Position: Boston Red Sox Baseball Data Architect

Location: Boston
Read the rest of this entry »

A few weeks ago Zach Buchanan of The Cincinnati Enquirer wrote a column titled “Can Michael Lorenzen be a two-way player?” It’s an intriguing question, and not an entirely far-fetched idea. The 25-year-old Reds right-hander was both a pitcher and a center fielder at Cal State Fullerton. Per Buchanan’s article, he could “kind of see it come to fruition” in the future.

For Christian Bethancourt, the future is now. As Eno Sarris shared yesterday in his look at two-way possibilities, the Padres are planning to use the strong-armed backstop both behind the plate and out of the bullpen.

Don’t count Bobby Dalbec among those looking to follow in Bethancourt’s footsteps. His resume suggests he could — Dalbec dominated on the mound in last year’s College World Series — but Boston drafted him as a third baseman, which is where he wants to stay. Our own Eric Longenhagen feels he has a future there, as Dalbec came in at No. 5 on that Red Sox’ top-prospect list.

When I talked to him this spring, the 21-year-old University of Arizona product told me he doesn’t particularly like pitching, and that he did it primarily because the Wildcats wanted him to play both ways. No longer having to perform double duty “took a big weight off [his] shoulders.”

He cited preparation as the biggest challenge.

Read the rest of this entry »

Below is an analysis of the prospects in the Boston Red Sox farm system. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from my own observations. The KATOH statistical projections, probable-outcome graphs, and (further down) Mahalanobis comps have been provided by Chris Mitchell. For more information on the 20-80 scouting scale by which all of my prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this. -Eric Longenhagen

The KATOH projection system uses minor-league data and Baseball America prospect rankings to forecast future performance in the major leagues. For each player, KATOH produces a WAR forecast for his first six years in the major leagues. There are drawbacks to scouting the stat line, so take these projections with a grain of salt. Due to their purely objective nature, the projections here can be useful in identifying prospects who might be overlooked or overrated. Due to sample-size concerns, only players with at least 200 minor-league plate appearances or batters faced last season have received projections. -Chris Mitchell

Other Lists
NL West (ARI, COL, LAD, SD, SF)
AL Central (CHW, CLE, DET, KC, MIN)
NL Central (CHC, CIN, PIT, MIL, StL)
NL East (ATL, MIA, NYM, PHI, WAS)
AL East (BAL, NYY, TB)

65 FV Prospects

Relevant/Interesting Metrics
Slashed .295/.360/.475 during big-league call-up.

Scouting Report
There were evaluators who didn’t know Benintendi was a draft-eligible sophomore as the 2015 season began. They had little reason to. He was solid but unspectacular as a freshman at Arkansas (in part due to injury), showing promising on-base skills but hitting for zero power while offering what appeared to be little physical projection. He didn’t play summer ball as a rising sophomore, either, as he recovered from a leg injury. He was allowed to do upper-body strength training and little else, so Benintendi bulked up. The following spring he was dominant, whacking 35 extra-base hits, posting a 1.205 OPS against mostly SEC opponents, and rocketing up boards into the top three or four for some clubs. The Red Sox drafted him seventh overall.

Read the rest of this entry »

In honor of Opening Day 2017, we thought it would be fun to take a look back at the five craziest Opening Day games (or home openers), as defined by swings in win expectancy. So we did, in this video we just posted at our Facebook page! Happy baseball!

Thanks to Sean Dolinar for his research assistance.

Sandy Leon was one of the more remarkable stories last season. As Jeff chronicled back in August, Leon took over for the Sox when they really needed a hero. He was that hero, at least for a brief time. He was nothing if not fresh — although that was mostly the result of not having played much at the major-league level previously. Now, he might be one of the most important members of the 2017 Red Sox team.

There are a couple of reasons Leon has become so important. The first and most important is that he has one of the highest (if not the highest) betas on his probable outcomes this season. Is Leon the guy who ran a 158 wRC+ from June to August, or the guy who ran a 44 wRC+ in September (and a 53 wRC+ over the first 107 plate appearances of his career, from 2012 to 2014)? The consensus seems to be something in between, but toward the lower end of that range. ZiPS has him pegged for a 78 wRC+; Steamer, a 74 wRC+ mark. Our depth charts split the difference at 76. The FANS projections are usually wildly optimistic, and that can be useful for players who have odd or small samples or some other manner of extenuating circumstance that might throw off those mean old algorithms. But even the FANS aren’t that optimistic: they have Leon down for just an 80 wRC+.

On the other hand, Leon told Evan Drellich of the Boston Herald recently that when he was signed as a professional, he was signed “because I could hit.” He said that defense was the thing on which he needed to work the most. It’s probably fair to say that, when he was signed, he needed to work on everything. Neither Baseball America nor John Sickels placed Leon among their top-10 Nationals prospect for 2008 — Sickels didn’t have him in his top 20. (Leon signed in 2007, but after both had compiled their Washington lists.) The same was true for the 2009 lists, and by that time, Derek Norris and Adrian Nieto were popping up on the Nats’ lists, so we can’t say that Leon was even the most highly rated catcher in the system.

Read the rest of this entry »

Major League Baseball has an interesting economic system, including a pay scale that is intentionally designed to limit the salaries of young players in order to funnel more money to veterans. All players with less than two full years of experience (and most with less than three) effectively have their salaries dictated to them, with no recourse to move the needle in any real fashion. Until a player becomes arbitration eligible, teams get to decide how much they want to pay a player in a given year, and there is nothing the player can do to change that number.

So, naturally, most pre-arbitration players make something close to the league minimum. With no market forces to force prices upwards, or even an arbitration panel to select between two options, there is just nothing in place to push pre-arb salaries up, and teams generally haven’t seen much value in paying higher wages to pre-arb players than they have to.

That might be slowly changing.

This week, the Cubs agreed to pay Kris Bryant $1.05 million for 2017, the highest salary ever awarded to a player with less than two years of service. Bryant’s salary is $50,000 more than Mike Trout got from the Angels back in 2014, and a $400,000 raise over what he made last year. Clearly, the Cubs wanted to reward the reigning NL MVP for helping bring the Cubs their first championship in over a century, and likely also wanted to avoid the negative publicity that would come from looking cheap right after reaping the financial benefits of a World Series title. In addition to giving Bryant the highest pre-arb contract a team has ever doled out, the Cubs also gave out substantial raises to Kyle Hendricks ($760K), Addison Russell ($644K), and Javier Baez ($609K).

Meanwhile, over in Boston, the Red Sox offered Mookie Bets $950K, but he declined to sign the contract, saying that he had a different price in mind. Because Betts has no actual leverage, the Red Sox simply renewed his contract unilaterally at their $950K offer. Betts will now get the third-highest salary for a pre-arb player ever, but he also took what he felt was a principled stand in not actually signing a contract that pays him less than he feels he’s worth.

So, in a few high profile examples, we’ve seen teams give significant raises to their best young players, perhaps attempting to buy some goodwill or some positive publicity for the kind of money that doesn’t really have any impact on a team’s bottom line. But this is still the exception, as most teams continue to determine pre-arb prices by simply creating an algorithm that looks at a player’s statistics and gives them an extra $10K or $20K above the league minimum depending on how they’ve performed in their first few years in the majors.

By simply citing a calculation that treats everyone the same way, teams can claim some degree of equity in a system designed to be unfair to these players, and the salary-by-algorithm model takes away most of the need for negotiation. The team simply says “this is what our model spits out”, and then, most organizations leave a little wiggle room to move up $5K to $10K from the calculated wage in order to give the agent the chance to tell the player they were able to negotiate his salary up slightly.

But this kind of no-leverage-negotiation doesn’t always go well, and some teams use the renewal ability to create a disincentive to not sign the contract, which often creates a small story for the media and pushes the wage structure back into the public eye, where fans are reminded that their best young players have no real say in their early-career wages. This is likely what happened in Houston last week, when the Astros renewed Carlos Correa for the league minimum, which is $535,000 for 2017.

We don’t know the specifics of the negotiation, but in talking with people who work for other teams, the belief within the game is that a minimum renewal for a player of Correa’s stature was probably threatened in order to try and induce him to sign the contract the team offered, and then the team felt obligated to follow through once Correa wasn’t willing to sign. This is a different approach from the one Boston took, where they didn’t create a punitive secondary offer for not signing, and Betts was able to take a cost-free stance on not signing his contract. Correa’s resistance to signing for what Houston may have originally offered likely did cost him some money.

From a pure publicity standpoint, the Cubs and Red Sox certainly look better in this ordeal than the Astros do, but I don’t think this is all as simple as “Chicago good, Houston evil”.

After all, the extra money the Cubs are giving Bryant in his pre-arb years pales in comparison to the money they cost him by sending him to Triple-A to begin the 2015 season, which delayed his free agency by a year. Not long ago, the Cubs chose to use the rights given them under the CBA to create as much value for their organization as they could, even though it came at the expense of Bryant’s future earnings. The Astros could argue that they are simply doing the same thing, using the rules that everyone agreed to in order to maximize the amount of money they have available to spend on free agents.

But a league-minimum renewal for Correa certainly doesn’t help the Astros reputation, which already could use some work. Even if they don’t believe that paying Correa a bit more than the league minimum is likely to buy them any future discount in arbitration or extension pricing — and there’s not much evidence to suggest that a player is going to leave a large amount of money on the table as a thank you for giving him an extra $50K or $100K a couple of years ago — it would seem that at least a few other organizations are acknowledging that there’s some value in rewarding young superstars with raises substantial enough to show up in a player’s bank account, rather than calibrating the salary algorithm to hand out minuscule increases simply because they can.

In the end, the Astros can probably say this will all be forgotten, and they’re probably right about that. And while it’s easy to make them the bad guys here, they’re participating in the system that the MLBPA has pushed for, and the union has made little effort to escalate the salaries of young players, instead focusing their efforts on trying to get teams to be able to pay as much as possible to veteran free agents. By giving pre-arb players no leverage in negotiations, the reasonable expectation is that teams are going to hold down costs for those players, and the union has continued to agree to that system as the accepted salary scale.

But with the Cubs and Red Sox bucking the trend, at least with a few of their best players, the Astros don’t look great here. And perhaps that negative P.R. will become the thing that puts at least some upwards pressure on salaries for young superstars. With teams rolling in money from their local TV contracts, there doesn’t seem to be much benefit to holding a hard line on wages for franchise players. Even though the Cubs gesture to Bryant is probably not going to get them any kind of discount on a long-term contract, and they can’t really be lauded for player-friendly tactics given how they handled the timing of his debut, at least there appears to be some move towards compensating the game’s best players a bit more than before.

In the end, the wage structure that takes money from guys like Bryant, Betts, and Correa and gives it to less-talented veterans is still one the union has tacitly endorsed, and if the players want this system to change, they’re going to have to impress upon their union to fight for a different pay model in the next CBA negotiations. But perhaps the Cubs and Red Sox paying their stars nearly $1 million each will make it less palatable for future teams to follow the Astros model, and baseball’s equivalent of peer pressure can serve as something of a market force for players who have no other leverage.

Two years ago, Max Scherzer and Jon Lester signed deals worth a total of $365 million between them, agreements which would keep both players employed into their age-36 seasons. The accepted wisdom, dating back at least as far as Mike Hampton and Barry Zito, is that signing free-agent starting pitchers to massive contracts into their 30s is a poor idea. If early returns are any indication, last season’s deal for Zack Greinke is unlikely to serve as evidence to the contrary. David Price’s injury scare, meanwhile, provides another reminder of the risks inherent to long-term agreements with pitchers.

Not all such commitments are doomed, however. We’re just entering the third year of the contracts signed by Scherzer and Lester, for example, and so far those deals look quite good.

Two offseasons ago, Lester and Scherzer represented the only two players to receive a contract of $100 million or more. Eight other players signed for at least $50 million, though. All 10 such contracts are listed below. For each player, I’ve also provided an estimate of the value he would have been expected to provide starting with the time he signed. To calculate this estimated value, I began with each player’s WAR forecast from the 2015 FanGraphs Depth chart projections, started with $7.5 million per win, added 5% inflation per year, and applied a standard aging curve. The rightmost column indicates whether the player in question was expected to outperform or underperform the cost of his contract.

The surplus and deficit figures for individual players vary by quite a bit. Overall, however, the actual contract and value numbers are within 1% of each other.

It might be hard to believe that, at the time, projection systems were calling for Chase Headley to record $100 million in value. Remember, though, that he had averaged more than five wins over the three previous seasons and had just completed a four-WAR year. From this point, it looked like Scherzer, Lester, and Hanley Ramirez signed contracts pretty close to their expected value. The number for Scherzer is probably even closer than what we see above after accounting for his deferrals, as he makes just $15 million per season over the playing life of the contract.

Read the rest of this entry »

The news is in. As Rob Bradford reported late last week, Boston lefty David Price will only miss seven to ten days with an elbow strain and won’t require surgery for the moment. That’s fortunate for the Red Sox, as the loss of Price would immediately have tested the club’s somewhat suspect depth.

Before news of Price’s injury surfaced, I was looking at his 2016 campaign to see what was amiss. It looks like the cutter was a big part of the problem. Given what happened on that pitch, and the information we now possess about Price’s elbow, it’s possible we can understand Price’s 2016 season much better.

Read the rest of this entry »

Heading into spring training, it looked as though there were five clear favorites for division titles plus the prospect of an interesting battle in the American League West. As in any year, injuries were always likely to have some kind of influence on those various divisional races. Now, still at the beginning of March, it’s possible that such an injury has already occurred: according to Pete Abraham of the Boston Globe, Red Sox left-hander David Price is seeking a second opinion on his elbow from Dr. James Andrews. The phrase “second opinion” combined with “James Andrews” isn’t frequently associated with ideal outcomes, and the Red Sox “are not optimistic” about the situation, per Jeff Passan.

If Price does indeed undergo Tommy John surgery and misses the 2017 season, the big advantage possessed by the Red Sox over the rest of the division would diminish considerably. Looking at the projections that include Price, the Red Sox profile as one of the very best teams in baseball, according to our Depth Chart Projections.

These are the top-17 teams by projected WAR — a group that includes all five AL East teams. Unsurprisingly, Jeff Sullivan noted just yesterday that the AL East looks to be the toughest division in baseball. David Price is currently projected for 4.7 WAR, seventh-highest total in baseball, although not highest on his team, as the Red Sox’ trade for Chris Sale would still leave the Red Sox with a clear ace and front-of-the-rotation starter. Entering the spring, Boston’s staff was heavy on the top and very light on depth. When Eno Sarris examined starting pitching depth recently, the Red Sox were near the bottom of the league.

Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Kopech’s fastball sits in the upper 90s and has reportedly been clocked at 105 mph. With that kind of electricity, he has one of the highest upsides of any pitching prospect in the game. Part of the package Chicago received from Boston in the Chris Sale deal, he’s a big part of the White Sox’ future.

He obviously needs to stay healthy, and continue to grow his game, for that to come to fruition. There’s risk in both areas. Kopech is just 20 years old, and thanks in part to a pair of off-the-field snafus, he’s thrown only 134.2 innings since being drafted 33rd overall out of Mount Pleasant (Texas) High School in 2014. He’s been a dynamo in that smallish sample, fanning 11.5 batters and allowing 6.2 hits per nine innings of work.

Kopech talked about his ongoing development, including his burgeoning velocity, late last week.

———

Kopech on his delivery and glove-side fastballs: “[Pitching coach Don Cooper] said he likes what I do mechanically, and a lot of that is from what I worked on with the Red Sox, but a few things have been tweaked. I’m trying to stay back over my back leg longer, and stay tall. Something that’s been really important for me is… not necessarily trying to stay in line toward the plate, but to have my momentum carried in the right direction. I’ve been a guy who throws across his body my whole career, but as long as I can keep my momentum going the right way, I feel like that’s more important than making a line.

Read the rest of this entry »