FanGraphs Baseball

These days, some people are hard at work trying to understand one another. As votes rolled in and results were released, segments of the population were taken aback. In certain corners, the mood has been celebratory, triumphant. Elsewhere there has been fear, disappointment, and, more than anything else, confusion. “How could anyone make that choice?” many have wailed. “How could so many people overlook all the evidence?” I won’t pretend to be more than I am. I know that I am but a single man in a rising, roiling ocean of souls. But I can try to defend at least my own decision. For 2016 American League Rookie of the Year, I voted for Michael Fulmer ahead of Gary Sanchez.

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Ben and Sam revisit their conversations about Cubs-parade attendance and multiple Andrew Millers, banter about Eddie Gaedel, and discuss which teams will see their World Series odds improve or decline by the most before Opening Day.

Here’s a fun fact for you. There’s so much talk about the Mets and Yoenis Cespedes. About how Cespedes is so important to the Mets, about how the lineup can’t function without him. I’m not going to argue that Cespedes isn’t important. Great player! But if you look at last year’s Mets position players, the leader in WAR was Neil Walker. Only Noah Syndergaard had a higher WAR on the team, and Walker barely played two-thirds of the season.

So the Mets are probably pretty happy with the news that Walker has accepted their $17.2-million qualifying offer. Walker becomes the second of two players to accept the QO this offseason, joining Jeremy Hellickson. Hellickson might be thinking ahead to a midsummer trade. Walker wants to win the World Series where he is.

The only reason we’re here is because Walker had back surgery. He’s a 31-year-old middle infielder with a brand new scar, and he didn’t play a game after August 27. If Walker had stayed healthy and kept up his performance, he would’ve had zero trouble finding three or even four guaranteed years. But things being what they were, Walker sensed the market would be more cautious. There’s not even great demand for second basemen in the first place, at least not among contenders, and Walker has a new red flag. It makes plenty of sense for him to take the money, and then look ahead to a healthy season, after which the QO system is likely to have been modified.

The surgery is the unknown here. I don’t know what we can reasonably be expected to make of it. I don’t know how Walker feels about his back. I don’t know how the Mets feel about his back. I assume the Mets wouldn’t have made the offer if they thought Walker might never play second base again. I have to think that Walker will resemble himself on the field. If he does, well, the last three years, he’s run a wRC+ of 120. That puts him around Nolan Arenado, Chris Davis, and Ben Zobrist. He’s not a baserunning plus, but he’s also not a baserunning minus, and he might be only a modest liability in the field. The numbers think last year he was actually quite good. The numbers kind of struggle to make sense of infields these days, with players constantly moving around, but Walker has played second almost exclusively. He can handle the position if he can move well enough.

If his back holds up, Walker will be okay. He’ll get his contract next season, after making more money than he’s ever seen in 2017. If his back doesn’t hold up, well, $17.2 million is a hell of a guarantee. By making the offer, the Mets acknowledged they think Walker will probably be fine. By taking the offer, Walker acknowledged the surgery would depress his market. There’s only one way for such a red flag to be lowered.

The Mets will presumably now turn their full attention to Cespedes and a reliever or three. They might never escape all the injury-related question marks, but perhaps next year those questions might have fewer negative answers.

It’s probably no secret that I like to run polling projects, as a means of crowdsourcing various questions. From time to time, I’ll run posts that include polls for all 30 teams, and as soon as those posts get published I can’t wait to get a chance to analyze the data. It’s fun to see what the data says about the questions being directly asked, but that’s not the only use. We can also examine demographics!

In some polling posts, you’re free to participate however much you want. In others, though, I ask you to self-identify as a fan of a specific team, or of specific teams. For example, in a polling post about which teams might beat the projections, I’m fine with everyone voting for everyone. But when it comes to, say, fan excitement ratings, then I’m just looking for you to vote about your own favorite team. Very obviously, I can’t actually control how you vote, but the numbers show that you all do a pretty good job of playing along.

So with that being said — here’s a small meta-analysis. I looked at the numbers from all of my polling projects in which you were expected to vote for just one or two teams. This only goes back a couple years, but by looking at participation, we can see where the audience loyalties are. Which fan bases are over- or under-represented around these parts? Wonder no more!

It’s important to note, again, this covers just a couple of years. Within those years, the Blue Jays have been successful, and the Cubs have been wildly successful, so, yeah, that sort of makes sense. But the Cubs have had the highest turnout, followed by the Jays, followed by a massive gap until you get to the Red Sox. They might as well be even with the Mariners. At the left are the fans who’ve been around and most eager to participate in polling projects.

On the right, the opposite of that. One of every 54 participants has identified as a fan of the Rockies. One of every 53 participants has identified as a fan of the Padres. The teams over there mostly aren’t very good, and a lack of success is going to depress online reading and engaging, but I bet the lowest teams aren’t surprising. I’ve mentioned before that certain teams just don’t seem to have strong Internet communities, at least as far as overlapping with FanGraphs goes. I know there are Rockies fans, but they can be difficult to reach.

I don’t have anything else. I just got the idea to create a little bar chart. As you were!

We have our first qualifying-offer acceptance of the offseason, and it’s Jeremy Hellickson who’s taken $17 million to stay put for another year. He’ll remain with the Phillies for now, and get paid rather handsomely to do so.

A guarantee of $17.2 million isn’t bad at all for a pitcher with Hellickson’s past. He was a somewhat interesting commodity given that he was coming off easily the best year of his career. Hellickson threw 189 innings of 3.71 ERA ball — or 3.98 FIP ball, if that’s more your speed. DRA, however, rated him at 4.34. Basically, Hellickson pitched like a middle-back-end guy and got a little lucky. Because this year’s stable of free-agent pitchers is largely composed of Rich Hill and a band of merry — if also raggedy — men, Hellickson would have probably had more than a few suitors had he declined the qualifying offer. The Phillies made him the offer assuming that he would — and that they would, in turn, collect the draft pick attached to it, cashing it in this coming summer.

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The people who say that history repeats itself usually aren’t referring to baseball trade rumors, but here we are, with an offseason that’s already feeling a lot like last July. Around the most recent trade deadline, teams were in the hunt for starting pitching, and at the top of the market were some potentially available, cost-controlled aces. Now teams have resumed the same hunt, with rumors around many of the same targets, and maybe foremost among them are Chris Sale and Chris Archer. Sale’s an ace on a team that might elect to rebuild. Archer’s an ace on a team that can’t afford loyalty.

Just so we’re all on the same page, odds are Sale and Archer don’t both get traded. For all I know, could be that odds are neither gets traded. But let’s explore the situation anyway. Sale’s been a great starter since 2012. He’ll turn 28 in March. Archer became a quality starter in 2013, and he turned 28 in September. Sale’s long been considered perhaps the best starting pitcher in the American League. Archer this season very narrowly avoided 20 losses. If I polled you, almost all of you would rather have Sale than Archer for a must-win game tomorrow. Yet as trade negotiations go, I bet Archer has the higher price tag.

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Gary Sanchez may or may not be named American League Rookie of the Year tonight. Either way, the New York Yankees catcher made a huge splash in his truncated campaign. In 53 games, he slashed .299/.376/.657 and clubbed a whopping 20 home runs.

Sanchez’s season has drawn comparisons to 1959, when San Francisco’s Willie McCovey copped National League honors. The erstwhile Giants slugger played in just 52 games, but he was every bit as brilliant in that short time. After being called up on July 30, McCovey slashed .354/.429/.656 and hit 13 round-trippers. With no other strong candidates on the ballot, he was a unanimous selection as top rookie.

He wouldn’t have won the award under today’s rules. The accolades almost certainly would have gone to Vada Pinson.

Since 1971, rookie status has been defined as having had fewer than 130 at-bats, or fewer than 50 innings pitched, in previous seasons. A player must also not have been on an active roster for more than 45 days prior to September 1.

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In baseball, it may not be possible to have too much of a good thing when it comes to quantity of elite-level players. The sport is, almost by definition, at its best when great players face off against one another. If there’s a problem with a strong collection of elite talent, though, it’s that truly great players can get overlooked. It’s hard to distinguish oneself when surrounded by an array of other distinguished performances.

A look at the WAR leaderboard from the American League this past season reveals that four second basemen finished among the top 11 overall performers in the league by this metric.

We know MVP finalist Jose Altuve was outstanding and we know Robinson Cano had an absolutely tremendous season in Seattle. Slightly less heralded was the overall performance of the Twins’ Brian Dozier, although his 28 homers in the second half still garnered him plenty of attention. But what about the fourth second baseman on the list? Did we pay enough attention to Ian Kinsler this year?

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On Friday, we rolled out our list of the top 50 free agents available this winter, with the crowdsourced contract estimates gathered over the last month, along with my guesses as what players will sign for. In the blurbs on each player, I noted a few guys I thought could be good values this year, but it’s always helpful to get it on the record; that way you can see whether I’m worth listening to.

For instance, last year, I identified Rich Hill, Ben Zobrist, and Steve Pearce as bargains based on the contracts we were expecting them to get, and all performed quite well, justifying my faith in their skills. My other two picks? Wei-Yin Chen and Jason Heyward. Yeah.

To some degree, this is the nature of playing in the free agent pool. Even the guys who look like values come with risk, and many times, the reason I think they may be underpriced is because they have some identifiable flaw. When you’re shopping in this kind of environment, you just have to hope your hits are bigger than your misses, and accept that a fairly high percentage of players you sign will end up not being worth the money. But if you get a Hill or a Zobrist, you can get enough value to make up for some of the signings that don’t work out so well.

So let’s try to find some guys who might be undervalued in this class. As other years, I’ll try to sort them by the magnitude of impact, so an undervalued high-end player will rank higher than a similarly underpriced role player; you’re better off landing a Zobrist than a Pearce, for instance. And I’ve included my contract and the crowdsourced projections, along with their 2017 Steamer forecast, as a reminder of what we think the market might pay them this winter.

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One year ago, Yoenis Cespedes was coming off an MVP-like season, having just turned 30 years old. It seemed inevitable he’d sign a large contract. Nevertheless, his market failed to develop. Instead, Cespedes opted to settle with the Mets on a three-year deal for $75 million, an agreement that also included an opt-out clause.

Now, entering the offseason, Cespedes isn’t merely a year older but he’s also coming off a season in which he produced roughly half the wins of his 2015 campaign. Given his age and performance in 2016, it would be reasonable to think his market and future would be less certain than a year ago. In a different market and a different level of certainty regarding his future, though, Cespedes is set to receive the contract most thought he would sign last season.

Determining a player’s value in a vacuum can be a different thing than determining the contract he’s actually likely to receive. For the most part, players in free agency receive more than they’re actually worth; the bidding process rewards/punishes the highest bidder, which is presumably the team with the highest valuation of the player. Cespedes was ranked as the top free agent by Dave Cameron this offseason, and both Cameron and the crowd have estimated that Cespedes will receive a five-year contract worth about $120 million. Now, let’s figure out how much Cespedes will actually be worth over the course of that contract.

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