FanGraphs Baseball

On Tuesday night, the Red Sox made David Price the highest paid pitcher in baseball history. Dave Dombrowski is clearly a Price fan, having previously traded for him while running the Tigers, and made good on his stated desire to bring a #1 starter to Boston. Of course, at $217 million over seven years, Price certainly isn’t coming cheaply, and the Red Sox throwing money at free agents certainly didn’t solve their problems a year ago, so it’s fair to be somewhat skeptical of this kind of team-building approach. But, rather than simply paint with broad strokes, it’s instructive to look at how pitchers who have performed similarly to Price have fared during the same stretch of their careers as the Red Sox just signed Price for.

To identify a list of similar pitchers, I used the FanGraphs leaderboard to identify pitchers in the last 20 years who had compiled between +26 and +34 WAR in their age-24 through age-29 seasons; this gives us a group that approximates the +30 WAR that Price put up during his six years as a full-time starter. Nineteen pitchers have accomplished this feat, Price included, though a couple of them — Felix Hernandez and Clayton Kershaw — are present-day peers, and thus, don’t have anything to tell us about how pitchers like this perform in their early 30s. So, excluding those two, we’re left with 16 pitchers who were comparably dominant during their 24-to-29 seasons.

How’d they do from ages 30 through 36? Well, take a look.

David Price Comparisons

Pitcher	Innings	WAR	WAR/200 IP
Mike Mussina	1,444	36	5
Roy Halladay	1,413	35	5
Andy Pettitte	1,282	28	4
John Smoltz	813	24	6
Javier Vazquez	994	19	4
Roy Oswalt	832	16	4
CC Sabathia	861	15	3
Dan Haren	958	12	2
Kevin Appier	930	11	2
Justin Verlander	557	11	4
Zack Greinke	425	10	5
Johan Santana	482	8	3
Jack McDowell	327	5	3
Jose Rijo	86	2	3
Ben Sheets	168	1	1
Brandon Webb	4	0	0

At the top, we see four very obvious success stories, with Mussina, Halladay, Pettitte, and Smoltz all maintaining their dominance, putting up performances as good or better than they did early in their careers. This is the kind of performance the Red Sox are clearly hoping for, and if he pitches like any of these four, this will go down as maybe the most successful free agent pitcher contract in baseball history. These four represent the best case scenario, and show that yes, it is indeed possible for a pitcher to maintain greatness even after turning 30.

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David Price can opt out of his seven-year, $217 million contract in three years? That’s either terrible for the Red Sox or a boon for the Red Sox, depending on how you think about it.

It’s terrible for the Red Sox!

It’s power in the hands of the player, since it’s a player option. If Price plays well, and the market continues to grow, they’ll have paid $30 million a year for three years and will have to get right back into negotiating with their ace, along with every other team.

If he gets hurt or plays poorly or the market doesn’t perform the same way going forward, they suddenly have to pay yesterday’s going rate for an overpriced, possibly hurt, aging ace… for another four years.

And before you say that it’s great for the Sox to be able to walk away if they feel the market will overvalue their pitcher… they could trade him if the market valued their under-contract ace more than they did. They would have a way to react other than just walking away, and they’d presumably get some sort of return for their asset.

It’s great for the Red Sox!

The opt-out makes it more likely that they get three good years from their investment and move on. It has to make it more likely than it would if the team gave him a seven-year confirmed deal, at least. That might be a matter of semantics, but it’s a fact. And teams prefer fewer years and higher average annual salaries, since it allows them to avoid larger commitments and work with greater flexibility.

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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 in recent years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Atlanta Braves. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Batters
While it’s possible that Atlanta might extract two or more wins from other positions around the field this next year by means of platooning, the algorithm inside Dan Szymborski’s computer indicates that there’s only one player likely to surpass that threshold by his own self — namely, Freddie Freeman. The first baseman has recorded declining batting figures over the last three seasons (150 wRC+ in 2013, 141 wRC+ in 2014, 133 wC+ in 2015), but almost all that is a product of fluctuating BABIPs — and even the low end of that range is sufficient to render him a solidly above-average player.

Unfortunately for the 2016 edition of the club, Freeman is the only above-average — and perhaps even just average-average — player on the team. Newly acquired shortstop Erick Aybar is a candidate to provide adequacy — and, given sufficient playing time, young catcher Christian Bethancourt could possibly do that, as well — but the roster offers little else in the way of a reliable source of wins.

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So David Price and the Red Sox have agreed to a seven-year deal worth $217 million, pending a physical that Price will presumably clear with some ease. As part of the terms, Price can opt out after year three, and sometimes pitchers do that, and sometimes they don’t. We’re in a weird place, where this was entirely predictable, for any number of reasons, and at the same time, we’re talking about the biggest pitcher contract in the history of the sport. That shouldn’t be something you just calmly nod at, but though this wasn’t a foregone conclusion, it was at least a popular guess. Price reunited with Dave Dombrowski on a team in need of an ace. Word is Boston blew the competition out of the water, which is what they figured to do.

Writing about these giant free-agent contracts is always a challenge. People want to know, “is it worth it?” and the bigger the contract, and the longer the contract, the more assumptions there are being made. You have to guess a player’s skill, and decline. You have to guess what a win is worth, now, and many years down the road. You have to guess at inflation, and around everything, you have to guess at a team’s success or failure. In the end, you’re left guessing. The teams themselves are left guessing. It’s not like they know the future much better than we do. It’s not like they understand injury risk much better than we do. Numbers are put on paper, and players sign on lines, and, subsequently, life happens. Each contract might turn out to be good, bad, or anywhere in between.

People want answers. There aren’t answers. Not that we know. Years down the road, we’ll all have opinions of the David Price contract with the Red Sox, but we can’t know what those opinions will be. I’m sorry to have to put it like that, but let’s leave this uncertainty behind, shall we? Let’s just focus on what we do know. That’s as much as can be done.

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In perhaps the easiest move to predict of the entire winter, Dave Dombrowski went and bought his new team an ace. And it’s the same ace he went and bought 18 months ago, for his old team, so I think we can say with a good amount of clarity that Dombrowski likes David Price. A lot.

To lure the best free agent pitcher on the market to Boston, the team gave him the largest contract for any pitcher in baseball history: seven years, $217 million. In addition to the $31 million annual average value, Price also gets an opt-out after the third year, so the deal could be viewed as a three year, $90 million contract, with a four year, $127 million player option that Price can choose to exercise if he gets injured or sees his performance diminish. So not only does Price’s deal beat Max Scherzer’s contract from a year ago in terms of total value and not include the deferred money that Scherzer took to get that total, but he also gets the right to hit the market again and get an even larger payday in a few years if he continues to pitch at a high level over the next 600 innings.

In terms of expectations, this deal beats the crowd’s estimate by $21 million, though my 7/$215M guess ended up being pretty close, though I didn’t think he’d also get an opt-out. Steamer projects him for +5.3 WAR in 2017, so based on our normal assumptions about the free agent market, the $/WAR framework would have had him at just a hair over $240 million. If you think the opt-out is worth about $25 million, then this is almost exactly in line with an $8 million per win estimate for free agents in this market.

David Price’s Contract Estimate — 7 yr / $241.2 M

Year	Age	WAR	$/WAR	Est. Value
2016	30	5.3	$8.0 M	$42.4 M
2017	31	4.8	$8.4 M	$40.3 M
2018	32	4.3	$8.8 M	$37.9 M
2019	33	3.8	$9.3 M	$35.2 M
2020	34	3.3	$9.7 M	$32.1 M
2021	35	2.8	$10.2 M	$28.6 M
2022	36	2.3	$10.7 M	$24.7 M
Totals		26.6		$241.2 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)

It’s certainly a huge commitment, but it’s a huge commitment for a great player, and Price should help get the Red Sox back to being a playoff contender. Their work certainly isn’t done after adding just one arm, but this is a big first step for the Red Sox.

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As a part of whatever their plan is, the Braves have reportedly made Shelby Miller available, and they’re taking calls from almost everyone. Miller has three more years of team control, so it’s not like he’d be just a short-term addition, but the Braves would probably like to exchange that for four or five or six years of control of somebody else. It’s nice to have three years of a good player, but it’s less nice when at least the first one will do little to get the team away from the basement. The goal isn’t the year ahead. The goal is survival, so that better years may come.

Even just on the surface, it’s no mystery why Miller has more than a dozen suitors. He’s a cost-controlled, 25-year-old starting pitcher who just eclipsed 200 innings. He played for a miserable team, explaining how he paired a lousy record with a sub-3.5 ERA. Miller still throws plenty hard, and he gained back a few strikeouts, while limiting quality contact. Miller, as is, is appealing. But I think here we could be looking at a brighter future than usual. You typically want to project a player based on what he’s already done. I think there’s a chance Miller’s on the verge of a breakthrough, making him simultaneously a veteran and a sort of prospect. The teams most interested in Shelby Miller might be looking to buy his promise.

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I’ll just be up front: some amount of bias will be present in this post. It’s unavoidable when you write a “sleeper team” post. I’m high on the Diamondbacks, and I’m not afraid to admit it.

Between radio hits and and my weekly chats here at FanGraphs, I’ve been asked plenty of times who my sleeper team is for 2016. Of course, it’s far too early to have any real idea what Opening Day rosters will look like four months from now, yet the questions remain. I did a spot for sports betting website BangTheBook recently and was read the World Series futures odds and asked to pick a potential breakout from the teams being given 60/1 odds or worse. Those teams are as follows:

• Diamondbacks, 60/1
• Reds, 60/1
• Marlins, 60/1
• Brewers, 60/1
• Athletics, 60/1
• Padres, 60/1
• Braves, 100/1
• Rockies 150/1
• Phillies, 300/1

Let’s pretend that we have to place a bet on one of these teams. The Phillies, Rockies and Braves are pretty clearly the three worst teams in baseball with no real hopes or plans for immediate contention. They’re out. Likewise, the Brewers, Reds and Marlins are all in the midst of some sort of rebuild that has them essentially out of the conversation for 2016. Nix them. That leaves the A’s, Padres and D’backs as sort of fringy teams with some interesting pieces that don’t seem to be totally committed to a rebuild.

The Padres won 74 games last year, and were a 71-win team by BaseRuns. Take away Justin Upton, Craig Kimbrel, Ian Kennedy and Joaquin Benoit and you’re currently looking at one of the worst rosters in baseball. Scratch them off. The A’s are interesting because they won only 68 games but BaseRuns saw them as an 80-win team. The Diamondbacks are more interesting, though, because BaseRuns pegged them as 80-win team and they actually won 79. Pythag saw them as better than .500.

It’s not a sexy pick, and I’m certainly not here to argue that the Dbacks are one of the best teams in baseball, but a complaint you often hear about bold predictions is that they aren’t bold enough. Well, by nearly any measure we have a true-talent .500 team here, a team whose most notable free agent departure is Jarrod Saltalamacchia, and a team whose future World Series odds are being lumped in with the likes of the Reds and Brewers. To me, that’s the definition of a sleeper. And there’s reason to believe the team could get better.
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Ben and Sam talk to Andre Archimbaud, whose experience at the 2002 Winter Meetings, just before Moneyball blew up, was chronicled in Josh Lewin’s book, Getting in the Game.

Every winter, hundreds of nondescript minor leaguers become minor league free agents. Minor league free agency is what happens to a player who’s not on a 40-man roster after spending at least six years in the minor leagues. In other words, these players weren’t good enough to merit a callup after several years in the minors, and their organizations didn’t think they had enough potential to be worthy of a 40-man spot.

Some of these players latch on with new organizations; some of them don’t. But regardless, the overwhelming majority never have much big league success. A couple of years ago, Carson Cistulli found that only about 1% of minor league free agents produce at least 0.5 WAR the following season. Minor league free agents are the absolute bottom of the barrel when it comes to player transactions.

But there’s an occasional gem at the bottom of that barrel. Its not at all unheard of for a minor league free agent to make a major league impact. In no particular order, Gregor Blanco, Jesus Guzman, Donovan Solano, Yangervis Solarte, Jake Smolinski, Jose Quintana and Al Alburquerque are some notable examples from the past few years. And there are certainly others that I neglected to mention. Each left his original organization via minor league free agency, but achieved some level of big league success with his new team.

Using my KATOH projection system, I identified a few players from this year’s minor league free agent class who showed glimmers of promise last season. Based on their minor league numbers, there’s reason to believe they might be able to help at the big league level sometime soon. Below, you’ll find the top three hitters and top three pitchers according to KATOH. For each player, I’ve also provided a projected win total through his age-28 season (denoted as WAR thru 28) based both on 2015 numbers and then also his 2014 season (denoted as 2014 KATOH).

*****

Hitters

Wilfredo Tovar, 2.0 WAR thru 28

2014 KATOH: 1.5 WAR

Former Team: New York Mets

Current Status: Unsigned

Tovar was an interesting prospect in the Mets system a few years back, but the infielder stalled out in the high minors after a couple of injury-plagued seasons. He spent 2015 with the Mets’ Triple-A affiliate, where he hit .283/.327/.356 with 30 steals. Tovar isn’t sexy — if he were, he wouldn’t be a minor league free agent — but he makes contact, runs well and plays up-the-middle defense. And most importantly, at 24, he’s still young enough that he could conceivably get a good deal better.

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