Archive for Teams

If you hadn’t noticed, Major League teams have decided that the best way to use their current financial windfall is to keep their best players for essentially their entire careers. It wasn’t long ago that single team lifers like Cal Ripken and Tony Gwynn were the outliers, but now, it is becoming unusual for an elite player to not sign a mega-contract with his original franchise. Just in the last few years, we’ve seen the following players commit to spending the great majority of their careers with just one Major League team:

Joe Mauer, Joey Votto, Ryan Braun, Troy Tulowitzki, Evan Longoria, Felix Hernandez, Matt Kemp, David Wright, Cole Hamels, Matt Cain, Yadier Molina, Ryan Zimmerman, Justin Verlander, Adam Wainwright, and now Buster Posey.

Maybe not all of these players will stay with their current teams for the duration of these contracts, and a few might end up going elsewhere after these deals expire to squeeze an extra year or two out of the end of their careers. These aren’t necessarily contracts “for life”, but they do cover enough of the prime years of the game’s best players that it ensures that their legacy will be forever tied to one franchise. This represents a significant shift for Major League Baseball since free agency began.

Great players still change teams, of course. Albert Pujols left the Cardinals. Prince Fielder left the Brewers. David Price is almost certainly going to leave the Rays. Robinson Cano might leave the Yankees, though I’ll believe that when I see it. It isn’t true that every great player now retires with the team that brought him to the Majors. But there’s no question that MLB teams are moving to make that the more common occurrence, and fewer stars are waiting to get to free agency before cashing in on massive paychecks.

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For much of the offseason, Felix Hernandez, Justin Verlander, and Clayton Kershaw were non-literally linked. All three have been among the most consistently outstanding starting pitchers in the world entire. All three were to enter 2013 two years away from free agency. So all three were to entertain thoughts of signing long-term contract extensions. Felix signed first, re-upping with the Mariners for the rest of days. Now, Friday, with the season just about upon us, Verlander has signed second, re-upping with the Tigers for several days himself.

Depending on how you think about things, Verlander has signed either a seven-year contract or a five-year contract. Verlander was already under contract for $20 million in each of the next two seasons, but upon the new agreement some of the language concerning those two seasons has changed. In any case, after Verlander makes $20 million a year for two years, he’ll make $28 million a year for five. The breakdown:

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Patience has been a big part of Andrew McCutchen’s game since his arrival in Pittsburgh in 2009. The two-time All-Star walked in at least 10 percent of his plate appearances in all four of his MLB seasons.

For McCutchen, consistency has come with patience. His first three seasons saw wOBAs of .363, .359 and .360 respectively. The jump from All-Star to MVP candidate came in 2012, as McCutchen hit .327/.400/.553 and set career highs in all three slash-line stats as well as ISO (.226), home runs (31) and RBI. And it also came with an added bit of aggression at the plate — controlled agression, but aggression nonetheless.

McCutchen set another career high in 2012: he swung at 45.2 percent of pitches, an increase from 40.9 percent in 2011 and 40.8 percent career. But it was controlled aggression: his zone swing rate went up six percent against just a two percent rise in out-of-zone rate, and according to Baseball Prospectus, most of the extra swings were on pitches over the middle third of the plate (see career and 2012 swing rates). More swings in this zone can only be a good thing; more swings means more contact, and McCutchen has a .640 slugging percentage on contact over the middle third of the plate.

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It’s been five years since Domonic Brown cracked the public consciousness as a five-tooler in the Phillies system. Five up and down years. Three of those years, he failed to impress in short samples with the big league team, and yet the team’s outfield crumbled around him gradually. So this year, playing time in the outfield is embarrassingly available. Domonic Brown made some changes, and looks to be ready to capitalize, finally.

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Wouldn’t you know it, but Scott Kazmir is relevant again. Jeremy Bonderman is relevant again, too, and that’s also amazing, but Kazmir’s actually got himself a big-league rotation job and that gives me an opportunity to talk about an incredible Kazmir fun fact. I could’ve talked about it anyway, even if Kazmir were completely off the radar, but now it’ll be less insignificant. You’re thinking about Scott Kazmir, and here’s another thing to think about him.

Pitching with the bases empty is different from pitching with at least one runner on. For many pitchers, the delivery changes, and of course the situation and the intensity changes. The defense changes. Things change when there are people on base, so it can be informative to look at the base-state splits. In such situations it’s always important to remain aware of small sample sizes, but when you get to talking about whole careers, those concerns by and large go away.

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In Arizona, J.D. Sussman and I hit the back fields together to scout talent from the Mariners, Indians, Rockies, Diamondbacks, Rangers and Cubs. Each of us took notes, collected radar gun readings, worked angles and collected the best information we could.

Back from the warm weather, we decided to rank the 10 best prospects we scouted together to highlight differences in opinion and player preference. Scouting is an inexact science. Prospect followers tend to pit opinions of writers against each other, but of course there’s room for dissent and discussion even among friends and colleagues.

Here’s my top-10 of players I liked the most. J.D.’s list will follow in an hour.

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Would it be too hack-tastic to use the experience of the spring season as a figure for the annual rebirth of baseball in Spring Training? Yes. So I won’t. Indeed, I suspect at this point Spring Training feels for others like it does for me: not an exciting time of newness, but as a never-ending sea of pointlessness that makes one ashamed for ever having enjoyed it at all. (I would make a joke about Harry Potter here, but after the Cougar Town outrage, I am steering clear of controversy.) At this point during Spring Training final roster decisions are being made. There is not much else to write about, so one can hardly blame people for latching on to last-minute stuff like this, even if the alleged contests are pretty much set from the beginning.

Case in point: the (alleged?) battle for Royals back-up catcher between George Kottaras and Brett Hayes.

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Not all that long ago, I wrote about Gio Gonzalez striking out a ton of opposing pitchers. Though Gonzalez set a modern-day record, the achievement itself was not entirely surprising: Gonzalez is a durable pitcher who gets a lot of strikeouts, and pitchers strike out a lot as batters. This is because pitchers are by and large terrible batters, dragging down the offensive numbers of the National League. What was more surprising, to me, was something I noticed about R.A. Dickey, which I included in the post as a note.

Dickey is a knuckleballer, and the league’s only knuckleballer worth a damn. He became a regular with the Mets in 2010, and as a Met, he threw more than 600 innings. Over that span, Dickey faced 2,344 non-pitchers, and he struck out 19% of them, or at least 19% of the guys who didn’t sac bunt. Over the same span, Dickey faced 172 pitchers, and he struck out 17% of them, or at least 17% of the guys who didn’t sac bunt. In other words: with the Mets, R.A. Dickey struck out a lower rate of pitchers than position players.

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When FanGraphs was in Arizona earlier this spring, our merry band of nerds made our way to a Jarrod Parker vs Chris Sale afternoon tilt. The result on that 16th of March — an 11-5 win for the White Sox and bad performances from the two starting pitchers — was mostly unimportant to everyone in involved. But a few innings sitting behind the plate did provide some insights, including some reasons why those results were unimportant.

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Fun fact: Jose Molina‘s FanGraphs player ID number is 25. Mike Trout’s is 10155. All right.

According to numbers provided to me by Matthew Carruth, last year there were 78 catchers in baseball who caught at least 1,000 called pitches. Carruth defines his strike zone not by the rule book, but by an average of the strike zones big-league umpires actually call. Out of those 78 catchers, Molina posted the fifth-lowest rate of pitches in the zone called balls. Molina tied for the second-highest rate of pitches out of the zone called strikes. Overall, Molina posted the highest rate of extra strikes per game, at +2.5. The other guys over 2 were David Ross, Chris Stewart, and Jonathan Lucroy. Molina caught more than 6,000 called pitches. We’ve had an idea for some time now that Jose Molina is an expert pitch-framer.

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