| 11:58 |
: And so it begins.
|
| 11:59 |
: OH GOD THERES NO QUESTION QUEUE I’M SCARED
|
| 11:59 |
: How was your weekend?
|
| 11:59 |
: Sleepy. I ate way too many cookies Friday.
|
| 11:59 |
: Why does ZiPS project K/9 rather than K%?
|
| 12:00 |
: ZiPS doesn’t explicitly project K/9 or K%. Probably easier for Cistulli to calculate since I don’t give him TBF in the base readout.
|
Miguel Sano didn’t exactly sneak up on the league. The massive 22-year-old Dominican slugger had been considered a top-100 overall prospect in baseball for each of the last six seasons, a top-20 overall prospect each of the last four. He’d have been a perennial No. 1 prospect for most any organization in baseball, if not for the presence of super-prospect Byron Buxton. In the prospect world, Sano played Pippen to Buxton’s Jordan.
Last season, they both arrived. And for Sano, the debut couldn’t have gone much better. Sano batted 335 times in his rookie season. Set the playing time minimum low enough, to include Sano on our leaderboards, and he was a top-10 hitter in baseball. Immediately, Sano thrust himself into the company of Giancarlo Stanton, Jose Bautista, Edwin Encarnacion and Chris Davis, not only as one of the game’s premier power hitters, but as one of the most dangerous all-around at-bats in the league.
Pitchers who had faced Sano in the minor leagues already knew what to expect. Pitchers who hadn’t faced Sano before quickly learned what to expect. The most simple scouting report goes like this: true 80-grade power, the kind of power that necessitates lofty comparisons with Stanton. Proceed with caution.
And that’s exactly what pitchers did. A reputation as a feared hitter is the kind of thing most guys have to earn. Bautista, Davis, Encarnacion: they had to earn their reputations as truly premier power hitters, as the most dangerous at-bats in the game. It wasn’t simply assumed. Sano? Sano arrived with that reputation.
In something of a curious trade, the Rockies flipped Corey Dickerson to the Rays for Jake McGee. Those two players were the headliners of the deal, but they weren’t the only two players involved. Also changing hands were third baseman Kevin Padlo and hard-throwing righty German Marquez, who head to the Rays and Rockies, respectively. Here’s what my fancy computer math says about the minor leaguers involved.
Kevin Padlo (Profile)
The Rockies drafted Padlo in the fifth round out of high school less than two years ago, but he wasted no time putting up gaudy numbers in the low minors. Padlo graded out extremely well by an embryonic version of KATOH and, nearly a year and a half later, his enticing combination of power, speed and youth still tips the scales. He placed 37th on KATOH’s newly-minted prospect list, with a projected 5.9 WAR through his first six years in the show.
After having typically appeared in the very hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past couple years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Oakland Athletics. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.
Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles NL / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / St. Louis / San Diego / San Francisco / Seattle / Texas / Toronto / Washington.
Batters
There’s always the sense, given the organization’s record of innovation and willingness to reconstruct its roster, that the A’s are likely to succeed then most when mediocrity appears to be the only possible outcome. If that sense is correct, then Oakland is likely to succeed very hard in 2016 — because the club, as presently constructed, is not well-acquitted by the projections.
Consider the following table, a version of which appears in the glossary entry for WAR and which provides a rough characterization for various WAR ranges:
| Category | WAR |
| Scrub | 0-1 |
| Role Player | 1-2 |
| Solid Starter | 2-3 |
| Good Player | 3-4 |
| All-Star | 4-5 |
| Superstar | 5-6 |
| MVP | 6+ |
By this rough taxonomy, Oakland currently employs only two batters classified as “solid starters” (Josh Reddick, Marcus Semien) and a third (Billy Burns) who profiles as precisely average. That triumvirate represents the exact sort of cost-controlled core a team like Oakland requires to win. Unfortunately, they’re surrounded not by stars, but role players.
It’s difficult, while examining the modest projections here, not also to consider for a moment the distinctly less modest one produced by ZiPS for Josh Donaldson. Last year’s American League MVP is expected to record more than six wins in 2016, at the cost of about $11.5 million. One needn’t be employed — or even have any training — as a rocket scientist to recognize what a benefit Donaldson would be to this club.
Episode 628
Jeff Sullivan is a senior editor at FanGraphs. He’s also the live-in-person guest on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.
This edition of the program is sponsored by Draft, the first truly mobile fantasy sports app. Compete directly against idiot host Carson Cistulli by clicking here.
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 31 min play time.)
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Location: New York
Description:
The New York Mets are seeking a Data Analyst to work its Research and Development team. The employee will analyze baseball data in order to build and maintain predictive models that support the decision-making processes within Baseball Operations. The Analyst will report to the Manager, Baseball Research and Development.
Responsibilities:
Qualifications:
To Apply:
Interested applicants should apply here by Sunday, February 7th.
Christin Stewart is the top power-hitting prospect in the Detroit Tigers system. He aspires to be the best overall hitter.
The 22-year-old outfielder got off on the right foot after being drafted 34th-overall last summer out of the University of Tennessee. Swinging from the left side, the muscular slugger slashed ..285/.372/.508 and bashed 10 home runs in half a season. He did the bulk of his damage in West Michigan, where he helped lead the Whitecaps to a Midwest League championship.
Stewart is highly touted, although the accolades come with cautions. Baseball America has lauded his plus bat speed and raw power, but also opined that he’s “an aggressive hitter whose swing gets long.”
This past summer, I asked the first-year pro about the latter assessment.
“There’s not a lot of movement in my swing,” Stewart told me. “I think I have a short swing to the ball. My extension through the ball can get a little long at times, and maybe that’s what they mean.”
Phil Clark, West Michigan’s hitting coach last year, had a different take. He concurred with his charge on length, but then to pointed to the start, as opposed to the finish. Read the rest of this entry »
Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times, orange for TechGraphs and blue for Community Research.
Read the rest of this entry »
It wasn’t that long ago that the Pittsburgh Pirates were a laughingstock. They experienced two decades of losing seasons from 1993 to 2012, but getting that proverbial monkey off their backs in 2013 didn’t exactly free them from the pain baseball can inflict.
In fact, the Pirates found a way to be simultaneously great and depressing. They’ve hosted three consecutive wild-card games, winning the first one and losing the last two. Not only have they failed to advance past the Division Series despite averaging over 93 wins a year, they have had to endure the madness of the coin-flip game three times in a row. Needless to say, the Pirates and their fans desperately crave a longer October stay in 2016.
To do that, they’ll either have to be better than the powerhouse Cubs or they will have to secure a wild-card spot and win a one-game playoff. The Pirates are perhaps the team at the steepest spot on the win curve because the best team in baseball is in their division, they’re projected to be competing among a tightly bunched group of contenders, and the indignity of another wild-card defeat might be too much to handle.
Ben and Sam talk to the new Director of Baseball Research and Development for MLB Advanced Media, Daren Willman, about what’s in store for Statcast in 2016 and beyond.
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