Archive for Teams

Michael Cuddyer wasn’t expected to receive a qualifying offer from the Rockies, so, he received a qualifying offer from the Rockies. Michael Cuddyer was expected to accept the qualifying offer, so, he didn’t accept the qualifying offer. Michael Cuddyer wasn’t expected to forgo the qualifying offer because of just a few extra million dollars, so, he forwent the qualifying offer because of just a few extra million dollars. And the Mets weren’t expected to pursue Michael Cuddyer after the compensation was attached, so, the Mets pursued him after the compensation was attached. The Mets pursued him, and they got him: Michael Cuddyer’s off to New York, for two years and $21 million.

The Mets, then, are out the 15th pick of next summer’s draft. The Rockies, then, are up one compensation pick in next summer’s draft. Cuddyer’s got himself a multi-year guarantee, and he’ll pull $8.5 million in this coming season, and $12.5 million in the next. The initial response, as is common, is that the Mets did something silly. Given a little more thought, it settles to merely questionable. Of greatest interest is what the Mets seem to be signaling.

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Today’s the day that Jose Abreu wins the 2014 American League Rookie of the Year Award. Seems like they’re doing a whole announcement show, and nothing’s official yet because they don’t want to spoil the suspense, but the suspense has already long been spoiled, by Abreu and by the rest of the AL rookie class. There’s been a little bit of chatter that Abreu might have an MVP case. Now, he’s not going to have an MVP case, as reflected by the voting, but if a guy is getting talked up in some circles as a dark-horse MVP, he’s your Rookie of the Year.

A little over a year ago, the White Sox signed Abreu to a six-year contract. At that point, it looked like a heavy investment in a player whose value would be entirely tied up in his bat. Now, Abreu’s looks like one of the more valuable contracts in the game, as he’s coming off a season that saw him answer most of the questions about his productivity. Abreu wasn’t an outstanding defender at first base. He wasn’t a stealth quality base-runner, so everything really did come down to the hitting, but the hitting was phenomenal from start to finish, and it seems worthwhile now to reflect upon Abreu’s scouting reports around the time of his signing.

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Pablo Sandoval is perhaps the most interesting free agent of the offseason. He’s both good and fairly young for a free agent these days, so there’s an argument to be made that his contract might not carry him very far into the steepest of the aging curve, which is when teams have often gotten burned with big money deals. Of course, he’s also a big guy, with the body type of the kind of player who often ages poorly, and he’s spent a significant chunk of time on the DL during his tenure with the Giants.

This makes him a bit of a unique free agent, as you can argue that he’s either lower risk (due to age) or higher risk (due to body type), depending on which one you one put more stock in. And both arguments have their merit. Projecting future playing time is difficult enough for a normal player, much less a guy on the extreme ends of two variables that offer different conclusions.

So, it seems inevitable that whatever Sandoval signs for, it’s going to be a polarizing contract. Especially if he lands the six year deal that he’s seeking. From his agent, Gustavo Vazquez, via Henry Schulman:

“Pablo is 28,” Vasquez said. “He is still young. Maybe if he was 30 or 31 we could talk about four or five years. But he’s 28. He deserves more than that.”

The immediate reaction is to imagine what a 34-year-old Sandoval might look like, and shrink back from the idea of guaranteeing real money to, as Grant Brisbee put it, a “less athletic David Wells.” The odds of Sandoval still being a highly productive player in 2020 are pretty slim, and a six year deal would make it very likely that the signing team would have paid a hefty premium for a pinch-hitter or part-time platoon guy by the time the contract ends. However, in and of itself, that doesn’t make a six year contract for Sandoval a bad idea.

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Let’s start with four Tampa Bay Rays-related facts we know to be either true or at least have been recently publicly stated as such:

1. The team’s 85 losses in 2014 were more than the franchise has had since 2007, when they were still the Devil Rays, had Brendan Harris, Akinori Iwamura and Delmon Young in the regular lineup, and were finishing off a run off 10 consecutive 90-plus-loss seasons.
2. The two men most publicly associated with turning the franchise around, general manager Andrew Friedman and manager Joe Maddon, both departed in the past month in search of higher salaries and greater visibility.
3. The 2015 payroll, as disclosed by owner Stu Sternberg in September, is “clearly going to be lower” than the $76 million Opening Day figure it was this year, a franchise record that nonetheless ranked as one of the lowest numbers in baseball and was referred to by Sternberg as “an enormous aberration.” While there are plenty of very valid reasons not to shift blame to the fan base, this is no doubt impacted by a third consecutive season at the bottom of the average attendance standings.
4. The battle to find the team a new stadium, clearly the main impediment towards long-term success and stability in the Tampa Bay area, continues to go nowhere, with a recent Tampa Bay Times editorial clearly showing the exhaustion and frustration with the issue, and forcing franchise officials to deal with rumors of a move to Montreal.

This isn’t all going to be doom-and-gloom, I promise, but it’s going to start out that way, because those four items are all irrefutably bad news. While new baseball boss Matt Silverman is well-respected and a replacement for Maddon hasn’t yet been named, it’s probably time to investigate the Rays as the offseason gets moving and ask the question: Have we seen the best this franchise has to offer? Has the miraculous run of success that lasted longer than anyone thought would finally come to an end? Read the rest of this entry »

It’s never easy to try to figure out intent after the fact. Consider questionable hit-by-pitches. Some of them are more obviously intentional than others, but there’s nothing we can do in a database to separate the intentionals from the accidentals. It gets a little tricky with bunting for a hit, too, because bunting can also serve a very different purpose, but there’s one thing we can look at as a proxy. Let’s focus only on bunt attempts with nobody on base. Sometimes, a hitter might be trying to bunt for a hit with somebody on, but that’s relatively uncommon, and when the bases are empty, at least we know with absolute certainty the idea. A bunt with no one on is a bunt attempt for a hit. Or it’s a bunt attempt by a guy inexplicably playing through a strained oblique, but, generally, it’s a bunt attempt for a hit.

So, 2014. Let’s use some data from Baseball Savant, combining bunts in play with foul and missed bunts, to come up with total attempts. Here’s something that won’t surprise you: Billy Hamilton led baseball with 77 bunt attempts with the bases empty. We can think of those as 77 bunt attempts for a hit. In second place, again unsurprisingly, we find Dee Gordon, with 70 attempts. Then there’s Leonys Martin, with 52, and Adeiny Hechavarria, with 40. All makes perfect sense. This only gets weird when you consider rate stats.

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Madison Bumgarner pitched quite a bit this past season. Including the regular and post season, he threw a total of 4,074 pitches, which wasn’t even the season’s top total; James Shields bested him by throwing six more, for a total of 4,080 pitches in 2014, not including spring training. So with all of the pitches thrown this season (and one month less of rest), how should we expect these two to produce next season? Let’s look at some comparable pitchers.

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The Colorado Rockies do weird things. Whether it’s reorganizing the front office in a way that puts the GM in charge of the farm system instead of the major league roster or having the new GM put an office in the clubhouse, they operate in a way that is unusual for an MLB franchise. Even their player personnel decisions can be a bit odd; heads were certainly scratched after the team made Michael Cuddyer a qualifying offer on Monday, for instance.

The big knock on the Rockies is that they seem unable to commit to a direction or a purpose. Despite four straight losing seasons, they’ve been unwilling to attempt to rebuild, rebuffing offers for not just their star players but for expensive role players like Jorge de la Rosa. Making Cuddyer the qualifying offer appeared to be yet another sign of a team that seems intent on trying to keep the pieces in place together, despite the fact that there’s mounting evidence that this roster just isn’t good enough to contend.

Except maybe extending the qualifying offer to Cuddyer didn’t mean that. A few days after that decision was made, Ken Rosenthal reported that the team has “their eyes and ears open” to potential trades for both Troy Tulowitzki and Carlos Gonzalez, a significant change in stance, as previously both players had been off-limits to suitors. You don’t let teams know that your two best players are finally available if you don’t think there’s a real chance you could trade either or both, and so it seems like the Rockies are finally ready to shake things up and try something different.

So, why make the 35 year old Cuddyer a qualifying offer if you’re planning on blowing things up? Because the calculations for making a QO for a rebuilding team are quite a bit different than for a team that expected to need to maximize payroll efficiency.

Cuddyer’s open market value is probably somewhere in the $10 million range on a two or three year deal, so making him an offer of $15 million for one year means that the team has committed to overpaying by a few million if he accepts the offer. But having an overpaid player that other teams still want isn’t the worst thing in the world for a rebuilding team, as they could simply pay part of his 2015 salary to make him a more desirable trade chip over the summer. With spending restrictions on signing amateur talent, paying the salaries of veteran players to acquire prospects in trade is one of the few ways left to essentially buy talent. Even if Cuddyer accepts the qualifying offer, the Rockies could likely flip him for something of value as long as they kick in a few million dollars, so having him accept isn’t really that harmful to the franchise.

And if he turns it down and gives a contender a discount in annual salary in order to get the multi-year deal he prefers, then the Rockies will receive a compensatory pick in next summer’s draft. Either way, they’d get the chance to add some young talent to the organization. Keeping Cuddyer at $15 million is only really an issue if having him on the books prevented them from making other necessary upgrades, but if they’re trading Tulowitzki and Gonzalez, few free agents of note would have been interested in taking their money to begin with. If you’re blowing things up, it’s better to have expensive trade chips that you can pay down in trade rather than having a bunch of unspent money that no one wants to take.

While it might seem counterintuitive, making the qualifying offer to Cuddyer actually makes more sense in the wake of the news about the availability of Tulowitzki and Gonzalez. It seems like perhaps new GM Jeff Bridich has finally convinced ownership of the need to rebuild, and perhaps the Rockies can start to commit to a direction and stick with it for once. While both Tulo and Gonzalez dealt with injuries again, and both have proven to be quite fragile, putting them on the market this winter actually seems to make some sense, rather than trying to let both prove that they’re healthy before accepting bids.

The idea of keeping both stars until they’re healthy in order to raise their market value seems wise, but let’s think about the logistics of what that might actually look like; in any scenario where both Tulo and CarGo are healthy and playing well, the Rockies are probably also probably a semi-competitive team. After all, they did go 16-12 in April when Tulo was tearing the cover off the ball, and even though this isn’t a great team when both are healthy, it will be a more difficult decision to move either player while the team hangs around the periphery of the Wild Card race.

With a healthy Tulo and CarGo, the Rockies are good enough to convince themselves to not blow things up; the reality of the necessary rebuild only becomes obvious when those two are not able to take the field, exposing a weak supporting cast that can’t make up for the loss of the team’s best players. The dream scenario of being able to trade both players at the peak of their value is probably unrealistic, because at the peak of their value, ownership is going to remember why they’ve been previously unwilling to trade them, and commence the annual spinning of their wheels.

The Rockies best chance to get out of this death spiral is to trade both players now. A weak free agent class on the position player side of things will help drive up demand for the team’s two star hitters, even as both have questions surrounding their health. Teams are more inclined to make blockbuster deals in the offseason anyway, and with teams like Boston actively looking to exchange multiple players for a controllable star, there are teams who will likely take the risk on the health of a younger star rather than taking the risk on a long-term deal for an aging free agent.

After all, while the talking points always center around Tulowitzki’s health, keep in mind that he posted a +5 WAR season in 2014 even while playing just 91 games, and he was over over +5 WAR in 126 games in 2013 as well. Over the last two years, while combining for just 887 plate appearances, Tulo still ranks 11th among position players in WAR. You pay for production, and Tulo’s health risks are offset by his absurd ability to play well when he’s on the field.

Even with the injury problems, Tulowitzki is one of the game’s premier players, and his contract is still well below market value. Shin-Soo Choo got $140 million over seven years last winter; Tulo is due $15 million less than that even if his seventh year option is picked up, which would likely mean that he stayed healthy enough to be worth keeping. Jose Reyes got $102 million over six years coming off an excellent season shortened by injury, and that was three years ago; baseball salaries have only gone up since.

There will be a strong market for Troy Tulowitzki, and Gonzalez should be able to fetch a decent return as well, especially if the Rockies pick up some of the cost of his salary. We’ll deal with a fair return for both players in another post, but for now, I’d suggest that Rockies fans should take this as somewhat promising news. A directionless franchise might actually be ready to commit to an overdue rebuild. Things might really be changing in Colorado for once.

Sometimes, a transaction is so immediately obvious you don’t have to spend any time at all trying to work out the rationale behind it. Other times, a transaction only seems that immediately obvious, because we’re not privy to all of the relevant information. In each case, though, we get to pretend like the move in question is immediately obvious, because we can’t know what we don’t know, and on Wednesday, the Astros made a trade. They got a guy they like, and they like him because of course they like him.

The Astros got one guy for two guys, giving up catcher Carlos Perez and pitcher Nick Tropeano. Perez might take over as the Angels’ backup, and Tropeano might manage to crack the Angels’ starting rotation. But the guy the Astros added is Hank Conger, and though Conger’s is by no means any sort of household name, you could say the Astros just got their Jose Molina. Have I mentioned lately that the Astros employ Mike Fast? Do I even need to?

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The days of having to rail against runs batted in as a particularly useful indicator of individual offensive value are long behind us. That does not mean there might not be potentially interesting research to do on situational hitting or the like, but simply that the straight-up use of RBI is not something that really needs to be debated.

Nonetheless, it is still interesting to see what sorts of hitters can accumulate high numbers of RBI, something we recognize with an award named for two players who managed big RBI numbers despite less than impressive advanced hitting metrics: the John Carter-Tony Bautista Award.

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Let’s stop beating around the bush. No more playing games. You’ve been thinking about it forever. I’ve been thinking about it forever. It’s always there in conversation, lingering somewhere just underneath. When it’s on your mind, you’re not sure how it’s ever not on your mind. It’s maybe the greatest trade hypothetical in baseball today. So let’s just try to figure this out, before the actual offseason starts happening. Would it make sense for the Angels to package Mike Trout and Albert Pujols together for nothing?

The actual question that gets asked gets asked in varying forms, but that’s what’s always right at the core. Does Pujols’ negative value cancel out Trout’s positive value? It’s not even that difficult a question to address. Last March, Dave Cameron referred to Mike Trout as the king of trade value, now and forever. During the summer, Dave asserted that Albert Pujols has the lowest trade value in the majors. This is why Trout and Pujols have been selected: They represent the very best and the very worst of something. Let’s proceed so we can never have to talk about this again — for a week or two.

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