“The strategy the Marlins have adopted is tried and true in baseball. I’m not saying it’s without pain… But it was a process that ultimately produced a winner [at times, including Houston this season], in terms of smaller markets’ ability to win.”

–Commissioner Rob Manfred on the Dan LeBatard show, Dec. 20

 
Rebuilding, of course, has long been a part of baseball.

Before the Astros and Cubs parlayed dramatic rebuilds into World Series titles, the Marlins conducted fire sales of their own amid championships in 1997 and 2003. Young, cheap, talented labor has been prized since the origins of the professional game.

However, it is the depth of baseball’s current rebuilds that has begun to create more concern recently, notably among the league’s 120 unsigned free agents. It seems like something is different is occurring, that organizations are thinking more extreme, more like an NBA team when retooling.

If the Cubs and Astros did not inspire these more extreme retooling efforts, the Cubs’ and Astros’ success has nevertheless allowed clubs to follow the “tanking” model with greater conviction.

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Last week, we found out that Vladimir Guerrero — among others — will go into the Hall of Fame. The Guerrero news was hardly surprising, given how well he fared his first time on the ballot, but still, the Hall of Fame is considered a black-and-white issue, and for all but the most obvious of cases, there emerge criticisms, cases against. Arguments that a given player might not be good enough. Guerrero’s career generated some of those arguments, as he wound up with a WAR under 60. WAR has never been and will never be the sole defining metric for Cooperstown, but it’s true that Guerrero’s number might be surprisingly low. It’s right there on his player page, one estimated summation of all he achieved.

One consequence of Hall-of-Fame conversations is that great players get nitpicked. Everyone who gets so much as close to induction had a remarkable career spanning more than a decade. Another consequence is that players can get reduced to totals, with little attention given to how they were amassed. In a case like Guerrero’s, this means there’s something left out. And maybe it’s better that way, I don’t know — maybe all that should matter are the final results. The numbers a player has to show for his career. Yet players play in different ways, and there are different paths to accumulate value. You might not need to be told this, but Guerrero was something extraordinary. He wasn’t just a regular great player. He was a great player in a way all his own.

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Monday afternoon, the Royals and A’s exchanged four players, and the most recognizable among them is also the least valuable. It’s one of those multiplayer trades that tends to be easy to ignore, and that’s made all the more true by the fact that the Royals have entered a down period, and the A’s might not yet have emerged from their own. But as I’ve repeated lately, every major-league move is interesting if you look at it long enough. And in this case, there are two notable players in particular. Two players who might be considered analytical standouts. Here’s the breakdown:

A’s get

• Ryan Buchter
• Brandon Moss
• $3.25 million

Royals get

• Jesse Hahn
• Heath Fillmyer

At first, you could interpret this as the A’s reuniting with a beloved slugger. It’s not so. Moss is likely to be dropped or flipped, and he’s only in here for the purposes of the Royals shedding about $5 million. From the A’s perspective, this is about landing Buchter, a much-needed lefty for the bullpen. For the Royals, they get to roll the dice on some pitchers. Fillmyer is the prospect. Hahn is arguably the more intriguing one.

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In the previous installment we learned how Lars ended up with the club-level Henley and Grange Rams, while Ryan Kalish landed with the Canberra Cavalry — the ABL team Anderson had journeyed Down Under to join. In Part 5, Lars makes the jump to Australia’s top league, where multiple teams wanted him but only after they could find room for an import on the roster. Would the former big leaguer wait on the Aces or the Bite, or was wearing his third color of Sox a better option?

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Lars Anderson: “Looking back at my career, I reckoned I had run the gamut of professional baseball experiences and transactions, from the top of Mt. Everest to the bottom of the Mariana Trench. I’ve been drafted, called up, sent down, designated for assignment, claimed off waivers, traded, released, entered free agency, signed free-agent deals. I thought that I had done it all, but while Gary and Ryan were visiting me in Adelaide, I found myself in a unfamiliar world: I was a relatively hot free-agent commodity in the midst of a modest bidding war.

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Back in April, this author argued that the new generation of ballparks is pushing us (well, some of us) away from the game.

The retro-ballpark era has been universally praised for bringing wider concourses, greater amenities, and generally more charm to major-league facilities. However, many of these parks suffer from a significant flaw: by removing obstructed views and adding layers of luxury suites, clubs have pushed fans in the upper decks — that is, the middle class of fan — further away from the sights and sounds of the playing surface.

While the move away from the cookie-cutter, multi-purpose stadiums of the 1960s and 70s is undoubtedly a positive one for the fan experience and while the actual ballparks of the past featured a number of design flaws themselves, not everything is ideal with this new generation of ballparks.

Consider: even as fans in the bleachers and upper deck have been further removed from the action, the installation of lower-deck seats has brought some folks closer. To get a sense of what I mean, consider the evolution of Dodger Stadium through images of the park from 1962, 1969, 2000, and 2014, paying attention in particular to the area along the border of the playing surface.

While the fairness of this trade-off is perhaps questionable, that particular concern is a consideration for another time. What’s relevant about this development in terms of the present post is the effect of that new seating on the game.

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You might’ve noticed that, even after adding Christian Yelich and Lorenzo Cain, the Brewers don’t project very well. That would seem to provide a pretty convincing argument against adding Christian Yelich and Lorenzo Cain. The Brewers, obviously, think they’re better than Steamer does. Steamer just doesn’t like them, just as it didn’t a year ago. And, to be fair, ZiPS is higher on the Brewers, and that’ll be reflected when we get everything uploaded into our system. Between today and opening day, the Brewers’ team projection will improve, unless something catastrophic takes place.

But let’s spend a minute talking about the state of the team. To narrow down, let’s talk about the state of the pitching staff. Why is it that the Brewers believe they’re competitive, even while the projections are, shall we say, less convinced? The Brewers are signing free-agent reliever Matt Albers for two years and $5 million. He doesn’t explain anything, since that news just emerged Monday, but Albers is representative of something else. The Brewers believe in the breakouts.

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A lot of people are disappointed that Edgar Martinez hasn’t been elected to the Hall of Fame yet — and, by extension, that he wasn’t elected during this most recent round of voting. But there’s good news on this front: Martinez’s chances of making the Hall of Fame have never been better.

Martinez debuted on the ballot eight years ago, garnering 36.2% of the vote. Five years after first becoming eligible for the ballot, though, his case had gained little headway. In fact, by 2014 and -15, he’d actually backslid a little, appearing on just 25.2% and 27.0% of ballots, respectively, in those two seasons. At that point, it appeared as though he had little chance of making the Hall of Fame.

In 2016, Martinez benefit from a healthy bump (to 43%) and then another big bump (to 59%) the next year. And while that improved his overall chances of earning admission, the probability that it would occur this year remained low. Consider: over the last 50 elections, only Ralph Kiner has been elected in one year after receiving less than below 60% of the vote the year before. Martinez will almost surely make it next season after a strong 70% showing this year.

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Back in December, Eno polled a number of front-office executives with questions regarding the changing nature of the game.

It was the perfect time for such a survey, as the game is evolving rapidly in many areas: in swing plane, bullpen usage, and even (maybe) the composition of the ball itself. The depth and volume of data have changed. The game has always undergone transformation, but rarely at this pace — and, really, it’s a universal phenomenon across many industries in this age of rapidly advancing information and technology.

But it was one comment Eno extracted — one unrelated to swings or home runs or fastball velocity or breaking-ball usage — that stuck with me:

One source felt that this mode of analysis was so pervasive that it ended up changing the way we digest baseball, even more than just changing the game itself.

“I do think there’s been a fairly extreme shift in the makeup of front offices and even media coverage,” said the higher-up. “The general framework of a lot of conversations about the game has really changed. Roster-building is a year-round sport, and it does tend to feel at times like we’re all a part of some meta theater that’s somewhat loosely attached to dudes playing on a field. The focus of what it means to be a fan or follow a team has shifted at least somewhat from simply knowing the players and what happened in games toward some bigger picture perspective that accounts for assets in the farm system, where you are on the win curve, and how efficiently resources are being utilized.”

That one reads FanGraphs.

The way we consume the sport has changed. This very website is evidence of that. We typically allocate fewer words to the daily box scores here at FanGraphs than we do, say, a large transaction.

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Nick Gordon is one of the top prospects in the Twins system. Drafted fifth-overall by Minnesota in 2014, the lefty-swinging shortstop is coming off an age-21 season where he slashed .270/.341/.408 for Double-A Chattanooga. He’s also coming off the release of his first album, “I Do It All,” which dropped earlier this month.

“G-Cinco” started rapping when he was in middle school, but it was only recently that he began sharing his hip-hop stylings beyond his inner circle. Prompted by the urging of a close friend, the son of former all-star closer Tom “Flash” Gordon, and brother of 2015 NL batting champion Dee Gordon, decided the time had come to “let people hear this side of me.”

The multi-talented youngster is well aware that mixing music and sports can make for a tricky balance, particularly in terms of image. But he doesn’t anticipate any issues. Not only does Gordon consider himself “a baseball player first,” he’s “never been one to lead a lifestyle that isn’t appropriate,” nor does he feel a need to “go out there and rap about things I don’t do.”

What he does do — along with rapping base hits — is “sit down and listen to beats, and write.” As for which he considers more important when crafting a song, the beat or the lyrics, that’s largely a matter of inspiration within the creative process. Read the rest of this entry »

In the previous installment, we learned that Ryan Kalish — Anderson’s friend and former teammate in the Red Sox and Cubs organizations — would be coming to Australia to play in the ABL. In Part 4, we’re regaled with stories about what happened upon his arrival, including how Anderson’s benevolence impacted where each of them would be playing “The baseball.”

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Lars Anderson: “While I still was on a beach in Cambodia, the Canberra Calvary contacted me with an offer for both myself and Ryan Kalish to play for them for the upcoming ABL season. Ryan had initially planned on playing in the Puerto Rican winter league, but Hurricane Maria put an end to that — the Caribbean league was forced to cancel the first two months of their season, leaving Ryan jobless. Having been sidelined for the past 20 months recovering from a major knee surgery, he was itching to play and realistically needed a job to prove to major-league teams that he is, in fact, healthy.

“We were both stoked. The thought of sharing the field again was something I’d previously thought was as likely as sharing a coffee with a Mormon, and the prospect of it all was quite frankly awesome. But, once again, the ABL’s import rules thwarted my plans. Canberra’s coach informed me via email that there was only one spot left, so Ryan and I would not be sharing the field, at least not on the same team.

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