FanGraphs Baseball

In a move that has been widely expected for months, the Phillies announced today that they’re not going to extend Ruben Amaro’s contract, ending his tenure as general manager of the club.

Full release from #Phillies on Amaro: pic.twitter.com/8PZPRC664T

— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) September 10, 2015

Amaro has been the Phillies GM since November of 2008. The Phillies won the division each of his first three years in charge, including making it to the World Series in 2009, but have struggled as their core aged and the team was unable to restock the talent pool around their former stars. Amaro was also one of the last holdouts against the move towards analytics, and the Phillies fell behind the rest of the league by resisting the trends toward data-inclusive decision making.

New team president Andy MacPhail will likely look outside the organization for the team’s next GM, and I wouldn’t be too surprised if the team went with a younger assistant GM from a team with an analytical bent. Given the Phillies payroll and market size, this is the kind of position that will appeal to a wide variety of candidates, and the Phillies should be able to interview just about anyone they want for the position.

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Lately there’s been some talk about Yoenis Cespedes as an MVP candidate. Jon Paul Morosi wrote a piece advocating for Cespedes at Fox yesterday, Richard Justice wrote a similar piece for MLB.com, and those are just the ones I saw in between cleaning up randomly placed pockets of cat vomit and carting my kids around town to their various appointments. So there might be more. Articles, not cat vomit. There is definitely more cat vomit.

To check, I did that thing where you start typing a search into Google then stop and let it suggest what you might want. Here’s what my Google suggested when I typed in “Yoenis Cespedes.”

So this is now a thing, apparently. Yoenis Cespedes: MVP candidate.

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Devised originally in response to a challenge issued by viscount of the internet Rob Neyer, and expanded at the request of nobody, NERD scores represent an attempt to summarize in one number (and on a scale of 0-10) the likely aesthetic appeal or watchability, for the learned fan, of a player or team or game. Read more about the components of and formulae for NERD scores here.

Most Highly Rated Game
Toronto at New York AL | 19:05 ET
Price (196.1 IP, 83 xFIP-) vs. Severino (35.1 IP, 94 xFIP-)
Owing to how he’s afflicted by indolence and riddled with lethargy, the author hasn’t attempted to record such a thing. It appears, however, that tonight’s Blue Jays-Yankees game is the first encounter of the season in receipt of a perfect NERD score — NERD being the fake acronym applied by a younger version of the author to the flawed algorithm used to determine a baseball game’s aesthetic appeal. The reason for this game’s appeal, mostly: the respective proximities of each club both to the top of their division and also to each other. And secondly, too: the respective talents of Toronto left-hander David Price and New York right-hander Luis Severino.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Toronto Radio?

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I’ve written about a few changes like this lately. I wrote about Ryan Goins, whose hot streak coincided with a new unwillingness to swing the bat. I wrote about Joey Votto, whose Bonds-esque second half has come with greater discipline and a preference for very particular strikes. In Goins’ case, the analysis was done in response to improved performance. In Votto’s case, the analysis was done in response to improved performance. There’s nothing quite like that here, no red-hot offensive tear commanding broader attention. Maybe that’s still to come, but I think the observation is interesting enough regardless of everything else.

Evan Gattis is patient now. He’s not Joey Votto-patient. He’s not Matt Carpenter-patient. His patience is relative, but compared to what he’s been, this is a whole different type of hitter. As always, you have to wonder how much of this is actually nothing. Sometimes the numbers we look at aren’t reflective of any deeper truths. But this isn’t based on outcome data. This isn’t based on the usual things that bounce around. This is about swinging. Hitters who like to swing will swing; hitters who like to wait will wait. Gattis has been a swinger. Now Gattis is more of a waiter. This is interesting because of how unexpected it has been.

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The Nationals’ season isn’t quite on life support, but there’s been a bad accident, and the family’s been notified. The situation appears to be dire, and while Tuesday brought its own fresh horrors, that wasn’t the day that slaughtered the dream. It’s the most recent event, the currently most upsetting event, but the Nationals weren’t even supposed to be in this situation in the first place. They’ve had problems for weeks, for months, and now they’re about out of time to save themselves and move on to the tournament. The Mets have simply done too much. The Nationals have simply done too little.

The story would be interesting if it were any division race. What makes this one extra interesting is that it’s this division race. The Nationals were expected to run away with the NL East. The Phillies, as assumed, have been bad. The Braves, as assumed, have been bad. The Marlins had the look of being mediocre. The Mets had the look of a fringe contender. The Nationals had the look of a champion. These are our preseason odds. The Nationals were given an 86% chance to win the division. They were projected to clear the Mets by 13 games. If the Nationals won out, and the Mets lost out, the Nationals would clear the Mets by 18 games. This was supposed to be a relative cakewalk. It’s been more of a…nailwalk? I don’t know. It’s been bad, is the point.

So: why? How has this happened? Obviously, the Mets have quite a bit to do with it, but this post is to focus on the Nationals. Where did this go wrong?

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I went to a baseball game in Oakland last night. This wouldn’t have any bearing on this article if not for this: I drove to the game, and in that 30-minute drive to the stadium, the Washington Nationals went from clawing their way back into some sort of contention in the NL East by beating the Mets to looking up October beachfront condo rentals. When I got in the car, there was the prospect of an interesting September division race. When I got out of the car, poof — that was all but gone. One inning, three pitchers, six walks, and six runs after the start of the top of the seventh, the score of the game was tied at 7-7, and all it took was a home run off the bat of Kirk Nieuwenhuis in the eighth to finally sink the Nationals.

If you follow either or both of these teams, yesterday’s seventh inning was an encapsulation of how the season has unfolded. The Mets have been one of the best stories in baseball; the Nats have been 2015’s poster child for the biggest gap between performance and preseason expectations. One of the most alluring things about baseball is how large season trends can play out in the microcosm of a single inning, and so the seventh inning saw a shift in win expectancy inline with the arc of the Nationals’ season, from spring training to today:

At one point, with two out and one on in the top of the seventh, the Nationals had a 99.2% expectation of winning the game. And, while late 7-1 leads are blown in games many times during the course of an entire baseball season, when they happen in this sort of context and with this kind of futility, it’s our responsibility to break them down.

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Back before the 2012 season, Frank McCourt owned the Los Angeles Dodgers. He had purchased the team in 2004, inheriting a club that featured a $105 million payroll in 2003. Nearly ten years later, he sold the team to the deep-pocketed Guggenheim-led group — handing over a club that also featured a $105 million payroll. Major League Baseball revenues had doubled during McCourt’s tenure as team owner — and salaries for players increased at something close to the same rate — but the Dodgers, sitting in one of the biggest media markets in the country, stuck to the status quo after fielding one of the bigger payrolls in baseball at the beginning of the century. The Dodgers have finally caught up with the times (some would say surpassed) in terms of payroll, but while their $300-plus million payroll might seem enormous, the team would still be right in line with the New York Yankees and Boston Red Sox if those two teams had not slowed their spending in recent years.

Prior to the arrival of the Dodgers’ new ownership and $8 billion cable deal, the Yankees were the only team to exceed a $200 million payroll. The Yankees crossed that threshold in 2005, but kept their spending fairly static over the following decade, only getting above $225 million once (in 2013) and falling below that mark last season. Their total outlay on players was often somewhat higher, given the luxury-tax payments the team was forced to make every season. Given the Yankees’ spending over the last decade and the Dodgers’ spending over the last few seasons, it might appear that the luxury tax is not much of a deterrent towards spending, but as Nathaniel Grow detailed back in May, the luxury tax has kept spending down at upper levels.

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Although I write about prospects on a regular basis, it’s not often I get to see the players I write about in action. However, this year’s 16th-overall pick, UCLA right-hander James Kaprielian, happened to be pitching for the Yankees’ New York-Penn League affiliate in Staten Island, which is just a short boat ride from my office. So I decided I’d get out from behind my computer screen to actually watch some of the players who fill up my hard drive. Luckily for me, the Yankees’ second-round pick, Indiana State left-hander Jeffrey Degano, pitched in relief, giving me plenty of solid pitching to observe. If I had a penchant for scouting, I’d be able to provide you with grades for each of his pitches and command — much like Kiley McDaniel does on the player pages. Unfortunately, my untrained eyes aren’t capable of grading pitches with that type of precision. So instead, I’ll just describe what I saw as best I can, and supplement it with some low-quality video courtesy of my iPhone.

Kaprielian sat 91-94 mph with his fastball, and dialed it up as high as 96 with two strikes. Observe this 93 mph two-strike offering to Bobby Wernes, who had struck out in just 12% of his plate appearances headed into play.

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