FanGraphs Baseball

I think it’s safe to say we lean pretty heavily on projections here. Now, it’s important to understand we’re all always kind of making projections. The Padres acquired Wil Myers on the basis of a positive internal player projection. When we think about our favorite teams adding, say, Dee Gordon or Nelson Cruz, we’re considering what we expect them to do in the season or seasons ahead. Our enthusiasm for the coming year is based in part on a mental projection of the quality of our team. We all project, and the only real difference is that, around here, we lean on the projections by Steamer and ZiPS, instead of doing things in our heads. FanGraphs makes things really easy. What do the projections think about next year? There’s a tab you can click on. It’s a starting point.

But while projections are handy, it’s only natural to wonder: do they matter? How important are they, actually, with regard to predicting the short-term future? Tons of people have tested individual player projections, but here we also include team projections, based on manually-updated depth charts, and if there’s error in each given player projection, how much error might we see with team projections as a whole? It’s a perfectly reasonable question. It can’t even be answered conclusively, yet. There’s not enough data in the FanGraphs post archive. But I can give you at least a little bit.

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Right-hander Burch Smith has been traded from San Diego to Tampa Bay. “Will he start or not?” is a question a person might reasonably ask about that. What follows is an attempt to answer the question — in part, if not in whole.

At some point during during April or May of 2013, after the latter had produced some conspicuously excellent numbers with Double-A San Antonio, the present author developed a fascination with then-Padres right-hander Burch Smith — including that pitcher, for example, in multiple editions of the Fringe Five.

When Smith was finally promoted to the Padres, it was not unlike Christmas on May 11th. And even after Smith conceded six runs over a single inning in his debut, I remained curiously enamored of him.

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The Baltimore Orioles are good at many things. Their greatest skill is probably confounding expectations. The rest of the league zigs and then the O’s zag their way into the playoffs, twice in the last three seasons.

While the rest of their division — the rest of baseball, really — gears up for a run at the playoffs, the Orioles sat back. Their off-season to date can best be described as “somnambulant”, They lost Andrew Miller, Nick Markakis, and Nelson Cruz to free agency, declined some options and added, um, Wesley Wright? That’s it.

Considering the state of their disabled list at the end of the season, returning Matt Wieters and Manny Machado from injury (and Chris Davis from suspension) will go a long way to improving their club. But there’s another reason the Orioles haven’t rushed out to apply quick fixes to their club – the unlikely emergence of Steve Pearce.

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Hey, remember the Matt Kemp trade that happened last Thursday? Well, it didn’t really happen so much as news of a pending agreement was reported a week ago. For the last seven days, details have been getting finalized, which included having Matt Kemp take a physical. He did that on Tuesday. Apparently, it didn’t go very well.

SD in perfect position to squeeze LAD for more money in Kemp deal: Kemp's medicals ugly, LAD has cash and needs Kemp deal more than SD does.

— Buster Olney (@Buster_ESPN) December 18, 2014

The holdup in Matt Kemp trade is because the physical revealed arthritis in both hips. The #Padres continue to consult medical experts.

— Bob Nightengale (@BNightengale) December 18, 2014

Arthritis in both hips. This isn’t something you hear too often, and it brings back memories of Albert Belle, who was one of the game’s most dominant hitters until an arthritic hip ended his career after the 2000 season. Belle’s decline was swift, as he went from a 165 wRC+ to a 139 wRC+ to a 104 wRC+ in his final three seasons, finally retiring after his age-33 season when it became clear that he wasn’t going to be able to play through the condition any longer.

Matt Kemp is only 30, and looked fine at the plate in the second half of last season, so maybe it all sounds scarier than it actually is. Maybe he’ll be fine, and the Dodgers will just kick in some extra money to get the deal done.

But this already looked like a bad deal for San Diego, and Kemp was already a poor fit for their park. Arthritic hips seem like the kind of thing that would make a defensive bounceback less likely, and on the surface, it would seem to serve Kemp’s interests to have him end up on an AL team where he could spend the bulk of his time at DH.

But it’s probably not as easy as the Padres just telling the Dodgers they changed their minds. As Ken Rosenthal and others have noted, Kemp’s medical information is protected by HIPAA, and should not have been released publicly, even anonymously. It would be difficult for the Dodgers to prove that the Padres leaked the information, but at the very least, backing out of the deal at this point might serve to make other teams reluctant to trade with San Diego in the future. A.J. Preller already had a reputation as a polarizing executive who didn’t always play by the rules during his days in Texas, and leaving the Dodgers holding a bag of arthritic hips wouldn’t be a good way to show everyone that he’s changed his stripes.

We should find out today whether this deal is happening or not. No matter what happens, this might get ugly for San Diego, either on the field or off of it.

The Winter Meetings revelry has passed. We’re still waiting on a few big trades to finally ‘consummate,’ but the list of free agents is less attractive by day. Before you turn down a chance at glory with the guys left waiting for a team, it’s probably a good idea to look at how badly you need them. This is not dating advice, but it sort of feels like it.

To that end, I’ve taking our depth charts and calculated a quick stat for ‘neediness.’ By averaging team WAR over 13 roster spots — the portion of the 25-man roster usually used for offense — and then looking at the difference between that average WAR and each position WAR, I’ve found a way to show where the biggest remaining lineup holes are.

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According to the rules of Major League Baseball, a drafted player cannot be traded by his team within the first calendar year of signing his initial contract. According to another rule, however, teams can agree to trade players to another organization without specifying who they are for up to six months, meaning that teams can actually trade drafted players six months and one day after they sign, using the player to be named later loophole.

This is the back door that the Padres are using to ship Trea Turner to the Nationals as part of the Wil Myers trade that should be announced shortly. When the deal is announced, no one is going to officially acknowledge that Turner is part of it; he will simply be referred to as a PTBNL. And then, when spring training starts, he’s going to report to Peoria and train with the Padres. He’s going to stay in their system until June 14th, in fact, meaning that he’ll spend the first two months of the minor league season playing for a team that actually traded him before Christmas.

Back before the internet and the land grab of information, this maybe wasn’t worth worrying about. Now, though, nothing a baseball team does remains in the shadows for too long, and Turner is certainly aware of the fact that he’ll be switching teams in June. And yet, he still has to go to camp with the Padres, play in their minor league system, get treated by their doctors, make friends with their prospects, and bide his time until the rules say he can finally join the organization who sees him as their shortstop of the future.

This just all seems beyond silly. The PTBNL is such an established loophole to the trade exception that it doesn’t really make sense to continue the charade. Teams can currently trade drafted players six months after they sign, so let’s just make that the rule. Why make Turner go through a few months of this? Why make the Nationals sit around and hope that the Padres don’t screw up their asset while they don’t have custody over him? What’s the point of any of it?

The PTBNL can serve a legitimate purpose — trade returns can differ based on how a player performs after a deal, helping mitigate risk when trading for a health risk — but I see no real benefit to requiring teams to use it as a loophole around the trade limitation. Let teams officially trade prospects six months after they sign, as they already can, and let the PTBNL be used for instances where teams actually decide later on who the prospect is going to be. Once everyone agrees to move a kid from one organization to another, how about we just go ahead and let him move?

Last month, not only did the Tampa Bay Rays cut Jose Molina, but, as Jeff detailed, no other Major League team was or has been interested in picking Molina up, even for the smallest of prices. As somebody who has always had their interests piqued by pitch-framing, this tiny morsel of a transaction nonetheless triggered a miniature existential crisis on the significance and value of pitch-framing. Have the estimates of framing value been, in fact, comically optimistic? Have savvier umpires begun to render this skill a moot point? Is there some other factor about the nature of the catcher position that we, on the outside, simply don’t know?

Some of those things may very well be true, maybe even all of them. But before we use the Rays dumping Molina as an example of the preacher turning pagan, let us consider yesterday’s big trade between the Rays, Nationals, and Padres. Somewhere amidst this flurry of new forwarding addresses, defensive-minded catcher Ryan Hanigan went from Tampa Bay to San Diego, while defensive-minded catcher Rene Rivera went from San Diego to Tampa Bay. The catcher swap was the minor part of the deal for the public, but perhaps the Rays don’t see it that way. In fact, if they still believe strongly in the value of catcher defense, perhaps the Rays didn’t even consider themselves as selling low on Wil Myers, given the potential value that Rivera might provide.

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Following yesterday’s historic announcement by President Obama that the United States will re-establish full relations with Cuba, many baseball fans have been speculating what impact this news is likely to have on Major League Baseball. Cuba, of course, is a baseball hotbed, producing a number of impact MLB players in recent years (Jose Abreu, Yasiel Puig, Yoenis Cespedes).

In the long-term, normalized relations with Cuba could potentially result in a significant influx of Cuban talent into U.S. professional baseball, while also opening up other lucrative business opportunities for MLB. In the short-term, however, yesterday’s announcement will likely have little immediate impact on professional baseball in the United States, and if anything, might even temporarily decrease the flow of players defecting to the U.S. from Cuba. Read the rest of this entry »

The main good thing about reaching the World Series is that it means you won your league. When you win your league, people like you a lot, and it’s a good feeling. Builds community. Another, bigger-picture good thing about reaching the World Series is that it brings in revenue, especially if you haven’t been real good for a while. New streams of money begin to flow, and preexisting streams of money flood their banks, as more people express interest in the product and other people express more interest in the product. Basically, if you get to the World Series, it’s a good thing for more than just the day or week of.

When the Royals came out of nowhere to come within a few runs of the championship, it stood to reason they’d reap an enormous benefit. An area love affair was re-kindled, as Kauffman Stadium became one of the loudest and most popular environments in the game. Estimates varied, but there was no question the World Series appearance would mean, for the team, some additional tens of millions of dollars. How much could that money mean, if re-invested in the roster? What would Dayton Moore be able to pull off, given greater financial flexibility?

The Royals re-signed Luke Hochevar for a couple of years, which seems like a good deal even given Hochevar’s operation. But lately the Royals have spent bigger money. They committed $17 million to Kendrys Morales. They committed $11 million to Alex Rios. And, most recently, they committed $20 million to Edinson Volquez. This is what the World Series has meant, in a way. It’s rather underwhelming.

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