Archive for Teams

We spent the latter half of last year drooling over Gary Sanchez, and rightfully so. The phrases “raking” and “mashing” and “laying waste to all that stand before you” were all invented by Greek philosophers to describe what Sanchez accomplished last year. When he first arrived, though, Sanchez’s success caused us to recall the 2015 success of one Greg Bird.

Bird had been called up to replace Mark Teixeira, and he hit well enough to help get the Yankees to the Wild Card game. He started that game at first base — partly because the Yankees lacked a legitimate right-handed option at the position to play against Dallas Keuchel, but also because Bird had acquitted himself well in his 46 games in pinstripes. Sanchez obviously far surpassed Bird’s own accomplishments. And because Bird missed all of 2016 while recovering from offseason shoulder surgery, the memory of those 46 games faded into the mist.

This spring may have been a good reminder of what Bird can do.

Spring-training statistics aren’t a good indicator of what will happen once we hit Opening Day. Batters are facing pitchers who either aren’t ready to be in the big leagues just yet or big-league pitchers who haven’t yet fully ramped up to being ready for the long haul. We’re going to throw out Bird’s high batting average and the handful of home runs that he’s hit, at least partially. We’re throwing them out in the sense that you can’t extrapolate them out over a full season (pay no attention to the Sanchez thing I just wrote, nothing to see there) and use them as the basis of a projection.

But certain metrics become reliable in a sample of one. A pitcher who throws a single 100-mph fastball is likely to throw another one — or, at least, another of similar velocity. A pitcher who throws five consecutive 90-mph fastball is unlikely to hit 100 mph on the sixth. In each case, the number is a manifestation of physical ability.

One equivalent to fastball velocity for batters is power on contact. Every one of Giancarlo Stanton’s improbably giant home runs is a testament to his impressive physical capacities, something he’s likely to replicate in the future. Likewise, one recognizes that Dee Gordon — who record one of the lowest peak exit velocities last year — is unlikely to cobble together a 30-homer campaign based on the evidence of his best effort.

In other words, one or two batted balls can provide a great deal of information about a hitter’s true talent. One or two batted balls like this one:

And this one, as well:

Again, this isn’t a matter of Bird launching dingers off half-prepared pitchers still trying to refine their mechanics. It’s a matter of how well the man is driving the ball. Bird’s shoulder injury was a labrum tear, and those can be tricky. There was reason to be concerned about Bird’s capacity to drive the ball, even after going to the Arizona Fall League for a tune-up.

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Any day now, the Rangers and Rougned Odor should finalize a six-year contract extension worth about $49.5 million. A club option at the end could boost the maximum value up to $62 million, and the deal would be effective immediately, buying out two or possibly three of what would’ve been Odor’s free-agent years. Even when it’s all over, Odor would be going into his age-30 season, so he could conceivably make another splash. Jon Heyman was the first person I saw with reports.

This time of year counts as extension season, as teams and players try to avoid having negotiations spill into the summer. And as a general rule, long-term extensions for young players tend to be more team-friendly than player-friendly. That is, at least, relative to what might count as “fair” terms. This is in part a consequence of differing incentives — teams are trying to save future money, while players are eager to sign their first impact agreement. The first millions of dollars for a player mean more than subsequent millions, for a variety of reasons, and Evan Grant highlighted what this contract should mean for Odor’s family. The MLBPA is no fan of these deals, but you can understand why they exist.

For business reasons, the Rangers are probably going to like this. They’ll get to keep Odor’s costs down even beyond those first six years. I also don’t think Odor is going to find himself regretting a $50-million contract. Just like that, he’s a massive success story, as a guy who just turned 23. There’s nothing atypical about this arrangement. What’s most atypical here is simply Odor himself. His is a very unusual profile.

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The Shelby Miller trade. Those four words haunt the Arizona Diamondbacks, and that one deal probably cost the last Arizona front office their jobs. It’s the worst transaction any team has made in recent history, and it was widely panned before Miller fell apart last year; having him fail so spectacularly certainly didn’t help the perception of the deal.

But Miller apparently isn’t content to just let his name become synonymous with bad decisions. Coming off the worst year of his career, Miller looks like he’s trying to change his narrative, and the easiest way to do that is become a wholly different pitcher.

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TAMPA, Fla. — Aaron Judge knew what his offseason objective must be. Everyone did. While his power is obviously rare among even major-league players — Jeff Sullivan recently detailed how difficult it is to exaggerate — so are his contact issues. Over his first 95 plate appearances with the Yankees, he posted a Joey Gallo-like strikeout rate (44.2%).

As the table below illustrates, Judge also recorded one of the lowest in-zone contact rates among players with 90-plus plate appearances.

While Judge posted these numbers in a relatively small sample, some of the players who accompany him here illustrate the challenges a batter faces when he has trouble making in-zone contact. His plus-plus raw power won’t matter if it doesn’t translate to game action.

So this winter, Judge did what many 25-year-olds do: he spent much of the day staring at his phone, and spent much of that time searching through videos. But unlike most 25-year-olds, this YouTube-ing (mostly YouTube research, he said) was done with a professional purpose in mind: to find ways to better keep his bat in a position to make quality contact.

“I was usually on my phone before bed or before I went to hit. It could be anytime, anywhere,” Judge said of his video research.

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Two seasons ago, Kris Bryant was regarded by many as the top prospect in all of baseball. After having dominated all levels of the minors, he appeared to be a candidate to begin the season on the Cubs’ 25-man roster. The conditions were nearly ideal. Not only had Bryant proven himself in the minors, but the club possessed no one of consequence to start at third. Furthermore, the Cubs intended to contend in the NL Central.

Despite all the arguments in favor of Bryant breaking camp with the Cubs, he was sent to Iowa. He waited a week and a half, at which point the team called him up. He proceeded to have a great season. By waiting to promote him, though — a decision that wasn’t without some controversy — the Cubs ensured that Bryant wouldn’t be a free agent until after 2021 instead of 2020.

The Chicago White Sox’ Yoan Moncada, named the top prospect in baseball recently by Eric Longenhagen, deserves (and doesn’t deserve) the same fate. Allow me to explain.

The Chicago Cubs “generously” gave Kris Bryant a $1 million dollar salary this season when they could have given him close to half, but that is nothing compared to the potentially tens of millions of dollars they stand to gain by having Bryant’s services in 2021. One year of a great player in his prime — and Bryant will be 29 years old in 2021 — is incredibly valuable. The cost of six wins on the free-agent market is roughly $50 million. Such a large figure might seem improbable at first: no players receive $50 million salaries and some six-win players (David Price and Max Scherzer, for example) do hit free agency. However, those players sign multi-year deals, often receiving the same salary in Year One as Year Seven despite the fact that expected production in that first season greatly exceeds that of the latter years of a contract. The production and salary are expected to average out by the end of a deal, with overpayments in later years compensating for underpayments in the earlier ones. The point here — and one that makes sense even in the absence of the math — is that one extra year of a player’s services can be incredibly valuable.

As for what such a young and talented player deserves in terms of compensation, there are a lot of ways to attack the concept. Kris Bryant deserved to be on the Opening Day roster in 2015 due to his play. Unfortunately, that play — and the promise it suggested — rendered Bryant too valuable for the Cubs not to manipulate his service time. Therefore, they waited those 10 days.

That isn’t a great system. It creates disincentives, even if very small, to putting the best team on the field. But it’s the system under which MLB is operating presently. And it matters right now because of Yoan Moncada.

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Though it started with a strikeout and a ground out, the World Baseball Classic appearance by Jose Berrios Wednesday didn’t end well. He allowed a single to the scuffling Nolan Arenado, then hit Eric Hosmer and walked Andrew McCutchen before he was replaced. In essence, the outing encapsulated the ups and downs of Jose Berrios as a pitcher: tantalizing stuff, near-fatal flaws. If you focus on the former, though, maybe the latter is just an adjustment away from being a faded memory.

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According to a Naver Sports report out of South Korea, Pirates third baseman Jung Ho Kang has been denied a visa to enter the United States putting his 2017 season and future with the Pirates very much in doubt.

Kang has had a myriad off-the-field troubles. After a Dec. 2 incident in Seoul in which Kang fled the scene of a crash, Kang was convicted of a third DUI this winter in South Korea. The two previous DUIs came before he was signed by the Pirates prior to the 2015 season, and the club claims to have had no knowledge of those incidents. For his most recent DUI, Kang was sentenced to eight months in prison, but Kang has appealed the sentence. He has missed the entire spring due to his legal issues. There was also a sexual assault claim made against Kang last year, alleged to have occurred in a Chicago hotel. But Kang was not charged and Chicago Police said last fall they have not been able to locate his accuser.

Off-the-field, Kang has his troubles and now the Pirates have on-the-field issues at third base.

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Terrance Gore can fly. The 25-year-old outfielder is as fast as anyone in the game, and he’s especially lethal on the base paths. Gore has 19 steals in 21 attempts as a Kansas City Royal, and he is 251 for 275 down on the farm. He takes his leads with a green light.

There is one thing holding him back: Gore has yet to invent a way to steal first base.

Hitless in seven big-league at-bats (his thefts have come as a pinch-runner), Gore has slashed .243/.342/.273 in 1,806 minor-league plate appearances. The OBP number in that slash line is acceptable, but given his SLG and his size — he’s listed at 5-foot,7, 165 — anything resembling Giancarlo Stanton-like respect is little more than a pipe dream. To earn ABs at the highest level, he’ll need to hit his way on.

He’s working on that, and — feel free to raise an eyebrow — launch angle plays a part in the process.

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Jay Bruce is not going to win any popularity contests in New York’s largest borough when the season opens next month.

Through no fault of his own, the Mets exercised his $13 million option this winter, ostensibly as insurance in case Yoenis Cespedes fled elsewhere. With the return of Cespedes, though, Bruce is now regarded primarily as an impediment to promising young outfielder Michael Conforto’s ability to receive more playing time. This is not a post arguing that Confroto shouldn’t be the recipient of more playing time. I would like to see a full season from Conforto, too. This is a post about Bruce independent of playing-time issues in New York.

This is a post, in part, about a player using batted-ball data to rethink his ideas about lifting the ball, a subject we’ve detailed exhaustively at FanGraphs this offseason and spring. This is also a post about a player who’s running out of time to live up to his lofty prospect pedigree. While Bruce’s 111 wRC+ last season and 107 mark for his career continues to render him employable, his declining defense has him pushed him near replacement-level the last two seasons, when he has combined for one unit of WAR. This is a player who must get more out of his bat to secure another lucrative contract, and to secure steady playing time.

But what’s a little different about this story is that Bruce already hits more fly balls than ground balls. This is a fly-ball hitter who wants to become an extreme fly-ball hitter, as James Wagner details in a recent, excellent New York Times feature.

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Every year we release team projections, and every year people express disagreement with them. But it’s not large-scale disagreement — typically, people differ on one or two or three specific teams. Sometimes it’s been the Royals, sometimes it’s been the Orioles, and this year it’s the Rockies. Most of the projections are considered basically fine. The FanGraphs crowd has determined that the Padres’ 2017 projection is basically fine. The Padres are projected to be the worst team in baseball, at 65-97, and we put their playoff odds at 0.1%.

But there are certain numbers I love to bring up. I have team projections going back to 2005, and since then, all the teams projected to win no more than 70 games have averaged 68 projected wins, and 68 actual wins. In that sense, the projections have been great. Yet the 2008 Marlins were projected to win 68 games, and they won 84. The 2010 Blue Jays were projected to win 65 games, and they won 85. The 2012 Orioles were projected to win 70 games, and they won 93. All of those teams were thought to be bad. All of those teams were contenders.

The Padres, right now, are thought to be bad. What if they turned into contenders? Let’s follow an 11-step process to make that happen. Let’s try to get these Padres into the playoffs, without doing anything too unrealistic.

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