FanGraphs Baseball

Earlier this afternoon, FanGraphs CEO and founder David Appelman announced that the ballots for the 2016 FAN Projections are now available for the tender ministrations of this site’s readership. With a view to ensuring that all notable players are addressed sufficiently — and also towards producing the number of posts he’s required to publish each week — the present author is highlighting certain players whose ballots are of some particular interest.

Before casting a ballot, don’t forget this note from Appelman’s announcement post:

Please note that everything this year is a rate stat. You’re projecting 2B+3B, HR, SB, and Fielding as a measure of 150 games (basically a full season). The player’s previous stats are shown per 150 games in the projection ballot too. This will make changing playing time projections much easier as you’ll only have to change the games played portion.

Now, here are five players for the reader’s consideration — the five, in fact, who produced the top WAR figures in 2015 among rookie-eligible position players. Note: listed age is for 2016.

Player: Kris Bryant, 24, 3B (Profile)
2015 Line: 650 PA, .275/.369/.488, 11.8% BB, 30.6% K, 136 wRC+ at MLB
Notes: Recorded top WAR mark among all 2015 rookies after consecutive seasons of unambiguously strong performances in minor leagues. Compensated for high strikeout rate with above-average walk rate and power on contact. Produced over 14 runs by means of baserunning and defense, according to FanGraphs’ methodology for measuring both.

Read the rest of this entry »

The free agent market is still moving pretty slowly for hitters, but another pitcher has gone off the board, as the Marlins have agreed to terms with Wei-Yin Chen, according to Jon Heyman and others.

chen gets 2-year opt out with $80M deal, and 6th yr vesting option that could make it $96M #marlins

— Jon Heyman (@JonHeyman) January 12, 2016

Hey, look, another opt-out, and in this case, a more interesting one than usual, because the Marlins have heavily backloaded the deal, as they always do. Chen will get just $20 million in the first two years of the contract, so his opt-out decision will be 3/$60M in guaranteed money after the 2017 season, which makes this one a a bit less likely to be used than some of the others signed this winter. Chen could certainly pitch well enough to get more than that in two years time, but given the attrition rate of pitchers, the more likely scenario is that he ends up choosing to stick with the full guaranteed years.

By backloading the deal, the Marlins make the opt-out less valuable for Chen, and in the scenarios where he pitches well, this could be a pretty nice deal for Miami; surrender a second round pick to sign a quality pitcher, get two good years for $20 million, then potentially get a draft pick as compensation (if that still exists in a few years) if he opts-out. In this scenario, the opt-out is less bad for the Marlins than it is for most teams who have handed them out this winter.

Chen’s deal fits in with Mike Leake and Jeff Samardzija at the top end of the mid-tier starting pitcher market, but I think I’d prefer Chen to the other two in terms of pitchers. The opt-out and the loss of the pick means that Chen did cost more than Leake — even with the same $80 million over five years in guaranteed money — but I think I’d probably still take this deal over the other two. For the Marlins, this looks like a pretty decent free agent value.

The 2016 FAN Projection ballots are now open!

Before you can project any players, you’ll have to select the team you follow most closely towards the top of the screen. If you really don’t follow a team, just pick one. You’ll only have to do this once.

After you’ve selected a team, there are 9 categories for pitchers and 10 categories for position players. Pick the values in the drop-down boxes closest to what you think the player will do in 2016, hit the submit button and you’re done! If you made a mistake, you can always go back and change your selection at any time.

Please note that everything this year is a rate stat. You’re projecting 2B+3B, HR, SB, and Fielding as a measure of 150 games (basically a full season). The player’s previous stats are shown per 150 games in the projection ballot too. This will make changing playing time projections much easier as you’ll only have to change the games played portion.

That’s really all there is to it. You can filter players by team, or if you go to the player pages, you can project players individually. If you want to see all the players you’ve projected, you can click on the “My Rankings” button which will show you only what you specifically projected a player to do.

Fan Projections will show up on the player pages after there have been 5 ballots submitted.

If you do notice any issues, please let us know.

Ben and Sam banter about BP’s new catcher-defense stats, then discuss the AL Central’s offseason.

A year ago today, things were looking pretty good in Ian Desmond’s world. He was 29 years old and the starting shortstop for the Washington Nationals, heavy favorites to win the National League East. A few months earlier, Desmonds completed his third straight season of at least 20 home runs and 20 stolen bases. Defensive metrics indicated he was roughly average to above average at shortstop, and in terms of overall value, he was sitting on three straight seasons of more than four wins above replacement. In matters related to his bank account, he was just one season from free agency with no other big-name shortstops and a big payday.

But now, after a disastrous year, Desmond is still unsigned and his market is unclear.

There were some signs heading into last season that Desmond was in decline. His wRC+ went from 128 to 116 to 107 from 2012 to 2014, and his strikeouts moved in the opposite direction: 20% in 2012, 22% in 2013 and way up to 28% in 2014. Noticing a decline and expecting a collapse are two different situations, however. This is the list of players who, along with Ian Desmond, produced at least four WAR in each season from 2012 to 2014: Andrew McCutchen, Buster Posey, Dustin Pedroia, Ben Zobrist, Adam Jones, Alex Gordon, Robinson Cano, Miguel Cabrera, and of course, Mike Trout. A year ago at this time, MLB Trade Rumors rated Desmond as the fourth-best pending free agent and mentioned a potential $200 million contract with another good season.

Read the rest of this entry »

Read the rest of this entry »

We usually turn to the tried and true method of analyzing players season by season. There’s a point at which we have to demarcate sections of a player’s career, and the beginning and end of a season give us a handy and obvious way of doing so. But there are often many changes and adjustments that go on within a season, and looking at six months of baseball as one unit misses a lot of trends that we might otherwise notice. With that in mind, today we’re going to look at a few players who improved their eye and contact rate at the plate from the first half of the 2015 season to the second, giving consideration to how those improvements might help them in the upcoming 2016 season.

We’ll be looking at the most-improved players for two main plate discipline statistics: the rate of swings at pitches outside of the strike zone, and the rate of contact on pitches swung at in the strike zone. There are more plate discipline categories than just these two, but these carry a lot of weight in respect to strikeout and walk rates, so this is a great place to start. The other good news is that these types of improvements have been shown to stabilize over a short period of time – that is, once they show up, it doesn’t take too long before we can be confident that what we’re seeing is actually an improvement instead of just random noise.

To begin with, let’s look at which players showed the most improvement at laying off pitches outside of the strike zone (called O-Swing %) during the second half of the season compared to the first. I’ve included each player’s first and second half stats, the difference between them, and the second half O-Swing % minus a three year average for each player. That final column is to try to discern whether the second half improvement was actually real, or whether it was simply a response (regression) to a first half that was outside of the player’s “normal” performance from the past three years. For players with less than three years of MLB service time, as much playing time as possible was included in the final column. Let’s see our top 10 for O-Swing improvement:

Evan Gattis basically became a completely different hitter in the second half of the season. Jeff Sullivan already pointed this out in September, and this should act as further confirmation: after a rough first half in which he struck out 22.4% of the time, Gattis showed a remarkable transformation, cutting down on the rate of swings at out-of-zone pitches by 13.5%. That lowered his second half strikeout rate to 16.3% — better than league average – and raised his walk rate from 3.5% to a more palatable 6.8%. These are very good signs for him getting back on track for the Astros in 2016 after a tough campaign last season.

Read the rest on Fox Sports.

Allow me to share with you an unremarkable batting line: .235/.308/.412. It doesn’t belong to Logan Morrison, but it might as well. This line belongs to another veteran, and it covers the last four years, and it’s worked out to a 98 wRC+. You can tell there’s seemingly nothing too special about the bat. To that, I’ll add that the player isn’t a particularly strong base-runner, nor is he a particularly strong defender. Some time ago, he had a $3-million club option declined, and that might just tell you enough. This is a player with some legitimate uses. This is a player with a fairly low value.

As far as 2016 is concerned, we’re talking about a role player. Currently a free agent, he’ll get a shot with someone in the coming month or two. He should be a weapon off somebody’s bench. But what’s most interesting about Ryan Raburn isn’t what he projects to be for the immediate future. What’s most interesting about Ryan Raburn is exactly how he’s arrived at such an uninteresting overall four-year performance.

Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 623
Dave Cameron is both (a) the managing editor of FanGraphs and (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio, during which edition he considers, among other sundry topics, the first iteration of FanGraphs’ 2016 win projections and also what one might learn about Mike Trout‘s future by inspecting Ken Griffey Jr.’s past.

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 41 min play time.)

Read the rest of this entry »

Just how good is a particular owner or ownership group, relative to the rest? It’s just about impossible to say. As fans, what we see is pretty well removed from what goes on at the ownership level, so it’s not like those executives can be evaluated like a pitcher with a sub-3 FIP. So we don’t know that much about who’s good or bad, really. But that never stands in the way of opinions. Oh, people have opinions, and those opinions aren’t based on nothing. A few days ago, I asked you all for your thoughts on your teams’ owners. What follows is the resulting information, based on many thousands of votes from presumably many thousands of participants.

The polls were simple. After each prompt, you could select from two positive opinions, two negative opinions, and one middle-of-the-road opinion. People don’t usually compare ownership groups, since situations are so different, but now we can at least try to do that, with numerical data. Of course, what you see won’t be infallible evaluations. This is opinion-polling, but I think it’s just interesting to see what people think, even if it turns out plenty of people are wrong. I love what crowd-sourcing can indicate, and I love that we get to do it. Thanks again for all your help.

Read the rest of this entry »