FanGraphs Baseball

The Tigers just signed Mike Pelfrey to a two-year deal worth $16 million. The big right-hander has a good fastball, a penchant for licking his fingers, and a split-finger that’s decent for grounders, but he still shows up on the bottom of an important leaderboard. Despite that, he’s been an average major league player four times in his career, and he’s projected to be worth the deal.

Turns out, he has one ability that is elite. And if he continues to display that skill, the Tigers will have made out on this short deal.

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Ben and Sam talk to BP author Chris Mosch about the newest innovation in defensive positioning: the outfield shift.

I was listening to a relatively prominent podcast a few days ago, just before David Price signed with the Red Sox, on which one of the commenters who has connections inside baseball said he knew Price wouldn’t go to the highest bidder. He isn’t that kind of guy, the commenter stated, matter-of-factly (that’s a paraphrase). To further paraphrase: he cares about location, about comfort, about winning. Then Price took the highest offer from a last place team, the most prominent player on which he’s reportedly had a feud.

As it turns out, Price is exactly that kind of guy. Which isn’t to say that being that kind of guy is bad, wrong, or indeed anything negative at all. [Insert boilerplate about how Price has earned everything he can get and also blah blah blah.] Even so, David Price’s seven year deal with the Red Sox makes some loud statements about the nature of free agency, statements that will almost assuredly be ignored by many, but statements that shouldn’t be. Because they are true, and the truth will set you free, and freedom is not free, like this bagel I’m eating, and bagels are delicious. So there.

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The next major free agent off the board is almost certainly going to be Zack Greinke. According to a wide number of reports, Greinke has narrowed his choices down to the Dodgers and Giants, and is pitting the two NL West rivals against each other with the goal of landing a six year deal at the highest annual average value of any player in baseball history; reportedly, he’s asking for $35 million per season, so if he gets six years, he’d end up with $210 million guaranteed. Even if he has to settle for five years and some kind of sixth year option, that’s still $175 million guaranteed at the AAV he’s seeking.

That’s a bit higher than the 5/$160M I predicted at the start of the off-season, and blows away the crowd’s expected 6/$156M valuation. On the one hand, when the Dodgers are bidding on someone, you can say that the dollars are irrelevant, because they have so much much money that the difference of a few million per year just doesn’t really matter. But this doesn’t seem like it’s just the Dodgers blowing away the competition to get the guy they want back; the Giants are reportedly being very competitive on price, making Greinke’s decision difficult.

And while Greinke is an excellent pitcher, there isn’t a lot of evidence that he’s a $200 million pitcher. For his career, he’s graded out as about a +4 WAR pitcher, regardless of whether you use ERA or FIP, and he’s headed into his age-32 season. Rationally, he’s going to get worse during his next deal, and even if you start him around his career average of +4 WAR — Steamer projects +4.1 for 2016 — then you’re looking at a pitching performance that projects to be worth about $150 million over the next six years.

Zack Greinke’s Contract Estimate — 6 yr / $151.2 M

Year	Age	WAR	$/WAR	Est. Value
2016	32	4.1	$8.0 M	$32.8 M
2017	33	3.6	$8.4 M	$30.2 M
2018	34	3.1	$8.8 M	$27.3 M
2019	35	2.6	$9.3 M	$24.1 M
2020	36	2.1	$9.7 M	$20.4 M
2021	37	1.6	$10.2 M	$16.3 M
Totals		17.1		$151.2 M

Assumptions
Value: $8M/WAR with 5.0% inflation
Aging Curve: +0.25 WAR/yr (18-27), 0 WAR/yr (28-30),-0.5 WAR/yr (31-37),-0.75 WAR/yr (> 37)

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Let’s be clear about what’s being said here: The A’s aren’t anyone’s division favorites. Not now, and not in March, I’m going to guess. The Astros are no longer up and coming; they’re up and they’ve come. The Rangers are coming off a huge bounce-back season, the Mariners are surrounding their core with more depth, and the Angels have baseball’s best player. The AL West is going to be tough, and the A’s probably have the most to prove.

But the A’s were supposed to be competitive in 2015. Not great, but competitive. That didn’t work out, and they’ve made some moves I’m sure they’d love to undo. Yet there’s a road to being competitive again in 2016. Understanding it requires some understanding of what, exactly, went wrong in the past season. It’s always complicated, for any team, but for the 2015 A’s, the story might be the least complicated possible.

I started thinking about this after receiving an email Thursday that referred to something I wrote in July. At that point, I called the A’s the unluckiest* team of the millennium. The asterisk serves a purpose — I don’t actually like the word “luck” in baseball. What happens happens. There’s just not a great list of alternative terms. Anyway, this relies upon a metric called BaseRuns. I don’t want to get too math-y, but BaseRuns is intended to calculate an expected team winning percentage, based on performance. What gets stripped away is the element of timing. Timing is critical, of course, but it’s not always predictive. Team records tend to follow team BaseRuns records. Deviations are common over the short term, but they’ll mostly balance out given time.

I’ve got team BaseRuns data stretching back to 2002. Which means I have actual team records, and BaseRuns team records. Below, see the teams with the greatest differences between those records, where the actual record was worse than expected:

Read the rest on Fox Sports.

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Jeff Bridich has been entrusted to build a championship team in baseballs’s most extreme park-factor environment. The 38-year-old Harvard graduate is the general manager of the Colorado Rockies, who play their home games in spacious, hitter-friendly-to-the-nines Coors Field.

Part of the Rockies front office since 2004, Bridich was the club’s director of player development prior to assuming his current role in October 2014.

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Bridich on what has changed since he became GM: “There are certainly changes in the composition of the roster. Most noticeably, we have a different person playing shortstop. There’s been a focus, the past 13 months or so, on adding powerful, high-impact, high-upside arms. Ideally those are guys with some sort of readiness to compete at the major league level.

“You look at guys like Jairo Diaz, and the guys we got from Toronto (Miguel Castro, Jeff Hoffman, Jesus Tinoco), in particular. Also, the guys we added to the roster, Antonio Senzatela and Carlos Estevez, to protect them from the Rule 5. There’s been a focus on that.” Read the rest of this entry »

Last year was the worst year for shopping in the non-tender market since 2007. No player that was non-tendered after the 2014 season was worth even a win in 2015, which hasn’t happened since MLBTradeRumors started tracking non-tenders with their handy tool.

Before we consider it a trend, remember that the year before was the best year for non-tender shopping over the same time frame. Infielder Justin Turner netted the Dodgers three wins, oufielder Sam Fuld nearly did the same for the Rays, now-Cub Chris Coghlan was worth two wins, and catcher Michael McKenry was also nearly average.

In any case, looking over the past non-tender values, a few truths emerge. The best non-tender pickups were above replacement level the year before, for one. And, like Kelly Johnson, Willie Harris, Aaron Miles, and Jeff Keppinger before, they usually had some positional flexibility. Or at least positional value, in the case of the center fielders and catchers.

In that way, maybe last year did buck the trend to some extent. Kyle Blanks (0.8 WAR) and Justin Smoak (0.6 WAR) led the way, and they don’t offer much in positional flexibility or value. Still, last year’s above-replacement non-tenders also included Slade Heathcott (0.5) and Gordon Beckham (0.3).

So who will lead this year’s non-tender market?

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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 Kansas City Royals. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Atlanta.

Batters
If the depth chart below seems to depict a more dismal situation than one might expect from a club that’s appeared in each of the last two World Series, note that it excludes at least one player (Alex Gordon) who’s been instrumental to the team’s recent success and another (Ben Zobrist) who benefited the 2015 edition of the club after arriving at the July trade deadline.

It’s not surprising, in light of Gordon and Zobrist’s respective departures, that corner outfield and second base are the team’s two weakest positions according to ZiPS. One assumes that the front office regards these as priorities for the offseason.

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The scores of Dominican Winter League games likely don’t represent a great concern for the majority of this site’s readership. One demographic to whom they’re pretty important, however, is Dominican people. Among that demographic is giant Twins batter and also Estrellas de Oriente designated hitter Miguel Sano.

Sano’s eighth inning plate appearances tonight against Toros del Este began with his club trailing by a score of 3-1. As those who possess either (a) some expertise in the field of nonverbal communication or (b) normal human eyes — as either of those types of people can infer from the visual evidence here, 3-1 was not the score when Sano’s plate appearance ended.

By means both of his deliberate exit from the batter’s box and also a vigorously outstretched left arm, Sano announces that he is bad. How bad? By all appearances, roughly as bad as he wanna be.