FanGraphs Baseball

If you’re an avid FanGraphs reader, you might remember a piece I wrote January in which I wondered whether Vladimir Guerrero had the credentials of a Hall of Famer. The verdict? He does. As an inductee, he wouldn’t have the most impressive resume in the Hall, but he’d belong — and, according to the first 44 ballots collected by Ryan Thibodaux by way of his BBHOF Tracker, it appears as though the voters agree:

At 74%, Guerrero is right on the threshold for induction (which requires a candidate is named on 75% of ballots). That means that even if he isn’t selected this year Guerrero will almost certainly gain entry to the Hall next year. Which is great. Guerrero was a fantastic player. He’s deserving.

Larry Walker was also a great player, though. In most important ways, he was a superior one. And he’s received enough votes on previous Hall of Fame ballots to return for a seventh year. Like the previous six years, however, Walker is unlikely to be enshrined in Cooperstown this year — if the early polling holds steady, that is. In light of Guerrero’s seeming popularity, that’s strange. By most reasonable accounts, Walker has a better case. If you vote for Guerrero, you have to vote for Walker.

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Two days ago, I examined what exactly is going on in the San Diego rotation. The notion of a Padres pitcher is almost a philosophical one. Technically there are starting pitchers on the roster, yes, but any resemblance to any quality pitchers, alive or dead, is entirely coincidental.

This is somewhat the case with the group of outfielders currently employed by the Cleveland Indians. I would hesitate to insinuate that these outfielders, who play for a team that reached Game Seven of the World Series, are of a similar quality to the starting pitchers of the Padres. Tyler Naquin, after all, just finished third in the American League Rookie of the Year voting. Brandon Guyer could be sitting on his couch at home and stand a good chance of being hit by an errant pitch and being awarded first place. Lonnie Chisenhall is a solid if unspectacular player. And we must remember that for all his injury tribulations this past year and change, Michael Brantley is still one of the more talented players in all of baseball.

Yet when taken altogether, this does not look like the outfield of a team that just won a pennant, nor one that’s expected to contend for a division title. Cleveland’s strength will always be its pitching. The team is built around Francisco Lindor, yes, but it’s also built around Corey Kluber, Carlos Carrasco, and Danny Salazar. These are the men who decide if the team soars or crashes. If the pitching is good, the team will have a chance. They still need good position players, though, and the outfield gives them three opportunities to do that.

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Relievers are the hot new thing, you might have heard. Aroldis Chapman and Kenley Jansen got north of $80 million, plus opt-outs. Mark Melancon got $62 million, plus an opt-out. Mike Dunn got $19 million. Mike Dunn! Perhaps nothing says reliever inflation more than Mike Dunn getting $19 million. Or maybe that just says he signed with the Rockies, and the Rockies are weird. But Colorado bizarreness aside, good relievers aren’t cheap anymore.

Well, unless they’re good in a really weird way, anyway.

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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 Tampa Bay Rays. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Chicago NL / Cleveland / Detroit / Houston / San Diego / Toronto / Washington.

Batters
Due to their limited resources, the Rays have been compelled to search for value in places where it isn’t readily apparent. These financial constraints, for example, led pretty directly to the phenomenon known as Ben Zobrist, Improbable Superstar. The ascent of Kevin Kiermaier (502 PA, 4.2 zWAR) is almost equally improbable as Zobrist’s, though. Selected in the 31st round of the 2010 draft out of Parkland College, Kiermaier has now averaged more than four wins per season over his first three major-league campaigns. Much of that value, of course, is a product of Kiermaier’s defensive acumen. ZiPS calls for more of the same in that regard, projecting Kiermaier to save 17 more runs than the average center fielder.

With the exception of Evan Longoria (658, 3.9), unfortunately, the club doesn’t currently employ any field players who profile as anything much better than average — and the short-term prognosis for newly acquired Wilson Ramos (465, 2.5), one of only four batters who receives a forecast for more than two wins, is uncertain in light of the season-ending injury he suffered at the end of 2016.

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The first few leaderboard sorts don’t produce many revelations about Junichi Tazawa, but if you finagle the filters and the cutoffs, you start to see why he might be attractive to a club. It’s more about consistency and volume than anything, and that’s a rare quality for a reliever — sufficiently rare, it seems, to earn him a two-year deal worth $12 million, the terms he reached late yesterday afternoon with the Miami Marlins.

Since 2012, Tazawa is 96th among 256 qualified relievers in ERA. He’s 38th in FIP. He’s given up a few homers, though, so let’s check strikeouts minus walks — weird, he’s 38th. So he’s okay.

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No offense to Welington Castillo, but the hottest topic in Orioles land right now is whether the team should trade Zach Britton. Clubs, unsurprisingly, have shown interest in a possible deal. Scour the web and you’ll find polemics both for and against one. I’m here to argue the latter case.

The Case For Trading Britton

The case for trading Britton isn’t hard to make. He’ll make $11.4 million next year, as projected by MLB Trade Rumors. That’s a lot of scratch for an ostensibly mid-market club to pay someone to pitch 70 innings.

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Position: Los Angeles Dodgers Baseball Research & Development Developer

Location: Los Angeles
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We can all agree that WAR does a pretty good job of sorting, right? Like, even if you can quibble with the numbers, it paints a pretty good general picture. Good players tend to have better WARs than worse players. Great, okay. Over the past couple seasons, 130 different players have batted at least 1,000 times. Recognize right away there’s selection bias here — it’s mostly just decent players, and better players, who would play that much. The sample is already skewed somewhat toward quality, toward talent. Within that pool, by WAR, Odubel Herrera ranks 38th. He’s statistical neighbors with Daniel Murphy, Dexter Fowler, Dustin Pedroia, and Kole Calhoun. Herrera turns 25 in a couple of weeks, and as a Rule 5 grab, he’s been fantastic.

It makes all the sense in the world that the Phillies would want to get Herrera locked up. And from Herrera’s side, of course he’d want guaranteed money. Two winters ago his old team left him unprotected. There’s vulnerability there, vulnerability no one wants to feel again and again. Herrera now has an extension, which isn’t strange. But it’s another extension that leaves a young player looking like he sold himself short.

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The Angels and Brewers recently made a trade, with Milwaukee ending up with Jett Bandy. I’m going to guess you didn’t linger on the deal, if you heard about it at all. It’s not a move that’s going to change the landscape of either league. But I saw an interesting tweet on Tuesday:

David Stearns says Bandy has plus raw power that hasn’t necessarily shown up in his stats. Playing time split with Susac/Pina remains TBD.

— Adam McCalvy (@AdamMcCalvy) December 13, 2016

Jett Bandy: plus raw power! But for the most part invisible, at present. This is fairly typical scout-speak, and if you just concentrate on Bandy’s profile, there could be something there. He’s an extreme fly-ball hitter, and he stands 6’4. He turns 27 in March. He could be a really strong guy.

Thinking about the tweet, however, got me thinking about Statcast. What might we be able to learn about raw power from baseball’s new tracking technology?

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