FanGraphs Baseball

Usually, the retirement of a 37-year-old journeyman who spent the vast majority of his 20-year career in the minor leagues is not a cause for reflection by most fans of major league baseball. A cause of wonderment, perhaps, at the drive of a player who would, year after year, continue to play past the point at which a full-time major league dream seemed out of reach. That assumes, however, that the player wasn’t incredibly accomplished, and just this past season set the minor league record for home runs. All of it assumes the player isn’t Mike Hessman, the modern-day embodiment of Crash Davis.

Hessman’s is a true baseball life – not that of a storied major league slugger, or a fire-balling ace who won 300 games – but a player who epitomizes the never-say-die attitude at the heart of many a great sports story. That perseverance deserves recognition, and today, we’re going to highlight Hessman’s career through a few key facts and graphics to try to capture just how special and zany it was.

First, the easy one: the home runs. Hessman hit a lot of them. Out of a total of 454 professional dingers, he hit 433 in the minors, 14 in the majors, six in Japan, and one while playing in Venezuela. Take a look at his career home runs by level:

It took Hessman almost six years to make it to Triple-A after being drafted by Atlanta out of high school, but when he arrived, he stuck around. While he would compile 109 games in the major leagues with the Braves, Tigers, and Mets, his most permanent team was the Toledo Mud Hens, the Triple-A affiliate for the Detroit Tigers. He spent five years bashing a combined 140 homers for them between 2005 and 2009; in 2015, he reunited with them to add on another 16, including his record-breaking 433rd, a fitting go-ahead grand slam to left:

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

Ben and Sam discuss the perplexities of the J.A. Happ and Jordan Zimmermann signings.

According to Ken Rosenthal, the Red Sox have added to their outfield depth today.

Sources: #RedSox in agreement with free-agent outfielder Chris Young on a multi-year contract, pending a physical.

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) November 30, 2015

Chris Young the hitter is one of the better fourth outfielders in baseball today, combining the ability to play all three outfield spots with some lefty-mashing abilities, making him a very nice platoon partner and capable reserve who won’t drag the offense down too far if pushed into regular duty. He gave the Yankees 350 quality plate appearances in just that role last year, putting up +1.2 WAR as a useful part-time player, and now he’ll take his skills to Fenway Park to provide depth behind the young OF trio of Rusney Castillo, Mookie Betts, and Jackie Bradley Jr.

With Betts and Castillo both being right-handed, it would seem that — barring a trade — most of Young’s playing time may come as part of a job-share with Bradley. Or, alternately, the team could be looking at trading Rusney Castillo and replacing him with a left-handed hitting outfielder; they’ve been rumored to have interest in Alex Gordon and Jason Heyward at different points this winter, and while you’re not going to platoon either of those guys, having Young around would be more useful if two of the three OFs were lefties.

Or, potentially, they just might like Young’s fit in their ballpark. After all, he’s about as extreme a pull hitter as there is in baseball.

Chris Young by Field Direction

Field	wOBA
Pull	0.496
Center	0.291
Oppo	0.156

Young is also one of the game’s most extreme fly ball hitters, and since Fenway inflates the value of fly balls to left field, Young’s skillset could work better in Boston than places without a Green Monster to bounce balls off of. So perhaps this isn’t as much about a roster fit as it is a skillset fit.

We don’t have terms of the deal just yet, but the FG crowd had Young down for a two year, $12 million deal in the crowdsourcing project, which sounds about right to me.

For four consecutive years, the Detroit Tigers sat comfortably atop the throne of the American League Central Division. Last year, they relinquished that reign and did so in dramatic fashion, fielding the franchise’s worst rotation since the 119-loss Tigers of 2003 while plummeting to last place in the division.

Clearly, the Tigers were going to add a pitcher or three in the offseason. The question was, would it be a series of band-aids to stop the bleeding, or something bigger to put them back on the attack? On Sunday, that question was answered, when the Tigers agreed to terms with Jordan Zimmermann.

Those terms, precisely, are five years and $110 million, which is less than the 6/120 that our crowdsourcing project predicted. In past years, the crowd has tended to err on the low side, especially with high-profile free agents, so any time a guy signs for less, it looks good for the team.

In fact, if you start with Zimmermann’s +3 WAR Steamer projection for 2016, assume he ages somewhat well and factor in inflation, Zimmermann’s contract comes out as a carbon-copy of what would be considered the fair, market price:

What the Tigers are paying for here is consistency. This is a team that gave 147 innings to Buck Farmer, Kyle Lobstein, Kyle Ryan, and Randy Wolf last year, and a team whose only qualified pitcher was Alfredo Simon. Even at the top of the rotation, there’s former workhorse Justin Verlander, who looked like his old self once returning from injury but still needs to prove he can throw 200 innings again; Anibal Sanchez, who has either been hurt or ineffective each of the last two years; and Daniel Norris, who’s never thrown more than 150 innings in professional ball and just had a cancerous growth removed from his thyroid.

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This post was written by the team behind NEIFI, a projection system and systematic evaluation methodology about which you can read more at their site. They also tweet @NEIFIco, and have started their own blog as well.

We’re NEIFI. We build decision systems for teams, systems that produce both evaluations and valuations. Increasingly, there’s a need for such systems to work globally, both in the literal and metaphorical sense of the word; decision makers must be able to intelligently compare the relative values of draft picks, Korean free agents, a prospect, and 30-year-old big leaguer with two years and $30 million left on his contract. We’ve now been working explicitly with international leagues for about five years, and for much longer with domestic evaluations and valuations. We believe our methodology helps to put players from wildly different contexts on a neutral playing field for cross-comparison.

A few weeks ago, members of the Baseball Writers Association of America chose Jake Arrieta as the recipient of the 2015 NL Cy Young Award, even though it’s generally agreed upon that Clayton Kershaw is currently the best pitcher on the planet right now. NEIFI has little interest in awards voting (or the subsequent debates), but we do enjoy estimating the future. Here’s how our system projects the top 10 overall talent levels among starting pitchers going into 2016, simply on a rate basis. This uses the ERA scale; league average is fixed at 4.00, and an average SP is around 4.13:

Top SP Projections for 2016

Name	2016	Age
Kershaw, Clayton	2.35	28
Fernandez, Jose	2.75	24
Sale, Chris	2.87	27
Arrieta, Jake	3.01	30
Scherzer, Max	3.03	32
Otani, Shohei	3.08	22
Keuchel, Dallas	3.13	29
Kluber, Corey	3.15	30
Price, David	3.15	31
Strasburg, Stephen	3.16	28
Darvish, Yu	3.19	30

SOURCE: neifi.co

So we actually cheated: there are 11 pitchers included there, because as you may notice, one of them is not currently pitching in Major League Baseball. Shohei Otani’s dominance may not be groundbreaking news if you follow Japanese baseball to some degree, but we find that it’s still interesting to put his projectoin in this context. And for the sake of corroborating his gaudy ranking above, consider Darvish, who actually played for the same team in Japan.

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Last Monday, Eno Sarris published a post here examining the possibility — based on some reasonable questions regarding the positional adjustments which inform WAR — that giant, large slugger-types are more valuable than our typical assumptions about the market have previously indicated. Eno’s conclusion: they’re still probably not (more valuable, that is). For whatever benefits these sluggers might receive from a revision of those positional adjustments, it probably doesn’t compensate for the other deficits generally tied to this type of player.

Eno’s work rests largely on this thread of logic: first basemen (and designated hitters) aren’t particularly great long-term free-agent investments because power tends to age poorly. There is, one finds, an assumption embedded within this claim — i.e. that the value of first basemen is tied strongly to power. And the assumption is supported by evidence. Regard: in 2015, first basemen and designated hitters produced the highest isolated-power figure (ISO) among all position types. In 2014, first basemen and designated hitters also produced the highest ISO among all position types. The year before that, in 2013, first basers and DHs produced the highest ISOs. This is very probably the case for every other season, as well. Nor is this a surprising development: in order to compensate for the runs they’re unable to save on the defensive side of the ball, first basemen have to produce more runs on the offensive side of it. Compiling extra bases is the most expedient means of doing that.

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Please note that this is not the most recent list. An updated version can be found here.

Last week, I published a 2,000-plus word primer on the KATOH projection system I use to forecast prospects. Most notably, I discussed the improvements I made to the model and also explored how well individual minor league statistics can predict big league success. Today, I’m back with the end result of all of my math: KATOH’s top 100 list.

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Well, the first major free agent domino has fallen, as the Tigers have agreed to sign RHP Jordan Zimmermann to a five year, $110 million deal. While I listed Zimmermann as a potential landmine to avoid this winter, that was with the expectation that he’d end up getting something closer to the 7 year, $140 million deal I guessed, but this comes in even below the crowd’s expected 6 year, $126 million estimate; it is pretty rare that a high-end player signs for less than the crowd expects.

At this price, Zimmermann seems a good bit more likely to be worth the deal. With an assumed cost of $8 million per win this winter, plus 5% annual inflation, this price is almost exactly what you’d expect if you projected Zimmermann as a +3.5 WAR pitcher for 2016.

Jordan Zimmermann’s Contract Estimate — 5 yr / $108.4 M

Year	Age	WAR	$/WAR	Est. Value
2016	30	3.5	$8.0 M	$28.0 M
2017	31	3.0	$8.4 M	$25.2 M
2018	32	2.5	$8.8 M	$22.1 M
2019	33	2.0	$9.3 M	$18.5 M
2020	34	1.5	$9.7 M	$14.6 M
Totals		12.5		$108.4 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)

That’s certainly not an absurd expectation, given his career track record; he’s averaged +3.7 WAR per 200 innings up to this point, and has been at +3.0 or better in five straight seasons. Steamer has him at closer to +3 WAR for next year, as it’s a little down on him due to the decline in velocity and strikeout rates in 2015, and it doesn’t think he’ll be able to keep suppressing home runs as he did earlier in his career. But even at that somewhat pessimistic forecast, he still looks like about a $90 million pitcher, so this isn’t some huge risk for Detroit. If he stays healthy, this contract will probably turn out fine for Detroit.

It will be interesting to see what Zimmermann signing for less than expected will do to the rest of the mid-tier pitching market. I’d imagine Johnny Cueto’s agents aren’t thrilled with this deal.

Four players propelled baseballs over the left field roof at old Tiger Stadium. Frank Howard, Harmon Killebrew and Mark McGwire did so in visiting uniforms. Cecil Fielder was the lone Detroit Tiger to achieve the feat.

Mammoth power was required to reach that rarefied air. The left field fence was 340 feet from home plate, and the roof above the second deck was 94 feet high. Those dimensions were in effect from 1938-1999, a time period that encompassed nearly 10,000 games.

Fielder donned the Olde English D from 1990-1996, and he loved home cooking. The jumbo-sized slugger averaged 35 dingers in his time as a Tiger, and he was especially productive at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull. In 514 career games at Tiger Stadium, he had a .514 slugging percentage (how’s that for symmetry?).

“It was my place,” Fielder told me recently. “Great backdrop, great fan base. That ballpark was tailor made for me.”

Tiger Stadium was a relatively cozy 325 feet to right field, but it was no bandbox for right-handed hitters. Along with being 340 to left, it was a hefty 440 to straightaway center. That didn’t matter to Fielder, who could clear fences at Yellowstone, and in any direction. Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Sam banter about troublesome software (for some reason), then answer emails about constructing sensible trades, solving moral hazard, subbing for Andrelton Simmons, and what makes free agents happy.