The Braves seem committed to fielding a competitive product next year. I don’t think we see eye-to-eye on this — the way I figure, it’s not yet time for the Braves to attempt to push forward. But I also can’t bring myself to be too critical of an operation that wants to build a winner for its fans, so I’m just looking for the Braves to keep from getting too aggressive. There’s nothing wrong with making affordable upgrades. And the Braves have made their first, signing R.A. Dickey for one year and a guaranteed $8 million. Dickey is back to being a starter in the NL East.

This is not about the Braves suddenly being a great team. This is not about Dickey suddenly being a great starter. But, you know what kind of shape the free-agent market is in, with regard to starting pitchers. You’ve seen some of the numbers thrown around when talking about Ivan Nova. Nova is a lock to get three years, and he could get four, or even five. And, well, Nova’s almost 30. Dickey just turned 42. But last year, Dickey had the worse ERA- by just four points. Over the past two years, Dickey has been better, by 10 points. Over the past three years, he’s been better by 19 points.

As far as just 2017 goes, I’m not convinced Nova will be better than Dickey. I know, I know, Ray Searage magic and everything, but Nova’s track record is unimpressive, and his contract will come with a ton of risk. Dickey isn’t nearly so risky. He projects to be basically the same as Jeremy Hellickson, Jason Hammel, Edinson Volquez, and Andrew Cashner. Dickey has been basically the same pitcher in Toronto for four years, and he practically never misses a start. With any knuckleballer, you think of the pitch as being unreliable. Pitch-to-pitch, that might be true, but Dickey himself is remarkably consistent.

He’s something in the vicinity of an average pitcher, and you can put him in for 30+ starts in ink. The Braves might not yet be within that competitive bubble, but last year, no other baseball team used as many starting pitchers as they did. They entered the offseason with an assortment of question marks behind Julio Teheran and Mike Foltynewicz, and Dickey is a useful stopgap. Maybe he won’t teach a younger player a nifty changeup grip or whatever, but there’s value in reliability. There’s value in fielding a better major-league product, and the Braves got Dickey without giving anything up. It’s not a bad way to start the push.

If the Braves want to win 80+ games in the season ahead, they need to make so many improvements. This is one they can cross off. Pitchers who are equally average are going to receive far bigger commitments, and they are unlikely to look very good.

Free agency is officially underway, and odds are good you’re going to spend the next few weeks thinking about who your team should sign, or not sign, depending on the faith you have in your team’s front office. To help with those endeavors, we’ve created a couple of free agent leaderboards for your perusal.

Free Agent Hitters

Free Agent Pitchers

As you know by now, this isn’t a particularly great free agent crop. Only three of the 75 pitchers on the list posted at least +3 WAR last season, and only seven of the 78 hitters got over +2.5 WAR. This is a free agent class of role players and depth pieces, not franchise-altering stars.

But role players are necessary too, and there are some useful players on the market. With these leaderboards, you can sort and filter to your heart’s content, looking for specific skills or traits that might fit your team’s needs.

For instance, does your team need a corner outfielder who can hit left-handed pitching? Well, click a few options, pick “vs L” from the splits drop-down, and all of the sudden, you have this, and can see that Franklin Gutierrez put up a 151 wRC+ against lefties in 329 PAs over the last three years. You shouldn’t expect that to be his production level going forward of course, but a guy like Gutierrez has some value to a team as a part-time player, and these leaderboards will help you find guys like him.

Or maybe you’re looking for a power arm for your bullpen. Everyone knows Arodlis Chapman is the hardest thrower on the market, but do you know who had the second highest average fastball velocity in this class in 2016? Well, now you can: Neftali Feliz, followed closely by Daniel Hudson. Goes to show you need a bit more than a 96 mph fastball to be a good reliever, I guess.

Anyway, we hope you find these tools useful. Because the player lists were created manually, we may have missed a few guys here and there, so let us know if you find any free agents not on the list, and we’ll get them added.

And stay tuned the next few days, because we’re going to be rolling out a list of the Top 50 free agents in this class, as well as providing the results of the contract crowdsourcing project to estimate what players may sign for this winter. Even in a weak class, there are still some bargains to be found.

Since the World Series ended, a few of us have been busy behind the scenes updating all the team depth charts. They’re still not perfect, and they’ve yet to be updated with a few final adjustments, but for the most part, everything’s in decent shape. We have 30 team depth charts that would look pretty good if the 2017 season were to start today. Very obviously, that will not happen! But free agents have been moved off rosters, onto our free-agent squad. Depth pieces within systems have been given appropriate playing-time estimates. What does the MLB landscape look like with the offseason just beginning? Here’s what I’m seeing:

We aren’t yet actually projecting 2017 wins on FanGraphs. We just have WAR projections, but I’ve gone ahead and converted those into team-win estimates. Which is simply the WAR projection, plus a constant. I can’t imagine much in here is surprising, but, sure enough, the Cubs have baseball’s best projection. They’re threatening to push 100 wins again. The Dodgers are right behind them, and then there’s a gap before you get to the Nationals. (Schedule strength is not taken into account for this.)

A bunch of rebuilding clubs are at the other end. The Brewers look worst here overall, while the Twins look like the worst in the American League. There are 10 teams that project between 76 – 81 wins, so that might represent the bubble. Any of those teams might elect to sell, or to try to push forward. Of some note here, the Astros get the best projection in the AL West, followed by the Angels. The Angels projection is precarious, given the health questions around Tyler Skaggs, Garrett Richards, and Matt Shoemaker, but you can see how they could have a path.

The point isn’t to reach any strong conclusions. Don’t place any bets based on these projections at the beginning of November. Rather, I think these are most useful as a baseline. These are the rosters the clubs will be adding to and subtracting from over the following months. Last season’s records don’t matter anymore. Whatever the Blue Jays do next won’t be tweaking an 89-win ballclub. It’ll be more like it’s tweaking an 81-win ballclub. Of course, you can argue with that number, but it’s an estimate. It’ll be interesting to compare the spring-training projections to these projections, to see which offseasons made the biggest differences on paper.

Have fun. But don’t have too much fun. This is how the teams all project. And all of the teams will change.

Position: Sports Info Solutions Video Scouting Internship

Location: Coplay, Pa.
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I wouldn’t say the Cameron Maybin trade exactly opened the floodgates or anything, but now we do have another trade to talk about. In this one, Carlos Ruiz is going from the Dodgers to the Mariners, and Vidal Nuno is headed in the other direction. You’re not impressed. No one’s impressed. This is a low-profile move, and maybe the most interesting player involved in the whole thought process is Austin Barnes, who’s now going to get a roster spot in Los Angeles. The Mariners are getting a backup catcher, and the Dodgers are getting a relatively soft-tossing reliever. It’s one of the first of many “whatever” moves we’re going to see over the next handful of months.

There’s still something here, though. The way I figure, it’s on the Dodgers’ side. To tackle the Mariners’ side first — they get a year of Ruiz, for $4.5 million. That’s not a bad rate for a reliable backup, and even though Ruiz is almost 38, he just managed a .365 OBP, and he projects to be a half-decent hitter. Pitchers seemingly like working with Ruiz, despite the fact that he rates as a below-average framer. He’s said to have those leadership qualities, he’s a better backup than Jesus Sucre, and he’s reasonable insurance for the unpredictable Mike Zunino. Ruiz makes sense here. You see why the Mariners jumped.

And I think you can see why the Dodgers jumped. In part, this is about clearing space for Barnes. But beyond that — I was asked recently about the market. We all know the market is light on starting pitching, and I was asked if there are more guys out there like Mike Montgomery, relievers you could target and think about putting in the rotation. Nuno might actually fit here. Here’s a plot of 2016 starting pitchers, and I’ve also included a red dot to represent Nuno, overall in the major leagues:

If there’s one thing Nuno has proven, it’s that he’s a strike-thrower. He’s thrown strikes as both a starter and as a reliever, and while he’s never been a swing-and-miss type, his contact rates haven’t been terrible. On top of that, when Nuno moved to the bullpen, his stuff didn’t really play up. It’s easier, then, to imagine him as a starter again, throwing the same pitches around the same speeds. Don’t be too turned off by his home-run rates — he just allowed the same average exit velocity as Justin Verlander and Johnny Cueto. I don’t think it’s a stretch to look at Nuno and think he has some shot of being another Wei-Yin Chen. The core abilities there are pretty similar. Chen signed an $80-million contract.

Nuno is already 29. If he’s going to be Chen, he’d better hurry up. And the Dodgers aren’t hurting for starters, and starting candidates. Nuno isn’t going straight into the rotation, and maybe we’ll just never hear from him again. But Ruiz is an old catcher with one year of control left. Nuno is a younger strike-thrower with three years of arbitration eligibility. You can see why the Mariners wouldn’t mind this move. And you can see why the Dodgers would go for it. The Dodgers’ front office hasn’t forgotten its small-market roots, and they’re always trying to win the surplus-value game. Nuno could be something more than he looks like. The boring moves are seldom quite as boring as they seem.

This past season we debuted our custom splits tool for players, and over the weekend, we updated the tool to include filtering options. These filtering options allow you to remove the lines of stats which don’t meet a specific criteria.

For example, if you wanted to view only those seasons in which Dexter Fowler recorded more than 200 plate appearances at home, you can add a filter for that. You could also add a filter to see the seasons where Fowler had over a 20% strikeout rate on those splits. This filter also works if you group by months, weeks and games, so, for example, you could return all the games in which a player had three or more hits. Filters act like the splits in that they can be combined and customized.

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Detroit acquired RHP prospect Victor Alcantara (video from Fall League here) from Anaheim last night in exchange for OF Cameron Maybin. Alcantara has been pitching for the Scottsdale Scorpions in the Arizona Fall League, and I’ve seen him a few times over the past several weeks.

Alcantara has mostly been 91-95 with sinking arm-side movement. His fastball command is well below average, a 30 on the 20-80 scale for me, and his delivery is full of effort and violent moving parts. His mid-80s slider is consistently above average and features more length than is usual for a slider that hard. I’ve seen some changeups as well, mostly in the 86-87 mph range, but the best one I’ve seen has been a 40 on the scale.

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I’ve been thinking about how to start this post for a week, and it looks like I’ve decided on writing about how I’m still thinking about what to write. I guess I always have been better at talking about baseball than about myself.

The conclusion of the World Series will also mark the conclusion of my tenure at FanGraphs. Later this week, I’ll begin my new job working for a major league front office. I can’t say too much about the specifics of what it is I will be doing or who I’ll be doing it for, but just know that it is an incredible opportunity, and one which I am unbelievably excited to begin.

On the one hand, this was an easy choice for me to make. I’m living out a childhood dream, doing what I can to help a major league baseball team win actual games (I think I can finally give up my dream of one day playing). On the other hand, it was an incredibly difficult decision to make. I adore FanGraphs. I look up to my co-workers. I love interacting with each and every one of you, the readers, in my chats, on Twitter, and even in the comments (mostly). There’s so much about this job that I love. Writing about baseball for a living, for FanGraphs in particular, was a dream I set out to achieve in college. Working for a major league front office was a dream I never realistically thought I could achieve. I’m beyond grateful to have been given both of these opportunities.

There’s no sense in this going on any longer than it has, but I have to thank Dave Cameron and David Appelman for taking a chance on me two-and-a-half years ago based on a silly article I wrote in the Community Blog section about Brian Dozier’s baserunning. My first article for the main site was a silly one about Kurt Suzuki’s baserunning, so shout out to the Twins, too, I guess. The Davids gave me my first real shot in this industry, and without them, none of the opportunities I’ve been given since them would be possible. I will forever be grateful toward these two people, not just on a professional level, but more importantly on a personal level, too.

Thanks to Jeff Sullivan and Eno Sarris and all the amazing writers here at FanGraphs who inspired me to be a better writer long before I began working for the site, and then especially once my work began appearing alongside theirs. Thanks to Carson Cistulli for putting up with my habitual tardiness and for making the posts I gave him enough time to edit become much better than what I gave him. Thanks to all the guys in the Cleveland media who have made my time in the Progressive Field press box these last three years so much fun, and to all the fellow writers I’ve met over the years who welcomed me with open arms into your awesome, unique, talented community. And lastly, thank you, the reader. The readership of FanGraphs is such a fantastic, bright, curious group of individuals who genuinely inspire and challenge all of us to be better at our jobs. I can’t thank you all enough for reading along.

I suppose it’s only fitting that my goodbye post went several hundred words longer than I intended it to. And there aren’t even any .gifs.

This post is centered around a controversial call. Maybe I’m being mealy-mouthed. This post is centered around a bad call. As such, I want to make something clear right now. I don’t root for the Indians, and I don’t root for the Cubs. My team of choice is not very good, and it’s not alive in the playoffs. Hasn’t been in forever! This post is not about me complaining, and it’s not about excusing the Indians’ loss, or asserting that the Cubs got lucky. A game result comes out of hundreds of events, and had this particular event gone Cleveland’s way, chances are they still would’ve come up short. We all good here? I just want to point something out, and introduce some context. Sorry if it makes your emotions flare up.

Game 5, fifth inning, 3-1 Cubs. Runner on third, one out, full count on the hitter. The hitter was Brandon Guyer, and the pitcher was Jon Lester. Lester executed the pitch he wanted. The second out went up on the scoreboard.

The funny thing about that being the pitch Lester wanted — the pitch was more of a ball than a strike.

Lester nailed David Ross‘ target. That much can’t be argued. What also can’t be argued is that Ross’ target was off the plate in the first place. Tough calls are nothing unusual, but they mean the most in full counts in close games. When Guyer was hitting, the Indians’ win expectancy was right around 29%. Had that pitch been called a ball, as it should’ve been, the Indians’ odds of winning would’ve increased to 32%. The strikeout dropped their odds of winning instead, all the way to 22%. That’s a swing of 10 percentage points. That swing is huge. Jose Ramirez’s solo homer was worth 11 percentage points.

Yes, I know, having stuff like this pointed out isn’t fun. Cubs fans feel like something is being taken away from them. Indians fans feel like something was taken away from them. Sorry! Even zanier, Lester got a worse call against Guyer earlier in the same series. From the sixth inning in Game 1:

The replay tells you what you need to know:

The pitch was literally on the chalk, so Guyer got screwed. But the win-expectancy swing there was under two percentage points, so in the end no one minded too much. The Game 5 call was a bigger deal.

But we’re not just dealing with freak called strikeouts here. Those aren’t necessarily good strikeouts, but Lester and Ross love those strikeouts. Here are all of Lester’s called strikeouts since 2014, with Game 5’s against Guyer in red:

Here’s the same plot, but with Game 1’s against Guyer in blue:

You see how they kind of blend in? Lester records a ton of arm-side called strikeouts off the plate. Over the last three years, Lester ranks 13th in rate of two-strike pitches taken for strikes. But he moves all the way up into second in rate of two-strike pitches taken for strikes off the plate in that neighborhood. Over the whole PITCHf/x era, Lester is the easy league leader in total number of these called strikeouts. And here’s a year-to-year breakdown:

An established, long-standing pattern doesn’t make the calls more correct, but it does make them less surprising. Lester loves that strikeout, and while he couldn’t get it without the umpires, it’s a credit to his own command, and it’s a credit to his catchers, which have often just been Ross. Lester can repeatedly hit that spot, and throughout the whole of baseball history, pitchers have been rewarded for being so accurate. I know that, from a certain perspective, it seems unfair. Strikes should be strikes, and balls should be balls. But it’s at least Lester’s own ability that leads him to a lot of these strikeouts, and while Brandon Guyer had every right to be annoyed, he couldn’t have been too astonished. Not in Game 1, and then, certainly, not Sunday night.

It was a few years ago when we all learned about Jon Lester’s pick-off problem. There was speculation that the Royals might take advantage in their one-game playoff against the A’s. The Royals could run, after all. And, against Lester that evening, Royals base-stealers went 3-for-4. In the one failure, Billy Butler just wandered off first base for some reason.

Lester’s same problem was supposed to be a major factor in the current World Series. The Indians were supposed to be able to take better advantage than the Giants and Dodgers. I suppose it’s possible that Lester could show up in relief in Game 7, but assuming that doesn’t happen, the Series is in the books as far as Lester on the field is concerned. Twice, the Indians were successful stealing against him. Twice, the Indians got thrown out. Jon Lester wasn’t exploited.

In the first game, Francisco Lindor went 1-for-2, as a runner. Sunday night, Rajai Davis was 1-for-1, and Lindor went 0-for-1. Davis stole in the sixth, and he scored to narrow the deficit to one. Lindor tried to steal in the sixth, but it didn’t work. It would’ve been a pretty big advance, but Lindor was done in in part by skill and in part by psychology.

Here’s Davis. David Ross couldn’t handle the baseball on the transfer, which is also how Lindor stole in Game 1.

And now here’s Lindor:

It’s time to dig into this! Quickly, you might notice something. Here’s Davis as Lester began to throw:

Here’s Lindor at almost exactly the same time:

Okay, that’s one factor — Davis had a better lead by about two and a half feet. In other words, Davis was about 4% closer to second base, based on the distance there from the secondary lead. Clearly, a huge factor is that, with Davis, Ross couldn’t even get off a throw. Ross got off a perfect throw with Lindor running. Javier Baez applied a perfect tag. Lester was even about 5% faster getting the ball to Ross in the first place. Compared to Davis, Lindor arrived at second base about 0.2 – 0.3 seconds slower. That’s huge, as steals are concerned, and so Lindor was out without so much as a replay review.

Lindor getting thrown out reduced the Indians’ odds of winning by about 3.7 percentage points. Had Lindor gotten in there safely, it would’ve increased the Indians’ odds of winning by about 1.9 percentage points, so, the break-even rate there is 66%. It made sense for Lindor to go if he believed he’d be safe at least two-thirds of the time. That feels like a safe assumption, when you’re Francisco Lindor, running against Jon Lester. It’s supposed to be nearly automatic, right? Even Joe Maddon conceded as much before the series began.

But not only did the Cubs execute with perfection — Lindor just couldn’t bring himself to go crazy. This is the same thing I wrote about a week and a half ago. Based on his lead and jump, sure, you can see how the Cubs threw Lindor out. But why didn’t he take an even bigger lead, to get an even better jump? Lindor simply would’ve felt too vulnerable. He would’ve felt naked out there, doing something you’re never supposed to do against a lefty. Jon Lester looks the part, and you have to really, really, truly believe he’s not throwing over. Lindor couldn’t accept that, even though Lester had just bluffed.

Go back to Game 1. This is nuts.

Lindor saw this for himself. In Game 1, he would’ve been an easy out, but Lester couldn’t do anything, so Lindor could scamper back. Lindor observed firsthand that Lester couldn’t and wouldn’t throw over. It’s so easy to sit here now and say “Just go! Just go! Who cares!” But that sells the psychology short. Lester is protected by the uniqueness of his pick-off problem. Francisco Lindor probably could’ve had a way bigger lead, and, given that lead, he probably could’ve stolen second base. It would’ve been a pretty important steal, with Mike Napoli batting. But Lindor fell into the same trap most runners fall into. Jon Lester’s problem doesn’t make sense. Therefore, it’s mighty difficult to believe.