The purpose of this post is to announce the availability — literally starting this exact minute — of tickets to a sabermetrics-themed event to be hosted by the Staten Island Yankees on June 19. The event will feature a number of your favorite baseball writers and also Dave Cameron.
From the club’s expertly composed press release:
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Blake Snell is already back in the minor leagues, but he probably shouldn’t be there for long. All the Rays need is an opening, and over the weekend Snell made his big-league debut in a spot start in Yankee Stadium. Everyone understood it would be a one-shot deal, but Snell got to get his feet wet. That counts for something. And we got enough data for a deep dive. That also counts for something.
Most of you probably learned about Snell for the first time last season. He got himself onto the radar for something extreme, which is to say, he made his 2015 debut on April 9, and he allowed his first run on May 23. Snell is forever going to have his scoreless streak, but what he did in the minors isn’t what’ll allow him to succeed in the majors. No — he needs to keep on performing, and in support of that, we can look to something else extreme. Snell’s a pitcher, so he throws a fastball. The fastball he throws is unlike almost any other.
Click here to cast ballot for television broadcast teams.
Recently, the present author began the process of process of reproducing the broadcaster rankings which appeared on this site roughly four years ago. The purpose of those rankings? To place a “grade” on each of the league’s television and radio broadcast teams — a grade intended to represent not necessarily the objective quality or skill of the relevant announcers, but rather the appeal those announcers might have to the readers of this site. By way of MLB.TV feeds, the typical major-league telecast offers four distinct audio feeds — which is to say, the radio and television commentary both for the home and road clubs. The idea of these broadcast rankings was to give readers an opportunity to make an informed decision about how to consume a telecast.
Below are the first six ballots for radio broadcast teams.
For each broadcasting team, the reader is asked to supply a grade on a scale of 1-5 (with 5 representing the highest mark) according to the following criteria: Charisma, Analysis, and then Overall.
Charisma is, essentially, the personal charm of the announcers in question. Are they actively entertaining? Do they possess real camaraderie? Would you — as is frequently the case with Vin Scully — would you willingly exchange one of your living grandfathers in order to spend time with one of these announcers? The Analysis provided by a broadcast team could skew more towards the sabermetric or more towards the scouting side of things. In either case, is it grounded in reason? The Overall rating is the overall quality of the broadcast team — nor need this be a mere average of the previous two ratings. Bob Uecker, for example, provides very little in the way of analysis, and yet certainly rates well overall, merely by force of personality. Finally, there’s a box of text in which readers can elaborate upon their grades, if so compelled.
Arizona Diamondbacks
Some relevant information regarding Arizona’s broadcast:
Back when the Rays finally got around to trading David Price, they took an awful lot of heat for the return. It’s not that the package was bad — it was that it appeared insufficient, to many observers. The argument in support of the Rays focused on the idea of surplus value. Willy Adames looked like a promising low-level prospect. Nick Franklin seemed useful, and Drew Smyly was a league-average starter. You can get plenty of value from a league-average starter in his team-control years. It wasn’t sexy, and it was hardly a blockbuster of the type that people imagined, but the Rays were going to be okay. The return was a little dull, but fair.
If you want to spin things in a negative way, you could observe that Franklin has more or less busted. Adames is still talented and still young, but he’s just getting accustomed to Double-A. And Smyly missed months with a labrum problem, while Price signed a massive free-agent contract he earned with his performance. There’s another way to spin things. Since that deadline deal a couple summers ago, Price has posted a 3.23 ERA, with 26% strikeouts. Smyly, meanwhile, has posted a 2.52 ERA, with 28% strikeouts.
No, Smyly hasn’t yet been durable. But Drew Smyly has whiffed more hitters, rate-wise, than the ace for whom he was traded. I don’t think even the Rays expected Smyly to develop into a strikeout machine.
The negotiations for the next Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) will feature considerable back-and-forth between the players’ union and the league’s various ownership groups. This is only natural: those are the two parties which must ultimately agree upon the terms of a new deal. But it’s also not an entirely aimless point to make, because those negotiations won’t be the only ones taking place. The owners themselves could have some fairly contentious discussions in deciding their own strategy, particularly when it comes to sharing revenue among the teams. Big-market teams have long gained an advantage on revenues at the gate, but increasingly, the advantage has come from television revenue from local cable networks. Teams continue to sign billion-dollar deals that include an ownership stake, and determining how to divide that money could prove difficult.
Over the last few years, the Arizona Diamondbacks, Philadelphia Phillies, and St. Louis Cardinals have all agreed to new long-term local television deals with Regional Sports Networks (RSNs). It has been a few years at FanGraphs since Wendy Thurm documented the local cable television deals for all MLB teams, and this post aims to provide an update. The work she did helped inform this post as well as a few others to provide a base for research.
When we hear about television deals, we often think of them in terms of the average annual value they provide. That’s a familiar term in baseball, as most player contracts are structured to be paid evenly over the course of the contract. That practice is less common under other circumstances, however, with deals often paying a smaller sum at the beginning of a contract and increasing over time. Television contracts are often structured in this second way. To account for that practice, I have estimated 2016 television money by assuming a yearly 4% increase in money paid to teams in order to find a (hopefully) realistic estimate for how much teams are receiving this year. For example, the Phillies currently possess a 25-year, $2.5 billion dollar deal that begins this year. Instead of assuming they will receive $100 million every year, I am assuming they will receive around $60 million this year with 4% yearly increases over the course of the contract.
There is a full chart below with all the relevant information, but let’s focus on 2016 money first in the graph below.
I did my best to include only contracted revenue — i.e. to omit revenue generated from an ownership stake in a network. However, due to the lack of publicly available information, it’s best to regard these numbers as estimates. Note that, particularly with respect to the Chicago teams, as well as the Los Angeles Angels and Boston Red Sox, that the revenue estimates actually might include money from network ownership. It was difficult to parse those figures.
| 11:59 |
: Presidential brawl?
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| 12:00 |
: ARRGGH, someone’s gotta remind me before we start chat! lol
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| 12:00 |
: If you’re the Mets, how concerned are you with Harvey?
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| 12:00 |
: Somewhere between mild and moderate.
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| 12:01 |
: Drew Smyly: what kind of stats does he end the year with?
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| 12:01 |
: 3.20ish ERA?
|
You know about the Cubs. It’s the team that entered spring training as the consensus World Series favorite. It’s the team with the already impressive collection of young stars who tacked on with a splashy offseason. It’s the team that already threw a no-hitter. The team with the potentially historic blend of discipline and power. Maybe you’re tired of hearing about the Cubs already. Maybe you think the coverage and attention has been overkill. Or maybe you think they’re deserving of more coverage, and more attention, considering they’re 14-5 with a run differential (+64) nearly as large as the next two best teams by that measure combined (Cardinals and Nationals, +74).
Whatever your stance, you’re getting one more Cubs post for the time being, because for all the attention the lineup and rotation has received, there’s another area in which they’re deserving of attention, an area that often goes overlooked but that can very much matter. In addition to the lineup having a top-five adjusted batting line with the most runs scored, the rotation being the best in baseball by ERA and second-best by FIP, and the defense leading everyone in Defensive Runs Saved, the Cubs have also been the best base-running team in the sport. Not only is it a continuation of last year’s success in that department, but it’s something that was seemingly improved by one offseason acquisition, and perhaps more importantly, amplified by another.
About eight years ago, Tanner Roark was pitching in the independent Frontier League after his college team released him. He had an ERA greater than 20.00 in three games. Then the Rangers drafted him, traded him to the Nationals, and he switched to throwing only two-seamers as his main fastball. A few years later, he put up a three-win, 198-inning season, and now — after largely unsuccessful work out of the bullpen in 2015 — he’s a few days removed from a 15-strikeout game. The career arc was pretty tumultuous and incredible before Saturday’s game, and now it’s the sort of thing about which someone writes a book a decade afterwards.
Let’s start with a table to reinforce this day of strangeness. Below is a list of all of the 15-plus strikeout games in the past five years. There are 21 of them, from Jered Weaver’s (!) 15-K game in April of 2011 all the way up to Roark’s gem this past Saturday. Average fastball velocity displayed is for that particular 15-plus strikeout game:
| Player | Ks | Date | Avg. Fastball Velocity |
| Carlos Carrasco | 15 | 9/25/15 | 95.4 |
| Chris Sale | 15 | 8/16/15 | 95.1 |
| Chris Archer | 15 | 6/2/15 | 95.1 |
| Vincent Velasquez | 16 | 4/14/16 | 94.7 |
| Max Scherzer | 15 | 5/20/12 | 94.6 |
| Max Scherzer | 17 | 10/3/15 | 94.5 |
| Max Scherzer | 16 | 6/14/15 | 94.3 |
| Clayton Kershaw | 15 | 9/2/15 | 93.6 |
| Yu Darvish | 15 | 8/12/13 | 93.2 |
| Chris Sale | 15 | 5/28/12 | 93.2 |
| Clayton Kershaw | 15 | 6/18/14 | 93.1 |
| Francisco Liriano | 15 | 7/13/12 | 93.1 |
| Corey Kluber | 18 | 5/13/15 | 93.0 |
| Anibal Sanchez | 17 | 4/26/13 | 92.9 |
| Michael Pineda | 16 | 5/10/15 | 92.3 |
| James Shields | 15 | 10/2/12 | 92.1 |
| Jon Lester | 15 | 5/3/14 | 91.9 |
| Cliff Lee | 16 | 5/6/11 | 91.9 |
| Felix Hernandez | 15 | 6/8/14 | 91.8 |
| Tanner Roark | 15 | 4/23/16 | 91.7 |
| Jered Weaver | 15 | 4/10/11 | 91.1 |
The Rays called up left-handed pitching prospect Blake Snell from Triple-A to face the Yankees in a spot start on Saturday. Snell looked very good in his debut. Although he lasted just five innings, he yielded just two hits, one walk and zero runs. By fanning six, he maintained the ~30% strikeout rate pace he’d been keeping in the minors for the last year-plus.
Prior to his call up, he owned a 3.01 FIP and 33% strikeout rate in three Triple-A starts this season. Last year, he blew through three minor-league levels — High-A, Double-A and Triple-A — and posted a 1.41 ERA and 2.71 FIP. Snell struck out an eye-popping 31% of opposing hitters, tops among pitchers to record at least 120 minor-league innings last year.
Episode 648
Emma Baccellieri is a writer for FanGraphs and Baseball Prospectus — as well as a contributor (past and/or present) to the McClatchy family of papers, the Charlotte Observer, and the Chronicle of Duke University. She’s also the guest on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.
This episode of the program is 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.
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Audio after the jump. (Approximately 59 min play time.)
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