FanGraphs Baseball

Play the player-profile game every day this week at 11:15am ET. We’re giving away a free annual subscription to FanGraphs+ to the first reader who guesses correctly the identity of that day’s mystery player. (Limit one copy per customer).

As Eno Sarris announced Monday, the newest iteration of FanGraphs+ is now available for purchase with money. As in recent years, we’re celebrating the release of FG+ by way of the player-profile game.

Said game is easy: the author offers the text of an actual player profile from the newest iteration of FG+, being careful to omit any proper names that might reveal the identity of the player in question. The reader, in turn, attempts to identify the player using only the details provided in the profile.

First reader to guess correctly (in the comments section below) gets a free annual subscription to FanGraphs+.

Today’s entry was composed by Patrick Dubuque and actually appeared in last year’s edition of FG+, but is of such considerable merit that it deserves to be revisited.

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Over the weekend, the long saga of James Shields, Pitcher For Hire finally came to a close, with Shields accepting a four year, $75 million contract from the San Diego Padres. $75 million is a pretty nice payday, but it’s a little less than half of the $155 million that Jon Lester received from the Cubs, and nearly one-third of the amount the Nationals will pay Max Scherzer over the life of his new contract. Because of how long it took Shields to sign, and the vast difference in guarantees between what he got and what the top two hurlers on the market got, Shields’ agent — Page Odle — has come under some criticism for how he marketed his player.

Yahoo’s Jeff Passan, for instance, offered up some interesting information about Shields’ early off-season asking price.

Shields found himself mentioned with the other two big-name free agent starters, Max Scherzer and Jon Lester. Consequently, his agent, Page Odle, started asking for terms in similar neighborhoods.
As the Red Sox proffered a six-year, $120 million opening offer to Lester, Odle sought terms in that range, according to multiple clubs involved early in the negotiations. One executive said Odle started discussions with a six-year deal in mind. Another confirmed what the Kansas City Star wrote Monday: He simultaneously was shooting for a five-year, $125 million pact with others.

…

After Lester signed, Shields could have pounced and ramped up negotiations. GMs expected that parry. They held firm, figuring Odle would lessen his demands. That never happened. Shields ended up in San Diego of his own volition, because had he budged earlier, executives believe he would have received plenty more.

There’s a reason no pitcher had signed for more than $50 million in February: No pitcher was foolish enough to wait until February to sign. Most teams, at this juncture, have locked-in budgets that need special dispensations to move. San Diego happens to be in the midst of a complete overhaul, so general manager A.J. Preller walked into negotiations with monetary flexibility – and the knowledge that were he to whiff on Shields, he could trade for Cole Hamels.

A simple move – lowering the expectations on the deal to four years – would have sparked the market. The San Francisco Giants originally were interested at around $80 million over four years. At least a dozen teams would listen at four years, and of those, surely one would pledge $21 million a year times four to separate itself. Which would prompt a jump to $22 million a year, maybe $23 million, and when you add in a club option as a sweetener, that’s a contract that potentially jumps comfortably into the nine-figure range.

$125 million to $75 million is a big drop, and Passan’s information adds context to the question of why Shields sat unsigned for so long. That said, I am left wondering if perhaps what we saw was not so much Shields’ agent overplaying his hand, but instead, the market gently reminding us all that major league teams aren’t valuing pitchers the same way anymore.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

Matt Carpenter never swings. People with dictionaries might take objection to the use of the word “never” in that context, but relative to his peers, Carpenter essentially doesn’t remove the bat from his shoulder. In 2014, he swung at just 32.8% of the pitches that came his way, which was the lowest mark among qualified hitters by quite a bit. Brett Gardner and Jayson Werth tied for second, swinging at 36.8% of the pitches they saw last year.

Since his debut in 2011, Carpenter’s swing percentage is the lowest in baseball among batters with 1000 PA. Joe Mauer is second and nearly a full percentage point behind. No one has mastered the art of the take like the Cardinals infielder, and that passivity hasn’t hurt his ability to make contact either. Among the same group, he’s 30th in contact rate since 2011.

In fact, last year, Pablo Sandoval nearly swung at a higher percentage of pitches outside the zone than Carpenter did against pitches inside the zone. When it comes to pitches outside the zone, Carpenter’s 17.4% was two percent lower than any other hitter. At a glance, you have to assume that Carpenter almost never chases bad pitches and if he does chase one, there has to be a pretty good reason.

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The other night on Twitter, I put out one of those early-February thoughts that can’t really be properly explained in a mere 140 characters: Rick Porcello is going to make more than $100 million next year, and people are going to freak out about that.

Needless to say, I received some interesting replies to that, because the second part’s pretty easy to understand. Porcello’s generally seen as a decent enough pitcher, but one who doesn’t miss bats or prevent runs like his peripherals say that he should, and he’s usually not been among the top three pitchers on his own team. (That he’s been teammates with Max Scherzer, Justin Verlander, David Price, Anibal Sanchez, and Doug Fister generally gets left out of that last point.)

James Shields, who has had something like seven seasons better than Porcello’s best, just very recently couldn’t get to $80 million. Porcello’s going to top that? Well, okay then. I guess I need to back this up. Let’s run through this and see if it’s crazy. Spoiler alert: It might be crazy.

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Ben and Sam talk to Russell Carleton about the possible fallout from rules changes intended to shorten games and increase offense, then Play Index replacement players and answer emails about breakouts and pitch clocks.

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Felix Hernandez’s changeup is one of the best pitches in baseball. How can we actually know this? You could, if you wanted, look at the assigned run values. Those’ll tell you what happened on Felix’s changeups, specifically. But, those run values get complicated, since all pitches are inter-related. One pitch has an effect on another pitch, even if it’s of a different type. Yet there’s a very simple solution to this. How do we know Felix’s changeup is amazing? Felix is amazing, and he uses his changeup a third of the time. So it stands to reason the latter has a lot to do with the former.

A year ago, I was talking to a major leaguer, and when we somehow got to the topic of Henderson Alvarez, the player remarked that Alvarez seemed like he was one little tweak away from becoming a superstar. That much is easy to understand — Alvarez is still very young and he still throws very hard, and all of his pitches have life. It’s easy to see the upside in Alvarez’s repertoire. Maybe he’ll never reach his ceiling, but because of his ability, his ceiling is higher than almost all others.

I was reminded in my chat earlier today that Alvarez has something in common with Felix. Actually, he has a lot of things in common with Felix. That would be another indication of Alvarez’s upside. If you’ve watched Alvarez, and thought to yourself he has an ace’s arsenal of pitches, you haven’t been wrong. He just hasn’t yet made the most of it.

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Last week, writing for Just a Bit Outside, managing editor Dave Cameron advanced a proposal — for roughly the fourth time during his tenure at FanGraphs — advanced a proposal for abolishing the draft, which proposal he examined in greater depth during Monday’s edition of the podcast.

Summarized briefly, Cameron suggests that combining a draft and strict bonus-allocation system for amateur talent is essentially redundant. The league doesn’t need the former if it has the latter. And if it has the latter, extending it to international talent becomes rather easy — certainly easier than installing an international draft.

Summarized less briefly, Cameron suggests this:

[W]hat if there was no draft? Instead, what if we just lumped all new players — foreign or domestic — into a single acquisition system where each player was free to sigh with the team of his choice, only with firm spending caps in place to ensure that young talent flows more freely to clubs that can’t compete on major-league payroll alone? In other words, a team’s talent acquisition budget would be inversely tied to its major-league payroll; the more you spend on big leaguers, the less you get to spend on prospects, and vice versa.

Last year, Major League Baseball gave out combined domestic draft and international signing bonus allocations of $285 million, or $9.5 million per team. Instead of distributing the pools based on prior year winning percentage — which rewards failure and incentivizes teams to lose on purpose — the player acquisition budgets could be increased or decreased based on the percentage of deviation from the league average major-league payroll. Last year, the league average payroll was $115 million, so a team that ran a $150 million payroll would have a 30-percent overage, and would in turn have its new talent acquisition pool decreased by 30 percent.

Below is a table featuring each club’s bonus pools for 2015 were Cameron’s proposal employed. The total overall bonus money is the same, but is allocated according not to where each club has finished in the standings, but to the funds they’ve committed to their major-league roster.

Pay denotes 2014 opening-day payroll; O/U, the percentage of that payroll relative to league average; and xPool, the expected bonus pool amount for the relevant club according to their major-league spending.

*Which is to say $0. Either that, or a $0.4 tax for more than slightly doubling the average league payroll.

This information is relevant today also because, with the Padres’ signing of James Shields, the order and projected pools for this year’s amateur draft are now set. Clubs such as Oakland, Pittsburgh, and Tampa Bay — because of their relative success — are all subject to more restrictive amateur spending limits than their payrolls would otherwise dictate. The Phillies and Yankees, meanwhile, benefit from having played poorly in 2014 despite considerable resources.

With James Shields finally signing, the off-season is probably closed for business now. Sure, there are a few veteran relievers still out there, and Rickie Weeks still has to find a new home, but most of the money has been spent and the trades have been made. We’ll see a few more deals in Spring Training, but with pitchers and catchers reporting next week, the Hot Stove is now more of a pile of smoldering coals.

And that means you’re about to be inundated with various lists and rankings of off-season moves. You’re going to read about the best and worst individual moves of the winter — I’ll likely have my own posts on those at the end of the week — as well as the always popular “winners” and “losers” of the off-season. In general, I find the winners/losers recaps to be a little bit formulaic, as they could almost always just be rewritten as “teams that made the most win-now moves” and “team that made the fewest transactions”.

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“I was always pitching to a smaller strike zone,” Ryan Vogelsong said of his time in Nippon Professional Baseball. “That’s just the way it is, it’s the unwritten rule of baseball there, the foreigner’s strike zone is going to be smaller.”

Vogelsong is not alone — other returnees from Japan report unfair treatment from umpires there. A first look at the numbers seems to hint at the possibility that the strike zone is called differently for Japanese and foreign players. But closer inspection reveals that this could also come from a clash of cultures — baseball cultures.

Last Friday, Giants Ryan Vogelsong and Casey McGehee — while highly appreciative of their time in Japan and the things they learned while playing there — both independently referenced preferential treatment for homegrown stars in Nippon Professional Baseball.

From the other side of the plate, McGehee said that “you end up striking out looking a lot because there were a lot of times that if the catcher caught it, you were sitting down.” Using the Japanese word for foreigner, McGehee said the matchup was important: “Your best case scenario was when you had a gaijin pitching and a gaijin hitting.”

Jason Coskrey covers baseball for the Japan Times and has heard foreign players say this sort of thing before. He reached out to Jeremy Powell, who was with the Expos for two years and pitched in both NPB’s Central and Pacific Leagues from 2001-2008. While Powell felt that umpires were “focused on simply doing their best to do a good job,” it was a bit different when it came to big calls — “in crucial counts that really had an impact on how the inning may end up there were times that the call would favor the native player — it came with the territory (literally), it’s part of the game and I had to move on, albeit it was never easy.”

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.