FanGraphs Baseball

Free agency begins five days after the end of the World Series. As in other recent offseasons, FanGraphs is once again facilitating this offseason a contract-crowdsourcing project, the idea being to harness the wisdom of the crowds to the end of better understanding the giant and large 2016-17 free-agent market.

Below are links to ballots for five of this year’s free agents — all of them starting pitchers, in this case.

Other Players: Pedro Alvarez / Erick Aybar / Jose Bautista / Carlos Beltran / Billy Butler / Rajai Davis / Ian Desmond / Edwin Encarnacion / Dexter Fowler / Carlos Gomez / Matt Holliday / Austin Jackson / Jon Jay / Matt Joyce / Brandon Moss / Mike Napoli / Angel Pagan / Steve Pearce / Wilson Ramos / Colby Rasmus / Josh Reddick / Michael Saunders / Kurt Suzuki / Mark Trumbo / Justin Turner / Chase Utley / Luis Valbuena / Neil Walker / Matt Wieters.

Andrew Cashner (Profile)
Some relevant information regarding Cashner:

• Has averaged 146 IP and 1.7 WAR over last three seasons.
• Has averaged 2.3 WAR per 200 IP over last three seasons.
• Recorded a 0.4 WAR in 132.0 IP in 2016.
• Is projected to record 2.1 WAR per 200 IP**.
• Is entering his age-30 season.
• Made $7.2M in 2016, after avoiding arbitration in January.

*That is, a roughly average number of innings for a starting pitcher.
**Prorated version of final updated 2016 depth-chart projections available here.

Click here to estimate years and dollars for Cashner.

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Ben and Sam banter about Zach Britton and Shohei Otani, then discuss Dave Roberts, bullpen management, and the NLCS.

If you didn’t already know that Andrew Miller has a great slider, you do now. The lanky left-hander has been dominating the postseason. He’s also been garnering plenty of media attention, including here at FanGraphs. Tony Blengino wrote about him last week. Dave Cameron wrote about him yesterday. So did Eno Sarris.

On the premise that you can’t get enough of a good thing, here’s one more on Miller, this time in his own words. The subject — surprise, surprise — is his signature pitch. Where did he learn it? How did it evolve? Why didn’t he throw more sliders when he was struggling earlier in his career? I asked Miller those questions, and more, late in the regular season.

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Miller on learning to throw a slider: “I wish I knew when I first threw one. I know that’s a big thing with kids: when do you start throwing a breaking ball? I guess I was probably around 13 or so.

“It’s never really been a curveball. It’s always been a slider, because that’s kind of where my arm slot is. The best way I’ve described my breaking ball — and it still holds true — is that I basically throw a curveball from a lower arm slot.

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Episode 690
Jeff Sullivan is a senior editor at FanGraphs. He dedicates nearly all this edition of FanGraphs Audio to the very entertaining Game 5 of the NLDS between the Dodgers and Nationals.

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 1 hr 4 min play time.)

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Jose Bautista is a quote machine, good and bad. Earlier, Craig Edwards looked at what the Jays outfielder said about the strike zone, and here’s a more benign thing that Bautista said about Andrew Miller’s great slider: “For some reason his slider seems like he’s playing with it a little more,” he told reporters Sunday. “I felt like I saw two different sliders. Sometimes it’s more of a short slider. Sometimes it’s like a little slurve, with a lot more break, a sharper turn on it. As opposed to last year when he was throwing only one type of slider, which was a slurvy one.”

Bautista is right — Miller’s slider is different now. What’s interesting beyond that fact is that, by adding a second slider, Miller may have changed the movement on all of the versions of the pitch.

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Eric Longenhagen is publishing brief, informal notes from his looks at the prospects of the Arizona Fall League and, for the moment, the Fall Instructional League. Find all editions here.

For this edition of the Fall League notes, here’s a brief collection of superlatives from last week’s action.

Hardest Fastball
Riley Pint, RHP, Colorado Rockies (101 mph on team gun)

Best Breaking Ball
Riley Pint’s 85-mph slider at the 5:45 mark of this video

Best Offspeed
James Kaprielian, RHP, New York Yankees (changeup) (Video)

Best At-Bats
Pat Valaika, SS, Colorado Rockies

Loudest Contact
Ramon Laureano, OF, Houston Astros (Video)

Fastest Home-to-First time
Yefri Perez, CF, Miami Marlins (4.01 (R))

Other Notes from the Past Week
Yoan Moncada’s footwork at third base looks far more polished and effortless than I anticipated… White Sox LHP Louie Lechich, a converted outfielder, has only been pitching in games since July 28th and is already flashing a plus changeup… The quality of defense, especially among Fall League catchers, has been quite poor.

Losing is generally not a fun, enjoyable experience. Winning is better, and when you don’t win, sometimes you look for reasons why that coveted win didn’t occur. In baseball, the margin between winning and losing is often very small, and that has certainly been the case in the American League Championship Series: both of the series’ first two games were close, low-scoring affairs won by a Cleveland team that scored a total of runs. While players generally control outcomes, for a high-scoring team like the Toronto Blue Jays to score just one run in two games, the results have been unusual, a little too unusual, per Mike Vorkunov’s twitter account.

I don’t know if I’m lumped in there with “you guys,” but I’m more than happy to discuss the “circumstances” of which Bautista speaks. Bautista’s addressing the strike zone, and he believes that Cleveland pitchers have been getting borderline calls that Toronto’s pitchers haven’t. Let’s work backwards and begin with Saturday’s game. Here’s the strike-zone plot against left-handers hitters for Cleveland and Toronto pitchers care of Brooks Baseball. (View from the catcher’s perspective.)

Green is a called ball and red is a called strike, with Cleveland represented by squares and the Blue Jays represented by triangles. For our purposes here, let’s break things into categories. We can look at missed calls in and out of the strike zone and borderline calls. Based on the typical strike zone, we find two missed calls going against Blue Jays pitchers. For borderline calls, let’s say anything touching the line of the typical strike zone is borderline. By that definition, Cleveland threw three borderline pitches and got two strikes. Toronto threw two borderline pitches and got one strike.

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This morning, I wrote about Andrew Miller’s postseason dominance, and compared his current usage to how Mariano Rivera was deployed by the Yankees during their World Series runs. I noted Miller’s postseason dominance, but because I didn’t have access to postseason splits, I couldn’t put those in context, showing how well Miller has done in the postseason relative to other relievers. Thankfully, David Appelman sent me the data today, and so now I can add some context to Miller’s playoff dominance.

We currently only have this kind of postseason data going back to 2002, so I can’t compare Miller directly to pitchers before then, but we can look at how well he’s done relative to other playoff relievers in the last 15 years. And, as you’d guess, he ranks pretty highly. Here are all the relievers (or pitchers pitching in relief, anyway) who have held hitters below a .200 wOBA during the last 15 years.

Miller isn’t quite at the top, but he’s in that top-three tier separated from everyone else. And yes, given what Tim Lincecum did out of the bullpen for the Giants in 2012, he probably deserved a mention in my piece this morning. He was doing what Miller is doing now before it was cool. It’s too bad he didn’t want to stay in that role; it would have been fun to see what Lincecum could have been as a relief ace before the stuff went away.

Also, if you’re surprised to see Roberto Osuna at the top of the list, join the club. I knew he was good for Toronto last year, but didn’t realize he’d been quite at this level. Of course, the primary reason we’re talking about Miller’s dominance more than Osuna’s is the way they’re doing it; Osuna has a career 25% strikeout rate in the postseason, and has mostly gotten to this list by holding hitters to an .091 BABIP during his playoff appearances. Miller has a 49% postseason strikeout rate, and is at 61% this year; he’s not relying on weak contact or quality defense for his outs, and it’s easier to remember a guy just making his opponents look foolish.

But also, yeah, look at Rivera in that table. 62 innings of a .173 wOBA allowed, and that’s just since 2002, so we’re not even including his earlier dominant years. What Miller has done for 16 innings has been remarkable; Rivera did something similar over a much larger sample. And that’s why he’s the best reliever of all time.

I know that we tend to exaggerate the meaning of the playoffs, which means we tend to exaggerate the meaning of playoff player performance. Regular players are made out to be heroes, superstars completing their development on the national stage. The playoffs make it easy to get swept away by anything. The increased focus on every single individual event allows for one to forget that all of these sample sizes are remarkably small. Through the middle of May, the Phillies had one of the best records in baseball. The Phillies were a bad team all along.

The point is: I get it. And, you get it. We all understand the postseason booby traps. And yet I need to share that Javier Baez is taking the playoffs over. Baez, already, was opening national eyes, and he owned the NLDS against the Giants. Sunday against the Dodgers, Baez authored a new chapter for his aggressively-growing legend. Not even very long ago, Baez felt risky and almost disposable. Now it’s difficult to see the Cubs winning without him.

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Over the next several months, I’ll be releasing comprehensive reports on each major-league club’s farm system and the prospects therein. Implicit in this is that I will be ranking the prospects – both within each farm system and across baseball – based on my own evaluation of the players as well as that of industry sources. The players will be ordered by their “Future Value” grade. This Future Value methodology was brought to FanGraphs in 2014 by former Lead Prospect Analyst, Kiley McDaniel (reggaeton horn).

If you’d like to read what is essentially the Book of Genesis on Future Value, then I’ll direct you here for McDaniel’s (reggaeton horn) 2015 top-prospects list for an explanation of FV and its merits, as well as here for discussion about the 20-80 scouting scale.

In short, Future Value attempts to combine a prospect’s potential (reasonable ceiling and floor) as well as his chance of realizing it (including injury-related risks or proximity to the majors) into one tidy, value-based number.

There are some pretty obvious issues with this system, some of which are practical, others more personal, and I’ll touch on those briefly before explaining why I’m retaining the system.

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