Archive for Teams

The White Sox aren’t close, but they’re building a long-term core. Earlier in the week they signed starting pitcher Jose Quintana to a five-year contract with two more years of club options. Appropriately, given the player, the news didn’t capture the nation’s interest. In fact, the biggest immediate effect was Quintana could stop being such a nervous, uncomfortable wreck. It’s a smaller deal than Starling Marte’s new contract with Pittsburgh, in both guaranteed money and in relevance to the average fan’s interests.

There’s something here, though. Something one wouldn’t expect. Quintana’s 25 years old. Last year, by WAR, he was tied for 24th among major-league starters — neck and neck with the likes of Homer Bailey, Madison Bumgarner and Patrick Corbin. By RA9-WAR, he was tied for 23rd, equal to Jordan Zimmermann and Chris Tillman. He made all of his starts, and he threw 200 innings. A season ago, ever so quietly, Quintana was one of the better starters in the majors. Which leads  to this: What the heck is a Jose Quintana?

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FanGraphs recently added the ability to view Inside Edge fielding data breakdowns to player pages, and it’s a fun way to look at defense. Milwaukee’s Carlos Gomez converted the highest percentage of “Remote” (defined as being 1%-10% likely) plays, not unexpected given his stellar defensive reputation, while Brandon Crawford and Pedro Florimon tied for the largest raw number of such plays, at 24, also not unexpected since they are shortstops who are mostly in the big leagues for their defensive value. You can view this data in any number of different ways, really. By definition, no major leaguer converted a single “Impossible” play, but the two players who had the most such plays head their way were Cincinnati outfielders Jay Bruce and Shin-Soo Choo, who had a combined 250 “Impossible” plays. That the top two players both played on the same team tells us… something, probably.

But we’ve already looked at Crawford’s greatness, and Florimon just really isn’t that interesting. What I’m thinking about today are the 90%-100% plays, defined as “Almost Certain / Certain” for our purposes. Those are the plays that are so routine that most every major leaguer should be converting nearly every such opportunity into an out, and for the most part, they do. Nine qualified big leaguers made 100% of those plays last year, including the defensively-maligned Choo, which tells you a little something that his issues were more with his routes and speed in center than they were with making plays on the balls he got to. (Which sort of makes him sound like the Derek Jeter of center fielders, doesn’t it?) 44 players converted at least 99% of those plays. 60 got to at least 98%. Every team made at least 97.2%; as a whole, the sport converted 98% of such plays.

This is all as you’d expect. Those are the routine, mundane, barely thought-of plays you see a dozen times a night. They’re just short of extra points in football; they’re made all the time because they should be made all the time. You don’t notice them until they give you a reason to. The rankings tend to overweight outfielders, because there’s of course a smaller likelihood of making a throwing error from the outfield. But someone has to be pulling up the rear, and that’s what I wanted to know: which big leaguer (non-catchers, for simplicity) was the worst at making the easiest play? Read the rest of this entry »

It’s spring training, and the results don’t matter. That’s the perfect time to work on process, and so everyone’s adding, subtracting, and adjusting right now. Even a mid-career veteran that’s top five in baseball over the last five years has to take part in the process. The thing is, he might not be working on the same things that some fans would expect. He’s not necessarily following the publicly-accepted offseason agenda for his game. But believe: Joey Votto is working on things.

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During the two weeks leading up to Opening Day, we’ve been taking a look at some of the most interesting teams in baseball – one contender and one rebuilder from each league. What makes a team “interesting”? Taking advantage of the extreme nature of its ballpark, for a couple of clubs. Bucking some of the game’s most prevalent current trends and having success, for another. Or almost completely breaking from every pattern displayed in a club’s fairly successful recent past. In this installment, let’s look at our NL contender, the reigning NL champs, the St. Louis Cardinals, who have built a sustainable winner by having a somewhat contrarian plan, and sticking to it. Read the rest of this entry »

You remember what Scott Baker used to be. He used to be the model of what the Twins were going for. Lots of strikes, easy outs, strikeouts not so much as a result of stuff but as a result of throwing in the zone enough and throwing fastballs high enough. Baker was a dependable guy right up until his elbow surgery. He came back and took a while to get right with the Cubs. In three starts to close last year, he struck out six of 57 batters before becoming a low-profile free agent. He wound up with the Mariners, seemingly with an inside track for a rotation job. All he needed to be was Scott Baker.

According to Chris Cotillo, Baker is leaving the Mariners and becoming a free agent again. Didn’t like his chances, despite rotation injuries. About that: let’s go back to March 1. In the second inning of a start against the Angels, Baker struck out Chad Tracy. The strikeout was called. The pitch was in, and out of the zone. That’s been Baker’s only strikeout in the Cactus League, even though he’s faced 64 batters. He’s walked seven, and he’s hit three, and all three in a row, incidentally. The point is this: we’re conditioned to dismiss spring-training statistics. Sometimes, though, it sure feels like they’re telling us something. In this case, it sure feels like they’re telling us that Scott Baker isn’t right, and he’s always had a pretty slim margin of error.

Not that this is a post about Scott Baker! I promise.

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They say the Marlins are loaded with quality young pitching. Our own numbers disagree, at least as far as this coming season is concerned, but that’s what they say, and there are clearly some promising hard throwers slated to wear the uniform. Based on the pitching staff, you’d think the Marlins might have some kind of shot at the playoffs. The problem is almost literally everything else. You might’ve noticed a theme while scrolling through the positional power rankings so far. A lot of the Marlins’ positions look terrible. Marlins position players are projected for the lowest combined WAR in baseball, a hair behind the Twins and a wig factory behind the Dodgers. As such, the Marlins are also projected for one of the worst records in baseball, and though there’s talent in place for the future, the future ain’t 2014.

The Marlins project last at first base, third base, and shortstop. They’re tied for last at catcher, and they’re third-to-last at second base. They’re tied for first in right field — look at that! — but they’re average in left and below-average in center. With every individual projection, you can quibble. There’s less quibbling to be done when a unit looks this bad as a group.

But remember: projections are averages. Or medians. I don’t really know. So projections come with downsides, and projections come with upsides. What if we talked about the Marlins’ upside? What if we stretched the definition of “possible” to examine perhaps the greatest realistic Marlins possibility?

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Last week, Ken Rosenthal reported — and others have since confirmed — that the Astros offered top prospect George Springer a seven year, $23 million contract. He turned them down, and has since been optioned to Triple-A, where he will begin the season. Presumably, had he accepted the contract offer, he may very well have been named the Astros Opening Day right fielder, as the contract would have nullified the benefits of keeping him from accruing a full year of service time in 2014, and it’s not like the Astros have a better right fielder blocking his path at the moment. However, since Springer did not accept the contract, he’ll have to wait at least a few weeks to join the Astros, and potentially a few months if they decide to try and get him past the Super Two cutoff as well.

On the one hand, it’s easy to paint this as a picture of an organization acting in bad faith, using the carrot of a big league roster spot to try and coerce a young player into signing away his future earnings potential. The MLBPA is even considering filing a grievance on Springer’s behalf — even though he isn’t a member yet, since he is not on the Astros 40 man roster — over the issue, though it would be nearly impossible for them to prove intent given that Springer only has 266 plate appearances in Triple-A; optioning out a young player with Springer’s contact rate would be pretty easily defensible on merit alone. But the perception of impropriety still exists, due to the appearance that his demotion was directly tied to his decision to reject the Astros contract offer, whether that is actually true or not.

The Springer news has brought about another round of calls for reformation of the rules in order to remove the incentives for teams to keep their best young players in the minor leagues to begin the season, and I’m with the crowd who thinks that MLB is best served by allowing teams to make roster decisions based on talent and performance rather than worrying about accrued service time. I’d rather see George Springer play in April than whoever the Astros end up rolling out there on Opening Day. But for MLB and the MLBPA to come to any sort of consensus on this in the next CBA negotiations, everyone will first have to admit that the concept of six years of team control is basically a myth.

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“I don’t like it, because it hates me.”

That was Dodger catcher A.J. Ellis‘ half-joking reply to me last weekend in Arizona, before the team left for Australia, when I asked him whether he was aware of the recent work on pitch framing or put any stock into it whatsoever. Ellis has a reputation as a particularly thoughtful player, so I didn’t really expect him to say that he had no idea what I was talking about, but then, I’m sure we’ve all read Eno Sarris’ recent Hardball Times piece about the language of the clubhouse, and how bringing up things even as relatively straightforward as FIP and walk rate can very quickly get you on the wrong side of the room if asked in the wrong way or to the wrong player.

Pitch framing, of course, is what passes for the new hot thing in sabermetrics these days, and we’ve written about it extensively here; Jeff Sullivan has made something of a cottage industry of the topic, as have other sites, and for good reason. It’s new. It’s exciting. It’s gotten people hired. It significantly changes how we value — or at least how we should value — catchers. We don’t have to necessarily buy into the exact ranges that some studies have come out with, because some of those extremes would indicate that the best framers are providing something like MVP-quality value to their teams, but the effects are real. It’s one of those very unique skills that only a catcher can offer, and we’re finally beginning to properly understand and measure it.

So what interested me was how much, if any, real-world application this work was having. You’d think that players and teams would jump at the chance to learn more about their performances and how to improve them, but you’d also think that in 2014, major league teams wouldn’t employ managers who actively avoid any strategic viewpoint created in the last four decades.

That being the case, do catchers buy into this? If so, is there a capacity to improve?

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As has been the case each of the past two years, the present author has recently transported his dumb body to Jupiter, FL, America — spring home of the Miami Marlins, the St. Louis Cardinals, and the author’s (now) 93-year-old grandfather.

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What do we have here? For an explanation of this series, please read this introductory post. As noted in that introduction, the data is a hybrid projection of the ZIPS and Steamer systems with playing time determined through depth charts created by our team of authors. The rankings are based on aggregate projected WAR for each team at a given position. The author writing this post did not move your team down ten spots in order to make you angry. We don’t hate your team. I promise.

Evan Longoria is good at baseball. Evidence:

The third base graph looks more like the first base graph than it does the catcher graph. There’s a thin top tier, and then a pretty large middle tier (that you can break up into two and three win players) and then a hide-your-eyes bottom tier. By and large, the teams in the bottom half have a couple different directions in which they could go, so things could look a touch different at the end of the season, with the Braves being the notable exception. Let’s not expend a lot of words in the intro though, as there are many words expended below!

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