FanGraphs Baseball

Ben and Sam answer listener emails about Yoan Moncada, sabermetric broadcasts, the replacement-level high-five rate, and more.

Episode 534
Dave Cameron is both (a) the managing editor of FanGraphs and (b) the guest on this particular edition of FanGraphs Audio — during which edition he discusses the risk and potential reward attached to the $63 million spent by Boston on Cuban defector Yoan Moncada.

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 33 min play time.)

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Part 1 is over. Part 1 was figuring out which team was going to sign Yoan Moncada, and now we know, with the Red Sox having given up more than $60 million for the right to try to make him into something. Most conspicuously, the Sox beat out the Yankees; less conspicuously, the Sox beat out everyone else. Moncada joins an organization with a silly amount of talent and resources, and he is now presumably Boston’s No. 1 prospect. Not a whole lot of prospects better than Blake Swihart, either. So that’s meaningful.

Now we move on to Part 2. What’s Part 2? Figuring out what Yoan Moncada is going to be. You can kind of deduce what teams expect him to be — based on the price, and based on all the attention, Moncada figures to be some kind of big-leaguer, with a high ceiling. But what have we seen from prospects like this before? Moncada’s going into his age-20 season. We can put some numbers to this, trying in a way to project the unfamiliar. Let’s scan some historical top-prospect lists.

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I’m pleased to announce that FanGraphs now has an auction calculator!

In terms of methodology, we are using a method that is pretty similar to the Last Player Picked methodology.

Besides all the usual features of an auction calculator, we have a couple of unique features that are worth some addition explanation:

– There is an “experimental” check box, which adds in replacement level value for players with incomplete playing time. If a player was to have a .300 batting average for the season in 450 plate appearances, it would add in an extra 150 plate appearances at a .220 average (numbers for illustration only) for that player and calculate the auction values off his new batting average.

This is something that could be useful if your league allows you to carry a lot of bench spots and you have the ability to supplement potentially high risk injury players with a replacement level player. Chad Young wrote about this a few years ago.

Please feel free to check the box and see how it changes player values if you feel it’s appropriate for your league. And like the option says, this is still an experiment and should be considered a “beta” feature.

– There is also an option to artificially increase or decrease relief pitcher value. Since we don’t project holds, this might be particularly useful for ottoneu leagues or other leagues where holds are considered. By not taking into account holds for a league that might consider them, relief pitcher values will most likely be inflated.

This could also be a useful option if the players in your league generally undervalue (or over value) relievers and you would like to put relief pitcher values more in line with reality as opposed to theoretical value.

Please let us know if you run into any issues!

My last article introduced the concept of estimating a pitcher’s ERA using a simulation called SERA. As I pointed out throughout the article, SERA was strictly an estimator, not a predictor. That is, a pitcher’s SERA in one season wouldn’t do a great job predicting that pitcher’s ERA the next season. It’s more similar to FIP than it is to xFIP; descriptive rather than predictive.

But what if we want to create a simulator that predicts ERA for the future instead of just estimating what the ERA should’ve been? Some things are going to need to be changed — not just the code for the simulation, but also the inputs.

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For the last few months, the baseball world has been speculating about Yoan Moncada. The question of who would sign him was less interesting, as the structure of the deal — a 100% tax on the signing bonus, due by the middle of the summer — meant that this was a bidding war that only teams with significant cash flows could justify winning. From the beginning, the Red Sox, Yankees, and Dodgers were identified as the heavy favorites, and in the end, Boston won the battle of the big spenders.

More interesting was the question of how much Moncada would sign for, because this was a bit of a unique situation in MLB. Because Moncada could only be lured with a signing bonus, and because of the tax on the signing, teams were being asked to spend significant present dollars for a chance to buy potential future wins. While this happens on a small scale in the draft and with other young international prospects, teams generally do not have to make these kinds of short-term investments without getting short-term rewards.

The last time I wrote about Moncada, I noted some similarities between signing Moncada and paying the posting fee for a player coming over from Japan, which pushed over $50 million for both Daisuke Matsuzaka and Yu Darvish. Those players also came with a steep up-front cost and hadn’t proven themselves as big league contributors, but neither one spent a day in the minor leagues before jumping into their team’s rotations; they were viewed more as major league free agents, just without the track record that other big league free agents bring.

Moncada has the short track record in common, but unlike Darvish, Matsuzaka, and Masahiro Tanaka, he’s not big league ready. The consensus is that he needs a year or two in the minors, and given that he’s just 19, that might even be aggressive. It wouldn’t be at all strange for him to not make a significant impact at the big league level until he’s 22 or 23, as even the prospects teams are most sold on don’t always develop as quickly as expected. So, the Red Sox $63 million investment — once you double the signing bonus to account for the tax — will likely return little or no value for several years, and because even very good prospects still have high failure rates, there’s a real possibility that this investment never returns anything at all.

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Despite all the gains advanced stats have made in gaining public acceptance over the years, there’s always going to be some cases that seem inexplicable to one side or the other. Jason Heyward is generally a good example of that, because if you still rely on traditional stats, you see a right fielder who hit .271 with 11 homers and 58 RBI and consider him a disappointment. If you believe in defensive metrics and understand the effects of age and the current offensive environment, you see a star who just put up a 5 WAR season at age 24 and could command a $200 million contract in free agency next winter.

One thing isn’t really disputable, however: Heyward hasn’t really delivered on the offensive promise he showed by putting up a 134 wRC+ at 20 in his rookie season of 2010. It was one of the finest age-20 seasons in baseball dating back to 1900, and everyone on the list ahead of him — with the exception of Dick Hoblitzel, who had his career cut short by World War I — ended up becoming either an inner-circle Hall of Famer or is a more recent player well on his way there.

Heyward followed up that smashing debut with a disappointing 96 wRC+ in 2011, due in part to a right shoulder injury, then put up three straight seasons in the 110-121 wRC+ range. While that all sounds similar, how he’s made it there hasn’t been. Heyward’s power has decreased — homers down from 27 to 14 to 11, slugging percentage down from .479 to .427 to .384 — while his on-base skills have improved, going from .335 to .349 to .351. It’s still valuable, it’s just a different kind of valuable, and not what we might have expected a few years ago.

So maybe this is what Heyward is now, and maybe that’s just fine. But to listen to Heyward himself, he seems to think he knows where the power has gone, and how he can get it back. Here’s two different bits from a St. Louis Post-Dispatch story on Sunday morning: Read the rest of this entry »

Yoan Moncada has a home, as Jesse Sanchez of MLB.com has reported that the Cuban prospect will be signing with the Boston Red Sox for something in the $30 million range. Of course, that price automatically doubles, since the Red Sox were already over their spending limit, incurring a 100% tax on the overage. Because they had already blown past their pool allocation, they’d already taken the hit of surrendering the right to sign international talents for more than $250,000 for each of the next two years, so the marginal cost of adding Moncada is lower to them that it would have been to a team that was pushed over their bonus limit by adding him.

Kiley McDaniel has covered Moncada in depth all winter; here’s a selection of his most recent post on him.

Moncada, 19, likely spends 1-2 years in the minors before settling in the big leagues at either second base, third base or center field, with the offensive upside of Yasiel Puig. For those wondering where Moncada would land on a top 100 prospects list, he’d be somewhere from 5-12 for me, with comparable talent to guys like Carlos Correa and Corey Seager, but with far less proven as Moncada hasn’t played in a game for a long time. That said, Moncada was a standout performer in nearly all of his international tournaments before leaving Cuba, so his hitting tools are expected to lead to big numbers.

With Dustin Pedroia already pushing Mookie Betts off second base, it seems unlikely that Boston will push Moncada to that position, given the long-term commitment they’ve made there. However, third base remains quite viable even after signing Pablo Sandoval, as it’s perfectly reasonable to think that Sandoval could shift to first base after a couple of years, opening up the position for Moncada in 2017 or so. Or, as Boston has shown this winter, they never think you can have too many outfielders, and perhaps Moncada will end up as a right fielder flanking country-mate Rusney Castillo.

They’ll figure out the fit when Moncada’s ready. This is the kind of talent that isn’t readily available, and so the Red Sox decided to invest in a high-end prospect. We’ll have more on the price and whether it makes sense — or whether others should have bid more — a bit later today, but for now, the Red Sox get to celebrate adding one of the game’s best prospects to their farm system.

With all of the arbitration cases heard and the major free agent signings completed, save for perhaps a Cuban free agent or two and a few relievers, we can come up with a solid estimate the Opening Day Payrolls for 2015. In 1998, the Baltimore Orioles’ payroll of $70.4 million topped all of Major League Baseball followed by fifteen straight seasons of New York Yankees payroll dominance. For the first time this centruy, the Los Angeles Dodgers finally unseated the Yankees last year. Despite Alex Rodriguez‘s suspended salary returning to the Yankees payroll and the signing of Chase Headley, the Dodgers remain well ahead. Trades for Jimmy Rollins and Howie Kendrick, the signing of Brandon McCarthy and agreeing to pay for much of Matt Kemp’s salary this season were more than enough to keep the crown for highest MLB payroll.

Figures from Cots. Minimum salaries of $507,500 added to guaranteed contracts to complete the 25-man roster.

For the second straight year, the Dodgers will have the highest payroll in baseball as the season starts. The Dodgers’ $266 million payroll figure appears staggering, more than 25% higher than the Yankees second place number and more than the ninth (Philadelphia Phillies) and tenth (Toronto Blue Jays) highest payrolls combined. However, the Dodgers’ buying power is still not at the level of the Yankees’ last decade. As a percentage of total team salaries, the Yankees’ payroll from 2004-2010 averaged 8.2%, never dipping below 7.5% before finally falling to 7.3% in 2011. The Dodgers’ payroll in 2015 accounts for 7.3% of total team payroll.
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