Archive for Daily Graphings

Now that Alex Rodriguez‘ career has quite possibly come to an end, it’s time to put it into some sort of historical perspective. He’s not just the player whose career is apparently ending in disgrace, with any number of emerging subplots. He’s also the Miami high school wunderkind, the Mike Trout of his time in his Seattle days, and guy who signed the biggest contract in baseball history – twice – with the Rangers and Yankees. He resides near the top of many all-time leaderboards, but at the same time his career can be seen as a disappointment.

He’s a paradoxical character who has been a consistent elite performer, but seems to be loved by no fan base, and has been derided for his postseason output though the numbers aren’t much different from those of Reggie “Mr. October” Jackson or Derek Jeter. He just might be the most universally hated superstar in US sports history. Let’s take a step back from all of it, however, and with as a critical and unbiased an eye as possible, assess his career and see where it fits within the history of the game. Read the rest of this entry »

Alex Rodriguez sued Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association on Monday as part of an effort to overturn his suspension. That suspension became effective on Saturday when arbitrator Frederic Horowitz issued a decision on Rodriguez’s appeal and reduced the slugger’s penalty from 211 games to the entirety of the 2014 season — 162 regular season games and any postseason games the Yankees might play.

Click here to read Rodriguez’s complaint and arbitrator’s 33-page written decision, which is attached as Exhibit A to the complaint.

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Despite not having a 1st round pick again in 2013 due to signing Kyle Lohse, Milwaukee keeps adding players I was fond of as amateurs. The bad news is that the Brewers still remain one of the weakest farm systems in the game. The cupboard isn’t as bare as it looked the last couple of years. I think the overall level of tools and raw talent has noticeably increased. In particular I think Milwaukee did a good job this year in scooping up a couple players who dropped in the Draft in Devin Williams and Tucker Neuhaus. Both those players were high school draftees, as was the team’s top pick in 2012 – Washington State prep catcher Clint Coulter. Yet one thing that struck me about this org. is how many of their top prospects are from “off the beaten path” kind of backgrounds. Three of the most exciting players in this system are Victor Roache, Mitch Haniger and John Hellweg. Roache came from Georgia Southern University. Haniger was taken from Cal Poly while Hellweg went to junior college in Florida. Sure, some of their top players came from traditional big schools and that’s to be expected. Jimmy Nelson played for the Alabama Crimson Tide and a few years back Milwaukee took two college pitchers in the first – Texas’s Taylor Jungmann and Georgia Tech lefty Jed Bradley. As someone who watches a whole lot of amateur and college baseball my curiosity was piqued: How often do 1st rounders come from smaller schools? Also, how often do these players succeed?
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Milwaukee’s system has a few intriguing names but lacks both impact talent and depth. The organization has had a lot of bad luck with high draft picks in recent years but found value in later rounds. Read the rest of this entry »

I was having a conversation with a friend the other day about athletes in other sports who might hypothetically be able to make a decent transition into baseball. It’s something I think everyone’s thought of at least a few times before, and the first thing that came to my mind was that hockey goalies could and would make for good backstops, since they’re highly skilled at keeping things moving quickly from getting right past them. I know, for example, Dan Wilson used to be a goalie, so it’s not a surprise he was also a good defensive catcher when it came to blocking low pitches. It requires pretty obviously the same kind of skill.

Yet, while it’s clearly important for a catcher in the majors to be able to block challenging pitches, it’s also true that, in the majors, there isn’t a lot of spread in skill. Which means there isn’t a lot to be gained by being particularly excellent at preventing pitches from flying by. Last year, by our measures, the A’s were baseball’s worst pitch-blocking team, and it cost them 5.5 runs. The Cardinals were baseball’s best pitch-blocking team, and it gained them 6.4 runs. From worst to best, it’s a spread of about a win, which makes it maybe an unjustifiable thing to be concerned about one way or another.

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In a sense, the pitching market is still at a standstill. Masahiro Tanaka has little reason to sign before his deadline, and other pitchers have little reason to sign before Tanaka does, so for about another week and a half, we could be dealing with a whole lot of nothing. And it’s not just free-agent pitchers. There could be renewed runs at David Price and Jeff Samardzija, but only after Tanaka goes. And free-agent position players might wait for financial clarity as well. The short-term result of all this is that we’re not seeing changes in the 2014 projected standings, because teams aren’t making moves. But something did happen to shake things up right before the weekend.

That something is that Derek Holland hurt himself on his own staircase. It sounds too absurd to take real seriously, but the fact of the matter is that Holland needed knee surgery and he’s projected to be out until midseason. To hear Holland talk, he’s determined to beat those projections back to the field, but medical timetables aren’t made up out of thin air. Holland is going to be out for a significant amount of time. Holland is good, and his replacement will be worse. The Rangers are in a fragile position, and this is a bigger deal than it might seem like.

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Alex Rodriguez has been suspended for the entirety of the 2014 season. You already know this, and if you haven’t yet, go read Wendy Thurm’s breakdown of the arbiter’s ruling for more information on the judgment itself. I’m not all that interested in talking about Rodriguez that much more, personally, as this is a story that has been so thoroughly covered that there just isn’t that much more to say.

However, I think that the precedent of the season long suspension, and the near unanimous agreement that we’re going to see significantly increased suspension lengths for failed PED tests in the next CBA, creates an issue that Major League Baseball is going to have to contend with eventually. As we’ve seen in the A-Rod case, the relationship between the team and the player has essentially disintegrated, as the interests of the Yankees were clearly aligned with the interests of Major League Baseball; both wanted Rodriguez suspended for as long as possible.

By virtue of the suspension, the Yankees have just received a $25 million rebate, which could allow them to get under the $189 million luxury tax threshold and lead to significant long term savings from the resetting of the tax brackets. After years of benefiting from Rodriguez’s on-field performance while he was presumably using PEDs, the Yankees are now benefiting from the fact that Rodriguez is being punished for using PEDs. And that is essentially the definition of a moral hazard.

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As we sit here in mid-January, there seems to be no more obvious free agent fit than the idea that Stephen Drew should sign with the Mets. It’s such an obvious pairing that the internet has been talking about it with such regularity that it almost seems like he already was a Met, and is now looking for his next new home.

It’s obvious because the Mets made some moves to improve this winter, importing Bartolo Colon, Curtis Granderson, and Chris Young, and still have a hole at shortstop. It’s obvious because their first-round pick is protected and they already gave up their second to add Granderson, so giving up a third-rounder seems to be a minor annoyance. It’s obvious because these are the guys who have started at least one game at short since Jose Reyes left following 2011 — Justin Turner, Omar Quintanilla, Ruben Tejada, Jordany Valdespin, Wilfredo Tovar, and Ronny Cedeno — and because that group has combined to contribute all of 2.8 WAR over two seasons. It’s obvious because a below-market return to Boston seems to be Drew’s only viable alternative at this point, his free agency waylaid by the qualifying offer.

Drew’s not a great player, but he is a good one, and almost certainly better than what the team currently has. So obvious! And yet just last week, GM Sandy Alderson reiterated his feeling that the team isn’t likely to sign Drew, instead intending to go into the season with Tejada and the .236 wOBA he put up last season. Merely media posturing, hoping to drag things out and get Scott Boras to lower his demands? Sure, possibly. Maybe even probably. Yet there’s also the not-small possibility that Alderson is just a bit smarter than the rest of us, and he really doesn’t have any intention of adding Drew. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball arbitrator Frederic Horowitz  reduced Alex Rodriguez’s suspension from 211 to 162 games in an opinion released to the parties today. Now that the arbitrator has ruled, Rodriguez’s suspension takes effect immediately.

The meaning of “immediately” is unclear, though, because we are in the midst of the offseason. Rodriguez’s attorneys told reporters that the third baseman plans to show up for spring training with the Yankees, even if he is barred from playing any regular-season games this year. The Yankees are likely to do what they can to stop that from happening.

At this point, we don’t know why the arbitrator reduced Rodriguez’s suspension to 162 games. His written opinion has not been made public. Rodriguez’s attorneys announced that they plan to ask a federal court on Monday to overturn the decision, despite the long odds (more on that below). If that happens, the opinion is likely to become public as an exhibit to Rodriguez’s complaint.

Until then, we are left to wonder what evidence Horowitz found credible or which provisions of the Collective Bargaining Agreement and the Joint Drug Policy he relied on in reducing the suspension from 211 games to 162.

On those points, let’s take a step back and remind ourselves how we got here.

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Thursday afternoon, I took a quick glance at 2014 team-by-team pitch-framing projections. This afternoon, I’m taking a quick glance at something else within the pitch-framing field. Longer glances are, of course, superior to quicker glances, but I take quick glances for three primary reasons. One, I don’t have the time, really, to dedicate to longer, research-paper-level glances. Two, I don’t have the mathematical chops to really get into stuff in depth. And three, quick glances make for good starting points, and they usually end up being fairly accurate. If you can get to X in an hour, and if you can only get to 1.1X in ten hours, how valuable are the extra nine hours? Extremely valuable, in science. Less valuable, in casual baseball analysis.

For some years, we’ve had pitch-framing information, for catchers. We’ve been able to tell how many strikes they gain or cost, and we’ve been able to assign run values. A major complication, however, lies in trying to separate catchers from pitchers. It’s the pitchers, after all, who’re throwing the pitches getting caught, and it stands to reason different pitchers might be differently challenging to receive. This is far from a new idea, but it’s an idea worthy of further exploration.

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