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

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles NL / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / San Diego / Seattle / Texas / Toronto.

Batters
This entry regarding Detroit’s position players and their relative strengths looked different at roughly 4pm ET yesterday, when the idiot author originally composed it. That version of the Tigers featured some combination of Anthony Gose (561 PA, 0.9 zWAR) and Mike Aviles (347 PA, 0.3 zWAR) in left field, accounting for little more than a win between them. What happened in the meantime, however, is Detroit signed Justin Upton to a six year, $132.8 million deal. The move, broadly speaking, appears to have added slightly more than two wins to the club’s projections.

While certainly benefiting the Tigers, the acquisition of Upton does little to counteract the team’s recent history of employing stars (on the one hand) and scrubs (on the other). Miguel Cabrera, Ian Kinsler, J.D. Martinez, and Upton are all projected to record a mark of 3.5 WAR or higher; every other field player on the roster, 1.6 WAR or lower. Of course, a distinct advantage to this particular method of roster construction is that it becomes much easier to upgrade this or that position — especially if the club’s owner is both (a) fabulously wealthy and (b) motivated by the proximity of his own, real death.

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The first of them cracked. Justin Upton and Yoenis Cespedes remained on the free-agent market, and all around the league, teams indicated they didn’t want to make the necessary commitments. The players wanted five or six or seven years. The teams wanted to give one or two or three. It was enough to make you think there could maybe be a potential bargain, but the market just doesn’t turn out like that. More often than not, a team gives in, and few should be surprised the team that gave in Monday was the Tigers. As always, all Mike Ilitch wants is to win. He’ll now get to watch his team try to win with Upton every day in left field.

The agreement is for six years and a little over $130 million, with Upton also having the opportunity to opt out two years in. That’ll give Upton the chance to hit the market again at the same age that Cespedes is now, and as we’ve written so many times, the opt-out clause has good value to the player. But at the same time, this is the Tigers — Ilitch’s Tigers. On one hand, Ilitch makes these analyses complicated. On the other hand, you could argue they couldn’t be simpler. Upton’s a good player. Ilitch was willing to pay for a good player.

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On Saturday, the Orioles agreed to re-sign star first baseman Chris Davis, and the price tag was staggering given his limited market: $161 million over seven years. Except, they aren’t really paying him $161 million over the next seven years; as part of the deal, the Orioles have deferred about a quarter of the contract, pushing $6 million per year of his annual salary into the years after the contract has expired, and pushing some of it way into the future. Under the terms of this deal, Baltimore will now be sending Davis checks for the next 22 years, with the $42 million in deferred money being paid out from 2023 through 2037.

So while the $161 million number is a headline-grabber, the actual value of this deal is quite a bit lower than that, since money loses value over time. We talked about this last year with the Max Scherzer deal, and not surprisingly, Davis and Scherzer are both represented by Scott Boras; he’s clearly willing to create long-term payment structures in order to get a larger total payout numbers when the deals are announced. And for the owners, these types of deals help them acquire (or retain) star players while potentially pushing the future costs of the deal onto another ownership group; Peter Angelos is 86 years old, and will probably not be alive for the entire duration of Davis’ payments.

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The minimum-wage lawsuit that a group of former and current minor leaguers is bringing against Major League Baseball could mark a paradigm shift in the industry. In a nutshell, a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs would fundamentally change the business model of the game, both at the minor league and major league levels.

As legal analyst Nathaniel Grow details as part of his running coverage of the suit, the plaintiffs contend that MLB violates federal and state minimum-wage and overtime laws by paying many minor leaguers as little as $3,300 a year. If plaintiffs were to obtain a favorable ruling, the cost of doing business for major league teams would increase dramatically. In all likelihood, major league clubs would try passing down that cost to minor league affiliates. In one extreme yet plausible scenario, we could see retraction in the minor leagues, which would have ripple effects on player development, the amateur draft and the international signing period. And that’s just the baseball side of it, saying nothing of the impact on regional economies that rely on their minor league franchises.

When a verdict is handed down, there will be plenty of time to assess its impact, the good and the bad. For now, I want to look at an issue that is getting less attention than the lawsuit’s hypothetical fallout: the risks that current minor leaguers must accept if they decide to join the lawsuit.

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Sarah Gelles was recently given a new title. The Baltimore Orioles’ Director of Analytics since April 2014, she is now the Director of Analytics and Major League Contracts. Based on her career track, don’t be surprised if she one day becomes a general manager.

In 2010, Gelles graduated summa cum laude from Amherst College with a degree in Law, Jurisprudence & Social Thought. Along the way, she interned for the Pirates in their baseball operations department. Upon leaving school, she worked for Major League Baseball’s Labor Relations Department. After that, she served a year-long internship with the Orioles before being hired full time when Dan Duquette became team president in November 2011.

She began making her mark even before Duquette arrived. While still an intern, Gelles “identified an area of need in the organization, and started to build out our first internal database.”

Think about that for a moment. One year out of college, an intern initiated one of the most-meaningful advancements in team history. Read the rest of this entry »

At the kind of money he wanted, Chris Davis basically had a one-team market. Other big-spending teams didn’t have openings at first base, and other big-spending teams weren’t buying Scott Boras’ pitch of Davis as a versatile could-be outfielder. The Orioles sensed even a month ago they would be bidding against themselves, and they attempted a couple leverage plays to try to force Boras’ hand. Yet Boras won, as he almost always does. Here’s what’s being reported: Davis re-signed with Baltimore for a seven-year deal worth $161 million. Somehow, the commitment got bigger from what was reported weeks back. The Orioles were the only team around $150 million, and Scott Boras got them to add on more.

That makes it kind of a bad look for Baltimore. The easy takeaway is that Peter Angelos just got played. And at the end of the day, it’s highly unlikely another team would’ve been willing to come close to this, had the Orioles walked away. But for one thing — however much this is worth — this does send a good message that the Orioles will spend to keep good players around. People have doubted that in the past, and now Davis joins Darren O’Day as a returning key player. And there are other factors, as well, in support of the idea this isn’t a certain catastrophe. This isn’t quite a straight-up $161-million commitment. There are, let’s say, special considerations.

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This morning, after a long and protracted negotiation that finally resulted in the team threatening to pursue alternative free agents, the Orioles reportedly agreed to re-sign their slugging first baseman Chris Davis. The price? $161 million over seven years, giving Davis the same annual average value as Jason Heyward, the winter’s best available position player. And Davis was able to land this contract despite the fact this contract is probably going to be a disaster and that the market for hitters has been quite frigid this winter.

Given the limited suitors looking for a first baseman, the remaining crop of quality outfielders, and the risks surrounding Davis’ skillset, this might be Scott Boras’ most impressive victory over reason yet. As an agent, he has perfected the ability to go around the baseball operations department, dealing directly with owners who simply don’t have the same level of knowledge as the people they employ to run their team on a daily basis. Except in this case, even Peter Angelos had to know he was bidding against himself.

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A pitcher, standing on the mound, peers in toward his catcher for a signal. It’s the first pitch of an at-bat. The catcher puts down a couple fingers, and the pitcher shakes him off once. He shakes him off twice. The pair agree on a pitch. The pitcher starts his windup, rears back, and fires. Miss. Ball one. A league-average batter now has a 37% chance of reaching base in this at-bat, just on the pitcher misfiring on his first offering alone. In an alternate universe, where the pitcher throws a strike, the batter’s chances of reaching are reduced to just 26%. Over the course of a full-length season, two identical batters with equal true-talent levels could bat 600 times each, and batter A, who starts out every at-bat with a ball, would reach 66 more times than batter B, who starts out every at-bat with a strike, the seperation being due entirely to the difference in count leverage.

We know count leverage is important, but its omnipresence makes it easy to undersell its magnitude. Someone’s always got the edge. The battle is winning it back. In the same vein, the other side of the battle is not losing it once you have it.

There’s no worse spot for a hitter to be than an 0-2 count. After falling behind 0-2, the league hit just .171 last year, with a .200 on-base percentage. It’s not any easier against Chris Sale. From a batter’s point of view, the words “easy” “against” and “Chris Sale” don’t mix well. Against Sale last year, batters were held to a .155/.169/.243 line after falling behind 0-2. Sale found himself with the advantage of an 0-2 count plenty of times — 231, to be exact. More than a quarter of Sale’s at-bats went directly to an 0-2 count. And from there, things only got worse for the hitter. Of those 231 counts that went straight to 0-2, Sale recorded a strikeout in 132 of them, with exactly one walk.

Only one time last season did Chris Sale lose an 0-2 count to a walk. Julio Teheran lost just one as well, but in 73 fewer at-bats. And, sure, what David Price did is probably every bit as impressive as Sale, except singularity is fascinating. And fascinations are worth exploring.

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The Padres have been linked to two shortstops this offseason. One was four years younger than the other, and still in some command of the tools that made him an All-Star-level player. But Ian Desmond is risky, and more expensive than $4 million guaranteed over one year with a mutual option for 2017. According to multiple sources, that’s the deal the Padres have agreed to hand Alexei Ramirez, who should be worth that price, no matter which Alexei Ramirez shows up.

One year, Alexei Ramirez hit 15 homers and stole seven bases. The next year, he hit nine homers and stole 20. And that’s not the only place where we’ve seen wild swings from Ramirez. He’s walked 2.6% of the time in a year, and 8.1%. He’s produced an isolated-slugging figure of .185, and also of .096. He’s swung and missed 10.7% of the time, and 6.5% of the time. He’s hit nearly one grounder per fly ball and also nearly two grounders per fly ball. He’s pulled the ball 38% of the time, and also 54% of the time. He’s shown below-average defense, and league-leading defense. He’s swung at 60% of the pitches he’s seen, and 49%.

Throughout it all, he’s recorded nearly 5,000 plate appearances and been above-average with the stick for a shortstop, and the third-best overall glove since he debuted in 2008. Even with all the oscillating, all the bad plate discipline, all the weird changes to his game, Ramirez has been above-average in all of his years save two — his first and his last.

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After having typically appeared in the very hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past couple 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 / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Houston / Kansas City / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / San Diego / Seattle / Texas / Toronto.

Batters
It’s not particularly common for one of the strongest teams in the majors to acquire a new best position player. Theoretically, such a club already features an assortment of talented players; otherwise, it wouldn’t have been one of the strongest teams in the majors. And yet, this is effectively what the Dodgers — who recorded the third-best Base Runs record in the league last year — it’s effectively what they’ll have done by deploying Corey Seager (643 PA, 3.9 zWAR) as their opening-day shortstop this spring. A projection represents an attempt to estimate a player’s true-talent level. Seager’s true talent appears to be more talented than everyone else’s.

There’s some uncertainty at the moment regarding new manager Dave Roberts‘ plans for the outfield. According to Dan Szymborski’s computer, allowing Joc Pederson (571 PA, 3.1 zWAR) to retain his starting center-field role would be part of the club’s optimal arrangement. As for second base, there doesn’t appear to be an optimal arrangement yet: both Enrique Hernandez (437 PA, 1.3 zWAR) and Chase Utley (464 PA, 1.1 zWAR) receive rather modest forecasts.

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