market. Teams wanted to know if they could get the best available pitcher; other available pitchers wanted to know which teams might be reduced to going after them. Wednesday, we all found out that Tanaka had made his decision. A day later, the Matt Garza domino has fallen. Out of nowhere, the Brewers swooped in and claimed Garza for four years and $52 million.

So, it’s that contract, for a pitcher going to a team that’s maybe on the fringes of the race. It’s identical to the contract Edwin Jackson signed to go to a team that wasn’t very good. It’s basically the same as the contract Ricky Nolasco signed to go to a team that wasn’t very good. None of these guys were given qualifying offers, so none of them cost any draft picks. They simply cost money, and as far as this particular move is concerned, it’s hard not to like it. I’d say it’s also hard to love it, but for the Brewers it’s a good upside play.

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If you had told me at the start of this week that Logan Forsythe was going to headline a seven-player trade, I’d have said that you just must be bored because nothing has been going on. After all, how often do seven-player trades happen? I mean, that’s just crazy talk. That it did actually happen, and that the headliner has compiled a grand total of 1.7 WAR is cool, in an odd sort of way. The trade is also rare in the sense that it both fills distinct needs for both clubs, but also is a bit of a challenge trade.

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The Braves are going to arbitration with Jason Heyward over $300 thousand dollars. It’s a wonderful sentence, full of so many words that could set you off in a million different directions. And so I followed those strings, talking to as many people involved in arbitration as I could. Many of those directions did lead me to denigrations of arbitration, and of the file-to-trial arbitration policy that the Braves employ. There’s another side to that sort of analysis though. Arbitration is not horrid. File-to-trial policies have their use. This is not all the Braves’ fault.

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Now that Masahiro Tanaka has agreed to terms with the New York Yankees, it appears quite likely that offseason player movement will finally be allowed to resume. In fact, the Rays and Padres kicked off the post-Tanaka era yesterday with a pretty interesting transaction of their own. Seemingly next on the docket would be negotiations for the consensus next three best starting pitchers on the market — Matt Garza, Ubaldo Jimenez, and Ervin Santana. Let’s take a look at those three, and most specifically their 2013 batted-ball profiles, to determine the talent gap among them, and assess the level of investment of which each is worthy. Read the rest of this entry »

Now kids, I’m not a user of the Twitter, but I did follow a link to it in one of Eno’s articles last week, whereupon I came across an interesting question posed in a tweet by one @b_g_h: “Are hitters with low BB% also more volatile [because] of BABIP variance?”  There are different ways to address the question statistically, but it seemed to me that with an altered version of my pitching correlation tool, one could provide insight into issues like this, at least regarding pitchers.  A hitting version is waiting in the wings, don’t worry.  So, what I bring to you today is an interactive and downloadable spreadsheet that allows you not only to analyze the relationship between any two pitching statistics, but also to filter your data by any three statistics of your choosing. Read the rest of this entry »

On the one hand, I’d feel like an unoriginal hack for going over Grady Sizemore’s career history. It is, after all, familiar to just about everyone — or at least everyone reading this website. He’s kind of like an outfield version of Mark Prior or Rich Harden: unbelievable talent, unbelievable fragility. He was amazing in 2008. But Franklin Gutierrez was amazing in 2009. Sizemore’s just another guy who hasn’t been able to stay on the field, and he’s well past the point of people thinking it might be bad luck.

On the other hand, over the past couple years it’s not like Sizemore’s provided anything to write about. Since the start of 2012, Sizemore has as many big-league plate appearances as Barry Bonds and Eddie Collins. And so if you’ll indulge me, I think it’s worth the very briefest of refresher courses.

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