Archive for Teams

Adam LaRoche finally gave in and took the Nationals two year contract today, after having sat it on it for most of the off-season. He’ll return to Washington and play first base, which means Mike Morse will not be playing much first base, and that means Mike Morse is going to get traded. Two years ago, Morse was really good. Last year, not so much. Teams thinking about acquiring Morse are going to have to figure out whether they think 2011 was a fluke, or whether he’s an impact bat who just had a down year while struggling with some health issues.

Because, let’s be honest, you’re only acquiring Morse for his offensive capability. The Nationals didn’t consider him an outfielder any more, which is why he’s available in the first place. His career UZR/150 in the OF is -15, which is pretty close to the line at which you see teams decide that the lack of range is too much of a problem to continue the experiment. He’s also been a negative baserunner for most of his career, and last year, only David Ortiz, Jesus Montero, Prince Fielder, and Billy Butler were worse at advancing around the bases. Morse is a guy who fits best as a 1B/DH, and if he doesn’t hit, he’s not particularly useful.

So, will he hit well enough at age 31 to justify not only his $7 million salary, but also the talent required to outbid other suitors and strike a deal with the Nationals? To find out, I decided to look at how other hitters have done, focusing on guys who have succeeded in a not too dissimilar way from what Morse has done the last three years.

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Similar to my post earlier in the summer on what a beautifully morbid season Cliff Lee was having, I tend to have a fascination with the way baseball sometimes refuses to be fair. I blame Tom Paciorek.

When I was 5 years old, I wrote Paciorek and asked him if he had any advice about how to get to the big leagues. After checking my mail obsessively over the next four months, I got an envelope with a Seattle Mariner trident on it. I tore it open. “Tom Paciorek! Tom Paciorek! Tom Paciorek!” I hollered, sprinting through through the house, waving the letter in the air.

And what sage advice did I receive? “Kid,” Paciorek wrote, “in baseball, you’re either the hero or the goat. – Tom.”

From those few words, my passion was born.

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Episode 291
FanGraphs managing editor Dave Cameron continues, in 2013, to analyze as much baseball as he did in 2012 — which is to say, all of it. In what follows, specifically, he analyzes the part of baseball concerning the recent signing by Texas of Lance Berkman. Also: center field in Texas and who’s playing it. Also-also: how Mike Trout is projected to have an eight-win season.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 42 min play time.)

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Stuff tends to fall by the wayside during the holidays, even for baseball blogs. Still, Hideki “Godzilla” Matsui’s retirement deserves a some attention. Even for Christmas Week, it seemed to pass quietly. So, about two weeks after the fact, here are some briefs thoughts on Matsui’s MLB career and some of his biggest moments at the plate.

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No bullpen took more losses (33) or blew more saves (29) than the Brewers’ relief unit last season. A total of 18 different relievers pitched to a combined 4.66 ERA, the worst mark in the big leagues. Unsurprisingly, GM Doug Melvin set out to remake the team’s bullpen this offseason, and that process started by jettisoning Francisco Rodriguez, Jose Veras, Manny Parra, Kameron Loe, and a handful of others. The only notable holdovers are hard-throwing right-handers John Axford and Jim Henderson.

Melvin has tackled his bullpen rebuild in a number of ways. It started with a pair of De Los Santoses late last season — Fautino was acquired from the Athletics (for George Kottaras) and Miguel was scooped up off waivers. Right-hander Arcenio Leon was claimed off waivers in early-November and a few days later minor league free agent Michael Olmsted was given a big league contract. Melvin acquired non-tender bait Burke Badenhop from the Rays in early-December, and in recent weeks he jumped into free agency to sign a pair of former Nationals southpaws: Tom Gorzelanny and Mike Gonzalez. Several others (Jim Hoey, Zach Kroenke, Frankie de la Cruz, Travis Webb) were given minor league deals along the way.

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After watching Josh Hamilton sign with their division rival, the Rangers made a move this weekend to replace his bat in their line-up, signing Lance Berkman to take over as their DH for 2013. Much is being made of the fact that Berkman got $11 million after spending basically the entire 2012 season on the disabled list, but Major League teams have begun to make the correct shift towards paying for future production rather than past performance. That Berkman was injured for essentially all of 2012 only matters to the extent that it informs our understanding of his likely health and performance in 2013, and the reality is that projecting future playing time is still something of a black box.

Healthy guys get hurt. Injury prone guys stay healthy. Some guys are more likely to end up on the DL than others, but there’s still an awful lot of randomness in playing time distributions. It is much easier to project a player’s performance than it is to project his health, and Berkman hasn’t yet established a track record of injuries that should make us view him like we do Travis Hafner. At 37, we shouldn’t expect Berkman to be an everyday player, but as a DH with big platoon splits, he doesn’t need to be. He plays the easiest position on the field to run a platoon at, and with the Rangers depth, they can afford to have Berkman spend a few weeks on the sidelines if the aches and pains start to add up. For their roster, performance is more important than durability.

And if we just look at expected performance for 2013, there’s a decent chance that Berkman will put up offensive numbers that are not too different from what Hamilton would have produced.

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Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections, which have typically appeared in the pages of Baseball Think Factory, are being released at FanGraphs this year. Below are the projections for the Los Angeles Angels of You-Know-Where. Szymborski can be found on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other 2013 Projections: Astros / Athletics / Cubs / Giants / Nationals / Phillies / Rangers.

Batters
It’s impossible to ignore the very optimistic projection for 2012’s Champion of WAR, Mike Trout — so, let’s not. While an eight-win season is certainly aggressive so far as a forecast is concerned — if for no other reason than only two or three players surpass the eight-win threshold per year — it’s also the case that ZiPS is being at least somewhat conservative with regard to Trout, forecasting him to hit fewer home runs, steal fewer bases, post a considerably lower BABIP, and save fewer runs afield in 2013 than in 2012.

Otherwise, the Angels are almost uniformly above average: with the exception of Mark Trumbo, every starter is projected to post a (rounded) WAR of 3.0 or greater.

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At the end of last May, Phil Dumatrait announced his retirement from professional baseball. It was an announcement that went largely unnoticed — note the three retweets — and that makes sense, because Dumatrait hadn’t pitched in 2012, and for his career he threw just 151 major-league innings over parts of four seasons. Many of them were not good innings, and while there are the usual qualifiers about how Dumatrait was one of the very best pitchers in the entire world, relative to his big-league peer group, he was lacking a certain something. “Ability to have consistent success,” is what he was lacking.

Dumatrait, like all professional ballplayers, once had a lot of promise. Dumatrait, unlike all professional ballplayers, was selected as early as in the first round in 2000. In fairness, that wasn’t much of a round — the two guys selected before Dumatrait have been worth negative WAR, and the six guys selected after Dumatrait fell short of the bigs — but Dumatrait found his way to prospect lists. According to Baseball America, he was seventh in the Red Sox’s system before 2002. He was fifth in the same system the next year, and the year after that, he was sixth in the Reds’ system, one behind Joey Votto. Phil Dumatrait looked like he could be something, for a while. And, ultimately, he was a big-leaguer, if a relatively unsuccessful one.

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Public opinion of the Rangers’ offseason seems to have taken a negative tone — they lost Josh Hamilton to free agency, and were unable to lure Zack Greinke into their clutches. But despite these two misses the sky is most definitely not falling in Texas. Between its additions around the edges, its addition by subtraction and the trio of prospects that it will graduate to the majors, the team should be primed for a fourth consecutive pennant chase in 2013.

First, let’s tackle the additions. The braintrust in Arlington has added four players on major league deals this offseason, two catchers and two relievers. The catchers, if they play to their capabilities, should improve the team’s outlook at the position significantly. Signing Geovany Soto only sort of counts as a free-agent move, since they had him under control, non-tendered him and then re-signed him. But signing A.J. Pierzynski — who had spent the entirety of his 15-year career with the White Sox before joining the Rangers — was completely new.

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In a stunning development, the Yankees reportedly have no interest in former Rays, Twins, and Tigers designated hitter and “outfielder” Delmon Young. A glance at a current rumors (as of this posting) about Young’s free agency seems to turn up at least as many reports of teams not being interesting in Delmon Young as teams that might be. Part of that might be that Young is waiting to get serious about shopping his services until he recovers from ankle surgery. Part of it might be Young’s public history of less-than-stellar behavior, both recent and in the past. And part of it might just be that over 880 major league games and 3575 major league plate appearances, Delmon Young has been mostly terrible. But is there still reasonable hope for Young to be a decent everyday player? After all, he just turned 27, was once considered the best prospect in baseball, and he has mashed the ball in recent postseasons. It might just be worth looking a bit more closely at Young alongside a player with a somewhat similar history and skill set to see where that kind of thinking can lead.

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