Archive for Teams

Joaquin Benoit got a two-year, $15.5 mmillion deal to pitch for the Padres this week. The signing didn’t make many waves — after all, Benoit has been a very good reliever the last three years. But three years ago, Benoit’s three-year deal seemed like a head-scratcher. Are there any multi-year reliever signings going on right now that we might look back on as favorably as Benoit’s with the Tigers? Are there any past relievers, future closers still on the market? Who’s the next Joaquin Benoit?

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Earlier today, polite and Canadian and polite Marc Hulet published his 2014 organizational prospect list for the San Diego Padres.

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 Padres 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 / Chicago AL / Miami / Minnesota / New York NL / San Francisco / Seattle / Toronto.

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There was what seems like a relatively unremarkable trade today, that went down between the Braves and the Twins. The Twins sent to the Braves one Ryan Doumit, in the last year of his contract. The Braves sent to the Twins one Sean Gilmartin, 23 years old and still in the minors. Doumit is expected to fill some kind of role on Atlanta’s bench. Gilmartin might be a Twins starting rotation candidate down the road. It’s a competitive team maybe exchanging a little longer-term value for a little shorter-term value, and it’s a rebuilding team doing the opposite of that. Perfectly understandable, ordinary trade that does very little to capture the imagination.

There might be something buried here, though, beneath the immediate layers. Something nothing more than statistical, but then numbers are so much of everything. It depends on how Doumit ends up being utilized by the Braves, but there’s a chance this could mark the end of an era, beyond just the era of Doumit playing for Minnesota. On the surface, the trade is mildly interesting. Below the surface, it’s a little bit more so.

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One of the more eye-opening deals of the winter so far is Brian Wilson re-signing for eight figures with the Dodgers. It isn’t just that Wilson is coming off a year in which he barely pitched due to injury rehab. He’s good, and he looks to be healthy now. What makes it weird is that Wilson is in line to be a setup guy, behind one of the best relievers in baseball. Kenley Jansen is almost literally unhittable, so injury is the only thing that could conceivably stop him in 2014. Wilson is getting paid a lot, then, to not be a closer, even though he has a long closing background.

Wednesday, the Padres signed Joaquin Benoit for two years and $15.5 million. Benoit is a good relief pitcher, and a proven closer. The tricky part is that the Padres already had a proven closer in the perfectly adequate Huston Street. Benoit, like Wilson, is getting paid a lot to not be a closer, at least from the outset. And he’s getting paid a lot by a team that doesn’t have a budget anywhere close to the one the Dodgers do. On the face of it, the Padres make for a strange destination.

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The 2013 Winter Meetings came and went without a team reaching an agreement with Shin-Soo Choo, the best free agent outfielder available, at least after the signing of Jacoby Ellsbury. During the meetings, reports were coming in from various sources who report on such things that the Rangers, the Reds, and perhaps the Mariners were all kicking Choo’s tires. All of this makes sense. Those were three reasonable destinations for Choo at the time. But the rumors were just that, and nothing was doing on that front as the Winter Meetings came to a close. Then, as the meetings were winding down and people were boarding planes home, USA Today’s Bob Nigtengale tweeted this:

One veteran GM believes that the #Astros will wind up to be the landing spot for Shin-Soo Choo.

— Bob Nightengale (@BNightengale) December 12, 2013

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Earlier this year, Bill Petti mentioned in his CLIFFORD work the single largest driver in a player’s wOBA collapse from one year to the next was Z-Contact%. Players that saw their Z-Contact% decline by at least 1.4% had a 1.68 times the odds of seeing their wOBA collapse that season than those that did not experience such a decline.

As with any correlation, nothing is a guarantee. Just because a player improves or declines with any one statistic does not guarantee that the results will behave in lockstep. The five players who saw their Z-Contact% improve the most in 2013 were Gerardo Parra, Everth Cabrera, Brandon Moss, Carlos Santana, and David Murphy. Parra, Cabrera, and Santana saw their wOBA improve by 1, 38, and 20 points respectively while Moss and Murphy’s dropped 33 and 80 points.

It was equally volatile on the other end of the scale. Raul Ibanez‘s Z-Contact% dropped 5.3%, yet his wOBA improved by 19 points. Chris Young‘s Z-Contact% dropped 6.2% from 2012 to 2013 as his wOBA dropped 36 points.  Marlon Byrd’s 6.7% decrease was the third-largest decrease in Z-Contact% in the sample size, yet his wOBA improved an amazing 148 points last season. The two largest declines in Z-Contact% from 2012 to 2013 had one thing in common – a last name.

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After having typically appeared in the entirely venerable pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections were released at FanGraphs last year. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the New York Yankees. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Cleveland / Minnesota / Philadelphia / San Diego / St. Louis.

Batters
It’s the ambition of the author, in the composition of these ZiPS posts, first to do no harm. For that reason, I’ll abstain from a prolonged discussion of Alex Rodriguez and/or The Alex Rodriguez Saga. The present state of affairs — at least with regard to how it affects the New York Yankees — appears to be thus:

1. Alex Rodriguez is appealing a very long suspension currently; and

2. The Yankees have signed Kelly Johnson; and

3. The Yankees, more recently, have signed Brian Roberts.

That’s three infielders, two of them injury-prone, for two positions. Johnson and Rodriguez are about equally valuable on a rate basis according to ZiPS, it looks like, while Roberts is closer to replacement level. That is all we will speak of that, for the moment.

Elsewhere, one finds both that (a) the WAR totals for the Yankees field players are sometimes low-ish and that (b) those same WAR totals are frequently low-ish (when they’re low-ish) because the playing-time projections are also low-ish. Brett Gardner, Derek Jeter, and Mark Teixeira: none of them are projected to reach even 500 plate appearances, for example. Also for example, each of them is considered the starter at his respective position.

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Free agent closers are the most expensive single player type in baseball. When Matt Swartz did his price calculations for different positions a couple of years ago, he found that teams were paying approximately three times the average $/WAR for relievers as they were for the general population of players. And a disproportionate amount of the money going to relievers was paid to the “proven closers” who hit free agency coming off strong seasons with big save numbers. While solid setup guys might collection a few million and get a two or even three year deal occasionally, big name closers were racking up paychecks that paid them like above average everyday players, with the crazy Jonathan Papelbon contract ($50 million over four years) as perhaps the height of the market’s absurd closer valuations.

The days of Papelbon-style contracts for brand name closers seem to be over. Last year, Rafael Soriano got the largest contract of any free agent reliever, at $28 million for two years, and besides Mariano Rivera’s final one year contract with the Yankees, no other reliever got more than $7 million per year. This year, Joe Nathan was the #1 closer on the free agent market, and he signed for $20 million over two years after the Rangers opted not to make him a $14 million dollar qualifying offer. Nathan’s age was always going to keep him from getting a long contract, but Nathan isn’t the only closer on the market, and now Grant Balfour is showing that the market for closers might not be what it used to be.

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Though the research put forth by Jeff Sullivan today on teams following the loss of a six-win player wasn’t extremely damning — teams letting stars go didn’t even lose two wins more than teams that chose to retain their stars — it’s hard to see the Yankees as having done much more than tread water this offseason. For all the good that signing Jacoby Ellsbury and Brian McCann did, going from Robinson Cano to Brian Roberts and Kelly Johnson shot a hole in their infield. And now, with unclear remaining resources and a third baseman fighting to play in 2014, it looks like the Yankees are still an infielder short of a full deck. What available infielder could help the team the most?

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Earlier today, polite and Canadian and polite Marc Hulet published his 2014 organizational prospect list for the New York Mets.

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 Mets 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 / Chicago AL / Miami / Minnesota / San Francisco / Seattle / Toronto.

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