To be clear, there are two positions here.
Location: Pittsburgh
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Location: St. Petersburg, Fla.
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The Braves have signed their second pitcher over the age of 40 in as many days. This time it’s the unflappable Bartolo Colon, bringing the man they call Big Sexy’s three-year run in Queens to an end. Colon made himself one of the most beloved figures in baseball during that time. He threw 588.2 innings as a Met, posting a 3.90 ERA, walking just 1.31 batters per nine innings, accumulating 8.3 WAR, and hitting one incredible home run. Thankfully, he will remain in the National League, and will continue to dazzle us with his hitting feats.
Much like R.A. Dickey, who they signed yesterday, Colon is being brought in by the Braves to soak up innings. He led the Mets in innings pitched during his time in Queens and shows no real signs of slowing down. The Braves used 16 starters last year, everyone from Julio Teheran to Lucas Harrell to Jhoulys Chacin to the artist formerly known as Fausto Carmona. Only three of them cleared the 100 IP mark. Teheran was legitimately good, Mike Foltynewicz was okay, and Matt Wisler, shall we say, has some things to work on.
Earlier recaps: Episode 1 / Episode 2 / Episode 3 / Episode 4 / Episode 5 / Episode 6.
Welcome to our recap of the seventh episode of Pitch, entitled “San Francisco”. As always, there are spoilers, so proceed with caution.
We open with Mike Lawson (Mark-Paul Gosselaar) alone in the Padres clubhouse, the first to arrive for that day’s game. This suggests that we may well be in for a Mike-centric episode.
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: Hello friends
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: Welcome to Friday baseball chat
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: Waiting for you, Bork!
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: praise Jeff, for baseball chat!
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: Praise FanGraphs, for the assignment!
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: Joel Sherman tweeted yesterday that the Rays came away from the GM meetings more confident that they’re going to trade one of Archer/Odorizzi/Smyly. Chris Archer for Andrew McCutchen — who says no? And what would have to be added to make it work? C’mon Jeff, rosterbate with me.
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I did a presentation in Arizona this weekend for First Pitch Arizona, an event at the Arizona Fall League hosted by BaseballHQ. The presentation served as an introduction to spin rates and exit velocity and so on. I examined the new stat from our friends at Statcast — Barrels — and how Michael Conforto does well by that stat, which attempts to combine exit velocity and launch angles to credit players who make dangerous contact. On the way out, someone asked me, basically: “So if he’s good at barreling the ball, what happened last year? What went wrong on those barrels?” There’s an easy answer and a hard answer.
The easy answer is that even players who are good at barreling the ball don’t barrel it all that often. Conforto is in the top 75 when it comes to barreling, and he barreled only about 11% of his batted balls this year. The elite guys this year — Gary Sanchez, Khris Davis, Nelson Cruz, Chris Carter and Mark Trumbo — barreled the ball around 18% of the time when they put the ball in play. Even among that group, there’s another 80% of batted balls unaccounted for.
That mirrors the difference in home-run rate, sort of. The top two in homers — you might recognize Trumbo and Davis — have a 7% home-run rate, about double that of the 75th guy, Andrew McCutchen (3.5%). But in the gaps between them, you still find interesting players. Conforto, for example, would have been 84th in home-run rate had he qualified, a little worse than (but still comparable to) his barreling rate.
There are a lot of reasons to assume that right-handed Boston Red Sox prospect Michael Kopech is well positioned — or, at least, as well positioned as any young pitcher can be — not only to reach the majors but also to experience some success while there. The velocity is one reason why, obviously. He reportedly hit 105 mph on multiple radar guns earlier this summer. He was sitting at 93-97 during instructional-league play last month. He’s recorded an average fastball of 98.7 mph in the Arizona Fall League. Provided his arm remains attached and in mostly serviceable condition, he appears certain to serve at least as competent reliever.
There are other promising indicators, though. Objective ones. Consider: Kopech was selected 33rd overall in the 2014 draft. Research by Matthew Murphy indicates that players taken between 31st and 35th overall as amateurs produce about two and three wins over the course of their team-controlled years. As for his status as a prospect, specifically, one finds that Kopech was ranked 89th on last year’s edition of Baseball America’s top-100 list. The most recently updated iteration of Kevin Creagh and Steve DiMiceli’s work on prospect valuation suggests a pitcher ranked between 75 and 100 on BA’s list is likely to contribute something like three or four wins before reaching free agency.
Two or three or four wins might not seem like a great result over half a decade, but that’s also just an average figure. There’s a lot of attrition baked into it, a lot of zero-win seasons. The point is that, on average, a pitcher with Kopech’s profile ends up contributing in the majors. That has considerable value.
There’s one more promising indicator for Kopech, though, and it’s not necessarily one you’d expect — namely, his performance so far in the Arizona Fall League, where he’s recorded the highest strikeout rate among starters. Given the circumstances under which it’s played, there are multiple reasons to discount the numbers coming out of the AFL. It’s a developmental league, first of all. The mandate isn’t really for prospects to “win” as much as it is to improve. Plus there’s also the fact of the inflated run environment, which is probably the product of an imbalance in the quality of pitching and hitting prospects and also the product of the weather in Phoenix. Finally, there’s an even more basic reason why to approach Fall League data with some caution: the samples are small. There are only about 30 games in an AFL season — or, the equivalent of a month’s worth of regular-season major-league play. The dangers of extrapolating too much from a single month of data are manifest.
So I actually ran two different polling projects this week. In one of them, I asked you to reflect on your 2016 fan experience. I wrote about the results of that on Thursday. In the other one, I asked you to look ahead to 2017. The question was pretty simple: For whichever given team, how many games do you expect that team to win?
I tried to make it clear I wasn’t asking about the teams with rosters as presently constructed. I wanted you to fold in some offseason expectations, some additions or subtractions. Of course, we don’t know how the real offseason will go, but we have ideas of what various teams want to do. In any case, I plan to look at numbers like these a few times before Opening Day 2017. Here goes the first analysis!
Free agency is here. As you’re well aware by now, it’s not a particularly great crop this year, but there are still some solid players out there to be signed, and some interesting high-risk bets to be made by teams that don’t mind a little (or a lot of) uncertainty. To help you get a sense of what we feel the market might look like this winter, we’ve decided to present the results of the Contract Crowdsourcing project along with my predicted contract values in one big list. We’ve previously done these in separate posts, but this year, we thought it made more sense to collect all the information in one place.
In terms of the numbers, keep in mind that the crowdsourced values are generally a good bit lower than what players actually sign for, because the player signs, most often, with the highest bidder, while the crowdsourced results are an average of what our readers think a player should get. My guesses are generally a bit higher than the crowd’s estimate, though that isn’t true for every player. It’s also worth noting that opt-outs are still likely to be a thing this winter, and they’re basically impossible to price into a series like this, so we didn’t really try. You might see guys sign for less than expected, but with an opt-out, which they’re accepting as part of the value of the deal.
Oh, and before we get to the list, I’d like to suggest that you not get too worked up over the ordinal rank of players, especially outside the top 20. There are ~15 to 20 solid players in this class, and then there are just a whole bunch of flawed role players who could be seen as not too different from one another. There are even some guys who didn’t make this top 50 that you could argue are as valuable some of the guys in the 30-50 range. The difference between players on the back half of the list is pretty small, for the most part, so if you think a guy should be No. 29 instead of No. 42, you’re not going to get much argument from me.
Also, the actual rankings themselves reflect my preference; they aren’t sorted by expected contract, either my guess or the crowd’s. There are some players who are going to get paid a lot more or less than their placement on this list indicates, and we’ll cover them in more detail next week when we look at the potential bargains and landmines this class offers.
With all that said, let’s get to the list.
Earlier this week, you were asked to place some votes, and some of those votes were placed on FanGraphs. I ran a polling project identical to the one I ran after the 2015 World Series, and many thousands of you participated, for which I am grateful. On a team-by-team basis, I asked you how you felt, in general, about the season that was. Here’s a sample poll:
Part of the fun of these projects is sparking some discussion. But most of the fun of these projects comes from eventually analyzing all the results. That’s what we’re here for today. I’ve got my spreadsheet and plots all together, so, away we go!
