FanGraphs Baseball

Are you going to be in town for the Saber Seminar? Of course you are, you wouldn’t miss the best baseball conference of the year, would you? Of course not. And, are you of legal drinking age and would like to meet up with other people who will be at the conference? Well, why wouldn’t you be? We can’t think of one good reason. So, for the third straight year, we’re organizing a Meetup at The Mead Hall in Cambridge on Friday, August 21, aka Saber Seminar Eve.

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As we unwind during baseball’s midsummer break, let’s take a look at the hitters and pitchers whose first-half contact scores sat at the extremes. For those of you who haven’t read my previous work on this topic, a player’s raw contact score is determined by stripping the strikeouts and walks (Ks and BBs) from his record. Run values are applied to all other events, and scaled to league average, represented by 100. Raw contact scores aren’t adjusted for context, so some noise can remain, often caused by home park, player speed, or luck. Still, the most pertinent variable is usually contact authority and overall quality, made or allowed. Read the rest of this entry »

Not to beat a dead horse, or any kind of horse, but the Matt Kemp trade has been lopsided. There’s still an awful long way to go, but for now the Matt Kemp trade is more like the Yasmani Grandal trade, and Grandal and the Dodgers couldn’t be happier. The other day on Twitter I was tipped off to an article about Grandal written by Matt Calkins. The headline: “Padres blew it with Yasmani Grandal.” It talks about Grandal’s limited playing time, and the lack of trust some Padres pitchers had in him. One paragraph stood out to me as particularly interesting:

Despite the general San Diego approach being to throw down and away, Grandal thought the power pitchers should be throwing inside in the early part of the count before using the outer half of the plate to record the out. But the veteran hurlers weren’t catching his drift, and as a result, he wasn’t catching their pitches.

Pitchers identified were Andrew Cashner, Tyson Ross, and Ian Kennedy. Last season, Grandal didn’t catch Cashner. Ross eventually stopped throwing to him, and Kennedy did too. They preferred working with Rene Rivera. This year, the Padres pitching staff has struggled. From the bottom of the same article:

San Diego’s pitching, however, has disappointed, and Grandal can’t help but wonder if that would be the case had his advice been heeded.

On the one hand, this doesn’t really matter. Grandal isn’t in San Diego anymore, so everyone just ought to move on. But on the other hand, this can be an interesting thing to investigate. So let’s talk about what Grandal talked about.

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Over the next month, rumors will shape baseball coverage, and a small portion of those rumors will actually develop into real trades. Every team with a shot at the playoffs wants to get better, and adding a starting pitcher is often the mode for many organizations. Even teams that have pitching could probably use a little more. To be willing to part with organizational resources, teams need to have an appropriate nexus between the impact of the new pitcher and a spot on the marginal win curve that makes the upgrade worthwhile.

Eliminating buyers is harder than finding them at present. Every team in the American League except for the Chicago White Sox, Texas Rangers, and Oakland Athletics have at least a 15% chance of making the playoffs and even those three teams might not have thrown in the towel yet this season. Only the Kansas City Royals, New York Yankees, and Los Angeles Angels have greater than a 55% chance of making the playoffs and even those teams do not have commanding leads in their respective divisions. The National League looks slightly more clear with seven teams likely fighting for five playoff spots. In a tight race, a pitching addition can have a considerable impact, but how much difference a trade makes depends on the hole the new player is filling.

A quick look at the rest-of-season depth-chart projections reveals how rotations are expected to perform in the second half. The graph below shows the projected WAR for all Major League Baseball rotations. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve teased in the last few chats that some big updates on the various prospects lists will be out in a few weeks, but I wanted to address some of the most-asked-about prospects I’ve recently scouted in one piece as an appetizer for the big update.

Jeff Hoffman, RHP, Toronto Blue Jays

In Hoffman’s offseason scouting report I noted that he was in contention to go #1 overall until his elbow surgery, just before the 2014 draft where he went ninth overall. He made his first pro appearance this year and started making buzz right away, showing big velocity in a late big-league spring-training appearance, then in extended spring training and in his regular season debut at High-A Dunedin (he was just promoted to Double-A in the last few days). In the video, the first game shown is when I saw Hoffman about a month ago and the second game is when our own Chris King saw his first start for Dunedin about a month before that.

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Despite his below-average walk rate and high strikeout numbers, Ian Desmond’s power and speed have made up for his contact inadequacies during the past three years. He is, at once, an exciting and frustrating player to watch: a hitter prone to incredible dry spells followed by gluttonous power explosions. The Nationals have accepted his droughts — even going so far as to offer him a seven-year, $107 million dollar contract extension before the 2014 season — because the hot streaks were worth it.

Desmond has relied on that full combination of speed, low contact, and high power during the years since his breakout in 2012, and because of that, his skill set is a relatively tenuous one. We’ve seen players excel at a high level with those same type of skills, but the difference between productive and unproductive is closer when you rely on the ball going over the fence a certain number of times.

If we navigate to the batter leaderboards and sort by wRC+, Desmond has been the seventh-worst qualified offensive player in the majors this season. He’s been the very worst defensive shortstop. The nightmare scenario has come to fruition in Desmond’s walk year: a cratered home-run rate per fly ball (HR/FB), a walk rate dive, an almost total absence of speed, and really poor defense. The 2015 edition of Ian Desmond is now 2010 Desmond, except with more strikeouts and less on the base paths. Take a look:

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It’s that time of year again. Time to gather around adult beverages ($4 pints!) and appetizers (free thanks to FanGraphs and BeerGraphs!) and talk baseball with some of your favorite writers. Thursday, July 16th, at the Rocking Horse in Chicago, FanGraphs has invited the writers below to come and be merry with you. This is a 21-and-over event — the BeerGraphers would have rioted if the beer selection wasn’t top notch — but if we keep packing these things, we’ll do more of these in different venues and styles.

See you soon.

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The All Star Game is the holy line of demarcation between the first and second half of the season. Dip your toe ever so gently across it and you’ve entered the second half of the season. Beware, friend! This is the time when we know who is good and who isn’t, who should sell at the upcoming trade deadline and who should buy. It’s all cut and dried, like beef jerky. Just look at the standings and, like listening to Donald Trump, all the secrets of the world will be revealed! By now, we know a lot about the season, much more than we did in March. Except, actually no, no really we don’t.

Last season’s standings featured the Orioles, Tigers, A’s, Nationals, Brewers (yes, seriously, the Brewers), and Dodgers in first place at the All Star break. During the second half of the season, the teams with the best records in those divisions were the Orioles, Royals, Angels, Nationals, Pirates, and Dodgers. There are certainly some similarities between those lists, but they’re clearly not the same either. The A’s and Brewers completely fell apart while the Royals and Angels got hot. Things aren’t always as they seem after one half season of baseball.

As FanGraphs’ Jeff Sullivan wrote here last week, pre-season projections are, on the whole, a better indicator of how the second half of the season will go than the games played in the first half. Even this late in the season, good projections can help us look past the noise in the data that comes from one half season of baseball. This is an important point because it’s so easy to look at the standings and start to cross teams off the list of prospective playoff contenders. Instead, we’re going to cast a larger net by looking at some projections for the rest of the season, and explore how they jive with what we’ve seen so far.

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Introduction
Players #50 to #41
Players #40 to #31
Players #30 to #21

In doing the penultimate article in this series, I can’t help but feel like this would be a perfectly acceptable Top 10 in some other years. We have some of the very best pitchers in baseball mixed in with a couple of true superstars, plus some young position players who already look like franchise cornerstones. The fact that these guys missed the top 10 isn’t any kind of knock against them, but a testament to the remarkable amount of young talent that is currently taking over the game. Not all of these guys are going to have long, outstanding careers, but with so many great young players, it feels like we’re heading into some kind of golden era.

As a reminder, in addition to the player’s biographical information, I’ve added a summary of his contract situation, and as a new feature this year, Dan Szymborski has provided me with five year ZIPS forecasts for all of the players on the list, which I’ve listed along with their 2016 projection. Of course, not every player listed is under control for the next five years — some are locked up well beyond that time frame — but this should offer you a pretty decent view of what a player is expected to do both in the short-term and the longer-term, according to Dan’s forecasting system.

For the contract details, I’m only displaying future obligations beginning with their 2016 salary. I’ve tried to ensure that these are as accurate as can be, but they were also collected manually, so there probably will be some mistakes; there are plenty of weird clauses and options that make aggregating all this information particularly annoying. Also, we’re not including things like All-Star bonuses or incentive escalators, as this is intended to give more of a big picture view than be a precise accounting of the exact cost of a future player. A few hundred thousand here and there won’t change the rankings.

Also, keep in mind that some players have contracts that give them a guaranteed minimum, but they are also able to opt-into arbitration when they are eligible. This is pretty common now with prominent international signings, and so some of these guys will probably earn more than their contracts currently call for, but I’ve still just included the guaranteed minimum in the future salary commitment because we don’t know for sure that they’re going to opt into arbitration yet.

Finally, we’ve also included a nifty little graphic at the bottom that visualizes a lot of the information contained below, so if you want to see the projections and contract status for everyone together, you can get a summary of that at the bottom. The chart goes out five years, so some players have additional value beyond what’s displayed, but it should give you a good overview of what each player offers going forward.

Alright, on to the list.

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