Archive for Daily Graphings

Whether you go by ZIPS or Steamer, the Orioles have exactly five good position players. In Adam Jones, Chris Davis, Manny Machado, Matt Wieters, and J.J. Hardy, the Orioles have a core of talent that projects for roughly +15 WAR, meaning that they’d only need to get about +25 WAR from the other 20 spots on the roster in order to project as a legitimate contender for 2014. +25 WAR across 20 roster spots is not a particularly high bar, and with the head start that their Big Five give them, the Orioles should be a good team next year.

But right now, they don’t project as a particularly good team. Our forecasted standings based on the Steamer data (ZIPS will be included once all the team projections are finished) have the Orioles as a 78 win team, 10 wins behind the Red Sox and in last place in the AL East. Steamer thinks the Orioles are approximately as good as the Mets. The Orioles, as currently constructed, are a perfect example of why roster spots #6-#30 matter quite a bit, and why the Stars and Scrubs model of building a baseball team isn’t always all its cracked up to be.

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Last weekend, I saw an interesting article in colleague Mike Petriello’s Twitter timeline. It was from retired Detroit News sportswriter/columnist Jerry Green, who was — for the 15th and final time — advocating for Jack Morris‘ Hall of Fame candidacy. Without getting into a line-by-line critique of the article, there were several things in the article that I did not agree with, but one thing did catch my attention:

I think it is quite sad that Morris will be left out. That the best baseball team I ever covered —the 1984 Tigers — will have not a single player in the Cooperstown Hall of Fame. Only Sparky Anderson, the manager, has been elected to the Hall of Fame. And forced to choose, Sparky opted to go into the Hall as the once-manager of the Cincinnati Reds.

Now, Green didn’t out and out declare that every World Series winner should have a member of its team in the Hall of Fame, but that was certainly the tangent that I led myself on in thinking about that passage. So, I decided to investigate — does every team have a Hall of Famer on it?

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Within the next few days, word will come down from on high regarding the Baseball Hall of Fame’s Class of 2014. This year, at least there will be a “class” elected by the Baseball Writers Association of America, unlike 2013, when dozens descended upon the idyllic town of Cooperstown, N.Y., to celebrate the induction of three men who were dead when Adolf Hitler invaded Poland. How did we get here, to the current mess of a ballot featuring the most Hall-worthy players in history – most of who have zero chance of being elected, or at the very most have a significantly worse chance than, say, the 17th or so best player on the ballot. Better yet, how do we get out of this fix? Read the rest of this entry »

The other day, Eno wrote something up about the importance of team depth, and about the importance of being able to measure it. I think the thing I like most about the A’s roster right now is how it’s so deep in so many places. The Cardinals, too, have given themselves some flexibility. Depth is something you never think about at first — at first, you’re simply focused on the top bits of the depth chart — but for as much as the need for particular depth is unpredictable, odds are those extra players are going to matter. Players who aren’t on the opening-day roster, or who aren’t starters, are going to end up responsible for attempted runs scored and attempted runs prevented.

I think most people have a good understanding that it matters to have starting-pitcher depth beyond the front five. At least, most people who hang around at places like FanGraphs. We all get that pitchers are volatile, and we all get that pitchers get injured. Yet still there’s a focus on just the first five, because no pitcher is individually super likely to break down, and if the five are good enough you should never need a replacement, right? People talk about filling out five-man rotations, but really, a team would be fortunate to lean on a five-man rotation, and I thought it could be useful to provide some updated numbers from the season most recently finished. Those sixth and seventh starters in a system — they’re going to get innings. Sometimes a lot of them.

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A few things to know about Nelson Cruz:

• Cruz is 33 years old
• He’s coming off a PED suspension
• The last three years, he’s been worth the same WAR as Sean Rodriguez and John Buck
• He’s a free agent seeking four or five years and about $15 million per

Cruz’s contract wishes are memorable, in the same way that Ervin Santana’s nine-figure contract wishes are memorable. Terms players want aren’t necessarily indicative of anything — ultimately, players have to play for what a team is willing to spend. Cruz might very well fall way short of what he came into the offseason seeking. It’s already January, and at least Santana has the excuse that his market has been held up by the Masahiro Tanaka situation. Cruz is just waiting to be bid on, and he doesn’t seem to have too broad a market. And, though we can’t know what his market actually is, we can attempt to determine it from the outside. Below, a quick review of all 30 teams as potential Nelson Cruz landing spots.

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Yeah, I know, this is like the 40th post this week about Masahiro Tanaka. I’m sorry about that, but in our defense, there’s nothing else going on. Tanaka’s posting has effectively shut down the market for starting pitching until he signs, or at least, until teams that think they have a shot at him learn that they don’t. Most of the position players worth writing about have already signed, and now we’re just into staredown mode between the Mets and Stephen Drew, the Mariners and Nelson Cruz, and the Orioles and Kendrys Morales. Maybe I’ll try to find something interesting to say about one of those three players next week.

Today, though, more Tanaka, because I still find this entire situation pretty fascinating. You guys expect him to sign for $120 million over six years, not including the $20 million posting fee, so the final price would put Tanaka squarely in the range of what Zack Greinke got last winter, despite the fact that he’s technically still a prospect. And historically, the crowdsourced contract forecasts have been low on the top guys, so there’s a pretty decent chance that he’s actually going to cost more than 6/$140M, and his final price might push him into the range of contracts recently signed by legitimate aces like Felix Hernandez and Justin Verlander.

And yet, the general consensus is that Tanaka probably isn’t an ace in the way that most people think of the word. Most of the scouting reports suggest that his strengths are going to be throwing strikes and getting ground balls, with enough strikeouts on his splitter to make the overall package successful. There are certainly very good pitchers who fit that description, so I thought I’d create a list of pitchers who have pitched to something like that skillset over the last three years, as a representation of what that kind of performance actually looks like.

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I can recall a handful of baseball stats that have just blown me away upon first viewing. Most recently, I was floored by advancements in pitch-framing research, and now I can’t think about any catcher without looking up how well he does or doesn’t receive. Obviously, PITCHf/x was sort of world-changing right away, and the same goes for the glimpses we’ve had of HITf/x. Years and years ago, I thought we solved almost everything with general batted-ball data, and I also remember opening a book and seeing batting averages and slugging percentages against specific pitch types. And there was an article I read in the Hardball Times, talking about various park factors. Some of them have been obvious for a long time. But it wasn’t until that day that I realized parks can affect outcomes like strikeouts and bases on balls.

There’s every reason for that to make sense. Every single ballpark is different, so in a way, every single ballpark’s version of baseball is different. The baseball will look different to the batter, and how the batter sees the ball is sort of one of the game’s fundamental components. The batter’s decision and swing lead to everything else. But what this isn’t is intuitive, or easily explained. People don’t pay much attention to these park factors, because they’re weird and ultimately not that important. Yet they exist and ought to be acknowledged, and one park in particular is extreme in a number of ways.

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Jamey Wright turned 39 on December 24, and he celebrated by signing a one-year deal worth $1.8 million with the Dodgers. As far as offseason signings go, it’s a relatively minor one, and coming as it did in the midst of the holiday season and the far bigger stories of Shin-Soo Choo and Masahiro Tanaka, it — quite reasonably — went unmentioned here. In fact, as far as I can tell, the last time he was even mentioned on the regular FG site was way back in 2009, and even that was a Jeremy Affeldt article that barely referenced Wright.

That’s neither surprising nor unexpected, because Wright’s claim to fame — if he even has one — is that he’s been surviving on minor-league deals for longer than most current players have even been in the big leagues. After eight consecutive years making seven different teams as a non-roster invite, he’s finally managed to collect a big-league deal for the first time since 2005. That’s great for him, but is otherwise a minor piece of trivia in the larger baseball world.

Still, we’re talking about him today because — well, okay, because no one can stand to talk about the Hall of Fame any longer — his age 35-38 seasons have looked like this:  Read the rest of this entry »

Ballots for Hall of Fame voters are due today. While I am a member of the BBWAA, I have not been in the organization for the requisite 10 years, so I do not have a vote for the Hall of Fame. But I still have opinions, and so, here is my hypothetical 2014 ballot. If you’re interested, here is my ballot from last year, where I voted for Bagwell, Piazza, Schilling, Biggio, Raines, Walker, Martinez, Bonds, Clemens, and Trammell. Because of the 10 vote limit, several of those players are getting bumped this year; hopefully the BBWAA does away with the arbitrary limitation and lets people vote for whoever they believe is worthy of enshrinement in the future.

On to my 2014 picks, listed in order from strongest to weakest candidate. For players who are holdovers from last year’s ballot, I just copied and pasted what I wrote a year ago.

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We know that Billy Beane has joked before that his stuff doesn’t work in the playoffs. And we know that, at least this time around, his Athletics team is built on depth and getting value out of the back end of his roster. These things seem to go hand in hand: your sixth starter and sixth infielder may mean a lot during the season, and they may not even make your post-season roster. But can we study this more rigorously in an effort to estimate the true value of depth?

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