FanGraphs Baseball

While it’s not going down as any kind of blockbuster, the Twins and Yankees struck a deal today, with Minnesota sending outfielder Aaron Hicks to the Yankees for catcher JR Murphy.

Hicks, a former highly though of prospect, finally showed some signs of life in 2015, putting up +1.5 WAR in 97 games after getting called back up from Triple-A. The improvement primarily came from his ability to avoid strikeouts, which looks to be potentially caused by a new-found willingness to swing at pitches in the strike zone; his in-zone swing rate jumped to 66%, significantly higher than it had been in his first two runs through the big leagues. With enough power to not just be a slap hitter and a good enough eye to draw some walks, Hicks profiles as something like a league average hitter going forward; Steamer projects him for a 99 wRC+ in 2016.

With some baserunning value and decent enough defense in center field, that makes Hicks a potentially interesting piece. In fact, if you look at the Steamer600 projections, where playing time is equalized for all players, you’ll note that Hicks looks like the kind of outfielder the Yankees have shown affinity for.

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This is the second piece in a two-part series previewing the upcoming 2016 collective bargaining negotiations between Major League Baseball and the Major League Baseball Players Association. Part I of the series examined the new leadership dynamic at MLB and the MLBPA, various economic issues (including the players’ declining share of league revenues, the qualifying offer system, and service time manipulation), and possible changes to the league’s Joint Drug Agreement.

In this post, I will be looking at bargaining issues related to the draft (international and domestic), along with various pace-of-play and scheduling issues, before offering a preliminary assessment of the likelihood that a work stoppage will impact the 2017 season.

International Draft

Since taking office, Rob Manfred has repeatedly suggested that one of his top priorities as commissioner is to implement a worldwide MLB draft, in one form or another (whether it be holding a single draft for all domestic and international prospects, or alternatively creating a separate draft for international players). As a result, one can safely assume that reaching an agreement on a “single method of entry into the game” – as Manfred likes to say – will undoubtedly be a top priority for MLB in the coming negotiations.

It is unclear whether the MLBPA will be willing to agree to subject international players to a draft, however. Read the rest of this entry »

Despite producing the same winning percentage as Colorado, Milwaukee and Oakland survive on run differential.

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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