Ben Lindbergh, Jeff Sullivan, and ESPN’s Sam Miller conduct the fifth annual Effectively Wild Minor League Free Agent Draft, selecting 10 minor league free agents each and competing to see whose roster will accumulate the most combined major league playing time in 2018.
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Earlier this week, I chatted wth Red Sox manager Alex Cora about the relative value of contact skills versus hunting pitches that you can drive. Not surprisingly, the 2017 American League batting champion’s name came up.
“People might be surprised by this, but Jose Altuve isn’t afraid to make adjustments even when he’s getting his hits,” said Cora, who was Houston’s bench coach last year. “When Jose is really, really, really good — because he’s good, always — his strike zone shrinks. He doesn’t chase his hits. Sometimes he’s getting his hits because he’s unreal with his hand-eye coordination — he gets hits on pitches that others don’t — but when he looks for good pitches he’s even better.”
Cora was a contact hitter during his playing days, and looking back, he wishes he’d have been more selective. Not only that, he wouldn’t have minded swinging and missing more often than he did.
“I had a conversation with Carlos Delgado about that,” Cora told me. “When you commit to swinging the bat — I’m talking about me — it often doesn’t matter where it is, you end up putting the ball in play. It’s better to swing hard and miss than it is to make soft contact for a 4-3.” Read the rest of this entry »
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.
Each week, we publish in the neighborhood of 75 articles across our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times and blue for Community Research.
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.
To apply, please follow the instructions in the original job posting.
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.
After having typically appeared in the hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have now been released at FanGraphs for half a decade. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Tampa Bay Rays. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.
Batters
Most major-league clubs probably feature multiple players whom one could reasonably designate as the Face of the Franchise. Until recently, that was not the case with the Tampa Bay Rays. Basically ever since his debut in 2008, Evan Longoria has been synonymous with the club — due in no small part, one assumes, to the concurrence of his best years with the best years of the team. Traded to the Giants on December 20, he’s expected to produce roughly three wins for San Francisco.
How the club will attempt to replace those wins remains uncertain at the moment. Christian Arroyo (409 PA, 0.6 zWAR), Matt Duffy (444, 1.3), Daniel Robertson (406, 1.0), Ryan Schimpf (459, 0.5), and Joey Wendle (563, 1.0) are all candidates for the second- and third-base nexus in Tampa Bay, each flawed in his way. I’ve included Duffy, Robertson, and Wendle on the depth-chart image below simply because they receive the top projections from Dan Szymborski’s computer.
The author noted elsewhere recently that Byron Buxton recorded the highest WAR (3.5) of any player in 2017 who also produced a below-average batting line. By virtue of his 2015 season, however, Kevin Kiermaier (474, 3.3) has the top mark by that same criteria of any player since 1997. He’s projected to produce a precisely league-average batting line in 2018 while also saving 14 runs in center field.
| 9:03 |
: Hello friends |
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: Welcome to Friday baseball chat |
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: Although that’s Friday baseball chat with an asterisk: there’s a decent chance that in about half an hour I’m going to have to go give someone an emergency ride to a wedding |
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: Not ideal! But here we are. I hope it works out |
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: Hello, friend, and welcome back! |
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: Hello friend |
My book Big Data Baseball was published back in 2015. For those unfamiliar with it, it chronicles the Pirates’ 2013 campaign, when the club broke a string of 20 straight losing seasons (a North American pro sports record) and advanced to the NLDS.
There was a misnomer back then that the Pirates were a young team coming of age. They were not. Gerrit Cole was the only prominent prospect who debuted that season, while 90% of the roster was composed of holdovers from 2012. The book documents how the Pirates made a dramatic pivot, in part by residing on what represented the cutting edge of analytical thought at the time.
Pittsburgh’s transformation came in the form of a three-pronged approach, based on framing, shifts, and ground balls. They were the first club to invest significant dollars on the open market in pitch-framing when they signed Russell Martin to a then-club-record, free-agent deal of two years and $17 million. (Yes, that was a record amount.) They increased their defensive-shift usage by 400%. And while they were not the first club to more frequently employ a shift, they were the first — through sequencing, location, and pitch type — to consciously spike their ground-ball rate, to coerce more ground balls into the shifts. The Pirates led baseball in ground-ball rate from 2013 to -15.
The Pirates were also on the cutting edge of communication, the first known club to integrate a quantitative analyst full-time, even on road trips, into their clubhouse. Mike Fitzgerald was there not only to enhance scouting material but to be a conduit in exchanging ideas between the clubhouse and front office. Of course, having peak Andrew McCutchen didn’t hurt either.
When the book appeared on shelves, the Pirates were at their high-water mark, en route to a 98-win season. They were viewed then as a model, sabermetric-leaning organization having engineered a remarkable turnaround. Since 2015, though, both the trajectory of the big-league club and the perception of the organization have turned south.
The timing of this post isn’t intentional, beyond the fact that I am writing it intentionally. With the market seemingly at a standstill, there’s increasing focus on the conflict between owners and the union, and when those two butt heads, my sense is the owners lose the PR battle. I’m not putting this up because of that. I’m putting this up out of curiosity.
As you might’ve guessed, this is another polling project. A little over a month ago, I asked the FanGraphs community to help me rate all the front offices. In so doing, I asked that you try to exclude the influence of ownership as much as possible. That’s not actually a possible thing to do, not all the time, but I just wanted your best guess. And I wanted to try to separate the two entities so as to allow for this follow-up. I’ve done this before, but it’s been two years. I’d like to see how things have changed, at least as far as opinions go. It’s always fun to get one set of data points, but it’s even more fun when you can look at points moving over time.
Your favorite baseball team has an owner, or it has some owners. Those owners are responsible for bankrolling the whole operation. Of course, it’s the players who are directly responsible for the outcomes on the field. And it’s usually the other front-office people who are directly responsible for those players being around in the first place. Most of the time, owners don’t want to be in the news. But your team has an owner, or owners, and you’ve got opinions. It’s simply part of being a fan.
Below, I’d like you to express those opinions, so I can collect them. Don’t worry about being right or wrong — there is no right or wrong, not as far as we can tell. Just pick the most fitting response, in your estimation, and I’m fully aware the polls are kind of strangely-worded. It should all be pretty simple, and as usual, the results allow for me to see how people feel across the whole baseball landscape. You might have a sense of how people feel about one team. How does that compare to every other team? The FanGraphs community is endlessly useful!
Do you trust the owners to make good decisions? Do you trust the owners to stay out of the way? Do you feel like the owners are sufficiently committed to winning, and winning every year? How much do the owners meddle? To what extent are the owners predictable? Are the owners approachable, or accessible? Have they placed a priority on improving the in-game ballpark experience? There are countless ways for owners to make a difference. You know more about your team’s ownership than I do. So I’m looking for you to share your information, as best as you can. Thank you in advance for your participation, and if everything goes according to plan, we’ll evaluate all the results early next week.
