“Tom Seaver, he had the whole package. Power, deception, command, everything,” said Giants pitching coach Dave Righetti last week before FanFest. We’d been talking about tipping pitches, and deception, but any time you hear about an icon in the same sentence as Yusmeiro Petit, you put down your recording device and start looking at some moving images.
After having typically appeared in the very hallowed pages of Baseball Think Factory, Dan Szymborski’s ZiPS projections have been released at FanGraphs the past couple years. The exercise continues this offseason. Below are the projections for the Kansas City Royals. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.
Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cincinnati / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Los Angeles AL / Los Angeles NL / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York AL / New York NL / Oakland / Philadelphia / Pittsburgh / San Diego / San Francisco / St. Louis / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Texas / Toronto / Washington.
Batters
A trait common among basically all the best baseball clubs is that they possess an ability to avoid the awful — which is to say, they exhibit enough either in the way of health or depth or general competence throughout their major-league roster to avoid allocating plate appearances to players who are something worse than average.
Last year’s ZiPS projections for Kansas City suggested that they were particularly well suited to avoiding the awful. While none of their starting batter-types received a forecast in excess of four wins, none of them received a projection below two wins, either. The club was built not to dominate the league, but to remain relevant over the course of a full season.
Per ZiPS, the 2015 iteration of the Royals has more weaknesses than that 2014 edition. No fewer than three of their starting batters — Omar Infante (558 PA, 1.0 WAR), Kendrys Morales (467 PA, 0.5 WAR), and Alex Rios (571 PA, 1.2 WAR) — feature win projections more commonly associated with strong bench players than actual major-league starters.
I suppose I should preface this by saying I have no scouting background, and I don’t pretend to. What I know about Joc Pederson comes entirely from a.) things written by actual, paid scouts and b.) numbers. This post will be using the latter, and not the former, in an attempt to produce an MLB comparison for Pederson, the Los Angeles Dodgers rookie. If that’s the sort of thing you’re into, great. If it’s not, well, thankfully you haven’t spent too much time reading this so far, and there are myriad scouts’ opinions on Pederson. For instance, here are a couple excerpts from our very own Kiley McDaniel, an actual paid scout:
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Ben and Sam preview the Royals’ season with Kansas City Star Royals beat writer Andy McCullough, and Sahadev talks to KC Star columnist Sam Mellinger (at 25:53).
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Episode 530
Mark Armour has contributed extensively to baseball’s literary canon. His most recent work, co-authored with Dan Levitt, is In Pursuit of Pennants, an examination of baseball-operations departments through time. He’s also (with Levitt) ranking the game’s best GMs.
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 49 min play time.)
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It’s become a practice of the present author in recent years to purchase — before FanGraphs’ annual spring pilgrimage to the desert — to purchase a new ballcap in February, with a view towards cultivating within my colleagues a combination of jealously and respect that my actual “work” is incapable of producing.
Last year around this time, I documented the search for such a cap in a progressively more absurd series of posts. The result of that search: the acquisition of a Winston-Salem Spirits cap from 1994 with a weird red sun and melancholy eagle on it.
What follows marks the beginning of this year’s search for a replacement.
To wit:
Chicago Cubs Deadstock 90’s Hat Vintage Snapback (Link)
Style: Snapback
Time Left: N/A
Cost: US $24.74 (Buy It Now)
Owing to calendar reform instituted by Julius Caesar, the year 46 BC actually lasted 446 days, roughly a third longer than the Roman years which preceded it. As someone who lived through 1997, I’m surprised to find now that the opposite phenomenon isn’t true — i.e. that all of 1997 wasn’t somehow truncated for logistical purposes. In any case, the year was long enough to allow for the production of this sad ballcap, awaiting an equally sad owner.
Let’s talk about release points. Are you ready to talk about release points? Of course you are — there’s no preparation necessary. If you’re on FanGraphs, there’s no becoming more ready than you already are. Good news!
Among all the things PITCHf/x keeps track of, release point is one of them. Or should I say, two of them; the system tracks both horizontal release point and vertical release point. For our purposes here, we’ll focus on the horizontal release point tracking. On this scale, which is shown in units of feet, 0 corresponds to the middle of the pitching rubber. A negative number means the ball was released more toward the third-base side, and a positive number means the ball was released more toward the first-base side.
Right-handed pitchers have negative horizontal release points. Their arms, after all, hang off from the sides of their bodies, nearer to third base than first. Left-handed pitchers are just the opposite. With side-armers, you’ll see extreme release points, three or four feet from the middle of the rubber. Occasionally you get someone even more extreme than that. A more ordinary pitcher will have a release point separated from the middle by a foot or two. This is only a little bit interesting, but let’s get into some information. Last year’s Brewers were mostly right-handed. Let’s examine those same Brewers.
With the James Shields signing bringing the off-season to something of a close, it’s time to look back at some of my favorite moves of the winter. A year ago, I was quite high on moves like the Doug Fister acquisition and the Jose Abreu signing, but also the Yankees landing Brian McCann and the Cardinals picking up Peter Bourjos, so you know, grains of salt and all that. Still, I do think there are some moves that appear to be demonstrably better than others, and look likely to push their organizations forward into the future. Below, you’ll find my top 10, plus a handful of other small moves that I liked.
With James Shields now firmly ensconced in San Diego, the meaningful portion of this winter’s free agency has come to a close. It seemed to me like one thing was missing from the last few months of sizzlin’ stove gossip: the New York Yankees weren’t breaking so many banks in their signature big-money championship pursuit.
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| 10:34 |
: I’ll be here soon! For now, an aptly-named song.
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| 12:02 |
enoooooooo I can’t make this chat so make sure it’s a boring one |
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or take this opportunity to say mean things about me behind my back |
| 12:02 |
: That Guest is the worst.
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| 12:02 |
Pod wrote a great article about drafting Billy Hamiton at #20. I’ve heard people say to avoid drafting one category guys. Why is that? Do you agree? |
