The Padres have had a pretty busy offseason, revamping their outfield around three right-handed sluggers in an attempt to bolster the team’s putrid offense. The pitching upgrades have been more muted, mostly limiting themselves to adding the two most similar sounding pitchers in baseball, in signing Brandon Morrow and trading for Brandon Maurer. Now, though, San Diego seems poised to make another big strike, with James Shields and Cole Hamels lingering as the two remaining fish in the pond.

Shields apparently has a strong preference to pitch on the west coast. Hamels is from San Diego and the Padres are not on his no-trade list. With both pitchers, the team has some leverage, as pretty much every other west coast team has publicly removed themselves from signing Shields, and Shields’ remaining availability gives the team an alternative to caving into Ruben Amaro’s demands. It’s not impossible that a team like the Cubs will swoop in to steal Shields, forcing the Padres to negotiate for Hamels without a safety net, but for today at least, it seems like San Diego could probably pick which path they want to go down.

Financially, the two pitchers probably won’t be dramatically different. Hamels is signed for $96 million over the next four years (or $109 million over five), while Shields is probably looking at a four year deal in the $80-$90 million range. Hamels will cost a little bit more in salary, but the difference is going to be minimal, especially if the Phillies are willing to pick up any part of Hamels’ contract in a trade. So, for A.J. Preller and his staff, the question is mostly whether they think the marginal difference in performance is worth surrendering the talent required to acquire Hamels versus forfeiting the draft pick if they signed Shields.

For reference, here are both pitchers numbers over the last three years.

On a per-innings basis, Hamels has been slightly better, though Shields has thrown a few more innings. Hamels is two years younger and hasn’t shown the downwards trends that Shields has displayed the last few years, and his overall career track record is stronger, especially if you evaluate pitchers by runs allowed. By RA9-WAR, Hamels has been roughly +1 WAR better per season than Shields over his career; the gap is closer by FIP-WAR, but Hamels has reached the point in his career where it’s pretty clear that he’s a bit underrated by FIP.

Hamels is likely to perform better than Shields in both 2015 and beyond, but the acquisition cost appears to be significantly higher as well. So, before A.J. Preller makes his choice, I’ll put this out to you guys: which would you pick? Older and slightly worse but retain your minor leaguers, or go for broke with the better pitcher and a diminished farm system?

As of yesterday afternoon, Cuban defector Yoan Moncada has been cleared to sign with a major-league organization. Kiley McDaniel has provided all the relevant information concerning Moncada — including McDaniel’s own best guesses regarding Moncada’s signing bonus and the club most likely to provide it.

The purpose of this post is to harness the wisdom of the crowds with a view towards estimating the probabilities of various outcomes. Use the ballot below to submit answers regarding various aspects of Moncada’s near and slightly less-near future. Note that estimates regarding Moncada’s bonus should not include the 100% tax for which the signing club will be responsible.

The Caribbean Series features the championship clubs from five Latin American leagues: the Dominican Winter, Mexican Pacific, the Roberto Clemente Professional (i.e. Puerto Rican), and Venezuelan Winter — and, as of last year, also the Cuban. This year’s tournament began at Noon ET today (Monday) and extends through Sunday’s championship game.

Telecasts of all the games are available by way of ESPN Deportes and (streaming via) Watch ESPN. For those who lack a subscription to Deportes, however, the Watch ESPN feed is also unavailable. Fortunately, the probably legal stream of CDN Sport Max from the Dominican carries the games, as well, it seems and offers strong video quality.

The champions of Cuba and Mexico are currently playing (box), while Puerto Rico and Venezuela are scheduled for 6:30pm ET this evening. All box scores are available here.

When Rob Manfred officially took over as MLB commissioner, he went on a bit of a media tour, explaining his plans to better the game of baseball. Among the things discussed were pace of play and possibly banning the defensive shifts. The latter has been discussed on these pages already, so I won’t get into that. But I do want to dive into pace of play for a bit.

One of the proposed changes involves installing a pitch clock. In fact, the Arizona Fall League was used as a bit of a test case already. The idea seems simple enough. The time between every pitch should last no more than 20 seconds. So, taking what we know about pace numbers and applying that restraint, what kind of change can we expect?

Looking at FanGraphs data from 2014 alone, I took the total pitches and pace data from every pitcher (minimum 10 IP). I took a weighted average of the pace numbers, to try and get as accurate of a number as I could (more weight to the time taken by the guys who throw the most pitches).

Here’s what was discovered:

• Weighted average of time between pitches: 23 seconds
• Total pitches logged by PitchF/X in 2014: 704,974
• 2430 major league games
• 290 pitches per game

A 20-second pitch clock means three seconds would be lobbed off of every pitch. That’s 870 seconds saved, or 14.5 minutes, or about 8% of the total game time.

If you wanted to get turbo-aggressive, you could turn to MLB rule 8.04:

When the bases are unoccupied, the pitcher shall deliver the ball to the batter within 12 seconds after he receives the ball.

There are a lot of rules that aren’t really enforced these days, but say the new commish wants to flex his newly-found muscle and implement this rule as well.

• 170,876 total pitches thrown with the bases empty
• 70 pitches per game thrown with no runners on

If pitchers only had 12 seconds to throw in this scenario, it would knock 11 seconds off each pitch. Over 70 pitches, that comes out to 770 seconds or around 13 minutes. Add in the remaining 220 innings at the usual three seconds a piece, and you get … around 14 minutes. All that math to save about 30 seconds.

So 14 minutes seems to be the magic number — a little less than 8% of total game time. But 8% is 8%, and considering a lot of the other percents (rest of the time to play the game, commercial breaks, pitching changes, etc.) probably aren’t going anywhere, 8% is not an insignificant number. There are certainly other factors to consider, but we’re doing this in a bit of a vacuum.

It remains to be seen what steps will be taken, if any, to increase pace of play. But if it’s done using some sort of time restriction on pitchers, we can expect a maximum of 14 minutes or so to be saved, on average. At least now we know. And I have it on good authority that knowing is around 50% of the battle.

Yesterday, the author published a post intended for an audience of roughly zero readers and purporting to have been written with a view towards identifying the Jose Bautista of the Ivy League. In reality, what the post did was to combine my curiosity about current Ivy League hitters with principles recently introduced by Chris Mitchell on forecasting a hitter’s future major-league performance with minor-league stats.

What follows is a much briefer version of that same thing, except in this case for the 2014 season of the Southeastern Conference.

To review very briefly: for hitters in the low minors (i.e. a level similar to the better collegiate leagues), the metrics most predictive of major-league success (besides age) are strikeout rate (K%), isolated power (ISO), and batting average on balls in play (BABIP). What the author has done is to combine regressed versions of those three metrics into an index stat, where 100 is league average and above 100 is better than league average.

Using that methodology (about which one can read more thoroughly in yesterday’s post), here are the top-10 hitters from the 2014 SEC baseball season by what I’ll continue to temporarily call KATOH+ (in homage to Mitchell’s system). Note that xK%, xISO, and xBABIP denote expected strikeout rate, isolated power, and batting average on balls in play, respectively.

Some assorted observations:

• The relevant league averages for the SEC in 2014 were as follows: 15.1% strikeout rate, .096 isolated power, .319 BABIP. For reference: that’s a lower strikeout rate, almost identical ISO, and higher BABIP than one finds in the Ivy League.

• By this methodology, former Kentucky first baseman and recent Houston second-round draft pick A.J. Reed was obviously the best hitter in the SEC last year. Among other of his exploits, he produced the highest expected isolated-power figure last year by over 150 points. Ruthian, is a reasonable adjective with which to describe that feat. Kiley McDaniel recently ranked Reed 13th among Astros prospects.

• Among returning SEC hitters, Sikes Orvis of Ole Miss produced the top batting line (by this methodology) in 2014. Logan Nottebrok of Texas A&M also deserves some recognition — not only because he occupies a more difficult area on the defensive spectrum than Orvis, but also because his .248 BABIP likely undersold the quality of his season.

The Nationals got Casey Janssen today, the same Casey Janssen that did a great job of getting the most out of his skill set before last year. Without an overpowering arsenal, he hung with the best in his craft. Though the contract wasn’t expensive, it still represents a hope that Janssen can return to those days.

Ken Rosenthal reports that the deal is for one year and $5 million, but contains a mutual option. Last year, the pitcher battled back and shoulder soreness to have his worst year in the past five.

But even before his 2014 season, Janssen was… a bit different. When we think of swing-and-miss stuff, we don’t think of his 90 mph fourseam paired with a good cutter and a loopy curve. And for good reason. From 2011-2013, Janssen outperformed his swinging strike stuff.

Read the rest of this entry »

Long-time readers of FanGraphs probably don’t need to spend much time reading up on Earned Run Average (ERA), but if you’re new to the site or to the understanding of sabermetrics, diving into the flaws of some of the more traditional metrics is a good way to learn about the value of the new ones.

This week, we’ve updated the ERA section of the Library to offer a little more information about why our writers prefer to talk about things like Fielding Independent Pitching (FIP) or Runs Allowed per 9 (RA9) instead of ERA. ERA has its place in context, but there are usually better alternatives if you’re trying to evaluate the quality of a given pitcher. Head over there to learn more.

As always, feel free to post questions in the comments below or to find me on Twitter with your inquiries @NeilWeinberg44.

The four Caribbean winter leagues have entered their respective playoff rounds. Below is a (probably incomplete) collection of video feeds for Wednesday’s games. The author will update it haphazardly over the course of the evening. Readers are invited to provide useful links, as well. Games listed in chronological order, with most recent start time on top.

Game: Gigantes at Estrellas (Dominican)
Start Time: 4:10pm ET
Players of Note: Maikel Franco, Jean Segura
Better Video / Worse Video / Box

Visual evidence of Jung-Ho Kang playing catcher.

Though the player himself is conspicuously unconcerned about his own defensive skills, some question certainly remains as to whether recent Pittsburgh signee Jung-Ho Kang has the tools to play a league-average shortstop. The purpose of this post is not to shed any light on a potential answer to that question, but rather merely to note that, in the event that Kang is unable to adequately play the six, that he has exhibited some competence, as well, at positions one through five.

Indeed, visual proof of him doing that has been made available by way of Korean weblog MLB Park, which site features a series of 10 GIFs depicting Kang at first and second and third and short and catcher and pitcher. With what level of skill he’s playing the aforementioned positions is an area of concern for individuals more qualified than the present author. In meantime, all GIFs are available here.

Credit to Dan at MyKBO for providing the relevant link.

For the last year or so, people have been asking what the Cubs are going to do with all these infielders. A trade, or several trades, has always seemed likely, so perhaps we shouldn’t be too surprised that the Cubs shipped Luis Valbuena to the Astros in exchange for Dexter Fowler and Dan Straily.

Valbuena and Fowler are somewhat similar players, as both draw a lot of walks and have average power, making them slightly above average hitters. Fowler’s a better baserunner, while Valbuena’s a better defender, but the overall packages are similar, and both project to be roughly league average players in 2015. The Astros are getting two years of Valbuena’s services in exchange for one of Fowler, though, which is why they added Straily as a sweetener making it a little strange that Chicago had to throw in Straily as well. This seems like a nice deal for Houston, given that they probably don’t get any worse and cut $4 million from their payroll, plus pick up a 2016 asset.

For the Cubs, they get to arrange their assets a bit more optimally, as Valbuena was blocking Kris Bryant’s path to the big leagues. Assuming Bryant will be on the team on May 1st, an OF is better for Chicago than infield depth, so making this swap now gives them a chance to avoid a roster crunch a month into the season. And they also get a chance to sign Fowler beyond 2015 if they so desire, so perhaps this isn’t a pure rental for them either.

This seems like a better deal for Houston, but it makes sense for Chicago as well, given their backlog of infield talents. If Bryant is what people expect him to be, no one will miss Valbuena for very long.