Archive for Daily Graphings

In case you haven’t heard, The Hardball Times Baseball Annual 2014 is now available to purchase on ye ole internets. You can find my post on the book here, Dave Studeman’s post on the book here, and listen to Carson Cistulli’s FanGraphs Audio episode with Studes here.

After you’re done consuming those posts, you can buy it from Createspace (where we get the biggest cut of sales), from Amazon (in both print and for the Kindle) and from Barnes & Noble on the Nook.

Because we’re giving folk, and since it’s the beginning of the holiday season and all, we want to give you a chance to win yourself a free copy of the book. So today, tomorrow and Wednesday, we’ll be running a trivia contest based on one of the articles in the book. The first person to post the correct answer in the comments will win a free physical copy of the book (sorry, no free Kindle or Nook versions). It’s just that simple!

Today’s question comes from the article entitled “The Most Storied Postseasons.” In it, Dave Studeman details the 10 most storied postseason careers, using ChampAdded as his metric of choice. Studes ran the list both before and after the 2013 postseason, and there were changes. The question before you today, dear reader, is this:

Which player got bumped off of the 10 most storied postseason career list, and which player played his way onto it during the 2013 postseason?

To win the free copy, you have to get both parts of the answer correct.

Good luck!

Over the weekend, the Cardinals signed Jhonny Peralta to a four year, $53 million contract. I think it’s fair to say that, heading into the off-season, he was expected to sign for much less. The Tigers didn’t bother making him a qualifying offer. He was coming off a 50 game suspension for using PEDs. Some teams that expressed interest in him saw him as an outfielder, not a shortstop, and his offensive production levels aren’t that fantastic for a corner OF. He was so overlooked that Carson Cistulli even forgot to include him in the Contract Crowdsourcing series, but the general consensus from other contract prognosticators was something in the range of $20 million over two years.

But Peralta landed a deal for twice as long and more than twice as much money, as the Cardinals spent aggressively for the right to fill their shortstop hole without trading from their base of young talent. They could have acquired a cheaper shortstop from a financial perspective, but the cost of talent would have been substantial, so they chose to spend their monetary resources rather than their physical ones. Eno’s already talked about some of the risks and rewards of signing Peralta, so rather than rehash that post, I wanted to talk about Peralta’s price, and perhaps how we should have seen this coming.

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Jacoby Ellsbury has shown the ability to be one of the league’s most dynamic offensive players in the cost-controlled portion of his career.  No one would dispute his ability to hit for average or his base running prowess.  Add on top of this his ability to play center field, and you have a marquee player that would make any MLB team better.  As Jeff Sullivan pointed out a couple weeks ago, the perceived disparity between Ellsbury and other speedsters like Michael Bourn lies in the history of his power tool and its potential going forward.  

To me, the questions that must be answered for prospective employers are: 1. Can Ellsbury stay healthy? 2. Is the power still there? and 3. Is the power predicated on getting consistent at bats, or did something change in his body or swing to cause the sudden loss (and appearance) of power?.  I will not try to predict the future of Ellsbury’s health; that’s the job of the trainers and doctors who can see him in person.  Here I would like to analyze the chances of Ellsbury putting up another 30+ home run season by observing the subtle differences in Ellsbury’s swing this year compared to his last fully healthy season in 2011.

First, let’s look for some clues in the batted ball data available for a comparison.  Below are the graphical representations of all the homeruns hit by Ellsbury in 2011 and 2013, courtesy of ESPN’s Hit Tracker:
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If there’s any baseball story that’s just never going to end this winter — other than, “Jack Morris should/shouldn’t be in the Hall!” and “Alex Rodriguez fights with MLB!” — it’s almost certainly going to be “the Dodgers have too many outfielders, who will they trade?”

It’s been a slowly building narrative for more than a year now, and now that Yasiel Puig has proven himself to be a quality major league player and top prospect Joc Pederson is just about ready to join him, it’s deafening. That means Matt Kemp is going to the Blue Jays… or the Rangers… or the Mariners… or the Red Sox… unless Andre Ethier goes to the Mets or an unlikely Puig trade blows up the baseball world else first. It’s both a fun and frustrating time of year, where every report that one team may possibly have communicated with another about some player sends fans into a frenzy. Read the rest of this entry »

Ken Rosenthal of FoxSports.com is reporting the Los Angeles Dodgers have signed Dan Haren to a one-year, $10 million deal that has a vesting 2015 option if Haren works at least 180 innings next season. Last month, when we did our crowdsourcing for Haren, Carson Cistulli presented the following Haren facts:
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Jhonny Peralta got four years and $52 million from the Cardinals to be their shortstop, or so reports Jon Morosi. That’s the longest contract given to a free agent after a suspension for performance-enhancing drugs — a fact that has made some in the game angry. But that’s only one of the reasons this signing is so interesting.

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Humans have had a long and storied relationship with tools. From rocks and sticks to pocket knives and sonic screwdrivers, we have depended on tools to make our lives easier and more efficient. But a recent study shows that our use of tools might also have a lot to do with how we use our hands. A study from the University of Sussex shows that our (humans’) penchant for right-handedness has a lot to do with what part of our brain thinks about how to manipulate tools. Our left hemispheres do most of the heavy lifting when it comes to how we interact with tools. This is how humans and their close cousins came to be right-hand dominant species. This also could help explain how humans developed speech, as the constant working of our left hemispheres — the side responsible for speech — caused them to get stronger.  However, the study shows that this dominance only manifests when the subjects were dealing with inanimate objects. When dealing with animate objects — like other animals or themselves — no real dominance was shown.

There are a lot of studies about handedness in humans — how it affects their personalities, relationships, careers, etc. From what I found, there really aren’t many on just how many people are left-handed. Perhaps that has to do with the fact that they don’t pass out a lot of grant money for just counting stuff. However, there seems to be a general consensus that about 10% of humans are left-handed. By left-handed, of course, I mean left-hand dominant. Many people fall somewhere in the middle along the Edinburgh Handedness Inventory.  I’m right-hand dominant, and very much so. I do everything I can think of as a righty, though I’ve been told I sweep like a lefty when curling. I know many people, and you may too, who switch it up, though. They may write and eat left-handed, but throw and bowl and play pool right handed. They may use their right to pick up the phone, but their left to open a door. Again, a lot of it comes down to what we’re interacting with. This is the point when I talk about actual baseball. Read the rest of this entry »

In the World Series, broadcasts from both TBS and Fox kept telling us how good of a center fielder Jon Jay was. In between plaudits, Jon Jay would inevitably get a poor jump, take a bad route, or just drop an easily catchable ball, sometimes all in the same game. It became something of a running joke, as Jay appeared to be a defensive disaster in the postseason, even while the networks kept insisting that he was terrific with the glove.

Well, the Cardinals clearly weren’t swayed by the rhetoric, and today, they’ve acquired Peter Bourjos from the Angels to be their new center fielder. And now TBS and Fox can properly say that the Cardinals have one of the best defensive center fielders on the planet, because Peter Bourjos is what Jon Jay was supposed to be.

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This week, the Rockies signed relief pitcher LaTroy Hawkins to bolster the back end of their bullpen. It’s an interesting move on two levels. First, it’s pretty remarkable just how long Hawkins’ career has lasted. Second, it’s another data point that shows that teams are less and less willing to pay big bucks for saves.

When Hawkins suits up for his second go-round with Colorado in 2014, it will be his 20th season in the major leagues. He has thrown at least 20 innings in each season since 1995. That’s pretty ridiculous if you ask me. Digging into the Play Index, I find that he really doesn’t have much company in this regard. Here is the list of the pitchers who have primarily been relievers during their careers and managed to pitch in 20 or more major league seasons:

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Before free agency began, I ran down five potential bargains that I thought had a good chance to be worth more than the contracts that the FanGraphs Crowd projected them to sign for this winter. On that list was Chris Young — the outfield version — who the crowd forecast for $7 million per year over two years. Today, the Mets have signed for him $7 million for a single year, and I continue to believe that this will likely go down as one of the best free agent signings of the off-season.

It is very easy to focus on Young’s warts. He hit just .200/.280/.379 last year. He doesn’t hit right-handed pitching all that well. Now 30, his defense probably isn’t what it used to be. These statements are all true, but they simply explain why Young was signing for 1/$7M instead of 5/$75M like B.J. Upton last winter. If Young was coming off a good year, and had historically better numbers against right-handed pitching, and was still in his defensive prime, he’d be signing a big money long term deal. For 1/$7M, you get warts. You just pick and choose which warts you’re okay with.

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