FanGraphs Baseball

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The parties in the minor league wage litigation were in court last Friday to debate two motions filed by the MLB defendants, and by the end of the hearing Judge Joseph Spero suggested that he was currently leaning towards issuing a split decision.  As a refresher, the litigation involves claims by two groups of former minor league players contending that MLB and its teams’ pay practices violate the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA), with many minor leaguers making less than the federally guaranteed minimum wage once all of their work-related duties have been accounted for.

MLB responded to these claims in several ways.  Of particular note for present purposes, all 30 MLB teams asked the court to transfer the case from California to a federal court in Florida, which they argued would be a more convenient venue for the trial.  In reality, MLB was hoping to take advantage of favorable legal precedents, as Florida courts have previously held that minor league baseball teams are seasonal operations immune from the FLSA’s minimum wage and overtime requirements.

During Friday’s hearing, however, Judge Spero indicated that he was unlikely to transfer the case.  This is a significant victory for the minor league plaintiffs.  Had the case been transferred, the Florida court would be bound by the earlier precedent mentioned above, and as a result the new court would have likely dismissed the case against MLB in relatively short order.  Should that have happened, the minor league plaintiffs would then have had to hope that the U.S. Supreme Court would be willing to take the case in order to overturn the Florida precedent.  Barring Supreme Court intervention, the minor leaguers would have had to proceed against MLB only under state law, claims that would have been less effective at securing the nationwide reform the plaintiffs are hoping to achieve.

At the same time, though, Judge Spero also suggested that he was currently leaning in favor of granting a motion to dismiss the case filed by 11 MLB teams (the Orioles, Nationals, Yankees, Rays, Braves, White Sox, Indians, Pirates, Phillies, Tigers, and Red Sox).  These teams had argued that they were not subject to the California court’s jurisdiction because they do not maintain any business presence in the state.  In particular, unlike the other 19 MLB teams, these 11 are not currently affiliated with any California minor league teams.  The plaintiffs had argued that these teams do employ scouts in California, while also routinely traveling to the state to play MLB games.  Judge Spero, however, seems to believe that these contacts are too limited to justify forcing the 11 teams to defend themselves in California court.

Rather than dismiss the teams from the case, though, Judge Spero gave the plaintiffs the opportunity to present additional evidence establishing the teams’ link to California.  In particular, he suggested that the plaintiffs identify minor leaguers who played in California for the 11 teams and are willing to participate in the wage litigation.

If the plaintiffs can find such players, it appears that they will be able to proceed with the case against all 30 teams in California.  If not, then the minor leaguers may be forced to move forward against only a smaller subset of MLB clubs. Ultimately, this difference may prove less significant than it at first seems, as a victory in the case by the plaintiffs against 19 MLB teams would likely still result in major reform to the entire league’s minor league pay practices.  But securing a dismissal would still allow the 11 affected teams to avoid paying damages for past violations of the law (assuming the plaintiffs don’t file a second suit against those teams in another jurisdiction), a potentially significant cost savings.

You know the difference between control and command? Mariano Rivera is why the difference exists. Some pitchers are good at throwing strikes; Mariano Rivera was good at throwing Rivera strikes, which were simply strikes where Rivera wanted them to be. They looked a lot like any other strike, and pitch to pitch you wouldn’t really notice a difference, but over time, pitches pile up, and locations really matter. No one has located quite like Rivera, and you can guess the effects. Or you don’t have to, since Rivera’s career is complete and we have a full statistical record, but anyway. Because Rivera could locate, he could make certain numbers work in his favor.

Yeah, he struck guys out. Yeah, he didn’t walk guys much. Those are the basics. But Rivera was also skilled at allowing weaker contact than your average other guy. One of the reasons we’re usually skeptical of BABIP-suppressing skill is that most pitchers just aren’t good at hitting the same spots over and over. Rivera was one of the exceptions. He limited the singles, and he limited the non-singles.

Let’s take a look at something. PITCHf/x captured only the last few years of Rivera’s career, but Rivera was still outstanding when the cameras were installed, so we have a good amount of data. Let’s consider balls in play that Rivera allowed on pitches that were out of the strike zone. (Thank you, Baseball Savant.) You know what those balls in play are? They’re worse balls in play. Worse, relative to pitches over the plate.

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Two bits of news spread almost simultaneously Monday night: Bruce Chen signed somewhere for a minor-league contract, and Barry Zito had signed somewhere else for, also, a minor-league contract. This is the season of minor-league contracts, as the pool of available free agents has been reduced to a puddle on an otherwise dry concrete foundation. But of those names still out there, Chris Young has a certain intrigue. If Chen and Zito can find opportunities, it stands to reason Young should find one as well. Right?

Certainly, his agent has been called. Certainly, there have been feelers. And it’s not a complete mystery why Young remains unsigned. This is Chris Young, to the naked eye:

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We often hear the Cardinals being described as one of the best organizations in baseball for their ability to consistently put a winning product on the field, and that’s a reputation that they’ve earned though consistent excellence. It never seems that the Tigers get talked about in quite the same way, but perhaps that’s unfair. In the nine seasons since and including 2006, when the two met in the World Series, the Tigers have won 790 games. The Cardinals have won 789. The Tigers have made five playoff trips and suffered one losing season; the Cardinals have made six playoff trips and suffered one losing season.

If there’s a difference, maybe it’s that the Cardinals have two rings in that span while the Tigers haven’t yet made it to the top, or maybe we just perceive them differently because the Tigers were absolutely dreadful for most of the two decades preceding their recent run. But the real difference is that the Cardinals seem to continually reinforce themselves from a deep and talented farm system, while the Tigers have continually made win-now moves to add more talent around their iconic duo of Miguel Cabrera and Justin Verlander.

Needless to say, that’s a considerable difference in team-building philosophies, and it’s not a cycle that can last forever. We’re already seeing cracks in the core due to injuries and aging, and we haven’t seen a lot of coming from within to help support that. That’s not to say the Tigers are done, of course; they’ve won four division titles in a row, and they may very well win a fifth in 2015, even though their offseason was more than a little uneven (more on that in a minute). But more and more you start to wonder how long the window remains open, and while that’s not an unfair question — I asked this same question back in late 2013, after the Tigers lost to the Red Sox in the ALCS — what I want to know is, what happens here when the window closes? Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Sam catch up on banter and answer listener emails about the Dodgers, the shift, Moneyball, and more.

9:02	Comment From Mets Fan BASEBALL IS BACK TOMORROW!!

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The following changes/fixes/additions were made:

1. We now have projections for Jung-Ho Kang and Yasmany Tomas. Kang checks in with a .249/.307/.399 (.312 wOBA) line and Tomas with a .252/.292/.433 (.317 wOBA) line.

2. We tweaked our projected league offensive level. We were projecting an average ERA of 3.88 and are now projecting an average ERA of 3.83 (for comparison, MLB pitchers had a collective ERA of 3.74 last year and 3.87 the year before). Before, we projected an average wOBA of .319 and now we’re projecting an average wOBA of .317 (non-pitchers had a wOBA of .315 last year and .318 the year before). In short, we’ve moved from projecting an offensive level like that of 2013 to level between those of 2013 and 2014.

3. The levels that low minors pitchers stats are regressed towards were adjusted to reflect the fact that they are, in fact, low minors pitchers. Will Locante is a good example of this change. Previously, Locante projected to a 4.43 ERA with the thinking that, if he does pitch in a Major League bullpen this year, he must be better than his low minors numbers indicate. With our new regression mean, Locante projects to a 5.19 ERA. This is in some sense wrong, since if he does pitch in the Majors he’s probably better than that, but it’s also a better estimate of how good Locante is right now since this projection is not conditional on his pitching in the Major Leagues. Where we have a fastball velocity for a low minors pitcher (from a scouting report) his projection will now take into account both his velocity and the fact that he’s only pitched in the low minors.

4. Projections are adjusted to better take into account changing league offensive levels. This primarily affects minor leaguers and foreign players who have been pitching in other leagues (and we wanted to make this adjustment before projecting Kang and Tomas) but will also have a (muted) effect on pitchers whose past MLB data is from longer ago. To explain why we felt that this is necessary, in 2009 MLB pitchers struck out 18.0% of the batters they faced while pitchers in Japanese leagues stuck out 18.9%. Last year, however, MLB pitchers struck out 20.4% of batters and JPL and JCL pitchers continued to strike out 18.9% of batters. If we use the same translation in 2014 that we used in 2009 we would be underrating pitchers from the Japanese leagues. A similar phenomenon holds when translating minor league statistics to MLB levels. Our change would have helped Masahiro Tanaka if we had implemented this last year and it still helps him a bit: dropping his projected ERA to 3.37 from 3.44. This change is a boon to Noah Syndergaard, however, dropping his ERA all the way down to 3.61 from 3.91. Cuban batters also get a significant boost: Jose Abreu is up from a .385 wOBA to .394 wOBA and Rusney Castillo jumps up from .317 to .328.

5. You may also notice higher BB/9 projections and, accordingly, higher ERA projections for MLB relievers who haven’t thrown many innings in recent years. Joel Hanrahan’s BB/9 jumps from 3.2 to 3.7 and Daniel Hudson’s from 2.2 to 2.8.

6. Batters’ projected lineup slots were updated and R and RBI projections were adjusted accordingly.

We’re hoping that these mid-off-season adjustments don’t catch you off guard. Our thinking is that when we see ways in which our system is falling short, we should fix them as soon as we can. That said, we fully expect that this will be the last update to the underlying algorithm this off-season. Playing times and roles may well change but the system for producing player rate projections will not.

There in the Giants clubhouse, behind the stars you’ve heard everything about, are two rare players. They’ve made a circuit that very few players have made before. After surviving the gauntlet, they took some time to pass on what they learned with their travels East.

New Giants’ third baseman Casey McGehee was pretty sure his Major League Baseball career was over when he packed his bags for Sendai in Japan. “Going over there, that was one of the toughest parts, I knew the chances of coming back weren’t great,” the player said before FanFest last week.

But both McGehee and Ryan Vogelsong made it back, and to the same team no less. Of the 167 foreigners that have played in Nippon Professional Baseball since 1998, Brian Cartwright found that only 11 position players have managed more than 100 plate appearances back in America, and only Julio Franco and McGehee managed as much as 300 in one season. Only nine pitchers pitched for more than one season after returning from Japan.

Or: nobody has come back from Japan since 1998 and become a full-time starter like McGehee, and only Eric Stults, Colby Lewis, and Ryan Vogelsong have returned and managed more than 100 innings twice in the big leagues.

Though the game itself isn’t very different there — they bunt a little more, swing a little more, and play for one run more often — it could be that the trip over has that sense of finality to it that you hear from McGehee. You don’t usually come back and become an important part of a good team.

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This morning, Kiley McDaniel released the FanGraphs Top 200 Prospects list, providing a remarkable source of information. We’re obviously biased, but Kiley’s doing great work with the prospect information provided here on the site. One of my favorite things he’s doing is working to break down the barriers of the ordinal ranked list, providing Future Value grades that allow for more reasonable tiers of prospects, so that less time is spent arguing over whether a particular player should be #23 or #28 on a particular list.

So, I wanted to see if I could come up with a piece that would complement the information he’s presenting, using the value of having additional information beyond just ordinal ranking. To that end, I took latest prospect valuation estimates from Kevin Creagh and Steve DiMiceli, and attempted to convert their tiered valuation estimations into numbers based on the Future Value calculations Kiley attached to each prospect on his list.

As I noted when we discussed the prospect valuation work a few months ago, the data is fascinating, but also slightly problematic for this purpose. For instance, here’s the table of values for prospect tiers according to Creagh and DiMiceli.

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