FanGraphs Baseball

“I don’t care about the money,” (Mike Ilitch) said. “I want the best players.”

The Tigers owner made that comment at yesterday’s press conference introducing Jordan Zimmermann as the newest member of Detroit’s rotation. For sure, Ilitch has indeed backed up that comment with significant spending over the years, giving out big money deals to acquire guys like Prince Fielder and Anibal Sanchez while still retaining players like Miguel Cabrera, Justin Verlander, and Victor Martinez. The Tigers have consistently run some of the highest payrolls in baseball over the last decade, and Ilitch clearly isn’t looking to rebuild, given his own age and that of most of the team’s players.

But while adding Zimmermann should help stabilize the rotation, the Tigers should not yet be done spending. If Ilitch is serious about not caring about his budget — he stated he’d even be willing to go over the luxury tax if need be — he has a real chance to back up those words this winter, because the Tigers were not one Jordan Zimmermann away from being the best team in the AL Central. Even with Zimmermann, they don’t currently look like one of the five best teams in the American League.

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Johnny Cueto didn’t want the Jordan Zimmermann deal with an extra year attached, or so the rumors go. That’s interesting, because the two 29-year-old righties are comparable players:

Johnny Cueto vs Jordan Zimmermann, Since 2011

Name	IP	K%	BB%	xFIP	FIP	ERA
Cueto	889.1	20.7%	6.3%	3.58	3.41	2.71
Zimmermann	971.2	19.8%	4.6%	3.58	3.30	3.14

At least by strikeouts and walks, these two are in the same class. Zimmermann’s strikeout minus walk rate is a little better than Cueto’s, even if the dreadlocked one has a better strikeout rate.

These guys look very similar, until you look at the batted ball stats. Over the last five years, 26.5% of Cueto’s balls in play have been hits, while 29% of Zimmermann’s have been. That’s led to a 2.71 ERA for one and a 3.14 ERA for the other.

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Let’s begin by acknowledging the obvious: the entire premise of this piece is probably absurd. Considering that the Major League Baseball Players Association’s top priority over the last several decades has been to resist the implementation of a salary cap, it is highly unlikely that the players will reverse course and seriously consider agreeing to a cap on team payroll anytime soon. Opposition to the very notion of a salary cap is simply too deeply ingrained in the union’s culture.

But even if the players are unlikely to agree to a salary cap in the foreseeable future, there is a legitimate case to be made that they should at least consider the possibility during their upcoming collective bargaining negotiations with Major League Baseball.

Indeed, in many respects, the players have been subject to a de facto salary cap for quite some time without receiving any of the accompanying benefits.

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Tommy Hottovy’s position within the Chicago Cubs organization isn’t high profile. It is, however, important to the team’s success. The 34-year-old former pitcher is the club’s Coordinator of Advance Scouting, with a focus on run prevention.

A graduate of Wichita State University, Hottovy played 10 professional seasons after being selected in the fourth round of the 2004 draft by Boston. His big league playing career consisted of 17 relief appearances for the Red Sox and the Kansas City Royals in 2011-2102. Hottovy was hired into his current position last December.

——

Hottovy on his current position: “I was in spring training with the Cubs in 2014, playing, and blew out my shoulder. I had a feeling I was done, but I spent the summer rehabbing, anyway. Along the way, I took the online Sabermetrics 101 course from Boston University. I was a finance major with an economics minor at Wichita State, so I have a numbers background. I wanted to refresh my statistics knowledge, and the sabermetrics course, which is obviously about baseball, helped with that.

“I started talking to teams. I told Theo (Epstein) and (Director of Video and Advance Scouting) Kyle Evans what I was interested in, and once we signed Joe Maddon, we discussed how the whole dynamic may work. They were in and we kind of ran with it. Nate Halm, who’s been here for a few years, took on the hitting side of our process. I think we’ve formed a really good rapport with the coaching staff and players.

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Episode 613
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 discusses the signings of Chris Young the Outfielder by Boston, of J.A. Happ by Toronto, and of Jordan Zimmermann by Detroit.

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 38 min play time.)

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On Thanksgiving Eve, the Athletics acquired infielder Jed Lowrie from the Astros in exchange for minor league reliever Brendan McCurry. If you haven’t already, you should check out Jeff Sullivan’s piece on Lowrie. This abbreviated missive focuses not on Lowrie, but on the minor league reliever who’s headed to Houston.

An undersized reliever, McCurry fell all the way to the 22nd round in 2014’s amateur draft, but his minor league performance has since lifted him to fringe prospect status. McCurry worked in relief at High-A and Double-A last season, where he pitched exceptionally well. He struck out 32% of his batters faced last season, and finished up with a 2.44 ERA.

McCurry’s numbers are excellent, but plenty of minor league relievers put up excellent numbers, especially in the lower levels. Throw in that he’s nearly 24, and he’s about as fringy as they come. KATOH forecasts McCurry for a mere 0.7 WAR through his age-28 season, making him the 771st highest-ranked prospect. Going by the stats, at least, most organizations have multiple relief prospects just as interesting as McCurry, if not more interesting. His Mahalanobis distance comps help illustrate how rarely guys like this become anything more than Triple-A depth.

Brendan McCurry’s Mahalanobis Comps

	Name	Year	Mah Dist	IP	WAR
1	Austin House	2014	0.23	0	0
2	Seth Frankoff	2013	0.28	0	0
3	Adam Kolarek	2012	0.37	0	0
4	Randy Fontanez	2013	0.42	0	0
5	Zack Thornton	2012	0.47	0	0
6	Cody Ege	2014	0.59	0	0
7	Grant Dayton	2012	0.71	0	0
8	Seth Rosin	2012	0.73	6	0
9	Robert Bell	2009	0.76	0	0
10	Rob Musgrave	2010	0.77	0	0
11	Zach Quate	2010	0.82	0	0
12	Ricky Brooks	2008	0.91	0	0
13	Cody Winiarski	2013	1.08	0	0
14	Mason Mcvay	2014	1.1	0	0
15	Kyle Bellamy	2010	1.12	0	0
16	C.C. Lee	2009	1.12	34	0
17	Jose Valdez	2012	1.22	0	0
18	Christopher Nunn	2014	1.24	0	0
19	Hector Neris	2012	1.25	41	0
20	Justin Kaye	2000	1.31	3	0

With Jordan Zimmermann, it’s so easy to focus on the downside. You’ve got a pitcher, coming up on 30, who’s already had Tommy John surgery once. He just posted a second-half ERA north of 4 despite playing in a woeful division, and he just lost a bunch of strikeouts, and he also just lost some fastball velocity. Every pitcher has red flags, and Zimmermann might have one or two more than usual. We’re all to some extent risk-averse, so it might not immediately seem like a great idea to guarantee Zimmermann $110 million over five years. In an ideal world, you’d like a bit more certainty.

Not that there’s ever such a thing as certainty. Someone as certain as, say, Carl Crawford dropped 8 WAR in between leaving the Rays for the Red Sox. Certainty is a lie, and beyond that, it’s not like Zimmermann wasn’t most recently good. By whatever measure, he had a three-win season. It was his fifth in a row. Zimmermann does actually seem fairly steady, even if you figure he peaked in 2014.

And underneath, Zimmermann has something going on. Most people are concerned with what’s physically going on. And, admittedly, what I’m going to highlight has an unclear link to ultimate performance. But Zimmermann has been changing himself, and in one way, he continued something he began two years ago.

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With the signing of J.A. Happ to a three year, $36 million contract, the Blue Jays seem to have turned the corner on their 2015 ace, David Price. So in that sense, for Blue Jays fans, the Happ signing is not a Happ-y occurrence… Has everybody left? Okay! Time to get down to business. While we are all focused on the big-name free agents, like Price, picking their new and surely happy homes, the almost-AL Champs north of the border have been somewhat quietly going about the business of doing lots of business, and that business has been assembling a rotation that can take advantage of their offense.

Happ is the third starting pitcher the Jays have brought in or back since the season ended. Recall that they re-signed Marco Estrada to a two year deal, and then traded Liam Hendriks to Oakland for Jesse Chavez. Now they bring back Happ, a member of the Jays as recently as 2014. With R.A. Dickey and Marcus Stroman, that’s five starting pitchers under team control for next season. While Happ represents likely the last and largest free agent outlay by the Blue Jays organization for a starting pitcher this offseason, that doesn’t mean the team is completely done. With Happ, the team has $92 million committed to seven players in 2016 and none of those seven are Josh Donaldson, meaning adding an eighth player will make that figure meaningfully larger. Last season Toronto spent $137 million, their highest payroll ever, and though reports are a bit conflicting, they don’t seem likely to go much beyond that if at all for 2016. Assuming that’s all true, fitting David Price’s salary in would have meant cutting some muscle from the payroll, and doing that likely would have meant cutting muscle from Toronto’s greatest strength, their offense.

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The Red Sox signed one of the Chris Youngs — the one who can hit. Terms haven’t yet been announced, or at least, terms hadn’t yet been announced when I first heard about this, and I haven’t bothered to check again since. It doesn’t really matter. He’ll get some millions over some years, and it will be neither great nor terrible, and whether Young is a success will probably come down to about five or ten swings per season. If they’re doubles or homers, terrific. If they’re outs, bad investment. So it goes with the role players. So it goes with everybody.

It’s fun that there are multiple Chris Youngs. It’s all the more fun they’re both weird and exceptional, extreme representations of ordinary profiles. The pitcher is unusually tall, and he throws unusually slow, and he generates an unusual amount of fly balls. The outfielder is also strange, and here’s a plot of part of his career profile:

Young hits a ton of balls in the air. A relative ton of those remain close to the infield. Young pulls the majority of his balls in play. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Young is sitting on a pretty low career BABIP, despite having a good amount of footspeed. Young isn’t the most difficult hitter to defend. You tend to know where the ball’s going, and then it’s a matter of covering as much of that limited ground as possible.

So, yeah, both Chris Youngs are fly-ball machines. They both get pop-ups and run low BABIPs. These are neat and coincidental fun facts. But let’s focus on that pull rate. Also, on the inversely-related opposite-field rate. Young does his damage hitting to left and left-center. He’s the worst opposite-field hitter we have on record.

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