The first week of baseball is a wondrous time to be a baseball fan. It’s also a weird time to be a baseball writer. On one hand, baseball is happening, and that’s a relief after the long dark night of the offseason. On the other hand, not that much baseball has happened, and most of the seemingly noteworthy stories are small-sample noise. Give me an early-season take (Tim Beckham is great! Sandy Alcantara is a top-10 pitcher!), and I’ll likely dismiss it as a fluke. One performance this week, however, made me sit up and take notice. Corbin Burnes struck out 12 batters on Sunday, and the way he did it should have Brewers fans, and baseball fans in general, salivating.

At first glance, Burnes’ start against the Cardinals is a textbook case of not reading too much into a single start. He struck out 12 batters and walked only one, which is obviously incredible. On the other hand, he gave up three home runs and only lasted five innings, producing a what’s-going-on split of a 6.53 FIP and 0.00 xFIP. If I were a betting man, though, I’d wager that the strikeouts are more predictive than the home runs. Why? Corbin Burnes’ fastball was absolutely ludicrous, and in a way that you can’t fake.

Most of the things that happen in a baseball game are contextual. Did a pitcher strike a lot of hitters out? Well, consider who was batting. If it’s a bunch of high schoolers or the 2019 Giants outfield, that’s an extenuating circumstance. Did he give up a lot of home runs? A ton of factors go into that. One thing that isn’t contextual is a pitch’s spin rate. The batter doesn’t influence it. Pitch selection doesn’t influence it. It doesn’t take long to stabilize. It’s basically as clean as it gets in baseball statistics — you throw the ball, and you get your results.

When Burnes threw the ball on Sunday, the results were off the charts. Burnes fired 61 four-seam fastballs on Sunday. His velocity was down a tick or so from last year, when he worked out of the bullpen — nothing unusual about that. His spin, on the other hand, was wholly new. Burnes averaged 2912 rpm, and it’s hard to explain how crazy that is. It was nearly 150 rpm higher than last year’s league leader in average spin rate, Luke Bard. The fastball that Burnes spun most slowly, at 2660 rpm, would have been good for the second-highest fastball spin rate in baseball last year.

Burnes has always been a high-spin pitcher (11th in baseball among pitchers who threw at least 100 fastballs in 2018), but this is an entirely different level. Spin rates vary from start to start, but not like this. In fact, Burnes made thirty appearances last year, and the gap between the highest spin rate he recorded and the lowest was 270 rpm. Sunday’s start was 200 rpm faster than last year’s highest rate. Graphically, that looks pretty absurd, like so:

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

As a part of the FanGraphs staff predictions for this season, I picked the Boston Red Sox to win the American League East, and the New York Yankees to pick up a wild card slot. All 32 of us picked the Yankees to make what would be a third consecutive trip to the postseason. And our preseason projections pegged the Bronx Bombers for 99 wins, the best record in baseball, and a whopping 66.4% chance of winning the American League East. The Yankees – on paper, at least – were and are good.

But life, they say, is what happens when you’re busy making other plans. The Yankees have started slowly, yes, but a 2-4 record is hardly alarming when you’re less than a week’s worth of games into a 162-game season. More worrisome is the fact that the Yankees’ injured list is suddenly beginning to resemble an All-Star team in its own right. First, newly extended center fielder Aaron Hicks went from tweaking his back in Spring Training to receiving two cortisone shots to an indefinite injured list stint with a lower back strain. That’s not good, seeing as Hicks is the second most valuable center fielder in the American League since 2017, behind some guy named Mike Trout. Still, the Yankees are deep, and they could plug Brett Gardner into center field without suffering a major catastrophe.

If this had been the team’s only major injury, the team might have been fine, especially on the back of what was projected to be an elite starting rotation. But also-newly-extended ace right hander Luis Severino joined Hicks on the shelf late in Spring Training after suffering rotator cuff inflammation, and isn’t expected back until May. Shoulder problems, including rotator cuff injuries, are notoriously finicky in pitchers, and while there’s no reason to believe Severino’s injury is more serious that we know, we also don’t know how the hard-throwing right-hander will fare after returning from the injury, particularly after not having had a single Spring Training start. With C.C. Sabathia’s farewell tour on hold after offseason heart surgery, the Yankees’ rotation suddenly started to look a little thin.

But no matter. The Yankees still had a fearsome lineup and perhaps the best bullpen ever, right? But then Dellin Betances’ spring training fastball clocked in the high-80s, and it wasn’t long before a shoulder impingement was diagnosed as the cause of his missing velocity. So Betances joined the list of the Yankees’ walking wounded.

Of course, why should the pitching staff have all of the fun? On the same day, two lynchpins of the Yankees’ fearsome lineup – outfield adonis Giancarlo Stanton and sophomore third-sacker Miguel Andujar – both suffered significant, and potentially long-term, injuries. Stanton suffered a left biceps strain whilst swinging and missing in just the team’s third game of the season, and Andujar suffered a small tear of his labrum diving into third base in the same game. By the end of the team’s second series of the year against the Tigers, Troy Tulowitzki had joined the injured list as well with a calf strain.

How bad are the Yankees’ injuries? Right now, including Tulowitzki, New York has 11 players on its injured list; no other team has more than eight. Here’s the complete list, with 2019 Depth Charts projected WAR:

• Miguel Andujar (1.9)
• Dellin Betances (1.1)
• Jacoby Ellsbury (0)
• Didi Gregorius (1.6)
• Ben Heller (0)
• Aaron Hicks (3.2)
• Jordan Montgomery (0.2)
• C.C. Sabathia (1.4)
• Luis Severino (4.1)
• Giancarlo Stanton (4.2)
• Troy Tulowitzki (0.9)

That’s 18.6 projected fWAR on the injured list at one time, which is more than the 2019 projected WAR for the entire Orioles team. That might also be understating the value of these players; they posted a combined 26 WAR in 2018. Some of these injured list placements were expected; after all, both Gregorius and Montgomery are still recovering from Tommy John surgery and aren’t expected back until midseason, and outfielder Ellsbury fell into a temporal vortex and likely will never be heard from again. Still, that’s a contending team’s starting third baseman (Andujar), starting shortstop (Gregorius), the replacement for the injured starting shortstop (Tulowitzki), starting left fielder/designated hitter (Stanton), and starting center fielder (Hicks), along with its No. 1 (Severino) and No. 4 (Sabathia) starters, and primary setup reliever (Betances), all injured at once.

That’s a lot of WAR for any team to lose, even the Yankees, even temporarily; the team is missing the equivalent of one and a half Mike Trouts. So in some ways, it’s a minor miracle that even after losing that much talent, the team is still projected to win 95 games. In fact, owing to the Red Sox’s nightmarish West Coast trip, the Yankees’ odds of winning the division have remained relatively steady since Opening Day, though they have dipped slightly.

The good news is that the Yankees’ pitching staff is well equipped to weather the storm. Johnny Loaisiga and Domingo German have both impressed as replacements for Sabathia and Severino. Even without Betances, a bullpen featuring Adam Ottavino, Zack Britton, and Aroldis Chapman is still fearsome, even if Chad Green has been hittable in the early going. James Paxton and Masahiro Tanaka have been great. Sabathia is expected back before the end of April, with Betances back around the same time. Severino’s return is somewhat murkier, but projected around May or June. In short, the Yankees should still spend the bulk of their season with their pitching at least largely intact.

The larger problem is one you wouldn’t have anticipated going into the season: the offense. And unlike the pitching staff, help isn’t arriving any time soon. Stanton hopes to be back in early May barring a setback, but Andujar is without a timetable and still may require season-ending surgery. All of a sudden, an infield without a place for D.J. LeMahieu to play regularly just a week ago is deploying Tyler Wade as its starting second baseman. Didi Gregorius won’t be back until the second half.

With so many big bats missing, the result is about what you’d expect. The Yankees gave up just six runs in their most recent three-game set against the Detroit Tigers, but scored only five and dropped two out of three. Tuesday, a lineup featuring D.J. LeMahieu batting fifth managed just one run against Jordan Zimmermann; Wednesday, the team struck out 18 times against a Tigers pitching staff that ranked just 24th in pitcher WAR, 25th in FIP, and 26th in strikeout rate in 2018.

The second wild card gives the Yankees a considerable margin for error, as does their depth. It might all prove to be fine. That said, with Tampa Bay, a deep and talented team in its own right, off to a 5-1 start, and the Red Sox healthy, the Yankees might not have the luxury of treading water until their injured players return if their goal is to win the division. Aaron Judge and Gary Sanchez can’t carry the offensive load by themselves, and Greg Bird is himself injury-prone. Clint Frazier is talented, but untested and coming off a concussion that ruined his 2018. Unless the team is willing to use heavy doses of Mike Tauchmann and Tyler Wade moving forward, the Yankees may have no choice but to start looking for offensive help from outside the organization.

12:01

Jay Jaffe: Hey folks, welcome to my first solo chat of the 2019 regular season. I’ve got a short thing on Randal Grichuk’s extension up this morning (https://blogs.fangraphs.com/randal-grichuk-joins-the-extension-parade/) plus yesterday’s big piece on catcher framing and its impact on Hall of Fame consideration (https://www.fangraphs.com/blogs/framing-the-hall-of-fame-cases-for-mar…). on with the show!

12:04

Jay Jaffe: Our projections are updated, yes. I don’t know the specifics of why the Mets went down in this instance but it could result from revisions in estimated playing time on their team or elsewhere in the league. If, for example, the Braves were to sign Kimbrel, that would improve their projection and take a bite out of the competition’s projections, with the effect felt most within the division (since that’s who they play the most frequently).

12:06

Jay Jaffe: Via our splits, nine teams have bullpens with ERAs over 5.00 right now, and seven teams have bullpen FIPs over 5.00. That’s <checks notes, pulls out slide rule and abacus, does math> not great.

Read the rest of this entry »

This spring, Randal Grichuk is following Mike Trout. The outfielder whom the Angels drafted with the 24th pick in 2009, one slot before they chose a player who’s already in the conversation for the greatest of all time, is the latest to agree to a long-term extension. It’s significantly less than Trout’s 12-year, $430 million pact, of course, but Grichuk nonetheless guaranteed himself a substantial payday by agreeing to a five-year, $52 million deal with the Blue Jays, covering the 2019-23 seasons. That’s not too shabby for a player who was viewed as a fourth or fifth outfielder when he was acquired from the Cardinals in January 2018.

As the Blue Jays have steered themselves into rebuilding mode by shedding the likes of Jose Bautista, Josh Donaldson, J.A. Happ, Russell Martin, Troy Tulowitzki, and others over the past 18 months, either via trade or free agency, the now-27-year-old Grichuk has emerged as more than just a backup. Last year, he started 84 games in right field, another 25 in center — largely when Kevin Pillar, who coincidentally was traded to the Giants on Tuesday, the same day that Grichuk’s deal was announced, missed time with a shoulder sprain — and one in left field. Despite hitting just .106/.208/.227 in 77 plate appearances before missing all of May due to a right knee sprain, he set a career high with 25 homers while posting his highest on-base percentage (.301), slugging percentage (.502), and wRC+ (115) since his 2015 rookie season. Read the rest of this entry »

FanGraphs has obtained bonus figures for over 90% of all the international signings in baseball history. We have all of the most significant bonuses, every big leaguer, notable current prospects, and everything in the mid-six figure range and above, along with many years for which we have every single signing.

This provides us with a pretty complete picture of the distribution and trends of these bonuses, also allowing us to estimate how many players we’re missing. Those players are overwhelmingly names you wouldn’t recognize, guys who played for a couple of years before being released, signing as filler for a five-figure bonus.

We’ve taken out all of the major league deals (think older, high profile Japanese and Cuban players), and we have incomplete data for all of the Mexican players, as MLB notes all of them as receiving a $0 bonus (it’s an easy workaround for a convoluted system that’s mostly cleaned up now). We’ve filled in correct bonuses for players where we have it, mostly among the high profile Mexican signings, like Luis Urias and Julio Urias (no relation).

We could do a lot of things with this data — and we will, including listing it on the player pages and THE BOARD — but the thing that interests me today is combining this bonus data with our asset value research, and the dollars-per-WAR framework to get a better idea of what a dollar invested in an international amateur player returns. We’ll start with some of the meta data:

2017 was the first season of hard-capped bonus pools, which explains why bonuses declined and also why they spiked the year prior. These figures don’t include the pool overage payments made to MLB from 2013 to 2016. We estimate those figures to add up to about $250 million over those four years, with about $100 million paid to MLB in 2016 alone. (The CBA says that this money was to be spent on international operations and initiatives.)

Since the international market changes and matures so rapidly, it makes sense to start with the early 2000s signing classes as a baseline for a similar era to today. Most of the players who signed 15 years ago are now in their early 30s and have either played out their entire careers or are into their seventh year of major league service time. We can grab the dollar-per-WAR figures from the years that spanned their controlled years and turn that historical WAR into a dollar amount of value created. I used seven seasons since we don’t have comprehensive service time data, which, from some spot-checking, appears to do the trick. We have the FV of the most recent signings that are current prospect on THE BOARD, which maps to an asset value.

The most interesting players to analyze signed in the last 5-10 years, are in the big leagues, and are in the middle of their control years, so I had to do some work to peg their value. I quantified what they’ve already produced the same way I did with the older players, then estimated or figured out by hand their current service time situation. I then used our various projections to fill in what those players are expected to produce in the rest of their controlled years.

In short, it’s not perfect, but as with filling in the holes in the bonus data, it’s fairly accurate and any mistakes appear to cancel each other out in the aggregate. There’s some noise in the data year-to-year, but it appears that right around 2004, the market improved its output and has held mostly steady to today. Here’s the production (a combination of produced WAR, projected WAR, and minor league asset values) over this period:

I included up to the 2017 class, but it would appear that we need three full seasons in the system — with players having signed on July 2, 2015, and played in 2016, 2017, 2018 — before the class as a whole has developed enough to reveal how much value it could create. As such, a dozen years (2004-2015) appears to be our usable sample.

We could use the above figures to create a simple return on investment calculation, but a true ROI would compute what a team is making on the average dollar spent, so we also have to consider the expense to operate the department that signs the players. Building or renting an academy, feeding and housing the players, running a DSL team, paying coaches, trainers, scouts, and administration and travel expenses are all facets of an international operation that are essential to signing and developing these players, so they have to be considered alongside the bonus expenditures. After consulting with some international directors, I’ve estimated those costs for all 30 teams combined and added that to the bonuses, before arriving at an ROI figure that represents something close to what MLB clubs can expect a bonus pool dollar to return. I used a rolling figure to smooth out any noise in the yearly results.

This gives us an idea of what a club’s accounting department would say their ROI was running an international operation in these years. There are a couple of other ways to look at this data. Going forward, we know that overages won’t exist. We also know the maximum that can be spent with hard caps in place. If we were to take the historic spending of 2016 and keep those signing rules, while also imagining that the talent of 2018 demanded the same outlay in bonuses and overages as the group in 2016, we could compare the two realities owners were considering in the most recent completed CBA negotiations:

You can see that there’s still a solid positive return even with historic spending levels, but owners negotiated to add a hard bonus cap to the international market, essentially doubling their ROI. The 2016 class was unique in that clubs were motivated to spend wildly in anticipation of the caps and because of that, a great class of Cuban players that couldn’t be duplicated today (four of our top 132 prospects are Cuban players from this class) drove much of that spending. That roughly $315 million expenditure may be the closest figure we’ll get to what clubs think the true value of a historically-talented class is in an open market with multiple motivated bidders. The market is now capped at half that figure.

We can also answer the question of what an international pool dollar is worth going forward. If we assume that the overhead of running a department is fixed, how should clubs think about the value of each additional dollar added to their bonus pool? We could take the table just above this one and use the projected actual 2018 row to figure out the ROI from $150 million in bonuses and the estimated $1.125 billion in value that will be created by the signees. The result is a staggering 650%. It appears that it takes about three years for the an investment in the international market to mostly mature in terms of trade value, though there’s a way to read this data where there’s further value gained in a 5-7 year horizon for full maturity.

This sort of analysis can get too close to quantifying the worth of humans in purely dollar terms, although going through the exercise in this way also helps to define what a fair market price is for someone’s service. 650% is a pretty abstract number to consider, so let’s compare it to an standard investment for wealthy individuals such as baseball club owners: investing in the stock market. An owner can invest roughly $5 million into international market each year and expect a median return of 650% after three years, while a strong 10% yearly compounded return in the stock market over that period would return a 35% return. That sort of return makes clear both the appeal for ownership of signing international players, and capping their bonuses. It also points to how wide a gap exists between the value these players generate for their clubs and their compensation relative to that value.

In the next part of this series, I’ll take a look at some of the best and worst signing classes, if we were to grade out every club’s international signing class over the last 30 years using the framework rolled out today.

We got a hold of the bonus slot values and, it follows, each team’s total pool amount for the upcoming 2019 MLB Draft. The PDF we acquired from an industry source was missing Washington’s comp pick for Bryce Harper at 138 overall, so we added that and manually recalculated each team’s pool total (which were incorrect on the PDF because of this missing pick).

(Update: After receiving additional clarification, it appears that Washington will not receive a comp pick for Harper; the pick that would have received as Harper compensation became the pick they gave up to sign Patrick Corbin.)

What follows is, first, the total draft bonus pool amounts for all thirty teams, followed by the individual slot values for each pick in the first ten rounds of the draft. Picks labeled “COMP” are compensatory selections for players lost via free agency or from last year’s unsigned draft picks. Picks labeled “CBA” or “CBB” are competitive balance picks (rounds A and B) allocated to teams in the spirit of parity. These can be traded, and several have been. In both the compensatory and traded competitive balance picks, we note the players for which the picks were received. The tables here will be updated if competitive balance picks change hands or if teams receive comp for a yet-to-sign free agent who received a qualifying offer, like Dallas Keuchel or Craig Kimbrel.

Tuesday, the Rockies and 24-year-old right-hander German Marquez reached an agreement on a five-year, $43 million contract extension, with the deal first reported ESPN’s Jeff Passan. The contract includes a club option for a sixth year, though that becomes a mutual option if Marquez finishes at or near the top of the Cy Young voting twice during the life of the extension, which runs through 2023.

The deal encompasses one pre-arb year (this season), all three of Marquez’s arbitration years, and either one or two of his would-be free agent years, depending on what happens with that club option. He’s now on track to hit free agency at age 30.

Marquez is a pro scouting success story and an example of how development often continues after players have reached the big leagues. Th Rockies acquired him from Tampa Bay along with Jake McGee in exchange for Corey Dickerson (who Tampa later traded for fringe prospect Tristan Gray) and Kevin Padlo (who did not make our Rays prospect list). Marquez reached the big leagues in his first season as a Rockie.

Then just a competent strike-thrower with two plus pitches — a fastball and a curveball — Marquez was in the middle of our 2017 top 100 prospects list in anticipation of him developing a third pitch, which occurred during his 2018 breakout in the form of a new slider. After tinkering with his seldom-used changeup and a hard slider during the spring and first half of 2018, he leaned more heavily on the slide piece down the stretch in 2018 and was dominant toward the end of the season.

What’s next? Perhaps increased two-seamer usage, which could be especially meaningful as a way of keeping the ball on the ground in Coors Field. It’d be ideal for Marquez to continue refining his changeup but, despite his strike-throwing prowess, he has some issues with release consistency (it was better last year, but is still relatively varied) that might impede development in this area if you buy that things like feel and release consistency are indicators of change development, which I do.

We don’t know how a new CBA might have impacted Marquez’s free agency were he not to have signed a deal and hit the market at 28. The financial security afforded by extensions makes more sense for pitchers, who are at greater risk of suffering a career-altering injury. But Marquez hasn’t been injured since 2014 and is built like a tank, so perhaps he’s at less risk of breaking than, say, Blake Snell, who seemed to set the market for this type of extension a few weeks ago.

A 2.7 WAR contributor in 2017 and a 4.2 WAR arm in 2018 (who was trending up late in the year), Marquez is clearly part of a Rockies very long-term core that includes recently-extended Nolan Arenado, Kyle Freeland, David Dahl and whomever among the Ryan McMahon, Garrett Hampson, Brendan Rodgers, Raimel Tapia, etc. group turn out to actually be good. Daniel Murphy and Charlie Blackmon have deals running through 2021, and Trevor Story is under team control during that stretch, too.

Other than Ian Desmond, who has been a replacement level player for the last two years, there are no scary long-term deal on the books, so the Rockies should be free to pay to add to this competitive core while it’s together for the next three seasons, especially while 40% of their division is rebuilding. The most likely trade chips on the farm are Tyler Nevin and Colton Welker, who are blocked by Arenado, and McMahon/Murphy.

After a strong 2017 campaign for Tampa and Baltimore led some observers to declare, perhaps prematurely, that the former No. 1 pick had finally figured out how to sustainably deliver on his sky-high potential, Tim Beckham’s 2018 performance was sufficiently awful (a 79 wRC+ over 402 plate appearances) that the Baltimore front office declined to tender him a contract and left him to sign a $1.75 million deal with the Mariners in early January. Well, for a guy who was probably only intended to hold the middle of the field warm until J.P. Crawford gets the call up to Seattle at some point later this summer, Beckham has had a remarkably good first week in the Queen City:

Usually, I wouldn’t note a first week like this except in passing — Preston Tucker was hitting .435 through his first seven games of 2018, after all — except for two things. First, Beckham was hurt — with a core muscle injury that required surgery — throughout much of 2018, which suggests that perhaps his poor performance over the full season was less a reflection of a regression from 2017’s breakout and more what you’d expect from a player toughing it out through a debilitating injury. Second, Beckham has actually had a pretty good five weeks, dating back to September 1st of 2018. Since that date, his wRC+ of 186 is eighth-best in the game.

Beckham has always had good power to all fields, but until 2017, that power was too often undercut by a tendency to end at-bats early by swinging at the first pitch he saw offered close to the zone. In 2017, he solved the mental hurdle that had pushed him to try to do too much and instead started taking a few pitches early in at-bats until he found the one he wanted. “These days,” he told me back then, “I want to see the ball in the zone where I can drive it, and if it’s not” — here, a pause — “I want to trust that it’s going to be a ball.” The core injury hindered his ability to execute on that mindset in 2018, yes, but since September of last year, he’s been able to put it into practice again. The results have been impressive. Read the rest of this entry »