Ben and Sam talk to Robert Arthur about what makes Pablo Sandoval uniquely valuable, then answer emails about eating contracts, baseball abroad, and more.
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2015 is likely going to be the final year of Torii Hunter’s Major League career, and as a free agent, he had a choice to make; he could join a contender to try and make one final run at a World Series title, or he could go back to Minnesota and finish his career where it started. According to Ken Rosenthal, he chose the latter.
Source: Torii Hunter signing with #Twins.
— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) December 3, 2014
Source: Hunter deal with #Twins is one year, $10.5M.
— Ken Rosenthal (@Ken_Rosenthal) December 3, 2014
Hunter’s deal is basically an exact match for the crowdsourced expectation, so kudos to you guys for nailing this one on the nose. As something like a +1 WAR outfielder, Hunter isn’t exactly a great use of funds for a Twins team that won’t be contending, but this is the kind of deal where measuring payroll efficiency misses the point the most.
The Twins very likely know that signing Hunter isn’t going to push the team into the postseason, and they probably know that there are better ways to spend $10 million this winter too. But Hunter is probably still a $7 or $8 million player, and so they’re paying a slight premium for the chance to let him have a victory lap in the town where he turned into a big leaguer. It’s a gesture of good will, and the kind of attraction that can add some enjoyment for the fans in a season that will probably be another stinker.
Hunter has had a very nice career, and now should get a chance to retire in the uniform he wore when he broke into the big leagues. He clearly placed a very high value on that opportunity, and while this move probably doesn’t push the Twins rebuild forward, it’s the kind of move that can create goodwill between the organization and their players and fans. And measuring that is probably out of our reach.
Hunter wanted to retire a Twin and the Twins gave him the chance to do so. It’s the part of baseball that we don’t specialize in, but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t have value. Good for the Twins and good for Torii Hunter.
The most obvious park-effect variable in baseball is Colorado’s altitude. Okay, nothing to be done about that. No way to pitch around it. The second-most obvious park-effect variable would have to be the Green Monster in Fenway. Boston’s got something no other place has, and it’s right there in left field looming over everything, and last week I took a look at how pitchers attempt to compensate for having that thing in play right behind them. In short, righties get pitched away more often, and lefties get pitched inside more often. It was all very intuitive, but toward the end, I threw in a note about an opposite effect I observed in Texas. Now seemed like as good an opportunity as any to turn that into a post of its own.
Globe Life Park doesn’t have a Green Monster. It doesn’t have any kind of monster, but it does have a justified reputation of being hitter-friendly. There are many culprits, but among them is a frequent gust that’s caused some fly balls to continue to carry out to right and right-center. It’s been referred to as the jetstream effect, and just as Boston is particularly hitter-friendly to left, Texas has historically been more hitter-friendly to right. How have pitchers dealt with that? Well, I guess I already told you.
| 6:22 |
: Hi everybody!
Jeff and I will be here at 9 pm ET to cram some baseball straight down your cramholes. So get ready. You can prepare by pumping the queue full of questions. See you soon! |
| 9:01 |
: Hi guys! Working feverishly to get our next book, When the Sparrow Sings, by Jason Linden, ready for purchase.
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| 9:02 |
Hey everybody. Go buy Hardball Times. It is excellent! |
| 9:02 |
: Thanks Pale Hose!
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| 9:02 |
First, can we get rid of this damn mountain. |
| 9:02 |
: I feel like this is a pop culture reference that I’m not getting.
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Intrepid newspaperman Ken Rosenthal reported over the weekend that the Toronto Blue Jays have considered signing Alberto Callaspo to play second base for them in 2015 and maybe beyond 2015. A “potential buy-low, bounce-back candidate,” is how the Blue Jays conceive of Callaspo, according to Rosenthal. Indeed, having recorded a -1.1 WAR in 2014, Callaspo has done himself the favor of setting a low enough bar of performance such that he can improve upon it merely by not even playing. A well conceived plan, that.
A cursory inspection of Callaspo’s player page reveals his clear strength: the ability to make contact. Or the capacity to avoid the strikeout, one could say. Either version is fine: swinging-strike rate and strikeout rate are so tightly correlated, there’s little practical difference between the two. In either case, the point is the same: Callaspo has excelled at putting the ball into play.
I’ve done plenty of rankings over the years for various outlets, but this new venture at FanGraphs is the first time I’ve gone through all 30 organizations to rank each team’s best talents. I’ve done some team prospect rankings in the past and the thing I experienced then — and heard about from people all over the industry — are the biases you have to wade through when club officials and scouts talk about their own players.
This is an obvious thing that even the most casual reader of prospect analysis would understand. The team wants to have the profile of their prospects boosted, both for their job security and for trade value. Nearly every source I talk to for these lists will reference a player from an earlier list in the series and ask a question about them, ask where I think their system stacks up so far in my research or ask my feelings about teams I haven’t written up yet. Most teams take the rankings from trusted publications and add them to their internal metrics, and they’re always checked for discrepancies or useful nuggets of information before trades are consummated. This isn’t just some fanboy nerd thing on the Internet. Well, it is that, but it isn’t only that.
On Friday night, when the A’s announced they traded Josh Donaldson for Brett Lawrie and three prospects, the public reaction was swift and harsh. How could Billy Beane trade one of the best players in baseball for so little in return? Did he not even bother calling other teams to let them know that Donaldson was available, since they obviously would have made better offers than this? Why even bother trading Donaldson if this was the best they could do? Even as I made the case for the deal being a reasonable one for the A’s, the popular consensus was that the A’s screwed up.
It all felt very similar. As I read through the reactions, I couldn’t help but feel like we just had this conversation four months ago, when the Rays traded David Price to Detroit for Drew Smyly and Nick Franklin. Price was a true ace, traded for players who were labeled a back-end starter and a utility infielder. Where was the upside? Why was this the best the Rays could do? Had they overplayed their hand, or were they just not smart enough to take a better deal that returned pieces with star potential? Like the Donaldson trade, I felt the deal was reasonable for the Rays, but the public sentiment strongly disagreed.
If we go back a year, the Doug Fister trade elicited the same kind of responses, though I shared in the shock at how little Detroit got back in that trade for a quality pitcher. But our reactions were basically the same, wondering how the Tigers turned a highly valuable asset into a collection of lower-upside role players. Wouldn’t other teams have bid more? How was this the best offer?
Two years ago, it was the Justin Upton trade that caused the public to scratch their heads. Martin Prado and some lesser prospects was not the haul that people were expecting, and even as I thought it made some sense for Arizona, the consensus was that this deal was a debacle for the Diamondbacks. A 25 year old slugger headed into his prime should bring back far more than in return than an above average player and prospects with limited ceilings, right?
Maybe not. As trades of this nature pile up, perhaps we need to consider that it’s not the teams selling the star players who are reading the markets incorrectly, but the public that expects returns above what teams are consistently getting. After all, is it more likely that our perception of a player’s trade value is incorrect, or that Billy Beane, Andrew Friedman, Dave Dombrowski, and Kevin Towers all decided to take inferior offers to what other teams were making?
| 9:04 |
: All right, let’s do this |
| 9:04 |
: Made the mistake of starting a twitter conversation right before the scheduled chat time. I’m the worst 🙁 |
| 9:07 |
If a chat goes on fangraphs and there is no Jeff Sullivan around, does it make a sound? |
| 9:07 |
: Pretty sure we can now observe that the answer is no |
| 9:07 |
Bottom to Top is terrible. |
| 9:07 |
: I tried to look for somewhere to change it but I don’t know where to change it 🙁 |
Deibinson Romero, a third baseman who spent a decade in the Twins' organization, has signed a minor-league deal with the Pirates.
— Aaron Gleeman (@AaronGleeman) December 1, 2014
One is generally best advised to regard internet personality Aaron Gleeman’s baseball reportage with due skepticism. This is an individual, for example, who voluntarily records his weekly adventures in tippling around the Minneapolis-St. Paul metroplex. “A ridiculous man,” one is inclined to say.
In this particular instance, however, what Gleeman utters has some foundation in the truth. As actual legitimate sources have confirmed, third baseman Deibinson Romero has signed with the Pittsburgh Pirates.
The acquisition of Romero isn’t notable in the same way that recent signings of Nelson Cruz, Hanley Ramirez, and Pablo Sandoval are (although he compares more favorably to Cruz than the difference in their contracts might suggest). Not only is he unlikely to begin the season in Pittsburgh’s starting lineup, but it’s far from certain that he’ll have a place even on the 25-man roster. Of note with regard to Romero, however, is what he represents so far as helping the Pirates avoid the awful — a concept explored in some depth by Jeff Sullivan and in less depth by the present author after that. The basic point: a quality almost universally found among good teams is their ability to avoid rostering players who provide negative WAR.
After the signing by St. Louis of infielder Dean Anna (who, coincidentally, was a Pirate at the end of 2014 ), no player who entered minor-league free agency this offseason received a better Steamer projection than Romero.
When the Rockies came to town this year, there was a tap on my shoulder. Adam Ottavino wanted to talk pitching. For some reason, I didn’t turn on my recorder. That’s fine, I guess, sometimes you just lose yourself in the conversation and want to kick yourself later when you look down. We had a good time talking, is what I remember. I even got some grips pics from him.
But anyway, I don’t have the exact quotes and so I can’t provide you a break down of Ottavino’s season peppered with the interesting things that Ottavino said about his craft. Just know that, yes, he thinks about platoon splits. And the primarily fastball/slider righty thinks about changeups. But a changeup hasn’t worked for him yet, and the strategies he’s had to deal with platoon splits have had varying success.
What stuck with me since that conversation was a pitcher he was interested in: Steve Cishek. Really, Ottavino was interested in how a primarily fastball/slider pitcher could avoid platoon splits. So, Adam, if you’re out there, let’s take a look at Steve Cishek for a bit. The rest of you that are still here, come along for the ride!
