Archive for White Sox

The White Sox aren’t close, but they’re building a long-term core. Earlier in the week they signed starting pitcher Jose Quintana to a five-year contract with two more years of club options. Appropriately, given the player, the news didn’t capture the nation’s interest. In fact, the biggest immediate effect was Quintana could stop being such a nervous, uncomfortable wreck. It’s a smaller deal than Starling Marte’s new contract with Pittsburgh, in both guaranteed money and in relevance to the average fan’s interests.

There’s something here, though. Something one wouldn’t expect. Quintana’s 25 years old. Last year, by WAR, he was tied for 24th among major-league starters — neck and neck with the likes of Homer Bailey, Madison Bumgarner and Patrick Corbin. By RA9-WAR, he was tied for 23rd, equal to Jordan Zimmermann and Chris Tillman. He made all of his starts, and he threw 200 innings. A season ago, ever so quietly, Quintana was one of the better starters in the majors. Which leads  to this: What the heck is a Jose Quintana?

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In the past week, the Steamer projections for Cuban emigre and presumptive White Sox first baseman Jose Abreu have changed a couple of times, from a line of .292/.381/.554 to .279/.364/.518 to .272/.356/.541. For many, this might be confusing. For some, these changes might only serve to underscore for them the fact that projections are, not unlike life itself, totally and irretrievably absurd. Many others probably didn’t even notice, have no opinion and have already stopped reading this paragraph.

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It’s a simple thing to say, but there’s an important interplay between the swing and the miss when it comes to pitching. In order to get a swinging strike, you need to get the batter to swing and you need to get them to miss. These are, in effect, two different skills, even if the best pitchers are awesome at both. And so it’s not surprising that we have two different metrics for that moment — whiffs per swing (whiff% in some places) and whiffs per pitch or swinging strike rate (swsTR% here). We probably need both. Is one better?

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The Braves are going to arbitration with Jason Heyward over $300 thousand dollars. It’s a wonderful sentence, full of so many words that could set you off in a million different directions. And so I followed those strings, talking to as many people involved in arbitration as I could. Many of those directions did lead me to denigrations of arbitration, and of the file-to-trial arbitration policy that the Braves employ. There’s another side to that sort of analysis though. Arbitration is not horrid. File-to-trial policies have their use. This is not all the Braves’ fault.

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The marriage of scouting and statistics is well past the honeymoon stage in most front offices, but there are times when it’s easier than others. A college player out of a big program in an established baseball conference? Talk to the nerds, get a stat translation, get a projection, pair it with the qualitative analysis from the scouts. Boom. Date night.

Not to push this analogy too far, but working with Cuban players is more like a seven-year itch in the pairing: Neither side is completely happy with what they’ve got. In the case of Jose Abreu in particular, the scouts have a few competitions, a handful of games against Liechtenstein perhaps, spread out over many years. They can do their best with video.

The quants? They’re in even more trouble when it comes to Cuba.

Doesn’t mean they can’t do their best. Now that we’ve got a few projections in hand for the new White Sox first baseman, let’s take a look. We know the stakes are high — Abreu is no Rey Ordonez, he’s got no glove value to fall back on and the requirements to be a major league first baseman are stiff.

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After having typically appeared in the entirely venerable pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections were released at FanGraphs last year. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Chicago White Sox. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Los Angeles NL / Miami / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Philadelphia / San Diego / Seattle / St. Louis / Tampa Bay.

Batters
Despite having performed no rigorous analysis on the matter, the author nevertheless feels comfortable asserting that it’s difficult for a club that features just one above-average hitter — it’s difficult for that sort of club to win very much. Unfortunately, barring any sort of further offseason acquisitions, this appears to be the sort of club with which the Chicago White Sox enter the 2014 season. According to ZiPS, the next-best projected batting line after Cuban emigre Jose Abreu’s 129 OPS+ is the 97 OPS+ shared both by Adam Dunn and Avisail Garcia.

That Cuban emigre Jose Abreu’s No. 1 comp is Paul Konerko might amuse the reader — on account of Konerko is more or less the player whom Abreu is replacing, that is. This particular comparison also serves as a pretense upon which to remind the reader that all comparable players pertain only to the age-season into which the projected player is entering. So, for example, the season of interest regarding Konerko as it pertains to Abreu is the former’s age-27 one — which, besides a deflated BABIP, wasn’t a bad one.

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The easiest part of the three-way Mark Trumbo trade to forget was the White Sox’s part. Given that we all call it the Mark Trumbo trade, of course a lot of interest followed Trumbo to the Diamondbacks. And given that it was the Angels giving Trumbo up, people have wondered about the return. But the White Sox were in there as a necessary component, and they arguably got the best of it, turning Hector Santiago into one-time quality Arizona prospect Adam Eaton. Eaton, now, is considered a potential part of the long-term White Sox core.

Monday, the White Sox and Diamondbacks struck again, and this time there was no third party. Being a team in little present need of a closer, the Sox gave up Addison Reed. Being a team in little present need of an extra third baseman, the DBacks gave up Matt Davidson. The focus for Arizona, again, is getting better right away. And the focus for Chicago, again, is adding another potential part of the long-term White Sox core. While it’s a trade I wouldn’t want to call lopsided, I like it more for Rick Hahn than I do for Kevin Towers.

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When Kevin Towers took over the Diamondbacks as general manager, one of the first things he did was make a trade. In Mark Reynolds, he had a 27-year-old entering his first year of arbitration eligibility. The big righty had clear strikeout problems, and he wasn’t known to be an asset anywhere in the field, but what made Reynolds was his power. Strength was his defining characteristic, and to that point Reynolds owned a career 108 wRC+ while being worth about eight WAR. In short, he was simultaneously flawed and useful, and Towers gave him up to the Orioles in exchange for a couple relievers. One of them is all right.

Towers is still in charge of the Diamondbacks as general manager, and the most recent thing he’s done is make a trade. As had been rumored for a good while, Towers pulled the trigger on a deal to bring in Mark Trumbo. Trumbo is a 27-year-old entering his first year of arbitration eligibility. The big righty has clear strikeout problems, and he’s not known to be an asset anywhere in the field, but what makes Trumbo is his power. Strength is his defining characteristic, and to this point Trumbo owns a career 111 wRC+ while having been worth about seven WAR. In short, he’s simultaneously flawed and useful, and Towers got him from the Angels in exchange for Adam Eaton and Tyler Skaggs. Both of them could be quality young players.

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I imagine that, for a front office exec, there’s nothing quite like the buzz you get from picking up another team’s non-tender and getting value from that player. Maybe it’s just ‘one man’s ceiling is another man’s floor,’ but in a business where one sector of the market has to continually work to find value in surprising places, it’s an important moment.

But is there much success to be found in the bargain bin? These are players that their own team has given up on — and we have some evidence that teams know more about their own players than the rest of the league, and that players that are re-signed are more successful. What can we learn from the successes and failures that we’ve seen in the past?

To answer that question, I loaded all the non-tendered players since 2007 into a database and looked at their pre- and post-non-tender numbers.

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Episode 402
Nathaniel Stoltz is a very thoughtful prospect writer for FanGraphs et al. He’s also the guest on this terribly pleasant edition of FanGraphs Audio.

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 48 min play time.)

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