How Did You Feel About the 2016 Season? (Part 1)

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November 7, 2016

With all due respect to Cameron Maybin, Carlos Ruiz, and Vidal Nuno, the offseason isn’t really underway yet. Roster tweaks are being made, sure, but the blockbuster moves are some time off, and for the majority of people, the 2016 season remains fairly fresh in the memory. The World Series is less than a week in the rear-view mirror, so I wanted to seize this chance to run the same polling project I ran after the end of the 2015 season. It’s time for me to analyze your fan psychology. All I need is your collective participation!

This is a post for fans of teams in the American League. The National League post will go up early Tuesday morning. If your favorite team plays in the AL, please take a moment to provide your response. If both your favorite teams play in the AL, please take two moments. If all three of your favorite teams play in — you see where this is going. You’re not an idiot. You read FanGraphs.

This should be very simple. It’s also probably something you could overthink, but I just want to know how your fan experience was over the last several months. Did you have a good time with baseball in 2016? Did baseball beat the emotional crap out of you? Was your favorite team a disappointment? Is it even possible for your favorite team to disappoint? Did you love going to the ballpark no matter what, or watching a new game every evening? There are so many variables that could go into this, but I’m going to guess the right answer will come to you. I’ll analyze all the results later this week. Thank you in advance for being good and helpful people.

All the polls are below. Hopefully the anchor text works to send you to your team directly!

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Ty Van Burkleo on the Indians’ Offense

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November 7, 2016

The Cleveland Indians finished the regular season with 777 runs scored. That qualified as fifth-most in the majors. Their lineup was more speed than power — they led the American League in steals — but they weren’t exactly the 1959 Go-Go Sox. The club logged over 500 extra-base hits, and they finished fourth in the junior circuit in both wOBA and wRC+.

Ty Van Burkleo deserves much of the credit. Cleveland’s hitting coach for each of the past four seasons, the 53-year-old Van Burkleo espouses an approach built on patience and controlled aggression. There’s an overall philosophy. At the same time, however, he recognizes that each hitter has strengths he needs to optimize.

Van Burkleo shared his views on hitting in two separate conversations. I spoke to him on the eve of the World Series, and again when the team was at Wrigley Field.

———

Van Burkleo on why the Indians offense was productive: “As a group — as nine guys in the lineup — everybody competes together. It’s not relying on just one or two guys to carry the load. We’ve had 11 walk-offs and I think they’ve been by nine different guys. Somebody is doing their part every day.

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The Interesting Part of a Boring Trade

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November 7, 2016

I wouldn’t say the Cameron Maybin trade exactly opened the floodgates or anything, but now we do have another trade to talk about. In this one, Carlos Ruiz is going from the Dodgers to the Mariners, and Vidal Nuno is headed in the other direction. You’re not impressed. No one’s impressed. This is a low-profile move, and maybe the most interesting player involved in the whole thought process is Austin Barnes, who’s now going to get a roster spot in Los Angeles. The Mariners are getting a backup catcher, and the Dodgers are getting a relatively soft-tossing reliever. It’s one of the first of many “whatever” moves we’re going to see over the next handful of months.

There’s still something here, though. The way I figure, it’s on the Dodgers’ side. To tackle the Mariners’ side first — they get a year of Ruiz, for $4.5 million. That’s not a bad rate for a reliable backup, and even though Ruiz is almost 38, he just managed a .365 OBP, and he projects to be a half-decent hitter. Pitchers seemingly like working with Ruiz, despite the fact that he rates as a below-average framer. He’s said to have those leadership qualities, he’s a better backup than Jesus Sucre, and he’s reasonable insurance for the unpredictable Mike Zunino. Ruiz makes sense here. You see why the Mariners jumped.

And I think you can see why the Dodgers jumped. In part, this is about clearing space for Barnes. But beyond that — I was asked recently about the market. We all know the market is light on starting pitching, and I was asked if there are more guys out there like Mike Montgomery, relievers you could target and think about putting in the rotation. Nuno might actually fit here. Here’s a plot of 2016 starting pitchers, and I’ve also included a red dot to represent Nuno, overall in the major leagues:

contact-strikes

If there’s one thing Nuno has proven, it’s that he’s a strike-thrower. He’s thrown strikes as both a starter and as a reliever, and while he’s never been a swing-and-miss type, his contact rates haven’t been terrible. On top of that, when Nuno moved to the bullpen, his stuff didn’t really play up. It’s easier, then, to imagine him as a starter again, throwing the same pitches around the same speeds. Don’t be too turned off by his home-run rates — he just allowed the same average exit velocity as Justin Verlander and Johnny Cueto. I don’t think it’s a stretch to look at Nuno and think he has some shot of being another Wei-Yin Chen. The core abilities there are pretty similar. Chen signed an $80-million contract.

Nuno is already 29. If he’s going to be Chen, he’d better hurry up. And the Dodgers aren’t hurting for starters, and starting candidates. Nuno isn’t going straight into the rotation, and maybe we’ll just never hear from him again. But Ruiz is an old catcher with one year of control left. Nuno is a younger strike-thrower with three years of arbitration eligibility. You can see why the Mariners wouldn’t mind this move. And you can see why the Dodgers would go for it. The Dodgers’ front office hasn’t forgotten its small-market roots, and they’re always trying to win the surplus-value game. Nuno could be something more than he looks like. The boring moves are seldom quite as boring as they seem.


Why Jason Hammel Is No Longer a Cub

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November 7, 2016

Not even 72 hours removed from winning the World Series, the Cubs made their first roster shakeup of the offseason – roster decision deadlines wait for no hangover. Yesterday, the Cubs officially declined the $12 million team option on Jason Hammel and will pay the $2 million buyout instead. Typically there isn’t too much surprise with contract options. Ryan Howard at $25 million? Decline. Wade Davis at $10 million? Accept. Declining Hammel’s option was so curious, however, that Cubs president of baseball operations Theo Epstein took a break from his bender to issue 318-word statement on the matter:

Hammel signed a one-year deal with the Cubs prior to the 2014 season, was traded to Oakland with Jeff Samardzija in the Addison Russell trade that July, and then returned to the Cubs on what would’ve been a three-year, $30 million contract had the option been picked up, but which has instead become a two-year, $20 million deal. In his two-and-a-half seasons with Chicago, he pitched 446 innings to a 3.59 ERA, 22.9% strikeout rate, and 5.9 WAR – and added 0.6 WAR with the bat, for good measure. Now, those stats might be disappointing for a top-of-the-rotation pitcher, but Hammel was functionally the Cubs’ fifth starter! Fifth starters aren’t supposed to be this good and the Cubs could’ve had effectively retained him for $10 million (his $12 million option minus the $2 million buyout), so why didn’t they?

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Filtering Options Have Been Added to the Splits Tool

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November 7, 2016

This past season we debuted our custom splits tool for players, and over the weekend, we updated the tool to include filtering options. These filtering options allow you to remove the lines of stats which don’t meet a specific criteria.

splits-tool

For example, if you wanted to view only those seasons in which Dexter Fowler recorded more than 200 plate appearances at home, you can add a filter for that. You could also add a filter to see the seasons where Fowler had over a 20% strikeout rate on those splits. This filter also works if you group by months, weeks and games, so, for example, you could return all the games in which a player had three or more hits. Filters act like the splits in that they can be combined and customized.

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The Team That Will Run the Winter

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November 7, 2016

The offseason is upon us. Free agency officially begins tomorrow, as the five day exclusive window ends, and teams and agents are free to begin officially negotiating with anyone they choose. But as we’ve seen in past years, the start of the free agent period doesn’t really set off a signing frenzy; the baseball free agent market moves pretty slowly for most players.

And that’s because teams generally want to kick a bunch of tires before committing to one path, and that tire-kicking includes exploring the trade market, figuring out who is buying and who is selling. The last few years, the league has seen a drastic shortage of sellers, as teams within spitting distance of .500 decided to fancy themselves as contenders thanks to the addition of the second Wild Card and the financial incentives related to making a deep postseason run. The reality of 22 or 23 teams trying to add talent while only six or seven teams were looking to unload veterans made for a challenging trade environment, and resulted in a bunch of teams deciding that free agency was the way to go last year.

This year, though, the free agent market stinks. There just isn’t the kind of impact talent out there that teams are used to being able to throw money at, so the trade market is likely to be even more active than usual. And yet, we might be in a similar position in regards to the ratio of buyers and sellers.

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Dan Szymborski FanGraphs Chat – 11/7/16

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November 7, 2016
11:59
Dan Szymborski: Main screen turn on.
12:00
Dan Szymborski: Been a few weeks since I did a chat – first I was away and then I haven’t been very social (lost a cat very suddenly and unexpectedly). No chat this week (traveling), but should hopefully settle into a normal pattern during the ZiPS Season.
12:01
JD15: Yesterday the Cubs declined the option on Jason Hammel which seemed very reasonable considering current market. Even if they didn’t plan to use him next year, wouldn’t it have made sense to pick up the option and trade him? Do you think this is Cubs trying to be “good people” by allowing Hammel to pick his own team (and make more money) or is it more likely medical related?
12:01
Dan Szymborski: And I’m holding the off-topics for the Lightning Round, for those that forgot.
12:02
Dan Szymborski: I would have picked up the option. Since they had a $2 million buyout anyway, it was essentially an option to pick up Hammel at 1/8, which I absolutely would have taken.
12:02
Dan Szymborski: I believe it was a mistake to not pick it up.

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The 2017 Free Agents Who Could Have Been

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November 7, 2016

You have a choice. Either I give you $100 right now, or you can let me flip a coin. If the coin lands on heads, I’ll give you $250. But if it lands on tails, I’ll give you $20. I’m using a fair coin, so the expected value of flipping the coin is $135 based on the 50/50 odds it lands on heads or tails. If you like risk or are a risk-neutral person, it’s an easy decision to take your chances with the coin because the odds are strongly in your favor. If you’re a risk-averse person, however, you’re more likely to take the sure thing because $135 isn’t a whole lot more than $100, and $100 is a whole lot more than $20.

Let’s add another wrinkle. It’s the same choice, but if you choose the coin flip, you have to wait a month. The dollar amounts are the same, but now there’s a time component. To get the value of the coin flip, you need to apply a discount factor to the $135. For some people, that discount factor is pretty close to one, but it might be much lower if you’re strapped for cash and the $100 would dramatically improve your life in the present.

Major-league players face a much higher stakes version of this decision when their club comes to them with a contract extension. Do they take a sure thing now, or do they wait and gamble on themselves? While we’re focusing a lot on the 2016-2017 free-agent class this month, there are 13 players who could have been free agents for the first time this year but instead chose to cash out early by signing extensions. Did they make the right decision?

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Justice Dept Sues AT&T/DirecTV Over Dodgers Broadcasts

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November 7, 2016

For the last three years, the overwhelming majority of baseball fans in Los Angeles have been unable to watch the Dodgers play on television. In 2014, the team partnered with cable provider Time Warner to launch SportsNet LA, a network dedicated to the franchise. Citing the excessive price that Time Warner was demanding from other cable providers for the rights to air SportsNet LA — such as an initial asking price of roughly $5 per subscriber per month — other service providers like AT&T, DirecTV, and Cox have subsequently refused to carry the network.

As a result, since 2014, upwards of 70% of Los Angeles residents have not had access to televised Dodgers games. Indeed, because Time Warner only offers cable services in parts of the Los Angeles metropolitan area, in many cases even if fans were willing to change cable providers to gain access to the Dodgers, they were nevertheless still unable to do so because none of the available providers in their neighborhood carried SportsNet LA.

Given its high asking price for the network, it’s not surprising that the public has typically painted Time Warner as the bad guy throughout this ordeal. According to a lawsuit filed last week by the U.S. Department of Justice, however, Los Angeles sports fans’ anger may have been misdirected, as it now appears that DirecTV — now owed by AT&T — may in fact be largely to blame for the Dodgers’ three-year blackout across much of Los Angeles.

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Contract Crowdsourcing 2016-17: Yoenis Cespedes

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November 7, 2016

As in other recent offseasons, FanGraphs is once again facilitating this offseason a contract-crowdsourcing project, the idea being to harness the wisdom of the crowds to the end of better understanding the 2016-17 free-agent market. Woefully omitted from the main round of this year’s crowdsourcing ballots was Yoenis Cespedes, who opted out of his contract with the New York Mets this weekend, forgoing $47.5 million over the next two years in order to test the market.

Below is a brief summary of Cespedes’ recent career, plus a link to his ballot.

***

Yoenis Cespedes (Profile)
Some relevant information regarding Cespedes:

  • Has averaged 621 PA and 4.4 WAR over last three seasons.
  • Has averaged 4.2 WAR per 600 PA* over last three seasons.
  • Recorded a 3.2 WAR in 543 PA in 2016.
  • Is projected to record 3.1 WAR per 600 PA**.
  • Is entering his age-31 season.
  • Made $27.5M*** in 2016, as part of deal signed in January 2016.

*That is, a roughly average number of plate appearances for a starting player.
**Prorated version of 2017 depth-chart projections now available here.
***Including a $17.5M base salary and $10.0M signing bonus.

Click here to estimate years and dollars for Cespedes.


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