On this year’s Hall of Fame ballot, four former players saw at least a 10-point increase in their voting share over the previous year. Vladimir Guerrero sailed into the Hall of Fame, Edgar Martinez solidified his status as a near-lock for next year, and Mike Mussina looks like a strong candidate for the 2020 class, if not the 2019 one.

Larry Walker, on the other hand, needs a lot of help. He received just 34.1% of the vote this year, leaving just two more cycles for him to reach the 75% threshold required for election. It’s not just that Walker needs some help to get elected: he wants it, too. And, most importantly, he deserves it.

Paul Swydan previously made a good case for Walker’s inclusion in the Hall, comparing him very favorably to Vladimir Guerrero. Here, though, I’d like to directly address a few points that still seem to cause confusion.

He Wasn’t Just Good Because of Coors Field

A lot of the arguments for Larry Walker’s inclusion in the Hall — including on sites like this one — are based on his very impressive 68.7 WAR. That figure ranks 66th all-time among position players and 39th since Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. His WAR is sixth in that time among right fielders, just behind Reggie Jackson and ahead of every other right fielder you can think of except for a handful of all-time greats in Hank Aaron, Roberto Clemente, Al Kaline, and Frank Robinson

Walker doesn’t lack for impressive numbers by traditional measures. He has a lifetime .313 batting average, for instance, behind only Clemente, Vlad Guerrero, Tony Gwynn, Stan Musial, and Ted Williams among outfielders who’ve recorded at least 8,000 plate appearances over the last 70 years.

Walker also fares well by counting stats. He hit a lot of home runs, a ton of doubles, and stole over 200 bases. The list of players with more doubles, triples, homers, and stolen bases is a pretty small group, composed of just Aaron, Carlos Beltran, Barry Bonds, Andre Dawson, and Willie Mays. He won an MVP award in 1997, receiving more than three-quarters of the first-place votes from the writers. He also has seven Gold Gloves, five All-Star appearances, three Silver Sluggers. He earned at least one vote for MVP in eight different seasons.

There are those who might dismiss Walker’s accomplishments out of hand simply because of Denver’s thin mountain air. It’s certainly true that, with regard to the counting stats, some mental adjustment is necessary. As for estimates of his overall value, though, such considerations are irrelevant: WAR already penalizes Walker for whatever benefits he received from playing half his games at Coors Field.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last week, I asked you to project too much of the future. And, bless your hearts, you complied. Every offseason, in February or March, I poll the FanGraphs community to see how many games it thinks each team will win in the season ahead. That project is still coming down the road, when opening day gets closer and more of these free agents have signed. This experiment was more ambitious; instead of asking you about single-season wins, I asked you about entire five-year windows. Five-year win totals, for every single team. It’s far too much, given how little of the future is knowable, but you voted in the polls anyway. I appreciate your doing that.

For every polling project, there is an analysis post. Otherwise there wouldn’t be a point. Below, you can see what the community thinks about the near- and medium-term futures for every club. The idea here is to try to get a sense of which teams are and aren’t well-positioned in the bigger picture. Or, at least, how this community thinks about that. There’s more to this evaluation than just the state of the major-league roster — there’s also the state of the farm system, the identities in the front office, the resources supplied by ownership, and so on. A baseball team is a big, complicated business. It’s time to look at what you think about these businesses.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about Nori Aoki’s return to Japan, Vladimir Guerrero’s swing rate, Franchy Cordero’s power/speed skills, spring training for free agents (again), and Melky Cabrera, then bring on Baseball Prospectus Director of Technology Harry Pavlidis to explain BP’s latest pitching-themed analysis, featuring robot umpires’ feasibility, desirability, and potential effects on offense; classifying pitchers and measuring stamina and command; and tunneling and deception.

Read the rest of this entry »

Podcast (effectively-wild): Play in new window | Download

Subscribe: RSS

I’ve been waiting for the Diamondbacks to sign Alex Avila for months. It’s not like it’s been some obsession, and it’s not something I’ve thought about every single day, but the fit just always seemed more or less perfect. Avila is younger than the departed Chris Iannetta, and, unlike Iannetta, he swings from the left side, which makes him a better partner for Jeff Mathis. Importantly, Avila had a highly promising 2017; importantly, he was never going to cost a fortune, and the Diamondbacks are dealing with limited financial flexibility. It’s a move that I thought was inevitable. Oftentimes, those inevitable moves fail to come to fruition, but at least this one is finally crossing the finish line. Avila is joining the Diamondbacks, on a two-year contract.

He’s going to get paid $8.25 million, and there are additionally some modest incentives. Avila’s likely to be something of a semi-regular, and last year’s 112 games played was his highest total since 2014. When a team uses Avila, he should be platooned, because southpaws just give him awful fits. There are so many reasons to just see this news and move right on by it, like seeing that David Hernandez signed with the Reds. But in case you don’t play much with Statcast tools, Avila’s 2017 was outstanding. He resembled, by one measure, a frightening threat.

Read the rest of this entry »

To be completely honest with you, I’ve been kind of bored. Bored and feeling uninspired. Maybe it’s just a winter funk, but there’s also the reality of the slow-motion baseball offseason. I know I’m not the only writer whose topic well has begun to run dry. It’s not a big deal; everything’s cyclical, and writing has its ups and downs. I’m just trying to explain to you how I got here.

When I’m feeling stuck, I frequently just play around on various leaderboards, searching for inspiration. I’ll run through leaderboards here, I’ll run through leaderboards on Baseball Reference, and I’ll run through leaderboards on Baseball Savant. Most recently I was bit by the Statcast bug, so I found myself on Baseball Savant’s familiar pages. I was looking at the exit velocity page. I was looking at the sprint speed page. Suddenly, a name jumped out I didn’t expect. And the more I thought about it, the more I realized I couldn’t ignore this.

I considered all the current Padres position players for whom there’s a decent sample of 2017 Statcast information available. The player with the fastest average sprint speed? It’s not Manuel Margot. It’s Franchy Cordero. And, the player with the fastest average exit velocity? It’s not Wil Myers. It’s Franchy Cordero. A few days ago, I knew next to nothing about Cordero’s skillset. I knew only of his existence. Now I realize he’s one of the more exciting young players around.

Read the rest of this entry »

“The strategy the Marlins have adopted is tried and true in baseball. I’m not saying it’s without pain… But it was a process that ultimately produced a winner [at times, including Houston this season], in terms of smaller markets’ ability to win.”

–Commissioner Rob Manfred on the Dan LeBatard show, Dec. 20

 
Rebuilding, of course, has long been a part of baseball.

Before the Astros and Cubs parlayed dramatic rebuilds into World Series titles, the Marlins conducted fire sales of their own amid championships in 1997 and 2003. Young, cheap, talented labor has been prized since the origins of the professional game.

However, it is the depth of baseball’s current rebuilds that has begun to create more concern recently, notably among the league’s 120 unsigned free agents. It seems like something is different is occurring, that organizations are thinking more extreme, more like an NBA team when retooling.

If the Cubs and Astros did not inspire these more extreme retooling efforts, the Cubs’ and Astros’ success has nevertheless allowed clubs to follow the “tanking” model with greater conviction.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

January 21st, 2011. That’s the day I got a phone call from David Appelman that changed my life.

I’d moved to California and was trying to make a full-time go of writing about fantasy baseball for a living, but my wife — as amazingly supportive as she’s been — had been wondering when I might be able to contribute more to the household. David’s call was a lifeline, a rope to a sinking writer, and I’ll never forget it. A job. Writing about baseball. Amazing.

Other than giving me a chance to do this for a living, David also gave me a chance to connect with you readers here at FanGraphs, readers I count as probably the best of the internet, and sometimes I feel like I’ve written for all of the internet. Maybe I have some authority on the matter. You guys are awesome, believe me.

This will be my last post for FanGraphs for now, post number 2,202 when you add them all up. Details to come, but I’m excited for this new chapter, and I will still see you around, but not on these pages.

Read the rest of this entry »

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 Arizona Diamondbacks. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Batters
A perfectly average group of field players would produce something like 16 wins collectively in a season (that is, two wins times eight starters). The group of D-backs field players on the depth-chart image below is projected for roughly 15 wins collectively in 2018. By one definition, at least, this is basically an average offense.

By another, it’s not at all. Of the club’s eight likely starters, only one — Ketel Marte (599 PA, 1.7 zWAR) — receives a wins forecast that would round to 2.0. Paul Goldschmidt (638, 4.1), Jake Lamb (589, 2.5), and A.J. Pollock (510, 3.4) occupy one mode of this hypothetical distribution graph; the rest of the starting eight (minus Marte), the other.

The weakness for a club constructed thusly is its exposure to risk: an injury to one of the teams leaders can have catastrophic effects. This was the case for the 2016 edition of the D-backs, for example, when A.J. Pollock was unable to make his season debut until late August. The strength for such a club, meanwhile, is the ease of upgrading the roster. In the case of Arizona, finding an alternative to Yasmany Tomas (426, 0.4) in left field might represent the most expedient means to such an upgrade.

Read the rest of this entry »