With disabled list information available going back 10 years, I have decided to examine some league wide and team trends.
League Trends
To begin with, here are the league values for trips, days and average days lost to the DL over the past 10 years.
Salvador Perez just joined a very exclusive club. By signing a five year, $7 million guaranteed contract — which includes three additional option years — with the Kansas City Royals, the 21-year-old catcher joins Evan Longoria and Matt Moore as players who have signed significant extensions before accumulating a year of major-league service time. While Longoria’s and Moore’s contracts are considered major steals for the Tampa Bay Rays, the Perez deal is a bit more uncertain. With the Royals starting their build a competitive team, they need to be sure they’re extending the right players.
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I have gone through all of the 2011 MLB transactions and compiled the disabled list (DL) data for the 2011 season. I have put all the information in a Google Doc for people to use
Kansas City entered 2011 with the undisputed best minor league system in baseball. A year later the landscape has chanced somewhat thanks to promotions (Mike Moustakas, Eric Hosmer, Salvador Perez, Tim Collins, etc.) and injuries. The organization is not as deep as it once was but it still has some impressive talent and is easily in the Top 10, if not the Top 5, when discussing the best minor league systems.
1. Wil Myers, OF
BORN: Dec. 10, 1990
EXPERIENCE: 3 seasons
ACQUIRED: 2009 3rd round, North Carolina HS
2010-11 TOP 10 RANKING: 3rd
Drafted as a prep catcher, the organization made the difficult decision to move Myers to right field so his defensive development would not hold him back and would allow his potentially-plus bat to dictate his movement through the system. After a dominating performance in A-ball in 2010, Myers struggled at double-A and was merely “average” according to his wRC+ of .104. He continued to show patience (12.5 BB%) but his strikeout rate rose to almost 21 K% and his average slipped to .254. His power output also dipped considerably with his isolated power rate hitting .138. A knee infection knocked Myers out from mid-May until early June and could be somewhat to blame for his struggles; his best power displays came in April and August. Perhaps feeling that he had something to prove, Myers lit the Arizona Fall League on fire after being assigned there for the fall. He hit .360 with 14 extra base hits in 23 games (wRC+ of 178). With the strong showing in the AFL, Myers will likely move up to triple-A for 2012 and could reach Kansas City before the end of the year.
It is a simple question.
What is sabermetrics?
Not the history of it, but what is it, right now? What is, in our nerdiest of lingoes, its derivative? Where is it pointing? What does it do?
Last Tuesday I created no little stir when I listed the 2012 saber teams, delineating them according to their perceived embrace of modern sabermetrics.
Today, I recognize I needed to take a step back and first define sabermetrics, because it became obvious quickly I did not have the same definition at heart as some of the readers and protesters who gathered outside my apartment.
I believe, and this is my belief — as researcher and a linguist — that sabermetrics is not statistics. The term itself has come to — or needs to — describe more than just on-base percentage, weighted runs created plus, fielding independent pitching, and wins above replacement.
Sabermetrics is the advanced study of baseball, not the burying of one’s head in numbers.
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Silly monkey, BRAINS ARE FOR ZOMBIES.
Casey Kotchman is in many ways a man without a home — a player equal parts under-appreciated and over-valued, who irks both old and new schools at the same time. Old school analysts say his defense is amazing, but they cannot quantify it, and in 2011, they claimed his cleared vision meant he finally learned how to aim the ball “where they ain’t,” but he’s still a .268 hitter with little power. The new school says he’s worth about 7.6 runs per season defensively, but worth ~1.1 WAR per 600 PAs — not good — and his BABIP was high 2011, so he should not be able to repeat his success.
Despite his inability to build a consistent following of fans in the baseball outsiders communities, Kotchman seems to have some insider communities very much interested in him, as Tom Tango points out:
Kotchman’s last four teams: Redsox, Mariners, Rays, Indians. Can we say that a team that signs Kotchman is saber-leaning?
Indeed, after spending five and a half seasons on the Angels’ and Braves’ rosters, Kotchman has begun to shuffle around with the Nerdz, most recently signing with the Cleveland Indians. It makes sense too — Kotchman’s lack of power keeps him cheap, and his strong defense keeps him amorphous for the old school teams, while the new schools might have different valuations on Kotchman, they can at least quantify his contributions and better know how he fits.
Then, on Monday, the Houston Astros signed Justin Ruggiano, long-time Tampa Bay Rays outfielder who was never good enough to stick on the Rays’ roster, but who possesses strong defensive chops and above average patience. His lack of power and ~.290 batting average, however, must make him a mystery — or at least an undesirable asset — to the old school teams.
Upon Ruggiano signing with the Astros, a once highly old school team, my reaction was all: “Welp, that’s one more team to compete with” — and then it occurred to me! No only have the Astros entered the realm of, so to speak, saber-minded organizations, but so have the long-backward Chicago Cubs.
Suddenly the league looks very different.
This morning I was scrolling through some of Dan Szymborski’s projections over at Baseball Think Factory, and I noticed that he had run a projection for Matt Stairs. I had not heard any news about the guy we all know now as a pinch-hitter. As I scoured the internets (read: typed “Matt Stairs” into Google) I quickly realized that Stairs had retired, though since he will be a studio analyst for NESN this year, all is not lost. Still, it will be disappointing to not see him on the field any longer.
Few pinch hitters struck fear in my heart the way Matt Stairs did. When Stairs came to the plate against a team for which I was rooting, I always sure that something bad was about to happen. Even still, I couldn’t hate him. A portly slugger with a great sense of humor — I will always remember Will Carroll forwarding the Baseball Prospectus email group an email from Stairs with a picture of his flexed calf muscle and promptly doubling over in laughter — Stairs was exceedingly easy to root for, and in the latter, pinch-hitting days of his career he became somewhat of a nerdy folk hero.
It’s probably the Canadian in me talking, but I have always been a Jeff Francis fan. The University of British Columbia product was selected 9th overall by the Colorado Rockies in the famed Moneyball draft, and rewarded the team with 11.8 WAR in his first five big league seasons before succumbing to the injury bug. Now, the 31 year old finds himself without a job a month before spring training despite posting 4.6 WAR over the last two seasons.
Why is he unemployed? Well, the 85 MPH fastball has something to do with it, but so does the fact that he’s traditionally been a guy whose results haven’t matched his peripherals. Other than his 36.2 inning cup of coffee in 2004, only once in his career has his ERA been lower than his FIP. For his career, his FIP is a respectful 4.40, but his ERA is 4.78, a 38 point gap that helps shed light on the perception of Francis as a guy you only want on the hill if you have no other options. The last two seasons have been especially brutal, with an ERA almost a full run higher than his FIP – the main culprit being, as usual, a .317 BABIP. His inflated hit rate has been fueled in part by a significant drop in his infield fly rate, which has hovered at close to 6% over the last two years after being over 10% early in his career.
There is nothing overly unusual about a pitcher posting back-to-back seasons with BABIP’s of .320 and .316, or having a career mark of .310. These numbers are well within the expected random variation of our sample of major league pitchers. However, Francis has changed quite a bit since his early days in Colorado when he was throwing 89-92 MPH. He is now down in the 85 MPH range, and is now a full-blown pitch to contact guy. Last season, only 16.20% of Francis’ plate appearances ended in a walk or strikeout, ranking him 93rd out of 94 qualified pitchers. I decided to do some digging to see if just maybe these two factors might be related.
Karl Marx famously opens his Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte by writing that “Hegel remarks somewhere that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.” While the attribution to Hegel is somewhat dubious, the application to yesterday’s events is all too applicable.
Late yesterday afternoon, when the Kansas City Royals were rumored to have agreed to a one-year, $2 million deal with Zombie Edgar Renteria, the reaction was mixed with approval, disapproval, and shrugs. But, as Buddy Bell once said, things can always get worse: it turned out the Renteria report was false, and the Royals had given a $2 million deal for 2012 (with incentives; no word on whether it includes the traditional Royals mutual option) to the man they had paid $2 million not to play for them in 2011: Yuniesky Betancourt. The Twitter reaction among Royals fans was swift and changing — from fury to laughter to, in some cases, apology. In the space of minutes things indeed moved from tragedy to farce (I heard somewhere that inserting historical references into posts gets you great gigs down the road). But if the facts surrounding the case of the Betancourt Farce are fairly plain for all to see, their “meaning” for the future of the the Dayton Moore-led Kansas Royals is not so clear.
Fan Projection Target season is upon us, a time for FanGraphs readers to show those computers what’s what and out-project them using only intuitive genius. In past seasons, relievers have sometimes suffered from a relative lack of ballots, and while I am not sure this is true of all the relievers mentioned below, it might be a good place to start getting into projecting bullpens. How will some notable 2011 rookie relievers fare in 2011?
