Archive for Featured

With the signing of J.A. Happ to a three year, $36 million contract, the Blue Jays seem to have turned the corner on their 2015 ace, David Price. So in that sense, for Blue Jays fans, the Happ signing is not a Happ-y occurrence… Has everybody left? Okay! Time to get down to business. While we are all focused on the big-name free agents, like Price, picking their new and surely happy homes, the almost-AL Champs north of the border have been somewhat quietly going about the business of doing lots of business, and that business has been assembling a rotation that can take advantage of their offense.

Happ is the third starting pitcher the Jays have brought in or back since the season ended. Recall that they re-signed Marco Estrada to a two year deal, and then traded Liam Hendriks to Oakland for Jesse Chavez. Now they bring back Happ, a member of the Jays as recently as 2014. With R.A. Dickey and Marcus Stroman, that’s five starting pitchers under team control for next season. While Happ represents likely the last and largest free agent outlay by the Blue Jays organization for a starting pitcher this offseason, that doesn’t mean the team is completely done. With Happ, the team has $92 million committed to seven players in 2016 and none of those seven are Josh Donaldson, meaning adding an eighth player will make that figure meaningfully larger. Last season Toronto spent $137 million, their highest payroll ever, and though reports are a bit conflicting, they don’t seem likely to go much beyond that if at all for 2016. Assuming that’s all true, fitting David Price’s salary in would have meant cutting some muscle from the payroll, and doing that likely would have meant cutting muscle from Toronto’s greatest strength, their offense.

Read the rest of this entry »

For four consecutive years, the Detroit Tigers sat comfortably atop the throne of the American League Central Division. Last year, they relinquished that reign and did so in dramatic fashion, fielding the franchise’s worst rotation since the 119-loss Tigers of 2003 while plummeting to last place in the division.

Clearly, the Tigers were going to add a pitcher or three in the offseason. The question was, would it be a series of band-aids to stop the bleeding, or something bigger to put them back on the attack? On Sunday, that question was answered, when the Tigers agreed to terms with Jordan Zimmermann.

Those terms, precisely, are five years and $110 million, which is less than the 6/120 that our crowdsourcing project predicted. In past years, the crowd has tended to err on the low side, especially with high-profile free agents, so any time a guy signs for less, it looks good for the team.

In fact, if you start with Zimmermann’s +3 WAR Steamer projection for 2016, assume he ages somewhat well and factor in inflation, Zimmermann’s contract comes out as a carbon-copy of what would be considered the fair, market price:

What the Tigers are paying for here is consistency. This is a team that gave 147 innings to Buck Farmer, Kyle Lobstein, Kyle Ryan, and Randy Wolf last year, and a team whose only qualified pitcher was Alfredo Simon. Even at the top of the rotation, there’s former workhorse Justin Verlander, who looked like his old self once returning from injury but still needs to prove he can throw 200 innings again; Anibal Sanchez, who has either been hurt or ineffective each of the last two years; and Daniel Norris, who’s never thrown more than 150 innings in professional ball and just had a cancerous growth removed from his thyroid.

Read the rest of this entry »

This post was written by the team behind NEIFI, a projection system and systematic evaluation methodology about which you can read more at their site. They also tweet @NEIFIco, and have started their own blog as well.

We’re NEIFI. We build decision systems for teams, systems that produce both evaluations and valuations. Increasingly, there’s a need for such systems to work globally, both in the literal and metaphorical sense of the word; decision makers must be able to intelligently compare the relative values of draft picks, Korean free agents, a prospect, and 30-year-old big leaguer with two years and $30 million left on his contract. We’ve now been working explicitly with international leagues for about five years, and for much longer with domestic evaluations and valuations. We believe our methodology helps to put players from wildly different contexts on a neutral playing field for cross-comparison.

A few weeks ago, members of the Baseball Writers Association of America chose Jake Arrieta as the recipient of the 2015 NL Cy Young Award, even though it’s generally agreed upon that Clayton Kershaw is currently the best pitcher on the planet right now. NEIFI has little interest in awards voting (or the subsequent debates), but we do enjoy estimating the future. Here’s how our system projects the top 10 overall talent levels among starting pitchers going into 2016, simply on a rate basis. This uses the ERA scale; league average is fixed at 4.00, and an average SP is around 4.13:

Top SP Projections for 2016

Name	2016	Age
Kershaw, Clayton	2.35	28
Fernandez, Jose	2.75	24
Sale, Chris	2.87	27
Arrieta, Jake	3.01	30
Scherzer, Max	3.03	32
Otani, Shohei	3.08	22
Keuchel, Dallas	3.13	29
Kluber, Corey	3.15	30
Price, David	3.15	31
Strasburg, Stephen	3.16	28
Darvish, Yu	3.19	30

SOURCE: neifi.co

So we actually cheated: there are 11 pitchers included there, because as you may notice, one of them is not currently pitching in Major League Baseball. Shohei Otani’s dominance may not be groundbreaking news if you follow Japanese baseball to some degree, but we find that it’s still interesting to put his projectoin in this context. And for the sake of corroborating his gaudy ranking above, consider Darvish, who actually played for the same team in Japan.

Read the rest of this entry »

Please note that this is not the most recent list. An updated version can be found here.

Last week, I published a 2,000-plus word primer on the KATOH projection system I use to forecast prospects. Most notably, I discussed the improvements I made to the model and also explored how well individual minor league statistics can predict big league success. Today, I’m back with the end result of all of my math: KATOH’s top 100 list.

Read the rest of this entry »

My role here at FanGraphs is to write about minor league players. Nearly all of my articles focus on the output from my KATOH projection system, which produces long-term forecasts for players who are still in the minor league phase of their careers. Today, I’m unveiling some updates to my model that will be reflected in my analysis from this point forward.

I’ve been meaning to work these updates into KATOH for quite some time now, but haven’t had the chance to finish up until now. Some pieces of this took a bit longer than expected, and day job stuff along with this year’s onslaught of prospect debuts pushed things to the backseat a bit. But I’m all caught up now and ready to unveil my new and improved KATOH. Here we go!

Rather than just putting out a straight leaderboard, I thought I’d use this as an opportunity to explain some of the inner workings of KATOH. I wanted to say something more insightful than “These are the best prospects because math.” That’s why this piece runs 2,000+ words without reference to a single baseball player. If you’re just interested in the output rather than the nitty-gritty, check back after Thanksgiving for KATOH’s top 100 list. I just wanted to get all of this background stuff down in one place, rather than cluttering future pieces with extra information.

*****

Obligatory Technical Details

The general framework of my model is largely the same as it’s always been. As I did in the past, I deployed a series of probit regressions to see what factors are most predictive of major league performance. For each player, I generated probabilities that he would achieve certain benchmarks through his age-28 season: play in the major leagues, earn at least 1 WAR, earn at least 2 WAR, etc. These percentages gave me a probabilistic outlook for each player, and enabled me calculate an “expected value” for his WAR through age 28.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Milwaukee Brewers have had nine winning seasons during David Stearns’ lifetime. Over that span, they’ve won 90 or more games just four times. Their last World Series appearance was in 1982, three years before the 30-year-old Harvard graduate was born. He has his work cut out for him.

Stearns stepped into one of baseball’s most challenging jobs when he took over as Milwaukee’s general manager at season’s end. The Brewers play in MLB’s smallest market, and they compete in its toughest division. On the heels of a competitive 2014 campaign, they went into this past season with high hopes, only to limp to the finish line with a record of 68-94.

A native of New York, Stearns spent the past the three seasons in Houston, where he was the Astros’ assistant general manager.

——

Stearns on his influences: “I think I bring a perspective from all of the different teams I’ve worked for. I’ve had the benefit of working for a number of different leaders, a number of different general managers. That started with Dave Littlefield when I was an intern in Pittsburgh and then Omar Minaya with the Mets. I spent time in the commissioner’s office working for Dan Halem and a number of very smart people. From there I went to Cleveland and worked for Mark Shapiro, Chris Antonetti and Mike Chernoff. And lastly, in Houston I worked for Jeff Luhnow.

Read the rest of this entry »

Bryce Harper won the National League Most Valuable Player this season, and the vote was unanimous. Kris Bryant won the NL Rookie of the Year, and the vote was unanimous. Josh Donaldson‘s American League MVP victory wasn’t quite as clear-cut — 23 to seven over Mike Trout — and Dallas Keuchel’s AL Cy Young even less so — 22 to eight over David Price.

Still, most of the major award victories were fairly one-sided, and they all came down to just two parties duking it out for the top spot. And this is how it usually goes. Occasionally, there’s some discrepancy between the last couple candidates, but more often than not it’s pretty clear who will take home the hardware at year end. If there is any controversy, it’s almost always between just two guys. Very rarely do you see three players eligible for the same award, all of which with a legitimate case to win.

And yet, the 2015 NL Cy Young vote looked like this:

Jake Arrieta emerged victorious, in my opinion rightfully so, but it’s clear by the vote that there was no obvious winner. And it probably came as a surprise to some that Clayton Kershaw didn’t receive more top-two votes and make the race even closer than it actually was.

I mean, Jake Arrieta finished with an ERA that started with a one, and had one of the best second halves in baseball history. Zack Greinke finished with an ERA that started with a one, and it was the lowest we’d seen since Greg Maddux in ’95. Clayton Kershaw finished with a FIP that started with a one, and it was the second consecutive year we’d seen him do that. The ERA wasn’t much higher.

Trying to pick an obvious winner from those three is like trying to pick which duffle bag full of $100 bills you want to take home without having the chance to count every last note. Just close your eyes and pick at random. Either way you’re walking out of that room with a big bag full of money.

It’s great that Arrieta won, because he totally deserved it, but it’s an equal bummer that Greinke and Kershaw didn’t win, because they totally deserved it, too. It’s a shame that seasons like the ones Greinke and Kershaw just had will go down in the record books unrecognized, solely because “sweet lord the caliber of the pitching talent in baseball today is unbelievable what a time to be alive whiffs everywhere.”

The consolation prize for Greinke and Kershaw is that they’re not alone, and they don’t have to go unrecognized. We just witnessed one of the greatest trios of single-season pitching performances in baseball history, so let’s give the runners-up of present and past their due.

Read the rest of this entry »

On Tuesday, I looked at five free agents who I think have a chance to provide some positive value for the team that signs them, based on our expectations of what the market will pay out this winter. Today, we’re going to look at the flip side of that coin, and I’ll identify five players who I think pose the highest risk of ending up as expensive disappointments.

Of course, based on my recent suggestions, maybe teams should just sign all of these guys. Last year, I warned teams off of Max Scherzer, Nelson Cruz, and Edinson Volquez, all of whom went on to have one of the best years of their careers. At least I got Victor Martinez right, and I did a little better a couple of years ago, but even Curtis Granderson’s appearance on that list is a reminder that these guys aren’t fated for disaster. Or that I’m an idiot, depending on your interpretation.

But for various reasons, I’m still skeptical of the five players listed below, and wouldn’t want to approach their expected market price this winter.

Read the rest of this entry »

When you come up through the ranks as a young lefty starter, you learn about the importance of the changeup. By breaking away from the right-handed batter, that pitch offers the best way to neutralize the natural platoon advantage those hitters have against you. By the time you get to the big leagues, it’s part of your approach, like it or not. That’s why lefty starters throw changeups 65% more often than righty starters in major league baseball.

If you look at Jon Lester’s career, though, his best years have come when he’s thrown his changeup the least. The flippant reason for that truth might be because his changeup isn’t that great, and his other pitches are better. The long version is much more interesting, though, as it gets to the theory of changeups, and a new concept called tunneling.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Cincinnati Reds front office underwent a makeover a few weeks ago. Dick Williams, a 44-year-old former investment banker, was appointed the club’s general manager. Walt Jocketty, who is heading into the final year of his contract, moved from GM to President of Baseball Operations.

Williams, who had been the assistant GM, will continue to work under Jocketty until the latter steps down at the end of the 2016 season. Not a lot is expected to change over the next 10-11 months, but it will be interesting to see how differently the Reds operate once Williams is handed the decision-making reins. Jocketty has a business background of own, but he’s also 64 years old and cut his teeth on scouting. By today’s standards, he’s very much an old school executive. Professionally speaking, Williams was weaned on analytics.

Williams talked about his philosophies during last week’s GM meetings in Boca Raton.

——

On working with and learning from Walt Jocketty: “It’s hard to work for a guy for eight years and not learn from him as you go. Walt has been an executive of the year for a couple of different teams. He’s been here for 20-plus years and has a ring. I’ve learned a lot from Walt.

“I got into baseball a little later in life. I was in my mid 30s. I had close to a 15-year business career in investment banking and private equity. My background isn’t totally unique in baseball front offices, but it’s somewhat unique, and it’s shaped a lot of who I am and how I think about problems.

Read the rest of this entry »