Archive for Featured

The Major League season is, I guess, already three games old, but for basically everyone who isn’t the Dodgers, today is still the real Opening Day. We have a nearly full slate of games on the docket, and we’ll be live blogging throughout the day here on the site. But before we get to the actual games, let’s run through a few more preview-ish things I believe about the 2014 that you might not infer from my picks in the Staff Predictions (NL, AL) posts from Friday.

1. I believe that the Cubs might be better than we think.

Read the rest of this entry »

The 2014 Major League Baseball season kicks off for real on Monday — no, random days where the Dodgers play someone and it’s the only game of the day don’t count — and so, as a baseball site, we are compelled to offer our staff’s predictions for the upcoming season. We are compelled because you like to read our staff predictions, even though they are terrible. And boy are they terrible.

Among last year’s gems were things like Aaron Hicks, American League Rookie of the Year. Aaron Hicks did not get a single vote by any one voter on a Rookie of the Year ballot last year. We also had the Angels and Blue Jays making the playoffs. Predicting baseball is silly. Everyone is terrible at it, including us. But as long as you know that going in, it’s still kind of a fun exercise.

Read the rest of this entry »

The 2014 Major League Baseball season kicks off for real on Monday — no, random days where the Dodgers play someone and it’s the only game of the day don’t count — and so, as a baseball site, we are compelled to offer our staff’s predictions for the upcoming season. We are compelled because you like to read our staff predictions, even though they are terrible. And boy are they terrible.

Among last year’s gems were things like Aaron Hicks, American League Rookie of the Year. Aaron Hicks did not get a single vote by any one voter on a Rookie of the Year ballot last year. We also had the Angels and Blue Jays making the playoffs. Predicting baseball is silly. Everyone is terrible at it, including us. But as long as you know that going in, it’s still kind of a fun exercise.

Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday, the Tigers agreed to make Miguel Cabrera the highest paid player in baseball history. If you look at the entirety of their future financial commitments to him as one single entity rather than two separate agreements, then this is the biggest contract in U.S. sports history. Over the next decade, the Tigers have agreed to pay Cabrera $292 million, a staggering figure for any player, and even more stunning given the context in which it was handed out. Cabrera turns 31 in less than a month. He wasn’t eligible to hit the free agent market for another two years. The contract begins with his age-33 season, and yet, without the benefit of free agency as leverage, he got more for eight years than Robinson Cano got for 10.

As you might imagine, I have a lot of thoughts about this contract. They don’t all agree with each other. So, let’s just go through the things I believe about this deal.

Read the rest of this entry »

For the last few weeks, word has been circulating that the Pirates wanted to sign Starling Marte to a long term contract, but that he had rebuffed their first few offers over the off-season. Yesterday, however, the Pirates finally changed his mind, agreeing to a six year contract that raises the question: if this is all that it took to get him signed, were their initial offers that he would pay them for the right to wear the uniform?

Yes, that comment is said in jest, and yes, the $31 million guaranteed money that Marte received in this deal is hardly chump change. But let’s call a spade a spade here: Marte left a ton of money on the table, and this contract is remarkably favorable to the Pirates.

Read the rest of this entry »

Good news everyone! You can now make your picks in FanGraphs: The Game for the 2014 season!

Please note you will be able to change the team of any of your players up until you first spend money. So, if you want your players to be on new teams, I advise doing it before you make any picks. You can do this on the settings page.

In addition, your player will keep all of his stats from the previous two seasons and continue on to the next year of his career.

Lastly, if you had autopick set last year, it has now be unset. If you want to keep playing with autopick on, you will need to make your autopick selections again.

And for those of you who are rookies to FanGraphs: The Game…

Read the rest of this entry »

Over the next couple of weeks, we’re taking a look at some of the most interesting teams in baseball – one contender and one rebuilder from each league. What makes a team “interesting”? Taking advantage of the extreme nature of its ballpark, for a couple of clubs. Bucking some of the game’s most prevalent current trends and having success, for another. Or almost completely breaking from every pattern displayed in a club’s fairly successful recent past. Today, it’s the Chicago White Sox, the most interesting rebuilding team in the American League. It’s interesting in part because it’s been quite awhile since the term “rebuilding” could truly be applied to the inhabitants of US Cellular Field. Read the rest of this entry »

For the last decade or so, various versions of payroll efficiency estimators have popped up to measure which teams are getting the most bang for their buck in terms of spending. The late Doug Pappas pioneered this research in MLB, using a formula he called Marginal Dollars, Marginal Wins. That is basically the ancestor of the present $/WAR calculation we often cite, looking at the cost a team paid to add wins to their side of the ledger. These kinds of calculations have helped identify which teams have invested their resources wisely, and which teams are simply squandering their wealth while getting little in return.

However, there’s always been a bit of a problem with $/WAR calculations, because we know that the value of each win added is not linear. The value of a win is better described as a curve, with a sharp inflection in the mid-80s when each additional win significantly increases a team’s chance of making the postseason and going on to compete for a World Series title. A team should not be incentivized to pay as much as for their 78th win as they are for their 88th win, and a rational GM would indeed pay more to make a marginal upgrade on a contender than he would if his team was expected to finish out of the running.

$/WAR calculations ignore the marginal differences in the value of a win, and end up putting too much emphasis on teams that manage to be good and cheap while penalizing teams that are great and expensive, even though the wins added that pushed the great team into that next tier are the ones that make the most sense to overpay for. So, today, I thought I’d try a new spin on the team efficiency calculations, using our expected playoff odds instead of a team’s projected WAR to measure the value of team spending.

Read the rest of this entry »

Over the next couple of weeks, let’s take a look at some of the most interesting teams in baseball – one contender and one rebuilder from each league. What makes a team “interesting”? Taking advantage of the extreme nature of its ballpark, for a couple of clubs. Bucking some of the game’s most prevalent current trends and having success, for another. Or almost completely breaking from every pattern displayed in a club’s fairly successful recent past. To kick it off, let’s look at our AL contender, the defending World Series champion Boston Red Sox, who a little more than a year and a half ago, were considered by most to be the single most underachieving team in the game. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last few years, we’ve seen several players with stalled markets become the beneficiary of an unexpected serious injury. Prince Fielder failed to generate interest at the price that he was asking until Victor Martinez blew out his knee and the Tigers suddenly had an opening in their line-up. Ervin Santana apparently wasn’t all that interested in playing in Baltimore or Toronto, so Kris Medlen’s elbow problems led him to Atlanta. One team’s needs in November and December might not be the same as their needs in February or March, and while players who sign late generally get less money than players who sign early, needs can develop that increase demand for a player closer to Opening Day.

So, naturally, when news broke on Saturday that Jose Iglesias was going to miss at least four months and maybe the entire season, all eyes turned to Stephen Drew. He’s the only free agent SS of substance left on the market, a solid contributor who held down the position for the defending World Champs a year ago and would perhaps even be an upgrade over Iglesias for the 2014 season. Drew’s market has been essentially non-existent at the price that Scott Boras is asking for, but the Tigers make all kinds of sense for Drew.

They’re a contender with a sudden need for a shortstop, they pick towards the end of the first round, they’ve historically been willing to give up draft picks to sign free agents, and they’re a strong contender with a real shot at winning the World Series. Once Iglesias’ injury became known, the general assumption is that Drew would be in camp with the Tigers within a few days. Except the obvious fit isn’t such an obvious fit for Dave Dombrowski, who has reportedly suggested to local media that he will not pursue Drew as a replacement for Iglesias. And in this instance, I think he’s entirely correct: the Tigers do not need Stephen Drew.

Read the rest of this entry »