FanGraphs Baseball

Oakland A’s fans didn’t have many reasons to be optimistic in 2016. The team’s playoff odds peaked at 20%… on April 3rd. As the season wore on, Sonny Gray’s ERA rose almost as high as the home runs against him flew. The team’s 69-93 final record was the icing on the cake.

Sean Manaea provided one bright spot. Acquired from Kansas City in 2015 in exchange for Ben Zobrist, Manaea is a 6-foot-5, 245-pound lefty. He debuted in April and, after tweaking his changeup grip, remained in the rotation the entire season. He gave up more than his fair share of home runs, but the 14.7-point difference between his strikeout and walk rates (K-BB%) proved he could fool batters. His 93 xFIP- ranked alongside that of Rookie of the Year Michael Fulmer.

The 2017 season doesn’t look much rosier for the A’s organization. Our Depth Charts projections have them bringing up the rear in the AL West again. But at least the team’s fans can be optimistic Manaea will perform well in 2017, for four very good reasons.

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The Diamondbacks are building a Boston culture in the desert. That’s according to Amiel Sawdaye, who has the title of Senior Vice President, Assistant General Manager. Sawdaye came to Arizona over the offseason along with Mike Hazen, who stepped into the GM role in October. Both had long tenures with the Red Sox, with Sawdaye most recently serving as Vice President of Amateur and International Scouting.

They didn’t travel west alone. Jared Porter was with the Red Sox for over a decade before spending last season as Director of Professional Scouting for the Chicago Cubs. His title with the D-Backs is the same as Sawdaye’s. Meanwhile, Torey Lovullo, Arizona’s new manager, was Boston’s bench coach the past four seasons.

Sawdaye explained what the foursome’s Boston roots mean for the organization, including its use of analytics and the adaptation of a flat hierarchy.

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Sawdaye on coming to Arizona from Boston: “From the standpoint of coming here, we’re in a different league — we have to look at things a little differently — but despite what people might think, a lot of things were being done really well. A lot of good was happening behind the scenes. There are some really good people here. Mike Bell, who oversees the player development department, has done a great job.
 
“There are a lot of really good young people in the front office. Read the rest of this entry »

Geography is a powerful force. In his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, for instance, Jared Diamond argues that geography is the most powerful force to have shaped civilization. Societies that have benefited from favorable geography and access to resources have enjoyed more prosperity than those that have not.

In baseball, geography has mattered quite a bit, too.

Generally, teams residing along the coasts are located in larger markets and enjoy more fans — which means they enjoy more paying customers, more advertising dollars and corporate sponsors, and greater TV deals, too. The Yankees, residing in the game’s largest market, own 27 World Series titles. Teams based in the fly-over country cities of St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Detroit, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Kansas City and Milwaukee, have combined for 32 World Series titles, with the Cardinals alone accounting for 11 of those.

So perhaps the lasting legacy, the top achievement of Bud Selig, was ushering in an era of greater competitive balance that made geography and market size less deterministic. The small-market Royals won the World Series in 2015, and small-market Cleveland was one more timely hit away from doing so last fall. Twenty-one of the sports’ 30 franchises have advanced to the postseason since 2013, and every team has reached the postseason in the 21st century.

In the 1990s, competitive balance, the divide between the large- and small-market clubs, was a frequent talking point. In the latest round of collective-bargaining talks, it was not often the subject of discussion outside caps placed on international spending. For The Hardball Times last month, Gerald Schifman demonstrated objectively that “hope and faith” are at record levels in baseball. The majority of teams enter the season with a plausible path to at least the No. 2 Wild Card. I wrote in 2015, about how fly-over country was no longer irrelevant.

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Last week, I wrote up what I thought were the 10 best transactions made this winter, looking at teams that helped themselves the most with quality upgrades. Today, we tackle the flip side of that coin, and look at the moves that I liked the least.

However, because of the significant improvements teams have made in their decision-making processes, the reality is that this list simply lacks the magnitude of the best moves of the winter. It was really quite difficult to find even 10 transactions that I think did real damage to the franchises that made them, and the ones that ended up towards the end of this list are the kinds of boring little moves that most fans aren’t even going to realize happened.

Even at the top of this list, we’re looking at teams spending a little inefficiently on useful players who can help them win, with no real huge overpays or franchise-killing contracts that will be regretted for years to come. There were no “what were they thinking?” trades this year, no insane free-agent signings that show a huge gap between the market’s perception and a player’s on-field value. So, these are deals I liked the least in a winter full of mostly good moves. At this point, every team knows what they’re doing, and they just aren’t giving us much meat for these kinds of columns.

But symmetry says we have to publish it anyway, so here are the 10 moves for which I didn’t entirely care this offseason.

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Episode 717
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 garbage interlocutor on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.

A reminder: for the cost of a very expensive cup of coffee, readers can experience FanGraphs without ads. Click here to learn more about an Ad Free Membership.

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 5 min play time.)

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Mike Montgomery threw the pitch that ended 108 years of frustration for Cubs fans everywhere. Three-plus months later, he’s in camp competing for the fifth-starter spot in Chicago’s rotation. If that doesn’t come to fruition, the southpaw will settle for being a valuable bullpen arm on a juggernaut.

A lot has changed in 12 months. Montgomery was a Mariner at this time last year — he came to the Cubs in July — and his old club wasn’t expecting much from him.

“Seattle basically told me I wasn’t going to make the team,” Montgomery said during the World Series. “I bet on myself. I said I was going to show up and earn a spot, and that I was going to pitch well. I had some success — I had some failures, too — but it was kind of my breakthrough.”

Eight years after being drafted 36th overall the Kansas City Royals, the now 27-year-old lefty finally stepped up his game. He made 47 appearances between Seattle and Chicago — all but seven as a reliever — and fashioned a 2.52 ERA over 100 innings.

An improved curveball was the catalyst. The pitch was a primary focus going into the season, and it became an even bigger one once Montgomery got to Chicago. Pitching coach Chris Bosio played a major role. Read the rest of this entry »

Here are some undeniable facts.

1. Dellin Betances was the third-best reliever in baseball by WAR last year.
2. He has the third-best strikeout rate, all-time, among pitchers who have thrown at least 250 innings.
3. He has 22 career saves, with 12 of them coming last year.

Betances, eligible for arbitration for the first time, filed for a $5 million salary this winter; the Yankees countered at $3 million. This was the second largest gap for any player that got to the filing stage this year, only $100,000 behind the $2.1 million difference that Drew Pomeranz ($5.7M request) had with the Red Sox ($3.6M offer), and unlike the Red Sox, the Yankees decided to not split the difference and instead head to a hearing.

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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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With apologies to Pedro Alvarez, just about every decent bat in this winter’s free-agent class has signed. We heard all winter about how the market for the offense-first, defensively limited sluggers was a bad one this offseason, and we saw many players sign contracts for less than expected. This happened to those at the highest levels — like Edwin Encarnacion who took a shorter deal than anticipated — as well as at the lower end, where many players expected to receive multi-year deals had to settle for one-year contracts. There was a general lack of talent among free agents this offseason, but the glut of mediocre options likely played into a depressed market.

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