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We are pleased to announce that Kiley McDaniel will be joining FanGraphs as our lead analyst and writer for all prospect coverage. The full announcement can be found over at InstaGraphs.

Thanks to David Appelman, Dave Cameron and the rest of the FanGraphs team for this opportunity.  I’m excited to tackle this challenge and feel like all my past experience working for MLB organizations and writing for various other outlets has led up to this, with each job giving me a specific tool or experience that will be key for what I want to accomplish here.

My Approach

It works out that baseball prospect writing jobs tend to fill certain roles that scouts fill in a real scouting department.  When I wrote for ESPN, I functioned as an area scout or maybe a regional cross-checker (covering mostly amateur players in a couple of states).  When I wrote for Scout, I functioned as a national cross-checker (covering mostly amateur players with a national focus).  In this new gig for FanGraphs, I will be filling something like the role of a pro scouting director.

I explain this to give you an idea of my aim and posture.  A pro scouting director focuses mostly on giving his GM recommendations for acquisitions of professional players, but many of them also will pitch in on the draft and international markets as their backgrounds and specialties dictate.  I have experience as a writer and club employee in all three markets, so I’ll be covering all three areas.

As is the focus of this site, I’ll be primarily focusing on minor/major league players, evaluating and ranking those players and finding the best way to communicate their ability and trade value.  In this metaphor, that makes the reader the GM.

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In ways, the 2013 Royals were both a success and a failure, but I’ll probably always remember them for one particular thing. Around the All-Star break, general manager Dayton Moore said that he wasn’t going to sell, and his big reason, paraphrased, was that there was no reason the Royals couldn’t win 15 of 20 games. Everybody made fun of Moore for being irrational and getting carried away, and shortly after that, the Royals began a run during which they won 17 of 20 games. They didn’t make the playoffs, but they were playing interesting baseball well into August.

This year’s Royals kind of backed into the All-Star break, and a few days later, they were a couple games under .500. There were reasons, legitimate reasons, for them to look into trading James Shields, but Moore never really entertained the idea, electing to charge ahead with the roster he’d built. Since then the Royals have won 15 of 18, including seven in a row, and not only are they the current second wild card — the Royals trail the Tigers by no wins and one loss. When the Tigers added David Price, it seemed to be a maneuver to prepare for the postseason. It’s far from clear now the Tigers will even sniff a play-in game.

Two years in a row, then, the Royals have surged after the break, playing themselves right into the race. It’s exciting, because it’s meaningful Royals baseball within the final two months. And what’s funny, if unsurprising, is that this isn’t the only parallel. What’s the strength of the 2014 Royals? Look to the strength of the 2013 Royals.

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The Rockies have been in a free fall for more than two months. And with apologies to Tom Petty, it hasn’t felt good for their team or fan base. They’ve suffered on-field slights, and off-field slights. They’ve suffered injuries, and embarrassment at the hands of those who have replaced those injured. Simply put, it’s been ugly.

Things have seemingly come to a head with Troy Tulowitzki’s comments earlier this week. Tulowitzki’s voice is going to carry a lot of weight, and if he doesn’t back down from his words, then this offseason ownership may need to decide who is more valuable — Tulowitzki or their baseball operations braintrust. Assuming Mrrs. Monfort come to their senses and choose Tulowitzki, the new baseball operations team will need to pick a new direction. Consider this my suggestion.

See, the thing is that the Rockies have plenty of talent. And there are elements of their strategy that have been sound, even if they took the long way to go about things. Jordan Lyles, for instance, has been an asset given his extreme groundball tendencies. With Nolan Arenado, DJ Lemahieu and Tulowitzki, the Rockies have about as good an infield defense as there is. Getting Lyles fits that strategy, even if he wasn’t good value for Dexter Fowler.

Still, given the talent that the team has, there are plenty of steps between where they are now and being a contending team. Let’s go in.

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The San Francisco Giants currently sit comfortably in a playoff spot in the National League. They are but 3.5 games behind the Los Angeles Dodgers in the NL West race. Only two teams in the NL have more wins than the Giants’ 62.

And yet, the Giants are probably not a great team. They project to land square in the middle of a Wild Card dogfight. They are either the worst good team in baseball or the best bad team in baseball. Sometimes they look the part, other nights their lineup betrays the mediocrity lurking within.

In my mind, these key traits of the the Giants are reflected in two of their best-known players, Tim Lincecum and Pablo Sandoval. Brilliant at times but perplexing at others. While Lincecum is quickly becoming a beloved enigma, Sandoval is a little tougher to figure. He’s not what he once was or what he might have been, but he remains a vital contributor to the Giants’ success.

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August 7th, 2013: Jordan Zimmermann lasts only four innings in his start against the Braves, giving up seven hits and a couple of runs before Davey Johnson goes to the bullpen. In need of a bridge to the team’s middle relievers, Johnson calls in a rookie, Tanner Roark, to make his Major League debut. It is about as nondescript an appearance as one could imagine, as he faces six hitters, giving up a hit to B.J. Upton — okay, so one remarkable thing happened — but erasing it with a double play, and facing the minimum six batters over his two innings of work.

No one really thought much of it. Even in this post-game interview, Roark looks about as excited in his debut as everyone watching was. He was just a guy, a 25th round pick by the Rangers who was traded to Washington as half of the return for Texas’ acquisition of Cristian Guzman back in 2010. Fun fact; after the trade, Guzman hit .152/.204/.174 and was worth -0.7 WAR in just 50 plate appearances. Whoops.

But, really, giving up Roark wasn’t anything to lose sleep over. When Texas traded him, he was a guy with 75 strikeouts in 105 innings in Double-A, and he wasn’t even avoiding walks that well. He was an organizational guy, a non-prospect with no obvious upside who looked like a career minor leaguer. Even when he got to Washington, he didn’t really have any kind of major breakthrough. He just progressed through up the chain, got to Triple-A as a 25 year old, and then threw enough strikes in Syracuse last year that the team called him up when they needed a long man in the bullpen.

Well, he’s not a long man in the bullpen anymore. Since Roark’s debut one year ago today, here are the top 10 qualified starting pitchers by ERA-.

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The other day, Kenley Jansen caused a minor stir when he threw a 98 mile-per-hour cutter. In reality, Jansen had thrown that pitch before, but (A) the camera angle really showed off the movement, and (B) who cares! That’s cruel all of the time! A cutter is a non-traditional sort of fastball and Jansen threw one with well-above-average velocity. It missed the bat that tried to hit it because what alternative was there? Who hits that pitch?

That pitch got me looking at other high-velocity pitches with unusual movement. Then that line of thought got me thinking: when you’re facing Jansen, you’re looking for cutters. He throws the cutter almost all the time. He uses it as his primary fastball, so the really mean pitches might be his non-cutters. That sent me on a search and I think I might have found the most dominant, unfair Kenley Jansen relief appearance. I know it seems kind of stupid to reflect on an outing from April 20 when we’re a week into August, but think of this as a fun examination of the tools Jansen has at his disposal.

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The year is 2014. Barack Obama is the President of the United States. Oil is selling at $98.29 per barrel. Ebola is spreading in Sierra Leone. A European space probe, after 10 years of orbit, will soon connect with the comet it is intended to study. And Adam Dunn pitched in a regular season baseball game last night.

This is like the Ben Revere home run of position players pitching. This is what we’ve all been waiting for, even if we didn’t know it before last night.

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In 2013, Andrew McCutchen was the best player in the National League, and he was rewarded with the NL Most Valuable Player award. In 2014, he and a few others are essentially even for the title of “best NL player,” non-pitcher division, at least among those who were healthy and not on awful teams. (Caveats included because Troy Tulowitzki has been outstanding, but doesn’t have much impact on the pennant race, is on the disabled list and has almost no chance of winning the MVP.) Combine the two years, and he’s easily been the best that the National League has to offer, and although the defensive metrics don’t seem to like him as much this year, he’s out-performing his 2013 on offense, thanks to some additional power.

On Sunday, he injured his left side, with scary statements like “he needed help from someone else to just zip up the travel bag at his feet” tossed around; he’s likely to be placed on the 15-day disabled list, and could miss several weeks in total. At the time this was all coming out before Tuesday’s loss to Miami (note: this was mostly written before the loss and not updated since the idea is to include McCutchen’s full absence, not one game into it), the Pirates were 1.5 games out of first place in the NL Central, but still only in third, since the Cardinals are in second ahead of them. They were a half-game behind the Giants for the second wild card spot, and just 1.5 games ahead of Atlanta in that chase.

Wins could not be more valuable to the Pirates than they are right now, and they just lost one of the five best players in the game. This is really, really bad. Read the rest of this entry »

You might not have heard, but Jose Abreu is a pretty good hitter.

Who am I kidding, you’ve heard about that by now. You also probably heard he just wrapped up a 21-game hitting streak. That’s the second-longest streak in the majors this season. You might have heard it was the second time this year he’s had a hitting streak of at least 18 games. He’s a rookie. Rookies don’t really do that. Then you might have heard that those two hitting streaks were separated by just one game. That means you probably heard, or at this point just deduced yourself, that Jose Abreu recorded a hit in 39 of 40 consecutive games. During that second hitting streak, you might have heard he had a stretch of 10 consecutive plate appearances in which a pitcher failed to get him out. These are all really good things to say about a hitter.

Prior to Abreu reaching base in 39 of 40 games, he had reached base in 7 of his last 10. Prior to that, he was on the disabled list with a foot injury. That stint on the DL serves as a pretty convenient place to split Abreu’s season into two halves. What you see looks like two different hitters:
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If you’re a regular FanGraphs reader, you probably know that I’m somewhat fascinated by market valuations, and have spent a decent amount of time talking about the price of a win in the baseball economy. Most of that effort is concentrated around the off-season, when teams are signing free agent contracts, since that is the most obvious place where a team is buying expected future wins with cash. However, free agency isn’t the only market, and the prices paid in free agency don’t necessarily apply to the other markets where teams can acquire talent.

We can say with some confidence that the average price per win in free agency last winter was around $6 to $7 million. What do they pay to add wins mid-season, though? We’re pretty sure the price is higher based on observation, and realistically, it should be higher; buyers have more information and more certainty about their playoff chances, and can assume that they are at a different point of return on investment than they can over the winter, when their playoff odds are lower. The value of a win doesn’t inherently change, but contenders now know which wins they’re likely to be buying, and the premium value of the marginal wins that get you into the playoffs push prices up.

But how much higher is the cost of a win in July versus in the off-season? This isn’t an an easy question to answer, because teams are generally not just exchanging expected future wins for cash, but are exchanging one player for several other players. Instead of having the known cost in dollars, we’re now mostly dealing with unknown values on both sides of the ledger, so this exercise will necessarily be less precise. But it still might be worth doing, even if we have to put a lot of caveats on the data in the process.

So, while admitting that this is about as inexact as science can get, let’s try and figure out what the market price of a win was in July.

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