Archive for Teams

Now that all the possible arbitration cases have been settled and all the offseason’s major free agents signed (apologies to David Freese and Austin Jackson), teams can turn their respective attentions towards locking up young players to contract extensions that buy out potentially expensive free-agent seasons. Earlier this week, the Royals and Salvador Perez agreed to a deal, although that amounted more to the restructuring of a previous deal and less a typical extension. Rather, the first standard pre-arbitration extension of the spring comes from the St. Louis Cardinals, who could get a decent bargain in Kolten Wong despite the second baseman’s lack of huge upside.

Wong’s service-time situation made him an ideal candidate for a contract extension. Wong is one year away from arbitration, so he was looking at the Major League Baseball minimum salary (or something very close to it) this season, with three seasons of arbitration to follow before he could hit free agency. The contract with the Cardinals is for five years and $24.5 million, with a $12.5 million option with a $1 million dollar buyout for the sixth season, making the guarantee $25.5 million. The guarantee is fairly low and has the potential to buy out two seasons of free agency when Wong will be 29 and 30 years old, respectively. Wong has shown himself to be an average player in his two full seasons in the big leagues and continuing to be average will make this deal a worthwhile one for the Cardinals — although Wong has shown some potential for more.

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Previous editions: Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati  / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles (AL).

Earlier this week, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the Miami Marlins. In this companion piece, I look at that same Miami farm system through the lens of my recently refined KATOH projection system. The Marlins have the worst farm system in baseball according to KATOH. They’re even worse than the Angels. As you’ll see below, there isn’t much to get excited about in Miami’s system, especially from a statistical standpoint.

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I decided not to write a post about it, but earlier I went into the spreadsheets to compare some of the fan projections for pitchers to some of the Steamer and ZiPS projections. The idea was basically to see if there are guys the fans are particularly high on or particularly low on, and as the former is concerned, the fans are higher on a bunch of relievers. Let me tell you, there are some real believers here in Mychal Givens. And that’s great! I love Givens, too. He’s really interesting, but he’s also a reliever, and I found myself scanning for starters. A name that quickly turned up is Tyler Duffey. Steamer and ZiPS see him good for a 4.37 ERA. The few fans who participated see him good for a 3.58 ERA. That was enough to grab my attention, and now we have an article.

Duffey, despite a strong 2015 debut, remains pretty anonymous. If it weren’t for the headline, I wonder how many of you would’ve known he pitches for the Twins. We’ve been conditioned to mostly ignore the various Twins starters, and for the most part that’s been a pretty sound policy, but Duffey has some unusual things about him. He was also all but guaranteed a rotation slot the other day by Paul Molitor. Consider this, then, a Tyler Duffey introduction, in case you’ve been in need of one. Twins fans know what’s up, but I’m guessing the others are almost all in the dark.

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Any opportunity to talk about Coors Field is a good opportunity, and, hey, wouldn’t you know it, but the Rockies’ home ballpark is undergoing some alterations that’ll have an effect on the gameplay. I’ve only just heard about them, but they’re relatively uncomplicated, and they should be in place in time for the start of the regular season. Baseball’s best argument against the idea that high-scoring baseball is exciting baseball is about to feature some higher fences.

I’m kind of a dork about park effects, and that’s why I find Coors so fascinating in the first place. They’re always trying to figure out if it’s possible to play some sort of normal baseball at altitude, and now we can get into the latest thought, as provided by Nick Groke. The Rockies are working to reduce the number of cheap dingers. It won’t not work. That much we can already say.

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Every player in baseball is having a good year. I mean it! No one’s had time to screw it up yet. Every prospect is going to be a star. The pitchers will all remain healthy. Any veteran whose career took a nosedive last year is on track to regain his old form. All the guys who played over their head have shown no indication they can’t maintain last year’s pace. Spring Training games don’t even count!

And all of the hulking 23-year-olds with tools through the roof and devastating contact problems haven’t swung and missed one time yet! What contact problems?

It’s only natural, as the fake-games begin and the regular season breaches the horizon, that we develop irresponsible fixations upon certain players. The way I see it is this: players have upside, and they have downside. Upside is always present — it’s like this mythological thing that cannot be seen or touched or heard or felt, but we know that it exists. But with the regular season comes meaningful games, and meaningful games present scenarios that remind you of your fixation’s flaws, the very things that will prevent Him from reaching His upside. During the offseason, those flaws cannot be seen; only upside exists, and we dream big.

I’m here to talk about Domingo Santana. But first, I want to talk about George Springer.

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Other clubs: Angels, Astros, Braves, Cubs, Diamondbacks, Indians, Orioles, Reds, Red Sox, Rockies, Royals, Tigers, White Sox.

To start off, a brief programming note: I’m going out of alphabetical order here, as inside information trickles in at different rates. I’ll be jumping around to different teams as soon as I get a suitable amount of corroborating sources for each.

With regard to the Marlins, specifically, they don’t have a ton of impact offense waiting in the wings, but there is a plethora of pitching reinforcements — mostly in terms of depth but some with high ceilings — at all levels of the minors. It’s interesting to think about what this group will do in the next few years, having enough potential to turn out a number of surprise contributors but not enough blue-chippers to rank highly among the league’s best farm systems.

Tyler Kolek has struggled a bit as a professional, but his talent makes him the best prospect in the organization. It seems I’m the high guy on Chris Paddack, but his placement only sticks out here because of the lack of certainty among other prospects around him. There aren’t a ton of other surprises elswhere, with a reasonable argument to be made about anyone outside the top-four or -five guys to either be in the top 10 or at the bottom of the list.

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The one conversation we continue to have about the Royals to this day is whether there’s just something about them that the numbers aren’t seeing. I think we’ve all agreed the Royals have deserved to be pretty good of late, but to be as good as they’ve been — let’s face it, the pro-Royals side has plenty of ammunition. They’ve played like something greater than the sum of the roster’s parts, and that’s where there could be a disconnect. One idea is that a team is the sum of its parts, plus or minus however much randomness. A counter-idea is we’re missing some kind of human element, in our haste to try to see the future. This would be where the Royals have perfected a magic formula.

If there’s one player who might adequately represent the Royals in a nutshell, it’s Salvador Perez. You could always try to go with Alcides Escobar, on account of #EskyMagic, and that’s fine, but I think Perez is a little more fitting. Perez is still young, and he’s obviously talented. Looking at his numbers, there are things for us to like, and there are things for us to not like. Objectively, Perez appears to be a good but flawed player, yet if you listen to the Royals themselves, they think of him as the heart and soul. They see him as the most important player on the roster, and over the last three years, the Royals have won 57% of the time when Perez has started, and they’ve won 49% of the time when Perez has been on the bench. Just as there might be something about the Royals, there might be something about Salvador Perez. It’s just another conversation for all of us to have.

One conversation we never needed to have: whether Perez’s old multi-year contract was team-friendly. It was stupid team-friendly. More than maybe any other deal, depending on your own Perez evaluation. Teams don’t often willingly amend such lopsided agreements, but the Royals wanted to keep Perez happy. So now that old contract has been torn up, and Perez has been more adequately rewarded for everything that he’s meant.

Call it a smart and atypical move, on the Royals’ part. Call it a necessary move, on the Royals’ part. There are plenty of team-friendly contracts out there, but not many to such an extent, so we don’t have a lot of situational comps. All that’s really important here is that Perez is being treated fairly. Maybe this is something the Rays would’ve been willing to do, and maybe it’s not. Perez just cares that the Royals did it.

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Determining profits and losses for baseball franchises is a speculative task. When teams say they’re losing money, we can take them at their word or ignore them. They don’t open their books, so how much money teams make or lose is subject to factors outside of publicly available knowledge — and, therefore, equally subject to a lot of potential “massaging” on the part of the teams themselves.

That state of affairs might change slightly in the near future, however. Liberty Media, owners of the Atlanta Braves — as well as a majority stake in Sirius XM and a substantial stake in Live Nation Entertainment — are planning to offer stock in their separate divisions. As a result, they’ll have to provide more information to the public on the Braves’ operations. The Braves are claiming losses over the past few years, although in a cash sense, those losses are a bit deceiving, and the team is set to make money this season after slashing payroll.

There was a time, not all that long ago, that almost all Atlanta Braves games were broadcast nationally on TBS. The cable network, owned ostensibly by the same person who owned the Braves, Ted Turner, used the Braves to get publicity for his cable network, and the Braves were able to reach a broader base of fans. In the middle of the Braves’ great run of success, Time Warner bought Turner’s broadcasting company and the Braves, and the new owners continued to put Braves games on TBS. Changes to this once symbiotic partnership, however, brought an end to TBS’s almost daily Braves telecasts and saw the team enter one of the worst television contracts of the last few decades.

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Pitchers know hitters. They’ve got to. Sure, for the most part, pitchers want to trust their stuff and hit their spots and any deviation too far from one’s comfort zone is a concession to the hitter, but pitchers have got to know hitters, lest they be made to look silly. Example: pitcher faces high-ball hitter, throws high ball, gives up dinger. Well, duh. We told you he was a high-ball hitter, dumb-dumb. Why’d you put it there?

This is why pitchers read scouting reports, and watch videos, and look at heatmaps, and converse with their peers, and use their human brain to rethink past matchups against whichever opponent looms next on the docket. So they don’t look like a dumb-dumb. That’s all anyone’s trying to do, really. Competitive edge, work ethic, drive, determination — those are all just codewords for “Please don’t let my peers judge me.”

That’s why Mike Trout stopped getting the low fastball last year. It wasn’t for baseball reasons. It was so that anytime a nearby group of people shared a laugh over This Week’s Meme, the group’s laughter would no longer be misconstrued by the dumb-dumb pitcher who threw Mike Trout a low fastball as a public and personal lampooning.

But it turns out nobody is perfect, and that’s why we’re all insecure. Mistakes are made, constantly, by every kind of person at every kind of job. Making mistakes is one of the things humans are best at. All we can do is try to be better at learning from mistakes than we are at making them, and oftentimes it feels like an uphill climb.

Say, speaking of which, plenty of pitchers made mistakes to Nolan Arenado last year. Did you know he hit 42 homers? Don’t believe me? Look, here they are!

Now we have something different to talk about. Now we have something different we have to talk about. You’ll notice I’ve drawn a red line that splits the field in two, and you’ll notice that 40 of the black dots representing home runs are to the left of that dividing red line. You could say Nolan Arenado has a type.

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A cornucopia of promising young hitters lost their rookie eligibility over the course of the 2015 season. Carlos Correa, Kris Bryant, Francisco Lindor and Kyle Schwarber are just a few of the most notable names. Each of them were consensus top prospects, and each looks primed to have an excellent big league career.

However, there was another youngster who eschewed his rookie eligibility with much less fanfare, yet whose future may be nearly as bright — at least according to the stats. As you probably deduced from the title of this piece, that player is Mets second baseman Dilson Herrera. Herrera’s minor league performance yields a KATOH forecast of 10.1 WAR over the next six years. Were he still prospect eligible, he would have landed 12th on KATOH’s top 100.

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