Eric A Longenhagen: Morning, everyone. Would like to extend condolences to the family and friends of Kevin Towers, who people in baseball held in high regard.
12:03
Blooper: How is the outlook for Jose Siri? He crushed it last year
12:04
Eric A Longenhagen: I buy it. Think he’s talented enough to make the approach (which is horrendous) work.
12:04
Rick C: What would an Atlanta package have looked like to match what the Brewers gave up for Yelich?
12:07
Eric A Longenhagen: Not sure there’s a clear match on prospect quality/readiness and package depth. Maybe something like Soroka, Anderson, Riley and a 40?
12:07
Scuffy McGee: Do the A’s have a true top of the rotation guy in the minors? Puk is a little wild for that designation I think
Lewis Brinson, CF (60 FV) – It’s important to note that Brinson opinions among scouts and executive vary pretty widely, especially for a player who has performed at the upper levels of the minors. Some people just don’t think he’s going to hit, but Brinson has made relevant swing adjustments multiple times as a pro and his strikeout rate has dropped every season. It’s been a very reasonable 20% over the last two years and he has monster complementary tools in plus power and plus speed.
Kiley McDaniel: Hello from sunny Orlando. I am prepared to chat with you.
12:03
Jared: Hi Kiley.
12:03
steev: Hi Kiley,
12:03
Kiley McDaniel: You guys are so formal, you can just skip to calling me biased next time
12:04
Alex: Hi Kiley, what are your thoughts on Cristian Pache’s ultimate offensive ceiling? Thanks!
12:06
Kiley McDaniel: He’s an interesting one. I’ve joked that he’s an LSU wide receiver athletically, so almost anything is possible in the long-term. More practically he needs to refine the approach and lift the ball a little more, but he’s also a 70 runner and if doesn’t improve at all he’s something like Kevin Pillar, which may not be what Braves fans want but that’s an everyday guy.
I noticed an underlying theme in both pieces I’ve written since coming back, along with many others written this offseason at FanGraphs. If you are a fan of a small- or medium-market team that will never spend to the luxury-tax line and thus always be at a disadvantage, do you want your team to try to always be .500 or better, or do you want them push all the chips in the middle for a smaller competitive window? In my stats vs. scouting article I referenced a progressive vs. traditional divide, which was broadly defined by design, but there are often noticeable differences in team-building strategies from the two overarching philosophies, which I will again illustrate broadly to show the two contrasting viewpoints.
The traditional clubs tend favor prospects with pedigree (bonus or draft position, mostly), with big tools/upside and the process of team-building is often to not push the chips into the middle (spending in free agency, trading prospects) until the core talents (best prospects and young MLB assets) have arrived in the big leagues and have established themselves. When that window opens, you do whatever you can afford to do within reason to make those 3-5 years the best you can and, in practice, it’s usually 2-3 years of a peak, often followed directly by a tear-down rebuild. The Royals appear to have just passed the peak stage of this plan, the Braves hope their core is established in 2019 and the Padres may be just behind the Braves (you could also argue the old-school Marlins have done this multiple times and are about to try again now).
On the progressive side, you have a more conservative, corporate approach where the club’s goal is to almost always have a 78-92 win team entering Spring Training, with a chance to make the playoffs every year, never with a bottom-ten ranked farm system, so they are flexible and can go where the breaks lead them. The valuation techniques emphasize the analytic more often, which can sometimes seem superior and sometimes seem foolish, depending on the execution. When a rare group of talent and a potential World Series contender emerges, the progressive team will push some chips in depending on how big the payroll is. The Rays have a bottom-five payroll and can only cash in some chips without mortgaging multiple future years, whereas the Indians and Astros are higher up the food chain and can do a little more when the time comes, and have done just that.
What we just saw in Pittsburgh (and may see soon in Tampa Bay) is what happens when a very low-payroll team sees a dip coming (controllable talent becoming uncontrolled soon) and doesn’t think there’s a World Series contender core, so they slide down toward the bottom end of that win range so that in a couple years they can have a sustainable core with a chance to slide near the top of it, rather than just tread water. Ideally, you can slash payroll in the down years, then reinvest it in the competing years (the Rays has done this in the past) to match the competitive cycle and not waste free-agent money on veterans in years when they are less needed. You could argue many teams are in this bucket, with varying payroll/margin for error: the D’Backs, Brewers, Phillies, A’s and Twins, along with the aforementioned Rays, Pirates, Indians and Astros.
Eleven clubs were over $175 million in payroll for the 2017 season (Dodgers, Yankees, Red Sox, Blue Jays, Tigers, Giants, Nationals, Rangers, Orioles, Cubs, Angels), so let’s toss those teams out and ask fans of the other 19 clubs: if forced to pick one or the other, which of these overarching philosophies would you prefer to root for?
Blue Jays, red birds, Conner Greene. The 22-year-old righty was the lone prospect involved in a trade Friday evening that sent power-hitting OF Randal Grichuk from St. Louis to Toronto in exchange for Greene and reliever Dominic Leone.
Greene is coming off a maddening statistical season at Double-A New Hampshire, where he accumulated a 5.29 ERA in 132.2 innings. He experienced some success till the beginning of summer, entering July with a 3.23 ERA despite erratic command, but started getting shelled as the season continued. Greene has a plus-plus fastball that sits 94-97 and will touch 99. The pitch has heavy sink and arm-side movement, as well as notable downhill angle to the plate — a result, that, of Greene’s size, relatively upright delivery, and high three-quarters arm slot. It’s Greene’s best pitch and he uses it heavily, perhaps too frequently, as his strikeout totals are not commensurate with his quality of stuff.
The curveball (which was bad last fall) has taken a huge step forward and is now Greene’s best secondary pitch. It has traditional power curveball shape, bite, and depth. It projects to a 55 on the scouting scale. Greene’s changeup is inconsistent and a bit easy to identify out of his hand, as Greene is prone to drop his arm slot when he throws it. Due to his loose, fluid arm action and incredible arm speed, though, some scouts project quite heavily on the changeup. It pretty conservatively projects to average and has more upside than that. There’s a chance Greene develops two above-average secondaries to pair with his plus-plus fastball, but no measure of his ability to miss bats indicates anything remotely close to that.
Greene struggles to repeat his release point and has 30-grade control. He walked 13% of hitters he faced in 2017 and 83 total hitters in his 132.2 innings. Unless Greene’s ability to locate greatly improves, he’ll wind up in the bullpen. It makes sense to continue developing him as a starter on the off chance that he develops 45 or better command and simply as a way to get him more reps than he’d get out of the bullpen, but the Cardinals were quick to move Sandy Alcantara to the bullpen last year and seemed inclined to keep him there. They’re thought, by other clubs, to be considering pulling the bullpen ripcord on either or both of Jordan Hicks and Ryan Helsley. Greene would seem to fall into that bucket of still-raw, upper-level arms. He has a chance to pitch as a mid-rotation starter if the command comes, but he’s more likely to be a hard-throwing, above-average bullpen arm. He’s a 45 Future Value prospect.
Kiley McDaniel contributed to the scouting notes on Conner Greene.
As a small-market club, the Pirates have a limited margin for error to be competitive.
(Photo: Keith Allison)
If you’ve read any of the dozens of articles over the years trying to create a framework for player asset values (putting a dollar amount on a player’s value), you’re aware of the biggest weakness of this genre of article. Take a star player, run him through a marginal-value analysis, and you’ll be disappointed in what it says about his trade value. Before we jump into the Gerrit Cole and Andrew McCutchen trades, follow me down a thought-experiment rabbit hole.
Clayton Kershaw is the best pitcher in baseball and Steamer projects him as a six-win player next year. Using the roughly $9-10 million at which a win is currently valued on the open market, Kershaw is likely to produce something between $50 and $60 million of value next year; let’s call it $55 million. Would multiple teams bid that amount for his services on a one year deal? Probably yes, because there’s some surplus value at that salary for which the formula fails to account. It doesn’t consider, for example, either extreme payrolls (i.e. the Dodgers’ on one hand, the A’s on the other) or more critical spots on the win curve (moving an 87-win team to a 93-win team is worth far more revenue-wise than 65 to 71).
So what would the A’s bid? They had an $86 million payroll last year, and they obviously wouldn’t give nearly two-thirds of it to one player. Oakland’s value for Kershaw would likely be whatever the maximum is that they would pay for any player, but that number is much lower than what the Dodgers would spend, maybe $20 million. Granted, these are extreme cases, but it illustrates the limitations of using a one-size-fits-all dollar-per-win calculator in specific instances, even if it works fine in aggregate.
More Granular Valuation
I point all that out to illustrate the fact that players aren’t worth the same to every team. Kershaw’s value, on which we all basically agree, varies by $30-40 million from the A’s to the Dodgers on just a one-year deal. So wouldn’t it follow that the A’s and Dodgers would value other players differently, too?
Note that WAR figures account for each player’s first six major-league seasons. KATOH denotes the stats-only version of the projection system, while KATOH+ denotes the methodology that includes a player’s prospect rankings.
*****
Colin Moran, 3B (Profile) KATOH: 3.0 WAR KATOH+: 2.8 WAR
The Marlins made Moran the sixth-overall pick back in 2013, but his stock has cratered since. His bat never developed the way scouts thought it would, culminating in a paltry .259/.329/.368 line in 2016. He showed signs of life last year, however, hitting .308/.373/.543 in his second crack at Triple-A. For the first time as a professional, he hit for power — largely by upping his fly-ball rate by 10 percentage points — while simultaneously cutting eight points off of his strikeout rate.
“Scouts vs. stats” is an expression that boils a complex, gray issue into clear black-and-white sides,in a way that’s familiar to those who follow political media. In the reality of front-office decision-making, however, this “debate” has been settled for years and the obvious answer was always “both.”
In fact, the issue has moved past simply using both. Until recently, if one suggested that a club should move further toward one side at the expense of the other, anyone could shoot back with a counter example of recent success from the other end of the spectrum. That’s a bit harder do now: two years removed from the Royals’ latest World Series appearance and three years out from the 2010-2014 Giants run, there isn’t a current standard bearer for the traditional point of view, even if that’s just cyclical and I’m using a somewhat subjective label.
The final four clubs standing in each of 2016 and 2017 — the Astros, Blue Jays, Cubs, Dodgers, Indians, and Yankees — would all rank among the top 10 of any industry poll of the league’s most progressive clubs. If you want to argue that their success is the result of variance, a blip, or mere coincidence, this development isn’t just the product of randomness. There’s an actual explanation. In these last two seasons, we’ve seen a fundamental change in the style of play (a greater emphasis on the air ball, quick hooks on starters, more aggressive bullpen usage, etc.) — particularly in the postseason. A progressive club, by definition, will adapt more quickly to such changes.
