Last week, Dellin Betances lost his arbitration case after his agents attempted to argue that he should be paid like an elite reliever, which, of course, he is. But because arbitration is based on historical comparisons and mostly rely on traditional metrics, Betances wasn’t able to overcome his lack of saves, which is effectively the deciding metric for how much a reliever will get in arbitration.

This is a problem for Major League Baseball. The ideas about traditional bullpen usage are finally breaking down, and increasingly, teams are looking to deploy elite relievers in situations before the ninth inning. But if you’re a young pitcher, and you know that the system the league uses to value your performance depends almost entirely on how many saves you rack up, there isn’t a good incentive for you to agree to that kind of role. The way the system is setup, the best young relievers are financially motivated to try and move into the closer’s role as quickly as possible, because that’s the only bullpen role that arbiters put a significant value on. The arbitration system is effectively propping up 1990s-style bullpen usage, and it’s going to hinder the buy-in from players on a better way to deploy relievers during the season.

As Ken Rosenthal wrote, maybe the best answer to this problem (and the many other problems with arbitration) is to just get rid of the process entirely, which costs both teams and agencies thousands of hours of work for no real purpose. As Rosenthal notes, it wouldn’t be that difficult to design an algorithm that could determine the salaries of pre-free-agent players, and could take into account more meaningful metrics than the ones generally considered by the arbiters making the decisions now.

But at this point, that’s a pipe dream. Dumping the arbitration system might be a long-term reality, but Dellin Betances probably won’t still be pitching by the time that actually has the chance of happening. So how do we fix arbitration before one of the game’s truly great relief pitchers spends the next three years getting his pay docked simply because he’s not pitching the ninth inning? It’s probably easier than we might think.

Read the rest of this entry »

To preview MLB spring training, Tyler Kepner examined the competitive “window” status — that is, the realistic possibility for contention — of all 30 major-league clubs earlier this month for the New York Times. Kepner employed four logical window designations: closed, open, closing and opening.

I think reasonable people can mostly agree that the Cubs’ window of contention is open, and the White Sox’ window is closed. The Royals’ is perhaps closing, and the Braves’ is opening (if not in 2017, then soon). While we will not agree on every status, it’s an interesting exercise.

Windows of contention are an interesting concept, particularly in an era of two Wild Cards in each league. How do teams balance the future and present? How do clubs play a so-so hand knowing the unpredictability of the game? Few teams are able to sustain long windows of contention. The Braves of the 1990s and early 2000s and the Cardinals of the 21st century have done it as well as any team in the in the Wild Card era.

It’s also easier to operate if you suspect your window is either completely open or closed. If you’re the Cubs and Indians last deadline, you’re willing to trade significant young assets for impact relief help. If you suspect your window is closed, like the White Sox, you’re willing to deal assets like Chris Sale and Adam Eaton. There’s a clarity in decision-making, in creating a strategy and plan to implement.

Said Texas Rangers GM Jon Daniels to FanGraphs’ David Laurila on charting a course:

“Something our management team has talked about a lot is the mistake we made our first year here, in 2006. We were caught in the middle. We convinced ourselves that if A, B, and C went right, we had a chance to win, and I think you can make the case that, for any team, it’s not a sustainable strategy.”

Being caught in the middle is the most difficult position for a club. Consider, for instance, a team with some relatively young stars at the major-league level. The front office thought this core of players would form the foundation of a contending team, but it’s not surrounded with the requisite depth, prospects or resources to realistically contend and sustain. The White Sox entered the season in that position. In the meantime, they’ve chosen a course. The Angels, Diamondbacks, Marlins, and Twins could all face difficult decisions in choosing paths in the not-too-distant future.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

Charlie Blackmon and Chris Denorfia share a similar philosophy when it comes to swing paths and launch angles. Each eschews chopping wood and champions the value of hitting the ball in the air, not on the ground. But while the Colorado Rockies’ outfielders are kindred spirits when it comes to process, their approaches to the science aren’t alike. One is more studious in his pursuit. The other is satisfied to simply be aware of the concept.

Blackmon and Denorfia shared their thoughts on the subject earlier this week.

———

Charlie Blackmon: “I try not to get super technical. I do understand that I want to match the angle of my bat with the angle that the pitch is coming in. I think that’s the best way to transfer the most energy into the ball. In saying that, I can feel what’s good and what’s bad. I can feel when I’m hitting the ball hard and when I’m just spinning the ball — I’m swinging at too much of a downward angle and just clipping it — as opposed to squaring it up and getting a lot of my energy transferred to the ball, with a better bat path.

“I haven’t seen a lot of the data, to be honest. I’d be interested in seeing it. But I think that no matter what the data says, I don’t think you can know what the launch angle is, and then backwards engineer a good swing. I think that would be hard.

Read the rest of this entry »

Dellin Betances made medium-level news a week ago when he lost his arbitration case. He’d been asking for $5 million — less, for example, than Trevor Rosenthal had made in his first crack at arbitration the season before. The Yankees, meanwhile, submitted a $3 million figure. The case went to arbitration, and the Yankees won. Randy Levine then took the medium-sized news and turned into big news by acting like a fool. While the $2 million difference might not seem like a big deal for Betances when he’s still guaranteed to receive $3 million, the affect on Betances’ finances in the coming years will be significantly greater.

Arbitration isn’t exactly the simplest of systems. Teams submit blind amounts, and if the parties can’t agree on a deal beforehand, they go to hearing. The FanGraphs glossary explains the process in slightly more detail, but if the player and team go to hearing, the arbitration panel decides on either the team’s figure or the player’s figure, with no option to choose a number in between. This makes the arbitration a winner-take-all scenario. If arbitrators could choose a number in the middle, settlements would be even more likely, simplifying the process and lead to far less debate. They can’t, though, and that means that arbitration decisions have a significant impact.

Also relevant is how service time fits into the process. Players’ salaries gradually increase based on service time, rendering the previous season’s salary quite relevant, as it represents the starting point for a raise. A few different researchers have gone through and figured out exactly how much salaries increase during arbitration. (Here’s a good one, for example.) As a general rule, though, it comes to something like a 50% increase in salary every year. Small differences, especially early in the arbitration process, compound to make bigger differences over time.

Read the rest of this entry »

Eno took some time on Wednesday to talk about last season’s unluckiest changeup. Today, we’re going to talk about a changeup that wasn’t unlucky so much as it was woefully misplaced. It was a first-pitch changeup that was as middle-middle as one can be.

That’s where the title comes in. Let’s roll the film.

You may remember this dinger from a recent article here about Giancarlo Stanton. Statcast says it was the longest blast of the year, at a staggering 504.35 feet. It’s pretty easy to understand how this happened.

Three variables are at work:

1. Giancarlo Stanton is more machine than man, a T-800 who warped back in time and stole a baseball bat from an innocent bystander instead of boots and a leather jacket.
2. Coors Field is the Cape Canaveral of baseball.
3. Chad Bettis missed his spot with a changeup pretty badly.

I don’t need explain the first point very much. You know all about Giancarlo Stanton and what he’s capable of doing. You’ve seen him lay waste to baseballs. His muscles are made of steel rebar. He’s been doing this for years, and if we’re lucky, he’ll do it for a while longer.

I also don’t need to explain point No. 2 very much. Coors is in Denver, and the 20th row of seats in the upper deck at Coors is exactly a mile above sea level. That means the air is thin, which means the ball flies further. This is good for guys like Stanton and bad for anybody who stands on the pitcher’s mound. Unfortunately, that includes Bettis.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ben Lindbergh and Jeff Sullivan banter about an Andrew Miller image and the top-heavy projected standings, then preview the Nationals’ 2017 season with Chelsea Janes of the The Washington Post and the Twins’ 2017 season with Aaron Gleeman of Baseball Prospectus.

Read the rest of this entry »

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

Subscribe: RSS

This is another post about the standings and the projections. We’ll do other stuff soon. Just not yet. All right, so, these are our current projected standings for 2017. The top six teams, along with their projected win totals:

• Cubs, 95 wins
• Dodgers, 94
• Red Sox, 93
• Indians, 92
• Astros, 91
• Nationals, 91

One quality representative from every division. That’s a pretty damn even spread. I also recently opened the team projections up to community debate. Earlier today, I analyzed the results, and here’s the community’s top six teams:

• Cubs, 96 wins
• Dodgers, 94
• Red Sox, 93
• Indians, 93
• Nationals, 91
• Astros, 90

There are some slight single-game shifts in there, but the level of agreement is strong. The projections identify six obvious favorites, and you, as a group, expect similar results. There’s nothing particularly strange about baseball having a tier of elites, but this time around we’re talking about six teams projected to win at least 90 games. That’s uncommon!

Read the rest of this entry »

We know early spring-training coverage, February coverage, is littered with Best Shape of His Life stories. While there’s no database to track the impact and predictive power of these stories, the general sense is they generally do not correlate with dramatically better performance in the following season.

In a FanGraphs chat a couple weeks ago, one questioner asked me to what types of stories I pay attention early in the spring. What really matters this time of year? It’s a good question. One story line that does interest me in February — something that can perhaps provide real value and change — is the addition of a new pitch.

Jason Collette was kind enough this week to track every reported pitch addition to date in 2017. Perhaps the new pitch about which we should be most excited isn’t really a pitcher adding a new pitch at all, but bringing back an old one. Eno Sarris is excited about the return of Dylan Bundy’s cutter, a pitch once described as “a supreme piece of aerodynamic filth” by former-BP-writer-turned-Cubs-scout Jason Parks. Imagine Andrew Miller with another weapon or Joe Ross with a much-needed changeup.

But perhaps no one needs a new pitch more than one lefty experimenting with one this spring: Reds reliever Tony Cingrani. (And no group in baseball needs more help than what was a historically poor bullpen in Cincinnati last season.)

Cingrani told MLB.com the cutter he began developing this offseason is “just another way to get guys out… [The cutter] feels comfortable.”

But Cingrani really has had only one way, to date, to get major-league hitters out. Among all pitchers who tossed at least 40 innings last season, Cingrani led baseball in fastball usage, throwing his four-seam fastball 89.5% of the time.

Read the rest of this entry »

Throughout much of the offseason in this space, we’ve been taking a look at hitter contact quality, using 2016 granular exit-speed and launch-angle data as our guide. We’re down to the last two installments, in which some non-qualifying hitters from both leagues will be reviewed.

Read the rest of this entry »