Ben and Sam preview the Yankees’ season, and Sahadev talks to Journal News Yankees beat writer Chad Jennings (at 31:40).
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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.
Ellis Valentine knows what Josh Hamilton is going through. Valentine battled substance abuse during his playing days, in the 1970s and 1980s, and now works as a certified drug counselor. Hamilton – assuming the reports are true – recently suffered a relapse in his own struggles with addiction.
Valentine has been clean for nearly three decades, and he’s been helping others fight their demons for nearly as long. He’s offered to help the troubled Angels’ slugger, but Hamilton’s handlers have kept him at arm’s length.
“People come to me all the time and ask, ‘Why don’t you work with Josh Hamilton?’ Valentine told me. “I say, ‘I’d love to try — I have tried — but I can’t get close to him.’ I have a lot of compassion for Josh, but the people surrounding him don’t want me around.”
Valentine works out of Dallas and tried reaching out to Hamilton multiple times when the outfielder played for the Texas Rangers. Repeatedly rebuffed, Valentine actually wrote a letter to himself, in 2010, chronicling his failed attempts to lend assistance.
If Hamilton were to allow Valentine the opportunity, he’d receive some tough love. The erstwhile Expo – he represented Montreal in the 1977 All-Star game — was passionate when offering an opinion on what Hamilton has to do. The advice was shaped by personal experience as well as clinical training.
“Somewhere along the line, Josh Hamilton has to grow up,” said Valentine. “I was 31 years old before I filled out my first tax form. I was making hundreds of thousands of dollars, but I had attorneys, my agent – I had all these people to do things for me, so I was allowed to just go out and get high and be in la-la land. Read the rest of this entry »
Episode 536
Dayn Perry is a contributor to CBS Sports’ Eye on Baseball and the author of three books — one of them not very miserable. He’s also the definitely splendid guest on this edition of FanGraphs Audio.
Don’t hesitate to direct pod-related correspondence to @cistulli on Twitter.
You can subscribe to the podcast via iTunes or other feeder things.
Audio after the jump. (Approximately 48 min play time.)
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Earlier, I published a post including this graph:
Of all the things that stand out, perhaps nothing stands out quite like the Cubs. Over the last 10 years, they’ve won 55 fewer games than they’ve been projected to win, and while there are some quibbles you can have with blending all the years and all the projection systems, at the end of the day, projections aren’t too dissimilar and they haven’t changed super dramatically over the decade, and no one comes particularly close to matching the Cubs’ level of disappointment. At -55, they’re separated from the next-lowest team by 19 wins.
I don’t think there’s really anything predictive, here. I’d never bet on a given team beating or undershooting its next-year projection. Certainly not based on what it just did. But -55 seems worthy of investigation. What can we find out, about why this might’ve happened? What traits or events might’ve contributed to the Cubs coming off as such a disappointment?
What follows does not constitute the most rigorous of statistical analyses. Rather, it’s designed to serve as a nearly responsible shorthand for people who, like the author, have considerably more enthusiasm for than actual knowledge of the collegiate game — a shorthand means, that is, towards detecting which players have produced the most excellent performances over the first weeks of the college season.
As in the first ever edition of this same thing from last week, what I’ve done is utilize principles recently introduced by Chris Mitchell on forecasting future major-league performance with minor-league stats.
I keep getting asked if Cuban RHP Yadier Alvarez will be eligible to sign in this international signing period or be forced to go into the 2015 July 2nd pool. The short answer is that nobody knows yet. The initial report on this topic is correct that Alvarez (and fellow Cuban defector RHP Vladimir Gutierrez) needed to already be registered with MLB (which they couldn’t do while in Cuba) to sign during this period, due to their birthdays. Since both are younger than Red Sox IF Yoan Moncada — whom I recently interviewed — and on the wrong side of MLB’s age cutoff for registration, Moncada didn’t face this same problem. We had a similar issue weeks ago when MLB teams were waiting on the MLB office to make a ruling about their OFAC clearance policy for Cubans and now teams are waiting on different sorts of rulings on multiple players.
That said, waivers have been granted to Dominican kids in the past for failing to register on time and Alvarez’s reps are working to get him the same waiver, though a Cuban player has never had to ask for one, so there’s little specific precedent. This waiver would allow him to sign during this signing period. Here’s the official language with emphasis on the important section:
That waiver would give Alvarez the flexibility to sign in this period or after July 2nd, if it turns out that’s when his best deal would come. That may end up being the case because, while it’s still very early in the process, a hot rumor is that the Dodgers are targeting Alvarez as part of an aggressive 2015 July 2nd spending push. That strategy is far from a done deal, as the Dodgers only recently passed on Moncada, so sources believe the club is still deciding what they want to do. I wrote up Alvarez in depth here and sources expect him to get over $10 million, but he’s been seen so little by scouts that it’s hard to say what his bonus ceiling may be. Here’s video from Alvarez’s second workout for scouts held earlier this month.
In addition to these two Cuban players, I referenced on twitter that MLB is also in the process of deciding what to do with the status of SS Lucius Fox. He played at American Heritage High School in the Miami-area last year but now is working out for scouts in his native Bahamas and it’s still unclear if he’ll be an international prospect (he’s high school senior age, so he’d be eligible right away) or draft eligible for this summer. He was seen as a solid top 5 round follow until recent workouts where he’s bulked up and kept his plus plus speed, making him a possible seven figure prospect in either market.
These three players, along with Cuban 2B Andy Ibanez, who is eligible to sign but still hasn’t pulled the trigger yet, could all be ruled/choose to not sign until July 2nd, giving further depth to a class already seen as one of the deepest in years. Cuban 2B Hector Olivera is 29, soon to be 30, and isn’t subject to international bonus pools like the above players, so signing him would come with no penalties and he’s expected to sign soon (full details). I’ll have more on the July 2nd class coming Monday.
The Blue Jays have new players up and down their lineup — Russell Martin, Justin Smoak, Josh Donaldson, Michael Saunders, Devon Travis, etc. Dalton Pompey basically qualifies here as well. But one incumbent player may end up being just as, if not more, important than all of the new acquisitions — middle infielder Maicer Izturis.
Signed early in free agency after the 2012 season, Izturis hasn’t really done what the Blue Jays had hoped he would in a Toronto uniform. He was, by WAR, the worst position player in the game in 2013, and then he missed all but 11 games in 2014. Ankle and knee injuries were culprits, though the ankle injury in 2013 may not explain the near-career low walk rate and career-low pitches per plate appearance. Either way, Izturis hasn’t gotten good results for awhile.
At first, it looked like pitchers that play their home games in extreme parks have extreme home run splits — that pitchers in pitchers’ parks go on the road and give up more home runs than expected. But it turns out, it might just be a Pittsburgh Pirates problem.
Staffs that leave the six most pitcher-friendly parks to go on the road have a 10.5% home run per fly ball rate, we found. But if you remove the Pirates (12%), that number for other six drops to 10.3%, very much close to the 10.1% sample average.
Take a look at the road homer per fly ball rates per team over the last five years. There’s a clear outlier.
Do you like an origin story? This post was originally going to be about the nature of spring-training optimism. Among players, even, not just fans. It seems like, every single February, when players show up to camp, you get quotes from everywhere about how a given team has a great bunch of guys, and if they play the kind of baseball they’re capable of, there’s no reason the season can’t be magic. I started looking for such quotes for every single team. The way I figured, they had to be out there. And as a matter of fact, I even found one for the Phillies. The same Phillies whose own front office has finally admitted that the team is rebuilding, and contention seems years off.
In case you’ve somehow been in the dark, this year’s Phillies are supposed to be bad. I mean, they aren’t supposed to be bad, but they’re expected to be bad, relative to every single other team. FanGraphs has the Phillies projected for the worst record in baseball. So does Baseball Prospectus. I’m not telling you anything new. Probably going to be a rough year in Philadelphia. But, you know who has opinions? Jonathan Papelbon. Here, he talks to Jim Salisbury about the possibility of being traded.
Toward the bottom of the post:
Papelbon said the Blue Jays would “fit his criteria” because they project as a contending club, but he was quick to add that he believes the Phillies can still be a contender, despite management’s charting a rebuilding course.
“If we come out and play the baseball we’re capable of playing then I plan on being right here and righting the ship here,” he said. […] “My storybook ending here is sneaking into the wild card and getting hot in the playoffs with these Phillies.”
It’s not exactly “we’re getting those rings,” but Papelbon has a certain level of confidence, a level that isn’t shared by Cole Hamels or the people in charge. Papelbon doesn’t see this as an impossible mission. And, wouldn’t you know it — it’s not an impossible mission. Let’s talk about how teams do, relative to how they’re projected to do.
