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It’s time for the annual refresh of FanGraphs+!

Let’s call it a refresh, because if you pay $5.99 for FanGraphs+, you get access to our articles for ESPN Insider for a full calendar year. And buying now also gives you access to all the FG+ research and pieces from past years.

But it’s also a big moment, because we’ve worked on 1200+ player caps for you, to help you prepare for the upcoming season. And yes, with that many player caps, there are plenty of fun ones, full of snark and celebration, just waiting for that random day you decide to look up Cody Ransom’s stats.

And, thanks to the hard work of our in-house analysts, we have the stable of long research pieces that form the ‘annual’ portion of FanGraphs+. Take a look at the table of contents:

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Kevin Towers is a confident, talkative man. He’ll tell you what he’s thinking about, and he’ll tell you what he’s doing. There aren’t many anonymous leaks that come out of the Diamondbacks organization because Towers doesn’t exactly keep many secrets — even when he’s actively negotiating. Towers has spent much of this offseason talking about how badly he wanted to acquire a No. 1-type starting pitcher. He was in on Masahiro Tanaka; he’s been in on David Price. He admitted he wanted to make a significant splash. Just the other day Arizona signed Bronson Arroyo for two years and $23.5 million. Or three years and $30 million. The bigger point is that Arizona signed Bronson Arroyo, and now they’re finished.

Arroyo, of course, is no one’s idea of an ace. Most simply, the best pitchers get strikeouts, limit walks and limit dingers. Arroyo does one of those things. He’s 37 in a couple of weeks, meaning he’s basically 37 now. There’s little sexiness with this acquisition, and Towers would tell you he knows he didn’t get a No. 1. Still, Arroyo does have something going in his favor. It’s just a matter of how much you believe in it.

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On Wednesday, the Braves announced that they had signed Freddie Freeman to an eight year, $135 million extension. I’ve already written about the diminishing need for a track record and about whether this deal heralds a coming market correction, but hopefully you’ll indulge some more thoughts about this contract and the changing economic structure of Major League Baseball.

There’s no question that teams are throwing more and more money at players who haven’t reached free agency; this is the 15th extension of $100+ million signed in the last three years by a player who was still under team control for at least another year. Players no longer have to reach the open market in order to obtain nine figure contracts, and as we’ve seen with Joey Votto, Elvis Andrus, and now Freddie Freeman, players don’t even have to get to their walk year to land a monster extension anymore. And while this shift towards big money deals for non-free agents is a new thing in MLB, it might be part of an ongoing trend that is shifting baseball’s payroll distribution back to what it was before “the PED era”.

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After having typically appeared in the entirely venerable pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections were released at FanGraphs last year. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the San Francisco Giants. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / Los Angeles NL / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Oakland / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / San Diego / Seattle / St. Louis / Tampa Bay / Texas / Toronto / Washington.

Batters
A haphazard inspection of the 29 ZiPS posts to have preceded this one reveals that only one field player (Mike Trout, at 9.5) is projected to produce as many wins in 2014 as Buster Posey. Andrew McCutchen also crosses the six-win threshold. Everyone else: less than that. Offensively, Posey has demonstrated excellent control of the strike zone and also power on contact. Defensively, he plays a difficult position and plays it well. That’s an ideal player, more or less.

Not entirely like Buster Posey is free-agent acquisition and probable left fielder Michael Morse. Other people smarter than the present author have questioned the wisdom of the Morse signing for the Giants. Germane to this post is that ZiPS renders objectively the reasons for those questions. Morse has one skill, his raw power, nor is ZiPS even particularly confident about that: the .162 mark projected here would only be fourth on the club, not much greater than the figures assigned to Roger Kieschnick and Brett Pill.

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Even a couple of days after the news broke about the Braves locking up Freddie Freeman to a $135 million contract, there remains a lot of residual skepticism about this price for a non-star player who was still three years from free agency. Yesterday I compared the deal to similar contracts signed by Ryan Braun and Elvis Andrus, but Freeman doesn’t have Ryan Braun’s track record and Andrus was a year ahead of him in service time, so both comparisons required a little imagination. The reality is that we haven’t seen a contract like this for a player like Freeman before. The guys who have landed $100+ million extensions while still early in their careers have almost exclusively been superstars (Braun, Troy Tulowitzki, and Buster Posey), and Freeman is not at that level. This is the first nine figure commitment we’ve seen to a player this far from free agency who isn’t already one of the true elite players in the sport.

The size of the Freeman commitment stands out because, over the last four or five years, we’ve seen a rash of young player contract extensions that have generally been for far less than what the Braves just gave their first baseman; in most cases, the total guarantees were half as large as what Freeman just got from Atlanta. It’s easy to react negatively to 8/$135M for Freeman when you see contracts like 7/$80M for Carlos Gonzalez, 6/$66M for Nick Markakis, 6/$51M for Andrew McCutchen, Justin Upton, and Jay Bruce, and a bunch of contracts hanging in the 5/30M range for good young pitchers like Madison Bumgarner, Chris Sale, Jon Lester, Derek Holland. These prices are what we’re used to seeing in terms of long term deals for good young players with potential but also real risk. Freeman’s deal blew all those contracts out of the water, even though as a player at this point in his career, he’s pretty similar to many of them.

So that leaves us with two options. Either the Braves massively overpaid Freeman — a pretty popular sentiment, it appears — or that players and agents have concluded that the previously agreed to price levels were simply too team friendly. I’m going with the latter.

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As the calendar has flipped to February, we are officially transitioning out of free agent season — though a few stragglers remain — and moving into extension season. With arbitration providing the nudge for teams and players to run valuations and negotiate over their differences, it’s only natural that these discussions often turn into conversations about long term deals that avoid the process entirely, and the spring training months provide the best opportunity for a team and a player to come to a mutual agreement on a mutli-year extension. While Clayton Kershaw kicked off the extension season a few weeks ago, Freddie Freeman’s new deal with the Braves is a reminder that extension season isn’t limited to just big market teams with overflowing revenues, and also a reminder of just how important a player’s age has become in long term valuations.

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After having typically appeared in the entirely venerable pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections were released at FanGraphs last year. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Oakland Athletics. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / Los Angeles NL / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / San Diego / Seattle / St. Louis / Tampa Bay / Texas / Toronto / Washington.

Batters
What the depth-chart graphic below doesn’t represent very well, but what is still true of the Oakland A’s, is that they’ll probably be getting value from players who aren’t proper starters. Of particular note in this regard is outfielder Craig Gentry, for whom Oakland traded Michael Choice and a friend to Texas this offseason. Gentry’s defensive figures over the last three season have been, speaking in very technical sabermetric terms, entirely bananas. Accordingly, it’s not so unexpected to see him receive a very optimistic projection here (2.4 zWAR) in just 300 or so plate appearances.

Also of note: John Jaso is projected as a catcher here, but is likely to get a significant numbers of plate appearances — perhaps the bulk of them — at DH. Even a poor defensive catcher still receives a pretty substantial increase in value by way of positional adjustment — relative to a designated hitter, certainly. Expecting him to produce two wins in a DH capacity might be unrealistic. Billy Butler posted a 116 wRC+ last season, for example, while DH-ing almost exclusively and still produced just a 1.4 WAR.

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On yesterday’s podcast, Carson and I had a brief conversation about how different history can look with the benefit of hindsight. Or, maybe more accurately, how different baseball history can occasionally look if you apply our current tools and analysis to players and transactions from before the statistical revolution really became popular. That isn’t to say our current tools are perfect — I’m sure in 15 to 20 years, we’ll look back at our current analysis and see a bunch of problems — but I think it’s pretty clear that both the people running baseball teams and watching baseball games understand the relative value of different players better now than they used to. And there’s perhaps no single transaction that better illustrates the stark changes in player valuation we’ve seen over the last 15 years than the trade that sent Ken Griffey Jr to the Reds after the 1999 season.

Griffey was, at that point, one of the game’s true elite. He’d racked up +20 WAR from ages 27 to 29, and that’s with defensive metrics that thought his defense was just average in center field, a sentiment which opposing managers didn’t agree, given that he won a gold glove in each of those three seasons. If he wasn’t the best player in the game, he wasn’t far off from that mark, and because he decided he didn’t want to play in Seattle anymore, the Mariners had to put him on the trade block.

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In its current state, the Yankees’ system is rather pedestrian, or middle of the road, when compared to the other 29 teams in Major League Baseball. The talent in the upper levels of the system underwhelmed in 2013 and many of the top prospects also dealt with significant injuries. The good news, though, is that the club has drafted extremely well and paired that with a strong international scouting presence, which made good use of their limited budgets. If a few of the lower level sleepers break out in 2014, this could turn into a Top 10, if not Top 5, system in short order. Read the rest of this entry »

After having typically appeared in the entirely venerable pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections were released at FanGraphs last year. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Washington Nationals. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / Los Angeles NL / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / San Diego / Seattle / St. Louis / Tampa Bay / Texas / Toronto.

Batters
Despite recording about -5 runs on just errors alone, third baseman Ryan Zimmerman managed to produce three wins in 2013, a figure which ZiPS expects him to approximate in 2014. Here’s what ZiPS likely knows about Zimmerman: that his defensive figures have been decidedly less impressive in recent years than previously. Here’s what it can’t know: that one reason for Zimmerman’s decline is a combination of shoulder weakness and perhaps even some manner of anxiety which have conspired to affect his throwing accuracy.

Reports this offseason suggest that Zimmerman will receive a modest number of starts at first base, in place of Adam LaRoche. This idea has merit to it. Not only might it allow Zimmerman to avoid having to contend daily with the throwing obligations of third base, but one also notes that Zimmerman is expected to outhit LaRoche by ca. 30 points of wOBA.

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