As suggested by the 9.74 ERA he recorded over 44 innings in the California League this season — or even his most recent start in the Arizona Fall League, during which he conceded six runs over 4.0 innings — Houston right-hander Mark Appel’s professional career hasn’t been entirely free of difficulties. That he continues to exhibit promise, however, is still very much the case. And that he’s capable still of throwing a slider with what is known alternatively as “two plane break” and “furious pleasure” — that he’s capable of doing so is made evident by the footage above, of Appel throwing that same breaking pitch to Washington catcher prospect Spencer Kieboom in a different AFL game currently underway and available by way of MLB.com.

Left-hander Masahiro Yamamoto, who turns 50 next August, has renewed his contract with the Chunichi Dragons of the Japanese NPB, according to Jun Hongo of the Wall Street Journal.

Yamamoto made his debut for the Dragons in 1986 — which is to say, the same exact year in which many American children (the author included) received the original Nintendo for their birthdays and wore Jams-brand shorts while so doing.

Given the Tokyo native’s birth date (i.e. after July 1st, by which date “baseball age” is calculated), next year will only technically represent Yamamoto’s age-49 season, a feat equaled in the major leagues by only three pitchers ever: Jack Quinn (1933), Hoyt Wilhelm (1972), and Jamie Moyer (2012). Of that triumvirate, only Quinn made any appearances as a 50-year-old, facing a combined 12 batters over two appearances during the six days after his birthday.

Satchel Paige notably made zero appearances as a 49-year-old, having left major-league baseball following his age-46 season with the St. Louis Browns. He did, however, throw three innings as a 58-year-old in 1965 with the Kansas City Athletics.

Of Yamamoto specifically, one finds that he actually threw about 150 innings for Class-A Dodgers affiliate Vero Beach in 1988 as part of an agreement between the Dodgers and the NPB. There, he was teammates with Jose Offerman, for example, who’s been retired for nearly a decade.

In conclusion — and for the benefit of everyone — here’s an animated GIF of Satchel Paige’s delivery:

Yesterday, the author published in these pages a pair of leaderboards featuring — care of PITCHf/x data from MLB Farm — featuring the top Arizona Fall League velocities among both the entire population of pitchers and then among that population who’d made half their appearances in a starting capacity.

As I noted in that post, the numbers appeared to skew lower than one might otherwise expect. And, as one particularly intrepid reader observed, there actually is a curious error present in the tables when one attempts to view the velocities for all pitch types at once.

What follows is an amended version for each of the aforementioned leaderboards. As in that first post, FF continues to denote a four-seam fastball; FT, a two-seamer. Count denotes the number of the relevant pitch type to have been recorded by PITCHf/x cameras.

Below the leaderboards are three additional observations of limited merit.

Read the rest of this entry »

As of today — or at least something like today — the Arizona Fall League has been underway for about a month. Two stadiums in that league, located in Peoria and Surprise, are equipped with PITCHf/x cameras, all manner of data from which is available at Daren Willman’s site MLB Farm.

What follows is a pair of leaderboards featuring the top velocities among those AFL pitchers — both overall, and also among starters only — who’ve appeared at either of the two aforementioned stadiums. Following those leaderboards are three observations of limited merit.

The pitch type FF denotes a four-seam fastball; FT, a two-seamer. Count denotes the number of the relevant pitch type to have been recorded by PITCHf/x cameras.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, FanGraphs published the results of our contract crowdsourcing project, as part of which effort readers of the site provided estimates of the years and dollars the top-55 free agents (more or less) are likely to receive during the 2014-15 offseason.

As part of that effort, respondents were also asked if certain eligible players were or were not likely to receive a qualifying offer (worth $15.3 million) from their respective clubs. As of last night, we know the identities of the 12 players who received qualifying offers in real life. Those same 12 players appear below, along with the percentage of crowd respondents who believed the player would receive a qualifying offer (denoted What the Crowd Said) and the percentage of respondents who thought the relevant player would accept a qualifying offer if extended one (denoted as Will He Accept?).

*****

Melky Cabrera (Profile)
What the Crowd Said
No prediction. Reports were pretty clear that Toronto would make offer.

Will He Accept?
No: 76%. Yes: 24%.

Read the rest of this entry »

With the free agent period now open, I’m going to make a habit of throwing up some free agent comparisons that might challenge the perceptions of the relative value of a few players. For various reasons, there are players who have performed pretty similarly, or project similarly going forward, but the general consensus has them as significantly different. I like pointing these cases out.

Let’s start with a pair of right fielders today. According to the Contract Crowdsourcing project, Nick Markakis is expected to sign for $33 million over three years, while Nori Aoki is expected to sign for $14 million over two years. According to Roch Kubotko, Markakis is going to do even better than the crowd thought, as the Orioles are reportedly talking with him about a four year deal; I think we can say with some certainty that Nori Aoki isn’t getting a four year deal this winter.

But now, let’s just look at some data. Here is Aoki and Markakis over the last three years.

There’s an error in the code that caused Aoki to be rated as an abysmal baserunner in 2014 — he wasn’t — so the numbers above won’t match what’s on Aoki’s player page or the leaderboards until the new code gets updated, but I’ve eliminated that error here. And removing that error makes it hard to argue that Markakis has been better at much of anything over the last few years. They’re basically the same type of player, only Aoki has been the better version of it.

They’re both high-contact, low-power guys, though Aoki is even better at avoiding strikeouts, so his BA/OBP are a bit higher. The defensive metrics also like him a bit more, though neither one is a big time asset in the field. Even if you decide that you think they’re equals in the field, that just serves to pull Markakis back up to Aoki’s level.

Markakis is two years younger, so it’s probably fair to project him for a slightly slower decline going forward, but even including the age factor, Steamer still sees Aoki and Markakis as equals, and that’s with the incorrect baserunning number factored into the projection. Factor that out, and Aoki inches ahead a little bit in the battle of slap-hitting right fielders.

But the perception is that Markakis is a lot better than Aoki, and he’s probably going to get paid a lot more. I’m not sure it’s reality, though.

Well, we’ve got our first surprise of the offseason, as right before the deadline to extend qualifying offers, the Rockies announced that they were going to extend that to free agent outfielder Michael Cuddyer. By making the QO, Cuddyer now has a week to determine if he wants to accept a one year, $15.3 million contract, or hit free agency with draft pick compensation attached.

Without the QO, I think Cuddyer likely could have landed a two three year deal, probably in the $10 million per year range. In the Contract Crowdsourcing project, the median forecast was for $18 million over two years, so even if the crowd was a bit low, expectations were somewhere in that range.

Now, though, that contract is basically out the window, as it wouldn’t benefit Cuddyer to accept a second year that only guarantees him $4.7 million more than accepting the qualifying offer. In order to get a deal that would be more valuable than taking the 1/$15M QO, he’s probably going to need to get three years. And ~3/$30M, plus the forfeiture of a draft pick, is a high price to pay for a guy who played in 49 games last year and turns 36 next March.

Now, the market has historically overpaid for power, and as a right-handed hitter with the ability to drive the ball, Cuddyer would likely have commanded a premium in free agency. Especially because he also comes with the reputation as a great clubhouse guy and off-the-field intangibles. But we’re still talking about a guy with a Steamer forecast of +1 WAR next year, and that’s assuming he stays healthy enough to play most of the season.

As a player, Cuddyer isn’t all that different from an older Kendrys Morales, though he does offer a bit more defensive value in that he can theoretically run around the outfield a bit. Last year, Morales bet on this skillset getting paid, turned down the qualifying offer, and found out that the market for good-not-great hitters with limited other skills wasn’t what he thought it would be.

Will Cuddyer turn down a guaranteed $15 million from Colorado in order to find out how much more valuable the league sees him than Morales? I’m guessing no. And if he does take the deal, becoming the first player to accept a qualifying offer, the big question then becomes what the Rockies do with their already crowded outfield.

For this week’s Library update, we’ve rolled out a very long thorough glossary entry that offers a brief description and links (where applicable) for every single offensive statistic available on our leaderboards. It’s easy to find our glossary entry on wOBA, for example, but if you want to know what wFB/C is, it takes a little bit of digging to get to the right place.

Now, we have a permanent pages that lists every statistic we have according to the acronym used on the leaderboard. You can jump over to this page at any time and find the corresponding stat or use “CTRL + F” to make your Internet computers do it for you.

As always, should you have any questions, I encourage you to drop a comment below, find me on Twitter @NeilWeinberg44, or stop by our weekly Q&A chats Wednesdays at 3pm. Enjoy!

It may have originally escaped the reader’s attention owing to how all of the postseason was happening, but MLB.com has featured broadcasts of several Arizona Fall League games and is scheduled to broadcast several more — including one tonight between Surprise and Salt River.

Tonight’s game features what one might reasonably call a surfeit of compelling-type prospects, including Houston third baseman Rio Ruiz, Minnesota second baseman-cum-outfielder Eddie Rosario, and talented Cincinnati batsman Jesse Winker.

Click here for the live feed and here for the relevant box score. Finally here is a schedule of future broadcasts.

On Wednesday, FanGraphs published the results of its contract crowdsourcing effort, an attempt to harness the wisdom of the crowds to the end of better understanding the 2014-15 free-agent market. That post includes the top-55 free agents (more or less) and estimates of the length and size of the contracts those free agents will receive this offseason.

As of this afternoon, only 54 of the players included in that post remain free agents, after Koji Uehara re-signed with the Boston Red Sox. Alex Speier reports:

Two years, $18M for Koji Uehara.

— Alex Speier (@alexspeier) October 30, 2014

The deal is more robust than the crowd anticipated. Uehara’s mean estimate was 1 year and $8 million; his average, 1.4 years and $11.9 million (an $8.5 million average annual value). The crowd missed by either half a year or a full year, depending on how one calculates it, and about $0.5 to $1.0 million per season — or roughly 5-10%.