Archive for Daily Graphings

I was reading something about Clayton Kershaw the other day. Kershaw’s been the guy to write and read about, because he’s been amazing, and because he just got paid, and because there sure as shoot hasn’t been anything else happening around the league. This is the article, and it talks about Kershaw’s ongoing search for a reliable changeup, to go along with all of his other weapons. A particular section:

And so I am boundlessly curious about the changeup, the mystical less-is-more pitch, and Kershaw’s curiosity for it, and the evolution of Kershaw as a pitcher and if there is room for another pitch along the way.

Pitchers like to say the hitters will decide. So far, hitters aren’t suggesting Kershaw needs another pitch. One or two fewer, maybe.

Read it over quickly and you might dismiss that as a worthless old bromide. But there’s a lot of truth tucked away in there — hitters will let pitchers know when they need to make changes. If a pitcher isn’t having problems, the pitcher’s having success, and success isn’t something you mess with unless it gets threatened. Kershaw’s facing no threat, but then this isn’t about him.

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We’ve already written about Carlos Santana’s third-base transition once. Mike Petriello jumped on that story almost as soon as it came out, and he figured it was worth a winter attempt. What’s the harm, right? It was all good and it was all worth doing, and it was all nearly forgotten about as the holidays came around and as the Masahiro Tanaka sweepstakes kicked off. Santana, though, kept on playing third base, and now this is more than just a creative idea. Now Santana considers himself a third baseman. Observers have been impressed, and while Santana isn’t forgetting about catching entirely, he believes he’s capable of playing third in the majors. In short, this is a thing to be taken real seriously.

Which is kind of surprising, because this is kind of a weird and unfamiliar endeavor. It isn’t often at all that you see a team convert a catcher to third base, and Santana in particular has never been thought of as a Gold Glove candidate. But then, that could be part of the point, and there’s also the matter of the Indians having Yan Gomes, who is real good. And while you don’t usually think about a catcher playing some third, how strange is that, really? Just how jarring is that kind of 90-foot adjustment?

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Without question, one of the most incredible achievements in baseball during my lifetime was the Braves winning 14 consecutive division titles between 1991 – 2005. There’s an asterisk, since in 1994 the season ended early with the Braves six games back, but what doesn’t count officially doesn’t count officially, and it’s not even like 14 out of 15 is all that much less impressive. Anyhow, another contender is this: since 2008, the Yankees have won the most games in baseball, with 564. The Rays have won the second-most games in baseball, with 550. Over that span, the Yankees have out-spent the Rays by more than nine hundred million dollars.

There’s always been concern over the difference between the Haves and the Have-Nots, and that concern is alive and well today, with the Dodgers having established themselves as a league elite. When it comes to payroll, baseball is far from an even field, and I have a pet theory that over time, as teams get smarter and smarter, the differences between them will get smaller and smaller, and success will correlate more and more with spending. Lower-budget teams, right now, have to focus on so-called market inefficiencies. But while it’s easy to get caught up in the details, perhaps the greatest market inefficiency of all is spending big money in general.

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Not everyone has the season they want to have. Some guys underperform, some guys get hurt and others simply don’t get the opportunities to shine in ways they had hoped. It’s a new year, though, and many of these same guys will enter spring training with a good dash of the olde hope and faith. Some will be looking at fresh starts; others will be looking at new opportunities. A few others may be staring down their final opportunity.

And that’s where we’ll begin.

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Minor-league contracts don’t really matter all that much in baseball, no matter how much some fans might think they do. Each year, teams sign dozens of guys to non-guaranteed deals that may or may not include an invite to major league camp, and much of the time you never hear those names ever mentioned again after March. It’s not an official FanGraphs rule that minor-league deals aren’t worth covering, but it might as well be; when Delmon Young got a guaranteed contract from Philadelphia last year, there was a post about it. When the Orioles made him an NRI last week, there wasn’t.

Yet here I am, talking about Milwaukee’s decision to add Mark Reynolds to the first base mix on a non-guaranteed contract, partially because it seems likely that he will have a real impact on the team this year, and partially because of what it says about the Brewers. Read the rest of this entry »

Pitch-framing! Am I right? It’s still very much a fascinating subject, which is one of the reasons I write about it so often. But by this point we have a pretty good idea who’s good at it and who’s bad at it. That ground’s been covered. We know that Jose Molina is great. We know that Ryan Doumit was a problem. Yet we can break things down further still. Often, people don’t go beyond describing a guy as good, bad, or okay. But there are actually specific types of framers.

Which makes plenty of sense, doesn’t it? There are great hitters and there are bad hitters. Among them, there are guys with tremendous plate coverage, but there are also high-ball hitters and low-ball hitters. Every part of the zone area is different, and every player is different, so we should expect that different players respond differently to pitches in different parts of the zone. How this relates to framing is that some guys might be better with receiving high pitches, while other guys might be better with receiving low pitches. Intuitively, why not? And thanks to some awesome updates at Baseball Savant, this couldn’t be much easier to examine.

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The other day, in making room for John Buck, the Mariners designated for assignment a player named Carlos Peguero. This means absolutely nothing to most of you, but absolutely something to some of you. Peguero’s out of options now, so in order to return to the minors, he’ll have to make it through waivers. Peguero clearing waivers is a decent possibility. What’s clear, at this point, is that Peguero is unlikely to develop into a big-league star slugger. What’s simultaneously clear — what’s been clear all along — is that Peguero has big-time raw upside, not unlike such predecessors as Wily Mo Pena and Wladimir Balentien. Jesus Colome got jobs because of his fastball. Peguero will get jobs because of his power.

For those of you unfamiliar with Peguero, you’re most certainly familiar with his general player type. But still, I’ll summarize him in two images. The first is a video:

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Clayton Kershaw signed the largest contract for any pitcher in baseball history on Wednesday. In doing so, he became the first player in MLB to agree to a long term deal for an annual average value of more than $30 million, so on a per season basis, he’s also the highest paid player in baseball history. And he got that deal a year before he was eligible to hit free agency, so this price reflects a discount over what the Dodgers believe he would have gotten with competitive bidding. Given these facts, it’s easy to look at this deal as a harbinger of escalating prices and further proof of significant inflation in Major League Baseball.

Interestingly, however, it’s really not that at all. I walked through Kershaw’s expected value about a half hour before the contract was announced on Wednesday, and my guess for the total price came out to $230 million over seven years, a little less than what he actually signed for, but also didn’t include the value to Kershaw of getting to opt-out after year five. Including that offsetting value, I think my guess was pretty decent.

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I’m not gonna lie to you — I’d love to be writing about something more compelling. Perhaps some unexplored Clayton Kershaw angle, or perhaps something else entirely. At the end of the day, traffic does have to be there, and traffic follows entertaining, easily-understandable blog posts. It doesn’t so much follow posts about what it’s like, statistically, to pitch to a rookie in Major League Baseball. But we’re all just slaves to the ideas that we have at any given moment, and after I messed around earlier with league-wide leaderboards, I felt the urge to keep messing around in the same place. I promise this is just a phase.

Earlier I did what I could to investigate whether or not veteran pitchers and veteran hitters get the benefit of the doubt from home-plate umpires when it comes to the called strike zone. Those are theories I’ve heard repeated time and time again, and they were easy enough to look into. That got me thinking about other well-worn baseball theories, and I wound up growing curious about how big leaguers have approached rookies, relative to how they’ve approached non-rookies. Do rookies get fed a steady stream of breaking balls? Alternatively, do they get fed a bunch of fastballs in the zone? Is there any meaningful difference in how rookies are pitched to? It didn’t take a lot to put some numbers together.

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Yesterday, the Dodgers signed Clayton Kershaw to a seven year, $215 million contract, or, if you prefer, a six year, $195 million extension, as they already owned his rights for 2014 at an arbitration price of around $20 million. That’s the amount that the Dodgers have guaranteed to pay Kershaw anyway, but I don’t know that it’s really all that accurate to describe it in that way, because there’s a pretty good chance the deal is actually going to end up as a five year, $150 million contract (or an extension of 4/$130M) when all is said and done. That’s because Clayton Kershaw is the latest to join the recent trend and get an opt-out clause negotiated into his deal; he can choose to void the final two years of the deal after the 2018 season if he so chooses and become a free agent again heading into his age-31 season.

Kershaw joins teammates Zack Greinke and Hyun-Jin Ryu in having received opt-out clauses from the Dodgers, so this is clearly something LA is comfortable negotiating into their deals in an attempt to outbid other suitors. Texas also gave two opt-outs to Elvis Andrus in his long term extension signed last year, so Kershaw is the fourth player in the last year to receive a guaranteed paycheck but also the right to reset the terms if he stays healthy and performs at a high level over the next few years.

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