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With Austin Jackson reaching a two-year deal on Monday to play center field for the Giants, another potential landing spot for Lorenzo Cain has evaporated.

Typically, in the free-agency era, impact up-the-middle talents like Cain are not available on January 23rd. A year ago to the day, all of Dave Cameron’s top-19 free agents had signed. As of this January 23rd, just eight of his top 20 have found a home.

Cain is coming off a four-win season. Even with his injury issues, he ranks 21st in position-player WAR since 2015 (13.1). J.D. Martinez, by comparison, ranks 42nd in WAR during that same period. Martinez reportedly has a five-year offer on the table, though. We’re unaware of such interest in Cain. There is a case to be made that Cain is the best remaining positional free agent available and that he’s quickly becoming the best bargain.

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Last week, I took a look at the unenviable position in which the Major League Baseball Players Association currently finds itself — and, in particular, the relative lack of leverage it is likely to have over ownership during the next round of collective bargaining in 2021.

In addition to noting that there are few substantive concessions the union could offer ownership, my post last week also briefly discounted the extent to which the threat of a work stoppage would benefit the players. The point probably merited further discussion, however, so this post is intended to more comprehensively explain my thinking in that regard.

How a Work Stoppage Would Most Likely Arise

To begin, it’s important to understand how a work stoppage would likely unfold during the next round of collective bargaining. As I previously explained back in 2016, any labor stoppage in Major League Baseball would — at least for the foreseeable future — most likely come in the form of a lockout by ownership rather than a strike by the players.

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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.

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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 »

Each week, we publish in the neighborhood of 75 articles across our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.

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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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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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Major League Baseball’s salary-arbitration process is a pretty ridiculous exercise. A player and team each submit a figure for how much that player should be paid the following season. At some point not long after that, each party argues in defense of their figure, employing an array of statistics that front offices don’t even use for the purposes of evaluation.

If a team’s representatives successfully make their case, then a panel of arbitrators chooses the number they’ve submitted. If the team fails to sufficiently badmouth their own player, then the panel of arbitrators chooses the player’s chosen figure. Even in the best-case scenario — i.e. when the player and team agree to terms before arbitration — they still arrive at that agreement based upon what would would transpire at a hypothetical arbitration hearing. There has to be a better way.

Travis Sawchik recently proposed the introduction of restricted free agency to baseball, an approach that would likely eliminate arbitration, allowing teams to match offers made by other franchises. Like Travis, I would like to see arbitration abolished. Also like Travis, I am concerned about the middle class of players who seem to be shorted in the current system.

I agree that something needs to be done and that restricted free agency represents a better approach than the one currently in place. That said, I do think there might be a better solution, one that doesn’t entirely dismantle the framework of the present system and yet allows players to receive compensation proportional to their talents.

I think the adoption of a new arbitration-type system might benefit from greater use of a mechanism that was first introduced during the 2012-13 offseason — namely, the qualifying offer.

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If you’ve read any of the dozens of articles over the years trying to create a framework for player asset values (putting a dollar amount on a player’s value), you’re aware of the biggest weakness of this genre of article. Take a star player, run him through a marginal-value analysis, and you’ll be disappointed in what it says about his trade value. Before we jump into the Gerrit Cole and Andrew McCutchen trades, follow me down a thought-experiment rabbit hole.

Clayton Kershaw is the best pitcher in baseball and Steamer projects him as a six-win player next year. Using the roughly $9-10 million at which a win is currently valued on the open market, Kershaw is likely to produce something between $50 and $60 million of value next year; let’s call it $55 million. Would multiple teams bid that amount for his services on a one year deal? Probably yes, because there’s some surplus value at that salary for which the formula fails to account. It doesn’t consider, for example, either extreme payrolls (i.e. the Dodgers’ on one hand, the A’s on the other) or more critical spots on the win curve (moving an 87-win team to a 93-win team is worth far more revenue-wise than 65 to 71).

So what would the A’s bid? They had an $86 million payroll last year, and they obviously wouldn’t give nearly two-thirds of it to one player. Oakland’s value for Kershaw would likely be whatever the maximum is that they would pay for any player, but that number is much lower than what the Dodgers would spend, maybe $20 million. Granted, these are extreme cases, but it illustrates the limitations of using a one-size-fits-all dollar-per-win calculator in specific instances, even if it works fine in aggregate.

More Granular Valuation

I point all that out to illustrate the fact that players aren’t worth the same to every team. Kershaw’s value, on which we all basically agree, varies by $30-40 million from the A’s to the Dodgers on just a one-year deal. So wouldn’t it follow that the A’s and Dodgers would value other players differently, too?

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