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Over at ESPN today, they published a feature on Bryce Harper. It’s really good, and you should read the whole thing, but there’s one section that stands out; the part where the story shifts from the view of Harper as a person or a player, and to his view of baseball needs to evolve.

He wants to change the game. He wants to change the perception of baseball players, to become a single-name icon like LeBron and Beckham and Cam. “I don’t know much about Bryce,” says his new manager, Dusty Baker, “but I know he’s one of the hippest kids around.” Harper wants to elevate his sport’s profile through his play, through his fashion, through the charisma of his personality, maybe even through the fascination with the size of the first free agent contract ($400 million? $500 million?) that he’ll sign shortly after his 26th birthday. Is this a prodigy’s natural urge to innovate or a sign of youthful hubris?

“Endorsements, fashion — it’s something baseball doesn’t see,” he says. “In soccer, it’s Beckham or Ronaldo. In basketball, it’s Curry and LeBron. In football, it’s Cam. Football and basketball have such good fashion.”

There are impediments endemic to the sport. Everyone knows about Russell Westbrook’s unique couture because he’s wearing it in an interview room. The baseball player, on the other hand, is interviewed at his locker, often shirtless and sporting a hat head that can ruin even Harper’s unique follicle landscaping. As Nationals first baseman Ryan Zimmerman says, “We’re uniformed personnel.”

And then there’s the larger obstacle: the game’s stern code. Case in point: Papelbon vs. Harper. It started when Orioles third baseman Manny Machado hit a home run against the Nationals last September and reacted with too much excitement, so Jonathan Papelbon drilled him the next time Machado came to bat, which caused Harper to suggest to reporters that baseball’s code is “tired,” which led to Papelbon berating and then choking Harper four days later after the closer found his teammate’s hustle lacking — a Rube Goldberg display of baseball’s grim underside.

Harper has admitted fault in going to reporters instead of speaking to Papelbon directly (“If I had a problem with Pap, I should have gone up to Pap,” he says), and both men say it didn’t last beyond that day. But that’s not what Harper wants to talk about now.

“Baseball’s tired,” he says. “It’s a tired sport, because you can’t express yourself. You can’t do what people in other sports do. I’m not saying baseball is, you know, boring or anything like that, but it’s the excitement of the young guys who are coming into the game now who have flair. If that’s Matt Harvey or Jacob deGrom or Manny Machado or Joc Pederson or Andrew McCutchen or Yasiel Puig — there’s so many guys in the game now who are so much fun.

“Jose Fernandez is a great example. Jose Fernandez will strike you out and stare you down into the dugout and pump his fist. And if you hit a homer and pimp it? He doesn’t care. Because you got him. That’s part of the game. It’s not the old feeling — hoorah … if you pimp a homer, I’m going to hit you right in the teeth. No. If a guy pimps a homer for a game-winning shot … I mean — sorry.”

He stops, looks around. The hell with it, he’s all in.

“If a guy pumps his fist at me on the mound, I’m going to go, ‘Yeah, you got me. Good for you. Hopefully I get you next time.’ That’s what makes the game fun. You want kids to play the game, right? What are kids playing these days? Football, basketball. Look at those players — Steph Curry, LeBron James. It’s exciting to see those players in those sports. Cam Newton — I love the way Cam goes about it. He smiles, he laughs. It’s that flair. The dramatic.”

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Other clubs: Angels, Astros, Braves, Brewers, Cubs, Diamondbacks, Indians, Marlins, Mets, Orioles, Reds, Red Sox, Rockies, Royals, Tigers, Twins, White Sox.

You might not know it by listening to talk radio or television discussions about the club, but it’s an awesome time to be a Dodgers fan right now. They continue to use their financial might to bring in a plethora of international and domestic amateur prospects, then proceed to pawn off their international bonus slots for even more prospects. While they’ve gotten a lot of criticism for letting Zack Greinke go and not dishing out any of the bigger contracts this offseason, the reinforcements they have available in their minor-league system are at least a part of the reason why. Not only do they boast one of the deepest major-league rosters, they have ready-made replacements within a couple levels of their parent club, particularly on the pitching side. On top of that, they keep making shrewd mid-level trades and taking some of my favorite upside talents in the amateur draft. At every turn, their process has been consistent and on point.

You could make a case that they’re light on impact offensive prospects outside of the guys who’ll be starting the year in Los Angeles and first baseman Cody Bellinger, but they have enough depth in the next tier down. Outfielders Johan Mieses, Jacob Scavuzzo and Alex Verdugo are close in the outfield, while Willie Calhoun and hopefully a return to form by Micah Johnson give them options in the infield should multiple position players falter this year. Julio Urias and Jose De Leon are two of the top pitching prospects in all of baseball, and could handle a promotion in the near future if pressed into duty.

Austin Barnes and Trayce Thompson are in the 50+ FV group here, despite how Barnes is only the club’s second or third option at catcher, and Thompson’s reputation in recent years as a questionable bat who might not make it in the big leagues. Thompson is quicker to explain: I really like the changes he made to his swing and approach. No one ever denied the tools and overall athletic ability, and barring a step back for some reason, he’s positioned to develop into a legitimate starting option in the outfield.

Barnes is much farther out there compared to perception, I’m well aware. He’s not a big power guy, and he doesn’t have big arm strength, both tools that historically are typical of catching prospects. His atypical profile is probably why he didn’t get more of an opportunity in the Marlins organization. Perhaps it’s telling, however, that one of the smartest front offices in baseball targeted him. As a professional, all he’s done is hit, flirt with an on-base percentage over .400, steal some bases and be one of the best pitch framers in the minor leagues — for years now. He makes enough contact and has a good swing, so there’s no reason I can find that he won’t continue to do it against big-league pitching. I don’t see any reason to discount his receiving behind the plate. Watch a Dodgers spring-training game and you’ll quickly notice what makes him so special back there.

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Indians’ starter Trevor Bauer prepares to collect data at Driveline Baseball.

Kyle Boddy spent years getting it wrong. “There were years of inconclusive results that led to more questions,” Boddy told me about his past work at his Driveline Baseball facility in Kent, Washington.

He had the best intentions. After years of day jobs, and coaching youth baseball with some competitive weightlifting sprinkled in, he started writing at The Hardball Times and studying injuries with Josh Kalk, now a member of the Tampa Bay Rays’ front office. They had some success using neural networks on PITCHf/x data in order to spot injuries earlier than usual.

In the end, though, the Seattle-based mechanics analyst wanted to take a look at pitcher development under the same data-based lens that he and Kalk had used to spot existing injury.

So he built a biomechanics lab, complete with high-speed cameras and objects of known size. (That object, known as the Cube, is a square box built of tubing that helps calibrate the cameras so that the video created is all comparable.) It was a lot of work with an uncertain reward. “We got a lot of great kinetic data,” said Boddy of that time. “Then we realized that there was a huge amount of noise.”

Helping Boddy with the realization was Dr. Murray Maitland in the Department of Rehabilitation Medicine at the University of Washington. When approached with analysis based on limb movement and pitchers’ physical tendencies and the link to injury, Dr. Maitland smiled and dropped what might have been a bombshell to Boddy that day. “Just because the joint or limb moves in this direction doesn’t mean the underlying muscle is doing that,” said Maitland in Boddy’s recollection. “The movement could be due to inertia, it could be due to whatever. You can’t infer muscle activity.”

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I’ll begin by saying I’m not sure what value all of what’s to follow actually has. I know that’s about the least-compelling way to begin a blog post, but I just want that to be very clear. TangoTiger’s recent Building a Better WAR Metric series on the site jumpstarted an idea I’d been kicking around in my head for a while. It’s an idea that mostly exists because I’ve seen people on the internet say they’d want to see something like it, and, at the very least, it could serve as a talking point for another constructive discussion about WAR, and any constructive discussion about WAR is a good thing, because we all admit it’s far from perfect and constructive discussions usher progress.

People don’t really have beef with the offensive side of WAR, I don’t think. As far as sabermetric stats go, wRC+, and therefore wRAA, are about as infallible as they come. Tough to argue with the outcomes of history. I don’t see too many quibbles with the base-running numbers, partially because I think most people think they do a good job, but also because they don’t move the needle much either way, and there’s bigger fish to fry. Some people aren’t fans of the positional adjustments — both the assigned weights, and the entire concept of including them. I’m in the camp that firmly believes in the idea of the positional adjustment, but, like anything, the formula for the weights could always be looked at to see if it could be improved in any way, and Jeff Zimmerman’s work on this topic last offseason was a great place to start.

But the bigger beef, beyond the positional adjustments, is of course defense. Anyone will admit this is the weak link of WAR. It’s probably the weakest link of sabermetrics, as a whole, in 2016. And mostly, what it boils down to is, we know that defensive metrics don’t stabilize until the sample spans roughly three years, or 3,000-ish innings. Meaning, the single-season data is subject to noise, and if we wanted to draw any conclusions from it, we’d have to regress it. Despite that, single-season WAR is powered by noisy, unregressed, single-season defensive metrics. That’s the crux of the beef with WAR.

So, some folks have suggested that the defensive component of WAR ought to be regressed in some way, in an effort to strip out some of the noise that comes with single-year defensive data, or to better capture a defender’s true performance. I think there are a number of flaws in this general line of thinking, but there are a number of flaws with the way it’s being done now, too, so let’s humor one another.

Both ZiPS and Steamer use multiple years of data, giving more weight to the most recent seasons. Multiple years of data to weed out noise? Check. Both also incorporate some form of “scouting” information: Steamer regresses toward the results of the Fans Scouting Report, ZiPS searches for keywords in actual, physical scouting reports and uses those as a means for regression. Eye test? Check. Blend all that together and factor in some aging curves, and you’ve got yourself as good an idea of any player’s true-talent defensive ability as you’re going to find. Sort the Fld column here and I think you’ll agree that these numbers pass the eye test with flying colors.

So let’s imagine a world where, last year, every player performed exactly to their true-talent defensive ability. Everyone hit the same, everyone ran the same, everyone had the same amount of playing time, but defensively, we knew exactly what everyone’s true-talent ability was worth, and no one varied from it.

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I write some version of this post every spring, and each time, I’m more excited at first than I am as I get more involved. Whenever it comes back to me, I always like the idea, but then eventually I remember it just isn’t that important. It certainly isn’t something people are keeping in mind all season long — no one really worries about the standings until, I don’t know, July, and the league-wide landscape in baseball is pretty even, relative to other professional sports. Most fans operate under the assumption the schedules are more or less even, and they nearly are. Differences are subtle.

But, you know, differences are there, and remember that this is an MLB environment that considers a win on the free-agent market to be worth something like $8 million. Every single win is important, in some sense, and because the schedules aren’t truly identical, there’s no harm in examining the projected advantages and disadvantages. Acknowledging from the outset that this is all based on projections, and that you don’t agree with all the projections, let’s quickly go over the various schedule strengths.

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For many irrational reasons, I have consciously decided to put myself through the experience of being an Oakland A’s season-ticket holder for the past three years. Every year since I joined this small, delusional, and fanatical club, the price of season tickets has gone up by a sizable amount. I say “sizable” as an intentionally unscientific term, as I realize there’s a lot that goes into it, but the increases have been more than noticeable for my section of the stadium, which is not one of the highest-priced nor one of the very-lowest. The A’s were really good between 2012 and 2014, so I understood that the increase was probably just the price of success, and left it at that. We all know what happened to the A’s in 2015, however: they lost 94 games. It was a woeful, terrible year. You can’t come up with a superlative to represent what trading Josh Donaldson and then losing 94 games is like. It felt — and feels — exactly what it sounds like reading that sentence.

It was with some confusion, then, that I looked at the prices of tickets this January and saw that the prices had stayed steady or increased, especially for those teams or dates that are denoted as top tier. As most teams now do, the A’s have adopted a dynamic pricing model for their ticket sales, which assigns higher pricing to favorable matchups, promotions, days of the week, etc. It’s a complicated and flexible model, and there’s the chance that holding off on buying tickets now might actually save money if certain circumstances arise. The possibility of the opposite is true, however, which is the point (for the A’s) of adopting the model. The fact remains, however: the A’s were one of the worst teams in baseball during 2015, yet one wouldn’t know it from the ticket-price differences between 2015 and 2016.

My own personal situation with the A’s is secondary to what we’re going to be looking at today, however, as it was simply the spark that caused me to ask a myself a few questions: what is the relationship between winning, losing, and ticket prices? How much do new stadiums increase ticket prices? What role does the larger economy play? And, on a deeper level — whether it’s actually the case or not — should teams have a moral obligation to own up to their team’s recent failures by adjusting ticket prices? With all those questions and a few more in mind, I set out to try to answer them.

The data for this sort of undertaking is inherently scattershot. There isn’t a great repository of, say, the lowest-priced ticket for every team over the past 10 years. At least not one I could find. The best resource I found was a site called Team Marketing, which assembles a yearly “Fan Cost Index” for each team and the league as a whole. In addition to factoring in the cost of beer, food, etc. into this index, they also log the cost of an average ticket — that is, the cost of a non-premium ticket based on season-ticket prices. The average is weighted to weed out the discrepancies of more or fewer seats in areas that don’t cost the same, so it’s actually a pretty representative figure of a strictly average ticket. The only knock against it is that the teams get to decide what is “general” seating and what is “premium,” but that’s splitting hairs a little bit, and this information is great in that it is one of the few available datasets not based on the secondary market for tickets. The data goes back to 2007, so I’ve pulled everything and assembled them in some tidy graphs for us to look at. For reference, here’s the source: 2015 Team Marketing MLB Report. It’s worth a look.

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Other clubs: Angels, Astros, Braves, Brewers, Cubs, Diamondbacks, Indians, Marlins, Orioles, Reds, Red Sox, Rockies, Royals, Tigers, Twins, White Sox.

With the exception of Steven Matz, this Mets system is a bit short on pitching. That would be a problem if the club didn’t already have one of the best young pitching staffs in the game. Most of their impact bats will probably be coming from the low minors, Desmond Lindsay being the most likely exception. Amed Rosario’s bat is still a few years away, but he’s the kind of talent where if/when things click he’s immediately a stud. Don’t sleep on their mid-level bats either, as guys like Dominic Smith, Eudor Garcia, Jhoan Urena and Wuilmer Becerra have quiet profiles that could erupt as they climb the next few levels.

The biggest strength of this group is its shortstop depth. Signing Gregory Guerrero and Andres Gimenez last year only added to an impressive group that will at least give the Mets some high-risk/high-reward trade chips should they need to add to another contender this year. The list goes on with Rosario, Milton Ramos, Luis Carpio, Luis Guillorme… making the defense at every level a nice crutch on which their young pitchers can lean.

The biggest surprises on this list have to start with Guerrero and Guillorme making their way into the top-10. Guerrero is unproven, but I think has the makings of one of the best swings in the system. Guillorme is good enough defensively he only needs to be a man with a bat at the plate to reach the big leagues. Brandon Nimmo is lower here than I have seen elsewhere, and I can’t deny he still has the potential to be an average MLB outfielder. I just don’t see his power showing up enough for his super patient approach to work against big-league pitchers with better command.

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As you probably have heard by now, our projection systems don’t like the Royals, again. Our Playoff Odds page has them forecasted for just 77 wins, with only an 8% of reaching the postseason, the lowest of any team in the American League. ZIPS and Steamer just aren’t that high on the team’s individual players, and since the projections are context-neutral, there’s no adjustment being made for the fact that the team has won more than expected in recent years. The Royals have relied heavily on context-specific performance to reach the postseason, and projection systems assume that’s not a sustainable skill, wiping it away at the start of each season.

On Friday, I posed a question to you guys, based on the crowd’s overwhelming response that they believe the projection systems are underrating the 2016 Royals. The response to my question was also overwhelming; you guys believe that the Royals are going to significantly outperform their BaseRuns record once again. The top four answers selected in the poll were the four options that had them beating their BaseRuns record, with 78% of those voting selecting one of the options that suggested the Royals have an inherent skill that BaseRuns isn’t accounting for.

Overall, by weighting the results by the proportion of people who voted for each option, you guys project that the Royals will beat their BaseRuns expected record by 3.4 wins in 2016, accounting for about three-fourths of the difference that Jeff Sullivan found when he polled the crowd about expected record versus the projections. Given that the Royals have beaten BaseRuns by an aggregate 25 wins over the last three years, our readers believe that there’s some real skill there. You don’t expect that they’ll get the same type of bump as they have the last few years, but you’re willing to assume that, at this point, BaseRuns is just missing something about how they play, and the forecasts are low by 3.4 wins because of it.

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Matt Murton had a lot of success in NPB after fading out in MLB. In six seasons with the Hanshin Tigers, he slashed .310/.352/.437. Now, at age 34, he’s back stateside, trying to win a job with the Chicago Cubs.

Murton’s path to Japan and back is a curious one. A first-round pick by the Red Sox Sox in 2003, he went to the Cubs a year later in the Nomar Garciaparra deal. From 2005-2007, he hit a solid .303/.370/.462. From 2008-2009, he appeared in a grand total of 57 games with three organizations. In 2010, he changed continents.

“It was either fight for a spot in a situation where I was out of options, or take something that was more of a guarantee,” Murton said of his decision. “I was 28 years old, and as crazy as this might sound, I came to the realization that this is what I do for a living. I have a family to provide for, and it was a good opportunity to do that.”

Murton has mixed feelings on his initial big-league tenure. He did his best and feels he was reasonably successful. He also feels he could have done a better job. He has a lone regret. Read the rest of this entry »

Other clubs: Astros, Braves, Cubs, Diamondbacks, Indians, Orioles, Reds, Red Sox, Rockies, Royals, Tigers, Twins, White Sox.

Despite only recently being regarded one of the worst farm systems in the league, the Brewers now have a wealth of talent that can be used to build up the next winner in Milwaukee. They project to have solid pitching and outfield depth for the foreseeable future, while the immediate term will see a sizable influx of quality players hopefully gearing up to fill important roles on the next competitive Brewers team. It may be another year before they can really start expecting to take steps toward the playoffs, but the Brewers have quality depth if not true studs, which can breed a few surprise impact players.

Some of the more bold rankings in this massive system include a few lows and highs. I see Michael Reed as a legitimate starting outfielder whose power is an inevitability, hence he ranks more highly here than anywhere I’ve read. The organization is convinced his power will come around, as well. I also like Josh Hader and Isan Diaz’s chances of reaching the 50-grade threshold. Rymer Liriano makes a surprise appearance in the 45 FV pod. The only thing I can say about it is maybe he won’t pan out, but there’s enough potential there that I don’t know how you essentially cut a guy like that…

Nathan Orf is a hustler who may not seem like much of a pure athlete, but his hit tool carries his value into this list for me. As for some lows, I recognize the potential value Jacob Nottingham and Gilbert Lara possess, but I just don’t have faith in either’s hit tool panning out in the long run. Lara is super young and Nottingham has his raw power, so neither is a lost cause, but I’m looking at it in terms of most likely outcomes.

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