For at least three franchises, this offseason could have taken a very different path. When Justin Upton vetoed a trade to the Mariners, he altered the direction of Seattle, Arizona and Atlanta, at the very least. Such negated transactions make for fascinating what-if’s, and now that we are edging into the time of year when all we will read is “best shape of my career” posts, I thought we could step back and take a look at some of these.
At one point last season, the Pirates were 63-47, right in the thick of the National League playoff race. They were in excellent position to finish at .500 or above for the first time since 1992; they just needed to win 18 of their remaining 52 games. They won 16 of their remaining 52 games and really Pirates’d everything up. What happened to the Pirates? Well, you can’t blame their inability to stop the running game, according to Rod Barajas, reasonably:
“Is (allowing stolen bases) the reason why we’re not winning? Absolutely not,” Barajas said. “The first half we weren’t throwing anybody out, either, and you didn’t hear anybody complaining.”
The Pirates didn’t lose because they couldn’t stop the running game, but they really couldn’t stop the running game. The numbers say that Michael McKenry threw out 13 of 74 would-be base-stealers, and that’s bad. The numbers say that Rod Barajas threw out six of 99 would-be base-stealers, and that’s much much worse. That’s arguably the worst throwing season in catcher history. Of course, a lot of this is out of the catchers’ hands, but they’re the ones who have to wear the statistics. Rod Barajas has to wear some humiliating statistics.
For the last entry from Pirates instructs, I’ll run through a number of players that caught my eye for different reasons, lightning-round style.
I saw Mel Rojas Jr. and Gift Ngoepe a good bit during the FSL regular season, and both will flash big league potential at times but had some struggles at the plate. Ngoepe is a great story as a South African-born, 5’10, 180 pound switch-hitting shortstop that will likely get at least a cup of coffee in the big leagues. He’s a switch hitter with plus speed and an above average arm with good hands and fluid actions that will be enough to allow him to stick at shortstop long term. He also uses his speed effectively in his offensive game, often bunting, stealing bases and finding ways to contribute.
Ngoepe’s weakness is his well-below average raw power and some rawness in his offensive game. He gets thrown out a little more than he should on the bases and needs to pick better spots to run but also needs to tighten up his strike zone. For as much as Ngoepe understands his limitations at the plate and tries to play within them, he can get pull-conscious and try to do something with anything close to the plate rather than being more selective. If Ngoepe can shrink his zone and continue to develop his game, there’s a potential big league future as a utility infielder. He’s a little tough to project given his unusual path, but from what I’ve seen I graded Ngoepe as an up/down player that will make the big leagues.
Rojas has some similar qualities to Ngoepe as a guy with big league tools and a good defensive profile who needs to tighten up his approach at the plate to reach his potential. That said, Rojas has much better size and tools; as a 6’3, 215 pound athlete Rojas is a solid-average runner with a solid-average arm and is a switch-hitter with above-average bat speed and average raw power from both sides. You can see why, with a toolset like that, the Pirates took him in the 3rd round out of an Illinois junior college in 2010.
Jeff Karstens‘s free agent case was, to me, one of the most intriguing of the offseason. I covered it multiple times at multiple outlets. I thought the Pirates’ decision to non-tender Karstens was curious — the club has little starter depth beyond A.J. Burnett, James McDonald and Wandy Rodriguez; Phil Irwin was the fifth best starter in the organization according to ZiPS, including minors-bound first overall pick Gerrit Cole. Things only looked worse following the Francisco Liriano debacle — his two-year, $14 million contract remains on hold, in the same limbo as Mike Napoli’s would-be deal with Boston.
Although I understood why Pittsburgh might not want to take the risk on Karstens — he has dealt with regular injuries and has never thrown more than 162.2 innings in a season. Given a likely budget crunch, it’s easy to see how Pittsburgh might be better served with a sure thing. But I thought Karstens and his 3.59 ERA and 3.94 FIP since 2010 (49 appearances, 41 starts) could be an intriguing value play for which a team would pay at least $5 million — meaning, considering the non-tender, Karstens wouldn’t return to Pittsburgh.
Tuesday, Karstens reportedly signed a $2.5 million contract with the Pirates. I was wrong on both counts of my prediction, a good reminder of the imperfect information available to those of us who try to foresee these things from outside MLB organizations.
Despite having covered the headliner arms of Pirates instructs — Gerrit Cole (covered last week) and Jameson Taillon (looking basically the same as when I covered him midseason) — there were still some interesting high ceiling arms on display.
First up is righty Nick Kingham, whom the Pirates signed for an over-slot bonus just under $500,000 in the 4th round of the 2010 draft from a Las Vegas area high school. Kingham made his full season debut in Low-A West Virginia as a 20 year old in 2012 and had a solid campaign—groundballs, good control and a solid K rate despite what appears to be a fluky home run rate fueling a 4.39 ERA.
Those stats imply an evaluation close to what I saw from Kingham in instructs. In a two inning stint, he sat 92-94 with consistent above average two-seam life down in the zone and solid location. Kingham’s 82-83 mph slider was above average at times with long action, occasional hard bite and three-quarters tilt. His changeup was the better off-speed pitch, consistently above average with better command, fade and bottom at 82-85 mph and he threw one that was plus.
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 Pittsburgh Pirates. Szymborski can be found on Twitter at @DSzymborski.
Other 2013 Projections: Angels / Astros / Athletics / Blue Jays / Brewers / Cubs / Giants / Nationals / Phillies / Rangers / Royals.
Batters
Andrew McCutchen’s projection unsurprisingly places him among the early candidates for the NL MVP award. Certain readers might note, however, that the WAR forecast here represents a decline not only from his excellent 2012 season, but also (by a slight margin) his 2011 one — despite the fact that he’s still theoretically on the upward slope of his age curve. I asked Szymborski about this, to which he responded, as follows:
Regression to mean. Great players usually have (and should have) lower projections than years in which very little went wrong — the risk is generally one-sided. And in this case, Cutch has that .375 BABIP in 2012 as well. ZiPS still gives him a 35% chance of a 140+ OPS+, 8% 160+.
Part of the difference is the defense — the projection’s the same as his 2011 fWAR minus 4 runs of defense.
While McCutchen has been Pittsburgh’s best field player in each of his first four seasons, ZiPS is optimistic that the club’s supporting cast will be more, uh… supportive than in previous seasons. Since 2009, never has McCutchen had more than three teammates with a season WAR total of 2.0 or greater. ZiPS projects four such players in 2013: Pedro Alvarez, Starling Marte, Russell Martin, and Neil Walker.
The obvious headliner at Pirates instructs was 2011 #1 overall pick Gerrit Cole. Cole has been on prospect radars for some time, as he went unsigned out of a southern California high school in 2008 when the Yankees made him a 1st rounder despite being an obviously tough sign. Negotiations never got started and Cole decided he wanted to go to UCLA, where he cleaned up his delivery and command while adding a plus changeup to his power fastball-slider repertoire. Three years after turning down a potential multi-million dollar bonus, Cole signed with the Pirates for $8 million.
Cole’s professional career has been mostly ho-hum. No arm injuries or real struggles while also not quite dominating the way his stuff probably should. He signed late in 2011 then had a successful if short stop in the Arizona Fall League followed by a debut season starting in Hi-A and ending in AAA with basically the same numbers at all four stops: a K/9 in the 9’s and BB/9 around 3. A notable event happened in late June when Cole was hit in the face with a liner while with AA Altoona, but he returned later in the season and looked fine in instructs.
Those numbers will obviously play in the big leagues but there’s math that we do looking at minor league numbers, expecting some regression at each level. One thing to keep in mind is the Pirates organizational development plan for pitchers. They heavily stress fastball command and in the first full season in the system. Pitchers are instructed to throw primarily fastballs, usually over 70% per game. In instructs, Cole threw one off-speed pitch in two innings and in a game I saw in Hi-A earlier in the year, I counted 7 off-speed pitches in a full outing. That will obviously affect Cole’s feel for these off-speed offerings and make projecting him a little more difficult.
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.
With the move of the Houston Astros to the American League, and the unfortunate fact that both leagues will have an uneven number of teams, interleague play is destined to change this year. As cross-platform play goes from something that happens in the middle of June, once a year, like some sort of strange exhibition mini-season, to something that happens every week, the National League will have to re-evaluate their past strategies for American League parks.
Armed with a new measure for offensive volatility (VOL), I wanted to revisit research I conducted last year about the value of a consistent offense.
In general, the literature has suggested if you’re comparing two similar offenses, the more consistent offense is preferable throughout the season. The reason has to do with the potential advantages a team can gain when they don’t “waste runs” in blow-out victories. The more evenly a team can distribute their runs, the better than chances of winning more games.
I decided to take my new volatility (VOL) metric and apply it to team-level offense to see if it conformed to this general consensus*.