FanGraphs Baseball

Some news-that-isn’t-really-news came out yesterday: Troy Tulowitzki will not demand a trade from the Rockies. After meeting with his agent, he decided against trying to force their hand, and will continue to play with the Rockies until they decide to trade him on their own timeline. But that is why this news isn’t really news, because Tulowitzki is headed out of Colorado at some point in the not too distant future whether he asked for a trade or not. The Rockies aren’t contenders, and it’s beyond time for them to admit this and divest themselves of expensive aging players who would offer more present value to a team that can win this year.

By not demanding a trade, Tulo takes the pressure off the Rockies to make a deal at a time when buyers aren’t really looking to buy, and allows them to let the market develop a little more naturally. With teams spending a significant portion of their time on the draft over the next three weeks, the Rockies will likely get more attentive bidders if they wait a month or so to aggressively market Tulowitzki as a trade chip. And, from their perspective, waiting another month gives Tulo a chance to stop swinging at everything and remind everyone that he is still an elite hitter; it’s probably best to trade him when he’s not running a .297 OBP.

Despite his mediocre start to the year, it’s probably fair to assume that he is still an elite player; our depth chart Projections have him producing another +3.4 WAR over 408 plate appearances through the remainder of the season, so even though we’re expecting him to miss some time — he is still Troy Tulowitzki, after all — he still forecasts to be one of the two dozen or so most valuable position players in the game. The Rockies will absorb some of that value by keeping him through the draft, but if we assume they’ll start really trying to trade him in a month, he should still have roughly a 300 PA/+2.5 WAR projection left when interested buyers start seriously trying to acquire him.

So that brings up the obvious question; at that point, what is Tulowitzki worth in trade?

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Projection systems tend to look at reality a whole lot more soberly than us humans, who can fall madly in love with a player on the basis of aesthetic appeal alone. That’s why most offseason columns here at FanGraphs reviewing free-agent acquisitions tend to damper down instead of ramp up excitement.

So it is a meaningful testament to Russell Martin’s skills that, upon being signed by the Toronto Blue Jays to a five-year, $82M contract as a 31-year-old catcher — i.e. after Martin has already sustained several lifetimes of knee-shredding, cup-checking abuse in baseball’s most brutal position — the deal was graded positively in these pages by Mr. Sullivan.

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Thursday afternoon, the Indians lost another close game, which is the sort of thing I have to presume they find awful maddening. Among the few bright spots was Michael Brantley, who batted four times and wound up with a homer and a walk. Said homer was all of the Indians’ offense, and it did come close to holding up. Brantley’s been outstanding on a team that’s underachieved.

Let’s stick with the same baseball game for a moment. In the game, Matt Adams struck out swinging three times. Nick Swisher struck out swinging two times, and so did Roberto Perez. I don’t bring this up to say anything about Adams, Swisher, or Perez. Rather, it just seems like an appropriate lead-in to this astonishing fact: Brantley has struck out swinging two times all season.

What’s taking place for Brantley isn’t a breakthrough. Brantley’s breakthrough happened last year, following seasons of gradual development. He wound up a participant in the All-Star Game, and he finished third in the voting for the American League MVP. What’s taking place is a continuation, a demonstration that Brantley doesn’t intend to return to what he was before as an almost impossibly average ballplayer. Brantley doesn’t have a single flashy skill. His team is threatening to drop out of the race before the season’s half over. The ingredients are there for Brantley to become a forgotten star. Consider yourself urged to not forget him.

So far this season, Brantley has been a top-15 hitter, a hair behind Mike Trout and Joc Pederson. If you expand the window to the start of last season, Brantley’s been the fifth-best hitter in the game, between Jose Abreu and Andrew McCutchen. There’s nothing about his results that seems particularly unsustainable. His improved power is almost all to the same area, but in that way, Brantley is sort of an outfield equivalent of Kyle Seager. More than anything else, Brantley’s been able to combine a quick and smooth swing with a smart approach. He hasn’t meaningfully altered his swing. It just seems like he’s always getting smarter.

Read the rest at Just A Bit Outside.

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The Houston Astros grabbed all of our attentions a couple of weeks ago, when they rattled off 10 wins in a row and vaulted to the top of the American League West. They’ve cooled off quite a bit since, going 3-6 since that streak. Yet, despite their recent struggles, they had built up enough of a cushion to maintain a .618 winning percentage and a four-game lead over the second place Angels. Not bad for a team that lost 111 games just two seasons ago.

The Astros have a very good record, and a decent shot at making the playoffs (45% by our calculator), but their roster isn’t without holes. And perhaps none of these holes is bigger than the one at shortstop. Currently, the Astros are employing Marwin Gonzalez as their primary shortstop, with a little bit of Jonathan Villar on the side. To date, these two have wRC+s of 68 and 30, respectively, and have contributed a total of -0.5 WAR.

It wasn’t supposed to be this way. The Astros signed Jed Lowrie to a three-year contract back in December to play shortstop, but he lasted all of three weeks before landing on the shelf with a thumb injury. As of this writing, Lowrie’s on the 60-day DL and isn’t expected to return until sometime after the All-Star break.

Gonzalez and Vilar are unlikely to contribute much value for the Astros going forward. And, given the nature of Lowrie’s injury, it’s anyone’s guess whether he’ll be of much use in the season’s second half. The immediate future looks pretty bleak for the Astros at short, but help is on the way. The Astros promoted top prospect Carlos Correa to Triple-A on Tuesday, putting him just a step away from the big leagues.

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Wins Above replacement (WAR) is probably the best known composite statistic that attempts to estimates the entire value of a player to a team in a context-neutral and park-adjusted environment. It is also an incomplete model, and while we’re always trying to make it as comprehensive as possible, that does require updating the formula from time to time; just this past March we added a few more things to try and make it even better.

In an effort to increase understanding of the all the factors that go into calculating WAR, I have created the following diagram to the various player statistics and league average values which have gone into the calculation. Our goal is to always make the process as transparent as possible, and hopefully this infographic can help on that path.

DISCLAIMER: This diagram is meant to summarize the process of calculating WAR, it does NOT contain every detail necessary to accurately perform that calculation. For a full description of the formulas and equations please see the library page, which more fully explains the process.

The very left of the diagram contains the stats which are the basic building blocks of WAR. These include the familiar walks, singles, doubles, triples, and home runs along with the alphabet soup metrics: UBR, wGDP, UZR, and RPP. Most of the latter stats are built on proprietary data, so you won’t be able to calculate our version of WAR from scratch yourself, though you could substitute your own fielding and baserunning metrics.

The right side contains the finished product, a player’s WAR components. The oval shapes represent inputs, while the rectangle shapes represent calculated components which are steps along the way to get WAR.

The WAR diagram is divided into six component areas: Batting, Base Running, Replacement, League, Positional, and Fielding. Four of those six areas also fall under either the Offensive or Defensive region, which are the greatest differentiators of talent. These areas represent different WAR component stats we host on FanGraphs in our Value section on our leaderboards.

The runs from the six areas are aggregated to yield runs above replacement (RAR), which is then converted into wins using each year’s specific R/Win ratio, and that resulting value is WAR.

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
New York AL at Kansas City | 20:10 ET
Pineda (46.1 IP, 55 xFIP-) vs. Young (23.0 IP, 104 xFIP-)
Most of the observations one might reasonably make while attempting to characterize the nature of Michael Pineda’s success so far this year were made by Jeff Sullivan for the benefit of this site’s readers on Monday. Summarized briefly, however, what Pineda has done is to produce one of the league’s best strikeout rates while also recording (relatively speaking) an even better walk rate. Indeed, were Bartolo Colon never to have been born, Pineda’s walk rate would currently stand as the best in the majors. Coincidentally, Bartolo Colon having never been born is actually the premise on which noted filmmaker Charlie Kaufman has written a remake of Frank Capra’s 1946 classic It’s a Wonderful Life.

Readers’ Preferred Broadcast: Kansas City Radio?

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Ever since the Diamondbacks selected Max Scherzer in the first round of the 2006 draft, his potential has been readily apparent to everyone who has watched him pitch. Anytime you have a pitcher with significant fastball velocity and movement, and at least one very strong secondary pitch, the sky is the limit. Stuff is pretty easy to identify early on, but becoming an elite pitcher requires more than raw ability.

For the first few years of his professional career, Scherzer had a classic case of “he should be better.” He was a solid contributor in Arizona and in his early years in Detroit, but if you watched his stuff on any given night, you were left wondering why he was above average rather than great. The biggest hurdle for Scherzer was repeating his rather chaotic delivery to the point where he could utilize his stuff effectively day in and day out. Adding a curveball certainly helped, but the turning point came in mid-2012 when Scherzer figured out how to find a consistent release point. He never looked back.

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Ben and Sam talk to Rob Arthur about which batters have had hard luck or good fortune so far, according to Statcast.

Even for those readers who regard Gary Huckabay’s contention from the late 90s that there’s no such thing as a pitching prospect — even for those who regard it as perhaps an exercise in hyperbole, the notion of a 30-year-old pitching prospect likely sounds absurd. Prospectdom, first of all, implies some degree of future potential, which itself implies some degree of youth. And second of all, what information exists regarding aging curves suggests that, if a pitcher wasn’t a prospect at 20 or 25, there’s little reason to suppose that he would be at 30, with years of abuse behind him already.

And yet, in the absence of that word (i.e. prospect), there’s a shortage of appropriate terms for what White Sox right-hander Junior Guerra is. At 30 years and 118 days, he’s made zero major-league appearances. Indeed, he recorded his first Triple-A appearance* just last Thursday. His rookie eligibility, in other words, is not in question. And yet, as noted in yesterday’s edition of the Fringe Five, Guerra has produced one of the top strikeout rates among all qualified minor leaguers while also exhibiting sufficient arm speed to suggest that his success isn’t the product merely of deception or veteran wiles.

*Affiliated Triple-A appearance, that is. Guerra played for Yucatan of the Mexican League in 2012, where he produced an unambiguously poor 20:22 strikeout-to-walk ratio in 28.0 innings.

Guerra made his second Triple-A appearance ever shortly after that newest installment of the Fringe Five was published. The purpose of this post is to report the absolutely most basic information regarding that start — and, probably mostly, to provide more footage of Guerra’s repertoire.

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