Jones and Thome sailed in on the first try, while Guerrero easily cleared the 75% bar this year after falling 15 votes short last year in his first appearance on the ballot. Hoffman’s path was less direct. After becoming eligible two years ago and appearing on 67.3% of ballots, he fell just five votes short last year. In public voting, he was tracking just above 75% for most of the winter — this after receiving a similar percentage of both the private and public vote.* Given those trends, Hoffman had a good shot at election. He makes it in his third try.
*Not all votes are available, as the Hall rejected the BBWAA’s request that ballots be made public.
Description:
The Boston Red Sox are seeking an Analyst for the team’s Baseball Research & Development department. The role will support all areas of Baseball Operations while working closely with the VP, Baseball Research & Development, and the analysts on the R&D team.
This is an opportunity to work in a fast-paced, intellectually curious environment and to impact player personnel and strategic decision making.
Responsibilities:
Statistical modeling and quantitative analysis of a variety of data sources, for the purpose of player evaluation, strategic decision-making, decision analysis, etc.
Effectively present analyses through the use of written reports and data visualization to disseminate insights to members of the Baseball Operations leadership.
Maintain working expertise of leading-edge analytics, including publicly available research and novel statistical approaches, in order to recommend new or emerging techniques, technologies, models, and algorithms.
Other projects and related duties as directed by VP, Baseball Research & Development, and other members of Baseball Operations leadership.
Qualifications:
Bachelor’s degree in an analytical field such as statistics, engineering, applied math, physics, quantitative social sciences, computer science, or operations research.
Demonstrated experience with baseball data analysis.
Advanced understanding of statistical methods or machine learning techniques.
Proficiency with modern database technologies including SQL.
Demonstrated experience with programming languages (e.g., R or Python).
Demonstrated ability to communicate technical ideas to non-technical audiences using data visualization.
Proficiency in Microsoft Office (Excel, PowerPoint, Word).
Demonstrated work ethic, passion for baseball, and strong baseball knowledge, including familiarity with current baseball research and analysis.
Attention to detail while also having the ability to work quickly and balance multiple priorities.
Ability to work evening, weekend, and holiday hours is a must.
Other programming and database skills are a plus.
To Apply:
To apply, please send an email to analyticsresume@redsox.com with the subject “Analyst”. Please include the following items/answer:
Updated resume.
Example of analysis you’ve done, preferably related to baseball.
What is a project that you believe would add substantial value to a baseball team? Please describe the project and provide an overview of how you would complete it.
Blue Jays, red birds, Conner Greene. The 22-year-old righty was the lone prospect involved in a trade Friday evening that sent power-hitting OF Randal Grichuk from St. Louis to Toronto in exchange for Greene and reliever Dominic Leone.
Greene is coming off a maddening statistical season at Double-A New Hampshire, where he accumulated a 5.29 ERA in 132.2 innings. He experienced some success till the beginning of summer, entering July with a 3.23 ERA despite erratic command, but started getting shelled as the season continued. Greene has a plus-plus fastball that sits 94-97 and will touch 99. The pitch has heavy sink and arm-side movement, as well as notable downhill angle to the plate — a result, that, of Greene’s size, relatively upright delivery, and high three-quarters arm slot. It’s Greene’s best pitch and he uses it heavily, perhaps too frequently, as his strikeout totals are not commensurate with his quality of stuff.
The curveball (which was bad last fall) has taken a huge step forward and is now Greene’s best secondary pitch. It has traditional power curveball shape, bite, and depth. It projects to a 55 on the scouting scale. Greene’s changeup is inconsistent and a bit easy to identify out of his hand, as Greene is prone to drop his arm slot when he throws it. Due to his loose, fluid arm action and incredible arm speed, though, some scouts project quite heavily on the changeup. It pretty conservatively projects to average and has more upside than that. There’s a chance Greene develops two above-average secondaries to pair with his plus-plus fastball, but no measure of his ability to miss bats indicates anything remotely close to that.
Greene struggles to repeat his release point and has 30-grade control. He walked 13% of hitters he faced in 2017 and 83 total hitters in his 132.2 innings. Unless Greene’s ability to locate greatly improves, he’ll wind up in the bullpen. It makes sense to continue developing him as a starter on the off chance that he develops 45 or better command and simply as a way to get him more reps than he’d get out of the bullpen, but the Cardinals were quick to move Sandy Alcantara to the bullpen last year and seemed inclined to keep him there. They’re thought, by other clubs, to be considering pulling the bullpen ripcord on either or both of Jordan Hicks and Ryan Helsley. Greene would seem to fall into that bucket of still-raw, upper-level arms. He has a chance to pitch as a mid-rotation starter if the command comes, but he’s more likely to be a hard-throwing, above-average bullpen arm. He’s a 45 Future Value prospect.
Kiley McDaniel contributed to the scouting notes on Conner Greene.
Over the past two weeks, the response to our call for a full-time writer has been incredible. As a result, it’s taking us some additional time to give all the applications the attention they deserve.
If you have not yet applied and had any desire to do so, we will be accepting applications until Tuesday, January 23rd at 12:00 AM.
Despite having failed to record more than 500 plate appearances in any of the past three seasons, outfielder Randal Grichuk has nevertheless produced a total of 6.8 WAR during that same interval — or just over two wins per season. Players who reliably produce two wins in a season are average players. One could make the case with some ease that Randal Grichuk is an average player.
For the St. Louis Cardinals, however, average isn’t sufficient to guarantee a place in the outfield. Dexter Fowler, Marcell Ozuna, and Tommy Pham will start for the club this year and all are superior to Grichuk. Jose Martinez is another outfield option, and he just authored a breakout season. Harrison Bader and Tyler O’Neill are loitering in the halls somewhere. That abundance of talent is what allowed the club to exchange Stephen Piscotty for a future MVP. And now the Cards have done a similar thing with another totally competent, but not sufficiently excellent, outfield piece.
Every year in the middle of January, the arbitration process starts with teams and players exchanging contract proposals. And every year — since 2015, at least — we produce a nice little data visualization using arbitration contract data from MLB Trade Rumors.
For those unfamiliar with the arbitration process, here’s the succinct explanation from years past:
Teams and players file salary figures for one-year contracts, then an arbitration panel awards the player either with the contract offered by the team or the contract for which the player filed. More details of the arbitration process can be found here. Most players will sign a contract before numbers are exchanged or before the hearing, so only a handful of players actually go through the entire arbitration process each year.
Note that WAR figures account for each player’s first six major-league seasons. KATOH denotes the stats-only version of the projection system, while KATOH+ denotes the methodology that includes a player’s prospect rankings.
*****
Colin Moran, 3B (Profile) KATOH: 3.0 WAR KATOH+: 2.8 WAR
The Marlins made Moran the sixth-overall pick back in 2013, but his stock has cratered since. His bat never developed the way scouts thought it would, culminating in a paltry .259/.329/.368 line in 2016. He showed signs of life last year, however, hitting .308/.373/.543 in his second crack at Triple-A. For the first time as a professional, he hit for power — largely by upping his fly-ball rate by 10 percentage points — while simultaneously cutting eight points off of his strikeout rate.
The Pirates receive some useful assets for their ace, although no top prospect. (Photo: Jon Dawson)
Gerrit Cole was reportedly traded to the Astros earlier this week. I wrote about that hypothetical move in greater length here and why Cole might fit well with Houston.
I wrote earlier this offseason that the Pirates ought to trade Cole. The Pirates are re-tooling to some degree, while the Astros are a World Series contender that has been motivated to find a starting pitcher. It makes sense for both parties.
When FanGraphs conducted its annual free-agent crowdsourcing project just after the end of the 2017 season, the results suggested that Addison Reed would receive the third-richest deal among relievers this winter.
“Rank” denotes rank among all free agents per crowdsourced results.
If the crowd were correct, Reed was in line for something remarkably similar to Mike Minor this offseason. So when Minor landed a guaranteed three years and $28 million at the beginning of December — that is, almost precisely the same figure for which he’d been projected by the masses — it seemed that, in theory, the crowd’s estimate represented a reasonable target for Reed.
