Archive for Daily Graphings

The strength of the Padres system is definitely young pitching but many of the arms are still in A-ball. Luckily help will be more readily available from the likes of Matt Wisler and Casey Kelly, both of whom could contribute to the big league roster in 2014. There are also some very intriguing hitting prospects that came to the organization via the international market but they just missed being ranked within the Top 15 prospects in the system. Read the rest of this entry »

There was what seems like a relatively unremarkable trade today, that went down between the Braves and the Twins. The Twins sent to the Braves one Ryan Doumit, in the last year of his contract. The Braves sent to the Twins one Sean Gilmartin, 23 years old and still in the minors. Doumit is expected to fill some kind of role on Atlanta’s bench. Gilmartin might be a Twins starting rotation candidate down the road. It’s a competitive team maybe exchanging a little longer-term value for a little shorter-term value, and it’s a rebuilding team doing the opposite of that. Perfectly understandable, ordinary trade that does very little to capture the imagination.

There might be something buried here, though, beneath the immediate layers. Something nothing more than statistical, but then numbers are so much of everything. It depends on how Doumit ends up being utilized by the Braves, but there’s a chance this could mark the end of an era, beyond just the era of Doumit playing for Minnesota. On the surface, the trade is mildly interesting. Below the surface, it’s a little bit more so.

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One of the more eye-opening deals of the winter so far is Brian Wilson re-signing for eight figures with the Dodgers. It isn’t just that Wilson is coming off a year in which he barely pitched due to injury rehab. He’s good, and he looks to be healthy now. What makes it weird is that Wilson is in line to be a setup guy, behind one of the best relievers in baseball. Kenley Jansen is almost literally unhittable, so injury is the only thing that could conceivably stop him in 2014. Wilson is getting paid a lot, then, to not be a closer, even though he has a long closing background.

Wednesday, the Padres signed Joaquin Benoit for two years and $15.5 million. Benoit is a good relief pitcher, and a proven closer. The tricky part is that the Padres already had a proven closer in the perfectly adequate Huston Street. Benoit, like Wilson, is getting paid a lot to not be a closer, at least from the outset. And he’s getting paid a lot by a team that doesn’t have a budget anywhere close to the one the Dodgers do. On the face of it, the Padres make for a strange destination.

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The 2013 Winter Meetings came and went without a team reaching an agreement with Shin-Soo Choo, the best free agent outfielder available, at least after the signing of Jacoby Ellsbury. During the meetings, reports were coming in from various sources who report on such things that the Rangers, the Reds, and perhaps the Mariners were all kicking Choo’s tires. All of this makes sense. Those were three reasonable destinations for Choo at the time. But the rumors were just that, and nothing was doing on that front as the Winter Meetings came to a close. Then, as the meetings were winding down and people were boarding planes home, USA Today’s Bob Nigtengale tweeted this:

One veteran GM believes that the #Astros will wind up to be the landing spot for Shin-Soo Choo.

— Bob Nightengale (@BNightengale) December 12, 2013

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By now, the “Kendrys Morales is this year’s Kyle Lohse” jokes are already stale, but the point remains: Just as we saw with Lohse last year, a decent-yet-hardly-elite player is going to get weighed down by the anchor of the qualifying offer placed upon him. Not only does the offer drop the cost of a draft pick on Morales, but it sets the baseline of a $14.1 million salary, and while there’s nothing that says he can’t ultimately accept less than that, the fact that he’s a Scott Boras client makes it incredibly unlikely.

As you’d expect, the proclamations for his future are getting dire, especially now that the Mariners — the only team who wouldn’t need to surrender a pick for him, of course — went out and added Corey Hart and Logan Morrison to a roster that already had Justin Smoak (and, somewhere, Jesus Montero). One unnamed GM told Peter Gammons that he “can’t see Morales signing until after the [June] draft,” when the compensation pick would disappear, which seems a bit drastic, but Buster Olney’s suggestion of “February or March” looks absolutely reasonable.

Boras eventually found Lohse a home in Milwaukee days before the 2013 started, and he’ll do the same here eventually. So let’s play along: Where can Morales land in 2014? Read the rest of this entry »

Earlier this year, Bill Petti mentioned in his CLIFFORD work the single largest driver in a player’s wOBA collapse from one year to the next was Z-Contact%. Players that saw their Z-Contact% decline by at least 1.4% had a 1.68 times the odds of seeing their wOBA collapse that season than those that did not experience such a decline.

As with any correlation, nothing is a guarantee. Just because a player improves or declines with any one statistic does not guarantee that the results will behave in lockstep. The five players who saw their Z-Contact% improve the most in 2013 were Gerardo Parra, Everth Cabrera, Brandon Moss, Carlos Santana, and David Murphy. Parra, Cabrera, and Santana saw their wOBA improve by 1, 38, and 20 points respectively while Moss and Murphy’s dropped 33 and 80 points.

It was equally volatile on the other end of the scale. Raul Ibanez‘s Z-Contact% dropped 5.3%, yet his wOBA improved by 19 points. Chris Young‘s Z-Contact% dropped 6.2% from 2012 to 2013 as his wOBA dropped 36 points.  Marlon Byrd’s 6.7% decrease was the third-largest decrease in Z-Contact% in the sample size, yet his wOBA improved an amazing 148 points last season. The two largest declines in Z-Contact% from 2012 to 2013 had one thing in common – a last name.

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Matt Thornton isn’t ready to call it a career. The southpaw reliever is 37 years old and is coming off a so-so season — the Red Sox left him off their post-season roster — but he feels he’s far from done. In fact, he just signed a free-agent contract with the New York Yankees.

It took a long time for him to get started on his career, though. Thornton was drafted out of high school by the Detroit Tigers, but his passion was basketball. The Sturgis, Mich., native eschewed his home-state team and enrolled at nearby Grand Valley State University, where he played both sports. Three years later, the Seattle Mariners made him the 22nd overall pick of the 1998 draft.

Thornton proceeded to spend seven years in the minor leagues. He reached Seattle at the age of 27, and after a pair of bumpy campaigns with the Mariners, he finally hit his stride after being dealt to the Chicago White Sox. Over 10 big-league seasons, Thornton has appeared in 606 games and averaged more than a strikeout per inning.

Thornton talked about his long road to big-league success late in the 2013 season. Read the rest of this entry »

Inspired by the Yankees’ loss of Robinson Cano, I got to thinking about how teams have coped with missing stars in the past, which led to this post published earlier Tuesday. Setting an arbitrary “star” threshold of 6 WAR, the data sample wasn’t huge over 25 years, but on average teams that lost stars fared only a little bit worse than teams that kept them. And I didn’t even control for circumstances by, say, including payroll information. Basically, stars are great and more or less replaceable if you can prepare for a departure and spread resources around. The Yankees should survive a Cano-less existence.

The first comment below the post points to an obvious follow-up:

Obligatory: How teams fare gaining a star level player

So, now this is that.

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Free agent closers are the most expensive single player type in baseball. When Matt Swartz did his price calculations for different positions a couple of years ago, he found that teams were paying approximately three times the average $/WAR for relievers as they were for the general population of players. And a disproportionate amount of the money going to relievers was paid to the “proven closers” who hit free agency coming off strong seasons with big save numbers. While solid setup guys might collection a few million and get a two or even three year deal occasionally, big name closers were racking up paychecks that paid them like above average everyday players, with the crazy Jonathan Papelbon contract ($50 million over four years) as perhaps the height of the market’s absurd closer valuations.

The days of Papelbon-style contracts for brand name closers seem to be over. Last year, Rafael Soriano got the largest contract of any free agent reliever, at $28 million for two years, and besides Mariano Rivera’s final one year contract with the Yankees, no other reliever got more than $7 million per year. This year, Joe Nathan was the #1 closer on the free agent market, and he signed for $20 million over two years after the Rangers opted not to make him a $14 million dollar qualifying offer. Nathan’s age was always going to keep him from getting a long contract, but Nathan isn’t the only closer on the market, and now Grant Balfour is showing that the market for closers might not be what it used to be.

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Though the research put forth by Jeff Sullivan today on teams following the loss of a six-win player wasn’t extremely damning — teams letting stars go didn’t even lose two wins more than teams that chose to retain their stars — it’s hard to see the Yankees as having done much more than tread water this offseason. For all the good that signing Jacoby Ellsbury and Brian McCann did, going from Robinson Cano to Brian Roberts and Kelly Johnson shot a hole in their infield. And now, with unclear remaining resources and a third baseman fighting to play in 2014, it looks like the Yankees are still an infielder short of a full deck. What available infielder could help the team the most?

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