FanGraphs Baseball

While certain parts of sporting media have welcomed a wide variety of sabermetrics, it looks as if almost every corner of the baseball word is integrating a few choice metrics into their broadcasts. One of those, which is the focus of this week’s Library update, is batted ball data.

It’s growing increasingly common to see line drive rate, ground ball rate, or fly ball rate dropped into casual baseball conversations outside of the analytics community, which makes this new entry on batted ball statistics for pitchers a useful tool for those just learning about these numbers. What does it mean to say a pitcher is a ground ball pitcher? How are ground balls different from fly balls for a pitcher? Follow the link to learn about the classifications, uses for the data, limitations, and handy reference points.

As always, please comment below if you have questions, find me on Twitter @NeilWeinberg44, or stop by our weekly FanGraphs Q&A chats, Wednesdays at 3pm.

The White Sox are going for it. With the additions of Jeff Samardzija and David Robertson — in addition to prior signings Adam LaRoche and Zach Duke — the Pale Hose have signaled to the rest of the American League Central that they’re not content to rebuild anymore. They might have only won 73 games a year ago, but with Chris Sale and Jose Abreu in the prime of their careers, the White Sox don’t want to sit around and dream about the future anymore. They want to win while their stars are still stars, so they’ve decided to make a run at the postseason next year.

There’s only one small problem; almost everyone everyone else in the American League has apparently made the same decision. No one is rebuilding anymore, especially not in the American League. Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration; the Astros and Twins still seem to realize that they’re probably not going to the World Series next year. They’re spending money in free agency, but they’re not sacrificing significant parts of their futures in order to make short-term upgrades. The 13 other AL teams? They have no problems trading the future to upgrade their 2015 chances.

And this race for the now is creating unprecedented parody across the league. Take a look at the current WAR forecasts — via the Steamer projections found on FanGraphs — for the 15 teams in the American League.

Read the rest on Just a Bit Outside.

The Red Sox have tried to erase the painful feelings of their botched Jon Lester negotiations by completing a flurry of pitcher transactions. While that’s unlikely to fool people who still just want Lester back, the pitchers acquired (or reportedly acquired) — Wade Miley, Rick Porcello and Justin Masterson — all have one thing in common in that they generate a lot of ground balls. Before that, they acquired Joe Kelly, who also generates a great deal of ground balls. Are ground balls the hip new thing on Yawkey Way?

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Ben and Sam discuss the deluge of signings and trades during the last two days of the Winter Meetings.

Episode 512
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 makes a third appearance on the pod this week, mostly because of the Dodgers.

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 55 min play time.)

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As was made evident by the Giancarlo Stanton extension, the Marlins are trying to build up to win. On Wednesday, they added Dee Gordon, a player who has been good in one year. On Thursday, they added Mat Latos, a player who has been good in several. There’s another difference, though — in 2014, Gordon was at his best. Latos, meanwhile, missed half the season due to a variety of injuries. The Marlins are betting on him to be successful in his last year of team control before free agency. To Cincinnati go Chad Wallach and Anthony DeSclafani.

Latos is a player of particular interest. Previously in his career, he was moved from San Diego in a blockbuster. Twice, he’s hit 4 WAR, and two other times, he’s come in around 3 WAR. He’s now coming off a half season in which he was worth 1.5 WAR. In a full season in 2015, Steamer projects Latos to be worth 1.2 WAR. It’s a surprisingly pessimistic figure, for a pitcher who just turned 27, so it’s worth explaining why Steamer thinks the way it thinks. Why is Steamer so down on a front-of-the-rotation starter?

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Scooter Gennett of the Milwaukee Brewers is among those players participating in an innovative cancer charity drive that ends Thursday night and benefits LUNGevity, “the largest national lung cancer-focused nonprofit.” An online auction, coordinated by Major League Baseball media and public relations offices, is awarding scores of unusual prizes to winning bidders. Pitching lessons with CC Sabathia or Dwight Gooden, for example. Rather than a game-used jersey or an autographed baseball, Gennett is donating his time and his noteworthy skills with ceramics, giving a pottery lesson to the winner of his auction.

MLB took this initiative in part to celebrate the life of Monica Barlow, who died earlier this year at age 36 because of lung cancer. Like a majority of people who get lung cancer, Barlow did not smoke. Gennett has gotten involved in part because his father is a cancer survivor. He discussed all of that and more in a phone conversation with FanGraphs during baseball’s winter meetings. In addition to the charity work, he also discussed how he’s preparing for the upcoming season, and further explained how Ryan Joseph Gennett became — sometimes — “Scooter.”

David Brown: Were you into Play-Doh as a kid?

Scooter Gennett: Yeah, when I was younger, I liked those kind of toys where you’d make something. I wasn’t the type of kid to play with action figures. I guess I was a Play-Doh type of kid. But once I turned 8 years old, until high-school age, there really wasn’t much for me other than playing baseball. So I didn’t take many art classes, certainly ceramics, until high school. It was all baseball.

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Everyone knew heading into the offseason that the Red Sox starting rotation was going to need some help, and so the first thing they went and did was sign Hanley Ramirez and Pablo Sandoval. Those guys are not pitchers, so while it gave the Red Sox perhaps the best lineup in the MLB, they still needed pitching.

The Red Sox rotation essentially consisted of a bunch of question marks — plus Clay Buchholz and Joe Kelly, who are question marks themselves. Buchholz is 30 years old, has never thrown 110 innings in consecutive seasons and had a 5.34 ERA last year. Kelly’s numbers as a starter aren’t particularly impressive. Some clubs entered the offseason looking for a frontline starter. Some clubs needed depth to fill out their rotation. The Red Sox needed both.

A Cole Hamels trade or James Shields signing are still possibilities for the Red Sox, as they’re still in the market for that frontline starter after whiffing on Jon Lester, who was the crowd favorite to return to Boston and fill the void at the top of their rotation.

The depth, on the other hand, appears to be shored up. As I was writing this post, the Sox dealt Yoenis Cespedes to the Tigers in exchange for Rick Porcello. (By the time I was done, they’d inked Justin Masterson). A full analysis of the Porcello deal will come in a different post, but for now we’re going to focus on Wade Miley, who the Sox are expected to acquire in the very near future for starting pitchers Rubby de la Rosa and Allen Webster. de la Rosa and Webster are both guys who had higher stock a couple years ago. Both have electric stuff, both have serious command issues, and both may be destined for the bullpen. Dave Cameron wrote up a quick InstaGraphs post on the deal last night, which you can read here.
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Unpopular opinion time: the Miami Marlins are the not a band of penniless rubes ready for the exploitin’ by the Dodgers slick-talkin’ front office army. The Marlins are a lot of things, but clueless is not one of them. They don’t have much in the way on field success — minus a couple of championships — but the Marlins could very well have the best player development record in baseball. The Marlins never-ending prospect churn seems to have produced more than its share of talent, and that’s probably not an accident.

At some point, even the thrifty Marlins decided to roll up their stake and make a move. The moves are still Marlins-sized, but this isn’t your typical Marlins deal. This time, the Marlins are trading pre-arb players OUT and bring established players IN, so this is not the run-off-the-mill Marlins sell-off. Something is afoot. Something is amiss. Could they be making their team…better?

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The Rule 5 draft began today (Thursday) at Noon ET, signifying the end of this year’s Winter Meetings in San Diego. Designed to facilitate opportunities for talented minor leaguers otherwise blocked within their own organization’s depth chart, the draft has created opportunities for (among others) Jose Bautista, George Bell, Roberto Clemente, Shane Victorino, and Johan Santana.

The complexion of the draft has changed since 2006, when an extra year of protection was added under the new CBA. That said, both an MVP (Josh Hamilton) and Cy Young (R.A. Dickey) winner have been selected in the meantime.

Players are eligible for selection in the Rule 5 draft if they’ve been excluded from their respectively club’s 40-man roster and were:

• Signed at age 19 or older and have played in professional baseball for four years; or
• Signed at age 18 and young and have played for five years.

A club, once selecting a player by means of the draft, must retain that player on its active roster for the duration of the following season, with exceptions for injury that are too tedious to reprint here. If such stipulations aren’t met, the player in question must be returned to his original club. Sometimes the original club declines to accept the player. Sometimes a small trade is worked out. There are other realistic scenarios, as well. As many as one can imagine.

There are surely other details I’m omitting. My concern here, however, isn’t to provide a flawless recapitulation of the current CBA’s Rule 5, but rather to examine facts about the players whom the rule has affected.

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