FanGraphs Baseball

Episode 708
Dave Cameron is the managing editor of FanGraphs. On this edition of the program, he discusses an innovation (care of Baseball Savant) in the measurement of outfield defense; examines Milwaukee’s rebuilding strategy through the lens of the club’s 2017 projections; and considers the optimal balance between fastballs and secondary pitches.

This episode of the program either is or isn’t sponsored by SeatGeek, which site removes both the work and also the hassle from the process of shopping for tickets.

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 40 min play time.)

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Ben talks to Joe Sheehan and Rany Jazayerli about unsigned free agents, baseball economics, trends to watch in 2017, and the perplexing Royals.

Whenever conventional wisdom and the numbers — or whatever conclusion I have drawn from the numbers — differ, I’m left wondering why such a difference exists. Many times there’s a good reason; other times, the reasons make less sense. One situation where my conclusions appear to differ from conventional wisdom comes in the form of Vladimir Guerrero and his case for the Hall of Fame. When recently considering Guerrero’s statistical credentials for the Hall, he seemed to fall short of the voting standards for most recent candidates who gained induction. At the same time, his name currently appears on 75% of this year’s ballots according to Ryan Thibodaux’s tracker. So what gives?

The easy answer is that voters — due to Guerrero’s brilliance and flair at the plate — are willing either to minimize or forgive entirely Guerrero’s defense and baserunning, as well as the fact that his last above-average season occurred at age-33. They aren’t necessarily wrong, as he certainly has a case by virtue of his peak and career WAR numbers. He also recorded a very good .318 career batting average and an MVP award. Plus, from 1997 to 2006, his 114 assists topped all outfielders, with his great arm obscuring his lack of range and errors, in which category (errors) he also topped MLB during that time. That’s probably the most reasonable explanation for why I concluded he was just below the cusp for the Hall of Fame — certainly worthy of consideration, but not a certain Hall of Famer like the voters appear close to making him.

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On Friday morning, the Mariners made what looked like a weird trade, shipping useful outfielder Seth Smith to the Orioles for less useful starting pitcher Yovani Gallardo, who is both not as good as Smith but also more expensive. Sure, the Mariners needed some more pitching depth, but they weren’t really rolling around in extra good outfielders, so subtracting Smith seemed weird.

Then, though, they made a second trade, this time swapping a starting pitcher for an outfielder, that made the pair of moves make a bit more sense. In the second deal, they shipped Nate Karns to Kansas City in exchange for Jarrod Dyson, who is a better player than Smith, so the series of moves actually resulted in an OF upgrade, with the impact to the pitching staff depending on what you think of Karns, who has both obvious strengths and minuses.

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There’s power in a great sales pitch.

The Ginsu knife ads included a blade slicing through a rubber hose and an aluminum can before carving a strip steak. Joy Mangano sold so well on QVC that Jennifer Lawrence played her in a film last year. At the TED Global 2009 conference, Michael Pritchard’s pitch for the Lifesaver water bottle, which uses nano-filtration technology to purify water, was named as one of the 15 best start-up pitches ever seen by the editors of Business Insider. Lifesaver was purchased by Icon Technology last year.

Sales pitches can be important in crowded, competitive industries, and perhaps the art of the sales pitch has never been more important for agents representing major-league players.

While various forms of Wins Above Replacement are imperfect and while it might be impossible to boil an athlete’s value down to one perfect number, such metrics are now widely accepted as useful tools to evaluate overall performance. Teams are generally operating with similar models and processes in regard to player valuation and projection. I suspect there are not many dramatic differences between club’s internal evaluations compared to public ones like fWAR or BWARP.

So if valuations are more accurate, and everyone has the same – or at least similar – data, then how does an agent beat the suggested values? How does an agent compel a club to pay for an age-33 season and older in an era when youth is king? How does an agent avoid this future: here is your client’s WAR/$ per year value, please sign on the dotted line.

Creating a market, an old-fashioned bidding war, is the preferable method. But while emotion will never be eliminated from the negotiation process so long as humans are involved, teams generally endeavor to act with more reason and less emotion.

I thought about the importance of the sales pitch after reading James Wagner’s fascinating article in The New York Times on Yoenis Cespedes and his contract negotiations.

Writes Wagner:

“With the help of an analytics firm in Chicago, (Cespedes’ agents) came up with a dollar figure for the impact Cespedes had on the field, social media, team television revenues, and ticket and merchandise sale. … They even put a figure, $3.2 million, on the value of the approximately 50 tabloid back pages that had featured Cespedes over the course of 2016. Cespedes playing with flair, Cespedes hitting game-changing home runs, Cespedes driving exotic cars in spring training, Cespedes arriving for a workout on horseback.”

Cespedes barbecuing?

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With the new year, you’ve probably noticed a few new things around here. For one, you can now help support the site with an ad-free membership, which is a pretty neat thing for both you and us. If you’re a heavy user of the site, it’s a great way to keep us in business but also make your FanGraphs experience more enjoyable.

And supporting us allows us to do things like hire Travis Sawchik, who made his debut as a staff writer last week, and has already made himself an integral part of the staff with pieces like the one he wrote this morning on home-field advantage. We’re really excited to have Travis here, and think he’s going to help make 2017 a great year for FanGraphs.

And we want you guys to get to know him better as well, so starting today, Travis is going to be taking over the Monday chat, and will be answering your questions starting at 12pm ET.

But don’t worry, fans of the Dan Szymborski chat; he’s not going away, he’s just moving. Dan will now be chatting on Wednesdays at 2pm ET, which should also lead to more Dan Szymborski chats, since there are fewer Wednesday holidays, so if you enjoy the Szymborski chat, you’ll probably have more of them in 2017.

So, that leaves us with the following chat schedule for 2017. All times listed are in eastern time.

Monday, 12 pm: Travis Sawchik
Tuesday, 12 pm: Eric Longenhagen
Tuesday, 9 pm: Paul Swydan and Jeff Zimmerman
Wednesday: 12 pm: Dave Cameron
Wednesday, 2 pm: Dan Szymborski
Thursday, 12 pm: Eno Sarris
Friday, 12 pm: Jeff Sullivan
Friday, 3 pm: Paul Sporer (RotoGraphs chat)

We hope you enjoy the chats, and we look forward to talking with you all this coming year.

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 Milwaukee Brewers. 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 / New York AL / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Toronto / Washington.

Batters
Milwaukee general manager David Stearns has dedicated the first year-plus of his tenure with the Brewers to a pursuit of affordable pieces that might contribute to the club’s next winning season, while trading away the most valuable pieces of its most recent one. The ZiPS projections here reflect the results of that endeavor. On the one hand, no field player is projected to record more than three wins in 2017. (Jonathan Villar, at 2.8 zWAR, is best acquitted by that measure.) On the other hand, 20 positions players receive a forecast of 1.0 WAR or better.

For context, consider: three of the National League’s playoff clubs from 2016 have been included thus far in this series of ZiPS posts. By comparison, only 16 of the Cubs’ position players receive a projection of one win or better. Only 13 of Washington’s do. And only 10 field players for the San Francisco Giants are expected to cross the one-win threshold, per ZiPS. Milwaukee, in other words, has gathered a large collection of players whose median probable outcome is slightly below average. Given the youth of that group, however, and the vagaries of the world, some of those players will develop into average or better players.

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Home-field advantage isn’t always considered a matter of great importance in baseball. Crowds aren’t as close to the action as they are in basketball. There’s nothing comparable in the sport to something like raucous Cameron Indoor Stadium. There are no 100,000-seat, canyon-like stadiums cascading noise to the playing surface like in college football.

But home-field advantage is a real thing in baseball, and significant, and has remained constant for better than a century.

The road winning percentage of visiting teams was .461 in the 1910s. Road winning percentage stands at .464 to date in the 2010s. Road winning percentage has remained consistent over the decades.

Since the 1970s…

Conventional wisdom has it that home-field advantage is derived from some combination of hostile crowds, fatigue from travel, and the familiarity of the playing surface. And, in a way that’s unique to baseball, teams can tailor their roster to their home park’s dimensions. Having carried on that way for better than a century, the home-field edge seems to be something of a scientific law.

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Per Ryan Thibodaux’s Hall of Fame Tracker, Edgar Martinez has received 69% of support from voters who have made their ballots public. This puts him well ahead of last year’s pace, although it’s likely that he’ll fall short of the 75% needed to put him over the top. This is the Seattle legend’s eighth year of eligibility.

While Martinez belongs in Cooperstown, it is understandable that some voters haven’t checked off his name. The 10-man limit is a primary culprit, as the ballot is once again stacked with strong candidates. Also working against him is his time as a designated hitter. Fairly or not, a not-insignificant number of ballot-casters hold that against him with a cudgel.

At least one voter feels Martinez simply wasn’t good enough. With ample room on his ballot, and a claim that DH had nothing to do with it, the scribe opined that he “never thought of him as a dominant, feared hitter in his era.” Read the rest of this entry »