Archive for Teams

Whenever conventional wisdom and the numbers — or whatever conclusion I have drawn from the numbers — differ, I’m left wondering why such a difference exists. Many times there’s a good reason; other times, the reasons make less sense. One situation where my conclusions appear to differ from conventional wisdom comes in the form of Vladimir Guerrero and his case for the Hall of Fame. When recently considering Guerrero’s statistical credentials for the Hall, he seemed to fall short of the voting standards for most recent candidates who gained induction. At the same time, his name currently appears on 75% of this year’s ballots according to Ryan Thibodaux’s tracker. So what gives?

The easy answer is that voters — due to Guerrero’s brilliance and flair at the plate — are willing either to minimize or forgive entirely Guerrero’s defense and baserunning, as well as the fact that his last above-average season occurred at age-33. They aren’t necessarily wrong, as he certainly has a case by virtue of his peak and career WAR numbers. He also recorded a very good .318 career batting average and an MVP award. Plus, from 1997 to 2006, his 114 assists topped all outfielders, with his great arm obscuring his lack of range and errors, in which category (errors) he also topped MLB during that time. That’s probably the most reasonable explanation for why I concluded he was just below the cusp for the Hall of Fame — certainly worthy of consideration, but not a certain Hall of Famer like the voters appear close to making him.

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On Friday morning, the Mariners made what looked like a weird trade, shipping useful outfielder Seth Smith to the Orioles for less useful starting pitcher Yovani Gallardo, who is both not as good as Smith but also more expensive. Sure, the Mariners needed some more pitching depth, but they weren’t really rolling around in extra good outfielders, so subtracting Smith seemed weird.

Then, though, they made a second trade, this time swapping a starting pitcher for an outfielder, that made the pair of moves make a bit more sense. In the second deal, they shipped Nate Karns to Kansas City in exchange for Jarrod Dyson, who is a better player than Smith, so the series of moves actually resulted in an OF upgrade, with the impact to the pitching staff depending on what you think of Karns, who has both obvious strengths and minuses.

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There’s power in a great sales pitch.

The Ginsu knife ads included a blade slicing through a rubber hose and an aluminum can before carving a strip steak. Joy Mangano sold so well on QVC that Jennifer Lawrence played her in a film last year. At the TED Global 2009 conference, Michael Pritchard’s pitch for the Lifesaver water bottle, which uses nano-filtration technology to purify water, was named as one of the 15 best start-up pitches ever seen by the editors of Business Insider. Lifesaver was purchased by Icon Technology last year.

Sales pitches can be important in crowded, competitive industries, and perhaps the art of the sales pitch has never been more important for agents representing major-league players.

While various forms of Wins Above Replacement are imperfect and while it might be impossible to boil an athlete’s value down to one perfect number, such metrics are now widely accepted as useful tools to evaluate overall performance. Teams are generally operating with similar models and processes in regard to player valuation and projection. I suspect there are not many dramatic differences between club’s internal evaluations compared to public ones like fWAR or BWARP.

So if valuations are more accurate, and everyone has the same – or at least similar – data, then how does an agent beat the suggested values? How does an agent compel a club to pay for an age-33 season and older in an era when youth is king? How does an agent avoid this future: here is your client’s WAR/$ per year value, please sign on the dotted line.

Creating a market, an old-fashioned bidding war, is the preferable method. But while emotion will never be eliminated from the negotiation process so long as humans are involved, teams generally endeavor to act with more reason and less emotion.

I thought about the importance of the sales pitch after reading James Wagner’s fascinating article in The New York Times on Yoenis Cespedes and his contract negotiations.

Writes Wagner:

“With the help of an analytics firm in Chicago, (Cespedes’ agents) came up with a dollar figure for the impact Cespedes had on the field, social media, team television revenues, and ticket and merchandise sale. … They even put a figure, $3.2 million, on the value of the approximately 50 tabloid back pages that had featured Cespedes over the course of 2016. Cespedes playing with flair, Cespedes hitting game-changing home runs, Cespedes driving exotic cars in spring training, Cespedes arriving for a workout on horseback.”

Cespedes barbecuing?

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After having typically appeared in the very famous pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past few years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Milwaukee Brewers. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cleveland / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / New York AL / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Toronto / Washington.

Batters
Milwaukee general manager David Stearns has dedicated the first year-plus of his tenure with the Brewers to a pursuit of affordable pieces that might contribute to the club’s next winning season, while trading away the most valuable pieces of its most recent one. The ZiPS projections here reflect the results of that endeavor. On the one hand, no field player is projected to record more than three wins in 2017. (Jonathan Villar, at 2.8 zWAR, is best acquitted by that measure.) On the other hand, 20 positions players receive a forecast of 1.0 WAR or better.

For context, consider: three of the National League’s playoff clubs from 2016 have been included thus far in this series of ZiPS posts. By comparison, only 16 of the Cubs’ position players receive a projection of one win or better. Only 13 of Washington’s do. And only 10 field players for the San Francisco Giants are expected to cross the one-win threshold, per ZiPS. Milwaukee, in other words, has gathered a large collection of players whose median probable outcome is slightly below average. Given the youth of that group, however, and the vagaries of the world, some of those players will develop into average or better players.

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Tuffy Gosewisch isn’t known for his stick. The 33-year-old catcher had a .522 OPS in parts of four seasons with the Arizona Diamondbacks. But he does provide value behind the dish. His defensive acumen — including his ability to work with pitchers — is a primary reason the Atlanta Braves claimed him off waivers earlier this winter.

He worked diligently to turn himself into a big-league asset. Selected by the Phillies in the 11th round of the 2005 draft out of Arizona State University, Gosewisch made his MLB debut with the D-backs eight years later. He’s now in Atlanta, where he projects to serve as the Braves’ backup backstop behind Tyler Flowers.

Gosewisch discussed various aspects of his position when Arizona visited Boston last August.

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Gosewisch on learning to call games: “The first time I caught was freshman year of high school. I caught off and on throughout my high-school career — I also played third and pitched — and in college I caught exclusively. I was [at ASU] for four years.

“In high school, they would occasionally let me call games — which is rare — but for the most part, our coach called them. In college, I called all of my games in my junior and senior years. My manager, Pat Murphy, trusted that I could handle the responsibility. That gave me a lot of confidence and, learning-wise, it was huge.

“I don’t think enough guys get to call their own games in college. I think it would be beneficial to the player, for sure. It would help him learn the game a lot better. But I know that the coaches’ jobs rely on winning, and they don’t want to take a chance on losing a game because of pitch-calling.

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The Mariners, after trading Taijuan Walker away in the Jean Segura deal, have been looking for a back-end starting pitcher. How desperate were they? Well, desperate enough to take a pitcher that the Baltimore Orioles — who have one of the worst rotations in baseball — didn’t want to keep around.

The deal, as announced by both teams, is a straight-up swap of Seth Smith for Yovani Gallardo, with the Orioles including some cash in the deal, though Dan Connolly reports the Orioles save about $4 million in the deal, so the cash doesn’t offset the price differences. In Smith, the Orioles are getting a guy who can play right field against right-handed pitching; he doesn’t field well or hit lefties enough to justify an everyday job, but as the strong side of a platoon, he’s a decent role player. Given that the Orioles current right fielder was Joey Rickard, Smith is an upgrade over a replacement level hole, and picking him up at a reasonable price makes plenty of sense for Baltimore.

For the Mariners, this is a bit weirder. Yeah, they needed another arm for the rotation, since the back-end was pretty thin, but it’s not entirely clear that Gallardo is actually much better than what they already had. After a nice run with Milwaukee at the beginning of his career, Gallardo transitioned more into an innings-eater in 2013, and things have been steadily downhill since then.

As the strikeouts disappeared, Gallardo survived by avoiding walks, but even that went away last year, when he posted the second highest walk rate of his career. His stuff has diminished to the point that he’s now a nibbler, but he doesn’t get swings and misses out of the zone anymore.

His in-zone contact rates are fairly steady (though worse than in his prime), but the lack of whiffs out of the zone means that Gallardo doesn’t really have any way to put batters away anymore, and so now he’s just a pitch-to-contact guy who doesn’t throw enough strikes.

If you want to be optimistic, you can look at his prior track record of success and his age, and hope that maybe Gallardo can get some of his prior stuff back, but the trends here are all negative. As a guy who throws 90 and doesn’t have an out pitch or plus command, he’s really nothing more than a #5 starter at this point, and even that might be generous. And toss in the elbow problems that turned his initial three year deal with Baltimore into a two year deal following his physical, then landed him on the disabled list last year, he’s not even necessarily an innings sponge you can count on to stay healthy.

Perhaps when your internal options are Ariel Miranda or Nathan Karns, even Gallardo looks useful, but for a team looking to win in the short-term, they should probably do better than hand the ball to Gallardo every five days. Smith isn’t a huge loss, especially with the team having younger outfielders worth taking a look at, but this feels like moving a useful-but-flawed outfield for a less-useful-and-flawed pitcher. Sure, the Mariners needed a pitcher more, but unless they know how to get Gallardo’s velocity back, I’m not sure this is the arm they needed.

The Giants aren’t a bad team. They just made the playoffs, and they signed a closer in Mark Melancon who (hopefully) won’t make the citizens of San Francisco tear their hair out. Hunter Pence should be healthy! That makes things fun. Fun baseball is good baseball, and the Giants are locked in to a pretty fun team at this point. Every position is accounted for, for the most part. Only left field offers a little room for finding something to write about pondering, so let’s ponder, shall we?

Currently, it looks like the Giants are going to deploy a platoon of Jarrett Parker and Mac Williamson there. Surprisingly enough, no, Parker and Williamson are not tertiary characters from It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but actual baseball players. They’ve both seen some playing time since 2015 in fits and starts as depth players.

The Parker/Williamson combo package could, in theory, be fine. The Giants likely aren’t expecting more than league-average production here, after all, and they don’t necessarily need more than that. Parker also has some serious pop in his bat, and frankly, there’s always room for some highlight-reel bombs.

That’ll do! That kind of power works in San Francisco, and if he can meet his ZiPS WAR projection of 1.4 as the big side of the platoon, maybe they don’t need to go get Saunders after all. Parker is also out of options, and may have a hard time making it through waivers to Triple-A.

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Ten plays. Ten plays can change a player’s career.

We talk all the time about how defensive numbers come in small samples. For an outfielder, the sample of plays that actually separate a good from a bad defender is even smaller.

In most cases, a batted ball to the outfield is either a can of corn or a clear hit. In between, there just aren’t many opportunities. For Rajai Davis as a center fielder, there are 19 plays that could have gone either way over the last two years. He missed 10 of them — which is bad — and then many of us stopped considering him as a center fielder. Ten plays!

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After having typically appeared in the very famous pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past few years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Minnesota Twins. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cleveland / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / New York AL / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Toronto / Washington.

Batters
If you were to travel back to the winter of 2013-14 and inform the earlier version of yourself that, in just three years time, Joe Mauer (532 PA, 0.9 zWAR) would receive the worst projected WAR among all Twins starters, the young iteration of you would slap the older one right in the mouth. After that, he’d have some pretty understandable questions about how your journey to the recent past has been made possible and why you’ve chosen to make it. In that intial moment, however, the absurdity of your comments regarding Joe Mauer would overcome him.

On the one hand, this is a negative development for Minnesota. For the past couple years, they’ve typically run payrolls of about $100 million. Allocating nearly a quarter of that to a single win isn’t helpful.

On the other hand, this represents a very positive development for Minnesota — because Mauer’s projection isn’t that bad. Rather, a number of the other projections are just better. For the past couple years, the Twins have lacked an adequate supply of competent hitters and fielders. Regard: last season, their position players ranked 25th by WAR. The season before that? 27th. What the ZiPS numbers here depict is something much more like an average group — with serviceable depth, too.

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On December 8, the Cleveland Indians’ Web site published a brief, 135-word story announcing James Harris as the club’s new farm director.

While filling such vacancies is typically not headline news, it was a modest announcement for one of the more inspired front-office additions of the offseason.

Why is it interesting?

Harris never played baseball professionally, in college, or high school.

In fact, Harris has never coached the sport at any level.

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