It’s that time of year again! This past Friday was the filing deadline for arbitration-eligible player contract offers. Once these numbers are published, I like to create a data visualization showing the difference between the team and player contract filings. (See the 2016 version here.) If you are unfamiliar with the arbitration process here’s the quick explanation from last year:

Teams and players file salary figures for one-year contracts, then an arbitration panel awards the player either with the contract offered by the team or the contract for which the player filed. More details of the arbitration process can be found here. Most players will sign a contract before numbers are exchanged or before the hearing, so only a handful of players actually go through the entire arbitration process each year.

The compiled team and player contract-filings data used in the graph can be found at MLB Trade Rumors.

Three colored dots represent a different type of signing: yellow represents a mutually-agreed contract signed to avoid arbitration, red represents the award of the team’s offer in arbitration, and blue represents the award of the player’s offer. A gray line represents the difference in player and team filings. Only players with whom teams exchanged numbers on January 13, 2017 will have grey lines. These can be filtered by clicking the “Filed” button.

The “Signed” button filters out players who have signed a contract for 2017; this will change as arbitration hearings occur. Finally, “All” includes every player represented in the graph. This year Jake Arrieta and Bryce Harper had the two largest contracts ($15.367M and $13.625M, respectively), but they both signed contracts before the filing deadline. This causes changes on the x-axis scale on the “Signed” and “All” tabs compared to the “Filed” tab, which is scaled to contracts under $10M.

The chart is sorted either by contract value or by the midpoint of the arbitration filings. The midpoint is the average of the two contracts and determines which contract the arbitrator awards based on his assessment of the relevant player’s value. The final contract value takes precedent over the midpoint since this represents the resolved value. Contract extension details will be written out over the data points. For our purposes, an extension is a multiyear deal that can’t be shown on the graph, since we are looking only single-year contracts for 2017.

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After having typically appeared in the very famous pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past few years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Miami Marlins. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cleveland / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles AL / Los Angeles NL / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / St. Louis / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Toronto / Washington.

Batters
In every season from 2011 to 2014, right fielder Giancarlo Stanton (484 PA, 3.8 zWAR) produced the highest WAR total among Miami’s field players. In 2015, he produced the second-highest WAR total on the club — less due to his own shortcomings, however, and more to the .383 BABIP that allowed Dee Gordon (606, 2.1) to record a career-best offensive season. Stanton was almost unassailably the club’s top position player for a period of five years.

The 2016 campaign marked a departure for Stanton, however, from the top of the club’s leaderboard. Limited by injury to just 470 plate appearances, Statnton also produced the worst offensive season of his career. He finished sixth on the team in wins. At the same time, Christian Yelich (638 PA, 3.8) recorded his second four-win season over the last three years. Now the two receive the same win projection, is the point of these whole two paragraphs.

One note: Yelich is located at center field on the depth-chart image below, Marcell Ozuna (602, 2.5) in left — because that seems like the club’s probable alignment in 2017. The two are projected at the opposite positions, however. Generally speaking, there’s about a 10-run difference in the positional adjustment between left and center over the course of a full season. That would render Yelich (projected for +6 runs in left) about a -4 defender in center; Ozuna (projected for -3 runs in center), a +7 fielder in left.

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The signing of Eric Thames and the projections subsequently produced for him represent two of the more interesting, if lower-profile, developments of the offseason. Since Thames took his quick left-handed swing across the Pacific, he’s become one of the top sluggers in the hitter-friendly Korea Baseball Organization.

If you have 30 free minutes you can watch all 47 of his 2015 home runs thanks to YouTube:

Despite having already played in the majors, Thames is something of a mystery, a curiosity, in transitioning from a foreign professional league. If the projections are accurate, however – and his Davenport translations are pretty close to other, former international unknowns like Jose Abreu, Yoenis Cespedes and Jung Ho Kang – then the Brewers have themselves a steal.

In the cases both of Cespedes and Kang, who played in foreign leagues that draw fewer scouts, analytics played a considerable role in the decision to sign them. Analytics and projections also played a significant part in the Thames signing, as Brewers GM David Stearns told David Laurila in the latter’s Sunday notes this weekend.

Kang was the first KBO hitter to make the jump directly to the majors. There were no direct comparisons. But plenty of South Korean stars had played in the Japan’s Nippon Professional Baseball Organization, so the Pirates looked at their production in Japan and then studied the more sizable sample of NPB position players who have played in the majors.

Back in 2013, the A’s were also creative in projecting Cespedes, then a trailblazing Cuban defector, as detailed by Ben Reiter in Sports Illustrated.

“[Farhan] Zaidi built a model that analyzed not just the grades the scouts had given to Cespedes on the usual eight-point scale, but also the scouts themselves. Say three guys have a six power on him, three guys have seven power on him. What kind of minor leaguers or major leaguers do those guys have those grades on?”

The A’s did not miss a chance to scout Cespedes when access was available. The Pirates did send scouts over to evaluate Kang in addition to video analysis (though Kang’s off-the-field issues were apparently not discovered). Still, recent success stories of players signed from foreign pro leagues are analytics-heavy because they’ve had to be. There are few scouting resources committed to South Korea and Japan. Cuba has been difficult to scout due to political reasons.

But what are MLB clubs missing at the professional and amateur levels by not having more of a scouting presence in places like South Korea? And why are such areas not heavily staffed?

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Football — what we Americans call soccer — rules Scotland’s sporting scene. Rugby runs a distant second, while golf, which was invented in St. Andrews, probably ranks third in terms of popularity.

Baseball barely registers a blip in the country’s sporting consciousness. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t played there. An organization called Baseball Scotland is keeping it alive, with hopes of increasing both interest and participation.

I learned more from one of its members while I was in Glasgow over the holidays.

Xander Harrison, a 24-year-old financial services analyst, plays for the Glasgow Comets. Over pints of Tennent’s Lager at a City Centre watering hole, Harrison told me that Baseball Scotland was formed in 2007 by the Edinburgh baseball club, which previously had teams in the British Baseball Federation, but had become disgruntled with the league organization and costs. There had also been a recognized BBF Scotland Division, and before that a Scotland Division in the old British Baseball League.

There is no organized baseball in the Scottish school system. Harrison began playing around the age 11, when he joined a youth league formed by the Glasgow Baseball Association. His team — one of eight in the league at the time— was the White Sox. That led to his becoming a fan of Chicago’s South Side club. Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 709
Dayn Perry is a contributor to CBS Sports’ Eye on Baseball and the author of three books — one of them not very miserable. He’s also the unlikely hero on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.

Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.

You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.

Audio after the jump. (Approximately 1 hr 13 min play time.)

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Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on 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.
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As the long dormant Hot Stove season shows signs of flickering to life, we continue our position-by-position look at hitter contact quality. Last week, we looked at a rather moribund group of AL left fielders; today, it’s their NL counterparts, whose 2016 production was much more significant. As a reminder, we’re utilizing granular exit-speed and launch-angle data to measure how position players “should have” performed in comparison to their actual stat lines.

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One of the great things about FIP, in my estimation, is the ease with which one can understand its value. If you’re watching a pitcher for your preferred team and ask yourself “What outcome would bother me the most right here?” a home run is the clear answer. A walk is second. A single, double, or triple isn’t ideal, of course. In the case of every ball in play, though, there’s at least some chance for the defense to make a play. The walk and home run don’t allow that. They are, almost uniformly, decisively negative.

Conversely, a strikeout is generally the best outcome for a pitcher*. A batter who strikes out create no opportunity for value.

*Outside of a double play, of course. That requires a runner at first and less than two outs, though, something that happens less than 20% of the time.

What FIP does is to take those three outcomes and transform them into a pitching stat that’s consistent from year to year and better predicts future ERA than ERA itself does. One thing for which FIP doesn’t account, though, is all of those balls that are hit into play.

Or maybe it does.

We know that a pitcher exerts a decent amount of control over the types of batted balls he concedes. He might be a ground-ball pitcher, a fly-ball pitcher or a mix of both. Newer data pushes us closer to the conclusion that a pitcher has some control over how hard a ball is hit, as well — although most of the control does appear to come from the batter.

Statcast has given us the ability to help reach those conclusions. The graph below comes from the work of Sean Dolinar and Jonah Epstein — you can play around with their tool here — and illustrates the degree to which a pitcher’s observed launch angle and exit velocity represents his true-talent launch angle and exit velocity.

As you can see, there’s more hope for arriving at something like “true-talent” launch angle. And this makes sense: as noted above, we talk frequently about “ground-ball” and “fly-ball” pitchers. Grounders and flies are expressions of a pitcher’s control over launch angle. The relationship between a pitcher and his exit velocity is a bit more speculative, though.

Yesterday, I discussed how there was a detectable relationship between those two variables even looking at one year compared to the next. We also have a relationship (as discussed yesterday) between exit velocity and FIP, even if there’s also a decent bit of noise in there.

To see how the relationship with FIP works, it might be helpful to break down the components of FIP. The chart below depicts the correlation coefficient between average exit velocity and HR/9, BB/9, and K/9 for 186 single-seasons from 2015 and 2016 for the 93 pitchers who recorded more than 100 innings in both years.

While it’s possible that there’s some sort of relationship between strikeouts, walks, and exit velocity, that relationship doesn’t easily present itself in the data above. Where there does seem to be some sort of relationship is in home runs. Now let’s take a look at three groups from 2016: those with a high average exit velocity, those with a low average exit velocity, and a large group in the middle.

While the relationship between exit velocity and both strikeout and walk numbers appears to offer some promise, it might be better to consider them more deeply on another day. Not only is the coefficient lower for both those variables than for home runs, but strikeouts and walks exert less of an overall effect over FIP than homers.

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The last time I saw Drew Smyly, it was during one of the lowest points of his career. It was July and he’d just completed a stretch of 20.2 innings over which he’d allowed 21 earned runs. He’d been assured that his job was secure, for the moment, but when a local beat writer asked him how it felt, the pitcher had a hard time looking up, doing his best to provide an honest answer before moving on to the next question — any other question, please. I obliged, and asked him about the home runs, pointing out that his strikeouts and walks were fine. Up came the eyes, and on was the conversation.

Back then, the focus for me was organization-wide: the Rays got hit harder by the home run bug last year than most teams, perhaps because they threw more high fastballs than any other team in the league. And yeah, Smyly, because of the unique nature of his stuff, will always throw high in the zone, and will always give up a few more homers than most.

But we did talk about Smyly’s particular issues last year, and what he was planning on doing about it. And it looks like he capitalized on that conversation somewhat, because things changed a bit from that day forward. The real question, though, is did it change enough?

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Over the 50-plus years since their inception, the Mets organization has established a tradition of drama. When they win, they seem to win big. When they lose, they self-immolate in spectacular fashion. If I were to tell you a team were Metsing themselves, you’d probably know what I mean. There are likely many reasons for this — the local media, the size of the market, the team itself — but it seems true, nevertheless.

Despite their penchant for theatrics, the Mets have made the playoffs in each of the last two seasons. They’ve done it despite an avalanche of injuries and all sorts of extracurricular nonsense. They went all the way to Game Five of the World Series in 2015, and had the bad luck of running into the buzzsaw of Madison Bumgarner’s left arm in the 2016 Wild Card game.

They’re by no means done, of course. The Mets still have a dynamic young rotation, and they still have Yoenis Cespedes. That’s a great place to start when building a contender. They’ve also got good secondary players in guys like Asdrubal Cabrera, Lucas Duda, and Neil Walker, and a young bat with a bright future in Michael Conforto. Grizzled veteran? Have some Curtis Granderson. Local hero who’s also a capable utility bat, and can crush lefty pitching? Everybody loves Wilmer Flores. If you believe in miracles, they may even have David Wright (remember him?) back for a game or two. The Mets can play ball.

And yet, they still have so much work to do. The Mets are still on track to go into 2017 with real uncertainty behind home plate and a bullpen that leaves much to be desired — especially once you consider that they’ll probably be without Jeurys Familia for a month or so due to a likely domestic-violence suspension. Jay Bruce still doesn’t really fit onto the roster, especially since the re-signing of Cespedes and the need for Conforto to get consistent plate appearances, and the fact that the National League has yet to adopt the designated hitter.

There are still weeks to go before spring training gets into swing, and there are still plenty of free agents out there. A large number of them are relievers, and good ones at that. The Mets have time to make themselves better and ready for a true contention run. We’ll see if they do that.

We’ve not yet been blessed with Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections for the kings of Queens, nor for that matter have we asked Kevin James for his feelings on the subject. In lieu of these, we’ll turn to our Depth Charts assessment of the Mets, and to their official depth chart. Because there are so many balls in the air with their position players (the health of Wright, whether or not Jay Bruce will be on the team, etc.), let’s focus on the bullpen for now. It’s pretty good at the top! Familia, Addison Reed and Hansel Robles can hold their own. It gets fuzzy after that.

The official Mets chart lists Josh Edgin, Josh Smoker, Erik Goeddel, and Sean Gilmartin. The Mets can do better.

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