Back in September, Jeff Sullivan wrote on this very weblog about The Three Most Distinctive Team Philosophies. On Tuesday, I published a piece exploring why Milwaukee Brewers pitcher Wily Peralta fails to record significant strikeouts totals despite possessing elite velocity. This is the result of those posts colliding.
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The Nationals got Casey Janssen today, the same Casey Janssen that did a great job of getting the most out of his skill set before last year. Without an overpowering arsenal, he hung with the best in his craft. Though the contract wasn’t expensive, it still represents a hope that Janssen can return to those days.
Ken Rosenthal reports that the deal is for one year and $5 million, but contains a mutual option. Last year, the pitcher battled back and shoulder soreness to have his worst year in the past five.
But even before his 2014 season, Janssen was… a bit different. When we think of swing-and-miss stuff, we don’t think of his 90 mph fourseam paired with a good cutter and a loopy curve. And for good reason. From 2011-2013, Janssen outperformed his swinging strike stuff.
The Chicago White Sox have had an interesting offseason. Even if you share Jeff’s view that they aren’t yet a very good team, you can’t deny that they made some nice additions this winter. The Sox added Melky Cabrera, David Robertson, Zach Duke, Adam LaRoche, Jeff Samardzija, and Emilio Bonifacio to a roster that included superstars like Chris Sale and Jose Abreu and very good players Adam Eaton and Jose Quintana.
The problem for the White Sox, of course, is all of those nice additions were replacing talent vacancies. As Jeff noted, the Sox got better but becoming Wild Card contenders or challenging the Tigers for division supremacy was a tall order given where they started. Even after the spending spree, they have serious issues behind the plate, at second base, at third base, in right field, and at the back end of the rotation.
It’s a roster that’s moving in a good direction, but it’s still pretty rare to see teams with that many serious holes make a legitimate playoff push. There’s no doubt the Sox are working to build a winner in the relatively near future. You don’t have the winter they had without a focus on the next one to three seasons, which naturally seems to hinge on Avisail Garcia in the short term to some degree.
| 10:13 |
: It’s a Wednesday, so we’re chatting. Because the wife is at the dentist, leaving me with both child and dog, there’s a chance we’ll start a little late today; I don’t know how well I’ll be able to work and care for two attention craving beings at the same time.
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| 12:09 |
: Alright, Mom’s home just in time for the kid to start screaming, so let’s talk some baseball while I ignore it.
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| 12:10 |
Any good reason to think Travis Snider is a better options for the Orioles outfield than De Aza or Lough? Does he make more sense as half a DH platoon with Delmon Young? |
| 12:11 |
: Why is it either/or? They didn’t DFA De Aza or Lough. Having three useful outfielders is better than having two.
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| 12:11 |
Casey Janssen can’t replace Clippard because almost nobody can, but do you expect a rebound from him next year? |
| 12:11 |
: Yeah, he seems like a decent bounce back candidate. Probably more of a decent arm than a relief ace, but he could be a nice little addition.
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Toward the end of the day on Tuesday, the Boston Red Sox and Texas Rangers swapped Anthony Ranaudo and Robbie Ross. It doesn’t immediately seem like a trade of much consequence: Ranaudo’s a prospect with diminishing sheen, and Ross is coming off a pretty ugly experience as an attempted big-league starter. And, probably, it won’t be a trade of much consequence. Ranaudo seems like, if he’ll be anything, he’ll be a decent reliever. And Ross has looked like a lefty reliever who doesn’t do a great job of getting lefties out.
But — well, let me start with this. I’m about to focus on one side of this trade. I’ve heard all you guys complaining that we post too much content about the Red Sox. I understand where you’re coming from, and this isn’t going to make things better. But this isn’t about fitting into a pattern; I just find Ross to be more interesting, statistically, than I do Ranaudo. Ranaudo’s all scouting. Visual learners are going to like to talk about him. Me? I want to share something about Ross’ 2014 — something that might make him better than he seems.
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 Seattle Mariners. Szymborski can be found at ESPN and on Twitter at @DSzymborski.
Other Projections: Arizona / Atlanta / 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 / Tampa Bay / Washington
Batters
In the first year of his 10-year and $240 million contract with the M’s, Robinson Cano served as a one-man illustration of park effects, recording almost precisely the same batting-average and on-base figures as the previous season with the Yankees, but producing only half the home runs. (We’ll ignore for the moment that he actually hit more homers at Safeco than on the road, as that would disturb the narrative.) The result was a park-adjusted offensive line roughly approximating 2013’s. ZiPS calls for another five-win season in 2015 despite a home-run total somewhere below 20.
On the topic of park effects, offseason acquisition Nelson Cruz moves from a home field that inflates right-handed homers by roughly 8% to one that suppresses them by about 6%. That move plus age plus mere regression conspire to produce a forecast of 29 home runs for Cruz in 2015 after last season’s total of 40.
New commissioner Rob Manfred is clearly not afraid of change. In his first 24 hours on the job, he postulated about a future of the sport that included pitch clocks but excluded defensive shifts, among other tweaks. Unlike the former commissioner — who famously hated computers — Manfred is a proponent of technology and wants to make sure baseball keeps itself relevant in a changing landscape of how fans consume sports and entertainment. In this day and age of screens everywhere, shorter is often better, and the commissioner seems serious about addressing the pace of play issue in Major League Baseball.
However, his comments about the shift came in the context of a stated desire to breathe some offense back into a sport that has shifted heavily towards the pitching side of the equation in recent years. With offense trending downwards, the league clearly feels there is a point at which rules may have to be adjusted to restore the balance between offense and defense, just as the league took action in 1969 (by lowering the mound) and again in 1973 (by introducing the Designated Hitter). While I’m among those who do not believe that restricting the shift would have much of an effect on increasing offense, the willingness to consider it as a remedy suggests that Manfred believes that current offensive levels are a potential problem for the sport.
So on the one hand, the league would like to speed up the games; on the other hand, the league would like the games to include more run scoring. This seems to be a bit of a paradox, given that the act of scoring runs inherently means that more time is spent doing things besides ticking off some of the 54 outs — or 51 outs, if the home team protects a ninth inning lead — allotted for each contest. More offense means more at-bats and often can mean more pitching changes, and those two things generally mean longer games.
But how closely does run scoring track with length of game? Is it such a clear relationship that any increase in offense would be immediately met with a corresponding uptick in the number of minutes in a contest? I wasn’t actually sure, so with the help of some data from our friends at Baseball Prospectus and Baseball-Reference, I lined up the average length of game with average team runs per game for each season since 1950. The results are displayed in the chart below.
It’s been a frustrating offseason for Baltimore fans, he says to people who already know just how little the Orioles have done. Nelson Cruz, Nick Markakis, Andrew Miller, and Nick Hundley have all left town. The entirety of the work the team has done to replace them was to bring back Delmon Young and import reliever Wesley Wright. While you can’t draw a straight line between the team’s inactivity and the ongoing “is Dan Duquette leaving for Toronto” saga, it’s easy to see how some may look to see a relationship there.
Trading for Travis Snider, as the O’s did on Tuesday night, won’t change that. But that we’re talking about him says a little bit about what the Baltimore offseason has come to, a lot about the state of baseball news on January 28th, and something about a player that the Orioles clearly hope can become their next scrapheap pickup to yield results on a team that’s making something of a habit out of confounding the expectations.
There’s no way to sugarcoat this, really: Snider’s major league career has been a bust, at least so far as the expectations go for being the 14th overall pick in the 2006 draft. It’s fair to wonder what might have been had the Blue Jays let him get more than 18 Triple-A games before promoting him to the big leagues as a 20-year-old in 2008, despite the fact that he’d struck out 27.4% of the time in 423 Double-A plate appearances prior to that. Still, he was rated as a top-6 overall prospect by both BA and BP headed into 2009… and never quite stuck. Read the rest of this entry »
Steve Cishek learned to throw a slider in 2009. Three years later, the side-winding Miami Marlins righty learned how to throw it more effectively against left-handed hitters. He has since emerged as one of the best closers in baseball.
Cishek – as Eno Sarris wrote in December – has a reverse platoon split, despite an arm angle that suggests otherwise. Eno’s article addressed the reasons why, but didn’t cover Cishek’s thought process and back story. In order to find out how the 28-year-old turned into into what he is today – a pitcher with a 13.25 K/9 and .209 BAA vs LHH in 2014 — I went directly to the source.
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Steve Cishek on his evolution as a pitcher: “What’s changed since I got called up is I throw my slider to two different locations. That’s kind of my big thing. I can backdoor a slider, whereas before I was just one side of the plate. Prior to 2012, I was in to lefties and away to righties with my slider.
“For me, it’s a different feel throwing a slider from arm side to glove side. I knew what my slider did, I just couldn’t understand how to command it to that side of the plate. Once I started figuring it out, it became a matter of muscle memory. Now it’s just a spot thing. If I start it here, it will end up here. Read the rest of this entry »
Ben and Sam answer listener emails about a world without the minors, bigger bats, Ernie Banks, and more.
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