FanGraphs Baseball

Strength of schedule, usually, is more of a football concern. The schedules are a lot shorter, meaning there’s a more narrow distribution of opponents, and that can make for some significant differences. It’s a worthwhile consideration in the evaluation of any given team — losses are more forgivable if you’re facing juggernaut after juggernaut. There’s not much impressive about clobbering a pushover.

You see less discussion of strength of schedule in baseball. This is easy enough to explain — the schedule sometimes feels interminable, and so people naturally assume that, over six months, differences more or less even out. On the other hand, we know that schedules are unbalanced. We know that some divisions are stronger than others. What that means is that there will be differences in schedule strengths, and then considering playoff spots can be determined by one win, that makes this important. Granted, that makes everything important. In a tight race, every run and every win are critical, so that goes for any advantage or disadvantage.

With teams essentially set, and with schedules having been laid out ages ago, I decided now would be a good time to project 2015 schedule strengths. How big are the differences between the toughest schedule and the weakest? Even though this isn’t a thing that’ll make a whole world of difference, it could very well make some difference, so now it’s time to take a look at that.

The method is simple. At FanGraphs, we feature team projections, based on author-maintained depth charts and two different projection systems blended together. Every team has a projected total Wins Above Replacement (WAR) value, so all I did was grab the 30 schedules off MLB.com and calculate, for each team, the average single-game opponent WAR. The higher the average WAR, the tougher the schedule. This is, naturally, only as good as the projections, but then our only alternative is, I don’t know, guessing? This is like very educated guessing.

No adjustments have been made for home games or road games, since those even out. In the chart below, you’ll see American League teams on the left in blue, and National League teams on the right in green. It’s immediately apparent that all the NL teams are projected to have lower opponent WARs than the AL teams. This is because the AL is still considered the stronger league of the two.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

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Spring Training statistics might not matter, but injuries can certainly make an impact on a team’s outlook heading into the season. After being hit by a pitch in yesterday’s game against the Chicago Cubs, Hunter Pence is expected to be out six to eight weeks with a broken forearm. Missing the first month of the season is far from a catastrophic loss for the San Francisco Giants as they defend their World Series crown, but if they want to fill Pence’s vacated role from outside the organization, there are multiple teams with too many outfielders.

The Los Angeles Dodgers, Boston Red Sox, San Diego Padres, and Cleveland Indians are all teams that should be willing to move outfielders this spring, per Jay Jaffe of Sports Illustrated. The Dodgers currently have Yasiel Puig, Carl Crawford, Andre Ethier, Joc Pederson, and Scott Van Slyke in their outfield with Andre Ethier apparently the odd man out. The Dodgers are eager to move Ethier and are reportedly willing to pay around half of the $56 million owed to Ethier over the next three years. A trade with the Dodgers is not impossible for the Giants, but as Dave Cameron recently noted, some rivals rarely trade with each other. The Giants and Dodgers have completed just one trade since 1985, when they traded Mark Sweeney to the Dodgers in August 2007 for a player to be named later that turned into Travis Denker.

Outside of the difficulty of trading with a rival, the Giants current outfield poses problems with taking on a long term deal for a player who expects to start. The Giants currently have an interesting composition of present and future. At 31, Pence is the youngest projected outfield starter for the Giants with Angel Pagan and Nori Aoki expected to start in center field and left field, respectively. Pence is also signed through 2018 and has the contract with the longest duration among the Giants outfielders. He is not the only Giant signed past 2015. Angel Pagan has one more year to go after 2015 and is scheduled to receive $10 million in 2016. The Giants have a club option on Aoki for 2016 at just $5.5 million. It is conceivable that the Giants projected outfield for 2015 will be the same for 2016. The age, term, and relatively small amounts owed to Pagan and Aoki do not preclude a long term solution for the outfield. However, even if Ethier were to cost the Giants under $10 million per year, a three year commitment through his Age-35 season to cover one month of missed time is likely more than the Giants would want to take on.
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The Dodgers are (reportedly) willing to pay half of Andre Ethier’s contract! As Dave Cameron pointed out, he seems a bit superfluous to the current state of the Dodgers. Now that he’s only going to cost a team around $28 million over the next three years, can we find him a home?

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Note: this post contains three-dimensional pie charts, less because they’re particularly well suited to presenting data clearly and more because the author’s whole life is an exercise in questionable decision-making.

What follows represents the second in a three-part series devoted to producing and analyzing objective demographic data regarding those players who’ve become good major leaguers. On Wednesday, I considered good players by their amateur origins — i.e. whether they were signed to professional contracts out of college, junior college, etc. In this installment, I look at good players by the round in which they were originally selected during the amateur draft (which obviously excludes any consideration of those players signed as international free agents).

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Ben and Sam preview the Blue Jays’ season with Andrew Stoeten, and Sahadev talks to Sportsnet baseball columnist Shi Davidi (at 30:49).

Earlier today, Kiley McDaniel published his consummately researched and demonstrably authoritative prospect list for the Los Angeles Dodgers. What follows is a different exercise than that, one much smaller in scope and designed to identify not L.A.’s top overall prospects but rather the rookie-eligible players in the Dodgers’ system who are most ready to produce wins at the major-league level in 2015 (regardless of whether they’re likely to receive the opportunity to do so). No attempt has been made, in other words, to account for future value.

Below are the top-five prospects in the Los Angeles system by projected WAR. To assemble this brief list, what I’ve done is to locate the Steamer 600 projections for all the prospects to whom McDaniel assessed a Future Value grade of 40 or greater. Hitters’ numbers are normalized to 550 plate appearances; starting pitchers’, to 150 innings — i.e. the playing-time thresholds at which a league-average player would produce a 2.0 WAR. Catcher projections are prorated to 415 plate appearances to account for their reduced playing time.

Note that, in many cases, defensive value has been calculated entirely by positional adjustment based on the relevant player’s minor-league defensive starts — which is to say, there has been no attempt to account for the runs a player is likely to save in the field. As a result, players with an impressive offensive profile relative to their position are sometimes perhaps overvalued — that is, in such cases where their actual defensive skills are sub-par.

5. Joe Wieland, RHP (Profile)

Wieland has been well acquitted by the projections for some time now, having produced considerably above-average strikeout- and walk-rate differentials through much of the minors but having been delayed en route to any sort of substantial major-league trial by an elbow injury that required Tommy John surgery and which caused him to miss much of the last two seasons. He enters 2015 with his health, however. Given the Dodgers’ rotation depth, Wieland is a candidate to begin the season in Albuquerque. Alternatively, he might join the bullpen, in which capacity he’d likely post better per-inning numbers than his projections here indicate.

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The way in which people evaluate defense fascinates me. Not because I find defense fascinating, per se, but because it strikes me as a very different evaluation process than the one most people use when evaluating offensive performance. I think this applies to both casual and die-hard fans, just to varying degrees.

Offensive evaluation is largely based on basic accounting. As a fan, analyst, or someone directly connected to the game, you weigh a player’s offensive actions against one another to develop an idea of their performance. Some people might choose to use a linear weights structure, or some might think only in RBI or RISP, but the methodology is largely consistent for each person. Each plate appearance is weighed based on its importance and not on the outcome.

Some will choose to treat each PA pretty equally, some will choose to place a lot of weight on certain moments, but it’s a predictable process. When evaluating defense, I believe things get much less clear.

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As an MLB team, it’s awful hard to reduce your payroll. All those long-term contracts you agreed to years ago come equipped with incremental annual raises, and then the free agent market inflates every year in the meantime. Cutting payroll can’t happen by accident: it’s a shift in organizational direction across all tiers of the operation.

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When it comes to making demands about improving a team’s roster, a fan’s simplest complaint is that the team is not spending enough. Ownership is the easiest target for criticism because they sign the checks. There is a lot of information hidden from the public and even the players when it comes to a team’s finances. Many assumptions are made, but still questions persist: Are the New York Mets and Atlanta Braves cheap? Are the Detroit Tigers outspending their market for a shot at a championship?

Without delving deeply into the finances of individual teams, the answers are not easy to come by. Even if everyone got a look inside the books, there would be reasonable differences regarding subjective definitions of the word cheap. What we can do is take a look at recent spending patterns within baseball. Looking at the known financial aspects of a franchise and attendance, a comparison can be made within the ranks of ownership. The owners might very well all be cheap, and that we cannot know for sure, but we can find out which franchises are cheaper.
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