Dave Cameron FanGraphs Chat – 9/16/15

Dave Cameron: Happy Wednesday; let’s talk baseball. The chat will start in 15-20 minutes.

Dave Cameron: The queue is now open, so feel free to load up the queue.

Dave Cameron: Alright, let’s get this rolling.

Comment From Blue Cat
geez, Dave, I bet you’re thrilled to have this chat today after last night’s Ranger’s game. You must be really interested to see what the Ranger’s crowd has to say today. Betcha can’t guess!

Dave Cameron: Yeah, it’s unfortunate so many have decided to take personally the reality that their team is winning games based on sequencing. It happens, it’s part of baseball, and it’s benefiting your team this year. Just enjoy it.

Dave Cameron: For what it’s worth, Texas fans, I’ll be on the Ticket at 1:10 central time, so if you want to tell them to yell at me on the air, you have a few hours left.

Comment From Ricks
Will getting into the post season change Cy Young voting? If Houston drops out does Keuchel still take it?

Dave Cameron: The MVP is the only award voters seem to care about team results for. Keuchel seems like a pretty easy pick at this point.

Comment From MAS
You mention in your recent piece on the Rangers (and Twins) that maybe we need to look into the gap between inputs and outputs. Can you think of any interesting avenues of research there? It appears that most I see banded about have little support from studies so far. Is it possible and even desirable (though not for Fangraphs I guess) for ‘luck’ and ‘randomness’ to simply be the explanation?

Dave Cameron: People hate the idea of randomness, so there is always going to be a pushback against accepting the idea that results are not a perfect indicator of performance. Besides hoping our country does a better job of educating the next generation about statistics and variance, I don’t know that there’s much we can do about that. Of course, that doesn’t mean that there can’t be any parts of sequencing that can be sustainable and repeatable performance, and I’d bet eventually we’ll find a few smaller parts of what we call randomness that are actually undiscovered skills at the moment. But for the most part, I’d bet most of the ordering of events is always going to be almost entirely unpredictable.

Comment From Pale Hose
What percentile outcome do you think $33M is for Andrew Heaney?

Dave Cameron: Probably ~35%. There has to be built in profit for the middle man (FanTex, in this case), and given the high risk associated with individual pitchers, this shouldn’t be a low margin product.

Dave Cameron: What I find perhaps most interesting is that a guy who already got a big signing bonus did this. The players most incentivized to divest themselves of some risk in exchange for present cashflow are guys like Starling Marte, who signed for $15,000 or whatever he got.

Comment From Rexdale
Where do Price and Cueto end up next year?

Dave Cameron: I legitimately don’t know. I’ve been thinking about this lately, and while I don’t doubt that these guys are going to get paid, I don’t know who is going to be paying the prices we’ve been expecting. Price should be able to get $200M, but where is it going to come from? The Cubs might prefer to try and lock up Arrieta instead. Assuming Greinke opts out and gets a raise, I don’t known if I see the Dodgers adding two $30 million pitchers this winter. The Yankees, I guess, seem like the best candidate, but they’ve still got a lot of money on the books.

Dave Cameron: These guys are going to get paid, but it might end up being teams like the Diamondbacks driving up prices, since the teams we always assume will be players for big name guys might not be hunting for big money SPs.

Comment From Bradstick
Can you (generic you, not specifically Dave Cameron) predict baseball?

Dave Cameron: I think we can project, on the aggregate, the context-neutral performances of players pretty decently. But we can’t project anything about the order in which those events will occur, and we can’t really project injuries, and when you add those factors in to the amount of variance around performance over one season, the error bars for projecting a team’s outcomes get pretty large.

Comment From IndiansFireworksOperator
Is BaseRuns available for historical years anywhere? Or perhaps the formula that FanGraphs uses?

Dave Cameron: Historical BaseRuns is on the list of things to add to the site, but it’s not up yet. That said, the formula is open source (it even has a Wikipedia page), so you can calculate them yourself if you’re industrious.

Comment From Guest
Given the respective sample sizes for each sport’s season, why do baseball W-L records seem so much more stochastic than american football W-L records?

Dave Cameron: The spread in talent between teams is much, much smaller.

Comment From BellinghamBeerQuokka
How active do you think the Phillies will be in free agency this year? Their projected payroll for next year is under $90 million.

Dave Cameron: I could see them going after several of the mid-tier free agents. If Samardzija doesn’t want to take a one year deal from the White Sox, someone like that could make a lot of sense for the Phillies.

Comment From Quinn
It seems clear that Arrieta is the better pitcher. Odds that we see him over Lester in the one game playoff? 60/40?

Dave Cameron: 99/1.

Comment From IndiansFireworksOperator
Between Alex Gordon and Jason Heyward, this offseason will tell us a lot about how much front offices value defensive metrics. if you had to guess, how much do you think teams overall will pay for defense WAR vs offensive WAR?

Dave Cameron: I actually don’t think Heyward’s payday will be centered around defensive metrics as much as it is around aging curves. Everyone agrees the guy is a great outfielder; that’s not really in dispute. The question is how much upside is left in the bat, and will it improve enough to offset the inevitable decline in fielding value. The team that signs Heyward will likely be betting on his hitting, not his fielding.

Comment From Zonk
So, what do you think AJ Preller does for an encore? Doubles-down on his “go for it” strategy, or swallows his pride and does a full on re-build?

Dave Cameron: Neither. I’d bet both the Padres and White Sox tweak their rosters and hope for better results from mostly the same core.

Comment From Something
More likely to repeat their current year, Granderson or Cruz?

Dave Cameron: Neither? Remember how great Victor Martinez was last year? Age sucks.

Comment From Terence
By RA9-WAR Keuchel is ahead of Donaldson, should he at least be getting mentioned in AL MVP discussions?

Dave Cameron: Not really, no.

Comment From Eminor3rd
Jeff Samardzija: 5.27 ERA / 4.29 FIP. K rate down by almost 2 per 9IP. He’s still a lock to decline a ~$17m qualifying offer, right?

Dave Cameron: Depends on his goals. If he wants to maximize lifetime payouts, he should probably take the QO, hope for a rebound next year, and then get a bigger deal next winter with less SP competition. But if he’s not sure he will bounce back, and he wants one decent contract, I’d bet he can still get 4/50 this winter or something. He will sell himself short if he has a comeback, but $50 million guaranteed coming off a crappy year might be tough to turn down. Should be interesting.

Comment From Matt
While power isn’t really “up”, it appears it has become very top heavy. We have a handful of 40 home run hitters and close to 20 30 home run hitters. Is this suprisi9ng?

Dave Cameron: Power is up; HRs on contact are back to their ~2003 levels. The only thing keeping HR totals down now are the strikeouts.

Comment From kevinthecomic
i hear the “pundits” talking about how the AL wildcard match ups will go with each team’s ace facing each other — don’t they realize that the aces may not be available if teams have to burn them just to get to the wildcard game?

Dave Cameron: And burning your ace in a game where you should be playing every match-up possible is sub-optimal strategy anyway.

Comment From primantis
Would you agree that arbitration is systemically unfair to the players? Since we commonly believe that players receive 40/60/80% of their market value, then the we are essentially saying the system is set up to screw the players, right?

Dave Cameron: It is “unfair” to young players and “too fair” to old players. The money that would go to arb guys goes to FAs instead, so it’s simply a redistribution system that benefits guys with lots of service time. Like almost every other union.

Comment From Evan
I think I’m going to go out on a limb and say this won’t be the last time the Rangers/Astros swap spots in the standings this year. But this season aside, if you’re Jeff Luhnow…what would you do to try and beef up the Stros this winter? Any obvious moves out there you think we should make, given who might potentially be available?

Dave Cameron: They need a first baseman and another outfielder, plus a better DH. I could see them pushing hard for Chris Davis.

Comment From Kyle
To your point on sequencing, which I agree with, there’s some that suggest the bullpen might be one place where there might be something besides “luck” to sequencing. My question is, could the Rangers this year serve as exhibit A for this? It seems some of their run differential has been created in bunches by middle relievers, and really just poor relievers at beginning of year. Just curious as to why sequencing with them is showing up prominently with them this year?

Dave Cameron: Bullpen performance is absolutely one way you can sequence your runs most optimally, but there’s no evidenc that anyone has figured out how to consistently get their bullpens to only allow runs when they don’t matter and not allow any runs when they do. This was the exact same argument the Orioles made last year, and now we’re left with 100 pieces from Baltimore writers wondering what could have possibly caused the team to play so much worse this year.

Comment From Tarik
As a Yankees fan, I just have to consider this season a bonus right? Cashman’s “retooling” process isn’t yet complete, and the seasons from Tex and A-rod, aren’t likely to be repeated. i feel like we’re playing with house money at this point.

Dave Cameron: Yeah, to some degree, you had a lot of surprising things go right, and it happened in the same year that the AL was a steaming pile of garbage, so a few fortunate turns gets you into the playoffs.

Comment From mtsw
If you hate randomness, you can tell yourself a team being “lucky” is actually them “playing better at key momemnts” even if you acknowledge that’s not a repeatable skill. A guy who strands 3 runners or hits a walk off HR did something good even if it’s not a repeatable skill in a meaningful way. People just hate it being called “luck” more than they hate the idea of randomness.

Dave Cameron: I agree that people don’t like it being called luck, but I don’t think it’s quite correct to say that’s the only problem. There is a pretty large group of people who really do hate the entire concept of randomness.

Comment From NMN
NL MVP. Go.

Dave Cameron: Harper.

Comment From Ben
Do you think Correa or Lindor wins AL ROY? Lindor is leading in WAR, but that’s mostly based on defense. I feel like Correa’s power could still win it for him.

Dave Cameron: Voters will pick the hitter.

Comment From Guest
Where does a healthy Cardinals team rank in a true talent evaluation? Holliday and Grichuk both healthy make that offense much more intimidating. (Adams and Jay help as well.)

Dave Cameron: They’re up there. I still think the Dodgers are the best team in baseball, with everyone else a step below them, but STL would be in that second tier.

Comment From Wilson
Do the Cards really NEED to resign Heyward? I know he would be an upgrade, but the OF depth is brimming and cheap aside from Holliday.

Dave Cameron: Yeah, I think the emergence of Grichuk and Piscotty will put a cap on where they’re willing to go for Heyward. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Cubs pushed pretty hard for him, both to get him and to get him away from STL.

Comment From Rick
Who gets the bigger contract – Upton or Cespedes?

Dave Cameron: Cespedes.

Comment From Roger
Luck/Random Chance/Sequencing/Whatever clearly plays a significant role, even over the course of a 162 game season. If the season were 200 games long instead would this effect be lessened? What if it were only 120 games?

Dave Cameron: The larger the sample, the less the role variance plays. 200 games wouldn’t change much, but it would decrease it a little bit.

Comment From jocephus
is they heyward contract one of the more polarizing possibilities in recent memory? seems like he’s very hard to determine (what team values which aspect of his game most)

Dave Cameron: I don’t think there’s actually that much difference within the game to the idea that Jason Heyward is an excellent player. The people running baseball teams now realize that he’s good, with very few exceptions.

Dave Cameron: The “he doesn’t hit HRs” dolts you see on Twitter have no bearing on his contract.

Comment From Josafat
Dave, do you think base stealing is coming back ? what time lapse can yoyu give? would it change the nature of amateur drafting and international signing now days who is focused in pitching and potencially power hitters?

Dave Cameron: I wrote about this at JABO today. http://www.fangraphs.com/bl…

Comment From Art Vandelay
I’m trying not to sound like a delusional fan, but the Twins are in a pretty good position to make a move at one of the big name FA pitchers, right? Even with Nolasco’s dead money on the books. Maybe they could try to package him with an Arcia or someone to get rid of it.

Dave Cameron: I could see them going after Jordan Zimmermann, who is their kind of guy. I don’t think they’ll be in on Price, Greinke, or Cueto, but I could be wrong.

Comment From dan
How much do you think is too much for Cespedes. Feel like the Mets are in a tough spot because of so much public outcry to bring him back. Kind of worried they will give him a regrettable contract

Dave Cameron: If I was the Mets, I’d probably try to convince ownership to go high AAV/low years. So something like 5/$130M or something.

Dave Cameron: In the next few years, Cespedes should remain a pretty good player, though not at his current level. I don’t think I’d want to pay a lot for years 6-7-8 though.

Comment From mtsw
Should there be an option in the next CBA that will allow certain players to enter free agency earlier in exchange for something? The system seems to work great for slugger position players but a lot of guys whose value is in their glove or speed are already entering their decline phase by the time they accumulate 6 years of service time.

Dave Cameron: I’ve long wondered when pitchers are going to fight back against the six year service time rule; so many great pitchers come up, dominate, blow out their arms, and never get paid because of the attrition rates of their job. Pitchers should qualify for FA sooner than hitters, realistically. I don’t know if the union would want to put up with that kind of headache, though.

Comment From Ray
Where do you get the HRs on contract data? Is that HR/FB%?

Dave Cameron: You can just do HR/(PA-BB-K-HBP) from the league leaderboards here on the site. I did it in excel in a few minutes last night while doing the research on my JABO piece.

Comment From Frank
Who do you think has the biggest chance of getting overpaid this offseason?

Dave Cameron: Cespedes.

Comment From The Boat
So who gives Heyward that money? Seems like the Cards are the best fit…

Dave Cameron: Or the Astros, maybe? They have a ton of money to spend, are building for the long-term, and probably won’t have many reservations about how good Heyward is.

Comment From Terence
Keuchel’s groundball rates and personal fielding lead the rest of the AL pitchers by a mile, but you don’t think those factors should be considered when comparing FIP based WAR to Donaldson’s accomplishments?

Dave Cameron: I didn’t say anything close to that. There’s a difference between accounting for Keuchel’s own fielding skill and simply using RA9 as if that was entirely Keuchel’s doing, though.

Comment From Scott
How is the AL a steaming pile of garbage this year? It’s actually doing better against the NL than previous years, and I can’t really see another way to measure quality of the league.

Dave Cameron: The AL doesn’t have any terrible teams, but it doesn’t have many good ones either; everyone is pretty evenly matched around being okay-ish. So when those okay-ish teams play all the really awful teams at the bottom of the NL, they thump them. But the best teams in baseball all reside in the NL right now.

Comment From MotherMary
Why would any team bet big on Heyward’s bat? When the inevitable defensive fade occurs, then he’s Andre Ethier at best. Who’s going to be happy with that at $20M per for 7+ yrs? Has anyone that large been able to maintain their agility past 30? Large dudes like that slow down dramatically once they hit 30 normally.

Dave Cameron: Go look at Carlos Beltran’s offensive numbers through age-25. Then go look at his age-26 on numbers.

Dave Cameron: That’s obviously n of 1, but to say there’s zero upside left in Heyward’s bat seems wrong.

Comment From Guest
Is Greg Holland hurt?

Dave Cameron: Pretty clearly, yes.

Comment From BellinghamBeerQuokka
Too bad we couldn’t have had full seasons from Sano and Schwarber, they’d probably be at the head of the ROY pack if they had.

Dave Cameron: Kris Bryant says hello.

Comment From Frank
What do think had the biggest affect in the Nats collapse this year?

Dave Cameron: Single player? Probably Anthony Rendon. He was legitimately one of the 5-10 best players in the NL last year. This year, he was bad or being replaced by Dan Uggla.

Comment From MAS
Referring to your piece on JABO today, how much of an effect do you think that PED testing has had on the drop in run scoring? Th data you show seems to say ‘not much’ but your language states otherwise. Thanks!

Dave Cameron: I don’t think there’s any question that PEDs helped keep aging players around longer, and sustained the career of some elite hitters that probably would have been out of the game without chemical assistance at a much earlier age. So it had an affect, but I think the affect has been overstated, and the fact that the strike zone became postage-stamp sized had as much or more to do with the increase in home runs we saw at the end of the 90s.

Comment From MotherMary
Instead of “sequencing” or worse, “randomness” we need to look at it as “efficiency” and try to determine which teams are able to convert base runners better and conversely who is better at stranding them. By and large, there is something that makes the better teams “better” and over such large samples as 162 games, there has to be some convergence of results and aggregate talent.

Dave Cameron: This is the refusal to accept randomness I was talking about earlier. Some people just will not accept that there is no underlying cause.

Dave Cameron: 162 games, by the way, is not a “large sample”

Comment From MotherMary
Despite the huge amount of talk about a Cespedes or Heyward contract, it’s going to be hard to justify a large contract for Upton. His numbers are not far above ordinary this year. Anyone going past 5/90 on him is nuts.

Dave Cameron: He’s a +3 WAR player still a few years from turning 30; he’ll crack $100M easily.

Comment From Zonk
What NL teams have the best 3-year outlook in your opinion?

Dave Cameron: Cubs/Cardinals/Dodgers.

Comment From Snarfle
The Mets-Cespedes thing is the narrative right now, but any chance they take a shot at Heyward? Or is he just too much for a competitive NYC team? With Lagares, Granderson, Cuddyer and Conforto already around, I’m guessing they actually look to spend on the infield. Not sure who that would be. Pillow contract for Desmond?

Dave Cameron: Yeah, I agree that the only OF they’ll really go hard after will be Cespedes. If he leaves, they’ll go with a Conforto/Cuddyer job share, and go after IFs instead.

Comment From Pacman Jones
A few weeks back you said that a team’s two best hitters should be at 2 and 4 in the lineup. Why #4?

Dave Cameron: Those spots bat with men on base/less than two outs more often.

Comment From Zilly
Will the strike zone finally get smaller again at some point? Or will it keep getting lower?

Dave Cameron: Depends on when MLB decides that more runs would be good for business. Things are going pretty well now, so I doubt they’ll make huge changes in the short-term.

Comment From TKDC
Since there was a near zero percent chance Howard would start this year on the Phillies, how about next year?

Dave Cameron: I would bet he gets DFA’d by the new GM this winter. It is about the easiest way to signal that you’re turning the page from the old regime.

Comment From Leo
Is Carlos Beltran a Hall of Famer?

Dave Cameron: I would vote for him, but I don’t think he’ll get in.

Comment From MotherMary
Heyward isn’t Carlos Beltran. Is it possible there’s more upside in the bat? Anything is possible, but do you want to be the one to make that large a bet? Dude has 12 HRs. 37 last 3 yrs combined. While it’s not all about HRs and you can make a reasonable Alex Gordon comparison, Gordon is good for about 20 per. I might prefer Kole Calhoun over the next 5-6 yrs than Heyward…

Dave Cameron: Heyward has a career 118 wRC+, and that’s without a lot of power. The idea that he’s not a good hitter is silly.

Comment From Eric Weinstein
Given Manfred’s comments earlier this year about fixing the strike zone, how would you explain the k zone getting even bigger this year? It’s harder to make the MLB had a hand in increasing the strike zone case (which I buy) as the major explanation with Selig gone and Manfred publicly admitting it’s an issue (unless he’s just completely BS’ing).

Dave Cameron: He’s never said they were going to fix it. He said they were monitoring the data and would intervene if they felt it was necessary.

Comment From Zac
Don’t you think a team would be “better” off offering Dexter Fowler at contract in the range of 3/30 as opposed to giving Heyward 7/140 or whatever he is going to get? I feel that Fowler is a very underrated player at this point due to the slow start to his career…

Dave Cameron: Fowler will not sign for 3/30.

Comment From Snarfle
Do you know of any attempts to measure bat speed (and maybe path) with something automated a la PitchFx? Seems like that could be a really fertile area for teams, at least in spotting injury. Maybe one of those biometric suits I see on the internet once in a while?

Dave Cameron: Yeah, tracking devices focused on these kinds of metrics are very much the way baseball is headed.

Comment From MotherMary
No. it’s the extreme view that there “is no underlying cause” that is the sticking point. I think it’s hard to accept that we know everything there is to know about projecting team performance today and 100% of the difference between projections and results is due to randomness of sequencing. That’s just too easy and agenda-driven for me.

Dave Cameron: No one said that.

Comment From Gary
Was Grady Sizemore as good as Andrew McCutchen? WAR makes it look that way. Is the end of his career one of the more depressing things to happen in the last decade?

Dave Cameron: Sizemore was a fantastic player before he broke down.

Comment From MotherMary
Yes, the argument is that a 118 RC+ bat with defense sure to decline in the next few years isn’t a guy you want to make a very large financial bet on.

Dave Cameron: Heyward is a +5 WAR player right now. Knock him down to a +3 to +4 WAR player when the defense regresses, and he’s still worth $25 million a year.

Comment From Phil
It seems like people just don’t like that Heyward isn’t a beast HR hitter. A 15HR, 20SB guy hitting .270-.280 with great defense seems like he should be worth a ton of money. Theat’s a pretty premium well rounded player.

Dave Cameron: Yep; all-around players are always underrated relative to one-trick ponies who do one very shiny thing well.

Dave Cameron: Alright, going to call it a day. Eno will be here tomorrow, and I’ll be back next week.