FanGraphs Baseball

For the second year in a row, I was given the opportunity to cast a ballot for the National League Cy Young Award. For the second year in a row, this was a very difficult task.

Last year, I had to pick between three aces who had historic seasons, finally settling on Jake Arrieta by the tiniest of margins over Clayton Kershaw and Zack Greinke. This year, no pitcher pitched a full season at the level that those three reached a year ago, so this year’s task was more about picking between good-but-flawed seasons rather than trying to decide which great year was the greatest.

And there was no shortage of options. In the end, I strongly considered eight players for the five spots we were asked to rank, and the guys who ended up at six through eight all had very strong cases for spots on the ballot. While the ordinal-rank system will make it look I saw a real difference between the guys ranked #3-#5 and the three notable omissions, the reality is that there was a six car pile-up at the back end of my ballot, and I think you have to split hairs to pick between the three guys who rounded out my ballot and the three guys who just missed.

But, it is an ordinal rank ballot, so let’s go through the ballot spot-by-spot so I can explain my rationale.

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The title of this post serves is a warning, but not an absolute one. There’s a price at which just about any player becomes palatable. If Edwin Encarnacion were available to a team for just $1 this offseason, that team should sign him. For a number of reasons, Edwin Encarnacion will not be available for $1 this offseason. For a number of reasons, Edwin Encarnacion is going to earn much more than that. For a number of reasons, he’s likely to be overpaid for the services he’ll render.

Encarnacion, 33, just finished a season in which he hit 42 home runs and produced four wins above replacement. That matches very well with his last five seasons, during which he has averaged 39 homers and four wins above replacement. A standard decline from that level of production should make Encarnacion a very valuable player in this year’s free-agent class, but there are major warning signs.

In his piece on free-agent landmines, Dave Cameron wrote that Encarnacion was unlikely to be worth $100 million ($90 million in salary plus the value of the draft pick) unless he defies the aging process. How do we estimate Encarnacion’s worth? A couple ways, actually.

Let’s begin with a simple way — namely, by applying a standard aging curve to Encarnacion’s current 2017 projection. Encarnacion has been a steady four-win player for half a decade. If we were to see some decline, we might expect him to produce just a 3.5 WAR next season. Our current projections for Encarnacion estimate that he’ll record only a 2.3 WAR next season, however.

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Times are desperate, man. You know what kind of shape the free-agent market for starting pitchers is in. I hope you like Edinson Volquez, because you can’t even get a Jeremy Hellickson, and there’s only one Rich Hill to go around. Everyone knows the market is bad. Even the pitchers who make up the market know the market is bad. Out of this bad market, the Astros have plucked Charlie Morton, for two guaranteed years, and at least fourteen million guaranteed dollars.

Morton is newly 33. He appeared in four games last year before getting hurt, and his career ERA is 19% worse than league average. The Phillies let Morton walk, instead of exercising a $9.5-million option. The thing about front offices thinking so similarly is that you can’t just say “oh, the Phillies were being stupid.” No one is stupid. In Morton, the Phillies saw downside. In Morton, the Astros see upside. It’s always interesting when this happens.

And me, I’m an optimist. I’m a believer in people, and though that does come back to bite me, I see reasons to believe in Charlie Morton. I like him as an upside play, as a guy who could affordably knock your socks off.

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If you’re a regular reader, you know that my primary role here at FanGraphs is to talk to people within the game and share their thoughts. Many of my conversations are with pitchers. From them, I’ve heard a particular phrase countless times:

“My job is to give my team a chance to win.”

The extent to which such a thing can be quantified is subjective. That doesn’t make it meaningless. In my opinion, the supposition — for lack of a better term — should factor into the Cy Young Award debate.

It’s well known that pitchers have little control over wins and losses. The best they can do is limit the opposition’s run total. They don’t have complete control over that, either, but they do strongly influence it. As a rule, the best pitchers have the lowest ERAs. Again, not a perfect stat, but it tells a big part of the story.

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This morning, the Astros announced that they have signed Charlie Morton to a two year, $14 million contract, bringing the right-hander to Houston to bolster their pitching depth. And as Mike Petriello notes, there’s some obvious synergy here.

Charlie Morton was top 5 (min. 50 thrown) in curve spin last year (2990 RPM). The Astros threw more curves as last year went on. Easy fit. pic.twitter.com/TuS7zjWtm7

— Mike Petriello (@mike_petriello) November 16, 2016

Charlie Morton is a high-spin curveball pitcher. The Astros like high-spin curveballs, using it as the primary reason to bring Collin McHugh into the organization a few years ago, and getting some good value out of that bet. Two years ago, when Eno Sarris wrote about trying to find “The Next Collin McHugh”, he showed a spin-rate table with Morton near the very top.

So, yeah, Morton and the Astros are a natural fit, and it’s easy to think about what Houston might be able to do with a guy with a good sinking fastball and a curve that should be a put-away pitch. But in reality, unless the Astros can figure out how to make Morton’s curveballs get lefties out, they might have just signed Bud Norris with health issues instead.

Since Morton debuted in the big leagues in 2008, no pitcher (minimum 350 innings pitched) has been worse against left-handed hitters. His sinking fastball dives right into a lefties wheelhouse, and despite the spin, his curveball hasn’t been effective at getting them off balance so they don’t just crush his fastball. Against right-handers, his repertoire is quite effective, but against lefties, he’s basically throwing batting practice.

That doesn’t make this a terrible gamble for the Astros. If they think they can fix Morton, and get him to stop running a .350 BABIP against LHBs — yes, that’s his career average — then maybe there’s some upside as a back-end starter. And if they can’t, maybe they’ll be able to convince him that he could be a quality reliever, using him mostly as a right-handed specialist. The ability to perhaps convert him into a quality bullpen arm if the starting experiment continues to fail gives his signing a chance to work even if they can’t make him Collin McHugh 2.0.

But the Astros already have a deep bullpen full of right-handed arms. What they really could use is another quality starting pitcher. Unless the new CBA bans left-handed hitters, I’m not sure I’d count on Morton being that guy.

Should pitchers throw their “best pitch” a higher percentage of the time? I asked that question a number of times this past season, but with a qualifier. Fastballs — most everyone’s primary offering — weren’t the focal point. Secondary pitches were. Think Lance McCullers’ curveball (which he threw roughly 50% of the time this year). Andrew Miller’s slider (61%). Deolis Guerra’s changeup (45%). Zach Putnam’s splitter (68%). Would it behoove more hurlers to up their usage in a similar fashion?

White Sox pitching coach Don Cooper is one of the people with whom I broached the subject. Our conversation came in mid-summer, at Fenway Park, one day after Putnam threw 15 splitters in a 20-pitch relief outing.

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Cooper on Zach Putnam: “He’s coming in for one, maybe two innings. We want him to command his fastball. But his fastball is not the reason he’s in the big leagues. His split is. If we’re going to win or lose a game, it’s going to be on the split more often than not. He uses the fastball to locate, and get them off splits. He uses it to protect the split.

“He’s on the DL right now, because he’s had some difficulty recovering, but listen, we’re not bringing him in to throw fastballs. If that’s what we wanted, we’d leave the starter in, because I guarantee you that whatever starter we have in has a better fastball. We’re bringing him in because his best pitch is the split. He’s been striking out a guy an inning, and he hasn’t been doing it with fastballs.

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The pitcher with the highest fastball spin rate in baseball in 2016 was also the first free agent signed this offseason. Maybe that’s just coincidence — Andrew Bailey was re-signed by the Angels to a modest one-year, $1 million deal with incentives, so it’s not like it required a ton of courting — but there are plenty of front offices who’ve designated at least one analyst to comb through the free-agent wires to find a pitcher with good spin rates. Let’s play along.

Of course, we can only play along so much: the major-league front offices have minor-league spin rates easily accessible in their databases, so they don’t have to go looking far and wide for data. Also, spin rates alone don’t tell the whole story, especially when it comes to changeups and sliders. However, we know this: given equal velocities, the fastball with the higher spin rate is superior fastball — and that looks to be true for curveballs, too. (Check the curveball tab of that linked spreadsheet, courtesy Jeff Zimmerman).

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The results are in. Terry Francona is your American League Manager of the Year. Congratulations to him! He’s probably an excellent manager. I actually had a vote for the AL version of the award, and, well, I probably screwed it up. One part of the screw up was on me, and I’ll eat my crow. But here’s my excuse: I didn’t have the most important part of the year at my disposal when I made my vote.

I voted for John Farrell, Buck Showalter, and Terry Francona in that order. I think all three are excellent managers, and so I relied on the numbers I produced to try and help me make the decision.

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Episode 699
Dave Cameron is the managing editor of FanGraphs. During this edition of FanGraphs Audio, he discusses new Blue Jays designated hitter Kendrys Morales and the impact, in actual runs and wins, of poor footspeed; examines the calculus performed by clubs when deciding whether to extend a qualifying offer (and of players when deciding to accept or reject one); and relives some of the least expected MVP-type seasons in recent years.

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 39 min play time.)

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