Archive for Featured

After having typically appeared in the very famous pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past few years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Los Angeles Dodgers. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cleveland / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Toronto / Washington.

Batters
Dodgers shortstop Corey Seager (675 PA, 5.4 zWAR) won the National League’s Rookie of the Year Award with ease in 2016. Were a similar award to exist for second-year players, Seager would be the favorite to win that, as well. ZiPS calls for Seager to record less gaudy BABIP and fielding numbers in 2017, but that’s to be expected. At the most basic level, a projection system is a regression machine. BABIP and fielding runs require large samples before they begin to represent true talent. As a second-year player, Seager lacks that kind of sample by definition.

Here’s some other news, though: ZiPS also projects a nearly three-point improvement in Seager’s strikeout rate, from 19.4% this past season to 16.7% in 2017. This does not appear to be a product of regression to the mean. It can’t really: the lowest strikeout rate National League batters have produced over the last three seasons is 19.9%. Szymborski’s computer, in other words, appears to be calling for actual improvement. Or perhaps a different sort of regression — regression to Seager’s 2015 numbers, when he made more contact in the minors and (for a brief stretch) majors. In any case, two propositions are true: both (a) Corey Seager is very good and (b) this section, which is intended to provide a brief overview of all the club’s starting field players, has failed to do that.

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Below is an analysis of the prospects in the Pittsburh Pirates farm system. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from my own observations. The KATOH statistical projections, probable-outcome graphs, and (further down) Mahalanobis comps have been provided by Chris Mitchell. For more information on thes 20-80 scouting scale by which all of my prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this. -Eric Longenhagen

The KATOH projection system uses minor-league data and Baseball America prospect rankings to forecast future performance in the major leagues. For each player, KATOH produces a WAR forecast for his first six years in the major leagues. There are drawbacks to scouting the stat line, so take these projections with a grain of salt. Due to their purely objective nature, the projections here can be useful in identifying prospects who might be overlooked or overrated. Due to sample-size concerns, only players with at least 200 minor-league plate appearances or batters faced last season have received projections. -Chris Mitchell

Other Lists
NL West (ARI, COL, LAD, SD, SF)
AL Central (CHW, CLE, DET, KC, MIN)
NL Central (CHC, CIN, PIT, MIL, StL)
NL East (ATL, MIA, NYM, PHI, WAS)
AL East (BAL, BOS, NYY, TB, TOR)

65 FV Prospects

Relevant/Interesting Metrics
Slashed .266/.333/.536 between Double- and Triple-A as a 21-year-old.

Scouting Report
Meadows dominated Double-A for 45 games before receiving a promotion to Triple-A Indianapolis in mid-June. Soon after that, he spent a month on the DL with a hamstring injury, the third one with which Meadows has dealt in as many years (he had reoccurring hammy issues in 2014) and never got things going after he returned, slashing .214/.297/.460. Even so, that’s not alarming in any way for a 21-year-old, especially in a small sample.

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Carlos Gonzalez is good theatre.

He hit baseball’s most impressive home run last season, according to Jeff Sullivan. The shot left Gonzalez’s bat with a 117-mph exit velocity and 14.2-degree launch angle. That’s baseball equivalent of a 1-iron from an in-his-prime Tiger Woods.

That’s not a snapshot of a player you’d worry about losing it the near term.

He also hit baseball’s fifth-longest home run last season, according to HitTracker. The 475-foot, third-deck shot at Coors Field featured his signature, and aesthetically pleasing, follow-through and bat drop.

For me, Ken Griffey Jr. had the best swing and home-run pose of the modern era, but Gonzalez’s swing is right there among today’s best left-handed batters. It’s the kind of cut to which you could get emotionally attached. The swing has allowed Gonzalez to distinguish himself as one of the sport’s most productive hitters since 2009.

But time catches up to all of us, and looks – and swings – can be deceiving. Gonzalez was once a tools-laden player who could impact the game a number of ways; now he’s more of a bat-only threat with mixed assessments of his defense. He’s entering the final year of a seven-year deal and is owed $20 million by the Rockies. As pretty as that left-handed swing is, 2018 will represent his age-32 season, and he’ll be arriving at a place on the aging curve where mild declines can accelerate in the wrong direction.

He’s become the type of player for whom the market has over-corrected, according to FanGraphs’ Dave Cameron.

So it’s interesting to see the Rockies remain interested in keeping Gonzalez around beyond his current contract. There’s been buzz about an extension dating back to December, and Rockies general manager Jeff Bridich confirmed to MLB.com’s Thomas Harding on Tuesday that the Rockies are open to a contract extension.

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Because we’ve been here for every moment of his career, we may have somehow lost track of just how good Mike Trout is. Obviously we know he’s the best player in the show right now, but it’s a not as easy to wrap your head around his historic greatness. Trout’s excellence isn’t the kind that lends itself to flashy highlight-reel plays, except for his trademark leaping home-run robberies. He isn’t a high-intensity player. His home runs aren’t moonshots, and he’s not a disciple of the Bryce Harper–Jose Bautista school of flare. He plays for a bad team, so we don’t often get to watch him on national television. Looking at WAR leaderboards and seeing his name at the top of the chart has become a mundane fact of baseball since 2012.

Let’s look at it another way, though. Consider Moises Alou. Had a pretty good career, no? He played his first big-league game in 1990 and his final in 2008. During that time he appeared in 1942 games and accumulated 47.7 WAR. He made the All-Star team six times. A fine career.

Mike Trout has played in 811 games. During that time he has also been worth 47.7 WAR, or roughly the value of Alou’s entire career. Take that with a grain of salt, of course, as the defensive metrics for Alou only go back so far, but yeah. We can somewhat confidently say that Trout has provided a similar amount of value in the span of 811 games that Alou, a pretty darn good player in his own right, provided in nearly 2000.

Trout is the sort of player who generates fun facts like this. You could easily do a recurring series of Mike Trout Fun Facts and not run out of material for a good while. Generational talent leads to statistical madness, and Trout is nothing if not a generational talent, perhaps a once-in-a-lifetime talent. He’s 25, and has already put together almost 50 wins. Only two players in history have compiled greater WAR totals through age 25, and they’re both inner-circle Hall of Famers. One of them is Mickey Mantle, to whom Trout is so often compared. The other is Ty Cobb.

Trout has yet to play his age-25 season.

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When the Rays acquired Nate Karns from the Nationals back in 2014, the story was that he had fastball velocity and a power curve, and we’ll see about the changeup. We saw the changeup, and it was good enough, and the curve was as advertised. Unfortunately, something happened to the fastball along the way.

The Rays sent Jose Lobaton and Felipe Rivero to the Nationals for that curveball and hoped on the change. The change looked good in 147 innings for the Rays in 2015, so the Mariners took a leap that offseason, sending Brad Miller, Logan Morrison and Danny Farquhar to the Rays for Karns, right-hander C.J. Riefenhauser, and center fielder Boog Powell. Now, after a poor year, Karns has been traded again — to the Royals, this time — for outfielder Jarrod Dyson.

What happened last year, when Karns had an ERA over five? The curve and the change were fine in Seattle! But in the meantime, something may have happened to Karns’ fastball. And it could have to do with useful spin. Kansas City has to hope that what broke is fixable.

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I was in the visiting clubhouse at PNC Park last May as the Chicago Cubs began to arrive for their game later that evening. Before games, at least for the period when media is present, major-league clubhouses are typically serene spaces. Players are often seated before their lockers, scrolling through their smart phones or listening to music on the device. There’s conversation, of course, there are players and coaches quietly examining video in the center visiting clubhouses, but there is typically not a frat-house atmosphere.

Then Anthony Rizzo walked in.

Rizzo appeared at the threshold of the locker room itself and boomed “What’s up [expletive]s!” beaming with a smile as he strutted to his corner locker.

The coaches and teammates present smiled and laughed. When I later departed, I walked past the visiting manager’s office, where Joe Maddon sat alone, rock music blaring.

It was not my first encounter with the Cubs’ clubhouse culture. I had briefly inhabited the old, cramped home clubhouse in Wrigley Field at the end of the 2015 season after the Cubs clinched a Wild Card berth. The narrow clubhouse was about the size of a batting cage. There I saw David Ross hand Maddon a bottle of spirits as a gift, and then embrace him. I asked then-rookie Addison Russell about his first conversation with Maddon. He said it was not baseball-related. They discussed some Stephen King novels, as Maddon had learned Russell was a fan of the genre. When Kris Bryant arrived to much fanfare early that season, Maddon didn’t talk to him about handling pressure and expectations, rather Maddon shared his favorite restaurants and places to bicycle in Chicago.

In my limited experience around the Cubs, I thought, This is a different kind of atmosphere: fun, loose, stress-free. This is a team that doesn’t feel overwhelmed by expectations. Sure, it helped that I was witnessing a club when in the midst of a historically good start. And sure, I was making an assumption off a small sample of behavior. But Malcolm Gladwell argued in Blink that human beings are adept at making accurate assessments very quickly.

So these anecdotes bring us to that time Maddon met Clemson football coach Dabo Swinney.

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There’s power in a great sales pitch.

The Ginsu knife ads included a blade slicing through a rubber hose and an aluminum can before carving a strip steak. Joy Mangano sold so well on QVC that Jennifer Lawrence played her in a film last year. At the TED Global 2009 conference, Michael Pritchard’s pitch for the Lifesaver water bottle, which uses nano-filtration technology to purify water, was named as one of the 15 best start-up pitches ever seen by the editors of Business Insider. Lifesaver was purchased by Icon Technology last year.

Sales pitches can be important in crowded, competitive industries, and perhaps the art of the sales pitch has never been more important for agents representing major-league players.

While various forms of Wins Above Replacement are imperfect and while it might be impossible to boil an athlete’s value down to one perfect number, such metrics are now widely accepted as useful tools to evaluate overall performance. Teams are generally operating with similar models and processes in regard to player valuation and projection. I suspect there are not many dramatic differences between club’s internal evaluations compared to public ones like fWAR or BWARP.

So if valuations are more accurate, and everyone has the same – or at least similar – data, then how does an agent beat the suggested values? How does an agent compel a club to pay for an age-33 season and older in an era when youth is king? How does an agent avoid this future: here is your client’s WAR/$ per year value, please sign on the dotted line.

Creating a market, an old-fashioned bidding war, is the preferable method. But while emotion will never be eliminated from the negotiation process so long as humans are involved, teams generally endeavor to act with more reason and less emotion.

I thought about the importance of the sales pitch after reading James Wagner’s fascinating article in The New York Times on Yoenis Cespedes and his contract negotiations.

Writes Wagner:

“With the help of an analytics firm in Chicago, (Cespedes’ agents) came up with a dollar figure for the impact Cespedes had on the field, social media, team television revenues, and ticket and merchandise sale. … They even put a figure, $3.2 million, on the value of the approximately 50 tabloid back pages that had featured Cespedes over the course of 2016. Cespedes playing with flair, Cespedes hitting game-changing home runs, Cespedes driving exotic cars in spring training, Cespedes arriving for a workout on horseback.”

Cespedes barbecuing?

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Home-field advantage isn’t always considered a matter of great importance in baseball. Crowds aren’t as close to the action as they are in basketball. There’s nothing comparable in the sport to something like raucous Cameron Indoor Stadium. There are no 100,000-seat, canyon-like stadiums cascading noise to the playing surface like in college football.

But home-field advantage is a real thing in baseball, and significant, and has remained constant for better than a century.

The road winning percentage of visiting teams was .461 in the 1910s. Road winning percentage stands at .464 to date in the 2010s. Road winning percentage has remained consistent over the decades.

Since the 1970s…

Conventional wisdom has it that home-field advantage is derived from some combination of hostile crowds, fatigue from travel, and the familiarity of the playing surface. And, in a way that’s unique to baseball, teams can tailor their roster to their home park’s dimensions. Having carried on that way for better than a century, the home-field edge seems to be something of a scientific law.

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Per Ryan Thibodaux’s Hall of Fame Tracker, Edgar Martinez has received 69% of support from voters who have made their ballots public. This puts him well ahead of last year’s pace, although it’s likely that he’ll fall short of the 75% needed to put him over the top. This is the Seattle legend’s eighth year of eligibility.

While Martinez belongs in Cooperstown, it is understandable that some voters haven’t checked off his name. The 10-man limit is a primary culprit, as the ballot is once again stacked with strong candidates. Also working against him is his time as a designated hitter. Fairly or not, a not-insignificant number of ballot-casters hold that against him with a cudgel.

At least one voter feels Martinez simply wasn’t good enough. With ample room on his ballot, and a claim that DH had nothing to do with it, the scribe opined that he “never thought of him as a dominant, feared hitter in his era.” Read the rest of this entry »

*Unless current standards are changed.

Making the Hall of Fame as a starting pitcher has never been harder than it is right now. Consider that in the last 25 years, only 11 starting pitchers have been elected to the Hall of Fame by the writers. During that same time period, four relievers have been elected, not including John Smoltz, and the pitcher closest to gaining election at the moment is Trevor Hoffman, also a reliever. We will get into active pitchers who have a shot at the Hall of Fame below, just like we looked at position players, but first let’s look at the nearly impossible standard Hall of Fame voters have created.

Over the last 25 years, back to 1992, here are the 11 starting pitchers who have been enshrined along with their WAR, Hall of Fame Rating, and their ranking among pitchers for said rating. You can read more about HOF Rating here. In essence, however, it represents an attempt to summarize a player’s Hall of Fame credentials by accounting both for peak and career.

Tom Glavine is the “worst” pitcher included here — if that’s an appropriate term to use — and he compiled more than 300 wins. His ERA was a bit lower than his FIP so by Jay Jaffe’s JAWS, which uses bWAR, Glavine ranks 30th among starters. There’s a pretty good argument that, over the last 25 years, a pitcher would have had to produce one of the 30 best careers ever in order to gain induction to the Hall. There are 67 starting pitchers currently in the Hall of Fame. The writers have long had tougher standards, but the next list shows the pitchers who were elected in the 25 years before 1992.

We have some truly great pitchers on this list. Koufax ranks a little lower here than one might place him if composing a more subjective list of greatest pitchers of all time — probably due to the way his career ended. Jim Palmer did sport a lower ERA than FIP, though how much Brooks Robinson had to do with that might be up for debate. Gaylord Perry pitched forever using (ahem) unique methods to keep pitching at a high level.

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