FanGraphs Baseball

Ten plays. Ten plays can change a player’s career.

We talk all the time about how defensive numbers come in small samples. For an outfielder, the sample of plays that actually separate a good from a bad defender is even smaller.

In most cases, a batted ball to the outfield is either a can of corn or a clear hit. In between, there just aren’t many opportunities. For Rajai Davis as a center fielder, there are 19 plays that could have gone either way over the last two years. He missed 10 of them — which is bad — and then many of us stopped considering him as a center fielder. Ten plays!

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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 Minnesota Twins. 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
If you were to travel back to the winter of 2013-14 and inform the earlier version of yourself that, in just three years time, Joe Mauer (532 PA, 0.9 zWAR) would receive the worst projected WAR among all Twins starters, the young iteration of you would slap the older one right in the mouth. After that, he’d have some pretty understandable questions about how your journey to the recent past has been made possible and why you’ve chosen to make it. In that intial moment, however, the absurdity of your comments regarding Joe Mauer would overcome him.

On the one hand, this is a negative development for Minnesota. For the past couple years, they’ve typically run payrolls of about $100 million. Allocating nearly a quarter of that to a single win isn’t helpful.

On the other hand, this represents a very positive development for Minnesota — because Mauer’s projection isn’t that bad. Rather, a number of the other projections are just better. For the past couple years, the Twins have lacked an adequate supply of competent hitters and fielders. Regard: last season, their position players ranked 25th by WAR. The season before that? 27th. What the ZiPS numbers here depict is something much more like an average group — with serviceable depth, too.

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On December 8, the Cleveland Indians’ Web site published a brief, 135-word story announcing James Harris as the club’s new farm director.

While filling such vacancies is typically not headline news, it was a modest announcement for one of the more inspired front-office additions of the offseason.

Why is it interesting?

Harris never played baseball professionally, in college, or high school.

In fact, Harris has never coached the sport at any level.

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Today we’re introducing a new form of FanGraphs Membership: Ad Free Membership. With Ad Free Membership, you become a full-fledged member of the site and you will not see a single third-party advertisement on the FanGraphs website so long as you maintain your membership. The price of Ad Free Membership is $50 per year.

If you are already a FanGraphs Member, you’ll be able to easily upgrade your membership at a pro-rated rate, depending on how much time you have left before your renewal date. Just select the new “Ad Free Yearly Membership” and hit the Sign Up Now button.

To give everyone a sense for what Ad Free Membership looks like, we’re going to put the site into Ad Free mode for all users through Monday. We hope you’ll like what you see. I know for the few of us who have been beta testing the product, we can attest that it really does make a noticeable difference in both the speed and responsiveness of the site.

Let me give you some details on why we’ve decided to do this. Earlier this year we introduced FanGraphs Membership, and we are incredibly thankful for everyone who has decided to become a member thus far! FanGraphs Membership is a way for you to help fund the site’s current operations and its future growth. If you think we’re doing a good job and you’d like to support our efforts, it’s a great way to show your support.

However, even with FanGraphs Membership, the majority of our revenue comes from advertising. Without advertising, there is no way the site could continue to operate. This has become a bit of a double-edged sword for us. As online advertising technology has advanced, it has also become more resource intensive, taking up both processing power and bandwidth. While there are movements within the online advertising industry to combat advertising bloat, we want to give our users a way to avoid ads completely, without cutting off the revenue stream which is essential for FanGraphs to operate. Ad Free Membership does exactly that.

We rely on various advertising networks to provide ads to us, and we do our best to vet all of these networks to make sure they’re not serving intrusive or malicious ads. But, even the most diligent ad networks have intrusive ads that slip through the cracks. Tracking down intrusive ads has more or less become a game of whack-a-mole for us over the past few years. Intrusive ads annoy us just as much as they annoy you, and we are constantly trying to make sure the advertising experience on FanGraphs is acceptable.

We will remain completely committed to having a non-intrusive advertising experience for those who would prefer not to become Ad Free Members.

It would be disingenuous of me to not mention ad-blocking. Ad-blocking is a real problem for us, but we also understand the many reasons people decide to install ad-blockers. If you are using an ad-blocker and you regularly visit FanGraphs, I urge you to become an Ad Free Member. There is now a real option for you that will help us continue to bring you high quality baseball content, without ads.

As we’ve stated before in our previous membership posts, Ad Free Membership, or any type of FanGraphs Membership is not a paywall. Whether you decide to be a member or not, all the content on FanGraphs remains available to you. We are incredibly thankful to the entire FanGraphs community for supporting us over the years and hope that we can continue to earn your support going forward.

Left-hander Marlon Arias hasn’t participated in affiliated ball since 2009, when he was a member of the Dodgers system. As for what he’s done in the meantime, it’s probably fair to say that his whereabouts haven’t been documented meticulously. His player page at FanGraphs suggests he’s passed at least a few of the subsequent years (2012 and 2014-15) in the Mexican League. Neither Baseball Reference nor Baseball Cube reveal much else of substance on the matter. Generally speaking, where the subject of Marlon Arias is concerned, mum has been the word.

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After a short break for the holidays, it’s time to jump back into the saddle and continue our position-by-position look at 2016 hitter performance using ball-in-play data. We’ve gone around the horn in the infield — finishing there with National League third basemen — and now move to the outfield, starting with AL left fielders. Be forewarned: this was not a very productive group. Things will pick up a little bit next week when we deal with their senior-circuit counterparts. As a reminder, we’re utilizing granular exit-speed and launch-angle data to measure how position players “should have” performed in comparison to their actual stat lines.

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Much like the run-up to Christmas or perhaps the NHL Stanley Cup playoffs, the Hall of Fame season seems to get longer and longer. Thanks to Ryan Thibidaux we have more data regarding how writers are voting and who might gain induction. Thanks to the revamping of the Veteran’s Committee, in the form of the Eras Committee, we’re able to begin debates over which overlooked players might be worthy of consideration. Also, the Hall of Fame has moved back the announcement of voting results by two weeks from last year, when Ken Griffey Jr. and Mike Piazza were received entry into the Hall of Famers. While early January might be more accurately considered the “leftover free-agent-market portion” of the baseball calendar, examining the cases of future Hall of Famers seems like a slightly more uplifting task. So, as part of this year’s Hall of Fame season, here’s a piece on active position players and what’s required of them to earn consideration for enshrinement when they become eligible.

First, a note: I’m not the first person to engage in this sort of exercise. Mike Petriello has now performed it two years running and Jay Jaffe took a brief look in the middle of last year, as well. In order to add some value to the conversation, we’ll take a look, using a WAR framework, at what exactly some of these players need to accomplish to establish their credentials for the Hall.

In each of the tables below, I’ve included every player’s HOF Ratings — about which metric one can read more here — and the median HOF Rating at the relevant position both for (a) all Hall of Famers regardless of how they got into the Hall of Fame and (b) Hall of Famers elected by the writers (denoted as BBWAA Median), who have had a tougher standard. Given the lapse in election by means of the Veterans (now Eras) Committee, it might be best to look more closely at the writer’s number in terms of likelihood of election. The last column shows an example of what the player likely needs to do to be a Hall of Famer or at least get in the discussion, where noted.

First, the guys who seem very likely to make the Hall of Fame.

Albert Pujols is an easy choice. Miguel Cabrera has already exceeded the standards for first basemen in the Hall, and with a few more good seasons will be better than Jeff Bagwell both by the advanced metrics and the traditional numbers. Ichiro presents a unique case given his late debut, but it’s difficult to see voters keeping him out with his considerable accomplishments. Adrian Beltre should be a no-brainer, but the writers have been particularly stingy when it comes to third baseman. Ron Santo couldn’t make it in on the writer’s ballots, for example, despite a strong resume. Although, to be fair, there haven’t been too many other third baseman who have had great cases. Chipper Jones has one for next year, Scott Rolen has a better case than one might think, and Beltre will have a great case in another half-dozen years or so.

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Back on November 29th, the Brewers decided to non-tender first baseman Chris Carter, despite the fact that he hit 41 home runs for them last year. Despite his big time power, they wanted to open the position for Eric Thames, a free agent they signed the same day. Thames has been a star over in Korea the last few years, and the Brewers decided to bet on his uncertainty, hoping that some of his success over there is based on real improvements, and not just evidence of what a minor league slugger can do to inferior competition.

Normally, when teams make moves, we like to cite the projection system data as a baseline, to give us a rough understanding of what a player might reasonably be expected to do going forward. Because Thames was playing in Korea, though, we didn’t have a Steamer projection for him at the time, and in fact, we didn’t have one for him until yesterday, when Jared Cross finished running his forecasts for international players. And so, starting today, we’re officially displaying a projection for Thames here on the site. And it’s a pretty good one.

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Position: Arizona Diamondbacks Senior Baseball Systems Developer

Location: Phoenix
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