FanGraphs Baseball

Over the holidays, Al Jazeera America released an explosive, undercover report on doping in professional sports. Included in the story were secretly recorded interviews with Charlie Sly, a pharmacist who boasted of having provided illegal performance enhancing drugs to numerous professional athletes.

Among the many athletes that Sly claimed to have supplied with PEDs were several baseball players, including Ryan Howard and Ryan Zimmerman. According to Sly, both players bought and used the drug Delta-2, a banned hormone supplement.

Initially, both Howard and Zimmerman issued a joint statement staunchly denying the allegations. The two have now gone one step further, each filing suit against Al Jazeera on Tuesday evening for defamation.

However, while filing suit may provide a boost to Howard and Zimmerman in the short-term in their public relations battle against the network, the players are incurring some degree of risk by initiating legal action, and ultimately appear unlikely to prevail in their respective cases.

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The free agent outfield logjam may be starting to break. This morning, Alex Gordon agreed to a four year, $72 million deal to return to Kansas City. This is significantly less than both I (4/$92M) and the crowd (5/$90M) estimated at the start of the off-season, and given the prices inferior players have been commanding, this is probably one of the best value signings of the winter. It will be interesting to see if reports come out stating that Gordon turned down higher offers to stay in Kansas City.

Given his health risks and concerns about how much defensive value he’ll retain as he heads into his mid-30s, plus the fact that he was tied to draft pick compensation, there are some potential risks here, but at just $18 million per year, the Royals don’t really need Gordon to perform at previous levels in order to justify the contract. Steamer projects Gordon as a +3.5 WAR player in 2016, and if you start with that assessment and run it through the normal contract assumptions, you get $94 million in estimated value over the next four years. Even setting the aging curve to a more aggressive decline only pushes him down to $80 million if he is as good as Steamer expects.

ZIPS was slightly less aggressive, but even going with that forecast, Gordon’s worth $80 million over four years if he ages normally, and $67 million if he ages poorly. Because of his age and his defense-based value, Gordon may very well end up significantly overpaid by years three and four of this deal, but he’s also dramatically underpaid at the beginning of the deal, especially if he’s the +3.5 WAR guy that Steamer projects for 2016.

With Gordon off the market, the pursuits of Justin Upton and Yoenis Cespedes should become a little more clear. The Royals weren’t likely to be players for either of those two, so Gordon going back to KC is probably good news for both of those players.

Yesterday, lead prospect analyst Dan Farnsworth published his excellently in-depth prospect list for the Boston Red Sox. In this companion piece, I look at that same Boston farm system through the lens of my KATOH projection system. 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 age-28 seasons, those who receive a projection of at between 1.0 and 2.0 WAR though their age-28 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.

1. Rafael Devers, 3B (Profile)

KATOH Projection Through Age 28 (2015 stats): 9.6 WAR
KATOH Projection Through Age 28 (2014 stats): 2.3 WAR
Dan’s Grade: 55 FV

Devers destroyed two levels of Rookie Ball in 2014, which prompted the Red Sox to send him to the Sally league as an 18-year-old. He didn’t disappoint. While his numbers weren’t flashy, his power and strikeout rate were both better than the league’s average. That’s remarkable for a guy facing pitchers three or four years his senior. He could stand to walk a bit more, but that’s a minor concern considering how little walk rate tells us about players at Devers’ level. All in all, there’s a lot to be excited about with Devers. Read the rest of this entry »

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 Arizona Diamondbacks. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Kansas City / New York AL / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / Seattle / Texas / Toronto.

Batters
Given the moves made by general manager Dave Stewart et al. this offseason — the signing of Zack Greinke, the exchange with Atlanta of three promising and cost-controlled pieces for Shelby Miller — it’s pretty clear that the club’s ambition is to win now. Of great assistance to that particular cause are Paul Goldschmidt and A.J. Pollock, both of whom had great seasons in 2015 and are projected by ZiPS to produce just over nine wins in 2016. They form a strong nucleus for the club.

Less strong are the parts surrounding that nucleus — the club’s figurative cytoplasm, to extend the metaphor clumsily. With the exception of indy league success story David Peralta, no other position player receives a forecast from ZiPS of two wins or more. The departure of Ender Inciarte appears to have created no little difficulty. The author of consecutive three-win seasons for Arizona, his absence compels the team to rely heavily on Yasmany Tomas, the author of one negative-wins season, to rebound from his difficult rookie campaign. ZiPS is pessimistic about Tomas offering anything much better than a replacement-level performance.

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There’s no perfect way to do this, because surprises are always relative to expectations, and I can’t speak to general, across-the-board expectations. You might personally expect more from Player X than the next guy, and I can’t quantify that. Given this caveat, it should be obvious the best thing to do is consider the preseason projections. Projections should always be around the center of the expectations, because we’re always projecting, even when we don’t think of it like that, and we all project in similar ways. We think about the track records, and we think about age. Your brain is but an endless series of spreadsheets.

To identify the most surprising hitter of the season, then, we compare actual numbers to forecasted numbers. Who beat the projections the most, basically. And now, try to think about this off the top of your head. The answer’s going to follow, of course, but what players are coming to mind? You’re thinking about Bryce Harper. Maybe, say, Kyle Schwarber, but mostly Harper. It’s not really surprising that Harper got to this level, but the suddenness of the transition was stunning. Harper made the leap, and I can tell you, yes, he’s near the top of the list. By this method he’s actually the runner-up. The winner? He’s so surprising that almost no one even noticed in the process.

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Welcome to the new year. The Chinese calendar says it’s the year of the monkey, the baseball calendar says it can’t possibly be the Royals year again, but most importantly, it’s the year you’ll finally do that thing you’ve been telling yourself for a long time that you’re going to do. “I’m going to do that thing,” you say to yourself. Go you! And what is that you’re talking about? It’s hard to tell with your mouthful of Cheetos-brand corn puffs so I’ll say it for you: you’re finally going to go to spring training!

Yay! Who cares about the kids? The husband and/or wife will be there when you get back, no matter what they say, probably. As for the job? You won’t have that for long anyway. Abuse it while you can! What’s more, you have vacation days for a reason, and nobody, not some highfalutin “boss,” is going to tell you when you can use ‘em!

So this is happening, dammit. The first step is go figure out who is coming. Call up your buddies! Email ‘em. Text ‘em. Record a message on a wax cylinder and strap it to a carrier pigeon. Round ‘em up! Figure out who you can goad into joining you, because this will be important information for the next step. You may want to start with a nice email. Something like this:

Hey jerks,

Hope you’re not dead yet. I’m going to spring training and you should come with me to help defray the cost. Also, because we’re friends! We’re going to see my favorite teams because I thought of this first. Baseball is baseball though so you should be happy, but even if it wasn’t I’m not interested in your opinion. Can’t wait to go! Send me a check ASAP.

Love,
You

The point is, get in touch with your peeps. You’ll need someone with intelligence, someone with money, and someone with the ability to behave like an adult occasionally. And it would be nice if all those attributes were found in one person so as to open up more spots for your actual friends.

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Ben and Sam banter about dress codes and the recent lack of rumors, then discuss Dan Haren’s revelatory tweets.

With the holiday break coming to an end, Phase II of the 2015-16 free agent and trade markets is about to kick off in earnest. As noted by August Fagerstrom earlier today, player movement is likely to be heavier than in the typical January, with plenty of top free agents, particularly on the position player side, still on the market.

The first wave of free-agent signings was particularly kind to starting pitchers, both at the top and middle of the market. Still, a handful of starters — Wei-Yin Chen, Yovani Gallardo and Ian Kennedy at the forefront — remain available. Does the market have enough suitors and dollars to satisfy those three? Today, we’ll look at the first of those three, who has spent all of his stateside career with the Orioles.

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The first time Dallas Keuchel broke out, it was because he found a new pitch. Moving from the curve to the slider really pulled his arsenal together. The second time he broke out, it was for reasons that were both more complicated but also just as conventional — it looks like Keuchel merely threw fewer pitches inside the zone, while getting batters to reach and swing just as much. More swings on pitches outside of the zone means more misses and more strikeouts.

All of that is nice, but it’s hard to know which breakout is easier to believe. Our intuition probably tells us that the first is less delicate — he needed a breaking ball, and he found a good one, and it should remain good. But batters could adjust more easily to the second one, couldn’t they? Just lay off more of those balls?

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