FanGraphs Baseball

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 Detroit Tigers. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Houston / Kansas City / Los Angeles NL / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / San Diego / Seattle / Texas / Toronto.

Batters
This entry regarding Detroit’s position players and their relative strengths looked different at roughly 4pm ET yesterday, when the idiot author originally composed it. That version of the Tigers featured some combination of Anthony Gose (561 PA, 0.9 zWAR) and Mike Aviles (347 PA, 0.3 zWAR) in left field, accounting for little more than a win between them. What happened in the meantime, however, is Detroit signed Justin Upton to a six year, $132.8 million deal. The move, broadly speaking, appears to have added slightly more than two wins to the club’s projections.

While certainly benefiting the Tigers, the acquisition of Upton does little to counteract the team’s recent history of employing stars (on the one hand) and scrubs (on the other). Miguel Cabrera, Ian Kinsler, J.D. Martinez, and Upton are all projected to record a mark of 3.5 WAR or higher; every other field player on the roster, 1.6 WAR or lower. Of course, a distinct advantage to this particular method of roster construction is that it becomes much easier to upgrade this or that position — especially if the club’s owner is both (a) fabulously wealthy and (b) motivated by the proximity of his own, real death.

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The Orioles, in conjunction with the consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, are hosting a Baseball Analytics Hackathon on Friday, February 5th. It will be an all-day affair, and there will be food provided throughout the day, so that you don’t need to burn precious brain space worrying about where to go eat. Which is nice.

Hackathons are generally an excellent way to expose oneself to people in the industry, and this particular event comes with the added bonus of having data scientists from one of the largest consulting firms in the world on hand as well. Not too shabby. As if that wasn’t enough, there will be prizes awarded for the top projects.

If you’re interested, you need to move quickly, as registration closes this Friday, Jan. 22. One neat item is that you don’t have to register individually, you can also register as a group. This would seem to insure that if you and a group of friends want to attend that you don’t have to worry about being split up on arrival.

Below is the poster for the event, and you can follow this link to register. Happy hacking!

The first of them cracked. Justin Upton and Yoenis Cespedes remained on the free-agent market, and all around the league, teams indicated they didn’t want to make the necessary commitments. The players wanted five or six or seven years. The teams wanted to give one or two or three. It was enough to make you think there could maybe be a potential bargain, but the market just doesn’t turn out like that. More often than not, a team gives in, and few should be surprised the team that gave in Monday was the Tigers. As always, all Mike Ilitch wants is to win. He’ll now get to watch his team try to win with Upton every day in left field.

The agreement is for six years and a little over $130 million, with Upton also having the opportunity to opt out two years in. That’ll give Upton the chance to hit the market again at the same age that Cespedes is now, and as we’ve written so many times, the opt-out clause has good value to the player. But at the same time, this is the Tigers — Ilitch’s Tigers. On one hand, Ilitch makes these analyses complicated. On the other hand, you could argue they couldn’t be simpler. Upton’s a good player. Ilitch was willing to pay for a good player.

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All winter, it’s been pretty clear that the Tigers needed another outfielder, and with an apparently soft market for Yoenis Cespedes and Justin Upton, it seemed perfectly logical for the Tigers to jump in and make a play for one of the better remaining players on the market. After all, this is a win-now team that threw $110 million at a good-not-great starter at the start of the off-season, and has a core of quality players who aren’t getting any younger; leaving a gaping hole in the outfield for the sake of cost effectiveness, at this point, was a strange proposition.

Apparently the Tigers now agree, and look like they’re going to be the landing spot for Justin Upton.

Sources: Upton six-year deal with #Tigers expected to be in $125M range. Agreed upon in principal, per @BNightengale.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) January 19, 2016

The crowd projected Upton for 6/$120M before the off-season, while I came in at 7/$140M, so the price seems right in line with what was presumed to be reasonable before the market looked to have softened. Given that Chris Davis and Ian Kennedy — also presumed to be dealing with little leverage — also landed larger than expected contracts in recent days, it may be time to stop assuming that the remaining free agents are going to have to take big discounts to get a long-term deal at this point. There’s clearly still plenty of money hanging around.

For the Tigers, Upton is a significant upgrade, even though he’s also more of a good player than a great one. If he can retain some of his non-offensive value as he ages, this contract should turn out okay for Detroit. It’s not any kind of steal, but it’s a good player at a reasonable price for a team that needed win-now production and probably shouldn’t be too concerned with their long-term future. The inevitable crash is coming to Detroit in a few years, and at this point, the only question is if they can get a title out of this roster before it happens. Adding Justin Upton to the 2016 roster makes that more likely.

To be perfectly honest with you, I don’t think about park factors very much anymore. Obviously, they matter as much as ever, but you just encounter them less since so many advanced numbers automatically fold them in. They go somewhat unseen, but they’re important, and I was recently reminded that three years ago, Petco Park and Safeco Field debuted new dimensions. There are other factors that affect how stadiums play, like weather patterns and nearby construction, but what’s most important tends to be the shape of a given field itself. So now that we have a good amount of data, let’s see how Petco and Safeco have played more recently.

To be straight, what follows isn’t very rigorous. I didn’t make adjustments or regressions, and almost anyone would tell you that the ideal involves more than three years of information. There are ways to do this more precisely. But, three years are three years, and it shouldn’t be hard to observe any significant changes. Off we go!

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This post was written by Adam Guttridge and David Ogren, the co-founders of NEIFI Analytics, an outfit which consults for Major League teams. Guttridge began his MLB career in 2005 as an intern with the Colorado Rockies, and most recently worked as Manager of Baseball of Research and Development for the Milwaukee Brewers until the summer of 2015, when he helped launch NEIFI. As part of their current project, they tweet from @NEIFIco, and maintain a blog at their site as well.

Much has been made lately of “title inflation”; the presence of multiple personnel above the role of assistant GM within MLB front offices. That’s a symptom of something larger, rather than a phenomenon unto itself. Front offices are growing, and most rapidly through analytics-centric staff of some type. Critically, though, they’re mostly proceeding with a classically hierarchical (vertical) structure. As a result, specialization is now at an all-time high.

40 years ago, a general manager’s duties extended to such perfunctory tasks as preparing operating budgets and arbitration presentations. In 2016, those may be functions of people who report to people who report to the GM (and perhaps the GMs themselves are reporting to yet another non-owner above them). Even just 10 years ago, well into post-Moneyball times, general managers would occupy barstools in the open lobbies of winter meetings hotels, and talk trades over drinks. That’s simply not how it is any longer, as the mechanics of trades (and evaluations) are more sophisticated.

Certainly, not all organizations have taken the vertical route. But many (or most) have, and it has several effects, as one might imagine.

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On Saturday, the Orioles agreed to re-sign star first baseman Chris Davis, and the price tag was staggering given his limited market: $161 million over seven years. Except, they aren’t really paying him $161 million over the next seven years; as part of the deal, the Orioles have deferred about a quarter of the contract, pushing $6 million per year of his annual salary into the years after the contract has expired, and pushing some of it way into the future. Under the terms of this deal, Baltimore will now be sending Davis checks for the next 22 years, with the $42 million in deferred money being paid out from 2023 through 2037.

So while the $161 million number is a headline-grabber, the actual value of this deal is quite a bit lower than that, since money loses value over time. We talked about this last year with the Max Scherzer deal, and not surprisingly, Davis and Scherzer are both represented by Scott Boras; he’s clearly willing to create long-term payment structures in order to get a larger total payout numbers when the deals are announced. And for the owners, these types of deals help them acquire (or retain) star players while potentially pushing the future costs of the deal onto another ownership group; Peter Angelos is 86 years old, and will probably not be alive for the entire duration of Davis’ payments.

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Way back on April 11 of last year, when the Matt Williams-led Nationals were still World Series favorites and Jed Lowrie was still the starting shortstop for the Astros, an unassuming at-bat took place between Matt Carpenter and Johnny Cueto in Cincinnati, Ohio. Cueto, facing his 45th batter of the season, quickly got ahead in the count, 0-2, spotting consecutive fastballs on the outer edge against which Carpenter could only muster a foul ball. Carpenter, who led the league in pitches per plate appearance in 2014, with 4.4, took a third-pitch fastball just inside for ball one. Then another fastball, outside, for ball two. Then a similar fastball, this one a bit lower and still outside for ball three. With the count now full, Carpenter took one more pitch, a low slider, for ball four, laid down his bat and took his base.

It’s not the kind of thing that makes fans jump up out of their seats, or really have any kind of reaction from their seats. It’s just a walk, seemingly as unremarkable as any other, especially given Carpenter’s role in the event, if not for the fact that it came after an 0-2 count, something Chris Sale only let happen once in 854 batters faced last year. Cueto did it in his second start, and then nine more times throughout the course of the year, more than anyone else in baseball save for Baltimore’s Ubaldo Jimenez.

Cueto was one of only four pitchers to break the 10-walk threshold after 0-2 counts, joining Jimenez, Trevor Bauer and Gio Gonzalez. Given enough tries, a hardcore baseball fan probably could have guessed those three names. Bauer, Gonzalez, and Jimenez are the kind of guys who issue plenty of walks all season long, so they’re the kind of guys one might expect to issue plenty of walks after 0-2 counts, too. Those three each routinely post walk rates close to or north of 10%. Cueto, on the other hand, walked just 5% of his batters last year, and is known for possessing impeccable command.

Going back several seasons, Cueto’s place on the leaderboard of 0-2 counts lost to walks remains equally eye-popping:

Cueto is the only pitcher in the top five with an overall walk rate under 8%, and therefore leads the top 10 in the percentage of his total walks that come after he’s ahead of the batter 0-2. Putting that into more perspective: since 2013, Cueto’s walked 129 batters, and 15% of those walks started out as an 0-2 count. As effective and entertaining as Cueto may be, this must be the sort of thing that’s downright maddening for fans, coaches, and teammates alike.

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The minimum-wage lawsuit that a group of former and current minor leaguers is bringing against Major League Baseball could mark a paradigm shift in the industry. In a nutshell, a ruling in favor of the plaintiffs would fundamentally change the business model of the game, both at the minor league and major league levels.

As legal analyst Nathaniel Grow details as part of his running coverage of the suit, the plaintiffs contend that MLB violates federal and state minimum-wage and overtime laws by paying many minor leaguers as little as $3,300 a year. If plaintiffs were to obtain a favorable ruling, the cost of doing business for major league teams would increase dramatically. In all likelihood, major league clubs would try passing down that cost to minor league affiliates. In one extreme yet plausible scenario, we could see retraction in the minor leagues, which would have ripple effects on player development, the amateur draft and the international signing period. And that’s just the baseball side of it, saying nothing of the impact on regional economies that rely on their minor league franchises.

When a verdict is handed down, there will be plenty of time to assess its impact, the good and the bad. For now, I want to look at an issue that is getting less attention than the lawsuit’s hypothetical fallout: the risks that current minor leaguers must accept if they decide to join the lawsuit.

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