Jeff Sullivan FanGraphs Chat — 1/8/16

January 8, 2016

9:13	Jeff Sullivan: Sorry about that, had to meet with the landlord right at 9 sharp

9:14	Jeff Sullivan: Her idea! I’m always late for this anyway! At least this time I have a good excuse for my terrible behavior

9:14	Jeff Sullivan: So anyway, hello friends, let’s baseball chat

9:14	frank the tank: Brian Costa ? @BrianCostaWSJWSJ exclusive: ex-Cardinals scouting director Chris Correa to be indicted today. Will plead guilty to charges related to hacking Astros. 10:29 AM – 8 Jan 2016

9:15	Jeff Sullivan: Remember this? This was the biggest thing! Literally only a few months ago. You figure discipline from MLB could and should eventually follow

9:16	Guest: If the Brewers move Khris Davis, could they expect a lower-end top 100 propsect back, plus maybe some filler? (Sorry, it’s January and I’m bored)

9:18	Jeff Sullivan: Pre-arb, but very limited player. I think it’s easy to draw some parallels between Davis and Mark Trumbo, but I don’t think Davis would bring back a Skaggs + Santiago return.

9:18	Jeff Sullivan: Clearly some value though, despite his relatively advanced age for someone with his service time. Your proposed terms seem appropriate, in order to make space for Domingo Santana

9:19	nickh93: What do you think about Rick Porcello in year 2 and Henry Owens?

9:19	Jeff Sullivan: I like Porcello just fine as a No. 3 who sometimes looks like a No. 2. He won’t give up as many home runs and he made some meaningful progress elsewhere

9:21	Jeff Sullivan: From Owens, I need to see more strikes. Didn’t throw enough in the majors, didn’t throw enough in Triple-A. He’s thrown strikes more frequently before, but he just took a year off, so I’ve got some skepticism

9:22	j6takish: In hindsight, are the 1998 mariners one of the most disappointing teams of all time? They had prime seasons From Griffey, A-rod, Edgar, Unit, and moyer plus pretty good seasons from Segui, joey cora and fassero. How the hell does that team finish below 500?

9:23	Jeff Sullivan: Say hello to an MLB-worst bullpen WPA of -5.5. League average that year was +2 — meaning the Mariner bullpen was 7.5 wins worse than an average group

9:23	Jeff Sullivan: Of course, even with another 7 or 8 wins, it was still somehow a disappointing team. Stars and scrubs ain’t all it’s cracked up to be, all the time

9:24	Jeff Sullivan: From 1995 – 1999, Mariners had elite-level position players, and roughly average starting pitchers. Bullpen was third-worst in baseball in WPA

9:26	Gary: Jeff, my good man! How many innings do you think Yu Darvish is going to pitch this year. I’m a cautiously optimistic Texas fan; any chance he’s back by April or May?

9:26	Jeff Sullivan: Let’s see. Surgery in March…already throwing…expected to miss the start of the year…I’ll put him at 150 innings

9:27	Jeff Sullivan: Rangers are going to want to be careful, and for the moment they’ve assembled plenty of bullpen depth to pull him early, early on

9:30

Fade to Gray: Hey Jeff–did you see Eno’s piece on Sonny Gray? It seems to make a pretty solid argument. But is there any reason to hope things might actually swing the other way? Gray’s K/9 was so much better in his partial debut season…what’s up with that? Do you ever see him becoming more of a strikeout guy?

9:31

Jeff Sullivan: Each year, Gray has gotten a little bit better at getting ahead in the count. I buy him somewhat as a soft-contact guy, and his command is improving. I don’t think he’s going to blossom into a swing-and-miss strikeout guy, but I could see him as a guy who ends up with a lot of strikeouts almost by accident. Not quite on the Cliff Lee level, but you get what I mean

9:32	Hugh: Can you please explain the basis of Griffeys backwards hat thing? Did he wear it backwards during games?

9:32	Jeff Sullivan: http://www.complex.com/sports/2016/01/ken-griffey-jr-explains-why-he-started-wearing-hats-backwards

9:32

Jeff Sullivan: “My dad had a ‘fro, and I didn’t,” he said. “So I wore his hat and it always hit me in the face, so I just turned it around and it just stuck. It wasn’t like I was trying to be a tough guy or change the way that baseball is played. It was just that my dad wore a size 7 1/2, and I had a 6 1/4. It was just too big.”

9:33	Jeff Sullivan: I guess that isn’t super helpful. No, you aren’t allowed to play games with a backwards hat, barring occasional exception. But it’s how Junior was frequently seen and pictured

9:33	matt: Better year next year, Baez or soler?

9:34	Jeff Sullivan: Soler

9:35

The Cincinnati Kid: How would the game be affected if teams used two SPs at the same time (two mounds, 1 RH & 1 LH required per rule change) and the batter got the better of the two outcomes (1 pitch is hit for HR, 1 pitch is a strike, it only counts as HR?) Erases splits, but also would take more concentration

9:35	Jeff Sullivan: The game would die and we’d all blame you for coming up with the proposal in the first place

9:35	Jeff Sullivan: In your defense, the game shouldn’t have listened

9:36	grumbleshoes: Garrett Stephenson is off to an outstanding 11-0 start. But is he for real, or are the Cardinals going to have to rely on younger guys like Rick Ankiel and Matt Morris come season’s end?

9:37	Jeff Sullivan: thank you for indirectly reminding me of Gene Stechschulte

9:37	Jeff Sullivan: who indirectly reminds me of Jason Simontacchi

9:37	Jeff Sullivan: who the hell were those Cardinals

9:37	Inigo: Do Cubs just stay pat with Heyward in CF? With Span signing with Giants there doesn’t seem to be many other options unless they push harder for Inciarte.

9:38	Jeff Sullivan: With every passing day, it gets a little more likely they run with Heyward in the middle, but there’s a lot of time left, and they still have plenty of interest in Inciarte, so you can’t rule that out

9:39

Sophomore Surger: A lot of people see Addison Russell’s rookie year as a disappointment, though several FG/RG writers remain cautiously optimistic. I tend to think that a kid who plays a full season as a 21 year old and OPS’s .780 when playing his natural SS position, still has pretty big offensive upside. Do you see any reasons to anticipate him making advances in contact% or plate discipline this season?

9:39	Jeff Sullivan: I assume you mean OPS’s .696, at least in the majors

9:41

Jeff Sullivan: But that’s still pretty good for a kid rookie handling shortstop in a pennant race. Historically young players have quickly improved in areas like discipline and contact rate as they gain experience, and so while I expect Russell will always have some swing and miss in his game, I think this year his K% ends up closer to 20% than 30%

9:42	groucho: How do you think Gyorko will do in st louis?

9:42	Jeff Sullivan: I like his bounceback potential, but right now he’s slated for pretty limited playing time, so he doesn’t have a clear avenue to 500 ABs

9:42	The Cincinnati Kid: Do you know of a location for projections on QS or am I missing it on the site?

9:43	Jeff Sullivan: Nobody projects quality starts. Nobody cares about projecting quality starts

9:43	Jeff Sullivan: If you really want to know that bad, you could just calculate some correlations between general performance and quality starts, historically

9:44	Guest: Do you think there could be a market inefficiency to be exploited if teams limited their front office hours to 40/week? Study after study, decade after decade shows employees are more productive, less burned out, etc etc when they are around 40 a week. Could that be true of baseball orgs?

9:44

Jeff Sullivan: I think it’s just unrealistic. That’d be far better for work/life balance, without doubt, but other teams aren’t ever going to operate like that, and since teams are constantly in communication with other teams, you’d have to tell employees to ignore messages from other teams until 9-5 hours. Other teams wouldn’t respond well to that, and then your team would be kind of left behind

9:45	Joe: Braves sign Upton to backloaded deal. They have all the pitching prospects, but no offense, and next year’s FA class isn’t very good. If they truly want to compete in 2017, why not get offense now while there is a surplus on the FA market?

9:46	Jeff Sullivan: It’s not a terrible idea, but I’m not at all convinced the Braves would want Upton back, or that Upton would want to go back

9:47	Clark: If Roberto Alomar, Craig Biggio and Ryne Sandberg are Hall of Famers then Jeff Kent should be a Hall of Famer, or no?

9:47	Jeff Sullivan: Kent was probably the worst of all of them

9:47	Jeff Sullivan: So, no, it doesn’t follow easily

9:48	Dweep: Do you think the Rockies are in for a massive season with lots of great victories, and an affable manger who tells it like it is. I saw Dante’s Peak yesterdat, and scoffed at it.

9:48	Jeff Sullivan: <3

9:48	Mets Fan: Hi Jeff. With Denard Span getting scooped up by the Giants, the Mets don’t have too many CF options in the FA market. I was hoping they’d sign Fowler…how likely is this now?

9:48	Jeff Sullivan: They seem to have their outfielders already. Always some chance they surprise, but I don’t think they’re ready to quit on Lagares. 2%

9:50	The Real Chris Davis: 2013, 2014 or 2015? Which Crush shows up in 2016? How much does it depend on the park and lineup he lands in–quite a bit, or not at all?

9:50	Jeff Sullivan: I mean, he’ll hit homers in any park. But I have to think he’s had his best season, and probably his best two seasons. I think next year he’s an above-average player, and then at some point along the line people start talking more about Richie Sexson

9:51	Jeff Sullivan: My sense is the Orioles are bidding against nobody. I think Davis stays in Baltimore, where Angelos loves him

9:51	Clark: If Rollie Fingers, Goose Gossage and Bruce Sutter are Hall of Famers than Lee Smith should be a Hall of Famer, or no?

9:51	Jeff Sullivan: This is the problem with precedents

9:51	natsfan: The Nationals have historically come out of nowhere to sign guys, most notably signing Werth and Scherzer, but also trading for Gio. Who do you see as their next surprise get?

9:52	Jeff Sullivan: As Rosenthal wrote about earlier, it wouldn’t be a shock if they negotiated with Boras for Chen

9:52	Jeff Sullivan: that’s going to depend on the market for Gio

9:53

Going the Distance: Hi Jeff. Can you explain a little bit about the difference between the HR/FB distance as recorded on the leader board at Baseball Heat Maps, and the “True Distance” I saw a fantasy writer on another site refer to? It was specifically in regards to Joc Pederson, and how his “true distance” on home runs was best in the league, better even than Stanton. What does that mean? Is it reason for optimism with regards to this season’s Joc looking more like last year’s first half than last year’s second half?

9:53	Jeff Sullivan: I believe the Baseball Heat Maps distance data is inferred from Gameday, while True Distance comes from the ESPN Home Run Tracker http://hittrackeronline.com/golden_sledgehammer.php

9:53	Jeff Sullivan: There’s never been any question that Pederson has power. I think the better measure of raw power is an estimate of max distance, where Stanton really shines. We know Pederson can hit the ball hard. We don’t know if Pederson can consistently hit the ball

9:54	BT-in-VT: Matt Cain says he is healthy, has reviewed film/corrected mistakes, and is ready for bounce-back season. What say you?

9:54	Jeff Sullivan: Sounds like we’re ready for spring training!

9:55	Jeff Sullivan: The stuff that made him successful is basically still there, but elite-level Cain was elite by a slim margin. He had to be super precise, and that precision doesn’t last forever. The home runs have started to come. The suppression days are probably finished

9:56	ArunK: Hey Jeff, what do you think about Span to Giants? Should be an upgrade on Pagan in centre, assuming Pagan moves to left anyway, but comes with the same injury risk perhaps. Cheap contract though?

9:56	Jeff Sullivan: Wrote about this for Fox. I’m probably guilty of under-playing the injury risk, but the more I think about this, the more I really like it

9:56	Jeff Sullivan: Span is such a good fit for the ballpark

9:56

Guest: As stat-inclined people, are we conflating the hall of fame with the hall of value? We spend so much time parsing e.g. whether Trevor Hoffman had as much value as Jim Edmonds or whatever, but maybe we’re just missing that he was more of a “thing,” nebulous and squishy but human, than Edmonds was. Our stat leaderboards aren’t going anywhere, but the hall is one of fame, not of stat leadership.

9:57

Jeff Sullivan: I absolutely agree with you, that there should be more that goes into this than just statistics. Like, Barry Bonds more than doubled Griffey’s career WAR, or something, and now that I think about it this was a bad example because Bonds belongs in the Hall, too. But there’s no questioning that Griffey was a 90s icon, and he’s a massive part of the story of the past few generations of the game

9:58

Jeff Sullivan: That counts. Perception counts, reputation counts. That comes out of the “fame” part. Now, a problem is this is in part dependent on media coverage, and then that slights underrated players, which is unfortunate because what really OUGHT to matter is performance over everything else. So we’re left making statistical cases

9:59	Jeff Sullivan: There’s no clean answer. We’ll see this pretty soon when Adrian Beltre retires and will statistically qualify as a Hall of Famer. Was he ever really “famous” enough? I’d like to think so, because I love him, but how much is Beltre really a big part of the MLB story of the 2000s?

9:59	Jeff Sullivan: This is why there are arguments. I don’t have the answer for you. I’ll keep trying. I’m only 10 years away from having a vote!