Archive for Teams

Nearly a year ago on these very electronic pages, I wrote a post entitled “The Dodgers And Too Many Outfielders,” investigating the fact that the Dodgers had four starting outfielders — Yasiel Puig, Matt Kemp, Carl Crawford and Andre Ethier — for three spots, a situation that would only get more complicated when top prospect Joc Pederson arrived. A move, it seemed, was a necessity, and I counted down six ways it could happen.

A year later, a lot has changed, both in terms of how some of those players are viewed and in what outfield positions they play. But what never did change is that Ned Colletti wasn’t able to move any of his veterans, and now Andrew Friedman, Farhan Zaidi and company are left with an even more constricting situation. Puig, Kemp, Crawford, and Ethier are still Dodgers. Pederson put up the first 30/30 season in the PCL in decades on his way to winning the league MVP and Rookie of the Year awards before making his major league debut in September. Most unexpectedly, lightly-regarded backup Scott Van Slyke became one of the league’s most valuable bench players and clearly deserves more time.

Four outfielders? If only. These Dodgers have six, and if we thought a move last year was a probability, now it seems like more of an imperative. But how is this going to resolve itself? Here we go again.

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The Yankees have found new ways to exploit their financial advantage in recent years.  For a long time, they were the team spending the most money on big league payroll by a good margin, then other teams caught up after the addition of the luxury tax along with an Hal Steinbrenner being more focused on the bottom line than his father.  The Yankees never really blew things out in the draft when they had the opportunity, but now there are essentially hard caps on draft spending and extra picks are tougher to come by with recent changes to the CBA.

The Yankees saw these two market opportunities dry up while their revenues stayed high and they pinpointed the international market as a target.  As a result of spending nearly $30 million dollars on teenagers last summer, the Yankees now cannot sign a player for over $300,000 for the next two summers.  If they get lucky with some timing, they may still be able to make this one-year international blowout even more advantageous, but their competitive advantage has mostly passed in these three markets for the time being.

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The word we’re supposed to use is “introduced”. As in, the Cubs introduced Joe Maddon on Monday as the team’s new manager. Really, Maddon’s a guy who needs no introduction, and in addition to that, Maddon isn’t a guy you bring in, as an organization, unless you feel like you’re on the verge of something. Maddon isn’t a guy you give five years and $25 million, as an organization, unless you feel like you’re entering a new era. The Cubs didn’t want to get rid of Rick Renteria, but at the same time, this wasn’t an opportunity they could let pass by. As was noted in the days prior to Monday’s press conference:

On Friday, Epstein said Maddon “may be as well-suited as anyone in the industry to manage the challenges that lie ahead of us.”

About those challenges — there are always challenges, for everyone, and there are certainly always challenges in Chicago, but the challenges that lie ahead now are quite different from the challenges that were ahead a few years back when the Cubs overhauled the front office. The idea now is that Maddon can help the team transition from loser to winner, and though that’s what all losers want, the Cubs are in a particular position. Maddon spent a chunk of his press conference talking about the 2015 playoffs. Theo Epstein, at the end of the regular season, also talked about the 2015 playoffs. The Cubs see Joe Maddon as the first step in a new level. The Cubs now intend to be serious about the present. So how far away are the Cubs from looking like a competitive team?

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I noted in my FanGraphs Player of the Year voting explanation that I very badly wanted to find a place for Aroldis Chapman. Ultimately I couldn’t do it, not with Chapman being a reliever and with other guys not being relievers, but I wanted to give Chapman some support for a season that was almost impossibly outstanding and extraordinary. Aroldis Chapman is coming off one of my favorite single seasons ever, and with everything in the books, none of the numbers are changing. Because I couldn’t give Chapman a vote, I decided I wanted to give him one last front-page post.

I know the headline sucks and I know lists seem lazy, but I don’t know a better way to capture what I want to be captured. I want to touch on my five favorite Chapman facts, and this is the simplest way to keep them organized. These are not the five best 2014 Aroldis Chapman facts, recovered after hours of mining — probably, there are things he did that have so far escaped my attention. These are just my five favorite facts, out of the facts I’m aware of. There are some good ones that didn’t qualify. Against left-handed batters, Chapman last season posted a negative FIP. He allowed a .121 batting average and a .172 slugging percentage, while National League pitchers batted .125 and slugged .156. Chapman was great! Here now are five better facts, that I haven’t bothered to order. It’s like trying to pick a favorite child, except none of these facts will spill grape juice on the carpet.

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Back in September, we announced the creation of the FanGraphs Player of the Year Award, in order to have an outlet to honor the player we felt performed at the highest level of any player in Major League Baseball each season. We wanted to try and avoid a lot of the semantical arguments about the meaning of different awards, and eliminate many of the divisions between leagues or player types, and simply recognize the most outstanding performer of the season.

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I think my most recent seven posts here at FanGraphs were about the Giants or the Royals or both, a necessary side effect of being a regular baseball writer during the World Series. Sometimes it feels like there’s only so much you can say about James Shields or Joe Panik or Lorenzo Cain, but really, why bother talking about something else during the most important games of the year?

With that finally behind us, we can look forward to 2015, and I keep thinking about the team that seems most likely, at this far-too-early date before any real offseason moves have been made, to make a move next year. You probably think I’m talking about the Cubs. I’m not talking about the Cubs. I’m talking about the Cleveland Indians. I was asked, during a live chat of one of the World Series games, whether I thought the Royals could hold off the Tigers in the AL Central next season. At the time, I said I thought Cleveland might be better than both, and now it’s time to put some words behind that feeling. In fact, let’s do this internet style. On to the <h3>’s! Read the rest of this entry »

The baseball offseason arrived all of a sudden. As the Giants were parading around the streets of San Francisco, I was on my computer writing about the Cubs ditching Rick Renteria to hire Joe Maddon. And then Saturday brought the offseason’s first meaningful trade — Adam Lind to the Brewers, and Marco Estrada to the Blue Jays. I’m going to be completely honest with you. I was excited at first, thinking more of the players in the deal than I wound up doing following further examination. I think I was just excited to have the offseason really get underway, to fill the baseball void. But still, this is a trade, with players you’ve presumably heard of, and it was swung to serve a purpose, so it’s worthy of our consideration. What the heck else do we have to consider?

We’ll get to the Blue Jays’ side of things. We’ll get into more detail. But we can start by acknowledging the obvious, that being the Brewers’ motivation to get a deal done. Lind is slated to be the Brewers’ regular first baseman. Here are the least productive positions in baseball, by our numbers, over the past two seasons combined:

• Red Sox, third base, -2.2 WAR
• Astros, first base, -2.2 WAR
• Yankees, shortstop, -2.7 WAR
• Yankees, designated hitter, -4.3 WAR
• Brewers, first base, -4.6 WAR

I don’t know, either, but it happened. Over two years, Brewers first basemen combined to be worth almost an impossible five wins below replacement. The situation was better in 2014 than it was in 2013, but it’s also better to have your arm cut off than it is to have your arm cut off, successfully reattached, and then cut off again. For the Brewers, first base was a disaster, a disaster without any reasonable internal solution, so the front office acted quickly to address one of baseball’s very greatest needs.

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Under pretty much all circumstances, relative to people involved in the game, we the public have a lesser amount of information. Sometimes, it’s close, like when it comes to specific player valuation — we have access to almost as much as the teams and executives do. But sometimes we’re bringing a straw to a knife fight. There’s perhaps nothing we understand less than the value of a manager. Analysts have tried to dig in deep, and within our heads we have ideas of which guys are better than others, but ultimately we’re always guessing on the impact. What are we supposed to do with charisma and leadership? The attempted evaluation of managers causes many people to just throw up their hands. Why even bother?

So, from the outside, we can barely say anything. We simply don’t know. And maybe teams don’t know much, either. Maybe they’re guessing almost as much as we are. But we can at least evaluate market behavior as an indirect reflection of a guy’s perceived value. And the market has responded strongly to Joe Maddon’s sudden and unanticipated free agency. The Cubs are going to hire Maddon, officially, maybe before I’m done writing this post. It’s pretty clear, then, how highly Maddon is thought of.

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“Grady did not know that. Grady had ignored Paul’s prodding to scout the players his computer flushed out. Paul had said the scouts ought to go have a look at a college kid named Kevin Youkilis. Youkilis was a fat third baseman who couldn’t run, throw or field. What was the point of going to see that? (Because, Paul would be able to say three months later, Kevin Youkilis has the second highest on-base percentage in all of baseball, after Barry Bonds. To Paul, he’d become Euclis: the Greek god of walks.)

Good nicknames in baseball are somewhat of a rarity these days. One of my favorite sections of The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract is “nicknames.” Nicknames like “Earache,” “Firebrand” and “The Grey Eagle” resonated a lot more than today’s silly trends of shortening people’s names, or adding “Y” or “IE” to the end of them. One notable exception was Kevin Youkilis. Blessed in the above passage in Moneyball as “The Greek God of Walks” nearly a year before his major league debut, the baseball world sat up and took notice of a previously anonymous player before his major league debut. No pressure. While that might not seem like much of an achievement in today’s prospect- and media-saturated world, things were quite a bit different back in 2003. Yesterday, it was reported that the Ohio native had retired. Throughout his career, he served as the perfect example for several well-worn baseball lessons.

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It was following a half-decent season in 2013 that Royals general manager Dayton Moore said he felt a little like he’d won the World Series. The remark didn’t go over very well locally or nationally, and Moore conceded later he could’ve chosen better words, but at the core of a poorly-worded sentence was a legitimate message. Moore sensed that people were getting into the Royals again. Even though the team that season had fallen a little short of the playoffs, the roster was at least competitive, and the fans at least had a product to watch. What Moore meant to say was that the franchise was restoring its bonds with the city around it, after too many years of two-way neglect.

The bonds are restored now. They maybe have never been stronger. After a year of no playoffs, Moore felt like he’d won a title, so I can’t imagine how he feels after a year of coming one win away. The fans are in love again. Many of the fans, they were always in love, but they’re once again willing to act on it. And new fans have been gained, as well, fans who previously never gave baseball a second thought. Consider one anecdote, to represent many:

People are wearing blue proudly again. People filled Kauffman Stadium proudly again. People are chanting proudly again. Last year put the Royals back on the map; this year circled the Royals with dark ink and arrows. The fans sense an opening window of contention, and as heartbreaking as it is to lose in a seventh game, this doesn’t have to have been the last chance. The Royals could be back, and they could be powered in no small part by gains from having made so deep a run.

All that success, all that restored loyalty and enthusiasm — that’s money. What’s more, that’s money the Royals weren’t even budgeting for. I’ve never been confused for a financial wizard, or for any kind of wizard, but what the Royals have been gaining is pure profit, and the gains aren’t going to end with the playoff run. As a matter of fact, the Royals will be benefiting from this past month for a good while yet.

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