On Friday, the Marlins announced that Kim Ng would be assuming the role of general manager. It was a historic move for a number of reasons: She’s the first woman and first Asian-American to be hired as a GM in the major leagues, and is indeed the first woman in any major American men’s pro sport to hold that role. It was also a move that was long foretold, as many pointed out, linking to various blog posts and lists of years and decades past that included Ng’s name as one to watch in the world of high-ranking baseball executives. She’s been at least an assistant GM for as long as I’ve been alive. “When I got into this business,” her statement posted to the Marlins’ social media read, “it seemed unlikely that a woman would lead a major-league team, but I am dogged in the pursuit of my goals.”

It was a celebratory day for many women in baseball, a sign of how far they have come and how far they could still go, and a testament to Ng’s individual drive and ability, which, given her history, is undeniable. It was also a celebratory day for Asian-Americans in baseball. What once seemed unlikely, and before that unimaginable, is now real, tangible, and true — not only for Ng individually, not only for the other people who have blazed trails in this industry, and not only for all the historically underrepresented people she might inspire to pursue careers in the game, but also for literally everyone, apparently, in the entire sport. All those heavy-hitters and decision-makers who for the decades upon decades prior to this day were fine with maintaining the status quo — this moment was, somehow, their achievement to celebrate as well.

When you’re a kid, you can dream of being all kinds of ridiculous, incredible things. The first person to create a cat-to-human translation system. The first person to walk on Mars. A kajillionaire, a world-peace creator, an undersea explorer — all at the same time, all existing within the same realm of possibility. You get older, of course, and with your increasing ability to understand the world around you, to grasp what is expected of someone like you, the dreams get scaled and hedged accordingly. You absorb information and adjust your ideas of what is possible. Kajillionaire becomes maybe a full-time job and your debt paid off by the time you’re 50. World-peace creator becomes maybe you survive another year of being exploited by your racist boss. The moon becomes a tiny room in a shared house for $900 a month. It’s good, after all, to have goals that are actually possible to reach. That’s what you’re taught in career planning classes and therapy sessions: achievable, real, tangible. The bounds of the imagination shrink. Read the rest of this entry »

As many readers have likely deduced from some of the early offseason transactions and the flurry of cuts made to scouting, player development, and other parts of baseball ops, owners are tightening their belts after a gate-less season and the repercussions are diffusing across the industry. If these early moves — like Brad Hand’s $10 million option being declined, and no team picking him up on waivers — are indications of how teams are going to behave this offseason, then this will, among other things, modulate some of the already-changing, pre-COVID shifts in the thinking surrounding payroll allocation and roster construction, which was already cutting deeper into the bottom of rosters.

I’d like to specifically talk about how I think the COVID-19 financial ripples will impact the way teams approach non-tendering players this offseason. It’s logical to assume that teams will be apt to non-tender players more often this year than ever before because of financial fallout from the pandemic, but based on recent trends, the game was perhaps likely to see a record number of non-tenders anyway. Here are the past 12 years of league-wide non-tender totals:

Read the rest of this entry »

Torey Lovullo didn’t have a lot of game-changing hits over the course of his career. The Arizona Diamondbacks manager finished his playing days with just 60 RBIs in parts of eight big-league seasons as a utility infielder. But he did have a handful of memorable knocks, three of which he recounted in a conversation earlier this week.

The first of Lovullo’s standout moments came in his second-ever game. Called up by the Detroit Tigers in September 1988, he plated a run with an 18th-inning single against the New York Yankees. Adding to the thrill was the fact that the Tigers were in a three-team pennant race with the Bombers and the Boston Red Sox. The balloon burst in short order. Claudell Washington walked off Detroit southpaw Willie Hernandez with a two-run shot in the bottom half, negating Lovullo’s heroics in blunt fashion.

Five years later, the Santa Monica native turned the tables with an extra-inning walk-off of his own. Lovullo had signed with the California Angels — a team he’d grown up cheering for — prior to the 2013 season. On a July afternoon, he made the most of a second chance.

“In the bottom of the 11th inning, [Yankees manager] Buck Showalter walked the bases loaded in front of me and I popped up with one out,” recalled Lovullo. “We ended up going deeper into the game, and in the 14th inning he did the exact same thing [issued two intentional walks to load the bases]. This time I got a base hit. That was a proud moment for me, because I didn’t want it to happen again. A manager targeted me, and I came through.” Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for nine years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the New York Yankees.

Batters

The possible loss of DJ LeMahieu is a real hit to the Yankees, but even if they don’t come to an agreement with him, I don’t expect the club to actually be cruising with Tyler Wade and Thairo Estrada come April. But even if they did, as long as the team remains healthy — a big condition given their recent experiences — it’s still an extremely potent lineup even if they tank a position or two. Brett Gardner is a free agent as well after the team declined his option, but I expect him to return anyway. After all, Gardner didn’t attract a ton of interest in last year’s free agent market, and with him being a year older and coming off a worse season, and with baseball’s economics, I doubt he gets more phone calls this time around. Like Mitch Moreland in Boston, Gardner appears to have a de facto arrangement where he can just show up at some point and the team will give him a one-year contract for $X million.

Did you really think that ZiPS would fall out of love with Gleyber Torres after his power went missing for six weeks? I do think he’s at the point at which I’d try to get him moved to third base. If the Yankees don’t re-sign LeMahieu and instead go after one of the players in the surprisingly deep shortstop pool, could Gio Urshela theoretically play second base? He’s likely a better third baseman than Torres, who hasn’t been great at second, and the team did work him out some at the position in summer training. How the infield gets shuffled will be one of the more interesting questions for them this offseason. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last three seasons, DJ LeMahieu’s 9.9 WAR ranks fifth among all free agents. Just ahead of him is George Springer (11.3), Trevor Bauer (11.6), and J.T. Realmuto (12.3), who comes in second place. But topping all current free agents over the past three seasons is Marcus Semien, with 12.6 WAR. Semien isn’t some older free agent, either; at 30, he’s younger than Springer and LeMahieu and within a handful of months of Bauer and Realmuto. If we looked at just the past two seasons, the production gap between Semien and his peers is even greater. But for a whole host of reasons, Semien doesn’t look like he’ll come close to earning as much as those peers in free agency, and that could make him the biggest bargain.

When examining the various free agent lists, it becomes clear that my fourth-place rank when it comes to Semien is the high-water mark. Keith Law and Kiley McDaniel both have him sixth. MLB.com’s Anthony Castrovince placed him seventh, CBS Sports’ R.J. Anderson put him 11th, and MLB Trade Rumors slotted him all the way down at 15th. I either need to justify my ranking with a little more explanation or admit that I might have had Semien too high. This article will probably be one of those things.

Let’s start with the negatives. Semien wasn’t a particularly good player until 2018 and has had exactly one above-average hitting season in his career (’19), and his production in ’20 wasn’t very good. Add in questions about his defense at shortstop and a very crowded market at the position over the next few seasons, and we have a recipe for someone whose value certainly seems down. Semien’s market was helped slightly by the lack of a qualifying offer from Oakland, but compared to the other factors working against him, it’s a small gain. It isn’t really production or age that is keeping Semien from landing a big contract, though; it’s uncertainty. The error bars surrounding his performance would seem to be significantly higher than many other players due to defensive questions and the truncated 2020 campaign. Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday, I wrote about the National League’s current state of limbo regarding the continued use of the designated hitter. The Senior Circuit’s adoption of the DH was one of several rules changes included as part of MLB’s 2020-specific health and safety protocols, though both the league’s operations manual and commissioner Rob Manfred made clear that all of those changes would be undone once the season ended unless the players’ union agreed otherwise. While rules-related proposals are usually in place in time to be voted upon at the annual November owners meetings, this year’s assembly was canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic, and with MLB hoping the players will agree to some kind of expanded playoff format in exchange, it could be awhile before we get a resolution.

In writing Tuesday’s piece, I thought it would be interesting to take a page from the Jeff Sullivan playbook and invite FanGraphs’ readership to weigh in regarding not only the universal DH, but also the other rules that were adopted for 2020 but could revert back to their previous state. Several of these rules, or variations of them, had been kicked around in proposals for years, but few of us dreamed they would be put into action given their relatively radical nature. The shortened season created conditions that allowed some of them to audition on the big stage, and while many purists were mortified, a significant share of players, fans, and media found that even some of the more radical ones weren’t so bad after all. Read the rest of this entry »

Here’s the honest truth about baseball analysis: Most of the ideas I look into don’t work. That’s mostly hidden under the surface, because it’s not very interesting to read an article about absence of evidence. Hey, did you know that batters who hit very long home runs see no meaningful effect on the rest of their performance that day? I did, because I looked into that at one point, but imagine an article about that and you can kind of see the problem. Read a whole thing looking for a conclusion and find none, and you might be more than a little irritated.

Now that I’ve told you how bad of an idea it is to write about failed ideas, I’d like to introduce you to an article series about ideas that didn’t pan out. I know, I know: I was bemoaning the difficulty of writing such an article just sentences ago. Some failures, however, are more interesting than others, and I’d like to think that I know how to tell the difference. In this intermittent and haphazardly scheduled series, I’ll write about busted ideas that taught me something interesting in their failure, or that simply examine parts of the game that might otherwise escape notice.

In September of this year, I came up with an idea that spent the next month worming its way into my brain. We think of pitch movement as relative to zero, but that’s obviously not true. Sinkers rise more than a spin-less pitch thrown on the same trajectory would; they’re “risers”, in fact. Don’t tell a player that, though, because they’re not comparing these pitches to some meaningless theoretical pitch that no one throws. They’re comparing them to other fastballs, four-seamers to be specific, and if your brain is used to seeing four-seamers, sinkers do indeed sink. Read the rest of this entry »

The first ZiPS team projection for 2021 goes live on Wednesday, and as usual, this is a good place to give reminders about what ZiPS is, what ZiPS is trying to do, and — perhaps most importantly — what ZiPS is not.

ZiPS is a computer projection system, developed by me in 2002–04 and which officially went live for the ’04 season. The origin of ZiPS is similar to Tom Tango’s Marcel the Monkey, coming from discussions I had with Chris Dial, one of my best friends and a fellow stat nerd, in the late 1990s (my first interaction with Chris involved me being called an expletive!). ZiPS moved quickly from its original inception as a fairly simple projection system: It now does a lot more and uses a lot more data than I ever envisioned 20 years ago. At its core, however, it’s still doing two basic tasks: estimating what the baseline expectation for a player is at the moment I hit the button; and then estimating where that player may be going using large cohorts of relatively similar players.

ZiPS uses multi-year statistics, with more recent seasons weighted more heavily; in the beginning, all the statistics received the same yearly weighting, but eventually, this became more varied based on additional research. Research is a big part of ZiPS, and every year, I run literally hundreds of studies on various aspects of the system to determine their predictive value and better calibrate the player baselines. What started with the data available in 2002 has expanded considerably: Basic hit, velocity, and pitch data began playing a larger role starting in ’13; and data derived from StatCast has been included in recent years as I got a handle on the predictive value and impact of those numbers on existing models. I believe in cautious, conservative design, so data is only included once I have confidence in improved accuracy; there are always builds of ZiPS that are still a couple of years away. Additional internal ZiPS tools like zBABIP, zHR, zBB, and zSO are used to better establish baseline expectations for players. These stats work similarly to the various flavors of “x” stats, with the z standing for something I’d wager you’ve already figured out! Read the rest of this entry »

As the offseason moves forward, we hear mostly about teams reining in spending. Searching out aggressive teams is a bit more difficult, particularly when there’s little benefit in broadcasting those intentions. But one team expected to be aggressive is San Francisco, with Farhan Zaidi entering his third winter as president and the club trying to end a streak of four straight losing campaigns. The Giants are lacking a bit in talent on paper, but some recent fliers have worked out, top prospect Joey Bart received some MLB experience, and a few of the holdovers from the more competitive squads of years previous showed they still have something left. Whether it’s possible to make a big leap forward in one offseason is the big question.

San Francisco acquitted itself fairly well in 2020, missing out on the expanded playoffs due to a lost tiebreaker. The Giants scored more runs than they allowed, and by BaseRuns (stripping out sequencing in results), they were the fourth-best team in the National League. They excelled on the position-player side, where their 9.8 WAR ranked sixth in baseball. But what they did in a 60-game sample in 2020 isn’t likely to carry over into next season. Here are the offensive numbers for Giants with at least 100 plate appearances this past season: Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I noted that Marcus Semien was the highest-ranked player from our Top 50 Free Agents list who did not receive a qualifying offer. He heads what projects to be the strongest free-agent class at any position this year, but for teams willing to shop for a shortstop via trade, Francisco Lindor presents a tantalizing alternative. The Indians have reportedly informed teams of their intent to trade the four-time All-Star, who would be at the top of an even stronger crop of free-agent shortstops next year and who almost certainly isn’t going to receive a competitive offer to stay in Cleveland.

Lindor, who turns 27 on November 14, had the weakest season of his career on the offensive side in 2020, hitting just .258/.335/.415 with eight homers and six steals; his 100 wRC+ represented a 14-point dip from 2019 and a 19-point drop relative to his previous career rate. He did overcome a slow start to finish strong, batting .212/.264/.353 (60 wRC+) through his first 21 games and then .285/.371/.450 (122 wRC+) over his final 39. That’s a rather arbitrarily chosen point of inflection, but it’s not far removed from acting manager Sandy Alomar Jr.’s suggestion that Lindor was pressing at the plate early in the season. Even while shedding 1.1 mph of average exit velocity, Lindor wound up underperforming his Statcast expected batting average and slugging percentage (.278 and .441, respectively), though that kind of variance is unremarkable.

Beyond the bat, Lindor was a career-worst 2.5 runs below average via his baserunning, his second year in a row in the red. Thanks to his 5.8 UZR, he still finished with 1.7 WAR, ranking eighth among shortstops and prorating to 4.6 WAR over the course of a full season. His two-year total of 6.1 WAR places him fifth at the position (Semien is first at 8.8), and his three-year total of 13.7 WAR is tops. Read the rest of this entry »