| 9:11 |
: Welp okay
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| 9:11 |
: Hello friends and welcome to delayed Friday baseball chat
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| 9:11 |
: Hello, friend!
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| 9:11 |
: Hello friend
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| 9:12 |
: Where’s my burrito? Where’s my burrito? Where’s my burrito?
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| 9:12 |
: at the store
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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 Tampa Bay Rays. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.
Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Chicago NL / Cleveland / Detroit / Houston / San Diego / Toronto / Washington.
Batters
Due to their limited resources, the Rays have been compelled to search for value in places where it isn’t readily apparent. These financial constraints, for example, led pretty directly to the phenomenon known as Ben Zobrist, Improbable Superstar. The ascent of Kevin Kiermaier (502 PA, 4.2 zWAR) is almost equally improbable as Zobrist’s, though. Selected in the 31st round of the 2010 draft out of Parkland College, Kiermaier has now averaged more than four wins per season over his first three major-league campaigns. Much of that value, of course, is a product of Kiermaier’s defensive acumen. ZiPS calls for more of the same in that regard, projecting Kiermaier to save 17 more runs than the average center fielder.
With the exception of Evan Longoria (658, 3.9), unfortunately, the club doesn’t currently employ any field players who profile as anything much better than average — and the short-term prognosis for newly acquired Wilson Ramos (465, 2.5), one of only four batters who receives a forecast for more than two wins, is uncertain in light of the season-ending injury he suffered at the end of 2016.
The first few leaderboard sorts don’t produce many revelations about Junichi Tazawa, but if you finagle the filters and the cutoffs, you start to see why he might be attractive to a club. It’s more about consistency and volume than anything, and that’s a rare quality for a reliever — sufficiently rare, it seems, to earn him a two-year deal worth $12 million, the terms he reached late yesterday afternoon with the Miami Marlins.
Since 2012, Tazawa is 96th among 256 qualified relievers in ERA. He’s 38th in FIP. He’s given up a few homers, though, so let’s check strikeouts minus walks — weird, he’s 38th. So he’s okay.
No offense to Welington Castillo, but the hottest topic in Orioles land right now is whether the team should trade Zach Britton. Clubs, unsurprisingly, have shown interest in a possible deal. Scour the web and you’ll find polemics both for and against one. I’m here to argue the latter case.
The case for trading Britton isn’t hard to make. He’ll make $11.4 million next year, as projected by MLB Trade Rumors. That’s a lot of scratch for an ostensibly mid-market club to pay someone to pitch 70 innings.
Location: Los Angeles
Read the rest of this entry »
We can all agree that WAR does a pretty good job of sorting, right? Like, even if you can quibble with the numbers, it paints a pretty good general picture. Good players tend to have better WARs than worse players. Great, okay. Over the past couple seasons, 130 different players have batted at least 1,000 times. Recognize right away there’s selection bias here — it’s mostly just decent players, and better players, who would play that much. The sample is already skewed somewhat toward quality, toward talent. Within that pool, by WAR, Odubel Herrera ranks 38th. He’s statistical neighbors with Daniel Murphy, Dexter Fowler, Dustin Pedroia, and Kole Calhoun. Herrera turns 25 in a couple of weeks, and as a Rule 5 grab, he’s been fantastic.
It makes all the sense in the world that the Phillies would want to get Herrera locked up. And from Herrera’s side, of course he’d want guaranteed money. Two winters ago his old team left him unprotected. There’s vulnerability there, vulnerability no one wants to feel again and again. Herrera now has an extension, which isn’t strange. But it’s another extension that leaves a young player looking like he sold himself short.
The Angels and Brewers recently made a trade, with Milwaukee ending up with Jett Bandy. I’m going to guess you didn’t linger on the deal, if you heard about it at all. It’s not a move that’s going to change the landscape of either league. But I saw an interesting tweet on Tuesday:
David Stearns says Bandy has plus raw power that hasn’t necessarily shown up in his stats. Playing time split with Susac/Pina remains TBD.
— Adam McCalvy (@AdamMcCalvy) December 13, 2016
Jett Bandy: plus raw power! But for the most part invisible, at present. This is fairly typical scout-speak, and if you just concentrate on Bandy’s profile, there could be something there. He’s an extreme fly-ball hitter, and he stands 6’4. He turns 27 in March. He could be a really strong guy.
Thinking about the tweet, however, got me thinking about Statcast. What might we be able to learn about raw power from baseball’s new tracking technology?
When MLB and the Player’s Association agreed to the terms of a new CBA, the most substantial changes came in the rules governing the acquisition of players from other countries. The replacement of the bonus pools with a hard cap on bonus allocations was the big story, but, pretty quickly, people realized that a smaller change — raising the age of players exempt from the bonus pool system from 23 to 25 — could have a major impact on one of the world’s best players.
Projected standings in December have little value beyond serving as a conversation starter. By our depth charts, remaining free agents are still projected to accumulate more than 50 WAR this season. Consequently, projected standings will continue to change over the rest of the winter as more signings and trades occur. As I said, though, they’re good conversation starters, and one of the more interesting conversations they’ve started this winter revolves around whether or not the Angels might actually be good in 2017.
As things stand right now, the Angels are projected to go 85-77 and finish second in the AL West behind the Astros. Not only that, but those projected 85 wins represent the fourth-highest projected total in all the American League. Does that mean it’s time to start printing up postseason tickets in Anaheim? Of course not. It’s possible, however — even in the middle of the offseason — to get a sense of current roster strengths and weaknesses from the depth charts that appear here. That’s true of every team.
Take a look at the Angels’ depth chart, for example, and you’ll find that they’re doing A-OK in center field thanks to Mike Trout, but that left field is a bit of a weak spot due to the comparatively limited projected production of Cameron Maybin. That’s certainly a conclusion which passes the sniff test.
However, even the use of projections to diagnose roster weaknesses can be misleading. The Angels’ starting rotation currently profiles to finish almost exactly in the middle of the pack among major-league teams — 16th out of 30 — which would represent a significant improvement for one of the league’s worst rotations of the 2016 season. While noting this potential for improvement, though, it’s important to recognize the unavoidable potential for deception in assigning one clean, round number to projected numbers — numbers, that is, which disguise an inherent degree of uncertainty. If Garrett Richards, Matt Shoemaker, and Tyler Skaggs are healthy and productive then, sure, the team is in good position to field an improved starting rotation. As Jeff Sullivan pointed out at the start of the offseason, however, all three of those pitchers carry significant health question marks.
| 1:29 |
: I can’t do this to you. I’ll keep chatting. It’s too much fun.
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| 12:01 |
: Eric Hosmer or Greg Bird for strictly an offensive standpoint for the next few years?
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| 12:01 |
: Bird. Hosmer too married to his BABIP.
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| 12:02 |
: Austin Hedges or Blake Swihart from a pure offensive standpoint for the next few years?
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| 12:02 |
: Swihart.
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| 12:02 |
: the mets should add who this offseason?
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