FanGraphs Baseball

After a classic ending to football season featuring an absurdly controversial decision — it’s indeed a travesty that Falcor was passed over for Puppy Bowl MVP — the sporting nation prepares to turn its eyes to baseball. Amid the oncoming rush of “best shape of my life” stories common to the February sports pages, one high-end free agent, James Shields, remains unsigned. He’s certain to be locked up soon, but almost as certain to land a financial guarantee much less than he was seeking just a couple months ago. Who is James Shields, what is his value and whose uniform might he be donning in the coming weeks? Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Sam draft 20 minor league free agents who might see major league playing time in 2015.

Episode 527
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 2015 iteration of the Yankees and the baseball equivalent of passing from the one-yard line and, in greatest depth, some possibilities for addressing game length.

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 39 min play time.)

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The Caribbean Series features the championship clubs from five Latin American leagues: the Dominican Winter, Mexican Pacific, the Roberto Clemente Professional (i.e. Puerto Rican), and Venezuelan Winter — and, as of last year, also the Cuban. This year’s tournament began at Noon ET today (Monday) and extends through Sunday’s championship game.

Telecasts of all the games are available by way of ESPN Deportes and (streaming via) Watch ESPN. For those who lack a subscription to Deportes, however, the Watch ESPN feed is also unavailable. Fortunately, the probably legal stream of CDN Sport Max from the Dominican carries the games, as well, it seems and offers strong video quality.

The champions of Cuba and Mexico are currently playing (box), while Puerto Rico and Venezuela are scheduled for 6:30pm ET this evening. All box scores are available here.

There are all sorts of prescriptions for a good changeup. We talk about things like ‘velocity gap’ and ’tilt’ and ‘fade’ when we talk about how good a changeup will be. But what about the curveball? Can we spot a good one coming?

We can use our Arsenal Score work to identify good curveballs in general, just as we used to find bad changeups a couple weeks ago. Basically, by weighting grounders and whiffs on a pitch, we can assign it a score based on those easy-to-identify and important outcomes.

According to this metric, here are the best curves thrown at least 100 times last year.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

This is all the excuse I need:

#Rockies sign SS Omar Quintanilla, a utility INF for 2005-09 teams, and re-sign veteran RH reliever Rafael Betancourt

— Matt Eddy (@MattEddyBA) January 30, 2015

I’ve developed a very minor obsession with Rafael Betancourt. If you’ve paid close attention over the years, you might’ve noticed, but I wouldn’t blame you for not paying close attention whenever I write about Rafael Betancourt. But here I am doing it again, because I don’t think I’ve talked about this for more than two years, and each time I do it, I have a little more data. Do you like fun facts? Betancourt comes with a couple awesome fun facts. They’re almost totally irrelevant, in the grand scheme of things, but then, what isn’t?

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Last night, the New England Patriots snatched victory from the jaws of defeat, intercepting a pass on their own goal line with just 30 seconds to spare. Before the play, Advanced NFL Stats gave the Seahawks an 88 percent chance of winning, as most teams end up converting 2nd-and-1 into a touchdown in that situation. Of course, most teams run the ball into the endzone from a yard out, and in the aftermath of the game, the primary focus was on Seattle’s decision to throw the ball rather than run it.

On both NBC and Twitter, incredulity seemed to be the most popular reaction. The overwhelming consensus appears to be that the Seahawks screwed up, and simply should have run the ball. The tenor of the commentary suggested that any other play call was demonstrably wrong; 2nd-and-1 from that spot on the field, with a running back like Marshawn Lynch, throwing the ball should apparent not have even been a consideration.

Of course, the reaction is inextricably tied to the result. Had the play worked, we’d likely be spending this morning hearing about what a genius Pete Carroll is for his creative play calling, zigging when the Patrios expected him to zag. This isn’t to say that throwing the ball was definitively the right decision, but I’m naturally wary of analysis that suggests that there is ever only one correct strategy to deploy, with no other decision ever being reasonable to consider. But because I don’t know football well enough to have an informed opinion, I started wondering what the baseball equivalent would be to the Super Bowl’s ending.

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As I write this on the afternoon of February 1, the Diamondbacks catching depth chart looks like this:

#31 Diamondbacks

That’s a position for a major league baseball team! A not particularly good or even interesting team, but a major league team nonetheless. Look at it. Bask in it. If the concept of “replacement level” needed a human face, well, here’s a bunch of them. With barely more than two weeks before pitchers report to begin throwing to those catchers, that’s what the Diamondbacks look like they’re going to have. It’s been nearly two months since Miguel Montero was dealt to the Cubs, and everyone assumed that another move would be coming, some way to ensure that the team would have at least a single dependable catcher to make it through the season.

Despite some rumors, nothing’s happened. Dioner Navarro is still a Blue Jay, despite Russell Martin. Welington Castillo, seemingly made redundant by Montero and David Ross joining the Cubs, is still in Chicago, and if a deal was going to be there, it seems like it would have been there within the Montero deal. Carlos Corporan is a Ranger. Geovany Soto went to the White Sox. A ton of other catchers — Ryan Hanigan, Rene Rivera, Yasmani Grandal, Derek Norris, Hank Conger, etc. — found themselves on the move. The top remaining free agent catcher is probably 35-year-old Gerald Laird, which is to say, there’s no longer any remaining free agent catchers.Update: Of course they did.

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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 New York Yankees. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.

Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / Baltimore / Boston / Chicago AL / Chicago NL / Cleveland / Colorado / Detroit / Houston / Los Angeles AL / Los Angeles NL / Miami / Milwaukee / Minnesota / New York NL / Oakland / San Diego / San Francisco / St. Louis / Seattle / Tampa Bay / Washington.

Batters
There are a number of players on this Yankees club projected not to produce wins at a rate commensurate with their salaries. The current market offers something like $6-8 million per win. Per ZiPS, Alex Rodriguez will receive about $18 million per one of those; Mark Teixeira, about the same; Carlos Beltran, about $25 million. In each case, durability is an issue beyond just declining skills. Regard: none is projected to record as many as 500 plate appearances.

A relative bargain within the context of the Yankee lineup is Chase Headley, who signed a four-year, $52 million contract with the team in December but is projected by ZiPS to play like someone roughly twice as good as that. This isn’t particularly surprising. As Dave Cameron noted earlier in the offseason, Headley’s profile — defensively above-average at third base with strong plate discipline but merely average power — hasn’t ever appealed greatly to the market. New York would appear to be the beneficiaries of this.

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