Archive for Teams

On Friday night, Zack Greinke decided to take his talents to Phoenix, joining the Arizona Diamondbacks, who are now an interesting potential contender for 2016. That decision, of course, left a significant hole in the Dodgers starting rotation, and the loss of their alternate ace has set the team down a different course. Since the Greinke news broke, they’ve struck deals with aging veterans Hisashi Iwakuma and Chase Utley, traded for Aroldis Chapman, talked to the Marlins about Jose Fernandez, were named as a suitor for Ben Zobrist, and probably have a few dozen other alternatives that haven’t leaked out to the public yet. This certainly won’t be a boring winter in Los Angeles.

But it’s certainly possible that, for the second straight winter, the Dodgers are going to choose to acquire a larger quantity of potentially good players rather than banking on the elite performances of a few high profile stars. Andrew Friedman’s roster revamp a year ago saw the team acquire guys like Brandon McCarthy, Brett Anderson, Yasmani Grandal, Jimmy Rollins, and Howie Kendrick rather than make runs at All-Stars like Max Scherzer or Jon Lester. And then the Dodgers essentially affirmed that philosophy in July, when they were heavily linked to Cole Hamels, but chose to make a deal that brought in Alex Wood and Mat Latos instead. Capping their offer to Greinke at $160 million might have been surprising for a team that has seemingly unlimited payroll space, but while the Dodgers have spent extensively on acquiring young talent (particularly in the international market), this front office has not shown an inclination to pay a premium for high-end veterans.

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Remember life before Mike Trout? There was less joy in the world and the Angels didn’t have to spend so much money on new baseballs. There were also different expectations placed on young players. Because of Trout, though, and the era of players he ushered in, the way we look at prospect timelines has changed. Trout was the best player in baseball at age 20 and has been great ever since. Bryce Harper, Manny Machado, and plenty of other newcomers have taken the sport by storm with awesome debuts. Carlos Correa! Kris Bryant! Francisco Lindor! Top prospects now burst onto the scene and are immediately awesome. It’s fun to watch.

But it can also be distracting. The Trout-led immediacy has moved us to forget about players who don’t excel right away. I’m not just talking about mid-level prospects who aren’t getting their due, I’m thinking about good prospects who don’t have four-win seasons prior to their 23rd birthdays.

There’s an attention gap between the year you lose prospect status and the year you show up near the top of the leaderboards for the first time. Once a player loses his rookie eligibility but before he’s fully reached his cruising altitude, we sort of lose track of them unless they play for our favorite team.

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On July 7th, 2006, a 23-year-old righty made his major league debut against the Tigers. He entered the game in relief and immediately began putting up 99s on the radar gun. It wasn’t enough, however, to prevent Chris Shelton from singling to shortstop and beating out the throw. Brandon Inge also wasn’t afraid of the velocity, as he hit a ground-rule double to center. The young righty was now flustered. He hit Curtis Granderson to load the bases. He paced around the mound, gathered himself, and then rallied to strike out Placido Polanco, get a weak grounder from Ivan Rodriguez, and strike out Magglio Ordonez to end the threat.

On that day, Mark Lowe began a journey that started with the Mariners and continued on to the Rangers (in the Cliff Lee deal), and then the Dodgers, Angels, Nationals, Rays, Indians, Mariners (again), and Blue Jays. And now, almost ten years later, the Tigers have signed him with a two-year deal to be their setup man. It’s been quite a trip for him.

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

Other Projections: Atlanta / Kansas City.

Batters
Toronto’s position players recorded the highest collective WAR in the majors this past year. Based on the numbers produced by ZiPS for 2016, the possibility of repeating that feat would appear to be distinct. Adding the rounded WAR figures in the depth chart below — a practice, it needs to be said, that should be reserved for entertainment purposes only — yields a sum of about 28 wins. That total would have been the third-highest in 2015. An encouraging development, that.

The strengths of the team aren’t surprising. Jose Bautista, Josh Donaldson, and Troy Tulowitzki have been good in the past and appear capable of continuing that trend. Of some interest is what appears to be the team’s only weakness — namely, second base. Devon Travis exhibited considerable promise as a rookie, but is expected to begin the season on the disabled list. Ryan Goins, meanwhile — despite what appears to be above-average defense — is regarded by Szymborski’s computer as a replacement-level player. Finding even just some value from second would appear to represent an easy means by which the club can improve itself this offseason.

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Want to know an easy way to provoke someone into complaining about how all professional athletes are overpaid? Tell this person there was a pitcher last year who led all of baseball in both hits and runs allowed. And I mean “led” in the bad way, not the good way. Let that sink in, then tell the person the pitcher was a free agent, and finally tell the person that pitcher signed for five years and $90 million. More often than not, a rant is going to follow. It’s going to be a weird rant, that misses the point about how much money there is floating around in baseball these days, and the reality is that players are getting less of the league revenue than they used to. But you already knew it would be a weird rant. That’s why you targeted this given individual in the first place.

There are people who like to say that free agency is about rewarding players for what they’ve already done. To some extent it’s true — free agents score when they’ve proven they can be good. But of course, free agency is really about investing in the future, and I’m not sure it gets more clear than it is right here, with the Giants paying pretty big money for a pitcher coming off a conventionally disappointing season. This isn’t about what Jeff Samardzija’s done, certainly not what he’s done most recently. This is about what the Giants think Samardzija is going to be. Heaven knows they weren’t alone.

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Zack Greinke looks to be worth what the Diamondbacks will be paying him. We still don’t have a complete idea of the structure of his contract, so it’s not like everything can be nailed down precisely, but he’s one of the most valuable pitchers in baseball, and he’s going to get paid like it. When you factor in everything he does — pitch, hit, defend — Greinke’s projected contract comes out looking a lot like his actual contract. So, based on our usual estimates, this is a totally acceptable free-agent deal. Good for Greinke, good for Arizona.

Here’s where it gets more complicated: those usual estimates don’t do much to account for team context. Let’s say the going rate for a win in free agency is $8 million. The specific number doesn’t matter. That’s what any team should expect to pay. But you can’t pay everyone free-agent money — that would mean, to expect 40 team WAR, you’d need a payroll of $320 million. $8 million might be the cost of a win in free agency, for every team, but not every team has the same total $/WAR target. As always, the biggest-spending teams have an advantage. Teams like the Diamondbacks need to be more careful.

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In Major League Baseball, the market tends to correct itself as clubs gain greater knowledge of players and their value. If aging players are less successful, the market for that group might slow a bit. Bullpen arms become more or less desirable depending on their scarcity. Increased revenues tend to move everyone up the pay scale. It is important to understand how and when to make adjustments in value as run-scoring environments, finances, and aging patterns change.

That is all well and good for those who run organizations and those who follow the game closely, but the arbitration process is much less nuanced. The non-tendering of contracts to Pedro Alvarez and Chris Carter, along with the trade of Mark Trumbo, are all the result of a failure to adjust — within the arbitration process, specifically — as the market slowly corrects for the overpayment of defensively- (and sometimes offensively-) limited home run hitters whose overall effectiveness has dimmed.

The arbitration process tends to favor the traditional stats that place like FanGraphs have tried to de-emphasize. Closers get big paydays in arbitratio, regardless of overall performance. As a result, the St. Louis Cardinals opted to let Steve Cishek go instead of moving to arbitration where he would receive a salary of around $7 million. Home runs and RBI tend to get paid as well, causing an overpayment for those players who rack up those numbers, but have big deficiencies in other areas.

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If you are a frequent user of this website, you likely know that on our player pages, you can find the five most-recently cited articles about a player — a mix of FanGraphs and RotoGraphs articles. Generally, a regular player will be written about at least five times a year. But when I sat down to write this piece, when I went to Peter Bourjos‘ page, the fifth article was Dave Cameron’s piece from Nov. 22, 2013, reacting to the news that Bourjos had been traded from Anaheim to St. Louis along with Randal Grichuk, for David Freese. That in and of itself is a bad sign. While we once thought of Bourjos as one of the game’s premier defenders, Bourjos — who was claimed this week via waivers by the Phillies — is an after-thought.

In that 2013 piece, Dave noted how Bourjos had basically become the best defensive center fielder in the game:

Since 2010, here are the top 5 center fielders in UZR/150 among players who have spent at least 2,000 innings in center field.

Peter Bourjos, +20.2
Carlos Gomez, +18.2
Jacoby Ellsbury, +13.7
Michael Bourn, +9.9
Denard Span, +9.5

The deal seemed like a great one for the Cardinals — and thanks to Grichuk, it may still be — but Bourjos never really held up his end of the bargain. In his four seasons with the Angels, he played 405 games — effectively two and a half seasons — and piled up 9.2 WAR. Not bad, right? That’s something between three and four WAR over a full season. Full seasons were hard to come by for Bourjos, though, which is why the playing time was spread out over four seasons. Still, hope sprung eternal when he landed in St. Louis.

Of note, Bourjos set a goal of stealing 40 bases in his first season in St. Louis. (Hat tip to Scott Perdue for the reminder) This was always going to be a bit of a stretch, as Bourjos, to that point, had just 41 stolen bases over his four-year career, against 13 times caught stealing. Clearly he had the speed, and a knack for stealing bases, but when your career high is 22 steals, shooting for 40 is a lofty goal.

That’s not really the point. The point is that he was excited. And the Cardinals appeared excited, as well. Bourjos started on Opening Day, and eight of the first 10 games in center. And then… he stopped playing. After those 10 games, Bourjos was hitting just .207/.258/.310, and while it was just 31 plate appearances, manager Mike Matheny had seen enough to know that he didn’t want Bourjos to be his everyday center fielder. Bourjos would start just six of the next 17 games in center, with Jon Jay logging the other 11 starts. And then Grichuk was called up. He and Jay would start the next five games, and then Bourjos reclaimed the job, as the Cards optioned Grichuk back to Triple-A. If this seems like an odd playing time pattern, well, let’s just say it wasn’t an isolated incident for Matheny.

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I was listening to a relatively prominent podcast a few days ago, just before David Price signed with the Red Sox, on which one of the commenters who has connections inside baseball said he knew Price wouldn’t go to the highest bidder. He isn’t that kind of guy, the commenter stated, matter-of-factly (that’s a paraphrase). To further paraphrase: he cares about location, about comfort, about winning. Then Price took the highest offer from a last place team, the most prominent player on which he’s reportedly had a feud.

As it turns out, Price is exactly that kind of guy. Which isn’t to say that being that kind of guy is bad, wrong, or indeed anything negative at all. [Insert boilerplate about how Price has earned everything he can get and also blah blah blah.] Even so, David Price’s seven year deal with the Red Sox makes some loud statements about the nature of free agency, statements that will almost assuredly be ignored by many, but statements that shouldn’t be. Because they are true, and the truth will set you free, and freedom is not free, like this bagel I’m eating, and bagels are delicious. So there.

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The next major free agent off the board is almost certainly going to be Zack Greinke. According to a wide number of reports, Greinke has narrowed his choices down to the Dodgers and Giants, and is pitting the two NL West rivals against each other with the goal of landing a six year deal at the highest annual average value of any player in baseball history; reportedly, he’s asking for $35 million per season, so if he gets six years, he’d end up with $210 million guaranteed. Even if he has to settle for five years and some kind of sixth year option, that’s still $175 million guaranteed at the AAV he’s seeking.

That’s a bit higher than the 5/$160M I predicted at the start of the off-season, and blows away the crowd’s expected 6/$156M valuation. On the one hand, when the Dodgers are bidding on someone, you can say that the dollars are irrelevant, because they have so much much money that the difference of a few million per year just doesn’t really matter. But this doesn’t seem like it’s just the Dodgers blowing away the competition to get the guy they want back; the Giants are reportedly being very competitive on price, making Greinke’s decision difficult.

And while Greinke is an excellent pitcher, there isn’t a lot of evidence that he’s a $200 million pitcher. For his career, he’s graded out as about a +4 WAR pitcher, regardless of whether you use ERA or FIP, and he’s headed into his age-32 season. Rationally, he’s going to get worse during his next deal, and even if you start him around his career average of +4 WAR — Steamer projects +4.1 for 2016 — then you’re looking at a pitching performance that projects to be worth about $150 million over the next six years.

Zack Greinke’s Contract Estimate — 6 yr / $151.2 M

Year	Age	WAR	$/WAR	Est. Value
2016	32	4.1	$8.0 M	$32.8 M
2017	33	3.6	$8.4 M	$30.2 M
2018	34	3.1	$8.8 M	$27.3 M
2019	35	2.6	$9.3 M	$24.1 M
2020	36	2.1	$9.7 M	$20.4 M
2021	37	1.6	$10.2 M	$16.3 M
Totals		17.1		$151.2 M

Assumptions
Value: $8M/WAR with 5.0% inflation
Aging Curve: +0.25 WAR/yr (18-27), 0 WAR/yr (28-30),-0.5 WAR/yr (31-37),-0.75 WAR/yr (> 37)

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