What a lousy week for pitchers. Yu Darvish, Cliff Lee, and Gavin Floyd have been felled by their arms, and now Marcus Stroman will join them on the disabled list after tearing the ACL in his left knee during practice today. Surgery to repair a torn ACL will cause him to miss the entire 2015 season.

This is a huge blow to the Blue Jays, as Stroman projected as their #1 starter; our depth charts forecast had him at +3.5 WAR in just under 200 innings. While this will mean a larger opportunity for either Marco Estrada or Daniel Norris, neither one is likely capable of providing what Stroman would have given the Jays, and this was a rotation already lacking in depth. While the Blue Jays don’t need to panic, the reality is that they probably need another starting pitcher now, and preferably a pretty good one.

Given their spot on the win curve — prior to Stroman’s injury, we gave them a 23% chance of winning the division and a 19% chance of winning the wild card — and the fact that they have a good number of core pieces at the tail ends of their careers, the Blue Jays are somewhat committed to trying to win in 2015. You don’t sign Russell Martin to a five year deal if you’re not pushing in on 2015.

The most obvious answer — and one that will likely be suggested immediately — will be a trade for Cole Hamels. He’s the only pitcher on the market who would give the Jays a legitimate replacement for Stroman’s production, and the team now has an incentive to pay more than they were willing to offer previously. That said, if the asking price remains focused on big league ready players, it’s not entirely clear that the Blue Jays actually have the ability to give the Phillies what they want without doing too much harm to their own team in the process; they don’t have the pitching depth to give up a guy like Norris to acquire Hamels, especially without Stroman around.

So, perhaps instead of aiming for the most expensive replacement around, the Jays will look for cheaper upside instead. The Nationals probably don’t want to trade Tanner Roark, but it’d be worth a phone call. Dillon Gee isn’t any good, but if the Mets wanted to move Jon Niese or Bartolo Colon, the Blue Jays should consider it. Or if they just wanted to take on some money without giving up any talent, I’m sure Edwin Jackson could be had with a subsidy.

But no matter what they do, the Blue Jays are going to be worse. This is a big blow. While the Darvish and Lee injuries were bad for the sport because they’re good pitchers, this is the most significant loss a real contender has suffered yet.

The FanGraphs Depth Chart Projections, compiled as a combination of Steamer and ZiPS, while using our depth charts for playing time are now available in a sortable format and on the player pages!

This week, Brian Cashman commented that he doesn’t foresee any Yankee being named captain to replace Derek Jeter. After Jeter and Paul Konkero retired at the end of 2014, there is currently just one captain in Major League Baseball: David Wright of the New York Mets. The idea of having a captain in baseball has become antiquated. There never was a strong tradition for this practice like there is in hockey, and players are now so transient that teams are more likely tying their own hands with future transactions by naming a captain than they are creating good will with the player and fans.

I wanted to get a better idea of what the Yankees captaincy looked like over the years, so I created the following timeline to visualize the leadership position.

Read the rest of this entry »

He doesn’t speak much English, I don’t speak any Spanish, I couldn’t get video from the traditional behind the backstop location, so you can’t really see the break on his pitches, but… there’s not much video of Yoan Lopez out there, so maybe you’d like to see a little of this 21-year old Cuban pitcher the Diamondbacks signed this year.

Read the rest of this entry »

The purpose of this post is to announce — for the benefit, in particular, of those readers who possess responsibilities which might preclude them from monitoring very closely such developments — the purpose is to announce not only that spring-training baseball has begun in earnest, but also that audio and visual of same is now officially available by way of MLB.TV and probably by other means, as well.

The image embedded above depicts a moment from the Yankees-Phillies contest currently underway in probably Clearwater, Florida. In it, New York right-hander Nick Goody delivers a pitch to Philadelphia third baseman Cody Asche. What sort of pitch? It’s not immediately apparent. The result of the at bat? The reader is surely capable of finding that sort of information. As in most cases, the precise details are immaterial. One is satisfied to learn, merely, that this excellent and useless pastime continues.

Cuban jugador Alfredo Despaigne, whose exploits and spirit have been celebrated previously in these pages, appears to have recorded both the 14th and 15th home runs of his season in Cuba’s Serie Nacional today.

The footage above depicts the former of those home runs and also depicts Despaigne’s not technically slow-motion, but still 41-second tour of the bases. Were he (i.e. Despaigne) a late-19th century Frenchman, it would be appropriate to describe him as a flaneur. That he is of neither that time nor that place, it follows that no word exists to characterize his brand of wild insouciance.

In conclusion:

Credit to American folk hero Ben Badler for bringing video to author’s attention.

The 2015 ZiPS Projections, courtesy of Dan Szymborski, are now available in sortable form and on the player pages.

In addition, ZiPS projections are now combined with the Steamer projections to make up our projected standings.

I keep getting asked if Cuban RHP Yadier Alvarez will be eligible to sign in this international signing period or be forced to go into the 2015 July 2nd pool. The short answer is that nobody knows yet. The initial report on this topic is correct that Alvarez (and fellow Cuban defector RHP Vladimir Gutierrez) needed to already be registered with MLB (which they couldn’t do while in Cuba) to sign during this period, due to their birthdays. Since both are younger than Red Sox IF Yoan Moncada — whom I recently interviewed — and on the wrong side of MLB’s age cutoff for registration, Moncada didn’t face this same problem. We had a similar issue weeks ago when MLB teams were waiting on the MLB office to make a ruling about their OFAC clearance policy for Cubans and now teams are waiting on different sorts of rulings on multiple players.

That said, waivers have been granted to Dominican kids in the past for failing to register on time and Alvarez’s reps are working to get him the same waiver, though a Cuban player has never had to ask for one, so there’s little specific precedent. This waiver would allow him to sign during this signing period. Here’s the official language with emphasis on the important section:

That waiver would give Alvarez the flexibility to sign in this period or after July 2nd, if it turns out that’s when his best deal would come. That may end up being the case because, while it’s still very early in the process, a hot rumor is that the Dodgers are targeting Alvarez as part of an aggressive 2015 July 2nd spending push. That strategy is far from a done deal, as the Dodgers only recently passed on Moncada, so sources believe the club is still deciding what they want to do.  I wrote up Alvarez in depth here and sources expect him to get over $10 million, but he’s been seen so little by scouts that it’s hard to say what his bonus ceiling may be.  Here’s video from Alvarez’s second workout for scouts held earlier this month.

In addition to these two Cuban players, I referenced on twitter that MLB is also in the process of deciding what to do with the status of SS Lucius Fox. He played at American Heritage High School in the Miami-area last year but now is working out for scouts in his native Bahamas and it’s still unclear if he’ll be an international prospect (he’s high school senior age, so he’d be eligible right away) or draft eligible for this summer. He was seen as a solid top 5 round follow until recent workouts where he’s bulked up and kept his plus plus speed, making him a possible seven figure prospect in either market.

These three players, along with Cuban 2B Andy Ibanez, who is eligible to sign but still hasn’t pulled the trigger yet, could all be ruled/choose to not sign until July 2nd, giving further depth to a class already seen as one of the deepest in years. Cuban 2B Hector Olivera is 29, soon to be 30, and isn’t subject to international bonus pools like the above players, so signing him would come with no penalties and he’s expected to sign soon (full details).  I’ll have more on the July 2nd class coming Monday.

As of press time, the Western Kentucky Hilltoppers are leading the No. 1-ranked Vanderbilt Commodores in the seventh inning of a college baseball game being played at the latter’s home park (box). For much of the interval before that press time, the author of this dumb post was sitting on his couch and watching the aforementioned game, during the course of which one was able to observe not only (a) the long home run depicted above and produced by WKU’s junior center fielder Anderson Miller, but also (b) the sliver of a Nashville-area intersection that appears at the end of that home-run footage.

If the author possesses one virtue it’s a child-like sense of wonder — which sense was stirred by this home-run footage. I wondered: “What is this seemingly busy thoroughfare that so closely abuts — indeed, is visible from — Vanderbilt’s baseball stadium?”

Read the rest of this entry »

These graphics are part of an on-going arbitration research project and is co-authored by Sean Dolinar and Alex Chamberlain.

Major League Baseball’s salary arbitration wrapped up this past week after a particularly busy year where there were 14 arbitration hearings. Arbitration is a process reserved for players who have accrued three to five years of service time (or two years, if he’s Super-Two eligible; a negligible detail in the context of this post). The entire process revolves around the mechanism of the arbitration hearing, but very few cases actually make it that far. In the formal arbitration process, the team files a one-year contract offer and the player counter-files a one-year contract demand. If both parties cannot reach a formal agreement, an arbitrator is summoned to rule in favor of one party or the other — that is, the arbitrator chooses either the player’s salary demand or the team’s offer — and the contract becomes binding.

However, players and teams typically avoid arbitration by successfully negotiating a one-year salary. Sometimes, both parties file for arbitration and submit salary offers but still end up successfully negotiating without having to resort to a hearing.

The graph below visualizes this process using data obtained from MLB Trade Rumor’s Arbitration Tracker tool. Each player’s gray line represents the difference between his filing and the team’s, and the gray tick indicates the midpoint between the two. (Team filings are always less than player filings.) The yellow dot represents the contract value upon which the team and player settled.

It’s immediately noticeable that most settlements occur very close the midpoint. Since the arbitration process, if fully carried out, is a gamble for both sides, teams and players both have a strong incentive to settle before the arbitration hearing to mitigate their own risks.

A player-team settlement doesn’t have the dramatic flair of an arbitration hearing. As aforementioned, the hearing is an all-or-nothing gamble; there is a clear-cut winner and loser for each case. The gray line in the graph below represents the same filing numbers as the previous graph, but now the results are bound to either end of the range indicating if the player won (green) or if the team won (red).

Again, there’s no meeting in the middle here. Of the 14 hearings this offseason, players won six and teams won eight. An arbitrator ruled in favor of Mark Trumbo to the tune of almost $2 million; meanwhile, an arbitrator ruled against Josh Donaldson for almost the same amount. Despite having a more moderate gap of $1 million, Mat Latos and Neil Walker — the players with the two highest filings in arbitration hearings — lost their cases. Just from eyeballing the data, teams generally won the hearings with wider ranges in offers, and players generally won the hearings with narrower spreads.

The two graphics in this post represent only the cases where the team and player filed salary figures, but usually the team and player reach an agreement before filing. We wanted to provide a comprehensive and very large graphic that visualizes all the players eligible for arbitration and signed a one-year deal. We omitted multiyear contract extensions, because they are more difficult to compare since players will typically discount their one-year value in exchange for long-term security.

We’ll have more arbitration related information on the site as the project goes along, but for now, we thought you’d enjoy these looks at how the process resolved for each player this winter.