People are always going to talk about baseball, even when there isn’t much baseball to talk about. Lately, people have been talking about the fact that there isn’t much baseball to talk about, and a recurring theme is that, in this current league environment, there just aren’t enough teams showing a commitment to winning. Now, that’s a belief supported by questionable evidence, and we can only truly evaluate this offseason after it’s finished, but let me say this right now for the Brewers — the Brewers are trying. Emboldened by the success of 2017, the Brewers don’t want to take a step back.
We’re talking about one of the smaller-market clubs in the league, and the Brewers shouldn’t get too much credit for anything until something actually happens. For the time being, the Brewers’ roster remains the same. But from the sounds of things, a decision has been made that the time could be right. As the Brewers emerge from their own tear-down process, they’re ready now to bring in some stars.
Yu Darvish is a famous right-handed pitcher.
(Photo: Keith Allison)
In a time that has been marked by the emergence of “super teams,” the Chicago Cubs of the last three years are one of the few clubs worthy of that description. They’ve averaged 97 regular-season wins, won two division titles, advanced to the National League Championship Series three times, and quite famously claimed a World Series title in 2016.
In that context, last season might be regarded as a disappointment. They won “only” 92 games during the regular season and then failed to get back to the World Series, losing in five games to the Dodgers. Much of the Cubs’ lack of success — which, admittedly, is a relative term in this case — has been attributed to a hangover effect from the long and satisfying World Series run. The Cubs were projected for 96 wins at the beginning of the 2017 season. Despite adding Jose Quintana at the deadline, the club finished four games under that mark.
As presently constructed, Chicago remains both excellent and flawed. Projected once again to cross the 90-win threshold, the Cubs’ roster nevertheless features some questions. Yu Darvish is the answer to the most prominent of those — namely, the club’s rotation depth.
Travis Sawchik argued three months ago that the Cubs are the best fit for the best pitcher on the market. Since that time, the team has signed Tyler Chatwood to fill a spot in the rotation. That seems promising.
At the same time, though, the Cardinals have made some moves on the margins and put themselves within striking distance. Entering Last season, for example, the Cubs featured a 10-game cushion over the Cardinals in our projections. As of today, however, Chicago’s projected lead over the St. Louis is just four games. The Cardinals got better, adding Marcell Ozuna to bolster their outfield.
As the forecasts suggest, the Cubs remain in a better position than the Cardinals. All things being equal, that’s good for Chicago. There are some warning signs, though.
Here’s your daily reminder that a lot of free agents remain available. A lot!
There are probably a number of reasons behind the slowly developing market, and we’ve documented a number of them here at FanGraphs dot com.
Teams have devalued free agency more and more. Players are trending younger. The average age of a position player was 28.3 years last season, compared to 29.1 in 2007. As I noted in a piece for The Athletic over the weekend, pitchers and position players aged 30 and older accounted for 41.8% of WAR production from 2001 to -03 but just 30.6% over the most recent three seasons (2015 to -17). While Craig Edwards noted yesterday that hitters in their early 30s are generally still pretty good, hundreds of age-30 seasons — almost always free-agent seasons — have disappeared.
Teams have perhaps also learned to wait on free agents, driving prices down. The data supports that hypothesis: February free-agent signings have increased for three straight years and are likely to far exceed last year’s mark of 65 signings, the most in a decade.
Moreover, large-market teams are trying to stay under the tax threshold and reset their tax status, while more and more clubs are following Astros- and Cubs-like rebuilds and tearing rosters down NBA-style while collecting premium picks and clearing payroll space in the process.
I always look forward to these posts, maybe a little too much. It’s one thing to begin a polling project, but it’s quite another to wrap up and take a look at all the community feedback. Sometimes, it isn’t surprising. I mean, we all have a sense of how the community feels about certain subjects. But every single project has something worth talking about. Let’s talk about owners, and ownership groups.
Last week, I ran a post with 30 polls, one for every team. The question: How do you feel about the people ultimately in charge? More than a month ago, I ran a very similar project, only, that time, I asked for your evaluations of the various front offices, independent of ownership. This was supposed to direct the spotlight to the other people, a follow-up project like the one I ran in January two years ago. It should be very obvious that we don’t actually know that much about the owners, or about the influences they have, but if nothing else, we have anecdotes, and we have success cycles and payrolls. Follow a team for long enough, and you’ll develop some form of an ownership opinion. I wanted to collect the community opinions.
That is what follows, down below. I’ve put all the numbers into a spreadsheet and performed some basic analysis. As it happens, for you fans of specific teams, you probably know more about your owners than I do. So, I’m not going to include very much discussion in this post — that can be carried forward in the comments. My job is just to reveal what you said! I should do that.
A few days ago, the Blue Jays picked up a new, young, cost-controlled starting outfielder. They got him in exchange for a reliever, and for a pitching prospect with lousy peripherals. It’s not hard to see how you could spin this as a big positive for Toronto. The other side, of course, is that the Blue Jays are taking a chance on a guy who the Cardinals couldn’t make better over a number of years. It’s fine for any team to express faith in its own player-development system, but if the Cardinals can’t get a guy polished, what hope might another club have?
As is generally the case, all three players in the trade are interesting. High-level baseball players are always interesting. Randal Grichuk is interesting, because of his track record and skillset. Dominic Leone is interesting, for the way he reemerged in 2017. And Conner Greene is interesting, because of the raw quality of his stuff. The Cardinals hope they just made their bullpen better. I don’t mean to ignore their side of this. But I’d like to focus on Grichuk, and, specifically, I’d like to focus on how he hasn’t progressed. The era in which Grichuk plays today isn’t the same as the era in which he debuted.
Last week, in Part 2, we learned about one of Lars’s colorful teammates with the Henley and Grange Rams. Today, we get reintroduced to Birdman Bats cofounder Gary Malec — previously featured in the Lars Anderson Discovers Japan series — and hear about a visit to a tattoo parlor that prompted an ink artist to say, “So, you lost a bet, did ya?” We also get a story about the cosmic jest and excruciating mental math that comes with the International Date Line.
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Lars Anderson: “The 2017 Birdman World Tour/Strategic Universal Takeover continued down under, rolling through Adelaide with a visit from the boss himself, Gary Malec. Since Gary was the catalyst for both myself and our bats being in Australia, it was only fitting that he’d check on the seeds he’d sown.
Could Scott Boras do for Eric Hosmer what he’s done for Prince Fielder and Matt Wieters in the past? (Photo: Cathy T)
Because of the nature of inactivity this offseason, we’ve explored, among other things, whether MLB teams have learned how to wait on free agents and how agents and players may need to adapt. These are trying times for a baseball scribe. We could use some transactions!
One agent who has tried to adapt, who is arguably the game’s greatest at his chosen profession, is Scott Boras.
In recent offseasons, when only a tepid market has developed for his clients, Boras has on occasion attempted to circumvent front offices — which are increasingly operating with less emotion and more reason — and appeal directly to owners. It worked with Prince Fielder in early 2012 in Detroit, for example.
Wrote FanGraphs alumnus Jonah Keri of that deal when it happened:
In short, Dave Dombrowski knows his stuff.
Which is exactly why Scott Boras wanted no part of him.
Mike Ilitch’s role in the nine-year, $214 million contract the Tigers gave to Prince Fielder has been well documented. … If you’re an agent representing a big-ticket client, do you negotiate with a GM who has 10 baseball ops guys at his disposal breaking down player projections to the smallest decimal point? Or do you approach the octogenarian owner who’s far more likely to make decisions from the heart, far more likely to say, “Eff it, I don’t care what happens in 2018, I want to win now”?
Boras perhaps didn’t pioneer this end-around approach in this age of data-drenched, free-agency-averse front offices. Rather, it might have been Dan Lozano, who appealed directly to Angels owner Arte Moreno while attempting to find a home for Albert Pujols.
I noticed an underlying theme in both pieces I’ve written since coming back, along with many others written this offseason at FanGraphs. If you are a fan of a small- or medium-market team that will never spend to the luxury-tax line and thus always be at a disadvantage, do you want your team to try to always be .500 or better, or do you want them push all the chips in the middle for a smaller competitive window? In my stats vs. scouting article I referenced a progressive vs. traditional divide, which was broadly defined by design, but there are often noticeable differences in team-building strategies from the two overarching philosophies, which I will again illustrate broadly to show the two contrasting viewpoints.
The traditional clubs tend favor prospects with pedigree (bonus or draft position, mostly), with big tools/upside and the process of team-building is often to not push the chips into the middle (spending in free agency, trading prospects) until the core talents (best prospects and young MLB assets) have arrived in the big leagues and have established themselves. When that window opens, you do whatever you can afford to do within reason to make those 3-5 years the best you can and, in practice, it’s usually 2-3 years of a peak, often followed directly by a tear-down rebuild. The Royals appear to have just passed the peak stage of this plan, the Braves hope their core is established in 2019 and the Padres may be just behind the Braves (you could also argue the old-school Marlins have done this multiple times and are about to try again now).
On the progressive side, you have a more conservative, corporate approach where the club’s goal is to almost always have a 78-92 win team entering Spring Training, with a chance to make the playoffs every year, never with a bottom-ten ranked farm system, so they are flexible and can go where the breaks lead them. The valuation techniques emphasize the analytic more often, which can sometimes seem superior and sometimes seem foolish, depending on the execution. When a rare group of talent and a potential World Series contender emerges, the progressive team will push some chips in depending on how big the payroll is. The Rays have a bottom-five payroll and can only cash in some chips without mortgaging multiple future years, whereas the Indians and Astros are higher up the food chain and can do a little more when the time comes, and have done just that.
What we just saw in Pittsburgh (and may see soon in Tampa Bay) is what happens when a very low-payroll team sees a dip coming (controllable talent becoming uncontrolled soon) and doesn’t think there’s a World Series contender core, so they slide down toward the bottom end of that win range so that in a couple years they can have a sustainable core with a chance to slide near the top of it, rather than just tread water. Ideally, you can slash payroll in the down years, then reinvest it in the competing years (the Rays has done this in the past) to match the competitive cycle and not waste free-agent money on veterans in years when they are less needed. You could argue many teams are in this bucket, with varying payroll/margin for error: the D’Backs, Brewers, Phillies, A’s and Twins, along with the aforementioned Rays, Pirates, Indians and Astros.
Eleven clubs were over $175 million in payroll for the 2017 season (Dodgers, Yankees, Red Sox, Blue Jays, Tigers, Giants, Nationals, Rangers, Orioles, Cubs, Angels), so let’s toss those teams out and ask fans of the other 19 clubs: if forced to pick one or the other, which of these overarching philosophies would you prefer to root for?
One of the oft-mentioned reasons for the slow free-agent market this winter is that teams are thinking on the same wavelength when it comes to evaluating players. One of the tenets of this theory is that free agents are bad bets because of the aging process. As players age, especially after 30, they get worse on the field, and teams don’t want to get stuck with those decline years.
There is a whole lot of reason in that explanation for the offseason’s lack of activity. There’s also a little bit of faulty logic regarding the aging process, particularly when it comes to this year’s free-agent class and the two biggest names out there, Eric Hosmer and J.D. Martinez.
The first flaw in this argument is based on a misunderstanding of how clubs are compensating players. All teams — and especially the “smart” ones — know and understand that the final year or years of a free-agent contract are unlikely to be valuable in terms of strict wins-per-dollar calculus. It’s generally accepted that those “out” years are going to be mostly dead weight. Players are typically signed to deals for which the total guarantee is equally distributed over the course of a deal. The team isn’t paying an equal amount every year expecting metronomic production over the life of a contract. They expect to receive a surplus of value in the early years and a deficit in latter years. The hope is that the early years compensate for the latter ones.
Teams could, in theory, compensate players a greater amount at the beginning of a contract than at the end, but most clubs choose not to do this because, by spreading the payments out, they get to keep more money in the present, which is more valuable to them. If a team doesn’t want to add, say, a seventh year at $25 million to Eric Hosmer’s offer, it isn’t because they believe he isn’t going to be worth $25 million in that seventh year. It’s because they believe he won’t be worth extra $25 million over the first six years. The value in the seventh year is going to be close to zero in terms of expectations. That’s not the main point I’m trying to make in this post, but it does deserve a mention.
Earlier this week, I chatted wth Red Sox manager Alex Cora about the relative value of contact skills versus hunting pitches that you can drive. Not surprisingly, the 2017 American League batting champion’s name came up.
“People might be surprised by this, but Jose Altuve isn’t afraid to make adjustments even when he’s getting his hits,” said Cora, who was Houston’s bench coach last year. “When Jose is really, really, really good — because he’s good, always — his strike zone shrinks. He doesn’t chase his hits. Sometimes he’s getting his hits because he’s unreal with his hand-eye coordination — he gets hits on pitches that others don’t — but when he looks for good pitches he’s even better.”
Cora was a contact hitter during his playing days, and looking back, he wishes he’d have been more selective. Not only that, he wouldn’t have minded swinging and missing more often than he did.
“I had a conversation with Carlos Delgado about that,” Cora told me. “When you commit to swinging the bat — I’m talking about me — it often doesn’t matter where it is, you end up putting the ball in play. It’s better to swing hard and miss than it is to make soft contact for a 4-3.” Read the rest of this entry »
