Archive for Teams

There’s not a contract agreement yet or even an indication that one is close, but one thing seems clear about this particular baseball offseason: There might not be a larger gap between our perception and the conversations we’re hearing in the real world than in those regarding Nick Markakis. A few weeks ago, it seemed like the Orioles were ready to retain him for the next four years, but that hasn’t quite happened yet, and the latest rumors have the Braves, Blue Jays, Giants, O’s, and potentially others all showing interest.

Earlier this week, ESPN’s Jim Bowden — who’s really very good at this sort of thing — suggested Markakis could get four years and $52 million. MLB Trade Rumors said 4/$48M in October. FanGraphs readers were a little more conservative, coming up with an average of 3.4 years and $39.8M, but we also know that the FanGraphs crowd tends to underestimate free agent contracts somewhat.

Just by those numbers, one would think that Markakis is a desirable player to have, but you probably already know that most of the FanGraphs staff doesn’t really see it that way. A month ago, Dave compared Markakis to Nori Aoki, who clearly isn’t getting a four-year deal. Steamer pegs him for a 103 wRC+ and 1.3 WAR in his age-31 season, and that’s with the benefit of a projected 679 plate appearances. Using Steamer/600 on our Free Agent Tracker, he’s tied for the 15th-best unsigned hitter out there. (The usual “don’t overthink the decimal point” caveat applies.) You’ve probably seen many of us mention how down we are on him via tweets or in chats, as well. He’s not young. He’s not improving. He’s not even a source of righty power, this year’s trendy “must-have.”

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The most obvious park-effect variable in baseball is Colorado’s altitude. Okay, nothing to be done about that. No way to pitch around it. The second-most obvious park-effect variable would have to be the Green Monster in Fenway. Boston’s got something no other place has, and it’s right there in left field looming over everything, and last week I took a look at how pitchers attempt to compensate for having that thing in play right behind them. In short, righties get pitched away more often, and lefties get pitched inside more often. It was all very intuitive, but toward the end, I threw in a note about an opposite effect I observed in Texas. Now seemed like as good an opportunity as any to turn that into a post of its own.

Globe Life Park doesn’t have a Green Monster. It doesn’t have any kind of monster, but it does have a justified reputation of being hitter-friendly. There are many culprits, but among them is a frequent gust that’s caused some fly balls to continue to carry out to right and right-center. It’s been referred to as the jetstream effect, and just as Boston is particularly hitter-friendly to left, Texas has historically been more hitter-friendly to right. How have pitchers dealt with that? Well, I guess I already told you.

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When the Rockies came to town this year, there was a tap on my shoulder. Adam Ottavino wanted to talk pitching. For some reason, I didn’t turn on my recorder. That’s fine, I guess, sometimes you just lose yourself in the conversation and want to kick yourself later when you look down. We had a good time talking, is what I remember. I even got some grips pics from him.

But anyway, I don’t have the exact quotes and so I can’t provide you a break down of Ottavino’s season peppered with the interesting things that Ottavino said about his craft. Just know that, yes, he thinks about platoon splits. And the primarily fastball/slider righty thinks about changeups. But a changeup hasn’t worked for him yet, and the strategies he’s had to deal with platoon splits have had varying success.

What stuck with me since that conversation was a pitcher he was interested in: Steve Cishek. Really, Ottavino was interested in how a primarily fastball/slider pitcher could avoid platoon splits. So, Adam, if you’re out there, let’s take a look at Steve Cishek for a bit. The rest of you that are still here, come along for the ride!

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Nothing’s ever really settled in Oakland. They can’t afford to settle, not if they want to be able to keep up despite their budget constraints. The A’s always have to be trying to think one step ahead, and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t, but Billy Beane, if nothing else, is doubtlessly bold. And he made a bold move the other day, exchanging a very excellent Josh Donaldson for a package of less excellent players. It remains to be seen how Oakland will build out the rest of its roster, but it’s obviously a team in transition. Beane stated as much in saying he wanted to stay away from having a roster in decline.

In terms of just looking at the depth chart, the A’s are shifting gears by bringing in new personnel. But there might also be something else going on, underneath. It’s nothing we can know, and it’s probably nothing we can ask Beane about while he’s still trying to work, but the recent A’s had a particularly distinctive characteristic, and one wonders whether Beane might be moving away from the philosophy. We can observe what might be interpreted as points within a pattern.

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The winner’s curse can often be used to describe the free-agent market. Generally speaking, a free agent will sign with the team that offers the most, and the team that offers the most will generally be the team that most overrates the given free agent. After Pablo Sandoval signed with the Red Sox, I found myself wondering whether the winner’s curse would apply, since according to reports, the Giants and Padres more or less made the same offer. Sandoval didn’t necessarily go to the high bidder. Nelson Cruz? Nelson Cruz went to the high bidder.

That high bidder being the Seattle Mariners, who are giving Cruz four years and $57 million. The Orioles wanted Cruz back, but they weren’t willing to match the Mariners’ aggressiveness. The Orioles didn’t want to go from three to four years, and the Orioles are reportedly interested in giving four years to Nick Markakis. It’s the Mariners who most highly valued Cruz, making for a pretty significant immediate overpay. It’s never really fun to analyze contract terms, but that’s the natural starting point, as Cruz has landed the contract he’s wanted for more than a year.

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Late this season, Padres righty Andrew Cashner came back from a shoulder injury with a new twist on his repertoire — again. This time, he featured a few more high fastballs and big curves than he had in the past. You’d think those two pitches are often linked across baseball, but the numbers aren’t as clear.

The last time Cashner came back from injury, he focused on throwing more two-seamers to get quicker outs, altered his changeup grip, and changed his grip on his breaking pitch. These changes were made with his health in mind, but they also served to make him a more complete pitcher.

This year, when he came back from shoulder inflammation that sidelined him for two months, Cashner again came back from a wrinkle. “I started throwing the four-seamer more in order to establish the high strike,” Cashner said before a game against the Giants in late September. Of course the pitcher knows best about his approach, but it’s worth noticing that he only threw an average of three more four-seam fastballs per game when he returned compared to the same time frame before his injury. And that his heat maps before and after his injury aren’t conclusive on the subject of high four-seamers.

He pointed out that he threw more curveballs when he came back, too. He’d thrown nine in his first fourteen starts before he got hurt. He threw 18 curves in the seven starts that came after his stint on the DL. This September was the month in which Cashner showed the best whiff rate on his curve ball in his career.

The second part of the plan was paired with the first, he admitted. That high fastball is “on the same plane” as the curveball. That makes all sorts of intuitive sense, considering the way the the idea of a high 94 mph high fastball coming the same general area as a big, dropping slow curve. It’s the kind of thing that seems to work for other pitchers.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

As you by now are well aware, Josh Donaldson was traded to the Toronto Blue Jays over the weekend in a blockbuster deal that sent Brett Lawrie back to Oakland. The Blue Jays gave up Lawrie and a few prospects to immediately get better, because Josh Donaldson is a guy that immediately makes any team better. Over the last two years, only Mike Trout and Andrew McCutchen have a higher WAR than Donaldson, and Donaldson’s been three wins better than the next-best third baseman. Donaldson can hit, he runs pretty well for a third baseman, and he’s good with the glove. Add those up and you’ve got a hell of a player.

But there’s something to that last point — that he’s good with the glove — that’s been on my mind for awhile. It’s something I was going to write about when the Gold Glove winners were announced, but then Donaldson didn’t win, so I saved it for another day. Now that Donaldson is back in the news, today is that day.
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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 Atlanta Braves. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Batters
Although it hasn’t been published here yet, one assumes that Jason Heyward’s projection (when it is available) will be one of the best among Atlanta’s collection of field players. Heyward, of course, won’t be playing for the club in 2015, having recently been traded to St. Louis in exchange for Shelby Miller et al. What that means, immediately, for the Atlantans is a more playing time for Evan Gattis in left field, at which position he made zero appearances in 2014 after starting there 47 times in 2013.

Expected to inherent Gattis’s catching role from 2014 is Christian Bethancourt, who enters just his age-23 season. Despite having recorded just a 54 wRC+ and -0.2 WAR over 117 plate appearances last year in what was effectively his debut (he appeared in a single game in 2013), Bethancourt is expected to produce enough offensively to render himself a league-average player.

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As November turns into December, we have a pretty good idea of what most teams are attempting to do with their short-term futures. The Red Sox are going for it, obviously, and so are the Blue Jays. The White Sox seem like they’re trying to improve for 2015; the Phillies might finally be ready to accept that they need to start over. Teams like the Cubs, Dodgers and Yankees haven’t yet made much noise, but their intentions are clear. Other than whatever it is the A’s are trying to pull, where most teams are on the success cycle is more or less an open secret.

Other than the Braves, that is. The trade that sent Jason Heyward and Jordan Walden to St. Louis for Shelby Miller and Tyrell Jenkins was largely unpopular in Atlanta, but it made a considerable amount of sense for both sides, because the Cardinals got one year of the best player involved and the Braves got 10 years of two pitchers with upside. For the long term, assuming they had decided that extending Heyward was just not going to happen, it’s a smart move. For the short term, it almost unquestionably made their 2015 team worse, and there’s been at least one recent media report that indicates that “it sounds as if the Braves will make moves aimed toward competing for titles in 2017 rather than the next two seasons.”

If so, that makes sense. There’s obvious appeal in having a winner ready for the new ballpark the club will move into in 2017, and this current Braves team, as constructed, isn’t likely to be particularly good. There’s constant rumors that Justin Upton could be traded, too, and Evan Gattis might follow him out the door as well — or worse, start every day in left field. There’s not currently a second baseman, or realistic hope for B.J. Upton, and the rotation is full of question marks. This was a bad offense last year, and without Heyward, now it looks worse.

With that reality, here’s the question: Why not trade Craig Kimbrel? Like, now? Read the rest of this entry »

I’ll try to complete the FanGraphs analysis of the Josh Donaldson deal, with Dave covering the A’s perspective of the deal and Drew Fairservice covering it from the Jays perspective while I’ll jump in with the prospect end of things. Those two prior pieces do a good job analyzing the various angles of this deal, with the main question being what the next few moves are for Oakland, since they seem far from done shuffling their roster.

Dave’s piece made the points that the gap between Donaldson and Brett Lawrie may be smaller than 2013-2014 would lead you to believe, so if one of the prospects end up as a star or a piece that can be used in another deal, it could swing the balance of the deal toward Oakland.  There’s an expectation that Lawrie won’t match Donaldson’s production, hence the three minor leaguers included. While Lawrie will be the player watched most closely in 2015 from this deal, one exec I talked to last night said Franklin Barreto is the key to the deal, so let’s start with him.

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