FanGraphs Baseball

With all due respect to Carter Capps, it looks like we have our first major injury of spring training.

Jhonny Peralta suffered a left thumb injury on Saturday. Early indications are that he tore a ligament, could miss 2-3 months.

— Jenifer Langosch (@LangoschMLB) March 7, 2016

The Cardinals have a good team, and are looking to contend again this year, but they don’t have a lot of organization depth at shortstop, and were counting on Peralta to play everyday. Barring a future move, this injury likely pushes Jedd Gyorko from a utility role into the starting line-up, which isn’t a position the Cardinals wanted to find themselves in. Not only is Gyorko not really a shortstop, losing him off the bench would mean taking away Kolten Wong’s platoon partner, weakening the team against lefties even more than simply swapping out Peralta for Gyorko would suggest.

While the gap between Peralta and Wong at shortstop over a full season is probably only 2-3 wins, and it sounds like Peralta will only miss about half the season, this seems like the kind of injury that should encourage the Cardinals to make a move for outside help. For one, the Cardinals can’t really afford to just surrender a win, given the fight the NL Wild Card race is shaping up to be, not to mention how good the Cubs are likely to be this year. And this isn’t a team that is built to just say “let’s get them next year”, as veterans like Adam Wainwright, Matt Holliday, and Yadier Molina aren’t getting any younger. The Cardinals need to maximize their chances of winning in 2016, and running Gyorko out at shortstop for a few months is at odds with that goal.

Unfortunately for St. Louis, the injury occurred a week after Ian Desmond and Jimmy Rollins signed as free agents, so there’s no easy solution sitting around looking for a job. On the trade market, Erick Aybar would seem to be a potential fit, as the Braves don’t really need a walk-year shortstop during their rebuild, but they don’t have any internal replacements ready, so Atlanta might not be keen on giving up their only decent option. The Mets have infield depth, with Ruben Tejada and Wilmer Flores both set to serve as reserves this year, but they might not be interested in helping an NL contender stay in the race.

The Cardinals have a long history of finding hidden gems, but unless they know something about Gyorko’s defense that no one else does, this could be a pretty big blow. Talking the Braves out of Aybar seems like the best option available at the moment, at least from my perspective.

As you probably have heard by now, our projection systems don’t like the Royals, again. Our Playoff Odds page has them forecasted for just 77 wins, with only an 8% of reaching the postseason, the lowest of any team in the American League. ZIPS and Steamer just aren’t that high on the team’s individual players, and since the projections are context-neutral, there’s no adjustment being made for the fact that the team has won more than expected in recent years. The Royals have relied heavily on context-specific performance to reach the postseason, and projection systems assume that’s not a sustainable skill, wiping it away at the start of each season.

On Friday, I posed a question to you guys, based on the crowd’s overwhelming response that they believe the projection systems are underrating the 2016 Royals. The response to my question was also overwhelming; you guys believe that the Royals are going to significantly outperform their BaseRuns record once again. The top four answers selected in the poll were the four options that had them beating their BaseRuns record, with 78% of those voting selecting one of the options that suggested the Royals have an inherent skill that BaseRuns isn’t accounting for.

Overall, by weighting the results by the proportion of people who voted for each option, you guys project that the Royals will beat their BaseRuns expected record by 3.4 wins in 2016, accounting for about three-fourths of the difference that Jeff Sullivan found when he polled the crowd about expected record versus the projections. Given that the Royals have beaten BaseRuns by an aggregate 25 wins over the last three years, our readers believe that there’s some real skill there. You don’t expect that they’ll get the same type of bump as they have the last few years, but you’re willing to assume that, at this point, BaseRuns is just missing something about how they play, and the forecasts are low by 3.4 wins because of it.

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It’s Spring Training, and everyone is trying to improve their game. That means everyone — I mean everyone — is seeking unsolicited advice from baseball writers who have no individual experience in their line of work. Right? Rather than call this advice, because I alone am not qualified to give advice in this particular field, let’s call it a discussion.

A few months back, I wrote a post titled The Outfielders Who Threw 100, in which I used Statcast data to identify the 15 outfielders who cracked 100 mph on a throw last season, and broke down the various types of 100-mph outfielder throws. The post, of course, was full of video clips — clips of the year’s most exciting throws.

But we didn’t always see the throws. Instead, we saw the ball hit to the outfielder, and the outfielder corralling it, and we felt the palpable suspense of watching the outfielder position himself to unleash a momentous throw, except as soon as he did, we saw a quick cut to a baserunner, and then another quick cut back to the fielder receiving the throw we’d just prepared ourselves to witness — a throw that ended up being one of the most impressive of the year.

This is how they all went. All of the year’s most impressive throws weren’t witnessed in full on the live broadcast, and were instead interrupted by a distracting, one-second interjection of a baserunner scrambling toward the next bag. After seeing this a dozen times in a row, I grew frustrated.

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If aliens landed on Earth and, rather than asking about our political systems or scientific accomplishments, inquired about the last 20 years of baseball philosophy, one of the things you would highlight is the growing disdain for the intentional walk. Certainly, there are times when an intentional walk makes sense, but one of the fundamental lessons of the era is that giving the other team a free base runner is typically foolish.

As Ben Lindbergh wrote at FiveThirtyEight, managers are increasingly aware of the downside of the intentional walk, and as a result, they’re are on the decline across the league. Billy Beane didn’t wake up one morning, discover intentional walks were bad, and begin a crusade against them or anything, but intentional walks have clearly fallen out of favor as teams, writers, and fans have gotten on board with a more data-friendly approach to the game.

As such, we’ve trained ourselves to see intentional walks negatively by default and praise teams that don’t issue them. If teams are issuing fewer intentional walks, we normally see that as a positive sign, so forgive me for the investigation I’m about to undertake to explore the opposite.  In 2015, the Blue Jays both (a) possessed an exceptional offense and yet (b) were on the receiving end of a shockingly low number of intentional walks.  What was the rest of the league thinking?

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Previous editions: Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati  / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles (AL) / Miami.

Last week, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the Minnesota Twins. In this companion piece, I look at that same Minnesota farm system through the lens of my recently refined KATOH projection system. The Twins have the sixth-best farm system in baseball according to KATOH.

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Episode 636
Jeff Sullivan is a senior editor at FanGraphs. He’s also the adult male friend 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 23 min play time.)

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Ben and Sam preview the Rangers’ season with BP author Kate Morrison, and George talks to Fort Worth Star-Telegram Rangers beat writer Jeff Wilson (at 26:32).

Matt Murton had a lot of success in NPB after fading out in MLB. In six seasons with the Hanshin Tigers, he slashed .310/.352/.437. Now, at age 34, he’s back stateside, trying to win a job with the Chicago Cubs.

Murton’s path to Japan and back is a curious one. A first-round pick by the Red Sox Sox in 2003, he went to the Cubs a year later in the Nomar Garciaparra deal. From 2005-2007, he hit a solid .303/.370/.462. From 2008-2009, he appeared in a grand total of 57 games with three organizations. In 2010, he changed continents.

“It was either fight for a spot in a situation where I was out of options, or take something that was more of a guarantee,” Murton said of his decision. “I was 28 years old, and as crazy as this might sound, I came to the realization that this is what I do for a living. I have a family to provide for, and it was a good opportunity to do that.”

Murton has mixed feelings on his initial big-league tenure. He did his best and feels he was reasonably successful. He also feels he could have done a better job. He has a lone regret. 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.
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