FanGraphs Baseball

Ben and Sam banter about daily-fantasy ads, then answer listener emails about Barry Bonds and splash hits, end-of-season awards, when to spend on free agents, baseball and the metric system, and more.

The most prevalent questions in our weekly chats this time of year are “What areas should [insert favorite team here] be looking to address this offseason?” and “Who should they target to fix them?” People really like to predict the offseason, which is an impossible thing to predict.

We can’t anticipate trades or say with any confidence where free agents will land, but we can figure out who needs a boost the most. Using our team depth charts, powered by the 2016 Steamer projections, we can pretty quickly calculate current league WAR averages and z-scores for each team by position to get a sense of which positions need the most help. So, before free agency really gets underway, let’s do just that. The American League version is what you’re reading now, and the National League edition will follow this one, tomorrow.

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Honorable mentions: Orioles LF, Royals RF, Orioles RF, Angels rotation, Orioles 1B, Red Sox bullpen, White Sox SS, White Sox 2B, Tigers rotation, Mariners catcher.

#10 Angels – LF

And to think, it was just a couple months ago when the Angels had enough left fielders for the entire American League West. Matt Joyce, Shane Victorino, David Murphy and David DeJesus are all free agents now, though, and the Angels are left with a gaping hole that will clearly be filled before the offseason is over.

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With free agency now officially underway, we’ve reached the point in the off-season where baseball scribes roll out our annual warning to Major League teams: DON’T DO IT! The history of the $100 million contract is served up as a reminder that these mega-contracts have often turned out poorly, with names like Mike Hampton and Carl Crawford trotted out as reminders that big pricey off-season additions don’t come with any kind of guarantee of success. Because most free agents reach the open market around (or after) their 30th birthday, teams are often signing players whose best days are behind them, and end up paying big money to players who are in decline before they even put their new uniforms on.

The newest entry in the annual reminder of big contract risk comes from Will Leitch over at Sports on Earth. In his piece on Tuesday, Leitch notes that players who have been paid an annual average value of $20 million or more during their long-term deals have fared particularly poorly of late.

That is the dirty secret of every free-agent season: Almost every long-term deal that will be signed will be bad. In FanGraphs’ rankings over the summer of the worst five contracts, all five were massive free agency “victories” for the team that signed them, all within the past three years. These deals are terrible business. I know this is exciting. I know we can’t wait to talk about them all. I know some long-term deals even work out (though the only one immediately coming to mind is Matt Holliday). There are 34 players — not counting the free agents signing new deals — who will be making $20 million or more in 2016. The majority of them will absolutely not be worth it.

Leitch goes on to note that just eight of the 34 players scheduled to make $20+ million next year are “boons” to their franchise, while another eight are “up in the air”, leaving 16 as “drains”, including several players who might not even have jobs next year if it weren’t for their guaranteed contracts. It’s unquestionably true that a lot of these major signings in recent years have gone poorly, and undoubtedly, many of the teams who will be celebrating their new acquisitions over the next few months will end up wishing they’d been outbid instead.

But while I agree with Leitch’s overarching point about free agency being an inefficient way to build a roster, I think there are a couple of reasonable counters to his claims. Let’s attempt them.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

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Last Wednesday, we looked at the most extreme home runs of the 2015 postseason. There was Daniel Murphy‘s off-the-shoetops homer, one of many ridiculous Kyle Schwarber blasts, and Jose Bautista’s now-infamous bat flip that caused such an uproar. And, while it was great to relive all of those home runs from the playoffs, a simple constraint to that piece was this: there were only 91 home runs hit during the postseason. We’re searching for extreme home runs, and that wasn’t the largest sample size from which to draw. Fun, absolutely, but there is more fun when more homers are involved.

And so we find ourselves here, staring at a sample of every home run hit during the regular season: all 4,907 of them. There are a lot of strange occurrences in that many separate events, and so I’ve pulled out some of the finest moments involving home runs during the entire 2015 regular season. As always, data has been mined from Baseball Savant and HitTrackerOnline. Let’s get to it!

Hardest-Hit Home Run: Josh Donaldson, 4/23/15

Josh Donaldson might win the American League MVP award this year. However, regardless of whether he wins or not, he beat out his biggest competitor in that award (Mike Trout) by almost a full mph in this category, producing an exit velocity of 120.5 mph on a belt-high changeup from Chris Tillman. Whether that fact will give Donaldson any solace if he loses the MVP award cannot be known, as we do not have an accurate knowledge of whether he reads these digital pages, or puts any stock into made-up awards related to home run compilation articles.

Also of note: the sound that emits from this particular contact of ball on bat. I’ve been trying to think of a way to describe it, and the best I can come up with is that something shattered. That something could’ve been the bat, or the ball, or might simply be the sound of a small fusion reaction. Read the rest of this entry »

Since we don’t have much more than velocity readings from Japan, it can be difficult to rely on anything but scouting reports when evaluating pitchers coming over from Nippon Professional Baseball. And now that 27-year-old Kenta Maeda is once again rumored to be coming to America through the posting system, we’re once again left wondering how to place him in context.

We have his Japanese strikeout and walk rates, which we can compare to recent postings to find comparable countrymen. We also have his velocity readings and a general sense of the quality of his pitches that we can use to compare him to pitchers beyond just ones that have come from Japan. We even have one game of PITCHf/x data to help us look at the movement of his pitches.

And the few comparable players we produce might be the best we can do from out here in the public sphere.

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I don’t know if Clayton Kershaw is going to win the Cy Young Award, but I know he deserves to as much as anybody else. Three years ago, he won the Cy Young by allowing a .521 OPS. Two years ago, he won the Cy Young by allowing a .521 OPS. This year, he might win the Cy Young after allowing a .521 OPS. Maybe he wouldn’t mind a loss so much; he’s already won three of these things, plus a league MVP. He’s not hurting for hardware. But then, it’s not like Clayton Kershaw likes to lose.

He is the total package, as a pitcher, as a player, as a person. On the field, he’s proven his durability. He’s turned himself into a good hitter for his position. He’s also a good defender, who’s difficult to run against. Few pitchers have Kershaw’s know-how, and few pitchers have his command. Kershaw throws what rates as one of the best fastballs in baseball. He throws what rates as one of the best sliders in baseball. He throws what rates as one of the best curveballs in baseball. He does everything, and he’s 27. There’s no such thing as an actually perfect pitcher, but Kershaw is as close as it gets. There are no meaningful weaknesses. He’s even now proven himself in the playoffs.

There’s just this one thing. This one nearly irrelevant thing, that bothers Kershaw even if it doesn’t bother anybody else. Ask anyone else, and they’d tell you that Kershaw is as good as they come. Ask Kershaw, and he’d tell you he wishes he could throw a decent changeup.

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As you know, the General Managers meetings are currently taking place in Boca Raton, Florida. I’ve had an opportunity to speak to several of the GMs – I’ll talk to more of them tomorrow – and some of those conversations will be shared here in the coming days. Here are snapshots from four of today’s one-on-ones, and another from a group session held yesterday:

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John Coppolella, Braves: “We’re looking at the way John Schuerholz built the Royals and the Braves. We’re looking at the way John Hart built the Indians and the Rangers. They went with young, upside talent. They took long-range views. I think we’re on the same track.

“It was tough for us to trade away Jason Heyward and Justin Upton. We traded them away because they brought us value in the deals. I wish we had Jason Heyward and Justin Upton going forward. If we had $350 million dollars, maybe we could get both of them this offseason. That’s not where were at, at this point in the winning cycle.”

Jerry Dipoto, Mariners: “The philosophy I’m bringing over here is pretty different. I respect Jack Zduriencik – he’s had a wonderful baseball career and I’m sure he’ll continue to have one – but we’ll do things differently than he did. We see things through a different lens.

“Regarding (the Angels), it would be fair to say that this is a different environment.”

Dave Dombrowski, Red Sox: “I’ve always tried to not have untouchables. If you have Miguel Cabrera and he’s the best hitter in the game, and somebody offers you two Miguel Cabreras, you have to be open minded about it… There are some players we have that are much less apt to be dealt than others. I’m not necessarily going to name them.”

Matt Klentak, Phillies: “Philosophically, I am very much of the mind to use all of the information to make every decision that we make. I’m not a huge fan of operating under any sort of absolutes, but I want to make sure that we’re managing all of the information as well as we can.

“We’re in the process of (building an analytics department). I’ve only been on the ground in Philadelphia for about a week, so there’s only so much I could have done do far, but that’s definitely a critical focus for us. We’ve started building (a proprietary system).”

David Stearns, Brewers: “Mark Attanasio, our owner, has given me complete autonomy. During the interview process, I presented my vision of where I thought the Brewers should head, and he agreed with it enough to give me the job.

“I really don’t see a dichotomy between (the analytics and scouting departments). I see them both as information sources where we need the absolute best of both. We’re going to build out both. In this industry, the game is, ‘What is the next frontier in baseball, and where can we get the next competitive advantage?’”

The Royals have got all of us thinking. It’s not so much about the Royals finding the only way to win, but they’ve definitely found an interesting way to win, and given their accomplishments you can’t just sweep it away as luck. The Royals have won with a bullpen-heavy model, and now it’s going to be interesting to see if other teams respond by putting more resources toward their relief. On the one hand, according to reports, there are a lot of excellent relievers on the market, as sellers try to meet perceived demand. On the other hand, I guess, every reliever addition is also a reliever subtraction, so. The point is, expect bullpens to be in focus.

And bullpens, I think, are something we struggle to measure. So much attention is paid to the difficulty of evaluating defense, but we also run into some trouble trying to value really good or really bad relievers. We’ve got reliever WAR, which takes leverage somewhat into consideration, but there’s an argument reliever WAR is missing something, something that, say, underrates how much a great reliever is really worth.

The goal here isn’t to try to answer everything. Bullpens are complicated and I can’t develop a model for everything in a day. I’ve simplified, to try to address one point. We already have reliever WAR. How have teams with an elite reliever actually done, compared to teams without one?

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“A pitcher, you throw 100 miles per hour, you are the shit.”

That’s Omar Vizquel, former longtime Cleveland Indians shortstop and current Detroit Tigers first base, fielding and baserunning coach, in a Maxim.com article by Hunter Atkins last month.

Vizquel’s not wrong. We love guys who can throw 100. It’s not much different than throwing 99 — no more different than 99 is to 98, at least. But there’s something about that number, 100, that appeals to us. For a while, there just weren’t that many guys who could do it, so the ones who could really stuck out. Even now, when plenty of guys can do it, the number is enticing. Maybe it’s the third digit. Maybe it’s the fact that the number starts with a one, when all the rest start with sevens, eights and nines. Maybe it’s those nice, round zeroes, their cleanliness and sense of closure. In the Maxim piece, Joba Chamberlain describes it as “sexy.”

So we’ve got 100, this big, clean, round, even, sexy number that pitchers can make appear on a radar gun for which crowds cheer regardless of the result or quality of the 100. But there are times when baseballs travel 100 miles per hour not having been thrown by a pitcher, and those aren’t given nearly the same attention.

This was the year of the exit velocity. It was our first season with Statcast data, and the number that infiltrated the public domain more than any other was batted ball velocity. Hitting 100 off the bat is nice, too, but it isn’t nearly as impressive as a pitcher throwing 100. For exit velo, the holy 100 is more like the holy 110, and that’s not nearly as fun a number. Let’s stick with 100.

Occasionally, an outfielder will get a running head start, whether on a single or a sac fly, and throw a bullet to home plate, just like a pitcher, and it elicits a response. We can see with our eyes that the ball was thrown exceptionally hard, but we don’t see it on the radar gun, so these throws go unrecognized. You’ll hear about “pitchers who can throw 100,” but you never hear outfielders regarded in the same light. The pitchers who can throw 100 have their own exclusive, little clubs. Some can do it, but most just can’t. Outfielders are the same way, just without the club.

This season, there were 24 pitchers who threw a pitch that registered in the triple digits. There were 15 outfielders. Let’s give them their own club.
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