Addison Russell already had one of the twenty-best debuts by a shortstop we’ve seen in the free agency era. But two adjustments — one made last year, and one made this spring — could end up driving the 22-year-old beyond his projections this year. Particularly because both adjustments spoke to his biggest flaws.
So, on Tuesday, I announced a meetup I’d be hosting in Toronto on April 8th, for those of you who won’t be attending the home opener to get together at a bar and watch the game. The space we had reserved at Tallboys had room for 30 people, and you guys bought up all the available spots in less than a few hours. In order to try and accommodate more people who expressed interest in attending, we’re moving the get together to a different bar: Firken on King.
This new space has room for 100 people, so we’re opening up 70 more spots as of today. If you purchased a ticket on Tuesday, don’t worry, that will still be honored, and you don’t have to buy a new ticket to get into the event. Because of the larger space, however, we’ve had to up the price slightly for this second round of tickets; the cost is now $8, but still includes your first beer, so it’s still close to free to attend. The event will start at 6 pm, and we’ll hang out and talk baseball before the game starts, then settle in and watch the game together starting at 7. For space reasons, you’ll need to be at Firken by 6:30 in order to have your space guaranteed, as they’ll be opening up the area to walk-ins after that point.
| EVALUATING THE PROSPECTS 2016 Angels Astros Athletics Blue Jays Braves Brewers Cardinals Cubs Diamondbacks Dodgers Giants Indians Mariners Marlins Mets Nationals Orioles Padres Phillies Pirates Rangers Rays Red Sox Reds Rockies Royals Tigers Twins White Sox Yankees |
Billy Beane has been the master of the pseudo-rebuild for a long time now, replenishing the farm system while simultaneously improving or at least diversifying the big league roster. This past year has been more about subtraction from the minor league depth than addition, but internal development, a solid draft last June and some lesser moves have put the system in a better spot than it was last year. Translation: they have some more chips to play with come this July.
Though it is definitely in a better spot, it certainly isn’t without weakness. Besides Sean Manaea, there isn’t much immediate help for the big league rotation without dipping into some more of the command specialist-types that they have had to rely on the last few years, albeit with pretty good success. On the offensive side, Matt Olson, Chad Pinder and Renato Nunez are close to ready for their big league shots, as are guys like Joe Wendle and Matt Chapman, to a lesser extent impact-wise.
Recent drafts have been fairly successful keeping the pipeline operational, though the A’s have had an inordinate amount of pitchers dealing with injuries. Raul Alcantara, Dillon Overton and Bobby Wahl are all in the comeback stages of arm injuries, and young Chris Kohler is dealing with shoulder stiffness this spring. It may just be a product of their wheeling and dealing of anyone who is healthy, but it still bears watching over the next season or two to look for any patterns.
As for the surprise picks on the list, Manaea’s consistency issues drop him down a little bit for me, though I still like his potential in the rotation. Chad Pinder and Rangel Ravelo are both better hitters than most people seem to think in my opinion, while Matt Chapman and Ryon Healy have some things to prove before I’ll really buy into their offensive profiles. Seth Brown is an interesting upside prospect to watch, coming out of nowhere to hit a bunch of homers in college, getting drafted late and continuing to hit well in the low minors.
| 12:46 |
: No idea where this floated to me from. I gather they were popular around when I was born.
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| 12:01 |
: Your pitcher rankings suggest you’re lower on Verlander than most. I know Sporer is a believer. What are you seeing that he isn’t?
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| 12:02 |
: I think I’ll revise that up. Apparently he’s got the best fastball spin rate, and when seen in tandem with the fact that he found his rise again last year, I think a lot of his struggles were release point related. If that’s true, and he’s healthy, it all seems fixable. I’ll move him up above Shields, maybe into the low 30s. I should update those.
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| 12:02 |
: Can you get a free agent to get an Eno clause in his contract in which you get to be around a team 24/7 like Laroche had?
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| 12:03 |
: Judging how Greinke gave me an hour last week after he told the beats that they had to pool their questions, I might have a chance.
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| 12:03 |
: Who’s leading the way for the Astros’ 1B job as of today?
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When we tell a lie, it’s often rooted in fact. It’s tough to just completely pull a lie out of thin air; somewhere, entrenched deep down within a lie, there’s a factual base. But we start with that small fact, and we turn it into a big lie, and at first we know not to believe that lie but over time, if we continue to lie, two things begin to happen. One, the lie begins to expand. We add in new layers, hyperbolize the already fictitious tale, and turn it into something larger than we’d ever intended. Two, we begin to believe that lie. We’re not aware of this happening, but tell a lie enough times and you’ll forget where you started. That’s how you really wind up in trouble.
Rich Hill felt like a lie last season. I’m still not sure I believe it happened. And, as if I was the one who told the Great Rich Hill Lie of 2015, I began to embellish the story. Two days ago, I’d have bet good money that Rich Hill did what he did last year over 10 or more starts. Give me enough time and I’d have said he did it over a full season. But alas! Rich Hill was only literally Clayton Kershaw for four starts, not 10 or 20 or 33.
But Rich Hill being literally Clayton Kershaw for any amount of time last year still seems like a lie, and when we look at the numbers, it’s almost impossible to make sense of them. It took long enough for us to come to terms that what Clayton Kershaw does is just what he does. We can’t have a second one. When we see 36 strikeouts in 106 batters faced, what does that mean? What does five walks mean? Half of balls in play on the ground — what’s that? In just four starts, these types of numbers have so little context, it almost does more harm than good to think about them. So naturally, we go deeper.
It’s Bold Prediction season over on the fantasy side, and since it’s in the water, it’s starting to spread. And though this bold prediction will be a silly enterprise, it’s not an insane one. It’s a prediction like any other, a dart thrown at a board with some intention and thought behind it.
The projections on our site that say that the Chicago White Sox are a .500 team poised to finish tied for second, five or six games back of the Indians in the American League central? Those represent the meat of possible outcomes, the median result of throwing thousands of player projections into a battle with each other.
But the error inherent in projecting one player adds up with each additional player added, and the error bars on those projections are relatively large. One standard deviation is around five wins, meaning that a result that is ten wins above or below the projection is not out of the norm.
In a spring-training game on Wednesday afternoon, Juan Nicasio struck out 10 Orioles. In fairness, everybody who pitched in the game for the Pirates struck out 10 Orioles, and I just struck out 10 Orioles while I was writing this sentence, but Nicasio is opening some eyes after what was a pretty quiet arrival in Pittsburgh. When he was brought in, the thought was he’d serve as a possible long reliever. Now there’s even talk about him starting.
It’s the middle of March, and Nicasio has racked up exactly zero regular-season innings, so it’s not like we know how this is going to play out. Pitchers open eyes in spring training all the time before coming apart when the games start to mean something. Nicasio, however, clearly has the stuff, and the narrative is building. After Wednesday, there’s a distinct feeling that Juan Nicasio is the Pirates’ latest pitching success story.
Ben and Sam preview the Blue Jays’ season with Joshua Howsam of Baseball Prospectus Toronto, and George talks to Sportsnet columnist Shi Davidi (at 19:49).
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This afternoon, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the New York Yankees. In this companion piece, I look at that same New York farm system through the lens of my recently refined KATOH projection system. The Yankees have the 5th-best farm system in baseball according to KATOH, due in no small part to the system’s depth. As you can see below, the Yankees have a lot of prospects projected for one or two WAR.
There’s way more to prospect evaluation than just the stats, so if you haven’t already, I highly recommend you read Dan’s piece in addition to this one. KATOH has no idea how hard a pitcher throws, how good a hitter’s bat speed is, or what a player’s makeup is like. So it’s liable to miss big on players whose tools don’t line up with their performances. However, when paired with more scouting-based analyses, KATOH’s objectivity can be useful in identifying talented players who might be overlooked by the industry consensus or highly-touted prospects who might be over-hyped.
Below, I’ve grouped prospects into three groups: those who are forecast for two or more wins through their first six major-league seasons, those who receive a projection between 1.0 and 2.0 WAR though their first six seasons, and then any residual players who received Future Value (FV) grades of 45 or higher from Dan. Note that I generated forecasts only for players who accrued at least 200 plate appearances or batters faced last season. Also note that the projections for players over a relatively small sample are less reliable, especially when those samples came in the low minors.
Over the last few years, there have been some players who have publicly acknowledged that they enjoy and use analytics to help themselves on the field. Zack Greinke, Brandon McCarthy, and Glen Perkins are some of the more notable players who have embraced nerd stats, and guys like Craig Breslow — with his molecular biophysics degree from Yale — buck the stereotype of the typical jock. But thanks to this great Travis Sawchik profile on Cole Figueroa, we might have a new contender for the title of King of the Ballplayer Nerds.
But he wasn’t interested in baseball analytics until he was traded to the pioneering Tampa Bay Rays in 2010, his third year in pro baseball.
“I said ‘OK, it’s important to them. Why isn’t it important to me?’” said Figueroa of analytics.
Figueroa said in the spring, in an auditorium setting, the Rays hold hitters’ meetings. He had never been in meetings like these. For example, Rays coaches spoke about evaluating the quality of hitter not by batting average but by batted ball exit velocity.
“Depending on who you were you could sleep through (the meetings), you could take exactly what they are giving you,” Figueroa said, “or you could expand upon it.”
Figueroa expanded.
“What can I do to become the most optimal player?” Figueroa asked himself. “What are my strengths? What are my weaknesses?”
Seeing the vast amount of data pouring into the game, and thinking about how to take advantage of it, he began to teach himself code, ‘R,’ or programming language.
He spent hours at Coursera.org — the Web site reassures a new visitor one can “Code Yourself!” — where there are step-by-step instructions in learning how to code and program.
With his nascent coding skills, he began to research and refine data given to him by the Rays, though the Rays kept much of their data off limits from their proprietary database.
He created models to understand how a player with his skills would age. He studied players with similar physical and statistical profiles. He studied what skills would age well, which would age poorly. In three consecutive seasons in Triple-A, he improved his on-base percentage.
“People think coding is some foreign language … in a sense where it’s only something really intelligent people can do,” Figueroa said. “And it’s really totally the opposite. Anyone can code.”
The whole thing is a great read, and even includes Figueroa giving hitting instruction to a teammate based on things he’d read from Alan Nathan, but the fact that Figueroa is writing his own code puts him on another level. I’d imagine that even if he doesn’t end up having a particularly great career on the field, every team in baseball has probably already penciled Figueroa’s name down for a potential front office or coaching job.
