The Astros are not a good baseball team. But, as Tyler Kepner detailed in the New York Times this weekend, they are a baseball team with a plan. Whether or not that will lead to wins this season is another matter, but the fact that they have a plan is shining through, even amidst the deluge of runs allowed. Read the rest of this entry »
Monday night, Jesus Montero went where no man has gone before — at least in 2013 — with this mammoth home run to center field at Minute Maid Park. With the blast, Montero became the first player to homer to dead-center field at Minute Maid this season. Observe, all home runs at Minute Maid Park, with 2013 home runs in blue (Montero’s marked by a “+”):
Rick Ankiel’s season began in about the best possible fashion. With the Astros holding on to a 4-2 lead on Opening Day, Ankiel was sent up to hit for Brandon Barnes in the bottom of the sixth inning. Derek Lowe threw him a meatball, and he responded by hitting said meatball 373 feet, good enough for a three run homer that would essentially put the game away. It’s hard to do much better than that on your first at-bat of the season.
Since that at-bat, though, things haven’t gone so well. Here’s Ankiel’s play log for the 2013 season. Read the rest of this entry »
After a hard-fought, closely-followed battle, Bryce Harper beat out former relief pitcher Micah Owings for the starting left field position in Washington. Okay, Owings was never really in competition to take playing time from the reigning Rookie of the Year, Jayson Werth or Adam LaRoche — the three players in positions accessible to Owings’s limited defensive upside.
But here is the deal:
B) The more time between at bats, the more a hitter struggles. (The Book.)
C) The more times a player faces a certain pitcher, the greater the advantage for the hitter — both in a game and in a career. (The Book Blog.)
All three of these elements suggest pitchers should hit, let’s say, about .145/.180/.190, or -10 wRC+ (that is, 110% worse than league average). Micah Owings — a pitcher — has, through 219 PA, hit .283/.310/.502 with 9 home runs and 14 doubles, a 104 wRC+.
Micah Owings is a good hitter. Possibly a great hitter. The Nationals have a bunch of those. But surely someone else out there could use a bench bat — or a starting outfielder — with the ability to pitch a 111 ERA- every now and then.
Read the rest of this entry »
Here on the site, we’re currently doing a series called the Positional Power Rankings, going through each team’s strengths and weaknesses at each spot on the field. Well, this is also a positional power ranking of sorts. The position is each team’s financial health. The ranking? More like placing the teams in tiers: the teams most constrained by their finances; the teams in the middle; and the most financially-successful teams.
We can’t get to the same level of precision on team finances because we have to rely on publicly-available information that we haven’t generated, and that publicly-available information lacks the kind of details we’d need to really flesh out the small differences between franchises in the same tiers. However, we do have enough information to paint with broad strokes, so as part of our attempt to give an overview of where each team stands as 2013 begins, we’ll look at their access to monetary resources for the upcoming season.
Today we begin our look at the financial health of all thirty major-league teams, starting with the bottom ten. Tomorrow we will look at the middle ten and on Friday the top ten. We will focus on ticket-generated revenue (attendance), local TV revenue, and player payroll. That leaves some holes, to be sure, particularly where team owners are carrying significant debt. Some of that information is publicly-available, but not all, and even the publicly-available information may not accurate or verifiable. This isn’t precise, but hopefully, it’s still informative.
With those caveats, let’s begin.
Due to an unfortunate data error, the numbers in this story did not include park factors upon publication. We have updated the data to include the park factors, and the data you see below is now correct. We apologize for the mistake.
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What’s all this, then? For an explanation of this series, please read the introductory post. As noted in that introduction, the data is a hybrid projection of the ZIPS and Steamer systems with playing time determined through depth charts created by our team of authors. The rankings are based on aggregate projected WAR for each team at a given position.
Third base is a little deeper than it used to be, and only a handful of teams have little to no hope of being productive at the position. The devil is in the details at the hot corner, as there has been very little turnover among the top 20 teams here. Teams that have quality reserves or prospects coming up the pipeline see a bump here, as we’re looking holistically at the position and not just at the nominal starter. This is an important consideration across the diamond, but particularly so at third given how physically demanding the position is. Only six third basemen suited up in 150 or more games last year. Compare that to 13 at second base and 11 at first base and shortstop, and it becomes clear that depth is important at third base. Unfortunately, most teams don’t have adequate depth, hence the bump for the teams that do.
Let’s get on to the rankings!
It sounds like the Yankees have one more name to take off of the list of potential Mark Teixeira replacements. Aubrey Huff is saying he is “pretty much retired.” Although earlier in the off-season he sounded like he still wanted to play, not surprisingly, there was not much interest in a 36-year-old first baseman coming off of a 87 wRC+ in 2011 and a 76 wRC+ in 2012. That should not be how we remember Huff. As Craig Calcaterra noted this mornining, Huff actually had a pretty nice career, and is hardly unique in having to have the game tell him it is time to say goodbye rather than the other way around. There are worse ways to go out than winning two World Series rings in three years. Huff is no Hall of Fame candidate, but his career is interesting for other reasons.
(I guess there is still a chance that Bruce Bochy will get nervous about Brandon Belt and give Huff a call, but we will leave that possibility aside for now.)
Spring training games kick off today with four tilts: two in the Grapefruit League and two in the Cactus League. All 30 teams will be in action in Saturday. Same for Sunday, when live television broadcasts start. That’s right. Major League Baseball, live on your television for the first time since October.
Well, if you live in the right place and have the right cable and satellite operators.
If you’ve been following my posts over the past several months, you know what I’m talking about. I wrote about every nook and cranny of the baseball-on-television landscape. I dissected the local TV contracts for all 30 teams. I analyzed the Dodgers’ proposed new TV deals. I examined News Corp.’s billion-dollar investment in the Yankees’ YES Network. I explained how the new revenue-sharing program in the collective bargaining agreement is flexible enough to capture the new local TV revenue. I talked about MLB’s blackout policy and the lawsuit trying to put a stop to it. I looked at the dispute between the Orioles and the Nationals over rights fees from MASN and the one between Fox Sports San Diego and several cable companies that kept the Padres off hundreds of thousands of televisions in San Diego last season.
As the 2013 spring season gets underway, many of these disputes remain unresolved and new ones are on the horizon. Plus, there’s a growing sense that the extraordinarily rich local TV deals we’ve seen in the past few years are reaching a tipping point. That is, that the live sports programming bubble may about to burst.
Some weeks ago, there was talk that the A’s were interested in trading for Jed Lowrie, while in return, the Astros were interested in getting Chris Carter and a young pitcher. Sometimes rumors reported in such a way are based in fact, and sometimes rumors reported in such a way are based in fantasy. Monday evening, the A’s swung a trade to get themselves Jed Lowrie. As part of the return, the Astros got themselves Chris Carter and a young pitcher.
The actual, complete specifics:
To Oakland: Jed Lowrie, Fernando Rodriguez
To Houston: Chris Carter, Brad Peacock, Max Stassi
In case you’d forgotten, where the Houston Astros used to be a National League baseball team, now they’re going to be an American League baseball team. It’s a big deal, because it’s a sort of pseudo-relocation, and it’s also been a long time coming since before the leagues were unbalanced and that didn’t make any sense. For years, we had one league with 14 teams and one league with 16 teams, and we didn’t just tolerate it — we hardly ever bothered to acknowledge it. Unbalanced leagues! Amazing!
The move has generated certain negative responses, both particular and broad. A lot of Astros fans aren’t happy, because they’ve grown to prefer NL baseball, and also because people prefer to remain unchanged, given their druthers. A lot of baseball fans aren’t happy, because now there’s going to be more regular interleague play, and people have strong feelings about that. And a lot of AL baseball fans aren’t happy, because the Astros are bad, they’re moving to the AL West, and the schedule is unbalanced. There’s a perception that the Astros will give an advantage to teams in the West, and therefore that they’ll give a disadvantage to teams in the Central and East.