FanGraphs Baseball

Last week, Kiley McDaniel published his write-up of the Milwaukee Brewers farm system, marking the 25th installment of his “Evaluating the Prospects” series. Once he makes it through the five teams left on the table, he’ll be publishing his ranking of all thirty teams’ farm systems. In anticipation of this release, I thought it would be interesting to create an organizational ranking based exclusively on KATOH — my prospect projection system. The methodology for making this list seems pretty obvious: Simply add up all of the KATOH projections for the players on each team. In practice, however, this isn’t nearly as straightforward as it sounds.

First, I had to decide what to do with players who appeared in only a small number of games. For example, Carlos Rodon — the White Sox top prospect — receives a projection of 7.9 WAR through age-28. That projection seems pretty reasonable for Rodon, but it’s only based on 95 batters faced over 21 innings. That  sample’s not nearly large enough to mean much of anything.

To address this problem, I decided to only consider players who logged at least 200 plate appearances last season (or 200 batters faced for pitchers). This inevitably means that some big-name prospects (like Rodon) wind up being excluded, but there’s really no other way to go about it. KATOH projections are based on 2014 stats, and for guys who only appeared in a few games, the 2014 stats are almost meaningless.

There’s also the issue of knowing the affiliations for thousands of minor league players. My database of 2014 stats includes each player’s organization from the 2014 season, but a lot has changed since then. It would be easy enough to account for the players who were traded, but what about the hundreds of nondescript minor league free agents who changed organizations over the winter? It would be futile to try to figure out where each one ended up.

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Most people know Daniel Norris as the bearded guy who lives out of his VW van. Despite the fact that he prefers the coast instead of down by the river, it’s still a pretty unique background, and that’s not all: Norris also happens to throw baseballs, and do it exceptionally well. Those two descriptions don’t find a confluence often, so the media attention is not unexpected, but it’s also not unwarranted: as one of the Blue Jays’ top prospects by projected WAR for 2015, Norris has expectations — the sort of expectations and hopes organizations put on promising young left-handed pitchers.

In truth, we might not even be talking about Daniel Norris this soon if it weren’t for another young Blue Jays phenom, Marcus Stroman, who will miss all of 2015 with a torn ACL. Stroman’s injury left a huge whole in the rotation, and with everyone moving up one rung on the ladder, the final spot was left up for grabs. Marco Estrada and Norris have been seen as the favorites during the spring up until this point, but it now sounds like the job is all but locked up for the young lefty. Because of that recent news, and because of his great prospect status, he warrants a closer look from us.

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What do we have here? For an explanation of this series, please read this introductory post. As noted in that introduction, the data below is a hybrid projection of the ZIPS and Steamer systems, with playing time determined through depth charts created by our team of authors. The rankings are based on aggregate projected WAR for each team at a given position.

Yes, we know WAR is imperfect and there is more to player value than is wrapped up in that single projection, but for the purposes of talking about a team’s strengths and weaknesses, it is a useful tool. Also, the author writing this post did not move your team down ten spots in order to make you angry. We don’t hate your team. I promise.

As we kick off the 2015 Positional Power Rankings with catchers, let’s start with a chart of the projected WAR totals, and…

…and good lord, Giants and Diamondbacks, for two entirely different reasons.

Immediately obvious: Buster Posey isn’t just the best catcher in baseball, he’s the best by a considerable amount. Also equally obvious: It’s going to be a really, really long season in Arizona. In between, you’ve got some pretty clear tiers of 4-6 teams apiece, and that’s far more important than the actual rankings themselves. After the Giants, the next 10 teams break down easily into two blocks, and then beyond that, starting with the Mets at No. 12, there’s a soft decline from “acceptable” to “poor” to, well, the Diamondbacks.

Remember, please, that there’s just not a lot of meaning in tenths of a point of WAR, so while (for example) we have the Mets and Rays separated by nine spots, they’re only 0.4 WAR from one another. Remember, also, that our WAR formula doesn’t currently account for pitch framing, which has been pretty well acknowledged here and elsewhere as being a real thing that exists. You’ll just need to mentally account for additions (or demerits) for those catchers well-known to be valued (or avoided) based on that skill. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the last three years, we’ve previewed the upcoming season by going position by position around Major League Baseball, looking at the how teams stack up to their various competitors at each spot on the diamond. This format provides a bit of a different look than a traditional team or division based preview, and gives us the ability to do some things that you might find in other outlets. For instance, by starting at the position level, we can see exactly where a team’s strengths and weaknesses lie, and identify some areas of for potential upgrade as well.

Additionally, by not just focusing on the starter at each position, we’re able to compare and contrast different strategies for manning a particular position on the field. How will one team’s everyday player compare to a left/right platoon? Or is a team with a hot young prospect on the way up in line for a second half upgrade once the service time issues are out of the way? What teams have enough depth to sustain quality performance in case of an injury? These are the kinds of things we can readily identify through this series.

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We’ve made some slight changes to the way WAR is calculated. The changes will impact players at most, about 0.5 wins, but the vast majority of individual player WAR will remain pretty unchanged.

1. Position player WAR now includes ground into double play avoidance (or lack thereof) with the stat wGDP. This will impact the very best players about +/- 0.5 wins. All but a few will fall in the +/- 0.2 win range. wGDP is also available as a separate stat in both the leaderboards and the player pages.

2. UBR has been updated to include advances and outs on WP and PB, as well as a few minor changes. Big thanks to Mitchel Lichtman for this and the wGDP inclusion.

3. Pitcher WAR park factors have been changed to FIP specific park factors. You can see all the new park factors under FIP in the FanGraphs Guts! Section. FIP park factors in general are considerably more compressed than runs park factors, so pitchers in extreme parks will be less impacted. Thanks goes out to Noah Baron for the suggestion.

4. We’ve adjusted the pitcher WAR league baseline to better even out the leagues.

Ben and Sam preview Boston’s season with Providence Journal Red Sox beat writer Tim Britton, and Sahadev talks to Boston Globe writer Alex Speier (at 27:48).

Travis Snider is a breakout candidate. Sound familiar? He’s owned the label for years, and maybe – just maybe – this will be the season he finally explodes. It’s not implausible. Somehow, Snider is still just 27 years old.

Skeptics will surely scoff at the idea, but the 2006 first-round pick feels ready to come into his own. Acquired by the Orioles in the off-season, the former Toronto and Pittsburgh outfielder is settling into his swing after nearly a decade of trying to reinvent the wheel.

‘I think I’ve had about eight different swings in eight years,” Snider told me on Friday. “In the last two years, I’ve been working toward recreating the same swing as much as possible.

“It’s about trying to create a consistent swing through the zone that can cover pitches in different quadrants, and not just be a low-ball hitter, or an inside hitter, or an outside hitter. Understanding, and being able to adjust to, the way pitchers are attacking you is often more important than mechanics.”

Mechanically, Snider said he’s concentrating on allowing his hips to clear and his hands to flow through the zone. He cited Miguel Cabrera as a hitter who can generate torque with his lower half, thus allowing his top half to uncoil. Snider admits to sometimes falling into the habit of trying to use every muscle in his body instead of taking a smooth, effortless swing. Read the rest of this entry »

Each week, we publish north of 100 posts on our various blogs. With this post, we hope to highlight 10 to 15 of them. You can read more on it here. The links below are color coded — green for FanGraphs, brown for RotoGraphs, dark red for The Hardball Times, orange for TechGraphs and blue for Community Research.
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Louisiana State plays Arkansas tonight in the second of a three-game series at the latter school’s home field. As the author has suggested elsewhere, the series is notable insofar as it features a number of players who currently rank among the SEC’s top hitters by (maybe) predictive stats — including, for example, LSU shortstop Alex Bregman and Arkansas center fielder Andrew Benintendi.

Who else tonight’s game, specifically, features is LSU freshman right-hander Alex Lange. In his most recent start for the Tigers, Lange recorded a 13:0 strikeout-to-walk ratio against 28 batters over 8.0 innings against Ole Miss (box). How he did it was largely by means of a hard curveball, footage of which the reader can find below with a view to whetting his or her appetite ahead of tonight’s 9pm (ET) first pitch.

An example of the curve from the second inning of that game against Mississippi:

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Yesterday, the author published a post claiming to include the top players by (maybe) predictive stats from college baseball’s most competitive conferences.

What follows are the three weekend series likely to feature the greatest number of players whose names appeared within that post. KATOH+ and KATOH- are index metrics based on those (maybe) predictive stats and designed for batters and pitchers, respectively. In each case, 100 is average, while above 100 is better for batters and below 100 is better for pitchers. Read more about the author’s questionable methodology here.

Miami at Wake Forest
Who It Features
Three of the ACC’s top-10 hitters. From Miami: junior third-baseman David Thompson (97 PA, 128 KATOH+). From Wake Forest: sophomore first baseman Will Craig (93 PA, 142 KATOH+) and sophomore second baseman Nate Mondou (100 PA, 124 KATOH+). Among pitchers, Wake Forest sophomore right-hander Parker Dunshee (28.0 IP, 81 KATOH-) has produced one of the conference’s top-10 lines this season. Typically the school’s Saturday starter, he most recently worked in relief of Friday night starter and senior Matt Pirro (28.2 IP, 94 KATOH-).

When It’s On
Friday at 6:00pm
Saturday at 4:00pm
Sunday at 1:00pm

How to Watch It
Watch ESPN (link).

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