Archive for Teams

There’s a pretty strong and obvious relationship between speed and baserunning. Speed is best demonstrated when running, and “baserunning” has “running” right in the word. There usually isn’t very much interesting to say about a fast guy who runs the bases well. Likewise, there usually isn’t very much interesting to say about a slow guy who runs the bases poorly. It’s more uncommon to hear about a fast guy with baserunning limitations, but we can make sense of that — baserunning skill isn’t 100% footspeed. Speed’s just a component, along with instincts and awareness and reaction time.

But it’s a major component. Not all good runners will be good baserunners, but it feels like all good baserunners should be good runners. Check out the top of last year’s baserunning value leaderboard. Jacoby Ellsbury is a good runner. Rajai Davis is a good runner. Eric Young, Elvis Andrus, Mike Trout, Alcides Escobar — all these guys, good runners. An almost infallible rule is, you need to be able to run pretty well to be able to run the bases pretty well. But note that I had to throw an “almost” in there. And I had to throw an “almost” in there on account of Daniel Murphy, baseball’s premier player with speed without speed.

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If it seems like we’ve written about the Dodgers second base competition a lot this offseason, it’s because we have. Two months ago, I looked into the questionable depth the team had at the position; a few weeks ago, Eno Sarris revisited the situation to see whether it would present a problem. Now, barely more than a week before the team kicks off the season in Australia, there appears to be a winner, at least if you believe this beat writer or that one or that one, and it’s not $28 million Cuban import Alexander Guerrero: it’s former shortstop Dee Gordon, who has 3.2 career innings at the position.

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I remember a Sunday several years ago, when I was in college, when I got myself all interested in pitcher release points. I wasn’t interested in anything, specifically — I just wanted to come up with some kind of measurement, because I hadn’t seen data like that before. So I spent many, many hours capturing screenshots from MLB.tv and marking pixel coordinates on a spreadsheet. In that way, I worked hard to estimate a handful of release points from one pitcher, and I was satisfied, at least with the concept. I felt like the labor was worthwhile. These days you can get release-point information instantly, and it’s better and a hell of a lot more thorough.

The advantage of having all this information is that we get to have all this information. If there’s a disadvantage, it’s that it used to be fun to try to figure things out by hand. Analysis used to take longer, and be longer. It was a journey, for everyone involved. Now almost everything’s quantified. The ESPN Home Run Tracker can spit out tons of details about every single home run hit during the season. It’s insane, how far we’ve come. Oh, but, the ESPN Home Run Tracker isn’t active during spring training. And Giancarlo Stanton plays in spring training.

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There’s nothing at all strange about a city the size of Denver having a major-league baseball team. I’ve been to Denver. Not only is it big enough to have multiple gas stations — it’s big enough to have multiple kinds of gas stations. Where things do get strange is in the details. Denver, of course, is really high up, relative to where sea level is, and that makes for an unavoidably different baseballing experience. There’s nothing, really, to be done about it. Baseball in Denver’s played at altitude, so baseball in Denver’s a different sort of baseball.

Things happen differently there, and for that reason Denver’s a perfect case for why park factors have to exist for analysts to get anywhere. It’s simply an extreme hitter-friendly run environment. Now, when it comes to games in Denver, everyone, at least, is on a level playing field (literally!) (figuratively too). But there are games played outside of Denver, and additionally, there are players who are removed from Denver. Whenever a position player leaves the Rockies, people get worried that he’s going to fall apart, because he’ll miss the lopsided circumstances. With players who used to play in Colorado, there’s a tendency to be cautious, and perhaps even skeptical.

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There’s bad days, and then there’s what Sergio Romo had against the Mariners in the midst of an 18-3 thrashing on Saturday. Romo faced five batters in the eighth inning, and you can imagine the type of opposition you face in the eighth inning of a Cactus League game on March 8:

1. Leon Landry singles to right. Most people don’t know who Leon Landry is. I only do because I remember the Dodgers trading him for Brandon League. Landry hit .216/.262/.303 as a 23-year-old in Double-A last year. Somehow, Seattle still won that trade.
2. Ketel Marte singles to right. I have absolutely no idea who Ketel Marte is, though he appears to not be related to Starling, Alfredo, Damaso, Andy or vodka.
3. Ty Kelly walks. Ty, or Tyler, Kelly, was apparently traded to Seattle last year for Eric Thames. Thames hit .252/.315/.356 in Triple-A for Baltimore, was picked up on waivers by Houston in September, and was released in December to sign in Korea. That is what Ty Kelly was traded for.
4. Tyler Smith walks. As I’ve moved into my 30s, I’ve become resigned to the fact that every male younger than me is named “Tyler” or “Austin.” And wouldn’t you know it, there were three different Tyler Smiths in pro ball last year alone. This one was drafted out of Oregon State in June, and played for Pulaski. Bonus points if you can identify the state “Pulaski” is in.
5. Ji-Man Choi singles. Now there’s a name you know, if only because “Ji-Man” is an 80 name. Despite a .411 minor league OBP, Choi didn’t rank on our top 15 Mariners prospects, and didn’t rank on the same list of most other sites.

I could do the same for his first outing of the spring, when he allowed six runs in an inning to Oakland, but the point here isn’t really to go on a tour of the lower levels of the American League West. The point is that there’s a sizable portion of you, I imagine, who have heard of zero of those five names. And yet Sergio Romo, World Series closer, All-Star, among the best relievers in the game for the last five years, managed to retire exactly none of them. After four games, Romo has faced 23 batters, allowed 14 of them to reach, and 12 to score (11 earned).

So… panic, right? Even within the context of “spring numbers don’t matter”, because no quality big leaguer should have such trouble with a collection of names like that without hiding some kind of serious injury.  Read the rest of this entry »

Once upon a time, Franklin Morales was the future of the Rockies. That time was 2007 and 2008, but things have never really worked out the way they were supposed to for the Venezuelan lefty. Now though, he has a World Series ring, but more importantly, another opportunity to be a starting pitcher in the major leagues. Back in Colorado, Jhoulys Chacin’s spring training injury and Brett Anderson’s overall brittleness signal that the Rockies are going to need plenty of starting pitchers this season, and while Morales may not be in the rotation come Opening Day, he has a chance to be one of the first off the depth chart. It may be his last chance to prove he can start in the majors.

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Pitch-framing research isn’t really new anymore. I mean, in the grander scheme of things, it’s only been a blink of an eye since the work first debuted, but we’re beyond the discovery stage. We’re at the point where the work is going into refinement, and earlier this week Baseball Prospectus published the latest update. The research was good, and the effort was extraordinary, but ultimately the piece offered a lot of confirmation. The guys we suspected were good are still good. The guys we suspected were bad are still bad. With framing, researchers are almost all the way there.

So, we know about framing, and we know about the numbers. We’re also on the outside, looking in. Whenever this comes up, there’s always the question: so, how is framing actually valued right now within the industry? For example, Jose Molina might be the face of the whole field of study. By the end of 2015, he will have played four years with the Rays for a total of less than eight million dollars. The framing numbers would suggest he’d be worth that much in a month or three. Teams just must not believe in it, right? Or they’re at least being super-cautious.

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Justin Masterson is scheduled to be a free agent at the end of the 2014 season, but over the last few days, he’s made it clear that he hopes he never gets there. He wants to re-sign with the Indians, and in fact, he’s made them an offer, and one that seems pretty generous on the surface, to be honest.

According to the Cleveland Plain-Dealer, Masterson has asked the Indians for a three or four year extension in the range of $40 to $60 million. I think we can safely assume that a three year deal would be closer to the $40 million figure and a four year deal would be closer to $60 million. Just to make the math easy, let’s say that his offer is $40 million for three years with a $5 million buyout on the fourth year, making it either 3/$45M or 4/$60M, depending on if the option is picked up. That’s the kind of structure that would make sense given the range of numbers being tossed around.

And of course those numbers pale in comparison to what the Reds just gave Homer Bailey a few weeks ago. Bailey, also set to be a free agent at the end of the year, got $90 million for five years with a $5 million buyout on a sixth year option, so the Reds either paid 5/$95M or 6/$115M to keep Bailey in Cincinnati for the long term. Even the low end of Bailey’s total guarantee is 50% higher than the high end of Masterson’s reported asking price, making this seem like an obvious no-brainer for the Indians.

I even said as much on Twitter yesterday after reading the report on his request. But the more I look at it, the less sure I am that Masterson’s offer does represent a significant discount to the Indians. I think that instead, the Bailey deal may have skewed our perceptions for what a reasonable price point looks like for this situation.

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If there are two somewhat separate skills when it comes to defense — getting to balls and converting the chances you can get to — we all know which one gets more attention. The leapers and divers get the oohs and ahs while those watching the ball all the way into the glove gets golf claps at best. It’s time to appreciate the guys that make the plays they are supposed to.

The All Sure-Handed Team.

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Earlier today, polite and Canadian and polite Marc Hulet published his 2014 organizational prospect list for the Los Angeles Dodgers.

It goes without saying that, in composing such a list, Hulet has considered the overall future value those prospects might be expected to provide either to the Dodgers or whatever other organizations to which they might someday belong.

What this brief post concerns isn’t overall future value, at all, but rather such value as the prospects from Hulet’s list might provide were they to play, more or less, a full major-league season in 2014.

Other prospect projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Oakland / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / St. Louis / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Texas / Toronto.

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