FanGraphs Baseball

Ben and Sam talk to incoming Los Angeles Times Dodgers beat writer Andy McCullough about the Players’ Tribune, the Dodgers and Royals and, for some reason, Sublime.

Sarah Gelles was recently given a new title. The Baltimore Orioles’ Director of Analytics since April 2014, she is now the Director of Analytics and Major League Contracts. Based on her career track, don’t be surprised if she one day becomes a general manager.

In 2010, Gelles graduated summa cum laude from Amherst College with a degree in Law, Jurisprudence & Social Thought. Along the way, she interned for the Pirates in their baseball operations department. Upon leaving school, she worked for Major League Baseball’s Labor Relations Department. After that, she served a year-long internship with the Orioles before being hired full time when Dan Duquette became team president in November 2011.

She began making her mark even before Duquette arrived. While still an intern, Gelles “identified an area of need in the organization, and started to build out our first internal database.”

Think about that for a moment. One year out of college, an intern initiated one of the most-meaningful advancements in team history. Read the rest of this entry »

At the kind of money he wanted, Chris Davis basically had a one-team market. Other big-spending teams didn’t have openings at first base, and other big-spending teams weren’t buying Scott Boras’ pitch of Davis as a versatile could-be outfielder. The Orioles sensed even a month ago they would be bidding against themselves, and they attempted a couple leverage plays to try to force Boras’ hand. Yet Boras won, as he almost always does. Here’s what’s being reported: Davis re-signed with Baltimore for a seven-year deal worth $161 million. Somehow, the commitment got bigger from what was reported weeks back. The Orioles were the only team around $150 million, and Scott Boras got them to add on more.

That makes it kind of a bad look for Baltimore. The easy takeaway is that Peter Angelos just got played. And at the end of the day, it’s highly unlikely another team would’ve been willing to come close to this, had the Orioles walked away. But for one thing — however much this is worth — this does send a good message that the Orioles will spend to keep good players around. People have doubted that in the past, and now Davis joins Darren O’Day as a returning key player. And there are other factors, as well, in support of the idea this isn’t a certain catastrophe. This isn’t quite a straight-up $161-million commitment. There are, let’s say, special considerations.

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You could say the market has agreed upon a price for mid-level innings-eaters around 30 years of age. The Kansas City Royals reportedly agreed on Saturday morning to sign right-handed starter Ian Kennedy to a five-year deal worth $70 million.

It’s a big contract, a surprising contract, but one that falls right in line with similar deals inked by Mike Leake (5/80), Wei-Yin Chen (5/80) and Jeff Samardzija (5/90). Looking back at our crowdsourced contract estimates, it’s clear that nobody expected this class of durable, mid-rotation starters to get paid the way they did:

It’s not the biggest “overpay,” relative to the what the crowd expected, but it’s close. Samardzija, Leake, Chen, and now Kennedy all received an extra year or two, and an extra few million dollars per year more than the crowd expected, adding up to each starter receiving between $20 and $30 million more than what folks thought.

But Kennedy’s contract leads the way, in terms of surprise. Thought was, Kennedy would get something like three years and $36 million. He got an extra two years, opposed to the extra one that the rest of the group received, and a larger AAV. When the crowdsourcing took place, an extra question was included, asking the crowd whether it thought Kennedy would accept the qualifying offer, a one-year deal worth just over $15 million. Nearly 40% of the crowd expected Kennedy to take the qualifying offer, more than double the number of people who thought Leake or Chen might accept. If Kennedy rejected the qualifying offer, there was fear among many that no team would be willing to concede a draft pick to sign Kennedy, even at the terms of 3/36.

Reason being, Kennedy simply hasn’t been as good as his peers. Last season, he allowed the highest OPS among any qualified starter, and whether you go back more years, or look toward the future, it’s tough to find any way to include Kennedy in the same class as Samardzija, Leake or Chen:

Last year, Kennedy was a replacement-level pitcher. In 2013, Kennedy was a replacement-level pitcher. He should be expected to do better than that, but odds are that Kennedy’s true-talent level lies a bit above a +1 WAR starter, with the most optimistic of projections putting him around +2 WAR, in the present. The contract runs for five years. Even if you start with Steamer’s more optimistic 2.2 WAR projections, it’s hard to justify, in a vacuum, Kennedy being worth $70 million:

The estimate comes in $20 million shy of the actual contract, and that’s not including the loss of a late first-round draft pick, likely valued somewhere around $10 million, and the fact that there’s an opt-out for Kennedy after two years, which shifts the needle even more towards Kennedy’s side. If he’s good, he’s gone after two years, and if he’s bad, the Royals are saddled with his salary for the duration.

Of course, moves are to be evaluated in context, and each team’s situation is unique, as well as each player’s situation. There’s more to every deal than the dollars and years.

For instance, maybe the Royals just aren’t too concerned about the loss of the 24th overall pick in the draft? The window of contention might not be open for too much longer with this roster. Lorenzo Cain, Eric Hosmer, Mike Moustakas, Wade Davis, Alcides Escobar, Edinson Volquez and more will all be free agents by 2018, the same year in which Kennedy’s opt-out resides, and so perhaps they just care more about maximizing their chances of winning again during that two-year window, rather than maybe winning down the road. It’s a reasonable thought to have, and you’ve got to applaud the World Series champs, a team that’s always been ran on the tightest of budgets under owner David Glass, for opening up the pocketbook in an effort to continue Going For It. Kansas City’s Opening Day payroll is going to be something like $130 million dollars, up $20 million from last year and up $100 million from five years ago.

At the same time, if Kennedy is bad, as he’s been in two of the most recent three seasons, then Kansas City might have a replacement-level albatross on their hands in the very near future, and it’s the kind of move that might keep the Royals from retaining one of their star players in a couple years, when the franchise isn’t coming off the high of a World Series victory and swimming in extra postseason revenue.

The Royals needed a pitcher. They needed a pitcher who was likely to give them plenty of innings. Banking on the health of Kris Medlen, Danny Duffy and, to an extent, Yordano Ventura, is a frightening proposition, and the Royals wanted to mix in some certainty. In terms of innings, Kennedy will give them that certainty, but at one point due the value of a pitcher’s ceiling, and his floor, outweigh his durability?

Kennedy has thrown plenty of innings lately, but most of them haven’t been good innings. The big problem, for Kennedy, has been the fly balls. He doesn’t induce any grounders, and way too many of the flies have been leaving the park. True, Kaufman Stadium has a massive outfield that suppresses homers, and true, Kansas City has an incredible outfield defense that turns would-be fly ball hits into outs. But Kennedy recently pitched his home games in PETCO Park, a stadium just as pitcher-friendly as Kaufman, against teams that batted with a pitcher in their lineup, and even the greatest outfield defense in the world can’t turn fly balls that land halfway up the bleachers into outs.

Jeff recenty ran through all the pros and cons of Kennedy as a pitcher, and while it’s hard to be overly pessimistic, it’s equally difficult to come away feeling encouraged, and that was before we knew the terms of the deal. On the surface, it seems like an overpay. Kennedy isn’t Samardzija, or Leake, or Chen, and yet he gone Samardzija/Leake/Chen money. But the Royals needed a pitcher, and Kennedy’s a pitcher, and the Royals are better today than they were yesterday. Is the rotation good enough to contend again? Only time will tell, and maybe Dave Eiland can work his magic again, reuniting with Kennedy from their days with the Yankees. It sure looks like an overpay, but maybe that isn’t the point. We always want to see teams boost up their payroll after a World Series run, and the Royals have done just that. They’ve got another two years until things could get ugly again, and doing everything they can to keep this run going. It’s hard not to like the decision to commit to that, and to spend some money. It’s just a little harder to like where the money went.

This morning, after a long and protracted negotiation that finally resulted in the team threatening to pursue alternative free agents, the Orioles reportedly agreed to re-sign their slugging first baseman Chris Davis. The price? $161 million over seven years, giving Davis the same annual average value as Jason Heyward, the winter’s best available position player. And Davis was able to land this contract despite the fact this contract is probably going to be a disaster and that the market for hitters has been quite frigid this winter.

Given the limited suitors looking for a first baseman, the remaining crop of quality outfielders, and the risks surrounding Davis’ skillset, this might be Scott Boras’ most impressive victory over reason yet. As an agent, he has perfected the ability to go around the baseball operations department, dealing directly with owners who simply don’t have the same level of knowledge as the people they employ to run their team on a daily basis. Except in this case, even Peter Angelos had to know he was bidding against himself.

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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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Let’s face it — there’s no way not to feel uncomfortable about the Chris Davis sweepstakes.

I’m not just referring to how the Orioles and Davis seem to be at something of an impasse. I’m not just referring to how Davis has to this point been unable to drum up much of a market. It’s just, this is going to require a lot of money, and it’s hard to know what Davis is going to be. He’s as much a boom-or-bust player as you can find: Last year, he hit as well as Jose Bautista; the year before, he hit as well as Jed Lowrie. He’s been bad and he’s been an MVP candidate, and there’s a whole lot of space in between.

I don’t think player comps can be much help. For one thing, there just aren’t very many. Davis is an unusual player, historically speaking, given his massive power and his massive strikeout side effect. Maybe the two best comps are Jim Thome and Ryan Howard, and their careers went in completely opposite directions. Those comps are as unhelpful as Davis’ recent track record. He could turn out really amazing. He could be a disaster. This isn’t particularly illuminating.

Davis is 230 pounds of uncertainty. The extent of his success will be determined by what happens with a handful of swings every season, and there’s a lot of room for that to go right or wrong. Basically, there’s no achieving actual comfort. There’s only pursuing artificial comfort. That comes out of just learning more information — more knowledge has to be a good thing, right? — so let’s take a look at something that’s been going on under the hood. Let’s learn more about Davis, even if it might not ultimately help to understand what his future’s going to be.

Read the rest on Fox Sports.

It might seem easy to envy the life of a major league baseball player: even the least famous of them make a lot of money, have a bunch of Twitter followers, and get to play a game for a living. But it’s always been a little tougher for me to envy the life of a relief pitcher, who seems to experience the worst drawbacks of the job with little of the upside. As opposed to starting pitching — where one’s mistakes can be more easily made up for by logging good innings — relief pitching is simply less forgiving, with every mistake massively amplified. And no pitcher has embodied that more in the past two seasons than Evan Scribner.

You might know about Scribner, as he was just traded from the A’s to the Mariners last month. There’s more than that to him, of course, and one of the big things is the number of strikeouts he’s recorded compared to the number of walks he’s issued. That’s important, because we like the K-BB% stat a lot for pitchers: it’s been shown to be the best ultra-simple ERA estimator we currently have. It’s not perfect, but it can be a handy way to get an idea of how a pitcher could perform in the future. There’s even some work that shows it performed better than xFIP, FIP, and SIERA at predicting second-half ERA after a first half was in the books. All of this is just a set up, really, for this table, which shows the 15 best K-BB% marks for relievers with at least 70 innings pitched between 2014-2015:

The list is pretty much a who’s who of dominant relievers, as every guy in the top 10 is closing or has closed for their respective teams sometime during the past two years. Then there’s Scribner, who sticks out like a sore thumb mostly because of his ERA and the fact that he walks no one. Well, not no one, but in major league terms, he walks no one. He has the lowest walk rate among relievers who have pitched meaningful innings in the past two years (20+ innings), and it’s not particularly close; in raw numbers, he’s walked four batters in 71.2 innings.

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Look, I don’t want you to think me unserious. I very well could be, quite possibly I am, but I don’t want you to think it. So you should know I debated with myself over writing this article. And I won that debate. So here I am. Here we are. Because it’s January. And we ain’t got nothing to do.

I asked myself this question a while ago: how do you improve the structure of baseball? We’ve been so focused on fixing small bits here and there, forcing a pitcher to do this little thing, or the batter to keep his foot there, but how do you take the general rules of the game and make it more interesting? Do you make pitchers throw with their opposite hands. No. Do you add little spikes to the ball? No. Do you put each base at the top of a small flight of stairs? Well… I’ll get back to you on that one. Otherwise, though, all of the above are ridiculous suggestions. They might be funny (or not), but you couldn’t implement them because they’re too silly and too painful.

However, there is one way you could change the game and create, at the same time, grounds for more strategy — as opposed to more injuries. The answer is, you eliminate one of the bases. Think about it. There are four bases. There could be two, or three, but for some reason, there are four. I’ll blame Old Hoss Radbourn. It’s odd to think about, but it takes forever to get around the bases and baseball, as baseball itself acknowledges, takes too long. What baseball needs is an HOV lane, an express lane, and a way to add some choice. Let’s give players options and watch them make mistakes!

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A pitcher, standing on the mound, peers in toward his catcher for a signal. It’s the first pitch of an at-bat. The catcher puts down a couple fingers, and the pitcher shakes him off once. He shakes him off twice. The pair agree on a pitch. The pitcher starts his windup, rears back, and fires. Miss. Ball one. A league-average batter now has a 37% chance of reaching base in this at-bat, just on the pitcher misfiring on his first offering alone. In an alternate universe, where the pitcher throws a strike, the batter’s chances of reaching are reduced to just 26%. Over the course of a full-length season, two identical batters with equal true-talent levels could bat 600 times each, and batter A, who starts out every at-bat with a ball, would reach 66 more times than batter B, who starts out every at-bat with a strike, the seperation being due entirely to the difference in count leverage.

We know count leverage is important, but its omnipresence makes it easy to undersell its magnitude. Someone’s always got the edge. The battle is winning it back. In the same vein, the other side of the battle is not losing it once you have it.

There’s no worse spot for a hitter to be than an 0-2 count. After falling behind 0-2, the league hit just .171 last year, with a .200 on-base percentage. It’s not any easier against Chris Sale. From a batter’s point of view, the words “easy” “against” and “Chris Sale” don’t mix well. Against Sale last year, batters were held to a .155/.169/.243 line after falling behind 0-2. Sale found himself with the advantage of an 0-2 count plenty of times — 231, to be exact. More than a quarter of Sale’s at-bats went directly to an 0-2 count. And from there, things only got worse for the hitter. Of those 231 counts that went straight to 0-2, Sale recorded a strikeout in 132 of them, with exactly one walk.

Only one time last season did Chris Sale lose an 0-2 count to a walk. Julio Teheran lost just one as well, but in 73 fewer at-bats. And, sure, what David Price did is probably every bit as impressive as Sale, except singularity is fascinating. And fascinations are worth exploring.

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