Archive for Daily Graphings

The Phillies re-signed Carlos Ruiz to a 3-year, $26 million deal. Also: Brayan Pena and Geovany Soto have locked down their 2014 teams (the Royals Reds and Rangers respectively). And now it appears Jose Molina is in the final stages of returning to St. Pete for another two years of expertly framed and eh, who cares about blocking? pitches.

So where does that leave the catching market? As far as I have seen, the Yankees, Red Sox, Rockies, Angels, Rangers (still), Blue Jays and Twins have all been connected with free agent catchers on MLBTR. Using their handy free agents leaderboards (with a few additions), we can examine the remaining free agent catchers and try our hand at predicting the right fits for each.
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This is going to be more of a quick take than any kind of long rambling analysis, as I have done too many of those today already, but hey, more news. This one’s not a Fielder-for-Kinsler trade, but the Royals have filled their last rotation spot by signing Jason Vargas to a four year, $32 million contract. The deal was first reported by Yahoo’s Jeff Passan.

I’m assuming the initial reaction of many is going to be the same as my initial reaction when I heard they had given Jason Vargas a four year deal; that’s nutty. Jason Vargas is a perfectly serviceable big league starter, but you don’t usually give four year deals to role players. Vargas isn’t any kind of front-of-the-rotation ace, he has moderate upside at best, and this deal covers his age 31-34 seasons, so the four year term is kind of odd. It’s entirely justifiable to say that you wouldn’t want to guarantee money to a 34-year-old Jason Vargas, given that his stuff is already marginal and he hasn’t always been the picture of health.

But there’s two parts of every contract, and the years are only half the story. You would happily give Jason Vargas a 20 year contract so long as the price was only for $1 million per season; there are different prices which justify different contract lengths. And so while we generally think of four year deals as being for significant amounts of money, this one is going to cost them just $8 million per season, and thus it has to viewed as an exchange of an extra year in exchange for a lower annual salary. And it’s a trade off that’s maybe worth making for the Royals.

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The St. Louis Cardinals have a well-earned reputation as one of the best organizations in baseball. From scouting to player development to the Win column, they excel in all areas. The people putting the pieces together are a big reason why.

Michael Girsch, the club’s assistant general manager, is part of that brain trust. Working under GM John Mozeliak, Girsch is a perfect fit for a front office that integrates analytics into The Cardinal Way. The 37-year-old has a math degree from Notre Dame and an MBA from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, there’s a lot of talk about Ian Kinsler’s decline. He just finished his age-31 season, and his power seems to be disappearing before our eyes. His ISOs over the last three years: .223/.166./.136, and that’s with playing half his games in Texas. There are signs that he might be slowing down too, as he was just 15 for 26 in stolen base attempts, not anywhere near his career 84% success rate heading into 2013.

Kinsler was still a reasonably productive player last year, but as a right-handed hitter who does most of his damage against lefties, a continuation of these trends might lead to Kinsler ending up as a very expensive platoon player in a couple of years. If the power starting to erode, or was a product of Texas’ ballpark, then Kinsler’s future value is going to depend on his baserunning and defense, both things we expect to evaporate as a player gets into his thirties.

Still, I can’t help but feel like I heard all these same arguments last year when the Red Sox signed Shane Victorino to a three year, $39 million contract. Because Victorino’s 2012 and Kinsler’s 2013 look pretty darn similar.

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The Rangers traded Ian Kinsler for Prince Fielder. You know this already. I’ve already written a post about this trade, in fact, detailing why I love this deal for the Tigers. If baseball trading were a zero sum game, this would mean that I hate this move for the Rangers, since a big win would have to be offset by a big loss on the other side. But baseball trades are not a zero sum game. There are mutually beneficial trades. The Rangers are now hoping this is one of those deals where both sides get better.

The Rangers had to move a middle infielder. They couldn’t go into 2014 with Jurickson Profar as a super utility guy behind Elvis Andrus and Ian Kinsler again. They had three starting middle infielders, and Kinsler wasn’t interested in becoming a starting first baseman, so shifting him over to make room for Profar probably wasn’t an option. Someone had to go.

So, in that sense, this deal is not quite as straight forward as it is from the Tigers perspective. Detroit turned a +3 WAR player into a +3 WAR player and saved a bunch of money in the process. For the Rangers, though, the context is the reason the deal got done, and simply comparing the value of the player going out with the value of the player coming in doesn’t work. This deal was made because of the other players on the roster, the ones not getting traded. So let’s try and sort this all out.

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(I decided to break this deal down in two separate posts, because there are too many angles to fit it all into one. Texas fans, we’ll talk about this deal from the Rangers perspective in a separate article.)

The Detroit Tigers were a very good baseball team, but with Omar Infante heading for free agency and too much money committed to other players to keep him around, they had a hole at second base. They also had too many designated hitters, with Victor Martinez’s presence forcing both Prince Fielder and Miguel Cabrera to play the field even when they really couldn’t. With Cabrera’s body breaking down in September, it became pretty clear that something had to give, and an obvious solution was moving one of their DHs could open up some money for them to fill their second base hole.

Instead of making a series of smaller transactions that accomplished that goal, the Tigers instead just found a way to directly exchange Prince Fielder for Ian Kinsler, filling their hole at second base, freeing up their DH logjam, and saving enough money to potentially keep the rest of their core in tact. This is a pretty fantastic start to the off-season for Dave Dombrowski.

Before we get too much further into the commentary, let’s break down the specifics of what swapping Prince Fielder for Ian Kinsler actually works out to.

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This evening, Jon Heyman broke the story that the Detroit Tigers are on the verge of sending Prince Fielder to the Texas Rangers for Ian Kinsler. We don’t have all of the details yet, so there could be more to it, but at the very least, it is a very, very interesting trade. Dave Cameron will have more on this later, but let’s take a brief look now, shall we?

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Alex Rodriguez stormed out of the arbitration hearing today on his appeal of Major League Baseball’s 211-game suspension after the arbitrator, Frederic Horowitz, denied Rodriguez’s request to call Commissioner Bud Selig as a witnesses.

Rodriguez’s outburst is just the latest twist in the on-going drama between him and MLB. And it suggests that Rodriguez and his attorneys believe that the arbitrator will uphold the suspension, at least for some number of games. But Rodriguez is unlikely to get the help he wants from a court — to either stop the arbitration or overturn Horowitz’s final ruling.

Let’s review how we got here:

MLB suspended Rodriguez on August 5 for violations of the the Collective Bargaining Agreement and Joint Drug Agreement between MLB and the Players’ Association (or MLBPA). MLB charged Rodriguez with using banned substances over a period of years and with attempting to obstruct MLB’s investigation. MLB suspended Rodriguez for the remainder of the 2013 season and all of the 2014 season, which amounted to 211 games.

Rodriguez immediately appealed his suspension to baseball’s arbitrator. That gave Rodriguez the right to continue playing baseball until the arbitrator issued his final decision.

The hearing on Rodriguez’s appeal got under way on September 30 at MLB’s offices in New York. Even though Rodriguez is, essentially, the complainant — as he is challenging the commissioner’s suspension — MLB has the burden to prove that Rodriguez used substances banned by the JDA and impeded the investigation, and that the 211-game suspension was justified.

Over the course of several weeks, MLB put on the testimony of Anthony Bosch, the owner of the now-shuttered Biogenesis Clinic; Dan Mullins, MLB’s lead investigator, and Rob Manfred, MLB’s Chief Operating Officer. Rodriguez’s lawyers had the opportunity to cross-examine these witnesses and did so. There were charges and counter-charges of secret meetings, witness tampering, purchasing stolen documents and more. The appeal hearing was adjourned in mid-October, and set to resume on November 18. In early November, the New York Times detailed the aggressive tactics used by both sides during MLB’s investigation and Rodriguez’s appeal in this story.

A few days after the Times story, Rodriguez sued MLB in New York state court for interfering with his contract with the Yankees and with other business relationships. Rodriguez accused MLB of doing everything in its power (and some things beyond its power) to paint him as the poster boy for the steroid era, to push him out of baseball and ruin his reputation. The complaint — which you can read here — previewed Rodriguez’s attack on MLB’s tactics and the appeal process, and tried to lay the groundwork for Rodriguez to overturn the arbitrator’s final ruling. But Rodriguez didn’t ask the state court to stop the appeal hearing.

MLB removed Rodriguez’s complaint to federal court on the theory that Rodriguez’s allegations and his claims are governed by the CBA and JDA, and thus pre-empted by federal labor law. MLB then filed a motion to dismiss Rodriguez’s complaint on the same grounds (copy here). MLB also argued that Rodriguez had failed to “exhaust his remedies” by filing a lawsuit before the end of the appeal hearing. Rodriguez, for his part, filed a motion to remand the case back to state court (copy here). The federal judge presiding over the case — Judge Lorna A. Schofield of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York — has not yet ruled on these motions.

Which brings us to today’s developments.

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A few weeks ago, we provided some links to a few different custom leaderboards, which allow you to sort and compare free agents to your hearts content. These are super useful for seeing how various players on the open market have done in the past, but the leaderboards don’t contain future projections, which is mostly what we care about when discussing what kind of contracts a player is going to sign or whether a team should pursue one free agent over another.

So, today, I’m going to let you in on a little secret that you may or may not have noticed: we now have a free agent depth chart, complete with 2014 Steamer Projection data, so you can compare available free agents at each position to each other based on their forecasts for next season. These depth charts reveal some pretty fun facts, so let’s walk through a few of them and see why I’m going to be using this page regularly.

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The 2013 season was a banner season for players going on the disabled list. The DL was utilized 2,538 times, which was 17 more than the previous 2008 high. In all, players spent 29,504 days on the DL which is 363 days more than in 2007. Today, I take a quick look at the 2013 DL data and how it compares to previous seasons.

To get the DL data, I used MLB’s Transaction data. After wasting too many hours going through the data by hand, I have the completed dataset available for public consumption.  Enjoy it, along with the DL data from previous seasons. Finally, please let me know of any discrepancies so I can make any corrections.

With the data, it is time to create some graphs. As stated previously, the 2013 season set all-time marks in days lost and stints. Graphically, here is how the data has trended since 2002:

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