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?”

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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.

Yoan Moncada has a home, as Jesse Sanchez of MLB.com has reported that the Cuban prospect will be signing with the Boston Red Sox for something in the $30 million range. Of course, that price automatically doubles, since the Red Sox were already over their spending limit, incurring a 100% tax on the overage. Because they had already blown past their pool allocation, they’d already taken the hit of surrendering the right to sign international talents for more than $250,000 for each of the next two years, so the marginal cost of adding Moncada is lower to them that it would have been to a team that was pushed over their bonus limit by adding him.

Kiley McDaniel has covered Moncada in depth all winter; here’s a selection of his most recent post on him.

Moncada, 19, likely spends 1-2 years in the minors before settling in the big leagues at either second base, third base or center field, with the offensive upside of Yasiel Puig. For those wondering where Moncada would land on a top 100 prospects list, he’d be somewhere from 5-12 for me, with comparable talent to guys like Carlos Correa and Corey Seager, but with far less proven as Moncada hasn’t played in a game for a long time. That said, Moncada was a standout performer in nearly all of his international tournaments before leaving Cuba, so his hitting tools are expected to lead to big numbers.

With Dustin Pedroia already pushing Mookie Betts off second base, it seems unlikely that Boston will push Moncada to that position, given the long-term commitment they’ve made there. However, third base remains quite viable even after signing Pablo Sandoval, as it’s perfectly reasonable to think that Sandoval could shift to first base after a couple of years, opening up the position for Moncada in 2017 or so. Or, as Boston has shown this winter, they never think you can have too many outfielders, and perhaps Moncada will end up as a right fielder flanking country-mate Rusney Castillo.

They’ll figure out the fit when Moncada’s ready. This is the kind of talent that isn’t readily available, and so the Red Sox decided to invest in a high-end prospect. We’ll have more on the price and whether it makes sense — or whether others should have bid more — a bit later today, but for now, the Red Sox get to celebrate adding one of the game’s best prospects to their farm system.

The highest average fastball velocity among major-league qualifiers in 2014 was the 97.0 mph mark produced by Kansas City right-hander Yordano Ventura. What follows is an animated GIF of Georgia sophomore Robert Tyler striking out Florida State outfielder DJ Stewart — ranked 20th overall, Stewart, among Kiley McDaniel’s way-too-early draft prospect rankings — on a pitch recorded at that same exact velocity. Tyler has produced five strikeouts against just 10 Florida State batters over 3.0 innings (in a game available by way of SEC Network Plus via Watch ESPN).

Here’s the fastball in question:

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Colorado’s previous center-field camera.

Twice now over the past four or so years, the author has attempted to rank all 30 clubs’ center-field broadcast cameras by some combination of shot angle (in which more central and lower is generally preferred) and shot size (in which closer up and not longer is generally preferred). It’s required some combination of art and science, this endeavor, but has produced, if nothing else, a reference for anyone with access to MLB.TV, MLB Extra Innings, or some other manner of game video, so that he or she might be better equipped to choose the ideal feed.

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Over the last week, we’ve published a bunch of prospect-related content, including Kiley McDaniel’s Top 200 list. So, as an end-of-week recap, I thought it would be useful to collect it all in one place. This is that place. We’ll start with Sean Dolinar’s pretty graphs, and then link to all the various prospect pieces that ran here on FanGraphs this week.

Top 200 Prospects — Kiley McDaniel

Top 200 Prospects: The Process and Introduction — Kiley McDaniel

Top 200 Chat — Kiley McDaniel

Top 200 Podcast — Kiley McDaniel and Carson Cistulli

KATOH projections for the Top 200 — Chris Mitchell

KATOH’s Top 200 Prospects — Chris Mitchell

Taking a Stab at Valuing the Farm Systems — Dave Cameron

Everyone is a Prospect — Dave Cameron

How Many Good Players Were Good Prospects? — Jeff Sullivan

It’s become a practice of the present author in recent years to purchase — before FanGraphs’ annual spring pilgrimage to the desert — to purchase a new ballcap in February, with a view towards cultivating within my colleagues a combination of jealously and respect that my actual “work” is incapable of producing.

Last year, an exhaustive search — painfully documented over a series of posts — resulted in the acquisition of a Winston-Salem Spirits cap from 1994 with a weird red sun and melancholy eagle on it.

This year’s edition of the search began last week and continues today.

To wit:

NOS 90s SEAGRAM’S GIN snapback hat rap hip hop (Link)
Style: Tasteful Snapback
Time Left: N/A
Cost: US $14.99 (Buy It Now)

There are many reasons for an octogenarian male to fall asleep whilst fishing for lake trout from the bow of a reasonably priced pontoon boat. To do so in the absence of this tastefully appointed cap, however, is poor form. Poor form all around.

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Since my specialization at FanGraphs is graphics creation, I aim to produce many non-traditional, yet thought-provoking data visualizations regarding different aspects of baseball throughout the year.

With free agency is winding down as pitchers and catcher report to Spring Training, I created two graphics showing different views of the free-agent signing period from November to February 18, 2015. I pulled data from FanGraph’s 2015 Free Agent Tracker, which includes the signing date, salary information and the contract length.

The first graph shows the total Average Annual Value (AAV) of all players signed each week. From this visual, teams spend the majority of their money within the first two months of the off-season with the bulk of the money spent right after the Winter Meetings. January and February show substantially less activity except for Max Scherzer’s $210 million, 7-year deal. Overall, most of free agency activity takes place before Christmas.

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A couple of days ago, I examined how the players listed on Kiley McDaniel’s top 200 list graded out according to KATOH — my prospect projection system. Well, not exactly. I actually examined how his top 142 prospects — those that he ranked — graded out according to KATOH. I left off the 58 honorable mentions who just missed the cut for receiving a full writeup. Each of these guys received a 45+ FV rating from McDaniel, which means their most likely to peak as weak everyday players or back-end starters. Think Charlie Blackmon or Mike Leake. While none of the names listed below are likely to be stars, or even average regulars, all of them are pretty good bets to make at least some sort of big league impact. Read the rest of this entry »