Archive for Daily Graphings

A year ago, the Marlins signed a bunch of free agents to long term contracts that were backloaded in salary and didn’t include no-trade clauses. At the time of the deals, many skeptics suggested the organization’s past history and the structure of these deals meant the entire spending spree was a mirage designed to fool the city of Miami into thinking they actually bought a competitive team with their new $500 million stadium. That once the rubber hit the road, the Marlins would just trade all these expensive players away and go back to putting a low payroll team on the field to accomplish their real goal: raking in cash while exploiting the flaws in the revenue sharing agreements for the owner’s own personal gain.

Tonight, the Marlins completed a trade with the Blue Jays that vindicates every single person who said or wrote such a thing last year. It doesn’t even matter if this was the original plan, or if this is just an audible that the organization called after things went south. There is a chance this wasn’t all pre-scripted 12 months ago, and the organization really did want to try and win with the group of players they signed. That’s now irrelevant. The fact that it looks like this was all part of a master plan concocted before Jose Reyes or Mark Buehrle signed up to play in Miami means that the Marlins not only traded away a bunch of players today, they shipped out any last remaining amount of credibility the franchise had as well.

Read the rest of this entry »

Based on reports from the last few days, the Giants have reportedly agreed to re-sign Jeremy Affeldt to a three year, $18 million contract. Predictably, the internet has responded with scorn.

Three years for a reliever. Might as well give the money to Jean-Ralphio “@marcoacosta28: @keithlaw you like the Affeldt signing ?”

— keithlaw (@keithlaw) November 13, 2012

Multi-year deals for relief pitchers are generally not a great way to spend money. Relievers are fickle, they can be replaced fairly easily, and it doesn’t take much money to cobble together a bullpen full of failed starters who can excel in a more limited role. Keith’s overarching point about long term deals for relief pitchers is correct.

But, at some point, it probably behooves us all to move beyond generalities and talk about the specifics of contracts for free agent relievers, because despite the rhetoric, not every multi-year deal for every relief pitcher is a giant waste of cash.

Read the rest of this entry »

Stop the presses! Theo Epstein and Jed Hoyer have signed a good player with durability questions to a one year contract. This time, their reclamation project is Scott Baker, who underwent Tommy John surgery last April and missed the entire 2012 season. To secure his services, the Cubs gave him $5.5 million guaranteed, with an additional $1.5 million in performance bonuses based on how many innings he throws.

When healthy enough to pitch, Baker has been an above average starter for the Twins, posting a career ERA-/FIP-/xFIP- of 97/93/94 in just under 1,000 innings. He’s an extreme fly ball pitcher, but he limits walks and racks up strikeouts by pitching up in the zone, so the trade-off works pretty well in preventing runs.

The question, of course, is how much quantity he’ll be able to provide. He’ll be less than a year out from surgery on Opening Day, and if he has any setbacks in his rehab, there’s a pretty decent chance he’ll have to start the season on the DL. If the Cubs want to play it safe and give him some time to build up his endurance in the minors, he might not pitch for Chicago until May or June. Projecting more than 100 to 150 innings from Baker in 2013 is probably too optimistic, so this deal likely buys the Cubs a pitcher for about half of next season.

But, just like with Paul Maholm last winter, this is exactly the kind of guy that the Cubs should be filling out their rotation with. Decent, young-ish starter with upside and no long term commitment who can provide solid results and potentially serve as a nice trade chip at the deadline. Or, if things go really well, they get a leg up on re-signing him before he hits the market again next winter.

For a rebuilding team, this is how Major League payroll should be used. Use available jobs and cash to sign guys who can offer some upside without locking yourself into any long term risk, and position the roster to offer the fans a decent product without giving up any of the long term assets that the team is building around. The cost isn’t so low that it would have made sense for every team to do this deal, but for a club like the Cubs, this is exactly the kind of move that makes sense.

At the end of May, the Braves were trying to get back on track. At 28-24 and on a two-game winning streak, things looked fine in an immediate sense. However, the club was in fourth place, was just coming off an eight-game losing streak, and Tyler Pastornicky looked like the worst player in the major leagues over the first two months. He hit just .243/.287 /.325 and played an awful shortstop, with seven errors on the one hand and a -12 UZR and -16 DRS on the other.

Of Pastornicky’s defense, Frank Wren simply said, “We need more.” Enter Andrelton Simmons.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Brewers were talking an extension with Corey Hart, and then they weren’t. Either way, extension is a key word for the 6-foot-6 slugger with the long levers.

The sunglassed-one turns 31 next year, so he’s most likely either post-peak or he’s rapidly approaching his decline phase. At the very least, he’s lost some of the speed he had when he came up as a five-tool player: His speed scores are regularly below average now, and he hasn’t stolen double-digit bases since 2009. His batting profile also has begun to skew more towards power. As it goes with such a move, his strikeout rate has jumped along with his isolated power. How age affects those two talents would be most interesting to his current employer when considering a contract extension.

Read the rest of this entry »

As noted here earlier, later on Monday the BBWAA will announce the two winners of the 2012 Rookie of the Year Awards. It’s expected that the winners will be Mike Trout and Bryce Harper, although the latter could conceivably lose in an upset. The awards are given to the best rookies from the American and National Leagues. No awards exist for the worst rookies from the American and National Leagues. This is because such a gesture would be incredibly cruel and while baseball does have a cruel sense of humor, it usually isn’t so blatant about it. The best rookies get awards, and the worst rookies try not to get noticed as they set their sights on improving or finding other work.

There’s not a whole lot to say at this point about Trout or Harper, though. They were awesome and they’ll probably be awesome later. There’s also not a whole lot to say about the Rookie of the Year award — sometimes the winners go on to accomplish big things, sometimes they bust, and what happened in the past doesn’t mean anything as far as Trout and Harper are concerned. For now, I’m tired of thinking about the best. I’m more interested in thinking about the worst.

Read the rest of this entry »

When you go to the FanGraphs leaderboards, the first group of players that comes up are the “qualified” players. For position players, at the end of the season, that equates to the players who had 502 or more plate appearances. This year, there were 143 such position players. But there are plenty of players vital to teams that don’t show up on among qualified players. Whether you call them platoon players, role players or simply part-time players, they almost always find themselves out of the limelight. Today, let’s take a look at the ten best part-time players of the 2012 season.

We’ve already defined these players as those with less than 500 PA. But we need to go a little further. There are plenty of regular players who didn’t reach 500 PA, but were most certainly not part-time players. Guys like Joey Votto and Matt Kemp would have easily reached 500 PA had they been healthy. There are also players who didn’t reach 500 PA, but started more than 100 games — guys like Ryan Ludwick, Todd Frazier and Jeff Keppinger. It’s hard to call them part-time players as well. Finally, there are players who only seem like part-time players because they were called up in the middle of the season. A player such as Luis Cruz falls into this category. Cruz wasn’t called up until July 2, but from then on he started in 73 of the 77 games in which he played. That’s an everyday guy in my book. So I combed the list to try and strip some of those players out, looking at the percentage of games started to games played. Obviously, that leaves some gray areas, but I’m more comfortable parsing the list a little than I am just leaving it alone and calling guys like Votto part-time players because they didn’t reach 500 PA.

Read the rest of this entry »

We already know that the three finalists for the 2012 American League Rookie of the Year Award are Mike Trout, Yoenis Cespedes, and Yu Darvish. We basically already know that Mike Trout will be named the unanimous winner later on Monday by the BBWAA. There is no particularly convincing argument for any of the other guys over Trout, unless you pretend like pitcher wins are the only statistic that exists. You’ll know if Trout does not win unanimously because in that event Twitter would go down on account of all the Internet rage. It doesn’t take a lot to make the Internet rage.

The award itself is something that matters only sort of. It would probably matter a great deal to Trout and to Trout’s family. It’s something that would immediately go on Trout’s resume, and it’s something that would be brought up in any Mike Trout Hall-of-Fame discussions. The recognition would boost Trout’s self-esteem but it would not give him a new house, and it would not give the Angels more wins. It certainly means little to the fans. I don’t think fans care about the awards because of the winners; I think they care about the awards because of the arguments for which they allow. On the surface, there’s not much room for argument in the 2012 AL RoY. But what follows is an argument in favor of Oakland’s Jarrod Parker.

Read the rest of this entry »

Tonight, Mike Trout is going to be named the American League Rookie of the Year, and it’s almost certainly going to be unanimous unless one voter is just completely out of his mind. Bryce Harper is also likely to take home a rookie of the year trophy tonight, though his win isn’t as certain, nor will his margin of victory be as large. You can actually make a pretty good case for Wade Miley, and it wouldn’t be a travesty if he ended up pulling off the upset tonight. Harper was excellent, but he wasn’t the dominating force that Trout was in his first season in the big leagues.

And yet, as we look forward to their respective careers, I’d still lean ever so slightly towards Bryce Harper having a better future than Mike Trout.

Read the rest of this entry »

With very rare exception, walks are bad, for the pitcher and for the pitcher’s team. Sometimes a pitcher will walk an opposing hitter on purpose, but sometimes that’s not even the right thing to do. Walks are just bad, as a general principle. But, of course, some walks are worse than others. There’s an entire spectrum, from okay walks to awful walks, from forgivable walks to unforgivable walks. It’s usually worse to walk a guy on four pitches, unintentionally. It’s usually worse to walk a guy with the bases loaded. It’s usually worse to walk an opposing pitcher, since pitchers are like the worst hitters ever. Now combine all three of those things.

It seems to me — and, upon checking, it seems to Dave Cameron — that the most unforgivable walk would be a four-pitch walk of the opposing pitcher with the bases loaded. Obviously, that’s something that wouldn’t happen very often, because you’re selecting for a few unlikely scenarios. But this past season, that happened two times. Two times, a pitcher was walked on four pitches to bring home a run. Once it even happened in a one-run game. Both times it happened, it happened in Arizona, in the Diamondbacks’ favor. We review, in no order. An order wouldn’t even really make sense. We’re reviewing two events. We have a list of two.

Read the rest of this entry »