For much the same reason that he published a final statistical report last week for the Arizona Fall League, the author is publishing here a combined statistical report for the various Caribbean winter leagues — again, not necessarily because such reports are of great utility for evaluating players, but because they provide a means by which to participate in those leagues which doesn’t also require a substantial investment in transportation and lodging.

In this case, what the author has done is to identify the regressed hitting and pitching leaders in the Dominican Winter, Mexican Pacific, Puerto Rican, and Venezuelan Leagues separately. What he’s then done is to combine the hitting and pitching leaders of those leagues into a pair of top-10 lists, which one can find below. Note: all ages are as of July 1, 2014.

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Earlier this afternoon, Dave Cameron examined third baseman Kyle Seager’s seven-year, $100 million extension with Seattle — with particular emphasis on the realities of Seager’s value as compared to the perceptions of it. The realities are evident merely by inspecting Seager’s player page, which reveals that he’s produced three consecutive three-win seasons or better.

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Last month, writing primarily about Dan Duquette’s Orioles, Jeff Sullivan observed the strong correlation between a team’s success and that same team’s ability to avoid players who produce negative WAR figures. As early as 2010, in fact, Jeff Zimmerman addressed a similar concept here with also similar findings. The conclusion of both pieces: avoiding blatant weaknesses/positional holes is probably just as relevant to a team’s success as acquiring or retaining superstar types — while also generally costing much less.

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We’ll have a more full write-up on this in the morning, but after a day of rumors, it appears that the Red Sox really are on the verge of landing free agent Hanley Ramirez. Per Ken Rosenthal:

Source: Hanley Ramirez headed to Boston tomorrow to finalize deal with #RedSox.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) November 24, 2014

Sources say Hanley’s deal with #RedSox will be in range of five years, $90M.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) November 24, 2014

This is a fascinating move in so many ways. For one, it’s far less than I expected Ramirez to sign for — I predicted 7/$140M for Hanley — but exactly the amount the crowd came up with in the crowdsourcing project. Of course, the crowd has been low on pretty much every other free agent contract signed to date, so even signing for the crowd’s expected figure makes it seem like a relative bargain.

But it isn’t just the terms that are surprising. For one, we don’t know where Ramirez might play in Boston, given their rather public pursuit of Pablo Sandoval. Does this mean they know they lost the bidding for Kung Fu Panda, and Ramirez took the deal that they had allocated for their primary third base choice? Or are they still trying to sign Sandoval as well, which would push Ramirez back to shortstop or the outfield, both positions at which the team does not have an obvious need.

This makes more sense if Ramirez was the backup plan at third base, but even then, they’ve openly talked about getting more left-handed, and third base was the obvious spot at which to add a left-handed bat. If it’s Ramirez instead of Sandoval, trades are still likely, given the team’s reliance on right-handed hitting. If it’s Ramirez and Sandoval, then trades are guaranteed, because they just won’t have room for everyone on their roster who deserves to play.

And finally, what does this mean for their pursuit of Jon Lester? The Red Sox could probably afford to add Ramirez, Sandoval, and Lester, but that seems like an offseason of extravagance that goes against what we’ve seen from them before. Perhaps Ramirez was the backup plan not for Sandoval, but for Lester. If they know they’ll be outbid for their preferred starting pitcher, then Ramirez could be added at something near Lester’s price to replace an outfielder like Yoenis Cespedes, who could then be flipped for a starting pitcher.

It’s the kind of move that launches more questions than answers. We’ll try to provide some more answers in the morning with a full write-up on the deal, but until then, speculate away on what you think this deal might mean for the rest of Boston’s offseason.

As he has previously in this life, the author has published below a statistical report for the Arizona Fall League — less because such reports are of great utility to prospect analysis, and more because, for those of us not residing in the Greater Phoenix area, one of the few ways to participate in that very compelling league is by dwelling for too long on very small statistical samples.

What follows is an example of the final such statistical report for the AFL, the season having ended last Saturday.

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Demographic data made available to the author reveals that no fewer than 90% or 95% of the present site’s readership is composed of busy executives. And while busy executives might definitely want to watch a collection of videos featuring that player revealed on Wednesday as the one projected, among all this offseason’s minor-league free agents, to record the highest WAR in 2015 — while those executives might want to do that, it’s also probably the case that the investment of time required to search all over the entire internet for those videos isn’t worth the return.

To that end, what I’ve done here is to aggregate the most illustrative of those videos featuring third baseman Deibinson Romero — i.e. the aforementioned player to have recieved the most promising Steamer projection among all minor-league free agents. What I’ve also done is supplied a brief passage with a view towards providing any relevant context to the video in question.

Begin.

1. Here’s the most recent available video of Romero care of Minor League Baseball — in this case, of Romero hitting a double for Triple-A Rochester in July.

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I tweeted a link earlier this week to an article in the Providence Journal with quotes for various big league executives about how the gap between Triple-A and the big leagues is widening.  The thrust of the article is that the step from dominating Triple-A as a top hitting prospect to performing well in a big league debut is even steeper now than in the past.  Gregory Polanco, Javier Baez, Jon Singleton, Michael Choice, Kolten Wong, Jackie Bradley, Jr, Will Middlebrooks, Xander Bogaerts and the late Oscar Taveras were all examples from just this past year that fit the description.  While these struggles can be blamed on plate discipline or mechanical breakdowns, they nearly all fall under the larger umbrella of mental toughness.

While I hadn’t heard about a MLB to Triple-A gap widening before, the underlying issue behind it keeps coming up in my Evaluating the Prospects series, with my recent Reds list a prime example.  In the report for #1 prospect RHP Robert Stephenson I said, “This year was a struggle for Stephenson as he hadn’t really failed before…” in the comment for #3 prospect LF Jesse Winker I mentioned, “Winker has never really failed before,” and for #7 prospect CF Phillip Ervin I summed up his disappointing 2014 campaign, “Ervin got into some bad habits at the plate early in 2014, getting too pull-conscious and was forced to deal with the first failure of his career.”

It’s a theme that came up earlier in the series and with some top pitchers.  In the Diamondbacks list, their #1 prospect RHP Archie Bradley had what some called a lost 2014 season because he “had never been hurt and basically hadn’t failed in his baseball career,” and while I didn’t use this phrasing in the Astros list, an executive with the team said former #1 overall pick RHP Mark Appel was embarrassed at some level about his struggles in 2014, the first failure of his career.  It also comes up in backwards-looking reviews of established big leaguers.  When talking to a Reds’ executive for their list, he mentioned that Jay Bruce experienced his first failure in the big leagues, which is quite rare, and that it defined his career in some ways.

I’m sure you can imagine the ways in which mental toughness is important to player development; specifically for hitters, failure is a huge part of the game and many top prospects haven’t experienced it in any form when they enter pro ball.  Beyond that, the humility, openness to coaching and improved work ethic that comes from working out of a funk are things that players refer back to for their entire career, on and off the field.  The timing and duration of these struggles often dictate whether the problem can become a teachable moment.

Every exec I’ve asked so far has agreed that if they could push a button to make a power pitching prospect throw in the upper-80’s just long enough that he wouldn’t fall apart mentally, learn to pitch without his best stuff, and then regain his velocity, that they all would do it.  The art of development is learning how much a player can handle, sometimes walking him into a tough spot but helping to guide him out of the abyss while being careful to let him do it on his own.

Roughly once a week, at least one person in a FanGraphs chat asks about the site’s name. Why do we have “Graphs” in the name if we hardly ever use the graphs section of the site? Well, some of the graphs don’t get much attention but one of the most popular features of the site is a graph. A win expectancy graph, to be more precise. It looks like this!

Source: FanGraphs

These graphs communicate the odds that a team will win from any given point in the contest based on the inning, score, base-out state, and run environment. They tell the story of the game and the changes from one location on the graph to the next is the Win Probability Added of that plate appearance.

This is a long-winded way of saying that the Win Expectancy and Win Probability Added sections of the FanGraphs Library received a makeover this week and now include more detailed information about these two statistics.

As always, feel free to ask questions in the comments section, on Twitter @NeilWeinberg44, or during our weekly FanGraphs Q&A chats (Wednesdays at 3pm).

Systems Architect/Developer, Baseball Analytics – Kansas City Royals (Kansas City, MO)

JOB SUMMARY:

The Kansas City Royals Baseball Club is seeking a highly motivated, full-stack systems architect / developer to support baseball operations. The ideal applicant will be able to manage multiple, concurrent projects that facilitate enhanced communications, reporting, and other interactions between teams internal to the organization.

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I’ll give Eno Sarris points for trying, although I fully expect his attempt to find value in Billy Butler’s three year, $30 million deal with the A’s will fuel the fires of those who think Billy Beane gets a pass for every move he makes. Hopefully, this post will assuage some of that, because despite Eno’s best efforts, I still don’t see why the A’s decided that Butler was the guy to go after this winter.

Yep, they needed a right-handed hitter, and Butler is probably a decent bounce back candidate, given his youth and prior production. They’re buying low on a not-terribly-old free agent, and for an annual salary that is basically right in line with what the 2/$18M that the crowd expected Butler to sign for. But I guess I just don’t see why you need to give a guy like Billy Butler a three year deal.

Last year, Kendrys Morales got shunned by the market and eventually took a prorated version of 1/$12M. Nelson Cruz got shunned by the market, and took 1/$8M right before the season began. Michael Morse and Corey Hart both got 1/$6M. Right-handed good-not-great hitters with minimal defensive value went for one year and somewhere in the range of $10 million.

At the end of the season, the Royals had to choose between paying Billy Butler $12.5 million for 2015, or paying him $1 million to go away. They chose the latter, suggesting that they didn’t believe he was worth $11.5 million (the net cost after factoring in the buyout) on a one year deal. Apparently no one else thought he was either, or else they would have asked the Royals to pick up the option and trade him for something of marginal value, as the Blue Jays did with Adam Lind.

So how did we get from there to 3/$30M? I don’t know. This deal just doesn’t seem to fit with what we saw the market say to similar players last year, or what the Royals just said to Butler last month. This just feels like one year too much.

If the A’s wanted a right-handed DH, why not call the Padres about Carlos Quentin? Do we really think he would have cost a significant piece of talent in return? Is Butler that much more likely to produce value in 2015 that he’s worth using up a significant amount of the A’s budget, especially given their middle infield hole?

I’m sure the A’s have their reasons for making this deal, and maybe they’re even similar to the ones Eno listed. Maybe all the other okay hitting/bat-only guys are going to sign for far more than we’ve expected, and the market for below average talent is about to take off. Or maybe the A’s just spent too aggressively for a player who just isn’t that good. Until I see good reason to assume otherwise, I’m going with the latter.