Ok, you guys have spoken, and you don’t want a bases loaded walk to count the same as a solo HR. That even though the base-out state before the event and after the event remain unchanged, and that the number of runs now in the bank are the same, the WAY it happened matters to most of you. Therefore, we are NOT trying to preserve the runs, we are not trying to make sure the runs add up. You have been clear on that.
Now, let’s talk about “preservation of wins”. It’s a 0-0 game, the bottom of the 9th, the bases are loaded with two outs. Historically, at this point in the game, the batting team would end up winning 68% of the time. It’s a high stakes situation, a Leverage Index of 6.4. And the batter walks. The batting team wins, game is over. Ooops, I meant the batter hit a single. No, wait, it was a Grand Slam. No, wait it should have been a Grand Slam, but Robin Ventura decided to abandon the bases after he reached first base. Regardless, the game is over, and the batting team won as soon as the batter touched first base.
You can give it this — the Orioles’ signing of Yovani Gallardo seemed like it was going to be pretty dull all-around, but now it’s becoming fascinating, thanks to a recent and familiar little twist. See, Gallardo still isn’t officially signed, and word is it’s because the Orioles aren’t comfortable with what they’ve seen so far in his medicals. I believe they’re waiting on results from more tests; I believe the issue is the health of his shoulder. So for the time being, the Orioles don’t yet have a starting pitcher they want, and that same starting pitcher is having to worry about an even further depressed market for his services. Nobody roots for these things.
It feels familiar because it’s the Orioles, and this is far from the first time the organization has wound up in a place like this. This further cements the team’s reputation for having an almost impossibly rigorous physical, and it can be rough, on Orioles players and fans alike. No one likes having the rug taken out from under them, and that’s exactly how it feels when these issues come up. It seems like it reflects poorly on ownership, and Peter Angelos has certainly taken a large amount of crap over the years. I’m not here to broadly attack or defend Peter Angelos. It just feels like it’s time to talk about the Orioles’ reputation, how true it is, and what it could mean.
You can probably be forgiven if you heard about a possible Blake Snell contract extension and your first reaction was to wonder, “Who?” Snell has never pitched in a major-league baseball game. He is not one of the top-ten prospects in baseball. Rather, he’s made just 21 starts above Class-A, has produced a walk rate above 10% in every year of the minors, and (perhaps as a result of playing in the Tampa Bay Rays organization) is generally unknown to the masses. However, Snell is one of the top-20 prospects in baseball, his walk rate has moved down as he’s moved up the minor-league ladder, he struck out more than 30% of batters last season, and he allowed just 21 runs in 134 innings last season (1.41 ERA). He’s also likely to see the majors this season, and the Rays have had talks with Snell about a contract extension.
Contract extensions for players with no service time are incredibly rare. The last one was Jon Singleton in June 2014, and prior to Singleton, Evan Longoria’s contract extension in April 2008 — which was not announced until after a week in the majors — was the closest comparison. The Rays are not strangers to similar deals. Matt Moore is in the final guaranteed year of his contract that he signed after pitching just 9.1 innings back in the 2011 regular season. They also approachedMelvin Upton as a teenager, but were unsuccessful in reaching an agreement. Since 2010, there have only been four contract extensions for players with under one year of service time and the Rays are responsible for two of them in Moore and Chris Archer. (Singleton and Salvador Perez are the others.)
Ben and Sam banter about Angels at the airport, Ryan Webb, and a home-run-hitting contest, then answer listener emails about winning three-game series, the best radio broadcasts, the baseball equivalent of the San Antonio Spurs, and more.
When news reports broke in November that Jose Reyes had been arrested in Hawaii for an alleged incident of domestic violence, many assumed that he would be the first test case under Major League Baseball’s new domestic violence policy. As I noted at the time the agreement was announced last August, both MLB and the Major League Baseball Players Association have agreed to a new set of rules to govern cases in which a player has been accused of domestic violence, sexual assault, or child abuse.
Among the provisions in the new policy was one giving Commissioner Manfred the power to place any player accused of domestic violence on paid administrative leave for up to seven days. This provision was intended to give the league sufficient time to investigate the alleged incident before deciding on an appropriate level of punishment, while at the same time preventing a player involved in a domestic incident from appearing on the playing field.
Given the seven-day time limit of any such interim suspension, MLB’s announcement on Tuesday that the league was indefinitely placing Reyes on paid leave until after his pending criminal proceedings in Hawaii have been resolved initially took some by surprise. Indeed, considering that Reyes’s criminal trial in Hawaii isn’t scheduled to begin until April 4th, the leave that MLB announced on Tuesday will undoubtedly extend well beyond the time limit seemingly authorized under the new domestic violence policy.
In reality, however, although many observers – including me – missed this detail when MLB first announced its new domestic violence policy in August, the new policy agreed to by the league and union did in fact include an additional provision that applies to Reyes’ case.
It’s become a practice of the present author in recent years to begin in February a painstaking search for the new ballcap that will express his entire being. It’s also become a practice in recent years to parlay that search into web content so that the author might “remain” “employed.”
Two years ago, this pursuit yielded a Winston-Salem Spirits cap from 1994 with a weird red sun and melancholy eagle on it. Last year, I had the fortune of procuring a handsome Diablos Rojos cap from the actual team store at Parque Fray Nano in Mexico City. In each case, I have documented the relevant search for the benefit of posterity — even if posterity has failed to show any real interest in my work.
Last week, the author began this year’s edition of the search. What follows is the second installment of the newest volume.
To wit:
Atlanta Braves A-Town Corduroy 5-Panel Velcro Snapback (Link) Style: Snapback Time Left: 23 days, 5 hours Cost: US $17.99 (Buy It Now)
While it’s difficult to conceive of a scenario in which one would voluntarily acknowledge any sort of affiliation with the city of Atlanta, this cap is almost certainly the best means by which to do it. The low crown preserves one from the awkward fit offered by other new caps. As for the corduroy, it’s the most expedient way to announce publicly that, regardless of what these so-called “credit reports” suggest, one has plans to acquire a sweet conversion van in the near future.
Mike Scioscia has a reputation as an old-school manager who has little interest in analytics. He doesn’t want you to believe that. The extent to which you should is subjective. Scioscia certainly isn’t cutting edge — at least not by today’s standards — but he’s by no means a dinosaur. His finger is on the pulse of what’s going on in today’s game, even if he isn’t always pushing the same buttons as his more progressive contemporaries.
On Monday, I had an opportunity to ask the Angels manager for his thoughts on analytics. Here is what Scioscia had to say:
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Scioscia on analytics: “Analytics have been around forever in the game of baseball, from when Connie Mack would use spray charts and move guys around from the dugout, to now. Analytics for projecting player performance have mushroomed over the last five years. Analytics in dugout probabilities have increased. We’ve had data, we’ve had analytics, since I’ve been in the game. And they’ve evolved.
Wins Above Replacement (WAR) has as its genesis Bill James, even if Bill might not necessarily take the credit (or blame based on some readers) for it. But make no mistake, Bill provided the plumbing for it. For those interested, you can read Brandon Heipp’s account on that backstory.
When you put all the plumbing together, you can create a framework. And that’s what WAR is, a framework to provide an estimate. Wins Above Replacement is an estimate of… something. What that something is is different for every person. While the currency is wins, it’s not clear what those wins represent. There are reasonable choices you can make along the way. And for every fork in the road you take, you may diverge yourself from the next guy. This is why WAR can never be one thing.
As a framework, WAR leaves little room for discussion. Whether it’s what you see at Baseball Reference or at FanGraphs or openWAR or (to some extent) at Baseball Prospectus, they have as their framework the WAR that was championed on my old blog, which culminated with this article. But a framework is not the same as an implementation. 95% of the cars on the road all follow the same core design. That’s the framework. But a Chevy is different from a Lexus. Those are implementations. And there are as many implementations of WAR as there are baseball fans. Whereas Baseball Reference and FanGraphs and the others provide a consistent, systematic implementation, most fans have their own personal mish-mash of arbitrary, biased, and capricious combination of stats, which can change as their mood fits.
This series of articles, of which there may be a dozen(*) is an effort to try to come up with a WAR metric that will satisfy the Straight Arrow readers.
(*) I have no idea. This is the first one I’ve written.
***
I’ll ask you a series of questions, starting now. The openWAR guys talk about “preservation of runs”. That is a good starting point, and a great way to describe the concept. So, the question centers around whether we want to make sure that everything adds up at the play level. If you get a bases-loaded walk, do we want to make sure that exactly one run is accounted for or not?
If you care about “talent”, you just want to account for around +.30 runs for offense (and -.30 runs for defense), because you don’t want to be concerned with the specific base-out state. (We’ll talk about “preservation of wins” in a later question.) Similarly, is a bases-empty walk and bases-empty single the same thing or not? And if you want to preserve runs, are you ready to accept a bases-loaded walk and a solo HR as being the exact same thing?
So, have a discussion, and then answer this poll question:
There are plenty of other discussion points that go into building an implementation of WAR, and we’ll get to those in the future. For this post, I’m interested to hear what you guys think about this issue specifically.
A couple weeks back, Dave Cameron wrote about how Dexter Fowler would be a good fit for the Orioles in the wake of the presumed Yovani Gallardo signing — and when he did so, the post began like this:
“While nothing is officially done yet, it seems reasonable to assume the Orioles are going to sign Yovani Gallardo, with reports that a deal just needs some tweaks before it is finalized.”
Dave had no reason to believe the Gallardo signing wouldn’t work out, but now it hasn’t, as the Orioles seemingly have a higher expectation than most when it comes to physicals, and so you understand that I’m cautious to say anything is set in stone between Fowler and Baltimore.
That being said, it sure looks like Dexter Fowler’s going to be playing in Baltimore next year! Just need to see that physical! Operating under the assumption Fowler does indeed pass his physical, it sounds like the Orioles will pay him $33 million over three years. That’s a year and some AAV fewer than the crowd’s estimation of four years and $56 million back in November. The qualifying offer strikes again.
If the Gallardo deal falls through, and it looks like it could, then the Orioles will surrender the 14th-overall pick in next year’s draft for Fowler. With Gallardo in the mix, it would be 14 and 28. Doesn’t much matter who’s responsible for the loss of which pick — 14 is gone either way. The 14th pick is worth something like $15 to $20 million, and so you can factor that into Fowler’s cost, if you’d like. Even with an extra $20 million tacked on for the pick, Fowler’s total guaranteed money falls short of the crowd, and so it’s easy to think of this as something of a bargain price for a quality outfielder who’s still on the right side of 30 for another 27 days.
Dave Cameron: It’s Wednesday, so let’s chat. I was only expecting to chat for 60 minutes or so, but Jose Bautista thinks 150 is more reasonable.
12:03
Dave Cameron: So we’ll see how long we go!
12:03
mtsw: [Orioles physical joke]
12:04
Dave Cameron: I wonder exactly what they think this all accomplishes? What’s the point of being known as the organization who will back out of deals?
12:04
Eddy: Should the Rangers opt to start Gallo in LF to open the season? Feel like they have viable in house options instead of signing a FA.
12:04
Dave Cameron: It seems like he should at least get a look, given that he’s blocked by Beltre at third. But if they are serious about contending, they can’t have their plan be Gallo with no backup.
