Ben and Sam discuss the seemingly aimless Oakland Athletics and bring on two unwitting contestants (Eric Roseberry and Steve Givarz) to play the first Effectively Wild game show, “Name that Oakland A’s Position Player.”
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Ben, Sam, Grant Brisbee, and Jeff Sullivan produce a sequel to Episode 500 by drafting 12 more things about baseball.
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In 2015, Travis d’Arnaud was one of the league’s best power hitters. His .218 ISO placed him in the neighborhood of sluggers like Joey Votto and Kris Bryant. Following the season, Steamer projected that d’Arnaud’s ISO would be fourth best among catchers, and 24% better than 2015’s league average.
But that power was absent this past year, as d’Arnaud’s ISO fell by two thirds. At .076, it was one of MLB’s worst 10 marks, ranking the Mets catcher amid weak-hitting middle infielders like Dee Gordon, Adeiny Hechavarria, and Ketel Marte. d’Arnaud’s overall output took a huge hit, as his wRC+ sank to 74 this year after reaching 130 in 2015. That 56-point plummet is among the 1.1% worst year-to-year differentials of all time (minimum 250 PA). A decline this severe is unusual — and particularly surprising for a player who looked like a burgeoning star in 2015.
How did this downturn happen? In other cases, we might point to injuries or small sample sizes, but there’s reason to think that more was at play for d’Arnaud in 2016. That’s because he struggled with a longer swing in the 2016 season, generated by his bat wrap.
The pieces are starting to come together for the rebuilding Braves. Though they’ve spent their winter stocking up on veteran starting pitchers and piratey-looking utilitymen, it’s been a winter spent with an eye looking to the future. None of the players whom Atlanta has added are standing firmly in the way of a young prospect, and they all make the team just a little bit better for their debut at their new taxpayer-funded stadium.
The extension of Ender Inciarte is a different matter. This isn’t a move that allows the future to happen, it’s one that shows what the future is going to look like. Inciarte has been given $30.525 million to stick around for an extra two years, and the Braves hold a $9 million option for an additional year after that. If that sounds cheap for a young, three-win center fielder, it’s because it is. Here’s how the deal breaks down.
| Year | Age | Earnings (Millions) |
|---|---|---|
| 2016 (Signing Bonus) | 25 | $3.5 |
| 2017 | 26 | $2 |
| 2018 | 27 | $4 |
| 2019 | 28 | $5 |
| 2020 | 29 | $7 |
| 2021 | 30 | $8 |
| 2022 (Club Option) | 31 | $9, $1.025 Buyout |
MLB Trade Rumors’ arbitration projections pegged Inciarte to earn $2.8 million this offseason, and assuming he’d been his usual productive self this year, he would’ve gotten a good raise next winter. Still, this seems like a real steal. Even if you assume Inciarte will record only the 2.4 wins for which Steamer projects him in 2017 and also assume that wins are going for $8 million a piece this offseason (when $8.5 million is more likely), it’s still likely that Inciarte will produce more than $100 million in on-field value over the next five years.
| Year | Age | WAR | $/WAR | Est. Contract |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2017 | 26 | 2.4 | $8.0 M | $19.2 M |
| 2018 | 27 | 2.6 | $8.4 M | $22.3 M |
| 2019 | 28 | 2.6 | $8.8 M | $23.4 M |
| 2020 | 29 | 2.6 | $9.3 M | $24.5 M |
| 2021 | 30 | 2.6 | $9.7 M | $25.8 M |
| Totals | 13.0 | $115.1 M |
Assumptions
Value: $8M/WAR with 5.0% inflation (for first 5 years)
Aging Curve: +0.25 WAR/yr (18-27), 0 WAR/yr (28-30),-0.5 WAR/yr (31-37),-0.75 WAR/yr (> 37)
As you can see, this deal saves the Braves a lot of money in the long run, and it gives Inciarte some immediate financial security. Atlanta will now have more money with which to play in free agency and in acquiring players in trades as they look to morph into a contending club.
Below is an analysis of the prospects in the Detroit Tigers farm system. Scouting reports are compiled with information provided by industry sources as well as from my own observations. The KATOH statistical projections, probable-outcome graphs, and (further down) Mahalanobis comps have been provided by Chris Mitchell. For more information on thes 20-80 scouting scale by which all of my prospect content is governed you can click here. For further explanation of the merits and drawbacks of Future Value, read this. -Eric Longenhagen
The KATOH projection system uses minor-league data and Baseball America prospect rankings to forecast future performance in the major leagues. For each player, KATOH produces a WAR forecast for his first six years in the major leagues. There are drawbacks to scouting the stat line, so take these projections with a grain of salt. Due to their purely objective nature, the projections here can be useful in identifying prospects who might be overlooked or overrated. Due to sample-size concerns, only players with at least 200 minor-league plate appearances or batters faced last season have received projections. -Chris Mitchell
Other Lists
NL West (ARI, COL, LAD, SD, SF)
AL Central (CHW, CLE, DET, KC, MIN)
NL Central (CHC, CIN, PIT, MIL, StL)
NL East (ATL, MIA, NYM, PHI, WAS)
AL East (BAL, BOS, NYY, TB, TOR)
| Rk | Name | Age | Highest Level | Position | ETA | FV |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Matt Manning | 18 | R | RHP | 2020 | 55 |
| 2 | Christin Stewart | 23 | AA | OF | 2018 | 50 |
| 3 | Beau Burrows | 20 | A | RHP | 2020 | 45 |
| 4 | Tyler Alexander | 22 | AA | LHP | 2018 | 45 |
| 5 | Michael Gerber | 24 | AA | OF | 2018 | 45 |
| 6 | Joe Jimenez | 21 | AAA | RHP | 2017 | 45 |
| 7 | Dixon Machado | 24 | MLB | SS | 2017 | 45 |
| 8 | Derek Hill | 20 | A | OF | 2021 | 40 |
| 9 | Jose Azocar | 20 | A | OF | 2020 | 40 |
| 10 | Kyle Funkhouser | 22 | A- | RHP | 2019 | 40 |
| 11 | Jacoby Jones | 24 | MLB | OF | 2017 | 40 |
| 12 | Adam Ravenelle | 24 | AA | RHP | 2017 | 40 |
| 13 | Gerson Moreno | 21 | A+ | RHP | 2019 | 40 |
| 14 | Sandy Baez | 23 | A | RHP | 2019 | 40 |
| 15 | Hector Martinez | 20 | R | SS | 2021 | 40 |
| 16 | Arvicent Perez | 22 | A | C | 2020 | 40 |
| 17 | Kevin Ziomek | 24 | A+ | LHP | 2018 | 40 |
| 18 | Spencer Turnbull | 24 | A+ | RHP | 2018 | 40 |
| 19 | A.J. Simcox | 22 | A+ | SS | 2018 | 40 |
55 FV Prospects
| Age | 19 | Height | 6’6 | Weight | 185 | Bat/Throw | R/R |
|---|
| Fastball | Curveball | Changeup | Command |
|---|---|---|---|
| 60/70 | 50/60 | 40/50 | 30/50 |
Relevant/Interesting Metrics
Has recorded 46 recorded in 29 pro innings.
Scouting Report
Manning is the prototypical prep righty. He has tremendous size, throws hard, is a terrific athlete (he was committed to Loyola Marymount to play baseball and basketball) with great bloodlines (his father played in the NBA) and has exhibited a nascent feel for a potentially dominant curveball. Any high-school pitcher cooking with that list of ingredients is a slam-dunk first-round pick, and Manning was clearly the second-best high-school righty in the 2016 draft.
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: Hello friends
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: Welcome to Friday baseball chat
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: I’ll let you know now this will be my last chat for a little while since right after Christmas I’m going on vacation
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: I’ll be back on January 13, which happens to be a Friday, which means I’ll be chatting, which means that time I’ll be asking *you* guys what’s been going on in baseball!
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If you’ll allow me to make whatever the opposite of a hot take is, I’ll go ahead and assert that Clayton Kershaw is the best pitcher in the majors. This is almost a law of the universe, at this point — a law I don’t intend to contradict here. As for who’s next on the list, though, there’s more room for reasonable debate. One might ask, “Who’s the second-best pitcher in major-league baseball?”
In fact, I did ask it. According to the highly unscientific poll I took of my Twitter followers, Max Scherzer is an extraordinarily popular answer – and for good reason! Over the past four seasons he’s posted a 2.95 ERA, 2.90 FIP, averaged 263 strikeouts a year, and won two Cy Young Awards. You could also make cases for guys like Chris Sale, Corey Kluber, and the always underappreciated Johnny Cueto. For any of those pitchers to be the second-best pitcher in baseball, though, they’d have to surpass the guy who generates exceptional results while commanding what I might argue is the most jaw-dropping starting pitcher repertoire we’ve ever seen: Noah Syndergaard.
There’s a video-game performance quality to what Syndergaard does on a baseball field that I’m not sure we’ve seen since Barry Bonds retired. We’ve had elite players, sure – Kershaw and Mike Trout are pretty dang good, after all – but there’s a real “this shouldn’t be humanly possible” quality to Syndergaard’s pitching.
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 San Francisco Giants. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.
Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Boston / Chicago NL / Cleveland / Detroit / Houston / Los Angeles AL / San Diego / Tampa Bay / Toronto / Washington.
Batters
A cursory examination of the club’s field players reveals a theme: almost all of them receive both a better-than-averge (a) strikeout and (b) fielding-runs projection. Nor should this be very surprising: Giants batters produced the second-lowest strikeout rate in the majors last year and the second-most defensive runs. Buster Posey (512 PA, 5.1 zWAR) is well acquitted by both measures. Brandon Crawford (575, 4.3) receives something closer to a league-average strikeout-rate projection; on the defensive side, however, the combination of his fielding mark (+9) and hypothetical positional adjustment (something like +7, probably) produce about 1.5 wins, rendering him league-average player almost without any consideration of his offensive skills.
Overall, the position-player side of things appears well suited to avoiding the awful. If an area of weakness remains, it’s in left field, where Jarrett Parker (449, 1.4) and Mac Williamson (389, 0.6) are expected to form a platoon. Even that combination, though, appears capable of providing wins at a league-average rate.
Thursday afternoon I spent a few minutes talking about pitch-framing with Michael Baumann and Ben Lindbergh. I was on their podcast for a segment to talk about my entry in this year’s Hardball Times Annual, and in the course of the conversation, Ryan Doumit’s name came up. As a big-leaguer, Doumit mostly stayed under the radar, but pitch-framing research exposed his crippling weakness. The numbers made him look bad. Not just bad-bad. Not just run-of-the-mill bad. Extremely bad. Extraordinarily bad. Doumit, as a receiver in 2008, is charged with -63 runs at Baseball Prospectus.
It wasn’t a one-year fluke. For his career, Doumit’s framing was worth almost -200 runs. If you look at his FanGraphs page, you see 8.2 career WAR. Fine role player, average bat. Add in framing, though, and he plummets to a WAR of nearly -12. Doumit goes from being useful to toxic. All because of something we couldn’t even measure a decade ago.
You’d be justified in wondering whether these numbers are accurate. I have trouble believing in them myself. That’s just so, so much value given away. However, allow me to offer this evidence. Doumit caught more than 4,000 innings. Other catchers on his teams caught twice as much. When Doumit was catching, the pitchers allowed 5.34 runs per nine innings. When someone else was catching, the pitchers allowed 4.90 runs per nine innings. That difference, over Doumit’s innings total: 213 runs. Something bad was happening there.
I’ve gone off course. I’m not here to pick on Ryan Doumit. He earned salaries totaling more than $22 million. He did it! But thinking about Doumit made me wonder. How bad could a pitch-framer possibly be? What would be the lower bound? I can’t give you a realistic answer, but I can give you estimates.
Cleveland came so, so, so close to the World Series crown just a couple months ago. It probably doesn’t hurt the way it hurt Red Sox fans in 1986, since they didn’t lose in the worst way imaginable, but it probably stings pretty hard, even now. Cleveland fans have likely buoyed themselves with the thought that with Carlos Carrasco and Danny Salazar back at full strength, and with a whole season of Andrew Miller, 2017 could bring a return trip. Bring the boys back and win it the second time around, the same way their American League Central brethren, the Kansas City Royals, did before them.
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