Archive for Daily Graphings

Very late last week, another quality starting pitcher in Hisashi Iwakuma nearly entered the free-agent market. But very late last week, the Seattle Mariners decided “hey we need quality players on our team” and re-signed Iwakuma to a multi-year contract. It was a predictable move, and a sensible move; the Mariners needed a good starting pitcher, and Iwakuma had previously expressed a fondness for Seattle. The two sides reached an agreement right at the end of the exclusive negotiating window, and Iwakuma will end up with either $14 million over two years or $20 million over three years. For the Mariners, it’s a potential bargain, and for Iwakuma, it’s security and still a small fortune.

Now, as for the headline, in your case the answer might be “literally anything.” Iwakuma last year flew under the radar, because he pitched for a nothing team, and he didn’t actually start pitching regularly for a few months. For me, personally, Wei-Yin Chen is a blind spot. For a lot of other people, Hisashi Iwakuma might be a blind spot. I don’t know. One should first acknowledge that he was pretty good. Then there’s something else, something specific.

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You can’t talk about Major League Baseball’s financials these days without hearing about how much money is flowing into the sport. New television contracts are everywhere. MLB Advanced Media is one of the most valuable technology companies in the world. The Dodgers ownership group has their own printing press, apparently. Baseball is rolling in cash, and everyone involved with the sport is getting rich.

Except for Joel Peralta. If he pays attention to any of this stuff, he has to be wondering why his own personal experience is so different than everyone else’s.

In 2010, Joel Peralta threw 49 excellent innings for the Nationals, posting a 50/76/86 ERA-/FIP-/xFIP- line thanks to his excellent command of the strike zone. For his efforts, he was non-tendered, as the Nationals decided they didn’t want to give him a raise that a pitcher with those numbers would get in arbitration. The Rays eventually signed him for $925,000, or about $500K more than the league minimum.

Since joining the Rays, Peralta has thrown 135 innings, with his minus stats lining up nicely – 84 ERA-/83 FIP-/87 xFIP-. His fly ball tendencies finally turned into a small home run issue, but his ability to limit walks and rack up strikeouts allowed him to be a good reliever even while putting the ball in the air all the time. While there is understandable skepticism about putting homer prone pitchers in the game with one run leads, he has basically the same skillset as Huston Street, and he’s had no problems collecting big paychecks throughout the years.

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That’s right: end of the season, time for me to hand out awards based on semi-goofy. questionable stats. Along with the Carter-Batista Award, this is one of the first I started publishing.. In fact, my very first post at FanGraphs (three years this week! Time flies when you’re wasting it.) back in 2009 was a King of Little Things award presentation. You can also check out the 2010 and 2011 versions for the thrilling results. So which 2012 hitter contributed to most his teams wins in ways not measurable by traditional linear weights?

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Last week, the Angels shopped Dan Haren around the league, as it was common knowledge that they weren’t going to pick up his $15.5 million option for 2013, and were willing to trade him to a team that wanted to take a one year flier on a pitcher was among the game’s best as recently as 2011. Because they owed him a $3.5 million buyout, the marginal cost of acquiring Haren was really $12 million, the same amount that the Royals agreed to take on in acquiring Ervin Santana in the same style of trade.

While Santana found a new home, Haren did not, and after a deal with the Cubs fell through — after the Cubs supposedly pulled out of the trade — the Angels allowed Haren to become a free agent. So, now, he’s at the top of everyone’s free agent bargain list. And, given his skills and track record, the idea that a team could sign him for less than 1/12 seems to be a potentially huge bargain. But, given what transpired last week, we have to at least consider that perhaps Haren is more broken than is obvious from the outside.

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The trade and free agent markets are flush with competent centerfielders this offseason. While Josh Hamilton and Michael Bourn are the marquee free agents, the second, third and even fourth tiers of conceivably available centerfielders features players capable of starting for many teams.

B.J. Upton is the most frequently mentioned player after Hamilton and Bourn. Angel Pagan — perhaps the most underrated player in the game — has also garnered plenty of attention in recent weeks. Before getting traded to Oakland, Chris Young was gaining recognition as a potential trade target, and his arrival could put Coco Crisp back on the market. The Angels’ Peter Bourjos plays the position better than mostly everyone in baseball, but he’s blocked by perhaps the best player in the game. Shane Victorino presents an interesting case — as one of the best all-around players at the position — but one who is getting older and coming off of one of his worst seasons.

Denard Span isn’t discussed as much as a potential trade target, but he combines some of the best attributes of everyone mentioned above: He fields the position terrifically, he’s a very good baserunner, he has a high career walk rate and a wRC+ 5% better than the league. He’s also signed to a team-friendly contract.

There’s certainly risk in acquiring him — his health has been questionable during the last two seasons — and the Twins will surely look to bring back a significant haul. But he’s also an underrated player, and he represents the type of cost-effective option teams wary of the Hamilton’s, Bourn’s and Upton’s should seriously pursue.

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For a very long time, the Boston Red Sox were good. Great, even. Then, beginning around September 2011 or so, the Red Sox turned into a disaster. The Sox followed a poor end to the 2011 season with a poor all of the 2012 season, and it became somewhat conceivable that David Ortiz would look for a change. Ortiz was set to be a free agent after the year, and as hard as it is to imagine the Red Sox without him, maybe Ortiz would’ve been sick of the atmosphere. Just recently, Ken Rosenthal wrote that the Texas Rangers would have interest in Ortiz as a potential free-agent DH. It wasn’t impossible that Ortiz would go somewhere else, is the point.

But that’s not happening, as it turns out. Friday was the end of the exclusive negotiating window for teams and their free agents. Recently there were reports that Ortiz and the Red Sox were close to an agreement, then there were reports that Ortiz and the Red Sox weren’t really close to an agreement. But Friday, word’s out that an agreement is in place. David Ortiz is not hitting the open market — David Ortiz is staying in Boston.

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Entering the 2012 season, Red Sox prospect Keury De La Cruz was a relative unknown after two years of modest production in short season baseball. At 20, De La Cruz burst onto the prospect scene by posting a .308/.352/.536 line in the South Atlantic League before earning a late season promotion. Is De La Cruz a legitimate prospect? Sure, but the amount of hype he has received due to coming out of nowhere is a phenomenon repeated every winter. The names change, but the excitement… and eventual let down… is the same.

Just last winter, fellow Red Sox Brandon Jacobs posted nearly identical numbers at the same age in Greenville. That success earned him multiple top-100 rankings highlighted by his being named the 46th best prospect on Baseball Prospectus’ top-101 prospects list. This isn’t to say Jacobs did not earn those lofty rankings. He did, and was one of my favorite bat first prospects in 2011. However, the hangover from his 2011 success was a nasty one as slightly above average production at the High-A level has caused his prospect stock to crater — Probably unfairly as he battled injuries in 2012. Read the rest of this entry »

Baseball players are assigned positions. Specific positions, I mean, and they’re generally assigned well before a player makes the major leagues. A baseball player’s position is a baseball player’s job, and no baseball player’s position is “professional baseball player.” There are relief pitchers, and starting pitchers, and shortstops, and catchers, and everything. There’s specificity, and corresponding specific training. A player who is trained as a shortstop will, over time — in theory — become a better shortstop than a player who is not trained as a shortstop. That other player will be better at whatever he is, probably. There’s a reason pitchers generally aren’t good hitters, and hitters generally aren’t good pitchers. Those activities aren’t their jobs, so they don’t receive training for them.

But sometimes pitchers hit, and sometimes hitters pitch. There’s a whole league where pitchers have to hit and in so doing end up embarrassing themselves, and sometimes a position player will take the mound should desperation or utter indifference set in. These make for some valuable and interesting reference points, because we can get an idea of how players perform without training. National League position players get lots of hitting training. NL pitchers get limited hitting training. AL pitchers get practically zero hitting training. So the differences between their performances are worth it to observe. And it’s always worth observing position players on the mound. This will be our focus today.

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Last month, I explained the formula Major League Baseball uses to divide postseason ticket revenue among the Commissioner’s Office, postseason teams, and players on postseason teams. Now that the postseason has concluded, we have enough information to estimate the amount of ticket revenue collected and, therefore, the amount the Commissioner, the teams, and the players will receive.

Before I launch into the numbers, I want to emphasize that these are estimates. Rough estimates, in fact. We know the attendance figures for each postseason game, and we know the range of ticket prices each team charged, but we don’t know precisely how many tickets at each price were sold by each team for each postseason game.

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Don’t forget – you can view all of the free agents stats and compare them side by side on our Free Agent Leaderboard.

Free Agency officially starts tomorrow, as the kinda-sorta-but-not-really-exclusive negotiating period comes to an end today, and players who haven’t re-signed with their former teams are free to sign with anyone they choose. Well, that’s not really true. They can sign with any team that makes them an offer. I’m pretty sure Jose Valverde couldn’t re-sign with the Tigers no matter how much he wanted to.

With free agency starting up, you’re also about to get inundated with lists of the top free agents. 50 seems to have been the agreed upon number, as Tim Dierkes already has his Top 50 up at MLBTradeRumors, while Keith Law has said that his list goes up on ESPN Insider when the clock strikes midnight. I’m sure there will be others, and some of them will probably ask you to view their list in a slideshow. Those people are the Jose Valverde of list makers. Don’t be one of those people. Slideshows are the worst.

Here at FanGraphs, we’re not giving you a slideshow. We’re not giving you a Top 50 Free Agent list either, because, to be honest, my list would have looked an awful lot like Tim’s, and probably an awful lot like Keith’s. I just didn’t see a lot of usefulness in telling you that I agree that Zack Greinke and Josh Hamilton are the two best free agents on the market, nor was I super interested in trying to draw a distinction between Carlos Lee and Carlos Pena. They’re both not good anymore. Does anyone really want to read about those guys today? Me either.

So, instead of producing our own list of 50 best free agents on the market in some order, we’re going to provide a different slant – using the Contract Crowdsourcing results that went up in full this morning, I’m going to provide a list of the 25 players that I would be most interested in signing at those given prices. And, for extra fun, the five players who I would not go anywhere near at the prices you guys projected them to sign for.

You’ll see bigger contracts at the top than at the bottom, even though you can get a better ROI on a smaller deal if the guy goes bananas, as Aaron Hill did last year. That said, those kinds of years are tough to predict, and in general, I think teams are better off getting a good player at a good price rather than a role player at a great price, even if in retrospect, some of those players will turn into good players and provide a lot of value beyond what they’re being paid. The goal here isn’t to provide the best value in terms of $/WAR, but to identify — at least, in my view — which contracts are likely to have the biggest magnitude of effect on a team’s chances of winning going forward. And, on the flip side, the contracts that could do the most harm to a team’s ability to contend over the life of the deal.

So, without further ado, here are my Top 25 Free Agent Values, followed by the Five Free Agent Landmines to avoid this winter.

1. Nick Swisher, OF: 4 years, $56 million

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