Archive for Teams

A pretty common question we see in FanGraphs chats is what one statistic we’d use to evaluate pitchers, if we could use only one. The truthful answer is always a non-answer: You shouldn’t ever use just one statistic. It’s an unrealistic hypothetical, and good evaluation is done with a blend of different data. But I will say that I tend to look at xFIP early on, just to get a sense of what I’m dealing with. It’s a number that can scrape out a whole bunch of noise. Something I noticed is that, this season, Max Scherzer posted a 3.16 xFIP. Rick Porcello posted a 3.19 xFIP. Both were full-time starters for the same team, and one of them, presumably, is about to win the American League Cy Young Award.

It’s a comparison that’s interesting enough on its own, but adding more significance to the comparison is talk that the Tigers will explore trading one of these two pitchers in the weeks and months ahead. There’s skepticism everywhere that a team like the Tigers would actually think deeply about moving Scherzer, considering everything, but the ace is one year from free agency and he’s represented by Scott Boras. Porcello is two years from free agency, and the Tigers have Drew Smyly just about ready to resume starting. Really, the Tigers aren’t limited to picking one between Scherzer and Porcello, but things could well work out that way. And in talking about this, xFIP is only the start.

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Quick: Who led minor league pitchers in FIP this year?* You might guess one of the top pitching prospects in baseball, such as Archie Bradley, Taijuan Walker, or Robert Stephenson. Or you might rack your brain thinking about 2013 breakout A-ball pitchers like C.J. Edwards, Tyler Glasnow, or Edwin Escobar. In either case, you’d be wrong, because the answer is little-known White Sox pitching prospect Tony Bucciferro.

*Minimum 80 IP. Giants relief prospect Derek Law had a lower FIP in 77 2/3, but I wanted to isolate starters.

Bucciferro’s 2013 numbers are certainly something to behold. Across three starts in the Rookie-Advanced Appalachian League and 13 outings (12 starts) in the Low-A South Atlantic League, he amassed 96 strikeouts, six walks, and a mere three homers allowed in 90 2/3 innings, good for a 1.74 FIP (2.48 ERA). Those numbers seem impossible to ignore, and yet Bucciferro registers barely a blip on the prospect radar. In this post, I will examine why he’s been successful, why he’s been ignored, and take a systematic look at how pitchers with this sort of statistical profile fare.

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One of the most remarkable things about the Internet is the speed with which news finds its way to updated Wikipedia pages. Even during the MLB playoffs, you can usually find notes about player achievements or umpire errors within a matter of minutes. MLB.com does not operate like Wikipedia, in that not just anyone can go in and change things around. But there is one similarity, in that here’s a screenshot of part of the Twins’ official roster from earlier Monday:

Somebody’s conspicuously absent. Let’s scroll down just a bit:

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The St. Louis Cardinals need a shortstop and have a surplus of talent with no obvious places to fit onto their roster. The Colorado Rockies have a superstar shortstop but need more good players than they currently have. These facts have people — including noted scribe Ken Rosenthal — speculating about what a Tulowitzki-to-STL deal might look like. In fact, it is probably now the most interesting trade rumor of the off-season.

For their part, the Rockies say that they aren’t interested in trading Tulowitzki. When you have one of the best players in the game signed to one of the most team-friendly contracts in the game, there shouldn’t be a huge sense of urgency to unload said player and contract. Over the summer, I rated Tulowitzki as the 13th most valuable trade chip in baseball, sliding in between Miguel Cabrera and Stephen Strasburg. For the Rockies to move Tulowitzki, the offer would have to be substantial.

The Cardinals have substantial talent though. Matt Adams looks like a nice player, but he’s blocked by Allen Craig at first base. Trevor Rosenthal wants to start, but there isn’t an obvious spot for him in the rotation at the moment. If Jaime Garcia is healthy by next spring, the Cardinals won’t even have room for all the starters they already have, not even counting the potential for Rosenthal or Carlos Martinez to transition back out of the bullpen. The team also has Kolten Wong now blocked by Matt Carpenter at second base, and if they end up re-signing Carlos Beltran, they’ll probably have to trade Jon Jay whenever Oscar Taveras proves ready for the big leagues.

So, yeah, the Cardinals have expendable talent that is basically the envy of every team in the sport. They have enough depth that they can probably target any player they want and make a serious offer that at least forces the other club to listen. The real question, though, is should they?

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If you squinted hard enough, you could have seen this winter being the beginning of the road back to success for the Mets. Matt Harvey was establishing himself as a superstar in his first full season, highly-touted rookies Zack Wheeler & Travis d’Arnaud were getting their feet wet, and they’d be finally free of the disastrous contracts handed to Johan Santana, Jason Bay, & Frank Francisco. With what appeared to be a talented starting rotation and more prospects on the way, if they could just add another bat or two around David Wright, well, maybe they’d have something going.

But then Harvey’s elbow blew up, and d’Arnaud looked overwhelmed in his first crack at the bigs, and Ike Davis & Ruben Tejada proved that they probably aren’t part of the future, and even the team’s COO is saying that there are only four players who they “are sold on” right now (Wright and pitchers Dillon Gee, Jon Niese, & Wheeler). Suddenly the road back appears delayed by at least a year, if not two. Read the rest of this entry »

Today, the Cincinnati Reds have agreed to sign Brayan Pena to a two year contract. Brayan Pena is a generic replacement level catcher, so you probably don’t care too much about him. You might care about Ryan Hanigan, however, since you’re reading FanGraphs. Because Hanigan is something of a sabermetric darling, and now he’s being cast aside in favor of a player who seems demonstrably worse.

For the Reds, this probably has less to do with Hanigan and more to do with Devin Mesoraco, who looks to be the team’s regular starting catcher in 2014 after today’s news. Pena fits the prototypical backup role, and now the team can attempt to use Hanigan as trade bait. And, given his skills and the amount of teams looking for a catcher this winter, they should have no shortage of suitors.

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From David DeJesus‘ 2003 debut through his 2010 season, the versatile outfielder hit 90 wRC+ (1175 PA) against left-handed pitchers. Since then, DeJesus has mustered a lulzwut 29 wRC+ (327 PA) against lefties. Despite his one-sided floundering in the past three seasons, DeJesus managed to procure a three-year contract extension from the Rays.

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By no means am I a veteran of the press box. But already I’ve tapped into a strange phenomenon that may be universal to all baseball writers — I’m not rooting for a team, I’m rooting for my story.

For example. Going into the American League Division Series, I decided I would do some research on the home field advantage offered by the extensive foul ground in Oakland. After gathering some quotes — easy, considering the optics of Josh Donaldson, running forever for a foul ball — I was ready for a Game-Changing Moment. A foul ball over the bullpen mound in the late innings. A missed foul ball by the Tigers. I was rooting for a foul ball.

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Robinson Cano just turned 31, and the FanGraphs crowd expects him to sign an eight year contract this winter that will take him through 2021, his age-38 season. It’s not out of the realm of possibility that he lands a nine or ten year deal, as Prince Fielder and Albert Pujols did a couple of years ago, and ends up getting signed through age-40. And it’s not a controversial statement to say that Robinson Cano is unlikely to still be a highly productive player at that point in his career.

Any team that signs Cano this winter is going to be be guaranteeing him in the range of $25 million per year for years in which Cano should reasonably be projected as a below average player, and maybe even a guy who shouldn’t be starting for a big league team. The negotiations for his services are essentially going to center around how many years a team is willing to guarantee Cano a significant paycheck while expecting almost nothing in return. The team that eventually gets to sign him will be the team that gives him the most “dead money” years.

This is what free agency for elite players has evolved into. Instead of negotiating on annual salary, the market has evolved to negotiate on years. Let’s look at some data, so you don’t have to take my word for it.

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Although the end of regular baseball is sad for both fans who blog and those who do not, for the former it at least provides a time to look back on the season and write about certain achievements. For me, it is a nice time to whip out some silly awards based on toy stats. On Monday, we looked at 2013’s Joe Carter–Tony Batista Award winner, which compared RBI totals with linear weights runs created. Today, we look at a more specific situational stat that someone (not me) suggested a few years back and that I have looked at annually. It is not the same thing as clutch, but does use situational metrics to see how much a player contributed on offense beyond what is measured by traditional linear weights, in this case by looking at the specific game states the player faced. For better or worse, we call the winner of this award the King of the Little Things.

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