FanGraphs Baseball

For the American League version of this same exercise, click here.

The final page has been ripped from the old calendar, and 2015 is finally upon us. Before “The Offseason – Phase II” kicks in for earnest next week, let’s again take a look at some leftover 2014 data over this extended weekend. This time, let’s take a look at the offensive ball-in-play (BIP) frequency and production leaders and laggards in the National League.

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Evaluating the Prospects: Rangers, Rockies, D’Backs, Twins, Astros, Red Sox, Cubs, White Sox, Reds, Phillies, Rays, Mets, Padres & Marlins

Scouting Explained: Introduction, Hitting Pt 1 Pt 2 Pt 3 Pt 4 Pt 5 Pt 6

Amateur Coverage: 2015 Draft Rankings, 2015 July 2 Top Prospects & Latest on Yoan Moncada

This list was gutted by five deals over an 12-day period earlier this month by new general manager A.J. Preller. He generally turned minor league pieces into big league pieces and these deals included 11 guys that would’ve been on this list: Trea Turner, Max Fried, Zach Eflin, Joe Ross, Joe Wieland, Mallex Smith, Jace Peterson, R.J. Alvarez, Johnny Barbato, Jake Bauers and Dustin Peterson, in that order.

Jesse Hahn would’ve been on the growth assets list and Burch Smith may have snuck on the end of the list but would likely be one of the last cuts, appearing in the others of note section. The lack of depth in the list below is understandable as a slightly above average system became a slightly below average one in the last month or so. Padres sources were quick to point out that only Justin Upton and Shawn Kelley were one-year assets, so this isn’t an all-in sort of move, but more of a reorganizing of the assets.

It’s interesting that the Rangers, where Preller worked until recently, have a reputation of not wanting to part with any prospects in trades. Preller came into a situation in San Diego where he didn’t sign any of the players he had and he immediately shipped one-third of the legitimate prospects out within a couple months, with no list-worthy prospects coming back in these deals. That’s somewhat misleading, as Preller’s job is to win big league games and a farm system exists to improve the big league team, but it’s interesting to note the contrast in styles.

Another big topic that came up on all my calls for this list was the recent history of Padres pitching prospects getting hurt. There have been somewhat recent Tommy John surgeries for Casey Kelly, Max Fried, Joe Wieland and Cory Luebke (twice) among the legitimate prospects, but the team has no explanation for why they’ve been hit harder than others. Padres execs detailed a study to me that was commissioned to answer this question and there were no common factors across the injuries and there didn’t appear to be problems with their throwing programs. It appears to just be rolling snake eyes a few more times than everyone else did, through random bad luck.

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Major league front offices apparently don’t like taking time off, so there were a bunch of transactions today while you were busy not being on the internet.

The Phillies trade outfielder Marlon Byrd and cash to the Reds for pitcher Ben Lively
The Reds continue their quest to be stuck in the middle, and I have to say, it’s going great for them. Byrd will help keep the ship afloat, and he is certainly an upgrade over Ryan Ludwick. Then again, that’s not saying much, as Ludwick was one of the worst players in baseball in his final two years with the Reds. Byrd isn’t going to move the needle for Cincinnati — they would have had do something bold like trade for Justin Upton if they wanted to appreciably improve their chances in 2015 — but he shouldn’t torpedo them the way Ludwick did.

What the move says about Cincy in the bigger picture is that they still think they can put together a competitive team in 2015, but that if they do so it will be largely with players returning to form. Between Joey Votto, Brandon Phillips and Jay Bruce, the team has no shortage of players who could be expected to do just that. Hoping for them all to do it at once and counting on players like Devin Mesoraco and Billy Hamilton to simultaneously worth three WAR or better again…let’s just say it isn’t a plan with very high odds of succeeding. All of which I’m sure is not much of a surprise to Reds fans, who are likely used to the lack of imagination from their front office at this point.

As for the Phillies, they keep on doing what they are supposed to be doing, even if they did get the ball rolling a year or two too late. Lively had a pretty decent season last year, and could be expected to contribute to a big league rotation in the near future. Here is what Kiley McDaniel had to say about him back in November, when he tabbed him as the 13th-best prospect in Cincy’s system:

13. Ben Lively, RHP Video: Lively was a 4th round pick out of UCF in 2013 and has beat expectations so far, with 79 stellar innings in the hitter-friendly Cal League this year before 72 more solid innings in Double-A.  Lively’s performance may overstate his raw ability a bit; he’s a back-end starter that sits 90-93 and hits 95 mph with four average-ish pitches, led by a slider that’s a 55 at times.  There’s deception and about average command; Lively’s delivery isn’t great but he manages to make it work for him and he throws strikes.

Rockies sign catcher Nick Hundley
Looking at our handy Free Agent Tracker, you see that this was about the best the Rockies could do if they wanted to add another catcher. And adding one certainly is a decent idea for Colorado. Now they have some options with respect to Wilin Rosario. Hundley is never going to be much with the lumber — his slugging percentage actually went down when he was traded from Petco Park to Camden Yards last season — but he earns good enough marks with his defense to be worth a roster spot.

That’s where things get a little interesting. The Rockies have to figure out what to do with Rosario. They can either keep Hundley, Rosario and Michael McKenry on the roster — with Rosario filling more of a first base/designated hitter role and catching only occasionally to stay fresh — or they can trade Rosario. Certainly, Rosario is a better hitter tha he showed last year — both Steamer and ZiPS expect a rebound from him offensively in ’15 (with Steamer more bullish than ZiPS). And even last year, he was mashtastic against lefties (156 wRC+ in 107 PA) so there can still be a role for him in Colorado.

No matter what, the Rockies won’t have a true starting catcher next year, but with three decent options, they won’t necessarily be punting the position either.

Cubs sign outfielder Chris Denorfia
In the past, Denorfia has down two things with aplomb — play defense and hit left-handed pitching. He only did one of those things well last season, so the deal is a bit of a risk. But if he does hit like he has in the past, he will make a great platoon partner for Chris Coghlan in left, and serve as a security blanket for Arismendy Alcantara and Jorge Soler in center and right. For $2.5 million, it’s certainly a gamble worth taking, and a nice bit of fine tuning for the Cubs roster.

By their own standards, the Yankees’ offseason has been strangely quiet. Has the team’s offseason to date flown under the radar? They’re simultaneously busy and quiet, signing two reasonably high-profile free agents and engineering two trades for everyday players. They’re both smart, imminently defensible trades but they don’t quite qualify as Yankee-scale blockbusters.

The team improved, but as it currently stands, New York trails the Blue Jays and Red Sox in terms of talent. Steamer Projections rank the Rays and Yankees as equals, forecasting an offense that marginally outscores the runs their defense and pitching allow. The offseason is far from over, but the Yankees are clearly taking their club into another direction.

The Yankees, against all odds, are getting younger. In doing so, they’re adding an element unseen in the Bronx for many years: uncertainty.

For years, fans of rival AL East teams waited on the mighty Yankees to age, decline, and finally collapse like an Old Vegas hotel rigged with dynamite. For the most part, those fans never got their wish. The Yankees had some down years, but they always had the resources to paper over their mistakes, to throw good money after bad and put together a competitive team. The second wild card spot kept the 2013 and 2014 Yankees within shouting distance of the playoffs when the talent on hand suggested they didn’t belong.

But the one thing the Yankees and their core of established talents always have is known commodities. With all their money and ability to spot a salvage job worth undertaking, the Yankees always manage a reasonably high floor for their talent. They traffic in big leaguers with little mystery. The opposite of the 2015 Chicago Cubs, in other words.

The recent veteran-laden Yankees teams came with long resumes and a whole lot of plate appearances to look back on when looking to their future. Especially over the last few seasons, the Yankees bent but never broke. They won 85 and then 84 games in the past two seasons, unable or unwilling to blow up their roster. It was never stars and scrubs as much as stars and plugs – upmarket scrubs preventing the Yankees from wallowing in rebuild seasons and netting higher draft picks.

Read the rest on Just A Bit Outside.

About 16 months ago, I wrote this 3,000-word-plus diatribe about Courtney Hawkins, attempting to make sense of how a 2012 mid-first-round pick could collapse from a .284/.324/.480 line in his post-draft 2012 season (complete with reaching High-A at age 18) to an abysmal .178/.249/.384 mark in 2013 (complete with ghastly 37.6% strikeout rate).

For some, those numbers were grounds for Hawkins’ dismissal as a prospect; for others, his youth and level made that immediate, severe pessimism seem a bit over-the-top and premature; he did manage to slug nineteen homers in 103 games in the midst of all that whiffing, at least. The thought of this latter group was that Hawkins would repeat High-A in 2014 as a 20-year-old and that the tools that made him a first-round pick would again surface as he grew into the level.

A glance at the big outfielder’s 2014 end-of-season results shows that those who held out hope for improvement weren’t off base. Hawkins came through with a .249/.331/.450 line this past season, good for a .352 wOBA and 117 wRC+. He cut his strikeout rate to a more workable 27.8% while raising his walks from 6.8% to 10.3%. If his 2013 season didn’t exist, statistically-minded prospect-watchers would look at Hawkins’ age-20 campaign and declare it a solid success, or at least say he met expectations.

In this piece, I want to look beneath this superficial dramatic improvement and examine what drove Hawkins’ improvements, with an eye toward where his 2014 modifications might lead him in the future.

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It’s the end of the year. At the end of the year, we like to look back before we look forward to the upcoming year. In that vein, I thought it would be instructive — and perhaps a little bit fun — to pull the most popular posts from our fair site for this calendar year. If you read the Best Of post each week (or even some weeks, or maybe you glanced at it while your significant other was in the dressing room that one time and you were suuuuper bored???), you know that I like to throw a little shine at all of the blogs in our family, so we’ll also have a spot for the most popular piece for each blog as well, if they didn’t reach the actual top 10. Onward!

Wait, before we move onward, a note — just because I’m using the “Best of” post here, doesn’t mean that these were necessarily the best posts. They’re simply the most popular. I am grouping them under the “Best of” banner because it’ll be easier to find them at a later date. You know, if you’re curious to find them again at a later date (I know I will be). OK, onward!!!

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This is the final installment of a three-part series looking back at what has been an unusually eventful year for Major League Baseball in the courtroom. Part One recapped the legal maneuvering surrounding Alex Rodriguez’s suspension and the Oakland A’s proposed move to San Jose, while Part Two looked at MLB’s 2014 minimum wage and gender discrimination issues. This part concludes the series by reviewing the status of various television-related legal proceedings for MLB and its teams, as well as covering an assortment of other legal developments.

Television

Television revenues are vital to MLB’s business, so it should be no surprise that the league was involved in a series of important TV-related legal proceedings in 2014. Perhaps the most significant of these cases is Garber v. Office of the Commissioner of Baseball, a suit challenging MLB’s television policies under federal antitrust law.

Wendy Thurm has previously discussed the Garber suit on several occasions. By way of a brief recap, the case alleges that MLB’s television policies violate the Sherman Act in two ways: first, by imposing unreasonable blackout policies on fans; and second, by selling only league-wide pay-per-view subscription packages (MLB Extra Innings and MLB.tv) rather than allowing teams to offer their own individual out-of-market plans. Read the rest of this entry »

The Padres didn’t need Seth Smith, and traded him to the Mariners. The Mariners are getting themselves a nice little hitter, especially against right-handed pitching. Jeff will likely have more on Brandon Maurer, who was the Padres’ return for Smith, in the next couple of days, but until then I wanted to type up a little something about Eli Manning’s backup quarterback (it’s true).

Eno reminded us about players with a very defined skill set on Monday, and that is definitely how you would describe Smith. He’s not a very adept defender. He isn’t a complete sieve, but he’s certainly not around for his defense. He’s not the worst baserunner, but he wouldn’t be the first runner you picked to steal a base. Probably not the second either. And he isn’t much against left-handed pitching. Well, he was last year in an incredibly small sample, but given his track record that probably won’t persist.

What Smith does do well is hit right-handed pitching. Since his debut in 2007, there have been 169 batters to compile 2,000 or more plate appearances against right-handed pitchers. Smith is tied for 36th in wRC+. Pretty good, right? Especially for a part-time player. And for a team looking to add a corner bench or platoon bat this offseason, it would have been hard for the Mariners to do better. Let’s look at the players on this list, their current status, and their stats vs. righties since 2007 to drive home the point:

So, there are a few players who are likely available with the same skill set, but most of them — Fielder, Choo, Ethier, Hamilton, Howard, Gonzalez, Beltran, and Teixeira — are either very expensive, come with injury concerns, or both.

There are a couple of standouts here — Morneau and Utley most notably — which is nice company to be in. When you add in positional concerns though, Smith sort of stands alone. Utley could probably play the outfield, but I doubt you’d get him to waive his no-trade clause to do so. Perhaps they could have landed Joyce if they had acted sooner, and Joyce is probably Smith’s best comp. But at this moment, given the objective of trying to find an available player with a great track record of mashing against righties and who doesn’t cost a fortune, it would have been hard for the Mariners to do better than Seth Smith.

In 2014, I had the pleasure of interviewing hundreds of people within baseball. Many of their words were shared via the FanGraphs Q&A series. Others came courtesy of the Sunday Notes column, which debuted in February. Here is a selection of the best quotes from this year’s conversations.

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“Later on, when they went to the QuesTec system, the strike zone became more of a north-and-south than an east-and-west. I had to learn how to pitch inside more, which wasn’t an easy thing to do.” – Tom Glavine, Hall of Fame pitcher, January 2014

“In my first at bat, I hit a home run and thought to myself, ‘I’m going to hit 30 home runs in this league.’ I ended up hitting five.” – Clint Frazier, Cleveland Indians prospect, January 2014

“As a pitcher, you’re supposed to feel at home on the mound. You’re supposed to feel comfortable and strong. I didn’t feel that way.” – Jesse Biddle, Philadelphia Phillies prospect, January 2014

“My mind was free, because I was only concentrating on one thing, which was getting hitters out. I was in the big leagues, so I was able to relax and do my job.” – Matt Harvey, New York Mets, February 2014

“Twenty-four hours to vent and rage, break things. I punched my door and put a crack in it. I broke a few boat oars out back of the house. I was mad, because I felt I was being stolen from.” – Luke Scott, former big-league outfielder, February 2014

“When I brawled, I blacked out. I don’t really remember much outside of watching the videos. I do remember telling Dean Palmer, ‘They’re about to start hitting our guys and we’ll need to go out there.’ ” – Doug Brocail, former Detroit Tigers pitcher, February 2014

“When I stood on the mound while on Adderall, everything faded away except for the catcher’s mitt. No crowd noise, no distractions. It was almost like being in the Matrix. Although you were sped up, everything slowed down.” – Player X, March 2014 Read the rest of this entry »

Ben and Sam end the year by answering listener emails about Barry Bonds, baseball in pop culture, Wil Myers, and more.