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The Rangers traded Ian Kinsler for Prince Fielder. You know this already. I’ve already written a post about this trade, in fact, detailing why I love this deal for the Tigers. If baseball trading were a zero sum game, this would mean that I hate this move for the Rangers, since a big win would have to be offset by a big loss on the other side. But baseball trades are not a zero sum game. There are mutually beneficial trades. The Rangers are now hoping this is one of those deals where both sides get better.

The Rangers had to move a middle infielder. They couldn’t go into 2014 with Jurickson Profar as a super utility guy behind Elvis Andrus and Ian Kinsler again. They had three starting middle infielders, and Kinsler wasn’t interested in becoming a starting first baseman, so shifting him over to make room for Profar probably wasn’t an option. Someone had to go.

So, in that sense, this deal is not quite as straight forward as it is from the Tigers perspective. Detroit turned a +3 WAR player into a +3 WAR player and saved a bunch of money in the process. For the Rangers, though, the context is the reason the deal got done, and simply comparing the value of the player going out with the value of the player coming in doesn’t work. This deal was made because of the other players on the roster, the ones not getting traded. So let’s try and sort this all out.

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(I decided to break this deal down in two separate posts, because there are too many angles to fit it all into one. Texas fans, we’ll talk about this deal from the Rangers perspective in a separate article.)

The Detroit Tigers were a very good baseball team, but with Omar Infante heading for free agency and too much money committed to other players to keep him around, they had a hole at second base. They also had too many designated hitters, with Victor Martinez’s presence forcing both Prince Fielder and Miguel Cabrera to play the field even when they really couldn’t. With Cabrera’s body breaking down in September, it became pretty clear that something had to give, and an obvious solution was moving one of their DHs could open up some money for them to fill their second base hole.

Instead of making a series of smaller transactions that accomplished that goal, the Tigers instead just found a way to directly exchange Prince Fielder for Ian Kinsler, filling their hole at second base, freeing up their DH logjam, and saving enough money to potentially keep the rest of their core in tact. This is a pretty fantastic start to the off-season for Dave Dombrowski.

Before we get too much further into the commentary, let’s break down the specifics of what swapping Prince Fielder for Ian Kinsler actually works out to.

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No team has been on a faster pace early in free agency so far than the Phillies, who have added Marlon Byrd to their outfield and agreed to retain catcher Carlos Ruiz. As you certainly know, both moves have been met with derision in certain corners of the baseball world, partially because both Byrd & Ruiz are older players with recent PED suspensions and at least one lousy year in the last two, and partially because Ruben Amaro’s reputation is such these days that he could find a way to trade John Mayberry for Mike Trout and people would still laugh at him about it.

Amaro’s earned a lot of that scorn, obviously, thanks to the atrocious Ryan Howard extension, his bets on Michael Young & Delmon Young last winter, and his insistence on retaining an aging core as the team has fallen from 102 wins to 81 to 73 in the last three years. But while these new moves aren’t exactly slam dunks, you can defend each of them on their own. Byrd’s contract is exactly in line with what basically everyone on the internet — FanGraphs readers included — expected he would get, and while guaranteeing Ruiz three years at his age is a lot harder to stomach, Dave Cameron did lay out a convincing case for why it can be considered a reasonable move. Read the rest of this entry »

The news is breaking now. It seems that Josh Johnson has gotten $8 million dollars from the Padres to pitch in 2014, according to Jerry Crasnick. By itself, that is an interesting match — Johnson gets to go to the National League and reboot his value in a pitcher’s park, and the Padres get a high-variance player for a little bit more than the price of a win.

But then I heard a little nugget about the contract, seconds before my internet went out and Jeff Passan broke the news while I was mashing my keyboard frantically: The Padres get a $4 million option on Johnson in 2015 if he pitches fewer than seven starts in 2014. That little nugget contains multitudes.

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Over the weekend, I wrote a piece for ESPN Insider and FanGraphs+ based around the question of how players like Jacoby Ellsbury have aged previously. There’s a belief among some that speed-and-defense players like Ellsbury are bad bets after they turn 30, since a large chunk of their value is tied to what they can do with their legs, and speed peaks earlier than other skills. However, there’s also data that shows that faster players actually age better than most other player types. Instead of just trying to show you what the aging curves say, though, I figured showing how similar players to Ellsbury actually did might be more appealing.

So, here’s the basic gist of how I went about finding Ellsbury-like players, though I’ll note that the process here is slightly different from the table I used in the ESPN piece, since I have a little more room to explain my thought process and findings here. I went to the leaderboards and set the date range to cover the last 30 years. I set the age filter to cover ages 27 to 29, the same ages as the last three seasons of Ellsbury’s career. To narrow it down to Ellsbury-type players, I used the positional tabs to select only outfielders, and then put a filter in place to cap Isolated Slugging at .180, which gets rid of the power hitters who are not really anything like Ellsbury to begin with. I also put in a minimum of 1,500 plate appearances, so that we only got players who were roughly full time players over those three seasons.

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Heading into the winter, it wasn’t entirely clear what the market for Carlos Ruiz was going to look like. He’s headed into his age-35 season, coming off his worst offensive year since 2008, and served a 25 game suspension for failing a drug test (for using amphetamines, specifically Adderall) last year. However, Ruiz proved to be a popular early market target for many teams, and after a week or two of a mini-bidding war, the Phillies have re-signed Ruiz to a three year, $26 million contract, a bit more than the FanGraphs Crowd’s 2/$17M forecast.

Because the Phillies have a long history of overpaying for aging players, the easy narrative is that Ruben Amaro strikes again. He just guaranteed Ruiz $8.5 million for his age-37 season, and the list of catchers who have been productive at that point in their careers is very small indeed. This deal, like almost every other contract signed by the Phillies in recent years, is unlikely to end well.

However, I will continue to point out that we should not evaluate a free agent contract by how it looks in the last year of the contract. Free agents on multi-year deals often take less money in AAV than they are worth for the beginning of the contract in exchange for being overpaid at the back end. This is entirely normal, and nearly every free agent contract is going to work the same way: value up front, albatross at the end. We cannot simply state that the Ruiz signing is a poor one for the Phillies because Ruiz will be overpaid at the end of the deal.

And while Ruiz is an aging catcher coming off a poor season, I think it would be useful to keep the lessons of Russell Martin in mind when talking about this deal for Ruiz, and perhaps hold off on the easy shots at Amaro for re-signing yet another old guy, since this old guy might still be a good player.

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Earlier this year, Jack Moore reviewed Josh Johnson’s inability to get hitters out while pitching from the stretch. Johnson and the Jays were very much aware of the situation, but even still, it did not improve as the season went on. In the end, Johnson limited batters to a .315 wOBA and a .307 BABIP when he worked out of a full wind-up, while opposing batters had a .440 wOBA and a .450 BABIP when Johnson worked out of the stretch. His BABIP while pitching from the stretch was 73 points higher than any other pitcher that made at least 15 starts in 2013.

The simple answer this dramatic split would be to simply point at Johnson’s BABIP and say he was unlucky. If one were to review the video from the first inning of his July 27th start against Houston, one could certainly believe that:
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Since 2008, PITCHf/x has collected six years of detailed pitch information. A raw search I just did shows 1,991 pitches over that span thrown at at least 100 miles per hour. Of those, 469, or just under 24%, were thrown in 2013. That one season represents just under 17% of the data. That’s…kind of interesting, and a little bit meaningful, but I probably shouldn’t have started with this. I probably should have started with this:

This year’s postseason was littered with hard-throwing starters and relievers. It seemed like bullpens were trotting out hard-throwing reliever after hard-throwing reliever, and if you’re at all active on Twitter, you might’ve noticed a few conversations taking place among certain big-leaguers. Prominent among them was Brandon McCarthy, who noted a few times that the landscape didn’t used to look like this, even just a few years ago. The feeling now is that every team has a handful of flamethrowers. The feeling used to be that a flamethrower was something special, something extraordinary to be cherished. The feeling, basically, is that yesterday’s 92 is today’s 96.

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The official 2013 National League Most Valuable Player is Andrew McCutchen, who was terrific. From what anyone can tell, he’s a very deserving winner, but the voting still came with a few little controversies. For one, Paul Goldschmidt didn’t pick up a single first-place vote, and all season he was incredibly clutch. For two, a pair of first-place votes went to Yadier Molina, both of them coming out of St. Louis. One of those writers put Matt Carpenter second, and it’s easy to write that off as simple bias. If you’re the only people to vote for a guy, and it’s a guy on your hometown team, and everyone else votes for another guy, that’s going to be pretty conspicuous.

My first impression, though, was that, even if they followed the wrong process, they might well have stumbled upon the right answer. Or at least, a good answer. Those people in St. Louis see Molina more than anybody else, and Molina, more than anybody else, seems to have value that’s tricky to measure. Catchers are hard, and Molina might be the best one, and he’s a leader who has the pitching staff’s full respect. Pitchers don’t shake Molina off. They say he’s the heart and soul of the ballclub, and I’m open to the idea that a bunch of Molina’s real value is basically hidden in other numbers. But I wasn’t satisfied with just a belief.

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Today, the Baseball Writers Assocation of America — an organization to which I belong — will wrap up their awards announcements by handing out the MVPs for both the AL and NL. Andrew McCutchen is very likely to win the award for the NL, and Miguel Cabrera is going to get his second consecutive trophy for the AL. The only drama surrounds how much of a landslide each will win by; it’s probably not going to be close in either case.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t other worthy candidates. Clayton Kershaw had an excellent season, as did Yadier Molina, Matt Carpenter, and Carlos Gomez, and you could make a case for any of those four. In the AL, obviously, there’s Mike Trout, who was the best player in baseball this year and would win this thing in a landslide if voters saw it as the Best Player award. But, as you’re going to hear numerous times today, this is not the Best Player award; it’s the Most Valuable Player award.

So, we’re going to sit through another day of explanations for why best and most valuable aren’t the same thing. To be honest, I have no real interest in those explanations, or in arguing about them, because the discussion is almost entirely removed from the game of baseball. Few of the people who cast their votes for Miguel Cabrera actually think he had a better year than Trout this season; they just believe they’re answering a question that deals with more than how a baseball player performed for his team over the last year.

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