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 »

My book Big Data Baseball was published back in 2015. For those unfamiliar with it, it chronicles the Pirates’ 2013 campaign, when the club broke a string of 20 straight losing seasons (a North American pro sports record) and advanced to the NLDS.

There was a misnomer back then that the Pirates were a young team coming of age. They were not. Gerrit Cole was the only prominent prospect who debuted that season, while 90% of the roster was composed of holdovers from 2012. The book documents how the Pirates made a dramatic pivot, in part by residing on what represented the cutting edge of analytical thought at the time.

Pittsburgh’s transformation came in the form of a three-pronged approach, based on framing, shifts, and ground balls. They were the first club to invest significant dollars on the open market in pitch-framing when they signed Russell Martin to a then-club-record, free-agent deal of two years and $17 million. (Yes, that was a record amount.) They increased their defensive-shift usage by 400%. And while they were not the first club to more frequently employ a shift, they were the first — through sequencing, location, and pitch type — to consciously spike their ground-ball rate, to coerce more ground balls into the shifts. The Pirates led baseball in ground-ball rate from 2013 to -15.

The Pirates were also on the cutting edge of communication, the first known club to integrate a quantitative analyst full-time, even on road trips, into their clubhouse. Mike Fitzgerald was there not only to enhance scouting material but to be a conduit in exchanging ideas between the clubhouse and front office. Of course, having peak Andrew McCutchen didn’t hurt either.

When the book appeared on shelves, the Pirates were at their high-water mark, en route to a 98-win season. They were viewed then as a model, sabermetric-leaning organization having engineered a remarkable turnaround. Since 2015, though, both the trajectory of the big-league club and the perception of the organization have turned south.

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The timing of this post isn’t intentional, beyond the fact that I am writing it intentionally. With the market seemingly at a standstill, there’s increasing focus on the conflict between owners and the union, and when those two butt heads, my sense is the owners lose the PR battle. I’m not putting this up because of that. I’m putting this up out of curiosity.

As you might’ve guessed, this is another polling project. A little over a month ago, I asked the FanGraphs community to help me rate all the front offices. In so doing, I asked that you try to exclude the influence of ownership as much as possible. That’s not actually a possible thing to do, not all the time, but I just wanted your best guess. And I wanted to try to separate the two entities so as to allow for this follow-up. I’ve done this before, but it’s been two years. I’d like to see how things have changed, at least as far as opinions go. It’s always fun to get one set of data points, but it’s even more fun when you can look at points moving over time.

Your favorite baseball team has an owner, or it has some owners. Those owners are responsible for bankrolling the whole operation. Of course, it’s the players who are directly responsible for the outcomes on the field. And it’s usually the other front-office people who are directly responsible for those players being around in the first place. Most of the time, owners don’t want to be in the news. But your team has an owner, or owners, and you’ve got opinions. It’s simply part of being a fan.

Below, I’d like you to express those opinions, so I can collect them. Don’t worry about being right or wrong — there is no right or wrong, not as far as we can tell. Just pick the most fitting response, in your estimation, and I’m fully aware the polls are kind of strangely-worded. It should all be pretty simple, and as usual, the results allow for me to see how people feel across the whole baseball landscape. You might have a sense of how people feel about one team. How does that compare to every other team? The FanGraphs community is endlessly useful!

Do you trust the owners to make good decisions? Do you trust the owners to stay out of the way? Do you feel like the owners are sufficiently committed to winning, and winning every year? How much do the owners meddle? To what extent are the owners predictable? Are the owners approachable, or accessible? Have they placed a priority on improving the in-game ballpark experience? There are countless ways for owners to make a difference. You know more about your team’s ownership than I do. So I’m looking for you to share your information, as best as you can. Thank you in advance for your participation, and if everything goes according to plan, we’ll evaluate all the results early next week.

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The Marlins have sold off a bunch of valuable pieces this offseason. You might’ve heard. Giancarlo Stanton? Traded. Marcell Ozuna? Traded. Dee Gordon? Traded. Regardless of whether they were good baseball moves, the immediate consequences are obvious: The Marlins are going to be bad. They hope to eventually become less bad. Now, all along, the Marlins have expressed an interest in building around Christian Yelich, who’s under team control for a while, thanks to his existing long-term extension. We would’ve been able to guess how Yelich has felt about that idea, but now his feelings are just…out there.

Christian Yelich’s relationship with the Miami Marlins is “irretrievably broken,” and it would be in the best interests of both the outfielder and the organization if the Marlins trade him before the start of spring training, his agent told ESPN on Tuesday.

In truth, Yelich has only so much leverage. He has to honor the contract he signed, and it wouldn’t help him to tank his own performance out of spite. If the Marlins kept Yelich, he’d essentially have to just deal with it. But it makes sense to trade Yelich anyway, given what else has gone on. The Marlins have already had a number of conversations about sending Yelich elsewhere, and, long story short, we come to Ronald Acuna.

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We haven’t spent much time talking about the Twins this offseason. The last post dedicated to the team was published Dec. 8, when this author wrote about two savvy little trades the club had made after losing out on the Ohtani sweepstakes.

But in what has been a quiet offseason, the Twins have quietly been one of the most active teams, bolstering their bullpen by signing ageless wonder Fernando Rodney, left-hander Zach Duke, and most recently, Addison Reed.

They’ve also made a move with an eye toward improving their 2019 rotation by signing Michael Pineda. Pineda is expected to miss most, if not all, of this coming season while recovering from Tommy John surgery. Given his bat-missing upside, though, the $10-million commitment seems like a prudent value play.

Overall, only 21 of Dave Cameron’s top-50 free agents have signed so far this winter. The Twins are responsible for two of them, however, in Reed and Pineda.

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Earlier this offseason, the Braves and Dodgers conducted a trade that is likely to have little bearing on the 2018 season in terms of on-field results. Los Angeles sent Charlie Culberson, Adrian Gonzalez, Scott Kazmir, and Brandon McCarthy to Atlanta; Atlanta sent Matt Kemp the other way. There was a little money involved, too.

It wasn’t so much the precise identities of the players that were relevant to the deal, however, but rather the manner in which it allowed the clubs to curate their payrolls over the next couple years. The trade permitted the Braves to concentrate more of the salary in just the 2018 season while allowing the Dodgers to spread the money out over the next two years, thus avoiding the luxury tax. For taking on the brunt of the payments now, the Braves received whatever production McCarthy will provide this season and whatever production Culberson will provide over the next few. More importantly, however, they relieved themselves of a large financial obligation in 2019.

It’s hard not to look at that trade and see that the Braves are positioning themselves for a contending run starting in 2019. Perhaps that’s the case. There’s a pretty good argument, however, that they should consider accelerating their timeline. It’s possible, with the right moves, that Atlanta could assemble a winning team a year earlier than expected.

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I suppose what I should say is that the Gerrit Cole trade has two perception problems. One, it’s clearly just a bad look for Pittsburgh. It’s generally a bad look when a major-league team has to trade away an established major-league talent, and with Cole and then Andrew McCutchen going out the door, it’s a twin reminder of how the Pirates failed to build on a tremendous run of success. I don’t know how much more the Pirates reasonably could’ve done, but there’s forever that lingering question regarding ownership’s commitment to winning. This is nothing new. It’s a reopening of wounds that never healed.

There’s also, though, another aspect. The Pirates have been heavily criticized for the return package they got for Cole from the Astros. I have no interest in trying to figure out whether the Pirates got the best package possible. I don’t know what else was truly on the table. Maybe more would’ve been available in July; maybe Cole’s stock would’ve dropped. All we know is what the Pirates got. My read of the consensus is that the Pirates didn’t get enough. But my read is also that the Astros have a little something to do with that. Specifically because the Astros are unusually good and deep.

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A little over a year ago, Brian Duensing signed a one-year contract with the Cubs worth $2 million. That’s hardly the kind of commitment that would break the Cubs’ bank, but it was still somewhat surprising that Duensing got such a guarantee, given that he was aging, and hadn’t been very good. He had thrown just 13.1 big-league innings in 2016, and that season he injured his elbow while moving a chair. It wouldn’t have been hard to see Duensing end up as a spring-training NRI. The Cubs, though, took a chance.

It worked out! Duensing had a good year. Appeared in 68 games. Did well. And now Duensing has re-signed, for two years and…$7 million. Compared to the previous contract, it’s more than double the commitment, I know, but it’s still modest, given what Duensing just did, and given what other free-agent relievers have signed for. This has been a slow-moving market, and there’s a strengthening conversation about how players aren’t getting their collective due. You might be tempted to point to Duensing’s deal as evidence.

Yet it doesn’t quite work. Duensing’s deal, it turns out, is rather evidence of something else.

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If you don’t follow college football, you may not be familiar with Baker Mayfield. He is the quarterback for the University of Oklahoma, the reigning Heisman Trophy winner, and a player who is expected to be selected in the first round of April’s NFL draft. What is his relevance to the pages of FanGraphs? Well, what is interesting to me about Mayfield is that he might not hire an agent to represent him.

Writes Mike Florio of NBCSports:

The argument against hiring an agent is simple: Thanks to the rookie wage scale, contracts for incoming players basically negotiate themselves. (Also, agent fees are no longer tax-deductible.)

Earlier today, Nathaniel Grow addressed the difficult situation in which the players union has found itself vis-à-vis owners. “The MLBPA Has No Leverage,” is how Grow titled that post. With baseball having introduced limits on amateur spending and having added recommended bonus for draft bonuses, it’s possible that more high-profile baseball prospects will question whether or not an agent is necessary when entering professional baseball. Several recent first-rounders like Hunter Harvey and Kyle Parker opted to negotiate for themselves and to varying degrees of success.

While negotiating pro contracts for amateur baseball prospects is more complicated than in, say, football as teams try to gauge signability and maximize their bonus pools and agents filter information for prospects, etc., what happens when negotiating major-league contracts becomes less and less about art and more and more about science? How will player representatives add value then?

Is it possible, to borrow Grow’s language, that agents have no leverage, either?

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