Archive for Diamondbacks

Adam LaRoche may or may not be retiring. It certainly seems as though he is, and it seems as though his decision was made abruptly. While that may not be 100 percent certain, now seems like a good time to look back on his career. On one hand, LaRoche was sort of a letdown, in that he never really took off the way it seemed like he might. On the other hand, LaRoche was a huge success, and should be celebrated as such.
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Way back in November, before I had finished tweaking my KATOH model, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the Arizona Diamondbacks. In this companion piece, I finally get around to looking at that same Arizona farm system through the lens of my recently refined KATOH projection system. The Diamondbacks have the 21st best farm system according to KATOH.

There’s way more to prospect evaluation than just the stats, so if you haven’t already, I highly recommend you read Dan’s piece in addition to this one. KATOH has no idea how hard a pitcher throws, how good a hitter’s bat speed is, or what a player’s makeup is like. So it’s liable to miss big on players whose tools don’t line up with their performances. However, when paired with more scouting-based analyses, KATOH’s objectivity can be useful in identifying talented players who might be overlooked by the industry consensus or highly-touted prospects who might be over-hyped.

Below, I’ve grouped prospects into three groups: those who are forecast for two or more wins through their first six major-league seasons, those who receive a projection between 1.0 and 2.0 WAR though their first six seasons, and then any residual players who received Future Value (FV) grades of 45 or higher from Dan. Note that I generated forecasts only for players who accrued at least 200 plate appearances or batters faced last season. Also note that the projections for players over a relatively small sample are less reliable, especially when those samples came in the low minors. Read the rest of this entry »

Retirement announcements are seldom surprising, because even from the outside it’s pretty simple to tell when a player has outlived his utility. Willie Bloomquist is 38, now, and after spending the offseason making up his mind, he tweeted the following last Friday:

Make your last swing your BEST swing. Farewell @MLB. Thank you for 14 amazing seasons. It’s been an incredible ride. pic.twitter.com/VuImzqOrSl

— Willie Bloomquist (@williebloom) March 11, 2016

Bloomquist is hanging them up, which means Bloomquist articles on analytical websites must also hang them up. In a way it’s amazing Bloomquist achieved such Internet fame in the first place, being a career reserve, but his name meant a little something over the years, and here, for one last time, I want to talk about what Willie Bloomquist was.

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Earlier this week, Salvador Perez and the Kansas City Royals agreed on a second contract extension. In terms of financial need or justification for the Royals, there weren’t any compelling reasons for the Royals to sign Perez to another extension when his previous contract kept Perez under control through the 2019 season. Even with no extensions, Perez would not have been a free agent until after this season. In his analysis of the deal, Jeff Sullivan focused on the human element of the deal and being fair to Perez. Ken Rosenthal wondered if this would start a trend and named a few other players who might benefit from teams deciding to be a bit more fair. Perez is certainly not the first player to sign a very team-friendly deal, but he is also not the first player to be awarded a second deal despite having a number of years still left on his first contract.

In Rosenthal’s piece, he acknowledges that Perez was a “special case,” noting that the Royals catcher had recorded just 158 plate appearances at the time he signed the contract. That lack of experience led to a very low guarantee and the three team options that would have prevented Perez from reaching free agency for another four seasons. While acknowledging both the lack of need and the recognition of fairness, Rosenthal suggested six other players who might fit the same bill as Perez, although perhaps on a smaller scale given their larger guarantees: Paul Goldschmidt, Anthony Rizzo, Jose Altuve, Chris Sale, Madison Bumgarner and Chris Archer.

On the whole, these types of extensions save massive amounts of money for teams, but we can take a look at the contracts Rosenthal discusses and compare them to Perez’s to see if they are actually close. The first few columns of the table below should be self-explanatory, but the last column, FA Surplus Value, might not be. To calculate the surplus value, I took current projections, applied standard aging curves, set the cost of a win at $8 million for this year along with 5% increases in years thereafter and compared the value of the projected production to the cost for free agent years only. For the players below, their arbitration salaries have also been at a discount, so if you want to include those values, feel free to add on another 20% or so (whichever number you feel like) to capture that discount as well.

Rosenthal did a very good job identifying the super-team-friendly contracts. Perez falls right in the middle of those contracts in terms of surplus value, but what makes his case different is the very low salary-level in relation to the other players — this, even if his options had been picked up. The top-four players on that list are massive bargains, but at least they will be paid around $10 million or more per year — double that of Perez. Altuve is in nearly the same boat as Perez in terms of salary, but he gave up just two years of free agency, which limits the surplus value.

Looking back through MLB Trade Rumors’ extension tracker, I identified players who were locked up to a second extension while still possessing multiple years on their first one. The idea: to find some sort of precedent for the Perez contract, or perhaps something closer to the situations of Sale, Bumgarner, Goldschmidt and Rizzo. Certain names come to mind immediately when considering players who’ve received a second extension while still playing on the first. Miguel Cabrera, for example. And Ryan Howard. These are classic cases of a team mistakenly extending players before they’d have to, but neither case is really similar to Perez’.

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Baseball has started, sort of, and it’s time to have a meetup. Don’t worry about the team projections, all of our teams are still in it, at least until April. Please come drink, rosterbate, and theorize with the following writers at OHSO Brewery in Scottsdale, Arizona on Friday, March 11th, at 6pm. Free appetizers for attendees!

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A year ago, the Arizona Diamondbacks went 79-83. Over the winter, they signed Zack Greinke and Tyler Clippard as free agents, plus they notably traded for Shelby Miller and Jean Segura. Reinforced with one of the game’s best pitchers, a quality starter, a good reliever, and a middle infielder with a pulse, we currently have the 2016 Diamondbacks projected to go… 79-83. And not surprisingly, Arizona’s GM doesn’t think we’re going to be right on this one.

Q: Does that make any sense to you? You add Greinke, you add Miller, and the math boys say you are not going to win any more games?

Stewart: “Jack, I think out there there are a lot of people that don’t want us to win. For those people that don’t want us to win, that’s OK. We’re still going to play the game the same way. We embrace the challenge every day of coming out and playing and doing the things that we’re capable of doing. And those who think that we’re a 78-win team, you know what? That’s what they think. When you start making predictions like that and you keep coming up wrong, you lose credibility.”

Q: Why do you think there are people who want you to lose?

Stewart: “I think the way that we do things. We’re a baseball team here. We believe in our team and how we play the game. I just think, in everything, there is always everyone who doesn’t want to see you do well. Obviously, anybody who says we can only win 78 games, they’re either not thinking or they’re not believing that what we have here is a team that’s capable of winning more games than that. So when I say that there are people out there who do not want us to win, that’s a prime example of that. To think we will only win 78 games? That’s a joke.”

Q: Do you think they are taking a shot at the old school, fundamental approach?

Stewart: “I try not to even think with people like that. I try to think with the people who think logically. And if you are thinking logically and we won 79 games last year, with the additions of Greinke, Miller, Clippard, Segura, people that make your team better, I think it is impossible for us to only win 78 games. Like I said, they predicted we would lose 96 last year.”

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You smell that? It’s baseball’s prospect-list season. The fresh top-100 lists — populated by new names as well as old ones — seem to be popping up each day. With the individual rankings coming out, some organization rankings are becoming available, as well. I have always regarded the organizational rankings as subjective — and, as a result, not 100% useful. Utilizing the methodology I introduced in my article on prospect evaluation from this year’s Hardball Times Annual, however, it’s possible to calculate a total value for every team’s farm system and remove the biases of subjectivity. In what follows, I’ve used that same process to rank all 30 of baseball’s farm systems by the surplus WAR they should generate.

I provide a detailed explanation of my methodology in the Annual article. To summarize it briefly, however, what I’ve done is to identify WAR equivalencies for the scouting grades produced by Baseball America in their annual Prospect Handbook. The grade-to-WAR conversion appears as follows.

Prospect Grade to WAR Conversion

Prospect Grade	Total WAR	Surplus WAR
80	25.0	18.5
75	18.0	13.0
70	11.0	9.0
65	8.5	6.0
60	4.7	3.0
55	2.5	1.5
50	1.1	0.5
45	0.4	0.0

To create the overall totals for this post, I used each team’s top-30 rankings per the most recent edition of Baseball America’ Prospect Handbook. Also accounting for those trades which have occurred since the BA rankings were locked down, I counted the number of 50 or higher-graded prospects (i.e. the sort which provide surplus value) in each system. The results follows.
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In yet another sign that baseball season is coming ever closer, the arbitration process this year is coming to a close. Many players signed one-year deals before the teams and players exchanged numbers last month, while others exchanged numbers and struck one-year deals. A few players have actually gone to arbitration. Four players — Lorenzo Cain, Josh Donaldson, J.D. Martinez, and A.J. Pollock — agreed to two-year deals with their teams, buying out no free-agent seasons, but ensuring both parties that arbitration would not be necessary next year. These two-year deals are common and typically come with a discount for the team. For the four players who signed this season, however, there was no discount.

The arbitration process is set up to provide a discount to teams in the years just before free agency. The players get their first taste of actual millions while the team retains control of the player at a price much less than what the market would yield — all without having to mark a multi-year commitment. Some players sign extensions which takie them through free agency while others are non-tendered and set free by clubs who think that even the small, arbitration-produced salaries are too much compared to the expected production.

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So I’m sitting here, passing a Wednesday afternoon by scrolling through players Steamer thinks are going to be worse. Most of the time, I get it. Yoenis Cespedes, sure — last year, he had almost everything go right. With Francisco Lindor, I understand bat-related skepticism. I see why a projection system thinks Joe Panik will take a step back, and the same goes for Justin Turner and Nelson Cruz. Honestly, I get it with David Peralta, too. I see why Steamer thinks what it thinks. All the reasons are right there on the player page. I just think in Peralta’s case in particular, there are positive traits that should lift the expectations. Allow me to make the argument.

We haven’t written that often about Peralta, although it was just a few months ago Dave suggested he might be baseball’s most underrated player. That would be fitting, since one of baseball’s other most underrated players is outfield-mate A.J. Pollock. There’s no defining or studying underratedness, so I don’t know quite where Peralta should rank, but he’s inarguably on the list. Dave pointed to some of the numbers he’d put up. I want to point to some other numbers, some numbers I think are especially encouraging.

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I don’t believe I’m out of line when I say that, of life’s most enjoyable pleasures, many are to be used, collected, consumed, or practiced in moderation. “You can have too much of a good thing,” they say. Food and alcohol, for example. Both delightful. Both substances which, were I unaware of the consequences of surplus consumption, I would regularly consume in excess. Both substances, in fact, which I do regularly consume in excess, despite being completely aware of the consequences. Likewise, I’ve taken nary a vacation which I didn’t find overindulgent. Don’t get me wrong — a break from the norm for a bit of traveling is always welcome, but I’m perpetually exhausted by the degree of stimulation that comes with falling asleep and waking up in a new bed, having to process an unfamiliar environment and having to create and enact routines that differ from the ones to which I am accustomed. Perhaps I’m just outing myself as a homebody, but without fail, I long for the comforts of a familiar bed, environment, and routine approximately 24-48 hours prior to the conclusion of any extended trip.

I recently sought to find an example of overindulgence in a baseball. A player whose approach, for example, was perhaps hindered by too much of a good thing. It was sort of an offshoot of the post I wrote yesterday which concerned Miguel Sano’s surprisingly disciplined approach against breaking balls. In that post, I found, among other things, that Sano took plenty of early at-bat breaking pitches for balls, and so he found himself in plenty of hitter’s counts, and not only that, but he capitalized on his abundant hitter’s counts by amping up his aggression and attacking pitchers when he had the upper hand.

It’s a fairly fundamental strategy, but there’s a most extreme everything, and someone had to be on the other end. There has to be someone who finds themselves in plenty of hitter’s counts but, for whatever reason, actually becomes notably less aggressive and less attack-oriented when they hold count leverage over the pitcher.

So I ran some BaseballSavant queries and I produced a couple lists in a spreadsheet that showed me overall swing rate, and ahead-in-the-count swing rate, and I calculated the difference between the two. Some interesting names popped up near the top — Xander Bogaerts, Matt Carpenter, Anthony Rizzo — but something seemed off, and I realized an unaccounted-for variable in my search: not all batters are pitched the same when they’re ahead in the count. Certain hitters get far more or fewer pitches to hit when ahead in the count, and so their swing rates are partly dictated by the pitcher. To control for this, it would be wiser to search only for the difference between overall in-zone swing rate and ahead-in-the-count in-zone swing rate. This was a search that yielded a particularly intriguing result.

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